‘Antonin Scalia once said that no one had ever been executed in the US for a crime they didn’t commit. Well, the Columbia Human Rights Law Review is devoting its entire spring issue to the case of Carlos DeLuna, who was executed by the state of Texas in 1989 for the murder of Wanda Lopez. Their investigation reveals that another Carlos, Carlos Hernandez, actually committed the murder.’  (via kottke).

“We all believe that death is bad. But why is death bad? In thinking about this question, I am simply going to assume that the death of my body is the end of my existence as a person. But if death is my end, how can it be bad for me to die? After all, once I’m dead, I don’t exist. If I don’t exist, how can being dead be bad for me?” — Shelly Kagan, professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of Death, published last month by Yale University Press (via The Chronicle of Higher Education).

“An innocuous-seeming U.S. Air Force press release. A serendipitous satellite image in Google Earth. Snapshots from a photographer on assignment at a Spanish air base. The crash of an Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle fighter-bomber in the United Arab Emirates. These are some of the fragments of information that Italian aviation blogger David Cenciotti has assembled to reveal the best picture yet of the Pentagon’s secretive war in the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa.

In a series of blog posts over the past two weeks, Cenciotti has described in unprecedented detail the powerful aerial force helping wage Washington’s hush-hush campaign of air strikes, naval bombardments and commando raids along the western edge of the Indian Ocean, including terror hot spots Yemen and Somalia. Cenciotti outlined the deployment of eight F-15Es from their home base in Idaho to the international air and naval outpost at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, north of Somalia.

Over the years there have been hints of the F-15s’ presence in East Africa, but “their actual mission remains a (sort-of) mystery,” Cenciotti writes. Based on the evidence, he proposes that the twin-seat fighter-bombers — one of the Air Force’s mainstay weapon systems in Afghanistan — are dropping bombs on al-Qaida-affiliated militants in Yemen. If true, that means the U.S. intervention in the western Indian Ocean is far more forceful, and risky, than previously suggested.” (via Wired).

‘Most of us have done it – told someone their performance was great when it was in fact woeful. But whose ego were we protecting? Theirs or our own? A new study has teased these possibilities apart by inviting 263 undergrad participants to read and provide feedback on an essay by another student on media violence and aggression.’ (via BPS Research Digest). 

It’s Winter in New York

and I’m flyin’ the friendly sky

and I can’t seem to make up my mind

O my melancholy baby

I’m undecided now

for you took away my heart

and left me with the hesitation blues

Can’t seem to make up my mind

you know you know

you could be my jazz baby

beyond the blue horizon

you could even be my satin doll

until I wouldn’t even know what time it is

O baby you stir my fire

I’m just sayin’ gimme time gimme time baby-face

’cause I’ve got the hesitation blues

and this poem is for you

You could be my Tokyo

even by my Janis my Billie

and bayybee I could be your Bobby McGee

but I’m still tryin’ to tame the lion for real

doin’ the money-musk farewell to whiskey

and stompin’ at the Pink Pony

so even tho the heat is on

and I’m moanin’ buried alive in the blues

afraid but thinkin’

of a second time around

I just can’t make up my mind

knowin’ there’ll never be another you

it’s as simple as that

just one of those things

like blues in the nite

I think I’ll have to get outta town

go about 500 miles away

all boogied out and bewildered

so for now I’m just sayin’

I’m undecided now

but remember

love can move mountains

and this poem is for you

– Herschel Silverman

“One of the universe’s greatest injustices is that poets, whose minds dwell far beyond the middling realities of the mundane world, have to worry about making a living. Poetry—even more than other arts—is a notoriously unprofitable endeavor, and in recent history great poets have spent their weekdays working as dreamy doctors, unlikely insurance salesmen, disaffected journalists—the list goes on. It’s probably safe to assume, however, that among them there was only one candy store owner, and that’s Herschel “Hersch” Silverman, who is turning 86 this year.” (via Tablet Magazine).

