We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A venture capitalist searches for the purpose of school and formal education. Here’s what he found.
An interesting topic. There is no doubt that schools are there to do the things that parents are not equipped to do or might not have time to do: acculturation, academic skills, some practical skills. Foundations for life.
Defined benefit pension systems have rules that strongly favor long term workers. Workers often didn’t qualify for pensions until they worked a threshold number of years—if you left the company before you ‘vested’, you lost your pension benefits. And because length of service played a large role in calculating pension benefits, workers who changed jobs or careers often ended up with very small pensions. There have been heartrending cases of workers in manufacturing companies who lost everything when their jobs went abroad before they had worked enough years to collect a good pension. And in their 40s and 50s, many could not replace those jobs or the lost pension benefits.
Those old-time pensions are a thing of the past, except for some government employees.
Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.
Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.
Look, I know you mean well, and some of you look quite fetching in a lab coat, horn rims, and high heels, but I am not interested in your "studies." You do not seem to have studied anything but grievances in school, yet you publish studies by the ream as soon as you escape. I do not care a fig if you think my cell phone is giving cancer to my autism. I am not all that interested in your theories about the correlation of causation with the cessation of sensation in my foot as I drop off to sleep at night.
I sleep when I'm tired and I eat when I'm hungry and I drink when I'm thirsty and I read when I'm curious and I wonder what you're on about. If you've got evidence, trot it out, but I warn you I'm going to want to inspect your test tubes before I throw away my office chair and sit on a beach ball.
"In our study, we found people who drank three to five cups of coffee per day had about a 15 percent lower [risk of premature] mortality compared to people who didn't drink coffee," says one of the study authors, nutrition researcher Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health. Decaf drinkers also saw benefits.
This article is only sorta-correct. It's true you'll live longer if you don't get in my way when I'm trying to get coffee.
Harvey hadn't snatched the brain for the morbid fascination of keeping a part of history the same way some collectors have done with Annie Oakley's gun or Neil Armstrong's hair. Instead, Harvey was hoping to learn whether or not Einstein's genius could be quantified. Was his brain somehow wired differently than ours? Gutfreund dismisses that line of research. "I don't know," he says. "Your brain is different than my brain. There are no two brains alike."
This is the equivalent of breaking into a bank to steal the deposit slips. Ted Williams frozen head is never going to bat .400, either.
But the truth is there are 2.5 billion people globally who lack access to even the very basic necessities of sanitation, cleanliness and safe water — that's twice the population of the U.S.World Toilet Day is November 19, and aims to raise awareness about the global issue of poor sanitation around the world. We ask: What would your life look like if you had to exist without access to clean water? To a hot shower? To a private, indoor toilet?
Another paid advertisement masquerading as a news article, but I'll play along: America doesn't have "access" to water. We have a population of capable humans who consider an inexpensive supply of potable water for its citizens to be an important, if trivial, undertaking, and then makes it happen. Well, except California.
I’ve consistently experienced connectivity issues between the cup and the app on my iPhone. Sometimes the app wouldn’t recognize the cup, so I’d have to physically reset the cup in order for it to work. I had to do that at least 10 times over the last couple of weeks. It was pretty frustrating, so I ended up not using Pryme for about a week until last night. I, once again, reset the cup and then connected it via Bluetooth to my phone. It worked fine until I woke up this morning and tilted the cup to look at my Pryme level. According to the cup, I was at my Pryme, even though I hadn’t had any water for the previous several hours. Sigh.
Yet another fake ad, but I'll play along. This woman believes she needs a handheld supercomputer wirelessly attached to an electronic cup in order to get herself a drink of water. She's the target audience for the last fake article, I imagine.
There is an unnamed epidemic slowly traveling through the middle of the U.S. This epidemic goes by many names, but our venture fund refers to it as “early exit disease.” This disease spreads when founders realize sub-$20 million exits. Many of these exits could have grown much larger. Instead, early exits have been quietly devastating the Midwest region’s startup maturation, cutting off the very process that first created Silicon Valley — and which could create more tech capitals in the middle of the country.
