The PGK Blog; The Knowledge Factory

Why I Love WMATA

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:29:15 -0400

Metro customers boarded a bus Friday afternoon as normal: paying their fares, swiping their SmarTrip cards and plopping down in their seats.

They were unaware, however, that the driver was an impostor.

William Jackson, a 19-year-old District resident, apparently fooled workers and passengers alike. Authorities said he wore a standard-issue Metro bus driver’s uniform, made his way into the Bladensburg bus garage in Northeast and drove off, pretending to be a driver assigned to the B2 route, which goes from Bladensburg Road to Anacostia.

Four miles later, the bus crashed into a tree and several cars.

The driver initially fled. Jackson was later arrested and charged with unauthorized use of a vehicle and fleeing an accident, Capt. Ronald A. Pavlik Jr. of the Metro Transit Police Department said on Saturday.

“He simply had a fascination with buses,” Pavlik said, recounting what Jackson allegedly told investigators.

Metro is initiating a “top-down review” of Metro’s procedures, Pavlik said, to figure out how someone was able to take the bus.

When I watch clips like this, I remember why I miss John Candy.

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:35:14 -0400

When I watch clips like this, I remember why I miss John Candy.

Class Warfare

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 15:21:59 -0400

From The NYT-

No need for tears, but the well-off are losing their master suites and saying goodbye to their wine cellars.

The housing bust that began among the working class in remote subdivisions and quickly progressed to the suburban middle class is striking the upper class in privileged enclaves like this one in Silicon Valley.

Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.

More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.

By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.

Though it is hard to prove, the CoreLogic data suggest that many of the well-to-do are purposely dumping their financially draining properties, just as they would any sour investment.

“The rich are different: they are more ruthless,” said Sam Khater, CoreLogic’s senior economist.

Five properties here in Los Altos were scheduled for foreclosure auctions in a recent issue of The Los Altos Town Crier, the weekly newspaper where local legal notices are posted. Four have unpaid mortgage debt of more than $1 million, with the highest amount $2.8 million.

The Proof we Need

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 10:05:26 -0400

From The People’s Daily- YES, THE PEOPLE’S DAILY!

An unidentified flying object (UFO) disrupted air traffic over Zhejiang’s provincial capital Hangzhou late on Wednesday, the municipal government said on Thursday.

Xiaoshan Airport was closed after the UFO was detected at around 9 pm, and some flights were rerouted to airports in the cities of Ningbo and Wuxi , said an airport spokesman, who declined to be named.

The airport had resumed operations, and more details will be released after an investigation, he said.

A source with knowledge of the matter, however, told China Daily on Thursday that authorities had learned what the UFO was after an investigation.

But it was not the proper time to publicly disclose the information because there was a military connection, he said, adding that an official explanation is expected to be given on Friday.

Inbound flights were diverted to the nearby airports in Zhejiang province’s Ningbo and Jiangsu province’s Wuxi. Outbound flights were delayed for three to four hours.

A staff member at the airport’s information desk said the airport had “no idea” how many flights were affected by the closure.

At around 11 pm on Wednesday, a netizen wrote three entries announcing the airport’s closure in

Looking to Beef up Your Brain?

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 16:08:18 -0400

From The NYT-

What goes on inside your brain when you exercise? That question has preoccupied a growing number of scientists in recent years, as well as many of us who exercise. In the late 1990s, Dr. Fred Gage and his colleagues at the Laboratory of Genetics at the Salk Institute in San Diego elegantly proved that human and animal brains produce new brain cells (a process called neurogenesis) and that exercise increases neurogenesis. The brains of mice and rats that were allowed to run on wheels pulsed with vigorous, newly born neurons, and those animals then breezed through mazes and other tests of rodent I.Q., showing that neurogenesis improves thinking.

But how, exactly, exercise affects the staggeringly intricate workings of the brain at a cellular level has remained largely mysterious. A number of new studies, though, including work published this month by Mr. Gage and his colleagues, have begun to tease out the specific mechanisms and, in the process, raised new questions about just how exercise remolds the brain.

READ ON!

"Now is the time to put my fucking children and my wife first for a change. I fucking busted my..."

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 15:00:54 -0400

“Now is the time to put my fucking children and my wife first for a change. I fucking busted my ass… I gave your fucking baby health care… What do I get for that? Only 13 percent of you think I’m doing a good job, so fuck all of you”

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-Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, quoted by the Chicago Sun Times, on a wiretap played at his corruption trial.

Simply Put; NPR

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 14:27:23 -0400

For all you NPR fans out there, get with the times….

