This short film by Erroll Morris  slaps conspiracy theory in the face, with reference to a famous controversy from the Kennedy assassination.

(via boing boing)

‘Codenamed the Cotton Candy (at 21 grams it weighs as much as a bag of the candy), the computer is powered by a dual-core 1.2 GHz Samsung Exynos ARM CPU and runs a version of Google’s Android operating system. It also sports wi-fi, Bluetooth, and a HDMI-out port, and a MicroSD card slot.

The Cotton Candy can be used either on a HDTV or a Mac or Windows computer. When The HDMI port is used with a TV, the USB port is used to power it, while Bluetooth is used to attach a keyboard and mouse. When used with a computer, you plug in the USB end and run the Android OS inside a secure window while your Mac OS X or Windows OS runs in the background.’ (via Complex).

“A new experiment by CERN has reproduced findings to confirm discovery of faster-than-light neutrinos in a modified study they claim is more accurate.” (via Neon Tommy).

‘Members of the “super committee” charged with coming up with $1.2 trillion in budget cuts are focused on how to announce failure to reach a deal, Democratic and Republican aides confirmed to CNN Sunday.

While aides said no final decision had been made, they acknowledged that — barring an unforeseen development — an announcement of an end to negotiations is the most likely scenario.’ (via CNN.com)

How to announce failure? Sen. Bernie Sanders (I.-VT) said it well in June:

“

Everyone understands that over the long-term we have got to reduce the
deficit – a deficit that was caused mainly by Wall Street greed, tax
breaks for the rich, two wars, and a prescription drug program written
by the drug and insurance companies. It is absolutely imperative,
however, that as we go forward with deficit reduction we completely
reject the Republican approach that demands savage cuts in
desperately-needed programs for working families, the elderly, the sick,
our children and the poor, while not asking the wealthiest among us to
contribute one penny.”

House of Representatives by party

‘The “60 Minutes” piece last week on the free pass members of Congress get when it comes to trading on nonpublic information they routinely receive opened a lot of eyes. But it came as no surprise to reform advocates or academicians who have studied the investing skills of federal lawgivers for years.

A 2004 study concluded that U.S. senators outperformed the stock market by 12 percent annually during the 1990s, about twice as well as corporate insiders did. A more recent study concluded that members of the House of Representatives outperformed the broad market by about 6 percent annually.’ (via Post-Gazette, with thanks to abby)

Follow Me Here…  is twelve today.

I was proud to have been a friend and neighbor of Dr Epstein. He championed many other ‘inconvenient truths’ before turning his attention to climate change in the past decade. This interest was a natural outgrowth of his radicalism and determination to encompass the political dimension of public health issues and the public health dimension of political issues, e.g. poverty, colonialism and the nuclear threat.

“…To those uncomfortable with quantum theory’s picture of wavelike particles that are simultaneously everywhere, their message in The Quantum Universe is clear: tough. Scientists are, they tell us, “not mandated to produce a theory that bears any relation to the way we perceive the world at large”, although you might comfort yourself with the thought that even Einstein found quantum mechanics disturbing.” (via New Scientist).

Related :

• Making Sense of It All (online.wsj.com)
• Paul Dirac: The unsung genius (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Mysticism in quantum mechanics (wrongscience.wordpress.com)
• Releasing Schrodinger’s Cat from its box (cordus.wordpress.com)
• Creating Quantum Matter (usnews.com)
• The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw: review (telegraph.co.uk)

‘Signs of consciousness have been detected in three people previously thought to be in a vegetative state, with the help of a cheap, portable device that can be used at the bedside.

“There’s a man here who technically meets all the internationally agreed criteria for being in a vegetative state, yet he can generate 200 responses [to direct commands] with his brain,” says Adrian Owen of the University of Western Ontario. “Clearly this guy is not in a true vegetative state. He’s probably as conscious as you or I are.” ‘ (via New Scientist).

“So-called cognitive-enhancing drugs are usually prescribed to treat medical conditions, but they are also known for their ability to improve memory or focus. Many people buy them over the internet, which is risky because they don’t know what they are getting. We also know next to nothing about their long-term effects on the brains of healthy people, particularly the young. But some scientists believe they could have a beneficial role to play in society, if properly regulated.

So who’s taking what?” (via New Scientist).

‘The Dove (De Düva) is an Academy Award-nominated short parody of Ingmar Bergman’s films, made in 1968. They used to show this a lot in the early days of HBO. The short lampoons elements of Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, The Silence and Smiles of a Summer Night.

Professor Viktor Sundqvist (co-director George Coe) is being chauffeured to a lecture at a university, when a dove shits on the car’s windshield. He decides to make a visit to his childhood home ala Wild Strawberries .

In a flashback, Viktor and his sister challenge Death (screenwriter Sid Davis) to a game of badminton in exchange for Death sparing her life. A dove shits on Death and he loses the game.

The ridiculous fake Swedish is a mix of English, Yiddish and adding “ska” to certain words, as in “It will take a momentska” or “sooner or lateska.” ‘ (via Dangerous Minds)

I remember seeing this in the early ‘70’s at the late great Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, MA. Abut half an hour into the screening, someone jumped up in the front row, raised his arms in amazement and exclaimed, “My God! I’m so stoned I can understand Swedish!!”

Related:

• Woody Allen on Ingmar Bergman (time.com)
• The greatest Ingmar Bergman online resource ever! (gointothestory.com)
• My 15 Favourite Moments in Ingmar Bergman Movies (via Southern Vision) (manonmona.wordpress.com)

Krulwich Wonders: “Suppose there’s a vanishing species of animal you love. Its population is down to a scary few, the last survivors are hiding deep in the wilderness, and you want to protect them, save them from extinction.

And let’s further suppose, that one day, you happen upon a small remnant, the last of these wild animals, and by sheer luck, one of them is healthy, strong, beautiful, a true survivor. What would you do? Cage it? Trap it? Let it go?

I’m going to tell you a story — it’s a true story, about William Temple Hornaday and the animal he loved, the American buffalo, but this tale is so improbable, so strange, I can’t quite explain what happened. It makes no sense to me.” (via  NPR).

“A few pig cells, a single surgery and a rigorous daily workout: They’re the three ingredients that patients will need to re-grow fresh, functional slabs of their own muscle, courtesy of Pentagon-backed science that’s already being used to rebuild parts of people.” (via Danger Room | Wired).

“Astronomer David Nesvorny from the Southwest Research Institute in Texas believes that the solar system might have once contained a fifth gigantic planet, which was ejected deep into the galaxy in a moment of cosmic turmoil.

By looking at the population of the Kuiper belt — the icy-cold ring of asteroids beyond Neptune — and by studying the historical fingerprints left on the craters of the Moon, Nesvorny was able to piece together clues about our solar system’s adolescence…” (via Wired).

