![]()
Young Love
Young Love
THIS DAY IN HISTORY: OCTOBER 13TH- THE ALMANAC AND THE SPY
This Day In History: October 13, 1792
Way back on October 13, 1792, when George Washington was serving his first term as president, the first issue of what is today known as The Old Farmer’s Almanac went on sale for the asking price of six pence (nine cents). It was a big hit, tripling its circulation from 3,000 to 9,000 by the time its second issue was published.
There were many almanacs available providing the same content, such as tidal information, astronomical events and weather forecasts, so what made – and makes – The Old Farmer’s Almanac more popular than all the others? …
Trump May Be Finished—But Trumpism Is Just Getting Started
By exposing the grievances of blue-collar white voters, the Republican nominee has shaped his party in ways that could last long after the election ends.
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is on life support after a barrage of damaging personal revelations last week sparked an unprecedented stampede of defections from Republican leaders.
But, ironically, if that sequence of events proves the fatal blow to Trump’s tumultuous candidacy, it may help the ideas and animosities powering his campaign to live on inside the GOP. In other words, the manner of Trump’s political demise may extend the life of Trumpism.
That’s a sobering prospect for the many Republican leaders and strategists who believed Trump was marching the GOP into a demographic dead end even before his campaign skidded entirely off the road—before his stumbling first debate; before The New York Times published a report detailing how he may not have paid personal federal-income taxes for two decades; and before the disclosure of a devastating Access Hollywood video on Friday, in which Trump boasted of groping women without their consent. “I don’t think [his supporters] will see a repudiation of him as a repudiation of [his] agenda because they will start talking about the establishment refusing to allow the will of the people to be expressed,” says Lanhee Chen, Mitt Romney’s chief policy adviser in 2012 and a frequent Trump critic. …
Trump campaign rocked by new wave of sexual harassment allegations
A series of women have come forward with claims about the Republican, while footage emerges of inappropriate remarks about a 10-year-old girl
A wave of claims about Donald Trump’s alleged sexual transgressions and inappropriate behaviour – in one case with a 10-year-old girl – has emerged, threatening the Republican presidential nominee’s already fragile campaign less than a month before election day.
Ever since video of the real estate mogul surfaced on Friday showing him bragging about how he could grab women’s genitals with impunity, more and more women have come forward to claim they were demeaned and touched inappropriately.
By late Wednesday evening the list of new allegations against Trump included:
• Two Miss USA contestants who claimed Trump deliberately walked in on them when they were naked in a dressing room.
• Two women who allege Trump groped or kissed them without consent – one in the first-class seat of an aircraft.
• A claim by a woman that she was groped at a Trump event at his Mar-A-Lago estate in Florida.
• A People magazine reporter who says Trump forced himself on her shortly before she was due to interview him and his wife in 2005.
• An incident in which Trump appears to sexualize a 10-year-old girl.
…
Why Donald Trump Is The Death Of Satire
Oh, come on. I’m a comedy writer. Writing comedy is what I do to put food on my table. Election season is my conveyor belt on the comedy assembly line, and if I don’t have a steady flow of shoddy parts to assemble, I can’t eat. And at this point, I think Donald Trump is purposely sabotaging my — and all comedians’ — ability to earn a living.
Trump has sunk to the stinking depths of being unparodiable. To whom do I turn to try to suss out anything that can be exaggerated in this overblown shitshow of a political commercial? Grey skies loom as Iranian terrorists shoot at gloomy Hillary Clinton. North Korea has a rainy day missile parade, while ISIS prepares to bury heads in the mud of another desert rainstorm, and all Clinton can do is wear her sunglasses inside, presumably to hide her red-rimmed and rheumy eyes, glommed thick with sickness and decay, before her Secret Service detail has to pile her into an SUV like a ventriloquist’s dummy and carry her away to some secret government hospital where your tax dollars will pay to have her shabby frame infused with cells from umbilical cords and bull urine so that she can remain active and semi-conscious for at least one more day.
And also coughing. Dangerously.
And then the sun breaks through the mire, and Trump, thumb uplifted like a chubby little sword fighting off the dark forces, proclaims he approves this message, letting us all know he’s the man with the stamina, the fortitude and the $4 trucker hats that don’t fit quite right who will take us into a new era of prosperity and/or bombing the shit out of strangers. …
Why People Fall for Charismatic Leaders
A new book explores how fear, uncertainty, and group psychology lead people to believe leaders who say false things.
