Friday, December 24, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Suicide bombers: fanatics, or suicidally depressed?

Posted: 24 Dec 2010 12:43 AM PST

A growing body of psychological literature suggests that suicide bombers aren't ideologues who are so committed to their cause that they're willing to die for it -- rather, they are suicidally depressed people who use the excuse of dying for a cause to psych themselves up to commit the deed, and as a loophole for committing suicide without committing a sin.
Lankford's forthcoming study, to be published early next year, is "far more robust" than his first: a list of more than 75 suicide terrorists and why they were likely suicidal. He cites a Palestinian woman who, five months after lighting herself on fire in her parents' kitchen, attempted a return to the hospital that saved her life. But this time she approached with a pack of bombs wrapped around her body, working as an "ideologue" in the service of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

Lankford writes of al Qaeda-backed terrorists in Iraq who would target and rape local women, and then see to it that the victims were sent to Samira Ahmed Jassim. Jassim would convince these traumatized women that the only way to escape public scorn was martyrdom. She was so successful she became known as the Mother of Believers. "If you just needed true believers, you wouldn't need them to be raped first," Lankford said in an interview.

Lankford is also intrigued by the man who in some sense launched the current study of suicide terrorism: Mohammed Atta, the ringleader behind the 9/11 hijacking. "It's overwhelming, his traits of suicidality," Lankford said. An isolated, neglected childhood, pathologically ashamed of any sexual expression. "According to the National Institute of Mental Health there are 11 signs, 11 traits and symptoms for a man being depressed," Lankford said. "Atta exhibited eight of them."

The truth about suicide bombers

(Image: London Underground Suicide Bomber Chilling Video Message, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from anniemole's photostream)

 


Holocaust-denying creep works for WITH Wikileaks, originated CIA-rape-honeypot rumor

Posted: 24 Dec 2010 01:20 AM PST

Update: Despite earlier remarks from both Shamir and Wikileaks spokespeople in the Swedish media, now both Shamir and Wikileaks disclaim any formal association between Shamir and WL. ("Israel Shamir is NOR a member, NEITHER an employee of Wikileaks: he is a free lance writer accredited with Wikileaks.")

A Swedish-domiciled Russian guy who calls himself "Israel Shamir," apparently serves as the official Wikileaks "content aggregator" for Russia (see update, above) -- he's also apparently a Holocaust-denying creepy nutjob who told a journalist that Auschwitz was merely an internment camp, Jews are a "virus in human form," the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are real and "it's every Muslim and Christian's duty to deny the Holocaust" (according to his own site).

What's more, he's the author of the article that asserted that one of Assange's rape-accusers was working for the CIA.

According to reports in the Swedish and Russian media, the broad strokes of which have been confirmed by a WikiLeaks spokesman, Shamir serves as the group's content aggregator in Russia, the man who "selects and distributes" the cables to Russian news organizations, according to an investigation by Swedish public radio. In the newspaper Expressen, Magnus Ljunggren, an emeritus professor of Russian literature at Gothenburg University, outlined Shamir's close ties to WikiLeaks and his position "spreading the documents in Russia." (The article is illustrated with a picture of Assange and Shamir in an unidentified office.)
Assange's Extremist Employees (Thanks, James, via Submitterator)
 


Pilot raided for YouTube video exposing airport security flaws

Posted: 24 Dec 2010 12:14 AM PST

Antinous sez, "An anonymous airline pilot posted cell phone video of security lapses at SFO to YouTube. Federal air marshals and the sheriff's department showed up at his house to take his gun away."

"Well, folks, I just wanted to give you an idea of what type of security for the ground personnel there is. This is their screening. As you can see, there's only a card slide and one door," the pilot says in the video. "And right here's a sign, 'Think security.' Well, I don't think there's much security here."

...According to sister station ABC7 in San Francisco, the disclosure resulted in federal air marshals and sheriff's deputies showing up at the pilot's home -- an event the pilot, a deputized federal air marshal, also recorded -- to confiscate his federally issued handgun.

Attorney Don Werno, who represents the pilot, says he believes the TSA was sending a message that "you've angered us by telling the truth and by showing America that there are major security problems despite the fact that we've spent billions of dollars allegedly to improve airline safety."

