Wesleyan's Emmy Winners

This year's winners are:
Bradley Whitford ’81 for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for Transparent.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus P’14 for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for Veep.
Executive producer and writer D. B. Weiss ’93 for Outstanding Drama Series for Game of Thrones. He also won with David Benioff for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series for 'Mother's Mercy.'
Shark Tank won for Outstanding Structured Reality Program. Kenneth Fuchs ’83 is a director on the show.
Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown won for Outstanding Informational Series or Special. Ben Selkow '96 is a producer.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart won for Outstanding Variety Talk Series. Juliet Werner ’03 is a segment producer.
Meredith Tucker '92 received an Emmy award for Outstanding Casting on Veep.

Andreas Burgess ’01 won a News & Documentary Emmy Award for his work as director of photography on A Crime to Remember.
After Tiller, a documentary directed by Martha Shane '05 and Lana Wilson '05 won Best Documentary at the News & Documentary Emmys.
James Novogrod '02, an NBC producer won two News & Documentary Emmys for Outstanding Hard News Report in a Regularly Scheduled Newscast and Outstanding Coverage of a Breaking News Story in a Regularly Scheduled Newscast.
Michelle Rabinowitz Carney '02 won a News & Documentary Emmy for Outstanding Sports Documentary for We Could Be King.

Coywolf

Members of the dog genus Canis: gray wolves, domestic dogs, dingoes, Ethiopian wolves, coyotes, and golden jackals cannot interbreed with members of the wider dog family: the Canidae, such as South American canids, foxes, African wild dogs, bat-eared foxes or raccoon dogs; or, if they could, their offspring would be infertile.
Members of the genus Canis can, however, all interbreed to produce fertile offspring, with two exceptions: the side-striped jackal and black-backed jackal. (From Wiki, which has a nice little summary.)

 

The coywolf — a hybrid of the coyote and the wolf that is also known as the Eastern coyote. According to a new article from "The Economist", their population seems to have reached more than a million. These animals have a completely new genetic makeup: Their genes are about one-quarter wolf DNA and two-thirds coyote DNA; the rest is from domesticated dogs. A 2013 study suggests this dog DNA is mostly from a few specific breeds, including German Shepherds and Doberman Pincers.
Scientists think this intermixing began with wild wolves in southern Ontario about a century or two ago.

While the grey wolf and the coyote are each other's closest living relatives, the two animals separated evolutionarily 1 to 2 million years ago. Usually hybrids — even between two closely related species — don't survive as well as their parent species, but the coywolves seem to be an exception.
ccording to The New York Times' Moises Velazquez-Manoff: "[The coywolf] can be as much as 40 percent larger than the Western coyote, with powerful wolf-like jaws; it has also inherited the wolf's more social nature, which allows for pack hunting." According to "The Economist": "With larger jaws, more muscle and faster legs, individual coywolves can take down small deer. A pack of them can even kill a moose."


  The Eastern coyote, an eastern wolf-coyote hybrid, pictured in West Virginia.

Cab Thoughts 11/4/15

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a
torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an
oracle, is inborn in us. -Paul Valery, poet and philosopher (1871-1945)

 

 

 

The Department of Homeland Security and representatives with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection have declined to comment on why certain states have been singled out, but starting in 2016, residents of New York, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and American Samoa will need a passport to fly domestically. All other states will still be able to use their state-issued driver's licenses and IDs - for now, at least.

 

Autism is diagnosed in 1 percent of individuals in Asia, Europe, and North America, and 2.6 percent of South Koreans. We know there is a strong genetic component to autism -- so much so that until recently autism was thought to be a primarily genetic disease. There is clearly an underlying genetic component to many cases of autism. If one identical twin has autism, the probability that the other is also affected is around 70 percent. Until recently, the sibling of an autistic child, even though sharing many of the same parental genes and overall home environment, had only a 1 in 20 probability of being afflicted. Meanwhile, the neighbor's child, genetically unrelated, has only a 0.6 percent probability, But even though millions of dollars have been spent trying to identify 'the genes' for autism, so far the picture is still murky. The hundreds of gene mutations identified in the past decade do not explain the majority of today's cases. And while we searched for genes, a big epidemic was brewing.


In business, the "holy grail" is to get long-term, recurring business from the same customer, rather than having to make a new sale each time. In the late 1800s, William Painter had achieved this with cork, a disposable sealant. One used the cork, then got rid of it and bought more. He encouraged a young employee named King Gillette to invent something with this same disposable quality, and Gillette came up with the idea of a disposable razor blade.

Who is...Patricia Highsmith?

