One Stop Thought Shop

Thinking that two percent own one half of the Earth,
here’s a maxim to consider that would make great politics:

“You bought it. You broke it. You fix it.”

When words are needles in the part of your brain you neglect, you have met both a writer and a citizen. [link]

As a 16 yr old, I will be looking into colleges soon and setting the foundation for the rest of my life. Is there anything you wish you knew at my age?

Verb: Triumph

Triumph the Web

The past is talking. I’ve always felt embarrassed to learn it’s been learned before. As if to boot the dust of blood, the little rage and smaller purpose in these days, there’s no good in our voice, less good in our hearts, and I am ashamed.

The poets come to portend Los Angeles’ deepest image of itself while winds blow writers, actors, ex-presidents, dancers, scientists, comedians, historians, grammarians, curators, filmmakers, and do-it-yourself experts.

“Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.“

Bunk.

“Social Isolation in America” [pdf]

We have fewer friends than two decades ago.

And loneliness affects our thinking and our health.

We are losing people that help and advise; losing our sounding board.

A quarter of us are just one person away from nobody.
And people who have no one has also reached about 25%.

The General Social Survey by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago looked at results from 1985 and 2004. The average number of people who are considered close confidants dropped by nearly one-third, from 2.94 in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. More than 50 percent named two or fewer confidants, most often immediate family members. The drop-off was greatest in the number of friends.

Lynn Smith-Lovin studies identity, action and emotional response — the basic question of how identities affect social interaction [http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2006/06/socialisolation.html].

She’s worried, “This change indicates something that’s not good for our society. Ties with a close network of people create a safety net. These ties also lead to civic engagement and local political action.” [npr podcast]

Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people’s personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics.
And…

Homophily limits people’s social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. [abstract]

Impact of social ties
The Boston Globe asks, “Imagine if some other piece of the social safety net had frayed that furiously. Imagine if income had gone down by a third, or divorce doubled, or the medical system halved. We would be setting up commissions and organizing rallies!”

About the impact of cellphones and the internet? “It could be that we are both increasingly in touch and isolated.”

Additional search terms:

affect control theory
ecological theory of affiliation

There’s an icon for our age here.

I found this good advice in the comments at ScienceBlog.

A Jesuit and a Franciscan sit in the train, both praying the breviary. Suddenly the Jesuit pulls out a silver cigarette box, and starts smoking. Asks the Franciscan indignantly: “How dare you smoke while praying?” The Jesuit responds: “Oh, I have asked Rome and got permission”. The Franciscan is interested and also writes to the Holy See.

Two weeks later the two priests meet again and the Franciscan complains: “You finely made a fool out of me, of course Rome denied to give permission”. Asks the Jesuit: “And how did you actually word your question?”

The Franciscan: “I asked whether it is allowed to smoke while praying…” “Wrong from the start”, interrupts the Jesuit, “you should have asked if it is allowed to pray while smoking….”

The migration of antibiotic resistance from animal feeding operations into groundwater has broad implications for human and ecological health. There are roughly 238,000 animal feeding operations in the U.S., which collectively generate about 500 million tons of manure per year. Groundwater comprises about 40 percent of the public water supply, and more than 97 percent of the drinking water used in rural areas.

While we scorn doctors that prescribe antibiotics unnecessarily, we’re also beginning to shop for meat and poultry products that are raised without routine antibiotic feed additives. And one day we will be brave enough to stop teaching bacteria by quitting the routine use of antiseptics in our household.

Many producers have quit the routine use of antibiotics for young birds and during weaning. But many farmers remain eager because protecting young livestock from bad bacteria increases growth.

But it’s difficult to keep antibiotics out of the environment. We know where the feed goes. Antibiotics accumulate in animal waste and into waste water from washing, into waste lagoons, drops along the ground and leaches into groundwater. Exposing bacteria to our arsenal of antibiotics increases the likelihood bacteria will develop resistance.

