Sophianotloren

Tennessee, despite being given concessions by the Obama administration that won the governor’s support, says no:

In December, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam, a Republican, got the deal he wanted from the Obama administration: Tennessee would accept more than $1 billion in federal funding to expand Medicaid, as allowed for in the Affordable Care Act, but Obama aides would allow Haslam to essentially write staunchly conservative ideas into the program’s rules for the state. He dubbed the reformed Medicaid program “Insure Tennessee.”

But the state’s chapter of Americans for Prosperity, the national conservative group whose foundation is chaired by controversial billionaire David Koch, argued Haslam was just trying to trick conservatives into implementing Obamacare in their state by giving it a new name. AFP campaigned aggressively Haslam’s plans for the next six weeks, even running radio ads blasting GOP state legislators who said they might vote for it.

On Wednesday, Haslam’s bill died in a committee of the Tennessee state senate. The vote was one of the clearest illustrations of the increasing power of AFP and other conservative groups funded in part by the Koch brothers.

The same thing happened further west:

Wyoming has become yet another state where a Republican governor’s effort to expand Medicaid has been defeated by his own Legislature.

On Friday, the Wyoming Senate shot down Gov. Matt Mead’s expansion plan, and a House committee then pulled its bill. The double whammy effectively killed the state’s chances of enacting the Obamacare option this year.

But I’m sure Republican lawmakers would react immediately to fix things if the Supreme Court finds that the Moops invaded Spain, because no Republican legislator could sit by as people went without access to medical care.

Note: All dollar figures in this post have been converted to constant 2014 dollars.

Yesterday I wrote about Greg Crespi’s paper regarding the financing what he refers to as “Harvard-style” legal education. Crespi describes this model:

By this phrase, I am referring generically to the instructional approach that originated at Harvard Law School in the late-19th century and since then has been very widely replicated. This approach requires three years of full-time legal study or the part-time equivalent thereof over a longer period, where the instruction is provided by research-oriented faculties comprised primarily of well-paid, mostly tenured scholars with relatively light teaching loads. It makes only relatively modest use of inexpensive adjunct instructors and online courses. It also includes large and expensive clinical programs, library facilities, and extensive student services. This expensive educational approach is designed primarily to prepare students for prestigious public sector positions, highly remunerative associate positions with prominent private law firms, or academic positions, often after a short-term judicial clerkship after graduation.

In the last few years there’s been some — although not nearly enough — discussion of how much law school tuition has risen since the mid-1980s. People probably focus on the last 30 years for two reasons:

(1) Many current legal academics attended law school in the 1980s, so that’s their natural baseline for comparison.

(2) The ABA publishes easily accessible statistics on changes in law school tuition starting in 1985.

In fact law school tuition started rising dramatically 30 years before that, in the mid-1950s. In what follows, I outline how at that time a Harvard-style legal education was, by contemporary standards, practically “free” even at private law schools, and indeed even at Harvard itself, let alone at public law schools. I place quotation marks around “free” because something that’s often under-appreciated is how higher education in general and post-graduate education in particular always involves very considerable opportunity costs, aside from the direct costs of tuition and other direct expenses.

For example, although resident tuition was nearly nominal at almost all public law schools well into the 1970s, and continued to be so at many even into the 1990s, the typical graduate of these schools probably incurred around $100,000 in opportunity costs by spending three postgraduate years in school rather than the workforce.

Postgraduate education, in other words, always involves a significant financial commitment/gamble, even if the student is paying little or no tuition. This only serves to highlight how utterly extraordinary the increases in law school tuition have been.

Here are tuition and fees for Harvard Law School, along with mean figures for private law schools, and resident tuition at public law schools, over the past 60 years:

Harvard Tuition and Fees (2014$)

1953: $5,586
1963: $10,243
1973: $13,703
1983: $19,985
1993: $30,455
2003: $41,676
2013: $54,173

Average Private Law School Tuition and Fees (2014$)

1953: $4,575
1963: $8,400
1973: $11,330
1983: $15,400
1993: $24,293
2003: $32,904
2013: $42,666

Average public law school resident tuition (2014$)

1953: $1,473
1963: $2,305
1973: $3.465
1983: $3,921
1993: $7,238
2003: $13,920
2013: $24,266

While the overall increase in tuition across these decades should astound us, note that the rate of increase is far from smooth. For example, in real dollars, law school tuition rose modestly – relatively speaking of course — from the early 1970s through the early 1980s, especially at public schools (A similar pattern obtains for undergraduate tuition over these same years). I suspect this has something to do with the fact that inflation was very high during these years, and that it’s more difficult to raise real prices quickly when nominal prices are doubling over the course of a decade, as they did during this time.

