Guns may not kill people, but they sure make it easier for people to kill other people. After watching this video it's also painfully obvious that guns make it awfully easy for people to shoot themselves, even if they're really smart.
If you've been drinking beer long enough you've encountered skunked beer at some point. So how does a beer get skunked? First thing you need to know is that the professionals don't call it skunked, they call it lightstruck.That's important to know because it ends up that the popular wisdom that letting a beer get hot will cause it to get skunked, er, lightstruck is incorrect:
What those researchers found is that there are two distinct pathways to getting skunky-smelling compounds in your beer. The two main actors is this tale of woe: hop alpha acids and light. Not heat. Not oxygen. Light…
All beers that have been bittered with hops can suffer skunking: As an experiment, get a draft beer poured into a clear glass and then let it sit in the sun for 10 minutes or so. Compare that beer to one fresh from the tap. You should definitely detect some skunk in the lightstruck beer. With clear, green or blue bottles, the glass doesn't filter out the ultraviolet and blue wavelengths that start the skunking reaction. Brown bottles are much better at keeping those wavelengths out of your beer…
In the end, if you want to avoid the skunk entirely, just buy a beer that has been packaged in a keg, cask or can. Those beers can (and do) develop bad flavors, but you'll never get one that has been skunked.
Duly noted.
Seven years before Coke aired its iconic peace-and-harmony I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke TV ad, the company's CEO staked out a controversial position in Atlanta, GA, the home of the company's headquarters. From Now I Know:
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta, Georgia on January 15, 1929. On October 14, 1964, he became the youngest person to ever win the Nobel Peace Prize. And his home town of Atlanta wanted to throw him a party: an inter-racial banquet, with official invitations going to the city’s leaders and titans of industry. The invites were signed by the city’s mayor, religious leaders from across faiths, a university president, and the publisher of the major area newspaper.
Unfortunately, Atlanta was still racially segregated, and while King had many fans, he also had many enemies. Many whites were upset that King had been honored by the Nobel committee… Invitations to the highly exclusive event came back with many more declinations than one would expect…
Mayor Allen and J. Paul Austin, the chairman and CEO of the Coca-Cola Company, called together a meeting of the Atlanta’s business leaders, and Austin threw down the gauntlet. According to the Atlanta Constitution-Journal, Austin told those assembled that “it is embarrassing for Coca-Cola to be located in a city that refuses to honor its Nobel Prize winner. We are an international business. The Coca-Cola Company does not need Atlanta. You all need to decide whether Atlanta needs the Coca-Cola Company.”
They decided. Within two hours, all of the tickets were sold…
For your viewing pleasure today we have two videos – the Coke ad mentioned above and Dr. King's I Have a Dream speech. Enjoy.
For your Friday viewing pleasure:
In a letter he wrote to Adlai Stevenson in 1959 author John Steinbeck wrote the following:
Adlai, do you remember two kinds of Christmases? There is one kind in a house where there is little and a present represents not only love but sacrifice. The one single package is opened with a kind of slow wonder, almost reverence. Once I gave my youngest boy, who loves all living things, a dwarf, peach-faced parrot for Christmas. He removed the paper and then retreated a little shyly and looked at the little bird for a long time. And finally he said in a whisper, "Now who would have ever thought that I would have a peach-faced parrot?"
Then there is the other kind of Christmas with present piled high, the gifts of guilty parents as bribes because they have nothing else to give. The wrappings are ripped off and the presents thrown down and at the end the child says—"Is that all?" Well, it seems to me that America now is like that second kind of Christmas. Having too many THINGS they spend their hours and money on the couch searching for a soul. A strange species we are. We can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick.
May we all get what we need and deserve, which of course is not always what we want.
