I was actually discussing this with someone recently, but if you want your kid to get ahead, don’t teach them Manderin but instead plain ole Spanish.

Alex Suskind writes on the enduring legacy of Cowboy Bebop. I don’t rewatch nearly as much of my old anime as I’d like, but I find myself rewatching Cowboy Bebop every few years.

Last summer, Scott Alexander reviewed Elizabeth Warren’s Two-Income Trap.

China has opened a Hogwarts! For art students.

Jeannie Suk is concerned that future lawyers are not being trained to understand rape law because of student sensitivity. Corey Yung isn’t seeing it, though. Non-lawyer Conor Friedersdorf also comments on the issue.

Yes! Our experiment in trying to get everybody out of bed earlier has been an abject failure.

California Sunday magazine has an in-depth look at the 43 Mexican students who went missing, and the change that may occur because of it.

About dang time. The pickings for Android car stereos have remained too slim for too long.

Alex Tabarrok writes about three felonies a day and its ramifications.

Even after a global apolocalypse, people gotta eat.

As Gabriel Rossman says, “Grant us this day our daily pageviews and forgive us our outrages as we forgive those who outrage against us.”

News is that e-cigarettes are less addictive than combustibles, Sally Satel argues that anti-smoking groups should endorse Snus and E-Cigarettes. The Snus thing is interesting, because both sides cite it without hesitation as proof on the potential dangers and potential of ecigarettes.

Here’s a story from 2006: A woman was applying for aid and was denied because the maternity test said that she wasn’t her child’s mother.

Jailed criminals think pretty highly of themselves.

Lain likes bananas. Only so much, though. She enjoys so much of a banana, then she really enjoys giving the rest to the dog and watching us scramble to prevent that from happening.

She likes apples. Only so much, though. She enjoys the first ten bites, and then she enjoys getting another apple.

The end result of all of this being I end up eating a lot more fruit than I used to.

She likes eggs sometimes. Other times, she does not want eggs and is offended at the very notion that I would try to put them in her mouth.

The end result of that being that I eat a fair amount of eggs, too. Smoke’em if you got’em, I guess.

John Sanphillippo advocates “Good Enough Urbanism.”

Keep that anger bottled up, lower your self esteem, hire a narcissist, and seven more counter-intuitive psychological findings.

Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Utah… what’s the difference, really?

According to a new study, assortive mating actually has increased over time.

“We don’t have a marriage crisis in this country because everybody has stopped following the rules. We have a marriage crisis because the rules don’t work.” -Eve Tushnet

MOOCs may be a disappointment by the standards of what their boosters have said, but there still may be gold in them there hills.

The Economist looks at what’s gone wrong with Germany’s energy policy.

Autonomous cars are going to require new kinds of digital mapping. The article discusses Nokia’s HERE software. I left that out of my navigation software review because it wasn’t available. I have tried it since and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Listen to the brave story of a cow being prepared for slaughter that had other ideas.

Universities are using the holidays for fundraising. My alma mater has never once called or contacted me requesting money. Which on the one hand, is convenient for me. On the other hand, it’s typical of their administrative incompetencies and I want to smack them over the head for it.

Keli Goff makes a progressive case against birthright citizenship, as part of a larger bargain. I’m not in favor if the idea, and it’s not going anywhere, but I hadn’t realized that a couple other countries have recently made that decision.

The curious case of Lawrence Franks, who ditched the US Army and joined the French Foreign Legion.

I am about to do an update of my feeds on the RSS app on my phone. The RSS app* makes updating the feeds a hassle, so it’s worthwhile to add a lot of sites at once rather than adding them as I find them. So before I go into it… are there any sites you recommend? I’m looking for anything from personal to cultural to political blogs.

* – Also, if you do Android, I’m up for hearing about good RSS apps, too. Bonus points if they can use the word “color.”

Hit Coffee is expanding to new locations with some new writers, in case you haven’t noticed.

Malcolm Blue (aka Mr. Blue) joined some time ago, though has only periodically contributed.

This week, James Hanley (formerly of Ordinary Times and presently of Bawdy House Provisions) has joined. Professor Hanley actually used the Trumanverse map in one of his classes.

And hopefully soon, Gabriel Conroy (of Ye Olde Republicke) will also be joining us.

