The Foreign Service memo advising yeti hunters: “This Foreign Service memo treats a science-fictional subject—the existence of the Yeti, or the Abominable Snowman—with utmost bureaucratic seriousness. Titled “Regulations Governing Mountain Climbing Expeditions in Nepal—Relating to Yeti,” it was issued from the American Embassy in Kathmandu on November 30, 1959.

The memo came at the end of a decade of strenuous Yeti-hunting. This Outside Magazine timeline of Yeti hunts tells the story in compact form. In 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay climbed Everest, and reported seeing large tracks. In 1954, the Daily Mail (UK) funded a sixteen-week “Snowman Expedition” to Everest to look for clues. (The newspaper is still on the case today.) And in the late 1950s, American oil millionaire and cryptozoology enthusiast Tom Slick—whose colorful life, as Badass Digest points out, should definitely be made into a movie—bankrolled a number of Himalayan expeditions in search of the creature.” (Slate) .

“A 32-year-old Brooklyn man is suing his parents, claiming he wasn’t loved enough by them and that their neglect has caused him to be homeless and jobless.

Bernard Bey filed a self-written lawsuit in Brooklyn court earlier this month, accusing his parents of causing him mental anguish and for making him feel “unloved and beaten by the world.” (U.S. News).

 

“Opponents of Egypt’s President Mohammed Morsi are voting to send him where no Islamist leader has gone before: outer space. Morsi on Saturday was leading the field in Egypt in an online contest sponsored by deodorant makers Axe to send a lucky few on a shuttle operated by space tourism company Space Expedition Corp.” (The Globe and Mail).

‘Local Timbuktu mat-seller Leitny Cisse al-Djoumat couldn’t hide his shock at the sheer amount of mats these strange fellows bought.

“It’s the first time someone has bought such a large amount,” al-Djoumat told the Associated Press. “They didn’t explain why they wanted so many.”

Well, AP reporters later figured it all out when they found a xeroxed copy of 22 tips to avoid drone detection.

We’ve put together the list, which serves as critical intel al-Qaeda in Mali.’ (Business Insider).

”

What might dolphins be saying with all those clicks and squeaks? Each other’s names, suggests a new study of the so-called signature whistles that dolphins use to identify themselves.

Whether the vocalizations should truly be considered names, and whether dolphins call to compatriots in a human-like manner, is contested among scientists, but the results reinforce the possibility.” (Wired Science).

‘Is the Higgs boson a herald of the apocalypse? That’s the suggestion behind a theory, developed more than 30 years ago, that is back in the headlines this week. According to physicists, the mass of the Higgs-like particle announced last summer supports the notion that our universe is teetering on the edge of stability, like a pencil balanced on its point.

“It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable,” Joseph Lykken, of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, said on Monday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “At some point, billions of years from now, it’s all going to be wiped out.” ‘ (New Scientist).

“It is a nightmare situation. A person diagnosed as being in a vegetative state has an operation without anaesthetic because they cannot feel pain. Except, maybe they can.

Alexandra Markl at the Schön clinic in Bad Aibling, Germany, and colleagues studied people with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS) – also known as vegetative state – and identified activity in brain areas involved in the emotional aspects of pain. People with UWS can make reflex movements but can’t show subjective awareness.” (New Scientist).

“Every 12 years, the northern Indian city of Allahabad plays host to a vast gathering of Hindu pilgrims called the Maha Kumbh Mela. This year, Allahabad is expected to host an estimated 80 million pilgrims between January and March.

People come to Allahabad to wash away their sins in the sacred River Ganges. For many it’s the realization of their life’s goal, and they emerge feeling joyful and rejuvenated. But there is also a darker side to the world’s largest religious gathering, as some take advantage of the swirling crowds to abandon elderly relatives.” (National Geographic).

Prof. Chen

‘It is a controversial theory which has been given some weight by new findings from a Yale University behavioural economist, Keith Chen.Prof Chen says his research proves that the grammar of the language we speak affects both our finances and our health.Bluntly, he says, if you speak English you are likely to save less for your old age, smoke more and get less exercise than if you speak a language like Mandarin, Yoruba or Malay.

Prof Chen divides the world’s languages into two groups, depending on how they treat the concept of time. “If your language separates the future and the present in its grammar, that seems to lead you to slightly disassociate the future from the present”. Strong future-time reference languages (“strong FTR”) require their speakers to use a different tense when speaking of the future. Weak future-time reference (“weak FTR”) languages do not.

“If I wanted to explain to an English-speaking colleague why I can’t attend a meeting later today, I could not say ‘I go to a seminar’, English grammar would oblige me to say ‘I will go, am going, or have to go to a seminar’. “If, on the other hand, I were speaking Mandarin, it would be quite natural for me to omit any marker of future time and say ‘I go listen seminar’ since the context leaves little room for misunderstanding,” says Prof Chen. Even within European languages there are clear grammatical differences in the way they treat future events, he says.”In English you have to say ‘it will rain tomorrow’ while in German you can say ‘morgen regnet es’ – it rains tomorrow.”

Speakers of languages which only use the present tense when dealing with the future are likely to save more money than those who speak languages which require the use a future tense, he argues… “The act of savings is fundamentally about understanding that your future self – the person you’re saving for – is in some sense equivalent to your present self,” Prof Chen told the BBC’s Business Daily.’ (BBC News).

“The meteorite that struck central Russia last week, which injured around 1,000 people as it broke apart over a section of the Ural Mountains and sent shockwaves across the ground below, was but one of thousands that have impacted our planet over the past four millennia. Now you can see the location of every recorded meteorite impact on Earth going back to 2,300 BCE all in one heat map created by Javier de la Torre, cofounder of geo software companies Vizzuality and CartoDB.

De la Torre created the map using CartoDB’s mapping software, which relies on the free crowdsourced OpenStreetMap for its base layer. The meteorite impact site data — 34,513 individual points of impact in total — came from the Meteoritical Society, an international nonprofit scientific collaboration…” (The Verge).

The upside of anger: ‘ “Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody’s power, that is not easy.”

So wrote Aristotle, more than 2000 years ago, in his classic work The Art of Rhetoric. His words don’t quite square with our modern concept of anger. Today, we tend to think of it as a destructive emotion that can wreck relationships and blight careers. Indeed, the field of anger management is awash with theories on how best to control or suppress excess anger. But anger, it now seems, is not all bad. In fact, we might do well to cultivate our anger in some situations – in personal relationships, in negotiating certain business deals and within social action groups, for example.

“To the extent that anger is usually unpleasant to experience, it could be viewed as a negative emotion,” says psychologist Brett Ford at the University of California, Berkeley. “But experiencing anger can help us pursue our goals, and be happier and healthier in the long run.” To reap these benefits, the knack, as Aristotle understood, is to know when, where, why and how to get angry. We need to learn to use our anger strategically, rather than letting it control us.’ (New Scientist).

Related articles:

• Why is anger the most problematic emotion? (ask.metafilter.com)
• Mad as Hell! (almondhead.wordpress.com)
• Anger (fosterwee.wordpress.com)
• Get Mad, Just Don’t Get Even (childsplayservices.wordpress.com)
• Want to Be Happy? 5 Ways to Handle Anger (psychologytoday.com)
• Is Hidden Hostility Harming Your Relationship? (atlantablackstar.com)
• How to express feelings? (anger) (psychforums.com)

“The meteor streaking across Russia this morning was largely captured by cameras mounted on car dashboards. Why do so many Russian drivers seem to have dash-cams? Protection against fraud & hit-and-runs. Kottke featured this article from Animal New York’s Marina Galperina back in December….The other reason for the dash-cams? Russians are apparently crazy drivers. From the other previous Kottke Russian driving post: 13 minutes of can’t-look-away traffic accidents. ” (kottke).

 

Meteor strike injures hundreds in central Russia: “A meteor crashing in Russia’s Ural mountains has injured at least 500 people, as the shockwave blew out windows and rocked buildings. Most of those hurt suffered minor cuts and bruises but some received head injuries, Russian officials report. A fireball was seen streaking through the clear morning sky above the city of Yekaterinburg, followed by loud bangs.” (BBC News).

[“Tunguska”? See here.]

“As part of a thought experiment to reform the electoral college, Neil Freeman redrew the US into 50 new states with equal population. In trying to balance the interests of the popular vote vs the integrity of states, he’s split the baby so that no one is likely to be happy. Perfect!