‘An extreme surfer is set to earn a place in the record books after riding a 90-foot wave.

Garrett McNamara caught the monster wave during the ZON North Canyon Project in Praia do Norte, Nazare, Portugal.

The coastline is home to a deep water canyon which funnels large swells from the Atlantic Ocean, creating record-breaking waves such as the one McNamara rode.’ (via Mail Online).

Also: Watch the video (YouTube).

Related:

• Hawaiian Garrett McNamara surfs a 90-foot wave off the coast of Portugal.McNamara has been working with the Portuguese Hydrographic Institute to understand how the waves reach such record-breaking heights at this particular point By KILIAN DOYLE (theboldcorsicanflame.wordpress.com)
• Garrett McNamara Sets World Record, Surfs 90-Foot Tall Wave [Video] (inquisitr.com)
• Garrett McNamara Breaks World Record For Largest Wave Ever Surfed (Video) (dailypicksandflicks.com)
• Surfer Garrett McNamara rides world’s biggest wave in Portugal – video (mirror.co.uk)
• Surfer Survives Towering 90-Foot Wave (abcnews.go.com)
• Scientists peer into mystery of giant waves off the coast of Portugal (theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com)
• Surfer breaks the world record riding a 90-foot wave [Video] (thenextweb.com)
• Watch: Surfer rides world’s biggest wave (cbsnews.com)
• Surfer breaks world record by riding 90-foot wave (newslite.tv)
• VIDEO: American surfer sets world wave riding record in Portugal – 90 feet (3news.co.nz)

We won’t have another moment so elevenish for a hundred years (unless you don’t use military time and will observe it again tonight). Eleven is the first number which cannot be counted with a human’s eight fingers and two thumbs additively. In English, it is the smallest positive integer requiring three syllables and the largest prime number with a single-morpheme name. Numerologists believe there is something quite powerful about the time 11:11, having to do with synchronicity. Imagine what they will be thinking today.

Related:

• What’s All The HYPE? (khamillion.wordpress.com)
• 11/11/11: What Does November 11, 2011 Really Mean? (VIDEO) (blippitt.com)
• Happy Super Luck Day! (And enjoy it because you’ll never see it again!) (michigantelephone.wordpress.com)
• 11-02-2011: Happy Palindrome Day! (cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com)
• Is the 11-11-11 Phenomenon Real? (amog.com)
• 11.11.11 Is Just Another Day! Period (techie-buzz.com)
• Eleven Eleven (wellheregoes.wordpress.com)
• How People Are Testing Their Luck On 11/11/11 (huffingtonpost.com)
• ‘Passionate’ date to tie the knot (mirror.co.uk)

‘All the while, the Supreme Court was debating whether Americans had a “reasonable” expectation their movements would not be electronically monitored. Yet we live in a world today where we pay $300 for a hotel room that spies on your alcohol intake, where millions of people voluntarily “check in” their every movement on FourSquare and Facebook, and where we routinely give big-name and no-name mobile-phone applications the right to track us everywhere we go.’ (via Wired.com).

As someone said: “Do you see (Washington Post)  what happens (Reuters) when you vote? Let’s try it again next year, shall we?” (thanks, Hal)

‘OverDrive is a digital distribution and publishing company that partners with thousands of libraries, schools, and universities around the globe to give users access to ebooks on any device they may own. The beauty of the OverDrive service though is that it’s not limited to Kindle owners, but it supports them and Kindle app users. The OverDrive Media Console works on Mac OS systems, Windows computers, iOS devices, Android devices, and Windows Phones, and OverDrive locations support lending ebooks to more ereaders and tablets than we can list here. It’s safe to say that if there’s a library near you in the search results, you can take any device and borrow an ebook to read.

A few months ago, Amazon announced that Kindle owners could visit their local libraries to check out books, which was really their way of announcing Amazon finally partnered with OverDrive for distribution to Kindle devices. OverDrive already works worldwide. To find out if your library participates, visit OverDrive Search, click Library Search, and type in your ZIP or postal code. Odds are there’s some location near you.’ (via Lifehacker).

 

 

‘Gwilym Davies has sworn off lattes and flat whites. The 2009 World Barista Champion has also removed cappuccinos and cortados from the menu of his Prufrock Coffee trolley at London’s Present. Gibraltar, SG-120 and all the other groovy terms for an espresso with hot milk have been banished from his vocabulary. Henceforce all his milk-marbleised coffees will be identified by their cup sizes: 4 oz, 6 oz or 8 oz.

The trouble with his old menu, according to Gwilym, was that the coffee names mythologised what were, from his hands, fundamentally the same drink: a double espresso blended with varying quantities of milk he steamed and textured in the identical manner. Furthermore, the terms were confusing and meant different things to different people from different places. It was problematic to figure out what each customer’s understanding of a flat white or a cortado was and frustrating when what the barista champion served measured below – or above – each one’s expectations.’ (Via YoungandFoodish, thanks to William Gibson)

[Fighting a small battle against pretension, I have always insisted on ordering my coffee as  ‘small’, ‘medium’ or ‘large’ when I have occasion to patronize a Starbucks.]

Related:

• Cappuccino vs Caffe Latte (savesavesave.blogspot.com)
• Choices (sorted.net.au)
• i wanna be a barista, lalala. (ask.metafilter.com)
• Barista’s “Starbucks Rant” song gets him fired (boingboing.net)

Oh, how I wish I had been pointed to this last week. These are definitely people who know how to have fun with Hallowe’en. (via boing boing)

“Fright night just got a little bit spookier. Pregnant women have their own little trick on Halloween – they seem able to time the delivery of their baby to avoid giving birth on this day.

Rebecca Levy at Yale School of Public Health and colleagues examined 1.8 million US birth records from 1996 to 2006, and found that birth rates dropped by 11.3 per cent on 31 October, when compared with the two-week window surrounding the date. The significant declines in deliveries on Halloween applied to natural births as well as scheduled caesarean and induced births….

Levy suggests that Halloween’s associations with death and evil are in direct contrast with the idea of creating life and may subconsciously affect a woman’s desire to give birth.” (via New Scientist).

Related:

• Are pregnant women refusing to give birth on Halloween? [Pregnancy] (io9.com)
• Do women avoid giving birth on Halloween? (hotair.com)
• Well Blog: Really? The Claim: Holidays Can Affect When Expectant Mothers Deliver (well.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Women Defy Biology to Not Give Birth on Halloween (neatorama.com)
• Move Halloween From October 31st To Last Saturday Of Month? “Today’s Stupid News, In Brief.” [10/26/11] (wirk.radio.com)

Mind Hacks pointed me to this fascinating article from the current issue of The Psychologist, which explores the psychology of horror, why we like to be scared, and whether a greater psychological understanding could even guide horror writers and directors into even scarier territory. I would welcome that, as long as my cardiovascular health can tolerate being frightened out of my wits. I have always been a fan of horror films and relished the feeling of the eerie, but it has been a long time since I have been truly, disquietingly, scared by a movie-viewing experience.

