Socialism in America

A Russian immigrant's view.

Philip Townsend

Philip Townsend is a British photographer who photographed many British rock groups during the 1960s and 70s. He was the first to photograph the Rolling Stones at the request of their then manager Andrew Loog Oldham. These revealing shots from 1963 are on display at the Morrison Hotel Gallery website. (They are copyrighted preventing me from showing them here.)

Meanwhile, here's a photograph of the early Rolling Stones from another source. It is rare in that it shows them smiling. It must have been taken before their manager at the time Andrew Loog Oldham decided that the group members should not be photographed smiling, presumably to distinguish them from that other rock and roll band of nice non-threatening boys. (The Stones projected a bad boy image.) Subsequently, the Stones would not be photographed smiling until most recent times.

Tiger Nervous

"The day I'm not nervous is the day I quit."
-- Tiger Woods

"All I wanted..."

Read the article written by Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger III describing his experiences. Link

Chesley "Sully" Sullenburger

Interesting statements made on television by Chesley Sullenburger the pilot of the Airbus A320 airplane who emergency landed on Hudson River in New York on January 15.

He didn't pray.

"I imagine somebody in back was taking care of that for me," he said, referring to the panicked passengers and flight attendants in the plane's cabin. "My focus was so intensely on the landing, I thought of nothing else."

"The physiological reaction I had was strong and I had to force myself to use my training and force calm on the situation,"

"It was the worst, sickening, pit-of-your-stomach, falling-through-the-floor feeling I've ever felt in my life. I knew immediately it was very bad."

Afterwards.

"The first few nights were the worst. The second-guessing would come: It made sleep hard."

"One of the hardest things for me to do in this whole experience was to forgive myself for not having done something else, something better, something more complete,"

About being called a hero.

"I don't feel comfortable embracing it, but I don't want to deny it. I don't want to diminish their thankful feeling toward me. Something about this episode captured people's imagination. I think they want good news; they want to be hopeful again, and if I can help in that way, I will."

Abraham Verghese

Read this article about a doctor turned a fiction writer, Abraham Verghese.

Robert B. Zajonc

Excerpts from an obituary in this morning's newspaper.

Robert B. Zajonc, a Stanford University professor who drew on his harrowing boyhood experience as a Polish refugee fleeing the Nazis during World War II to become an expert on human behavior and a founding father in the field of modern social psychology, has died.

[...]

Born in 1923 in Poland, he and his parents fled to Warsaw from their small hometown after the Nazi invasion. In 1939, the large apartment building where they were living was bombed. The 16-year-old boy woke up in a hospital, both legs broken, to learn that he was the only survivor of the blast.

He was later rounded up by Nazi troops and sent to a labor camp, where he made bales of hay. One night in 1942, he and another youth escaped the camp and spent the next three months on the run to France - hiding during the day, walking at night. In France, he was caught by Nazis and sent to a political prison. After connecting with the French resistance, in 1943 he escaped to England where he joined the U.S. Army, working as a translator. He eventually became fluent in seven languages.

When the war ended, he worked as a translator for the U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Paris. He relocated to New York in 1948 and worked as a statistician for American Express. A year later he was admitted to the University of Michigan, where he earned his bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees. There he taught until 1994.

Professor Zajonc helped shape the post-World War II science of social psychology.

[...]

One of Professor Zajonc's early important studies led him to the conclusion that when someone else is present, one's performance is enhanced if engaged in a simple or well-known task. If, on the other hand, the task is difficult or unfamiliar, the presence of another person will adversely impact one's performance.

As part of that research conducted over three years, Professor Zajonc worked with cockroaches from Central America. A cockroach would run a simple maze faster if another cockroach were present. But if the maze was complex, or if the cockroach was alone, it would run the maze slower.