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Garcia's First Win in 3 Years
There is one thing that professional golfers want to do more than anything else: win tournaments. And since there can only be one winner each week, the finale of the Tournament Players Championship was made even more dramatic. Sergio Garcia, who hadn't won anything in 3 years, edged out Paul Goydos who has only won twice in 11 years. Cannes: Four Nights with Anna
"The film''s small, bleakly funny, quite sad, and beautifully controlled - a tale of peeping-tom passion about a hospital handyman who drugs his favorite nurse''s nighttime tea so he can sit and watch her as she sleeps. Creepy, yes, but the film teases the pathos and even nobility out of this wretched man." Sunday sighs
We will have to get back early from our day in the woods, though, for certain celebrations. (My good friend Duff says that today is a rehearsal for Father’s Day.) Larry Ayers’ blog Riverside Rambles was down for a few weeks, and I feared the worst. I couldn’t connect to it at all. I was happy to find earlier in the week that he had returned and had a new post up. Apparently he had some server issues that are now resolved, so why don’t you head on over there and tell him how good it is to have him back. They’ll be raising more than frolic over at Raising Frolic . A long-anticipated item finally arrived over there. The second anniversary edition of the Festival of the Trees is coming up, and it will be hosted by Wren of Wrenaissance Reflections . (Careful followers of the Festival will recall that Wren hosted the first anniversary edition at her former blog.) Wren’s deadline for submissions is May 29. You can send her your links at jlblum [at] Wrenaissance [dot] com (be sure to put Festival of the Trees in the subject line) or by using the handy online submission form . What is Pablo reading now? I am currently in the middle of Ceremony in Lone Tree by Wright Morris. He is considered one of the essential authors of Midwest regionalism. I’m reading this one for the library book discussion group I’m in. The social justice group didn’t meet last week, so we didn’t get to distill all of the moral implications from The Road . We may revisit it in the fall. What are you reading? Missouri calendar:
High Gas Prices, Taking It In The Shorts
It's getting close. I'm about 50 or 60 cents away from either another vehicle purchase or to stilling my own bio-diesel in the back yard. It's not just affecting my normal driving either. It's affecting my off road and ATV fun too. According to a couple of sources including AAA and the chairman of Houston-based Dune Energy, Alan Gaines, predictions are being made that the price for a gallon of gasoline will cost as much as $9.00 to $10.00 a gallon in the next two years. We're already seeing major jumps at the pump now, and I don't think we're even switched over to the so called summer blend yet. I've caved in and bought the wife another motorcycle to commute on, (yeah, yeah, a GSXR 600 is not really a commuter bike), and we're already saving about a hundred bucks a week now that the GMC is parked. If things keep going the way they're going, I may be increasing my current cylinder count at home from 54 to 58 in the form of a hybrid or another motorcycle for myself. Shorts, fests, books, etc
Also in the Los Angeles Times: "Developer Sonny Astani wants to hang a 14-story animated billboard on the side of the condominium tower he''s building at 9th and Figueroa, up the street from the Staples Center and the new Nokia Theatre, which already is shrouded in video billboards," notes Tim Rutten: Decision making, is it all 'me, me, me'?
However, psychology experts at the Universities of Leicester and Exeter have recently found evidence that this assumption is not necessarily true. In fact the research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, shows that most of us will act in the best interest of our team often at our own expense. Psychology experts carried out the first systematic tests of team reasoning theories by assessing two well known views of how people behave:
Lead researcher Professor Andrew Colman, of the University of Leicester School of Psychology, said: We have shown that, in some circumstances, decision makers cooperate in their collective interests rather than following the purely selfish predictions of orthodox game theory. We carried out two experiments designed to test classical game theory against theories of team reasoning developed in the 1990s by British game theorists. As per classical game theory, decision makers invariably act in their individual self-interest, leading to Nash equilibrium, named after the US game theorist and Nobel laureate John Nash, depicted in the biopic A Beautiful Mind......... Siemens shenanigans roll on
First, the company's former chief executive Heinrich von Pierer has been forced to come out and deny reports that he arranged bribes after he had been fingered by witnesses. Still, that hasn't stopped him being interviewed by prosecutors. Significantly, the prosecutors are refusing to say whether he is under investigation. Meanwhile, the allegations continue with claims in court that the company had paid bribes of as much as US$80 million to "intermediaries" to "ensure" a multi-million dollar business digitization of identification documents in Argentina. All this coinciding with reports that the company might sue its former executive board for its involvement in the scandal which is also being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the US Department of Justice. Beautiful Tropical Beach
Through the years, it has always appealed to me if the beach is undeveloped and not too crowded everyday of the year. I grew up with one nearby, only 20 minutes away. If you are looking for an offbeat beach destination, you might wanna consider going to Rizal Beach, Gubat, Sorsogon, Philippines. it might be too undeveloped for some people's taste, but I find it more beautiful that way. Don't you think that's better? That's my son in the photo, taken last year, one afternoon in Rizal Beach. There are only a couple of beach resorts offering a basic room accommodation for as low as 18$ (US) per night. The food are out of fresh catch and produce in dirt cheap prices! Well....I hope to find you here, sometime soon. ;-) Attending Religious Services Predictive of Fidelity
Led by David C. Atkins and Deborah E. Kessel of the Fuller Theological Seminary, the study explores how various dimensions of religious life, including prayer, closeness to God, faith, and religious activities correlation to infidelity. Religious service attendance was the only unique, religious predictor of infidelity. Prayer, importance of religiousness, and strong reported faith were not predictors. The authors think that that attendance likely implies prevention of infidelity in the sense that it is a shared activity between spouses. Attending services can create a strong network of relationships within the church, synagogue, or mosque that can provide social support to the spouses. Also, attending services means that an individual is hearing religious teaching on marital fidelity and the general importance of marriage. "Our study focuses the spotlight on religious service attendance with respect to this important aspect of marital life" the authors conclude. "It opens the door for a host of questions about why attendance might have this special association". The participants for this study were drawn from the 1998 General Social Survey (GSS) conducted by the National Opinion Research Center. The surveys consisted of structured, face-to-face interviews with questions correlation to religion and spirituality......... Misery, Not Miserly
So says a team of behavioral researchers from four major U.S. universities, whose research study finds that sadness impacts spending. Specifically, people who feel sad and self-focused pay more money for goods than those in neutral states, even when purchasing the same item. "The tendency is to focus on oneself when sad drives this effect," says the study's lead author Cynthia E. Cryder, a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pa. "Our studies revealed the more self-focused people were in the sad condition, the more money they spent.". "More studies are needed to determine whether participants are deliberately trying to improve their sense of self by acquiring goods," adds co-author of study Jennifer Lerner, an experimental social psychology expert at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Mass. The study, "Misery is not Miserly: Sad and Self-Focused Individuals Spend More," was funded by the National Science Foundation and was presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology annual meeting in Albuquerque, N.M. in February of this year. It would be reported in the June 2008 issue of Psychological Science--a premier journal for scientific experiments in psychology......... Older Blog Entries |
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