Just in Case...

...there was any question about the correlations discussed in this post, one of the stellar GOP presidential candidates spells it out clearly.

From Good.Is...

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum has really gone after higher education lately. Earlier this month, he called President Obama's suggestion that everyone should go to college "elitist snobbery." Now, he's speaking out in response to Obama's State of the Union education plans:

"It’s no wonder President Obama wants every kid go to go college... The indoctrination that occurs in American universities is one of the keys to the left holding and maintaining power in America. And it is indoctrination. If it was the other way around, the ACLU would be out there making sure there wasn’t one penny of government dollars going to colleges and universities, right?"

Looks like some in the GOP know a thing or two about their base.

View From Our Window: Gotham

A quick overnighter for a wonderful surprise party.  It was a busy 28 hours packed with lots of old friends, good food, plenty of cocktails, my new favorite park (High Line), and a beautiful panoramic view of the city.

Dumb, Prejudice, ???

Where, oh where, to begin?

From LiveScience...

There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy. 

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. 

Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.

Then there's this which I just happened to come across a few hours after the above.

Perfect confirmation from HuffPo...

A little more than a year after the conservative-led state board of education in Texas approved massive changes to its school textbooks to put slavery in a more positive light, a group of Tea Party activists in Tennessee has renewed its push to whitewash school textbooks. The group is seeking to remove references to slavery and mentions of the country's founders being slave owners. 

According to reports, Hal Rounds, the Fayette County attorney and spokesman for the group, said during a recent news conference that there has been "an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another." 

The group demanded that Tennessee lawmakers change state laws governing school curricula. The group called for textbook selection criteria to include: "No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership."

Definitely not the brightest bulbs in the pack.

Minimalist Transit

These wouldn't help mush if you're lost but on a wall they're pretty nice.  

The four I've ridden the most over the years...

DC's is so anemic.

Available here.

Sun Storm

Right now, the biggest solar storm since 2005 is hitting Earth.  The impact?  A few planes have been rerouted and phenomenal aurora borealis.

Gorgeous.

The (Not So) Grand Old Party

Watching the Republicans candidates cannibalize each other over the past few months has warmed my heart.

Newt's victory yesterday in SC...awesome! To paraphrase another pillar of the GOP, keep it up guys you're doing a heckuva job.

From CTV News (Canada)...

America's long-held distrust of intellectuals is legendary, but the already perplexing national trait has moved into overdrive in the Republican presidential race, with Mitt Romney facing heat for knowing French and Jon Huntsman viewed with suspicion because he speaks Mandarin. 

In South Carolina, a pair of Newt Gingrich attack ads against Romney focus on his ability to -- mon Dieu! -- speak French.  Romney "will say anything to win, anything, and just like John Kerry, he speaks French, too," the narrator intones menacingly as a jaunty French accordion tune plays in the background. Romney is seen speaking French in the web spot. 

Huntsman, for his part, has tried to use his acuity in Mandarin to portray himself as a serious presidential contender who could sit down and make progress with America's biggest trade irritant. Instead, his penchant for breaking into the language in debates -- and even during campaign stops in South Carolina -- has raised the hackles of some Republicans.  

"You don't speak Mandarin during a Republican debate," griped Joe Scarborough, former congressman for the party and now host of MSNBC's "Morning Joe." Chimed in Michael Steele, former head of the Republican National Committee: "I thought he was ordering takeout."

China's Spark

No matter how big the economic, cultural, or technological change they all start with one person who dared to think differently.

From NPR...

"Back then, even one straw belonged to the group," says Yen Jingchang, who was a farmer in Xiaogang in 1978. "No one owned anything."  At one meeting with communist party officials, a farmer asked: "What about the teeth in my head? Do I own those?" Answer: No. Your teeth belong to the collective.

"Work hard, don't work hard — everyone gets the same," he says. "So people don't want to work." 

So, in the winter of 1978, after another terrible harvest, they came up with an idea: Rather than farm as a collective, each family would get to farm its own plot of land. If a family grew a lot of food, that family could keep some of the harvest. 

This is an old idea, of course. But in communist China of 1978, it was so dangerous that the farmers had to gather in secret to discuss it. Despite the risks, they decided they had to try this experiment — and to write it down as a formal contract, so everyone would be bound to it. By the light of an oil lamp, Yen Hongchang wrote out the contract. 

The contract also recognized the risks the farmers were taking. If any of the farmers were sent to prison or executed, it said, the others in the group would care for their children until age 18.

The audio...

Shoot First, Focus Later

To get the effect, click on parts of the images in the foreground and background. 

Very intriguing. (thx KS)

From Lytro...

[The light field] is the amount of light traveling in every direction through every point in space. Conventional cameras cannot record the light field.

The light field sensor captures the color, intensity and vector direction of the rays of light. This directional information is completely lost with traditional camera sensors, which simply add up all the light rays and record them as a single amount of light.

