Scratch That

Yoga? Don't think so.

Black has come to believe that “the vast majority of people” should give up yoga altogether. It’s simply too likely to cause harm...
“Yoga is for people in good physical condition. Or it can be used therapeutically. It’s controversial to say, but it really shouldn’t be used for a general class.”

What Now Post-Iowa

Here's what Andrew Sullivan expects:

But how remarkable that the Tea Party infused GOP has picked two of the most fiscally liberal candidates as their final two. Now Newt and Santorum will savage Romney; and the press will expose Santorum. Paul will have his delegates and will have to be handled right if he is not to indirectly re-elect Obama in a landslide.

 I also do not see Santorum lasting long and who knows what Newt will do, he's such a loose cannon. Sullivan also noted that Santorum didn't even file signatures in Virginia, so maybe Romney can promise to make him Secretary of State. Or maybe that's what Newt wants, I dunno.
But I'm not convinced that a third-party run for Paul wouldn't be just as bad for Obama as for Romney. I just picture all these techno geeks as his base, but maybe that's wrong. Haven't really seen any analysis of his supporters.

Top 18 (minus four months) of 2011

Contrarienne is very grateful that not everything in ones and zeroes is garbage. She spent all New Years Day culling the year past for the best links that fed this site in 2011. But by the time she hit April, she was worn out and quit. Then she remembered she had to do the new video embed and that's a pain, really. So she procrastinated.
  Of course, she should have thought of all that a day or two earlier and got it up on Saturday, but her editor was busy with other things and forgot to remind her.

As an intro, let's start with a little Tennyson. He had to wait fourteen years to marry his intended, the family fortune having been lost to bad investment. Nevertheless, marry they did and produced two sons. The success of his poetry allowed him to buy a house in the country where he could have solitude to write. You don't see that kind of thing much nowadays, do you? I'm looking at you, Billy Collins. (See below.)

1. Dec. 25. Much to my surprise, the multiverses are not only much smaller and inaccessible, but also much larger. I stand corrected better informed, but no more stable.

2. Dec. 8. Best poem. No contest, note last line. Take it, Billy.

Aristotle by Billy Collins

This is the beginning.

Almost anything can happen.

This is where you find

the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,

the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page.

Think of an egg, the letter A,

a woman ironing on a bare stage

as the heavy curtain rises.

This is the very beginning.

The first-person narrator introduces himself,

tells us about his lineage.

The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings.

Here the climbers are studying a map

or pulling on their long woolen socks.

This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn.

The profile of an animal is being smeared

on the wall of a cave,

and you have not yet learned to crawl.

This is the opening, the gambit,

a pawn moving forward an inch.

This is your first night with her,

your first night without her.

This is the first part

where the wheels begin to turn,

where the elevator begins its ascent,

before the doors lurch apart.

This is the middle.

Things have had time to get complicated,

messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.

Cities have sprouted up along the rivers

teeming with people at cross-purposes—

a million schemes, a million wild looks.

Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack

here and pitches his ragged tent.

This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,

where the action suddenly reverses

or swerves off in an outrageous direction.

Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph

to why Miriam does not want Edward's child.

Someone hides a letter under a pillow.

Here the aria rises to a pitch,

a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.

And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge

halfway up the mountain.

This is the bridge, the painful modulation.

This is the thick of things.

So much is crowded into the middle—

the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,

Russian uniforms, noisy parties,

lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall—

too much to name, too much to think about.

And this is the end,

the car running out of road,

the river losing its name in an ocean,

the long nose of the photographed horse

touching the white electronic line.

This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade,

the empty wheelchair,

and pigeons floating down in the evening.

Here the stage is littered with bodies,

the narrator leads the characters to their cells,

and the climbers are in their graves.

It is me hitting the period

and you closing the book.

It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen

and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck.

This is the final bit

thinning away to nothing.

This is the end, according to Aristotle,

what we have all been waiting for,

what everything comes down to,

the destination we cannot help imagining,

a streak of light in the sky,

a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.

4. Nov. 28. Must read o' teh year. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

You say lazy, I say ego depletion.

 But System 2, in addition to being more deliberate and rational, is also lazy. And it tires easily.

5. Nov. 26 Paper (unlike sand, see below) is fabulous!

6. Is this what they mean by keeping it real?

7. Laugh o' teh year. "Digression, cast adrift on the buoyant Dead Sea of your own narrations, is a sign of old age, and remarked by ancient moralists and proven by modern neurology and brain science to be a symptom of natural decay of the aging brian, so let me conclude with one, which now that I consider it, is not really a digression at all, though this present clause surely is:
January 13, 2010: I am defending to a colleague the wisdom of the police rounding up the usual suspects.
Me: Claude Rains was being more than a mere cynic, which of course he was also being, when he said "round up the usual suspects" because the usual suspects were not innocent but the known criminals of whatever the city was, Tangiers, Marrakesh, I forget which.
Colleague: Casablanca
Me: I am going to shoot myself.

