Sunday! Night! Links!

* …these acts of apparent choice have had their meaning hollowed out. The real decisions are taken elsewhere. We have become squatters in the ruins of the great democratic societies of the past.

* Ask yourself this: Do you know the name of any one of the victims killed in the West Chemical and Fertilizer Company disaster? Do you know how many of them there were? Their ages, aspirations, what they looked like, whether they left behind children or what messages they last posted on Facebook? Do you know if there is an explanation yet for what caused the explosion? Or if investigators are still searching for one?

* Inside a mile-deep open-pit copper mine after a catastrophic landslide.

* How the hyperkinetic media is breeding a new generation of terrorists.

* You’re Eight Times More Likely to be Killed by a Police Officer than a Terrorist, and other facts.

* Sympathy as social performance.

* Privacy is ‘off the table’ in a ‘post-9/11 world,’ says New York City police chief.

“You’re never going to know where all of our cameras are,” Bloomberg said. “And that’s one of the ways you deter people; they just don’t know whether the person sitting next to you is just somebody sitting there or a detective watching.”

* From a broader series begun in 1997, the photographs in this suite are the result of mean averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the four decades beginning Jan. 1960 through Dec. 1999. This tracks, en masse, the evolution of this form of portraiture.

* Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst Selects Author of Tennessee’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Bill as ‘Reformer of the Year.’

* Parents are confining sons and daughters to their homes, even if it means keeping them away from friends. Schools are canceling outdoor activities and field trips. Parents with means are choosing schools based on air-filtration systems, and some international schools have built gigantic, futuristic-looking domes over sports fields to ensure healthy breathing. In China, Breathing Becomes a Childhood Risk.

* EPA: More than half of U.S. rivers unsuitable for aquatic life.

* What is Causing Iran’s Spike in MS Cases?
 Vitamin D deficiency from lack of sunlight could be an unexpected long-term consequence of the Iranian revolution
.

* Alyson Provax’s Time-Wasting Experiment.

* When the US tried to weaponize the weather.

* The “electrosensitive” are moving to a cellphone-free town. But is their disease real?

Weekend Links – 2

* Against Jared Diamond.

* Stories from Newtown: Victoria Soto. Dawn Hochsprung.

* Tactical Reality: the new gun culture.

* From the reclaimuc archives: The police state in Europe vs. the police state in the US.

* The argument makes no sense at all, but people who use those lines aren’t making arguments. They are invoking the magic spell that licenses them to be able to kill.

* A Modest Proposal for the Reform of Academe.

* Democratic Senator Compares Private Student Loans To Dickens-Era Of Debt Prisons.

* Report: Humanity Has Overshot The Earth’s Biocapacity.

* And the average age at which people reach the lowest point of happiness in their lives in various countries. I feel pretty certain mine is and will always be 31, but then I’ve always been an outlier.

A Tax on the Innumerate

Powerball simulator. Mine’s been playing for 25 years and I’ve won $312, bringing my net loss to a clean $-4200. Via MeFi.

Links from the Weekend!

* Wes Anderson bingo. Meanwhile, Moonrise Kingdom is setting records.

* Great television contrarianism watch: Neoliberal Holmes, or, Everything I Know About Modern Life I Learned from Sherlock. In which I analyze my allergy to Sherlock.

* David Harvey: The financial crisis is an urban crisis.

* Utopia and dystopia in quantum superposition: New parking meters text you when time’s running out.

* Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it.

* Shaviro reviews Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. LRB reviews Embassytown. LARoB reviews Railsea. The New Yorker reviews Game of Thrones.

But there is something troubling about this sea of C.G.I.-perfect flesh, shaved and scentless and not especially medieval. It’s unsettling to recall that these are not merely pretty women; they are unknown actresses who must strip, front and back, then mimic graphic sex and sexual torture, a skill increasingly key to attaining employment on cable dramas. During the filming of the second season, an Irish actress walked off the set when her scene shifted to what she termed “soft porn.” Of course, not everyone strips: there are no truly explicit scenes of gay male sex, fewer lingering shots of male bodies, and the leading actresses stay mostly buttoned up. Artistically, “Game of Thrones” is in a different class from “House of Lies,” “Californication,” and “Entourage.” But it’s still part of another colorful patriarchal subculture, the one called Los Angeles.

