Sean Carroll on entropy at TED. Part 1 and 2. (via). Related article on Boltzmann brains here.

A perfect cartoon for todays uncertain times...

Ten Pop Songs Performed By Porn Stars.

That lumbering giant, Microsoft is planning some web moves with its Office suite. Of course, Google was there a couple of years back... Given the penetration of Office, one never knows the landscape a couple of years from now...

The financial Turing test. (via).

Depression may have a secret purpose. Maybe our medical interventions are making a bad situation worse... Here is the original paper "The Bright Side of Being Blue". (via).

Meet Carl Wimmer, Republican in the Utah House of Representatives.

"Her nakedness is essential so she can be fully at the center of that connectivity of energy." - so goes the artists rationale for his exhibit featuring a nude woman at the gallery window. Make of it what you will. I think the artist craves attention...

My Mothers Sari - a poem.

LRB does salmon.
Most farmed salmon tastes horrible because caged fish have no opportunity for active swimming. Fed on high-fat pellets full of artificial colour – the pinkness of a wild salmon’s flesh comes from the amphipods and krill it eats during its time at sea – the cooped up salmon simply put on weight without distributing the fat around their bodies. A wild sea-run salmon, by contrast, prepares itself for the journey home by storing fat reserves across its muscles,

Richard Dawkins Interviews Creationist Wendy Wright. (via).

A New York Day. (via). Best viewed in HD and full screen. Description of lenses and workflow here:

Hijda, a new oil painting.

It grows increasingly clear that the Mossad screwed this one up...

The Salman Khan academy (recipient of the 2009 Microsoft Tech Award in Education). (via).

Spiegel has a chilling version of the last four minutes of Air France flight 447 from Rio to Paris. What really got to me was the clarity that an accident like this could easily happen again to anyone flying in an Airbus A330 - the freezing up of the pitot tubes that function as airspeed sensors seems to be the root cause. (via).

The Dude Plumbs His Weary Soul.

Don’t believe the argument that the reconciliation process should never be used for anything as big as health-care reform (which is what the Republicans want the public to believe). Health-care reform has a 10-year cost of about $950 billion. The Bush tax cuts, which passed through reconciliation, had a 10-year cost of about $1.8 trillion. (via).

Photos from the Whitney Biennial...

This post earlier talked about how animals can be genetically engineered to feel no pain during slaughter and can thus be a lifeline for those folks who would not meat for the ethical reasons... I found this hilarious response this morning to that article...
Adam Shriver applauds the possibility that we may soon be able to reduce the discomfort of the animals we choose to raise in the horrific warehouses of factory farms through neuroscience. I’d like to propose an alternative: that we consider using neuroscience and genetic engineering to modify humans so that they derive less pleasure from consuming large amounts of animal flesh and more pleasure from consuming things like tofu. Another option, of course, is that we leave both humans and animals unmodified and instead encourage the humans to use their superior intelligence, freer wills and more developed moral sense to see how deeply repellent it is for humans to continue to devote so much energy to find new ways of exploiting animals so that they can have tasty morsels on their plates.

I saw the following headline this morning in the Times: Banks Bet Greece Defaults on Debt They Helped Hide If one switches the word 'Greece' to 'Housing Market', one can gets to an eerily similar situation that happened in 2008.
When the F*** are we going to reform them?
As Greece’s financial condition has worsened, undermining the euro, the role of Goldman Sachs and other major banks in masking the true extent of the country’s problems has drawn criticism from European leaders. But even before that issue became apparent, a little-known company backed by Goldman, JP Morgan Chase and about a dozen other banks had created an index that enabled market players to bet on whether Greece and other European nations would go bust.

Obama should keep Bill Maher in mind when he convenes the health care summit today. Bill said that "Americans are aren't bright enough to understand healthcare the issues, but they can sense strength or weakness". If the Democrate need to pass the healthcare bill via reconciliation, then so be it. Don't waffle... It is also instructive to keep the following in mind: Sixteen of the 22 “reconciliation bills” that have made it through Congress were passed in the Senate when Republicans had majorities. Among them were the signature tax cuts of President George W. Bush, the 1996 overhaul of the welfare system, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Medicare Advantage insurance policies and the Cobra program allowing people who leave a job to pay to keep the health coverage their employer provided (the “R” and “A” in Cobra stand for “reconciliation act”).

