Your Evening Sift

I saw "Up In The Air" today and agree with SteveBM from Blind Mind that it's a keeper. Good flick. Here's your things-are-starting-to-slow-down-for-New-Years Hump Day evening Sift...

A- Eater Miami finishes their year-end survey of "friends, industry types, bloggers, and readers" with a flourish of posts that you can best access by going to the main URL.

B- Rakontur thinks that Luther Campbell should be coaching the 'Canes.

We nominate Uncle Luke for a coaching job at The U. He has the passion and swagger to inspire, the familiarity with local talent to recruit, and the coaching experience to lead the team to victory.

C- AAA and Budweiser are teaming up and providing free rides for folks who have had a bit too much to drink on New Year's Eve, according to The South Florida Traveler.

D- A [Florida?] blogger is hit with a subpoena from the Department of Homeland Security, according to Random Pixels.

E- What did a few Miami-based artists give or receive as presents this year? Artlurker tells us.

F- Mojito reviews are back at Miamism! This week they visit the newly-opened Balan's.

G- Bark Bark Woof Woof has some thoughts on the Obama Administration's response to the underwear bomber.

The Obama administration has a lot to answer for. They're the ones in charge, and they are the grown-ups now. As tempting as it may be, it's not going to make travel any safer if we keep reminding ourselves that the Department of Homeland Security has been without a leader because a right-wing senator is holding up the confirmation, or that some of the people who trained Mr. Abdulmutallab were released from Gitmo in November 2007 to attend "art therapy rehabilitation program" in Saudi Arabia, or that it was both the Dutch and the Nigerian authorities who allowed him to get on the plane in the first place.

H- Incertus discusses the affect that technology is having on all of our lives and, specifically, theirs.

In other words, just like so many others, my focus has decreased beneath the length of a tweet, and I've been sucked into the vortex of modern life in which tasks whirl about at the ends of my attention and the end of my every rope is frayed.

Because it's changing my life, I decided to do some research on the subject. It took me a while though, because I did it while doing 20 other things. ;) I've discovered that, contrary to popular wisdom, younger people who multi-task by habit are not "better at" it, not even at Stanford, and that by making ourselves so distracted we're increasing our chances of death. There's more: frequent multitasking so stresses the body it makes us age faster by pumping us full of cortisol, a stress hormone. Cortisol also makes us gain weight. And when we do two or more things at the same time (or try to) we're less productive and the work gets done less well. Multitasking even shifts tasks to a part of the brain that doesn't retain memory, meaning you'll go through your work like an Ambien-amnestic, waking to discover you have no idea what you've read or done. It's all a big clusterfuck of best intentions gone horribly awry: as forgetting was brought to us by writing, all this was brought to us by technology too.

H- The Reid Report compares the underwear bomber to the shoe bomber.

When they’re not using the terror plot to raise money, or licking their chops in partisan glee over the potential death of airline passengers, or dreaming about Jack Bauer-style torture for the suspect, right wingers are acting fit to be tied over the Obama administration’s approach to Abdulmullatab, but they were damned near casual about the Bush administration’s response to Richard Reid. They’d also like to implement new airline rules that profile anyone with a name like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Funny, they’ve yet to propose profiling people named “Reid.”

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