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POPSCory Doctorow: Follow your weird More: Did you get into that blissed-out concentration state that great athletes and musicians and artists find themselves in? Did you go to a place where your mind was able to talk to itself without the endless chatter of the million billion grocery items and nagging doubts? If you got there, you’re winning the game of life. You’ve spent your time well. You might even end up changing the world.
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POPSA glossary of winter squash Click through for the recipes: # Leek and Delicata Squash Soup with Caramelized Apple Croutons # Winter Squash Soup # Butternut Squash Lasagne # Squash Ravioli # Spaghetti Sauce with Chicken Sausage and Swiss Chard # Saffron Risotto with Butternut Squash # Pumpkin Bread # Pumpkin Gingersnap Pie
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POPSDisneyfied Vaginas Questioned by Cranky British Researchers It's distracting to have imperfections while naked with a man, ... Being a human being with idiosyncratic features can feel weird after taking in the cultural obsession with cookie-cutter beauty, and if you're cursed with a partner willing to vocalize his disappointment with your human body, it can be even worse. But it's a shame that most of us absorb this nonsense. ... if you can clear your head of all this perfectionist, conformist pressure, appreciating people's little differences can be more fun and certainly more sexy ... In fact, I often look at the sea of airbrushing and plastic surgery and Brazilian waxing, and I see a profound prudery at the bottom of it, a fear of truly embracing sexuality. The airbrushed plastic perfection promoted by Playboy and Maxim magazine are to sex as EPCOT Center is to world travel: experience simulation for those too cowardly to truly dive in, but too egotistical to admit their cowardice.
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POPSAttack on Ft. Hood, Nov. 5th Guy Fawkes Day Interesting timing: "Remember, remember the 5th of November" . Psy-op staged? Virginia Tech graduate? What exactly was this conspiracy to kill all about? Growing list of direct news sources with some commentary at CLG, which military and government sites are reading avidly. Surveillance video of suspect before shooting here.
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POPSBad Manors Squirrel Diner LIVE Catch a live streaming video cam of the "diner" here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/Bad-Manors-Squirrel-Diner-LIVE (I just saw a squirrel take some of the fruit when I was clipping this, so cute! But he ran off for now)
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POPSPeople give birth and die on Facebook (internet actually)
The thing about Facebook and Twitter is that unlike earlier times on the Internet, these two companies have shaped the perception of people connected to each other more closely than ever before. Everyone is on-line on FB or Twitter or both!. Not that people were not connected earlier via email or email groups (and some exclusively still are), but FB and Twitter are humongous instant messenger type services where everyone perceives as something where you know others are on (email does not give a perception that you are on and individual instant-messenger were always individual). So as Facebook comes up with ideas on what to do with people who are dying on the internet, I think they should also come up with some special arrangements when people are born. I'm not talking about some FB application (I hate them and they are annoying). There is no denying that babies are being born on Facebook every day (it sounds weird but that is a truth).
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POPSAlternate Iraq War Universe … Obama Won!
Never mind that the surge was initiated by President George Bush, and the current withdrawal was negotiated by the Bush administration with a sovereign, elected Iraqi government which his actions allowed to come into being, in place of the prior despot he had deposed, while Democrats, including Obama, were howling for abandonment. Obama deserves some credit, of course. For staying Bush’s course and throwing his own boneheaded pandering demands for a precipitous pullout under the bus. OK, I thought Friedman had got about as weird as he could. Silly me. This next step is particularly important, which is why we cannot let Afghanistan distract U.S. diplomats from Iraq. Remember: Transform Iraq and it will impact the whole Arab-Muslim world. Change Afghanistan and you just change Afghanistan. Fascinating. The big clamor for the last few years of course has been that Iraq was distracting us from Afghanistan, and now every jackanape out there, to include Friedman . . .
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POPSOn becoming invisible More: I abandoned my cart, walked over to Customer Service, and asked if I could have a comment form to fill out. The Customer Service employee—who, bless his heart, could see me—said they didn’t have a comment form, but he listened to my complaint… He told me that if I wanted to talk to the Assistant Manager…I could deliver my complaint in person. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the Assistant Manager had been one of the guys who couldn’t see me. What the hell. It was worth a try. I walked over to the Assistant Manager. When I was just a few feet away from him, I stopped, planted my cane, and looked directly at him. Damned if I wasn’t still invisible. It was weird—he was a tall man, but when his eyes moved from one side to the other I could see them making an upward bump in their travel path when they were passing over me. He refused to look directly at me for even a second. I kept looking straight at him. There was no way he could have missed me.
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POPSWall Street Derivatives: So complex as to be "Computationall intractable" MORE: In principle, an alert buyer can detect tampering even if he doesn't know which asset classes are the lemons: he simply examines all 1000 CDOs and looks for a suspicious overrepresentation of some of the asset classes in some of the CDOs. What Arora et al. show is that is an NP-complete problem ("densest subgraph"). This problem is believed to be computationally intractable; thus, even the most alert buyer can't have enough computational power to do the analysis. Arora et al. show it's even worse than that: even after the buyer has lost a lot of money (because enough mortgages defaulted to devalue his "senior tranche"), he can't prove that that tampering occurred: he can't prove that the distribution of lemons wasn't random. This makes it hard to get recourse in court; it also makes it hard to regulate CDOs. Everyone on Wall Street... UP AGAINST THE WALL, THE LOT OF YOU BASTARDS!
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POPSRacist old man says "I am not racist!" More: It is weird, right? That this man understands that it is a Bad Thing to be A Racist, but doesn't really get the rest of it? Other self-avowed non-racists include all of these people and this guy and this winner .
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