* Terrible news, state by state:

* Louisiana Incarcerated: How We Built the World’s Prison Capital. Via MeFi.

* The Institute for Southern Studies covers North Carolina’s answer to the Koch brothers, Art Pope.

* Detroit shuts off the lights.

* Kansas Republicans reinstitute feudalism, deliberately bankrupting the state.

* Voter purges in Florida, again.

* Contemplating these dreary statistics, one might well conclude that the United States is — to a distressing extent — a nation of violent, intolerant, ignorant, superstitious, passive, shallow, boorish, selfish, unhealthy, unhappy people, addicted to flickering screens, incurious about other societies and cultures, unwilling or unable to assert or even comprehend their nominal political sovereignty. Or, more simply, that America is a failure.

* The New Yorker‘s science fiction issue is live. If you wanted to get me to read New Yorker fiction for the first time in years, well, mission accomplished…

* And we’re still pouring college money down the for-profit drain. Because never learning from your mistakes is the most important thing we have to teach.

The 1 and the 99

87: Percentage of women who possess at least four years of high school or more education, as compared to 86 percent of men.

58: The percentage of all undergraduate degrees in the U.S. that were awarded to women in 2010.

50: The percentage of the total college educated population women accounted for in the U.S.

12: Number of Fortune 500 companies that have female CEOs.

1.9 million: Number of firms that are majority-owned (51% or more) by women of color in the U.S.

26: The percentage of vice presidents and senior executives that are female.

7: The percentage of directors on the world’s coporate boards who are female.

15.6: Percentage of elected parliamentary seats globally that are held by women.

18: Average percentage by which women worldwide are paid less than their male counterparts at work.

0.77: The female-to-male earnings ratio in the U.S., meaning female workers earned 77 cents on every dollar earned by a male worker. Progress on the pay gap in the last 10 years remains statiscally unchanged.

Women and the economy, by the numbers. Here’s one more: Globally, Women Own 1% of the World’s Property.

We’ve really got to get this whole mess straightened out before Zoey is born. At this point we only have a couple weeks.

Stat of the Day, Insane Wyoming Legislative Survivalists Edition

…via MetaFilter.

Population of Wyoming: 568,158.

Crew of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier:
Ship’s company: 3,200
Air wing: 2,480

568,158 / 5,680 = one out of every 100 Wyoming citizens will serve aboard its aircraft carrier.

Wednesday Links

* Tomorrow’s crimes today: man arrested for attempting to steal five tons of glacial ice in Chile.

* Parlor game of the day: French Toast. Via Alex, via MetaFilter.

* Major birth control pill recall. Bring on the lawsuits! Wow.

* Worst idea in comics history confirmed.

* Cary Nelson on fighting for the humanities.

We take it for granted that scientific knowledge must advance, that there is much we do not know and much that we will live out our lives without knowing. Knowledge of the physical universe beyond the solar system and the galaxy remains so limited that it is hard even to calculate its partiality. The nature of life elsewhere in the universe remains beyond our grasp, as does knowledge of the human body that would enable us to control diseases like cancer.

And yet we often—unreflectively, uncritically, and in a learned form of self-deception—assume that we largely know ourselves and our history. Through its institutions and the norms of social life, human culture immerses us in collective understanding that is often deceptive or false.

The task of the humanities is not only to show us the ways that artists and others have penetrated our illusions by creative acts both modest and grand but also to try to discover when human cultures as a whole have seen through a glass darkly.

* Somebody in Stockholm finally noticed that the commander-in-chief of the biggest military on the planet is an odd choice for a peace prize.

* A Kinseyan gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

* Abolish the dollar bill! For freedom!

