Links 7/13/13

Decapitated worms can regenerate their brains, and the memories stored inside ExtremeTech (Carol B)

The growing culture of living furniture Financial Times. I am pretty sure not to include worms.

Finally! A Human-Powered Helicopter Wins the $250,000 Sikorsky Prize Popular Mechanics (Lambert)

DNA analysis suggests Lake Vostok harbors animal life ars technica (Carol B)

Google Reader has expired, but your data lives until July 15 CNET. I am still mourning. The only one that has a good search function, RSS Owl, quit updating about half my feeds on July 1 and the only fix if I’ve found is deleting and re-adding them, which I’m not about to do (way too many). Digg looked promising but they seem to have stopped adding features and not alphabetizing feeds within a folder is retarded (you used to be able to reorder them manually, which I had started doing, reluctantly, but now it won’t let me change the utterly arbitrary order they are in).

Fukushima Spiking All of a Sudden OpEd News (furzy mouse)

Another entrant into currency wars? China halts the yuan appreciation Sober Look

Brazil protests: Tens of thousands in union-led strikes BBC

In Brazil, Killings by Police Become Routine Wall Street Journal

Egypt’s unravelling threatens democracy Financial Times

After the Shooting In Cairo New Yorker

Signature Targeting Comes Home to Roost CounterPunch (Chuck L)

Big Brother is Watching You Watch:

Edward Snowden accuses US of illegal, aggressive campaign Guardian

Luxembourg government resigns following spy scandal IntelNews (downhill)

MIT Project Reveals What PRISM Knows About You TechWeek Europe

Snowden revelations stir up anti-US sentiment Financial Times. See final para. US still convinced it will blow over.

Democracy and Empire CounterPunch (Carol B)

Obamacare Gets Easier to Implement All the Time . . . As Long as You Don’t Care About Losing Major Functions Megan McArdle

The Savvy Tech Strategy Behind Obamacare Slashdot. Big Lie alert!. Yet again, Obama shows that he thinks the solution to any problem is better PR.

Life Expectancy in Some U.S. Counties Is No Better Than in the Third World National Journal (Carol B)

Affidavit: Man using rifle as crutch when it fired Associated Press

Milwaukee: Pair of men with concealed-carry permits engage in shootout TwinCities (Chuck L)

Mitch McConnell’s 30-Year Senate Legacy Leaves Kentucky In The Lurch Huffington Post

Protests Sparked in Detroit Over the Dumping of Black History Books Atlantic (furzy mouse)

New York’s Spitzer, once a target, makes appearance on late-night comedy Reuters

JPMorgan Chase Faces Questions on Potential New Capital Rules New York Times

ART CASHIN: This Week’s Fed Governor Resignation May Be A Much Bigger Deal Than You Think Clusterstock

Gender Gaps Appear as Employment Recovers From the Recession Floyd Norris

BofA Says Ex-Workers Made Impossible Loan-Program Claims Bloomberg. You have to read this. This is the spin but this is the real message: “Who do you believe, guys who made $15 an hour or hundreds of thousands a year?” The idea that the workers misrepresented or somehow misunderstood large scale efforts to discard documents is pathetic. And many if not all of the workers would have had access to the servicing notes for specific borrowers, so they’d actually know BETTER than management how specific cases had been handled.

Antidote du jour (Amolife):

beautiful-birds-14

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42 comments

    1. Inverness

      Bravo. Of course, how many just go straight to stage 5, without any reflection whatsoever? Or, “gee, I don’t use any trigger phrases, like ‘Allah Akbar’ anyway.”

  1. Susan the other

    Fukushima Spiking. OEN. The NOAA map of the Pacific radiation contamination is mindboggling. And the admissions from TEPCO and Japan’s NRA are just f’cking stupifying. TEPCO is pure incompetence and their NRA is its enabler. They are building a deep containment barrier to keep the radiation from leaking into the Pacific? Should be working by 2015? Why didn’t they just do what was done at Chernobyl? Dump massive amounts of cement on the melt down first. That would have contained some of the radiation immediately. Now what they have finally admitted is that their water samples contain almost one million times as much radiation (various particles) as is considered safe, above “acceptable” levels. Clearly this isn’t Japan’s drinking water – it’s the water being flushed out into the ocean intentionally. Some brave swat team needs to assassinate every executive at TEPCO.

    1. neo-realist

      I read a report somewhere that radiation has already leaked into the pacific so we here in the west coast states will soon, if not already, be beneficiaries of cancer and shortened life spans.

      1. JEHR

        I sometimes think that the world will end either with radiation poisoning the oceans and everything in them and on the land or climate change will make large areas of the land uninhabitable due to drought or too much rainfall. Take your pick!

        1. F. Beard

          The world’s gonna end one day anyway – to be replaced with a better one. What? You like dust, heat and humidity? I can do without such as that.

    2. Gordon

      The map in the Fukushima post is NOT a map of radiation. It’s the map posted after the Tohoku earthquake showing the propagation of the tsunami. Look at the legend. The units are in centimeters, meaning the height of the propagated wave. I don’t know how this ended up on NC. Yves is usually more careful.

      1. susan the other

        It doesn’t look like the big expanding wave of a tsunami. It does look like ocean currents carrying radiation particles. And anyway, the measurements are the mind numbing part. It is a massive, ongoing leak.

