The practice of naming storms (tropical cyclones) began years ago in order to help in the quick identification of storms in warning messages because names are presumed to be far easier to remember than numbers and technical terms. (…)

In the beginning, storms were named arbitrarily. An Atlantic storm that ripped off the mast of a boat named Antje became known as Antje’s hurricane. Then the mid-1900’s saw the start of the practice of using feminine names for storms.
In the pursuit of a more organized and efficient naming system, meteorologists later decided to identify storms using names from a list arranged alpabetically. Thus, a storm with a name which begins with A, like Anne, would be the first storm to occur in the year.

Before the end of the 1900’s, forecasters started using male names for those forming in the Southern Hemisphere. (…)

Since 1953, Atlantic tropical storms have been named from lists originated by the National Hurricane Center. (…) Six lists are used in rotation. Thus, the 2008 list will be used again in 2014.

{ World Meteorological Organization | Continue reading }

related { This isn’t the first time we’ve met Hurricane Irene | As the storm’s outer bands reached New York on Saturday night, two kayakers capsized and had to be rescued off Staten Island }

{ The most valuable coin in the world sits in the lobby of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in lower Manhattan. It’s Exhibit 18E, secured in a bulletproof glass case with an alarm system and an armed guard nearby. The 1933 Double Eagle, considered one of the rarest and most beautiful coins in America, has a face value of $20—and a market value of $7.6 million. | How did a Philadelphia family get hold of $40 million in gold coins, and why has the Secret Service been chasing them for 70 years? | Businessweek | full story }

What would happen if the world stop spinning? (…)

Although the Earth isn’t likely to stop spinning any time soon, its has slowed considerably since its formation.

Because gravity is strongest at the poles, and the Earth bulges at the equator by about 21.4 kilometers (due to the Earth’s rotation), if the Earth were to stop spinning, water would move from the equatorial regions toward the poles. The low-lying areas of northern Europe, Asia and North America would be covered by ocean. Land currently covered by sea around the equator, however, would become dry land, forming a massive equatorial continent.

{ GeoJunk | Continue reading }

{ List of countries by military expenditures | Thanks JLB }

{ In May 2010, a tattered and brittle map was discovered in storage at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Experts identified it as a rare item, a Bernard Ratzer “Plan of the City of New York” map in its 1770 state. Until then, only three copies were thought to exist. After a painstaking restoration to remove layers of shellac and grime and repair dozens of breaks, the map is now behind plexiglass and ready to be displayed to the public. | NY Times | full story }

Here is the great irony: S&P (and the rest of the ratings agencies)  helped contribute in no small way to the overall economic crisis. The toadies rated junk securitized mortgage backed paper AAA because they were paid to do so by banks.

They are utterly corrupt, and should have received the corporate death penalty (ala Arthur Anderson).

{ Barry Ritholtz | Continue reading }

related { Standard & Poor’s removed the United States government from its list of risk-free borrowers for the first time since it was granted an AAA rating in 1917. | Standard & Poor’s (S&P) is a United States–based financial-services company, headquartered in Rockefeller Center in New York City. It is a division of the McGraw-Hill Companies. | S&P’s credit ratings }

photo { Scott Eells }

The dialects of Madagascar belong to the Greater Barito East group of the Austronesian family and it is widely accepted that the Island was colonized by Indonesian sailors after a maritime trek which probably took place around 650 CE. The language most closely related to Malagasy dialects is Maanyan but also Malay is strongly related especially for what concerns navigation terms. Since the Maanyan Dayaks live along the Barito river in Kalimantan (Borneo) and they do not possess the necessary skill for long maritime navigation, probably they were brought as subordinates by Malay sailors.

In a recent paper we compared 23 different Malagasy dialects in order to determine the time and the landing area of the first colonization. In this research we use new data and new methods to confirm that the landing took place on the south-east coast of the Island. Furthermore, we are able to state here that it is unlikely that there were multiple settlements and, therefore, colonization consisted in a single founding event.

{ Maurizio Serva, The settlement of Madagascar: what dialects and languages can tell | Continue reading }

{ Watch the video }

While the Frenchman credited with inventing dry cleaning started with turpentine, perc has been used since the 1930s to clean clothes, and about 80% of cleaners still rely on it. Like turpentine—and benzene, kerosene and gasoline, which were also tried in the early years—perc is good at dissolving oil-based stains. It is pumped into a supersized washing machine to flush dirt from the clothes.

