Good Reads

[rosco rathbone]

I've only read "One Market Under God", but I like his stuff for Harpers quite a bit.

Why was it a disappointment?

It lacked his usual polemical flair and energy. He seemed to be going through the motions.

One Market Under God is his best book anyway in my opinion but all the rest of them are worth reading as well as the Bafflers.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

When second-grader Christian Bucks noticed that some of his friends didn’t have anyone to play with on the playground at Roundtown Elementary School in York, Pa., he decided to take action to help foster friendships at his school, setting forth to acquire a buddy bench.

The way the buddy bench works is if students feel lonely on the playground without anything to do, they can go to the buddy bench, and another student will come to the bench and ask if they want to play or talk.

If two people are sitting at the bench, they could ask each other if they want to play, Christian said.

He described the buddy bench as having a purpose to “grow our dream circle of friends.”​

- read the full article 2nd-grader's buddy bench helps lonely classmates make friends (from The Saratogian)​

My daughter does something along these lines. When one of her kids has a birthday everyone is invited to the party (kids). She buys stacks of 5 buck pizzas from Little Caesar, tubs of storebrand ice-cream, and plenty of sodas. The kids don't care that the fare isn't SNOOTYS OWN PEDIGREED ITALIAN ICES.

Another thing she does is keep a box by her front door stocked with balls, bats, and all the shit kids need to play. All are welcome to borrow from the box. And no one ever steals anything.

And! Her kids know to help neighbors carry groceries in from the car.

Slowly, ever so slowly, glacially, some of the self-absorbed teens in her neighborhood are committing random acts of kindness.

 

[Sean]

How The Web Discriminates Against You

 

[gotsnowgotslush]

“It won’t be some alien invasion of robots coming over the hill,” [Ray Kurzweil] Kurzweil told me, “because they’ll be made by us.”
In his compound in Sri Lanka, [Arthur C. Clarke] Clarke wasn’t so sure. “I think it’s just a matter of time before machines dominate
mankind,” he said. “Intelligence will win out.”

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
by James Barrat

We may be forced to compete with a rival more cunning, more powerful & more alien than we can imagine. Thru profiles of tech visionaries,
industry watchdogs & groundbreaking AI systems, Our Final Invention explores the perils of the heedless pursuit of advanced AI. Until now,
human intelligence has had no rival. Can we coexist with beings whose intelligence dwarfs our own? Will they allow us to?

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17286699-our-final-invention

 

[Laurel]

Let me share a slice of "Holy shit, it's a small world"....

In 1999, I was doing contract work as a program mgr. for the old Central Carolina Bank (CCB). My band of itinerant project mgrs and I were holed up at the Durham Hilton on Hillsborough Drive...the bank ops center was a mile up the road in a "secure area" in the middle of a NC pine forest. We'd hit the restaurant row hard each day...Biscuitville for breakfast stands out, and I most definitely remember the Waffle House next to the Interstate entrance because I ate a chicken breast sandwich there one day and cracked and spit out most of a molar tooth.

The only other thing I recall about Hillsborough drive was that it had a "porn warehouse" on the other side of the Interstate. First time I'd ever been in a "warehouse" full of porn.

Lol! That reminds me of the Mr. Show bit about the Cock Ring Warehouse.

 

[Laurel]

http://im.ft-static.com/content/images/e54eb4c6-5c82-11e3-931e-00144feabdc0.img

It’s very hard to imagine phoning someone up and saying, “Hey, come over to my house and we’ll sit next to each other on chairs and go online together!” Going online is such an intrinsically solitary act yet, ironically, it fosters the creation of groups and very strong relationships.

. . .

Last year, at a conference about cities, I met this guy from Google who asked me what I knew about Fort McMurray, Alberta. I told him it’s an oil-extraction complex in the middle of the Canadian prairies and, because of this, it has the most disproportionately male demographic of any city in North America. Its population is maybe 76,000. I asked him why he was asking and he said, “Because it has the highest per capita video-streaming rate of anywhere in North America.” Nudge nudge.

