Brownian Motion

To prefer low prices is not the same as demanding low prices, especially when the long-term consequences of that preference are both enormous and not at all readily apparent. If the long term consequences aren't readily apparent, there doen't seem to be much difference between prefer and demand. Demand is mass preference. MG I forgot that "demand" in economics has a more specific meaning than the sense in which I was using it. I guess my point is that there would have been a much smaller demand for Chinese-produced goods at Wal-Mart if the Wal-Mart consumers had been able to see the logical long-term consequences of their Wal-Mart purchases.

R. Mutt Nude Descending a Staircase Harry Nudel

To prefer low prices is not the same as demanding low prices, especially when the long-term consequences of that preference are both enormous and not at all readily apparent.

Cotton Mather Silky Sullivan Sheb Wooley

Where is the apology to the customers who bought these toys?

Rikki Lake Veronica Lake Los Angeles Lakers Utah Jazz Jazzbo Brown Jazzbo Collins

These penis-in-jeopardy stories have become a regular feature in the news over the last decade. They always seem to occur in the Balkans, and they do not usually have happy endings, unless another animal is involved, in which case the other animal winds up happy. I'm not sure what conclusions we're all supposed to draw from these stories--unless it's something along the lines of "Balkan men are such stupid brutes that they don't even bother to protect that which after life itself they hold most dear".

I don't want to defend the expenditure of 600,000 dollars to keep the politicalcorrectnesspolice quiet, but if the money is going to be invested in photovoltaic cells, well, that seems like a win for everyone.

Three of these folks are distant relatives of mine. http://texashistory.unt.edu/permalink/meta-pth-12592

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By September 21, 2007 Specs Powell, Swing Era Drummer, Dies at 85 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS SAN DIEGO, Sept. 20 (AP) — Specs Powell, a drummer who played with some of the biggest names in jazz and was one of the first jazz musicians hired by a national radio network, died Saturday in San Marcos, Calif. He was 85 and lived in San Marcos, a suburb of San Diego. The cause was complications of kidney disease, said his son Ted Smith. Mr. Powell, born Gordon Powell in New York on June 5, 1922, played piano as well as drums early in his career. But he rose to fame as a drummer during the swing era, when he was a fixture on the active 52nd Street jazz scene. In 1943 he was hired by CBS for its in-house orchestra. Moving from radio to television, he later helped provide music for “The Ed Sullivan Show,” “The Jackie Gleason Show,” “Candid Camera” and other CBS shows. He remained active in jazz during his years with CBS and in 1957 recorded his first and only album as a leader. Over the years Mr. Powell worked with Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins and many other jazz stars. He was the drummer on a celebrated 1945 recording session, led by Red Norvo, that was among the first to feature the modern-jazz pioneers Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. A versatile percussionist who carried a kit filled with castanets, clickers and other noisemakers, Mr. Powell used a specially designed stand that would allow him to play his bongo drums standing up, instead of slowing down to settle them between his knees. He stayed with CBS until 1972, then moved to the Virgin Islands. He and his wife, Peggy, later retired to the San Diego area. Mr. Powell is survived by his wife and three children.

