WTF!

1. This woman who tried to ride an escalator in a wheelchair.

Source: newkidsonmycock11

2. This dude planking on a McDonald's sign.

Via: kylesfuckingtumblr

3. This person wearing whatever this is.

Source: blackkokaine

4. This woman who couldn't fit in her theater seat.


5. This cheetah woman and her kin.

Source: scrotumcoat

6. This person in a cow costume.

Via: fuckyeahloldemort

7. This woman who is also maybe a witch.

Via: peetaah.me

8. This woman taking a selfie.

Source: duosion

9. This woman who tucked her tatas into her pants.

Source: okaythatwasfunny

10. This woman wearing these tights.

Via: thisurge

11. This woman wearing a cat coat.

Via: katlee3

12. This person walking their computer.

Source: caiticornia

13. This bro who is also maybe a witch.

Source: carrier71

14. This dude planking on a tiger.

Source: peterfromtexas

15. This girl with super big hair.

Source: meme-meme.org

16. This kid eating pizza with chopsticks.

Source: goodbyeforeverfatty.com

17. This cheese model.

Via: canadumb

18. This girl blow drying her teeth.

Source: keepingupwiththekardacheyennes

19. This parent carrying a child.

Via: pricklylegs

20. This woman eating a block of cheese.

Via: ratchetmess

21. This granddaughter.

Source: suicideyear

22. This kid who brought his Xbox to prom.

Via: lyingrock

23. This girl just doing her homework.

Via: otherbully1

24. This person who wore these Crocs for this long.

Via: pi4nobl4ck

25. This girl eating her own fist.

Source: kevinjonassvirginity

26. This guy riding the bus.

Via: seesectionc

27. This dude getting lunch.

Via: thisisnthappiness.com

28. This man in this koala mask.

Via: theinternetaccordingtoadrian

29. This woman wearing this Sarah Palin t-shirt.

Via: notofficialmerch

30. This grandma.

Via: notsufferingfrominsanity

31. Her.

Via: milesjai

32. This person with these toenails.

Via: memewhore

33. This kid at the grocery store.

Via: memewhore

34. This guy who shaved his chest like this.

Via: spiritualboner

35. This dude.

Via: tyleroakley

36. This girl wearing a Doritos bag in her hair.

Via: luisstacks

37. This grandma at the grocery store.

Via: jaidefinichon.com

38. This dude at Starbucks.

Via: tyleroakley

39. This girl who is also a cat.

Via: shorturl

40. This woman at Burger King.


41. This McDonald's wizard.


42. And Paula Deen.



43 People You Won't Believe Actually Exist

12 Extremely Disappointing Facts About Popular…

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elizabethmargaretban hour ago


#20 is so me, LOL! #18, I get the hunch I'd do that…

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sharonsteedleypa day ago


Funny, but don't mess with Paula.

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Carrie Teter5 days ago


buzzfeed do you always disregard your title? it says 43 when in fact its 42. same with your polar plunge pictures!

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danh306 days ago


9 takes the prize! Stretchy pants pulled up over Ur Tatas in public is just white trash at it's finest! Although there were some very close runners up!

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didrikma week ago


22) I suspect he actually married his XBox.
23) Books are sexy, yo!

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ZarMaza week ago


Hey doesn't it say “43 people you won't believe actually exist”? But there are 42 pictures…

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stephene2a week ago


You ask me, they didn't burn nearly enough male witches back in the 1600's. They're out there.

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benderr22 weeks ago


I started to squeak, whinny, snort, lose breath when I got to #31. Then I was totally deflated at #33 because “Amy” (Gretchen) was so much *not* in ecstasy that she committed suicide earlier this very month. It really should be taken out of the list. It's not fun… it's not funny.

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The Unibloggera week ago


I was thinking the same thing about #33 — But I didn't know she had killed herself! So sad!

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jeann42 weeks ago


I almost lost my lunch on the “toe nails” in the music section… have a hang nail w/ that CD? LMAO

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username7892 weeks ago


this dude getting lunch - can't tell if he doesn't have another music player or if he's just trying to live large… literally

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Alliance19112 weeks ago


Gosh. 6. Kinda reminds me off Octavia Spencer, anyone else agree? 20. Is nasty. 18. Cute but dumb. 31. Rasputia off “Norbit”, “How YOU Doin”. 23. Looks 'alright'

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We are raising a generation of deluded narcissists

We are raising a generation of deluded narcissists


By Dr. Keith Ablow

Published January 08, 2013

FoxNews.com




Are we raising a generation of deluded narcissists?

Survey: College students think they're 'greatest...

The 'Hooked up' Generation


A new analysis of the American Freshman Survey, which has accumulated data for the past 47 years from 9 million young adults, reveals that college students are more likely than ever to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, even though their test scores and time spent studying are decreasing.

Psychologist Jean Twenge, the lead author of the analysis, is also the author of a study showing that the tendency toward narcissism in students is up 30 percent in the last thirty-odd years.
This data is not unexpected. I have been writing a great deal over the past few years about the toxic psychological impact of media and technology on children, adolescents and young adults, particularly as it regards turning them into faux celebrities—the equivalent of lead actors in their own fictionalized life stories.

On Facebook, young people can fool themselves into thinking they have hundreds or thousands of “friends.” They can delete unflattering comments. They can block anyone who disagrees with them or pokes holes in their inflated self-esteem. They can choose to show the world only flattering, sexy or funny photographs of themselves (dozens of albums full, by the way), “speak” in pithy short posts and publicly connect to movie stars and professional athletes and musicians they “like.”



We must beware of the toxic psychological impact of media and technology on children, adolescents and young adults, particularly as it regards turning them into faux celebrities—the equivalent of lead actors in their own fictionalized life stories.