‘It is hard to pinpoint when exactly Vincent van Gogh crossed over from being a mere titan of modern art to a general symptom of our culture—a painter whose name adorns bottles of vodka and whose supposedly liberating madness is regarded with worshipful reverence. Twenty-five years ago, his paintings ushered in the era of stratospheric prices for leading Modernists, with the sale of “Sunflowers” for $39.7 million and “Irises” for $52.9 million—at the time, three- and fourfold increases over the previous world record for any work of art. Not long after that, Japanese industrialist Ryoei Saito set a new mark again by paying $82.5 million for “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” and then suggested that he might have it cremated and buried with him.

But despite continual invocation in exhibitions, movies and books, little of the legend of mad Vincent withstands serious scrutiny. If anything characterizes Van Gogh’s intensely felt landscapes and portraits, the critic Robert Hughes long ago observed, it is lucidity, not lunacy. And the scrupulous recent biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, while continuing the tradition of viewing the artist’s work as an expression of his “fanatic” personality, nevertheless concludes that his untimely death by a gunshot wound was more likely an accident than a raving suicide. What is perhaps more surprising is that almost as many questions surround the art as the life. In the past two decades, museums around the world have quietly downgraded some 40 works formerly attributed to the artist, and doubts have been raised about even highly sought-after paintings like the record-breaking “Sunflowers.” ‘ (via WSJ.com).

Related articles

• How Van Gogh went from being an abject failure to a hero (macleans.ca)
• Autumn Landscapes by Van Gogh (artsnapperrecs.wordpress.com)
• Museum discovers ‘new’ Van Gogh painting (cnn.com)

The Moral Limits of Markets: “…[H]ow long will it be before a severely cash-strapped government will be tempted to sell people-killing licenses? There are sure to be people out there who would pay to shoot, say, a condemned murderer. One could add to the fun by setting the the murderer free in the fields, and the shooters could go after him in helicopters — an updated version of the Roman circus where gladiators dispose of those already given the thumbs-down. Come to think of it: what about creating a market in killing Taliban, allowing people to buy an opportunity to do so from a drone-control center in the safety of Texas? The variations and possibilities are legion. But if (as I hope we do) we think these are horrible suggestions, then we think that there are moral limits to markets…” (via The Barnes & Noble Review).

‘Contrary to myth, Christianity’s concept of marriage has not been set in stone since the days of Christ, but has constantly evolved as a concept and ritual. Prof. John Boswell, the late Chairman of Yale University’s history department, discovered that in addition to heterosexual marriage ceremonies in ancient Christian church liturgical documents, there were also ceremonies called the “Office of Same-Sex Union” (10th and 11th century), and the “Order for Uniting Two Men” (11th and 12th century).’ (via anthropologist)

“You wouldn’t know it, not right away, but there is something strange about this picture. It’s a sunset, yes, but notice the blush of color right above the sun. It’s blue. And as you look up, the blue fades into a faint rose or pink.

Now think about the sunsets you’ve seen, how often the sky can turn golden, or orange, sometimes pink, red, but when you look up, away from the setting sun, those colors fade back to a pale, twilight blue? It’s rare to see a sunset dipped in blue.

So this photo is a puzzle: it’s blue where the red should be and red where the blue should be. Why?” (via Krulwich Wonders… : NPR).

Tikal

“In a striking find, archaeologists in Guatemala report the discovery of a small building whose walls display not only a stunningly preserved mural of a brightly adorned Mayan king, but also calendars that destroy any notion that the Mayans predicted the end of the world in 2012… The mural is the first Mayan painting found in a small building instead of a large public space. And it’s also the oldest known preserved Mayan painting. ” (via Washington Post).

So if you were planning to rack up massive amounts of credit card debt in the waning part of the year, think again.

Related articles

• The Mayans must surely be laughing at us. No, mocking us! (atwistedcrownofthorns.com)
• Late Night FDL: Mayan Art and Their Remarkably Accurate Calendar (my.firedoglake.com)

Timeless Photography of Past and Present: Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose (via WebUrbanist)

“On May 8th, the people of North Carolina voted in support of Amendment One, a constitutional amendment that discriminates against LGBT people, couples & their families. In protest, the Democratic National Convention Committee should MOVE its convention (September 2012) to a state that upholds values of equality & liberty, and which treats ALL citizens equally.” (via Change.org).