Pilot in Hot Water for Exposing Security Flaws
 


Wright's Falling Water in gingerbread

Posted: 24 Dec 2010 12:10 AM PST


As part of the Internet's ongoing effort to recreate Frank Lloyd Wright's famous Falling Water house in as many media as possible (Lego, Half Life 2), the folks at Garden Melodies have produced a gingerbread edition:
•It took over 12 hours to design
•It took Brenton and I around 40 hours to build and decorate
•There are around 164 different pieces of gingerbread
•It took roughly 12 square feet of gingerbread dough (that's four large batches) to make all the walls, floors and roof
•Over 8 bags of powdered sugar were used to make all the frosting
•It took over 40 sleeves of large Smarties which are used to simulate dry stack stone on the building exterior
•The river and water fall are made up of three batches of hard candy
Falling Water Gingerbread House (via Geekologie)
 


Secret history of Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic game

Posted: 24 Dec 2010 12:05 AM PST

In a Metafilter discussion of Starship Titanic, a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy spin-off game, Yoz Grahame, who was Douglas Adam's sysadmin and technology dogsbody, pops up with some of the incredible, hilarious backstory behind the venture.
When we created the initial fake-brochure site, we thought it'd be a fantastic laugh if the fictional shipbuilders had their own intranet. If you filled in the form on the brochure site (specifying your name, email address and favourite species of frog) we followed the occasional mail about the game. Then, one day, folks got a mail from the intranet admin, "Chris Stevedave", giving folks the link to the intranet and the current password, which was hurriedly followed by a second mail apologising for the accidental mail leakage and urging customers not to click the link, then a third email noting that Chris Stevedave had been demoted to Bilge Emptier Third-Class. It worked fantastically (so fantastically that some people really did send the emails back, reassuring us that they hadn't looked at the site) everyone poured into the Starlight Lines intranet.

Have a wander around the intranet. Look at the wireframes, enjoy the status reports and play with the currency calculator.

Then go look in the forum.

The idea was to present a read-only Senior Management forum in which you'd see some of the key backstory characters getting on each others' nerves. But we figured there should probably be a writeable forum for the lower-level employees, so I spent half a day hacking up a stupidly basic forum system and forgot all about it.

Six months after the site launch, I happened to peek at the employee forum and there were ten thousand posts in there.

The Post That Cannot Possibly Go Wrong
 


How a little girl's Christmas pageant with punch was ruined by Kenny Loggins

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 11:54 PM PST

From the always insanely funny Hyperbole and a Half, a touching story of a little girl's demented attempt to produce a homebrew Christmas pageant with punch, ruined by unhelpful relatives and Kenny Loggins.

My mom, always wanting to nurture my creative side, agreed on behalf of everyone that we should go forward with the production. I would be playing the part of Mary and my dad would be Joseph. My aunt and my grandma would play the wise men. My mom would be filming. The dogs were slated to play the animals in the manger, but they kept trying to chew the eyes off of the doll I'd chosen to play Jesus, so their parts were cut and they were relegated to the bedroom for the duration of the production.

Once I had assigned everyone their parts, we set about the task of gathering costumes and props. Joseph was outfitted in a brown bath robe and Mary wore a blue blanket over her head like a cloak. The wise men, who were heavily intoxicated at that point in the evening, decided to dress themselves like gypsies.

I felt that the struggles of my character, Mary, needed to be emphasized. The audience really needed to understand that she was suffering. I constructed my costume accordingly.

The Year Kenny Loggins Ruined Christmas (Thanks, Marilyn, via Submitterator)
 


Gilliam's steampunk puppet movie: 1884

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 11:46 PM PST

Terry Gilliam's forthcoming film 1884 is a steampunk puppet movie with a distinctly Gilliamesque touch, written and directed by protege Tim Ollive.

Terry Gilliam to co-produce 1884 (Thanks, Politeruin, via Submitterator)

 


Neo-Nazis go nuts over black Thor in Marvel movie

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 11:04 PM PST

Various neo-Nazi nutjobs in the USA are up in arms at the news that Marvel Comics is doing a Thor movie in which some of the Norse gods are played by black actors. Apparently, the ethnic identity of fictional beings of imaginary sky-beings from antiquity is of real political moment for the sort of person who believes that humans can be subdivided into distinct "races."
Marvel is headed by radical left-wingers who insert their ideologies and agendas into their comic books and movies.