I think that because of the internet, straight people are now having the same amount of sex as gay guys were always supposed to be having. There’s a weird look I can see on the face of people who are getting too much sex delivered to them via hooking up online: wait, is this as good as it gets?

. . .

Way back on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Lou Grant asked Mary how many times a woman could be with a guy before she became “that kind of girl”; Mary thought about it very carefully and said “six”. Some psychologists have come to the conclusion that most people have five or six “loves” and once they use them up, that’s it. Sixes get used up very quickly in the new information world.

. . .

Question: how many times can a person fall in love? Apparently, if you average it out, two-and-a-half times. Men are slightly more inclined to believe in a third-time love than women.

. . .

People in the pornography industry have found that the magic price point for people subscribing to a porn site is $29.95. The moment you cross that line, potential customers balk and leave. This is called “the porn wall” and it seems to be an impenetrable thing – a constant that’s built into us by nature, like the nesting instinct of birds or the molecular weight of zinc.​

- read the full article Douglas Coupland: notes on 21st-century relationships (from FT Magazine)​

 

[Wings]

Well, now we know how much you can charge for chat.

 

[Laurel]

lol!

I think Mr. Coupland may be a bit out of touch. Are there people who pay US$29/month for pron anymore?

 

[Laurel]

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/198wbn53bcyatjpg/ku-xlarge.jpg

Back in 1949, the linguist George Zipf noticed something odd about how often people use words in a given language. He found that a small number of words are used all the time, while the vast majority are used very rarely. If he ranked the words in order of popularity, a striking pattern emerged. The number one ranked word was always used twice as often as the second rank word, and three times as often as the third rank. He called this a rank vs. frequency rule, and found that it could also be used to describe income distributions in any given country, with the richest person making twice as much money as the next richest, and so forth.

Later dubbed Zipf's law, the rank vs. frequency rule also works if you apply it to the sizes of cities. The city with the largest population in any country is generally twice as large as the next-biggest, and so on. Incredibly, Zipf's law for cities has held true for every country in the world, for the past century.​

- read the full article A mysterious law that predicts the size of the world's biggest cities (from io9)​

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/198wbn53bcyatjpg/ku-xlarge.jpg

Back in 1949, the linguist George Zipf noticed something odd about how often people use words in a given language. He found that a small number of words are used all the time, while the vast majority are used very rarely. If he ranked the words in order of popularity, a striking pattern emerged. The number one ranked word was always used twice as often as the second rank word, and three times as often as the third rank. He called this a rank vs. frequency rule, and found that it could also be used to describe income distributions in any given country, with the richest person making twice as much money as the next richest, and so forth.

Later dubbed Zipf's law, the rank vs. frequency rule also works if you apply it to the sizes of cities. The city with the largest population in any country is generally twice as large as the next-biggest, and so on. Incredibly, Zipf's law for cities has held true for every country in the world, for the past century.​

- read the full article A mysterious law that predicts the size of the world's biggest cities (from io9)​

Robert Gunning and Fleishman discovered the same thing at the same time, 1950. 50 common words are used 50% of the time for all written/spoken expression; 3000 common words are used 98% of the time. More, and no one understands you OR youre redundant, and most of the excess verbage is redundant.

 

[JohnnySavage]

"The distance was further than I thought."

Is the correct word, further, or farther?

I always say further, but I've noticed the smart people reading the news always say, farther.

 

[Laurel]

"The distance was further than I thought."

Is the correct word, further, or farther?

I always say further, but I've noticed the smart people reading the news always say, farther.