“A month after the authorities began taxing Romania’s witches and fortunetellers on their trade, Parliament is considering a new bill that would subject them to fines or even prison if their predictions do not come true. Superstition is taken seriously in Romania, and officials passed the tax bill in an effort to increase revenues. The new bill would also require witches to have permits and provide their customers with receipts, and it would bar them from practicing near schools and churches. Witches argue they should not be blamed for the failure of their tools.” (via NYTimes with thanks to rich)

“…[M]embers of the animal kingdom dig the 9.7-inch tablet too — particularly a clan of six orangutans at the Miami Zoo.

At the Miami Zoo’s Jungle Island, handlers are interacting with orangutans using the iPad. The apes use the tablet to identify items they’re familiar with, and express their wants and needs. This is done primarily through an app designed for autistic children that displays an array of object images onscreen.

“We’ll ask them to identify ‘Where’s the coconut?’, and they’ll point it out,” Linda Jacobs, who oversees the Jungle Island program, told Wired. “We want to build from that and give them a choice in what they have for dinner — show them pictures of every vegetable we have available that day, and let them pick, giving them the opportunity to have choices.”

Orangutans are very intelligent, but lack voice boxes and vocal cords, which can make communication difficult. Up until now, zoo keepers have been using sign language to communicate with them. Using the iPad gives the orangutans another form of communication with humans, provides them with mental stimulation, and also gives those who don’t know sign language a chance to interact with humans.” (via Wired.com).

“The fight for fairness and equal treatment under the law for all Americans took a critical step forward today when President Obama went on record stating that he believes the freedom to marry should be extended to same sex couples. Please join us in thanking him.” (via American Civil Liberties Union)

“The NFL is done for the year, but it is not pure fantasy to suggest that it may be done for good in the not-too-distant future. How might such a doomsday scenario play out and what would be the economic and social consequences?

By now we’re all familiar with the growing phenomenon of head injuries and cognitive problems among football players, even at the high school level. In 2009, Malcolm Gladwell asked whether football might someday come to an end, a concern seconded recently by Jonah Lehrer.

Before you say that football is far too big to ever disappear, consider the history: If you look at the stocks in the Fortune 500 from 1983, for example, 40 percent of those companies no longer exist. The original version of Napster no longer exists, largely because of lawsuits. No matter how well a business matches economic conditions at one point in time, it’s not a lock to be a leader in the future, and that is true for the NFL too. Sports are not immune to these pressures. In the first half of the 20th century, the three big sports were baseball, boxing, and horse racing, and today only one of those is still a marquee attraction.

The most plausible route to the death of football starts with liability suits….” (via Grantland).

‘Claude is 100 times bigger than a standard UK shore crab. Yet he is still a juvenile and will grow to double his weight. Claude was caught off the coast of Tasmania last month, but was sold to the Sea Life group along with two other Tasmanian giant crabs.’ (via Mail Online, with thanks to lloyd).

‘…[W]hen the language style of two people matched, when they used pronouns, prepositions, articles and so forth in similar ways at similar rates, they were much more likely to end up on a date… This is not because similar people are attracted to each other, Pennebaker says; people can be very different. It’s that when we are around people that we have a genuine interest in, our language subtly shifts.

But some of his most interesting work has to do with power dynamics. He says that by analyzing language you can easily tell who among two people has power in a relationship, and their relative social status. “It’s amazingly simple,” Pennebaker says, “Listen to the relative use of the word “I.” What you find is completely different from what most people would think. The person with the higher status uses the word “I” less….. We use “I” more when we talk to someone with power because we’re more self-conscious. We are focused on ourselves – how we’re coming across – and our language reflects that….’ (via NPR).

…You Put Your Hand in the LHC Beam? (via Life’s Little Mysteries).

Every day

I see or hear

something

that more or less

kills me

with delight,

that leaves me

like a needle

in the haystack

of light.

It was what I was born for -

to look, to listen,

to lose myself

inside this soft world -

to instruct myself

over and over

in joy,

and acclamation.