Graham on speculation: "To see why temporarily high returns don't prove anything, imagine that two places are 130 miles apart. If I observe the 65-mph speed limit, I can drive that distance in two hours. But if I drive 130 mph, I can get there in one hour. If I try this and survive, am I 'right'? Should you be tempted to try it, too, because you hear me bragging that it 'worked'? Rashy gimmicks for beating the market are much the same: In short streaks, so long as your luck holds out, they work. Over time, they will get you killed."

 

A "Brocken Spectre" occurs when a person is standing above the horizon, causing a shadow to be cast on the mist or cloud below. As a result, a circular rainbow halo forms around the shadow or "Spectre."  In essence, it is a man's own shadow cast on mist.A "Brocken Spectre" occurs when a person is standing above the horizon, causing a shadow to be cast on the mist or cloud below. As a result, a circular rainbow halo forms around the shadow or "Spectre." so named because of sightings on the Brocken, the highest peak of Germany's Harz Mountains.

Mawkish: a.: 1. characterized by sickly sentimentality; weakly emotional; maudlin. 2. having a mildly sickening flavor; slightly nauseating. Mawkish entered English in the late 1600s from the now-obsolete word mawk meaning "maggot."

Two documents were issued in the mid-1980s under the auspices of the Roman Catholic church - one is a document from the U.S. National Conference of Catholic Bishop, and the second is from a 30-member Lay Commission of Catholics. "The work of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops' ad hoc committee and the Lay Commission both start from the same presumption: that there is a well-defined body of Catholic thought or, more accurately, set of values, which united with economic principles will yield an economic policy prospectus.  The truth is that there is no such well-defined body of Catholic thought, i.e., set of values, and it is quixotic to believe that there could be.  If the history of the Catholic Church teaches us anything it is that the Church as an organization has extraordinary survival characteristics both across nations and through time.  The Catholic Church is nothing if not universal, i.e., catholic.  It has been and is all things to all people.  Can we reasonably expect such an organization to have a unified view of what constitutes justice, or what trade-off is appropriate between present and future poverty, or between freedom and distributive capacity." --from Alchian's 1986 essay, co-authored with William Meckling, "The Bishops and the Lay Commission"

The Smithsonian is getting calls from a campaign to have the bust of Margaret Sanger removed from the institute.In 1952, novelist Patricia Highsmith published the novel The Price of Salt -- the inspiration behind the highly-anticipated lesbian drama " Caro,"  starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. Also included in her body work are the famous novels  Strangers on a Train, which later became an Alfred Hitchcock film, and The Talented Mr. Ripley.

 

Jacob Fugger changed history because he lived in an age when, for the first time, money made all the difference in war and, hence, politics.  He paid the bribes that secured Charles V's elevation as Holy Roman Emperor, he had also financed Charles's grandfather and taken his family, the Habsburgs, from the wings of European politics to center stage. Fugger made his mark in other ways, too. He roused commerce from its medieval slumber by persuading the pope to lift the ban on moneylending. He helped save free enterprise from an early grave by financing the army that won the German Peasants' War, the first great dash between capitalism and communism. He broke the back of the Hanseatic League, Europe's most powerful commercial organization before Fugger. He engineered a shady financial scheme that unintentionally provoked Luther to write his Ninety-five Theses, the document that triggered the Reformation, the earth-shattering event that cleaved European Christianity in two. He most likely funded Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe.--or so Greg Steinmetz believes in his book The Richest Man Who Ever Lived

That horrible picture of the drowned child is said to be a rallying point against Assad and his war. But the kid was a Kurd. His family were Kurdish refugees from Kobani who had to flee that city when it was besieged, not by Assad, but by Assad’s enemy, ISIS. What can be done here? It is likely that Europe will never run out of people to rescue and will exhaust their resources long before. And what of the inherent changes in the European nations? In his 1964 “Suicide of the West” James Burnham predicted that the magnanimity of liberals, who subordinate the interests of their own people and nations to utopian and altruistic impulses, would bring about an end to Western civilization. After all, civilizations are of fragile components.


"Woodpeckers don't get concussions, but there's nothing we can learn [from them]," Dr Ainissa Ramirez said on the podcast StarTalk.

Tolkien's mother, Mabel, valued learning and vigorously set about transmitting what she knew to her son. She instructed him in Latin, French, German, and the rudiments of linguistics, awakening in him a lifelong thirst for languages, alphabets, and etymologies. She taught him to draw and to paint, arts in which he would develop his own unmistakable style, primitive and compelling, She passed on to him her peculiar calligraphy; he would later master traditional forms and invent his own. She tried to teach him piano, although that proved a failure. And she introduced him to children's literature.
But Mabel wished to give her children more than the metaphorical immortality of transmitted gifts; she wished to give them true eternity. This she accomplished in 1900, by bringing herself and her two boys into the Roman Catholic Church, a controversial and unpopular move in Anglican England.

