Nerve of Steel

 

"I went over to the body where there was a lady sitting there and she said he was dead. She had comforted him by putting something under his back and a jacket over his head. I took his pulse and there was none. I couldn't see the man's face but I could see no evidence that suggested someone had tried to cut off his head. I could see nothing on him to suggest that he was a soldier.

"Then a black guy with a black hat and a revolver in one hand and a cleaver in the other came over. He was very excited and he told me not to get close to the body. I didn't really feel anything. I was not scared because he was not drunk, he was not on drugs. He was normal. I could speak to him and he wanted to speak and that's what we did. Guardian

I would have peed in my pants and ran away from a public murder scene like this. She engaged with these murderers and probably have saved more lives in the process. Amazing.

There are three women overall handling the situation, all civilians
 
Daily Mail

Oklahoma

Daily Mail
Mother Nature can be pretty evil.

Samsung takes all of Android's profit

Analysts broke it down like this: Globally, it’s estimated the Android industry made $5.3 billion profit in the first quarter of this year, while the profit estimates for Android phones shipped by Samsung comes in at $5.1 billion for the same period. The exact figure quoted is 94.7 percent profit share, and that’s not including tablets either. Digital Trends

Austerity Coup de grâce

In normal times, an arithmetic mistake in an economics paper would be a complete nonevent as far as the wider world was concerned. But in April 2013, the discovery of such a mistake—actually, a coding error in a spreadsheet, coupled with several other flaws in the analysis—not only became the talk of the economics profession, but made headlines. Looking back, we might even conclude that it changed the course of policy.

Why? Because the paper in question, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” by the Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, had acquired touchstone status in the debate over economic policy. Ever since the paper was first circulated, austerians—advocates of fiscal austerity, of immediate sharp cuts in government spending—had cited its alleged findings to defend their position and attack their critics. Again and again, suggestions that, as John Maynard Keynes once argued, “the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity”—that cuts should wait until economies were stronger—were met with declarations that Reinhart and Rogoff had shown that waiting would be disastrous, that economies fall off a cliff once government debt exceeds 90 percent of GDP. Krugman

The man who (could be) invented BitCoin

A few years after returning to Japan, Mochizuki turned his focus to the ABC Conjecture. Over the years, word got around that he believed to have cracked the puzzle, and Mochizuki himself said that he expected results by 2012. So when the papers appeared, the math community was waiting, and eager. But then the enthusiasm stalled.

“His other papers – they’re readable, I can understand them and they’re fantastic,” says de Jong, who works in a similar field. Pacing in his office at Columbia University, de Jong shook his head as he recalled his first impression of the new papers. They were different. They were unreadable. After working in isolation for more than a decade, Mochizuki had built up a structure of mathematical language that only he could understand. To even begin to parse the four papers posted in August 2012, one would have to read through hundreds, maybe even thousands, of pages of previous work, none which had been vetted or peer-reviewed. It would take at least a year to read and understand everything. De Jong, who was about to go on sabbatical, briefly considered spending his year on Mochizuki’s papers, but when he saw height of the mountain, he quailed. The Paradox of the Proof

Ted Nelson explains this in a YouTube video. 

Ending the drug prohobition

Insulza describes the report, which examines a number of ways to reform the current pro-prohibition position, as the start of "a long-awaited discussion", one that experts say puts Europe and North America on notice that the current situation will change, with or without them. Latin American leaders have complained bitterly that western countries, whose citizens consume the drugs, fail to appreciate the damage of the trade. In one scenario envisaged in the report, a number of South American countries would break with the prohibition line and decide that they will no longer deploy law enforcement and the army against drug cartels, having concluded that the human costs of the "war on drugs" is too high. Guardian

Oi, this is great news. Finally there will be real talk about drugs problem other than "war, war, war".

The Russian Play

As Putin sees it, that resolution was taken way beyond its stated purpose of imposing a no-fly zone over Libya — it also opened the door for a full-scale military intervention. Under the U.N. mandate, the U.S. and NATO began flying bombing raids against Gaddafi’s military convoys, which were then moving toward the rebel-held city of Benghazi with the express aim of “cleansing” its revolutionary populace. After fending off that assault, NATO air power continued to provide the rebels with a clear military advantage.

Within weeks, Gaddafi’s army was routed, his convoy was bombed from the air while fleeing the Libyan capital, and the dictator himself was captured hiding in a drain pipe in his hometown. A video of rebels beating, insulting and finally killing Gaddafi soon appeared on YouTube. Putin was furious over this turn of events — seeing it as a blatant violation of Libyan sovereignty and a betrayal of Russia’s willingness to trust the west’s intentions. He has not gotten over the slight. “What we really do not want is to allow the same mistake as with Libya,” Klimov says, “when we believed we were getting one thing and got something totally different.” Time

There won't be another "no fly zone" resolution coming out of UN Security Council regarding Syria. As I wrote before, the Libyan No Fly Zone was a full out air war against the Qaddafi at the time.

Russia wants Assad out but the regime to stay, possible reformed, but still within Russia's sphere of influence.  They are using the US playbook on Yemen on Syria (kick the dictator, replace it with somebody within the regime, change the regime within your influence).

Sending money via Gmail

This new Google service is now available in the US 

Blogging double mastectomy procedure

Angelina Jolie's doctor blogs about the procedure.