Related:

• Can’t Look Away: The Lure of Horror Film Exhibit Opens October 2nd in Seattle (dreadcentral.com)
• What Makes A Good Horror Movie? (somethinsomethin.wordpress.com)
• Why I Write Horror (hoomahmoos.wordpress.com)
• Horror Flicks Done Right – The Asian Way (seesuestitch.wordpress.com)
• This Your Brain On Horror (pinkbananaworld.com)
• The best horror seldom pounces (gregoryhamel.net)

This is from a Padre Island sand-castle sculpting contest. The artist, Carl Jara writes, “Calavera del Toro… depicts Occupy Wall Street in a Day of the Dead satire. Created last weekend at Sand Castle Days in South Padre Island, Texas. A banker and a politician sit comfortably toasting their overflowing champagne flutes to the skull of their recently slain Wall Street bull, draped in a Golden Parachute.” (via Flickr, with thanks to Boing Boing)

“This 2009 video shows off a curiously effective Hallowe’en prank: the pranksters dressed a child-sized mannequin in a skeleton costume, then posed it, holding a candy-bag, in front of houses, rang the bell and ran off. The homeowners opened their door to find a silent, staring, motionless, costumed “child” — creepily clever. ” (via Boing Boing).

When Maryland educator and artist  Hasan Elahi was erroneously flagged as a would-be terrorist and investigated by the FBI, he decided to cooperate and given them all the information they needed to clear himself… and more, much much more. He found that overwhelming them with irrelevant meticulous edtail about your life protects your privacy as well as trying to hide. It sort of reminds me of what some people did to resist the draft in the ’70’s, trying to paralyze and overwhelm the system by sending tons of data, or even bricks, for inclusion in their Selective Service files. Elahi conceived of it as an art project, and more:

 

“What I’m doing is no longer just an art project; creating our own archives has become so commonplace that we’re all — or at least hundreds of millions of us — doing it all the time. Whether we know it or not.” 

(via NYTimes)

Related:

• Helping the FBI Track You (yro.slashdot.org)
• Color Me Unprivileged – Color Me Patriot Acted (thevigilantlens.com)
• Flipping the Script on the FBI With 45,000+ Pieces of Digital Art (mashable.com)

Hilarious Straight Dope column from Cecil Adams.Read to the bottom for one manufacturer’s application instructions. Has any of my readers run across a merkin before? (I had not.) Perhaps you would care to share your experience in the comments? :-P

Related:

Famous merkins on screen

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. It is fortunate that Hallowe’en falls on a Monday this year, as there is evidence that the pagan festival was celebrated for three days.

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)

Writer Steve Silberman, who studied with the same Buddhist teacher as Jobs, reflects on the surprising sincerity and depth of Jobs’ Buddhist practice. In so doing, we have a microcosm of the history of the last several decades of Buddhism in the West. (via NeuroTribes).

Scary books for all ages for this Halloween. all hallow’s read. Based on Neil Gaiman’s suggestion here that:

… on Hallowe’en or during the week of Hallowe’en, we give each other scary books. Give children scary books they’ll like and can handle. Give adults scary books they’ll enjoy.

305163_10150334410450950_526805949_8616623_127442494_n.jpg (480×480). (via rich)

Are we seeing ‘…the evolution of a style of music (and musicians) once beloved for its outsider ethos and “authenticity” into something that has been characterized as, variously, “dad rock,” “for sale next to the register at Starbucks” or, even… “NPR Muzak”…? (via The Record : NPR).

“…But “Occupy” is anything but a protest movement. That’s why it has been so hard for news agencies to express or even discern the “demands” of the growing legions of Occupy participants around the nation, and even the world. Just like pretty much everyone else on the planet, occupiers may want many things to happen and other things to stop, but the occupation is not about making demands. They don’t want anything from you, and there is nothing you can do to make them stop. That’s what makes Occupy so very scary and so very promising. It is not a protest, but a prototype for a new way of living….” — Douglas Rushkoff (via Boing Boing).

‘Only recently have scientists accorded chimpanzees, so closely related to humans we can share blood transfusions, the dignity of having a mind. But now, increasingly, researchers who study octopuses are convinced that these boneless, alien animals—creatures whose ancestors diverged from the lineage that would lead to ours roughly 500 to 700 million years ago—have developed intelligence, emotions, and individual personalities. Their findings are challenging our understanding of consciousness itself.’ (via Orion Magazine).

A decade after Bush’s signature, information is sketchy about how the law is being used in practice: ‘…despite its namesake of “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism,” the law seemingly is being invoked far more to target domestic crime than for fighting terrorism.

The act, which has remained largely the same since President George W. Bush signed the legislation six weeks after 9/11, among other things gives the government powers to acquire phone, banking and other records via the power of a so-called “national security letter,” which does not require a court warrant.

National security letters, perhaps the most invasive facet of the law, are written demands from the FBI that compel internet service providers, financial institutions and others to hand over confidential records about their customers, such as subscriber information, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, and arguably websites you have visited.

The FBI need merely assert, in writing, that the information is “relevant” to an ongoing terrorism or national security investigation. Nearly everyone who gets a national security letter is prohibited from even disclosing that they’ve received one (the automatic gag order provision was struck down in a rare legal loss for the Patriot Act, but they persist in practice). More than 200,000 letters have been issued by the FBI.

Amendments requiring that the letters seek data relevant to a “terror” investigation have failed.’ (via Wired.com).

‘Remember that Target commercial last year that poked fun at homemade Halloween costumes? Some people, including me, were not too fond of the message it sent. This year at New York Comic Con, the GeekDads and GeekMoms hosted a discussion panel and my topic was “five reasons you should build your kid’s costume.”  ‘ (via Wired.com).

 

 

‘The Harvard professor has spooked the right. As she begins her high-profile Senate campaign against GOP star Scott Brown in Massachusetts, the consumer advocate tells Samuel P. Jacobs how she created much of the intellectual foundation for the Occupy Wall Street movement.’ (via The Daily Beast).

“That stunning shot is from the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn. The big moon is Titan, and by big, I mean bigger than the planet Mercury. Big enough to have a thick nitrogen atmosphere, clearly visible in this picture. The bright moon superposed right on top of Titan is Dione, its icy surface shiny and white.

On the right, just outside the rings, is tiny, flying saucer-shaped Pandora. And the fourth moon? That’s Pan, the tiny white spot in the gap in the rings on the left, barely visible in this shot. But that’s understandable, since Pan is less than 30 km (18 miles) across, and this was taken from a distance of nearly 2 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) away!

I love pictures like this; they remind me that even after 7 years of Cassini touring around Saturn, there’s still much to see and much beauty to behold there.” (via Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine).

