Rotundus.com

The Atlantic Cities recently spit out a post entitled Canada's Rail System May Have Peaked...in 1968 reminding most Canadians who've either forgotten or never been informed that Canada once upon a time had a little high-speed rail. How fast was it?

In 1968 however, the Canadian National Railway Company developed "Turbo," a train that could go as fast as 170 mph but, because it used pre-existing railroads, typically reached about 95 mph (Amtrak's Acela, in comparison, can go as fast as 150 mph, but averages about 80 mph).

They actually managed to dig up a promo video for the Turbo (in addition to a 20-something-minute movie on it that you can find at the Atlantic Cities' article).

(Poor Darren... the trains look streamlined otherwise he might find it interesting).

Perhaps it's more-or-less a marketing thing, given that those campaigning for legal abortions argue it's a woman's right, but public campaigns against sex-selective abortion virtually always seem to assume that it's almost exclusively girls aborted as a result of sex-selection procedures. such an assumption reasonable?

Much of the evidence that Americans preferentially choose girls is anecdotal, as no larger body tracks gender selection procedures. But data from Google show that “how to have a girl” is searched three times as often in the United States as “how to have a boy.” Many fertility doctors say that girls are the goal for 80 percent of gender selection patients. A study published in 2009 by the online journal Reproductive Biomedicine Online found Caucasian-Americans preferentially select females through PGD 70 percent of the time. Those of Indian or Chinese descent largely chose boys.
(Source: Slate)

Similarly, this article notes that requests for girls amount account for ~66-75% of the use technologies such as MicroSoft to sort sperm in such a manner as to influence the gender of children concieved by filtering out other sperm.

Are girls being aborted due to their gender in North America? Such seems to be the case - at least to a certain extent in certain immigrant communities. At the same time, as I can't think of a great reason for gender-preferences to be reversed for different methods of sex selection, it doesn't seem too unreasonable to suggest it likely that girls only account for a minority of victims of such.

How to turn Obama and Romney’s face-off into a real debate

"A true debate is just too risky. From 1960 onward, the events called presidential debates have delivered not clashes of of rhetorical greatness but the spectacle of two people engaged in dueling job interviews. These interviews unfold side by side in front of the same human resources representative, and the skill needed to land the position is much like the one eighth-graders rely on to win spelling bees: the ability to memorize the answers to the questions ahead of time, then repeat them, precisely as learned. Debates? Modern politicians don’t partake in debates. Not real ones."

Army Seeks To Curb Rising Tide Of Suicides

Apparently so far this year US soldiers have more often killed themselves than been killed in combat.

Sharing the chores can lead to divorce, study says

"a new study out of Norway has found that divorce rates are as much as 50 per cent higher among couples that share the load equally, compared with households where women do the majority of the chores."

The PQ’s retroactive tax on affluence is damaging and unfair

They're banned in the US constitution but apparently retroactive taxation is legal in Canada. Doesn't sound like a great idea though to me - makes it seem a more unstable area to invest in with unpredictable returns. Of course, electing the PQ probably already helped accomplish that.