The map began with an algorithm that groups counties based on proximity, urban area, and commuting patterns. The algorithm was seeded with the fifty largest cities. After that, manual changes took into account compact shapes, equal populations, metro areas divided by state lines, and drainage basins. In certain areas, divisions are based on census tract lines.” (kottke).

”

A new study on the chemicals in the latest batch of legally sold ‘synthetic highs’ has found what looks like an unintended hybrid drug.

As regular Mind Hacks readers will know, I’m a keen watcher of the murky ‘legal high’ market.

We seem to be in the unprecedented position where sophisticated grey-market pharmacologists are rapidly inventing completely new-to-science drugs in underground labs for thrill-seeking punters.

These synthetic drugs have typically come in two types: ‘fake pot’ – made from synthetic cannabinoids and stimulants, usually derived from cathinone.

A study just published in Forensic Science International looked at the chemicals in a new wave of ‘fake pot’ herbal highs sold over the internet.” (Mind Hacks).

Are there only five artists in the music world?

 

“Maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that the man who brought us a vision of compassionate conservatism would turn to art to express the angst of a crappy presidency that got us into two wars; used homophobia, racism, and sexism as an electoral tool; crashed our economy; and made the world hate America. This is a man who is obviously feeling his mortality. He sits in the bathtub alone. Nothing to contemplate. Nothing to see beyond reflections of himself and his body. There is almost a melancholy in these images, with their grays, and he is not presented as a strong, heroic person — in fact, quite the opposite. This is not the George W. Bush of Fox News or Sunday morning talk shows. This is Bush the old man, with lots of time on his hands. Once the most powerful man in the world, Bush is now alone, exploring his immediate surroundings in these spurts of introspection. If only he had done this all along, maybe he would’ve been a better leader.” (Salon)

Related articles

• Republicans suddenly remember Dubya fondly because Romney was THAT bad (dailykos.com)
• A. Barton Hinkle on Dubya’s Fourth Term (reason.com)
• George W. Bush — My Sister’s Been HACKED!!!! (tmz.com)
• George W. Bush’s Secret Paintings Bare His Soul (And His Naked Body) (fastcodesign.com)
• Art world’s newest superstar: George W. Bush? (hotair.com)
• What Barack owes Dubya (qz.com)
• Okay, this is weird… (cannonfire.blogspot.com)

‘Question: Why, when you’re waiting for a lift having already pressed the “call lift” button, does someone always arrive after you and insist on re-pressing the button?… (T)o truly understand the root of Bob’s action, we would do well to consider other futile activities in his life…’ The Morning News).

“• A massive earthquake struck Wednesday east of Kira Kira that has generated a localized Tsunami.

• Five people have been confirmed dead and coastal villages have been damaged.

• In the previous week, the region has seen about 7 earthquakes of magnitude 6 to 6.5 until Wednesday.” (Xinhua)

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• 8.0 quake strikes off Solomon Islands; Tsunami warning up

“Refrigerators, foam buoys and even ketchup bottles are piling up on Alaska’s beaches. Almost two years after the devastating Japanese tsunami, its debris and rubbish are fouling the coastlines of many states — especially in Alaska.”(NPR).

Related articles

• What we are doing, and why we are doing it
• Tsunami Debris Problem Gets Worse in Alaska, with Little Clean Up Funding In Sight
• Alaska Coast Like a ‘Landfill’ 2 Years After Tsunami
• Wave of Styrofoam from 2011 tsunami threatens Alaska environment
• Alaska senator seeks $15 million for tsunami debris cleanup on West Coast

“The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) project has scored its 14th consecutive victory, discovering the largest prime number so far.

The number, 2 to the power of 57,885,161 minus 1, is a digit that’s 17,425,170 digits long. That’s big enough that if you want to see the full text, you’ll have to brace yourself for a 22.5MB download.

GIMPS, a cooperative project splitting the search across thousands of independent computers, announced the find yesterday after it had been confirmed by other checks. At present, there are 98,980 people and 574 teams involved in the GIMPS project; their 730,562 processors perform about 129 trillion calculations per second.” (CNET).

Related articles

• Newly-discovered prime number is more than 17 million digits long
• World’s largest prime number discovered — all 17 million digits
• Largest prime number found
• Largest known prime number – 17M digits long – discovered
• More experimental evidence for the infinitude of the primes
• New 17-million-digit monster is largest known prime

‘When Dr. Michael Anderson hears about his low-income patients struggling in elementary school, he usually gives them a taste of some powerful medicine: Adderall.

The pills boost focus and impulse control in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Although A.D.H.D is the diagnosis Dr. Anderson makes, he calls the disorder “made up” and “an excuse” to prescribe the pills to treat what he considers the children’s true ill — poor academic performance in inadequate schools.

“I don’t have a whole lot of choice,” said Dr. Anderson, a pediatrician for many poor families in Cherokee County, north of Atlanta. “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.” ‘ (NYTimes.com).

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• Spike in stimulant abuse packs ERs with students, others
• Kill Pills
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“The story of Richard Fee, an athletic, personable college class president and aspiring medical student, highlights widespread failings in the system through which five million Americans take medication for A.D.H.D., doctors and other experts said.

Medications like Adderall can markedly improve the lives of children and others with the disorder. But the tunnel-like focus the medicines provide has led growing numbers of teenagers and young adults to fake symptoms to obtain steady prescriptions for highly addictive medications that carry serious psychological dangers. These efforts are facilitated by a segment of doctors who skip established diagnostic procedures, renew prescriptions reflexively and spend too little time with patients to accurately monitor side effects.” (NYTimes.com).

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• Stimulant Abuse and Teens
• First Do No Harm: A.D.H.D. & Amphetamines
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“No, this isn’t a make-believe place. It’s real.” (Krulwich Wonders… : NPR).

“In a long life of scholarship and dissent, Gene Sharp has been imprisoned and persecuted, but never silenced. His ideas continue to inspire resistance movements across the world.” (New Statesman).

‘…The so-called intelligence “Fusion Center” sifted through data on 29 major mass killings in the U.S. since 1999, starting with the Littleton, Colorado school shooting. Its practical advice is to be more concerned by your co-worker with the bad hygiene who mutters about putting his “things in order” than by the war veteran in the next cubicle.

The basic pattern found by the New Jersey DHS fusion center, and obtained by Public Intelligence (.PDF), is one of a killer who lashes out at his co-workers. Thirteen out of the 29 observed cases “occurred at the workplace and were conducted by either a former employee or relative of an employee,” the November report finds. His “weapon of choice” is a semiautomatic handgun, rather than the rifles that garnered so much attention after Newtown. The infamous Columbine school slaying of 1999 is the only case in which killers worked in teams: they’re almost always solo acts — and one-off affairs. In every single one of them, the killer was male, between the age of 17 and 49.’ (Danger Room | Wired.com).

Related articles

• Mass Shooters: Mostly Solo White Guys, Lots Mad at Their Jobs, Still Not Much We Can Do in Public Policy Terms
• Ammo clips key in mass killings
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• Everyone of the mass murderers were Democrats
• Was the Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting a False Flag Operation to Ban Guns?
• Shooter risk factors: rejection, bullying
• Why should mass school shootings get media attention?
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‘…most of the top 20 “happiest” countries according to the index are in western Europe. So what gives? What do these nations have in common that can somehow explain their prosperity?Being an electoral democracy is virtually a given – of the top 20 most prosperous countries, only Singapore and Hong Kong aren’t democracies. Being small also seems to help. Big countries with heterogeneous populations are more unwieldy; disparate groups make it harder for a society to build social cohesion and trust.What else? They are all borderline socialist states, with generous welfare benefits and lots of redistribution of wealth. Yet they don’t let that socialism cross the line into autocracy. Civil liberties are abundant consider decriminalized drugs and prostitution in the Netherlands. There are few restrictions on the flow of capital or of labor.So where does the United States rank? It’s at 12th place this year, slipping from 10th. According to Legatum, the U.S. has slipped in the areas of governance, personal freedom, and most troubling, in entrepreneurship & opportunity. America is supposed to be the land of opportunity, but Legatum notes “a decline in citizens’ perception that working hard gets you ahead.” ‘ (Yahoo! Travel).