The article says startup owners are cashing out before they've sufficiently bilked investors out of enough money to fund still more startups. Welcome to the fabulous new iAmway economy!
The first, built in 1887, was Sioux City’s corn palace, which spanned more than 18,000 square feet, rose 100 feet high and cost $25,000–hundreds of thousands in today’s dollars. In the year it was built, a drought had devastated crops across the middle of the country. But for some reason, Sioux City's part of Iowa was spared and even had an excess of corn. The city wanted to signal that life in the Midwest wasn't as dreary and desperate as it might seem, and, as Pamela H. Simpson writes in Corn Palaces and Butter Queens, the idea for the palace came from a town meeting, at which one enterprising man asked “why, if Saint Paul and Toronto could have ice palaces, Sioux City couldn’t have a corn palace.”
The United States has always been an endlessly interesting place, and continues to be so.
What happens when you apply thousands of LED lights to a bicycle? You fit right in with Venice, California locals. Venice Beach, which served as a US hippy hub of the 1960s, is now seeing dozens of locals cruising its boardwalk late at night with brightly glowing rides.
The United States has always been an endlessly interesting place, and continues to be so.
Mr. Jindal unveiled a series of policy proposals, ferociously attacked Donald J. Trump and spent considerable time courting conservatives in Iowa, which begins the presidential nominating process. None of it worked.
If a couple more Republican candidates quit, they're not going to be able to field a baseball team.
A disgruntled crowd member stormed the pitch and hit an assistant referee with his penis during a football match in southern Spain. The incident occurred during a match between Second Division Andaluza Sénior and fellow Andalusian team CD Abes in Granada on Sunday.
I've noticed that gruntled people never attack anyone with their penis.
The analysis of a fossil tooth from Siberia reveals that a mysterious people known as Denisovans, discovered a mere five years ago, persisted for tens of thousands of years alongside modern humans and Neanderthals.The find underscores that our Homo sapiens ancestors shared the Eurasian continent with other human-like populations. For hundreds of thousands of years, modern humans lived alongside Neanderthals, a sister hominid species that died out about 40,000 years ago. Denisovans appear to have shared some of that territory as well.
I know they're scientists, but I doubt I'm related to Julia Roberts.
Well, there you go. If I were you, I'd blow off work, get hopped up on pots of coffee, build a house out of corn shucks, and then ride a bicycle covered with LEDs in circles around it. If you don't, the terrorists have won.
India has to be one of the most complicated nations on earth. It is not really a nation except nominally. It's an antique empire with little except a corrupt, incompetent, and inertly-lazy bureaucracy to duct tape it together.
Well-trained paramedics and EMS-type people can do a lot of good, if they have the skills to decide what needs more expertise and what does not. Even the best-trained MDs often get that wrong.
Like our editor, I am more interested in vigorous fitness for functional life and endurance rather than in conspicuous muscle mass. However, it has not escaped my notice than some mass has a signaling effect on females.
Limitations I have found in my (recent) mixed cardio-resistance-endurance program are strength and power in my extremities, ie forearms and lower legs. Those tend to be neglected in resistance work. They are more or less expected to respond in strength to the other things you do.
That is true to a point, perhaps, but, for examples, but my dead lifts and kettlebell walks are limited by my grip strength. Lower leg strength is needed for everything you do, posture and agility, and especially to prevent injury.
What I am learning is that I have to strengthen everything to pursue my maximum functional endurance. The two go hand-in-hand.
The passionate endeavors to eliminate the classical studies from the curriculum of the liberal education and thus virtually to destroy its very character were one of the major manifestations of the revival of the servile ideology.
