Mike Cane's Library tagged no_tag →  View Popular

Paine's fortunes, always precarious, were at a particularly low ebb in 1774. He had been sacked from the excise service on a trumped up charge, the tobacco shop he had started with his late father in law had failed, he had to sell most of the household goods to avoid a debtor's prison, and his marriage to the much younger Elizabeth was in tatters.

www.guardian.co.uk/...paine-separation-deed - Preview

Individuals in a stressful situation -- as in a troubled relationship -- typically have elevated levels of chemicals known as cytokines. These proteins are produced by cells in the immune system and help the body mount an immune response during infection. However, abnormally high levels of these proteins are linked to illnesses such as cardiovascular disease, type-2 diabetes, arthritis and some cancers.

"Typically, if you bring people to a lab and put them under stress, either by engaging them in a conflict or giving them a public speaking task, you can see an increase in proinflammatory cytokines such as Interleukin-6 (Il-6) and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha)," explained Graham.

www.brightsurf.com/...couples_stay_fighting_fit.html - Preview

The latin poem Catullus 16 is famous among Catullus's Carmina because it is so sexually explicit that a full English translation was not openly published until the late twentieth century.[1] Several editions of Catullus omit the more explicit parts of the poem. An interesting example is the 1924 Loeb Catullus: this omits lines 1 and 2 from the English translation, but includes them in the Latin; lines 7-14 are omitted from both Latin and English; a later Loeb edition[2] gives the complete text in both languages. Other editions have been published with the explicit words blanked out.[3] The poem is famous among classicists as a benchmark of classical obscenity and invective.

en.wikipedia.org/Catullus_16 - Preview

This sort of book once fell into a particular publishing category called a vanity book—it was not to be taken seriously. It was to be dismissed, or tolerated only with the clearest condescension.

But now the most valuable and therefore well-looked-after books are vanity publications.

www.newser.com/...books-are-bad-for-you.html - Preview

TOKYO—Anime, Japan's stylized animation that has become hugely popular around the world, helped reshape the country's image as a cultural trend-setter. But behind the scenes, things aren't so rosy.

Japan's animation industry is struggling. Anime workers are unhappy, toiling long hours at low pay. Sales have been declining. On top of that, there is fast-growing competition from across Asia. Studios in China and South Korea now churn out high-quality anime-style programs, helped by cheaper labor and, in some cases, government subsidies.

online.wsj.com/...3819904574551834260925714.html - Preview

Fuck those condescending, ignorant, self-important, stupid, blind, fearful pricks. Fuck them real hard. Where it hurts.

And fucking them real hard where it hurts is exactly what Apple is doing right now.

www.quirksmode.org/...apple_is_not_ev.html - Preview

Griffiths argues that because we all now produce so much data online via clickstreams, blogs, tweets, online transactions and so on, we may soon reach a point where “the diversity and detail of a single dataset of an average member of the population is enough to enable us to give an account of what everybody is thinking”.

www.research-live.com/...-market-researchers-learn-from - Preview

For the most part, though, the general formula is simple, and quintessentially American -- miserablism to triumphalism, with the closing benediction, through sales, of capitalism.

The critic Dubravka Ugresic has likened this parade of stories depicting a downtrodden but ultimately redeemed real-life protagonist to Soviet social realism, in that they take actual events as a starting point but twist them into sanguine rags-to-riches propaganda that serves to reinforce readers' belief that anyone can overcome difficult times. Such stories, in this analysis, are an insidious, uniquely modern incarnation of Horatio Alger's dime novels.

www.latimes.com/...elf22-2009nov22,0,366900.story - Preview

A man thought by doctors to be in a vegetative state for 23 years was actually conscious the whole time, it was revealed last night.

www.dailymail.co.uk/...year-coma-conscious-along.html - Preview

What you’ll see are endless acres of urban ruin, block after block and mile after mile of empty and rotting office buildings, storefronts, hotels, apartment buildings and private homes. It’s a scene of devastation and disintegration that stuns the mind, a major American city that still is home to 900,0000 people but which looks at times like a cross between postwar Berlin and the ruin of an ancient civilization.

Detroit was the arsenal of democracy in World War II and the incubator of the American middle class.

www.nytimes.com/...21herbert.html - Preview

Using ultrasound to examine the vessels leading in and out of the brain, Dr. Zamboni made a startling find: In more than 90 per cent of people with multiple sclerosis, including his spouse, the veins draining blood from the brain were malformed or blocked. In people without MS, they were not.

He hypothesized that iron was damaging the blood vessels and allowing the heavy metal, along with other unwelcome cells, to cross the crucial brain-blood barrier. (The barrier keeps blood and cerebrospinal fluid separate. In MS, immune cells cross the blood-brain barrier, where they destroy myelin, a crucial sheathing on nerves.)

