Don't have an account yet? You can create one. As a registered user you have some advantages like theme manager, comments configuration and post comments with your name.
Posted by heff on Thursday, March 04 @ 09:54:41 CST (4 reads)
(Read More... | Score: 0)
How To Report The News
Posted by heff on Thursday, March 04 @ 09:50:53 CST (4 reads)
(Read More... | Score: 0)
Lost Leno Film Re-Appears - Unending Stream of Racist Stereotpyes
Posted by heff on Sunday, February 28 @ 09:51:56 CST (7 reads)
(Read More... | Score: 0)
Happy 89th Birthday, Abe Vigoda!
He doesn't look a day over a thousand.
Posted by heff on Thursday, February 25 @ 07:52:00 CST (6 reads)
(Read More... | Score: 0)
Windows 7 Parody
Posted by heff on Wednesday, February 24 @ 07:56:47 CST (6 reads)
(Read More... | Score: 0)
Stunning and Beautiful 'Buckle Up' PSA
Posted by heff on Friday, February 19 @ 07:55:31 CST (9 reads)
(Read More... | Score: 0)
Salt of the Earth Returning to The Sheldon in November!
For those of you who may have missed their recent "Notes from Home" concert at the Sheldon, local talent Salt of the Earth will be making their triumphant return in November along with previous cohorts Prairie Soul.
I can't emphasize enough what an amazing sound they had at their last performance in the acoustic perfection of the Sheldon Concert Hall. Here's your chance to make up for missing the last one.
And hey, maybe they'll even be able to slip 'Face of the Earth' into the setlist this time. (wink, wink)
Here are the details:
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 9TH
The Sheldon Concert Hall – Notes From Home Concert Series
3648 Washington Blvd. (right behind the Fox Theatre)
314-533-9900
In his book How We Decide, and in a recent Wall Street Journal article, Jonah writes about an experiment by Stanford University professor Baba Shiv, who collected several dozen undergraduates and divided them into two groups.
In the WSJ article, Jonah writes:
"One group was given a two-digit number to remember, while the second group was given a seven-digit number. Then they were told to walk down the hall, where they were presented with two different snack options: a slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit salad."
And then he writes:
"Here's where the results get weird. The students with seven digits to remember were nearly twice as likely to choose the cake as students given two digits. The reason, according to Professor Shiv, is that those extra numbers took up valuable space in the brain — they were a "cognitive load" — making it that much harder to resist a decadent dessert. In other words, willpower is so weak, and the prefrontal cortex is so overtaxed, that all it takes is five extra bits of information before the brain starts to give in to temptation."
It turns out, Jonah explains, that the part of our brain that is most reasonable, rational and do-the-right-thing is easily toppled by the pull of raw sensual appetite, the lure of sweet. Knowing something is the right thing to do takes work — brain work — and our brains aren't always up to that. The experiment, after all, tells us brains can't even hold more than seven numbers at a time. Add five extra digits, and good sense tiptoes out of your head, and in comes the cake. "This helps explain why, after a long day at the office, we're more likely to indulge in a pint of ice cream, or eat one too many slices of leftover pizza," Lehrer writes.
Posted by heff on Tuesday, February 16 @ 07:43:44 CST (12 reads)
(Read More... | Score: 0)
During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a Japanese air attack. They covered it with camouflage netting and trompe l'oeil to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air.
Follow the link for some amazing pictures.
Posted by heff on Tuesday, February 16 @ 07:35:06 CST (9 reads)
(Read More... | Score: 0)
AMC Streaming Original Prisoner Series for Free
Well, I can't say I exactly enjoyed AMC's recent remake of the classic BBC mind-fuck TV series 'The Prisoner', but I can say I'm thrilled that they are streaming the entire original series from their website for free.
Your adventure begins with Episode 1: "Arrival" in which our hero, a retired spook, wakes to find himself upon a mysterious island.
Posted by heff on Tuesday, February 16 @ 07:19:50 CST (14 reads)
(Read More... | Score: 0)
In a 15,000-square-foot warehouse just down the road from the Oakland Airport, an entrepreneur is opening a one-stop shop for medicinal marijuana cultivation that's believed to be the largest in the state.
Don't know the first thing about growing pot? The folks at iGrow have a doctor on site to get you a cannabis card and sell you all the necessary equipment for indoor, hydroponic cultivation - from pumps, nutrients and tubing to lights and fans.
Don't know how to set it up? For a fee, on-site technicians will show you how to build it in your home and even maintain it weekly.
NPR also did a great story covering the grand opening, including local officials from the City of Oakland who are more than happy to collect the tax revenue from the store's sales. What sensible folks those Oaklanders can be when they aren't rioting against the cops.
Posted by heff on Tuesday, February 16 @ 07:14:32 CST (9 reads)
(Read More... | Score: 0)
Older couples are more in love than most and continue to have satisfying sex lives, despite some physiological hurdles, according to Canadian researchers.
