Read about the policewoman who charged and stopped the gunman at Fort Hood.
quote:
Sergeant Munley — a woman with a fierce love of hunting, surfing and other outdoor sports — bolted from her car, yanked her pistol out and shot at Major Hasan. He turned on her and began to fire. She ran toward him, continuing to fire, and both she and Major Hasan went down with several bullet wounds, Mr. Medley said.
It's been a while since I contributed a new word to the English language and I figured today was as good as any. I stumbled across this word by a typo, but I like it.
Proposed New word: Florify
Definition: To enhance with flowers.
Usage: The landscapers florified the home with plantings around the walk and along the drive.
I did a google search and apparently florify is used by some company that rebuilds the natural bio in your gut/digestive tract, but that's not the usage of florify I intend here.
Here's an interesting story in the Washington Post that links to charts comparing the costs of common healthcare usage units in the U.S. vs. other countries. His conclusion is that we don't necessarily consume more healthcare - it's just that we're paying alot more for the same thing - our system isn't very good at buying healthcare.
Example:
Average cost per hospital day:
U.S.: $3181
Canada: $837
France: $1050
Germany $550
Netherlands: $502
Spain: $579
This is just one of many chart comparisons shown. Really good stuff.
I think we've gotta admit something is seriously broken/wrong with our health care system before we're willing to move on to try something else. To a large degree I think simply the idea that centralized healthcare can work better than the free market alternative is "ideologically incompatible" with the standard American mental framework that we discard the possibility that the free market has completely failed the country when it comes to healthcare. It's not even a close debate in my book but we still want to hang onto this broken thing we have for some reason.
I'm a fan of protecting intellectual property and copyright, however I do find it funny that China cares too given that it's widely considered the global home of pirated music and DVDs.
In general I'm a fan of Google's efforts to build an online book libraries mentioned above - especially for out of print books - provided compensation can be agreed to for authors and publishers. Google has produced considerable societal benefit through its web search engines, and I think there's a lot more to be gained by being able to search books.
Funny, but a couple weeks back I posted a live video of Stevie Ray Vaughan playing Little Wing and I just ran across this unique interpretation of the same song on a crazy looking stringed instrument called a Chapman Stick. I'm not exactly sure how the instrument is strung or tuned, but it seems like it's got both bass and guitar strings strung together on the same fretboard. Anyhow I thought this was pretty cool. Bob Culbertson is the musician here.
I found this perspective interesting.
What the Soviets were saying about Afghanistan 20+ years ago
Here's a live version of Stevie Ray Vaughan playing Little Wing - my favorite tune that he plays, and probably my all-time favorite guitar instrumental. There are similarities to the studio version, but quite a bit of differences too. This is a cover of a Hendrix tune (there are some cool live versions of Hendrix playing this out on youtube also to give you an idea of how close SRV's interpretation is to Hendrix's).
You can see he has trouble getting his amp to feedback for him in places. At the end it goes into a different song.
There aren't many songs like this one. It's somewhat unique even among SRV's stuff - maybe "Lenny" is the most similar - but there's just not much that sounds like this.
Click the link to read Google co-founder Sergey Brin's op-ed on the value of Google's controversial proposed online book library for out of print books.
He claims over 10 million books are now out of print and are increasingly difficult to find even in the best stocked libraries. It really is an ambitious project to make knowledge more accessible to everyone - and to prevent some books from being lost forever.
(I've read recent articles that libraries now regularly have to cull the shelves due to space constraints and the increasing volume of new material. Sorry, I don't have a link on that, but read it in NYTimes maybe year or two ago if you're the investigative type. After reading the article I did a search of the local Nashville public library system also and found some of the so-called classics aren't available here either presumably due to similar culling processes over the year. Apparently the many of the classics weren't being requested very often and ended up on the cull piles due to their unpopularity.)
Brin on the agreement with the Author's Guild and Publishers:
This agreement aims to make millions of out-of-print but in-copyright books available either for a fee or for free with ad support, with the majority of the revenue flowing back to the rights holders, be they authors or publishers.
I was looking through one of my songwriting books and the name "Richard Leo Johnson - Glidepath" scratched on a page. I sometimes will jot cool things down when I see them - I guess I saw him on a TV show somewhere. For Richard Leo Johnson I wrote down "cool guitar-strum technique - reminds me some of Auten music on cable access." (the Auten mention is probably guitarist D.R. Auten - he's the only D.Auten I can find reference to on the web.)
