inkbluesky

jennifer garner con las flores

The original was color and after I aged and grained it, the photo seemed a little stark so I threw in a little color with a special effects brush.

Medieval book of psalms unearthed

Irish archaeologists Tuesday heralded the discovery of an ancient book of psalms by a construction worker while driving the shovel of his backhoe into a bog.

The approximately 20-page book has been dated to the years 800-1000. Trinity College manuscripts expert Bernard Meehan said it was the first discovery of an Irish early medieval document in two centuries.

Guggenheim Study Suggests Arts Education Benefits Literacy Skills

In an era of widespread cuts in public-school art programs, the question has become increasingly relevant: does learning about paintings and sculpture help children become better students in other areas?

snip

The study found that students in the program performed better in six categories of literacy and critical thinking skills — including thorough description, hypothesizing and reasoning — than did students who were not in the program. The children were assessed as they discussed a passage in a children’s book, Cynthia Kadohata’s “Kira-Kira,” and a painting by Arshile Gorky, “The Artist and His Mother.”

Defending the arts is a thankless tasks. In casual consersation I’m frequently reduced to the but it enriches our lives in intangible ways defense. While that argument may still stand it is great to have an actual study that shows the real life benefits.

A Conservative seems to be ashamed of his party affiliation,

Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-N.Y.), who is in charge of keeping Congress in GOP hands this fall, surprised the political establishment yesterday by airing an early television advertisement that made no mention of his party affiliation.

Don’t Feed The Homeless

It is now a crime to feed the homeless in Las Vegas, Nevada. Of all places, the city that takes pride in tourists’ participation in debauchery and cover-up doesn’t want people feeding their homeless.

Las Vegas last week outlawed feeding homeless people at city parks. The City Council voted to prohibit serving meals to groups of 25 or more people in parks and other public property within two miles of City Hall without a special permit.

You can play craps in a group of one, you can go to a ranch with prostitutes in groups of two or three, or buy a bottle of liquor and drink yourself into a coma from alcohol poisoning, but make damn sure you’ve got a permit and a group of 25 before you feed some hungry homeless people.

morning and new waves

Homing instinct of bees surprises

Bumblebees can navigate their way home over distances of up to 13km (eight miles), a UK research team has shown.

The study also found only worker bees seemed to have this homing ability.

Bees pollinate flowering plants and therefore play a crucial role in food webs, but numbers of the insect in Britain have been declining recently.

The team said the homing research would inform conservation strategies that sought to adapt landscapes to create optimum habitats for bees.

As someone who impulsively finds north and south wherever I go and must meticulously map out all road trips, I don’t just appreciate the workers bee’s ability I envy it a little. If I would have been in charge of intelligently designing humans I think I would have included a built in compass at the very least.

Hume referred to GOP-led House of Representatives as “we” 

Summary: On Fox News Sunday, Brit Hume used the pronoun “we” in reference to the Republican-led House of Representatives, which recently passed a bill to cut the estate tax. Hume said: “We’ve passed” a measure that would eliminate the tax “for nearly everybody,” but that the measure is “stuck in the Senate.”

Brit isn’t just another pretty face in broadcast news, he is also the news director and I give him credit for his unabashed bias in reporting. I hope that the RNC at least sends him some free baseball tickets or fruitcake to compensate him for his work on their behalf.

keira and the rain

Someone was kind enough to send me this photo. It looks like a production still, rather then a screen capture, so the quality is very good. I’m not sure why they sent it to me. I do like rain and M’s Knightly has an amazingly mature talent for someone that recently turned 21, but I am one of maybe 14 people in America that have not seen her latest pirate movie. I will get around to seeing it eventually. I’ve gotten where I don’t care much for theatres so I’ll probably end up watching it on DVD or cable. -click photo for larger.

Some things just strike me a funny. Funny as in odd, most people give up believing in things like the tooth faerie for obvious reasons, yet they will persist in believing in myths like the magic power of laissez faire economics, Enron and the Myths of Runaway Capitalism

The most basic issues of Enron are system issues. These come down to two, not unrelated truths:

1) The ideal of the unregulated free market is flawed, and it’s time we said goodbye to the invisible hand.

2) Managing a company solely for maximum share price can destroy both share price and the entire company.

These are foundational flaws in theory, flaws in how we conceive of markets and how we define business success. They are system design flaws. For beyond the juicy tales of villainy at Enron, the deeper issue is why the system lent so much power to villainy, and why there were so few checks and balances to stop it.