If you're considering cosmetic surgery you may want to steer clear of some procedures involving the use of stem cells:
Wu could see that something was wrong: Her eyelid drooped stubbornly, and the area around her eye was somewhat swollen. Six and a half hours of surgery later, he and his colleagues had dug out small chunks of bone from the woman's eyelid and tissue surrounding her eye, which was scratched but largely intact. The clicks she heard were the bone fragments grinding against one another.
About three months earlier the woman had opted for a relatively new kind of cosmetic procedure at a different clinic in Beverly Hills—a face-lift that made use of her ownadult stem cells. First, cosmetic surgeons had removed some the woman's abdominal fat with liposuction and isolated the adult stem cells within—a family of cells that can make many copies of themselves in an immature state and can develop into several different kinds of mature tissue. In this case the doctors extracted mesenchymal stem cells—which can turn into bone, cartilage or fat, among other tissues—and injected those cells back into her face, especially around her eyes. The procedure cost her more than $20,000, Wu recollects. Such face-lifts supposedly rejuvenate the skin because stem cells turn into brand-new tissue and release chemicals that help heal aging cells and stimulate nearby cells to proliferate.
This kind of puts the potential risks of botox to shame doesn't it?
Remember Nate Silver? He's the guy who got so much attention for accurately predicting (in an eerily detailed way) the results of the last election. He's come out with an analysis of gun owners in the US and going by his numbers it looks like the most well-armed segment of our population is white middle-aged men, who are married with children, make between $50-100k, belong to the Republican party, are Evangelical Christians (but only go a couple of times per yeare, i.e. Chreasters), didn't graduate from college, live in the rural midwest and served in the US military.
I can't imagine that fits anyone's stereotype of a gunowner.
Tempted to make fun of someone on Facebook because he doesn't know the difference between lose and loose? Probably not a good idea, and it might actually mean you're a bit of a whank:
There was a time that it gave me a blush of pride to be referred to as “the Spelling Sergeant” or “the Punctuation Police”. I would gleefully tear a syntactic strip out of anybody who fell victim to the perils of poor parallelism or the menace of misplaced modifiers. I railed against atrostrophes and took a red pen to signs posted in staff rooms, bulletin boards and public washrooms. I was, to put it bluntly, really, really annoying…
So if I crap on Jonny’s spelling, I’m either reinforcing an oppressive status quo, or picking on a person with a disability, or both. And taking part in these kinds of insults, even when they’re directed at an Internet troll, encourages other people to participate in this kind of shaming. It’s frankly also pretty ineffective as a debate tactic. I’m not going to change Jonny’s mind, nor help him improve his writing abilities, by making fun of him. He may be a jerk because he’s never learned how to express himself in a healthy way, and I’m not doing much to help him. And reducing my arguments to the level of ad homonym attacks debases my own credibility – because if I have a valid point to make, I should be able to make it without resorting to pettiness. Furthermore, it is guaranteed that somewhere out there on the Interwebs, there is someone I agree with whose reasoned arguments are disparaged, dismissed or ignored because they come wrapped in a package of nonstandard language.
This is no trifling issue, either. I like to shock the new tutors I train by quoting statistics from theInternational Adult Literacy Survey. I ask them to estimate, in a developed country like Canada or the U.S., what percentage of the population has literacy skills below the very basic level needed to function well in our society. People usually guess ten percent, fifteen percent, maybe as much as twenty-five. Then I pull out the sad, stunning facts: nearly half of all North American adults cannot cope with complex written material of the sort that the other half of us take completely for granted. HALF, you guys. This should be considered anational crisis. Not fodder for sport.
The blog post that's the source of these opinions is titled Literacy Privilege: How I Learned to Check Mine Instead of Making Fun of People's Grammar on the Internet and it's well worth the read, if for no other reason than absorb the list of privileges we literate members of society enjoy. Here's a sample:
The companion pieces to this post are also well worth the read. You can find them here and there.
Hopefully we'll see many presentations like this at Greensboro's TEDx in Spring, 2013:
This is a really nice piece on graphic design:
Befuddled 