It's nice work if you can get it. Last year, Ed Casabian began moving around New York City, living in a different neighborhood every week. He writes about his experiences, and is booked up through October already.
I’d like to stay with people of different ages, races, religions, sexual orientations and economic situations. I’d like to hit the five boroughs (Staten Island eludes me but its on the calendar!). I’m trying to do 52 neighborhoods. I’m at around 40 right now depending on how you define them. Ultimately though, I’m looking for different perspectives and ideas. So far, I have stayed with some of my best friends, friends of friends, relatives of friends, former coworkers, complete strangers through some of the recent press I have received. It has been difficult, scary, interesting, and exciting. Most of all, it has been immensely rewarding, which is what I expected when this idea first popped into my head.
Casabian was granted a SoundCloud Community Fellowship to underwrite his adventures. Link -via Laughing Squid
In the French animation Mortys, death is a working mother. Business is disrupted when her child schemes to get more of her time. Mortys is a graduation short film co-directed by Gaelle Lebegue, Mathieu Vidal, Aurelien Ronceray-Peslin et Nicolas Villeneuve, and produced by the ESMA. -via I Am Bored
Once again, it's time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog! Do you know what the object in this picture is?
Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will each win a T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
Check out the What Is It? Blog for additional pictures. Good luck!
Update: The object pictured is an ice chipper. Craig Clayton was the first of many with the correct answer, so he wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop. The funniest answer came from Maxx McIlhargey, who said it was a toothpick for crocodiles, used by wildlife conservationists to get the drug runner bones from between the crocodile's teeth from a distance. He did not select a shirt.
Here we are, at the intersection of video game and board game. Elisabeth Redel made a Monopoly game for her boyfriend fashioned after the video game Fallout! The streets are locations from the game instead of Atlantic City. Even the cards are Fallout-oriented. See more pictures at Geeks Are Sexy. Link
Cornell Creative Machines Lab connected two chatbots to each other to see what would happen. You could call this a conversation, and however odd it is, it honestly makes more sense than some chats I've heard between real people. -via Metafilter
New York City didn't see as much destruction as they had expected, but many communities up and down the east coast were severely impacted by Hurricane Irene. Buzzfeed has a roundup of frightening photographs from various locations. This one shows Route 12 at Cape Hatteras National Seashore. The damaged road isolated 2,500 people on Hatteras Island. Link
This Twaggie is based on a Tweet by @thesulk. If true, it would go a long way toward explaining why Rachmaninov's music is so difficult for us mere mortals to play. Link
Previously at Neatorama: Another possible explanation.
How to Be a Retronaut has a collection of portraits of married couples a hundred years back or more. Some look strangely alike, and they all look fairly uncomfortable posing for the photographer. http://www.howtobearetronaut.com/2011/08/victorian-husbands-and-wives/ -via Everlasting Blort
A man entered Eastern Bank in South Boston with the intention to rob it Thursday, but left empty-handed. He went to a teller and presented a note demanding money, but she said her window was closed. The unidentified man then went to the next window and received a scolding about cutting in line!
The suspect was told by a teller and customer that he had to wait in line for his turn, and to take off his hoodie, police said. The suspect refused to remove his hoodie and left the bank.
He was last seen walking toward F Street, police said.
Police said no one was injured and no weapon was shown. The robbery attempt is under investigation and no arrests have been made, police said.
Ursus Wehrli is an artist and comedian from Switzerland. In his latest picture book, The Art of Clean Up, he meticulously rearranges components of photographs to be neat and tidy and completely meaningless. See more examples at Colossal. Link | Artist's site -via Metafilter
Hurricane Irene is causing havoc along the east coast, but some business owners in its path retained their sense of humor, at least long enough to thumb their noses at the storm -just before evacuating. See a collection of such business signs at Buzzfeed. This one is my favorite. Link
by Yoram Bauman[1] University of Washington, Seattle, Washington
The cornerstone of Harvard professor N. Gregory Mankiw’s introductory economics textbook, Principles of Economics, is a synthesis of economic thought into Ten Principles of Economics (listed in the first table below). A quick perusal of these will likely affirm the reader’s suspicions that synthesizing economic thought into Ten Principles is no easy task, and may even lead the reader to suspect that the subtlety and concision required are not to be found in the pen of N. Gregory Mankiw.
I have taken it upon myself to remedy this unfortunate situation. The second table below summarizes my attempt to translate Mankiw's Ten Principles into plain English, and in doing so to provide the uninitiated with an invaluable glimpse of the economic mind at work. Explanations and details can be found in the pages that follow, but the average reader is advised to simply cut out the table below and carry it around for assistance in the (hereafter unlikely) event of confusion about the basic Principles of Economics.
#1. People face tradeoffs. #2. The cost of something is what you give up to get it. #3. Rational people think at the margin. #4. People respond to incentives. #5. Trade can make everyone better off. #6. Markets are usually a good way to organize economic activity. #7. Governments can sometimes improve market outcomes. #8. A country’s standard of living depends on its ability to produce goods and services. #9. Prices rise when the government prints too much money. #10. Society faces a short-run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment.
