‘My theme is ‘Halloween in the Time of Cholera,” collector Steven Martin told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. ‘The idea being that people back then were probably on a more intimate level with death — and that would have affected the way they celebrated Halloween.'”

“But one vestige of his yet-to-be-past self nagged at him — his Harvard Law School diploma. It stood, a symbolic barrier, between him and freedom. “Sometimes,” he decided, “you just need to say goodbye to your past in order to move forward.” So goodbye he said, in much the same way that a spurned spouse says goodbye to memories of a former lover. He set it on fire.

Not only did he incinerate his Harvard degree, but he captured the conflagration on video, describing it on his blog and posting it to YouTube. “In the end,” he writes, “it was just a piece of paper. Nothing more. I would rather live my life on my own terms than be a person that needs a piece of paper to justify their own worth.” I suspect a few folks in Harvard’s alumni-development office will be hot under the collar when they see Jack’s video. But one lesson every Harvard Law grad can learn from watching Jack’s act of career-defiance is that these things are not all that easy to burn.’ (Legal Blog Watch)

This has raised a hornets’ nest of controversy, with people holding forth with much sound and fury – and often signifying nothing. So I want to ask what, if anything, the teaching of this long-dead economist has to offer us today.

John Maynard Keynes, born in 1883, died in 1946; present at the Versailles negotiations in 1919; Britain’s representative at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944; father of the two key institutions of the post–war monetary order, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; author of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money; and, most importantly, the origin of the adjective “Keynesian”.

This is a word which has all but lost its original meaning. Like fascist, or feminist, it began describing a set of beliefs, but it has become a term of abuse or approbation, wielded by those who have, for the most part, not the faintest idea of what it actually means. So I want to give my version of “Everything you wanted to know about Keynes and were afraid to ask.” I think I can reduce Keynes’ view to seven essential propositions…” (Telegraph.UK<)

A number of mysteries remain.” (Economic Principals)

…(D)on’t just abandon a tradition that you yourself loved as a child, that your own children look forward to months in advance, and that helps preserve our sense of fellowship and community with our neighbors in the midst of all this madness.”

Vanity Fair magazine and the National Security News Service claim to have knowledge “developed from first-hand sources” of a car crash that involved then-Lt. McCain at the main gate of a Virginia naval base in 1964, according to legal filings. The incident has been largely, if not entirely, kept from the public. And in documents suing the Navy to release pertinent information, lawyers for the NS News Service allege that a cover-up may be at play.” — Sam Stein (Huffington Post)

It’s a Halloween sky show.

On Oct. 31st, the crescent Moon will sneak up on Venus for a close encounter of startling beauty. The gathering is best seen just after sunset when the twilight is pumpkin-orange and Halloween doorbells are chiming in earnest. Venus hovers just above the southwestern horizon, the brightest light in the sky, while the exquisitely slender Moon approaches just a few degrees below…” (NASA)

According to proponents, you possess a secret arsenal of psychological defenses designed to keep your death anxiety at bay (and to keep you from ending up in the fetal position listening to Nick Drake on your iPod). My writing this article, for example, would be interpreted as an exercise in “symbolic immortality”; terror management theorists would likely tell you that I wrote it for posterity, to enable a concrete set of my ephemeral ideas to outlive me, the biological organism. (I would tell you that I’d be happy enough if a year from now it still had a faint pulse.)

Yet a small number of researchers, including me, are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start.” (Scientific American Mind)

So annealed into pop culture are the five stages of grief—introduced in the 1960s by Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross based on her studies of the emotional state of dying patients—that they are regularly referenced without explication.

There appears to be no evidence, however, that most people most of the time go through most of the stages in this or any other order. According to Russell P. Friedman, executive director of the Grief Recovery Institute in Sherman Oaks, Calif. (www.grief-recovery.com), and co-author, with John W. James, of The Grief Recovery Handbook (HarperCollins, 1998), “no study has ever established that stages of grief actually exist, and what are defined as such can’t be called stages. Grief is the normal and natural emotional response to loss…. No matter how much people want to create simple, bullet-point guidelines for the human emotions of grief, there are no stages of grief that fit any two people or relationships.”” (Scientific American)

How did politics in the US come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind’s closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama was a Muslim and a terrorist?

Like most people on my side of the Atlantic, I have for many years been mystified by American politics. The US has the world’s best universities and attracts the world’s finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.

There have been exceptions over the past century – Franklin Roosevelt, JF Kennedy and Bill Clinton tempered their intellectualism with the common touch and survived – but Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore and John Kerry were successfully tarred by their opponents as members of a cerebral elite (as if this were not a qualification for the presidency). Perhaps the defining moment in the collapse of intelligent politics was Ronald Reagan‘s response to Jimmy Carter during the 1980 presidential debate. Carter – stumbling a little, using long words – carefully enumerated the benefits of national health insurance. Reagan smiled and said: “There you go again.” His own health programme would have appalled most Americans, had he explained it as carefully as Carter had done, but he had found a formula for avoiding tough political issues and making his opponents look like wonks.” — George Monbiot (Guardian.UK)

“Where does a lot of that earmark money end up, anyway? […] You’ve heard about, um, these — some of these pet projects they really don’t make a whole lot of sense, and sometimes these dollars they go to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not!”

It’s hard to know where to begin deconstructing this statement. This was a speech on autism, and Palin’s critics have pounced on the fact that a recent study of Drosophila fruit flies showed that a protein called neurexin is essential for proper neurological function — a discovery with clear implications for autism research.

Awkward! But this critique merely scrapes icing off the cake.

