What Is The Word

Jul
19th

Sat

Pedestrian Ryan Johnson Pedestrian 2007 Wood, paint, 6 1/2’ x 4’ (via Guild & Greyshkul | Ryan Johnson

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Jul
3rd

Thu

WHO has not found the heaven below Will fail of it above. God’s residence is next to mine, His furniture is love.

Emily Dickinson.

— 100. “Who has not found the heaven below.” Part One: Life. Dickinson, Emily. 1924. Complete Poems

May
30th

Fri

Moqtada, his friends said, has always been a prankster, in ways both innocuous and macabre. Once, he made a big show of offering a 7-Up to a student, who was then surprised to learn that Sadr had filled the bottle with water. In a more recent incident, he anonymously sent Shaibani, the aide, text messages threatening to kill him, only to reveal later with laughter that it was all a practical joke.

— Sadr Pursues Image to Match His Power - washingtonpost.com

May
28th

Wed

Hangovers also have an emotional component. Kingsley Amis, who was, in his own words, one of the foremost drunks of his time, and who wrote three books on drinking, described this phenomenon as “the metaphysical hangover”: “When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover… . You have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is.

— Annals Of Drinking: A Few Too Many: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

May
21st

Wed

John Hinckley, the deranged would-be assassin who attempted to kill US president Ronald Reagan in 1981, claimed that he was inspired by it. He said that his action was an attempt to impress Foster. (The movie features a scene in which a mohawked De Niro attempts to assassinate a politician.) According to Mundell, the wave of sympathy for Reagan that was engendered by the assassination attempt deterred Democrats in Congress from voting against his proposed tax cuts. Because of this accident of history, the US administered a big fiscal stimulus at the same time that Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve was administering tight money. This, for Mundell, was vital in creating the era of prosperity that followed. ” Taxi Driver is the most important movie ever made from the standpoint of creating GDP,” Mundell told delegates. “It’s the movie that made the Reagan revolution possible. That movie was indirectly responsible for adding between $5trn and $15trn of output to the US economy.

— FT.com / Home UK / UK - Film that created the most wealth

After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit! Why? Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for. It’s hard to describe the level of energy in the Zappos culture—which means, by definition, it’s not for everybody. Zappos wants to learn if there’s a bad fit between what makes the organization tick and what makes individual employees tick—and it’s willing to pay to learn sooner rather than later. (About ten percent of new call-center employees take the money and run.)

— Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too - Harvard Business Online’s Bill Taylor

May
18th

Sun

Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL) is a sign language (now extinct), once widely used on the island of Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts, U.S., from the early 18th century to the mid 20th century. It was remarkable for its use by both deaf and hearing people in the community; consequently, deafness did not become a barrier to participation in public life. Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language is also notable for the role it played in the development of American Sign Language. The language was able to thrive on Martha’s Vineyard because of the unusually high percentage of deaf islanders. In 1854, when the island’s deaf population peaked, the United States national average was one deaf person in 5728, while on Martha’s Vineyard it was one in 155. In the town of Chilmark, where most of the deaf people lived, it was 1 in 25; in a section of Chilmark called Squibnocket, as much as a quarter of the population of 60 was deaf. Hearing people sometimes signed even when there were no deaf people present: children signed behind a schoolteacher’s back; adults signed to one another during church sermons; and farmers signed to their children across a wide field, where the spoken word would not carry[citation needed]. Frequently, the punchlines to dirty jokes were told only in sign language.

— Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Apr
26th

Sat

usa-00190 Cynthia was a prostitute in Las Vegas from the south. She helped me find a place to stay when we passed this wonderful ad. (via Subpage)

Apr
19th

Sat

Berlusconi claimed that he had to “dust off my playboy skills” with the Finnish president, Tarja Halonen, to convince her to locate the EFSA in Parma. This caused criticism from both Italy and Finland, with the Italian ambassador in Finland being summoned by the Finnish foreign minister.[40] Berlusconi later ‘retracted’ the comment by saying that “anyone who had seen a picture of Halonen must have been aware that he had been joking

— Silvio Berlusconi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Apr
18th

Fri

In the Middle East, it is widely rumored among American and coalition military forces stationed there that Solifugae will feed on living human flesh. The story goes that the creature will inject some anaesthetizing venom into the exposed skin of its sleeping victim, then feed voraciously, leaving the victim to awaken with a gaping wound. Solifugae, however, do not produce such an anaesthetic, and they do not attack prey larger than themselves unless threatened. Other stories include tales of them leaping into the air, disemboweling camels, screaming, and running alongside moving humvees; all of these tales are dubious at best.

— Solifugae - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Apr
17th

Thu

When a sighted 3-year-old is asked to “look up,” he will tilt his head upwards, even blindfolded. A blind 3-year-old raises her hands instead.

— How blind children learn the verb ‘see’ | Science Blog

The company uses re-purposed artificial snow machines to generate the floating ads and messages, dubbed Flogos. The machines can pop one Flogo out every 15 seconds, flooding the air with foamy peace signs or whatever shape a client desires. Renting the machine for a day starts out at a cost of about $2,500. Designers use computer software to make a stencil that when placed into the snow machine, “cuts the foam in the exact right shape,” said Flogo inventor Francisco Guerra. (via Sky-High Ads Float Like Clouds | LiveScience)

Mar
30th

Sun

Memory Palace

It was used in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as is sometimes mistakenly attributed to Cicero himself as Cicero describes it in his work De Oratore. (Yates 1966) According to De Oratore, the method was invented by Simonides of Ceos. As the story goes, Simonides was attending a dinner with a number of notable Greeks, after which he had stepped outside. Suddenly, the roof of the building collapsed, killing everyone inside. During the excavation of the rubble, Simonides was called upon to identify each guest killed. He managed to do so by correlating their identities to their positions (loci) at the table before his departure….. A reference to these techniques survives to this day in the common English phrases “in the first place”, “in the second place”, and so forth.

— Method of loci - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mar
25th

Tue

Wildlife biologists fear a significant die-off in about 15 caves and mines in New York, as well as at sites in Massachusetts and Vermont. Whatever is killing the bats leaves them unusually thin and, in some cases, dotted with a white fungus. Bat experts fear that what they call White Nose Syndrome may spell doom for several species that keep insect pests under control. Researchers have yet to determine whether the bats are being killed by a virus, bacteria, toxin, environmental hazard, metabolic disorder or fungus. Some have been found with pneumonia, but that and the fungus are believed to be secondary symptoms.

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Bats Perish, and No One Knows Why - New York Times

When I first read this I thought they had discovered White NOISE Syndrome, not White NOSE Syndrome. White Nose sounds bad enough, but imagine bats dying from the ambient effects of man made white noise? Or urban and suburban noise somehow interteferring with their ability to hunt at night? The high pitched whirl of disk drives in pc’s, ipod’s, etc somehow all singiing in the same tone and damaging the inner ears of bats. Man made frequencies polluting the night air, an invisible and inaudible threat to our bat friends. Instead, for right now it’s probably just regular old pesticides. But one can imagine, right? Just a thought.

Mar
20th

Thu

Seduction of the Stone

description; Foreign subtitles extracted from “Romancing the Stone (1984, Starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas)” and translated into english using Google Translate.