Another reason why I hate the far right and their minions in our country.

How Python (a programming language) is guiding infrastructure construction in Africa. Personally, I like Python.

Some cogent thoughts on giving up eating the meat of animals killed brutally...
To give up the taste of sushi or roasted chicken is a loss that extends beyond giving up a pleasurable eating experience. Changing what we eat and letting tastes fade from memory creates a kind of cultural loss, a forgetting. But perhaps this kind of forgetfulness is worth accepting – even worth cultivating (forgetting, too, can be cultivated).

Picture of Indian sub-continent on a blue marble.

The parable of Basicland. Read and weep. (via). Guess the lesson boils down to this one statement from Keynes: "When the capital development of a country is the byproduct of the operations of a casino, the job is likely to be ill done."... This Jon Stewart segment is also relevant.

If you are buying a Dell, you are buying a blooming dud. The Bloom may not be one... Continuing the tech theme, the buzz on Buzz.

Is meat the next tobacco?

Even if I did cover Matt Taibbi's article about Goldman Sachs scamming the bailouts here earlier, this particular quote from the article deserves another mention...
The question everyone should be asking, as one bailout recipient after another posts massive profits– Goldman reported $13.4 billion in profits last year, after paying out that $16.2 billion in bonuses and compensation– is this: In an economy as horrible as ours, with every factory town between New York and Los Angeles looking like those hollowed-out ghost ships we see on History Channel documentaries like Shipwrecks of the Great Lakes, where in the hell did Wall Street’s eye-popping profits come from, exactly? Did Goldman go from bailout city to $13.4 billion in the black because, as Blankfein suggests, its “performance” was just that awesome? A year and a half after they were minutes away from bankruptcy, how are these assholes not only back on their feet again, but hauling in bonuses at the same rate they were during the bubble? The answer to that question is basically twofold: They raped the taxpayer, and they raped their clients.

Can psychiatry be a science? Neither science nor psychiatry can shine much light on the fact that in India, one married man commits suicide every nine minutes.

Goldman Sachs invented the most toxic financial instruments that led to the 2008 financial meltdown. While it was inherently clear to those following the brouhaha on a regular basis, now they seem to have proof. Meanwhile, Wall Street bonuses rise 17%.

The age for consenting to sex in Vatican City is twelve years. In other related Catholic news, a bill in Arizona extends the time a victim has to sue a child molester … unless the target of the suit is a church … the ostensible reason stated was that bishops need this time to buy pedophile insurance. In like minded fashion, Vatican's top bioethics official recently dismissed calls for his resignation following an uproar over his defense of doctors who aborted the twin fetuses of a 9-year-old child who was raped by her stepfather.

A new painting - took some time but worth the effort...

Statistics shed light on a recent news report claim that beautiful women do indeed have more daughters... These females are cocksure.

For those who are vegetarians and offer ethical reasons (animals are slaughtered under the most brutal conditions) against meat eating, genetic engineering comes to the rescue with reports that animals can be genetically engineered to feel no pain during slaughter...
Recent advances suggest it may soon be possible to genetically engineer livestock so that they suffer much less. This prospect stems from a new understanding of how mammals sense pain. The brain, it turns out, has two separate pathways for perceiving pain: a sensory pathway that registers its location, quality (sharp, dull or burning, for example) and intensity, and a so-called affective pathway that senses the pain’s unpleasantness.

Masquerading conservative op-ed columnist David Brooks nostalgically pines for those good ol' WASPy days when white Christian men from a selected gene pool controlled America - of course, he delivers it in a savvy, PC tone...
If you were an old blue blood, you traced your lineage back centuries, and there was a decent chance that you’d hand your company down to members of your clan. That subtly encouraged long-term thinking.

