Category: Informative

Nearly two-thirds of Americans report possessing a library card, and most continue to visit the library in person at least once a year. These are among the findings of the American Library Association in its first “State of America’s Libraries” report. Released on Monday, the survey, conducted earlier this year, found that patrons’ use of some crucial library services had increased significantly since 2002: 81 percent of library visitors say they take out books (up 14 percentage points from 2002); 54 percent say they consult the librarian (up 7 points); 38 percent say they take out CD’s, videos or computer software (up 13 points); and 22 percent say they go to the library to attend special programs (up 8 points).

— Arts, Briefly – New York Times

At two minutes and three seconds after 1 AM Wednesday it will be:
01:02:03 04/05/06.

Thanks to Mike for the info.

Number of centenarians that the U.S. census counted in 2000: 50,740

Projected number it will count in 2050: 1,149,500

Harper’s Index for February 2006

“Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.”

Abraham Lincoln in a letter as quoted in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals.

“David Blanchflower of Dartmouth and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England calculated that if you increased your sexual activity from once a month to once a week, you’d be as happy as if you had an extra $50,000 a year.”

Maureen Dowd

Forbes picks The 20 Most Important Tools Ever — among them, the knife, the abacus, the compass, the pencil, the candle.

Also, a feature on the other greatest tool ever — duct tape.

Talk to a person instead of a computer phone tree with these access numbers from the gethuman database.

Our goal is to improve the quality of customer service and phone support in the US. This free website is run by volunteers and is powered by over one million consumers who demand high quality phone support from the companies that they use.

Thanks to Veronica for the link.

At Slate, Steve Olson tells us Go back a few millenniums, and we’ve all got the same ancestors.

It gets even stranger. Say you go back 120 generations, to about the year 1000 B.C. According to the results presented in our Nature paper, your ancestors then included everyone in the world who has descendants living today. And if you compared a list of your ancestors with a list of anyone else’s ancestors, the names on the two lists would be identical.

This is a very bizarre result (the math behind it is solid, though—here’s a brief, semitechnical explanation of our findings). It means that you and I are descended from all of the Africans, Australians, Native Americans, and Europeans who were alive three millenniums ago and still have descendants living today. That’s also why so many people living today could be descended from Jesus. If Jesus had children (a big if, of course) and if those children had children so that Jesus’ lineage survived, then Jesus is today the ancestor of almost everyone living on Earth. True, Jesus lived two rather than three millenniums ago, but a person’s descendants spread quickly from well-connected parts of the world like the Middle East.

An article in The New York Times Magazine explains that freedom means different things to different classes in America. To upper and middle class Americans it means the freedom “to.” To working class Americans it means freedom “from.”

We also analyzed how freedom and choice are presented in one of our most pervasive and influential cultural products: popular songs. In every region, Americans with higher education and higher incomes typically prefer rock music over country. We found that rock lyrics had a lot more talk of choice, control and self-expression, as in the Rolling Stones’ refrain, “‘Cause I’m free to do what I want any old time.” But when we analyzed country music, preferred over rock by less-educated Americans in every region, we heard more mentions of self-protection and defense, as in Darryl Worley’s observation, “We didn’t get to keep [our freedom] by backin’ down.” When choice was mentioned, it was often as a prelude or coda to tragedy, as in George Jones’s lament “Now I’m living and dying with the choices I’ve made.”

Another study that compared people in different occupations showed that those employed in middle-class jobs got upset when a friend or neighbor bought the same car as theirs because they felt that the uniqueness of their choice had been undercut. But those in working-class jobs liked it when others chose the same car because it affirmed that they had made a good choice.

“If you look, in fact, at emergency room statistics, you’ll see that more people are admitted every year for non-dog bites than dog-bites–which is to say that when you see a Pit Bull, you should worry as much about being bitten by the person holding the leash than the dog on the other end.”

Malcolm Gladwell

Sorry, too many generations of fearing wolves in my genes to buy this.

