Reddit, almost every day some random Haitian couple calls and talks to my two year old giving me time to clean the house, etc. What weirdly awesome random little things are you thankful for? More Details inside. : AskReddit: One day when they called and I was really busy doing laundry so I just put the phone on speaker and gave it to my 2 year old daughter. She reacted to their voice, and started "talking" back babbling, laughing and mimicking them. I went in the other room and came back 10 minutes later and they were still on the phone talking to her. Eventually my daughter mashed enough buttons to hang up the phone.
The next day, they called back, phone went straight to my daughter... This has been going on for about 2 months now. Some days they listen and talk for 20 minutes, most days its only around 5, but they have talked to her for as much as thirty minutes before. During this time, I am able to load the dishwasher, do laundry, pick up the house and use the bathroom. Stuff that is really hard to do with a very active 2 year old.
This is a very plain blog with quotes from and links to articles I found interesting, thought-provoking, or relevant to the times. Linking is neither endorsement nor condemnation. Run by http://willslack.com
29 November, 2012
The Myth of American Meritocracy | The American Conservative
The Myth of American Meritocracy | The American Conservative: Meanwhile, there has been an astonishing concentration of wealth at the top, with America’s richest 1 percent now possessing nearly as much net wealth as the bottom 95 percent.2 This situation, sometimes described as a “winner take all society,” leaves families desperate to maximize the chances that their children will reach the winners’ circle, rather than risk failure and poverty or even merely a spot in the rapidly deteriorating middle class. And the best single means of becoming such an economic winner is to gain admission to a top university, which provides an easy ticket to the wealth of Wall Street or similar venues, whose leading firms increasingly restrict their hiring to graduates of the Ivy League or a tiny handful of other top colleges.3 On the other side, finance remains the favored employment choice for Harvard, Yale or Princeton students after the diplomas are handed out.4
Fall
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/53745876?badge=0" width="700" height="394" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> <p><a href="http://vimeo.com/53745876">Fall</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user9815051">jamie scott</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
28 November, 2012
LOST should not have been a show. But was.
Alan Sepinwall on the origins of 'Lost' - Grantland: The story of Lost makes no sense.
And by that I don't mean the story on the show — though this is the point where you can feel free to insert jokes about the numbers, the outrigger shootout, or the reasons why Walt was "special" — but the story of how Lost itself got made.
The creation of Lost defies nearly everything we know about how successful television shows — or great ones — are made. The idea for Lost came not from a writer, but a network executive. The first writer on the project got fired. The replacement creative team had a fraction of the usual time to write, cast, and produce a pilot episode. The executive who had championed the show was himself fired before it ever aired. One of the two creators all but quit the moment the pilot was finished. Nearly every creative decision at the start of the show was made under the assumption that it would never succeed. Everyone believed it was too weird, too dense, too unusual to work. And it may have been. But it worked, anyway.
And by that I don't mean the story on the show — though this is the point where you can feel free to insert jokes about the numbers, the outrigger shootout, or the reasons why Walt was "special" — but the story of how Lost itself got made.
The creation of Lost defies nearly everything we know about how successful television shows — or great ones — are made. The idea for Lost came not from a writer, but a network executive. The first writer on the project got fired. The replacement creative team had a fraction of the usual time to write, cast, and produce a pilot episode. The executive who had championed the show was himself fired before it ever aired. One of the two creators all but quit the moment the pilot was finished. Nearly every creative decision at the start of the show was made under the assumption that it would never succeed. Everyone believed it was too weird, too dense, too unusual to work. And it may have been. But it worked, anyway.
Meanwhile, On The West Bank… - The Daily Beast
Meanwhile, On The West Bank… - The Daily Beast: Police have begun ordering Palestinian laborers with legal work permits off buses from the Tel Aviv area to the West Bank, following complaints from settlers that Palestinians pose a security risk by riding the same buses as them.
The Transportation Ministry says it is considering adding bus lines between West Bank roadblocks and central Israel; these would be geared toward Palestinian laborers.
The Transportation Ministry says it is considering adding bus lines between West Bank roadblocks and central Israel; these would be geared toward Palestinian laborers.
CABINET // The Coldscape
CABINET // The Coldscape: These are spaces in which a perpetual winter has distorted or erased seasonality; spaces that are located within an energy-intensive geography of previously unimaginable distance—both mental and physical—between producers and consumers. Artificial refrigeration has reconfigured the contents of our plates and the shape of our cities—it has even contributed to the overthrow of governments, as anyone familiar with the rise and fall of United Fruit can attest. Perhaps most bizarrely, although their variations in form reflect the particular requirements of the perishable product they host, coldspaces have, in turn, redesigned food itself, both in terms of the selective breeding that favors cold-tolerance over taste and the more fundamental transition from food as daily nourishment to food as global commodity.
