U.S. economic mobility

It turns out that the United States has less intergenerational relative mobility, the ability of a family to improve their economic status, than Canada and several European countries.

About half (50 percent) of parental earnings advantages are passed onto sons in the United States compared to less than 20 percent in high-mobility European countries. This means that it takes an average of six generations for family economic advantage to disappear in the United States compared to three generations in Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark.

42 percent of American men born into the poorest fifth of families stay in the bottom fifth of the earnings distribution as adults, compared to 25 to 30 percent in some other countries.

A smaller percentage of Americans move from the bottom to the top fifth in one generation, than do people in other European countries. Note that Americans making such a climb travel a further distance in absolute dollars than do Europeans because of greater earnings inequality in the United States.

Read the summary of findings (pdf) of the February 2008 report.

What the hell is the appendix and why do we have it?

The appendix is a blind ended tube connected to the cecum (a pouch-like structure of the colon) and is located near the point where the small intestine and large intestine meet (lower right corner of the abdomen). It is about 10 cm in length and 7 to 8 mm in diameter. No one knows exactly why we have an appendix, but some have suggested theories.

One possible explanation, proposed by Charles Darwin, is that it was once used for digesting leaves as primates. Over time, we have eaten fewer vegetables and more meat, so this organ became smaller to make more room for our stomach. Herbivorous animals, for example, have a very long cecum. It may be that the appendix is a vestigial organ used by our ancestors but is no longer needed by us.

A second notion contends that the appendix provides a safe haven for good bacteria until they're needed. So if your gut is affected by diarrhea or another illness, the good bacteria in the appendix can take over to keep you healthy. But in societies with modern medical care and good hygiene, the bacteria don't give any added benefit and thus renders the appendix useless. According to this hypothesis, the lack of germs in modern society may cause the immune system to overreact and attack the good bacteria stored in the appendix. Then the inflammation that comes with appendicitis may obstruct the intestines. So actually, the appendix does more harm than good in a society like ours.

Another theory is that it helps maintain homeostasis in fetuses around the 11th week of development.

At any rate, there have been no discernible negative side effects after the removal of the appendix.

Democracy Index

The Economist has examined democracy in 167 countries and attempted to quantify this with an Economist Intelligence Unit Index of Democracy which focused on five general categories: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, functioning of government, political participation and political culture. The nations were classified as full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes, and authoritarian regimes.

In 2008 Sweden was ranked number one, scoring 9.88 out of a possible 10 points. The next nine were Norway, Iceland, Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Australia. The lowest ranked was North Korea, scoring a stellar 0.86. The United States ranked number 18 with an 8.22.

PDF here.

Kit

A kit is the standard equipment and attire worn by players in soccer. The sport's Laws of the Game specify the minimum kit which a player must use, and also prohibit the use of anything that is dangerous to the player or another participant.

Hardwood flooring vs. carpet

What are the advantages and disadvantages of hardwood flooring and carpets? I know most of these might seem like common sense to the average person but I actually did learn something today.

Hardwood
Pros
* Lasts longer than carpet, though you may need to refinish it from time to time.
* Not conducive for dust or pollen.

Cons
* More expensive.
* Less forgiving to the knees and elbows if you were to roll around on it. You'll need some rugs.

Carpet
Pros
* Cheaper.
* Softer and warmer. You can toss and turn on it.

Cons
* Doesn't last as long. Gets stained relatively easily and looks ragged after about five years.
* Bad for people with allergy and worsens indoor pollution.

Limn

Limn means "to describe."

Coachella Fest

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is a three day annual music and arts festival held in Indio, California. It features alternative rock, hip hop, and electronic music, as well as large sculptural art.

In 1993 Pearl Jam performed in Indio in front of about 25,000 fans to protest Ticketmaster and the stadiums it controlled in southern California. Organizers realized that this venue could be furbished for large-scale rock events. Six years later the first Coachella Fest was held.

Watch a video (NSFW) of a guy running around high and naked, and getting tasered by the cops, at this year's Coachella.

