Further proof that love is a sham (as if I needed it): in an upcoming Season 27 episode of The Simpsons, Marge and Homer are set to legally separate.
Homer will reportedly leave Marge and the kids for a pharmacist voiced by Lena Dunham, and though many a Internet user has voiced dismay that the sanctity of cartoon marriage is once again being undermined, The Verge points out that the Simpsons have technically been separated for much of the series.
According to The Verge, Homer files for divorce in the Season 8 episode “Millhouse Divided” but remarries Marge at the end of the episode, a marriage that was determined in Season 20’s “Wedding for Disaster” to have been unofficial. In other words, the pair were technically unmarried for 12 seasons.
TV, much like love, is weird. What do you think of the big break-up, gang?
Yesterday, the Health Committee of the California State Assembly approved Senate Bill 277, which would bring an end to the state's practice of allowing parents to claim a personal exemption to the state's mandatory childhood vaccinations. Should the full Assembly and governor approve the bill, the only exemptions that would be allowed would require a doctor to document that vaccination poses a health risk.
Currently, state law requires any school, nursery, day care, etc.—either public or private—to have documentation of vaccinations against common childhood diseases before admitting any student. But the law also allows a personal belief exemption, wherein parents can simply claim that vaccination is against their convictions. While the state's immunization levels as a whole remain high, parents who ask for personal exemptions often cluster in the same communities, which has fostered outbreaks of several preventable diseases.
This situation has prompted state legislators to act to eliminate these exemptions. But the move has drawn some angry opposition. According to the Sacramento Bee, many parents have shown up for hearings about the bill to claim that vaccines cause various harms to children. And opposition to the bill within the legislature has mostly focused on it as an issue of personal freedom.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, Intel's CEO Brian Krzanich pledged that the company would commit $300 million to improve diversity in tech. The statement came after the company found itself embroiled in controversy just a few months before, when it pulled an advertising campaign from gaming website Gamasutra after GamerGate supporters were displeased with a “controversial” article.
According to the Associated Press, Intel's new Diversity Fund will overlap somewhat with the $300 million pledge. Still, Intel said, the capital fund won't overlap completely, raising the company's diversity commitment to more than $300 million, although Intel did not say by how much.
Rachid Ben Othman, 56, wore a white linen button-down and a pair of khaki shorts that showed his knees for Tunisia’s first Slutwalk.
Technically named the Worldwide Day of the Miniskirt, the event was held in Tunis on June 5, and was modeled after Canada’s 2011 Slutwalk campaign. Ben Othman, president of Tunisia’s League for the Defense of Secularism and Freedom, co-organized the protest with feminist activist Najet Bayoudh, “in solidarity with Algerian women and with oppressed women all over the world.”
In early May 2015, an Algerian student was banned from sitting her law school exams because her skirt was deemed inappropriately short. “This is a coup de colère in response to what happened in Algeria,” Ben Othman told Quartz before the protest started on Avenue Bourguiba, the main artery that cuts through Tunis’s downtown. “It is also to say to the Islamists [here] that a woman is not a slave; her liberties belong to her.”
But the protestors were a small presence; fewer than ten women—and even fewer men—showed up in a collection of shorts, dresses, and skirts. More didn’t show because “women are scared,” protestor Loola, 65, explained. “Many people told me not to come here because [wearing a miniskirt is] a way of making a woman an object,” another female protester said. “But putting a woman in a headscarf makes her an object as well.
Jennifer Ciochon(Sarah Souli)
There weren’t enough protesters to march, so they stood in a small semi-circle. A crowd amassed. Some passers-by began arguing with the protestors, but most people just stopped to stare. A few men stood close to the women, their eyes travelling up their bare legs.
Anja, 21, was walking down the street when she decided to pause and watch the event unfold. “I wouldn’t wear a miniskirt on the street here because it attracts too much attention,” she said, arms folded across her chest.
Basma, 53, was one of the first to arrive at the protest, pulling off the flowing, flowered skirt that reaches her ankles to reveal a denim miniskirt. “I didn’t want to attract attention in the cab ride over,” she explained. But attracting attention is undoubtedly what a Slutwalk in a Muslim country does, even in a region with secular leanings and a tourism industry that brings plenty of bare-limbed Europeans into town on vacation.
