Power play

A power play in hockey happens when one team, after one of its players commits a foul, loses that player, which makes it a 5-on-4 situation.

That's as deep as I care to go, and obviously I'm not a huge hockey fan (except when the U.S. is playing in the Olympic gold medal game against Canada). Congrats to the Canadian team for winning today, but dammit, we were so close.

Another one of those visual perception tricks from Sciam

Click here. I'm tired.
Here was the other visual effect from Scientific American.

Reconciliation, explained

I had known that reconciliation, the process being discussed nowadays as a possible solution to the logjam in Congress that health insurance reform is facing, had been used more than 20 times since Ronald Reagan. I also knew that George W. Bush used it for his massive tax cuts for the rich. What I didn't know is that reconciliation was also used for COBRA, Children's Health Insurance Program, and welfare reform in 1996.

Besides, why the fuck would you need 60% of a body to get anything done?

Challenger Deep

The Challenger Deep is the deepest point on Earth. It is about 36,000 feet deep (almost 7 miles) and is located between Japan and Papua New Guinea.

I'm in a class-action lawsuit!

That's because Google decided to come out with that retarded Twitter-like thing a few weeks ago without setting the proper privacy settings for Gmail users. A class-action lawsuit is brought when a lawyer or group of lawyers decide to represent a large number of individuals who have been harmed by a product.

From Slate:

Joining a class-action lawsuit is a so-called "opt-out" process, not "opt-in." In other words, if you qualify as part of the class -- a group of individuals with shared grievances -- you're included unless you specifically ask not to be. In this case, the group includes every Gmail user whose account was linked to Buzz.

If the plaintiffs win, either after a trial or through a settlement, then the "claims process" begins. In order to receive money, class members must submit a claim form outlining who they are and proving that they suffered because of the defendant's actions.

But I don't expect to be getting any amount of money. The proof that I was affected is just too much work.

Ex cathedra

Ex cathedra means "spoken with authority; with the authority of the office."

Where's the coding key?

As I've said before, I'm kind of a computer geek. I'm in the process of interviewing for positions in the computer science field, so I have to know the very basic things of coding, right? Apparently, no.

Turns out that the vast majority of people interviewing for programming positions don't even know the first thing of programming. I'm assuming that most of the 3 readers of this blog don't know much about computer science, so I'll quote a sentence from the article that makes an analogy:

To be clear, hard is a relative term -- we're not talking about complicated, Google-style graduate computer science interview problems. This is extremely simple stuff we're asking candidates to do. And they can't. It's the equivalent of attempting to hire a truck driver and finding out that 90 percent of the job applicants can't find the gas pedal or the gear shift.

So I guess I'm slightly ahead of the game. Bosses are now, during the interviewing stage, forcing applicants to write some practice code in order to weed out the non-programmers. They've been doing this over the phone (which is kinda hard to do), handing them a piece of paper, or, a new method, giving them a problem to solve over the Internet.

Owl ears

From Cognitive Neuroscience (p. 168):

Barn owls rely on two cues to localize sounds: the difference in when a sound reaches each of the two ears, the interaural time, and the difference in the sound's intensity at the two ears. Both cues result from the fact that the sound reaching two ears is not identical. Unless the sound source is directly parallel to the head's orientation, the sound will reach one ear before the other. Moreover, because the intensity of a sound wave becomes attenuated over time, the magnitude of the signal at the two ears will not be identical. The time and intensity differences are minuscule. For example, if the stimulus is located at a 45° angle to the line of sight, the interaural time difference will be approximately 1/10,000 of a second. The intensity differences resulting from sound attenuation are even smaller -- indistinguishable from variations due to noise. However, these small differences are amplified by a unique asymmetry of owl anatomy: The left ear is higher than eye level and points downward, and the right ear is lower than eye level and points upward. Because of this asymmetry, sounds coming from below are louder in the left ear than the right. Humans do not have this asymmetry, but the complex structure of the human outer ear, the pinna, may amplify the intensity difference between a sound at the two ears.

Mormonism

Julia Sweeney summarizes the history of Mormonism. Yes, I checked if it was true. Sadly it is.

Skip to 8:04.

Oldest national anthem

The Dutch national anthem, "Het Wilhelmus," is generally regarded as the world's oldest national anthem. The words were first written around 1568.

Alan Turing was gay?

