A while back, Katie Alison Granju wrote about Tennessee changing its divorce by way of court decree forbidding judges from forbidding “sleep-overs” between a parent and significant other, post-divorce. Granju isn’t sure what to think:

As for me, I admit that I’m kind of torn on this one. On the one hand, I do struggle with a deep-seated, somewhat kneejerk distaste for the idea of kids waking up to mom or dad’s latest hook-up reading the sportspages in the breakfast nook. Additionally, I don’t think that a parent who has gone through the hell of seeing his or her marriage end in whole or in part due to infidelity should have to endure the secondary pain of begging a judge to keep the third party in the marital break-up from spending the night in a home where the children are present.

But on the other hand, a blanket ban is clearly discriminatory toward gay parents, who have no ability to marry their romantic partners in Tennessee, and thus, under a blanket ban they wouldbe de facto barred from ever again having a meaningful family relationship with another adult until the children were grown and gone. Plus, I’m kind of with the libertarians on this one in that I don’t want the courts telling me how to raise my kids and run my household unless and until I clearly demonstrate that my behavior is causing real harm to my offspring.

I find the reasoning in the second paragraph to be a little weak. This isn’t about an automatic ban, but rather one that a judge can issue or not issue. Presumably, a gay couple would be more likely to say “live and let live” since neither one of them can marry (in Tennessee, at any rate, at the present time). It’s straight couples, where marriage is at least an option, where one partner or the other might say “You/we can wait until we’re remarried.”

But it is an interesting question and I guess in the overall I am similarly conflicted. Bans can be enforced if the other parent can prove some specific harm, but it’s hard to prove harm without making divorce proceedings much more acrimonious than they would already be. “My soon-to-be former spouse is a slut, your honor.” or even better, “My ex-husband has demonstrated a history of having bad taste in women. Uhmm, except me!”

One of the thoughts that comes to my mind is that such a ban is convenient to ask for in the event that one side or the other remarries quickly. You know, if maybe they already had their spouse picked out before the papers were files. It would strike me as a double-whammy for a cheater to turn around and say “No sleepovers until you are re-married like I am now!”

On the other hand, in cases of joint custody, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to say “Hey, you can have the sleepovers when the kids are at the other parents’ house.” Of course, that only works if the kids bounce back and forth. It becomes a little more complicated when one does have the kids around almost all of the time.

I think I lean slightly in favor of allowing sleepovers absent the demonstration of harm of one sort or another. I can think of instances where I would not want it to happen, but the scenarios are so variable and diverse that I am not sure how much faith I would have in a judge correctly sussing it out.

An obvious link that hadn’t occurred to me: our levels of incarceration hurt our mobility. People in jail can’t leave, of course, but there are other reasons as well. Richard Florida also writes about the make-up of “Stuck America.”

A look at Stanford’s free online education experiment.

ED Kain argues that America needs 1Gbps Internet in every home. I honestly don’t think that top speeds are the issue. The primary issue is reliability. Both in terms of having it available everywhere and in reliability of speed. The maximum speed is just a number. The average speed is more helpful. The minimum speed during periods of high usage is the most important thing.

The story of a woman who jokingly tried to sell her husband on eBay.

I love this! We should use landfill junk to expand Manhattan.

An interesting story on the link between video game playing and creativity. Kudos to the article for not conflating correlation with causation (it wouldn’t be surprising if more creative people were attracted to video games in the first place). The fact that computers and the Internet were “unrelated to creativity” is itself interesting, as these things are supposed to be the death knell to creativity compared to reading Dickens, locked in chains, in a basement.

What law schools can learn from Zappos!

Half Sigma likes to talk about how unhealthy marathoning is. Could cardio exercise itself be a problem?

I agree with the “weirdly sinister” description of this 1967 IBM ad that Jim Henson put together.

Should antivirus companies be allowed to overlook spyware put on your computer by the police? I find this question refreshing, as I fear the question may ultimately become: Should they be allowed not to overlook it?

Also, to what degree should police be allowed to use license plate readers? I’m having trouble coming up with a good libertarian argument against this, other than just a vague sense that the government should not be able to track us so easily. But the expectation of privacy on where you drive your publicly-registered vehicle has to be pretty minimal.

So in 1999, a federal judge ruled that police can bar people with high IQs from becoming police officers. From a constitutional standpoint, this makes sense. And in a way, I guess it’s personality profiling. But once this makes its way to the courts, what police force wants to defend the policy that cops shouldn’t be too smart? It’s a series of jokes that write themselves.

