Rotundus.com

Lehigh University student sues over grade, seeks $1.3 million

On the positive side, at least future potential employers will be able to able to see online evidence of her antics.

37 People Who Are Worse At Cooking Than You

Epic fails in the kitchen. Worth a laugh or two.

Bing Politics: ‘State of the Union’ Page Can Filter News According To Your Political Bias

I suppose that this is what people tend to do anyways, but only reading news sources that share your own ideological views is a bad idea.

China's 'Re-Education Through Labor' System: The View From Within

"Harry Wu, a 75-year-old Chinese human rights activist who spent 19 years in so-called "re-education through labor," or laogai, a Chinese labor camp system originally modelled after the Soviet Gulag. Wu has written extensively about the laogai system, combining first-hand accounts with extensive research." Wu: "The Chinese government profits handsomely from the labor camp system by allowing goods made with forced labor to enter both domestic and international markets...Due to intentional deception on the part of laogai enterprises, lax international labelling requirements for manufactured goods, and the fact that many laogai products are traded via middlemen, it is extremely difficult to trace the origins of laogai products once they have entered the market."

My favourite of the Oscar-nominated animated shorts this year:

From the Telegraph of Calcutta's article Sleeping with the enemy:

The activists believe that marital rape should not be seen as a “gender-neutral” law, which is what the government has been envisaging. “Women could become vulnerable to harassment and be slapped with false cases,” says Rohini Hensman, a writer and an activist in Mumbai.

The Cambridge Law Journal does suggest - what shouldn't be an overly shocking assertion - that women also have an ability to make false allegations.

The Terrible, True Insight of 'House of Cards': Bad People Run D.C.

Sounds like a pretty accurate description of politics: "Underwood may be a dramatization, but his ticks are familiar. He is a hopped-up version of a dominant archetype in national politics: People who enter the arena for the same reasons a big audience still watches it — the thrill, glory, and ambition. Policy and morality run a distant second and, even then, often serve as props to underscore 'the stakes' of the maneuvers involved, not as dimensions of independent substance." Still haven't gotten around to watching the show... but hopefully will do so in the near future.

Why You Love That Ikea Table, Even If It's Crooked

"in new experiments published recently, they've discovered why it happens: Building your own stuff boosts your feelings of pride and competence, and also signals to others that you are competent." The article links up some of the studies on this.

Programmer Ryan Gosling

A very strange tumblr - computer-oriented cheesy pickup lines. About as close as this blog is likely to get to a Valentine's-related post.

Drowned in a Stream of Prescriptions

On addiction and suicide associated with ADHD meds. Drugs like adderall "... improve performance in normal, learning-disabled, and ADHD/ADD students" (src) and the NYT piece suggests that "Various studies have estimated that 8 percent to 35 percent of college students take stimulant pills to enhance school performance." Those figures sound possibly-inflated to me but I haven't done any digging (yet) to verify.