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By September 20, 2007 Physicist Shows How Steroids Can Fuel Home Runs By REUTERS Filed at 3:12 p.m. ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Steroids can help batters hit 50 percent more home runs by boosting their muscle mass by just 10 percent, a U.S. physicist said on Thursday. Calculations show that, by putting on 10 percent more muscle mass, a batter can swing about 5 percent faster, increasing the ball's speed by 4 percent as it leaves the bat. Depending on the ball's trajectory, this added speed could take it into home run territory 50 percent more often, said Roger Tobin of Tufts University in Boston. "A 4 percent increase in ball speed, which can reasonably be expected from steroid use, can increase home run production by anywhere from 50 percent to 100 percent," said Tobin, whose study will be published in an upcoming issue of the American Journal of Physics. Tobin, who normally studies condensed matter and physics, wondered if professional baseball players who have recently been accused of boosting their performance with steroids really would benefit from using the drugs. "If you look at other sports, you don't see radical changes in performance. No one is running a 6-second 100-meter dash, no matter what they are taking," Tobin said in a telephone interview. BONDS NOT FOCUS OF STUDY Tobin read reports about steroids that said they could add about 10 percent to an athlete's total muscle mass. Could this be enough to help San Francisco Giants player Barry Bonds, dogged by allegations of past steroid use, hit his record-breaking 756th career home run last month? "I haven't tried to look at Barry Bonds specifically so I haven't looked at his weight numbers," Tobin said. What he did look at was the power of a batter's swing, and how it might affect a baseball. An extra 10 pounds (4.5 kg) of muscle, he said, could add just enough extra to a batter's swing to send the ball out of the park, or at least into the stands. It works for pitchers, too, but not as well. He calculated that a 10 percent increase in muscle mass should increase the speed of a thrown ball by about 5 percent, or 4 to 5 mph (6.4 to 8 kph) for a pitcher who throws a 90-mph (144-kph) fastball. That could translate into one fewer earned run every other game. "That is enough to have a meaningful effect on the success of a pitcher, but it is not nearly as dramatic as the effects on home run production," Tobin said. "The unusual sensitivity of home run production to bat speed results in much more dramatic effects, and focuses attention disproportionately on the hitters." Tobin said it is possible that baseball players could gain the muscle mass by lifting weights. "This doesn't prove anything. This is not an indictment of Barry Bonds or anybody else," he said. Home * World * U.S. * N.Y. / Region * Business * Technology * Science * Health * Sports * Opinion * Arts * Style * Travel * Jobs * Real Estate * Automobiles * Back to Top Copyright 2007 Reuters Ltd. * Privacy Policy * Search * Corrections * RSS * First Look * Help * Contact Us * Work for Us * Site Map

What, did Rita marry Leonard Feather or something?

Did Greenspan ever record?

Lon Chaney Lon Armstrong Lon Nol Madam I'm Adam Michael Palin Dromedary Quartet

Leadbelly Goldfinger Sarah Silverman

Orange Julius Purple Herman Yellow Dog

I'd like to hear James Moody's improvised tenor sax solo on "I'm In the Mood for Love" that King Pleasure transformed into "Moody's Mood for Love". Is it on CD?

True, but that man has to be cured. And there would be a lots to say about how owners grown their dogs in today's society. A "cure", in this instance, might be worse than the malady: he might start forcing his attentions on female members of his own species.

