East London residents warned of surface-to-air missiles sited on their roofs for the Olympics – Boing Boing

Charlie Stross points out that a wily terrorist who buzzes east London with an RC airplane and triggers a launch would succeed in tricking the MoD into showering a crowded residential area with blazing supersonic shrapnel. For bonus points, aim the RC plane to get the missile to shower the white-hot shrapnel over a crowded train station.

Insanity: CISPA Just Got Way Worse, And Then Passed On Rushed Vote | Techdirt

Update: Several people have asserted that Quayle’s amendment actually made CISPA better, not worse. I’ve now posted my thoughts on that.

Apple ‘Sidesteps’ Billions in Corporate Taxes, NY Times Reports

Satellite mapping pinpoints penguin population | Reuters

tags: science

SuperBetter Is a Game that Rewards You for Healthy Living and Working Towards Your Goals

SuperBetter is a free game, and once you sign up, you can choose a goal you want to work towards, and add “quests” to your account that you can complete to work your way there. As you complete quests and inspire other people with your progress, you’ll earn points in different character areas, like mental, emotional, social, and physical resilience. Once you select your goal, you can add quests and create your own adventure, or you can choose a “power pack” that’s a bundle of quests, activities, and “bad guys,” (or things that stand in your way) that will help you get started.

When I signed up, I started with the “Lazy Exercise” power pack, which includes activities like walking around the block and dancing to my favorite song. … If I want help, or want to work towards my goals with friends, I can invite “Allies” from Facebook, or connect with other SuperBetter players. All the while your goals are kept front and center at the top of the page, right next to your level progress bars. You even get a “secret lab” that’s completely private where you can brainstorm and keep track of your activities and progress.

SuperBetter is the brainchild of Jane McGonigal, game designer and author of the book Reality Is Broken. …

tags: gamification

Is Princess Culture Redeemable? | Women and Hollywood – March 27, 2012

Jolie is about to start shooting Maleficent in June (written by Linda Woolverton) where she plays the “evil” nemesis of Sleeping Beauty. It’s a look at Sleeping Beauty from the perspective of Maleficent. It’s about humanizing the “witch.”

Angelina Jolie has gone on the record with EW about how this film could be good for girls: …

The other princess project in the news (and I’m sure there are others I have no idea about) is the new children’s book series Pennyroyal’s Princess Boot Camp by M.A. Larson which Reese Witherspoon and her production partner Bruna Papandrea have picked up to develop.

MPAA Data Shows Women and Men Each Buy Half the Movie Tickets Sold | Women and Hollywood

For the second year in a row the MPAA has released data showing that men and women each buy half the tickets to movies. (Here’s the post of the 2010 stats.) Two years ago women bought more than half the tickets.

On the Rules of Literary Fiction for Men and Women – NYTimes.com

As VIDA, a women’s literary organization, showed in February in its second annual statistical roundup, women get shockingly short shrift as reviewers and reviewees in most prestigious publications. Of all the authors reviewed in the publications it tracked, nearly three-fourths were men. No wonder that when we talk about today’s leading novelists — the ones who generate heat and conversation and are read by both men and women — we are talking mostly about men.

Exploring Amazon, I came across a category called “Women’s Fiction” where I am listed, along with Jane Austen, Sophie Kinsella, Kathryn Stockett, Toni Morrison, Danielle Steel and Louisa May Alcott. (Needless to say, Amazon fits us into other categories as well.) If there is a stylistic or thematic link to be found among us, it’s hard to see.

Birth Control Access Boosts Women’s Wages, Study Finds – Huffington Post – 3/26/12

While women still earn 77 cents for every dollar that men make in the United States, the gender wage gap has closed significantly over the past several decades. Now, for the first time ever, a new study has connected the narrowing of that pay gap to increased access to birth control pills.

Daily Kos: The Bee Colony Collapse Mystery Isn’t Quite Solved Yet

…there are some concerns with this study, and the authors were very professional and straightforward noting them. The most serious, in my opinion, is that none of the studied hives were reproductively healthy, including their controls. I’m sure most DKos readers aren’t really interested in the breeding habits of bees. But basically, when their hives should have been having lots of little baby bees, they … weren’t. And that got worse as the study ran, for both the hives they treated with imidacloprid and their controls.

Before going any further, that is, in my mind, a pretty serious problem with this study. Something was wrong with their bees.

Daily Kos: A Series On Logic: Informal Fallacies, Part 5 — “That Begs The Question”

pyrrhiccomedy: Stick Theater Presents: How To Prussia! Part 1.

You might have already heard of the Battle of the Ice, but just in case you haven’t, here’s how Prussia’s ‘crusade’ against Novgorod played out: …

So Prussia went to war with pagan Lithuania instead, and pretty much stayed at war with Lithuania until Lithuania moved in with Poland.

tags: history

pyrrhiccomedy: Stick Theater Presents: The Third Crusade!

The Crusades! Adventure! Romance! Plate armor in climatically inappropriate regions! Sacking, attempted sacking, conspiracy to sack, and jaywalking! It’s like we were the Vikings, only afterwards we were too embarrassed to look anybody in the eye.

tags: history

pyrrhiccomedy: Stick Theater Presents: The Time of Troubles!

But the point is that Godunov was not generally considered to be of sufficiently noble blood to be the ruler of Russia, and many of the Russian aristocracy (including the Romanovs) chafed under his appointment. But, Godunov had been a capable administrator under the tsar; so the whole thing went forward.

Unfortunately, things then turned Very Russian. …

Things proceeded in the manner to which Russia is accustomed: the cold weather led to famine, famine led to economic collapse as refugees from the outer provinces fled into Moscow to take advantage of government relief efforts, disorganization and depopulation led to banditry, the Don Cossacks on the frontier grew restless, starvation and plagues broke out in the cities, some rivers might or might not have turned to blood, Girls Gone Wild put out another video, etc.

The oligarchs of the National Assembly had just one thing to say about all this.

tags: history

pyrrhiccomedy: Stick Theater Presents: The Hundred Years’ War!

Considering that the Hundred Years’ War was one of history’s most defining “I just don’t like his face” grudge matches, it may surprise you to know that in the beginning, there was an actual reason for it! See, in 1328, France’s line of kings died out.

…hang on, let me just show you, this shit is bananas:…

In other words, between 1314 and 1328, the kings of France had the average life expectancy of a pet turtle.

tags: history

BETA: Failbook: Baby Got Book – Cheezburger

I like big books and I cannot lie.

When George H. W. Bush Was Known As a Family-Planning Champion — New York Magazine – Mar 25, 2012

Oklahoma court strikes down ultrasound abortion law | NewsOK.com – March 28, 2012

The War on Women Voting | The Nation

Voting rights “evangelist” Faye Anderson says advocates who’ve been protesting new state photo voter ID laws have it all wrong. When voting rights advocates prop up elderly voters who might be disenfranchised because they may not have the correct form of ID, or the necessary documents to obtain proper voting ID, these are the wrong avatars for the campaigns. …

Elderly voters losing out on voter participation is a very real thing, as evidenced recently in Wisconsin. …

But there are many women who are ill-served by the new photo voter ID laws. …

Much has been made about President Obama’s lop-sided 19-point lead over GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney with women voters. This sounds great until you start converting poll results to actual voter turnout. …

Anderson, an African-American woman, has seen this kind of contempt for low-income citizens not only from conservative white men like Derbyshire and Vadum, but also from otherwise privileged women. …

Anderson tells me she’s even heard this from some black well-off women. But according to the Brennan Center, she reminds me, only 48% of voting-age women have ready access to a birth certificates that reflects their current legal name, and only 66% of voting-age women have proof of citizenship documents reflecting their current name.

Arizona Passes Harsh Abortion Law Regarding Pregnancy Term

…pregnancy now legally begins on the first day of a woman’s last period, the earliest delineation in American legislation. And while this bill may seem a matter of semantics, the possible ramifications on health care for women who want abortions could literally be life-changing.

Watch Daily Beast reporter Allison Yarrow explain the bill’s details and how Gov. Brewer’s decision may affect other Republican-leaning states: …

Wyclef Jean Drops “Justice” For Trayvon Martin

…musician and activist Wyclef Jean has released a new song, “Justice (If You’re 17),” dedicated to Trayvon Martin and other young men his age.

The Haitian-born veteran hip-hop producer, best known for his role in the Fugees and his work in his home country, said in a press release, “When I think of Martin Luther King Jr. and his statement ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’ I had to do something. This did not start with Trayvon. We can no longer say, this is not my kid. This affects everyone and we all know a 17-year-old.”

Jackie Robinson: 65 Years Later, We Highlight Other Players Like Him | The Root

tags: photography

Sharing the Bounty: Dining Hall Swipes as Hunger-Fighting Tool – News – GOOD

Come the end of an academic term, dorm-housed and dining hall-nourished college students face the “leftover meal points” dilemma. Because meal plans are usually included in housing contracts, every dining hall swipe for the term—whether used or unused—generally comes out of the individual’s pocket.

… A student group turned nonprofit organization called “Swipes for the Homeless” has found a way to transform leftover meal points into a means of combating hunger in Los Angeles.

How to kill an abortion bill – Salon.com – Mar 29, 2012 – By Irin Carmon

Step one: Wait for a politician to say something stupid. Repeat.

Daily Kos: Ancient America: The Birth and Death of a Pueblo

In 1245 CE, the Anasazi (Ancestral Puebloan) began construction on the Sand Canyon Pueblo in Colorado. The pueblo is located at the head of a canyon with most of the construction below the canyon rim. The pueblo would grow to 420 surface rooms, 90 kivas, 14 towers, and an enclosed plaza. …

Archaeologists feel that the construction of the town was pre-planned. Architecturally, the pueblo was laid out in 14 discrete roomblocks, each of which had residential and storage rooms associated with a kiva.

tags: archaeology

Daily Kos: This week in science: No more blues for a Red Planet?

If recent cuts to planetary science weren’t drawing blood before, they are now. Because this week a group of scientists reexamined data from the 1976 Viking Landers and announced we had indeed found strong evidence of microbial life on Mars at that time: …

This is an extraordinary claim, as such it will require extraordinary evidence… Ergo, all eyes are now on NASA’s Mars programs and especially the Mars Science Laboratory already en route to the red planet … But [it] does not have either of the two items that might solve this issue once and for all: a high power microscope or return sample capability.

tags: science

Daily Kos: Tennessee Is Monkeying With Science

There’s a difference between socially controversial and scientifically controversial. …

Science class is where you learn that the universe doesn’t give a damn about your precious opinion. Science is about gathering together plausible hypotheses, smashing them with the heaviest hammers you can find, and seeing which ones hold up. …

Dem lawmaker implies GOP budget violates biblical teachings – The Hill’s Floor Action – 04/02/12

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) last week implied that the House Republican budget resolution goes against many of the teachings found in the Bible, and said Republicans need to explain how they can justify their budget based on these discrepancies.

Schakowsky noted that at Seder, the feast marking the beginning of the Jewish holiday Passover, the youngest person asks four questions in an effort to understand the holiday. In keeping with that format, Schakowsky suggested four questions that could be asked of Republicans to describe their budget.

[I like how she used their professed values against them while at the same time resisting the implication that only Christian values count. -L]

Daily Kos: This week in the War on Women: Women are not an interest group

This is how we fight back and win: …

Daily Kos: Mitt Romney to mothers: Want dignity? ‘You need to go to work’ – Kaili Joy Gray – Apr 15, 2012

Mitt’s statement perfectly articulates what the Republican Party has always believed. Being a mother isn’t work; it is only through employment outside the home that a mother achieves “dignity.” And women who don’t have the convenience of their husbands’ stock portfolio don’t deserve to have a choice to stay home with their children. They “need to go to work.” Rich women who stay home work hard. Poor women who do are lazy. And undignified. …

Pick any policy that better enables women to spend more time with their children…, and Republicans are 100 percent against it. Paid family leave laws so working mothers can spend time with their new infants? Against it. Housing and nutritional assistance so women can forgo employment to stay home with their children? Not only are Republicans against that, but in several states, Republicans have pushed for, and even enacted, legislation requiring those women to submit to drug tests. Because obviously any woman who wants to make the choice to stay home with her children must be a drug addict. Unless her name is Ann Romney.

tags: classism

Who are the Super PACs’ Biggest Donors?

This chart shows the share of all contributions given by the top ten donors to each of the 12 largest super PACs, through Feb. 29. Some corporations are affiliated with individual donors, such as the Contran Corporation, which is owned by Harold Simmons. Some donors, such as Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, Yasmin and Oren Lukatz, and Sivan Ochshorn gave individually but are all members of a single family. Hover over each super PAC’s name to see the total raised by its top ten donors, and hover over each donor to see how much they gave.

PAC Track: What and Where are the Super PACs Spending?

Two federal court rulings in 2010 paved the way for the ascent of “super PACs,” political action committees that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on political races, as long as they don’t coordinate with a specific candidate. And so far, they’re spending heavily on the Republican race. This app, part of our long-term investigation into “dark money,” keeps track of where super PACs are spending and raising their cash to influence the presidential race.

A Tangled Web: Who’s Making Money From All This Campaign Spending? – ProPublica

Many have been detailing the vast sums being raised by the presidential candidates and the super PACs supporting them. But where are all those millions being spent? Among other things, the answers can provide hints on potential improper coordination between campaigns and super PACs. Here are the 200 biggest recipients of spending by the major campaigns and most of the major super PACs.

Share Our Strength : Food Network

The new documentary, “Hunger Hits Home,” takes a first-hand look at the crisis of childhood hunger in America through the eyes of the parents, children, anti-hunger activists, educators and politicians on the frontlines of the battle. The film is part of an ongoing partnership between Food Network and Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry Campaign to end childhood hunger in America by 2015.

tags: video

Daily Kos: With billion-dollar settlement, Obama administration again makes good on its promises to Indians – Apr 16, 2012

In just over three years, the Obama administration has done more for American Indians than any administration since Lyndon Johnson called for an end of termination policy 44 years ago. A good deal of that has to do with simply being a good listener. But the administration is also building a solid record of compensating the tribes for decades of government bungling and behavior that, labeled properly, was outright theft.

The latest move, announced April 11, is the billion-dollar settlement with 41 tribes from Maine to California. Funding does not have to be approved by Congress because it has already been allocated in the Judgment Fund. The settlement ends a 22-month-long negotiation between the tribes and the United States over more than a century of mismanagement…

Daily Kos: Darlin’, Don’t Disrespect Your Man That Way

…my new neighbor wanders over with a beer in hand, and tells me I shouldn’t be disrespecting my man by doing hte yard work. I should be prepping the food for him to grill for tonight’s dinner while he mows.

I shrugged and said I didn’t have a man. So he says maybe my father should do the lawn while I cook him dinner. I said I didn’t have a father. So he says my brother should be mowing while I feed him and his family. I said my brother was in the ICU and I doubted his doctor would approve of him mowing should he ever live to leave it. So he hesitatnly asks if I have a son.

So I tell him, “Yes, They’re in Afghanistan fighting for the right for men like you to go around insulting their mama while she goes about her business.” …

tags: sexism

As ice cap melts, militaries vie for Arctic edge – Yahoo! News

To the world’s military leaders, the debate over climate change is long over. They are preparing for a new kind of Cold War in the Arctic, anticipating that rising temperatures there will open up a treasure trove of resources, long-dreamed-of sea lanes and a slew of potential conflicts. …

The U.S., Canada and Denmark held major exercises two months ago, and in an unprecedented move, the military chiefs of the eight main Arctic powers — Canada, the U.S., Russia, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland — gathered at a Canadian military base last week to specifically discuss regional security issues.

None of this means a shooting war is likely at the North Pole any time soon.

tags: global_climate_change

Political Animal – The Real War on Moms Has a Mortality Rate

Mommy Wars rhetoric, aside, the Republican policy agenda actually offers bubkes in the way of practical support to moms (and dads, who, let’s not forget, are parents too) struggling to raise their kids up right. I’d concur and add:

One of the distasteful things about the tendency to label all sorts of debates or initiatives as “wars” is that in real wars, people die. But the reality is that a shockingly high number of American moms are dying for preventable reasons. The U.S. Maternal Mortality Ratio (the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births) is shockingly high, well above the average for the developed world, and higher than virtually all of Western Europe as well as some countries in Asia and the Middle East. Even more troubling, U.S. maternal mortality has increased in the last two decades, and is now more than twice as high as it was in the late 1980s. The Affordable Care Act included provisions designed to help stop this scary trend…

Motherhood is THE MOST IMPORTANT JOB IN THE WORLD (unless you are poor)

The crux of the issue is that Mitt Romney’s definition of “stay-at-home mom,” like his definition of “good mom,” is limited to women in his racial group and economic class. I would wager a lot of money that when Romney made those comments in January, he wasn’t even thinking of the term “stay-at-home mom” — because a low-income mother who relies on state aid is not a stay-at-home mom. She’s a welfare cheat, or lazy, or a drain on society. She’s undignified.

But sure, let’s keep talking about two stupid sentences uttered by Hilary Rosen were offensive. Nothing else to see here!

The Trayvon Martin Killing, Explained | Mother Jones

[news timeline, plenty of links]

Airplane Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style

To pass the time during long flights, artist Nina Katchadourian goes to the lavatory, adorns herself in tissue paper costume, and creates hilarious self-portrait photos in the style of Flemish Renaissance paintings.

tags: photography humor

Apple Insists They’re Totally Not Fixing Any E-Book Prices – The Consumerist – April 13, 2012

A Privacy Advocate Seeks Public Help To Build A Spy-Proof ISP – The Consumerist – April 13, 2012

Workhorse Climate Satellite Goes Silent: Scientific American – April 13, 2012

Loss of contact with Europe’s Envisat monitor raises worries about gaps in environmental data

Backyard Pesticide Use May Fuel Bee Die-Offs | Wired Science | Wired.com – April 13, 2012

Uneasy Targets: How Justifying the Killing of Terrorists Has Become a Major Policy Debate – Magazine – ABA Journal – Apr 1, 2012

The question is key to the debate over the legal and moral justification of targeted killings by one nation against a nonstate aggressor, even when the prospective assailant seeks a separate nation’s protection.

Trayvon Martin Judge Reveals Possible Conflict of Interest – April 13, 2012

Florida Judge Jessica Recksiedler, who was assigned the Trayvon Martin shooting case, revealed a possible conflict of interest tied to her husband, a lawyer who works for a television legal analyst with ties to the defendant.

fembio.org

Biographies of notable women.

tags: resource

PayScale – Salary Comparison, Salary Survey, Search Wages

PayScale has collected salary and career data from more than
30 million people, covering 12,000 job titles and 1,100 distinct
industries in 150 countries.

Best jobs for your second act – Oct. 10, 2011 – CNN.com

tags: career_change

For Love of Liberty: The Story of America’s Black Patriots – Internet Public Library (IPL)

Initially airing February 2010, For Love of Liberty: The Story of America’s Black Patriots is a PBS documentary that details the military contributions of African Americans. Realizing the educational significance of the film, the U.S. Army created an edited 25-minute version of the film and corresponding high school and college facilitator guides. The materials, structured to fit a classroom timeframe, are versatile and can compliment studies in American history, civics, social studies and ROTC programs.

ipl2 was asked by a representative of United Solutions and Services, LLC., to continue offering these materials after funding from the U.S. Army for hosting these materials at their original site (http://www.forloveofliberty.net/) ran out on September 30, 2010.

Two professors, Marcelite D. Johnson, Ph.D. and Jewell G. Winn, Ed.D., of M and J Consultants, holding PhD’s in curriculum development created the facilitator guides. These guides define course outcomes, general information, important facts and post viewing questions for each chapter.

The chapters of the film are divided according to wars, which allow educators the option to adapt the materials to fit specific topical discussions. The 25-minute version can be shown in its entirety or according to appropriate content. Either way, educators can customize the video footage to support several presentation formats.

tags: education history

Transportation Bill Replaced By Stopgap Measure In House – Huffington Post – 03/29/2012

The House of Representatives Thursday rebuffed a bipartisan Senate plan to keep major transportation projects humming for the next two years, and instead voted 266 to 158 to pass a 90-day stopgap…

John Boehner Weighs In On Bobby Rush Hoodie – Huffington Post – 03/29/2012

[Rep. Rush] was escorted out by the House Sergeant at Arms for violating the House dress code, which prohibits wearing hats and hoods.

Meanwhile, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, told Fox News Wednesday night that he plans to ask Boehner to be more consistent about enforcing the dress code, which he says members of Congress violate on a regular basis.

The Story Behind Bobby Rush, the Hoodie-Wearing, Trayvon-Supporting Congressman – The Daily Beast – by Nicholas McCarvel – Mar 28, 2012

Before Wednesday morning, Bobby Rush was best known as the one politician to ever have beaten Barack Obama in an election.

President Obama’s Bid To End Oil Subsidies Voted Down By Senate – Huffington Post – 03/29/2012

Gender Gap Tops $1 Million for CEO Pay at Lobbying Groups – Bloomberg – Mar 28 2012

yuki_onna: Let Me Tell You About the Birds and the Bees: Gender and the Fallout Over Christopher Priest

I keep trying to think of what a male blogger would have to say about science fiction to have someone say they hope he gets raped to death. I’m not coming up with anything.

Misogyny in the West is coming up and it’s a gross, miserable, chthonic thing swirling at our feet. It’s getting worse, not better. Sites that consider themselves evolved, liberal-leaning, and intellectual (hello Reddit! Hello Gawker!) have comments and whole sections full of such boiling hate for women that it knocks you back. I hear people say with a straight face that the younger generation isn’t sexist or racist anymore, and unpacking how woefully wrong that is would take another post entirely. And geek culture isn’t immune, not even close. Sometimes it’s worse, because it’s so convinced it doesn’t have the same work to do as the mainstream.

Futurity.org – First female professor’s archive goes digital

Laura Bassi (1711-1778) was the first woman to be offered an official teaching position at a European university. Bassi had a significant influence on the scientific culture of the Enlightenment in Italy. She was the most prominent female member of Italy’s leading scientific society, the Bologna Academy of Sciences, and helped create a network of experimenters and teachers connecting Italy with France and England.

…left behind 6,000 pages of intriguing documents that describe her life and work. They now rest in the archives of the principal municipal library in Bologna, Italy, safe but not accessible to the world at large.
That is about to change.

Cal State to close door on spring 2013 enrollment – 3/20/2012

California State University will accept no new admissions for the spring semester of 2013 – with a few exceptions – as part of a drastic cost-cutting strategy to reduce enrollment by about 16,000 students next spring, officials said Monday.

tags: education

Pinterest’s Pernicious Terms of Service | Electronic Frontier Foundation

To be clear: Pinterest has built its business on fair use. Trying to impose terms requiring users to say they have formal licenses they generally will not have makes no sense, and does not reflect the way those users use the site. Moreover, this does not appear to be the way even Pinterest expects its users to use the site. Appropriately, they have removed that provision.

At 11th Hour, Georgia Passes “Women as Livestock” Bill : Ms. Magazine Blog – 3/31/12

After an emotional 14-hour workday that included fist-fights between lobbyists and a walk-out by women Democrats, the Georgia House passed a Senate-approved bill Thursday night that criminalizes abortion after 20 weeks.
The bill, which does not contain rape or incest exemptions, is expected to receive a signature from Republican Gov. Nathan Deal.
Commonly referred to as the “fetal pain bill” by Georgian Republicans and as the “women as livestock bill” by everyone else, HB 954 garnered national attention this month when state Rep. Terry England (R-Auburn) compared pregnant women carrying stillborn fetuses to the cows and pigs on his farm.

