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Thursday, April 18, 2013
Today in History
| 310 | St. Eusebius begins his reign as Catholic Pope. | |
| 1521 | Martin Luther confronts the emperor Charles V, refusing to retract the views which led to his excommunication. | |
| 1676 | Sudbury, Massachusetts is attacked by Indians. | |
| 1775 | American revolutionaries Paul Revere and William Dawes ride though the towns of Massachusetts warning that "the British are coming." | |
| 1791 | National Guardsmen prevent Louis XVI and his family from leaving Paris. | |
| 1818 | A regiment of Indians and blacks is defeated at the Battle of Suwanna, in Florida, ending the first Seminole War. | |
| 1834 | William Lamb becomes prime minister of England. | |
| 1838 | The Wilkes' expedition to the South Pole sets sail. | |
| 1847 | U.S. forces defeat Mexicans at Cerro Gordo in one of the bloodiest battle of the war. | |
| 1853 | The first train in Asia begins running from Bombay to Tanna. | |
| 1861 | Colonel Robert E. Lee turns down an offer to command the Union armies. | |
| 1885 | The Sino-Japanese war ends. | |
| 1906 | A massive earthquake hits San Francisco, measuring 8.25 on the Richter scale. | |
| 1923 | Yankee Stadium opens with Babe Ruth hitting a three-run homer as the Yankees beat the Red Sox 4-1. | |
| 1937 | Leon Trotsky calls for the overthrow of Soviet leader Josef Stalin. | |
| 1942 | James H. Doolittle bombs Tokyo and other Japanese cities. | |
| 1943 | Traveling in a bomber, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the mastermind of the attack on Pearl Harbor, is shot down by American P-38 fighters. | |
| 1946 | The League of Nations dissolves. | |
| 1949 | The Republic of Ireland withdraws from British Commonwealth. | |
| 1950 | The first transatlantic jet passenger trip is completed. | |
| 1954 | Colonel Nasser seizes power in Egypt. | |
| 1978 | The U.S. Senate approves the transfer of the Panama Canal to Panama. | |
| 1980 | Zimbabwe's (Rhodesia) formal independence from Britain is proclaimed. | |
| 1983 | A suicide bomber kills U.S. Marines at the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon. |
The Saudi Marathon Man
A new crime, apparently: being brown while being bombed.
A twenty-year-old man who had been watching the Boston Marathon had his body torn into by the force of a bomb. He wasn’t alone; a hundred and seventy-six people were injured. But he was the only one who, while in the hospital being treated for his wounds, had his apartment searched in “a startling show of force,” as his fellow-tenants described it to the Boston Herald, with a “phalanx” of officers and agents and two K9 units.
Did you know ...
That these 5 viral stories about Boston that aren't true
Here's a short, recent history of pressure cooker bombs
That only dozens attend DC Tax Day protests
That a repugican county commissioner uses the n-word. but he's not racist, because, in his words, he "built habitat homes for colored people"!
Med Express uses broken Ohio law to silence critics who say true things
Are you a lawyer in Ohio? If so, your pro-bono services are urgently
needed to defeat a trollish, bullying legal action from Med Express, a
company that sells refurb medical equipment on eBay. The company is
suing one of its customers for providing accurate, negative feedback on
eBay's comment system, trying to establish a precedent that saying true
things on the Internet should be illegal if it harms your business.
They're relying on the fact that Ohio has no anti-SLAPP laws -- laws
designed to protect people against the use of litigation threats to
extort silence from critics -- and have admitted that, while they have
no case, they believe that they can use the expense of dragging their
victims into an Ohio court to win anyway. Ken from Popehat has more:
This is the ugly truth of the legal system: litigants and lawyers can manipulate it to impose huge expense on defendants no matter what the merits of their complaint. Censors can abuse the system to make true speech so expensive and risky that citizens will be silenced. Regrettably, Ohio does not have an anti-SLAPP statute, so Med Express and James Amodio can behave in this matter with relative impunity. If Ms. Nicholls has to incur ruinous legal expenses to vindicate her rights, the bad guys win, whatever the ultimate outcome of the case.
Unless, that is, you will help Amy Nicholls stand up — not for $1.44, but for the freedom to speak the truth without being abused by a broken legal system.
If you are an attorney practicing in Medina County, Ohio, please consider offering pro bono assistance. Mr. Levy will be coordinating assistance, and I can tell you from personal experience that it is a privilege to work with him. Help give Med Express and James Amodio the legal curb-stomping they so richly deserve. Justice, karma, and the esteem of free speech supporters everywhere will be your reward.
