“For cooking.”
bugs
anyone know of a place where i could purchase insects for cooking? pet shops and graveyards are excluded.
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From a pretty overheated Associated Press article about stem-cell research and the commingling of species:
“But the biological co-mingling of animal and human is now evolving into even more exotic and unsettling mixes of species, evoking the Greek myth of the monstrous chimera, which was part lion, part goat and part serpent.
In the past two years, scientists have created pigs with human blood, fused rabbit eggs with human DNA and injected human stem cells to make paralyzed mice walk.
Particularly worrisome to some scientists are the nightmare scenarios that could arise from the mixing of brain cells: What if a human mind somehow got trapped inside a sheep’s head?
The ‘idea that human neuronal cells might participate in ‘higher order’ brain functions in a nonhuman animal, however unlikely that may be, raises concerns that need to be considered,’ the academies report warned.”
From the December 12, 1885 New York Times:
“Bellaire, Ohio–Frederick Glatzer and Frederick Summers are coal diggers and reside with their families up Indian Run, a few miles from this city. What has made them notorious is the fact that they are fond of dog meat, and on occasions when the average mortal buys a turkey to celebrate with, these people kill a dog and roast it. Glatzer’s wife has not been in the country very long, but during the time she has lived here the family has had several dog roasts, and have made them very enjoyable occasions, and on Christmas expect to have another, at which a number of relatives will be present.”
I don’t understand why children can’t go into bars or buy cigarettes, but they can eat at fast-food restaurants. It ingrains in them at an impressionable age as unhealthy a lifestyle as can be. I have no problem with adults who choose to do these things, but I don’t get how we draw the line with kids to allow them to stuff huge amounts of salt and sugar into their hearts.
That said, I’ll acknowledge that I’ve always been entranced by the branding and design of fast-food places: the consistency, the brightness, the modernism, the formerly industrial materials being wound into a homey decor in a way that Ray and Charles Eames could appreciate. It’s the perfect meeting of form and function. Don’t get me wrong: Even if I wasn’t a vegetarian, I would not eat this garbage, and the implications of its globalization also bother me. But I do love the architecture and design of such places, especially the earliest iterations.
From Jimmy Stamp’s Smithsonian blog post, “Design Decoded: The Golden Arches of Modernism,” an excerpt about the initial McDonald’s structures, which were planned and executed during the apex of roadside culture:
“In the early 1950s brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald hired architect Stanley Clark Meston to design a drive-in hamburger stand that carried on the traditions of roadside architecture established in the 1920s and 1930s. They had some experience with previous restaurants and a very clear idea of how they wanted their new venture to work – at least on the inside. Meston described the design as ‘logically dictated by clear program and commercial necessities’ and compared it to designing a factory. Though he didn’t necessarily consider himself a modernist, Meston’s pragmatic, functionalist approach reveals, at the very least, a sympathy with some of the tenets of Modernism. Function before form. But not, it would appear, at the expense of form.
And anyway, the exterior had its own function to fulfill. In an age before ubiquitous mass media advertisements, the building was the advertisement. To ensure the restaurant stood out from the crowd, Meston decided to make the entire building a sign specifically designed to attract customers from the road. Now, many architects have speculated that McDonald’s iconic Golden arches have their origin in Eero Saarinen’s 1948 design for the St. Louis Gateway Arch or Swiss architect Le Corbusier’s unbuilt 1931 design for the Palace of the Soviets. But they tend to read little too much into things. The answer is much simpler.
The building was a sign but it wasn’t really signifying anything – other than ‘hey! Look over here!’ According to Hess, the initial idea for the golden arches –and they were called ‘golden arches’ from the very beginning– came from ‘a sketch of two half circle arches drawn by Richard McDonald.’ It just seemed to him like a memorable form that could be easily identified form a passing car. The longer a driver could see it from behind a windshield, the more likely he or she would be to stop. Oddly enough, the idea to link the arches, thereby forming the letter ‘M’, didn’t come about until five years later. McDonald had no background in design or architecture, no knowledge of Eero Saarinen, Le Corbusier, or the triumphal arches of ancient Rome. He just thought it looked good. Weston turned that sketch into an icon.
