As a Public Service . . .

I present what I consider to be a treasure trove of information that almost anybody can find something in that's useful.


What are the most productive ways to spend time on the Internet?

• Documentary Heaven- Literally hundreds of streaming documentaries, all arranged by topic. All free. (/u/drake_diablo)
• Foreign Service Institute - language courses developed by the Foreign Service Institute. These courses were developed by the United States government and are in the public domain. (/u/SourMilk)
• Free Section of Craigslist - You can find a lot of cool stuff if you go to the free section of craigslist. The original poster's friend recently got a fully functional dentist's chair for his room that automatically adjusts to any position. (/u/tornato7)
• Any Song You Want Not In A Torrent- I'll just link the comment, I'm not sure how to summarize this. (/u/pizzarox2)
• Project Gutenberg- Project Gutenberg's books are often taught in all shorts of literature classes, get em for free when you can (/u/atomicheartmother)
• Google Drive - you'd be surprised how many people don't know what it is (/u/ryantyrant)
• Retail Me Not - Search for coupon codes before buying anything online. (/u/etak1980 and/u/BigBad_BigBad)
• Duolingo - a great site that teaches you foreign languages for free. No idea how they make a profit, but there yah go. If Duolingo can't satisfy that need. LiveMocha looks like a promising site, though I haven't had a chance to try it out. (/u/iKickComputers)
• Project Free TV - Pretty much a project for free TV, I believe. 1channel is also pretty darn excellent. (/u/Boob_Inspector and /u/Giblet_McGravy) EDIT: DO NOT USE 1CHANNEL, USE LetMeWatchThis - Watch Movies Online Free - Just Added
• SNES Box or NES Box, two great emulators to play games from Super Nintendo and Classic Nintendo respectively online. (/u/shifty1032231)

All the below is by /u/Fletch71011-

• No Excuse List - Includes sources for everything you can want. I included some more popular ones with brief write-ups below. Credit to /u/lix2333.
• Reddit Resources - Reddit's List of the best online education sources
• Khan Academy - Educational organization and a website created by Bangladeshi-American educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School. The website supplies a free online collection of micro lectures stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, healthcare and medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, American civics, art history, macroeconomics, microeconomics, and computer science.
• Ted Talks - Talks that address a wide range of topics ("ideas worth spreading") within the research and practice of science and culture, often through storytelling. Many famous academics have given talks, and they are usually short and easy to digest.
• Coursera - Coursera partners with various universities and makes a few of their courses available online free for a large audience. Founded by computer science professors, so again a heavy CS emphasis.
• Wolfram Alpha - Online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might. Unbelievable what this thing can compute; you can ask it near anything and find an answer.
• Udacity - Outgrowth of free computer science classes offered in 2011 through Stanford University. Plans to offer more, but concentrated on computer science for now.
• MIT OpenCourseWare - Initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to put all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, partly free and openly available to anyone, anywhere.
• Open Yale Courses - Provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University.
• Codecademy - Online interactive platform that offers free coding classes in programming languages like Python, JavaScript, and Ruby, as well as markup languages including HTML and CSS. Gives your points and "level ups" like a video game, which is why I enjoyed doing classes here. Not lecture-oriented either; usually just jump right into coding, which works best for those that have trouble paying attention.
• Team Treehouse - Alternative to Codecademy which has video tutorials. EDIT: Been brought to my attention that Team Treehouse is not free, but I included it due to many comments. Nick Pettit, teaching team lead at Treehouse, created a 50% off discount code for redditors. Simply use 'REDDIT50'. Karma goes to Mr. Pettit if you enjoyed or used this.
• Think Tutorial - Database of simple, easy to follow tutorials covering all aspects of popular computing. Includes lots of easier, basic tasks for your every day questions or new users.
• Memrise - Online learning tool that uses flashcards augmented with mnemonics—partly gathered through crowdsourcing—and the spacing effect to boost the speed and ease of learning. Several languages available to learn.
• Livemocha - Commercial online language learning community boasting 12 million members which provides instructional materials in 38 languages and a platform for speakers to interact with and help each other learn new languages.
• edX - Massive open online course platform founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University to offer online university-level courses in a wide range of disciplines to a worldwide audience at no charge. Many other universities now take part in it, including Cal Berkeley. Differs from most of these by including "due dates" with assignments and grades.
• Education portal - Free courses which allow you to pass exams to earn real college credit.
• uReddit - Made by Redditors for other Redditors. Tons of different topics, varying from things like science and art to Starcraft strategy.
• iTunes U - Podcasts from a variety of places including universities and colleges on various subjects.
• Stack Exchange - Group of question and answer websites on topics in many different fields, each website covering a specific topic, where questions, answers, and users are subject to a reputation award process. Stack Overflow is used for programming, probably their most famous topic. Self-moderated with reputation similar to Reddit.
• Wikipedia - Collaboratively edited, multilingual, free Internet encyclopedia. Much better source than most people give it credit for, and great for random learning whenever you need it. For those looking for more legit sources for papers and such, it is usually easy to jump to a Wikipedia page and grab some sources at the bottom.