Hillary and her staff have announced they are trying to show more spontaneity and humor. They seemingly see no conflict between planning and spontaneity.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2009/09/fundamentalist.html


The earliest settlers of the lands that lie within the heart of Europe between the Carpathian Mountains and the Danube were the Boii, a Celtic tribe on the run from northern floods. Those pioneers were gradually pushed out by Germanic warriors, who were then suppressed by the legions of imperial Rome. The Romans called the land 'Bohemia' after the Boii, which means that the territory was named by Italians in honor of the Irish.

 

The Southern Cross is such a famous constellation that it is depicted on the national flag of Australia.


Billions of research dollars have been spent on depression; probably less than a million has been spent to find treatments for psychopathy. One of the most striking peculiarities of psychopaths is that they lack empathy. They lie and manipulate yet feel no compunction or regrets -- in fact, they don't feel particularly deeply about anything at all. Images of psychopaths' brains made by Kent A. Kiehl show a pronounced thinning and underdevelopment of the paralimbic tissue, and area which includes the orbitofrontal cortex, the amygdala, the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula; that is, their brains look different. Some researchers have estimated that as many as 500,000 psychopaths inhabit the U.S. prison system, and there may be another 250,000 more living freely -- perhaps not committing serious crimes, but still taking advantage of those around them.

 

The Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report (MMWR) is the publication that provides how many people got sick or died last week.

 

In Mayan civilization, cacao beans were the currency, and counterfeiting cacao beans out of painted clay had become a thriving industry. Goods could be priced in units of cacao: a slave cost 100 beans, the services of a prostitute cost 10 beans, and a turkey cost 20 beans. While the Spanish conquistadors horded gold, the Mesoamericans horded cacao beans. In some parts of Latin America, the beans were used as a currency as late as the 19th century.

 

Nicknamed "Three Finger" by the press because a farming accident in his youth cost him parts of two fingers on his right hand, Mordecai Brown was one of the top Major League Baseball pitchers at the turn of the 20th century. He used his injury to his advantage, developing a unique grip on the ball that produced an unusual amount of spin, baffling batters. Over the course of his major league career, Brown won 239 games and lost just 130.

 

AAAAAnnnnnnddddd.........a Brocken Spectre:

 

The Creative Process

In 1815, Germany's General Music Journal published a letter in which Mozart described his creative process:

 

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer; say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. All this fires my soul, and provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost finished and complete in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. When I proceed to write down my ideas the committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is, as I said before, already finished; and it rarely differs on paper from what it was in my imagination."

This letter has been used as a classic explanation of the creative process, the appearance of the finished product through an almost mystical experience, almost devoid of work and sweat.
Regrettably, it is a forgery. More important, what is says and implies is untrue. Visionary moments are rare. Eureka breakthroughs unusual. The real creative person is more like Edison, indefatigable, tireless and methodical.
The lightening struck creator is a unicorn.

Vikings, Ibn Fadlan and Crichton‏

The Arab merchant Ibn Fadlan met the Vikings in a Bulghar encampment on the Volga, far east of Kiev, around 800A.D.. They were quite compelling people. They all wore some kind of indelible cosmetic, which may have been a tattoo, to draw attention to their eyes: men and women alike. They wanted people to be afraid of their gaze. "I have never seen bodies more perfect than theirs," he wrote. "They were like palm trees." They had no concept of privacy; their camp was an open latrine. The same for sex. Their drinking was appalling.
He describes a Viking funeral and it is incredibly savage, filled with ritualized drunkenness and violent, group rape.
It is Ibn Fadlan's writings that Crichton read before writing Eaters of the Dead which became the semi-wonderful "13th Warrior."

Sunday 11/1/15

Today is All Saints Day, a day of remembering the saints of the Church. At first the choice of the gospel, the Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes, might seem strange but, rather, it is illuminating. Christ's description of tho Good in the Beatitudes include meekness, the poor in spirit, those who mourn--they are not limited to the dramatic apostles, their dramatic lives and deaths.
In many respects these qualities are in the everyday.
Saint Irenaeus was a man of the Second Century, a man who campaigned against the Gnostics. He has a famous quote: “The glory of God is man fully alive.” This has been debated for years; does it imply the value of self fulfillment, without God? In fairness, he answers this himself in the next phrase: “The life of a man is the vision of God.” But it implies that spiritual fulfillment is possible for humans in the everyday.
The author Alan Furst gave an interview once on his writings, a collection of WWII spy stories that describes heroism of everyday men during the time before the war. He says that his readings of the period have led him to believe that evil, a true evil life, requires full time application. That it was simply too hard to be devoted to evil without eliminating all other elements of your life. (Or perhaps evil eventually fills the moral space?) So the caricatures of Evil are true.
Goodness, on the other hand, emerged as a by-product of living a normal thoughtful life inspired, as Irenaeus would say, by God.
Not at all tooth and claw. And achievable by all.