The massive jump in tuition during the 1950s may have been in part caused by the GI Bill, but I would have expected the original Higher Education Act, passed in 1965, to have an even greater effect. The demographics of the baby boom are no doubt also significant here (the first baby boomers started enrolling in law school in the late 1960s, and law school enrollment doubled between 1968 and 1980, in part because women began to enroll in significant numbers). It may be that per capita tuition rose relatively slowly in the 1970s and early 1980s because revenues were being driven up so quickly by larger enrollments (enrollments increased much faster than the number of law schools).

Of course it’s important to place the cost of attendance in the context of larger economic trends. Here the story is fairly straightforward:

(1) Median family income shot up between the early 1950s and the early 1970s, so much so that even though private law school tuition skyrocketed, it remained relatively affordable relative to the average family’s income (Note that in the figures below I’m using family rather than household income, because family income, which tends to be about 20% higher than household income, is probably more significant in regard to financing higher education costs). Thus while a year’s worth of Harvard Law School tuition cost 16.8% of a median family’s income in 1953, that percentage had only grown to 23.9% 20 years later, even though HLS tuition rose by an amazing 145% in real terms over this time. During these years, the growth in the income thresholds for the 95th percentile of family income and the 99th percentile of family income were comparable to the growth in median family income.

1953:

Median family income: $32,918
95th percentile: $79,168
Threshold of top one percent: $141,000

1973:

Median family income: $57,391
95th percentile: $142,941
Threshold of top one percent: $263,500

(2) Starting in the early 1970s, growth in median family income stalled out. Over the next 20 years it remained essentially flat. Meanwhile the 95th percentile of income grew moderately, and that of the threshold of the top one percent increased a great deal.

1993:

Median family income: $59,623
95th percentile: $182,588
Threshold of top one percent: $393,000

While the average American family’s income wasn’t going anywhere, and that of those at the border of what can be thought of as the lower upper class (the 95th percentile) increased relatively slowly over the course of the two decades, private law school tuition doubled, and resident public law school tuition began for the first time to become a significant part of the cost of attending law school.

(3) Over the past 20 years, this pattern has continued:

2013:

Median family income: $64,690
95th percentile: $220,553
Threshold of top one percent: $510,000

Meanwhile, private law school tuition has nearly doubled yet again, and resident tuition at public law schools has more than tripled, reaching levels that exceed Harvard’s tuition in the 1980s, even though Harvard’s tuition had by that point already quadrupled in real terms over the previous 30 years.

One final note for now: it’s often claimed that the American economy boomed in the quarter century immediately after World War II, but has grown only modestly since then, which explains why median incomes have been flat for 40 years now. This is completely false:

Per capita GDP in 1953: $17,782
Per capita GDP in 1973: $28,241
Per capita GDP in 2013: $54,780

Per capita GDP grew by 58.8% between 1953 and 1973.

Per capita GDP grew by 94% between 1973 and 2013.

Most of this several trillion dollar increase in wealth per capita has of course gone to either the extremely rich, or the ordinarily rich, or the sort of rich. Meanwhile, the cost of a “Harvard-style” legal education* has gone from something that even a middle class family could afford without going into debt, to something that has to be debt-financed to the tune of several years’ worth of an average American’s income, unless one happens to already be in the upper-upper class.

This may work out OK if you’re getting a Harvard-style education at Harvard (although at these prices even that is getting dangerous for the not-already privileged). Of course the absurdity at the core of contemporary American legal education – and to a lesser extent at the center of American higher education in general – is that a 190-odd Not Harvard Law Schools have followed Harvard’s lead into the tuition stratosphere,* in a nation in which most families are at substantially the same income levels they were 40 years ago.

*In real dollars, Harvard Law School is currently collecting fives times as much each year in expendable endowment income as it received in total tuition in 1953, when the school’s endowment was comparatively negligible.

Dear Friends:

I was asked by Ken, whom I esteem most highly and whose website "Pope Hat" is among the finest published today, to write a special guest contribution. I would like to thank Ken for this opportunity, and all of you, my most valued friends, for reading this important message.

Friends, what do you think of, when I mention the common American pony, or, as science calls it, Equus Maleficus? Like most, you probably think of fairgrounds and hayrides and smiling kids. Have you considered that behind the smiling mask that is Equus Maleficus, there lurks the grin of a hate-crazed demon? I swear it is true. I have been to the ceremonies. I have drunk the sacrificial offerings. I have spoken with the nameless devotees of the pony cult, high atop the barns, as the ponies circled below, feasting on the children, my ears ringing with the din of the screams, a din so shudderingly perverse as to shock the conscience of hardcore Satanists.