Nor am I talking

about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,

the very extravagant -

but of the ordinary,

the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.

Oh, good scholar,

I say to myself,

how can you help

but grow wise

with such teachings

as these -

the untrimmable light

of the world,

the ocean’s shine,

the prayers that are made

out of grass?

– Mary Oliver

“Astronomers have gathered the most direct evidence yet of a supermassive black hole shredding a star that wandered too close.

Supermassive black holes, weighing millions to billions times more than the Sun, lurk in the centers of most galaxies. These hefty monsters lay quietly until an unsuspecting victim, such as a star, wanders close enough to get ripped apart by their powerful gravitational clutches.

Astronomers have spotted these stellar homicides before, but this is the first time they can identify the victim. Using a slew of ground- and space-based telescopes, a team of astronomers led by Suvi Gezari of The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., has identified the victim as a star rich in helium gas. The star resides in a galaxy 2.7 billion light-years away.” (via HubbleSite)

Lunar perigee and apogee apparent size comparison

“The full Moon has a reputation for trouble. It raises high tides, it makes dogs howl, it wakes you up in the middle of the night with beams of moonlight stealing through drapes. If a moonbeam wakes you up on the night of May 5th, 2012, you might want to get out of bed and take a look. This May’s full Moon is a “super Moon,” as much as 14% bigger and 30% brighter than other full Moons of 2012.

The scientific term for the phenomenon is “perigee moon.” Full Moons vary in size because of the oval shape of the Moon’s orbit. The Moon follows an elliptical path around Earth with one side (“perigee”) about 50,000 km closer than the other (“apogee”). Full Moons that occur on the perigee side of the Moon’s orbit seem extra big and bright.” (via NASA Science).

Related:

• Get ready to be moonstruck (again) this Saturday (news.cnet.com)
• Moon at perigee this weekend (go.theregister.com)
• Overstated in orbit – Sydney Morning Herald (drugstoresource.wordpress.com)
• The Biggest Supermoon in Years is Coming Saturday Night (blogs.smithsonianmag.com)
• Super Full Moon Expected Saturday Night (fox2now.com)

Antonin Scalia

Anders Breivik

David Barash, University of Washington psychologist: “What to do with psychopaths? They’re the Anders Breivik’s, the Ted Bundy’s, the people who kill without remorse, sometimes for sport, profit, out of boredom, or for no particular reason at all, their despicable actions lubricated by a literally inhuman lack of empathy. And, as I noted earlier, there is no known treatment for psychopathy.

For all of my oft-expressed lefty political positions (on war – especially nuclear weapons – social justice, environmental protection, health care, etc.) the more I know about psychopathy the more readily my opinion on one issue at least converges with such hanging judges as the right-wing lunatic Antonin Scalia. Thus, even though I am against the death penalty generally, believing that the state shouldn’t kill people in an effort to demonstrate that people shouldn’t kill people, I’m not so sure I feel that way when it comes to clearly diagnosed, murderous psychopaths.

Given that psychopaths appear to derive their behavior from nervous systems that function differently than the rest of us, they raise an interesting question: Can such people be held legally responsible for their actions? To tell the truth, I don’t really care. To my mind, psychopaths are so dangerous (and intractable) that I’m much less concerned about their rights than about our rights to be protected from their depredations.” (via The Chronicle of Higher Education).

Related:

• Female Psychopaths (psychologytoday.com)
• The psychopath among us (psychopathresistance.wordpress.com)
• Psychopath Vs Sociopath (mademan.com)
• The Psychopath and the Rest of Us (jl10ll.wordpress.com)
• Psychopaths are Inconsistent and Contradictory (phoenixsphere.wordpress.com)
• The psychopath: Facts and research resources (drjezphillips.wordpress.com)

…you’re in the wrong room. (Google search)

“BPA is a chemical used in something that passes through our hands every day, the cash register receipt. But even though Canada has declared BPA to be toxic, many companies continue to use this chemical in receipt paper manufacturing as well as in many other common everyday household items. Why haven’t companies quit using BPA in their products; after all does BPA really pass through a person’s skin?

Does BPA really get absorbed through contact with your skin?