Goldman Sachs and other big banks aren't just pocketing the trillions we gave them to rescue the economy - they're re-creating the conditions for another crash!!! from Matt Taibbi. Unless we break up these big banks we are falling headlong into another crisis. Greece is an example where Goldman Sachs is directly implicated in hiding that country's debt until the situation imploded. When are we going to stop this??? In the excerpt below, Matt talks about Goldman's scam also known as "Swoop and Squat"...

When writers turn to painting - reflections... In related links, John Hockenberry talks to Tom Shannon and looks at his science-inspired art. Biology inspired art here. Luke Jerram's science inspired art is fabulous.

Money quote from Bill Maher: "What the Democrats never understand is that Americans don't really care what position you take, just stick with one! Just be strong! They aren't bright enough to understand the issues, but they can sense strength or weakness".
Rich Posner talks about the economic consequences of emotions like public anger and fear contributing to the inability of the federal government to deal with the economic crisis.

An alternative review of Outliers, that book from Malcolm Gladwell with his singularly non-mainstream views (first honed here)...

Fractal zoom video...

It is not housewives anymore - it is the reign of the househusbands!! The new future for men - stay at home dads with the kids...

Chart of the day. From here.

Harpers has the legal ramifications of Cheney's public statement on Sunday... "I was a big supporter of waterboarding. I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques.”

The cartoon below is particularly apt after reading Sunday's headline in news related to Afghanistan...

Does journalism exist? The Hugh Cudlipp lecture by Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger. Very relevant.
The business model is that one that says we must charge for all content online. It's the argument that says the age of free is over: we must now extract direct monetary return from the content we create in all digital forms.    ...it leads onto two further questions

Thomas Belesis, hired by Wall Street to defend the good, moral character of people on the Street and to "polish Street's image" has a story. His previous background included working at a company that was accused of the following lurid details in a federal lawsuit:

Are you cut out to be an entrepreneur? A test... and some thoughts.
"I like to take risks" is not on the list. People don't choose to be entrepreneurs by opting for a riskier lifestyle. What they do, instead, is reframe the salary vs. entrepreneur choice as between two different sets of risk: the things they don't like about having a steady job —

Microsoft is trying pretty hard with its new smartphone... If you look at their profits and the divisions that actually deliver then you will realize that it is nothing more than a dying company. In other weird tech news, a touchscreen electric guitar... (via). Meanwhile, an ode to the iPad.

Why winning streaks end... Lessons from Toyota.
Winners become sinners when confidence turns into complacency and arrogance. They over-estimate their own invincibility and under-value mundane disciplines. Whenever someone feels on top over a long period of time, they are tempted to neglect the very fundamentals that helped them succeed in the first place. They might even start to feel that the rules don't apply to them. Success means that people or teams or organizations survive long enough to need maintenance, repairs, and reinvestment.

20 pictures of lovers here. My favorite is # 4.

How gaunt, anorexic looking models are transformed...   Anorexic Model is an informational site about anorexia and anorexic models. 2010 Fashion Week in the city featured a Mercedes Benz car and even Tupperware, maker of kitchen containers... Portraits of extreme plastic surgery here (click only if you really need to...). (via).

Make Love Not Porn! An apropos writeup considering that today is the so-called 'Valentine's Day'... (via).

A beautiful poem by Erika Meitner.

"Sailing to Byzantium", a new oil painting I completed recently...

Conservative activists on the Texas Board of Education say that the authors of the Constitution intended the United States to be a Christian nation. And they want America’s history textbooks to say so - a comment on how how history is made — or rather, how the hue and cry of the present and near past gets lodged into the long-term cultural memory or else is allowed to quietly fade into an inaudible whisper.

Edwidge Danticat’s haunting short story ‘The Revenant’ is set in Haiti immediately after the death of a child. Edwidge's cousin died in the earthquake and she talked about her loss here.

The Wall Street Journal (as expected) makes the case for privatizing space travel using Avatar like logic... "companies and investors are realizing that everything we hold of value—metals, minerals, energy and real estate—are in near-infinite quantities in space. As space transportation and operations become more affordable, what was once seen as a wasteland will become the next gold rush". The conservatives are confused about the whole thing (as expected)... "the discussion is a clash between two threads of conservatism, one that touts limited government and the empowerment of the private sector, the other that touts national security and national greatness as virtues as well."