Yes. Satanists.

Make no mistake. Ponies are in league with Lucifer. After forty-three years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate conviction to tell the truth, I am here to vouch for that which "sane" men fear to utter. There is reason to believe that the pony was in fact the beast which tempted Eve into eating the forbidden fruit, for do not ponies eat the apple, sweetest of all the harvest? Yes, the HARVEST. And at the Harvest, each May Eve and Walpurgisnacht, the robed, masked figures sit gibbering before their pony idols, chanting the chants and praying the prayers to their obscene gods, the ponies, who are well sated by the blood and flesh of the innocent, the virgins. The virgins, how their screams echo round the hills and valleys, as the ponies come to take their tribute. A tribute whose cost, over the centuries, must be reckoned with that taken by Adolf Hitler himself.

Yes. Adolf Hitler. None dare call it treason, and yet it is fact, cemented in stone, that the so-called Aryan unbermensch was a devotee, nay, a high priest, of the pony cult. And at the ceremonies, the shouts and cries of the Jewish children, ripped from their mothers' bosoms and fed to the ponies by hand, caused Father Martin Heinmuller, an early convert to Nazism, the public front of the pony cult, to faint on the spot, blood bursting from his ears in an astonishing orgy of woe. This was his testimony at Nuremberg, the testimony that led to the conviction and execution of Baldur Von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth and High Epopt of the pony cult.

These things have happened. Man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralyzing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific lurking peril within, the pony, Equus Maleficus, which is the gateway to the door of death. Their hand is ever at your throat, though you see it not. "As a foulness shall ye know them." The pony is a spiritual corrupter, a ghost of fire made flesh, come to devour the good and the young. For was it not, as told in the Holy Qur'an, Al Rum, the pony that misled the Prophet Muhammad and deceived him into drinking the very wine of foulness?

Other examples, through religion and history, can be given. As for me, my time is short. The ponies come. I pray that this missive is heeded, though it be too late to save me from the gnawing teeth, the trampling hooves. Be on guard, lest they come for you.

Theodore Weinzel

Public Affairs, National Miniature Donkey Association.

A Warning To All Mankind © 2007-2014 by the authors of Popehat. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Using this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. No scraping.

This week, profiting from antiquities, public parks for billionaires, net neutrality, deleting the internet, the ethics of selfies, McDonald’s that won’t decay, and more.

 Are museums and educational organizations treating antiquities as cash cows?

In September 2014, word that the AIA-St. Louis planned to auction the Treasure of Harageh began to circulate around the web and media outlets. The auction was set for October 2, 2014, at British auction house Bonhams, with the estimated bidding price at $130,000–190,000. News of the auction prompted strong and negative reactions by scholars in the academic community. In an op-ed published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Douglas Boin and Thomas Finan, professors in the department of history at St. Louis University, wrote, “One of the things we adore about our city is that so much of its art and culture are free. Unfortunately, the St. Louis Society of the Archaeological Institute of America has their own ideas about art and culture—and how to profit from it.”

 This is how the FCC plans to ensure net neutrality:

Originally, I believed that the FCC could assure internet openness through a determination of “commercial reasonableness” under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. While a recent court decision seemed to draw a roadmap for using this approach, I became concerned that this relatively new concept might, down the road, be interpreted to mean what is reasonable for commercial interests, not consumers.

That is why I am proposing that the FCC use its Title II authority to implement and enforce open internet protections.

 Writer Inga Saffron believes billionaires in the US are turning our public parks into personal playgrounds:

But the billionaire’s island, as some New Yorkers have called the project, is the latest, most extreme example of how big money and business elites are warping the way America’s urban parks are funded, widening the amenities gap between rich and poor neighborhoods. Until the 1980s, upkeep of America’s urban parks was mainly the responsibility of city parks departments. But as the crises of the 1960s and 1970s hollowed out municipal budgets, public spaces were increasingly neglected. Elegant limestone balustrades crumbled, and graffiti ran wild as kudzu. Urban parks became scary, unsafe places. The deterioration of those public spaces was a big factor in driving people out of American cities.

 Scenes from life inside ISIS-controlled (aka Islamic State) Mosul, with illustrations by Molly Crabapple:

Christians once constituted the largest religious minority in Nineveh, the province of which Mosul is the capital. Shortly after capturing Nineveh province, ISIS gave non-Sunni minorities an ultimatum: convert, pay extra taxes, or “face the sword.” Under those conditions, the sole alternative left for Christians was to depart, leaving their property behind. The jihadist group claimed these properties as its own. They were labeled with the discriminatory Arabic mark “ن,” the equivalent of the letter “N” [short for Nasrani, or “Christian”]. This shop is one of many which was commandeered merely because its owner is a Christian. Thousands of Christians lived in Mosul. Some were rich. Many were poor. All were uprooted from a past that dates back thousands of years.