Related:

• New Map of Saturn Moon Titan Reveals Surprisingly Earth-Like Features (livescience.com)
• Say Hello to Saturn’s Moons (neatorama.com)
• Saturn’s Odd Pockmarked Moon Revealed in New Photos (foxnews.com)
• Saturnian moons merge into a quintet (photoblog.msnbc.msn.com)

‘Out at the Energy Department’s Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, the last of America’s B-53s is in storage. Come Tuesday, it will be dissected: The 300 pounds of high explosives will be separated from its enriched uranium heart, known as a “pit.” The pit will be placed into a storage locker at Pantex, where it will await a final, highly supervised termination.

“It’s the end of the era of monster weapons, if you will,” says Hans Kristensen, who directs the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of the American Scientists.

First brought into the U.S. nuclear stockpile in 1962, the B-53 was so big because it was so dumb. With poor precision mechanisms for finding a target — “Its accuracy was horrendous,” Kristensen says — what it lacked in smarts it made up in strength. The nukes that vaporized Hiroshima were a mere 12 kilotons; the B53 provided nine megatons — 9,000 kilotons — of destructive power.’ (via Wired)

‘When a rabbit or other animal is trapped by a predator, it will freeze and assess the situation. It might then flee or attack, what we usually call the “fight or flight response”. If that fails, a last-ditch defence mechanism is to go completely immobile, to play dead.

Researchers in Brazil now say that in times of grave danger, this same automatic last resort is also exhibited by humans and is experienced as a terrifying feeling of being “locked-in”. The team led by Eliane Volchan performed what they describe as the first lab-study of “tonic immobility” in humans, and they argue that greater awareness of the response could help our understanding of people’s reactions in real-life situations. For example, rape victims often experience shame after not resisting physically, and in some jurisdictions their passive response is interpreted as a sign of consent. Similarly, police officers and related professionals may be condemned for not reacting proactively in danger situations.’ (via BPS Research Digest).

‘Pessimists, anti-capitalists, conservatives and greens, take note – we are much more peaceful now than we used to be, says the psychologist.’  (via  New Scientist).

Related:

• Bombings, Beheadings? Stats Show a Peaceful World (maboulette.wordpress.com)
• World Becoming Less Violent: Despite Global Conflict, Statistics Show Violence In Steady Decline (jhaines6.wordpress.com)
• Steven Pinker has a blinkered appreciation of war and peace | the big issue (guardian.co.uk)

‘Brian Meier and his team had dozens of students rate the agreeableness, extraversion and neuroticism of 100 people, based on pictures of their faces and a strap-line identifying each person’s preference for a particular food, such as “I like grapefruit”. People who said they liked a sweet food were judged by the students as more agreeable, suggesting that we implicitly recognise that a taste for sweet things is grounded in a sweet personality.

Are people right to make this implicit assumption? Further studies suggested so. Students who rated their own personality as more agreeable also tended to have a stronger preference (than their less agreeable peers) for sweet foods and drinks. Among a different set of students, a stronger preference for sweet foods correlated positively with their willingness to volunteer their time, unpaid, for a separate unrelated study – considered by the researchers as a sign of prosocial behaviour.’ (via BPS Research Digest).

Jonah Lehrer on Daniel Kahneman’s New Book: 

‘(Princeton psychologist) Daniel Kahneman’s … disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way that we think about thinking. While philosophers, economists and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents, Mr. Kahneman and his scientific partner, the late Amos Tversky, demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe…’ (via WSJ).

Related:

• http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/opinion/brooks-who-you-are.html?src=me&ref=general (nytimes.com)
• “Kahneman and Tversky were not given to broad claims. But the work they and others did led to the…” (underpaidgenius.com)
• Op-Ed Columnist: Who You Are (nytimes.com)

Family study of 300 000 people with severe mental disorder: The link between madness and genius is a common trope in our thinking. Skeptics say that creativity happens despite rather than because of mental illness. but a new study supports the notion that there is indeed a link. (via British Journal of Psychiatry)

‘…New Rule: Republicans have to stop calling the Wall Street protesters “hippies”. Yes, they’re peeing outdoors, and having sex in sleeping bags, or as Bristol Palin calls it, “dating”. But they’re not hippies!

The hippies are all gone. Woodstock was 42 years ago. Forget the brown acid, the people who were at Woodstock are now taking the blue Viagra. “Turn on, tune in, drop out”, refers to their hearing aids. Wavy Gravy is 75 years old. He’s making wavy gravy in his pants.

Now, last Saturday, I was in our nation’s capital, and I had the chance to see for myself what was going on when I visited Occupy DC. Everyone was extraordinarily well-behaved, and contrary to reports, I was not offered a single marijuana cigarette. And I’m a little insulted. All right, someone did give me a magic mushroom, and it did blow my mind, and I thank you, Senator McConnell. And sorry about your eyebrows, I’m sure they’ll grow back.

Anyway, the next morning, when I woke up bloody and naked in the woods, I had a relevation… I mean, a revelation. Of course conservatives want to make this about hippies, because they like to live in the past! Rush Limbaugh, who really is too square to be a drug addict, said, “When the free drugs run out, when the free sex runs out, they’ll get bored and move on to something else.”

Oh that’s right, Grandpa. Look at them, strumming their sitars and wearing dungarees. Whatever happened to the good old days of segregation and date rape? But I get it. You’re bitter because we fought a culture war in the ’60s and the Right lost. Rick Santorum is like that Japanese soldier on the island who doesn’t know the war is over, so he’s still fighting against birth control and butt sex.

Plus, Republicans are now mostly a Southern party, and if there’s one thing Southerners don’t do well, it’s lose a war and get over it. (audience applause) But that war is indeed over. The ideals of the youth movement became assimilated into American society. That’s why we have gays in the military now, and pre-natal yoga classes, and tofurkey. And that’s why Rick Santorum will never be President, and a black guy who snorted cocaine is. (audience applause)

It’s also why there’s not going to be a repeat of what happened the last time the hippies were in the streets. Those hard hats that you’re depending on to turn against the lousy hippies? Heh. Here’s what they’re doing now. They’re cheering them on. (audience applause) Because now, the hard hats are just as broke as everybody else.

These people down there, they’re not the counter-culture. They’re the culture. (audience applause) They don’t want free love. They want paid employment. (audience applause) They don’t hate capitalism. They hate what’s been done to it. (audience applause)

And they resent the Republican mantra that the market perfectly rewards the hard-working and punishes the lazy, and the poor are just jealous moochers who want a handout. Yeah, because if there’s one group of people who hate handouts, it’s Wall Street…’ (via Daily Kos).

‘…[H]ere in Orlando, not far from the launching site of the space program’s most triumphant achievements, the government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, drew hundreds this month to a symposium on the 100-Year Starship Study, which is devoted to ideas for visiting the stars.

