Archive for February, 2010
Was Jimi Hendrix’s Ambidexterity the Key to His Virtuosity?
Instead of “virtuosity” I would say “genius” … a very interesting article from Sean Michaels in the Guardian:
Was Jimi Hendrix’s ambidexterity the secret to his talent? This is the question explored in a new paper by psychologist Stephen Christman (via TwentyFourBit), who argues that Hendrix’s versatility informed not just his guitar-playing – but his lyrics too.
According to Christman, who is based at the University of Toledo, Hendrix was not strictly left-handed. Although he played his right-handed guitar upside down, and used his left hand to throw, comb his hair and hold cigarettes, Hendrix wrote, ate and held the telephone with his right hand. He was, Christman argues, “mixed-right-handed”. And this “mixed”-ness, signaling better interaction between the left and right hemispheres of the guitarist’s brain, suffused every part of his music.
Glenn Beck Creates His Own Shepard Fairey-Inspired Obama ‘Hope’ Poster, Featuring…
Hmm … I tend to think this particular Founding Father would NOT be happy with Glenn Beck using his image … but he’s been dead for a long time. I bring that up for legal reasons, because helps to define what we call the “public domain.”
So actually, even though Shepard Fairey’s Obama art is legally problematic, I do wonder if Beck can do this under “fair use.”
Legal scholars, your opinion is welcome. (And those who have something to say about Glenn Beck…)
P.S. Glenn Beck “paints”?!?
Clay County, Kentucky: Precinct Worker Testifies She Stole Votes
Bill Estep writes in the Lexington Herald-Leader:
FRANKFORT — A former Clay County precinct worker testified Friday that top election officers in the county taught her how to change people’s choices on voting machines to steal votes in the May 2006 primary.
Wanda White testified that Clerk Freddy Thompson — the county’s chief election officer — helped show her how to manipulate voting machines along with Charles Wayne Jones, the Democratic election commissioner.
The scheme involved duping people to walk away from the voting computer before they had finished their selections, then changing their choices, said White, the Democratic judge in a precinct in Manchester.
White said she stole more than 100 votes that election. “It was easy done,” she said.
White said she also went into the booth with people who had sold their vote to make sure they cast ballots for the candidates who had paid.
Read More in the Lexington Herald-Leader
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The Virginia Colonists at Jamestown Practiced Cannibalism
Another chapter from my book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, inspired by historian Howard Zinn, who passed away earlier this year.
For more me, check out: The Memory Hole.
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During the harsh winter of 1609–1610, British subjects in the famous colony of Jamestown, Virginia, ate their dead and their shit. This fact doesn’t make it into very many U.S. history textbooks, and the state’s official website apparently forgot to mention it in their history section.
When you think about it rationally, this fact should be a part of mainstream history. After all, it demonstrates the strong will to survive among the colonists. It shows the mind-boggling hardships they endured and overcame. Yet the taboo against eating these two items is so overpowering that this episode can’t be mentioned in conventional history.
Luckily, an unconventional historian, Howard Zinn, revealed this fact in his classic, A People’s History of the United States. Food was so…
The New York Times on Its ‘Kill More Civilians’ Op-Ed Writer
Glenn Greenwald writes in Salon:
Last week, I wrote about the mysterious Op-Ed writer, Lara M. Dadkhah, published by the New York Times, who urged that the U.S. be less restrained about slaughtering Afghan civilians with air attacks (when Dadkhar reads things like this from today — “Airstrike kills dozens in Afghanistan … Ground forces at the scene found women and children among the casualties” — she presumably thinks: “yes, that’s exactly what we need more of”).
As I noted, beyond how deranged the argument was, virtually no information was disclosed about Dadkhah herself, who was allowed to tout her work for a “defense consulting company” without even specifying who it was. The Hillman Foundation’s Charles Kaiser asked NYT Op-Ed Page Editor David Shipley about this strange matter and received this reply:
Keith Olbermann: ‘My Father Asked Me To Kill Him’ (Video)
Danny Shea writes on Huffington Post:
“Last Friday night, my father asked me to kill him.”
Keith Olbermann opened his emotional Special Comment on health care Wednesday with the story of his father’s six-month-long hospitalization suffering through a colon removal, pneumonia, kidney failure, liver failure, and many infections.
After a particularly difficult week, Olbermann said he went into his father’s hospital room to find him “thrashing his head back and forth” and mouthing the word “Help.”
“It was just too much for my father,” Olbermann said. “‘Stop this,’ he mouths. ‘Stop, stop, stop.’”
Olbermann said he resorted to gallows humor, asking his father, “What, you want me to smother you with a pillow?” And his father responded, mouthing, “Yes, kill me.”
