A FULL REVOLUTION
In the run-up to the Olympics, Simone Biles is transforming gymnastics.
By Reeves Wiedeman
 | ||
Wednesday, May 25, 2016
The Best
From The New Yorker -
A FULL REVOLUTION
In the run-up to the Olympics, Simone Biles is transforming gymnastics.
By Reeves Wiedeman
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/simone-biles-is-the-best-gymnast-in-the-world?mbid=nl_160525_Daily&CNDID=27124505&spMailingID=8970946&spUserID=MTE0MzE0NDEyNDUyS0&spJobID=922460323&spReportId=OTIyNDYwMzIzS0
A FULL REVOLUTION
In the run-up to the Olympics, Simone Biles is transforming gymnastics.
By Reeves Wiedeman
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
Monday, May 23, 2016
What a Sad Man
Excerpts from 2 Paragraphs -
The Supreme Court of the United States found in favor of Timothy Tyrone Foster, a black man on death row in Georgia. Convicted of killing a white woman in 1987, Foster's case before the nation's highest court claimed that he was a victim of racial discrimination at his original trial. SCOTUS agreed in a rare 7-1 decision, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing: "The focus on race in the prosecution's file plainly demonstrates a concerted effort to keep black prospective jurors off the jury."
~~~~~~~~~~
Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court's only African American Justice, was the lone dissenting vote.
~~~~~~~~~~
Of course he was (my comment).
The Supreme Court of the United States found in favor of Timothy Tyrone Foster, a black man on death row in Georgia. Convicted of killing a white woman in 1987, Foster's case before the nation's highest court claimed that he was a victim of racial discrimination at his original trial. SCOTUS agreed in a rare 7-1 decision, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing: "The focus on race in the prosecution's file plainly demonstrates a concerted effort to keep black prospective jurors off the jury."
~~~~~~~~~~
Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court's only African American Justice, was the lone dissenting vote.
~~~~~~~~~~
Of course he was (my comment).
A Deep Dive
This is long, but worth the read.
From The New Yorker -
THE BANK ROBBER
The computer technician who exposed a Swiss bank’s darkest secrets.
By Patrick Radden Keefe
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/herve-falcianis-great-swiss-bank-heist?mbid=nl_TNY%20Template%20-%20With%20Photo%20(41)&CNDID=27124505&spMailingID=8959693&spUserID=MTE0MzE0NDEyNDUyS0&spJobID=922244030&spReportId=OTIyMjQ0MDMwS0
From The New Yorker -
THE BANK ROBBER
The computer technician who exposed a Swiss bank’s darkest secrets.
By Patrick Radden Keefe
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/herve-falcianis-great-swiss-bank-heist?mbid=nl_TNY%20Template%20-%20With%20Photo%20(41)&CNDID=27124505&spMailingID=8959693&spUserID=MTE0MzE0NDEyNDUyS0&spJobID=922244030&spReportId=OTIyMjQ0MDMwS0
Just Let Him RIP
From Consequence of Sound -
BET Awards mock Madonna and Stevie Wonder’s Prince tribute at the Billboard Music Awards
"Yeah, we saw that. Don't Worry. We Got You."
http://consequenceofsound.net/2016/05/bet-awards-mocks-madonna-and-stevie-wonders-prince-tribute-at-the-billboard-music-awards/
BET Awards mock Madonna and Stevie Wonder’s Prince tribute at the Billboard Music Awards
"Yeah, we saw that. Don't Worry. We Got You."
http://consequenceofsound.net/2016/05/bet-awards-mocks-madonna-and-stevie-wonders-prince-tribute-at-the-billboard-music-awards/
Wealth Distribution
From Vox -
Something massive and important has happened in the United States over the past 50 years: Economic wealth has become increasingly concentrated among a small group of ultra-wealthy Americans.
http://www.vox.com/2016/5/23/11704246/wealth-inequality-cartoon
Something massive and important has happened in the United States over the past 50 years: Economic wealth has become increasingly concentrated among a small group of ultra-wealthy Americans.
http://www.vox.com/2016/5/23/11704246/wealth-inequality-cartoon
Sunday, May 22, 2016
Laughing til it Hurt!
Every Mom can relate to this scenario. Read the entire message. I dare you not to laugh out loud.