1. The Vice President Richard Cheney
2. Speaker of the House John Dennis Hastert
3. President pro tempore of the Senate Ted Stevens (age 82)
4. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
5. Secretary of the Treasury John Snow
6. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld
7. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
8. Secretary of the Interior Gale A. Norton

This useful web site is linked here because — to NewMexiKen — it shows yet another of the jillion uses of the internet.

Select a word from the list and see a quick video of how to sign that word. Pretty nice.

I also post it to compensate for all the silliness posted so far today.

Two months ago my father told me that he had just sent a cheek swab sample to the National Geographic Genographic Project, which, at the time, I had never heard of. To have the website tell it, the goal of the project is to “understand the human journey — where we came from and how we got to where we live today.” The data collected “will map world migratory patterns dating back some 150,000 years and will fill in the huge gaps in our knowledge of humankind’s migratory history.”

The participation kit is only $100 and it’s money well spent if you ask me.

Read what Justin Blanton’s father found out.

Sunday’s New York Times has these comparisons to a trillion (in light of the $2.77 trillion U.S. budget for 2007):

• Possible hands for one bridge player: 635 billion
• Stars in the Milky Way: Up to 400 billion
• Pennies in use: 150 billion
• All people who ever lived: Perhaps 100 billion
• Acres of land on earth: 37 billion

Central Intelligence Agency Homepage for Kids

From an article in the Christian Science Monitor:

Not so long ago it seemed as if we all spoke the same pop-culture language. But in an era of 500 TV channels, billions of Web pages, unlimited Netflix rentals, and iPods with music libraries of Smithsonian proportions, popular entertainment has suddenly become mind-bogglingly vast. As the overlap between what we all watch, read, and listen to steadily erodes, the water cooler has become a modern-day tower of Babel, where conversations sound like the jumbled voices emanating from the jungle in “Lost.” (If that reference is lost on you then, well, Q.E.D.)

In decades past, major pop-culture moments – the ones that everybody experienced at the same time – acted as an intangible glue that bound us together. “There’s a ‘we’ in all of those; the unum of the pluribus,” says Tim Burke, a cultural historian at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. “It’s harder to get those things as the media fragments.”

Which makes Sunday’s Super Bowl all the more remarkable.

“It’s the largest national event, at least in terms of people doing a common thing at one time in American culture,” says Mark Dyreson, a Pennsylvania State University professor who co-wrote the chapter “Super Bowl Sunday: A New American Holiday?” for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of American Holidays.

That got us thinking: Which other pop-culture phenomena still bind us together? After days of argument, research, fact-checking, and multiple rounds of voting – a process as rigorous as a “CSI” forensics test – the staff here at Weekend came up with a highly subjective, nonscientific list of 10 things that act as common denominators.

Go read about the 10.

In the most recent year for which figures are available, these are the numbers for firearms homicides:

Ireland 54
Japan 83
Sweden 183
Great Britain 197
Australia 334
Canada 1,034
United States 30,419

Cited by Garry Wills in a review of Jimmy Carter’s Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis.

… from the Roman republican calendar month Februarius, named for Februa, the festival of purification held on the 15th. The name is taken from a Latin word, februare, meaning “to make pure”.

The always worth reading Malcolm Gladwell on “What pit bulls can teach us about profiling.” A short excerpt from an article more about decision-making than dogs:

Of course, not all pit bulls are dangerous. Most don’t bite anyone. Meanwhile, Dobermans and Great Danes and German shepherds and Rottweilers are frequent biters as well, and the dog that recently mauled a Frenchwoman so badly that she was given the world’s first face transplant was, of all things, a Labrador retriever. When we say that pit bulls are dangerous, we are making a generalization, just as insurance companies use generalizations when they charge young men more for car insurance than the rest of us (even though many young men are perfectly good drivers), and doctors use generalizations when they tell overweight middle-aged men to get their cholesterol checked (even though many overweight middle-aged men won’t experience heart trouble). Because we don’t know which dog will bite someone or who will have a heart attack or which drivers will get in an accident, we can make predictions only by generalizing. As the legal scholar Frederick Schauer has observed, “painting with a broad brush” is “an often inevitable and frequently desirable dimension of our decision-making lives.”