Back to sane mode.

• Ninite - Something I myself can personally recommend, its a safe download site with no toolbars and malware. Any software you need will be there, and I have discovered a lot of software there. (DELETED)
• Free Electronic Component Samples from Texas Instruments - OP just had a $15 voltage regulator delivered for free. You need to create a free account, and then you get something like four free samples a month. This is incredibly useful for some harder to find parts. Plus they're good quality, as far as I know, and they ship fast using FedEx. (/u/LXL15)
• The First Row - semi ILLEGAL site to watch sports events, proceed at your own risk. Many sports events are available there. (DELETED)
• Pixlr Editor - Basic picture editor that will irritate people using Photoshop, but its easy and free, and if I'm using a crappy computer without any software (like I am now) I'd go there. (/u/xCry0x)
• Mint- get your finances firmly under control. Downloads and categorizes transactions from your Debit and Credit accounts, and even tracks Mortgages and Car Loans. It allows you to set budgets for expenditures of certain types and then tracks those on a month-to-month basis and will nag you when you're spending too much on something. (/u/icyliquid)

The Eternal Divide: A Broken Record

Some things I encounter have to be put out there in toto, or much of the point is lost. When once the country rolls over and dies because of the disparity of wealth, such pieces as this will seem prescient. Every single one of these points is telling (not to mention outrageous), but I'm absolutely convinced that no one in this country is the least bit concerned. We're more intent on fiddling while the country falls down about our ears.

 

This article--and it's not included in its entirety--appeared on the Alternet blog. It's just variation on a theme that's been echoing through the nation's consciousness for several years now. But it doesn't seem to be striking any chords.

 A recent posting detailed how upper middle class Americans are rapidly losing ground to the one-percenters who averaged $5 million in wealth gains over just three years. It also noted that the global 1% has increased their wealth from $100 trillion to $127 trillion in just three years.

The information came from the Credit Suisse 2014 Global Wealth Databook (GWD), which goes on to reveal much more about the disappearing middle class.

1. Each Year Since the Recession, America's Richest 1% Have Made More Than the Cost of All U.S. Social Programs

In effect, a reverse transfer from the poor to the rich. Even as conservatives blame Social Security for being too costly.

Much of the 1% wealth just sits there, accumulating more wealth. The numbers are nearly unfathomable. Depending on the estimate, the 1% took in anywhere from $2.3 trillion to $5.7 trillion per year. (All numeric analysis is detailed here.)

Even the smaller estimate of $2.3 trillion per year is more than the budget for Social Security ($860 billion), Medicare ($524 billion), Medicaid ($304 billion), and the entire safety net ($286 billion for SNAP, WIC [Women, Infants, Children], Child Nutrition, Earned Income Tax Credit, Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and Housing).

2. Almost None of the New 1% Wealth Led To Innovation and Jobs

In 2005, for every $1 of financial wealth there was 66 cents of non-financial (home) wealth. Ten years later, for every $1 of financial wealth there was just 43 cents of non-financial (home) wealth.

What happens to all this financial wealth?

Over 90% of the assets owned by millionaires are held in low-risk investments (bonds and cash), the stock market, and real estate. Business startup costs made up less than 1% of the investments of high net worth individuals in North America in 2011. A recent study found that less than 1 percent of all entrepreneurs came from very rich or very poor backgrounds. They come from the middle class.

