Sucking Eleonora

Eleonora Sucking the Venom out of the wound which Edward I, her Royal Consort, received from a poisoned dagger by an assassin in Palestine
In 1270, Eleanora of Castile accompanied her illustrious consort, Edward the First, then Prince Edward, to the third holy war, and was present before Acre, when one of the tribe of the Ansayrii, or " assassins," made his way into Edward's tent, and, while pretending to deliver a letter, attacked the prince with a poisoned dagger, inflicting a severe gash in his arm. The miscreant was instantly slain by Edward ; and an old legend asserts, that Eleanora, utterly regardless of herself, sucked the poison from her husband's wound, and by this means saved his life.


The story, however, is wholly repudiated by modern chroniclers, though it is difficult to imagine how it could have passed current at the time, when, as we are now taught, it was without the shadow of a foundation.
The History of Woman: And Her Connexion with Religion, Civilization, & Domestic Manners, from the Earliest Period
By Stephen Watson Fullom
Published by G. Routledge & Co., 1855

Angelica Kauffman came to England from Switzerland in 1764 and spent 15 years here flaunting her own outrageousness: a founder member of the Royal Academy and one of the most celebrated narrative painters of her time, she was a woman in a man's man's man's man's world.
Kauffman turned the perceived incongruity of her vocation to advantage by making it one of the prime subjects of her art. She did so most strikingly in her Self-Portrait Hesitating Between the Arts of Music and Painting, a work which now seems subtly proto-feminist in intention. .
Kauffman was not a great artist, although this may be as much down to her historical circumstances as to the nature of her talents. She was a history painter in Britain working at a time when history painting everywhere except France was a genre in near-terminal decline. Her attempts to find and paint grand themes congenial to English tastes led her, on more than one occasion, to desperately recherche subjects, as suggested by the crazy longueurs of some of her titles: The Tender Eleonora Sucking the Venom out of the Wound which Edward I, her Royal Consort, Received with a Poisoned Dagger from an Assassin in Palestine, or Lady Elizabeth Grey Imploring of Edward IV the Restitution of her Deceased Husband's Lands, Forfeited in the Dispute between the Houses of York and Lancaster.
Kauffman's allegories may also be charged with a form of autobiographical significance. Her relationships with men do not seem (although it is hard to know how much of this is down to malicious rumour) to have been especially happy: she is said to have had affairs with, among others, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Henry Fuseli and the French revolutionary Jean Paul Marat; and shortly after her arrival in England she married, disastrously, a man calling himself Count Frederic de Horn who turned out to have at least one previous, undivorced wife and fled the country four months after marrying Kauffman. She may have had good reason to suspect the impetuosity of men.
Kauffman may not have been quite as soft as the writer liked to think. She did remarkably well for herself in the 15 years that she spent in England, earning pounds 14,000, roughly the equivalent of pounds 750,000 in today's money. She knew how to market herself, and there may have been a certain element of self-satisfaction in that Self-Portrait Hesitating Between the Arts of Music and Painting: Angelica Kauffman knew that she had made the right choice.
(read more...)

But to live outside the law, you must be honest

"Four days before the Bernie Madoff bust, I found myself, through circumstances too complicated to explain, in a Bukharan Kosher restaurant in Queens, eating skewers of lamb, beef, liver, and sweetbreads with a wildly mixed group of guys that included a retired Jewish gangster I'll call Lucky, since most of his rackets involved gambling of some type. Lucky had great stories to tell. He saw himself as the last of a dying breed—"I'm the caboose," he kept saying—a breed that spawned legends like Meyer Lansky, Mickey Cohen, Bugsy Siegel, and Longy Zwillman..."
"It began to seem to me that the whole Bernie Madoff scandal was not about Jews and money but Jews and respectability. (And, by the way, let's cut the crap about Jews and money in the first place. If you look at the history of America, the big money has always been made by criminals of non-Jewish persuasions. The non-Jews who committed genocide to steal the land in the first place. The non-Jews who built up big fortunes through the disgusting and murderous crime of slavery. The non-Jews who built "respectable" old-money fortunes on the broken backs of the wage slaves they exploited. As Balzac famously said, behind every great fortune is a great crime. Old money in America is for the most part just old crime well-varnished by time.)"

(read more...)

Can Nurses Be Wrong?

