Hey, "Dog's Playing Poker," you're great and all, but "Dogs Playing Dungeons and Dragons" is the best dog painting in the history of all dog paintings. The end.
Created by Johannes Grenzfurthner along with game designer and artist Heather Kelley, this delightful work give the original Dogs and Poker series by C.M. Coolidge a run for its money.
The work is available for purchase over at Red Bubble.
[via Laughing Squid]
Surely you've heard about this. A Texas court — full of old men, reeking of misogyny — has ruled that taking upskirt photos of unwilling women is free speech protected by the First Amendment!
How ridiculous! How despicable!
I mean, at least — that's what I think happened, based on how the story has been reported and talked about.
Consider, say — the Mary Sue, a really very good blog that deals with how pop culture treats women. Here's how they headlined and wrote about it:
Kansas City, Missouri May Soon Outlaw Catcalling; Texas Lifts Proposed Ban on Upskirt Photos
. . .
Just this week, Texas’ highest criminal court threw out a state law banning “improper photography” like upskirts and other invasive images taken without consent —in a decision ostensibly meant to protect “free speech” that will just protect perpetrators instead.
You think a blog is a bad example? OK, take The Guardian:
Texas court upholds right to take 'upskirt' pictures
A court has upheld the constitutional right of Texans to photograph strangers as an essential component of freedom of speech – even if those images should happen to be surreptitious “upskirt” pictures of women taken for the purposes of sexual gratification.
It's not all progressives. Look at Breitbart:
Texas Court: Ban on 'Upskirt' Photos Violates First Amendment Rights
HOUSTON, Texas — Texas' highest criminal court threw out a law on Wednesday banning "improper photography in public." Banning such photography, which includes "upskirting" or "downblousing" for the purpose of sexual gratification, would be considered a violation of free speech.
Or, on the other side, Salon:
Texas court throws out “upskirt” photo law, because banning creepshots is “paternalistic”
Texas’ highest criminal court struck down part of a law banning “upskirt” photos on Wednesday, arguing that photos taken without permission in public are entitled to First Amendment protections. Outlawing “improper photography or visual recording,” the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals panel ruled, would be a violation of federal free-speech rights and a “paternalistic” effort to regulate the photographers’ thoughts.
If you read those articles — if you read most of the coverage of this decision — you would conclude that (1) Texas had a law banning upskirt photos, and (2) a Texas court struck down the law because upskirt photos are protected by the First Amendment and can't be banned.
Or, you could, you know, read the actual court decision to see what the court said. Mike Masnick at Techdirt did so, and found that the decision didn't much resemble its coverage.
First, take the statute that was at issue. It's Texas Penal Code section 21.15(b)(1).
(b) A person commits an offense if the person:
(1) photographs or by videotape or other electronic means records, broadcasts, or transmits a visual image of another at a location that is not a bathroom or private dressing room:
(A) without the other person's consent; and
(B) with intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person.
That odd "not a bathroom" clause, by the way, is there because there's a separate part of the statute that deals with filming in bathrooms and dressing rooms — which the Texas court did not strike down.
So. Let's consider this a minute. Taking a picture of someone in public with the intent to gratify anyone sexually is a felony under this statute.
Is this picture a felony?
That depends on whether a jury thinks that the photographer took it for anyone's sexual gratification. Could you get arrested for taking the picture? That would depend on whether a cop thinks that you are taking the picture for sexual gratification. The picture is iconic; it depends upon apparent juxtaposition of a heavily-policed riot and a passionate embrace. I'm sure the cops will have a nuanced view of it when you're standing there taking pictures. No doubt someone finds the picture sexually stimulating. If you take the picture, with the intent to put it on the internet, and you know what the internet is like, are you committing a felony? Does it depend on whether you intended that people would be stimulated by it, or merely knew that they would?
How about this picture?
Various people find Jake and/or Maggie Gyllenhaal to be sexually stimulating. Many of these people probably read the papers and magazines that print pictures of them at the beach. The photographers know this, which is why they take the pictures, so they can sell them to the papers and magazines. Has the photographer committed a felony? Does it depend on how "hot" the picture is? Does whether it is a felony depend on whether Jake is wearing a rash guard?
Perhaps you think that's a ridiculous question, that I'm making up stupid slippery slopes. The Texas court doesn't think so.
This statute could easily be applied to an entertainment reporter who takes a photograph of an attractive celebrity on a public street.
How do we know it won't? We don't. We're supposed to rely on the discretion of cops and prosecutors. We're supposed to believe that when a statute allows the government to arrest and prosecute you for a wide range of conduct based on its subjective evaluation of your mental state, that they won't abuse it to go after people they don't like. But experience teaches that cops will, in fact, harass photographers given a chance.
But wait, you say. The Texas court didn't just say that! They said that upskirts are protected by the First Amendment!
No. They didn't. In fact, they explicitly said they weren't saying that.
Here's what the court did. Faced with a challenge to the statute, it first addressed whether photography in general is protected by the First Amendment. The answer — which I hope you will be happy to hear — is yes.
