Descendants is an animated short film by Heiko van der Scherm about two flowers, and the curiosity and treachery between them. In a manner that reminds me of the rabbits of Watership Down, the flowers are anthropomorphized, but still motivated primarily by the plant life cycle.
Starring Whoopi Goldberg. Run time: 14 minutes, 32 seconds.
via Nerdcore
This page on political polls and analysis will be updated daily so bookmark it and return frequently for updated information. The data will grow over time to include sections on key 2010 Senate race polls, 2012 presidential polls, and the data you see today.
What we have now is an analysis of Rasmussen data as it pertains to Barack Obama’s job approval rating on a 3-day basis and on a 7-day basis, public opinion of his performance on the Economy and National Security, healthcare weekly updates, the generic congressional ballot, trust on the issues on ten issues and trust on the issues regarding healthcare alone.
Recent updates are highlighted in pink.
| Analysis of Rasmussen Polls | |
|---|---|
| Last Update | Poll Data and Analysis |
| 3/9/10 | President Obama, Daily Approval Rating |
| 3/6/10 | President Obama on National Security |
| 3/6/10 | President Obama on the Economy |
| 1/13/10 | Democrats vs. Republican, Support on Health-Care |
| 1/11/10 | Heath-Care Public Opinion Tracking |
| 3/9/10 | Congressional Polls – Generic Ballot |
| 2/6/10 | Trust on the Issues |
| 3/9/10 | Weekly Job Approval, Honeymoon Over? |
| 2010 Senate Polls | ||
|---|---|---|
| Last Update | Classification | State Race |
| 3/5/10 | solid R | Delaware Polls (DL) |
| 3/5/10 | leans R | Arizona Polls (AZ) |
| 2/23/10 | leans D | Wisconsin Polls (WI) |
| 2/23/10 | solid R | North Dakota Polls (ND) |
| 2/23/10 | leans R | Florida Senate Polls (FL) |
| 2/21/10 | leans R | New Hampshire Senate Polls (NH) |
| 2/21/10 | leans D | New York Senate Polls (NY) |
| 2/20/10 | leans R | Colorado Senate Polls (CO) |
| 2/19/10 | leans D | California Senate Polls (CA) |
| 2/18/10 | leans R | Ohio Senate Polls (OH) |
| 2/18/10 | leans R | Indiana Senate Polls (IN) | 2/14/10 | tossup | Illinois Senate Polls (IL) |
| 2/13/10 | leans R | Missouri Senate Polls (MO) |
| 2/3/10 | solid R | Arkansas Senate Polls (AR) |
| 2/3/10 | leans R | Nevada Senate Polls (NV) |
| 1/18/10 | win R | Massachusetts Senate Polls (MA) |
| 2/14/10 | leans R | Pennsylvania Senate Polls (PA) |
| 2/3/10 | leans D | Connecticut Senate Polls (CT) |
| 2010 Governor Polls | ||
|---|---|---|
| Last Update | Classification | State Race |
| 2/23/10 | leans R | Texas Governor Race Polls (TX) |
Cabinet-card portrait of Phineas Gage, shown holding the tamping iron
which injured him. From the Gage family of Texas collection.
Even if you’re not a neurologist or a psychotherapist, you may
have heard of Phineas Gage. When a guy survives being impaled with a three-foot
iron rod in the skull, he tends to gain a certain notoriety. What makes
Gage’s case interesting isn’t the fact that he survived, it’s
how he changed after his accident.
A
HOLE IN ONE
Phineas Gage considered himself a lucky man. At the age of 25, he had
a responsible, well-paid job as construction foreman for Rutland and Burlington
Railroad in Vermont. On September 13, 1848, as Gage was packing a load
of explosives into the ground, the charge exploded without warning. The
iron rod he was using to tamp the explosives into the earth flew into
the air with the force and speed of a rocket, hitting Phineas Gage directly
in the head. The 3′7" rod (109 cm), which weighed 13 pounds
(6 kg), entered his left cheek, careened straight through his skull and
brain, and emerged out of the top of his head like a yard-long bullet.
SURVIVOR
They loaded him into an ox cart and took him - still conscious - to
a hotel where some local doctors treated him. They never expected him
to live; he was bleeding horribly and blind in his left eye. Yet, Gage
was still able to walk, talk, even to work. He returned home just ten
weeks after his accident. However, Gage wasn’t unscathed, not by
any means. The iron bar that had practically destroyed the front left
lobe of his brain had irrevocably changed his personality.
