Category: interesting

Boys do not carry babies.
Moral condemnation is silly.

“There are certain levels of acceptable risk in society.”

That’s the policy position of ALEC, a right-wing group that pre-writes legislation introduced by many Republicans.

A top representative said ‘kids eating rat poison is an acceptable risk’ that does not justify government intervention.

From rat poison to weed killer:

Women who drink water contaminated with low levels of the weed-killer atrazine may be more likely to have irregular menstrual cycles and low estrogen levels.

These findings, published in the journal Environmental Research, were based on municipal tap water tested in 2005.

From rat poison to weed killer to toxic sewers:

Traces of pharmaceutical compounds commonly present in wastewater are interacting with bacteria during the treatment process to transform them from non-toxic to toxic.

The anti-inflammatory drug naproxen is altered by wastewater bacteria into a similar compound known to be highly toxic to the liver.

 
Jimmy Greer sez, “It’s knackered industries…”

 

Meanwhile,

“Most Americans pay more in debt service than Scandinavians pay for the welfare state.” (tweet)

Meanwhile,

The true US federal costs of Iraq & Afghan wars is estimated at $3.6 trillion, and rising.

USA broadband is sloppy. It’s better in urban centers where profits are dense, but overall, coverage and quality is generally poor.

46 billion deaths over our history.

That staggering number is even more frightening in context.

Mosquitoes have killed half the humans that ever lived ?!

via Salon: Australia awarded its highest distinction for ‘Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism‘ to WikiLeaks.

“WikiLeaks easily produced more newsworthy scoops over the last year than every other media outlet combined.”

“WikiLeaks and its editor-in-chief Julian Assange took a brave, determined and independent stand for freedom of speech and transparency that has empowered people all over the world.”

..we’re on a trajectory

…we’re collapsing towards ‘neofeudalism’

…what does it look and feel like?

I’d say it has five key characteristics:

1. Neoserfdom.
2. Output fetishism.
3. Kleptarchy. …governance as we know it isn’t.
4. Patronage. …replaces meritocracy (etc).
5. Cronyism. …directing the flow resources.

And it’s not just vegetables. Fruit has also been bastardized as just too much of a nuisance to eat, so enter the frankenfooders to simplify it for us. Fruit Roll-Ups? They have brainwashed us into believing the burden of hauling around an apple or a pear had become so daunting, we needed someone to mix up fruit with some corn syrup and “Roll It Up”.

Elliot Loh

I used to laugh at those Cialis ads until I realized they’d become the most romantic thing on television.

http://twitter.com/#!/loh/status/135436961925169152

The Food and Drug Administration says that any honey that’s been ultra-filtered and no longer contains pollen isn’t honey.

Food Safety News:

• 76 percent of samples bought at groceries had all the pollen removed.

• 100 percent of the honey sampled from drugstores had no pollen.

• 77 percent of the honey sampled from big box stores had the pollen filtered out.

• 100 percent of the honey packaged in the small individual poly-paks had the pollen removed.

“Removal of all pollen from honey makes no sense and is completely contrary to marketing the highest quality product possible.” —Mark Jensen, president of the American Honey Producers Association

“This is the most damning report ever on the status of a country’s nuclear program.”

—International Atomic Energy Agency

Unusual for the normally understated organization, the report was explicit in pointing out where Iran had failed to convince the agency that it was not developing weapons, and implicit in allowing people to conclude that Iran is bent on developing a nuclear arsenal.

 

“…the flourishing of humans, the only value that cannot be denied.”

Steven Pinker has written a book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Pinker’s first task is to convince us that there is less violence in the world today than in the past.

He knows people don’t want to believe this.

We want to fit in, we want people to like us, we want more stuff.

Are we sustainable?

“Sustainability is a word without a clearcut meaning. It means different things to different people. It can’t be reduced to one single meaning.

“And I think that is exactly why the word is so powerful. It inspires us to imagine better ways of living our lives, organizing our societies, and relating to the environment. To me, sustainability means living within your local ecosystem, coevolving with the other plants, animals, insects, fungi, and bacteria, in a way that perpetuates the functioning of the whole biotic system.

 

Chris Anderson is the curator of TED.

“Here are seven ideas that can make powerful, positive and measurable differences in how we create the future.”

Here’s a slideshow published at Forbes.

1. We’re measuring the wrong success goals. Is the GDP really the best…?
2. If you’re offered money as a reward, you’ll work better and faster, right? No!
3. Kahn Academy’s education online.
4. Cities are not bad things.
5. Entrepreneurs want to do good and be successful.
6. Healthcare, education and government have been strangled.\
7. Our brains are buggier than we realize.

