Viral Today

 

From Michael Ferry at First Draft. Krugman posted it today, maybe because it linked to his pessimistic post yesterday.

I Thought The Weekend Was Going Well

too. Then the weedeater broke. And the dryer. And my glasses fell apart.
I tried the internet, but there is no consolation apparently.
Thanks, Andrew Sullivan, you brighten my day.
Remember, I read it (once in a while) so you don't have to.
Oh, and Palin's not running. So there's that.
Just stay away from TV news.
Thanks, Lawrence O'Donnell (MSNBC) and Jonathan Miller (Politico, it's not what he said, but what he didn't say.)


'Too Big to Fail' in 80 Seconds from Joe Mande on Vimeo.

Climate change, you know you want it.

Honorary Contrarienne

My fitness mentor, Hilary Metzger, celebrates Rhody Fest each year by walking in the 7.5-mile marathon.
This year, she won the coveted "Words Per Mile" trophy, an honor she devised and awarded to herself. I believe the established record is something in the neighborhood of 7,000 words total.

Inspired, I attempted to top my personal best record of most baby carrots miniature Tootsie Rolls consumed on the 4-mile drive home from the grocery store and, of course, beat myself. As usual.

DNA

UPDATE: Apparantly I left out the links when I originally posted. They're added now, and worth following.

Some folks over at MeFi really miss Douglas Adams, whose initials are DNA and who was born in Cambridge the same year ... well, you know the rest.

Anyway, this is the anniversary of one of the Adams accomplishments, his death or the publication of one of the books or somethings and someone found one of his speeches that was, like him, a lot of fun, and this quote popped out. For your entertainment and enrichment.

There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions. Curiously enough, quite a lot of these have come from sand, so let's talk about the four ages of sand.

The Trouble With Psychopaths

is that they can gang up on you. I say that in all seriousness. I believed then and I believe now that I once worked for two psychopaths at the same time. How did I survive?
They don't cooperate well with others, even others like themselves.
That should be question #21 on the test.

Jane Mayer vs. The World

Mayer may be the best journalist working today. One of her highest skills is good sourcing, which means she's trusted by people who probably don't trust anyone.
She's trusted because she has not only good intentions, but good judgment. I love that. In my silly, small way, it was also my professional goal.
This story on an N.S.A. renegade is such good leg work it seems almost mundane.

Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with “dictionary selection,” in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer#ixzz1N0fhwkmn

Newt Gingrich Is Crazy

And we've known that since at least 1997. Here's the proof.

Do No Harm

Someone I admire, respect and love angered and disappointed me today.
But I had to go to the library. Not only did I find all the poetry books I've been craving, the Montaigne biography I'd ordered, but...Also. Life is good.

I'm Starting A File Tagged Presidential Election 2012

Item #1

Comment O' Teh Day

Over at a fairly technical discussion of type face criticism on MeFi, is a good example why I love MeFi. (That and the enlightening discussion of iconic font designer Eric Gill, who had an incestuous relationship with his sister, sexuallyy abused his children and had "an experimental connection to his dog.")

On a rainy day, what could be better?

This is probably the whitest thing I've seen in years. Talk about your first-world problems.

(I actually found the article reasonably interesting, but then I fit the criteria given above)
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:04 PM on May 15 [1 favorite]

A Worthy Goal

I am trying to get at something so simple
that I have to talk plainly
so the words don't disfigure it
and if it turns out that what I say is untrue
then at least let it be harmless
like a leaky boat in the reeds
that is bothering no one.

This is from a poet named David Berman, who Andrew Sullivan cited today with a different but equally worthy quote.
It's from 2003 and there are no comments on the site.
Can't help but wonder what became of Berman.
I would post the entire thing, but it's long. And very good.

Ingrid Bergmanngr

Saw this yesterday and it stayed with me. The barely restrained passion is breathtaking. Forgot what a good actress she was.

Another Silly Time-Wasting Thing

to do on the internet.
Look in on Andrew Sullivan's View From Your Window Feature every Saturday (I love Saturdays although I missed This American Life Today and, wait, I have to turn on Radiolab), recognize nothing (okay, I got Paris once) and read all the selected answers on Tuesdays. People really get into it and it's sort of a mental puzzle for world travelers. I don't mind being an armchair traveler at all. Who wants to go on an airplane anyway?
I think today's is Cannes for no other reason than that I want to go to there and the film festival is there this week and one of my young FB friends who wisely left off newspapering and took up publicity is there and sending pictures of her breakfast. She likes the new Jack Sparrow movie, by the way, but then, she's young.

