Hell or High Water: Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts

“It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive.”

~Mark Twain, Following the Equator

This is one of the only known birds to be toxic. Its feathers contain one of the most potent toxins known to science – but why? Hooded Pitohui bird via Malchkeon the bird lover even the toxic bird is bad for you ...

Medical hand-washing is addictive, and persists once monitoring is removed, an important result.  That is by Reshmaan Hussam, currently a job market candidate at MIT.  Here is her YouTube talk on the same topic.  This is probably going to be one of the best and most important job market papers of the year - via Naked Capitalism

"Seeing the world from the position of the weak person is a great education. We lack imagination. If we had enough imagination to put ourselves in the shoes of the person we oppress, things would begin to happen. So it is important that we develop the ability to listen to the weak."

Bill Moyers: A World of Ideas remains a ceaselessly rewarding read in its hefty totality, featuring wisdom from such luminaries as physicist Steven Weinberg, anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, poet Derek Walcott, management legend Peter Drucker, geneticist Maxine Singer, linguist Noam Chomsky, and novelist E.L. Doctorow. Complement this particular fragment with Achebe on the meaning of life and the writer’s responsibility to the world, then revisit Moyers’s poignant conversation with Maya Angelou about courage and facing evil

 Would it be better to have fewer but larger cities?

What is the most underrated American poem?

Fake Failures: Why Are Successful Young Women Writers Playing Miserable Online?

90-Minute Meeting Was a ‘Great Honor,’ Says President-Elect New York Times. Body language in other Obama-Trump pix not as awful as the one on the NYT front page, but the ones I’ve seen in the Michelle-Melania shots looked good, FWIW

University of Maryland, ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing, DOI: 10.1145/2914793 – “The recent miniaturization of cameras has enabled finger-based reading approaches that provide blind and visually impaired readers with access to printed materials. Compared to handheld text scanners such as mobile phone applications, mounting a tiny camera on the user’s own finger has the potential to mitigate camera framing issues, enable a blind reader to better understand the spatial layout of a document, and provide better control over reading pace

    

The Thufa hill in Reykjavik, Iceland

On the Knife-Edge of Western Globalization: A Stint at Standing Rock
George WashingtON

Is the Severity of the Penalty an Effective Deterrent?
 A Strategic Approach for the Crime of Tax Evasion 

E‑Filing and Compliance Risk: Evidence from Australian 
Personal Income Tax Deductions