On the corporate side, stock buybacks are employed to enrich executives rather than to invest in new technologies. In 1981, major corporations were spending less than 3 percent of their combined net income on buybacks, but in recent years they've been spending up to 95 percent of their profits on buybacks and dividends.

3. Just 47 Wealthy Americans Own More Than Half of the U.S. Population

Oxfam reported that just 85 people own as much as half the world. Here in the U.S., with nearly a third of the world's wealth, just 47 individuals own more than all 160 million people (about 60 million households) below the median wealth level of about $53,000.

4. The Upper Middle Class of America Owns a Smaller Percentage of Wealth Than the Corresponding Groups in All Major Nations Except Russia and Indonesia.

The upper middle class in the U.S., defined as everyone in the top half below the richest 20%, owns 11.9 percent of the wealth. Indonesia at 10.5 percent and Russia at 7.5 percent are worse off, but in all other nations the corresponding upper middle classes own 12 to 27 percent of the wealth.

America's bottom half compares even less favorably to the world: dead last, with just 1.3 percent of national wealth. Only Russia comes close to that dismal share, at 1.9 percent. The bottom half in all other nations own 2.6 to 10.2 percent of the wealth.

5. Ten Percent of the World's Total Wealth Was Taken by the Global 1% in the Past Three Years

As in the U.S., the middle class is disappearing at the global level. An incredible one of every ten dollars of global wealth was transferred to the elite 1% in just three years. A level of inequality deemed unsustainable three years ago has gotten even worse.

 This is the bad news, and it's surely bad enough, but if you continue to read the article, it goes on to suggest that a so-called transaction tax could be used to get the richest to contribute their fair share towards the cost of everything. They don't pay anywhere near that now, you can be sure.

Map of World Wealth

Where the Fat Cats Are

The map of world wealth

This is a map of the world weighted not by land mass or navigation lines but around how much wealth each country has. As you can see, North America and Western Europe balloon to enormous proportions — even after adjusting for purchasing power, 46 percent of global wealth in 2002 was in their hands. The horror of this map is the shrunken husk of Africa. That’s a lot of people living with very little.

The New Brutalism

Fascinating article today in "Truthout" by Henry Giroux. About the "new historical conjuncture" of:

attacks on higher education as a democratic institution and on dissident public voices in general - whether journalists, whistleblowers or academics - are intensifying with sobering consequences. The attempts to punish prominent academics such as Ward Churchill, Steven Salaita and others are matched by an equally vicious assault on whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond and Edward Snowden, and journalists such as James Risen. (1) Under the aegis of the national surveillance-security-secrecy state, it becomes difficult to separate the war on whistleblowers and journalists from the war on higher education - the institutions responsible for safeguarding and sustaining critical theory and engaged citizenship.

These attacks have been labeled "the new brutalism in academia."

This is far too good and lengthy piece for me to try and summarize. Suffice it to say, it's a cogent critique of what our deification of the market has done to us not only in the educational sphere but also in just about any others that matter. It's taken anti-intellectualism in America to undreamt of depths.

The Backwater Gospel

Wanna see something creepy? Try this:

Process Theology

It is really interesting and exciting stuff, but you cannot get from here to there on it in a hundred words or less. Our little tiny congregation church of progressive Christians had fully 14 people attend the first book club discussion on a book by John Cobb and David Griffin entitled Process Theology: an Introductory Exposition. (To give you an idea of what kind of congregation this is, on a good Sunday we will have 25-30 people attend services. So that means about half the people in the church will first of all read a heavy, academic assignment, and then come out on a weeknight for a 90-minute discussion.)

 Here's the scoop in only the most general terms: it's a 20th century attempt to apply the concepts of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy to our thinking about God. It is dense and fun stuff. Its chief progenitors are John B. Cobb, Jr. and Charles Hartshorne. And it is seminal in the thinking of progressive Christians, although most of us may not even be aware of origins, we embrace the main ideas. I'll be writing about this some more, but for now let me lay out the concepts of God that process thinking rejects. You cannot but notice that these ideas are foundational in traditional unitheistic religions. So we will not take as our starting point the following assumptions about God:

1. God as cosmic moralist, that his fundamental concern is the development of moral attitudes. Which makes such attitudes intrinsic to the basic importance of human beings. No.
2. God as the Unchanging and Passionless Absolute. God is not really related to the world, that his influence upon the world is "in no way conditioned by divine responsiveness to unforeseen, self-determining activities of us worldly beings." No.
3. God as controlling power who determines every detail of the world, even down to deciding who dies in natural disasters, finding a parking place, or who wins a football game. No.
4. God sanctions the status quo. The previous three notions set the stage for this one. Cosmic moralist = primary interest in order; unchanging absolute = God has established an unchangeable order for the world; controlling power = God wills the present to exist. Therefore obedience to God is preserving the status quo. No.
5. God is male. He is the archetype of the "dominant, inflexible, unemotional, completely independent (read 'strong') male. No.

