October 2009
Musician Making A Living With Forty Committed True... →
Suffice it to say that I’m renting a house in Wellesley, MA with a couple of room mates… I’m not starving, I can still eat sushi from time to time, and my car (neither a Pinto nor a Bentley) is paid off.
So, he’s making a living wage, but not raking it in, which is to be expected (and is certainly a hell of a lot better than many musicians).
Spider web confirmed as 'oldest' →
Spider webs encased in amber which were discovered on an East Sussex beach have been confirmed by scientists as being the world’s oldest on record. The amber … dates back 140 million years to the Cretaceous period.
Watchvruz:
Bill Moyers Journal web exclusive with Glenn Greenwald, pbs.org
Acclaimed blogger Glenn Greenwald, recipient of the Park Center for Independent Media Izzy Award, spoke with Bill Moyers this week for the special web-exclusive conversation.
You Are What You Eat: Inside America's... →
20 photographs by Mark Menjivar of the inside of people’s refrigerators.
“The Arctic is melting faster than predicted — and the resulting release of...”
– Jeff Goodell in Warming Gets Worse
“About 99 percent of the battles and skirmishes that we fought in Afghanistan...”
– Marshal Akhromeyev,a hero of the Leningrad siege in World War II, told his superiors in November 1986
From the New York Times
“Appearing cheerful is vital in a society where all of life monitored by an...”
– Joe Bageant (via azspot)
Whales Are Polite Conversationalists →
Natalia Sidorovskaia of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and colleagues have discovered that whales change the intervals between these echolocating clicks in a way that seems to prevent cluttering the echoes from these calls.
“In other words, whales are polite listeners; they do not interrupt each other,” writes Sidorovskaia. She suspects that this communication strategy would...
“A quarter of households in Britain – more in the larger cities, and a majority...”
– Car-free cities: an idea with legs [via] (via earthmancomehome)
“When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is...”
– Zadie Smith, Fail better (via igather)
“How should I spend my life? he thought. That had become the question. Dribble it...”
– Madison Smartt Bell - Ten Indians (p. 155)
“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than...”
– Samuel Adams, 1776 (via poortaste)
“How did our world become so screwed up that a decision by McDonald’s to...”
– Andrew Leonard in Salon.com
The War Condolences Obama Hasn’t Sent →
The Pentagon admits to a mounting suicide crisis in its ranks. Numbers of acknowledged suicides have steadily climbed, from fewer than 100 in 2005, by one report, to nearly 200 in 2008, with a like number among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.
…
In August, President Barack Obama addressed the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, saying, “[T]here is nothing more sobering than signing a letter...
Cockroach Superpower No. 42: They Don’t Need to... →
The microbe Blattobacterium genes that code for enzymes that break down urea and ammonia, the components of uric acid. Other genes instruct the microbe to take the resulting molecules and use them to make amino acids, repair cell walls and membranes, and perform other metabolic tasks.
This allows cockroaches to subsist on nitrogen-poor diets, an ability “critical to the ecological range and...
“The Pashtun insurgency, which is composed of multiple, seemingly infinite, local...”
– Matthew Hoh (via azspot)
It’s tribal, stupid!
US soldier commits suicide in Indiana movie... →
ledgergermane:
A National Guard soldier home on a 15-day leave from the war in Afghanistan committed suicide in a Muncie, Indiana, movie theater October 12. Jacob W. Sexton, a 21-year-old from rural Farmland, Indiana, shot himself in the head, approximately 20 minutes into the violent comedy Zombieland, with friends and siblings sitting around him. The suicide underscores once again the...
What's Killing the Aspen? | Science & Nature |... →
bluesiren:
Aspen, one of the few broad-leaved trees to grow at high altitude in Western mountains, are emblems of the Rockies. Their lean, chalky trunks are instantly recognizable on an alpine slope, their blazing-yellow fall displays part of the region’s seasonal clockwork. The characteristic flutter of their heart-shaped leaves in the breeze gives them their nickname—”quakies”—and fills their...
WatchShowdown in Chicago: Protesters Greet American Bankers Association Conference
Let’s see if this protest is covered by Fox News with the enthusiasm equal to their coverage of the teabaggers.
Financial Support for the Unemployed Dries Up at... →
Unemployment hits some population groups much harder than others—young people, people of color, and anyone with relatively few years of education. Among workers over 20 years of age, black men had the highest jobless rate in June at 16.4 percent. The rate for Hispanic women was 11.5 percent, for black women 11.3 percent, and for Hispanic men 10.7 percent. In contrast, the jobless rate was under 10...
Nouriel Roubini: Big Crash Coming →
There’s a huge bubble, because we have zero rates in the U.S., zero rates around the world and a huge carry trade. Everyone is borrowing at zero interest rates in dollars and getting a capital gain because the dollar is weakening, so they are borrowing at negative rates. And then they invest in risky assets: commodities, equities, credit. We’re creating a bigger bubble than before.
It’s going to...
A post-oil world gets less sci-fi by the day →
azspot:
Oil has fallen sharply in price since last summer, but this is only because the world tumbled into its worst recession in decades, clobbering industrial output and trade volumes, and therefore oil demand. What is curious, though, is that oil prices, having tumbled below $40 earlier this year, went back above $81 a barrel last week, their highest for a year.
There are plenty of possible...
Tartit - Abacabok
'Freezer plan' bid to save coral →
The prospects of saving the world’s coral reefs now appear so bleak that plans are being made to freeze samples to preserve them for the future.