If Holden Caulfield Spoke Russian. I didn’t know J.
D. Salinger, or “Jerry,” as he was known, but I saw him around town: tall but stooped, with a patrician look that seemed out of place in rural New Hampshire. How Chris McCandless Died. Twenty-one years ago this month, on September 6, 1992, the decomposed body of Christopher McCandless was discovered by moose hunters just outside the northern boundary of Denali National Park.
He had died inside a rusting bus that served as a makeshift shelter for trappers, dog mushers, and other backcountry visitors. Taped to the door was a note scrawled on a page torn from a novel by Nikolai Gogol: From a cryptic diary found among his possessions, it appeared that McCandless had been dead for nineteen days. Your Brain on Poverty: Why Poor People Seem to Make Bad Decisions - Derek Thompson. In August, Science published a landmark study concluding that poverty, itself, hurts our ability to make decisions about school, finances, and life, imposing a mental burden similar to losing 13 IQ points.
It was widely seen as a counter-argument to claims that poor people are "to blame" for bad decisions and a rebuke to policies that withhold money from the poorest families unless they behave in a certain way. After all, if being poor leads to bad decision-making (as opposed to the other way around), then giving cash should alleviate the cognitive burdens of poverty, all on its own. Quasicrystals are highly structured patterns which. I post original stuff about maths, space, computational linguistics and other things that I like.
This blog is meant to be accessible and interesting to people of all backgrounds. My undergrad was maths in Cambridge, and I'm now starting research in Speech and Language technology. Email me at matt@matthen.com. If you're new, check out this overview of my posts. Raccoon eats grapes with his little hands. Naked Ski and Snowboard Segment from VALHALLA. WLGN Goes Mobile! 7 Data Viz Sites to Inspire Your Creative Eye. In the age of data overload, "big data" and "data visualization" are major buzzwords, and they'll likely grow even bigger as we gather more information on a daily basis.
With data visualization on the rise, we rounded up seven sites to help you find useful ways of interpreting big data, as well as infographics that parse information into visually pleasing graphics. These sites range from aggregation blogs to how-tos to tools that allow you to create your own visualizations. Check out the list, and let us know in the comments below what your favorite site is for data visualizations. 1. Flowing Data Image: Flowing Data Statistician Nathan Yau edits Flowing Data, which is one of the most popular sites for infographics aggregation. Flowing Data also features tutorials on how to make useful graphics and how to use the tools to do so. 2. Image: Information is Beautiful 3. Image: Visual.ly Visually is a community platform for data visualization. 4. Image: Information Aesthetics. Steve Miller. Not until after he turned 40 did it occur to Steve Miller that he never really needed to fear whether he’d “make it” in the music business.
That may sound like an odd bit of neurosis coming from the mind of a rock superstar whose hit songs saturated airwaves in the early days of FM radio, and continue to do so today on classic-rock formats Miller’s new album, Bingo! , is a set of covers drawing from the songbooks of Jimmy Reed, T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, Jimmie Vaughan, and others. Working with longtime friend and engineer/producer Andy Johns, Miller transforms classic rhythm and blues songs into noteworthy rock bits spiced with tracks of Latin percussion. Looking back, it certainly seems Miller was destined to live a life in music. White America says “Let the Fire Burn” In Jason Osder’s disturbing and extraordinary new documentary “Let the Fire Burn,” which entirely consists of archival footage, we see a Philadelphia police officer named James Berghaier testify at a commission hearing about the events of May 13, 1985.
That was when police dropped an incendiary device (a bomb, in plain English) on a rowhouse in West Philadelphia, igniting a massive fire that killed 11 people – five of them children – and destroyed 61 homes in a working-class neighborhood. Although it happened almost three decades ago, at a time of immense urban dysfunction in America, the Philadelphia MOVE bombing has a startlingly contemporary feeling, partly because it was one of the first all-day live news events, captured in extensive detail by numerous video cameras.
Berghaier’s testimony is quite different. The stone-faced police demeanor is missing; this young officer clearly feels conscience-stricken about what happened, and is visibly grieving. A Proud Nation Ponders How to Halt Its Slow Decline. David Burns : Mind over MIsery (Stanford) Psychiatrist David Burns wants people to reason their way through anxiety and depression into happiness.
By Robert L. Africa's true size will blow you away. Why is Albert Camus Still a Stranger in His Native Algeria? The Great Puppet-Master Debate. Life is rough for parasites.
Say you’re a tapeworm that only lives in the gut of one species of shark. You start out as an egg inside an adult tapeworm. Briefly, on Rationality and Addiction. Assuming irrationality is one easy way to make sense of the world, simultaneously affording the assumer his own superiority while summarizing the assumed’s behavior as that of a person whose thought processes are underdeveloped.
Whether that second part is an extension of the assumer’s desired superiority or it is an attempt to make sense of a complicated world is really beside the point: the conclusion denies the possibility of unique individual experience. This is hugely unfair. One way to identify irrationality is to trust a person’s own accounting of motivations. Foucault pendulum. A Foucault pendulum installed at the California Academy of Sciences.
The Earth's rotation causes the trajectory of the pendulum to change over time, knocking down pins at different positions as time elapses and the Earth rotates The Foucault pendulum (English pronunciation: /fuːˈkoʊ/ foo-KOH; French pronunciation: [fuˈko]), or Foucault's pendulum, named after the French physicist Léon Foucault, is a simple device conceived as an experiment to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. Least Helpful. "Found supernatural romance novel implausible because potatoes" For a second there I was worried he wouldn’t work Obama into it Beats praying the gay away, I guess.