1963 Wega 3300 Hi-Fi System | Design: Verner Panton for Wega-Radio GmbH | Germany - Via: 1 | 2

A space stewardess using a portable videophone in a production photo from 2001: A Space Odyssey - Via

How did a kid from Belarus become an Internet buzzkill? Evgeny Morozov likens his polemics to grenades. “In five years, I am returning in a tank”… more»

It's become something of a cliche: disabled, aged or relatively impoverished whites who literally could not survive without federal government assistance in many case nonetheless raging against Washington, "hand outs" and government dependency. It's there with a vengeance in this article in National Journal by Beth Reinhard on GOP plans to double down on race-based class warfare as the ticket to success in the 2014 elections.

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https://twitter.com/idriselba/status/419636942893240320

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The anime series Serial Experiments Lain contains a screen shot of Conway’s Game of Life in LISP. (source @nmu102)

malformalady:

Ice washed up on a black sand beach Jökulsárlón glacial lagoon, Iceland

Photo credit: Mel Sinclair

le Bat

wetheurban:

ART: Kimsooja’s Room of Rainbows

South Korean-born artist Kimsooja has had a long, intense career full of installations, performances, photography, videos and site-specific project. This particular installation from 2006 is at the Palace de Cristal in Madrid.

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Fergus Wilson, one of England's largest landlords, has announced that he will no longer rent to people receiving welfare benefits, and has served all of his benefits-receiving tenants with eviction notices. He says that the cuts to benefits in the UK have resulted in an unacceptably high level of rent arrears, so high in fact that rent guarantee insurers will no longer cover properties let to welfare tenants.

The problem of social housing tenants falling behind on rent will get much, much worse shortly, when the "universal credit" scheme is introduced -- a massive change in the way benefits are paid that has delayed by massive IT problems.

The hardest hit groups of tenants are elderly people and single mothers, as well as people who are too disabled to work.

"Tenants on benefits are competing with eastern Europeans who came to the UK in 2005 and have built up a good enough credit record to rent privately. We've found them to be a good category of tenant who don't default on the rent. With tenants on benefits the number of defaulters outnumbers the ones who pay on time," he said.

"Single mothers on benefits have been displaced to the bottom of the pile; sympathy for this group is disappearing. There aren't enough places for people to live."

Dan Wilson Craw, a spokesman for campaign group Priced Out, says he is dismayed to hear Wilson's announcement: "Evicting tenants because you're suddenly upset about new government policies is unbelievably heartless, and could lead to more people deciding not to claim benefit for fear of losing their home, and sinking further into poverty," he said, "This is just one symptom of a wider housing market that is simply not working in the consumer's interests. The instability and poor conditions that private tenants have to deal with would not be tolerated in any other market."

Buy-to-let property supremo shuts door on housing benefit tenants [Emma Lunn/The Guardian]

magictransistor:

Antoine Vérard, L’Art de Bien Vivre et de Bien Mourir (The Art of Living Well and of Dying Well), c. 1494.

New submitter sfcat writes "Companies, headhunters and recruiters increasingly are using social media sites like Facebook to evaluate potential employees. Most of this is due to a 2012 paper from Northern Illinois Univ. that claimed that employee performance could be effectively evaluated from their social media profiles. Now a series of papers from other institutions reveal exactly the opposite result. 'Recruiter ratings of Facebook profiles correlate essentially zero with job performance,' write the researchers, led by Chad H. Van Iddekinge of FSU (abstract. Not only did the research show the ineffectiveness of using social media in evaluating potential employees, it also showed a measurable biases of the recruiters against minorities (African-American and Latino) and against men in general."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in 2012, when Canada's Harper government announced that it would close down national archive sites around the country, they promised that anything that was discarded or sold would be digitized first. But only an insignificant fraction of the archives got scanned, and much of it was simply sent to landfill or burned.

Unsurprisingly, given the Canadian Conservatives' war on the environment, the worst-faring archives were those that related to climate research. The legendary environmental research resources of the St. Andrews Biological Station in St. Andrews, New Brunswick are gone. The Freshwater Institute library in Winnipeg and the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Centre in St. John's, Newfoundland: gone. Both collections were world-class.

