Month: September 2011

Heather Kovich describes her experience as an examiner of Social Security disability applicants:

In the 1950s it was estimated that 250,000 people would be eligible initially for the new disability benefit. By December 1974, nearly 4 million adults were receiving disability payments, and by December 2005 the number had grown to 7.1 million. This increase in people who are considered too disabled to work has far outpaced the growth of the population, and it’s happened in the context of astounding advances in medicine, which have made formerly debilitating illnesses treatable. Although the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 attempted to make the workplace more hospitable for those with disabilities, it did not lead to increased employment for the disabled, nor a decline in disability applications.

Linguistically:

The No. 1 danger is pretentiousness; we all know, and roll our eyes at, chaps who say "chap" and talk of their time "at university." There is a poll at the end of each entry on my blog, asking readers to vote on whether the expression at hand is Perfectly Fine, Borderline or Over the Top. They generally seem to feel (and I agree) that the over the toppest are the Britishisms that have an exact U.S. equivalent: advert, called, bespoke, presenter, chat show, queue, whilst, and full stop, for instance. There exists in our country a perfectly good word for the smaller dish that is consumed before the main dish, and it's appetizer. Starters are for people who wear hunting jackets with Turnbull & Asser ascots, which really isn't appropriate dress at Famous Dave's.

Adrian Fisk has photographed young people across China and India for his project iSpeak:

It is the young Chinese who will inherit this new found global influence, but who are they and what do they think about life? I traveled on a 12,500 km journey through China to find an answer to this question. I looked for young Chinese from 16-30 years, gave them a piece of paper, and simply told them they could write whatever they wanted to on the piece of paper. I then photographed them holding the paper.

Above is Luo Zheng Chui, a 30-year-old farmer from Yunnan, whose sign reads:

After watching television I have many ideas, but am unable to realize them.

John Crowley looks backwards in search of it:

My wife recently said to me, The past is the new future. She is given to remarks of that kind, full of vatic force yet requiring mental application on my part to make them useful. The sense I make of it is that instead of growing clearer as we probe it, the future has grown dimmer, less solid, almost hard to believe in, but the past has continued to expand rather than shrink with distance: the actual things we did do have gained rather than lost complexity and interest, and the past seems rich, its lessons not simple or singular, a big landscape of human possibility, generative, inexhaustible.

After piecing together 600 images of astronaut photography of Earth, James Drake captions:

A time-lapse taken from the front of the International Space Station as it orbits our planet at night. This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the Amazon. Also visible is the Earth’s ionosphere (thin yellow line) and the stars of our galaxy.

(Hat tip: Open Culture)

If Bachmann really wanted to honor the Founding Fathers, she'd embrace vaccination:

If it hadn’t been for mandatory smallpox inoculation, the Republic might never have survived. General George Washington ordered the Continental Army inoculated against smallpox in 1777, the first large scale inoculation of an army in history. … Among his many achievements, which included writing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson was a pioneer of smallpox prevention. He was a proponent of smallpox inoculation. As a young lawyer he acted on behalf of doctors who were persecuted for performing inoculations, including one physician whose house was burned to the ground by a mob during an anti-inoculation riot.

Robin Hanson takes issue with our remembrance of 9/11:

In the decade since 9/11 over half a billion people have died worldwide. A great many choices could have delayed such deaths, including personal choices to smoke less or exercise more, and collective choices like allowing more immigration. And cryonics might have saved most of them. Yet, to show solidarity with these three thousand victims, we have pissed away three trillion dollars ($1 billion per victim), and trashed long-standing legal principles.

Ari Schulman complicates Hanson's point:

He implies that all deaths are equally tragic — so there is no difference, apparently, between a peaceful death and a violent one, or between a death in old age and one greatly premature. … . While he may think he is making a trenchantly pro-humanist case for how insensitive and outrageous it is that we focus our emotions on some deaths much more than others, one wonders whether dulling our sensitivity to the deaths of the few can really be the best way to make us care about the deaths of the many. If we cannot feel outrage at what is shocking, can we still be moved by what is commonplace? 

Christopher Jobson explains:

Since 2008 balloon artist Addi Somekh and photographer Charlie Eckert have traveled to 34 countries and shot over 10,000 photographs of people wearing balloon hats. After focusing more on balloon twisting than homework in college Somekh began working professionally as a balloon artist, charging wealthy executives up to $150 an hour to make elaborate balloon hats. He also donated the same skill to shelters for battered women and their children where he realized something: both groups, the rich and the poor, were laughing and enjoying his work in the same way.

(Video: universality from retainer media on Vimeo.)

A new experiment tested people's ability to choose the best car. When presented with a limited number of variables, people in a "detail-focus" group easily selected the best option. But when presented with a much more complex set of information, those tasked with going with their instinct, or the "feeling-focus" group, chose the right car at a much higher rate. Jonah Lehrer's conclusion:

For too long, we’ve disparaged our inarticulate instincts/hunches/emotions/intuitions as irrational and irresponsible, a vestigial legacy of our animal past. Thanks to this new research, however, it’s becoming increasingly clear that our emotions have a logic all their own, that our instincts are often rooted in the processing powers of the unconscious brain.