From The Washington Post-

No need for formalities here: National Public Radio now says it wants to be known simply as NPR.

So the Washington-based organization has quietly changed its name to its familiar initials. Much like the corporate names KFC or AT&T, the initials now stand for the initials.

NPR says it’s abbreviating the name it has used since its debut in 1971 because it’s more than radio these days. Its news, music and informational programming is heard over a variety of digital devices that aren’t radios; it also operates news and music Web sites.

Hence: “NPR is more modern, streamlined,” says Vivian Schiller, NPR’s chief executive. She points to other “re-brandings” by media organizations, such as Cable News Network, which has been plain old CNN for years.

NPR hasn’t formally announced the change. But it has told its staff and some 900 affiliated stations in recent months to use only the initials on the air or online.

There’s a little bit of tension in those three initials. NPR’s affiliates, which contribute about 40 percent of NPR’s $154 million operating budget, are still primarily in the radio business. Some station managers have grumbled that NPR has invested in digital operations at the expense of more and better radio programs.

Buffet on the state of the American Economy. Go to Hell Krugman.

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 10:41:17 -0400

Buffet on the state of the American Economy.

Go to Hell Krugman.

OUCH!

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 15:39:12 -0400

From Breitbart-

After a hugely disappointing World Cup, England striker Wayne Rooney is unlikely to be cheered by his latest accolade: ugliest footballer on the planet.

The Manchester United goal machine, who flopped after being hyped as a potential superstar in South Africa, heads the list of unattractive players on dating website BeautifulPeople.com.

Most beautiful, according to online voters subscribing to the site, are Italy’s Fabio Cannavaro, Fernando Torres and David Villa of Spain, US mainstay Landon Donavan and France’s Thierry Henry.

Rooney has the company of England team mate John Terry in the top 10 ugliest, but it’s the Algerian team that comes out as collectively the least attractive on the planet, according to the poll.

Spy Swap?

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 10:14:27 -0400

From The Wall Street Journal-

MOSCOW—Representatives of a Russian academic convicted in 2004 of spying for the U.S. said he has agreed to be part of a deal to exchange prisoners held in Russia for the suspected spies for Russia arrested last month by U.S. authorities.

The academic, Igor Sutyagin, told his mother of the deal early Wednesday after authorities unexpectedly moved him from a prison in northern Russia on Tuesday to a special jail in Moscow in preparation for release, his mother said.

His lawyer, Anna Stavitskaya, who also met him Wednesday at the Moscow prison, confirmed the account.

Russian and U.S. officials couldn’t immediately be reached to comment.

Mr. Sutyagin’s mother said he had signed an agreement with Russian authorities as part of the deal, admitting his guilt although he continues to deny the espionage charges on which he was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2004.

“He couldn’t not sign this document,” his mother told reporters. The exchange is expected to take place in Vienna on Thursday, she said, after which Mr. Sutyagin will travel to the U.S.

"Another thing we can do for jobs is make toys of me, especially for the holidays. Little dolls. Me...."

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:00:27 -0400

“Another thing we can do for jobs is make toys of me, especially for the holidays. Little dolls. Me. Like maybe little action dolls. Me in an army uniform, air force uniform, and me in my suit. They can make toys of me and my vehicle, especially for the holidays and Christmas for the kids. That’s something that would create jobs. So you see I think out of the box like that. It’s not something a typical person would bring up. That’s something that could happen, that makes sense. It’s not a joke.”

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-U.S. Senate candidate Alvin Greene (D)

In an interview with The Guardian, the South Carolina candidate discussed his “big idea” to create jobs in his state.

The iphone; Globalization 101

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 01:28:17 -0400

The NYT-

SHENZHEN, China — Last month, while enthusiastic consumers were playing with their new Apple iPhone 4, researchers in Silicon Valley were engaged in something more serious.

They cracked open the phone’s shell and started analyzing the new model’s components, trying to unmask the identity of Apple’s main suppliers. These “teardown reports” provide a glimpse into a company’s manufacturing.

What the latest analysis shows is that the smallest part of Apple’s costs are here in Shenzhen, where assembly-line workers snap together things like microchips from Germany and Korea, American-made chips that pull in Wi-Fi or cellphone signals, a touch-screen module from Taiwan and more than 100 other components.

But what it does not reveal is that manufacturing in China is about to get far more expensive. Soaring labor costs caused by worker shortages and unrest, a strengthening Chinese currency that makes exports more expensive, and inflation and rising housing costs are all threatening to sharply increase the cost of making devices like notebook computers, digital cameras and smartphones.

