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The place where the world comes together in honesty and mirth.
Windmills Tilted, Scared Cows Butchered, Lies Skewered on the Lance of Reality ... or something to that effect.


Monday, September 30, 2013

The Daily Drift

Editor's Note: We have reached 1.8 million readers for the year (the actual count was 1,848,119 when we counted the totals for publication). Thank you.
So, true ...

Carolina Naturally is read in 193 countries around the world daily.
 
Tell all those weak-minded religio-nuts to go fornicate with themselves today  ... !


Today is Blasphemy Day  
 

Don't forget to visit our sister blog: It Is What It Is

Some of our readers today have been in:
The Americas
Chattanooga, Hamtramck, Lubbock, San Tan Valley, Madbury, West Linn, Homer Glen, La Crosse, Contoocook and Las Cruces, United States
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San Juan, Puerto Rico
Managua, Nicaragua
Buenos Aires, Argentina
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Rouen, Lyon, Marseille, Cerny and Laval, France
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Pacific
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Today in History

1399 Richard II is deposed.
1568 Eric XIV, king of Sweden, is deposed after showing signs of madness.
1630 John Billington, one of the original pilgrims who sailed to the New World on the Mayflower, becomes the first man executed in the English colonies. He is hanged for having shot another man during a quarrel
1703 The French, at Hochstadt in the War of the Spanish Succession, suffer only 1,000 casualties to the 11,000 of their opponents, the Austrians of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I.
1791 Mozart's opera The Magic Flute is performed for the first time in Vienna
1846 The first anesthetized tooth extraction is performed by Dr. William Morton in Charleston, Massachusetts.
1864 Confederate troops fail to retake Fort Harrison from the Union forces during the siege of Petersburg.
1911 Italy declares war on Turkey over control of Tripoli.
1918 Bulgaria pulls out of World War I.
1927 Babe Ruth hits his 60th homerun of the season off Tom Zachary in Yankee Stadium, New York City.
1935 George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess opens at the Colonial Theatre in Boston.
1938 Under German threats of war, Britain, France, Germany and Italy sign an accord permitting Germany to take control of Sudetenland–a region of Czechoslovakia inhabited by a German-speaking minority.
1939 The French Army is called back into France from its invasion of Germany. The attack, code named Operation Saar, only penetrated five miles.
1943 The Women's Army Auxiliary Corps becomes the Women's Army Corps, a regular contingent of the U.S. Army with the same status as other army service corps.
1949 The Berlin Airlift is officially halted after 277,264 flights.
1950 U.N. forces cross the 38th parallel separating North and South Korea as they pursue the retreating North Korean Army.
1954 The first atomic-powered submarine, the Nautilus, is commissioned in Groton, Connecticut.
1954 NATO nations agree to arm and admit West Germany.
1955 Actor and teen idol James Dean is killed in a car crash while driving his Porsche on his way to enter it into a race in Salinas, California.
1960 Fifteen African nations are admitted to the United Nations.
1962 U.S. Marshals escort James H. Meredith into the University of Mississippi; two die in the mob violence that follows.
1965 President Lyndon Johnson signs legislation that establishes the National Foundation for the Arts and the Humanities.
1965 The 30 September Movement unsuccessfully attempts coup against Indonesian government; an anti-communist purge in the aftermath results in over 500,000 deaths.
1966 Bechuanaland ceases to be a British protectorate and becomes the independent Republic of Botswana.
1972 Pro baseball great Roberto Clemente hits his 3,000th—and final—hit of his career.
1975 The AH-64 Apache attack helicopter makes its first flight.
1994 Aldwych tube station (originally Strand Station) of the London Underground transit system closes after 88 years.
1999 Japan's second-worst nuclear accident occurs at a uranium processing facility in Tokai-mura, killing two technicians.
2009 Earthquakes in Sumatra kill more than 1,115 people.