Recent research has proven that this harmful chemical really does pass through your skin and can be absorbed into your blood stream. In the case of cash register receipt paper, BPA is in a powdered form that coats the paper and then can be rubbed off onto your skin. The pores in your skin can absorb the chemical and then it can be transmitted throughout your body through your blood stream.” (via Yahoo! Voices ). 

Perhaps it is not a stage of decline but a crowning achievement of human evolution? (via The Washington Post.)

Related:

• Middle Age Is the Secret Weapon of Mankind (patospapa.wordpress.com)
• 10 biggest puzzles of human evolution (newscientist.com)
• Middle-aged prodigies: Seven poster children over 40 (newscientist.com)
• Good news if you’re middle-aged! You’re at evolution’s peak, according to scientists (dailymail.co.uk)
• Paul Vallely: That’s me – at the pinnacle of evolution (independent.co.uk)
• Why the middle-aged are most impressive life-forms of all time (thesun.co.uk)
• The Advantages of the Middle-Aged Brain (ideas.time.com)
• I’m loving being middle aged (blogs.telegraph.co.uk)
• The Middle-Aged Man (lewrockwell.com)

‘Did Neanderthals sing? Is there a “music gene”? Two scientists debate whether our capacity to make and enjoy songs comes from biological evolution or from the advent of civilization.’ (via The Atlantic).

The quarry road tumbles before me

out of the early morning darkness,

lustrous with frost, an unrolled bolt

of softly glowing fabric, interwoven

with tiny glass beads on silver thread,

the cloth spilled out and then lovingly

smoothed by my father’s hand

as he stands behind the wooden counter

(dark as these fields) at Tilden’s Store

so many years ago. “Here,” he says smiling,

“you can make something special with this.”

– Ted Kooser (thanks, Barbara)

Courtesy of the incomparable pipes of Grace Slick, backed by Jorma’s soaring guitar. Jefferson Airplane on the Dick Cavett Show on 08-19-1969, the day after Woodstock. If they paid attention to the lyrics, this might have been the end of the line for the Airplane’s credibility with some Cavett viewers (and the beginning of their cred for others). (via Dangerous Minds). [Do these terms mean anything to you: Grace Slick? Jefferson Airplane? Dick Cavett? Woodstock? 'Up against the wall, motherfucker'?]

“If you visit a Northwest ocean beach this summer, you’ll likely run across objects from last year’s Japanese tsunami.

The things you’ll likely see include milk jugs, detergent bottles, tooth brushes and bottles for water, pop or juices with Japanese stamps, marks and labels. Perhaps a soccer ball or a volleyball — two that washed up on an Alaskan island have been claimed by their Japanese owners.

The things you are highly unlikely to see are human remains, refrigerators or anything else that would have to be sealed to float or can come apart, like bigger parts of houses. Months on the ocean will breakup anything with parts, experts say.” (via KPLU News for Seattle and the Northwest).

Paul Krugman: “So Mitt Romney gave a speech at a closed Ohio drywall factory, which he tried to use as a symbol of Obama’s economic failure. The symbolism was perfect — not as an illustration of Obama’s failure, but as an illustration of just how stupid Romney thinks we are.

Even regular reporters noticed that the factory in question closed under, yes, George W. Bush — a fact Romney failed to mention, although his campaign scrambled to cover for him afterwards.

What I didn’t see mentioned was the point that this was a drywall factory — that is, a supplier of a product largely used in home construction. It’s one thing to say that Obama should have revived the economy as a whole; it’s another to say that he should have brought back the housing bubble!

Finally, why should we believe that Romney’s policies — basically tax cuts for the rich, as usual — would yield great economic results? Well, I guess you can point to Bush’s example; how did his administration at this point compare with Obama? From BLS data:

You can offer various excuses for Bush’s record, I guess. But on the face of it, what possible reason is there to think that Bush-like policies would be an improvement?” (via NYTimes.com).

“While baboons can’t read, they can tell the difference between real English words and nonsensical ones, a new study reports.” (via NYTimes).

