October 4, 1957 to June 20, 1963

Have you done your apocalypse shopping yet?

2012 Mayan Apocalypse Rumors Have Dark Side, NASA Warns

Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer

Date: 28 November 2012 Time: 06:46 PM ET

“While this is a joke to some people and a mystery to others, there is a core of people who are truly concerned,” he said.

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“I think it’s evil for people to propagate rumors on the Internet to frighten children,” (astrobiologist at NASA Ames Research Center) Morrison said.

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NASA scientists took questions via social media in the hour-long video chat, debunking doomsday myths from the rogue planet Nibiru to the danger of killer solar flares.

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Nor are any near-Earth objects, planetary or otherwise, threatening to slam into our planet on Dec. 21, said Don Yeomans, a planetary scientist who tracks near-Earth objects at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The only close asteroid approach on the horizon is forecast to occur on Feb. 13, 2013, when an asteroid will pass within 4.5 Earth radii to our planet (for perspective, Earth’s radius is 3,963 miles, or 6,378 kilometers). The asteroid is not going to hit Earth, Yeomans said.

Other rumors – that the Earth’s magnetic field will suddenly reverse or that the planet will travel almost 30,000 light-years and fall into the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy – were also dismissed. (A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, or about 6 trillion miles, or 10 trillion km.)

One popular rumor that the planet will undergo a complete blackout from Dec. 23 to 25 earned a “What?” and blank looks from the panel of scientists.

Ultimately, concerns about Earth’s fate would be better focused on slow-acting problems such as climate change rather than some sort of cosmic catastrophe, said Andrew Fraknoi, an astronomer at Foothill College in California.

It would be irresponsible not to speculate.

Speaking of death, Connections #2.

Surprise!  It’s about economics.

42 Million Dead In Bloodiest Black Friday Weekend On Record

The Onion

November 26, 2012

Survivors of the deadly holiday sales event said that while the weekend began as a chance to “get in on some unbeatable post-Thanksgiving deals,” it quickly escalated into a merciless, no-hold-barred fight to the death.

“At some point in time we all stopped caring about the deals and the holiday shopping and were pretty much just out for blood,” said Dana Marshall, 37, a Target shopper who suffered seven broken ribs and a cracked sternum while fighting two other customers for a discounted Nikon digital camera. “I remember just sitting on top of a woman and smacking her head with a DVD player until her face was completely unrecognizable. I felt nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

The Onion will continue to publish a running list of the Black Friday dead throughout the week.

Ha ha ha.  You are so funny ek.

I am put in mind of a question- you see someone slip on a banana peel and tumble down a flight of stairs doing the most hilarious prat falls you can imagine.  When they land at the bottom they stop in a motionless heap.  You go over to check and find them dead.

Question: When did that stop being funny?

Answer: It never stopped being funny.

Alleged Walmart thief dies after confrontation

WSBTV

Monday, Nov. 26, 2012

According to a police report obtained by Channel 2 Action News, the incident happened at the Walmart on Fairington Road in Lithonia. The police report said that about 1:30 a.m. Sunday, a middle aged man was caught shoplifting two DVD players.

He exited the front door of the store and three employees caught him in the parking lot, where a physical altercation took place while they detained him.

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The police report said one of those Walmart employees had placed the man in a choke hold, but the cause and manner of death will be determined by a medical examiner.

(h/t Chris in Paris @ Americablog)

Sales at Nation’s Retailers Fell Short of Expectations in November

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD, The New York Times

Published: November 29, 2012

“The traditional post-Black Friday lull, normally starting the following week, started on … Black Friday,” Mr. Johnson wrote in an e-mail. Activity in shopping malls slowed down starting about noon that Friday, he said, “right about the time the early bird specials expired, and long after the Thanksgiving evening doorbuster items were all sold out – leaving financially stressed consumers with little reason to shop” so many weeks away from Christmas.

Over all, the 16 retailers tracked by Thomson Reuters that reported results Thursday recorded a 1.6 percent increase in sales at stores that were open at least a year. Analysts had expected a 3.3 percent jump.

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Some shoppers said the deals this year were not good enough to get them to buy. “We looked through the ads and didn’t see anything we really wanted,” said Lisa Apple, 46, who was shopping in Columbus, Ohio, on Black Friday. “The good deals were on TVs, but how many TVs do you need?”

