firehose

Buried in Apple's two-hour keynote today was the exciting fact that iOS 8 will save you cell plan minutes with Wi-Fi calling — but that feature will likely depend on carriers to allow it. T-Mobile was quick to announce it will be the first US provider to support Wi-Fi calling, saying in a blog post that iPhone users would soon join the 5 million T-Mobile customers who already use Wi-Fi calling on their devices. It's not a particularly surprising move for T-Mobile, given its "uncarrier" campaign of customer-friendly moves and the fact that the company has enabled Wi-Fi calling for seven years. What would really be news is if giants Verizon and AT&T announced support for Wi-Fi calling — but given how long it took them to support FaceTime over cellular connections, you probably shouldn't hold your breath.

Google has just released a new version of Android: 4.4.3. After Sprint totally jumped the gun by announcing the update in April, Google has finally pushed 4.4.3 to the Nexus Factory Image page. T-Mobile has a changelog for the update, which is wildly descriptive:

Improvements

• Security enhancements
• Various bug fixes

Google is hosting 4.4.3 images for the Nexus 5, both Nexus 7s, Nexus 10, and Nexus 4. These are full images that must be manually applied and will erase everything on your device. Users interested in not losing their data should wait for the OTA update, which is slowly rolling out to devices now. And if you're the type of person interested in seeing the code, the AOSP code drop is going on right now, too.

“Playing House” is a new show on the USA network. USA as in, these colors don’t run/never forget/”Monk.” I was late to this show because I literally thought the only person that watched USA was my mom. When I saw the commercial for “Playing House,” starring amazing comics like Lennon Parham, Jessica St. Clair, Zach Woods and Keegan-Michael Key, and killer guest stars like Andy Daly, Neil Casey and Jane Kaczmarek, I thought, “Well that’s a shame. Hope they all get back on their feet.”

Turns out, USA has some of the longest-running shows out there! It’s a station that people love! Sure, it has some crappy shows, but as the USA motto goes, “Freedom ain’t free.”

Most important, USA is one of the few networks that has taken a chance on a comedy with two female leads — and made something totally unique. Two female leads who aren’t looking for men to define them, or who have found men who define them and are holding said men accountable for their “hilarious” man shenanigans.

In America, we love our white-guy leads with their white-guy stubble, and their white guy “get laid or die trying” mentality. These adorable screw-ups are looking for love in all the wrong places and sleeping with hundreds of women who are out of their league along the way. Have a crush on your neighbor? Well, just bother her for enough seasons and eventually she will have to sleep with you. Hell, according to ’80s movies, even mannequins will have sex with you.

“Playing House” focuses on the relationship between two best friends united by two things: a baby and German porn. Maggie (played by Parham) discovers during her baby shower that her husband has been having a long-distance affair with a German cam girl. Emma (St. Clair), who almost lost her fancy job in China just to travel back to her hometown for the baby shower, decides to quit, move back home and help her old bestie raise the baby. Adorable!

The supporting cast has Keegan-Michael Key (of Comedy Central’s “Key and Peele”) as the local cop and ex-high school sweetheart of St. Clair. He is charming, hilarious and a pro at playing “chronically annoyed.” Finally, Zach Woods plays Parham’s brother, who is super-weird and also runs the local poetry club. Anyone who has seen Woods improvise live knows he’s one of the best out there.

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You know, I’m sure there are people reading this and saying to themselves, “What do you mean, ban on funding trans healthcare? There was a ban?”

Yes, there was a ban. In 1980, based upon the information presented by one woman, Janice Raymond, author of the recently published at that time anti-trans screed, “The Transsexual Empire”, the National Center for Healthcare Technology blocked all funding for transition-related surgeries, which caused a cascading effect throughout the healthcare and health insurance industries, until no transition-related care whatsoever would be covered.

Think about that. Based on the known-biased opinion of one person, the federal government changed course, cutting off millions of trans people for accessing life-saving healthcare for the next 34 years. And you probably didn’t even know about it.

Where would the acceptance of trans women be today in 2014, if for the past 34 years, we had been able to access the the care we needed? Where would medical technology have progressed? How many trans people would not have committed suicide? We know that trans people attempt suicide at a rate over 25 times that of the general population. And those are only the ones we can count because they didn’t succeed. How many trans women would not have been murdered?

Today, we finally saw that ban rescinded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, the descendent of the NCHCT, at least in part, but it is the removal of that blanket ban which is the crack which will ultimately cause the dykes to burst under the pressure of the tide of conscience.

Today, the arc of history at long last bent toward justice for all women, not just some. Beginning today, we will speak not of justice delayed, not of justice denied, but of justice fulfilled, of justice upheld.

I can not even begin to express my thanks that Janice Raymond lived to see this day, so that one day, she will go to her grave knowing that despite her best efforts to destroy us, in the end she lost. Upon her soul lie the countless numbers of women whose lives she could have saved, but instead extinguished, in the name of feminism.

A new day has dawned in America. We have moved that much closer to the promise of freedom for all that was made to us 238 years ago, and again 149 years ago, and again 50 years ago. The tide has turned, and now we can truly say that the day will soon come when all trans women, all trans people, will receive the care they need in the moment when the need is discovered, to the best of our abilities.

"I can not even begin to express my thanks that Janice Raymond lived to see this day, so that one day, she will go to her grave knowing that despite her best efforts to destroy us, in the end she lost."

