Bmi, Britain’s third largest airline, will fly near-empty “ghost flights” in order to keep valuable take-off and landing slots at Heathrow.

The company admitted it would continue flights, despite an expected slump in passenger numbers, in order to avoid losing the multimillion-pound slots.

Government “use-it-or-lose-it” rules mean airlines must use 80 per cent of their scheduled slots, or forfeit them.

The rise in fuel prices and an expected slump in passengers after the summer break will force many airlines to cancel flights. However, bmi said it will go to extreme lengths to ensure it does not lose any of its coveted slots.

{ Telegraph | Continue reading }

related { A federal court jury in San Francisco awarded more than $1.2 million in damages Thursday to a former American Airlines flight attendant who said the airline concocted reasons to fire her after she complained about an assault by a passenger. | San Francisco Chronicle | Continue reading }

Modern movies begin here, with Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” in 1960. No debut film since “Citizen Kane” in 1942 has been as influential. It is dutifully repeated that Godard’s technique of “jump cuts” is the great breakthrough, but startling as they were, they were actually an afterthought, and what is most revolutionary about the movie is its headlong pacing, its cool detachment, its dismissal of authority, and the way its narcissistic young heroes are obsessed with themselves and oblivious to the larger society. (…)

The credits for “Breathless” are a New Wave roll call, including not only Godard’s direction but an original story by Francois Truffaut (Godard famously wrote each day’s shooting script in the morning). Claude Chabrol is production designer and technical adviser. (…)

Godard’s key collaborator on the film was the cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who worked with him many times, notably on “Weekend” (1967). It was only Coutard’s fourth film, and his methods became legend: How when they could not afford tracks for a tracking shot, he held the camera and had himself pushed in a wheelchair. How he achieved a grainy look that influenced many other fiction films that wanted to seem realistic. How he scorned fancy lighting. How he used hand-held techniques even before lightweight cameras were available. How he timed one shot of Belmondo so that the streetlights on the Champs Elysses came on behind him. There is a lovely backlit shot of Belmondo in bed and Seberg sitting beside the bed, both smoking, the light from the window enveloping them in a cloud. (…)

In this scene and throughout the film, Godard uses jump cuts–cuts within continuous movement or dialogue, with no attempt made to make them match. The technique “was a little more accidental than political,” writes the Australian critic Jonathan Dawson. The finished film was 30 minutes too long, and “rather than cut out whole scenes or sequences, Godard elected to trim within the scene, creating the jagged cutting style still so beloved of action filmmakers. Godard just went at the film with the scissors, cutting out anything he thought boring.”

{ Roger Ebert | Continue reading }

What psychology experiment would you love to carry out if neither ethics nor practical reality stood in your way? (…)

I would collect all newborn babies and randomly reassign them to new parents. I’m confident that we will confirm the 50-0-50 rule: Adult personality is roughly 50% genetic, 0% how they are raised by their parents, and 50% socialization outside the family by peers and friends. I think we will discover that within a broad range, it doesn’t really matter how parents raise their children. Parents are enormously important for children, not because they raise them, but because they give them their genes.


-Satoshi Kanazawa (The Scientific Fundamentalist) is an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics.

………………………………………………………………………………………

Mr. Kanazawa,

As an evolutionary psychologist you clearly have little to no experience working with real live human beings. (…)

Do you really believe that a kid raised in a happy, healthy and loving home will turn out the same as a kid raised in an angry, hatefull and abusive home? If so you must not have kids of your own. (…)

-Tony Malinda

{ Psychology Today | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Lester’s Petulia, 1968 }

{ Ashley Macknica at L’Asso, NYC }

Ask any wine distributor or retailer and you will find that price is the critical factor in retail wine sales. Although wine enthusiasts like to think of themselves in complicated ways — favoring red versus white wine, old world versus new world, merlot versus pinot noir, fruit bomb versus barrique reserve — the dirty little secret of wine retailing is that price is the key to most wine buying decisions. When push comes to shove, buyers are really looking for an $8 wine or a $10 wine and and make their purchases within a relatively narrow price range, regardless of other factors.

The wine aisle in your grocery store is probably organized this way. (…) The wines you have come to buy are probably on the shelf just below your natural eye level, so that you cannot help but see those special occasion wines just above them (and the higher priced wines above them on the top shelf). Cheaper wines are down below, near the floor, so that you have to stoop down to choose them.

The physical act of taking the wine from the shelf mirrors the psychological choice you make — reach up for better (more expensive) wines, stoop down for the cheaper products. (…) Studies suggest that people establish a wine price comfort zone (and corresponding wine shelf) and stay there, moving up a rank for special occasions and down a shelf for parties and other higher-volume purchases.

{ American Association of Wine Economists | Continue reading }

{ Do you want to open a restaurant? Well, you are going to need a good concept. | Ideas by Chuck | Continue reading | via Gawker }

{ Anti-terrorism exercises in China | Boston.com | more }

{ Absolut Vodka ad, NYC | bekanyenow.com redirects to absolut.com }

{ Concrete washbasin shaped as a fossil | HighTech | via Trendir }

related { Japanese onomatopoeia }

{ msnbc }

My primary life study has been about love. Second comes economics, so here, in the form of a few rules, is a little amalgam of the two fields: the economics of love.

In general, and with rare exceptions, the returns in love situations are roughly proportional to the amount of time and devotion invested. The amount of love you get from an investment in love is correlated, if only roughly, to the amount of yourself you invest in the relationship.

If you invest caring, patience and unselfishness, you get those things back. (This assumes, of course, that you are having a relationship with someone who loves you, and not a one-sided love affair with someone who isn’t interested.)

High-quality bonds consistently yield more return than junk, and so it is with high-quality love. As for the returns on bonds, I know that my comment will come as a surprise to people who have been brainwashed into thinking that junk bonds are free money. They aren’t. The data from the maven of bond research, W. Braddock Hickman, shows that junk debt outperforms high quality only in rare situations, because of the default risk.

In love, the data is even clearer. Stay with high-quality human beings. And once you find that you are in a junk relationship, sell immediately. Junk situations can look appealing and seductive, but junk is junk. Be wary of it unless you control the market.

{ Ben Stein/NY Times | Continue reading }

{ William Torres is escorted by Allentown Police from the police station to the jail. | The Morning Call }