NYTimes Bad Reporting Edition

The NYTimes is taking some heat for a character assassination they did on Yale's QB from last season. In the follow up story they buried this gem in the last paragraph:

Magazu has confirmed that the complaint was of a sexual assault but said that the encounter was in fact consensual.

 I didn't care before but now I really want to know why and how someone consented to being sexually assaulted?

Chips vs Wings

Wings are an east coast thing. I didn't know.

Chris Blattman's cool link

Chris Blattman discovered this great comment from another guy's blog that I'm reposting on mine.

It suggests ways to decide whether to use a pool that an NGO in Kenya owns but feels guilty about using or something.

A) Form a swimming pool collective with a rotating chair, with use of the pool to be voted on every week. Pool to be funded by bake sale at the local international school.

B) Divide the pool surface area into 100 square use rights – sell rights to the staff and/or guests, who are only allowed to swim within their allotted area, unless allowed to by other freeholders. Let residents buy and sell these rights to each other and let the market reach an efficient outcome

C) Let NGO workers use the pool, but constantly make them feel guilty about it: surround the pool with posters of photos from recent/ongoing drought. Actually, this could be a win win situation – if you run into anyone who seriously objects to the idea of Oxfam using a pool, let *them* stand on the side and heckle the swimmers.

D) Randomly allocate 50% of your guests with passes to the pool. Use pre and post survey data on stress levels, health, etc to evaluate the actual impact of pool usage. If you’re concerned about financial viability, charge a high price and then randomly distribute vouchers of varying levels to the treated group to tease out the demand curve for pool usage.

I give extensive thanks to Chris so he doesn't try to beat me up or something.

Some random genius

Some random genius named Sarah Walker wrote this gem the comments of a TED talk:

The trouble with natural happiness is that it can be so short-lived. [. . .] Synthetic happiness on the other hand can be a choice of a state of mind and can therefore be more permanent. I think people have trouble with the words 'synthetic' and 'natural' where emotionally speaking, 'natural' is seen as superior. If we were to change the words to 'intrinsic' and 'extrinsic' maybe people would have an easier time accepting the notion that happiness can be a [choice]

I suspect she is right. Maybe Dan Gilbert or some marketing students will do an experiment.

Awesome

I can't believe I didn't find this website until tonight. It's easily one of the five best blogs on the Internet.

Religion

Salon has a story about how Mitt Romney is secretly trying to take over the country on a theological crusade with unspecified goals. The evidence is that he was popular in college and his church is rich. I'm not going to link to the story because I'd feel like I'm contributing to the bigotry.

But I stumbled on this and I think it's worth linking to.

I'm an atheist. I know how awful people can be in the name of their god, but it's a fact that people are more often kind than cruel in the name of religion.

Facebook Sex Scam

I don't know how I missed this one when it happened. It's insane.

To make a long story short, a gay highschooler was mocked for being gay and lost a lot of friends, so to get revenge on the word he posed as girls looking for a good time and got male students to send naked photos. Then he used the photos to blackmail those guys into having anal and oral sex with him.

First, I can kind of understand how its better to let someone suck your dick than have the whole world be able to look at it, but I'd rather have my entire high school marvel at my junk than take it up the ass. Am I really in the minority?

Second, should this kid--by kid I mean 18 year old adult--really get 15 years for what he did? He's gay and he did it because he had a lot of teenage angst about it. Shouldn't gay people be allowed to be mad at the world for hating them and blow off some steam? As long as they say "sorry" at the end it's probably best to forgive, forget and hope that more people are harmed in the future due to the soft stance on crime.