Life of Alan

More than half of adult Americans report they have had a spiritual experience that changed their lives. Now, scientists from universities like Harvard, Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins are using new technologies to analyze the brains of people who claim they have touched the spiritual — from Christians who speak in tongues to Buddhist monks to people who claim to have had near-death experiences. Hear what they have discovered in this controversial field, as the science of spirituality continues to evolve.

(tags: Religion)

(tags: Star_Trek)

(tags: Almost_Live)

(tags: Television)

(tags: Spain)

Jaroslaw Anders's Between Fire and Sleep, a collection of essays that first appeared in American periodicals, especially The New Republic, when Eastern Europe was digging out from under the wreckage of Communism, is the best book of its kind available in English and, quite likely, any other language. Granted, the field of nonscholarly books that synopsize modern Polish literature is admittedly narrow, so such praise may sound slight, a little like Spinal Tap exclaiming that they're huge in Japan.

(tags: Poland)

An international peer-reviewed scholarly journal. Its aim is to facilitate the systematic development of the scientific body of knowledge in the field of information architecture.

(tags: Journals)

(tags: Brooklyn)

(tags: Gastronomy Television)

John Cheever was most unhappy to be picked up for vagrancy by the cops. “My name is John Cheever!” he bellowed. “Are you out of your mind?” Found sharing some hooch with the down-and-outs in downtown Boston, he was promptly admitted to Smithers Alcoholism Treatment Centre on Manhattan’s East 93rd Street, where he shared a room with a failed male ballet dancer, a delicatessen owner and a smelly ex-sailor. “The ballerina is up to his neck in bubble bath reading a biography of Edith Piaf,” he noted in his journal. He spent most of his time in group therapy correcting his counsellor’s grammar. “Displaying much grandiosity and pride,” they wrote in their notes. “Very impressed with self.” Eventually he fell silent. Four weeks later he emerged, shaky, fragile and subdued. “Listen, Truman,” he told Truman Capote. “It’s the most terrible, glum place you can conceivably imagine. It’s really really, really grim. But I did come out of there sober.”

(tags: Writing)

For generations, Minnesota’s prairie towns have distinguished them-selves by their skylines: the water tower, church steeples and grain elevator. But in the last decade, new landmarks have been sprouting along the countryside in the form of wind turbines. Some stand alone in a wide open field; others huddle in bunches of 20 or 30.

(tags: Minnesota)

(tags: Diplomacy)

An algorithm is presented to calculate the point on the surface of a sphere maximising the great-circle distance to a given spherical polygon. This is used to calculate the spots furthest from the sea in major land masses, also known as Poles of Inaccessibility, a concept that has raised the interest of explorers. For the Eurasian pole of inaccessibility (EPIA), the results reveal a misplacement in previous calculations ranging from 156 to 435 km. Although in general there is only one pole for a given coastline, the present calculations show that, within the error inherent to the definition of the coastline, two locations are candidates for EPIA, one equidistant from Gulf of Ob, Gulf of Bengal and Arabian Sea, and the other equidistant from Gulf of Ob, Gulf of Bengal and Gulf of Bohai, both poles being located in the north westernmost Chinese province of Xinjiang. The distance to the sea at these locations is 2510 and 2514 km respectively, about 120 km closer than generally thought.

(tags: Geography)

On a recent Sunday, Minnie Mortimer was at a dinner in Montauk to celebrate the fall collection of her clothing line. Kelly Bensimon, an editor at large for Gotham and Hamptons, was also present. Ms. Mortimer proclaimed the two society magazines her favorite. “Cristina grew up here so she really knows everybody and not just like studied them and knows who they are,” she said. “She’s friends with so many people that she really understands the vibe and the feeling of being out here.”

(tags: Magazines)

(tags: Internet_Phenomena)

You and 472 other people have the chance to recreate Star Wars: A New Hope. Below is the entire movie split up into 15 second clips. Click on one of the scenes to claim it, film it, and upload it. You can have up to three scenes! When we're all done, we'll stitch it all together and watch the magic happen.

