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A metabolic analysis suggests that dinosaurs could regulate their body temperatures, but only to a point

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Emerald green, fainter than the zodiacal light and visible on dark nights everywhere on Earth, airglow pervades the night sky from equator to pole. Airglow turns up in our time exposure photographs of the night sky as ghostly ripples of aurora-like light about 10-15 degrees above the horizon. Its similarity to the aurora is no coincidence. Both form at around the same altitude of  60-65 miles (100 km) and involve excitation of atoms and molecules, in particular oxygen. But different mechanisms tease them to glow. (...)
Read the rest of How to See Airglow, the Green Sheen of Night (1,036 words)

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Post tags: airglow, aurora, emission, oxygen, spectrum

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The EEOC announced yesterday that it has filed suit yesterday in a New York federal district court against Syosset, N.Y.-based United Health Programs of America and its parent corporation for forcing employees to take part in religious activities in the workplace.  According to the EEOC, since 2007 employees have been required to participate in:

group prayers, candle burning, and discussions of spiritual texts. The religious practices are part of a belief system that the defendants' family member created, called "Onionhead." Employees were told wear Onionhead buttons, pull Onionhead cards to place near their work stations and keep only dim lighting in the workplace. None of these practices was work-related. When employees opposed taking part in these religious activities or did not participate fully, they were terminated.

New York Daily News has more on the lawsuit.

So that’s the beginning to what has to be my favorite creepy convo I’ve seen posted to the Reddit CreepyPMs subreddit yet. I don’t want to SPOIL anything, but let’s just say that the pink lady in this conversation comes up with a rather unique way to send this dick-pic-posting male correspondent packing.

See here for the rest, and here for the Reddit thread. Oh, and don’t worry, you won’t have to look at his c*ck, or any other horrifying thing, and nothing else will be spoiled if you scroll down through all the pics. (You’ll get what I’m talking about in a second.)

On Wednesday, the United Nations issued a damning report — “unprecedented,” CNN termed it – that detailed the Vatican’s historical and continued opposition to assessing and addressing decades of sex abuse against minors by members of the Roman Catholic Church. While the sex abuse scandal first broke over a decade ago, and avalanches still, the report presented the most pointed criticisms against the network of cover-ups and obfuscation the Vatican has continued to purvey. The report also called for the Vatican to turn over known and suspected abusers who have remained within the church.

“The main finding of the committee was that the Holy See has adopted policies and practices which have led to the continuation of the abuse by and the impunity of the perpetrators,” Kirsten Sandberg, of the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, said in a statement.

As Reuters reports:

In a scathingly blunt report, the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child said Church officials had imposed a “code of silence” on clerics and moved abusers from parish to parish “in an attempt to cover up such crimes”. …

The combative exchange sets the scene for the Vatican’s biggest clash with the United Nations since 1994. Then, at a U.N. population conference in Cairo, the Vatican forced the international organization to back down on a proposal to approve abortion as a means of birth control.

One of the most important facets of the report, which notes that the Vatican’s employees have been responsible for the abuse of “tens of thousands” of children, denies that Vatican leaders are responsible for the goings-on solely of the denizens of the city-state in Rome. As it is, as the Pope can stake occasional infallibility, the claim that the Vatican bears no responsibility for the actions of far-flung clergy stands somewhere between self-deception and outright fabrication.

Calling the report “distorted,” “unfair,” and claiming it “interfere[d]” with the Catholic Church’s proceedings, the Vatican offered a concerted pushback against the report. Noting that the U.N. also cited the Church’s backward teachings on contraception and homosexuality, Silvano Tomasi, head of the Vatican delegation to U.N. organizations in Geneva, said that “[t]his committee has not rendered a good service to the United Nations.”

Moreover, Tomasi managed to share that such teachings fall under the rubric of “religious freedom,” putatively believing that a handful of Biblical passages allow for discriminatory, illogical practice to promulgate.

Unfortunately for the church, the report tamps much of the positive press it has gained since Pope Francis’s 2013 election. There may be, however, a bit of hope on the horizon. The results of the social surveys Francis asked to be issued among Catholics following his election have begun to filter in, albeit in limited fashion. Bishops from Germany and Switzerland recently publicized their parishioners’ responses, which sound promising. Strong majorities opposed the church’s teachings on divorce, contraception, and same-sex marriage — with the attendant bishops apparently supporting such beliefs. Indeed, the Swiss bishops even noted that such focus on minutiae is threatening “the church’s very mission.” Whether or not such beliefs will impact church teaching — which remains unchanged under Francis’s tenure — remains to be seen.

 

Image: Screenshot via AP video

Casey Michel is a graduate student at Columbia University, and former Peace Corps Kazakhstan volunteer. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, and Talking Points Memo, and he has contributed multiple long-form investigations to Minneapolis’s City Pages and the Houston Press. You can follow him on Twitter.

More than 200 internal documents implicate a garment factory used by Walmart, Macy’s, JCPenney and Kohl’s.

It is the third and final season of the Danish political drama, and Birgitte Nyborg is fighting against all the odds for her principles

SPOILER ALERT: This is for people watching Borgen at BBC4 pace. Don't read on if you haven't seen episodes one and two of the third season – and if you've seen further ahead, please do not post spoilers.

Catch up with Vicky Frost's season two blog

A child of Denmark; The Land is Built on Law

Welcome back, dear Borgen fans, for this third and final season of the Danish political drama. I admit my heart plummeted at tonight's opening scenes: not only was Birgitte abroad, shunning Danish for English – not normally a recipe for success – but those first shots of a super-glamorous Nyborg in a helicopter over Hong Kong, the diary engagements of a successful private sector boss being spelled out, landed with a massive thunk. Was this going to work?

Moving from bad dialogue about tiles to her impassioned speech as leader of the New Democrats in a couple of hours was some feat. This first episode was effectively sacrificed to set up Katrine and Kasper's baby and break-up; Birgitte's brilliant life and seemingly stable family set-up; management pressures on the newsroom.

All of which made the second hour a very satisfying watch indeed – but I was glad BBC4 showed this as a double bill. And future episodes look promising. Nyborg has now been wrangled into the perfect narrative position: fighting against all the odds for her principles. Could there be a better starting place than the effective rebirth of that idealistic politician we first fell for?

The New Democrats

And then there were six … Birgitte, Nette, Jon, Erik, Bent and Katrine. Hanging around in a grungy unit, drinking instant coffee on hand-me-down chairs and plotting massive political and social change on a single whiteboard. I'm excited by the idea of Nyborg working without the constraints of years of tradition, established party factions or lines. Philip's response to her plan – a look that said Birgitte was batshit crazy and a delighted guffaw – was pretty much mine too.

Not that it will be straightforward. There is a promising inbuilt tension in this coalition of right, centre and leftish politicians: in Erik's background at the New Right, Jon's slippery reputation and Nette's mistrust of him. I'm still not entirely sure what happened with Bertholson at the party conference. Why was he so embracing Kruse before backing Birgitte?

Kruse is, in any case, worried enough to be bumped into offering Nyborg the deputy leadership – as well he should be, given that he's sold his party's principles down the river. The reinstatement of Sjero in his rightful place at Nyborg's side will presumably trouble the Moderate leader further. I forsee some interesting fights.

I hope, too, that we have more of the general political discussion that propelled these episodes forward; there was a real fire in this script about the erosion of civil liberties as immigration laws are pulled ever tighter. (I write this from Australia, where the government's policy of processing those who seek asylum by boat in off-shore camps is truly shocking.) The argument wasn't subtle, particularly where Hoffman was concerned, but sometimes it doesn't need to be.

The newsroom

Talking of unsubtle … there wasn't a great deal of nuance going on at TV1, with poor old Torben Friis battling a new boss, Alex Hjort, arrived from Warner Brothers with a sharp haircut, considered stubble, jaunty scarf – and apparently no ability to differentiate between an imported sitcom and a homemade current affairs programme when it comes to cost and value.

These are interesting debates around broadcasting in terms of cost, quality and ratings, but I've always understood TV1 to be a publicly funded channel – like, in fact, DR1 and BBC4 on which Borgen broadcasts, which adds a little spice. That fact would surely shape this discussion, not least in terms of the number of news hours/programmes the broadcaster is committed to by its charter and the independence of its news, which would probably dull Hjort's arguments somewhat.

In any case, I like the idea of Torben defending his ideals against the unpleasant man from Warner Brothers. Both he and Birgitte fighting for the things they strongly believe in. Fingers crossed.

Private lives

I am more gutted than I expected about Kasper and Katrine no longer being together. It is dramatically satisfying – Kasper clearly isn't over it, and it leaves Katrine struggling as a single mum to balance priorities and finances, of which more in future blogposts – but emotionally, it's a bit heartwrenching. Clearly, there is still unfinished business, on Kasper's side at least. Maybe he just couldn't deal with sex on top of Gustav's various noisy toys. Can't say I'd blame him.

Philip and Birgitte are looking quite cosy too. Really, DR is a terrible tease with these two, setting up what will surely be a series-long will-they-won't-they storyline driven by the odd hand on shoulder or shared laugh. And the pair's incredible on-screen chemistry, of course. Jeremy seems a bit cold in comparison, though that might be more about Birgitte and him speaking a very particular, buttoned-up English than anything else.

Thoughts and observations

• Nice specs, Birgitte! Sidse Babett Knudsen only gets more gorgeous.

• It would be the bloody Guardian, being all liberal and going on about immigration …

• Something about Jeremy reminds me a bit of Sebastian Coe. Anyone else?

• I love the idea that Laura might follow in her mother's footsteps and become active in politics – or, at the very least, start advising Birgitte on what younger people want from politicians.

• There is always something quite delicious about an evil telly boss as drawn by those in the telly business. And there are no punches pulled with Alex Hjort.

• Can we talk about hair? Everybody seems more coiffed than before: Birgitte's hair is more luxuriant than ever, Katrina's is perfectly straightened, her mum's is beautifully blown-out, and Kasper's quiff is an unexpected delight. It's a hairdresser's dream.

• Good to see that while Katrina now has a bigger flat, it is just as chaotic as her old one. And that her wall of cuttings and pictures – which edges ever closer to the rainbow delight of Carrie from Homeland – remains, albeit with added Gustav pic.

