Rotundus.com

Flatulent cows cause fiery explosion at German dairy farm

Apparently you can light farts on fire - "High levels of the methane gas had built up in the farm shed on the dairy farm, in Rasdorf in central Germany. A 'static electric charge caused the gas to explode with flashes of flames'"

Frito-Lay Mountain Dew Cheetos

A new Cheeto's flavour in Japan. I think I'll recommend passing on trying this.

Al-Qaeda isn’t on the run, it’s on the march

To quote a bit of the linked Financial Times article: "al-Qaeda has proved to have a Hydra-like quality. Far from withering, it has proliferated. The group and its affiliates have never controlled more land, had as many recruits in their ranks or been as well financially resourced as now."

Snacking Your Way to Better Health

"Consistent evidence for the health benefits of nuts has been accumulating since the early 1990s. Frequent nut consumption has been linked to a reduced risk of major chronic diseases, including heart and blood vessel disorders and Type 2 diabetes." It also seems to be associated with a lower-weight.

I came across an article entitled John Welden sentenced to 13 years, eight months for slipping his girlfriend an abortion pill and was a bit curious how that compared to sentences for killing a spouse. When doing so I found two almost opposite claims.

Claim 1 (which seems to appear more frequently) as stated here:

The average prison sentence for men who kill their intimate partners is 2 to 6 years. Women who kill their partners are sentenced, on average, to 15 years.

Claim 2 (originally found here):

Wives who kill their husbands were acquitted in 12.9 percent of the cases studied, while husbands who kill their wives were acquitted in only 1.4 percent of the cases. Women who were convicted of killing their husbands were sentenced to an average of six years in prison, while men received an average of seventeen years for killing their wives

Claim 1 generally references some unnamed 1989 work from the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence which I've been unable to track down. A number reference a no longer existing page at cybergrrl.com but the Internet Archive's copy again fails to actually cite a specific document showing source data to support the claim. Claim 2 fairly closely aligns with a publication by the US DOJ's Bureau of Justice Statistics which specifies a data set of the 75 largest US counties in 1988 - i.e. it appears to trace down to actual court data.

It seems to me that the second claim - that men receive harsher sentences - is the one supported by the data though the first claim seems to be made more frequently. There are certainly instances of discrimination against women which are right to point out - one of the more interesting examples I think is the use of blind auditions seeming to change orchestra hiring results - but all too often the underlying scholarship is dubious at best. As I noted before, for example, the research that people seemed to find most intriguing in Sheryl Sandberg's book Lean In either seems to have failed the reproducibility test or come into conflict with other research findings.

For the Love of Money

An interesting piece on money becoming an addiction. The opening paragraph: "In my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted."

North Carolina Suspends Internal Research That Made Their Athletes Look Bad

"UNC-Chapel Hill is trying to disqualify research by one of their own employee, after results ... found that 60 percent of the 183 football and basketball players she studied were reading somewhere between a fourth and eighth grade level."

McDonald's Advice To Underpaid Employees: Break Food Into Pieces To Keep You Full

Given obesity being a bigger problem than starvation amongst the poor in the US these days perhaps this isn't a bad idea? (The pay of McDonalds employees is a separate question). My favourite of the crazy ways to get people to slow down their eating in hopes of avoiding obesity: using smaller plates.

Women want ban on marriage to deities

"Women in southern Nigeria have been protesting against alleged ritual killings and 'forced marriages' to traditional deities, it’s reported."

I wasn't too sure what to expect from reading 'We Saved the World': WWI and America's Rise as a Superpower in Der Spiegel but it wasn't the following (emphasis mine):

The other side consisted of idealists; it was an approach which would later be named after Wilson himself. “Wilsonian foreign policy” is premised on the notion, established in the Puritan days of the founding fathers, that the United States should emulate the Biblical city on the hill, a role model for all other nations. ... Wilson managed to win over a majority in Congress with his fiery speech. Senator Ben Tillman described it as “the most startling and noblest utterance that has fallen from human lips since the Declaration of Independence.” The New York Times called it a “moral transformation” of American policy. The Germans, who had not been opposed to the idea of peace talks until then, responded nine days later with the resumption of unlimited submarine warfare.

I've read a fair bit on the events leading up to the start of the war as well as of the peace talks at Versailles which marked its conclusion. Am I missing an angle here wherein Wilson may have accidentally prolonged the "Great War" by a year or so due to idealism rather than a "realist" view of foreign policy, perhaps also resulting in a less sustainable treaty at its end (which may then have led to the next war)?

This seems like something worth further exploration. Anyone got pointers to any more information on this? Or is this just a red herring perhaps resulting, in part, from Der Spiegel being a German publication?