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http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/atlas_obscura/2013/10/24/a_terrifying_tour_of_the_world_s_most_dangerous_road_north_yungas_in_bolivia/1382620229.jpg.CROP.promo-large2.jpg

To one side is solid rock. To the other, a 2,000-foot abyss. In between is a two-way, 12-foot-wide path known as "Death Road."

Regularly named as the world's most dangerous route, North Yungas Road was cut into the side of the Cordillera Oriental Mountain chain in the 1930s. Many sections are unpaved and lack guardrails. Warm and humid winds from the Amazon bring heavy rains and fog. There are numerous mudslides and tumbling rocks, and small waterfalls occasionally rain down the cliff sides. These conditions explain why an estimated 200 to 300 people are killed on the road every year.​
- read the full article A Terrifying Tour of the World's Most Dangerous Road (from Slate)​
 
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/10/15/sports/basketball/BHUTAN/BHUTAN-articleLarge.jpg

THIMPHU, Bhutan — With just seconds left in the game, the queen of Bhutan went to the hole like a hungry snow leopard pouncing on a mountain goat, taking two dribbles and three long strides before putting up a royal layup.

Yes, your majesty!

Queen Jetsun Pema Wangchuck’s final basket was just one of 17 she made in a friendly game of basketball last month with nine other women. Basketball may be a street game in the United States, but it is the game of kings and queens in Bhutan.

Indeed, the 23-year-old queen, who plays almost every day, is surprisingly good. The royal set shot is as sweet as honeyed ghee, and the royal dribble as poised as a monk in meditation. Her statistics in that game were like those of an N.B.A. star: 34 points, 3 rebounds and 4 assists. (Perhaps it helped that the Bhutanese custom forbidding citizens from touching a royal without an invitation seems to extend to the basketball court.)​
- read the full article In Bhutan, a Bid to Turn Basketball From a Royal Sport to a National One (from The New York Times)​
 
http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2336/1805744187_c0d50aac70.jpg
image from supermendikute (Flickr)

My story is a bit different from the others here. I was a skinhead since I was a kid..about 13. We ran in a gang and listened to both racial music and also non racial music. We were a bit mouthy etc about race, but the place we grew up in was totally white. There was one chinese lass out our whole school..about 1,200 people. It didn't take me too long to realise that the "they took our jobs" talk was a load of shite as there were no ethnic people..and no jobs. So I did grow out the racist thing myself pretty quickly.

It was only really when I went to university that I actually encountered different races. I got to work beside black and asian guys, played football with Africans and Greeks and generally had a great time and met great people who I still keep in contact with. I think even though I didn't consider myself racist..I couldn't imagine me having black friends..or going on holiday with a group that included several Muslims, which I did do a couple of years back.

Wee funny story before I end about prejudices. I went to live in another city, and was just myself..talk to anyone. One night I got a cab. The driver was a Muslim in full Pakistani cultural gear. Skull cap, long gown etc. I thought, people are people and have the right to do or dress how they want, but I don't think we are going to have a lot o talk about, not much common ground. I gave him my address and sat back to chill out.

Guy turns round..you a Scot? I said yeah mate. Then he starts chatting about when he first came to England in the 60s before the majority of Pakistanis, he used to get picked on at school. The other guys who were picked on were Scots and Irish. So they formed a gang of the eight of them. From that day they could go watch football, go out at night, and generally stick up for each other. He said, that was a long time ago, and I still get a shiver when I hear Scots or Irish accents. Now he teaches kids at the mosque not to dislike white christians, and the best ways to mix and interact. We sat for 20 minutes when we arrived at my house and just shot the breeze.

I think that's when the last bit of bigotry left me.