Can You Save Diplomacy From Itself? - By Cristina Odone | Foreign Policy
Can You Save Diplomacy From Itself? - By Cristina Odone | Foreign Policy: The chamber of the Security Council spreads out, airless and dimly lit, at the heart of the United Nations complex in New York. This is the inner sanctum of world diplomacy: Council members are responsible for maintaining peace and security across the globe, no less. A huge oil canvas mural, painted by the Norwegian artist Per Krogh, decorates one wall: A phoenix rises from its ashes, symbolizing the world's rebirth after World War II; and a group of farmers weigh out grain for all to share, showing how the international community values equality. This sense of bounty and fairness fills the big room with its large U-shaped table surrounded by welcoming blue chairs.
Erick Erickson educates us
A Primer for Rich Donors Who Got Taken to the Cleaners by Republican Consultants | RedState: Every precinct has a “dead dog” race that defines who the yellow dog Democrats are and who the pure Republicans are. These are the voters for either side who will vote for the dead dog over someone in the other party. A great example of this would be Angela E. Speir in Georgia.
Ms. Speir ran for the Georgia Public Service Commission as a Republican in 2002, when Democrats still controlled Georgia. She spent roughly $7,000.00 for this statewide office and won. For a long time, her race was the dead dog race. If someone wanted to see what a generic Republican and a generic Democrat would get in a particular precinct, her race was the one to establish that number given it was a statewide race in which she had no name ID and spent less than $10,000.00.
Find that number in each precinct for each party and that is the base number each side needs in a district.
Ms. Speir ran for the Georgia Public Service Commission as a Republican in 2002, when Democrats still controlled Georgia. She spent roughly $7,000.00 for this statewide office and won. For a long time, her race was the dead dog race. If someone wanted to see what a generic Republican and a generic Democrat would get in a particular precinct, her race was the one to establish that number given it was a statewide race in which she had no name ID and spent less than $10,000.00.
Find that number in each precinct for each party and that is the base number each side needs in a district.
Prosthetic Arms a Complex Test for Amputees - NYTimes.com
Prosthetic Arms a Complex Test for Amputees - NYTimes.com: So there he was one recent afternoon, kayaking down the sun-dappled San Marcos River, using the wrong prosthesis because he had broken his kayaking limb while surfing. Normally he is at the front of the pack, but today his arm kept slipping off and he seemed in pain as he struggled just to keep up.
Yet he said nothing that could be heard as a complaint. And at the end of the six-hour trip, he went over the 14-foot Graduation Falls, the first time he had done so in a boat. After dropping vertically into the frothing water, his kayak momentarily disappeared beneath the surface before popping out like a cork.
Eyes smiling below the brim of his helmet, Corporal Gallegos paddled to shore, hefted his boat onto his good shoulder and started the trudge upstream.
He did not ask for help.
Yet he said nothing that could be heard as a complaint. And at the end of the six-hour trip, he went over the 14-foot Graduation Falls, the first time he had done so in a boat. After dropping vertically into the frothing water, his kayak momentarily disappeared beneath the surface before popping out like a cork.
Eyes smiling below the brim of his helmet, Corporal Gallegos paddled to shore, hefted his boat onto his good shoulder and started the trudge upstream.
He did not ask for help.
Staring into Saturn's baleful eye | The Planetary Society
Staring into Saturn's baleful eye | The Planetary Society: This is just wow. It's part of a long sequence Cassini took, staring at Saturn's north pole. When? Today.
27 November, 2012
NYU Student Accidentally Hits Reply All to 40,000 Students, "Replyallcalypse" Ensues
NYU Student Accidentally Hits Reply All to 40,000 Students, "Replyallcalypse" Ensues: When NYU sophomore Max Wiseltier received an email from NYU's Bursar office last night about a new, electronic tuition form, he wasn't sure what to do so, naturally, he forwarded the email to his mom. "do you want me to do this?" was his exact response. There was one small problem, though; instead of hitting "Fwd" he clicked "Reply all," accidentally sending the message to all 39,979 NYU students on the list.
Revealed: Google's manual for its unseen humans who rate the web • The Register
Revealed: Google's manual for its unseen humans who rate the web • The Register: Google's outsources the ratings to contractors Leapforce and Lionbridge, who employ home workers. Lionbridge describes itself as a "global crowdsourcing" agency and lists the advertisements here. According to one Leapforce job ad there are 1,500 raters. The work is flexible but demanding - raters must pass an examination and are consistently evaluated by Google. For example, a rater is given a "TTR" score - "Time to Rate" measures how quickly they make their decisions. Here's one contractor's tale, and an interview at SEO site SearchEngineLand with another.
