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POPSYou know you want one of these crazy Japanese toys Draw a picture, and then use this special magic wand to scan it. Then, when you turn out the light and wave the wand around in the air, the picture appears in the form of LED lights. Woohoo! Only 2625 (about thirty U.S. dollars).
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POPSVirginia attorney general seeks to rescind bans on anti-gay discrimination at the state's public colleges This strikes me as remarkably audacious. Cuccinelli has sent letters to the state's public higher education establishments, most of which have bylaws banning discrimination based on sexual orientation, instructing them to strike those clauses. The argument is that only the state's General Assembly can establish protected-class rules with reference to state employment, and that colleges and universities are thus acting without outside the bounds of their authority when they enacted those rules. Several legal sources for this article commented that the letter's directive is probably more or less unenforceable, but who knows. One Republican member of GMU's board of visitors commented: "What he's saying is reprehensible... I don't know what he's doing, opening up this can of worms."
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POPSWhich nutritional supplements are actually proven to work? This chart will tell you From Information is Beautiful, a very practical data visualization project. They took a large number of nutritional supplements and rated their approximate effectiveness using data from PubMed (on a scale of "None," "Slight," "Conflicting," "Promising," and "Strong"). Then they plotted these values, along with approximate assessments of their popularity as treatments for different conditions, in a "bubble race" graph. It's hard to describe, but very easy to read once you look. Unfortunately the image itself was too large to clip, so you'll have to go to the site to investigate. There's also a well-conceived interactive version. Some examples of what works: omega-3's (but not for everything they say it does), green tea (ditto), folic acid, beta-glucans, and vitamin D. What doesn't: vitamin C, echinacea, antioxidants, and glucosamine.
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POPSNewsweek's editorial staff on when journalists should say "terrorist" If you fly a plane into a building and kill people, apparently, that's not enough to make you a terrorist. You have to "be foreign" and "hate Americans" to qualify. In other words, Joseph Stack is not a terrorist. He's a "separatist/protester/activist", in the words of one journalist. Another points out that the media are afraid of suggesting that the radical fringe of the anti-tax movement in this country (in other words, the Tea Party people) is, for all purposes, actually connected with domestic terrorism.
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POPSStudy shows that childhood poverty reshapes the brain, with detectable biological effects into adulthood Poverty affects young children on a biological level, with detectable, quantifiable effects lasting at least into the late thirties. The money quote: " ow income creates constant stress that the children feel in the home. Indeed many of the biological changes seen in the brain are consistent with prolonged exposure to stress... Evidence suggests that both of these mechanisms contribute to cognitive and behavioral problems in low-income children. This means interventions need to target more than just early childhood education for children." The article is based on research by Jack Shonkoff of Harvard, Katherine Magnusson of UW Madison, and Greg Duncan of UC Irvine.
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POPSWhy we didn't catch the underwear bomber: too much information, too little analysis
Since the passage of the PATRIOT act and the creation of related data-gathering efforts, various U.S. intelligence agencies have amassed mind-bogglingly huge collections of data (at an unprecedented cost to privacy and constitutionally-protected civil liberties, I might add, but let's forget about that for now). The problem is, no one really knows what to do with all that information. We have half a million "suspected terrorists" on a list. But, as one official said, a name on a list is just a name. You have to do something with it before it's useful. But no one really knows where to start, and no one agency wants to be the first to tip its own hand. It's interesting how often the author of this article mentions Google in connection with his discussions of how to manage large amounts of information well (in the sense of, "What we need is the equivalent of a Google search for all this data"). Wonder how long it's going to be before Google is contracted out to handle U.S. national secur
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POPSTennessee TV station airs "exposé" on local Muslims, but finds nothing remarkable; mosque vandalized a week later It's a familiar and depressing story. A TV station (WTVF, a CBS affiliate in Nashville) decides to "investigate" a local community of Muslims, starting its program off with the usual crap: "Some say it's a training camp for terrorism. Others say it's not." Of course, they found that it wasn't. But of course, they want to attract viewers, so the report's tone was calculated to cast an ominous pall of suspicion over the community, even without any evidence that anything unsavory was going on. The report continually repeats the phrase "Homegrown Jihad," for example, and cites as evidence vague suspicions on the part of people who've never seen or researched this particular community. Well, surprise! One week after airdate, vandals spray-paint a Jerusalem cross (a Crusader symbol) on the wall of a Nashville mosque. All in a day's work, right, WTVF? Part two of story is here - http://j.mp/cDulkg . Part two is the one where a reporter actually goes out and, you know, reports. Part one just
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POPSWhat international marketing is doing to contemporary fiction Good piece by Tim Parks on how the need for English-language success is gradually sapping the distinctiveness of local literary traditions and substituting a kind of vaguely liberal aesthetic posturing for real literary creativity. I have been bothered by this for some time -- I think you see this pseudo-postmodern sensibility in English-language authors too, like Yann Martel, Zadie Smith, Angela Carter, and even T.C. Boyle. But postmodernism isn't the problem -- think Italo Calvino. And on the other hand, we still have talents like Jhumpa Lahiri writing in a related "global" idiom.