From StumbleUpon -
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1JhMev/:1GHP2NVT2:h154ZrzH/hellogiggles.com/guy-panic-texts-wife-son-pukes
From StumbleUpon -
Guy panic-texts his wife after their son pukes everywhere, internet cannot get enough
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1JhMev/:1GHP2NVT2:h154ZrzH/hellogiggles.com/guy-panic-texts-wife-son-pukes
Saturday, May 21, 2016
Redemption
Excerpts from The Huffington Post Highline -
Meet the Ungers
Merle Unger escaped from jail for the first time in 1967, when he was an 18-year-old dropout with an interest in petty crime. People in his native Greencastle, Pennsylvania, saw him as a harmless character—a scrawny kid who figured out how to tie his bedsheets together and climb out of the nearby jail at night so he could see his girlfriend and play bingo at the Catholic church before climbing back into his cell in time for roll call. He did this until a sheriff’s deputy went to play bingo, saw Unger sitting there and was like, wait a minute.
Whenever jail officials increased security, Unger found another route out. A local radio station started a Merle Unger Fan Club. His public defender made T-shirts that said, “Merle, baby, where are you?”
In 1975, after more escapes and arrests, he found himself locked up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, fixating on a skylight in the lunchroom, 45 feet up. Early one morning he tied a piece of rope to a 5- or 10-pound dumbbell and wrapped the other end of the rope around his neck. He piled up some tables, put a small step ladder on top of the pile, climbed atop a beam, pulled up the ladder, set it up again, reached higher, hurled the dumbbell through the skylight’s glass, and climbed through the broken window into the December cold, wearing a short-sleeved shirt. “I mean, I’m not proud of that,” Unger told me last month. “I just wanted my freedom.”
~~~~~~~~~~
In the middle of all this, in the ’80s, Unger happened to meet a woman. A fellow inmate in Florida had put a personal ad in Mother Earth magazine, and he got so many responses that he sold the extras to other prisoners for a dollar apiece. Unger bought a few, sent letters and a woman from Illinois came to visit. They ended up getting married in 1988 and had two children, both conceived in prison. He says his life changed when he held his infant son for the first time: “I didn’t want to commit no crimes anymore.”
In Unger’s telling, this is the moment he developed an obsessive interest in the American legal system. Another friend worked in the prison’s law library and told him about a case in which a federal inmate earned his freedom by challenging the constitutionality of the jury instructions in his trial. Unger spent hours studying the case. It was all he could talk about. And the more he read, the more he thought he might have a shot at winning a new trial on the murder charge if he came back to Maryland to fight it.
~~~~~~~~~~
Unger v. State doesn’t say that these prisoners should be freed, only that they can ask to be retried. In practice, though, there’s a strong incentive to settle cases where the defendant has a clean prison record. Re-trying a case that’s 30 or 40 years old can be tricky: the witnesses have moved away, the detectives are dead and the case file is skeletal, or missing, or destroyed. Since the decision came down, 142 of 231 prisoners have negotiated their freedom, almost all of them getting probation. One was acquitted at a new trial. Another eight have died behind bars before they could get a hearing. There are still about 70 prisoners with open cases, which means that even more may yet go free.
http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/meet-the-ungers/
Meet the Ungers
Merle Unger escaped from jail for the first time in 1967, when he was an 18-year-old dropout with an interest in petty crime. People in his native Greencastle, Pennsylvania, saw him as a harmless character—a scrawny kid who figured out how to tie his bedsheets together and climb out of the nearby jail at night so he could see his girlfriend and play bingo at the Catholic church before climbing back into his cell in time for roll call. He did this until a sheriff’s deputy went to play bingo, saw Unger sitting there and was like, wait a minute.
Whenever jail officials increased security, Unger found another route out. A local radio station started a Merle Unger Fan Club. His public defender made T-shirts that said, “Merle, baby, where are you?”
In 1975, after more escapes and arrests, he found himself locked up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, fixating on a skylight in the lunchroom, 45 feet up. Early one morning he tied a piece of rope to a 5- or 10-pound dumbbell and wrapped the other end of the rope around his neck. He piled up some tables, put a small step ladder on top of the pile, climbed atop a beam, pulled up the ladder, set it up again, reached higher, hurled the dumbbell through the skylight’s glass, and climbed through the broken window into the December cold, wearing a short-sleeved shirt. “I mean, I’m not proud of that,” Unger told me last month. “I just wanted my freedom.”