Using Twitter, young people can pretend they are worth “following,” as though they have real-life fans, when all that is really happening is the mutual fanning of false love and false fame.

Using computer games, our sons and daughters can pretend they are Olympians, Formula 1 drivers, rock stars or sharpshooters. And while they can turn off their Wii and Xbox machines and remember they are really in dens and playrooms on side streets and in triple deckers around America, that is after their hearts have raced and heads have swelled with false pride for “being” something they are not.

On MTV and other networks, young people can see lives just like theirs portrayed on reality TV shows fueled by such incredible self-involvement and self-love that any of the “real-life” characters should really be in psychotherapy to have any chance at anything like a normal life.

These are the psychological drugs of the 21st Century and they are getting our sons and daughters very sick, indeed.

As if to keep up with the unreality of media and technology, in a dizzying paroxysm of self-aggrandizing hype, town sports leagues across the country hand out ribbons and trophies to losing teams, schools inflate grades, energy drinks in giant, colorful cans take over the soft drink market, and psychiatrists hand out Adderall like candy.

All the while, these adolescents, teens and young adults are watching a Congress that can’t control its manic, euphoric, narcissistic spending, a president that can’t see his way through to applauding genuine and extraordinary achievements in business, a society that blames mass killings on guns, not the psychotic people who wield them, and—here no surprise—a stock market that keeps rising and falling like a roller coaster as bubbles inflate and then, inevitably, burst.

That’s really the unavoidable end, by the way. False pride can never be sustained. The bubble of narcissism is always at risk of bursting. That’s why young people are higher on drugs than ever, drunker than ever, smoking more, tattooed more, pierced more and having more and more and more sex, earlier and earlier and earlier, raising babies before they can do it well, because it makes them feel special, for a while. They’re doing anything to distract themselves from the fact that they feel empty inside and unworthy.

Distractions, however, are temporary, and the truth is eternal. Watch for an epidemic of depression and suicidality, not to mention homicidality, as the real self-loathing and hatred of others that lies beneath all this narcissism rises to the surface. I see it happening and, no doubt, many of you do, too.

We had better get a plan together to combat this greatest epidemic as it takes shape. Because it will dwarf the toll of any epidemic we have ever known. And it will be the hardest to defeat. Because, by the time we see the scope and destructiveness of this enemy clearly, we will also realize, as the saying goes, that it is us.



Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team. Dr. Ablow can be reached at

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/01/08/are-raising-generation-deluded-narcissists/#ixzz2HWPcoA56

Fake mission to Mars leaves astronauts spaced out

Fake mission to Mars leaves astronauts spaced out

Trip to Mars in pretend spaceship on Moscow industrial estate affects sleep, activity levels and motivation of six-man crew
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Ian Sample, science correspondent
The Guardian, Monday 7 January 2013 14.59 EST

Members of the Mars500 crew relax on the fake spaceship in Moscow. Photograph: AFP


As the cheerless skies and grim economy sap all will to return to work, take heart that even on a trip to Mars, it is hard to get out of bed in the morning.

The drudge of interplanetary travel has emerged from research on six men who joined the longest simulated space mission ever: a 17-month round trip to the red planet in a pretend spaceship housed at a Moscow industrial estate.

Though chosen for the job as the best of the best, the would-be spacefarers spent more and more time under their duvets and sitting around idle as the mission wore on. The crew's activity levels plummeted in the first three months, and continued to fall for the next year.

On the return leg, the men spent nearly 700 hours longer in bed than on the outward journey, and only perked up in the last 20 days before theyclambered from their capsule in November 2011. Four crew members suffered from sleep or psychological issues.

"We saw some problems," said Mathias Basner, of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies the effects of sleep-loss on behaviour. "There were no major adverse events, but there could have been if the stars were aligned in a certain way."

The $10m (£6.2m) Mars500 project, run by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems, launched, metaphorically, when the hatch to the mock-up spaceship closed behind three Russians, two Europeans and a Chinese man in June 2010. The men spent the next 520 days in windowless isolation. Their only contact with the outside world was over the internet and by phone lines that carried a delay of up to 20 minutes, to mimic the time it takes radio waves to reach Mars from Earth.

Throughout the mission, the men endured daily medical, physical and psychological examinations, to help space agencies learn how humans cope with the stress, confinement and limited company that astronauts will face on future voyages. The crew fought boredom by watching DVDs, reading books and playing Guitar Hero on a games console. Mission controllers faked a fire and a power outage to keep them alert.

The ESA selected the crew from thousands of highly qualified applicants, and put them through a year of intensive training. But despite embodying "the right stuff" that underpins the astronaut corps, the men struggled with the tedium of the mission.

"The monotony of going to Mars and coming back again is something that will need to be addressed in the future. You don't want your crew hanging around doing nothing," Basner said.

On a real mission, sedentary astronauts would be at greater risk of bone and muscle wastage.

According to the study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, some crew members fared worse than others. One began living a 25-hour day, and quickly fell out of routine with the others. "If you live on a 25-hour day, after twelve days it's the middle of the night for you when it's daytime for everyone else," Basner said.

Another crew member slept at night but took ever longer naps during the day. Taken together, the two men spent a fifth of their time, or 2,500 hours, asleep when the rest of the crew were awake, or vice-versa. "That cannot be good for mission success, because mission-critical tasks will be scheduled for the day," Basner said.

A third crew member slept so badly he suffered chronic sleep deprivation and single-handedly accounted for the majority of mistakes made on a computer test used to measure concentration and alertness. "He was falling apart in terms of his attention system," Basner said. In a second study, not yet published, the team describes a fourth crew member who was developing mild depression.

