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The Ultimate Guide To The Gun Safety Debate

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When was the last time you went a day without hearing about sore sort of senseless gun violence?  One whole day?  How many people need to be killed before fire arm regulation laws are reviewed?

At this point, the NRA, it’s members, and the politicians that it has purchased should be considered domestic terrorists, holding the United States citizens hostage, paralyzed with fear and tricked into thinking that more guns makes everyone safer.

Use your voice. Say something. Post/tweet/blog/email something. Be involved.  Contact your elected officials and tell them to do their jobs and protect their votes.  If they cannot provide a straight yes or no answer as to where they stand on military style assault rifle and extended magazine clip regulation, let them know you will vote for someone who can.

It is so very sad to me to see people that have had their lives dramatically changed by gun violence trying desperately to change the laws to make sure no one has to go what they have gone through and be ignored and discounted.  They are trying to save lives, they are trying to keep lives from being shattered.  It is disheartening to know that the message can’t be heard over the NRA propaganda scare tactic bullshit.

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The Ultimate Guide To The Gun Safety Debate

By Zack Beauchamp on Jan 31, 2013 at 3:20 pm

Since the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, the debate over gun violence in the Untied States has begun in earnest. Some common talking points can and should be easily dismissed — the idea that regulating access to guns is always unconstitutional or makes tyranny more likely, to take two examples. But not every argument against expanded gun regulation is ridiculous. There are some, based on the evidence about and history of gun use in the United States, that are worth taking more seriously. You’re likely to hear them a lot over the course of the coming debate. Here’s a list of some of the more commonly made, more serious arguments against gun regulation — and why they fail to effectively make the case against new laws:

“Assault weapon” is a meangingless term. || The last assault weapons ban failed. || Assault weapons don’t kill many people. || Deaths went down after the ban expired. || How can background checks stop killings?
Are background checks unfair? || High-capacity magazines don’t assist in mass killings.
People need high-capacity magazines to defend themselves. || The ban on high-capacity magazines failed.
More guns, less crime. || Why do gun-regulating cities have more crime?

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THE ASSAULT WEAPONS BAN

1. “The law’s ban on some so-called assault weapons is nonsensical. All such weaponry terminology means is that they are semi-automatic weapons (which most guns are) with some military-style external features.”

These so-called “external features” not only themselves allow for faster rates of fire and other more lethal uses of the guns, but also serve as effective proxy definitions for the sort of weapons best suited to kill people as efficiently as possible. The definition of “assault weapon” in the new federal ban proposed by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) with respect to semi-automatic rifles and pistols is focused on two kinds of each. The rifles are civilian equivalents of “assault rifles,” the main class of rifle used by modern militaries. “Civilian” versions are distinguished only by their inability to fire either automatically or in bursts without a conversion kit. The pistols have features that make them liable to be converted to full automatic versions (that is, into submachine guns) or otherwise enhance their lethality (e.g., allow for faster rate of fire).

The Feinstein law picks out those sorts of weapons in two ways. First, it bans specific guns (like the AR-15s used by James Holmes in Aurora and Adam Lanza in Newtown) that are particularly deadly. Many of these guns are civilian equivalents of military assault rifles, because — as assault rifle expert C.J. Chivers puts it — these guns were “conjured to form solely for the task of allowing men to more efficiently kill other men” because they are “smaller, lighter in weight, more tactically versatile and require a lighter per-man effective ammunition load than the infantry rifles that preceded them.” The Feinstein provisions, unlike in the 1994 federal ban, specify that “altered facsimiles with the capability of any such weapon thereof” are also banned, so taking out a single screw and calling the weapon something different would not allow manufacturers to skirt the ban. The second provision defines generic features — like barrel shrouds that allow for faster fire or (for pistols) magazines outside the pistol grip — and bans any gun that has more than one of them and a detachable magazine (the old ban allowed a maximum of two features, making it easier to skirt).

These aren’t merely cosmetic features: they’re the ones that mark guns optimized for effective performance in combat-style situations. They also mark guns easily convertible to full automatic fire, like the TEC-9 submachine guns once favored in gang killings. One such kit is fully legal, despite the 1934 National Firearms Act banning the possession of automatic weapons without a permit. The kit produced by the company Slide Fire product allows you to turn your AR or AK series assault rifle into a rapid-fire machine without technically running afoul of the federal definition of “machine gun.”

The notion that assault rifles are similar in caliber to hunting rifles, and hence no more dangerous, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny for similar reasons. As the California Attorney General’s office explains, “Caliber has no bearing on a weapon’s status as a series weapon and should be disregarded when making an identification. For example, upper receiver conversion kits are available to convert almost any AR series weapon into .45 ACP, .40 S&W, 7.62 X 39 mm, 9 mm, 10 mm, or .223 caliber.”

2. “The last assault-weapons ban didn’t work.“

There is evidence that the 1994 federal ban saved lives despite a series of loopholes closed in the Feinstein bill and several state bans. Though there isn’t reliable data on the number of people killed by assault weapons in the United States, there is strong evidence from the Mexican border that both California’s assault weapons ban the federal assault weapon ban lowered the homicide rate. The clearest comes in a 2012 academic paper that treated the expiration of the federal assault weapon ban in 2004 as a natural experiment — California still had its assault weapon ban, but Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona didn’t have equivalents. The authors tracked homicides and weapon seizures in the Mexican provinces bordering the states, finding disproportionately lower homicide rates in provinces near California. This difference remained when other potential causes (like police presence) were accounted for, suggesting the federal and California bans had successful kept assault weapons out of the hands of cartels and other criminals. The expiration of the federal law, on this paper’s model, has gotten roughly 239 people killed on the Mexican border per year since 2004. This is consistent with another paper that found “the expiration of the AWB is responsible for at least 16.4 percent of the increase in the homicide rate in Mexico between 2004 and 2008.”

