Yesterday, in our nation’s capital, I spent two hours in a beautiful fantasy. A world where the usual constraints of time and space don’t apply, where almost everyone in our fractured nation is connected, closer than ever, united by technology. No, I wasn’t smoking weed, though it’s legal here: I was at the Hyperloop…
We have seen people make music using some strange instruments over the years. The use of hard drives as MIDI instruments to make music comes to mind. Now we have an orchestra, if you can call a bunch of dudes that bang on obsolete office equipment an orchestra. These guys call themselves the Boston Typewriter Orchestra, and they play music on old typewriters.
Basically they bang on the keys for sounds, whack carriage returns, and smack typewriter lids. I remember messing with the fancy IBM electric typewriters at my mom’s work as a kid – they do make some cool sounds.
These guys incorporate singing or at least spoken word into their music. The result is something very nerdy, but pretty darned cool as well. You can check out a couple of their performances below:
[via Laughing Squid]
After her daughter’s hair began falling out, Daniella Wride took her to a dermatologist and learned that her child had alopecia. A few weeks later, she became nervous about “Crazy Hair Day,” a themed day at school her daughter always enjoyed, until she found a creative solution in Walmart’s craft section.
Wride, who lives in Salem, Utah, told The Huffington Post that on January 1 she noticed her daughter, 7-year-old Gianessa Wride, had a bald spot on the back of her head that was the size of a quarter. The hair around her temples was also beginning to thin. A visit to the pediatrician and the dermatologist confirmed Gianessa’s alopecia diagnosis.
March 28 marked Gianessa’s school’s “Crazy Hair Day.” Last year, she turned her hair into a colorful unicorn horn. Determined to come up with an idea for this year’s themed day, Wride hit the craft aisle at Walmart.
“I knew that I wanted to do something fun for her,” she told HuffPost.
On her search, the mom of three found a pack of jeweled scrapbooking stickers and thought that the bright colors and fun designs would complement her daughter’s charm.
“It just fits her perfect personality perfectly,” she said.
Wride told HuffPost Gianessa was nervous about the idea initially. Since her daughter’s diagnosis, Wride had also worried that Gianessa’s classmates would bully her.
“I told her kind of what the plan was,” she said. “She wasn’t sure if people would like it.”
Once Gianessa looked in the mirror after her mom applied the sticker designs ― flowers, a butterfly and an owl ― she was ecstatic. She especially adored the jeweled green owl on the side of her head because green is her favorite color.
Her classmates loved her look, too. Wride said as soon as she dropped Gianessa off for school, she heard kids complimenting her daughter’s hair.
“She opened the car door in the car drop-off lane and kids were already telling her that it was amazing and awesome and that they wish they could do it and that it looked so great,” Wride said. “When she got home from school she told me they all told her that they absolutely loved her crazy hair.”
Wride makes sure to remind Gianessa that she is “awesome, with or without hair.” She also encourages other people with the autoimmune disease to wear whatever feels most comfortable for them, not for everyone else.
“Whether that’s wearing a wig, donning a scarf, wearing hats or rocking the bald look, you got this!” she said.
The HuffPost Parents newsletter, So You Want To Raise A Feminist, offers the latest stories and news in progressive parenting.
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Jay Leno made a return to “The Tonight Show” on Thursday to tag in during Jimmy Fallon’s monologue.
The comedian, who left his hosting gig at the show in 2014, held nothing back, making jabs at everyone from Willie Nelson to Colin Kaepernick to Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Considering the current political climate, Leno also made a few quips about Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders and, of course, Donald Trump.
“Trump said he won’t throw out the first pitch. He’s skipping the correspondents’ dinner. Is he that thin-skinned?” Leno asked, adding, “You know, if this guy was any more of a pussy he could grab himself,” prompting the audience to erupt into cheers.
“And where are all these jobs?” he went on. “Where are all these jobs Trump promised? You know, Sears just announced they’re closing 42 stores. You know what that means? Lost jobs for 42 sales clerks.”
The monologue didn’t come without one misstep, though, when Leno poked fun at Caitlyn Jenner’s transition, delivering a tasteless (and, frankly, transphobic) joke about her upcoming memoir.
Toward the end, the comedian went on to comment about the nation’s economy, offering up lines like, “The economy is so bad at Mattel, Barbie is now living in her Dream Car,” and, “It is so bad, I saw Matthew McConaughey talking to himself in a Kia.”
Leno has made a few appearances on “The Tonight” show in the past year ―most recently in October, when he fired off some hilarious election zingers.
Watch the whole monologue above.
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Do you get your best work done late at night and then struggle to wake up in the morning? New research suggests your night owl tendencies could be hard-wired in your genes.