The second question is a bit trickier. Is photography an inherently expressive act that triggers the First Amendment, or does it depend on whether any given photograph has a "particularized message?" The Texas court weighed the precedents — parades are inherently expressive, flag-burning may or may not be expressive depending on the circumstances — and decided that photography is inherently expressive. The court quoted Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian & Bisexual Group of Boston, which pointed out that demanding an individualized show of "particularized message" tends to chill and suppress speech:
As some of these examples show, a narrow, succinctly articulable message is not a condition of constitutional protection, which if confined to expressions conveying a "particularized message," cf. Spence v. Washington, 418 U.S. 405, 411 (1974) (per curiam), would never reach the unquestionably shielded painting of Jackson Pollock, music of Arnold Schönberg, or Jabberwocky verse of Lewis Carroll.
The third question is also tricky. Even if photography is generally protected, is this statute limited at only specifically unprotected types of photography? That's what the state argued — that because the statute only applied to photography intended to cause sexual gratification, it only applied to unprotected photography. Not so, said the court. Not everything designed for sexual gratification is unprotected. In fact, a large amount of sexual expression is protected. Here, the law bans both protected expression — say, taking a photograph of an attractive celebrity on the street — and unprotected expression, like child pornography or obscenity. The fact that something is designed to cause sexual arousal doesn't take it outside the protections of the First Amendment:
Banning otherwise protected expression on the basis that it produces sexual arousal or gratification is the regulation of protected thought, and such a regulation is outside the government’s power . . . .
But what about the "without consent" clause? Can the government ban non-consensual photographs? The state thought so — they argued that the lack of consent makes the ban constitutional, even though it would still apply to the hypothetical celebrity on the street. But, as the Texas court points out, the state is vague on the details. The state conceded in this case that we all effectively consent to being photographed when we go out in public to some extent, but argues there are some circumstances — which it can't define — in which that consent is no longer implied. But the First Amendment doesn't permit such ambiguity. Here the Texas court found that the state's definition of consent was so vague that it wasn't clear whether or not the defendant's conduct (taking pictures of women and children in bathing suits at a water park) would be illegal or not.
So, does that resolve the issue? No, it does not. That merely means that the statute bans some protected conduct. The next question is whether the state has a sufficiently compelling reason to ban that conduct. Here's where the coverage was the most woefully misleading. The court explicitly suggests that a law banning upskirts may survive First Amendment analysis:
We agree with the State that substantial privacy interests are invaded in an intolerable manner when a person is photographed without consent in a private place, such as the home, or with respect to an area of the person that is not exposed to the general public, such as up a skirt.
But this statute doesn't do that. This statute bans non-consensual photography (with a definition of consent that is not clear even to the state prosecuting under the statute) if someone has sexual intent. As the court points out, the state is perfectly capable of drafting a narrower statute, and does so in the next subsection by banning nonconsensual photography in bathrooms and private dressing rooms.
So — shouldn't the court just uphold convictions when they are for clearly unprotected conduct (say, a photo of a child that qualifies as child pornography, or a picture that qualifies as obscenity, or an unquestionable invasion of privacy like an upskirt), and strike down the ones that are for protected conduct? That's not how First Amendment analysis works. Under the overbreadth doctrine, if a statute poses a "realistic" risk of banning a "substantial" amount of protected speech, the whole thing fails. Here, the court found that the statute's reach was "breathtaking." Therefore, even though there might be some constitutional applications, the statute is unconstitutional.
But wait. What about that extremely douchey part where the Texas court said that banning non-consensual pervy photography was "paternalistic" to the women it sought to protect? What assholes!
Well, actually, that's not what they said at all.
Protecting someone who appears in public from being the object of sexual thoughts seems to be the sort of “paternalistic interest in regulating the defendant’s mind” that the First Amendment was designed to guard against. [emphasis added by irritable blogger]
The court was talking about being paternalistic to defendants by regulating sexual thoughts, not paternalistic to victims of creepshots.
So, to sum up, allow me to mainsplain:
Sometimes the rule of law — due process, application of established rules, procedures, and rights — result in nasty people getting away with bad things. That makes us angry. But it's not about how we feel.
The Texas court didn't say upskirts are protected by the First Amendment. Texas could probably ban upskirts, if it did a halfway-competent job of drafting a sufficiently narrow statute.
But who's going to get outraged about that?
If you're wondering why I give a shit, consider this: our freedoms are recognized or denied based on court rulings. Our understanding of those court rulings often derives from media coverage of them. When we do a lousy job of covering law, or when we put up with journalists doing so, we're doing a lousy job as citizens.
Texas Court Makes Upskirts Mandatory, Outlaws Kittens, Hates Your Mother © 2007-2014 by the authors of Popehat. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Using this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. No scraping.
Adam Victor BrandizziRapaz, que coisa fascinante é o filk.
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I remember watching an Attenborough documentary and seeing elephant babies having a funeral for their mother and burying her in big leaves and stroking her face and crying. It was one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen I was literally sobbing.
Adam Victor Brandizzi— I can transfer you to the continental department.
— It can't be any worse.
. . .
— Hello, this is Sartre.
