[Whoops, backlog from over the weekend. -L]
8/19, 10am:
- Mission Accomplished
- [Hullabaloo - digby]
It was very moving watching the US troop exodus TV show yesterday. Except for all the troops and contractors left inside the country you would have thought that the whole expensive mess was over. [...]
Makes you want to run into the street and kiss a random sailor doesn’t it?
*Also to those who are kvetching that we aren’t having homecoming parades and patting Obama on the back for ending the war, Miss Manners says it’s unseemly for a country to celebrate the end of its illegal invasion of another country. It’s best to keep such things understated.
- Trusting Souls Excel At Spotting Liars
- [Scientific American]
When you think of someone who’s trusting, you may assume that they’re gullible. But that’s not necessarily true–a fact that your Pollyanna pal might be in a good position to point out. Because people who have faith in their fellow human beings are actually good at spotting lies…
- Probabilistic processing: the analogue computer waits in the wings
- 8/17, noon:
- Deranged: American Family Radio’s Bryan Fischer: ‘No More Mosques, Period.’
- [Pandagon - Pam Spaulding]
- BP Oil Spill Fund to Go Into Operation on Aug. 23, Receives Claims From All 50 States
- [Mass Tort Litigation Blog]
8/19, 8am:
- Giant star that should have been a black hole became something even stranger
- [io9 - Alasdair Wilkins]
A star went supernova with more than twice the mass needed to ultimately collapse into a black hole. But something weirder happened – the star became a magnetar, an asteroid-sized star with the most powerful magnetic field in the universe…
- The U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Gender Gap in Earnings
- [Echidne of the Snakes]
…All this means that Mr. Peck compares two undefined concepts and then declares a conclusion which proper research cannot substantiate. The whole thing is then posted on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce website. Nice, eh?
Still, discussing Mr. Peck’s ideas offers us one useful reminder: Young women should get proper training on what it means to pick a certain career path in the longer run, not only in terms of job satisfaction or flexibility but also in terms of later earnings and retirement income. Young women should be taught how to negotiate a good salary, and they should also be taught how to apply for promotions and raises and how to make sure that their hard work is properly noted by the powers that be.
[And young men should be taught to consider the effects that their career choices may have on their future ability to be involved as parents. -L]
- EpicWin Turns Your To-Do List into a Role-Playing Game, Available Now
- [Lifehacker - Adam Pash]
iPhone: If playing a game wins out over crossing items off your to-do list every time, consider EpicWin, a new iPhone app that turns your to-do list into a full-on role-playing game, complete with to-do driven XP and level ups…
[This alone might be worth the cost of an iPhone. For some of us, anyway. -L]
8/18, 4pm:
- Female pay ‘unequal’ for 57 years
- [BBC News]Women managers face a wait of more than 50 years for their salaries to equal their male colleagues, a study says.
- Atom images raise quantum computer hopes
- [New Scientist]Silicon-beating quantum computers are a step closer now that two teams have imaged ultracold atom in a grid
- Evolution Surprise: Bacteria Have “Noses,” Can Smell
- [National Geographic News]The single-celled organisms can detect the aroma of ammonia, says a new study that suggests the sense of smell evolved earlier than thought.
- The next best thing to landscape photography on other planets
- [io9 - Charlie Jane Anders]Photographer Allison Davies hasn’t yet been able to leave Earth for other biospheres. But the photographer has made it to some of Earth’s most otherworldly locations, in between her assignments as an undercover investigator for a private detective firm…
- A clone who can live for 20,000 years
- [io9 - Annalee Newitz]One of the great mysteries of plant biology is a seemingly immortal tree called the Trembling Aspen (Populus tremuloides), which reproduces by growing clones from its root system. A new study suggests that the trees live for 20,000 years…
- US Chamber: Equal Pay “A Fetish for Money,” Women Should “Choose the Right Partner at Home”
- [Firedoglake - Michael Whitney]The US Chamber of Commerce has apparently spent too much time watching Mad Men: in a blog post this morning, Chamber blogger Brad Peck called women’s fight for pay equity to be nothing more than a “fetish for money,” and said women complaining about their pay should focus instead on “choosing the right partner at home.” [...]