• More housing thoughts: I missed the old Borgen flat. I'm glad to see Birgitte is swapping the massive glass penthouse for something else – hopefully where the bedroom is off the kitchen.

• Presumably, she'll also be pleased to have a usable office. Nyborg spent a great deal of these episodes outdoors, meeting people at monuments, on bridges, down alleyways, by the harbour. She must have been freezing. (And/or likely to be made minister for Danish tourism.)

• Scarf watch: Hjort taking up the scarf mantle seems an unlikely development, but Katrina has completely abandoned hers and Hanna has downsized. Laura, I'm glad to see, appears to be in training with her gift from Birgitte.

No threats? Good. The Storify is here if the embed doesn’t work for you.

It’s simple, really. Evolutionary psychology evolved to provide a niche for the evolutionary psychology douchebag.

And that article further provides a niche for all the evolutionary psychology douchebags who are nesting in the comments, oblivious to how tired their songs are.

During his onstage interview this afternoon, James Randi announced that ten days ago he married his partner of 27 years, artist Jose Alvarez, whose real name is Devyi Pena. This was presaged by a slide in Michael Shermer’s talk this morning, which, when touching on gay marriage, showed a picture of Randi and Alvarez in tuxes with carnations in their lapels.)

When asked by the interviewer about his “news,” Randi raised his hand, displaying a wedding ring, and said it was not for decoration: he and Alvarez had gotten married in Washington, D.C. a bit more than a week ago.  Randi flew there; Alvarez, who can’t fly because he’s restricted due to a legal conviction, drove up. D. C. is the closest place to Florida where gay couples can be legally married. The audience gave Randi a standing ovation.

The discussion itself involved two filmmakers who have made a documentary on Randi that will soon be released; they screened several clips from the movie. The last one showed Randi returning home after a long trip, displaying his new silver-headed cane (“I guess I’ll have to find some silver cane-head polish,” he said) and being embraced lovingly by Alvarez. It was a very touching scene, and many people teared up.

I hope to meet Randi at the speakers’ reception tomorrow after my talk. He really is amazing, and was hugely entertaining in the conversation.

By Jacob Combs

After the whirlwind that has been the last two days at the Supreme Court, it’s hard to point to any outcome in either the Prop 8 case or in Edie Windsor’s challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act as more likely than another.  There was division on the Court as to the constitutional merits of both laws (unsurprisingly, the liberal Justices tended to express doubt about the laws’ validity while the conservative Justices leaned towards upholding them), and there was substantial time devoted to legal and procedural questions that could prevent the Court from even deciding whether the laws are constitutional or not.  Here’s a brief look at the possible outcomes available to the Court in each case.

The Prop 8 case (Hollingsworth v. Perry)

A dismissal of the case as ‘improvidently granted’

Any Supreme Court watcher will tell you that the magic number at 1 First Street is five: with five votes, you can do anything; without them, you can do nothing.  That’s true of the Court’s legal decisions, where five votes are required to create a controlling, majority opinion.  But since the high court has discretion over which cases it reviews from the lower courts, there is a different magic number when it comes to whether or not the Court will take up a specific appeal.  That number is four, and since four Justices can vote to hear a specific case (the technical term is called ‘granting a writ of certiorari), the Court can end up hearing a case that only a minority of Justices want to consider.

At Tuesday’s oral arguments, it looked like there might indeed have only been four votes on the Court to take up the Prop 8 case in the first place.  Justice Sotomayor specifically mused whether the Court should let the issue of marriage equality percolate in the lower courts, to which Justice Scalia snippily responded that the Court had decided to take the case, so it didn’t matter what Sotomayor thought since that decision had already happened.  But Justice Kennedy, the über-powerful swing vote, seemed almost eager to avoid the central constitutional questions in the case, asking lawyers on both sides of the issue if the case was properly granted.  That could signal that it was only the Court’s four conservative Justices who voted in the first place to consider the Prop 8 case, and that there are five votes (the liberals plus Kennedy) for–as the legal terminology puts it–dismissing the case as ‘improvidently granted.’

Such a dismissal is uncommon but not unheard of, and it essentially means the Court decides that it was wrong to take up a particular appeal and dismisses the case without any decision on the merits.  The significance of such a move is that it leaves the Ninth Circuit’s ruling in place, restoring marriage equality to California on the narrow grounds that it was unconstitutional for the state to extend equal marriage rights and then rescind those rights by a popular vote.  Such a decision would be binding on everyone in California and would also also stand as precedent in the entire Ninth Circuit, meaning that no other state in the circuit with marriage equality (for now, only Washington) would be able to take away same-sex couples’ marriage rights through a ballot initiative.

A decision that the Prop 8 proponents do not have standing

A very significant gateway question in the Prop 8 case is whether the ballot measure’s official proponents–who intervened in the lawsuit to defend Prop 8 after the governor and attorney general of California declined to do so–have what is known as Article III standing to defend the law at all.  Without getting too lost in the legal weeds, in order to have standing in a federal court, a party generally has to show that they’ve suffered a specific, personalized injury and are not simply putting forward a claim to some more generalized injury that does nothing to distinguish them from the general public.

When the Ninth Circuit addressed the constitutionality of Prop 8, it asked the California Supreme Court for an advisory opinion on whether the law’s proponents had standing under state law to defend the statute in court, and relied on the California court’s determination that the proponents could represent the interests of the state in seeing its laws defended to grant them Article III standing.  (Neither the California Supreme Court nor the Ninth Circuit addressed the issue of personalized injury.)  The Supreme Court, however, essentially has to decide this issue for itself.  At oral arguments, there was a clear conflict for the Justices surrounding the competing questions of whether a law enacted by popular vote could be nullified if a governor or attorney general decided not to defend it and also whether any citizen of a state could step up to represent the state’s interest.

This means that the Supreme Court could very well decide that the Prop 8 proponents did not have standing to defend the law, meaning that the Court, just as if it had dismissed the case as improvidently granted, would not be able to reach the merits of the law’s constitutionality.  The difference between these two decisions is that a ruling on standing would vacate the Ninth Circuit’s opinion, since the proponents would not have had Article III standing to defend Prop 8 in that court either.  That would mean Judge Vaughn Walker’s broad district court ruling that Prop 8 violates the U.S. Constitution on both equal protection and due process grounds would finally be able to go into effect.

There’s some uncertainty about exactly what the outcome of such a decision would be, although it’s very likely marriage equality would come back to California.  Judge Walker ruled that Prop 8 is unconstitutional throughout California and enjoined the governor and attorney general from enforcing it.  Technically, however, a district court can only issue a remedy for the specific plaintiffs in the case.  This could mean that Walker’s ruling would only allow the two same-sex couples who filed the Prop 8 lawsuit to marry, and that it would be up to California’s governor and attorney general to decide if they wanted to stop enforcing Prop 8 based on the district court’s decision.  It’s likely there could be more litigation in the California state courts to determine exactly how Judge Walker’s ruling should be interpreted and put into effect, so a standing decision could create even more uncertainty.

A decision on the merits

If the Supreme Court decides the Prop 8 case was not improvidently granted and that the proponents do have standing to defend the law, it would then issue a decision on Prop 8′s constitutional merits.  The Court could limit its ruling to California only, or it could institute marriage equality nationwide.  It could also rule that Prop 8 is constitutional and that states can limit marriage to opposite-sex couples.  Based on Tuesday’s oral arguments, only the first of those three scenarios appears likely.  There did not seem to be five votes to explicitly uphold Prop 8, but neither were there five votes for a sweeping ruling establishing marriage equality nationwide.  Justice Kennedy, in particular, seemed to hesitate in regard to a broader ruling, saying that he does not believe the social science surrounding marriage equality is conclusive yet or that the Court should dictate marital law to the states.  He also seemed skeptical of the Ninth Circuit’s California-only ruling.  From his apparent distaste for both upholding and invalidating Prop 8, Kennedy appeared eager not to address the constitutional merits of Prop 8.

The DOMA case (U.S. v. Windsor)

A ruling on standing/jurisdiction

In Edie Windsor’s case challenging Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibits duly married same-sex couples from accessing federal marital benefits, there are two related procedural issues that could keep the Court from ruling on the merits of the law.  In 2011, the Justice Department, acting on instructions from President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, announced it would stop defending DOMA in court and argue instead against the law’s constitutionality.  The Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG), a 5-member body in the House of Representatives made up of the Republican and Democratic party leadership, voted 3-2 on party lines to defend the law.

During Wednesday’s arguments, the Justices asked whether BLAG has standing to appear in court in defense of DOMA and whether the Court itself has jurisdiction to hear the appeal since the federal government (the defendant in the case) and Edie Windsor (the plaintiff) agree on the law’s merits and both want it to be struck down.  On the former issue, most of the Justices seemed less than convinced that BLAG should be allowed to join the case as a party, since it is only a small subgroup of one house of Congress and because it falls to the Executive Branch under the U.S. Constitution to execute and defend the nation’s laws–or to do neither.

On the issue of the Court’s jurisdiction, the Justices asked if the United States could point to any specific injury present in the case that would allow it to seek an appeal of the district court decision.  At the same time, the Justices also expressed concern about issuing a ruling that would allow parties to appeal cases in which both sides agree on the fundamental constitutional issues.

As in the Prop 8 case, if the Court were to rule both that BLAG lacks standing to defend DOMA and the federal government cannot appeal a decision that it agrees with, there would be no ruling on DOMA’s constitutionality.  The Second Circuit’s dramatic decision invalidating DOMA would be vacated, and the district court’s ruling striking down the law and ordering a tax refund for Edie Windsor would be final.  DOMA would still be on the books and it would be up to President Obama to decide whether or not to continue enforcing the law.

A ruling on the merits

Unlike during the Prop 8 oral arguments, Justice Kennedy did appear during Wednesday’s hearing to be leaning towards the position that there was a recognizable injury in the DOMA case (since a ruling in Windsor’s favor would force the federal government to refund over $363,000 to her) and that the Court could issue a ruling on the merits.  There was a clear majority on the Court in favor of invalidating DOMA: the liberal Justices appeared open to striking down the law as a violation of equal protection, while Kennedy and Chief Justice Roberts (and, to an extent, Justice Alito) seemed open to ruling it an unconstitutional intrusion of federal power upon an area of traditional state sovereignty. Between these five to seven Justices, some majority decision against DOMA seems very likely.