Lawyers Opposing Health Care Law Cite Kids-With-Pre-Existing-Conditions-Can-Go-Fuck-Themselves Clause | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

Legal experts noted that if this argument fails, plaintiffs would undoubtedly cite the 24th Amendment’s If-You-Don’t-Have-Health-Insurance-Already-You-Must-Be-A-Poor-Fuck-Who-Doesn’t-Deserve-It-Anyway provision.

tags: satire

The Brain from Top to Bottom

tags: science

i heart interiors: Tutorial :: Finding An Image Source

I think everyone has images they saved from somewhere that they’ve either forgotten where it was from or the source wasn’t named to begin with. Personally, I try to post only images that are mine or that I have a source that I can link to but it makes it frustrating when I have images I really want to use but have no source information.

I was so excited to learn how to find the original source of an image so I can use some of those images. This works on all images that are public on the internet.

Here is how to do it:…

Women Can Do Science Too; Wikipedia ‘Bout to Find Out – gawker.com

Muslim Women In History

…Princess Fatima Al Zamil qualified as one ruler. A blue-blooded lady born of a marriage between members of the Al-Rasheed and Shammar tribes – which makes her a relative of the current Saudi Arabian King Abdullah – she ruled the province of Ha’il from 1911 to 1914 as an administrator of her minor grandson’s estate. …

tags: history

Replacing “crazy” for ableism and preciseness of language — What Privilege?

If you’ve arrived at the conclusion that the word “crazy” is ableist, or at least makes some people uncomfortable, or is commonly misused and overused to the point of losing its meaning, you may be struggling to find substitute words. This post is for you. I’ve put together a list of many words that convey better what you mean when you say “crazy” and the specific usages and contexts where they make sense. And fear not: many of them are colorful, and all of them pack punch.

Letters To My Country – John Derbyshire Absolutely Loses It; Writes Batshit Crazy Racist Article With “Sources”

This is a textbook example of how institutional racism continues to exist in a “color-blind” world. Derbyshire sees racial disparities, and assumes that those disparities are not the result of implicit biases that are baked into all of us, but rather, reflections of the personal choices and character of Blacks. He thinks this despite evidence that Blacks use illegal drugs at lower rates than Whites; that police are actually more likely to discover evidence of criminal activity searching white suspects than Blacks; that people of all races engage in criminalized activity at remarkably similar rates; He thinks this despite the fact that implicit racial biases have been demonstrated by various studies, in which none of the participants could be described as overt racists. He thinks this despite the fact that Blacks have been discriminated against in bankruptcy proceedings, where attorneys demonstrated a propensity to steer Blacks with similarly situated finances towards harsher forms of Bankruptcy. He thinks this despite the fact that Blacks receive harsher sentences for committing the exact same crimes, or that there is a 4-1 racial disparity in executive pardon recipients, even when the nature and severity of the recipient’s crime are accounted for.

In other words, John Derbyshire has essentially put together a list of instructions on “how to be racist in America.” If he spent mere moments examining the facts on the ground, he would understand that the racial disparities he points to as evidence of Black anti-social behavior cannot be explained by the choices Black people actually make.

How Felicia Day And Chris Hardwick (Unwittingly) Reinforced Geekdom’s Whiteness | Racialicious – the intersection of race and pop culture

…conversations about race, gender, and culture have to take place outside of Special Episodes.

It’s not enough anymore for people of color and members of the LGBT community to be presented as the Special Guests, or the (x) Friends of the Host, or the Supporting Players. There’s more than enough proof online that our experiences as fans are not automatically divorced from our experiences as members of minority groups, and that there’s many of us looking for more safe spaces in which to discuss them. If some geeks of color don’t want to discuss sensitive topics, that’s fine; that doesn’t mean none of us ever should.

Because while it’s all too easy for people to distance themselves from those racist Hunger Games fans, those viewpoints don’t appear out of thin air, either.

When woman-oriented sites like The Mary Sue don’t report on Issa Rae getting assailed by racist tweeters after winning an industry award, that contributes to the problem. When a sci-fi heavy site like IO9 is content to let Jezebel report on the Games controversy, that contributes to the problem. When Marvel Comics would rather publish stories about the umpteenth version of Dark Avengers than about a group of black Avengers, that contributes to the problem. …Unintentional marginalization is still marginalization.

Armed Neo-Nazis Now Patrolling Sanford, Say They Are “Prepared” For Post-Trayvon Martin Violence – Miami News – Riptide 2.0

Neo-Nazis are currently conducting heavily armed patrols in and around Sanford, Florida and are “prepared” for violence in the case of a race riot. The patrols are to protect “white citizens in the area who are concerned for their safety” in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting last month, says Commander Jeff Schoep of the National Socialist Movement. “We are not advocating any type of violence or attacks on anybody, but we are prepared for it,” he says. “We are not the type of white people who are going to be walked all over.”

Because nothing diffuses racial tension like gun-toting racial separatists patrolling an already on-edge community.

ANIMALS TALKING IN ALL CAPS

YEAH, TOM, THE CONSERVATIVES’ DECENTRALIZED FREE MARKET IS QUITE EFFICIENT AT HANDLING MANY ASPECTS OF ECONOMIC LIFE, BUT LEGITIMATE REFORM WILL BE EFFECTIVELY IMPOSSIBLE IF WE DON’T ACCEPT THE DISRUPTIVE NATURE OF CAPITALISM’S FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS, SPECIFICALLY IN THE CONTEXT OF CAPITAL-INTENSIVE PRODUCTION PROCESSES! SO WHILE WE MAY, IN THEORY, ADMIRE OR PRAISE THE PROPERTIES OF FREE MARKETS FOR THEIR EFFICIENCY IT’S BEYOND APPARENT THAT THEIR DOMAIN IS RESTRICTED. WE SHOULD BE WORKING TOWARD THE DEVELOPMENT OF INSTITUTIONS THAT CONTROL AND CONSTRAIN LIABILITY STRUCTURES, ESPECIALLY THOSE OF THE FINANCIAL SECTOR OR PRODUCTION PROCESSES THAT REQUIRE COLOSSAL INVESTMENTS OF CAPITAL. THAT’S ONE OF THE KEY PARADOXES OF CAPITALISM, RIGHT? THAT IT CANNOT READILY ASSIMILATE LARGE-SCALE CAPITAL ASSET PRODUCTION PROCESSES? I MEAN COME ON!

Evernote for Android Update: Speech-to-text and Big Widget Enhancements | Evernote Blogcast

Dominique Browning: The Racial Politics of Asthma | TIME Ideas | TIME.com

African American children are far more likely to develop asthma than get a bullet to their heads. In 2008, African Americans had a 35 percent higher rate of asthma than Caucasians. A study revealed that one-quarter of the children in New York City’s Harlem have asthma. The following national statistics are even more jarring: …

Why? One likely reason is that 68% of African-Americans (compared to 56% of whites) live within 30 miles of a coal-fired power plant—the distance within which the maximum ill effects of the emissions from smokestacks occur.

The Simple Math That Can Save Cities From Bankruptcy – The Atlantic Cities – by Emily Badger – 30 Mar 2012

We tend to think that broke cities have two options: raise taxes, or cut services. Minicozzi, though, is trying to point to the basic but long-buried math of our tax system that cities should be exploiting instead: Per-acre, our downtowns have the potential to generate so much more public wealth than low-density subdivisions or massive malls by the highway. And for all that revenue they bring in, downtowns cost considerably less to maintain in public services and infrastructure.

“We really are kind of preachy, because we know it works,” says Minicozzi, who has performed similar tax studies in 15 cities across the country. “And the reason we know it works is because cities have been here forever. That’s all we’re saying: think urban. When I talk with people about urbanism, we as hairless apes have lived in these things called cities for thousands of years. Now over these last 40 years, we think we don’t need them any more?”

So, broke cities: Need money? If you’ve got underutilized buildings in your downtown, do anything you can to fix them up, because that’s where your wealth comes from.

Global Warming Close to Becoming Irreversible: Scientific American – By Nina Chestney – March 26, 2012

The world is close to reaching tipping points that will make it irreversibly hotter, making this decade critical in efforts to contain global warming, scientists warned on Monday.

tags: science global_climate_change

Texas Has to Chill With War on Voting Rights Act – COLORLINES

The state of Texas preemptively challenged the constitutionality of Section 5, meaning they filed a lawsuit to have it overturned before they even heard back from DOJ about whether their voter ID law would be cleared. This is a clear frontal attack on the keystone of one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation achieved in the United States.

A three-judge panel determined that it would consider Texas’ challenge of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act only after the lawsuit concerning their photo voter ID law is reconciled. But Texas isn’t playing nice in that lawsuit. Last week, the state’s attorney general Greg Abbott opposed releasing 12 state legislators — sponsors of the voter ID bill — for depositions requested by DOJ’s civil rights division attorneys. DOJ has requested the depositions, along with any written communications between state legislators about the bill, so that they can investigate whether there was any discriminatory intent behind creating it.

Jamal Joseph: Screenwriter Speaks on Activism in Black Arts | The Root – By: Akoto Ofori-Atta – March 31, 2012

The former Black Panther and filmmaker talks about Trayvon Martin and activism in black arts.

New Black Panthers: Zimmerman Bounty Criticism Reveals Double Standard | The Root

Recently, a group named the New Black Panther Party offered $10,000 to anyone who makes a citizen’s arrest of George Zimmerman, the white Hispanic man who admittedly shot the 17-year-old Martin on the night of Feb. 26 in Sanford, Fla. …

How can [Sanford] police sanction vigilante justice in the name of self-defense by Zimmerman against an unarmed child but condemn a response of “perceived” vigilante justice by the New Black Panthers?

How to Get Started with Usenet in Three Simple Steps – Lifehacker

Usenet is a wonderful service for finding and downloading digital media, giving you speed and reliability you won’t find with other file-sharing options—like, say, BitTorrent. Here’s a quick guide on setting up and getting started with Usenet.

What’s a Private BitTorrent Tracker, and Why Should I Use One? – Gawker

What single book is the best introduction to your field (or specialization within your field) for laypeople? – books introduction | Ask MetaFilter

What if Cake Was More Rational? – io9

The inside is delicious cake. The outside is a pie chart indicating what ingredients are inside.

The First Structure to Incorporate Crumpling as a Design Element – io9

Generally, something that buckles under strain is regarded as a bad idea, but the newly devised buckliball is designed to do just that. Crafted by a team of MIT and Harvard engineers, it marks the first morphable structure to incorporate buckling as a desirable engineering design element. …

If this technique can be ported to a number of different shapes and sizes, you have a wide variety of objects that can switch between two sizes readily. It could even be used as a mechanical joint, with hinge-points decided by the pattern of dimples in the rubber. What about other uses? Collapsible roofs or walls, tiny drug-delivery capsules or soft movable joints requiring no mechanical pieces.

The disappearing virtual library – Opinion – Al Jazeera English

Los Angeles, CA – Last week a website called “library.nu” disappeared. A coalition of international scholarly publishers accused the site of piracy and convinced a judge in Munich to shut it down. …

And not just any books – not romance novels or the latest best-sellers – but scholarly books: textbooks, secondary treatises, obscure monographs, biographical analyses, technical manuals, collections of cutting-edge research in engineering, mathematics, biology, social science and humanities.

The texts ranged from so-called “orphan works” (out-of-print, but still copyrighted) to recent issues; from poorly scanned to expertly ripped; from English to German to French to Spanish to Russian, with the occasional Japanese or Chinese text. It was a remarkable effort of collective connoisseurship. Even the pornography was scholarly: guidebooks and scholarly books about the pornography industry. For a criminal underground site to be mercifully free of pornography must alone count as a triumph of civilisation.

…Library.nu was making…learning possible where publishers have not. It made a good show of being a “book review” site – it was called library.nu after all, and not “bookstore.nu”. It was not cluttered with advertisements, nor did it “suggest” other books constantly. It gave straight answers to straightforward searches, and provided user reviews of the 400,000 or more books in the database.

It was only the fact that library.nu included a link to another site (“sharehosting” sites like ifile.it, megaupload.com, or mediafire.com) containing the complete version of a digital text that brought library.nu into the realm of what passes for crime these days.

…library.nu was facilitating discovery: the ability to search deeper and deeper into the musical or scholarly tastes fellow humans and to discover their connections that no recommendation algorithm will ever be able to make. In their effort to control this market, publishers alongside the movie and music industry have been effectively criminalising sharing, learning and creating – not stealing.

tags: war_on_efficient_copying intellectual_property education

The Best Textbooks on Every Subject – Less Wrong

Three short poems by Adrienne Rich, R.I.P. | Death and Taxes

…feminist, poet, essayist and all around brilliant woman Adrienne Rich has died this week at age 82.

For a complete, outstanding obit, read the one at the New York Times. We’re paying our respects by showing three of the artist’s shorter poems.

Happy Hour Roundup – The Plum Line – The Washington Post

[L: Seven recommended articles concerning the constitutionality of the health care mandate. Plus...]

Elspeth Reeve has very helpful advice for Victor Davis Hanson and anyone else struggling to understand what is actually very simple etiquette problem (try in good faith to call people by the name(s) they ask to be called… make sure you read down to the bottom. …

Michael Cohen argues that anyone worried about government overreach should have been focused on Libya, not health care. …

Speaking of unpopular moves, Jared Bernstein talks GOP plans to slash Pell Grants.

…higher education across the nation is getting battered. Must-read from Coburn Palmer.

Paul Ryan Finally Meets a Budget Cut He Hates | Mother Jones

Just to be absolutely clear here: if we’re talking about a program that helps the poor or the elderly or the sick, Ryan is eager to cut spending. In fact, he’s usually eager to be the biggest budget cutter in the room. But if it’s a program for the military, he won’t accept spending cuts even if the military brass supports them.

How Turning My To-Dos into a Story Boosted My Memory and Solved My Procrastination Problem – Lifehacker

tags: mindhack productivity

BBC News – Kwok brothers arrested in Hong Kong on bribery charges

Two billionaire brothers who run one of Asia’s biggest property companies have been arrested on suspicion of bribery.

Microbial Mules: Scientists Experiment With Engineering Bacteria to Transport Nanoparticles and Drugs: Scientific American

Engineering nimble robots that are smaller than blood cells is extremely challenging. Rather than design them from scratch, some scientists have been experimenting with the idea of enlisting an army of sophisticated nanobots already at our disposal: the thousands of species of bacteria swarming inside our bodies right now.

Pesticide-dosed Bees Lose Future Royalty, Way Home – Science News

Low doses of insecticides can lead to fewer queens, shrinking colonies
By Susan Milius

Timelines that are Easy to Make and Use – FlowingData

As a project of the Knight News Innovation Lab, Timeline by Verite is an open source project that lets you make and share interactive timelines. It’s simple and customizable. Plug in your own data as JSON, or use the Google Docs template for an even faster route…

Who is Corporate Philanthropy for? Arundhati Roy Says It’s Not Who You Think – NPQ – Nonprofit Quarterly – Promoting an active an engaged democracy.

We don’t often find people writing in such beautiful prose about arcane and often minuscule policies affecting charity and philanthropy in the U.S. But Roy’s essay should also lead readers to think deeply about the tradeoffs we are making via the nonprofit sector’s close and frequently uncritical relationship with corporate philanthropy. Read the full text. You will find that Roy doesn’t blindly condemn nonprofits, scholars, writers, or artists for accepting corporate largesse. She is asking for deep thinking on corporate (and foundation) philanthropy as to whose interests are being served and whose are not.

Atheist Symbol Rejected By Capital One, But Jesus Is Preapproved – The Consumerist

“I spoke to someone after the second rejection that someone there said that there was a note in my file regarding the fact that they do not allow religious or anti-religious images,” Mike tells Consumerist.

And yes, far down that list of possible reasons for rejecting a card, CapOne does list “Controversial subject matter such as political or religious statements and/or images.”

But why, Mike asks, does the card-making interface on Capital One’s own website have 34 photos in a category it labels “Spiritual” and which includes several options to put Christian and Jewish imagery on your card?

Plan Your Weekly Meals, Stress Free | LIfehacker

The linchpin of my system is an iPad app called Menu Planner. With it, I can create a directory of my favorite recipes, import them from tons of different food web sites, plan out my week, and create a grocery list for that week’s meals with one tap. Meal Planner works on the iPhone as well, and if you’re an Android user, the free Food Planner app has a very similar feature set, so you should be able to set up an identical system with it. Of course, if you prefer, you could always set up something similar using pen and paper or Excel, but I’ve found these apps make everything very easy once you get past the initial setup. …

Condor Cam Update: Chick Is Cute | Wired Science | Wired.com

tags: cute_animals

WMC Releases Media Guide for Gender Neutral Coverage of Women Candidates and Politicians | Women’s Media Center

Today the Women’s Media Center releases a new Media Guide for its Name It. Change It. Project, which works to identify, prevent and end sexist media coverage of women candidates and politicians. The Women’s Media Center’s Media Guide to Gender Neutral Coverage of Women Candidates + Politicians (click to download) shows members of the media how to avoid injecting sexism into their own coverage and how to spot sexism in other’s.

tags: sexism

Predicting Supreme Court outcomes is a sucker’s game – The Plum Line – The Washington Post

The consensus from the oral arguments on health care today at the Supreme Court seems pretty clear from twitter, the blogs, and the cable news networks: the big loser today was Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, who argued the case for the law.

Everyone is quoting Jeffrey Toobin’s claim that “this was a train wreck for the Obama administration. This law looks like it’s going to be struck down.”

Don’t get carried away.

BBC News – Riot report reveals ’500,000 forgotten families’

A lack of support and opportunity for young people contributed to the outbreak of riots in England last summer, an independent report says.

A huge competitive advantage awaits bold publishers – O’Reilly Radar

Ries also says that “the one realization that has not hit publishing yet is that if you make content, you’re in the software business … if you look at the supply chain, who’s accumulating all the power? It’s software companies like Apple, Amazon and Google.” (Discussed at 6:43.)

For more on how the lean startup methodology applies to publishing, check out the full interview in the following video: …

How To Decrease Your Attachment To Your Stuff – The Consumerist

Opinion analysis: Enabling a constitutional fight : SCOTUSblog

Finding that lower courts were too modest about judicial power, the Supreme Court on Monday assigned them the task of sorting out a potentially fundamental issue over how — or whether — the President or Congress controls a very sensitive foreign policy issue, in this case dealing with the tinderbox of Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East. It is possible that the assignment might be quite narrow, and might not require judges to second-guess major foreign policy choices. But it is also possible that the lower courts may have to say when, and how, Congress can dictate some foreign policy to the Executive Branch, a much bigger question. It is not unlikely that the dispute would some day return to the Supreme Court.

Constitutional questions linger in the case of Zivotofsky v. Clinton (docket 10-699) simply because the Supreme Court chose not to decide them, even though it had taken on that task. …

Texas has now had forced TRANSVAGINAL ultrasounds in practice for 50 days. – Keep your Boehner out of my Uterus!

While Texas is only state currently forcing people to undergo transvaginal ultrasounds, Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, AND VIRGINIA all have forced ultrasounds before an abortion.

Oklahoma and North Carolina have passed similar laws to the one in Texas but they are not being enforced due to pending court decisions.

Guttmacher’s updated .pdf of what ultrasound laws are passed and in effect in which states. [pdf]

FTC Guidelines Give Consumers More Control Over Online Data Collected About Them – The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times

Proclaiming itself “the nation’s chief privacy policy and enforcement agency,” the Federal Trade Commission today released a 72-page final report establishing best practices for protecting consumer privacy in the digital era.

New twist on 1930s technology may become a 21st century weapon against global warming

Far from being a pipe dream years away from reality, practical technology for capturing carbon dioxide — the main greenhouse gas — from smokestacks is aiming for deployment at coal-fired electric power generating stations and other sources, scientists said here today. Their presentation at the 243rd National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society, was on a potential advance toward dealing with the 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide released into the air each year through human activity.

Facebook Threatens Legal Action Against Employers Asking for Your Password – Megan Garber – Technology – The Atlantic

It looks like Facebook is considering suing the parties who ask for its users’ passwords.

The language here also leaves open the possibility of suing users who voluntarily share their passwords with others. …

The policy update is a striking admission of the value of the connections that live and grow on Facebook’s platform: A violation of one user’s privacy through password access is, implicitly, the violation of the privacy of all of that user’s friends and family and coworkers and former coworkers and random acquaintances and elementary school classmates and bowling league teammates and former flames.

The Case Against Google – Gizmodo

One Googler authorized to speak for the company on background (meaning I could use the information he gave me, but not directly quote or attribute it) told me something that I found shocking. Google isn’t primarily about search anymore. Sure, search is still a core product, but it’s no longer the core product. The core product, he said, is simply Google.

Ultimately, it’s not about Gmail or Search or Android or Chrome or Maps or Plus. All of those are in service to one great master; pieces of the larger Google. He said that if I paid attention to what Larry Page has been saying recently, this would be apparent.

Researchers uncover 8,000 years of human history hidden in the Middle East – io9

…esearchers have turned to satellite imagery to uncover a vast network of over 14,000 long-overlooked Mesopotamian settlements, spanning 8,000 years of ancient civilization. Their findings represent a monumental step forward for the fields of archeology and anthropology, and suggest that an aerial perspective may hold the key to unlocking the mysteries of humanity’s first major settlements.
A significant body of archaeological evidence suggests that the earliest civilizations arose in Mesopotamia, the geographic region that today comprises Iraq, northeast Syria, southeast Turkey and southwest Iran. The size and distribution of these settlements throughout the Mesopotamian landscape, however, has long remained something of a mystery. …

tags: science archaeology

A Doctor’s Manifesto for Fighting Transvaginal Ultrasounds – Jezebel

Fellow physicians, once again we are being used as tools to screw people over. This time, it’s the politicians who want to use us to implement their morally reprehensible legislation. They want to use our ultrasound machines to invade women’s bodies, and they want our hands to be at the controls. …

It is our responsibility, as always, to protect our patients from things that would harm them. Therefore, as physicians, it is our duty to refuse to perform a medical procedure that is not medically indicated. Any medical procedure. Whatever the pseudo-justification.

It’s time for a little old-fashioned civil disobedience.

Here are a few steps we can take as physicians to protect our patients from legislation such as this. …

Attention-Grabbing Mag Cover Features Gorgeous Cate Blanchett Without Photoshop – Jezebel

Did Doctors Discover a Cure for Type 2 Diabetes? – Jezebel

Obviously this is invasive, life-altering surgery, so it’s not exactly some quick fix. And it would be preferable to find a non-surgical way to keep people from getting the disease in the first place. But if these initial results hold up over time, then this certainly does seem like it could be an excellent option for patients who’ve already got type 2 diabetes.

Women are Prescribed More Drugs But Take Less of Them – Jezebel

If more women than men are dying from these diseases, how come their antidotes are still tailored to men’s bodies?

To be fair, the FDA is aware of the issue, and just released a draft guidance in December 2011 that recommends sex-specific analyses and calls for a larger amount of women in clinical studies. But the Society For Women’s Health Research, a leading non-profit which co-sponsored the recent study, wrote a letter to the FDA last week asking them to expand the scope of their guidance from “evaluating” sex differences to actually requiring tests based on sex, race, and ethnicity before any drug is approved. …

Along with asking the FDA to require sex-based pre-approval tests, SWHR is very reasonably calling for proportional gender representation in clinical trials and sex-specific drug labeling regarding dosage.

Top 10 Essential DIY Skills That Aren’t as Hard as You Think – Lifehacker

Pygmy Goats Perform Heathen Dance to Hall & Oates – Jezebel

tags: video cute_animals

Are Pharmacists Lying to Keep Teenage Hussies Pregnant? – Jezebel

A new study has unearthed something in the world of pharmacy more depressing than filled pediatric cancer-fighting prescriptions that never get picked up: it appears that across the country, pill-dispensing professionals are giving teenage girls misinformation about the morning after pill’s legality and availability. But when doctors call the same pharmacists with questions, suddenly everyone at the pharmacy’s got their facts straight.

