They’re going to find out I’m not good enough… I’m pretending to be someone i’m not.
A British philosopher by the name of Bertrand Russell once said: “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”
The other day a doctoral student/assistant professor in one of my education classes mentioned this thing called: “Impostor Syndrome”. I asked what she meant by that and she said, “It’s this thing where you think that you’ll be found out. Where you look around you and you think that the people around you are smart and you are a “fraud”. A light bulb immediately went off in my head and I thought, “I have never heard of such a thing however, I think that I have a mild form of this…”
TWINKIES ARE ONLY GOOD FOR 25 DAYS
Today I found out that Twinkies have a shelf life of only 25 days. The popular notion that they “last forever” or for some ridiculously large amount of time is incorrect.
Here are two other popular myths concerning Twinkies:
• Myth: Twinkies aren’t baked; the sponge cake instead is made from a chemical reaction that causes a cake-like material to foam up. It is then colored dark brown at the bottom to give the appearance of being baked. (Twinkies are in fact baked and their primary ingredients are flour, sugar, and eggs.)
• Myth: Twinkies contain a chemical used in embalming fluid which helps account for some of their extreme longevity. (Twinkies contain no such chemical.) …
The Pitfalls of Early Voting
With frequent debates and candidates dropping out by the week in the topsy-turvy Republican primary, there’s more risk in going to the polls long before Election Day.
Donald Trump won the Republican primary in Louisiana on Saturday. But he didn’t actually get the most votes on Election Day.
No, Trump carried the state based on the huge tranche of votes he banked back in February, during the weeklong early voting period when about 15 percent of the GOP electorate cast their ballots. That window, from February 20 to 27, coincided with Trump’s winning streak through New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. And it came before the Republican establishment escalated its all-out war on its party’s presidential front-runner, before Trump refused to disavow David Duke (who ran for governor of Louisiana) in an interview, before he made an astonishing boast about his anatomy in last week’s debate, and before Ben Carson had even dropped out of the nomination race.
Trump built a nearly 24-point lead over Ted Cruz among the early voters, but Cruz topped him among people who went to the polls on Saturday and closed the gap to the point where it seemed the networks and the Associated Press had called the race for Trump too soon. Cruz appeared to pick off some support from Trump but even more from Marco Rubio, who won the votes of fewer than one-in-10 Republicans on Saturday after capturing more than 20 percent of the Louisiana vote in February. …
Bloomberg Says He Won’t Run For President And ‘Risk’ Electing Trump Or Cruz
Former three-term mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg said Monday he will not run for president, after months of speculation that he would jump in as in independent during a campaign in which it seems anything could happen.
In a column on his opinion site Bloomberg View, he said looking at the data made it “clear to me that if I entered the race, I could not win.” He added that he feared his running could split votes enough to give Donald Trump or Ted Cruz an advantage.
Bloomberg writes that he believes he could have won a number of states but that ultimately the race could come down to three people in the general election, none of whom would get enough electoral votes to win the presidency. That would put the onus on the Republican-controlled Congress and, as Bloomberg writes, “out of the hands of the American people.” …
The Confusing, Anticlimactic Demise of Ben Carson
This spring, as you may have noticed, there is a true outsider—a newcomer to electoral politics—who is leading the race to become the next Republican candidate for President. Even observers who have been paying close attention may find it hard to explain how, exactly, this situation came to pass. And many of them may find it surprisingly easy to forget that, just a few months ago, there were two of them: dual (but not quite duelling) political amateurs, both of them outpolling the professionals. From early September until early December, the Republican leaders in the RealClearPolitics polling average were Donald J. Trump and his unlikely counterpart, Dr. Ben Carson. But while Trump continued to defy pundits’ expectations, Carson fulfilled them: in the months leading up to the Iowa caucus, his poll numbers collapsed. And on Friday he said, “I am leaving the campaign trail”—although by then, the trail had long since left him.
