From Paul Krugman's most recent op-ed:
Unlike the dollar, the euro or the yen, whose values fluctuate freely, China’s currency is pegged by official policy at about 6.8 yuan to the dollar. At this exchange rate, Chinese manufacturing has a large cost advantage over its rivals, leading to huge trade surpluses.
Before the 1970s, college students got only a two week vacation for Christmas and the New Year, and took exams after the break. But in the 1970s when the economy was going into hell and most schools found themselves in a financial squeeze, the administrators realized they could save money by closing school down for a month in the winter. That way, they could cut costs on heating at a time when oil prices soared.
Car booting is where a company puts a wheel clamp on your car's tire when your payment at a parking meter has expired. Sometimes companies car boot even when the time hasn't yet run out, like how it's popular here in Dallas.
Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda is an old, fat Puerto Rican man who believes he's the second coming of Christ. He formed his own ministry in the 1980s named Creciendo en Gracia (Growing in Grace Ministry). According to Bill Maher's movie Religulous, Miranda has 100,000 idiots who are even dumber than him following him worldwide.
His message to people is to let loose:
- The devil, hell, and sin don't exist.
- Don't pray. It's useless.
- So are moral or ethical guidelines.
So as long as you give him money, life will be ok.
Make some time and read "Rediscovering Central Asia," an article from The Wilson Quarterly in which the author presents the fascinating period of Central Asia between 800 AD to 1100 AD. The region we now view as a mountainous void harboring religious extremism, was actually "the intellectual epicenter of the world." Here are a few quotes that help paint a picture of the scientific advances they made:
In astronomy, they estimated the earth’s diameter to a degree of precision unmatched until recent centuries and built several of the largest observatories before modern times, using them to prepare remarkably precise astronomical tables.
In chemistry, Central Asians were the first to reverse reactions, to use crystallization as a means of purification, and to measure specific gravity and use it to group elements in a manner anticipating Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table of 1871.
And in technology, they invented windmills and hydraulic machinery for lifting water that subsequently spread westward to the Middle East and Europe and eastward to China.
Are there other solar systems out among the stars, they asked, or are we alone in the universe? In Europe, this question was to remain open for another 500 years, but to these two men it seemed clear that we are not alone. They also asked if the earth had been created whole and complete, or if it had evolved over time. Time, they agreed, is a continuum with no beginning or end. In other words, they rejected creationism and anticipated evolutionary geology and even Darwinism by nearly a millennium. This was all as heretical to the Muslim faith they professed as it was to medieval Christianity.
The first, Nizam al-Mulk (1018–92), was a highly gifted administrator and also one of the best political scientists of the era. Al-Mulk’s teachers had introduced him to works by the best minds of the Central Asian renaissance. But by the time he was appointed vizier of the Seljuk Empire, the battle against Shiite dissidence was at full tilt. Fearing deviance on every side, al-Mulk proposed to establish a network of schools, or madrassas, that would instill orthodox Sunni Islam and turn young men into well-informed loyalists of the faith. Graduates would reject not only the Shiite schism but any other forms of thought that might be suspected of deviance from orthodoxy.
The second transformative figure, Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali (1058–1111), a philosopher and theologian, launched a frontal attack on the dangers posed by the unrestrained exercise of reason. The title of his most famous work tells it all: The Incoherence of the Philosophers (i.e., scientists). Like the Grand Inquisitor in Feodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, al-Ghazali intimately knew his enemy, in this case Aristotelian empiricism, which had attracted the best minds of the region. Attacking Aristotle, he attacked all contemporary rationalists, and to devastating effect.
Together, al-Mulk and al-Ghazali lowered the curtain on independent thought that had been raised in Central Asia for three centuries.
From this descent into obscurity it was an easy step to Dan Rather’s coverage of Afghanistan and the region in the immediate wake of 9/11. Donning a bush jacket and filming at dawn and dusk, he presented the region as inaccessible, backward, exotic, marginal, and threatening--in short, the end of the world. Ibn Sina, al-Biruni, and scores of other world-class geniuses from the region might just as well never have lived.
