It’s apparently not uncommon in China to send your kids to ruralia to live with the grandparents.

The Guardian argues that fans may be exerting too much influence over their favorite shows. It’s my fervent belief that comic books have been hurt immensely by focusing on fans.

A senate candidate wants to move the US capitol to Nebraska! I approve, although disagree with the rationale. Mostly.

According to Jim Russell, part of the Rust Belt’s perception problem is due to shoddy journalism.

A neurologist makes the claim that ADHD doesn’t exit.

Idaho is deprivatizing a prison.

The ranks of law enforcement are changing with rising levels of education to tackle an increasingly complex job.

In a strange battle in World War II, Americans, French, and Germans fought side-by-side.

Here’s a bunch of pictures of an abandoned theme park in Germany.

ESP has been debunked.

The Science Museum in London is featuring an exhibit on the history of psychology.

Here is the psychology of Winter Blues and Retail Therapy.

The Washington Post has 40 maps that explain the world. And 40 more…

A complaint I’ve heard from fathers – especially the primary caregiver sort – is the degree of scrutiny they sometimes receive from strangers of the female persuasion. Though I had never experienced this myself, it sounded quite credible to me.

Today is the first time I experienced it. There was an older couple of ladies behind me in line at the supermarket making goo-goo eyes at the baby. When we were outside, one of them informed – not in those precise words – that I was handling the unloading process wrong.

My process is: Take the cart to the car, unload the groceries, return cart, take baby from cart and carry her with me back to the car.

Her order was: Put the baby in the car, start the car with the air conditioning or heater on, unload cart, and then return the cart.

The concern, I suppose, is that the baby was cold while I was unloading the cart. The weather outside was actually quite pleasant, though. Starting the car is something I might consider doing if it were -20 or something, or the weather was just miserable, but I haven’t seen a need to do that just yet. Otherwise, the baby is more likely to get upset at my absence than she is at the temperature.

Like I said, she didn’t precisely tell me that I was doing it wrong. She just told me how “mothers” do it. She then asked if my wife did it that way and whether or not my wife knows that I do it that way. En route to telling her the story of this encounter, she now knows that I do, in fact, do it that way. And as to whether or not she does it differently, she doesn’t get the opportunity to because taking the baby while going grocery shopping is something I do and she does not have to.

Dylan Matthews wants to fire the TSA.

The best literature review available on the efficacy of counterterrorism tactics found that, on average, adding metal detectors and security screenings at airports led to about 6.3 fewer airplane hijackings in the years examined (a hijinking-heavy period chronicled in Brendan Koerner’s latest book, in case you’re interested). But that was more than compensated for by an increase in “miscellaneous bombings, armed attacks, hostage taking, and events which included death or wounded individuals (as opposed to non-casualty incidents) in both the short and long run.” In fact, metal detectors and security screenings at airports led to about 6.8 more of these substitute events. “When calculating the overall weighted mean effect size for all of the findings examining the effectiveness of metal detectors, the positive and harmful effects cancel each other out,” the review’s authors conclude.

This is likely to fall on deaf ears in the US because, well, we haven’t seen a non-airport attack in a very long time. So people don’t think the terrorists would try to bomb a building.

As I’ve mentioned before, though, fortunately our adversaries are quite unimaginative, though, and it seems like they are focused primarily on planes (excluding attacks on foreign soil, though). I actually can’t help but wonder if the additional security isn’t a part of why. It’s like the bat-signal on Batman’s chest: It’s there to draw fire because it’s the most protected. Not that it’s the most protected because of the security theater, mind you, but it’s the place where people are on the lookout.

Of course, the primary victory of 9/11 wasn’t the hijacking of the planes at all, which has a tendency to get lost in the discussion. The victory was what they did with the planes. Something I doubt they will ever, ever be able to do again. But I’d much rather they try than that they reassess the places where we are actually much more vulnerable.

ABC News reports on an alleged feud between an anchorwoman and a meteorologist on a CBS affiliate in Philadelphia.

The folks involved say it’s all in good fun, but the ABC folks are skeptical. Here’s more actual footage:

To be perfectly honest, after watching the footage, I actually think that they are having fun with one another. If there’s unprofessional behavior going on, that they are too relaxed rather than that they are at one another’s throats.