In the new study, researchers looked at 70 people from six families and found that a mutation in a gene called CRY1 was common among those who have a condition known as delayed sleep phase disorder (DSPD). In people with this condition, the circadian clock runs behind, so they wake up later than normal, and go to bed later than normal.
The mutation was absent in the members of these same families who did not have DSPD, the researchers said. In addition, the researchers showed in lab experiments that this gene may play a key role in driving the circadian clock. [Top 10 Spooky Sleep Disorders]
This is the first genetic mutation found to be associated with DSPD, the researchers said.
“Carriers of the mutation have longer days than the planet gives them, so they are essentially playing catch-up for their entire lives,” Alina Patke, the lead author of the study and a research associate in the Laboratory of Genetics at The Rockefeller University, said in a statement from Cell Press. The findings are published today (April 6) in the journal Cell.
The circadian clock is an internal rhythm that guides nearly all life on Earth. In people, it dictates when one feels tired, hungry or awake. It even regulates body temperature. Most people are hard-wired to a 24-hour clock, but up to 10 percent of peoplewith DSPD follow an internal clock that runs on a longer loop.
“A person like a bartender, for example, might not experience any problem with the delayed sleep cycle,” Patke told Live Science. “But someone like a surgeon who has to be in the OR in the early morning – that’s not compatible.”
Patke and her colleagues first identified the DSPD-linked mutation seven years ago, in a 46-year-old U.S. woman who had come to a sleep clinic after a long struggle with her late sleep cycle.
Patke’s team andother researchers analyzed the woman’s natural sleep patterns. She was placed in an apartment for two weeks that was isolated from all time cues. [5 Surprising Sleep Discoveries]
“It didn’t have windows, TV or internet,” Patke said. “Then we told her to live on her own timeline and to eat and sleep according to what her body told her to do.”
In this isolation, the woman settled into a rhythm that stretched about 1 hour longer than the typical 24-hour circadian cycle, and her sleep was fragmented, Patke said.
In sequencing her genes, the researchers identified the CRY1 mutation. The mutation is a single-point mutation in the CRY1 gene, meaning just one “letter” in its genetic instructions is off.
In the new study, Patke’s team confirmed CRY1 genetic mutation’s link to delayed sleep phase disorder by looking for the mutation among the woman’s extended family, and in other population samples.
Using a database of genomic information for people in Turkey, the researchers identified people who carried the mutation in CRY1. In collaboration with researchers at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, the researchers reached out to these people, and were able to conduct interviews and perform further DNA sequencing with the members of six families.
Among the Turkish family members, 39 carried the CRY1 mutation, and 31 did not. Data revealed that the sleep cycles of those carrying the gene were clearly late-shifted. Their midpoint of sleep naturally fell between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m., while the midpoint of sleep for those who did not carry the mutation fell around 4 a.m. [5 Things You Must Know About Sleep]
Clinical studies estimate that up to 10 percent of people experience delayed sleep phase disorder, and not all the cases may be linked to this single mutation, the researchers said.
In fact, Patke said that she is a night owl and often works late into the night. But she does not carry the CRY1 mutation.
“I checked,” she said. “Not everybody who had this behavior necessarily has this mutation, but it does seem to have an effect on a large part of the population.”
There are likely other underlying genetic causes for the condition, Patke said.
Still, identifying at least one genetic mutation behind the sleep disorder represents an important step.
“Understanding how the rhythms are controlled opens the door to eventually manipulating them with drugs,” Patke said.
Also, she said that if a drug is eventually found to help night owls align their sleep schedules to normal patterns, a similar pathway could tapped to help travelers deal with jet lag.
In the meantime, the researchers emphasized there are strategies that people with delayed sleep phase disorder can use to try to reset their clocks.
Patke advised practicing “good sleep hygiene,” which involves going to bed at a set time every night, even on weekends, and waking up at a set time each morning. Avoiding bright lights (including laptops and smartphones) at night also helps, as does exposing yourself to the sunlight first thing in the morning.
“Even if you have this mutation, it’s not unchangeable destiny,” Patke said. “There are steps you can take to try and match your internal rhythms to the outside world.”
Original article on Live Science.
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President Donald Trump announced the first serious military intervention of his young presidency on Thursday evening, a strike on a Syrian air base launched in retaliation for a horrific chemical weapons attack on civilians earlier in the week.
The strike was largely symbolic, and some critics of the move saw it as little more than a slap on the wrist for Syrian President Bashar Assad, who the U.S. has accused of orchestrating the chemical attack. And while it raised a number of questions about a possible retaliation, civilian casualties, legality, and just how comprehensive the military strategy was, there was one constituency that, by and large, approved.
