So go and eat lots of donuts!
To end a week that saw New York City declare war on sugar, it seems only right to offer a little nod to National Donut Day.
FYI: Today only, Dunkin’ Donuts is offering a free donut of your choice with the purchase of any drink.
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Yahoo Health “Find information on wellness, diet, fitness, weight loss, mental health, anti-aging, conditions and diseases, drugs and medications, and more on Yahoo! Health.”
Chateaubrian is a cut of beef from the center of the tenderloin, about 6 to 8 inches in length, that is usually cooked whole and then sliced into servings. The chateaubriand is the most tender part of the tenderloin. The meat is either broiled or grilled and is often served with a Bearnaise sauce. This dish was named for Francois Rene, Vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), French writer and statesman.- Provided by The World Almanac 2012
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Woman Who Couldn’t Be Intimidated by Citigroup Wins $31 Million
By Bob Ivry – May 31, 2012
Bloomberg Markets Magazine
Sherry Hunt never expected to be a senior manager at a Wall Street bank. She was a country girl, raised in rural Michigan by a dad who taught her to fish and a mom who showed her how to find wild mushrooms. She listened to Marty Robbins and Buck Owens on the radio and came to believe that God has a bigger plan, that everything happens for a reason.
She got married at 16 and didn’t go to college. After she had her first child at 17, she needed a job. A friend helped her find one in 1975, processing home loans at a small bank in Alaska. Over the next 30 years, Hunt moved up the ladder to mortgage-banking positions in Indiana, Minnesota and Missouri, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its July issue.
On her days off, when she wasn’t fishing with her husband, Jonathan, she rode her horse, Cody, in Wild West shows. She sometimes dressed up as the legendary cowgirl Annie Oakley, firing blanks from a vintage rifle to entertain an audience. She liked the mortgage business, liked that she was helping people buy houses.
In November 2004, Hunt, now 55, joined Citigroup (C) Inc. as a vice president in the mortgage unit. It looked like a great career move. The housing market was booming, and the New York- based bank, the sixth-largest lender in the U.S. at the time, was responsible for 3.5 percent of all home loans. Hunt supervised 65 mortgage underwriters at CitiMortgage Inc.’s sprawling headquarters in O’Fallon, Missouri, 45 minutes west of St. Louis.
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The 1 Percent’s Problem
Adapted from The Price of Inequality, by Joseph Stiglitz, to be published in June by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. (U.S.), and in July by Allen Lane (U.K.); © 2012 by the author.
Let’s start by laying down the baseline premise: inequality in America has been widening for decades. We’re all aware of the fact. Yes, there are some on the right who deny this reality, but serious analysts across the political spectrum take it for granted. I won’t run through all the evidence here, except to say that the gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent is vast when looked at in terms of annual income, and even vaster when looked at in terms of wealth—that is, in terms of accumulated capital and other assets. Consider the Walton family: the six heirs to the Walmart empire possess a combined wealth of some $90 billion, which is equivalent to the wealth of the entire bottom 30 percent of U.S. society. (Many at the bottom have zero or negative net worth, especially after the housing debacle.) Warren Buffett put the matter correctly when he said, “There’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years and my class has won.”
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15 Picturesque Shipwrecks Worldwide
The United Nations estimates that there are more than 3 million shipwrecks on the ocean floor. But, also, shipwrecks can be found on deserted beaches, on coral reefs in the middle of the ocean, at restricted diamond areas, uninhabited islands or other remote & uncivilized places. Therefore, this is a list dedicated to picturesque shipwrecks which are still visible on beaches around the world.1. Dimitrios Shipwreck, Greece
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Ghost ships in the desert
In the middle of the desert, you may stumble across a strange sight – a panorama of ghostly ships basking in the sun.
The ships are a relic from a bygone age, when the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan was a rich area teeming with fish and providing a bustling trade for the surrounding communities.
Then, in the space of a few years, much of the sea dried up, the fish died, and nothing was left but the rusting hulls.
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Probiotics May Be a Good Option for UTI Prevention
Recurring urinary tract infections (UTIs) are common among some women, and low-dose antibiotics are occasionally used as a preventative measure. Though effective at reducing UTI incidence, this method allows antibiotic-resistan t bacteria to proliferate in and on the body. Therefore, some women might choose to forgo antibiotics and instead opt for probiotics, harmless bacteria that help to protect the body. Though slightly less effective at preventing UTIs, a probiotic treatment of lactobacilli was found in a recent study to reduce UTI incidence and have no real influence on antibiotic resistance.
