And there was the snow country. The night had turned white.
pipeline
‘Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there.’ –Hegel
In the early 1970s, NASA sent two spacecraft on a roller coaster ride towards the outer Solar System. Pioneer 10 and 11 travelled past Jupiter (and Saturn in Pioneer 11’s case) and are now heading out into interstellar space.
But in 2002, physicists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, noticed a puzzling phenomenon. The spacecraft are slowing down. Nobody knows why but NASA analysed 11 years of tracking data for Pioneer 10 and 3 years for Pioneer 11 to prove it.
This deceleration, called “the Pioneer anomaly,” has become one of the biggest problems in astrophysics. One idea is that gravity is different at theses distances (Pioneers 10 and 11 are now at 30 and 70 AU [Astronomical Units]). That would be the most exciting conclusion.
But before astrophysicists can accept this, other more mundane explanations have to be ruled out. Chief among these is the possibility that the deceleration is caused by heat from the spacecraft’s radioactive batteries, which may radiate more in one direction than another.
And the little woman, whom we call hysterical, alone and unhappy, isn’t she still a riddle for us?
Häxan (English title: The Witches or Witchcraft Through The Ages) is a 1922 Swedish/Danish silent film written and directed by Benjamin Christensen.
Based partly on Christensen’s study of the Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th century German guide for inquisitors, Häxan is a study of how superstition and the misunderstanding of diseases and mental illness could lead to the hysteria of the witch-hunts.
The film was made as a documentary but contains dramatized sequences that are comparable to horror films. With Christensen’s meticulous recreation of medieval scenes and the lengthy production period, the film was the most expensive Scandinavian silent film ever made, costing nearly two million Swedish krona. Although it won acclaim in Denmark and Sweden, the film was banned in the United States and heavily censored in other countries for what were considered at that time graphic depictions of torture, nudity, and sexual perversion.
Breathe the air and feel the air
Despite persistent urban myths to the contrary, chewing gum is, technically speaking, edible. However, doctors do agree that it is not usually wise to swallow it, due to the risk of “gum-based gastrointestinal blockages.” Given that in 2005, Americans chewed, on average, 160-180 pieces or about 1.8 lbs of gum per person, per year, with relatively few swallowing incidents, the resulting post-masticatory waste probably adds up to more than 250,000 tons annually.
Inevitably, disposing of this sticky mass poses some challenges. (…) Discarded chewing gum debris forms the dominant decoration of the urban floor.
And this is from the gospel of Mary Magdalene herself
Times have not been good for electronic media giant Sony. The New York Times recently carried a short article that reported the company has lost 37 percent of its market value over the last six years. It has been hit by one disaster after another. Future projections do not look good either.
While there are many explanations that analysts offer to explain the dismal performance of this once stellar company, there is one explanation that is never mentioned: the Curse of the DaVinci Code.
It has been six years since Sony began production of the movie, The DaVinci Code, based on the bestselling yet now forgotten book with the same title by Dan Brown. The book’s blasphemous affirmations denied the Divinity of Christ and claimed He was married to Saint Mary Magdalene and had children, which offended countless faithful at the time. Numerous books and studies debunked these absurd and horrific theses along with others that author Dan Brown nevertheless affirmed were true.
From the moment production began, it appears as if the Curse of the DaVinci Code descended upon Sony and there it still remains.
{ The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property | Continue reading }
We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us
Atlanta entrepreneur Mike Mondelli has access to more than a billion records detailing consumers’ personal finances — and there is little they can do about it.
The information collected by his company, L2C, comes from thousands of everyday transactions that many people do not realize are being tracked: auto warranties, cellphone bills and magazine subscriptions. It includes purchases of prepaid cards and visits to payday lenders and rent-to-own furniture stores. It knows whether your checks have cleared and scours public records for mentions of your name.
Pulled together, the data follow the life of your wallet far beyond what exists in the country’s three main credit bureaus. Mondelli sells that information for a profit to lenders, landlords and even health-care providers trying to solve one of the most fundamental questions of personal finance: Who is worthy of credit?
The answer increasingly lies in the “fourth bureau” — companies such as L2C that deal in personal data once deemed unreliable. Although these dossiers cover consumers in all walks of life, they carry particular weight for the estimated 30 million people who live on the margins of the banking system. Yet almost no one realizes these files exist until something goes wrong.
Federal regulations do not always require companies to disclose when they share your financial history or with whom, and there is no way to opt out when they do. No standard exists for what types of data should be included in the fourth bureau or how it should be used. No one is even tracking the accuracy of these reports. That has created a virtually impenetrable system in which consumers, particularly the most vulnerable, have little insight into the forces shaping their financial futures.
But to that second circle of sad hell, where mid the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw
Inferno (Italian for “Hell”) is the first part of Dante’s 14th-century epic poem Divine Comedy. It is followed by Purgatorio and Paradiso. It is an allegory telling of the journey of Dante through what is largely the medieval concept of Hell.
Hell is depicted as nine circles of suffering located within the Earth.
First Circle: Limbo
Second Circle: Lust
Third Circle: Gluttony
Fourth Circle: Greed
Fifth Circle: Anger
Sixth Circle: Heresy
Seventh Circle: Violence
Eighth Circle: Fraud
Ninth Circle: Treachery
Yellow like a geisha gown, denial all the way
Exaggeration means to make something seem larger, better, worse, etc than it really is. It is beyond limits of truth that creates doubt. It is a negative factor. So everybody is afraid of it. But nobody can avoid it. It causes irritation. It causes annoyance. Thus exaggerated remarks ultimately aggravate the target person. A fool or a wicked person exaggerates. A wise person neither fabricates the fact nor manufactures a new one. Similarly an innocent soul describes a fact unchanged and states it as it is.