One can trust Wall Street to keep doing what it is best at - fooling people... Wall Street tactics akin to the ones that fostered subprime mortgages in America have worsened the financial crisis shaking Greece and undermining the euro by enabling European governments to hide their mounting debts.

More proof that feelings of spirituality and transcendence arises in the brain... "Researchers pinpointed two parts of the brain that, when damaged, led to increases in spirituality: the left inferior parietal lobe and the right angular gyrus. These areas at the back of the brain are involved in how we perceive our bodies in spatial relation to the external world. The authors of the study in the journal Neuron1, say that their findings support the connection between mystic experiences and feeling detached from the body." (via).

Marriages of people in their early to mid-20s are not nearly as risky as one thinks.

I finished a new oil painting over last week.

5 scenarios to watch in light of the military's decision to repeal the ban on homosexual soldiers. Here is an aggrieved homosexual's story that ends with some redemption..

A movie made by a fugitive child rapist is opening this week. Question: Does being an artist trump being a child rapist?

This cartoon from a recent New Yorker is priceless.

Letting Poor People Vote is Dangerous: A comment about the recently concluded Ukrainian elections...Ukraine's recent election witnessed the convergence of democracy's two greatest weaknesses - the tendency to fear strong individuals (Tymoshenko) and the tendency to vote for simple-minded people (Yanukovych). Poor people are capable of feats of bravery and revolution. They can storm the Bastille, overthrow the tsar or stage an Orange Revolution. But impoverished people are incapable of making sober decisions and voting responsibly in a popular election. And this, unfortunately, applies to Russia as well. In the unfair presidential election of 2000, Vladimir Putin emerged the winner.

Beautiful pictures of Saturn's moon, Enceladus, billed as 'among the most likely places to find the necessary ingredients for extraterrestrial life in the solar system'.

British Airways as a metaphor for Britain. British Airways are in a really tight spot - they have a frightening pension deficit, fewer premium passengers because of the recession and staff who are mutinous as they see their benefits cut back steadily. On my last BA flight, I asked one of the stewardesses what the staff thought of chief executive, Willie Walsh. She replied - “Put it this way, nobody’s ever seen him eat anything on a flight.” There is very little sympathy for BA staff in Britain - since they are widely portrayed as mollycoddled and economically illiterate. 

This surely has to be the money quote for today: After permanently shutting down email services from Google for all users in Iran, an Iranian official said "the measure was meant to boost local development of Internet technology and to build trust between people and the government".

Noticed on reddit... "I said they would never elect a B movie actor as president. They did twice. I said they would never elect a retarded son of an ex-president. They did twice. Do not underestimate the possibility of Sarah Palin. Please. Please. Please."

We have BRIC economies. I also notice that we have PIIGS. While the former infused credibility in these emerging economies, the latter denotes the loss of credibility in some established ones...

America has an impressive record of starting wars but a dismal one of ending them well.

Far fewer children would get a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. “Binge eating disorder” and “hypersexuality” might become part of the everyday language. Revisions have been proposed to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders... One significant change would be adding a childhood disorder called temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria, a recommendation that grew out of recent findings that many wildly aggressive, irritable children who have been given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder do not have it. The misdiagnosis led many children to be given powerful antipsychotic drugs, which have serious side effects, including metabolic changes. More here.

Economists have no clothes - an essay by James Buchanan.

Touring a black hole's environs just got better than a previous simulation.

How a computer scientist specializing in search recommendation systems managed to write and publish a  compilation of 44 alternate versions of Homer’s Odyssey. An excerpt.

Malcolm Gladwell on the sociology of drinking. " If you are good-looking and the world agrees that you are good looking, drinking doesn’t make you think you’re even better looking. It only makes you feel you’re better-looking if you think you’re good-looking and the world doesn’t agree. Alcohol is also commonly believed to reduce anxiety. That’s what a disinhibiting agent should do: relax us and make the world go away. Yet this effect also turns out to be selective. Put a stressed-out drinker in front of an exciting football game and he’ll forget his troubles. But put him in a quiet bar somewhere, all by himself and he’ll grow mare anxious. Alcohol's principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental field of vision. It causes, “a state of short- sightedness in which superficially

On Buzz... Google will suppress status updates judged to be boring because they have, say, just a couple of words or a lack of comments. .. The message here is that Google intends to apply its algorithmic smarts to social networking and do away with the gunk – “A good day,” “Apples are yummy,” “Jasper is soooo funny” – that’s slowing us down. From here.