The 1994 ban, according to a Department of Justice review, also appears to have caused the percentage of crimes involving assault weapons in some major US cities to drop from 72 percent to 17 percent.

While it’s true that the same review couldn’t find support for the idea that the Assault Weapons Ban reduced crime in 2004, the authors concluded that there simply hadn’t been enough time or data to come to a strong conclusion. The more recent Mexican studies may have filled this gap.

3. “So-called ‘assault weapons’ are nowhere near the root of the American violence problem.”

The reality is that even a minor percentage decline in fatalities could means hundreds of fewer people killed per year. Estimates about the percentage of crimes involving assault weapons range from two to eight percent. But if the Feinstein law could make a dent in that number, that’s still a big deal. Consider one estimate, based on federal gun trace data, that the original federal assault weapons ban reduced the national percentage of gun crimes involving assault weapons from about five percent to about two percent. Assuming that, because assault weapons are rarer and deadlier and hence more likely to be responsible for homicides, this translated to a one percent decline in the homicide rate. That’s 110 fewer murders per year given the roughly 11,000 Americans killed by gun homicide every year. We can debate whether would-be murderers would simply use other types of guns, and whether they’d be as deadly, but the point is that even a small percentage drop in gun homicides nationwide would be a huge victory.

4. “Violent crime has decreased 17 percent since the assault weapons ban expired..”

This one is just an abuse of statistics — just because violence is declining doesn’t mean it couldn’t be declining faster. It’s true that violent crime as a whole, including gun homicides, has declined over the course of the past decade. This suggests that gun laws aren’t the only factors that determine the crime rate — see Kevin Drum’s fantastic series on lead and crime for a clear explanation of the other causes that might’ve mattered.

Moreover, when you compare different states with different gun laws at the same time, you find states with tighter gun regulations (including assault weapon bans) have significantly lower rates of firearm death. This suggests that, independent of whatever good fortune the United States has seen the past decade, better gun laws could significantly accelerate decline in lives lost to gunfire.

UNIVERSAL BACKGROUND CHECKS AND DEALER INSPECTIONS

1. “How is this supposed to prevent mass murder?”

First, some mass shooters do have criminal or worrisome mental health records, like James Holmes and Seung-Hui Cho. Both Holmes and Cho bought their weapons legally. Cho even passed a background check despite being ruled “an imminent danger to himself because of mental illness” because of Virginia’s lax standards about what counts as a red flag for purposes of a background check.

Second, there’s another kind of mass murder — the 11,000 gun homicides per year — that improving our background check and inspection system could unequivocally help prevent. One percent of gun dealers sell half of the guns used in crimes nationally, which other evidence indicates have been deterred in the past by stepped-up ATF enforcement. Domestic violence perpetrators, people with substance abuse problems, and individuals convicted of other violent crimes are all more likely to commit firearm crimes, yet they can freely purchase a weapon in a private sale at, say, a gun show, no questions asked. In a finding that should surprise no one, 80 percent of firearms used in crimes appear to have been purchased privately. State and city-level comparisons indicate that “states which do not regulate private gun sales, adopt permit-to-purchase licensing systems, or have gun owner accountability measures, like mandatory reporting of gun thefts, export significantly more guns used by criminals to other states that have constrained the supply of guns for criminals by adopting strict gun sales regulations.”

It’s hard to estimate a specific number of lives that would be saved by requiring background checks on all sales, requiring all states and federal organizations to input criminal and drug records to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (they don’t have to, currently), and giving the ATF more power to trace and sting “bad apple” gun dealers and traffickers, but this mountain of evidence suggests that the effect of such measures could be substantial.

2. “Although better enforcement of existing restrictions on gun ownership sounds unobjectionable, it would unjustly deny millions of people the right to armed self-defense.”

Background checks are hardly onerous and likely won’t “unjustly” disqualify that many people. A check usually process very quickly at the point-of-sale and even abnormally long wait times top out around five days. It’s hardly an excessive burden for someone seeking a deadly weapon they’ll then be able to own for life.

But does current federal law unfairly bar certain groups of people from acquiring guns? Currently, only one percent of sales are blocked by background checks, the vast majority of which because the purchaser has committed or been indicted for a felony, is a fugitive from justice, or is a perpetrator of domestic violence. Presumably, both the percentage and absolute number of people denied would go up if the background check system were improved, but the breakdown suggest that only a minute number of (for example) harmless, recreational drug users would have their access to guns restricted because they failed a drug test.

Moreover, it’s critically important that felons be restricted from accessing firearms. The New York Timessurveyed felons and people convicted of “domestic violence misdemeanors” who (as a consequence of state-level, NRA-backed legislation loosening restoration standards) regained their gun rights. It found that 13 percent went on to commit crimes, half of which were felonies. As the Times notes, there’s also evidence that denying handguns to people arrested for or convicted of felonies reduces their likelihood to commit future crimes by 20 to 30 percent.

