“Good readers, and a bit of company in the evenings.”
Yes.
Quote by Chandrahas Choudhury, in the post he wrote to commemorate the one-year anniversary of his taking over The Middle Stage.
Do click and read the piece; he has some moving things to say about what blogging has done for him as a writer.
From Diana Peterfreund, who modestly titles her post “10 Things I Know About My Writing” — in reality it’s a generous share for aspiring fiction writers.
My favorite: #7, “It’s a thousand times easier to write a new book than to sell a bad book.”
lol
A Dutch bricks & mortar bookseller has implemented Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology in two of its stores to help it manage inventory — and to help customers shop for books.
I find both applications interesting, but it’s the latter that truly rocks, and here’s why: once you’ve used Amazon’s search capabilities, hunting for a book in a traditional shop seems awfully cumbersome.
So to my way of thinking, any retailer that’s maintaining bricks & mortar outlets should be looking at ways to implement the customer-friendly aspects of online shopping in its physical locations. Being able to search for a product on an in-store kiosk is a prime example. Combine that with the capability to pinpoint exactly where that product is in the store and you’ve mimicked one of the major conveniences of an online store.
I mean, how many times have you stood in line at a customer service desk in a bookstore, you finally get a clerk to help you, the clerk looks up a title on a computer, leads you to the shelf, and then you stand there while the clerk spends another five minutes hunting for the book?
That’s pretty much the brick & mortar book-shopping experience.
Whereas with Amazon, you run a search on a title, click on “add to shopping cart” and you’re done. Don’t even have to enter your credit card info if you’ve set up an account.
The disadvantages of online shopping are that you can’t actually touch an item before you buy, and you usually have to pay shipping. Brick & mortars win hands down on those two counts. Bricks & mortars also have human beings to give you face time should the technology fail you, which is a huge plus when you need it.
So why not build on those strengths, but at the same time become more like an online store?
Another example: why shouldn’t I be able to shop at Gap.com from within a conventional Gap store?
No reason, except that Gap execs haven’t considered the possibility — or grasped what it would mean to its customers . . .
(RFID story found via Publisher’s Lunch.)
Found this morning via Instapundit: a blog about neuroscience and metacognition written for lay people. I’ve just added it to my blogroll after reading a post there about a political blogger’s decision to close comments.
The article argues, based on research on mirror neurons (which I’ve blogged about here) and other phenomenon that avoiding unhappy people, and surrounding yourself with people who exhibit qualities you want to cultivate in yourself, is a highly rational and constructive thing to do.
One piece of advice you often find in self-help books on personal transformation is that sometimes you need to drop your old friends and find new ones. It turns out that bit of folk wisdom may actually have a basis in science . . .
Last month, I posted about a study that looked at people who think they’re lucky. The study found that self-described “lucky” people don’t actually beat the odds in an objective sense. But because they tend to be extroverted and open, they’re more likely to pick up cues and recognize opportunities, so they do have “luckier” lives.
Now comes a new twist, in a news story about a Powerball ticket worth $853,492 that has expired, unclaimed.
Somebody out there was lucky. But they missed an opportunity, and that made all the difference.
(There’s another unclaimed ticket for the same amount, purchased in Colorado, that expires at midnight tonight . . . )
If you live up in the Northeastern U.S., and get out into the country at all, you may have noticed that the skunk cabbage has begun to leaf out. It’s one of the earliest woodland plants to contribute any serious green, and always looks so bright and fresh this time of year.
Skunk cabbage is as fascinating as it is purty. Damn Interesting has an article up now by Cynthia Wood about how skunk cabbage blossoms exhibit thermogenesis — they are able to generate heat. It’s thought that the heat helps attract insect pollinators.
Here’s another article on the same phenomenon, with more details on other members of the arum family.
And here’s a third article with more general information on skunk cabbage, including a bit about how it has been used as a medicinal herb and, by Native Americans, as a food plant (it needs to be dried to be rendered edible, otherwise it’s so high in calcium oxalate that it would raise blisters in your mouth!)