Participants — an eclectic mix of engineers, scientists, science fiction fans, students and dreamers — explored a mix of ideas, including how to organize and finance a century-long project; whether civilization would survive, because an engine to propel a starship could also be used for a weapon to obliterate the planet; and whether people need to go along for the trip. (Alternatively, machines could build humans at the destination, perhaps tweaked to live in non-Earth-like environs.)…’ (via NYTimes)

.

Related:

• 100 year Starship Symposium considers mankind’s next step (charlotte.news14.com)
• DARPA’s 100-Year Starship Study sponsors research for interstellar travel (geek.com)
• These Are the Voyages… (Very OT) (theonlinephotographer.typepad.com)
• The 100-Year Starship: US Agencies Ponder Interstellar Travel (space.com)
• Visionaries gather to ponder 100-year starship (msnbc.msn.com)
• Starships In a Century? (science.slashdot.org)

‘When Sybil first came out in 1973, not only did it shoot to the top of the best-seller lists — it manufactured a psychiatric phenomenon. The book was billed as the true story of a woman who suffered from multiple personality disorder. Within a few years of its publication, reported cases of multiple personality disorder — now known as dissociative identity disorder — leapt from fewer than 100 to thousands. But in a new book, Sybil Exposed, writer Debbie Nathan argues that most of the story is based on a lie.’ (via NPR).

Strongly supporting the conception that psychopathy is defined by predatory, nonempathic, disconnected self-justification: ‘Psychopaths used more conjunctions like “because,” “since” or “so that,” implying that the crime “had to be done” to obtain a particular goal. They used twice as many words relating to physical needs, such as food, sex or money, while non-psychopaths used more words about social needs, including family, religion and spirituality. Unveiling their predatory nature in their own description, the psychopaths often included details of what they had to eat on the day of their crime.’ (via MedicalXpress.

Go here. Laugh out loud. Cry..

Illegal Secret Subway Art in NYC: ‘It’s “an elusive pirate treasure of contemporary art” – an abandoned subway chamber under Manhattan that was illegally opened for a year starting in 2009 to allow 103 select artists to paint for one night each. Then it was sealed off from the world, the original entrance to the station removed. The Underbelly Project is a mysterious urban art experiment that seeks to subvert the commercialism that has overtaken much of the street art scene.’ (via WebUrbanist).

Related:

• Trippy Graffiti Project Pairs Street Art and Photography (weburbanist.com)
• Americana’s Underbelly: Times Square Mickey Mouse Edition [Usa] (gawker.com)
• Arabic-Like Graffiti Appears on Underbellies of Southwest Jets (laist.com)
• Walls Notebook: Legal Graffiti via WebUrbanist (lawtag.wordpress.com)

I love this weblog, You Are Not So Smart, which explodes our assumptions about why we do the things we do. Here, it is the notion that we behave toward people according to how we feel about them. In reality, it is often the other way around; our feelings toward others will be post facto justifications for how we see ourselves acting toward them. This is because feeling justified, having a plausible explanation for our actions, is so essential. So if you can get someone who dislikes you to do a favor for you, their attitude toward you will change. And, perhaps more important, if you would like to cultivate an attitude of lovingkindness and dissipate your own bitter feelings toward someone, do a favor for them.

“We talked to a group of nutritionists and asked them to share the food myths they find most irritating and explain why people cling to them. Here’s what they said.” (via Lifehacker).

“If the result is true…, it does change everything. In particular, the likely explanation is that the neutrinos are taking a short-cut through one of the extra dimensions which string theory postulates are hidden among the familiar four of length, breadth, height and time. Measured along this five-dimensional route, Einstein might still be right. (It would not so much be that he made a mistake as that he did not know the whole story.) Indeed, moving beyond four dimensions in this way would also allow physicists to try to integrate Einstein’s work with quantum theory, the other great breakthrough of 20th-century physics, but one which simply refuses to overlap with relativity. A unified theory of everything, including perhaps as many as 11 dimensions, would then beckon.” (via The Economist).

“Climate shifts were a statistically significant cause of social disturbance, war, migration, epidemics, famine, and nutritional status, the researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And climate caused famines, economic downturns, and catastrophic human events far more often than did any of the other 14 variables. The most direct way in which extreme climate shifts influence human society is through agriculture, Zhang says; a falling supply of crops will drive up the price of gold and cause inflation. Similarly, epidemics can be exacerbated by famine. And when people are miserable, they are likely to become angry with their governments and each other, resulting in war.” (via ScienceNOW).

Prescription Stimulant Use in Kids With ADHD Still Rising (via Medscape).

There are many ways not to believe. Jonathan Rée on the evolution of atheist thought. (via New Humanist).

Everything you need to know about dark energy. How do we know it exists? What might it actually be? What is the “coincidence problem”? All this and more explained in clear, easy to grasp fashion. (via Discover Magazine).

“Recent research shows that turbulent times reward crazy leaders. Here’s what we can do to counteract that…” (via Salon).

Related:

• Bert Jansch: Let No Man Steal His Thyme (shorequalblog.com)

Occupy Wall Street (Evan O’Brien photo)

Not that I agree with this, but it is worth saying:

‘For the first time since the days of Abraham Lincoln, an American president has ordered the killing of a U.S. citizen, far from any battlefield or courtroom.

And like Abraham Lincoln, Obama has saved the constitution and the country by defending it against a nihilistic and narrow reading of the constitution that would prevent the country from protecting itself.

This has shocked the American Civil Liberties Union, Ron Paul, legal scholars, and libertarians, who have long argued that the constitution’s Fifth Amendment, which says that no citizen shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” means that the constitution bars killing non-combatants without a trial. Since Awlaki had not been convicted in a proper court or hasn’t been killed while shooting at American soldiers, they contend, his killing is unconstitutional. A side argument, beloved by the ACLU, is that the method of deciding who goes on the CIA target list is secret and therefore an illegal violation of due process.

These are clever arguments, but wrong.’ (via The Daily Beast).

Related:

• Al-Awlaki And The Law (andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
• Ron Paul Condemns Obama Admin For ‘Assassinating’ U.S. Born Anwar al-Awlaki (mediaite.com)
• “Awlaki Did what he had to do” – American Muslim Cleric contrasts American Reaction (hinduworldvision.wordpress.com)
• Al-Awlaki killing hailed by Obama, slammed by rights groups (theglobeandmail.com)
• New reality: US assassinates it own citizens with no due process (boingboing.net)
• Obama’s Dangerous al-Awlaki Precedent (alternet.org)
• The Death Of Anwar Al-Awlaki And The Imperial Presidency (outsidethebeltway.com)
• Thanks To Obama Administration For Eliminating Anwar al-Awlaki, A Radical American Muslim Cleric (dekerivers.wordpress.com)
• Multiple terror plots linked to Anwar al-Awlaki (cbsnews.com)
• Anwar al-Awlaki’s Death Highlights Obama’s Success (rationalactors.com)

(via  Unplggd).

