Ok…I’ll try to keep the reading list manageable.  Most of these are pretty long…

1. The Broken Senate: The world’s greatest (non-) deliberative body?
2. Hospice: What should medicine do when it can’t save your life? (Gawande)
3. The Crisis of Middle Class America (Financial Times)
4. State budget deficits and their real world impacts (NYT) (Commentary by Klein)
5. Filmmaker/Photographer Sean Smith’s Afghan War diary (video and article, guardian uk)
6. Mexico: The (drug) war within (npr, part 1 of 5)
7. The Laffer Curve: Or do tax hikes ever pay for themselves? A Survey (Klein)
8. 65 Years since Hiroshima: Accounts from Nuclear Blast Survivors
9. Where are all (some) of the medical innovations? Locked out by a purchasing organization.
10. Stories from the periodic table (intro, Antimony. Slate)

And one for fun

• The secret ingredient is…
  

US Politics and Policy

• Why beverage companies don’t want a soda tax.
  
• Zombies and Public Policy
• Climategate aftermath: researchers cleared
• Industry standards vs BP Practice (infographic)
• Where are all (some) of the medical innovations? Locked out by a purchasing organization.
  

  This is hardly the first time Shaw has found his path to market blocked. In fact, he has spent the last fifteen years watching his potentially game-changing inventions collect dust on warehouse shelves. And the same is true of countless other small medical suppliers. Their plight is just the most visible outgrowth of the tangled system hospitals use to purchase their supplies—a system built on a seemingly minor provision in Medicare law that few people even know about. It’s a system that has stifled innovation and kept lifesaving medical devices off the market. And while it’s supposed to curb prices, it may actually be driving up the cost of medical supplies, the second largest expenditure for our nation’s hospitals and clinics and a major contributor to the ballooning cost of health care, which consumes nearly a fifth of our gross domestic product.

• Election poll data: (Klein)
  

  

• Policies and market confidence
  

  Today, markets seem to think that large fiscal deficits are the greatest threat to government solvency. Tomorrow they may think the real problem is low growth, and rue the tight fiscal policies that helped produce it.

  Today, they worry about spineless governments unable to take the tough actions needed to deal with the crisis. Perhaps tomorrow they will lose sleep over the mass demonstrations and social conflicts that tough economic policies have spawned.

  Few can predict which way market sentiment will move, least of all market participants themselves. Even with hindsight, it is sometimes not clear why markets go one way and not the other. Similar policies will produce different market reactions depending on the prevailing story, or fad of the moment. That is why steering the economy by the dictates of market confidence is a fool’s errand.

  The silver lining in all this is that, unlike economists and politicians, markets have no ideology. As long as they make money they do not care if they have to eat their words. They simply want whatever “works”—whatever will produce a stable, healthy economic environment conducive to debt repayment. When circumstances become dire enough, they will even condone debt restructuring—if the alternative is chaos and the prospect of a greater loss.

• Towards a “flatter” government (Douthat) (sidebar: And…what about the poor??)
  

  This kind of spending can be problematic. But conservatives need to recognize that the most pernicious sort of redistribution isn’t from the successful to the poor. It’s from savers to speculators, from outsiders to insiders, and from the industrious middle class to the reckless, unproductive rich.

• Where do libertarians belong? (reason)
• The limits of behavioral economics
  

  Behavioral economics should complement, not substitute for, more substantive economic interventions. If traditional economics suggests that we should have a larger price difference between sugar-free and sugared drinks, behavioral economics could suggest whether consumers would respond better to a subsidy on unsweetened drinks or a tax on sugary drinks.

  But that’s the most it can do. For all of its insights, behavioral economics alone is not a viable alternative to the kinds of far-reaching policies we need to tackle our nation’s challenges.

• Hospice: What should medicine do when it can’t save your life? (Gawande)
  

  Wasn’t the goal of hospice to let nature take its course?

  “That’s not the goal,” Creed said. The difference between standard medical care and hospice is not the difference between treating and doing nothing, she explained. The difference was in your priorities. In ordinary medicine, the goal is to extend life. We’ll sacrifice the quality of your existence now—by performing surgery, providing chemotherapy, putting you in intensive care—for the chance of gaining time later. Hospice deploys nurses, doctors, and social workers to help people with a fatal illness have the fullest possible lives right now. That means focussing on objectives like freedom from pain and discomfort, or maintaining mental awareness for as long as possible, or getting out with family once in a while. Hospice and palliative-care specialists aren’t much concerned about whether that makes people’s lives longer or shorter.

• The Broken Senate: The world’s greatest (non-) deliberative body?
  

  The Senate is often referred to as “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” Jeff Merkley, a freshman Democrat from Oregon, said, “That is a phrase that I wince each time I hear it, because the amount of real deliberation, in terms of exchange of ideas, is so limited.” Merkley could remember witnessing only one moment of floor debate between a Republican and a Democrat. “The memory I took with me was: ‘Wow, that’s unusual—there’s a conversation occurring in which they’re making point and counterpoint and challenging each other.’ And yet nobody else was in the chamber.

• The Crisis of Middle Class America (Financial Times)
  

  The slow economic strangulation of the Freemans and millions of other middle-class Americans started long before the Great Recession, which merely exacerbated the “personal recession” that ordinary Americans had been suffering for years. Dubbed “median wage stagnation” by economists, the annual incomes of the bottom 90 per cent of US families have been essentially flat since 1973 – having risen by only 10 per cent in real terms over the past 37 years. That means most Americans have been treading water for more than a generation. Over the same period the incomes of the top 1 per cent have tripled. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the ­multiple is above 300.

  The trend has only been getting stronger. Most economists see the Great Stagnation as a structural problem – meaning it is immune to the business cycle.

• Human trafficking in the US (npr) (Actual Report @ Dept of State)
  

  This year, for the first time ever, the U.S. included itself in the State Department’s annual report on human trafficking. The report said the U.S. has a serious problem with human trafficking — a practice they call the equivalent of modern-day slavery, including commercial sex exploitation and forced labor — as a source country, and as a destination for victims.

• Top Secret America (WaPo)
  

  The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

• A critique of Top Secret America
• The long-term unemployment trap (Cohn)
  

  But there’s also the possibility that long-term unemployment has become a trap: Once you fall in, it’s awfully hard to get out. Gary Burtless, the Brookings economist, sketched out this theory to me via e-mail:

  The really attractive job candidates find employment sooner than the less attractive candidates. This may mean that the longer the duration of unemployment, the higher the proportion of really attractive laid-off workers who have already been snapped up by employers, leaving a steadily less attractive (or less eager) pool of job seekers.

• Stat of the Day: 78% of US farmworkers are foreign born. 53% of those lack authorization to work in the US (Cohn)
• Static Kill finally stops BP Oil Spill
  

  I wonder how many people believe this graphic…
  

• America’s tax code: incentivizing massive debt
  

  Debt in itself is not harmful, financial analysts say. But they also question whether the government should be prodding companies to borrow and favoring businesses that heavily rely on debt.

  “The tax code is interfering dramatically with the choice of how you finance and how you deliver returns in the corporate sector,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist who heads the American Action Forum. “Why would you build into the tax code a permanent bailout for corporate debt-financed investments?”

  From Campeau’s point of view, all this leverage came with a big benefit, compliments of the federal government. Under the tax code, the company he took over could deduct its high interest payments from the taxes it paid on its income.

  If Campeau had used the borrowed money to build, say, a new warehouse, rather than take over an entire company, he could have won yet another kind of tax benefit. Many firms use borrowed money to pay for buildings and equipment and are entitled to a second tax deduction under an accounting principle known as “accelerated depreciation.” As the value of buildings or equipment declines over time, a company can use this depreciation to reduce its tax liability.

  The combined impact of those two deductions can be tremendous, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Together, they can free a company from paying tax on any income produced by projects financed with debt. But that’s not all. The combined deduction can be so large that a company may also be able to apply some of it to its other income, reducing the overall tax bill even further.

• Crisis Economics (Mankiw)
• The Google-Verizon Deal
  

  But that was then, before Google’s announcement Monday of a controversial policy proposal with Verizon that would allow for Internet service providers to prioritize data traffic delivered through mobile devices and new premium broadband subscription services

• The impact of a PhD, in pictures
• Fewer unemployed, but for longer. (NYT)
  

  One of the distinctive features of the Great Recession has been the enormous number of people who have been out of work for months on end. Almost 45 percent of today’s unemployed workers have been without a job for at least 27 weeks. In no other downturn since World War II did the share exceed 26 percent.
  …
  Compare the current slump with that of the early 1980s, which was similar in severity. Over the course of 1980, 18.1 percent of the labor force was unemployed at some point. In 2008, the first year of this slump, only 13.2 percent was, according to the Labor Department’s most up-to-date data. That number surely rose in 2009, but it is unlikely to have come close to the 1982 peak of 22 percent.

• Fareed Zakaria returns his Anti-Defamation League award. (Note, the ADL is against the Islamic center being proposed near Ground Zero.)
  

  Five years ago, the ADL honored me with its Hubert H. Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize. I was thrilled to get the award from an organization that I had long admired. But I cannot in good conscience keep it anymore. I have returned both the handsome plaque and the $10,000 honorarium that came with it. I urge the ADL to reverse its decision. Admitting an error is a small price to pay to regain a reputation.