On cable news, Trump’s decision to take action was nothing short of heroic.
CNN’s Fareed Zakaria said Friday morning that “Donald Trump became President of the United States” the moment the bombs started dropping.
Zakaria went on to suggest that Trump had achieved this milestone by recognizing that presidents should have a “broader moral and political purpose,” and that the U.S. has some responsibility to “enforce international norms.”
It remains to be seen if that’s an overly generous interpretation of this particular moment. Either way, it likely makes Trump the first U.S. commander-in-chief to “become president” not once, not twice, but three times during his first 11 weeks in office.
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius was similarly excited about Trump’s airstrikes.
“In terms of the credibility of American power, I think most traditional Washington commentators would say he’s put more umph, more credibility back into it,” Ignatius said on MSNBC Friday morning, arguing that former President Barack Obama had disappointed many people by failing to “enforce the red line” in Syria.
To MSNBC’s Brian Williams, the images of U.S. ships launching missiles into the night sky were downright awe-inspiring.
“I am guided by the beauty of our weapons,” he said on Thursday, misappropriating a line from the late singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen.
Williams then riffed about the “beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments making what is, for them, a brief flight over to this airfield.”
On Trump’s favored Fox News, Jeanine Pirro openly cheered the president.
“He took swift decisive action,” she said. “We finally have a man who knows the difference between right and wrong and good and evil and it makes us proud. Finally.”
Reporter Judith Miller, who somehow still gets consulted on issues of war, also went on Fox News to give her blessing.
“I’m glad to see that President Trump has done this,” she said. “This is long overdue.”
On CNN, retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. James Marks had a hot take for anyone who might have wished pundits were taking a more sober approach to this drumming up of the U.S. war machine.
“This is not like Kentucky basketball one-and-done,” he said Thursday, referring to the University of Kentucky men’s basketball program’s habit of sending players to the NBA after their freshman year. “This is the start of a series of operations.”
Across media outlets, two driving forces of our current political system appear to be coming together in a disturbing confluence. There are few things cable news likes to cover more than the spectacle of war, and there are few things Trump likes more than the affirmation of cable news. Both of these entities are motivated by the same basic need for ratings ― Trump’s are especially bad right now ― and they both seem to know where to find them.
But among the cable television commentariat, there also seems to be an inherent bias in favor of a president bombing things. Viscerally, they interpret this to be “action” and “leadership.” It’s not messy, like diplomacy. It’s decisive.
Pundits did this once with Trump already. After he praised the widow of a slain Navy SEAL during his speech before Congress, they called him “presidential.” At the time, Fusion’s Alex Pareene argued that this feedback loop could end up getting lots of people killed, because Trump loves nothing more than accolades on TV.
The reactions to the president’s Syria bombing campaign suggest Pareene had a point.
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Nils Ušakovs may be the mayor of Riga, Latvia, but it’s obvious cats rule the roost at his office.
Last Sunday, Ušakovs was being interviewed on live TV about the city’s efforts to fix potholes when his cat, Dumka, walked up to a mug on the mayor’s desk, according to the Associated Press.
Dumka then started drinking from the cup, not giving a damn that Mayor Ušakovs was dealing with important city matters.
Ušakovs stopped talking and just looked at the thirsty feline for a few awkward seconds, probably realizing that watching a rude cat drink from a cup was far more interesting than any discussion of potholes could ever be. (We’re not actually sure what was in the mug here, but keep in mind that in general, cats should not be allowed to drink coffee.)
The 40-year-old politician then realized the eyes of Riga ― well, maybe one or two ― were sharing this awkward kitty coup d’etat with him.
That inspired this reaction shot:
Ušakovs then tried to pet the upstaging pussycat. Dumka jumped away, because that’s what cats do.
Ušakovs then told his TV viewers, who probably forgot all about potholes by this moment: “Anything can happen when cats boss around in the office.”
The mayor is clearly a cat person. A town hall building in the city is home to two “official cats of Riga,” Muris and Kuzyu. ABC News notes both were adopted from an animal shelter.
He once posted a 360-degree photo of his office on his Facebook page and challenged his followers to find his cats.
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WASHINGTON ― Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) blamed “left-wing activist groups” on Thursday for making him the target of an ethics investigation that he says forced him to step down as leader of the House Intelligence Committee’s probe into Russia’s role in the 2016 election.
But that story doesn’t check out.
MoveOn.org, a liberal activist group, and two nonpartisan ethics groups, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and Democracy 21, filed ethics complaints against Nunes with the Office of Congressional Ethics on March 28. But it’s not yet clear whether that office will even investigate him.
