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Since becoming president of the FRC in September 2003, Perkins has been a vocal opponent of LGBT equality. He opposed the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” opposes marriage equality and adoption by LGBT people.

Perkins continues to advocate and lobby the U.S. Congress to pass a federal marriage amendment to overturn state laws where same-sex marriage is legal, and to define marriage in the U.S. as between one man and one woman.

Under his leadership, the FRC was classified as an anti-gay hate group by the SPLC, which characterized the group as a source of “anti-gay propaganda,” including repeatedly conflating sexual orientation and gender identity with pedophilia.

Louisiana — which still maintains an unenforceable anti-sodomy law 10 years after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas struck down sodomy laws across the nation — recently came under national scrutiny after the East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff’s office used the law to arrest gay men for agreeing to have private, consensual sex in their homes with undercover agents.

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The city's difficult issues with suicide have been more front-and-center of late than is typical. Media coverage—usually limited to public suicides—has swirled around a spate of people jumping off the Vista Bridge, and the controversial barrier officials have put in place to prevent them.

But the problem goes far deeper than that, of course, and a new report released by the Portland Police Bureau's Behavioral Health Unit this morning offers up some stark statistics. Portland's suicide rate from April 2011 to June 2013—the study's date range—was nearly three times the national average. White males made up the overwhelming majority of the suicides police saw in that time. That number, by the way, was 202, compared to 121 homicides and traffic deaths in the same time period.

"Suicide is one of Oregon’s most persistent yet largely preventable public health problems; it is the second leading cause of death among Oregonians ages 15-34, and the eighth leading cause of
death among all Oregonians in 2010," the document says.

From the report [pdf]:

The point of releasing the data, cops say, is to get the word out that these deaths are preventable, and to encourage people to reach out to acquaintances in crisis. Here's a video that accompanied the report.

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EverythingApplePro ran various speed tests on every iPhone ever made — the newly released 5s and 5c, the 5, 4S, 4, 3GS, 3G, and even the original 2G — to demonstrate which iPhones are the fastest at shutting down, booting up, launching apps, and loading webpages.

via Business Insider

Animal Instincts Pet Condoms are touted as “pregnancy protection for dogs and cats” but they are really a campaign for San Francisco SPCA to remind people to spay or neuter their pets.

via RICK!

NBC4 Washington

Panda Cam Would Go Dark in the Event of a Government Shutdown NBC4 Washington Animal fans around the region were overjoyed to hear about the birth of the National Zoo's panda cub almost six weeks ago. As news hit Monday that the zoo's Panda Cam would go dark in the event of a government shutdown, readers took to Twitter to vent ... and more »

The on-ramp to adulthood is delayed and harder to reach for young people today, a reality that is changing the country's society and economy, according to a new report.

Ask the brassy Stanford CS department about Clinkle, the student project that's taken $25 million in venture capital and produced nothing but a video, and they'll tell you they hate it. They hate it enough, apparently, to show the world what it looks like.

When Elton John guests on an album-closing ballad for its (great) comeback record, it’s easy to forget Fall Out Boy’s members all came from the hardcore scene. And it’s not just John crooning, “You are what you love, not who loves you”—Save Rock And Roll didn’t have a lot in the way of guitars, just big, hook-laden pop songs.

But the heavy hand of producer Butch Walker won’t be buffing the upcoming Pax Am Days to a blinding sheen. The second surprise album from Fall Out Boy this year drops digitally October 15 (and on limited-edition vinyl) and re-embraces the “loud fast rules” of the old days, if “Love, Sex, Death” is any indication. The band premiered the song via Rolling Stone today to announce the album. Fall Out Boy recorded Pax Am Days with Ryan Adams over two days at his Pax Am ...

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Sick

At some point or another, you've heard the stat that American women earn just 77 cents for every dollar that men make. But what about state to state? Is it as bad in New York as, say, Ohio or Wyoming?

In a new report, the Center for American Progress offers up this coast-to-coast breakdown. The pay gap ranges all the way from a low of 15 cents in places like Vermont and Nevada up to 36 cents in Wyoming. (More story after the chart. Also note: CAP tracks what women earn compared to white men specifically, though that doesn't seem to have changed the average disparity). 