"Only two of the men adapted well to the mission. Of the other four, there was at least one major reason for concern, where we would ask, should we really send someone like this on a long mission," Basner said.

For the 17 months of the mission to nowhere the crew had control over the amount of exercise they took, their meals, and the levels of ambient lighting. The right lighting is crucial to keep people on a regular sleep and wake cycle.

Improved lighting to mimic day and night could help some astronauts cope with long missions, but the results point to a need for tests that can spot astronauts who are vulnerable to sleep disorders, Basner said.

Steven Lockley, a neuroscientist who specialises in sleep medicine at Brigham and Women's hospital in Boston, said the study raised concerns about long-term space missions.

"Having some of the six crew members with different schedules, and different amounts of sleep, would likely make for poor team performance and increased risk of accidents and injuries in a real-life situation," he told the Guardian.

Astronauts on a trip to Mars would probably face even worse problems if they spent time on the surface of the planet, because the length of the Martian day is slightly longer than an Earth day. "The deleterious effects on sleep, performance, psychological health and physical health would likely have been much worse had the subjects been required to live on a 24.65-hour day," Lockley said.

It's About Time

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Current Issue
WFS Home › Blogs › James Ware's blog ›
It's About Time
Posted on January 3, 2013




I have been thinking a lot about Time recently—mostly because I have so little of it under my own control. Don’t get me wrong; it’s nice to be busy. However, when something you value becomes scarce, it also becomes incredibly precious.

So here are a few somewhat-connected (at least in my mind) perspectives on Time, and how it affects our work and our organizations. I’ve chosen to focus in particular on how well-managed organizations (and effective individuals) allocate their work activities using Time as a major sorting mechanism.

One of the most classic ways of thinking about organizations and hierarchy is to separate their activities into three broad categories:

1. Doing (the day-to-day, short-term activity focused on producing products or services that create value for customers). Time frame: days, or at most weeks.
2. Managing/Coordinating – the task of overseeing the Doers, and of short-term planning. Time frame: weeks, or perhaps months and quarters.
3. Leading/Strategizing – the longer-term, direction-setting role of “senior management.” Time frame: sometimes the next quarter, but more importantly the next several years, or even decades for larger organizations.

Those three levels of focus led to the traditional image of the organization as a pyramid, since historically there were always many people involved in the Doing, fewer doing the Managing, and even fewer providing long-term direction-setting.

Obviously, most large organizations have far more than three levels of hierarchy today; some of the most bureaucratic ones (both public and private sector) have as many as twelve to fourteen layers of responsibility and decision-making scope (that's one reason it takes them forever to resolve issues and change direction!).

That model worked reasonably well for centuries; it reflected the realities of the Roman Army, the Catholic Church, and industrial corporations as they grew up in the mid-1800’s. The model grew out of a stable world, where the task of leading was essentially looking in a constant and very predictable direction, out towards the horizon. The task of Managing was then largely one of translating long-term direction into short-term assignments, and the task of Doing was one of following directions from above.

Now, of course, the world has become far more dynamic and unpredictable; and technology has introduced massive automation into the Doing and Managing levels of responsibility. The classic pyramid has broken down. Many of the Doers today are not on assembly lines; they are knowledge workers who are solving problems, creating new products and processes, and thinking for themselves.

And because information technology makes it so easy for the senior executives among us to track daily production, product shipments, and revenues, it can actually seduce them to become too focused on today, and to forget that their job is to look beyond the horizon—to explore the future, and to launch long-term projects that will change what the Doers are doing five years from now. Let the Doers and the Managers deal with today and even tomorrow.

Clearly, the most common reaction to this new state of perpetual and unpredictable change has been to dissolve the hierarchy, to remove levels in the bureaucracy, and to enlarge decision-making authority (and responsibility) up and down the organization.

In one sense this is all to the good; today in many ways each of us operates at all three of these levels in our own individual work. We define our own Strategies; we Manage our own activities (we create To-Do lists, we set priorities, we coordinate our work with our peers); and we “Do” everything ourselves as well (often including specialized tasks that others could do for us far more quickly and inexpensively than we can do ourselves).

While flat organizations sound wonderful in theory, I am convinced that our confusion between short-, medium-, and long-term responsibilities is creating most of this chaotic “busy-ness” we all complain about. We don’t know how to separate our time commitments among Strategy and Planning, Managing and Coordinating, and just plain Doing.

I certainly know that lately I have personally been spending too much time doing, and not enough planning and priority-setting.

If I am going to be my own CEO and my own Manager, then I have to get much clearer about my purpose, my plans, my priorities, and my commitments (as much to myself as to my clients). And I have to become more disciplined about the way I spend my time every day. It’s way too easy to let the urgent drive out the important.

This note is thus a public commitment to getting better “organized.” I’m going to work hard to spend my precious time and energy on only three kinds of activities:
1. Meeting commitments I have already made;
2. Creating new commitments that meet my purpose and priorities;
3. “Green time” for brainstorming, exploring, and renewing my purpose

What do you think?

ARE WE LIVING INSIDE A COMPUTER SIMULATION?

ARE WE LIVING INSIDE A COMPUTER SIMULATION?
Analysis by Ray Villard
Sun Dec 16, 2012 01:42 PM ET
(145) Comments | Leave a CommentPrintEmail




The popular film trilogy, The Matrix, presented a cyberuniverse where humans live in a simulated reality created by sentient machines.

Now, a philosopher and team of physicists imagine that we might really be living inside a computer-generated universe that you could call The Lattice. What's more, we may be able to detect it.
WATCH VIDEO: DARK ENERGY

SLIDE SHOW: Violent Beauty of Our Evolving Universe

In 2003, British philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paperthat proposed the universe we live in might in fact really be a numerical computer simulation. To give this a bizarreTwilight Zone twist, he suggested that our far-evolved distant descendants might construct such a program to simulate the past and recreate how their remote ancestors lived.