50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2005.

Salon’s Ask the pilot on why airplane mishaps seem such sensationalist news:

First and foremost, millions of people find it hard to reconcile with the notion of traveling hundreds of miles per hour, far above the earth, inside pressurized tubes weighing hundreds of thousands of pounds. Flying is not natural for human beings, and while it doesn’t quite violate the laws of physics, it does seem to violate any and all common sense. Technology has made it work, but while airplane travel isn’t statistically dangerous, inherently it’s another story. I wouldn’t call us ignorant, exactly; most Americans can’t tell you how a television set works either, never mind a 747. The difference is, a TV set can’t crash into a skyscraper and kill 3,000 people — one of them you. In the end, everybody from veteran pilots to first-time fliers contemplates their mortality when stepping onto a plane, as well they should.

Second, the airlines themselves shoulder a heavy portion of the blame for being such lousy communicators. Airlines have a terrible habit of responding to anomalies — be it a minor malfunction or a catastrophic crash — in one of two ways: either with total silence or, perhaps worse, by employing hideous oversimplifications. A flight from Las Vegas is canceled because “it’s too hot to fly”; a crew aborts a landing because “a plane crossed in front of us.” At Flagstaff, Ariz., counter staff at America West Express told a group of delayed passengers that several volunteers were needed to give up their seats. When passengers asked why, they were told, “We need to lighten the load. The plane has been having problems and we’re afraid one of the engines might cut out.” The result is nearly total lack of trust from the public. People dislike airlines and don’t believe anything they say — partly because they never actually say anything — or, when they do, it’s both condescending and terrifying.

Amen!

Patrick Smith, the pilot, notes that 2 billion people boarded commercial aircraft in 2005; 1,050 of them were killed.

Note: This item from the same Salon web page (i.e., same link) as preceding item.

NewMexiKen is a fan of Salon’s feature Ask the pilot, despite the annoyance of having to watch an ad to get a free day pass. Though I knew something about altimeters and altitude, I still found this interesting:

A plane’s altimeters (typically there are three independent units) — and, in turn, all air traffic control instructions — are referenced to sea level, not to the ground. Parked at the gate at Mexico City, they will read about 7,500 feet. Thus, when the captain announces that you’re cruising at 35,000 feet, the surface of el mundo may or may not be 35,000 feet below you. Over the ocean, yes, but over a high plateau, mesa or mountain range, no. A sea level datum allows aircraft to be safely and evenly sequenced. You couldn’t have a sector full of planes, all at 15,000 feet, if 15,000 kept changing each time you passed above a hill or depression.

Altimeters have no idea where the ground is, strictly speaking. Essentially barometers, they are set by dialing or programming in the local barometric pressure, gauged in inches of mercury (or metric millibars) like the ones given out by TV meteorologists. The atmospheric standard for sea level is 29.92 inches (1013.2 mb), but actual pressures will vary from place to place, depending on the weather. If you enjoy tuning in to United’s Channel Nine, you’ll hear crews being advised of the local value. “Altimeter: two-niner eight-six,” for example.

En route, above certain heights — 18,000 feet in the U.S., but usually lower elsewhere — all aircraft change over to the single standard of 29.92 inches. At this point, cruising altitudes become known as “flight levels.” Thirty-five thousand “feet” is technically “flight level three-five-zero.”

There’s a separate cockpit unit called a radio altimeter that measures a plane’s position relative to the turf itself. Height above ground level, or AGL, is referenced when flying close to the surface — up to maybe 1,500 feet or so– such as during instrument approaches. Over uneven terrain, the radio altimeters, unlike the main altimeters, will be constantly changing.