So what does this tell us? Before getting to that, we need to talk a little bit about the raw wage gap as a statistic. Because it has problems. Enough problems that my editor Derek Thompson and I strongly diverge on whether it's even a useful measure. (I think it is, he thinks it isn't.) When someone says women earn 84 cents on the dollar compared to men in New York or 70 cents on the dollar compared to men in Utah, they're comparing all female workers and all male workers at once. As a result, you sort of end up comparing apples and oranges, or in this case, software engineers and elementary school teachers. As a rule, women tend to work in lower-paying careers. They also tend to work fewer hours, thanks largely to family obligations, and often take breaks in their career to take care of children, both of which bring down their pay. When you compare women and men who work in the same kinds of jobs for similar hours and similar years, most (though not all) of the gap disappears. So the graph up above isn't really showing us the states where women face the most discrimination, in the sense of not being paid equally for equal work.* 

All of that said, I do think that on a very basic level, it shows us the states where women are having the most luck matching up financially with men, whether it's because public policy gives them a leg up in the labor force, or because the local mix of industries happens to favor women (I don't think it's an accident that hospitality-heavy Florida has a relatively small gap). Though it's not an airtight relationship, for instance, states where women hold a greater percentage of management jobs seem to have a smaller pay gap. 

Now, back to that first chart. I think there are two particularly interesting things about it. First, in almost half of all states, the pay gap is within 2 cents of the national average. It's within 4 cents in all but 16. The problem really is similarly severe in most corners of the country, regardless of how the state is governed, or what industries dominate. 

And what about the exceptions? Well, it's hard to tell what links them together. I don't know exactly what Alabama, Utah, Louisiana, West Virginia, and have in common that they'd all end up together on the low end of the graph, except maybe religious and cultural conservatism (but then, how do you explain Texas having a smaller than average pay gap?). I'm even less clear what threads together the ten states where women make at least 82 cents for every dollar men earn. It's hard to think of two economies that have less in common than New York and Nevada, yet they're ranked beside one another. All of which I think just goes to reinforce what a tricky issue the wage gap really is. 

This post originally appeared on The Atlantic.

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

On an Internet whisker-deep in cat photos, cat videos and cat memes, Grumpy Cat is the indisputable king — or, rather, queen, as the peevish feline is actually a female named Tardar Sauce. She has her own meme manager, her own book, her own book tour, a litter-pan full of web awards, a movie deal [...]

You see a lot of rants about how social media is destroying venerable old TV news and newspapers. But there's another force that's wrecking the old media way of doing things: crime. In San Francisco, there has been a rash of people stealing equipment from TV news reporters.

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If sometimes it feels like Malcolm Gladwell is just trying to troll you, well, you might be right. The influential ideas man and New Yorker writer admitted yesterday that he doesn't actually believe most of the things he argues. On the eve of Gladwell's newest release, David and Goliath, the author defended that practice and took on some of his critics in an interview with The Guardian.

Gladwell's constant contrarianism has reached the level of an eponymous adjective — Gladwellian. One of his most Gladwellian ideas was to defend performance-enhancing doping in sports from Lance Armstrong and others, likening it to a students doing their homework to overcome less-than maximum genetics. But he doesn't actually believe his own argument. Gladwell told The Guardian that he is "totally anti-doping … But what I'm trying to say is, look, we have to come up with better reasons. Our reasons suck! And when the majority has taken a position that's ill thought-through, it's appropriate to make trouble." Making trouble, to Gladwell, seems to mean taking a contrarian position and marshaling all available data in its defense.

His comparison of football to dogfighting, his assertion that football will become "ghettoized," his argument that the criticism of quote-fabricator Jonah Lehrer was just a "hysteria" — all thought-provoking anti-mainstream viewpoints, and all recognized as kind of ridiculous. And he's perfectly okay with admitting that point. "When you write about sports, you're allowed to engage in mischief," he told The Guardian. "Nothing is at stake. It's a bicycle race!" 

And he's got some words for his critics, too, who claim that he oversimplifies complicated ideas. Of course he is, and if you think that's a problem, you can just go elsewhere. "If my books appear to a reader to be oversimplified, then you shouldn't read them: you're not the audience!" he said. Feed the troll or get out of the way, he seems to say.

This all relates back to his new book David and Goliath, which tells stories about how underdogs take down the power structure. When the little guy takes on the big guys, "the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty," he explained. That could apply just as much to Gladwell's own arguments, which elicit a thoughtful conversation but won't unseat the overwhelming mainstream opinion. 

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Bridget Jones is soon to be a sad singleton once again. In an interview about the series’ forthcoming third book, Mad About The Boy, that ran in yesterday’s Sunday Times, Helen Fielding revealed that [spoiler alert, we guess] she’s killed off Mark Darcy, Jones’ “just as you are” love, presumably because a Bridget Jones book wouldn’t be interesting if its main character is actually happy. While the offing obviously doesn't mean much to anyone who’s not interested in the books or movies, it’s big news for fans, who are absolutely appalled that Fielding would kill a character so important to the series—and, of course, so tied to actor Colin Firth.

According to Fielding, Darcy dies in a car accident, five years before the events of the third book, leaving the now-51-year-old Jones a single mother of two who's dating (sigh) a 30-year-old ...