Science has some hope - according to this research from scientists at UPenn who have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles... readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.
Meanwhile, the Creation Museum is closed today due to inclement weather...

A hot potato is a kind of virtual timer that is passed between mobile devices that players hold. During the game, the hot potato counts down to zero when it explodes. When this happens, the person holding it is out. The game repeats until only one player is left. Players can "throw" the hot potato to another player by moving close and making a throwing action with their arm (while holding their device). Moving too far from the other players increases the chances that a new hot potato will be generated on your device. That keeps the players together. Until one of them receives a hot potato, in which case it pays to move away from them so they can't throw it to you. The games our children will play...

Goojje, a Google clone in China told to cease and desist. They copy cars too. The Chinese are not too far behind in copying gadgetry...

Honey, I'm ignoring the kids.

The Senatorial 'hold' and lessons from Poland for US.

There seems to be a blog for everything - here is one that chronicles the thoughts a pork eating Muslim...

Looks like hearts actually do break.

Who Dat!!

You know that America's premier neo-conservative magazine (the Weekly Standard) is losing readers and desperate for attention when its cover story focuses on increasingly cruder mating patterns of young white Americans. In retrospect, they seem to have got it right when one considers the IQs of some of our premier neocons (Cheney, Palin, Glenn etc...).

Nanotechnology finally grows up - this invention will revolutionize everything... I remember the time spent in looking for a job without much success after getting a masters degree in this field... But that was 10 years back...

Remember the Matt Taibbi line about Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money" - That description could not be more true in this case outlined in today's Times article about how it sucked and bled A.I.G. dry...

Finished another painting this morning... Here.

Song for the snows outside.. Brooklyn Rider and Kayhan Kalhor Part I and II. Seun Kuti's Music of Resistance I and II.

Neurophilosophy brings us the cutaneous rabbit illusion.

The poodle across the pond is catching up with like minded folks here in stupidity... The number of British people who are sceptical about climate change is rising, a poll for BBC News suggests. The Populus poll of 1,001 adults found 25% did not think global warming was happening, a rise of 8% since a similar poll was conducted in November. One would have assumed that this kind of ignorance was a passing fad and was bracketed to the Bush years...

The River-Merchant’s Wife - a poem by Ezra Pound (after Li Po).

Wall Street has ways to profit from waiting for people to die... The increasingly popular practice of buying rights to older people's life insurance are called "life settlements"... These arrangements allow senior citizens to sell their policies at a discount to face value. As a buyer, you claim the benefits when the seller dies. In the meantime, you pay the policy premiums. Investment earnings hinge on how long the insured person lives. The ghoulish facts of such investing: The sooner the original policyholder dies, the better for the investor.

A free copy of an excellent book: Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air, by David MacKay.

The NYRB looks at two books about Facebook. "The site was a lark. For all that it reduced personality to a series of "position takings" and changed the word "friend" from a noun, something defined by duration, to a verb—"I friended him," a one-off event—the early Facebook nonetheless appeared as a natural extension of the atmosphere of college, where everlasting friendship often seems as simple as making another late-night dorm-room acquaintance, and whether one names Jane Austen among one's favorite authors, or removes Charlotte Brontë from the list, can seem enormously important, deeply representative of one's shifting personality."

A recent study reports that water can freeze at different temperatures depending on whether the surface it rests on is positively or negatively charged. Under certain conditions, water can even freeze as it heats up.

The Kerr kerfuffle.

