There’s got to be a political metaphor to be made here: A technical hitch saw Oban’s community fireworks all released at the same time at Mossfield Stadium tonight, November 4 2011. The display,which usually lasts around half an hour, barely lasted a minute as a spectacular number of fireworks went off simultaneously. Chime in TMVers! Via.

Carlos Miller: One photographer was detained for photographing a subway turnstile and accused of being in cahoots with Al-Qaeda. Another photographer was detained for photographing a courthouse and investigated for terrorist activity. And another photographer was detained for photographing refineries at night and placed in the back of a police car for 45 minutes. Now all three men are suing the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department for unlawfully detaining them for the legal act of taking photos. The...

And you can bet safety is the more likely loser. AP says that one out of every five Americans lives in a community that pays a for-profit company to install and operate cameras that record traffic violations. That’s 700 communities in nearly half the states have for-profit deals. USA Today: Some contracts restrict police from doing things like lengthening the yellow signal and leave taxpayers holding the bag if the contracts are terminated early, says the report from the U.S. Public Interest...

Not that I would know. But Martin A. Sullivan, now he’s convincing: In the United Kingdom the government is led by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron. His government did not adopt stimulus. Instead it boldly enacted an economic program that cut spending and raised taxes. The chart below shows the results and compares it to the U.S. experience. After three and a half years, U.S. GDP is just about returning to the pre-recession peak. That’s awful. But it s far better than the U.K… Via.

Kathy Gill points to RSAnimate on the book I’m reading now, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World… In this new RSAnimate, renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist explains how our ‘divided brain’ has profoundly altered human behaviour, culture and society. Taken from a lecture given by Iain McGilchrist as part of the RSA’s free public events programme. View the full lecture.

The tagline on the new Air Force ad, “It’s not science fiction. It’s what we do every day.” Danger Room’s Spencer Ackerman, say what? [T]he C-17s swoop over a breaking bridge to evacuate some poor souls in the middle of an emergency. So far, so good. But then the C-17 engines rotate into a vertical position. (Nope.) The behemoth of a plane — which is 174 feet long and can weigh up to 585,000 lbs. — lands on the bridge without collapsing it further. (Would...

On The Media remembers a study last year finding that sometimes misinformed people become more convinced of their opinions even when given the facts: Mr. BRENDAN NYHAN (Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research, University of Michigan):… it’s threatening to us to admit that things we believe are wrong. And all of us, liberals and conservatives, you know, have some beliefs that aren’t true, and when we find that out, you know, it’s threatening to our beliefs and...

How far do they have to go to offend the American people’s sensibilities? You will remember that Texas ended the practice of last meals for death-row inmates. Now no lunch on weekends: Thousands of inmates in the Texas prison system have been eating fewer meals since April after officials stopped serving lunch on the weekends in some prisons as a way to cut food-service costs. About 23,000 inmates in 36 prisons are eating two meals a day on Saturdays and Sundays instead of three. A meal the...

He’s being docked 10 vacation days for violating departmental guidelines: The Internal Affairs Bureau reviewed the incident and found that Inspector Bologna “used pepper spray outside departmental guidelines,” said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman. He declined to elaborate. The inspector can accept the charges and plead guilty, or he can opt for a departmental trial. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly is the ultimate arbiter of punishment in such matters and has...

To be blunt,that number has never been, uh, higher: PRINCETON, NJ — A record-high 50% of Americans now say the use of marijuana should be made legal, up from 46% last year. Forty-six percent say marijuana use should remain illegal. When Gallup first asked about legalizing marijuana, in 1969, 12% of Americans favored it, while 84% were opposed. Support remained in the mid-20s in Gallup measures from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, but has crept up since, passing 30% in 2000 and 40% in 2009...

From Technology Review: Your car may soon be able to warn you if your blood sugar dips, alert you to high pollen counts, and remind you to take your medication. Ford demonstrated the new in-car technology—currently a research project—this week at the Wireless Health 2011 conference in La Jolla, California. Many carmakers see a big opportunity in adding new functionality to the computers built into many models. Some cars already use Internet connectivity to alert drivers to traffic tie-ups....

My hero: when i found out that jamey rodemeyer killed himself – i felt deeply troubled. but when i found out that jamey rodemeyer had made an it gets better video only months before taking his own life – i felt indescribable despair. i also made an it gets better video last year – in the wake of the senseless and tragic gay teen suicides that were sweeping the nation at the time. but in light of jamey’s death – it became clear to me in an instant that living a gay...

I’m disgusted: On the Bowery, on the second floor of an ancient flophouse, nine men pay less than $10 a night to sleep in cramped cubicles topped with chicken wire. Half the stalls in their shared bathroom are missing doors, and their halls are lined with spooky rows of empty cubicles whose last occupants either took off or died off. Directly above them, on the third and fourth floors, stylish young men and women pay $62 to $129 a night for a refined version of the gritty experience below....

