JOE AND I ARE TIRED OF BLOGGING TO OURSELF

Y'ALL IS SOME PISS POOR CONTRIBUTORS

The 50 greatest films of all time

In no particular order

1. The Thing
2. Aliens
3. Star Trek II
4. Star Trek IV
5. Star Trek VI
6. Event Horizon
7. A New Hope
8. Empire Strikes Back
9. Return of the Jedi
10. Fellowship of the Ring
11. The Two Towers
12. Clerks
13. Pulp Fiction
14. Reservoir Dogs
15. Lethal Weapon 2
16. Rushmore
17. O Brother Where art Thou
18. Big Lebowski
19. The Shining
20. Full Metal Jacket
21. Dirty Dozen
22. Big Trouble in Little China
23. Back to the Future
24. Ghostbusters
25. Raiders of the Lost Ark
26. Leon
27. Spinal Tap
28. Spaceballs
29. Men in Tights
30. Princess Bride
31. Beetlejuice
32. Eraserhead
33. Die Hard
34. Transformers: The Movie (animated)
35. Blues Brothers
36. Saving Private Ryan
37. Glory
38. Platoon
39. Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
40. 2001
41. The Abyss
42. Silence of the Lambs
43. Ben-Hur
44. Forrest Gump
45. American Beauty
46. The Shawshank Redemption
47. The Wrestler
48. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
49. Terminator 2
50. Total Recall

You 2010 National League Central Champtions, The Cincinnati Reds!!

I can't explain how much this means to me after 9 consecutive losing seasons.


GO REDS!!!!

STORMCOCK

Poonami: Brooklyn Canal Turns Into Literal River Of Human Shit

This one's for John.

Marxism Just Isn't Cool

No matter how hard you try

My blue jeans is tight, so onto my love rocket climb

Segway company owner dies in apparent Segway accident

(CNN) -- The owner of the Segway company has died, apparently in an accident involving one of his upright two-wheeled vehicles, police in England said Monday.

The body of James Heselden, 62, was pulled from the River Wharfe in northern England on Sunday, police said.

A Segway-type vehicle was recovered from the river, police said.

The incident is not thought to be suspicious and the coroner has been informed, police added.

The company confirmed "with great sadness" that he had died "in a tragic accident near his home."

It hailed his charitable work, saying that a donation of 10 million British pounds (nearly $16 million) to a local foundation earlier this month raised his lifetime charitable giving to 23 million pounds (over $36 million).

The British veterans' charity Help for Heroes was another beneficiary of his donations, the company statement said.

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OH HI MARK

Yay! Lunch time!

I think this speaks for itself

I love this news channel so much

So Lee can listen to my songs

Do not make eye contact with pigapewoman

ME WANT FOOTBAW

Monday is so stupid

Here's your mantra for this crappy, crappy beginning of the week day.

Why?

don't my .gif's work???

Why??

Anyways,

Monkey Steals Puppy

Kill Whitey. It’s the Right Thing to Do.

• By David Dobbs
• September 15, 2010 |
• 4:51 pm |
• Categories: Brains and Behavior, Neuron Culture, Science Blogs
• 
  

A couple years ago, David Pizarro, a young research psychologist at Cornell, brewed up a devious variation on the classic trolley problem. The trolley problem is that staple of moral psychology studies at dinner parties in which you ask someone to decide under what conditions it’s morally permissible to kill one person to save others. Here, via Wikipedia, is its most basic template:

A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are 5 people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately, you can flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch?

This has generated scores of studies that pose all kinds of variations. (You can take a version of the test yourself at Should You Kill the Fat Man?) Perhaps the richest has been the footbridge problem. The footbridge scenario puts the subject in a more active (hypothetical role): You’re on a footbridge over the trolley track, and next to you, leaning perilously over the rail to see what happens, stands a very large man — a man large enough, in fact, to stop the train. Is it moral to push the guy over the rail to stop the train?

Researchers generally use these scenarios to see whether people hold a) an absolutist or so-called “deontological” moral code or b) a utilitarian or “consequentialist” moral code. In an absolutist code, an act’s morality virtually never depends on context or secondary consequences. A utilitarian code allows that an act’s morality can depend on context and secondary consequences, such as whether taking one life can save two or three or a thousand. In most studies, people start out insisting they have absolute codes.

But when researchers tweak the settings, many people decide it’s relative after all: Say the man is known to be dying, or was contemplating jumping off the bridge anyway — and the passengers are all children — and for some people, that makes it different. Or the guy is a murderer and the passengers nuns. In other scenarios the man might be slipping, and will fall and die if you don’t grab him: Do you save him … even if it means all those kids will die? By tweaking these settings, researchers can squeeze an absolutist pretty hard, but they usually find a mix of absolutists and consequentialists.

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/kill-whitey-its-the-right-thing-to-do/#ixzz0zueYwPKj

Bill Maher is back on air, thank god.

