"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Krinshnamurti

Most of what we feed to chickens, pigs, and other farmed animals—most of it is burned off, simply keeping the animals alive until they're slaughtered.

It's bizarre, really: You take a crop like soybeans, oats, corn, or wheat, which are all high in protein, fiber, and complex carbohydrates but devoid of cholesterol and artery-clogging saturated fat. You feed them to an animal and create a product with no fiber or complex carbohydrates at all but with lots of cholesterol and saturated fat. It makes about as much sense as taking pure water, running it through a sewer system, and then drinking it.

Vegetarianism in a Nutshell: Environment

always remember

Legend tripping, also known as "ostension," is a name recently bestowed by folklorists and anthropologists on an adolescent practice (containing elements of a rite of passage) in which a usually furtive nocturnal pilgrimage is made to a site which is alleged to have been the scene of some tragic, horrific, and possibly supernatural event or haunting. The practice has been documented most thoroughly to date in the United States, though there can be little doubt that it occurs in many other countries and cultures.

Wikipedia | Legend Tripping

∆ difference ∆ change

Their theory is simple. Where diseases are common, individuals are mean to strangers. Strangers may carry new diseases and so one would do best to avoid them. When people avoid strangers—those outside the tribe—communication among tribes breaks down. That breakdown allows peoples, through time, to become more different.

Differences accumulate until in places with more diseases, for example Nigeria or Brazil, there are more cultures and languages. Sweden, for example, has few diseases and only 15 languages; Ghana, which is a similar size, has many diseases and 89 languages. Cultural diversity is, in this view, a consequence of disease. [...]

Fincher and colleagues tested their theories by simply looking at whether there were consistent patterns in how cultural practices vary among regions of the world, and whether the prevalence of disease varies in a similar way. Are the places with the most diseases also the most xenophobic? Yes, they found.

we experience ourselves

What's in your pocket? Screws and fastenings? A lottery ticket? A scrap of felt?

All of these insignificant objects reveal something about a person. They carry some history and become stories in themselves, says Rachel Ellison. She calls her study of pockets "pocketology."Ellison, a 24-year-old art student, has used pocketology to connect strangers and express the autobiographical in what's known as relational art. In a hyper-connected digital world, these person-to-person links create a moment's intimacy.

Ellison organized a Pocketology Picnic at Christie Pits on a recent Sunday. It was a rainy afternoon and only a dozen people joined her but they willingly emptied their pockets.

Raoul, who is from El Salvador, produced a packet of Marlboro cigarettes.

"Marlboro are the only ones I smoke," he told her. "I started smoking when I was 18 years old. I was in Guatemala for two months waiting for some papers ... I was sitting in a park and there were a lot of people and didn't know what to do because I didn't know anybody. So I decided to go to the store and buy cigarettes. I bought Marlboro Reds. Since then, when I feel stressed, I smoke a cigarette and try to feel better."

Thestar.com Sociology | Pocketology 101

"You don’t understand the basic assumptions of your own culture if your own culture is the only culture you know." - Alan Watts

After prayer, we ate dinner. The food was catered from one of my favorite greasy restaurants, Kennedy Fried Chicken. It’s a huge halal food chain here in New York. It’s halal and open late, can’t go wrong with it. Tonight I had a philly cheesesteak, cheesy tater tots and an orange (to give my meal an ounce of healthiness). Epic yum.

30 Mosques, 30 Days

Dubai tends toward gluttony every month of the year, but during Ramadan, things are even more over the top, with nearly every eating establishment offering an Iftar fast-breaking gut-buster at sundown. It's Dubai doing what it does best: using its limited resources for its own commercial advantage. Even American fast-food outlets in Dubai offer Ramadan Value Meals, usually adding a dessert to the already calorie-packed meal deal. At the Dubai Mall, McDonald's was the only major international food chain that didn't have a special offer, just a banner that read: "Ramadan Kareem"--"Happy Ramadan."

Slate | My Ramadan World Tour

Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world.

Tokyo Undressed [NSFW]

As I wended the shores I know, / As I walk'd with that electric self seeking types.

Social workers in the Netherlands have taken legal action to try to stop a 13-year-old girl from sailing around the world on her own.
They want Laura Dekker to be made a ward of court, so that her parents, who support her plans, temporarily lose the right to make decisions about her.[...]
Laura had a yacht by the age of six and began sailing solo when she was 10.
"Since I was 10 years old, I've known that I would like to sail around the world," she told Dutch television.
"I want simply to learn about the world and to live freely."