(tags: Star_Wars)

(tags: Peru)

Lobbying expenditures have increased in the second quarter of this year, and health care lobbyists appear to be the ones raking in the dough, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. Around $262m has been spent on health care related lobbying so far this year. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce continues to be the biggest individual spender. Each of the three biggest issues on Capitol Hill this year - the stimulus, climate change and health care - have been of significant concern to the Chamber's member companies, so they've been lobbying hard, doubling the spending of the next largest lobby. Almost every organization in the top ten graph below has a significant stake in either health care or environment. It's a departure from previous years, where ordinarily Northrop Grumman or Lockheed Martin would appear high on the list. (It's also a big change from say 1998, where the two biggest spenders were British American Tobacco and Phillip Morris.)

(tags: Lobbying)

(tags: NYC:Media)

Temporal construal effects on abstract and concrete thinking: Consequences for insight and creative cognition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 177–189] has identified temporal distance as a situational moderator of creativity. According to Construal Level Theory [Liberman, N., Trope, Y., & Stephan, E. (2007). Psychological Distance. In E. T. Higgins & A. W. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: A handbook of basic principles (pp. 353–381). New York: Guilford Press], temporal distance is just one case of the broader construct of psychological distance. In the present research, we investigated the effect of another dimension of psychological distance, namely, spatial distance, on creative cognition and insight problem solving. In two studies, we demonstrate that when the creative task is portrayed as originating from a far rather than close location, participants provide more creative responses (Study 1) and perform better on a problem solving…

(tags: Psychology)

Unlike almost every other country in the West, Norway remains relatively unscathed by the worst financial crisis in decades. While most nations spent during boom years, Norway saved. Today, housing prices and consumption are rising, interest rates are low, and frugal management of income from Norway's huge oil and natural gas reserves have helped the country build one of the world's biggest investment funds. The sailing ship tattoos on Capt. Knut Jansen's forearms flex as he steers the boat Patricia through a narrow channel, past quaint vacation homes in the calm waters outside Kristiansand in southern Norway. He's smiling — and why shouldn't he be? The tour boat business is good, the sun is shining and Johnny Cash is on the radio. Jansen chuckles when asked how his nation has fared so well financially when most of the rest of the world has seen only economic pain and stress. "Isn't it lucky that Norway has plenty of money? A big, big oil fortune," he says.

(tags: Norway)

Here's a surprise: Wild crows can recognize individual people. They can pick a person out of a crowd, follow them, and remember them — apparently for years. But people — even people who love crows — usually can't tell them apart. So what we have for you are two experiments that tell this story.

(tags: Biology)

(tags: Science)

(tags: Energy)

(tags: Chicago)

(tags: Small_Arms)

Supercomputers pitted against one another in a high-stakes battle of attack and counterattack over a global network where predatory algorithms trawl the information stream, competing every millisecond to gain an informational advantage over rivals. It sounds like Hollywood fiction, but it's just an average trading day on the stock market.

(tags: Capital_Markets)

Our mission is to ensure the reliability of the bulk power system in North America. To achieve that, we develop and enforce reliability standards; assess reliability annually via 10-year and seasonal forecasts; monitor the bulk power system; and educate, train, and certify industry personnel. NERC is a self-regulatory organization, subject to oversight by the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and governmental authorities in Canada.

(tags: Energy)

(tags: Internet_Phenomena)

(tags: NYC Architecture)

In 1996, an investor named Henry de Kwiatkowski sued Bear Stearns for negligence and breach of fiduciary duty. De Kwiatkowski had made—and then lost—hundreds of millions of dollars by betting on the direction of the dollar, and he blamed his bankers for his reversals. The district court ruled in de Kwiatkowski’s favor, ultimately awarding him $164.5 million in damages. But Bear Stearns appealed—successfully—and in William D. Cohan’s engrossing account of the fall of Bear Stearns, “House of Cards,” the firm’s former chairman and C.E.O. Jimmy Cayne tells the story of what happened on the day of the hearing:

(tags: Psychology)

The first thing that struck us was the distance between the watchtowers. We had just cycled a strenuous mile uphill above the medieval village of Geisa, along the Iron Curtain Trail that follows the old Warsaw Pact-NATO divide in central Germany. Now, in the tranquillity of the early evening, we emerged at the top of the hill onto a verdant field adorned with European Union and German flags — and two sinister-looking structures that faced off against each other no more than 70 yards apart.