Women’s rights are regressing
Tunisian women cast their first ballot in 1957. By 1962 they had access to birth control, and in 1965 abortion was legalized, ten years before its former colonizer, France. Still, the fight for gender equality is an ongoing struggle in this country; sexual violence and harassment at home and at the hands of the state has remained a reality for women in Tunisia for decades.
Although Tunisia’s new constitution explicitly stipulates that “the state is obliged to act through public authorities by taking measures to eliminate all forms of violence against women,” many of the Slutwalk protesters lamented that their rights have regressed since Tunisia’s 2011 revolution.
“There is a phenomenon of fear and frustration with Tunisian men,” protestor Dalinda, 54, said as she smoothed the front of her blue and green patterned sundress. “Things have changed a lot after the revolution, it did not used to be this way. My mother and grandmother talked about how different things were.”
Nadim, 19, stopped to watch the protest, although he doesn’t agree with its message. “Especially after the revolution, men and women are equal,” he told Quartz. “The law protects women more than men.” From his perspective, there are more important issues to discuss, namely petrol.
Earlier in the day, a separate protest organized by the League for the Protection of the Revolution (LPR), an Islamist group dedicated to preserving the achievements of the revolution and “reinforcing Tunisia’s Arab-Muslim identity,” kicked off a few blocks further down Avenue Bourguiba. Nearly four hundred people attended that march, protesting corruption and the lack of transparency surrounding the country’s natural resources.
When the rival demonstration was violently put down by the police, several dozen female protesters, mostly in headscarves, migrated down the street to find themselves in front of a group of bare-legged women. “Maxi, mini! Where is the petrol?” they shouted at the Slutwalk protestors, clapping their hands and ululating.
The false divide: secularism vs. religion
One driving wedge in the Arab world’s discussion of gender equality is a perceived incompatibility between secular values and religion. Many attending the miniskirt protest lamented Tunisia’s Islamists, equating Islam and religious dress with “regression.” “I am against the veil,” Ben Othman said, “because it’s never been a choice. It’s something that’s been imposed since childhood.”
Secular feminism, on the other hand, has been accused of boxing out entire segments of the Tunisian population. Amel Grami, professor of gender studies at Manouba University, told Al Jazeera in 2014 that “feminist activists in Tunisia have committed serious errors by developing into an elitist movement, opting to ignore marginalized women and adopting a western model of feminist activism.”
Jennifer Ciochon(Sarah Souli)
When Egyptian activist Mona El Tahawy published her controversial piece in Foreign Policy entitled “Why do They Hate Us?” in 2012, she was lambasted by feminist activists who accused her of reducing the agency of Arab women and succumbing to stereotypes of Islam. Tunisian activist Amina Sboui, who gained headlines after posting topless pictures of herself on Facebook to bring attention to “demands for women’s liberation in a patriarchal society,” left the Sweden-based and often topless feminist organization Femen, after accusing it of Islamophobia.
Islam is an inextricable part of the Arab world’s history, language, and culture, even where secular characteristics are also prominent. These issues are often presented as though women must choose between their religion or their human rights, but the reality in these countries is necessarily more complex. Sometimes, the fight for gender equality can even be a reason for unity.
Butyana, 46, arrived at the Slutwalk clad in a gray headscarf and aviators, after the police shut down the petrol protest she was previously attending. “Of course I support these women,” she says, throwing her fist up in solidarity with some of the Slutwalk protestors.
Her friend Zohra, 49, nods in agreement. “My daughter doesn’t wear the headscarf,” she tells Quartz. “She lives her life, has her boyfriend, wears her miniskirts.”
For them, Tunisia’s first Slutwalk does not symbolize a divide between women in the country. “Today it’s the miniskirt, tomorrow it’s my veil,” says Zohra. “My enemies are not my sisters, these women. My enemy is the machismo that is found in the family and in the political state.”