[Light field cameras] allow both the picture taker and the viewer to focus pictures after they're snapped, shift their perspective of the scene, and even switch seamlessly between 2D and 3D views.

This Week's Bread

It had been awhile since I made bread so on Monday, since it was a holiday, I decided to crank out a couple of loaves.

The plan was to make one a plain loaf as well as a raisin/walnut loaf but the walnuts had gone AWOL so it was audible time.  Out came a dried cherry/pepita bread and a plain loaf (no problem with that one).

We kept one and the other went to a neighbor.

Tomorrow the walnut/raisin bread will at last make an appearance.

The recipe minus the audible

Occupy Lynching

I thought I knew what a lynching is but apparently not, at least as applied under California law.

From MSNBC...

Sergio Ballesteros, 30, has been involved in Occupy LA since the movement had its California launch in October. But this week, his activism took an abrupt turn when he was arrested on a felony charge — lynching. 

Under the California penal code, lynching is “taking by means of a riot of any person from the lawful custody of any peace officer," where "riot" is defined as two or more people threatening violence or disturbing the peace. The original purpose of the legal code section 405(a) was to protect defendants in police custody from vigilante mobs — especially black defendants from racist groups.

A wholly inappropriate use of the statute.

Dr. King on Capitalism

Well said.

From Good.Is...

The profit motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic system, encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that inspires men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life. It can make men so I-centered that they no longer are Thou-centered. Are we not too prone to judge success by the index of our salaries and the size of the wheel base on our automobiles, and not by the quality of our service and relationship to humanity? Capitalism may lead to a practical materialism that is as pernicious as the theoretical materialism taught by Communism.

The Redneck Shop

Poetic justice at its best.

From the NYT...

LAURENS, S.C. — The Redneck Shop has been selling Confederate bikinis and white satin robes on the historic courthouse square in this former mill town for so long that most people have learned to ignore it... 

...Now, in a quirk of fate laced with lawsuits, religious conversions and a small-town Southern narrative Harper Lee might deliver, a black pastor will eventually control what just might be the most famous white supremacist shop in America. 

Last month, a state circuit judge in Greenwood, S.C., decided that Pastor Kennedy’s tiny New Beginning Missionary Baptist Church held the valid title to the old Echo Theater, whose lobby the Redneck Shop occupies. It was handed over fair and square years earlier by an acolyte of John Howard, the Klan leader who founded the shop.

The Long Game

An excellent fact based review of President Obama's first term which, if read objectively, would silence detractors from both the right and the left. 

From Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Beast...

You hear it everywhere. Democrats are disappointed in the president. Independents have soured even more. Republicans have worked themselves up into an apocalyptic fervor. And, yes, this is not exactly unusual. 

A president in the last year of his first term will always get attacked mercilessly by his partisan opponents, and also, often, by the feistier members of his base. And when unemployment is at remarkably high levels, and with the national debt setting records, the criticism will—and should be—even fiercer. But this time, with this president, something different has happened. It’s not that I don’t understand the critiques of Barack Obama from the enraged right and the demoralized left. It’s that I don’t even recognize their description of Obama’s first term in any way. The attacks from both the right and the left on the man and his policies aren’t out of bounds. They’re simply—empirically—wrong.

Dismantled

A "more sustainable" kindai tuna gets the slice and dice treatment.

From Bon Appetit...

Reminds me of the pig from a little while ago.

Children of the Disappeared

Absolutely tragic.

From Marie Claire...

On a cold, gray August day in 2003, Victoria Donda, a 26-year-old law student, got a call from her friend Isaac. "We need to meet. It's urgent," he said. The petite Argentine was having a hellish week. Her father had tried to kill himself and now lay comatose with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. She had barely left his side since, even to shower or eat. Now, her head spinning from lack of sleep, her dark eyes swollen and red from crying, Victoria raced from the hospital to a nearby café to meet Isaac. 

Earlier that week, the Argentine government had publicized allegations that her father, along with other ex-military officers, had taken part in Argentina's military dictatorship in the 1970s. He was accused of interrogating and torturing prisoners; he'd tried to commit suicide the night the news broke. Entering the café and sliding into a seat by the window, Victoria desperately hoped that Isaac, a friend from her volunteer work, would tell her the charges had been a huge mistake. Instead, he just looked at her, his eyes welling up behind his thick glasses. 

"Negrita," he said, using a term of endearment for the black-haired Victoria, "you are the daughter of a couple murdered during the dictatorship. The people who raised you aren't your parents," he continued. She'd been kidnapped, and her identity had been changed at birth.

Blind Tennis

First blind soccer now blind tennis. Fantastic.

From Oddity Central...