Technology has long conditioned urban form and continues to do so today. But this was perhaps never quite so clear as it was with roadside attractions and restaurants like McDonalds.”
Tags: Jimmy Stamp, Maurice McDonald, Richard McDonald, Stanley Clark Meston
In a New York Review of Books essay, Martin Scorsese sums up the new literacy:
“Now we take reading and writing for granted but the same kinds of questions are coming up around moving images: Are they harming us? Are they causing us to abandon written language?
We’re face to face with images all the time in a way that we never have been before. And that’s why I believe we need to stress visual literacy in our schools. Young people need to understand that not all images are there to be consumed like fast food and then forgotten—we need to educate them to understand the difference between moving images that engage their humanity and their intelligence, and moving images that are just selling them something.
As Steve Apkon, the film producer and founder of the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York, points out in his new book The Age of the Image, the distinction between verbal and visual literacy needs to be done away with, along with the tired old arguments about the word and the image and which is more important. They’re both important. They’re both fundamental. Both take us back to the core of who we are.
When you look at ancient writing, words and images are almost indistinguishable. In fact, words are images, they’re symbols. Written Chinese and Japanese still seem like pictographic languages. And at a certain point—exactly when is ‘unfathomable’—words and images diverged, like two rivers, or two different paths to understanding.
In the end, there really is only literacy.”
Tags: Martin Scorsese, Steve Apkon
The opening of a Guernica piece about the fall of Detroit and the rise of American income disparity, by that tiny communist Robert Reich:
“One way to view Detroit’s bankruptcy—the largest bankruptcy of any American city—is as a failure of political negotiations over how financial sacrifices should be divided among the city’s creditors, city workers, and municipal retirees—requiring a court to decide instead. It could also be seen as the inevitable culmination of decades of union agreements offering unaffordable pension and health benefits to city workers.
But there’s a more basic story here, and it’s being replicated across America: Americans are segregating by income more than ever before. Forty years ago, most cities (including Detroit) had a mixture of wealthy, middle-class, and poor residents. Now, each income group tends to lives separately, in its own city—with its own tax bases and philanthropies that support, at one extreme, excellent schools, resplendent parks, rapid-response security, efficient transportation, and other first-rate services; or, at the opposite extreme, terrible schools, dilapidated parks, high crime, and third-rate services.
The geo-political divide has become so palpable that being wealthy in America today means not having to come across anyone who isn’t.
Detroit is a devastatingly poor, mostly black, increasingly abandoned island in the midst of a sea of comparative affluence that’s mostly white. Its suburbs are among the richest in the nation.”
Tags: Robert Reich
Do we want the future to be seamless or jarring, at least initially? From Brad Templeton’s Robocars post about Vislab’s driverless car, which relies mostly on cameras:
“The Vislab car uses a LIDAR for forward obstacle detection, but their main thrust is the use of cameras. An FPGA-based stereo system is able to build point clouds from the two cameras. Driving appears to have been done in noonday sunlight. (This is easy in terms of seeing things but hard in terms of the harsh shadows.)
The article puts a focus on how the cameras are cheaper and less obtrusive. I continue to believe that is not particularly interesting — lasers will get cheaper and smaller, and what people want here is the best technology in the early adopter stages, not the cheapest. In addition, they will want it to look unusual. Cheaper and hidden are good goals once the cars have been deployed for 5-10 years.”
Tags: Brad Templeton
REVENGE!-ladies please read…. (westport)
ladies…get some extra cash in your hands for what YOU WANT..not him
sell me your man’s “secret” porn collection….it will piss him off and make you happy
do it TODAY
“The last one to pay the penalty was a woman.”
I only trust so much the historical reports about Native American behavior in white publications, which reported on the tribes from a posture of fear and ethnocentrism. So make what you will of this excerpt from an article in the September 20, 1903 New York Times:
“North Yakima, Washington–The Indian Tribes of the Northwest do not permit bad medicine men to experiment on the lives of their members. When one dies under the care of the doctor, the medicine man generally goes to the happy hunting grounds to atone for his sins. The Yakima Indians of Washington have recently disposed of two old doctors because of their failure to cure sick families. The last one to pay the penalty was a woman. Her name was Tee-son-a-way. She had lived to see almost 100 years of life before the hand of vengeance was turned against her.
