New Yorker: How the Pentagon Started Taking UFOs Seriously - "If Mick West [UFO skeptic] feeds the stigma that allows a potential adversary to fly all over your back yard, then, cool—just because it looks weird, I guess we’ll ignore it.” Also see Here, Here, Here and Here.

4/15/21

CNN: Defense Dept Confirms Leaked Video of UFO Is Real and Guardian

3/31/21

New Yorker: How to Negotiate Withe Ransomware Hackers

3/4/21

Classic Me: Tallulah Bankhead From Jaded Sophisticate to Humane Survivor - Famous last words.

2/26/21

AJC: Canton Cobbler Passes

2/18/21

Guardian: End of Neanderthals Linked to Flip of Magnetic Poles - "The Earth’s magnetic field has weakened by about 9% over the past 170 years, and the researchers say another flip could be on the cards."

1/25/21

Guardian: Billions of Cicada's Set to Emerge Across Eastern US - Once every 17 years.

1/18/21

New Yorker: Have We Already Been Visited by Aliens? - Facts about Oumuamua on which all astronomer scientists agree:

- It's an 'interstellar object': an object from far beyond our solar system that was just passing through. It's the only interstellar object ever identified.

- It is travelling at about 200,000 mi. per hour - more than 4X faster that any other object in its area.

- It had no tail and there was no evidence of any outgassing. There is no expalnation as to what makes it move.

- "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." But why is that not the standard for dark matter, and dark energy which have never been observed, and string theory and the multiverse for which no empirical evidence exists? Extraordinary conservatism keeps us extraordinarily ignorant.

Carl Sagan: “Look up into the sky some clear, starlit night and allow yourself the freedom to wonder.”

Q&A with Avi Loe. and an article he wrote for Scientific American.

And yet it deviated.

1/14/21

12/7/20

Weather Channel: December Offers One of Year's Best Light Shows

New Yorker: The Skeletons At the Lake - "The idea that Indo-European languages emanated from the Yamnaya homeland was established in 1956, by the Lithuanian-American archeologist Marija Gimbutas. Her view, known as the Kurgan hypothesis—named for the distinctive burial mounds that spread west across Europe—is now the most widely accepted theory about Indo-European linguistic origins.

It’s long been known that, from around 2500 to 2000 B.C., major new artistic and cultural styles flourished in Western and Central Europe.

the DNA of Iberian skeletons dating from this period of transformation told a different story, revealing what Reich describes as the “genetic scar” of a foreign invasion.

In Iberia during this time, the local type of Y chromosome was replaced by an entirely different type. Given that the Y chromosome, found only in males, is passed down from father to son, this means that the local male line in Iberia was essentially extinguished. It is likely that the newcomers perpetrated a large-scale killing of local men, boys, and possibly male infants. Any local males remaining must have been subjugated in a way that prevented them from fathering children, or were so strongly disfavored in mate selection over time that their genetic contribution was nullified. The full genetic sequencing, however, indicated that about sixty per cent of the lineage of the local population was passed on, which shows that women were not killed but almost certainly subjected to widespread sexual coercion, and perhaps even mass rape.

We can get a sense of this reign of terror by thinking about what took place when the descendants of those ancient Iberians sailed to the New World, events for which we have ample historical records. The Spanish conquest of the Americas produced human suffering on a grotesque scale—war, mass murder, rape, slavery, genocide, starvation, and pandemic disease. Genetically, as Reich noted, the outcome was very similar.

Marija Gimbutas hypothesized, men and women held relatively equal places in a peaceful, female-centered, goddess-worshipping society—as evidenced by the famous fertility figurines of the time. She believed that the nomads from the Caspian steppes imposed a male-dominated warrior culture of violence, sexual inequality, and social stratification, in which women were subservient to men and a small number of élite males accumulated most of the wealth and power."