In temperament as well as trajectory, Carson was the anti-Trump, a pediatric neurosurgeon whose eerily calm manner became a running joke—he delivered his stump speeches and debate responses with all the vehemence of a somniloquist. To many of his supporters, he was a hero twice over, first for his surgical successes and second for his speech at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast, when he had delivered a sharp (if implicit) critique of the policies of President Obama, who was sitting a few feet away. Carson always maintained that he was drafted into the Presidential race by his supporters, and it was tempting to believe him. He told the Washington Post that running for President “wasn’t something I particularly wanted to do.” And he recalled telling the Lord, “If you really want me to do this, then you will have to open the doors. I’m not going to push them open.” And from the campaign’s launch, last May, to its crash, last month, Carson was by far the least pushy candidate in the field, and surely one of the least pushy major candidates in recent history. …
10 Real Honeypot Operations That Played Out Like Spy Thrillers
The honeypot might be the most glamorized espionage technique in fiction. It’s a tale of hushed phone calls and late-night rendezvous, of secrets whispered through lying lips. But femme fatales and lovers’ plots are not exclusive to fiction. Although the honeypot isn’t used as often as other spy techniques, it still has a place in the real world.
10. For The Love Of Clayton Lonetree
There was never a man lonelier than Clayton Lonetree. A Navajo native, Sergeant Lonetree was stationed at the US embassy in Moscow during the Cold War, and unlike many of the other Marine guards on base, Clayton didn’t have a wife or a girlfriend to write to him. He took to heavy drinking, which distanced him even more from his colleagues in the Corps.
Disconsolate and increasingly disillusioned with his assignment abroad, Clayton nevertheless refused to request a transfer. He came from a long line of proud Marines, distinguished Navajos who had died serving their country in past wars, and he wasn’t keen to be the one who stained the family name.
That’s when lonely Clayton Lonetree met Violetta Seina. …
US Women Make Strides Toward Equality, But Work Remains
People march on the street to mark the International Women’s Day in Tbilisi, Georgia, March 8, 2016.
The beginnings of International Women’s Day — a mass protest by thousands of women in New York City seeking better pay and working conditions, and the right to vote — have evolved into a day to take stock of the progress made toward gender equality as well as issues that still need to be addressed.
The United Nations views gender equality – the view that women and men have equal value and should be afforded equal treatment — as a human right.
Yet despite a more than 100-year history for International Women’s Day, discrimination against women and girls continues worldwide in the form of gender-based violence and discrimination. …
Nancy Reagan had the ideal perch to advance women’s rights. She didn’t use it.
She could have used her visibility to promote tolerance – and the feminism that gave her a say. Instead she pushed the war on drugs and an exclusive version of marriage
The idea of Nancy Reagan-as-feminist is a complicated one.
The former first lady, who died over the weekend at 94, has been heralded by many who served in her husband’s administration as one of his most trusted political advisers and the general keeper-of-the-peace in the White House. She was a stalwart supporter of the Girl Scouts and the mother of the “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign, a message that bolstered the war on drugs – one of the primary causes of our current incarceration epidemic.
But Reagan was perhaps best known for her love for her husband, the man she knew as her Ronnie. Their love story has been heralded as the stuff of legend; both President and Mrs Reagan said they felt incomplete when not physically in the presence of the other.
And it’s this attitude about what constitutes heteronormative love, modelled from the most influential perch in the world, that seems to most complicate the possibility of Nancy Reagan having any kind of a feminist legacy. …
10 Chilling Unsolved Mysteries From Michigan
The mystery of union big shot Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance is arguably one of the most famous in the US. Numerous places in Michigan and other states have been searched for his body. However, there are plenty of other compelling mysteries that have happened in the Mitten State, some of them supernatural and others just as earthly.
10. The Murder Of Donald Goines And Shirley Sailor
In a career that spanned only the first four years of the 1970s, Detroit-born author Donald Goines pumped out over 16 novels, nearly all of them following criminal characters in the underground world of African-American ghettos. Like the antiheroes in his novels, Goines lived a wild and tragic life.
After he dropped out of school in the ninth grade, Goines joined the US Air Force during the Korean War by lying about his age. Following an honorable discharge when he was 17 years old, Goines fell into drug addiction and street crime.