In the past few years, science has lurched closer to envisioning habitable Mars, though at the moment estimates for creating breathable oxygen range from hundreds to 100,000 years in the future, the soil is currently toxic to astronauts, and travel is so unwieldy that scientists have proposed "printing" humans on Mars. So why not make Earth's increasingly inhospitable deserts greener?
the weirdest thing about the perception of body hair on women is that we’re trying to be edgy or making a statement, but it’s the exact opposite. It’s us not trying at all. We’re just existing as we are.
God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs. Man writes review. Dinosaurs eat man. Woman and lady dinosaurs inherit the earth and talk about nothing but tampons and makeup.
There’s an almost Gaia-ist conception of how dinosaurs might solve their own crises and in a (partial) nod to contemporary views, we get a heroine who can take out dinosaurs with a stun gun and also run very fast away from them in heels. All these dinosaurs are female, which incidentally puts Jurassic World in the clear as far as the Bechdel test is concerned.
Dr. Satler would like a word with you later.
But for now, we’ll take up the discussion. While there are some motherhood themes explored in the film, I can’t say I see what Bradshaw is referring to as far as the female dinosaurs representing the mythological mother goddess.
That aside, he also has no idea how The Bechdel Test works.
The Bechdel Test (named for cartoonist Allison Bechdel) is not meant to be a be-all, end-all on the discussion of feminism or sexism in media but rather a jumping off point for discussion, showing how often these three, seemingly basic qualifications, aren’t met. The test:
1. It includes at least two women,
2. who have at least one conversation,
3. about something other than a man or men.
You could make the argument for dinosaurs to count toward the test in say, The Land Before Time, but when you’re discussing a film with actual humans in it (though we have discussed robots before), female dinosaurs don’t count toward representation! Also, Bradshaw would have to be fluent in velociraptor, Indominus, etc. in order to know if the dinosaurs conversations were about anything but men. Since I fell asleep in dino-languages class, if I had to guess from context cues, that Raptor Gang was having nothing but conversations about dudes in Jurassic World.
The film very well may pass The Bechdel Test, I only saw the film a few days ago but I can’t recall if Bryce Dallas Howard and Lauren Lapkus meet the criteria in the control room scenes (no other pair does), but one thing’s for sure—I love lady dinosaurs.
'Sherman noted in one fell swoop that everybody thinks he is better than Cromartie, his team is better than Cromartie's, and that Cromartie's greatest professional accomplishments are so unimportant that he couldn't be bothered with them due to his other obligations.'
Richard Sherman thinks Antonio Cromartie needs to be more thankful.
"That was unfortunate," Sherman said Tuesday after Seattle finished an OTA session. "You would think after me helping him get a Pro Bowl bid (for the 2014 season) ... We went to the Super Bowl and he wouldn't have made it to the Pro Bowl otherwise. And now he's talking bad."
Sherman was one of eight cornerbacks voted into the Pro Bowl by fans, coaches and players, while Cromartie was not. But since the Pro Bowl is now the week before the Super Bowl, players on teams in the Super Bowl can skip it. Sherman and the Seahawks were in the Super Bowl this year, so he couldn't play, and his roster spot went to Cromartie. And Sherman thinks Cromartie should be a bit more grateful.
Actually getting into an argument with Cromartie would've been fun, but instead Sherman noted in one fell swoop that everybody thinks he is better than Cromartie, his team is better than Cromartie's and that Cromartie's greatest professional accomplishments are so unimportant to Sherman, that Sherman couldn't be bothered with them due to his other obligations.