He felt that such an experiment was inevitable for a supercivilization. If it didn't happen by now, then in meant that humanity never evolved that far and we're doomed to a short lifespan as a species, he argued.

To extrapolate further, I'd suggest that artificial intelligent entities descended from us would be curious about looking back in time by simulating the universe of their biological ancestors.

As off-the-wall as this sounds, a team of physicists at the University of Washington (UW) recently announcedthat there is a potential test to seen if we actually live in The Lattice. Ironically, it would be the first such observation for scientifically hypothesized evidence of intelligent design behind the cosmos.



The UW team too propose that super-intelligent entities, bored with their current universe, do numerical simulations to explore all possibilities in the landscape of the underlying quantum vacuum (from which the big bang percolated) through universe simulations. "This is perhaps the most profound quest that can be undertaken by a sentient being," write the authors.

Before you dismiss this idea as completely loony, the reality of such a Sim Universe might solve a lot of eerie mysteries about the cosmos. About two-dozen of the universe's fundamental constants happen to fall within the narrow range thought to be compatible with life. At first glance it seems as unlikely as balancing a pencil on its tip. Jiggle these parameters and life as we know it would have never appeared. Not even stars and galaxies. This is called the Anthropic principle.

ANALYSIS: Building the Universe Inside a Supercomputer

The discovery of dark energy over a decade ago further compounds the universe’s strangeness. This sort of “antigravity” pushing space-time apart is the closest thing there is to nothing and still is something. This energy from the vacuum of space is 60 orders of magnitude weaker that what would be predicted by quantum physics.The eminent cosmologist Michael Turner ranks dark energy as "the most profound mystery in all of science."

We are also living at a very special time in the universe's history where it switched gears from decelerating to accelerating under the push of dark energy. This begs the question "why me why now?" (A phrase popularly attributed to Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan in 1994 when she was attacked and crippled by an opponent.)

If dark energy were slightly stronger the universe would have blown apart before stars formed. Any weaker and the universe would have imploded long ago. Its incredibly anemic value has been seen as circumstantial evidence for parallel universes with their own flavor of dark energy that is typically destructive. It's as if our universe won the lottery and got all the physical parameters just right for us to exist.

Finally, an artificial universe solves the Fermi Paradox (where are all the space aliens?) by implying that we truly are alone in the universe. It was custom made for us by our far-future progeny.

Biblical creationists can no doubt embrace these seeming cosmic coincidences as unequivocal evidence for their "theory" of Intelligent Design (ID). But is our "God" really a computer programmer rather than a bearded old man living in the sky?



Currently, supercomputers using a impressive-sounding technique called lattice quantum chromodynamics, and starting from the fundamental physical laws, can simulate only a very small portion of the universe. The scale is a little larger than the nucleus of an atom, according UW physicist Martin Savage. Mega-computers of the far future could greatly expand the size of the Sim Universe.

ANALYSIS: Artificial Universe Created Inside a Supercomputer

If we are living in such a program, there could be telltale evidence for the underlying lattice used in modeling the space-time continuum, say the researchers. This signature could show up as a limitation in the energy of cosmic rays. They would travel diagonally across the model universe and not interact equally in all directions, as they otherwise would be expected to do according to present cosmology.

If such results were measured, physicists would have to rule out any and all other natural explanations for the anomaly before flirting with the idea of intelligent design. (To avoid confusion with the purely faith-based creationist ID, this would not prove the existence of a biblical God, because you’d have to ask the question "why does God need a lattice?")

If our universe is a simulation, then those entities controlling it could be running other simulations as well to create other universes parallel to our own. No doubt this would call for, ahem, massive parallel processing.

If all of this isn’t mind-blowing enough, Bostrom imagined "stacked" levels of reality, "we would have to suspect that the post-humans running our simulation are themselves simulated beings; and their creators, in turn, may also be simulated beings. Here may be room for a large number of levels of reality, and the number could be increasing over time."

To compound this even further, Bostrom imagined a hierarchy of deities, "In some ways, the post-humans running a simulation are like gods. However, all the demigods except those at the fundamental level of reality are subject to sanctions by the more powerful gods living at lower levels."

If the parallel universes are all running on the same computer platform could we communicate with them? If so, I hope the Matrix's manic Agent Smith doesn’t materialize one day.

To borrow from the title of Isaac Asimov's novel I Robot, the human condition might be described as I Subroutine.

Editor's note: Whoa.

Image credits: Warner Brothers, J.F. Colonna, Boston University

Your Time on Earth

5 Tips for Negotiating a Big Deal

Matthew Bellows
Nov 27, 2012
5 Tips for Negotiating a Big Deal

How do you decide the price of your first big deal without pricing yourself out of business? Here are simple steps to a better negotiating strategy.


The product is done and out there. The feedback is great. It’s not perfect, but you and your team have every right to be proud start-upers. Let’s say you even have some cash coming in from early purchasers. Things are good.

Next step: close some big freaking deals!

It’s time to take the one-offs and the small website purchases and leverage the awesome product you’ve built to bring in some real revenue. It’s time to build your sales muscles. But before you run off and hire a salesperson, you and your existing team have to close some initial deals.

The good news is that finding early customers will be easy. You know who is using your product, loving it, and sharing it. You’ve got advocates inside your target companies. So you reach out to a big corporate buyer and say something like, “Five of your 500 people are using this every single day. Why don’t you roll it out to everyone else?” But now you encounter your first roadblock: your proposal price is too high. It’s about four times too high. Ouch.

