gregladen | June 3, 2009 Speaking at a London girls' school, Michelle Obama makes a passionate, personal case for each student to take education seriously. It is this new, brilliant generation, she says, that will close the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be.
Michelle Obama's life as First Lady of the United States is informed by her early life, growing up as the daughter of a pump operator for the Chicago water department. Though money was tight, her parents emphasized education and possibility for their two brilliant children. Both kids went to Princeton (her older brother, Craig Robinson…
gregladen | June 3, 2009A custom here in Minnesota is to dangle a light bulb near the water meter or any other water-carrying pipes that are in your unheated basement. You don't need a switch. You just have a light socket on a wire, and at the beginning of winter you screw in a 100 watt light bulb, and at the end of winter, you loosen the light bulb so it stays off for the summer. This prevents the pipes from freezing and provides light in the basement at the same time.
This sort of practice has led me to wonder if compact fluorescents should be pulled out of some of the light sockets during the winter, and…
gregladen | June 3, 2009One fall afternoon ... I was summoned to... a windowless room on an upper floor, where men dressed in crisp white garments instructed me to remove all of my clothes. ... four-inch metal pins were affixed... to my vertebrae at regular intervals from my neck down. I was positioned against a wall; a floodlight illuminated my pin-spiked profile and a camera captured it. ... I'd been told that this "posture photo" was ... routine... Those whose pins described ... erratic postural curve were required to attend remedial posture classes.
1995 New York Times by Ron Rosenbaum.
gregladen | June 3, 2009 Kaki King, the first female on Rolling Stone's "guitar god" list, rocks out to a full live set at TED2008, including her breakout single, "Playing with Pink Noise." Jaw-dropping virtuosity meets a guitar technique that truly stands out.
Kaki King combines jaw-dropping guitar work with dreamy, searching songwriting. Her percussive technique (guitar geeks compare it to Preston Reed's; everyone else compares it to Eddie Van Halen's) drives her songs forward, while layers of overdubs and her own soft vocals create a shimmering cloud of sound.
King's work on the soundtrack for 2007's Into the…
gregladen | June 2, 2009This question is shorthand for a larger and more nuanced set of questions that has emerged over the last 24 hours here and here as people engage in this very interesting and important discussion about rape, especially wartime rape and related post-apocalyptic rape cultures.
"The switch" is a term I first heard from a student, who wrote a term paper for me on this in 1993. The basic idea of a switch would be supported if more or less randomly (though age biased, likely) selected men, put into a certain situation, tended to commit rape on a much larger scale ... or more exactly, a much…
gregladen | June 2, 2009... is not entirely accurate scientifically, but it is very inspiring.
Hat tip: Miss Cellania
And while you are over at Miss Cellania's place, check out this scary video.
gregladen | June 2, 2009PZ Myers has called for help on this one, as it's a tough cookie. One New Snow Dot Com has a crazy yahooistic poll asking your opinion on LGBT Pride Month.
Check out PZ's site for the state of the poll earlier today, then click through to vote.
gregladen | June 2, 2009Or to put it more accurately, yet another study seems to show that girls learn from their teachers, parents, and peers that they are not supposed to be good at math. Sterotypes can be fulfilled. Pleas stop doing that, everyone.
Here is some press on this story.
University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers continue to find evidence that shows there is no innate difference in the math ability of males and females.
"There is a persistent stereotype that girls and women are just not as good at math as boys and men," said UW-Madison psychology professor Janet Hyde. "And the data we have…
gregladen | June 2, 2009Carnival of Evolution #12 is up and swimming at Deep Sea News, and it's a good one.
gregladen | June 2, 2009I am having lunch in an eatery, a cafeteria sort of place, where you get your food, pay at the cash register, and sit down somewhere. At one table is a woman reading. At another table there is a young man eating a muffin. At another table is a pair of women having a quiet conversation. At another table is a man looking over some papers. I'm off to the side with my laptop out writing this.
And in the middle table is a woman with a fairly large voice standing at her table making a series of phone calls. She is discussing personnel related issues and contract related issues connected to…
gregladen | June 2, 2009-Activists concerned by this year's escalation of sexual violence in eastern Congo are trying to turn up the heat on those benefitting--directly or indirectly--from illicit mineral extractions.
"Conflict minerals power our entire electronic industry," John Prendergast, co-founder of the Enough Project, told U.S. senators at a May 13 hearing on sexual violence in eastern Congo and Sudan.
The Enough Project is a Washington-based organization campaigning against genocide and crimes against humanity, including rape in eastern Congo.
Women's eNews
gregladen | June 2, 2009Bachmann implies that killing doctors and other terrorist acts is the expression of a "difference in opinion," and that people who are against killing doctors is merely an "interest group".
She calls for the investigation of those who would call right wing killers "terrorists."
Read more here.
Bachmann's comments are in response to Janet Napolitano's concerns over right wing extremism. These concerns were voiced before the murder of Dr. Tillman by an anti-abortion activist with Operation Rescue. The document mentions single-issue anti abortion or anti-immigration leanings together with…
gregladen | June 1, 2009Expanding on the discussion from here ...
In the paper Anthropology's "Fierce" Yanomami: Narratives of Sexual Politics in the Amazon, Sharon Tiffany and Kathleen Adams provide the following opening passage:
Imagine a society in which one woman in every three is raped, usually by a man she knows, consider the consequences of living in a society where one third of all women are beaten during pregnancy and 35 percent of women using emergency medical facilities are battered . Since wee are anthropologists, readers may mistakenly think that these appalling data were collected in an exotic society…
gregladen | June 1, 2009A repost, continuing along the lines of bashing the shell.
Having examined Learning the bash Shell (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly)) (see here, here, and here), it is now time to turn to a more advanced reference to help you geek out on your Linux computer. If you want to have only one book on bash, get Classic Shell Scripting by Robbins and Beebe. This book has an excellent mixture of history, philosophy, rigorously described details and creative solutions.
For instance, after giving a brief history of Unix (required in all such books) the authors layout the basic principles of what is…
gregladen | June 1, 2009Please read the following vignette of an actual incident.
I am a scientist observing the culture of the Namoyoma people. I am sitting in a shady spot just outside the village, writing up some notes, and I observe a disturbing event. Four men are trying to drag a young woman from the road into the nearby forest, and from what I hear them saying, they intend to rape her. There are also four older women trying to drag the young woman back to the village, and they are yelling that she must go back to her father's house where she will be protected. The battle over this young woman continues…
gregladen | June 1, 2009.. this is being reported by the BBC. The plane has 226 people flying out of Rio de Janeiro to france. An automatic mesage was received from the plan regarding a "short circuit" following turbulence, suggesting that the aircraft was struck by lightning.
Since this is a disappearance of an aircraft over the ocean, it is reminiscent of the Comet maneno, which you may know about.
Regarding the analysis of a Comet air liner near Elba in the 1950s ...
The Attorney General, Sir Lionel Heald QC, told the first day of the inquiry that initial suspicions of sabotage were unfounded.
He said the…
gregladen | May 31, 2009Erratum published in the Times Observer:
An errant classified "personal" ad which appeared in Thursday's Times Observer has drawn the attention of law enforcement officials.
A person from Warren placed the ad, which apparently alludes to the wish that President Obama meet an untimely end by linking him with four assassinated presidents. The ad representative didn't make the connection among the four other presidents mentioned and mistakenly allowed the ad to run.
Upon realizing the mistake early Thursday morning, the ad was immediately discontinued and the identity of the person who placed…