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Posted on August 29th, 2007 by Myk.
Categories: Travel & Leisure, Consumer Products, Business & Finance.
There is considerable confusion as to why Amex is so good and what sort of travel perks can be enjoyed by Amex card holders. We at VM figure we figure we would write a quick note on the the Platinum Amex card and its advantages for global nomads:
Back in April, we wrote about Priority Pass, a company that gets you into airline travel clubs all over the world–at least 500 of them we heard. There are about 1.5 million members worldwide and costs $399 for an unlimited yearly membership with a couple of other price plans that for people who travel less. Well, Amex partners with Priority Pass for all Platinum and Blamex members to get them automatic membership–so that’s one perk.
Another is that when you use a Platinum to buy any domestic roundtrip ticket through Amex Travel Services for $300 or more (base fare), you get another one complimentary. This can be done up to 4 times per year. Basic math shows that this can save you at least $1200 in the worst case. SO, the cost of the Platinum ($450) can mostly be made up with just one such purchase. A similar benefit exists to Europe however it’s for biz/first class and can only be used once per year.
There are obviously other cool benefits to Amexes but these are real and practical that make the cost of the card worthwhile.
Oh, and one more hott tip on credit cards in general–and this one is really cool. On the back, instead of signing your signature, write “see i.d.” That way, cashiers will ask to see identification before swiping your card, potentially decreasing the risk of credit card fraud.
Posted on August 28th, 2007 by Myk.
Categories: Philosophy & Spirituality.
From the Zaadz newsletter, one of my favorite quotes from Carlos Castaneda, one of my favorite mystics:
We talk to ourselves incessantly about our world. In fact we maintain our world with our internal talk. And whenever we finish talking to ourselves about ourselves and our world, the world is always as it should be. We renew it, we rekindle it with life, we uphold it with our internal talk. Not only that, but we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die. A warrior is aware of this and strives to stop his internal talk.
OK, so what does that mean? It means that our personalities, our egos, speak to us constantly, reminding us who we are. This isn’t obviously negative, though in many spiritual schools, it is believed that this internal talk is what prohibits our connection to the universe, to God. Hence meditation. Castaneda makes his point brilliantly and relevantly when he writes that our talk makes us repeat the same choices over and over. Habits, decisions, and situations in our lives are reinforced because we (our egos) keep repeating the same messages. If they are good messages, you are in luck although you should beware of stagnant thought. If they are negative or limiting or wrong, you need to understand this as well. You may think that I sound like a Chinese fortune cookie, but humor me. If you want to manifest change in your life, reread this passage, and think about it makes you feel. I’m curious if the following message resonates with our readers–It is our internal talk that causes us so much trouble.
Posted on August 27th, 2007 by Phil.
Categories: Media & Entertainment, Travel & Leisure, Philosophy & Spirituality, Food & Wine, History & Politics, Philanthropy & Environment, Science & Technology, Arts & Literature, Sports & Health, Humor & Pop Culture, Coming Events.
Today, at 12:00 midnight, Burning Man opened its gates. The next 8 days will mark the peak of the year for many people, as Black Rock City one again rises like a phoenix from the ashes. For the week that it exists, the Black Rock City (the remote city that is Burning Man) is Nevada’s fourth largest city. 40,000 inhabitants gather in the middle of a dry lakebed to create something truly unique. A shining jewel on America’s tarnished soul. Once the event is over, the entire city vanishes without a trace, but its spirit remains.
VM has had no shortage of posts about this subject, and I assure you that there will be more to come. I don’t know what to expect from this year’s event, as each one is its own journey. Every year I have learned something new about myself, about life, and about the universe in which we exist. What lessons await me in the middle of the desert this year, only time will tell.
One thing is certain though, this year our group’s level of preparation far exceeds that of years past. Gone are the days of sleeping in the back of my car, gone are the days of sleeping in a small tent, gone are the days of sleeping in a large tent – welcome is the era of the RV. Ahh, the recreational vehicle… A staple of red-blooded American travel. A bastion of air conditioning, living space you can stand and walk around in, and a refuge from dust storms. Fuck yeah man. Other changes form years past include a huge camp of 150 people, complete with a bar, a DJ booth and giant dance floor, camp showers, a full kitchen, and our own private toilets. The lap of desert luxury. My friends joining me for their first time out there are getting spoiled.
Right now we are passing through Reno, NV, about to hit the road out east. Every other car is full of burners, and the energy is building. Wish us luck, and we’ll see you on the other side.
Posted on August 26th, 2007 by Phil.
Categories: Philosophy & Spirituality, Sports & Health.