I guess when compared to the general population, I'm kind of a computer geek (I use Linux and program in Java). So I was surprised to find out that a member of computer science's pantheon, Alan Turing, was gay. I had heard a faint rumor before but it had totally escaped my mind because I didn't pay attention to it.

In 1952, Turing admitted to having a homosexual affair with a 19 year-old. He was charged with gross indecency, at a time when homosexual acts were illegal in Britain. Given a choice to go to prison or go on probation on the condition that he ingest estrogen to reduce his libido -- a process known as chemical castration -- he chose the latter. A side effect caused him to grow breasts. Two and a half years later he died from cyanide poisoning, in what most people believe was a suicide.

In September of last year, the British government formally apologized to Turing for prosecuting him as a gay man.

I don't know about you, but I would have much rather gone to prison.

What exactly causes a stroke?

From Cognitive Neuroscience (pg. 134):

The most frequent cause of stroke is occlusion of the normal passage of blood by a foreign substance. Over years, arteriosclerosis, the buildup of fatty tissue, occurs in the heart. This tissue can break free, becoming an embolus that is carried off in the bloodstream. An embolus that enters the cranium may easily pass through the large carotid or vertebral arteries. But as the arteries and capillaries reach the end of their distribution, their size decreases. Eventually, the embolus becomes stuck, or infarcted, blocking the flow of blood and depriving all downstream tissue of oxygen and glucose. Within a short period of time, this tissue will become dysfunctional. If the blood flow is not rapidly restored, the cells will die.

Boy Blunder

Let's face it. Ever since the discovery of King Tut's tomb in 1922, popular culture cast him as one of Ancient Egypt's greatest leader, simply because of the treasures buried with him and the fact that his tomb was one of the most intact pharaoh tombs ever found. But anyone who even did the slightest bit of research knew that he was actually pretty mediocre and perhaps a forgotten figure at the time. Today we find out even more. This is the first ever DNA test done on an Egyptian royal mummy.

Three take-home points about him:

- He had a club foot and needed a cane to walk.
- He had the most noxious type of malaria, and actually caught more than one malarial infection while he lived, which gives the strongest reason of his death. This marks the oldest genetic proof of the disease.
- His mother and father were also his sister and brother. That's probably why his immune system sucked to begin with.

Peter Benenson

One morning in the early 1960s, a man named Peter Benenson was reading the newspaper in a London subway. He noticed an article that reported on two Portuguese students being sentenced to seven years in prison for praising liberty in a public place in Lisbon. Benenson immediately penned an open letter to the British newspaper The Observer, which was later published, asking people to support the two students. This event is what started the group now known as Amnesty International.

Teeth are not bones

I was taught a long time ago that teeth were bones. If that's the case, would they be counted as 32 of the 206 bones in our body? Nope, because they're not even considered bones (PDF). The reasons are irrelevant to me. Too many big dental terms I'll never understand without taking a dentistry course.

Midi-chlorians

No, I'm not a Star Wars geek. Midi-chlorians "are a microorganism in the fictional Star Wars galaxy, first mentioned in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. They are microscopic life-forms that reside within the cells of all living things and communicate with the Force. They are symbionts with all other living things and without them life could not exist. The Jedi have learned how to listen to and coordinate the midi-chlorians. In order to be a Jedi or a Sith, one must have a high enough concentration of midi-chlorians in one's cells."

This prankster is awesome. Check out his YouTube channel pranking more TV fundies.

In it for the money

From Research Methods in Psychology (p. 154-5):

Sax et al. (2003) reported the results for the portion of the survey in which students are asked to rate the importance of different values to assess students' need for meaning and purpose in their life. Two values were of particular interest: "the importance of developing a meaningful philosophy of life" and "the importance of being very well off financially" (pp. 6-7). Figure 5.3 [below] displays the results for the percentage of students who endorsed these values as "very important" or "essential." In the late 1960s, over 80% of students indicated that developing a meaningful philosophy of life was very important or essential -- in fact, this was the top value endorsed by students. In contrast, being well-off financially was very important or essential to less than 45% of the students, and ranked fifth or sixth among students' values during the late 1960s.

