So here is my gift to you – a Get Out of Jail Free card for those silly social situations. Simply print, cut out, and keep in your wallet. If you want to get really serious, then I would suggest laminating it. Whenever you are short on time, or just not feeling it, simply show the card and other people are banned from complaining. Done! You are now free to only partake of the baking, cleaning, shopping, gift-giving, that you WANT to do or that are NECESSARY to keep people clean, clothed and fed. Enjoy the freedom, and you are welcome! READ:
I recently spoke with Greenfield about her latest book, Generation Wealth, an enormous undertaking made up of Greenfield’s photography as well as short reflections on wealth and money. Generation Wealth documents the last quarter-century of America’s obsession with and desire for money and the material goods that signify status—and what happens when people lose all of it. The conversation below has been lightly edited for clarity.
Gillian B. White: This book seems perfectly timed. There’s not only an ongoing conversation about inequality, but the U.S. has a president who seems to fancy himself a populist, but has also made his name off of flaunting his wealth. What do you make of this moment?
Lauren Greenfield: I did not expect Trump to win the election, but when he did, it was kind of like the content of this work, of the 25 years, bearing out. In so many ways, Trump and his rise was the apotheosis of Generation Wealth. There were so many commonalities between him and David Siegel [one of the main subjects in Greenfield’s documentary, The Queen of Versailles, about a wealthy family before, during, and after the financial crisis], from the love for gold and the aesthetic of luxury, to the owning beauty pageants, to beautiful women in their personal life being an expression of their success, to making money in real estate. That’s more for Trump than for David Siegel, but certainly a theme in the book, the power of celebrity. But I think in terms of the populist part, there’s a quote from Fran Lebowitz that I put in the front of the book about how Americans don't resent the rich because they always imagine that will be them someday. I think that is part of the admiration for Trump. Unlike some other cultures that resent the rich or resent the upper class, Americans admire wealth. READ
The Queen of Versailles is a character-driven documentary about a billionaire family and their financial challenges in the wake of the economic crisis. With epic proportions of Shakespearean tragedy, the film follows two unique characters, whose rags-to-riches success stories reveal the innate virtues and flaws of the American Dream. The film begins with the family triumphantly constructing the largest privately-owned house in America, a 90,000 sq. ft. palace. Over the next two years, their sprawling empire, fueled by the real estate bubble and cheap money, falters due to the economic crisis. Major changes in lifestyle and character ensue within the cross-cultural household of family members and domestic staff. VIA
We could have told him that wouldn't work–> Last week, a Minnesota man was pulled over and then arrested for outstanding warrants. But before police could slap the handcuffs on him, he pulled out a "get out of jail free" card from a Monopoly game and tried to use it to get off the hook. According to a local NBC affiliate, the cop gave him an A for effort but hauled him in nonetheless.
BOOM is kinda ditching directions in our next few posts - we can poke fun at the wealth gap, greed, sexism and classism all around us...Don't worry, it will be fun... BOOOM
A manned research submersible takes a rock sample from the seafloor near Brazil. Video still courtesy CPRM
A lost continent off the coast of Brazil may have been found, scientists had announced in 2013.
Granite boulders dredged from the seafloor off the coast of South America two years ago could be remnants of a long-vanished continent, according to Roberto Ventura Santos, the geology director of Brazil's Geology Service.
"This could be the Brazilian Atlantis," Santos told reporters, adding that he was speaking metaphorically and not claiming to have found the legendary sunken world. "Obviously, we don't expect to find a lost city in the middle of the Atlantic," he said.
Santos and his team speculated that the granite—a relatively low-density rock found in continental crust—belonged to a continent that was submerged when Africa and South America drifted apart and formed the Atlantic Ocean about 100 million years ago.
But Michael Wysession, an Earth and planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, noted that granite can find its way onto the seafloor through other means. "There are pieces of granite in the middle of the seafloor that date to about 800 million years ago when we had a snowball Earth scenario and there were large pieces of rock embedded in ice rafts"—mobile glaciers, essentially—"all over the ocean," explained Wysession, who was not part of the discovery. "As those ice rafts were melting, large blocks of rock dropped down all over the seafloor."