More on all this later. As you might imagine, if you start with the rejection of these age-old notions of the nature of God, you're definitely not in Kansas anymore.

Freelancers Taking Over

 Ran across this interesting piece puttering around today.

A new report shows some 53 million Americans—or 34 percent of the U.S. workforce—are now working as freelancers in some capacity. "This is more than an economic change," asserts the report, a joint effort from the Freelancer's Union and freelance markeplaces oDesk and eLance. It's also "a cultural and social shift" that will "have major impacts on how Americans conceive of and organize their lives, their communities, and their economic power." 

That's more than a third of the workforce. I am one of these guys. I do freelance editing for a publishing house. And I fit easily into one of the demographics below. I don't need to do this work, but I like it, and it's nice it pays a little something in return. I'm not saying I'd do this without pay, but . . . well, you take my point.

Here's how the report breaks these 34 million people out:

• Independent contractors (21 million). This group hews closest to our "traditional" idea of freelancing: individuals whose main source of employment involves working on a project-to-project basis in their field. They make up about 40 percent of freelancers.
• Moonlighters (14.3 million). These are individuals who work regular full-time jobs and also do some amount of freelance work. This group includes 27 percent of freelancers. 
• Diversified workers (9.3 million). These are our serious hustlers, the folks pulling in income from multiple sources, including traditional employment and freelance work. A diversified worker may have a 20-hour per week bartending or retail job and supplement her income with freelance graphic design work and some time as an Uber driver. This group makes up about 18 percent of freelancers. 
• Temp workers (5.5 million). Temp workers are those working with a single employer, client, job, or project but on a temporary basis. This could be "a business strategy consultant working for one startup client" (the report's example) or a recent college graduate doing grunt or admin work for different companies each week through a temp agency. They make up about one-tenth of freelancers.
• Freelance business owners (2.8 million). This group includes people employ between one and five others and who consider themselves both freelancers and business owners. They make up 5 percent of the freelance economy.

And there are some other observations:

• 77 percent say they make as much or more money now than they did before becoming a freelancer
• About half (53 percent) say going freelance was totally their preference; the rest say it was out of necessity. 
• The main reason people take on freelance work is to earn extra money (68 percent), followed by the ability to have a flexible schedule (42 percent).

What the report doesn't address are the penetrating questions posed above, which all boil down basically to what's this doing to us? It's a major cultural and social shift, with major impacts, we're told. But you look in vein for what this might mean. Which upon reflection seems reasonable since analyzing and explaining major cultural shifts is something that gets done after they get done. Would be nice to know where we're headed though.

This is Why I Read "Some Assembly Required"

I don't miss "Some Assembly Required." Classy, very classy cynicism . . . oh, and truth.

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 Walks Like A Duck: US forces have begun conducting “military operations” against the al-Shabaab rebels in Somalia. To date the effort appears to be limited to air strikes, but you have to start somewhere.   

 Dollar Diplomacy: Facing economic threats from the US and UK, Israel has backed down from its plans to steal a thousand acres of land from Palestinians on the West Bank. It seems that taking Palestinian lives is acceptable, but taking their land is not.

 
Supersized: Climate scientists say there is a 50/50 chance for a 'megadrought' lasting 30 years to settle into the American Southwest, with an 80% likelihood of a 10-year 'extreme' drought. Currently over 80% of California is in 'extreme' drought and nearly 60% qualifies as 'exceptional'. Remember the good old days when the Central Valley fed the nation?

Noted: The US health-care system, taken by itself, would be the fifth largest economy in the world.

War Ware Where: The US is opening a drone base in the middle of nowhere the Sahara as a base for surveilling and attacking Islamic jihadists in North and West Africa. Attendance at weddings is expected to plunge dramatically. 
 

