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.

The Catatonics (grad student a cappella singers) and SPG (grad student improv comedy) are combining forces one more time, and you won’t want to miss it! Live music and live comedy – two great tastes that taste great together – for free!

There will be singing (from the Catatonics), improv (from SPG), and maybe even some improvisational singing =b.

Friday, May 28
7pm
Northwestern University
Technological Institute, LR2
2145 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208 US

Light snacks will be provided. Parking is available in the lot across the street (@ Sheridan and Noyes)

The Top 5:

• The 2020 projected US budget (pdf by CBO, summary by Klein)
• A Math Curriculum Makeover (TED. 12min)
• The BP Disaster (photos – May 12, 2010)
• 10 things about Elena Kagan (SCOTUSblog)
• Not as easy as claimed: US Budget and Deficit Simulator. Douthat gives it a spin:

World

• What do you learn at terrorist training camp (ForeignPolicy)
• India’s Tampon Sanitary Napkin King (GlobalPost)
  

  In 2006, Muruganantham, a high school dropout, perfected a machine for making low-cost sanitary napkins against all odds. Along the way he’d taught himself English, recruited local college professors to help him draft letters and surf the web for suppliers, worn panties (not to mention a sanitary pad and a football bladder full of blood), and spent many times the cost of his TVS Motors moped on laboratory analyses. He even invented an alter ego to get past the gatekeepers at the U.S. firms that supplied the pine wood-based cellulose — not cotton — that he discovered was the raw material he needed.

US Policy

• Staying healthy is more expensive than not? The answer lies in lifespan and nursing homes…
  

  Our main finding is that although the current health care costs of healthy retirees are lower than those of the unhealthy, the healthy actually face higher total health care costs over their remaining lifetime. To illustrate, the expected present value of lifetime health care costs for a couple turning 65 in 2009 in which one or both spouses suffer from a chronic disease is $220,000, including insurance premiums and the cost of nursing home care, and 5 percent can expect to spend more than $465,000. The comparable numbers for couples free of chronic disease are substantially higher, at $260,000 and $570,000, respectively.

• The 2020 projected US budget (pdf by CBO, summary by Klein)
  
  
• Not as easy as claimed: US Budget and Deficit Simulator. Douthat gives it a spin:
  

  I’ve successfully reduced our deficit to a relatively stable 60 percent of G.D.P. by the year 2018. All it took was means-testing Social Security and raising the retirement age to 68, keeping health care reform in place but slashing its insurance subsidies by 20 percent, increasing cost-sharing and premiums for Medicare and raising the retirement age to 67, passing tort reform, returning food stamp spending to 2008 levels, slashing subsidies for agriculture and biofuels, cutting the federal workforce by 5 percent across the board, cutting earmarks by 50 percent, converting the home-mortgage deduction to a smaller credit, replacing the tax deduction for employer-provided health care with a flat credit, increasing the gas tax by 10 cents a gallon, cutting foreign aid and military spending by $200 billion, drawing down troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan to 60,000 in 2016, taxing life insurance benefits, letting the Bush tax cuts expire for high earners and partially phasing them out for the middle class, eliminating the state and local tax deduction, and cutting out a lot of smaller things as well.

• Barack Obama, the Healthcare Reform Campaign Manager (HuffPo)
• Who is Elena Kagan? (long, SCOTUSblog)
• 10 things about Elena Kagan (SCOTUSblog)
• The Climate Bill Proposals, side-by-side-by-side (Wonkroom)
• The BP Disaster (photos – May 12, 2010)
• America COMPETES: Science and Technology Funding fails to clear the House *facepalm* (The Hill, 5/19/10)
• Republican Games: Quick, what does science and technology funding have to do with porn? (Chait, The Hill, 5/13/10)
  

  Democrats had labeled their COMPETES Act — a bill to increase investments in science, research and training programs — as their latest jobs bill. It was the only non-suspension bill Democrats brought up all week.

  But the Republican motion to recommit the bill — a parliamentary tactic that gives the minority one final chance to amend legislation — contained language prohibiting federal funds from going “to salaries to those officially disciplined for violations regarding the viewing, downloading, or exchanging of pornography, including child pornography, on a federal computer or while performing official government duties.”

  That provision scared dozens of Democrats into voting with Republicans to approve the motion to recommit.

• Financial Regulation: A mixed bag (Scheiber)

Science and Technology

• Tornados and Supercells (photos)
• Facebook “Privacy” (NYT, infographic)
• Cloud formations from space (Photos, Wired)
• Antivenom shortages imminent (popmech)
  

  Wyeth kept up production of coral snake antivenom for almost 40 years. But given the rarity of coral snake bites, it was hardly a profit center, and the company shut down the factory that made the antivenom in 2003.

