Valerie Plame

POLL: FIFTH OF COLLEGE STUDENTS SUPPORT VIOLENCE AGAINST PEOPLE WITH DIFFERENT POLITICAL OPINIONS
Preliminary results of a Brookings Institution poll surveying US college students’ attitudes toward political speech find that 44% of them don’t believe “hate speech” is protected by the First Amendment. A slim majority—51%—find it perfectly acceptable to start screaming incoherently in order to prevent a crowd from hearing a speaker whose political opinions they dislike. And 19% sees nothing wrong when a “student group opposed to the speaker uses violence to prevent the speaker from speaking.”

Lord, bless the beasts but not the children. At least not this time. Right now, the children are assholes.

WHY BOYS ARE BETTER AT PHYSICS
A trio of researchers—two in Australia, one in Scotland—have suggested a delightful explanation for the unfortunate and embarrassing fact that boys outperform girls on physics tests.

It’s because boys pee standing up.

In an allegedly scholarly paper called “Taking the pee out of physics: how boys are getting a leg-up,” Anna Wilson, Kate Wilson, and David Low say they realize that some people will think they’re “daft,” but they insist that their intentions are “honourable.” They say that “playful urination practices” such as Peeball or even spelling their names in the snow with their pee “may give boys an advantage over girls when it comes to physics”:

The fact that boys (and men) play with their ability to projectile pee is hardly contentious.…All this is experienced up to five times a day, so by 14, boys have had the opportunity to play with projectile motion around 10,000 times. And 14 is when many children meet formalised physics in the form of projectile motion and Newton’s equations of motion for the first time.

But as we all know, their statements—and by extension, all “academic” papers of this ilk—are worthless once you take the piss out of them.