Desperate factory owners are already shifting production away from this country’s dominant electronics manufacturing center in Shenzhen toward lower-cost regions far west of here, even deep in China’s mountainous interior.

At the end of June, a manager at Foxconn Technology — one of Apple’s major contract manufacturers — said the company planned to reduce costs by moving hundreds of thousands of workers to other parts of China, including the impoverished Henan Province.

While the labor involved in the final assembly of an iPhone accounts for a small part of the overall cost — about 7 percent by some estimates — analysts say most companies in Apple’s supply chain — the chip makers and battery suppliers and those making plastic moldings and printed circuit boards — depend on Chinese factories to hold down prices. And those factories now seem likely to pass along their cost increases.

“China makes very little money on these things,” said Jason Dedrick, a professor at Syracuse University and an author of several studies of Apple’s supply chain. Much of the value in high-end products is captured at the beginning and end of the process, by the brand and the distributors and retailers.

According to the latest teardown report compiled by iSuppli, a market research firm in El Segundo, Calif., the bulk of what Apple pays for the iPhone 4’s parts goes to its chip suppliers, like Samsung and Broadcom, which supply crucial components, like processors and the device’s flash-memory chip.

In the iPhone 4, more than a dozen integrated circuit chips account for about two-thirds of the cost of producing a single device, according to iSuppli.

Apple, for instance, pays Samsung about $27 for flash memory and $10.75 to make its (Apple-designed) applications processor; and a German chip maker called Infineon gets $14.05 a phone for chips that send and receive phone calls and data. Most of the electronics cost much less. The gyroscope, new to the iPhone 4, was made by STMicroelectronics, based in Geneva, and added $2.60 to the cost.

The total bill of materials on a $600 iPhone — the supplies that go into final assembly — is $187.51, according to iSuppli.

Ringo Turns 70!

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 01:19:24 -0400

From The NYT-

Ever since Ringo Starr vowed, on a well-known cover of Buck Owens’s hit “Act Naturally,” that he’d become “the biggest fool to ever hit the big time,” the renowned rock ’n’ roll drummer has done all right for himself. As a member of the Beatles and as a solo artist, Mr. Starr has sold more than a few records, won some Grammy Awards and even had a minor planet named for him. But on Wednesday Mr. Starr will reach a very special milestone: he turns 70 years old.

As you’d expect, he plans to mark the occasion with a little help from his friends, and anyone else he can round up. Finding himself in New York on the big day, he is celebrating with a private event in the morning at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square; Hard Rock International is honoring the day at locations around the world.

Mr. Starr spoke recently with Dave Itzkoff about hitting the big seven-O and some other recent accomplishments. Here are excerpts from the conversation.

Q. How are you feeling about the number 70?

A. As far as I’m concerned, in my head, I’m 24. That’s just how it is. The number, yeah, it’s high. But I just felt I’ve got to celebrate it. I’m on my feet and I’m doing what I love to do, and I’m in a profession, as a musician, where we can go on for as long as we can go on. I’m not hiding from it, you know.

Q. When you were 24 what did you think you’d be doing at age 70?

A. I don’t know, but when I was 22, actually, I remember this so well, and I was playing, and there was another band, and these people in that other band were 40, and I was saying, “My God, you’re still doing it?” [laughs] Which doesn’t look funny in black and white, but it was incredible, and now I’m waaaaay past 40. My new hero is B. B. King. I have a great line: B. B. is still playing, even though he is sitting down now. But hey, I’m sitting down already. You’ve just got to get on with it. I’d like to be out there pretending I’m only 55, but I’m not.

Q. What seems like an advanced age to you now?

A. I think 90. But we’ll see. It’s a birthday at a time.

Continue Reading

J-BIEBS To North Korea!

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:43:07 -0400

The minute the Great Leader puts these tickets on sale, I’m going to buy 50. I will then scalp them to North Korean hard laborers in the Coal mine regions of the North… Rumor has it they would sell for up to three days worth of food. J-Biebs is big within the Gulag state.

From The BBC-

A public vote on the Canadian singer’s My World Tour page asked users which country he should tour next, with no restrictions on the nations that could be voted on.

This spurred users of imageboard website 4chan to nominate North Korea, with the vote now turning viral.

There are now almost half a million votes to send Bieber to the secretive communist nation.

The contest, which ends at 0600 on 7 July, saw North Korea move from 24th to 1st place in less than two days, several thousand votes ahead of Israel.

Given the fact that almost all citizens of North Korea are denied internet access and there are restrictive controls over all media, it is unlikely that any of the votes have actually come from within the country.