As a start-up negotiating with a big company, you don’t have much leverage even on a good day. For your first few deals, things are even worse. So while you know you have to walk away from the wrong deal, you also need to close a few enterprise clients, and build some momentum. How do you close that price chasm without hobbling your business? Here’s how I approach it:

1. Find the ceiling. There’s a dollar value that a big company just won’t pay a start-up. Buyers compare your price to other related products from bigger companies, and they won’t go higher than that. Your first job is to find that price and set an anchor price right under it.

2. Start high. The top tier, highest value, biggest ticket option on your product should be close to that ceiling. Some people will buy it. More importantly, a high priced product pulls aspirational people up a tier. They want to buy something good, but aren’t willing to shell out for the deluxe model.

3. Discount. All corporate buyers expect discounts. In the SaaS (Software as a Service) world, discounting is commonly done for volume purchases and advance payments. In the early days, you probably want to include a “beta customer” or similar additional discount that you can write out of later “Most Favored Nation” clauses that some corporate buyers will insist on. For those first few deals, you want to propose pricing between 20% and 40% off the list price.

4. Get feedback from the decision maker. Unless you own the situation, you’ll land a meeting to discuss your proposal. Leading up to it, you might get price pushback from others. Try not to lower your price until you hear feedback from the person who is going to sign the check. Everything else is probably foreplay. It’s good to keep your powder dry for the big negotiation.

5. Have a price floor. You need a price below which you just won’t do the deal before you start the negotiation. One way of figuring this floor is by adding up the variable costs— your product costs some money in people, infrastructure and third party service dollars. Don’t load up on fixed costs like rent, or sunk costs like development investment into your floor price. But do figure out how much you are going to have to spend above where you are now in order to support the deal. Signing money-losing deals and making it up on volume is so 2000.

Another way to think about your floor is the optics that it gives. If your high-tier corporate deal with all the extra premium features ends up costing the same as your entry-level product, you are setting a bad precedent. Probably better to go back to product development and add more value to the higher tier options.

Assuming that you can get agreement somewhere between the decision-maker’s counter offer and your floor, you should be good to go. Don’t forget to ask for extra intangibles like press mentions, testimonials and participation in white papers or research. Those things can make up for a big price break from the right customer.

Then sign the freaking deal and get back to work!

STRANGE, CARNIVOROUS SPONGE FOUND IN DEEP SEA

STRANGE, CARNIVOROUS SPONGE FOUND IN DEEP SEA
A new carnivore shaped like a candelabra has been spotted in deep ocean waters off California's Monterey Bay.
Mon Nov 12, 2012 09:23 AM ET
Content provided by Becky Oskin, OurAmazingPlanet


enlarge

This photograph of the recently discovered carnivorous harp sponge, Chondrocladia lyra, was taken in Monterey Canyon, off the coast of California, at a depth of about 11,500 feet (3,500 meters). Click to enlarge this image.
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI)



A new carnivore shaped like a candelabra has been spotted in deep ocean waters off California's Monterey Bay.

The meat-eating species was dubbed the "harp sponge," so-called because its structure resembles a harp or lyre turned on its side.

PHOTOS: Deepest Vent Community Revealed

A team from the Monterey Bay Research Aquarium Institute in Moss Landing, Calif., discovered the sponge in 2000 while exploring with a remotely operated vehicle. The sponges live nearly 2 miles (3.5 kilometers) beneath the ocean's surface.

"We were just amazed. No one had ever seen this animal with their own eyes before," said Lonny Lundsten, an invertebrate biologist at the research institute and one of the first to see the harp sponge. (The World's Freakiest Looking Animals)

Researchers later collected two sponges and made video observations of 10 more. Comparison with other carnivorous sponges confirmed that Chondrocladia lyra, the sponge's scientific name, was a new species and revealed some interesting insights into the sponge's life cycle. The results of the analysis were published Oct. 18 in the journal Invertebrate Biology.

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PHOTOS: The Unexpected Beauty of Coral Crustaceans

Catching a meal

Velcro-like barbed hooks cover the sponge's branching limbs, snaring crustaceans as they are swept into its branches by deep-sea currents. Once the harp sponge has its meal, it envelops the animal in a thin membrane, and then slowly begins to digest its prey.

The sponges cling to soft, muddy sediment on the ocean floor with root-like "rhizoids," living among other mysterious creatures. The first harp sponges scientists found had only two branches, called vanes. Additional remote-vehicle dives revealed creatures with up to six vanes, Lundsten told OurAmazingPlanet. The biggest were 14 inches (36 centimeters) tall. The team believes the harp sponge evolved this elaborate, candelabra-like structure to increase the surface area it exposes to currents so it can capture more prey.



ANALYSIS: Fossil of Oldest Skeleton Possibly Found

The harp sponge is one of four new species Lundsten has helped identify. "We've seen only 1 percent of Monterey Bay and it's still one of the most well-studied regions of Earth in deep water," he said. "I can look out over the waters from MBARI and imagine thousands of species out there yet to be discovered."

Sponge sex

Scientists first discovered sponges can be carnivores less than 20 years ago. Most live in the deep ocean, which makes it difficult to fully understand their lifestyle.

The harp sponges collected by MBARI scientists mark the first time researchers observed the complete cycle of a carnivorous sponge's unique approach to sexual reproduction.

Most sponges release actively swimming sperm into the surrounding seawater, but it appears that all carnivorous sponges transfer sperm in condensed packages (spermatophores), the researchers report.

The swollen balls at the tip of the harp sponge's upright branches hold the sperm packets. The balls release the spermatophores into passing currents, and other nearby sponges capture the packets on fine filaments along their branches. The sperm then works its way from the packets into the host sponge to fertilize its eggs, according to the research scientists.