Why We're Teaching 'The Wire' at Harvard

September 12, 2010

by William Julius Wilson and Anmol Chaddha

In our course on urban inequality at Harvard this semester, we want our students to understand the roots of the social conditions in America's inner cities. To that end, we get some help from Bodie, Stringer Bell, Bubbles and others from HBO's "The Wire."

100 Acre Deadwood

Autism’s First Child

As new cases of autism have exploded in recent years—some form of the condition affects about one in 110 children today—efforts have multiplied to understand and accommodate the condition in childhood. But children with autism will become adults with autism, some 500,000 of them in this decade alone. What then? Meet Donald Gray Triplett, 77, of Forest, Mississippi. He was the first person ever diagnosed with autism. And his long, happy, surprising life may hold some answers.

By John Donvan and Caren Zucker

The Modern Economy Rules

The next level in outsourcing: "He has his assistant seducing women for him. His assistant, who is female and lives in India, logs onto his account on a popular dating site, browses profiles and (pretending to be him) makes connections with women on the site. She has e-mail conversations and arranges first dates. Then her employer reads the e-mail conversation and goes to the date."

Can anyone tell me any interesting stories

about what in the hell is going on back in Carrboro/Chapel Hill/Pittsboro whatever the fuck. I feel so isolated out here.

Sorry for using this thing as a social medium but come on, w/o facebook it's like I don't exist any more... reach out touch me digitally!

I think your long stupid hair sucks, but I will defend to the death your right to have stupid sucky hair

How Can One Mustache be so Wrong?

The most e-mailed articles on the nytimes' website today was an op-ed piece by none other than Thomas Friedman: the Times' resident master of muddled metaphors and poor reasoning, at least until Ross Douthat gets more settled in.

(This is something I promise not to make a habit out of, since I'm far from the first person to do it and wouldn't want to subject you to regular Tom Friedman articles anyway.)

The article comments on a Newsweek piece from the other week that lists the 100 greatest countries in the world, based on varied metrics such as education, health, political dynamism, and so on. America is ranked #11, which Mr. Friedman attributes to our failing school systems by tying in a Washington Post op-ed that widens blame for failing schools to include "shrunken student motivation." Kids today don't want to excel and society's to blame.

After the usual couple of paragraphs of aimless blathering Tom arrives once again, club in hand, to one of his favorite dead horses: Americans need to be more like the Chinese or Indians:

"China and India have been catching up to America not only via cheap labor and currencies. They are catching us because they now have free markets like we do, education like we do, access to capital and technology like we do, but, most importantly, values like our Greatest Generation had. That is, a willingness to postpone gratification, invest for the future, work harder than the next guy and hold their kids to the highest expectations."

This is not what irks me about this article though. The poor wages and living conditions that China and India endure in order to compete globally aside, there's nothing wrong with this somewhat bland, we-can-be-great-again attitude that Mr. Friedman pushes weekly (I used to eat that shit up when Obama would say it). It's the implication that we're out of Newsweek's top 10 at #11 because we aren't more like #59 (China) or #78 (India) that bothers me.

Wouldn't it make more sense to look at the countries who are ranked above the US and try to figure out what they're doing right that we're not? Let's see...

1. Finland

2. Switzerland

3. Sweden

4. Australia

5. Luxembourg

6. Norway

7. Canada

8. Netherlands

9. Japan

10. Denmark

Coming in at #9, Japan is the only country on this list that qualifies for Tom's work-a-holic model of success that our Greatest Generation had, and I'm pretty sure that they just haven't stopped working since the Meiji Restoration unless it's to invade Manchuria.

As for the rest, you guessed it, they're European-style Democratic Socialists with strong social safety nets and national health care systems. We could begin catching up to these models but instead, we're urged by one of the United States' most uncontroversial pundits to work 50-hour weeks and demand suicide-inducing workloads of schoolchildren.

Well that's it. To anyone still reading, I appreciate you letting me vent. This all just boils down to facial-hair envy anyway.

I mean, just look at it...

Thoughts on Graphs

This is my first attempt at this kind of analysis, so bear with me if my data is incomplete or my conclusions misleading.

After looking at these two graphs, the first related to incidents of violent crime in the US and the second detailing rates of incarceration, you could come to a couple of conclusions. One is that America is putting record numbers of people in prison over a 20-year period during a time when violent crime has decreased dramatically, meaning the majority of that red bulge is non-violent offenders. Conversely, you could assume that our higher rates of incarceration are helping to keep all of the violent criminals off of the streets, leading to an all-around decrease in violent crime.

Personally, I'm led to believe in the former, particularly due to the more-or-less steady rate of arrests for violent crimes, displayed in the first graph's purple line. Correlation does not equal causation though, and these opposing figures don't even begin to scratch the surface of the elaborate tapestry of shit that is our great American prison system. Just a little food for thought, if you will.

Harsh to Christen thee as such,

but here's the first funny thing I found since signing up. I don't doubt our one follower (me) will enjoy!