 In case you thought the internet was forever, writer Carter Maness discusses the fact that most of the blogs he has written for have been deleted, leaving no trace online. He writes:

We assume everything we publish online will be preserved. But websites that pay for writing are businesses. They get sold, forgotten and broken. Eventually, someone flips the switch and pulls it all down. Hosting charges are eliminated, and domain names slip quietly back into the pool. What’s left behind once the cache clears? As I found with that pitch at the end of 2014, my writing resume is now oddly incomplete and unverifiable. Ex-editors can provide references, but I have surprisingly few examples of published work to show beyond scanned print features from my early days, so I’ve started backing up my work.

For media companies deleting their sites, legacy doesn’t matter; the work carries no intrinsic value if there is no business remaining to capitalize on it. I asked if RCRD LBL still existed on a server somewhere. It apparently does; I was invited to purchase it for next to nothing. I could pay for the hosting, flip the switch on, and all my work would return. But I’d never really look at it. Then, eventually, I would stop paying the bills, too.

 Portland, Oregon, decided to save its namesake building by Michael Graves, which many consider one of the most iconic postmodern buildings. Here’s the story and why many people don’t “get” pomo:

It isn’t just my students who don’t get PoMo. Or the good people of Portland. John King, the architecture critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote last year of a goofy downtown San Francisco clock tower, circa 1989, that was about to be lopped off from its perch on a former savings and loan headquarters. When built, it was the sort of faux historical flourish that city planners believed enhanced the character of historic neighborhoods. “PoMo,” King wrote, is the embarrassing uncle who won’t shut up about the first time he saw Depeche Mode.”

 One Bollywood songwriter was told by India’s Central Board of Film Certification that he couldn’t use the name “Bombay” in a song, since authorities are enforcing the city’s post-1995 name, Mumbai. Very strange:

He chose “Bombay” in the second line of the song, he said, because he needed a rhyme with “today.” But by doing so, Mr. Joshi stumbled into one of India’s many unresolved tugs of war over history and identity …

“If the name of this city has been changed, it’s only fair that we adhere to the new name,” said Meenal Baghel, editor of The Mumbai Mirror, a daily newspaper. “But should it have been bleeped as if it is a four-letter word? I think that’s ridiculous.”

The film censor’s decision drew considerable criticism and mockery on Monday, but the board’s top official, Pahlaj Nihalani, said he stood by the decision, which was made by his predecessor. (Mr. Nihalani became the board’s chairman in January.)

Here’s the song without the bleep:

 How a crazy coincidence sparked a plagiarism inquiry at the Telegraph newspaper. Here’s a taste:

 Writing for BuzzFeed, Joseph Bernstein explores the strange history of the “internet’s favorite anti-semitic image“:

What is most significant about this image isn’t the thing itself — there is far more creative, and far more disturbing, anti-Jewish imagery out there — but its sheer ubiquity. A Google reverse image search for “Jew-bwa-ha-ha.gif,” as the file is most frequently, but not always, named, returns 1,210 matches. It’s unquestionably the most popular anti-Semitic image on the internet, and if one pauses to think about the scope and reach of the internet, it’s easy to make an argument that “Jew-bwa-ha-ha.gif” is the most widely seen anti-Semitic image in history.

So where did it come from, and how is it used?

 BuzzFeed published its new editorial standards and ethics guidelines, including this bit about selfies:

Selfies are fantastic and you should take them as often as possible with friends and loved ones. But when celebrity visitors come to a BuzzFeed office, please don’t ask for photographs unless the staffer who brought them in has checked that it’s OK. BuzzFeed News reporters should use good judgment when taking images with their subjects. Ultimately, all staffers should answer this question when it comes to photographs: “Would taking a photo with this subject undermine the work I’m doing?”

 After the economic crash in 2008/9, the McDonald’s fast-food chain decided to close its restaurants in Iceland. On October 30, 2009, the day before one closed down,  Hjörtur Smárason went to McDonald’s and bought a burger. “Not to eat, but to keep and it was put in the original emballage on a garage shelf,” the website explains. “Three years later he opened it again to find it looking exactly like it was when he left it. So he donated it to the national museum in Iceland where it was in storage for a year.” Now, it’s on display at Bus Hostel Reykjavik in Iceland, and there’s also a live video stream where you watch the hamburger rot on live camera — though it looks rather untouched. This says a lot about the state of fast food:

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

Update 12/2016: Redsea has seen a lot of development since this post was written; see Redsea 0.7, a lightweight RDS decoder.

redsea is a command-line RDS decoder. I originally wrote it as a script to decode RDS from demultiplexed FM stereo sound. Later I've experimented with other ways to read the bits, and the latest addition is to support the RTL-SDR television receiver via the rtl_fm tool.

