Rotundus.com

The answer seems to be "yes". At least that seems to be my conclusion from reading the New York TImes piece Are Today’s New Surgeons Unprepared?.

One day I finally gathered the courage to ask him for his “secret.” ... he answered without hesitation. “It’s doing the operations over and over and over again,” he said. He described the hundreds of operations he had participated in during his residency and the final years of training when he felt as if he were “living, breathing and eating surgery. I could have done these operations with my eyes closed,” he said grinning. “And,” he added with a chuckle, “with one hand tied behind my back.”
I thought of his words often over the next few years as I tried to hone my own surgical skills. And recently I was reminded of them once more when I read a recent study in The Annals of Surgery assessing the skills of young surgeons trained after regulations went into place limiting their work hours in the hospital.
For the past decade, in response to increasing pressure from politicians, unions and sleep experts, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, the organization responsible for accrediting American medical and surgical training programs, has been working to cap the hours that residents work.
... And in what may be the starkest proof of the link between experience and proficiency, the failure rates on certifying oral exams administered at the end of residency have almost doubled since the duty hour changes went into effect. While 15 percent of would-be surgeons failed a little under a decade ago, nearly 30 percent fall short on the exams now.

We're talking here about the negative effects on surgeon training from restricting them to working no more than 80 hours per week. Adhering to such limits would mean these new doctors working a mere 20 hours per week MORE than actual hours worked by Chinese sweatshop employees (or 30 more than China's legal limit).

If not working new surgeons more than 80 hours per week has negative consequences for their skills wouldn't you expect similar implications in the business world? I've mentioned before that CEOs work much longer hours on average. One example is Marissa Mayer, now Yahoo CEO, working 100-130 hours per week in the early years of Yahoo and slacking off at a mere 90 hours per week in later years. Those aren't particularly family-friendly hours - 130 hours per week is likely to kill most people excepting a few with the genes needed to permit survival with minimal sleep. Just working 90 hours per week means an average of about 13 hours per day 7 days per week.

Severed hand kept alive on man's ankle

"Xiao Wei lost his right hand in an accident at work but could not have it reattached to his arm right away. Instead, the hand was kept alive by stitching it to Mr Wei's left ankle and 'borrowing' a blood supply from arteries in the leg."

Japanese man stole $185,000 to feed 120 cats gourmet food

Instead of the crazy cat lady stereotype it's an actual crazy cat guy.

Moon Turnips? NASA Takes Gardening to New Heights

Given the price I've been paying for small amounts of basil from the grocery store I'd have assumed it was already been grown on the moon and imported from there - that would seem to be the only possible explanation for its price.

Japanese man accidentally switched at birth grew up in poverty while other baby lived life of privilege

Seems like the plot of a movie or two but also seems to happen in real life.

Today, I ran across another example which declares women to be disproportionately burdened in areas in which conflict is an everyday reality. The brochure asserts that

women and girls are disproportionately and sometimes uniquely burdened – particularly in the Gaza Strip.

The only element of their case that seems gender-specific (as most are general consequences of the poverty typically found in such areas) is the following:

Frequent Israeli military attacks have left a large number of women in Gaza on their own to raise their families. Pal-Think for Strategic Studies estimates that in just the aftermath of the
23-day Israeli military operation called “Cast Lead” in 2008-2009, more than 800 new widows were created. These widows suffer from insecure incomes and constant feelings of threat and insecurity, high levels of anxiety and concern about lack of access to education and other services for them and their children.

In other words, these women seem to be oppressively not getting killed. Reminds me a bit of Hillary Clinton who argued as follows in a speech:

Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. ...

Men are indeed more likely to die in conflict areas so if this is indeed a disproportionate burden on women how can it be resolved? The only two possible resolutions seem to be to push for fewer male deaths (rather than just deaths as a whole) which doesn't exactly sound like a feminist cause, or to push for more female deaths which, fairly obviously, seems an extremely stupid idea.

I should add that the feminist argument that seems to amount to women being oppressively less likely to die also applies a bit more generally. Take, for example, the suicide rate amongst male farmers in India:

Two hundred and seventy thousand Indian farmers have committed suicide since Monsanto entered the Indian seed market. That’s more than a quarter-million. It’s a genocide. And every farmer who commits suicide leaves behind a widow. For me, this is a prime example of violence against women through violent economic means.

What happens if you test young kids to see what phrases they've picked up listening to songs? (Warning, the language for the most part is pretty crass but that's kind of the point here)

HT: A Few Grown Men