A Million Library Books To Be Sent Down The Mines
Manchester Central Library
By Deborah Linton for the Manchester Evening News:
One million books from Manchester’s Central Library – including valuable volumes dating back to the 15th century – are to be put into temporarily storage with many going deep underground in the Cheshire salt mines.
Works from the city’s reference library will be stored in the mines, hundreds of feet below ground, for the next three years while the landmark city centre site undergoes a massive refurbishment to save it from ruin.
Experts say the mine’s caverns – the size of 700 football pitches – provide the perfect environment for preserving the manuscripts, which include the works of eminent academics.
A phased shut down of the St Peter’s Square library will begin next month, with the site closing its doors in June. The Library Theatre, which will most likely relocate to the historic Theatre Royal, will close the following month with a celebratory show…
Basically, It’s Over: A Parable About How One Nation Came To Financial Ruin
Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s less famous but no less capable colleague at the helm of Berkshire Hathaway, makes some ominous predictions for 2012 (albeit in the form of a modern-day parable), and this time there’s nothing sketchy about the science. Be afraid, people. His parable appears in Slate:
In the early 1700s, Europeans discovered in the Pacific Ocean a large, unpopulated island with a temperate climate, rich in all nature’s bounty except coal, oil, and natural gas. Reflecting its lack of civilization, they named this island “Basicland.”
The Europeans rapidly repopulated Basicland, creating a new nation. They installed a system of government like that of the early United States. There was much encouragement of trade, and no internal tariff or other impediment to such trade. Property rights were greatly respected and strongly enforced. The banking system was simple. It adapted to a national ethos that sought to provide a sound currency, efficient…
The Philosophy of Punk Rock Mathematics
Tom Henderson, a/k/a Mathpunk
Tom Henderson explains his philosophy of punk rock mathematics. Via Technoccult:
1) People use the average Joe’s poor mathematics as a way to control, exploit, and numerically fuck him over.
2) Mathematics is the subject in which, regardless of what the authorities tell you is true, you can verify every last iota of truth, with a minimum of equipment.
Therefore, if you are concerned with the empowerment of everyday people, and you believe that it’s probably a good idea to be skeptical of authority you could do worse than to develop your skills at being able to talk math in such a way that anyone can ask questions, can express curiosity, can imagine applying it in the most weird-ass off-the-wall ways possible.
140 Year Old Hot Dog Discovered in Coney Island
Proof that dinosaurs coexisted with the Palin family ancestors? Nope, just a frozen hot dog.
Debt Dynamite Dominoes: The Coming Financial Catastrophe
By Andrew Gavin Marshall for the Centre for Research on Globalization:
Understanding the Nature of the Global Economic Crisis
The people have been lulled into a false sense of safety under the ruse of a perceived “economic recovery.” Unfortunately, what the majority of people think does not make it so, especially when the people making the key decisions think and act to the contrary. The sovereign debt crises that have been unfolding in the past couple years and more recently in Greece, are canaries in the coal mine for the rest of Western “civilization.” The crisis threatens to spread to Spain, Portugal and Ireland; like dominoes, one country after another will collapse into a debt and currency crisis, all the way to America.
In October 2008, the mainstream media and politicians of the Western world were warning of an impending depression if actions were not taken to quickly prevent this. The problem was…
On the Credibility of Climate Research, Part II: Towards Rebuilding Trust
By Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
I am trying something new, a blogospheric experiment, if you will. I have been a fairly active participant in the blogosphere since 2006, and recently posted two essays on climategate, one at climateaudit.org and the other at climateprogress.org. Both essays were subsequently picked up by other blogs, and the diversity of opinions expressed at the different blogs was quite interesting. Hence I am distributing this essay to a number of different blogs simultaneously with the hope of demonstrating the collective power of the blogosphere to generate ideas and debate them. I look forward to a stimulating discussion on this important topic.
Losing the Public’s Trust
Climategate has now become broadened in scope to extend beyond the CRU emails to include glaciergate and a host of other issues associated with the IPCC. In responding to climategate, the climate research establishment has appealed to its own authority and failed…
Anarchy On The High Seas
One imagines that Hollywood studios will be bidding furiously for this raunchy tale, as described by Reuters:
Violence, drunkenness and all manner of debauchery featured on a six-month voyage on a migrant ship bound for Australia 170 years ago, a newly discovered diary reveals. The raunchy tale of anarchy on the high seas is recorded by a junior officer, James Bell, aboard “The Planter” which sailed to Adelaide from Deptford in east London in 1838.
Alcohol-fueled acts of “great violence” involving officers, mates and even the ship’s doctor are all recounted. In the green vellum-bound journal, Bell tells how the captain regularly entertained two of the 11 daughters of a doctor-preacher from Liverpool called McGowan.