Not much leaks away
One study says not to worry; the volume of antibiotics reaching the soil and groundwater is minimal. Paul Sibley from the University of Guelph has shown that environmental contamination from antibiotics does not pose significant risks to soil and aquatic organisms.

Sibley’s six years of research examining the use of pharmaceuticals found the “toxicity effects of pharmaceuticals were in the milligram- to gram-per-litre range” and “wasn’t necessarily high enough to pose any danger.”

But do we measure the wrong threat?
We may be incorrectly measuring toxicity and resistance. The risk may not be in the amount of antibiotics we find downstream, but from the bacteria’s genes passed like a baton in soil and groundwater.

R.I. Mackie, a professor at the Institute for Genomic Biology, conducted one of the first surveys of the bacterial genes that directly pass tetracycline resistance from hog waste lagoons into groundwater wells. Wells that were closest to the lagoon “almost always had every gene.”

Accelerating bacterial resistance by increasing antibiotics in groundwater and the environment remains a serious risk. Mackie says:

“If the genes are there, potentially they can get into the right organism at the right time and confer resistance to an antibiotic that’s being used to treat disease.”

Tip to Doug Powell at Agnet

Acknowledging paradigm requires us to face ambiguity. The fearful cannot. ‘New’ requires a gentle invitation. We left the Inquisition upon our questions not our answers. To encourage producing a new studio, yes, the manufacture of fantastic, new ideas for these strife-encrusted men just off a donkey, and their children learning dust, their women keeping must, once many years ago with whiskey and lunch in Tiburon, I begged for a new media company in the Persian Gulf, a Big Yellow Bird, a Sesame Street quacking, a strip of Vegas’ neon, Walt’s gentler Disney, something more than cardamom and thickened chickens, for and until we communicate we are not interested in War, but it seems we first must convince ourselves.

Ode to City Lights

On the curb
not inside the bookstore
doors of frames
beat understanding,
And beyond belief
bent key-less wards.

Now what?

Plagiarize paradigm.

For the “immortality of the prosthetic self…
The old paradigm is the wrong paradigm.”

Within wide swathes, it will in the end begin with something else.

Craprovement:

In all your getting, get understanding.

Doctors do not care:

Physicians apparently learn to “shut off” the portion of their brain that helps them appreciate the pain their patients experience while treating them and instead activate a portion of the brain connected with controlling emotions, according to new research using brain scans at the University of Chicago.

The explanations uncover additional insight too:

“It would not be adaptive if this automatic sharing mechanism for pain was not modulated by cognitive control.

“Think, for instance, of the situations that surgeons, dentists, and nurses face in their everyday professional practices. Without some regulatory mechanism, it is very likely that medical practitioners would experience personal distress and anxiety that would interfere with their ability to heal.”

[story]

Too many look for ideal transportation, but our solutions do not need to be fancy.

I believe that a ‘true’ monorail is an overlooked transportation option. An iron track suspended over an existing road is the most effective transportation option available.

The right of way is already amortized.

An iron wheel on an iron track is tremendously efficient. Track and beams are both inexpensive and common.

Suspending a weight costs less than lifting a weight. Rights of way are costly and too many transit ideas, such as BART or Maglev, lift a costly roadbed into the air, but suspending weight over existing roadway requires far less engineering.

A monorail is simple and easy corridor. Cargo and passengers, containers or cars, are moved along ordinary pathway. Developing over existing roadway is developing unused air. There’s the saving and the wealth.

Hell has its followers:

“We have 100,00 mercenaries in Iraq that are fundamentally Boy Scouts. There’s something wrong with that system.”

Bill Moyers interviews Jerry Scahill

You don’t know. Snippets may be a neuron’s library.

Here’s a neuron’s yawning gap “between predictive accuracy — accurately predicting what people want to buy next — and perceived quality — the usefulness of the recommendations to users.”

All brains please note: “emphasis on credibility is insightful.”

In other snippets, $2.2million has been granted to “create software that will predict the actions of paramilitary groups, ethnic factions, terrorists and criminal groups, while aiding commanders in devising strategies for stabilizing areas before, during and after conflicts.”