Headline says it all:

Fatty Foods Addictive as Cocaine in Growing Body of Science

By Robert Langreth and Duane D. Stanford – Nov 1, 2011

The Shadow Superpower
Forget China.

The $10 trillion global black market is the world’s fastest growing economy !

yo!
this is pockets
http://vimeo.com/30578363

 

What does the FTC chairman say about online personal data?

snippets via [pdf]
Online and Overexposed:
Consumer Privacy, the FTC, and the Rise of the Cyberazzi

First, companies in the business of collecting, storing, and manipulating consumer data need to build privacy protections into their everyday business practices – we call this “privacy by design.” Companies that collect consumer data should do so only for a specific business purpose, store it securely, keep it only as long as necessary to fulfill its legitimate business need, then dispose of it safely.

The more sensitive the data, the stronger the protections should be. To its credit, much of industry is embracing this approach – even before we issued the draft report.

Second, transparency. Any companies gathering information online need to tell consumers what’s going on. And by this, I do not mean another three-point font, ten-page document written by corporate lawyers and buried deep within the site. I asked our staff to look at data disclosures on mobile devices; one form took 109 clicks to get through, and the staffer who discovered that is probably the only one who ever made it to click number 109.

Transparency is not an unreasonable request. My daughters can go to any of a number of retail clothing websites, and, with one click, see a clear description of a pair of pants – color, sizes, fit, customer reviews, shipping options. One more click – that’s a total of 2, not 109 – and they can choose exactly the pants they want, in their sizes and favorite colors, shipped where they want them. Put the guy who designed that page on the job of presenting a meaningful disclosure and consent form.

Third, choice. Consumers should have streamlined and effective choices about the collection and use of their data. That includes choices about when, why, and how cyberazzi follow them into cyberspace.

To that end, we proposed a “Do Not Track” mechanism that will allow consumers to decide whether to share information about their browsing behavior. We envision a system consumers can find and use easily and one that all companies employing cyberazzi must respect.

A vision of Do Not Track bears some similarities to the successful Do Not Call program. Now with more than 200 million registered phone numbers, Do Not Call has brought some peace and quiet to Americans’ dinner hour; no wonder Dave Barry called it the “most popular federal concept since the Elvis stamp.”

But unlike Do Not Call, the FTC does not think Do Not Track should be administered by the government.

We hope different sectors of industry will work collaboratively to give consumers choices about how and when they are tracked online.

HA!

 

http://www.txtpost.com/playboy-interview-steven-jobs/

But more revealing was the scene after the party. Well after the other guests had gone, Jobs stayed to tutor the boy on the fine points of using the Mac. Later, I asked him why he had seemed happier with the boy than with the two famous artists. His answer seemed unrehearsed to me: ‘Older people sit down and ask, “What is it?” but the boy asks, “What can I do with it?”‘

Playboy: We survived 1984, and computers did not take over the world, though some people might find that hard to believe. If there’s any one individual who can be either blamed or praised for the proliferation of computers, you, the 29-year-old father of the computer revolution, are the prime contender. It has also made you wealthy beyond dreams‐‑your stock was worth almost a half billion dollars at one point, wasn’t it?

Steven Jobs: I actually lost $250,000,000 in one year when the stock went down. [Laughs]

Playboy: You can laugh about it?

Jobs: I’m not going to let it ruin my life. Isn’t it kind of funny? You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me in the past ten years. But it makes me feel old, sometimes, when I speak at a campus and I find that what students are most in awe of is the fact that I’m a millionaire. When I went to school, it was right after the Sixties and before this general wave of practical purposefulness had set in. Now students aren’t even thinking in idealistic terms, or at least nowhere near as much. They certainly are not letting any of the philosophical issues of the day take up too much of their time as they study their business majors. The idealistic wind of the Sixties was still at our backs, though, and most of the people I know who are my age have that ingrained in them forever.

Playboy: It’s interesting that the computer field has made millionaires of‐‑

Jobs: Young maniacs, I know.

awesomepeoplehangingouttogether

Oh yeh. How about Reagan & Travolta?

“I think we’re rarely honest about anything in our society.” – Ken Burns, National Press Club

“Steve had this perspective that always started with the user’s experience; and that industrial design was an incredibly important part of that user impression.

“He always looked at things from the perspective of what was the user’s experience going to be? What did they want? How can I possibly ask somebody what a graphics-based computer ought to be when they have no idea what a graphic based computer is? No one has ever seen one before.”

Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children.

He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.

hey:::   the oldest living things in the world   :::hey you