~~~~~~~~~~
In the middle of all this, in the ’80s, Unger happened to meet a woman. A fellow inmate in Florida had put a personal ad in Mother Earth magazine, and he got so many responses that he sold the extras to other prisoners for a dollar apiece. Unger bought a few, sent letters and a woman from Illinois came to visit. They ended up getting married in 1988 and had two children, both conceived in prison. He says his life changed when he held his infant son for the first time: “I didn’t want to commit no crimes anymore.”
In Unger’s telling, this is the moment he developed an obsessive interest in the American legal system. Another friend worked in the prison’s law library and told him about a case in which a federal inmate earned his freedom by challenging the constitutionality of the jury instructions in his trial. Unger spent hours studying the case. It was all he could talk about. And the more he read, the more he thought he might have a shot at winning a new trial on the murder charge if he came back to Maryland to fight it.
~~~~~~~~~~
Unger v. State doesn’t say that these prisoners should be freed, only that they can ask to be retried. In practice, though, there’s a strong incentive to settle cases where the defendant has a clean prison record. Re-trying a case that’s 30 or 40 years old can be tricky: the witnesses have moved away, the detectives are dead and the case file is skeletal, or missing, or destroyed. Since the decision came down, 142 of 231 prisoners have negotiated their freedom, almost all of them getting probation. One was acquitted at a new trial. Another eight have died behind bars before they could get a hearing. There are still about 70 prisoners with open cases, which means that even more may yet go free.
http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/meet-the-ungers/
Friday, May 20, 2016
Otto – Self-Driving Trucks
Now the downside -
http://2paragraphs.com/2016/05/self-driving-trucks-threaten-3-5-million-american-jobs/
Quiet Discontent
An excerpt from the New York Times -
No Sound, No Fury, No Marriage
My marriage had long ago turned into the cliché of roommate-ness, and that it could suffer such a change without any emotional upheaval was revealing. In fact, the silence said it all.
The words I don’t say to my neighbors, the words that get held on my tongue, are: I wish you had heard a fight. I wish our voices had been loud enough to carry across the valley. He and I may have free speech, but we’re not so good at frank speech.
Shakespeare had it right: “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart, concealing it, will break.” I never spoke of the anger in my heart, the mounting resentments and hurts, and neither did he. I never demanded attention or care, and neither did he. And that’s why we broke.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/fashion/marriage-breakups-separation.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share&_r=0
No Sound, No Fury, No Marriage
My marriage had long ago turned into the cliché of roommate-ness, and that it could suffer such a change without any emotional upheaval was revealing. In fact, the silence said it all.
The words I don’t say to my neighbors, the words that get held on my tongue, are: I wish you had heard a fight. I wish our voices had been loud enough to carry across the valley. He and I may have free speech, but we’re not so good at frank speech.
Shakespeare had it right: “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart, concealing it, will break.” I never spoke of the anger in my heart, the mounting resentments and hurts, and neither did he. I never demanded attention or care, and neither did he. And that’s why we broke.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/fashion/marriage-breakups-separation.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share&_r=0
Deja Vu
Valedictorian barred from high school graduation because he has a beard
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/valedictorian-barred-high-school-graduation-article-1.2643541
H/T Tiff
 |
| Amite High School Class of 2016 valedictorian Andrew Jones was not allowed to participate in his own graduation because of his beard. (WLTX 19 NEWS) |
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/valedictorian-barred-high-school-graduation-article-1.2643541
H/T Tiff
Thursday, May 19, 2016
Wood Hotline
There’s a Hotline for People With Knotty Wood Questions
Inside Wisconsin's Forest Products Laboratory, where experiments are conducted on all things wood.
By David Jester
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/theres-a-hotline-for-people-with-knotty-wood-questions?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura&utm_campaign=f2e9493ee3-Newsletter_5_19_20165_17_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_62ba9246c0-f2e9493ee3-59905913&ct=t(Newsletter_5_19_20165_17_2016)&mc_cid=f2e9493ee3&mc_eid=866176a63f
Inside Wisconsin's Forest Products Laboratory, where experiments are conducted on all things wood.