Wow, thanks for the replies and gold. Now I'm very anti racist and try challenge wherever I go​
 
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/newsroom/img/2013/10/15/1113_WEL_Somers_Hofstadter/mag-article-large.jpg

The idea that changed Hofstadter’s existence, as he has explained over the years, came to him on the road, on a break from graduate school in particle physics. Discouraged by the way his doctoral thesis was going at the University of Oregon, feeling “profoundly lost,” he decided in the summer of 1972 to pack his things into a car he called Quicksilver and drive eastward across the continent. Each night he pitched his tent somewhere new (“sometimes in a forest, sometimes by a lake”) and read by flashlight. He was free to think about whatever he wanted; he chose to think about thinking itself. Ever since he was about 14, when he found out that his youngest sister, Molly, couldn’t understand language, because she “had something deeply wrong with her brain” (her neurological condition probably dated from birth, and was never diagnosed), he had been quietly obsessed by the relation of mind to matter. The father of psychology, William James, described this in 1890 as “the most mysterious thing in the world”: How could consciousness be physical? How could a few pounds of gray gelatin give rise to our very thoughts and selves?

Roaming in his 1956 Mercury, Hofstadter thought he had found the answer—that it lived, of all places, in the kernel of a mathematical proof. In 1931, the Austrian-born logician Kurt Gödel had famously shown how a mathematical system could make statements not just about numbers but about the system itself. Consciousness, Hofstadter wanted to say, emerged via just the same kind of “level-crossing feedback loop.” He sat down one afternoon to sketch his thinking in a letter to a friend. But after 30 handwritten pages, he decided not to send it; instead he’d let the ideas germinate a while. Seven years later, they had not so much germinated as metastasized into a 2.9‑pound, 777-page book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which would earn for Hofstadter—only 35 years old, and a first-time author—the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.​
- read the full article The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think (from The Atlantic)​
 
Laurel said:
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/newsroom/img/2013/10/15/1113_WEL_Somers_Hofstadter/mag-article-large.jpg

The idea that changed Hofstadter’s existence, as he has explained over the years, came to him on the road, on a break from graduate school in particle physics. Discouraged by the way his doctoral thesis was going at the University of Oregon, feeling “profoundly lost,” he decided in the summer of 1972 to pack his things into a car he called Quicksilver and drive eastward across the continent. Each night he pitched his tent somewhere new (“sometimes in a forest, sometimes by a lake”) and read by flashlight. He was free to think about whatever he wanted; he chose to think about thinking itself. Ever since he was about 14, when he found out that his youngest sister, Molly, couldn’t understand language, because she “had something deeply wrong with her brain” (her neurological condition probably dated from birth, and was never diagnosed), he had been quietly obsessed by the relation of mind to matter. The father of psychology, William James, described this in 1890 as “the most mysterious thing in the world”: How could consciousness be physical? How could a few pounds of gray gelatin give rise to our very thoughts and selves?

Roaming in his 1956 Mercury, Hofstadter thought he had found the answer—that it lived, of all places, in the kernel of a mathematical proof. In 1931, the Austrian-born logician Kurt Gödel had famously shown how a mathematical system could make statements not just about numbers but about the system itself. Consciousness, Hofstadter wanted to say, emerged via just the same kind of “level-crossing feedback loop.” He sat down one afternoon to sketch his thinking in a letter to a friend. But after 30 handwritten pages, he decided not to send it; instead he’d let the ideas germinate a while. Seven years later, they had not so much germinated as metastasized into a 2.9‑pound, 777-page book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which would earn for Hofstadter—only 35 years old, and a first-time author—the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.​
- read the full article The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think (from The Atlantic)​
Click to expand...

GEB is the best book in the world and I love his butterfly shirt.
 
http://ecarrerasg.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/wikipedia-logo.png

The sixth most widely used website in the world is not run anything like the others in the top 10. It is not operated by a sophisticated corporation but by a leaderless collection of volunteers who generally work under pseudonyms and habitually bicker with each other. It rarely tries new things in the hope of luring visitors; in fact, it has changed little in a decade. And yet every month 10 billion pages are viewed on the English version of Wikipedia alone. When a major news event takes place, such as the Boston Marathon bombings, complex, widely sourced entries spring up within hours and evolve by the minute. Because there is no other free information source like it, many online services rely on Wikipedia. Look something up on Google or ask Siri a question on your iPhone, and you’ll often get back tidbits of information pulled from the encyclopedia and delivered as straight-up facts.

Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-*ranking quality scores.

The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.​
- read the full article The Decline of Wikipedia (from MIT Technology Review)​
 
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gadgetlab/2013/10/gl_honan_f.jpg

A few years ago, my wife and I spent three weeks hiking the backcountry of California. We walked more than 200 miles without crossing a road—and even better, without fielding any calls, emails, tweets, or other day-to-day Internet bullshit. It was heavenly. But at trail’s end, as we stood atop Mount Whitney, looking over the unfolding American West, I was appalled to see smartphones everywhere. People were snapping photos and sending texts; one woman was even making calls. We sniffed at the jibber-jabberers, walked down to the trailhead, and hitchhiked back into Yosemite, where our car was parked, feeling pretty smug. That sentiment fell off a cliff a few days later when I arrived at WIRED’s offices.

As I began telling my story to a colleague, he stopped me cold: “Did you bring GPS?” I said that I had. “Well, that’s not really being out in the wilderness,” he replied. And he kind of had a point.
[...]
Getting away from technology by leaving it behind becomes a pointless exercise in competitive reductionism. Where do you draw the line? Your smartphone? Your GPS? Your compass? Your tent? Fire?

Here’s a better idea: Shut up and bring your iPhone into the backcountry, but resist the urge to open the email app. If you can’t manage that, delete or turn off the account. Don’t worry, it’ll come back.

Meanwhile, technology can enhance your wilderness experience. The Night Sky mobile app on iOS, for example, can tell you exactly which constellations you’re observing, and it serves up thousands of years of human history. There are other apps that have transformed birding; they can identify species, forecast migrations, even alert you to rare birds in your area. And by tracking your location from your pocket, your phone lets you spend less time squinting at a map and more time looking at the world.

The phone isn’t the problem. The problem is us—our inability to step away from email and games and inessential data, our inability to look up, be it at an alpine lake or at family members. We won’t be able to get away from it all for very much longer. So it’s vitally important that each of us learns how to live with a persistent connection, everywhere we go, whether it’s in the wilderness or at a dinner party.​
 
http://31.media.tumblr.com/5f7f0a48096272588d1d968e2c9399c7/tumblr_mvh5k890Yy1qzdxioo1_400.jpg

Many library collections use special equipment, such as special gloves and climate-controlled rooms, to protect the archival materials from the visitor. For the Pierre and Marie Curie collection at France’s Bibliotheque National, it’s the other way around.

That’s because after more than 100 years, much of Marie Curie’s stuff – her papers, her furniture, even her cookbooks – are still radioactive. Those who wish to open the lead-lined boxes containing her manuscripts must do so in protective clothing, and only after signing a waiver of liability.

Along with her husband and collaborator, Pierre, Marie Curie lived her life awash in ionizing radiation. She would carry bottles of the polonium and radium in the pocket of her coat and store them in her desk drawer. In his 2008 book “The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914” historian Philipp Blom quotes Marie Curie’s autobiographical notes, in which she describes the mysterious blue-green lights in her lab:

One of our joys was to go into our workroom at night; we then perceived on all sides the feebly luminous silhouettes of the bottles of capsules containing our products. It was really a lovely sight and one always new to us. The glowing tubes looked like faint, fairy lights.​
- read the full article Marie Curie: Why her papers are still radioactive (from The Christian Science Monitor)​
 
http://pandodaily.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/1-resized.jpg?w=600

It’s my first class of the semester at New York University. I’m discussing the evils of plagiarism and falsifying sources with 11 graduate journalism students when, without warning, my computer freezes. I fruitlessly tap on the keyboard as my laptop takes on a life of its own and reboots. Seconds later the screen flashes a message. To receive the four-digit code I need to unlock it I’ll have to dial a number with a 312 area code. Then my iPhone, set on vibrate and sitting idly on the table, beeps madly.

I’m being hacked — and only have myself to blame.