In a little wickiup that had done service for a quarter of a century the medicine woman made her home. She was compelled to live an isolated life because of being a medicine woman. Her possessions consisted of an eighty-acre farm which the Government had given her, a band of ponies and stock, and $40 in money. She had passed beyond the stage of life when her associates had faith in her charms for healing the sick. Her hair was long and gray, which caused many members of the tribe to reverence her. But the piercing black eyes made them think an evil one was lurking about and they desired to get rid of her presence.
Tee-son-a-way sat in her tepee smoking the pipe of peace and sadly dreaming of the fate that soon would be hers, for she knew that the Indians would drag her away into the mountains and leave her for wolves to devour if she did not die or some of her enemies had not the courage to take her life. A face darkened the door, and one of the redmen quickly stepped inside the hut. He had a duty to perform. It was to avenge the death of some member of his family whom the doctor had failed to heal. With a stone he struck the medicine women on the head and felled her to the ground. Then her head was cut off and dragged away, leaving the body in a tepee.
For many days the body lay in the wickiup, while the head was discoloring in the hot sunshine of the Yakima Valley. Then, Yallup, an Indian, had a call to make on the medicine woman. He entered the tepee and discovered the signs of death. He called the tribe, and there was much mourning among the Yakimas. The remains were buried in the Indian cemetery with the pomp due the chieftain of many wars. Blankets of every hue were woven about the body and spread over the grave. The medicine rattle was buried with Tee-son a-way, and her voice will be heard no more.
Tee-son-a-way was one of the fortunate doctors whose lives were spared during the cold Winter of 1890 and 1891. The tribe held a long pow-wow at that time and executed their medicine men. They argued that the men were bad or the snow would not fall so deep and continue so long on the ground. One of the chiefs was so earnest in his dances and marks of violence to appease the wrath of the Great Spirit that he stabbed his breast with a dagger until he dropped dead in the council chamber. Yet the good spirit did not breathe a warm wind on the frozen camp, and the medicine men were burned at the stake or shot in the snowdrifts.”
Tags: Tee-son-a-way, Yallup
Noam Scheiber of the New Republic just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit about his recent article which predicts the collapse of Big Law. A couple of exchanges follow.
_______________________
Question:
Why do you think the business model is collapsing?
How can you show that the current biglaw downturn is not just the product of a big recession that will subside?
Why do you think that corporations will pay less for legal services in the future in a systematic way?
Noam Scheiber:
I think the business model is collapsing because of increased transparency in billing/pricing. Corporations are able to see what they’re paying for in more detail than ever before when it comes to legal services, and they don’t love what they’re seeing. Increasingly over the past decade or so, but especially since the recession, they’re simply refusing to go along with it. The best example is paying $300 an hour for the continued legal education of a first or second year associate who just doesn’t know anything. That is a dying institution. It’s of course possible that the current downturn is a product of the recession, but certain numbers suggest otherwise. According to NALP, the percentage of law grads who find a job where bar admission is required within 9 months is at its lowest ever – significantly lower than it was midway through the recession.
Tags: Noam Scheiber
The opening of Nadja Durbach’s Public Domain Review reconsideration of the life of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man:
“The scenes are among the most heartless in cinema history: a drunken, abusive showman exhibiting the severely deformed Joseph Merrick to horrified punters. David Lynch’s The Elephant Man begins with its lead character being treated little better than an animal in a cage. But it soon finds a clean-cut hero in the ambitious young surgeon Frederick Treves, who rescues the hapless Merrick from his keeper and gives him permanent shelter at the London Hospital. Supported by charitable donations, the victim recovers his humanity: he learns to speak again (in a decidedly middle-class accent), to entertain society guests and to dress and behave like a well-heeled young dandy. Merrick, no more the degraded show freak, reveals his inner goodness and spirituality and dies happy.
Lynch’s movie is based largely on Treves’ sentimental chronicle. But that narrative is merely one version of events – and one that in the end tells us more about middle-class morality than it does about Merrick. There is another story that casts a different light on what happened. The memoirs of Tom Norman, Merrick’s London manager, are surely as biased as Treves’. But as one of the most respected showmen of his day, Norman’s account challenges head on Treves’ claim that Merrick was ultimately better off in the hospital than at the freakshow.