A ruling striking down DOMA would only affect Section 3 of the law (since only that section was challenged in court) and would allow married same-sex couples across the country to access federal marital benefits.  Of course, Section 2 of the law, which allows states to ignore marriages between same-sex couples obtained in other states, would remain on the books.  (It’s also likely that even without Section 2, states would be free to continue to ignore same-sex couples’ marriage licenses from outside states.)  This could very well lead to substantial legal confusion in terms of marital benefits, since a couple who married in Iowa (where marriage equality is legal) but moved to Missouri (where it is not) would possibly be eligible for some federal but no state benefits. As always, it would take further litigation to sort through these issues entirely.

The bottom line

To put it simply, there are several paths of action that the Supreme Court could take on the Prop 8 and DOMA cases.  Absent an invalidation of DOMA and a ruling that extended equal marriage rights to same-sex couples in all 50 states, the post-decision legal terrain will probably look different but nearly as complicated as it is right now.  There will undoubtedly be more lawsuits filed pertaining to the intersection of state and federal marital benefits if DOMA is struck down, and there could be further legal fights in California depending on the Court’s ruling on Prop 8.  And, of course, equal marriage campaigns will continue to take place in state legislatures, at the ballot box, and in the state courts.  There is plenty more to come.

During the oral argument in the Prop 8 case on Tuesday, Justice Scalia trotted out the old conservative premise that no right exists if it wasn’t recognized long before now. This is one of the questions he asked and Ted Olson’s excellent reply to it:

JUSTICE SCALIA: You — you’ve led me right into a question I was going to ask. The California Supreme Court decides what the law is. That’s what we decide, right? We don’t prescribe law for the future. We — we decide what the law is. I’m curious, when -when did — when did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted?

Sometimes — some time after Baker, where we said it didn’t even raise a substantial Federal question? When — when — when did the law become this?

MR. OLSON: When — may I answer this in the form of a rhetorical question? When did it become unconstitutional to prohibit interracial marriages? When did it become unconstitutional to assign children to separate schools.

JUSTICE SCALIA: It’s an easy question, I think, for that one. At — at the time that the Equal Protection Clause was adopted. That’s absolutely true.

But in fact, that’s not true — especially to someone who claims to follow originalism. The framers of the 14th Amendment made absolutely clear that the amendment would not have any effect on state laws against interracial marriage. There’s no way in hell it would have passed if it had. So whether you’re going by the original intent, the original public meaning or the original expected application, it would be absolutely wrong to apply the 14th Amendment to strike down laws that banned miscegenation. And in fact, the Supreme Court ruled exactly that in 1883 in Pace v Alabama.

This has always been a problem for Scalia, as I’ve pointed out previously. He claims that Loving v Virginia was rightly decided, but every single argument he uses against same-sex marriage was used against interracial marriage in that case. No one can seriously believe that if Scalia was on the court in 1967, he would have been in the majority in Loving, at least not without some serious logical backflips.

The Onion…

Supreme Court Justices Brought To Tears By Heartfelt Testimony Of Bigot Who Hates Gay People

WASHINGTON—Listening to oral arguments Wednesday regarding the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, all nine Supreme Court justices were reportedly moved to tears by the heartfelt and highly personal testimony of a bigot who despises homosexuals unreservedly. “It’s impossible for anyone who hasn’t spent their whole life in a state of benighted prejudice to know the pain and hardship that people like myself endure every day in our efforts to ensure that gays and lesbians remain oppressed and unequal,” said the immense homophobe, whose stirring, emotional speech about his harrowing daily struggles to impede social progress prompted a weeping Chief Justice John Roberts to halt the proceedings briefly so that he and the 500 individuals in attendance could compose themselves.

By Scottie Thomaston

Today, the Supreme Court is hearing Edith Windsor’s challenge to Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act. Jacob is in the courtroom and will have first impressions of the hearings after they conclude – today’s proceedings are an hour and fifty minutes long, and may actually go on for a bit longer, since no other case is scheduled for the day.

But I thought I would address some frequent questions we’ve received on yesterday’s hearing in the Prop 8 case.

If the Court says that Prop 8 proponents lacked Article III standing to appeal the case, would same-sex marriage return to California?

It’s a bit of a complicated mess. If the Court dismisses the petition as improvidently granted because the proponents lacked Article III standing to appeal, that would mean the Supreme Court nor the Ninth Circuit had authority to hear the case. But there is no issue regarding standing at the district court level – everyone in district court was a proper party and there was a “case or controversy” that Judge Walker’s decision resolved.

But there is a question over the scope of Judge Walker’s injunction. Proponents argue that it can only apply to the two couples who actually challenged Prop 8 in this particular case, but the Olson/Boies team say that the clear wording of the injunction means it should apply to all of California. And during oral arguments at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, David Boies suggested that if the injunction were held to only apply to the two couples, there would likely be further litigation in an attempt to ensure uniform application of same-sex marriage across the entire state.

But immediately after the Court denies standing, the Ninth Circuit will issue its mandate.

How much time was spend talking about the jurisdictional issues versus the merits issues in the Prop 8 hearing yesterday?

Chief Justice Roberts deliberately asked all parties to start with the jurisdictional and standing issues rather than starting with the merits. So for all parties to the case, their initial time was spent on the issue of standing. This was true even for the Solicitor General, who appeared as amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) after filing a brief which only addressed the merits of Prop 8, not the issue of Article III standing.

From there, the Justices spent time on standing before Chief Justice Roberts directed them to discuss the merits. From my perspective, reading the transcript (I was unable to get into the arguments) it seemed that there was a fair amount of time spent on each issue, and it seemed that Chief Justice Roberts was very deliberate in directing everyone to speak on certain issues at certain times. I would guess they spent more time on the merits and less on standing, but there didn’t seem to be a significant gap, at least to me.

Could we get an early decision if they rule on standing?

Yes. The Court could dismiss the petition as improvidently granted, and a “DIG”, as it is called, is only a one-line “opinion.” In some cases, petitions are dismissed as improvidently granted for lack of standing in as little as a week, and sometimes it’s longer. So it is possible we could see an early, short decision dismissing the petition. It’s also possible the Justices may feel like they need to write an actual opinion on the Article III issues in this case, as they’ve never definitively ruled that ballot proponents have (or lack) federal Article III standing.

Why was the issue of “putting our civil rights up to a popular vote” not addressed?

The point sort of was, and sort of wasn’t, addressed. No one asked directly whether it’s okay to put rights up for a vote, but this was an equal protection challenge and there was not much focus on due process “fundamental rights”, so from my read of the transcript, discussions on this point tended to focus on Justice Scalia’s questions about “when it became illegal” to ban same-sex marriage, in other words, if it is a right, when did that happen? (As Mr. Olson adeptly pointed out, this is not a typical inquiry in these cases, so it seemed a bit of a straw man argument.)

It was my impression that if the Court had focused more on whether marriage is a fundamental right and less on whether the Ninth Circuit’s rationale was valid or “odd” (as Justice Kennedy said) then some Justices would have discussed why it is that the right is voted on through state ballot initiatives. Obviously, in the briefs in this case, Olson and Boies have pointed out that gays and lesbians have faced ballot initiatives more than any other group in American history.

What is the schedule for today, Wednesday, March 27?

Arguments in United States v. Windsor, the DOMA case, began at 10AM Eastern time. Today’s arguments are one hour and fifty minutes, because the parties were asked to brief and argue whether the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG, defending DOMA for House Republicans) has Article III standing, and whether the Justice Department’s agreement with Edith Windsor that Section 3 of DOMA is unconstitutional means the Court should not have granted their petition because they lack jurisdiction over it. The Court appointed an outside attorney, Victoria C. Jackson, to argue that the Court lacks jurisdiction and BLAG lacks standing. And the Solicitor General and BLAG’s lawyer, Paul Clement, will argue the opposite. Edith Windsor’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, did not get time to argue on standing and jurisdiction, but was, of course, given time to argue on the merits.

Jacob will have more when he leaves the Court today.

By Jacob Combs

Part Three: the merits

On to the most exciting section of today’s oral arguments: the constitutional merits of DOMA.  My general impression today is that there are at least five votes to strike down the law, although some Justices seemed to lean today towards a decision on the question of the federal government’s intrusion on traditionally state affairs as opposed to a strict equal protection analysis.

Clement was up first.  He framed the legal question in the case narrowly: if it is constitutional for states to define marriage as something limited to opposite-sex couples, shouldn’t it also be constitutional for the federal government to have its own definition?  Justice Ginsburg jumped on this quickly, pointing out that a marriage that does not provide federal benefits might prompt anyone to ask, “What kind of marriage is this?”

Justice Kennedy noted that DOMA restricts same-sex couples from accessing over 1,000 federal rights, and told Clement he was “at real risk of running in conflict” with states’ police power to regulate marriage.  Clement replied that DOMA simply provides for consistency in the federal definition of marriage, but Kennedy pointed out that it only provides consistency when it comes to differing state marriage laws regarding sexual orientation and not any other classification.

Justice Sotomayor also took issue with the idea that DOMA provides consistency for federal benefits, saying that Clement’s argument elides the fact that the federal government treats married couples in New York differently from those in Nebraska.  Justice Breyer picked up this line of reasoning, asking if Congress could constitutionally limit federal marital benefits on the basis of age or residency.  Clement said that it could, which Breyer scoffed at, saying that Clement’s argument was essentially that a desire for uniformity could save otherwise irrational classifications.  Why are marriages between same-sex couples different, he asked, and what about them makes the federal government need a uniform national definition for federal benefits?

Clement told Breyer that DOMA allowed the states to make decisions about marriage equality for themselves, instead of allowing one state to provide equal marriage rights (in 1996, the fear of those who supported DOMA was that this state would be Hawaii) and thus bring marriage equality to the whole country.  Justice Sotomayor was unconvinced, asking why the federal government should worry about what would happen to the states in this regard.  Justice Kennedy also pointed out a central contradiction in Clement’s argument that DOMA was passed in order to help the states: even if Section 2 of the law protects states from recognizing other states’ same-sex marriage licenses, Section 3 of the law undoubtedly harms states that do decide to extend equal marriage rights to same-sex couples.  In essence, Kennedy wryly pointed out, the only states that got the federal government’s help on DOMA were those who did what the government wanted, i.e., retained the traditional definition of marriage for opposite-sex couples only.