Non Sequitur

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Pakistani girl shot by Taliban honored at Harvard

Malala Yousafzai, waves to onlookers after speaking at a news conference on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Mass. on Friday, Sept. 27, 2013. The Pakistani teenager, an advocate for education for girls, survived a Taliban assassination attempt in 2012 on her way home from school. (AP Photo/Jessica Rinaldi) 
The Pakistani girl who survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban has been honored as Harvard University's humanitarian of the year.
Malala Yousafzai, an outspoken proponent for girls' education, was at Harvard on Friday to accept the 2013 Peter J. Gomes Humanitarian Award. Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust said she was pleased to welcome Malala because of their shared interest in education.
Malala was shot in the head last October. Militants said she was attacked because she criticized the Taliban, not because of her views on education.
The 16-year-old Malala said she hopes to become a politician because politicians can have influence on a broad scale.
She spoke nostalgically about her home region, the Swat Valley, and said she hopes to return someday. She called it a "paradise" but described a dangerous area where militants blew up dozens of schools and sought to discourage girls from going to school by snatching pens from their hands. Students, she said, reacted by hiding their books under their shawls so people wouldn't know they were going to school.
"The so-called Taliban were afraid of women's power and were afraid of the power of education," she told hundreds of students, faculty members and well-wishers who packed Harvard's ornate Sanders Theater for the award ceremony.
Malala highlighted the fact that very few people spoke out against what was happening in her home region.
"Although few people spoke, but the voice for peace and education was powerful," she said.
Malala also described waking up in a United Kingdom hospital, where she was taken for emergency treatment following the assassination attempt in Pakistan.
"And when I was in Birmingham, I didn't know where I was, I didn't know where my parents are, I didn't know who has shot me and I had no idea what was happening," she said. "But I thank God that I'm alive."
The chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize Committee, Thorbjorn Jagland, paid a special tribute to Malala in a message read publicly during her award ceremony.
"Your courage," Jagland said in the tribute, "is sending a strong message to women to stand up for their rights, which constitutes a precondition for peace."

Why Do Leaves Change Color in the Fall

One of the hallmarks of autumn is the beautiful array of leaves changing color. But why do leaves change from green into reds, oranges, yellows, and browns in the first place? Trace has all the answers.

Meatless in Munich

Oktoberfest Introduces Vegan Food Options

by Friederike Heine
 Meatless in Munich: Oktoberfest Introduces Vegan Food Options
For some 200 years, Oktoberfest has been all about copious amounts of beer and meat. But, this year, organizers are breaking with tradition and reaching out to visitors with dietary restrictions by offering vegan dishes and even vegan wine. More
Say it ain't so!

Did you know ...

About these 4 ways the repugican cabal is attempting to murder democracy

That pretty much nobody wants to defund Obamacare

Damn that online dating, making America politically polarized

Harry Reid Tells Pointless House repugicans, ‘We will not be extorted by tea party anarchists.’

Harry Reid 
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid responded to the news the House repugicans are going to vote against Obamacare for a 43rd time by saying, “The American people will not be extorted by tea party anarchists.”
After House repugicans came out of their brainstorming session with the bright idea to keep trying to get rid of Obamacare, Reid said in a statement:
To be absolutely clear, the Senate will reject both the one-year delay of the Affordable Care Act and the repeal of the medical device tax. After weeks of futile political games from repugicans, we are still at square one: repugicans must decide whether to pass the Senate’s clean CR, or force a Republican government shutdown. Senate Democrats have shown that we are willing to debate and vote on a wide range of issues, including efforts to improve the Affordable Care Act. We continue to be willing to debate these issues in a calm and rational atmosphere. But the American people will not be extorted by tea party anarchists.
Using the exact same language that the president used about being willing to debate anything was a nice touch, but Reid’s message is the same as it was yesterday, last week, last month, and last year. The ACA isn’t going anywhere.
Some Democrats have complained about the lack of leadership at the top of the party, but those complaints never had much merit. If you want to see what a party without leadership really looks like, check out what’s happening over on the repugican side of the street. Democrats aren’t going to give in. The entire House repugican premise is that if they just keep saying no, eventually Democrats will give in and give them what they want.
It seems lost on them that this approach has never worked. What happened each time that House repugicans have done this is that Democrats tell them to grow up, the pressure from the corporate interests and billionaires who fund repugican campaigns gets to be too much, and Boehner manages to cobble together just enough repugican support for Nancy Pelosi to pass a bill in the House that saves us all from disaster.
That’s how it always goes. So far, House repugicans are sticking to the script. They are going to continue to talk tough and pass something that won’t even be considered by the Senate. Democrats are saying no, and now we all will sit around and wait for the House repugicans to cave and pass a clean CR.
Democrats are unified. They have all the leadership, and they hold all of the cards. Once again, the country will be injured because House repugicans want no part of reality. Reid and Obama are leading, and Democrats should be proud to hear their leaders just say no.

