pipeline
A duel between titans. My golden gun against your Walther PPK.
The electronic “pistol” of this summer’s Games was designed to overcome an astonishing problem: The speed of sound is too slow for Olympic athletes. That is to say, athletes far away from the starting pistol were delayed by the time it took for the sound to travel to them, and differences so tiny can matter in races in which the margins are so small.
related { Statisticians Predict The Number Of Olympic Records That Will Fall at London 2012 }
If someone eggs your house, burn theirs down
If you’re a lawyer in New York, there’s no sweeter deal than getting assigned to an estate case in Surrogate’s Court.
The work is often routine — selling assets, paying bills, contacting heirs — but the pay can reach into the millions.
Landing such a gig requires currying favor with one of the city’s seven surrogate judges, who handle wills and estates. They have the power to appoint lawyers and approve their sometimes jaw-dropping invoices.
The jobs often go to the judges’ friends, associates or campaign contributors, court authorities admit. Looting of the estates can sometimes result.
The most recent example involves Bronx Judge Lee Holzman, who last week faced removal from the surrogate bench after he signed off on legal work that was never done.
The bills, according to the Bronx District Attorney’s Office, totaled $300,000 and went to the judge’s associate, lawyer Michael Lippman, a Democratic Party crony who ran Holzman’s campaign financing, raising $125,000, a court watchdog claims.
Lippman then got into money trouble himself, racking up $1 million in gambling debts and allegedly faking bills to cover his losses.
Prosecutors say they uncovered the cooked books and charged him with fraud.
Another alleged thief preyed on a lucrative and largely unsupervised part of the system — cases in which there is no will.
Such cases go to public administrators, who work with Surrogate’s Court judges in handling their finances.
In May, Richard Paul, the bookkeeper for the Brooklyn public administrator, was indicted for stealing $2.6 million from these estates, allegedly manipulating the check-writing process to get at the cash.
photo { Dina Goldstein }
‘Even if it communicates nothing, discourse represents the existence of communication.’ –Lacan
He concocted an astroturf outrage campaign to publicize the screen adaptation of his client Tucker Max’s book I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell. He bought billboards and defaced them with stickers saying Max “deserved to have his dick caught in a trap with sharp metal hooks. Or something like that.”; he used fake email accounts to send angry emails about the movie to college progressive organizations; he started a boycott group on Facebook; he started fake blogs reporting false stories about his client’s “outrageous behavior.”
previously { On ABC News, he was one of a new breed of long-suffering insomniacs }
artwork { Ellsworth Kelly, Black Relief II, 2010 }
Never lie, you will always get caught
Ryan Holiday could be called an “expert.” As head of marketing for American Apparel, an online strategist for Tucker Max, and self-styled “media manipulator,” he can talk social media and modern advertising with the best of them – he’s done so both online and in print on countless occasions. […]
On Reuters, he became the poster child for “Generation Yikes.” On ABC News, he was one of a new breed of long-suffering insomniacs. At CBS, he made up an embarrassing office story, at MSNBC he pretended someone sneezed on him while working at Burger King. At Manitouboats.com, he offered helpful tips for winterizing your boat. The capstone came in the form of a New York Times piece on vinyl records — naturally, Holiday doesn’t collect vinyl records.
artwork { Béatrice Cussol }
A crucial component of martial arts and meditation is learning to let go of the ego-self and enter into mushin
Every sect of Buddhism maintains that it is a religion of compassion and nonviolence. Throughout its history, however, Buddhism has occasionally been embroiled in warfare and military campaigns. Zen Buddhism in particular has managed to find its way into various military arts. From its incorporation into the Shaolin Monastery and the impact on the Japanese samurai to its absorption into the curriculum of several martial arts, Zen and fighting have come to be seen as closely related. This is due to certain characteristics of its doctrine as well as its practice. In fact, fighting is not entirely absent from Zen texts and literature. There are stories and kōans which depict amputations, encounters between samurai, or some kind of confrontation. Fighting, in the sense of an inner struggle is also present. […]
The objective of this examination is to draw parallels between Zen meditation and martial arts training and explore the reasons why Zen’s core philosophical doctrine and meditative practice can be integrated seamlessly into the martial arts.
