Mahayana

Pobrezinhos dos caras na Friendzone.

centaragrandisland:

All the dates of when she beat cancer.

laughingsquid:

What Happens Online in 60 Seconds in 2013

Nicholas Christakis, a medical scientist perhaps best known for his controversial claim (see also here), based on joint work with James Fowler, that obesity is contagious, writes:

The social sciences have stagnated. They offer essentially the same set of academic departments and disciplines that they have for nearly 100 years: sociology, economics, anthropology, psychology and political science. This is not only boring but also counterproductive, constraining engagement with the scientific cutting edge and stifling the creation of new and useful knowledge. . . .

I’m not suggesting that social scientists stop teaching and investigating classic topics like monopoly power, racial profiling and health inequality. But everyone knows that monopoly power is bad for markets, that people are racially biased and that illness is unequally distributed by social class. There are diminishing returns from the continuing study of many such topics. And repeatedly observing these phenomena does not help us fix them.

I have just a couple comments here. I’m no economist so I can let others discuss the bit about “monopoly power is bad for markets.” I assume that the study by economists of monopoly power is a bit more sophisticated than that!

I have studied racial profiling, and I can assure you that this work is not about the claim “that people are racially biased.” I can also assure you that, whatever it is we have learned, it’s not true that “everyone knows” it.

As Duncan Watts has written so memorably, it’s easy to say that everything is obvious (once you know the answer).

Regarding the question of illness being distributed by social class: Is it really true that “everybody knows,” for example, that Finland has higher suicide rates than Sweden, or that foreign-born Latinos have lower rates of psychiatric disorders. These findings are based on public data so everybody should know them, but in any case the goal of social science is not (just) to educate people on what should be known to them, but also to understand why. Why why why. And also to model the effects of potential interventions.

The study of the contagion of obesity is just fine. In fact, I was once part of an NIH panel where where we recommended funding some of this research. But to say that this is the real stuff, and then to dismiss studies of monopoly power, racial attitudes, and variation in disease rates—that’s just silly.

Resources are limited, and I think it’s good to have open discussion about scientific priorities. So I applaud Christakis for sticking out his neck to participate in this debate. Even though I don’t agree with his particular recommendations.

Funkeiro = bandido

Boys play with toy sailboats along the Nile south of Aswan, Egypt, October 1963.Photograph by Georg Gerster, National Geographic

Eu, profunda conhecedora da língua culta tento ensinar mas esses bananenses não aprendem de jeito nenhum…

Carl Masthay sent me the following photograph of a tattoo consisting of four large Chinese characters:

Viewed thus, the characters are unreadable. When flipped as in a mirror, they look like this:

The characters are dàmá chénnì 大麻沉溺 ("addicted to marijuana").

Florian Simala astutely observes:

It looks like a button-down watch pocket on top of the right side pocket of the jeans is where it should be. The tag on the back reads correctly, "1 XG denim", so the tattoo must be backwards.

This means that the reversal of the tattoo is not due to inversion of the entire photograph but to the work of the tattooer. When flipped (as in the second photograph above), the writing on the pants is reversed.

The same thing (mirror reversal of characters) happened in this ad put out by the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism: "Massachusetts is red(-faced)".

One more reason not to get a Chinese tattoo, especially not when you're high on your favorite addiction, and not unless you're 100% certain that the tattoo says something that won't embarrass you ten or twenty years from now. (Lots of negatives there, but I hope that the sentence still makes sense.)

Visualize Your Life Via Your Email

Pictured here: One section of the last year of my life. Amazing.

Pobres homens subjugados ao arbítrio da mulher dominadora, só no Bananão ultrafeminista!

Before Sunrise (1995), dir. by Richard Linklater

miss.

withlovefromryan:

Wooden Charts! | For when you miss someone. 

Today Wikileaks posted a statement from Edward Snowden, time-stamped Monday July 1, 21:40 UTC. As originally posted, the first sentence of the fourth paragraph reads as follows:

For decades the United States of America have been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum.