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Yesterday marked the beginning of hurricane season, but the first big piece of hurricane news isn't about a looming storm. Instead, it's about how severe hurricanes with female names kill more people, on average, than hurricanes with males names. And the reason they're so deadly has more to do with the way society perceives women than the strength of the storms themselves.

Less motivation to evacuate for "Hurricane Victoria"

"Our experiments suggest that a storm with a feminine name is seen as less threatening and risky than one with a more masculine name," said Sharon Shavitt, a marketing researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in an email to The Verge. Her study, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that people are less motivated to evacuate when a serious storm is named "Victoria"  than when the same storm is named "Victor."

To assess the effect of a storm's "gender" on its death toll, Shavitt and her team used data from the past six decades. Because the World Meteorological Society selects hurricane appellations from six pre-established lists of alphabetically sorted names with alternating genders, the naming system is free of gender bias. But to make sure the analysis wouldn't be tainted by outliers, the researchers excluded two particularly lethal hurricanes from the analysis: 2005's Hurricane Katrina and 1957's Hurricane Audrey.

The researchers found that although there was no difference between fatalities caused by small hurricanes with male names compared to those with female names, there was a substantial difference when the storms grew in intensity. On average, the researchers write in the study, a severe hurricane with a masculine name causes 15 deaths, whereas a strong hurricane with a feminine name causes 42 deaths.

deadly gender stereotypes

But the researchers also needed to verify people's threat perception, so they asked a group of 346 participants to imagine being in a certain hurricane's path. As expected, participants thought that hurricanes with names like Arthur would be more intense than those named Bertha or Dolly — all names from the official 2014 Atlantic Hurricane list. And a second experiment, in which the researchers compared participants' perception of Hurricane Alexander with their perception of Hurricane Alexandra, confirmed that participants think storms with male names are more dangerous. "These kinds of implicit biases routinely affect the way actual men and women are judged in society," Shavitt said, "but now it appears that these gender stereotypes can have deadly consequences."

Hurricanes kill more than 200 people in the US each year, so Shavitt hopes this study will make people less likely to judge the riskiness of future storms based on the gendered meanings of their names. But regardless of the study's impact, it might still make sense to "move away from human names," she said. The problem with that idea, however, is that any naming system can be tainted by cultural or gender biases. If you decide to name three storms "delta," "lion," and "begonia," Hurricane Lion is probably going to get more people to move out of its way. That's why labels should be pre-tested beforehand, Shavitt said, if only "to make sure the meanings associated with them are appropriate."

Most people aren't going to change their default iOS search provider away from Google anytime soon, but that's not stopping Apple from giving them new choices. Mixed into a slide containing dozens of new features in iOS 8 that went unmentioned on stage was something interesting: "DuckDuckGo support in Safari." With its latest mobile operating system, Apple will easily let users switch over to the privacy-minded search engine and set it as the default for all queries within Safari. DuckDuckGo was designed to be a less creepy and less invasive alternative to Google. It ditches the tracking habits of Mountain View, much to the relief of internet users who've grown wary of overzealous surveillance from tech companies and the government alike.

Apple gives the 'anti-Google' a major boost

Apple throwing its weight — or at least some of it — behind a startup search offering like DuckDuckGo is an interesting move. DuckDuckGo's inclusion in Safari's list of search providers should provide a decent boost to the company, letting curious users give it a quick try with just a tap. The addition can also be interpreted as yet another development in the uneasy, tense relationship between Apple and Google.

Last year, Apple did Microsoft's Bing an even larger favor by choosing it to replace Google for all Siri-related search activity in iOS 7. It's still possible to conduct voice searches by saying "Google" before whatever you're looking for, but it's an extra step that many users likely don't bother with. Google still remains the default search engine for web searches, however. Changing that would (understandably) be seen as an anti-consumer move. But iOS users can switch to Bing, Yahoo by visiting the settings menu, and starting in the fall, DuckDuckGo will be a third alternative.

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Despite the existence of a (faux-) Muzzy program for the language, it’s never been that easy to learn Dothraki. Fortunately, Game Of Thrones fans will now have the chance to learn from the guy who invented it with David J. Peterson’s Living Language Dothraki: A Conversational Language Course.

Out Oct. 7, the official guide to Dothraki will contain “more than 500 words and phrases,” as well as “never-before-heard material and words coined exclusively” for the course. According to Peterson,  readers will soon be able to tell their arakhs from their zhavvorsas, as well as learn common grammar, pronunciation, and cultural do’s and don’ts related to the Dothraki culture.

Living Language Dothraki will be available as both a standard book with accompanying audio CD, as well as in an expanded online version with additional grammar and games. It will also have a companion mobile app, allowing users ...

The Salt Lake Temple in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Kisdobos/Flickr

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is coming to the rescue of an online dating site for Mormons in a case involving the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The church is trying to block the site from being named Mormon Match amid accusations that the term "Mormon" breaches the church's intellectual property rights.

The legal flap concerns Jonathan Eller, the man behind the startup website, and Intellectual Reserve Inc., (IRI), which is the holding company for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Eller has filed to trademark his site's name, while the holding company has moved to block it before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board.

"IRI cannot restrict Eller from using the word “Mormon” to describe his Mormon matching service as 'Mormon Match,' any more than Burger King® could prevent In-n-Out Burger® from including the term 'burger' in its name," the EFF wrote in a Texas federal court amicus brief.