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...memories...   original article here

Point for Miranda - Mockingjay supposedly good for teens ... ?

Original story here.

 

If, as an adult, you saw The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1 last weekend, you might have been a little disturbed. The third installment of the Hunger Games film franchise—in which protagonist Katniss Everdeen struggles with PTSD while simultaneously becoming the official face of a rebellion—is by far the most evocative of real-world inhumanity. It’s a truly upsetting beginning to a two-movie reckoning, but it’s mostly because this isn’t Saving Private Ryan—it’s a story meant for teens.

But as its source text might have signaled to incoming audiences, Mockingjay’s violence is something different altogether. Its brutality is partly why the book has been so relatively unpopular within the fandom; running the gamut from public executions by firing squad to prisoner torture and fear conditioning to hospital bombings, the ugly cruelties of this part of the story blur the line between critical fantasy and real life situations more than its predecessors. Like all great dystopian fiction, The Hunger Games is a chilling allegory for the despair of the present, and from Syria to Gaza to Ferguson, Mockingjay echoes a lot of awful real-world scenarios.

And then one has to level with the reality that 13-year-olds are reading, and watching, right along with us. Despite its young adult genre, Mockingjay—the PG-13 rating of which seems extremely charitable—seems like it might contain too much suffering for young people, whose worlds are already barraged with gratuitously violent media. It’s easy to understand how scenes in which ragged, injured children are being given medical treatment alongside the corpses of their friends (only to be fire-bombed minutes later in a sick power play against Katniss) could be traumatic for younger viewers, especially since recent studies have begun second-guessing the previously held notion that violent media has no negative affect on viewers.

But parents ought to sleep soundly, because for the most part, that worry isn’t founded in any reality at all—in fact, the chilling barbarism contained in Mockingjay likely has the opposite effect of a Kill Bill or Grand Theft Auto (if, indeed, they desensitize kids to violence or make them more aggressive): When it resonates at all, Mockingjay is probably breeding more empathy, not less.

Disturbing Stories Can Help Young People Define Ethical Boundaries

The first thing you have to understand is that the way adolescents process violent media is not in the way adults might worry they do. For teenagers in particular, according to psychologist Gayani DeSilva, the ritual of consuming disturbing stories like The Hunger Games is extremely constructive. A child and adolescent psychiatrist at St. Joseph Hospital who also works with teens in the prison systems of California and New Mexico, DeSilva says that adolescents are particularly attuned to this sort of media because it helps them define their own ethical boundaries.

“The teenage years are a time to question social mores … and develop and commit to their individual set of morals and values,” says DeSilva. “Teens actively look for a better way to do things. Coupled with a broad belief in their invincibility, they truly believe they can change their world.”
What’s more, she says, violence that adults see as being symbolic of deeply scarring real-world events don’t entirely have the same effect on young people, who instead see them as reflections of the internal stakes young people grapple with as they approach adulthood.

“I don’t think this kind of violence is desensitizing as much as it is reflective of their id,” DeSilva says. “I think it does help teens understand their primitive process, their struggle of determining where they take a stand on how to interact with the world, and how to resolve those violent fantasies of their own.”

This clinical assessment holds up from a historical perspective as well. Steve Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood, points out that almost all young children “seem to be able to distinguish between ‘real’ violence and its visual representation” in entertainment, and that “middle-class kids are more knowledgeable [now] than in the past, and have been [more] exposed to violent imagery on the news, in newspapers, as well as through fictional imagery.”

But he also says that the success of disturbing media like Mockingjay isn’t just the product of a cynical youth; it can be viewed as an unconscious collective response to how adults perceive children in general.

“As children’s lives have, in certain respects, become more constrained (with school pressures intensified, geographical mobility limited, outdoor time truncated, and play more highly supervised), movies have compensated by challenging the restraints on the young and empowering their young protagonists,” Mintz says. “In this sense, violence in film can be seen as a reaction against the ‘juvenilization’ of the young in a culture that still seeks to enclose the young within a restrictive cultural category that offers few ways for them to demonstrate their growing maturity or express their autonomy.”

That said, just as recent studies have discovered an individual’s personality matters when linking aggression with violent entertainment, both DeSilva and Mintz also stipulate that context and individual circumstance matter immensely when discussing teens as a viewing demographic. DeSilva, for one, explains that underprivileged and traumatized adolescents, unlike some of their peers, have completely different emotional toolsets and therefore approach entertainment differently, and possibly negatively. “Teens with histories of trauma operate at a much younger age when it comes to processing emotional, developmental, and cognitive stimuli,” she says. “They may relate directly to the reality of the violence and become more depressed and prone to further demoralizing and oppressive feelings.”