• Inside the West Wing: Senior Staff
• Inside the West Wing: Economic Advisors
• Income tax cuts are not swiss army knives (Klein)
  

  If you want to help small businesses, cutting taxes for rich individuals — some of whom file as small businesses — is an awful way to do it. The average business income on a 1040 is $40,000. Extending the tax cuts for filers making more than $250,000 isn’t going to do much for small businesses. But you know what would do a lot for small businesses? The small-business bill, which spends tens of billions of dollars opening lines of credit to small businesses that want to expand. And you know why we don’t have a small-business bill? Because Republicans are filibustering it.

  Similarly, a bill to reduce the deficit would do a good job of reducing the deficit. The Bush tax cuts, by contrast, will add about $4 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years. A bill designed to stimulate the economy could do quite a bit to stimulate the economy. But the Bush tax cuts weren’t designed to stimulate the economy, and so they’re not good at it: You only get about 32 cents of stimulus for every dollar you spend, as opposed to a payroll tax cut or job-creation tax credit, both of which give you about $1.25.

• State budget deficits and their real world impacts (NYT) (Commentary by Klein)
  

  Plenty of businesses and governments furloughed workers this year, but Hawaii went further — it furloughed its schoolchildren. Public schools across the state closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year to save money, giving students the shortest academic year in the nation and sending working parents scrambling to find care for them.

  Many transit systems have cut service to make ends meet, but Clayton County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, decided to cut all the way, and shut down its entire public bus system. Its last buses ran on March 31, stranding 8,400 daily riders.

  Even public safety has not been immune to the budget ax. In Colorado Springs, the downturn will be remembered, quite literally, as a dark age: the city switched off a third of its 24,512 streetlights to save money on electricity, while trimming its police force and auctioning off its police helicopters. By the Police Department’s own calculations, there is a 23 percent chance that all patrol units in Colorado Springs will be busy when someone calls the police.

  Faced with the steepest and longest decline in tax collections on record, state, county and city governments have resorted to major life-changing cuts in core services like education, transportation and public safety that, not too long ago, would have been unthinkable. And services in many areas could get worse before they get better.

• Unemployment Rate vs Education (Yglesias)
  
• The needs of Republican governors vs the wants of Republican congressmen
  
• Reagan’s Director of OMB on the debt
• The Laffer Curve: Or do tax hikes ever pay for themselves? A Survey (Klein)
  

  I would venture that the answer is 60% or higher…. The idea that we’re on the wrong side has almost no support among academics who have looked at this. Evidence doesn’t suggest we’re anywhere near the other end of the Laffer curve
  ~Joel Slemrod, Paul W. McCracken Collegiate Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy, University of Michigan:

• Federal Energy Subsidies (Klein)
  
• Muslim worship service at the Pentagon is a terrorist plot (satire)
  

  You see, what happens is this: First radical Muslims disguised as patriotic American military officers take over Room 1E438, and then, before you know it, they’ve conquered Room 1E437, and Room 1E439, and from there… well, you know how this ends. These rooms, of course, are holy, because Muslims once attacked the Pentagon.

World

• Iran-approved haircuts
• US troop levels in Iraq nearing drawdown targets
  

  U.S. forces are scheduled to draw down to 50,000 by September 1, 2010 following President Obama’s withdrawal plan. It’s hardly been noticed, but U.S. troops are almost at that level already.

  Since 2009 over 60,000 U.S. soldiers have been pulled out of Iraq. In January 2009 when Obama first took office, there were 142,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. … According to the spokesman for U.S. forces in Iraq, there are currently 77,500 U.S. personnel in Iraq as of July 2010.

• The narratives of NYT’s Nicholas Kristof Sad. Is this really necessary?
  

  But I do take your point. That very often I do go to developing countries where local people are doing extraordinary work, and instead I tend to focus on some foreigner, often some American, who’s doing something there.

  And let me tell you why I do that. The problem that I face — my challenge as a writer — in trying to get readers to care about something like Eastern Congo, is that frankly, the moment a reader sees that I’m writing about Central Africa, for an awful lot of them, that’s the moment to turn the page. It’s very hard to get people to care about distant crises like that.

  One way of getting people to read at least a few grafs in is to have some kind of a foreign protagonist, some American who they can identify with as a bridge character.

• Automated national border defence
• Beauty ideals around the world (Newsweek)
• Bizarre Taiwanese newscast animation about Palin
  
• What happened to the North Korean football team after they got back from the World Cup
  

  Early this month the players were summoned to an auditorium at the working people’s culture palace in Pyongyang, forced onstage and subjected to a six-hour barrage of criticism for their poor performances in South Africa, according to the US-based Radio Free Asia.
  …
  In true Stalinist style, the players were then “invited” to mount verbal attacks on their coach, Jung-hun.

  The coach was reportedly accused of betraying the leader’s son, Kim Jong-un, who is expected to take over from his ailing father as leader of the world’s only communist dynasty.
  …
  A South Korean intelligence source told the Chosun Ilbo that in the past, North Korean athletes and coaches who let the nation down were sent to prison camps.

• Filmmaker/Photographer Sean Smith’s Afghan War diary (video and article, guardian uk)
  

  Take “contact” heading south. Our patrol is on foot. We are trying to keep on owning ground, keeping the Taliban away from the patrol base. We are about 20 people, maybe less, walking, carrying water, body armour, grenades, helmets. It’s sweaty, but you forget about it after a while. It’s a short patrol, maybe three hours. A long patrol would be about 10 hours. The temperature will get up to 55C. The combination of the heat, the weight, the uneven ground . . . you just have to try to look where you’re going, try to keep aware of your surroundings, all the while trying to film. It is difficult because you have to keep walking. We are spreading out in case one of us steps on an IED – best to keep about 50m apart. So, we are spread over half a kilometre.

  It’s so hot. A little jump over an irrigation ditch becomes a huge effort, even though it would normally be a small step.

  Then the attack comes. It went like this. The radio operator got news that an attack was imminent. The message that came over the radio was: “We don’t know if it is your position or not, but there is a possible imminent attack.”

• An American’s perspective on the history of China
  

  But here’s the difference between Europe and China, and it takes considerable adjustment to absorb all the implications of this difference.

  The history of Europe is driven by sharp discontinuities of period and self-conscious distinctions between peoples.

  A classical Roman would have felt that “his” history extended back to the beginning of the Republic in the 700s BC or in a cultural sense perhaps to the Trojan war sometime before that. Further back then that, it didn’t concern him.
  …
  But with China, there really is no choice: You have to study the whole damn thing to understand any of it.

• Mexico: The (drug) war within (npr, part 1 of 5)
  

  More than 3 1/2 years after Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched his war against the drug cartels, violence in Mexico continues to escalate, and 2010 is on track to be the deadliest year yet in a campaign that has already claimed some 25,000 lives.

• US Military creates US-Japanese relationship manga
• US support dropping in the Middle East
  

  
  
  

• 65 Years since Hiroshima: Accounts from Nuclear Blast Survivors
  

  TAKAKURA: No, no [The Black Rain] it didn’t. Maybe I didn’t catch enough rain, but I still felt very thirsty and there was nothing I could do about it. What I felt at that moment was that Hiroshima was entirely covered with only three colors. I remember red, black and brown, but, but, nothing else. Many people on the street were killed almost instantly. The fingertips of those dead bodies caught fire and the fire gradually spread over their entire bodies from their fingers.

  A light gray liquid dripped down their hands, scorching their fingers. I, I was so shocked to know that fingers and bodies could be burned and deformed like that. I just couldn’t believe it. It was horrible. And looking at it, it was more than painful for me to think how the fingers were burned, hands and fingers that would hold babies or turn pages, they just, they just burned away.

• Severe flooding in Pakistan (Photos, BigPicture)
• Flooding in Pakistan more devastating (but not more deadly) that 2004 Tsunami. (bbc)
• Pollution makes a quarter of China’s water unusable (reuters)
• Wildfires in Russia (article, Photos)
  

  Long inured to bitterly cold winters, when the mercury sometimes falls to minus 30 degrees Celsius, they have found the heat a much sterner adversary. Since mid-June, when the heatwave set in, more than 30,000 forest and underground peat bog fires have ignited across Russia’s giant Eurasian land mass.

• Humanizing those we help (AidWatch)
  

  My Ghanaian friends often tell me that if you want to understand Ghanaians at all, you have to understand how religious are most Ghanaians. I believed them of course, but it didn’t really become vivid until I attended the most amazing church service this morning.
  …
  I think it’s something about how to understand people’s behavior, you need to understand how they see themselves. A good guess is that the people in the congregation this morning, in one of the poorest regions of Ghana, do NOT see themselves primarily as “poor” or “developing”, they see themselves as Christians. Another guess is that similar feelings about religious faith would apply to other Ghanaians in other religious services, like Muslims, Catholics, traditional religions, etc.)

• Slum Tourism
  

  For a moment I saw my home through her eyes: feces, rats, starvation, houses so close together that no one can breathe. I realized I didn’t want her to see it, didn’t want to give her the opportunity to judge my community for its poverty — a condition that few tourists, no matter how well intentioned, could ever understand.

