Only way to resolve this issue is to actually pay women money to raise their own kids and/or tending house. I can't see another way around it.

Another way around it would be mandatory paid maternity and paternity leave. So if you hire someone of child-bearing age, regardless of gender, they are equally apt to disappear to have children.

And since this is the 21st century, it is actually possible for a father to cook, clean, change diapers, etc. Childbirth isn't exactly a minor event - having someone else around to help after the birth wouldn't be a bad idea. Perhaps, if the father had the time and opportunity to bond with his child, instead of being forced into the traditional breadwinner role, families would be stronger.

Did the author provide some sort of collaboration that other people could verify? Or was this due to correspondence between him and a Wikipedia admin? After all, if I changed a Wikipedia article to claim a fact that nobody else could check, does that serve Wikipedia's fact checkers?

But it is a very different, much more drastic procedure. Not comparable.

There is a form of female circumcision that only removes the clitoral hood. The clitoral hood is similar to the foreskin in males, in that it protects the clitoral glans.

So at least one form of female circumcision is similar to male circumcision.

This actually seems like a feasible plan.

If it is feasible (and he has a rather odd title for a feasible plan), I wonder how it compares to fertilizing parts of the ocean with iron to encourage carbon sequestration through plankton growth. (Short explanation - in parts of the ocean, plankton growth is limited due to low iron levels, this plan adds iron to the ocean, the plankton take up CO2, die, then some of that CO2 ends up in the ocean abyss, where it tends not to escape (hopefully).)

I don't suppose much is known about the rate at which it replenishes, but I bet scientists will be able to find out about that long before we begin to see measurable depletion of seawater uranium on a global scale.

However, rivers bring more uranium into the sea all the time, in fact 3.2x10^4 tonne per year.

- Source

No, seriously. There is no food crisis. As a species we have a food distribution problem, and a food wastage problem and they're rather shocking at that, but we really have no issue with feeding the population of earth today without resorting to eating genetically modified photosynthetic aphids.

Plus the logic is bad. We already have mechanisms for turning sunlight into food, they are called "plants". Why not eat high-protein plants instead of aphids in the first place?

That's why I ended up with a Nook first edition. Unfortunately, it got smashed on my current trip, but I've had it for years.

That happened to my first Kindle. I wised up and picked up a Pelican hard case for the second. IIRC, it was $40 off of Amazon, but well worth it, since I can now throw the kindle into any bag or case without too much worry.

Yes, let's poison the inner core of the world until plates move around enough to fuck shit up really really good...

Technically, the earth is already "poisoned".

Radioactive elements are in the earth's crust and mantel, and contribute to earth's geothermal heat.

However, even if we buried nuclear waste deep inside the earth's crust, as far as I can tell, it is unlikely to make its way to the inner core of the earth. From what I can tell, most of elements in nuclear waste is lithophilic - that is, it tends to stay in the mantle, or so states several webpages I checked on geology.

To compare the radiation from radon gas to the insanely toxic radioactive isotopes that were released into the air, water, and soil is retarded. (e.g.: Caesium, Plutonium, Strontium, Iodine, etc) It has gotten into the food they eat, the water they drink, and the air they breathe. And when it gets into the body, it will cause cancer.

Shouldn't you say "it may cause cancer"? After all, at low enough doses, the radiation a victim is exposed to is probably unlikely to cause cancer. I base this assumption on the naturally occurring radioactive isotopes in our body that also expose people to radiation. For example (using numbers from Wikipedia), we have 140 grams of potassium in our body, which naturally would dose us with about 4 kBq. (31 bq per g of potassium, .14 kg of potassium in the average human body.)

Presumably, considering that many people do not suffer from cancer in their life-times, exposure at low enough levels of radiation is not guaranteed to cause cancer.

Also, I just want to point out again: 4 kBq. That's 4,000 atoms decaying every second. In the 2 minutes or so it took me to write this post, my body had about half a million atoms decay. And I survived. It sounds rather impressive, doesn't it?

I really prefer e-ink for reading. Its nice on the eyes, and the low-power consumption of the screen gives excellent battery life. Plus, most of the e-ink readers I see seem a little lighter than the corresponding tablets.

Right now I have a Kindle Keyboard. The screen may be too small if you read books with a lot of diagrams or illustrations. The Kindle DX would be better in this regards, but it is a tad spendy.

Regardless of what you get, I'd recommend Calibre for managing your library, and I would strongly suggest checking out your local library system's ebook lending. It is extremely convenient to be able to borrow books at any hour of the day or night. If you have access to different library systems, check out the ebook lending offers at each - sometimes one system will have a wider selection.

See the discussion on whether or not sexual harassment is ingrained in hacker culture...

Well, heteronormativity seems to be. ;)

(No, I don't know the gender orientation or preferences of the individuals who selected this image. I'm just pointing out the assumption being made.)