At this point in time, virtually everyone knows about yoga, and can tell you at least a few words from the yoga vernacular, or relate some yoga experiences that they have had. For that one in a million reader who is not as familiar, yoga is most easily defined as a group of ancient spiritual practices originating in India which are believed to lead to enhanced physical and mental health, and a profoundly spiritual insight into the nature of existence. Outside India, Yoga is mostly associated with the practice of asanas, or postures, of Hatha Yoga as a form of exercise (although it has influenced the entire dharmic religions family and other spiritual practices throughout the world). Major branches of Yoga include: Hatha Yoga, Karma Yoga, Jnana Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, and Raja Yoga. More familiar yoga terms to many westerners would include Vinyasa Yoga (think flow) and the Bikram Yoga (think hot and sweaty).
For some, yoga is a way of life, and a pathway both personal enlightenment and a deeper spiritual connection with the universe. For many, it is simply a means to improve one’s health and state of mind. Well, for those of us more causal practitioners, there is some good news out there. A systematic review to assess the efficacy of mind-body therapies (MBT), such as meditation, yoga and guided imagery in the treatment of hypertension, has shown that such complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) approaches significantly reduce systolic and diastolic blood pressures. The review and synthesis of 12 published randomized trials also showed that yoga was the most effective among the three therapies studied in reducing hypertension. For anyone that does yoga, this is not exactly a groundbreaking discovery, but it’s still nice to hear.
The researchers involved in the study reviewed randomized, controlled trials comparing mind-body techniques alone or in combination with conventional treatment, to conventional treatment alone, to intervention/waiting list control. It was found that yoga therapies demonstrated results of the greatest magnitude, with mean systolic BP reductions of 19.07 mm Hg and diastolic BP reductions of 13.13 mm Hg.
”This review shows that there is some high quality scientific literature supporting the use of mind-body therapies as a treatment for hypertension, and the magnitude of effect is clinically significant,” says lead author of the study, Dr. Ather Ali of the Prevention Research Center, School of Medicine, Yale University. Perhaps we are now one step closer to yoga being accepted by the healthcare community as a whole.
Posted on August 24th, 2007 by Phil.
Categories: Coming Events.
For all of you heading out to Burning Man this year, those of us at VM want to make it that much easier to find us out on the playa. Ergo, the above displayed map. The street running up the right side is 4:30, up the left is 4:00, across the bottom is Coral Reef, and across the top is Desert. The highlighted box on the left side is the RV that Myk and I will be calling home. Stop by to say hi, grab a cocktail, grab Myk’s perfectly rounded buttocks, whatever your heart desires… Leave us a note if nobody’s home. The other highlighted area is where we’ll have a message board for the RLD camp in general.
If you have any trouble viewing the image above, a larger version can be found at:
http://img207.imageshack.us/my.php?image=rldcamplayout2007ko6.jpg
Hope everyone going has a great burn, and we’re very much looking forward to seeing your beautiful faces out on the playa. If you can’t make it this year, you’ll be in our thoughts and hearts.
Posted on August 24th, 2007 by Myk.
Categories: Travel & Leisure, Consumer Products, Philanthropy & Environment, Science & Technology.
We like nice things. Porsches qualify as nice things. We also like green things. So logically green Porsches would be something that we could enjoy. Recently, Porsche unveiled a plan for a Cayenne hybrid that, in testing, gets about 24.4 miles per gallon compared with 17.9 miles per gallon for a conventional Cayenne.
Even cooler, is a car I’ve just become acquainted with, the Tesla. It is to other electric cars what a bottle of Silver Oak is to 2 Buck Chuck. AND you can drive the hell out of a Tesla–it accelerates faster than a 911 Porsche and can go 200 miles on a single charge at $.02 cents a mile. How’z that for your tree hugging tendencies?
And what about current cars like the Toyota Prius? Well, chairman of Tesla and former Paypal Founder Elon Musk is convinced that plenty of customers, like him, will want something faster or flashier than a Prius. He currently drives a Porsche and his wife drives a 14-mpg Maserati sedan. “I just can’t get into the Prius,” Musk says. Damn right! Personally, although Phil may disagree, Priuses are for serious wimps.
According to Newsweek, the waitlist for the $98,000 electric sports car, which starts coming off the assembly line in October includes George Clooney, Gov. Schwarzy, and Google Inc. founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
So here’s to cars that don’t need to overcompensate. Looks like my next car might have to be a Tesla…
Posted on August 23rd, 2007 by Phil.
Categories: Consumer Products, Science & Technology, Sports & Health.
