billtron

Ms. Richardson, who appeared as an extra in more than 100 Hollywood films as a child, spent years as Sister Agnes Marie before coming to New York and eventually becoming editor of Seventeen magazine.

The Wall Street Journal has the behind-the-scenes account today of the chilly and contentious "fiscal cliff" talks between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner.

In the piece, Obama comes across as emboldened post-election to push for a better deal than the debt ceiling "grand bargain" that collapsed during the summer of 2011. Boehner, meanwhile, wanted something in return if he agreed to raise income tax rates on those earning more than $1 million a year.

When Boehner asked Obama if they agree on a deal along the same lines as the one he walked away from during the 2011 talks, according to the paper, Obama retorted: "You missed your opportunity on that."

Obama's frustrations grew, and he told Boehner he would rail publicly against the Republicans in the absence of a reasonable compromise.

As the Journal reports:

Mr. Obama repeatedly lost patience with the speaker as negotiations faltered. In an Oval Office meeting last week, he told Mr. Boehner that if the sides didn't reach agreement, he would use his inaugural address and his State of the Union speech to tell the country the Republicans were at fault.

At one point, according to notes taken by a participant, Mr. Boehner told the president, "I put $800 billion [in tax revenue] on the table. What do I get for that?"

"You get nothing," the president said. "I get that for free."

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Former Major League player Ryan Freel has commited suicide, as first reported by First Coast News.

Freel, a utility player who spent parts of eight seasons in the Majors, took his own life at the age of 36. Best known for his years with the Cincinnati Reds, he played 594 games with five teams from 2001 through 2009.

Citing confirmation from Sgt. Mike Paul of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, Jacksonville.com reported that Freel was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

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More on Obituaries

I want to flag this post about eliminating the voting age from Katrina Moncure, who is involved in the Youth Rights movement:

So what do I recommend? No voting age or test at all? So that even a 4-year-old can wander into the polling place and cast her ballot? Some youth rights people say things like “she can’t read the ballot anyway, she can’t reach it, she wouldn’t want to”. Which, honestly, is still very disenfranchising language. Supporting her having the right to vote must include support for her having the ability. Voting right now, being open to only adults, is built for adults. If young kids had the franchise too, then the voting system would have to change to accommodate their smaller sizes, lesser likelihood of being able to read the choices, their lesser ability to travel to the polling place. Perhaps pre-K classes could go to the polls together and file one by one into little child-sized voting booths with voting machines designed for people who may not be able to read well, that maybe lights up the candidate’s names and says out loud who they are. Whatever the case, even though even with adults there are lots of accessibility concerns (lots of people’s polling places are accessible only by car, essentially disenfranchising those who don’t drive and can’t get a ride and can’t mail in their ballot, for example), accessibility would become a much bigger issue with enfranchised children. You can’t just say they have the right to vote. You have to make sure they are able to if they want to. That will have to come with a lot more youth liberation advances down the road, which I should think would be in place by the time abolishing the voting age entirely would be at all feasible. Hell, just lowering it to 16, which is virtually free of these extra accessibility issues, is hard enough!

The idea of “children’s rights” such as letting 5-year-olds vote can seem absurd. And in one sense I think we can say that it is absurd: in a society structured around excluding children from participation, of course it is almost-unimaginable to think of children participating. But Moncure’s point is really important: support for rights is only meaningful if it is also support for capacities. For children’s rights to mean anything, they have to have opportunities to exercise them, and that means that social institutions would have to change to accommodate them. The connection to disability is crucial, since there, at least to some extent, we have tools for thinking about the interplay between institutions and capacities, and the importance of accommodation for the exercise of “rights.” But the idea that children are by definition unable to make choices about their interests is both false and offensive.

(One way to think about this is that negative freedoms — “freedom from” — are always an exclusive, adult-ist construct, and all real freedoms are positive freedoms — “freedom to”. We all depend on social institutions that accommodate our particular needs and characteristic in order to develop and exercise our capacities, and its not at all clear why positive freedoms, or a capability approach, can’t apply to children as well.)

nevver:

NYC Subway Infographic Posters

It would be most remiss of me not to mention this Kickstarter project from Andrew Lynch, also known as vanshnookenraggen. As well as these great posters, he’s also responsible for the fantastic animated history of the MBTA map that I’ve featured before.

Basically, Andrew is seeking funding for bulk printing of these posters (in effect, your pledge to him is a preorder for the poster(s) of your choice). For every $25 you pledge, you get another poster, all the way up to $225 for the entire set of nine.

Printing won’t start until next year, so they won’t arrive for Christmas, but if you like the look of this (and I sure do!), I strongly encourage you to get behind this project and give what you can. $25 for an awesome NYC subway poster sounds like a good deal to me. I’ve personally pledged $50 to the project and hope you can join me.

Kickstarter Project Page | Flickr Photoset

How he hated Saturday morning shopping

Electrical networks emit such a constant, locally recognizable hum that their sound can be used to help solve crimes.

[Image: Random sound file using Sound Studio].

A forensic database of electrical sounds is thus being developed by UK police, according to the BBC. "For the last seven years, at the Metropolitan Police forensic lab in south London," we read, "audio specialists have been continuously recording the sound of mains electricity. It is an all pervasive hum that we normally cannot hear. But boost it a little, and a metallic and not very pleasant buzz fills the air."

Any digital recording made anywhere near an electrical power source, be it plug socket, light or pylon, will pick up this noise and it will be embedded throughout the audio.

This buzz is an annoyance for sound engineers trying to make the highest quality recordings. But for forensic experts, it has turned out to be an invaluable tool in the fight against crime.

Even with—or, in fact, because of—slight fluctuations in the level of local electric power, such recordings can reveal sonic traces of where and when they were recorded; these barely audible details act as "a digital watermark," the BBC explains, secret audio artifacts that put "a date and time stamp on the recording."

You can thus acoustically prove that someone was in a certain part of, say, London at a certain time of day, and that a given audio recording is thus genuine (or faked), due to the exact signature of what electrical networks in that part of the city had been doing at the time.

It's like cosmic microwave background radiation, an immersive soundtrack—a sea of acoustic metadata—hidden in the built environment, detectable electronically, droning all around us at a volume usually below human hearing.

(Via New Aesthetic).

What’s truly strange to me is how divorced these guys seem to be from the old-school music notion of writing “a hit” — a song that moves units, yes, but also moves asses (and hearts) — while simultaneously being baffled by why their songs aren’t played on the radio.

from A rant about Grizzly Bear and writing with an audience in mind

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Richard Osborne has been pondering a Top Ten of silent pieces in the New Statesman this week. As someone who has not long ago written about silence in the post-Cage world, of course I had to take a look. It’s … Continue reading →

Most of the literary fantasies about women in charge, ancient or modern, make the same point. In Aristophanes' 5th-century BC comedy, Assemblywomen, for example, women have taken charge of Athens, and bring in a whole series of hare-brained pseudo-egalitarian measures – including the requirement that men had to sleep with ugly old women before pretty young ones. It would have been enough to reconcile the average Athenian man to any kind of male government, no matter how incompetent.

Classicist Mary Beard's response to Hanna Rosin's The End of Men puts it in historical context and dismantles it soundly. It's the review I've been waiting for.