He wrote: “our captain of course could not want a mistress till he returned to his own in England, but made love to two of McGowan’s daughters … The Capt was allowed to keep the daughters company at…
Dubai Narrowly Misses More Terror Attacks At Largest Mall – By Sharks! (Video)
Just ten days ago I was in Dubai for the International Conference on Ancient Studies. We had half a day of free time before we flew out so most of us headed straight to the Dubai Mall, mainly to check out the excellent Book World as we wanted to make sure they were stocking our books (I was with numerous authors including Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval, John Major Jenkins, Michael Cremo, Andrew Collins and Robert Schoch). Nonetheless, we also visited the world’s largest mall’s marquee attraction, it’s aquarium stocked with 33,000+ sea creatures, including some very large sharks. It is very impressive, but as with the rival mall in Dubai that features a ski resort with real snow, it seems to be tempting fate. Yesterday that became all too apparent – check out the video below:
New Outer Space Policy – Rights for Martians and Astronauts?
Professor Andy Miah notes there’s already international government policies taking hold on outer space – and a need for new ethical guidelines. “For instance, what obligations do we owe to the various life forms we send there, or those we might discover? Can we develop a more considerate approach to colonizing outer space than we were able to achieve for various sectors of Earth?”
And what rights do astronauts have? “Could our inevitable public surveillance of their behavior become too much of an infringement on their personal privacy?”
But more importantly, professor Miah notes that “the goods of space exploration far exceed the symbolic value,” pointing out that “A vast amount of research and development derives from space exploration… For example, the United Kingdom’s 2007 Space Policy inquiry indicated that the creation of space products contributes two to three times their value in GDP.”
The Bank of the Fed is Closed…Forever
In an effort to explain our escalating financial crisis, an American Nightmare (an Environmental Dream), the pundits are focusing their angst on the 44th POTUS, who might very well go down as the single most inept president in all of American history. (How to Squander the Presidency in One Year, David Michael Green)
Barack Obama is not inept, greedy or stupid and he isn’t one of “us”.
He rose from obscurity to power with his top economics adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the co-founder of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission and he travels in the same circles as other members of the super-secret Skull & Bones Society at Yale University, who pretend to be running for president every four years.
The decision to have Obama preside over the greatest financial calamity since the Great Depression was made five years ago; the November election was a formality. (Why Joseph Biden will be the Next Vice President of…
Another Wall Street Criminal Bites The Dust
There are plenty more where this guy came from. The new Danny Schechter documentary Plunder: The Crime of Our Time, coming out in April, details all kinds of complicated crimes like the ones committed by the white collar criminal dubbed “mini Madoff” by the determinedly tabloid New York Post:
A Florida money manager dubbed the “mini Madoff” said he was “profoundly sorry” before pleading guilty this morning to all charges in a $397 million Ponzi scheme.
“I understand the anger and rage on the part of all the people I let down after they placed their faith in me,” Arthur Nadel said in Manhattan federal court. “I want them to know I will carry this burden with me for the rest of my life.”
Nadel, 77, also implicated two hedge-fund trading partners, Neil and Christopher Moody, saying the three of them “received tens of millions in fees” that “we were not entitled to.”…
2 Ton Mystery Object Crashed in Mongolia
Witness image. MUFON database.
Roger Marsh writes in the Examiner:
Very little information accompanied a photo of what is claimed is an object that fell from the sky near the Mongolian capital, according to a report filed February 23 with the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) witness database.
The report states that two objects fell near the Mongolian capital on February 19. The first object, according to the report, weighed 10 kg, while the second larger object weighed “approximately 2 tons.”
Could this simply be an engine that fell off a jet?
Read More: Examiner
It’s a Trap! Students Push Admiral Ackbar for Ole Miss Mascot
This story gets my “Meme of the Year” award!
From the AJC:
The campaign for Admiral Ackbar is gaining Internet, if not intergalactic, steam.
Tuesday, Ole Miss students voted to find a new mascot to replace the abandoned Colonel Reb. A student committee to develop and propose a new mascot will be formed soon.
Ackbar, a member of the Mon Calamari species who led the Rebel Alliance ships into the Battle of Endor, appears to be the early favorite. He has more than 14,000 Facebook fans. Websites like notatrap.org — “It’s a trap!” was his famous line — are promoting Ackbar’s candidacy.
“Who wants a Colonel when you could have an Admiral?” the Web site asks, before launching into “The Story of Ole Miss Ackbar.”
“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away … Admiral Ackbar received a deep space transmission of SEC coverage. He found that he couldn’t stop watching everything from football to…