“For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War II.” (Smithsonian via steve) Never mind being unaware of WWII; they were essentially unaware of the 20th century.

“The Atlantic pulled an advertorial package singing the praises of the Church of Scientology and its leader, David Miscavige, last night after the sponsored content drew the attention—and ire—of both reporters and readers, and no doubt sparked an untold number of newsroom conversations about the ethics and optics of such revenue-generating efforts.

In place of the the advertorial headlined “David Miscavige Leads Scientology to Milestone Year” that trumpeted the opening of a dozen new Scientology churches around the world, the magazine is now running a note to readers alerting them that the ad campaign has been temporarily halted while the magazine reviews its official policy for such sponsored content.” (Slate).

“A gift exchange between Asian rulers several centuries ago may have inadvertently saved a population of elephants from extinction, according to a new study.

Today a small population of unusually placid and genetically distinct elephants lives in the northeast corner of Borneo…” (National Geographic).

‘People applying for gun licences could be asked to prove that their current or recent partners have consented to the application, Theresa May has suggested.

The home secretary said it was “not appropriate” for people with a history of domestic violence to own guns.

Ministers are examining if the extra check could “reduce the risk to domestic violence victims”, she said.’ (BBC News).

“Rather than mouth empty platitudes, so-called shy and silent Finns may actually be showing respect, says Michael Berry, the latest in a line of linguists to explain the phenomenon of the stereotypically quiet Finn.”  (yle.fi).

“Next year features an anomaly for American Jews – The first day of Hanukkah coincides with Thanksgiving, on 11/28/2013 (meaning the first night of Hanukkah is actually the night before Thanksgiving). I was curious how often this happens. It turns out that it has never happened before…and it will never happen again. (Correction: it happened once before, in 1888: see Addendum.)” (Jonathan Mizrahi).

“Researchers have claimed that they have found the ultimate brew – a tea made from coffee leaves – that is healthier than both the drinks.

According to experts, the coffee leaf tea – said to have an ‘earthy’ taste – is less bitter than tea and not as strong as coffee, boasts high levels of compounds, which lower the risk of diabetes and heart disease.

The brew carries far less caffeine than tea or coffee and contains antioxidant, which reportedly help combat heart disease, diabetes and cancer, and anti-inflammatory properties, the Daily Mail reported.

The coffee leaves were examined by researchers from the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, South-West London, together with researchers in Montpellier, France.” (Yahoo! News India).

The article talks about a method of dismantling skyscrapers floor-by-floor, lowering the roof as you go. Lots of people tweeting about this technological marvel.

Massive reduction in release of dirt and debris to the environment. The technique has been developed in Japan, where

“…there are 797 skyscrapers over 100 metres tall, around 150 of which will be between 30 and 40 years old in the next decade, says Ichihara. This has historically been the age when such buildings are earmarked for demolition, but conventional methods are not suitable for such tall skyscrapers.”  (New Scientist)

The real issue for me is why in the world so many massive buildings are built with a 30-40 year lifespan! That would be the real cause for environmental concern! (Me, I am unapolgetic about my love for tall buildings…)

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• Not a big year for tall buildings: the world’s new skyscraper count is low
• Watch a skyscraper slowly vanish as it gets demolished from the top down
• The First Forested Skyscraper is Almost Here
• The New Art of Gentle Demolition
• Build ’em High: Skyscraper Culture, for Better or for Worse
• China Plans to Build the World’s Largest Skyscraper in Just 90 Days
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Does anybody know what Jorn Barger is up to these days? Philip Agre?

The unjustified use of psychiatry for preventive detention?

‘According to the largest study of released prisoners, conducted by the Bureau of Justice, the re-arrest rate for sex offenders is lower than that for perpetrators of any violent crime except murder. But the notion that sex offenders have a unique lack of self-control has been repeated so frequently that it has come to feel like common sense. In 1997, the Supreme Court ruled that sexually-violent-predator state laws are constitutional, because they adhere to the medical model of commitment, by which patients who pose a danger to themselves or others can be prevented from leaving a hospital. To be detained, inmates must have a psychiatric illness or “mental abnormality”—typically sexual in nature—that renders them out of control.

…

The science of perversion is decades behind the rest of the field. The diagnostic criteria for sexual disorders were tested on only three patients before being added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, in 1980. No field trials have since been conducted. Most offenders labelled “sexually dangerous” receive a diagnosis of pedophilia, sadism, exhibitionism, fetishism, hebephilia (attraction to pubescents), or “not otherwise specified,” a category in the D.S.M. reserved for insufficiently studied disorders. Michael First, the editor of the two most recent editions of the D.S.M., told me that there is no scientific research establishing that abnormal desires are any harder to control than normal ones. “People choose to do bad things all the time,” he said. “Psychiatry is being coöpted by the criminal-justice system to solve a problem that is moral, not medical.” ( — Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker).

Related articles

• Paedophilia: bringing dark desires to light (guardian.co.uk)
• “Sex Offender Exceptionalism and Preventive Detention” (sentencing.typepad.com)
• Ponerized society: UK’s Guardian publishes favourable article on pedophilia – ‘Bringing dark desires to light’ (familysurvivalprotocol.com)
• Sexual abuse – the enemy within (ruleofstupid.wordpress.com)
• Ethics and Religion Talk: Welcoming sex offenders into worship (mlive.com)
• Half of registered sex offenders are paedophiles (standard.co.uk)

‘You might have heard about the “kill list.” You’ve certainly heard about drones. But the details of the U.S. campaign against militants in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia — a centerpiece of the Obama administration’s national security approach – remain shrouded in secrecy. Here’s our guide to what we know—and what we don’t know.’ (ProPublica).

“Few of us use all–or even most–of the 3,000 English-language words available to us for describing our emotions, but even if we did, most of us would still experience feelings for which there are, apparently, no words.In some cases, though, words do exist to describe those nameless emotions–theyre just not English words. Which is a shame, because–as todays infographic by design student Pei-Ying Lin demonstrates, they often define a feeling entirely familiar to us.” (Popular Science).

 

Joshua Lang: “Since its introduction in 1846, anesthesia has allowed for medical miracles. Limbs can be removed, tumors examined, organs replaced—and a patient will feel and remember nothing. Or so we choose to believe. In reality, tens of thousands of patients each year in the United States alone wake up at some point during surgery. Since their eyes are taped shut and their bodies are usually paralyzed, they cannot alert anyone to their condition. In efforts to eradicate this phenomenon, medicine has been forced to confront how little we really know about anesthesia’s effects on the brain. The doctor who may be closest to a solution may also answer a question that has confounded centuries’ worth of scientists and philosophers: What does it mean to be conscious?” (The Atlantic)

“It may sound less likely than hell freezing over, but physicists have created an atomic gas with a sub-absolute-zero temperature for the first time1. Their technique opens the door to generating negative-Kelvin materials and new quantum devices, and it could even help to solve a cosmological mystery.” (Nature)

Adam Green: “In magic circles, Robbins is regarded as a kind of legend. Psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and the military study his methods for what they reveal about the nature of human attention.” (New Yorker).

Related articles

• Video: The Art of Pickpocketing (newyorker.com)
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• A handy guide to pickpocketing (washingtonpost.com)
• The Best Pickpocket in the World (neatorama.com)
• Watch This Man Reveal His Pickpocketing Secrets (fox4kc.com)
• The neuroscience of pickpockets (kottke.org)

Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner’s Handbook: “When I first started writing about poisons, I had a certain image of poisoners in mind — creepy, yes, but cool, collected. After all, a poison murder is always premeditated. It’s a colder kind of killing, one that I used to imagine was somehow infused with extra intelligence.

But over the last year, I’ve come to realize that I might be overrating the poison killer… The poisoners of 2012 didn’t seem to be carefully planning as much as they seemed to be grabbing up the first bottle lurking in the medicine chest or under the kitchen sink. I’ve been picking up a pattern of bumbling rather than capability.

And, over all, I’ve realized that’s something to be appreciated. We don’t actually want our would-be killers to be too smart. The dumber and the more easily caught the better.” (Wired.com)

A map showing laws about abortion around the World.

“We have found that there are no mental health consequences of abortion compared to carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term. There are other interesting findings: even later abortion is safer than childbirth and women who carried an unwanted pregnancy to term are three times more likely than women who receive an abortion to be below the poverty level two years later.” (io9 ).