Wysession thinks that because the ocean floor has been extensively mapped with satellites, it is unlikely that evidence for any major lost continent will be found. "There's nothing that big that's hidden down there," he said.
The Atlantis-like lost, hidden, or fantastic world is a common theme in fiction. There are J. R. R. Tolkein's Middle Earth and James Hilton's Shangri-La, not to mention Lewis Carroll's Wonderland. The original lost land, Atlantis, was first mentioned by Plato around 360 B.C. According to Plato, Atlantis sank into the earth and drowned beneath the seas. Real continents rarely disappear in such dramatic fashion. "Continents by definition are made of low-density rock and cannot be subducted deep into the earth," explained Staci Loewy, a geologist at the University of Texas at Austin.
Nonetheless, there are real "lost lands" like the Brazilian "Atlantis" that have disappeared from view because of rising seas or the geological upheavals of plate tectonics and erosion. "Parts of continents can be worn down by erosion, and fragments can be broken off and isolated as microcontinents when larger continents break apart," Loewy said.
Here are some actual "lost lands" discovered by science.
Pangaea
A supercontinent believed to have formed around 300 million years ago, Pangaea was an enormous landmass that later broke up to eventually form the continents we know today.
Scientists now think several other supercontinents—such as Kenorland, Columbia, and Rodinia—existed before Pangaea, but the shapes of these ancient land masses are unclear.
Rodinia, for example, was a supercontinent thought to have been formed about one billion years ago; it's believed that it subsequently broke apart to form Pangaea.
"Those pieces are now part of the modern continents, but they have been significantly altered by one billion years of plate tectonics and erosion such that reconstructing the supercontinent of Rodinia is very difficult," explained Loewy.
While they appear stationary, Earth's landmasses shift around over geologic time, carried across the planet's surface by the slow, grinding movement of enormous, shell-like plates.
"The surface of the earth is made up of a rigid layer called the lithosphere; the lithosphere is broken into numerous pieces referred to as tectonic plates," Loewy explained.
"These plates move around the surface of the Earth, colliding into each other, creating mountains such as the Himalaya and Andes; pulling apart from each other, creating volcanic ridges in the middle of oceans like the mid-Atlantic Ridge; and sliding past each other, such as in the San Andreas Fault in California."
Mauritia
Scientists earlier this year announced that they had found evidence of a drowned "microcontinent" off the coast of Africa, near the island of Mauritius.
Sand grains from Mauritius's beaches were found to contain fragments of the mineral zircon that were between 660 and 2 billion years old—far older than the island itself.
One theory is that the sand grains are remnants of Mauritia, a lost microcontinent that once existed off the coast of Africa and which was submerged when India broke apart from Madagascar about 85 million years ago.
Microcontinents are shards of land broken off from continents and supercontinents. The distinctions among the three aren't clear-cut, however, and labeling a landmass a continent or microcontinent can be arbitrary since there are no precise size requirements for each term.
New Zealand, for example, is actually part of a large continental structure that includes the Campbell Plateau. "It's not all that different in size from Australia, but because most of it is underwater, we call Australia a continent and New Zealand an island," Wysession said.
Microcontinents can also merge into larger structures. For example, "the north African edge of the supercontinent Gondwana broke up into slices like the pieces of an apple, and each of those [microcontinents] moved north to form southern Europe," explained Louis Jacobs, a paleontologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
Beringia
Though Asia and North America are now separated by a thin strait, it is very shallow—about 150 feet (46 meters) deep—and when sea levels are low, such as during ice ages, the two continents are connected by a land bridge known as Beringia.
According to a controversial theory, humans heading east after leaving Asia some 40,000 years ago found their way blocked by glaciers and were forced to settle in Beringia for thousands of years until conditions thawed enough for them to continue to North America.
Less contentious is the theory "that the Clovis people came over from Siberia to North America about 14,000 years ago," Wysession said.
Scotland's Hidden Landscape
In 2011, geologists studying ocean-mapping data stumbled upon a previously unknown landscape now buried beneath more than a mile of marine sediment off the coast of Scotland.
The hidden landscape, which had an estimated area of about 3,861 square miles (10,000 square kilometers), had furrows cut by rivers and peaks that were once part of mountains.