Forget-me-not

The name of the author is the first to go

followed obediently by the title, the plot,

the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel

which suddenly becomes one you have never read,

never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor

decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,

to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye

and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,

and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,

the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,

it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,

not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river

whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,

well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those

who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night

to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.

No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted

out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

 – Billy Collins

Very funny. How many of these have happened to you? (via The New Yorker)

“As you educate yourself about your own talent and ambitions, you graduate from doing a task right to doing the right task. It takes some experience to realize that a lot of work is better left undone. It might be busywork that is performed out of habit, or it might be work that is heading in the wrong direction. Working smart means making sure you are spending your time on jobs that are effective and that actually need to be done.” (via Smarterware).

“I’m typically a year or two behind any cultural trend, so you probably already know about gender-reveal parties. I first heard of them over the weekend: a couple, strangers to me, had invited friends and relatives over to bite into cupcakes at the same instant and share the moment when the blue or pink custard inside would inform them all of the sex of the baby. (The sonogram result had gone from lab to baker without being seen by anyone else, including the parents-to-be.) Other couples choose different methods of revelation: grip the knife together and cut into a cake with blue or pink filling. Open a sealed box that releases pink or blue helium balloons. Then put the scene on the Web so that everyone not invited can participate vicariously.

These events are becoming more and more popular. The first video of a gender-reveal party was posted on YouTube in 2008, but in just the last six months almost two thousand have been uploaded. You can watch one from last month. (Spoiler alert: it’s a girl.)

Maybe it was the context—I happened to hear about the gender-reveal party in a rundown inner-city café full of ex-felons who were having a very hard time finding jobs—but my initial take was incredulity trending negative. These parties seem to marry the oversharing of Facebook and Instagram with the contrived ceremonies that modern people in search of meaning impose on normal life events: food journaling, birthday parties for grownups, workout diaries, birth-experience planning. (One birth-planning center offers a “baby gender selection kit” involving three safe and natural steps that turn sex itself into a gender-reveal party.)

In the case of gender-reveal parties, couples take a private moment made possible by science and oblige others to join in, with the result—as in so many invented rituals of our day—that the focus turns from where it ought to be (in this case, the baby) to the self. At a bris or christening, the emotional emphasis falls on the arrival of a new life in the embrace of family and community. At a gender-reveal party, the camera is on the expectant father tearing up at the sight of pink cake.

That’s the nature of manufactured customs and instant traditions. They emerge from an atomized society in order to fill a perceived void where real ceremonies used to be, and they end by reflecting that society’s narcissism. Is it too much to say that gender-reveal parties are a mild symptom of cultural despair?” (via The New Yorker)

Flying Burrito Brother Dies at 65: “Chris Ethridge, a founding member of the country-rock band “The Flying Burrito Brothers,”died here on Monday. He was 65.He learned he had pancreatic cancer in September, his family said.Mr. Ethridge, a bassist and a songwriter, spent eight years on the road with Willie Nelson. He played alongside Gram Parsons in the Flying Burrito Brothers and the International Submarine Band and co-wrote several of Mr. Parsons’ solo tunes.In later years, Mr. Ethridge played with Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Ry Cooder and other stars, both as a session musician and touring player.” (NYTimes.com obituary)

Ethridge was smack dab at the center of the musical scene I enjoyed so much back in those years. Along with Levon Helm’s passing, the music is much diminished this week.

“Last Friday, …we asked readers to propose a single English word that should be eliminated from the language. Suggestions were made via Facebook or Twitter, with the hashtag #tnyquestion. We started the contest with high hopes that readers would help to streamline the language, but the first wave of responses was not auspicious…” (via The New Yorker).

Some of the scurrilous suggestions are not surprising, but the runaway favorite is.

The Forty-Year Itch (Adam Gopnik):  “So it seems time to pronounce a rule about American popular culture: the Golden Forty-Year Rule. The prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between forty and fifty years past. (And the particular force of nostalgia, one should bear in mind, is not simply that it is a good setting for a story but that it is a good setting for you.)” (via The New Yorker).

