Category Archives: Interesting

A Voice of Principle and Reason

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President Obama wrote the following on Twitter: "With Robert Byrd's passing, West Virginia has lost a true champion, and America has lost a voice of principle and reason."

Let's put this in perspective.  That sentence was written by America's first black president about a man who while he was serving in Congress filibustered against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and as a young man had belonged to the KKK.  Byrd later said that he regretted both of those decisions, but to me that even further highlights the change we've seen in this country in what is really a historical blink of an eye.

Here's an interesting fact for those of us who live in the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina: Byrd was born in 1917 in North Wilkesboro (about an hour from Winston-Salem) and was originally named Cornelius Calvin Sale, Jr. His mother died in the 1918 flu pandemic and he was adopted by his aunt and uncle from West Virginia and they changed his name to Robert Carlyle Byrd.  

Who Wants Their Car to Be a Rolling Windows PC?

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This story in the New York Times (h/t to BookofJoe for the lead) shouldn't have surprised me since I regularly have to re-boot the one late-model car I own, but with paragraphs like these it's hard not to be shocked:

The scientists say that they were able to remotely control braking and other functions, and that the car industry was running the risk of repeating the security mistakes of the PC industry.

“We demonstrate the ability to adversarially control a wide range of automotive functions and completely ignore driver input — including disabling the brakes, selectively braking individual wheels on demand, stopping the engine, and so on,” they wrote in the report, “Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile.”

We're so very hosed.

There’s a &%!$ing Study for Everything

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Should leaders cuss?  Believe it or not, someone's done a management study on that question and as you can imagine it sounds like it was one of the more entertaining academic exercises you'll ever find:

In the most memorable scene of any academic paper I've read lately, Jenkins, after working in the packing department for a couple of months, uses nuclear-grade profanities to challenge an alpha-male co-worker, a guy named Ernest: "Well f—–g get on with it then, you lazy —-." Other workers gasped, but in fact, the incident led Jenkins to be invited to join group activities from which he'd previously been excluded. "[Jenkins] had identified the profane linguistic 'initiation rite' for inclusion in the packers' social group, and used it successfully," the authors concluded.

Whatever You Do, Don’t Tick Off the Artists

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If you want to publish something online that generates a gazillion comments then I suggest the following:

  • Use, without permission, an original illustration.
  • When asked by the artist to remove the illustration, do so, apologize, say something like "it's kind of silly to put that image out there in the online wilds without any protection and get upset when someone uses it," and then explain to him how he shouldn't have made it so easy to use his image and point him to tools he could use to protect his image.
  • Sit back and wait for the illustrator community to beat a path to your comments.
  • Wonder how you never knew that artists could be so, so, so, virulent.
  • Write another post on another blog that's inspired by your first post, and in this new post detail how artists can protect themselves from people like yourself.
  • Sit back and gaze in wonder as the illustrator community finds your new blog post and goes even more batsh** crazy.
  • Defend your position and watch those flames get higher and higher.
  • Watch your boss take the illustrators' side in comment #147 and tell the world that you screwed up and apologize on the company's behalf.

BTW I've been reading Dana Blankenhorn, the author in question, for years and I definitely understand his point of view and I get what he's saying. I tend towards his view of online content (image or word) that in the long run you generally make more money by making it readily available online, but in this specific case I think the illustrator, Chris Buzelli, made some great points.  

Buzelli does work for hire and he feels like the value of his work is diminished if it appears in the wrong place, and he also worries that a work for hire might be used inappropriately without his permission.  For instance if a client gives him permission to use one of the pieces he did for them as a sample on his website and then that client sees the image used elsewhere, perhaps even on a competitor's website, Buzelli risks losing a client.  Another good point he made is that he doesn't want his work used to illustrate an article that he might find objectionable.

Just so we're clear I think that Blankenhorn made a mistake by not first getting permission to use the image and then did the right thing by taking down the image as soon as he heard from Buzelli.  I think he made another mistake by not simply apologizing and moving on, but I also think that because of this kerfluffle content creators now have an object lesson to reference. For his part I think Buzelli really did the right thing by not lawyering up and taking care of this directly himself.  Finally, I think the last group of people I want to tick off are artists.  They're scary when they get riled.