The truth be told

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NSA has, as the paranoids warned us, been studying the social ties of Americans through our data

Gen. Keith Alexander, National Security Agency director
James Risen and Laura Poitras, two journalists who have experienced first-hand the consequences of pissing off the federal government in the course of performing uncompromising investigative journalism, have a story in the New York Times revealing a new layer of the NSA's domestic surveillance activities. Edward Snowden's leaked documents are the source of the report, which shows that since November 2010, NSA has been mining its vast data collections to "create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information."
The policy shift was intended to help the agency “discover and track” connections between intelligence targets overseas and people in the United States, according to an N.S.A. memorandum from January 2011. The agency was authorized to conduct “large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness” of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier, the document said. Because of concerns about infringing on the privacy of American citizens, the computer analysis of such data had previously been permitted only for foreigners. The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such “enrichment” data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners.
N.S.A. officials declined to say how many Americans have been caught up in the effort, including people involved in no wrongdoing. The documents do not describe what has resulted from the scrutiny, which links phone numbers and e-mails in a “contact chain” tied directly or indirectly to a person or organization overseas that is of foreign intelligence interest.


DiFi admits that the NSA is wiretapping the Internet's backbone

Ever since whistleblower Mark Klein revealed that he'd build a secret wiretapping room for the NSA at AT&T's San Francisco switching center, we've known that the NSA was illegally wiretapping the Internet's backbone. But the government has steadfastly denied it. However, as Bruce Schneier documents, Senator Diane Feinstein has let slip that the NSA is tapping the backbone on several occasions, though president Obama continues to deny it. 

FBI: We know you're innocent, but you're not getting off the No-Fly list unless you rat out your friends

An ACLU report on the FBI called Unleashed and Unaccountable details how three ACLU clients were added to the no-fly list, and were told by FBI agents that though they were understood to be innocent of any wrongdoing, they would not be taken off the list unless they agreed to inform on their friends. In one case, the FBI waiting until their victim was in Yemen before sticking him on the no-fly list; they told him he would be stranded there until he agreed to act as an informant.
FBI agents put this pressure on ACLU clients Abe Mashal, a Marine veteran; Amir Meshal; and Nagib Ali Ghaleb. Each of these Americans spoke to FBI agents to learn why they were suddenly banned from flying and to clear up the errors that led to that decision. Instead of providing that explanation or opportunity, FBI agents offered to help them get off the No-Fly List—but only in exchange for serving as informants in their communities.Our clients refused.
The ACLU's report,Unleashed and Unaccountable: The FBI's Unchecked Abuse of Authority, explains what happened to Nagib Ali Ghaleb. Nagib was denied boarding when trying to fly home to San Francisco after a trip to visit family in Yemen. Stranded abroad and desperate to return home, Nagib sought help from the U.S. embassy in Yemen and was asked to submit to an FBI interview. FBI agents offered to arrange for Nagib to fly back immediately to the United States if he would agree to tell the agents who the "bad guys" were in Yemen and San Francisco. The agents insisted that Nagib could provide the names of people from his mosque and the San Francisco Yemeni community. The agents said they would have Nagib arrested and jailed in Yemen if he did not cooperate, and that Nagib should "think about it." Nagib, however, did not know any "bad guys" and therefore refused to spy on innocent people in exchange for a flight home.
Nagib's experience is far from unique. After Abe Mashal was denied boarding at Chicago's Midway Airport, FBI agents questioned him about his religious beliefs and practices.The agents told Abe that if he would serve as an informant for the FBI, his name would be removed from the No-Fly List and he would receive compensation. When Abe refused, the FBI promptly ended the meeting.
Neither Nagib nor Abe present a threat to aviation security. But FBI agents sought to exploit their fear, desperation, and confusion when they were most vulnerable, and to coerce them into working as informants. Moreover, the very fact that FBI agents asked Nagib and Abe to spy on people for the government is yet another indication that the FBI doesn't actually think either man is a suspected terrorist. This abusive use of a government watch list underscores the serious need for regulation, oversight, and public accountability of an FBI that has become unleashed and unaccountable.

The Teflon Man

Teflon man three times charged with murder, three times freed

Three times since 2004, Jackson County prosecutors have charged Marlyn Standifer with murder.
 
