Some say you're never too old to learn something new. Others say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Well, you know where we come down on this. And we've got some celebrity case studies to back us up. In a blog post yesterday, The New York Times featured four cultural icons and one war hero who learned new skills later in life. Miles Davis started boxing when most boxers are hanging up their gloves. Ayn Rand, in her 60s, improbably took up the hobby of stamp collecting. Marie Curie learned to swim in her 50s. And the great novelist Leo Tolstoy took his first bike ride at the age of 67. The Times writes that he started cycling:

NASA's long-lived rover Opportunity has returned an image of the Martian surface that is puzzling researchers.

Spherical objects concentrated at an outcrop Opportunity reached last week differ in several ways from iron-rich spherules nicknamed "blueberries" the rover found at its landing site in early 2004 and at many other locations to date.

Opportunity is investigating an outcrop called Kirkwood in the Cape York segment of the western rim of Endeavour Crater. The spheres measure as much as one-eighth of an inch (3 millimeters) in diameter. The analysis is still preliminary, but it indicates that these spheres do not have the high iron content of Martian blueberries.

Iraq plans to raise its oil exports from its current 2.6 million barrels per day (bpd) to 6 million in 2017, helped by foreign investment in the sector.

Activism Articles Featured -- 08 September 2012

Apple has patented a piece of technology which would allow government and police to block transmission of information, including video and photographs, from any public gathering or venue they deem "sensitive", and "protected from externalities."

In other words, these powers will have control over what can and cannot be documented on wireless devices during any public event.

And while the company says the affected sites are to be mostly cinemas, theaters, concert grounds and similar locations, Apple Inc. also says "covert police or government operations may require complete `blackout' conditions."

"Additionally," Apple says," the wireless transmission of sensitive information to a remote source is one example of a threat to security. This sensitive information could be anything from classified government information to questions or answers to an examination administered in an academic setting.

At a conference organised by the European Commission: Jobs For Europe.

I distribute. You re-distribute. He gives your hard-earned money to lazy scroungers. -- JakeS

SEATTLE--With the holiday shopping season officially under way, millions of consumers proceeded to their nearest commercial centers this week in hopes of acquiring the latest, and therefore most desirable, personal device.

"The new device is an improvement over the old device, making it more attractive for purchase by all Americans," said Thomas Wakefield, a spokesperson for the large conglomerate that manufactures the new device. "The old device is no longer sufficient. Consumers should no longer have any use or longing for the old device."

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/15/1132352/-I-may-need-some-help-Anyone-in-Amsterdam

Two news cycles have already been dedicated to trashing organic food. Organic food is free of pesticides and genetic manipulation, both of which are proven to cause learning disabilities, decreased IQ, sterility, and a myriad of other health problems including a wide variety of cancers.

This most recent anti-organic food campaign began with a Stanford study (and here) out of its Center for Health Policy (a subsidiary of Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies), examining the nutritional value of organic food versus non-organic. Food with pesticides on it had nearly the same nutritional value, the study claims, as organic food - completely skipping over the whole point of eating organic.

Indeed, the nutritional value would be similar - but the entire point of eating organic is not because of vastly superior nutritional value, but to avoid the "extras" included with products from big-agri corporations.

The Stanford study intentionally dismisses concerns regarding the presence of pesticides by simply claiming levels were within legal tolerances. No discussion was made on whether legal tolerances equated to safe tolerances, nor was there any mention made of the harmful effects of genetically modified organisms (GMO) or other controversial food additives found in non-organic food products.

So why the strawman argument?

A Corporate-funded "Study"

The Stanford Center for Health Policy states the following  on its own website:

"The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) relies on support from its friends, as well as from national and international foundations and corporations, for the funding of the Institute's research, teaching and outreach activities."

The Center for Health Policy is a subsidiary of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). So who are these "friends," national and international foundations and corporations funding the research of FSI and its subsidiary, the Stanford Center for Health Policy?

 

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

"Smart people" in America will never back conservative Republicans, or so says Rick Santorum - a conservative Republican whose verbal missteps are becoming as well-known as his hardline posturing on social issues.

