What gender expectations do to people.

Settlers of Catan really is the perfect board game.  I should buy my own soon.

China refuses to participate in an important awareness raising climate change action in order to celebrate “Serf Liberation Day” – when the Dalai Lama was kicked out of Tibet. Oh propaganda.

If the Obama Administration does go ahead and officially identify climate change as a threat to public health, the US will have to take more action on the issue.  Unfortunately, we’ve got a lot of idiots in office who may make significant changes very very difficult.

There are so many awesome education tools and resources on the internet.  Youtube EDU is my new favorite resource. (Did you just call me a nerd for watching lectures on youtube?  Because I think this is way nerdier.)  Also, I think writing/editing/correcting wikipedia entries for classes is something that should be done more often – especially in grad classes.

One & two freaking awesome data visualizations from Flowing Data.

Just two recent examples of sexism in lower and higher education.

Many people think we should deport all of our illegal immigrants and support immigration raids (which target legal immigrants, too).  But they don’t understand what those immigration raids do.  They make a joke of our legal system, are unnecessarily cruel, and hurt EVERYONE in the community.

PZ has an awesome post up about the chronic underfunding of our nation’s universities and an important admonition for voters:

Why do you keep electing cretins to your legislatures who despise the “intellectual elite”, who think being smart is a sin, who are so short-sighted that they care nothing for investing in strengthening the country in ways that take ten or more years to pay off? Stop it! Your representatives should be people who value education enough to commit to at least maintaining the current meager level of funding, but instead we get chains of ignoramuses who want to demolish the universities…and simultaneously want to control them to support their favorite ideological nonsense, via “academic freedom” bills. This is also a long-term goal: we have to work to restore our government to some level of sanity. It’s been the domain of fools and thieves for far too long.