Jonathan Kuniholm’s right arm terminates in a carbon-fiber sleeve trailing cables connected to a PC. He has no right hand, unless you count the virtual one on a display in front of him. The CGI hand, programmed to look like silvery stainless steel, moves through a sequence of motions: spherical grasp, cylindrical grasp, thumb to forefinger — all in response to signals from Kuniholm’s muscles picked up by electrodes in the sleeve. Part man, part machine, part virtual.
Kuniholm and his fellow engineers at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, or APL, are at work on the most ambitious prosthetics project in history. They seek the field’s holy grail… to build an artificial human arm that acts, looks and feels to its user like his native arm, and to do it with astonishing speed by the end of 2009. After all, Luke Skywalker got one, so why shouldn’t you.
To get there from here, they’ll have to achieve major breakthroughs in neurological control systems and robotics. A lot of the work involves physically rerouting sensory nerves in unaffected parts of the amputee’s body to give the wearer the ability to use their mind to direct movements in an artificial limb, as well as to give some degree of tactile feedback to the wearer. To do all of this, the team has called on engineers at 28 companies and research institutions in six countries to help. If it works, they hope to create a single, seamless piece, that a user can don in the morning and use to accomplish daily tasks like tying his shoes, typing, throwing a ball, even playing a piano, with hardly a thought. If it doesn’t work, Captain Hook can still feel cool with what he’s got.
Most research in this line has been to benefit soldiers injured in war, and much of the basic technologies used today still date back to World War I. The current generation of myoelectric arms read muscle signals from electrodes on the skin, and are actually slower, heavier and more difficult to operate than the old-school system of physically implanted hooks. Either way, our recommendation at VM is to keep your biological arms for the time being. We’ll let you know when we advise an upgrade to bionic limbs.
Posted on August 21st, 2007 by Phil.
Categories: Media & Entertainment, Travel & Leisure, Consumer Products, Science & Technology.
Think Star-Trek or Deep Space Nine, when the intrepid explorers encounter varied life forms and use a stylish little hand-held device to communicate with the other-worldly beings. Now step that down a notch and imagine one that could simply let all of us humans talk to one another. Well, we’re getting closer…
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers are evaluating prototype, real-time, two-way translation systems. As one might expect, the program is being sponsored by the US military, and is initially being designed solely for tactical use. The current research efforts focus exclusively on translating between English and Iraqi Arabic. From July 16 to 20, NIST ran a series of laboratory and outdoor evaluation tests on prototype systems with English-speaking U.S. Marines and Iraqi Arabic speakers at its Gaithersburg, MD. campus. In each of the exercises, NIST measured system capabilities in speech recognition, machine translation, noise robustness, user interface design and efficient performance on limited hardware platforms. The results indicate that they’re making good progress, but still have a ways to go. I’d imagine that they’ll have the system pretty well nailed down and working nicely right around the time when the US no longer has a significant military presence in Iraq. After all, that would be about on par with efficiency yielded by most dollars spent on US military contracts - though in contrast, this project may have some useful applications for the rest of us.
There’s nothing that can compare to learning another language, and actually conversing with someone directly in their native tongue, and I doubt there ever will be. But still, I’d have to say that if a palm sized universal translator existed, I’d want one. Not too great for having a romantic personal conversation with a beautiful foreigner perhaps, but probably handy when your truck breaks down eastern Mongolia. What would be the ramifications of having such translators is the interesting question. Would people lose their interest in learning other languages? Would the world’s cultures get further apart, or more integrated? I guess like with many technologies, its how people decide to use them that makes all the difference. Regardless, I think we’re still a good ways away on this puppy coming to market, so don’t give up on your Spanish lessons yet.
Posted on August 19th, 2007 by Phil.
Categories: History & Politics, Science & Technology.
Secretary Donald Winter has made a habit of telling military audiences exactly what they don’t want to hear. A few months back, he told a bunch of defense contractors that they were robbing the Pentagon blind and should be ashamed of themselves. More recently, at a conference held by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), he rocked the boat again by taking the position that America’s nifty spy-tech innovations may not make a damn bit of difference in the so-called “War Against Terror”, and that we don’t have the edge we think we do.
“There’s a tendency to view Islamists as backwards barbarians”, Winter said. This image is “misleading and very dangerous.” The real terrorist enemies we face are more tech savvy than people think, and most are not just another “evildoer in a cave.” Americans think of themselves as the most technologically advanced in the world. US film audiences revel is watching characters like US military trained Jason Bourne dominate his adversaries with MacGyver meets Real Genius tech skills.