“The past year provided no shortage of futureshock. We watched a cyborg compete at the Olympic Games, and marveled at the news that NASA was actually working on a faster-than-light warp drive. It was also a year that featured the planet’s first superstorm, the development of an artificial retina — and primates who had their intelligence enhanced with a chip. Here are 16 predictions that came true in 2012.” (io9).

This is the annual update of my New Year’s post, a tradition I started early on on FmH:

I once ran across a January 1st Boston Globe article compiling folkloric beliefs about what to do, what to eat, etc. on New Year’s Day to bring good fortune for the year to come. I’ve regretted since — I usually think of it around once a year (grin) — not clipping out and saving the article. Especially since we’ve had children, I’m interested in enduring traditions that go beyond getting drunk [although some comment that this is a profound enactment of the interdigitation of chaos and order appropriate to the New Year’s celebration — FmH], watching the bowl games and making resolutions.

A web search brought me this, less elaborate than what I recall from the Globe but to the same point. It is weighted toward eating traditions, which is odd because, unlike most other major holidays, the celebration of New Year’s in 21st century America does not seem to be centered at all around thinking about what we eat (except in the sense of the traditional weight-loss resolutions!) and certainly not around a festive meal. But…

Traditionally, it was thought that one could affect the luck they would have throughout the coming year by what they did or ate on the first day of the year. For that reason, it has become common for folks to celebrate the first few minutes of a brand new year in the company of family and friends. Parties often last into the middle of the night after the ringing in of a new year. It was once believed that the first visitor on New Year’s Day would bring either good luck or bad luck the rest of the year. It was particularly lucky if that visitor happened to be a tall dark-haired man.

“Traditional New Year foods are also thought to bring luck. Many cultures believe that anything in the shape of a ring is good luck, because it symbolizes “coming full circle,” completing a year’s cycle. For that reason, the Dutch believe that eating donuts on New Year’s Day will bring good fortune.

“Many parts of the U.S. celebrate the new year by consuming black-eyed peas. These legumes are typically accompanied by either hog jowls or ham. Black-eyed peas and other legumes have been considered good luck in many cultures. The hog, and thus its meat, is considered lucky because it symbolizes prosperity. Cabbage is another ‘good luck’ vegetable that is consumed on New Year’s Day by many. Cabbage leaves are also considered a sign of prosperity, being representative of paper currency. In some regions, rice is a lucky food that is eaten on New Year’s Day.”

The further north one travels in the British Isles, the more the year-end festivities focus on New Year’s. The Scottish observance of Hogmanay has many elements of warming heart and hearth, welcoming strangers and making a good beginning:

“Three cornered biscuits called hogmanays are eaten. Other special foods are: wine, ginger cordial, cheese, bread, shortbread, oatcake, carol or carl cake, currant loaf, and a pastry called scones. After sunset people collect juniper and water to purify the home. Divining rituals are done according to the directions of the winds, which are assigned their own colors. First Footing:The first person who comes to the door on midnight New Year’s Eve should be a dark-haired or dark-complected man with gifts for luck. Seeing a cat, dog, woman, red-head or beggar is unlucky. The person brings a gift (handsel) of coal or whiskey to ensure prosperity in the New Year. Mummer’s Plays are also performed. The actors called the White Boys of Yule are all dressed in white, except for one dressed as the devil in black. It is bad luck to engage in marriage proposals, break glass, spin flax, sweep or carry out rubbish on New Year’s Eve.”

Here’s why we clink our glasses when we drink our New Year’s toasts, no matter where we are. Of course, sometimes the midnight cacophony is louder than just clinking glassware, to create a ‘devil-chasing din’.

In Georgia, eat black eyed peas and turnip greens on New Year’s Day for luck and prosperity in the year to come, supposedly because they symbolize coppers and currency. Hoppin’ John, a concoction of peas, onion, bacon and rice, is also a southern New Year’s tradition, as is wearing yellow to find true love (in Peru, yellow underwear, apparently!) or carrying silver for prosperity. In some instances, a dollar bill is thrown in with the other ingredients of the New Year’s meal to bring prosperity. In Greece, there is a traditional New Year’s Day sweetbread with a silver coin baked into it. All guests get a slice of the bread and whoever receives the slice with the coin is destined for good fortune for the year. At Italian tables, lentils, oranges and olives are served. The lentils, looking like coins, will bring prosperity; the oranges are for love; and the olives, symbolic of the wealth of the land, represent good fortune for the year to come.

A New Year’s meal in Norway also includes dried cod, “lutefisk.” The Pennsylvania Dutch make sure to include sauerkraut in their holiday meal, also for prosperity.

In Spain, you would cram twelve grapes in your mouth at midnight, one each time the clock chimed, for good luck for the twelve months to come. (If any of the grapes happens to be sour, the corresponding month will not be one of your most fortunate in the coming year.) The U. S. version of this custom, for some reason, involves standing on a chair as you pop the grapes. In Denmark, jumping off a chair at the stroke of midnight signifies leaping into the New Year. In Rio, you would be plunging into the sea en masse at midnight, wearing white and bearing offerings. In many northern hemisphere cities near bodies of water, they will have a tradition of people plunging into the cold water on New Year’s Day. The Coney Island Polar Bears Club in New York is the oldest cold-water swimming club in the United States. They have had groups of people enter the chilly surf since 1903.

Ecuadorian families make scarecrows stuffed with newspaper and firecrackers and place them outside their homes. The dummies represent misfortunes of the prior year, which are then burned in effigy at the stroke of midnight to forget the old year. Bolivian families make beautiful little wood or straw dolls to hang outside their homes on New Year’s Eve to bring good luck.

In China, homes are cleaned spotless to appease the Kitchen God, and papercuttings of red paper are hung in the windows to scare away evil spirits who might enter the house and bring misfortune. Large papier mache dragon heads with long fabric bodies are maneuvered through the streets during the Dragon Dance festival, and families open their front doors to let the dragon bring good luck into their homes.

The Indian Diwali festival, welcoming in the autumnal season, also involves attracting good fortune with lights. Children make small clay lamps, dipas, thousands of which might adorn a given home. In Thailand, one pours fragrant water over the hands of elders on New Year’s Day to show them respect.

Elsewhere:

• a stack of pancakes for the New Year’s breakfast in France.
• banging on friends’ doors in Denmark to “smash in” the New Year, where it is also a good sign to find your doorstep heaped with broken dishes on New Year’s morning. Old dishes are saved all years to throw at your friends’ homes on New Year’s Eve.
• going in the front door and out the back door at midnight in Ireland.
• making sure the First Footer, the first person through your door in the New Year in Scotland, is a tall dark haired visitor.
• water out the window at midnight in Puerto Rico rids the home of evil spirits.
• cleanse your soul in Japan at the New Year by listening to a gong tolling 108 times, one for every sin
• it is Swiss good luck to let a drop of cream fall on the floor on New Year’s Day.
• Belgian farmers wish their animals a Happy New Year for blessings.
• In Germany and Austria, lead pouring” (das Bleigießen) is an old divining practice using molten lead like tea leaves. A small amount of lead is melted in a tablespoon (by holding a flame under the spoon) and then poured into a bowl or bucket of water. The resulting pattern is interpreted to predict the coming year. For instance, if the lead forms a ball (der Ball), that means luck will roll your way. The shape of an anchor (der Anker) means help in need. But a cross (das Kreuz) signifies death.
• “It’s a bit bizarre when you think about it. A short British cabaret sketch from the 1920s has become a German New Year’s tradition. Yet, although The 90th Birthday or Dinner for One is a famous cult classic in Germany and several other European countries, it is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, including Britain, its birthplace.” (Watch on Youtube, 11 min.)

Some history; documentation of observance of the new year dates back at least 4000 years to the Babylonians, who also made the first new year’s resolutions (reportedly voews to return borrowed farm equipment were very popular), although their holiday was observed at the vernal equinox. The Babylonian festivities lasted eleven days, each day with its own particular mode of celebration. The traditional Persian Norouz festival of spring continues to be considered the advent of the new year among Persians, Kurds and other peoples throughout Central Asia, and dates back at least 3000 years, deeply rooted in Zooastrian traditions.Modern Bahá’í’s celebrate Norouz (”Naw Ruz”) as the end of a Nineteen Day Fast. Rosh Hashanah (”head of the year”), the Jewish New Year, the first day of the lunar month of Tishri, falls between September and early October. Muslim New Year is the first day of Muharram, and Chinese New Year falls between Jan. 10th and Feb. 19th of the Gregorian calendar.