Scientists think it was briefly elevated above the waves by geological processes about 55 million years ago but became submerged again after about 2.5 million years.
“A lot of the time, if someone says they hear voices, you immediately jump to psychotic illness, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia,” [the Yale psychologist Philip] Corlett said. But research suggests hearing voices is not all that uncommon. A survey from 1991—the largest of its kind since—found that 10 to 15 percent of people in the U.S. experienced sensory hallucinations of some sort within their lifetime. And other research, as well as growing advocacy movements, suggest hearing voices isn’t always a sign of psychological distress.
The researchers at Yale were looking for a group of people who hear voices at least once a day, and had never before interacted with the mental-health-care system. They wanted to understand, as Corlett put it, those who do not suffer when “the mind deviates from consensual reality.”
From its first moments, In Transit — the late documentarian Albert Maysles’s final film, completed with help from Lynn True, Nelson Walker III, David Usui, and Benjamin Wu and released after he died in March 2015 — is fixated on and shaped by lives in transition. Amtrak’s Empire Builder train regularly embarks on three-day jaunts between Chicago and points in the Pacific Northwest, and the film joins passengers on one of these journeys. While a bit of a ticking clock element is introduced with a young, pregnant passenger days away from her due date, no plot contrivances drive the narrative aside from the locomotive reaching its final destination. (showing in theatres in June 2017)
Alex's apartment was located in the South Side neighborhood of Pittsburgh.
Alex is seen riding one of the Duquesne Incline cable cars when she goes to visit Hannah.
Hannah's apartment is located at 2100 Sidney Street at the southeast corner of South 21st Street. The entrance to the apartment is from South 21st Street.
The opening sequence of scenes with Alex riding her bicycle starts on Warren Street at its intersection with Catoma Street. She rides south on Warren Street to Henderson Street, makes a hairpin turn from Henderson Street onto Fountain Street, and is next shown riding south on Middle Street. The last scene of the sequence shows Alex riding east over the Smithfield Street Bridge, which is a continuity error.
Another theory–that Atlantis was actually a much more temperate version of what is now Antarctica–is based on the work of Charles Hapgood, whose 1958 book “Earth’s Shifting Crust” featured a foreword by Albert Einstein. According to Hapgood, around 12,000 years ago the Earth’s crust shifted, displacing the continent that became Antarctica from a location much further north than it is today. This more temperate continent was home to an advanced civilization, but the sudden shift to its current frigid location doomed the civilization’s inhabitants–the Atlanteans–and their magnificent city was buried under layers of ice. Hapgood’s theory surfaced before the scientific world gained a full understanding of plate tectonics, which largely relegated his “shifting crust” idea to the fringes of Atlantean beliefs.
Pangea Proof?
Some proof that Pangea, the Supercontinent, did exist is that scientists found fossils of the same animals and plants in South America, Africa, Antarctica, India and Australia. If the continents hadn't been joined together at some point then we wouldn't find fossils of the same species in continents that are so far away from each other because the animals wouldn't be able to get across the other side of the world. Also, the same types of rocks were found in South America and Africa. These rocks were found to have formed around the same time period.
As you can see, there does not appear to be any space in the mid-Atlantic where a continent like Atlantis could have existed. But perhaps a modest size island in the Caribbean could be squeezed into this map.
Newspaper account:
"Located traces of enormous sheets of ancient lava as much as 20 miles thick that spewed from undersea volcanoes. One such deposit covered almost four million square miles on the bottom of the Atlantic, stretching from eastern Canada to Spain and Africa's Ivory Coast." "For instance, an expedition a year ago in the tropical Atlantic turned up evidence, buried in seafloor sediment, of repeated episodes of rapid global warming that led to massive plant and animal extinction in the distant past."