I guess you learn a new thing every day: Just found out yesterday from an (online NPR interview with Randi Hutter Epstein, author of Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth...) about the dark secret about Dr. J. Marion Sims - commonly referred to as the 'father of gynecology' - who is credited with figuring out how to cure vaginal fistulas, or tears in the vaginal walls. He perfected this by practicing on slave women that he bought and stitching them up over and over and over again. This rather graphic paper from the University of Alabama describes the ethics behind Dr. J. Marion Sims ‘Joseph Mengele type experimentation’ on the usage of powerless black women as experimental subjects. He perfected this in the South where slaves were plentiful and then he migrates to the North and ‘popularizes’ this technique as a life saving procedure. Wily, very wily!!

I would classify the recent news of 10 Americans jailed in Haiti for smuggling 33 children out of that country under the theme "white Christian knight in shining armor reforms colored people and colored people are thankful for the Christian ideals imparted and thus assimilate better'. Other notable additions to this age old theme include the movies Avatar, Precious, Dangerous Minds and The Birth of a Nation.

The cave man diet explained on the Colbert Show... by a 'cave-man'.

After a long time, I managed to finish up a painting. The hiatus was worth it.

Noticed on Wordsmith... "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." - Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)

Breaking news! Trying not to be punny - we have a Prius...

An open letter from a former Microsoft employee who tried to make tablet PCs and e-books happen at Microsoft a decade ago. It is a familiar story about how large companies fail due to turf wars and in-fighting... He calls Microsoft a 'highly repentant, largely accidental monopolist'.

More grist for late night talk show hosts: Iran sends worms into space...

New studies suggest that the popular antidepressant drugs like Zoloft, Paxil, Prozac and a host of like minded clones are no more effective than a placebo. Meanwhile the Lancet, made a historic retraction and expunged from the published scientific record the research report that first linked autism to the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine. Also, a new study indicates that physicians do not use the criteria outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders when diagnosing major depressive disorder in patients.

For years her epilepsy was seen as panic attacks, menstrual issues, migraines, stress, low-glucose, anxiety, and depression, and treated with medications such as birth control pills and anti-depressants. In a medical system where womens' physical problems are often seen as psychological, doctors do not speak to one another, and the prescription pad is preferenced over genuine dialogue between doctor and patient, this lady fights against the medical opinion that it was “all in her head.”

In this listing that rates a country's rating, it is interesting to note that other than for Singapore, all of the countries carrying a triple AAA rating are Anglo Saxon, White and Christian...

In response to recent news that homeowners were coolly walking away from their 'underwater' homes, a wall street economist said recently that borrowers were not victims - they “signed contracts, and as adults should also be held accountable”. My response is simple: Give us a single instance where an 'adult' was punished for the reckless financial practices promoted on Wall Street... Keep walking away - may your ilk increase!!! ... Other ironies of the day include the news that AIG will distribute about $100 million in bonuses today to "adults" working at its financial products unit, which traded in the derivatives that imploded in September 2008, leading to the biggest government bailout ($182 BILLION) in history. The gravy train on the casino never amazes me – there is also news that the CEO of Goldman Sachs will receive $100 million in bonuses.

As the turncoat democratic senator Chris Dodd tries his best to scuttle any meaningful reform of Wall Street, it is instructive to keep the following words by previous Fed Chair Volcker in mind... "Attempts by big banks to regulate themselves will inevitably fail. When a bank trades for its own account (prop trading) — as opposed to the money of its customers — it will almost inevitably find itself, consciously or inadvertently, acting at cross purposes to the interests of its customers". Oh, and guess who would be hit hardest by the prop trading limit - yes, it is Goldman Sachs..

An NRA like movement arises in India with catchy lines like "An armed society is a polite society"...

Thoughts on why it is hard to face up to our astrological nature...

Only in these United States of America: Lawyers ask court to stop Toyota from fixing cars with the accelerator pedal issue. Meanwhile some reports are pointing that the pedals are not to blame - instead it is faulty electronics. Even Apple's founder takes a swipe.

A review of cursing.

"True power requires modesty and empathy, not force and coercion, but what people want from leaders—social intelligence—is what is damaged by the experience of power" - on the power paradox and the corruptive influences of wielding power.

100 ways city buildings can be made cleaner, greener and more energy efficient...

A mathematics column on the NYT site by a professor of applied mathematics at Cornell. Should be interesting...