Racist Hunger Games Fans Are Very Disappointed – Jezebel

The tumblr Hunger Games Tweets has collected a smattering of Twitter postings, with the goal of exposing “Hunger Games fans on Twitter who dare to call themselves fans yet don’t know a damn thing about the books.” What people are saying is disappointing, sad, stomach-churning, and just plain racist. …

The posts go on and on and on. It’s not just a [couple] of tweets, it’s not just a coincidence.

tags: racism hunger games

I am Trayvon Martin, #wearetrayvonmartin #iamtrayvonmartin…

NYS Senator Eric Adams and his colleagues memorialize Trayvon Martin during the March 26, 2012 senate legislative session

Trayvon Martin’s Psychological Killer: Why We See Guns That Aren’t There. | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network

Correll’s research demonstrated that everyone – even an upstanding college undergraduate lacking any racial prejudice – is vulnerable to making racially biased decisions, particularly under the split-second pressures of the Police Officer’s Dilemma. Did racism motivate George Zimmerman’s actions against Trayvon Martin? Yes. But does a person have to be racist to make the same split-second decision? No.

When you grow up in a culture that endorses certain stereotypes, they become ingrained in your cultural knowledge; even if you don’t endorse them, they can still impact your behavior in stunningly horrifying ways. …

Note: Psychological aspects of the Trayvon Martin case have been covered very well elsewhere in the blogosphere as well. Some particularly good examples are here and here. [links]

tags: racism

Are We Doomed to Wage Wars Over Water? | Cross-Check, Scientific American Blog Network

War-correspondent-turned-antiwar-firebrand Chris Hedges expressed this idea during a radio interview with Brian Lehrer of WNYC radio, NPR’s affiliate in New York City. For more than a month, Lehrer has been hosting discussions of my claim—spelled out in my new book The End of War—that war is not inevitable.

Searching for clues on the Justices’ inclinations about the constitutionality of the individual mandate : SCOTUSblog – 3/26/2012

…we were looking not only for indications whether the Court would dismiss the present challenges to the Affordable Care Act as premature (the actual question up for discussion), but also for any clues on the Justices’ thinking about the merits of the challenge (the question up for argument tomorrow). In general, the Justices seemed careful not to ask questions or make comments that gave much insight on their broader views on the constitutionality of the statute. But a couple of issues did arise in this morning’s arguments that may have broader implications.

BBC News – Microsoft moves to disable Zeus botnet

Microsoft described the action as its “most complex effort to disrupt botnets to date”.

However, security company Sophos Labs said it had not seen any “significant disruption” to the illegal network.

Senior attorney for Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit Richard Boscovich gave details of the operation in a blog post. …

BBC News – Obama and Medvedev caught in unguarded missile remarks

Mr Obama said he would have more “flexibility” on difficult issues such as the US missile defence plans after November’s election.

Mr Medvedev said he would relay the message to Vladimir, a reference to newly elected President Vladimir Putin.

The White House later released a statement playing down the importance of the remarks.

Use YouTube to Learn How to Pronounce Proper Nouns – Lifehacker

If you’re searching for the pronunciation of a standard word, search Google with the “define:” paramater for the quickest method to get a pronunciation. However, Google doesn’t work for proper nouns or non-English words. For that, YouTube can be a great help. From YouTube, search for any word followed by a comma and cc, for instance, “mordor, cc.” This pulls up all the videos with closed captioning. Click the close captioning button below the video for the transcript, search for the word you want to learn, and click on it to be taken directly the that section of the video.

Myanmar – The Big Picture – Boston.com

Is the recent political thaw in Myanmar genuine? Democratic elections are coming to the long-reclusive southeast Asian nation of Myanmar, formerly Burma. A long military dictatorship has nominally ended, and the regime has signed peace treaties with several ethnic separatist insurgencies. Nobel laureate Aung San Su Kyi’s long house arrest is over, and she is campaigning for a seat in Parliament in the upcoming April 1 vote. Western investment is beginning to mass, which may ultimately be the reason the country is finally opening its doors. Other speculation on the thaw points to the incompetent emergency response to Cyclone Nargis in 2008, which left as many as 140,000 dead and sowed deep dissatisfaction with the government. Whatever the reasons for the unprecedented opening, the isolated and impoverished Burmese people are eager to reconnect with and catch their more developed neighbors in ASEAN, the Association of South East Asian Nations. While it’s impossible to represent every corner of any nation, collected here are images from the last couple of months in Myanmar, a nation of 55 million. — Lane Turner (41 photos total)

tags: photography myanmar

Shortlist for the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award Announced – SFWA

Six novels have been listed as finalists for the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award. They were selected by a panel of judges from works submitted by twenty-five different publishing houses and imprints.

The nominees are:

Greg Bear, Hull Zero Three (Gollancz)
Drew Magary, The End Specialist (Harper Voyager)
China Miéville, Embassytown (Macmillan)
Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press)
Charles Stross, Rule 34 (Orbit)
Sheri S.Tepper, The Waters Rising (Gollancz)

tags: science_fiction

Romney, Rep. Ellison see ‘The Hunger Games’ – The Hill’s Twitter Room

GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison (Minn.) ‏ had very different reactions to the new blockbuster movie “The Hunger Games” this weekend.

Romney, who saw the movie with wife Ann, son Matt, and grandkids, told CNN he “enjoyed it” and it was a “fun” weekend activity.

Ellison tweeted that it was sort of “chilling.”

Bill Chameides: The Carbon Footprint of Oil Sands Oil – Huffington Post

Bill to repeal oil tax breaks advances in Senate – MarketWatch.com

ImmigrationProf Blog: Stop Wasteful Spending on Incarceration of Immigrants

The Devaluation Of Black Life | Racialicious – the intersection of race and pop culture

This country has vilified young men of color so heavily that just existing makes them dangerous and threatening. Some say you can’t put value on life, but the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, Emmett Till and so many other innocent young men of color says otherwise.

As Supreme Court Listens, Here’s a Look at What It Means to Lock Kids Away for Life – COLORLINES

The Elements Of Navigation | Smashing UX Design

Employers Claim Feudal Rights Over Facebook Pages « Above the Law

Economist’s View: “The Changing Face of Foreclosures”

The problematic JOBS Act | Felix Salmon

Big data enters open-source hype cycle • The Register

Exclusive: Shadowy WI Super-PAC Bankrolled by Big Labor Unions | Mother Jones

Is Free Will an Illusion? Scientists, Philosophers Forced to Differ | Is There Fate? | Do I Have a Destiny? | LiveScience

Tolerance for Income Gap May Be Ebbing – Economic Scene – NYTimes.com – By EDUARDO PORTER – March 20, 2012

We have accepted income inequality in the past partly because of the belief that capitalism can’t work without it. If entrepreneurs invest and workers improve their skills to improve their lot in life, a government that heavily taxed the rich to give to the poor could destroy that incentive and stymie economic growth that benefits everybody.

…Two-thirds of American families — including four of five in the poorest fifth of the population — earn more than their parents did 30 years earlier. But they don’t advance much. Four out of 10 children whose family is in the bottom fifth will end up there as adults. Only 6 percent of them will rise to the top fifth.

It is difficult to measure changes in income mobility over time. But some studies suggest it is declining…

Women Flooding Rick Perry’s Facebook Page With Questions About Menstruation | Happy Place

Perry recently refused $35 million intended for Planned Parenthood to provide preventive healthcare to low-income women, basically denying reproductive care to all uninsured women in Texas. Now women are bombarding Perry’s Facebook page with all those extremely graphic questions about menstruation and other vaginal activities that Rick would never have to hear about if he’d just give them back their Planned Parenthood.

Male Congressmen Now Being Inundated With Knit And Crocheted Vaginas | Happy Place

In the latest brilliant counterstrike against the GOP’s Vag Offensive, The Snatchel Project is encouraging craftswomen to send their congressmen knit and crocheted bags, pouches and decorations in the shape of their favorite ladyparts.

Things We Saw Today: Thor On a Cat | The Mary Sue – by Jamie Frevele – March 21, 2012

Sheltr App Helps You Direct The Homeless To Food, Shelter | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation

…Sheltr gathers information about meal providers, homeless intake facilities, shelters, and more, and makes it all easily searchable. The app detects a user’s location to guide them to the nearest facilities.

Nokia Thinks We Need The Ability To Get Phone Alerts Via Vibrating Tattoos – The Consumerist – By Mary Beth Quirk on March 21, 2012

10 Stubborn Exercise Myths that Won’t Die, Debunked by Science – Lifehacker

You should rub honey on your everywhere | Disease Prone, Scientific American Blog Network

Honey’s ‘healing powers’ can be summarised into 5 main ingredients or activities of the components of honey;

1. Hydrogen peroxide – Honey contains an enzyme called glucose oxidase which breaks down glucose sugars and generates hydrogen peroxide, a kind of bleach, when there is free water available. …

Obama Responds to Deaf Student in Sign Language, Leaves Him ‘Speechless’

Stephon, a 26-year-old Prince George’s Community College student signed to President Obama “I am proud of you.” The president, “almost involuntary, instinctively, immediately” signed back with a thank you…

Stephon took to YouTube after the event share his experience: …

Florida Refuses to Suspend Gun License of Trayvon Martin’s Shooter – Colorlines

tags: racism violence

Pictures: Hungary Literally Burns Money for Fuel – National Geographic News

Hungary is the only country to recycle its worn cash for fuel, recycling forints worth $1 billion (U.S.) each year into briquettes distributed to the poor.

tags: photography hungary

Activists fined for watching TV protests – The Times.co.uk

Six activists in Harare were fined $500 (£315) and ordered to do 420 hours of community service for watching newsclips…

Mitt Romney As the Political Etch-A-Sketch – Firedoglake – by Jon Walker

If you shake him, he rewrites his positions

Don’t Tread on Us – NYTimes.com – By MAUREEN DOWD – March 13, 2012

As secretary of state, Clinton is supposed to stay out of domestic politics. But this was a moment pregnant with possibility, a titanic clash of the Inevitable (Hillary) and the Indefensible (Republican cavemen).

The attempt by Republican men to wrestle American women back into chastity belts has not only breathed life into President Obama, it has roused and riled Hillary. And that could turn out to be the most dangerous thing the wildly self-destructive G.O.P. leaders have done.

In some kind of insane bout of mass misogyny, Republicans are hounding out the women voters — including Republicans and independents — who helped them gain control of the House in 2010.

Senator Olympia Snowe, who’s fed up and leaving Congress, told The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty that “it feels as if we are going back to another era,” warning that Republicans could drive women into Democratic arms.

tags: reproductive_justice misogyny sexism patriarchy

dw_news: Dreamwidth Update: 17 Mar 2012

Changes recently implemented include:

* Opening up the Support History page to everyone, so if you’re looking for a support request you filed ages ago, you can locate it again. (This page isn’t linked on the main support pages yet — we’re still trying to figure out where to put it.)

* The ability to only track a single user’s posts to a community (instead of tracking the community as a whole). This option now shows whenever you hit the “track this” icon or link for a community (as a whole) or an entry in a community. (And, while we were at it, we rearranged the options for tracking an entry to make them a little less overwhelming.)

[I should point out, by the way, that the bug for adding that feature was bug #8 -- logged well before we actually opened our doors -- and was also the last single-digit bug we had remaining. Hooray for resolving older bugs!]

* Displaying the number of screened comments on entries with screened comments (to those who have the ability to see the screened comments on those entries, I mean) — previously, if you had 2000 comments on an entry but only 20 were visible, the comment count on the entry would say “20 comments”. Now, it will instead say “20 visible | 1980 screened comments”. For now this is only available on site-skinned comment pages (including the light mode entry view), but now that the hard part’s done, we can do the tedious part of enabling it in individual styles’ custom comment pages.

A Way Forward on Judicial Ethics – NYTimes.com – March 11, 2012

Last Tuesday, an alliance of government watchdog groups delivered 100,000 signatures to the Supreme Court along with a letter from hundreds of law professors calling on the justices to voluntarily adopt the code of conduct that applies to all other federal judges and to reform how they handle requests for recusals.

A federal appeals court ruling the next day on the case of a federal trial judge illustrates why recusal over a conflict of interest cannot be left solely to the judge involved and needs to be reviewed by other jurists. Yet the Supreme Court operates with no such mechanism, which is critical to preserving confidence in the court’s integrity.

tags: scotus

Top 10 Ways to Get a Better Job – Lifehacker

Put Together a Resume That’s Actually Compelling
Ensure Your Resume Isn’t Filled with Common Words and Redundant Phrasing
Search Unconventional and Career-Specific Job Sites
Find a Better Job by Searching for a Great Company Rather Than a Position
Learn to Make Even Your Irrelevant Experience Seem Relevant
Dress Well for the Interview
Learn to Read Body Language for a More Successful Interview
Know How to Give Great Answers to Common Job Interview Questions
Ask for a Signing Bonus
Leave Your Current Job Without Burning Any Bridges

tags: careers

Virginia Republican Tells Cringeworthy Story About How Wife Won’t Fuck Him, Everyone Laughs and Laughs – Jezebel – 2/24/2012

tags: reproductive_justice rape_culture video

RIAA chief: ISPs to start policing copyright by July 1 | CNET News – by Greg Sandoval – March 14, 2012

NEW YORK–The country’s largest Internet service providers haven’t given up on the idea of becoming copyright cops.

Last July, Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and other bandwidth providers announced that they had agreed to adopt policies designed to discourage customers from illegally downloading music, movies and software. Since then, the ISPs have been very quiet about their antipiracy measures.

…It will be interesting to see how the tech sector reacts once accused Internet pirates begin having their Web access suspended.

Clooney, others arrested in protest at Sudanese Embassy over claims of humanitarian crisis – The Washington Post – 3/16/2012

A Jobs Bill That Will Provide Help, but for All the Wrong People – NYTimes.com

Finally, the House passed a jobs bill last week. And what a bill it is!

Officially called the Jump-Start Our Business Start-Ups Act, it calls for reopening our capital markets to exciting new start-ups by ridding protections for investors and stripping away disclosure requirements for smaller companies.

JOBS has been repeatedly assailed, but it will bring much-needed help to some of the harder hit sectors of the economy.

John Coffee, a Columbia Law professor, has hailed the bill as “the boiler room legalization act.” And rightly so. Boiler room operations were one of the unsung job creators of the 1990s, producing some of America’s greatest penny stocks and boom times for yacht makers and coke dealers.

Federal Report Cites Bank Officials in Foreclosure Surge – NYTimes.com – 3/12/12

Managers at major banks ignored widespread errors in the foreclosure process, in some cases instructing employees to adopt make-believe titles and speed documents through the system despite internal objections, according to a wide-ranging review by federal investigators.

The banks have largely focused the blame for mistakes on low-level employees, attributing many of the problems to the surge in the volume of foreclosures after the housing market collapsed and the economy weakened in 2008.

But the report concludes that managers were aware of the problems and did nothing to correct them.

tags: real_estate_crisis

Plaintiff in healthcare law challenge went bankrupt – with unpaid medical bills – latimes.com – March 8, 2012

Mary Brown, a 56-year-old Florida woman who owned a small auto repair shop but had no health insurance, became the lead plaintiff challenging President Obama’s healthcare law because she was passionate about the issue.

Brown “doesn’t have insurance. She doesn’t want to pay for it. And she doesn’t want the government to tell her she has to have it,” said Karen Harned, a lawyer for the National Federation of Independent Business. Brown is a plaintiff in the federation’s case, which the Supreme Court plans to hear later this month.

But court records reveal that Brown and her husband filed for bankruptcy last fall with $4,500 in unpaid medical bills.

“This is so ironic,” Jane Perkins, a health law expert in North Carolina, said of Brown’s situation. “It just shows that all Americans inevitably have a need for healthcare. Somebody has paid for her healthcare costs. And she is now among the 62% whose personal bankruptcy was attributable in part to medical bills.”

Texas Loses Entire Women’s Health Program Over Planned Parenthood Law – 03/15/2012 – Huffington Post

The Department of Health and Human Services announced on Thursday that it will cut off all Medicaid funding for family planning to the state of Texas, following Gov. Rick Perry’s (R) decision to implement a new law that excludes Planned Parenthood from the state’s Medicaid Women’s Health Program.

Cindy Mann, director of the Center for Medicaid and State Operations (CMSO), wrote Texas health officials a letter on Thursday explaining that the state broke federal Medicaid rules by discriminating against qualified family planning providers and thus would be losing the entire program, which provides cancer screenings, contraceptives and basic health care to 130,000 low-income women each year.

tags: reproductive_justice why_we_can’t_have_nice_things texas

Arizona Birth Control Bill Penalizes Women For Using Contraception For Non-Medical Reasons – 03/14/2012 – Huffington Post

Arizona legislators have advanced an unprecedented bill that would require women who wish to have their contraception covered by their health insurance plans to prove to their employers that they are taking it to treat medical conditions. The bill also makes it easier for Arizona employers to fire a woman for using birth control to prevent pregnancy despite the employer’s moral objection.

tags: reproductive_justice patriarchy why_we_can’t_have_nice_things arizona

Nike To The Irish: Sorry We Named Black And Tan Sneakers After A Violent Paramilitary Group – The Consumerist – By Mary Beth Quirk on March 14, 2012

The SB Dunk Low, known also as “The Black and Tan” brings to mind mixing Guinness and Harp ale, something Americans and Brits love to order. What they might not know is that the Royal Irish Constabulary Reserve Force, known as the Black and Tans, were a violent group that terrorized civilians during Ireland’s civil war in the early part of the 20th century.

How a Computer Modeler Predicted the Mountain Pine Beetle Tree-Killing Rampage: Scientific American – By Nathanael Massey and ClimateWire | March 14, 2012

Over the past decade, the forests of North America have been gripped by some of the worst mountain pine beetle epidemics in history. Driven by record-high temperatures and frequent drought, beetle kill has expanded more than twentyfold across the American West.

In central British Columbia, the insects have destroyed more than 14 million hectares of trees — an area the size of Connecticut — in the single largest outbreak the world has ever seen. …

The answer, it turns out, lay within the beetle itself — in its cyclical pattern of birth, life, procreation and death. In particular, it rested on a delicate balance between temperature and the insect’s development.

Afghanistan: February 2012 – The Big Picture – Boston.com

Angry protests broke out and shock rippled through Afghanistan on February 21 when accounts surfaced that NATO personnel at Bagram Air Base had burned a number of Korans and were preparing to burn more. A NATO spokesman said the books were inadvertently sent for incineration after being gathered at a detention facility for suspected insurgents. The incident brought nearly a week of strong anti-American demonstrations in which 30 people, including American troops were killed and many others wounded. Despite President Obama’s letter of apology to President Hamid Karzai, the violence escalated. Two American soldiers were shot dead inside the Interior Ministry building in Kabul on Feb. 25. On Feb. 27, two suicide attackers detonated a car bomb at the entrance to a NATO air base in eastern Afghanistan. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the bombing as revenge for the burning of the Korans. While the violence raged, Afghan civilians faced harsher than usual winter weather and cold temperatures in which more than 40 people, mostly children, have frozen to death. — Paula Nelson (48 photos total)

tags: photography afghanistan

Breaking: Thomas Jefferson School of Law’s Motion to Dismiss DENIED — And Twenty More Law Schools to Be Sued « Above the Law – By Staci Zaretsky – 14 Mar 2012

Apparently, suing law schools isn’t a fool’s errand.

Thomas Jefferson School of Law filed a motion to dismiss its class action lawsuit over its employment statistics this summer. …

When we last checked in with the attorneys responsible for the law school litigation movement, we were informed that “a very big announcement” would be coming in the “next few days.” With a promise to make 2012 the “year of law school litigation,” Team Strauss/Anziska is working hard to remain true to its word. March isn’t even over, and they’ve already sued 12 law schools.

…they are planning to target 20 more law schools for class action lawsuits over their allegedly deceptive post-graduation employment statistics. This time around, you may be surprised by some of the law schools that appear on their list.

First Amendment Law Prof Blog: Ulysses Grant’s Anti-Semitic Order and Its Impact on Jewish Participation in American Public Life – March 14, 2012

On Slate, Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University and chief historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History, offers an interesting, brief account of General Grant’s 1862 order expelling Jews as a class from the region under Grant’s Civil War command.

…Sarna explores how Grant’s order first frightened but then mobilized American Jews, spurring many to seek a more prominent role in political life. Sarna also examines how Grant’s regrets about the order affected his presidency, prompting him to reject claims that America should be identified as a “Christian nation” and to include Jews among those receiving important government appointments.

tags: history

Starling Flocks Behave Like Flying Magnets | Wired Science – By Brandon Keim – March 13, 2012

To achieve their extraordinary coordination, starling flocks in flight behave mathematically like metals becoming magnetized, researchers say.

tags: science

Jennifer Lawrence THE HUNGER GAMES Interview – collider.com

What kind of training did you have to go through for this role?

LAWRENCE: Running, free running, which is for agility, archery, climbing, combat and yoga. But, that’s all.

The Science of Rail Guns – io9

…will we ever really get to use them the way people in science fiction do? And could rail guns be used for a non-violent reason — inexpensively launching payload into space? …

Ejecting pieces of metal at phenomenal velocities
Scaling up is the problem
Space exploration
Handheld rail guns

Open the Future: Forensic Futurism

Those of us in the discipline really need to examine why serious forecasts can turn out to be terribly wrong. This takes two related forms:

Understanding why forecast X didn’t happen as expected. Maybe we thought that certain drivers would continue to be important, or that other drivers wouldn’t be important, or perhaps simply never expected a “Black Swan” event. This is a useful practice for all foresight professionals, in order to better understand (and ultimately to communicate) how reasonable expectations can go terribly wrong.

Understanding why X was forecast in the first place. This is the more difficult process, as it requires engaging in an objective, dispassionate look at how futurists came to their conclusions. Not simply what they looked at, the lines of evidence they selected as important, but why they chose those lines of evidence in the first place.

SFWA Announces Honorees of the 2012 Solstice Awards

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America are pleased to announce Octavia Butler and John Clute as the recipients of the Solstice Awards for 2012. The Solstice Awards are granted to up to three persons, living or dead, who have consistently had a positive, transformative influence on the genre of science fiction and fantasy. …

And Now for Some Real Science Fiction … Studio Math! – Filmcritic.com Feature

I read that in order for John Carter to turn a profit, it would have to make something like $600 million at the box office. But the movie only cost $250 million to make. Why does it have to take in so much more to make money?

Leaving aside the amusing irony of the word “only” in regards to a film with a $250 million production budget, this is a fair question. To answer it, we need to follow the money. …

EMILY’s List: Top 10 Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Attacks on Women’s Rights – By Alison McQuade on 03/14/2012

tags: reproductive_justice misogyny rape_culture

Write Together: Google Docs Is Now Available for All Google+ Hangouts – SocialTimes

To use the feature, just start a Hangout, and while you’re in it you just click the “Docs” button and you get a list of available documents. You have a few options to you once you’re in the Docs mode.

- you can add an existing document, or upload a new one
- added documents are available as a list on the left-hand side
- you can switch between and collaboratively edit multiple documents at once

Hobbit Businesses Sued by Hobbit Rights Owner | The Mary Sue

A few years ago, New Line Cinema swore up and down that they’d never let Peter Jackson direct another Tolkien movie because he’d asked an independent auditor to take a look at New Line’s profits on The Lord of the Rings to make sure everybody was getting paid the right amounts (as allowed under his contract) and then sued. At the same time, Zaentz was doing much the same, because the company had refused to reveal the numbers that would confirm their profits. …

GenerateApologyMessage() – The Daily WTF

“We came across this trying to sort out why the application never threw errors which said what the problem was,” Tom writes, “I wouldn’t have minded (much) but the random number generator was something to behold.”