Screenshot (click to embiggen):

But mysteriously, at around 22:30 UTC (6:30 pm Eastern Time), the sentence was edited to read:

For decades the United States of America has been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum.

Screenshot:

Shortly before the edit was made, Slate's Farhad Manjoo had drawn attention to the peculiarity of an American using a plural verb ("have been") with "the United States of America" as the subject, tweeting:

Did Edward Snowden really write this? No American would use plural verbs for America — the United States "have been" http://t.co/gxEBBtBoj2

— Farhad Manjoo (@fmanjoo) July 1, 2013

So what's going on? Has there been some sort of editorial mischief? If Snowden wrote the original, did he simply err in his verb choice, and an unseen hand made the change after Manjoo or others drew attention to it on social media? It's hard to know what's going on in the shadow world of Snowden and Wikileaks right now. But Manjoo is right that the original verb choice is distinctly unidiomatic for a native speaker of American English, and has been for the past century.

For more on how "the United States are" gave way to "the United States is," see my 2009 Word Routes column "The United States Is… Or Are?," which followed on my 2005 Language Log post, "Life in these, uh, this United States." Mark Liberman has also posted on the topic here and here. And finally, I give the shift from plural to singular "United States" as an example of what can be investigated on the new and improved Google Ngram Viewer in this article for the Atlantic.

Google Ngram search

A estudante branca norte-americana Abigail Fisher não foi aceita na Universidade do Texas e entrou na justiça contra a instituição, alegando ter perdido a vaga por causa do sistema de cotas raciais. O caso foi subindo de corte em corte até chegar à Suprema Corte, que acabou de mandar o caso de volta para as cortes inferiores, se recusando a julgá-lo. Água ainda vai correr debaixo dessa ponte.

Enquanto isso, Krystie Yandoli, escritora residente nos Estados Unidos, também branca, estagiária do site Huffington Post e colaboradora do Jezebel e do The Nation, escreveu a seguinte carta aberta à Abigail Fisher:

Abigail Fisher, descendo os degraus da Suprema Corte.

* * *

Prezada Abigail Fisher,

Cá entre nós, duas brancas de 23 anos que não foram aceitam pelas universidades que mais desejavam, preciso lhe dizer: acho que você levou essa história toda longe demais.

Depois de transformar seu fracasso em entrar na universidade em um processo que nem mesmo a Suprema Corte dos Estados Unidos conseguiu resolver, sua invencível convicção em uma noção distorcida de “justiça” é preocupante.

Estou falando como alguém que esteve em uma situação similar à sua, mas, se nós estivéssemos em um poema de Robert Frost, iríamos acabar em caminhos muito diferentes.

Deixe-me explicar.

Temos algumas coisas em comum. Também não fui aceita na universidade que eu mais queria. Mas, logo depois, também pude cursar outra universidade prestigiosa que me proporcionou uma ampla rede de oportunidades à minha escolha. Assim como você, que mesmo não tendo sido aceita pela Universidade do Texas, conseguiu entrar em outra boa universidade e conseguiu até um bem pago trabalho de analista financeira depois de se formar.

Veja, existe uma coisa chamada privilégio branco. Você tem. Eu tenho. Nossos pais têm. E isso reduz consideravelmente a probabilidade de passarmos por qualquer tipo de discriminação ou desigualdade profunda.

Privilégio branco significa que você, graças a normas sociais culturalmente arraigadas, possui uma vantagem automática sobre várias outras pessoas. Significa que existem hierarquias e sistemas agindo explicitamente para garantir o seu sucesso no mundo. Privilégio branco significa que, se você não não conseguir entrar na sua “universidade dos sonhos”, você ainda poderá se formar em outra universidade e ainda assim conseguir um emprego acima da média, mesmo em uma economia sucateada.

Também significa que, uma vez na universidade, você não será vítima frequente de nenhum tipo de racismo, seja ele óbvio ou sutil.