“In case any FmH readers were wondering how I’ve come by my opinionated gall, it may have something to do with the fact that I turn 50 years old today. (Others may be thinking I probably shouldn’t be doing this at my age…). And my son turns eight today…”

So today my son is eighteen, and I’ve put on a few years too. Thanks to everyone for all the wonderful birthday greetings.

‘Dmitri Krioukov, a senior research scientist at UCSD, successfully appealed his failure-to-stop ticket using a physics and math argument that ultimately swayed a San Diego judge.

In the paper, entitled “The Proof of Innocence,” Krioukov offered a series of equations and graphs to show that it was physically impossible for him to have broken the law, as an officer claimed.

The judge was “very, very smart,” Krioukov told The Times. “She got my point, I think, very precisely.”

Krioukov compared the problem to the way a person sees a train approaching from the platform and thinks it is moving slowly, when in fact it is barreling down the track. Using math and physics, Krioukov determined that a car moving at a constant speed can appear to move in the same way as a car that is moving fast but stops for a short time and then accelerates again.

In other words, a car that appears to be moving at a constant speed through a stop sign could have actually stopped at the stop sign, before speeding up again.’ (via LATimes).

Levon Helm performing with The Band. Hamburg, May 1971.

Sad news. Levon Helm is near death, according to this note posted on his website by his family:

“Dear Friends,

Levon is in the final stages of his battle with cancer. Please send your prayers and love to him as he makes his way through this part of his journey.

Thank you fans and music lovers who have made his life so filled with joy and celebration… he has loved nothing more than to play, to fill the room up with music, lay down the back beat, and make the people dance! He did it every time he took the stage…

We appreciate all the love and support and concern.

From his daughter Amy, and wife Sandy”

The Band‘s brown album would be one of my ten desert island discs, for sure, and always has heavy rotation on my iPod. My best friend, if anything a more intense fiend for the Band, and I were always planning to get to one of the Midnight Rambles Helm had been holding on his farm. Sorrowfully, not to be. Saving grace is that he is soon to join Richard Manuel and Rick Danko in the Angel Band. (via Levon Helm Studios, with thanks to abby for the original heads-up).

And: Levon Helms’ finest musical moments. (via Recordonline)

“Exactly one hundred years ago Sunday, an ocean liner struck a block of ice and sank in the North Atlantic. The story of the ocean liner has been told hundreds of times. This story is about the block of ice.

[These] photos … are quite possibly the only known photographic evidence of the actual iceberg that struck the Titanic. Understandably, nobody had bothered to snap any photographs while the ship was actually sinking, so it’s impossible to make an absolutely confirmed positive identification. But both photographs feature the telltale sign of a collision with a ship, and likely a recent one at that: a streak of red paint.” (via Wired)

“A massive genetics study relying on fMRI brain scans and DNA samples from over 20,000 people has revealed what is claimed as the biggest effect yet of a single gene on intelligence…” (via New Scientist).

But that is not the most significant aspect of this finding. The effect, although real, was miniscule, accounting for less than 2 points in IQ. So, is it any surprise that the authors conclude that, to the extent that genetics influences intelligence, it is a function of the interplay of multiple genes, not just one?

“An incredibly stunning solar flare erupted from the sun’s surface, throwing charged particles and searing plasma millions of miles out into space on Apr. 16.

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured data from the flare — a medium-sized M-class event — which was turned into a movie by Steele Hill, media specialist at the Goddard Space Flight Center. The blast was not directed at the Earth and is unlikely to hit any of the planets in our solar system….

The sun is currently entering a time of renewed activity, following a quiet period in its 11-year solar cycle. Peak action is expected from early- to mid-2013. Though it is predicted to be one of the least active cycles in the last 100 years, we have already witnessed several massive flares this year.” (via Wired).

‘The latest installment of the Up Series of documentary films is due out in the UK in May. The films have followed the development of fourteen British children since 1964 with a new film appearing every seven years…the participants are now 56.

…

This may be the last film in the series…director Michael Apted will be 78 when the next film is due and he’s unwilling to pass it off to someone else to finish.” (via kottke) 

Any documentary lover and any Anglophile (I count myself as both) should have been following this fascinating and unprecedented series of films.