I've always wondered this. Merriam-Webster says:

Farther and further have been used more or less interchangeably throughout most of their history, but currently they are showing signs of diverging. As adverbs they continue to be used interchangeably whenever spatial, temporal, or metaphorical distance is involved. But where there is no notion of distance, further is used <our techniques can be further refined>. Further is also used as a sentence modifier <further, the workshop participants were scarcely optimistic — L. B. Mayhew>, but farther is not. A polarizing process appears to be taking place in their adjective use. Farther is taking over the meaning of distance <the farther shore> and further the meaning of addition <needed no further invitation>.​

 

[Super-Surprise]

http://img.ffffound.com/static-data/assets/6/739fdfb6a65cac5b51c3e748a17d2d038f63468d_m.jpg

 

[Laurel]

http://images.smh.com.au/2013/11/20/4940388/art-spider-620x349.jpg

Memories can be passed down to later generations through genetic switches that allow offspring to inherit the experience of their ancestors, according to new research that may explain how phobias can develop.

Scientists have long assumed that memories and learned experiences built up during a lifetime must be passed on by teaching later generations or through personal experience.

However, new research has shown that it is possible for some information to be inherited biologically through chemical changes that occur in DNA.

Researchers at the Emory University School of Medicine, in Atlanta, found that mice can pass on learned information about traumatic or stressful experiences – in this case a fear of the smell of cherry blossom – to subsequent generations.

The results may help to explain why people suffer from seemingly irrational phobias – it may be based on the inherited experiences of their ancestors.

So a fear of spiders may in fact be an inherited defence mechanism laid down in a families genes by an ancestors' frightening encounter with an arachnid.
​

- read the full article Phobias may be memories passed down in genes from ancestors (from The Syndey Morning Herald)​

 

[neci]

http://am-elec14-cdn.agilecontents.com/resources/jpg/7/9/1386778254597.jpg

Half a million Salvadorians will be unable to vote

Facing presidential elections in the upcoming year, half a million Salvadorians will be unable to vote.

So said Eugenio Chicas, magistrate president of the Electoral Supreme Court (TSE), who told that the number corresponds to the citizens who have not renewed their Single Document of Identity (DUI).

The official explained that these citizens still have time to begin the process of renovation.

Added to this number, there are more than 600,000 Salvadorians who do not exist judicially, that is to say, have birth certificates or a DUI.

In addition, the speaker for the TSE also indicated that an important amount of young people have not processed their documents, so they may not vote in the upcoming elections.

 

[Laurel]

A new exhibition at London's Science Museum demonstrates how the nerves of the body sound like a creaking ship when acting normally but erupt into a panicked alarm during a seizure - almost sounding like an emergency siren

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02761/mind-mapping_2761842b.jpg

The nerves of the body erupt into a natural alarm during a seizure, a new exhibition at the Science Museum in London has demonstrated.

When acting normally, nerves make a gently creaking noise, almost like a ship rolling in the water.

But during a siezure, such as an epileptic fit, the nerves change to emit a panicked siren, a noise which sounds like an emergency alarm.

The sound, which has been amplified by a microphone, is the noise of nerves transmitting electrical impulses around the brain.

When everything is going well the rhythm is steady and slow. But the cataclysmic effects of a storm of impulses is easy to hear.

Mind Maps: Stories from Psychology charts this history of how mental health conditions and other psychological disorders have been treated over the past 250 years.​

- read the full article (with audio files of your nerve sounds!) A creaking ship? No, it's the sound of your nerves (from The Telegraph)​

 

[Laurel]

here here

It pains me to openly disrespect or belittle the work of any artist, for any reason, but god damn if this comic making the rounds isn’t one fat, steaming globule of trite, patronizing horseshit and I really need to vent my resentment of it all at once.

*DEEP BREATH*

http://media.tumblr.com/3de2293d663618fce4fca391ecc781e3/tumblr_inline_mx9hjfH5iR1qbgh4j.jpg

OH MAN look at those ignorant, pathetic people of various ages, sexes and ethnic groups all doing internet shit on their phones while they ride on a subway! HOLY SHIT THEY’RE ALL DOING IT! EVEN THE GUY IN THE TURBAN FROM WHATEVER THE HELL VAGUE COUNTRY HE’S SUPPOSED TO BE FROM THAT HAS TURBANS!