Santorum, who ended up being Mitt Romney's closest rival for the 2012 Republican nomination, made the comment at the conservative Value Voters Summit in Washington.

"When you were six, I was driving a brand new Chevy station wagon and paying $125 a month," he says. "I remember seeing Cadillac commercials on TV saying, 'Drive away today with little money down and $450 a month,' and I remember thinking, 'I'll never be able to afford that.' And today that's a totally common car payment. We lived in a three-bedroom condo with two full baths for $280 a month. Nothing"--except the kind of crap boxed up in Susie's warehouse--"is cheaper now than it was then."

My father did ultimately lease a string of Cadillacs when I was older. Now he drives a Lexus SUV. Now he works at a firm that companies hire to headhunt the managers and VPs and CEOs they need, generally people in the $130,000 range but often much more. At the moment, my father has been tapped by a company to find the right candidate for a position that pays $600,000. Last year he placed someone who made $1.4 million annually, and another who made $1.5 mil. He bills enough that at the office, where I've had occasion to use the nap room, his is one of the faces etched in bronze on the plaques for people who've earned the firm a million or more.

"You know, you used to be able to survive blue collar," he says. "Now, the blue-collar guy, they just crush the life out of him. It's very depressing." Unemployment has doubled since the beginning of the recession, and home equity has fallen by more than a third, but Wall Street profits are up more than 700 percent. Profits at his firm, which is part of a global group with more than 4,000 employees, have remained steady. "Recessions," as my father sometimes puts it, "don't affect people like me."

Native News Network

Yesterday, he was an American. Just as Pima tribal citizen Ira Hayes was an American when he raised the flag on Iwo Jima during World War II, Ambassador Stevens was an American. Ira Hayes is immortalized in the Iwo Jima Memorial near the Pentagon. Somehow his American Indianness gets forgotten in the Memorial. He is simply an American.

Yesterday, Ambassador Stevens' American Indianness was obscured by the American flag, which is fine. He shared a dual status. American Indians understand this.

whimper

Ever since I learnt about confirmation bias I've started seeing it everywhere

Lord Hill, an Education Minister, remains in his post after apparently trying unsuccessfully to resign from the Government during the reshuffle two weeks ago.

The Prime Minister is said to have been distracted and failed to catch what Lord Hill was saying to him when they met in Mr Cameron's Commons office at the end of what had been a long day of blood-letting.

Warned he was late for a photocall, the Prime Minister left the room telling the minister to "carry on the good work," leaving him with little choice but to remain in office.

The rallies in Portugal were mostly incident-free, but a young protester of about 20 was taken to hospital with burns after an attempted self-immolation during the protests in the northern town of Aveiro. RTP television quoted firemen as saying his life was not in danger.

The article cited above - A Contrarian Worth Listening To: Caltech Professor John Doyle Thinks "Complexity" is Over-Simplified - notes that the "Science of Complexity" is a new approach where:

... theorists (often physicists) apply statistical physics to problems in fields like engineering and biology. After reading through many such papers, Doyle says it's a recipe: Authors combine the same physics theories in the same definable steps to reach sometimes far-fetched conclusions. "What they've done is standard operating procedure in the physics literature, but now they've stretched it into a regime where we can check the answers," says Doyle, "If you're not a particle physicist, it's hard to check a measurement in quantum mechanics; but if you're an engineer or a biologist, you know they make claims about how things work in engineering and biology that are obviously absurd."

Mainstream economics shares this tendency. If you went to graduate classes in macroeconomics (and micro for that matter) you will realise how technically complicated the mainstream economists have made the discipline. Graduate students are imbued with a sense of self-importance because they can parade over others with the jargon-laden claims about the economy - appearing as deep thinkers who combine a complex understanding of human psychology with sophisticated analytical mathematics to solve intertemporal maximisation problems that have no real limits.

Polish exorcism boom leads to launch of `Egzorcysta' magazine

I distribute. You re-distribute. He gives your hard-earned money to lazy scroungers. -- JakeS