In February 2010, the TEA Party movement was viciously attacked in an issue of Captain America. Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Qesada publicly defended the issue.

Marvel creator and front man Stan "Lee" Lieber is a notorious left-winger and financier of left-wing political candidates.

"What is needed is a school campaign to get White kids to boycott everything that comes out of Marvel Studios," wrote a human being called Annis Isbell. Another fan of the boycott, James Hick wrote, "Need to try and get black sepratists in on this to. Let them know that marvel is trying to negate and down play their racial culture & heritage and saying by default blacks are cultureless unless they imbrace the white mans culture. That would sit a black back lash," which we suppose is an almost utopian sentiment for someone whose Facebook profile pic is the Confederate flag.

Racists Totally Freak Out Over Idris Elba Playing Norse God in 'Thor' (Thanks, John!)

Black swan eggs were the secret ingredient in Ovaltine

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 10:58 PM PST

Marilyn sez, "Speaking of maniacal ballerines, black swans are a separate species found only in Australia and New Zealand. Their green-shelled eggs are big enough to make breakfast for three people. Unlike white swans, which are loners, black swans hang out in groups and raise families together. And until the late 1960s, the Ovaltine company in New Zealand used black swan eggs as a secret ingredient in their drink. From National Geographic's Pop Omnivore blog."
Black swan eggs were a secret ingredient in Ovaltine. Until the late 1960s, New Zealand's Ovaltine factory harvested local black swan eggs to add to their drink mix. Since the black swan nests in colonies, collecting the eggs was easy. After the black swan population suffered great losses following a 1968 storm, the Ovaltine folks turned to chicken eggs instead.
Black Swans: Competitive in Ballet, Cooperative in Nature

(Image: Ovaltine, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from gracelikeriver's photostream)

Ben Goldacre: bad science kills

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 10:54 PM PST

Here's Ben "Bad Science" Goldacre presenting on how non-evidence-based medicine (that is, woo), can actually, no fooling, kill you and thousands of your friends.

Ben's book, oddly enough titled Bad Science, is great as well, and I highly recommend it. There's a chapter he had to take out due to litigation by a guy named Mathias Rath, who says vitamins can cure AIDS. Yes, you read that correctly. Ben posted that chapter on his website, and it may be one of the most important things ever written in the area of critical thinking. Lack of proper treatment for AIDS kills hundreds of thousands of people in Africa alone. Hundreds of thousands.

When people like Ben win, lives are saved. The more people who know about him, the better. He's a true hero of skepticism.

Some bad science can make you laugh, and some kills
 


Card flourishes and mystical poetry

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 10:49 PM PST

Here's YouTube user Scottmfreda doing delightful card-flourishes while reciting mystical poetry. He's a talented card mechanic and a pretty good poet! According to PeaceLove, he's also a fine painter and guitar and sitar player.

doing flourishes and magic to my its all in the mind poem (Thanks, PeaceLove!)

 


Interview with imprisoned Russian art group

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 04:29 PM PST

The-storm-of-White-House.jpgYusuf from Don't Panic UK says: "We've just published an interview with anarchistic Russian art renegades Voina on the website. Two members of the group, Oleg Vorotnikov and Lenja Nikolaev, answered their questions from St. Petersburg Prison, where they're awaiting trial on charges of hooliganism."
What do you think about a commentary on activism or radical art in Russia?

N.S.: Contemporary art is, first of all, an art activism for us, and not the piles of the art-rubbish kept in the galleries. Today activism is the only form of the radical left-wing art, which we are trying to revive in Russia. It's important to understand that there is no any other radical art in Russia, except for the one represented by a dozen of art-activists.

A.P-S: Anarch-art-activism is the only lively activity in Russia. Nowadays, when even hope for democracy in Russia is ruined, painting flowers and pussy cats or making any other "pure" art, lacking a socio-political content, is to support the right-wing authorities. The symbol of anarchy - a skull-and-bones - has to be painted right at the Russia's parliament building. That's what we did Our Jolly Roger laser projection was almost 50 meters high, covering almost the whole front of the White House in Moscow.