Human nature is to exaggerate to gain something. This gain may either be classical or commercial or both simultaneously. Everybody tries to magnify his good traits and minimize his faults thus to win both ways. Emotion makes one blind. It kills clarity of thought. It escorts a lover in the kingdom of romance, far from the madding crowd. Emotion of the lover exaggerates the good traits of his fiancée hundred times and allures to love her. Later on when emotion is replaced by reality then faults of fiancée are exaggerated thousand times automatically and compel him to depart her mercilessly. Both of these events are striking examples of exaggeration and happen at the beckon of emotion. Exaggeration when is rendered for mere enjoyment, there lies no problem. At that jovial moment fact is fabricated and colored as per the sweet will of the narrators. Each of the narrators joins the competition of exaggeration. Since, they have no base and no brake at all, they stretch the truth with immense power of imagination. But it is too bad if this is used as a weapon to defame or harm to others.
Man beats his own drum with much intensity to gain name, fame and win the game. Due to exaggeration original story remains a mystery. As such they say, in history the names are real but the fact is either full of intentional exaggeration or suppression or both. So it is the topic of research to the scholars to find out the truth. Problem arises if a single topic is exaggerated differently by different scholars.
{ Dibakar Pal, Of Exaggeration, 2011 | SSRN | Continue reading }
I don’t believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear
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.
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 }
Stand up and take it. The rest is sentiment.
There is this fountain of youth inside the adult brain that actively makes new neurons. Yet we don’t know how this fountain is constructed or maintained.
photo { Allan Macintyre }
Mandrake, have you ever seen a Commie drink a glass of water?
Peter Brabeck-Letmathe chairs Nestlé, the world’s 44th-largest company, which last year earned US$10.5 billion in profits on US$121.1 billion in revenues. He is the consummate international businessman, bargaining hard, overseeing 280,000 employees, outflanking competitors and at ease with heads of state. Yet Brabeck remains incapable of negotiating one simple and irreplaceable ingredient without which his company ceases to exist: water.
He hardly seems a gloomy Malthusian, yet Brabeck foresees “limits to growth” because our global fresh water supply is both finite and being rapidly, stupidly, depleted. The world can sustainably use 4,200 cubic kilometres of water, he notes, but it consumes 4,500 even as aquifers plummet and rivers run dry.
It was twelve o’clock one friday night, I was rockin to the beat and feelin alright
I have been reading Curzio Malaparte’s Technique of the Coup d’état this weekend. It’s a fascinating document – the basic argument is that the October Revolution represented an exportable, universally applicable technology for taking control of the state, quite independent of ideological motivation or broader strategic situation. (…)
So, what’s this open-source putsch kit consist of? Basically you need a small force of determined rebels. Small is important – you want quality not quantity as secrecy, unanimity, and common understanding good enough to permit independent action are required. You want as much chaos as possible in advance of the coup, although not so much that everything’s shut. And then you occupy key infrastructures and command-and-control targets. Don’t, whatever you do, go after ministries or similar grand institutional buildings – get the stuff that would really cause trouble if it blew up.
I had never seen that. My friend had never seen it, either. What’s more, I couldn’t care less.
How Flawed is the Nation’s Most Watched Economic Indicator
Last October, when the government released its monthly tally of how many people had jobs, there was a collective groan. The September report, which came out the first Friday in October, said the number of employed people in the U.S. had dropped by 95,000, worse than the 57,000 job drop the month before. After looking like we had finally hit an economic rebound, the jobs market was again slipping back again perhaps toward the dreaded double-dip recession. Or was it?
A month later the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tracks and releases the employment numbers for the government, revised its jobs count for September. In fact, the economy, it turned out, had lost only 41,000 jobs that month. Is that right? Actually no. A month later, the BLS revised the number again. The final tally: In September, the number of people working in America fell by just 24,000. So the economy was improving? Not quite. Remember that month before figure of 57,000 jobs lost. Yeah, well, that was wrong, too, off by nearly all of the drop, or 56,000 jobs.
illustration { Joe Heaps }
‘A hidden connection is stronger than an obvious one.’ –Heraclitus
Sybil accounts are fake identities created to unfairly increase the power or resources of a single malicious user. Researchers have long known about the existence of Sybil accounts in online communities such as file-sharing systems, but have not been able to perform large scale measurements to detect them or measure their activities. In this paper, we describe our efforts to detect, characterize and understand Sybil account activity in the Renren online social network (OSN). We use ground truth provided by Renren Inc. to build measurement based Sybil account detectors, and deploy them on Renren to detect over 100,000 Sybil accounts. We study these Sybil accounts, as well as an additional 560,000 Sybil accounts caught by Renren, and analyze their link creation behavior. Most interestingly, we find that contrary to prior conjecture, Sybil accounts in OSNs do not form tight-knit communities. Instead, they integrate into the social graph just like normal users. Using link creation timestamps, we verify that the large majority of links between Sybil accounts are created accidentally, unbeknownst to the attacker. Overall, only a very small portion of Sybil accounts are connected to other Sybils with social links. Our study shows that existing Sybil defenses are unlikely to succeed in today’s OSNs, and we must design new techniques to effectively detect and defend against Sybil attacks.
images { 1. Vitaly Virt | 2. Melvin Sokolsky }
