Rotundus.com

Hyperloop and Experts Skeptical of Hyperloop (But Not Because of the Science)

The SpaceX founder's proposal for a high-speed transportation system involving travel in tube held as a vacuum and some of the feedback.

Tambourine player tased during church service

I can understand why someone might want to do this... but then again I'm kind of picky about noise at times.

Do women sometimes say no when they mean yes? The prevalence and correlates of women's token resistance to sex.

Very politically incorrect research is all I can say. "We investigated whether women ever engage in token resistance to sex--saying no but meaning yes--and, if they do, what their reasons are for doing so. A questionnaire administered to 610 undergraduate women asked whether they had ever engaged in token resistance ... We found that 39.3% of the women had engaged in token resistance at least once."

Cross a border, lose your ebooks

This time it's Google Play that's the culprit.

This New Yorker article contains a double of paragraphs that sounds somewhat absurdist:

FISA proceedings, decisions, and legal rationales are typically secret. America’s surveillance programs are secret, as are the court proceedings that enable them and the legal rationales that justify them; informed dissents, like those by Levison or Senator Ron Wyden, must be kept secret. The reasons for all this secrecy are also secret.

... According to the [FISA] court’s rules of procedure, a party may be held in contempt for defying its orders. The secret court may consider many punishments—secret fines for each day of noncompliance, or even secret jail time for executives. The idea behind civil contempt is that “you hold the key to your own cell.” If you comply, the punishment stops. But hold out long enough and your contempt may be criminal, and your compliance will not end the jail sentence or displace the fine.

The closing of Lavabite, the email service which Edward Snowden used, it seems may result in criminal charges being filed against its former owner for failing to cooperate with an undisclosable order of this secret court. How confident is the chief justice of this secret court that they're able to provide adequate oversight of US government agencies? According to an interview with the Washington Post:

The chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said the court lacks the tools to independently verify how often the government’s surveillance breaks the court’s rules that aim to protect Americans’ privacy. Without taking drastic steps, it also cannot check the veracity of the government’s assertions that the violations its staff members report are unintentional mistakes. “The FISC is forced to rely upon the accuracy of the information that is provided to the Court,” its chief, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, said in a written statement to The Washington Post. “The FISC does not have the capacity to investigate issues of noncompliance, and in that respect the FISC is in the same position as any other court when it comes to enforcing [government] compliance with its orders.”

If only this were a parody. (On a related note, civil forfeiture laws in play also seem to parody justice. That article's byline: "Under civil forfeiture, Americans who haven’t been charged with wrongdoing can be stripped of their cash, cars, and even homes. Is that all we’re losing?")

I while back I posted a piece with some data on how likely men are to have children, and how that differs amongst certain groups. Poking around a bit more there's also similar data available for women. The previous data suggested that only about 50% of highly educated, liberal men reproduced. Compare to some stats for educated women in NBC's article
Childlessness is up in the U.S.

While higher-educated women overall are more likely to be childless, that may be slowly changing. In 2008, about 24 percent of women ages 40-44 with a master's, doctoral or professional degree did not have children, a decline from 31 percent in 1994.

On the side of the Atlantic, in the UK things seem more extreme. Consider the article
Are you too clever to be a mother? Maternal urge decreases by a QUARTER for every 15 extra IQ points

When Kanazawa, who used data from the UK's National Child Development Study, added controls for economics and education, the results remained the same - the more intelligent the woman, the less likely she was to have children. ... One in five 45-year-olds is childless, while among those with degrees, the figure rises to 43 per cent, suggesting that Kanazawa's findings are sound.

If 43% of 45-year old women with university degrees in the UK is childless, I wonder how the figures compare for those with graduate degrees. Is the effect more pronounced?

You'll see an article here or there where a women gets depressed after not having had kids which leads to more interesting articles like the following one from The Daily Beast which discusses "whether the fear of future regret is a valid motivator for popping out babies"

Places Actually Discovered by Europeans, Mapped

"The tiny islands that European explorers really did discover."

Calgary researchers react to stem cell breakthrough

Apparently Chinese researchers have come up with "an easy and safe way to transform an ordinary cell into a stem cell." Interesting quote from a researcher cited in the article "Everybody is excited because they behave like [embryonic] cells"

Ode to Joy: Join a choir. Science shows it’ll make you feel better.

Perhaps a good reason for atheists / agnostics to consider joing one of those "atheist churches" that have been popping up?

A Response to "The Economics of Slut-Shaming"

"Among the anthropological records of 93 pre-industrial societies collected in the nineteenth century (and compiled in the 1960s by Peter Murdock and Douglas White), only 17 societies had the belief that men’s sexual urges are stronger than women. Seventy-one believed that men and women had equally strong sex drives and, remarkably, five believed that women had stronger sex drives than men." (see #601 here)