A meritocracia do Brasil, em uma charge.

Não ser aceita pela universidade que você sonha em cursar é horrível. Mas sabe como isso se chama? Vida. Mas sabe o que horrível mesmo? A complexidade do racismo sistêmico que atormenta os Estados Unidos desde que ele existe. Assim como também é horrível ser discriminado à primeira vista somente porque nasceu pertencente a uma raça de seres humanos que foi, desde sempre, historicamente ferrada e desfavorecida.

O mais engraçado é você conseguiu convencer alguns juízes da Suprema Corte a levar tão a sério suas reclamações tão problemáticas e tão banais, e que advogados, políticos, jornalistas, ativistas e cidadãos gastaram o seu precioso tempo debatendo e refletindo sobre ação afirmativa, e tudo porque uma estudante que se formou no ensino médio com nota 8.0 não foi aceita em uma das mais competitivas e prestigiadas universidades públicas da nação.

Sem contar que o seu nome será para sempre sinônimo de tentativa de retrocesso contra a igualdade social. Mas vou além.

Essa coisa toda é maior do que você e eu. Não é apenas sobre esse caso isolado ou sobre o que uma pessoa (sem razões ou méritos legítimos) acha que merece em detrimento de outros estudantes. Na verdade, não existe isso de casos isolados. Tudo existe dentro de um contexto e, contextualmente falando, você não ter sido aceita pela Universidade do Texas não foi um caso de desigualdade.

Peggy McIntosh, em seu famoso ensaio, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” (ou seja, “Privilégio Branco: abrindo a mochila invisível”, talvez você queira procurar no Google), escreveu:

“Para mim, o privilégio branco se mostrou um assunto fugidio e impreciso. A pressão para ignorá-lo é enorme. Encará-lo de frente significa abandonar o mito da meritocracia. Se essas coisas forem verdade, então não vivemos em um país livre; então, a vida de um indivíduo não depende de suas ações; então, muitas portas se abrem para algumas pessoas por nenhum mérito da parte delas.”

Minha sincera esperança é que um dia você entenda e aceite a realidade de seu privilégio branco e de sua posição social. Até lá, tente refletir sobre as palavras sábias de Peggy McIntosh.

Tudo o tenho consegui com o esforço dos meus pais!

* * *

Tradução de Jorge Buratti.

O artigo original: An Open Letter to Affirmative Action Reject Abigail Fisher.

Mais sobre as cotas: O Peso da História: A Escravidão e as Cotas.

Escravidão, essa pica é nossa: Senzalas & Campos de Concentração.

Dois links sobre o desempenho superior dos cotistas: “Desempenho do cotista é superior ao do não-cotista” e Alunos cotistas têm desempenho superior a não-cotistas.

Por fim, uma indispensável matéria de capa da Isto É: Por que as cotas raciais deram certo no Brasil

Lessons from Japan's response to Aum Shinrikyo:

Yet what's as remarkable as Aum's potential for mayhem is how little of it, on balance, they actually caused. Don't misunderstand me: Aum's crimes were horrific, not merely the terrible subway gassing but their long history of murder, intimidation, extortion, fraud, and exploitation. What they did was unforgivable, and the human cost, devastating. But at no point did Aum Shinrikyo represent an existential threat to Japan or its people. The death toll of Aum was several dozen; again, a terrible human cost, but not an existential threat. At no time was the territorial integrity of Japan threatened. At no time was the operational integrity of the Japanese government threatened. At no time was the day-to-day operation of the Japanese economy meaningfully threatened. The threat to the average Japanese citizen was effectively nil.

Just as important was what the Japanese government and people did not do. They didn't panic. They didn't make sweeping changes to their way of life. They didn't implement a vast system of domestic surveillance. They didn't suspend basic civil rights. They didn't begin to capture, torture, and kill without due process. They didn't, in other words, allow themselves to be terrorized. Instead, they addressed the threat. They investigated and arrested the cult's leadership. They tried them in civilian courts and earned convictions through due process. They buried their dead. They mourned. And they moved on. In every sense, it was a rational, adult, mature response to a terrible terrorist act, one that remained largely in keeping with liberal democratic ideals.