Clement kept coming back to his uniformity argument, but several of the Justices seemed quite unconvinced.  Justice Ginsburg noted that marriage affects every aspect of life, and said that DOMA essentially created two types of marriage in America, the full kind and another one that’s more like “skim milk.”  Justice Kagan denounced the uniformity argument entirely, pointing out that the only uniform aspect to the federal government’s definition of marriage before DOMA was that it deferred to the states’ own definitions.  Since such a federal definition has never been attempted before DOMA, she asked, shouldn’t that be a red flag that the law was passed out of animus towards gays and lesbians?

Justice Sotomayor continued on this line, quoting the House record from the passage of DOMA that read that the law expressed Congress’s “moral disapproval of homosexuality.”  Justice Breyer asked Clement to assume that uniformity isn’t enough to save DOMA and asked for a list of “really specific things” that would explain why Congress needed to limit federal marital benefits to same-sex couples for the sake of uniformity.

Next up was Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, Jr., who faced very tough questioning from the Justices.  Verrilli presented the federal government’s position that there was no fundamental federalism problem with DOMA, instead asking the Court to strike down the law based on equal protection grounds, but the Justices proceeded to tear apart Verrilli’s federalism contention.  Chief Justice Roberts asked if it would be constitutional for Congress to pass a law that explicitly extended federal marital benefits to same-sex couples, and seemed taken aback by Verrilli’s answer that such a law would be admissible.  Justice Kennedy asked if Verrilli was saying that Congress could dictate a definition of marriage for the states, telling the Solicitor General that the Court didn’t even need to address the equal protection question if the law was an unconstitutional exercise of federal power.

Alito brought up the issue of gay soldiers injured in the line of action.  Assume, he said, that there are three soldiers injured, all of whom are in committed relationships.  One is married, another is in a domestic partnership and the third is neither.  Should only the first one’s spouse be allowed to visit them in the hospital?  Verrilli kept to his argument, saying that the question in the DOMA case was the problem of equal protection.

Chief Justice Roberts pressed Verrilli on whether a lack of DOMA in 1996 would have meant that when one state extended equal marriage rights, all of the states would have had to do the same.  Verrilli responded that the federal government should have continued its policy of deferring to the states, and said that an interest in uniformity cannot save the law.  The Chief Justice asked if that meant that all of the legislators who voted for DOMA and the president who signed it (Clinton) were motivated by animus.  Verrilli said that that was not necessarily the case, but then said pointedly that “Section 3 is discrimination” and that singling out gays and lesbians for disfavor does not comport with the ideals of the U.S. Constitution.

Justices Sotomayor and Breyer pressed the Solicitor General on whether an invalidation of DOMA would mean that the Court would also have to strike down state marriage bans.  In response, Verrilli said that states could make their own rationales in favor of their laws for the courts to determine, but that the federal government’s rationale for DOMA clearly fails to pass muster.

Last up was Roberta Kaplan, representing Edie Windsor.  Kaplan was asked many of the same questions as Solicitor General Verrilli, but in response to a question from Justice Alito as to what would happen without DOMA if a same-sex couple married in one state and then moved to another without marriage equality and challenged that state’s marriage laws, Kaplan said that the courts would need to consider the individual state’s reasons for limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples.  Regardless, though, she argued, no compelling argument can (or has) been made to explain why the federal government should treat same-sex couples differently.

Justice Breyer asked if DOMA was simply a decision by Congress to “stay out” of the marriage equality issue, but Kaplan disavowed this idea, saying that DOMA in no way stayed out of the question, instead setting up a legal scheme that would eventually punish states that extended equal marriage rights to same-sex couples.  In response to the same question about pro-DOMA legislators being motivated by animus (asked by Roberts as he had asked Verrilli), Kaplan said, “I think times can blind.”  Since then, she argued, there has been a sea change in the public understanding of gay and lesbian individuals and their relationships.

Chief Justice Roberts made a brief nod to the question of whether gays are a politically powerful class (an important element of the Court’s consideration of which level of scrutiny it should employ to review DOMA), saying that “political figures are falling over themselves to endorse [Kaplan's] side of the case.”  Kaplan responded that gays and lesbians have been uniquely discriminated against, and that they are currently less powerful than women were when the Supreme Court decided gender was a class that merited heightened scrutiny.

In his final rebuttal, Clement pointed out Verrilli’s position that the federal government sees no federalism problem inherent in DOMA.  He again underscored the importance of a uniform federal definition of marriage, and said that the ‘sea change’ to which Kaplan referred was occurring because of the democratic process–a process, he told the Justices, that the Court should not interfere with.

The bottom line: what does it all mean?

Because of the Justices’ skepticism regarding Clement’s arguments in favor of BLAG, it seems quite likely that there are at least five votes on the Court to invalidate DOMA, especially if such a decision were based on issues of federalism rather than an equal protection question.  Based on today’s arguments, it seems possible that Chief Justice Roberts would join such an opinion striking down the law, and that Justice Kennedy would rather rule on federalism grounds than equal protection grounds if he can.  Justice Alito’s questions were less clear, but also seemed to open the door to the idea that he could rule against the law as well.

The gateway question, however, is whether the Court believes BLAG had standing to defend DOMA or if the federal government could appeal a decision it agreed with.  On the first count, it seemed that there were not five votes on the Court to grant BLAG standing.  But the Court’s four liberals, as well as Justice Kennedy, did seem to lean towards a decision that the federal government’s appeal was proper and that the law could be considered on the merits.

Of course, we’ll have to wait a few months to find out.  A final decision in both cases should come by the end of June, and could be handed down even sooner.  Until then, gay and lesbian Americans’ rights to marriage and to federal benefits are in the hands of the Justices.

By Jacob Combs

Part Two: questions of standing and jurisdiction

This post and my next will take a deeper dive into the two separate sections of today’s oral arguments.  A caveat: these may still be somewhat wonky because the arguments themselves certainly were.  For the most part, Justices’ questions here are my paraphrases, not direct quotes, since it was very, very difficult to write down full quotes as I was furiously writing on my steno pad.  Direct quotes are in quotation marks.  Here goes!

The first lawyer up to argue was Vicki Jackson, a Harvard Law professor whom the Court appointed to take the position that BLAG does not have standing to defend DOMA and that the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction over the Windsor case since it agrees with Edie Windsor that DOMA is unconstitutional.  Her central arguments was simple: the federal government is only asking the Supreme Court to affirm the lower courts’ decisions, as opposed to asking for redress, which is the traditional remedy that courts can supply, and BLAG cannot point to any cognizable injury that it would suffer if DOMA were overturned.

Justice Scalia asked why the district court hadn’t simply ordered the federal government to refund Edie Windsor’s money without deciding the merits of DOMA, since the federal government argued against DOMA at that court (after modifying its position from its original defense of the law).  Justice Breyer likened the president’s position to that of a trustee who feels obligated to obtain a final, authoritative decision on a question of law before relinquishing some of the trust’s money, even if he or she were to agree with the legal decision on the law.  Kennedy seemed to agree that there was an injury in the Windsor case for the government, with Kagan jumping onto his point to say that whether the government is “happy or sad” to pay the tax refund, there nevertheless is a fiduciary injury.  Justices Sotomayor and Breyer seemed on board with this reasoning.

As I mentioned before, Chief Justice Roberts told Deputy Solicitor General Sri Srinivasan that the federal government’s argument that it could appeal a ruling where all parties are pleased by the decision would be “wholly unprecedented.”  Scalia expressed deep discomfort with the idea, calling it a strange new world where the Attorney General could simply choose not to defend laws, which he worried would bring many more cases like Windsor (where both parties agree) to the Supreme Court.  In defense of the government’s position, Srinivasan quoted a previous Supreme Court decision, Chadha, which held that the United States is the aggrieved party in any ruling against it, even if it agrees with the ruling.  Justice Sotomayor steered Srinivasan to the question of BLAG’s standing, to which he also quoted Chadha, which he argued had amicus status in mind for the houses of Congress as opposed to joining cases as full parties.

Arguing for BLAG, Paul Clement read Chadha to the reverse effect, arguing that it in fact points to the House as the proper party to defend a law in court if the executive won’t.  Chief Justice Roberts pushed back on Clement: could Congress file to join a lawsuit if it didn’t like the executive’s arguments in defense of the a law it had passed?  Kagan then jumped in: could the House try to join a lawsuit if the attorney general decided to interpret a law more narrowly than it liked?  Kennedy asked if the Senate could join as a party to defend DOMA–which Clement said it could not–while Justice Alito asked why one house of Congress alone should be able to defend a law when it takes both of them to pass one.  Clement also ridiculed a motion to dismiss filed by the federal government when the Windsor case was in the district court that the government wrote was essentially for the purposes of creating a suitable appeal.  In response, Justice Kennedy said that that brief could give anyone “intellectual whiplash.”

Long story short, it seemed unclear from today’s oral arguments whether the Supreme Court will get past the standing questions to consider DOMA on the merits.  From the Justices’ questioning, there didn’t look like much support for the contention that BLAG has standing to join the case as a party.  But the question of whether the United States can appeal a decision that it agrees with is much more central to the Windsor case: if the Court finds the appeal was invalid, it simply will not be able to rule on the merits of the law.  Justice Kennedy and the court’s liberals did seem to lean towards the idea that the Court does have jurisdiction since there was a fiduciary injury to the United States.  That means the Court will probably issue a decision on the merits.

By Jacob Combs

Part One: first impressions

I just got out of the Supreme Court’s press gallery where we heard two packed hours of oral arguments on the constitutionality of Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act.  A big first impression: it seems quite likely that Section 3 of DOMA will be struck down by the Supreme Court.  But the Court may not get to that decision the way observers might have expected, and there remains a chance it doesn’t get to that question at all.  Today’s oral arguments felt like a marathon: we had a brief break between the jurisdictional and merits questions (and by brief, I mean brief) and other than that it was over two hours of solid legal back-and-forth.  Like yesterday, the arguments were wonky and didn’t include any fireworks.