More from OurAmazingPlanet:
Images: 17 Amazing Sea Creatures You've Never Heard Of
Gallery: Bizarre Creatures from the Census of Marine Life
Strangest Places Where Life Is Found on Earth

U.S. becoming California becoming Greece

Mark Landsbaum: U.S. becoming California becoming Greece

California arguably leads the nation in government dependency, while events in Greece illustrate the ultimate destination of that path.

The nation has opted to become more like California, and California even more like itself, which is to say, the state has taken another long stride toward becoming Greece on the Pacific.

In Tuesday's election, Republicans held the House of Representatives, and the Democrats the U.S. Senate. But arguably, the nation nudged further to the blue side of the political spectrum, as voters rejected Republican Mitt Romney and doubled down on the decidedly liberal leadership of Democrat Barack Obama for four more years.

Flanked by children Rhianna Smith, 4, left, and Xavier Valencia, 7, California Gov. Jerry Brown appears at a rally for precinct walkers from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), urging they go all out in support of Proposition 30, in downtown Los Angeles, Nov. 3, 2012.
Associated Press photo
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In California, Democrats gained a two-thirds supermajority of both houses of the Legislature for the first time in most Californians' lifetime. When the new legislative session begins, Democrats will be able to raise taxes without a single Republican vote, and also approve constitutional amendments and urgency legislation. In short, whatever Democrats want to do, they will have no meaningful Republican opposition.

What does all this mean? For Democrats, it may be the best news since the income tax, the mother's milk of Big Government.

Overall, the nation probably isn't any bluer at ground level than four years ago. Indeed, the president received several million fewer votes than in 2008. But the nation effectively handed the reins of power to a bluish leader already noted for a propensity for ruling without the consent or even advice of Congress. That effectively makes government bluer than when Barack Obama needed congressional help to make things happen. Obama also now is largely unfettered by political considerations, his last campaign behind him.

Thanks to Republicans controlling the House, the president is unable to ram through legislation as he did in 2010 with Obamacare. But he certainly will effectively legislate with an expected flood of executive orders and regulations from myriad administration bureaus, not the least of which is the Environmental Protection Agency and the Obamacare overlords at Health and Human Services.

Some may argue that, based on exit polls and because Republicans' retained House control, the president has no mandate for bigger government, or for more regulations or for higher taxes. What that analysis overlooks is the disconnect between people who tell pollsters they favor smaller, less-intrusive, less-costly government, but in the next breath demand government-provided benefits, favored treatment and, in the case of businesses, punishment of their competitors.

The reliance on big, costly government intruding in this way into private lives is perhaps best exemplified in California, and Tuesday's election only emboldened that attitude.

"We have big issues," Gov. Jerry Brown said in the election's wake. "We still have a divided state, between, you know, the red and the blue. But we have a predominant Democratic majority now in the Legislature, and the challenge is, what can we do with it?"

Considering what Brown and fellow blues already have done, his words are ominous. "California moved farther to the left with a big push from public employee unions," GOP California chairman Tom Del Beccaro commented about the election results.

Chapman University demographer Joel Kotkin told the Wall Street Journal earlier this year that demographic changes coupled with increasingly progressive policies drive out moderates and conservatives from California's middle class. He concluded that, "increasingly the only ones fit to survive in California are the very rich and those who rely on government spending."

Welfare recipients "aren't leaving," Kotkin said. "Why would they? They get much better benefits in California or New York than if they go to Texas. In Texas the expectation is that people work."

California may be in the forefront of government dependency, but the nation is following the same trajectory. The conservative Heritage Foundation says 70.5 percent of federal spending goes to dependency-creating programs for housing, food, income, student aid and other assistance, "once considered to be the responsibility of individuals, families, neighborhoods, churches and other civil society institutions."

Nationally, in 2010 welfare spending increased 40 percent over two years. About 100 million people, nearly a third of the population, receive monthly aid from one or more of the 80-plus means-tested aid programs. Annual welfare spending soon will reach an unprecedented $1 trillion. The Senate Budget Committee found last year that the U.S. essentially spent $61,194 to support welfare programs per each household living below the poverty line, based on data from the Census, Office of Management and Budget and Congressional Research Services. That, incidentally, is 2.5 times the amount actually pocketed by each household, revealing the costly administration of government's handout machinery.

In fiscal 2011, a record 70.4 million Americans were enrolled in Medicaid, the health program intended for the poor. That's about 22 percent of the population, or more than one in five Americans.

In these respects the nation is becoming increasingly like California, where disproportionate numbers of residents draw welfare, where gratuitous spending on public infrastructure, like a 200-mph train abounds, and where income and sales taxes, as a result of the election, now are the highest in the country.

Critics of the Obama administration sometimes accuse the president of transforming America into something like the social democracies of Europe, where Big Government's guiding hand meddles intrusively in private industries, and where the social safety net is laced with luxuriant entitlements that, incidentally, carry bankrupting price tags.

But actually, the Obama administration is transforming the nation into California, where regulations of the private sector choke economic growth, tax burdens stifle job creation, and entitlements rival anything Europe has to offer. How many Europeans retire, as do some California public employees, with a quarter century or more of life expectancy and retirement checks approaching 100 percent of their former top salary?

The U.S. is trending toward California. Welfare spending is at record highs nationally, but California accounts for 33 percent of the nation's welfare recipients, although the state has 13 percent of the nation's population. Welfare is so endemic that even Hollywood is on the dole. The governor signed a two-year extension of tax credits for film and television production to reduce by 20 percent to 25 percent some companies' sales and income taxes. As with most tax credits, this benefit isn't extended to all industries, but only to a favored few to essentially be subsidized by other taxpayers who pick up the slack.