Stubborn stains from difficult-to-remove substances, such as ink, wine and mustard, are attacked by hand with chemicals that target particular substances. Bruce Barish, owner of New York City’s Ernest Winzer Cleaners, cites balsamic vinaigrette as “very hard to get out.” It’s a mix of both water-based and oily stains with a dark dye that is hard to remove—especially since most customers accidentally rub it in.

The quality and service vary, in part because most dry cleaners are independently owned. There are 24,124 dry-cleaning and non-coin-operated laundry establishments in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau.

In a 2009 study that examined 50 randomly selected dry cleaners, New York-based Floyd Advisory LLC found that women paid an average of 73% more than men for laundered shirts. Dry cleaners surveyed say women’s shirts don’t fit in their industrial presses as well as men’s and must be ironed by hand.

Last year, market-research firm Mintel International found that 75% of women who had gone clothes-shopping in the past 12 months said they avoided buying clothes that required dry cleaning.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

{ Visualization: USA national debt in physical $100 bills }

related { Why the Debt Crisis Is Even Worse Than You Think }

{ During economic downturns, consumers usually spend less on what the Fed calls “discretionary services” — items like education, entertainment, restaurant meals and insurance. But in the chart above, it’s clear that consumers today are cutting back much more sharply. Part of the reason: In previous years, households often added debt to continue spending. Now the bill has come due. | NY Times | full story }

{ Stranger moves into foreclosed home, citing little-known Texas law }

images { 1. Young Kyu Yoo | 2. John Portman }

More than a billion people cannot count on meeting their basic needs for food, sanitation, and clean water. Their children die from simple, preventable diseases. They lack a minimally decent quality of life.

At the same time, more than a billion people live at a hitherto unknown level of affluence. They think nothing of spending more to go out to dinner than the other billion have to live on for a month. Do they therefore have a high quality of life? Being able to meet one’s basic needs for food, water, and reasonable health is a necessary condition for having an adequate quality of life, but not a sufficient one.

In the past, we spent much of our day ensuring we would have enough to eat. Then we would relax and socialize. Now, for the affluent, it is so easy to meet our basic needs that we lack purpose in our daily activities—leading us to consume more, and thus to feel we do not earn enough for all that we “need.”

{ What does quality of life mean? And how should we measure it? Our panel of global experts weighs in. | World Policy Institute | Continue reading }

Earlier this year, Michael Stipe turned 51, and his band, R.E.M., released its 15th full-length album. In early March, we sat down at his kitchen counter in downtown New York City over sushi to talk about his career.

I came to New York for the first time with Peter Buck at age 19. We spent a week living out of a van on the street in front of a club in the West 60s called Hurrah. It’s where Pylon played. I saw Klaus Nomi play there. And Michael Gira’s band before he did Swans-they all wore cowboy boots and were so cool and had great hair. I was so jealous. I bought Quaaludes at the urinal for everyone and we all got stoned-I mean, totally fucked up-and we watched Klaus Nomi and Joe King Carrasco. I sat on a couch with Lester Bangs at this party someone threw for Pylon and the only thing to eat was jelly beans and cheesecake. (…)

What happened in 1983?

I stopped taking drugs. There were a lot of things that led up to it. One thing was that a lover died. An ex of mine died in a car wreck and I was really trashed when I found out about it and I couldn’t cry. I woke up the next morning and I said, “That’s it,” so I quit then. It was horrible. A bunch of people died around that time and she was one of them. I wrote a song about her-that was when I still did pull from autobiographical material. I didn’t really have my voice until after that. Also, AIDS had landed and I was terrified. I was very scared, just as everyone was in the ’80s. It was really hard to be sexually active and to sleep with men and with women and not feel you had a responsibility in terms of having safe sex. And this was the Reagan years, where they were talking about internment camps for HIV-positive people and people with AIDS. The straight community was freaking out because, in their minds, this was a “gay” disease, and bisexual people were passing AIDS from the gay community to the straight community.

