Month: April 2009

Post-Madoff Palm Beach Blues

The last time he was here, he fell for a $2,000 pair of worsted spun cashmere pants, which the up-scale Worth Avenue boutique Trillion didn’t have in his size, and had to be ordered from Italy.After the slacks arrived, but before Mr. Madoff could come by for a fitting, he was arrested.

“I remember I heard about the arrest and I went directly to the store to charge those pants on his credit card,” recalls Mr. Neff, a fit, gray-haired man in perpetual motion. “But the card had already been canceled.”

So, what happened to the pants?

“They’re in the racks, over there,” Mr. Neff says, nodding toward the trouser section.

via Recession Pain, Even in Palm Beach – NYTimes.com.

Freedom To Criticize Faith Threatened

History has shown that once governments begin to police speech, they find ever more of it to combat. Countries such as Canada, England and France have prosecuted speakers and journalists for criticizing homosexuals and other groups. It’s the ultimate irony: free speech curtailed for the sake of a pluralistic society.

Religious orthodoxy has always lived in tension with free speech. Yet Western ideals are based on the premise that free speech contains its own protection: Good speech ultimately prevails over bad. There’s no blasphemy among free nations, only orthodoxy and those who seek to challenge it.

via The Free World Bars Free Speech – washingtonpost.com.

Free Food, Party All Night – At Denny’s

On February 1, the 56-year-old company aired a Super Bowl commercial that promised free Grand Slams to anyone who walked through the door from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Feb. 3. Denny’s, which is open 24/7, says some two million free meals were served.

Do these promotions justify the cost? CEO Marchioli. The additional customers buying juice and coffee with their free breakfast, plus the repeat business the giveaways generate, covers the cost. “We’ve already paid for the Super Bowl promotion, and then some,”

dennys-free-breakfast1Denny’s has created something called the “Allnighter” program. From 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., the chain has started playing alternative rock music on the restaurant soundtrack. Denny’s has now sponsored over 30 emerging bands —they get free meals while on tour — and organized late-night meet-and-greets, and occasional jam sessions, with the musicians in the restaurants. The servers wear casual black t-shirts instead of a buttoned-up uniform. Denny’s also just introduced four new late-night menu items, each priced between $3 and $4. These include the “Pancake Puppy 12-pack,” a dozen bite sized hotcakes rolled in cinnamon and sugar, and “Kickin’ Flavor Wraps,” two tortillas served with chicken strips. The idea is to serve stuff that groups of amped-up rabble-rousers can share. Denny’s wants to give the late-night crowd a social experience they can’t get at the fast-food drive-thrus, which are now staying open later through the night and eating away at the chain’s graveyard shift revenues.

via Denny’s: Where The Food Is Free, and Drunks Can Pee – TIME.

Search For The Best Grateful Dead Show

dead1977THE GRATEFUL DEAD’S live recordings represent a special order of surfeit. Nearly 2,200 Dead shows exist on tape, of the 2,350 or so that the group played. Most of those are available online — either for free streaming on Web sites like archive.org and nugs.net, , or for download on iTunes, like the “Dick’s Picks” series and the more recent “Road Trips” archival series, which uses master-tape audio sources.

Deadheads have often been polled about their favorite show, through fanzines and Web sites. The answers have stayed fairly consistent. May 8, 1977, at Barton Hall, Cornell University. The pairing of Feb. 13 and 14, 1970, at the Fillmore East in New York — perhaps the first widely traded shows.

via Music – Dissecting the Grateful Dead, Forever Live – NYTimes.com.

Delaying Gratification – the New Frugality

cat_police_dogsThe brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others. The good news, however, is that practice increases willpower capacity, so that in the long run, buying less now may improve our ability to achieve future goals — like losing those 10 pounds we gained when we weren’t out shopping.

No one knows why willpower can grow with practice but it must reflect some biological change in the brain. Perhaps neurons in the frontal cortex, which is responsible for planning behavior, or in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is associated with cognitive control, use blood sugar more efficiently after repeated challenges. Or maybe one of the chemical messengers that neurons use to communicate with one another is produced in larger quantities after it has been used up repeatedly, thereby improving the brain’s willpower capacity.

Whatever the explanation, consistently doing any activity that requires self-control seems to increase willpower — and the ability to resist impulses and delay gratification is highly associated with success in life. Thanks to frugal Maria for this article

via Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind – New York Times.

Black Swan-proof World

We love 10 step programs. So here an economic perscription by the author who was a veteran trader, a distinguished professor at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute and the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable 1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of hidden risks – and hence the most fragile – become the biggest.

2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.

via FT.com / Comment / Opinion – Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world.

Continue reading “Black Swan-proof World”

The End of Philosophy

What shapes moral emotions in the first place? The answer has long been evolution, but in recent years there’s an increasing appreciation that evolution isn’t just about competition. It’s also about cooperation within groups. Like bees, humans have long lived or died based on their ability to divide labor, help each other and stand together in the face of common threats. Many of our moral emotions and intuitions reflect that history. We don’t just care about our individual rights, or even the rights of other individuals. We also care about loyalty, respect, traditions, religions. We are all the descendents of successful cooperators.

The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.

Finally, it should also challenge the very scientists who study morality. They’re good at explaining how people make judgments about harm and fairness, but they still struggle to explain the feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not ancillary to most people’s moral experiences, but central. The evolutionary approach also leads many scientists to neglect the concept of individual responsibility and makes it hard for them to appreciate that most people struggle toward goodness, not as a means, but as an end in itself.

via Op-Ed Columnist – The End of Philosophy – NYTimes.com.

The Road to Area 51

The problem is the myths of Area 51 are hard to dispute if no one can speak on the record about what actually happened there. Well, now, for the first time, someone is ready to talk—in fact, five men are.

“We couldn’t have told you any of this a year ago,” Slater says. “Now we can’t tell it to you fast enough.” That is because in 2007, the CIA began declassifying the 50-year-old OXCART program. Today, there’s a scramble for eyewitnesses to fill in the information gaps. Only a few of the original players are left.

via The Road to Area 51 – Los Angeles Times.

Sports Gene Found?

A difference in just one amino acid in a protein might explain why some people learn new motor skills faster and reach higher levels of performance.

The protein, called brain-derived neurotro­phic factor (BDNF), is a key driver of synaptic plasti­city, the ability of the connections between brain cells to change in strength. This plasticity is an important factor in learning, explains neurologist Janine Reis, who led the study at the National Institutes of Health. According to Reis, this finding offers the first evidence that slight variations in BDNF’s structure affect learning ability.

Other groups have found that the BDNF version that Reis linked with poorer acquisition of skills is associated with reduced function of the hippocampus, a brain region involved in motor learning.

via Athletic Ability May Lie in a Single Gene: Scientific American.