In August 1884, after checking himself out of the Leicester workhouse, Merrick began his career as “the Elephant Man”. The exhibition of human oddities had been part of English entertainment since at least the Elizabethan period. In the 1880s, alongside the Elephant Man, the British public could see Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy, American Jack the Frog Man, Krao the Missing Link, Herr Unthan the Armless Wonder and any number of giants, dwarfs, bearded women and other “freaks of nature”. Despite the freakshow’s popularity, by the end of the 19th century, middle-class morality was condemning it as immoral, indecent and exploitive.
Most Victorian freaks, however, actually earned a comfortable living. Many were free agents who negotiated the terms of their exhibition and could ask for a salary or a share of the profits. They sold souvenirs to the crowds to make extra money. The freakshow was thus an important economic resource for working people whose deformities prevented them undertaking other forms of labour. Indeed, freak performers did not consider their exhibitions to be obscene or degrading. Rather, they saw themselves as little different from other entertainers.”
Tags: David Lynch, Joseph Merrick, Nadja Durbach
One of the most shocking episodes in the upside-down decade of the ’70s was the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a violent and radical outgrowth of the tortured anti-war movement of the ’60s. The nation shuddered for the shanghaied scion, but soon Hearst was a full-fledged member of the SLA, knocking over banks, cursing the “pigs” and being pursued, along with her new “friends,” by the FBI. Was she brainwashed? Was she a traitor? Was she a rich girl acting out?
I doubt Rolling Stone received too much grief for putting a terrorist on its cover back in 1975 (with an image that played off of Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World”), since the magazine was then decidedly counterculture and un-glossy. From Howard Kohn and David Weir’s article:
“The next day Patty ate her meals in the car. Even standing in line at a McDonalds was a risk. Millions had seen her picture on the evening news and the cover of Newsweek or heard her soft, distinctive voice on radio broadcasts of the S.L.A. communiqués.
For most of the previous four months she had been cooped up inside. Her excursions outside twice had ended in gunfire. Now she was driving across country through an FBI dragnet that already had employed more agents than any other civilian case.
The strain of the past months was showing. To Patty the passing world was populated by an army of undercover agents. Once, as Jack showed up to ease past a construction site, she ducked and whispered in a half shriek: ‘did you see that guy? I know he’s a pig.’
‘C’mon, he’s a highway flagman. Don’t be so uptight.’
When Jack pulled in for gas she frequently demanded he speed away as an attendant approached. ‘I don’t like the way he looks,’ she’d explain. ‘He looks like a pig.’
Patty’s repeated reviling of ‘pigs’ soon lead to a discussion about the political criterion for such a classification. Patty took the position that a pig was anyone who did not give wholehearted support to the S.L.A. Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, for instance, were pigs because they’d criticized the S.L.A. tactics. Patty sounded like what she was — a new convert to radical thinking.”
From the September 14, 1897 New York Times:
“La Grange, Ind.–Ida Bolley, wife of a farmer, died to-day while in a fit of laughter. A friend told a story which greatly amused Mrs. Bolley. While she was making merry over it, a blood vessel burst and caused her death.”
Tags: Ida Bolley
From “Slow Ideas,” another excellent Atul Gawande New Yorker article, this one about why some innovations are almost instantly sticky and why others get stuck:
“This has been the pattern of many important but stalled ideas. They attack problems that are big but, to most people, invisible; and making them work can be tedious, if not outright painful. The global destruction wrought by a warming climate, the health damage from our over-sugared modern diet, the economic and social disaster of our trillion dollars in unpaid student debt—these things worsen imperceptibly every day. Meanwhile, the carbolic-acid remedies to them, all requiring individual sacrifice of one kind or another, struggle to get anywhere.
The global problem of death in childbirth is a pressing example. Every year, three hundred thousand mothers and more than six million children die around the time of birth, largely in poorer countries. Most of these deaths are due to events that occur during or shortly after delivery. A mother may hemorrhage. She or her baby may suffer an infection. Many babies can’t take their first breath without assistance, and newborns, especially those born small, have trouble regulating their body temperature after birth. Simple, lifesaving solutions have been known for decades. They just haven’t spread.