{ Interview | Continue reading }

Honey Space presents “Panties For Diamonds - A Psychodramatic Audition For Love In The Age Of Abandonment,” the New York debut of collaborative team INNER COURSE.

In this installation and three-act performance, Ms. Kleinpeter and Ms. Lopez flirt with antiquated methods of psychological inquiry within an environment generated by their analysis of the Other. Herein Actors/Audience become emotional accomplices in an unscripted narrative through role-play, interrogation and Softing. Participants will be guided through an assortment of exercises designed to cleanse the palate of perception - inviting new space to permeate.


INNER COURSE performs Tuesday through Saturday from 1-6 pm. Appointments may be booked at innercourse@honey-space.com.

{ NY Art Beat | Continue reading }

related { Begging for change on Houston Street nude, browsing books at the NYU Library nude, buying a street hot dog nude – photographer Erica Simone created this series of self-portraits exposing herself all over New York City doing typical New York City things. | Animal NY | photos }

Every generation has its life-defining moments. (…) For much of my generation—Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980—there is only one question: “When did your parents get divorced?” (…)

“Whatever happens, we’re never going to get divorced.” Over the course of 16 years, I said that often to my husband, especially after our children were born. Apparently, much of my generation feels at least roughly the same way: Divorce rates, which peaked around 1980, are now at their lowest level since 1970. In fact, the often-cited statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce was true only in the 1970s—in other words, our parents’ marriages. Not ours.

According to U.S. Census data released this May, 77% of couples who married since 1990 have reached their 10-year anniversaries. We’re also marrying later in life, if at all. The average marrying age in 1950 was 23 for men and 20 for women; in 2009, it was 28 for men and 26 for women.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

photo { Walker Evans, Torn Poster, Truro, Massachusetts, 1930 }

Where does psychological health end and mental illness begin? (…)

We are in the midst of a mental illness epidemic. Office visits by children and adolescents treated for the condition jumped forty-fold from 1994 to 2003. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly half of all Americans have suffered from mental illness—depression, anxiety, even psychosis—at some time in their lives. Is one out of every two Americans mentally ill, or could it be that the system of psychiatric diagnosis too often mistakes the emotional problems of everyday life for psychopathology?

This system is codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official handbook of the American Psychiatric Association. Now in its fourth edition, the psychiatric bible, as it is sometimes called, spells out the criteria for over 360 different diagnoses. The DSM serves as the basic text for training practitioners, for insurance companies who rely on it to determine coverage, for social service agencies who use it to assess disabilities, and for the courts, which turn to it to resolve questions of criminal culpability, competence to stand trial, and insanity.

Despite the vast influence of DSM and the best efforts of its architects, the manual has failed to clear up the murky border between health and sickness.

{ The New Republic | Continue reading }

Despite growing numbers of singles, the idealization of marriage and child rearing remains strong, pervasive, and largely unquestioned. Guided by life course perspective, the purpose of this article was to examine familial and societal messages women receive when not married by their late 20s to mid-30s. (…)

Women, when compared with men, experience more pronounced pressure to confirm to the “Standard North American Family” ideology and this may be especially true after 9/11, when mainstream messages strongly promoted tra- ditional ideologies of gender and families. Accepted notions of femininity remain based on women having a connection with a man to protect and care for her. Such constructions reflect Rich’s argument that “compulsory heterosexuality” is a controlling force in women’s lives. Compulsory heterosexuality positions the heterosexual romantic relationship within a patriarchal context as natural, normative, and the most desirable of all relationships. Furthermore, the dic- tate of motherhood and the coupling of marriage and motherhood further encourage women to enter into marriage.

Despite such ideologies, increasing proportions of women are single, with 41% of women aged 25 to 29 years and 24% of women aged 30 to 34 years having never married (U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2007).

{ SAGE | Continue reading }

related { Psychologists find link between ovulation and women’s ability to identify heterosexual men }

photo { Alonzo Jordan }

{ Many species of Pacific predators stick to familiar routes each season, according to new findings of a decade-long study that tracked 23 types of marine animals. The two most heavily trafficked corridors are the California Current along the West Coast of the U.S. and the North Pacific Transition Zone, where cold and warm water meet halfway between Alaska and Hawaii. | Washington Post | full story | photos }