Another shopper, Laura Schimpf, 32, who lives in Delaware, Ohio, and works for the state’s government, agreed. “The deals don’t seem too good. We really had to hunt for good ones. I’ve been looking online for three weeks,” she said.

Retailers report weak sales gains for November, hurt by Superstorm Sandy early in the month

By Associated Press

Nov 29, 2012 09:17 PM EST

Meanwhile, department store chains Macy’s and Nordstrom Inc. reported their first monthly sales drops since late 2009 when the U.S. economy was just coming out of the Great Recession.

Nordstrom recorded a 1.1 percent decline in November, blaming the weakness not only on Sandy but also on tepid customer response to its semi-annual sales in the first half of the month. Nordstrom also said customers continue to prefer fashion and newness over bargains, which has made its clearance sales less enticing. The November figure was Nodstrom’s first monthly decline since September 2009 when it had a 2.4 percent drop.

Macy’s revenue at stores open at least a year fell 0.7 percent in November, compared with the 1.5 percent increase analysts expected. It was Macy’s first monthly sales drop since November 2009 when it recorded a 6.1 percent decline.

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Perhaps most surprisingly, Target reported that revenue at stores opened at least a year fell 1 percent, well below the 2.1 percent increase that Wall Street was anticipating.

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Analysts were puzzled by Target’s disappointing sales performance in November. Earlier this month, the no. 2 discounter behind Wal-Mart had issued a profit outlook for the holiday quarter that beat analysts’ estimates. The chain also opened its doors at 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving, three hours earlier than a year ago.

Given the tough spending climate, Brian Sozzi, chief equities analyst at NBG Productions, said: “Not everyone is going to win.”

Retailers’ Thanksgiving Deals Cut Black Friday Sales

By Sapna Maheshwari & Matt Townsend, Bloomberg News

Nov 25, 2012 1:41 PM ET

Karen Carlow, a 57-year-old from Coventry, Rhode Island, said the damage caused by superstorm Sandy made her “think more about what other people lost.” Carlow said in an interview at the Crystal Mall in Waterford, Connecticut, that she was less willing to make extravagant purchases this year.

Others are spending carefully as the unemployment rate, while down from almost 9 percent a year ago, remains above 7 percent. Deb Bettini, 56, plans to spend about $300 on holiday gifts, about the same as last year and mostly in the form of gift cards to retailers such as Lowe’s Cos. and Panera Bread Co., she said said yesterday after spending $27.04 on pajamas and socks at a Roses discount store in Reidsville, North Carolina.

“There is a lot of belt-tightening by companies going on and people are still losing their jobs,” said Bettini, who with her husband, Randy, raises grapes, mushrooms and vegetables on a family farm. They also plan to give gift baskets with homemade cider. “People are trying to get by the best way they can.”

Ho, ho, ho.  Merry ek’smas.

You know, I do have other interests.

My comment at the moment was-

Fields have different expressions depending on how you interact with them.

Nothing so hard about that.

But the Standard Model is only as useful as Newtonian Mechanics.  Good for some things, not so much for others.

This is the kind of pithy insight that has some of my acquaintance begging me to get a crack habit twitter account.

Well, I have one and a few blogs that I frequent which leads me to gratefully accept affirmations of sanity.

Supersymmetry Fails Test, Forcing Physics to Seek New Ideas

By Natalie Wolchover, Scientific American

November 29, 2012

As a young theorist in Moscow in 1982, Mikhail Shifman became enthralled with an elegant new theory called supersymmetry that attempted to incorporate the known elementary particles into a more complete inventory of the universe.

“My papers from that time really radiate enthusiasm,” said Shifman, now a 63-year-old professor at the University of Minnesota. Over the decades, he and thousands of other physicists developed the supersymmetry hypothesis, confident that experiments would confirm it. “But nature apparently doesn’t want it,” he said. “At least not in its original simple form.”

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“Supersymmetry is such a beautiful structure, and in physics, we allow that kind of beauty and aesthetic quality to guide where we think the truth may be,” said Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist at Columbia University.

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“I think it is a mistake to focus on popular versions of supersymmetry,” said Matt Strassler, a particle physicist at Rutgers University. “Popularity contests are not reliable measures of truth.”

Originally posted August 26, 2011.

I’m not talking about John “Wet Start” McCain and his bestest bud Lindsey Graham.  Clearly the voters of Arizona and South Carolina have spoken and they like having liars and hypocrites as representatives of their States.

