- Sofie -
( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )
(talkpost)
I enjoy the fact that that Time Machine icon winds backward.
And speaking of time, although I love my automatic watches, I did finally give in to my geek nature and got an "atomic" watch that syncs with the Colorado Springs signal. (And a couple of other frequencies around the world - you do want to be careful when buying one of these, as many of the models sold for the US market only work in the US.) Since it's a Citizen Eco-Drive, it's the electronic equivalent of an automatic. Never needs a battery.
I still think it would be better to sync with GPS, as the ground-based transmitters aren't that strong (or completely non-existent) in many parts of the world, and GPS chips are cheap enough to be included in cell phones these days. But apparently there's only two watches that do this, and they are really new on the market, and still extremely expensive.
It's not just streetlights that are going out in Detroit.
Mortician discovers gunshot wound in body after man's death ruled natural
These are the basic services that people rely on to create a safe, civilized city. The things that all but the most extreme anarchists are willing to pay taxes for. And Detroit can't manage it.
Originally published at craschworks. You can comment here or there.
I enjoyed Brandon Rennels‘s list of aspirations for 2012. His first two:
1. Mindful habits. Reciting a 4-line gatha to myself each morning, taking my first bite of food for my friends and family, setting mindfulness bells to ring every 30 minutes when I open the computer, etc. I have spent the last six months building a solid habit base that I’d like to continue working with. As I’ve written about before habits are critical for long-term change, but they are often hard to implement. One reason why habits have been difficult for me in the past is that my current life environment is constantly changing. This makes things like setting a standard wake-up time or keeping to a specific ritualized practice quite difficult. Here in Plum Village I have worked on habits that don’t require specific times of the day in order to be effective; they are more centered around how I approach daily activities.
2. Voluntary Simplicity. Related to #1, but big enough to warrant its own point. This is about not cramming “just one more thing” into the present moment. Not writing “just one more email” before eating lunch, reading “just one more chapter” before bed or sleeping in “just five more minutes” when I’m due to be somewhere soon. I do this all the time and it squeezes many moments of stillness from my day.
I can really relate to both of these.
Brandon also turned me onto this video, which is spectacular, both in visuals and in sound. The song is “Nuvole bianche” by Ludovico Einaudi.
Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Originally published at craschworks. You can comment here or there.
Base rate fallacy dooms TSA’s risk-based screening
“Risk-based screening, if it describes any partitioning of airline passengers at checkpoints, is a fraud. It doesn’t matter what the criteria are for putting passengers into low-risk and high-risk categories, because the concept is mathematically unsound.
The base rate fallacy is the failure to account for underlying incidence of the condition being tested for. Imagine this hypothetical (and completely fantastical) scenario: that the TSA employs a near-perfect test for risk-based screening, a test that always flags terrorists if they are present and only flags innocent people 1 time out of 10,000. (The TSA’s actual success rate at flagging known terrorists is zero.)
Under these conditions, only one out of every five million people flagged would be a terrorist. This is the base rate fallacy in operation. In other words, for all intents and purposes, every flagged person is a false positive.”
One salient downside of central air:
When it fails it's hot in the house everywhere.
http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/m
( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )
Police say the attacker may have been suffering from a drug-induced mania which causes the body to heat up, causing some users to strip off, the Miami Herald reported.
Armando Aguilar of the Miami Fraternal Order of Police suggested the drug may have been a new form of LSD.
Now, I'm not the least bit surprised that police are using this incident as an excuse to stink up the room with Dragnet-worthy culture war drivel, but I am thoroughly disgusted that the Huffington Post would print this garbage without asking questions like, "What is this supposedly new form of LSD?" "What evidence do you have that the attacker had taken it?" "Have there been other incidents of violence associated with this drug?" and most importantly, "Who the frak is Armando Aguilar, and why should we take his pronouncements seriously?"
Given that the cops were careful to say that the attacker may have been under the influence of cannibalism-inducing psychedelic drugs, let me ad a few more mays to the list.
The attacker may have been a Mormon.
The attacker may have voted Republican.
The attacker may have used a cell phone.
The attacker may have attended public school.
The attacker may have been taking prescription medications like Lipitor, Plavix, Viagra and Zoloft.
Colin Marshall sits down in Barnsdall Art Park with Hollywood Steve Huey, writer and media personality, former critic at All Music Guide and host of the web series Yacht Rock. They discuss his introductions to the likes of Michael Jackson, Yngwie Malmsteen, and Barry Manilow; elements of his home state of Michigan, including Big Rapids (not to be confused with Grand Rapids), Ann Arbor, and the urban ruins and $5,000 mansions of Detroit; the All Music Guide's shaping force on his musical consciousness; the lack of a genre equivalent to Yacht Rock today thanks to marketing departments' lack of imagination; great works, like Nirvana's Nevermind, that both found genres and dissolve them; life in the music nerd ghetto within the entertainment capital of the world at the time of bewildering musical (and cinematic and televisual) bounty; acquiring the name "Hollywood Steve" through a one-off gig on Pirates of the Caribbean; how he came to appreciate Barry Manilow, an artist known to some as a byword for bad music; and why guilty pleasures — whether musical ones in the case of Barry Manilow, or urban ones in the case of Los Angeles — are better enjoyed as regular pleasures.
Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed here or on iTunes here.
(Photo: Sammy Primero)
Vital stats:
Format: sound-oriented radio fictions
Episode duration: 9-18m
Frequency: 2-3 per month
“I thought there would be a revival of fiction and theater on the radio,” says science-fiction author Terry Bisson, “and I’ve been very disappointed that it hasn’t, kind of, worked out that way.” You and me both, brother. I say this as someone who, in childhood, obsessively collected bootleg tapes of old-time radio shows like Amos & Andy and X Minus One and had the newer, more internationalist productions of the ZBS Foundation playing on infinite loop. I dreamed of re-introducing “movies for your mind,” in the words of one radio-drama survivor whose tapings I attended as a kid, to the dead airwaves of my benighted time. Bisson made his lament to producer Jonathan Mitchell on an episode of Mitchell’s podcast The Truth [RSS] [iTunes] which adapts Bisson’s story “They’re Made Out of Meat” [MP3]. I bet Mitchell went through similar youthful befuddlement, wondering what made all those cool old shows go away and hoping — knowing, in some quasi-messianic sense — that they would return. It hasn’t, kind of, worked out that way.
What to blame? Maybe the increasingly utilitarian slant of modern American radio, which either feeds listeners’ anxiety over not having the latest news and information or numbs them completely with three-minute shots of anesthetic familiarity. But I get the sense that, deep in the minds of even dedicated tuners-in, radio just isn’t for fiction. They may express great admiration for the idea of new radio drama, and they may even bemoan the past 50 years’ lack of it, but they’ll keep turning the dial if they suspect what they’re hearing isn’t true. I doubt they do it for strictly gray-flannel-suit reasons; they probably just fear that they can’t keep up with a fictional narrative on the radio, or that they’ve already missed some plot point critical to understanding what happens next, or that they’ll get where they’re going before the big twist ending when everything falls into place. Or they just assume the story won’t give them much to talk about at the water cooler.
( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-radio-a
Canada prepares for an Asian future
By Ayesha Bhatty Vancouver
View of Vancouver Nearly one in five of Vancouver's population is Chinese
Chinese immigrants have flocked to Canada's west coast and transformed Vancouver into Canada's very own Asian metropolis. The days of concern over the city being turned into 'Hongcouver' have gone. What does the future hold for Canada's Asian population?
Shoppers stroll casually past a Lamborghini store in Richmond's Aberdeen Centre - a major Asian mall in this once sleepy Vancouver suburb known for its farmland and fishing village.
Outside the shopping centre, people are queuing at the many Chinese restaurants. In the local supermarkets, butchers are picking live seafood out of fish tanks, chopping off the heads, then gutting and packaging them up under the watchful eye of customers, almost exclusively Chinese-Canadian.
Richmond is North America's most Asian city - 50% of residents here identify themselves as Chinese. But it's not just here that the Chinese community in British Columbia (BC) - some 407,000 strong - has left its mark. All across Vancouver, Chinese-Canadians have helped shape the local landscape.
We saw Ian McDiarmid last night on stage, playing the title character in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens.
McDiarmid is most famous as the guy who plays the Emperor in Star Wars.
I can't say I cared much for the play, but McDiarmid's performance was very impressive. He was quite spry for a man of 67, and his vocal technique as an actor seemed to outmatch everyone else on stage. He seemed to move through a couple of octaves when speaking, without drawing attention to the changes in pitch. He projected his voice even when apparently speaking quietly and reflectively. And his pronunciation was crisp and distinct, articulating his consonants and vowels, again while seeming natural about it. Mind you, he was on stage with a lot of very experienced Chicago Shakespeareans, who have spent a lot of time on that same stage, so his superiority was actually a bit puzzling to me.
The play is unlike other Shakespeare plays, in various ways, including having an extremely simple story line. Shakespeare's plots are usually complicated. Current scholarly thinking has Shakespeare writing two thirds of the play, with Thomas Middleton writing the rest.
For some reason, this production recast two female prostitutes into one lascivious male soldier/prostitute. I didn't know this going in, but I suspected genders had been altered while watching the play. The dialog and relationships weren't making sense to me. So I researched it today.
Despite the players' acting chops,
gender switching often flops.
Navigate: (Previous 20 posts)