Encyclopedia Britannica Out of Print | The Mary Sue

I admit that when I saw the headlines about the Encyclopaedia Britannica going out of print, I thought it was an Onion headline about the Encyclopaedia going out of print hundreds of years from now, with descriptions of just how much shelf space it took up, or hard drive space, or dilithium valence matrix space or somesuch.

But nope. …

According to a 2005 study by Nature (which EB Inc. called “completely without merit”), Wikipedia has an average of four errors per post, while the Encyclopaedia has three.

Brooklyn Water Bagel’s ‘Brooklynized’ Water a Fraud, Lawsuit Says – FindLaw.com Legally Weird

[Brooklyn] Water Bagel boasts a 14-step “proprietary water treatment” system that allegedly recreates the water found in Brooklyn businesses and homes, explains the Sun-Sentinel. With “Brooklynized” water on hand, franchises across the country can produce New York bagels. …

As with all lawsuits, Greenbaum needs to prove his accusations are true. To do so, he and his lawyer have contacted experts who can test both Brooklyn and “Brooklynized” water. If the chemical compositions don’t match, he will be on his way to winning the lawsuit.

The best new scientific idea in years – io9

Crowdfunding site Kickstarter has now successfully helped more than one project earn over $1 million, turning the traditional model of media production on its ear. What if we could do the same thing for science? …Last week, he and his team launched Petridish.org, and they’ve already got reputable researchers whose projects are almost funded after just a few days. Could this be the future of publicly funded science?

If you visit Petridish right now, you’ll see a handful of projects — all from reputable scientists associated with institutions like NASA, the California Academy of Sciences, and Stanford University — that request fairly modest sums to do incredibly important work. It’s all basic research, and ranges from searching for exomoons (moons in other solar systems), to tracking endangered sea turtles, recording the sounds of undersea ecosystems (how cool is that?), to discovering new species of ants in uncharted regions of Madagascar. The videos of the scientists requesting funds are geeky and lo-fi, but still incredibly exciting. Imagine helping somebody discover weird new life forms in the ocean! …

Petridish will make money the same way Kickstarter does, by taking a 5% transaction fee off the top of donations. He says Petridish will vet the researchers, weeding out “junk science like perpetual motion machines.” They will also encourage scientists to make their work as accessible as possible in order to get the public engaged.

Solar Panels Made By Ion Cannon Could Halve Production Costs | Geekosystem – by Eric Limer – March 13th, 2012

When Scientists Choose Motherhood » American Scientist – Wendy M. Williams, Stephen J. Ceci

A single factor goes a long way in explaining the dearth of women in math-intensive fields. How can we address it?

TIP: Air Dry Your Dogs for Fewer Wrinkles | The Fluffington Post

tags: cute_animals

Kid Cudi’s ‘Hunger Games’ Song ‘The Ruler & The Killer’: Listen – idolator.com

tags: music

Mind-controlled dress just might be the sexiest robot fashion ever – io9

tags: the_future

Scientists may have just discovered a brand new species of human [Evolution] – io9

This skull has a weird mix of ancient and modern traits. It was discovered in a cave in southwest China and dates to between 14,500 and 11,500 years ago. …

Witness the Moon’s breathtaking 4.5-billion-year evolution in less than three minutes [Video] – io9

Red Panda Can’t Even Believe How Awesome This Pumpkin Is | The Fluffington Post

A red panda at the Maruyama Zoo in Sapporo, Japan was seen totally freaking out over an awesome pumpkin in his enclosure on Wednesday. …

Take Action Now – End the use of child soldiers – Amnesty International USA

While the United States is supporting efforts to apprehend LRA leader Joseph Kony, it must also ensure that other armed groups and governments in the region cease recruiting child soldiers and help rehabilitate the children who are already soldiers.

[That viral video KONY 2012 by Invisible Children, Inc. is deceptive, but Amnesty is seizing the moment. Click through to email the White House.]

tags: call_for_action

Inspiring stuff: Art of the Toilet Paper Roll by JUNIOR FRITZ JACQUET

6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying | Cracked.com – By: David Wong – March 05, 2012

…implies that money earned is a perfect indicator of a person’s value to society — if you’re broke, it must mean you’re a loser who contributes nothing to anyone’s life. And that’s downright bizarre when it comes from the same people who also go on and on about the importance of parenting and family values. Surely they’ve noticed that being a great stay-at-home parent makes you exactly zero dollars a year. …

It’s like setting a jar of moonshine on the floor of a boxcar full of 10 hobos and saying, “Now fight for it!” Sure, in the bloody aftermath you can say to each of the losers, “Hey, you could have had it if you’d fought harder!” and that’s true on an individual level. But not collectively…

Hell, every Christmas we celebrate the tale of the wealthy Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. We hate him in the first part of the story, and then we love him by the end. Not because he gave away all of his wealth and became poor (he didn’t), but because he stopped acting like a shithead. Do you get the incredibly subtle and nuanced message of that story?

Subject for Debate: Are Women People? | TIME.com – By JESSICA WINTER – March 7, 2012

This debate has reached critical mass, and leaves me uncertain of my legal and moral status. Am I a person? An object? A ward of the state? A “prostitute”? (And if I’m the last of these, where do I drop off my W-2?) …

Case No. 1: U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes
The Recap: Following a 10-week maternity leave, a three-year employee of a Houston debt collection agency filed a sex discrimination suit, alleging she was fired for asking permission to bring a breast pump to work. Hughes sided with the company, but added that the truth of the plaintiff’s claim was irrelevant.

tags: reproductive_justice sexism rape_culture misogyny

GA Republicans Come Between Women and Doctors « Georgia Politico

SB 438 would prohibit any state employee insurance plans from covering abortions. There is no exemption for the health of the mother’s life. So, if a woman nearly dies giving childbirth and a life-saving abortion has to be performed, the women will be stuck with the bill.

SB 434 also seeks to limit the choices of women in our state. It would prohibit any money to be spent on an insurance plan that covers abortion: …

tags: reproductive_justice

Virginia Women to Virginia GOP: Now You’ve Made Us Angry. REALLY Angry. | Firedoglake – By: Phoenix Woman – March 4, 2012

Note to Governor McDonnell: Arresting women’s-rights activists won’t make your little problem go away.

tags: reproductive_justice rape_culture

George Will Finally Admits GOP Leaders are Afraid of Limbaugh | Crooks and Liars – By John Amato – March 05, 2012

Rush Limbaugh and Sandra Fluke: Apology Not Accepted | Swampland | TIME.com – By Joe Klein – March 5, 2012

Jim Poniewozik raises the most important question here: Has Limbaugh reached an Imus-like tipping point, where his power and audience will be severely curtailed?

[I'm not sure that's THE most important question, but it is a pretty significant one, considering how much misinformation and hatred the man has contributed to the national consciousness. -L]

Using Art to Open Up the Political Process in ’8′ | ThinkProgress

When Perry v. Schwarzenegger (which became Perry v. Brown), the legal case challenging California’s Proposition 8 ballot initiative which banned marriage equality, went to trial, the proceedings, like the proceedings in many American courtrooms, weren’t broadcast. …

…playwright and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black attended a considerable amount of the trial, and adapted transcripts of it into [his play] 8.

WATCH: Star-Studded Performance Of Proposition 8 Play Now On YouTube | ThinkProgress

If you missed Saturday night’s live performance of “8,” Dustin Lance Black’s play based on the transcripts of the Proposition 8 trial, it is now available online. Celebrities like Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Jane Lynch, and Martin Sheen brought to life the trial’s powerful arguments for equality… Given Prop 8′s proponents fought so hard to prevent public distribution of the videos of the proceedings, this reading is a must-watch and must-share glimpse into what actually transpired: …

tags: video marriage_equality

The Maddow Blog – ‘Three steps backwards for Virginia women’

The picture above shows how Virginia State Police greeted protesters for reproductive equality this weekend. On Saturday, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports, 31 people were arrested for marching to the Capitol and sitting down on the steps, where they were faced officers in riot gear.

tags: reproductive_justice

Being Progressive: You’re Doing it Wrong | Shakesville – by Paul the Spud

So. Rush Limbaugh grumbled and rolled his eyes and offered a non-apology apology to Sandra Fluke.

Progressive hero Michael Moore thought this was worth noting on Twitter. …

Progressive hero Keith Olbermann thought this was so hilarious, it was worth retweeting.

tags: misogyny why_we_can’t_have_nice_things

Overheard… | Alethian Worldview

“Claiming that someone else’s marriage is against your religion is like claiming that someone else’s donut is breaking your diet.”

tags: marriage_equality

The Consequences of Hate | Hullabaloo – David Atkins

“You see, my 16 year old daughter came home from school on Friday in tears and has been in a state of utter despair since. She was told, in no uncertain terms, that she is a slut…”

This is the consequence of the hate being peddled by Rush Limbaugh and his ilk. It’s not just “entertainment” or “humor” as he and his defenders like to claim. The bullying these folks do on the airwaves trickles down to bullying in the workplace and in the schoolyard. It has very real, very negative consequences to people’s lives–including to these “mean girls” bullies themselves, who are at significantly higher risk of teen pregnancy and doomed shotgun weddings due to a learned prejudice against basic birth control.

tags: reproductive_justice misogyny

The 16 Percenters: female leadership is stalled and going backwards | Hullabaloo

Having come of age with the women’s movement, I’ll admit that I felt for many years that change was coming fast and was inevitable. For a long time I bought into the idea that once women had to come to a certain age and level of experience parity would naturally be reached. That time is now. And we’re at 16%.

tags: misogyny patriarchy

T.J. Martin: Oscar Winner for Undefeated Talks to The Root | By: Lathleen Ade-Brown | Posted: March 5, 2012

[Interview with] the first African American to win an Oscar for a full-length documentary.

Inspiration: Profiles of Trailblazing Black Women | The Root – By: Joshua R. Weaver | Posted: March 5, 2012

Just in time for Women’s History Month, Crystal McCrary has released her latest book profiling the who’s who of influential black women in the 21st century.

Is Single Parenthood Child Abuse? Senator Proposes Law Equating the Two | The Root – By: Claudio E. Cabrera | Posted: March 3, 2012

tags: why_do_they_hate_families

Limbaugh Apologizes to Sandra Fluke for ‘Slut’ Comment | The Root – By: Claudio E. Cabrera | Posted: March 4, 2012

[He's sorry for his "choice of words", but not for spreading misinformation about a) how prescription birth control expenses work, b) what change exactly is being proposed for b.c. pill coverage, c) who uses the pill, d) why they use it, and e) who needs help paying for it.

Suck my left tit, Limbaugh.

-L]

tags: reproductive_justice misogyny

Women in Publication: The 2011 Count – Forbes – 2/29/2012

[pie charts]

gospelofbvvt: Bread That Makes WonderBread Feel Like LoserBread

I will spare you my verbose and slightly disturbing breadfeels in exchange for making some bread, because making stuff you can shove into your face is a brilliant idea. Do not be frightened. We’ll get through this together.

tags: recipes

Single Dad Learns Comics for His Daughter | The Mary Sue

Maddy’s almost four now, and Logelin, while struggling through his fears of learning to braid hair and travelling with a baby, considered himself to have a stroke of luck in that she was turning into quite the tomboy. He felt well equipped to teacher her about baseball, football, and fishing; the things he did as a kid, but Maddy is also very, very interested in comic book superheroes, and those, he confesses, are completely beyond his experience.

What even I sometimes forget, steeped as I am in the “but women don’t read comics/play video games” discussion, is that not every guy reads comics or plays video games. Logelin is one of those guys.

According to Google, Santorum Is No Longer Most Known for Being a Frothy Mix of Lube and Fecal Matter – gizmodo – MAR 1, 2012

arduinna: Google and privacy and alternatives: giant post o’ doom

Daily Kos: Bravo, NPR! – FEB 28, 2012

NPR last week replaced its old code, The NPR Code of Ethics and Practices, with a new ethics handbook that seems to direct journalists to abandon reportage that strives for balance at the cost of accuracy. …

Already, some NPR journalists are grappling with this new code of ethics and how, exactly, their reportage will fit (or not) into the new guideline to be “impartial” and “fair to the truth.”
And already, listeners – including myself – have noticed NPR journalists being a bit more dogged about calling out dubious facts when they are presented by advocates for a particular side of a story.

…Chris Bowers has pointed me to a Daily Kos action item: a petition to NPR thanking the institution for its new handbook’s rejection of false balance.

tags: journalism

TED Blog | Choose your own TEDTalk: Sebastian Wernicke at TED2012

Sebastian Wernicke thinks there’s something missing from the Full Spectrum of TED2012: The audience has had no influence over the talks.

Free Trade Ad Nauseam – Jagdish Bhagwati – Project Syndicate

[Four misconceptions about trade policy. -L]

The first misconception is that exports create jobs, while imports do not …

Student Loan Debt Hits Home for Bernanke – Real Time Economics – WSJ – February 29, 2012

The most interesting anecdote to come out of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke‘s semiannual testimony to Congress: His son, who is in medical school in New York, is likely to rack up $400,000 of student loan debt in the process of getting his degree.

Off the Charts Blog | Center on Budget and Policy Priorities | The Myth of the Out-of-Control Federal Government – February 29, 2012

Are the size and reach of the federal government exploding, as some have suggested? While overall federal spending is well above its historical average as a share of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and is expected to remain so even after the economy recovers, our new examination of the latest Congressional Budget Office (CBO) data belies claims of a large and permanent expansion of the federal government. … [charts and graphs]

Stop Starving Public Universities and Shrinking the Middle Class – Robert Reich – February 29, 2012

Public higher education has been the gateway to the middle class but that gate is shutting – just when income and wealth are more concentrated at the top than they’ve been since the 1920s, and when America needs the brainpower of its young people more than ever.

This is nuts.

The U.S. Economy in Charts | Treasury.gov – 2/29/2012 – By: Dr. Jan Eberly

Looking Back With Shrillness – NYTimes.com – Paul Krugman – February 29, 2012

…throughout these past ten-plus years… pundits in good standing have been expected to make calls for bipartisanship that involve pretending that Republican politicians are actually the kind of statesmen the party used to contain, but no longer does.

So now we see a primary struggle in which the choice is between a series of not-Romneys whose political and policy views are stark raving mad, on one side, and the not-not-Romney who is, maybe, just pretending to share those views. …

The GOP isn’t just spectacularly unlucky in its menu of candidates; this is what the party has been for decades.

55 Free Philosophy Courses | Open Culture

Chespirito | About.com Latin American History

…Mexico’s greatest children’s TV star. His beloved characters, among them “el Chavo del Ocho” (“the kid from number 8″) and “El chapulin colorado” (“the red grasshopper”) have been on Spanish-speaking TV for decades and are among the most-watched TV shows anywhere, anytime.

The Lost City of Xochicalco | About.com Latin American History

…has been discovered and excavated. Xochicalco means “House of Flowers”

Eloy Alfaro, the Old Fighter | About.com Latin American History

The People of Quito -some of them, at least – hated former President Eloy Alfaro enough that on January 28, 1912, they broke into the prison where he was held, shot him and some of his supporters, and dragged their bodies through the streets. Yet today, Alfaro is considered by modern Ecuadorians to be one of their best presidents ever and his image in on the Ecuadorian 50 cent piece. …

What Is Character? Debunking the Myth of Fixed Personality | Brain Pickings

Much of our understanding of personhood hinges on what we call “character” — but what, exactly, is it? Here is an omnibus of definitions and insights from notable cross-disciplinary thinkers, from philosophy to neuroscience to literature, underpinning which is a shared sentiment that “character” is fluid and responsive to context, rather than a static and unflinching set of traits.

Memory Is Not a Recording Device: How Technology Shaped Our Metaphors for Remembering | Brain Pickings

I spend a lot of time thinking about the evolution of knowledge in the age of Information Overload, and “memory” has always been a centerpiece of “knowledge.” But at a time when the rift between accessibility and access to information is gaping wider than ever, memory as a foundation for knowledge is shifting from retentional to relational, elevating the importance of the ability to retrieve and connect information over that of the ability to retain it.

As we move from storing units of data — books, music, images, footage — to saving pathways to and among them, our frameworks for thoughtful interpretation, which include the curation and contextualization of information, will become of crucial importance.

This Day in History: Christopher Columbus Tricks Native Jamaicans into Giving Him Supplies by Using His Knowledge of an Upcoming Lunar Eclipse

February 29, 1504

This Day in History: Samuel Byck Hijacks an Airliner with the Intent of Flying it into the White House to Kill President Nixon

February 22, 1974

Rush Limbaugh Calls Sarah Fluke A “slut” For Supporting Obama Regulation That Makes Birth Control Coverage Mandatory For Health Insurance | The New Republic

I’m not quite sure what to say to this.

Do I point out that, for many women, access to contraception has nothing to do with trying to prevent pregnancy…? That many people wishing to use contraception are married people who simply want some control over whether, and when, to have children? That the most effective forms of contraception are expensive… regardless of whether you have sex once a month, once a week, or once a day? That, as a forthcoming paper from Harold Pollack and Adam Sonfield points out, studies show women will choose these forms of contraception if they are affordable? That contraception has all kinds of economic and health benefits, which is why a non-partisan commission of experts from the Institute of Medicine first recommended birth control be part of basic health insurance?

I could say any of those things. But to do so might seem to concede an argument that doesn’t deserve conceding: the suggestion that women who have premarital sex are “sluts.”

tags: reproductive_justice misogyny

Daily Kos: Rush Limbaugh loses big advertiser, but Republican leadership refuses to take him on – Mar 02, 2012

[Click through to sign a petition denouncing this slut-shaming. -L]

Sandra Fluke is the Georgetown college student who Democrats had asked to testify in the infamous Issa no-girls-allowed hearing about women’s health. Democrats held their own hearing to get her testimony on the record, which led to Limbaugh’s tirade, calling Ms. Fluke a “slut” and “prostitute” and saying “if we’re going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”

Republican leadership is too intimidated by Limbaugh to denounce him and so far the media hasn’t done much of a job in pushing those Republicans to make public statements. Pressure is going to build, however, as Limbaugh is getting hurt where it counts: with his show’s advertisers.

tags: call_for_action reproductive_justice misogyny

Cyg: WaPo, are you seriously paying someone to draw Venn diagram jokes in MS Paint right now?

Does she need an intern?

Cat Breeds Join Wolfram|Alpha’s (Meow) Mix of Data – Wolfram|Alpha Blog

Daily Kos: H.R. 347 Redress of Grievances Suspended in Proximity to Politicians – Feb 28, 2012

When meeting up at sea, bottlenose dolphins exchange name-like whistles | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine

Signature whistles were first discovered by Melba and David Caldwell in the 1960s, but we still know relatively little about how they’re used. We know that bottlenose dolphins develop their signatures when they’re a few months old, possibly modelling them on those of their mothers. They can go unchanged for decades, although males will sometimes change their whistles to resemble that of a new ally.

The signature whistles seem to act like badges of identity. One dolphin can learn information about another by listening to its whistle. But they’re not entirely like human names. For a start, they’re invented, rather than bestowed.

[Um. Methinks I detect a whiff of cultural bias. -L]

tags: science

NCBI ROFL: It was as big as my head, I swear! Biased spider size estimation in spider phobia. | Discoblog | Discover Magazine

tags: science

This Day in African History — Ethiopia’s Decisive Victory at Adowa

On 1 March 1896, troops of Menelik II, Emperor of Ethiopia, routed those of General Oreste Baratieri, Italian governor of Eritrea. The victory at Adowa saved Ethiopia from Italian colonization …

Why I Tearfully Deleted My Pinterest Inspiration Boards | DDK Portraits – February 24, 2012 – by kirsten

From a legal perspective, my concern was for my own potential liability. From an artist’s perspective, my concern was that I was arguably engaging in activity that is morally, ethically and professionally wrong.

…There is a lot more to the legal analysis surrounding copyrights and fair use but the bottom line is that the law is still evolving and the case law is having a hard time keeping up with technology. With no clear guidelines from the courts, I was feeling very uneasy so I decided to go back to Pinterest and see what else they say about [pinning] work that isn’t mine. …

This “defend and indemnify” stuff means that if some photographer out there decides that he or she does not want you using that photogs images as “inspiration” or otherwise and decides to sue you and Pinterest over your use of that photog’s images, you will have to hire a lawyer for yourself and YOU will have to hire a lawyer for Pinterest and fund the costs of defending both of you in court.

Ebooks Get the Respect They Deserve at ‘Download the Universe’ – Rebecca J. Rosen – Technology – The Atlantic – Feb 29 2012

Ebooks aren’t just electronic versions of printed books. They present a different reading experience and, in certain cases, demand their own reviews.

Windows 8: Microsoft’s radical redesign of the computer desktop. – Slate Magazine

Microsoft takes on Apple with the radically redesigned Windows 8. By Farhad Manjoo – Feb. 29, 2012

…What’s jarring, though, is Windows 8’s split personality. While it is optimized for touchscreens, the new OS is also meant to run on…laptops and desktops…

25 alleged Anonymous members arrested internationally; hacker group retaliates | Ars Technica – By Megan Geuss – February 28, 2012

10 Amazing Uses for Wolfram Alpha – How-To Geek

This Day in African History – Spain Grants Western Sahara Independence | About.com African History – 28 February 1976

This Day in African History – Egypt Declared a Sovereign State

…Egypt underwent several periods of foreign domination: starting with Alexander the Great in 330 BCE, cycling through the Ptolemaic Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Mamelukes, Ottoman Turks, and French, and ending up under the British until they unilaterally declared Egyptian independent on 28 February 1922.

New African History Resources for Swaziland | About.com African History

…African History Timeline for Swaziland, biographies of three of its more famous leaders, and a few Swaziland related terms in the African History Glossary.

What is Pan-Africanism? | About.com African History

JE Casely Hayford — Leading West African Pan-Africanist | About.com African History

Teacher, author, lawyer, politician… In the period following WWI JE Casely Hayford was probably the most important nationalist leader in Africa. Find out more …

This Day in African History: French Test Nukes

…successfully tested its first atomic bomb near the Reganne oasis in the Sahara Desert in Algeria. Three further atmospheric tests were done at the site, but following condemnation from other African nations the tests moved underground in the Hoggar Massif at In Ecker. At the time of the first test, Algeria was still a French colony, but testing continued even after independence on 3 July 1962. Testing ended only in 1966… Read more on the history of nuclear weapons testing…

This Day in African History – Nelson Mandela Released

After imprisonment for 27 years… to Cape Town where he appeared on the balcony of the City Hall. 50,000 people congregated to hear his address: …

The Elizabeth Sails from New York for West Africa – 6 February 1820 | About.com African History

The American Colonization Society (its full name was the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States) arranged for its first wave of colonizers to head for what is now Liberia in 1820. Along with the 86 ex-slaves (of whom only a third or so were adult men) were three white ACS agents (the membership of the ACS was predominantly white, and many came from the Southern states, hoping to induce freed slaves to emigrate to Africa).

[Can you say "problematic"? -L]

Macmillan’s “Wind of Change” Speech: 3 February 1960 | About.com African History

It was a watershed moment in the struggle for black nationalism in Africa and the independence movement across the continent. It also signaled a change in attitude towards the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Find out more…

Ultrasounds before abortions – TimesDaily.com – 27 Feb 2012

The chairman of the Alabama Senate Health Committee said he doesn’t see a conflict of interest between his support for a bill that would require physicians to perform ultrasounds on women seeking abortions and his company, which sells the type of equipment the bill would require.

tags: reproductive_justice shenanigans

Sorry, Facebook – on breastfeeding you seem rather confused | Belinda Phipps | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Facebook is very confused. They seem to think breasts are only about sex, but breasts have more than one function. Adults know that lips and hands are used for sex, but if they are being used for eating, smiling or waving we all understand that it is fine for children to see them and for pictures containing hands and lips to be on Facebook. So please can we apply the same rule to breasts and to nipples – yes, even to nipples.

