This is one of those pieces of trivia I've dragged up on occasion that I suspect most people I've told it to speculated I was making up. At long last I present a source.
For many centuries, and perhaps back to Homer, Western society slept in two shifts. People went to sleep, got up in the middle of the night for an hour or so, and then went to sleep again. Thus night — divided into a “first sleep” and “second sleep” — also included a curious intermission.Link
The US rate of 700-739 (depending on the source) per 100,000 people is in rare company. From The Straight Dope (dated Feb 2004, so perhaps the discrepency between Wikipedia and Snopes is that an additional 500,000 people have entered the US prison system in the last four years):In absolute terms, the United States currently has the largest inmate population in the world, with more than 2½ million[14] or more than one in a hundred adults[15] in prison and jails. Although the United States represents less than 5% of the world's population, over 25% of the people incarcerated around the world are housed in the American prison system. Pulitzer Prize winning author Joseph T. Hallinan wrote in his book Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation, "so common is the prison experience that the federal government predicts one in eleven men will be incarcerated in his lifetime, one in four if he is black." In 2002, both Russia and China[16] By October 2006, the Russian prison population declined to 869,814 which translated into 611 prisoners per 100,000 population. also had prison populations in excess of 1 million.
As a percentage of total population, the United States also has the largest imprisoned population, with 739 people per 100,000 serving time, awaiting trial or otherwise detained.[17]
According to the International Centre for Prison Studies at King's College London, the U.S. currently has the largest documented prison population in the world, both in absolute and proportional terms. We've got roughly 2.03 million people behind bars, or 701 per 100,000 population. China has the second-largest number of prisoners (1.51 million, for a rate of 117 per 100,000), and Russia has the second-highest rate (606 per 100,000, for a total of 865,000). Russia had the highest rate for years, but has released hundreds of thousands of prisoners since 1998; meanwhile the U.S. prison population has grown by even more. Rounding out the top ten, with rates from 554 to 437, are Belarus, Bermuda (UK), Kazakhstan, the Virgin Islands (U.S.), the Cayman Islands (UK), Turkmenistan, Belize, and Suriname, which you'll have to agree puts America in interesting company. South Africa, a longtime star performer on the list, has dropped to 15th place (402) since the dismantling of apartheid.Cecil at The Strait Dope ads that maybe, or even probably China and North Korea are vastly under reporting the number of prisoners in the dock, which would maybe knock the USA down from the gold medal to the bronze, but regardless, hardly a podium Americans can be proud to be on.
This is a party I want to host! From the New York Times
They were among 40 or so people who were tasting under the influence of a small red berry called miracle fruit at a rooftop party in Long Island City, Queens, last Friday night. The berry rewires the way the palate perceives sour flavors for an hour or so, rendering lemons as sweet as candy.Link
I'm going to read this article every time Simon's birthday rolls around, just to remind myself of how it's the effort he puts in that counts. From Scientific American: Link
When we hear news of tragedies like China's recent earthquake a number like 50,000 dead is hard to fathom, it becomes a statistic. Scroll through this collection of photos and each of those 50,000 become a person again. Warning, the pictures are often graphic.
Saw a link to this over at Neatorama (courtesy of Eli Schwimmer), very fun, an interactive, visual dictionary. This is how my mind works...
Some of the nodes can be expanded by double clicking, though I haven't figured out what the rules are showing which can be expanded. Try the word "moral", it seems to have alot of nodes that can be explored.
Not sure if it has something to do with becomeing a dad in this last year, but I love funny kid videos! Wait for the kid at the end...
Funny Kids - video powered by Metacafe
Photo: David Ball
The Freakonomics blog over at the NYTimes is a fun place. They had a post on Pirates (ie the swashbucklers of the high seas) called "Are Pirates the Key to Understanding the World?" I read some of an article by Peter T. Leeson it listed; Pirational Choice: The Economics of Infamous Pirate Practices. In it I found out that pirates of the late 17th and early 18th century used...