It is almost certainly true that universal background checks and a more complete database of disqualified persons will lead to less people being able to buy guns legally. Some fraction of them likely wouldn’t commit crimes — your average pot smoker isn’t the violent type. But the misguided excesses of the war on drugs shouldn’t obscure the fact that, right now, domestic abusers, violent felons, gang members, and drug addicts can buy guns with impunity. The evidence is very clear that members of these groups are more likely to commit gun crimes and that improved background checks can limit their ability to do so, saving lives in the process. A minor limitation on a tiny percentage of Americans’ ability to buy guns seems like a trade-off that’s easily worth making in light of America’s gun homicide rate.

HIGH CAPACITY MAGAZINES

1. “High-capacity magazines…require less frequent reloading, but are more likely to jam, and at any rate changing magazines is not difficult even for the untrained.”

There are plenty of large capacity magazines that aren’t more likely to jam that could majorly amplify the death toll in a mass shooting. While it’s true that 100-round magazines are more likely to jam, most high-capacity magazines aren’t nearly that large, and hence can use mechanisms that don’t appreciably increase the risk of jamming. The modern US Army M-16, for example, has a 30-round magazine, as does a standard AK-47 (a gun famous for jamming rarely). And as magazine technology improves, larger magazine sizes become more practicable: as Josh Sugarmann, executive director and founder of the Violence Policy Center, told ThinkProgress, evidence “from gun magazines and industry publications [suggests] the trend is towards higher capacity magazines.”

The Feinstein law, then, bans magazines that hold more than ten bullets for a reason. Suppose a shooter had the same assault weapon, but had four magazines or clips that could hold thirty rather than ten bullets. That shooter would have 80 more bullets, or three times the number, than he would have without the high-capacity magazine ban. Since magazine size doesn’t make much of a difference for how many magazines an individual shooter could carry on their person, limiting access to high-capacity magazines could result in a shooter carrying significantly fewer bullets — and hence being able to fire at significantly fewer people.

2. “Magazine size is more likely to matter for people defending against aggressors.”

Not only is this assertion dubious on its face, but it’s bad justification for making policy given how rare defensive gun use is. Presumably someone who’s attacking a school or a family would have more people to shoot, and hence require more bullets than the people trying to stop just him. But debating the nuances of this very specific hypothetical situation misses the point broader point that it doesn’t make sense to fixate on these extraordinarily uncommon cases.

The often-cited number that guns are used defensively 2.5 million times a year in the United States is mathematically impossible (more on that later). A survey of criminals who had been shot in a Washington, DC jail indicated that, far from being injured by their victims, they had almost all been hit by other criminals. These data suggest, when combined with other evidence, that defensive gun use is quite rare: “to believe fully the claims of millions of self-defense gun uses each year would mean believing that decent law-abiding citizens shot hundreds of thousands of criminals. But the data from emergency departments belie this claim, unless hundreds of thousands of wounded criminals are afraid to seek medical care. But virtually all criminals who have been shot went to the hospital, and can describe in detail what happened there.”

There are at least two other reasons to believe that defensive gun use is rare. First, people very commonly label criminal and/or aggressive behavior as “defensive” when asked in surveys, for somewhat obvious reasons. Second, many crimes, like most sexual assaults, simply aren’t likely to be deterred or stopped by guns.

Defending one’s family is surely a legitimate use for a gun, but the fact that a high-capacity magazine *might* be useful in some subset of these already-exceptional cases isn’t a good reason to permit their widespread ownership if keeping them legal also comes with real, identifiable costs in human lives.

3. “In the latest incarnation of Mrs. Feinstein’s ban, we would see the return of an ammunition limit that had no proven impact on crime while it was in effect from 1994-2004.”

It very likely the ban reduced the supply of high capacity magazines to criminals and a decent chance it prevented unnecessary deaths. While it’s hard to separate the effects of federal and state high-capacity magazine bans on crime from assault weapons bans (they’re generally enacted at the same time), there is excellent evidence that the federal ban on high-capacity magazines ended up restricting access to them. The Washington Posttracked police seizures of high-capacity magazines in Virginia during and after the federal assault weapons ban was in effect. The Post‘s reporters found a steady decline in number of magazines recovered from 1994-2004 (when the law was in effect), but saw the trend halt and then reverse after the ban expired, indicating more criminals were getting high-capacity magazines. One gun expert who was “skeptical” that the federal ban worked said the Post’s evidence changed his mind; its data was “about as clear an example as we could ask for of evidence that the ban was working.”

There is also some old, very tentative evidence that “that victims killed with guns having large-capacity magazines tend to have more bullet wounds than victims killed with other firearms, and that mass murders with assault weapons tend to involve more victims than those with other firearms.” While this evidence is, again, rudimentary, it suggests that a renewed, effective ban on high-capacity magazines might very well save more lives.

THE SCIENCE ON GUNS

1. “More guns, less crime.”

The best evidence we have says the opposite.

The “guns reduce crime” argument gets made in two ways, often together: 1) the presence of more guns deters crime and 2) concealed carry laws allow citizens to stop crime where they encounter it. The two main sources cited for these claims are John Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime, and a series of papers written by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz suggesting that Americans used guns defensively 2.5 million times per year.

The overwhelming consensus among scholars is that Lott, Kleck, and Gertz are wrong. In a blockbuster article after the Newtown shooting, Salon‘s Alex Seitz-Wald reviewed this research in great detail, finding a series of glaring methodological flaws and a wealth of evidence suggesting more guns led, in fact, to more gun death. It’s really worth reading Seitz-Wald’s piece in full, but to summarize a few salient points: Lott has been unable to produce the survey data supporting his major claim about guns and concealed carry reducing crime, while independent reviews of the evidence have come to opposite conclusions. Kleck and Gertz fail to account for the fact that people often falsely self-report as using guns defensively when they’re actually intimidating people a la George Zimmerman and the Kleck-Gertz numbers mathematically require assuming “burglary victims use their guns in self-defense more than 100 percent of the time,” among other problems.

