“The left hand of a dead man dipped in a milk pail causes cream.” — Irish saying

From: Ptak Science Books

“[…] Mr. Conway's The Prevention and Correction of Left-Handedness in Children appeared in 1936, at a time in which he and others saw left-handedness as a deterrent to succeeding in the newly industrialized world. The pamphlet emphasizes the training of children from infancy to overcome left-handedness, which came as a result of parental 'indifference,' who were unable to 'realize the seriousness of the handicap,' which was a ‘sinisitrial condition,’ a ‘disease’ that needed to recognized along the same lines as ‘rickets and pneumonia and colic.’ Much needed to be done to ‘stamp out the newly recognized disease, the curse of left-handedness.’”
— Ptak Science Books
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“Historically, the left side, and subsequently left-handedness, was considered negative. The word ‘left’ itself derives from the Anglo-Saxon word lyft, ‘weak.’ In Ancient Greek both words meaning ‘left’ were euphemisms: the word ἀριστερός, aristerós (the standard word in Modern Greek as well) is derived from ἂριστος, áristos, best,’ and the word εὺώνυμος, euōnymos, ‘of good name,’ is another euphemism used in lieu of ‘ill-named.’
     The Latin adjective sinister/sinistra/sinistrum originally meant ‘left’ but took on meanings of ‘evil’ or ‘unlucky’ by the Classical Latin era, and this double meaning survives in European derivatives of Latin, and in the English word ‘sinister.’
     Alternatively, sinister comes from the Latin word sinus meaning ‘pocket’: a traditional Roman toga had only one pocket, located on the left side. [...]
     In Irish, deas means "right side" and "nice". Ciotóg is the left hand and is related to ciotach meaning 'awkward'; ciotógach (kyut-OH-goch) is the term for left-handed. In Welsh, the word chwith means 'left,' but can also mean 'strange,' 'awkward,' or 'wrong.' [...]
     The Scots term for left-handedness is corrie fistit. The term can be used to convey clumsiness. [...]
     In Sanskrit, the word वाम (waama) stands for both 'left' and 'wicked.'”
— Wikipedia
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“truth” is a four letter word… believe me

Photo: Michael Hale

“[…] Jeff Leen, the Washington Post’s assistant managing editor for investigations, begins his renewed attack on the late Gary Webb’s Contra-cocaine reporting with a falsehood.
     Leen insists that there is a journalism dictum that ‘an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof.’ But Leen must know that it is not true. Many extraordinary claims, such as assertions in 2002-03 that Iraq was hiding arsenals of WMDs, were published as flat-fact without ‘extraordinary proof’ or any real evidence at all, including by Leen’s colleagues at the Washington Post.
     A different rule actually governs American journalism – that journalists need ‘extraordinary proof’ if a story puts the U.S. government or an ‘ally’ in a negative light but pretty much anything goes when criticizing an ‘enemy.’
     […] Leen is trying to fool you when he presents himself as a ‘responsible journalist’ weighing the difficult evidentiary choices. He’s just the latest hack to go after Gary Webb, which has become urgent again for the mainstream media in the face of ‘Kill the Messenger,’ a new movie about Webb’s ordeal.
     What Leen won’t face up to is that the tag-team destruction of Gary Webb in 1996-97 – by the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times – represented one of the most shameful episodes in the history of American journalism.
     The Big Papers tore down an honest journalist to cover up their own cowardly failure to investigate and expose a grave national security crime, the Reagan administration’s tolerance for and protection of drug trafficking into the United States by the CIA’s client Contra army.”
— Robert Parry, Consortiumnews.com
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“James Risen is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. He's also currently under subpoena, possibly facing jail time, because of his reporting.
     Specifically, he's being investigated because of an article on a CIA ploy to hinder Iran's quest for a nuclear bomb that went epically sideways and may have actually helped Iran along. 60 Minutes ran a great story on him this weekend, during which they cited a well-known statistic: the Obama administration has prosecuted more national security ‘leakers’ than all other presidencies combined, eight to three.
     But the story also prompted me to look into another figure, which is less well known and potentially more dramatic. Partially because of press freedom concerns, sentencing in media leak cases has historically been relatively light. Not so under President Obama. When it comes to sending these folks to jail, the Obama administration blows every other presidency combined out of the water – by a lot. By my count, the Obama administration has secured 526 months of prison time for national security leakers, versus only 24 months total jail time for everyone else since the American Revolution. It's important – and telling – to note that the bulk of that time is the 35 years in Fort Leavenworth handed down to Chelsea Manning.
     It takes a bit of digging to find all this information. As my public service for the day, here's a rundown of every leak case, the sentence (if there was one), and its current disposition.”
— Gabe Rottman, ACLU
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i did not know that #1

Photo: Michael Hale

How long it takes Apple to garner revenues of $42,000 — 9 seconds

How much Bill Gates earns during that 9 seconds — $4,250.00

How many people die from gunshots each day in the USA — 85
That’s one death every 2 minutes

