Review by Theda Skocpol of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer
Kevin Hall’s followup studies of the “Biggest Loser” dieters at +6 years, PDF
Why the Gold Standard is poor policy
List of Email to SMS Gateways
Technological Improvement Graphs
Economics of Karl Polanyi
Meet the Father of Modern Space Art, Chesley Bonestell
Military equip given to police departments
Sex isn’t chromosomes: the story of a century of misconceptions about X & Y
Congressional Progressive Caucus’ Budget for Fiscal Year 2017
Laser Sonics model 8000, 150 W medical YAG laser system, pulsed or CW, which runs on three-phase 230 VAC
Disease heatmap showing the introduction of vaccines
New National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) five year plan still encourages nonsense
CDC uninterested in discussing how the Nepal UN mission to Haiti started a cholera epidemic
The Urgent Need to Save Orthodox Economists from their Crippling Myths by William Black
Our autopsies revealed a number of patterns that proved critical to our analysis, predictions, and policy prescriptions. For the sake of brevity I will not define here terms I have explained in hundreds of blogs, articles, and slides. As I noted, the blogger has heard me present and define the terms. First, we came to understand that the S&Ls were “control frauds.” Second, we found that “accounting” was the “weapon of choice” in finance – we were dealing with “accounting control frauds.” Third, we realized that accounting control fraud had become epidemic. Fourth, we realized that the control frauds were so numerous and concentrated (by asset type, commercial real estate loans (CRE) and geography) and growing so quickly that they were hyper-inflating regional real estate bubbles in the Southwest. Fifth, we identified the four “ingredients” of the fraud “recipe” for a lender. Sixth, we recognized that the CEOs running control frauds ran them for their personal benefit, by looting the S&L. Seventh, we recognized that firms following the fraud recipe were mathematically guaranteed to report record (albeit fictional) profits. Eighth, we realized the truth of the industry saying: “a rolling loan gathers no loss.” Ninth, we identified the recurrent scams by which S&L control frauds, individually and collectively, transmuted massive losses into fictional gains. Tenth, we realized that the CEOs running accounting control frauds were routinely able to suborn supposed “controls” by using the ability to hire, fire, and expand the engagement (in the case of outside auditors and counsel) to generate a “Gresham’s” dynamic (Akerlof 1970). Eleventh, we realized that the accounting control frauds had a great “tell” – they had to gut their underwriting and internal controls to follow the first two ingredients of the fraud recipe. Twelfth, we saw that the fraud recipe created an Achilles’ “heel” – the need for extreme growth, so we adopted a rule limiting growth.
Playmate figures graphed!
The Phenomenon of Man reviewed by Sir Peter Medawar
Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender’s Game, Intention, and Morality by John Kessel
Explaining what goes on in the world: in memory of Bob Fitch by Doug Henwood
Bob Fitch and New York history
5 Icelandic words you can’t translate
Vesen (veh-sen)
Skreppa (SCRAP-ah)
Nenna (NEN-ah)
Jæja (YI-yah)
Dugnaður (DOOG-na-thuhr)
JPL Visions of the Future posters
Dissent in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) (Justice Scalia, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist)
Scalia’s pro-creationism dissent.
The Former Dentist Uncovering Sugar’s Rotten Secrets by Francie Diep
University of California–San Francisco researcher Cristin Kearns dropped a promising career at the Kaiser Foundation to dig through sugar industry archives for a smoking gun. With help from the man who brought down Big Tobacco, she’s now proving that Big Sugar steered scientists away from looking at the ingredient’s harmful effects.
The Powder Keg: The seething racial resentment of the Obama era is of an altogether different kind. by Charles P. Pierce
Many tarantulas are one particular shade of vivid blue, and no one knows why. A structural color, not a pigment color.
Doggerland, between England and France was covered by the ocean 7,000 YPB.
Woman can smell Parkinson’s disease
A bogus “Obama economic indicators” graphic is going around Facebook. Here are employment stats for the Obama Presidency:
This chart is incorrect–let’s take a look a the first line.
Full time workers, Jan 2009 are 116M (BLS Jan 2009, A-6), down to 111M a year later at the peak of the recession, and now in Sept 2015 at 122M (+ 6 million jobs in 6.5 years) (BLS Sept 2015). Well done Mr president!.
Under Bush, Jan 2001 – Jan 2009 employment went from 112M to 116M (+4 million in 8 years). (Table A-4
These figures are readily available from the BLS Current Population Survey.
Trap, neuter, release does not work
Article on the HEMA documentary. How People Actually Fought With Swords.
Back to the Source, a documentary about Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA).