>>

* Ontem rolou o histórico show da cinquentenária (e contando) superbanda Rolling Stones no Glastonbury Festival 2013. A maior das bandas vivas no maior dos festivais vivos. E, não, nem teve tantas participações especiais dividindo o palco com Jagger & Richards. Pois é, o Daft Punk NÃO apareceu

“Até que enfim nos convidaram para tocar aqui”, disse Jagger depois de umas duas músicas de show. No meio do discurso, o vocalista dos Stones falou ainda que foi ao festival na noite anterior para ver o Arctic Monkeys. Pensa.

Achei praticamente o show todo de ontem, no Youtube. Alguns deles estão fora de sincronia, mas ainda assim dá para ver bem e principalmente ouvir bem a performance. Quando tiver um vídeo só, com o show todo, a gente bota aqui.

Ladies & gentlemen: The Rolling Stones…

>>

Só pessoas como EEEUUU devem votar, já que nunca recebemos benefício ou privilégio nenhum do governo!!!

Uma das melhores coisas que eu li hoje, essa semana e possivelmente este mês.

heyluchie:

My comic; “Introversion” is finished! Please go to the main page of my blog to read it in full size (the text is kinda small)

I really hope you’ll like it!

* Vai, Pa-ra-ra-pa-Palmeiras!!!

Grupo indie com um pé no pop, os belgas do Garcia Goodbye despontam hoje como a banda mais cool do mundo da música, mesmo sem a gente saber muita coisa sobre eles.

O trio é formado por Tommy Gontie (vocalista e guitarrista), Tin Verryken (baixista) e Jens Leen (baterista) e iniciou a carreira em 2008. Eles têm algumas peculiaridades. A principal delas talvez seja o fato de a banda querer fazer mais sucesso fora da Bélgica do que no próprio país. Daí eles viajam para outros lugares tentando divulgar seu trabalho. Já fizeram um barulhinho em Luxemburgo, na Holanda e Turquia, por exemplo. Em 2011, vieram ao Brasil e fizeram uma session para uma rádio, se eu entendi bem.

No início deste ano, o grupo bolou uma estratégia de marketing surreal para lançar “Horizon”, seu single, que deixaria o Daft Punk com inveja. Eles pegaram um pen drive e gravaram nele o tal novo single e um release, pedindo para quem encontrasse o pen drive, retornasse o contato. A banda prometeu que iria atrás de quem achasse a mídia.

Então eles pegaram esse pen drive, o penduraram em um monte de balões e soltaram a partir da Bélgica, para que o vento “lançasse” o single para um lugar qualquer. Dias depois, chegou um email da DINAMARCA. Um rapaz havia encontrado o pen drive perto de um ponto de ônibus.

Cumprindo a promessa, a turma do Garcia Goodbye viajou cerca de 800 quilômetros até a casa do “novo fã” que encontrou o pen drive. A história ganhou até matéria no grande jornal El País. E a banda até fez um vídeo sobre isso.

Agora, apostando no mercado brasileiro (hihi), o Garcia Goodbye gravou uma música em homenagem ao Palmeiras (!!!!!!). Com o singelo título “Vai Palmeiras”, o grupo gravou um clipe para divulgar a faixa, usando camisa do time e botando umas palmeiras como decoração perto de uma trave. Fora isso, ao final, eles ainda cantam um pedaço do hino do clube.

Espero que eles sejam escalados para abrir a turnê dos Stones no estádio do Palmeiras daqui uns meses. Ou até mesmo do One Direction. Nada mais justo.

Vai, Palmeiras!