Even though the Central Asia of Rather’s depiction was and is an evocative image, it carries some bothersome implications. On the one hand, it conjures up a place where the best the United States and the world community can hope for is to limit the damage arising from it. This means destroying whatever threatens us and then getting out. The problem is that the thinking behind such an approach can then become self-fulfilling: A place we judged to be hopeless becomes truly so, and even more threatening than before. The fact that Central Asia and Afghanistan are situated between four--and possibly soon five--nuclear powers does not help matters.
This means focusing more of our support and theirs on reopening the great continental transport routes, instituting freer borders, lowering tariffs, and reducing meddling from the governments. Free trade must also extend to the world of ideas. This means creating the unfettered intellectual space that enabled Ibn Sina and al-Biruni to hypothesize on evolution rather than creationism and even to contemplate the existence of other worlds. Though they each lived under a different government, nobody intercepted their mail and nobody censured their heretical thoughts. In fact, rulers competed to become their patrons and to support their work.
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico -- which is about a ten minute drive from El Paso, TX -- currently has the world's highest murder rate, thanks to the drug cartel wars. It registers 130 murders per 100,000 residents. As of August 2009, that murder rate is more than three times higher than that of Baghdad.
Why does taking something with a grain of salt mean taking something with a degree of skepticism? Basically, if you can eat bitter food more easily with a small amount of salt, then lies or shady claims can be mitigated by a grain of salt.
In 77 AD Pliny the Elder, in his encyclopedia Naturalis Historia, translated the recipe for an antidote to poison by stating to "take two dried walnuts, two figs, and twenty leaves of rue; pound them all together, with the addition of a grain of salt; if a person takes this mixture fasting, he will be proof against all poisons for that day."
From David Attenborough's Life on Earth (p. 100):
Termites construct some of the greatest of all insect buildings. A termite fortress, walled, buttressed, and castellated, may contain ten tons of mud and stand three or four times as tall as a man. Several million inhabitants, busily running their errands within, can cause overheating and produce a foul oxygen-poor atmosphere so ventilation is of the greatest importance. Around the margins of the hill, the termites construct tall, thin-walled chimneys which stand out from the sides like ribs. No insects live inside these huge smooth-walled ducts. Their only function is ventilation. As the sun warms their walls, the air inside becomes hotter than that in the centre of the nest. It rises, drawing exhausted air from the central galleries and the deeper parts of the hill, creating a circulation. The thin, external walls of the chimneys are porous and so oxygen from the outside atmosphere diffuses in. The air, thus refreshed, rises to the top of the nest and then circulates back down other passageways. In very hot weather, the workers descend tunnels that go deep into the ground to the water table. Each returns carrying a crop full of water with which it wets the walls of the main part of the nest. The heat evaporates the water and this also lowers the temperature. By such devices, the worker termites manage to keep a very even temperature inside the nest.
Scientists believe that 80% of all volcanic eruptions on Earth happens in the oceans, and most volcanoes are located in the deep sea.
Yesterday I learned that the General Slocum disaster of 1904 was the second most deadly fire in U.S. history. The single most deadly one was the Peshtigo fire of October 8, 1871.
In fact, the Great Peshtigo Fire was the worst of its kind in North American history, but its story isn't as interesting as that of the General Slocum. The loggers at that time made it a common practice to start small fires in order to burn the dry forest debris. Massive wind that day fanned the flames and created a colossal fire out of the smaller ones that raged through 1 million acres in Wisconsin and upper Michigan, leaving 1,500 people dead.
As with the General Slocum, this disaster has been overshadowed by another fire incident. The Triangle Shirtwaist factory pushed the General Slocum catastrophe out of public consciousness, possibly because German-Americans died on the boat and Germans at the time were viewed in a different light. The Great Chicago Fire had actually happened on the same day as Peshtigo, but one reason Peshtigo got relegated is because people are still trying to figure out if Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked the lantern over.
The General Slocum disaster was the second most deadly fire in U.S. history. It killed 1,021 people in New York on June 15, 1904.
