Waterboarding is torture.

Well, Hannity is too filled with hot air to follow through with his offer to be waterboarded, but Christopher Hitchens and conservative radio host Erich 'Mancow' Muller have each undergone the treatment. Both lasted less than ten seconds and have reversed their positions, stating that waterboarding is unequivocally torture. Check out the videos (and the associated articles) below (the sound on the Mancow videos is terrible).

Hitchens: "Believe Me, It's Torture"


Mancow: "Mancow Waterboarded, Admits It's Torture"

Robobama is coming for you!

Actually, this is pretty awesome.

"The Course of Human Events."

In 1972 the National Endowment for the Humanities founded the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities lecture series, which the NEH describes as "the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities." David McCullough won the honor of being the 2003 Jefferson lecturer and gave a great speech on the arc of history, the text of which can be found here.

McCullough's general point:
"The truth of history is the objective always. But the truth isn't just the facts. You can have all the facts imaginable and miss the truth, just as you can have facts missing or some wrong, and reach the larger truth."

Random note about McCullough: He still uses a 1940s typewriter and writes only in a small shed/studio behind his house on Martha's Vineyard (seen in the above picture).

I wouldn't ever live somewhere that scores below 10,000!

Video dump.

Rather than a bunch of annoying little posts I have decided to bug you with only one longer one filled with short videos.

Fenway cameraman tells you about his camera and shows you how it is controlled:

Fenway HD Camera - Sony HDC-910 - Canon 75x from Tom Guilmette on Vimeo.

The da Vinci surgical system:


Escalator spinning:


The walking table:


LSD tested on a British army group:

The biggest drawing in the world.

Eric Nordenanker decided to draw the biggest drawing in the world by sketching a self-portrait on a world map and then paying DHL to fly a GPS tracking device around the world to these locations. But, you may be saying, what about those ridiculous loops in the middle of the ocean? Well, for any points that were un-named Nordenanker provided DHL with the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. Check out the list of locations here (.pdf). The continuous line of the drawing "[...] passed through 6 continents and 62 countries, thus becoming 110664 km long." (To save you the trouble: 110,664km= 68,763.4216 miles (according to Google's conversion mechanism).)

The video that first introduced me to this project:

Biggest Drawing in the World - Click here for the funniest movie of the week

"Bar-onomics"

[Update: Fixed source--New York Magazine, not The New Yorker]
[Note: I have simply copied and pasted the entire article (go here for original) from New York Magazine because it is so short.]

So you want to open a bar, huh? A profitable bar? We asked four experts to run the numbers on a make- believe, 1,000-square-foot neighborhood pub in the East Village.

• By Beth Shapouri
• Published May 17, 2009

Start-Up Costs
Rent for six months while waiting on a liquor license: $49,800 (assuming $8,300 a month)
Liquor license and fees: $9,000
Equipment, construction, and demolition: $60,000
Signage: $1,000
Décor and glassware: $21,000
Training for six employees: $858
Initial liquor order: $6,000 (45 percent on beer, 40 percent on liquor, 5 percent on wine, 10 percent on mixers)
Sound system: $1,000
Emergency funds: $50,000
Misc.: $2,000
TOTAL . . . . . . . $200,658

---

Ongoing Monthly Costs
Rent: $8,300
Booze: $10,000
Insurance: $500
Misc.: $1,900
Staff pay: $1,720 (assuming 100 hours a week at $4.30 an hour)
Utilities: $1,320
Taxes and fees: $1,000
TOTAL . . . . . . . . $24,740

---

The Markups
Draft beer: $3.59 a pint
Bottled beer: $3.85 a bottle
Well liquor: $4.65 a pour
Top-shelf liquor: $3.35 a pour
Wine: $3.48 a glass

---

Break-Even Point
Amount you’d have to gross in 18 months before you start turning a profit: $645,978 (monthly expenses of $24,740 for 18 months, or $445,320, plus start-up costs of $200,658)
Number of customers required per night to reach $645,978 in 18 months (assuming $5 per average drink and 1.5 drinks per person): 160

"Going Dutch"

This article by Russell Shorto (author of The Island at the Center of the World and Descartes' Bones) is a relaxed examination of the similarities and differences between the American and the Dutch social welfare systems. This is not a number-filled article, but rather a straightforward discussion of some of the pros and cons of both the Dutch and American systems. Shorto also discusses the cultural roots of the two systems and the historical forces that shaped the trends of each system.

One of the interesting points raised in the article:

This points up something that seems to be overlooked when Americans dismiss European-style social-welfare systems: they are not necessarily state-run or state-financed. Rather, these societies have chosen to combine the various entities that play a role in social well-being — individuals, corporations, government, nongovernmental entities like unions and churches — in different ways, in an effort to balance individual freedom and overall social security.