• Mechanical Butterfly
• A Math Curriculum Makeover (TED. 12min)
• The great beaver dam of Canada

Religion

• The New Atheists: a critique (Linker)
• Drum Responds
• Hart Responds
• Drum responds

Society

• Will Google save the news? (Fallows)
  

  Now, having helped break the news business, the company wants to fix it—for commercial as well as civic reasons: if news organizations stop producing great journalism, says one Google executive, the search engine will no longer have interesting content to link to.

• I hate memes. (theonion editor)
  Once an “enjoyable thing” becomes a “meme,” we stop enjoying the thing for its own sake, but consume and regurgitate our enjoyment of it as a symbol of hipness, as if to say: “I am aware of this thing’s popularity — therefore I, too, exist!”
  …
  (And if you’ve never had the unfortunate occasion to hear someone, forgetting that life is not a message board, yell “FAIL!” aloud, you are missing out on an exquisite kind of existential rage.)
• Engrish around the world (176 in all, NYT)
• The cultural tyranny of New York
• Yes, Virginia, we are that vain: Wrinkles are scarier than skin cancer
  

  “They’re not worried about skin cancer, but they are worried about getting wrinkled and being unattractive,” said June Robinson, a professor of dermatology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and senior author of a May 17 paper in Archives of Dermatology reporting the findings.

• Left behind: victims of the new economic reality (NYT)
  

  For the last two years, the weak economy has provided an opportunity for employers to do what they would have done anyway: dismiss millions of people — like file clerks, ticket agents and autoworkers — who were displaced by technological advances and international trade.

• (not) Clarifying relationships with mathematic models
  
• New York’s evolution (4-shot image)
• A peek inside the Iron Man 2 suits
• Do men and women name colors differently? (xkcd)
• I, rearrangement servant (aka, internet anagram server)
• Why do Harvard kids go to Wall Street? (Klein, BaselineScenario)
  

  Their (our) decisions are motivated by two main decision rules: (1) close down as few options as possible; and (2) only do things that increase the possibility of future overachievement. Money is far down the list; at this point in their lives, if you asked them, many of these people would probably say that they only need to be middle or upper-middle class, and assume that they will be.

Arlington National Cemetery. One of two national cemeteries administered by the Army. 6,700 funerals a year. 300,000 bodies of service(wo)men and their spouses and their families. Row after row after row after row of tombstones. These are the remains of those who gave their lives to establish and protect our country, our freedoms, our way of life. (And yes, I understand that many died in wars that were fought for reasons far less idealistic.) In a way far more visceral than the grandeur of the World War II memorial, the haunting visages of the Korean, and the understated sea of names etched upon the Vietnam, these tombstones proclaimed, “Here lies sacrifice. Live life. Honor it.”

I’m not sure why, but within 15 seconds, my mind whirred to the Cross. It too marks a death. A death that saved me from a fate far worse than “taxation without representation.” How much greater is the sacrifice? How much more should my life be changed?

A most unexpected find was the Women’s Memorial, which should actually be renamed to the Women’s Memorial Museum. On one interior wall is a series of exhibits documenting the history of women in the armed forces (both officially and unofficially). On the other wall…oh man, on the other wall, is a series of (decently) matched photographs and personal stories of present-day service members / veterans. The stories provide a glimpse into their lives. Their eyes, a glimpse into their souls.

(Left to Right)
Sgt. First Class Kim Dionne, US Army Reserve
Col. Jenny Holbert, US Marine Corp, Retired
Sgt. Mikeishia Kennedy, Virginia Army National Guard

Usually I see the pomp and ceremony of a “changing of the guards” reserved for a country’s royalty or high officials. Instead, at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, this honor is bestowed (fittingly) upon those who died: unknown, unidentified, but unforgotten.

The NU Community Jazz Bands will be playing for us and it will be a boppin’ good time. We expect a great turnout, so this is a good opportunity to bring friends and meet new people. As always, there will be a free beginner lesson at 7pm and the music starts at 8pm.

Swing Dance with NU Jazz Bands
Norris University Center Louis Rm (2nd floor)
8pm – 11pm
May 23rd, Sunday
beginner lesson @ 7pm
only $5 w/ Wildcard, $7 otherwise

A portion of the proceeds will go to the NU Jazz Bands, so more people showing up = more monetary support for them!