It happened in what was called Kleindeutchland, or Little Germany, on the Lower East Side. This enclave teemed with German immigrants who had been arriving there since the 1840s. St. Mark's Lutheran church, one of the churches in the area, held an annual event to celebrate the end of the Sunday school year. They usually rented a boat named General Slocum to take them to a nearby facility for a day of games and food. More than 1,300 people boarded the boat that fateful day.
A short while after the boat left the dock, smoke started coming out of a storage room. Crewmen tried putting the fire out, but because no one trained them to handle fire drills, they failed to extinguish the blaze and reported the emergency to Captain William Van Schaick ten minutes later. The captain basically panicked and, instead of docking the boat at a nearby spot, raced to North Brother Island a mile away. He did this because he feared the oil tanks situated at the nearby locations might have prompted an even greater disaster with the raging fire, even though onlookers shouted for him to dock it there.
The speed of the boat only fanned the flames, however, and passengers began jumping overboard or clinging onto parts of the boat not yet overtaken by the fire. And to make matters worse, nothing that could have halted the situation was able to work in the first place. The crew was inexperienced, the 3,000 life jackets were corked and disintegrated, the lifeboats were too firmly wired in place, and the hoses burst when the water was turned on. Plus, most of the kids who jumped off the boat could not swim, so many of them drowned. When the boat touched shore at North Brother Island, a team of onlookers and nearby nurses attempted to help the people still onboard. The rescue boats did all in their power but could only save the few who did not already drown.
In the aftermath Van Schaick and executives of the Knickerbocker Steamboat Co. were indicted, but the jury found Van Schaick the easy scapegoat. The judge sentenced him to 10 years of hard labor for criminal negligence and manslaughter. The Knickerbocker Steamboat Co. suffered only a minor fine, even though the trial revealed they falsified records on the true safety of the boat. But four months later a commission issued a damning report on the lack of common sense used on the construction of the General Slocum. People were fired and President Roosevelt instituted new regulations for all steamboats to have:
- fireproof metal bulkheads to contain fires
- steam pipes extended from the boiler into cargo areas (to act as a sprinkler)
- improved lifejackets (one for each passenger and crew member)
- fire hoses capable of handling 100 pounds of pressure per square inch
- accessible life boats
President Taft pardoned Captain William Van Schaick on this day in 1912.
Prialt is a new painkiller that is derived from the venom of cone snails. These animals spear their prey with rods that contain around 100 to 200 different poisons, which have been tested in clinical trials. Prialt, however, is the only one that is FDA approved. It is the most successful painkiller since morphine; in fact, it is 1,000 times more potent than morphine and doesn't lead to tolerance.
The snails can be found in the coral reefs, but climate change severely threatens this area. Plus, there exist some 500 species of cone snails, only one percent of which has been studied. So that's a whole lot of potentially useful neurotoxins.
Although the goatee is usually thought of as the chin hair connecting the mustache, a real goatee doesn't connect to the mustache.
In the Brazilian Amazon alone, loggers have illegally built about 107,000 miles of roads cutting through the forest. That's enough to encircle the earth four times over. The most notorious of these roads is the BR-319, which is 500 miles long and is even being paved.
Kinda like this one and this one.
39% of Americans can't name a fossil fuel. Even more can't name a renewable energy source. 56% thinks that nuclear energy contributes to global warming, while 31% thinks solar energy contributes to global warming.
Sigh...
Erwin Planck was a son of physicist Max Planck who was involved in the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler. He was arrested three days later and executed in Berlin the following January.
Today I watched all three parts of NOVA's "Becoming Human". I thought it was alright, but it did introduce me to some new things I hadn't heard about. One of them was that constant climate change of 2 million years ago might have actually increased our brain size.
From around 6 million to 2 million years ago, our line was becoming more bipedal but the size of our brain stayed relatively the same. Then the climate in Africa changed from wet to dry to wet in a span of about a thousand years. Only the most intelligent apes could have survived in this unstable environment, thus leading to what would become Homo habilis, nicknamed the "handy man" for his proficient use of stone tools. This was also the first species of the genus Homo.
So I guess Glenn Beck has one more excuse to casually dismiss today's climate change. Luckily, he probably won't be one of the humans to survive.