In a video on this page, the artists are shown closing traffic on a bridge to paint a giant penis on the asphalt, so that when the bridge was raised it faced the KGB offices. In the comments, we can discuss whether or not this was just as irresponsible as what the Orange County band the Imperial Stars did earlier this year when they shut down the 101 freeway in Los Angeles to play a set of songs.

[Link has a NSFW photo of a staged orgy at an art gallery] Russian art anarchists explain themselves: Banksy's new favourites Voina speak from prison



Dragon Dictate speech-to-text application: I love it

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 02:42 PM PST

ddt-svaf.jpgI had dinner with Mr. Jalopy a couple of nights ago and he mentioned an e-mail I'd sent to him earlier in the week, in which I described how much I like my recently-purchased Dragon Dictate 2.0 speech-to-text application.

He told me, "In your e-mail you said that you hoped that you didn't sound too chatty. You didn't sound too chatty, but you sounded like you were crazy."

I understand what he meant. It's a lot easier for me to talk than it is to type, because I am a pathetically clumsy typist. But typing forces me to slow down and organize my thoughts, instead of running off at the mouth. However, I am so pleased with DragonDictate's accuracy, and how it saves wear and tear on my hands and wrists, that I am sold on it and never want to go back to typing.

The application costs $154 on Amazon, which may seem steep, but it comes with a nice USB headset. It takes only about five minutes to train the application to learn how you speak.The last time I tried using a speech-to-text application, the training took much longer and the accuracy was terrible. Also, this was many years ago, and computers were much slower so it took forever for the words to appear on the screen after I said them. I swore off speech-to-text programs, until I heard Alex Lindsay on MacBreak weekly talk about how much he loved Dragon Dictate. I decided to give it a try myself.

It's magical seeing my words appear on the screen almost as fast as I utter them. I think I would probably be too embarrassed to use DragonDictate in an environment where other people could hear me talking to my computer. I work alone in a home office, so it works for me.

Dragon Dictate 2.0

Sure fire ways to open a conversation with a woman

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 12:42 PM PST


(Video link) This fellow has some tips for men who want to meet women, with an emphasis on picking up women "in a church environment."

Steampunk Tales #9

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 12:23 PM PST

A new issue of Steampunk Tales is always cause for celebration: "Steampunk Tales, a quarterly electronic anthology of original, first run, steampunk fiction has released its 9th issue. Issue 9 contains 8 original steampunk pulp fiction stories penned by authors including G. D. Falksen, Jillian Venters, Cindy MacLeod and Justin Porter. Cover art by Bethalynne Bajema!." (Thanks, John!)

Top iPhone indie game devs partner for charity-driven IndieSale

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 12:08 PM PST

indiesaleiphone.jpg In other holiday charity game bundle news: six indie developers are also working together on the IndieSale, a week-long price drop on truly the best original games on the App Store: Canabalt, Eliss, Drop7, Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor, Osmos and Solipskier. While they can't quite bundle themselves in the same way as the Humble Indie Bundle, what they have done is collectively dropped their prices to 99 cents for the week, and are tracking sales to donate a full third of the proceeds to the Child's Play charity. Like the Humble Bundle, though, they've also added a number of freebie ringtones, soundtracks, wallpapers and extras as incentives, and Canabalt developer Semi Secret, at least, is promising new features for the game if the group can raise at least $10,000. To take part, visit IndieSale, or use the App Store links below to get each game (all of which are wholly worthy of collecting-them-all): Canabalt Solipskier Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor Osmos Eliss Drop7 Indie iPhone Holiday Sale


Humble Indie Bundle 2 adds games from first bundle

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 12:03 PM PST

HIB2and1.jpg Cory mentioned this campaign when it first launched, but the team behind the charity-driven Humble Indie Bundle 2 -- which lets you pay what you like for five top-tier indie games -- have now added all six games from this year's previous Indie Bundle, if you donate more than the overall average amount. That means that for at least around $7.60 (you choose how much goes to the developers or organizations like EFF and Child's Play), you get eleven games: World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, Penumbra Overture and Samorost 2 from the first bundle, along with newcomers Braid, Cortex Command, Machinarium, Osmos, and the newly released and super-stylized Revenge of the Titans. Further unlocks like this are also expected -- the Bundlers have also just announced that Titans will go open-source if donations reach $1.75 million in the 2 days remaining in the campaign. Click here to contribute! (Humble Indie Bundle 2, illustration by the ever-amazing Nikklas Jansson via Amanita)