Marlyn Standifer 
And three times he has gone free.
In the one murder case in which a jury found him guilty, the 25-year-old Kansas City man won a new trial after accomplice Marlawn Chaney, who had testified against Standifer, recanted. Chaney said he was the one who shot James Atkinson Sr. to death in January 2007.
In a letter to Standifer’s attorney, Chaney wrote that he needed to “get myself right with God.”
It turned out to be a timely move.
Before Standifer’s second trial in Atkinson’s killing, Chaney was found shot to death on the front porch of a Kansas City house. Without his testimony, a jury acquitted Standifer.
Now Standifer is back in custody, charged in a southeast Kansas City home invasion and attempted robbery that left a victim with multiple gunshot wounds.
That crime earlier this month occurred 15 days after Standifer was released after serving eight months of what was supposed to be a 24-month sentence for probation violations in a federal gun case.
“I wanted to throw up,” Atkinson’s sister Tonia Reid said of hearing that Standifer had been arrested once again.
In two of Standifer’s murder cases, and a handful of others involving nonfatal shootings, court records are no longer available. Records of criminal court cases that end with a dismissal or acquittal are closed to the public.
But attorneys who handled those cases say they were dismissed because witnesses and victims either did not cooperate or could not be found to testify.
Standifer’s first murder charge was filed when he was 16. In January 2005, he was certified to stand trial as an adult in the June 21, 2004, killing of Ronald Taylor and assault of two other people.
Taylor was shot to death during an apparent attempted robbery near 29th Street and Flora Avenue, and Standifer was charged with second-degree murder along with another man, Gemayel Martin.
Martin, whose fingerprint was recovered from the car Taylor was in when he was killed, later entered a plea to a lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter.
But the case against Standifer was dismissed because the only witness disappeared, according to Dan Miller, an attorney in private practice who handled the case while he was an assistant Jackson County prosecutor.
“When it was all said and done there were no witnesses,” Miller said.
In January 2007, Atkinson, the father of three young sons, was found shot to death at 30th Street and Lister Avenue.
Standifer, Chaney and another man were implicated as suspects. The night before Atkinson was found dead, surveillance video showed him and Standifer entering a hospital together. According to court documents, Standifer was wearing a sweatshirt with the words: “Felons with guns. One will get you five. None will get you killed.”
He was wearing the same shirt when detectives questioned him a few days later.
Standifer remained free while detectives built their case. Within months, he was charged in federal court with being an illegal drug user in possession of a firearm during a March 2007 shooting and with participating in an April 2007 kidnapping scheme that ended with one of his accomplices shot dead by the would-be victim.
Standifer and three others were charged with murder for the death of their companion, Keith Wooden, because it occurred during the commission of a dangerous crime.
By then, prosecutors also had charged him with first-degree murder in the death of Atkinson after Chaney gave a statement to police. Chaney said Standifer shot Atkinson because he didn’t pay for drugs.
In June 2007, Standifer pleaded guilty to the federal gun charge, and in March 2008, he was sentenced to the five years in prison presaged by his “felons with guns” sweatshirt.
For the two murder cases pending in Jackson County, Chase Higinbotham, an attorney in private practice, was appointed as a special prosecutor. Higinbotham also was assigned to handle two assault-robbery cases involving Chaney.
In October 2009, a jury found Standifer guilty of first-degree murder in Atkinson’s death. In December of that year, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Efforts to prosecute Standifer for the assault-robbery cases and the kidnapping-murder case, however, were thwarted by witness and victim noncooperation, Higinbotham said.
“Not one person came forward to testify,” he said, so those cases had to be dismissed.
Standifer remained in custody for the Atkinson murder conviction, which he appealed to the Missouri Court of Appeals. The appeal was pending when Chaney sent his confession letter to Standifer’s attorney in July 2010.
“I was high that night, but I can’t let my friend go down for something I did,” Chaney wrote.
Based on that letter, the appeals court sent Standifer’s case back to Jackson County for a hearing to determine whether he should get a new trial. Chaney, who was in custody on an unrelated robbery, testified at that hearing and a judge granted Standifer’s request for a new trial.
Shortly after that, Chaney was released from custody. In September 2011, he was found shot to death on the front porch of a vacant house in the 1800 block of Newton Avenue.
“He was shot execution-style,” Higinbotham recalled.
That killing remains unsolved.
Because Chaney was no longer available to testify, the judge ruled that none of his statements could be used at the second trial. Without that testimony, Higinbotham said, no evidence supported the premeditated murder charge.
Higinbotham amended the charge to second-degree murder, but in August 2012, jurors found Standifer not guilty.
He was released from state custody and taken into federal custody to serve the sentence in the gun case. However, Higinbotham said, federal prison authorities gave Standifer credit for some of the time he had already served and he was almost immediately released.
In November 2012, he was cited for violating conditions of his release, and in January a federal judge sentenced him to an additional 24 months.
But once again, federal prison officials calculated that he should receive credit for some of the time he had previously served, and Standifer was released on Sept. 5.
On the morning of Sept. 20, Standifer allegedly accosted a man taking out trash in the 7100 block of East 111th Terrace and ordered him at gunpoint to knock on the door of a neighbor’s house, according to court documents.
He knocked, and when the neighbor looked out and saw what was going on, he ran to a bedroom and grabbed a gun of his own. According to court documents, Standifer allegedly forced the man he had originally accosted inside, and yelled at the homeowner, “You got 10 seconds before this turns into a murder scene.”
The homeowner said that when he came out of the bedroom, Standifer fired at him and the homeowner fired back, according to court documents. The man who had been accosted outside was struck by several shots but survived.
Standifer and several co-defendants fled in a vehicle but were arrested after a chase, according to court documents. He is charged with attempted robbery, kidnapping, burglary and armed criminal action and is being held on a $250,000 cash bond.
Court records do not list a current attorney for Standifer, and police and prosecutors declined to discuss his criminal history because of the pending case.
But members of Atkinson’s family said they are still angry about what happened in their case, and hope Standifer will be convicted of the charges he faces.
“He needs to be off the streets and off the streets for a long time,” said Atkinson’s father, Harold Atkinson

