Positive Sociology

How much money do wounded veterans receive from the VA system?  Not much, according to a Washington Post piece . The Center for Investigative Reporting released a telling infographic today that breaks down how much money veterans are eligible for based on the severity of their injuries.  This chart is eye-opening and is a painful reminder of how much the US neglects wounded veterans.   Vets deserve better Here are some highlights: If you lose a hand or become deaf from combat, you are eligible for a whopping $100 extra per month; if you lose both legs, you can get between $1,000 - $1,300 dollars in compensation; and if you are paralyzed, you are eligible for $2,100 in extra funds each month.  These are shameful figures, but the VA system isn't to blame here.  If anything, these figures point to the enormous financial strains that the VA system is under.  Nevertheless, this chart should be a huge stain on our public conscience. While reading this ...

Renzo Gracie and some of his friends have been arrested for their role in a street fight. This isn't the first time that Renzo Gracie (an MMA legend and BJJ black belt) has made the news for street fighting.  Many of you might remember that Gracie recently live tweeted while beating and stalking two guys who tried to mug him in NYC. Renzo Gracie is the wrong person to mug Not surprisingly, this event elicited mixed responses from the blogosphere and martial arts community.   Some people praised Renzo, saying that he was like a modern day Batman taking down thugs on the street; others were skeptical and said that Renzo acted like a thug, stalking his prey, and then celebrating it on Twitter. Someone shot a video of his most recent altercation, but the video leaves much to the imagination.  As viewers we don't get to see who started what, or how the altercation even unfolded.  Instead, we are treated to the poster's comments about how Renzo is an MMA legen...

Dr. Dre just became the richest person in Hip Hop. That is crazy.  The mastermind behind N.W.A.'s beat-making and the guy responsible for launching the careers of Snoop, Eminem, 50 Cent, and most recently Kendrick Lamar was estimated at a worth of $550 billion dollars. According to Forbes, Dre's net worth was only second to P.Diddy's in Hip Hop, who is reportedly worth $700 billion dollars. But, scratch that. Earlier this week, Dre sold his "Beats" brand to Apple for a reported 3.2 billion dollars!  After taxes, Dre is estimated to be worth $800 million , making him the wealthiest Hip Hop entrepreneur. Dre in the lab This news has coincided with my own Dr. Dre renaissance.  I've been knee deep in writing this week and have been on a Dr. Dre binge. From well-established hits to leaked singles from his long anticipated "Detox" album, I've been enjoying the simple and hypnotic sounds of Dre's production style.  His style might not w...

Who has the largest vocab in Hip Hop? Matt Daniels, a New York designer/coder/scientist, has published a cool infographic  that appears to answer this age old question.  His chart compares 85 Hip Hop artists and the unique words that appear in their music.  He selected the first 35,000 lyrics in an artist's history and compared them against one another.  I wonder how this list might look if he developed some sort of unique words per song average?  We could think of this figure like a baseball player's batting average of a basketball player's field goal percentage.  These figures might help account for style shifts across an emcee's career and give us a more accurate representation of how many unique words emcees use in their music. Is this list really about vocab? And if we did this, speed and cadence might begin to complicate his findings. For instance, the Top 10 or so are dominated by East Coast artists, who tend to have a faster delivery than ...