The jurisdictional/standing arguments made it clear that there is skepticism on the Court as to whether the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group has standing to defend DOMA in court but also uncertainty about the idea that the federal government should be able to appeal a lower court decision that it agrees with.  Chief Justice Roberts, for instance, asked why President Obama has not simply ceased to enforce DOMA as opposed to continuing to enforce it and instead attacking it in court.  At one point, he told Deputy Solicitor General Sri Srinivasan (arguing on behalf of the federal government) that recognizing jurisdiction in this case (where all parties agree with the lower court’s decision) would be “wholly unprecedented.”

Justice Kennedy, however, did seem convinced that there was an injury present in the case, as did Justice Kagan (who said, simply, that there’s “a lot of money” at stake in the case).  Roberts also opened up his own argument a bit, asking if a house of Congress of could move to join a lawsuit if it simply didn’t agree with the government’s arguments in favor of a law it had passed.  Several Justices questioned Paul Clement (speaking on behalf of BLAG) as to why just the 5-member body could throw the full weight of the House behind DOMA, and pointed out that a full House vote would be more persuasive.  Justice Kennedy asked if the Senate could intervene on the other side of the case, which Clement said it could not.

On the merits of the case, the Justices spent a significant a significant amount of today’s argument time questioning all parties on whether DOMA was an unconstitutional intrusion of the federal government into an area traditionally reserved to state law.  For instance, when Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, Jr. stepped up to represent the federal government’s position, the Justices grilled him on this issue and seemed very skeptical of his claim that there is no federalism problem inherent in DOMA.

Justice Kennedy in particular pointed out that DOMA affects over 1000 federal rights, and told Clement that he was at “real risk of running in conflict” with the state police power to regulate marriage.  Justice Sotomayor critiqued Clement’s argument that DOMA could be defended as an expression of the federal government’s wish that marital eligibility be uniform for the purposes of federal law, saying that doing so would treat couples in New York differently from those in Nebraska.  Justice Breyer asked whether Congress could limit federal marital benefits based on age or residency, and when Clement said that it could, the Justice said that doing so would be thoroughly irrational.

Nevertheless, there appeared to be at least five clear votes on the Court for invalidating DOMA, either on issues of federal overreach or on equal protection grounds.  On the latter issue, the Court spent some time–but not much–discussing whether laws that classify based on sexual orientation should be subject to the more searching judicial review of heightened scrutiny.  Justice Kagan in particular questioned whether or not Congress might have had other motives in passing DOMA besides uniformity; Justice Sotomayor quoted the House record from when the law was enacted, which stated that the law was intended to “express[] moral disapproval of homosexuality.”  But Chief Justice Roberts asked both Verrilli and Kaplan if the legislators who voted in favor of DOMA could be explicitly accused of animus, which both lawyers disavowed.  Breyer pressed Clement for a “list of reasons” why Congress would want to limit federal marital benefits to opposite-sex couples only.

From today’s arguments, it does seem that DOMA is on its last legs and that the Supreme Court will likely strike it down this summer if it decides Edie Windsor’s case on the merits.  But there are many complex arguments on the standing/jurisdiction questions that the Justices will have to address in their decision.  We’ll have more in-depth analysis at EqualityOnTrial.com today on the specific issues in the case–check back later for more coverage!

Editor’s note: To close out Women’s history month we are running this series of guest posts from Emily May and Samuel Carter co-founders of Hollaback as they reflect on taking an idea and moving it to action, the best practices they have learned along the way and documenting for us that feminist history is happening right now. 

We were a group of seven friends, helping each other get through this tough city-workaday world in daily free-wheeling conversations. Gender was a particularly rich theme. We were three men and four women, all a bit queer, and as we talked about our lives, neighborhoods, commutes to work, the parks and cafes we frequented, something emerged; the women of our group had a vastly different set of experiences in public space from the men, the women enduring a constant barrage of foul comments, violations of personal space, and groping from strangers on the subway and the streets of the city.

For the men, hearing these stories from was eye-opening as they suddenly understood our city of New York as actually being two cities—one as experienced by women, the other by men.  And this kind of commonplace inequality was shaking..

On August 23, 2005, a young woman named Thao Nguyen was riding the R train.  She looked up to find a man sitting across from her staring. The man started to masturbate.  At this point, Thao did not avert her eyes or bury herself in a book.  She did not get up and leave the train car.  Instead, she took out her cell phone, and took a photo of the man.  And when she got off the train, she tried to report the incident. In her words:

Thao took a bold step.  After trying to report the incident, she shared her story on flickr, where it quickly went viral.  Gothamist picked it up first, then the  New York Daily News, which ran the photo on the front page of their tabloid (TK).

It was one of those stories that New Yorkers were all buzzing about. Gothamist got flooded with comments. It felt like everyone either had a similar story of public masturbation, or they knew someone who did. Women came forward and recognized the man in Thao’s photo. Eventually, the subject of Thao’s snap turned himself in to the police.
Amongst ourselves, we picked apart what had happened.  Essentially, Thao had taken an action against her harasser using a digital tool that we all carry in our pockets, and then shared it with her broader community.  It had sparked public debate.  As we went through the timeline of the media story, we found ourselves revisiting familiar ground: the use of all this new personal technology, the power of the Internet and the emerging social media, the rise of blogs, and of course, gender.

And it was then that we realized that it was completely within our power to keep this conversation alive in New York City.  That we could start a new site, dedicated to sharing the kind of photos and stories that Thao Nguyen had, and make it open to everyone in New York.

We got to work.

We quickly identified the work to be done.  Some of us had set up websites and registered domains before, some were good with design, some with marketing. Others had legal expertise and could put together a basic framework for the project. We settled on the name Hollaback NYC.
On October 3, 2005, at 12:38 PM, we put up our first post:

First Post!

Here’s the skinny–next time you’re out and about and some cocky ass on a power trip whistles, hoots, or hollas–Just Holla back! Whip out your digicam, cameraphone, 35mm, (or sketchpad), and email us the photo. We’ll post their ugly face for the whole world to see. If you can’t pull out a camera, or you don’t have one on you, just send us a story and we’ll post that too.

We began to populate the site by soliciting stories from each other—and our friends.  Here’s Emily’s first Hollaback from October 11, 2005 at 3:54pm:

“Trudging home from the subway I hear the words “beautiful mommy” murmered. I look up to find a man (the one on the left) not staring into my eyes but rather sneering at my tits. I felt like poo, and it took all my willpower to grab my camera and run down the street after him to get this shot. A little scared, and very shaken, I scurried home holding my camera like radioactive material.”

We pissed people off.

The photos got a lot of attention – and a lot of controversy – to the site.   Our cell phone cameras became a cry of resistance. This was of course very scary for folks.  Changing the power structures usually is.  We got hate mail and criticism up the wazoo. The most common critique was “what if she’s lying?” This critique was about more than our project.  If you watch the news, you’ll be hard pressed to find coverage of a rape case that didn’t question victim’s integrity – either because of her short skirt, her dark skin, or failure to carry boyfriend-on-arm at all hours of the night. The media makes it sound like women are just running amok, making up stories about sexual assault for shits and giggles.

This is, of course, factually untrue. According to the FBI, only 3% of rape reports are “false.” But the fear of being dragged through the mud by the media, a courtroom, the world, makes rape victims skittish about coming forward. According to the American Medical Association, it’s the most “the most under-reported violent crime.”

Street harassment is on the spectrum of gender-based violence. It’s on the lower end of the spectrum, but it’s important to note because people bring the same shit to the party.  Victims of street harassment are seen as liars, and unsurprisingly, this has a hushing effect on victims.  Being able to tell your story anonymously — with no risk of public shaming — was revolutionary. And with each picture of a blurry sidewalk, a picture of gold cowboy boots being worn during the incident, or the harasser himself — the stories told on the site brought exposure into an otherwise unspoken part of our daily lives.

With success came failure.

Over the next five years, the stories kept coming and interest in Hollaback! grew. We wrote op-eds, spoke at universities, spray painted t-shirts, and designed tote bags. We even successfully got anti-harassment ads in the New York City subways in coordination with New Yorkers for Safe Transit, a coalition we co-founded in 2008. Our work was featured by Good Morning America, NPR, CNN, and many many others.  By our count, we’d appeared in press articles over 450 times by 2010.

With international press came international interest.  We started to receive posts from outside the United States, and some of our allies suggested that Hollaback! become the “Craigslist of street harassment” and post stories from around the world. We discussed it, but deep in our hearts, we knew that although street harassment is a global issue, the power of our project lies in local leadership.

Building the movement.

In the words of Gloria Steinum, “movements start by people telling their stories, and they succeed when power dynamics change.”  This draws a distinction with nonprofits: movements aren’t fueled by people who are paid to do the work.  They are powered by people who recognize injustice and are motivated to work for change. So we struck out on our own.  We tried to build a nonprofit that looked like a movement.

Along the way, we made a bunch of mistakes, and learned a few new things.

Ah yes – the ever-popular “random man tells woman to smile” number.

When I did not smile (I continued looking for my keys in my purse and avoided all eye contact, in fact), he told me my “pretty face was going to waste.”

Ah, no. It’s not. It’s being put to good use keeping her eyes in their right place so that she can see to find her keys and make her way around, and keeping her mouth where it belongs so that she can eat. It’s not going to waste at all. Its function isn’t to provide something for that random man.

There are lots of comments. Some are interesting.

• A guy did this to me recently as I passed him on a sidewalk, and I was so thrown that I actually did smile a little. Then he frowned and said “No, that looks fake.”
• Oh, god. I don’t even want to see the array of comments about how dude meant no harm, feminists are crazy, yadda yadda. You people don’t get it. It’s basically a command to play cute for a random guy. Hard to imagine a random street guy telling another man to smile? There’s a reason for that. Fume.
• It must be tricky to get through each day when every interaction is forcibly turned into a power struggle.

  He was just trying to compliment you.  He did not literally mean your face is a waste unless you are smiling.  All he did was call you pretty.  You brought all the drama.