Up until about the eighth grade, the first semester ended about two weeks after we returned from Christmas vacation. Then, some law was passed that allowed school to begin earlier in the year. A few days off and inservice days were shifted to the Spring, and the semesters were separated by winter break. Shortly after I graduated high school, there were grumblings that the school year was starting too soon. The local theme parks and other summer-fun places were complaining that they were left with only a little more than a couple months of business. So they tried to pass another law forcing districts to wait until September to start school. Education experts, in turn, argued that starting the semester earlier in the year was problematic because it would require splitting up the first semester again, which was problematic because of the brain drain that occurs over those two or so weeks.

As I read about this debate, I scratched my head. First, if they forget it over two weeks, then they never really learned it. Second, though, if we’re worried about what happens over two weeks, what about the two to three months of summer?! One of the frustrations for K-12 for me was that how it seemed that half of each year was spent reminding us of what we had learned over the previous year and forgotten over the summer (except that I didn’t forget, which made it even more frustrating). I was reminded of this when I read the following snipit from Reihan Salam’s piece on education:

Alan Krueger, the Princeton economist President Obama tapped to serve as his chief economic adviser, co-authored an important paper with Molly Fifer in 2006 on summer learning loss. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are at a big skills disadvantage in early grades, but that gap grows with each passing year. One reason is that while middle-class kids take part in enriching activities during the summer, ranging from camp to stimulating conversations with educated parents, poor kids are far less likely to do so. With that in mind, Krueger and Fifer called for a program of summer opportunity scholarships paying for enrichment programs during long vacations. It’s an excellent idea that should be pursued.

But what we really need is a cultural shift in which all of us take more responsibility for our education. We are not empty vessels into which credentialed professionals ladle knowledge. Rather, we are a special kind of animal uniquely good at learning through imitation and practice. Somehow we need to find better ways to capitalize on this fact — inside school walls and outside as well.

Or, of course, we could eliminate and/or divide out the “long vacations.”

There are a few arguments against this one. The theme park lobby being one of them. They like having things condensed in a way that allows them to concentrate all of their business over a short period of time (though, apparently, there is such a thing as “too short”). And a lot of leisure activities are season-specific (beaches, for instance). The fall and spring, where at least a few weeks of vacation would be harbored, can be too cold for outdoor swimming (where applicable) but too warm for playing in the snow (where applicable).

The second argument is that a lot of schools up north are not cut out for summers. They have non-existent or insufficient air conditioning. Which strikes me as insane no matter where you live. I hear this in particular about the northeast and that just strikes me as bizarre. They brag about how much money they spend on schools, but don’t shell out for adequate air conditioning systems?

The last argument is that summer school is necessary for some kids to get caught up.

In any event, I am unmoved by these arguments when you consider the degree of brain-drain that does occur over the summer. The third is the only really problematic one, to me. For the students that fall behind, I think the solution to that is with a quarter system where some classes over some quarters are repeated. While useful for shorthand, I think that overall the tendency to delineate too much by “grade level” is problematic. I would prefer more of an assessment/promotion approach on a class-by-class basis. So if we did go to a year-around system, I would support other changes occurring at the same time. Up to and including allowing families to pull their kids out of school for family trips, in the event that the months-off are staggered between the school. Staggering months-off could also go a ways towards alleviating the Disneyland problem.

As for the air conditioner problem, buck up and pay for it.

A minor pet peeve in TV shows. For various reasons, they often use fictitious entities like universities and sports teams. I know why they do it and I don’t mind at all (says the guy who fictionalized the entire United States of America). But if you’re going to do this, jot down the name of the entity you created and use it in the future.

I’m watching an episode of Cold Case, where they have a fictitious Penn University. Not to be confused with the University of Pennsylvania, which they used in a previous episode (I think in that case it was referring to the real Penn). Having these two coexist doesn’t sit entirely right, but I wouldn’t make waves about it. What does bug me, though, is that Penn U’s mascot is the Jaguars. That bothers me because another episode had a Pennsylvania University with a mascot of the Warriors.

People. It’s a single show. This is not like asking DC Comics, with its dozens and dozens of titles under scores of writers/artists, to keep things straight.

Las Vegas was also really bad about this. UNLV existed in that show, but then they would have “Nevada State University” (there is a Nevada State College – little more than a community college – but no NSU) in a plot involving a crooked card-counting professor. Then, a season later, they had Las Vegas State University. This isn’t quite as bad as the above since NSU, LVSU, and UNLV can all co-exist, but would it have been too much to ask them to dip into the same well when they needed a fictional U?

On the other hand, Law & Order, despite spanning several shows, was actually decent about using the same universities repeatedly. They were less good about sports teams, however. giving New York two additional basketball programs.

Another nail in the coffin of the “The Internet is destroying our sociability” meme.