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The US military has ambitious plans—$7 billion worth—to install renewable energy at bases and other facilities across the nation. American taxpayers, of course, are footing the bill. But now they can choose to put their money into a military solar project and make a return, thanks to the crowdfunding craze.

Mosaic, a California startup that earlier this year began letting ordinary investors put in as little as $25 to help finance commercial rooftop photovoltaic arrays, today announced its first military-related project, a 12.3-megawatt (MW) installation that will put 55,189 solar panels on housing at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey. The panels will be installed on 547 homes and are expected to supply 30% of their electricity demand.

The deal is significant on two fronts. Military bases represent a huge market that will help drive down the cost of solar energy through economies of scale. Silicon Valley’s SolarCity, for instance, scored a $1 billion deal in 2011 to finance and install 371 MW of photovoltaic panels on military housing in 30 states. Second, the deal marks a new way to finance solar energy. As lucrative US tax breaks for solar and wind projects fall from 30% to 10% at the end of 2016, they will become less attractive to big banks and corporate investors currently bankrolling commercial and residential solar projects.

Enter the mom-and-pop investor.

The housing at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst is owned by a private contractor and leased to the military. Working with bank holding company CIT and True Green Capital Management, a New York investment firm, Mosaic will initially offer investors the opportunity to finance $250,000 of the $13 million project with the option to increase that amount to $3 million, according to the prospectus.

Here’s how it works: Investors sign up at Mosaic’s site and then peruse the prospectuses of available projects. If they find one they like, they invest through a bank transfer. No money is transferred if a deal isn’t fully financed. (It’s like a Kickstarter project in that sense.) The developer pays back the loan, with interest, from income generated by the monthly sale of electricity to its customers. Mosaic takes 100 basis points of the interest rate, plus an origination fee and annual platform fees, and passes the rest to investors.

The return on military solar investment is the one-month Libor rate plus 2.25% to 2.5% . As of today, that return on investment would be 2.43% to 2.68%, considerably lower than 4.5% return Mosaic has offered investors in some of its other commercial projects. Mosaic spokeswoman Katie Ullmann told Quartz that that its partner CIT preferred to use the Libor rate but that upcoming Mosaic projects would offer returns in the 4.5% to 7% range. Still, the military solar project beats by far the rates on a one-year certificate of deposit (a fixed-term savings account), currently hovering around 1%.

How did a startup that’s been crowd-funding solar projects for only nine months score such a deal? Mosaic president Billy Parish told Quartz that it came about through past work with CIT by Greg Rosen, the company’s chief investment officer. Rosen “had worked on a number of military projects prior to coming to Mosaic, including Nellis Air Force Base, which was the largest solar project in the country when it was built in 2006,” Parish said in an email.

Team Meat's Tommy Refenes wrapped his mitts around a 3D-printed prototype version of Valve's recently announced Steam controller, and offers up an insightful set of impressions regarding the precision and performance of its unique dual-trackpad setup.

Refenes first tested out Valve's controller with his studio's hyper-difficult platformer Super Meat Boy. "The configuration they had set up was simple enough," he explains. "The left circle pad acted as the directional buttons, the right acted as a big giant jump button. The big problem with touch pads / touch screens is you never know when you are actually over a button or pressing it. Valve has tried to rectify this by having some adjustable haptic feedback fire when you press one of the circle pads. Throughout my play session the haptic feedback helped with the problem, but wasn't enough to solve it."

Despite reporting issues with the prototype controller, Refenes notes that he was still able to pull off some of the game's more demanding techniques. "The button configuration worked fine for SMB," he writes. "I was able to get to the Salt factory no problem. I was able to sequence break C.H.A.D. by getting the keys before he could do his attacks. I was even able to do the bandaid the super fast way in the second level of the hospital shown here."

Continue reading Team Meat offers hands-on impressions of Valve's Steam controller

Team Meat offers hands-on impressions of Valve's Steam controller originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 15:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I told Miyazaki I love the “gratuitous motion” in his films; instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or they will sigh, or look in a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are.

"We have a word for that in Japanese," he said. "It’s called ma. Emptiness. It’s there intentionally.”

Is that like the “pillow words” that separate phrases in Japanese poetry?

"I don’t think it’s like the pillow word." He clapped his hands three or four times. "The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it’s just busyness. But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just get numb.

”

- Rogert Ebert, on Hayao Miyazaki (via fennecs)

Six of the 10 most expensive places to buy health care in the nation are in Louisiana, including Metairie, Baton Rouge and Lafayette.That’s according to a new Institute of Medicine study that attempted to examine geographic differences in health care spending among...

via @ImportantChart