The creation of the sport is largely credited to Miyoshi Takei, who in spite of his blindness, started to play tennis as a kid with the encouragement of his high school teacher. His only aim at the time was to hit a ball that was flying through the air as hard as he could, even though he couldn’t see it. After several trials, he finally invented a special kind of tennis ball that is spongy and light in weight. The ball rattles, so that blind players can track its movement with their ears. Miyoshi’s endeavors met with success and the first national blind tennis championships were held in Japan in the year 1990. Today, hundreds of Japanese players take part every year and a few from other countries too, such as China, Korea, Taiwan, Britain and the United States.

Blind tennis is played on a badminton court with string taped to the lines so players can feel the boundaries. Junior-sized rackets are used to hit the ball. Players who are deemed legally blind wear eye masks to level the field. They are expected to hit the ball after it bounces two to three times, depending on the level of their visual impairment.

Shredding Crow

To quote a friend of mine, "this bird can board better than I can." (thx AG)

From The Atlantic...

I wanted to know if there was a greater significance to this video and this amazing bird. So, I called up Alan Kamil, who has been studying corvids for decades and is co-director of the Center for Avian Intelligence at the University of Nebraska. I've got to send you this YouTube clip of this crow sledding down a roof in Russia, I told him.

Across the phone line, I heard Kamil gamely open his email and begin to watch the video. Like most people who watch the video, he chuckled and said, "Wow, this is cool," a proposition to which I assented.

Then I started my questioning. What can we learn from this YouTube video? How can we explain this bird's behavior? Is there some natural analog to this in the wild? Was there some kind of greater lesson here about the evolutionary process or how crows use play?

Smoke It

Thanks to my brother-in-law's wonderful family and his mom who lugged it over from Sweden, we now have a new culinary gizmo with which to experiment...a smoker.

First up was the dish that led to our initial smoker infatuation during our Sweden visit, aspen smoked trout.

Next came a first time experiment in making beef jerky.  And experiment we did.  Spicy Bourbon Honey beef jerky, half with smoke and half without.

Fantastically delicious and a great snack for a cross-country flight.

Thanks to my Swedish family, I'm now solidly on the smokey path but I promise, I won't smoke the TV.

Here's the jerky recipe, sans smoke.

Double Take

Nice photos huh?

Not quite. They're paintings.

 From Flavorwire...

Artist Dennis Wojtkiewicz’s photorealistic paintings of succulent fruit could easily be a series of macro photos, but they are indeed hand painted.  Strawberries, apples, and [other fruits] are rendered with incredible detail right down to every fiber, hair, and seed.

Offside Explained

Those Brits are very clever.

From SlamXHype...

To coincide with the London Olympics later this year, The Royal Mint has issued a new 50p coin which attempts to explains football’s offside rule. The coin is part of a set released to celebrate the Olympics, and designed with function in mind; to explain a rule which leaves so many people confused.

I can't wait to get my hands on a few of these.

Stick Together

Simply brilliant.

From MyModernMet...

Equipped only with some rolls of brown packing tape and a scalpel, artist Max Zorn constructs unbelievably realistic portraits. This new medium that Zorn works with is so fascinating because it is such a common item most of us take for granted.  

These artworks from his Stick Together series rely on backlighting to distinguish the different shades of the brown tone. He also has an exceptional grasp of layering and carving when working with the sticky materials.

Gold, Frankincense, & Myrrh

Today being the Epiphany/12th day of Christmas (hint, hint...time to take down the Christmas decorations) there's no better day to take a look at the gifts of the Three Magi.

From The Independent (UK)...

They journeyed from the East to pay homage to the boy king bearing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. But they would struggle to complete the feat today. Gold prices are soaring on commodity markets, myrrh crops have been hit by drought – and now frankincense could soon be no more. 

Solid frankincense resin can be sold at up to £37.33 per kilo (about $75). Myrrh is roughly twice as expensive, but prices are volatile. And four days before Christmas, an ounce of gold costs £1,029.20 on the international market – up by nearly 20 per cent this year. 

But the worst news comes from Dutch ecologists studying populations of Boswellia in Ethiopia, who warn that the number of the frankincense-producing trees could halve in the next 15 years and eventually cease altogether if factors such as fire, grazing and insect attack go unchecked. An extinction of Boswellia would put an end to a millennia-old trade in the aromatic resin, which peaked under the Roman Empire and still provides materials for the perfume and aromatherapy industries today.

Off the Couch

The extrapolation of the data is a bit much but the main point doesn't change.  This would make for a good New Year's resolution for the couch potatoes of the world.

From MSNBC...

Watching an hour of TV after the age of 25 can shorten the viewer's life by just under 22 minutes, according to researchers in Australia. 

Smoking two cigarettes has approximately the same effect. 

The problem is not actually TV itself but the lack of activity by the viewer for long periods, the researches said. Cardiovascular disease, diabetes, excess weight and other health problems are associated with a sedentary lifestyle. 