How cheaper cocaine meant less crime. Speaking of drugs, it’s harvest time in Marijuana Country!

So our stereotypes about fast food may be mistaken. As incomes rise, so does fast food consumption.

Something to keep in mind when we tell Chris Christie to just put down the fork. What I don’t understand, though, is why we can’t just inject people with leptin? Also, more on the genetic basis for obesity. Just because you’re thin doesn’t mean that you had to work harder at it and sacrifice more than the person who is not thin. I think about food and diet and nutrition a lot less now than I did 75 pounds ago.

City people extol the virtues of the city, unsurprisingly, but it appears that city-dwellers rely on the narcotic effect of carbon monoxide to get through the hassles of the area.

The NHS declares that C-Sections should be available to all women. I have mixed feelings about it, to be honest, but a general animosity towards the expectations that doctors (all of whom work for the NHS) should have to do this.

Cricket is being destroyed by an “indecent obsession with money.” Well, why should cricket be any different? I sometimes dream of picking a sport that’s not “all about the money,” but of course as soon as it becomes popular, it becomes all about the money. And if it’s not popular, it’s not a social activity, and therefore I lose interest in it. I mean, I think Arena football (which is not all about the money) is cool, but since nobody knows anything about it, there’s no point in paying attention to it. I’ve always wanted to learn more about cricket. And I think that colleges that don’t play football should play scholarship-free rugby, just to have a new playing field without all the big boys. Until, of course, USC notices and starts its own rugby team If it gains in popularity that is. So the same basic problem.

Another cool gadget: A marriage calculator. Calculating, that is, the likelihood of divorce. My likelihood of having already been divorced is 5% and another 6% chance that we will divorce in the next several years. My wife has a 14% and 12%. I have no idea why she would be more likely to divorce than me. I would guess it is related to fact that it asked the kids question for her and not for me.

I really, really wish I’d known about this elections gadget in 2008. I hope they do one for 2012. You can see who would win what state by swings in demographics in voting and in turnout.

Should we chalk this up to the War on Drugs or the regulatory state? This, the closing of a soup kitchen because they want to regulate it like a restaurant, definitely falls into the latter category.

Over at NaPP, I am in charge of the weekly trivia question. I thought I would reproduce it here.

This week’s question is going to be a little trickier than some, so I am going to give out several hints at once.

Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Vermont have none.

There were roughly 650 of these in 2006 in the entire world, on every continent but Antarctica. There are over 700 now.

There are roughly 150 in the United States. Over a third of these are in one of three states.

Canada has roughly 20, with one in most provinces.

Direct answers here.

Peter Singer makes the case that we should ban cigarettes. I actually admire the upfront approach in comparison to the approach that of course they should be legal but you should not actually be allowed to smoke anywhere. Also, a text messaging program appears to help people quit. And, at least in some places, the war on smoking actually is a war on pleasure.

The young Turks (as in, the ones from Turkey) are over-educated, tech-savvy, and jobless. I worry sometimes that will be the case with us. Lots of educated people with little to do.

In the UK, kids with higher IQ’s are more likely to do drugs than those with lower iQ’s. It brings the point back up as to how much drug-use is actually self-medication.

Is Italy falling apart? Was it ever a real thing to begin with? Between Italy and Belgium, and especially considering the EU’s problems, it seems like rather than a trend towards unification, the trend is towards increased dissolution.

Intel and Dreamworks are working on a chip that will allow them to render in realtime. This is, apparently, a very big deal.

The NFL intentionally buries footage that would make understanding the mechanics of the game easier.

40% of kids’ calorie consumption is junk food. Ergo, kids, in the aggregate, consumer a lower percentage of junk calories than I do.

When stuck in a situation we can’t get out of, we rationalize. Is there any way that this is not logical? There is a neat sort of “pre-emptive status quo bias” thing going on, though.

How Ronald Reagan shaped Hollywood economics. I’m not entirely sure that this was for the better. I think there is something to be said for the old studio system. Also, Poland has built a statue in the former president’s honor.

I sort of rolled my eyes when I saw an article title that indicated that Bill Gates had some thoughts on drug companies, but they actually make some sense. Also, why there will never be another drug like Lipitor.

A sperm donor discovers his unsettling legacy. I was almost a donor once. The thought of a bunch of unknown children out there is something that I am glad I do not have to live with. A character in one of my novels is inspired to make the world a better place for the children he has out there but will never meet.

No shocker: white girls face a bigger penalty for being obese. What did surprise me that there is no “social marginalization penalty” at all for blacks and Hispanics.

From Arapahoe County, Colorado:

A CBS4 investigation has learned that former Arapahoe County Sheriff Patrick J. Sullivan Jr. has been arrested, suspected of trafficking methamphetamine, a controlled substance.

