Rotundus.com

I'd have preferred a few less external slo-mo replays - trimming the length of the video down to about 30 or 40 seconds, but nonetheless overall still quite interesting:

A Salon headline yesterday read Being forced to view an ultrasound doesn’t change women’s decisions about abortion, asserting the results of a study on the topic. It argued that after viewing an ultrasound 98.4% of women chose to proceed with an abortion. However, I think that the conclusions miss some key bits. See my emphasis here in an excerpt from the Salon article:

Researchers reviewed nearly 16,000 visits to a provider where women were given the option to view their ultrasound image before going forward with an abortion. While a majority chose not to look, women did opt to view the sonogram a little over 40 percent of the time. Among the women who elected to view the image, 98.4 percent still went forward with the abortion. (Ninety nine percent of the women who did not view the ultrasound went forward with the procedure.)

It seems to me that the optional nature of viewing is likely to highly distort the results. i.e. It seems likely that two categories of women would likely want to view an ultrasound of their baby: those who didn't want to abort the baby (and hence who wouldn't be at an abortion clinic in the first place), and those who might be curious but simply didn't really care a whole lot about whether the baby looked human or not - their decision had already been made.

Compare to how large-scale agriculture has managed to get bans on recording animal cruelty into law. Why do you think they'd do so if, along the lines of what's outlined above this wouldn't actually change consumer opinions?

I suppose this kind of invokes Godwin's law, but the denazification policies in which civilians and military personell were forced to view concentration camps and face their victims seem another very appropriate parallel. I recently watched the German film Lore which spoke of how in order to get bread from distribution centres people were required to spend some hours looking through photos from these facilities. Do you think this was likely to change the views of the German population? If not, why do you think the allies would have done so?

Kale? Juicing? Trouble Ahead

Apparently fruit and vegetable juices are worse for your teeth than drinking cola.

Snake-handling pastor won't face charges of possessing dangerous wildlife

I like the Out of Ur comment: "Church motto: There's an asp for that."

Dogs are sensitive to small variations of the Earth’s magnetic field

"Dogs preferred to excrete with the body being aligned along the North–South axis" - if you're lost in the woods and missing a compass is the best way to find your way back out to get your bearings using a pile of poo?

The Price Had Better Be Right

"We manipulated whether an ad promoted an expensive or a cheap product using a sexually charged or a neutral scene. As predicted, women found sexual imagery distasteful when it was used to promote a cheap product, but this reaction to sexual imagery was mitigated if the product promoted was expensive. This pattern was not observed among men. Furthermore, we predicted and found that sexual ads promoting cheap products heightened feelings of being upset and angry among women."

I've sort of adjusting to viewing family courts as a travesty of justice, but this case seems to take the cake. Take a look at this man's case:

Last November, his child support payments were paid in full. Sometime between then and now, the child support agreement between Hall and his wife was modified without his knowledge. Hall wound up overpaying by $3,000, a fact that Harris County District Court Judge Lisa Millard found contemptible. Another term that was modified without his knowledge was his visitation schedule. Subsequently, Hall was found to have over-visited his son. Judge Millard ended up finding Hall in contempt of court.

It seems to me that you'd have to be a pretty despicable individual not to be in contempt of this particular court.