...an early form of workers' compensation to support crew members injured during duty. In Captain Bartholomew Roberts' pirate crew, for instance, the company's articles of agreement stipulated that "If . . . any Man should lose a Limb, or become a Cripple in their Service, he was to have 800 Dollars, out of the publick Stock, and for lesser Hurts, proportionately" (Johnson 1726-1728 [1999]: 12). Before dividing up their loot, pirate crews deducted the insurance amounts their articles identi…ed, distributed these sums to injured pirates, and then divided the rest.I googled around for the history of Workers Compensation and found an article called "Workers' Compensation, A Brief History" by Lloyd Harger. He places the birth of modern workers' compensation laws in Germany in the early 19th century:
Germany took the lead in the protection of injured workers in 1838 by passing legislation protecting railroad employees and passengers in the event of accidents. Further changes were made in 1854 when a law was passed requiring certain classes of employers to contribute to sickness funds and in 1876 a “Voluntary Insurance Act” was passed, which failed in actual operation. Bismarck introduced a Compulsory Plan in 1881, which was enacted in stages and finalized in 1884 and is the model for our present system.Unless someone tells me otherwise, I'm going to give cred to the swashbucklers for it! Comment if you have any more info...
My son Simon turned one years old this last week, Grandma and Papa visited from Ontario, and Simon treated them to his first steps, and amazingly Janet caught them on video! How special will it be for him to one day see himself take his first steps!
It's often occurred to me that Simon will have his whole life documented in film; I have him in-utero kicking, I have him moments after birth, I'll document everything until he leaves home. His generation will have their lives documented like few before, save the children of celebrities or royalty.
In response the post Economist and Mother Jones, my friend Lara King mentioned More Intelligent Life, kind of a human interest compendium of what is written by The Economist. I went and checked it out and loved it! I'll be posting more from there in the future...
I've been on hockey teams, volley ball teams, band, track teams, triathlon teams, and above all else (with regards to fundraising) swim teams, and I've gone door to door to sell a lot of things to raise money. Bottle drives, swim-a-thons, oranges, coupon books, and chocolate covered almonds are what memory brings to mind, I'm sure I'm suppressing the memory of more though. So I have to bow down to this girl, who leaves me in awe! Jennifer Sharpe knows how to sell Girl Scout cookies. She sold them to friends. She sold them to strangers. She even convinced her orthodontist to buy the popular sweet treats. And now, with 17,323 boxes sold under her name, the 15-year-old Dearborn girl is believed to have sold more cookies in a single season than anyone in the United States ever, according to Girl Scout officials.
Wow, Linux, the NYSE, in bed together, make lots of children! The barbarians are at Microsoft's gate. Link
In a better world, more of it's opinions would be formed after reading from two very fine websites:
www.Economist.com and www.MotherJones.com
Both of these sites have more well written analysis, I'll say it again, analysis, not rhetoric, analysis, than 99% of the web put together.
Greenspan was regarded as godlike for so long he could have marched us all off a cliff at will, oh wait he did a couple of times. He will be remembered as the finest honer of financial bubbles since the Dutch and their tulips. It is impresive that after being chastized for the dot.com bubble, he solved that with the housing bubble, kind of like solving a headache by taking painkillers that soon give you cancer.
Finding a story this soul affirming in the giant river of bad news, scare stories our media loves to deliver is like going for a swim in one of those pig poo holding ponds and comming away with a dimond you stumbled on with your big toe while wading in.
Florence Russell is looking forward to this year’s offerings. On a recent Saturday she watched from the end of Alabama Avenue as gardeners worked compost into beds at Hands and Hearts Garden, one of the sites where the Wilkses keep beds, along with 24 other growers. Fresh greens, she said, would be a welcome alternative to tough collards from the local grocery.
“This is something good happening here,” Ms. Russell said.
Another story in the same vein a few weeks later on May 20th, this time from Philidelphia; Link
