Stephan: Yet another child has killed herself with a gun she found in her house. I just hate these stories, and I see them again, and again, and again.
Mariah Davis
DETROIT — Police say a young girl has fatally shot herself in Detroit after finding a handgun under her grandmother’s pillow.
Detroit police Sgt. Michael Woody says in an email that police responded around midnight Tuesday to a home on the city’s northwest side and the girl was taken by medics to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
Relatives identified the girl as Mariah Davis, CBS Detroit reports.
Police say the girl was 4 years old. CBS Detroit, citing family members at the scene, reports Davis was 5.
Family members told CBS Detroit station WWJ-AM she loved Disney movies.
“It was an awful tragedy that has all of us shook up and our heart broke,” aunt Freda Davis told WWJ-AM. “It seems like our souls was ripped out of us. She was a lovely little girl. All she loved to do was sing.”
According to the initial investigation, police say the girl found the gun in an upstairs bedroom and shot herself while the grandmother was downstairs. Police say two other […]
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Wednesday, May 11th, 2016
Rupert Neate, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Twenty five hedge fund managers made more money in one year than the economy of several nations; could there be a better example of income inequality, and what our social priorities are? This is so out of whack, and everytime I read these stories I can't help making an historian's assessment of how this tale of corruption and profit above all will be seen by the future.
Kenneth Griffin
The world’s top 25 hedge fund managers earned $13bn last year – more than the entire economies of Namibia, the Bahamas or Nicaragua. (emphasis added)
Kenneth Griffin, founder and chief executive of Citadel, and James Simons, founder and chairman of Renaissance Technologies, shared the top spot, taking home $1.7bn each – equivalent to the annual salaries of 112,000 people taking home the US federal minimum wage of $15,080.
The earnings of the best-performing hedge fund managers, published by Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine on Tuesday, dwarfs the pay of top Wall Street executives who have been under fire for their multimillion-dollar pay deals. The best paid banker last year was JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who collected $27m.
The huge pay at the top comes despite a tumultuous year on Wall Street that has led many well-known hedge funds to lose billions of dollars and others to close down. Daniel Loeb, CEO of Third Point, a hedge fund that manages […]
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Wednesday, May 11th, 2016
JACK HEALY, JULIE BOSMAN, ALAN BLINDER and JULIE TURKEWITZ, - The New York Times
Stephan: There is no other developed nation on earth that has this domestic accidental death of children, by gun shot. It is extraordinary and very revealing of who we are as a people that this level of death is not only tolerated, but barely remarked upon. This story stands out as an outlier.
Zai Deshields, 4, at her home in Stone Mountain, Ga., this week. Last week she pulled a handgun out of a backpack at her grandmother’s home in Arlington, Tex., and shot her uncle in the leg.
Credit Melissa Golden/ The New York Times
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Sha’Quille Kornegay, 2 years old, was buried in a pink coffin, her favorite doll by her side and a tiara strategically placed to hide the self-inflicted gunshot wound to her forehead.
She had been napping in bed with her father, Courtenay Block, late last month when she discovered the 9-millimeter handgun he often kept under his pillow in his Kansas City, Mo., home. It was equipped with a laser sight that lit up like the red lights […]
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Wednesday, May 11th, 2016
Richard Gray, - The Daily Mail (U.K.)
Stephan: This is a very innovative and insightful way to think about religion; but one based on data. I see it as part of the Great Schism Trend. And I think it is going to cause a lot of social disruption.
Stefan Lochner’s Last Judgement
They have helped to guide the moral compass – for better and for worse – of millions of humans for around 2,000 years.
But the world’s major religions are set to disappear according to recent research that examines how they emerged in the first place.
Scientists suggest moralising religions – Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism – emerged due to growing differences between wealthy elites and poorer general populations.
Moralising religions such as Christianity (Stefan Lochner’s Last Judgement pictured), Islam, Judaism and Hinduism may have emerged as a way to help the wealthy elite compete with a more sexually promiscuous and aggressive general populous, but this may also lead to the downfall of such religions, scientists claim
By setting out a moral framework for people to live by, these religions helped to level the evolutionary playing field as people’s lifestyles changed.
According to evolutionary psychologist Dr Nicolas Baumard, at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, affluence causes humans to switch to a slower lifestyle where […]
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Wednesday, May 11th, 2016
Stephan: Battery technology has always been the weak link in the electric vehicle power system. But that is changing with amazing alacrity. Here is the latest.
Credit: Toyota
Engineers at the Toyota Research Institute of North America (TRINA) think they’ve found the secret to using magnesium in rechargeable batteries. This would replace lithium as a safer, more energy-dense option for batteries in everything from cell phones to cars.
Magnesium has been considered a potential replacement for lithium in rechargeable batteries for some time. Lithium is not stable in air and can combust when exposed, so to make lithium-ion batteries safer, the ions are reduced and the lithium is embedded into graphite rods. This reduces the amount of metal (reducing density), which limits the amount of power the li-ion battery can store. To increase density, engineers have toyed with the mix of lithium and graphite and the shape of the cells, but the balance is tricky.
Magnesium, on the other hand, is stable in the atmosphere and more potentially energy dense than is lithium in terms of storage. The trouble is, forming an electrolyte that doesn’t degrade the magnesium while offering efficient transfer had proven difficult – until a chance […]
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