A case can be made that in California, not only welfare, but the other roots of fiscal calamity – overregulation, bureaucracy, high taxes and public worker unionization – are aggravated beyond even Washington's excesses.

That's because, as Newt Gingrich told the Register's Editorial Board early this year, California is a harbinger of things to come for the nation. If it's not apparent by now, that is not good news.

A Reuters news agency headline last week announced: "Victory Puts Obama In Position To Expand Government's Reach." If Obama needs advice, he might ask California Gov. Jerry Brown. After all, Obama couldn't get a Democratic-controlled Congress to adopt a costly, economy-stifling carbon cap-and-trade regimen, but Brown's got one up and running.

Greece created a welfare state that similarly suffocates the free market, and now faces grave consequences. European governments and the European Central Bank are arguing about whether to forgive some of what Greece owes, or to give more bailout loans. Will European bankers bail out California? The United States?

Welfare states can't last forever. The inevitable collapse occurs because it is unsustainable to spend more than comes in. The required higher taxes eventually hit a ceiling of political acceptability, although California seems intent on finding that upper limit, and may succeed now that Republicans have been removed as legislative impediments.

The nation's route to Greece through California may be avoidable, but not as long as those steering the ship of state continue missing the point: government's proper role is not to provide things, but to protect rights.

Contact the writer: mlandsbaum@ocregister.com

Contact the writer: or 714-796-5025

Thousands of banks may disappear

Thousands of banks may disappearBy Stephen Gandel, senior editor November 9, 2012: 1:59 PM ET

Wall Streeters say Obama's second term will be the death knell for small banks.

FORTUNE -- Do we need to worry about Too Small to Survive?

Now that President Obama has been re-elected, analysts, consultants and dealmakers have turned from whether Dodd-Frank will be repealed to what it means for banks now that it's likely here to stay. The overwhelming conclusion: Thousands of small banks will soon disappear.

Emmett Daly, a Sandler O'Neill dealmaker who specializes in small banks, predicted at an industry conference put on by Mergermarket on Thursday that the number of banks in the U.S. would shrink to a few hundred. There are currently more than 7,000. Bill Egan, head of financial institutions investment banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, agreed, but said the weeding out process was likely to take more than a decade.

Indeed, the deal this week to buy bank adviser KBW by larger rival Stifel Financial appeared to be motivated by the belief that more banks would have to make deals. Says Rochdale Securities bank analyst Dick Bove, "It's fairly clear that 50% of the banks in the U.S. need to be recapitalized."

MORE: The fiscal cliff may be overblown

Kamal Mustafa, who heads up bank consulting firm Invictus and is a former Wall Street M&A banker, says it's not just Dodd-Frank. Low interest rates and the Fed's annual stress tests are making it tough for small banks to survive as well. His firm looked at bank profits and capital rules and came to this conclusion: Nearly 2,000 banks need to sell. "There are a large number of banks that are limping toward oblivion," says Mustafa. "Capital requirements have gone up too fast, and rates have gone too low. There's no way out."

Like post offices and small businesses in general, law makers are likely to come to the rescue of small community banks. What's more, at least so far small banks haven't done significantly worse under Dodd-Frank than big banks.

Still, it's probably true that all the rules we have lumped on the banking industry in a good faith effort to make our financial system safer will most likely make it harder for small banks to stick around. The real question is how much we should care.

Canada, afterall, has less than two dozen banks, and by most accounts it's banking system did pretty well in the financial crisis. What's more, the vast majority of lending, something like 90%, in this country is done by the nation's 50 largest banks. So losing nearly 7,000 banks would only cut off credit to 10% of borrowers at most.

Joseph Mason, a finance expert at Louisiana State University, says there's no hard economic evidence to show whether small banks benefit the economy or not. Nonetheless, Mason says he falls into the camp that believes small banks are good for the U.S. He says competition matters. And while small banks only make up a small portion of lending, the types of loans they do, to local businesses that large banks might deny, may matter.

MORE: Wall Street prepares to face the music

But all this comes at a cost. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has spent tens of billions saving mostly small banks over the past few years. Is it worth it? In the mortgage market there appears to be somewhat of an answer. Home loans are dominated by a few large banks, Wells Fargo and J.P. Morgan, mostly. Small banks have largely been pushed out. The result: Mortgage rates are about one percentage point higher than they would be if we had more competition. Apply that to all mortgages, and that higher interest rate costs consumers about $100 billion a year in extra interest. Not to mention all those who can't actually get refinanced. I'd say that's pretty good evidence that we should figure out a way to keep small banks around.

The Universe Is Almost Done Making Stars

The Universe Is Almost Done Making Stars
Star formation is now 30 times lower than at its peak 11 billion years ago.
By Rebecca Boyle Popular Science.


Globular Cluster M10 NASA/ESA/Hubble Space Telescope

In its youth, the universe was a roiling soup of star ingredients, with new stars forming rapidly. But now it’s much quieter, and things are not expected to get more exciting anytime soon, astronomers say. For the first time, astronomers have figured out the universe's star-birth rate, and found that today, it's 30 times lower than its likely peak some 11 billion years ago. As a result, all of the future stars may be no more than a 5 percent increase above what we’ve got now.



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TAGSScience, Rebecca Boyle, galaxies, nova, star formation, stars, universe, Very Large TelescopeAstronomers figured this out by taking snapshots of the universe at 2, 4, 6 and 9 billion years of age. (It’s 13.7 billion years old now.) The results show a clear decline in star-forming activity. A team led by David Sobral at Leiden Observatory studied the universe’s hydrogen-alpha emission line, which is a reliable indicator of star formation. They used Japan's Subaru Telescope and the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and the Very Large Telescope in Chile, covering a huge portion of the sky.



