Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Marc Dion: We Are Fragile (Creators Syndicate)
My father used to tell me that, for his mother, one of the worst moments of the 1930s depression was when she no longer had a dime to put in the collection plate at Sunday Mass.
Paula Cerni: Dead Philosophers Are Cool: 'Philosophy Bites Back' (PopMatters)
The popular philosophy of today suffers from a curious paradox: it isn't very popular. Even high-profile contemporary thinkers like Slavoj Žižek and Peter Singer are known mostly to the cognoscenti, while the masses largely ignore them and the mainstream of our money- and celebrity-obsessed culture passes them by.
Amanda Hess: Think the Porn Industry Discriminates Against Women? Lean In (Slate)
Enforcing a government ban on pornography won't actually rid the world of smut (and the proposal, which has been raised before, is unlikely to lead to a legitimately enforceable ban).
Jillian Keenan: We're Kinky, Not Crazy (Slate)
Including "paraphilic disorders" in the DSM V is redundant, unscientific, and stigmatizing.
Lakewood restaurant customer arrested after trying to use waitress's stolen ID
Brianna Priddy's wallet was stolen on Feb. 13 during a night out with friends. On Feb. 25, a customer came to the Applebee's on the 10600 block of West Colfax in Lakewood where Priddy works as a server. … "Four people come in, walk in, sit down. They start ordering drinks. This girl hands me my ID as a fake ID," Priddy said.
Dave Simpson: "Jack White on the Mississippi blues artists: 'They changed the world'" (Guardian)
Jack White learned his craft listening to the blues legends of the 20s and 30s on albums released by a tiny Scottish label. And now he's rereleasing Document Records' archive on vinyl.
Phelim O'Neill: "The Outer Limits: box set review" (Guardian)
This vintage sci-fi treat is that rarest of TV shows - a knock-off that often equals what it was knocking off.
Xan Brooks: "Elijah Wood: 'Frodo's never going away'" (Guardian)
In his latest film, 'Maniac,' the actor plays a serial killer searching out women to scalp. But, he admits, it's as the hobbit Frodo in 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy that he will always be remembered.
George Dvorsky: Watch as retired lab chimps see the sky for the very first time (io9)
Watch as these chimps - many of whom have never left the lab - cautiously venture outside to gaze at the wide expanse that's set before them.
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David Bruce has approximately 50 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
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From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Marty's Annoyed
Link Removal
From the realm of no good deed going unpunished, I've been hit with a barrage of 'remove my link from your site' requests.
These sites had information, or something that I found interesting, or useful, so I linked to them. That's it.
In a variety of manners they state that Google has determined that the use of their link on my page is 'unnatural' and in return, Google is mucking with their rankings.
I am then requested, and in some cases, demanded, to remove their link from an archived page.
Sometimes they demand all the text surrounding their link also be deleted.
This annoys me on several levels, ranging from freedom of speech, altering history, extra work, and how effing dare you accuse me of trying to pull a fast one that upsets Google (like I have that kind of juice - jeez).
Yes, I realize these sites are dependent on Google ads.
But I don't have advertising, and to put it bluntly, there is nothing in it for me to comply with these requests.
Here's a partial list:
educational leadership , com
Criminology , com
Credist Score , net
Clinical Psychology , net
Psychology Degree , net
mesothelioma help , net
online mba programs , org
Online Counseling Degrees , net
OTOH, so far, I have complied with all the requests, but I'm not happy about it.
And I wonder why is Google so concerned with controlling content through advertising?
~ marty
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny, clear and cool.
Calls On 'One Million Men'
Patrick Stewart
Sir Patrick Stewart stood in the center of the Diplomat Ballroom at the UN Hotel here on Friday, pounding his fist methodically against a podium, each thump punctuated with a number ("One ... two ... three ...") until he got to nine.
"Every nine seconds a woman is assaulted or beaten in the United States," Stewart said.
The 72-year-old British-born actor, best known for his roles in "X-Men" and "Star Trek: The Next Generation," served as host for the launch of "Ring The Bell," a global campaign calling on one million men to make one million "concrete, actionable promises" to end violence against women.