End of fire poles

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 11:48 AM PST

Fire poles, invented in the 1870s, are becoming a thing of the past. Why? Liability, of course! Already, Seattle has banned fire poles after a firefighter fell and suffered brain injuries last year, resulting in a lawsuit that was settled for $13 million. New fire stations are mostly single-story, contain multiple staircases, or, in some cases, slides. From Time:
21 25081302 20Fe782C57 Z While some new stations in the U.S. still include poles, the National Fire Protection Association aims to change that. "Fire departments are questioning the need for a fire pole and going with regular stairs," says Ken Willette, a retired fire chief in Massachusetts who now manages the association's public fire-protection division. "If there was a fire pole, we would want it enclosed so nobody stumbles into it in the middle of the night..."

"The pole is something we associated with as kids," says Scott Wolf, a partner at the architectural firm Miller Hull, which designed Seattle's Lake City station that opened in June and another station set to open in the Greenwood neighborhood in 2011. "But the pole has been one of the biggest sources of firefighter injury."

No matter the conduit, getting firefighters to the equipment as quickly and directly as possible remains critical. Susi Rosenthal, an assistant fire chief in Seattle who oversees the city's facilities, says poles have always been a personal decision anyway. "I always prefer stairs," the 30-year veteran says. "As long as you get there at the same time, it doesn't matter. In my experience, the younger you are, the more likely you are to slide a pole."

"Sorry, Kids. Fire Stations Are Ditching Fire Poles"

(photo: "firepole at Eugene, Oregon firestation #1 open house" by drcorneilus)

Photographer Bill Durgin's unusual figure studies

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 11:31 AM PST

Durginnnn
New York photographer Bill Durgin's figure studies are as beautiful as they are strange. From his artist statement:
Figuredurgin-1 The gesture within each photograph is created through exploring my own physical limitations and collaborative improvisation with dancers and performers. Often I will come up with a pose and demonstrate it and then ask the model to repeat or respond to it. Each pose transmogrifies the figure towards abstraction; exaggerating or diminishing the skeletal structure until it approaches an amorphic form. I want the bodies to be recognized as bodies, but also to be detached from common perceptions of the figure. Bound within each singular view, the uncanny figures convey the body as both abject and marvelous.
Bill Durgin: Figure Studies (via Imaginary Foundation)

Maximal brands made minimal

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 11:09 AM PST

redbullfixed.jpg Antrepo took mass-marketed product branding and reduced it to the basics: simplicity stands out when surrounded by everyone else's visual clutter. It shows just how trashy even some relatively plain brands have become. A couple of the improvements set off my genericdar, however, which got me thinking about the positive signifiers maximalist design carries in certain product categories. Perhaps this is because packaging tends to show off premium printing processes, encouraging us to assume similar quality within -- valuable when it comes to products we already know are similarly mass-produced, such as cornflakes. Flickr Set [via DF and Laughing Squid]

Shotgun lock and wall mount

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 10:55 AM PST

Costco is selling this useful ShotLock Universal Solo Vault Safe for $130, including shipping.
shotgun-lock.jpgIntroducing the ShotLock Solo-Vault universal shotgun mounting system; designed as a shotgun mounting platform with the ability to integrate and secure the greater majority of pump, semi-auto, O/U, side by side and pistol grip shotguns on the market today. Now you can enjoy the peace-of-mind that comes with knowing your personal home defense shotgun is always close, secure and ready. When the first responder is YOU, there may be no time to fumble with trigger locks or enter your combo and open your gun safe. With the ShotLock you're at-the-ready in seconds. Mount your ShotLock Solo-Vault on a wall, or in a vehicle to put the security you need, right where you need it, when you need it.
ShotLock Universal Solo Vault Safe

Elie Wiesel is a winner for shoah!