Many solutions aren’t ones you can try at home, and that’s part of the problem. Increasingly, however, women around the world are giving birth in hospitals. In India, a government program offers mothers up to fourteen hundred rupees—more than what most Indians live on for a month—when they deliver in a hospital, and now, in many areas, the majority of births are in facilities. Death rates in India have fallen, but they’re still ten times greater than in high-income countries like our own.
Not long ago, I visited a few community hospitals in north India, where just one-third of mothers received the medication recommended to prevent hemorrhage; less than ten per cent of the newborns were given adequate warming; and only four per cent of birth attendants washed their hands for vaginal examination and delivery. In an average childbirth, clinicians followed only about ten of twenty-nine basic recommended practices.
Here we are in the first part of the twenty-first century, and we’re still trying to figure out how to get ideas from the first part of the twentieth century to take root.”
Tags: Atul Gawande
From Brian Handwerk’s new National Geographic piece about the next wave of robot learning:
“Would a robot serving you coffee in bed make waking up easier on weekday mornings? Could a household robot help an elderly relative who is living alone? How would you like to climb into a robotic car and eat breakfast with the kids while you’re all driven to school and work?
These scenarios may sound like science fiction, but experts say they’re a lot closer to becoming reality than you probably think.
Brown University roboticist expects a near-term robot revolution that will echo the computing revolution of recent decades. And he says it will be driven by enabling robots to learn more like humans do—by watching others demonstrate behaviors and by asking questions.
‘The robots you’re seeing now mostly are analogous to the mainframe computers of the 1970s,’ Jenkins said. ‘But you’re starting to see things develop. The vacuum cleaners, the drones, those are the initial steps,’ he said, referring to iRobot’s Roomba vacuum cleaner, which has autonomously cleaned millions of homes since its 2002 debut.”
Tags: Brian Handwerk, Chad Jenkins
“Steve.”
Biggest Bra in Brooklyn (metro nyc)
Seeing if there is an audience of unattached quality ladies interested in winning the largest bra size in Brooklyn.
Will advise by email details and if responce is viable. No kooks please (I have to say that ladies.) Kindly indicate your size.
Thanks, Steve.
“His success in roping giraffes is a matter of surprise.”
At some point, Col. Charles “Buffalo” Jones put down his gun and picked up a lasso. A big-game hunter of national fame, Jones converted to conservationist in later life and led a roping expedition in Kenya to stock American zoos with all manner of living specimens. From an article about his dangerous mission in the April 3, 1910 New York Times:
“Hunting with a lasso is the latest innovation in the world of sport.
Col. C.J. Jones, better known as ‘Buffalo’ Jones, has cabled to friends in America from British East Africa that he has succeeded in roping with a lasso most of the animals which Col. Theodore Roosevelt brought down with his gun in the same region. He will bring to the United States live specimens of the same animals, whose pelts Col. Roosevelt has sent to the Smithsonian Institution.
In his first cablegram received in this city late this past week, Col. Jones tells of an exciting experience with an immense bull rhinoceros. The creature charged a hundred times before it was securely tied. It demolished the camera, and barely gave the photographer of the party time to escape.
Besides rhinoceri, Col. Jones has captured giraffes, leopards, and cheetahs. His success in roping giraffes is a matter of surprise. A. Radclyffe Dugmore, the camera hunter, who preceded Col. Roosevelt over the country where Col. Jones is now hunting, said that he always had to photograph the giraffe with a telescope lens, so wary did he find them.
Col. Jones carries with him on his safari, a large supply of firecrackers which he intends to use in routing lions from the thickets. He has had great success in capturing mountain lions in the West with a rope, and anticipates no greater trouble with the lion, if he can get him into the open, he said.
‘My lassos,’ said Col. Jones, before he left, ‘are of Russian hemp, hard twisted so they will go through the air with the least possible resistance. Though no thicker than my little finger, my lasso will hold the weight of two tons. When I have made a capture I tie it with a rope through which runs a steel wire.