Liu Bolin is a 35 year-old Chinese artist who paints his body to camouflage himself with the surrounding areas.
This is my favorite pic. Can you find him?
The tongue-eating louse is a type of parasite that measures one to two inches long and lives inside fish by entering through their gills and eating their tongues. But it doesn't immediately kill the host; instead, the louse eats whatever scraps of food the fish is eating, thereby slowly killing it.
"Making pozole" is a term used by Mexican-American drug cartels that refers to dissolving their victims' bodies in chemicals. Pozole is a Mexican stew that takes a few hours to make.
In these rough economic times, instead of going out on the street and begging for money at the expense of your pride, you can do it online and no one will know who you are.
Websites like Begslist, CyberBeg, and DonateMoney2Me are places where you can tell your story to the whole world in hopes of getting some money or some other things you may need (or just want).
(NPR had a pathetic story this morning about parents using these sites to solicit Christmas gifts for their kids, as if Christmas gifts are the end-all, be-all for a child's happy life. But that's how I learned about this.)
Kenneth Biros, a condemned Ohio killer, today became the first person in the country to die by a single injection, instead of the usual three. The state changed the law after a September attempt to lethally inject a rapist failed because he had no usable veins.
This new method takes about the same amount of time as the old one and is supposedly less painful.
Ten-codes are the code words used by law enforcement officials and radio operators. They were introduced in 1937 by a man in the Illinois State Police, who got frustrated over the fact that radios at the time took about a tenth to a fourth of a second to "spin up." So adding the word ten would allow enough time for the radio to send the signal clearly.
The most famous ten-code is 10-4, which means "OK."
But the federal government recently suggested that the ten-codes should be phased out in favor of plain language, since different agencies have different meanings for a number of codes.
Art therapy is the same thing as psychoanlaysis but patients express themselves more by making art (painting, drawing, clay modeling, etc.) and reflecting on their work than by talking.
It's been proven to work relatively well on the elderly, suicidal adolescents, and people dealing with everyday stress, but not so well on those suffering from schizophrenia and PTSD.
Mississippi became the last state to ratify the 13th amendment, which in 1865 officially abolished slavery. They ratified it in 1995.
Kentucky had ratified the amendment in 1976. We already know they fail.
An urban heat island occurs when the infrastructure of a city uses up energy, thus making an "island" where it's warmer than the city's surrounding rural areas.
On a typical summer day, the sun can heat exposed surfaces in the city, like pavements and rooftops, to temperatures 50 to 90 degrees hotter than the air. Surfaces in rural areas, which are generally more shaded and moist, stay close to air temperatures. Surface urban heat islands are hottest during the day.
On the other hand, atmospheric urban heat islands, where the air is warmer than its surroundings, are strongest at night because of the time it takes the release of heat from the infrastructure to reach the atmosphere. In a city of 1 million people, the air can be 22 degrees higher than its surroundings.
A Hobson's choice is one where you have no real option - you either take what's given to you or leave it.
The term has its origins from around the end of the 17th century, when a man from Cambridge named Thomas Hobson (not to be confused with Thomas Hobbes) ran a successful horse and carrier rental business but only gave each of his customers one choice of horse. Hence, Hobson's choice.
Last year I learned a few reasons why women live longer than men. Today the BBC has given me one more reason.
Researchers in Japan experimenting on mice have found that if you eliminate the male genes from the offspring before its birth, the animal will live a third longer than one with normal genetic inheritance. The resulting mouse is lighter and smaller but also appears to have a better immune system.
The reason is a gene that is passed down by the fathers, which is inherited by both his male and female kids but only expressed in the males. It allows the males to grow big and strong, but at the expense of their life spans.
Not only do female humans live longer than their male counterparts, the same is true for many other mammals. And of course for humans, it might not be as simple as just one gene, but the general picture is still the same.
Atlanta hasn't had a white mayor since 1974. It looks like it might stay that way, as State Senator Kasim Reed beat his white opponent, Councilwoman Mary Norwood, by less than a percentage point in a runoff election today. The votes will most likely face a recount in the city with a 56% black population.