  I love how people say the Seattle Freeze is not real when I read things like this.  This could not be more passive aggressive.

He, a complete stranger and random person, was just trying to compliment you. And we all want complete strangers trying to compliment us on our appearance (by ordering us to smile)?

Think, people. It’s not that difficult.

There’s another paper out debunking the ENCODE consortium’s absurd interpretation of their data. ENCODE, you may recall, published a rather controversial paper in which they claimed to have found that 80% of the human genome was ‘functional’ — for an extraordinarily loose definition of function — and further revealed that several of the project leaders were working with the peculiar assumption that 100% must be functional. It was a godawful mess, and compromised the value of a huge investment in big science.

Now W. Ford Doolittle has joined the ranks of many scientists who immediately leapt into the argument. He has published “Is junk DNA bunk? A critique of ENCODE” in PNAS.

Do data from the Encyclopedia Of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project render the notion of junk DNA obsolete? Here, I review older arguments for junk grounded in the C-value paradox and propose a thought experiment to challenge ENCODE’s ontology. Specifically, what would we expect for the number of functional elements (as ENCODE defines them) in genomes much larger than our own genome? If the number were to stay more or less constant, it would seem sensible to consider the rest of the DNA of larger genomes to be junk or, at least, assign it a different sort of role (structural rather than informational). If, however, the number of functional elements were to rise significantly with C-value then, (i) organisms with genomes larger than our genome are more complex phenotypically than we are, (ii) ENCODE’s definition of functional element identifies many sites that would not be considered functional or phenotype-determining by standard uses in biology, or (iii) the same phenotypic functions are often determined in a more diffuse fashion in larger-genomed organisms. Good cases can be made for propositions ii and iii. A larger theoretical framework, embracing informational and structural roles for DNA, neutral as well as adaptive causes of complexity, and selection as a multilevel phenomenon, is needed.

In the paper, he makes an argument similar to one T. Ryan Gregory has made many times before. There are organisms that have much larger genomes than humans; lungfish, for example, have 130 billion base pairs, compared to the 3 billion humans have. If the ENCODE consortium had studied lungfish instead, would they still be arguing that the organism had function for 104 billion bases (80% of 130 billion)? Or would they be suggesting that yes, lungfish were full of junk DNA?

If they claim that lungfish that lungfish have 44 times as much functional sequence as we do, well, what is it doing? Does that imply that lungfish are far more phenotypically complex than we are? And if they grant that junk DNA exists in great abundance in some species, just not in ours, does that imply that we’re somehow sitting in the perfect sweet spot of genetic optimality? If that’s the case, what about species like fugu, that have genomes one eighth the size of ours?

It’s really a devastating argument, but then, all of the arguments against ENCODE’s interpretations have been solid and knock the whole thing out of the park. It’s been solidly demonstrated that the conclusions of the ENCODE program were shit.

So why, Yale, why? The Winter edition of the Yale Medicine magazine features as a cover article Junk No More, an awful piece of PR fluff that announces in the first line “R.I.P., junk DNA” and goes on to tout the same nonsense that every paper published since the ENCODE announcement has refuted.

The consortium found biological activity in 80 percent of the genome and identified about 4 million sites that play a role in regulating genes. Some noncoding sections, as had long been known, regulate genes. Some noncoding regions bind regulatory proteins, while others code for strands of RNA that regulate gene expression. Yale scientists, who played a key role in this project, also found “fossils,” genes that date to our nonhuman ancestors and may still have a function. Mark B. Gerstein, Ph.D., the Albert L. Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics and professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry, and computer science, led a team that unraveled the network of connections between coding and noncoding sections of the genome.

Arguably the project’s greatest achievement is the repository of new information that will give scientists a stronger grasp of human biology and disease, and pave the way for novel medical treatments. Once verified for accuracy, the data sets generated by the project are posted on the Internet, available to anyone. Even before the project’s September announcement, more than 150 scientists not connected to ENCODE had used its data in their research.

“We’ve come a long way,” said Ewan Birney, Ph.D., of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in the United Kingdom, lead analysis coordinator for ENCODE. “By carefully piecing together a simply staggering variety of data, we’ve shown that the human genome is simply alive with switches, turning our genes on and off and controlling when and where proteins are produced. ENCODE has taken our knowledge of the genome to the next level, and all of that knowledge is being shared openly.”

Oh, Christ. Not only is it claiming that the 80% figure is for biological activity (it isn’t), but it trots out the usual university press relations crap about how the study is all about medicine. It wasn’t and isn’t. It’s just that dumbasses can only think of one way to explain biological research to the public, and that is to suggest that it will cure cancer.

As for Birney’s remarks, they are offensively ignorant. No, the ENCODE research did not show that the human genome is actively regulated. We’ve known that for fifty years.

That’s not the only ahistorical part of the article. They also claim that the idea of junk DNA has been discredited for years.

Some early press coverage credited ENCODE with discovering that so-called junk DNA has a function, but that was old news. The term had been floating around since the 1990s and suggested that the bulk of noncoding DNA serves no purpose; however, articles in scholarly journals had reported for decades that DNA in these “junk” regions does play a regulatory role. In a 2007 issue of Genome Research, Gerstein had suggested that the ENCODE project might prompt a new definition of what a gene is, based on “the discrepancy between our previous protein-centric view of the gene and one that is revealed by the extensive transcriptional activity of the genome.” Researchers had known for some time that the noncoding regions are alive with activity. ENCODE demonstrated just how much action there is and defined what is happening in 80 percent of the genome. That is not to say that 80 percent was found to have a regulatory function, only that some biochemical activity is going on. The space between genes was also found to contain sites where DNA transcription into RNA begins and areas that encode RNA transcripts that might have regulatory roles even though they are not translated into proteins.

I swear, I’m reading this article and finding it indistinguishable from the kind of bad science I’d see from ICR or Answers in Genesis.

I have to mention one other revelation from the article. There has been a tendency to throw a lot of the blame for the inane 80% number on Ewan Birney alone…he threw in that interpretation in the lead paper, but it wasn’t endorsed by every participant in the project. But look at this:

The day in September that the news embargo on the ENCODE project’s findings was lifted, Gerstein saw an article about the project in The New York Times on his smartphone. There was a problem. A graphic hadn’t been reproduced accurately. “I was just so panicked,” he recalled. “I was literally walking around Sterling Hall of Medicine between meetings talking with The Times on the phone.” He finally reached a graphics editor who fixed it.

So Gerstein was so concerned about accuracy that he panicked over an article in the popular press, but had no problem with the big claim in the Birney paper, the one that would utterly undermine confidence in the whole body of work, did not perturb him? And now months later, he’s collaborating with the Yale PR department on a puff piece that blithely sails past all the objections people have raised? Remarkable.

This is what boggles my mind, and why I hope some sociologist of science is studying this whole process right now. It’s a revealing peek at the politics and culture of science. We have a body of very well funded, high ranking scientists working at prestigious institutions who are actively and obviously fitting the data to a set of unworkable theoretical presuppositions, and completely ignoring the rebuttals that are appearing at a rapid clip. The idea that the entirety of the genome is both functional and adaptive is untenable and unsupportable; we instead have hundreds of scientists who have been bamboozled into treating noise as evidence of function. It’s looking like N rays or polywater on a large and extremely richly budgeted level. And it’s going on right now.

If we can’t have a sociologist making an academic study of it all, can we at least have a science journalist writing a book about it? This stuff is fascinating.

I have my own explanation for what is going on. What I think we’re seeing is an emerging clash between scientists and technicians. I’ve seen a lot of biomedical grad students going through training in pushing buttons and running gels and sucking numerical data out of machines, and we’ve got the tools to generate so much data right now that we need people who can manage that. But it’s not science. It’s technology. There’s a difference.

A scientist has to be able to think about the data they’re generating, put it into a larger context, and ask the kinds of questions that probe deeper than a superficial analysis can deliver. A scientist has to be more broadly trained than the person who runs the gadgetry.

This might get me burned at the stake worse than sneering at ENCODE, but a good scientist has to be…a philosopher. They may not have formal training in philosophy, but the good ones have to be at least roughly intuitive natural philosophers (ooh, I’ve heard that phrase somewhere before). If I were designing a biology curriculum today, I’d want to make at least some basic introduction to the philosophy of science an essential and early part of the training.

I know, I’m going against the grain — there have been a lot of big name scientists who openly dismiss philosophy. Richard Feynman, for instance, said “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” But Feynman was wrong, and ironically so. Reading Feynman is actually like reading philosophy — a strange kind of philosophy that squirms and wiggles trying to avoid the hated label, but it’s still philosophy.

I think the conflict arises because, like everything, 90% of philosophy is garbage, and scientists don’t want to be associated with a lot of the masturbatory nonsense some philosophers pump out. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that some science, like ENCODE, is nonsense, too — and the quantity of garbage is only going to rise if we don’t pay attention to understanding as much as we do accumulating data. We need the input of philosophy.

A paper just out in GRL by Balmaseda, Trenberth and Källén claims to have affirmed the location of the "missing energy" in the climate system -- it's (as suspected) in the deep ocean (the 300-2000 m layer, and especially below 700 m).

You can read the abstract here; this is from the paper's conclusion:

The deep ocean has continued to warm, while the upper 300 m OHC appears to have stabilized. The differences in recent trends among the different ocean layers are profound. The small warming in the upper 300 m is belied by the continuing warming for the ocean as a whole, with considerable warming occurring below 700 m. However, this raises the question of whether this result is simply because of the new Argo observing system? The results shown here suggest otherwise, although Argo clearly is vitally important quantitatively. Instead changes in surface winds play a major role, and although the exact nature of the wind influence still needs to be understood, the changes are consistent with the intensification of the trades in subtropical gyres. Another supporting factor is the uniqueness of the radiative forcing associated with global warming.

The magnitude of the warming trend is consistent with observational estimates, being equivalent to an average 0.47 ± 0.03 W m^-2 for the period 1975–2009. There is large decadal variability in the heat uptake, the latest decade being significantly higher (1.19 ± 0.11 W m^-2) than the preceding record. Globally this corresponds to 0.84 W m^-2, consistent with earlier estimates [Trenberth et al., 2009]. In an observing system experiment where Argo is withdrawn, the ocean heating for the last decade is reduced (0.82 ± 0.10 W m^-2), but is still significantly higher than in previous decades. The estimation shows depths below 700 m becoming much more strongly involved in the heat uptake after 1998, and subsequently accounting for about 30% of the ocean warming.

