Big Wheel

I think the NW division doesn't have a totally sucky amongst the bunch, unlike other divisions. The Southwest could be a sleeper, with the Mavs looking stronger-than-expected and the Rockets in a much better position after the Harden trade. The question mark is New Orleans and how much Anthony Davis improves them. Probably enough for mediocrity, but not better.

Howard shot 15/19 FT tonight (79%). Unfortunately the Lakers squandered his good night by losing by 10. Nuggets score only 75 points? I sure hope this isn't a harbinger of the rest of the season...

Heat looked good but uneven defensively without LeBron on the floor. Probably Rashard Lewis's aging legs played a role. I didn't catch most of the second half though to see how they built that big lead in the third.

Yes, and it needs it to work. What purpose does radioactive material serve in a food dish? Obviously it doesn't, and it's wise to minimize your exposure to all sources of ionizing radiation, but screaming "CONTAMINATION" like Three Mile Island is melting down inside your house is an overreaction. With the level of Cobalt-60 we're talking about here, if you hear about the recall, take the bowl back or dispose of it however they're telling you and you'll be fine. And if you don't and the thing stays on your floor for 20 years, you'll almost certainly still be fine thanks to the inverse square law that causes radiation intensity to vary with the square of your distance from it. (I hope everyone freaking out about trace Cobalt-60 in your pet bowls also makes sure to avoid the backscatter X-ray machines that are still at many smaller airports, which likely deliver a much stronger dose.)

Radiation exposure is especially dependent on distance from whatever is emittiing it. Your house's smoke detector likely contains radioactive americium, but as long as it's staying on your ceiling and not strapped to your pajamas every night your exposure should be negligible.

If I had to guess these people are logged into Yahoo Social Bar, which Yahoo claims is completely opt-in, though the devil is in how they've defined "opt-in" - if connecting Yahoo Social Bar to Facebook automatically opts you in to sharing, then that's sort of perverted the idea of opt-in. They should be able to control what they share by logging into Yahoo Social Bar and adjusting their settings, or disconnecting this app from Facebook entirely. Edit:OK, just installed it to see what it does. On the one hand it does automatically opt you in to sharing immediately upon install, which is somewhat shady. On the other, it only appears to display Yahoo News stories you read, not your actual searches on Yahoo. That doesn't make it appear much different than the other social newsreader apps out there like Washington Post Social Reader and whatnot. The main difference is that your activity is shown to people on Yahoo's sites, where they may not be used to seeing it, rather than in the Facebook news feed, where they are used to seeing it.

Uhhhhh......I have a very hard time believing that that is really the case. The tech press would be up in arms about it. Probably something is mimicking real searches or else there is some shady 3rd-party software doing something. Can you upload a screenshot with the names blacked out?

There probably was one, it just was much smaller than an airplane or space shuttle boom because of Baumgartner's smaller volume (displaces a much lower amount of air) and also because of the much thinner air at the altitude where he broke the speed of sound (less air to displace). http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-10/watch-felix-baumgartners-record-setting-jump-32000-feet-live As for the temperature, it sounds like there was some sort of foam insulation in the spacesuit to protect him from the effects of aerodynamic heating. Interesting that virtually nobody has discussed that aspect of it though.

(fixed broken link)

You laugh, but I think Donna Lee would sound super hip played at about 350 bpm over this kind of groove. I tried to do it with a combo last year but the guitar player was more interested in being an exact copy of Django Reinhardt and nobody could play the head that fast anyway.

No offense, but Hitler is probably the last person in the history of the world who could be taken at his word. His hatred for the Jews was so visceral and all encompassing that the idea of letting them just pick up and leave is absurd. This argument sounds apppealing, but it's wrong. The Nazis formulated plans before the Holocaust for mass deportation without extermination, eg to Madagascar. None of which is to deny the evils of Nazism, just pointing out that history is always weirder and more nuanced than "they were the bad guys and always had a secret master plan to do bad stuff."

I don't read Ross as "normalizing" anything, especially not Wagner's views on Jews. He's pointing out the irony that even the grandfather of the Jewish state drew great inspiration from Wagner's work, yet it's still off-limits in Israel. Your last two sentences appear to be suggesting that Herzl, who was 23 when Wagner died, couldn't have possibly been aware that Wagner was, personally, a raging anti-semite. That appears to be very much false: http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/19/opinion/editorial-notebook-wagner-israel-and-herzl.html?pagewanted=2&src=pm

Lots of Jews didn't buy Volkswagens, or Mercedes for that matter. My grandfather has pointedly never bought a German car in his life. That said, I think Larry is reaching a bit with the bit about normalization. More later.

e I'm not sure that this makes much sense. The issue of Wagner has obviously been "politicized" in Israel since pretty much forever; you can't put the genie back into the bottle. And any thoughtful discussion of whether to play Wagner in public in Israel has to pretty quickly start to address the question, "OK, what are some reasons we shouldn't play Wagner in Israel?" Are you saying those discussions just shouldn't be happening, or happening in public? Some people just aren't going to ever like the idea and will try to convince people that they're right. That's OK. And the people on the other side of the argument will do the same. That's OK too. There's a difference between having empathy for the victims of persecution and making a persecution complex into national policy. Israel has been down this road before in other manifestations (the Eichmann trial, for example, wasn't just about bringing one high Nazi to justice; it was a Stonewall-like event that brought the idea of public discussion of the Holocaust out of the shadows, in a place where for the past 15 years these memories had basically been repressed for the sake of building a new country and making as clean as break as possible with the past.)