(tags: Cycling)

Photo: Dan Winters

The rules changed all the time—sometimes day to day, sometimes hour to hour—and whenever he tried to recite them, people thought, "This guy is nuts." The rules dictated when and where Scott Adams, the chief engineer of the Dilbert comic empire, was allowed to speak. He could neither control them nor predict exactly when they'd go into effect. All he knew was that he'd woken up one morning and found that his voice had turned against him, imposing a set of bizarre restrictions.

(tags: Comics)

(tags: Rhetoric)

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, but before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture often takes place. All of a sudden, people know the game is up: they simply cease to be afraid. It isn’t just that the regime loses its legitimacy: its exercise of power is now perceived as a panic reaction, a gesture of impotence. Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski, in Shah of Shahs, his account of the Khomeini revolution, located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman withdrew. Within a couple of hours, all Tehran had heard about the incident, and although the streetfighting carried on for weeks, everyone somehow knew it was all over. Is something similar happening now?

(tags: Italy)

At the Last Supper, Jesus knew that it would be the last, and that he would be dead by the next day. Each of the Evangelists tells the story differently, but, according to John, Jesus spent the time he had left re-stating to the disciples the lessons he had taught them and trying to prop up their courage. At a certain point, however, he lost heart. “Very truly,” he said to his men, “one of you will betray me.” Who? they asked. And he answered, “It is the one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.” He then dipped a piece of bread into a dish and handed it to Judas Iscariot, a disciple whom the Gospels barely mention before the scene of the Last Supper but who now becomes very important. Once Judas takes the bread, Satan “entered into” him, John says. Is that a metaphor, meaning that Jesus’ prediction enables Judas to betray him? Maybe so, maybe not, but Jesus soon urges him directly. “Do quickly what you are going to do,” he says.

(tags: Christianity)

Joel McHale and John Keister parody a popular beer commercial. Stay cool, everyone!

(tags: Almost_Live)

(tags: Almost_Live)

Ed Wyatt is having a microwave pizza dinner, alone. But that can change.

(tags: Almost_Live)

Why shop in a barn when somebody's foreclosing on the palace? In this case, it is the Oak Palace, and everything must go! Just show your 'Platinum Card' at the door…

(tags: Almost_Live)

Let everybody know just what a BMOC you were back in the glory days while retaining that professional look at the office. Order today, and be cool again tomorrow!

(tags: Almost_Live)

(tags: Banking Texas)

This started when I was trolling our local Craigslist in my continuing attempts to find interesting additions to our furnishings. I’ve decided that people suck at Craigslist, and I decided to provide illustrations to demonstrate this fact.

(tags: Internet_Phenomena)

(tags: Gastronomy)

Jogue, yipe, simoi are three short words for foods in Kim, a language in Sierra Leone that Tucker Childs has been trying, for the past three years, to write down, record and understand. Kim is a dying language, and Dr. Childs a field linguist. From his base here in Tei, a small fishing village on the Waanje River, he canoes up the narrow waterways that cut across the river’s floodplain, and hikes a few miles inland, to where the last Kim communities remain. Based on recordings taken there, he has devised an alphabet and compiled a dictionary and is finishing a book on the grammar.

(tags: Languages)

On 2009-7-11, Malaysians will mark 100 days of Najib Razak's premiership. How do we do it? By asking the simple question - "where is democracy?". After 100 days, we are still searching for it, we are still yearning for it, we are still fighting for it. How do you 'ask' the question? 1. Print it or write it on a piece of paper. Hold it up in front of a place of significance: police station, court complex, government department office, parliament building, state assembly building, local council office, etc…and take a picture. 2. Make it viral .. post the pictures on The 1BLACKMalaysia Facebook group and Facebook page, Email them to 1blackmalaysia.1blackcoffee@gmail.com, Your blog or your Flickr or Picasa or other social networking account with the tag "711whereisdemocracy," Tweet your links to the photos with the tag "#711whereisdemocracy" Once there are enough photos, something will be made out of it - a present for the Prime Minister who is marking his 100th day in power.