It is a fact that a hundred years ago only a few people anticipated the over-powering momentum which the antilibertarian ideas were destined to acquire in a very short time. The ideal of liberty seemed to be so firmly rooted that everybody thought that no reactionary movement could ever succeed in eradicating it. It is true, it would have been a hopeless venture to attack freedom openly and to advocate unfeignedly a return to subjection and bondage. But antiliberalism got hold of peoples’ minds camouflaged as superliberalism, as the fulfillment and consummation of the very ideas of freedom and liberty. It came disguised as socialism, communism, planning.
No intelligent man could fail to recognize that what the socialists, communists and planners were aiming at was the most radical abolition of the individuals’ freedom and the establishment of government omnipotence.
Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, 1956 (h/t Reader)
Since the entire world has quickly settled on singing a dreary, infantile ditty written by a wife-beater that extols the state religion of Nazi Germany and the USSR as a response to an existential threat, I guess it's time to move on to new topics. Speaking of existential, didn't those Frenchmen invent existentialism? No, I think that was Kierkegaarde. Maybe it was Nietzsche. Whatever. It was one of those grouchy fellows. I was doodling in my copybook and trying to get a peek down a girl's blouse that day in school, and must have missed it. At any rate, Europe is just a bunch of zebras at the watering hole watching a lion eat their little sister while mumbling, "Wasn't me, don't care." Who am I to bother about it? Let's read the papers:
Ignored in news coverage of the Paris massacre is the single most pertinent piece of background: A 2014 opinion poll found that ISIS had an approval rating in France (at 16%) almost as high as President Francois Holland (at 18%). In the 18-to-24-year-old demographic, ISIS’ support jumped to 27%. Muslims comprise about a tenth of France’s population, so the results imply that ISIS had the support of the overwhelming majority of French Muslims (and especially Muslim youth), as well as the endorsement of a large part of the non-Muslim Left.
Like Obama, Hollande looks at terror attacks through the lens of self-interest. If it affects their personal reputation, they get peevish and start talking like a fop's idea of Audie Murphy. Otherwise, they really don't give a sh*t.
Hacker collective Anonymous posted a video Saturday on YouTube in which it declared a cyber war on ISIS. In the nearly two-and-a-half-minute video, a person wearing the group’s signature Guy Fawkes mask read a statement in French promising that the hacktivist organization would attack ISIS in cyberspace with the ultimate goal of weakening the terrorist organization.
I'm sure a multinational terrorist organization is shaking in their sandals over the prospect of a deluge of fake one-star reviews on Yelp.
Machine made snow is made up of exactly the same stuff as natural snow - frozen water. When the weather provides cold temperatures, but no moisture, our snowmaking team simply adds just the right amount of moisture to the atmosphere to produce excellent snow. It may sound easy, but making great snow requires millions of dollars in specialized equipment and an experienced team of snowmakers.
In my experience, machine snow is half-frozen filthy retaining pond water sprayed all over you if you deign to ski on a weekday.
Society judges people by what they can do for others. Can you save children from a burning house, or remove a tumor, or make a room of strangers laugh? You've got value right there. That's not how we judge ourselves though. We judge ourselves by our thoughts."I'm a good person." "I'm ambitious." "I'm better than this." These idle impulses may comfort us at night, but they're not how the world sees us. They're not even how we see other people.
Silly me. I thought holding up an inexpertly lettered sign with a preachy message and a hashtag was the pinnacle of human achievement.
In a religion where the first woman in history is said to have caused all kinds of problems, the Roman Catholic Church should have perhaps been able to see what was coming with Francesca Chaouqui.Her hiring in 2013 to be part of COSEA, the Pope’s Commission for Reference on the Economic-Administrative Structure of the Holy See, was an eyebrow-raiser for Vatican watchers and Italian tabloids alike.She was, at 30, the youngest member on the influential eight-member panel by more than two decades. She was also the only female.
Bombshell? You guys don't get out much. She reminds me of homely girls who go to Star Wars conventions.
