Chewing Over the Issues

Man robs bank of $1 so he can get prison health care

A North Carolina man robbed a local bank for a dollar just so he could get health care in prison, he said.
 
James Verone, 59, handed the teller a note demanding $1 and claimed he had a gun, ABC News reported.
 
He then walked away and sat down, waiting for police.
 
“I started to walk away from the teller, then I went back and said, I’ll be sitting right over there in the chair waiting for the police,” he said, according to local television station 9News. “I wanted to make it known that this wasn’t for monetary reasons, but for medical reasons.”
 
Verone, who committed the robbery on June 9, does not plan to pay his bail, which was recently reduced to $2,000.

With little money to his name and many medical problems, including a growth on his chest, two ruptured disks and an unidentified problem with his left foot, he said the “robbery” was his last resort.

“The pain was beyond the tolerance that I could accept,” he told the Gaston Gazette. “I kind of hit a brick wall with everything.”

He calculated that a non-violent crime like the bank hold-up would land him in jail, and even enable him to collect Social Security benefits upon his release.
 
“I’m sort of a logical person and that was my logic, what I came up with,” he said.
 
On the day he committed the felony, Verone mailed a letter to the Gaston Gazette explaining his logic.
 
“When you receive this a bank robbery will have been committed by me. This robbery is being committed by me for one dollar,” he wrote. “I am of sound mind but not so much sound body.”

Another story about it here.

Google’s new Recipe Search: “the new winners are recipes packaged for the American eating and cooking disorder”

When searching for recipes, I still use plain old Google search. Yes, it returns a fair bit of chaff, but I feel like it allows a bit more serendipity than the new Recipe Search seems to.

From an essay by Amanda Hesser on food52.

The entity with the greatest influence on what Americans cook is not Costco or Trader Joe’s. It’s not the Food Network or The New York Times. It’s Google. Every month about a billion of its searches are for recipes. The dishes that its search engine turns up, particularly those on the first page of results, have a huge impact on what Americans cook. Which is why, with a recent change in its recipe search, Google has, in effect, taken sides in the food war. Unfortunately, it’s taken the wrong one.

…

Google must surely know that recipes are anything but precise formulas: they’re descriptive guides, and quality cannot be quantified in calories or time. The search engine’s real opportunity lies in understanding the metrics that actually reflect great quality. A very simple place to start is by tracking the number of comments relative to pageviews, the number of Facebook likes a recipe has garnered, or how often a recipe has been shared. A recipe with 74 comments is almost certainly better than one that takes 8 minutes to make. (And at some point, Google should create its own system for calculating calories.)

I’m glad Google put effort into improving its recipe search, but their solution feels robotic rather than thoughtful. If they don’t change their current approach, I fear to contemplate the future of American cooking. As it stands, Google’s recipe search gives undue advantage to the “quick & easy” recipe sites, encourages dishonesty, and sets up people to be dissuaded from cooking, as they will soon learn that recipes always end up taking more time than they expected. Alas, the search algorithm fundamentally misunderstands what recipe searchers are really looking for: great recipes.

(Source: food52.com)

What is the Monkeysphere?

I’m always a bit bemused when I consider Cracked.com. I mean, it’s Cracked. When I was a kid, they were the low-rent, less-funny competitor to Mad Magazine. On the other hand, they’ve posted some very funny (and not stupid) stuff, and sometimes they come out with insightful things like this essay. Worth clicking through and reading the whole thing.

What do monkeys have to do with war, oppression, crime, racism and even e-mail spam? You’ll see that all of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world will suddenly make perfect sense once we go Inside the Monkeysphere.

“What the Hell is the Monkeysphere?”

First, picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if that helps you. We’ll call him Slappy.

Imagine you have Slappy as a pet. Imagine a personality for him. Maybe you and he have little pirate monkey adventures and maybe even join up to fight crime. Think how sad you’d be if Slappy died.

Now, imagine you get four more monkeys. We’ll call them Tito, Bubbles, Marcel and ShitTosser. Imagine personalities for each of them now. Maybe one is aggressive, one is affectionate, one is quiet, the other just throws shit all the time. But they’re all your personal monkey friends.

Now imagine a hundred monkeys.

Not so easy now, is it? So how many monkeys would you have to own before you couldn’t remember their names? At what point, in your mind, do your beloved pets become just a faceless sea of monkey? Even though each one is every bit the monkey Slappy was, there’s a certain point where you will no longer really care if one of them dies.

So how many monkeys would it take before you stopped caring?

That’s not a rhetorical question. We actually know the number.

You see, monkey experts performed a monkey study a while back, and discovered that the size of the monkey’s monkey brain determined the size of the monkey groups the monkeys formed. The bigger the brain, the bigger the little societies they built.

They cut up so many monkey brains, in fact, that they found they could actually take a brain they had never seen before and from it they could accurately predict what size tribes that species of creature formed.

Most monkeys operate in troupes of 50 or so. But somebody slipped them a slightly larger brain and they estimated the ideal group or society for this particular animal was about 150.

That brain, of course, was human.

(Source: cracked.com)

Smart city governments grow produce for the people

More from Grist.org.

The produce outside the capitol building at Madison, WI, is donated to a food pantry.(Kelly Hafermann/Flickr)

Chard is one of the many plants growing in the Montpelier, Vt. state house vegetable garden.Photo: Waldo Jaquith via FlickrThere’s a new breed of urban agriculture germinating throughout the country, one whose seeds come from an unlikely source.

Local government officials from Baltimore, Md., to Bainbridge Island, Wash. are plowing under the ubiquitous hydrangeas, petunias, daylilies, and turf grass around public buildings, and planting fruits and vegetables instead — as well as in underutilized spaces in our parks, plazas, street medians, and even parking lots. The new attitude at forward-thinking city halls seems to be, in a tough economy, why expend precious resources growing ornamental plants, when you can grow edible ones? And the bounty from these municipal gardens — call it public produce — not only promotes healthy eating, it bolsters food security simply by providing passersby with ready access to low- or no-cost fresh fruits and vegetables.