Redsea is on GitHub. It has minimal dependencies (perl core modules, C standard library, rtl-sdr command-line tools) and has been tested to work on OSX and Linux with good enough FM reception. All test results, ideas, and pull requests are welcome.

What it says

The program prints out decoded RDS groups, one group per line. Each group will contain a PI code identifying the station plus varying other data, depending on the group type. The below picture explains the types of data you'll probably most often encounter.

A more verbose output can be enabled with the -l option (it contains the same information though). The -t option prefixes all groups with an ISO timestamp.

How it works

The DSP side of my program, named rtl_redsea, is written in C99. It's a synchronous DBPSK receiver that first bandpass filters ① the multiplex signal. A PLL locks onto the 19 kHz stereo pilot tone; its third harmonic (57 kHz) is used to regenerate the RDS subcarrier. Dividing it by 16 also gives us the 1187.5 Hz clock frequency. Phase offsets of these derived signals are adjusted separately.

The local 57 kHz carrier is synchronized so that the constellation lines up on the real axis, so we can work on the real part only ②. Biphase symbols are multiplied by the square-wave clock and integrated ③ over a clock period, and then dumped into a delta decoder ④, which outputs the binary data as bit strings into stdout ⑤.

Signal quality is estimated a couple of times per second by counting the number of "suspicious" integrated biphase symbols, i.e. symbols with halves of opposite signs. The symbols are being sampled with a 180° phase shift as well, and we can switch to that stream if it seems to produce better results.

This low-throughput binary string data is then handled by redsea.pl via a pipe. Synchronization and error detection/correction happens there, as well as decoding. Group data is then displayed on the terminal, in semi-human-readable form.

Future

My ultimate goal is to have a tool useful for FM DX, i.e. pretty good noise resistance.

A study of students in Israel by Victor Lavy and Edith Sand has discovered a surprising result…or maybe not so surprising to you, but I was rather shocked. Math teachers score girls’ performance lower when they know their identities.

In math, the girls outscored the boys in the exam graded anonymously, but the boys outscored the girls when graded by teachers who knew their names. The effect was not the same for tests on other subjects, like English and Hebrew. The researchers concluded that in math and science, the teachers overestimated the boys’ abilities and underestimated the girls’, and that this had long-term effects on students’ attitudes toward the subjects.

For example, when the same students reached junior high and high school, the economists analyzed their performance on national exams. The boys who had been encouraged when they were younger performed significantly better.

They also tracked the advanced math and science courses that students chose to take in high school. After controlling for other factors that might affect their choices, they concluded that the girls who had been discouraged by their elementary schoolteachers were much less likely than the boys to take advanced courses.

But…math. Isn’t that one of those incredibly objective disciplines in which questions all have a right answer and a best method, and there’s no wiggle room for adjusting a score? Just like all of science — there’s no subjectivity here at all.

No, when you’re evaluating how well students think, there’s always lots of room for taking student knowledge into account. I teach genetics, and it’s a good example: I grade exams with my nice brief key by my side, and when students come up with the same answers I do, it’s easy and fast. But when they don’t, I have to look much more closely. Did they just make an arithmetic error in the last step? Did they understand the basic concepts, but just fail to integrate them all? Did they demonstrate a complete lack of comprehension of basic Mendelian principles? I have to see some sign of understanding in the work to make the effort to track through the problem more carefully, and it would be tempting to, for instance, know that this student did poorly on their last exam, so it’s not worth the effort to try and figure out what dumb mistake they made this time.

(I take steps to avoid that trap: I grade papers anonymously, not looking at the name on the first page.)

But I have a hard time imagining taking a negative attitude towards a math problem on the basis of the solver’s sex. Apparently it’s common enough that it actively skews assessments downward, though.

I’m familiar with the Swedish study that showed a pervasive bias against women scientists on the job market, but it’s clear the problem goes much deeper: women are being discouraged from going into math as early as middle school.

The paper also tried to puzzle out what was going on with these teachers, and found some other interesting correlations.