Meanwhile, a large study in Taiwan found that doing just 15 minutes of moderate exercise a day might add three years to your life.

Off to climb close to 500 steps.

Some "Gentle People"

Of course, the entire Amish community shouldn't be tainted by the horrific deeds of a few but this article certainly paints a disturbing picture of broader problems within certain Amish communities.  

From Legal Affairs...

To the hordes of tourists who travel to Pennsylvania Dutch country each year to go to quilting bees and shop for crafts, the Gentle People, as the Amish are known, represent innocence. They are a people apart, removed in place and arrested in time. They reject the corruptions of modernity—the cars that have splintered American communities and the televisions that have riveted the country's youth. The Amish way of life is grounded in agriculture, hard work, and community. Its deliberate simplicity takes the form of horse-drawn buggies, clothes that could have come from a Vermeer painting, and a native German dialect infused with English words... 

...In some church districts, which encompass only two or three dozen families scattered along back roads, there appear to be many crimes like Johnny and Eli's to forgive. No statistics are available, but according to one Amish counselor who works with troubled church members across the Midwest, sexual abuse of children is "almost a plague in some communities." Some police forces and district attorneys do their best to step in, though they are rarely welcomed. Others are slow to investigate or quick to let off Amish offenders with light punishments. When that happens, girls like Mary are failed three times: by their families, their church, and their state.

Waiting for 77 Years

A remarkable story about loss, life, and finding family almost eight decades later.

From MSNBC...

For most of her 100 years, Minka Disbrow tried to find out what became of the precious baby girl she gave up for adoption after being raped as a teen. 

She hoped, but never imagined, she'd see her Betty Jane again. 

The cruel act of violence bore in Disbrow an enduring love for the child. She kept a black and white photograph of the baby bundled in blankets and tucked inside a basket. 

It was the last she saw of the girl — until the phone rang in her California apartment in 2006 with the voice of an Alabama man and a story she could have only dreamed.

Close Call

Taken off the coast of Santa Cruz, CA in late October 2011.

Return of the Porch

This article reminds me of a post from a couple of years ago related to the societal implications of porches vs. patios.

From The Atlantic...

Most of us can recognize a product of the 1990s McMansion boom when we pull into a subdivision and see one. But these trends suggest that 10 years from now, a keen eye will be able to identify the homes that were built - or renovated - during the recession. Their hallmarks? Infill location, simpler detailing and more durable, low-maintenance exteriors. And porches. People are pretty into porches right now. 

"I always interpret it as of one of the obvious manifestations of the New Urbanism movement, where there was more outward emphasis on homes integrated into a larger community, homes where people would interact more with their neighbors, going back to small-town living," Baker says. "Rather than isolation and security and safety, where everyone had their own privacy, their own big yard with big fences around it, where they were trying not to interact with others." 

The rise of the porch, in other words, may suggest a decline of interest in the heavily fortified privacy that was promised by the McMansion.

After living in a house with a porch for over 15 years (not much longer though), there's no question that a porch has an impact on the dynamics of a neighborhood.  It's nice to see they're making a comeback.

"The Art of Listening"

Late one night several years ago, while attending the Oregon Country Fair, I came across a girl telling a wonderful story about a bush and the magical huayruro seeds that it produces. I don't remember any of the details of the story but vividly remember how captivated I was as I listened to her story.

From the NYT...

I heard the two men talking about a third old man who had recently died. One of them said, “I was visiting him at his home. He started to tell me an amazing story about something that had happened to him when he was young. But it was a long story. Night came, and we decided that I should come back the next day to hear the rest. But when I arrived, he was dead.” 

The man fell silent. I decided not to leave that bench until I heard how the other man would respond to what he’d heard. I had an instinctive feeling that it would prove to be important. 

Finally he, too, spoke. 

“That’s not a good way to die — before you’ve told the end of your story.” 

It struck me as I listened to those two men that a truer nomination for our species than Homo sapiens might be Homo narrans, the storytelling person. What differentiates us from animals is the fact that we can listen to other people’s dreams, fears, joys, sorrows, desires and defeats — and they in turn can listen to ours.

Videorative Portrait

I had to watch this video twice before I could figure out what was going on. It's kind of interesting though. From Fastcodesign...

Spanish artist Sergio Albiac wants to dig deeper. So he recently created a “videorative portrait”--a dynamic painting in which the face of filmmaker Randall Okita is made up of tagged videos about the subject’s life and work. In doing so, Albiac hoped to “create a new type of portrait,” he says. “One that goes beyond physical appearances and is more realistic, as it renders the founding blocks of the intimate world: your memories, your relationships, and your emotions.”

11:58:43

Not very long at all.

From Culture of Science...

The Writing's on the Wall

(Thx BD)

Gratitude

I'm starting the new year filled with gratitude.

(Thx BD)