In 1969, after almost 10 years of going in and out of jail for a number of crimes, Goines decided to straighten out his life and become a writer. While serving time for attempted larceny, Goines wrote his debut novel, Whoreson, and sent it to a publisher. The novel was accepted. …
BOULDER TO OK $300 FINES FOR SMOKING POT, CIGARETTES IN OPEN SPACE, PARKS?
Once upon a time, people who wanted to smoke without annoying anyone would simply head outside.
Now, however, large parts of the outdoors in Boulder County may be off-limits to smokers no matter the substance they’re consuming, be it tobacco or marijuana.
And violations could result in fines as high as $300.
The figure is part of changes proposed by Boulder Parks and Open Space in a document on view below. Boulder County Commissioners will consider the request at a meeting slated for tomorrow [today], March 8 — and the potential policy shifts go beyond smoking. …
How the supreme court learned to love gay couples
The dismissal of an Alabama judgment that denied the rights of lesbian parents shows the court’s strong support for LGBT rights – what a contrast with 30 years ago
VL v EL, a ruling handed down by the supreme court on Monday, is not a highly publicized blockbuster. But it’s an important sign of progress for gay and lesbian rights nonetheless. The court quickly dismissed the Alabama supreme court’s attempts to deny parental rights to a same-sex couple. This is the latest example of a fundamental transformation in the rights granted to LGBT people in the United States, with the supreme court shifting from a major barrier to progress to a major instrument progress for gay and lesbian rights.
VL v EL involves a run-of-the-mill custody dispute. A lesbian couple living in Alabama had three children together through the use of reproductive technology. Under Alabama law, same-sex couples did not have parental rights. As a result, VL established temporary residence in Georgia and formally adopted the children, with both VL and EL recognized as legal parents by the Georgia court. The couple broke up in 2011, and subsequently VL claimed that her former partner had denied her access to her children. The matter went to the family court, which granted visitation rights to VL. EL appealed against the decision, making (among others) the argument that the Georgia grant of parental rights was invalid. The Alabama court of civil appeals rejected this argument, while sending the case back to family court to hold an evidentiary hearing.
Enter Roy Moore. The chief justice of the Alabama supreme court – who was once removed from office for defying a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from his court building – isn’t just a rightwing fanatic on church-and-state questions. Earlier this year, Moore ordered the state’s probate judges to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, although the state’s ban on same-sex marriage was ruled unconstitutional by the supreme court of the United States in the landmark Obergefell v Hodges ruling. While most of Alabama’s probate judges have properly ignored Moore’s lawless order, it demonstrates Moore’s fierce resistance to the rights of same-sex couples. …
THE ORIGIN OF THE GREEN, YELLOW, AND RED COLOR SCHEME FOR TRAFFIC LIGHTS
Today I found out the origin of the green, yellow, and red color scheme for traffic lights.
This color scheme derives from a system used by the railroad industry since the 1830s. At this time, railroad companies developed a lighted means to let train engineers know when to stop or go, with different lighted colors representing different actions. They chose red as the color for stop, it is thought, because red has for centuries been used to indicate danger. For the other colors, they chose white as the color for go and green as the color for caution.
The choice of a white light for go turned out to cause a lot of problems. …
Why Straight Men Gaze at Gay Women
The psychology behind the male sexual desire for lesbians
“What is the most popular porn search term in your state?”
This headline dutifully poked open a gap in my curiosity when variations of it appeared a few days ago.
Ooh, is it “half-Jewish bloggers with autoimmune issues?”
Click. Sigh. No, alas. It’s lesbians.
The map, created by data from Pornhub, reveals that in the majority of states, people are searching for lesbian porn the most. Oh sure, in a few quirky states, cartoons are most popular. Others have ethnic preferences or mother figures they’d like to, uh, well you know. Perhaps the cold weather in Wyoming, Maine, and Minnesota makes people pine for their stepsisters. …
The Dizzying Cityscape of Hong Kong
A layer of fog floats into Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong late on March 15, 2010.
