Category: interesting

Zombies too.

Phooey on words when video is better.

“what is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics?”

You are comfortable with feeling like you have no deep understanding of the problem you are studying. Indeed, when you do have a deep understanding, you have solved the problem and it is time to do something else. This makes the total time you spend in life reveling in your mastery of something quite brief. One of the main skills of research scientists of any type is knowing how to work comfortably and productively in a state of confusion.

Yes you should see this, know this, feel this, do this.
Bobby McFerrin at TED, the natural appeal of the pentatonic scale.

Wow!

Top 1% of Mobile Users Consume Half of World’s Bandwidth

The Atlantic:

…solid pieces of evidence that Japan’s nuclear industry is a black hole of criminal malfeasance, incompetence, and corruption.

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the monolithic corporation that controls all electric power in Greater Tokyo, and runs the Fukushima Daichii nuclear plant that experienced a triple meltdown following the March 11 earthquake, is on the brink of nationalization according to Japanese government sources.

The official reason is that the firm may not be able to handle the massive compensation payments it owes to victims of the meltdown without going bankrupt. Unofficially, the firm has such long-standing ties to anti-social forces, including the yakuza—that some members of the Diet, Japan’s national legislature, feel the firm is beyond salvation and needs to be taken over and cleaned up.

…in other words, “When a man is has to survive doing something, it’s the nuclear industry; for a woman, it’s the sex industry.”

The Massachusetts Congress declared Christmas illegal from 1659-1681.

Another fact: The early Christian church did not celebrate Jesus’ birth at all.

In other words, there were no Christmas Eve services and no pageants and no ministers trying to make sense of it all! Only over centuries, and only after solstice feasts turned really wild and really out of control did Christians seek to offer an alternative, calling it “Christ’s Mass,” or Christmas.

Another fact: Nobody was as hard on Christmas as the Puritans.

Christmas wasn’t biblical. And Jesus wouldn’t have approved of celebrations. Puritans ordered shops to stay open on Christmas. They banned holiday cakes and candles.

There’s more.

Ahh, forget it. Wingnuts don’t use facts !

For the rest of us, love is on our minds during the holidays.

But we can correct our history thought by thought, image by image.

For example, instead of a rowboat on Christmas Day in 1776, George Washington crossed the Delaware on a ferry pulled by a cable and crowded with troops.

OK, here’s the weird part.

Vowels pull on our brains.

“I”s pull us differently than “O”s.

A curious pattern shows up.

Ice cream companies mix lots of “O”s and “A”s

Rocky Road, Jamoca Almond Fudge, Chocolate, Caramel, Cookie Dough, Coconut

But the cracker brands stick pretty much to “E”s and “I”s.

Cheez It, Wheat Thins, Pretzel, Ritz, Krispy, Triscuit, Chips, Biskit

But Why?

When Google Street View becomes peer to peer,
we should push for that,
there won’t be the world we know.

http://9-eyes.com/

explaining the decision:

We never run this type of image without discussions at the highest levels in the newsroom.

We understand that it is a tough image to look at, but we felt the news value of the photo made it worth publishing. We feel that we cannot hide important news from our readers, even when it is unpleasant.

The war in Afghanistan is an important and complicated story, and the violence seems to never end. In these attacks, the fact that it was sectarian violence adds yet another layer to the complexity of the situation.

The photo, while gut-wrenching, shows just how many innocents are being killed. The bodies of dead, maimed and wounded children breaks your heart but also lets you know how indiscriminate the killing has become.

Photo by Dawn Nelson at National Geographic

By age 23, up to 41 percent of Americans have been arrested at least once…. What?!

Although an arrest doesn’t necessarily mean a child, teen or young adult is a criminal, previous research has connected run-ins with the law with other problems — drug addiction, physical or emotional abuse and poverty, to name a few.

“We’re really asleep at the wheel right now when it comes to these problems with our young people.”

DEBKAfile (Hebrew: תיק דבקה‎) is a Jerusalem-based English language Israeli open source military intelligence website.

Can you believe this story?

Iranians not only unlocked the Sentinel’s secret software but also penetrated the command and control center running the drones from CIA Headquarters at Langley in McClean, Virginia.

Iranian electronic experts subsequently reprogrammed the directives guiding the satellite and the RQ-170 stealth drone by falsifying the images appearing on the screens at Langley.

As if Roy Rogers whistles to Trigger! As far as I’m concerned, secrets are secrets and propaganda is cheap. More likely this story is an interception of news that’s fed to Iranian locals.

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But let’s not be complacent folks.

Technology requires democracy’s whip.

December 10, 2011

Reporting from Washington — Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said.

Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties.

He also called in a Predator B drone.