BBC News | Dutch bid to thwart young sailor

say what?

What is 365Black?
At McDonald's®, we believe that African-American culture and achievement should be celebrated 365 days a year — not just during Black History Month. That's the idea behind 365Black.com. It's a place where you can learn more about education, employment, career advancement and entrepreneurship opportunities, and meet real people whose lives have been touched by McDonald's. Plus, you can also have a chance to win exciting once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. So make sure you visit often — you just might get inspired.

Like the unique African Baobab tree, which nourishes its community with its leaves and fruit, McDonald's has branched out to the African-American community nourishing it with valuable programs and opportunities.

365Black | McDonald's has a new website for black people.

i fear no beer

"Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder." - Aldous Huxley

We're now using surgery to relieve social suffering. We're drifting from a standard of necessity rooted in you to a standard—"socially crippled"—that's dictated by others.

Eight years ago, when Ban was 23, she decided she was too short. How short? Around 5 feet 1 inch. That's 1 inch shorter than my wife and 3 inches taller than the minimum height for service in the U.S. Army. According to the Courier Mail of Australia, which published Ban's story two months ago, she said she had been taunted at school and called names such as "midget". When she got older, it became an issue of credibility and people not taking her seriously, particularly in her chosen profession of law and now politics. "I get tired of people focusing on the physical side of me because I feel like I have a lot to offer and I'm a qualified lawyer," she said.

So Ban changed her body. She went to Russia, where, as the Times of London put it, doctors agreed to "break both her legs in four places and stretch them slowly for 1mm every day for nine months." Then she wore plaster casts for three more months.
Result: Ban gained 3 inches. She entered politics, and today, she's a city councilwoman.

Slate | Broken is Beautiful

Check out the newest season of Ice Road Truckers on History, with a new route and new truckers

In an area of China not known to ever contain people, let alone industry, there are three mysterious triangular openings on top of a mountain containing hundreds of ancient rusty iron pipes of unknown origin. Some of the pipes go deep into the mountain. Some of them go into a nearby salt water lake. There are more pipes in the lake, and more still running east-west along the lake shore. Some of the larger pipes are 40 cm in diameter, are of uniform size and are placed in what seems like purposeful patterns.
Cracked.com | 6 Insane Discoveries That Science Can't Explain

barnacles!

Well, it turns out a potty mouth does more than earn your conversations an R rating: it actually relieves pain, according to a new study by Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University in the UK. But that’s not all: you’d never know it from what your mom told you, but there are many positive, beneficial aspects of swearing, including harmless venting and social bonding (not to mention reams of adult comedy). Bad language does a lot of good.[...]

I wondered whether innocent exclamations like “By the hammer of Thor!” and Battlestar Galactica’s frak have the same beneficial effects as taboo language, but Fay emphatically said, “NO. Euphemisms exist because they don’t do what the more offensive words do…. We already have a rich vocab and the inventions have to compete for space, which they don’t very well, historically speaking. The seven dirty words have been around for centuries.” Stephens agreed, saying that “…I doubt they (pain-sufferers) would have the same emotional reaction to frak, although because frak is somewhat similar to fuck, maybe there would be a lesser effect. That remains to be seen.”

GOOD Blogs | Why Swearing is Good for You
MCLA | Timothy Jay

I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody.

Promoting the people most competent at one job does not mean that they’ll be better at another, according to a new simulation of hierarchical organizations.
There’s a paradox at the heart of most Western organizations. The people who perform best at one level of an organization tend to be promoted on the premise that they will also be competent at another level within the organization. I imagine that most readers will have had personal experience at the way that this hypothesis fails in practice.

In 1969, a Canadian psychologist named Laurence Peter encapsulated this behavior in a rule that has since become known as Peter’s Principle. Here it is: “All new members in a hierarchical organization climb the hierarchy until they reach their level of maximum incompetence.”

That’s not as unfair as it sounds, say Alessandro Pluchino and buddies from Universita di Catania, who have modeled this behavior using an agent-based system for the first time. They say that common sense tells us that a member who is competent at a given level will also be competent at a higher level of the hierarchy. So it may well seem a good idea to promote such an individual to the next level.[...]

Now Pluchino and co have simulated this practice with an agent-based model for the first time. Sure enough, they find that it leads to a significant reduction in the efficiency of an organization, as incompetency spreads through it. That must have an uncomfortable ring of truth for some CEOs.