HAHA
Carl Chancellor and Richard D. Kahlenberg argue that when it comes to education, economic segregation is worse than racial segregation:
African American children benefited from desegregation, researchers found, not because there was a benefit associated with being in classrooms with white students per se, but because white students, on average, came from more economically and educationally advantaged backgrounds. All-black schools that included the sons and daughters of doctors and lawyers and teachers alongside the offspring of less-advantaged parents often provided excellent educational environments because the economic, not racial, mix drives academic strength.
The solution, they say, is school choice:
School officials today emphasize public school choice – magnet schools and charter schools – to accomplish integration, having long rejected the idea of compulsory busing that gave families no say in the matter. In Hartford, Connecticut, for example, magnet schools with special themes or pedagogical approaches often have long waiting lists of white middle-class suburban families who are seeking a strong, integrated environment.
While many charter schools further segregate students, some are consciously seeking to bring students of different economic and racial groups together. The Denver School of Science and Technology, for example, uses a lottery weighted by income or geography to ensure a healthy economic mix in its seven middle schools and high schools. …
Today, more than eighty school districts, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Raleigh, North Carolina, to Champaign, Illinois, promote socioeconomic integration, almost always relying on choice. These districts educate more than four million students nationally.
But as Sara Neufeld notes, charter schools around the country are struggling with a separate problem – teacher turnover:
Since the “no excuses” movement began in the mid-1990s, its schools developed a reputation for attracting teachers who are young, idealistic and often white, available to families around the clock until they leave after a few years. Sometimes they’re ready to have children of their own or move on to more lucrative career prospects; other times they’re just tired. The phenomenon has been blasted for depriving students of stable adult relationships and creating mistrust in minority neighborhoods when white teachers serving black and Hispanic students come and go. So now the focus is sustainability.
Bashar al-Assad is losing the support of his own Alawite sect, which forms the basis of regime support in Syria. As the Washington Post reports:
Members of the minority group have become more critical of the regime’s handling of the conflict on social media and during rare protests, according to activists and analysts. They also say Alawites, who form the core of Assad’s security forces, increasingly have avoided compulsory military service in a nearly four-year war where their community has sustained huge casualties relative to Syria’s Sunnis, who lead the rebellion. [...]
“People are realizing that the war is not going to go away any time soon and that you can’t shoot your way out of this problem—not with Syria’s demographics,” he said. “There are too many Sunnis.” [...]
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in Britain, recently put the number of security forces killed at a minimum of 110,000, while many describe rural Alawite villages as virtually gutted of military-age men.
That exhaustion on the part of Alawite communities could go a long way explaining the shifting attitudes within the Syrian army, as described by Robert Fisk, long-time Middle East correspondent for the UK Independent, in a recent interview with the Australian Broadcasting Company:
[I]t’s interesting: the Army doesn’t talk about Bashar al-Assad. It says, “We’re the Syrian Army.” It doesn’t talk about the regime. It can’t talk about the regime critically of course. But it’s interesting to see that their concentration is on the country, not on the President, as it would’ve been years ago. [...]
The Army has got to fight because if it doesn’t, Syria as a regime will be wiped out and so will the Army. Look what happened to the Syrian soldiers who were captured in Raqqa. 200 of them were taken away and beheaded. So, Syrian soldiers fight for their lives of course as well as for their country. One or two say, “We fight for our President, Bashir al-Assad,” but it’s a propaganda line that I think has sort of washed away now. The Syrian Army wants—it is a very important institution in Syria and I suspect it’s more important than Assad. And I think the reason for that is that Assad knows that without the Army, he’s finished and the Army know that.
Fisk is an interesting commentator who has decades of experience in the Middle East, and the entire interview is well worth a read. But that shift in perception that has occurred, away from a regime centered around the Assad family to one focused on a Syrian and in particular Alawite sense of identity in the face of a war of annihilation is worth emphasizing.
It makes for interesting reading now to go back and consider what might have occurred had the Alawites taken a different path from the outset of the war, as TAI’s Adam Garfinkle wrote in 2012. Ultimately the regime did not crack, and the survival of Syria’s Alawites became ever more closely linked to the survival of the Assad regime. But two years on, with countless lives lost and victory no closer, the Alawites may be beginning to think that perhaps they made a bad deal.
“Do you know who you are talking to?” That is one of the most common statements one can hear from a Brazilian authority that is caught red-handed. An ongoing case shows how bizarre that can be. Traffic officer Luciana Tamborini was fined in about US$ 2,000 because she stopped a man that had no documents at all and whose car wasn’t bearing any plates. When the offender told the agent that he was judge José Carlos Paes, she replied: “a judge is not God.” So he held her for exceeding her powers and for contempt of court. The decision was confirmed by three other judges of Rio’s Court. The officer will appeal.
What is most interesting about this case is that for the first time in a while there was a revolt against Brazil’s baroque and shadowy Judiciary. Thanks to lawyer Flávia Penido, about US$ 8,000 were raised to pay the allegedly heavy damages suffered by poor judge Paes. Although many judges insist there is no mistake in the decision against the traffic officer who denied them Godly powers, even members of the highest court in the nation noticed the gap between them and average Brazilians was widening because of that case. So some of them came out with a very bold thesis: judges are like everyone else.