Here are some figures from the paper:



Finally, here is their summary of trends for the different layers over different times, which makes it clear why the surface temperature jumped up so much in the 1990s -- the ocean was actually losing energy (heat), mostly because of the big 1997-1998 El Nino -- and why it's been on "haitus" during the last decade -- the ocean took up a huge amount of heat, at a rate far higher even than in the 1980s, with most of it going below 700 meters.


(The number 0.708 is simply the total surface area of all the planet's oceans divided by the planet's total surface area, viz. 70.8% of the surface is ocean.)

We keep talking about making appropriate responses to sexism — not just those of us who are strongly pro-feminism, but even the regressive thugs on the other side will say that, although we’ll argue about what level of response is appropriate. But this is where I lose patience every goddamned time: apparently no response other than silence and submission is acceptable.

We’ve all seen how “guys, don’t do that” was turned into cause for outrage. Here’s another instance: Adria Richards was at a tech conference when, during a presentation that was about women coders no less, a couple of guys behind her started cracking suggestive jokes.

The guys were clearly in the wrong. They were being rude, distracting, and trying to assert their dudely privilege in one of the few moments granted women during a conference dominated by men. So Richards turned, snapped their picture, and tweeted it to the conference organizers, asking them to handle it.

This was a measured response. It wasn’t a blast of anger, it was a request that the conference enforce its code of conduct. It disrupted the meeting less than a couple of chattering smart-asses did. This is exactly what we should want people to do: polite confrontation through appropriate channels.

The conference organizers also did exactly what they were supposed to do: they called the two men aside and asked them to stop and behave themselves.

I assume the two men also reacted appropriately. There are no tales of angry shouting or rejection of the admonishment. I charitably presume that they were chagrined and a little embarrassed, nothing more.

This should have been the end of it: a happy story of a minor breach of manners handled by grown-ups who moved on to do their jobs professionally. Lessons learned all around; don’t disparage or harass minorities (women were only 20% of the attendees), trust the organizers to manage hiccups smoothly, deal with problems through official channels. Except you know more happened or it wouldn’t be news.

A whole bunch of otherwise uninvolved people completely lost their shit. This is ridiculous.

But instead, the internet decided to throw one epic fucking tantrum. First, one of the men pictured in Richards’s photographs was fired from his job (his company was one of the sponsors of PyCon). Richards did not call for him to be fired, nor did she celebrate the decision, according to this post. Nonetheless, Richards’s company SendGrid—NOT the company that fired the dude—was subject to a DDoS attack courtesy of 4chan (their express purpose was to “ruin her life”). She’s also been subjected to the usual avalanche of violent harassment and rape threats that descends upon any woman who dares to criticize male-dominated tech culture (see: Sarkeesian, Anita; also everything else ever). Sidenote to tech dudes: GET A FUCKING GRIP.

SendGrid subsequently fired Richards.

Firing one of the men over a brief incident of inappropriate behavior: totally inappropriate and excessive. That would only be reasonable if there were far more severe breaches of courtesy.

4chan getting involved: disgraceful. Launching a denial of service attack against Richards’ employer: what the fuck is wrong with these people?

Worse: Richards’ employer, SendGrid, caving in to extortion and firing her. I hope she’s considering legal action. That was incredibly craven.

Worser, appallingly disgusting: the violent reaction by some assholes.

Richards has been called practically every name under the sun. Some Twitter commenters demanded she kill herself. A 4chan user allegedly released Richards’s personal information. But few reactions were more disturbing than this one, sent to her Wednesday evening: a photo (blurred but still NSFW) of a bloody, beheaded woman, bound and stripped, with the caption “when Im done.” Next to it was a home address and phone number, ostensibly Richards’s.

And of course the usual slymepitters are crowing over all this on twitter, taunting via the #ftbullies and #wiscfi hashtags, as they always do. This is the kind of behavior they love to applaud.

This is the heart of the problem. We can build all the protocols for reasonable responses we want; women like Adria Richards can use them; responsible people can implement appropriate reactions.

And then, beneath it all, lies the festering sewer of rape culture that rises in rage at any damned uppity woman who dares to speak out against our very own homegrown Taliban.

And one last bit of insult: the conference organizers retroactively revised their code of conduct to exclude public shaming.

Public shaming can be counter-productive to building a strong community. PyCon does not condone nor participate in such actions out of respect.

Cowards. Just remember, ladies, decorum must be maintained, and the proper young woman will be meek and silent in the face of offense. The men can’t build a strong community if women keep speaking out publicly.

I wonder how many women will now think twice before complaining about asshole behavior at their job or at a meeting? If they’re inhibited, congratulations, scumbags: you got what you wanted. On the other hand, maybe we’ll finally reach a critical mass of outrage, and the next time some dudebro starts with the sexist shit at a conference, a dozen people, men and women alike, will rise up and tell him to grow up or get out.

I know I’m even less inclined to let casual smears slide now. I hope you feel the same way.

Is there a connection? And if so, how does it work? Does a warming world lead to more El Ninos? More La Ninas? Or more intense El Ninos and La Ninas?

Lots of processes affect the climate. Certainly greenhouse gases have an effect and it’s clear that rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing a long-term rise in global temperatures. Another process that affects the climate is the El Nino-Southern Oscillation.

The El Nino-Southern Oscillation

To understand what the El Nino-Southern Oscillation or ENSO is about, you should think of the tropical Pacific Ocean as a huge bathtub with water sloshing back and forth. But a bathtub with an important characteristic: in this tub, the surface water at the western end (near Indonesia and Australia) tends to be warm while the water on the eastern end (near South America) tends to be cool.

When the water sloshes toward the east, the surface of the central Pacific Ocean fills up with warm water, triggering more rain over the central Pacific and suppressing rain over Asia, among a wide variety of other types of meteorological effects throughout the globe, including, as illustrated in the graphic below, in the United States. (See here and here.) This condition is referred to as El Nino.

(Source: NOAA)

Conversely, when the water sloshes to the west, the central Pacific fills up with cool water, isolating the warm surface water at the western edge of the Pacific and limiting precipitation to that region as well. (See here and here.) This condition is known as La Nina. (See more graphics for help visualizing the different events.)

(Source: NOAA)

The Atmosphere-Ocean Dance

The ocean is not alone in this oscillation. While the ocean sloshes back and forth, the atmosphere is doing its own thing over the Pacific. Climate scientists refer to the wind patterns over the tropical Pacific as the Walker circulation [pdf] after meteorologist Sir Gilbert Thomas Walker who worked out the nature of this circulation pattern in the early 1900s. Under normal conditions the surface winds of the Walker circulation over the Pacific run from east to west. During La Nina, the surface winds intensify — thus moving the cool waters of the eastern Pacific over the central Pacific. During El Ninos the surface winds reverse, blowing the warm waters from the west over the central Pacific.

This “ongoing dialog between the ocean and atmosphere” is called the El Nino-Southern Oscillation.

(Source: NOAA)

The ENSO-Climate Connection

All this sloshing back and forth can affect the weather around the globe in complex and in some cases surprising ways. For example, El Ninos tend to bring heavy rainfall to California and wetter conditions to the Southeast. La Ninas tend to bring less rain to the Midwest and the arid Southwest. In recent years the conditions in the equatorial Pacific have been dominated by La Ninas (more on this later) and is probably one of the reasons for the ongoing drought in much of the Midwest.

The sloshing back and forth can also influence global temperatures. During an El Nino, the tropical Pacific fills up with warm water, which enhances the transfer of heat from the ocean to the atmosphere. This tends to raise global temperatures. Conversely, during La Nina, the tropical Pacific fills up with cool water, which tends to depress heat transfer and therefore global temperatures.

Now think about what happens when we superimpose a long-term rise in global temperature from greenhouse gases with the ENSO sloshing. We should find year-to-year variations in the global temperature rise with upward spikes in temperature during El Nino years and flatter or even modest short-term decreases during La Ninas. And this is exactly what we find when we examine the global temperature record (see graphic).

(Source: NOAA)

Note, for example, that two (1998 and 2010) of the five years with the highest recorded temperatures (1998, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2010) occurred during El Ninos. The other three were neutral years; i.e., neither El Nino or La Nina.

Also note that since 2000, there has been only one year with an El Nino (2010). Some have argued that this is a major reason why global temperatures in the 2000s have been flat.

In fact, Grant Foster of Tempo Analytics and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research have shown that when you use statistical techniques to filter out the influence of La Nina and El Nino, one finds that global temperatures have been steadily rising over the last 30 years. (See here and here.) Note, for example, in the graphic that 2006, 2008 and 2012 were the warmest La Nina years on record for this period.

Is There A Climate-ENSO Feedback?

Given the influence of ENSO on global temperatures, we’d like to know if the frequency of La Ninas and El Ninos and their intensity are changing over time and more specifically if climate change itself is driving such a change.

If these things are occurring, the implications could be significant.

Imagine that global warming is causing more La Ninas. That would imply a negative feedback — warmer temperatures leading to cooler ocean temperatures, less heat transfer from the ocean to the atmosphere, which would slow the rise in global temperature at least for some period of time.

Conversely, a positive feedback would arise from global warming causing more El Ninos.

Some Say Yes and Here Come the El Ninos

For more than a decade scientists have been trying to figure out, with mixed results, if such a climate-ENSO connection exists. Some have concluded on the basis of analyses of data that global warming is increasing the likelihood of El Ninos. For example see this 1996 paper by Kevin Trenberth of the National Center of Atmospheric Research and co-authors and this 2005 paper by A.A. Tsonis of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and co-authors, both published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

A number of other investigators have used climate model simulations to explore how global warming would affect ENSO. Most have concluded that global warming will lead to more and more intense El Ninos. (See here, here and here.)

Others: Not So Much

A somewhat more equivocal conclusion was reached by a team headed by Kim Cobb of Georgia Tech. In a January 2013 report published in the journal Science, Cobb and her co-authors reported on the results of an analysis of oxygen isotopes in coral reefs that yielded information on ENSO cycles over the past 7,000 years.