Cab Thoughts 10/31/15

"If we do not allow free-thinking in chemistry and biology, why should we allow it in morals and politics?"--Comte

In 1943, 26-year-old poet Robert Lowell was sentenced to jail for a year for evading the draft. Lowell refused to be drafted because he objected to saturation bombing in Europe and other Allied tactics. He served the term in New York's West Street jail. He had answered earlier draft calls willingly, and had even tried to enlist; on all occasions he had been turned down because of poor eyesight. There was every reason to think that he would be turned down again at his upcoming recall examination.

The $9 trillion drop in combined market cap between the MSCI All World index and Chinese stocks, is the second highest ever, surpassed only by the $13 plunge in global market capitalization in late 2008.

Immigrant migrations have different causes and the causes in Europe are wars. The homicidal xenophobes from militant Islam are one factor. 11 million Syrians have fled or been driven from their homes in that country's civil war since it started in 2011. The French hold the Americans responsible for one element: Libya. Since the ill-advised destabilization of Libya, France has been the preferred sanctuary for refugees from the resulting Libyan chaos. The U.N. says there are 60 million people displaced worldwide - the most since the U.N. started keeping records and the most since WWII.
In the U.S. the migrations are more complex. More than half of this nation's immigrants receive some kind of government welfare, a figure that's far higher than the native-born population.

Who is...William Marshall?

The Magna Carta of 1215 was a true intellectual revolution in the relationship between leaders and citizens but it began to fade in importance and, when John died, was not a relevant document. It was rescued by none other than William the Marshall who wanted to use it to strengthen the bond between the nobles and the new young king, Henry III. The reissued Charter played a crucial part in safeguarding the throne of the young Henry III and in ensuring the survival of the Angevin dynasty itself. It became the prototype for the broader pattern of reform in England and it placed Magna Carta at the center of that process of negotiation and careful compromise. 

When the Byzantine Christian emperor Basil defeated the Bulgarians in 1014, he had fifteen thousand Bulgarian war captives blinded. He left one man out of each hundred with one eye in order that he might lead the other ninety-nine homeward and thereby spread the terror.

An interesting site: http://www.theflightdeal.com/

At 10 in the morning on February 11th, 1963, the Beatles gathered at Abbey Road studios in London to make a debut album. Twelve hours later, they'd done it. the album was Please Please Me, contained 10 songs, including some of their most indelible early performances: 'I Saw Her Standing There,' 'There's a Place,' 'Do You Want to Know a Secret,' 'Baby It's You.' The final, "Twist and Shout," was added on at the end of the day. It took 12 hours and cost about 400 pounds. It is said to be the most natural production of the Beatles, raw and talent-laden, before they became sophisticated performers.

Angelina Jolie has resigned from the landmine clearing charity made famous by Princess Diana in a row over trustees being paid as much as 500 British pounds a day.

In the founding myth of the city of Rome, the twins Romulus and Remus established the city on the banks of the Tiber River in roughly 750 BCE and invited the outcasts of society to be its first citizens. there was a certain truth there. Rome was not produced by a single ethnically homogeneous people. Over the years and then the centuries, much of Rome's population came from outside Italy -- this even included some of the later emperors, such as Hadrian, who was Spanish, and writers like Columella, Seneca, and Martial, also Spanish-born. Celts, Arabs, Jews, and Greeks, among others, were included under the wide umbrella of Romanitas. This was the inevitable result of an imperial system that constantly expanded and frequently accepted the peoples of conquered countries as Roman citizens. Not until the end of the first century B.C. with the reign of Augustus, does a distinctively 'Roman' art, an identifiable 'Roman' cultural ideal, appear.

Jejune: adj: 1. without interest or significance; dull; insipid: a jejune novel. 2. juvenile; immature; childish: jejune behavior. Jejune comes from the Latin word jējūnus meaning "empty, poor, mean."