What do you think?

Experts are worried about children and tablets.

What interning at Google is really like.

Adam Ozimek continues to chip away at the notion food-stamps-are-corporate-welfare meme.

According to a study, pessimism overlaps with happiness.

The deleterious effects of marijuana usage. Patrick Kennedy is setting off alarm bells.

Red light camera usage has, for the first time, declined in usage. My opposition to red light camera is outlined here.

Even though I know this means that I have forfeited any right to object to the government parking drones outside my bedroom window, I actually think the “ebooks are reading you” phenomenon is pretty cool.

These cake fakes are pretty cool. The pitcher makes me want cake and a beer.

The Los Angeles Times is calling on the California State Bar to release data to researchers looking at affirmative action.

Speaking of preferred admission criteria, children of Texas lawmakers who go to the UT School of Law are more likely to struggle once they get there.

In the future, computers will be invisible and telemarketing will be done by cyborgs.

Using science to find a mate.

While back home, we went out to eat on the outskirts of the metro area in a town that allows smoking in restaurants (which is, of course, increasingly rare). It was an odd experience. They had a smoking and a non-smoking section, separated by nothing. Mom – who doesn’t smoke at the table anymore – made a comment about it. Which the guy smoking overheard and misinterpreted as a complaint and moved tables further away. It’s amazing how increasingly trained smokers are becoming.

It’s been a long enough time since I have had a cigarette that I stopped counting.

I’ve been increasingly impatient with Blu brand ecigarettes, though. The batteries seem to die too fast and I seem to be spending almost as much on replacement batteries as I am on cartridges. While saving money was not the reason for my transition from analogs to digital cigarettes, it was frustrating to watch the “savings” dissipate (Like smoke! Or vaper! Haha).

The reaction among the family has been mixed. My father wants to know when I am going to quit these things. My father-in-law, who hates cigarettes far more than anybody in my family, is quite supportive. His best friend made the switch and he was comfortable with them. He even came out to talk to me while I was vaping, demonstrating how non-offensive/non-existent the odor is.

Unlike when I was smoking, I made no real effort to minimize or hide what I was doing. Which actually felt quite nice. I would simply say “Hey, I’ve going to go outside and have a puff” and would go.

As it happens, my wife’s cousin’s husband is in a similar boat as myself. He made the transition a couple of years ago, though. So we chatted about that. Both of us were struck by how inconvenient we hadn’t realized that smoking had become. Both of us with wives that don’t like it and now kids (a new thing for me, not for him). You smoke, you come in, you wash up, you maybe change a shirt. Multiple times a day. Smoking jackets when it’s cold, smoking shirts when it’s not. You come up with all sorts of ways to minimize the impact of your habit on those around you, which in our SES is becoming almost entirely comprised of non-smokers.

He got started the same way that I did, with Blu. We had similar complaints about Blu and that told me that I really needed to try to find something else because it wasn’t just me. Blus look like regular cigarettes, more or less, which make them ideal for replacing the habit. Extra points because they’re extremely convenient and you can deprive yourself the excuse of smoking because you ran out of cartridges (you can just go to the convenience store and get new ones).

The Halos, which he had switched to, looked nothing like cigarettes and feel, if anything, like robotic cigars but not really. Honestly, what they remind me of are the cigarette thingies from Watchmen. Except that you are using a battery instead of a lighter to get the fluid to get things going. Okay, so they don’t look all that much alike. But I think of Watchmen every time I look at the tank on the thing.

It also reminds me a bit, oddly, of the “The Second Rennaissance” from Animatrix, the animated accompaniments to Matrix. In that, they told you the story of how the humans got displaced by the robots. Early on, when humans were in charge, the robots were made to look as much like humans as possible. Over time, as they started building themselves, they became more utilitarian in less human-like.

I needed to start with something that looked like a cigarette. Both as a matter of conquering my habit and to alleviate self-consciousness. Now that I can point to these things as having completely displaced my tobacco habit, though, I am beginning to care very little. No, these things don’t look like cigarettes. They look like something that works better than the ones that look like cigarettes do.