Harvard Med Surgical Oncologist Ramzi Amri thinks so: I have done 1.5 years of research on the type of tumor that affected Steve Jobs and have some strong opinions on his case, not only as an admirer of his work, but also as a cancer researcher who has the impression that his disease course has been far from optimal. Let me cut to the chase: Mr. Jobs allegedly chose to undergo all sorts of alternative treatment options before opting for conventional medicine. This was, of course, a freedom he had...

Of natural causes, yesterday, at his home in Washington, DC. I was lucky enough to have interviewed Kameny nearly thirty years ago, and to have visited him in his home, while working on the film Before Stonewall. Together we dug through his collection of memorabilia. He showed me the State Department letter confirming that it “does not hire homosexuals and does not permit their employment” and his photos from picketing the White House in 1965. While the women wore skirts and the men suits and...

With their vote on a motion to proceed, the Senate avoids even a real debate on the jobs bill. The BBC: Forty-six Republican senators joined with two Democrats to filibuster the $447bn (£287bn) bill. Democratic support for the bill wavered this week, as several Democrats said they would vote for moving the bill forward, but against the bill itself. Republicans opposed the measure over its spending to stimulate the economy and its tax rise on millionaires. Joe Nocera today, in a column arguing that...

Happy Coming Out Day. Come Out. It’s good for you… “The more you’re in the closet, the worse for you,” says Robert Trivers, a Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University. “There is an immunological dimension to self-deception.” In his new book (out in the UK, Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others, and coming soon to America as The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life)...

President Obama: Michelle and I are saddened to learn of the passing of Steve Jobs. Steve was among the greatest of American innovators – brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it. By building one of the planet’s most successful companies from his garage, he exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity. By making computers personal and putting the internet in our pockets, he made the information revolution not only...

From On The Media: In February of last year, a group of Muslim students on the University of California Irvine campus disrupted a speech by Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the US. The university punished the students, but the “Irvine 11″ also faced criminal charges. A couple weeks back 10 of them were convicted of conspiracy and disturbance of a meeting. OTM spoke with both Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas, who explained why his office decided to prosecute, and...

Received wisdom (read, rumors and leaks) around today’s Apple event… A Sprint exclusive. $20B for 30B iPhones. If it really is a white label deal I just might switch (and sell my old iPhones for top dollar). A $99 iPhone? iPhone 4S or 5? I’m guessing both. An expansive Facebook deal and a three screen strategy. Phone, tablet, big screen (formerly known as “the TV”). Assistant, Apple’s evolution of Siri, the virtual Personal Assistant Software Apple bought last year....

Lincoln Caplan’s full review of The Collapse of American Criminal Justice By William Stuntz is an absolute must read. Caplan calls the book brave and contrarian, utopian and powerful. You will remember I quoted a snippet earlier in the week. It’s stuck with me; let’s go back for more. Caplan explains that Stuntz believed too much discretion has led to the misrule of law and a mistaken assertion of political power: The most compelling explanation for the different crime patterns...

A telling anecdote from Fred Wilson: With my phone in hand, I looked up at the young man helping me and said “can you make a photocopy of this page so I can take it home with me?” He looked straight at my phone and said “that has a camera in it, right?” I felt silly and chuckled. My friends who were with me laughed at me and the irony of the situation. I snapped a picture of the sheet of paper… The phone worked perfectly for that situation. The young man was right....

Set your DVRs. From the NYTimes review: Flappers in speakeasies and biddies beating temperance drums: hardly seems a recipe for modern-day relevance. Yet you can hear history talking directly to the Americans of 2011 all through “Prohibition,” an absorbing five-and-a-half-hour documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that runs for three nights, beginning on Sunday on PBS stations. Especially now, the story of America’s disastrous experiment with banning alcoholic beverages seems made for Santayana’s...

I’ll be in Atlanta this afternoon on a panel after the screening of my video, For Such A Time As This, at the 24th annual Out on Film Festival. The documentary short tells the story of out proud lesbian Baptist preacher, Genie Hargrove, who was ordained the Southern Baptist minister of her rural Georgia church in 2004. My partner, Doug Keith, and I interviewed Genie for StoryCorps last February. That interview (scroll down) became the basis of the video profile. In it, Genie tells the story...

“I don’t collect vinyl. I have a small collection. I’d say none of it is prized.” That’s Gregg Gillis speaking in episode 4 of Hulu’s, A Day in the Life, from documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock. The quote comes as a series of interviewers repeatedly and mistakenly ask the musician about his career as a DJ: I never play with DJs; I never really associated with DJ culture. I never came out of that. For six years, from 2000 to 2006, no one had ever referred to...