A spokesman for the North Korean Embassy in London told BBC News that any application for 16-year-old Bieber to tour would be dealt with by its mission to the United Nations, although the matter would be referred to Pyongyang.

Gender Based Follow up

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:47:13 -0400

From Deadspin-

Semenya was cleared to return to competition by track’s governing body today, even as questions remain regarding her gender. Here’s what happened.

It’s been nearly a year since Semenya was suspended after dominating the competition at Worlds. Because of rumors that had long dogged her, combined with almost unheard-of improvements in her personal times, they forced her to undergo gender testing.

• The genetic testing confirmed she is female, by the IAAF’s nebulous standards. This goes against the sensational news story in September, claiming she was unequivocally male. But that same report stated that IAAF would permanently bar her form competition, so we can discount the rest of it.

•She is now female by the IAAF’s standards, due to a combination of a surgical procedure and hormone therapy. If there was uncertainty to Semenya’s gender, it wasn’t something that couldn’t be altered by modern medicine. There’s speculation that she’s been able to regulate her hormone levels to an acceptable proportion for her to compete as a female. The length of such a process would explain why her suspension lasted so long.

The Prophet HATED Mullets...Clearly

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 14:27:09 -0400

From The Telegraph-

In an attempt to rid the country of “decadent Western cuts”, Iran’s culture ministry has produced a catalogue of haircuts that meet government approval.

The list of banned styles includes ponytails, mullets and elaborate spikes. However,quiffs appear to be acceptable, as are fashioning one’s hair in the style of Simon Cowell or cultivating a 1980s-style floppy fringe.

Most of the models are clean-shaven although one picture features a man with a goatee beard, previously frowned upon by Iran’s conservative clerics. Using hair gel is also within the law, albeit in modest quantities.

The “journal of Iranian hairstyles approved by the ministry of [culture and Islamic] guidance” was previewed at a government-approved hairdressing show in Tehran.

The pictures were reminiscent of those gracing barber shop windows across Britain.

“The proposed styles are inspired by Iranians’ complexion, culture and religion, and Islamic law,” said Jaleh Khodayar, who is in charge of a Modesty and Veil Festival later this month at which the guide will be promoted.

“We are happy that the Islamic republic of Iran’s government has backed us in designing these hairstyles.”

Several barber shops have reportedly been shut down and penalised in recent years for offering Western-style haircuts.

"The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or..."

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 11:57:44 -0400

“The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it. The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good.”

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-The artist formerly Known as PRINCE.

Would you Want to Know?

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 11:49:42 -0400

From Wall St Journal-

By analyzing the DNA of the world’s oldest people, Boston University scientists said Thursday they have discovered a genetic signature of longevity. They expect soon to offer a test that could let people learn whether they have the constitution to live to a very old age.

The researchers, who studied more than 1,000 people over the age of 100, identified a set of 150 unique genetic markers that, taken together, are linked to extreme longevity. They acknowledged they didn’t know all the genes involved, nor their exact function in extending old age.

“This is an extremely complex trait that involves many processes,” said lead researcher Paola Sebastiani, a biostatistician at BU’s School of Public Health. Even so, “we can compute your specific predisposition to exceptional longevity.”

The researchers said they had no plans to patent the technique nor profit from it. Instead, they expect to make a free test kit available on the Internet later this month to foster longevity research.

The test might reveal more than some people would like to know, the BU scientists warned. Genetic testing often reveals tantalizing but incomplete information, and it’s sometimes difficult to know how to respond. People with genes for extreme longevity could face a series of difficult decisions about their careers, retirement savings, insurance coverage, medical treatments and marriages in old age.

“I don’t think people are ready for this from a social point of view,” said BU geriatrician Thomas Perls, the other lead researcher. “But I don’t think that will stop companies from trying to market this.”

The iphone 4. Undressed

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 10:03:00 -0400

The iphone 4. Undressed

KNOW ABOUT IT

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:04:35 -0400

Borat would be proud!The world’s largest tent opens in the Central Asian Utopia of Kazakhstan.

From The BBC-

Designed by the British architects Foster & Partners, the Khan Shatyr Entertainment Centre in the capital Astana is 150m (490ft) high.

It opens on the day the city celebrates 13 years as the capital and President Nursultan Nazarbayev his 70th birthday.

The centre has a huge indoor leisure park, designed to be protected from the region’s harsh climate.

Standing on a 20m concrete base, Khan Shatyr is the city’s highest structure and the world’s tallest tent.

Inside, visitors will find shops, restaurants and cinemas - even an artificial beach and a running track.