Month: January 2013

A female Marine writes:

Maybe I’m in the wrong here, but I don’t think the big challenge will be getting women physically ready; it will be getting grunts to accept us. The Lioness and FET programs were great, but (speaking from second-hand knowledge here) any patrol that expected contact left its girls behind the wire. I cannot be the only female Marine who has walked into a shop of men and gotten an eye roll. Or spoken to like I had a mental disability. Or, occasionally, called honey or baby.I have also worked with grunts. And they for one do not think we can do it, and don’t want us there. I’m just a lowly enlisted lady jarhead and maybe things are different on the officer side (I suspect they are). But, if enlisted men don’t want women among them, they certainly will not be led by one. Maybe if male and female recruits were taught from day to respect each other at boot camp this mentality could change.

Continue reading Females At The Front, Ctd

Nate Cohn thinks Virginia’s electoral vote changes, which might not pass, could easily backfire:

Splitting Virginia’s electoral votes could actually force Republicans to win additional “blue” states. If Republicans win all of Virginia’s 13 electoral votes under the current system (together with Florida and Ohio), they’re just one state, like Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado, or Pennsylvania, away. Under the congressional district proposal, Republicans would probably only win 9 of Virginia’s 13 electoral votes if they won the state. As a result of losing those 4 electoral votes, Republicans might need to win two of Nevada, Iowa, and New Hampshire instead of just one, at least if the GOP also lost Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Wisconsin.

But, if other states join Virginia, the calculus would change:

On its own, the Virginia plan won’t do much to reshape the electoral map. But the combination of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin could be the ticket for Mr. Rubio or Mr. Bush to win the presidency while losing Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and every battleground state other than Florida and North Carolina.

Meanwhile, Molly Ball interviews Jordan Gehrke, the political strategist plotting with Ken Blackwell “to raise money for an effort to propose similar electoral reforms in states across the country.” Earlier Dish on the GOP’s shenanigans hereand here.

Researchers recently used DNA to perfectly encode, transmit and reconstruct all of Shakespeare’s sonnets and a portion of MLK’s”I Have A Dream” speech, among other things. Ed Yong runs down the advantages this method has over your average thumb drive:

For a start, it takes up far less space. Goldman’s files came to 757 kilobytes and he could barely see them. For a more dramatic comparison, CERN, Europe’s big particle physics laboratory, currently stores around 90 petabytes of data (a petabyte is a million gigabytes) on around 100 tape drives. Goldman’s method could fit that into 41 grams of DNA. That’s a cupful. …

Continue reading The Ultimate Data Compression

Alyssa is disappointed that J.J. Abrams will direct the next Star Wars. She notes that major movie franchises “are opportunities for writers and directors to exert enormous cultural influence”:

There should be debates about what it means to have extraordinarily powerful people emerge in our society, which is why I’m glad that Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel apparently is going to explore a much more ambivalent reaction to the rise of superheroes than either The Avengers or Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies ever contemplated. There should be arguments about what our future is going to look like, which is one of the reasons Abrams’ Star Trek, which was a dramatic retreat from the socially engaged tradition of the franchise, was a disappointment even as it was highly entertaining.

And while Star Wars is a space opera, it’s also always been about totalitarianism, religious extremism, torture, and the moral value of political engagement, too. The source and meaning of mystery isn’t the only issue worth considering. And white, male geek gods aren’t the only people with profound investment in these franchises, and the way they express these questions.

Ackerman profiles Anthony Sharp, whose new private security firm Typhon will take to the seas to defend commercial tankers from pirates. It’s a tough market:

[H]e might be too late. Without much notice, piracy actually declined in 2012, bringing down the high insurance rates that send shipping companies running for armed protection. Meanwhile, the market for such security is being filled by companies that station armed guards aboard commercial ships to deter or combat pirates. That practice, known as “embarked security,” follows years of security firms, including Blackwater itself, trying and mostly failing at amassing fleets to escort commercial ships — Typhon’s model.

Harry Enten uses the East Coast’s cold snap to look more broadly at climate data:

It’s important to remember that the last few days are a very small location and sample size. While the east is a tundra, Denver, Colorado is dealing with near-record highs with temperatures in the 60s. When we expand our look to over the past month, record high maximums and minimums are running 2 to 1 ahead of record low maximums and minimums in the United States. The United States’ average temperature in 2012 was 55.3F – 3.2F above the 20th-century average and 1F above the previous record, 1998. When you drill down to specific locations, there were 356 record-high maximum temperatures compared with only 22 low maximums – a 16 to 1 ratio – over the past year. There were 105 record-high minimum temperatures against only 4 low minimums – a 26 to 1 ratio.

(Hat tip: Mark Memmott)