The classical Roman New Year’s celebration was also in the spring although the calendar went out of synchrony with the sun. January 1st became the first day of the year by proclamation of the Roman Senate in 153 BC, reinforced even more strongly when Julius Caesar established what came to be known as the Julian calendar in 46 BC. The early Christian Church condemned new year’s festivities as pagan but created parallel festivities concurrently. New Year’s Day is still observed as the Feast of Christ’s Circumcision in some denominations. Church opposition to a new year’s observance reasserted itself during the Middle Ages, and Western nations have only celebrated January 1 as a holidy for about the last 400 years. The custom of New Year’s gift exchange among Druidic pagans in 7th century Flanders was deplored by Saint Eligius, who warned them, “[Do not] make vetulas, [little figures of the Old Woman], little deer or iotticos or set tables [for the house-elf] at night or exchange New Year gifts or supply superfluous drinks [another Yule custom].” (Wikipedia)

The tradition of the New Year’s Baby signifying the new year began with the Greek tradition of parading a baby in a basket during the Dionysian rites celebrating the annual rebirth of that god as a symbol of fertility. The baby was also a symbol of rebirth among early Egyptians. Again, the Church was forced to modify its denunciation of the practice as pagan because of the popularity of the rebirth symbolism, finally allowing its members to cellebrate the new year with a baby although assimilating it to a celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus. The addition of Father Time (the “Old Year”) wearing a sash across his chest with the previous year on it, and the banner carried or worn by the New Year’s Baby, immigrated from Germany. Interestingly, January 1st is not a legal holiday in Israel, officially because of its historic origins as a Christian feast day.

Auld Lang Syne (literally ‘old long ago’ in the Scottish dialect) is sung or played at the stroke of midnight throughout the English-speaking world (and then there is George Harrison’s “Ring Out the Old”). Versions of the song have been part of the New Year’s festivities since the 17th century but Robert Burns was inspired to compose a modern rendition, which was published after his death in 1796. (It took Guy Lombardo, however, to make it popular…)

Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and days of auld lang syne?
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and days of auld lang syne?
And here’s a hand, my trusty friend
And gie’s a hand o’ thine
We’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet
For auld lang syne

Here’s how to wish someone a Happy New Year around the world:

• Arabic: Kul ‘aam u antum salimoun
• Brazilian: Boas Festas e Feliz Ano Novo means “Good Parties and Happy New Year”
• Chinese: Chu Shen Tan Xin Nian Kuai Le (thanks, Jeff)
• Czechoslavakia: Scastny Novy Rok
• Dutch: Gullukkig Niuw Jaar
• Finnish: Onnellista Uutta Vuotta
• French: Bonne Annee
• German: Prosit Neujahr
• Greek: Eftecheezmaenos o Kaenooryos hronos
• Hebrew: L’Shannah Tovah Tikatevu
• Hindi: Niya Saa Moobaarak
• Irish (Gaelic): Bliain nua fe mhaise dhuit
• Italian: Buon Capodanno
• Khmer: Sua Sdei tfnam tmei
• Laotian: Sabai dee pee mai
• Polish: Szczesliwego Nowego Roku
• Portuguese: Feliz Ano Novo
• Russian: S Novim Godom
• Serbo-Croatian: Scecna nova godina
• Spanish: Feliz Ano Nuevo
• Swedish: Ha ett gott nytt år
• Turkish: Yeni Yiliniz Kutlu Olsun
• Vietnamese: Cung-Chuc Tan-Xuan
• [If you are a native speaker, please feel free to offer any corrections or additions!]

However you’re going to celebrate, my warmest wishes for the year to come… and eat hearty! [thanks to Bruce Umbaugh for research assistance]

Related?

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…2013 could be the best year for comet spotting in generations. “A comet set to pass by the Earth could be the brightest in memory, and it’s not the only one coming for a visit next year.” (CNET).

“It’s an up-close view of childbirth as no one has seen it before: for the first time, an MRI movie captures the second stage of labour up to the expulsion of the fetus. Filmed in 2010 by Christian Bamberg and colleagues at Charité University Hospital in Berlin, Germany, the clip was released earlier this year.” (New Scientist Best videos of 2012).

(Wired Science)

Firmin DeBrabander, an associate professor of philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art: “…[A]n armed society — especially as we prosecute it at the moment in this country — is the opposite of a civil society.” (NYTimes).

‘A 2006 paper that appeared in Injury Prevention analyzed the possible results of the 1996 gun law reforms in Australia. The most striking result: in the 18 years before tougher laws were passed, there were 13 mass shootings in Australia…and none in the 10.5 years afterwards:

“Results: In the 18 years before the gun law reforms, there were 13 mass shootings in Australia, and none in the 10.5 years afterwards. Declines in firearm-related deaths before the law reforms accelerated after the reforms for total firearm deaths (p = 0.04), firearm suicides (p = 0.007) and firearm homicides (p = 0.15), but not for the smallest category of unintentional firearm deaths, which increased. No evidence of substitution effect for suicides or homicides was observed. The rates per 100 000 of total firearm deaths, firearm homicides and firearm suicides all at least doubled their existing rates of decline after the revised gun laws.

Conclusions: Australia’s 1996 gun law reforms were followed by more than a decade free of fatal mass shootings, and accelerated declines in firearm deaths, particularly suicides. Total homicide rates followed the same pattern. Removing large numbers of rapid-firing firearms from civilians may be an effective way of reducing mass shootings, firearm homicides and firearm suicides.” ‘ (via kottke).

Jeffrey Toobin: ‘Does the Second Amendment prevent Congress from passing gun-control laws? The question, which is suddenly pressing, in light of the reaction to the school massacre in Newtown, is rooted in politics as much as law.

For more than a hundred years, the answer was clear, even if the words of the amendment itself were not. The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The courts had found that the first part, the “militia clause,” trumped the second part, the “bear arms” clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon.

Enter the modern National Rifle Association. Before the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. had been devoted mostly to non-political issues, like gun safety. But a coup d’état at the group’s annual convention in 1977 brought a group of committed political conservatives to power—as part of the leading edge of the new, more rightward-leaning Republican Party. (Jill Lepore recounted this history in a recent piece for The New Yorker.) The new group pushed for a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that gave individuals, not just militias, the right to bear arms.’ (The New Yorker).

Adam Gopnik: “Gun control is not a panacea, any more than penicillin was. Some violence will always go on. What gun control is good at is controlling guns. Gun control will eliminate gun massacres in America as surely as antibiotics eliminate bacterial infections. As I wrote last week, those who oppose it have made a moral choice: that they would rather have gun massacres of children continue rather than surrender whatever idea of freedom or pleasure they find wrapped up in owning guns or seeing guns owned—just as the faith healers would rather watch the children die than accept the reality of scientific medicine.” (The New Yorker).

“The more terrifyingly criminal the world looks, the more ineffective law enforcement seems, the more Americans demand the right to deadly weapons with which to defend themselves. It is local TV programming directors, not the National Rifle Association, who are tirelessly persuading Americans that they need to strap a gun to their legs before heading to the mall.

And what will change those attitudes is not more atrocity stories, but instead the reassuring truth: The United States is safe and getting safer, safer than ever before in its history.

The police can protect you, and will, and do. And a gun in the house is not a guarantee of personal security — it is instead a standing invitation to family tragedy. The cold dead hands from which they pry the gun are very unlikely to be the hands of a heroic minuteman defending home and hearth against intruders. They are much more likely to be the hands of a troubled adolescent or a clumsy child.

In the land of the Second Amendment, nobody will take your guns away. But if you love your children, you should get rid of them voluntarily.” (David Frum, CNN).

“After a couple of horrible mass shootings in Britain, handguns and automatic weapons have been effectively banned. It is possible to own shotguns, and rifles if you can demonstrate to the police that you have a good reason to own one, such as target shooting at a gun club, or deer stalking, say. The firearms-ownership rules are onerous, involving hours of paperwork. You must provide a referee who has to answer nosy questions about the applicant’s mental state, home life (including family or domestic tensions) and their attitude towards guns. In addition to criminal-record checks, the police talk to applicants’ family doctors and ask about any histories of alcohol or drug abuse or personality disorders.