Ethel Merman Ethel Mertz Vivian Vance Dick Vance John Nesbitt Neil Hefti

Modo Mr. Moto Quasimodo

washingtonpost.com NEWS | OPINIONS | SPORTS | ARTS & LIVING | Discussions | Photos & Video | City Guide | CLASSIFIEDS | JOBS | CARS | REAL ESTATE  ad_icon Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach By Shankar Vedantam Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, September 4, 2007; A03 The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either "true" or "false." Among those identified as false were statements such as "The side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu vaccine." When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual. Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC. The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have broad implications for public policy. The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths. This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi. While these beliefs likely arose because Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to connect Iraq with Sept. 11, the experiments suggest that intelligence reports and other efforts to debunk this account may in fact help keep it alive. Similarly, many in the Arab world are convinced that the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 was not the work of Arab terrorists but was a controlled demolition; that 4,000 Jews working there had been warned to stay home that day; and that the Pentagon was struck by a missile rather than a plane. Those notions remain widespread even though the federal government now runs Web sites in seven languages to challenge them. Karen Hughes, who runs the Bush administration's campaign to win hearts and minds in the fight against terrorism, recently painted a glowing report of the "digital outreach" teams working to counter misinformation and myths by challenging those ideas on Arabic blogs. A report last year by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, however, found that the number of Muslims worldwide who do not believe that Arabs carried out the Sept. 11 attacks is soaring -- to 59 percent of Turks and Egyptians, 65 percent of Indonesians, 53 percent of Jordanians, 41 percent of Pakistanis and even 56 percent of British Muslims. Research on the difficulty of debunking myths has not been specifically tested on beliefs about Sept. 11 conspiracies or the Iraq war. But because the experiments illuminate basic properties of the human mind, psychologists such as Schwarz say the same phenomenon is probably implicated in the spread and persistence of a variety of political and social myths. The research does not absolve those who are responsible for promoting myths in the first place. What the psychological studies highlight, however, is the potential paradox in trying to fight bad information with good information. Schwarz's study was published this year in the journal Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, but the roots of the research go back decades. As early as 1945, psychologists Floyd Allport and Milton Lepkin found that the more often people heard false wartime rumors, the more likely they were to believe them. The research is painting a broad new understanding of how the mind works. Contrary to the conventional notion that people absorb information in a deliberate manner, the studies show that the brain uses subconscious "rules of thumb" that can bias it into thinking that false information is true. Clever manipulators can take advantage of this tendency. The experiments also highlight the difference between asking people whether they still believe a falsehood immediately after giving them the correct information, and asking them a few days later. Long-term memories matter most in public health campaigns or political ones, and they are the most susceptible to the bias of thinking that well-recalled false information is true. The experiments do not show that denials are completely useless; if that were true, everyone would believe the myths. But the mind's bias does affect many people, especially those who want to believe the myth for their own reasons, or those who are only peripherally interested and are less likely to invest the time and effort needed to firmly grasp the facts. The research also highlights the disturbing reality that once an idea has been implanted in people's minds, it can be difficult to dislodge. Denials inherently require repeating the bad information, which may be one reason they can paradoxically reinforce it. Indeed, repetition seems to be a key culprit. Things that are repeated often become more accessible in memory, and one of the brain's subconscious rules of thumb is that easily recalled things are true. Many easily remembered things, in fact, such as one's birthday or a pet's name, are indeed true. But someone trying to manipulate public opinion can take advantage of this aspect of brain functioning. In politics and elsewhere, this means that whoever makes the first assertion about something has a large advantage over everyone who denies it later. Furthermore, a new experiment by Kimberlee Weaver at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and others shows that hearing the same thing over and over again from one source can have the same effect as hearing that thing from many different people -- the brain gets tricked into thinking it has heard a piece of information from multiple, independent sources, even when it has not. Weaver's study was published this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The experiments by Weaver, Schwarz and others illustrate another basic property of the mind -- it is not good at remembering when and where a person first learned something. People are not good at keeping track of which information came from credible sources and which came from less trustworthy ones, or even remembering that some information came from the same untrustworthy source over and over again. Even if a person recognizes which sources are credible and which are not, repeated assertions and denials can have the effect of making the information more accessible in memory and thereby making it feel true, said Schwarz. Experiments by Ruth Mayo, a cognitive social psychologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, also found that for a substantial chunk of people, the "negation tag" of a denial falls off with time. Mayo's findings were published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2004. "If someone says, 'I did not harass her,' I associate the idea of harassment with this person," said Mayo, explaining why people who are accused of something but are later proved innocent find their reputations remain tarnished. "Even if he is innocent, this is what is activated when I hear this person's name again. "If you think 9/11 and Iraq, this is your association, this is what comes in your mind," she added. "Even if you say it is not true, you will eventually have this connection with Saddam Hussein and 9/11." Mayo found that rather than deny a false claim, it is better to make a completely new assertion that makes no reference to the original myth. Rather than say, as Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) recently did during a marathon congressional debate, that "Saddam Hussein did not attack the United States; Osama bin Laden did," Mayo said it would be better to say something like, "Osama bin Laden was the only person responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks" -- and not mention Hussein at all. The psychologist acknowledged that such a statement might not be entirely accurate -- issuing a denial or keeping silent are sometimes the only real options. So is silence the best way to deal with myths? Unfortunately, the answer to that question also seems to be no. Another recent study found that when accusations or assertions are met with silence, they are more likely to feel true, said Peter Kim, an organizational psychologist at the University of Southern California. He published his study in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Myth-busters, in other words, have the odds against them.

I have eight tracks of this band on a Vogue lp, the title is "Back To Memphis", recorded in 1956. On what label did the cd you mentioned appear? The 2 CDs I mentioned were on Vogue.

Lord Haw Haw Chuckles the Clown Jubilation T. Cornpone

Berry was part of a Sammy Price band that toured Europe in 1955. They recorded with Sidney Bechet (a session I have split between 2 CDs "Sidney Bechet and His American Friends, Vols 1 & 2), and they also made a couple of concert albums that originally appeared on Jazztone records--don't know whether they ever made it to CD. Besides exemplary work from Emmett, these dates feature the always excellent Herb Hall (better than Edmond, IMO) and the growly trombone of George Stevenson.

This is my position as well, but I believe I'm in the minority around here.