During World War ll the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from Japanese air attack. This is how they did it. Fascinating photographs.
They call them social-networking sites for a reason. Networking once meant something specific: climbing the jungle gym of professional contacts in order to advance your career... Commercial society did not eliminate the self-interested aspects of making friends and influencing people, it just changed the way we went about it. Now, in the age of the entrepreneurial self, even our closest relationships are being pressed onto this template. A recent book on the sociology of modern science describes a networking event at a West Coast university: "There do not seem to be any singletons—disconsolately lurking at the margins—nor do dyads appear, except fleetingly." No solitude, no friendship, no space for refusal—the exact contemporary paradigm. At the same time, the author assures us, "face time" is valued in this "community" as a "high-bandwidth interaction," offering "unusual capacity for interruption, repair, feedback and learning." Actual human contact, rendered "unusual" and weighed by the values of a systems engineer. We have given our hearts to machines, and now we are turning into machines. The face of friendship in the new century.Via John Brissenden
Portrait of a Glasgow prison's execution chamber and a man that worked there in the 50's. Best Doc Award Reel to Real Festival 98. Shot entirely on 16mm black & white film stock... In the autumn of 1995, former Death Watch officer Frank McKue returned to the execution chamber of Barlinnie Prison to view the facility before its imminent destruction. The following year, he returned and was appalled at what he saw.
On the value of an education in economics
"You live in a state where the most severe criminal punishment is life imprisonment. Someone proposes that since armed robbery is a very serious crime, armed robbers should get a life sentence. A constitutional lawyer asks whether that is consistent with the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. A legal philosopher asks whether it is just. An economist points out that if the punishments for armed robbery and for armed robbery plus murder are the same, the additional punishment for the murder is zero–and asks whether you really want to make it in the interest of robbers to murder their victims."Via Tim Worstall
Fortunately Tim Worstall was on hand to bring a little perspective to the proceedings:Here’s the bottom-line: if your personal income is over £50K, you are not only one of the top 10% of earners in the UK, but you are quite comfortably one of the richest tenth of one percent of people who have ever been born. Anywhere, ever.
And if your income is £5,000 a year (just about the minimum that you can have given the benefits system) then you’re in the top 15% of all the people who have ever lived. Good thing this capitalism shtick, innit? We’re all vastly, humoungously, richer than those who do not live (or did not live) in a country that’s been using the system for a couple of hundred years.
Can you judge a person's health simply by smelling their bodily waste? It sounds unlikely - but scientists from Warwick University say that not only is it possible, it can be more accurate and faster than traditional methods of diagnosis.
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, President Obama essentially called for peace and justice while describing situations in which war is both unavoidable and justified. He also described situations in which, to avoid war, the international community must "stand together as one" to rectify egregious injustice.
For instance, he said this: "I believe that we must develop alternatives to violence that are tough enough to actually change behavior -- for if we want a lasting peace, then the words of the international community must mean something. Those regimes that break the rules must be held accountable. Sanctions must exact a real price. Intransigence must be met with increased pressure -- and such pressure exists only when the world stands together as one."
But he does not apply that standard to Israel and its illegal occupation of the territories it won in the 1967 war. Not only is Israel not held accountable, but the Obama administration actually blocks efforts to hold it accountable (i.e., the Goldstone report on war crimes in Gaza). The Obama administration even backed away from its demand that settlement activity stop. Additionally, the world community knows that the United Nations is helpless in dealing with Israel because the United States uses its veto on Israel's behalf whenever Israel asks it to.
So where's the accountability?
Here’s the bottom-line: if your personal income is over £50K, you are not only one of the top 10% of earners in the UK, but you are quite comfortably one of the richest tenth of one percent of people who have ever been born. Anywhere, ever.
