A tribute at a funeral

Excerpts from an article in Runner's World:

This powerful photo says so much about Jim Kelley, and it says even more about running.

My friend Jim died this month while out on a run, doing one of his favorite things in the world. A car struck him as he was crossing the street.

Jim was amazing and selfless. He placed in the top three in his age group 90 percent of the time. He loved to run, more than anybody I know, whether by himself or supporting others...

Jim wasn't a dressy guy. He loved jeans and T-shirts. Teri, Jim’s wife of more than 30 years, told everybody to come to his funeral dressed in their running clothes. That's how Jim would be buried, she said. Come in your tights and your running shorts. Wear your running shoes.

I was one of Jim’s pallbearers. When it was time to go to the cemetery, the funeral director had this idea. The cemetery was only a mile away, he said to us. Instead of vehicles following behind, would we want to honor Jim by running behind the hearse?

It was a genius idea.

The rest of the story is at the link.

Explore the demographics of your ZIP code

A Washington Post article examines the demographics of ZIP codes:

The Washington Post analyzed census data to find Zip codes where people rank highest on a combination of income and education. They are Super Zips.

The ranks, ranging from 0 to 99, represent the average of each Zip’s percentile rankings for median household income and for the share of adults with college degrees. Super Zips rank 95 or higher...

The map... shows the nation’s 650 Super Zips. Among them, the typical household income is $120,272, and 68 percent of adults hold college degrees. That compares with $53,962 and 27 percent for the remaining 23,925 Zips shown. Only Zips with at least 500 adults are displayed.

I don't live in a "Super ZIP" (in  yellow).  I'm in the bile-green category one step down.  The image I've embedded is a screencap but the map at WaPo is interactive; you can click on your ZIP code to reveal specific data.

Mega-churches for atheists

From the StarTribune:

Nearly three dozen gatherings dubbed "atheist mega-churches" by supporters and detractors have sprung up around the U.S. and Australia — with more to come — after finding success in Great Britain earlier this year. The movement fueled by social media and spearheaded by two prominent British comedians is no joke...

They don't bash believers but want to find a new way to meet likeminded people, engage in the community and make their presence more visible in a landscape dominated by faith...

"If you think about church, there's very little that's bad. It's singing awesome songs, hearing interesting talks, thinking about improving yourself and helping other people — and doing that in a community with wonderful relationships. What part of that is not to like?"..

Sunday Assembly — whose motto is Live Better, Help Often, Wonder More — taps into that universe of people who left their faith but now miss the community church provided... It also plays into a feeling among some atheists that they should make themselves more visible...

"In the U.S., there's a little bit of a feeling that if you're not religious, you're not patriotic. I think a lot of secular people say, 'Hey, wait a minute. We are charitable, we are good people, we're good parents and we are just as good citizens as you and we're going to start a church to prove it.."

During the service, attendees stomped their feet, clapped their hands and cheered as Jones and Evans led the group through rousing renditions of "Lean on Me," ''Here Comes the Sun" and other hits that took the place of gospel songs. Congregants dissolved into laughter at a get-to-know-you game that involved clapping and slapping the hands of the person next to them and applauded as members of the audience spoke about community service projects they had started in LA.

"Pink for boys, and blue for girls"

Excerpts from an essay at Smithsonian:

Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the two colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War I—and even then, it took time for popular culture to sort things out.

For example, a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw's Infants' Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti.

In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. stores. In Boston, Filene’s told parents to dress boys in pink. So did Best & Co. in New York City, Halle’s in Cleveland and Marshall Field in Chicago.

Today’s color dictate wasn’t established until the 1940s, as a result of Americans’ preferences as interpreted by manufacturers and retailers. “It could have gone the other way,” Paoletti says.

Photo: TongRo Image Stock / Corbis

Thought for the day

Via Bits and Pieces.

Changing demographics in modern America

More, and link to source, at The Dish.

"From ancestor worship to descendant worship"

From a brief essay in Intelligent Life magazine:

"... ours is the first civilisation to find its deepest fulfilment in its descendants...

There is the greater dismay we seem to feel at youth unemployment than at the poverty of pensioners, although some of the most disturbing scenes I’ve witnessed have been in the homes of the elderly. There is the way that older people are expected to give far more to voluntary organisations. We assume that the over-65s will take on almost the entire burden of supporting political parties, for which the young occasionally vote, and of maintaining the churches in which the young like to marry. We accept too easily that the young should not be called upon to carry the burden of sustaining communities because "their lives are too busy".

People who might once have been public figures, deeply invested in their work, are instead busy serving their children. Ours is a culture not of ancestor worship but of descendant worship. Children must sense that nothing an adult does is more important than their own desires. All political questions seem to come down to the interests of "the next generation".