I don’t intend to retreat in my own output, which I will grant has not been as robust as I would like. Life intervenes. So this will be “in addition to” rather than “instead of.”

Via Dustbury and Autoblog, here is a video of a news reporter who doesn’t know how to use an ice scraper:

She takes the correction in really good humor. And in her defense, she apparently made her way up to Washington State by way of Los Angeles, where you don’t have to deal with this sort of thing often.

I can relate. I remember when I first moved to Deseret from Colosse. It’s not that there was never ice in Colosse that needed to be scraped off, but you never needed more than a credit card and taking anything more than a hand-scraper was a waste of automobile interior real estate. Snow? The last time I had seen snow that was still snow when it hit the ground was 1987.

So it was a bit of a shock.

Also, I had to learn quite a bit about these things. Including the ubiquitous design of those scraper-brushes, and how they worked.

Another thing I learned was that below a certain temperature, even cars that are otherwise in good working order won’t start. I remember my shock when I arrived and people would go into the convenience store while leaving their cars running. Back in Colosse, that was asking to get your car stolen, it seemed to me. But people there did it all the time. Was crime really all that non-existent? Not the case, it turned out. It was just that the comparative risk of a car failing to restart versus the less common but more severe stolen car… well, the frequency of the former trumps the severity of the latter.

What I’ve discovered since, I’ve determined, is that the concern over the stolen car is most likely pretty foolish to begin with. It’s just something you only notice when stopping your car and taking the key out of it takes some risks. This goes into a bit about the regional and generational differences in how we think about crime and the risk of crime. A subject for a post at a later date. Right now we’re talking about ice scrapers.

As it turns out, the scraper-brush is almost a perfectly sized broom for Lain to push around the outside deck when she wants to mimic me pushing around the deck broom. It is every bit as cute as you imagine.

Scientific American has a piece on the differing opinions between scientists and the rest of us on various issues (some political, some not).

The biggest gap that I am on the commoner side of things is world population (23 points). After that, it’s offshore drilling (20 points), vaccination requirements (18 points), and fracking (8 points). All of these are subject to nuance, however. It’s possible that on the world population question it could be hashed out over a beer into more agreement than a boolean answer allows for.

So where do y’all fall on the side of the commoner and against those pencilnecks in lab coats?

Modern feminism apparently can’t compete with targeted marketing, as gendered toys are now more common than they were 50 years ago.

Popular Mechanics looks at the hits-and-misses of its long ago, long term predictions about the future.

The gift of coal: Matt Frost has an interesting proposal to reconcile our love for coal with our need to do something about global warming. Sort of.

There may be a universe where time runs backwards.

Joe Carter looks at the implications that an ultrasound-on-a-chip will have for abortion. {More}

Everybody knows that bike helmets reduce bicycle injuries… but maybe they do so by convincing kids not to ride bikes.

Cory Weinberg looks at modular construction in the Bay Area. I’m a fan of modular instruction (our home was so constructed), but it seems more appropriate for places where construction costs, rather than location, are the cost issue.

As air travel becomes easier and cheaper, European sleeper trains are retiring.

Anyone over a certain age probably wishes they could go back in time and invest in Apple in 1976. Turns out, you would have done better with gold.

What happens when you’re an Airbnb guest and your host dies?

In Valentine, Texas, the entire student body (including two girls) is on the basketball team.

According to the Washington Post, women are dyeing their armpit hair. Young people make me glad to have been young a long time ago. (But not too long ago, because 80’s.)

Koalas do not exactly make good house pets, if the tale of GumNut is to be believed.

The Nereid Under Ice vehicle was deployed to find out who eats whom under the ice.

On Friday, we got a visit from a meat seller. As it happens, we’re somewhat interested in bulk meats, and we definitely want a freezer (which they were throwing in), so we let him in.

His sales pitch was solid. I was initially pretty reluctant, but Clancy (who in particular is interested in bulk meats) was a bit more enthusiastic. I want to start doing a lot more cooking, and having a lot of meat around seemed like a pretty good way to encourage me to do so. He almost had a sale.

I remembered Dr Phi’s post on Town & County Foods, however. Clancy asked if he could step outside to give us a few minutes. Which he did. Remembering Dr Phi’s post on Town & County Foods, I was inspired to look up the company online. While the model of this company differed from T&C, there were enough similarities that I wanted to check up on them. It… did not paint a pretty picture.