Older and single teachers seem to favor boys over girls: the coefficient of a dummy indicator of being older than 50 years old is positive and significant (0.206, SE=0.104), and so is the estimate of the indicator for single teachers (0.315, SE=0.202). The estimated coefficient for teachers from Europe-North America origin is negatively and significantly correlated with teachers’ biases (-0.204, SE=0.113). The other individual characteristics that we examined are being married (positive but insignificant) and the number of children and the proportion of daughters, both of which have negative coefficient but not significantly different from zero.

So older teachers are more biased in favor of boys; there’s hope that that effect will diminish as a newer generation of teachers takes over. I don’t think we can insist that teachers get married.

I also wondered about the effect of the teacher’s sex on this problem. Buried deep in the paper is an interesting revelation: they couldn’t look at that because all of the teachers in their sample were women. We learn two things from that, of course: that women can propagate sexist attitudes (no surprise), and that teaching is a deeply gendered profession. The gender distribution in the teaching profession also has to be sending a message to girls and boys.

Here’s the authors’ conclusion.

We also find that favoritism of boys among math and science teachers has an especially large and positive effect on boys math test score and on their successfully completion of advance math and science studies in high school; the respective effect on girls is negative and statistically significant. The estimates of the direct-subject effect in math are of special interest because of the considerable gender gap in math achievements and its impact on future labor market outcomes. Moreover, since this gap in math achievement partly results from teachers’ stereotypical biases against girls in mathematics, eliminating these biases will go a long way toward reducing the math achievements gender gap, and it will also decrease the gender gap in enrollment in advanced math studies. The impact on the various end of high school matriculation outcomes carries meaningful economic consequences because these high stakes outcomes affect sharply the quantity and quality of postsecondary schooling and impact earnings at adulthood as well.

Another message we should take away from this: teaching is important. All you primary school teachers out there are shaping society as a whole.

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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weowned8000saladplates:

completelyfrozen:

mediamattersforamerica:

Fox’s Steve Doocy is worried Frozen is “empowering girls by turning our men into fools and villains.” WHAT?

Just watch the full video. I have never seen such bullshit in my life.

The exact definition of what a “meninist” is. Love it. Class A misogyny and ignorance.

thepeopleofsingapore:

"When I was a child, girls would never wear trousers. But then women’s lib came along and they started to wear them all the time. So I figured, if women are allowed to wear trousers, men should be allowed to wear skirts. That’s liberation too, right? So I started with a kilt and realised I quite liked it. After that I tried other skirts. I now I wear them regularly. Not all the time mind you - just whenever I feel like it.

People sometimes tease me and ask why I am wearing a woman’s skirt. But look at me. I am quite clearly a man. So this is not a woman’s skirt. It’s MY skirt. It’s a man’s skirt.”

alex-v-hernandez:

aegontargaryen:

reason no #23940303 why miles morales makes me happy

wormwoman

alex-v-hernandez:

batsvsupes:

Redemption

wormwoman

actionables:

okay now tell me that sex ed is not important

i’m so happy they’re trying to help eachother tho >.

“An outbreak of the measles at Kenneth Copeland’s Texas megachurch has gotten some attention because (1) measles is something children are generally vaccinated for, these days and (2) Kenneth Copeland is, of course, an anti-vaccine crackpot. In what seems to be yet another bitterly ironic attempt by God to teach noisy religious fundamentalists what-for, the church has thus become the epicenter of a small but worrisome outbreak that has so far infected 10 and resulted in the Department of State Health Services issuing an alert spanning North Texas.”

- Anti-vaccine megachurch hit with measles epidemic, now offering free vaccinations

thefaceshekeepsinajarbythedoor:

LET THE BEES GET HER

aspiringdoctors:

Thank you!

pleatedjeans:

someone is an idiot [x]

NICKERS and SICKERS

Neil Armstrong’s purse: First moonwalker had hidden bag of Apollo 11 artifacts | collectSPACE.

Neil Armstrong had a secret stash of moon landing mementos.

The first man to walk on the moon kept a bag full of small parts from the lunar module “Eagle” that he and his Apollo 11 crewmate Buzz Aldrin famously piloted to a landing at Tranquility Base on July 20, 1969. The stowage bag was discovered by Armstrong’s widow after he died in 2012.

“I received an email from Carol Armstrong that she had located in one of Neil’s closets a white cloth bag filled with assorted small items that looked like they may have come from a spacecraft,” Allan Needell, the Apollo curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, wrote in a blog published on Friday (Feb. 6). “Needless to say, for a curator of a collection of space artifacts, it is hard to imagine anything more exciting.”

The bag, itself flown to the moon, was referred to as the “McDivitt purse,” after the Apollo 9 astronaut whose idea it was to include aboard the spacecraft.