Here’s the other piece of the tax facts puzzle (courtesy The Heritage Foundation).
Washington will spend $23,760 per household in 2006 — the highest inflation-adjusted total since World War II, and $6,500 more than in 2001. The federal government will collect $20,044 per household in taxes. The remaining $3,716 represents this year’s budget deficit per household, which, along with all prior government debt, will be dumped in the laps of our children.
The article then gives a breakdown of that $23,760 per-household spend.
From Saturday’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required):
* The standard income tax code is now estimated to be 60,000 pages;
* Last year, 60 percent of filers hired professional preparers;
* Psychiatrists “are trying to get ‘fear of tax filing’ designated as an official medical disability;”
* The Tax Foundation estimates that tax compliance costs the US economy $250 billion annually.
In the comments a couple of days ago, the John Earle left a link to Americans for Fair Taxation, an organization that advocates a consumption tax. I find the idea intriguing, but it seems almost too radical (it would require the repeal of the 16th Amendment, for instance, and predicting its effects on spending and tax revenues strikes me as well-nigh impossible to do). I also have questions about the logistics. For instance, a proposed rebate would serve as a way to exempt people below the poverty line from paying the tax. It would seem to me that proving you qualify for this would require some significant paperwork. Can we really expect our poorest citizens to cope with that? Certainly we’d have to put a huge bureaucracy in place to manage that facet of the scheme alone . . .
The Journal editorial proposes that we modify the Alternative Minimum Tax and use that as a kind of flat tax. Perhaps that would work.
We definitely need to do something. I’d heartily support any politician who showed some leadership on this issue . . . well, almost any politician, LOL
[tags] income tax, consumption tax, flat tax [/tags]
In this case, it was a Golden Retriever’s nose. Her name is Wrigley, and she knew something wasn’t quite right with her human companion, Steve Werner.
Steve’s doctor hadn’t been able to figure out why he’d been experiencing some troubling symptoms like ringing in his ear and a feeling of unease.
Then in July, Wrigley started to behave strangely.
Every day when Werner would curl up next to his beloved canine at his Brentwood home, she would turn, focus on his right ear and sniff doggedly.
“I thought it was just a friendly sniff,” Werner said. “But after four or five days, I realized she seemed to be focusing on something. At some point, I noticed she was always sniffing at the opening of my right ear. She would set herself up and intently smell my ear.”
One day, Werner was watching TV when a feature about cancer-sniffing dogs grabbed his attention. What he heard propelled him back to his doctor’s office.
A subsequent MRI revealed a non-malignant tumor that has since been surgically removed.
You may have heard similar accounts, or that some people are training dogs to screen people for cancers. The thinking is that cancerous cells emit chemicals that are not present in healthy cells.
I had to laugh at one part of the article, though. It describes a study conducted by the Pine Street Foundation in California. For the study,
[R]esearchers collected breath samples in plastic tubes from 83 healthy volunteers, 55 lung cancer patients and 31 breast cancer patients.
The tubes were numbered and placed in plastic boxes and presented to the dogs, five at a time. If the dog detected cancer, it was trained to sit or lie down. Researchers determined that the dogs were accurate 99 percent of the time in detecting lung cancer and 88 percent of the time in detecting breast cancer.
But then the article goes on to say “Not everyone is wagging their tails about the dog studies.”
The results of the lung and breast cancer study were too good to be true, said Donald Berry, chairman of the department of applied biostatistics and applied mathematics at the University of Texas-M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
“It’s essentially impossible that anything could be that good,” he said.
lol
I dunno, Don. I’ve definitely encountered some things that are that good!!!
Banana worm bread! Rootworm beetle dip! Chocolate chirpie chip cookies (the chirps are from the crickets, of course)!
And don’t miss the insect nutritional value table :-)
(Via Improbable Research.)
