Toles: Not Getting Much Done Here

Controversial preacher killed in house fire

By Michelle E. Shaw
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Rev. Arthur Allen, known for his run-ins with the law because he oversaw and ordered whippings of misbehaving children during worship at the House of Prayer, died in a house fire Monday.

Allen was identified by the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office. Atlanta Fire Department officials say there is an ongoing investigation into the fire.

Allen was convicted in 2002 of cruelty to children. He served two years in prison before his release in 2005. Prior to his incarceration, he was on the run for five months before he was caught in Cobb County in August 2003.

A criminal investigation into Allen and the practices of the House of Prayer began in 2001 when two boys showed up at school with welts and bruises. Social workers took the boys from their parents and soon seized 47 other House of Prayer children and put them in foster care and group homes. Police arrested Allen and other church members.

more
http://www.ajc.com/news/news/preacher-killed-in-house-fire/nbbDy/?icmp=ajc_internallink_textlink_homepage

Why China is turning to 'trial by television' in sensitive cases

By Peter Ford,

Last month, Chinese police interrogators offered investigative reporter Liu Hu a deal.

“They told him that if he confessed his crime on TV he would be released,” says Mr. Liu’s lawyer, Zhou Ze.

Liu, refusing to acknowledge that his corruption allegations against a senior official were false, also refused to say publicly that he was guilty of defamation. The New Express reporter was formally arrested a month ago and is now awaiting trial.

That is the price Liu is paying for bucking a new police trend that defense lawyers here say makes a mockery of Chinese criminal procedure law. The police have persuaded at least six men accused of wrongdoing – but not officially charged with anything – to appear on national television over the past three months to confess their “crimes.”

“This is a step backward for China,” says Li Fangping, a prominent lawyer. “This is law enforcement by political campaign; it is a political matter, not a legal one.”

more

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2013/1028/Why-China-is-turning-to-trial-by-television-in-sensitive-cases

More on the crisis in research: Feynman on 'cargo cult science'

By Michael Hiltzik

October 28, 2013


After reading my weekend column about the crisis in life science research, Hajime Hoji of USC's linguistics department reminded me of the late Richard Feynman's brilliant deconstruction of the flaws and pitfalls of science as it's done in the modern age.

"Cargo Cult Science" was adapted from Feynman's 1974 commencement speech at Caltech, where his spirit reigns as one of that institution's two certified saints. (The other is Robert A. Millikan, Caltech's first president.) The text appears in his 1985 book, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" Here are some excerpts, but the talk is worth reading in its entirety, both for Feynman's lucid, engaging style and the depth of his thinking.

In the talk, Feynman discussed how much laypersons and scientists themselves take for granted about research results. "We really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science," he said. "Cargo cult science" was his term for research that never seemed to yield provable results, but acquired public acceptance because they possessed the veneer of rigorous methodology.

What cargo cult science lacked was something that, he observed, was never actually taught to Caltech students. "It's a kind of scientific integrity...that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it....Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them....If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it."

more

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-feynman-20131028,0,2450203.story

Remembering Lou Reed

By Chuck Klosterman

When a famous man dies, his critics tend to evaporate (at least temporarily). The type of person who disparages the newly dead always comes across like an opportunistic coward, and every postmortem potshot inevitably has the opposite effect. When a famous man dies, you don't mention the qualities that made him a problem. There is no point in attacking a man who is no longer there.

Unless that man is Lou Reed.

Then there is a point, and it explains everything else.

Reed died yesterday — somehow both predictably and surprisingly — at the age of 71. You probably won't find an obituary that fails to mention the cantankerous complexities of his character. In the punk oral history Please Kill Me, Reed's nastiness is literally described as "famous," which is completely accurate. He was uncommonly famous for acting like a prick; it was essential to who he was as a public figure. He was the single-most famous jerk in an idiom supersaturated with jerks who hope to be famous. But that's not why his death is such a loss. That's not what's important. What's important is that this universally shared opinion about Lou Reed's persona never made anyone question the merits of his music. You were allowed to think whatever you wanted about who he was as a person (mostly because he didn't seem to care), but there was never any argument over the veracity of his genius. Few rational listeners injected their discomfort with Reed's personality into the experience of hearing his records; even fewer concluded that the way he sometimes acted in public eroded the insight of his output. You might say, "I hate Lou Reed," but you couldn't say, "I hate Lou Reed and I hate all his music." If you did, it only meant you had terrible taste in everything. This is why Reed's life was such a profound, unparalleled success: He proved that the only thing that truly mattered about an artist was the art.

