Even if Japan’s nuclear crisis is contained, its earthquake and tsunami now seem certain to be, economically speaking, among the worst natural disasters in history, with total losses potentially as high as two hundred billion dollars. In response, fearful investors sent the Nikkei down almost twenty per cent on the first day of trading after the tsunami, and it’s still down more than ten per cent. Yet, while the fear is understandable, this may turn out to have been an overreaction: history suggests that, despite the terrifying destruction and the horrific human toll, the long-term impact of the quake on the Japanese economy could be surprisingly small.

{ New Yorker | Continue reading }

The first day of spring arrives on varying dates (from March 19-21) in different years for two reasons: Our year is not exactly an even number of days; and Earth’s slightly noncircular orbit, plus the gravitational tug of the other planets, constantly changes our planet’s orientation to the sun from year to year.

This year, spring started Sunday, March 20, at 7:21 p.m. EDT (23:21 UTC). That’s when the so-called vernal equinox occurs.

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

{ The Systems Theory Framework of Career Development | PDF }

Man posing as officer pulls over undercover police vehicle.

Gay couple spent the last 20 years pretending a baby doll named Digby is their son.

Avalanche victims buried in Canada die significantly quicker than those buried in Switzerland.

Man busted for polygamy after unfriending wife No. 1.

Man charged with stabbing four people, killing one, after he became enraged because people were criticizing him for being flatulent, police said.

Philadelphia magazine fired editor Larry Platt for giving a framed photo of his testicle to a female employee.

Vegetarian throws meal at flight attendant.

Coyote Attacks: An Increasing Suburban Problem.

Quentin Tarantino Sues Neighbor Over Pet Birds.

U.S. millionaires say $7 million not enough to be rich.

In the last five years, full-fledged adults have seemingly given up the telephone — land line, mobile, voice mail and all.

Banking on a Paywall at The New York Times. Related: New York Times paywall: wishful thinking or just crazy? And: Here’s what the New York Times paywall looks like (to Canadians).

A study of magicians’ fake movements.

An afternoon nap tunes out negative emotions, tunes in positive ones.

The mathematics of being nice.

Study explains why birds crash into buildings.

New gadget provides fresh insight into goose-bumps.

Stress affects the balance of bacteria in the gut and immune response.

How Network Theory Can Prevent Extinctions.

Two stars caught fusing into one. Astronomers observe a merger in action for the first time.

Current computer graphics are fairly well known and understood. But how did we get here? The evolution of computer graphics is intertwined with textual display, and it is difficult to consider the two separately.

The Digital Crimes Unit at Microsoft, working with the US authorities, has managed to lay the smack down on the world’s largest spam network, Rustock.

How the iPhone Led to the Sale of T-Mobile USA.

How did a British polytechnic graduate become the design genius behind £200billion Apple?

The King of LSD.

Owsley Stanley died last weekend in a car crash in Australia, where he lived. It was Owsley who gave acid to Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend and Brian Jones (among many others) at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival of 1967. It was Owsley who agreed to deliver a lifetime supply of LSD to John Lennon. [NY Times, Rolling Stones]

John Hoke was fired from the federal government in 1962 because he wanted to build a boat powered by the sun.

The evolving design of cemeteries.

Cannibals Seeking Same: A Visit To The Online World Of Flesh-Eaters.

The 44-year-old ex-heavyweight champion is in bed by 8 and often up as early as 2 in the morning, at which point he takes a solitary walk around the gated compound in the Las Vegas suburb where he lives while listening to R&B on his iPod. Tyson then occupies himself with reading (he’s an avid student of history, philosophy and psychology), watching karate movies or taking care of his homing pigeons, who live in a coop in the garage, until 6, when his wife, Lakiha (known as Kiki), gets up.

Fire is a rare species: the professional boxer-model-actress.

What if your wife were a porn star?

Stan Lee on Which Superhero Has the Best Penis.

Sean Parker, the Napster founder and 31-year-old Facebook billionaire, paid $20 million to buy 40 West 10th Street, one of the best townhouses in Greenwich Village. More: As a teenage computer hacker in the Washington, DC, suburbs a decade and a half ago, Sean Parker had acceptable technology skills but none of the out-and-out wizardry of a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs.

Was Monopoly originally meant to teach people about the evils of capitalism?

Russian Anarcho-Punk zine: PunkWay #5, winter 2011

How Much Radiation Do We Absorb Every Day?

7 Ways Larry Page Is Defining Google’s Future.

World’s Top Scientific Cities.

How Shar-Pei dogs got their wrinkles.

Ambient music and live NYPD police radio.

The JWT Salt Lick BBQ truck at SXSW is so good if you were a cow you would eat yourself. [Thanks Glenn]

Do you use a hand sanitizer?