WASHINGTON — In response to the Paris attacks, a top American intelligence official on Monday renewed a debate on government surveillance and privacy, denouncing “hand-wringing” over intrusive spying and saying that leaks of classified information had made it harder to identify terrorists.John O. Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, appeared to be speaking in part about the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of phone and Internet communications that were disclosed by Edward J. Snowden in 2013. Those disclosures prompted sharp criticism and new restrictions on electronic spying both in the United States and in Europe.
Ever hear of the Fourth Amendment? Cute little thing. It was popular around here 200 years ago. It almost seems like you have a problem using probable cause to determine who to surveil because then you'd have to admit who is probably gonna cause a problem.
A man has been sentenced for knocking out his sister's two front teeth in a row over a Christmas record 40 years ago. Patrick and Anita Ackroyd disagreed over John Lennon's Happy Xmas (War is Over) when they were teenagers in December 1975. A court heard that he punched her in the face and knocked out her teeth in an assault that has left her wearing a dental plate ever since.
Judge: I need to know which one of them liked that dreadful song in order to rule against him or her.
Weapons have been stolen from an Army base following a break-in just 24 hours after the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris. The firearms went missing from the armory at the Lincoln Army Reserve Center in Worcester, Massachusetts, on Saturday night after the suspects entered the building through the roof.
Recently, US presidential candidate Ben Carson commented on his theory that the pyramids were actually primarily used for storing grain, much to the consternation of the US media. Why do pyramid mysteries and alternative theories persist even now? And why have we never explored them fully?
Don't worry. ISIS will crack those open like a pinata after their next Mahdi connects the Sudan to Vienna.
The Paleoart of Julius Csotonyi, available on May 20, is a collection of artwork by Julius Csotonyi, an award-winning illustrator whose work lives in museums and in science papers. Csotonyi, who holds a PhD in microbiology, works frequently with paleontologists who need help bringing their fossil finds to life.
"Brutal" prehistoric world? Compared to what? My housecat will kill anything it can catch, and tortures it first, too. Your goldfish would eat you if it could fit you in its mouth.
Be careful out there in the brutal posthistoric world today.
Biceps are not major functional muscles. There are only three good reasons to strengthen biceps in isolation: arm-toning for middle-aged women, showing off in wife-beater Ts - and, usefully, to provide some complementary balance for the far more useful and important triceps.
However, fact is that most upper-body chest, core, back exercises, and full-body exercises and body-weight calisthenics like pull-ups and ropes activate biceps enough without needing to do very much of those muscle-isolating "curls for girls."
As BD has said, the Maggie's fitness philosophy for sedentary-working people is about overall fitness, muscle and cardiovascular endurance, athletic functionality, posture, core strength, and good body-weight management rather than body-building and body-sculpting. Maximally-functional for life, not for the gym, prison yard, or for the Gay Parade..
In my view, the more muscles an exercise stresses, the better. Besides intense interval cardio, what kills me but makes me fitter are pushing the full-body, mixed cardio+strength+core exercises like ball smashes, ropes, lunges with kettles, pull-ups, burners, and the like. You just do them until you break.
Yes, birds are still seen as essentially dinosaurs. Lots of new interesting evolutionary details though. The Cretaceous Extinction had a major impact on birds (and everything else) with which we are still living.
Well, it's Monday. Your favorite team lost, so the water cooler is looking less like an oasis and more like an enemy gun emplacement. Hey, Bob, did you see Peyton Roethlesberger throw a pick six and a tantrum on fourth down with the game on the line? You know, the one that caused my team to win, and your favorite team and their benighted fans to be consigned to ignominy and defeat? What did you think about that Bob? Did you enjoy it as much as I did? Whaddya say about that, Bob?
Me, I don't mind Mondays so much. I don't root for Jameis Manziel or Cam Bradford or Russell Brees, so it's of little consequence if the Green Bay Pacers fall to the Dallas Drovers. The first day of the work week holds no terrors for me. I kind of like it there. No one makes me rake leaves at the office. I don't have to change every battery in every smoke alarm in the building at 4 AM because I can't figure out which one is beeping. It would be silly to be required to paint the outside of a skyscraper, wouldn't it? I don't even know where to look for the gutters on a 50-story building, never mind clean them out. No, the office is just fine. Besides, the Internet connection is better, and I get to read the Maggie's Farm morning links while pretending to be working, instead of pretending to be asleep on the couch when my wife gets home with groceries.
Two brothers who used H-1B workers to create a low-cost and profitable on-demand workforce were found guilty Thursday in federal court of violating the law. The trial took place in U.S. District Court in Dallas and lasted for six days. At the end, a jury convicted Atul Nanda, 46, and his brother, Jiten "Jay" Nanda, 44, each of one count of conspiracy to commit visa fraud, one count of conspiracy to harbor illegal aliens and four counts of wire fraud. The U.S. filed the indictment in 2013. Penalties range as high as $250,000 in fines and upward of 20 years in prison. A sentencing date was not set.
Silly me. From what I've observed, I would have assumed that a "fraudulent H-1B case" would involve NOT bringing illegal aliens into the country to work like coolies.
I was a total monster. I was spending $1,000 a week on weed, and everyone I was in the band with at the time smoked as much as I did. There's so much stupid behavior caused by weed, but I always had that cliché: I needed it for creativity. I've come to realize that at the end of the day, it's only you yourself that creativity comes from. It doesn't come from weed.
Um, it's really only necessary for your audience to be stoned, not you. Sober or not, your records sound like Sesame Street on Seconal, dude.
The standard error of measuring inches or liters is usually zero assuming you have perfectly reliable, standard measurement devices. Intelligence tests generally show high test-retest reliability but they also have a standard error, and the standard error is often larger for higher scores than for lower scores. Any intelligence test score change after an intervention needs to be considered relative to the standard error of the test. Studies that use a single test to estimate intelligence before and after an intervention are using less reliable and more variable scores (bigger standard errors) than studies that combine scores from a battery of tests.
I have always found that the only way I could measurably increase other people's intelligence is by drinking heavily. The girls get better looking, too.
He was a successful and well-traveled professional, with close to seven figures in the bank, and plans for much more. And then he gave it all away, more than $718,000, in chunks at a time, to two Manhattan psychics.They vowed to reunite him with the woman he loved. Even after it was discovered that she was dead. There was the 80-mile bridge made of gold, the reincarnation portal. “I just got sucked in,” the man, Niall Rice, said in a telephone interview last week from Los Angeles. “That’s what people don’t understand. ‘How can you fall for it?’ ”
Well, those psychics certainly measurably increased that guy's intelligence. While $718k isn't exactly cheap, it still cost less than a Head Start class.
An official government site confirms the ban with a generic message that reads, "After technical analysis and legal consideration ... administration measure has been taken for this website." The note is dated November 13th. According to the statement, Reddit was taken down under Turkey's controversial internet censorship law, known as Internet Law No. 5651. Under the law, Turkish Supreme Council for Telecommunications and IT (TIB) can ban websites and block internet content for a handful of reasons, including anything involved with pornography, prostitution, drugs, terrorism, illegal file sharing, sexual abuse of children, and "crimes against" Mustafa Atatürk, the first president of Turkey.
I've blocked Reddit from my computer under an uncontroversial lack of interest in the opinions of neckbeards law.
"Made in France," directed by Nicolas Boukhrief, stars Malik Zidi as the journalist who uses his own Muslim background to infiltrate a mosque in the suburbs of Paris. He eventually hooks up with a group of would-be terrorists planning to "sow chaos in the heart of Paris," according to a synopsis on the French movie website Allociné.
The Paris gig has been cancelled. I wouldn't worry about it, though; it's not a big Cinema Verite town.