Sybil Shaver writes:

Reading Stephen White's novel Line of Fire I encountered the following: (in the middle of a discussion of a death which is either accidental or suicide, p. 51 of the hardcover)

"What do you mean 'if she intends to die'? Isn't dying always intent?"

I shook my head. "It helps to think about suicidal behavior having two pairs of defining variables. Picture a simple chi square – a two-by-two graph. On one axis is the dichotomy of intent – the person intends either to die or to survive. On the other axis is the dichotomy of lethality – the person chooses either a method of high lethality or one of low lethality.

"The two-by-two chi square allows for four possible combinations." I turned over our grocery list and sketched a chi-square with four boxes. "People with low intent sometimes choose methods of high lethality. They can end up dying, almost by accident, because death wasn't what they were seeking. The opposite is people who intended to die, but they chose a low-lethality method. They're the ones who believed that five aspirin and two shots of vodka would kill them. But they end up surviving, again, almost by accident."

"You drew four boxes. What are the other two?"

I squeezed water from a rag to use to wipe the counter. "I described low intent/high lethality, and high intent/low lethality. The other two are low intent/low lethality, and high intent/high lethality. People in both those categories get the outcome they intended. Low intent/low lethality is the classic 'cry for help' suicide attempt-someone who intends to survive but is eager for someone else to know about the gesture. That person doesn't wish to die, and she chooses a method that makes death unlikely. High intent/high lethality is the guy who puts a shotgun barrel in his mouth and pulls the trigger with his toes. He intends to die and chooses a method that is damn near certain to do it.'

The first-person narrator uses "a chi-square" to refer to what I have always called "a contingency table". [In fact, the description of the four possibilities is very close to the way I describe the four possible results of doing a classical hypothesis test: two are errors, of different natures, and two give correct results.]

The narrator is Alan Gregory, a clinical psychologist (Ph. D.) and presumably at least a partial alter-ego for the author, who is also a clinical psychologist.

There is certainly some overlap between the usage of contingency tables and the usage of Chi-square tests, but I've never seen or heard of a contingency table being referred to as "a chi square" before. So is this an idiosyncracy of Stephen White (or possibly, of his teacher whom he thanks in the acknowledgments) or is it a common usage in some circles?

I don't intend to embarrass anyone by this question. (I'm quite sure that 30 years after my last heard lecture in PDEs, I'd badly mangle the terminology today.) But I'm curious. I hope you can find a way to put this out to the LL commenters.

I agree with Sybil — a matrix of (e.g.) intents and choices is called a "contingency table", while a "Chi square(d) distribution" is "the distribution of a sum of the squares of k independent standard normal random variables", used in various sorts of "Chi-square(d) test".

It's true that the contingency table described in White's novel is a square matrix (with the same number of rows and columns), and it's also true that the Χ² distribution plays a role in the analysis of contingency tables, e.g. via Cramér's V. So it's plausible that someone might get confused, fictionally or in reality, and misunderstand or misremember a square contingency table as a "Chi square".

On the other hand, maybe some sub-tribe of statisticians has taken this terminological nexus as the basis for reducing the six syllables of "contingency table" down to the two syllable of "Chi square". Comments?

Dividindo com o Papa o posto de mais MIDIÁTICO dos torcedores cuervos, Viggo Mortensen adquiriu o equivalente a 150m² para ajudar no retorno do San Lorenzo ao terreno da Avenida La Plata, em Boedo, conforme informou o San Lorenzo Web Site.

Em maio, o San Lorenzo lançou campanha para levantar 94 milhões de pesos (cerca de 40 milhões de reais) e comprar o terreno que hoje pertence ao Carrefour, conclamando cada torcedor a adquirir um metro quadrado.

Não é a primeira vez que Viggo Mortensen coloca uma grana para ajudar o Ciclón. Volta e meia ele também aparece no Gasómetro para assistir algum jogo. O ator tornou-se torcedor do San Lorenzo no período em que morou na Argentina, durante sua infância.