No doubt Brazil’s Supreme Court is very open if compared to international peers. We see their trials on TV and that has even sparked accusations of exhibitionism of some Justices. But the lower branches are poorly covered by the press, face little interference from their ombudsmen and even less from Brazil’s attorney’s bar. In those lower branches there is loads of decisions just like that one of Judge Paes — but few hit the news. Such leeway to act strongly discourages any willingness to reform, since Brazil’s endless appeal system keeps judges, law firms and authorities happy enough.
Another sign Brazil’s Judiciary truly believes they can be God is how little they care about budgets and excessive spending. Every Justice in the Supreme Court gets the same pay of President Dilma Rousseff: about US$ 10,000 a month. In the lower courts, bonuses, allowances and extras are so intere$ting that judges sometimes make more than the head of State. Recently all key members of the Judiciary decided they would get a US$ 1,500 extra to pay for their rent. That is about 20 times the average paid to members of social program Bolsa Família, which feeds poor families despite criticism of many of those judges.
Judges that are uneasy with the system could be punished
A judge in São Paulo went on TV to admit that the housing allowance was just a way to raise their salaries, since they needed to go to Miami and buy nice suits to be fit for their job. When President Rousseff rejected the budget sent by the Judiciary a couple of years ago, Justices of the Supreme Court went on camera to cry foul: it was unacceptable interference from the Executive. Despite rejecting that intrusion, Justices are usually glad in reinterpreting the Constitution to bypass Congress in matters that are allegedly in grey areas. No wonder it is so difficult for these guys to believe they are not a deity. Brazil allows them to.
A morte fotografada de uma maneira diferente.
Você provavelmente já ouviu falar da prática da fotografia post mortem, e em um sentido técnico, isso é exatamente o que fotógrafo Arne Svenson faz mas com uma diferença: seus modelos nunca viveram de verdade.
São esculturas de reconstruções faciais feitas por artistas forenses e moldadas a partir de restos de esqueletos não identificados.
Estas esculturas são encomendadas pela polícia com o intuito de conseguir algum tipo de identificação e são feitas diretamente sobre os crânios das vítimas e assim que são identificadas os artistas devem desmontar o seu trabalho para entregar os crânios às suas respectivas famílias.
O trabalho de um artista forense não é fácil. Usando apenas a fibra de vidro, argila, intuição e o crânio da vítima eles tentam recriar os seus traços.
O foco em todas estas fotos são os olhos e estas reconstruções são assustadoramente detalhadas e estranhas.
Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
2014 November 12
Explanation: Today humanity will make its first attempt to land a probe on the nucleus of a comet. As the day progresses, the Philae (fee-LAY) lander will separate from the Rosetta spacecraft and head down to the surface of Comet 67P/ChuryumovGerasimenko. Since the texture of the comet's surface is unknown and its surface gravity is surely low, Philae will then attempt to harpoon itself down, something that has never been done before. Featured here is an artist's illustration of dishwasher-sized Philae as it might look on Comet ChuryumovGerasimenko's surface, along with explanation balloons detailing onboard scientific instruments. Many people on a blue planet across the Solar System will be eagerly awaiting news and updates. Whether Philae actually lands, whether it lands on a smooth patch, whether the harpoons take hold, and how far the robotic lander sinks into the surface should all become known as events unfold today.
Comet lander updates: From ESA
Authors & editors:
Robert Nemiroff
(MTU) &
Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
NASA Official: Phillip Newman
Specific rights apply.
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Privacy Policy and Important Notices
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& Michigan Tech. U.
This morning at 16:03 GMT, history was made as the European Space Agency’s Philae probe successfully landed on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. Rosetta is the first space mission to land on a comet and the first to follow it around the Sun.
The mission has been unfolding in real time on the ESA’s Flickr stream.
Update Nov. 13: Philae has relayed a picture from the surface!
The image below is of the landing site, shortly before landing.
The full image shows the landing site in detail, with a resolution of 3m per pixel.
The probe was launched in March 2004, and using Mars as a gravity slingshot, in 2007 Rosetta hurtled towards a rendezvous with comet 67P. Here’s a selfie that Rosetta took as it passed Mars:
Rosetta approached, orbited and landed on Comet 67P, examining the surface to discover towering cliffs and dunes. The lander took a farewell picture of the Rosetta orbiter as it descended (the orbiter returned the favor):
The descent to the surface was a tense seven hours, and towards the end, problems were detected with the top thruster that counteracted the momentum of the landing harpoons. At 16:03 GMT, a signal was received on Earth that Philae had landed, which led to scenes of jubilation at ESA mission control and all over the world.
Philae is currently relaying panoramic images from the surface of the comet back to Earth, and we will update this post as soon as they are public. In the meantime, please check out the European Space Agency’s photostream and their collection of incredible images from The Rosetta Mission.
Adam Victor BrandizziHahaha que excelente.
The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Nine scientists became new Nobel Laureates this week when the 2014 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, Physics and Physiology or Medicine were announced. Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell and William E. Moerner won the chemistry prize for improving the microscope; Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura won the physics award for inventing blue light-emitting diode (LED) lights; and John O’Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser won the medicine prize for discovering cells that make up the brain’s navigational system. They won’t pick up their medals, certificates and cash prizes until a December ceremony in Stockholm, but their names have already been added to the lists of the 196 previous physics laureates, the 166 chemistry laureates and the 204 medicine laureates.