I ordered Halos as soon as I got home. They couldn’t have arrived too soon. The night before, I was scrambling about trying like heck to find some battery-cartridge combination that would give me my nicotine hit and put me at peace with the world and nothing seemed to work. With the exception of the snow day, it was the first time I found myself saying “I need a cigarette!” (because… no mechanical failures with those!). Had the Halos not been arriving the next day, it’s conceivable (though not probable) that I would have had a complete relapse.

But the Halos are thus far working great. The batteries last longer. The puff is stronger. I can see how much fluid is left in there and I can fill it myself. It will be much cheaper in medium and long term. (1ml of fluid from Blu costs roughly $2. 7ml of standard fluid from Halo costs $6. 30ml costs $20.) The only real downside is that it’s much more conspicuous and slighly less convenient… but I have little reason to care about the conspicuity and if I find myself in a jam I can go out and get a disposable. And I’ll still have my Blu stuff.

Japanese cars (and American ones, too), built in America, to be exported elsewhere.

Republicans are perennially more self-critical than Democrats.

How DC has changed, less about the red and blue than the green.

I enjoyed season one of House of Cards, but Joshua Braver is right that it doesn’t translate well into the Americaqn political system.

A college acquaintance who is (or was) a freelance journalist in Syria has been missing for over a year now. It’s an epidemic.

Genetics accounts for more than half of exam result variation.

Meanwhile, if you have an hour or so, I recommend this Bloggingheads between Glenn Loury and Roland Fryer where they talk about innovation in education and an education experiment in Houston that yielded surprising results.

When Apple released the iPhone, Google had to pivot with Android and start over. No surprise, but I think I like the previous direction better.

Contrary to popular perception, Steve Jobs did listen to consumers.

Software is replacing human labor… and hardware investment.

Lauren Davidson makes the case for the six hour workday.

One of the main reasons we need to do away with DST is because we’re waking up too suddenly and too early.

The Internet connection has been absolutely rotten lately. So much so that despite the fact that we’re paying $70 a month for Internet, we’ve been hobbling along by periodically hotspotting my phone and connecting through that.

I’m running through my checklist of things to do before contacting Comcast about the problem. I figured it was one of three things: My router, the cable modem, or something on their end. The most obvious thing to do is replace the router. I’ve gone through three routers or so in the last six years, which is pretty crazy. They gradually lose signal strength until I just can’t use them anymore reliably. But the current one’s predecessor would at least give me an idea of where the problem lies. If only I knew where it was. A lot of my computer stuff is still in boxes. Most of it open as I do my giant sorting of stuff and throwing away stuff I don’t need anymore (not to self, scratch “previous router” off that list).

While in the area, I decided that I wanted to clear the way to the utility room. The big obstacle being the paper shredder which the baby loves to knock over. So I took that and put it on some box, and preceded to look for the router.

An hour later, I found out which box it was in. Want to take a guess?

The 90’s had its share of goofiness. This one has a video with Erik Estrada!

For reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, I consider this to be one of the most enjoyable music videos (irrespective of the song) that I have ever seen. Some combination of narrative, attractive ladies, and the artists having a good time, I guess.

French books don’t really sell abroad. BBC News asks why.

More than 20% of Americans will be income-rich at some point, but it often doesn’t last. Which I consider depressing, for some reason.

Previous research has suggested that Americans think that our perceptions of wealth inequality are skewed. Anyway, some new research from Saint Louis University suggests that we actually overestimate income inequality. Which mostly goes to show how poorly the entire conversation conveys the important distinction between wealth inequality and income inequality.

Women who make career sacrifices to spend more time at home are happier. What about men?

Ebenezer Scrooge was a forward-thinking liberal.

A Japanese soldier continued to fight World War II for almost 30 years after it ended because he couldn’t believe that Japan had lost.

Japan is looking at building a real-life Gundam!

Teen pregnancy, abortion, and sex rates decline. Thanks, Obama.

Our patent system is out of control. Thanks, Carter.

Old maps don’t actually say “here be dragons” though a globe maybe does.

What are the next new countries? Maybe these are. Here are some odd national borders.

What would the United States look like if every state secessionist movement (not including North Colorado) were successful? Adam Ozimek considers the repercussions. I myself can barely conceptualize a 248-seat senate with equal representation among states.

Mapping weird sex laws in the United States.

Maps, maps, and more maps!