theodp writes: Never underestimate the ability of tech and its leaders to create a crisis. The S.F. Chronicle's Jill Tucker reports that the San Francisco School Board unanimously voted Tuesday to ensure every student in the district gets a computer science education, with coursework offered in every grade from preschool through high school, a first for a public school district. Tech companies, including Salesforce.com, as well as foundations and community groups, are expected to pitch in funding and other technical support to create the new coursework, equip schools and train staff to teach it. From Resolution No. 155-26A2 (PDF), In Support of Expanding Computer Science and Digital Learning to All Students at All Schools from Pre-K to 12th Grade: 1. "All students are capable of making sense of computer science in ways that are creative, interactive, and relevant." 2. "All students, from pre-K to 12, deserve access to rigorous and culturally meaningful computer science education and should be held to high expectations for interacting with the curriculum." 3. "Students' access to and achievement in computer science must not be predictable on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, language, religion, sexual orientation, cultural affiliation, or special needs." MissionLocal has a two-page SFUSD flyer on the project, which aims to illustrate the "importance of computer science" with the same Code.org jobs infographic that Microsoft used to help achieve its stated goal of creating a national K-12 CS crisis, and demonstrate "disparities in accessing CS education" for SFUSD's 57,000 students with a small-sample-size-be-damned bar chart of the racial demographics of the school district's 209 AP Computer Science participants (181 Asian, 0 African American, 6 Latino, 1 Native American, 14 White, 7 Other).
The Mississippi school superintendent withdrew the disorderly conduct complaint he'd filed against four black audience members who cheered for thier loved one at a high school graduation on May 21.
An anonymous reader writes: NASA is releasing global climate change projections to help scientists and planners better understand local and global effects of hazards. The data includes both historical measurements from around the world and simulated projections based on those measurements. "The NASA climate projections provide a detailed view of future temperature and precipitation patterns around the world at a 15.5 mile (25 kilometer) resolution, covering the time period from 1950 to 2100. The 11-terabyte dataset provides daily estimates of maximum and minimum temperatures and precipitation over the entire globe." You can download them and look through the projections yourself at NASA's Climate Model Data Services page.
If you want proof of the deep irrationality of America’s health care system, look no farther than Florida. Of the 50 hospitals in America that mark up their prices the most, a full 40% are in Florida, according to a new study (paywall) appearing in the health policy journal Health Affairs.
Nationally, the prices listed in hospital charge masters (documents putting a price on all medical procedures and supplies used) are 3.4 times what the federal government lists as allowable costs under Medicare, meaning that patients at a typical US hospital would be charged $340 for a procedure which Medicare estimates costs $100. At North Okaloosa Medical Center in Florida, the hospital with the highest markups, they would be charged an estimated $1,260.
Forty-nine of the 50 hospitals with the highest markups are for-profit, and half are operated by one company, CHS (Community Health Systems). The average markup for hospitals on the list is more than 1,000% over what Medicare pays.
Most consumers never see these prices; there are layers of insurers, deals, and payers in between—not so for the uninsured, though, nor for out-of-network patients and casualty or workers compensation insurers. They typically get charged full freight.
In most places in the US, there’s essentially no limit to what hospitals can charge; only Maryland and West Virginia regulate markups.
“Collectively, this system has the effect of charging the highest prices to the most vulnerable patients and those with the least market power,” the authors of the study write.
Most uninsured people don’t end up paying the incredible markup dictated by a hospital’s charge master. But it’s the one that appears on their bill, and the one people are called about by bill collectors when they’re unable to pay. Potential consequences include personal bankruptcy, or avoiding needed medical care. Hospitals also use inflated prices to negotiate higher payments from insurers.
Some hospitals do have programs, purely voluntary in the case of for-profit hospitals, to help the uninsured afford treatment. But the markups they charge at the outset are another sign of how thoroughly divorced and opaque prices and cost are in the United States when it comes to health care. The average, uninformed consumer has no idea what he or she might be expected to pay, or how to compare it to what another hospital might charge.
Here are the 18 hospitals that mark up over cost by at least 1000%. The full top 50 are available at The Washington Post’s graphical breakdown of the study:
'Han and I are 200 miles away, across the Oregon border in the Portland suburb of Wilsonville, inside a 4-acre structure flanked by a manufacturer of industrial shredders and a storage facility for boats and RVs.
Microsoft hasn't played up the fact that it has a major operation in Wilsonville. Actually, it's been downright stealthy about it. (The roadside signage directing visitors to the main entrance doesn't even mention a company name.) But since March 2014, the building is where the company has been engineering the device Han has been showing me, the Surface Hub.'
