Link Banana

Or “a picture that uses a pair of legs to frame something, usually a torso, in the picture.” Print Magazine — which appears to have little talent at web design — has documented hundreds of examples of what it calls “the most popularly copied trope ever used.” Am I the only one that thinks it’s a little bit dirty?

(via kottke)

Finally, Good Magazine has a chart that’s both nice looking and easy to understand. These are some interesting numbers.

The always-interesting Ze Frank is collecting stories of when people realized their parents aren’t perfect. Those contributed so far are interesting, and a reminder that I don’t remember when that happened for me.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff in Michael Sokolove’s few-week-old piece, but this statistic is certainly the most jarring:

If girls and young women ruptured their A.C.L.’s at just twice the rate of boys and young men, it would be notable. Three times the rate would be astounding. But some researchers believe that in sports that both sexes play, and with similar rules — soccer, basketball, volleyball — female athletes rupture their A.C.L.’s at rates as high as five times that of males.

This in an interesting phenomonon:

We also have rules of thumb for taking decisions, and Gigerenzer’s paradox is that knowing a bit is sometimes better than knowing a lot. He describes an experiment in which American and German students had to pick the larger of pairs of American cities: San Diego or San Antonio? Detroit or Milwaukee? Many Americans got the answers wrong, but almost none of the Germans did. They correctly named the first of each pair, even though many of them had never even heard of Milwaukee or San Antonio. That ignorance was informative: the city they had heard of was probably the bigger one.

In another experiment 100 pedestrians were stopped and asked which of 50 company stocks they recognised. The portfolio this generated beat 88% of all entrants in a stock-picking competition. “Ignorance isn’t random; it’s systematic,” says Gigerenzer. “If you know too much, it is harder to distinguish between what is important, and what is not.”

This very nearly made me cry.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

His argument:

Congress is considering a major reform of copyright law intended to solve the problem of “orphan works” — those works whose owner cannot be found. This “reform” would be an amazingly onerous and inefficient change, which would unfairly and unnecessarily burden copyright holders with little return to the public.

It’s often said that a near-death experience is the surest way to understand what’s important in life. If Edward Wong’s story about Wang Zhijun and Li Wanzhi is to be believed, that’s exactly what’s happened for the couple.

“The only thing we had was each other,” Mr. Wang said. “We encouraged each other to live on, and we said once we got out, we’d live a good life and care for each other. Now we have a new start.”

Joan Acocella offers a thoroughly New Yorker-y exploration of hangovers in this week’s issue (and finishes with a thoroughly annoying conclusion). My favorite bit was this:

Some words for hangover, like ours, refer prosaically to the cause: the Egyptians say they are “still drunk,” the Japanese “two days drunk,” the Chinese “drunk overnight.” The Swedes get “smacked from behind.” But it is in languages that describe the effects rather than the cause that we begin to see real poetic power. Salvadorans wake up “made of rubber,” the French with a “wooden mouth” or a “hair ache.” The Germans and the Dutch say they have a “tomcat,” presumably wailing. The Poles, reportedly, experience a “howling of kittens.” My favorites are the Danes, who get “carpenters in the forehead.”

That is: the next pollutant we’re to get collectively scared about. From Wired Science:

“The natural nitrogen cycle has been very heavily influenced by human activity over the last century perhaps even more so than the carbon cycle,” said University of East Anglia biogeochemist Peter Liss, a co-author on the second paper.

The problem isn’t strictly nitrogen, which comprises more than three-quarters of the air we breathe, but so-called reactive nitrogen. These are analogous to better-known free oxygen radicals: an altered electron configuration makes them especially unstable, and more likely to wreak environmental havoc.

In 1860, humanity produced 15 metric tons of reactive nitrogen. By 1995, that number stood at 156 tons, and swelled to 185 tons by 2005. Those numbers are small in comparison to global CO2 emissions — 27 billion tons annually — but the impacts are magnified by what James Galloway, a University of Virginia biogeochemist and co-author of the review, calls the nitrogen cascade.

The Economist addressed the same topic. I’m sure 100 other publications have or will soon.

Andy Baio points out that Garry Kasparov was recently “griefed,” while giving a speech, by a flying phallus. A similar event occured in the alternate reality of Second Life a few years ago.

I finally read Phil Zabriskie’s New York article about suicide tourism. It essentially comes down to this simple/interesting/tragic fact:

Recently, however, researchers stumbled on a striking fact about suicides in New York: A surprising number of people who kill themselves in the city come here from out of town, and many appear to come expressly to take their own lives. In a report published last fall called “Suicide Tourism in Manhattan, New York City, 1990–2004,” researchers at the New York Academy of Medicine and Weill Cornell Medical College found that of the 7,634 people who committed suicide in New York City between 1990 and 2004, 407 of them, or 5.3 percent, were nonresidents. More strikingly, nonresidents accounted for 274, or 10.8 percent, of the 2,272 suicides in Manhattan during that time.