• What’s afoot in Iran?
  

  The sanctions are working; they’re having a major impact on the Iranian economy. The powerful bazaari community has been shocked not just by the universal support for the sanctions, but also by their comprehensive nature. Iranian ships are sitting at their docks because they international community is refusing to insure them. Banks that have done business with Iran in the past are refusing to do so now because the UN sanctions–that’s right, those “weak” UN sanctions–target them as well. The Iranian economy, a stagflation fiasco before the sanctions, is cracking.

  As a result, the Administration has been receiving all sorts of feelers–public and, for the first time, private–from the Iranians about resuming the negotiations on the nuclear program.

• China shuts down 2,000 energy inefficient factories (NYT)

Society

• The Pay and Sit Park Bench
  PAY & SIT: the private bench (HD) from Fabian Brunsing on Vimeo.
• Why online dating is so unsatisfying
  
• Polish prison tattoos (photos, mini-essay)
• The lies people tell in online dating (okcupid)
• Rent-a-friend
• New Media and the Breakup
  

  “People really are using all the ways in which these technologies give them access to different kinds of information about what’s going on, to try and figure out what’s going on,” Gershon said. “What I find really interesting about the break-up stories is that they were really detective stories.”

  Some people told Gershon they figured out who their former lovers were seeing by checking their Netflix queues and matching them against the movies that their suspected new lover listed as their favorites on Facebook. She also found a great deal of “Facebook stalking” and Google searching — by people on both sides of the failed relationship — to discern how “their exes were feeling about what happened and the aftermath.”

• Trader Joe’s owner Theo Albrecht dies
• Jeremy Lin, undrafted ex-Harvard shooting guard, signs with the Warriors
  

  “I understand my unique situation,” said Lin, who, as an undrafted free agent out of Harvard, signed a two-year deal with Golden State last week. “But I am playing because I love the game. I am not playing for other fans. I don’t think that is the right approach to the game. I appreciate everything they do, and I totally appreciate that support — I really do. But when I step on the floor it is going to be because I love the game, pure and simple.

  “When I put that pressure of pleasing everybody else, the Asian community and every other Asian, that’s when I lose my joy for playing the game and that is when it’s not fun for me anymore because I am playing for the wrong reasons,” added Lin, the son of Taiwanese immigrants. “It is impossible to please everybody.”

• How will you measure your life?
  

  On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys—but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.

• The unemployed: 99 weeks later (NYT)
  

  For them, the resolution recently of the lengthy Senate impasse over extending jobless benefits was no balm. The measure renewed two federal programs that extended jobless benefits in this recession beyond the traditional 26 weeks to anywhere from 60 to 99 weeks, depending on the state’s unemployment rate. But many jobless have now exceeded those limits. They are adjusting to a new, harsh reality with no income.

  In June, with long-term unemployment at record levels, about 1.4 million people were out of work for 99 weeks or more, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Not all of them received unemployment benefits, but for many of those who did, the modest payments were a lifeline that enabled them to maintain at least a veneer of normalcy, keeping a roof over their heads, putting gas in their cars, paying electric and phone bills.

• 40 billionaires pledge to donate half their wealth.
• Goodbye materialism, hello hedonism? (NYT)
  

  One major finding is that spending money for an experience — concert tickets, French lessons, sushi-rolling classes, a hotel room in Monaco — produces longer-lasting satisfaction than spending money on plain old stuff.
  …
  “A $20,000 increase in spending on leisure was roughly equivalent to the happiness boost one gets from marriage,” he said, adding that spending on leisure activities appeared to make people less lonely and increased their interactions with others.

• They don’t make students like they used to
  

  In 1961, the average full-time student at a four-year college in the United States studied about twenty-four hours per week, while his modern counterpart puts in only fourteen hours per week. Students now study less than half as much as universities claim to require.
  …
  Most of the decline predates the innovations in technology that are most relevant to education and thus was not driven by such changes. The most plausible explanation for these findings, we conclude, is that standards have fallen at postsecondary institutions in the United States.

Science and Technology

• Why mathematicians shouldn’t own lawnmowers (mowing patterns)
  
• Stories from the periodic table (intro, Antimony. Slate)
• How physiology affects running and swimming performance. And just for some controversy, racial differences in physiology.
• Louisiana’s artificial barrier islands are already breaking down. (photos)
• Automated parking systems
  
• Love is a like a drug
  

  For the study, Fisher explained, they chose 15 people who had been recently rejected from love and observed their brain functions in a brain scanner.

  “We found activity in a brain pathway that is exactly the same brain pathway that becomes affected when you’re profoundly addicted to cocaine and nicotine,” explained Fisher. “Brain regions associated with intense romantic love, physical pain and deep attachment. So, you’re craving this person. You’re madly in love with him. Deeply attached to them. You’re in physical pain. And you are obsessed with somebody.”

• The (partial) secrets of Mona Lisa
  

  Specialists from the Center for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France found that da Vinci painted up to 30 layers of paint on his works to meet his standards of subtlety. Added up, all the layers are less than 40 micrometers, or about half the thickness of a human hair, researcher Philippe Walter said Friday.

  The technique, called “sfumato,” allowed da Vinci to give outlines and contours a hazy quality and create an illusion of depth and shadow. His use of the technique is well-known, but scientific study on it has been limited because tests often required samples from the paintings.

• “Artificial” blood developed
  

  The blood is made from hematopoietic stem cells from discarded human umbilical cords, which are turned into large quantities of red blood cells by a method called “blood pharming” that mimics the functions of bone marrow. Pharming is a method of using genetically engineered plants or animals to create medically useful substances in large quantities. Using this process the cells from one umbilical cord can produce about 20 units of blood, which is enough for over three transfusions for injured soldiers in the field.

• Solar powered carbon capture
  

  As the scientists explain, the process uses visible sunlight to power an electrolysis cell for splitting carbon dioxide, and also uses solar thermal energy to heat the cell in order to decrease the energy required for this conversion process. The electrolysis cell splits carbon dioxide into either solid carbon (when the reaction occurs at temperatures between 750°C and 850°C) or carbon monoxide (when the reaction occurs at temperatures above 950°C).

• Gulf Oil Spill model visualizations
• The actual health effects of the oil dispersant Corexit are unknown, but I doubt you’d want to eat it.
  

  Scientists have found signs of an oil-and-dispersant mix under the shells of tiny blue crab larvae in the Gulf of Mexico, the first clear indication that the unprecedented use of dispersants in the BP oil spill has broken up the oil into toxic droplets so tiny that they can easily enter the foodchain.

• A peek into the emotional state of pigs
• How to feed a hungry world (Nature)
  

  Easy, that is, if the world brings into play swathes of extra land, spreads still more fertilizers and pesticides, and further depletes already scarce groundwater supplies. But clearing hundreds of millions of hectares of wildlands — most of the land that would be brought into use is in Latin America and Africa — while increasing today’s brand of resource-intensive, environmentally destructive agriculture is a poor option. Therein lies the real challenge in the coming decades: how to expand agricultural output massively without increasing by much the amount of land used.

• Girl folds paper 12 times
• Ecuador receives $3.6 bil to not drill for oil
  

  Ecuador is now set to receive $3.6 billion for leaving it in the ground. In a UN agreement that’s the first of its kind, the country has committed to not drill in its Yasuni National Park — one of the most biologically-diverse corners of the Amazon rainforest — in exchange for a payment from wealthier nations. “The trust fund that we have just established is historic, not only for Ecuador but for the entire world,” says one UN official.

• Gulf might be able to recover from the oil spill
  

  The Gulf of Mexico’s impressive self-cleanup makes sense given its history and makeup. The Gulf regularly absorbs environmental insults: overfishing, trawlers raking sea floors, frequent hurricanes. And then there’s the dead zone, an area starved of oxygen because 40 percent of America’s runoff pours from the Mississippi River into the Gulf.
  oil-sheen-feather. Scientists are optimistic about the long-term recovery of the Gulf of Mexico. The currents and drainage are right to flush and dilute tainted water. And the Gulf has long been exposed to natural gas, oil and a host of other contaminants.

  And yet the Gulf remains America’s most biologically diverse place, with 15,419 species. It is the nation’s buffet of life as well as its gas station and septic tank.

  It’s too soon to know the full effects of the BP oil spill disaster. But to get a sense of where the Gulf has been and where it’s going, the Associated Press surveyed 75 scientists about the health of the Gulf of Mexico before the spill. On a 0-to-100 scale, the scientists graded its general health a 71 on average. That’s a respectable C, considering 100 would be considered pristine and untouched by civilization.

• Gamers: masters of fast-twitch muscle control and pattern recognition in protein-folding?
  

  Though very few of those who played Foldit had any significant background in biochemistry, the gamers tended to beat Rosetta when it came to solving structures. In a series of ten challenges, they outperformed the algorithms on five and drew even on another three.
  ….
  That’s not to say the Rosetta algorithm didn’t play a valuable role in Foldit. Humans turn out to be really bad at starting from a simple linear chain of amino acids; they need a rough idea of what the protein might look like before they can recognize patterns to optimize. Given a set of 10 potential structures produced by Rosetta, however, the best players were very adept at picking the one closest to the optimal configuration.