Why do people still believe Donald Trump when he says things like, “Our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape they’ve ever been in before. Ever. Ever. Ever”? (Even setting aside slavery and Jim Crow, “Nationally, the black poverty rate is 24.1 percent, which is much higher than the 9.1 percent percent it is for whites. But that’s still lower than it has been in the past,” Politifact points out.) Or that there could be anywhere from 3 to 30 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., but “the government has no idea.” (The number is 11.4 million, Politifact says, and the government is quite sure.)
It could be because Trump, like many charismatic leaders, casts his arguments in ways that tickle the emotional parts of our brains while telling the more rational lobes to shush. That’s the process explored by Sara E. Gorman, a public-health expert, and her father, Jack M. Gorman, a psychiatrist and CEO of Franklin Behavioral Health Consultants, in their new book, Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us. “Persuaders might want to reduce the possibility of dissonance by constantly reassuring people that they have made the right choice … or that there is no viable reasonable alternative,” they write. (Remember “I alone can fix it?”) …
Will decriminalization solve the drug scourge?
The cover of “Every 25 Seconds: The Human Toll of Criminalizing Drug Use in the United States,” a report by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Illegal drug use and trafficking has led to a multitude of ills in the United States, sometimes because of racially infected law enforcement, particularly in black neighborhoods.
But is decriminalizing small amounts of narcotics at least part of the answer to the scourge?
Two major human and civil rights organizations make a good case for it and advance the decriminalization discussion in a report released Wednesday. Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are engaged in a major push to change the way federal, state and local governments deal with drug enforcement and abuse.
Consider this from the report:
• Every 25 seconds someone is arrested in the United States for possessing drugs for personal use.
• At least 137,000 individuals are locked up on any given day for drug possession.
• Black adults are four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white people.
…
10 Dying Symptoms Of The Roman Empire
The gradual process of decline that brought the Roman Empire to an end is one of the all-time favorite history topics. That a nation so powerful could fall has always acted as a warning to any subsequent state that rose to a privileged geopolitical position. The ascension of Commodus in AD 180 is considered by many as the beginning of the end. But in reality, the exhaustion of Rome had started long before.
10. Unclear Succession System
Augustus, the first Roman emperor, could never establish a clear imperial succession system. The result: When the time came to replace an emperor, there were numerous rivals for the throne competing with one another.
Sometimes, the potential emperors had an incentive to end the service of the ruling emperor prematurely so that they could take the throne for themselves. This is part of the reason behind the long record of imperial assassination plots. …
BRYAN CHRISTY – INVESTIGATING RHINO HORN TRADE WITH NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
National Geographic’s Bryan Christy talks about his investigation into illegal rhino horn trade in South Africa and weighs in on how to stop the practice.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available to embed.
BARACK OBAMA, NEURAL NETS, SELF-DRIVING CARS, AND THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD
It’s hard to think of a single technology that will shape our world more in the next 50 years than artificial intelligence. As machine learning enables our computers to teach themselves, a wealth of breakthroughs emerge, ranging from medical diagnostics to cars that drive themselves. A whole lot of worry emerges as well. Who controls this technology? Will it take over our jobs? Is it dangerous? President Obama was eager to address these concerns. The person he wanted to talk to most about them? Entrepreneur and MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito. So I sat down with them in the White House to sort through the hope, the hype, and the fear around AI. That and maybe just one quick question about Star Trek. —SCOTT DADICH
SCOTT DADICH: Thank you both for being here. How’s your day been so far, Mr. President?
BARACK OBAMA: Busy. Productive. You know, a couple of international crises here and there.
DADICH: I want to center our conversation on artificial intelligence, which has gone from science fiction to a reality that’s changing our lives. When was the moment you knew that the age of real AI was upon us?
OBAMA: My general observation is that it has been seeping into our lives in all sorts of ways, and we just don’t notice; and part of the reason is because the way we think about AI is colored by popular culture. There’s a distinction, which is probably familiar to a lot of your readers, between generalized AI and specialized AI. In science fiction, what you hear about is generalized AI, right? Computers start getting smarter than we are and eventually conclude that we’re not all that useful, and then either they’re drugging us to keep us fat and happy or we’re in the Matrix. …
THIS DAY IN HISTORY: OCTOBER 13TH- NOT COUNTRY ENOUGH
This Day In History: October 13, 1975
If the kids today think Kanye West invented behaving badly at awards ceremonies when he interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 VMAs – they are sadly mistaken. At the Country Music Awards held on October 13, 1975, Charlie Rich, the reigning CMA “Entertainer of the Year,” caused quite the ruckus announcing the new honoree, John Denver.