Fruit flies are more than just the occasional vehicles for research relevant to human disabilities. They are literally the foundation of modern genetics, the original model organism that has enabled us to discover so much of what we know about heredity, genome structure, congenital disorders, and (yes) evolution. So for Palin to state that “fruit fly research” has “little or nothing to do with the public good” is not just wrong — it’s mind-boggling.

What else does this blunder say about Palin and her candidacy? Many people have used it as just another opportunity to call her a dummy, since anyone who has stayed awake through even a portion of a high-school-level biology class knows what fruit flies are good for. But leave that aside for a second. Watch the clip. Listen to the tone of her voice as she sneers the words “fruit fly research.” Check out the disdain and incredulity on her face. How would science, basic or applied, fare under President Palin?

We have other questions. Who wrote this speech? Was he or she as ignorant as Palin about the central role that fruit flies have played in the last century of biomedical research? Or was this a calculated slight to science and scientists — a coded way of saying, “We don’t care what you know or what you think”? We find it odd that, of all the examples of dubious expenditures of public funds, the speechwriters alighted on this one.” — Palmer and Pringle (HuffPo)

…it appears that after decades of fruitless negotiations with Beijing as part of an attempt to gain some concessions for his homeland, the 15th Dalai Lama may have finally reached the end of his tether.” (Time)

Telemarketers make use of a telescript – a guideline for a telephone conversation. This script creates an imbalance in the conversation between the marketer and the consumer. It is this imbalance, most of all, that makes telemarketing successful. The EGBG Counterscript attempts to redress that balance.

Good luck!”

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.” (thanks, seth)

In an interview with AFP, the second man to set foot on the Moon said the Red Planet offered far greater potential than Earth’s satellite as a place for habitation.” (PhysOrg)

Some time later, James Cadle, who lived on a farm in rural Illinois, was inspired by this debate to create the Flag of Earth. It is intended to be used for ANY purpose that is representative of Humankind as a whole, and not connected to any country, organization, or individual. James made it his life’s work to promote and distribute this flag everywhere. He and his wife made the flags on their kitchen table, and sold them for what it cost to make and distribute them.

The Flag of Earth is often flown at locations doing SETI work in order to indicate that the search is the “work of humanity and not a specific country or organization.” Cadle died in 2004, but he left the design in the public domain, bless him.

At the Flag of Earth website there are templates for printing them out or purchasing ready-to-fly sown ones.” (via Kevin Kelly)

Here are some sites where the Flag has been flown.”

Right wingers in the US will have to revisit their assumptions about the inherent racism and conservatism of the American people as well as the power of wedge issues to divide people and lead them to vote on their fears. Emphasizing bizarre issues such as Obama’s acquaintance with Bill Ayers, or calling Obama a socialist because of his notion that tax policy should not simply redistribute wealth upwards, failed to influence more than a few voter this time. This should suggest to the operatives of the right wing that they their cynical understanding of America can be trumped by a more affirming and progressive sentiment in the electorate.

It is, however, the American left which will have to do the most intriguing and challenging rethinking of basic assumptions when Obama wins. For years now a central piece of the progressive worldview is that progressives are enlightened Americans in a sea of their ignorant, bigoted and narrow-minded compatriots. If you don’t believe my assertion, see how many times in the comments section of a progressive blog, Americans voters are referred to as ignorant or uninformed, or eavesdrop at any progressive coffee shop or other hangout. Opposition to progressive causes is often explained away by saying that Americans are bigots, or somehow stupid. This demonstrates an ugly contempt for voters, and in fact for democracy, that should have no place in progressive politics.

Nonetheless, this feeling of specialness is a central part of progressive identity for many. For example, the tone often used to express disbelief that Obama could win, particularly early in this campaign, was often a mixture of anger with racism and a sense of self-righteousness from the speaker for being above that racism.

November 4th will almost certainly show these beliefs to be the nonsense that they are.” (HuffPo)

So this week’s comic is a friendly reminder: keep your brain running at all times. When you switch it off bad things happen.” (Miscellanea via boing boing)

If she wins, she will use her office to indict George Bush for the murder of the citizens of Vermont who were killed in his fraudulent war.

You can support her efforts here.” (Current)

The Enawene Nawe say the 77 dams to be built on the River Juruena will pollute the water and stop the fish reaching their spawning grounds. Fish is crucial to the Enawene Nawe’s diet as they do not eat red meat. It also plays a vital part in their rituals.

‘If the fish get sick and die so will the Enawene Nawe,’ said one member of the tribe.” (Survival International via miguel)

In just a matter of days, we have seen literally trillions of dollars offered to the financial services sector by national treasuries and central banks across the globe. Britain alone has put $1 trillion at the disposal of the bankers, traders, lenders and speculators; and this has been surpassed by the total package of public money that Washington is shoveling into the financial furnaces of Wall Street and the banks. These radical efforts are being replicated on a slightly smaller scale in France, Germany, Italy, Russia and many other countries.

The effectiveness of this unprecedented transfer of wealth from ordinary citizens to the top tiers of the business world remains to be seen. It will certainly insulate the very rich from the consequences of their own greed and folly and fraud; but it is not at all clear how much these measures will shield the vast majority of people from the catastrophe that has been visited upon them by the elite.” (Empire Burlesque)

It’s time to fight back.

The solution we’re creating is simple: an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian or similar analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines. The primary challenge inherent in our task is that stupidity is not a binary distinction, but rather a matter of degree. To this end, we’re collecting a ranked corpus of stupid text, gleaned from user comments on public websites and ranked on a five-point scale.

Eventually, once the research is completed, we plan to release core engine source code for incorporation into content management systems, blogs, wikis and the like. Additionally, we plan to develop a fully implemented Firefox plugin and a WordPress plugin.”