Earth as Art

NASA has put together an extraordinary new booklet: Earth as Art. Here is an excerpt from the Introduction:

This book celebrates Earth’s aesthetic beauty in the patterns, shapes, colors, and textures of the land, oceans, ice, and atmosphere. Earth-observing environmental satellites can measure outside the visible range of light, so these images show more than what is visible to the naked eye. The beauty of Earth is clear, and the artistry ranges from the surreal to the sublime. Truly, by escaping Earth’s gravity we discovered its attraction.
Let this booklet load up and enjoy the show. Earth as you've never seen it before, from satellites.

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Creating a film in two days

The 48-Hour Film Project is a challenge to make a 4 to 7 minute film in only 48 hours, including writing the script, shooting the scenes and all editing the film, including the creation of a musical score. Very ambitious and intense. The competing teams each submit films which are viewed and graded by judges. In 2011, a friend of mine, Jon Abrahams, was part of the team that won not only the local competition, but the international competition, with a film called "In Captivity." His team's film was featured in this Youtube introduction to the 2012 competition. Also featured here is an interview of Jon. This looks like a blast--I'd love to try it someday.

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Why older folks get ripped off more often

In this article in the WP, it is reported that older folks are much more trusting than younger people, and they often miss cues that broadcast untrustworthiness. This correlates with the fact that older folks are victims of fraud much more than younger people.

To see if older people really are less able to spot a swindler, Taylor and colleagues showed photos of faces considered trustworthy, neutral or untrustworthy to a group of 119 older adults (ages 55 to 84) and 24 younger adults (ages 20 to 42). Signs of untrustworthiness included averted eyes; an insincere smile that doesn’t reach the eyes; a smug, smirky mouth; and a backward tilt to the head. The participants were asked to rate each face on a scale from minus-3 (very untrustworthy) to 3 (very trustworthy). In the study, appearing online last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the “untrustworthy” faces were perceived as significantly more trustworthy by the older subjects than by the younger ones.

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The non-debate regarding Susan Rice

Glenn Greenwald reports on the lack of meaningful debate regarding Susan Rice:

Virtually all of this debate has concerned Rice's statements on a series of Sunday news shows in September, during which she claimed that the Benghazi attack was primarily motivated by spontaneous anger over an anti-Islam film rather than an coordinated attack by a terrorist group. Everyone now acknowledges that (consistent with the standard pattern of this administration's behavior) Rice's statements were inaccurate, but in a majestic display of intellectual dexterity, progressive pundits claim with a straight face that public officials should be excused when they make false statements based on what the CIA tells them to say, while conservatives claim with a straight face that relying on flawed and manipulated intelligence reports is no excuse. All of that is standard, principle-free partisan jockeying. It goes without saying that if this were Condoleezza rather than Susan Rice, the two sides would have exactly opposite positions on whether these inaccurate statements should be held against her. None of that is worth examining. But what is remarkable is how so many Democrats are devoting so much energy to defending a possible Susan Rice nomination as Secretary of State without even pretending to care about her record and her beliefs. It's not even part of the discussion.

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Bradley Manning in a sentence

Found this cartoon on Facebook, but cannot determine how to link directly to it, even at the site mentioned in the cartoon. I'm reprinting it because it is one of the best statements I've seen regarding of America's massive denial regarding the significance of the actions of Bradley Manning: Glenn Greenwald , Greg Mitchell, Truthdig.com and Amy Goodman have been among the relatively few media sources giving serious coverage to Bradley Manning (and to Wikileaks). What kinds of scandals has Bradley Manning revealed? Here are more than a few.

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