In 1920 the Psychologist Edward Thorndike, a lecturer at the Columbia School of Education, staged an experiment in which he asked two U.S. Army Air Service commanders who had recently returned from the Great War to evaluate their platoons of airmen according to the attractiveness of their outward appearance -- neatness, voice, physique, bearing, and 'energy.' Then he asked them to assess the same set of aviators according to their 'inner' qualities of personality and character -- among which he included intellect, dependability, loyalty, selflessness, and leadership skills.
In his seminal paper ''A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings,' Thorndike reported that the aviators who were rated highly on their external qualities were 33 percent more likely to receive favorable judgments from their officers when it came to their supposed 'inner,' psychological qualities, including their potential as future leaders. Physical attractiveness, in other words, embellished these men with added credibility. 'The correlations,' wrote Thorndike, 'were too high and too even.' The psychologist called this phenomenon the halo effect.

"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."--Keats

Or: "What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness. -Leo Tolstoy, novelist and philosopher (1828-1910)
 
Lula Mae Wright, the mother of the legendary Motown singer and songwriter Stevie Wonder, was born in Hurtsboro, Alabama in 1930. Her teenage mother gave her away when she was six months old, and she later lived from couch to couch before marrying a man who forced her into prostitution.

September 3rd was the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, a treaty that gave independence to the United States and defined its boundaries. You would think it would be celebrated.

It was also the anniversary of one of modern man's creepier episodes, the ending of the siege of Beslan. The Heroes of Beslan were finished off by Russian troops after the Heroes successfully attacked and captured a grade school. A grade school. In deference to one of modern society's weirder customs, Shamil Basayev, a militant Islamist and leader of the Chechen separatist movement, claimed responsibility for the Beslan school siege. 331 people were killed as a result of the siege, 186 of them children, and over 700 more individuals were injured. He did not comment on the choice of the attack target but it must have been that there was no nunnery available.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/12/bond-carol-bond.html

In the years after World War II, the Allies were concerned that the fragile economies of Germany and Japan would cause them to fall under the influence of the Soviet Union or Communist China. As a result, they took extraordinary steps to assist these economies -- for example, from 1947 to 1953, the U.S. and its Allies forgave essentially all of Germany's external debt, an amount estimated at 280% of Germany's GDP. Similarly, the U.S. gave Japan preferential status in trade and economic support, a strategy that worked so well that by 1970s, the U.S. considered Japan an economic threat and sought to open its doors to China as a counterbalance.

Any time you are overwhelmed with lawyers and juries in the world, Google "trial by ordeal," one of the precursors of modern justice.

The teachings of Confucius shape the daily lives of well over 1.6 billion people today, nearly a quarter of the world's population -- in a huge geographic swath stretching from northern Japan down to Java in Indonesia. Only Christianity can claim to hold greater sway over modern global culture. The most famous text associated with him, the Analects, consists, for the most part, of snippets of conversations he had with his students while instructing them on virtue, good government, interpersonal relations, ethics, and history. What Confucius taught was the wisdom of Chinese antiquity, a timeless code of morality and gracious vision of humanity. Many modern East Asians, exposed to Western ideas on civil liberties and political freedom, have perceived Confucius as an impediment to democracy and human rights in the region.

Humiliated repeatedly on medieval battlefields by armies from Pisa, Siena and Lucca, the Republic of Florence later employed its artist-scientists to combine with its soldiers to defeat the enemy by means of ingenious engineering. Already famous for his as yet uncompleted dome, Brunelleschi was dispatched in 1430 to Lucca, where he began to divert the River Serchio so as to flood the land around the city and force it to surrender. The still more ingenious Lucchesi, however, sallied out and breached Brunelleschi's new canal, flooding the plain in an unexpected way so that it demolished a dam built by the architect and swamped the Florentine camp. Seventy years later, a new republic tried a similar tactic, although this time the plan was to divert the River Arno away from Pisa so as to leave that city without water. The engineer employed to design the project was Leonardo da Vinci, an even more versatile figure than Brunelleschi, but his miscalculations with his canal were as embarrassing as his predecessor's. On this occasion the waterway was destroyed not by the defenders but by a storm which collapsed its walls. 

The House Agriculture Committee held a hearing on the government's official Dietary Guidelines, that decades of government warnings about whole milk may have been in error. 

"In fact, research published in recent years indicates that the opposite might be true: millions might have been better off had they stuck with whole milk. Scientists who tallied diet and health records for several thousand patients over ten years found, for example, that contrary to the government advice, people who consumed more milk fat had lower incidence of heart disease.
By warning people against full-fat dairy foods, the U.S. is "losing a huge opportunity for the prevention of disease," said Marcia Otto, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Texas, and the lead author of large studies published in 2012 and 2013, which were funded by government and academic institutions, not the industry. "What we have learned over the last decade is that certain foods that are high in fat seem to be beneficial." (WashPo)

AAAAaaaaaannnnnnddddd........a graph: