Rotundus.com

From the Toronto Star:

In remarks made Tuesday, Karzai backed a “code of conduct” written by the Ulema Council of 150 leading Muslim clerics ... [which]... says women should not travel without a male guardian or mingle with men in public places such as schools, offices or markets. It also allows wife-beating in the case of a “sharia-compliant” reason, although it rejects forced marriage and the bartering of women to settle disputes.

I've still never quite figured out how invading Afghanistan was supposed to achieve massive changes in their society.

The above statement is the title of a CNN article and one that I'm inclined to agree to. This whole emphasis on doing everything from scratch, farm-to-table cooking, etc. seems to go too far for average folk. Yet I wonder if one could revise that title a bit to come up with a slightly different statement that might also be valid: intentionally excluding your child from food prep does make you a bad parent.

A common theme that I found when reading this book on why people didn't learn to cook seemed to pretty closely resemble the following excerpt of that CNN piece:

My mother's own mother had refused to teach her to cook, thinking that it would trap my mother in the home rather than in the world of work where my grandmother thought she should live.

She later notes on her mother's later attempts at cooking that:

... it has never been easy for her the way it has for mothers who have cooked from scratch since they were little girls.

And finally goes on to say that

Even those of us with more time or money than our struggling parents have a hard time cooking because we didn't learn how to do it well as children. Dinner prep looks easy in the hands of a pro, can take as little as 20 minutes and tastes delicious. When I'm in charge, it’s harder and takes longer and could involve a TV bribe to keep my kid from amused while I try to cook.

That sounds rather like a cascade failure, passing down through the generations, causing her to be less efficient at making meals, and likely both increasing her family's food costs as well as decreasing the nutrional value of meals that her children eat. Eating out tends to be more harmful to the environment too.

A far more reasonable action for that grandmother to take would, IMO, be not to intentionally exclude her daughter(s) from the kitchen but to bring in her son(s) as well. Perhaps if the woman in this case had learned to cook well as a child, then rather than having to spend time with her children outside the arena of food prep perhaps her children might be able to gradually learn as they grow to at first "help" and later help with the cooking.

Reading the Privacy Policies You Encounter in a Year Would Take 76 working days

"... working from several sources including their own monthly tallies and other survey research, they came up with a range of between 1,354 and 1,518 [privacy policies read] with their best estimate sitting at 1,462. So, each and every Internet user, were they to read every privacy policy on every website they visit would spend 25 days out of the year just reading privacy policies!" The figures are from 2008 so, as the article notes, it's probably worse now.

Obama apologizes to Afghanistan for Quran burning

Not sure how mainstream an opinion this is: "Afghan religious scholar Anayatullah Baligh said it can be appropriate to burn a damaged Quran to dispose of it, but that it should be done by a Muslim performing the act respectfully. 'I can't tell you whether Americans intentionally burned the copies of the holy Quran to make Muslims angry or if they did it mistakenly,' he said, but said their 'carelessness' was 'a crime they have committed against the holiest book of 2 billion Muslims around the world.'" So is burning OK is not done in a "careless" manner?

We’ll mock Jesus but not Mohammed, says BBC boss

"The head of the BBC, Mark Thompson, has admitted that the broadcaster would never mock Mohammed like it mocks Jesus. ... But Jesus is fair game because, he said, Christianity has broad shoulders and fewer ties to ethnicity."

French-German Border Shapes More Than Territory

Will the French try to adopt some of the German system? "Sélestat also has an unemployment rate of about 8 percent, much higher than towns just across the border in Germany. Emmendingen, a German town of 27,000 that is only slightly larger than Sélestat and barely 20 miles away, has an unemployment rate of under 3 percent. Among those under 25 years of age, the unemployment rate in Sélestat is 23 percent; in Emmendingen, it is 7 percent. The divergent economic circumstances of these two towns are striking, particularly given the cross-border cultural ties in the region."

How Do You Cite a Tweet in an Academic Paper?

In case you were curious or needed to know.

Young: Downside of rising single motherhood

"... all else being equal, out-of-wedlock birth is a risk factor for economic hardship, psychological and behavioral problems, and lower educational attainment. There are other ways the kids lose out. Many single mothers speak of their children's longing for fathers. ... Yet the trend toward more engaged fatherhood is being canceled out by the growing number of children with no father in the home. This redefinition of families as women and their children is a modern-day version of the old-fashioned, very non-feminist notion of family and child-rearing as a female domain in which men are only visitors. Sending men the signal that they are disposable is hardly a way to encourage them to be better fathers."

Where the Jobs Are, the Training May Not Be

"Technical, engineering and health care expertise are among the few skills in huge demand even in today’s lackluster job market. They are also, unfortunately, some of the most expensive subjects to teach. As a result, state colleges in Nebraska, Nevada, South Dakota, Colorado, Michigan, Florida and Texas have eliminated entire engineering and computer science departments."

Disney cancels plan to open fitness park after obesity 'bullying' claims

"Disney has closed a new theme park exhibit promoting healthy eating and exercise, but not because it was ineffectual. The reason? It was deemed too offensive to overweight children."

World's first biodegradable joint implant grows new joints

"Once in place, it reduces pain by acting as a cushioning spacer between the exposed bone ends, while also also restoring a reasonable range of movement, and keeping the already-compromised cartilage from being damaged further. Additionally, however, it triggers the body to produce new fibrous tissue, which proceeds to gradually replace the implant. According to the university, all that's left eventually is a fully-functioning "neojoint," made from the body's own cells."

Privacy management on social media sites

"Social network users are becoming more active in pruning and managing their accounts. Women and younger users tend to unfriend more than others... A majority of social network site users – 58% – restrict access to their profiles and women are significantly more likely to choose private settings. ... Half of SNS users say they have some difficulty in managing privacy controls,
but just 2% say it is “very difficult” to use the controls. Those with the most education report the most trouble. ... 11% of SNS users have posted content they regret."