‘An artificial cerebellum has restored lost brain function in rats, bringing the prospect of cyborg-style brain implants a step closer to reality. Such implants could eventually be used to replace areas of brain tissue damaged by stroke and other conditions, or even to enhance healthy brain function and restore learning processes that decline with age.’ (via New Scientist, thanks to Neal).

‘A taxi cuts you off in Rome. A Mumbai merchant spurns your best offer. A maitre d’ snubs you in Beirut. At times like these, words can fail even the most seasoned polyglot. But now salvation is literally at hand, thanks to Rude Hand Gestures of the World, by Romana Lefevre, with photographs by Daniel Castro. If I’d had a copy of this in my days as a boy diplomat, my Foreign Service career would have come to an even more abrupt halt! Herewith a sampling, courtesy of the ever-brilliant Chronicle Books, of how to throw down with the locals, wherever you are:…’ (via The Atlantic).

…applies for a patent for a method in which merchants can pay for your GPS to serve you up a suboptimal route that takes you past their business establishment. Where there are competing routes, you end up being sent past whatever business paid the most for your attention. (United States Patent Application: 0110087524).

The CERN results are prompting a renewed interest in neutrino jokes on the net. (Google Search). Here are some:

— A neutrino walks into a bar and the bartender says, “You’re early.”

— A neutrino walks into a bar and the bartender says, “For you, no charge.”

— A neutrino walks into a bar and the bartender says, “We don’t serve your kind here.” The neutrino replies, “I’m just passing through.”

But the best, to my way of thinking:

— “We don’t allow faster than light neutrinos in here” said the bartender. A neutrino walks into a bar.

And here are some related jokes about other subatomic particles etc.

 

 

‘About once a year or so, a case comes along that jars us from our complacency, reminds us that, as a society, we put people to death. Without making judgments about the efficacy of the death penalty as a deterrent against crime, or about its moral legitimacy as a form of justice, its worth noting that putting someone to death is a weighty thing, and it inevitably takes a profound toll on those involved.’ (via PBS).

(via Spiked Math).

Lehigh Valley workers tell of brutal heat, dizzying pace at online retailer. (via Allentown Morning Call).

Writer Jenny Diski: “…In 1964, having spent some time myself in a psychiatric hospital, I read The Three Christs, and soon after came on Laing’s early books, which confirmed what I had seen in it. It has made me very wary of reading ‘case histories’, written about the disturbed by those who believe themselves to know better. It also seemed to me, aged 16, that The Three Christs of Ypsilanti contained everything there was to know about the world. That’s not the case of course, but if resources were short, I’d still be inclined to salvage this book as a way of explaining the terror of the human condition, and the astonishing fact that people battle for their rights and dignity in the face of that terror, in order to establish their place in the world, whatever they decide it has to be.” (via London Review of Books, September 2011).

The book to which she refers, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, is by my uncle, the late psychologist Milton Rokeach. This brilliant and poignant study in the 1950s, an attempt  at a god-like manipulation of three deluded long-term denizens of a psychiatric hospital,  is well-described in Diski’s article and well worth your while if you are interested in the nature of belief and the boundaries of delusions.

Related

• Jenny Diski: The psychology and history of shoplifting. (newyorker.com)
• “They were astonished at the majesty of God” (worryisuseless.wordpress.com)
• What proof do we have that Jesus Christ is real (wiki.answers.com)
• Caution: The Delusion Of Good Intentions (defrostingwindows.wordpress.com)
• psychosis (alixmacdonald.wordpress.com)

‘The holiday of Autumn Equinox, Harvest Home, Mabon, the Feast of the Ingathering, Meán Fómhair or Alban Elfed (in Neo-Druidic traditions), is a pagan ritual of thanksgiving for the fruits of the earth and a recognition of the need to share them to secure the blessings of the Goddess and the God during the winter months. The name Mabon was coined by Aidan Kelly around 1970 as a reference to Mabon ap Modron, a character from Welsh mythology.[14] In the northern hemisphere this equinox occurs anywhere from September 21 to 24. In the southern hemisphere, the autumn equinox occurs anywhere from March 20–23. Among the sabbats, it is the second of the three pagan harvest festivals, preceded by Lammas/Lughnasadh and followed by Samhain.’ (via Wheel of the Year – Wikipedia).

“Scientists said on Thursday they recorded particles travelling faster than light – a finding that could overturn one of Einstein’s fundamental laws of the universe… [M]easurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done…

If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a “cosmic constant” and that nothing in the universe can travel faster. That assertion, which has withstood over a century of testing, is one of the key elements of the so-called Standard Model of physics, which attempts to describe the way the universe and everything in it works.” (via Telegraph.UK)

 

 

‘The innermost parts of a black hole’s active jets have been revealed for the first time. The observation suggests that the energetic spouts are more dynamic than previously suspected, with enormous blasts firing off randomly over timescales as short as 11 seconds.

It is somewhat odd that black holes, which are ultra-dense balls of matter from which no light can escape, can produce energetic flares. But these jets are a byproduct of gas and dust from a companion star that the black hole is consuming. The matter falls in circles toward the black hole, like water down a drain, and forms a gigantic flat disk that accelerates particles within, causing them to discharge energy. As yet scientists have only a vague notion of how the entire process works.’ (via Wired).

‘1982: At precisely 11:44 a.m., Scott Fahlman posts the following electronic message to a computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University:

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use:

:-(

With that post, Fahlman became the acknowledged originator of the ASCII-based emoticon. From those two simple emoticons (a portmanteau combining the words emotion and icon) have sprung dozens of others that are the joy, or bane, of e-mail, text-message and instant-message correspondence the world over.

Fahlman was not, however, the first person to use typographical symbols to convey emotions. The practice goes back at least to the mid-19th century, when Morse code symbols were occasionally used for the same purpose. Other examples exist as well.

In 1881, the American satirical magazine Puck published what we would now call emoticons, using hand-set type. No less a wordsmith than Ambrose Bierce suggested using what he called a “snigger point” — \__/ — to convey jocularity or irony. Baltimore’s Sunday Sun suggested a tongue-in-cheek sideways character in 1967.