In “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions” (Harper; $25.95), Dan Ariely, a professor at M.I.T., offers a taxonomy of financial folly. His approach is empirical rather than historical or theoretical. In pursuit of his research, Ariely has served beer laced with vinegar, left plates full of dollar bills in dorm refrigerators, and asked undergraduates to fill out surveys while masturbating. He claims that his experiments, and others like them, reveal the underlying logic to our illogic. “Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless—they are systematic,” he writes. “We all make the same types of mistakes over and over.” So attached are we to certain kinds of errors, he contends, that we are incapable even of recognizing them as errors. Offered FREE shipping, we take it, even when it costs us.
As an academic discipline, Ariely’s field—behavioral economics—is roughly twenty-five years old. It emerged largely in response to work done in the nineteen-seventies by the Israeli-American psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. (Ariely, too, grew up in Israel.) When they examined how people deal with uncertainty, Tversky and Kahneman found that there were consistent biases to the responses, and that these biases could be traced to mental shortcuts, or what they called “heuristics.” Some of these heuristics were pretty obvious—people tend to make inferences from their own experiences, so if they’ve recently seen a traffic accident they will overestimate the danger of dying in a car crash—but others were more surprising, even downright wacky. For instance, Tversky and Kahneman asked subjects to estimate what proportion of African nations were members of the United Nations. They discovered that they could influence the subjects’ responses by spinning a wheel of fortune in front of them to generate a random number: when a big number turned up, the estimates suddenly swelled.(read more...)

A Woman Over the Hood

The study showed that when heterosexual men are exposed to positive emotional stimuli — in this case, erotic photos of a man and woman — an area of the brain associated with anticipation of reward is stimulated. In the immediate aftermath of that stimulation, men are consistently more likely to take bigger financial risks than they otherwise would, said Brian Knutson, assistant professor of psychology.
"This is the first study to demonstrate that emotional stimuli can influence financial risk-taking," said Knutson, lead author of a paper describing the research in the current issue of NeuroReport. The hard evidence was gathered by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of participants' brains as they viewed photographs of positive, negative or neutral subjects and then had to quickly make a decision to choose one of two levels of financial risk in a required gamble.(more sex and money)

Danny "Bill Gates" Verhovsky

Time Warner's U.S. Internet giant American Online is once again using Israeli technology to help it battle its rivals. This time AOL's answer to Google and Yahoo! is Israeli startup Yedda from Kfar Malal.
Only a few days after buying Quigo, AOL has decided to buy the question-and- answer-service site (www.yedda.com) for tens of millions of dollars.
Yedda's 20 employees have developed a semantic search engine that can analyse questions and requests. The site invites users users to post questions, and then asks others to answer the questions or match them to existing answers.
The founders of Yedda are CEO Avichay Nissenbaum, 41; chief technology officer Yaniv Golan, 35; vice president of research and development Osher Frimerman, 44; and entrepreneurs Daniel Verhovsky and Eran Sandler.

"Daniel Verhovsky - master of the Yedda stove pipes, making all the pieces actually work. Between Yedda and his new born, still finds time for endless hours of WoW gaming. A vocal supporter for adding “Advanced Search”, and, last but not least, his skills as a former truck driver often come in handy".

(more from Haaretz)

Ein Hod We Trust

Few phrases seem more quaintly outmoded these days than “sound as a dollar.” Once the embodiment of American financial strength, the dollar has spent the past five years getting sand kicked in its face by the world’s currencies, and in recent weeks, thanks to the Federal Reserve’s surprisingly big interest-rate cut, its decline has accelerated. A euro, which you could buy for eighty-six cents in January, 2002, now costs $1.40, and the Canadian loonie, once an easy object of derision, is as valuable as a dollar. In 1922, Ernest Hemingway wrote an article explaining how to live in Paris on a thousand dollars a year. These days, an American in Paris is lucky to spend a thousand dollars a week.
Most Americans, of course, don’t worry too much about the price of dinner at Taillevent(more from New Yorker)

Gesundheit! Rich can smoke...

The public generally believes that poor lifestyle choices, faulty genes and infectious agents are the major factors that give rise to illness.
Research now tells us that lower socio-economic status may be more harmful to health than risky personal habits...
I recently saw a billboard for an employment service that said, "If you think cigarette smoking is bad for your health, try a dead-end job." This warning may not just be an advertising quip: public health research now tells us that lower socio-economic status may be more harmful to health than risky personal habits, such as smoking or eating junk food.
In 1967, British epidemiologist Michael Marmot began to study the relationship between poverty and health. He showed that each step up or down the socio-economic ladder correlates with increasing or decreasing health.
Over time, research linking health and wealth became more nuanced. It turns out that "what matters in determining mortality and health in a society is less the overall wealth of that society and more how evenly wealth is distributed. The more equally wealth is distributed, the better the health of that society," according to the editors of the April 20, 1996 issue of the British Medical Journal. In that issue, American epidemiologist George Kaplan and his colleagues showed that the disparity of income in each of the individual U.S. states, rather than the average income per state, predicted the death rate.(more from AlterNet)