The Maddow Blog – What a difference a decade makes on income inequality – By Steve Benen – Tue Feb 28, 2012

…it wasn’t too terribly long ago that Republicans felt this was at least a problem worth considering. Our pal James Carter flagged a fascinating item from 2002…

The author was then-Sen. Rick Santorum, in a piece for the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics, & Public Policy.

It’s only fair to note that Santorum’s preferred prescription was not at all progressive. The Republican’s focus was on addressing inequality by expanding “wealth creation” — we would see more income mobility, for example, if working families had their own retirement investment accounts, replacing Social Security.

But what’s striking about the Santorum piece is the way in which it helps document the rhetorical transition.

TED Blog | A brief history of classical music: Michael Tilson Thomas at TED2012 – 28 February 2012

tags: music

Lynn Casper: Homoground Puts a Feminist Twist on the Deck of Cards (PHOTOS)

What started as a podcast featuring the bands of my friends and their friends has now turned into a platform for LGBTQ musicians and our allies to get their music out into the world. With a year’s worth of weekly podcasts under our belt, Homoground has grown into a full-fledged media company that books and promotes events and artists. By using music and other creative forms of media as our main driving force, we hope to make people more aware of social issues and things that affect them and the people around them. …

Our latest project, Feminist Playing Cards, is a custom deck of playing cards featuring more than 52 musicians illustrated by 14 artists. The cards feature musicians from different generations and genres: Tori Amos, Joan Baez, Edith Piaf, Joanna Newsom, Nina Simone, Patsy Cline, and many more (you can see examples of illustrations of these musicians in the slideshow below).

tags: music

What Words Are Homeland Security Looking for When It Cyberstalks You On Social Media?

The list was only released after a long round of legislative posturing. And, for the record, the Department of Homeland Security has told the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counter-terrorism and Intelligence it is more interested in tracking what people are saying and not necessarily who is saying it.

The monitoring is being done at an expense to taxpayers of about $11 million and extends beyond social networks to comments left on articles and Websites…

TED Blog | Solving (for) x: Terry Moore at TED2012

A few years ago, Terry tells us, he decided to begin learning Arabic. He found it to be a language that was extremely precise and chock-full of information. Learning the language, and even speaking it, is similar to crafting a mathematical equation. Perhaps this is why everything we know as science, engineering, and mathematics has its derivations in the Arabic language system, most notably, algebra.

When Arabic texts made their way to Spain in the 11th century, Europe wanted to translate this mathematical wisdom of the East into a written, Western language. Attempts to do so, however, proved to be problematic. …

The Pirate Bay, Now Without Torrents | TorrentFreak – February 28, 2012

The largest torrent site on the Internet has just removed all popular torrent files and made the switch to magnet links. The Pirate Bay team believes the move is needed to make the site future proof, and is confident that it won’t cause much trouble among users. “Just click the red button instead of the green one and all will be fine,” they say.

Brownback: ‘Go work somewhere else’ if you want contraception | The Raw Story – February 27, 2012

[Because in this economy, that's no problem at all! -L]

tags: reproductive_justice

languagehat.com: MORE ON MEH.

“Yiddish appears to be the ultimate source. I checked with Ben Sadock, a Yiddish expert in New York, and he turned up a tantalizing early example. …”

Ben discusses the historical development at greater length …

Nancy Wake, ‘White Mouse’ of World War II, dies at 98 – The Washington Post

…was one of the most effective and cunning British agents working in German-occupied France during World War II.

tags: obituary

Chris Schweizer’s Blog: The Schweizer Guide to Spotting Tangents

Comic art is, as a general rule, a line-based medium. … A tangent is when two or more lines interact in a way that insinuates a relationship between them that the artist did not intend.

tags: art

Violations in majority of San Francisco foreclosures | Rebuild the Dream – February 28, 2012 by Sandra Khalifa

New York Times reports that an audit of 400 home foreclosures in San Francisco, California revealed that 84% of the cases involved some kind of legal violation or suspicious documentation. Violations ranged from failing to notify borrowers they were in default or transferring of loans by unauthorized entities.

tags: real_estate_crisis

Squirrels Can Purr | Today I Found Out – 28 Feb 2012

Why banks are reluctant to foreclose on expensive homes | Felix Salmon – 28 Feb 2012

…an interesting if unsurprising article today, showing that expensive homes are less likely to be foreclosed on than cheaper homes.

…And if a rich person owes a bank somewhere north of a million dollars, the bank is likely to be quite aggressive in attempting to get all of the money it’s owed, rather than simply letting the borrower walk away from their house.

[I'm puzzled at the reference to "foreclosing" as "letting the borrower walk away", which sounds like magnanimity from the bank and freedom for the borrower; I expect that most people who are foreclosed upon do not find it a burden-free experience, and since the bank can be expected to resell the house, I don't think it can be called generous. Neither aggressive pursuit of repayment nor foreclosure are generous, but I don't blame banks for taking either option as long as they are not doing so fraudulently. -L]

…there is a problem here, and it’s not that people in expensive houses get to live rent-free for 792 days on average. Rather, it’s that people in normal-sized homes are treated unnecessarily badly by Fannie and Freddie.

tags: real_estate_crisis

Yet Another (Yes Another!) Study Suggests Hollywood’s Problem Is Dumb Release Windows That Cost It Money | Techdirt

To be fair, a big part of the reason this doesn’t happen is because of the theaters themselves. Any time the studios seek to take away the box office window by releasing something elsewhere earlier or at the same time, the theaters throw a complete hissy fit — effectively admitting that they’re so bad at the service they provide, that they can’t compete with home theaters. Of course, it’s not all the theaters’ fault. As we’ve seen with studios like Warner Bros., they’re so obsessed with the ability to price differentiate through windows, that they keep seeking to add new windows, which only serve to drive more consumers to infringe.

In Honor of the 500th Episode: Top 10 Pro-feminist Episodes of The Simpsons – Chicago Feminism and Relationships | Examiner.com – Denise Du Vernay – 19 Feb 2012

Ann Dummett obituary | Law | guardian.co.uk

Ann was one of Britain’s foremost campaigners for racial justice and a leading expert on British nationality law. With her husband, Sir Michael Dummett, she was committed to assisting victims of racism in Britain’s immigration practice as it developed in the 1960s and 1970s.

tags: obituary

Virginia passes bill to ban LGBT parents from adopting | The Raw Story – 21 Feb 2012

The Virginia Senate passed a bill Monday afternoon that would allow private adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex parents…

North Dakota is the only state in the nation that allows private adoption agencies to discriminate.

tags: virginia north_dakota homophobia

Let’s Swap the Audio for Girls’ and Boys’ Lego Commercials and See What Happens – Jezebel

tags: sexism

Media FAIL in Coverage of Study on Gender Conformity and Abuse – Feministing – 22 Feb 2012

Short story: ILU-486 | Panda-monium

Every part of you belongs to you.

tags: reproductive_justice fiction

How an interview with Detroit talk show host Lou Gordon effectively ended Mitt Romney’s father’s presidential hopes | MLive.com

Michigan Governor George Romney—Mitt Romney’s father—received 48 delegate votes at the 1964 Republican convention and was considered a front-runner for the 1968 GOP nomination.

That changed on August 31, 1967 when, during an interview on Channel 50’s The Lou Gordon Program, Romney explained his change-of-heart on Vietnam in a manner most would now describe as cogent, reasonable and sincere.

In essence, Romney said U.S. military and diplomatic leaders lied about the state of the war when he visited Vietnam in 1965. In hindsight, Romney concluded his previous support for Vietnam was misguided. The problem is George Romney didn’t say he was lied to or tricked or conned or sold a bill of goods.

“When I came back from Vietnam, I had just had the greatest brainwashing that anyone could get,” George Romney told Lou Gordon almost 45 years ago.

A poster inspired by yesterday’s amazing… – ShortFormBlog

A poster inspired by yesterday’s amazing marshmallow cannon situation. Obama’s mouth has never been so agape.

A Whole Lotta Nothing: Why libraries matter

If you can take yourself out of your first world techie social media smart-shoes for a second then imagine this: you’re 53 years old, you’ve been in prison from 20 to 26, you didn’t finish high school, and you have a grandson who you’re now supporting because your daughter is in jail. You’re lucky, you have a job at the local Wendy’s. You have to fill out a renewal form for government assistance which has just been moved online as a cost saving measure (this isn’t hypothetical, more and more municipalities are doing this now). You have a very limited idea of how to use a computer, you don’t have Internet access, and your survival (and the survival of your grandson) is contingent upon this form being filled out correctly.

[Click through the metafilter link and read the rest. -L]

tags: technology

The Future Is Gender Distributed | Life With and Without Animated Ducks – Cat Valente – 21 Feb 2012

You know that wonderfully, wryly apt Gibson line: “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed”?

I came across this article a few days ago, detailing several self-cleaning fabric technologies, some chemical, some using nanotech.

…the tech I was using [while living in Japan] was incredibly gendered. In the “male” sphere, of professional operations, offices…the available technology was extremely high-level, better than anywhere I’d yet lived. In the “female” sphere, the home, domestic duties…it was on a level my grandmother would find familiar. …

Right this very second, here in the US, we are having an actual, serious, if incredibly stupid, conversation about whether or not women should have easy access to birth control. … I’m super excited about that, because it means it’s 1965 and we’re gonna go to the moon soon.

…The article I linked to is fascinating because it is a very high tech response to a domestic issue, which is something I don’t come across very often. …

One of the things that has frustrated me about science fiction is that technology pertaining to the smaller aspects of our lives is often neglected in favor of big giant rockets … One of the things that “the future,” …is supposed to do for us is give us time. Relieve us from work that is repetitive …by far the biggest time sink going is the need to clean our habitats, prepare food and clothing, and maintain our environments. For those who have always had the, dare I say, privilege of ignoring that work, you simply cannot imagine how much time it takes to do all that and then turn around and do it again, often multiple times a day if there are offspring at play. … Fully automating this activity would free humanity on a scale that even the most awesome BFG can’t even begin to contemplate. …

By far the biggest literary offender on this subject, I feel, is steampunk. Because when you’re talking about the 19th century, the invention that changes everything is not the difference engine, it’s not the airship, it’s not clockwork robots. It’s the washing machine. …Free women from [the laundry] and you have a strong feminist movement almost instantly and probably a suffrage movement far earlier…

…that article on self-cleaning clothes was not greeted with near the excitement of the last miniscule change in the specs of a new Apple product or probably uninhabitable planets around a distant star. Yet it is far more likely to figure in the daily lives of each of us than any of that…

tags: technology patriarchy

Super PACs: Who are the biggest players in the 2012 elections? – Slate Magazine – By Jenny Livengood – Feb. 23, 2012

Who are the biggest players in the 2012 presidential campaign?

tags: infographics plutocracy

Santorum: Obama “A Snob” For Wanting All Americans To Go To College

tags: education

Notes From A Unicorn – The Rumpus.net – Seth Fischer – 24 Feb 2012

[Trigger warning for discussion of self-injury]

Here’s the thing I want to tell…all the gay rights groups who have done such incredible work, who now have their own buildings in Washington and are thinking in terms of talking points and “ramifications” and focus groups and public polling:

The gay rights movement has been so successful because activists like Harvey Milk encouraged people to come out and tell the truth to their families, to their friends, and to their coworkers, to be everything they were, to say “We’re here, we’re queer,” yes, but also, implicitly, to say, “We’re here, it’s complicated, and probably it’d be good if we talked about this over tea.” …

If I’m a unicorn where I live now, in L.A., then I was a unicorn rocky mountain oyster when I moved to the old rustbelt city of Syracuse, New York to go to grad school and live for the first time as a fully out bi man. There was one other mythical bi man in the entire city, but try as I might, I never found him. At the gay bar, I sometimes got called a “half-breeder.” Straight people treated me just as shittily as they treat gay people. Three times, gay men hit me in the back of the head when they saw my head turn for a women. For the most part, straight women wouldn’t date me …

I wanted to join a team so I wouldn’t have to answer any more questions, so I wouldn’t have to say that I preferred one or the other or whether I exist or if I’m a unicorn or how I can ever hope to be monogamous if I’m attracted to more than one gender. But I failed to choose a side…

No one will ever make this go away. No one will ever make it simple.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s how I win.

tags: bisexuality

She Has No Head! – No, It’s Not Equal | Comics Should Be Good! @ Comic Book Resources

…four primary categories: Body Type, Clothing, Beauty, and Posing.

tags: comics

Run… Command / Windows / Computer Productivity

The Run command in Windows is one of the most unused, yet powerful features (in terms of productivity) in the operating system.

Basic Run Command Information
Common Tasks with Run
Creating Your Own Run Commands
Infrequently Used Run Commands
Using Run as a Command Prompt

New Study From Consumer Advocates Shows Mass Servicer Abuse | FDL News Desk – By: David Dayen – February 22, 2012

…“mortgage servicers continue to initiate foreclosure proceedings improperly, either while a homeowner is awaiting a loan modification or due to improper fees or payment processing.” This is a key element of the servicing standards in the (as-yet unseen) foreclosure fraud settlement, but it was also part of the consent order last year from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. In other words, the banks are under an order to stop doing these types of things, and they have simply not complied. That’s the state of things heading into the settlement, when the banks will be asked to comply again.

…Servicers routinely place people in foreclosure while negotiating a loan modification, and they routinely apply illegal fees to homeowners, helping to drive them into default. And the government settled with these companies!

tags: real_estate_crisis foreclosure_fraud

$80.35 Million in Foreclosure Fraud Settlement Funds Now Getting Redirected to State Budgets | FDL News Desk – By: David Dayen – February 23, 2012

I’m trying to keep a running tally of the direct funds to states from the foreclosure fraud settlement that will get diverted to General Funds to fill budget holes. When we last left this story, Maine had decided to send $5.7 million to the general fund, joining Missouri’s $40 million and Wisconsin’s $26 million. …

tags: real_estate_crisis state_budget_crisis

Malware Gets Uploaded to Computer from Bone on Bones | Geekosystem

In this episode, we see a character’s computer burst into flames because a malware fractal that was imprinted on bones shut the computer’s fans off when the bones were scanned into the computer, thus uploading the virus. It’s all very scientific. Watch the clip after the jump.

tags: video

The Maddow Blog – Serious satire: ‘It is the purpose of the General Assembly to assert an invasive state interest in the reproductive habits of the men of this state’ – By Laura Conaway – Feb 22, 2012

And now Georgia State Representative Yasmin Neal has a bill that would ban vasectomies.

tags: reproductive_justice

Cop Identified in Scott Olsen Incident? | East Bay Express – By Ali Winston – 22 Feb 2012

Video and police records indicate that Oakland Police Officer Robert Roche threw a stun grenade at protesters trying to help the injured Iraq War vet. …

One of the most indelible images of the Occupy movement to date is that of Marine veteran Scott Olsen being carried away from a skirmish line of riot police at 14th Street and Broadway on October 25 in Oakland. Stunned and bleeding from an ugly gash on his forehead, the 24-year-old Wisconsin native had been struck in the head by an unknown projectile during the first salvo of tear gas, flash-bang grenades, and less-than-lethal munitions fired at hundreds of Occupy Oakland supporters facing off against Oakland police and several other Bay Area law enforcement agencies called in on mutual aid. …

As several protesters ran to Olsen’s aid, someone from the cluster of police appears to lob a flash-bang grenade into the crowd gathered around the young veteran. The stun grenade explodes amid a cloud of tear gas and deafening noise, scattering Olsen’s rescuers.

tags: 2011_protests united_states california occupysolidarity police_brutality

Winners And Losers Of The Payroll Tax Cut Debacle | TPMDC – Sahil Kapur – February 23, 2012

Middle class and out-of-work Americans will be better off this year as a result of this package; 160 million American workers will take home an average of $40 more per paycheck, and the long-term unemployed won’t see their benefits lapse as soon as they otherwise would. …

Welfare recipients who want to pull out some cash at a strip club are down on their luck: House Republicans inserted language seeking to ensure that welfare funds cannot be accessed at ATMs in strip clubs, liquor stores or casinos. How that will be implemented and how much it will cost is a separate question.

Little Green Footballs – VA Governor Backs Down on Invasive Ultrasound, but the Bill Still Stinks – Feb 22, 2012

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell has issued this press release, backing down on the trans-vaginal ultrasound issue, and calling for amendments to Virginia’s proposed “informed consent” law stating that invasive procedures are not mandated. …

Gov. McDonnell says, “No person should be directed to undergo an invasive procedure by the state, without their consent, as a precondition to another medical procedure.”

But why does it matter whether the procedure is invasive or not? The state has absolutely no business mandating any kind of unnecessary medical procedure…

tags: reproductive_justice

Virginia Legislature Kills Personhood Bill, Postpones Ultrasound Bill | TPM Livewire – Jillian Rayfield – 23 Feb 2012

tags: reproductive_justice

Romney Flips On His Own Tax Plan, Admits He’d Give Huge Tax Break To Top 1 Percent | ThinkProgress – By Travis Waldron on Feb 22, 2012

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney released his latest tax reform plan today in Arizona and highlighted specifically the fact that it provided a 20-percent across-the-board cut in marginal tax rates for all Americans.

Upon unveiling the plan, Romney claimed that it would actually force the richest Americans to pay their fair share.

…But when former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) attacked Romney at the GOP debate tonight, Romney admitted that his tax plan contained a massive tax cut for the wealthiest Americans:…

BREAKING: Maryland Senate Passes Marriage Equality Bill | ThinkProgress – By Zack Ford on Feb 23, 2012

Today, the Maryland Senate passed marriage equality legislation with a vote of 25-22. …the passed bill now proceeds to Gov. Martin O’Malley (D), who has promised to sign it. The law is set to take effect January 1, 2013, but will likely be challenged in a referendum before then.

[Rock on, Maryland and California. -L]

tags: marriage_equality

BREAKING: Bush Appointee Finds DOMA Unconstitutional | ThinkProgress – By Igor Volsky on Feb 22, 2012

Moments ago, Judge Jeffery White of the District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) violates the Constitution’s equal protection clause in a case brought by Karen Golinski. Golinski, represented by Lambda Legal, “was denied spousal health benefits by her employer, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.” … Read the full opinion here.

tags: marriage_equality

Mitt Romney Said Cutting Spending Slows the Economy – NYTimes.com – By ANDREW ROSENTHAL – February 22, 2012

Why contraception is scary, and why it’s not | pandagon.net – by Amanda Marcotte – February 20, 2012

Sara mentions that we’re three—actually four—generations into the pill now. (The first users were my grandmother’s generation, then my mother’s, then mine, and now the Millenials.) That’s going to make it a hard entitlement to attack, since as far as most living Americans are concerned, this is how it’s always been. But I think it’s even more interesting than that. First of all, you can tack a couple more generations onto that, since birth control became socially normalized in the late 20s and 30s, and was considered pretty standard by the 50s. …

The pill doesn’t cause pregnancy, dirty girls do | Hullabaloo – by digby

CNN only showed three women on the screen all night long: one screen shot of an older woman, one shot of Rick Perry’s wife and the sole female questioner who asked about education policy. That’s it. Three women on the screen during the entire debate.

…The word “woman” was never uttered, even once, despite long segments devoted to the subjects of birth control and healthcare. The word “mother” and the word “mom” came up one time each, when Mitt Romney talked about his opposition to gay adoptions. But every one of these important, middle aged and old, white men had strong opinions on contraception, the morning after pill, abortion and sexual morality for the other 50% of the human species that was rendered invisible.

tags: reproductive_justice

Romney Pushes Altered Versions Of Newspaper Endorsements, Edits Out Criticisms | ThinkProgress – By Adam Peck on Feb 23, 2012

Mary Poppins, A Timelord? | The Mary Sue

[See also the discussion. -L]

The fake chemical compound Isaac Asimov invented to punk science writers

…his thiotimoline story made him famous among chemists and scientists in general in a way that his science fiction never did. It also suggested to him the possibilities of writing more on actual science topics, and he credited this story with launching his second career as a science writer, one that actually ended up far outstripping his science fiction career, in sheer volume of work if not necessarily in renown.

That said, there is probably at least one group for whom the word “thiotimoline” dredges up nothing but bad memories. That group, of course, is the poor librarians of New York City: …

tags: science_fiction

Code Hero Teaches You to Code Video Games In a Video Game | Geekosystem

…a game that strives to teach you to code video games, and does that from inside a video game.

While Code Hero has been kicking around for a while now, it just got enough money to become a reality …

Physicists explain technical glitches behind those faster-than-light neutrinos – io9

Did you catch that? Both of the proposed sources of error are related to the experiment’s use of GPS, but each one would skew the neutrinos’ measured flight time in a different direction; the issue with the oscillator would actually increase the size of the measured effect, while the error associated with the fiber optic cable would diminish it. So what’s the net effect?

Reuters is reporting that the loose fiber optic cable appears to “be more significant” than the problems posed by the oscillator, but it will still be a few months until we know for sure.

Something strange happens when you expose ice to an electrical field – io9

One of the fun things about science is the many times you scoff at something being impossible, like say, lasers being able to erase metal from x-ray scans, and end up being a fool who was completely wrong about everything. …

In an electric field, water molecules align themselves so that their positive ends face one way and their negative ends face the other. That directional quality can actually stay in the water as it freezes, so a frozen icicle can have one end with only the positive hydrogen ends of the water sticking outwards and one end with only the negative oxygen ends sticking outwards.

tags: science

Throttling Unlimited Data Plans Doesn’t Do Much | Geekosystem – by Eric Limer – February 23, 2012

AT&T stopped offering unlimited data plans a while ago, the only remaining users with unlimited plans being those who were fortunate enough to be grandfathered in. AT&T asserted that the throttling is to keep their network from being overtaxed…

What the numbers show is that there’s really no huge difference in behavior between users with unlimited plans and users with tiered plans, even among customers with data usage in the top %5 …

Now AT&T definitely isn’t the only one out there throttling data speeds, but they’re probably being the most agressive about it …

The Best of CafePress’ New Official Hunger Games Merchandise Store | The Mary Sue – by Susana Polo – 23 Feb 2012

This is hands down our favorite piece of merch in the newly opened official CafePress story for Hunger Games merchandise. Our only problem? You can only get it on shirts and bags, but not as a poster. I have bare walls ready to cover in 50′s style propaganda based on post-apocalypic, dystopian young adult novels, your argument is invalid.

Oh, but there are other things we like too.

[OH MY GOD THE CLOCK. WAAAANT. -L]

Tumblr Takes a Stand Against Self-Mutilation, Pro-Ana Sites by Banning Them | The Mary Sue – by Jamie Frevele – 23 Feb 2012

There was an idea to keep allowing the sites while attaching additional information on how someone seeking out self-harm tips can find real help and avoid engaging in destructive behavior. But instead, they have decided to prohibit the sites completely. They will also post “public service announcements” when users search for the pro-self-harm terms on the site.

Shepherd’s Beaked Whale Filmed for the First Time [Video] | Geekosystem

This secretive creature has only been spotted a handful of time since its discovery, so catching it on film is a pretty big deal. The beasts were spotted off the coast of southern Australia …

MPAA Rates Documentary About Anti-Childhood-Bullying Movement Too Severely For Children To Actually See It | The Mary Sue – by Susana Polo – 23 Feb 2012

Because the film features unedited interviews with kids and footage of bullying, there’s understandably a lot of language being used that isn’t “network television safe,” and the film garnered an R rating, which would prevent anyone under seventeen from seeing this movie without the presence of an adult. In other words, the MPAA is trying to protect kids from the words that they’re already using every day, by making it difficult for kids to see a movie designed to give a lot of them hope. …

It’s easy to say “Well, those kids can just have their parents take them to the movie,” but sidesteps an important issue. Boys and girls aren’t just bullied for being overweight, introverted, bookish, awkward, poor, in the wrong clothes or skin color or a myriad of other stupid reasons. Kids are also bullied for being, or seeming in the eyes of their persecutors to be, gay, lesbian, trans, or otherwise for bucking established gender roles. And the sad facts are that in the case of many of those latter situations (and, indeed, at least some of the former ones) those kids may not actually have adults in their communities to turn to for any kind of support, even a sympathetic ear, much less a movie ticket and a few hours of their time.