Vitally, it is also very hard to get hold of ammunition. Just before leaving Britain in the summer, I had lunch with a member of parliament whose constituency is plagued with gang violence and drug gangs. She told me of a shooting, and how it had not led to a death, because the gang had had to make its own bullets, which did not work well, and how this was very common, according to her local police commander. Even hardened criminals willing to pay for a handgun in Britain are often getting only an illegally modified starter’s pistol turned into a single-shot weapon.” (The Economist).

“There is something new under the sun, every day, all over the world. Around the corner is something that will surprise the hell out of you. Atlas Obscura is for people who still believe in discovery. We hope that’s you.” (Atlas Obscura).

The only Buddhist region in Europe and well known as an international center for chess because its former President, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, is the head of the International Chess Federation (FIDE). (He also believes he was abducted by aliens, who demonstrated to him the extraterrestrial origins of the game.)  (Wikipedia).

In which a retired California state bureaucrat, science-fiction buff and frustrated linguist invents a language to improve the efficiency and precision of thought and expression, only to find it hijacked by a group of Slavic ultranationalists who think it would be the perfect tool for the creation of the Ubermensch. A fascinating story with a long detour into the history of fabricating languages. (The New Yorker).

Look to Hunter-Gatherers (Newsweek and The Daily Beast).

A fun series of photo manipulations and fantasy settings by Swedish photographer and retoucher, Erik Johansson. (Juxtapoz Magazine)

“To call for a boycott of a movie — that’s extreme.

And for a writer, who is by definition a champion of free expression, to call for a boycott of a film he has not seen — isn’t that right out of the Taliban playbook?

It is. And yet that’s exactly what I’ve come here to do: to urge you not to see “Zero Dark Thirty,” the new film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

My reason is simple: The film glorifies torture.” (HeadButler).

“Did you miss out on this year’s keen Orionid meteor shower or the super perigee moon? Don’t fret, as a mega meteor shower this Thursday evening could appease those craving an extraterrestrial event. Set your alarm for 11 p.m. ET on Thursday, as that’s when the Geminid meteor shower peaks. It could deliver dozens (or even hundreds) of visible meteors per hour until about 3 a.m. on December 14. Keep your eyes (and scopes) toward the constellation Gemini for the best view of the shiny shower.” (CNET)

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My town on the edge of metropolitan Boston is in a pitched battle against vicious wildlife. (Brookline Police Dept. tweet) Have they finally had enough of what we do to their domesticated brethren at the end of every November?

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“It’s not just children who like to build towers with Lego – the internet is alive with discussion on how many Lego bricks, stacked one on top of the other, it would take to destroy the bottom brick. So what’s the answer?

There has been a burning debate on the social news website Reddit.

It’s a trivial question you might think, but one the Open University’s engineering department has – at the request of the BBC’s More or Less programme – fired up its labs to try to answer.” (BBC News)

‘Eleven billion miles from Earth, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered a “magnetic highway” that connects our solar system to interstellar space. This could be one of Voyager 1’s last steps on its long journey to the stars.

“Although Voyager 1 still is inside the sun’s environment, we now can taste what it’s like on the outside because the particles are zipping in and out on this magnetic highway,” said Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. “We believe this is the last leg of our journey to interstellar space. Our best guess is it’s likely just a few months to a couple years away. The new region isn’t what we expected, but we’ve come to expect the unexpected from Voyager.” ‘ (NASA Science via abby)

‘We’ll soon know what historic Martian data NASA is sitting on…unless it isn’t.’ (CNET). I am eagerly awaiting the early December announcement. I’m predicting NASA will confirm the detection of organic compounds in the Martian soil. Attempts at deflecting what they have so far let slip are just that.

A question for any readers who might be in the know: a space vehicle is sent to another planet to scan for organic compounds. What do you have to do to disinfect it from traces of earthly organics to avoid a false positive? Is the trip through the void of space enough? What has NASA done?

“We all want more pals, but a Scottish survey suggests you should think twice before accepting your mom’s friend request.” (CNET).

‘The girl who feels no pain was in the kitchen, stirring ramen noodles, when the spoon slipped from her hand and dropped into the pot of boiling water. It was a school night; the TV was on in the living room, and her mother was folding clothes on the couch. Without thinking, Ashlyn Blocker reached her right hand in to retrieve the spoon, then took her hand out of the water and stood looking at it under the oven light.” (NYTimes).

‘When Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger told NPR earlier this week that the Mars rover had found something that “is gonna be one for the history books,” most of the speculation centered around the possibility that the surface probe has discovered evidence of organic life on the Red Planet.

Perhaps, but we won’t know the answer until next month when NASA said it will spill the beans about the “historic” data from a recent Curiosity soil sample-collecting foray that the mission’s “science team is busily chewing away on,” as Grotzinger put it.

One thing’s for sure—the space agency that seemed on the verge of irrelevance in the public mind just a couple of years ago is back to playing the public relations game like nobody’s business.’ (ThinkDigit News).

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‘Apparently in China, bad genes are grounds for divorce — and six-figure fines. “Failed relationships can get ugly,” says Ji Lin at the Irish Examiner, but the weird, sad tale of Jian Feng and his wife “really gives meaning to the old cliché.” The story starts out conventionally enough: Feng, a resident of northern China, met and married a beautiful woman, and they had a baby girl. That’s when things reportedly got, um, ugly. Feng was “so sure of his own good looks, so crushed by the wrinkly ugly mess that was handed to him in a swaddle, that he decided to sue his wife because the awful looking baby was totally her fault,” says Madeline Holler at Babble. And then things went from ugly to crazy: He won.’ (Yahoo! News)

‘ “It started,” he says, “by accident.” As a young, idealistic psychology student, Olivera interned at El Borda in the early nineties. “I found a lot of my friends and family kept asking me what it was like in there,” he explains. “I decided to let the patients tell them.” He started a radio workshop. Not as strange as it sounds in a psychiatric hospital that offers tango workshops, circus workshops, a patient-run bakery and an artist’s cultural center where the community and university students also come to paint. I have fallen down the rabbit hole.’ (The Atlantic).

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Epidemic of “…a trendy form of retribution in a country in which fidelity is a strongly appreciated value…” (Guardian).

‘We may finally have proof that there are aliens among us. Using a complicated system unknown to us humans, aliens appear to have managed to beam their image onto the spectacular Northern Lights sky.’  (Yahoo! News UK)

‘The internet is a new lifeform that shows the first signs of intelligence. So says brain scientist and serial entrepreneur Jeff Stibel.’  (BBC)

‘A South Pacific island, shown on marine charts and world maps as well as on Google Earth and Google Maps, does not exist, Australian scientists say.’

(BBC News)

‘Look past the award-season hype and the current bounty of decent, good, great movies, and one thing becomes clear: We live in interesting narrative times, cinematically. In “Cloud Atlas” characters jump across centuries, space and six separate stories into a larger tale about human interconnectedness. In “Anna Karenina” Tolstoy’s doomed heroine suffers against visibly artificial sets, a doll within an elaborate dollhouse, while in “Life of Pi” a boy and a tiger share a small boat in a very big sea amid long silences, hallucinatory visuals and no obvious story arc. In movies like these, as well as in “The Master” and “Holy Motors,” filmmakers are pushing hard against, and sometimes dispensing with, storytelling conventions, and audiences seem willing to follow them. The chief film critics of The New York Times, Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, consider this experimental turn.’ (NYTimes)

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‘Using brain scans, scientists are trying to find how great freestyle rappers drop dope lines. Discovery News reports on a study conducted by researchers the voice, speech and language branch of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Here’s the paper: “Neural Correlates of Lyrical Improvisation: An fMRI Study of Freestyle Rap.” ‘ (Boing Boing)

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“After using it for over a week now, it’s hard to come up with a lot of nice things to say about the Surface. Don’t get me wrong, there are some solid things here. But by and large, it’s a strange, buggy, and clunky product that I simply can’t imagine many people buying after the initial hype wears off.” (TechCrunch).

