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How Appropriate: Ref who blew Seahawks call is a Bank of America VP
Bankers have come in for a beating of late, much of it earned, but this is going a bit far.
Turns out that the replacement referee most responsible for that disastrously blown call in the Seattle Seahawks-Green Bay Packers game Monday is a vice president of Bank of America in California.
Lance Easley, who signaled the touchdown that wasn’t, has been with BofA since June 2011. According to his LinkedIn profile – confirmed by a BofA spokesman who said nothing further – he handles “personal business banking services, credit facilities and commercial lending to businesses $250,000 to $5 million in gross revenue” out of a BofA office in Santa Barbara County.
Before that he was a business banking specialist with Wells Fargo for three years, “marketing business banking products to the San Luis Obispo business community.”
http://blog.sfgate.com/bottomline/2012/09/27/ref-who-blew-call-is-a-ca-bofa-vp/
Seeking the “true” Romney is like seeking Bigfoot
3:20 pm September 27, 2012, by Jay Bookman
The core problem with Mitt Romney is, well, his core. As in he apparently doesn’t have one. This is a man who can say the following in an interview yesterday with NBC’s Ron Allen, when asked about his lack of empathy …
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“Don’t forget, I got everybody in my state insured. One hundred percent of the kids in our state had health insurance. I don’t think there’s anything that shows more empathy and care about the people of this country than that kind of record.”
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…. and then literally a few minutes later stand in front of a crowd and say this:
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“I will repeal Obamacare and replace it with real health care reform. You see, Obamacare is really Exhibit No. 1 of the president’s political philosophy, and that is that government knows better than people how to run your lives. It is a view that government should stand between you and your doctor. I don’t believe in a bigger and bigger government…I believe in freedom.”
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I think that’s remarkable. If creating such a system is evidence of empathy, what does it say about a person who seeks to dismantle such a system? How can a person go from one statement to another without an apparent hitch, and seemingly with equal sincerity? Which statement reflects the “true” Romney?
I do not know. I am baffled by the man. In fact, given such statements, the more pertinent question may be: Can a “true” Romney even be said to exist?
http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2012/09/27/seeking-the-true-romney-is-like-seeking-bigfoot/?cxntfid=blogs_jay_bookman_blog
Curiosity Finds Evidence of An Ancient Streambed on Mars
NASA’s Curiosity rover found evidence for an ancient, flowing stream on Mars at a few sites, including the rock outcrop pictured here, which the science team has named “Hottah” after Hottah Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech
The Curiosity rover has come across a place in Gale Crater where ankle-to-hip-deep water once vigorously flowed: an ancient streambed containing evidence of gravel that has been worn by water. At a press briefing today, members of the Mars Science Laboratory team said the rover has found “surprising” outcrops and gravel near the rover landing site that indicate water once flowed in this region, and likely flowed for a long time.
“Too many things that point away from a single burst event,” said Curiosity science co-investigator William Dietrich of the University of California, Berkeley. “I’m comfortable to argue that it is beyond the 1,000 year timescales, even though this is very early on in our findings.”
“Hottah looks like someone jack-hammered up a slab of city sidewalk, but it’s really a tilted block of an ancient streambed,” said Mars Science Laboratory Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology.
Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/97620/curiosity-finds-evidence-of-an-ancient-streambed-on-mars/
Tycoon offers HK$500 million to wed 'married' daughter
Hong Kong (CNN) -- The daughter of the tycoon who on Tuesday offered HK$500 million (US$64 million) to any man who would marry her found the proposal "quite entertaining," she told CNN.
Gigi Chao said her father, property developer Cecil Chao Sze-tsung, "loves her very much" and was aware of the cash offer before it was first reported Tuesday by local Hong Kong media.
The tycoon's offer came after Chinese media reports last week that she married another woman, her long-time companion Sean Eav, in a civil ceremony in Paris last week. Asked by CNN to confirm her civil union, Chao said she was "not in a position to verify that."
Her father, however, was unequivocal, telling CNN "reports of Gigi being married is not true, it's a rumor." However, he did confirm that he is offering the multi-million dollar bounty for a future son-in-law: Any nationality or wealth of the suitor is fine, the only requirement is that the man "loves my daughter, and she loves him."
http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/27/business/hong-kong-tycoon-daughter-reward/index.html?hpt=hp_t3
One Coalition Stays True to Todd Akin: Home-Schoolers
By JOHN ELIGON
Published: September 25, 2012
HARRISONVILLE, Mo. — On a recent Wednesday, when many teenagers here were doing homework or playing after-school sports, 17-year-old Ania Bishop, in an ankle-length skirt with American flags, was cheering at a political rally for Representative Todd Akin.