• Awesome, but I’m not certain how this doesn’t violate Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Scientists observe electrons moving
• Scientists regrow bone
  

  Wooley’s team inserted a rod to hold the separated pieces together, then wrapped the rod in a porous scaffolding of composite material suggested to them by a local composites manufacturer affiliated with the aviation industry in Wichita.
  …
  Something like this project had been mentioned as theory, and had been the subject of some experiments by others.

  But it had never been done successfully with aviation composites, Wooley said.
  …
  In only six weeks, bone and even blood vessels grew through the matrix of material and reconnected the two separated cuts, Wooley said.

Fun

• Japanese modded cars (Photos)
• Stop Motion Graffiti 2
  
• The secret ingredient is…
  
• Remember these? Garbage Pail Kids
• These are so nerdily cute: DNA/RNA base pair friendship necklaces
• World’s wildest water slides (PopMech)
• Concept art for Captain America and Thor
• Dubai water fountains set to Baba Yetu (ie, the Lord’s Prayer / best title song music ever, Civ IV)
  
• Custom Japanese Scooters
• Great Metro Maps of the World
• The hidden views of Washington (Photos)
• Crap at my parents’ house (Photos)

In the intervening years, I’ve taken a golf PE class at college (3 hrs total) and gone to the driving range a handful of times. To say that I am a n00b would be an understatement.

That said, my 2 hours in the company of 3 friends yielded a number of thoughts for those of you who are just starting out like me.

The Insights
Hole 1: Golf is a game about form

Hole 2: Golf is a game about consistency

Hole 3: Accuracy is worth more than distance (unless you are putting)

The Practical
Hole 4: Get a golf cart. You’ll be spending a lot of time chasing wayward balls

Hole 5: Reduce the number of clubs you use. Each new club is just another variable for your body to have to adjust to.

Hole 6: Go with one good person (who can help spot balls and bail you out if you play “best ball”) and one other novice (who you can commiserate with.)

The Meta
Hole 7: Have fun

Hole 8: Set realistic goals

Hole 9: It’s just a game

The Reality
The Driving Range: Golf costs money. $100 for clubs, $5 for trips to the driving range, $10-30 each time out.

Chip and Putt: Teaching yourself is hard. After going to the driving range 4-5 times in the past few weeks, I’ve resigned myself that I’m either going to have to make a new friend (any readers out there teach golf? =b) or shell out for lessons (which also cost money).

 
]]> http://www.hermyt.com/wordpress/2010/08/10/sub-par-thoughts/feed/ 0 http://www.hermyt.com/wordpress/2010/08/10/sub-par-thoughts/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/hermyt/~3/ImV9V9vJov8/ http://www.hermyt.com/wordpress/2010/07/10/photoblog-midland-edition/#comments Sat, 10 Jul 2010 19:38:20 +0000 admin http://www.hermyt.com/wordpress/?p=787 As per the requests of mmok and mboyden, here is the (cropped) view of a standard issue sunset off to the left of my balcony here in Midland. Thunderstorm sunsets are breathtaking. One of these days, I will post a photo of the view of the outside my window in Chicago for comparison.

Midland Sunset
Nikon d40, 55mm, f/5.6, 1/60s, ISO1600, as shot
(don’t ask me why I was shooting in 1600. I don’t know.)

I also tried my hand at some astrophotography off my balcony last night (something that is nigh-impossible to do in Chicago). Fun diversion for a night, but I don’t think it’ll become a full-time hobby without a real tripod and a field. Plus I don’t need yet-another-excuse to deprive myself of sleep. Nikon d40, 35mm/f1.8, 10-30s exposures, Lightroom adjusted (enhanced blacks)

The Big Dipper (outlined)

The wee-bitty Dipper (outlined)

Cygnus the Swan (outlined)
(or at least the Great Northern Cross part of her)

The Milky Way (outlined)
(sort of.  It’s hard to pick up on the photo.)

Midland: Not nearly as exciting as Chicago, but there’s something to be said about clear-ish skies (there’s still a decent amount of light pollution here) and good farmer’s markets. Speaking of which, anyone have a good recipe for fresh shelled sweet peas?

Things in the news: World Cup! Kagan, McChrystal, BP Oil Spill (slowly fading), Economic falterings, July 4th, and did I mention the World Cup? (Oh, I suppose Wimbledon as well. And the Tour de France. And the Lebron James Sweepstakes.)

Here’s your top 5

1. The Renegade General (McChrystal)(RollingStone)
2. Kagan hearing write-ups.
3. Who’s a scientist? 7th graders describe and draw scientists after a visit to Fermilab
4. James Sturm is quitting the internet
5. Life inside the North Korean bubble (BBC + video, 15 min, worth watching)

The Oil Spill / Environment

• Regulations + bad regulators = no regulations
  

  The company responded that it applies for permits to drill oil wells “in accordance with the process prescribed by MMS officials,” but goes on to say that it was not “MMS practice” to require anyone to comply with that particular section of the law.

  “I find it very disturbing that BP asserts that the ‘practice’ in oil drilling is to avoid current laws designed to keep our beaches safe,” Grassley responded in his letter. “And I am outraged that MMS is looking the other way.”

• Coal’s toxic sludge (Rolling Stone)
  

  When you burn it, coal releases monstrous quantities of deadly compounds and gases — and it all has to go somewhere. The worst of the waste — heavy metals like arsenic, cadmium and mercury, all of which are highly toxic — are concentrated in the ash that’s left over after coal is burned or in the dirty sludge that’s scrubbed from smokestacks. Each year, coal plants in the U.S. churn out nearly 140 million tons of coal ash — more than 900 pounds for every American — generating the country’s second-largest stream of industrial waste, surpassed only by mining. If you piled all the coal ash on a single football field, it would create a toxic mountain more than 20 miles high.

• Fracking: The dirty side to natural gas
  

  “Fracking,” as it’s colloquially known, involves injecting millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals, many of them toxic, into the earth at high pressures to break up rock formations and release natural gas trapped inside.

• Aerial footage of the oil slick
  
• The “What went wrong” chart for the BP Oil Spill (FP)
• Oil spill impact (interactive map)

Politics and Policy

• Atul Gawande’s Commencement Speech to the Stanford School of Medicine
  

  You come into medicine and science at a time of radical transition. You have met the older doctors and scientists who tell the pollsters that they wouldn’t choose their profession if they were given the choice all over again. But you are the generation that was wise enough to ignore them: for what you are hearing is the pain of people experiencing an utter transformation of their world. Doctors and scientists are now being asked to accept a new understanding of what great medicine requires. It is not just the focus of an individual artisan-specialist, however skilled and caring. And it is not just the discovery of a new drug or operation, however effective it may seem in an isolated trial. Great medicine requires the innovation of entire packages of care—with medicines and technologies and clinicians designed to fit together seamlessly, monitored carefully, adjusted perpetually, and shown to produce ever better service and results for people at the lowest possible cost for society.

• The Renegade General (McChrystal)(RollingStone)
• The Media-Lobbying Complex
  

  The first step, Ridge explained, was to “create nuclear power plants.” Combined with some waste coal and natural gas extraction, you would have an “innovation setter” that would “create jobs, create exports.”

  As Ridge counseled the administration to “put that package together,” he sure seemed like an objective commentator. But what viewers weren’t told was that since 2005, Ridge has pocketed $530,659 in executive compensation for serving on the board of Exelon, the nation’s largest nuclear power company.
  …
  Moments earlier, retired general and “NBC Military Analyst” Barry McCaffrey told viewers that the war in Afghanistan would require an additional “three- to ten-year effort” and “a lot of money.” Unmentioned was the fact that DynCorp paid McCaffrey $182,309 in 2009 alone.
  …
  In a single hour, two men with blatant, undisclosed conflicts of interest had appeared on MSNBC.

• Kagan hearing write-ups.
  

  Simply put, this squat, henny-penny little woman has TV-star quality: mobile features, a mischievous smile, all-but-unshakeable poise, and an infectious giggle. (I once read a theory that people who look like Muppets do best on television. Can’t you picture Elena Kagan singing “O is for Opinion” with Oscar the Grouch?)

  Kagan has been able, seemingly without trying, to dominate a room full of silver-haired senators. That’s an accomplishment, of course: but what’s more impressive is that she’s doing it without breaking a sweat.

• Is unemployment insurance stimulative? (ResearchDesk)
  

  Mark Zandi of Moody’s comparison of the per-dollar impact of various stimulus policies.
  …
  With that process, Zandi estimated that each dollar spent on extending unemployment benefits generated $1.61 in economic growth. Extending benefits had the third-greatest bang-for-the-buck of any component in the stimulus package, after increasing food stamps and subsidizing work-sharing, both temporary measures. To quote Zandi, “No form of the fiscal stimulus has proved more effective during the past two years than emergency UI benefits.”

• Does inequality cause financial instability? (Krugman slides, Klein comments)
  

  Krugman says that he used to dismiss talk that inequality contributed to crises, but then we reached Great Depression-era levels of inequality in 2007 and promptly had a crisis, so now he takes it a bit more seriously.

