Rotundus.com

Consider this quote:

We live in a world that considers a few swift swats to the ass to be “child abuse”, but permanently damaging his future educational, relationship, and job prospects isn’t.

That was said in response to the story of a high school kid who committed suicide to after facing life as a registered sex offender (and expulsion) following a streaking incident as a US high school football game. Something to think about whatever your views on corporal punishment.

How to read good books for free without breaking the law (sort of)

"Earlier this month, the Canada chapter of free ebook site Project Gutenberg announced that it had released all seven of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia novels into the public domain. ... Go south of the border, and suddenly the Lewis books aren’t public domain anymore. In the US, you need to buy them. This peculiarity stems from a somewhat complex and inconsistent way in which copyright durations are enforced all over the world." The books are here if you're interested (and in Canada).

The Couple That Pays Each Other to Put Kids to Bed

"At one point, they paid each other $24 an hour to watch the kids. At another, Danny paid Bethany about $30,000 in various costs to have their first child while he worked a full-time tech job and she took time off school. Split over what to name their kid, they submitted sealed bids worth several thousand dollars." There's moderately nerdy and then there's this. I'm not sure whether I should be surprised that they're computer scientists rather than economists.

South Carolina woman jailed after failing to return movie rented nine years ago

"Finley is charged with petite larceny, and more specifically, the now seemingly archaic charge of, 'failure to return a video or cassette.' The charge is a misdemeanor, and police told the news station they had no choice but to serve the warrant for her arrest, no matter how old or outmoded."

Goats sacrificed to fix Nepal jet

"Nepal's state-run airline has confirmed that it sacrificed two goats to appease a Hindu god, following technical problems with one of its aircraft."

Recently Facebook updated the way that users could set their gender on the site:

Facebook has just updated to let users choose the gender pronoun they associate with. Aside from the usual “male” and “female” options, users can choose up to 10 different gender definitions to describe themselves out of more than 50 options, including “cisgender,” “transgender” and “intersex.”

Not only will this show up on the user’s About page, but it will show up in all other pronouns on the site that refer to that user. This way, users will not only show up as he/him and she/her, but some may show up with the neutral they/their.

Allow users to choose up to 10 identifiers from a list of 51 would provide users with roughly 16.5 billion different ways to specify their gender (assuming that Facebook isn't policing things and disallowing combinations like a cisgender male-female, which doesn't really work out).

Facebook updated their personal gender pronoun settings to allow users to choose from three different options, but their new options already appear to be more restrictive than those that some have already chosen to adopt for themselves. What about people who choose to identify as any of hum/per/thon/jem/ver/xem to draw just a few from Wikipedia's list of gender pronouns and why restrict it to only the possible pronouns that you might find such a location rather than allowing users to choose their own? The person referenced in this Slate article prefers the pronoun ou for some reason or other.

Why not allow users to go freeform rather than restricting them to just this somewhat larger selection of options for gender pronoun / identity? Three different personal gender pronoun options already fails to reflect the full spectrum of pronouns that users choose for themselves - will choosing a maximum of 10 of 51 gender identifiers eventually meet the same fate?

Scollay trial: Guilty of manslaughter

"Her defence claimed she only wanted to somehow shake her deeply depressed 48-year-old husband out of his funk and make him realise just how 'desperate' their lives had become. The only issue for the jury was whether she had any murderous intent when she picked up the large kitchen knife and plunged it into his chest." I may be a bachelor, but allow me to suggest to married folk that stabbing your spouse with a large knife might not be a great way to improve their mental health.

Vancouver baby becomes first person to have three parents named on birth certificate in B.C.

Given the expression some like to trot out that "it takes a village to raise a child" one might wonder why the new BC law only allows a maximum of four parents.

US Army invests in Linux-powered, Wi-Fi capable 'smart rifles'

Linux ... coming soon to a gun near you?

Taking Attitude into Account for the Gender Wage Gap: Compensating employees equally when gender role attitudes differ

"The wage gap between men with traditional views and men with egalitarian views is greater than the wage gap between men and women" I'm a bit skeptical of this - wouldn't mind seeing more data. This is their current data source: "The researchers studied a subset of people enrolled in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), a long-term panel study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that has been following over 12,000 people since 1979. Due to sample attrition (from funding constraints, trouble locating participants, death, or dropping from the survey), the response rate for the NLSY is 80 percent. "