In Hong Kong, space has always been at a premium. The small autonomous territory, part of the People’s Republic of China, houses more than 7.3 million residents within just 426 square miles (1,104 sq kilometers)—resulting in one of the highest population densities in the world: 17,150 people per square mile (6,650 people per sq kilometers). In such a limited and popular environment, developers tend to build as tall as possible, leading to a bristling cityscape that has led some to call Hong Kong a concrete forest. Reuters reports that home prices in Hong Kong have risen by 120 percent since 2008, with prices in the luxury market being pushed up by wealthy buyers from mainland China. The market has cooled in recent months as investors wait to see which direction China’s slowing economy will trend. …
Visual Goodness…….
Suicide Headaches: 5 Realities Of The Worst Thing Ever
They say that childbirth is the worst pain you’ll ever feel, but those people probably don’t understand what it’s like to lose a Tamagotchi. Or have a cluster headache, for that matter. How bad can a headache be, even in cluster form? We’ll get into that more in a moment, but for now, just know that cluster headaches are also referred to as “suicide headaches,” and for exactly the terrifying reason you suspect. We spoke to five people who live every day with the fear of these headaches. They told us …
#5. You Can’t Describe the Sheer Amount of Pain Accurately
We were not being dramatic in the intro (okay, we were being dramatic about our dead Tamagotchi, but not about the headache thing). Tons of people who have super-impressive initials next to their names insist that cluster headaches are the worst possible pain a human can experience. According to Brown University, it feels like having a tiny demon poke you in the eye. That’s not a weirdo throwaway description we made up. There are illustrations.
You know your disease sucks when its descriptive drawings look like death metal album covers.
Finally, some good news about the Silicon Valley housing crisis
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Last week the city council in Mountain View, California, took a significant step toward addressing Silicon Valley’s housing affordability crisis. The city approved a new planning document for its North Bayshore district that envisions the creation of up to 10,250 units of high-density housing. Mountain View only has about 32,000 households total, so that would be a substantial 32 percent increase.
The decision is a victory for Google. The search giant has its headquarters in the North Bayshore district, owns much of the land in the area, and has long been lobbying for more housing near its sprawling corporate campus. If private developers (or perhaps Google itself) step up to realize the city’s vision, it could allow thousands of Google employees to find housing within walking distance of their jobs, making Google a more attractive place to work.
The big question is whether this represents an isolated victory for housing advocates or whether it’s the start of a trend toward denser development in Silicon Valley more broadly. Mountain View’s about-face came after voters elected a new pro-development city council in 2014. If voters in nearby municipalities elect pro-development leaders as well, it could lead to dramatic changes housing and transportation policies across the region. …
How Boulder, a developer and Google helped create housing for hundreds
When Boulder’s Element Properties went shopping for a banker in the summer of 2014, it found instead a non-banker: Google.
Eighteen months later, in a deal that would involve dozens of attorneys, accountants, appraisers, a city official or two and a handful from a state-charted agency, Element closed on one of the largest public-private affordable housing deals in Boulder’s history.
The project, announced in December, allows Element to buy 238 apartments in three complexes: The Nest, in north Boulder, and Osage and Thunderbird, in south Boulder. Each unit will be extensively rehabbed and made permanently affordable.
It was financed largely by a low-interest, 40-year mortgage that Google funded through its investment partner Red Stone Tax Exempt Funding. The Colorado Housing and Financing Authority issued $41.7 million in tax-exempt bonds. It also allocated federal tax credits that were then sold to private institutional investors, raising nearly $20 million for the project. The city of Boulder threw in $11 million in cash. …
10 Unexpected Languages That Enrich The English Vocabulary
French, Latin, and Germanic languages—vast swaths of our lexicon owe their existence to these three culprits, with another sizable chunk coming from Greek. But English is enriched by the exceptions, the idiosyncratic loanwords from Quechua, Japanese, Swahili, Sanskrit, and more. These non-European languages and language groups have made significant contributions to English, giving us some truly unique and unusual words.