And if we built a few modern reactors (i.e. something less than 20years old) a lot of that waste would become a source of fuel. But we sure as hell can't build a new reactor. We have wind power!

I really do like the potential wind, geothermal and solar power has. They aren't bad things to develop.

But it seems that the purpose of a wind turbine is to make us feel green, while we generate most of our electricity from coal.

There's also the issue that monocultures are bad. We should have a diversity of energy sources. And we should have more electricity. Electrical use should be to replace fossil fuel heating, for example. It should be used to power our transportation, either directly or indirectly.

All My Sins Remembered, by Joe Haldeman. About an idealistic young Anglo-Buddhist who joins the galactic version of the UN because he believes in the duty of protecting humans and other sentients. They turn him into a deep cover spy by changing his appearance and implanting different personalities and memories in him. He doesn't handle it well during his debriefings.

By "kill" do you mean that 1) on one day, someone was just walking down the sidewalk, happy-go-lucky, prime of life, sunny day, and the next day just died? Or 2) It's estimated that a person who hasn't done too much excercise or is a smoker might have lived to 73 and actually died at 72.5 years?

I'm guessing it's somewhere between the two, but I don't see the details needed.

I did some digging, and for lung cancer, it seems the average age of diagnosis is 71. Considering that life expectancy is about 78 years in the US, and assuming 1 year average between diagnostic and death (the 5 year survival rate of lung cancer is pretty low, so lets err on the side of overstating the impact), that gives an estimated 6 years lost per victim, or the equivalent of 215 full lifetimes lost per year.

Not sure what the expected Fukushima cancer death toll will be. It looks like the median age is about 45 years in Japan. Guess about 10 years between exposure to low-lying radiation and cancer. Say it's as deadly as lung cancer, and on average kills the person 1 year later. Life expectancy in Japan is 83. That's 83 - 56 = 27 years lost per victim. So if Fukushima, on average, would cause about 510 additional (Japanese) deaths each year due to cancer, it would be the same amount of years lost as is due to lung cancer via coal power plant pollution in the US. (Presuming no other nasty nuclear accidents in Japan at the time.) Admittedly, we're comparing apples and oranges, somewhat, since the population of the US is 2.6x that of Japan. So really, 196 additional cancer deaths each year would be needed to put the Japanese nuclear industry (including Fukushima) on par with the US.

First google search for estimated Fukushima deaths from cancer puts the most likely number at 130 total. (Not per-year.)

All of this post is admittedly a back-of-the-napkin calculation with several guesstimates. There's also some flaws in the methodology. I'm also comparing a smaller country with a higher population density but smaller total population to a much larger country with a lower population density but higher total population. But it seems that for the risk of cancer deaths, the Japanese nuclear industry is far safer, including the meltdown, than the US coal power industry, unless one of my guestimates was wildly out of line. Even if I'm off by a factor of 10 in underestimating the risk of Fukushima, or overestimated the risk in coal, Fukushima-catastrophes would have to strike about once a decade in Japan to have a similar amount of years lost in proportion to the total population.

There's a few other factors involved as well. I ignored the 600 evacuation deaths from Fukushima. That's a one time event, but it does up the amount of deaths from Fukushima significantly. On the other hand, I haven't considered the majority of estimated deaths from coal power is not due to lung cancer. Assuming that the non-cancer deaths from coal are similar to the cancer deaths (6 years lost per victim), and figure that the evacuation deaths are evenly spread out among the Japanese population (39 years lost per victim). We'll go with about 10,000 dead from coal power that isn't lung cancer (going with the later study that shows a lower death toll), and that gives us 60,000 years of human life lost each year. While Fukushima's 600 evacuation deaths are at around 24,000 years of human life lost. But remember, US has 2.6 times the population, so Fukushima so it actually works out as slightly more years (60,840 years vs 60,000 years) of human life if the populations are equalized.

There's also the environmental and economic effects. Fukushima took out a few hundred square miles of land due to fallout. That's going to have a real cost. OTOH, we could estimate the land lost to global warming, and figure out carbon power plants in the US's share of the pie, and that's going to have a real economic cost as well. No comparison will be perfect. And we could redo all of the above calculations with more accurate figures, but I strongly suspect the result will be in the same ballpark.

I'm rather disturbed by the result I have. Unless I've made a horrible mistake that throws off the result of the calculations, in terms of years of life lost when compared to the total population size, coal in the US is more or less on on par with a Fukushima-event happening every year in Japan.

[1]: Safer because it doesn't conjure up the radioactive boogyman, even though some statistics say coal plants toss up more radioactive crap in the air on an annual basis than nuclear reactors even use.

According to a study done by under the Bush administrator, coal power plants kill 24,000 a year, including 2,800 lung cancer deaths, in the US alone.

A more recent source "only" blames coal for 13,000 deaths a year in the US.

We would be outraged if normally functioning nuclear power plants caused even a tenth of that death toll in the US each year. Why do we tolerate non-nuclear power plants that kill literally thousands each year?