We’re being domesticated, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by.

Einstein was once asked about his intelligence and he said, “I’m no more intelligent than the next guy. I’m just more curious.” Now, we can grant Einstein that little indulgence, because we think he was a pretty clever guy.

Maybe Einstein’s ideas were just as random as everybody else’s, but he kept persisting at them.

And if we say that everybody has some tiny probability of being the next Einstein, and we look at a billion people, there will be somebody who just by chance is the next Einstein.

But it might even be the case that that small number of innovators just got lucky.

And this is something that I think very few people will accept …the possibility that we are infinitely stupid.

Arrogance makes news.
Shutting down ignorance, not so much.

Release Date: December 15, 2011

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
Contact: 202-282-8010

“The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is troubled by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) findings of discriminatory policing practices within the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO).

Discrimination undermines law enforcement and erodes the public trust.

DHS will not be a party to such practices.

Accordingly, and effective immediately, DHS is terminating MCSO’s 287(g) jail model agreement and is restricting the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office access to the Secure Communities program.

DHS will utilize federal resources for the purpose of identifying and detaining those individuals who meet U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) immigration enforcement priorities.

The Department will continue to enforce federal immigration laws in Maricopa County in smart, effective ways that focus our resources on criminal aliens, recent border crossers, repeat and egregious immigration law violators and employers who knowingly hire illegal labor.”

A) Your Facebook profile is your biography.
B) Your preferences are a product.
C) This man is not your friend.

Four months after Mark Zuckerberg first introduced it to the media, Facebook’s Timeline feature was rolled out in early December in New Zealand. Why New Zealand?

Perhaps because the country makes for a relatively small control group and is marginal enough not to become an international center of outrage once it becomes clear that the company’s innovations, as is so often the case, are destined to kill your privacy.

 

Congressional anti-piracy bills could cripple the Internet.

Stop their corporate-funded votes. Complain.

Tim O’Reilly said the following about SOPA and PROTECT IP Act:

We’re in one of the greatest periods of social and business transformation since the Industrial Revolution, a transformation driven by the open architecture of the Internet. We’re still in early stages of that revolution. New technologies, new companies, and new business models appear every day, creating new benefits to society and the economy.

But now, fundamental elements of that Internet architecture are under attack.

These legislative attacks are not motivated by clear thinking about the future of the Internet or the global economy, but instead are motivated by the desire to protect large, entrenched companies with outdated business models that are threatened by the Internet. Rather than adapting, and competing with new and better services, they are going to Congress asking for protection.

If they succeed, they will vitiate [clobber] the Internet economy.

Corporate dominance is out of control, folks.

Real pirates are multinational companies that falsely claim ownership.

Some music royalty firms have claimed infringements in ‘silent movies’ !

For cryin’ out loud, our values are upside down.

Keep The Web Open.

There are things we can do to make our own situations better at the end of life.

Let’s get real about our last days alive.

“We use healthcare resources far out of proportion to any other country on the planet.”

It’s understandable. Nobody wants to think in advance about life ending.

In our satisfied state of denial, we want to believe medical advances will keep us healthy until we die in our sleep at a ripe old age.

But death doesn’t always come on our terms, and failing to face up to other possibilities can put crushing burdens on loved ones — not to mention that soaring end-of-life medical costs are at the center of the national budget crisis.

 

→ autonomous,
→ wireless,
→ remote
optical sensor measures fluorescence in the presence of E. coli

Finally a snoop doing something, er, useful:

detect and transmit pathogens in water.

Tumors are not industrial.

The panel decided that men who have PSAs of 10 or less and Gleason scores 6 or less “should no longer be told they have cancer”.

Men with these criteria are not candidates for treatment, but for active monitoring, if you can find it.

There are a thousand striking at the branches of evil to one that is striking at the root.

8 April, 2011: Keynote at National Media Reform Conference, calling for rootstrikers, and launching a project of FixCongressFirst: rootstrikers.org

The 2012 TED Prize has been awarded to an idea and not an individual.

The mask, a sallow, smirking likeness of Guy Fawkes, was created in 1982 by Alan Moore and the artist David Lloyd.

At Occupy sit-ins in New York, Moscow, Rio, Rome, Athens and the gatherings outside G20 and G8 conferences in London and L’Aquila, the V for Vendetta mask has been a fixture.

Alan Moore is ‘baffled, tickled, roused and quite pleased’ that his creation has become an emblem of modern activism.

“I suppose when I was writing V for Vendetta I would in my secret heart of hearts have thought: wouldn’t it be great if these ideas actually made an impact? So when you start to see that idle fantasy intrude on the regular world… It’s peculiar. It feels like a character I created 30 years ago has somehow escaped the realm of fiction.”