When has a culture owed so little to its few “great” minds or its few hereditarily fortunate men and women? One of the contrasts between the culture of Europe and that of the United States is that the older culture traditionally depended on the monumental accomplishments of the few, while the newer culture – diffused, elusive, process-oriented – depended more on the novel, accreting ways of the many.--Boorstin
The north pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus is unexpectedly fascinating and complex with large and deep fissures suggestive of global interplay between the surface and potential seas underneath, seas that future missions might target for signs of life.
Witchcraft: By the fall of 1692, twenty men and women, ages 20 to 80, had been executed under the imprimatur of the highest officials in Massachusetts. (Contrary to popular memory, however, no one was burned alive. Nineteen people were hanged, and one man was pressed to death with large stones in a failed attempt to extract a confession.) As many as 165 more, in two dozen villages and towns, had been publicly accused of sorcery; they ranged from an American Indian slave to one of the richest merchants in the colony. In 1693, the executions stopped, the accusers fell silent, the jails emptied. The magic had stopped.
Who is...Irving Berlin?
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., has called for the criminal investigation of people and organizations that are seen as global-warming deniers. This would include lawsuits against the coal and oil industries, certain think tanks and other organizations that question global-warming. Apparently they would use RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) statutes rather than old fashioned Grand Inquisitors. (Of note, Holocaust denial is a crime in many countries.)
Kakistocracy: n: 1. government by the worst persons; a form of government in which the worst persons are in power. Kakistocracy entered English in the early 1800s from the Greek word kákistos meaning "worst," and -cracy, a combining form meaning "rule" or "government."
There have been at least four attempts in five years in which criminal networks with suspected Russian ties sought to sell radioactive material to extremists through Moldova, an investigation by The Associated Press has found. One investigation uncovered an attempt to sell bomb-grade uranium to a real buyer from the Middle East, the first known case of its kind.
From The Daily Mail: "A successful doctor and mother of three had been taking cocaine and drinking with two men before she was found dead in the doorway of a Manhattan apartment, a source told Daily Mail Online. Kiersten Cerveny, 38, had been taking cocaine while she was with Marc Henry Johnson, a married 51-year-old television and movie producer and another man, James 'Pepsi' Holder, 60, who is being sought by police, before she died. Cerveny had passed out and been taken downstairs by the two men, the source said. Police were today examining the scene of the death, at an apartment block in the Chelsea area of Manhattan. Cerveny had been drinking heavily in the Lower East Side of the city before partying with the men in the third-floor apartment. She was not wearing any underwear at the time and they were later discovered in her purse. Cerveny, 38, had a notable career in dermatology after graduating magna cum laude from Duke University. She had risen to be an assistant professor and lived in a million dollar home in Long Island with her second husband and their three young children." This is an astonishing story worth looking up.
For centuries, the real cost of labor has been increasing while the real cost of raw materials has been declining. That’s why we can afford to buy so much more stuff than our ancestors could. As a labor-intensive activity, recycling is an increasingly expensive way to produce materials that are less and less valuable.
Alexander's Ragtime Band, Anything You Can Do, Easter Parade, I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm, There's No Business Like Show Business, White Christmas. Irving Berlin had no musical training, and his piano skills were the most rudimentary of all the great composers, but he had an ear for melody and soon he began writing music as well. (Famously, Berlin only ever learned to play in the key of F-sharp, and had a specially designed piano that allowed him to transpose keys by turning a small wheel.) The combination of his lack of training, on the one hand, and seemingly inexhaustible, high-level production, on the other, spawned urban legends, which would persist his whole life, that he had between one and three 'colored boys' in the back room who wrote his songs. --from The B Side by Ben Yagoda
Politics has little in common with science. "Strictly speaking, pure science is about the search for the genuine causes of observable phenomena; politics is about gaining the authority to pursue favored outcomes. The method of science entails tolerance of and relentless but reasoned criticism of all views, including one’s own; the tools of politics include what urbanist Jane Jacobs calls “deception for the sake of the task.” Real science is about critically examining premises; pure politics is about defeating your opponent."--Sandy Ikeda, a professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY
Berlin has become a magnet for European youth, with 40,000 new residents flocking to the city every year, but only about 8,000 new housing units are added each year.
A rich entrepreneur named Martin Shkreli recently bought the rights to Daraprim — a drug used mainly to treat life-threatening, parasitic infections in babies — and almost overnight raised its price from $13.50 to $750 per tablet. That’s over a 5,000 percent increase. What we see is a wealthy man profiting, or at least trying to profit, from the misfortunes of the ill and less well-off. What makes his efforts possible is the complex and expensive regulations prevent a competitive drug from being developed. Note that the drug Daraprim is generic. Such behavior is possible only with real or de facto monopoly.
The word diamond is derived from the Greek adamas, meaning 'unalterable' or 'unbreakable.' Each diamond is a single crystal. In a typical diamond there are about a million billion billion atoms perfectly arranged and assembled into this pyramidal structure. And it is this structure that accounts for its remarkable properties. In this formation, the electrons are locked into an extremely stable state, and this is what gives it its legendary strength. It is also transparent, but with an unusually high optical dispersion, which means that it splits light that enters it into its constituent colors, giving it its bright rainbow sparkle. The combination of extreme hardness and optical luster makes diamonds almost flawless as gemstones. Because of their hardness, virtually nothing can scratch them, and so they keep their perfectly faceted shape and pristine sparkle not just throughout the lifetime of the wearer but throughout the lifetime of a civilization. Even in antiquity diamond was known to be the hardest material in the world.
For 12 consecutive years — from 2001 through 2012 — each home run leader in the American League had a Hispanic surname. When two American boys whose ancestors came from India tied for first place in the U.S. National Spelling Bee in 2014, it was the seventh consecutive year in which the U.S. National Spelling Bee was won by an Asian Indian. Does inequity of outcome imply unfairness?
AAAAnnnnddddd....a picture of a whippit with the myostatin gene missing:
No comments:
Post a Comment