Finding Meaning in The Hunger Games’ Bleak World

So what are tweens paying attention to in The Hunger Games movies, if not just yet how much District 11 resembles a plantation, or how a tortured Peeta seems to have been delivered straight from the gates of Guantanamo Bay?

Culture and communications researchers at Drexel University conducted a study last year on how teens interacted with The Hunger Games and found evidence to support DeSilva’s observations on teenagers’ optimism and perceived invincibility. In a more qualitative study, they processed over 100,000 tweets to examine the ways in which teens process and adapt the language of dystopian YA into everyday interactions on social media. Their findings, collected around the release of Catching Fire last fall, indicate that the violence only seems to enhance the meaningfulness of role-playing in online fan communities.

“We found that, particularly with younger ages, preteens and young teens were using the language of The Hunger Games—everything from protecting the family to having to enter an arena—to describe their experiences in everyday life,” says Allison Novak, one of the study’s authors. Novak’s study also included corroborating datasets around The Dark Knight, among other teen-fandom-heavy movies, and found similar language patterns. “Sometimes their uses seem kind of silly, or they’re just being dramatic, which fits in with what we already know about teenagers, but at the same time, it’s doing something healthy: It’s giving them a vocabulary to articulate things that are stressful.”
It goes further. Ever seen those weird fan accounts on Twitter that tweet as fictional characters?

Those are part of the identification that allow teens (the typical account owners) to, as Novak says, “supplement their everyday experiences with roleplaying.” Beyond specific fan accounts, Twitter has also been the breeding ground where young adults are using hashtag rhetoric, like the nonprofit Harry Potter Alliance’s #MyHungerGames economic inequality awareness campaign, to synthesize their own realities with those in dystopian fiction. Once used to wrestle with the internal strife of adolescence, now the Hunger Games allegory creates a space for frank confessions of childhood hunger, poverty, and worker abuse in everyday life.

So, relax—or better, rejoice—at all the tragic gore disturbing your kid in Mockingjay. We have to be careful about the kinds of media violence we call “gratuitous,” because depending on the context of both the graphic content and the young person viewing it, it’s possible it’s not as inappropriate as one might think. Moreover, it will continue to positively affect its younger audiences well into adulthood, when atrocities come to mean something else entirely.

War is hell, but if you’ll recall, so is growing up.

Expensive Hat - Napoleon’s famed two-cornered hat sold at auction for $2.4 million

Original article here. I wonder if my Grandpa's red cap or my Blue Jay's hat will ever be worth anything?

Napoleon Bonaparte’s trademark bicorn hat sold at auction near Paris on Sunday for roughly $2.4 million, according to news reports.

A South Korean collector, whose name was not released, paid nearly five times more than the minimum price set for the two-cornered, black felt hat that was apparently worn by the French emperor during the Battle of Marengo in 1800, the BBC reported.



Jean-Pierre Osenat of the Osenat auction house in Fontainebleau, France said the hat, now weathered from its age, is part of a collection belonging to the Prince of Monaco, whose family is distantly related to Napoleon. Prince Albert II said the family decided to sell the items in the collection “rather than see them remain in the shadows,” the Associated Press reported.

Napoleon wore it and others made by French hatmaker Poupard sideways, rather than with the points facing front and back, so he could easily be spotted on the battlefield, an official with the Osenat auction house told Reuters.

Napoleon’s battlefield style was depicted in the painting “Napoleon Crossing the Alps” by Jacques Louis David from 1801. Credit: Getty Images

“He understood at that time that the symbol was powerful,” said Alexandre Giquello, who works at the auction house, told the AP. ”On the battlefields, his enemies called him ‘The Bat’ because he has that silhouette with this hat.” During the emperor’s 15-year reign in the early 19th century, Napoleon reportedly went through about 120 hats — 19 of which of are currently in museums around the world.

The auction of the hat concluded a three-day sale of about 1,000 other Napoleon artifacts, including dozens of medals, decorative keys, documents, a jeweled sword, a Russian caviar spoon and a bronze eagle that once perched atop a battle flag, complete with bullet holes, the AP reported.

Oldest Surviving Photo of a Human

Original article here

This photo of a Paris street was taken by Louis Daguerre in 1838.