United States motor vehicle deaths per day in the 2012 —  92

Average number of US residents who die from flu-related infections each day — 113

Average number of deaths per day in the US caused by cigarette smoking — 1,300

Number of air transport accidental deaths, on average, per day in the US — 2

— Thanks to the fine example of  Harper's Index

"thesaurus of obfuscation"

From: JF Ptak Science Books

“In the entirety of the text of Social and Behavioral Factors in the Implementation of Local Survival and Recovery Activities (written by William Chenault, Richard Engler and Peter G. Nordhie in August 1967) there is little evidence that its authors fought to rid themselves of their Thesaurus of Obfuscation. A dissected version of their effort would've made for good, clean fun, adding their bits to a Menckenian database of extraordinarily-written governmentese, but since all of this involved surviving thermonuclear war, the 'fun' part is obliterated. […]

     It is assumed that the character of the post-attack country would be pretty much the same as it was before thermonuclear war, and that we all want to return there. The report states that one of the most important elements of that society is the military and its capacity to protect people and industry. Therefore the survivors of nuclear war must be induced to work on a national scale to maintain the military and thus the stability of whatever was left of society, in spite of the fact that 'in the heaviest attack, the loss of familiar landmarks, relationships and dependencies would be unsettling to survivors.'  (I'm not sure what 'dependencies' relates to, whether they are child or the need for pharmaceuticals or the need to watch the news on television. This is unclear.)
     This continues on and on, a cascade of some wincing ideas tumbling over themselves, settling into a confusing mist of wording and logic that is difficult to translate. Perhaps that was the inention. Perhaps not. There's not much left in the bottom of a smoking, radioactive hole, except for smoke and radiation.”
— JF Ptak Science Books
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exponential decay

Still from gif: "Mutant Baby" by Zolloc

“[…] Dr. Beth Bell, director of the CDC's National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, testified before the committee, making a case for increased funding. Her department, which has led the US intervention in West Africa, was hit with a $13 million budget cut as a result of the cuts in 2013. Though appropriations increased in 2014 and are projected to rise further in 2015, the agency hasn't yet made up for the deficit—according to Bell, $100 million has already gone toward stopping the Ebola epidemic, and much more is needed. The United Nations estimates it will take over $600 million just to get the crisis under control.
     Bell also argued that the epidemic could have been stopped if more had been done sooner to build global health security. International aid budgets were hit hard by the sequester, reducing global health programs by $411 million and USAID by $289 million. 'If even modest investments had been made to build a public health infrastructure in West Africa previously, the current Ebola epidemic could have been detected earlier, and it could have been identified and contained,' she said during her testimony. 'This Ebola epidemic shows that any vulnerability could have widespread impact if not stopped at the source.'"
— Susie Madrak, Crooks and Liars
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“WASHINGTON -- The U.S. military operations targeting Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria have already cost taxpayers between $780 and $930 million, according to an analysis by an independent think tank.
     The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments issued a new report Monday assessing how much the military campaign has already cost (through Sept. 24) and how much more will likely be spent in the coming months.
     CSBA estimates that if the current pace of operations continues, the United States could spend between $200 and $320 million a month, in a conservative estimate assuming a ‘moderate level of air operations and 2,000 deployed ground forces.’”
— Amanda Terkel, Huffington Post
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"[...] and God created exponential growth [...]"

Source images: Ebola Virus, Scott Camazine via Huffington Post;
Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel fresco The Creation of Adam, Sharp About...

anthropomorphs

From: Ptak Science Books

“The concept of high-tech machines shaped like humans has been with us for the better part of a century. The word ‘robot’ itself, derived from the old Slavonic word rabota, meaning ‘servitude’, dates back to 1921, when it appeared in the Czech play R U R (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek. Then, the robots in the play were, of course, played by human actors, and thus humanoid in appearance. Yet this early work set the stage for what form robots should take in our imagination; from the novels and short stories of Isaac Asimov to the androids of the movies, they have, for the most part, looked, acted, and even experienced the world like us. [...]"

— Michael Belfiore, aeon
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“I’ve addressed the ideas of early mechanical men elsewhere in this blog (just enter 'robot' in the site search box at left and you'll find two or three dozen related posts on the subject), but failed to include this very fine and early example by William Heath in his March of Intellect series (printed from 1825-1829). He was particularly bitter about what he saw as an aristocracy of official ruination, and created an unusual steam-driven mechanical man with a book-driven intellect that swept up the great ‘rubbish’ and ‘dust’ of society. At the top of this early robot (preceding the invention of the term by about 100 years) was a pile of books with a ‘crown of many towers,’ which was London University, beneath which was a set of gas-light eyes, iron arms, and legs made of printer's tools, sweeping away useless and insulting lawyers and jurists and their legal wigs and obsolete and repetitive rules, medical quacks, and the dust of other official abuses, ‘sweeping rubbish from the land.’”
— Ptak Science Books
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