Two months earlier I challenged Nicholas Percoco, senior vice president of SpiderLabs, the advanced research and ethical hacking team at Trustwave, to perform a personal “pen-test,” industry-speak for “penetration test.” The idea grew out of a cover story I wrote for Forbes some 14 years earlier, when I retained a private detective to investigate me, starting with just my byline. In a week he pulled up an astonishing amount of information, everything from my social security number and mother’s maiden name to long distance phone records, including who I called and for how long, my rent, bank accounts, stock holdings, and utility bills.​
 


Strictly speaking, this probably doesn't qualify as a "good" read. It is, in fact, a bit horrifying. It might make you hesitate before you reach for the pepper mill.





Imported Spices Tainted With Filth, U.S. FDA Says (Bloomberg)



Insect fragments and animal hairs taint 12 percent of imported spices, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said in a report.

The FDA said it looked at the safety of spices after outbreaks involving the seasonings. The agency also found pathogens in the spices, including salmonella, and suggested the spice industry look at options to mitigate risk including training to stress preventive controls.

“Nearly all of the insects found in spice samples were stored product pests, indicating inadequate packing or storage conditions,” the agency wrote in the draft report released yesterday. “The presence of rodent hair without the root in spices generally is generally indicative of contamination by rodent feces.”

more... http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-30/imported-spices-tainted-with-filth-u-s-fda-says.html
Click to expand...
 
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/newsroom/img/posts/3974879094_fbd1678149_o.jpg

According to Dr. Rick Hanson, a neuropsychologist, a member of U.C. Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center's advisory board, and author of the book Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence, our brains are naturally wired to focus on the negative, which can make us feel stressed and unhappy even though there are a lot of positive things in our lives. True, life can be hard, and legitimately terrible sometimes. Hanson’s book (a sort of self-help manual grounded in research on learning and brain structure) doesn’t suggest that we avoid dwelling on negative experiences altogether—that would be impossible. Instead, he advocates training our brains to appreciate positive experiences when we do have them, by taking the time to focus on them and install them in the brain.​
- read the full article How to Build a Happier Brain (from The Atlantic)​
 
islandman said:
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/newsroom/img/posts/3974879094_fbd1678149_o.jpg

According to Dr. Rick Hanson, a neuropsychologist, a member of U.C. Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center's advisory board, and author of the book Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence, our brains are naturally wired to focus on the negative, which can make us feel stressed and unhappy even though there are a lot of positive things in our lives. True, life can be hard, and legitimately terrible sometimes. Hanson’s book (a sort of self-help manual grounded in research on learning and brain structure) doesn’t suggest that we avoid dwelling on negative experiences altogether—that would be impossible. Instead, he advocates training our brains to appreciate positive experiences when we do have them, by taking the time to focus on them and install them in the brain.​
- read the full article How to Build a Happier Brain (from The Atlantic)​
Click to expand...


Awesome article
 
http://cdn.theatlanticwire.com/img/upload/2013/10/31/lizardman/large.jpg

As 12 million Americans "know," the United States government is run by lizard people (or, to be scientifically accurate, reptilians). But they never said which members of the government are the reptilians. So we're here to help.

Piecing together the latest groundbreaking research being conducted by commenters at conspiracy websites, we've been able to isolate a number of prominent individuals who possess reptilian-compatible bloodlines. As "ufochick" writes at DavidIcke.com (Icke is a prominent reptile theorist, as evidenced by his book at right), even if a person has compatible bloodlines, "they will not become a reptilian unless a reptilian entity inhabits their physical body."​
- read the full article How to Spot the Reptilians Running the U.S. Government (from The Atlantic Wire)​
 
islandman said:
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/newsroom/img/posts/3974879094_fbd1678149_o.jpg

According to Dr. Rick Hanson, a neuropsychologist, a member of U.C. Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center's advisory board, and author of the book Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence, our brains are naturally wired to focus on the negative, which can make us feel stressed and unhappy even though there are a lot of positive things in our lives. True, life can be hard, and legitimately terrible sometimes. Hanson’s book (a sort of self-help manual grounded in research on learning and brain structure) doesn’t suggest that we avoid dwelling on negative experiences altogether—that would be impossible. Instead, he advocates training our brains to appreciate positive experiences when we do have them, by taking the time to focus on them and install them in the brain.​
- read the full article How to Build a Happier Brain (from The Atlantic)​
Click to expand...