How to determine someone's age

Pull one of their teeth out. Every day, each of our teeth accumulates two lines in its enamel and dentin. In turn, another line shows up every year in the cementum, the stuff that helps keep a tooth in place. Poor diet can change the spacing between lines, but it won't prevent this natural cycle.

This is pretty invasive, though. A new way involving a powerful X-ray synchrotron machine could theoretically be performed on a tooth while the tooth is still in place, but the machine's dose of radiation would be deadly.

Edgar Cayce

Edgar Cayce was one of the most famous clairvoyants of all time. Born in 1877 in Kentucky, he fell off a fence post onto a board with a protruding nail, which entered his brain. He managed to escape any serious consequences, but his life would be changed forever.

Starting when he was about 24 years old, Cayce did more than 14,000 clairvoyant readings based only on his clients' names and addresses. He told to his secretary about his visions while putting himself in an out of body experience. Of these 14,000+ readings, more than 9,400 dealt with medical diagnoses and treatment recommendations, of which he had no prior experience. He originally wanted to be a photographer but he took up his readings as a hobby. But his hobby eventually became all for which he was known, and he continued it for the rest of his life, though he got very little out of it financially. Others, however, did get lots of money from his predictions; he correctly foresaw events involving the stock market and pointed to people places to drill for oil.

In 1910 Dr. Wesley Ketchum, a famed homeopath, decided to see if Cayce was for real. Dr. Ketchum had a condition which he self-diagnosed as appendicitis, which was confirmed by other doctors. Cayce, on the other hand, told Ketchum that the doctor had a spinal condition that was impinging upon a nerve. This diagnosis was confirmed by successful spinal manipulation.

Among Edgar Cayce's visitors were Woodrow Wilson, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, and many others. His sons compiled their own study of their father's work and found only 200 flawed readings out of 14,246. Now Cayce is considered the "father of holistic medicine." He actually advised the use of colonic therapy as a way to detoxify the body.

Edgar Cayce died in 1943.

How Teddy Roosevelt fixed football

Back in the day, football (being played only in college) was such a violent sport that 18 people died in 1905, with a significantly less number of players than today. Basically anything was legal, including slugging and gang tackling. Fans started turning away from the sport.

So in 1905 President Teddy Roosevelt called in football's version of the Big Three (Harvard, Yale, and Princeton) to try to change the way they did things. Adamantly refusing at first, they succumbed to the wishes of the cogent, table-thumping president.

Now football is the #1 watched sport in America, and it would've probably disappeared in the early 20th century had Roosevelt not forced the rules down the game's throat.

Collective effervescence

Collective effervescence is the perceived energy discerned at a gathering, as in a sporting event or a riot. The energy can cause individuals to act differently than they would in their everyday lives.

The term is from French sociologist Emile Durkheim. In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim argues that religion is a fundamentally social phenomenon, by which societies can maintain a sort of integrity in the modern era. He studied the Australian aborigines, who perform normal tasks (hunt and gather), but on the rare occasions they come together, the high energy level coming from these events gets directed onto physical objects or people which then become sacred.

Face on Mars

I saw this on TV a long time ago and shit my pants. I didn't understand the story, I just looked at the image. Now I know what it's about.

In 1976 the Viking 1 spacecraft was circling Mars to find a good landing spot for Viking 2. As it was snapping photos, it discovered an image of a human/alien face on the planet's surface. It stretched nearly two miles and was located on the region of Mars called Clydonia.

The scientists' shock and awe didn't last that long, though. They soon found out it was just another mesa common throughout Clydonia, only this one had the weird resemblance of a face.

In 1998 the Mars Global Surveyor went back to the red planet and snapped pictures ten times sharper than those in 1976. The results showed a natural-looking landform; the older version was so blurred that it depicted a face.

But you can never shut a conspiracy theorist up. The CTs claimed that at that the time the new pics were taken, it was winter on Mars, and so the clouds and winds hazed up the alien markings.