Fortune, Cookies: Now that low paid Chinese factory workers have dismantled US manufacturing and turned well paid workers into grab and run clerks, the Chinese assault on high skilled jobs is underway. Training programs for the newly unemployed are futile if there will be no jobs left in the country regardless of 'skills'. What part of 'race to the bottom' didn't you understand? Why do you keep falling for these damned 'trade agreements' that are nothing but suicide pacts?

 
If, Then: If you are one of 2.5 million homeowners who are facing an average $250 a month bump in your mortgage payment within the next 3 years, are you expecting a 10 – 15% pay raise, or are you going to stop eating?

You Learn Something New Every Day

But you don't learn something like this necessarily. It seems that all those galaxies we see around us are part of a so-called super cluster, which is but one of God knows how many super clusters comprising the known universe. Here is the picture of our super cluster, which is named Laniakea, and our galaxy's place in it. Way out on the fringe. 

Words Fail . . .

This is a short video, from which the still above is taken, will give you some conception of the miracle we're talking about here. My mind simply boggles at how the human brain is capable of figuring out such things. We didn't know this ten years ago . . . what will we learn in ten more?



Oh, and here's the article that explains all this: right here.

Poof!

Sparky

 Astronomers have for the first time caught a glimpse of the earliest stages of massive galaxy construction. The building site, dubbed “Sparky,” is a dense galactic core blazing with the light of millions of newborn stars that are forming at a ferocious rate.

The discovery was made possible through combined observations from NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, the W.M. Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and the European Space Agency's Herschel space observatory, in which NASA plays an important role.

A fully developed elliptical galaxy is a gas-deficient gathering of ancient stars theorized to develop from the inside out, with a compact core marking its beginnings. Because the galactic core is so far away, the light of the forming galaxy that is observable from Earth was actually created 11 billion years ago, just 3 billion years after the Big Bang.

Although only a fraction of the size of the Milky Way, the tiny powerhouse galactic core already contains about twice as many stars as our own galaxy, all crammed into a region only 6,000 light-years across. The Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across.(Source)

 And we are under the illusion that our affairs are . . . what's the phrase "earth-shaking"? That our experiences are of consequence. That somehow what we say and do matters. What truly is earth-shaking is that there is no word in any language I know to describe how tiny and insignificant we are. Nothing we can say or think can capture this immensity . . .

And yet we've discovered the science to reveal this all to us. And we keep having these questions that won't go away.

A Serious Question . . . and a Correct Answer

For the first time in the over four years--can you believe that?--I've been doing this blog, I'm going to reproduce something off the Net in its entirety. The site is Quora. I find myself there often because it habitually addresses interesting questions, and sometimes they are interesting and important questions, like the one below.

I've long contended that part of our problem in America is our national character, which is the cause of so much self-congratulation, but in fact is seriously flawed. The following answer makes this clear. Not only is our character flawed, but we are ignorant . . . which makes it worse.

Why do Americans seem to be so scared of a European/Canadian style of healthcare system?

Dan Munro, knows some healthcare stuff

The fear is largely fueled by four things.

1.      A false assumption (with big political support) that a system based on universal coverage is the same thing as a single payer system. It isn't. Germany is a great example of a healthcare system with universal coverage and multi-payer (many of which are private insurance companies). We tend to lump the two together (single-payer and universal health coverage) because it’s convenient to argue a simple comparison than a more complex, nuanced one.

2.     A fear of "rationing" - which was set ablaze by Sarah Palin and her cavalier remarks about "death panels." The reality is that ALL healthcare (globally) is rationed - but systems from all the other industrialized countries start with “universal coverage”. Our system is largely based on who can afford to BUY health insurance - and if it's provided through employment (about 150 million Americans) you're chained to your employer for health benefits. It's artificial, but it's a great way to keep wages depressed because the employer is contributing to health benefits and getting a tax benefit at the same time. In other countries – employers make a contribution to the healthcare system – but those contributions accrue to the whole healthcare system – not just their employees.

3.     An attitude and culture of what's loosely known as American Exceptional-ism. There is simply no other country on planet earth that can teach us anything. This was highlighted recently by Commonwealth Fund report which ranked the U.S. “dead last” in comparison to 10 other countries. Our entire raison d'être is to be the world's beacon of shining success - in freedom, liberty, democracy and really everything (but especially technology).