In 2003, the position of these values was reversed, with 73.8% of students endorsing being well-off financially as very important or essential. In 2003, developing a meaningful philosophy of life dropped to its lowest value in the survey history [sic], with 39.3% of students endorsing this as very important or essential. As can be seen in Figure 5.3, these contrasting trends in values began to shift in the early 1970s, crossed in 1977, and were completely reversed by the late 1980s. Since then, they have remained relatively unchanged. For example, data for 2006 indicate that 42% of first-year students regarded developing a meaningful philosophy of life as essential or very important (Bryant & Austin, 2006). Sax et al. (2003) emphasize that the contrasting trends in values since the late 1980s "reflect the continuing tension between extrinsic and intrinsic values within this generation of college students" (p. 7). Interestingly, these researchers also reported that 2003 was a record year for "volunteerism," with 83.1% of the college freshmen indicating that they participated in volunteer work their last year of high school, and a record number reported that there is a "very good chance" they will participate in volunteer work or community-service work during their college years.

Cicero

The fundamentalists of our economy are wrong

From an adaptation of Henry Paulson's new memoir On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System. This is when John McCain suspended his presidential campaign in September 2008 to "focus on the economy." Paulson was weary that a presidential candidate who knew little or nothing about the economy wanted to hold an, ahem, economic meeting:

Then Obama sketched the broad outlines of the problem and stressed the need for immediate action. He said the Democrats had been working closely with me; he ran through the rough terms of the morning's discussion on the Hill, then mentioned the need for adjustments on oversight and executive compensation, as well as help for homeowners. He spoke without notes -- much less a teleprompter -- and spoke eloquently. "The Democrats will deliver the votes," he asserted.

Then he sprang the trap that the Democrats had set: "Yesterday, Senator McCain and I issued a joint statement, saying in one voice that this is no time to be playing politics. And on the way here, we were on the brink of a deal..."

But, of course, there was no deal yet. ...Skipping protocol, the president turned to McCain to offer him a chance to respond: "I think it's fair that I give you the chance to speak next."

But McCain demurred. "I'll wait my turn," he said. It was an incredible moment, in every sense. This was supposed to be McCain's meeting -- he'd called it, not the president, who had simply accommodated the Republican candidate's wishes. Now it looked as if McCain had no plan at all -- his idea had been to suspend his campaign and summon us all to this meeting.

Then chatter and partisan throat-grabbing ensued. The final blow was dealt after that.

Finally, raising his voice over the din, Obama said loudly, "I'd like to hear what Senator McCain has to say, since we haven't heard from him yet."

The room went silent and all eyes shifted to McCain, who sat quietly in his chair, holding a single note card. He glanced at it quickly and proceeded to make a few general points...

As he spoke, I could see Obama chuckling. McCain's comments were anticlimactic, to say the least. ...[H]e had little to say in the forum he himself had called.

Vocal cord dysfunction

Click here for a great WebMD video on vocal cord dysfunction.

Orange Revolution

The Orange Revolution was a series of protests in Ukraine that lasted from November 2004 to January 2005. It stemmed from what appeared to be a fraudulent election pitting the conservative candidate Viktor Yanukovych against the pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko. Eventually, after court decisions and run-offs, Yushchenko became Ukraine's president.

This year, Yushchenko failed to clinch a spot in the election. That left the loser of five years ago, Yanukovych, to run against the more liberal Yulia V. Tymoshenko, who had also taken part in the revolution. Yushchenko won this time in a fair election, due in large part to the failure of the Orange government to make way economically. So it might look like the Orange Revolution lasted a relatively short time, but now Ukrainians enjoy more freedom of speech and have gone through a fair election process.

Kippumjo

The Kippumjo is a collection of groups maintained by the North Korean head of state for the purpose of providing pleasure to high-ranking officials. There are three "teams":

1. A satisfaction team which provides sex.
2. A happiness team which provides massages.
3. A striptease team.

The women are between the ages of 13 and 40, though most are believed to be between 18 and 25. Little is known about this secretive organization. It was started in 1978 by Kim Il-sung, who was Kim Jong-il's father.

Sedulous

Sedulous means "involving great care, effort, and persistence."

First women on U.S. stamp

In 1893, Queen Isabella of Spain became the first woman to make an appearance on a U.S. stamp, as Christopher Columbus was depicted asking her for funds. In 1902, Martha Washington became the first woman to appear in a portrait on a U.S. commemorative stamp.

