Link Banana

A bit of history was Twittered into my lap today. Jourdan Anderson writes his former master in 1865 to decline — or more accurately, ask for more details about — an invitation to return to his plantation. This may be my favorite part:

…we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty- two years and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the interest for the time our wages has been kept back and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams Express, in care of V. Winters, esq, Dayton, Ohio.

It’ll only prove that America is too racist to elect a black man. So says Slate’s Jacob Weisberg:

If it makes you feel better, you can rationalize Obama’s missing 10-point lead on the basis of Clintonite sulkiness, his slowness in responding to attacks, or the concern that Obama may be too handsome, brilliant, and cool to be elected. But let’s be honest: If you break the numbers down, the reason Obama isn’t ahead right now is that he trails badly among one group, older white voters. He does so for a simple reason: the color of his skin.

Though this quiz is a tad on the detail-oriented side, I did enjoy it. I’m guessing you can do better than 23, but you’ll need to be able to tell an Estonian accents from a Lithuanian. Or a Canadian from an American.

(via Passport)

Not quite sure why — perhaps because the topics been on my mind recently — but I feel compelled to link to Gary Bass’s passable summary of the concept of humanitarian intervention.

Hidden in a rather good mental_floss post called “3 Controversial Maps” is an interesting idea:

If George Etzel Pearcy had his way, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s famous song would have been called “Sweet Home Talladego.” In 1973, the California State University geography professor suggested that the U.S. should redraw its antiquated state boundaries and narrow the overall number of states to a mere thirty-eight.

Pearcy’s proposed state lines were drawn in less-populated areas, isolating large cities and reducing their number within each state. He argued that if there were fewer cities vying for a state’s tax dollars, more money would be available for projects that would benefit all citizens.

Though there are a substantial number of reasons to immediately reject this proposal, I think I could get used to this new map.

The New York Times reports that Americans eat 1.8 more pounds of food — for a total of 18.2 — per week than they did in 1970. The chart shows that we’re eating more or just about everything but dairy.

The percentage changes at the bottom of the graphic are the most interesting: fresh spinich, cream cheese, and corn sweetners (HFCS FTW!) are the biggest gainers. Veal, whole milk, and lard are the biggest losers.

(via kottke)

This is certainly the coolest graph I’ve seen in a while. It might be the coolest ever.

(via kottke)

The internet’s a place where people often call themselves strange things. In the legal realm, however, a judge has to allow you to take such a name. Eugene Volokh documents some of the most interesting names, and the judge’s ruling:

1. 1069. No dice. The North Dakota Supreme Court (1976) and Minnesota Supreme Court (1979) both say: Names can’t be numbers.

2. III, to be pronounced “Three.” Nope, on the same grounds, said the California Court of Appeal in 1984 to Thomas Boyd Ritchie III. A concurring judge asserted that the problem was that III was a symbol, rather than just that it was a number. Such subtle distinctions are what law is all about.

These graphs — plotting ideology of Senators against Congressmen against voters — don’t surprise me, but it’s a very useful way to quickly understand how politics works.

(via kottke)

There is now greater equality of happiness in America than there was in the 1970s. Eduardo Porter considers why:

Still, it is not surprising that happiness among blacks rose in the years after the civil rights law outlawed segregation and discrimination on the basis of race. Mr. Wolfers speculates that the gay-straight happiness gap is also likely to have declined over the period, for similar reasons. Changes in family life might also help. Married people are happier than unmarried people, on average. Still, later marriages and more divorces might have winnowed out the unhappiest marriages. And while the shift to two-earner families brings to mind the stressful rush from work to pick the kid up at day care, it also has empowered unhappy stay-at-home moms.

William Saletan sees the impersonality of killing with aerial drones — now made more videogame-like by Raytheon — as a bad thing:

Is the “synthetic environment” real? That depends on which end of the missile you’re looking at. In the targeted car, it’s as real as death. But from the console, it looks more like virtual reality. If the drone goes down, you’re not in it. The environment you actually inhabit is pretty nice. To enhance “operator comfort,” Raytheon offers “ergonomic, memory seating,” “ergonomically-correct displays,” and “adjustable hand and foot positions.” According to the Associated Press, “The leather chair is adaptable to individual users, who can also control a heating and cooling duct above their head at the touch of a switch.”

If you’ve seen combat in the flesh, you know what the fireball on the screen means to the people in the car. But to a teenager raised on Doom and Halo, it looks like just another score. He can’t feel or smell the explosion. He isn’t even there. The eeriest thing in the demo video is the total silence that accompanies the car’s destruction. The only sound that follows is the pilot’s triumphant verdict: “Excellent job.” It’s like something you’d read on the screen after getting a high score at an arcade.