“Before coffee houses were homogenized into interchangeable Starbucks, and sucked dry of atmosphere and character, the espresso bar was a meeting place for Beats, musicians, writers, radicals and artists. Each coffeehouse had its own distinct style and clientele, and provided a much needed venue for the meeting of minds and the sharing of ambitions over 2-hour long cappuccinos.It was the arrival in London of the first espresso machine in 1952 that started this incredibly diverse sub-culture, which became a focus for writers like Colin Absolute Beginners MacInness and pop stars like Tommy Steele, Billy Fury, Cliff Richard and Marty Wilde, who frequented the famous 2-i’s cafe. This beautiful, short film serves up a frothy serving of London’s cafe scene in 1959, long before Starbucks ruined it all.” (Dangerous Minds)

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From the article:  “One batch fell into the hands of some enthusiasts who cleaned them up, transferred them to a digital format, and began distributing immaculate copies to the vast network of Deadhead tape collectors.” I was one of about ten tape-traders, calling ourselves, the “Unindicted Co-Conspirators”, who handled the distribution of a number of these shows, through a series of postings to the rec.music.gdead Usenet group under the title, “What’s Become of the Bettys?” I was really a small-timer in the tape-trading community until then, and I no longer recall how I got tapped to be a part of that group, but it was a great time. (New Yorker)

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Follow Me Here… turns thirteen today. (I know this because I got a text message from my calendar app reminding me to send FmH a birthday greeting.) This is the age, according to Jewish law, when a young man becomes accountable for his actions and become a “Bar Mitzvah”. If FmH were female, this would have happened a year since, as a “Bat Mitzvah” occurs when Jewish girls become 12, and it means the same as it does for boys — a rite of passage from being considered unable to properly understand things to being considered old enough to begin to understand and thus for boys and girls alike to be treated more like adults. So I guess there is no excuse anymore. I will try to act responsibly…

In any case, thank you all for continuing to be a part of this journey and helping to make this a vibrant conversation. Many happy returns to us all.

Is there is one post from the time you have been reading FmH which you would single out for distinction?

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“During the day after the 2012 presidential election we took note of a spike in hate speech on Twitter referring to President Obama’s re-election, as chronicled by Jezebel (thanks to Chris Van Dyke for bringing this our attention). It is a useful reminder that technology reflects the society in which it is based, both the good and the bad. Information space is not divorced from everyday life and racism extends into the geoweb and helps shapes its contours; and in turn, data from the geoweb can be used to reflect the geographies of racist practice back onto the places from which they emerged.

Using DOLLY we collected all the geocoded tweets from the last week (beginning November 1) with racist terms that also reference the election in order to understand how these everyday acts of explicit racism are spatially distributed… So, are these tweets relatively evenly distributed? Or do some states have higher specializations in racist tweets? …” (floatingsheep)

Exclusive account from conservative site Breitbart News about the massive failure of ORCA, the program on which the Romney campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort depended. The informant does the math and figures that it may have lost the election in some of the swing states. As Richard Metzger comments on Dangerous Minds,

“The reichwing is still trying to wrap their heads around, not just why Romney lost, but why he failed even to match John McCain’s tallies in 2008. I tell ’em: HEY, IT WAS GOD’S WILL.”

Related articles

• topixpolitix: Romney Camp Suppressed Up to 700,000 of Its Own…
• Karl Rove Claims Obama Won Because He Suppressed The Vote
• Cincinnati-area GOP strongholds leave Romney short
• 25 million self-described “evangelicals” voted for Obama. Why & what else do the exit polls tell us about how Christians voted?
• Woe is us: the stupid party at work
• Team Romney: Actually Project ORCA Was Pretty Darn Successful
• Orca May Not Have Worked for Romney Camp All of Election Day in Swing State
• Killer fail: how Romney’s broken Orca app cost him thousands of votes
• Inside Project ORCA
• On Election Day, Romney’s Killer Whale Couldn’t Stay Afloat

Diagram of ABO blood antigen system

“…Here, a person’s blood type is popularly believed to determine temperament and personality. “What’s your blood type?” is often a key question in everything from matchmaking to job applications.

According to popular belief in Japan, type As are sensitive perfectionists and good team players, but over-anxious. Type Os are curious and generous but stubborn. ABs are arty but mysterious and unpredictable, and type Bs are cheerful but eccentric, individualistic and selfish.

Four books describing the different blood groups characteristics became a huge publishing sensation, selling more than five million copies…” (BBC News via Boing Boing)

NOAA explains why we don’t try to destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them.

Related articles

• Tropical cyclones are occurring more frequently than before
• Update: Sandy re-classified as a post-tropical cyclone
• Why Do Hurricanes Have Names?
• “Rare” for October: Tropical Cyclone Anais rages in the Indian Ocean

“Tyson teamed with DC Comics to track down a Krypton-like system that matches hints from the comics. He found a fitting red dwarf in the constellation Corvus (the crow) in the southern sky, a mere 27.1 light years from Earth.

Tyson even gets a cameo in Action Comics #14, “Star Light, Star Bright,” when Superman makes a visit to the astrophysicist’s planetarium. The Man of Steel attempts to track down the location of his former home, which was destroyed shortly after he left, according to Superman mythology. The story’s timing should be just right for the light from the planet’s destruction to reach Earth.

“As a native of Metropolis, I was delighted to help Superman, who has done so much for my city over all these years. And it’s clear that if he weren’t a superhero he would have made quite an astrophysicist,” Tyson said in a release about the new comic.” (Crave – CNET)

“These are baby bats — embryos actually. They remind me of those See No Evil, Say No Evil, Hear No Evil monkey pictures I saw growing up, but these little guys are much, much cuter. And, of course, being bats, the hearing thing doesn’t apply. Bats don’t hear with our kind of ears, so of course, there’s no covering-ears-up picture. That wouldn’t make bat sense.

This photograph was taken by Dorit Hockman of Cambridge University. It’s the 20th place winner in the Nikon Small World 2012 Photomicrography Competition.” (Hmmm : Krulwich Wonders… : NPR).

“Trapped by European-style Socialism—And I love It!” Claire Lundberg, a freelance writer and consultant who lives in Paris with her husband and one-year-old daughter, declared Friday in a column on Slate, the U.S. online magazine, “The coming presidential election represents a choice, says Mitt Romney: a choice between evil European-style socialism and good old American can-do capitalism. As a new mother in France, I’m here to argue that he’s wrong. Neither candidate represents actual European-style socialism. And it’s a damned shame they don’t. The women of America would have a much better shot at having it all if they did.” (NYTimes)

Abstract: “It is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type. In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection to this proposal remains–that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant.” (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1376114/pdf/jmedeth00282-0040.pdf).

Looking for a picture of a tongue in a cheek…

“…[N]on-voters are an invisible enigma: no one talks much about the appallingly low turnout in this country, except to mention it in passing. So documentary filmmaker Errol Morris The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, provocateur and social critic, decided to discuss the issue with over 50 people under the age of 40. The result is the short film above, teasingly titled “11 Reasons Not to Vote?”What Morris found confounds the faithful—the junkies scowling into their microfiche readers. Non-voters, and the undecided, can take a larger view; as Morris points out in his accompanying New York Times essay, non-voters not only comment on the fact that no major party candidate has discussed issues so many people care about—poverty, climate change, the drug war, the dysfunctional prison system—but non-voters realize that if no one’s talking, nothing will be done. Some of them may be cynical, but many more may justly say they’re realists. Perhaps it’s us, the voters, who are dreamers…” (Open Culture).

A reprise of my traditional Hallowe’en post of past years:

It is that time of year again. What has become a time of disinhibited hijinx and mayhem, and a growing marketing bonanza for the kitsch-manufacturers and -importers, has primeval origins as the Celtic New Year’s Eve, Samhain (pronounced “sow-en”). The harvest is over, summer ends and winter begins, the Old God dies and returns to the Land of the Dead to await his rebirth at Yule, and the land is cast into darkness. The veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead becomes frayed and thin, and dispossessed dead mingle with the living, perhaps seeking a body to possess for the next year as their only chance to remain connected with the living, who hope to scare them away with ghoulish costumes and behavior, escape their menace by masquerading as one of them, or placate them with offerings of food, in hopes that they will go away before the new year comes. For those prepared, a journey to the other side could be made at this time.