Winning the prize, considered the highest honor in each of these fields, tends to have a dramatic effect on scientists’ lives. “Your life does change overnight,” recalled astrophysicist Brian Schmidt, who won the 2011 Nobel Physics Prize for co-discovering dark energy—the mysterious element of the universe that is causing the expansion of spacetime to speed up. “It’s not like you get advanced warning, they just sort of call you up, in my case, in the middle of cooking dinner. ‘Hello? By the way, you’ve won the Nobel Prize.’”
Schmidt spoke about his experience at an event in New York City last month celebrating the construction of one of the largest observatories in the world, the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), due to open in 2020 in Chile. His institution, Australian National University, is part of the GMT consortium. Among other scientific goals, the telescope will study faraway stars and galaxies to understand the expansion of space and the nature of the dark energy that is pulling it apart, which is thought to make up about 70 percent of the total mass and energy in the universe.
Among the many changes the Nobel Prize brought to Schmidt’s life: travel hassles. Here’s what he said it’s like to carry a Nobel medal aboard an airplane:
“There are a couple of bizarre things that happen. One of the things you get when you win a Nobel Prize is, well, a Nobel Prize. It’s about that big, that thick [he mimes a disk roughly the size of an Olympic medal], weighs a half a pound, and it’s made of gold.
“When I won this, my grandma, who lives in Fargo, North Dakota, wanted to see it. I was coming around so I decided I’d bring my Nobel Prize. You would think that carrying around a Nobel Prize would be uneventful, and it was uneventful, until I tried to leave Fargo with it, and went through the X-ray machine. I could see they were puzzled. It was in my laptop bag. It’s made of gold, so it absorbs all the X-rays—it’s completely black. And they had never seen anything completely black.
“They’re like, ‘Sir, there’s something in your bag.’
I said, ‘Yes, I think it’s this box.’
They said, ‘What’s in the box?’
I said, ‘a large gold medal,’ as one does.
So they opened it up and they said, ‘What’s it made out of?’
I said, ‘gold.’
And they’re like, ‘Uhhhh. Who gave this to you?’
‘The King of Sweden.’
‘Why did he give this to you?’
‘Because I helped discover the expansion rate of the universe was accelerating.’
At which point, they were beginning to lose their sense of humor. I explained to them it was a Nobel Prize, and their main question was, ‘Why were you in Fargo?’”
During a fundraiser, a congressman catches my eye and waves me over. He’s in the middle of a conversation but reaches out for a two armed hug as he says my name: “HEATHER!” He holds me by my shoulders and asks me how I am. “And how is mom?” Mom is good. Mom is away at Columbia University earning her Master’s in Journalism. “Please tell her I said hello. But wait. Have you met my friend?” He’s personable and introduces me to the candidate for whom he is fundraising. “This is Heather! She’s the federal lobbyist for Big Name Organization.” She says that she's been looking forward to meeting me. I see the congressman again a month later after becoming unceremoniously unemployed. He stops to introduce me to Nancy Pelosi. “I want you to meet Heather,” he says to the House Minority Leader. “She’s with…” his voice trails off. “This is Heather.” I started to continue for him, “This is Heather. She is nobody.”
***
At 23 I became a lobbyist and at 30 I was not. You should know that I wasn't born into some political family. I was born to a black man from Birmingham, Alabama who was raised in the deep south during the Civil Rights Movement. My father still expected to see a fountain labeled “COLORED.” My mother was from a coal town in West Virginia and wanted to spend her days speaking Castilian Spanish under palm trees in Barcelona. Together they wound up with a child who watched a lot of CSPAN and prayed at the altar of Ted Kennedy. I was not raised to believe politics was the be all, end all or even in my future and yet I found myself wanting for nothing than to be seated at one of the desks on the floor of the Senate.
When people asked what I did for a living I would say "lobbyist," which was quickly followed by "but not for like, guns or anything."
Read more Hi, My Name is Heather and I’m a Recovering Lobbyist at The Toast.
CBS and executive producers Chuck Lorre, Steven Molaro and Bill Prady said in a joint statement: “The Big Bang Theory family has lost a beloved member today with the passing of Carol Ann Susi, who hilariously and memorably voiced the role of Mrs. Wolowitz.
“Unseen by viewers, the Mrs. Wolowitz character became a bit of a mystery throughout the show's eight seasons. What was not a mystery, however, was Carol Ann's immense talent and comedic timing, which were on display during each unforgettable appearance.
“In addition to her talent, Carol Ann was a constant source of joy and kindness to all. Our thoughts and deepest condolences are with her family during this time, and we will miss her greatly.”
A representative for Susi also released a tribute to the late actress.
“A spunky Italian gal from Brooklyn whose passionate interests included Doctor Who, Halloween horror mazes, cooking and the Magic Castle, Carol Ann drew fervent circles of followers,” it read.
“She has a force of nature who didn't suffer fools and was fiercely loyal to her friends. Known only to a very lucky few, she was a world-class culinary genius who frequently scored blue ribbons at the very competitive cooking competitions at the Los Angeles County Fair.”
