Stack o' magazines
Aug. 31st, 2007 04:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunrabIt's the end of the month; I might as well try to clear off the big stack o' magazines that's piled on my desk. Some of it will just be recipes to tear out, but there's a few things of general interest, I think.
Let's see. The Economist, 18th August, has a review of a book called A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World which sounds interesting - the E's headline for the review is "The merits of genteel poverty." Basic thesis seems to be that in pre-industrial-revolution England, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, and that spread middle-class attributes such as patience, hard work, and education to the middle and lower classes; in other societies at the time, the rich had fewer children. Thus Britain was positioned to take advantage of the capitalist/industrial revolution. If our library gets that one, I definitely want to look more closely at it.
The July/August issue of Washington Monthly has a review of a book entitled Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America by Cullen Murphy. This one sounds like fun, too - "post-9/11 geopolitics served up with a heavy dose of ancient arcana." A quote: "America is increasingly turning to its own outside sources - not the Visigothi and the Ostrogothae, but the Halliburtoni and the Wackenhuti."
OK, here's one that got me worked up: an article in New Scientist, 11 August, about a system that the US gov't is developing to try and stop terrorists by picking up "involuntary signs of hostility" on security cameras and have them analyzed by computer. I can barely begin to say how stupid an idea this is. Identifying microexpressions, gait, and perspiration rates that are characteristic of hositlity or the desire to deceive. Let's see. That would catch every guy who hasn't told his wife how much those golf clubs he's swinging into the scanner cost, and every wife who hasn't told her husband how much the shoes cost, and every college student who's lied to his/her parents about where they're going on spring break, and every spouse headed off for an adulterous liaison, and everyone who hates flying and airlines in general but has to do it, and all the people angry because someone else paid less for a ticket than they did, and... and then, looking for people who are "trying to hide their emotions" you'd get everyone who's had Botox or other cosmetic surgery on their face, everyone with heavy makeup or hair hanging down in their eyes, anyone with a medication or an illness that has flattening of the affect as a side effect... by the time you catch everyone who is either concealing their emotions or expressing hostility or deceit, is ANYONE going to get through airport security besides children under 8 years old and maybe the Dalai Lama?
Another issue of New Scientist, this time 28 July, has an article about pack-hunting squid. Somehow, I feel as though I've mentioned this already. But in case I haven't. Normally solitary, now jumbo Humboldt squid are forming predatory packs in Monterey Bay.
An article in Scientific American, August issue, about "race-based medicine," particularly the heart-failure drug Bidil. And a humor article about the taxonomy of "Artificial Plantae: the Taxonomy, Ecology, and Ethnobotany of the Simulacrae." Yes, taxonomizing plastic plants. Part of the original article, in the journal "Ethnobotany Research and Applications," was written in Pig Latin.
Oh, and a rather peculiar ad from that same issue - an ad from the "New York Mint" which is not a US mint at all, of course, selling gold liberty coins - so far, sounds like the usual not-quite-a-scam, right? But here's the interesting part: the ad claims that "since 1999, the number of coin collectors has sharply risen from 3 million to 130 million..." Oh, really? They're claiming that over 1/3 of every man, woman, and child in the US is a coin collector? And that this sudden hobby fad has arisen in the last few years - somehow unremarked by any other source of news? Uh huh.
Next up, the August issue of Discover - which I determined was August only by looking at the "Save the Date" listing inside it; they don't mention the month or issue number on the cover, the inside cover, the table of contents, or the editorial listing pages, nor at the bottom of odd-numbered pages. Sorta creepy. Anyway. A new species of bee fly, from the genus Phthiria, has been named Phthiria relativitae. Yes, that's pronounce "theory o' relativity."
The rest seems to be recipes and yarn ads.
Let's see. The Economist, 18th August, has a review of a book called A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World which sounds interesting - the E's headline for the review is "The merits of genteel poverty." Basic thesis seems to be that in pre-industrial-revolution England, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, and that spread middle-class attributes such as patience, hard work, and education to the middle and lower classes; in other societies at the time, the rich had fewer children. Thus Britain was positioned to take advantage of the capitalist/industrial revolution. If our library gets that one, I definitely want to look more closely at it.
The July/August issue of Washington Monthly has a review of a book entitled Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America by Cullen Murphy. This one sounds like fun, too - "post-9/11 geopolitics served up with a heavy dose of ancient arcana." A quote: "America is increasingly turning to its own outside sources - not the Visigothi and the Ostrogothae, but the Halliburtoni and the Wackenhuti."
OK, here's one that got me worked up: an article in New Scientist, 11 August, about a system that the US gov't is developing to try and stop terrorists by picking up "involuntary signs of hostility" on security cameras and have them analyzed by computer. I can barely begin to say how stupid an idea this is. Identifying microexpressions, gait, and perspiration rates that are characteristic of hositlity or the desire to deceive. Let's see. That would catch every guy who hasn't told his wife how much those golf clubs he's swinging into the scanner cost, and every wife who hasn't told her husband how much the shoes cost, and every college student who's lied to his/her parents about where they're going on spring break, and every spouse headed off for an adulterous liaison, and everyone who hates flying and airlines in general but has to do it, and all the people angry because someone else paid less for a ticket than they did, and... and then, looking for people who are "trying to hide their emotions" you'd get everyone who's had Botox or other cosmetic surgery on their face, everyone with heavy makeup or hair hanging down in their eyes, anyone with a medication or an illness that has flattening of the affect as a side effect... by the time you catch everyone who is either concealing their emotions or expressing hostility or deceit, is ANYONE going to get through airport security besides children under 8 years old and maybe the Dalai Lama?
Another issue of New Scientist, this time 28 July, has an article about pack-hunting squid. Somehow, I feel as though I've mentioned this already. But in case I haven't. Normally solitary, now jumbo Humboldt squid are forming predatory packs in Monterey Bay.
An article in Scientific American, August issue, about "race-based medicine," particularly the heart-failure drug Bidil. And a humor article about the taxonomy of "Artificial Plantae: the Taxonomy, Ecology, and Ethnobotany of the Simulacrae." Yes, taxonomizing plastic plants. Part of the original article, in the journal "Ethnobotany Research and Applications," was written in Pig Latin.
Oh, and a rather peculiar ad from that same issue - an ad from the "New York Mint" which is not a US mint at all, of course, selling gold liberty coins - so far, sounds like the usual not-quite-a-scam, right? But here's the interesting part: the ad claims that "since 1999, the number of coin collectors has sharply risen from 3 million to 130 million..." Oh, really? They're claiming that over 1/3 of every man, woman, and child in the US is a coin collector? And that this sudden hobby fad has arisen in the last few years - somehow unremarked by any other source of news? Uh huh.
Next up, the August issue of Discover - which I determined was August only by looking at the "Save the Date" listing inside it; they don't mention the month or issue number on the cover, the inside cover, the table of contents, or the editorial listing pages, nor at the bottom of odd-numbered pages. Sorta creepy. Anyway. A new species of bee fly, from the genus Phthiria, has been named Phthiria relativitae. Yes, that's pronounce "theory o' relativity."
The rest seems to be recipes and yarn ads.