(…)

{ A Paradoxical Property of the Monkey Book | Continue reading }

In late 1979, Debbie Harry suggested that Nile Rodgers join her and Chris Stein at a Hip hop event in a communal space taken over by young kids and teenagers with boom box stereos, who would play various pieces of music to which performers would break dance. The main piece of music they would use was the break section of “Good Times.”

A few weeks later, Blondie, The Clash and Chic were playing a gig in New York at Bonds nightclub. When Chic started playing “Good Times,” rapper Fab Five Freddy and members of the Sugarhill Gang jumped up on stage and started freestyling with the band; Rodgers allowed them to “do their improvisation thing like poets, much like I would play guitar with Prince.”

A few weeks later Rodgers was on the dance floor of New York club LaViticus and suddenly heard the DJ play a song which opened with Edwards bass line from “Good Times”. Rogers approached the DJ who said he was playing a record he had just bought that day in Harlem. The song turned out to be an early version of “Rapper’s Delight” by The Sugarhill Gang, which Rogers noted also included a scratched version of the song’s string section. Rogers and Edwards threatened The Sugarhill Gang with legal action, which resulted in them being credited as co-writers on “Rappers Delight”.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

{ Gloria Baker Feinstein, Shredding Project }

{ The Weather Channel | full story }

In all of negotiation, there is no bigger trap than “fairness.”

This chapter from the Negotiator’s Fieldbook explains why among multiple models of fairness, people tend to believe that the one that applies here is the one that happens to favor them. This often creates a bitter element in negotiation, as each party proceeds from the unexamined assumption that its standpoint is the truly fair one.

For a negotiation to end well, it is imperative for both parties to assess the fairness of their own proposals from multiple points of view, not just their instinctive one – and to consider the fairness of their negotiation procedures as well as of their substantive proposals.

{ Perceptions of Fairness | PDF }

A deterministic universe [is one] in which “Every decision is completely caused by what happened before the decision—given the past, each decision has to happen the way that it does.” After being presented with this description of determinism, one group of participants was asked whether it is possible for anyone to be morally responsible for their actions in such a universe. These participants tended to say that it is not possible to be morally responsible in that universe. That question about moral responsibility is, of course, pitched at an abstract level.

Another group of participants was presented instead with a concrete case of a man who killed his family. That provoked a much different response. People tended to say that the man was fully morally responsible for his actions.

People are pulled in different directions because different mental mechanisms are implicated in different conditions.

{ Science | via Overcoming Bias | Continue reading }

photo { Lauren Edwards }

The Federal Reserve has blessed the balance sheet of Goldman Sachs — paving the way for the investment bank to pay back the $5 billion investment that Warren Buffett made at the height of the financial crisis in 2008. (…)

In the darkest days of the financial crisis, Mr. Buffett agreed to invest $5 billion in Goldman Sachs, whose stock was suffering amid a general liquidity scare. The deal in September 2008 came at a hefty price, namely a 10 percent annual dividend that amounted to about $500 million.

At the time, Mr. Buffett also picked up warrants, giving Berkshire the right to buy $5 billion of stock with a strike price of $115. With Goldman stock currently trading at $160, Buffett’s profit on the warrants is around $2 billion.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

For the first time, researchers prompted the very rich—people with fortunes in excess of $25 million—to speak candidly about their lives. The result is a suprising litany of anxieties: their sense of isolation, their worries about work and love, and most of all, their fears for their children.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

photo { John Coplans }

{ Ken Shung }

Over the last few decades many Buddhists and quite a few neuroscientists have examined Buddhism and neuroscience, with both groups reporting overlap. (…)

Neuroscience tells us the thing we take as our unified mind is an illusion, that our mind is not unified and can barely be said to “exist” at all. Our feeling of unity and control is a post-hoc confabulation and is easily fractured into separate parts. As revealed by scientific inquiry, what we call a mind (or a self, or a soul) is actually something that changes so much and is so uncertain that our pre-scientific language struggles to find meaning.

Buddhists say pretty much the same thing. They believe in an impermanent and illusory self made of shifting parts. They’ve even come up with language to address the problem between perception and belief. Their word for self is anatta, which is usually translated as ‘non self.’  One might try to refer to the self, but the word cleverly reminds one’s self that there is no such thing.

{ Seed | Continue reading }

photo { Edward Weston }

{ Musician Smiley Culture dies during police raid on Surrey home. Police watchdog launches inquiry as 1980s reggae star dies from stab wounds. }

The Prime Minister of Japan recently stated that his nation was facing its worst crisis since World War II. While most of the world is focused on tragic images of floodwater and rubble, and fixated on radiation levels, there is a bigger picture to be examined – one that also includes  energy, coal and the Strait of Hormuz.

The geography of the Persian Gulf is extraordinary. It is a narrow body of water opening into a narrow channel through the Strait of Hormuz. Any diminution of the flow from any source in the region, let alone the complete closure of the Strait of Hormuz, would have profound implications for the global economy.

For Japan it could mean more than higher prices. It could mean being unable to secure the amount of oil needed at any price. The movement of tankers, the limits on port facilities and long-term contracts that commit oil to other places could make it impossible for Japan to physically secure the oil it needs to run its industrial plant. On an extended basis, this would draw down reserves and constrain Japan’s economy dramatically. And, obviously, when the world’s third-largest industrial plant drastically slows, the impact on the global supply chain is both dramatic and complex.

{ George Friedman | Continue reading }

Nuclear plants in France, Germany, and the U.S. are far more automated than in Japan, where more controls are based on manual decisions, switches, and reactions, says Roger Gale, a nuclear industry consultant and former official at the U.S. Department of Energy who served as a consultant to Tepco for 20 years. He thinks U.S. utilities would have acted more quickly in a similar disaster. “[Tepco] probably reacted more slowly in the initial case than they needed to.”

Gale says a culture of complacency within Tepco may also have contributed to the crisis. Tepco has massive cash flows and a reputation for hiring the best and brightest engineers in Japan. However, Gale says, an array of management problems–a lack of transparency, problems with record keeping, relying on manual rather than automatic controls, and being slow on the draw when making decisions—plague the organization.

{ Fast Company | Continue reading }

At this point in the Japanese nuclear emergency it is coming down to the simple proposition of how do you drop enough water on the stricken reactors, and especially the spent fuel ponds, to keep further damage from happening?

{ Robert X. Cringely | Continue reading | And: Japan Takes Extraordinary Measures to Cool Nuclear Plant }

related { CNN/Money jumps on the fear bandwagon with this interactive graphic }

{ Rinsed It }

Disaster and rebirth is an old story in this part of the country. I know. My family has lived that cycle for generations deep in the Mississippi Delta—in Plaquemines Parish, a name that since the British Petroleum (BP) oil spill has become a cultural marker, the equal, after Katrina, of “the Lower Ninth Ward.” But the oil spill? Will it prove one too many disasters for the return of the Plaquemines Parish my family once knew? Or will it, like Hurricane Katrina, be a dangerous opportunity for changes long overdue?


As much of America suddenly knows, the mouth of the Mississippi River and the surrounding marshlands of Plaquemines Parish nurture the foodstuffs that grace the tables of New Orleans’s world-famous restaurants and provide much of the seafood—25 to 30 percent of it—that Americans eat. Over two centuries the region’s diverse, amphibious Delta culture—Alsatian, Croatian, Isleño, African American, Italian, and Native American—also nurtured my family’s culinary roots that flowered into the Ruth’s Chris Steak House restaurant empire.

{ Randy Fertel/Gastronomica | Continue reading }

photo { Jessica Craig-Martin }

The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an “online persona management service” that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

painting { Jean Leon Gerome }

Three new lines will be added to the New York City subway system next fall, giving residents of Chelsea and the Meatpacking District direct transit service down to Soho and up to the Upper East Side.

Plans call for two rapid transit subway lines and one ultra-slow line: The BB, the K, and the RL–which respectively stand for Boone Boone, Koons, and Roy Lichtenstein. The three lines are expected to open October 15, 2011 in unison.

M.T.A. awarded the construction contract to Manhattan-based company Imp Kerr & Associates, NYC. Other projects the firm currently works on include the eradication of Science Limited, the maintenance of a jellyfish farm, and private lectures on Spinoza. Imp Kerr will serve as executive supervisor.

{ Text | Images and maps }

Among 20th-century artists, few can compare for sheer cinematic drama with the Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani, “probably the most mythologized modern artist since Van Gogh,” according to the art historian Kenneth Silver. Scenes from the life of Modigliani might include “Modi” hobnobbing with Picasso in Montmartre, having a torrid affair with the married Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, and ending his long relationship with the English journalist Beatrice Hastings when her new lover drew a gun on him at a drunken party attended by Picasso, Matisse, and Juan Gris.

Modigliani drank heavily, used cocaine and hashish, and, a gorgeous hunk of a man despite his modest height of 5 feet 3 inches, fathered an indeterminate number of illegitimate children. (…)

“Sometimes, when drunk, he would begin undressing,” a friend reported in a typical account of Modigliani misbehaving, “under the eager eyes of the faded English and American girls who frequented the canteen … then display himself quite naked, slim and white, his torso arched.” When his life was cut short by tuberculosis at the age of 35, his final lover, Jeanne, eight months pregnant with their second child, threw herself out of a window.

{ Slate | Continue reading | More: Loving Modigliani thanks to Daniel }

artwork { Modigliani, Femme nue, 1916 }