(Non sequitur paragraph, but I don't care. This is what a CT would've spammed on YouTube had it existed in 1998. ALIEN MARKINGS FOUND ON MARS! NASA IS COVERING IT UP!! 39 WELL-KNOWN PHYSICISTS AND ASTRONOMERS ARE COMING OUT AND TELLING THE TRUTH. FOLLOW THIS LINK!)

So three years later, on a cloudless summer day in Clydonia, the scientists took more photos -- these ones were digital camera pics. And guess what? No face. It was proved even more thoroughly with the much sharper images.



In fact, this is a 3D image of the "face." It debunks the alien thing even further.



But still the conspiracy theorists permeate the message boards and spread their lies.

2038

The year 2038 problem involves your computer, the year 2038, and the same needless paranoia present during the Y2K debacle.

Most C programs use a library called standard time library, which establishes a 4-byte format for the storage of time values. This format assigns the value 0 to January 1, 1970 at 12:00:00 am, which is the beginning of time for the computer clock. Anything after that is expressed by the number of seconds passed after that time. So 919642718, or 919,642,718 seconds, would be February 21, 1999 at 16:18:38, U.S. Pacific time.

The problem comes when the 4-byte integer's maximum value is reached. This would be 2,147,483,647, or January 19, 2038. It's a relatively easy thing to fix, however. Well-written programs can be recompiled with 8-byte integers.

There's also the 2116 problem, the 2184 problem, and Apple's 29,940 problem.

Big-city brains

Why are people in big cities better than those in small towns? (I can sense some people exiting this page.)

The answer may be rooted in the neurochemistry and neuroanatomy of our brains. Scientists demonstrated that our brains can be altered by either formal training or informal experience.

Let's consider this experiment. Rats of the same sex were randomly assigned to three environments: standard condition (SC), impoverished condition (IC), and enriched condition (EC). In the SC, three animals were kept in a typical-sized cage and given food and water. This was the control group. In the IC, only one rat was kept in an SC-sized cage. In the EC, 10 to 12 animals entered a large cage containing ladders, treadmills, a sort of obstacle course, and the like. These stimuli were changed daily. This environment is considered enriched because it provides more informal learning than does the SC.

So what happened? The answer has to do a lot with the cerebral cortex, one of the most important parts of the brain and that which is responsible for complex cognition. Total enzymatic activity and the physical weight of this area increased in the rats put in the EC. This result was not influenced by greater handling of the rodents in the EC situation (this experiment has been done on several other animals as well).

Experience in an EC environment induces better learning and problem-solving abilities. This type of environment alters the expression of a plethora of genes, some of which play key roles in learning and memory. ECs also aid recovery from conditions such as malnutrition and brain damage. It has been shown that, for recovery in brain injury in animals, enriched environments prove more effective than formal training or physical exercise. The amount of dendritic branching and the size of synaptic contacts also shot up in the animals kept in the EC.

And what does all this mean? It suggests that animals and people in more crowded areas with more activities tend to process information faster and more efficiently than those in smaller or mid-sized towns, as also in the case of memory storage. Which explains why city dwellers are just better and smarter than you. I live in a suburb, by the way.

Paraphrased from Biological Psychology, chapter 18.

Sovereign immunity

Sovereign immunity is a type of immunity that traces its origins from an early English law. It's the idea that the state can commit no wrong and is immune from civil suit or criminal prosecution. Hence the saying "the king (or queen) can do no wrong."

Sunita Williams

Sunita Williams was the first person to run a marathon in orbit. On April 15, 2007, she finished the Boston marathon in space in a time of 4:23:10. The Massachusetts native and accomplished marathoner said that the reason she did it was to "encourage kids to start making physical fitness part of their daily lives."

Biosphere 2

In the early 1990s scientists set up Biosphere 2, a 3-acre closed ecosystem built in a desert in Oracle, Arizona. It was designed to be an earth within an earth (The Truman Show before it became famous), enclosed in glass and filled with soil, air, water, and animals. The creators put in fragments of rainforest, savanna, thornscrub, desert, pond, marsh, coral reef, and ocean to simulate Earth's natural habitats. The only connections to the outside world were electrical power and communication.