9. I play this all the time. All. The. Time. It's attributed to Mississippi John Hurt but is only available by Gillian Welsh on a tribute album I bought once by mistake.

10. Contrarienne predicts: 2012 is a presidential election year. What a great opportunity for Occupy Everything. Just sayin'.

11. Contrariennes o' teh year: Cassinni and Voyager planetary imaging scientist Carolyn Porco, and Helen Frankenthaler.

12. Margeret Atwood's not worried about Facebook and Twitter, so neither am I.

13. Headline o' teh year: Riots in London worsen, stock markets drop and is it all over for hitchhiking. BBC, Aug. 8.

14. Aug. 7. Definition o' teh year:

First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. Bertrand Russell

15. Recipe o' teh year: Bacon Jam.

16. ABD update. How could I have forgotten them?




17. Lest we forget, Too Big To Fail. Top of my Save list on Netflix.


18. In Memoriam Douglas Adams. Because we all should read a little DNA each year.

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.

Happy Jan. 3, 2012.

The Standup Economist

It's a little long and the video isn't very good quality, but I finally stumbled on this guy and just had to share.

60 Minutes Nails It

And the smarmy Eric Cantor cannot escape. This link is to an analysis and if you can't stand to watch him aw-shucks his way through it all, just go over to the 10:19 mark and watch and listen as Cantor does a deer-in-the headlights and his press secretary makes a major blunder. Did he really think 60 Minutes wouldn't use it? I'd love to have been listening in on the phone calls as they begged and threatened. Not ready for prime time.

Barely Able To Keep Up

It is comforting, but only a little, to know that scientists are as flummoxed as mere mortal me when it comes to certainty. I have only recently learned the term "liquid" modernity to describe the sociologists' current world view of our basically unstable and unpredictable times, which at least seems to contain a finite number of people in a measurable space, thank Dog for that.
As for the multiverses, I say, bring 'em on! (But what if they also conclude there are people in some of those, too? Oh, my.)

It is as if you walked into a shoe store, had your feet measured, and found that a size 5 would fit you, a size 8 would also fit, and a size 12 would fit equally well. Such wishy-washy results make theoretical physicists extremely unhappy. Evidently, the fundamental laws of nature do not pin down a single and unique universe. According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science.

A Little Story Not Many People Know About

A movie star and an avant garde composer together invent a weapons system.

 Lamarr, however, not only possessed a head for abstract spatial relationships, but she also had been in her former life a fly on the wall during meetings and technical discussions between her ­munitions-manufacturer husband and his clients, some of them Nazi officials. 

...Hedy’s folly may have been in assuming men in government might overcome their prejudice that a beautiful woman could not have brains and imagination. But she lived to see similar versions of her invention be put into common practice, and in 1997, Hedy Lamarr, at the age of 82, and George Antheil (posthumously) were honored with the Pioneer Award by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 

Nature Wants To Eat You

What an amusing title for a web site.

The house centipede has the same poison fangs that normal centipedes do, but they can move towards you at great speed thanks to its long spindly legs. They have a top speed of 40 cm per second.
Incidentally, 40 cm is the exact distance between the house centipede and your face.

Buckley on Hitchens

Buckley is never as amusing as I want, but Hitchins usually was.

One of our lunches, at Café Milano, the Rick’s Café of Washington, began at 1 P.M., and ended at 11:30 P.M. At about nine o’clock (though my memory is somewhat hazy), he said, “Should we order more food?” I somehow crawled home, where I remained under medical supervision for several weeks, packed in ice with a morphine drip. Christopher probably went home that night and wrote a biography of Orwell. His stamina was as epic as his erudition and wit.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/12/postscript-christopher-hitchens.html#ixzz1gjgYWzL1

Silly Me

I assumed I would never have to think about John Bolton again. Then Newt promised to threatened to named him Secretary of State.
Here's Juan Cole, the rational blogoshere's go-to guy on such matters:

 ... wants to bomb Iran so badly he sometimes just sits in an F-18 and imagines himself over Isfahan

O Death

I was all set to make fun of Hillary's wardrobe, but I can't get the photos to work.

In the meantime, here's something completely different.
I'm not a big Hitchins fan,  but he's so rigorously honest and truthful in this piece and I'm really grateful for it.

So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion. It is our common fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that don’t live up to their apparent billing.