4.     A fierce independence that has a really dark side. It took another Quora question to really help me see this one. The question was: "Why do many Americans think that healthcare is not a right for its own taxpaying citizens?" Here's the #1 answer by Anon:

The fundamental mythos of American culture, is that no matter how poor or humble your birth, you can through grit, spunk and hard work become wealthy and prosperous.

On the face of it, and from the perspective of a class divided Europe, that seems incredibly noble and empowering. The idea that there is that much social mobility, that anyone can forge their own destiny is a powerful part of the American psyche. When it happens, it is an incredible thing. Something Americans can feel proud of.

However, there is a dark side to this mythos. Which is this ... if anyone can win through hard work and effort, anyone who doesn't win, therefore deserves to be poor.

At the core of all the anti-health care reforms is the single concept "why should I pay for the healthcare of those losers?"

Added together, these 4 things all contribute mightily to the runaway healthcare system we have today. Today - the National Healthcare Expenditure (NHE) for the USA is $3.5+ trillion per year (about 18% of our GDP) and it's growing at about 5% per year (for as far as the eye can see). The system we have is optimized around revenue and profits - not safety and quality. That safety and quality is best highlighted by what’s known as “preventable medical errors” inside hospitals. That number? Somewhere between 210,000 and 440,000 – per year.

Not My Game

Chess Olympiads are held once every two years. It's a great big tournament where most of the countries in the world send teams to compete. The latest one, which took place in Tromso, Norway, this time, had over 3,000 participants, men and women. China won the men's competition; Russia won the women's. But that's not the big news. Although it was big news in China, their first gold medal ever in chess. Russia and before that the Soviet Union has won both divisions many times.

The big news this time is that two players died during the tournament. One of them, Kurt Meier, a 67-year-old player from the tiny Pacific nation Seychelles, died at the board during play. (I wonder if his opponent thought: "I knew I had a good position, but I didn't know it was that good.") The other, from Uzbekistan, was found dead in this room.

This the first time anything like this has ever happened at the Olympiad. But it's interesting to note that death is delivered at the chessboard in the natural course of events, if the game isn't drawn. The object of the game is to destroy your opponent, after all.   (source)

Life

This is one of those cutesy things people sometimes send you in the email. Why I'm not so sure. Don't most people know that virtually everybody gets too much email? I try to be sparing of such stuff mainly because I really get too much email. Way too much. But somehow for some unknown reason this one struck me today. Sorry if it doesn't do anything for you. I understand . . . but try thinking about it in terms of Hiroshima. Today is the 70th anniversary of the first time a nuclear weapon was used on a people, a country, an "enemy." Brought to you by the freedom-loving people of the United States. 80,000 people were killed outright, another 10-50,000 died later from radiation and wounds.

Life.

War is Boring

 OK. So I'm going to tell you about one of the web sites I found on the list I told you about yesterday--and I have to say that my initial explorations have not uncovered that much of interest, at least to me. But this site had a fetching title: "War is Boring." And as you will see from the entry, the news wasn't new. Fighting an killing in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, and Gaza. And a lovely photo of rockets launching.

So I suppose war is boring because we just get tired of hearing about it? Or war is boring because it never stops?

DailyTekk Discovery

Regular readers know that I'm a lover of lists. I make them myself and always dispose of them, when they finally reach the point of uselessness, a very fluid notion. But I've always got lists around. I've got scraps of lists of web sites to check out, books to read, music to listen to, things to do, words I don't know the meaning of, etc. I could not live without lists, even though, if I'm truthful only the ones I take with me to the grocery ever have any real impact on my life.

And, like I suppose everybody else--though I know that's not so--I cherish "best of" lists. You know, best of at-the-end-of-the-year lists: books, movies, music, etc. So it goes without saying that I would find a list called "The 100 Best, Most Interesting Blogs and Websites of 2014"would be a real turn-on. Especially since I googled "best blogs out there ". I always google "the best of . . . " something. I know it's crazy, but I believe this does give some granularity to the process.  (Yeah, right. That search only turned up 761,000,000 results in .20 seconds.)

So this site was 4th down on the list. You should check it out. I'm not about to get to writing about the places I've found. I'd never get finished.