Start at the beginning. Start with The Velvet Underground & Nico. You play the record once. You play it again. Maybe you've heard it many times before, but it always sounds less reassuring than you expect. The first track is fragile. The second track is gravel. All 11 songs make you think about things you normally ignore. Maybe your first thought is, This music seems like it could have been recorded last week. Considering that the album is 46 years old, this is mildly amazing. But then you think something else: You know, these songs are still weird. The voices are bizarre. The structures are so simple they almost seem awkward. Some of these ideas are crazy. So then you start to wonder how this contradiction could exist. You wonder how something this old could feel so in step with everything that's happened in popular culture over the past 46 years, yet still manages to strike the audience as perverse and unorthodox and consumed with self-aware otherness. It makes no sense: Something that sounds this modern should also feel familiar; something that feels this weird should also sound like it belongs to a different age. But it doesn't sound rote and it doesn't sound anachronistic. It is, in all likelihood, the most irrefutably timeless rock music anyone has ever made — not necessarily the best, but the most aesthetically durable. The smartest, all things considered. "Heroin" wasn't the first song ever written about heroin, but it was the first song about heroin that was titled "Heroin." It was not a metaphor to unpack. It arrived unpacked. You just had to deal with it. And because Lou Reed was the man who wrote it, you just had to deal with him, too.

more

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9892086/remembering-lou-reed

Quantum reality more complex than previously thought

Imagine you order a delivery of several glass vases in different colors. Each vase is sent as a separate parcel. What would you think of the courier if the parcels arrive apparently undamaged, yet when you open them, it turns out that all the red vases are intact and all the green ones are smashed to pieces? Physicists from the University of Warsaw and the Gdansk University of Technology have demonstrated that when quantum information is transmitted, nature can be as whimsical as this crazy delivery man.

Experiments on individual photons, conducted by physicists from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw (FUW) and the Faculty of Applied Physics and Mathematics at the Gdansk University of Technology (PG), have revealed yet another counterintuitive feature of the quantum world. When a quantum object is transmitted, its quantum property – whether it behaves as a wave or as a particle – appears to depend on other properties that at first glance have nothing to do with the transmission. These surprising results were published in the research journal Nature Communications.

Wave-interference experiments are some of the simplest and most elegant, and can be conducted by almost anyone. When a laser beam is directed at a plate with two slits, we observe a sequence of light and dark fringes. It has long been known that the fringes are visible even when just individual particles – single electrons or photons – pass through the slits. Physicists assume that every individual particle exhibits wave properties, passing through both slits at once and interfering with itself.

The situation is very different when it is possible to detect the path taken by a given photon or electron and determine which slit the particle has passed through, at least in principle. When information about the particle path leaks from the system to the observer, the interference disappears and instead of interference fringes no pattern is observed.

more

http://phys.org/news/2013-10-quantum-reality-complex-previously-thought.html

Suzanne Somers: The Affordable Care Act Is a Socialist Ponzi Scheme

What will the Affordable Care Act mean for retirees?

SUZANNE SOMERS: As a writer of 24 books mostly on health and wellness and by using my celebrity to get to the best and brightest doctors, scientists and medical professionals in the alternative and integrative health-care world, I have come to the following conclusions:

First of all, let’s call affordable health care what it really is: It’s socialized medicine.


I’ve had an opportunity to watch the Canadian version of affordable health care in action with all its limitations with my Canadian husband’s family. A few years ago, I was startled to see the cover of Maclean’s, a national Canadian magazine, showing a picture of a dog on an examining table with the headline, “Your Dog Can Get Better Health Care Than You.” It went on to say that young Canadian medical students have no incentive to become doctors to humans because they can’t make any money. Instead, there is a great surge of Canadian students becoming veterinarians. That’s where the money is. A Canadian animal can have timely MRIs, surgeries and any number of tests it needs to receive quality health care.

My sister-in-law had to wait two months to get a General Practitioner. During this period she spent her days in bed vomiting continuously, unable to get any food or drink down because she couldn’t get an appointment with the doctor. When she finally did, the doctor said, “Oh you don’t need me, you need a specialist.” That took another two weeks until she got a pill that corrected the problem.


more crap http://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2013/10/28/suzanne-somers-the-affordable-care-act-is-a-socialist-ponzi-scheme/

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Fleetwood Mac's John McVie diagnosed with cancer; band cancels tour

Source: CNN

Los Angeles (CNN) -- Fleetwood Mac co-founder John McVie has been diagnosed with cancer, forcing the group to cancel upcoming shows on its world tour.

The band just completed the European leg of the tour and had been scheduled to perform 14 shows in Australia and New Zealand in November and December.

An announcement on the band's Facebook page did not disclose details about McVie's cancer, only saying that the 67-year-old is "now scheduled to be in treatment for cancer during that period of time."
'
Rumours' still the perfect album after 35 years

"We are sorry to not be able to play these Australian and New Zealand dates," the announcement said. "We hope our Australian and New Zealand fans as well as Fleetwood Mac fans everywhere will join us in wishing John and his family all the best."

Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/27/showbiz/fleetwood-mac-mcvie-cancer/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

Banksy....