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Trees of Life: A Visual History of Evolution
Mapping 450 years of mankind’s curiosity about the living world and the relationships between organisms.
Since the dawn of recorded history, humanity has been turning to the visual realm as a sensemaking tool for the world and our place in it, mapping and visualizing everything from the body to the brain to the universe to information itself. Trees of Life: A Visual History of Evolution (public library) catalogs 230 tree-like branching diagrams, culled from 450 years of mankind’s visual curiosity about the living world and our quest to understand the complex ecosystem we share with other organisms, from bacteria to birds, microbes to mammals.
Though the use of a tree as a metaphor for understanding the relationships between organisms is often attributed to Darwin, who articulated it in his Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, the concept, most recently appropriated in mapping systems and knowledge networks, is actually much older, predating the theory of evolution itself. The collection is thus at once a visual record of the evolution of science and of its opposite — the earliest examples, dating as far back as the sixteenth century, portray the mythic order in which God created Earth, and the diagrams’ development over the centuries is as much a progression of science as it is of culture, society, and paradigm.
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Earhart’s Anti-Freckle Cream Jar Possibly Found
A small cosmetic jar offers more circumstantial evidence that the legendary aviator, Amelia Earhart, died on an uninhabited island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati.
Found broken in five pieces, the ointment pot was collected on Nikumaroro Island by researchers of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which has long been investigating the last, fateful flight taken by Earhart 75 years ago.
When reassembled, the glass fragments make up a nearly complete jar identical in shape to the ones used by Dr. C. H Berry’s Freckle Ointment. The ointment was marketed in the early 20th century as a concoction guaranteed to make freckles fade.
More HERE.
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Dog domestication may have helped humans thrive while Neandertals declined
Pat Shipman
We all know the adage that dogs are man’s best friend. And we’ve all heard heartwarming stories about dogs who save their owners—waking them during a fire or summoning help after an accident. Anyone who has ever loved a dog knows the amazing, almost inexpressible warmth of a dog’s companionship and devotion. But it just might be that dogs have done much, much more than that for humankind. They may have saved not only individuals but also our whole species, by “domesticating” us while we domesticated them.
One of the classic conundrums in paleoanthropology is why Neandertals went extinct while modern humans survived in the same habitat at the same time. (The phrase “modern humans,” in this context, refers to humans who were anatomically—if not behaviorally—indistinguishable from ourselves.) The two species overlapped in Europe and the Middle East between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago; at the end of that period, Neandertals were in steep decline and modern humans were thriving. What happened?
A stunning study that illuminates this decisive period was recently published in Science by Paul Mellars and Jennifer French of Cambridge University. They argue, based on a meta-analysis of 164 archaeological sites that date to the period when modern humans and Neandertals overlapped in the Dordogne region of southwest France, that the modern-human population grew so rapidly that it overwhelmed Neandertals with its sheer numbers.
Because not all the archaeological sites in the study contained clearly identifiable remains of modern humans or Neandertals, Mellars and French made a common assumption: that sites containing stone tools of the Mousterian tradition had been created by Neandertals, and those containing more sophisticated and generally later stone tools of the Upper Paleolithic were made by modern humans. This link between tool and toolmaker is well supported by sites that do contain hominin remains, but there is nothing inherent in a stone tool that tells you who made it—not even if you find a skeleton right next to it. Still, stone tools are one of the best available indicators of which species—modern human or Neandertal—inhabited a particular location.
Mellars and French compared the number and sizes of Neandertal and modern-human archaeological sites, as well as the density of tools and the weight per square meter of prey animals, represented by fossils, in those sites. They standardized their results for 1,000-year periods to compensate for the varying amounts of time that the different locations had been occupied. In every respect, modern humans surpassed Neandertals. In fact, the greater success of modern humans was so clear that, according to Mellars and French’s calculations, the human population increased tenfold over the 10,000-year overlap period. Modern humans thrived and Neandertals did not—even though Neandertals had lived in the European habitat for about 250,000 years before modern humans “invaded.” Why weren’t Neandertals better adapted to their environment than the newcomers?
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Confirmed: US and Israel created Stuxnet, lost control of it
The new account is unlikely to alter Iran’s view of the US, seen here in a mural on the old US embassy in Tehran
David Holt
In 2011, the US government rolled out its “International Strategy for Cyberspace,” which reminded us that “interconnected networks link nations more closely, so an attack on one nation’s networks may have impact far beyond its borders.” An in-depth report today from the New York Times confirms the truth of that statement as it finally lays bare the history and development of the Stuxnet virus—and how it accidentally escaped from the Iranian nuclear facility that was its target.