WHY ARE THEY MESSAGING ESTABLISHED FRIENDS AND FAMILY ON A PHOENEZ WHEN THEY COULD BE INTERACTING WITH COMPLETE AND UTTER STRANGERS ON A GROSS FUCKING SUBWAY CAR

HOW DARE THEY HAVE PERSONAL OUTLETS AND PRIVATE SPACE AND SHIT


[...]


DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY OVER JUST THE PAST DECADE HAS CONNECTED AND EDUCATED MORE HUMAN MINDS THAN PROBABLY THE ENTIRE SUM OF OUR PLANET’S HISTORY

IT’S ALSO A MIRACULOUS FIRST-WORLD PRIVILEGE THAT ALLOWS YOU TO MAKE FRIENDS, SHARE YOUR IDEAS, LEARN NEW THINGS, HEAL EMOTIONAL WOUNDS THROUGH SOCIAL INTERACTION, FIND ESCAPE FROM ABUSIVE SITUATIONS, FIND NEW LIVING SITUATIONS, APPLY FOR JOBS, CREATE YOUR OWN PERSONAL OUTLETS AND GENERALLY PURSUE HAPPINESS AT THE TOUCH OF A DAMN BUTTON

DOES ANYONE UPVOTING THIS PILE OF TURDS REALIZE HOW MANY CHILDREN IN THE WORLD COULD USE AN INTERNET PHONE WHILE THEIR PARENTS ACTUALLY ARE SHOOTING UP DRUGS IN THE OTHER ROOM IGNORING THEM BETWEEN GODDAMN BEATINGS

*please note: The guy who drew this comic is not a bad person just because he made one comic with a really irritating message. He has some others that are okay and he seems to work pretty hard as an artist, everything can’t be solid gold and I’ve smeared some pretty steamy artistic wads on the web myself. Nothing personal here.​

- read the full article An angry tirade about one comic (from Bogleech.tumblr.com)​

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

here here

It pains me to openly disrespect or belittle the work of any artist, for any reason, but god damn if this comic making the rounds isn’t one fat, steaming globule of trite, patronizing horseshit and I really need to vent my resentment of it all at once.

*DEEP BREATH*

http://media.tumblr.com/3de2293d663618fce4fca391ecc781e3/tumblr_inline_mx9hjfH5iR1qbgh4j.jpg

OH MAN look at those ignorant, pathetic people of various ages, sexes and ethnic groups all doing internet shit on their phones while they ride on a subway! HOLY SHIT THEY’RE ALL DOING IT! EVEN THE GUY IN THE TURBAN FROM WHATEVER THE HELL VAGUE COUNTRY HE’S SUPPOSED TO BE FROM THAT HAS TURBANS!

WHY ARE THEY MESSAGING ESTABLISHED FRIENDS AND FAMILY ON A PHOENEZ WHEN THEY COULD BE INTERACTING WITH COMPLETE AND UTTER STRANGERS ON A GROSS FUCKING SUBWAY CAR

HOW DARE THEY HAVE PERSONAL OUTLETS AND PRIVATE SPACE AND SHIT


[...]


DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY OVER JUST THE PAST DECADE HAS CONNECTED AND EDUCATED MORE HUMAN MINDS THAN PROBABLY THE ENTIRE SUM OF OUR PLANET’S HISTORY

IT’S ALSO A MIRACULOUS FIRST-WORLD PRIVILEGE THAT ALLOWS YOU TO MAKE FRIENDS, SHARE YOUR IDEAS, LEARN NEW THINGS, HEAL EMOTIONAL WOUNDS THROUGH SOCIAL INTERACTION, FIND ESCAPE FROM ABUSIVE SITUATIONS, FIND NEW LIVING SITUATIONS, APPLY FOR JOBS, CREATE YOUR OWN PERSONAL OUTLETS AND GENERALLY PURSUE HAPPINESS AT THE TOUCH OF A DAMN BUTTON