Suffice to say, more guns are not the answer to gun violence.

2. “If gun control works, Chicago ought to be safe.”

This argument is mistaken as a matter of both statistics and law. While a simple glance at rough homicide rates suggests very little difference in crime rates between cities with strict gun laws and those without, the relevant research strongly suggests that ease of acquiring guns legally increases the local gun homicide rate. A 2001 paper by Mark Duggan estimated county-by-county gun ownership, finding that counties with higher rates of gun ownership had higher gun homicide rates. A second paper, which used a different measure of gun ownership, came to a similar conclusion. Both papers found that only gun homicide rates — and a county’s other homicide or broader crime rates — is affected by gun ownership, suggesting that easy access to guns increases gun homicide by getting more guns to more people.

A third, more recent paper goes further, finding that gun ownership increased gun homicides even when you control for levels of urbanization and poverty. That is, cities with more guns, all other things being equal, will have more homicide deaths, as will poorer areas. This points to the basic statistical error in the “what about Chicago?” argument — the question isn’t whether gun regulation is the only or principal determinant of gun homicide rates, it’s whether there’d be more or less gun death in Chicago if Chicago and nearby counties did a better job restricting access to guns. Given that states with tighter gun laws also have less guns (and less gun deaths), it seems the same would hold true (again, if you hold other variables like poverty and overall crime rate constant) on the city-to-city level. Moreover, studies of cities with strong background check and illegal sales enforcement provisions have found clear evidence that imposing these measures lowered the number of guns being diverted to criminals.

There’s another, well-known problem with this conceit — lax federal and state laws make it easy to purchase guns from nearby, underregulated counties or states and bring them into cities. In Chicago, for example, gun sellers will simply set up shop just outside the city limits and sell to traffickers who bring the weapons into the city. That’s one of the key arguments for the sort of federal action being considered today, especially universal background checks at nearby gun shows to prevent this sort of trafficking. A uniform federal standard would make it much harder for criminals to take advantage of state and local variation.

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Hedy Lamarr – Style Icon

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Brains and beauty go together to the extreme in Hedy Lamarr.   Achingly beautiful actress AND brilliant scientist.  She is an amazing example of everyone’s ability to have many interests and explore all of them.  Ladies and gentlemen, Hedy Lamarr.  Style Icon.

NAME: Hedy Lamarr
OCCUPATION: Film Actor, Pin-up
BIRTH DATE: November 09, 1913
DEATH DATE: January 19, 2000
PLACE OF BIRTH: Vienna, Austria
PLACE OF DEATH: Orlando, Florida
ORIGINALLY: Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler

BEST KNOWN FOR: Extraordinarily beautiful, Hedy Lamarr was a Austrian-American actress during MGM’s “Golden Age.”

Actress. Born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, on November 9, 1913, in Vienna, Austria. Discovered by an Austrian film director as a teenager, she gained international notice in 1933, with her role in the sexy Czech film Ecstasy. After her marriage with Fritz Mandl, a wealthy Austrian munitions manufacturer, ended, she signed a contract with the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio and began her career in Hollywood as Hedy Lamarr. Upon the release of her first American film, Algiers, co-starring Charles Boyer, Lamarr became an immediate box-office sensation.

Often referred to as one of the most gorgeous and exotic of Hollywood’s leading ladies, Lamarr made a number of well-received films during the 1930s and 1940s. Notable among them were Lady of the Tropics (1939), co-starring Robert Taylor; Boom Town (1940), with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy; Tortilla Flat (1942), co-starring Tracy; and Samson and Delilah (1949), opposite Victor Mature. She was reportedly producer Hal Wallis’ first choice for the heroine in his classic 1943 film, Casablanca, a part that eventually went to Ingrid Bergman.

In 1942, during the heyday of her career, Lamarr earned recognition in a field quite different from entertainment. She and her friend, the composer George Antheil, received a patent for an idea of a radio signaling device, or “Secret Communications System,” that later became an important step in the development of technology to maintain the security of both military communications and cellular phones.

Lamarr’s film career began to decline in the 1950s; her last film was 1958′s The Female Animal, with Jane Powell. In 1966, she published a steamy best-selling autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, but later sued the publisher for what she saw as errors and distortions perpetrated by the book’s ghostwriter. She was arrested twice for shoplifting, once in 1966 and once in 1991, but neither arrest resulted in a conviction.

Lamarr was married six times and had two children, Anthony and Denise, with her third husband, the actor John Loder. She also adopted a son, James. In the later years of her life, Lamarr lived quietly in Orlando, Florida. She died on January 19, 2000, at the age of 86.

For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Hedy Lamarr has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6247 Hollywood Blvd.

In 2003, the Boeing corporation ran a series of recruitment ads featuring Hedy Lamarr as a woman of science. No reference to her film career was made in the ads.

Personal Quotes

“My problem is, I’m a hell of a nice dame, The most horrible whores are famous. I did what I did for love. The others did it for money.”

“Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

Hedy Lamarr – Style Icon.