It's amazing how the image Google likes to promote - and politicians believe - one of high tech boffinry and magical algorithms, contrasts with the reality. Outsourced home workers are keeping the machine running. Glamorous, it isn't. �
It's amazing how the image Google likes to promote - and politicians believe - one of high tech boffinry and magical algorithms, contrasts with the reality. Outsourced home workers are keeping the machine running. Glamorous, it isn't. �
End of the Line in the ICU | The Health Care Blog
End of the Line in the ICU | The Health Care Blog: You will not find a group less in favor of automatically aggressive, invasive medical care than intensive care nurses, because we see the pointless suffering it often causes in patients and families. Intensive care is at best a temporary detour during which a patient’s instability is monitored, analyzed, and corrected, but it is at worst a high tech torture chamber, a taste of hell during a person’s last days on earth.
How the FEC can stop the tidal wave of secret political cash - The Washington Post
How the FEC can stop the tidal wave of secret political cash - The Washington Post: Instead, the FEC just has to do its job. For that to happen, we need new commissioners dedicated to enforcing the laws passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court. As it happens, five of the six commissioners are holdovers whose terms have expired.
To overhaul the panel, Obama will have to upend decades of tradition. Since the establishment of the FEC, presidents have appointed commissioners according to an unwritten agreement: Two have been proposed by the Senate leadership (one from each party), two by the House and two by the White House. The nominees got routine Senate confirmation.
To overhaul the panel, Obama will have to upend decades of tradition. Since the establishment of the FEC, presidents have appointed commissioners according to an unwritten agreement: Two have been proposed by the Senate leadership (one from each party), two by the House and two by the White House. The nominees got routine Senate confirmation.
26 November, 2012
It really is that bad: A powerful speech on North Korea
It really is that bad: A powerful speech on North Korea: “One challenge I always have when I speak about North Korea is I run out of adjectives for how bad things are. And many of you that follow policy or human rights situations oftentimes get jaded with numbers,” Hong begins, speaking at an event for Melanie Kirkpatrick’s book Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia’s Underground Railroad, sitting between Kirkpatrick and Joseph Kim, a young escapee whose journey her book chronicles. “It’s very easy for us to write off bad things because we just assume these are bad things that happen ‘over there,’ and many times they don’t necessarily affect us. And the challenge with North Korea in particular is that things are so bad on such a scale and scope that it sounds fake. It sounds unfathomable, it’s impossible to really comprehend.”
Revenge of the Reality-Based Community | The American Conservative
Revenge of the Reality-Based Community | The American Conservative: The final line for me to cross in complete alienation from the right was my recognition that Obama is not a leftist. In fact, he’s barely a liberal—and only because the political spectrum has moved so far to the right that moderate Republicans from the past are now considered hardcore leftists by right-wing standards today. Viewed in historical context, I see Obama as actually being on the center-right.
At this point, I lost every last friend I had on the right. Some have been known to pass me in silence at the supermarket or even to cross the street when they see me coming. People who were as close to me as brothers and sisters have disowned me.
I think they believe they are just disciplining me, hoping I will admit error and ask for forgiveness. They clearly don’t know me very well. My attitude is that anyone who puts politics above friendship is not someone I care to have in my life.
At this point, I lost every last friend I had on the right. Some have been known to pass me in silence at the supermarket or even to cross the street when they see me coming. People who were as close to me as brothers and sisters have disowned me.
I think they believe they are just disciplining me, hoping I will admit error and ask for forgiveness. They clearly don’t know me very well. My attitude is that anyone who puts politics above friendship is not someone I care to have in my life.
US Science Could Face Fiscal Cliff Doom : Discovery News
US Science Could Face Fiscal Cliff Doom : Discovery News: "Sequestration would be dropping an anchor on the science enterprise, while many others are setting their sails," said Hourihan. "As an example, here are some factoids derived from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data: since 1999, the US has increased the research intensity of its economy by 10 percent. Over the same period, research intensity in Israel, Finland, and Germany have grown about twice as fast. In Taiwan, it's grown five times as fast. In South Korea, it's grown six times as fast. In China, the number two funder behind us, it's grown ten times as fast."
'100 elected pundits' - POLITICO.com
'100 elected pundits' - POLITICO.com: Right now, the Senate are 100 elected pundits. The game is between the White House and House Republicans for now. At some point the action could move to the Senate, but right now it's about the House.
25 November, 2012
Skills Don’t Pay the Bills - NYTimes.com
Skills Don’t Pay the Bills - NYTimes.com: The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. “It’s hard not to break out laughing,” says Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the shortage of skilled workers. “If there’s a skill shortage, there has to be rises in wages,” he says. “It’s basic economics.” After all, according to supply and demand, a shortage of workers with valuable skills should push wages up. Yet according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of skilled jobs has fallen and so have their wages.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)