* Over a longer time span, say a decade, we would expect about 19 spill incidents with an aggregate spill volume of about 8,000 barrels, enough to fill about half of an Olympic-sized swimming pool. We would expect about 1.3 of these spills to be “large,” which means that on average we would expect a “large” spill to occur about once every 8 years or so. Clearly, based upon reported historical industry performance, spills in general and large spills in particular would not be a rare occurrence for the proposed pipeline.
* Elsevier’s behavior is so egregious that it has provoked a boycott from academics who refuse to write or review papers for its journals. But to focus on one malefactor elides a larger question: Why should academic knowledge — largely produced by academics at public and nonprofit universities and often with government grants — be turned into private property and kept from public dissemination?
* Dartmouth College Cancels Classes After Sexual Assault Protesters Receive Rape Threats. More at Student Activism.
* Piranhas are a very tricky species: On Gift Horses and Trojan Horses: The Proposed Aquatics Center.
* Tumblr of the day: Little Girls Are Better at Designing Superheroes Than You.
* Women Writers take heed, you are being erased on Wikipedia. It would appear that in order to make room for male writers, women novelists (such as Amy Tan, Harper Lee, Donna Tartt and 300 others) have been moved off the “American Novelists” page and into the “American Women Novelists” category. Not the back of the bus, or the kiddie table exactly–except of course–when you google “American Novelists” the list that appears is almost exclusively men (3,387 men).
* Mad Men’s Misery Problem And How TV Can Handle Characters Who Never Change.
* Right Wing Media Exploit Boston Bombings To Attack Government Assistance Programs. West Virginia Republican: Make Kids Work As Janitors For School Lunches.
* Feds spend at least $890,000 on fees for empty accounts. That’s a crushing 0.000025% of the federal budget going to WASTE.
* Holding Corporations Responsible for Workplace Deaths. And then there’s Matt “Proud Neoliberal” Yglesias.
* Rhode Island Becomes 10th State To Approve Marriage Equality.
* A Slavoj Žižek Text Adventure.
* Monster.com bans unpaid internships.
* And the new $100 is awful. Good thing I’ll never actually have one.
