What can the richest man in the world do with his money?

1. Let Microsoft seem to be failing.
2. Let experts criticize Vista.
3. Let public be led astray.
4. Let profits soar.

While experts scorn Vista,
dribble Web 2.0,
tax Bandwidth,
scour China,
fear Google,
raid homes,
Microsoft profits soared to a record high in the first three months of 2007 due to Vista and Office.

Recent press:

Reports abound of security problems with the new Windows Vista operating system. The new operating system is too pricey, requires too many hardware upgrades and doesn’t work. Revenue forecasts [link] for the coming year are below most analysts’ estimates.

Current press:

While most reports beforehand were about problems with Microsoft and Vista, Microsoft’s profit jumped 65 percent, 50 cents per share [link].

Better press:

Microsoft’s latest gains are based on deferred revenue from upgrade coupons during Christmas

While misleading stories remain in our brain, money escapes our pockets. Not Einstein nor Bill Moyers have saved us.

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Update:
In 10 Stunning Facts About Microsoft’s Profits, RawFeed reveals that Microsoft is collecting a profit of $55 million per day.

An old Cherokee told his grandson about a debate.

My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all.

One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.

The grandson thought and then asked, “Which wolf wins?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

what is at stake is our very capacity to reason

Each word in Webster’s is,
when you think about it,
like an old coin handled by millions;

each, with its various meanings,
is a tissue of experiences
and interpretations of our predecessors
crystallized into word.

Charles Johnson

There is overwhelming evidence that we have fewer and fewer truly literate, to say nothing of truly learned, people today.

Among those who have expressed alarm at the decline of literacy and literary culture is Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association and a librarian at California State University in Fresno. “It’s appalling — it’s really astounding,” he said.

“There is a failure in the core values of education,” he said. “They’re told to go to college in order to get a better job, and that’s OK. But the real task is to produce educated people.”

In a grouchy essay in the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley despairingly wrote. “We have virtually institutionalized ‘minimal competence’ and mediocrity in our schools, our books, even in our thought about education and literature.

what is at stake
is our very capacity to reason

Each word in Webster’s is,
when you think about it,
like an old coin handled by millions;

each, with its various meanings,
is a tissue of experiences
and interpretations of our predecessors
crystallized into word.

Each sentence
is a basic unit of logic or reasoning.

Technique is vision.
Style is sense.

And once you move to larger units of expression — the novel or story — you see beyond all doubt that fiction is not simply about “entertainment” or escapism, but is one of the most important means at our disposal for the ongoing chore of making sense of the world of consciousness and culture.

Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, in his 1970s essay, “Culture Now,” reminded us that,

“No community altogether knows its own heart, and by failing in this knowledge a community deceives itself on the one subject concerning which ignorance means death. The remedy is art itself. Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of mind, the corruption of consciousness.”

A new grouchy essay:
Charles Johnson, a National Book Award and MacArthur Fellowship winner, has taught literature at the University of Washington for 31 years. Maybe you can’t rant to the illiterate, yet his rhythmic rant continues

Infant comfort:
New design offers comfort and safety acknowledged in maternity hospitals and homes throughout Europe.

Babies adopt a natural position and “it is amazing to see how quickly they calm and relax.”

Lightweight when filled with water… strong… similar to being in a tummy.

Tummy Tub

Commonly used growth charts wrongly classify healthy babies as underweight.

Overfeeding babies may be a path to obesity.

“American people don’t need to be told elaborate tales…”, said Jessica Lynch speaking at a congressional hearing on the use of misleading information.

Ms Lynch criticised the Pentagon, saying: “I’m still confused why they lied and tried to make me into a legend.”

Ms Lynch said the real heroes were those who died in the attack and those who rescued her.

Initial reports also suggested that Ms Lynch had been abused after she came round in the hospital.

She said the reports were lies: she had been treated well and the Iraqis had tried to return her to US forces.

“The nurses tried to soothe me and return me,” she told the hearing, adding that she objected to the way in which the US military had portrayed her.

Mark Leiren-Young interviewed Kurt Vonnegut.

None of these quotes have been published before.

But first, Mark comments about achieving his 1990 interview while nervously but thoroughly preparing:

“He said, ‘Hello.’ He may have apologized for the delay. I can’t be sure because that was when he shook my hand and smiled at me. His hand was warm. His grip was friendly, not too tight.

“I realized I should probably call the whole thing off, that I didn’t want to interview him after all. What if he wasn’t the person I wanted him to be? What if he hated me? What if I said something stupid? I wanted to go home and take that warm handshake with me. But it was too late.

“I’d never been better prepared for an interview before and I’ve never been better prepared since.

“When he’d finish speaking, I’d stare blankly, then look down at my list of prepared questions, decide they were stupid and try to come up with something else.”

Vonnegut on easy street

“I had a good job at General Electric as a public relations man. And just writing on weekends I was suddenly making so much more than General Electric was willing to pay me for a whole year. I had a wife and two kids. I didn’t hate General Electric. I admired them back then, I don’t think much of them now. But, anyway, I quit and moved to Cape Cod. That was in 1951. And the magazines were knocked out of business finally by TV, about 1960. The magazines finally died and so I was without a means of supporting my family, but we had been on easy street.”

Vonnegut where the money was

TV. “When TV was just starting out, it was possible for an outsider like me to send in a script and they might produce it. And the industry was very briefly in New York City and so I did sell some TV scripts, three or four of them. One of them was the first dramatic part that Sammy Davis Junior ever had.

Vonnegut on Vonnegut

He barely paused before continuing. “See, I was born in 1922. So was Norman Mailer. And so — roughly speaking — were Gore Vidal, Irwin Shaw and Truman Capote. And we’re the last generation of American writers or Canadian writers whose brains were marinated in books….