But none of those caught on. The internet emoticon truly traces its lineage directly to Fahlman, who says he came up with the idea after reading “lengthy diatribes” from people on the message board who failed to get the joke or the sarcasm in a particular post — which is probably what “given current trends” refers to in his own, now-famous missive.’ (via Wired)

Related:

• Happy :-) emoticon day! (arjanshahani.wordpress.com)
• Happy Birthday, Emoticon :-) (abcnews.go.com)
• Internet Emoticons Are 29 Today :-) (gizmodo.com.au)
• September 19 in history (homepaddock.wordpress.com)
• Afternoon Bites: Ambrose Bierce, Edsel, Goodreads, and more (vol1brooklyn.com)

 

 

 

 

 

Miami Invaded By Giant, House-Eating Snails: ‘In southwest Miami, a small subdivision is being called “ground zero” of an invasion by a destructive, non-native species.”It’s us against the snails,” Richard Gaskalla, head of plant industry for Florida’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz.That’s the Giant African Land Snail, to be precise. They can grow to be 10 inches long. They leave a slimy trail of excrement wherever they go. They harbor the microscopic rat-lung worm, which can transmit meningitis to humans. And they will literally eat your house.’ (via NHPR)

Related:

• These giant snails are looking for a new home – your home. (inquisitr.com)
• Florida Residents: Don’t Touch That Giant Snail! Make A Phone Call Instead (alternativenewsreport.net)

Obama: “The odds of me being reelected are much higher than the odds of me being elected in the first place.” (via Talking Points Memo).

“…Archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence…” (via DISCOVER Magazine).

Pet parrots, such as cockatoos, that are let loose in the wild are teaching native birds to talk. (via Australian Geographic).

Jonathan Sacks (chief rabbi of the UK): ‘The question is not radical Islam but, does the West believe in itself any more? Is it capable of renewing itself as it did two centuries ago? Or will it crumble as did the Soviet Union from internal decay. “We have met the enemy,” said the cartoon character Pogo, “and he is us.” That is the challenge of 9/11. It’s about time we came together to meet it.’ (via Standpoint).

‘Sci-fi has predicted reality before (think Star Trek‘s communicators and The Prisoner’s ubiquitious surveillance). But now there’s a science fiction concept that we never thought we’d see in real life: psychohistory.

Psychohistory is a concept found in Isaac Asimov’s epic series Foundation—which beat out Lord of the Rings in 1965 for the Hugo award for best all-time series—about using sociology, history and statistics to predict the future of large groups.

Now the BBC reports that “Feeding a supercomputer with news stories could help predict major world events.”

Could it help? Actually, it already has. Believe it or not, a computer predicted the revolutions in Libya and Egypt, as well as the approximate location of Osama bin Laden.’ (via Blastr).

‘The Department of Homeland Security said today that it was studying several “credible threats” made to the United States government in a two-hour broadcast Wednesday night from a location believed to be the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California.

Homeland Security spokesman Harland Dorinson said that the Department did not want to alarm the American people, “but whenever you have a group of individuals threatening to dismantle the US government piece by piece, it has to be taken seriously.”

In reviewing the two-hour tape, Homeland Security officials said they found threats to some of the most essential functions of the US government, from Social Security to the Federal Reserve.

While stopping short of saying that the speakers were engaged in some sort of jihad, Mr. Dorinson did note that a tone of religious extremism dominated the video.

“One speaker in particular, seemed bent on rolling back the advances of science and plunging America back into the Dark Ages,” he said.

But the most terrifying moment in the tape came when that same speaker received thunderous applause from the audience after threatening to execute people.’ (via Borowitz Report, with thanks to Dennis).

“…[M]any of society’s most pernicious troubles arise under the guise of, or as a consequence of, attempts to help others. Pathologies of altruism can result in all kinds of abuses, such as the neglect of children, and can lead to misinformed legislation and the misapplication of science. If we really want to help others, we should recognise that altruism can be dangerous…” (via New Scientist).

 

 

 

 

 

A modern approach to interviewing witnesses of crimes may make things worse: “People love to tell tales. Indeed, even when someone’s memory is patchy, he will still do his best to spin the information he has into a credible yarn. This is not a matter of deceit. Rather, it is an established psychological phenomenon in which the brain tries to make sense of fragmentary information. Although such behaviour is natural and normal, it is a nuisance for the forces of law and order when they are trying to find out what happened during an incident by taking statements from witnesses. For this reason, psychologists working with the police often advocate asking witnesses of crimes to say what they saw in reverse order, to stop them making things up to help the story run smoothly. It sounds like sensible advice, and police forces in Australia, Britain, New Zealand, Norway, Spain and Sweden have all adopted it. But a new study suggests that far from improving recall, it makes things worse.” (via The Economist.

“Whence the female orgasm? After 40 years of debate evolutionary biologists are no closer to deciding whether it evolved to give women a reproductive boost, or whether it is simply a by-product of male orgasm evolution. The latest attempt to settle the dispute involves quizzing some 10,000 twins and pairs of siblings on their sexual habits.

Some evolutionary biologists reckon the female orgasm is adaptive and possibly influences mate choice, strengthens pair bonds or indirectly helps to suck sperm into the uterus. Others argue that women have orgasms for the same reason that men have nipples – being highly adaptive in one sex, the traits tag along for the ride in the other…” (via New Scientist).

So you got to college, but… “…[t]o get an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institution that you find yourself in—no matter how prestigious it may be. (In fact, the more prestigious the school, the more you’ll probably have to push.)” (via Oxford American)

“For centuries, almost all carrots were yellow, white or purple. But in the 17th century, most of those crunchy vegetables turned orange. Why? Turns out it all has to do with Dutch politics.” (via  Ezra Klein – The Washington Post).

“An Israeli psychologist is asking whether Moses may have been tripping when he saw God on Mount Sinai, suggesting that many of our traditional ideas about the Abrahamic God may have been inspired by hallucinogenic drugs.

Professor Benny Shannon’s apparently cites historical evidence that the religious ceremonies of the Israelites included hallucinogenic plants and further bases his speculation on his own experiences with the reportedly similar psychedelic plant ayahuasca.”  (via Mind Hacks).

Jim Romenesko is closing up shop at the OS & RR as part of his ‘semi-retirement’, after 13 years. One of the first generation of webloggers and always worth reading. I was honored that he took note of and encouraged me, back when there were so few of us you couldn’t help but notice. Coming soon: jimromenesko.com, “a blog about media — and other things I’m interested in.”

Related:

• A fond farewell to The Obscure Store (kottke.org)
• The End Of The Obscure Store (theawl.com)
• The Sad Decline Of Poynter Media News (lukeford.net)
• Half the end of an era – Jim Romenesko plans ‘semi-retirement’ (nextlevelofnews.com)

Illusory Invulnerability Created by Taking Dietary Supplements Licenses Health-Risk Behaviors (Chiou, Yang and Wan, 2011, abstract via Psychological Science).