(tags: Malaysia)

(tags: Marketing)

(tags: Computer_Science)

(tags: Kyrgyzstan)

It all comes together on the roads. Delhi is a segregated city; an impenetrable, wary city – a city with a fondness for barbed wire, armed guards and guest lists. Though its population now knocks up against 20 million, India’s capital remains curiously faithful to the spirit of the British administrative enclave with which it began: Delhiites admire social rank, name-dropping and exclusive clubs, and they snub strangers who turn up without a proper introduction. The Delhi newspapers pay tribute every morning to the hairstyles and parties of its rich, and it is they, with their high-walled compounds and tinted car windows, who define the city’s aspirations. Delhi’s millionaires are squeamish about public places, and they don’t like to go out unless there are sufficient valets and guards to make them feel at home, and prices exorbitant enough to keep undesirables out.

(tags: Delhi)

Books, documentaries, pamphlets, reorganization strategies and so on have been written about development aid from donor countries and its effectiveness. A simplistic, but often held view is that it is not very effective at achieving fundamental goals, but is better than nothing. Indeed, the amount of development aid per capita, in terms of donors and recipients has risen dramatically over the last 30 years - using 1975 as the approximate end of the direct colonial period with the independence of most Portuguese colonies - and small but perceptible increases in human well being have been seen in least developed countries (those who rely the most on aid). The large increases in total aid flows have resulted from several trends: First, more donors are present, as oil-rich middle eastern states and others have since the 1980s begun to provide a significant portion of development aid. Second, OECD countries have increased both in number and in disbursals.

(tags: Donors)

(tags: Portugal Português)

There’s no small irony to the fact that the announcement of the folding of Vibe magazine occurred the day after the death of Michael Jackson. Though Jackson’s career was on the downside in the United States when Vibe published its first issue in September of 1993, the magazine was the product of a cultural landscape that Jackson had a large hand in crafting. Presenting a glossy and urbane view of urban culture, Vibe became a preeminent site for journalists and scholars chronicling contemporary black popular culture. The lists of writers who can claim a Vibe byline represent the cutting edge of a critical intelligentsia, many of them black writers who would have had few other legitimate options to hone their craft. As such the death of Viberaises questions about the future of popular criticism at a moment when few print or on-line journals see the value of paying for such content or the ability to do so.

(tags: Magazines)

Eight years into the war we were compelled to wage, the ground mission in Afghanistan remains just as brutal as war there has been for centuries. And now, after years of inattention from Washington, this war begins again. On the hunt with the men of Viper company.

(tags: Afghanistan)

Summer movies tend to crush box-office records, dumbfound critics, and be terrible. Our STAFF AND READERS tell us about the movies they know they shouldn’t love.

(tags: Movies)

(tags: New_Jersey)

Inspired by the work of Australian graphic designer Rhett Dashwood (and trying to kill time while recovering from a car accident), British researcher Rachel Young has compiled a New York alphabet using Google Maps, the New York Post reports. She’s never even been to New York, if you can believe it! We think Sesame Street should sponsor her on a stateside diplomatic voyage. We also think the burgeoning font has ransom note potential.

(tags: New_York)

In these Time Magazine polls, Iowa always seems to be on the opposite side of things. And seriously, they must really, really, like their Jon & Kate.

(tags: Iowa)

(tags: Chihuahua)

(tags: Restaurants)

(tags: Accounting)

If Michael Bay is looking for his next Transformer, I have found it in the middle of the Mississippi River. It's a dredge boat named the Dodge Island, and it's eerily anthropomorphic. On its side are two dragarms, giant metallic appendages that are lowered down by winches that make the sound of a whale's cry. When the arms are dropped dozens of feet into the river, its hands—called dragheads—scoop up sediment that has settled at the bottom of the river. It pumps the sand through its arms like a heroin addict injecting through the wrist. The sediment is pushed against gravity and into the tubes, where it's deposited in the ship's hopper.