‘We dead yo.’ –Samantha Hinds
{ Three satellites found that 97 percent of Greenland — the land mass second only to Antarctica for its volume of ice — underwent a thaw never before seen in 33 years of satellite tracking, NASA reported Tuesday. Satellite experts at first didn’t trust their readings, especially since they showed an incredible acceleration. Over four days, Greenland’s ice sheet — which covers 683,000 square miles – went from 40 percent in thaw to nearly entirely in thaw. | NBC | Continue reading | Thanks Samantha }
On the left and carefully down a turning staircase of more than five steps
We experience the world serially rather than simultaneously. A century of research on human and nonhuman animals has suggested that the first experience in a series of two or more is cognitively privileged.
{ PLoS ONE | Continue reading }
It’s a long-standing truism. Plaintiffs have an edge with the jury because they go first. The defense has to convince those same jurors that the plaintiff story just isn’t true. […]
Researchers performed studies wherein they show that what we see first is what we most often prefer. Whether it was human salespeople, bubblegum, or which of two violent criminals was more worthy of parole–the photo we see first is the one we prefer to either purchase a vehicle from, chew, or deem more worthy of parole. Are we really that simple-minded? Unfortunately, it would appear the answer is yes.
But this tendency is only reliable when we are forced to make our decisions quickly. When we are given time to consider and ponder our choices–like juries have–we don’t tend to choose the first item brought to our attention, but rather the most recent.
photo { George W. Gardner }
Half a league onward! They charge! All is lost now! Do we yield?
Cinderella Castle is the worldwide-recognized icon of the Disney empire. Physical representations of it stand at the center of two Disney Parks: Walt Disney World in Florida, and Tokyo Disneyland. Assuming it were an actual fortress, how would you take it?
A ground must be chosen in which you can quickly secure a foothold into the Magic Kingdom. This position must be easily accessible for the invasion force, provide cover and concealment for the troops and give strategic advantage once taken while depriving the enemy of the same. For this mission, I choose the area outside the tracks, between Tomorrowland and Main Street USA. Consideration must be taken to ensure we are not spotted by the monorail.
{ Jonathan Kirk Davis, Sergeant of Marines/Quora | Continue reading }
related { Macaroni Combat films }
‘My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.’ –Orson Welles
Whenever a pharmaceutical company tests a new migraine prevention drug, nearly 1 in 20 subjects will drop out because they can’t stand the drug’s side effects. They’d rather deal with the headaches than keep receiving treatment. But those suffering patients might be surprised to learn that the drug they’ve quit is only a sugar pill: the 5 percent dropout rate is from the placebo side.
Lurking in the shadows around any discussion of the placebo effect is its nefarious and lesser-known twin, the nocebo effect. Placebo is Latin for “I will please”; nocebo means “I will do harm.”
The delegation, present in full force, consisted of Commendatore Bacibaci Beninobenone (the semi-paralysed doyen of the party who had to be assisted to his seat by the aid of a powerful steam crane), the Archjoker Leopold Rudolph von Schwanzenbad-Hodenthaler, Countess Marha Virdga Kisászony Putrápesthi…
Fallout continues from the MOCA board’s removal of chief curator Paul Schimmel.
“Jeffrey has always been supportive of my work, but I don’t understand the direction he’s taking the museum right now,” McCarthy said. “I see it as placating the populace. It’s not really what art’s about, but a ratings game.”
Among those in Deitch’s corner is Shepard Fairey, an art star of a younger generation, especially since he designed the “Hope” poster that became the unofficial image of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. (The design firm Fairey founded, Studio One, is now handling much of MOCA’s design work.)
In an email, Fairey, 42, praised Deitch’s “astute understanding of the interconnected nature of high and low art culture. When I say low, I don’t mean inferior.”
