About this:

In their book “SuperFreakonomics” Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner point out the (apparently well known?) demographic fact that daughters increase a couples likelihood of divorce. A married couple that has 2 daughters is 15% more likely to divorce than a married couple that has 2 sons. No one knows why, but the…

I hope that Vocativ becomes important while Erin Gloria Ryan is there. I had/have high hopes for Vocativ, but so far they have not found their groove. They were launched around the same time as Vox and Fivethirtyeight and they were initially described as a site that was going to do that type of “data journalism”, but…

I wonder how women felt, for thousands of years, when they were forced into these relationships? Did they simply adapt, or did they hate every moment of it? Some of these relationships seem to have evolved into loving relationships, though I wonder how much Stockholm Syndrome there is, especially after the first child…

God I love this:

The majority of all marriages in India are still arranged marriages, which very much sends the message that the children are the property of the parents.

I have friends who got married and kept their own names, but invented a new name for their children. Their last names were:

A few facts worth remembering:

The “I don’t care” makes me think the old guy thinks he is playing one the rednecks in Easy Riding. He didn’t have a shotgun handy, but he used his car almost as effectively as in the movie.

I don’t think the 13 year old should take much blame for this. Any time the government credits children with too much agency, bad things happen. If not in this case, then in future cases, because it sets a precedent. When the government trusted Betty Parris, age 9, and her cousin Abigail Williams, age 11, to be honest…

Since there is a black man involved, let’s put all the blame on him. I’m thinking 6 months probation for mom and daughter, and 25-to-life for the black guy.

So nothing has improved in 350 years? That is kind of depressing. I’ve often read about this gender uprisings where women did amazing stuff for awhile. For instance, during the English Civil War several women became ministers, and for 20 years England was full of female preachers. Once the Restoration came, these…

This isn’t terribly far from where Keira Knightley now lives. I do get that the poor people are angry to be losing their home to the developers who are renovating old warehouses and turning them into the kind of luxury condos that actresses buy.

Alpha male presumably refers to the leader of the tribe, so I guess that mean President Obama is our alpha male? Or John Boehner? God help us if John Boehner was ever our alpha male. That would mean that at one time Newt Gingrich was our alpha male. There is a thought worthy of nightmares. But if President Obama is…

I think engineering is somewhat unique in the amount of continuous study that is required. I am a software engineer and I spend about 10 hours a week keeping up with the newest libraries, the newest languages, the newest hardware, etc. But very few professions demand this kind of constant study. Lawyers need to keep…

“God is sufficient” — Some of these phrases are very old and they go back to a time when the words had a different meaning. During the English Civil War of 1642-1649 the Protestant radicals would often say “God is no respecter of Persons” which means exactly the opposite of what you would think. This was back when…

“Fort Greene” can mean a few different things, depending on which specific blocks he is talking about. If he is talking about the tiny strip between BQE and the (northern) Brooklyn Naval Yard, he is right that the area was completely abandoned. In 1997, it was a great area for raves, because you could seize an…

World wide, there have only been 2 paradigms for mating: