2013-09-24

“Decisions in this country need to be made by females and Latinos and Asians and blacks.” Florida Representative Alcee Hastings nyt

Appearances

Melissa Garzon, a sophomore majoring in criminology, said she was upset when she heard of the changes. [...] “I wish this was something we had a vote on,” she said. “All you see are plants all around campus so it will look pretty and parents will want to send their kids to USF. But we don’t need more plants and more flowers — we actually use the Library. ... I feel like our tuition should be paying for the Library, not the pretty flowers around campus.” The Oracle 27 August 2013

Campus beautification projects have abounded left, right and center, and while those funds couldn’t directly be used toward other areas, perhaps unused funds could have been carried forward. The Oracle 27 August 2013

Mr. Johnson’s wife, Nancy, was a trim, exercising, vegetable- and fiber-chomping nonsmoker in her early 40s when she felt a lump in her groin. It proved to be a metastasis from a malevolent form of uterine cancer, one whose cells are atypically aggressive and prone to spreading. Her situation and her terrible prognosis reminded Mr. Johnson of nothing more than his New Mexico backyard, with headstrong wildflowers blooming where they choose and intractable weeds exploding by night. A man may plan a garden, but nature has different patterns in mind, patterns so intricate and orderly in their chaotic way that scientists now understand cancers to be collections of cells as complex and ambitious as any healthy organ. The extraordinary determination of those cells wins Mr. Johnson’s grudging admiration: “Cancer cells are those that rebel against their fate — they hope for so much more.” The New York Times 27 August 2013

Telling

"An Indian village on the Missouri River in 1750 must have been a lively place. Barking dogs running between large earth-covered houses; children playing on the roofs; women making pots and chatting by the doorways; a party of men returning from a hunting expedition laden with bison meat—all contribute to a picture of confusion, sound, and motion. The same village in 1965 is a silent cluster of dim green rings of grass on the brown prairie, the only sound that of the wind, the only motion and life that of a tumbledweed rolling across the low mounds and depressions, and of a hawk circling high in the sky. The people are gone, and the only things which attest to their former presence are fragments of the objects which they made and used, buried in the collapsed remains of their dwellings. If you had gone into this village after all the people had left, but before any deterioration had begun, understanding what had taken place there would be difficult enough. [...] Add to the porblem the factor of disintegration over a period of two centuries, and the magnitude of the archaeologist's task becomes painfully clear."—James Deetz Invitation to Arhaeology 1967 (page 8)

"Kimmerle said she's not certain how long the process [of exhuming bodies buried at the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida]—which includes forensic examination, identification and DNA testing in some cases — will take. "Our goal is to identify every individual," she said. "That's probably not possible, but we're going to try. Those not identified will be reinterred at the location." Florida CFO Jeff Atwater said he hopes the Legislature, which already approved spending $190,000 on USF's project, will continue to fund it until all the remains are reunited with families. "This is a historic day," said Robert Straley, 66, of Clearwater. "We finally found an administration with the guts to go back in time to help the boys who couldn't help themselves."—Ben Montgomery Tampa Bay Times "Cabinet agrees to let USF researchers exhume bodies at Dozier" 6 August 2013 (link)

"[Your housecleaner knows more about you] than you think. I see the piles of bills marked “past due” and know you’re having money problems. I find drugs and condom wrappers in kids’ bedrooms. And I can tell who’s unfaithful because the cheaters always start hiding laundry."—Jennifer Steil Reader's Digest "13+ Things Your Housecleaner Won’t Tell You" (slide 25)

Head-fake

"Why does exercise have so little impact on weight loss for so many people? The answer is almost certainly, as a number of the new studies say, “multifactorial,” and one of the most reverberant and bizarre of those multiple factors is that, as a species, we're astonishingly efficient at clawing back lost calories, or, in scientific parlance, compensating. “People's systems are pretty good at recognizing when they have entered negative energy balance and doing something about it,” Dr. Ravussin says, “which usually involves regaining weight.” Compensation can take many forms, but in the context of exercise and avoirdupois, none is more devious than what has been called “non-volitional exercise-induced inactivity.” People relying on exercise to burn calories sometimes, without deliberate intent, begin moving less during the rest of the day. They grow more sedentary. They sit when they once might have stood or walked around the house. A similar dynamic occurs when you reduce food intake. The body tries hard to maintain its weight."—Gretchen Reynolds The First 20 Minutes (link)

“The message of our work is really simple,” although perhaps not agreeable to hear, Dr. Melanson says. “You don’t get any freebie calories.” Exercise, or at least moderate exercise, doesn’t rev up your metabolism and turn you into a fat-burning furnace for the rest of the day. The extra calorie burning ends with e exercise session. So if you follow up your workout with a Mars bar, you likely will have replenished the calories you just burned (and possibly then some). “It all comes down to energy balance,” says Dr. Melanson—or, as you might have guessed, calories in and calories out. People “are only burning two hundred or three hundred calories” in a typical thirty-minute exercise session, he points out. “You replace that with one cookie.”—Gretchen Reynolds The First 20 Minutes (link)

"Should you choose not to warm up at all, you will be in fine company. Jack LaLanne famously scoffed at the idea of pre- exercising. “Warming up is the biggest bunch of horseshit I've ever heard in my life,” he once told an interviewer. “Fifteen minutes to warm up! Does a lion warm up when he’s hungry? ‘Uh-oh, here comes an antelope. Better warm up.’ No! He just goes out and eats the sucker.”—Gretchen Reynolds The First 20 Minutes (link)

Justice

"No arrest was made in the case, even though authorities knew who set the fire. Out of fear and shame, some family members of the deceased refused to claim the ashes of their 'loved' ones. On the issue of identifying the victims, Major Henry Morris, a detective with the New Orleans Police Department said, 'We don't even know these papers belonged to the people we found them on. Some thieves hung out there, and you know this was a queer bar.' Churches were either silent or subtly suggested the victims deserved what they got, most refused the use of their facilities for a memorial service."—Daily Mail "Scandal of the New Orleans firebomb attack that killed 32: Forty years after […] officials finally apologize for their inaction" 22 June 2013 (link) via Le Show

"The pair was last seen by family on Dec. 16, when they left [Doris] Carter's house in a rural area north of Plant City. They were in [Kelly] Moriarty's car. Four days later, the car was found abandoned on State Road 62 in Parrish. It wasn't impounded until the next week. In the meantime, a leg washed ashore at 6990 Fourth St. S, pale and bent at the knee. It was cleanly cut at the thigh and the foot. Police speculated someone had gone to great lengths to dismember the body. […] On Jan. 27, the manager of the Bradenton apartment where Moriarty lived called Moriarty's emergency contact — her brother — because she hadn't paid rent or contacted the office in weeks. The brother and manager entered the apartment together. Nothing appeared disturbed, deputies said. But her brother found one thing odd: The Christmas tree was still up, and the gifts were under the tree, still wrapped. He filed a missing person's report with Bradenton police, and when officers visited Carter's family, they began to worry. On Jan. 28, Carter's daughter filed a missing person's report with the Hillsborough Sheriff's Office. […] "We loved and miss her tremendously," Moriarty's brother, Brenden, said in an email. He said the family hopes law enforcement officials across the Tampa Bay region work to find who is responsible for her death "and bring them to justice." His email did not discuss the pair's relationship."—Jessica Vander Velde Tampa Bay Times "Severed leg identified as missing Bradenton woman's" 27 March 2012 (link)

"For Nujood, the nightmare began at age 10 when her family told her that she would be marrying a deliveryman in his 30s. Although Nujood’s mother was unhappy, she did not protest. “In our country [Yemen] it’s the men who give the orders, and the women who follow them,” Nujood writes […] Nujood’s father asked the husband not to touch her until a year after she had had her first menstrual period. But as soon as they were married, she writes, her husband forced himself on her. He soon began to beat her as well, the memoir says, and her new mother-in-law offered no sympathy. “Hit her even harder,” the mother-in-law would tell her son."—Nicholas Kristof New York Times "Divorced Before Puberty" 3 March 2010 (link)

Perception

"Like gambling, interacting on social media activates the part of the brain involved with rewards, Bengtson said. Just as gamblers get a rush of good feelings when they win, a social media junkie feels gratification when their Facebook posts get lots of "likes," when their Twitter followers multiply, and when their Instagram photos are big hits. The repeated, positive reinforcement can turn an occasional user into a constantly connected fanatic who neglects normal human contact. "The addiction may not be as destructive as alcohol or drugs, but it can be destructive to your personal relationships and in your professional life if it interferes with your job," said Kelli Burns, a mass communications professor and social media researcher at USF."—Irene Maher Tampa Bay Times"Social media can become an addiction, but you can break free" 25 July 2013 (link)

"The tendency is to draw a circle around language, to herd neat sentences into the corral and wrangle out the parts of speech. But most problems with language, the problems that come up when you try to use it to communicate, aren’t about sentences and parts of speech. They have to do with wild herds of sentences, out on the open range. Don’t get me wrong. Had there been a shared grammar and dictionary in the midst of that passionate confrontation between Hispanics and police in Mount Pleasant, it couldn’t have hurt. But, as the meetings and arguments and newspaper articles since the riot make clear, the confrontation in Mount Pleasant was an encounter between different worlds of meaning, meaning that travels well beyond the dictionary, meaning that tells you who you are, whom you’re dealing with, the kind of situation you’re in, how life works and what’s important in it—meaning that ties language inside the circle, grammar and the dictionary, to the world outside. If you want to use language, if you want to communicate, language inside the circle isn’t enough. The circle is a lie. It’s like saying that if you can put rings on a piston, you can drive in traffic. To understand language, you have to understand that differences in language go well beyond what you find in the grammar and the dictionary. Otherwise, why would my Black and female colleagues and I have had trouble, even though we all spoke the “same” language?"—Michael Agar Language Shock: Understanding The Culture Of Conversation 1996 (link)

"This study finds that homicides with a white perpetrator and a black victim are ten times more likely to be ruled justified than cases with a black perpetrator and a white victim, and the gap is larger in states with Stand Your Ground laws. After accounting for a variety of factors, such as whether the victim and perpetrator were strangers, the gap is smaller, but still significant. Cases with a white perpetrator and a black victim are 281 percent more likely to be ruled justified than cases with a white perpetrator and white victim."—John Roman Urban Institute "Race, Justifiable Homicide, and Stand Your Ground Laws" 26 July 2013 (link)

Innovation

"At 9:44 a.m. the M.I.T. police were called in; by 10:30 a.m., the Cambridge police were en route, and by 11 a.m., Michael Pickett, a Secret Service agent and expert on computer crime, was on the scene. On his recommendation, a surveillance camera was installed in the closet and a second laptop was connected to the network switch to track the traffic. […] Michael Sussmann, a Washington lawyer and a former federal prosecutor of computer crime, said that M.I.T. was the victim and that, without more information, it had to assume any hackers were “the Chinese, even though it’s a 16-year-old with acne.” Once the police were called in, the university could not back away from the investigation. “After there’s a referral, victims don’t have the opportunity to change their mind.”—Noam Cohen New York Times "How M.I.T. Ensnared a Hacker, Bucking a Freewheeling Culture" 20 January 2013 (link)

"MIT and the U.S. Secret Service conducted the video surveillance of the closet at MIT that discovered Swartz’s downloading. He was charged by the Middlesex County district attorney’s office with breaking and entering in the daytime. Lawyers familiar with the case have told me that it was anticipated that the state charge would be continued without a finding, with Swartz duly admonished and then returned to civil society to continue his pioneering electronic work in a less legally questionable manner. Tragedy intervened when [federal prosecutor Cameron] Ortiz’s office took over the case to send “a message.”—Harvey A. Silverglate Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly "The Swartz suicide and the sick culture of the Justice Dept." 24 January 2013 (link)

"U.S Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz today defended her office’s prosecution of Reddit co-founder and Internet activist Aaron Swartz, expressing sympathy for his family and saying she is “terribly upset” she is being blamed for his suicide. […] “The evidence they had, the charges they brought, this case was fairly and appropriately and reasonably handled,” she added. […] Ortiz’s prosecution of Swartz has drawn harsh nationwide criticism, ranging from Internet freedom circles to Congress…"—John Zaremba and Matt Stout Boston Herald "Emotional Carmen Ortiz `terribly upset’ over Swartz suicide" 17 January 2013(link)

Belch

"So now, “in the City by the Bay," [San Francisco] if you want to roller skate naked down Castro Street wearing a phallic-symbol hat and snorting an eight-ball off a transgender hooker’s chest while underage kids run behind you handing out free heroin needles, condoms and coupons that’s your right as a free citizen of the United States. But if you want to put a Buzz Lightyear toy in the same box with a hamburger and fries and sell it, you’re outta line, mister!”—Jayson Lusk The Food Police 2013 (page 3)

"For reasons that scientists don't yet fully understand, people who spend time in high altitudes tend to shed weight. [Robert Roach, research director at the Colorado Center for Altitude Medicine and Physiology in Denver] cautions, "We're still shooting in the dark," but he and his colleagues are investigating whether subjecting people to the effects of high altitude by having them sleep in specialized tents at night, might lead to weight loss."—Amanda Onion ABC News "Could High Altitude Cure Obesity?" 7 January 2006 (link)

"To accept the respondents’ interpretation of the authority granted to the Board by the New York City Charter would leave its authority to define, create, mandate and enforce limited only by its own imagination. The fact that respondents interpret the Charter precisely to conclude same, tolls the bell on this regulation. The Portion Cap Rule, if upheld, would create an administrative Leviathan and violate the separation of powers doctrine. The Rule would not only violate the separation of powers doctrine, it would eviscerate it."—Hon. Milton A. Tingling New York Supreme Court "NY Coalition vs. NY Dept. of Health" 11 March 2012 (link)

Kids

"[Erik] Martin estimates that about 20 percent of the content on Reddit is N.S.F.W. (not safe for work), but emphasizes that this also includes “Trees,” Reddit’s dedicated marijuana-loving community. Regardless of the accuracy of Martin’s estimate (many experts think the porn traffic is much higher), the popularity of subReddits like “Gone Wild” and the now-banned “Creepshots,” which featured photos of girls taken without their knowledge, helped create a profile of the typical Redditor as a nerdy, pervy, compulsively masturbating pothead."—Jay Kang New York Times "Should Reddit Be Blamed for the Spreading of a Smear?" 28 July 2013 (link)

"Deputies say [83-year-old Seminole pedestrian] James Morris Wheeler was struck around 8:43 a.m. by L.C. Dudley, 85, who was driving a 2004 Mercury Grand Marquis southbound on 113th Street North and 74th Avenue around." Staff Tampa Tribune "Seminole pedestrian killed while crossing road" 27 July 2013 (link)

"Celestar defense firm chief executive officer Greg Celestan wanted to bring two younger associates to the Tampa headquarters from his firm's office near Washington, D.C. When they said they wanted to live somewhere without relying on a car, he told them to stay there. "I think that the lack of reliable mass transit adversely affects our ability to attract a younger demographic that does not want to drive to work or entertainment," Celestan says. […] Cushman & Wakefield commercial real estate executive Larry Richey points to the nation's two mass transit laggards among major metro areas: Tampa Bay and Detroit, which just declared bankruptcy."—Robert Trigaux Tampa Bay Times "Lagging on mass transit, Tampa Bay tries to get its act together again" (link)

Weapons

"A woman ran a red light in Tampa in the summer 2010, killing a bicyclist on the sidewalk. No charges. A Naples man ran a red light in his pickup truck, killing a 76-year-old woman in 2011. No charges. A Sarasota County woman ran a flashing red light, killing a 58-year-old woman also in April. No charges. When alcohol is involved, criminal charges are filed. […] To make [a vehicular homicide] charge, prosecutors must be able to prove that the person was driving 'in a reckless manner likely to cause the death of, or great bodily harm to, another.' Unknowingly running a red light and slightly speeding is not included under that definition…"—Jessica Vander Velde Tampa Bay Times "Red light crashes are often accidents, not crimes, law says" 19 July 2013 (link)

"Steven Rickert, a bus driver since 2006, contacted the sheriff's office on Tuesday to tell investigators he might have struck the man while driving a HART bus. The pedestrian was identified Tuesday as Eric Lewis, 43, of Tampa. He was hit and killed shortly before 9 p.m. Monday on 79th Street, near Fir Drive. Rickert told investigators he was heading west on Fir Drive and turned north on 79th Street. He said he didn't know he struck a person until he heard about the hit-and-run crash on Tuesday morning, the sheriff's office said. Rickert has been in two previous accidents while driving a HART bus, [HART spokeswoman Marcia] Mejia said. The first crash occurred in February 2007 and the second in January 2010. In the January 2010 crash, a black 1996 Dodge struck the HART bus driven by Rickert at Fletcher Avenue and 42nd Street. No one was cited. The crash was ruled "preventable" and Rickert was given additional training."—Jose Girona, Tampa Tribune "Driver in fatal hit and run was driving HART bus" 21 February 2012 (link)

"Hours after the wreck, a tipster called investigators to say his sister's boyfriend had a damaged red Ford Explorer, according to a search warrant obtained this week by The Tampa Tribune. The man said the boyfriend had called him, crying, shortly before 4 a.m. At first, the boyfriend said something had hit the Ford, but he wasn't sure what, court documents show. Later, the boyfriend said the Ford had struck two deer on Van Dyke Road. When deputies tried speaking to the boyfriend, he invoked his Fifth Amendment rights and requested an attorney, the search warrant states."—Josh Poltilove Tampa Tribune "Tips lead to breakthrough - but no hit-and-run arrest" 6 October 2010 (link) ed. Shawn Burton, the driver, received 7 years for the death of USF cancer researcher Kayoko Ishizuka. The sentence would have been longer if he remained at the scene and was found drunk.

Proof

"The sample was put into a DNA database and turned up a “hit” — a local man by the name of Lukis Anderson. Bingo. Mr. Anderson was arrested and charged with murder. There was one small problem: the 26-year-old Mr. Anderson couldn’t have been the culprit. During the night in question, he was at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, suffering from severe intoxication. Yet he spent more than five months in jail with a possible death sentence hanging over his head. Once presented with Mr. Anderson’s hospital records, prosecutors struggled to figure out how an innocent man’s DNA could have ended up on a murder victim. Late last month, prosecutors announced what they believe to be the answer: the paramedics who transported Mr. Anderson to the hospital were the very same individuals who responded to the crime scene at the mansion a few hours later."—Osagie K. Obasogie New York Times "High-Tech, High-Risk Forensics" (link)

"The murderer dubbed the Phantom of Heilbronn had been baffling German investigators for two years. The criminal was a rarity, a female serial killer, and a very busy one: police had linked DNA evidence from 40 crimes — including the infamous homicide of a policewoman in the southern German town of Heilbronn — to the same woman. Police had found her DNA on items ranging from a cookie to a heroin syringe to a stolen car. They had put a $400,000 reward on her head. Profilers from around Europe were called in to help hunt her down.[…] The police thought they'd been looking everywhere. But it turns out they should have been looking down — at the cotton swabs they were using to collect DNA samples. On March 26, German police revealed that the cotton swabs they use may have all been contaminated by the same worker at a factory in Austria — and that the Phantom of Heilbronn never existed."—Claudia Himmelreich Time World "Germany's Phantom Serial Killer: A DNA Blunder" 27 March 2009 (link)

“It is heartening that the mainstream scientific community today has validated so much of what the defense bar has been asserting for many years in the courts, the legislatures and in the public arena. This report should help avoid some of the heartache and injustice associated with the wrongful convictions and imprisonment resulting from junk science in the courtroom, and the myth that forensic science is infallible. The search for truth does not favor the prosecution or the defense, and neither should publicly funded forensic labs. The defense bar has long maintained that forensic laboratories and their personnel should be independent of the police and prosecution."—John Wesley Hall National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers News Release "National Academy of Sciences Finds Serious Deficiencies in Nations Crime Labs" 18 February 2009 (link)

Loop

"We have a brain for one reason and one reason only, and that's to produce adaptable and complex movements. There is no other reason to have a brain. Think about it. Movement is the only way you have of affecting the world around you. […] think about communication -- speech, gestures, writing, sign language -- they're all mediated through contractions of your muscles. So it's really important to remember that sensory, memory and cognitive processes are all important, but they're only important to either drive or suppress future movements. There can be no evolutionary advantage to laying down memories of childhood or perceiving the color of a rose if it doesn't affect the way you're going to move later in life. Now for those who don't believe this argument, we have trees and grass on our planet without the brain, but the clinching evidence is this animal here -- the humble sea squirt. Rudimentary animal, has a nervous system, swims around in the ocean in its juvenile life. And at some point of its life, it implants on a rock. And the first thing it does in implanting on that rock, which it never leaves, is to digest its own brain and nervous system for food. So once you don't need to move, you don't need the luxury of that brain. And this animal is often taken as an analogy to what happens at universities when professors get tenure, but that's a different subject. (Applause) So I am a movement chauvinist. I believe movement is the most important function of the brain -- don't let anyone tell you that it's not true."—Daniel Wolport, TED Talks, "The real reason for brains" July 2011 (link)

"When you have anxiety or depression, exercise often seems like the last thing you want to do. But once you get motivated, exercise can make a big difference."—Mayo Clinic (link)

"Losers, sad excuses for human beings who have no reason to feel good about themselves or their failed, miserable lives, are approximately 25 times as likely to suffer the emotionally crippling effects of depression as any other group researched, the study claims. […] Because of their severe, profound "loserdom," realistic treatment options for depressed losers are almost nil, the Stanford report concludes. "The only treatment that makes any sense is loathing and rejection," Wyler-Hustad noted. "It is only logical that stupid, fat, ugly, bed-wetting, crybaby losers be shunned as outcasts and be treated with the hatred and disrespect they so richly deserve.""—The Onion, "Study: Depression Hits Losers Hardest" 5 March 1997 (link)

Momentum

"The [afterburn] hypothesis goes something like this: When you exercise, you rev up your body's metabolism. Because things in motion want to stay in motion, even after you stop exercising, your body's engine continues to rev for some time following the workout. Thus, even once you stop running, you continue to burn up more fuel for some period following exercise. The only problem with this hypothesis is that it hasn't always held up in research studies. Some have found no post-exercise effect. Others obtained results that were negligible. Yet others identified significant afterburn - to the tune of hundreds of extra calories."—Adam Cohen and Dr. Stephen Prescott, The Oklahoman, "Is exercise 'afterburn' real?" 24 May 2011. (link)

"This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall. […] Sitting, it would seem, is an independent pathology. Being sedentary for nine hours a day at the office is bad for your health whether you go home and watch television afterward or hit the gym. It is bad whether you are morbidly obese or marathon-runner thin. “Excessive sitting,” Dr. Levine says, “is a lethal activity.”—James Vlahos, New York Times, "Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?" 14 April 2011. (link)

"The brain is ravenous. Though just 2 percent of the body’s mass, it uses 20 percent of its resting energy, and the body’s other main sources of energy—amino acids, which are broken down from proteins, and fatty acids and glycerol, which are broken down from fats—cannot power the brain. This is a bother, because we store pound on pound of fat, which most of us would just as soon burn for fuel, whereas we store only a few ounces of glycogen. Our brains are thus on a nearly constant prowl for sugar. There is, however, a fallback: ketone bodies, which are highly acidic compounds created when fatty acids are broken down for energy. The best-known ketone is acetone, as in the clear flammable liquid used to remove nail polish and scour metal surfaces before painting. Once thought to be waste products, ketones are in fact fuel—and fuel that can power the brain.—Steve Hendricks, Harper's Magazine, "Starving your way to vigor." (page 51)

Baseline

"It was not meaningful to [Shin] that North Korea in the dead of winter is ugly, dirty, and dark, or that it is poorer than Sudan, or that, taken as a whole, it is viewed by human rights groups as the world's largest prison. His context had been twenty-three years in an open-air cage run by men who hanged his mother, shot his brother, crippled his father, murdered pregnant women, beat children to death, taught him to betray his family, and tortured him over a fire."—Blaine Harden (page 121)

"Suicide is a powerful temptation for North Koreans plucked out of ordinary lives and subjected to the labor camps' regime of hard labor, hunger, beatings, and sleep deprivation. […] The Party [said Kang Chol-hwan] saw suicide as an attempt to escape its grasp, and if the individual who had tried the trick wasn't around to pay for it, someone else needed to be found. […] North Korea's National Security Agency warns all prisoners that suicide will be punished with longer sentences for surviving relatives…"—Blaine Harden (page 72)

"But South Koreans struggle mightily to fit into their own success-obsessed, status-conscious, and education-crazed culture. […] South Koreans work more, sleep less, and kill themselves at a a higher rate than citizens of any other developed country…"—Blaine Harden (page 172)

Ignorance

"The United Arab Emirates has been heavily criticized by rights groups, which say it condones sexual violence against women. Human Rights Watch has called its record "shameful," saying it must change the way it handles such cases. In December 2012, a British woman reported being raped by three men in Dubai. She was found guilty of drinking alcohol without a license and fined. In January 2010, a British woman told authorities she was raped by an employee at a Dubai hotel. She was charged with public intoxication and having sex outside of marriage. An Australian woman reported in 2008 that she was drugged and gang-raped. She was convicted of having sex outside marriage and drinking alcohol, and she was sentenced to 11 months in prison."—Nicola Goulding and Phil O'Sullivan, "Norwegian woman: I was raped in Dubai, now I face prison sentence" (link)

"In 1984, when Calvin Burdine was awaiting sentencing for allegedly stabbing his gay lover to death, the prosecuting attorney encouraged the jury in his closing remarks to award Burdine the death penalty, rather than life in prison, on the grounds that sending a gay man to prison was akin to sending a kid to a candy store. After 17 minutes of deliberation, the jury obliged and sentenced Burdine to die. His death sentence was later overturned (mostly because Burdine's public defender had slept through much of his trial), but the homophobic thinking – that prison is some kind of paradise for gay men – lingers on."—Sadhbh Walshe, "The grim truth of being gay in prison" (link)

St. Julien: I know about the Johns Committee, but could you give me an idea of your impressions of it and what you heard about it?
Deer: It put a terrible damper on the University [of South Florida]. I am terribly aware of this. There was a fellow in English, the one that Charlie Johns really descended on, who incidentally is now a very distinguished scholar in the New York State University System. He is the head of one of the New York State University colleges. This is who Charlie Johns descended upon. And of course what made my husband and I both go into a panic was that he got in trouble for teaching an essay that we booked standard and used on the subject of pornography. It was just absolutely standard. It really put a damper on what people felt that they were free to do and say. We lost not only that guy, but we lost an extremely good philosopher at that time.—Harriet Deer (page 30)

Biblical

"The origins of homosexuality are obscure, as is the question of whether it is sin or sickness. […] Rather than review the multitudinous theories, conclusions, contentions and claims advanced through the years to “clarify” consideration of homosexuality, we have contented ourselves with presenting as an appendix to this report as complete and responsible a bibliography on the subject as we believe can be compiled, and leave to each individual the prerogative of selecting the authority and theory that most nearly jibe with his own views. We would, however, suggest that the Biblical description of homosexuality as an “abomination” has stood well the test of time."—Johns Committee Report (page 9)

"Whether it be with youth or with older individuals, homosexuality is unique among the sexual assaults considered by our laws in that the person affected by the practicing homosexual is first a victim, then an accomplice, and finally himself a perpetrator of homosexual acts."—Johns Committee Report (page 14)

"Incarceration is not a satisfactory answer in many cases, for indeed prison life produces its own specialized brand of deviates, known as “institutional homosexuals,” who would not, in freedom, consider homosexual activity, but in prison turn to it in search of escape from sexual tensions. The Florida Legislature in 1963 recognized this problem and enacted legislation directing the Division of Mental Health and Division of Corrections of the State to plan for the construction of facilities at the prison system’s new receiving and treatment center “for the care of child molesters and criminal sexual psychopaths.”—Johns Committee Report (page 17)

What

"PETA, [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] considered by many to be the highest-profile animal rights group in the country, kills an average of about 2,000 dogs and cats each year at its animal shelter [in Norfolk, Virginia]."—Michael Winerip (link)

"…we also experience food through a third sensory system called chemesthesis, which is based on touch and is perceived by the face’s trigeminal nerve. Branches of this nerve go to the eyes, nose, tongue and teeth, where they sense pain, irritation and temperature. This includes the burning sensation of chili peppers and the cooling sensation of a minty mouthwash. (Some people have argued that these perceptions should also be considered basic tastes.) Fat is perceived through the trigeminal nerve, which sends signals to the brain that our mouth is experiencing something viscous, slippery or (as in the case of ice cream) creamy."—Julie Wan (link)

"According to Amtrak, the major passenger rail provider in the United States, and a World Resources Institute (WRI) study, trains produce an average of 0.21 kg of carbon per passenger mile. This is compared to 0.35 kg of carbon per passenger mile for car transport and 0.48 kg of carbon per passenger mile for air transport."—Brendan McGuigan (link)

Place

"The diminutive scale of the early models of the cosmos resulted from the assumption that the earth sits, immobile, in the center of the universe. If the earth does not move, then the stars do: the starry sphere must rotate on its axis once a day in order to bring the stars trooping overhead on schedule, and the larger the sphere, the faster it must rotate. Were such a cosmos very large, the speed mandated for the celestial sphere would become unreasonably high. The stars of Ptolemy's universe already were obliged to hustle along at better than ten million miles per hour, and were the celestial sphere imagined to be a hundred times larger it would have to be turning faster than the velocity of light. One did not have to be an Einstein, or even to know the velocity of light, to intuit that was too fast—a point that had begun to worry cosmologists by the sixteenth century. All geocentric, immobile earth cosmologies tended to inhibit appreciation of the true dimensions of space."—Timothy Ferris (page 34)

"But just as Darwin and Copernicus and the biological scientists and physical scientists have removed us from our special perch, they've also done something else: they've connected us to the rest of life, connected us to the rest of the planet, and connected us to the cosmos beyond. To me, that's a very profound gift." —Neil Shubin (link)

"…biologists and geologists have learned a priceless lesson: by bringing natural phenomena into time, by making them dynamical and contingent, we make possible a more complete and more rational understanding of them. What I am proposing is that a similar shift must take place in our understanding of physics and cosmology. The laws of nature themselves, like the biological species, may not be eternal categories, but rather the creations of natural processes occurring in time. […] a theory of a whole universe, if it is to be consistent with what we know of quantum theory and relativity, must be a theory of a complex, self-organized universe."—Lee Smolin (pages 18-19)

Boss

"It turns out that Newton's laws aren't fundamental, they are emergent; that is, they are what happens when quantum matter aggregates into macroscopic fluids and objects. It is a collective organizational phenomenon. The thing is, you can't predict Newton's laws from observing the behavior of atoms, nor the behavior of atoms from Newton's laws."—Michael Gazzaniga (page 125)

"The key to understanding emergence is to understand that there are different levels of organization. My favorite analogy is that of the car. If you look at an isolated car part, such as a cam shaft, you cannot predict that the freeway will be full of traffic at 5:15 P.M. Monday through Friday. In fact, you could not even predict the phenomenon of traffic would ever occur if you just looked at a brake pad. You cannot analyze traffic at the level of car parts. Did the guy who invented the wheel ever visualize the 405 in Los Angeles on Friday evening? You cannot even analyze traffic at the level of the individual car. When you get a bunch of cars and drivers together, with the variables of location, time, weather, and society, all in the mix, then at that level you can predict traffic. A new set of laws emerge that aren't predicted from the parts alone."—Michael Gazzaniga (page 136)

"…a unique language, which has yet to be developed, is needed to capture the thing that happens when mental processes constrain the brain and vice versa. The action is at the interface of those layers. In one kind of vocabulary it is where downward causation meets upward causation. In another vocabulary it is not there at all but in the space between brains that are interacting with each other. It is what happens at the interface of our layered hierarchical existence that holds the answer to our quest for understanding mind/brain relationships. How are we to describe that? That emergent level has its own time course and is current with the actions taking place. It is that abstraction that makes us current in time, real and responsible. The whole business about the brain doing it before we are conscious of it becomes moot and inconsequential from the vantage point of a different level of operation. Understanding how to develop a vocabulary for those layered interactions, for me, constitutes the scientific problem of this century."—Michael Gazzaniga (page 220)

Revelation

"Did you ever talk about a movie with someone who read the book? They're always so condescending, like "oh the book was much better than the movie." I say "Oh really? What I enjoyed about the movie was this: no reading. It only took two hours, and then I took a nap." […] Every now and then I'll read a book and be so proud of myself that I'll try to squeeze it into conversations. People say "Hey Jim, how are you doing?" and I'll say "I read a book that was two-hundred and fifty pages!" and they'll say "that's great, what was it about?" I say "I have no idea. It took me two years to read it!"—Jim Gaffigan (link)

"Many warnings have been uttered by eminent men of science and by authorities in military strategy. None of them will say that the worst results are certain. What they do say is that these results are possible, and no one can be sure that they will not be realized. We have not yet found that the views of experts on this question depend in any degree upon their politics or prejudices. They depend only, so far as our researches have revealed, upon the extent of the particular expert's knowledge. We have found that the men who know most are the most gloomy."—Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein (link)

"One of the best established facts in sleep regulation in mammals is that slow-wave activity increases in proportion to the duration of prior wakefulness and progressively decreases during sleep. […] Is such slow-wave activity a mere epiphenomenon, or does it have some functional significance? According to the [synaptic homeostasis] hypothesis, slow waves occurring in the cortex during sleep would actively promote a generalized depression or downscaling of synapses. In this way, the total synaptic weight to neurons would progressively return to a baseline level, thus effecting a kind of synaptic homeostasis. […] A need to rescale synaptic weight after learning, in order to preserve a constant level of synaptic input without obliterating memory traces, confer stability to neuronal firing, and prevent runaway potentiation or depression, has long been recognized in computational models of synaptic plasticity. […] Provided there is a threshold below which synapses become ineffective or silent, synapses contributing to the noise, being on average weaker than those contributing to the signal, would cease to interfere in the execution, and the [signal-to-noise ratio] would increase."—Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli (link) via RadioLab (31:20)

Knowledge

"The single great existential fact of plant life is... well, they can’t locomote. They can move with the wind and water, but they can’t pick themselves up and go. So what they’ve worked on, what they have, are chemicals instead of legs. Cannabis works on our minds in order to borrow our feet, basically. And plants have developed this incredible variety of molecules either to attract or repel other species. They have to rely on chemistry for their defense and for their propagation: for their movement. And they’ve gotten really, really good at this."—Michael Pollan (link)

"If I sit back and say "what's the purpose in life? Why should anyone care that I live here and you live here and so on?" In the end, after many drinks, I've come to the conclusion that the goal in life is to acquire knowledge, and to make sure that knowledge is preserved. […] We're now finding earth-like planets that are "only thirteen light-years away!" Isn't that great? I think that's wonderful, but how long would it take to get a human there? Will they survive? Probably not. If we want to explore the universe, then I think we have to do it with machines that don't breathe oxygen and are not sensitive to the things we are sensitive to. And so in the end here I think this is all about accelerating knowledge accretion, and intelligent machines are an amazing tool for accelerating that."—Jeff Hawkins (50:00)

"Other seeds are able to remain alive for astonishing periods. One of the most remarkable examples comes from an archaeological site in Japan. Two thousand years ago, a small settlement stood at a place called Asada. The people who lived here had only just begun to master the art of working metal. They were also among the first people in Japan who knew how to plant and reap rice. They stored this in small pits in the ground. In one of those pits scientists found a magnolia seed. They took that strange ancient seed, planted it, and it grew. In its tenth year it produced its first flower buds. Magnolias typically have six petals on their flowers, but this plant had a variable number of petals on each flower. Could this be an ancient species that has only survived with that one lone seed in an archaeological ruin? This is surely a marvelous example of the fact that plants with their seeds are not only extraordinary travelers in space, but incomparable travelers in time."—David Attenborough The Private Life of Plants (45:00 or 00:00)

Accidental

"A Canadian tourist whose body was discovered in a water tank atop a downtown Los Angeles hotel four months ago died in an accidental drowning, coroner's officials said Thursday. A maintenance worker discovered the body of Elisa Lam, 21, on Feb. 19 after residents of the Cecil Hotel complained about low water pressure. Lam had been missing for three weeks before being found. During that time, detectives with the LAPD's Robbery-Homicide Division appealed to the public for help in the case that included the release of video of her inside a Cecil Hotel elevator. In surveillance footage, Lam could be seen pushing buttons for multiple floors and at one point stepping out of the elevator and waving her arms."—Andrew Blankstein (link)

"According to the report, 31- year-old Chad Wolfe "suffered complete dislocation of cerviical vertibre 5 & 6, with spinal cord laceration due to blunt impact to head and neck." Investigators have determined that shortly after midnight on the 15th, Wolfe entered an elevator on the third floor of the main [Tampa International Airport] terminal that stopped on the seventh floor of the Short Term Parking Garage. Later, Wolfe apparently forced open the elevator door to gain entry. He fell and landed on top of the elevator."—WFTS (link) "But on Thursday, 10 News obtained surveillance video from inside the airport that captures Wolfe's bizarre behavior just minutes before his death."—WTSP (link)

"The Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office told The Valdosta Daily Times that 17-year-old Kendrick’s Johnson’s body was found upside-down, lodged inside a wrestling mat at the Lowndes High School gym. “At some point, Kendrick Johnson either reached into the center of one of the rolled mats or fell into the center opening of the mat and became lodged,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement to the Daily Times. “We feel like he was trying to reach a shoe that was down that hole, but no one knows (why he reached into the mat) but him and the good Lord.” The sheriff’s office says that the rush of blood to Johnson’s head over a period of time caused him to pass out and eventually die. Despite what authorities have said, Johnson’s family believes the teen was murdered."—CBS (link)

Intentions

"Hilltops have been leveled to make room for the [California marijuana] crop. Bulldozers start landslides on erosion-prone mountainsides. Road and dam construction clogs some streams with dislodged soil. Others are bled dry by diversions. Little water is left for salmon whose populations have already been decimated by logging. The idea that the counterculture’s crop of choice is bad for the environment has gone down hard here. For the professed hippies who moved here decades ago, marijuana farming combines defiance of society’s strictures, shared communal values and a steady income. “These grow sites continue to get larger and larger.” […] “There is a gold rush, and it’s a race to the bottom in terms of environmental impact.”—Felicity Barringer (link)

"Three to five percent of the long sisal leaf consists of a tough fiber demanded in temperate zone countries for use as twine in baler and binder machines operating in grain fields. For a variety of reasons, the world price for hard fibers rose to an unparalleled high in 1951. This price stimulus combined with government incentives led to the establishment of the first extensive sisal plantations in the states of Paraiba and Bahia [Brazil]. Subsequent boom years in 1960-62 further stimulated expansion of the crop, and, in some areas as much as fifty percent of the total land was planted in sisal. […] A concomitant of the introduction of sisal was the widespread abandonment of subsistence agriculture. This was particularly true of small landholders who, in the years of highest prices, were motivated to fill all or most of their small plots with sisal plants. […] The process is nearly irreversible because sisal, once planted, is very difficult to eradicate." —Daniel Gross (link)