  The problem, he says, is finding a mechanism. Krugman brings up underconsumption (wherein the working class borrows a lot of money because all the money is going to the rich) and overconsumption (in which the rich spend and that makes the next-most rich spend and so on, until everyone is spending too much to keep up with rich people whose incomes are growing much faster than everyone else’s).

World

• Impact of North Korea’s currency devaluation (NYT)
  

  And then, one Saturday afternoon last November, his sister burst into his apartment in Chongjin with shocking news: the North Korean government had decided to drastically devalue the nation’s currency. The family’s life savings, about $1,560, had been reduced to about $30.

• Life inside the North Korean bubble (BBC + video, 15 min, worth watching)
  

  Instead, the North Koreans have a special internal intranet which I was shown at Pyongyang University.

  A postgraduate metallurgy student who spoke good English explained that he could not compare his research with a fellow student in say, London or Los Angeles, because the system would not let him.

  But, he added brightly, “the Dear leader has kindly put all we need to know on our intranet system”.

  At the university’s foreign language department I asked the students how they had managed to learn such good English.

  “Thanks to the Great Leader,” one young man replied, “we are allowed to watch English and American films, like The Sound of Music.”

• Female anti-rape condoms (cnn)
• US Food Aid policies create 561 jobs in Kansas, risk millions of lives around the world
  

  I read recently the First Law of Policy Economics: Every inefficiency is someone’s income.
  …
  Second, current US food aid policies are NOT an effective or efficient way for the US to achieve what should rightly be the primary objective for food aid. According to the government’s own accountability office, buying food locally in sub-Saharan Africa (which is where the majority of US food aid goes) costs 34 percent less than shipping it from the US, AND gets there on average more than 100 days more quickly, AND is more likely to be the kind of food people are used to eating. I am not arguing that cash aid is ALWAYS better than food aid, only that any reasonable food aid policy would allow aid agencies the flexibility to determine what kind of assistance works best in each situation.

• Profile of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah (FP)
  

  Yet, despite the new levels of openness enjoyed by Saudi citizens, Abdullah is not leading the kingdom on the path to political liberalism. Just the opposite: While making small social and economic concessions, the king is in fact turning the clock back in Arabia, using his popularity to confront clergy and restore the kind of unchecked authority his family enjoyed in the 1970s.

• One Laptop Per Child: Update from Rwanda
  

  The President wants to make Rwanda a technology and services hub — another tall order considering that just 7% of the country’s 11 million people currently have electricity. And that, curiously enough, is where the laptops come in. He and OLPC proponents hope the computers will both teach the students the language of technology and offer them a way to chase down simple information they lack but which kids in rich nations take for granted.
  …
  the per-laptop price of $181 is also more than half the average Rwandan’s annual income. Skeptics of the OLPC program ask why Rwanda and other poor countries should spend so much money on the program’s specially designed XO laptops when teachers often earn less than $100 a month.

  Indeed, Rwanda’s poverty has thrown up some unexpected challenges to the OLPC vision. One of the program’s key principles is to involve children more in their own education by giving each of them their own laptop to take home each night. But for now, the two schools in Kigali that use the laptops keep them locked up after the school day. One problem has been that parents say that they do not want to be held responsible if the laptops are lost or stolen. Several students have sold their laptops to unscrupulous buyers for less than $10 — to the kids and their parents, still an enormous sum.

• Parasites, Disease and Intelligence (Economist)
  

  They note that the brains of newly born children require 87% of those children’s metabolic energy. In five-year-olds the figure is still 44% and even in adults the brain—a mere 2% of the body’s weight—consumes about a quarter of the body’s energy. Any competition for this energy is likely to damage the brain’s development, and parasites and pathogens compete for it in several ways.

Science

• Who’s a scientist? 7th graders describe and draw scientists after a visit to Fermilab
• Self Folding “Origami” Sheets (MIT/Harvard)
• How what we touch affects our decision-making
  

  Weight is linked to importance, so that people carrying heavy objects deem interview candidates as more serious and social problems as more pressing. Texture is linked to difficulty and harshness. Touching rough sandpaper makes social interactions seem more adversarial, while smooth wood makes them seem friendlier. Finally, hardness is associated with rigidity and stability. When sitting on a hard chair, negotiators take tougher stances but if they sit on a soft one instead, they become more flexible.

Society

• Interview with Hephzibah Anderson, author of Chastened (theAtlantic)
  

  Hephzibah Anderson is an attractive, successful British journalist in her early 30s who enjoys a life of jet-setting between London, New York, and Paris. And after ringing in her 30th birthday, she swore off sex for a year.
  …
  And I’m in no way advocating for the clock to be turned back, but I think that a lot of women know that they have the right to say no, but actually feeling like they have the right to say no in certain situations is a quite different thing.

• 10 most important things they don’t teach you in school (cracked, humor)
• Science: showing you why you didn’t get in to the club, since 2010. (Kellogg)
• 14 long lost (thankfully) 90’s trends
• Women, childbirth rates, and education
• Gender-segregated classrooms
  

  Regardless of the mixed research, the interest in single-sex classrooms shows just how desperate teachers and administrators are to find a cure to the oft-lamented “problem with boys.” By just about every metric, boys are, and have been for perhaps a decade, lagging tremendously behind girls in terms of academic achievement. They consistently score lower GPAs, college-admissions rates, and fare worse in reading and writing. And it’s not just a problem for them; their scores aren’t helping the country’s plummeting academic ranking as compared to the rest of the developed world.

  The gender gap goes far beyond high school. Today, women make up nearly 60 percent of college students and they’re much more likely to go on to pursue advanced degrees.

• The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
  

  Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.”

  It became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect — our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence.

• Hummus catches on in the US (NYT)
  

  In 2000, Holy Land introduced hummus flecked with jalapeño. More recently, the company, which makes about 100,000 plastic tubs of hummus each month for the Midwest market, rolled out guacamole-flavored hummus. By August, its blend of hummus and peanut butter will hit the shelves. “That one is for my daughter, Noor,” Mr. Wadi said. “She didn’t think she liked hummus. Then we stirred in peanut butter.”

• The high cost of kids (Tribune)
  

  The grand total for middle-income parents raising one child from birth to age 17 is $222,360, which doesn’t include college tuition, according to the recently released U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2009 Expenditures on Children by Families report.
  …
  “Annual child-rearing expense estimates ranged between $11,650 and $13,530 for a child in a two-child, married-couple family in the middle-income group,” the report’s abstract says.

• Kobayashi retires (!)
• Gail Dines: The implications of the modern-day ‘Pornland’
  

  Boys and men don’t realize the power they’re giving away to pornography. They don’t understand the power it has to shape who they are, their sexuality, and their sexual identity. In this culture, we think of pornography as a joke or something to laugh about. We don’t take it seriously as a source of information that has the ability and power to impact on the way we think about the world. Most boys and men go to pornography for an ejaculation; they come away with a lot more. I don’t think they’re quite aware of it.

  Pornography, like all images, tells stories about the world. It tells stories about women, men, sexuality, and intimacy.

• James Sturm is quitting the internet
• Rory Sutherland: Small solutions to big problems: “The impact of a solution is often inversely proportional to the money and effort to implement it.”
  

Fun

• The origin of the word “soccer”
  

  Now British school boys of the day liked to nickname everything, which is still somewhat common. They also liked to add the ending “er” to these nicknames. Thus Rugby was, at that time, popularly called “Rugger”. Association Football was then much better known as “Assoccer”, which quickly just became “Soccer” and sometimes “Soccer Football”.

• X-ray scans of toys (gallery)
• FIFA World Cup in Pictures (Big Picture)
• The geek hierarchy (pdf)
• (Hockey) Fight School
  

  Tom segued into hockey fighting’s rules of engagement: 1. Never fight with your visor on. 2. Don’t antagonize only to back down. 3. Star players have immunity. 4. Enforcers only battle other enforcers. 5. No trash talk if you can avoid it.

• Nation’s boyfriends dreading ‘free event in the park‘ season (theOnion)
• Bulwer-Lytton (aka bad fiction) prose contest
  

  The Winner:
  For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss–a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.

  Molly Ringle
  Seattle, WA

• MC Escher in Lego
  
• How Crayolas are made
  (pics, videos)
• Fireworks display (photos)

Topics in the news: Israel, Gaza, BP, World Cup, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan

Must reads over the past two weeks

1. Countdown to the BP disaster (GQ)
2. What if political scientists wrote the news? (Salon)
3. Science Funding: The “Broader Impacts” requirement (Nature)
4. Solitude and Leadership (delivered at West Point)
5. What is Israel blockading, really? (graphic, analysis)

And…one for fun BP coffee spill.

BP Oil Spill

• Birds: Victims of the Oil Spill (Big Picture)
• BP coffee spill
• Massive Flow of Bullshit Continues to Gush from BP Headquarters (theonion)
• BP spill: overlaid on your hometown
• BP’s history of OSHA violations (graphic)
• Failures leading to the BP oil spill (WaPo)
  

  Mr. Hayward and BP have taken the position that this tragedy is all about a fail-safe blow-out preventer (BOP) failing, but in reality the BOP is really the backup system, and yes we expect that it will work. However, all of the industry practice and construction systems are aimed at ensuring that one never has to use that device.

