YES! “I don’t want a curved phone. I want one that won’t break when dropped, is waterproof, and that I can see in the sun.” And with all-day battery life.
Archive for 2014
January 16, 2014
AT LEAST IT DOESN’T INVOLVE WEIRDO FRUITATARIAN DIETS: Steve Jobs’ Doctor Wants to Teach You the Formula for Long Life.
Agus, 49, is no average pop-doc. He’s also an accomplished and well-regarded research scientist. A professor of medicine and engineering at USC, he has helped develop new drugs and landmark diagnostic tools, cofounded two health care technology companies, and made breakthroughs in both how to treat cancer and how we think about it. On top of all this, he’s a clinician, devoting two and a half days a week to seeing patients—more than a few of them famous. Sumner Redstone, for example, has publicly thanked Agus for his “miracle recovery” from prostate cancer. “He thinks outside the box,” says Redstone, 90. “Everything he told me to do contributed to my battle against cancer. Today I feel better than I did when I was 20.” Neil Young, who mentions Agus in his recent memoir, calls him simply “my mechanic.” As for Jobs, the iCEO was such a close friend that he helped Agus’ first book find its audience by renaming it. (Agus’ original title for The End of Illness was What Is Health?—but Jobs vetoed it, saying reading it was like “chewing cardboard.”)
Read the whole thing.
ROAD AND TRACK: 6 things we learned about the BMW M3/4 in Detroit.
MARK RIPPETOE: The Important Distinction Between Exercising and Training.
NOBODY TELL STEPHEN GREEN: The French drink more whiskey than Americans do. We’ve failed as a country.
IN MY CASE, THE ISSUE IS ENTIRELY CONJECTURAL: What Ultra-Marathons Do to Our Bodies.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Law Schools Cut Tuition Amid Dismal Legal Jobs Market.
SCIENCE: Inexpensive Brain Scans Could Catch Concussions. “Quantum Institute’s first product is a brain-mapping system based on electroencephalography, or EEG. This test, commonly used to monitor neurological disorders like epilepsy, detects electrical activity in the brain through sensors placed on the scalp. Gee’s company uses quantitative EEG, which includes computer-aided analysis of the wave patterns in the scan.”
READER BOOK PLUG: From Ann Trenton, The Thank You Angel.
COMING: The Anti-NSA Smartphone. “The simple, nondescript device comes from the mind of Phil Zimmermann, who created the data encryption program PGP and is the co-founder of Silent Circle.”
SCIENCE: Study: Having Sex Makes You Smarter.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Small, New University Does Something Radical — Only Hires Professors Who Want To Teach And Only Admits Students Who Want To Learn. An idea so crazy it just might work!
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 252. Another big one.
AUSTIN BAY ON BENGHAZI: THE VIDEO DIDN’T DO IT.
BOEHNER’S IMMIGRATION PLAN: If the GOP wants to jumpstart a National 3rd Party movement for Conservatives. . . . “Because as Presidents Romney & McCain not to mention Senator Brown can tell you, there is no precedent for the base staying home in a critical election when the leadership pisses them off.”
Meanwhile, for people who are unhappy, let me repeat this advice from an InstaPundit reader.
I suggest you actually attend your state’s Republican and Democrat party conventions (Bing is your friend). Attend every day and stay at the convention hotel, don’t be a day tripper. Mingle. Listen in the hallways and listen in the hospitality suites. And learn.
After your learning assignment, go back to your home district and ally yourself with people who think like you and are eager to act. Then get busy. It’s already 2014, if your candidate hasn’t already got a campaign committee, six figures of campaign money in a campaign account at the bank, and at least a dozen supporters other than committee members who are ready to start putting in 20+ hours per week on campaign grunt work as of this minute, then your candidate has already lost. So move on to the next best choice. And if that candidate also has already lost, move on again. Repeat until you’ve found the best candidate that can win. Volunteer for that candidate. Work hard starting Day One. You’ve got less than 11 months on the election calendar left. Time’s running out. Stop talking and get busy.
It’s good advice.
HOPEY-CHANGEY: Voters’ worries about Obama’s economy rise. “’More Americans, 42%, say they are financially worse off now than they were a year ago, reversing the lower levels found over the past two years,’ Gallup announced Wednesday.”
BRAD SCHLESINGER: How The Drug War Disappeared The Jury Trial.
The criminal jury trial is a vital check against prosecutorial excesses, police misconduct, and arbitrary state power. But over the last three decades, criminal justice policy has transferred enormous amounts of power to prosecutors and away from juries and judges. Judges once had wide discretion in weighing the facts and circumstances of each case prior to sentencing. Mandatory sentencing laws give control of sentencing proceedings to prosecutors instead, leading one federal judge to describe the process of sentencing someone to years in prison as having “all the solemnity of a driver’s license renewal and [taking] a small fraction of the time.”
For example, when United States Army veteran Ronald Thompson fired two warning shots into the ground, he intended to scare off his friend’s grandson, who was attempting to enter her home after she denied him entry. He never imagined his actions would leave him facing decades in prison.
He was charged “with four counts of aggravated assault with a firearm” under Florida’s 10-20-Life mandatory minimum gun law. Prosecutors used the minimum twenty years in prison he faced to try to avoid a trial by asking him to accept three years in prison. While the deal remained on the table throughout the trial, he was ultimately convicted and sentenced to twenty years in prison.
Ronald Thompson’s case, and so many others, reveals that prosecutors don’t think that twenty-year sentences for shooting into the ground constitute justice. Why else would the plea bargain stay on the table.
The case is an example of the trial penalty in action. Utilized by prosecutors to scare accused citizens into pleading guilty, the trial penalty threatens severe sentencing outcomes if found guilty at trial compared to the plea. And the the last thirty plus years have shown that it works. . . . The prosecutor alone chooses whether to charge the accused, which charges to file, whether to drop charges, and whether or not a plea on lesser charges will be offered, outside of any judicial oversight. These unilateral discretionary decisions “often predetermine the outcome of a case since the sentencing judge has little, if any, discretion in determining the length, nature, and severity of the sentence.” This results in radically different sentencing outcomes between the sentence a defendant receives who loses at trial compared to one who pleads guilty.
These enormously different outcomes effectively coerce criminal defendants into pleading guilty. Mandatory minimum sentencing laws give prosecutors the leverage and superior bargaining position needed to coax accused citizens, many of whom are completely innocent, into surrendering a fundamental right for a perceived benefit – a significantly lesser sentence for forgoing a jury trial and pleading guilty.
I think that bullying people into foregoing a trial is a deprivation of constitutional rights. This is a topic I have addressed before.
LEARNING A LESSON ABOUT CLASS AND GENDER STEREOTYPING: “I assumed that a man in a business suit wouldn’t be patient…” It’s funny, but if you watch old movies, or even cartoons, it’s regularly assumed that adult males have nurturing instincts. Only in our supposedly progressive era are men reduced to cardboard cutouts dominated by lust and Mammon.
AT AMAZON, New Year, New You.
Also, get ready for The Big Game.
Plus, today only: 50% Off Lucky Brand Jeans, for men, women, and kids.