#1. Choices are bad. #2. Choices are really bad. #3. People are stupid. #4. People aren’t that stupid. #5. Trade can make everyone worse off. #6. Governments are stupid. #7. Governments aren’t that stupid. #8. Blah blah blah. #9. Blah blah blah. #10. Blah blah blah.
At first glance, the reader cannot but be impressed by the translation’s simplicity and clarity. Accessibility, however, should not be mistaken for shallowness: further study will reveal hidden depths and subtleties that will richly reward the attentive student. Indeed, a moment’s reflection will identify any number of puzzles and mysteries. Chief among them is probably this: Why do Principles #8, #9, and #10 have identical translations?
The immediately obvious explanation is that these are macro-economic principles, and that I, as a micro-economist, am ill equipped to understand them, let alone translate them.[2] As is often the case in this complex world we live in, this immediately obvious explanation is also wrong. The true reason I have provided identical translations of “Blah blah blah” for Principles #8, #9, and #10 is that these principles say exactly the same thing, namely, “Blah blah blah.” Sometime when you’ve got a few hours to spare, go and ask an economist -- preferably a macro-economist -- what he or she really means by “standard of living” or “goods and services” or “inflation” or “unemployment” or “short-run” or even “too much.” You will soon realize that there is a vast difference between, say, what Principle #10 says -- “Society faces a short-run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment” -- and what Principle #10 means: “Society faces blah between blah and blah.” My translations are simply concise renderings of these underlying meanings.
Having cleared up that issue, let us go back to Mankiw’s
PRINCIPLE #1 People face tradeoffs. TRANSLATION: Choices are bad.
An Illinois appellate court dismissed a case that two grown children have pursued against their mother for two years. The lawsuit accused Kimberly Garrity of bad mothering for a long list of complaints, including making the daughter come home at midnight, threatening the son at age 7 over buckling his seatbelt, and failing to buy toys on occasion.
Among the exhibits filed in the case is a birthday card Garrity sent her son, who in his lawsuit sought damages because the card was "inappropriate" and failed to include cash or a check. He also alleged she failed to send a card for years or, while he was in college, care packages.
On the front of the American Greetings card is a picture of tomatoes spread across a table that are indistinguishable except for one in the middle with craft-store googly eyes attached.
"Son I got you this Birthday card because it’s just like you ... different from all the rest!" the card reads. On the inside Garrity wrote "Have a great day! Love & Hugs, Mom xoxoxo."
Children have the right to sue parents for emotional distress, but courts will only pursue a case if the parent's behavior is "extreme or outrageous." The Illinois court found that none of the mother's behavior fit that description. Link -via Fark
The following is an article from the book History's Lists from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
During America's wars, they were considered entertainers more than harbingers of fear to U.S. troops. But sometimes media stars like Tokyo Rose and Hanoi Hannah broadcast strategic information that there's no way the enemy should have known.
As radio propagandists transmitting from enemy capitals, their job was to undermine the morale of opposing troops in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Uncle John examines the careers of seven infamous enemy broadcasters of the 20th century.
1. TOKYO ROSE
Iva Toguri was born in Los Angeles in 1916 and graduated from UCLA with a zoology degree; she was visiting Japan when war broke out in 1941. She was hardly a household name in World War II -until the name given her by Allied forces in the Pacific made her an international celebrity.
Wartime Activities: Tokyo Rose played American music and used American slang during her 20-minute daily newscast on Radio Tokyo's "The Zero Hour" while she predicted attacks, identified American ships and submarines, and even peppered her conversation with the names of prominent individuals. Listeners thought she was uncannily accurate, but she had little impact on the offensive juggernaut that first isolated and then defeated Japan.
Postwar: After the war, Toguri was arrested, convicted of treason, and imprisoned; she was released for good behavior in 1956 after serving six years. Upon moving to Chicago, where her family ran a store, she insisted she had always been a loyal American. She claimed that she was forced to make the broadcasts, and Allied POWs who worked with her confirmed her story years later, convincing president Gerald Ford to pardon her in 1977. In January 2006, she received the Edgar J. Herlihy Citizenship Award from the World War II Veterans Committee; she died in September of that year.
2. LORD HAW-HAW
The British gave the nickname "Lord Haw-Haw" to a collection of announcers on the English-language propaganda broadcasts from Hamburg, Germany, during World War II. But it was William Joyce, who claimed to be a British citizen, who came to symbolize Lord Haw-Haw as the chief Nazi sympathizer. Born in the United States and raised in England and Ireland, Joyce was a member of the British Union of Fascists and was about to be arrested when he fled to Germany in 1939.
Wartime activities: From 1939 to 1945, his radio broadcasts to England on the "Germany Calling" program were designed to undermine the morale of the English, Canadian, Australian, and American troops, as well as the citizens of the British Isles. Joyce reported Allied ship losses and planes shot down, and bragged about Nazi secret weapons with the goal of demoralizing the Allies.