The team’s observing area encompassed the largest sky samples ever, more than 10 times larger than any previous samples. Observing the cosmos at different ages--so at different distances--with the same observational technique provides an apples-to-apples comparison.

It turns out that half the stars in existence now formed more than 9 billion years ago, and it took just 2 billion years to form all of them. The other half took almost five times as long to produce. If this trend continues, the universe will only get 5 percent more stars, even if we wait forever, the scientists say.

“We are clearly living in a universe dominated by old stars. All of the action in the universe occurred billions of years ago,” Sobral said in a statement.

Better go enjoy them while we still can.



Star Formation Slowing Down: The single method used for tracking and studying galaxies revealed a continuous decline of star formation in the last 11 billion years. By using this method and the derived star formation history of the universe, it is possible to predict the total mass in stars and its distribution in the universe. The prediction fully agrees with independent measurements. David Sobral/HiZELS



[NAOJ]


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The Pacific Island Chain of Tokelau Is The First Territory Powered Solely By Solar

The Pacific Island Chain of Tokelau Is The First Territory Powered Solely By Solar
The string of atolls has switched fully from expensive and environmentally harmful diesel generators to solar energy.
By Clay Dillow


The Tokelau Atoll Of Atafu, From Space NASA Johnson Space Center

The remote island chain of Tokelau, positioned between New Zealand and Hawaii in the Pacific, suddenly has a significant claim to fame. Tokelau has become the first territory able to meet all of its electricity needs with solar power, officials say, completely weaning the string of atolls off of the diesel generators it has relied on for decades.

Tokelau--which is made up of the Atafu, Nukunonu, and Fakaofo atolls--is administered by New Zealand, and it was New Zealand that made the $7 million investment in the territory’s energy future. With solar stations on all three atolls (the last of which was completed this week) the three main atolls now have the renewable energy capacity to meet the electricity needs of all of Tokelau’s 1,500 inhabitants.



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TAGSTechnology, Clay Dillow, energy, environment,renewable energy, solar energy, tokelauThat doesn’t necessarily make Tokelau a model for the future, but it is significant for a few reasons. It’s true that a remote, sunny island chain with 1,500 inhabitants is not a fair analog for the world’s densest cities, or even its less dense regions that are more developed. But remote regions of the world need energy too, and they often get it through running dirty, inefficient diesel or gasoline generators that suck up economic resources while adversely impacting the environment. Plus there are high transit costs--financial and environmental--associated with the transport of liquid fuels to remote areas (like the middle of the Pacific Ocean).

So the investment in solar, should the maintenance costs remain below a certain threshold, will not only pay environmental/ecological benefits but will also free up economic resources for social and economic development on Tokelau. It’s not a cure-all or a model for the rest of the world, but a demonstration that in the right situation renewables like solar can make perfect sense.

The Six Lessons I Live By

The Six Lessons I Live By

Ari Emanuel
October 02, 2012


1. Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you and move out of their way.

If you feel like you know everything, you’re wrong. I know what I don’t know and then I find partners who can teach me. A perfect example is my partnership with Patrick Whitesell, my co-CEO at WME. While we take on different roles at the company and focus on different things, we share the same goals and at the end of the day, we’re working toward the same end. That’s been the key to our success.

2. The only constant in business is change. Get comfortable with it.

When I started in the business, there were four broadcast networks and 19 cable networks. Now there are five broadcast networks, 117 cable networks, Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, HBOGo, iTunes, Amazon Prime, VOD – the list goes on and on. Next year there will be more distribution platforms, and in ten years the landscape will have shifted another 180 degrees. The business is changing quickly, and the only way to succeed is to change with it. I always tell my colleagues, there is no such thing as a traditional talent agent anymore. It’s about pushing beyond that 10% commission and finding opportunity where it didn’t exist before.

3. Fail often, fail quickly.

Nobody fucks up like I do, but you’ll never succeed unless you take risks. Big ones. In 2009, we took Endeavor, a company that was doing incredibly well, and merged it with the oldest talent agency in the world. From a cultural and organizational standpoint, it was a big risk. People had their doubts. But we had a vision and a lot of help from very smart people (see #1.) Three years later, our business is stronger, our bench is deeper and smarter, and our deal-making is more innovative. It’s a better company – period. You have to lead by example if you want to promote a culture where risk-taking is rewarded.

4. Your schedule makes you dumber.

Force yourself outside of your daily schedule. Be curious and take time to learn about worlds outside of the one you live in. Watch the news, read the paper, educate yourself. Don’t be afraid to call people you don’t know, start a conversation, and ask for things you need. At the very least, you’ll be more interesting. At the most, you’ll take your business in new and bigger directions.

5. You only get one shot – make it count.

I learned this the painful way. After being hit by a car and lying face-down in the middle of Wilshire Boulevard, I was confronted with a whole lot more than my mortality. Take advantage of each day that’s given to you and do something to move the needle on your business, even if it’s just an inch. You’ve heard it before, but life is not a dress rehearsal. Don’t waste your time (or mine.)

6. Good ideas rule all.

In the end, it’s all about creative ideas and content – it’s the lifeblood of our business. I’m fortunate enough to work with the writers, directors, musicians and actors who are defining culture with their voices. It’s why I come to work in the morning. In 100 years, when the world looks different, and we communicate in new ways, and we have more devices and platforms and distribution methods, I believe great artistry will still matter most.

What do you need to rig an election?

Popular Science

What do you need to rig an election? A basic knowledge of electronics and $30 worth of RadioShack gear, professional hacker Roger Johnston reveals.


How I Hacked An Electronic Voting Machinewww.popsci.com
Roger Johnston is the head of the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory. Not long ago, he and his colleagues launched security