- Federal Judges’ Treatment of Coerced Statements in Gitmo Cases
- [Constitutional Law Prof Blog]Federal district court judges have ruled against the government in 8 of 15 Guantanamo detainees’ habeas cases because of interrogations of detainees and witnesses under “questionable circumstances,” ProPublica reports in its latest installment in its ongoing investigation of detention at…
8/17, 8am:
- Let me present you
- [I Can Has Cheezburger]
- The mountains of Titan are formed by the moon slowly shrinking
- [io9 - Alasdair Wilkins]
The mountains on Saturn’s moon Titan defy easy explanation, but readings from the Cassini probe offer a fascinating new possibility: Titan is slowly releasing heat and shriveling up, causing mountains to form on its surface like wrinkles on a raisin…
- Jupiter became king of the planets by devouring a "Super Earth"
- [io9 - Alasdair Wilkins]
Jupiter became the solar system’s biggest planet by consuming its chief rival, a massive rocky planet ten times bigger than Earth. New discoveries suggest Jupiter and Saturn learned a lesson from their mythological namesakes, “eating” any planet that opposed them…
- Choice Blindness
- [Wired: Science]
…Although we’re convinced that we’re living in an Ingres canvas – full of exquisite detail and verisimilitude – we actually inhabit a post-impressionist painting, rife with empty spaces and abstraction. It’s a world so full of ambiguities that it requires constant interpretation.
I’m most interested in the practical consequences of our sensory flaws. Let’s begin with this clever paper, published earlier this year in Cognition. The study was led by Lars Hall, at Lund University. It was inspired by a 2005 study, led by Petter Johansson, that showed male subjects a pair of female faces. The subjects were asked to choose the face that they found more attractive. Then, the mischievous scientists used a “card trick” to reverse the outcome of the choice. Here’s where the results get a little sad: Less than 30 percent of subjects noticed that their choice had been changed. Our eyes might have preferences, but this doesn’t mean our mind can remember them…
- Muscles Remember Past Glory
- [Wired: Science]
Pumping up is easier for people who have been buff before, and now scientists think they know why — muscles retain a memory of their former fitness even as they wither from lack of use.
That memory is stored as DNA-containing nuclei, which proliferate when a muscle is exercised. Contrary to previous thinking, those nuclei aren’t lost when muscles atrophy…
The findings suggest that exercise early in life could help fend off frailness in the elderly…
- Fires around Moscow seen from space
- [Science News]
Scientists at the University of Leicester have released satellite images of vast plumes of smoke emanating from the peat bog fires which are currently sweeping across central and western Russia.
- UN Says Millions Without Help In Pakistan Floods
- [Science News]
The World Bank said Tuesday it will redirect $900 million of its existing loans to Pakistan to help in flood recovery, as the U.N. warned that many of the 20 million people affected by the disaster have yet to receive any emergency aid.
- Monkeys comfort each other after conflict
- [New Scientist]
Macaques who witness conflict will seek comfort in the company of other bystanders
[The lurkers support me in email. -L]
- Guantánamo captive’s interrogation tapes found under CIA desk – Guantánamo – MiamiHerald.com
- Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The CIA has videotapes of Sept. 11 plotter Ramzi bin al Shibh being interrogated in a secret overseas prison. Discovered under a desk, the recordings could provide an unparalleled look at how foreign governments aided the United States in holding and questioning suspected terrorists.
The two videotapes and an audiotape are believed to be the only surviving recordings made in the clandestine prison system…
8/16, 1pm:
- The compiler doesn’t care what you’re wearing
- [Geek Feminism Blog - guest post by Lindsey Kuper]
I’ve talked to a few women who’ve said that they fear they won’t be taken seriously as computer professionals if they dress in a “girly” way. I used to think that I was immune to that fear. But two weeks after my job started at GrammaTech, I looked at my closet and pushed everything I’d worn in the last two weeks to the left and everything I hadn’t worn to the right. On the left were jeans and t-shirts and gray and black and brown. On the right were dresses and bright green and bright blue and pink and floral prints. I was very surprised. I took a picture of what it looked like so that I wouldn’t forget.
I realized that what I thought my clothes looked like, based on what was hanging in my closet, was completely different from what my clothes looked like to other people in practice. I clearly liked the dresses and the floral prints and the bright colors, or I wouldn’t have had them in my closet — but I wasn’t wearing them, because on any given day, they seemed like the wrong thing to wear.