Stephen Hawking – Style Icon

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NAME: Stephen Hawking
OCCUPATION: Physicist
BIRTH DATE: January 08, 1942 (Age: 70)
EDUCATION: Oxford University, Cambridge University, Caltech, Gonville & Caius College
PLACE OF BIRTH: Oxford, United Kingdom

BEST KNOWN FOR: Stephen Hawking is known for his work regarding black holes and his several popular science books. He suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA (born 8 January 1942) is a British theoretical physicist and cosmologist, whose scientific books and public appearances have made him an academic celebrity. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and in 2009 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.

Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge for 30 years, taking up the post in 1979 and retiring on 1 October 2009. He is now Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and a Distinguished Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. He is known for his contributions to the fields of cosmology and quantum gravity, especially in the context of black holes. He has also achieved success with works of popular science in which he discusses his own theories and cosmology in general; these include the runaway best seller A Brief History of Time, which stayed on the British Sunday Times best-sellers list for a record-breaking 237 weeks.

Hawking’s key scientific works to date have included providing, with Roger Penrose, theorems regarding gravitational singularities in the framework of general relativity, and the theoretical prediction that black holes should emit radiation, which is today known as Hawking radiation (or sometimes as Bekenstein-Hawking radiation).

Hawking has a motor neuron disease that is related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a condition that has progressed over the years and has left him almost completely paralyzed.

 

Anatomy of Boredom

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What Madame Bovary has to do with MRI and rock’n’roll.

Boredom has never enjoyed an admirable reputation, and in the age of the internet’s incessant on-demand stimulation, it seems at once anachronistic and antithetical — a particularly pathetic condition to profess, a personal failure of sorts. But in Boredom: A Lively History (public library), classics scholar Peter Toohey examines boredom as an adaptive mechanism. From Madame Bovary to fMRI, he explores the roots, symptoms, and symbolism of boredom across art history, psychology, and neurochemistry to examine what it reveals about us both as individuals and as a culture.

Boredom is, in the Darwinian sense, an adaptive emotion. Its purpose, that is, may be designed to help one flourish.

Toohey argues that boredom, unlike primary emotions like happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, or disgust, takes a secondary role, alongside “social emotions” like sympathy, embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride, jealousy, envy, gratitude, admiration, and contempt. He delineates between two main types of boredom — simple boredom, which occurs regularly and doesn’t require that you be able to name it, and existential boredom, a grab-bag condition that is “neither an emotion, nor a mood, nor a feeling” but, rather, “an impressive intellectual formulation” that has much in common with depression and is highly self-aware, something Toohey calls the most self-reflective of conditions.

Toohey examines the relationship between boredom and disgust, the former being a mild derivation of the latter — boredom is to disgust what annoyance is to anger. Boredom is also connected to surfeit — surfeit, coupled with monotony, predictability, and confinement, produces boredom.

Boredom is an emotion usually associated with a nourished body: like satiety, it is not normally for the starving.

But our reflexive means of alleviating boredom — novelty-seeking, drugs, extreme behaviors — are, as most of us are intellectually aware but have at some point been experientially blind to, remarkably ineffective. Toohey observes:

As fast as the new is experienced…it is liable to become boring. The new becomes a variant of the infinite. It recedes infinitely.

This touches on what’s perhaps the most transfixing aspect of boredom — its relationship with time:

Infinity is of course temporal as well as spatial. Time has a very interesting relationship with boredom and its representations. We have all experienced the sluggishness of time when we have been confined in boring situations. According to one of the late Clement Freud’s famous witticisms, ‘if you resolve to give up smoking, drinking and loving you don’t actually live longer, it just seems longer.’

In this way, boredom appears to be the polar opposite of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has famously termed flow — a state of intense focus you enter whilst absorbed in an enthralling task, when you lose track of time.

And yet, our tendency to seek a cure for boredom in the new and shiny appears to be a fundamental part of being human, a deep-seated cultural phenomenon:

Popular culture is littered with examples of this process of rule breaking as a way to escape the chronic boredom of modern life. The problem with this rule breaking is that it so quickly becomes predictable, prosaic and boring. Avant-garde art and rock’n’roll, to take two examples, both staged revolts against the status quo precisely by way of dazzling, intense novelty, but both quickly became as predictable as corn niblets.

[…]

Rule breaking, if it’s done regularly, quickly becomes just another element in the edifice of the middle-class boredom that it was designed to replace. Worse still, rule breaking becomes confused with fashion and being modern and that quickly becomes old-fashioned too. Remember what Oscar Wilde had to say? ‘Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly.”

Boredom, it turns out, is adaptive as a transient state, but dangerous as a chronic condition. In 1986, psychologists designed a test, known as the Boredom Proneness Scale (BPS), as a way of distinguishing between those who suffer transient boredom from those who suffer chronic boredom:

The statements to follow can be answered using a 7-point scale — from ’1′ (highly disagree), to ’4′ (neutral), to ’7′ (highly agree).

  1. It is easy for me to concentrate on my activities.
  2. Frequently when I am working I find myself worrying about other things.
  3. Time always seems to be passing slowly.
  4. I often find myself at “loose ends”, not knowing what to do.
  5. I am often trapped in situations where I have to do meaningless things.
  6. Having to look at someone’s home movies or travel slides bores me tremendously.
  7. I have projects in mind all the time, things to do.
  8. I find it easy to entertain myself.
  9. Many things I have to do are repetitive and monotonous.
  10. It takes more stimulation to get me going than most people.
  11. I get a kick out of most things I do.
  12. I am seldom excited about my work.
  13. In any situation I can usually find something to do or see to keep me interested.
  14. Much of the time I just sit around doing nothing.
  15. I am good at waiting patiently.
  16. I often find myself with nothing to do, time on my hands.
  17. In situations where I have to wait, such as in line, I get very restless.
  18. I often wake up with a new idea.
  19. It would be very hard for me to find a job that is exciting enough.
  20. I would like more challenging things to do in life.
  21. I feel that I am working below my abilities most of the time.
  22. Many people would say that I am a creative or imaginative person.
  23. I have so many interests, I don’t have time to do everything.
  24. Among my friends, I am the one who keeps doing something the longest.
  25. Unless I am doing something exciting, even dangerous, I feel half-dead and dull.
  26. It takes a lot of change and variety to keep me really happy.
  27. It seems that the same things are on television or the movies all the time; it’s getting old.
  28. When I was young, I was often in monotonous and tiresome situations.

