Popular Science: We’re better off without comments at our website

Boorish comments distort the readers perception of articles, according to PS:

It wasn't a decision we made lightly. As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter. That is not to suggest that we are the only website in the world that attracts vexing commenters. Far from it. Nor is it to suggest that all, or even close to all, of our commenters are shrill, boorish specimens of the lower internet phyla. We have many delightful, thought-provoking commenters. But even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story.

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Einstein proves fraud

Huge securities trading spike occurs before it would be possible to even receive the information electronically, much less react to it after reading it.

"[T]he Fed news was certainly present in trading centers in Chicago and New York before 2pm. The evidence is overwhelming. It is unknown how many people had access to this information - for a timed news release, it would have been at least an administrator, probably Q.A. and others. What we do know is the resulting explosion of trading just 1 thousandth of a second after 2pm, was unprecedented in the history of Fed news announcements, and much of that trading was based on information obtained before the set Federal Reserve Board release time."
I'm betting that there won't be any prosecutions.

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Following the money to understand political corruption

Shocking story by "This is American Life." Nancy Pelosi attends 400 political fundraisers per year. Politicians of both parties spend untold amount of town raising money, planning to raise money or thinking about raising money. How much money do members of the house of representatives need. At 7:41 of this recording, you'll hear a Federal Representative from Ohio admitting that he needed to raise $10,000-15,000 PER DAY. This amounts to $2.5 M over two years. The story goes on and on, and amounts to a total corruption of our supposed democracy.

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Nixon more Liberal than Obama?

Fascinating article in Daily Kos. Here's some of Nixon's accomplishments (granted, that he had a different Congress):

1969 - Nixon enters peace negotiations with North Viet Nam 1970 - Nixon negotiates permanent deal with USSR not to use Cienfuegos (Cuba) for ballistic missile Submarines 1971 - Nixon increases arms sales and loans to Israel 1972 - Nixon enters into successful SALT talks with USSR 1973 - Nixon withdraws thousands of troops from VietNam, ends draft. 1973 - Nixon agrees to support Israel, begins airlift that allows Israel to counterattack. Nixon and the USSR negotiate a peace protecting Israel and ending the war.
Big sections on domestic policies too. Well worth a read.

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To smile or not to smile

I was given an article about smiling and portraits over the years. Fascinating.

"Smiling also has a large number of discrete cultural and historical significances, few of them in line with our modern perceptions of it being a physical signal of warmth, enjoyment, or indeed of happiness. By the 17th century in Europe it was a well-established fact that the only people who smiled broadly, in life and in art, were the poor, the lewd, the drunk, the innocent, and the entertainment – some of whom we’ll visit later. Showing the teeth was for the upper classes a more-or-less formal breach of etiquette. St. Jean-Baptiste De La Salle, in The Rules of Christian Decorum and Civility of 1703, wrote: There are some people who raise their upper lip so high… that their teeth are almost entirely visible. This is entirely contradictory to decorum, which forbids you to allow your teeth to be uncovered, since nature gave us lips to conceal them. Thus the critical point: should a painter have persuaded his sitter to smile, and chosen to paint it, it would immediately radicalise the portrait, precisely because it was so unusual and so undesirable. Suddenly the picture would be ‘about’ the open smile, and this is almost never what an artist, or a paying subject, wanted."

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