An irreplaceable, 50-volume collection of logs from HMS Challenger's 19th century expedition went to the landfill, taking with them the crucial observations of marine life, fish stocks and fisheries of the age. Update: a copy of these logs survives overseas.

The destruction of these publicly owned collections was undertaken in haste. No records were kept of what was thrown away, what was sold, and what was simply lost. Some of the books were burned.

Hutchings saw the library closures fitting a larger pattern of "fear and insecurity" within the Harper government, "about how to deal with science and knowledge."

That pattern includes the gutting of the Fisheries Act, the muzzling of scientists, the abandonment of climate change research and the dismantling of countless research programs, including the world famous Experimental Lakes Area. All these examples indicate that the Harper government strongly regards environmental science as a threat to unfettered resource exploitation.

"There is a group of people who don't know how to deal with science and evidence. They see it as a problem and the best way to deal with it is to cut it off at the knees and make it ineffective," explained Hutchings.

"The other worrying thing is that no one seems to care a great deal about it. There is minimal political cost for doing these things just as there is no political cost to making bad decisions about ocean management."

Many scientists, including Hutchings and world famous water ecologist David Schindler, compared the government's concerted attacks on environmental science to the rise of fascism and the total alignment of state and corporate interests in 1930s Europe.

"You look at the rise of certain political parties in the 1930s," noted Hutchings, "and have to ask how could that happen and how did they adopt such extreme ideologies so quickly, and how could that happen in a democracy today?"

What's Driving Chaotic Dismantling of Canada's Science Libraries? [Andrew Nikiforuk/The Tyee]

(Image: Book burning, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from ender's photostream)

chemb0t:

So in the effort to make my bedroom more work-friendly, I went back to an old hobby of mine, with a bit of a twist. You see, I used to keep a bunch of aquariums in my room. I enjoyed breeding Bettas and Plattys but the large tanks took up a lot of space and needed a lot of attention to maintain. This time I’m trying out small, low maintenance ‘nano’ tanks or ecospheres that just house a couple plants and shrimp.

The first image is of my attempt of making a closed ecosphere. It’s a large 5000ml boiling flask that my highschool chemistry teacher gave to me. Think terrarium, but with aquatic plants instead of normal moss and shrubs. If I balance things correctly, I should be able to seal this up and have it regulate its own nitrogen cycle so that all I need to provide it is light.

The green spheres of fluff you see in the other images are known as Marimo. It’s a unique ball-like algae growth native to Japan. They grow in the bottom of lakes, so little light is needed to keep them healthy. I intend to give away a few of them to friends. They make for some interesting company. =]

Angela Kelly's beautiful photographs of frozen soap bubbles.

(Want more? See NOTCOT.org and NOTCOT.com)

Kevin Dowell (formerly of Wo Hing General Store, Zero Zero, Rio Grande, Starlight Room, and many other places) has taken over the cocktail program at Mission restaurant and brunch epicenter Foreign Cinema, as well as at the casual bar Laszlo in the front of the building. That means 3 new cocktail menus: One for each venue and a third for brunch drinks. And they all launch tomorrow, January 4. Customers drink a lot of cocktails at both venues, but this venus and its clientele aren't on the cocktail snob circuit, so Dowell has made an effort to keep the drinks in balance between friendliness/ease of use, interestingness, and speediness to execute. Foreign Cinema's dinner menu is split into Originals, Classics, and Friends - those made by people Dowell's worked for. On the first menu he posts cocktails by Joel Teitelbaum, Brooke Arthur, and Scott Baird. Stranglehold Diplomatico Rum, Lime, Orgeat, Rittenhouse Rye, Angostura This drink is a riff on the Trinidad Sour, except it uses 1/2 ounce of Angostura bitters rather than an ounce or more. It has that nice spice from the Ango and added rum to bring up the proof. Lady Grinning Soul Reyka Vodka, Grapefruit Cordial, Lemon,...

[Visit Alcademics.com for the full post.]

GLEN RIDGE, N.J. (AP) — Some schools no longer want to serve as polling places since the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

Pope Francis has made another one of his cold calls to wish a group of nuns in a Spanish convent Happy New Year. Only he got their answering machine, instead.

Michelin-starred chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten owns 11 restaurants in New York City, two in Las Vegas, a pair in Shanghai, another in Paris, and has a hand in more than a dozen other popular dining establishments in the glittering capitals of the world.