Sullivan, 68, was the elected Arapahoe County Sheriff for 19 years. He retired in 2002 and went on to become director of safety and security for Cherry Creek Schools. He was a nationally-regarded law enforcement figure and in 2001 as the National Sheriff Association named Sullivan “Sheriff of the Year.”

A more complete story here, with an ironical tidbit: he was sent to a jail named after.

The story gets worse from there:

There were other developments in the Sullivan story Friday. Denver Police reopened an investigation into the death of Sean Moss, a case that led to police interviewing Sullivan earlier this year about his relationship with Moss.

The 27-year-old’s body was found face down in the South Platte River in January. A DPD detective interviewed Sullivan after Moss death after learning Sullivan and Moss were friends and that Sullivan had bailed Moss out of jail two weeks earlier.

When CBS4 reported on the connection Thursday, a Denver Police spokesperson said it was a “closed case” and there was “nothing suspicious” about the Moss death. Friday, the Denver Police Department labeled that a “misstatement” and spokesperson Sonny Jackson said there is an “active, ongoing investigation” into Moss’ death.

Long Island University Professor says that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was bullied, others agree and disagree:

Millions of viewers have reviewed the evidence. So, was Rudolph bullied?

“What they do to him is bullying especially what they’re teaching the kids now as big as it is in the schools, but yes, he was definitely bullied,” Audra Bamford said.

“We just watched it the other night and I was telling my kids that’s not how we treat our friends,” Ronette Hillenbrand added.

“No I don’t think he’s being bullied,” Dr. Friday said. “I think the problem lies with Santa. He’s just not hugging this poor defenseless thing.”

Santa’s involvement (or lack thereof) hadn’t really occurred to me. Perhaps it’s a telling indictment of how the expectation isn’t even there that authority figures will help.

I think it all depends on how far you stretch the definition of “bullied.” You can limit it to physical violence. You can broaden it a little to include threats of physical violence. You can broaden it even further to taunts and ostracization. I think all of these things apply as bullying of some sort, though some of these forms are more serious than others. I remember back in college I had a discussion with a female classmate wherein she argued that girls are worse bullies than men because guys rely on violence while girls are more creative and hit other girls where it really hurts: self-esteem. I countered that (a) violence hurts and (b) violence in boys is not unrelated to self-esteem. On the second point, she said that the same was true of girls and it was nothing like the self-esteem hit of being accused of being fat. We never came to an agreement. I think there was a fundamental misunderstanding of how boys and girls respond to accusations of weight (which hits girls far harder than boys) and physical weakness (the other way around).

As for Rudolph, I am inclined to agree with Dr. Giuliani that yes Rudolph was bullied, but disagree with his assertion that the movie promotes violence. The attitude towards the taunting of the other reindeer is treated with uniform negativity. If it does anything wrong, it’s to perpetuate the notion that the bullied are bullied because they are “special.” Which sounds nice, of course, but… doesn’t exactly ring true.

On the subject of bullying, Dr. Phi wonders to what extent “helicopter parenting” has actually helped alleviate the bullying problem from years past.

There was an incident at Palm Beach International Airport where an ornery Airtran flight attendant allegedly through three people off of a plane for questionable reasons:

The women — a lawyer, a therapist and a retired travel agent — were complete strangers until they were seated near one another on AirTran Flight 1451 to White Plains, New York. They were buckled in and ready to take off when they said a male flight attendant began mishandling some overhead luggage.

“I said, ‘Hey, I have breakables in that,'” said Marilyn Miller.

Miller said her plea was ignored and that the flight attendant even began shoving other bags into hers. “It was just like a bully and I found myself shaking.”

Passenger Carol Gray also had a problem and requested attention from the same flight attendant.

“I said, ‘Excuse me sir, my seat is broken,’ and he looked at me and said, ‘I’m not talking to you,’ and poked me in the arm,” said Gray.

Miller and Gray said the attendant was getting angry and threatened to throw both women off of the airplane.

“He said, ‘Well, you’re getting off.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,'” said Miller, who was escorted off of the plane into the jet-way.

The women claim two sheriff’s deputies and some airline staffers arrived to take them away. Passenger Karyn Schorr decided it was time to speak up.

“I said, ‘This is crazy, they didn’t do anything. Why are you doing this to them?'” And he said, ‘Throw her off too,'” Schorr said.

The link has two videos on the story (one appearing after the other). One of the three women said something to the effect of “If I am ever on a flight with that guy again, I am going to get off.”

Which, of course, is in good part what they are complaining about.

At least Steven Slater went nuts with style.