{ LA Times | Continue reading }
John Baldessari, citing Paul Schimmel’s ouster, becomes the fifth trustee to bolt since February.
threesome { Jeffrey Deitch, Yoko Ono, Jeff Koons }
FIND THE BLUE JAY AT SIX AND A HALF AND FIFTY SIXTH AND TELL HIM YOU ARE THE LAST
Reddit user delverofsecrets posted photos of a cryptic note that he or she obtained from a “homeless looking man” on the 1 train in New York City. The user asked Reddit for help in identifying what the characters might mean, and the post quickly shot to the top of the front page as Redditors discussed and looked for clues.
[…]
There’s plenty more money to make. Figure this out and prepare to meet July 19th, 56th & 6th. There’s a hot dog stand outside Rue57 cafe. Ask for Mr. Input.
photo { Robert Frank, London, 1952 }
previously { NotSoSerious.com–the campaign in advance of the Dark Knight }
Or the other story, beast with two backs?
Sometime within the next 5 years, the Voyager 1 space craft is expected to reach interstellar space. It will be the first man made object to cross the heliosphere, which is the final stop in our solar system.
After being launched in 1977, Voyager 1 was the first probe to visit many of the outer planets. It has sent back countless original images from space, almost all of which have been released to the public. Although NASA does sell images, and many appear in copyrighted works (such as books); NASA is very good about releasing information into the public domain, almost all scientifically significant information from space is given to the public.
Voyager 1, famously contained a gold phonographic record. The record was filled with iconic sights, images, and sounds from earth, and the prevailing message, “we come in peace”. We think. Even though any alien that can figure out how to play a phonographic record, will have certainly already have received fox news, the contents of the actual gold record are not public domain.
The disc was comprised by a man named Carl Sagan, and it contained many pieces of art, songs, and images, that are all copyrighted. Sagan had to secure the rights to include these items separately, at great expense. The special alien license does not allow the right to free copy and distribution to educators. In fact, it is unclear if an original copy of the entire disc still exists on earth at all.
{ Active Politic | Continue reading }
Each Voyager space probe carries a gold-plated audio-visual disc in the event that either spacecraft is ever found by intelligent life-forms from other planetary systems. The discs carry photos of the Earth and its lifeforms, a range of scientific information, spoken greetings from the people (e.g. the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the President of the United States, and the children of the Planet Earth) and a medley, “Sounds of Earth,” that includes the sounds of whales, a baby crying, waves breaking on a shore, and a variety of music.
photo { featured in the Voyager Golden Record: Demonstration of licking, eating and drinking }
‘Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.’ –Kurt Vonnegut
In Namibia of southwestern Africa, the sparse grasslands that develop on deep sandy soils under rainfall between 50 and 100 mm per annum are punctuated by thousands of quasi-circular bare spots, usually surrounded by a ring of taller grass. The causes of these so-called “fairy circles” are unknown, although a number of hypotheses have been proposed. This paper provides a more complete description of the variation in size, density and attributes of fairy circles in a range of soil types and situations. Circles are not permanent; their vegetative and physical attributes allow them to be arranged into a life history sequence in which circles appear (birth), develop (mature) and become revegetated (die). Occasionally, they also enlarge. The appearance and disappearance of circles was confirmed from satellite images taken 4 years apart (2004, 2008).
{ PLoS One | Continue reading | More: Science }
photo { Nicolas Hosteing }
His free hand graciously wrote tiny signs in air
The FBI and national cybercrime agencies are warning people traveling abroad to be wary of shady scammers planting malware via insecure hotel Internet connections.
The Internet Crime Complaint Center notes that malware perpetrators are masking their cybercrime weapons as popup software updates travelers see when setting up their Internet connections.
When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it
Legal action conducted by organisations deemed to be “patent trolls” cost US companies an estimated $US29 billion during 2011.
The study suggested that during 2011, 2150 companies mounted a total 5842 defences in US cases against intellectual property companies that owned and licensed patents without producing any related goods of their own.