The House Ethics Committee, meanwhile, does not appear to have relied on those complaints to launch its own investigation into whether Nunes broke House rules by improperly disclosing classified information.
House Ethics Committee Chairwoman Susan Brooks (R-Ind.) and ranking member Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) said in a statement on Thursday that they were investigating Nunes based on “public allegations” — presumably a reference to the multiple news reports indicating he’d discussed classified information on live television. Even if “public allegations” include MoveOn.org’s complaint, that complaint itself cites media reports on Nunes’ actions.
And furthermore, the House ethics investigation Nunes is now facing could be very different from the formal, public probe that “left-wing” groups are probably hoping for. The House committee is investigating Nunes under Committee Rule 18(a) ― which allows the committee to “consider any information in its possession” that indicates a House member violated “any law, rule, regulation, or other standard of conduct” related to his or her duties.
That Nunes stepped down over this probe ― and blamed liberals ― is notable, since this type of investigation is preliminary and doesn’t even necessarily mean Nunes will ever face punishment related to it.
Committee investigations launched under Rule 18(a) do not involve a full investigative subcommittee, and can be as simple as a Google search. The committee can decide to take up a formal investigation after this first step, but it’s never a certainty that it will.
“It is the most informal and uncertain form of Ethics Committee investigation that they can conduct,” Bryson Morgan, a lawyer at Caplin & Drysdale and former investigative counsel for the Office of Congressional Ethics, told The Huffington Post.
These preliminary investigations also have no public reporting requirements and can go on for as long as the committee desires. It is out of the ordinary for the committee to even announce this type of investigation publicly, as it has for Nunes. “Some of these 18(a) investigations run for years without resolution,” said Morgan. “It doesn’t provide much transparency into what is going on.”
What’s also notable is that launching this type of an investigation gives the ethics committee the power to tell the Office of Congressional Ethics to back off any of its own potential investigations. While the House committee has a history of going easy on fellow congressmen, the OCE ― an independent, nonpartisan entity ― has a record of reaching much harsher conclusions in its investigations.
Some observers suspect the committee stepped in early to avoid OCE getting involved with the Nunes allegations.
“The Ethics Committee is not known to act quickly in the past, so that could be a motive there,” said Morgan. “It’s a little bit of a race.”
The House Ethics Committee did not respond to a request for comment. The Office of Congressional Ethics declined to comment.
Morgan’s not the only person questioning the committee’s intentions. “The good news is the House Ethics Committee is doing what it should do,” said Meredith McGehee, an ethics expert at the nonpartisan campaign finance reform group Issue One. “It’s saying there’s been a lot of public information out there on these allegations of sharing classified information. That is a serious allegation and it raises allegations of violations of House Rules. The bad news is: Will they have the credibility and will they in fact conduct a credible investigation?”
Independent ethics watchdogs have long questioned the seriousness of the ethics committee’s investigations. Congress created the OCE after the committee failed to punish unethical activities of congressmen caught up in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.
A House Democratic aide, who did not want to be publicly named due to the sensitivity of congressional ethics investigations, told HuffPost it was unlikely that ranking committee member Deutch would join an investigation like this without an assurance that it would be taken seriously. “If they pull this behind the curtain, there will be more agitation,” the aide said.
Morgan also said he’s hopeful that the committee’s very public action on the Nunes investigation means that it is taking the allegations against him seriously.
“I hesitate to be very critical of the ethics committee because there’s a possibility that this could be a prelude to an investigative subcommittee,” he said.
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Maybe it was her all-Japanese-potato diet or the reports that his entire family despised her, but Olivia Munn and Aaron Rodgers are apparently donezo after three years of dating.
A source close to the pair (educated guess: not the estranged “Bachelor” brother Jordan Rodgers) confirmed to People that the couple has “amicably ended their relationship” and “remains close friends and wish nothing but the best for each other moving forward.”
The Green Bay Packers quarterback and the “X-Men” actress began dating in 2014, weeks after Munn split from actor Joel Kinnaman. Munn became a mainstay throughout football season, sitting on the sidelines and cheering Rodgers on at every home game.
The breakup comes as a bit of shock, considering rumors of an engagement between the two began swirling months ago, after Munn was snapped with some new bling on her ring finger.
The actress quickly shot down the speculation by sharing a hilarious text exchange with her mother, who believed the engagement was real after reading reports online.
Let’s hope she did, in fact, let her mom know about the breakup “way before the internet.”
The Huffington Post has reached out to Olivia Munn’s and Aaron Rodgers’ representatives for comment and will update this post accordingly.