"From Figure 1 we can see that something very dramatic happened in the late 1960s. This was the availability of low cost synthetic competition in the form of Polypropylene slit film twine. Its use as a sisal substitute in cordage started to take off around 1970 and its growth has scarcely paused during the past thirty years. I have little doubt that this pattern will continue during the next decade, as projected in Figure 2. Polypropylene, having penetrated sisal's core markets in agricultural twine and cordage, in effect capped the price possibilities for sisal. This, in turn, forced raw sisal prices down."—Gordon Mackie (link)

Complacent

"A University of South Florida engineering professor who often warned his students about the dangers of lightning died a day after he was struck by a bolt while walking on campus. Richard Stessel, an associate professor who had been at the school since 1982, died Saturday without regaining consciousness. "He was very aware of lightning issues. He was always warning us," said Maysson Sallam, a doctoral candidate. Stessel, 44, was walking near tall trees when he was struck as a thunderstorm approached Friday."—Orlando Sentinel (link)

"The work of the Kraffts [documenting lava flows] was highlighted in a National Geographic video which featured a large amount of their footage and photographs as well as interviews with both. Maurice is famous for saying in the video that "I am never afraid because I have seen so many eruptions in 23 years that even if I die tomorrow, I don't care", coincidentally on the day before he and his wife's death in the Mt. Unzen [volcanic eruption]."—Wikipedia (link)

"On 9 April 2004, a DEA agent (who has not been identified by name in press accounts) delivered a presentation on gun safety to about 50 adults and students at an event sponsored by the Orlando Minority Youth Golf Association. Partway through his lecture, the agent picked up his .40-caliber duty weapon and held it up for the audience to see as he announced: "This is a Glock 40. Fifty Cent, Too Short, all of them talk about a Glock 40, OK? I'm the only one in this room professional enough that I know of to carry this Glock 40." Seconds later the gun discharged, wounding the agent in the thigh."—Snopes (link)

Control

"The real danger of psychedelics is not so much neurological as political—that 'turned-on' people are not interested in serving the power games of the present rulers. Looking at the successful men, they see completely boring lives. In the Epilogue I shall make it clear that psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. When you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope; he goes away and works on what he has seen. Furthermore, speaking quite strictly, mystical insight is no more in the chemical itself than biological knowledge is in the microscope. There is no difference in principle between sharpening perception with an external instrument, such as a microscope, and sharpening it with an internal instrument, such as one of these drugs."—Allan Watts The Joyous Cosmology 1965 (link)

"Some people say brains can't understand brains. Very Zen-like. Whoo. It sounds good, but why? I mean, what's the point? It's just a bunch of cells. You understand your liver. It's got a lot of cells in it too, right? I don't think there's anything to that. Some people say "I don't feel like a bunch of cells, I'm conscious. I've got this experience, I'm in the world, you know. I can't just be a bunch of cells." Well people used to believe there was a life force to be living, and we now know that's not true at all. People just have a disbelief that cells can do what they do. And so some people have fallen into the pit of metaphysical dualism, and some really smart people, too. But we can reject all that. There's another reason we don't have a good brain theory, and it's because we have an intuitive, strongly-held, but incorrect assumption that has prevented us from seeing the answer. There's something we believe that's obvious but wrong. It turns out it's really hard to think of [theories], but once you've thought of them, it's easy to understand [phenomena]. The answer was there all along, but we ignored it because it was an intuitive, strongly-held belief that was wrong. […] We all intuitively know the Earth isn't moving. Do you feel like you're moving a thousand miles an hour? Of course not. And if someone said it was spinning around in space and it's so huge, they would lock you up, and that's what [we once did]."—Jeff Hawkins (7:15)

"Addiction, drug abuse, are the [diseases] that are the most stigmatized. They are diseases of the brain that produce a loss of your ability to exert control, or what we call "free will." Free will is not something that's spontaneous, it's a product of the biology of the brain, and there are certain circuits that enable you to do it. Drugs disrupt those specific circuits. As a result, even though you are aware that you shouldn't be taking drugs, you cannot stop it."—Nora Volkow (4:00)

Fate

"Civilization is a complex human society that has advanced to the point of establishing dysfunctional political structures, unfair social hierarchies, and economic systems that clearly do not work. A civilization is often characterized by its shoddy public education and its decrepit mass transit. In some fields of modern scholarship, the term is associated with “culture,” which refers to the unreadable literature, overwrought paintings, and mindless, lowest-common-denominator music that together make up the arts."—The Onion Book of Known Knowledge (Page 42)

"Fate will give you a lot to do next week, and you had better do exactly as you are told or Fate will start executing hostages."—The Onion Horoscope (link)

"Billions of years from now, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will collide, marking the end of the galaxy as we know it"—Elizabeth Landau (link)

Turk

"Of the 1,000 jobs, 375 would be "higher-wage quality jobs," according to the county, with average annual pay of $47,581. Commissioner Sandra Murman, who represents the area where the distribution center is being considered, said she's "ecstatic." "This is the big silver bullet we've needed to kick off our economic development efforts," Murman said. When the facilities are operational, Amazon will begin collecting the 6 percent state sales tax as required under Florida law. Negotiations between Amazon and the state seemed dead last month after Scott signaled that he would not support a proposal that would include — essentially — a tax increase for many Floridians. But Scott spokeswoman Melissa Sellers said the deal announced Thursday was not a reversal of his earlier stance but a "culmination of ongoing discussions."—Michael Van Sickler and Bill Varian (link)

"Only one of the employees interviewed described it as a good place to work. Workers said they were forced to endure brutal heat inside the sprawling warehouse and were pushed to work at a pace many could not sustain. Employees were frequently reprimanded regarding their productivity and threatened with termination. […] During summer heat waves, Amazon arranged to have paramedics parked in ambulances outside, ready to treat any workers who dehydrated or suffered other forms of heat stress. Those who couldn't quickly cool off and return to work were sent home or taken out in stretchers and wheelchairs and transported to area hospitals. And new applicants were ready to begin work at any time. […] When Amazon workers asked in meetings why [loading dock doors weren't left open to allow air to circulate] at the Amazon warehouse, managers said the company was worried about theft."—Spencer Soper (link)

"Whenever he clocked out after his 12-hour shift at an Amazon warehouse, Jesse Busk had one more critical task to perform before he could hop into his car and head home to sleep: Pass through the sprawling warehouse security checkpoint. The purpose of the checkpoint was to prevent workers like Busk from pilfering electronics or other pricey goods from the Amazon stock. The process deeply annoyed Busk, but not because of any indignity he may have felt in being checked for contraband. What bothered him was the time it required after an exhausting day -- up to 25 minutes, all of it unpaid."— Dave Jamieson (link)

Fitness

"The fear mongering about China is one aspect of [Geoffrey Miller's Edge.org essay, Chinese Eugenics], although to be fair there are some sentences in the end that suggest Miller’s fear mongering is more like an idealisation of what he fancies to be the Chinese state and culture. I thought the strangest part of his piece is he takes it for a given that eugenics work, and the only reason it is not done in the west is some kind of backward political correctness. The man is a proper nazi. That would be my main problem with him. By the way, selective breeding on livestock did produce more milk producing cows and more obedient dogs, but all these races are hopelessly unadapted to the changing natural environment and would not stand competition with their natural counterparts outside their human protected enclave. I think it would be the same if some people played with selecting people’s genes to maximise one trait at the expense of other traits."—Anonymous (link)

"As with all fine-tuning stories, however, an unresolved question lurks in these and other examples: why does variety persist? […] no matter how much a potential mate might admire your intelligence, for example, he or she might think twice about you if you lack bodily coordination or adequate social skills. We choose whole individuals to mate with, warts and all, and we also have no reliable way of predicting how our genetically unique offspring will turn out. Further, every individual belongs to a population, and that population to a species. Those species and populations are also out there competing in nature with similar entities; and the excellence of your adaptations as an individual will count for little if your population as a whole is being edged out."—Ian Tattersall (link)

"Dear obese PhD applicants: if you didn't have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won't have the willpower to do a dissertation. #truth."—Geoffrey Miller (link) *by way of Le Show