Both these could have something to do with Atlantis. Depending on how long it took for the lava to accumulate, Atlantis could be beneath the lava. "Repeated episodes of global warming that led to mass plant and animal extinction..." discussion here
A very unique monument is being unveiled in Ireland, according to reporter Naomi O’Leary: “Sculpture to be unveiled in Cork to remember generosity of the Choctaw Nation, Native American tribe that sent famine aid to Ireland in 1847.” It’s by artist Alex Pentek. (via Twitter/NaomiOhReally)
When I was 23, I moved from Washington state to New York City to get into show business. My college classmate BJ's mom was an agent for actors and singers. I wrote Shirley and asked if could live with them in Queens until I got settled and employed as an actress-model-singer. She said, "Yes!"
For fast money I was employed by Model's Service and modeled shoes, sweaters and jeans. Back then earning $100 a day was like a million bucks... well to me anyway. (And I was able to buy clothes at a greatly reduced price.)
Soon I was working at the Kona Tiki as a hostess (in the Sheraton Hotel, 163 W. 52nd St) when I met singer-actor-model Daniel Drake who was also a healer-reflexologist. Dan explained about mystics like Edgar Cayce and over time he took me to some of the best bookstores in Manhattan. I read every single book about Edgar Cayce over the years.
At the Kona Tiki, I worked for Cynthia Kipness who was daughter of Broadway producer Joe Kipness who had his own restaurant Old Joe's Pier 52 across the street. My agent Shirley kept me busy working for her, delivering contracts, driving her around, auditioning and singing. Cynthia was Shirley's friend. That's how I got the very cool job and met some very high-powered people.
All this changed me. New York City has it's own power. I was lucky to get an agent but in the process I had make-believe friends who wanted Shirley to be their agent, too. It was like a war was going on between actors. Not nice. I celebrated my 24th birthday with Dan. By late November, I was on the Greyhound back to the midwest. Let's just say, I met bad people, too.
BUT WAIT! My mind was opened. That is a good age to start questioning what you know, or think you know.
Theory, ideas, spirituality, etc. are just that: theory.
In the next few posts I plan to share theory about Pangea, Atlantis and more. We have to question more. New York did that for me. Maybe these posts will open your mind too.
Privacy Mythbusting #3:Anonymized data is safe, right? (Er, no.)
Companies often tell you that sharing your data is safe because they "anonymize" it by first removing or obfuscating your personal information. However, this depersonalization leads to only partial anonymity, as companies still usually store and share your data grouped together. This data group can be analyzed, and in many cases, then linked back to you, individually, based on its contents.
Deanonymizing data has been studied for a long time. In 1990, Carnegie Mellon University researcher Latanya Sweeny showed that with just a list of gender, date of birth, and five digit zip code, you can uniquely identify, thereby deanonymizing, 87% of Americans!
Data deanonymization of this nature has taken place time and time again when companies release so-called "anonymized data," even with really good intentions such as for research purposes. For example, even though every effort was taken to anonymize data, people were still deanonymized through Netflix recommendations and AOL search histories.
Now imagine what happens when companies don't even make that effort when sharing your anonymized data. It's like trying to win a game of hide-and-seek like this:
Fig 1: Hide and Seek Champions
The only truly anonymized data is no data. That's why at DuckDuckGo we throw out your personal information every time you search, making sure we don't store anything that could be tied together to identify you. We protect your search history from everyone — even us!
In the December 1994 issue, for instance, Atwood described being “Bored” not so much as a mental state as a series of mundane physical tasks, sensations, and observations:
BORED
By Margaret Atwood
All those times I was bored out of my mind. Holding the log while he sawed it. Holding the string while he measured, boards, distances between things, or pounded stakes into the ground for rows and rows of lettuces and beets, which I then (bored) weeded. Or sat in the back of the car, or sat still in boats, sat, sat, while at the prow, stern, wheel he drove, steered, paddled. It wasn't even boredom, it was looking, looking hard and up close at the small details. Myopia. The worn gunwales, the intricate twill of the seat cover. The acid crumbs of loam, the granular pink rock, its igneous veins, the sea-fans of dry moss, the blackish and then the graying bristles on the back of his neck. Sometimes he would whistle, sometimes I would. The boring rhythm of doing things over and over, carrying the wood, drying the dishes. Such minutiae. It's what the animals spend most of their time at, ferrying the sand, grain by grain, from their tunnels, shuffling the leaves in their burrows. He pointed such things out, and I would look at the whorled texture of his square finger, earth under the nail. Why do I remember it as sunnier all the time then, although it more often rained, and more birdsong? I could hardly wait to get the hell out of there to anywhere else. Perhaps though boredom is happier. It is for dogs or groundhogs. Now I wouldn't be bored. Now I would know too much. Now I would know.