- Disturbing? Cool? Both! 3 Kids Take Plane Trip W/Out Informing Parents
- [FreeRangeKids - Iskenazy]
- Automated Poll Produces Starkly Different Results on Gay Marriage Question
- [FiveThirtyEight - Nate Silver]
Not so fast, ladies and ladies (and gentlemen and gentlemen). On the heels of a CNN poll earlier this week which was the first ever to show majority support for gay marriage, Public Policy Polling has come out with a survey showing a clear majority of their respondents still opposed to it…
I mentioned yesterday that the graph we produced, which appeared to show accelerating support for gay marriage, was quite sensitive to new polling data on the endpoints. If we include the PPP poll in the graph, and re-run the LOESS regression, we no longer show an accelerating trend toward support for gay marriage but instead, a steady-as-she-goes one, with support currently on the order of 43-44 percent and opposition at about 52 percent. The lines are converging at a rate of about 1.5 points per year which means that they would cross at some point in 2013, 2014, or thereabouts.
- Rachel Maddow: Arizona Private Prisons Set to Gain From Arizona Immigration Bill
- [Crooks and Liars - Heather]
- Feminism in 1970s Sitcoms
- [About.com Women's History]
During the Women’s Liberation Movement, U.S. television audiences were offered a dose of feminism in several 1970s situation comedies. Moving away from the “old-fashioned” nuclear family-oriented sitcom model, many 1970s …
- BP Cheated Out Of $10,000!by tristeroListening to the Beeb this morning, I learn…
- [Hullabaloo - tristero]
Listening to the Beeb this morning, I learned, much to my utter shock and amazement, that not everyone applying for compensation in the wake of the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico caused by BP and pals is entirely honest. Hard to believe, but out of the $300,000,000 BP’s paid out so far, one slimeball went so far as to claim $10,000 in damages which he didn’t deserve.
This is an outrage. Do you have any idea how much BP can do with that $10,000? Look, MMS or no MMS, mid-level bureaucrats at the Department of Energy still have to be entertained properly and 10 grand goes a very long way towards the purchase of second-class hookers and mediocre coke.
All I can say is thank God for the BBC and the rest of the mainstream media for focusing not on what BP did but instead on what is being done to them…
- Passive Aggressive Racism
- [Hullabaloo - Digby]
It’s always interesting when white celebrities lecture black people about being “hypersensitive” to racism by making a whole bunch of racist assumptions and defensively referencing the use of the word nigger. It’s quite clarifying…
[Example from Laura Schlessinger's radio show redacted. Consider yourself warned. -L]
…The original assumption, which Schlesinger goes back to in the second part, is that this woman is wrong for being resentful at having to constantly answer questions from someone who asks her what “black people” think about things. To Schlessinger, this is perfectly normal. After all black people are very exotic, unknowable creatures, and so it’s completely understandable that people might turn every conversation into a discussion of how these strange others look at the world. The caller finds that uncomfortable and annoying,which makes Dr laura very angry at her. The question is, why?
…As the conversation continues, it’s clear that Schlessinger is carrying quite a bit of anger about how “the blacks” continue to believe racism exists even though we have a black president. Evidently, that was supposed to have been the end of all that unpleasantness, particularly since blacks allegedly voted for him simply because of his race, thus proving their own racism. (The fact that they voted nearly unanimously for John Kerry, Al Gore and Bill Clinton as well would seem to indicate an ideological rather than a racial bias, but [voting for Obama is considered proof of racism anyhow].)
…anyone who’s been on the receiving end of [passive-agressive hostility] knows very well that they aren’t crazy. Millions of years of evolution have taught humans how to spot someone who doesn’t like them.
…It turns out that 200 years of racism in this country didn’t just disappear in one generation after all <s>-</s> it adapted. Who ever could have predicted that?
- Progressive Caucus Co-Chairs to Catfood Commission: No Social Security Cuts
- [Firedoglake - David Dayen]
Raul Grijalva and Lynn Woolsey, the co-chairs of the Progressive Caucus, have sent a letter directly to Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the co-chairs of the President’s deficit commission. In it, they say in no uncertain terms that cuts to Social Security, including an increase in the retirement age, must be off the table…
UPDATE: House members have also this week held hundreds of events across the country, and at all of them, Democrats to a man [sic] have rejected raising the retirement age.
- There’s an app for flat.
- [I Can Has Cheezburger]
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