Setting blurred images in motion improves perception


Blurred images that are unidentifiable as still pictures become understandable once the images are set in motion. That’s because of a phenomenon called “optic flow”—which may be especially relevant as a source of visual information […]

Oxytocin could make us more accepting of others



Oxytocin – often referred to as the ‘love hormone’ because of its ability to promote mother-infant attachment and romantic bonding in adults – could also make us more accepting of other people, as found in […]

New intravaginal ring guards against HIV infection


It’s often said that the HIV/AIDS epidemic has a woman’s face. The proportion of women infected with HIV has been on the rise for a decade; in sub-Saharan Africa, women constitute 60 percent of people […]

Believe it or not

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Polanski Rape Case 'I Don't Feel I Was a Victim'

Polanski Rape Case: 'I Don't Feel I Was a Victim'
When she was 13, Samantha Geimer was raped by Roman Polanski at Jack Nicholson's home in Los Angeles. She has written a new book about that night in 1977 and its aftermath. In an interview she tells why she still doesn't hate the director. More

A bleak future for the wife of a rapist


Excerpts from a grim story in the Wall Street Journal:
Akshay Kumar Singh and three other men were convicted this month of a crime that focused the world's attention on violence against women in India: the gang rape and killing of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student on a bus in December.

For the parents of the woman who died, the sentencing brought a measure of closure. For Ms. Devi, who is in her 20s, and her 2-year-old son, her husband's crime and punishment have opened up a chapter of profound uncertainty.

Ms. Devi expects to be cast out by her in-laws and face ostracism and destitution here in India's conservative hinterland—not because she is married to a convicted murderer, but because she is a woman without a husband. "As a widow, my honor will be lost forever," she says.

Her husband's relatives say they can't afford to feed her. Her parents say they are too poor to take her back. The customs of purdah practiced in the region make it almost impossible for her to work outside the home.

"I am not educated. Our traditions are such that I cannot even step out of the house," Ms. Devi said. "Who will earn money to feed me and my son?"...

Ms. Devi says she can write her name and a few Hindi words, and read a bit. She knew from an early age, she says, what was expected of a woman: to raise children and take care of household tasks...

Since Mr. Singh's December arrest, his family has been thrown into upheaval. His brothers, Vinay and Abhay, who had also been working around Delhi, left their jobs for three months to help out at home, straining household finances. The family's reputation has been damaged.

"They treat us as untouchables," says Abhay Singh, who works in a paint factory in a Delhi suburb...

Ms. Devi doesn't know where to turn. "Is there anyone who is thinking of me?" she asked, crying after learning of the death sentence. "I am alive and I have a small child who is still breathing."