"Violence against women is the single greatest human rights violation of our generation," Stewart said.
The event-coinciding with International Women's Day and the 57th session of the Commission on the Status of Women at United Nations headquarters-was attended by about 200 assorted actors, activists, politicians, filmmakers and musicians, including Michael Bolton, who fought back tears while talking about his work lobbying for the extension of the Violence Against Women Act passed by Congress earlier this week.
Patrick Stewart
Research Discovers Hard Truths
Budget Crisis
Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Carol Greider used to have eight to 10 young researchers working in her university laboratory, but with U.S. government funds for scientific research shrinking in recent years, she's gone down to four.
Sequestration, Washington's name for $85 billion in federal spending cuts this year, promises to cut even deeper into Greider's team at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She's decided she cannot afford to hire "a promising young researcher" she wanted to add to her staff for the next academic year.
Federally funded, university research has long been a major engine of scientific advancement, spurring innovations from cancer treatments to the seeds of technology companies like Google.
But now some of the largest U.S. research universities fear that spending cuts under sequestration could lead to layoffs, curtail scientific discovery and leave a generation with less access to careers in science, school officials said.
Budget Crisis
Republicans Get Their Hate On
Ashley Judd
Hating on people is an essential part of campaigns. There are groups dedicated to it; our political parties become almost entirely consumed with hating on people every two years. A lot of money goes into it.
But when it comes to Ashley Judd, Republicans are pouring Haterade over the actress as if she had just won a bowl game.
Judd, a Democrat, may or may not challenge Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Lace Panties), the nation's second-most-powerful Republican, for his Kentucky Senate seat in 2014, and the GOP has gone out of its way to make even the notion of such ambitions seem ludicrous.
On Friday the National Republican Senatorial Committee cheekily announced Judd as the Republican Party's own top Senate recruit, sending reporters a fake fundraising email.
Ashley Judd
Huge Graveyard?
Stonehenge
British researchers have proposed a new theory for the origins of Stonehenge: It may have started as a giant burial ground for elite families around 3,000 B.C.
New studies of cremated human remains excavated from the site suggest that about 500 years before the Stonehenge we know today was built, a larger stone circle was erected at the same site as a community graveyard, researchers said Saturday.
"These were men, women, children, so presumably family groups," University College London professor Mike Parker Pearson, who led the team, said. "We'd thought that maybe it was a place where a dynasty of kings was buried, but this seemed to be much more of a community, a different kind of power structure."
Parker Pearson said archeologists studied the cremated bones of 63 individuals, and believed that they were buried around 3,000 B.C. The location of many of the cremated bodies was originally marked by bluestones, he said. That earlier circular enclosure, which measured around 300 feet (91 meters) across, could have been the burial ground for about 200 more people, Parker Pearson said.
Stonehenge
Immortal Line Created
Mice
Japanese researchers have created a potentially endless line of mice cloned from other cloned mice. They used the same technique that created Dolly the sheep to produce 581 mice from an original donor mouse through 25 rounds of cloning, the scientists report in the March 7 issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell.
The researchers used a cloning technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, in which a cell nucleus containing one individual's genetic information is inserted into an egg cell whose nucleus has been removed. Dolly the Sheep became the first cloned mammal in 1996 using this technique. Many other animals have been cloned since, but the technique has had a low success rate and attempts to "reclone" animals have often failed.
Genetic abnormalities that can accumulate over consecutive generations of clones may explain these failures, Wakayama said.
The team successfully cloned the mice 25 consecutive times. In other words, they cloned one mouse, then cloned those clones, and so on. A total of 581 healthy mice were made, all of which were fertile and lived a normal life span of about two years. The efficiency of making the cloned cells neither worsened nor improved over the generations.
Mice
Case Raises Questions On Consent
Sadomasochism
Can mentally ill people consent to sadomasochistic sex? Can anyone consent to abusive and degrading sexual acts?
Connecticut's highest court has decided to take up those questions in the case of a Greenwich woman suing a man she alleges had an abusive sexual relationship with her daughter, who had multiple mental and physical ailments. Arguments before the state Supreme Court are scheduled for Wednesday.