(CNN) -- At first glance, it doesn't seem that remarkable: An old black-and-white scene of a strangely deserted city, smudged in places by some primitive photographic process. But this image, taken in Paris, France, in 1838, is believed to be the earliest known photograph featuring a person. Look in the photo's lower left corner and you'll see a man getting his boots cleaned on the sidewalk. The boot-cleaner is there too, although he is harder to spot.

The image has been posted online before, but it gained a higher profile after news site Mashable published a full-page version on Wednesday in partnership with Retronaut, a website that archives photos from the past.

This detail from the photo's lower left corner shows a man who appears to be getting his boots cleaned.It was taken by Louis Daguerre, the French photographer famous for pioneering the daguerreotype, an early type of photo produced on a silver plate or a silver-covered copper plate. According to Retronaut's Amanda Uren, the exposure time for the image was around seven minutes. The street appears deserted because while the two human figures were relatively still, other pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages were moving too fast to register on the plate. 

 

The photo shows the Boulevard du Temple, a then-fashionable area of shops, cafés and theaters.The two people on the sidewalk are the most recognizable human figures in the photo, although Uren points out that a detailed examination reveals other possible people on a bench and in a window of the building in the foreground.

 

The image is not close to being the earliest known surviving photograph, though. That distinction belongs to a photo by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, one of Daguerre's partners, who used a crude camera to capture the view from a window at his French estate in 1826 or 1827.

Today, when almost everyone has a phone camera in their pocket and more than 350 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day, Daguerre's milestone seems quaint. In 2014, he might have just snapped a selfie.

Planetary System - great baby picture

The Best Baby Picture Ever of a Planetary System

original article here

Protoplanetary disc surrounding the young star HL Tau.

Astronomers have taken the best picture yet of a planetary system being born. The image, taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the high-altitude desert in Chile, reveals a planet-forming disk of gas around a young, sun-like star, in great detail. “The first time I saw this image, I thought it was actually probably a simulation—it was way too good,” said Tony Beasley, director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, in a video accompanying a press release. The NRAO helps operate ALMA.

The disk has gaps and rings that are carved out by nascent planets—features that have only been modeled in computer simulations. The star, named HL Tau, is 450 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. It’s only about a million years old—remarkably young to be already giving birth to planets.

A star forms when a cloud of gas and dust collapses under its own weight. As the embryonic star comes together, it spins, and the excess gas and dust flatten out into a surrounding disk like a pizza. All that stuff in the disk starts to form particles that then clump together, accumulating until they eventually form asteroids, comets, and planets. As those budding bodies grow, they plow through the remaining material in the disk, creating the gaps and rings seen in the new ALMA image.

HL Tau’s surroundings, as seen by Hubble.

Resume writing recommendations

from here.

What makes a recruiter reject your resume in seconds?

When it comes to job hunting, your resume can make or break your chances ... very quickly. Three-quarters of human resource professionals said it takes them less than five minutes to review a resume before deciding whether a job applicant makes it to the next round, according to a recent survey from the Society for Human Resource Management. And that may be generous. "I thought it would be a lot less. [Often] an initial screen takes 30 seconds," said Doug Arms, a vice president at staffing firm Kelly Services.

So, basically, think Tinder for talent.
Hiring managers and recruiters say there are telltale signs that help them weed out candidates at first glance. These are the resumes that can make an applicant seem, among other things, careless, immature or just not worth pursuing relative to the competition.

And here's the thing: Anyone, regardless of education or experience, can fall into these traps.
"I see it at every level for every type of job I've ever hired for," said Alison Green, an HR consultant in the Washington, D.C., area who runs AskAManager.org.

Here are seven of the biggest resume killers that hiring pros say they see all the time:
1. Using a ridiculous email address: Your college friends may know exactly why hairofthedogdude@yahoo.com is fitting for you, but recruiters and hiring managers may not be so amused. "It just shoots your credibility," Arms said.
2. Making spelling errors and grammatical mistakes: Time to admit it, your mother was right. "If you can't be trusted to proof your resume, why should I trust you with details once you're on the job?" Arms said.
3. Including crazy fonts, colors and other graphics: Creativity is desirable in many jobs. But resumes that look like art projects are not.
"Keep the document simple and clear. If it takes too long for us to figure out where people work and what they do, they won't get too far," said Maryanne Rainone, managing director of Heyman Associates in New York.
4. Not using keywords: Terms particular to the job you want and the relevant skills you have should feature prominently on your resume and LinkedIn profile.Pay attention to the words in the job description, Arms said. "Ask yourself first: 'Do I satisfy the criteria?' If so, is that reflected on your resume?"
Some employers use software to search for keywords when they are sorting through hundreds of applicants' resumes. Recruiters also use keywords to find potential candidates through LinkedIn and other sites.