The authors did find a significant increase in the intensity and variability in ENSO in the 20th century, but also found that similar departures occurred in the past, for example in the 17th century when global temperatures were not elevated. It is therefore not at all clear that the 20th century ENSO trend that Cobb et al saw had any relationship to the contemporary trend in global temperatures.

But Maybe La Ninas on the Way

Now a new study by Michelle L’Heureux of the NOAA Climate Prediction Center and co-authors appearing last week in the journal Nature Climate Change adds a new wrinkle.

Analyzing surface pressure data over the last century, the authors were able to reconstruct the variations of the Walker circulation over that period. Their conclusion: since the 1970s the atmospheric circulation patterns over the Pacific have tended to favor La Nina conditions over El Nino ones. And, they write: “The overall trend towards a stronger, La Niña-like Walker circulation is nearly concurrent with the observed increase in global average temperatures.”

This whole ENSO-climate change thing is really fascinating and is critical to our ability to understand and predict interannual and interdecadal trends in global temperatures. But, at least for now, it’s a work in progress. Regardless, over the long-term, I foresee rising global temperatures.

The recent 'revelation' that a popular science Facebook site is the work of a woman prompted a number of sexist comments, which were in turn met by serious criticisms. But if you ignore the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, it's true that women just aren't as good at science

As a man, I of course have an innate understanding of science. As a bespectacled man who started going bald when he was 17 years old, this is even truer for me than most. I was often allowed to skip science exams at GCSE and A-Level. The teachers would usually take one look at me, correctly assume that I already knew more than enough to pass, and save my time and theirs by letting me avoid a clearly unnecessary assessment.

Sadly, it's an undeniable fact that the same cannot be said of women. It's nobody's fault, but it's not something that should be ignored any longer. The recent "revelation" that the popular Facebook site "I Fucking Love Science" is run by a woman resulted in numerous sexist comments based on her gender, looks and well-known stereotypes. But should we not look at why this reaction occurred?

Now I'm as non-sexist as the next thirty-something heterosexual white male with his own dedicated section on a high-profile media site, but surely more could be achieved if we acknowledged the inherent deficit females have when it comes to understanding science, rather than just ignoring it?

As a scientist I know it's important to provide evidence for controversial claims, and sadly it's all around us. People often fear and mistrust what they don't understand, and teenage girls have an inherent fear and mistrust of science, as evidenced by the fact that, despite my being the best at science in school, none of the girls there showed even the slightest interest in dating me. They were clearly frightened and intimidated by my science prowess. What other logical explanation is there?

My own wife says she went to an all-girl school that was the first in the UK to teach girls maths, as there was a fear at the time that women's brains would overheat if they tried it. But this is a very real concern. If I even mention to my wife that it may be the actual truth, she gets very red and angry and I have to sleep on the couch for a week. If that's not indicative of an overheated brain, then I don't know what is. Trust me on this, I'm a male neuroscientist.

A quick glance at the magazines available in a typical shop shows how different the appreciation of science is between the sexes. Women's magazines all seem to be about celebrity gossip, cupcakes, frilly umbrellas (I assume), whereas men's magazines are regularly dedicated to seriously niche scientific subjects like the botanical study of the numerous types of hard single-seed fruit, the mechanics of Familial hemiplegic migraine, analysis of the geometrical incidence structure the Generalized quadrangle. I've not read any of these myself as they're not about my field, but this clearly demonstrates a male preference for less shallow pursuits. These magazines often put women on the covers so they don't feel left out. But still, they don't seem happy, which again shows a difficulty with grasping logic.

Stereotypes occur for a reason, and there are numerous examples of these that reveal the disadvantage women have with science. For example, women may laugh at men's tendency not to ask for directions, but this suggests that women have no problem with asking for them, so are keen to solicit information from others. This is something a real scientist would never do! Science doesn't work that way.

There's also the belief that women's menstrual cycles, whatever they are, can be affected by the moon. That's the actual moon, influencing things on Earth. How unscientific can you get? But then women are often confused by their own biology. When it comes to sexual interaction, women seem to have trouble telling which sex is which, meaning they often end up having sex with another woman, presumably by accident. This is a very common error; there is a vast amount of data about it available online and I've spent countless hours trawling through it. If women can't recognise their own sex when it's right in front of them, how are they going to grasp something as complex and confusing as cutting edge science?

Attempts have been made to encourage and support the role of women in science, with initiatives such as Ada Lovelace day. But if the best available role model is a woman known for simply loving lace, that's not exactly a great example. Famous male scientists, on the other hand, were so dedicated they were named after scientific measurements, like Newton and Kelvin. How can women compete?

Even here in the Guardian Science section, this gender-difference is clear to see. As liberal and politically correct as the Guardian tries to be, there aren't any science blogs written by women. You may argue that yes, there are, but those are just the several dozen examples that prove the rule.

The Guardian folk even suggested I could have some female guest bloggers for this very blog. I steadfastly refused. Science blogs written by women? What next, blogs written by educated sparrows? Super-intelligent wombats? Surprisingly articulate Tupperware? There's politically correct, and there's just silly. You'll be saying women can be funny, next.

In conclusion, for anyone who still thinks this is a serious piece, if you're a man who claims to "fucking love" science but are shocked to find out that women may feel the same, please go away and look up what "science" actually is, then come back and start again, as you've clearly gone wrong somewhere.

Dean Burnett isn't acually a massive sexist and admits that this blog is inspired by a classic Harry Enfield sketch after a comment by Dave Briggs on Twitter, where Dean tweets as @garwboy

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Here's a map from NASA that shows the amount of vegetative growth in the western hemisphere of the Arctic over the past 30 years. (The eastern hemisphere is even more impressive.)


It's mostly tundra and tiaga.

These images accompany a new paper in Nature Climate Change, that says latitudinal shifts in vegetation in the Arctic -- essentially, how fast the greening is moving north -- is 4-7° in 30 years. If I figured correctly, that's 445-778 km in 30 years, or about 50 meters a day, or about 2 meters an hour.

The paper says climate models predict the shift will be 20° more by the end of the century. That's about 1400 miles.

Denver will move to Mexico City. Saskatchewan will move to Houston. Fairbanks, Alaska will move to Portland, Oregon, and Portland will move somewhere equivalent to Miami's latitude. Unless someone can find a way to alter the molecular properties of carbon dioxide. I hope someone, somewhere, is working on that.

Maureen sent me a selection of videos about Malala’s return to school.

She defies her enemies’ attempt to silence her.

Yes she does.

She wants to learn about politics and the law. She wants to learn how to bring change to this world.

Getty Images

The National Voter Registration Act of 1993, better known as the federal "motor-voter law," allows people to register to vote while renewing drivers licenses or applying for social services. As part of the documentation process, folks have to say that they're American citizens.

Arizona, however, approved something called Proposition 200, which gave the federal law a little touch-up -- those registering can't just say they're American citizens; in this state, folks are expected to prove it.

And this, in turn, has led to an interesting Supreme Court case.

Supreme Court justices expressed some skepticism on Monday about an Arizona law that requires people registering to vote in federal elections to show proof of citizenship.

The legal question before the nine justices is whether the voter registration provision of the 2004 state law is trumped by a federal law, the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which outlines various ways in which people can register to vote in federal elections.

That law requires no proof of citizenship. Would-be voters simply sign a statement saying they are citizens.

The case comes just two weeks after the Supreme Court heard a challenge to the Voting Rights Act. (Curiously, Justice Scalia appears to have been obnoxious during oral arguments in both cases.)

The legal question today was a little different, and arguably more straightforward: are states able to create new voter-registration restrictions under the motor-voter law? Arizona says yes; the Obama administration says no.

But let's not brush past the potential significance of the answer. Rick Hasen, an elections-law expert at UC-Irvine, told Sahil Kapur the "implications of this sleeper case could be profound." If the justices rule in Arizona's favor, and states can bypass the existing federal voter-registration form, "it could have a major effect on the power of the federal government to impose rules on states for running congressional elections."

---

Supporters of the federal law seemed cautiously optimistic after this morning's arguments. Doug Kendall, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, said in a statement, "A majority of the Court, including Justice Kennedy, appeared to recognize that the entire point of having a single Federal form was to streamline the voter registration process, and that approving Arizona's law would pave the way for a patchwork of 50 state forms. We are optimistic that that recognition will lead the Court to strike down Arizona's law and respect Congress' power to protect the right to vote in Federal elections."

Whether that optimism is misplaced is unclear.

As is often the case, the most ambivalent was Justice Anthony Kennedy, who channeled the views of both sides during different parts of the argument.

At one point, Kennedy wrestled with whether Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship requirement crosses a line. He asked the state’s attorney general, who was defending the law, whether states may also require proof of one’s address or date of birth when registering to vote. If so, he posited, then the federal requirement “is not worth very much.”

At another point, he launched a defense of Arizona’s actions in principle and took issue with some of the reasoning by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled against Arizona.

A ruling is expected over the summer.

Following up on Corey’s piece, I want to restate a point that seems to be forgotten a lot, especially by those who went along with the Bush-Blair claims about WMDs. Until December 2002, there was plenty of behavioral evidence to suggest that Saddam had WMDs, namely the fact that he had expelled (or, more precisely, refused to co-operate with) the UN weapons inspection program. Given the benefits from being declared WMD-free, this made little sense unless he had weapons. Equally, Bush and Blair were making statements that they knew what WMDs Saddam had and fairly accurate knowledge of their location. Again, this seemed (to me, at any rate) to make no sense if they were relying on a bluff that Saddam could easily call.

All of that changed, in December 2002, when Saddam readmitted the inspectors and declared that he had no WMDs. At that point, it suddenly became obvious (again, to me, at any rate) that Bush and Blair had been making it up. I naively supposed that it would be equally obvious to everyone else, and that, as a result it would be impossible to mobilise support for war. I was particularly struck by the unanimity with which the pro-war bloggers reproduced the ever-changing propaganda lines of the Administration. No one would be surprised now, but back then, the assumption was that disputes with people like Glenn Reynolds were a matter of honest disagreement.