And, a hilarious summary of the Dutch personality:

'If you tell a Dutch person you’re going to raise his taxes by 500 euros and that it will go to help the poor, he’ll say O.K.,' [an American expatriate] said. 'But if you say he’s going to get a 500-euro tax cut, with the idea that he will give it to the poor, he won’t do it. The Dutch don’t do such things on their own. They believe they should be handled by the system. To an American, that’s a lack of individual initiative.'

Nobody doesn't like Tom Hanks

During Tom Hanks' interview on The Daily Show last week, a friend and I were discussing how he might be most well-liked man on planet. The interview makes it so clear what a professional entertainer he is - he knows exactly how to make everyone in a room look at him and like him. And if anyone did dislike him, you really couldn't after this:

Tom Hanks Saves Wedding



Can the man do no wrong (excluding, of course, "You've Got Mail")??

...like I need another hole in my head.

A doctor in Australia drilled into a twelve-year old's skull using a household drill (taken straight out of the maintenance room) in order to lessen pressure caused by internal bleeding suffered during a bicycle accident. The hospital had no neurological drills and no neurosurgeon, so general practitioner Dr. Robert Carson had to perform the surgery while being instructed by a neurosurgeon over the phone--this doctor told him things like where and how deep to drill (I imagine the answers to be 'the head' and 'not too deep.' Wow, those look dirtier than I realized they would.). The boy is fine and returned home on his thirteenth birthday.

Backwards discrimination.

So it turns out that wildly ignorant racism by whites can be directed at whites, and not even in that neo-Nazis-hate-non-racist-whites kind of way. Born and raised in Mozambique, Paulo Serodio, a white man from Africa (also known as a white African-American), was recently suspended from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey for TWO YEARS after insisting upon calling himself African-American during a "[...] cultural exercise in a clinical skills course" (whatever the hell that is).

Well, let's keep the spirit going: America, fuck yeah!!!

And you think Twittering is rude???

No longer will our lawmakers be obliged to voice complaints through text alone as they listen to the president! In the future these oppressed people will be allowed to use their voices without even having to physically talk. National Instruments is working on the device in the above video, which intercepts signals sent from the brain to the vocal chords and translates these electrical signals into speech. The system currently has only 150 recognized words, but the creators compare this limited vocabulary to early speech-recognition systems. Current applications focus on those who have lost the ability to speak naturally (e.g. those with severe ALS), but someday soon let's hope that our lawmakers will be able to bitch publicly before the president even finishes speaking! Think of the possibilities: Boehner could criticize Barack via Twitter while having a call-in conversation with Hannity about how poor the speech is without ever moving his lips!

Maybe the bright side of this is that soon lawmakers will wear their collars more publicly, perhaps exposing some of the currently-hidden leashes that so dramitcally impact legislation.

(Twin) brother by another father.

I am not even going to bother moving beyond fact in this case: a woman had sex with her boyfriend, and then cheated on him soon after, leading to the one-in-a-million (seriously, 1/1,000,000) outcome of a set of twins with different fathers. The boyfriend has been told of the infidelity and has agreed to raise both boys as his own, despite being biological father to only one. Of course, since modern news stories only ever seem to hamper progress toward social equality, the family is black, the parents unmarried, and the lot of them live in good ol' Texas. America, fuck yeah!

Slick Willy heads for abroad...

(Come on, that title is funny.) Bill Clinton has been named Special UN Envoy to Haiti. Two aspects of this strike me as representative of Bill Clinton's personality: 1. He truly seems to respect the importance of at least the idea of the UN (let's ignore his beliefs on the UN's execution/hesitation issues in Somalia and the Balkans for the sake of this point); and, 2. Clinton is headed to Haiti, not some posh country where he can relax and live in high-society style--Clinton genuinely loves being around real people.

It is nice that Carter works with Habitat for Humanity, but that organization only focuses on the under-served within the domestic population. To have a (popular!) former president dedicate his time to the plight of some of those who are worst-off in the world is a demonstration that society seems to be gradually coming to the conclusion that suffering abroad is as unacceptable as suffering here.

Americans are the best...

...at killing the planet through consumption! The 2009 National Geographic Greendex survey, "[...] a comprehensive measure of consumer behavior in 65 areas relating to housing, transportation, food and consumer goods" (Greendex Highlight Report.pdf), has, for the second consecutive year, given the US the worst overall score. (This must be qualified in just a few ways: the survey is only in its second year, only includes 17 countries (14 in 2008), and is based entirely on Internet-based polling data.)

A bit more about the approach: The survey measures "[...] energy use and conservation, transportation choices, food sources, the relative use of green products versus traditional products, attitudes towards the environment and sustainability, and knowledge of environmental issues" (Greendex: Survey of Sustainable Consumption), in order to give each respondent a score in each of the four main categories listed above (housing, transportation, food, and consumer goods). Based on performance in these categories each respondent is given an overall Greendex score.

One more thing: Brazil's Greendex score went down from last year to this year, so they are clearly gunning for our position at the top. We must waste as much as possible in the coming year in order to keep our crown. I hope each of you will do your part.