* The headline reads, “India Factory Workers Revolt, Kill Company President.”

* Science uncovers the high cost of bad handwriting.

* Freddie deBoer on divorce rate hokum.

* And why do you have two nostrils instead of one giant hole in the middle of your face? io9 reports.

Friday Night

* ‘Technically, we’re in the United States’: life for the U.S. citizens who live on the other side of the border fence.

* I saw this movie: Orangutans to Skype Between Zoos with iPads.

* Iowa Lottery officials had more questions than answers Friday as they tried to unravel the stunning mystery behind a year-old winning ticket turned in less than two hours before Thursday’s deadline for a jackpot worth up to $14.3 million.

* Elizabeth Kolbert on Obama’s (latest) climate betrayal.

* This Year Was A Statistically Fantastic One In Terms Of Staying Alive On Airplanes.

* And Slate has the 12 kinds of undecided voters
. Just a few days of this interminable primary left. Just a few days left.

* In 2008, the Iowa Republican Caucus got record turnout: 120,000 people. That is to say, four percent of all the residents of Iowa. And those 120,000 people represent four hundredths of one percent of the total population of America.

Better Fraud Please

According to a Benford’s Law analysis, corporate fraud has been trending steadily upwards for the last 50 years. Via MeFi.

Quick Wednesday Links

* xkcd has a funny observation about password strength, then gets into the weeds at AskMetaFilter to explain/defend the joke.

* If Male Superheroes Posed Like Wonder Woman. The Gender Bent Justice League.

* So that’s what graduate school is for: “‘Lucky’ woman who won lottery four times outed as Stanford University statistics PhD.”

* Moore’s Law may soon be broken.

* “The Avengers heads to Cleveland.”

What Day Is It? Tuesday?

* 10,000 protestors gather in Madison to protest Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s anti-union vendetta.

* Update: Computers really stink at Jeopardy. Or so I keep telling myself.

* In Yeskov’s retelling, the wizard Gandalf is a war-monger intent on crushing the scientific and technological initiative of Mordor and its southern allies because science “destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men!” He’s in cahoots with the elves, who aim to become “masters of the world,” and turn Middle-earth into a “bad copy” of their magical homeland across the sea. Barad-dur, also known as the Dark Tower and Sauron’s citadel, is, by contrast, described as “that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic.”

* Matt Yglesias is making sense:

Right now we have conservatives simultaneously calling for huge spending cuts and also getting the line’s share of old people’s votes even while the vast majority of non-security spending is on old people. In essence, by first separating the domestic budget into “discretionary” and “entitlement” portions and then dividing the entitlement programs up into “what today’s old people get” versus “what tomorrow’s old people will get” the political class has created a large and vociferously right-wing class of people who are completely immune from the impact of their own calls for fiscal austerity.

* Statistic of the day: 51% of Republicans claim they don’t believe Obama was born in the U.S.

* Curveball: How US was duped by Iraqi fantasist looking to topple Saddam.

* But the only story anyone seems to care about is whether This American Life really has Coca-Cola’s secret formula.

Cracking the Lottery

Here’s an awesome article at Wired explaining how a Toronto statistician cracked the local scratch-off lottery. There’s some great stuff about organized crime and money laundering too as the piece goes on.

Stat of the Day

The world’s four richest men control more wealth than its 57 poorest countries. Via MeFi.

Studying Maths

In a country in which people only want boys every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?

I more or less spent my day taking every possible position on every possible variation on this question. Is there any way I can get my Sunday back?

Two Days Left Links

* What in life did it take you a surprisingly long time to realize you’ve been doing wrong all along? It’s not the first time I’m finding out about this, but I should say I don’t think I’ve ever written “discreet” correctly.

* What drowning is like.

* Why you’re getting divorced.

* Climategate: absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever.

* What to do about the suburbs?

* Climate legislation vs. the filibuster.

* And Salon has the latest on the Daily Show-Jezebel flare-up.