11/23/20

Weather.com: Winter Solstice Rings in Planetary Treat The World Hasn't Seen the Middle Ages

6/18/20

New Yorker: Untangling Andy Warhol

6/13/20

Visual Capitalist: Cryptocurrency: Redefining the Future of Finance - I remain interested in hearing a clear explanation of how blockchain prevents hacking and guarantees the safety of the investment. Nobody has yet been able to explain how blockchain happens at the coding level, and what protects it from smart hackers. At some point in the explanation, there’s the inevitable hand waving, and then ‘magic happens’. Remember that at one point tulip bulbs were an accepted medium of exchange, became wildly valuable and then its ‘magic happened’. Historically, market bubbles only last as long as someone is willing to step forward and pay increasingly high prices for a commodity. Once the prices get so high that no one is willing to step forward, the bubble bursts, usually very rapidly.

3/1/20

Guardian: Please be Quiet: My Search for a Noise-Free Life

11/25/19

Vox: HGTV's Most Famous Couple Turned Their Hometown into a Shopping Destination. Will More Places Follow?

11/2/19

Parentology: Study Reveals Which Children Become Successful Adults - those who can delay gratification, which is evidence of self-control

10/6/19

Psychology Today: Forget Me Not: The Persistent Myth of Repressed Memories - #RepressedMemories

4/9/19

New York Magazine: What I’ve Learned From Collecting Stories of People Whose Loved Ones Were Transformed by Fox News - #FoxNews

4/4/19

SB Nation: Bruce Pearl's Complicated History With NCAA Rules - He probably thought they were just suggestions.

3/2/19

High Museum: Way Out There: The Art of Southern Backroads

11/27/18

Reuters: Special Report: Little Known to Many Investors, Cryptocurrency Reviews Are For Sale

9/6/18

Brain Pickings: The Woman who Smashed Codes: The Untold Story of Cryptography Pioneer Elizebeth Friedman

1/22/18

New Yorker: William Melvin Kelley: The Lost Giant of American Literature

11/5/17

Psychology Today: The Joy of Solitude - loneliness is not so much an objective state of affairs as a subjective state of mind

loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of meaning from the universe

people with a strong sense of purpose and meaning or simply with a strong narrative, such as Nelson Mandela or St Anthony of the Desert, are protected from loneliness regardless of the circumstances in which they find themselves

St Anthony sought out loneliness precisely because he understood that it could bring him closer to the real questions and value of life. He spent fifteen years in a tomb and twenty years in an abandoned fort in the desert of Egypt before his devotees persuaded him to withdraw from his seclusion to instruct and organize them, whence his epithet, ‘Father of All Monks’ (‘monk’ and ‘monastery’ derive from the Greek, monos, ‘solitary’, ‘alone’). Anthony emerged from the fort not ill and emaciated, as everyone had been expecting, but healthy and radiant, and expired in his hundred and sixth year, which in the fourth century must in itself have counted as a minor miracle.

St Anthony did not lead a life of loneliness, but one of solitude. Loneliness, the pain of being alone, is damaging; solitude, the joy of being alone, is empowering.

solitude frees us to reconnect with ourselves, assimilate ideas, and generate identity and meaning.

For Nietzsche, those without the aptitude or opportunity for solitude are mere slaves because they have no alternative but to parrot culture and society. In contrast, anyone who has unmasked society naturally seeks out solitude, which becomes the source and guarantor of a more authentic set of values and ambitions:

"I go into solitude so as not to drink out of everybody’s cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think I really think. After a time it always seems as if they want to banish my self from myself and rob me of my soul."

Solitude removes us from the mindless humdrum of everyday life into a higher consciousness which reconnects us with our deepest humanity, and also with the natural world, which quickens into our muse and companion.

For the poet RM Rilke, the highest task of a bond between two people is not merely to tolerate but to ‘stand guard over’ the solitude of the other.

solitude, the joy of being alone, stems from, as well as promotes, a state of maturity and inner richness

not everyone is capable of solitude

Dalí's aim was to use its realism to bring him closer to the spirituality contained in all substances and, therefore, closer to the divine.

Hide and Seek

The Meaning of Life

Me: Those without the aptitude for solitude are unable to look within and only experience the pain of the absence of meaning from the universe.

Those who can practice solitude have a strong sense of purpose and meaning. It brings them closer to the real questions and value of life. They know how to reconnect to themselves, assimilate ideas, and generate identity and meaning.