(tags: Rivers Louisiana)

(tags: International)

It is not without the bitter taste of self-awareness, specifically about the overwhelmingly crass and commercial (and, indeed, downtrodden and dreary, bleakly suburban, and economically grim) nature of the content of this site, that we at NFA embark on our quest to document bad conversions. That said, it is perhaps best that we look at this phenomenon as a delightful yet sad part of our culture's clattering landscape: it is an amusing diversion, it is an economic gestalt, it is a crime of design, it is a confusion to the would-be consumer. Let us rejoice in bad conversions and seek to amuse ourselves with them wherever possible, taking utmost pains to observe the careful, hopeless touches of their renovation and their indelible flourishes of nonsense on our landscape. Embrace blight! We have no other hope.

(tags: Architecture)

(tags: Namibia)

Thanks to the popular 1988 movie Stand and Deliver, many Americans know of the success that Jaime Escalante and his students enjoyed at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. During the 1980s, that exceptional teacher at a poor public school built a calculus program rivaled by only a handful of exclusive academies. It is less well-known that Escalante left Garfield after problems with colleagues and administrators, and that his calculus program withered in his absence. That untold story highlights much that is wrong with public schooling in the United States and offers some valuable insights into the workings — and failings — of our education system.

(tags: Education)

(tags: Middle_East)

(tags: Music)

In Watsonville, within certain circles, it is a well known fact that if your wife or parents kick you out, or if you’re down on your luck, or if you just don’t want to be found, you can go down to the river levee. There, hidden along the banks of the Pajaro River in the brush and high grass, out of sight from the apartment complex windows and the prefab homes with their Dish Network satellites, you’ll find the casitas–little houses–built from tarps, bungee cords, tree limbs and blankets, constructed and tended to by a chronically homeless population of monolingual Spanish speakers. If you have nowhere to go, on the levee it’s possible to get a bite, maybe a beer and, if you get there early enough, even a bed. Most nights, that is, except for the night of March 25.

(tags: NoCal)

(tags: Almost_Live)

Actually not that funny, when you think about it.

(tags: Almost_Live)

Top lobbyists for the banking industry were gathered in a war council. The Obama administration had proposed big changes in financial industry oversight, including a consumer protection commission and regulation of some executives’ paychecks. The lobbyists listened to presentations from big Washington public affairs firms ready to deploy arsenals including television commercials and direct-mail campaigns. But at the end of the meeting, the lobbyists publicly opted to emphasize, if with caveats, their industry’s backing of President Obama’s broader call for reform. Steve Bartlett, president of the Financial Services Roundtable and a participant in the discussion, said in an interview, “This administration has reminded us of the lesson our mother taught us: If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

(tags: Lobbying)

(tags: Almost_Live)

(tags: Almost_Live)

(tags: Almost_Live)

(tags: Almost_Live)

(tags: Almost_Live)

(tags: Brooklyn)

(tags: Brooklyn)

(tags: Lobbying)

An evening view of the city's Downtown skyline offers more than just a beautiful blend of old and new architecture towering over glistening moonlit rivers. If you look high atop the 33-story Grant Building, you see the red neon lights flashing, in International Morse Code, a one-word message: "P-I-T-E-T-S-B-K-R-R-H" Wait, that's not right, said Tom Stepleton, as he decoded the message while waiting to see the city's Fourth of July fireworks show with friends at the Brew House on the South Side. "I was looking at it, and I saw the letter 'K,' which is [dash-dot-dash]," Mr. Stepleton said. "I remembered 'K' because my sister's name starts with 'K.' And I knew that wasn't supposed to be there." Mr. Stepleton, 29, of Squirrel Hill, a graduate student pursuing a degree in computer sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, knew from past viewing that the code should spell "Pittsburgh." He learned Morse code as a teenager, when he became a ham radio operator.

(tags: Pittsburgh)