If you aren't an attorney, you can help, too. Med Express should not be permitted to act in this manner without consequence. The natural and probable consequence is widespread publication of their conduct. Help by publicizing the case on Facebook, Twitter, on your blog, on forums, and on every other venue available to you. Ask yourself — would you want to do business with a company that abuses the legal system to extract revenge against customers who leave truthful negative feedback?
American oligopolies are the new monopolies
Tim Wu says, "I wrote something quick in the New Yorker about America's
big blind spot when it comes to big business -- if its not a monopoly,
its no problem, so highly concentrated industries can get away with
whatever they want."
This blind spot is of particular significance during an age when oligopolies, not monopolies, rule. Consider Barry Lynn’s 2011 book, “Cornered,” which carefully detailed the rising concentration and consolidation of nearly every American industry since the nineteen-eighties. He found that dominance by two or three firms “is not the exception in the United States, but increasingly the rule.” Consumers, easily misled by product labeling, often don’t even notice that products like sunglasses, pet food, or numerous others come from just a few giants. For example, while drugstores seem to offer unlimited choices in toothpaste, just two firms, Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive, control more than eighty per cent of the market (including seemingly independent brands like Tom’s of Maine).
The press confuses oligopoly and monopoly with some regularity. The Atlantic ran a recent infographic titled “The Return of the Monopoly,” describing rising concentration in airlines, grocery sales, music, and other industries. With the exception of Intel in computer chips, none of the industries described, however, was actually a monopoly—all were oligopolies. So while The Atlantic is right about what’s happening, it sounds the wrong alarm. We know how to fight monopolies, but few seem riled at “The Return of the Oligopoly.”
Things were not always thus. Back in the mid-century, the Justice Department went after oligopolistic cartels in the tobacco industry and Hollywood with the same vigor it chased Standard Oil, the quintessential monopoly trust. In the late nineteen-seventies, another high point of enforcement, oligopolies were investigated by the Federal Trade Commission, and during that era Richard Posner, then a professor at Stanford Law School, went as far as to argue that when firms maintain the same prices, even without a smoke-filled-room agreement, they ought to be considered members of a price-fixing conspiracy. (By this logic, the Delta and US Airways shuttles between New York and Washington, D.C., would probably be price-fixers, since their prices do vary by how far in advance you buy, but are always identical.)
Bitcoin Trading Prompts Tulip Mania Comparison
What does a 21st century electronic currency have to do with tulips in 1630s Holland? Here's a primer.
New broad-spectrum antibiotic can kill MRSA, anthrax
A new broad range antibiotic, developed jointly by scientists at
The Rockefeller University and Astex Pharmaceuticals, has been found to
kill a wide range of bacteria, including drug-resistant Staphylococcus
(MRSA) bacteria that do not respond [...]
New type of solar structure cools buildings in full sunlight
Homes and buildings chilled without air conditioners. Car
interiors that don’t heat up in the summer sun. Tapping the frigid
expanses of outer space to cool the planet. Science fiction, you say?
Well, maybe not [...]
Algae-Powered Apartment Complex Blooms In Hamburg
As the world's first building powered by algae, the 15-unit Bio Intelligent Quotient House generates biomass and heat with the assistance of 129 integrated glass bioreactor panels covering approximately 2,150 square feet of the four-story structure's southeast and southwest facing sides.
The Seating Preference of Subway Riders
Do
you stand or sit down in a crowded subway train? Give up your seat to
a pregnant woman or an elderly or do you pretend not to notice?Researchers from the New York City Transit Authority know what you'll do, because they've done the research:
Some of the findings might seem intuitive to the veteran subway rider, even if the rationale is not.Matt Flegenheimer of The New York Times has the post: Here.
When a subway car has more passengers than seats, the study found that an average of 10 percent or more of the seats were not taken. And even when a subway car is less than half-filled, the authors found that a small percentage of riders would inevitably choose to stand.
Riders prefer seats near a door, the authors said, and demonstrate “disdain for bench spots between two other seats.” Those who stand also prefer to do so near doors, in part because of its many “partitions to lean against,” and for the precious seconds they save getting off the train.
But the doorway area was desirable for a less obvious reason, too, the report found; it allowed riders to avoid “the sometimes uncomfortable feeling of accidentally making eye contact with seated passengers.”
The snapshots combine to sketch a transit landscape of convenience, game theory and occasional altruism, where often every movement is executed with purpose.
Science Proves That Men Just Don't Get Women's Emotions
... new research suggests men really do struggle to read women's emotions — at least from their eyes.Tia Ghose of LiveScience summarizes it for us: Here.