Dogs On Trampolines (VIDEO) – Huffington Post

Watch the first scene from Pixar’s Brave now! – io9

You’ve seen the trailer [link] and the concept art [link] — now check out the very first scene from Pixar’s supernatural Scotland flick Brave. In this 148-second clip, Princess Merida flaunts her archery skills before the awestruck masses.

tags: video

Local Kitten Just Can’t Get It Together in the Morning | The Fluffington Post

Despite copious amounts of coffee, an area kitten is still struggling to start her day with pep in her step.

tags: cute_animals

Baby Dingoes Open Their Eyes! – ZooBorns

These photos show Fort Wayne Children’s Zoo’s Dingo pups at 3 weeks old with their eyes open. The pups spend a lot of time yawning when they are awake. The puppies’ parents Mattie and Naya are one of only about 75 pairs of pure Dingoes worldwide, so the pups are an important addition to the pure Dingo population. …

tags: cute_animals

The National Museum of African American History and Culture | About.com African-American History

The museum, which is being built on the The Mall in Washington, D.C., will be devoted to the documentation of African American life, art, history, and culture. President Obama, speaking at the groundbreaking ceremony, noted that the idea for the museum had been “a long time coming,” as the idea was first proposed by black veterans who had fought for the Union in the Civil War. …

The museum is scheduled to open in 2015. The groundbreaking ceremony was broadcast on C-Span, and a video of the event can be viewed on the C-Span web site. [link]

Opinion analysis: Court reverses habeas grant and limits application of Miranda : SCOTUSblog

Under Miranda, any statement obtained by government officials during custodial interrogation is inadmissible in evidence in the prosecution’s case in chief unless first the defendant was informed of his constitutional rights to silence and the assistance of counsel and had made a knowing waiver of those rights before making the incriminating statement. …

The decision reversing the grant of habeas relief was predictable in light of the Court’s long insistence on looking at all the facts surrounding the procurement of an incriminating statement to determine whether Miranda custody existed. … The decision on custody, while unnecessary to decide this case, may be more significant. While recognizing that people in prison could [be] “in custody” for Miranda purposes, the decision suggests that persons who are incarcerated will rarely be deemed to be “in custody” because an inmate is familiar with the environment and is used to routine prison constraints. … the standard for finding custody outside the jail or prison may be changing as well in the future.

tags: civil_liberties

Physicists surprised by disappearing and reappearing superconductivity in iron selenium chalcogenides – February 22, 2012

Superconductivity is a rare physical state in which matter is able to conduct electricity — maintain a flow of electrons — without any resistance. This phenomenon can only be found in certain materials at low temperatures, or can be induced under chemical and high external pressure conditions. Research to create superconductors at higher temperatures has been ongoing for two decades with the promise of significant impact on electrical transmission. New work from a team including Carnegie’s Xiao-Jia Chen and Ho-kwang “Dave” Mao demonstrates unexpected superconductivity in a type of compounds called iron selenium chalcogenides.

tags: science

10 Staggering Facts Behind Apple’s Foxconn Factory – Mashable – February 22, 2012 by Samantha Murphy

Nightline anchor Bill Weir was the first reporter to be allowed into the controversial Foxconn factory following years of reports about the harsh working conditions at the facility, which creates Apple products such as the iPad, iPhone and Mac computers. Foxconn is also a supply chain provider for Nintendo, Dell, HP and Intel products.

The special, which aired on Tuesday night, revealed that Foxconn workers get paid $1.78 an hour and live in a dorm room for about $17 a month, along with seven roommates. …

Making Solar Power Competitive with Coal – Technology Review – February 22, 2012 – By Kevin Bullis

A study identifies early-stage technologies that could be combined to cut the cost of solar panels in half.

NY To Require That Banks Send Decision-Makers, Not Mouthpieces, To Foreclosure Proceedings – The Consumerist – By Chris Morran on February 22, 2012

Like many states that are trying to both expedite judicial review of foreclosures and keep as many people in their homes as possible, New York has enacted new measures, like requiring that bank lawyers verify foreclosure paperwork and that all homeowners receive legal assistance. But a big problem keeps coming up that continues to cause delays — no one in the room actually has the authority to change a loan agreement.

tags: real_estate_crisis

Masternaut Tells You When You’re Driving Badly, Helps Save Gas [VIDEO]

Masternaut, a gadget made in the UK, aim to make sure you’re being a safe driver. It is your own personal driving instructor, in effect; it attaches to the dashboard of your car and could reduce gas cost by up to one-fifth.

The system was created to give the driver near real-time feedback. It tracks your location with GPS while a gyroscopic inertial system detects acceleration and a microprocessor records use and revs.

LinkedIn Buys Smart Email Startup Rapportive – Mashable

Rapportive is a sidebar for Gmail that displays information from relevant email contacts’ social media accounts, including LinkedIn, as you open and compose emails. It also lets you add those email contacts as friends on social networks without leaving your inbox.

Zipcar Wants to Make Your Car Part of its Fleet – Mashable

Although Zipcar brought in about $63 million in 2011, its net income was only $4 million. In order to scale, it currently needs to add and maintain new fleets of vehicles — an expensive affair. A peer-to-peer model…, however, could help it scale more quickly and with much less capital by relying on other people’s vehicles. It could also allow Zipcar to enter rural markets that were previously not viable for its business model — and to do so while taking a cut of rental fees for vehicles it doesn’t even own.

States Making A Profit Selling Machetes, Knives, Fuzzy Handcuffs Confiscated By TSA – The Consumerist – By Chris Morran on February 22, 2012

How to Sell Your Excess Crap for Cash in Just a Few Hours with Amazon’s Fulfillment Program – Lifehacker

You basically dump your crap in a box, tell Amazon what’s inside of that box, print out a shipping label, and schedule a pickup request. The process generally takes an hour or two, unless you have more stuff than you could ever possibly sell, and if you’ve already got the box(es) you’re going to use you don’t even have to leave your home. When Amazon gets the box, they’ll post all your items for sale on their product pages and people will be able to buy them. Amazon will ship the items out for you in their own packaging and handle any customer issues that may arise post-sale. …there are a few downsides you should be aware of: …

#194: “I am so socially awkward that my boyfriend won’t take me anywhere.” « CaptainAwkward.com

This is a “you get to break up with people for any reason” zone. Nobody wants to have the “even though I adore you we’re not well-matched in this one respect and it’s a dealbreaker for me” conversation, but it sure beats the way he is gaslighting you into feeling like there is something wrong with you and everything’s your fault!

There is no amount of socially awkward you could be that would justify him treating you like he is ashamed of you and that you need to hide in a hotel room because you’re not fit company for others.

Tomahawk Combines Your Local Music with Spotify, Grooveshark, and Others to Put Virtually Any Song at Your Fingertips – Lifehacker

Windows/Mac/Linux: Tomahawk is a free desktop music player that combines your local library with the libraries of our favorite streaming music services, like Spotify, Grooveshark, and more, so you don’t need to open a multitude of separate players to listen to your music.

We love streaming services, but none of them have a perfect selection, and it would be nice if you could combine them all into one service. Tomahawk does this, starting off with your local library and letting you add extensions—called resolvers—to bring in libraries from services like Spotify, Grooveshark, Last.fm, Soundcloud, YouTube, Ex.fm, and even 4Shared.

How to Disable Ubuntu’s Annoying Global Menu Bar | Lifehacker

Ubuntu’s new Unity interface has some cool features, but if it’s global menu bar just gets on your nerves, here’s how to turn it off.

This trick will get your menu bar—that is, the bar with the File, Edit, View, and other dropdown menus—back into each individual window, rather than on the top menu bar.

Flickr Can’t Go Back To What It Once Was | ReadWriteWeb

The new Flickr homepage will look more like the slick, image-only homepages of online visual pinboard Pinterest and photo-sharing app Pixable. There will be little white space on the homepage. In the new version, photos will appear four times their current size. They will lie on the page, scattered about like puzzle pieces slipped together without overlap. Flickr is repositioning itself to look more like an app, which is right in line with Yahoo’s “mobile first” strategy. But this is a Web-only photo community – and if Instagram is showing us anything, it’s that the future of photography is in smartphones.

Next week, users will be able to see changes to their contacts page, which includes the removal of some whitespace. In late March, users will notice significant changes to the photo uploading process.

Madonna’s Super Bowl XLVI Halftime Show Re-Done By Brazilian Drag Queens (VIDEO)

tags: video

Women & Co: How To Ask For A Raise In 3 Steps | Huffington Post – 02/22/2012

Fact: Women who do not consistently negotiate their salary increases may earn up to $1 million less during their careers compared to women who do negotiate. That’s according to Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, authors of “Women Don’t Ask.”

Economist’s View: Shifting the Center of the Political Debate – Mark Thoma – February 20, 2012

…consider the current discussion over the president’s proposed budget, a budget that is touted as “broadly consistent with the bipartisan deficit reduction proposals put forward by the Bowles-Simpson Commission.”

I thought the recommendations for balancing the budget that came out of the Bowles-Simpson committee gave far too much to the GOP…

However, Republicans have shifted the debate so far to the right that Bowles-Simpson is now being portrayed by the administration and others as a model of balance, reason, and compromise that both sides ought to embrace. …

When he chooses [to] engage, the president is doing a bit better in battling Republicans. I wish he’d engage on more fronts, but lately there has been progress. However, it seems to me that all the president has done is stop the rightward drift in the center of the conversation.

Timeline of the Civil Rights Movement, 1960-1964 | About.com African-American History

Zora Neale Hurston | About.com African-American History

The writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston wrote plays and novels in the 1930s and 1940s before passing into obscurity and being rediscovered decades after her death. …

Often considered essential works of the Harlem Renaissance, her novels include Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Seraph On the Suwanee. She wrote a memoir, Dust Tracks On the Road, which was published in 1942.

29 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web | Open Culture

Enjoy, and don’t miss our other collections of free writings by Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman.

A Lack of a Culture War Truce In One Graph | Rortybomb – February 13, 2012

One thing I’m noticing in reporting on the birth-control coverage debate is the idea that there’s a culture war “truce” … currently ongoing, and that a debate about reproductive freedoms enters the national stage out of nowhere and/or out of cynical posturing.

[chart]

…the new Tea Party and far-right state legislators – the ones who were supposed to be all libertarian and focused on the budget while dismantling unions under a culture war truce – also initiated a wave of abortion restrictions beyond anything in recent records.

It should not surprise us if this very active project in the states goes national in the 2012 elections.

danwebb.net – It’s About The Hashbangs

URLs are important. The reason the web is so powerful is that it is a web of information. Any piece of content can reference any other piece of content directly. Our information is no longer siloed into various disconnected libraries … The means by which one piece of data is linked with another piece of data is via a URL. That makes the URL possibly the most important part of the web. …

So, you’ve implemented hashbang URLs. This means that the part of the URL after the #, the identifies the specific content, is not even sent in the HTTP request.

…You’ve just rendered your content invisible to everything apart from people running certain browsers. The hashbang itself is an attempt to address this by Google but it’s quite a painful thing to implement and why get yourself into a situation where you are creating a fix for something you just broke. Just don’t break it in the first place.

Want to Delete Web History Before Google Gathering Takes Effect? EFF Shows How – News – ABA Journal – Feb 22, 2012

Google plans to begin combining your data into a single cauldron on March 1. On that date, the search engine will combine your Web history with information gathered from products such as YouTube and Google Plus to create advertising and targeted reminders. The information can reveal sensitive information such as your interests, sexual orientation, religion and health concerns, EFF says.

EFF is offering step-by-step instructions on how to delete your Web history along with screen shots of the pages you will see.

tags: privacy

Supreme Court Stays Montana Campaign Ruling; Ginsburg Sees Opportunity to Revisit Citizens United – News – ABA Journal – Feb 21, 2012

A controversial Montana ruling that distinguished Citizens United and upheld corporate campaign restrictions in the state could give the U.S. Supreme Court an opportunity to revisit the issue, according to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. …

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission found that corporations have a First Amendment right to expressly support political candidates with independent spending. The Montana Supreme Court said it wasn’t bound by Citizens United, partly because of the state’s unique history of political corruption.

…Ginsburg’s statement appears to refer to large amounts of money spent by super PACs after Citizens United. Corporations and wealthy persons have contributed millions of dollars to such PACs, which outspend candidates by 2-1, according to an estimate by an ad tracking firm.

tags: plutocracy

Humans are ‘naturally nice’ – Americas – Al Jazeera English

Biological research is increasingly debunking the view of humanity as competitive, aggressive and brutish.

“Humans have a lot of pro-social tendencies,” Frans de Waal, a biologist at Emory University in Atlanta, told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Monday.

…Until just 12 years ago, the common view among scientists was that humans were “nasty” at the core but had developed a veneer of morality …

tags: science

Rick Santorum Opposes Prenatal Testing, Women – New York News – Runnin’ Scared – By Victoria Bekiempis – Feb. 20 2012

Rick Santorum doesn’t think that insurance companies should have to pay for a simple diagnostic test that determines whether a baby will be born sick or severely disabled.

Prop. 8 Gay Marriage Ban Backers, Defeated, Seek Full Ninth Circuit Court Do-Over – Los Angeles News – The Informer – By Dennis Romero – Feb. 21 2012

Backers of California’s overturned same-sex-marriage ban said today that they’ll ask the full Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for a review.

The move avoids for now taking the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court…

tags: marriage_equality

Mormon Baptism Targets Anne Frank — Again | Huffington Post – 02/21/2012

Radkey’s discovery of another possible proxy baptism for Frank follows an apology from the Mormon Church last week for recent posthumous baptisms of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal’s parents.

Radkey noted that the latest baptism of Frank by proxy is especially egregious, because she was an unmarried teenager who left no descendants. Mormon officials have stressed that church members are only supposed to submit the names of their ancestors, in accordance with the agreements.

“The security of the names submissions process for posthumous rites must be questioned, in view of the rash of prominent Jewish Holocaust names that have recently appeared on Mormon temple rolls,” Radkey said about her latest find.

Contraception Crackdown: Grim Lessons from the Philippines | Global Spin | TIME.com – By Emily Rauhala | February 21, 2012

Over the past few decades, as most of the world has embraced family planning, the majority-Catholic nation has waged war on reproductive rights. There, abortion is strictly prohibited and crackdowns on contraception are common. …

A report by the Center for Reproductive Rights documented a relative rise in maternal mortality, a slew of unwanted pregnancies and evidence of injury caused by clandestine abortions. …

The country’s high unmet need for contraception means that almost half of pregnancies are unwanted and about 500,000 per year result in abortion. …Every year, an estimated 60,000 Filipinas are injured trying to terminate a pregnancy. About 1,000 die from abortion-related complications. …

Behind the Manichaean religious rhetoric espoused by some conservative Catholics hide plain truths about public health: access to contraception decreases maternal mortality and lowers the number of abortions.

tags: reproductive_justice

Graphene is thinnest known anti-corrosion coating

New research has established the “miracle material” called graphene as the world’s thinnest known coating for protecting metals against corrosion.

USB stick can sequence DNA in seconds – 17 February 2012 – New Scientist

It may look like an ordinary USB memory stick, but a little gadget that can sequence DNA while plugged into your laptop could have far-reaching effects on medicine and genetic research.

The UK firm Oxford Nanopore built the device, called MinION, and claims it can sequence simple genomes – like those of some viruses and bacteria – in a matter of seconds. More complex genomes would take longer, but MinION could also be useful for obtaining quick results in sequencing DNA from cells in a biopsy to look for cancer…

tags: science

The US recording industry is stealing from ME! – Science and Technology News and Commentary: Aardvark Daily – 21 February 2012

My vids are 100% my own so I should have nothing to fear when I up load them to YouTube — or so you’d think. …

On three occasions now, I have received emails from YouTube advising me that a content/copyright claim has been made against one of my videos. These claims allege that I have used someone else’s content without permission and therefore, the claimant will get any revenues that might arise from advertising that appears on those videos.

How on earth can that happen — when the videos in question contain no third-party footage, no third party images and no music at all?

tags: war_on_efficient_copying intellectual_property

Scott Brown struggles to refight old culture war with Elizabeth Warren – The Plum Line – The Washington Post – Greg Sargent – 02/16/2012

You can watch video of the interview here. The reporter repeatedly pointed out that the measure goes much further than just exempting religious organizations from covering contraception; it also allows employers and insurers to refuse to cover any health service they find morally objectionable. Brown repeatedly insisted that the bill doesn’t do this.

… with conservative groups gearing up to make this a major crusade, it looks like even “moderate” Republicans are going to get sucked into this vortex.

tags: reproductive_justice

How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did – Forbes

What Target discovered fairly quickly is that it creeped people out that the company knew about their pregnancies in advance.

tags: privacy

» Towards my personal Sex-Positive Feminist 101 » Clarisse Thorn » 8 May 2011

Santorum Plays Reverend Wright Card While Doing Damage Control For Supporter’s Contraception “Joke”

20 Cats As Fonts

A Tale They Won’t Believe • The beginnings of the American Revolution, simplified

BRITISH EMPIRE: Get over it, it’s just tea. Seriously, where do you get this idea that you’re special and should never have to pay taxes? We hope that idea doesn’t go on to infect your political discourse centuries from now.
AMERICAN COLONIES: We’re not buying your stupid tea.
BRITISH EMPIRE: Are you being serious right now? What are you going to do, just stop drinking tea?

Little Green Footballs – New Poll Finds Republicans in ‘State of Collapse’

A new survey from Democracy Corps finds Republicans in deep trouble at almost all levels, and new voter enthusiasm among Democrats — especially among unmarried women, oddly enough.

Film Screening: They Took My Choice Away | Public Health Program | Open Society Foundations – OSF

The Open Society Foundations present the premiere of They Took My Choice Away, a short film about forced sterilization in Namibia. The premiere will include a discussion with filmmaker Bob Sacha.

The film features Hilma Nendongo, a mother of two young boys who was sterilized without her consent in a state hospital. She shares the pain and shock she felt when she was told by a nurse after the operation that she had been “closed” and could have no more children. The doctor sterilized Hilma because she is HIV-positive, despite the fact that she is on antiretroviral treatment and her sons do not have the virus. …

tags: reproductive_justice

NJ Gov. Christie vetoes gay marriage bill as vowed – US news – msnbc.com

tags: marriage_equality

Romney Is Attacking Santorum For Being Pro-Union. How Absurd. | The New Republic

Marcia Alesan Dawkins: Interracial Love Is No Societal Cure-All – Truthdig

A recently released report by the Pew Center is a belated Valentine’s Day gift to interracial families. The report indicates that intermarriage across racial and ethnic lines continues to be on the rise in the U.S. and the change is a sign that acceptance is growing. Although this is definitely cause for celebration and a reason to continue the fight for marriage equality everywhere, we should remember that a fuller and more accurate historical account of interracial sex and marriage in the U.S. should focus on social and legal constraints along with demographic patterns.

One reason why is the large-scale psychological distress experienced by all racial groups resulting from a social and legal history around interracial sex and marriage that’s been fraught with challenges.

…if marriage were the cure for our social ills then certainly sexism would be dead by now.

tags: racism

Rep. Darrell Issa Bars Minority Witness, a Woman, on Contraception – ABC News

…Roman Catholic Bishop William Lori, used a hypothetical example of the government forcing a Jewish orthodox-owned deli to serve pork, as a comparison to the Health and Human Services’ mandate for religious employers. …

Fluke sat directly behind the bishop as he made the orthodox deli analogy.

“He spent his entire testimony talking about a hypothetical story,” she said. “It was very difficult to hear his testimony about a hypothetical story and not about the real stories, about the women in my story.”

tags: reproductive_justice

Everything Is A Remix Part 4: System Failure | Brain Pickings

For the past year, Kirby Ferguson has been tracing the history and evolution of remix culture in his fantastic ongoing series Everything Is A Remix, with each episode tackling a different facet of collaborative creation. This week, the fourth and last part of the series, titled System Failure, finally makes its timely debut …

Google Violated IPhone Users’ Privacy, Stanford Study Finds – Businessweek – February 17, 2012

tags: privacy

The Inside Story on Climate Scientists Under Siege | Wired Science | Wired.com

It is almost possible to dismiss Michael Mann’s account of a vast conspiracy by the fossil fuel industry to harrass scientists and befuddle the public. His story of that campaign, and his own journey from naive computer geek to battle-hardened climate ninja, seems overwrought, maybe even paranoid.

climate_desk_bugBut now comes the unauthorized release of documents showing how a libertarian thinktank, the Heartland Institute, which has in the past been supported by Exxon, spent millions on lavish conferences attacking scientists and concocting projects to counter science teaching for kindergarteners.

Mann’s story of what he calls the climate wars, the fight by powerful entrenched interests to undermine and twist the science meant to guide government policy, starts to seem pretty much on the money. …

tags: global_climate_change

OMG: Turtle climbing a wall « Why Evolution Is True

tags: video

How Citibank Dumped Lousy Mortgages on the Government – ProPublica – by Cora Currier – Feb. 16, 2012

Citigroup agreed yesterday to pay $158 million to settle a lawsuit over bad loans that the bank passed on to the Federal Housing Administration to insure. The whistle-blower who originally brought the case, Sherry Hunt, an employee of Citi’s mortgage department, said the company actively undermined the process that was supposed to check for fraud in order to push through reckless loans and get higher profits.

The suit itself makes for good reading. We’ve pulled out the juiciest bits, and explain just what Citi appears to have been doing. …

tags: real_estate_crisis

The Best, Most Revealing Reporting on the Foreclosure Crisis – ProPublica – by Blair Hickman – Feb. 17, 2012

The housing crisis in the U.S. has now been going on nearly five years, with still regular revelations about misdeeds by banks and others. Here’s our round up of standout reporting on the crisis.

[Links stories from July 2009 to the present. -L]

tags: real_estate_crisis

Elie Wiesel criticizes Romney for keeping mum on Mormon posthumous baptism of Jews – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News – 16 Feb 2012

Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate says does not see U.S. presidential hopeful as complicit in the Mormon custom, adding, however, that the issue was serious enough to be addressed.

Thousands rally in Gaza, West Bank in support of Palestinian jailed in Israel – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News – 17 Feb 2012

‘We are all Khader Adnan,’ chant Palestinians in Gaza, referring to the Islamic Jihad leader who is on the 62nd day of a hunger strike to protest his detention by Israel.

U.S., EU welcome Iran nuclear letter, suggest talks possible – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News – 17 Feb 2012

West expresses cautious optimism over prospects that Iran may be willing to engage major powers in new talks.

Wall Street steps in when Ivy League fails – The Washington Post

No high school senior gets an acceptance letter from Harvard and begins thinking about the exciting life he or she will lead constructing credit derivatives. Yet that’s where many students end up. Even after the financial crisis. Even after the bailout of Wall Street. Even after the dominant cultural metaphor for Goldman Sachs became a money-sucking vampire squid. …

The economic determinists say this is no mystery. Finance, law and consulting pay high salaries — much higher than most other options on the table. It would be strange, given the financial incentives, if these graduates weren’t going into such high-paying fields.

The social determinists say these students are simply following their tribe.