  …

  This well failed its casing integrity test and nothing was done. The data collected during a critical operation to monitor hydrocarbon inflow was ignored and nothing was done. This spill is about human failure and it is time BP put its hand up and admitted that.

• Countdown to the BP disaster (GQ)
• How to clean a pelican

Policy

• Lawmakers’ investments and policy interests (article, graphic)
  

  In 2008, while advocating for the United States to reinstate a gold standard, he (Ron Paul) reported owning up to $1.5 million in shares of at least nine gold-production companies. In addition, he disclosed up to $200,000 in silver stocks. In all, those holdings represented close to half of his assets.

  …

  Judges cannot rule in cases involving companies in which they own stock, and executive branch officials must sell assets in industries they regulate or put them in blind trusts. By contrast, long-standing ethics rules for Congress generally leave it up lawmakers to decide whether their holdings pose a conflict and whether they should recuse themselves from a vote.

• The true cost of oil (Klein)
  

  Some of the best work on this subject has been done by Ian Parry, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future. … it should be as high as $4.60.

  Oil might be cheap compared to its true costs, but adding those costs in wouldn’t make it unaffordable. That gets to the bigger issue, which is that energy sources are only cheap or expensive relative to one another. And the anchor beneath our reliance on oil is that, at this point, there’s nothing to replace it. “We’re pretty much stuck with our dependency on oil,” says Parry. “People need to drive and get to work.”

• The Hitchhikers Guide to Risk (Douglas Adams, HT Klein)
  

  It was, of course, as a result of the Great Ventilation and Telephone Riots srDt 3454 that all mechanical or electrical or quantum-mechanical or hydraulic or even wind-, steam-, or piston-driven devices, are now required to have a certain legend emblazoned on them somewhere. It doesn’t matter how small the object is, the designers of the object have to find a way of squeezing the legend in somewhere, because it is their attention that is being drawn to it rather than the user’s.

  The legend is this: “The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

• Tariffs hurt the poor more than the rich.
  

  The disparities are staggering. In his research, Gresser found that the tariff rate on a cashmere sweater is 4 percent; the rate for one made of much cheaper acrylic is 32 percent. A silk brassiere has a tariff rate of less than 3 percent, but the rate on a polyester one is slightly less than 17 percent. The tariff rate on a snakeskin handbag is just over 5 percent but climbs to 16 percent for one made of canvas. Similar variations occur when it comes to household goods. Drinking glasses that cost more than $5 each have a tariff of 3 percent, while those that cost less than 30 cents each have a rate of 28.5 percent. A silk pillowcase has a rate of 4.5 percent; this goes up to nearly 15 percent for one made of polyester.

• The obvious budget deal (Klein)
  

  The right move for deficit hawks would be to release a proposal that pairs a generous jobs bill with serious long-term reforms (for instance, a bill providing $300 billion in immediate stimulus and also lowering the cap on the mortgage interest deduction, bringing back the full estate tax and cutting defense spending). This moment, viewed correctly, actually offers a substantial opportunity for long-term deficit reduction because the need for short-term deficit spending gives hawks a bargaining chip that will bring liberals to the table. But no one seems interested in offering that deal.

• How laws are made (graphic)
• Why we don’t prepare for disasters (WaPo)
  

  Two final problems illuminate our vulnerability to such risks. First, it is very hard for anyone to be rewarded for preventing a low-probability disaster.

  …

  The second problem is that there are so many risks of disaster that they can’t all be addressed without bankrupting the world many times over. In fact, they can’t even be anticipated.

• Should capital gains receive a lower tax rate? (TheAtlantic)

Science

• Science Funding: The “Broader Impacts” requirement (Nature)
  

  Research-funding agencies are forever trying to balance two opposing forces: scientists’ desire to be left alone to do their research, and society’s demand to see a return on its investment.

  …

  But no agency has gone as far as the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which will not even consider a proposal unless it explicitly includes activities to demonstrate the project’s ‘broader impacts’ on science or society at large. “The criterion was established to get scientists out of their ivory towers and connect them to society,” explains Arden Bement, director of the NSF in Arlington, Virginia.

  Unfortunately, good intentions are not enough to guarantee success, says Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, a physicist at the University of Texas in Dallas who is active in popular science writing and other forms of outreach.

• Relative sizes of space objects

World

• What is Israel blockading, really? (graphic, analysis)
• Which countries are the most content?
• Bill Easterly on the the diversity of $2 a day (video, 8 min)
• UNHCR Refugee data 2010
• Iran, 1 year later (Klein)

Society

• Deadly: The Televised Food Diet (Time)
  

  When the research team calculated the nutritional content of a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet containing only foods that were advertised on television, they found that it exceeded the government’s recommended daily amount of fat by 20 times and had 25 times the recommended daily intake of sugar.

• 12 Financial Concepts you should know
• Cyber-athletes or just computer-gamers?
  

  One leading gamer in his twenties appeared to be slim and healthy with a physique similar to an endurance athlete.

  But tests revealed he in fact had the lung function and aerobic fitness of a heavy smoker in his sixties.

• What is happiness? (TED, 17 min)
  

  “Below 60,000 dollars a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. I mean I’ve rarely seen lines so flat.”

  “Clearly… money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery,” he said. But the real trick, Kahneman said, is to spend time with people you like.

• Why is $60K enough to make you happy?
• Profile of Julian Assange, Founder of Wikileaks (New Yorker)
• What if political scientists wrote the news? (Salon)
  

  Prospects for an energy bill, meanwhile, are looking grim, since Obama has spent all his political capital. He used to have a lot. Now it’s gone. Why winning legislative battles builds momentum but saps political capital, I have no idea. Just go with it.

• Pricey grocery stores have skinnier shoppers
  

  The percentage of food shoppers who are obese is almost 10 times higher at low-cost grocery stores compared with upscale markets, a small new study shows.

• A sociologist writes the news
• Interracial Marriage: We’re all gonna be mutts (Pew, graphic, excerpts)
  

  A record 14.6% of all new marriages in the United States in 2008 were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from one another. This includes marriages between a Hispanic and non-Hispanic (Hispanics are an ethnic group, not a race) as well as marriages between spouses of different races — be they white, black, Asian, American Indian or those who identify as being of multiple races or “some other” race.

  Among all newlyweds in 2008, 9% of whites, 16% of blacks, 26% of Hispanics and 31% of Asians married someone whose race or ethnicity was different from their own.

  Gender patterns in intermarriage vary widely. Some 22% of all black male newlyweds in 2008 married outside their race, compared with just 9% of black female newlyweds. Among Asians, the gender pattern runs the other way. Some 40% of Asian female newlyweds married outside their race in 2008, compared with just 20% of Asian male newlyweds. Among whites and Hispanics, by contrast, there are no gender differences in intermarriage rates.

• The Sperm Donor Kids aren’t as all right (slate)
  

  The results are surprising. While adoption is often the center of controversy, it turns out that sperm donation raises a host of different but equally complex—and sometimes troubling—issues. Two-thirds of adult donor offspring agree with the statement “My sperm donor is half of who I am.” Nearly half are disturbed that money was involved in their conception. More than half say that when they see someone who resembles them, they wonder if they are related. About two-thirds affirm the right of donor offspring to know the truth about their origins.

• US intra-state migration (Forbes)

Fun

• World Cup Posters
• Top 10 South African terms to know for the World Cup
• Venues of the 2010 World Cup (SI, photos)
• Photos from the Stanley Cup (Tribune)
• 10 Teams to watch in the World Cup
• Solitude and Leadership (delivered at West Point)
  

  I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.

• Music Without Borders @ Millennium Park – Thursdays, 6:30-9:30p, June 3 – July 22
• Downtown Sound: New Music Mondays @ Millennium Park – 6:30-9p, May 24 – July 26
• Made in Chicago: World Class Jazz @ Millennium Park – Thursdays, 6:30p, July 29 – Sept 2
• The Grant Park Music Festival @ Millennium Park Varies, June 15 – August 21
• Chicago Summerdance – Free Outdoor Dancing with Live Music and Lessons @ 601 S. Michigan Ave. Thursday, Friday and Saturday evening, 6 to 9:30 pm, and Sunday afternoon, 4 to 7 pm, weather-permitting. Free. June 17 – August 28
• Ravinia – outdoor music venue, various
• Chicago Festival Calendar @ Metromix
• The Art Institute – Free Thursday Evenings, 5-9p
• Hot Summer Nights @ Chicago Botanic Gardens – Free Music and Dance Lessons, Thursdays 6-8p, June 10 – Sept 2
• Let’s Dance! @ 909 Davis St Plaza (Metra, Evanston) – Free Music and Dance Lessons, Thursdays 6-9p, July 15 – Aug 19
• Official City of Chicago Festivals (Blues, Taste, Air and Water, Jazz, Viva!, Country Music)
• Chicago Festivals
• Maxwell St. Market – Sundays, 7a-3p
• Chicago Arts District 2nd Fridays Gallery Night – Near 18th and Halsted, 6-8p
• Tuesdays on the Terrace – Live Jazz @ Museum of Contemporary Art. Free (and free adm to the museum itself on tuesdays!), Tuesdays 5:30 – 8p, June 1 – Sept 28

And of course, there are the always handy Chicago Reader, NewCity, and TheOnion weeklies to help you keep tabs on some of the smaller events. (film festivals @ Gene Siskel, outdoor Shakespeare, theater performances, etc.) Have fun exploring the city!