Susi was first discovered by the casting department at Universal Studios in Los Angeles, after she moved to the city to pursue a career in entertainment in the Seventies.
She went on to secure dozens of small screen appearances, including in cult comedy Cheers, Doogie Howser, M.D., Mad About You, Just Shoot Me, Seinfeld and Six Feet Under.
She also starred in ABC series The Night Stalker as Kolchak's secretary, Monique Marmelstein.
She is survived by her brother, Michael.
Science says lasting relationships come down to—you guessed it—kindness and generosity.
Every day in June, the most popular wedding month of the year, about 13,000 American couples will say “I do,” committing to a lifelong relationship that will be full of friendship, joy, and love that will carry them forward to their final days on this earth.
Except, of course, it doesn’t work out that way for most people.
The majority of marriages fail, either ending in divorce and separation or devolving into bitterness and dysfunction.
Of all the people who get married, only three in ten remain in healthy, happy marriages, as psychologist Ty Tashiro points out in his book "The Science of Happily Ever After," which was published earlier this year.
Social scientists first started studying marriages by observing them in action in the 1970s in response to a crisis: Married couples were divorcing at unprecedented rates. Worried about the impact these divorces would have on the children of the broken marriages, psychologists decided to cast their scientific net on couples, bringing them into the lab to observe them and determine what the ingredients of a healthy, lasting relationship were.
Was each unhappy family unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy claimed, or did the miserable marriages all share something toxic in common?
Psychologist John Gottman was one of those researchers. For the past four decades, he has studied thousands of couples in a quest to figure out what makes relationships work. I recently had the chance to interview Gottman and his wife Julie, also a psychologist, in New York City. Together, the renowned experts on marital stability run The Gottman Institute, which is devoted to helping couples build and maintain loving, healthy relationships based on scientific studies.
John Gottman began gathering his most critical findings in 1986, when he set up “The Love Lab” with his colleague Robert Levenson at the University of Washington. Gottman and Levenson brought newlyweds into the lab and watched them interact with each other.
With a team of researchers, they hooked the couples up to electrodes and asked the couples to speak about their relationship, like how they met, a major conflict they were facing together, and a positive memory they had. As they spoke, the electrodes measured the subjects' blood flow, heart rates, and how much they sweat they produced. Then the researchers sent the couples home and followed up with them six years later to see if they were still together.
From the data they gathered, Gottman separated the couples into two major groups: the masters and the disasters. The masters were still happily together after six years. The disasters had either broken up or were chronically unhappy in their marriages.
When the researchers analyzed the data they gathered on the couples, they saw clear differences between the masters and disasters. The disasters looked calm during the interviews, but their physiology, measured by the electrodes, told a different story. Their heart rates were quick, their sweat glands were active, and their blood flow was fast. Following thousands of couples longitudinally, Gottman found that the more physiologically active the couples were in the lab, the quicker their relationships deteriorated over time.
But what does physiology have to do with anything? The problem was that the disasters showed all the signs of arousal — of being in fight-or-flight mode — in their relationships. Having a conversation sitting next to their spouse was, to their bodies, like facing off with a saber-toothed tiger.
Even when they were talking about pleasant or mundane facets of their relationships, they were prepared to attack and be attacked. This sent their heart rates soaring and made them more aggressive toward each other. For example, each member of a couple could be talking about how their days had gone, and a highly aroused husband might say to his wife, “Why don’t you start talking about your day. It won’t take you very long.”
The masters, by contrast, showed low physiological arousal. They felt calm and connected together, which translated into warm and affectionate behavior, even when they fought. It’s not that the masters had, by default, a better physiological make-up than the disasters; it’s that masters had created a climate of trust and intimacy that made both of them more emotionally and thus physically comfortable.
Gottman wanted to know more about how the masters created that culture of love and intimacy, and how the disasters squashed it. In a follow-up study in 1990, he designed a lab on the University of Washington campus to look like a beautiful bed and breakfast retreat.
He invited 130 newlywed couples to spend the day at this retreat and watched them as they did what couples normally do on vacation: cook, clean, listen to music, eat, chat, and hang out. And Gottman made a critical discovery in this study — one that gets at the heart of why some relationships thrive while others languish.
Throughout the day, partners would make requests for connection, what Gottman calls “bids.” For example, say that the husband is a bird enthusiast and notices a goldfinch fly across the yard. He might say to his wife, “Look at that beautiful bird outside!” He’s not just commenting on the bird here: he’s requesting a response from his wife — a sign of interest or support — hoping they’ll connect, however momentarily, over the bird.
The wife now has a choice. She can respond by either “turning toward” or “turning away” from her husband, as Gottman puts it. Though the bird-bid might seem minor and silly, it can actually reveal a lot about the health of the relationship. The husband thought the bird was important enough to bring it up in conversation and the question is whether his wife recognizes and respects that.
People who turned toward their partners in the study responded by engaging the bidder, showing interest and support in the bid. Those who didn’t — those who turned away — would not respond or respond minimally and continue doing whatever they were doing, like watching TV or reading the paper. Sometimes they would respond with overt hostility, saying something like, “Stop interrupting me, I’m reading.”