A local NBC affiliate reports that 30-year-old Branden Joseph Deel began his Downton Abbey–disc binge in January 2014, “when he stole 12 DVD box sets worth a total retail value of $560.88 and has continued to target retailers since then.” As Downton Abbey fans ourselves, we can‘t help but hypothesize that “the Downton Abbey addict” was so enraged by a story line early in the period drama’s fourth season—that Lady Mary would dare to entertain a flirtation so soon after the tragic death of her one true love, Matthew—that, in an act of misguided revenge, he tried to wipe out local retailers’ Downton stocks and possibly save fellow fans from future devastation.
Occam's Razor: he needs coasters and finally ran out of AOL discs.
And as more and more of what we listen to comes from our hard drives and cloud services, we’re less dependent on the medium itself and more dependent on the technology that turns data to drum beats. But the audio company, Schiit, which started back in 2010, argues that the best way to maximize the sound that comes into your headphones is to connect the headphones via USB to an external digital-to-analog converter (DAC). The idea is that, whether you have lossless, uncompressed files (which, unlike stripped down MP3s, hold more information and more accurately represent the original sound), iTunes, or a streaming service like Spotify, you’re not getting the full potential without a middleman.
First sentence begins with "And." Second sentence begins with "But." The author then uses parentheses to enclose a dependent clause instead of commas. The rest is all stupid, useless Schiit. So the answer to the second question is 01101110 01101111! Whoops, forgot to convert it to analog. NO!
As the largest developer of ad blockers, Eyeo, with its popular Adblock Plus, has found itself at the center of a fierce debate about ethics and, potentially, the legality of blocking mobile browser ads. The subject has been a popular one in Europe for some time, but it caught fire in the U.S. in June when Apple announced that its iOS 9 mobile operating system would enable (and some say welcome) mobile ad-blocker apps on iPhones. (A new Adblock Plus iOS app for iOS 9 was approved by Apple in September.)
Adblock won't ever stop things like that Popular Science "article" about a particular brand of audio converter. Me, I just want a parentheses blocker.
The Redmond-based tech giant has been eager to build buzz around the launch of its first standalone Asia Pacific location and second flagship, after the two-storey Microsoft store in Manhattan. Customers queued in the bright sun with the the promise of free concert tickets and lucky door prizes for early birds, before the window coverings dropped to reveal store staff dancing and cheering inside.
I wonder. Is it no longer possible for a tech company to survive in the market without pretending the entire business is a Gymboree?
That should be enough information to tide you over until lunch. If you fib and say you have a doctor's appointment right after, you might make it until 3:30 before you're required to do any actual work. Make sure to leave early, too. As they say on the Department of Public Works crew, "No sense killing the job."
Some readers may remember when that was a bumpersticker. (It's on the same order as Bird Dog's old school football cheer: "Repel them, repel them; make them relinquish the ball.")
It is a theme on this blog to think about the things that people hold most dear and the things they hold to be sacred. I tend to judge such things based on people's behavior, not on what they say. I tend to believe that God should come foremost in my life, but I can be a hypocrite at times.
Karl Reitz at TCS looks at secular religions - systems of belief which can play as strong a role in shaping people's lives as loving God can for the religious. His piece is consistent with several things we have written over the past week or two. A key quote from An atheist's defence of religion:
The fundamental difference between traditional religions and these secular religions is that secular religions promise us that perfection (heaven) is possible here, on earth, in present times. Conservatives, starting with Eric Voegelin, have long warned against buying into these secular religions by warning us not to "immanentize the eschaton." As Jonah Goldberg explained:
"Immanentize means to make part of the here and now. Eschaton, like eschatology, relates to the branch of theology which deals with humanity's destiny. You know, the end times, when all of that wacky, end-timey, Seventh-Seal stuff happens (oceans boil, the righteous ascend to heaven, Carrot Top is funny, etc). Hence 'immanentizing the eschaton' means, in effect, trying to make what is reserved for the next life part of the here and now."
There are two utopias - the womb, and Heaven (if you can get there before they close the door). Life is bracketed by utopias, but in between we must toil and strain and sometimes suffer. It's "the way things are", as the mice say.
