Rotundus.com

Weird but I found it amusing:

Do they need to work more on robot golfing or robot trash talking?

Trying to Learn a Foreign Language? Avoid Reminders of Home

"Zhang, Morris, and their colleagues recruited male and female Chinese students who had lived in the United States for a less than a year and had them sit opposite a computer monitor that displayed the face of either a Chinese or Caucasian male called "Michael Lee." As microphones recorded their speech, the volunteers conversed with Lee, who spoke to them in English with an American accent about campus life. ... Although participants reported a more positive experience chatting with the Chinese version of "Michael Lee," they were significantly less fluent ... 'It's ironic' that the more comfortable volunteers were with their conversational partner, the less fluent they became, Zhang says. 'That's something we did not expect.'"

Key points from “How North Korea Could Cripple the U.S.”

The original Wall Street Journal article is now locked up but kind of an interesting look at a scary possibility. I've mentioned the electromagnetic pulse vulnerability before, but think that North Korea could potentially knock out all electronics in basically all of North America with a single nuclear explosive detonated high-enough up in the atmosphere.

64 percent of Muslims in Egypt and Pakistan support the death penalty for leaving Islam

"According to Pew’s data, 78 percent of Afghan Muslims say they support laws condemning to death anyone who gives up Islam. ... This is also the majority view among Muslims in Malaysia, Jordan and the Palestinian territories."

Separating the Influence of Capitalism and Democracy on Women’s Well-Being

"This empirical analysis seeks to determine which institutional arrangement - capitalism or democracy - tends to be more effective at improving women’s well-being and promoting gender equality in society. ... The results indicate that capitalism often has a stronger beneficial impact on many aspects of women’s well-being and gender equality in society."

To add to my typical argument that legal marriage has been essentially meaningless for a number of decades now, consider the following blurb found in an article on the subject:

For most of the 20th century, couples who lived together before marriage had a greater chance of divorce than those who entered directly into marriage. But when the demographer Wendy Manning and her colleagues looked at couples married since 1996, they found that this older association no longer prevailed. For couples married since the mid-1990s, cohabitation before marriage is not associated with an elevated risk of marital dissolution.