Sobre a volta do San Lorenzo a Boedo, leia também:

San Lorenzo de Almagro, de Bajo Flores ou de Boedo?
Impedimento presente na marcha dos cuervos para voltar a Boedo
A fé move hipermercados
Los gauchos de Boedo no se iran jamas
Voltar ao Santo Gasómetro

Abaixo, um vídeo em que Mortensen DISCURSA no centenário do San Lorenzo, em 2008:

Promoting an 1890s edition of the dictionary
(Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.)

unabridged noun A big dictionary.

unabridged adjective (Of a dictionary) big.

We’re so used to these definitions—most recently applied to the online Merriam-Webster Unabridged—that we don’t notice how odd it is to use “unabridged” for a dictionary. For that distinctive use, we can thank George and Charles Merriam.

What other word might you use to indicate that a dictionary is big? Well, you could try Universal, as in Nathaniel Bailey’s 1721 Universal Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. Noah Webster tried Compendious for his 1806 Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. But most of the big dictionaries, including Samuel Johnson’s 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language and Webster’s 1828 An American Dictionary of the English Language, didn’t even try to mention size in their titles.

That posed a problem for publishers. If size matters in a dictionary, and it does, how could you get people to recognize it?

You could look through your dictionary for the right word.

“Compendious”? Here’s the usage discussion in the new Unabridged: “Noah Webster’s A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language defines 37,000 words in 355 pages; he intended its vocabulary to be larger than that of Samuel Johnson’s large two-volume dictionary. Webster’s compendious meant ‘comprehensive and concise.’ And ‘comprehensive and concise’ is how most dictionaries have since defined the word. This sense is still in use.” Fine, but “concise” suggests the opposite of big.

So maybe “comprehensive”? According to the new Unabridged, that’s “covering a matter under consideration completely or nearly completely.” An honest lexicographer knows that no dictionary can completely cover the vocabulary of any living language.

Well, what about “universal”? “Including or covering all or a whole collectively or distributively without limit or notable exception or variation.” Another impossibility.

Meanwhile, on Noah Webster’s death, in 1843, the Merriam brothers obtained the rights to his dictionaries. Around that time, they or some marketing genius hit upon the word “unabridged” to imply bigness without stretching the literal truth. As Merriam-Webster still does nowadays, they published a whole line of dictionaries, from large to small. The big one was An American Dictionary of the English Language, advertised as “the unabridged” with testimonials like this:

“Webster’s Quarto Dictionary Unabridged.

“We believe we shall be certain of doing a service to the people of the State, if we say a word or two upon the Unabridged Quarto Dictionary of the English Language, by Noah Webster. The word UNABRIDGED has been purposely employed, because if such a work is wanted for any but the very lowest uses—those of mere orthography, or orthoepy—it cannot be too copious and comprehensive. When one is ignorant of the proper and precise powers of a word, he can not endure to be turned over to an abridgment that gives him a synonym, instead of a definition; but he demands to know as much as any body knows of its history or etymology, and its different shades of meaning. Then only can he employ it with confidence and effect, as a mighty weapon for the expression of intellect or passion.”—Newark Daily Advertiser, March 25, 1851.

Indeed, “unabridged” has two virtues: avoiding any promise of comprehensiveness, while implying that other dictionaries are abridgements of the magnum opus. The biggest Merriam-Webster has been known as “unabridged” ever since, but only now has that become its name.

And how does this new Unabridged define “unabridged”? Its second definition is a little plug for itself: “being the most complete of its class <an unabridged dictionary>.”

Still, it’s odd. “Un” implies that the opposite is the norm, the unmarked or usual term. We wouldn’t say “an uncensored book” unless censoring were the norm, “an unbroken window” unless broken windows were the norm, “an unlimited expense account” unless limitations on accounts were the norm.

So to say “an unabridged dictionary” implies that abridgement is the norm and encourages us to think less of anything but the biggest. But what else can dictionary makers do? They adopted “unabridged,” and now they’re stuck with it.

Health

via Kurt White