Links for 2010-02-08

“At least 60 percent of the people in Rockland who have gotten mumps during the current outbreak had not been fully immunized, Facelle said.

Mumps were common before the vaccine became available. In 2008, there were only two reported cases in Rockland, according to the Department of Health’s year-end communicable disease report.”

“Playing Grandin in the HBO biopic Temple Grandin, Claire Danes captures the brilliance of the woman: how she sees things that others don’t, and makes connections others can’t. Danes gets Grandin’s braying monotone, stooped posture and default defensive stance to other people–and more importantly she conveys it all unselfconsciously, as Grandin would, with no awareness of how she must look to others. (That is, until they start laughing or whispering behind her back.) The performance is more than just a collection of skillfully strung together tics. Danes also captures Grandin’s sense of humor and her perception of everyday life: how she finds things funny that aren’t necessarily jokes, and how unexpected sounds, lights and motion can put her in a mild state of panic.”

“Periodisation in human history is an artifice. We the historians impose periods onto history in order to try to tame it and make it easier to handle and in doing so we run the very real risk of falsifying it. There are no sign posts rammed into the real roadmap of time saying you are now leaving the Early Middle Ages please conduct your self in future in a manner suitable for the High Middle Ages. In fact as the peasant farmer in Middle Europe turned over the page of his calendar from the 25th to the 26th of March in 1199 and thus entered the thirteenth century nothing changed in his life at all. Time is a constantly flowing river and change is incremental and on the ground mostly imperceptible as societies, cultures and ways of live evolve within the general flow. It is only with hindsight and selective interpretation of the facts that we can perceive the major changes that we then use to identify the periods that we stamp out of the riverbed.”

“Most of us can’t tell our secant from our cotangent. But the forms are everywhere, and Nikki Graziano wants to help us see them. Graziano, a math and photography student at Rochester Institute of Technology, overlays graphs and their corresponding equations onto her carefully composed photos. “I wanted to create something that could communicate how awesome math is, to everyone,” she says. Graziano doesn’t go out looking for a specific function but lets one find her instead. Once she’s got an image she likes, Graziano whips up the numbers and tweaks the function until the graph it describes aligns perfectly with the photograph.”

Star Wars vs. Titanic.

“As the middle linebacker, [Jonathan] Vilma is the quarterback of the defense. Watch him, and not Peyton Manning, for at least one drive during the Super Bowl and check out what kinds of furiously intense and split-second head games the two men are playing with each other. Maybe it looks uncomplicated, but you’d rather take a staple gun to your chode than replace either of these men for one play.

They say there’s only 11 minutes of actual “game” during a football game, but they’re wrong. This tete-a-tete between quarterback and middle linebacker is the equivalent of watching a player’s eyes during a chess match, if the pieces tried to kill each other, and their actions resulted in wanton crying and unnecessary financial ruin for some of the spectators. Enjoy.”