A key reason is that we are told — and, more incredibly believe — that checks and balances are bad, because free markets are good. Unregulated markets are ideal. Left free to work its magic, self-interest (ie. greed) ostensibly leads things to work out to the benefit of all, as though guided by an invisible hand. This myth is taught in Economics 101 as gospel truth, trumpeted routinely in the business press, and sold abroad as the cure for what ails all economies.

The lie of it has been exposed many times. Think of the Great Depression, the savings and loan crisis, or the collapse of Asian economies in 1997-98. Unregulated free markets often lead to disaster. Self-interest is an insufficient regulator for a complex economy. (Duh.) Yet we seem to have to learn this lesson again and again.

Just an armchair theory as to why we have to learn the lesson again and again. Some people do get rich, at the expense of moral values, but they do get rich. Then the legend begins, if only that wicked regulation that protects shareholders and consumers was done away with we could not just make millions. Why settle for millions when we could make tens of millions. Who likes rules anyway. The next generation that comes along can’t remember the news from last month much less 1929 so full steam ahead and damn the consequences. Its a memory of convenience combined with a kind of self centered quality possessed by people who think life is a game and whoever has the most toys wins. The toy approach to economics.

I’ve always wondered and I’m sure you have to, why don’t elephants like to climb hills, Why elephants avoid the high road

Elephants do their utmost to avoid going uphill, a new satellite-tracking study shows - their finely balanced metabolism may reveal why.

Researchers tracked elephants by satellite and found that the animals avoid travelling up slopes whenever possible. Calculations suggest an explanation for this behaviour: the big beasts would have to spend hours eating to compensate for travelling up even a relatively gentle incline.

city gargoyle

I tend to think of gargoyles as a European phenomenon and one associated with the 12th or 13th century at that, but as an architectural ornament they did manage to make the leap across the great pond. As a matter of fact there are quite a few in New York, GARGOYLES , THE FUNNY AND THE GROTESQUE IN NYC. The photos aren’t the best, but they manage to illustrate the point.

This piece from CNN’s Future Boy picks up on yesterday’s post about my wish that we get to truly interact with computers, Surfing the Web with nothing but brainwaves, this snip from the end gets to the grist of what I mean,

Brain-reading technology is improving rapidly. Last year, Sony (Charts) took out a patent on a game system that beams data directly into the mind without implants. It uses a pulsed ultrasonic signal that induces sensory experiences such as smells, sounds and images.

And Niels Birbaumer, a neuroscientist at the University of Tuebingen in Germany, has developed a device that enables

Stu Wolf, one of the top scientists at Darpa, the Pentagon’s scientific research agency which gave birth to the Internet, seriously believes we’ll all be wearing

By that time, we’ll have superfast, supertiny computers that make today’s machines look like typewriters. The desktop will be dead, says Wolf, and the headband will dominate.

“We already know we can trigger neurons mechanically,” he says. “You can interact directly with the brain without implanted electrodes. Then the next step is being able to think something and have it happen: Flying a plane, driving a car, operating household machinery.”

Controlling devices with the mind is just the beginning. Next, Wolf believes, is what he calls “network-enabled telepathy” - instant thought transfer. In other words, your thoughts will flow from your brain over the network right into someone else’s brain. If you think instant messaging is addictive, just wait for instant thinking.

The only issue, Wolf says, is making sure it’s consensual; that’s a problem likely to tax the minds of security experts.

While I’m not crazy about the possible biological invasiveness, the idea of thinking through papers-essays-research and having high speed retrieval would be worth the risks, to me anyway. I’d even go for the implantation of a small device to allow that interactivity. Anyone that eats out is actually already taking the risks of implanting some pretty nasty microbes, so the idea of putting some dime sized chip in my brain doesn’t bother me at all. Though according to the article even that mat not be required.

Some interesting history of corporations,  Corporations in the United States

Initially, the privilege of incorporation was granted selectively to enable activities that benefited the public, such as construction of roads or canals. Enabling shareholders to profit was seen as a means to that end.

The states also imposed conditions (some of which remain on the books, though unused) like these:

* Corporate charters (licenses to exist) were granted for a limited time and could be revoked promptly for violating laws.

* Corporations could engage only in activities necessary to fulfill their chartered purpose.

* Corporations could not own stock in other corporations nor own any property that was not essential to fulfilling their chartered purpose.

I just came across this site today and haven’t had time to read everything for accuracy, while I did see a little bit of breathless hyperbole, since I’ve read some of the same information in various mainstream articles it does seem to be worth a visit.