Not to worry. The day is soon. We knew that.

I say aggrandizing yourself is a documentary you will not see. The Monk at the Mall is not a Movie. When they say name dropping they mean it. You are less another. You are the bottom, vote. You are nothing until yourself. There is no degree. Not for sale.

A story about the impact of sleep deprivation on cognitive abilities:

Convinced by the mountain of studies, a handful of school districts around the nation are starting school later in the morning. The best known of these is in Edina, Minnesota, an affluent suburb of Minneapolis, where the high school start time was changed from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30. The results were startling. In the year preceding the time change, math and verbal SAT scores for the top 10 percent of Edina’s students averaged 1288. A year later, the top 10 percent averaged 1500, an increase that couldn’t be attributed to any other variable. “Truly flabbergasting,” said Brian O’Reilly, the College Board’s executive director for SAT Program Relations, on hearing the results.

Another trailblazing school district is Lexington, Kentucky’s, which also moved its start time an hour later. After the time change, teenage car accidents in Lexington were down 16 percent. The rest of the state showed a 9 percent rise.

More

Were more of this:

“some civilizing — educative, pragmatic mix of honey and wormwood“, then less Viking and Dominant and Petrified in our lives.

Simple things we are.
Enamored with our clamor.

Gold/Golf,
Queens/Kings,
Cheats/Presidents,

Beaches and Bikinis and Bombs have marked a terrific journey, a good journey perhaps, and a journey we do not understand. It isn’t Us/Them, whether Marx or checks on our passports. It’s when we learn to smile. Flowers in the rifle. Community. All us. Waters. Ground up. Down with. A tune in the wind. Sidewalk. Celebrate.

Now what? Plagiarize paradigm.

For the “immortality of the prosthetic self… The old paradigm is the wrong paradigm.”

William Gibson says he doesn’t know anything about the future. He likes to intercept conversations about the future to say he doesn’t know anything about the future. He says he can only stand by the door.

“There’s some enormous number, millions and millions, of Iranians who are about to get their first cell phones. The infrastructure has been built. That’s an interesting side of Iran we don’t hear so much about.

“And you know, they’re not just getting cell phones, they’re getting Internet. What is that going to do to that country? The government is not going to be able to control what those people are watching. I just find that amazing, really.”

Local army took our world before private army.

The police had to shoot him with tasers and bean bags after he ran away because he was carrying what they knew to be “…the camera which could be used as a weapon…”

Video at OregonLive

I celebrate uncovering fraud.

It’s important to be provoked.

There is just one Christopher.

Locke that up.

Tears are greater by far than celebrity and are more proud than politicians and blink more color than art and own more wealth.

I don’t think Oprah, Bill Cosby or anyone at Harvard, Princeton, USC, Stanford, or anyone making a salary can say one thing to the walking poor nor do they have, IMHO, a right to paint statistics they didn’t gather, nor dare the scorn they shake toward the congregation of prisoners and the utterly poor, nor those alone.

So long before dirt on the streets are the lies that put it there.

For the poor, Oprah, Bill Cosby and anyone at Harvard, Princeton, USC, Stanford, and anyone making a salary can speak only to their peers.

Frank wrote that the blackbirds were condensing, and chattering, and comfortable. It was a time of year. But why the effort and why a blog?

Without a good explanation but condensing my heart, I spent the night searching for the link, a pundit incising that blogs will always stack and stack but our stories will redeem us, the most precious thing, the gift no one can bring but us, that view that afternoon when lifting over the ridge, when curved around a building on that busy sidewalk, when nuzzled along that shoulder that keeps her smile, when all this breath collects what we wish and what we give away. Asking why we post our blogs, it must be for justice and knowing its grip, and it must be for beauty.

Some like the fist and will enjoy the blow from a fist they love. I’ve never understood it. A fuller thing cannot fit pain and will not give it. A fuller thing cannot fit war.

Is love or loyalty not worth keeping? Count the days these were your prize. Count your treasure.

We provide our love to less than love deserves. And give our loyalty to fools.