The States Where Women Make the Most (and Least) Compared to Men

The wage gap is a complicated issue, but here's a simple chart showing where it's most severe. 


At some point or another, you've heard the stat that American women earn just 77 cents for every dollar that men make. But what about state to state? Is it as bad in New York as, say, Ohio or Wyoming? In a new report, the Center for American Progress offers up this coast-to-coast breakdown. The pay gap ranges all the way from a low of 15 cents in places like Vermont and Nevada up to 36 cents in Wyoming. (More story after the chart. Also note: CAP tracks what women earn compared to white men specifically, though that doesn't seem to have changed the average disparity).  
So what does this tell us? Before getting to that, we need to talk a little bit about the raw wage gap as a statistic. Because it has problems. Enough problems that my editor Derek Thompson and I strongly diverge on whether it's even a useful measure. (I think it is, he thinks it isn't.) When someone says women earn 84 cents on the dollar compared to men in New York or 70 cents on the dollar compared to men in Utah, they're comparing all female workers and all male workers at once. As a result, you sort of end up comparing apples and oranges, or in this case, software engineers and elementary school teachers. As a rule, women tend to work in lower-paying careers. They also tend to work fewer hours, thanks largely to family obligations, and often take breaks in their career to take care of children, both of which bring down their pay. When you compare women and men who work in the same kinds of jobs for similar hours and similar years, most (though not all) of the gap disappears. So the graph up above isn't really showing us the states where women face the most discrimination, in the sense of not being paid equally for equal work.*

All of that said, I do think that on a very basic level, it shows us the states where women are having the most luck matching up financially with men, whether it's because public policy gives them a leg up in the labor force, or because the local mix of industries happens to favor women (I don't think it's an accident that hospitality-heavy Florida has a relatively small gap). Though it's not an airtight relationship, for instance, states where women hold a greater percentage of management jobs seem to have a smaller pay gap.
Now, back to that first chart. I think there are two particularly interesting things about it. First, in almost half of all states, the pay gap is within 2 cents of the national average. It's within 4 cents in all but 16. The problem really is similarly severe in most corners of the country, regardless of how the state is governed, or what industries dominate.
And what about the exceptions? Well, it's hard to tell what links them together. I don't know exactly what Alabama, Utah, Louisiana, West Virginia, and have in common that they'd all end up together on the low end of the graph, except maybe religious and cultural conservatism (but then, how do you explain Texas having a smaller than average pay gap?). I'm even less clear what threads together the ten states where women make at least 82 cents for every dollar men earn. It's hard to think of two economies that have less in common than New York and Nevada, yet they're ranked beside one another. All of which I think just goes to reinforce what a tricky issue the wage gap really is.

*Now, I would argue that the way young women are steered away from certain subjects in school, the way they're nudged out and passed over in alpha-male centric industries like finance and tech, and the entrenched social expectation that they handle the bulk child care all impact things like career choice and work hours and could be grouped under the headline of systemic discrimination. And those factors might well vary state to state. But let's not digress too far.

Random Celebrity Photos


Marilyn photographed by Andre De Dienes, 1949
Marilyn photographed by Andre De Dienes, 1949

UN '95% sure' humans cause warming

UN '95% sure' humans cause warmingArctic ice

Scientists are 95% certain that humans are the "dominant cause" of global warming since the 1950s, a landmark report says. 2158
Even though cartographers have a shorter height evaluation for Mount McKinley, the mountain is still growing.

Measuring 'Quake Island'

Quake islandSatellite measures 'quake island'

The "quake island" that rose from the sea off Pakistan this week is pictured clearly in a new satellite image.

Awesome Pictures

blue-spruce:

Really want to visit here

Water on Mars

Mars RoverWater surprise in Curiosity samples

The Curiosity rover finds a surprising amount of water bound up in Martian soil - a potential resource for future astronaut explorers.

Diet of Easter Islanders Revealed

A surprising lack of seafood found in the peoples' diet.

Mammals threatened by fragmentation

Mammals threatened by fragmentation

Small mammals affected by rainforest fragmentation are likely to be wiped out more quickly than previously thought, scientists warn.

Colonizing Songbirds Lost Sense of Syntax


As one species of European songbird island-hopped to colonize mid-Atlantic archipelagoes over the course of a half million years, their songs lost their sense of syntax. Chaffinches (Fringilla coelebs) on the furthest island of their […]

Animal Pictures

magicalnaturetour:

Paul Hancock Photographer