I looked up a video for Glidepath and here's what I found. I still think it's awesome.
Here's a tune from D.R. Auten I found on youtube I thought was cool.
One of my favorite journalists is Thomas Friedman. To me he has a refreshingly practical common-sense approach to his writing that fits well with his insightful and not-always-obvious observations that strike at the core of issues.
Here his most recent op-ed "Real Men Tax Gas" discusses how we are still unwilling to take steps to reduce our dependence on oil - the one thing that would weaken our enemies the most. The essential crux of his argument: Why are we so willing to send thousands of more young Americans to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan, but so unwilling to seek energy alternatives to oil? And what does that say about us?
There are arguments on both sides of this, and there are certainly valid arguments that it's not all about oil... but Friedman as usual hits on a key point that has gone largely un-addressed.
"How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer finally became available at the library (long-long hold list) and I read it over the past few days. I'd requested it so long ago that I forgot about it. I remember seeing the author on C-Span book-TV and must've requested the book and am very glad I did.
"How We Decide" is a popular science book that attempts to summarize many recent neurological experiments that highlight new findings about BRAIN function, coordination, strengths, weaknesses, limitations, and ultimately how we arrive at decisions incorporating input from all the different parts of our brain.
It's full of stories about poker (getting reads on other players), consumer decisions (like buying a car, buying a house, buying jam, using credit cards, how we're manipulated by marketers and retailers), military decisions, airline emergency scenarios, quarterback decisions, stock market bubbles and crashes, rationalization, creativity, autism, and many others.
Key concepts.
- The author and the studies presented attack the prevailing conventional wisdom that humans are primarily rational decision makers. If anything, the research utilizing real-time brain scans seems to indicate that our older emotional brains often make decisions before we're aware of it, and then our conscious mind tends to rationalize those decisions "after the fact".
- The author sees the subconscious and older emotional brain centers as a highly powerful computer that picks and considers alot of things that our conscious mind is unaware of. There's alot of power our "gut" feeling about things - and often if we try to rationalize our gut instinct we end up making more mistakes than just going with our initial impressions.
- There are significant limitations to our conscious rational mind (prefrontal cortex)- and it's far more limited than we realize. It's a small part of the brain's mass and it's really best at coordinating the work of the unconscious mind. (Some of the discussions/research reminds me of the futility of multitasking when we see how small stresses on our conscious mind degrade functionality and decision capacity).
Anyhow - this is an excellent book. The best read I've had in a long time. One of the few books I come across that isn't "padded" with fluff. When it was finished I was actually wishing there was more. There are lots of "Wow!" and "Aha" moments in reading through. I'm going to check out his other books.
I guess we like to think we remember things, but maybe we mis-remember them better?
I played in a corporate band challenge about 5 months back and recently watched a video of that performance. Alot of the performance was kindof like I remembered, but then there was the judging section at the end (kindof like American Idol) where a panel of local celebs and music industry people evaluated our performance. I sortof remembered the general theme what they said, but on rewatching the video I realize my mind had stored several of the comments quite a bit differently. I think the process of replaying the comments in my head after the performance may have gradually changed my memory of the comments themselves. (Like the game where you line up a bunch of people and whisper a story into one person's ear, and they whisper to their neighbor, and so on.... When you get to the end the story may have changed quite a bit just through the retelling.)
I've seen quite a few studies about how memories of an event can easily evolve over time to become considerably different than what actually occurred, but here's a very interesting study that shows that in some cases you can actually come to believe the exact opposite of something you directly experienced. Here researchers doctored a videotape of test subjects and successfully convinced 40% of them that something happened that didn't. Basically the researchers showed that we can be led to completely abandon real memories and replace them with fake memories. And get this - many of the test subjects were so convinced of the new fake memory that they would say they'd testify that the fake memory was the actual truth...
I read alot of pop-science related stuff, but for some reason this caught my imagination. Apparently scientists have determined that some deep sea creatures utilize chlorophyll to enhance their vision in extremely low light conditions.
Efforts are underway to see if "drops" can be developed to allow humans to see better at night. The military is particularly interested.
Here's an interesting discussion - should a human mission to Mars be a one way trip?
It seems kindof cold to me, but worth reading.