…In conversations with [young people], I’ve come to favor another explanation: Their educations are failing them. …

What Wall Street figured out is that colleges are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, an incredible work ethic and no idea what to do next. So the finance industry takes advantage of that confusion, attracting students who never intended to work in finance but don’t have any better ideas about where to go.

It begins by mimicking the application process that Harvard students have already grown comfortable with.

Order has returned to Nigeria after the fuel protests, but deep anger remains | Global development | guardian.co.uk

After the January unrest caused by fuel subsidy cuts and rising petrol prices, Nigerians are demanding fundamental change

Attention, online shoppers: You owe state $1.1 billion – OC Watchdog : The Orange County Register

Simply scan the receipts from your online purchases (which you kept neatly filed, of course), check to see if you paid sales tax, and if not, calculate what you owe to the Great State of California, and pay it along with your income taxes (which will soon be due — sorry to bring that up).

More than $1.1 billion in use taxes are owed to the state of California, but go unpaid each year because folks don’t pony up, the BOE says.

Now, to make this easier on you — consumers of good conscience that you are — they’ve created this handy-dandy “use tax lookup table,” which will be included in tax forms this year: …

Does Contraception Really Pay For Itself? : Shots – Health Blog : NPR

Here’s the way the new plan is being explained: Employers that object to paying for birth control — like a Catholic hospital — will no longer have to do so. Instead, their insurer will foot the bill. White House officials, like chief of staff Jacob Lew, say insurance companies don’t mind paying for contraception because it actually saves them money.

[...You seem to be assuming that insurance companies are logical. -L]

One industry official who didn’t want to be named said it’s clear contraceptive services save money over time or are at least cost neutral. But he’s worried about the White House compromise, anyway. He says insurance companies will be forced to put out a lot of money up front without getting reimbursed and that sets a dangerous precedent.

Insurance industry consultant Robert Laszewski says the problem is complicated by the fact that most employers and virtually all big companies self-insure. They pay their employees health care costs out of pocket every year. The insurance company is paid just to administer the plan. And it typically passes on its costs to the employers. Only in this case, it won’t be able to do that.

Santorum Tax Returns Draw Critics Of His Low Charitable Giving : It’s All Politics : NPR – by Frank James

House Passes Payroll Tax Cut, Jobless Benefit Bill : NPR – February 17, 2012

Social Media Makes Teens Aware Of Others’ Needs, Study Says

About 55 percent of teens ages 13 to 17 said Facebook and Twitter have opened their eyes to what others are experiencing, according to an online study conducted by Harris Interactive. And 91 percent felt it was important to volunteer in the community. …

Charitable organizations have apparently seen the light, and have begun integrating fundraising tools into their social networking profiles to promote their causes and rally support.

Nonprofits that combined this technique with more traditional promotional methods, such as mailed pamphlets, have reported a 40 percent increase in their fundraising…

The Nation’s Most Radical Abortion Bill? Iowa GOP Proposal Would Ban All Abortions, Sentence Doctors To Life In Prison | ThinkProgress

Democrats complained the the bill — which would almost certainly violate Roe v. Wade — was a waste of time when there are pressing economic problems facing the state. “House Republicans and their colleagues in the Senate would rather put the lives of women in danger than have a real discussion about how we create jobs and move Iowa forward,” Iowa Democratic Party Chairwoman Sue Dvorsky said in a statement.

While the prospects of Pearson’s bill are unclear, a state House committee is currently debating a separate anti-abortion measure that would make doctors show a woman sonogram of the fetus before terminating a pregnancy. The focus on abortion does seem to violate a pledge made by Iowa House Speaker Kraig Paulsen (R) when he said in November, “we’re also not interested in squandering Iowans’ time” on divisive social issues.

Federal Judicial Emergencies – AmericanProgress.org – By Andrew Blotky, April Carson | February 17, 2012

More than one-half of Americans—160 million people—today are living in a jurisdiction that has been declared a judicial emergency* meaning that in courtrooms across the country there aren’t enough judges to hear the cases that are piling up. … In practical terms, it shows where judges are overworked and where justice is being significantly delayed for the American public. The nation’s federal courts—where Social Security appeals are heard, employment cases decided, immigration issues settled, and where Americans vindicate their constitutional rights—are in a crisis because there simply aren’t enough judges on the bench. …

For more information on judicial vacancies and nominations, go to www.judicialnominations.org.

A Powerful, Historic, And Happy Moment For Gay Marriage | MoveOn.Org

The governor of Washington State signs the Marriage Equality Bill into law. Watch: …

tags: marriage_equality video

Anti-abortion personhood bill clears Oklahoma senate | Reuters

Oklahoma lawmakers edged closer toward trying to outlaw abortion on Wednesday by approving “personhood” legislation that gives individual rights to an embryo from the moment of conception.

The Republican-controlled state Senate voted 34-8 to pass the “Personhood Act” which defines the word person under state law to include unborn children from the moment of conception.

The measure now goes to the state House where pro-life Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than a 2-1 margin.

Image-of-the-Week: Boozy Fruit Flies | Mother Jones

Fruit flies live on fruit, and a lot of fruit rots and ferments, so that fruit flies also live to some extent on alcohol. A new paper in Current Biology reports on whether this boozy lifestyle contributes anything besides slurred flight, impromptu couplings, and fruit fights (okay, I made that part up). …

The 196 people who will choose our next president – Salon.com – 16 Feb 2012

At a time when it’s become a cliché to say that Occupy Wall Street has changed the nation’s political conversation — drawing long overdue attention to the struggles of the 99 percent — electoral politics and the 2012 presidential election have become almost exclusively defined by the 1 percent. Or, to be more precise, the .0000063 percent. Those are the 196 individual donors who have provided nearly 80 percent of the money raised by super PACs in 2011 by giving $100,000 or more each.

These political action committees, spawned by the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United decision in January 2010, can raise unlimited amounts of money from individuals, corporations or unions for the purpose of supporting or opposing a political candidate. …

If 2008 was the year of the small donor, when many political pundits (myself included) predicted that the fusion of grass-roots organizing and cyber-activism would transform how campaigns were run, then 2012 is “the year of the big donor,” when a candidate is only as good as the amount of money in his super PAC.

tags: plutocracy

Grassley Holds Domestic Violence Victims Hostage To Lash Out At Gay Victims And Immigrants | ThinkProgress

Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act in 1994, and it’s been reauthorized without a hitch twice since then. Now that it’s up for reauthorization again, however, Senate Republicans have suddenly decided to use it as part of an anti-gay and anti-immigrant crusade. Every single Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee voted against reauthorization…

“…over a few new provisions in the reauthorization — specifically, protections for LGBT individuals, undocumented immigrants who are victims of domestic abuse and the authority of Native American tribes to prosecute crimes.”

Nancy Pelosi Rips GOP Over Birth Control: I May Be ‘Moved To Explain Biology To My Colleagues’

Pelosi’s remarks came shortly after three House Democrats walked out of a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on religious liberty and birth control in protest of Chairman Darrell Issa’s (R-Calif.) refusal to allow a woman to testify in favor of the Obama administration’s contraception rule. The morning panel at the hearing consisted exclusively of men from conservative religious organizations.

A second panel included two women, but both were critics of Obama’s birth control mandate, which does not exempt religiously affiliated employers from having to include contraception in employees’ insurance coverage.

tags: reproductive_justice

Let It Not Happen Again: Reflections on the 70th Anniversary of Japanese American Incarcerations

Reflections on the 70th anniversary of Japanese American incarcerations.

tags: racism history

Tiger Beatdown › Even kitchenmaids get the blues: compulsory heterosexuality on Downton Abbey

Downton Abbey is the best show on television at the moment, is it not? Or at least, it has the best frocks and hats on television at the moment (sorry Mad Men, you’re so whatever year it was that everyone was into you). There is romance! Hats! It has the glorious Professor MacGongall Maggie Smith! And [snip snip snip -L] …now that we’ve established how amazing Downton Abbey is (and it really is), here is the bit where I tear it apart and make pretty shapes out of it.

… despite the presence of one queer character on the show, Downton has been decidedly thin on queer romance. …

But it’s actually in a heterosexual storyline that I think the compulsory heterosexuality of the show really comes out…

Keeping Up With the War on Choice and Contraception | Our Bodies Our Blog

This past week has been an absolute whirlwind of “What the….?!?” with ongoing attempts by Republicans to push back against women’s access to contraception and choice. If you’re catching up now, here’s some good reading: …

tags: reproductive_justice rape_culture

Amelia: When Your 7-Year-Old Son Announces, ‘I’m Gay’

Six months ago “gay” wasn’t even a word in my son’s vocabulary. He has always known that some of our male friends are married to men and some of our female friends to women, and it is such a normal part of his life that he never needed a special word to describe them. When he did notice the word and asked what it meant, I told him that when boys want to marry boys and girls want to marry girls, we call that “gay.” He didn’t seem very interested and quickly went off to do something else more exciting than a vocabulary lesson with his mom.

Fast-forward a few months. I was on the phone with a relative who had just discovered that I was blogging on The Huffington Post and openly discussing my son’s crush on Blaine. I was in another room alone (I thought), explaining, “We’re not saying he’s straight, and we’re not saying he’s gay. We’re saying we love who he is,” when my son’s voice piped up behind me.

“Yes, I am,” he said. …

He says this very naturally and happily, the same way he announces other things that he likes about himself. Mention that a person is tall and he’ll quickly add, “I’m tall!” If he hears the word “Legos,” barely a second passes before he says, “Legos. I love Legos.” Saying “I’m gay” is his way of telling people: this is something I like about myself.

PolitiFact | Keeping facts straight on 98% of Catholic women – February 17th, 2012

For the past week, thoughtful readers have let us know that we were wrong to give a Mostly True to the claim from a White House official that “most women, including 98 percent of Catholic women, have used contraception.”

They said we overlooked a chart in a study from the Guttmacher Institute that showed the percentage was far more limited. But there’s a good reason we didn’t rely on the chart — it wasn’t the right one.

BBC News – Slow walking ‘predicts dementia’

The speed someone walks may predict the likelihood of developing dementia later in life, according to researchers in the US.

They also told a conference that grip strength in middle-age was linked to the chance of a stroke.

tags: science

BBC News – Body clock ‘alters’ immune system

The time of the day could be an important factor in the risk of getting an infection, according to researchers in the US.

tags: science

Senators Promise War With ‘Nuclear Capable’ Iran, Don’t Define ‘Capable’ | AlterNet

A bipartisan coalition of senators essentially promised Thursday that the U.S. would take military action against Iran if they become capable of producing nuclear weapons. Just don’t ask them to define “capable.”

Thirty-two senators have signed on to sponsor the six-page resolution that “rejects any United States policy that would rely on efforts to contain a nuclear weapons-capable Iran.” Some believe it amounts to a promise that the U.S. would use force against Iran if they become capable of producing nuclear weapons…

The Court in a second Obama term : SCOTUSblog

[Speculation about possible future nominees. Blogger thinks Calif. AG Kamala Harris might be Obama's choice. -L]

Egypt’s Brotherhood warns US over aid cut-off – Middle East – Al Jazeera English

The Muslim Brotherhood has warned that Egypt may review its 1979 peace deal with Israel if the United States cuts aid to the country, a move that could undermine a cornerstone of Washington’s Middle East policy.

Washington has said the aid is at risk due to an Egyptian probe into civil society groups that has resulted in charges
against at least 43 activists, including 19 Americans who have been banned from leaving the country.

Egypt has been one of the world’s largest recipients of US aid since it signed the peace treaty with Israel, and the Muslim Brotherhood, which does not yet hold the reins of power, said any decision to cut that aid because of the investigation would raise serious questions.

UN condemns crackdown in Syria – Middle East – Al Jazeera English

The United Nations General Assembly has voted 137 to 12 to approve a non-binding resolution calling for an immediate halt to the Syrian government’s crackdown on the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s rule.

The vote on Thursday followed another day of violence as opposition activists said at least 22 people had been killed in a continuing military assault on opposition strongholds.

A prominent blogger and other leading activists were also arrested on Thursday, just hours before the UN vote on the crisis.

tags: syria

Republican Misconceptions on Americans and Birth Control | The Progressive

What the Catholic bishops and other religious leaders want is something larger than simply not paying for birth control coverage. “They want to be able to take taxpayer money, and provide social services, but not be judged by the same standards as anyone else,” O’Brien says.

He explains: “So let’s say they are providing services to a victim of sex trafficking, or to a refugee. Very often refugees and victims of sex trafficking need reproductive health services or emergency contraception in situations where they’ve been raped. …

“They want to be able to take government money and not provide services most people would regard as being scientifically, medically, and socially sound,” he says.

tags: reproductive_justice

Pakistan-Afghanistan talks ‘end in acrimony’ – Central & South Asia – Al Jazeera English – 17 Feb 2012

Reports say Karzai’s demand that Taliban chief be delivered to the negotiating table was dismissed as “preposterous”.

This Girl Snuck Into a Russian Military Rocket Factory | Gizmodo

Her name is Lana Sator and she snuck into one of NPO Energomash factories outside of Moscow. Her photos are amazing, like sets straight out of Star Wars or Alien. Now the Russian government is harassing her.

tags: photography

Alternate titles for Dr. Seuss stories

Stanford courses update | The Do It Yourself Scholar – February 10, 2012

The 14 new free online courses from Stanford University are getting underway this month at a website called Coursera. For those who missed the initial announcement, these are non-credit courses, which let you watch short videos and take embedded quizzes. If you sign up, do the homework and take exams, you will also a letter of completion signed by the course’s instructors.

languagehat.com: CLICKS IN ENGLISH.

“Speakers, it turns out, use clicks for a previously overlooked purpose: as a form of verbal punctuation in between thoughts or phrases. …This finding had previously eluded linguists, whose research often focuses on words and sentences in isolation. Wright was able to uncover the new pattern because she analyzed clicks in the context of complete conversations…”

languagehat.com: THE DAWN OF RECORDED SOUND IN AMERICA.

The Smithsonian has hundreds of the earliest audio recordings ever made, but they have been considered unplayable and nobody knew what was on them. Recently, the Library of Congress and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory collaborated to make optical scanners capable of recording the patterns, and some of the results are becoming available. …

Frederick Douglass | About.com African-American History

Frederick Douglass did not know his date of birth beyond that he was born in February 1818. But he would choose today’s date, February 14, as the day to celebrate as his own birthday.

tags: biography

The First Automatic Bread Slicer was Invented by Otto Frederick Rohwedder

He first built a prototype of his bread slicer in 1912. Unfortunately, his blueprints and machine were destroyed in a fire in 1917. From there, he struggled to obtain funding to begin again on his machine as the idea of pre-sliced bread was not at all popular among bakers. They felt the reduction in shelf life of the bread would not be popular among consumers…

Stay the Course or Try Something New and Promising? Some Ways to Decide | LucReid.com

Occupy Wall Street Claims the City Ruined Its Library – NYTimes.com – February 9, 2012

A member of the Occupy Wall Street movement filed a claim on behalf of the group Thursday that the city had damaged or destroyed $47,000 worth of books and other property while clearing its protest site at Zuccotti Park last fall. The notice of claim, filed with the comptroller’s office, is a preliminary step toward lodging a civil lawsuit.

…[claims] that the city “unreasonably seized and took possession” of about 3,600 books, four computers, WiFi equipment, shelves, wooden chairs and the large tent that covered the area that the protesters called the People’s Library. The man who is named in the claim, Peter Dutro, is described in the notice as the “de facto treasurer” of the group.

When the librarians went to the sanitation facility, the claim said, only 1,003 of their books could be found and 201 of them were so damaged as to be unusable. The four computers were also damaged beyond repair…

Love Letters Digitized: The ‘Triumphant Happiness’ of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning – NYTimes.com – February 14, 2012

Wellesley College and Baylor University collaborated on the project, which began today with more than 1,400 letters by the poets available online. Of those, 573 represent the complete set of love letters, and at least 1,500 additional pieces of correspondence to other people the couple knew are to be up by summer.

Browning wrote first, on Jan. 10, 1845, immediately establishing the intensity that would characterize the relationship: …

Diario de Filipinas – Report: Bonifacio and Aguinaldo in Duel – Jan 30, 1897

Manila, Philippines – Diario de Filipinas has confirmed that Andres Bonifacio and Emilio Aguinaldo, leaders of rival factions in the Katipunan, engaged in a duel recently. The duo, and their supporters, have worked to keep the animosity between the leaders quiet. However, sources have confirmed that they almost pulled pistols on one another in the town of San Francisco de Malabon.

The source of the widening rift between Bonifacio and Aguinaldo appears to be more than personal and is connected to their disparate views on the future of the Philippine Revolution. The Magdiwang faction, led now by Andres Bonifacio, favors retaining Katipunan leadership of the Revolution. The Magdalo faction, led by Emilio Aguinaldo, favors creating a new government that reflects the new composition of the Revolution; recent enlistees (many deserters from the Spanish military) are not members of the Katipunan. Correspondence acquired by Diario indicates that the Magdalo faction has been working to establish a new revolutionary government based in Cavite. …

tags: history

Rough Week for Scientology | Religion Dispatches – February 13, 2012

Scientology is a religion everyone loves to hate. Despite its small size, several journalists and individuals have become full-time critics, dedicating significant time and energy to sites such as Operation Clambake. In world religion classes, my students are fascinated by Scientology and inevitably bring it up as an example of a “cult,” although their ideas about Scientology are almost always derived from South Park and other satirical media. I have yet to meet a student who has spoken with a practicing Scientologist.

This is not to exonerate the Church of Scientology from the kind of accusations currently made against Jan Eastgate. Apostate Scientologists have come forward with stories of estranged family members, neglected children, lost fortunes, and even false imprisonment that are quite disturbing. However, compassion for these individuals does not seem to be what motivates all of Scientology’s critics.

Trotsky, Russian Revolutionary, Makes Debut Performance Before Microphone (1932) | Open Culture – February 15th, 2012

The short clip above was recorded in Denmark in 1932 and is titled “Trotzky makes debut performance before microphone”. …You can read the text of the speech called “In Defence of October” held on November 27 here. There are also two impressive photos secretly taken by a photojournalist. There was a lot of commotion surrounding Trotsky’s trip to Denmark…

tags: history

Are humans responsible for Africa’s lost rainforests? | A Blog About History – History News

New research indicates that the rise of agriculture in Central Africa may have contributed to the demise of the lust rainforests of the area.

The Seedy, Scandalous History of Valentine’s Day : Discovery News

[Warning: harm to women and animals]

tags: history

How Pinterest Changed Website Design Forever – Mashable!

Even if you haven’t ever visited popular visual bookmarking site Pinterest, you might recognize its design elements — which have been popping up everywhere…

“It flattens the information hierarchy,”…

Pinterest puts web content into sticky-note sized blocks users can organize onto pinboards that fill the entire browser screen. The majority of each block is filled by a photo, and the ability to “like,” “repin” or comment at the bottom make it look like its own mini web page. …

It also broke the system of organizing information online based on reverse chronology, as favored by Twitter and Facebook. Reverse chronology is a tired, overly-used system; as Vinh says, “I almost thought it was the default way to organize information on the web.”

[I don't think Pinterest did it. I think this is happening because of the long slow death of the static web and the rise of a) content syndication/aggregation and b) social media [read: friendslists]. The static web, and the desire of website owners for repeat visitors, absolutely necessitated reverse chronological presentation. -L]

Fitness Buddy Is a Comprehensive Exercise Planner, Tracker, and Instructor for Your Smartphone – Lifehacker

Android and iPhone: …It not only provides instructions for over 1700 exercises, but also plans and tracks your workouts, weight and body metrics, and blood pressure.

Judge Really Thought No One Would Catch Her Dismissing Her Own Parking Tickets – The Consumerist

She reportedly had two tickets from November 2010 for parking violations, and a third ticket for an out-of-date registration, and had failed to pay those tickets on time. So instead of showing up according to the summonses she received, she simply logged on to the online court system records and zap! — erased those violations.

She was arraigned and released on $25,000 bond, ostensibly under the orders of another judge. Because if she’d done it herself, no one would ever know any of this had ever happened.

The Best Wallpaper Manager for Windows – Lifehacker

Windows’ built-in wallpaper switcher is okay, but not spectacular. If you’d like to beef up your rotating wallpaper, John’s Background Switcher gives you tons of options for doing so, and at no cost.

New Trade-In Program.. Gift Cards for old phones at Verizon WirelessAndroidGuys

Encouraging its customers to “save the planet”, Big Red is allowing eligible customers to redeem their old handsets for gift cards to use at the Verizon store.

Instantly redeemable gift cards can be used in store to purchase a new phone, tablet or other accessory. Also, you can use the gift card towards your bill. A representative will need to give a quick evaluation of the device and its condition. Depending on the make, model and condition you could receive up to $300.

Refuge of Refuse: The Trashiest City on Earth | WebUrbanist

Garbage City, as it’s known, has long been the ultimate destination of all of Cairo’s trash. Here, a community of people called the Zabbaleen view trash as a way of life. As depicted in the documentary Garbage Dreams, the Zabbaleen scratch out a living by carting away the trash from Cairo’s streets and then sorting through it, recycling 80% of it and feeding the remaining organic matter to pigs, which provided meat and fertilizer. But as Cairo’s population grows, so does the trash – and since authorities removed the pigs in 2009 due to swine flu, the trash is getting harder to manage.

Free Technology for Teachers: 7 Resources for Teaching and Learning Anatomy and Physiology

The University of Pennsylvania Health System provides nearly 200 video animations and explanations of injuries, diseases, and body systems. The animations, like this one of a balloon angioplasty, are concise which makes them good for general reference purposes.

tags: education medicine

Senator: Claims Of TSA Harassment Demonstrate The Need For Passenger Advocates – The Consumerist

Following claims by female passengers that they have been harassed while going through airport security checkpoints, Senator Chuck Schumer from New York has renewed his call for the Transportation Security Administration to place passenger advocates in every airport terminal.

The latest allegations against the TSA come from women who say they have been singled out for more intensive screenings by male agents just because they are female.

Dr. Google Will See You Now: Search Can Identify Causes of Health Symptoms

The next time you need to identify a mysterious pain in your body, you could look it up in Google Search, and Google will tell you directly on the results page what might be the possible cause of your symptoms. …

Of course Google reminds users that the list is not created by doctors and shouldn’t be used to replace the expert advice from medical professionals.

ThinkGeek :: Doctor Who Flesh Bowl Figure Creator

If you’d like to recreate scenes from The Rebel Flesh, you can with your very own Doctor Who Flesh Bowl Figure Creator.

Daily Kos: Mitt Romney spits on Michigan’s unionized autoworkers in Detroit News op-ed – by Eclectablog – Feb 14, 2012

NOTE: I highly commend your attention to Congressman Gary Peters’ diary “I was there – why Romney is still wrong on Michigan’s auto industry.” [link] …

Today, in a Detroit News op-ed titled “Taxpayers should get GM shares’ proceeds”, Mitt Romney doubled down on his previous New York Times editorial in which he declared the Obama administration should have let the auto industry perish.

From the NYT piece “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt”: …

Daily Kos: Pew: Imitating Canada would get the deceased off the voter rolls and make registration cheaper

David Becker, director of Pew’s Election Initiatives, said that the center’s findings did not suggest any kind of voter fraud or voter suppression from these problems, but noted they do “underscore the need for an improved system.” …

They found that [Oregon] spent $8.8 million on registration for the 2008 general election, which clocks in at $4.11 for each voter registered and $7.67 for each registration transaction. …

[Canada] spends 35 cents to maintain its list of voters in a federal election year.

Daily Kos: Feminism – How Quickly We Forget – by msopine – Feb 14, 2012

Sadly, Barbara Walters took the Clarence Thomas position in this morning’s discussion on feminism. According to Ms. Walters, Rick Santorum’s statement blaming “radical feminism” for “convincing women that professional accomplishments were the key to happiness” was not “terribly off point” and that “feminists made women who stayed home and had children feel inferior”.