The research, published Wednesday (April 10) in the journal PLOS ONE, showed that men had twice as much trouble deciphering women's emotions from images of their eyes compared with those of men. Parts of the male brain tied to emotion also didn't activate as strongly when the men looked at women's eyes.
Social science + engineering = help for dying languages
Many of the world’s languages are disappearing. David Chiang
wants to do something about that. Chiang, USC Viterbi research assistant
professor and computational linguist at the USC Information Sciences
Institute, worries that the loss of [...]
How To Converse Properly
18 Tips From Old Etiquette Books
Hundreds of etiquette books were published in this period, and they all had something to say about how to use language. Here are 18 perfectly charming rules on how to converse properly culled from 19th century etiquette books.
Women Who Graduated from Elite Universities Work Less
“Even though elite graduates are more likely to earn advanced degrees, marry at later ages and have higher expected earnings, they are still opting out of full-time work at much higher rates than other graduates, especially if they have children,” said Hersch.But why? Hersch doesn't think it's because these women are being forced out: More
Hersch’s research finds that 60 percent of female graduates from elite colleges are working full time compared to 68 percent of women from other schools. [...]
Hersch found that when comparing graduates from elite and less selective schools, the largest gap in full-time labor market activity is among women who also earned a master’s in business degree.
“Married MBA mothers with a bachelor’s degree from the most selective schools are 30 percentage points less likely to be employed full time than are graduates of less selective schools,” said Hersch.
Reality TV Cracks Open The Extravagant World Of Hollywood Vintage
Eyeball Shaving
Forget
mascaras! To properly beautify your eye, you'd need to shave it. Here's
the bizarre ancient Chinese art of eyeball cleaning:The bizarre practice is dying out in China, but customers can still get the traditional treatment from the Mr Deyuan, who has been offering the service from his stand in a park in Chengdu city, Sichuan province, for the past seven years.The Daily Mail has more pics that you should NOT see if you're squeamish about those sorts of things: Here.
After holding the eye open and running his blade across the surface of the eyeball, the barber then inserts a small rod beneath the upper and lower lids and scrapes it back and forth.
Mr Deyuan will provide a head and face shave plus an eye cleaning for RMB5 - the equivalent of around 50 pence.
The Top 8 Neglected Monster-Slayers In World Mythology
Wikimedia Commons Pictures of the Year
The winners of the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year Contest 2012 have been announced. This is their seventh annual contest, and the winner were selected by votes from active Wikimedia project members. The picture above, of a pair of European Bee-eaters (Merops apiaster) by Pierre Dalous, came in first place. Continue reading to see the rest of the 12 top vote-getters.
Link
Freighthopping Hobos
Free - And Illegal - Transportation For Gentlemen Of The Rails
Born out of the need to travel in search of work, the term 'hobo' is thought to have originated in the United States after the mid 19th century when the end of the American Civil War left discharged soldiers to find their way home or look for employment elsewhere.
Poland's Underground Salt Cathedral
Commercial mining was discontinued in 1996 due to low salt prices and mine flooding. Now a museum, the Wieliczka Salt Mine's attractions include dozens of statues, three chapels and an entire cathedral that has been carved out of the rock salt by the miners.
The secret history of a hidden mural at a Los Angeles hotel
In May 2012, when the renowned Wilshire Grand Hotel in Los Angeles was slated to close its doors for good, the owners ran a huge liquidation sale—the entire contents of the hotel went up for grabs. The hotel changed hands over the years, originally the Statler—then Statler-Hilton, then Omni, and finally the Wilshire Grand— remained one of the “see and be-seen” hotspots of the midcentury atomic age.
During the clearance sale, a puzzling discovery was made: a fifteen-foot mosaic mural commissioned by The Los Angeles Petroleum Club was found behind some old wood paneling. The Club had at one time maintained a posh member’s suite at the hotel. This is where the intrigue and mosaic sleuthing begins.
Hobbit Humans Had Big Brains
New findings on the brain size of the tiny folks who lived until about 12,000 years ago suggest we may be cousins.
Could Life Be Older Than Earth Itself?
Applying a maxim from computer science to biology raises the
intriguing possibility that life existed before Earth did.
Animal News
Lead threat grows for rare US birds 
One of the rarest US birds is under a growing threat from ingesting lead fragments.
Pine marten survey suggests recovery
One of Scotland's rarest carnivores is showing signs of recovery after years of declining populations, a new report suggests.
Animal Pictures
Inca Tern, a species of bird, lives in the Pacific coastline from
northern Peru south to central Chile.
The birds are famous for their
manly "mustache".
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