He re-invented DONT WORRY BE HAPPY!
 
Laurel said:
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/newsroom/img/2013/10/15/1113_WEL_Somers_Hofstadter/mag-article-large.jpg

The idea that changed Hofstadter’s existence, as he has explained over the years, came to him on the road, on a break from graduate school in particle physics. Discouraged by the way his doctoral thesis was going at the University of Oregon, feeling “profoundly lost,” he decided in the summer of 1972 to pack his things into a car he called Quicksilver and drive eastward across the continent. Each night he pitched his tent somewhere new (“sometimes in a forest, sometimes by a lake”) and read by flashlight. He was free to think about whatever he wanted; he chose to think about thinking itself. Ever since he was about 14, when he found out that his youngest sister, Molly, couldn’t understand language, because she “had something deeply wrong with her brain” (her neurological condition probably dated from birth, and was never diagnosed), he had been quietly obsessed by the relation of mind to matter. The father of psychology, William James, described this in 1890 as “the most mysterious thing in the world”: How could consciousness be physical? How could a few pounds of gray gelatin give rise to our very thoughts and selves?

Roaming in his 1956 Mercury, Hofstadter thought he had found the answer—that it lived, of all places, in the kernel of a mathematical proof. In 1931, the Austrian-born logician Kurt Gödel had famously shown how a mathematical system could make statements not just about numbers but about the system itself. Consciousness, Hofstadter wanted to say, emerged via just the same kind of “level-crossing feedback loop.” He sat down one afternoon to sketch his thinking in a letter to a friend. But after 30 handwritten pages, he decided not to send it; instead he’d let the ideas germinate a while. Seven years later, they had not so much germinated as metastasized into a 2.9‑pound, 777-page book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which would earn for Hofstadter—only 35 years old, and a first-time author—the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.​
- read the full article The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think (from The Atlantic)​
Click to expand...

Gotta love the navel gazers, theyre always first in line to eat the bread the peasants bake.
 
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/files/2013/10/Rogers1-500x423.jpg

Questions abounded: Had Mary been killed by someone she knew? Had she been a victim of a random crime of opportunity, something New Yorkers increasingly worried about as the city grew and young women strayed farther and farther from the family parlor? Why hadn’t the police of New York or Hoboken spotted Mary and her attacker? The Herald, the Sun and the Tribune all put Mary on their front pages, and no detail was too lurid—graphic descriptions of Mary’s body appeared in each paper, along with vivid theories about what her killer or killers might have done to her. More than anything, they demanded answers.
[...]
Working in the spring of 1842, Edgar Allan Poe transported Mary’s tale to Paris and, in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” gave her a slightly more Francophone name (and a job in a perfume shop), but the details otherwise match exactly. The opening of Poe’s story makes his intent clear:

The extraordinary details which I am now called upon to make public, will be found to form, as regards sequence of time, the primary branch of a series of scarcely intelligible coincidences, whose secondary or concluding branch will be recognized by all readers in the late murder of MARY CECILIA ROGERS, at New York.​

A sequel to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” widely considered the first detective story ever set to print, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” would see the detective Dupin solve the young woman’s murder. In shopping the story to editors, Poe suggested he’d gone beyond mere storytelling: “Under the pretense of showing how Dupin unraveled the mystery of Marie’s assassination, I, in fact, enter into a very rigorous analysis of the real tragedy in New York.”​
 
Laurel said:
...I think that'll be hard, 'cause reptiles are a pretty happy bunch.
Click to expand...

I meant for we humans.

"Verily I say unto you: Consider the reptiles of the field; they neither sow nor reap and God made them ugly as fuck, yet their happiness aboundeth."

We could use some of that shite.
 
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