Think about the connection between your plate, and the resources required to grow all that food:

We already use 1/3 of the earth's surface to grow food. By 2050, we'll need twice as much food. 

via Fast Company

The players are locked out. The fans are depressed. And now the N.B.A. stalemate has claimed a whole new class of victims: New York’s bar owners, who say they’re losing as much as a 1/3 of their revenue because sports fans and tourists aren’t showing up to watch games.

They said bar receipts in the region were down 30 % from last year at this time — an estimated loss of up to $40 million since July, when contract talks broke down. 

Winning or losing, the Knicks have been a bankable draw not only for bars, but also for liquor distributors, cabdrivers and other small businesses...“Now, if a guy doesn’t go to see a game, the person parking his car is getting no money,” he said. There are no taxis to be taken, no pretzels to be sold.”

Can’t football fans carry the ball for New York’s economy? Mr. Shapiro thought not. “Have you been to a basketball game lately?” he asked. “People spend money, they get dressed up. For a football game, they dress for the cold. This is like going to the opera.”

via NY Times 

Legendary Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman is one of the most influential thinkers of our time. A Nobel laureate and founding father of modern behavioral economics, his work has shaped how we think about human error, risk, judgement, decision-making, happiness, and more. [This] month is the highly anticipated release of his “intellectual memoir,” Thinking, Fast and Slow.

"The word HAPPINESS is just not a useful word anymore because we apply it to too many different things." 

Kahneman [introduces] the machinery of the mind — the dual processor of the brain, divided into two distinct systems that dictate how we think and make decisions. One is fast, intuitive, reactive, and emotional. The other is slow, deliberate, methodical, and rational. 

Among the book’s most fascinating facets are the notions of the experiencing self and the remembering self, underpinning the fundamental duality of the human condition — one voiceless and immersed in the moment, the other occupied with keeping score and learning from experience. Kahneman spoke of these two selves and the cognitive traps around them in his fantastic 2010 TED talk: 

Daniel Kahneman's thesis [is] that more money won't necessarily make you happier, but lack of it will make you miserable. [At TED] he spoke on the disparity between what people experience versus what they remember — how we feel when we are experiencing something is often very different from how we will eventually remember that experience. His survey of hundreds of thousands of Americans has shown that $60,000 is a critical salary inflection point. Income above that level leads to few changes in the level of one's happiness. However, below $60,000, people are measurably less happy.

 via Brain Pickings 

On the misuse of apostrophe's (did your eye just twitch?) and our increasingly rhetorical language

Punctuation arouses strong feelings. 

People fuss about punctuation not only because it clarifies meaning but also because its neglect appears to reflect wider social decline. And while the big social battles seem intractable, smaller battles over the use of the apostrophe feel like they can be won.

Yet the status of this and other cherished marks has long been precarious. The story of punctuation is one of comings and goings.

Early manuscripts had no punctuation at all, and those from the medieval period suggest haphazard innovation, with more than 30 different marks. The modern repertoire of punctuation emerged as printers in the 15th and 16th centuries strove to limit this miscellany.

Many punctuation marks are less venerable than we might imagine. Parentheses ( ) were first used around 1500, having been observed by English writers and printers in Italian books. Commas ,  were not employed until the 16th century; in early printed books in English one sees a virgule (a slash like this /), which the comma replaced around 1520.

In fact, Internet culture generally favors a lighter, more informal style of punctuation. True, emoticons have sprung up to convey nuances of mood and tone. Moreover, typing makes it easy to amplify punctuation: splattering 20 exclamation marks !!!!!!  on a page, or using multiple question marks ????? to signify theatrical incredulity. But, overall, punctuation is being renounced.

Such marks are symptoms of an increasing tendency to punctuate for rhetorical rather than grammatical effect. Instead of presenting syntactical and logical relationships, punctuation reproduces the patterns of speech.

Graphic designers, who favor an uncluttered aesthetic, dislike hyphens - . They are also partly responsible for the disappearance of the apostrophe ' . This little squiggle first appeared in an English text in 1559. Its use has never been completely stable, and today confusion leads to the overcompensation that we see in those handwritten signs. The alternative is not to use apostrophes at all—an act of pragmatism easily mistaken for ignorance...The apostrophe is mainly a device for the eye, not the ear.

By contrast, use of the semicolon ; is dwindling. Although colons were common as early as the 14th century, the semicolon was rare in English books before the 17th century. It has always been regarded as a useful hybrid—a separator that's also a connector—but it's a trinket beloved of people who want to show that they went to the right school.

—via Wall Street Journal; excerpt from Mr. Hitchings's latest book. "The Language Wars: A History of Proper English," will be published in November.

"For every hour that American teens listen to music, they hear more than three references to brand-name alcohol -- about 34 in the course of day.

Researchers point the finger clearly at rap, R&B and hip-hop artists, who they say promote a"luxury lifestyle characterized by degrading sexual activity, wealth, partying, violence and the use of drugs."

Although the alcohol trade industries publicly say they do not market to underage drinkers, researchers said the line is "difficult to distinguish" because liquor companies "retroactively reward" the recording artists with product sponsorships and endorsements when songs climb the charts.

Many of the brands that are cited in lyrics -- Patron Tequila, Grey Goose Vodka and Hennessey Cognac -- are those named as favorites by underage drinkers, especially girls....(and) most of the alcohol references in those songs were positive rather than negative ones, they said. The brand names were associated with the following:

wealth 63.4 % of the time;

sex, 58.5%;

luxury objects, 51.2 %;

partying, 48.8 %;

other drugs, 43.9 % 

vehicles, 39%

The Post's in-depth report cited that...8 % of rap songs had references to alcohol in 1979, but by 1997, 44 %of them had alcohol references.

"The 'gangsta' mystique is really about aggressive self-indulgence," said Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media, culture and communications at New York University.

"It's highly consumeristic and not in any way socially conscious or beneficial to anyone's health," Miller said. "It builds on an old mystique that's more infantile than that. It's really about going to the crib and buying really ostentatious goods and drinking yourself into a stupor and using drugs and stashing huge guns."

He compared the power of music lyrics to the lure of cigarettes in movies and television in an earlier generation."

via ABC news

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