These bidding interactions had profound effects on marital well-being. Couples who had divorced after a six-year follow up had “turn-toward bids” 33 percent of the time. Only three in ten of their bids for emotional connection were met with intimacy. The couples who were still together after six years had “turn-toward bids” 87 percent of the time. Nine times out of ten, they were meeting their partner’s emotional needs.
Flickr/Scarleth Marie By observing these types of interactions, Gottman can predict with up to 94 percent certainty whether couples — straight or gay, rich or poor, childless or not — will be broken up, together and unhappy, or together and happy several years later. Much of it comes down to the spirit couples bring to the relationship. Do they bring kindness and generosity; or contempt, criticism, and hostility?
“There’s a habit of mind that the masters have,” Gottman explained in an interview, “which is this: they are scanning social environment for things they can appreciate and say thank you for. They are building this culture of respect and appreciation very purposefully. Disasters are scanning the social environment for partners’ mistakes.”
“It’s not just scanning environment,” chimed in Julie Gottman. “It’s scanning the partner for what the partner is doing right or scanning him for what he’s doing wrong and criticizing versus respecting him and expressing appreciation.”
Contempt, they have found, is the number one factor that tears couples apart. People who are focused on criticizing their partners miss a whopping 50 percent of positive things their partners are doing and they see negativity when it’s not there.
People who give their partner the cold shoulder — deliberately ignoring the partner or responding minimally — damage the relationship by making their partner feel worthless and invisible, as if they’re not there, not valued. And people who treat their partners with contempt and criticize them not only kill the love in the relationship, but they also kill their partner's ability to fight off viruses and cancers. Being mean is the death knell of relationships.
Kindness, on the other hand, glues couples together. Research independent from theirs has shown that kindness (along with emotional stability) is the most important predictor of satisfaction and stability in a marriage. Kindness makes each partner feel cared for, understood, and validated—feel loved. “My bounty is as boundless as the sea,” says Shakespeare’s Juliet. “My love as deep; the more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite.” That’s how kindness works too: there’s a great deal of evidence showing the more someone receives or witnesses kindness, the more they will be kind themselves, which leads to upward spirals of love and generosity in a relationship.
There are two ways to think about kindness. You can think about it as a fixed trait: either you have it or you don’t. Or you could think of kindness as a muscle. In some people, that muscle is naturally stronger than in others, but it can grow stronger in everyone with exercise. Masters tend to think about kindness as a muscle. They know that they have to exercise it to keep it in shape. They know, in other words, that a good relationship requires sustained hard work.
“If your partner expresses a need,” explained Julie Gottman, “and you are tired, stressed, or distracted, then the generous spirit comes in when a partner makes a bid, and you still turn toward your partner.”
In that moment, the easy response may be to turn away from your partner and focus on your iPad or your book or the television, to mumble “Uh huh” and move on with your life, but neglecting small moments of emotional connection will slowly wear away at your relationship. Neglect creates distance between partners and breeds resentment in the one who is being ignored.
The hardest time to practice kindness is, of course, during a fight—but this is also the most important time to be kind. Letting contempt and aggression spiral out of control during a conflict can inflict irrevocable damage on a relationship.
Flickr/Ian Livesey “Kindness doesn’t mean that we don’t express our anger,” Julie Gottman explained, “but the kindness informs how we choose to express the anger. You can throw spears at your partner. Or you can explain why you’re hurt and angry, and that’s the kinder path.”
John Gottman elaborated on those spears: “Disasters will say things differently in a fight. Disasters will say ‘You’re late. What’s wrong with you? You’re just like your mom.’ Masters will say ‘I feel bad for picking on you about your lateness, and I know it’s not your fault, but it’s really annoying that you’re late again.’”
For the hundreds of thousands of couples getting married each June — and for the millions of couples currently together, married or not — the lesson from the research is clear: If you want to have a stable, healthy relationship, exercise kindness early and often.
When people think about practicing kindness, they often think about small acts of generosity, like buying each other little gifts or giving one another back rubs every now and then. While those are great examples of generosity, kindness can also be built into the very backbone of a relationship through the way partners interact with each other on a day-to-day basis, whether or not there are back rubs and chocolates involved.
One way to practice kindness is by being generous about your partner’s intentions. From the research of the Gottmans, we know that disasters see negativity in their relationship even when it is not there. An angry wife may assume, for example, that when her husband left the toilet seat up, he was deliberately trying to annoy her. But he may have just absent-mindedly forgotten to put the seat down.
Or say a wife is running late to dinner (again), and the husband assumes that she doesn’t value him enough to show up to their date on time after he took the trouble to make a reservation and leave work early so that they could spend a romantic evening together. But it turns out that the wife was running late because she stopped by a store to pick him up a gift for their special night out.
Imagine her joining him for dinner, excited to deliver her gift, only to realize that he’s in a sour mood because he misinterpreted what was motivating her behavior. The ability to interpret your partner’s actions and intentions charitably can soften the sharp edge of conflict.
“Even in relationships where people are frustrated, it’s almost always the case that there are positive things going on and people trying to do the right thing,” psychologist Ty Tashiro told me. “A lot of times, a partner is trying to do the right thing even if it’s executed poorly. So appreciate the intent.”