On Being Afraid

I would not have come up with the precise same list, but it would be something analogous, for sure. Another post from one of my favorite bloggers at "Some Assembly Required".

On Being Afraid: Things to worry about, more or less in order: Texting while driving, brain-eating parasites, Publisher's Clearing House, falling out of bed, flying Malaysian Air, pink slime in your hamburger, hospitals, autoertoic asphyxiation as an observer, Paul Ryan budgets, terrorists. 

I think I would have added somewhere in there: 2nd amendment crazies, bedbugs, running out of coffee, and environmental deterioration everywhere.

Facing Up

I read in the Washington Post that we're on the brink of having technology that will be able to predict how long we're likely to live. It does this with facial recognition software and, one supposes, the black magic that is behind all these technological wonders. Article says that if your parents were people who didn't age in a hurry, you're not likely to either. Nobody believes how old I am now (except those who know), but I suppose that has something to do with my looking about 10 when I was 16, 16 when I was 26, etc. At this stage of the game, it's about the only blessing of aging that I can think of. Looking younger than you are, that is. And now through the magic of technology we (and all the insurance companies) will have a basis for projecting our future years. What a country!

My Kind of List

Of course, it's patently ridiculous that I should be getting ready to recommend books to you. I, who have scads of books here on my shelves that I have yet to read, about a half dozen of them only partially read . . . and yet, that's exactly what I'm about to do. Reason is, this is a list of really necessary books. I'm happy to say, I've probably read about ten percent of them already, but I got the idea for a whole bunch more to see if I can download to my Kindle for free. (One of the advantages of being an Amazon Prime member is one free Kindle book to "borrow" every month . . . with no time limit to return it.) My guess is there are a number of these that are downloadable.

The list is from Counterpunch, another of my regular-read blogs. The list is the 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century and Beyond in English. Of course, everybody would come up with a different list, and these, mind you, are from Counterpunch. So by definition they're going to be edgy, counter-cultural, progressive . . . and scintillating. They run the gamut of Ida Tarbell's early 20th century expose of the monster that was and still is Standard Oil (Exxon) to the 2nd Edition of The Oxford English Dictonary. From Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire through Francis Yates's The Art of Memory, you are bound to find a bunch of treats for the mind, heart, and conscience here.

Knock yourself out. If you don't find several things on this list that fire you up, then maybe, as one of my old history mentors used to say: "you have reptile blood."

Perspective

And There We Are

That pale little blue dot in the tan band on the right is the Earth in a photograph taken from 3.7 billions miles away, near the edge of our solar system. Picture was taken from the Voyager I spacecraft about 13 years after it had been launched from our planet.

I have read the following words of astronomer Carl Sagan before, and maybe you have too. But they bear repeating and repeated pondering.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of  particular interest. But for us, it's different. Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every  hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every  "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species  lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in  glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction  of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could  migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the  Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of  human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

How Many Trouble You?

I'm a word maven. I've loved the English language all my life. And I really can be a pain the arse sometimes about it. I'm kind of a stickler. My kids and my wife have complained over the the years about my correcting their grammar, pronunciation, or use the language. I know it's an embarrassment for me when--on those admittedly rare occasions--I myself get corrected. My friend Cecil catches me every so often in pronunciation faux pas. But usage . . . well, I'm pretty good on that. (Would you believe I have no less than half a dozen books on usage right here next to me?) So I was arrested today when I came across this little article about what was billed as the "30 Incorrectly Used Words That Make You Look Bad." Okay, I agree that misuse can make you look bad, but only in some circles. The vast American public doesn't know and doesn't care.

So how many of these give you difficulties?

• adverse - averse
• affect - effect
• compliment - complement
• criteria - criterion
• discreet - discrete
• elicit - illicit
• farther - further
• imply - infer
• insure - ensure
• its - it's
• number - amount
• precede - proceed
• principle - principal
• they're - their
• whose - who's
• you're - your

Now I have to tell you: I agree with the list and am pretty much appalled by how often you see them misused both in print and speech. But that's just me. As I said, the vast majority could not care less.

Oh, the only pair on the list that gives me trouble is farther-further, and I just read in one of my usage books that this is largely a distinction without difference. Further down the road = Farther down the road. Wouldn't you agree?