More striking still was that, when Dr. Zamboni performed a simple operation to unclog veins and get blood flowing normally again, many of the symptoms of MS disappeared. The procedure is similar to angioplasty, in which a catheter is threaded into the groin and up into the arteries, where a balloon is inflated to clear the blockages. His wife, who had the surgery three years ago, has not had an attack since.

The researcher's theory is simple: that the underlying cause of MS is a condition he has dubbed “chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency.” If you tackle CCSVI by repairing the drainage problems from the brain, you can successfully treat, or better still prevent, the disease.

www.theglobeandmail.com/...article1372414 - Preview

People do need to be aware of the stresses -- and the dire costs associated with them, but the chances of that happening are slim. The massacre at Fort Hood is bound to produce volumes of analyses resulting from multiple government inquiries into the killings. But neither the FBI nor Congress nor any other government agency will ever convene an investigation into the slow motion bloodbath resulting from the global economic crisis. For this reason, there will never be anything approaching a full tally of all the victims who were killed or died or were wounded or psychologically devastated as a result of evictions, foreclosures, job losses, and other forms of financial distress over the last years. Nor will President Obama head back to Elkhart, or anywhere else for that matter, to attend a memorial service to the fallen from this less spectacular, but far deadlier bloodbath. As a result of the inattention, and despite ever rosier economic predictions and a surging stock market, the body count from the economic crisis is destined only to grow in the weeks and months ahead.

www.truthout.org/112009vh07 - Preview

But what of the kids who continue to spiral down? The ones with the low IQs who don’t get any validation from their teachers? Those who identify with macho violent culture rather than being appalled by it? These boys - and increasingly girls - are going out into the world filled with hate and are on the look out for anyone who is different. Ryan Herbert and Brendan Harris found it when they saw the two Goths in the park. But this isn’t a crime against a couple for having piercings and dyed hair - the victim could just as easily have been a gay man, someone of a different race or height or weight or accent. Indeed, one of the teenagers had been given community service for beating a young man unconscious only a few weeks before, and may well have killed him if the victim’s mother hadn’t intervened.

incoldblogger.blogspot.com/...formation-of-feral-thug.html - Preview

Forget Adam Smith and his invisible hand, Edmund Burke’s little platoons and Karl Marx’s cry that the workers have nothing to lose but their chains. There is a new political philosopher — Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the easyJet founder. The theory that he is peddling is perfectly suited to the modern frugal era. It’s time for easyPolitics.

This entrepreneur from the land of Aristotle, who wears Gap rather than Gucci, is not an obvious guru for the political class. But David Cameron believes that Sir Stelios’s business brand — which has so far spawned easyJet, easyCruise, easyBus and easyHotel, among others — is a model for the public sector in these recessionary times.

www.timesonline.co.uk/...article6925705.ece - Preview

So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory - a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below - emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down sceptics.

blogs.news.com.au/...hadley_hacked - Preview

This piece is based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005 -- one at the O'Reilly ETech conference in March, entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one at the IMCExpo in April entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." The written version is a heavily edited concatenation of those two talks.

Today I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we've adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies.

shirky.com/...ontology_overrated.html - Preview

On a hillside above the Hsing Tian Kong temple in the northern reaches of Taipei, Jonney Shih sits on a wobbly stool next to an ornate low wooden table. Dressed in a taupe suit, white shirt, and silver tie emblazoned with jaguars, Shih, 57, cheerfully waves off three umbrella-wielding employees who try in vain to shield their boss from the hot sun and a swirl of menacing bees.

brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/...e-man-behind-the-netbook-craze - Preview

Woodward was that rarity in the entertainment world: one who specialised in nothing much, yet appeared to be especially talented in whatever he took on: villains, heroes, characters from melodrama and the musical comedy stage – all were tackled with a superb professionalism.

To his portrayal of the cynical secret service agent Callan, he brought an authentic seediness; while his majestic portrayal of the avenging Robert McCall, the upright figure in the long overcoat in The Equalizer, turned him into an unlikely cult figure in the United States.

www.telegraph.co.uk/...Edward-Woodward.html - Preview

Nigerian author Chinua Achebe has spoken out about his dislike at being labelled "the father of modern African literature".

The author of the multi-million bestseller Things Fall Apart, Achebe was given the label by Nadine Gordimer as he was awarded the Man Booker International prize two years ago; it has been frequently used both before and since. But the author said yesterday that he "resisted that very, very strongly".

"It's really a serious belief of mine that it's risky for anyone to lay claim to something as huge and important as African literature ... the contribution made down the ages. I don't want to be singled out as the one behind it because there were many of us – many, many of us," he said when asked about the title.

www.guardian.co.uk/...ther-modern-african-literature - Preview

So I guess my current thought is this: when people like Declan, along with other great writers like, say, Ray Banks and Allan Guthrie, are storming the bestseller charts, maybe then I’ll start worrying about the plight of certain self-promoting writers bleating about the state of the industry. Whose fucking books can be found on the shelves in Asda.

www.theleftroom.co.uk/?p=908 - Preview