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Top 5

1. The inside story on how health care reform got enacted (Cohn)
2. Obama vs Wall Street (NYMag)
3. The Race to the Top: Education Reform and Teachers Unions (NYT)
4. Video from 25 feet below the oil slick. (abc)
5. Saving the Rust Belt (Reason)

US Politics

• Why everyone hates the government (Bernstein)
  

  “Why do Americans, seemingly regardless of party affiliation or geographic location, despise the political establishment?”

  That’s easy! The key to public opinion, especially when it’s about abstractions divorced from practical day-to-day life, is that it follows opinion leaders. And all opinion leaders in America are against the establishment. In fact, no opinion leaders in America will admit to being part of the establishment!

• The inside story on how health care reform got enacted (Cohn)
  

  Obama had come to view this debate as a proxy for the deepest, most systemic crises facing the country. It was a test, really: Could the country still solve its most vexing problems? If he abandoned comprehensive reform, he would be conceding that the United States was, on some level, ungovernable. Besides, several aides recall him saying, “I feel lucky.”

• Obama vs Wall Street (NYMag)
  

  But one of the city’s most successful hedge-fund hotshots offers a different surmise: “The majority of Wall Street thinks, ‘Hey, you lent us money. We did a trade. We paid you back. When you had me down, you could have crushed me, you could have done whatever you wanted. You didn’t do it! So stop your bitching and stop telling me I owe you, because I already paid you everything! The fact that I’m making money now is because I’m smarter than you!’ I think that’s where you’ve got this massive disconnect. In simple human terms, the government is saying, ‘I saved your life, and all you did was thank me once. You should be calling me every day: Thank you. Thank you.’ The guy who saved the life expects more. And the guy whose life is saved says, ‘I already thanked you!’?”

• Kagan and executive powers
  

  “She clearly thinks that greater presidential control over the bureaucracy is a good thing because it can bring vigor to government,” said David F. Engstrom, a Stanford law professor of administrative law. “She thinks that is important in light of political gridlock in Washington.”

• The Race to the Top: Education Reform and Teachers Unions (NYT)
  

  Same building. Same community. Sometimes even the same parents. And the classrooms have almost exactly the same number of students. In fact, the charter school averages a student or two more per class. This calculus challenges the teachers unions’ and Perkins’s “resources” argument — that hiring more teachers so that classrooms will be smaller makes the most difference. (That’s also the bedrock of the union refrain that what’s good for teachers — hiring more of them — is always what’s good for the children.) Indeed, the core of the reformers’ argument, and the essence of the Obama approach to the Race to the Top, is that a slew of research over the last decade has discovered that what makes the most difference is the quality of the teachers and the principals who supervise them. Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University of Washington, reported, “The effect of increases in teacher quality swamps the impact of any other educational investment, such as reductions in class size.”

• Libertarianism 2.0
  

  Yet that’s precisely why Paul’s 1.0 argument breaks down on its own terms: at the scene of a four-century crime against humanity—the kidnap, torture, enslavement, and legal oppression of African-Americans—ideal theory fails. We libertarians, never burdened with an excess of governing power, have always had a utopian streak, a penchant for imagining what rich organic order would bubble up from the choices of free and equal citizens governed by a lean state enforcing a few simple rules. We tend to envision societies that, if not perfect, are at least consistently libertarian.
  …
  Libertarians need to think harder about how our principles should degrade elegantly, how they can guide us through a fallen world where the live political options seldom afford a full escape from injustice.

• 3 common policyl arguments (Bernstein)
  

  1. “The government” vs. the people
  2. Congress vs. the presidency
  3. The bureaucracy vs. elected officials.

• Libertarians and Racism (TNC)
  

  It’s not so much that they hate you, it’s they are shocked–shocked–to discoveIt’s not so much that they hate you, it’s they are shocked–shocked–to discover that some of their fellow travelers hate you. When discussing them, all bloggers are required to begin their missives by quickly dispensing with with the “Are they racist?” strawman. Answering in the affirmative has been outlawed in polite company, where there are no actual racists. And so we are left, as I’ve said, with imbecility as an explanation, and a much more troubling query–”Are they stupid?” (”Are you so stupid that you would allow racist newsletters to be published in your name?” “Are you so stupid that you would have a campaign manager with “Happy Nigger day” on his Myspace page?”)

• What’s up with Rasmussen’s polling? (538, Chait add’l commentary 1, 2)
  

  If, on the other hand, this is a feature rather than a bug, it requires a more robust explanation from Rasmussen. It is not sufficient, after all, to believe that Rasmussen is getting it right: you also have to believe that almost everyone else is getting it wrong.

  Their use of a likely voter model alone is not sufficient to explain the differences. Citing Rasmussen’s success in calling past election outcomes, which is formidable, is also somewhat non-responsive, since their house effect was not so substantial in past election cycles. Moreover, most objective attempts to rate pollsters, including ours, rely on an evaluation of the accuracy of polls in the week or two immediately preceding an election (when pollsters have strong incentives to “behave” themselves). They may reveal little or nothing about the accuracy of polls months ahead of one.

• Strains of conservatism: Fight for the GOP’s soul (Slate)
  

  One way to understand the divisions in the Republican Party is as a clash of regional philosophies. Northeastern conservatism is moderate, accepts the modern welfare state, and dislikes mixing religion with politics. Western conservatism is hawkish, hates government, and embraces individual freedom. Southern conservatism is populist, draws on evangelical Christianity, and plays upon racial resentments.

BP Oil Spill

• Diving through the BP oil slick
  

  But what worries Dr Shaw most is the long-term potential for toxic chemicals to build up in the food chain. “There are hundreds of organic compounds in oil, including toxic solvents and PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), that can cause cancer in animals and people. In this respect light, sweet crude is more toxic than the heavy stuff. It’s not only the acute effects, the loss of whole niches in the food web, it’s also the problems we will see with future generations, especially in top predators.”

• Oil from the BP disaster reaches shore (photos, BigPicture)
• Video from 25 feet below the oil slick. (abc)
• The time evolution of the extent of the BP Oil Spill (animation)
• Bill Nye answers questions about the BP Oil Spill (nothing new, but still interesting)

World

• COIN Symposium Recap Part 1, 2, 3, 3.5, 4, 4.5, 5
• Reality TV and the Arab World (Part 1, 2)

Science and Technology

• The power of the interwebs: potential human trafficking = foiled!
  

  Late Wednesday night, Kathrine Gutierrez Hinds, 24, came across a frightening story—unfolding in real time on an online message board—about two young Russian women who, by the looks of it, were about to unwittingly become hostesses at a seedy nightclub. Now, less than 48 hours later, they are sleeping in her Chelsea apartment in Manhattan, and she is trying to keep them safe while helping them figure out their next move. In an exclusive interview with NEWSWEEK, she tells her story, which, unfortunately, isn’t over yet.

• Feed your inner amateur astronomer: help ID moon photos from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (HT: npr)
• Mars Lander Phoenix killed by Ice
• Freaky: Fish with Hands (NG)
• The science behind accupuncture
  

  The research focuses on adenosine, a natural compound known for its role in regulating sleep, for its effects on the heart, and for its anti-inflammatory properties. But adenosine also acts as a natural painkiller, becoming active in the skin after an injury to inhibit nerve signals and ease pain in a way similar to lidocaine.

  In the current study, scientists found that the chemical is also very active in deeper tissues affected by acupuncture. The Rochester researchers looked at the effects of acupuncture on the peripheral nervous system – the nerves in our body that aren’t part of the brain and spinal cord. The research complements a rich, established body of work showing that in the central nervous system, acupuncture creates signals that cause the brain to churn out natural pain-killing endorphins.

Society

• The story of Homeboy Industries: Redeeming LA’s gangs (npr)
  

  Homeboy Industries is the largest gang-intervention program in the country, serving the needs of thousands of East Los Angeles gang members who are looking for a way to leave the streets behind. Its motto is: “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.” For the past 20 years, the Rev. Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest who started Homeboy, has mentored and counseled the more than 12,000 gang members who pass through Homeboy each year to learn job skills, get their gang tattoos removed and attend therapy sessions on everything from alcohol abuse to anger management.
  …
  Boyle recently published a memoir, Tattoos on the Heart, which recounts his decision to leave his position at the Dolores Mission Church in Los Angeles in 1992 to focus on helping ex-gang members find jobs. He says that he looks at his position as a calling.

• Pixar: The Making of Toy Story 3 (Wired)
• Saving the Rust Belt (Reason)
  

  You want a quick indicator of urban decline in any city you visit? Ask a local what’s great about the place. If the top three answers include “a world-class symphony orchestra,” you’re smack dab in the middle of a current or future ghost town.