Inside the Secretive World of Tax-Avoidance Experts by Brooke Harrington
Turgay Trough Geoglyphs 250+ collections of mounds in square, cross, line, and tri-armed shapes
Man’s larger penis is a consequence of his larger brain. All about the baby head.
Studs Terkel, recordings from The Good War
How Humans Evolved Supersize Brains, by Ferris Jabr Experiments putting human/chimp regualtory regions into mice, database of human accelerated regions (HARs).
Mitochondria are a network of tubular organelles
Chicago cops conduct illegal spying on protesters
Thelonious Monk’s List of Tips for Playing a Gig
Forensic Pseudoscience: The Unheralded Crisis of Criminal Justice
More guns means more people shot
How to sequence and assemble a large eukaryote genome with long reads in 2015
Convert between RefSeq and Ensembl Transcript
Ion Torrent S5, $65k, between Proton and PGM in capability, 200bp reads in 2.5 hrs
Podcasts:
Stuff You Should Know
Stuff You Missed in History Class
HOW TO DO EVERYTHING
Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe
50 despicable things George W. Bush did before and after 9/11
Oak leaf mites bite humans this year
Japanese zoning. Allow mixed land use by design, up to a maximum use for each zone. Contrasted with US Euclidian zoning.
India’s Subterranean Stepwells
Solidarity Squandered by Rick Perlstein. The attacks brought us together until we let them turn us against each other–and damn near everyone else.
Article on the culture of Iceland and how it intersects with the 2008 bankruptcy crisis, “Wall Street on the Tundra” J
by MICHAEL LEWIS, APRIL 2009
Illinois good hiking spots
Pics of a WWI German sub (sunk and recovered by the British–all Steampunk
Rethinking government debt by Frances Coppola. Covers the economics of money and debt.
God damn letter sent to Abraham Lincoln
Virus GBV-C protects somewhat against AIDs
Colourlex: pigments and paintings
Dietary pesticides (99.99% all natural) (pdf)
The toxicological significance of exposures to synthetic chemicals is examined in the context of exposures to naturally occurring chemicals. We calculate that 99.99% (by weight) of the pesticides in the American diet are chemicals that plants produce to defend themselves. Only 52 natural pesticides have been tested in high-dose animal cancer tests, and about half (27) are rodent carcinogens; these 27 are shown to be present in many common foods. We conclude that natural and synthetic chemicals are equally likely to be positive in animal cancer tests. We also conclude that at the low doses of most human exposures the comparative hazards of synthetic pesticide residues are insignificant.
“Racism and Science Fiction” by Samuel R. Delany
Genetics of color, COLOUR AND PATTERN CHARTS
Sarah Hartwell
Info on college costs from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)
A genome-wide analysis of putative functional and exonic variation associated with extremely high intelligence. Spain et. al., 2015. Molecular Psychiatry
Although individual differences in intelligence (general cognitive ability) are highly heritable, molecular genetic analyses to date have had limited success in identifying specific loci responsible for its heritability. This study is the first to investigate exome variation in individuals of extremely high intelligence. Under the quantitative genetic model, sampling from the high extreme of the distribution should provide increased power to detect associations. We therefore performed a case–control association analysis with 1409 individuals drawn from the top 0.0003 (IQ >170) of the population distribution of intelligence and 3253 unselected population-based controls. Our analysis focused on putative functional exonic variants assayed on the Illumina HumanExome BeadChip. We did not observe any individual protein-altering variants that are reproducibly associated with extremely high intelligence and within the entire distribution of intelligence. Moreover, no significant associations were found for multiple rare alleles within individual genes. However, analyses using genome-wide similarity between unrelated individuals (genome-wide complex trait analysis) indicate that the genotyped functional protein-altering variation yields a heritability estimate of 17.4% (s.e. 1.7%) based on a liability model. In addition, investigation of nominally significant associations revealed fewer rare alleles associated with extremely high intelligence than would be expected under the null hypothesis. This observation is consistent with the hypothesis that rare functional alleles are more frequently detrimental than beneficial to intelligence.
In the modern Republican Party, making sense is a secondary consideration. Years of relentless propaganda combined with extreme frustration over the disastrous Bush years and two terms of a Kenyan Muslim terrorist president have cast the party’s right wing into a swirling suckhole of paranoia and conspiratorial craziness. There is nothing you can do to go too far, a fact proved, if not exactly understood, by the madman, Trump.
First octopus genome published: California two-spot octopus, Octopus bimaculoides
Pentagon tiling discovery.
Hugo awards 2015! Yea, the asshole muckers lost! Nice to see Orphan Black win.
What the alternate Hugo Ballot would likely have been Good source for my TO READ list.