On September 26, 1991, eight volunteers entered Biosphere 2 (they were called Biospherians) to see if human life could be independently sustained in bubbles anywhere in the solar system not lethally attacked by heat or dangerous radiation. For about five months everything went as planned but then...the concentration of oxygen dropped a level similar to that of 17,500 feet above Earth, at which point oxygen was pumped in from the outside. Carbon dioxide levels rose sharply, despite an artificial recycling procedure. The level of nitrous oxide also went up.

Many of the vertebrate species and animal pollinators that were put in the sphere went extinct at an extraordinarily fast rate. Because of this, the amount of smaller insects and vines exploded. The vines had to be cut by hand.

The Biospherians learned to manage these things though, and stayed inside the dome for two years, as was originally planned. So it wasn't a complete failure. It taught us the vulnerability of human life and the living environment on which we depend.

Now Biosphere 2 is under the management of the University of Arizona and is being used more or less as an ecosystem museum.

Steven Wright

Steven Wright is known as the "deadpan of comedy." Somehow people are enthralled by him. I know, I don't get it.

This one is ok, though.

Fealty

Fealty means "faithfulness; allegiance."

The next line of failed banks

*** This has been put in the section 'Posts I wish I could take back.' Reason below. ***

Failed and greedy bankers at the country's top banks are leaving en masse to either retire early (good, get the hell out) or to start life over again at up-and-coming banks (oh shit). Some experts say this is good in that Wall Street is being spread out. No longer does everything have to be concentrated to a few of these aforementioned assholes, and when they fuck up we all get fucked up. But some dickwads are hell-bent on proving those optimistic (and maybe myopic) experts wrong.

The New York Times dug up some of these smaller banks and found that hundreds of people who used to work at the larger institutions have been migrating to the smaller ones to utilize their shitty ambition and fuck up the economy again. Some of these boutique firms are Aladdin, Broadpoint, Pinetum Capital, and BTIG.

Lee Fensterstock, CEO of Broadpoint (which hired more than 240 people in about a year and a half), said: “We have the opportunity to step into the shoes of a Bear Stearns or a Lehman.” Michael O'Hare, some guy who used to work for JPMorgan Chase and who is now looking to make his kill at LaBranche Financial Services, said: "We are attracting people from Merrill, from JPMorgan, from Bear. I’m not talking the second tier. We have the cream of the crop." YOU FUCKING IDIOTS!!! We don't want you to become another Bear Stearns, Lehman, or JPMorgan!

Oh wait, I'm looking at it from the rational average American's perspective. Let's try the other side's: Man, this is gonna be the SHIT! Hey fellas, let's go absolutely batshit like we did last fall. We can't really fuck up. If we make horrible loans and go down, the government will hand us the money by going all puppy eyes on them...AGAIN! Then the cycle continues until we're all old and reminiscing on the Florida golf course. HAHAHAHA!!

Bottom line: Obama, Geithner, et al have to make it where banks can't grow beyond a certain percentage of the nation's GDP, and dramatically scale back the leveraging rate. That way, we all don't feel the pain if and when they leverage the shit out of their loans and grow into uncontrollable behemoths. Make the banking system boring again.

Update 06.19.10: Here is where I put my foot in my mouth.

Koko

Koko is a gorilla who lives in Woodside, CA that has mastered more than 1,000 words in American Sign Language. She also expresses sophisticated thoughts and emotions that have helped people rethink their views on animal intelligence.

¡Ask a Mexican!

¡Ask a Mexican! is a syndicated weekly column by Gustavo Arellano, which started in the OC Weekly in 2004. Arellano uses satire to answer his readers' sometimes racist, sometimes funny, most of the time serious questions about Mexicans and Mexican culture. He includes "Dear Gabacho" at the beginning to his responses to white people, gabacho being a derogatory term for whites. He doesn't shy away from any question and has promised to answer each and every one.