Posted by heff on Tuesday, February 16 @ 07:12:09 CST (9 reads)
(Read More... | Score: 0)
A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything
Posted by heff on Tuesday, February 16 @ 07:03:23 CST (9 reads)
(Read More... | Score: 0)
Jon Stewart Covers Obama's Q&A with the GOP
Posted by heff on Wednesday, February 03 @ 08:09:39 CST (12 reads)
(Read More... | Score: 0)
Scientology 'Touch Healers' in Haiti - FAIL!
Seems the Scientologists sent a planeload full of their whack-job followers down to Haiti to provide relief and aid. Seems also, that they had no freakin' clue what they were doing.
One girl was in designer cowboy boots. I asked her if she'd brought any sturdier footwear.
"Oh no, these'll be fine."
I asked another guy what he'd packed and he said he hadn't bothered to bring soap or toilet paper or food, but that he'd just "buy whatever I need at Port-au-Prince airport." I couldn't break it to him.
They had no place to stay, and no supplies — their idea was to use the ton of money they had to buy food to distribute when they got there. But there was no food and no water. That was the point.
...snip...
they had no-one who spoke Creole, and they brought the weirdness of touch healing into a very superstitious society.
They'd leave the tent and come into the general hospital downtown, and try healing people. One of the doctors and one of the nurses told me that the wounded started coming to them to tell them they didn't want to be treated by the people in the yellow shirts.
One nurse told me that the Scientologists actually caused harm — they gave food to people who were scheduled to go into surgery. That then led to complications in the operating theater.
Wow, what a bunch of assholes.
Posted by heff on Wednesday, February 03 @ 07:57:37 CST (12 reads)
(Read More... | Score: 0)
Quiz: Are These Comments About the 2001 iPod or 2010 iPad?
Just a reminder as you ponder the hype and criticism of Apple's latest creation: the iPad — we've heard all of this before. And most of the critics were dead wrong.
We pulled 11 comments from the 2001 release of the iPod and the 2010 release of the iPad. Can you tell which is which?
"I guess the negative reactions indicate that people expect miracles from Apple."
"maybe that thing is not revolutionary...but it shows best at what Apple excels over and over....DESIGN... this thing is so damn beautiful, that i'm already thinking about wanting one (not buying, wanting one!)...this is almost a sexual thing.."
You might be surprised which quotes are from 2001 and which from 2010.
Posted by heff on Wednesday, February 03 @ 07:34:10 CST (14 reads)
(Read More... | Score: 0)
List of Nations the U.S. Has Bombed Since 1950
Korea and China 1950-53 (Korean War)
Guatemala 1954
Indonesia 1958
Cuba 1959-1961
Guatemala 1960
Congo 1964
Laos 1964-73
Vietnam 1961-73
Cambodia 1969-70
Guatemala 1967-69
Grenada 1983
Lebanon 1983, 1984 (both Lebanese and Syrian targets)
Libya 1986
El Salvador 1980s
Nicaragua 1980s
Iran 1987
Panama 1989
Iraq 1991 (Persian Gulf War)
Kuwait 1991
Somalia 1993
Bosnia 1994, 1995
Sudan 1998
Afghanistan 1998
Yugoslavia 1999
Yemen 2002
Iraq 1991-2003 (US/UK on regular basis)
Iraq 2003-present
Afghanistan 2001-present
Pakistan 2007-present
Somalia 2000-presemt
Yemen 2010
Dang, that's a lot of "nation building."
Posted by heff on Tuesday, February 02 @ 18:34:47 CST (17 reads)
(Read More... | Score: 0)
Hanson Covers Radiohead
Not only does their cover of Radiohead's Optimistic not suck, it's pretty damn good.
I figure they'll never be remembered for anything other than Mmm Bop, but damn them kids is pretty talented.
Posted by heff on Tuesday, February 02 @ 18:31:54 CST (16 reads)
(Read More... | Score: 0)
Jaron Lanier on The Serfdom of Crowds
Jaron Lanier (the guy who basically invented virtual reality) is a brilliant thinker and musician who really understands technology, creativity, and the human process. I consider this article by him to be must-read material. Give it a look.
If you want to know what's really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of to musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than with truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless. The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this contract is that authors, journalists, musicians, and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.
At the time the Web was born, in the early 1990s, a popular trope was that a new generation of teenagers, reared in the conservative Reagan years, had turned out to be exceptionally bland. The members of "Generation X" were characterized as blank and inert. The anthropologist Steve Barnett saw in them the phenomenon of pattern exhaustion, in which a culture runs out of variations of traditional designs in their pottery and becomes less creative. A common rationalization in the fledgling world of digital culture back then was that we were entering a transitional lull before a creative storm - or were already in the eye of one. But we were not passing through a momentary calm. We had, rather, entered a persistent somnolence, and I have come to believe that we will escape it only when we kill the hive.
Posted by heff on Tuesday, February 02 @ 18:26:44 CST (19 reads)
(Read More... | Score: 0)
Can't...stop...laughing/crying...
Yeah, I'm just gonna let this one play without further comment.
Posted by heff on Thursday, January 14 @ 12:10:06 CST (31 reads)
(Read More... | Score: 0)