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Mat, originally uploaded by 160507.

 
In an ABC interview, the closest friends of the Republican VP nominee revealed that she hates cats.

Meow! We knew there had to be another reason why our hairs stand on end every time we see you on TV, moose-huntin’-and-dressin’ woman. Another reason besides the obvious fact that you are not qualified to be America’s Number Two and the thought of you being so close to a nuclear arsenal gives us the creeps. You sound catty enough in your speeches, but we are more highly-evolved than you are. For starters, we understand what evolution is. We are deeply offended on behalf of Socks’ human. Cat-hater, you’re no Hillary Clinton. While cats are either monarchists or anarchists, we approve of the Democratic nominee’s feline elegance and intelligence. We do not recognize the quaint concept of borders, but as members of the United Species, we are for Obama.

This message was approved by Matthias Eomer Octavian Federer-Urban.

There has to be a better word for someone who loves books than “bookworm.” No offense to worms, which are essential to the ecological balance, but they’re way down the food chain and have appeared in too many horror images — decomposing corpses, rotten fruit, slimy stuff.

People who go on and on about foie gras and that grotty little dive with the delightful ceviche are called “foodies,” but we were beaten into “bookies” by sinister men with kneecap-busting associates. I’ve tried “bibliophile,” but there’s something effete and artsy-fartsy about it — think of men in smoking jackets holding forth about their first editions (and still living with their mothers).

The candidates: bibliophile, bibliomaniac, bibliophage, bibliotaph, biblioleptic.  Seizures in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.

The correct answers to our Flip Reader giveaway: 1.  D, 2. B, 3. A, 4. E, 5. C.

All the correct entries were placed in a hat, and the winner picked out by Koosi is. . .pan de sal. Congratulations. Please post your mailing address in the Philippines in Comments (it won’t appear on the blog). 

By the way, if you won one of our previous contests, and the prize was supposed to be mailed to you and you still haven’t received it, it’s because you may have forgotten to say “Thank you.” You’ll get your prize eventually, we’re just having a small etiquette fit.

“Wanted: the owners of 137 artworks discovered in an apartment in Manhattan, suspected stolen. The FBI is appealing for owners to come forward to claim the paintings and sculptures that were found in the Upper East Side – some of them stuffed under a bed – in one of the more unusual mysteries to fall to federal investigators.

“The artworks were found in the apartment of an occasional art writer and genealogist called William M V Kingsland, who died in March 2006, aged 62, leaving no will. His collection of about 300 pieces – including works by Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso and Odilon Redon – was handed to two auction houses to sell off.”But over the past 18 months the relatively straightforward story of an intestate private art collector has slowly turned into a deepening mystery of double identities and theft. The alarm was first sounded when a gallery owner bought a portrait by John Singleton Copley of the Second Earl of Bessborough for $85,000 (£ 42,000). Looking into its provenance, he found it had been stolen from Harvard University in 1971…”
The stolen art under the bed in The Guardian.

Maybe they’re all Sanyo? Bad ad joke.

My cats are too sophisticated to fight. However, they do not wish to arouse the suspicion of their human, and to assure her that she’s still higher up on the food chain, they “fight”. No provocation necessary; they seem to have arranged for the staging of mock hostilities. They approach each other slowly, putting on squinty looks like Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti western. Then each cat raises a claw and swipes repeatedly at the air, at lightning speed. They are a foot away from each other, so there is no actual contact. Fur does not fly. Sometimes to heighten the drama they snarl and yowl. Seconds later, the battle is over. They go back to roaming the house, as if nothing had happened.

In the light of the cataclysmic collapse of financial institutions, Nassim Nicolas Taleb, Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute, author of Fooled by Randomness and the bestseller The Black Swan, asks: Are we using models of uncertainty to produce certainties?

“Black swans” are highly improbable and unpredictable events that have massive impact. Taleb argues that the banking system, betting against black swans, just wiped out one TRILLION dollars, more money than was ever made in the history of banking.

“It appears that financial institutions earn money on transactions (say fees on your mother-in-law’s checking account) and lose everything taking risks they don’t understand. I want this to stop, and stop now— the current patching by the banking establishment worldwide is akin to using the same doctor to cure the patient when the doctor has a track record of systematically killing them. And this is not limited to banking—I generalize to an entire class of random variables that do not have the structure we thing they have, in which we can be suckers.

“And we are beyond suckers: not only, for socio-economic and other nonlinear, complicated variables, we are riding in a bus driven a blindfolded driver, but we refuse to acknowledge it in spite of the evidence, which to me is a pathological problem with academia. . .”

The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics, in Edge. Makes stats riveting!