Controlling children's heights

In the book Normal at Any Cost, Susan Cohen and Christine Cosgrove write about the efforts of the medical-pharmaceutical complex to control kids' heights at the behest of the parents. For example, society views short boys and tall girls a different way then it does tall boys and short girls. So since the 1950s, drug companies have developed new ways to manipulate height so that the kids would feel "normal" about it. If a tall girl wants to stop growing, they would speed up her rate of puberty. If a short guy wants to get taller, the rate of his puberty would be slowed down.

This is not available to everyone, though. It is up to the doctor/drug company to decide whether the child needs the procedure. It is still unknown what the long-term effects this will have since it takes decades for those effects to emerge.

Meet the parents

I don't know that much about music nor do I care, but when I was riding in a friend's car last summer and he had the radio on, I heard possibly the dumbest fucking song in human history. It was "I Kissed a Girl" and it was barely 3 minutes long, with the chorus taking over about 2/3 of it. I got back home and googled the title and found out it was made by an idiot named Katy Perry. I spent some time on YouTube and found another one of hers called "Ur So Gay." What the fuck is up with this bitch? She has no problem publicly saying she kissed another girl but slams gay and metrosexual men. What a fucking hypocrite.

I let people at school fill me in on the pop culture front, so today I discover that Katy's parents are deeply religious and they're pastors. They claim their daughter was taken in by the "big city lights of LA," and her mom "bows her head and prays" every time she hears "I Kissed a Girl" on the radio. Katy struck back by telling everyone that her mom dated Jimi Hendrix and her dad was a drug dealer.

Just goes to show that the tighter the leash on the kids, the more disastrous the result will be for the parents later in life. How many more examples do we need of stories like this? Not that I think Katy should be "reformed" or "find Jesus" or any of that garbage. But parents, particularly religious ones, tend to think they can change or subvert human nature by trying to "watch" everything their kids do, and if they don't like it, the parents shove the Bible in their children's faces.

Children love rebeling against their parents. So if you at least appear like a damn loser to them (you tell them you sell crack and the IRS is after your ass), they probably will grow up to be devout. Open everything up, have a conversation, and let them know what's going on. It's called human nature. Just a thought.

I'm done with my rant. That was the most fun I've had since this one.

Do animals laugh?

Some do. The animals closest to us, the chimps and apes, clearly do laugh, pointing to the fact that they possess self-awareness. Orangutans also have a sense of empathy and mimicry needed for laughter, which pushes the age of human laughter to at least 12-16 million years ago, when orangutans split from the line that led to gorillas, chimps, and humans.

Mice also laugh but in sounds we can't hear. They appear to have tickling groups in which the young mice can join. These young mice enjoy the tickling orgies more than their parents.

40 year-old virgin

Former NBA player A.C. Green remained a virgin throughout his whole playing career. He was committed to celibacy until he got married because of his religious philosophy.

His freewheeling Showtime Laker teammates tried everything to get him to lose it. They started a pool on who was going to get Green laid (which got up to about $600) and even sent a hooker to his hotel room. The next morning Green went downstairs to the lobby and told his teammates that he was going to have to start quoting the Bible to them.

A.C. Green married in 2002 at the age of 38.

Gender symbols

The two gender symbols for men and women are actually astronomical symbols. The male's is Mars and the female's is Venus. The astronomical symbols, first used in 1751 by Carl Linnaeus, were meant to denote the gender of planets. Mars is supposed to represent a shield and spear
and Venus is supposed to be carrying a hand mirror.

(Never mind Pluto at the end.)

Furadan

Does laughing gas really make you laugh?

Stupid question to ask if you've been to the dentist in the last decade.

Laughing gas kinda makes you laugh. It acts as an anaesthetic-type agent and makes you feel a bit tipsy, like alcohol. If you have some more of it you'll feel sleepy.

In 1799 Humphry Davy observed its psychological effects. When he noticed his subjects acting like drunkards he coined the term laughing gas and suggested it be used for surgical operations to alleviate the pain. No one paid attention to him, though, and people used it instead as a recreational drug at carnivals.

Cataplexy

Cataplexy is a condition in which a person, upon feeling a strong emotion (such as exhilaration, anger, surprise, and laughter), loses muscle tone in at least one part of the body.