The world's ten busiest air-travel routes in 2012

The data in chart form is at Amadeus:

Among other key findings, the study reveals that 22% of all global air travel is concentrated on just 300 origin and destination ‘super routes’, each of which carries over 1 million passengers annually. Furthermore, 69% of all global air travel is made on major routes with 100 thousand annual passengers...

So, where are those "super routes"?  VizualStatistix has plotted the top ten on a map, which I've placed below the fold to challenge you to name any one of those top ten routes before peeking (i.e. name the cities the planes fly between).

"Note that the lines are not geodesics; I curved path #7 so that you could see path #6 beneath it."

Airplane seats are shrinking. Are you?

From a story in the Wall Street Journal:

Airlines' push to lure high-paying fliers with flatbed business seats and premium economy loungers is leaving economy-class passengers with less space. A push over the past decade by carriers to expand higher-fare sections has shrunk the area devoted to coach on many big jetliners. But airlines don't want to drop passengers. So first airlines slimmed seats to add more rows.

Now, big carriers... are cutting shoulder space by wedging an extra seat into each coach row. That shift is bringing the short-haul standard to long-haul flying. 

For almost 20 years, the standard setup in the back of a Boeing BA -0.48% 777 was nine seats per row. But last year, nearly 70% of its biggest version of the plane were delivered with 10-abreast seating, up from just 15% in 2010...

The new trend in economy seating reverses a half century of seat growth in economy class. Early jet planes like Boeing's 707 had 17-inch seats, a dimension based on the width of a U.S. Air Force pilot's hips...

The solution, said Mr. Clark at Emirates, is to offer distractions like big meals, frequent snacks and lots of electronic entertainment...

"With food and TV," said Mr. Clark at Emirates, "people are mesmerized."

"Panem et circenses" is what they used to call it.  (Many more details at the link).

¿Bailamos? ("Shall we dance?")

YouTube link.

I hope the English subtitles will turn on automatically (if not, use the "cc" button in the bottom menu bar).

The purpose of this video is to remind parents immersed in a cultural dynamic of work and consumption, that children are children, and they have to play and enjoy their childhood.

First prize at Corso Zundert, 2012

YouTube link.

Bloemencorso Zundert is the largest flower parade in the world entirely made by volunteers. The parade takes place on the first Sunday of September. The floats are large artworks made of steel wire, cardboard, papier-mâché and flowers. In the Bloemencorso Zundert, only dahlias are used to decorate the objects and it takes thousands of them just to cover one float.

The huge floats are made by twenty different hamlets and each of them consists of hundreds of builders... A professional and independent jury decides which float is the most beautiful and which hamlet will be crowned the winner of that year.

There are more photos and videos at the festival's website, including this one -

And I found this impressive one at the Wikipedia entry:

Wow.  And unlike many parades in America, these floats don't appear to be sponsored by corporations and designed to sell products.

Cheerleading has evolved

YouTube link.

It seems to have incorporated Olympic (and video game) moves.  These are not without hazard, as Miss Cellania notes in her Neatorama post:

You are about to watch young men and women perform stunts that were once only seen in circuses. This is a music video from CheerSounds, a company that produces custom music for cheerleading squads, with video recorded at StuntFest 2013. The song is called "Decitona."

Oh, these gymnasts are impressive, but also frightening from a parent's perspective. A recent study in the Journal of Pediatrics confirmed a trend that cheerleading is the most dangerous sport for female Americans. So I feel I must say, "Don't try this at home." You have to wonder about the stunts that didn't make the cut.

Those who enjoy watching youngsters getting hurt can search YouTube for cheerleading +  injury.

With a "smart rifle" anyone can be a sniper

YouTube link.

Excerpts from a fascinating article at Vice's Motherboard:

[TalkingPoint Solutions] made headlines in early 2013 when it unveiled the precision guided firearm (PGF). Think of it as a long-range, laser-guided robo rifle—as much Linux-based computer as traditional firearm. The PGF's closed-loop system comprises not just the gun itself, a custom Surgeon rifle, but also custom ammunition and, notably, a proprietary (and WiFi-enabled) scope. The technology packed into TrackingPoint's initial PGF package is so advanced that we'd heard it could have an inexperienced shooter, maybe even someone who hasn't ever fired a gun, putting lead on targets at over 1,000 away in mere minutes. Not lifetimes. Not years. Minutes...

The art of sniping has traditionally been one of complex ballistics. A long-distance shot must be aimed above a target due to the bullet's drop (gravity) and a slew of other ambient factors that play with projectiles—wind, incline, cant, humidity, temperature, the coriolis effect. TrackingPoint's system does the exact same real-time ballistics calculation, only it does it for you. This is what the company means when it says it's "democratizing accuracy"...