Another powerful kindness strategy revolves around shared joy. One of the telltale signs of the disaster couples Gottman studied was their inability to connect over each other’s good news. When one person in the relationship shared the good news of, say, a promotion at work with excitement, the other would respond with wooden disinterest by checking his watch or shutting the conversation down with a comment like, “That’s nice.”
We’ve all heard that partners should be there for each other when the going gets rough. But research shows that being there for each other when things go right is actually more important for relationship quality. How someone responds to a partner’s good news can have dramatic consequences for the relationship.
In one study from 2006, psychological researcher Shelly Gable and her colleagues brought young adult couples into the lab to discuss recent positive events from their lives. They psychologists wanted to know how partners would respond to each other’s good news. They found that, in general, couples responded to each other’s good news in four different ways that they called: passive destructive, active destructive, passive constructive, and active constructive.
Let’s say that one partner had recently received the excellent news that she got into medical school. She would say something like “I got into my top choice med school!”
If her partner responded in a passive destructive manner, he would ignore the event. For example, he might say something like: “You wouldn’t believe the great news I got yesterday! I won a free t-shirt!”
If her partner responded in a passive constructive way, he would acknowledge the good news, but in a half-hearted, understated way. A typical passive constructive response is saying “That’s great, babe” as he texts his buddy on his phone.
In the third kind of response, active destructive, the partner would diminish the good news his partner just got: “Are you sure you can handle all the studying? And what about the cost? Med school is so expensive!”
Finally, there’s active constructive responding. If her partner responded in this way, he stopped what he was doing and engaged wholeheartedly with her: “That’s great! Congratulations! When did you find out? Did they call you? What classes will you take first semester?”
Among the four response styles, active constructive responding is the kindest. While the other response styles are joy-killers, active constructive responding allows the partner to savor her joy and gives the couple an opportunity to bond over the good news. In the parlance of the Gottmans, active constructive responding is a way of “turning toward” your partners bid (sharing the good news) rather than “turning away” from it.
Active constructive responding is critical for healthy relationships. In the 2006 study, Gable and her colleagues followed up with the couples two months later to see if they were still together. The psychologists found that the only difference between the couples who were together and those who broke up was active constructive responding. Those who showed genuine interest in their partner’s joys were more likely to be together. In an earlier study, Gable found that active constructive responding was also associated with higher relationship quality and more intimacy between partners.
There are many reasons why relationships fail, but if you look at what drives the deterioration of many relationships, it’s often a breakdown of kindness. As the normal stresses of a life together pile up—with children, career, friend, in-laws, and other distractions crowding out the time for romance and intimacy—couples may put less effort into their relationship and let the petty grievances they hold against one another tear them apart.
In most marriages, levels of satisfaction drop dramatically within the first few years together. But among couples who not only endure, but live happily together for years and years, the spirit of kindness and generosity guides them forward.
This article originally appeared at The Atlantic. Check out The Atlantic's Facebook, newsletters and feeds. Copyright 2014. Follow The Atlantic on Twitter.
Actualizamos uno de nuestros gráficos favoritos. El que señala el hecho más importante del siglo: la convergencia. Los países pobres crecen más que los países ricos, con una regularidad que no ocurrió jamás en la historia de la humanidad. De 58 países que tenían en 2000 una población mayor a 15 millones (y que cubren el 90% de la humanidad) la mitad rica creció al 1,95% en lo que va del siglo; la mitad pobre, al 3,3%.
Al pasar: ¡qué mito el milagro brasileño! Amamos a Brasil, y por eso mismo estamos muy en contra de todo el endiosamiento que se hizo de Brasil en la última década. Nunca lo creímos. Entre esos 58 países, Brasil ocupa el puesto 37 en crecimiento económico: 1,91% en producto per cápita, menos que el promedio de la mitad rica. La mayoría de los países a los que supera son del mundo desarrollado, que sufren el combo de crisis económica y de la natural ralentización del crecimiento en economías ricas.
Si se toma solamente los países no ricos se nota más claramente el mito del milagro de Brasil. La frontera entre ricos y pobres es clarísima: en el año 2000, en el puesto 13 estaba Korea (contando países de más de 15 millones) con 20.000 dólares; en el 14, Malasia con 13000. De los 45 países más pobres que Korea, Brasil ocupa, por su crecimiento en 2000-2014, el puesto 34. Sólo supera a Sudáfrica, Irak, Argelia, Kenia, Camerún, México, Venezuela, Costa de Marfil, Yemen, Madagascar y Siria.
Los milagristas de Brasil ven estas cifras pero se resisten. “Tiene que haber algo mal”, dicen. “Exportan aviones, tienen empresas enormes, buscan petróleo en alta mar”. Sí, pero todo eso habla en gran medida de (1) el tamaño de la economía brasileña y (2) el hecho de que, por ser un país relativamente pobre, es natural que esté más especializado en productos industriales.
Pero para crecer en serio Brasil tiene un problema grave de competitividad: es caro y no es muy productivo. Hasta que eso no cambie, seguirá esperando un milagro.
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