I FEEL LIKE A NEW MAN
A few months after the accident he was feeling well enough to return
to work, but his old boss wouldn’t hire him back at the same position
because - even though Gage was almost back to normal physically, emotionally,
and mentally - he was a changed man. Before his accident he’d
been efficient, capable, kind, and polite; now he was foul-mouthed, rude,
and easily annoyed.
A FREAK, ALIVE OR DEAD
Gage never worked as foreman again. He drove coaches and cared for horses
in New Hampshire and in Chile. He exhibited himself (and the rod) as a
curiosity at P.T. Barnum’s Museum in New York. All in all, he lived
13 years after his dreadful accident and died in 1860 after a series of
epileptic seizures.
Gage’s skull (and the rod) are now on display at Harvard Medical
School, where they’ve been studied intensively over the years by
neuroscientists.
FIRST THE GOOD STUFF
Gage’s abrupt personality changes clues neurologists in to the
fact that certain portions of the brain corresponded with personality
functions. And in fact, Gage’s case made the very first brain tumor
removal operation possible in 1885. After studying what had happened to
Gage, the operating physician concluded that lesions or tumors located
in the frontal lobes of the brain didn’t affect the brain’s
ability to take in sense information. Nor did they have an impact on physical
movements or speech. However, such localized lesions or tumors did produce
highly characteristic and unusual personality changes like Gage’s.
In 1894, that same surgeon removed a tumor from a patient’s left
frontal lobe. The patient had complained his thinking was becoming increasingly
slow and dull. Seeing the similarities between this patient’s mental
faculties and Gage’s, the doctor successfully removed the tumor
that lay, just as he expected, in the left frontal lobes of the brain.
THE BIRTH OF THE LOBOTOMY
Gage’s case put scientists on alert. Now they knew that certain
areas of the brain were responsible for certain functions. In 1890, after
a German scientist discovered that dogs were tamer and calmer after their
temporal lobe was removed, the attending doctor at a Swiss insane asylum
began to perform lobotomies on his patients - six in 1892. The patients
who had been hard to handle, restless, and even violent, seemed much calmer
after their surgeries. Lobotomies fell out of favor for a time, but were
revived in the 1930s. Suddenly, a sort of lobotomy frenzy overtook the
American psychiatric world.
THE ICE PICK TRICK
Along
came enterprising physician and neurologist Walter Freeman, a.k.a. the
Lobotomy King, who performed over 3,000 lobotomies from the 1930s to the
1960s. Impatient with the slowness of other brain surgery methods, Freeman
even created the superquick ice pick lobotomy. Instead of surgically opening
a hole in the patient’s head, he put his patients under local anesthesia
and plunged an ice pick through the skull and into the brain. Once in,
Freeman would swing the ice pick swiftly back and forth, severing the
prefrontal lobe. An ice pick lobotomy took only a few minutes. The lobotomy-happy
Freeman would set up production lines at mental hospitals, operating on
as many as ten patients in a single afternoon.
EVERBODY’S DOING IT
Lobotomies were the psychiatric cure-all of choice in the 1940s and 1950s.
They were used not just on uncontrollable patients, but homosexuals, political
radicals, “troublesome” personalities, and other so-called
undesirables who veered from established norms. Even amateur surgeons
got into the act; they performed hundreds of lobotomies without first
performing psychiatric evaluations. Joseph Kennedy ordered a lobotomy
on his “difficult” daughter Rosemary in 1941 without consulting
anyone else in the family. Playwright Tennessee Williams was devastated
to find in 1937 that his schizophrenic sister Rose Williams had been lobotomized,
altering her personality utterly and permanently. The movie, Frances,
is a true story of fiercely independent actress Frances Farmer (as played
by Jessica Lange), who, after her lobotomy is a tragic picture of blandness.
LOBOTOMY TODAY?
Lobotomies are now outlawed in most countries, although they’re
still occasionally performed to control violent behavior in Japan, Australia,
Sweden, and India.
Even though Phineas Gage needed that 1848 accident like a, well, like
a hole in the head, his case revolutionized brain surgery - in good
ways and bad.
__________
The
article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle
John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular
books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure
yet fascinating facts.
If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom
Reader Institute’s books - go ahead and check ‘em out!
I watched the Mitt Romney interview on Fox News Watch with Chris Wallace this morning. I actually watched twice, I was stunned. What a debacle! Apparently, this was his opening gambit in his 2012 Presidential campaign, since he has written a book. Wallace, by far the most skilled of the talking head interviewers, pressed Romney on his two primary claims: that Obama has spent his first year apologizing for being an American, and that his health care plan is awful.