Bliss and ease are only momentary during this brief spell on earth, and it has something to do with how reality was built. Specifically, I think it has to do with finiteness, limits, and scarcity - of just about everything, and not just of material things. I know only about four things that do not fit that: air, a dog's love, God's love...and blogs. No scarcity of good blogs.
All humans are thought to be descendants of one woman, Mitochondrial Eve, who lived around 140,000 years ago - 4600 generations ago - in West Africa. Our cellular mitochondria follow the female genetic line.
In the linked piece, our Berkshire friend also notes, interestingly, in a quote:
Do the math as you count generations into the past. Two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on through the centuries. Soon you reach a point where the number of ancestors in a given generation is larger than the population of the Earth at the time. (This is possible because as you move back, a single individual may occupy a large number of slots on your family tree, which is known as pedigree collapse.)
Pic is by Masolino, c 1426, in the Brancacci Chapel, Florence
I have a few friends who have taken trips to France or Italy to attend 5-day to one week hands-on cooking schools. Generally, husband and wife participate although one is usually more interested than the other. Some also offer classes for youth.
Many of the schools run from around noon or 1 through suppertime, when the students eat their creations together. The meal planning and local shopping are part of most courses except for the ones sited on farms.
People have told me that these have been the most fun they have ever had while traveling because it gets you into the culture and away from the "sights."
Just for fun, you can google "tourist cooking schools near Paris," or "in Provence", or "in Italy," etc. As you know, each region of Italy has its own cuisine and its own different produce.
Hello everyone. I trust you're all done sleeping one off.
Whoops, I meant to say, I trust you're all back from Sunday service now. If you're like me, there's nothing like a hot cup of joe and the Sunday paper spread out in front of you after church. Of course a printed newspaper was last spotted in my home back when Reagan was abroad in the land, and when the Pope wasn't pro-choice, so I have to make do with a passel of pixels spread out in front of me. On the plus side, the poorly cropped pictures are more plentiful, and some of the articles actually start talking to you, which give the voices in my head a day off. On to the news!
Smartphones, tablets and e-readers should have an automatic "bedtime mode" that stops them disrupting people's sleep, says a leading doctor. Prof Paul Gringras argued the setting should filter out the blue light that delays the body clock and keeps people awake later into the evening. The doctor, from Evelina Children's Hospital in London, said every new model was "bluer and brighter". He said manufacturers needed to show more "responsibility".
Or, you know, you could shut the stupid thing off, and make your kids shut it off. You know, like an adult.
A few years ago, WIRED’s chief photographer was standing in line at Starbucks when inspiration struck forcefully. “The ribbing on the drink holders reminded me of solar panels,” Winters says. “That instantly registered ‘TIE fighter’ in my head.” That sent him on a quest to create a Yoda-sized TIE fighter using only stuff from Starbucks. All told he needed one tall lid, 10 96-ounce coffee boxes, 12 sample cups, 37 grande cups, 63 drink holders, 216 stirrers, and a workspace significantly larger than a coffee-shop table.
Alternate title: How to Make an Infantile Adult Using Only Pop Culture and a Candy Store Masquerading as a Coffee Shop.
Earlier that year, the Comorian government had received a proposal from some visiting Arab businessmen. What if the Comoros started to sell their citizenship to raise funds? There was a great demand for passports in the Middle East, the men explained; for starters, wealthy individuals saw a second or third nationality as a shortcut to make travelling and doing business abroad easier.
I think France has also been toying with the idea of hosting some "visiting Arab businessmen." I wonder how that's going?
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Federal drug agents have built a massive wiretapping operation in the Los Angeles suburbs, secretly intercepting tens of thousands of Americans' phone calls and text messages to monitor drug traffickers across the United States despite objections from Justice Department lawyers who fear the practice may not be legal.
I have a dictionary. I fear that "Fear" is the wrong word in that headline. DILLIGAF might approximate their mood. however.