Deception

"The center of cougar genetic diversity is in Brazil, but the Western Hemisphere has six robust subspecies in all. The Florida panther was listed as endangered in 1995, when eight Texas female cougars were released in South Florida in a last effort to save them from extinction. It worked. The Florida panther, it turned out, [was not a separate species, but] is a North American cougar whose kinked tails, heart defects, small litters and short lives were consequences of prolonged inbreeding. From fewer than 30 in 1995, the panther population in southwestern Florida has grown to more than 150."—Guy Gugliotta (link)

"The tests were conducted six times over a three-month period, and the results were not encouraging. Only 65 percent of the designated drivers showed no blood alcohol content, 17 percent registered 0.02 percent to 0.049 percent, and 18 percent measured 0.05 percent or higher. “When you look at evaluations of designated driver campaigns, they’re really ineffective,” said the study’s lead author, Adam E. Barry, an assistant professor of health education at the University of Florida. “Often people choose designated drivers because they’re the ones who’ve drunk the least. The most practical recommendation is that if you drive, you shouldn’t drink at all.”—Nicholas Bakalar (link)

"In all, Zions [Bank of Salt Lake City, Utah,] let roughly $39 million be withdrawn from hundreds of thousands of accounts from 2007 to 2009. Much of that money was ultimately transferred to bank accounts in Canada, India and the Caribbean, according to a Times review of court records. Many of the Internet merchants’ customers were older people and others on shaky financial footing. But that, too, worked in banks’ favor: the withdrawals set off a cascade of insufficient fund fees — more than $20 million in all, court records show."—Jessica Silver-Greenberg (link)

Guilt

"Collectively the 50 worst charities raised more than $1.3 billion over the past decade and paid nearly $1 billion of that directly to the companies that raise their donations. If that money had gone to charity, it would have been enough to build 20,000 Habitat for Humanity homes, buy 7 million wheelchairs or pay for mammograms for nearly 10 million uninsured women. […] Florida-based Project Cure has raised more than $65 million since 1998, but every year has wound up owing its fundraiser more than what was raised. According to its latest financial filing, the nonprofit is $3 million in debt."—Kris Hundley and Kendall Taggart (link)

"Doug White is one of the nation's foremost experts on the ethics of charity fundraising. A consultant to nonprofits for more than 30 years, White teaches in Columbia University's fundraising management master's degree program. He said charities with high fundraising expenses often rationalize that such costs are inevitable in the early years. But White said the Times/CIR findings, based on a decade of data, show that the nation's worst charities can't use that excuse. White also criticized reputable nonprofits that refuse to condemn bottom-tier charities. "When you start a charity, you have a sacred compact with society," said White, one of 30 charity experts interviewed for this series. "They are ripping off the public under the guise of an organization that's supposed to do good for society."—Kris Hundley and Kendall Taggart (link)

"After facing criticism for high fundraising costs year after year, charities and fundraisers have learned how to hide the costs of telemarketing and direct mail. Some have obscured costs by reporting mailing expenses and other fees separately. Others run their own telemarketing operations in-house. Some of the charities' IRS filings were incomplete or had not been filed. Others contained obvious errors that sometimes could not be clarified."—Kendall Taggart and Kris Hundley (link)

Progress

"The reason there wasn't thermonuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis was because a single deputy commander of a Soviet submarine refused to take orders. One human being. If he hadn't done that, how many people would have perished? If that had happened, Steven Pinker's numbers [on the worldwide decline of violence] would be rather different, wouldn't they? A hundred million people down the tubes pretty quickly, and then the breakdown of production and distribution, illness, horrible death. Multiply Hiroshima or Nagasaki by a hundred or two hundred and that's what you'd get. That was one human being. So where is the great inexorable progression toward peace coming from?"—John Gray (45:00)

"Eugenicist ideas and racist forms of biology were strong right up until the start of the second World War, and not only in Nazi Germany in the interwar period, but in Britain and the whole of Europe in the latter part of the 19th century. Some of these ideas, such as craniometry, even entered into law. These ideas about improving the stock of humanity by eliminating inferior elements were not defeated within the context of science, they were only defeated by the military defeat of Nazism. They didn't go away completely, of course, but they were set back. Were they set back by meritocracy in science? No. They were set back by a military defeat. If the defeat didn't happen, I bet you they would still be around."—John Gray (50:00)

"Growth of knowledge is very powerful, but what it produces is new forms of civilization and new forms of barbarism. […] Although science is an embodiment of rationality, the long-run impact of science on society is not to make human beings more reasonable, it simply enables them do what they want to do with greater effectiveness. It gives human beings more power."—John Gray (16:15)

Loneliness

"Victor Crist, a republican [Hillsborough County Commissioner] said "The [gay pride] festivals, the activities and things need to have a little different tone to them. Parading around in lingerie, pasties, g-strings and outfits that promote your sexual organs is not necessarily an appropriate thing to do in Hillsborough County." A member of the audience replied "that's Gasparilla," bringing laughter."—Bill Varian (link)

"All vectors have a right to exist."—Dr. Paul J. Schmidt, professor of pathology, University of South Florida, in response to a question about medical defenses for as-yet unknown pathogens, asked by myself during a lecture about the accidental transfusion of AIDS/HIV to healthy patients before suitable blood tests were developed. 12 October 2012.

"My wife is my only friend."—Tampa bus driver, from an overheard conversation with a fellow passenger. 7 June 2013, 4:30 A.M.

Blinding

"The eyeball cannot register an image at the point at which the optic nerve attaches, and hence that point is known as the blind spot. No one can see an object that appears in the blind spot because there are no visual receptors there. Your brain uses information from the areas around the blind spot to make a reasonable guess about what the blind spot would see if only it weren't blind, and then your brain fills in the scene with this information. That's right, it invents things, creates things, makes stuff up! It doesn't consult you about this, doesn't seek your approval. It just makes its best guess about the nature of the missing information and proceeds to fill in the scene."—Daniel Gilbert (page 90)

"In the early 1950s researchers used technology to counteract eye movements by mounting a tiny slide projector onto a contact lens affixed to the observer’s eye with a suction device. This retinal stabilization technique forces the image to remain still with respect to the eye, even when the eye continues to move. The images, in these experiments, fade away perceptually, because of the lack of neural stimulation."—Susana Martinez-Conde (link)

"My reaction to reading the article was a mixture of incredulity and amazement at the complexity of our biological clocks — and the continuing ability of sleep research to overturn our presumptions. Instead of exposing their subjects' eyes to light, sleep researchers at the Cornell Circadian Rhythm and Sleep Laboratory delivered the light to the skin on the back of the knees. Incredibly, they measured significant changes in the subjects' circadian rhythms as a result of this seemingly innocuous light exposure."—William C. Dement (page 95)

Rollin'

"Songs can have multiple meanings, but to think the author [of Creedence Clearwater Revival's Proud Mary] didn't intentionally reference drugs is like being in a room with an elephant and deciding to close yours eyes and say there's no elephant. It is there. Also, it doesn't matter what the band said or didn't say. There could be a million reasons why he would rather give one answer in an interview rather than another. And Rob (Novi, MI) did you write this straight from DEA headquarters? On your lunch break maybe?"—Karl, Seattle, WA (link)

"With the benefit of hindsight we can now safely say that this opening [for the 1989 Academy Awards show] was the worst fucking idea in the history of the universe. A myopic Carr imagined that a theatrical conceit that barely made sense within the context of a raunchy San Francisco revue would work just as well as the opening of cinema’s most important and self-serious night."—Nathan Rabin (link)

"Steve wanted it to be five or six minutes long at the most, but Allan got nervous and threw in everything but the kitchen sink."—Jo Schuman Silver
"When you see something that doesn't work, by four minutes it's terrible, by five minutes it's outrageous, by eight minutes it's the kiss of death, and by 12 minutes it's the worst thing you've ever seen in your life."—Gilbert Cates (link)