Read more & The Armstrong Purse: Flown Apollo 11 Lunar Artifacts.

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Czech: A free word order language. Yoda speaks consistently in SOV. Interestingly enough, putting an object before a verb does sound unusual to most speakers of Czech.
Estonian: A free word order language. Yoda retains the English OSV order. This is grammatical in Estonian, but does make it seem as though Yoda is constantly stressing the object phrase as the main point of his statements. This gives his speech an unusual quality.
French: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV.
German: An SVO or SOV language. Yoda brings the Object to the front (OSV), like in English.
Hungarian: A free word order language. There is nothing unusual about Yoda’s speech.
Italian: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV. Note: OSV is also the syntax used in the Italian of the less-proficient speakers of Italian from the region of Sardinia.
Japanese: An SOV language. Yoda seems to use a more or less correct syntax, with a more archaic vocabulary.
Korean: An SOV language. Nothing is unusual about Yoda’s grammar.
Norwegian: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV.
Romanian: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV. He also places adjectives before the noun instead of after the noun, and uses an archaic form of the future tense.
Spanish: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV.
Turkish: An SOV language. Yoda speaks in OSV. Note: This order is also used in classical Ottoman poetry, so the syntax may have been chosen in order to emphasize Yoda’s wisdom or age.

In her project Seeing Networks, author Ingrid Burrington seeks to better understand the scale and ubiquity of the Internet by examining its physical infrastructure. Her project is currently focused on New York City, where she has identified all manner of Internet infrastructure, including various antenna, buildings, manhole covers, and street markings. The project can be viewed on her website and in an upcoming book, Networks of New York: An Internet Infrastructure Field Guide. The book can be pre-ordered or it can be found at Eyebeam’s 2015 Annual Showcase in Brooklyn through February 21, 2015.

“A Distributed Antenna System (DAS) is basically a way to expand a cell network’s reach, adding capacity in under-covered areas. They’re a little easier to find on the street because they’re not on top of buildings–they’re attached to street poles and linked to underground fiber-optic networks. If you ever see an orange cable marking going into a street pole, look up. You’ll probably see a DAS.”

“Level 3 Communications began trading on NASAQ in 1998 and received its franchise to build a fiber optic network in New York City in 1999. They are a major Tier 1 network, which means that their network has a direct connection to every other network online without paying fees to do so. In 2012, Level 3 received a $411 million contract from the Department of Defense’s Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) to provide fiber cable and maintenance support to DoD networks. This is just something that is interesting to know.”

images by Ingrid Burrington

via Gothamist

I mean, I guess? But not really. Here’s a few things about when people say stuff like “cis het guys are fucking disgusting.”

1. When it comes to harmful comments, being told that cis heterosexual guys are shitheads is the bottom of the barrel.

Do you know why it doesn’t really bother me when I hear shitty things about cishet guys? Because on the wide fucking spectrum of gender and sexuality, we have it easiest by a fucking MILE.

We have the most privilege and the least resistance in a LOT of things. We never have to deal with our actions being called into questions and we’re allowed a stupid and ridiculous amount of wiggle rooms with ideas like “boys will be boys.” 

We can do things women would get crucified for doing. Sleeping around doesn’t make us “slutty,” it makes us “studs.” Spending a lot of time focusing on our look and style doesn’t make us “shallow,” it makes us “classy,” even though neckbeard fedora MRA dickheads have ruined that word.

So if a woman wants to call cishet guys gross, it’s kinda like calling a white dude a cracker. You can’t be racist or sexist to the people who are in power, because it’s an institutionalized thing.

2. Here’s the thing. Straight guys are kiiiinda the worst.

I’m sorry, but have you SEEN other dudes? Jesus christ, we’re fucking awful.

It’s gotten so bad that literally like 80 percent of the time I’ve begun to talk to a new girl through the internet, dating sites, tumblr or texting, they seriously make a point to say something like “holy fuck I’m so glad you can have an actual conversation.”

When I see screenshots of dudes texting it’s so fucking terrible. This “what would u do if I was there right now lol” bullshit is so disgusting, charmless, lame and fucking pathetic, it reminds me of me when I was like 18 and I fucking hate 18 year old me. He’s a sexist and a dipshit.

And that’s not even the worst of it. This isn’t even touching the sort of hatred and hostility that a LOT of men have when it comes to rejection. I’ve SEEN conversations women have had with men where, once the woman rejects the guy as politely as she can, he immediately turns on her.

As soon as he has to fathom the idea of a woman not wanting him to shove his terrible dick inside her for 20 seconds, he gets fucking furious. He insults her weight, appearance, anything he knows she might be insecure about. It’s horrible and disgusting.