Romney was unable to delineate any major differences between the plan he developed in Massachusetts and Obama’s, except that the latter is a national policy, whereas Romney’s just applied to one state. He claimed that insurance companies bear no responsibility for rising health care costs, and then said that when insurance companies act ‘badly’, actions should be taken against them, but couldn’t clarify what he meant. When he tried to say a difference was that the Massachusetts plan didn’t have a public option, Wallace nearly laughed out loud. I don’t know if Romney thought that Wallace would give him a free ride, since it was on Fox. If he did think that, he might have wanted to watch the show once in awhile or at least prepare.
I readily admit that he is the presumptive nominee. Wall Street adores him. My guess is that if he gets the nomination, it would be a debacle. Name one Bible Belt state that would support him – perhaps Mississippi. He will bring down a number of Republican House seats in this region. He didn’t say anything that I thought was believable in the last campaign. I had made a bet with a friend that if he and HRC won their respective nominations, we could set up lie detectors on both of them, and make a drinking game out of it. But that’s beside the point. Instead of just foisting another nominee upon the American public, it might be worth the party’s time to actually try to figure out who the voters would support. For his part Romney might try being honest, and see how Americans like actually knowing what he would do. But I sort of think he doesn’t even know what he believes any more.
“In 1905, an unknown cameraman filmed a streetcar trip along San Francisco’s Market Street. The following year, the Great Earthquake struck, and he filmed the trip again. This is a five-minute silent film that edits together excerpts of his two films. Footage from the Prelinger Archives, edited by Matt Lake.”
Perhaps the more startling aspect of the video to a modern viewer is the realization that a century ago people walked, ran, drove, rode bicycles and horses wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted in the streets. The first electric traffic lights weren’t invented until a decade after these segments were filmed.
Via ArchaeoBlog.
Virginia’s Republican Attorney General, Kenneth Cuccinelli, dropped a big one regarding collegiate discrimination onto “gay-rights” activists and other Democrats. On Thursday, he sent a letter to state college presidents and other officials, loaded with these words: (Please brace yourselves)
“It is my advice that the law and public policy of the Commonwealth of Virginia prohibit a college or university from including ’sexual orientation,’ ‘gender identity,’ ‘gender expression,’ or like classification, as a protected class within its nondiscrimination policy, absent specific authorization from the General Assembly.”
Once this letter was lead aloud at colleges across Virginia, there was a sudden spike in Cosmopolitan consumption, and lengthy text-messages about bigotry, hatred, and questions about who’s gonna look **Stunniiiiiing!**, at Sunday night’s Oscars.
Jon Blair, CEO of the “gay rights” group Equality Viagina, said that Cuccinelli’s “radical actions are putting Virginia at risk of losing both top students and faculty, and discouraging prospective ones from coming here.” It is common knowledge that homosexuals and higher education go hand-in-hand. Apparently if Cuccinelli doesn’t stop discriminating against anti-discrimination, the fine colleges of Virginia will suddenly be devoid of talent and homosexuality.
Cuccinelli goes on to say that his letter merely stated Virginia law, which prohibits discrimination because of “race, color, religion, national origin, sex, pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, age, marital status, or disability,” but “sexual orientation” is strangely off that list.
In regard to criticisms of this letter, Cuccinelli remarks that:
“None of them suggest our reading of the law is wrong. It’s people who don’t like the policy speaking up because it’s their opportunity to go on the attack.”
Dig this:
The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia legal director Rebecca Glenberg said colleges are bound by U.S. Supreme Court decisions not to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.
A spokesman for the Family Foundation of Virginia, which has opposed expanding state anti-discrimination policies to protect gays, said the criticism of Cuccinelli’s action is unwarranted.
“My understanding is all he’s done is essentially ask the universities to follow the law,” spokesman Chris Freund said. “It’s a little perplexing to see people respond the way they have.”
OMG! You mean that this horrid and hateful man asked people to, gasp!, obey the law that is already written? Someone fetch me a fainting pillow, quickly!
And so goes the continuing saga of the relentless pursuit of equality based on social acknowledgment and forced acceptance of a lifestyle choice that is made by a small percentage of Americans. Someday you’ll break free from the thumb of oppression and bigotry, and all your rights to choose homosexuality will be defended, and your entitlements will be even bigger and better than ever!
Until then, I’ll be watching the Oscars for the eye-candy.