A swaying Rich, who had enjoyed a great many gin and tonics prior to that moment, stood behind the podium and slurred his way through the nominations. He finally clumsily ripped the envelope open, pulled a Zippo from his pocket and set fire to the card with a sardonic smile, revealing the winner as: “My friend, Mr. John Denver!” Mercifully, Denver was appearing from Australia via satellite and happily accepted the honor without a clue about what just transpired.
So just what message was Charlie Rich trying to convey? …
Central America’s rampant violence fuels an invisible refugee crisis
The numbers are staggering, and governments are doing little to protect people from warring gangs and corrupt security forces. Yet entire families who are now seeking asylum are being sent back and told to simply live elsewhere
Until a few months ago, Carlos Hernández was a government health promoter in central El Salvador. His job was to visit poor families and ensure their children attended school and received health checks, in exchange for modest cash benefits.
One day in March, on his way to visit a family in a neighbourhood controlled by the Mara Salvatrucha (MS13) gang, Hernández witnessed a beating by gang members. Too scared to intervene, he hurried past, completed his visit and started his long walk home.
The four assailants were waiting for him.
“I pleaded with them to let me live. I said I had children, that I’d say nothing,” said Hernández, 31. “They agreed to spare my life but told me never to return.”
The victim was found dead three days later – one of 611 homicides in the tiny Central American nation that month.
Hernández was scared, but couldn’t find another job. So when he returned to visit the same family a month later, he took a different route and left his uniform at home in hope of going unnoticed. …
Is Silicon Valley a Meritocracy?
Obviously not. But maaaybe? (Still no.)
Every year, The Atlantic sends a survey to dozens of influential Silicon Valley executives, start-up founders, and tech thinkers to take the pulse of the technology industry.
For this year’s View From the Valley, we asked people to tell us everything from who has the best job in Silicon Valley—Tesla’s Elon Musk and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg were the favorites—to their voting plans in the upcoming presidential election. More than 85 percent of respondents indicated they’d vote for Clinton, none said Trump, and the rest were either undecided, voting for a third party, or not voting at all. (“I’d even take a poorly written PHP script over Trump,” said David Cann, the CEO of Double Robotics, in his reply.)
One interesting layer to the political section of the survey was how responses broke down by gender. Women were near-unanimous in their support for Clinton, whereas men were slightly less likely to support the Democratic nominee—a dynamic that reflects attitudes among voters across the country. And, not surprisingly, there were other key areas of the poll where responses from men and women were notably different. …
10 Bizarre Tales Of Dead Soldiers Turning Up Alive
War is often a confusing mess where soldiers are killed or taken prisoner. In many cases, they’re left unaccounted for and disappear from history. While most soldiers who are declared dead will never be seen again, some have been found alive years after their “deaths.”
10. Mateo Sabog
In 1970, Master Sergeant Mateo Sabog was preparing to return to the United States from Vietnam. He was supposed to head from Saigon to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, but he never showed. The Army only learned of his disappearance when his brother, Kenneth, wrote a letter asking about his whereabouts in 1973. Sabog was believed to be a deserter, but a second letter from Kenneth caused the Army to declare him dead in 1979.
Then, in 1996, Sabog reappeared seemingly out of nowhere. It seems that he simply walked away from the military and began living with a woman in California. After her death, he applied for social security, revealing his identity. Still considered active military, Sabog briefly became the oldest serving soldier until returning to his family. His only remark was, “I’m sorry.” He died in Hawaii in 2007. …
Nobel prize in literature won by Bob Dylan
Singer-songwriter takes the award for ‘having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’
Bob Dylan was named the surprise winner of the Nobel prize for literature in Stockholm today “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
Speaking to reporters after the announcement, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, said she hoped the Academy would not be criticised for its choice.
“The times they are a’changing, perhaps,” she said, comparing the songs of the American songwriter, who had yet to be informed of his win, to the works of Homer and Sappho.
“Of course he [deserves] it – he’s just got it,” she said. “He’s a great poet in the English-speaking tradition. And he is a wonderful sampler, a very original sampler. He embodies the tradition and for 54 years now he has been at it, reinventing himself constantly, creating a new identity.” …
Google’s DeepMind learns how to navigate the London Underground
Yes, even the Bank and Charing Cross branches of the Northern Line
GOOGLE’S DEEPMIND artificial intelligence (AI) system is learning something with which many Londoners struggle: navigating the London Underground.
The keyword here is ‘learning’. The system doesn’t get taught the thousands of stations and routes, but is given an external memory of them and is left to learn by itself. Deep learn, to be precise.
DeepMind is the same intelligence that has recently thrashed grand masters at fiendishly complex board game Go.