DNA

(Note: I have gone to some trouble — some, not a lot — to reconstruct a post that strangely and inexplicably disappeared just as it was being saved on Wednesday. Blogger went down and stayed that way much of yesterday. They called it maintenance problems. I call it uncanny.)

Douglas Adams, whose initials are DNA and who was born in Cambridge in 1952, the same day as...well, you know the rest, is receiving another periodic revivals over at MeFi. I guess May 11 was the 10th anniversary of his death, but book publishing anniversaries are also popular.
In the comment thread to the post calling attention to this piece was a cite to a speech of his I plan to keep in reserve. Because I will need it.

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions. Curiously enough, quite a lot of these have come from sand, so let's talk about the four ages of sand.

Josh Marshall Hearts Newt Gingrich

There are a lot of right-wing performance artists now, but Newt invented the genre. Sort of like the let's-look-back at the first rappers.

And that's Gingrich, not a politician or even a mere huckster, but something much more than that, a right-wing performance artist who for a critical decade or so overlapped with the real world of electoral politics and ascended to the highest echelons of power. The almost appealing slasher barging in on the carefree picnic day of our political life.

Web Site O' Teh Day

The Library of Congress now has its full archive of historical sound recordings available online.
It's called the National Jukebox and this is Arthur Prior's band playing Temptation Rag.

Graphic Proof

I'm tempted to make a bunch of posters of this and slap them up everywhere. Maybe I will.
Sorry I can't make images fit, but click through at bottom or the link above.

Via: Medical Billing And Coding

Just Sayin'

A harmonic oscillator in classical mechanics (A-B) and quantum mechanics (C-H). In (A-B), a ball, attached to a spring (gray line), oscillates back and forth. In (C-H), wavefunction solutions to the Time-Dependent Schrodinger Equation are shown for the same potential. The horizontal axis is position, the vertical axis is the real part (blue) or imaginary part (red) of the wavefunction. (C,D,E,F) are stationary states (energy eigenstates), which come from solutions to the Time-Independent Schrodinger Equation. (G-H) are non-stationary states, solutions to the Time-Dependent but not Time-Independent Schrodinger Equation. (G) is a randomly-generated superposition of the four states (C-F). H is a "coherent state" ("Glauber state") which somewhat resembles the classical state B.

Some generous guy named Steve Byrnes contributed this gif to Wikipedia's entry on quantum physics, which I finally looked up today and, sure enough, it's all about math. Except when it's not.

...according to the theory of quantum decoherence, the parallel universes will never be accessible to us. This inaccessibility can be understood as follows: Once a measurement is done, the measured system becomes entangled with both the physicist who measured it and a huge number of other particles, some of which are photons flying away towards the other end of the universe; in order to prove that the wave function did not collapse one would have to bring all these particles back and measure them again, together with the system that was measured originally. This is completely impractical, but even if one could theoretically do this, it would destroy any evidence that the original measurement took place (including the physicist's memory).

Good Poem Today

I intended to stop republishing whole poems in a nod to copyright and all that. But then I realized hardly anybody but you — and you, and you — reads this blog so if they find me and tell me to desist, I will. If they threaten to sue, I will desist and laugh.

Blue Dementia

by Yusef Komunyakaa

In the days when a man

would hold a swarm of words

inside his belly, nestled

against his spleen, singing.

In the days of night riders

when life tongued a reed

till blues & sorrow song

called out of the deep night:

Another man done gone.

Another man done gone.

In the days when one could lose oneself

all up inside love that way,

& then moan on the bone

till the gods cried out in someone's sleep.

Today,

already I've seen three dark-skinned men

discussing the weather with demons

& angels, gazing up at the clouds

& squinting down into iron grates

along the fast streets of luminous encounters.

I double-check my reflection in plate glass

& wonder, Am I passing another

Lucky Thompson or Marion Brown

cornered by a blue dementia,

another dark-skinned man

who woke up dreaming one morning

& then walked out of himself

dreaming? Did this one dare

to step on a crack in the sidewalk,

to turn a midnight corner & never come back

whole, or did he try to stare down a look

that shoved a blade into his heart?

I mean, I also know something

about night riders & catgut. Yeah,

honey, I know something about talking with ghosts.

Viral Dog Video O' Teh Week

I have never had so many friends share one of my found videos before. Of course, it is raining really hard, not much to do.