Japanese designer Yoshi Akai creates electronic musical instruments from unusual objects, such as telegraph machines and stylophones. One of his recent works is a three-channel, eight-step synthesizer that can be played by placing different colored LEGO blocks in various positions.
via CrunchGear | Official Website
While in grad school, one of my favorite courses looked at different voting systems and how, in many cases, the choice of system determines who wins the election. And you thought your life was boring?
So, I’m reading USA Today, and it turns out the Oscars are using my favorite system. There are 10 movies up for best film. Everyone chooses their favorite and their runner-up. If nobody gets a majority of first place votes, they eliminate the 10th place movie, give the runner up votes to one of the other 9, then recalculate. If no movie still gets a majority, they eliminate the 9th place movie, etc. I love this system. I thought this system was called Ware’s Voting or Irish Voting, but USA Today doesn’t refer to it by name.
Normally, down here in LA, they just do a runoff between the two highest placed candidates, then do a runoff. Usually, this runoff gets about a 5-10% turnout. It also takes a couple of extra months before a winner is declared. An advantage to Irish Voting is that you’re much more likely to have your vote count, even if you vote for minor-party candidates. Another advantage is that a candidate who isn’t the plurality first ballot winner still has an opportunity to win. Think about the 1992 presidential race. I assume that, for most Clinton and Bush voters, Perot was their second choice. So, if Perot could’ve beaten Bush for 2nd place, he would’ve been elected President. Yet another advantage is that candidates can run for election with less money since they don’t have to worry about funding runoffs.
I’m not positive, but I think some cities on the left coast in the US use this system for local elections. I’m pretty sure that Ireland votes for President using this system.
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Congressman Jim Matheson (D-UT) is a lucky man, or should I say his brother, Scott. The same day Matheson agreed to support the Obama health care plan, Obama appointed Scott Matheson, Jr. to the U.S. 10th District Court. Naturally, the White House denies any connection between these two events. But if the timing of this isn’t fishy enough for you, here are other examples.
Last week, Congressman Joe Sestak (D-PA) made news during his U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania. Obama and the DNC committed themselves to supporting ex-RINO Arlen “Magic Bullet” Specter to keep his seat. Specter was getting clobbered in the polls as he faced a primary fight against Pat Toomey as the GOP candidate. After Specter switched parties and ‘officially’ became a Democrat (giving then their 60 vote majority), he was quickly facing Sestak as a challenger for the Democrat primary. In a very strange announcement last week, Sestak said he was offered jobs by the White House if he dropped out of the race.
In Colorado, it has been reported by the Denver Post that Andrew Romanoff was offered a job specifically by White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Jim Messena, if Romanoff dropped out of his primary race against Sen. Michael Bennet. In both cases, Sestak and Romanoff declined the offers, seeing that this is a good year to campaign against incumbents.
Obama and the Democrats have been pulling out all the stops to get some sort of health care bill passed. Yesterday, Obama once again took to the podium and made another speech. With a backdrop of doctors in white lab coats, and some hideous golden drapes, Obama declared that the timing for talking was over. He called for an “up or down vote”, deliberately avoiding using the term, reconciliation.
Health care has turned into a huge mess for Obama and Democrats in Congress. Months wasted on fruitless negotiations, ‘Cornhusker Kickbacks’ and other bribes have tarnished his once lofty ambition of making public health care the pinnacle of an Obama legacy. Even yesterday, he continued to talk up that aspect, since no president has achieved it since proposed by Truman in the late 1940s.
James Carville, former Clinton political guru, has joined the chorus of GOP analysts comparing health care with Waterloo. It would seem clear now, given the public’s opposition, that Obama will become a political exile whether it passes now or not. But the Democrat leadership has decided that whatever the outcome, they must pass something now.
Even once ardent supporters are turning against him. The anti-war crowd is mad about his expansion of the War in Afghanistan and a whole new war in Pakistan. The anti-Patriot Act crowd is furious over Obama and Congressional Democrats not only extending it another year, but adding to the government’s ability to spy on citizens. Gay Rights and Abortion Right advocates see him as dragging his feet on their needs. Oh, and then there’s that whole unemployment problem. Don’t worry about that one, it was just caused by snow.
So look for more judge, ambassador and agency appointments from the Obama White House over the next few weeks. If Jim Matheson will sell out his vote so his brother Scott can be a judge, I’m sure that plenty of others will have their own price. It is politics as usual in Washington. So how’s that whole hope-y-change-y thing working out for you?