Kelly Dingee, director of strategic recruiting at Staffing Advisors in Maryland, suggests thinking broadly about which words to use.If she's trying to recruit for a development officer position, for instance, she'll search not just for that job title but for words like "philanthropy," "fundraising" and "major gifts."
5. Stating everything but your accomplishments: Listing your day-to-day responsibilities (e.g., managing a Web site, organizing conferences) in your current and past jobs won't distinguish you from the pack.
Instead, hiring managers should be able to tell at first glance what you've accomplished (e.g., doubled sales, increased audience reach by 30%, negotiated the company's biggest deal, etc.).
6. Writing too much: Writing a book is an impressive feat, but your resume shouldn't read like one.
Recruiters won't read paragraph after paragraph. They'd much prefer short, bulleted points.
7. Forgetting to include dates: The years that you worked at every job you held should be easily scannable.
Otherwise, "it looks like someone is trying to hide something," Rainone said.

Map of American Dialects

Original article here.

Do you pahk the cah in Hahvahd yahd? Do you refer to multiple people as “dey”? Is a jelly doughnut called a “bismark,” or is everything that comes out of a soda fountain called a coke, even if it’s really 7-Up? Do you root for Da Bears?

The way we speak, both the phrases we use and the accents that inflect those phrases, come from our upbringings. And in a nation of more than 300 million people, it’s little wonder that those accents vary widely. More than a decade ago, Robert Delaney, a reference associate at Long Island University, put together this map of the 24 regions of American English:

Dialects and Subdialects of American English in the 48 conterminous states, image copyright Robert Delaney

Here’s a quick rundown of the regions Delaney identified:

Eastern New England: These are the cah pahkahs, the blue collar residents from Maine to Massachusetts who drop their Rs and substitute an H. Think Jack Donaghy when he hangs out with Nancy Donovan on “30 Rock.”
Boston Urban: There are a few sub-dialects in the Hub, from the stereotypical Southie dialect (Sully and Denise on “Saturday Night Live”) to the Boston Brahmin (John Kerry). The differences are more determined by class than anything else.
Western New England: Outside eastern Massachusetts, it’s the T that gets dropped. The last Democratic president was Bill Clin-n, for example. It’s not as distinctive as the eastern accent.
Hudson Valley: Dutch settlers, Delaney says, influenced language development north of New York City. The sitting area in front of your doorstep is a stoop, and the best-sellers at Dunkin’ Donuts are crullers and olycooks.
New York City: The mix of ethnicities that built the Big Apple created their own dialect that doesn’t sound much like the rest of America. TH sounds become Ds, and words get smashed together easily. There’s no better example than Marisa Tomei and Joe Pesci in “My Cousin Vinny.”
Bonac: A small and dwindling dialect on Long Island, which was once a part of New England. Combine New York City and Eastern New England and you get the idea.
Inland Northern: Upstate New York and Vermont combine Western New England and the Midwest, and words like marry, merry and Mary are all pronounced identically. Delaney points out another doughnut difference: Here, they’re called friedcakes.
San Francisco Urban: The city by the bay has more in common with the East Coast than the West Coast, thanks to the settlers who originally made their way to the Bay Area. San Franciscans speak a mishmash of Northeastern and Midwestern English.
Upper Midwestern: Home of the Midwestern twang, influenced by a combination of Northeasterners and Southerners who migrated up the Mississippi River, as well as the Scandinavian immigrants who settled the area. A subdialect in and around Minnesota reflects more of that Norwegian influence. Think “Drop Dead Gorgeous.”
Chicago Urban: Bill Swerski would be proud. Chicago’s distinctive dialect is influenced by what linguists call the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, when short vowels started sounding like their longer cousins. Chicago’s dialect was influenced by migrants who traveled along the Erie Canal, west from the Northeast. They root, of course, for Da Bears.
North Midland: Here’s where the European immigrants who didn’t move to New York City start playing a role. The Scotch-Irish, German and Quaker settlers from Pennsylvania to the central Midwest created what Delaney calls a “transition zone” between the north and south. Doughnuts are dunkers or fatcakes.
Pennsylvania German-English: A small but distinct dialect in the center of the Keystone State, probably spoken by Dwight Schrute’s ancestors. The grammar system is the most distinctive remnant of the region’s immigrant populations; it sounds more like German than English.
Rocky Mountain: Think Montana, Colorado and Utah. Heavy influences from frontier settlers and Native American languages.
Pacific Northwest: More influence from Native American languages. An example is the potluck, a gathering where everyone brings a dish, a derivation of the Native American “potlatch.” Muckatymuck, known elsewhere as a big shot, is another Native American term adopted by Northwesterners. But there’s less of an accent here than elsewhere, given the fact that the region was settled relatively recently.
Pacific Southwest: The settlers who showed up came to California for the gold, and that still shows in some of their slang — Delaney cites “pay dirt,” “pan out” and “goner” as phrases that started in California. Sub-dialects of Valley Girls and Surfer Dudes are ripe for parody, as in Cher and Travis from the timeless classic “Clueless.”
Southwestern: Mexican dialects of Spanish infuse Southwestern English, though the region is still what Delaney calls a melting pot of other dialects. Words like “patio” and “plaza” became a part of everyday English thanks to the Southwest.
South Midland: West of the Appalachians and into North Texas, speakers here sometimes put an A before a word ending in -ING, in place of words like “are.” TH is often replaced with an F. Delaney says this region retains more strains of Elizabethan English than modern British English has, including words like “ragamuffin,” “reckon” and “sorry,” meaning “inferior.”
Ozark: Southern Appalachian settlers developed their own dialect, best embodied in pop culture by the Beverly Hillbillies.
Southern Appalachian: The “g” in gerunds doesn’t survive often here. But overall, the accent is pretty similar to the South Midlands.
Virginia Piedmont: A syrupy drawl starts to develop south of Washington, where the letter R, when coming after a vowel, becomes what Delaney calls a slided sound. So “four dogs” sounds like “fo-uh dahawgs.”
Coastal Southern: Similar to the Piedmont drawl, but with more remnants of Colonial English. Something diagonally across the street is “catty-corner.”
Gullah: A Creole mix found in coastal areas of Georgia and South Carolina combines English with West African languages brought over by slaves who entered the U.S. in the 1700s and 1800s. Words like “peruse,” “yam” and “samba” all entered the country here.
Gulf Southern: Basically the Deep South minus Georgia and New Orleans. It’s a result of mixing English settlers from the southern colonies with French settlers in Louisiana, and it’s where we get words like “armoire,” “bisque” and “bayou.”
Louisiana: The French settlers who first traveled up the Mississippi River brought a whole mess of dialects. They include Cajun French, which incorporates some Spanish, and Cajun English, which makes New Orleans “Nawlins.”

Here’s another way linguists view the English dialects spoken in the U.S.:

A new clue to the mystery of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance?

original post here. I never heard of this island or this theory before this article - wonder if it could ever be solved.... Seems like an interesting, but hostile, island to visit (do a wiki search on Gardner Island).

Left: An undated photograph of Amelia Earhart in the cockpit of an airplane. Right: Earhart’s twin-motored monoplane on June 1, 1937. (AP)

On June 1, 1937, a Miami Herald photographer arrived at the Miami Municipal Airport to document the most famous female adventurer in national history. Amelia Earhart was in town on the fourth leg of her doomed trip across the globe. The image the photographer snapped wasn’t much to look at — just a plane resting on the tarmac as dawn’s light punched through a darkened sky. So it’s no wonder the picture remained forgotten for decades — until it suddenly reemerged this July and rekindled one of the most enduring mysteries in American history: What happened to Amelia Earhart?

The image had a very unusual detail, unique among thousands of pictures of Earhart’s aircraft. On the rear of the plane was a patch of shiny metal a shade lighter than rest of the plane’s exterior. “Could it be a clue — the clue — to what happened when Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan vanished somewhere over the trackless Pacific Ocean three months later?” the Miami Herald asked.

This was the final bit of information prolific Earhart sleuth Ric Gillespie had been waiting for to finally substantiate suspicions he has harbored for decades. He doesn’t think Earhart ran out of gas over the Pacific Ocean and crashed and sank, as others contend. He thinks she and her navigator made it miles beyond their last confirmed position to arrive at the uninhabited Gardner Island, where they starved to death. This unearthed picture was important, he said. It appeared to match an otherwise unusual metal fragment recovered from the island.