The scope records video every time the system tags, tracks, and fires. Being WiFi enabled, users can immediately upload videos of their kills from the scope directly to social media. Shared killing—it's part of a broader push to target digital natives. "If there's one thing we've got, it's 12-year-olds on the Internet," said TrackingPoint's marketing director Oren Schauble, who is Jason's younger brother.

The PGF is by no means perfect, at least not yet.  But that doesn't mean it's not really, really good at doing precisely what it's designed to do. It took all but five minutes for me to put that one together. That's how long I waited, in another stuffy blind on the opposite side of the ranch, for a 250-pound hog to saunter out of the brush and into a clearing, a black blob in the HUD's reticle. It was a big thing, the sort of critter that my guide, a leather-skinned ranch hand named Chris, referred to as a "fuckin' toad." I dropped my tag, aligned the pip and reticle, and just when I thought the PGF would fire, it did. It was a 200 yard shot to the neck. I was told if it had been just fractions of an inch further to the left I would've blown the thing's head clean off.

To think, even experienced snipers "have difficulty making first-round hits at long range," as TrackingPoint claims. But there I was, just some dude who only 48 hours prior had neither fired nor held a gun. One shot, one kill...

TrackingPoint doesn't want to wait around. To hear Jason Schauble tell it, they'll do it better and faster, and sell it to the public all the while. The company tells me they're on pace to sell 500 PGFs by the end of 2013, which would double initial projections. As of this writing, the startup has sold $250,000 worth of its custom ammo alone.

Much more at the link.  Interesting reading.

A bleak future for the wife of a rapist

Excerpts from a grim story in the Wall Street Journal:

Akshay Kumar Singh and three other men were convicted this month of a crime that focused the world's attention on violence against women in India: the gang rape and killing of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student on a bus in December.

For the parents of the woman who died, the sentencing brought a measure of closure. For Ms. Devi, who is in her 20s, and her 2-year-old son, her husband's crime and punishment have opened up a chapter of profound uncertainty.

Ms. Devi expects to be cast out by her in-laws and face ostracism and destitution here in India's conservative hinterland—not because she is married to a convicted murderer, but because she is a woman without a husband. "As a widow, my honor will be lost forever," she says.

Her husband's relatives say they can't afford to feed her. Her parents say they are too poor to take her back. The customs of purdah practiced in the region make it almost impossible for her to work outside the home.

"I am not educated. Our traditions are such that I cannot even step out of the house," Ms. Devi said. "Who will earn money to feed me and my son?"...

Ms. Devi says she can write her name and a few Hindi words, and read a bit. She knew from an early age, she says, what was expected of a woman: to raise children and take care of household tasks...

Since Mr. Singh's December arrest, his family has been thrown into upheaval. His brothers, Vinay and Abhay, who had also been working around Delhi, left their jobs for three months to help out at home, straining household finances. The family's reputation has been damaged.

"They treat us as untouchables," says Abhay Singh, who works in a paint factory in a Delhi suburb...

Ms. Devi doesn't know where to turn. "Is there anyone who is thinking of me?" she asked, crying after learning of the death sentence. "I am alive and I have a small child who is still breathing."

See if you could pass this "literacy" test

In the 1960s literacy tests were used in some states in the United States to suppress voting.  The Civil Rights Movement Veterans website has collected a number of these.

In addition to completing the application and swearing the oaths, you had to pass the actual "Literacy Test" itself. Because the Freedom Movement was running "Citizenship Schools" to help people learn how to fill out the forms and pass the test, Alabama changed the test 4 times in less than two years (1964-1965). At the time of the Selma Voting Rights campaign there were actually 100 different tests in use across the state...

Most of the tests collected here are a battery of trivia questions related to civic procedure and citizenship. (Two from the Alabama test: “Name the attorney general of the United States” and “Can you be imprisoned, under Alabama law, for a debt?”).

But this Louisiana “literacy” test, singular among its fellows, has nothing to do with citizenship. Designed to put the applicant through mental contortions, the test's questions are often confusingly worded. If some of them seem unanswerable, that effect was intentional. The (white) registrar would be the ultimate judge of whether an answer was correct.

Try this one: “Write every other word in this first line and print every third word in same line (original type smaller and first line ended at comma) but capitalize the fifth word that you write.” 

Done with page one (above)?  Here are pages 2 and 3:

  

Oh, BTW...

The test was to be taken in 10 minutes flat, and a single wrong answer meant a failing grade.

Did you fail?  You can't vote.

Via Slate and BoingBoing.

