Current Affairs

Polar bears hunt seals on ice.  When the ice melts they move back to land and fast, waiting for the ice to come back.  In some parts of the world, the water is now frozen over 2.5 weeks less a year, meaning that polar bears have 2.5 weeks less a year to hunt, eat and […]

Link: Wired News: Where Are All the Women?. Companies with the most women in senior management had a 35 percent higher return on equity than those with the fewest, according to a study (.pdf) by Catalyst, a nonprofit group that studies women in business.

You are more likely to vote for a candidate that looks like you – or rather you are more likely to vote for a candidate that you think looks like you no matter what they really look like.  In this experiment researchers morphed voters faces into one of the two candidates.  When shown the morphed

For years I’ve said that we are wasting our time arguing about abortion.  If we put half of those efforts into preventing unwanted pregnancies, the issue would just go away.  I’ve never found anybody willing to lay the issue aside and agree that both sides would like to see an end to unwanted pregnancies.  An

Parachutes for small planes.  What a novell idea.  Obvious once you’ve thought about it but not intuitive.  These are parachutes installed behind the back seat of small planes – up to 4,000 pound aircraft – that can be deployed when the pilot loses control of the plane. Link: Yahoo! News – Parachute System Can Save

23% of women between the ages of 30 and 34 have not been married (up from 6% in 1970). Not a surprise. What was a surprise to me was a comment from David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values who was quoted as saying it concerns him that some people don’t feel the

A bill before Congress now might make it illegal to fast forward through the previews on a DVD! If this bill passed, DVD players would not allow you to fast forward just like they don’t allow you to fast forward through the legal statements. Shouldn’t you get to decide whether or not you want to

Some folks from the University of Michigan have been playing around with different election result maps.  This cartogram shows the results with the states sizes scaled to population: This cartogram shows the states sizes scaled to population AND additional colors to show percentages of voters per county. Which just goes to show that there aren’t

I found a way cool site to find out what is going on in Congress around any subject you are interested in.  Look up legislation, in a very readable way, by subject or by representative. GovTrack.us

Vote! I don’t care whether you like the candidates or not. I don’t care whether you are Republican, Democrat or Independent. Just vote! Vote!