‘The African lion is a difficult proposition,’ admitted Jones, who has climbed trees to lasso cougars in the West. ‘But I think I can rope him. I don’t know what will happen after I get him roped, being a hunter and not a prophet. I am taking my branding irons, and the lions I don’t want I’ll brand and turn loose to fight another day.’
‘Buffalo’ Jones was accompanied on the expedition by four boon companions, who had been visitors at his famous buffalo range in the painted desert of Arizona. …
The Jones expedition was financed by New York sportsmen, who wanted to give Jones in his sixty-sixth year another chance to distinguish himself. … Before he sailed for Africa in the early part of February, Col. Jones told of his project in the presence of Dr. William T. Hornaday, director of the Bronx Zoological Gardens. He said he expected to rope lions, rhinoceri, and other wild African beasts.
‘Why, you’ll be killed,’ exclaimed Mr. Hornaday.
‘Maybe so,’ replied the veteran plainsman calmly. ‘But I never did look forward to dying in bed as a great privileged end, one to be prayed for.'”
Tags: A. Radclyffe Dugmore, Charles "Buffalo" Jones, Theodore Roosevelt, William T. Hornaday
Not all devices that track us are cameras. Some are black boxes. Not only do airplanes have them, but most cars do as well. Soon all will. Even police cars. Technology is the police of us all. And that’s so seamless and efficient, so why does it give pause? Because it’s something different? Or for another reason? From Jaclyn Trop in the New York Times:
“When Timothy P. Murray crashed his government-issued Ford Crown Victoria in 2011, he was fortunate, as car accidents go. Mr. Murray, then the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, was not seriously hurt, and he told the police he was wearing a seat belt and was not speeding.
But a different story soon emerged. Mr. Murray was driving over 100 miles an hour and was not wearing a seat belt, according to the computer in his car that tracks certain actions. He was given a $555 ticket; he later said he had fallen asleep.
The case put Mr. Murray at the center of a growing debate over a little-known but increasingly important piece of equipment buried deep inside a car: the event data recorder, more commonly known as the black box.
About 96 percent of all new vehicles sold in the United States have the boxes, and in September 2014, if the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has its way, all will have them.”
Tags: Jaclyn Trop
Before New Wave was just another old wave, selling its own nostalgia, it was trying its best to give the past a slip. Once that mission was accomplished, there was really nowhere for its leaders to go. But sometimes a brief revolution that clears the deck, even if it doesn’t build a new deck, is better than nothing at all. Devo, guesting on Merv Griffin’s show in 1980.
Tags: Devo, Merv Griffin
From the September 16, 1897 New York Times:
“Omaha–Sunday night all Omaha was startled by the announcement that ten men had been held up by three daring highwaymen in the heart of the city. The bandits entered a pleasure resort and forced all present to hold up their hands, range in line, and allow themselves to be robbed. Now the police have Carl Bruner and George Price in jail, charged with being two of the men who did the work. The police declare that the object of the deed was to secure funds to buy a coffin in which to bury Casper Boyce, a member of the gang, who had died the day before.
The two suspects are young Oregon men, who the police have thought for some time were members of a desperate gang of robbers working in this city and neighboring towns. They were arrested on suspicion, and the police discovered that the men had made arrangements with a local undertaker to bury their friend the day after the robbery. They had no money Sunday, but assured him that the funds would be forthcoming Monday, and early that day it was paid. The money they paid is said to correspond with that taken from the ten victims of the bandits.”
Tags: Carl Bruner, Casper Boyce, George Price
There have been a myriad of reasons suggested for the steady fall of petty and violent crime across America since the early 1990s. The Freakonomics guys controversially suggested it may have occurred because legalized abortion had diminished the population of unwanted children. But the trend America has experienced has spread across the globe in the decades that followed, and not all of those countries have similar abortion laws. Is is because of criminology, technology or shifting demography? All of these things combined? From “Where Have All the Burglars Gone?” in the Economist:
“Both police records (which underestimate some types of crime) and surveys of victims (which should not, but are not as regularly available a source of data) show crime against the person and against property falling over the past ten years in most rich countries. In America the fall began around 1991; in Britain it began around 1995, though the murder rate followed only in the mid-2000s. In France, property crime rose until 2001—but it has fallen by a third since. Some crimes are all but disappearing. In 1997, some 400,000 cars were reported stolen in England and Wales: in 2012, just 86,000.