The hunt for those responsible (eight terrorists were killed Saturday night, but accomplices may still be at large) led to a number of raids in nearby Brussels. Evidence reportedly turned up included at least one PlayStation 4 console. Belgian federal home affairs minister Jan Jambon said outright that the PS4 is by used ISIS agents to communicate, and was selected due to the fact that it’s notoriously hard to monitor.
"The hunt for those responsible." That's a good one. I imagine common-sense Playstation control will fix everything. With an outright ban on assault Playstations, of course.
As humans, our failings are epic. Some of us eat too much, lie to ourselves, don’t exercise enough, and spend so much money that we have nothing left for that vacation in Hawaii. But technology, Dan Ariely believes, might save us from ourselves. Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, is an investor and the chief behavioral economist at Qapital, a Swedish-startup geared toward encouraging Millennials to save.
Or, you know, you could shut the stupid thing off, and make your kids shut it off. You know, like an adult.
First, a machine learning model takes a first pass on the data, or every video, image or document that needs labeling. That model also assigns a confidence score, or how sure the algorithm is that it’s making the right judgment. If the confidence score is below a certain value, it sends the data to a human annotator to make a judgment.
I know! We could install a steering wheel in self-driving cars! That would let the passenger drive the car using their judgment! Of course, first they'd have to shut their stupid iPhone off, and make their kids shut theirs off. You know, like an adult.
While the term may mean little to your average retail investor, swap spreads have become the talk of financial markets in recent weeks as they plumb historic lows and seemingly defy market logic. At issue is the fact that swap rates—or rates charged for interest rate swaps—have dipped below yields on equivalent U.S. Treasuries, indicating that investors are charging less to deal with banks and corporations than with the U.S. government. Such a thing should never happen, as U.S. Treasuries theoretically represent the "risk-free" rate while swap rates are imbued with significant counterparty risk that should demand a premium.
Let's see: Barack Barry Hussein Soetoro Obama. I only count five.
T-Mobile, the wireless company, said last week that it would let customers watch as many movies as they wanted on services like Netflix and HBO as well as all other kinds of video, without having it count against their monthly data plans. Given the growing popularity of streaming video, its plan, called Binge On, should appeal to many consumers. But there are real concerns about whether such promotions could give telecommunications companies the ability to influence what services people use on the Internet, benefiting some businesses and hurting others.
Or, you know, you could shut the stupid thing off, and make your kids shut it off. You know, like an adult.
On August 21, a new hotel opened on the campus of Denmark’s foremost specialized care hospital, Rigshospitalet. Called the Patient Hotel, this 74-room building provides convenient accommodations for self-sufficient patients who have traveled from far away, for an exam or treatment. For patients undergoing long-tern medical care, the tranquil, sky-lit space also provides a temporary escape from the regular hospital’s blaring machines and daily bustle.
Wow. Those benevolent and intelligent Scandinavians have discovered that neurotic hypochondriacal lonely people prefer a four-star hotel over staying at home and reading Web MD -- if someone else pays for it. There's also a helpful picuture of of a member of this super-race of humans bicycling on two underinflated tires while texting.
Well, that's all the news that fits. Into my schedule, I mean. I think I'm going to, I don't know, shut this stupid thing off now. You, know, like an adult.
13:1 As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, "Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!"
13:2 Then Jesus asked him, "Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down."
13:3 When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked him privately,
13:4 "Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?"
13:5 Then Jesus began to say to them, "Beware that no one leads you astray.
13:6 Many will come in my name and say, 'I am he!' and they will lead many astray.
13:7 When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.
13:8 For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birthpangs.
Biceps are not major functional muscles. There are only three good reasons to strengthen biceps in isolation: arm-toning for middle-aged women, showing off in wife-beater Ts - and, usefully, to provide some complementary balance for the far more useful and important triceps.
Earliest Beginnings Of Bird Evolution Brought Into Focus With New DNA Analysis
I almost tripped over a big fat Striped Skunk in my gym's parking lot before dawn last week. I was lucky not to alarm him, and he just scurried away.
A repost -
Pepper, especially.