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The monthly survey of workplaces revealed a slower pace of job growth in March, as payrolls grew by 98,000, the lowest gain since last May, and down from the pace in recent months, while downward revisions reduced payroll gains from the first two months in the quarter by 38,000. The survey of households, however, told a more robust story of the March labor market, with unemployment down to a cyclical low of 4.5%, and for the right reasons: job seekers finding work, not giving up and leaving the labor market.
That’s the lowest unemployment rate since May 2007, while the underemployment rate–a more encompassing measure of labor demand important gauge–fell from 9.2% in February to 8.9% in March, its lowest rate since December 2007.
While some news sources will be tempted by this below-trend payroll number to declare a slump in employment growth–“if it bleeds, it leads”–that would be a mistake. One month does not a new trend make. The monthly confidence interval for change in payrolls is 120,000 (meaning that there is a 90 percent chance that the true change in payroll employment for the month of March lies between about -20,000 and 220,000; that’s the statistical noise I’m always going on about), the underlying trend remains solid, weather effects may have been in play in March, and the household survey looks strong.
It is not unusual for the two surveys released on jobs day to tell somewhat different stories, and the key point to keep in mind re these monthly numbers is that they are noisy. Therefore, we want to be careful not to over-interpret one month’s results. Instead, we should look at the underlying trends.
Our monthly smoother helps amp up the payroll signal by averaging out some of the noise in the monthly data, taking averages of monthly payroll gains over 3-, 6-, and 12-month spans. Over the past three months, payrolls added 178,000 jobs on average, close to the underlying trend for the past year of 182,000. Given the size and growth of the US labor force, these averages represent a solid pace of job gains that is clearly and steadily moving the job market to full employment. It is, however, a slower pace of monthly payroll gains compared to earlier in the recovery (a year ago, the 12-month average was 229,000).
Still, today’s lower-than-average (and lower-than-expected) payroll number does not alter my assessment that the job market is closing in on full employment. Of course, if future months show a clear deceleration of the ongoing trend–say, a downshift from close to 200K/month to 100K/month, this would signal a decline in hiring activity and could (I’d argue “should”) slow the Federal Reserve’s plans to raise rates.
Meanwhile, tighter job markets provide wage earners with more bargaining power. On average, as the next figure shows, average wage growth has accelerated in recent months, from around 2% to a pace north of 2.5% (March came in at 2.7%). A few caveats, however, are notable. First, inflation has also picked up in recent months, partially due to normalizing energy costs, and was growing most recently at about the pace of hourly wage growth, implying flat real hourly earnings. Also, on an annualized quarterly basis, wage growth was 2.4% in 2017q1, below its recent trend. Given data volatility, this doesn’t yet imply a slowdown, but we’ll track this going forward.
A few other notable results:
–The employment rate for prime-age workers, a closely watched measure to see if the labor market recovery is pulling working-age persons into the job market, was 78.5% last month, up half-a-percentage point over the past year, and another sign of progress. These 25-54-year-old workers have clawed back 3.7 out of 5.5 percentage points, or two-thirds, of their losses since the big downturn. It is thus extremely important to heavily discount reports that such workers are out of the reach of a strong labor market. Some surely are, but many others are clearly not. Be very careful, my friends, not to conflate the cyclical with the structural!
–The decline in the underemployment rate reflects the monthly tick down of about 150,000 involuntary part-timers. Over the past year, that measure of slack is down by about half-a-million workers (6.1 million last March to 5.6 million this March). The figure shows a steady, improving trend in the number and employment share of part-timers who’d prefer full-time work, though the series is not quite back to pre-recession levels.
– Fans of seasonal adjustment were concerned that the March payroll number would be biased down due to weather effects, specifically unseasonably warm weather that raised February’s job gains and, conversely, a winter storm in March that blanketed parts of the Northeast and Midwest during the week in which the job surveys are in the field. But BLS data on absences from work due to weather show a huge spike in full-timers who had to work part-time due to weather (the largest on record for March with data back to the 1970s), but not much of one for people not at work at all. Still, the part-time issue could have dampened March’s payroll count, yet another reason not to worry yet about slumping job creation.
In sum, moderate, steady GDP growth amidst low productivity continues to equal solid job creation that is squeezing slack out of the labor market. The overall pace of job gains has probably slowed a bit but that is not unusual as we move towards full employment and face utilization constraints. However, there’s still room to run on the supply side of the job market, as the prime-age employment rates and involuntary-part-time series reveal. Also, it will be very important for the Fed to carefully track the wage growth point I made above regarding the slower quarterly rate. If that sticks, they’ll want to be very careful not to shut down wage gains just as they’re catching on.
This post was originally published on Jaredbernsteinblog.com.
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