Cities have seen the greatest progress. The number of violent crimes has fallen by 32% since 1990 across America as a whole; in the biggest cities, it has fallen by 64%. In New York, the area around Times Square on 42nd Street, where pornographers once mingled with muggers, is now a family oriented tourist trap. On London’s housing estates, children play in concrete corridors once used by heroin addicts to shoot up. In Tallinn you can walk home from the theatre unmolested as late as you like.
What is behind this spectacular and widespread improvement? Demographic trends are an obvious factor. The baby-boom in the decades after the second world war created a bubble in the 16- to 24-year-old population a couple of decades later, and most crimes are committed by men of that age. That bubble is now long deflated. In most Western countries, the population is ageing, often quite fast.
But demographics are not everything.”
“Parents can put it to good use while traveling in a car with their little ones.”
Agent wented (Greenwich Village)
I’m a writer, that need a agent that can sell my story
I have now three books.
One is a child book and the other adventure books.
Her is a sample of my first book.
FELECIA, THE CAT WHO WENT TO SEA
Is a wonderful children’s book, about a cat that gets separated and lost from her old-maid mistress on an ocean voyage.
It takes you on an exciting adventure with all her cartoon friends she meets along the way, and they help her find her way back to her owner.
The 88-page book has 44 large color pictures to keep the children interested while you read the story to them.
It has great potential.
It’s a great story for a cartoon movie – also a CD, that parents can put it to good use while traveling in a car with their little ones.
However – I need someone to make it happen, as I haven’t the money or the experience to pull it off. Would you like to sell my book?
We still believe on some level that we can control the cameras, that there can be a correction, but that isn’t so. From an NPR story by Brenda Salinas about facial-recognition software that allows retailers to identify preferred customera:
“When a young Indian-American woman walked into the funky L.A. jewelry boutique Tarina Tarantino, store manager Lauren Twisselman thought she was just like any other customer. She didn’t realize the woman was actress and writer Mindy Kaling.
‘I hadn’t watched The Office,’ Twisselman says. Kaling both wrote and appeared in the NBC hit.
This lack of recognition is precisely what the VIP-identification technology designed by NEC IT Solutions is supposed to prevent.
The U.K.-based company already supplies similar software to security services to help identify terrorists and criminals. The ID technology works by analyzing footage of people’s faces as they walk through a door, taking measurements to create a numerical code known as a ‘face template,’ and checking it against a database.
In the retail setting, the database of customers’ faces is comprised of celebrities and valued customers, according to London’s Sunday Times. If a face is a match, the program sends an alert to staff via computer, iPad or smartphone, providing details like dress size, favorite buys or shopping history.”
Tags: Brenda Salinas
From the August 29, 1902 New York Times:
“Washington–Sol Smith Russell, the actor, died at Richmond Hotel, in this city, this afternoon, of perpetual hiccoughs. Mr. Russell had been ill for some time from this malady, but during the past few days the disease took a serious turn, and since early morning the end had been hourly expected.”
Tags: Sol Smith Russell
Ahead of Elon Musk’s August announcement about the particulars of the Hyperloop, Russell Brandon at the Verge guesses at what the technologist will reveal. An excerpt:
“The details Musk has already hinted at tell us a great deal about the project, and outline a number of the challenges he’s likely to face. Based on simple math, we know it will have to travel an average of more than 600 mph. And it will have to do so almost frictionlessly, allowing for the low-power travel Musk envisions. It’s a big promise, and one that would have major consequences for the transportation industry and for society at large. For the technically minded, it raises the obvious question: how in the world is this thing going to work?
So far, the closest we’ve got is Japan’s superconducting maglev train — best known as the ‘bullet train.’ Its official top speed is 361mph, although it usually travels closer to 300 mph. Jim Powell, co-inventor of the bullet train and current director of Maglev 2000, thinks that’s as fast as open-air rail lines will ever go. ‘Air drag becomes too much of a problem after 300 mph, just from a power point of view,’ Powell says. ‘And then that air drag starts to generate noise. You wouldn’t want an airplane flying past your house at 600 mph.'”
Tags: Elon Musk, Russell Brandon