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POPSDid you know you're not allowed to say Moleskine on the web without permission? Wow, Moleskine sure has a lot of rules about what you can and can't do with the word "Moleskine" on the web. Examples: you cannot use it generically or as an adjective, you must include the (registered trademark) symbol, and any page referencing the Moleskine name must include the disclaimer, "MOLESKINE is a trademark registered by Moleskine S.r.l." Also, technically, you must have the company's permission, though the implication seems to be that they will not prosecute you if you follow the listed guidelines. Is this kind of thing common?
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POPSDeath by ennui. Yes, really In a 25-year longitudinal study, researchers found that people who complained of boredom were significantly more likely (two and a half times as likely, to be exact) to die of heart disease or stroke than others. Not too shocking, I guess, seeing as how it's not hard to imagine boredom correlating with lots of unhealthy lifestyles and habits (drinking, overeating, etc.).
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POPSScience confirms it: driving a Porsche really does make you more of a man A creative and elegant study has found that for men, driving a Porsche (and presumably other high-end, powerful vehicles) increases your testosterone levels, even -- and here's the kicker -- if no one ever sees you drive it. That means it's hard-wired, not just a "social construct." (That's what this author says, anyhow, though it's not obvious to me that that's the only explanation.) The post then goes on to say, interestingly, that this is going to be a big problem for auto designers of the future who want to be environmentally responsible, because, presumably, environmentally responsible cars aren't sexy. They'll have to "figure out how to make hybrid and electric cars cool." As in, like, raise-your-testosterone-level cool. My question is, why? Is the post implying that if electric cars don't get sexier, then we'll just continue to destroy the environment? Are those really the only two options?
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POPSListening in on the everyday lives of jihadis Thomas Bartlett, "Before Martyrdom, Breakfast," The Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan. 24, 2010). On the research of Flagg Miller, a linguistic anthropologist who has been studying a cache of audiotapes that reveal something about the day-to-day life of jihadis in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As an example, the article relates a conversation involving a veteran militant Abu Hamza, which veers from how to fry eggs on a camp stove, to wet dreams, to "the rivers of paradise."
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POPSAn eyewitness description of Blackwater's Nisoor Square shootings (Sept. 2007) The father of a nine-year-old boy, Ali Kinani, killed by Blackwater employees in September 2007 in what was apparently an unprovoked massacre of unarmed civilians, is now suing the Blackwater employees he thinks were responsible. This article provides a rundown of some of the currently available information, including Kinani's own eyewitness account of the incident. It makes pretty harrowing reading. The federal lawsuit against Blackwater was recently dismissed; the company attempted to settle with Kinani in the matter of his son's death for $20,000. (One official remarked that it was important to keep the settlements low, because otherwise Iraqis might try "to get killed by our guys to financially guarantee their family's future.")
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POPSCandidate for SC governor: helping the poor is like "feeding stray animals" This is current SC Lt. Gov. André Bauer, who is campaigning for the Republican nomination for governor (to take over Mark Sanford's seat). His astute powers of observation have also revealed that "free and reduced lunch" schools correlate with low test scores. Stop the presses! News flash! Politician discovers that poor kids perform poorly on standardized tests! Who could have guessed it? Bauer's apparent solution to poverty: take away their free lunches, and these kids will suddenly start testing better.
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POPSSatan to Pat Robertson: "You're making me look bad" I've been trying not to pay too much attention to Pat Robertson and his shenanigans, but this letter to him, written by Satan himself (channeled by a reader of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and sent to the paper's editors) is too good not to post.
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POPSThink Buddhists are all peaceniks? Think again. A new collection of academic studies reveals a strong strain of violence and militancy that runs through the world's historically Buddhist cultures. So -- it's not all about "present moment, wonderful moment" after all, I guess.
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POPSStudy suggests that most "real" news stories still originate at traditional news outlets This is pretty much what I've always thought. People say that traditional journalism and "old media" are dying. Maybe, sure, for economic reasons. People also say "you can get all your news online now." But what does that mean? You can get your news from blogs. Okay, but where are bloggers getting their news? Mostly from other bloggers. Well, if you trace all those links all the way back to the source, you usually wind up at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, a major TV network, or some other "old media" source. Someone still has to pay reporters to actually go out there and collect the news. It doesn't just materialize out of thin air. Once the newspapers and beat reporters are gone, do you think Matt Drudge is going to start going to press conferences?
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POPSA remarkably bitter take on the "top ten stories of the last decade" -- in short, we're hosed The last paragraph is worth quoting in full: "The meaninglessness of elections: This is the most embittering revelation of all. Despite the greatest electoral majority since Johnson crushed Goldwater in '64, Obama has betrayed everything he ran on. In every case where he had the opportunity to confront power " in financial bailouts, financial regulation, health care, wars and military spending, utilities and global warming, national surveillance " Obama has sided with the rich and powerful against the interests of the American people. He has probably engendered more cynicism, more disaffection with government than any president since Richard Nixon. It will deal a staggering blow to the hopes of mobilizing masses of people again for a real takeback of government. And he's not even one year into it."
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POPSEating healthfully can increase your food bill tenfold, says Ag Dept. study More evidence that overhauling the U.S. health insurance system is only a small step towards making Americans healthier. If, as the study's authors conclude, " resh vegetables and fruits are rapidly becoming luxury goods" (since their prices are most strongly influenced by inflation), then we have a structural nutritional problem built into our food system. This piece is from March 2008.
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