To find out your own proneness to boredom, add up the total of the scores you gave each question. The average score is 99, and the average range 81-117. If you scored above 117, you become bored easily, and if you scored below 81, your boredom threshold is very high.

Researchers have found that some people have a metabolic proneness to chronic boredom, correlated with neurotransmitter imbalances and higher risks for depression, anxiety, addiction, eating disorders, gambling, hostility, low academic performance, and more. (Though Toohey is careful to caution against assuming causality, pointing out that chronic boredom is just a symptom of these chemical imbalances, along with risk-taking and sensation-seeking, rather than a causative agent.) Meanwhile, those who suffer only transient boredom have been found to perform better in various aspects of life, including work, education, and personal autonomy.

By looking at everything from body language in classical paintings to studies from some of the world’s best neuroscience labs, Boredom: A Lively History goes on to paint a portrait of boredom that is at once a sweeping cultural observation across time and space and a deeply relatable, personal lens on this most unglamorous yet most universal aspect of what it means to be human.

via Anatomy of Boredom | Brain Pickings.

Lonesome George, famed Galapagos tortoise, dies

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I met Lonesome George about ten years ago when I was on the Galapagos Islands.  He was inside the Charles Darwin Research Center on Santa Cruz Island.  It is sad to think that he was the last of his kind and now he is gone.

QUITO, Ecuador— The giant tortoise Lonesome George, whose failed efforts to produce offspring made him a symbol of disappearing species, was found dead on Sunday, officials at the Galapagos National Park announced.

Lonesome George was believed to be the last living member of the Pinta island subspecies and had become an ambassador of sorts for the islands off Ecuador‘s coast whose unique flora and fauna helped inspire Charles Darwin’s ideas on evolution.

The tortoise’s age was not known but scientists believed he was about 100, not especially old for giant tortoises, who can live well over a century. Scientists had expected him to live another few decades at least.

Various mates had been provided for Lonesome George after he was found in 1972 in what proved unsuccessful attempts to keep his subspecies alive.

He lived at a tortoise breeding center on the archipelago’s island of Santa Cruz. He was found Sunday morning in his pen by his longtime keeper, Fausto Llerena, the park said in a statement.

The park said the cause of his death would be investigated.

The Galapagos’ giant tortoise population was decimated after the arrival of humans but a recovery program run by the park and the Charles Darwin Foundation has increased the overall population from 3,000 in 1974 to 20,000 today.

via Lonesome George, famed Galapagos tortoise, dies – latimes.com.

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Bluefin Tuna: New Endangered Animal for 2012

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All any of us should ever want or hope for from our lives is to leave the world better than how we found it.  That should be everyone’s ultimate goal.  Protecting creatures that cannot protect themselves is part of making a better world.

With its meat used in the preparation of sushi, the fishing industry continues to harvest 60,000 tons each year.

Overfishing continues despite repeated warnings of the current precipitous decline. In 2007, researchers from the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT)—the regulators of Atlantic bluefin fishing—recommended a global quota of 15,000 tonnes to maintain current stocks or 10,000 tonnes to allow the fisheries recovery. ICCAT then chose a quota of 36,000 tonnes, however surveys indicated that up to 60,000 tonnes was actually being taken (1/3 of the total remaining stocks) and the limit was reduced to 22,500 tonnes. Their scientists now say that 7500 tonnes is the sustainable limit. In November, 2009 ICCAT set the 2010 quota at 13,500 tonnes and said that if stocks were not rebuilt by 2022 it would consider closing some areas.

In 2010, Greenpeace International added the northern bluefin tuna to its seafood red list.

On March 18, 2010 the United Nations rejected a U.S.-backed effort to impose a total ban on Atlantic Bluefin tuna fishing and trading. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) vote was 68 to 20 with 30 European abstentions. The leading opponent, Japan, claimed that ICCAT was the proper regulatory body.

In 2011, the USA‘s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) decided not to list the Atlantic bluefin tuna as an endangered species. It is still considered a “species of concern,” but NOAA officials claimed that the more stringent international fishing rules created in November 2010 would be enough for the Atlantic bluefin tuna to recover. NOAA agreed to reconsider the species endangered status in 2013.

The easiest way to help is to not support any sushi restaurant that sells Atlantic Blue Fin and tell them why.

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Mike Biddle: We can recycle plastic

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Less than 10% of plastic trash is recycled — compared to almost 90% of metals — because of the massively complicated problem of finding and sorting the different kinds. Frustrated by this waste, Mike Biddle has developed a cheap and incredibly energy efficient plant that can, and does, recycle any kind of plastic.

via Mike Biddle: We can recycle plastic | Video on TED.com.