10. Bantu Languages
We’ll start with Bantu, a group of languages spoken in a region of sub-Saharan Africa that stretches from Cameroon to Kenya. Their contributions to English are limited to a few quirky items, most notably “jumbo” and “zombie.”
“Jumbo” comes either from the Swahili word jumbe, meaning “chief,” or nzamba, the Kongo word for “elephant.” It entered English in the 1880s as the name of an African elephant in P.T. Barnum’s “Greatest Show on Earth.” In 1882, Barnum purchased Jumbo from London’s Regent’s Park Zoo and brought him to the United States. The animal performed in Barnum’s circus for three years before he was hit and killed by a freight train.
As for “zombie,” some believe this word comes by way of Louisiana Creole from the Spanish sombra, a word that means “shade” or “ghost.” But other linguists say it comes from Bantu languages. It could have roots in the Kikongo word zumbi, meaning “fetish,” or the Kimbundu word for “god,” nzambi. In Haitian Creole, which is influenced by West African languages, the word “zombi” means “spirit of the dead.” …
Google’s artificial intelligence machine to battle human champion of ‘Go’
Lee Se-dol, 33, one of the world’s top players of the ancient Asian pastime, is confident he can beat Alphago. But he hasn’t seen improvements made to the system – and the match results could have implications far beyond the game.
On Wednesday afternoon in the South Korean capital, Seoul, Lee Se-dol, the 33-year-old master of the ancient Asian board game Go, will sit down to defend humanity.
On the other side of the table will be his opponent: Alphago, a programme built by Google subsidiary DeepMind which became, in October, the first machine to beat a professional human Go player, the European champion Fan Hui. That match proved that Alphago could hold its own against the best; this one will demonstrate whether “the best” have to relinquish that title entirely.
Lee, who is regularly ranked among the top three players alive, has been a Go professional for 21 years; Alphago won its first such match less than 21 weeks ago. Despite that, the computer has already played more games of Go than Lee could hope to fit in his life if he lived to a hundred, and it’s good. Very good. …
BMW’s insane car of the future replaces dashboards with augmented reality
And a gemstone-like thing called ‘Companion’ that thinks for you
BMW is in the midst of celebrating its 100th anniversary, and to mark the occasion, it just rolled out the Vision Next 100 concept at its Munich headquarters. By all appearances, it’s one of the most insane concept cars BMW has ever conceived.
If you squint your eyes, you can still see a car that’s clearly a BMW here — it has the iconic “kidney” grille, for instance — but beyond that, the details are all visions of a distant future. The entire windshield is an augmented reality display, which takes the place of every single dashboard display. There are also 800 triangles embedded in the dash, which BMW calls Alive Geometry. These multicolor polygons apparently communicate “very directly with the driver through their movements, which are more like gestures than two-dimensional depictions on a display.”
As with other recent concept cars (including BMW’s own i Vision Future Interaction Concept at CES a couple months ago), the Vision Next 100 refuses to take sides in the self-driving debate — when you want to drive, you can, and the car helps you by drawing the optimal driving line on the windshield. That’s “Boost” mode. In the alternative “Ease” mode, the car takes over, the steering wheel retracts (a solution Elon Musk has also suggested in the past), and the seats change shape to make driver-passenger communication a little easier. Meanwhile, the windshield can be used for entertainment. …
HOW DID HARRY HOUDINI DIE?
Few people in any field of human endeavor rise to become the unquestioned “top-dog” in their profession in their generation, let alone of all time. But ask almost anyone who the greatest illusionist / escape artist in history was and take the proverbial “dollars to doughnuts” wager that they’ll say “Houdini”.
The Houdini legend persists, and indeed, seems to grow even larger with each passing decade. But we’re not here to talk about Houdini’s life. Rather, we’re going to discuss the truth about how he died.
Thanks to the hugely popular (and largely fictional) 1953 film Houdini, starring Tony Curtis, a common myth you’ll often hear concerning how Houdini died is that he drowned failing to escape from a water tank during a performance, having to ultimately be pulled from the tank as depicted in the film.
The real story of how Houdini died is very different. …
Video Goodnesses
(and not-so-goodnesses)
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.