On the upshot, this was not a fly-by-night operation. A lot of the complaints I saw involved their aggressive sales strategies. There were no items about hidden contracts, which was a primary concern. There were vague comments about how the business did business, but little in the way of specifics.

However, they do have an “F” from the Better Business Bureau. While they have no obligation to be members, that they aren’t and that they failed to respond to any of the complaints against them… well, that doesn’t prove anything, but also doesn’t fill me with confidence. Given the sheer number of complaints out there, they seem to have accepted or resigned themselves to having a pretty negative reputation online. Which means that if things go sideways, they don’t have a reputation that they would particularly like to protect.

We told the salesperson that it wasn’t going to happen. He made some sale-save efforts, but quickly determined that it was a lost cause. It was a very long few minutes while he packed up his meats and went on his way. On the one hand, I felt bad for him because he really probably thought that he had made a sale. And it fell apart due to no mistake of his own, and on account of something there was absolutely nothing he could do without.

On the other hand, he was an unsolicited solicitor. That’s got to come with the business.

Unlike T&C, I don’t know that what they were offering was a bad deal. I was mostly worried about, once having ordered from them, fending off attempt and attempt at re-order. I once had an ongoing issue when I purchased some printer ink that was alledgely “no obligation” that ultimately resulted in my having to tell shipping “please to not accept any packages from these people.” The salesguy said that wasn’t how they operate. Maybe it’s not. But there was enough out there to make it a concern.

The UAB football program, whose demise I talked about here, isn’t going as quietly into the night as UAB President Ray Watts and the University of Alabama Board of Trustees had hoped. Some, including Superdestroyer here but also some national commentators, wondered if the fall of the UAB football program wasn’t a harbinger of things to come for the have-nots of college football. What Ray Watts did, a lot of other university presidents are not going to be eager to follow. The media attention has largely turned negative, particularly in Alabama (where, a year ago, I would have thought that indifference would have reigned.

Though many assume (and is often the case) faculty is hostile to sports, Watts himself has received a no confidence vote from the faculty (as well as the student government):

During President Watts’ 22-month tenure, the resolution says, he has failed to apply principles of shared governance to selection of university administrative officers, disbanding of the athletic programs, changes in academic operations and changes in faculty benefits.

UAB FAR Frank Messina told the Faculty Senate in December that he was given no indication from Watts or a consulting group analyzing the university’s athletics department that those programs could be on the chopping block.

The other resolution was a statement in support of UAB Athletics. It calls for “a comprehensive analysis of UAB Athletics that is transparent and includes consideration of campus-wide impact for discontinuation of any athletic program.”

The basketball program gave an extension to their basketball coach, with an added stipulation to make sure he does not criticize the school. UAB has always had a stronger basketball program than a football one. The current coach hasn’t been particularly good in light of that, but he pulls in a half-million a year, which is good pay.

The former football coach, Bill Clark, has declined coaching opportunities, in part hopeful that UAB will reverse course on its decision. There are signs that it might, with the introduction of a “task force” to revisit the report on which Watts based his decision:

The numbers in the study have been called into question by several critics of the decision, with some saying it overestimated expenses and underestimated revenue and charitable support. UAB President Ray Watts announced the creation of the task force earlier this month.

In a statement, Smith said the group met Jan. 16 for about three hours. He said the task force discussed a number of issues, including a request for proposal to help determine the firm or firms that will conduct the report.

I actually read the report. It wasn’t hard, being something like sixteen pages. It quite obviously started with the conclusion and moved backwards. People are questioning the numbers, but it looks apparent to me that the preparers, CarrSports, gave the administration the numbers that they wanted to reach the desired conclusion. Last year they prepared a report for James Madison University, which suggested that JMU should make the transition from FCS to FBS, also likely a case of telling administrators what they wanted to here. There is talk, actually, of JMU being UAB’s replacement in Conference USA.

Conference USA is having its winter meeting, where among other things they will determine UAB’s fate in the conference. No decision is expected, but it could weigh heavily on UAB’s decision. If UAB doesn’t have a spot in Conference USA waiting for them, it’ll be harder to justify rebooting their football program. The only potential home for them will be the Sun Belt, which has substantially lower payouts. That’s if they can get an invitation. On the one hand, they’d be a great get for the Belt. On the other hand, they have two teams in Alabama already.