This week, he claimed he proved the connection. “During Amelia Earhart’s stay in Miami at the beginning of her second world flight attempt, a custom-made, special window on her Lockheed Electra aircraft was removed and replaced with an aluminum patch,” wrote Gillespie, the director of an Earhart search organization called Tighar, which Gillespie at one point ran out of his garage. ” … The patch was as unique to her particular aircraft as a fingerprint to an individual. Research has now shown that a section of aircraft aluminum Tighar found on [the island] in 1991 matches that fingerprint in many cases.”
...... Gillespie’s conclusion, neither academic nor peer-reviewed, is based on comparing the metal fragment found on Gardner Island to a model replica of the Electra.

Researchers probing Earhart’s disappearance of famed American aviator Amelia Earhart said they believe a slab of aluminum, above, found decades ago on an uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean came from her aircraft. (REUTERS/The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery)

 Their investigation unfurled as follows: The team huddled around a clipboard, pictures show. Then they held the metal fragment against the interior of the plane where they think the hole in Earhart’s plane might have been. It appeared to be a perfect fit, but could they be sure? “Because the artifact is necessarily several inches closer to the camera than the skin of the aircraft, it appears to be a bit too big to fit,” the team wrote in their analysis. “That’s an illusion.”

The ongoing drama over the metal fragment hints at the longtime clash of wills and theories between Long, who authored a book purporting to show Earhart crashed at sea and sank, and Gillespie, who thinks she starved to death on Gardner Island. To Gillespie, Long is “the patron saint of the crashed-and-sank school,” and he published a full takedown of Long’s book. “Rather than reach a conclusion which flows logically from the evidence, Long began where most researchers hope to end,” Gillespie wrote.

A location designated by TIGHAR as the Seven Site on the uninhabited island of Nikumaroro, formerly Gardiner Island, in the South Pacific, where researchers say they found bone fragments that could help prove Earhart died as a castaway. (AP

He thinks the Electra was “torn apart” and now lurks in fragments along the underwater reef slope off the island’s shore. His team has already trolled those waters twice — and found nothing. But now, after someone on team Tighar “spotted an unusual feature in the sonar imagery,” he reiterated this week the plane is down there, 600 feet beneath the surface.

“The new research on [the metal fragment] may reinforce the possibility that the anomaly is the rest of the aircraft,” he wrote. “The artifact is not, as previously suspected, a random fragment from an aircraft shredded by the surface.”

So Gillespie, with the release of his new research, has gone into fundraising mode. His team is slated to return to the island in 2015 to finally put this mystery to bed once and for all. As he told Discovery News: “Funding is being sought, in part, from individuals who will make a substantial contribution in return for a place on the expedition team.” He added: “Is the anomaly the aircraft? The only way to know is to look.”

Forget Facebook, Abandon Instagram, Move To A Village

Great NPR Article, from here by Diane Cole. I especially support the conclusion at the end.


"In the parts of the world that we cover in our blog, many people live in villages.
Villages have their problems, to be sure. There may not be a doctor or clinic nearby. Girls may not be able to go to school. Clean water might be a long walk away.

But a new book points out that village life has its advantages.

We asked psychologist Susan Pinker, author of The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier and Smarter, to explain the benefits of living in a community of about 150 people, the average population of traditional villages throughout history around the world.

What is the village effect?
The village effect is a metaphor for the social contacts we all need as humans in order to thrive. These are the strong social ties that develop naturally in a village, where by necessity you cross paths with each other repeatedly every day. When you think of most villages, there is a central square, a public area where everyone converges or passes by going to the grocer or the post office or city hall or to sit at a cafe. And that is something we have less and less of today in our era of online connections. Commerce is moving online, everything is moving online, and these traditional village spaces are disappearing.

Why is 150 the ideal number for a village population?
One-hundred-fifty is the number that comes up time and again in the types of social interactions that work smoothly. We see it throughout history — whether we're talking about the number of people in traditional hunter-gatherer societies, Neolithic villages, an English country village or the number of Christmas cards we send out. These are people with whom you have strong enough ties that you could ask to borrow $10 until the next payday.

How do these 150 "village" ties compare to online ties?
Not all types of social ties are created equal. Oxford evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar posits 150 as the maximum number of meaningful relationships that the human brain can manage. We know from our own lives there are only so many people that you can invest in that way, that you can call and invite to dinner or check in on when sick.

 

These are the types of social ties that develop naturally in a village, where by necessity you cross paths with each other repeatedly every day. When you think of most villages, there is a central square, a public area where everyone converges or passes by going to the grocer or the post office or city hall or sit at a cafe. And so these ties develop naturally through frequent in-person contact.
These are different from the weak contacts that you might have in your online social networks. You could walk by some of these online contacts on the street without even recognizing them. These weak contacts are great if you need a recommendation for a restaurant in a strange city, for instance, or [are] looking for a cleaning lady or other types of information. But in terms of social ties, it's the difference between your mother's lasagna or homemade chicken soup compared with fast food.

Why is the village effect so important?
If you have a cohesive community, you will have extra helping hands for the young and the old and everybody in between. The village effect impacts not only those who are vulnerable but it helps people feel they belong somewhere.

And if we know anything from all of the demographic studies in neurosciences, if you are lonely or isolated, it is almost a death sentence.

When you are getting together face to face, there are a lot of biological phenomena: Oxytocin and neurotransmitters get released, they reduce stress and allow us to trust others. Physical contact unleashes a whole chain of events that make us and make the other person feel good, and affects our health and well-being.

By contrast, according to research, we've never been lonelier as a society than we are now, and this can take a toll on our health.

Those of us who don't live in villages — are we out of luck?
 You can create your own village effect. Get out of your car to talk to your neighbors. Talk in person to your colleagues instead of shooting them emails. Build in face-to-face contact with friends the way you would exercise. Look for schools where the emphasis is on teacher-student interaction, not on high-tech bells and whistles.

We need to recognize that digital connections should enhance but never replace the real-life connections. I don't think we all should throw out digital devices and move back to the village. I'm not romanticizing village life but using it as a metaphor as what is disappearing: deep social ties and the in-person contact we all need to survive."

Jack-0-Latern Sun image taken from our old friend SDO

NASA SDO Image: Jack-o-Lantern Sun From here

Active regions on the sun combined to look something like a jack-o-lantern’s face on Oct. 8, 2014. The image was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, which watches the sun at all times from its orbit in space.
The active regions in this image appear brighter because those are areas that emit more light and energy.  They are markers of an intense and complex set of magnetic fields hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona. This image blends together two sets of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths at 171 and 193 Ångströms, typically colorized in gold and yellow, to create a particularly Halloween-like appearance

Lego Batman to get his own movie - and another Lego movie coming.....

Batman Gets His Own LEGO Movie

Master Builders, rejoice! Warner Brothers has announced Will Arnett’s return as the voice of Batman in a LEGO Movie spinoff coming in 2017.

With The LEGO Movie standing firm as the highest-grossing animated film of 2014, an eventual sequel in development and a LEGO Ninjago film coming in 2016, the LEGO-verse is having a pretty great year. Now, The Hollywood Reporter has announced that the LEGO Movie version of Batman will be getting his own film as well.

The LEGO Batman movie is due out in 2017.

Family Halloween Ideas for the Yard

Here are a few things that were on the web. Maybe we can do something similar?

From geekmom

Coywolves, coyote-wolf hybrids, are prowling Rock Creek Park and D.C. suburbs

from here,  By Sadie Dingfelder July 1, 2014

Perfectly adapted to living among humans, coywolves eat just about anything, including deer, mice, feral cats and last night’s leftovers from your garbage can. (Photo by Jonathan Way)

On an overcast morning in May, Melissa Farley, 25, and her dog, Kai, went for a hike in Rock Creek Park. They were walking on the outskirts of the public golf course when two creatures emerged from the woods.

“At first, I thought they were stray dogs or lost dogs,” Farley says. “They were really beautiful, kind of grayish and cool in color, and almost as big as Kai.”

Kai, a 60-pound German shepherd mix, took off after them. Farley listened helplessly as the animals fought in the underbrush. When Kai returned, dog and owner sprinted back to their Brightwood condo.

When Farley reported the incident to rangers the next day, they told her she’d had a run-in with Rock Creek Park’s resident coyotes.

Farley, however, isn’t so sure.

“I’ve seen a lot of coyotes out west,” says Farley, who recently returned to D.C. after six years in Los Angeles. “This was no average coyote.”

Farley probably saw a coywolf — a coyote-wolf hybrid — says Javier Monzon, a genetics researcher at Stony Brook University in New York.

Regular coyotes, which are native to the American Southwest and the Great Plains area, tend to be tawny-colored and weigh around 25 pounds. Coywolves run upward of 45 pounds and come in an array of hues, including gray and black.