Margaret Atwood is the author of numerous books, including The Robber Bride(1993). Her volume of new poems, Morning in the Burned House, will be published next year.
Paul Hoffman, a geologist at Harvard University who has studied the snowball Earth period, says this work won’t be the last word on how the planet responds to dramatic climate change. “That such a basic issue should not have been simulated in a model until now, even in a preliminary way, illustrates how much is still to be learned about the snowball Earth phenomena,” he says.
This year, the June solstice falls on two different days: Wednesday, the 21st, for those in Eastern Standard Time, and Tuesday, the 20th, for time zones further west! Enjoy seven cool (or, is it hot?) solstice facts—and see how many you know!
Aimee Mann is a Grammy- and Oscar-nominated singer-songwriter. In the 80s, she fronted the band ‘Til Tuesday, and in 1993, she released her first solo album. In 2017, Aimee released her 9th album, Mental Illness, and in this episode, she tells the story of how the song “Patient Zero” was made. I talked to Aimee along with the song’s co-writer, Jonathan Coulton. The interview was recorded in front of a live audience, on board the JoCo Cruise, a music and comedy themed cruise organized by Jonathan Coulton. VIA
Adding to a recent string of discoveries that are rewriting the narrative of human evolution, fossils of a number of ancient human individuals that were unearthed in Morocco have been dated to more than 300,000 years ago. this find pushes evidence for the age of Homo sapiens back by roughly 100,000 years, and also shows that our ancient ancestors were much better traveled than previously assumed.
The fossils in question were excavated from the Jebel Irhoud cave, located 62 miles west of modern-day Marrakesh, and included the remains of five individuals, along with flint tools and the remains of their campfires. The skulls of the individuals bore faces that were unmistakably that of modern humans; although despite having a brain of similar size to other H. sapiens, the cranium was somewhat flattened and elongated towards the rear, unlike the more spherical braincase we see today.
The researchers were surprised to find that the group's tools dated to between 280,00 to 350,000 years ago -- roughly one-third older than modern humans were assumed to be. The previously oldest known remains were 200,000 years old, and found in Ethiopia, prompting the scientific community to assume that the area they were found in was the origin of humanity. But aside from being separated by 1,000 centuries, the remains found in Morocco and Ethiopia are on opposite sides of the African continent: with the far older remains being found 5,600 kilometers (3,500 miles) away from the previously-assumed eldest fossils, this raises the question of where modern humans actually originated from.
"What people, including myself, used to think was that there was a cradle of humankind in East Africa about 200,000 years ago, and all modern humans descend from that population," explains Philipp Gunz, with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. "The new finds indicate that Homo sapiens is much older and had already spread across all of Africa by 300,000 years ago. They really show that the African story of our species was more complex than what we used to think."
All humans–including orphans–should have a right to know and have access to our first family and to ancestral roots. The demand-driven adoption market ignores childrens’ rights. Visit the website: http://www.adoptioncoalitionworldwide.com
I’ve hoped for another glimpse inside the minds of New York Times obituary writers. So when I heard about Vanessa Gould’s latest documentary, Obit, I rushed to see it. The film, one of the most endearing—and, perhaps surprisingly, uplifting—I’ve seen in awhile, follows the paper’s necrology department as they piece together the lives of the recently deceased: everyone from William P. Wilson, who not only negotiated the terms for the 1960 presidential debate but who also applied the makeup that gave Kennedy his “unflappably cool” look onscreen; to Betty James, the woman who thought up the name for her husband’s new toy—Slinky. The sweetest parts of the film, though, are the interviews with the writers themselves—Bruce Weber, William Grimes, and Fox, among others—all of whom take seriously the task of celebrating their subjects, breathing life and humor into their work. As Fox tells us, “Obits have next to nothing to do with death and absolutely everything to do with life.” The same is true of Gould’s remarkable film. —Caitlin Youngquist via