Orwell v. Huxley

A good contrast of the views of George Orwell (1984) and Aldous Huxley (Brave New World). I had known Orwell's stance but not Huxley's, even though I read BNW in high school. Basically, Orwell thought that what we feared would destroy us, while Huxley said what we loved would destroy us. I guess I'm more of a Huxley person, but if you lived in North Korea and you had the least bit of intellect, you'd probably be more in line with Orwell's opinions.

How's Canada doing right now?

In these economic times where the U.S. is struggling financially, Canada is actually not doing bad. Even as both countries faced cheap goods coming in from Asia, we all but totally collapsed a little over a year ago while our neighbors to the north survived. Why?

Rate policies for both nations were pretty much the same. A lot of people, particularly those of the libertarian persuasion, have put the blame on the Fed for keeping interest rates too low for too long. Actually, Canada's interest rates have tracked ours. So interest rates alone don't look like a big cause of the crisis.

On the left, liberals have criticized banks that are "too big," "too interconnected," or "too important to fail." I was one of those when I stated that the government should prevent banks from reaching a certain ceiling. But in reality, Canada has about five banking cabals that control the country's finances. They can grow as big/interconnected/important as they wish. Sound familiar?

The thing is, our friendly neighbors have what we now term a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which is part of the bill passed in the House. Canada restricts their institutions from leveraging like crazy and packaging their mortgages, and also blocks much of their ability of subprime loans. And with these simple regulations that still let banks possess a lot of freedom, Canada has done a lot better than us these days.

Cummerbund

A cummerbund is one of those stupid-looking things some people wear around their waists at dinner parties and other stupid events.

Tlatelolco massacre

1968 wasn't just a year of turmoil in the United States. On October 2, Mexican government officials opened fire on a crowd of college students in a section of Mexico City called Tlatelolco. The exact number of deaths is disputed, but most sources cite it around 200 to 300. The number of arrests might have exceeded 1,000. This event is known as the Tlatelolco massacre.

That year, Gustavo Diaz Ordaz was Mexico's president. He was notorious for suppressing independent labor unions and peasant farmers, and the economy suffered while he was in office. Hence, dismay pervaded the country's working class.

Mexico City was also set to host the Olympic Games, and the government poured in $150 million in its preparation, a huge amount compared to the amount they invested in the economy. Angered, college students organized and initially demanded greater employment and respect for university independence, but the dissatisfactions of the working class soon found way in the demonstrations.

On July 23, the riot police attacked students and teachers at Vocational School #5 in Mexico City, marking the first time the government seriously infringed on student autonomy. Actually, according to one person, "the granaderos [riot police] said that the authorities gave the men in the riot squad thirty pesos for every student they clubbed and hauled off to jail." This incident galvanized students from outside the city and other parts of society. Small groups of college students began to distribute leaflets and collected money and sympathy from older people. On August 1, 50,000 students marched peacefully in Mexico City, which was not interrupted by any major distractions.

Next, a silent march was planned to take place on September 13, one where students invited other students, teachers, workers, peasants, and the general public to attend. The organizers told fellow students and teachers to return to class only if their institutional demands were met. The government quickly stated that the march had nothing to do with the Olympics or the holidays surrounding Independence Day in Mexico. The demands were:

1. Repeal of Articles 145 and 145b of the Penal Code (which sanctioned imprisonment of anyone attending meetings of three or more people, deemed to threaten public order).
2. The abolition of granaderos (the tactical police corps).
3. Freedom for political prisoners.
4. The dismissal of the chief of police and his deputy.
5. The identification of officials responsible for the bloodshed from previous government repressions (July and August meetings).

Diaz Ordaz soon ordered the army to pay a visit to the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the country's largest university, where they randomly beat and arrested students.

On October 2, approximately 10,000 people -- students and spectators alike -- gathered at a plaza in Tlatelolco, listening to speeches and chanting "We don't want Olympic games, we want revolution!". Then, around 6:30 pm, 5,000 soldiers and 200 tanks and trucks encircled the crowd.

The shootings proceeded throughout the night. Demonstrators and passerby, adults and children, were indiscriminately killed, their bodies hitting the ground. Soldiers rummaged through the apartment complex adjacent to the plaza. Snipers enjoyed safety as they picked off their defenseless enemies.

The next morning, the state-run media reported that the "criminal" actions of the students led to 20 to 28 being killed, with hundreds injured and hundreds arrested. Of course, the truth ultimately came forth.