DOES ANYONE UPVOTING THIS PILE OF TURDS REALIZE HOW MANY CHILDREN IN THE WORLD COULD USE AN INTERNET PHONE WHILE THEIR PARENTS ACTUALLY ARE SHOOTING UP DRUGS IN THE OTHER ROOM IGNORING THEM BETWEEN GODDAMN BEATINGS

*please note: The guy who drew this comic is not a bad person just because he made one comic with a really irritating message. He has some others that are okay and he seems to work pretty hard as an artist, everything can’t be solid gold and I’ve smeared some pretty steamy artistic wads on the web myself. Nothing personal here.​

- read the full article An angry tirade about one comic (from Bogleech.tumblr.com)​

Naaah. What digital technology really does is let millions of ugly dumshitz package and market themselves like Whoppers with Cheese & Bacon. Have it your way, right away.

 

[Laurel]

"The distance was further than I thought."

Is the correct word, further, or farther?

I always say further, but I've noticed the smart people reading the news always say, farther.

I just learned this on Twitter:

Grammar Tip:
Farther = physical distance
Further = metaphorical distance
Father = emotional distance

 

[unregistered]

 

[evesdream]

Why is there a human-sized lump at the back of these baby portraits?

http://cdn.twentytwowords.com/wp-content/uploads/Mothers-Hiding-in-Baby-Pictures-05.jpg
http://www.bust.com/components/images/myblog/34766/52a0df6fa924a.jpg


Photos of Victorian Babies and Hiding Parents

Back in the 19th Century, exposure times were about thirty seconds, meaning that if a subject moved in that time, the photograph would only capture a blur. So how did they photograph babies, whom no one could expect to sit still for so long?

Well, the parents hid themselves and held them, disguised as chairs and behind drapes.


Victorian parents hiding in pictures to keep their babies still long enough for a portrait

 

[JohnnySavage]

I just learned this on Twitter:

Now can you help me with whether or not the "." or "!" or "?" goes inside or outside the "?

 

[lovetoread]

Why is there a human-sized lump at the back of these baby portraits?

Photos of Victorian Babies and Hiding Parents

Back in the 19th Century, exposure times were about thirty seconds, meaning that if a subject moved in that time, the photograph would only capture a blur. So how did they photograph babies, whom no one could expect to sit still for so long?

Well, the parents hid themselves and held them, disguised as chairs and behind drapes.


Victorian parents hiding in pictures to keep their babies still long enough for a portrait

Sometimes they did this with the dead as well to make them look more lifelike by sitting up. Memento Mori is an interest of mine.

 

[evesdream]

Sometimes they did this with the dead as well to make them look more lifelike by sitting up. Memento Mori is an interest of mine.

Those Victorians. They couldn't smile in photos, but they were so full of sentimentality and emotion. Some of the pictures made me laugh, but it's pretty touching the amount of trouble they went through to capture pure memories of their children and other loved ones.

 

[Laurel]

http://hyperallergic.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/terracottadaughters3.jpg

There’s a growing gender imbalance in China, where the one-child policy aimed at reducing population growth has influenced selective abortions and abandonments of female babies, and a male population that is growing disproportionately. French artist Prune Nourry is exploring this issue of gender selection in China by riffing off of one of its most iconic heritage sites: the Terracotta Warriors.

Nourry’s Terracotta Daughters follow her Holy Daughters project in India, where she also examined gender imbalance, although through a mythical goddess figure she created that incorporated the revered image of a sacred cow. Some of these figures were shown in her Holy River exhibition last year at the Invisible Dog in Brooklyn, where she’s also been an artist-in-residence. This exhibition included a 2011 project where she had a towering, 18-foot vision of the cow goddess built from mud like the other gods that are processed in the Durga festival in Kolkata, and it was tossed into the Ganges alongside the other “real” holy figures.​

- read the full article Terracotta Daughters: An Army to Battle Gender Imbalance in China (from Hyperallergic)​