It’s not surprising that Israel’s 60th anniversary has gotten a lot more ink than the 60th anniversary of the coincident nabka (catastrophe). Yesterday, Elias Khoury wrote an Op-Ed adressing the latter.

Israel has depicted the problem as rooted in the Arab world’s refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist. But even after the majority of Arab states demonstrated their recognition of this right by supporting the Saudi peace initiative of 2002, nothing changed; in fact, things became worse. To Palestinians, the true problem lies in Israel’s rejection of the Palestinian right to an independent state, and in the prevailing Israeli culture’s refusal to recognize that Palestinians were themselves victims of forced expulsion from their lands.

Recognizing the sufferings of the victim, even if they are of the victim of a victim, is the necessary condition for an exit from this long and tragic tunnel. However, as the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci suggests, it is difficult to maintain the optimism of the will in the face of the pessimism of the intellect.

Pessimism of the will is what we are living today in the Middle East. It is a pessimism that warns not only of the danger of recurring episodes of catastrophe as Arab societies break apart, but of the dismal prospect of an endless war that will provoke future tragedies in the 21st century.

Speaking of language, Portugal has given in and accepted Brazilian spellings of words. (Also, congratulations to the BBC employee that came up with the title: “Reform spells change for Portugal.” Get it?)

The agreement standardises numerous spellings and adds three letters - k, w and y - to the alphabet.

A large majority of lawmakers backed government proposals to phase in the changes during the next six years.

(via Passport)

For a little linguistic fun, consider the following sentences:

• The old man the boat.
• The horse raced past the barn fell.
• The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi.

(via Austin Kleon)

Given the perceived causal linkage between Hurricane Katrina and greater popular understanding of the dangers of climate change, this could have interesting results:

[Tom Knutson] has warned about the harmful effects of climate change and has even complained in the past about being censored by the Bush administration on past studies on the dangers of global warming.

He said his new study, based on a computer model, argues ”against the notion that we’ve already seen a really dramatic increase in Atlantic hurricane activity resulting from greenhouse warming.”

The study, published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience, predicts that by the end of the century the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic will fall by 18 percent.

Rob Walker has an interesting, if sometimes shallow-feeling, exploration of the increasingly common practice of reviving old brand names that people remember faintly. It an interesting look at psychology and the logic of branding.

Too many such deals, or the wrong kinds, can boomerang: this happens with some regularity in the fashion world, when a famous designer name gets spread over so many products, with so little regard to quality, that the entire image of the brand sinks. Still, if you see a ladder made by Stanley, you may well think, Well, there’s a name I can trust. What you’re trusting, though, isn’t Stanley workers in Stanley factories upholding Stanley traditions and values under the watchful eye of Stanley managers. What you’re trusting is Stanley’s recognition that a badly made ladder with the Stanley name on it could be highly damaging to the Stanley brand. You are trusting Stanley’s recognition of the value of its brand and its competence in defending that value.

Combining the theme of the last two posts: a lot of pundits are saying it’s a good idea to invade Burma to provide humanitarian relief. (If you don’t believe me, sample the sources cited in this UN Dispatch post.) I think Mr. Yglesias offers an interesting explanation of the trend:

The thing you have to understand about the surge of pundits wanting to invade Burma is that it’s the very absurdity of the idea that makes it such an appealing op-ed thesis. It’s self-righteousness without responsibility. Advocate an invasion of a country you don’t know anything about and have it happen and, well, all kinds of things might go awry in a way that’s embarasing. But since everyone knows there’s not going to be an invasion of Burma, you can say there ought to be one and then make up a nice story about how well it hypothetically went. You can even show your thoughtful seriousness about matters of war and peace by chalking up the tragic failure to invade as yet another disastrous consequence of the war in Iraq.

The Atlantic — even as they wait many weeks to get their currently-in-print magazine online — has put online their 1958 feature on Burma. It at least worth a quick glance. I thought this bit, from the section on naming, was interesting:

One or more of a Burmese child’s names is almost certain to show the day on which he was born—a survival from our belief that human destiny is linked with the stars. Certain letters of the alphabet are ascribed to each day, so that a “Thursday’s child” would have one name beginning with our P, B, or M.

(via James Fallows)

Joshua Keating makes an interesting point about Francis Fukuyama’s “the end of history” and a few other clichés:

Why does it seem as thought every big-think piece on the last two decades of foreign policy must include at least one instance where the author trots out Fukuyama just to kick him in the teeth? Is there really no other way to describe early-90s, capitalist triumphalism than using this one phrase?

But “The End of History” is hardly alone. There are a number of convenient phrases and quotes that seem to pop up again and again as convenient shorthand for writers discussing big, complex foreign policy ideas. It’s for this very reason that FP has a blanket ban on article submissions begining “Since the end of the cold war…” or “In the wake of Sept. 11…”