While sadomasochism was glamorized in the popular 2011 book trilogy "Fifty Shades of Grey," the practice has long been on questionable legal ground.
Some lawyers believe people can't consent to being assaulted or abused under common law, while others say established legal principles provide sexual rights to most people, including elderly people in nursing homes and the mentally ill. There are few court rulings, however, dealing directly with BDSM, short for bondage, discipline, dominance/submission and sadomasochism.
In the Connecticut case, Mary Kortner sued fellow Greenwich resident Craig Martise in 2006, saying her daughter could not have consented to sadomasochistic and abusive sex acts with him because of her mental state. A state jury, however, found in favor of Martise in 2009, concluding there was a sadomasochistic relationship but no proof that Kortner's daughter couldn't consent.
Sadomasochism
Seeing Elephants
Iditarod Fatigue
There comes a time during the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race when fatigue can turn Alaska's frozen landscape into an unlikely habitat for an elephant that really isn't there.
Ask Lynda Plettner, a former participant in the 1,000-mile race. The Big Lake, Alaska, musher was so sleep-deprived once that she saw a large gray African elephant in the distance trudging in the snow toward a metal building that had no doors or windows. Both the elephant and the building got bigger as Plettner got closer and her weary brain focused on getting the dogs safely past them before it dawned on her that she was hallucinating.
Participants in this year's race are struggling with their own exhaustion in their journey toward the finish line in Nome on Alaska's western coast. But they keep on mushing anyway.
Mushers catch what little sleep they can, when they can. But many will shrug and tell you it's no big deal. It's just part of running an endurance match in some of the world's toughest conditions, where blizzards can create blinding stretches of trail, temperatures can plunge to 50 below - or, as is happening in this race, above-freezing temperatures can slow teams down in punchy snow or river overflows.
Iditarod Fatigue
Alderney Crystal
Sunstone
A rough, whitish block recovered from an Elizabethan shipwreck may be a sunstone, the fabled crystal believed by some to have helped Vikings and other medieval seafarers navigate the high seas, researchers say.
In a paper published earlier this week, a Franco-British group argued that the Alderney Crystal - a chunk of Icelandic calcite found amid a 16th century wreck at the bottom of the English Channel - worked as a kind of solar compass, allowing sailors to determine the position of the sun even when it was hidden by heavy cloud, masked by fog, or below the horizon.
That's because of a property known as birefringence, which splits light beams in a way that can reveal the direction of their source with a high degree of accuracy. Vikings may not have grasped the physics behind the phenomenon, but that wouldn't present a problem.
Vikings were expert navigators - using the sun, stars, mountains and even migratory whales to help guide them across the sea - but some have wondered at their ability to travel the long stretches of open water between Greenland, Iceland, and Newfoundland in modern-day Canada.
Albert Le Floch, of the University in Rennes, is one of several who've suggested that calcite crystals were used as navigational aids for long summer days in which the sun might be hidden behind the clouds. He said the use of such crystals may have persisted into the 16th century, by which time magnetic compasses were widely used but often malfunctioned.
Sunstone
Maryland Park
Harriet Tubman
Abolitionist Harriet Tubman's struggle to help roughly 70 slaves escape to freedom using the Underground Railroad was remembered on Saturday at the groundbreaking of a Maryland state park in her honor.
An escaped slave herself, Tubman toiled in bondage on the land that will soon be the 17-acre Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park on the eastern shore of Maryland's Chesapeake Bay.
Construction of the park on open marshland and forests in Dorchester County marks the 100-year anniversary of the abolitionist leader's death.
It also coincides with the opening of the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway, a 125-mile drive with more than 30 historical stops related to Tubman's early life and the Underground Railroad. Highlights include the Mason-Dixon Line, a one-room school, a historic village store with artifacts from the 1800s and, eventually, the new Harriet Tubman park itself.
Slated to open in 2015, the park is located on the same land where Tubman worked as a slave before escaping to Pennsylvania at the age of 27. While in bondage, she had been rented out for work throughout the region, including chopping wood on the land that will now be named after her.
Harriet Tubman
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