In reality, the global growth in commercial computing power has eroded America’s Cold War technical edge. The same, or even better, gear now gets out to kids worldwide long before soldiers ever see it. The playing field has been somewhat leveled. Tech innovations are more likely to come from other regions of the world, closer to terrorist hubs, and militant extremists are becoming much more resourceful. Look at how Iraqi insurgents have utilized the Internet to recruit, train, and spread propaganda. They are faster to adapt to new paradigms, and the independent, network-like “command and control” structures that these guys are using, as compared to our old military hierarchies, are highly effective. In short, its just another of many examples demonstrating the need to America to revisit its defense and intelligence strategies. Believe it or not, times have changed – as they do.
At the end of his speech, as Winter headed off-stage, DARPA chief Tony Tether stopped him, telling Winter, “I don’t know if I want to thank you for that sobering talk or not.” Denial… it ain’t just a river in Egypt.
Posted on August 17th, 2007 by Phil.
Categories: Sports & Health, Humor & Pop Culture.
Yesterday I was drawn into a long but fascinating conversation with a rather interesting fellow. I had been lounging by the pool in South Beach, doing my usual mid-August training to prepare for the prelims of the International Tanning Circuit (Nordic Men’s Division). The South Florida sun this time of year is perfect for pre-season work - gives a good base - but I digress. Anyway, this chap was a former pro football player, and was regaling me with tales of playing with the greats, and partying with the team in Miami, back in the day. What was interesting to me was how massive drug use was such a consistent theme, both on and off the field. I was intrigued. To research the issue further, I decided to consult my favorite sports blog - No Mas. And lo and behold, what do I find but an ‘Illustrated History of Recreational Drugs and Sports’. Great stuff. Take a look below, and re-live some memories. Play ball!
1970 - Jim Bouton’s book, Ball Four, is published, exposing the public to the prevalence of drug use amongst professional athletes.
1970 - Pittsburgh Pirates’ pitcher Dock Ellis throws a no-hitter will tripping on LSD.
“The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes, sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I tried to stare the hitter down and throw while I was looking at him. I chewed my gum until it turned to powder. They say I had about three to four fielding chances. I remember diving out of the way of a ball I thought was a line drive. I jumped, but the ball wasn’t hit hard and never reached me.”
1970’s - “Sweet” Lou Johnson sells 1965 World Series ring to cocaine dealer for $500.
1971 - MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn announces a long-term Drug Education and Prevention Program. According to the Program: “…unprescribed possession and distribution of amphetamines and barbiturates (including greenies) is a violation of federal and states laws. Discipline will be considered by the Commissioner’s Office in cases of illegal involvement. Such matters will be handled on a case by case basis.”
1972 - Cy Young winner Denny McClain is charged with racketeering and cocaine possession with intent to distribute.
1985- Denny McClain was found guilty of federal charges involving racketeering, extortion and narcotics and sentenced to 23 years before the convictions are overturned.
1996- Denny McClain is convicted of conspiracy, theft, money laundering, and mail fraud. He is sentenced to eight years in Federal Prison.
1976 -1967 MVP Orlando “Baby Bull” Cepeda is caught claiming baggage containing 150 pounds of marijuana in a San Juan, PR. Cepeda spends 10 months in a Florida prison. He goes on to become a practicing Buddhist and to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
1978 - New York Ranger Don Murdoch is arrested for possession of cocaine. He is suspended for the1978-79 season but reinstated after 40 regular-season games.
1980 - Texas Rangers pitcher Ferguson Jenkins is suspended by Major League Baseball after he is arrested with cocaine, hashish, and marijuana, and convicted of narcotics possession in Canada. The Player’s Union files a grievance and the suspension is lifted.
1981 - Dr. Patrick A. Mazza, a former Phillies organization doctor, is cleared of criminal charges that he improperly prescribed amphetamine pills to Tim McCarver, Steve Carlton, Pete Rose, Larry Christenson, Larry Bowa and his wife, and the wife of Greg Luzinski. Mazza has his medical license suspended for one year.
1981 - “Confessions of a Cocaine Cowboy” by Dallas Cowboys Pro-Bowl linebacker Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson appears in the December issue of Playboy.
1983 - Henderson is arrested and charged with sexual assault and false imprisonment after he admits smoking crack with two teenagers in his apartment. He serves 28 months in prison.
1982 - When N.L. East favorite Montreal Expos finish third, team president John McHale blames cocaine: ‘’We felt we should’ve won in ‘82. When we all woke up to what was going on, we found there were at least eight players on our club who were into this thing.” Rookie All-Star Tim Raines, the only user publicly identified says, ‘’I had it in little gram bottles that I kept in my pocket…when I carried it in my pocket, I’d go in head first.’’