AP Russian President Vladimir Putin has rescinded a blanket ban on demonstrations in and around the Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Sochi.

At the end of the day even the combined military might of the United States could not stand up to the relentless onslaught of cute, adorable sea otters. What on earth am I talking about? Just a few paragraphs in a 1,100 page bill. On June 14 the House passed their version of the National […]

Data is an endangered species. So too are full interviews.

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Fran Solly Photos has added a photo to the pool:

He has moved in with his family and taken solace under the house on a windy day

HelenB55 has added a photo to the pool:

This Little Owl was found 4 weeks ago - cold and shivering and with hardly any feathers. What a difference 4 weeks of care makes.

Gary Fairhead has added a photo to the pool:

Great Grey Owl

The new line, deployed against Pope Francis’ dismay at the materialism and ideological fixity of global market capitalism, is that the Pope was only referring to Argentina. Global capitalism in Argentina, according to the theocons and neocons, is so different than in the United States that Pope Francis’s critique is simply a regional one. In Argentina, he’s only referring to crony capitalism, entwined with government, combined with an entrenched lack of social mobility. If the Pope were to understand American capitalism better, he’d realize it was a truly free market, empowering social mobility, creating wealth and disseminating it on a massive scale. On CNN last week, that was essentially Newt Gingrich’s argument against the Pope’s Apostolic Exhortation (which I explore in considerable detail here).

A mega-rich donor to the American Catholic church is so offended by the Pope’s words on the importance of poverty that he is allegedly hesitant to pay for a large amount of the restoration of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Cardinal Dolan, the reactionary now left stranded by the new papacy, has struggled to rebut the implications of the Pope’s somewhat unequivocal words. Arthur Brooks, a Catholic running the American Enterprise Institute that favors torture, unfettered global capitalism, and pre-emptive war, makes the case as succinctly as he can:

Arthur Brooks … said he agrees that the pope’s beliefs are likely informed by his Argentine heritage. “In places like Argentina, what they call free enterprise is a combination of socialism and crony capitalism,” he said. Brooks, also a practicing Catholic who has read the pope’s exhortation in its original Spanish, said that “taken as a whole, the exhortation is good and right and beautiful. But it’s limited in its understanding of economics from the American context.” He noted that Francis “is not an economist and not an American.”

So America is so unlike Argentina that the Pope should not be taken seriously. The trouble with this assessment is that the Pope clearly was not restricting himself to Argentina in his Exhortation. His remit was much wider. Here’s a critical passage and it’s quite clear that the Pope is referring not to a single country but to the ideology of a global system, rooted in the economy of the United States and its unipolar power since the end of the Cold War:

The current financial crisis can make us overlook the fact that it originated in a profound human crisis: the denial of the primacy of the human person! We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption. While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few.

The question is: is this only true of Argentina and not of the US, as Arthur Brooks and Newt Gingrich claim? Let’s take a look at each countries’ one percent, and then the top 0.1 percent, and see how much of a country’s wealth they each represent. Here’s a graph from 2005 that shows where various countries fit on that scale:

Funny, isn’t it, how utterly similar the US and Argentina are in terms of inequality? Since that date, the US’s top one percent have moved from earning around 17 percent to more than 20 percent.

On the core question of social mobility, Argentina and the US are also very close together as the following chart shows:

So in terms of both income inequality and social mobility, the US and Argentina are basically the same country. So why does the Pope’s arguments apply only to Argentina and not to the US? I’m not an economist, so maybe there’s another dimension here that I’ve overlooked. As always, I’d be more than happy to post any correctives or clarifications to this basic reality. But right now, it seems to me that the Catholic right is simply wrong. Their American exceptionalism has morphed from a thoroughly admirable national pride at America’s achievements to a fixed and rigid idolization of a single country along with an idolization of wealth. Both, to put it mildly, are heresies. And perhaps the biggest impact of the new Pope on American politics will be more forthrightly denying the denialist, ideological right any Catholic crutch to peddle their snake-oil with.

(Photo: Vincenzo Pinto/AFP/Getty)

"Pope Francis understands that menswear is meant to express the character of the man wearing the clothes," says Mary Lisa Gavenas, author of The Fairchild Encyclopedia of Menswear, before adding: "No rapper-style popewear for him."