Throwing water bottles into the recycling bin doesn’t begin to address the massive quantity of postconsumer plastic that ends up in landfills and the ocean. Because it’s so difficult to separate the various kinds of plastics – up to 20 kinds per product – that make up our computers, cell phones, cars and home appliances, only a small fraction of plastics from complex waste streams are recycled, while the rest is tossed. In 1992, Mike Biddle, a plastics engineer, set out to find a solution. He set up a lab in his garage in Pittsburg, California, and began experimenting with complex-plastics recycling, borrowing ideas from such industries as mining and grain processing.

Since then, Biddle has developed a patented 30-step plastics recycling system that includes magnetically extracting metals, shredding the plastics, sorting them by polymer type and producing graded pellets to be reused in industry – a process that takes less than a tenth of the energy required to make virgin plastic from crude oil. Today, the company he cofounded, MBA Polymers, has plants in China and Austria, and plans to build more in Europe, where electronics-waste regulation (which doesn’t yet have an equivalent in the US) already ensures a stream of materials to exploit – a process Biddle calls “above-ground mining.”

He says: “I consider myself an environmentalist. I hate to see plastics wasted. I hate to see any natural resource – even human time – wasted.”

“Biddle’s company ventures into lands where few recyclers — who stick to the safer world of steel and aluminum — dare to tread.” myhero.com

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The art of Jay Inslee: donors get sketch

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Politics Northwest | The art of Jay Inslee: donors get sketch | Seattle Times Newspaper.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jay Inslee has been making a pitch to regular donors – give him money and he’ll send you a drawing once a month.

He calls it “The J Team.”

We at Politics Northwest have been curious to see the former Bainbridge Island Congressman’s artistic side, and today one of Inslee’s donors shared his first creation: an impressionistic colored-pencil drawing of a Lopez Island beach.

“I promised you a sketch every month for joining the J-Team — and am excited to share my first J-Team drawing,” Inslee said in an email message to donors, adding “it’s because of you that we’re running one of the most competitive races in the nation and because of you I’m so confident we’ll win this November.”

Jaime Smith, Inslee’s campaign spokesperson, said Inslee “doodles all the time” and likes to keep colored pencils and paper on hand wherever he goes.

“This is Jay’s sanity mechanism. Some people smoke. He draws,” Smith said.

No word yet on whether Republican Attorney General Rob McKenna is preparing a counter-sculpture.

Visit http://www.jayinslee.com/home

Voting History Compiled by On The Issues: http://ontheissues.org/House/Jay_Inslee.htm

Jay Inslee on Abortion
Voted NO on banning federal health coverage that includes abortion. (May 2011)
Voted YES on expanding research to more embryonic stem cell lines. (Jan 2007)
Rated 100% by NARAL, indicating a pro-choice voting record. (Dec 2003)

Jay Inslee on Budget & Economy
Voted YES on regulating the subprime mortgage industry. (Nov 2007)

Jay Inslee on Civil Rights
Voted YES on prohibiting job discrimination based on sexual orientation. (Nov 2007)
Voted NO on Constitutionally defining marriage as one-man-one-woman. (Jul 2006)
Voted NO on making the PATRIOT Act permanent. (Dec 2005)
Rated 100% by the HRC, indicating a pro-gay-rights stance. (Dec 2006

Jay Inslee on Corporations
Voted YES on more funding for nanotechnology R&D and commercialization. (Jul 2009)
Voted YES on allowing stockholder voting on executive compensation. (Apr 2007)

Jay Inslee on Crime
Voted YES on enforcing against anti-gay hate crimes. (Apr 2009)

Jay Inslee on Drugs
Voted NO on prohibiting needle exchange & medical marijuana in DC. (Oct 1999)

Jay Inslee on Education
Voted YES on $40B for green public schools. (May 2009)
Voted YES on additional $10.2B for federal education & HHS projects. (Nov 2007)
Rated 100% by the NEA, indicating pro-public education votes. (Dec 2003)

Jay Inslee on Energy & Oil
Voted NO on barring EPA from regulating greenhouse gases. (Apr 2011)
Voted YES on tax incentives for renewable energy. (Feb 2008)
Rated 100% by the CAF, indicating support for energy independence. (Dec 2006)

Jay Inslee on Environment
Rated 100% by the LCV, indicating pro-environment votes. (Dec 2003)

Jay Inslee on Families & Children
Voted YES on four weeks of paid parental leave for federal employees. (Jun 2009)
Rated 15% by the Christian Coalition: an anti-Family-Value voting record. (Dec 2003)

Jay Inslee on Foreign Policy
Voted YES on $156M to IMF for 3rd-world debt reduction. (Jul 2000)

Jay Inslee on Free Trade
Voted YES on assisting workers who lose jobs due to globalization. (Oct 2007)

Jay Inslee on Government Reform
Voted YES on protecting whistleblowers from employer recrimination. (Mar 2007)

Jay Inslee on Gun Control
Voted NO on prohibiting product misuse lawsuits on gun manufacturers. (Oct 2005)
Voted NO on prohibiting suing gunmakers & sellers for gun misuse. (Apr 2003)
Voted NO on decreasing gun waiting period from 3 days to 1. (Jun 1999)
Rated F by the NRA, indicating a pro-gun control voting record. (Dec 2003)

Jay Inslee on Health Care
Voted YES on expanding the Children’s Health Insurance Program. (Jan 2009)
Voted NO on banning physician-assisted suicide. (Oct 1999)
Rated 100% by APHA, indicating a pro-public health record. (Dec 2003)