The disappearing "middle class"

Excerpts from an essay at Salon:

When I was growing up, it was assumed that America’s shared prosperity was the natural endpoint of our economy’s development, that capitalism had produced the workers paradise to which Communism unsuccessfully aspired. Now, with the perspective of 40 years, it’s obvious that the nonstop economic expansion that lasted from the end of World War II to the Arab oil embargo of 1973 was a historical fluke, made possible by the fact that the United States was the only country to emerge from that war with its industrial

capacity intact. Unfortunately, the middle class – especially the blue-collar middle class – is also starting to look like a fluke, an interlude between Gilded Ages that more closely reflects the way most societies structure themselves economically. For the majority of human history – and in the majority of countries today – there have been only two classes: aristocracy and peasantry. It’s an order in which the many toil for subsistence wages to provide luxuries for the few. Twentieth century America temporarily escaped this stratification, but now, as statistics on economic inequality demonstrate, we’re slipping back in that direction. Between 1970 and today, the share of the nation’s income that went to the middle class – households earning two-thirds to double the national median – fell from 62 percent to 45 percent. Last year, the wealthiest 1 percent took in 19 percent of America’s income – their highest share since 1928.

Capitalism has been doing exactly what it was designed to do: concentrating wealth in the ownership class, while providing the mass of workers with just enough wages to feed, house and clothe themselves.

The United States will never again be as wealthy as it was in the 1950s and ’60s. Never again will 18-year-olds graduate directly from high school to jobs that pay well enough to buy a house and support a family.

More at the link.

Influential and successful marijuana users

"Marijuana Policy Project, the nation’s largest marijuana policy organization, released a list of the “Top 50 Most Influential Marijuana Users” in the United States on Wednesday. At the top of the list is none other than our hypocrite…er…commander in chief Barack Obama, who has sent more pot smokers and other nonviolent drug offenders to prison in his five years as president than any before him...

“The goal here is to dispel the myth that marijuana users are ‘losers’ who lack motivation and highlight the fact that they are typically productive and oftentimes quite successful,” said Mason Tvert, director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project. “As this list demonstrates, many of our nation’s most successful citizens have used marijuana.”
The list is composed of Americans who have used marijuana at least once during their lifetimes, including some who speak openly about their current marijuana use. "

Here's the start of the list:

Barack Obama
Oprah Winfrey
Bill Clinton
Clarence Thomas
Stephen Colbert
Jon Stewart

Jay-Z
John Kerry
George Soros
Bill Maher
Bill Gates
George W. Bush
Andrew Cuomo
Rand Paul
Sanjay Gupta
LeBron James
Rush Limbaugh
George Clooney
Michael Bloomberg
Lady Gaga
Brad Pitt
Ted Turner
Tom Browaw
Michael Phelps...

The rest of the list, with citations of their admissions to marijuana use, is at Salon.

Portrait

The above image comes from a gallery posted in The Telegraph.  The photographs come from what must be a remarkable book "Before They Pass Away," documenting the faces and ethnic dress of members of small tribes around the world.

This photo was captioned "Others included the Chukchi and the Nenets (both Russia), the Drokpa (India/Pakistan), the Banna and the Karo (both Ethiopia)," but doesn't specify which group this lady belongs to.

How addictive is morphine?

Research previously conducted on rats did not adequately control for the environment in which the rats were studied:

Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself. He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that "severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can."

To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, an 8.8 m2 (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times the square footage of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16–20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters. The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. "Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment." Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments. 

Via garry's subposthaven.  There is a relevant discussion at Reddit.

Addendum:   A hat tip to Fletcher in Portugal for noting that the research described above has been summarized in a well-illustrated 40-page cartoon.

The importance of old people in human cultural evolution

Excerpts from an article published by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science:

Increased longevity, expressed as number of individuals surviving to older adulthood, represents one of the ways the human life history pattern differs from other primates. We believe it is a critical demographic factor in the development of human culture. Here, we examine when changes in longevity occurred by assessing the ratio of older to younger adults in four hominid dental samples from successive time periods... there is a dramatic increase in longevity in the modern humans of the Early Upper Paleolithic. We believe that this great increase contributed to population expansions and cultural innovations associated with modernity...

Longevity, in particular, may be necessary for the transgenerational accumulation and transfer of information that allows for complex kinship systems and other social networks that are uniquely human...

However, whether the result of cultural factors, other forms of relaxed selection affecting the mortality of young adults, and/or biological change, the increase in adult survivorship would have considerable evolutionary impact... Increased adult survivorship strengthens those relationships and information transmission by extending the time over which people can learn from older individuals and by the increase in the number of older people, which promotes the acquisition and transmission of specialized knowledge such as that reflected in the Upper Paleolithic.

Not only does increased survivorship imply greater lifetime fertility for individuals, the investment of older individuals in their children's families may provide a selective advantage promoting further population increase.

Via The Dish.