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 04:42 PM PST

Med Wp-Content Uploads 2010 12 Holocaust-Winner
Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel was a guest on Fox & Friends last week. Ooops! However, I guess you could say that having survived the death camps, he "won" in some sense. Mediaite has the video. (via @dailygrail, thanks Rob B for the headline)

Hunter Stabler, exquisite papercutting artist

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 10:42 AM PST

Images Babayaga Images Majick Downsize
Images Majick Detail 01 Downsize Papercutting artist Hunter Stabler is an absolute X-Acto master. Above left, "Baba Yaga Misquotes the Face to Steeleye Span," W24" x H36," Hand Cut Paper. Above right (and detail at left), "Magick Kruller Alefbet Lamen of the Golden Dawn," W27" x H35," ink and graphite on hand-cut paper and Color-aid mounted on Plexiglass. Hunter Stabler (via Phantasmaphile)



Massive airship hangar now water park

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 08:56 PM PST

Images Then-And-Now-Airships-To-Waterslides-Gal2 Above is the world's largest freestanding building, an airship hangar built a decade ago at an abandoned Soviet military base south of Berlin. The $110 million hangar -- 1,181 feet long by 688 feet wide by 351 feet high -- held a massive airship that entrepreneur Carl von Gablenz hoped would prove that such vehicles were ideal to deliver massive industrial machinery like oil rigs and wind turbines. But in 2002, von Gablenz's company, Cargo Lifter AG, was out of cash. A Malaysian firm, Tanjong, bought the hanger for $24 million and converted it into Tropical Islands Resort, a huge water park. From Air & Space:
Images Then-And-Now-Airships-To-Waterslides-Gal1 Tanjong soon found that keeping the hangar at 78 degrees Fahrenheit year-round was a challenge. So workers welded shut the two steel doors, which weigh 600 tons each. To open the hangar to light, "we exchanged the [steel] skin of the hall with 20,000 square yards of translucent film," says Tanjong spokesman Patrick Kastner. "This makes natural tanning possible..."

At 3,000 square yards, (the pool is) larger than four Olympic-size pools, and its artificial horizon conjures a faraway island. At the "shoreline" are 600 feet of sandy beach and hundreds of deck chairs. The Bali Lagoon has a grotto and waterfall, as well as the world's largest indoor rainforest, with 50,000 trees in 600 varieties--from palm to papaya--that thrive in natural light. Its most popular attraction is a nine-story waterslide that propels sliders to 44 mph.

"Then and Now: From Airships to Waterslides"

How To: Make a Figgy Pudding

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 10:00 AM PST

beeton_Xmas_plum_pudding_1890s.jpg

When the carolers come to your door, will you be ready? A strategic stockpile of figgy puddings may well be the only thing standing between you, and certain doom. Protect your family from the singing hordes. Make a figgy pudding today!

There are a couple of directions you can take this:
• NPR's figgy pudding (Similar in style to a bundt or rum cake)

• More traditional British-style figgy pudding (With suet! Expect something more dense and fruitcake-esque.)

In memory of Tim Lloyd and Emily Gunther, who had no figgy puddings and have surely been eaten by ravenous carolers by now.

Santa will take you to hell

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 09:19 AM PST

Pagan idol Santa Claus is responsible for the economic meltdown, amid sundry other offenses. [Westboro Baptist Church via Dangerous Minds]

Not all of Thomas Edison's ideas were successful

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 09:16 AM PST

Just in time for Christmas, the Atlantic has a story all about Thomas Edison's failed experiment with selling creepy robot baby dolls.

Lesbians make more money than straight women (And nobody really knows why)

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 12:55 PM PST

cashmoneyhoney.jpg

Statistically, women are paid less than men for the same jobs. But here's something I didn't realize—lesbian women are paid more than straight women.

Even when you control for factors like race, education, profession, location, and even number of children, lesbians still make about 6% more than straight gals. There are a lot of theories about why this happens (I, for one, am curious as to whether lesbians are more likely to negotiate for raises than straight women), but one theory centers around the idea that straight women expect to, eventually, be involved with a man. And they expect, just as reasonably, that that man will earn more than they do—and, thus, when it comes time to decide who will make career sacrifices, the women expect that they'll be the ones to take that hit. All those assumptions make sense—given what we know about American life—and they all lead to straight women investing less human capital in their careers. Anyway, that's the theory tested by a 2009 study explained by The Big Think blog:

This theory is cleverly tested in a paper which calculates the wage premium paid to lesbians in two distinct groups--those who were once in a heterosexual marriage and those have never been married.* The assumption made is reasonable; lesbian women who were once married to men (about 44% of the lesbians in the sample) presumably have in the past had the expectation that they would have a marriage partner with a higher income. The never-married women might also have had this expectation, but it is much more likely that, on average, women in that group expected to be in a relationship with another woman with a comparable income.

Does the evidence support the theory that the wage premium can be explained by greater investment in more market-oriented skills by lesbian women? Well the premium does not disappear completely for the subset of previously married women but is reduced by about 17%, providing some support for the idea. At 5.2% though, the once-married lesbian premium is still high enough that I don't think we can consider the case closed.

So why does the lesbian wage premium exist? Nobody is really sure. Hopefully further research will make more sense of this. I'm posting about it mainly because I had no idea this phenomenon existed, until I read the Big Think story. Some other research angles I'd love to know more about: Whether some lesbians make more than others and whether that can be correlated to differences in social circles and personality; what do high-earning straight women and high-earning lesbian women have in common; and (from a more navel-gazing perspective) where do bisexual women stand?

Image: Some rights reserved by AMagill

Building a censor-resistant web with distributed hashes

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 08:55 AM PST

Aaron Swartz's "A Censorship-Resistant Web," is a good high-level view on distributed hash-cacheing, a fairly credible system for augmenting the web to make it harder to censor and spoof sensitive information:
What's nice about this system is that it gets you censorship resistance without introducing anything wildly new. There are already certificate authorities. There are already hash-to-URL servers. There are already mirrors. There's already Tor. (There's already tor2web.) The only really new thing specific to censorship resistance is URL-to-hash servers of the form I described, but they're very simple and hopefully uncontroversial.

There is some work to be done stitching all of these together and improving the UI, but unlike with some other censorship-resistance systems, there's nothing you can point to as having no good purpose except for helping bad guys. It's all pretty basic and generally useful stuff, just put together in a new way.

And even if you don't like my particular distribution system, if you agree with the notion of authentic pages you can distribute them through whatever network you like.

A Censorship-Resistant Web

The placebo effect: Now with 100% fewer lies

Posted: 23 Dec 2010 08:22 AM PST

placebex.jpg

If you read Steve Silberman's excellent Wired story on placebos last year then you know that fake medicine can have some very real effects. Scientists are only beginning to ask the important questions here—why placebos seem to be able to alleviate certain medical problems, why they don't have much impact on others, and what all of this tells us about the human body.

But, looming behind those questions is a nagging, clawing beast. Even if placebos can be medicine on a technical level, could we ever ethically use them? Most of us agree that it would be wrong for doctors to lie to patients, even if it might help the patients feel better. And most of us assume that lies are part of how placebos work.

But that may not be true.

A small study, recently published the journal PLoS One, looked at what might happen if the irritable bowel syndrome patients who received a placebo knew they were taking nothing more than sugar pill. Amazingly, the placebo group improved. In fact, they improved as much as the people taking the real drug. These results aren't comprehensive. As Silberman explains in a nuanced and fascinating blog post, this is the first word on ethical placebos—not the last. But the questions it raises are important ones. The research that will come out of this line of inquiry could change the way our children and grandchildren think about medicine and health. And it opens whole barrels of worms ...

Its modest sample size and brief duration leave plenty of room for followup research. (What if "ethical" placebos wear off more quickly than deceptive ones? Does the fact that most of the volunteers in this study were women have any bearing on the outcome? Were any of the volunteers skeptical that the placebo effect is real, and did that affect their response to treatment?)

Before some eager editor out there composes a tweet-baiting headline suggesting that placebos are about to drive Big Pharma out of business, he or she should appreciate the fact that the advent of AMA-approved placebo treatments would open numerous cans of fascinatingly tangled worms. For example, since the precise nature of placebo effects is shaped largely by patients' expectations, would the advertised potency and side effects of theoretical products like Placebex and Therastim be subject to change by Internet rumors, requiring perpetual updating?

Read More: Meet the Ethical Placebo by Steve Silberman

Image: Some rights reserved by Mykl Roventine

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