Post-hoc

"The neuroscience supports the claim that self is constructed. For example, Michael Gazzaniga demonstrated that split-brain patients presented with inconsistent visual information would readily confabulate an explanation to reconcile information unconsciously processed with information that was conscious. They would make up a story. Likewise, Oliver Sacks famously reported various patients who could confabulate accounts to make sense of their impairments. Ramachandran describes patients who are paralyzed but deny they have a problem. These are all extreme clinical cases but the same is true of normal people. We can easily spot the inconsistencies in other people’s accounts of their self but we are less able to spot our own, and when those inconsistencies are made apparent by the consequences of our actions, we make the excuse, “I wasn’t myself last night” or “It was the wine talking!” Well, wine doesn’t talk and if you were not your self, then who were you and who was being you?"—Bruce Hood (link)

"The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules) we don't seem to be good at getting. We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion."—Nassim Nicholas Taleb (page xxi)

"This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing— and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness."—Nassim Nicholas Taleb (page 84)

Breezy

"The sea breeze accounts for 70 percent of annual rainfall in the state of Florida. Central Florida is located in a prime spot to receive a sea breeze from both the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. In light wind regimes, two sea breezes typically form. However, prevailing winds can blow these toward one another, forming one intense thunderstorm line down the middle of the state. Thanks to a higher tropical tropopause, Florida's thunderstorms easily grow to heights greater than 10 miles. When coupled with abundant moisture and slow movement, it is not uncommon for Florida thunderstorms to drop four or more inches of rain in less than one hour."—H. Michael Mogil (link)

"Florida is the lightning capital of the United States. Tampa has about 50 cloud-to-ground flashes per square mile per year, the highest of any U.S. location. When coupled with an active, outdoor lifestyle, lightning can be a major killer. Ron Holle, a renowned lightning expert, noted that 74 deaths occurred in Florida during the period from 1998- 2007. Florida ranks fifth in lightning deaths when data is adjusted for population but first in actual fatality numbers."—H. Michael Mogil (link)

"The sea breeze circulation reverses at night and becomes the land breeze. The land becomes cooler than the water and thus the placement of the low and high pressure areas reverse. Locally, when the land breeze encounters the warm Gulf Stream, a line of nocturnal thunderstorms is often observed offshore of the coast."—NOAA (link)

Gay

"All men, to varying degrees, have the ability and desire to form affectionate ties with other men. Women have a corresponding ability and desire to form affectionate ties with other women. Attraction to members of the same sex and expression of that attraction is in no way contrary to or an alternative for attraction to members of the other sex. Homosexuality is an emergent quality of individual selection for same-sex affiliation and has been a part of the human experience, perhaps all primate experience, since its inception."—R.C. Kirkpatrick (link)

"Although homosexuality is a widespread phenomenon, in some societies homosexuals confront repression or ridicule. In parts of the United States, for example, public displays of same-sex affection between men in particular are often looked upon as distasteful or even disgusting. One nationwide exception is the football field, where an extreme measure of rough-and-tumble masculine behavior makes it possible for players to pat each other on the behind, exchange celebratory hugs, and even leap into each other's arms without bringing their sexual orientation into question."—William A. Haviland (link)

"Among the most thoroughly homosexual societies known are the Etoro of New Guinea. As reported by anthropologist Raymond Kelly, the Etoro believe that semen is a precious life-giving fluid which each man possesses in limited supply. Without semen, a man withers and dies. They believe that semen can be acquired only as a gift that one male bestows on another. To ensure that semen is properly distributed and used for worthy social purposes, older Etoro men are expected to transfer their semen to young boys. This is done by penis-to-mouth intercourse (fellatio) between seniors and juniors respectively, who sleep together in a village men’s quarters—a separate large house—from which all females are barred."—Marvin Harris (link)

Icarus

"Allan had a way of treating fellow homosexuals like mere employees and straight male friends like the brothers he never had. Despite Kleiser and Joel Thurm's exemplary work on Grease, it was the film's cinematographer, Bill Butler, whom Allan sought to adopt as an honorary brother of sorts, and he rewarded Butler in ways that went far beyond the dollars of his contract."—Robert Hofler (link)

"Allan allocated days, not hours, to searching every gym and athletic field in the Los Angeles area to find just the right 1,000 or so male contestants who could be whittled down to no fewer than 250 specimens of absolute masculine perfection. Allan envisioned something similar [to the gym scene from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes] for the “Y.M.C.A.” production number, only he jettisoned the lead female and radically multiplied the number of men, using split screens to cram as many glutes, pecs, and abs as possible into each frame.—Robert Hofler (link)

"The great thing he wanted in his life was [to host the Oscars], and he got that job and then would spend the rest of his life trying to recover from it."—Gary Pudney
"The Oscars is the one night Hollywood has no sense of humor."—Lorna Luft (pages 244-6)

Addiction

"Everything goes back to this: If addiction is a disease, there's a system that we know to rely on: the medical model. You go to the doctor when you're sick. But if addiction is about morals and choices, then it's a completely different universe. This goes back forever: Addicts look like bad people; they’re the criminals. Most crimes in America are related to drugs and alcohol. There’s a whole treatment system that built up over the years based on this model that people need to be chastised."—David Sheff (link)

"Somebody with cancer, you’re treated for a month. They evaluate, do you need more time? Maybe you need to stay another month. After two months, you’re doing better, you go home, keep seeing your doctor. Then it hits again. You go back into the hospital and insurance is there; it has to be. With addiction, that doesn’t happen."—David Sheff (link)

"He said "I cannot believe what I did. I was at someone's house. I opened up the medicine cabinet, and there was a bottle of Vicodin. I took one. I thought to myself, just one."—which for addicts is the first thing they say to themselves and us—"and soon the bottle was gone. I woke up this morning and realized if I don't do something, I am going to be back on the streets within a week." So he got on the phone and called the treatment center in Minnesota. He was on a plane that day. To me, it's possible to look back on this and say the treatments were a failure: here he was sober for such a long time and he relapsed. But to me, it's the opposite: It shows the treatments had helped him so much that he was able to recognize he was in a free fall and that it was very dangerous."—David Sheff (link)

Urination

Stan: He abused me! He did drugs, he had sex, he paid a woman to pee on my body. He beat up a cop, and then somehow he paid off the cop, and then he peed on me too! Hayley: Wait, who peed on you? Stan: Everyone!—American Dad! "Da Flippity Flop" 5/12/2013

Carter: Peter, what are you doing here? You're not a member! And that means me and the other jocks get to throw you in the pool! Hey Banks, Duffy, get over here! This guy's going for a swim, grab him! Alright, you're kind of heavy so we're gonna pee on you. Not happening. All right, we'll just spit on you. Nothing we have works.—Family Guy "No Country Club for Old Men" 5/19/2013

Donna: I don't have to do anything but rain Hater-Ade on all you fools. Woosh! That's Hater-Ade!—The Cleveland Show "Wheel! Of! Family!" 5/19/2013

Pressure

"When astronauts take a leak while on a mission and expel the result into space, it boils violently. The vapor then passes immediately into the solid state, and you end up with a cloud of very fine crystals of frozen urine."—Straight Dope (link)

"When the breathing ventilation valve opened at a height of 168 kilometers, the gradual but steady loss of pressure was fatal to the cosmonauts within about 30 seconds. By 935 seconds, the cabin pressure had dropped to zero and remained there until 1,640 seconds when the pressure began to increase as the ship entered the upper reaches of the atmosphere. The extent of tissue damage to the bodies of the cosmonauts caused by the boiling of the blood during the 700 seconds they were exposed to the vacuum could have been misinterpreted initially as being the result of a more catastrophic and instantaneous decompression."—NASA (link)

"Four divers in a compression chamber system were suddenly decompressed from 9 atmospheres to 1 atmosphere. One of the divers was about to close the door between the chamber system and the trunk when the accident happened. He was shot out through the door and severely mutilated. The three others died on the spot. The autopsy results are described. The most conspicuous finding was large amounts of fat in the large arteries and veins and in the cardiac chambers, as well as intravascular fat in the organs, especially the liver. This fat can hardly have been embolic, but must have "dropped out" of the blood in situ. It is suggested that the boiling of the blood denatured the lipoprotein complexes, rendering the lipids insoluble."—Giertsen, et al (link)