With Christianity, perhaps because with calendar reform it was no longer the last day of the year, All Hallows’ Eve became decathected, a day for innocent masquerading and fun, taking its name Hallowe’en as a contraction and corruption of All Hallows’ Eve. All Saints’ Day may have originated in its modern form with the 8th century Pope Gregory III. Hallowe’en customs reputedly came to the New World with the Irish immigrants of the 1840’s. The prominence of trick-or-treating has a slightly different origin, however.

The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated not with the Irish Celts, but with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for “soul cakes,” made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could expedite a soul’s passage to heaven.

Jack-o’-lanterns were reportedly originally turnips; the Irish began using pumpkins after they immigrated to North AMerica, given how plentiful they were here.

The Jack-o-lantern custom probably comes from Irish folklore. As the tale is told, a man named Jack, who was notorious as a drunkard and trickster, tricked Satan into climbing a tree. Jack then carved an image of a cross in the tree’s trunk, trapping the devil up the tree. Jack made a deal with the devil that, if he would never tempt him again, he would promise to let him down the tree.

According to the folk tale, after Jack died, he was denied entrance to Heaven because of his evil ways, but he was also denied access to Hell because he had tricked the devil. Instead, the devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness. The ember was placed inside a hollowed-out turnip to keep it glowing longer.

Folk traditions that were in the past associated wtih All Hallows’ Eve took much of their power, as with the New Year’s customs about which I write here every Dec. 31st, from the magic of boundary states, transition and liminality.

The idea behind ducking, dooking or bobbing for apples seems to have been that snatching a bite from the apple enables the person to grasp good fortune. Samhain is a time for getting rid of weakness, as pagans once slaughtered weak animals which were unlikely to survive the winter. A common ritual calls for writing down weaknesses on a piece of paper or parchment, and tossing it into the fire. There used to be a custom of placing a stone in the hot ashes of the bonfire. If in the morning a person found that the stone had been removed or had cracked, it was a sign of bad fortune. Nuts have been used for divination: whether they burned quietly or exploded indicated good or bad luck. Peeling an apple and throwing the peel over one’s shoulder was supposed to reveal the initial of one’s future spouse. One way of looking for omens of death was for peope to visit churchyards

The Witches’ Sabbath aspect of Hallowe’en seems to result from Germanic influence, and fusion with the notion of Walpurgisnacht. (Familiar with the magnificent musical evocation of this, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bare Mountain?) Although probably not yet in a position to shape mainstream American Hallowe’en traditions, Mexican Dia de los Muertos observances have started to contribute some delightful and whimsical iconography to our encounter with the eerie and unearthly as well.

What was Hallowe’en like forty or fifty years ago in the U.S. when, bastardized as it has become with respect to its pagan origins, it retained a much more traditional flair? For my purposes, suffice it to say that it was before the era of the pay-per-view ’spooky-world’ type haunted attractions and its Martha Stewart yuppification with, as this irreverent Salon article from several years ago [via walker] puts it, monogrammed jack-o’-lanterns and the like. Related, a 1984 essay by Richard Seltzer, frequently referenced in other sources, entitled “Why Bother to Save Hallowe’en?”, argues as I do that reverence for Hallowe’en is good for the soul.

That would be anathema to certain segments of society, however. Hallowe’en certainly inspires a backlash by fundamentalists who consider it a blasphemous abomination. ‘Amateur scholar’ Isaac Bonewits details academically the Hallowe’en errors and lies he feels contribute to its being reviled. Some of the panic over Hallowe’en is akin to the hysteria, fortunately now debunked, over the supposed epidemic of ‘ritual Satanic abuse’ that swept the Western world in the ’90’s.

The horror film has become inextricably linked to Hallowe’en tradition, although the holiday itself did not figure in the movies until John Carpenter took the slasher genre singlehandedly by storm. Googling “scariest films”, you will, grimly, reap a mother lode of opinions about how to pierce the veil to journey to the netherworld and reconnect with that magical, eerie creepiness in the dark (if not the over-the-top blood and gore that has largely replaced the subtlety of earlier horror films).

In any case: trick or treat!

Related:

• Tricks, Treats and Traditions – Some Useful Tips for Hallowe’en (southeasttourguides.co.uk)
• Weighing In on Hallowe’en (4mothers1blog.wordpress.com)
• Preparing for All Hallow’s Eve (sporeflections.wordpress.com)
• OCTOBER FINALE! Hallowe’en! (pm27.wordpress.com)
• Tricksey Treats (jasperlocalfood.wordpress.com)
• Hallowe’en Night divination game. (jenniferlinton.com)
• Hallowe’en Weekend (sporeflections.wordpress.com)

See for yourself!.

“If you’re anywhere near the path of Hurricane Sandy and you’re still considering voting for a Republican, peer into the crystal ball of President Mitt Romney telling you to go fuck yourself in case of a catastrophe. According to the Mittster, when CNN’s John King asked him about FEMA, Federal funding for disaster relief is “immoral,” and is best left to the states or, “even better,” to the private sector.

Of course, unlike most of the residents of the Eastern seaboard all the way through to Michigan, when disaster strikes for Mitt Romney, he and Ann just pick up stakes, jump into their private jet and head off to another one of their palatial homes. Not his fault you don’t work hard enough. He sent you a bus, didn’t he, moocher?

I just read that Obama says that he doesn’t expect the hurricane to have much of an effect on the election, but I’d say this is a net gain for him, not Romney, but especially with videotape like this around to haunt the GOP nominee. Federal emergency aid? IMMORAL! Tax cuts for millionaire “job creators”? Bring it on!

You’d have to have your head examined to vote for Romney in the face of an act of God like this one. Would Romney really give the cold shoulder to red states caught up in devastation? He says he would, let’s take him at his word.” (Dangerous Minds)

Eating the ashes of cremated loved ones. (Don’t ask me why…)

 

At Least A Dozen GOP Senate Candidates Oppose Abortion For Rape Victims: “GOP Senate candidates Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin have faced outrage and derision from both Democrats and Republicans for their controversial comments about whether rape victims should have access to abortion.

Akin famously said that women who have been victims of a “legitimate rape” are physically unable to become pregnant. Mourdock, more recently, said he believes that pregnancies resulting from these horrific assaults are “something God intended.”

At the heart of these comments is their belief that rape victims who become pregnant should not be able to have access to abortion. While Akin and Mourdock perhaps stumbled in explaining why they hold this view, it’s a position that is actually not that uncommon in their party: At least 11 other GOP Senate nominees this cycle, as well as dozens of House candidates and incumbents, agree.” (Huffington Post)

Related articles

• RNC remains mum on Mourdock rape flap
• Mitt “No Apology” Romney Stands By Richard “God Intended [Rape]” Mourdock
• Stewart mocks Mourdock for having to deny he worships a rape-loving deity

Desperate appeal of Indians facing eviction: “A group of Brazilian Indians who endured violence and death to return to their land have made a dramatic appeal to the government after learning that they face eviction once more.The 170 Indians, members of the 46,000-strong Guarani tribe in Brazil, have suffered several brutal attacks since going back to a small part of their ancestral land. The Indians’ territory, known as Pyelito Kuê/ M’barakai, is now occupied by a ranch. The Indians are surrounded by the rancher’s gunmen, with little access to food or health care.Last month a judge ordered their eviction. Now the Indians have declared in a letter, ‘This ruling is part of the historic extermination of the indigenous peoples of Brazil. We have lost hope

of surviving with dignity, and without violence, on our ancestral land… We will all die soon.‘We want to die and be buried with our ancestors right here, so we ask the government and the justice system not to order our eviction, but to order our collective death and our burial here. We ask, once and for all, for our slaughter to be ordered, and for tractors to dig a big hole for our bodies.‘We have decided, all together, not to leave here, dead or alive.’Four Guarani from the community have already died since the reoccupation: two from suicide, and two following attacks by gunmen. lFUNAI, Brazil’s indigenous affairs department, which is responsible for mapping out Guarani land, and demarcating it, says it is working to overturn the eviction order.” (Survival International).

Related articles

• Entire Indian tribe threatens to commit mass suicide after Brazil court rules they must leave sacred burial land
• Indigenous Tribe Guarani-Kaiow, Brazilian Indian, treaten Suicide over Loss of Land
• Brazil Tribe of 170 Threatens Mass Suicide If Forced to Leave Ancestral Land
• Brazil Denies Tribe is Planning Mass Suicide