Loneliness, the pain of being alone, is damaging; solitude, the joy of being alone, is empowering.

6/1/17

On Being: Brian Greene: Reimagining the Cosmos - This highly entertaining Columbia University theoretical physicist lectures to lay audiences all over the world regarding String Theory, Dark Energy and the Higgs Boson Particle. As he states towards the end of the interview, there is no empirical evidence of String Theory - as he says, it should be called String Hypothesis - and the only partial evidence for Dark Energy is the existence of the Higgs Boson Particle, simply because it is a spin-less particle and spin-less particles have to exist if current theories of Dark Matter are to be consistent. It’s not proof, but it does add a little weight to the theory.

4/24/17

BBC: How Many People Can the Earth Support?

6/13/16

Wired: The Uncanny Mind That Built Ethereum

1/7/16

NYTimes: Gun Control and White Terror

11/9/15

The Conversation: From Newton to Einstein: The Origins of General Realitivity - #Quantum

5/12/15

New Yorker: Scientists: Earth Endangered by New Strain of Fact-Resistant Human

12/5/14

Smithsonian: Killing Wolves Actually Leads to More Livestock Deaths

11/5/14

You Tube: Genome Editing with CRISPER

8/19/14

New Yorker: How to Pick a Good Summer Read - humor

5/29/14

Slate: It Wasn't Abortion That Formed the Religious Right. It Was Support for Segregation. - Also see the movie "Bad Faith".

1/28/14

Atlanta Snowmageddon!!!!!!!

2/28/12

Freakonomics: Days of Wine and Mouses - A break from the serious. Next time that wine snob you know tries to tell you that you shouldn’t drink that cheap wine that you happen to like, cite these studies. It’s a long interview, so if you want you can skip down to the first occurrence of “Robin Goldstein.” This is a writer/lawyer/economist who writes about food and wine.

He performed two now famous economics experiments. First experiment: he paid a $250 submission fee to Wine Spectator as a candidate for its “Award of Excellence.” He made up a fake restaurant with a fake web site, a fake address, a fake answering machine and a wine list made up of expensive wines that Wine Spectator had already rated in the low 60s, describing them as “decayed,” “barnyardy,” and “smells like bug spray.” Result: His fake restaurant got the Award. Conclusion: It had nothing to do with the wine list. It was all about the $250 submission fee. You can’t trust Wine Spectator.

Second experiment: he did a blind test: 500 volunteers (from sommeliers and wine makers to simple wine drinkers),14 wines that varied in price from $1.59 to $150 per bottle, so 7,000 observations. Result: Overall, people like cheap wine better than expensive wine. Even the experts could barely tell the difference between the most and least expensive.

Takeaway: Wine “experts” don’t know squat.

#WineTasting

9/26/10

Boston Globe: New England's Hidden History

8/19/10

NPR: Fresh Air: Tracking the Companies That Track You Online

10/23/06

Richard Dawkins: What If You're Wrong?

8/15/06

Harvard Courant: Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited From Slavery

5/1/2005

New Yorker: Sonny Rollins Saxophone Colossus

4/9/2000

Anthony Bourdain: One Day - and One Night - in the Kitchen at Les Halles

11/6/97

NYTimes: 'Memory' Therapy Leads to a Lawsuit and Big Settlement - #RMT - discusses false repressed memories of abuse associated with post-partum depression

6/4/1995

New Yorker: Revisiting the Streets That Spawned Walt Witman's Masterpiece - 99 Ryerson St.

6/5/48

New Yorker: The Case of Eleven Blue Men - "...there is usually a subnormal concentration of sodium chloride in the blood of alcoholics. Either they don’t eat enough to get sufficient salt or they lose it more rapidly than other people do, or both. Whatever the reasons are, the conclusion was all I needed. Any animal whether a mouse or a man, tends to try to obtain a necessary substance that his body lacks. The final question had been answered."

8/23/1946

New Yorker: John Hersey: Hiroshima

5/17/1929

New Yorker: F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Short Autobiography - "A feeling that all liquor has been drunk and all it can do for one has been experienced, and yet..."