“We’ve known for a while that most Eastern coyotes are hybrids to some degree, and now we’re finding a greater degree of hybridization than anyone expected,” Monzon says.

In lay terms: The coyotes in Rock Creek Park are probably coywolves.

Just a few hundred years ago, coyotes stuck to the plains between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River. As humans killed off wolves, coyotes took over their territory. The coyotes that pressed north into Canada came across the remnants of wolf populations and interbred, creating a hybrid creature that’s small enough to live undetected among humans, but large enough to feast on fawns (though perhaps not full-sized deer).

In other words, they are perfectly adapted to the I-95 corridor, Monzon says.

“The more deer there are around, the more wolf-like the coywolves tend to be,” he says.

Coywolves are about 62 percent coyote, 27 percent wolf and 11 percent dog,according to a 2013 paper by Monzon published in Molecular Ecology. Researchers have found them as close as Quantico, Va., and surrounding Prince William County, and game-management officials have confirmed their presence in Laytonsville, Md., in Montgomery County.

A Rock Creek Park spokesman denies their existence in D.C., however.

“We don’t have any evidence to suspect that our coyotes here in Rock Creek Park are anything other than just normal coyotes,” says the park’s acting deputy superintendent, Jeremy Sweat.

Game officials tend to shy away from the term “coywolf,” since it sounds scary, like “werewolf,” says Megan Draheim, a professor at Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources, National Capital Region.

“It’s not my favorite term either,” she says. “To be a coywolf sounds like half-coyote, half-wolf, and that’s not really what we’re talking about. We are talking about coyotes that have interbred with timber wolves and have some wolf genes in them. It can be fairly negligible or it can be more,” she says.

Wolf genes seem to be spreading quickly and thoroughly through the Eastern coyote population, Monzon says. His 2013 study found that even Ohio coyotes had wolf genes, a surprising finding that suggests coywolves are moving south from New England through the D.C. area and circling back westward.

We won’t know the precise genetic makeup of Rock Creek Park’s canids until someone conducts a study, but they look pretty wolf-y to D.C. resident Gareth Wishart.

The 28-year-old conservationist, who’s tracked coyotes in Montana and wolves in Spain, says he’s seen coywolves in Rock Creek Park on two different occasions, most recently in January.

“It came to within about 8 yards of us,” says Wishart, who took a friend to the park for some wildlife spotting one evening.

“Their size is really noticeable — how much bigger they are than coyotes out west. They are much stockier and you can notice the difference in the size of their skull.”

Wishart, who wrote about an earlier coywolf encounter for Gizmodo.com, was thrilled to find the apex predators in such an urban park.

“It’s a presence you can really feel when you’re out in the woods I think,” he says. “It’s one that I appreciate, at least, and I hope others do as well.”

Farley has a different perspective. Though Kai escaped with just two puncture wounds on his hindquarters, both dog and human are wary of the woods these days.

“I liked it better when I was growing up in D.C., and we didn’t have any coyotes or coywolves or whatever,” she says. “But they’re here now, so what are you going to do?”

Are they dangerous?

Not to humans, though outdoor cats and unattended dogs have reason to be concerned.

The most important thing is to walk your dog with a leash, says Rock Creek Park’s acting deputy superintendent, Jeremy Sweat. Coyotes have been living in Rock Creek Park since at least 2004, and there have been only two reported attacks, both on dogs that were running through the woods off-leash, he says.

“Especially in the spring and early summer, a lot of these coyotes might have dens in the park. They might have young pups. If a dog approaches them off leash, they are much more likely to act aggressively to protect their young or protect their territory,” Sweat says.

If the presence of coyotes or coywolves makes D.C. slightly scarier for pets, that goes double for rodents, says Megan Draheim, a professor at Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources, National Capital Region.

“They eat a lot of rats and mice,” she says. “That’s something we can all appreciate.”

Full Lunar Eclipse - right before dawn 10/8

We were up early to witness this. It was very pretty; and 'insanely nerdy' according to at least one of my kids.

Image from Nelis Du Toit, GSFC Astro Club, this one taken at 6:16AM.

Cool Pictures from Newsweek.com 

A "blood moon" was once a terrifying event for our ancestors, who struggled to explain the orb's sudden transformation into a fiery red ball. Modern-day observers understand the science behind the event, but it still provides an opportunity for people to gaze in wonder at the night sky.

On Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, depending on where in the world you were, a total eclipse made a “blood moon” visible for observers in Asia, Australia and North and South America.