By David Jester
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/theres-a-hotline-for-people-with-knotty-wood-questions?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura&utm_campaign=f2e9493ee3-Newsletter_5_19_20165_17_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_62ba9246c0-f2e9493ee3-59905913&ct=t(Newsletter_5_19_20165_17_2016)&mc_cid=f2e9493ee3&mc_eid=866176a63f
Fake Trees
An excerpt from Atlas Obscura -
All over the world, there are trees that quietly carry our phone messages. They come in variety of species: palm, cypress, fir, elm, pine, cacti. Perhaps you have passed by one of these alien trees before, or spotted them sticking high above the natural treeline. From top to bottom, nothing about these trees is natural.
Despite telecommunications and utility companies' best efforts, cell phone tower trees are notoriously unattractive. The architecture of these fake trees is also not the least bit convincing. For example, the pine cell towers have metal “trunks” that lack the pliability of natural trees, and support a small tuft of branches and fake foliage that attempts to cover up the hardware underneath.
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/take-a-look-at-americas-least-convincing-cell-phone-tower-trees?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura&utm_campaign=f2e9493ee3-Newsletter_5_19_20165_17_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_62ba9246c0-f2e9493ee3-59905913&ct=t(Newsletter_5_19_20165_17_2016)&mc_cid=f2e9493ee3&mc_eid=866176a63f
 | ||
A pine cell tower tree built by one of the leading companies
in the cell tower concealment business in Tuscon, Arizona.
(Photo: Bill Morrow/CC BY 2.0)
|
All over the world, there are trees that quietly carry our phone messages. They come in variety of species: palm, cypress, fir, elm, pine, cacti. Perhaps you have passed by one of these alien trees before, or spotted them sticking high above the natural treeline. From top to bottom, nothing about these trees is natural.
Despite telecommunications and utility companies' best efforts, cell phone tower trees are notoriously unattractive. The architecture of these fake trees is also not the least bit convincing. For example, the pine cell towers have metal “trunks” that lack the pliability of natural trees, and support a small tuft of branches and fake foliage that attempts to cover up the hardware underneath.
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/take-a-look-at-americas-least-convincing-cell-phone-tower-trees?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura&utm_campaign=f2e9493ee3-Newsletter_5_19_20165_17_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_62ba9246c0-f2e9493ee3-59905913&ct=t(Newsletter_5_19_20165_17_2016)&mc_cid=f2e9493ee3&mc_eid=866176a63f
Combat Juggling?
From Now I Know -
Combat juggling was created by a well-known juggler (to the extent that there is such a thing) named Jason Garfield. Garfield, per Wikipedia, "is regarded as one of the most controversial members of the juggling community" (yes, really) because he "despises the concept of 'artistic juggling,' promoting the idea that juggling should also be regarded as a form of sport." Combat juggling, which adds competition and athleticism to something typically reserved for clowns and magicians, probably fits that bill. And while it still seems like a joke, it's become increasingly popular since. As VICE reported, the sport matured enough that, in 2011, ESPN3 ended up airing a combat juggling competition, and YouTube is littered with videos of people dueling while juggling with sometimes hilarious results. (Yes, sometimes, someone gets hit in the head and no, the rules don't allow you to bludgeon your opponent.)
http://nowiknow.com/combat-juggling/
Combat juggling was created by a well-known juggler (to the extent that there is such a thing) named Jason Garfield. Garfield, per Wikipedia, "is regarded as one of the most controversial members of the juggling community" (yes, really) because he "despises the concept of 'artistic juggling,' promoting the idea that juggling should also be regarded as a form of sport." Combat juggling, which adds competition and athleticism to something typically reserved for clowns and magicians, probably fits that bill. And while it still seems like a joke, it's become increasingly popular since. As VICE reported, the sport matured enough that, in 2011, ESPN3 ended up airing a combat juggling competition, and YouTube is littered with videos of people dueling while juggling with sometimes hilarious results. (Yes, sometimes, someone gets hit in the head and no, the rules don't allow you to bludgeon your opponent.)
http://nowiknow.com/combat-juggling/
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