A man with a dream. A company in flux. A secret factory outside Portland. And a hyper-ambitious gambit to reimagine how meetings happen.
“The parks department is underestimating what I’m willing to do on or near a ping-pong table.”
The city of Seattle has pledged to install family-friendly ping-pong tables in public spaces to combat the perception that parks are unsafe and to reduce criminal acts like drug dealing, theft, and prostitution. What do you think?
The Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules take effect Friday this week, and they've already had a noticeable impact on the behavior of Internet service providers.
The FCC passed the rules on February 26, but they didn't get published in the Federal Register until April 13. The publication date started the 60-day waiting period until the rules take effect, and it has been a busy two months.
The latest news occurred today when AT&T and network operator Cogent announced a new interconnection agreement for exchanging Internet traffic. If AT&T Internet users were experiencing trouble reaching websites, this could resolve that problem for any Internet traffic traveling from Cogent to AT&T.
BP just dropped its latest annual look at global energy markets, and though the plunge in oil prices might seem temporary, the company thinks there are larger effects at play.
“Rather, they may well come to be viewed as symptomatic of a broader shifting in some of the tectonic plates that make up the energy landscape, with significant developments in both the supply of energy and its demand,” said CEO Bob Dudley in an introductory statement.
Changes on the supply side should be pretty obvious. Thanks to controversial fracking techniques and massive investments in shale, the US has raised its oil output dramatically. It now produces more of the stuff than Saudi Arabia for the first time since 1991—a fact that gives an extra edge to the two countries’ battle for energy supremacy.
And that’s not the only country the US eclipsing: It’s also extending its lead in oil and gas over Russia. The shifts are “a prospect unthinkable a decade ago,” Dudley said.
On the demand side, last year was the second in a row that emerging-market economies, or those outside the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, made up the majority of global oil consumption.
Though weak growth in richer economies like Europe and the US has been one of the factors weighing on energy prices—in addition (paywall) to heightened production—it’s noteworthy that their influence is fading.
Last month, 24 years after the collapse of the USSR, Ukraine began “decommunization.” The country has more than 4,000 towns and villages (paywall) whose main street is named after Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, plus countless thousands of squares, avenues, boulevards, villages, factories, schools, and other places with Soviet-related names. Under a new law that bans both Nazi and communist symbols and propaganda, all must be changed.
Ukraine is explicitly trying to distance itself from Russia. Recently meduza.io, a Russian news site, asked the local search engine giant Yandex to catalogue streets in Russia named after Lenin. The Yandex folks decided to also look for 34 other names (link in Russian) with Soviet associations. They found more than 5,000 Lenin streets—plus 224 called Ulyanov, Lenin’s birth name—as well as thousands named for Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Yuri Gagarin (the first man in space), and other heroes. There were more streets named “Soviet” and “October” (for the Bolshevik revolution) than “Lenin,” but he comes first in the total length of streets, at 8,632 km (5,363 miles)—more than the distance from Moscow to Minneapolis:
Street names aren’t the only thing in which Russia and Ukraine are diverging. Ukrainians have been tearing down Lenin statues across the country since the revolution that ousted a pro-Russian president last year. A crowd-sourced site, leninstatues.ru, estimates that Russia had 7,000 Lenin monuments (link in Russian) when the USSR fell and still has 6,000 today—including, of course, the Bolshevik leader’s mausoleum in Red Square—while Ukraine, which had 5,500 of them in 1991, is already down to 1,400.
The one Soviet figure Russia has more or less expunged is Stalin. A website operated by the Russian tax service counts only 31 streets (link in Russian) in the country with some variant of the dictator’s name.
As for Russian president Vladimir Putin, he has just one street, barely more than a mile long, named after him, according to the Yandex search (though the tax service lists a handful more). That street is in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. Chechnya is ruled by the warlord-governor Ramzan Kadyrov, a Putin loyalist who took the job over from his assassinated father, Akhmad Kadyrov. There are 59 Kadyrov streets in Russia.
Super Opinionated.
God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs. Man writes review. Dinosaurs eat man. Woman and lady dinosaurs inherit the earth and talk about nothing but tampons and makeup.
