Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Cab Thoughts 4/16/14

"Education is a self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon.”--Sugata Mitr
 
 
 
Centaur-class minor planets are small Solar System bodies that orbit the sun between the orbits of the outer planets.  The distant asteroid 10199 Chariklo has a diameter of about 250 kilometers and is the largest of the centaurs. It recently was found to have at least two orbiting rings. It orbits the Sun between Saturn and Uranus.
 
The Revolution liberated the Americans from many things, one was protection by the British navy. North African pirates were constantly taking American ships and the Americans had no real military to oppose them. The Americans chose ransom as their solution.  Under the Treaty of Marrakesh in 1786, the sultan of Morocco freed the American merchant ship Betsey and its crew from Tangier for $30,000 (about $712,000 in 2010 dollars) and promised to protect American shipping and encourage commerce between the two countries. Barclay insisted that there would be no annual tribute. Ratified by Congress on July 18, 1787, this was the first treaty between the United States and an African, Arab, or Muslim nation
 
Professor Robert Hare is a criminal psychologist who has developed a scoring system for psychopathology. He says that about 1% of the population has psychopathic tendencies.
 
What is....Bletchley Park?
 
Tax Freedom Day is the day when the nation as a whole has earned enough money to pay its total tax bill for year. Tax Freedom Day divides all federal, state, and local taxes by the nation’s income. In 2014, Americans will pay $3.0 trillion in federal taxes and $1.5 trillion in state taxes, for a total tax bill of $4.5 trillion, or 30.2 percent of income. This year, Tax Freedom Day falls on April 21, or 111 days into the year.
 
An argument is developing in the House over Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Richard Cordray's suit against Ally Bank and other car lenders. The CFPB alleges lending has a "disparate impact" on minorities. But the industry doesn't identify borrowers by race so, presumably, investigators would have to guess their minority status. The implication is that basic good lending practice eliminates people; well , of course it does. But here, perhaps, there are a disproportionate number of minorities who do not qualify for financial reasons, not racial. Is that the bank's fault? Is that de facto bigotry? Or is this just another way to rub resentment raw?
 
Aphorism (n.): interesting word meaning a short, pithy statement containing a truth of general importance. From 1520s; from Late Latin aphorismus, from Greek aphorismos "definition, pithy sentence," from aphorizein "to mark off, divide," from apo- "from" (see apo-) + horizein "to bound" ( "horizon" has the same base, "boundary.").
 
James Naismith graduated from the theological college at Montreal's McGill University and joined the group of thinkers with "muscular Christianity," accepting athletics as a legitimate means of exercise. He hoped to use it as a way of delivering Christian message as well. He was particularly interested in a game that could be played indoors in the winter and had none of the contact of football or soccer. As a child in Onterio he had played a game where stones were thrown to land and stay on a large rock. Using that as an image, he invented basketball.

 
The poet Robert Burns was not carried away by his renown. "When proud misfortune's ebbing tide recedes," he wrote in one letter, "you will bear me witness, that when my bubble of fame was at the highest, I stood, unintoxicated, with the inebriating cup in my hand, looking forward with rueful resolve to the hastening time when the blow of Calumny should dash it to the ground, with all the eagerness of vengeful triumph." His mother stressed the emptiness of the "bubble of fame." In response to one of the first statues erected to her son (he is reputed to have, with Columbus and Lenin (for a while), the most statues in the world) she is reported to have quoted scripture: "Aye, Robbie...ye asked for bread and they've given ye a stone." Moms are tough.
 
An argument started by Clinton has been that the terrorist acts plaguing the world are criminal and should be dealt with by courts. The Muslim convert, Adebolajo, who hacked the British soldier, Fusilier Rigby, to death with a meat cleaver, has filled an appeal of his life sentence conviction of murder claiming his act was a military operation and that he was a "soldier of Allah".
 
Golden Oldie:
 
Vessels classified as participating in  illegal, unregulated and under reported fishing are designated as such because they regularly ignore domestic and international fishing laws, fish in areas closed or restricted to commercial fishing, target endangered and at-risk species, and use illegal gear. A recent UBC study places the size of such fishing at between $1 billion and $2 billion annually, or between 15% and 26% of the total value of wild-caught imports.
 
Charles Darwin’s last book, published in 1881, was a study of the earthworm. His book before that was The Power of Movement in Plants (1880).
 
In his definitive book, Models of Madness, John Read, a clinical psychologist at Liverpool University, showed that in the 10 studies testing the matter, the more extreme the childhood adversity in the home--by the parents either with abuse or the lack of love, the greater the risk of adult psychosis. But....one can always wonder if parents prone to that behavior bring bad genes to the table as well.
 
AAAAAAaaaaannnnndddddd.....the family tree of House Targaryen:
 

No comments: