September 2011
61 posts
“The next time someone tells you something is the “least worst option”, tell them...”
– BBC News - Americanisms: 50 of your most noted examples
Some of these complaints are people unwilling to accept different but legitimate ways of saying things, others are actual grammatical complaints.
“Over the past decade, better technology has simply reduced the number of things...”
– Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: the Ars Technica review
➚ Where Have All the Girls Gone? →
This article is full of recent history that I was unaware of. Good read, just to find out about how sociologists in the past 60 years helped give rise to this:
In China, India, Korea, and Taiwan, the first generation shaped by sex selection has grown up, and men are scrambling to find women, yielding the ugly sideblows of increased sex trafficking and bride buying. In a Chinese boomtown, I...
“Idols may be powerless to form faithful Christians, but as fund-raisers and...”
– The Confessions of a Cage Fighter: Masculinity, Misogyny, and the Fear of Losing Control
“Something transcendent happens to autistic people at the threshold of adulthood....”
– The Aut Rapture
➚ The Evolution of Ape-Face Johnson →
What kept going around and around in my head was this: But I never changed! I looked at school pictures of myself, and I didn’t see any huge difference in my looks. These people were all crazy! I had cried brokenheartedly over the opinions of crazy people! What an idiot I’d been. And my own mother would’ve paid a plastic surgeon to mutilate me to conform to their norms? Unbelievable.
“It baffles me that grown people must convince themselves that those with whom...”
– Dubya and Me
➚ The Dark Side of the Placebo Effect →
I had no clue there was such a thing as a nocebo.
Across cultures, night-mare visits play out in very similar ways. Victims experience the strange feeling of being “awake.” While they have a realistic perception of their environment, they can’t move. Worse, they feel an “overwhelming fear and dread” accompanied by chest pressure and difficulty breathing. Scientists have a pretty good grasp of...
➚ Jobs Will Follow a Strengthening of the Middle... →
Most telling of all, Washington deregulated Wall Street while insuring it against major losses. In so doing, it allowed finance — which until then had been the servant of American industry — to become its master, demanding short-term profits over long-term growth and raking in an ever larger portion of the nation’s profits. By 2007, financial companies accounted for over 40 percent of American...
“The prevailing American story line right now is seething anger at politicians:...”
– Anand Giridharadas, “The Fraying of a Nation’s Decency”, The New York Times (September 23, 2011)
➚ Trust Issues →
This article from Lapham’s Quarterly on Methuselah Trusts is fascinating.
Hartwick College didn’t really mean to annihilate the U.S. economy. A small liberal-arts school in the Catskills, Hartwick is the kind of sleepy institution that local worthies were in the habit of founding back in the 1790s; it counts a former ambassador to Belize among its more prominent alumni, and placidly...
“The first full series of scans of the developing adolescent brain—a National...”
– National Geographic Magazine - NGM.com
“The best-kept secret in America is what doctors are doing,” McGiffert said....”
– Health-Care Reform Rules Would Restrict Public Reporting
Agencies typically adopt rules to administer laws like the health-care act. The rules being developed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) propose restricting the release of Medicare billing data to “qualified entities.”...
➚ Fukushima disaster: it's not over yet →
Great article about the psychological effects of Fukushima.
“Individuals are being forced to make decisions about what is safe to eat and where is safe to live, because the government is not telling them – Japanese people are not good at that,” says Satoshi Takahashi, one of Japan’s leading clinical psychologists. He predicts the mental fallout of the Fukushima meltdown will be worse than the...
➚ The absurdity of low speed limits. →
“In a free-market paradise, capital will flow to talent, until rewards...”
– Robert Nozick, father of libertarianism: Even he gave up on the movement he inspired
Every thinking person is to some degree a libertarian, and it is this part of all of us that is bullied or manipulated when liberty is invoked to silence our doubts about the free market. The ploy is to take...
➚ Sheryl Sandberg & Male-Dominated Silicon Valley →
The New Yorker profiles one of the most powerful women in Silicon Valley.
David Fischer, Facebook’s vice-president of advertising and global operations, recounts a performance review of a female executive that he and Sandberg conducted. Fischer says that he told the executive numerous times that she wasn’t assertive enough, but he felt that she wasn’t hearing him. “Sheryl jumped in after I...
“This is the challenge that Malick gives himself: to demonstrate that goodness,...”
– The music and meaning of Tree of Life.
“All mobile web apps today suck.”
– Some constructive criticism of mobile web apps.
Building the Next Generation of Mobile Web Applications
➚ The Biggest Green Scam in America →
There’s a growing awareness of “greenwashing,” the fact that you can say something is green and people will buy it, even if there’s nothing sustainable about your product. But this is a whole new level:
Since 2008, securities officials have targeted at least five alleged scams involving clean energy, prompting the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority to release an...
➚ China's Bizarre Food 'Safety' Scene, and Our Own →
Mark Bittman, making the fear case for eating foods that you can trace the origins of:
There was the famous village wedding at which more than half of the 500 guests were hospitalized after eating pork contaminated with Clenbuterol, a drug that accelerates fat burning and muscle growth. (It makes pigs grow faster and leaner, and when consumed in excess by humans can cause nausea, convulsions,...
Some Unqualified Thoughts on Troy Davis
Last night I went to bed heavy with the news that Troy Davis had been executed by the State of Georgia. If you don’t know who he is, or why this is significant, read these 10 reasons why he shouldn’t have been executed. That and a Google search of his name should get you up to speed.
This issue, like so many others, has already fallen upon political lines: conservatives are pro-death...
“I suppose there’s no getting around the fact that I’m a notebook person —...”
– The Weight of a Good Notebook
I too am horribly guilty of this. The messenger bag I carry has 5 notebooks in it (each with a specific purpose) and on my desk are 5 more with various purposes. If I have something I want to write down, I immediately know which notebook it goes in to, and which pen is...
➚ How to Be a Writer →
This post was so very good. It’s good advice for anyone who wants to instill creativity and imagination in a child.
What should you do to help your child pursue her dreams of becoming a writer?
First of all, let her be bored. Let her have long afternoons with absolutely nothing to do. Limit her TV-watching time and her internet-playing time and take away her cell phone. Give her a whole...
➚ Writers in Hollywood →
Someone had to say it.
Its conception of what makes a good picture is still as juvenile as its treatment of writing talent is insulting and degrading. Its idea of “production value” is spending a million dollars dressing up a story that any good writer would throw away. Its vision of the rewarding movie is a vehicle for some glamorpuss with two expressions and eighteen changes of costume, or...
“I feel funny. I feel funnt. I feel feely. I’m—not feeling altogether confident...”
– Giles Turnbull collapsed in public a few weeks ago, and was ever so kind to record his memories of the experience.
“We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a...”
– The Good Short Life With A.L.S.
Great article.
➚ The CIA's Secret Sites in Somalia →
Nestled in a back corner of Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport is a sprawling walled compound run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the facility looks like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four corners. Adjacent to the compound are eight large metal...
➚ The End →
Los Angeles Magazine on dying in LA county. This little tidbit of information was horrifying:
By state law, if nobody picks you up after 30 days, you will be incinerated. In bureaucratese this is called “county disposition,” or “county dispo” for short. Smith located a private crematorium willing to kindle his uncollected dead, but it wouldn’t take bodies over 350 pounds. He found a mortuary...
“…The targeting of Iraq also represented a desperate and irrational...”
– War Without Humans: Modern Blood Rites Revisited
I like this article for the thoughts it raises. I do not know if she’s on the right track, but it is well worth thinking about.
War will continue to be used against insurgencies as well as to “take out” the weapons facilities, command...
“On the one hand, the e-book is far more compact and portable than the codex,...”
– The Mechanic Muse — From Scroll to Screen
“One semester I did a guy’s entire course load for a semester. I was paid $1000 a...”
– Other People’s Papers
A dialogue between a professor and a guy who writes term papers for a living. The professor here explains how he identifies cheating sometimes:
In those cases I was alerted to plagiarism by the sudden appearance, in a paper that is otherwise a morass of grammatical errors,...
“What is wrong with making a decent living in doing something you love forever?...”
– Matt Haughey
➚ The woman who fell to Earth →
Incredible story of a woman whose parachute did not deploy while she was skydiving and who somehow survived. The story goes into the neurological and relational issues she encounter after this horrible accident.
She had already been resuscitated twice at Antioch’s Delta Memorial Hospital, and the scans there showed a staggering array of injuries: a punctured, collapsed lung that was leaking...
“I have always been the overachiever in my family—the one who NOT ONLY got his...”
– My Father Is an African Immigrant and My Mother Is a White Girl from Kansas and I Am Not the President of the United States
➚ When Google Shuts down your account, you have no... →
[edit: this did not happen to me, click the title to go to the full article. Just a warning to all people who use Google services]
Dear Google,
I would like to bring to your attention a few things before I disconnect permanently from all of your services.
On July 15 2011 you turned off my entire Google account. You had absolutely no reason to do this, despite your automated message telling me...
“There’s never been a time when so much of the new stuff I look at is so very far...”
– It Just Doesn’t Work
➚ The unusual way Carl Reiner develops plots →
“I start with a blank page, and I put a line on it. I’ve done this a lot. I just put a line down, anything. And then I ask questions about it. The best example was a book I wrote called All Kinds of Love. I remember, from nowhere, I wrote the line – and I had nothing in my mind – I wrote, “He didn’t realize that hiring the Japanese tutor would have the impact in his marriage that it did.”
Now,...
➚ How they did the special effects in 2001: A... →
“The only thing that separates a “worship band” from a “rock band” is the...”
– Where Rock Stars Go to Die
“I think one of the most sad things is to not realize is that writing can achieve...”
– Frank Chimero
➚ How America turned poverty into a crime →
This should make you angry.
The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, leading to the arrests of...
➚ The Trivialities and Transcendence of... →
First, users must define a specific “project” — a word the founders did not choose lightly. A project suggests something finite; it is not supporting a career or underwriting a start-up. Second (and contrary to my attitude when my friends and I started our little campaign), Kickstarter isn’t for handouts. It encourages — indeed, it mandates — an exchange of value. Creators must offer “rewards”...
➚ Adam Lisagor Is The Quietest Pitchman →
“I’ve always been fixated on the image of a person eating alone in a public place. It’s so evocative—more so if the eater is on a park bench and even more so if the food being eaten is a sandwich. It’s such a simple, delightful thing, the sandwich. The concept itself—incredibly efficient packaging to contain an infinite variety and combination of substance.”
“Video is a special word that takes...
➚ Origins of the debt showdown →
The frantic showdown that followed, bringing the nation to the brink of default, looked like the haphazard escalation of a typical partisan standoff.
It wasn’t.
It was the natural outgrowth of a years-long effort by GOP recruiters to build a new majority and reverse the party’s fortunes. That effort began before the economy collapsed in 2008, before the government bailouts that followed,...
“The curious thing about the eruption of cheap and indiscriminate lending of...”
– It’s the Economy, Dummkopf!
Michael Lewis continues his series of economic tourism articles with a new one on Germany. It’s very interesting for all the analysis, but there’s also this hilarious passage on the fascination of Germans with poop (caution, foul language):
There’s a...
“Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor...”
– The Secret History of Guns
This article was pretty amazing. Here’s more:
In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control. The organization’s president at the time was Karl T. Frederick, a Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer known as “the... 