McSweeney's offers the challenge – which is which?
1. loog a his lirow nose
2. there is some shit I will not eat
3. LISN bud LISN
4. this i bad sorry to saY
5. leave her alone
she's not your gal
6. She is Lucifierian !
7. THuNdeRB loSSo!M iN
8. aThe):l
9. stunned. i. am. stunned. every question speaks to us
10. What is nothing?
Answers after the jump:
YouTube comment: 1, 4, 6, 9, 10
e. e. cummings: 2, 3, 5, 7, 8
Amy Wallace reports on the consequences of the anti-vaccine movement:
In certain parts of the US, vaccination rates have dropped so low that occurrences of some children’s diseases are approaching pre-vaccine levels for the first time ever. And the number of people who choose not to vaccinate their children (so-called philosophical exemptions are available in about 20 states, including Pennsylvania, Texas, and much of the West) continues to rise. In states where such opting out is allowed, 2.6 percent of parents did so last year, up from 1 percent in 1991, according to the CDC. In some communities, like California’s affluent Marin County, just north of San Francisco, non-vaccination rates are approaching 6 percent (counterintuitively, higher rates of non-vaccination often correspond with higher levels of education and wealth).
That may not sound like much, but a recent study by the Los Angeles Times indicates that the impact can be devastating. The Times found that even though only about 2 percent of California’s kindergartners are unvaccinated (10,000 kids, or about twice the number as in 1997), they tend to be clustered, disproportionately increasing the risk of an outbreak of such largely eradicated diseases as measles, mumps, and pertussis (whooping cough). The clustering means almost 10 percent of elementary schools statewide may already be at risk.
Steven Heller gets the answer from designer Michael Cronan:
Jeff [Bezos, the CEO] wanted to talk about the future of reading, but in a small, not braggadocio way. We didn't want it to be 'techie' or trite, and we wanted it to be memorable, and meaningful in many ways of expression, from 'I love curling up with my Kindle to read a new book' to 'When I'm stuck in the airport or on line, I can Kindle my newspaper, favorite blogs or half a dozen books I'm reading.'" Kindle means to set alight or start to burn, to arouse or be aroused, to make or become bright. The word's roots are from the Old Norse word kyndill, meaning Candle. "I verified that it had deep roots in literature," adds Hibma. "From Voltaire: 'The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others and it becomes the property of all.'"
No other name could hold a candle to Kindle.
This is white music:
James Poulos springboards off my post on Pat Buchanan:
The culture wars are the playing out of a fateful, momentous, confusing, and difficult argument in America: an argument over what culture is. Not a culture, not the culture, but culture itself — the foundational, necessary elements and structures of social order. Go back to James Madison and you see a certainty that American social order, including our political order, requires a religious culture. Even then, that certainty wasn’t so certain that it hadn’t to be spoken. Things have only gotten more explicit and less certain since then. But one thing is clear. The anti-culture which the counterculture spawned or gave the opportunity of a lifetime used race/power as simply a weapon against the real foe of those against culture — religion/authority. And the foolish white racists of yesterday failed to realize that choosing to fight over the former meant choosing to lose the fight over the latter.
Jonah Leher explains the brain's reading pathways and applies this to e-reading:
This research suggests that the act of reading observes a gradient of fluency. Familiar sentences printed in Helvetica activate the ventral route, while difficult prose filled with jargon and fancy words and printed in an illegible font require us to use the slow dorsal route. Here's my rampant speculation (and it's pure speculation because no one has brought a Kindle into a scanner): new reading formats (such as computer screens or E-Books) might initially require a bit more dorsal processing, as our visual cortex adjusts to the image.
(One has to remember that printed books have been evolving to fit the peculiar sensory habits of the brain for hundreds of years – they're a pretty perfect cultural product.) But then, after a few years, the technology is tweaked and our brain adjusts and the new reading format is read with the same ventral fluency as words on a page.
The larger point is that most complaints about E-Books and Kindle apps boil down to a single problem: they don't feel as "effortless" or "automatic" as old-fashioned books. But here's the wonderful thing about the human brain: give it a little time and practice and it can make just about anything automatic. We excel at developing new habits. Before long, digital ink will feel just as easy as actual ink.
Jason Jones and Tim Greenberg talk about their revelatory trip last spring:
Daily Show Goes to Iran from sahar sarshar on Vimeo.
Mark Johnson reports:
56 days .?.?. 55 days .?.?. 54 days .?.?. Chelsea Caudle began signing her text messages this summer with a countdown. At 14 years old, she knew no better way to express what was coming. Day Zero was to be Oct. 7, the day Dad left for Army basic training in Fort Jackson, S.C. He was moving 950 miles from their home in Watertown, 950 miles from Mom. He was leaving, even though Mom was sick with ovarian cancer. Even though he had been at her side through two long, miserable rounds of chemotherapy. Even though she now faced the likelihood of a third. In fact, Dad was leaving because Mom was sick.
In March, he was laid off from his job as a raw materials coordinator for a plastics company called PolyOne, where he'd worked for 20 years. His severance package had provided several months' salary, but by August the paychecks were winding down. Soon the cost of his family health coverage was going to triple, then a few months after that, nearly triple again. They needed coverage so Mom could fight her cancer. Dad's solution: a four-year hitch in the Army.
(Hat tip: Zaid Jilani)
Your weekly dose of retro Internet camp (slightly NSFW):
Fareed Zakaria says China is:
Almost every country in the Western world entered the crisis ill prepared. Governments were spending too much money and running high deficits, so when they had to spend massively to stabilize the economy, deficits zoomed into the stratosphere…China entered the crisis in an entirely different position. It was running a budget surplus and had been raising interest rates to tamp down excessive growth. Its banks had been reining in consumer spending and excessive credit. So when the crisis hit, the Chinese government could adopt textbook policies to jump-start growth. It could lower interest rates, raise government spending, ease up on credit, and encourage consumers to start spending. Having been disciplined during the fat years, Beijing could now ease up during the lean ones.
More on the American and Chinese relationship in the latest Economist.
The Dish 