The rest of her family was there, too: her father and teenage brother, both in “Stand With Todd” T-shirts, and her 6-year-old sister, who sat cross-legged at her mother’s feet. They listened while Mr. Akin, the Republican seeking to unseat the incumbent Democrat, Claire McCaskill, in one of the year’s most closely watched Senate races, reiterated his anti-abortion stance to the approving crowd. The mother, Ellen Bishop, says she spends 10 to 15 hours a week working on Akin campaign matters, while her children put in about 6 to 10 hours. Because the children are home-schooled, she said, they can translate their campaign work into lessons.
As Mr. Akin, a six-term congressman, fights for his political life after making controversial comments about rape victims, he is counting on a coalition of home-schoolers as part of a crucial support network for his struggling campaign. Mr. Akin and his wife, Lulli, home-schooled all six of their children, and it was other such families who helped in his political rise. Now, after losing the backing and financing of much of the Republican Party establishment, he is counting on them — and other parts of his conservative, evangelical base — as never before for help in grass-roots fund-raising and in coordinating volunteers across the state.
more
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/26/us/politics/todd-akin-counts-on-support-of-home-schoolers.html
It's not a party anymore, it's a Cult
High-resolution image of supermassive black hole shows engine of destruction
The large image shows the jet streaming from the center of the galaxy M87, in visible light. The inset zooms in on the black hole, and shows the swirling gas around the galaxy’s core. M87 is one of the largest galaxies known, and has the largest-known black hole, estimated around 6.6 billion times the mass of the Sun.
Thanks to years of observation, all but the most stubborn astronomers are convinced: black holes exist. Vast numbers of objects that are simultaneously too massive and occupy too little space to be anything except black holes have been found, both within our galaxy and at the cores of nearly every other galaxy. However, many details of black holes predicted by theory are difficult to confirm observationally, simply because black holes are too small relative to their masses. In particular, the event horizon—the boundary within which nothing can escape—is typically very small, so even our best telescopes have yet to measure one.
New observations from the Event Horizon Telescope (actually an array of four millimeter-wave telescopes working in concert) have revealed the best view so far of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87. As described in a Science paper, astronomers measured the motion of gas to a distance approximately 5.5 times the event horizon radius. That is close enough to confirm the gas circles in the same direction the black hole itself rotates. These observations help clarify the origin of the powerful jet of gas streaming from the galaxy’s center at a high fraction of the speed of light: it is likely driven by the swirling matter near the black hole’s boundary.
Millimeter-wave observations lie on the boundary between microwaves and infrared light. Radiation of this type can pass through many regions opaque to visible light, including those occluded with gas. Since the central regions of galaxies are typically dense, millimeter-wave observations are very useful. On the other hand, the longer the wavelength, the larger the telescope must be to achieve reasonable resolution. That’s why the largest telescopes in the world are radio telescopes.
more
http://galileospendulum.org/2012/09/27/big-telescopes-reveal-the-maelstrom-around-a-black-hole/
Paradox of Hoaxes: How Errors Persist, Even When Corrected
By Samuel Arbesman
It was an accidental hoax. A screenshot from Back to the Future got passed around this summer, showing that June 27, 2012 was the date when the DeLorean hurtled forward in time. After a certain period of excitement, posts, and retweets, people soon realized that the image had been modified: the “actual” date wasn’t for three more years. Turns out this wasn’t even the first time this had happened. A similarly fudged screenshot of the DeLorean’s time counters spread across the internet just two years before (though that was an intentional hoax).
Not only were people spreading incorrect information, but the collective internet consciousness didn’t even recognize the return of the same error. And even when we do recognize such errors, we can’t fix them as easily as we might like. Just ask Philip Roth about how difficult it was to correct an entry on his own Wikipedia page – he had to publish an open letter in the New Yorker to satisfy the requirement for a more reputable secondary source.
Knowledge changes around us all the time. Yet we don’t always have the most up-to-date facts. This is true, I’d argue, even in an age of instant and massive information. Despite our unprecedented ability to rapidly learn new things and crowdfix mistakes, Knowledge and its sinister twin Error continue to propagate in complex and intriguing ways. Errors persist among us for far longer than they should and even when there is more accurate knowledge elsewhere. Newer knowledge does not spread as fast as it should and weaves its way unevenly throughout society.
The problem isn’t just epistemological – it can have serious consequences. Doctors might not realize there is a newer and better treatment. Teachers might not have the most current materials. Parents might not have the latest child-rearing techniques. Entire fields of science invest time, money, and other resources recapitulating the findings of others due to their ignorance of other fields’ advances.
more
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/09/opinion-errors-knowledge-crowdfixing/
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