What was the Motor City Miracle? The Music City Miracle looked like a forward lateral from most camera angles, but most analysis has shown that the ball went either directly sideways or slightly backwards before Dyson gathered it. One of the most amazing sports finishes I've ever seen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPhONc6xC48

Any chance of sharing all this without having to enlist at Facebook? Obviously there are a number of people here (and elsewhere) who do not want to join FB! Hey brownie, Is that still a requirement? I thought they had opened that up. I think you can sign up w/ a email acct. here: https://www.spotify.com/au/signup/plain/ I still get: You need a Facebook account to register for Spotify. If you have an account, just log in below to register. If you don't have a Facebook account, get one by clicking the 'Create an account' link below. Try scrolling down. In the US at least, there is a link far down the page that says "OR....create an account using my email address". They must have some partnership with Facebook where they are trying to drive new Facebook registrations in exchange for integrating with Facebook so tightly, so they've made the flow for signing up without Facebook not-very-obvious. Thanks for the info, BfB, much appreciated. If we see more bugs is it OK to report them to you on this thread or would you rather us PM them to you? I've come across a couple of weird UI glitches but am still checking into whether it's the app or some other issue with Spotify causing it.

One error I caught on the app: the original album and CD of Further Explorations of the Horace Silver Quintet included the original version of "Melancholy Mood," but this track isn't showing up in the app's version of the album - even though it's on Spotify along with the rest of the record. Maybe a goof with a de-duping algorithm (since the same tune, though a different version, appeared on the CD versions of Blowin' the Blues Away)? Also, BfB, do you know if EMI has any plans to upload material that was OOP on CD before Spotify launched? One example would be Pete La Roca's Basra, which has now come out twice in the US but was hastily deleted and still isn't on Spotify. Another example is some of the Rare Grooves and later records like Candido's Thousand Finger Man - it was deleted from the catalog not too many years ago. Hoping they haven't done something dumb like destroy digital masters as soon as the production runs end - if they haven't, it seems like it would be pretty trivial to just put that stuff up for streaming too.

Chuck means never having to say you're sorry.

All true, no doubt-was simply pointing out that there was plenty of prime JOS material that BN wasn't actually cashing in on in 1960.

Sort of. Several from this period were not released until the mid-60s or later. Even Back at the Chicken Shack sat unreleased for 3 years! JOS probably had a plurality in this period, but if you combined Silver/Blakey and their sidemen during this period (Mobley, Morgan, Fuller, etc.) it would probably be a similar number.

A common view, but one based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how IPOs work. Zuckerberg's fortune wasn't necessarily affected at all by the post-IPO fall in share prices. It was all the people who bought shares at the offering price who took a bath. The IPO accomplished exactly what it was supposed to, maximizing the price paid by these latter investors to fill Facebook's coffers.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/monitoring/46398.stm

Well....there are probably shades of gray too. As trane_fanatic said, if the tooth was healthy he could have gotten it back. And I've gotten random stuff back before from the oral surgeon (a salivary stone). So that's why I think the amount and probable virulence of the bacteria probably play a role in the decision - if it's something that will easily dry out before too many bacteria accumulate on it, it might be OK, but if it's already chock-full of potentially dangerous organisms, no. Has anyone been given back healthy wisdom teeth in the last 10 years or so? I never saw any of mine but feel like it used to be common to get them back after extraction.

I can understand the desire to have the tooth back (it's a part of your body, however gross it may have gotten). But I side with the dentist on this one. While the bacteria are relatively harmless in the unsterile environment of your mouth, that doesn't apply once the tooth is out of your mouth. In terms of quantity and probable toxicity of the bacteria, we're basically talking about handing a jagged, rusty nail back to you (only with a lot more bacteria on it, I bet) and praying you don't inhale, ingest, or - especially - have any microbes work their way into an open wound. And I suspect a decayed molar is almost impossible to perfectly sterilize - there are all these nooks and crannies where bacteria can hide out. Streptococcus mutans can potentially do much nastier things to you than just give you cavities: http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/index.cfm?id=3240 It's the dentist's job to protect you from obvious hazards like this, and probably he's figuring that on the .01% chance you end up with a nasty infection, it's a malpractice suit that he could have easily avoided.

Trying it right now. This is actually a really cool idea and well-executed. The opportunity to browse through the catalog chronologically, while showing all those old album covers, is something I really like. It's not perfect - much of the more obscure OOP material still hasn't been uploaded by EMI itself, so there are gaps and missing tracks (the John Hardee/Ike Quebec sides include only two cuts that were issued by some PD label). But huge props to whoever came up with a way to map all the albums to what's in the Spotify database. I don't know how much money this is going to make them but this is the kind of thing that makes me at least want to spend money on the CDs.