And then there's always this which, when I told her about it, frightened my therapist into a quick and facile rejection of the tone, that last line. She's my age, and sicker, at least judging from the last time I saw her shopping and looking like death, not even a smile of recognition, but a complaint. Maybe she was in pain.

User's Guide to Physical Debilitation

 by Paul Guest

        Should the painful condition of irreversible paralysis

last longer than forever or at least until

your death by bowling ball or illegal lawn dart

or the culture of death, which really has it out

for whoever has seen better days

but still enjoys bruising marathons of bird watching,

you, or your beleaguered caregiver

stirring dark witch's brews of resentment

inside what had been her happy life,

should turn to page seven where you can learn,

assuming higher cognitive functions

were not pureed by your selfish misfortune,

how to leave the house for the first time in two years.

An important first step,

with apologies for the thoughtlessly thoughtless metaphor.

When not an outright impossibility

or form of neurological science fiction,

sexual congress will either be with

tourists in the kingdom of your tragedy,

performing an act of sadistic charity;

with the curious, for whom you will be beguilingly blank canvas;

or with someone blindly feeling their way

through an extended power outage

caused by summer storms you once thought romantic.

Page twelve instructs you how best

to be inspiring to Magnus next door

as he throws old Volkswagens into orbit

above Alberta. And to Betty

in her dark charm confiding a misery,

whatever it is, that to her seems equivalent to yours.

The curl of her hair that her finger knows

better and beyond what you will,

even in the hypothesis of heaven

when you sleep. This guide is intended

to prepare you for falling down

and declaring détente with gravity,

else you reach the inevitable end

of scaring small children by your presence alone.

Someone once said of crushing

helplessness: it is a good idea to avoid that.

We agree with that wisdom

but gleaming motorcycles are hard

to turn down or safely stop

at speeds which melt aluminum. Of special note

are sections regarding faith

healing, self-loathing, abstract hobbies

like theoretical spelunking and extreme atrophy,

and what to say to loved ones

who won't stop shrieking

at Christmas dinner. New to this edition

is an index of important terms

such as catheter, pain, blackout,

pathological deltoid obsession, escort service,

magnetic resonance imaging,

loss of friends due to superstitious fear,

and, of course, amputation

above the knee due to pernicious gangrene.

It is our hope that this guide

will be a valuable resource

during this long stretch of boredom and dread

and that it may be of some help,

however small, to cope with your new life

and the gradual, bittersweet loss

of every God damned thing you ever loved.

The following may be a little over the top for you, but I love the death masks and had never seen them before.

Remember Stuxnet?

No. Well let me refresh your memory. And introduce you to Conficker.
Dog, I love cyberterrorism.

They Call It Ego Depletion

and here all along I just thought I was being stupid. Huh.

But System 2, in addition to being more deliberate and rational, is also lazy. And it tires easily

In my new quest to find out about happiness, Nobelist Daniel Kahneman's book is now at the top of the list.

Mitt v. Mitt

But I still say, please Dog, let it be Newt.

I Don't Consider My Ideas Controversial

I consider them right."
Biologist Lynn Margulis, recently deceased and awarded an honorary contrarienne title because we hardly ever hear about them when they're alive

He Who Seeks Beauty

shall find it.

Your Thanksgiving Therapy

You're welcome.

So, Yeah, I Want To Believe He's That Smart

You may have heard this week that all the Democrats have to do is do nothing. Wasn't that Sun Tsu's line?
(Sun Ya? I get all those dead Chinese generals mixed up.)
You may not have heard that this has been the plan all along. but if I hadn't been busy elsewhere I would have told you that the Supercommittee was not a serious move.
I am happy to see that Jon Taplin's hangin' in there because I miss his blog since he went and compromised himself by getting a real job. Rope-a-dope indeed.

Vaping

Why, indeed, do I still yearn for it?

They go on smoking in part because of a fact that the prohibitionists are loath to recognize: Nicotine is a drug with benefits. It has been linked by researchers (and smokers) to reduced anxiety and stress, lower weight, faster reaction time and improved concentration.

Yet the New Puritanism of the anti-smoking crowd stinks strongly of a vested lobbying interest, not just some twisted moral stance.

Americans! Can't Live With 'Em, etc.

http://ask.metafilter.com/200224/What-are-Americas-quirksMeFi has a lovely thread answering the musical question, "What do foreigners find weird about us/our country."
My favorite:Only in America would we have a Mexican Sushi place that is actually called "Casa Sushi".
It is nice to know that our service culture is actually superior to others, who apparently get away with being sullen and difficult. I think Americans expect each other to act like they like people, even though they don't. Where do we get that? And exactly what's wrong with it? Makes the day more pleasant.