  2. charger01

    Milwaukee: Pair of men link is utterly depressing. Those idiots broke several Federal and state laws (discharging a firearm in a populated area, shooting across an interstate highway, etc.) if I understood the article, it sounds like they won’t serve jail time.

    1. Goyo Marquez

      It seems from the story that one of the shooters was trying to play the “stand your ground” game while he chased the other guy down trying to shoot him.

    2. Paul P

      These guys should have a duel.
      Duels are legal under a commonsense understanding of
      stand your ground.

      My poor species: will you not give me any hope.

  3. mk

    “Obamacare Gets Easier to Implement All the Time . . . As Long as You Don’t Care About Losing Major Functions Megan McArdle”
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ really? megan mcardle? is this a joke link? i really want to know because i can’t make myself click through

  4. rjs

    i cant say i’ve found a reasonable alternative to google reader either; believe it or not, i’m now using 4 readers simultaneously, 2 newly built & 2 with GR data downloaded, to perform the same functions…

    time stamps on net vibes are interesting though; midweek bill mcbride reported on the afternoon Fed minutes release at 8 AM…

  5. Max

    On the Reader front, I’ve given up on the upstarts, and started hosting my own tt-rss instance. Uses typical web components found on most hosts (php, mysql/postgres, apache), and I found the learning curve to be almost zero coming from Reader.

    All of this, with the added bonus of no one tracking my reading behaviour, since I’m self hosted.

    1. marianne jones

      theoldreader.com has a “Like” button, instead of starring, you could “like”?

  6. My-iPad-is-it-spying-on-me?

    Hey Yves, have u tried Mozilla thunderbird? Yes, it has a search function. I’m happy enough with it.

  7. marianne jones

    Have you tried http://theoldreader.com as a Google Reader replacement? I was a die hard GReader user, over 100 feeds total articles read before I stopped using it was +300k articles.

    It’s been an adequate replacement.

    I’m able to drag drop and resort feeds, tagged groupings, and there is a search function. I’m not sure the search would meet your needs, but I wasn’t really happy with GReader’s search feature to begin with?

  8. Antifa

    What’s happening at Fukushima? It’s bloody well falling apart, mate, that’s what. Piece after piece. Humpty Dumpty’s “had a great fall’ — that’s where things stand. You know the poesy from there.

    What’s TEPCO willing and capable of doing about it? Taking a proactive attitude of waiting for things to get better. Also known as puttin’ a hose on it for about ten thousand years. That oughta fix ‘er.

    There are things in this world that just do not get better. Ever. Ever. Hence the old adage, “If ever you find yourself swallowed by a crocodile, best make yourself comfortable. It’s gonna be a while.”

  9. diane

    Sadly, … missing ….. from the links today, the nasty bitch who presided (for just one major issue) over the disgusting TSA violations, Janet Napolitano, is now president of the University Of California $y$TEM (which not only has implications for the US, but for the world at large, as California is the West Coast District of Columbia (DC)). So much for libewal, pwogwessive, SCIENTIFIC! California …which so many assholes who have never lived in Ayn Randian California, bow down to, without a moment’s thought.

    Oh wait, she’s a Lesbian, and as we all know ….Lesbians and Gay Males …can never be wrong. Talk about Trojan Horses ….can we say Peter Thiel? etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

    1. ambrit

      Dear diane;
      Rather, Janet would be a Trojan Mare? You know, the one with the pregnant load of Greeks.

      1. diane

        As far as I know, ambrit, the word “horse” encompasses both biological genders – versus: Mare, Stallion, and Gelding -and that was my intent.

        And, well I just have to say, it’s rather ugly (and truly telling) how little highlighting Janet Napolitano’s new position -stunningly powerful, from the head of Homeland Security to the head of one the most powerful, Educational $yStem$ in the World …despite absolutely no teaching qualifications (in a far better world) -.. has received (even when others, who have the ability to highlight it (witness the absence even on today’s “Links” ?????????), are put on notice that it has transpired).

        ‘Siiigh’ UUUUUGHHHHHHHHHHHH….. ;0( ….

        1. ambrit

          Diane;
          I hadn’t heard that! Ugggh is right!
          You’re right about the gender neutral status of ‘horse.’ I was reaching for a cross allusion to Night Mare, which is an allusion to the maere, which often rode horses through the night and bought on evil dreams in people. Janet certainly qualifies on all counts.
          “Hiyo gold standard, and away!”

  10. gordon

    RE: Eliot Spitzer –

    If so-called “respectable” gents never went to prostitutes, there would be damn few prostitutes.

    1. F. Beard

      What’s with our hyper-Puritanical society since it is supposedly “post-Christian” anyway?

  11. ambrit

    Re. the antidote; Budgies!
    My middle sister used to breed and raise Finches and Budgerigars. It started when Casey, our dumb as a brick Border Collie brought a live Budgie inside and dropped the stunned bird at my moms feet. “Hey there!” he sat down and looked up at my mom. She was cooking something in the kitchen, and turned around to see what was up. “Oh, how sweet,” she called out to us in the living room. “Caseys bought me a present! Someone come in here and pick it up before it flies off!” Thus started my sisters career in birds. The next year the dog caught and brought my mom a pure white Budgie. I’m not sure how the Finches ended up in the mix. Our front yard in Miami seemed to be a transit camp for exotic birds though. Saw a lot of interesting varieties over the years. Every time I’m in a pet store, I wander over to the Budgie cages and “talk” to them. They usually start “talking” back once the shock of an articulate hominid wears off.

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