Related:

• Who should take dietary supplements? (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• The Orchestrated Smear Campaign (lewrockwell.com)
• Take vitamin pill, eat cake. How supplements can encourage unhealthy behaviour (bps-research-digest.blogspot.com)
• Dietary supplements: Do we need them? (pdresources.wordpress.com)
• Balancing the risks and benefits of dietary supplements (bioidenticalhormoneexperts.com)

“Although the history of carving miniature bas relief sculptures into coins stretches back to the 18th century if not earlier, it was greatly popularized in the early 20th century with the introduction of the Buffalo nickel. This particular coin was minted using soft metal and was imprinted with the portrait of an indian with bold features, making it easier to deface and transform into the portraits of other people, animals, or even scenery. Add to that the idle hands of unemployed artists during the depression (thus, “hobo”) and soon a flood of curious numismatic treasures were born. Most of the images on hobo nickels are too folk artsy for my taste, however a number of artists etched away the flesh of the subject to reveal these awesomely macabre skulls. Hobo nickel carving remains a popular hobby today and it even has a society. Don’t you wish we had actual money that looked like this?”  (via Colossal).

Related:

• Hobo Nickels (neatorama.com)

Scholars are enchanted by the notion of this anarchistic region in Asia. But how real is it? 

‘Much of the most recent debate has been spurred by the Yale University professor of political science and anthropology James C. Scott, who describes the region in his latest book, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009)…

Zomia does not appear on any official map, for it is merely metaphorical. Scott identifies it as “the largest remaining region of the world whose peoples have not yet been fully incorporated into nation-states.” Though the scholars who have imagined Zomia differ over its precise boundaries, Scott includes all the lands at altitudes above 300 meters stretching from the Central Highlands of Vietnam to northeastern India. That encompasses parts of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Burma, as well as four provinces of China. Zomia’s 100 million residents are minority peoples “of truly bewildering ethnic and linguistic variety,” he writes. Among them are the Akha, Hmong, Karen, Lahu, Mien, and Wa.

 

He depicts an alternative past for the inhabitants of Zomia. The majority of the people who ended up in the hills were either escaping the state or driven out by it, he says…

While others might describe the hill peoples as “primitive” because they did not have permanent abodes or fixed fields, adhere to a major religion, or adopt other modern practices, Scott turns that idea around. He argues that those many minority ethnic groups were, in a sense, barbarians by design, using their culture, farming practices, egalitarian political structures, prophet-led rebellions, and even their lack of writing systems to put distance between themselves and the states that wished to engulf them.

As Scott develops his thesis, concepts that many scholars might hold dear vanish. Longstanding notions about the meaning of ethnic identity: Poof, gone. The idea that being “civilized” is superior to being uncivilized. Poof. The perception that absence of a written language signals a group’s failure to advance. Poof.

Instead, Scott asserts, “ethnic identities in the hills are politically crafted and designed to position a group vis-à-vis others in competition for power and resources.”

Over the past two millennia, “runaway” communities have put the “friction of terrain” between themselves and the people who remained in the lowlands, he writes. The highland groups adopted a swidden agriculture system (sometimes known, pejoratively, as “slash and burn”), shifting fields from place to place, staggering harvests, and relying on root crops to hide their yields from any visiting tax collectors. They formed egalitarian societies so as not to have leaders who might sell them out to the state. And they turned their backs on literacy to avoid creating records that central governments could use to carry out onerous policies like taxation, conscription, and forced labor.’ (via  The Chronicle of Higher Education).

“A recently published New York Times expose details the improper ties between Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and influential rightwing funder and activist Harlan Crow…

Crow is not the sole source of questionable ethical behavior on the part of Clarence Thomas. His highly questionable relationship to an ethically challenged Supreme Court justice is simply the latest to be exposed.

Clarence Thomas participated in a secret political fundraising event put on by the Koch brothers to fund Tea Party infrastructure groups.³

And for years, Thomas disregarded rules requiring him to report his wife’s income on financial disclosure forms. His household received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the conservative Heritage Foundation during a period when he was voting on landmark cases in which the rightwing think tank had a clear ideological stake.⁴

This type of behavior wouldn’t be tolerated for other federal court judges because they, unlike the Supreme Court, are bound by a code of ethics. Common Cause Attorney Arn Pearson says in the Times, “The code of conduct is quite clear that judges are not supposed to be soliciting money for their pet projects or charities, period. If any other federal judge was doing it, he could face disciplinary action.”

…Clarence Thomas’ behavior has long been beyond the bounds of what is considered acceptable. In response to these latest revelations by the New York Times it’s well past time to demand Clarence Thomas’ resignation.” (via CREDO Action).

Related:

• Clarence Thomas: Liberal nightmare on Obamacare (gunnyg.wordpress.com)
• Is Clarence Thomas the only man in America that can take down ObamaCare? (ironmill.wordpress.com)
• Clarence Thomas praised in New Yorker (blithespirit.wordpress.com)
• Clarence Thomas Is Not An Idiot [The Supremes] (jezebel.com)

“Inspired by The Lesser Key of Solomon, comics, mythology and 17th-century grimoire, the 72DEMONS project is a venue for new and budding visual artists. Our goal is to compile and publish an illustrated book depicting the 72 demons archived in the Ars Goetia, believed to be a guide for summoning spirits.The 72DEMONS project started in the summer of 2011. We encourage all artists to apply.” (via Ars Goetia).

“Ars Goetia, contains descriptions of the seventy-two demons that Solomon is said to have evoked and confined in a brass vessel sealed by magic symbols, and that he obliged to work for him. It gives instructions on constructing a similar brass vessel, and using the proper magic formulae to safely call up those demons.

It deals with the evocation of all classes of spirits, evil, indifferent and good; its opening Rites are those of Paimon, Orias, Astaroth and the whole cohort of Infernus. The second part, or Theurgia Goëtia, deals with the spirits of the cardinal points and their inferiors. These are mixed natures, some good and some evil.^[1]

The Ars Goetia assigns a rank and a title of nobility to each member of the infernal hierarchy, and gives the demons’ “signs they have to pay allegiance to”, or seals. The lists of entities in the Ars Goetia correspond (to high but varying degree, often according to edition) with those in Johann Weyer‘s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, an appendix appearing in later editions of his De Praestigiis Daemonum, of 1563.

A revised English edition of the Ars Goetia was published in 1904 by magician Aleister Crowley, as The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King. It serves as a key component of his popular and highly influential system of magick.” (via Wikipedia).

“This spring, the Archives of Internal Medicine published a much-discussed study that showed that doctors might recommend different treatments for their patients than they would for themselves. They were far more likely to prescribe for patients a potentially life-saving treatment with severe side effects than they were to pick that treatment for themselves.

Understandably, people are worried that this means doctors know something they’re not telling their patients. But my own experience with illness taught me a simpler truth: when it comes to their own health, doctors are as irrational as everyone else.” (via NYTimes).

“Take a piece of paper. Crumple it. Before you sink a three-pointer in the corner wastebasket, consider that you’ve just created an object of extraordinary mathematical and structural complexity, filled with mysteries that physicists are just starting to unfold.” (via Wired.com).

Starting with Yellowstone, a gallery of 21 satellite images. False color highlights features that might not otherwise stand out. How many have you visited? (via Wired.com).