December 2010
15 posts
4 tags
A traditional Nativity scene, Catalan-style →
At the nearby Christmas market amid the sprigs of holly and Santa hats rows of miniature, crouching country boys are lined up for sale.
Innocuous-looking from the front, their buttocks are bare and each one has a small, brown deposit beneath.
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Remembering a Victory For Human Kindness: WWI's... →
“The ones who survived, who lived to see other Christmases in the war, themselves expressed amazement that this had occurred,” Eksteins said. “The emotions had changed to such a degree that the sort of humanity seen in Christmas 1914 seemed inconceivable.”
6 tags
A Question of Character →
The quest to comprehend the American national character is, if anything, even more urgent now than it was in Tocqueville’s time
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A Physicist Solves the City →
“We spend all this time thinking about cities in terms of their local details, their restaurants and museums and weather,” West says. “I had this hunch that there was something more, that every city was also shaped by a set of hidden laws.”
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A Manifesto for Scholarly Publishing →
Why obsess about content if books as we know them are about to become obsolete in favor of some yet-to-evolve form? Has creative destruction spelled the end of books?
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Odds Are, It's Wrong: Science fails to face the... →
Supposedly, the proper use of statistics makes relying on scientific results a safe bet. But in practice, widespread misuse of statistical methods makes science more like a crapshoot.
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Your Apps Are Watching You →
An examination of 101 popular smartphone “apps”—games and other software applications for iPhone and Android phones—showed that 56 transmitted the phone’s unique device ID to other companies without users’ awareness or consent.
4 tags
Tokyo Hooters Girls: The burgers, beer, and boobs... →
And so a team of managers and image trainers flew to Japan from Texas, Illinois, and Georgia to transform 30 Japanese recruits and 10 Tokyo-dwelling foreigners, including me, into American-style Hooters girls.
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A Friend’s Mistake, an Understudy’s Chance →
The next day, Hofstra hired Cassara, who called his father and said he was not coming home to tend bar but was instead the new head coach of the Pride.
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Newton situation exposes NCAA — again →
Supporting a powerful institution (NCAA) that exploits the poor (athletes) for the economic benefit of the rich (coaches and executives) is what we’ve been doing unabated in America ever since Ronald Reagan introduced trickle-down economics.
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WikiLeaks: Moving Target →
You can’t burn down the Library of Alexandria any more— it will respawn in someone’s basement in Stockholm, or Denver, or Beijing.
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118 Days, 12 Hours, 54 Minutes →
Then I was ordered to take off my glasses and don my blindfold. I took a last look around. We were on Kurdistan Highway driving north. We were definitely going to Evin.
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Throwing Free Trade Overboard →
Strangely, for a movement named after an 18th-century protest against import levies, Tea Partyers are largely skeptical about free trade’s benefits — according to a recent poll by NBC and The Wall Street Journal, 61 percent of Tea Party sympathizers believe it has hurt the United States.
6 tags
The Shameful Attacks on Julian Assange →
But the truly scandalous and shocking response to the Wikileaks documents has been that of other journalists, who make the Obama Administration sound like the ACLU.
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No Secrets: Julian Assange’s mission for total... →
“We’re not going to give validity to WikiLeaks,” he said. “You’re not doing anything for the Army by putting us in a conversation about WikiLeaks. You can talk to someone else. It’s not an Army issue.” As he saw it, once “Collateral Murder” had passed through the news cycle, the broader counter-intelligence problem that WikiLeaks poses to the military had disappeared as well. “It went away,” he...