This is just a SMALL part of the shitty things that cishet guys are capable of because we’re taught to think of ourselves as kings who, if the women are lucky enough, will bestow our kingly dick and balls upon them.

This isn’t even TOUCHING the dangerous ideas of the friend zone or how dehumanizing and manipulative it is, but I’ve talked about that before, mostly because I used to be one of those white knight dudes and I feel horrible about it to this day.

3. The most terrible thing to men? IS MEN.

Somehow, MRAs got this idea that feminism is about killing men and taking their place or something. That just goes to show why feminism has to exist, because somehow men’s rights activists took a movement about women and made it about them.

But here’s the thing. The terrible shit that happens to men? We pretty much do all of it to ourselves.

First of all, there’s the idea of toxic masculinity. We raise boys to believe that they have to be tough. “boys don’t cry,” we try and tell them. And because of this, they feel pressured to be tough and to feel nothing, so they’re emotionally stunted and filled with anger.

Second of all, we throw out dangerous ideas that grant them more freedom to be shitty to each other. “boys will be boys,” we say as we write off bad and violent behavior. 

Let’s look at that mixture. We’re telling young boys that they aren’t free to express their emotions in the natural way, so they end up bottling up everything. Then, we grant them the freedom to be physically and verbally aggressive to other people.

That’s a dangerous mixture.

Even beyond that, MRAs are so quick to shout “things are bad for men too” at so many things, then when presented with those ideas, they write them off as invalid.

Whenever we talk about the statistics of women who are raped and how it’s a problem and a crime of aggression, men are so quick to say things like “Men get raped too!”

But if you look on Facebook, as soon as someone posts an article about some 35 year old teacher who raped a 17 year old boy, it’ll literally only be the men who say things like “heh, that boy is so lucky” or “wish I had a teacher like that!”

do you know what it means to claim that men are also raped, and then immediately joke about how lucky it is for a man to be raped by a woman?

It means that you don’t give a fuck about other men. It means that you don’t give a fuck about other human beings. It means that literally the only reason that you said it, without caring about the men who are hurt in those crimes, is because you want to take attention away from the VASTLY higher number of women who are raped and make it about you.

That is why women need feminism.

And that is why I don’t mind seeing jokes about straight(ish) dudes like me on tumblr.

nitatyndall:

mercurialgurl:

kuvira-is-my-bae:

wonkistan:

Reader Chris passes along an article about differences in American Sign Language usage between white and African-American signers. Researchers investigating what they call Black ASL found significant variations in signs, signing space, and facial cues. They explain:

Black ASL is not just a slang form of signing. Instead, think of the two signing systems as comparable to American and British English: similar but with differences that follow regular patterns and a lot of variation in individual usage.

They hypothesize that these differences began in segregated learning environments, and continue to evolve in Black social spaces. The whole article is worth a read.

Thanks, Chris, and remember — you can submit Wonk-worthy links through our ask or via email!

ETA, 9/24/12: Many of you have brought up the use of the word “mainstream” in this infographic. Better choices definitely exist, since this word rings of othering. We appreciate your nuanced and attentive readership!

This is really cool!

this is awesome i was not aware of this

If you want more information, Dr. Joseph Hill has it: He’s Deaf himself and has a PhD in Linguistics from Gallaudet University, too, and created a really informative video about the history and structure of Black ASL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7ooYqdEdUY

(turn on Closed Captionings to understand the signs) 

vaspider:

genderfuckedover:

thewomanfromitaly:

i-am-river:

So, i read this awful article using bathroom “scare tactics,” which was claiming that trans women are potential rapists. “Men” who dress as women to gain access to women only spaces and force them self on women. This really upset me and i had a bit of a Twitter rant. They were read by others and i was urged to post them in other media also, so i am posting them here. (Edited together in easy reading format from top to bottom.)

This is the link in the first tweet about how there are no cases of a trans woman attacking a cis woman in public restrooms: Link 1.

This is the link in the second tweet about the cases where trans people are assaulted in the bathroom by cis people: Link 2.

if you’re cis and you follow me i’m gonna need you to reblog this

don’t care if you’re cis or trans, this is important.

Be an ally. Police the bathroom police.

wreckingbally:

Jeffrey Cranor on the Anti-Vaccines Nonsense

Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad could be here, right now.

“The class-action lawsuit featuring more than 700 civilly committed sex offenders, many from Moose Lake, will go to trial in a St. Paul courtroom beginning Monday after a judge denied the state and its defendants a summary judgment earlier this week.”

Link to article