The article is adapted from journalist David Sanger’s forthcoming book, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, and it confirms that both the US and Israeli governments developed and deployed Stuxnet. The goal of the worm was to break Iranian nuclear centrifuge equipment by issuing specific commands to the industrial control hardware responsible for their spin rate. By doing so, both governments hoped to set back the Iranian research program—and the US hoped to keep Israel from launching a pre-emptive military attack.
The code was only supposed to work within Iran’s Natanz refining facility, which was air-gapped from outside networks and thus difficult to penetrate. But computers and memory cards could be carried between the public Internet and the private Natanz network, and a preliminary bit of “beacon” code was used to map out all the network connections within the plant and report them back to the NSA.
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Court Martial of Benedict Arnold Begins (This day in 1779)
When Arnold was court-martialed in 1779, it was not for the treason that would later make his name synonymous with betrayal. The charges involved fiscal irregularities and were relatively minor. Though he was largely exonerated, the trial sullied his reputation. Despite having distinguished himself in various American military campaigns—he was wounded more than once—Arnold was subsequently passed over for promotion. Embittered, he hatched what plot to aid the British in the American Revolution?
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Unmarked Aircraft at Dulles Airport – Why?
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What skills can earn a woman $5,500 an hour? Still reeling from Eliot Spitzer’s surprise bouts of discretionary spending, Allison Schrager examines the supply and demand of high-end call girls …
Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE
Among the many things we are left to consider in the wake of the Eliot Spitzer scandal, there is one I still can’t quite get over: the staggering price of a high-end call girl. What service can anyone provide to justify up to $5,500 an hour?
Although sex is a unique commodity, it must still obey market principles of supply and demand. In a post last year on Free Exchange, The Economist’s economics blog, I wrote about how the prostitution market is exceptionally sensitive to large fluctuations in wealth and expectations, and so it might be considered a lagging indicator. I mentioned that while most people consider it an extremely undesirable job, on the high end “it can be quite lucrative and requires few skills (though a fair helping of unequally distributed natural endowments).”
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Writing in the middle of the 19th century, Karl Marx predicted that the gulf between the newly rich and the miserable urban poor, made much worse by the Industrial Revolution, would continue to widen indefinitely. This ever greater disparity, he thought, would ultimately undermine capitalism. Marx turned out to be wrong. Income inequality in Britain (and, from what we can tell, elsewhere in Europe too) began to narrow after the 1860s, and inequality in wealth peaked by the time of World War I. In America, inequality in both incomes and wealth began to lessen after the 1920s. The rich continued to live far better than the poor, but over the next 50 years the gap between them narrowed substantially.
Writing in the middle of the 20th century, the American economist (and future Nobel laureate) Simon Kuznets extrapolated into the indefinite future this newer trend toward more equal incomes and living standards — at least for the advanced economies. He theorized that while the initial stages of industrialization caused inequality to increase, and would do so whenever new economies industrialized, further economic development would foster ever greater equality. Alas, Kuznets turned out to be wrong too. The gap between rich and poor has been growing for the past 30 years in most of the world’s advanced economies, and especially in the United States.
Modern economists have learned from Marx’s and Kuznets’s mistakes. Like Kuznets, they see widening or narrowing inequality as the cumulative outcome of several different influences, some pushing the rich and the poor apart and some drawing them closer together. But instead of assuming that the tug of war between those opposing forces is automatically decided by an economy’s stage of development, today’s thinking seeks to understand what makes each influence stronger or weaker. And part of the object is to search out ways for public policy to affect the balance, instead of viewing the overall outcome as predetermined.
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The Nazca Lines
Peru’s mysterious geoglyphs
I like a good murder mystery now and then, and despite the violence inherent in the genre, often find these movies and TV shows fascinating. There’s something satisfying about following clues to reach the answers to those vexing questions—how, who, and why. The first two questions can be engrossing, but the last is sometimes the most consuming. Once the means and identity of the killer are known, knowing his or her motivation is the last piece to the puzzle. If no answer to that question is forthcoming, it can be maddening.
It’s human nature to want to know how the world works—and in the case of murder mysteries, to understand how another person thinks—when it is not obvious to us. This same phenomenon is at work when looking at history; there is no way, other than the evidence left to us, to know what was in the minds of those who preceded us. We see this gap in our knowledge clearly when we try to explain the existence of certain ancient human-made structures, such as Stonehenge or the statues on Easter Island. Another example is the Nazca Lines of Peru: a mystery 2,000 years in the making.
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