Rotundus.com

A bit of a recent post by Dalrock:

Social scientists are obsessed with the “gender wage gap”; for decades they were distraught that the gap existed at all. Now large numbers are alarmed that the gap is shrinking.

... To start with, they very much should be frightened by the shrinking wage gap, but not because men are ignoring market signals or are somehow unfit for the modern economy. In fact, the problem is that men are slowly but surely starting to respond to market signals stemming from our radical overhaul of the family structure in recent decades.

Video: Planned Parenthood Official Argues for Right to Post-Birth Abortion

It should be noted that this is NOT a hidden-camera video - this is footage from a Florida legislature committee's session: "Alisa LaPolt Snow, the lobbyist representing the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, testified that her organization believes the decision to kill an infant who survives a failed abortion should be left up to the woman seeking an abortion and her abortion doctor."

Overstating the Costs of Inequality

Is income inequality's impact overstated? An interesting (if somewhat long) argument...

Easing Brain Fatigue With a Walk in the Park

"Researchers have long theorized that green spaces are calming ... [b]ut it had not been possible to study the brains of people while they were actually outside, moving through the city and the parks. Or it wasn’t, until the recent development of a lightweight, portable version of the electroencephalogram, a technology that studies brain wave patterns."

Maybe academics aren’t so stupid after all

An interesting part of a quote in the intro: "The highest percentage of well-formed sentences are found in casual speech, and working-class speakers use more well-formed sentences than middle-class speakers. The widespread myth that most speech is ungrammatical is no doubt based upon tapes made at learned conferences, where we obtain the maximum number of irreducibly ungrammatical sequences." The article gets somewhat into why this might be. I'd agree, to quote a later portion of the article that "When we academics were in graduate school, we were trained to write badly (no one put it this way of course)."

From the New York Times article Cooling on Warming (emphasis mine):

earlier this month, a deeply noncontroversial Senate resolution commemorating International Women’s Day had to be taken back and edited because someone objected to a paragraph — which had been in an almost identical version passed in the last Congress — stating that women in developing countries “are disproportionately affected by changes in climate because of their need to secure water, food and fuel for their livelihood.”

Unlike men, of course, who either don't require any nonsense like "water, food, and fuel". Perhaps they obtain it by magic?

Seven Health Benefits of Chocolate

Not that not-having-an-excuse would stop people from eating chocolate - particularly around Easter.

Why Are Some Boiled Eggs Easier To Peel Than Others?

"As a rule, the fresher the egg, the more difficult it is to peel cleanly. ... Over time ... the pH of the white gradually increases, making it less acidic." Apparently some eggs are treated with mineral oil before sale resulting in them never peeling properly.

Jarome Iginla traded to Penguins, not Bruins, after strange night for TSN

This seems like a reasonable reminder of the problems of trying for instant news coverage - but for once it's something that's unlikely to offend people. If you insist on this sort of thing rather than a more relaxed approach don't be surprised to see inaccurate reports.

Looking for Evidence That Therapy Works

"Over the last 30 years, treatments like cognitive-behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy and family-based treatment have been shown effective for ailments ranging from anxiety and depression to post-traumatic stress disorder and eating disorders. The trouble is, surprisingly few patients actually get these kinds of evidence-based treatments once they land on the couch"