This week’s rant of the week has the awkward title of “As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God.” It was written by Matthew Parris of the Times.
Rant of the Week: 12/28/08-1/3/09
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Author Archives: the editor
Essay of the Week: 12/28/08-1/3/09
This week’s essay of the week is “The City Where the Sirens Never Sleep” by Matt Labash. It takes some time to get going (could have used more editing) but it is worth the effort.
Shock!
From various reports I had already figured that Egypt and Israel had some secret understanding regarding Isreal’s planned attack on Hamas. I knew that the Egyptian government was furious with Hamas. But I never expected to see the above expressed on Egyptian prime time television in Arabic by Egypt’s Foreign Minister. Regardless of what Arab leaders think in private, they are not supposed to say things like this in public.
Granted, the clip is short and I am sure if I had a full transcript of what he said I would find that he made some kind of pro forma denouncements of Israel. Still, I admire his forthrightness.
However, if I was a life insurance company I would deny him coverage. There is a reason why he went on television to say this and not Mubarak.
They really were on Crack
As I am sure readers know all too well, that sort of thing is quietly prevalent in investment banks (well, except for being so indiscreet as to have your implements on view), as coke-snorting traders and institutional salesmen were sufficiently common in the 1980s so as to become a staple of fiction and magazine articles. Even in the seemingly innocent early 1980s, a member of Goldman’s corporate finance department was known to use uppers and downers on what was presumed to be a daily basis. He made partner. A attorney buddy realized how naive he was when on a deal, with all too great frequency, the room where negotiations were being held would empty itself. It took him a couple of days to figure out everyone else wasn’t making urgent phone calls, but repairing to bathrooms, and not to have sex with each other, either. I’ve also been told of very high level IT guys (the kind who built and ran mission critical systems, and made seven figures in the peak years) having meth habits. (Based on my very very limited anecdotal sample, meth does appear to live up to its billing and leads to much more rapid personal train wrecks than other stimulants).
And this is the world from which our current Treasury Sectary comes from.
Changing The Rules
That threshold was lowered considerably by yesterday’s operation when, for the first time, Israel targeted groups of Hamas soldiers and policemen not involved in active operations.
Membership alone of the security structures of Hamas was yesterday turned by Israel into grounds for attack. To put on a Hamas police baseball cap is to make oneself a target.
This means that any Hamas traffic cop on a street corner in Gaza – or manning a makeshift ‘border’ checkpoint – can expect to be attacked.
From later on in the article…
Throughout this period, Hamas planners assumed their security forces were safe from Israeli strikes, as long as they were not directly involved in running or ordering an attack. All of that changed with yesterday’s raids. Somehow, I no longer expect to see uniformed Hamas officers guiding traffic at Gaza’s junctions.
Kind of amazing that Hamas could shoot at Israel and assume that only the people involved in the shooting were in danger huh?
What defines allowable capacity?
Authority officials initially said that about 1.7 million cubic yards of wet coal ash had spilled when the earthen retaining wall of an ash pond breached, but on Thursday they released the results of an aerial survey that showed the actual amount was 5.4 million cubic yards, or enough to flood more than 3,000 acres one foot deep. The amount now said to have been spilled is larger than the amount the Authority initially said was in the pond, 2.6 million cubic yards.
Authority officials offered little explanation for the discrepancy, telling reporters that the initial number was an estimate based on their information at the time. The aerial survey was done on Tuesday, but the results were not released until Thursday. Calls to an Authority spokesman on Friday morning were not immediately returned.
Residents were stunned by the new numbers. “That’s scary to know that they can be off by that much,” said Angela Spurgeon, whose yard is swamped with ash. “I don’t think it was intentional, but it upsets me to know that a number was given of what the pond could hold, and the number now is more than double of what the pond actually held.”
Gilbert Francis Jr., a spokesman for the Authority, said Wednesday that the pond had not exceeded its allowable capacity.
Look, the dam burst. That is a fact.
Thus, it seems that the pond had exceeded the its allowable capacity according to the laws of physics. Now maybe there is a piece of paper somewhere that says that the dam could hold more. But if so, that piece of paper was wrong.
Given that their are lots more of these dams all around the pressing question is why was that piece of paper wrong?
In this case though, I suspect that someone is lying. The clip below seems to suggest that they knew there where problems with the dam.
For All The Fans Of Pearls Before Swine
Alarming surveys have come in that indicate that most people failed to get the reference in the latest Pearls Before Swine Comic strip.
So here is the reference….
Apologies to those who don’t follow Pearls Before Swine.
You Can't Make This Up
From the Telegraph….
“You can’t make this up” is a catch phrase of Inspector Gadget. I faithfully follow his blog and I read various British publications and I have gotten kind of use tales of total absurdity coming out of the United Kingdom. But every now and again, I come a crossed a story that still shocks me. This is one of them.
Figures released by the Conservatives show that 2,196 foreign offenders have been invited to take part in the early release scheme, called End of Custody Licence, since its introduction 15 months ago in response to prison overcrowding.
As well as walking free having served less than half of their sentence, each released prisoner is entitled to around £7 a day in compensation to make up for missing out on the state-provided food and lodging they would have received had they remained in jail.
Offenders released on End of Custody Licence receive an initial discharge payment of £46, followed by the subsistence allowance of £47.12 a week, up to a cap of £168.24.
If all those eligible received the full allowance, the taxpayer would by now have paid out £369,455 in compensation to foreign prisoners who had been released early.
Now for something a little less professional
The Unconscious Mind
Neuroscientists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky received a 2002 Nobel Prize for their 1979 research that argued humans rarely make rational decisions. Since then, this has become conventional wisdom among cognition researchers
Contrary to Kahnneman and Tversky’s research, Alex Pouget, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has shown that people do indeed make optimal decisions—but only when their unconscious brain makes the choice.
“A lot of the early work in this field was on conscious decision making, but most of the decisions you make aren’t based on conscious reasoning,” says Pouget. “You don’t consciously decide to stop at a red light or steer around an obstacle in the road. Once we started looking at the decisions our brains make without our knowledge, we found that they almost always reach the right decision, given the information they had to work with.”
When he finally tried it, though, something remarkable happened. He zigzagged down the hall, sidestepping a garbage can, a tripod, a stack of paper and several boxes as if he could see everything clearly. A researcher shadowed him in case he stumbled.
“You just had to see it to believe it,” said Beatrice de Gelder, a neuroscientist at Harvard and Tilburg University in the Netherlands, who with an international team of brain researchers reported on the patient on Monday in the journal Current Biology. A video is online at www.beatricedegelder.com/books.html.
The study, which included extensive brain imaging, is the most dramatic demonstration to date of so-called blindsight, the native ability to sense things using the brain’s primitive, subcortical — and entirely subconscious — visual system.
All the things that go on in our minds with out us being conscious of it always strike me as being a little freaky.