That’s Democracy.

No, I’m talking about the Russerts and Gregorys and Stephanopouloses and Schieffers and their Producers who’s Rolodexes always seem to come up 22 Black.

I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

If only it were a gamble.

William Randolph Hearst is famously remembered for this apocryphal quote–

You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.

I don’t labor under the illusion that there was a golden age of truth and nobility in the press which is why stories like this don’t surprise me a bit.

Julian Assange Refuses to Submit to Erin Burnett’s Planned Hit Job

By: Kevin Gosztola, Firedog Lake

Wednesday November 28, 2012 11:12 pm

From the beginning, Assange tried to discuss what he found to be important and not trivial or plain disingenuous and ignorant. As the clip shows, he got into how companies are working in countries to engage in widespread surveillance showing documents. Burnett reacted, “I’m curious though about this – A lot of people share this fear about being under surveillance, right? Some people might say you go way too far on it, but people do share your fear. But you are someone trying to champion and like I said benefiting by the Internet by putting out information governments don’t want people to have.”

“Some people might say” is Burnett saying what she thinks. She thinks Assange’s fear of the surveillance state goes to(o) far. She does not want to talk about this issue and, though Assange began the interview ready to talk on this topic, Burnett is prepared to steer this to Ecuador (but not before casting his agenda as something that is nefarious and shady).

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Erin Burnett did not get the segment she wanted except if you go to CNN Video where they are featuring a part of the segment that makes it seem like all Assange was asked to do was come on and talk Ecuador and refused to cooperate with Burnett.

Now I’m going to stop right there because Kevin Gosztola’s link doesn’t go anywhere in particular and it took me a while to figure out what he was referencing.  I think it was this-

Edited Segment

Continuing-

Assange was clearly told he could come on and they would talk about the book. She opened with a question about his thoughts on the Internet. Then, she gradually moved the discussion into one about Ecuador because all she wanted to do was make the point that in her mind she sees Julian Assange, who she thinks is probably a criminal, seeking asylum in a country where the government has no respect for press freedom and he is being used or manipulated for their purposes.

If Burnett had her way, the interview would have been some looney segment about Ecuador exploiting him for their ends to get away with violating freedom of the press. And she would have touted it as “aggressive journalism,” when it is not aggressive at all to set someone up who is the target of one of the most powerful governments of the world and has been granted what someone would consider a refugee status to push for safe transport to Ecuador.

Kevin Gosztola very helpfully embeds the full segment and I thought I’d share it with those of you who think that there is a real journalist in it who’s analysis might interest you (hint: it’s not the one who worked for Goldman Sachs and is engaged to a Citigroup executive).

Full Segment

Originally posted August 25, 2011.

In Drive to Unionize, Fast-Food Workers Walk Off the Job

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE, The New York Times

Published: November 28, 2012

Fast-food workers at several restaurants in New York walked off the job on Thursday, firing the first salvo in what workplace experts say is the biggest effort to unionize fast-food workers ever undertaken in the United States. The effort – backed by community and civil rights groups, religious leaders and a labor union – has engaged 40 full-time organizers in recent months to enlist workers at McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Domino’s, Taco Bell and other fast-food restaurants across the city.

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Over the decades there have been occasional efforts to unionize a fast-food restaurant here or there, but labor experts say there has never before been an effort to unionize dozens of such restaurants. The new campaign aims in part to raise low-end wages and reduce income inequality, and is also an uphill battle to win union recognition.

Ruth Milkman, a sociology professor at the City University of New York, said there had been so few efforts to unionize fast-food workers because it was such a daunting challenge.

“These jobs have extremely high turnover, so by the time you get around to organizing folks, they’re not on the job anymore,” she said. Nonetheless, she said the new effort might gain traction because it is taking place in New York, a city with deep union roots where many workers are sympathetic to unions.

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Richard W. Hurd, a labor relations professor at Cornell, said the organizations backing the fast-food campaign seemed intent on finding pressure points to push the restaurants to improve wages and benefits.

“But it’s going to be a lot harder for them to win union recognition,” he said. “It will be harder to unionize them than carwash workers because the parent companies will fight hard against it, because they worry if you unionize fast-food outlets in New York, that’s going to have a lot of ramifications elsewhere.”

Originally posted August 23, 2011.