Month: November 2007

CD Baby: let’s find you some great new music…

CD Baby: let’s find you some great new music…
This site is part of the new music model that has shaken the music business. It’s not just the downloads over the internet, it is getting your music heard through your friends on MySpace. They tell their friends and the buzz spreads from the grassroots. They can buy your music through this site. You don’t need the majors and radio play to heard these days. You don’t have to just depend on CD sales at your concerts anymore with CD Baby. Thanks to Caroline for pointing this out.

Keeping Up with the Jonses

Success Depends on Others Failing – TIME
The study, by cognition experts and economists at the University of Bonn in Germany, looks at the brain regions that process reward. Nineteen pairs of subjects performed a series of tasks, estimating the number of dots on a screen, while their brains were scanned. Each time a subject answered correctly, he or she won a cash prize but the prizes were not always the same. Players could see whether their opponents had answered correctly, and how the prize money was distributed.

The researchers were especially interested in the set of outcomes where both players answered correctly. For any given prize value, the brain’s reward response was bigger if the other player earned less. Players on average were more pleased with a 60 euro prize when the other player got just 30 euros, for example, than they were if both players earned 60 euros, or if the other player got more.

Doom & Gloom Economic View

FT.com / Home UK / UK – Draining away
Bill Gross, chief investment officer of Pimco, the world’s largest bond fund, has in recent years become famous for issuing downbeat warnings about the credit world. This month, however, his tone has turned positively apocalyptic.

“We haven’t faced a downturn like this since the Depression,” he observed to reporters when talking about the US housing sector and its impact. The debt market’s “effect on consumption, its effect on future lending attitudes, could bring [America] close to the zero line in terms of economic growth”, he said. “It does keep me up at night.”

By Wall Street standards, such sentiments still sound extreme: in public, at least, most financiers are still anxious to avoid any comparisons with the terrible 1930s. Nevertheless, behind the scenes a mood of gloom is spreading across Wall Street and other parts of the financial world. Thanks to Richard Collier for this doom & gloom article

Why 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Linger

 Tinfoil Nation: Why 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Linger
A majority of Americans say it is “likely” that their government knew about the September 11 attacks in advance and ignored the warning, a recent poll revealed: more evidence that what were once considered loony fringe theories have penetrated the U.S. mainstream. Richard Miniter examines the roots of the claims and debunks them.

Why does this conspiracy theory linger? Historian Joseph E. Persico argues that it is simply human nature. Persico is an acknowledged expert on the last surprise attack on the American homeland, the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor. He notes that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had some inkling of Japan’s dark designs before the December 7, 1941 attack. Relations between Washington and Tokyo had been souring for years and the U.S. was opposed to Japan’s bloody invasion and occupation of eastern China. So FDR knew that Japan might attack at some point. But there was no intelligence suggesting that Japan would attack at Pearl Harbor or when it would attack or how. Still FDR’s critics and many others continue to suspect that he knew all along and that he allowed Pearl Harbor to happen as a “backdoor to war.”

“Why do conspiracy theories keep sprouting?” Persico asks. “Neat, suspenseful plots create high drama, while the truth is often messy, contradictory, even dull.”

Unfortunately, the same is true today. Bush’s critics are as misguided as FDR’s.

Fans as LCD

South Korea: boys cheering for their soccer teams. the most amazing thing is that they do this with their CLOTHES (not holding up cards). they have a jacket that is one color on the back, one on the front, and that they can open or close to show a third color shirt on the inside. One school has also figured out how to use their pants to make shading

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.442024&w=425&h=350&fv=autostart%3Dfalse%26token%3D453_1191345802]

Obama to End the Culture Wars?

Goodbye to All That

Consevative blogger Andrew Sullivan comes out for Obama with this week’s “Atlantic” magazine’s Cover Story, as the cure for our ongoing, self-destructive 60’s Boomers Culture War.
The Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo­mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.

We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama.

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