Then Mark asked, “one of the only questions I was actually proud of, a question he had to take a beat to think about.”

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Update:

Vonnegut also said,

“With a liar for president, what is a novelist by comparison?”

Another insight of Vonnegut outside of mainstream tributes and obits, published at the Hartford Advocate.

“One thing I noticed about Vonnegut was his capacity to listen to a person without condescension or impatience. He was game for any conversational subject, from the weather to Bush.

“I got the impression that Vonnegut stayed alive these last four years simply in hopes that he’d live long enough to see Bush and Cheney hang. His anger burned at the thought of these “power-drunk chimpanzees” who treat soldiers “like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.”

Here’s serious and unusual photography by Scott Mutter where he builds “A More Perfect World”.

This example is as if the corporate high rise is fused as the cap of our civilization…

For me, this photo might summarize our age…

Scott Mutter calls his collection of photomontage Surrational Images.

“Sometimes I spend weeks in the darkroom working on a picture, changing it, adjusting it… and when it finally comes together exactly right, I feel a rush going through my body… a signal that it’s finished, and somehow complete and ready to take on an existence of its own.”

Remember when you were in math class at school? You may be reluctant to admit it, but perhaps you enjoyed it at least occasionally while you accidentally learned stuff.

But for too many young people, the process of learning can be damaged by excessive stress that accumulates to reduce ability.

Family turmoil and other problems cause physical changes in the brain that make learning more difficult – especially math.

Adolescents who are chronically exposed to family turmoil, violence, noise, poor housing or other chronic risk factors show more stress-induced physiological strain on their organs and tissues than other young people. The cardiovascular systems of youths who are exposed to chronic and multiple risk factors are compromised. When stressed by a mental arithmetic problem, the cardiovascular systems of adolescents who had been exposed to chronic risk factors responded less actively.

In Developmental Psychology, psychologist Gary Evans published the first study to look at how maternal responsiveness may protect against the build-up of stress, as well as the first to look at cardiovascular recovery from stress in children or youths. [story]

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Update:
When a person’s under stress or injured, the adrenal gland releases cortisol to help restore the body’s functions to normal. But the hormone’s effects are many and varied, lowering the activity of the immune system, helping create memories with short-term exposure, while impairing learning if there’s too much for too long. [new research]

What are we thinking?

Young offenders transferred to the adult system are later arrested for violent and other crimes 34 percent more frequently.

State-run programs for juvenile offenders achieve poor results.

John Dvorak asks,
“As usual, what should be obvious if you think about it for half a second took a study to prove.”

“The politics of crime are far behind the science of criminality.” says says criminologist Jeffrey A. Fagan of Columbia University.

“Even given problems in the juvenile-justice system, transfer to the adult-justice system produces even worse results,” says the Centers for Disease Control.

Beginning around 35 years ago, increases in violent juvenile crime spurred many states to modify laws so that young people could be tried as adults for serious crimes. By 2004, 44 states and the District of Columbia permitted judges to transfer juveniles to adult-criminal courts.

No national data exist on the number of juvenile offenders prosecuted as adults, but there’s no evidence that shifting some young offenders to the adult-justice system prevents or reduces violence in the general population of children and teenagers.

We’re using straw

The estimate is that one bale of straw is 200 dollars worth of electricity or about 200 dollars worth of natural gas.

The cost of heating with wheat straw is similar to that of using [local] coal but straw fuel is about 90 percent less expensive than heating with either natural gas or electricity.

We put 16 bales on a conveyer, the conveyer feeds them into the system. We have a shredder that shreds the bales into finer particles and delivers it into the primary combustion chamber where we essentially do a low temperature burn, or create smoke.

Then we take that smoke and send it into a secondary chamber, or afterburner, and we burn it in there at two thousand degrees Fahrenheit which then means we get full and complete combustion, clean gas that we then move over into our heat exchanger to heat water. The water, in turn, heats the facilities.

We’re [saving money and making use of what's on hand without damaging the environment].

A new “ongoing Pulitzer-caliber project” compares advertising vs. reality in the fast food sector.

“Each item was purchased, taken home, and photographed immediately. Nothing was tampered with, run over by a car, or anything of the sort. It is an accurate representation in every case.”

“Fast Food: Ads vs. Reality” – a positive use of the Internet.

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Update:
It’s a “myth” that fast food meals are the same around the world.

Looking at french fries and fried chicken at McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken in 35 countries over the past two years showed high levels of industrially-produced trans fatty acids in Eastern Europe – between 29 and 34 percent.

McDonald’s sells trans fat levels of 20 percent in Oman compared with 15-16 percent in London.

Yo Ivanhoe! at the Rake Today creates marvelous original snippets of writing, like this gem:

At a dusty roadside stop somewhere in Montana, where there was a statue of the Virgin Mary and vases full of bleached, plastic flowers, an old man, who was leaning against the front of a pickup truck and having a smoke, pointed with his cigarette towards the range that ran all the way down the valley and addressed one sentence to me:

“A choir’s rumored to be lost in them mountains.”

The Internet Crime Complaint Center, a partnership betweeen the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center issued a report for the year 2006.

1. Auction Fraud 44.9%
2. Non-Delivery 19%
3. Check Fraud 4.9%
4. Card Fraud 4.8%
5. Computer Fraud 2.8%
6. Confidence Fraud 2.2%
7. Financial Center Fraud 1.6%
8. Identity Theft 1.6%
9. Investment Fraud 1.3%
10. Child Pornography 1.0%

[link]