• How bad is it for the unemployed? Very (TNR)
  

  Of the 908-person sample, 67 percent remained unemployed but were still looking for work, and an additional 12 percent had given up and dropped out of the labor force. Only 21 percent had found jobs (only 13 percent full-time) and were currently employed. A stunning 28 percent of the newly reemployed had been looking for work for more than one year, and 6 percent for more than two years. Fifty-five percent accepted a pay cut in their new jobs; 13 percent took a cut larger than one-third of their previous salary.

• Women in Movies: A Test
  
• 2010 Mercer Quality of Living Survey: Best places to live (excerpts)
• Biking to work: Not as healthy as you think.
  

  Cycling to work may seem the healthy option, but a study has shown that people riding in cities inhale tens of millions of toxic nanoparticles with every breath, at least five times more than drivers or pedestrians.

Art

• Paper Art (galleries)
• Concept Art (galleries)
• Defying gravity: Art from Li Wei

versus

But, how do the cities stack up? Does the city of our Founding Father’s have what it takes to relegate Chicago to Second City status? Or will the City of Broad Shoulders outmuscle the lily-livered City of Brotherly Love?

Iconic Food
Chicago: Deep dish pizza and Chicago-style hot dogs and Italian beef
Philadelphia: Cheese steak
Verdict: Philadelphia: Outnumbered three-to-one, the cheese steak still comes out on top. It’s an unholy trinity of greese, cheese, and meat, but oh-so-amazing.

Art Museum Entrances
Chicago: Lions
Philadelphia: Rocky steps
Verdict: Philadelphia: The Lions just sit there. The Rocky steps provide for endless re-enactment opportunities

Centers of Government
Chicago: City Hall
Philadelphia: City Hall
Verdict: Philadelphia: City Hall is beautiful and has Billy Penn. Plus, no one knows where the heck Chicago City Hall is anyways.

Public Transit
Chicago: The ‘El’
Philadelphia: SEPTA
Verdict: Chicago: The ‘El’ actually runs places you’d want to go to, and it runs all night.

Sports Icons
Chicago: Michael Jordan
Philadelphia: Wilt ‘The Stilt” Chamberlain
Verdict: Philadelphia: MJ was the man, but he they never changed to rules to stop him.

Iconic Sculptures
Chicago: Cloud Gate (aka the Bean)
Philadelphia: Love Statue
Verdict: Chicago: Love statue is an icon, but that’s about all there is too it.

Outdoor performance spaces
Chicago: Ravinia and Millenium Park
Philadelphia: The Mann Music Center
Verdict: Chicago: Ravinia is a joke (you can’t see the stage from the lawn? seriously?), but MP has a huge array of concerts, and they’re ALL FREE.

Bodies of Water
Chicago: Lake Michigan
Philadelphia: The Atlantic
Verdict: Chicago: Lake Michigan is right at your door step, versus two hours for the Atlantic. It’s no the ocean, but it’s powerful enough to provide a reasonable facsimile.

Topography
Chicago: Topography?
Philadelphia: Yes
Verdict: Philadelphia: It’s always a treat to see hills after a long stay in the Prairie

Chinatown
Verdict: Philadelphia: People actually live and work in the same neighborhood. As opposed to the neighborhood next door. And it has drinkable sweetened soy milk. And a dou hua shop!

Local Coffee
Chicago: Intelligentsia and Metropolis
Philadelphia: La Colombe
Verdict: *shrug* I don’t drink coffee.

Old Town
Verdict: Philadelphia: Ours actually has a thing called history

Shopping
Chicago: Mag Mile, Belmont, Westfield Mall: Schaumburg
Philadelphia: Rittenhouse Square, South Street, The King of Prussia Mall
Verdict: Chicago: Not that I would really know, but I imagine larger city = more diversity in designers and stores.

Oddball Museum
Chicago: International Museum of Surgical Science
Philadelphia: The Mutter Museum
Verdict: Philadelphia: I’ve never been to the IMSS, but I can’t imagine any surgical equipment topping the medical oddities found at the Mutter Museum

Weather
Chicago: Pros: beautiful summers. Cons: harsh winters
Philadelphia: Pros: mild-ish winters. Cons: humid summers
Verdict: Chicago: Even mild-ish winters aren’t particularly pleasant. Neither place gets enough snow to merit getting cold

Nearby cities
Chicago: Madison, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Detroit
Philadelphia: New York, DC, Boston, Baltimore
Verdict: Philadelphia: Honestly, are there any other big cities in the Midwest?

Outdoor gardens
Chicago: Chicago Botanic Gardens
Philadelphia: Longwood Gardens
Verdict: Chicago: If only because I haven’t been to Longwood in over a decade (maybe 2!) and don’t remember what it’s like

Traffic
Verdict: Chicago: The highway traffic in Chicago is worse, but Philadelphia’s combination of one-ways and super-narrow streets makes it a pain to drive around.

Claim to fame
Chicago: being big, mobsters
Philadelphia: birthplace of freedom
Verdict: Philadelphia: Is there any question?

High End Restaurants and Chefs
Chicago: Alinea – Grant Achatz, Topolobampo – Rick Bayliss
Philadelphia: Morimoto – Masaharu Morimoto
Verdict: Chicago: Achatz cooks without a real sense of taste. That’s baller. Plus, he’s evidently a food tech geek

Power Universities
Chicago: Northwestern, University of Chicago
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore, Princeton
Verdict: Philadelphia. Plus, we have a semblance of college basketball.

Musicians
Chicago: Kanye West, Buddy Guy, Fall Out Boy
Philadelphia: Boyz II Men, Stan Getz, The Roots
Verdict: Chicago: Buddy Guy is the only one I’ve seen live, and he is amazing.

Sports Teams
Chicago: Cubs, White Sox, Bulls, Bears, Blackhawks
Philadelphia: Phillies, 76ers, Eagles, Flyers
Verdict: Philadelphia: The Phillies are the most recent championship team, and Philadelphia also has at least some semblance of college sports (if only during the basketball season)

Sports Fans
Chicago: Long-suffering
Philadelphia: Throwing batteries, booing Santa
Verdict: Chicago: Both fans are fiercely loyal, but Philadelphia fans have this bad habit of turning on their heroes in a heartbeat

Cultural Institutions
Chicago: The Lyric, The CSO, The MCA, The Art Institute, The Field Museum, Museum of Science and Industry, The Shedd
Philadelphia: Museum of Art, The Franklin Institute, The Natural History Museum, The Philadelphia Zoo, The Opera Company
Verdict: Chicago, if only because I haven’t been to any Philadelphia Institutions recently.

Parks
Chicago: Grant Park, Millenium Park
Philadelphia: Fairmount Park
Verdict: Philadelphia: Fairmount Park is y’know, nature-y and stuff. Like a park should be.

Regional Accent
Chicago: The nasal A, “dis”, “da” (as in “da Bears”)
Philadelphia: Wuder (as in water), Yo, yoos guys
Verdict: Philadelphia: If you’ve got a Philadelphia accent, you sound a like a tough guy (or girl). If you’ve got a Chicago accent, you sound like a…midwesterner.

Local stereotype
Chicago: Blue collar midwestern
Philadelphia: Blue collar, chip on shoulder
Verdict: Depends: If you’re just a tourist, Chicagoans are nicer. If you befriend an Philadelphian though, they’ll take a bullet for you.

Summer Festivals
Verdict: Chicago: It has way too many neighborhoods and there’s basically at least one neighborhood with a big block party bash every week.

Multiculturalism
Verdict: Chicago: Size has its advantages

Famous politicians
Chicago: Barack Obama
Philadelphia: Benjamin Franklin
Verdict: Philadelphia: Obama may be the most powerful man in the world at the moment, but they don’t say “show me the Benjamins” for nothing.

RR station markets
Chicago: The French Market
Philadelphia: Reading Terminal Market
Verdict: Philadelphia. Please, the French Market opened 2 years ago.

Stadiums
Chicago: Wrigley, Soldier Field
Philadelphia: The Linc, Citizen’s Bank
Verdict: Philadelphia: The Linc and Citizen’s Bank are both beautiful. Wrigley has lots of history, but Soldier Field looks like it got hit by a UFO.

Mayor strength
Chicago: Daley
Philadelphia: Nutter
Verdict: Chicago:  Daley freakin’ bulldozed an airport he didn’t like just because he didn’t like it.

Large Buildings
Chicago: Willis, Trump, Hancock
Philadelphia: Comcast, 1 Liberty Place, Cira
Verdict: Chicago: Chicago has the #1, 2, and 5 tallest buildings in the US. Philly maxes out at #15.

Final Tally and Thoughts
Chicago: 16
Philadelphia: 17
Tie: 2
Verdict: Both are great cities to live in, but Philadelphia eeks out a victory in this carefully controlled, absolutely unbiased, thoroughly scientific study.* Hopefully this bodes well for the Flyers as well.

Despite my years in the MidWest, I still bleed orange, red, green, and whatever the heck the Sixers are considered to be colored. Go Flyers!

contributors: jchou, elee

* n.b. I have actually only lived in the nearby suburbs, not within, the limits of both cities. However, for the purposes of this post, I have considered myself to be a veritable font of knowledge on all things Chicago and Philadelphia-related.