This is a stunning achievement, but the majority of its decision making was based on logic alone. The Tube task means that DeepMind has to adopt a strategy from a context, such as the quickest route, the one with the least walking or the one with fewer leaves/persons on the line. …
10 Family-Unfriendly Facts From The Life Of Dr. Seuss
Behind the poems and the pictures, Theodor Geisel, the real Dr. Seuss, was an adult man, with adult thoughts and adult experiences. He created subversive things, was sure he would be remembered as a risque comedian, and lived a life that could never be published between the pages of a children’s book.
10. He Was Traumatized For Life By Teddy Roosevelt
World War I was in full swing, and the young Seuss was a plucky boy scout doing his part to help the war effort. He went door-to-door, and, thanks largely to a $1,000 purchase from his grandfather, became one of the most successful war bonds salesmen in his town.
Seuss and nine other boy scouts were honored for their efforts. They were brought up on stage at the Municipal Auditorium and presented award by the president himself: Theodore Roosevelt.
Roosevelt only had nine medals with him—and when he got to Seuss, he was empty-handed. Roosevelt turned to the organizers and angrily barked, “What’s this boy doing here?” They quickly hustled Seuss off the stage and gave him nothing. …
Hypernormalisation: Adam Curtis on chatbots, AI and Colonel Gaddafi
It’s a techno-utopia on the BBC
Hypernormalisation, the new film by English documentary-maker Adam Curtis, dives deeper into technology than any of his previous films for the BBC. It goes up on the Beeb’s iPlayer on Sunday (at 9pm) and “it’s a bit of a monster”, he admits.
(The film is pushing three hours long. I had to watch it over two nights – a one-movie binge). But he doesn’t mind. Curtis describes it as a book with chapters, and says you can watch it however you want.
In the movie, Curtis puts the spotlight on characters such as cyber activist John Perry Barlow; AI pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum, father of the chatbot Eliza; and Judea Pearl, the father of the murdered hostage Daniel Pearl. These are woven around in a long studies of Libyan dictator Colonel Gadaffi and a modern history of Syria (“Isn’t it astonishing no one’s done a proper basic history of Syria on television?” wonders Curtis) and the apparent master media manipulator of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Vladislav Surkov. …
Mercedes answers autonomous car moral dilemma: Yeah, we’ll just run over pedestrians
Chances are that they’re peasants anyway
It is a question that has grown in urgency since the prospect of truly autonomous cars became a close reality: what does a computer-driven car do when faced with a crash?
With decisions likely to be made by algorithms in milliseconds, there will likely need to be a moral component pulled into systems: should a car protect its inhabitants at all costs? Or should it weigh up the likelihood of injury or death to others?
When faced with crashing into a woman with a stroller or swerving and hitting a tree, which should the car choose to do?
Well, one company has the answer. Luxury car manufacturer Mercedes likely reflects the attitude of its customers when it decided that those in the hurtling metal box come first, and the squishy non-car-driving masses a firm last in life-and-death stakes. …
AMERICANS AND THE DATE FORMAT AND HOW THAT RELATES TO DATA STORAGE, HOLY WARS AND SOFT-BOILED EGGS
In the United States, our date format begins with the month and ends with the year (MM/DD/YYYY), and this arrangement is unique. In most of the rest of the world, the day is written first and the year last (DD/MM/YYYY), although in some places like China, Korea and Iran, this order is flipped (YYYY/MM/DD). Regardless, no one seems to know why Americans put the month first, although we have been doing it for a long time.
One of the earliest examples I found is on the Declaration of Independence, with its large “July 4, 1776” inscribed at the top –a format that was copied by John Dunlap, the printer who made the 200 broadsides that were later distributed in the colonies. (Interesting side fact, the Declaration of Independence was not signed in July as is commonly stated, but rather in August of that year.)
Apparently the founders were fond of this format, as it is seen on at least some of the Federalist Papers, as well as the Constitution, signed by 38 of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention on “September 17, 1787.” …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
“Had to chase it for 5 minutes and I had named it Stanley like minutes before this happened so that’s why I was yelling that.”
FINALLY . . .
Try Not to Cry While Watching Earth Rise From the Moon in HD
These aren’t renderings, special effects, or a scene from No Man’s Sky. This is actual footage of the Earth and the Moon, as seen by Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft in October 2008. Shot with a pair of 2.2 megapixel HDTV sensors, it’s some of the first HD footage of our nearest neighbor that humans ever captured.
From 2007 to 2009, three Japanese scientific probes composing the Selenological and Engineering Explorer (SELENE) mission orbited the Moon, collecting troves of data along with some spectacular photos. This week, the Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, publicly released all of the images captured by the mission’s primary photographer, Kaguya. …