If I Drink 142.85 Cups of Coffee Today I’m Probably a Goner

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DeathByCaffeine
 I drink a lot of coffee.  By a lot I mean A LOT, and it bothers some people enough that they nag me and tell me if I drink too much coffee all kinds of bad things will happen to me.  When I reply, "Like what?" they generally hem and haw because they have no research to back up their assertions.  I'll readily admit that nothing is good for you if you ingest too much of it, but I don't think I've hit that point with coffee so I don't worry too much about it.  If I did happen to worry about it I now know, thanks to this website, how much coffee I can drink before I'll die. BTW, it would take 445 cans of Coke Classic to put me six feet under. Useful info.

Video of Tasered Streaker is Interesting for Unexpected Reason

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A video shot in Wrightsville Beach by Greensboro resident Stephen Stearns is interesting, but not because it features a naked dude being tasered by the police.  Sure, that's interesting if you're into seeing a naked guy tasered in the middle of the street, but I was more interested in the fact that Mr. Stearns kept running his camera even as he was being ordered by the police to stop.  He rightly pointed out that he was in a public place and that he had every right to continue filming. The officer threatened to arrest him, but Mr. Stearns held his ground and he obviously won the argument because he continued to record as the streaker was being escorted away by the police.

Doctor vs. Big Pharma and Government: Burzynski at a/perture

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Cancer is insidious and I'd venture a guess that almost every person in America has been touched by the disease.  Whether it's a family member, a co-worker or a friend we know someone who has had cancer and we've seen first hand how it decimates them and their loved ones.  That's why watching Burzynski, the movie will likely infuriate you.

The movie is a documentary about a doctor and chemist named, you guessed it, Burzynski who discovered a revolutionary treatment for cancer more than 30 years ago. Thanks to battles with myriad government and private entities his treatment has had difficulty getting approved for advanced clinical trials, and has only been available to a limited number of patients as a result.  That's all I'm going to say about the actual content of the movie for fear of spoiling it, but I will say that while I found the movie to be obviously slanted towards supporting Dr. Burzynski, it also provides compelling and objective evidence in support of its stance.  I also found it refreshingly absent of the kind of stunts that Michael Moore has made popular with his movies, and instead relies on public documents, interviews and public hearings to make its case.

All that's not to say that the movie is boring or slow.  To the contrary the pacing seems just right, there's very little redundancy in the evidence presented and yet it still seems thorough.  As a result Burzynski is compelling, the story infuriating and it's a movie I highly recommend seeing.

Burzynski, the movie is appearing this weekend (May 29-30) through next week at a/perture cinema (across from Mellow Mushroom on Fourth Street in downtown Winston-Salem) was written, directed and produced by Eric Merola. You can find show times on a/perture's website.

A Pox on the Poor

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This won't surprise anyone: According to a recent study poor people spend more on lotteries than anyone else.

A recent study found that poor folks – households earning under $13,000 per year – spend about nine percent of all their income on lottery tickets, reported Consumerist.com…

In all, an estimated 20 percent of Americans are frequent players, shelling out about $60 billion a year.

The study claimed that the relatively low cost of lottery tickets – the so-called "peanuts effect" – helps explain the popularity of state lotteries.

The study also stated that poor people play because they believe a lottery ticket is their best, fairest shot at riches.

I will readily concede that it's unfortunate that the people who can least afford it play the lottery in a fruitless attempt to gain riches, but I still get irked when people call it a "tax on the poor."  Taxes aren't optional (in theory at least), and lotteries are most definitely optional.  Personally I think a better term for lotteries is a "pox on the poor."

What Percentage of Personal Income Comes From Private Pay?

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If you had to guess what percentage of Americans' personal income would you say comes from wages paid by private employers?  75%?  60%?  50%?  The answer, my friends, is 41.9%.  That's a record low, and to me it's an amazing number.  From the USA Today article:

Key shifts in income this year:

• Private wages. A record-low 41.9% of the nation's personal income came from private wages and salaries in the first quarter, down from 44.6% when the recession began in December 2007.

•Government benefits. Individuals got 17.9% of their income from government programs in the first quarter, up from 14.2% when the recession started. Programs for the elderly, the poor and the unemployed all grew in cost and importance. An additional 9.8% of personal income was paid as wages to government employees.

Okay, I have a question that I'm hoping someone smarter than me and with more time to do research can answer: If about 42% of personal income comes from pay and about 28% comes from government programs/wages, then where does the other 30% come from?  I can think of medical benefits and interest on investments, but my little pea brain can't come up with anything else.

h/t to Fec for the link.