Jay Inslee on Homeland Security
Rated 89% by SANE, indicating a pro-peace voting record. (Dec 2003)
Repeal Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell, and reinstate discharged gays. (Mar 2010)

Jay Inslee on Immigration
Voted NO on building a fence along the Mexican border. (Sep 2006)
Rated 0% by FAIR, indicating a voting record loosening immigration. (Dec 2003)
Rated 0% by USBC, indicating an open-border stance. (Dec 2006)

Jay Inslee on Jobs
Voted YES on end offshore tax havens and promote small business. (Oct 2004)
Rated 87% by the AFL-CIO, indicating a pro-union voting record. (Dec 2003)

Jay Inslee on Principles & Values
Rated 100% by the AU, indicating support of church-state separation. (Dec 2006)
Member of Democratic Leadership Council. (Nov 2007)

Jay Inslee on Social Security
Rated 100% by the ARA, indicating a pro-senior voting record. (Dec 2003)

Jay Inslee on Tax Reform
Voted NO on making the Bush tax cuts permanent. (Apr 2002)
Rated 100% by the CTJ, indicating support of progressive taxation. (Dec 2006)

Jay Inslee on Technology
Voted NO on terminating funding for National Public Radio. (Mar 2011)

Jay Inslee on War & Peace
Voted YES on investigating Bush impeachment for lying about Iraq. (Jun 2008)

Jay Inslee on Welfare & Poverty
Voted YES on providing $70 million for Section 8 Housing vouchers. (Jun 2006)

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America is pretty empty without you kids

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America is pretty empty without you kids

Groucho Marx wrote this lovely letter to U.S. troops stationed in Suriname in 1943, in response to a request from a Corporal Darrow to send a morale-boosting message. Groucho doesn’t disappoint, and cracks a couple of gentle jokes about life back home and his attempt to grow some vegetables; there are even a few genuinely touching remarks towards the end. The icing on the cake has to be the paper on which it’s typed — a sheet of the comedian’s unmistakable letterhead.

Transcript

GROUCHO MARX

August 18, 1943.

Dear Corporal Darrow,

You asked me if I have a message for the soldiers in the jungle. I could probably send one but it would be collect and would only run into money. I imagine it’s difficult enough to stay awake on those lonely islands without having to read messages from me.

I don’t want you to worry much about the 4-Fs back home — true, we have been deprived of a few things but nothing of any importance. We don’t get much meat any more — the butcher shops have nothing in them but customers. Fortunately, I don’t rely on the stores for my vegetables. Last spring I was smart enough to plant a Victory garden. So far, I have raised a family of moles, enough snails to keep a pre-French restaurant running for a century and a curious looking plant that I have been eating all summer under the impression that it was a vegetable. However, for the past few weeks, I’ve had difficulty in remaining awake and this morning I discovered that I had been munching on marijuana the whole month of July.

Anyhow, we miss all you boys (I have a son in the Coast Guard) and we wish you were all back again raising hell and children. We are doing what little we can to further the war effort — we buy bonds, play service camps and short-wave broadcasts to our soldiers on the foreign fronts. We drive carefully, we take no vacations and, in general, do what we can. God knows it’s little enough. We all know that you boys are doing the real job.

In closing, all I can say is good luck, God bless you all and hurry home — remember, America is pretty empty without you kids.

Yours,

(Signed, ‘Groucho’)

Cpl. Jerone G. Darrow,

Force Headquarters,

U. S. Army Forces in Surinam,

Camp Paramaribo, Surinam,

Dutch Guiana.

via Letters of Note.

Alexander Graham Bell – Style Icon

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One hundred and sixty five years ago, Alexander Graham Bell was born.  Your life today is different because of his inventions.  Send him a quick text:  THX A.  Ladies and gentlemen, Alexander Graham Bell.  Style Icon.

NAME: Alexander Graham Bell
OCCUPATION: Educator, Linguist, Inventor, Scientist
BIRTH DATE: March 03, 1847
DEATH DATE: August 02, 1922
EDUCATION: Edinburgh Royal High School, Edinburgh University, University College in London
PLACE OF BIRTH: Edinburgh, Scotland
PLACE OF DEATH: Cape Breton Island, Canada

BEST KNOWN FOR: Alexander Graham Bell was one of the primary inventors of the telephone, did important work in communication for the deaf and held over 18 patent.

Alexander Graham Bell (March 3, 1847 – August 2, 1922) was an eminent scientist, inventor, engineer and innovator who is credited with inventing the first practical telephone.

Bell’s father, grandfather, and brother had all been associated with work on elocution and speech, and both his mother and wife were deaf, profoundly influencing Bell’s life’s work. His research on hearing and speech further led him to experiment with hearing devices which eventually culminated in Bell being awarded the first US patent for the telephone in 1876. In retrospect, Bell considered his most famous invention an intrusion on his real work as a scientist and refused to have a telephone in his study.

Many other inventions marked Bell’s later life, including groundbreaking work in optical telecommunications, hydrofoils and aeronautics. In 1888, Alexander Graham Bell became one of the founding members of the National Geographic Society. Bell has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history.

Honors and tributes flowed to Bell in increasing numbers as his most famous invention became ubiquitous and his personal fame grew. Bell received numerous honorary degrees from colleges and universities, to the point that the requests almost became burdensome. During his life he also received dozens of major awards, medals and other tributes. These included statuary monuments to both him and the new form of communication his telephone created, notably the Bell Telephone Memorial erected in his honor in Brantford, Ontario‘s Alexander Graham Bell Gardens in 1917.

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