MIT Technology Review| The Physics arXiv Blog | Why Incompetence Spreads through Big Organizations

frens

In A.D. 64 the Stoic philosopher Seneca pondered friendship. The Stoics’ intellectual adversaries, the Epicureans, had claimed that a man sought friends for purely instrumental reasons, “for the purpose of having someone to come and sit beside his bed when he is ill or come to his rescue when he is hard up or thrown into chains.” But Seneca knew better. A wise man wanted friends “so that he may have someone by whose sickbed he himself may sit, or whom he may himself release when that person is held prisoner by hostile hands.” Kindness was man’s duty but also his joy: “No one can live a happy life if he turns everything to his own purposes. Live for others if you want to live for yourself.”

The Believer | The Problem of Other People

it's the final countdown

To understand the units of time we need to investigate the number systems of ancient civilizations. How did the Sumerians count to 12 on one hand and to 60 on two? What advances did the Babylonians make and how did they use this number system for measurement? And what refinements did the Egyptians make to time measurement to give us the system we still use today?

Scienceray | Why are there 60 minutes in an hour? 

In today's world, the most widely used numeral system is decimal (base 10), a system that probably originated because it made it easy for humans to count using their fingers. The civilizations that first divided the day into smaller parts, however, used different numeral systems, specifically duodecimal (base 12) and sexagesimal (base 60). [...]
Although it is unknown why 60 was chosen, it is notably convenient for expressing fractions, since 60 is the smallest number divisible by the first six counting numbers as well as by 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30.

Scientific American | Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes, yet there are only 24 hours in a day?

"I don't like defining myself. I just am." - Britney Spears

Kelly Peña, or “the kid whisperer,” as some Hollywood producers call her, was digging through a 12-year-old boy’s dresser drawer here on a recent afternoon. Her undercover mission: to unearth what makes him tick and use the findings to help the Walt Disney Company reassert itself as a cultural force among boys.

Ms. Peña, a Disney researcher with a background in the casino industry, zeroed in on a ratty rock ’n’ roll T-shirt. Black Sabbath?

“Wearing it makes me feel like I’m going to an R-rated movie,” said Dean, a shy redhead whose parents asked that he be identified only by first name. Jackpot.

Ms. Peña and her team of anthropologists have spent 18 months peering inside the heads of incommunicative boys in search of just that kind of psychological nugget. Disney is relying on her insights to create new entertainment for boys 6 to 14, a group that Disney used to own way back in the days of “Davy Crockett” but that has wandered in the age of more girl-friendly Disney fare like “Hannah Montana.”
Walt Disney Expert Uses Science to Draw Boy Viewers

We are their masters, Babe. Let them doubt it for a second and they'll walk all over you

Afghanistan's only known pig has been locked in a room, away from visitors to Kabul zoo where it normally grazes beside deer and goats, because people are worried it could infect them with the virus popularly known as swine flu.

The pig is a curiosity in Muslim Afghanistan, where pork and pig products are illegal because they are considered irreligious, and has been in quarantine since Sunday after visitors expressed alarm it could spread the new flu strain.

[...] There are no pig farms in Afghanistan and no direct civilian flights between Kabul and Mexico.

"We understand that, but most people don't have enough knowledge. When they see the pig in the cage they get worried and think that they could get ill," Saqib said.

Reuters | Afghanistan's Only Pig Quarantined in Flu Fear
Image from Cuteoverload | The Perfect Schnozzle
Quote from Babe, 1995

Prefrontal cortex: most rostral part of frontal lobe. Strategy, Ability to set goals, social norms, social feedback.

Let's trim our hair in accordance with the socialist lifestyle [1] was part of a North Korean government propaganda campaign promulgating grooming and dress standards. It was broadcast on the state-run Korean Central Television in the capital of Pyongyang. The television program claimed that hair length can affect human intelligence, in part because of the deprivation to the rest of the body of nutrients required for hair to grow.[2] It was one part of longstanding North Korean government restrictions on haircuts and fashions deemed at odds with "Socialist Values".

Let's trim our hair in accordance with the socialist lifestyle | Wikipedia

Anger makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond what you were. - German Proverb

People Who Sit in the DIsability Seats While I'm Standing on My Crutches

"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art." - Susan Sontag

Tumblr | David Horvitz