Two interesting data points, both pointed out by Kevin Drum, should cheer gay activists and allies:

• Support for Proposition 8, California’s ballot initiative to define marriage as “between a man and a woman,” is only at 42%. With 51% opposed, most think it’s unlikely to pass, leaving the recent court decision in favor of gay marriage as state law.
• American public opinion now favors gays serving openly in the military by a wide margin. Where in 1993, only 44% of people supported it, a recent poll puts the number as high as 75%.

I’ve often heard people say that America’s maternity benefits are bad, but this chart really drives it home. Worst in the OECD isn’t the worst in the world, but it’s still a touch embarrassing.

Annie Murphy Paul’s story on the discipline of ministering to morbidly obese pregnant women drives home how overweight this country is.

The challenges of caring for these patients begin early. “We perform an anatomical survey of the fetus, but in an extremely obese woman, the ultrasound signal often can’t penetrate through all the tissue,” Chames says. He must use a vaginal probe instead. A thorough examination is especially important in obese women, Chames said, because they are at greater risk of having babies with neural-tube defects and other malformations.

Birth brings more difficulties. The fetuses of obese women are often too large to fit through the birth canal; their mothers are about twice as likely as normal-weight women to need a Caesarean section. Longer surgical instruments are required, as are extra-wide operating-room tables, reinforced to support hundreds of additional pounds.

Taking off on the Indian experiment, William Saletan envisions a future in which all Americans are paid for using public toilets:

I bet somebody will figure out pretty soon how to monetize toilet waste. And it won’t be the government; it’ll be the private sector. Did you see the New York Times story a few weeks back about restaurant grease? It’s being illegally siphoned from filthy bins and barrels. Bandits are selling it for conversion to biodiesel. When bandits start siphoning public toilets, maybe governments will wake up and get in on the action. And you’ll stop having to pay.

Steven Levitt explains and considers:

Blacks who “sound black” earn salaries that are 10 percent lower than blacks who do not “sound black,” even after controlling for measures of intelligence, experience in the work force, and other factors that influence how much people earn. (For what it is worth, whites who “sound black” earn 6 percent lower than other whites.)

Citing Leona Helmsley’s generous-sounding donation to dogs, Ryan Madoff take offense at something most people happily forget:

The charitable deduction enables people to donate as much of their assets as they like for charitable purposes without paying a tax. While some choose to contribute to broad public goals, the law does not require it. In recent years, charitable status has been recognized for organizations with purposes as idiosyncratic as promoting excellence in quilting and educating the public about Huey military aircraft. Indeed, Mrs. Helmsley might have limited her beneficence to the Maltese breed of dogs she favored, and that, too, would have been allowed as a “charitable” purpose.

If this were only a matter of Leona Helmsley wasting her own money, no one would need to care. But she is wasting ours too.

The charitable deduction constitutes a subsidy from the federal government. The government, in effect, makes itself a partner in every charitable bequest. In Mrs. Helmsley’s case, given that her fortune warranted an estate tax rate of 45 percent, her $8 billion donation for dogs is really a gift of $4.4 billion from her and $3.6 billion from you and me.

To put it in perspective, our contribution to Mrs. Helmsley’s cause equals approximately half of what we spend on Head Start, a program that benefits 900,000 children.

I strongly suspect this is months old, but it’s none the less fascinating.  The USA Today offers a great Flash presentation of some data from the latest Pew Religion Survey. A few things that really struck me (unfortunately, it being Flash, I can’t link straight to the relevant charts):

• Jehovah’s Witnesses are truly exceptional. They seem to be outliers on just about every question in the set.
• Catholic’s acceptance of homosexuality is much higher than I’d expected. (58%, higher than the general population, which is at 50%. Still nowhere near the 80ish scores for Buddhists, Jews, and “Other Faiths.”)
• Belief in heaven is most common among Mormons and historically black churches. Who knew the two would have so much in common?
• Jews pray about as much as the unaffiliated.

(via Robin, who offers other portraits of the United States)

Since I already made one belated July 4th post, there can be no harm in another. Ted Widmer addresses the oft-forgotten fact that that there are many different versions of the Declaration of Independence. For example, I’d never considered this fact:

Most of us would answer that [the Declaration of Independence is] the manuscript written on vellum, dated July 4, 1776, now displayed in a baroque case at the National Archives, where it is protected by bulletproof glass, argon gas and the 55-ton underground vault it is lowered into every night. But like everything connected to the Declaration, the situation is complicated, for that document was not written on July 4; it was a handwritten copy that Congress ordered later that summer and post-dated. The version that was in the room as the vote was taken has never been seen since then.

I’m a touch late, but Cabel Sasser has collected some thoroughly entertaining pictures of fireworks packaging. It’s ersatz America through the eyes of Chinese gunpowder manufacturers. What could be better?