Really Barbara? That was your take-away about the feminist movement of the seventies? If it was, than like Thomas, you will never give feminism any credit for your success, or the fact that the feminist movement made it possible for you to become the first woman news anchor on television. I’m sure you believe it was completely your talent and not fear of the feminist reaction that persuaded the network to stand behind you and show veteran reporter Harry Reasoner the door when he refused to work with you because you were a woman. After all, we know how daring and fearless networks are when it comes to change.

‘The Romney campaign did not comment’ – POLITICO.com – By DYLAN BYERS | 2/13/12

[A compilation.]

Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich All Promise To Ban Porn – By Jason Easley – February 13, 2012

The conservative group Morality In Media is head over heels today after all three top Republican candidates promised to go war against the distribution of porn. In a written statement, Rick Santorum said, “Federal obscenity laws should be vigorously enforced. If elected President, I will appoint an Attorney General who will do so.”

Not to be outdone, Mitt Romney gave a statement to the group …

On one of their many websites, the group claims blames pornography for most of society’s ills and believes that porn causes brain damage …

While combing through the group’s websites, I could not find a distinction between “legal” and “illegal” porn, but in their press release they express the belief that the distribution of all hardcore pornography is illegal.

…consider that the top three candidates for the Republican presidential nomination has given more detail about how they would ban pornography than they have about how they would create jobs.

languagehat.com: DOWNTON ANACHRONISMS.

My wife and I are as hooked on Downton Abbey as everyone else … so I’ve been interested to see the recent spate of investigations into the language used. Ben Zimmer has a post at Visual Thesaurus listing “lines that seem a bit questionable” and “assessing their accuracy for the time period”; Ben Schmidt at Sapping Attention (“Digital Humanities: Using tools from the 1990s to answer questions from the 1960s about 19th century America”) has a post with a similar goal but a more comprehensive approach: …

Finally, Mark Liberman at the Log investigates “Just sayin’”. It’s really very hard to get period dialog right, though that’s no excuse for “logic pills” or “get knotted.”

Daily Kos: History of Evolutionary Biology Part 2: Darwin, Wallace, and the Origin of Species [part 1 below]

In the previous diary we saw how in the early 19th century the fossil record and other geological evidence supported both the idea that the earth was ancient and that life on earth had changed over time. A number of scholars had proposed biological evolution and some had even proposed natural selection. So then why is Charles Darwin (1809-1882) celebrated above all other biologists and why is the publication of his work, ‘On the Origin of Species’ considered the most momentous event in the history of biology?

tags: science

Daily Kos: History of Evolutionary Biology Part 1: Evolution Before Darwin

The purpose of these diaries is to give an overview of genuine evolutionary controversies that have cropped up over the last 150 years, as opposed to the social controversies that creationists contrive and then try and pass off as scientific disagreements. …

Important Caveat: My training is in the general area of evolutionary ecology with substantial exposure to evolutionary genetics. I am also married to someone who does research in the field of evolutionary genetics.

…discusses topics in European science relevant to evolutionary biology from the 17th century through the first half of the 19th century. Similar ideas had been proposed by Greek, Roman and Islamic scholars (and possibly others) in the more distant past. However the foundations of modern biology really begin in the 1600s and the work of the last few centuries is much more directly foundational to Darwin’s ideas and what has come afterward.

The 1600s In this period the foundations of modern biology were laid down. …

tags: science

Bishop Nickless: Contraception Mandate a Plot by the Devil that Must be Violently Opposed | Right Wing Watch – by Kyle Mantyla on February 14, 2012

tags: extremism reproductive_justice

Daily Kos: Yves Smith: Gov’t Is Lying To Us About Mortgage Settlement Release, It Is “Broad”

Essentially, the settlement…provides a much broader release of liability to our too-big-to-fail banks than was noted in coverage on the matter late last week. …

The issue here (at a minimum) is that MERS is arguably responsible for running a terrible database (from what we have been able to infer, it is lacking in normal protocols to assure the accuracy and integrity of information, such as audit trails) and in failing to devise procedures that were permissible in all the states in which it operated. That presumably constitutes negligence. In turn, the MERS members were arguably liable for taking impermissible actions, such as assigning mortgages when they did not own the note, or making assignments after foreclosures had been started. So they were also negligent. …both parties are likely to argue that their indemnification isn’t operative due to the negligence (and also possibly bad faith) of the other party. Put more simply: even with the indemnification of MERS by MERS members, don’t expect it to be easy to pin liability on banks.

…this seems to call into question the claim that Schneiderman got a carve-out for his MERS suit …

But even with all these caveats, it’s hard to read the executive summary, which no doubt was vetted by the bank, Administration and AG sides, as meaning other than what it intends to mean: that the banks have been released …of the monstrous mess they made in their failure to convey notes as stipulated in their own contracts…

tags: real_estate_crisis foreclosure_fraud

Daily Kos: Gallup poll: Birth control flap hasn’t affected Catholic view of President Obama

Daily Kos: In birth control fight, Catholic bishops take hard stance on Viagra

According to the Catholic Church, birth control is “intrinsically evil” and requiring insurance companies to cover it is a “grave moral concern.” …

But don’t worry. The Catholic Church is on to those few men out there who are considering taking the pill for non-procreative purposes…

tags: reproductive_justice

Daily Kos: Black Hole in Milky Way Munches Asteroids and Planets

tags: astronomy

Vintage Valentine’s Day Postcards from the Early 1900s | Brain Pickings

This Will Make You Smarter: 151 Big Thinkers Each Pick a Concept to Enhance Your Cognitive Toolkit | Brain Pickings

Every year for more than a decade, intellectual impresario and Edge editor John Brockman has been asking the era’s greatest thinkers a single annual question, designed to illuminate some important aspect of how we understand the world. … In 2011…“What scientific concept will improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?”

[Damn Brain Pickings, I swear every single one of their blog posts makes me want to buy a few more books. -L]

Valentines: 6 Hearts Bokeh Pictures | DIYPhotography.net

tags: photography

“I love you” « Resist racism

It’s “ketapanen” in the Menominee language. “Hello” is “posoh.” Seventh grader Miranda Washinawatok taught those two phrases to a friend at Sacred Heart Catholic Academy in Shawano, Wisconsin.

…Washinawatok was benched during a basketball game for her “bad attitude.” …

I often think that racism stole my mother’s tongue from me. My parents grew up in the assimilation generation; they believed it would be safer if we spoke only English in the home. I don’t fault them for their choice. …

But when my grandmother is dying and I am holding her hand and the words don’t come, I feel tremendous loss.

Deported Dad Begs North Carolina To Give Him Back His Children – COLORLINES

[At the bottom of the article, there's a link to a petition. -L]

Every morning since the first of his three boys was born in 2007, Felipe Montes would wake early and prepare breakfast for his wife and children, get his boys ready for their day, change them, feed them and when he could not arrange a ride with another family member, drive them to daycare. Then he’d go to work at a landscaping company for the next 9 hours and return home in time to cook his children dinner.

…Montes was deported to Mexico after nine years in the United States…

…his wife Marie Montes fell on hard times. She was pregnant with their third child and was surviving on disability payments … Without Felipe’s income and support she could not keep her family afloat. …the Allegheny County child welfare department took the children from Marie and put them in foster care.

…[The county]…plans to ask a judge to cease all efforts to reunify the family and put the children into adoption proceedings with foster families. …Felipe Montes was his children’s primary caregiver before he was deported and has not been charged with neglect…

…Montes travelled to his uncle’s home in a small town in the state of Tamaulipas, Mexico. …With the support of his uncle and aunt and in the company of three young cousins, he says his children would be cared for and loved.

…“[The county] did not approve the father’s home for placement because water is hauled in, there is a concrete roof and cement floor,” …

Our November investigation found that child welfare departments and juvenile courts regularly refuse to consider reunification with deported parents based on objections that have less to do with the parents ability to care for their children than with bias about living conditions in other countries. …

In 2011, the federal government deported more noncitizens than any single year in generations, and approximately 22 percent of those deported were the parents of U.S. citizen children. …

[Montes] was married to a United States citizen, and thus eligible for a visa. But he said the process of applying for documents was simply too expensive — thousands of dollars to complete visa applications and pay for travel costs to leave the country and apply, as the rules demand. What’s more, as the breadwinner in the family, he feared that leaving to Mexico while he applied for reentry would leave his family at risk.

…the child welfare department has decided to ask a judge to terminate his parental rights.

tags: call_for_action

VIDEO: Bear and Wolf Baby Playtime

Obsidian Wings: Remix at the Super Bowl

When I heard the halftime show at the Super Bowl would be Madonna, I knew it was going to be something pretty flamboyant in the way of over-the-top entertainment. But I didn’t imagine that it was going to be a fannish remix.

…She is performing *about* the Super Bowl as well as *during* it, showing and telling how the game, and football, and American masculinity itself, can be ridiculous and campy.

I do think Madonna is pivoting off Luminosity — there’s no other connection between “Vogue” and pseudo-classical warrior hunks, and Lum’s vid is well-known enough that Madonna (or one of her people) is likely to have come across it in the past few years. It really looks to me as though Madonna remixed Luminosity’s remix, iterating culture.

Not MY Nude — Why I Started the Brown Bra Scavenger Hunt | xoJane

My mom has been buying nude bras and dyeing them brown for the last 30 years. And if my mom can dye nude bras brown, surely bra makers have the capability of doing the same.

If It Looks Like a Compliment, and Sounds Like a Compliment…Is It Really a Compliment? | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network

A recent paper by Julia Becker and Stephen Wright details even more of the insidious ways that benevolent sexism might be harmful for both women and social activism. In a series of experiments, women were exposed to statements that either illustrated hostile sexism (e.g. “Women are too easily offended”) or benevolent sexism (e.g. “Women have a way of caring that men are not capable of in the same way.”) The results are quite discouraging; when the women read statements illustrating benevolent sexism, they were less willing to engage in anti-sexist collective action, such as signing a petition, participating in a rally, or generally “acting against sexism.” Not only that, but this effect was partially mediated by the fact that women who were exposed to benevolent sexism were more likely to think that there are many advantages to being a woman and were also more likely to engage in system justification, a process by which people justify the status quo and believe that there are no longer problems facing disadvantaged groups (such as women) in modern day society. Furthermore, women who were exposed to hostile sexism actually displayed the opposite effect – they were more likely to intend to engage in collective action, and more willing to fight against sexism in their everyday lives.

How might this play out in a day-to-day context? Imagine that there’s an anti-woman policy being brought to a vote, such as a regulation that would make it easier for local businesses to fire pregnant women once they find out that they are expecting. If you are collecting signatures for a petition or trying to gather women to protest this policy and those women were recently exposed to a group of men making comments about the policy in question, it would be significantly easier to gain their support and vote down the policy if the men were commenting that pregnant women should be fired because they were dumb for getting pregnant in the first place. However, if they instead happened to mention that women are much more compassionate than men and make better stay-at-home parents as a result, these remarks might actually lead these women to be less likely to fight an objectively sexist policy.

tags: sexism

Exterminom Nom Nom Nom: Dalek Oreos [Pic]

tags: cute

Rat Training 5-Fetch (Advance) – YouTube

This video is about training a rat to fetch…

commanderspock.tumblr.com: Night Witches

for those not in the know, night witches were russian lady bombers who bombed the shit out of german lines in WW2. Thing is though, they had the oldest, noisiest, crappest planes in the entire world. The engines used to conk out halfway through their missions, so they had to climb out on the wings mid flight to restart the props. the planes were also so noisy that to stop germans from hearing them combing and starting up their anti aircraft guns, they’d climb up to a certain height, coast down to german positions, drop their bombs, restart their engines in midair, and get the fuck out of dodge.

their leader flew over 200 missions and was never captured.

BBC News – Apple factories to face independent inspections

The working conditions in factories which produce Apple products are to be inspected, the computing giant has announced.

The Fair Labor Association (FLA) will audit several suppliers, including Foxconn in China, at Apple’s request.

Safety at the factories has come under scrutiny after a series of fatal accidents and suicides in recent years.

Smoking bans lead to less, not more, smoking at home

Smoking bans in public/workplaces don’t drive smokers to light up more at home, suggests a study of four European countries…

No Sir, Those Aren’t My 79 Adorable Turtles Covered In Pantyhose Hiding In This Package At The Airport – The Consumerist

Journalist Arrested for Tweets Gets Deported to Saudi Arabia – Mashable!

Hamza Kashgari, the twenty-three-year-old Saudi blogger whose controversial tweets about the Prophet Muhammed last weekend incited controversy among religious conservatives in the Middle East, has been returned to Saudi Arabia at the request of the Saudi government.

He was detained by authorities at Kuala Lumpr International Airport Thursday morning while attempting to catch a flight to seek asylum in New Zealand. …

In an interview with Reuters, Saudi lawyer Sulaiman al-Jomaii said Kashgari is certain to face harsh punishment, but will likely escape the death penalty if he repents in court.

Use Your Fears of Starting a New Project to Create a Checklist of the Tools You Need

The idea is that when you acknowledge your fears you can make the steps necessary to dive into a big project.

A Separation of Church and Bank — YES! Magazine

There were more than 3,500 foreclosures in Father Eduardo Samaniego’s San Jose parish in 2008. The banks were unwilling to work with the community to keep people in their homes, and the number of houses that were standing empty were becoming a blight on the community and devaluing the remaining homes. …

So what did the congregation do? They divested the Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church’s money from Bank of America and moved funds [totaling $3 million] to a local credit union.

Don’t Be Stupid, Cupid: How to Show Your Love Responsibly by Annie Leonard

What classic Valentine’s gifts are linked to exploitation—and what can you do about it?

How to Discover New Music in the Post-MP3 Age – Lifehacker

Until relatively recently, listening to new music meant hearing a song on the radio or hunting down new albums or MP3s. Now services like Spotify, Rdio, and Grooveshark allow you to listen to virtually any song on demand whether you’ve bought an MP3 or not.

tags: music

Speed Through Boring Tasks with an Unpleasant Alarm – Lifehacker

I know I’d certainly be more motivated to crank out all my bill-paying if I knew Justin Beiber would start blasting in ten minutes, or if my least favorite politician were about to start ranting at me through my phone.

Why Mitt Romney should have to pay $3,339.04 for a pizza – thestar.com

A pizza would have to cost U.S. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney $3,339.04 for him to understand how average people live.

…$708.69 for a lottery ticket, $662.62 for a dozen eggs and $1,187.05 for a gallon of gas…

The online calculator Mittbucks.com is the product of outrage from Adam Scruggs and his wife, Danielle. …

Even to feel what it’s like to be Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whose salary is roughly $6,500 a week, Romney would have to pay $88.06 for a 591 millilitre bottle of pop, according to Mittbucks.

Occupy Kindergarten: The Rich-Poor Divide Starts With Education – Jordan Weissmann – Business – The Atlantic – Feb 11 2012

Economic class is increasingly becoming the great dividing line of American education.

The New York Times has published a roundup of recent research showing the growing academic achievement gap between rich and poor students. It prominently features a paper by Stanford professor Sean F. Reardon, which found that, since the 1960s, the difference in test scores between affluent and underprivileged students has grown 40%, and is now twice the gap between black and white students. …

[Of course, since in the U.S. class has a racial dimension, that doesn't mean we can declare racism is over. -L]

It may not simply be a matter of the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer — although that certainly is a part of it. The growing differences in student achievement don’t strictly mimic the way income inequality has skyrocketed since the middle of the 20th century. It’s actually worse than that.

…studies show wealthy parents are spending more on their young children and paying more attention to their academic development. One paper found that by the time an upper-income kid starts school, they’ve spent 400 more hours on “literacy activities” than their less fortunate peers.

Missouri Becomes Second State To Divert Foreclosure Funds Away From Homeowners To Balance Its Budget | ThinkProgress – By Travis Waldron on Feb 13, 2012

tags: wisconsin missouri real_estate_crisis

N.J. Senate approves bill legalizing gay marriage | NJ.com

The bills passage elicited a round of applause from those in the audience wearing blue in support of the bill, which Gov. Chris Christie has promised to veto.

tags: new_jersey marriage_equality

Fox Pundit Says Women In The Military Should ‘Expect’ To Be Raped | ThinkProgress – By Ben Armbruster on Feb 13, 2012

The Pentagon announced new rules last week easing the ban on women serving in combat. While conservatives like Rick Santorum are a little uneasy with the news, the announcement only formalizes military practices that were already taking place.

But Fox News contributor Liz Trotta’s commentary on the matter took the issue to a whole other level. She’s not really concerned about the “controversy” surrounding the Pentagon’s announcement. For Trotta, the issue is having “women once more, the feminist, going, wanting to be warriors and victims at the same time.”

tags: asshattery rape_culture

Republican Women Senators Breaking Ranks With Party, Come Out In Favor Of Obama Contraception Rule | ThinkProgress – Feb 13, 2012

While GOP senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has pledged to fight the Obama’s administration’s modified regulation requiring health insurers and busnisses to offer contraception coverage without additional cost sharing, the revised rule “appears to have won over” two of the five Republican women senators.

Sens. Olympia Snowe (ME) and Susan Collins (ME) — both of whom have sponsored legislation requiring insurers to offer contraception benefits in all health plans — are in favor of the new compromise, which would allow religiously affiliated colleges, universities, and hospitals to avoid providing birth control. Their employees will still receive contraception coverage at no additional cost sharing directly from the insurer: …

Republicans in the senate seem determined to oppose the compromise and have introduced legislation that would allow employers or individuals to opt out of any benefit that undermines their moral beliefs.

How Not To Write About Female Musicians: A Handy Guide – Village Voice – By Maura Johnston Fri., Feb. 10 2012

…hoo boy has there been a lot of terrible writing about female musicians in the past few weeks. The latest offender is the New York Times style magazine T’s cover-worthy profile of Lana Del Rey, which manages to be offensive from its first sentence and somehow gets worse from there.

tags: music sexism

A Universe from Nothing: Einstein, the Belgian Priest and the Puzzle of the Big Bang: Scientific American

Now, almost one hundred years later, it is difficult to fully appreciate how much our picture of the universe has changed in the span of a single human lifetime. As far as the scientific community in 1917 was concerned, the universe was static and eternal, and consisted of a single galaxy, our Milky Way, surrounded by a vast, infinite, dark, and empty space.

tags: science

African Women in Film: New Screen Adaptation of Chimamanda Adichie’s Novel, Half of a Yellow Sun

There are plans underway for a major screen adaptation project based on one of Nigeria’s most treasured novels, Half of a Yellow Sun.

…It tells the story of two sisters, Olanna and Kainene, during the Biafran War, which began when the Igbos tried to secede as the Republic of Biafra due to political and ethnic struggles…

The effect of the war is shown through the dynamic relationships of four people’s lives ranging from high ranking political figures, a professor, a British citizen, and a houseboy.

…undoubtedly one of Africa’s literary gems as it — for once — tells the history of the Nigerian people from the perspective of its inhabitants, and in particular, women…

The movie is currently slated to be shot in Nigeria and will be backed by UK producers Andrea Calderwood (The Last King of Scotland) and Gail Egan (The Constant Gardener). Nigerian writer-director, Biye Bandele, has had a hand in the development of the script, and actors Thandie Newton (who is of Zambian heritage) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (Nigerian) are part of a UK cast.

Court of Appeals Prop 8 Ruling – Treating Marriage as a License, Not a Sacrament | | Feminist Law ProfessorsFeminist Law Professors

…what’s even more interesting about the opinion, now that I’ve had overnight to think about it, is the degree to which the 9th Circuit’s ruling amounts to a pretty definitive slap down of the Boies and Olson strategy in litigating the case. Recall that one of the main approaches taken at the trial by the so-called “dream team” was to paint a picture of marriage as the most sacred, revered, mature form of adult coupling…

Instead, the reasoning used in Judge Stephen R. Reinhardt’s opinion marks a triumph for the fabulous and smart Therese Stewart, the lawyer in the San Francisco City Attorney’s office who has shined time and again in oral argument and in briefs filed in the marriage equality litigation in California.

…it avoids the kind of sermonizing about the sanctity of the marital relation … The court can find a constitutional problem with Prop 8 while remaining agnostic…on the question of whether the state should be in the marriage business at all.

tags: marriage_equality

Women’s Media Center Launches “Women Under Siege”

…a project with the mission of “documenting how rape and other kinds of sexualized violence are used as tools in genocide and conflict throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.” By exploring the ways in which sexualized violence has been used as a weapon during times of genocide or conflict, Women Under Siege will play a significant role in educating people about sexualized violence and developing strategies to prevent such violence in future conflicts.

Lil Hardin Armstrong, Jazz Pioneer | About.com Women’s History

tags: music

Mother of Black History Month? | About.com Women’s History

Mary McLeod Bethune was the founder of Bethune-Cookman College, originally opened as the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute in 1904, serving African Americans at a time when most schools admitted only white students. Because the local hospital was whites-only, the school hosted its own hospital from 1911-1921. In addition to playing a key part in other organizations, Bethune served as president for the Study of Negro Life and History …

Traveling Preacher Turned Abolitionist | About.com Women’s History

Born into slavery in New York at the end of the 18th century, the woman who would take the name Sojourner Truth became a traveling preacher, and then a popular speaker for the growing abolitiionist movement. …

Poetry Saturdays: Virginia Hamilton Adair – The Pursuit of Harpyness

Virginia Hamilton Adair was a 20th century American poet whose work was frequently compared to TS Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Frost.

U.S. judge allows enforcement of Texas abortion law | Reuters

Sparks said his action on Monday came out of deference to the higher court. But he criticized the appellate court for “making puppets out of doctors” and stripping them of rights to freedom of speech under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

“There can be little doubt that (the law) is an attempt by the Texas Legislature to discourage women from exercising their constitutional rights by making it more difficult for caring and competent physicians to perform abortions,” Sparks wrote in the opinion on Monday.

The law, enacted in 2011, requires abortion providers to perform an ultrasound on pregnant women, show and describe the image to them, and play sounds of the fetal heartbeat. Though women can decline to view images or hear the heartbeat, they must listen to a description of the exam.

[This is very important legislation because without it the women who are seeking abortions might not realize that There Is Something In There. -L]

tags: sarcasm

Anna Holmes On the “Anger” of Public Women | Name It. Change It.

Today the Washington Post features a great column by Anna Holmes talking about female anger, but specifically how the anger of public women is perceived. She mostly focuses the recent interview with Newt Gringrich’s second wife Marianne and Michelle Obama’s portrayal and reaction to, the new book by Jodi Kantor, The Obamas.

Holmes is incredible perceptive about how we view women’s anger, even to the point of when it’s called “anger.”

…she also highlights a tiny moment from Elizabeth Warren’s interview on Tuesday with Jon Stewart. [links and video]

Timothy Dolan: Birth control tweak a “first step” – Political Hotsheet – CBS News – February 10, 2012

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops… said Friday that it was reserving judgment on the administration’s decision to tweak the policy. …

Under the policy announced Friday, employees of church-linked schools, hospitals and charities would still have access to free contraceptive coverage – but those organizations would not have to pay for it. Instead, health insurance companies would provide it free of charge.

Santorum: Insurance shouldn’t cover birth control at all – The Plum Line – The Washington Post – 02/10/2012

…could very well turn this into a wedge issue against the GOP, as more and more Republicans are asked whether (like the majority of Americans) they think insurance companies should be required to cover birth control.

…this is a position that’s strongly supported by the GOP base. In the new Fox poll, 71 percent of Tea Partyers, and 52 percent of conservatives, disapprove of requiring insurance companies to cover contraception.

…this could become a litmus test issue for GOP candidates …

Yet embracing this position could be toxic in the general election, because large majorities support the use of government power to compel insurance companies to cover birth control.