Mexico’s Supreme Court Declares Individuals Have the Right to Consume and Cultivate Marijuana

How long will the US hold out? I think it will be like gay marriage: gradually, and then suddenly.

It sounds like Big Brother’s wet dream

Vizio Smart TVs spy on their owners and sell what they learned. How far away is blackmail?

Marco Polo, meet Jocelyn Reckford

Very interesting. And learning in this way would include all the “deep learning” of cultural norms and signals on an experiential level.

PPP Uses the Power of Pyramids to Figure Out Which Republican Candidate Has the Weirdest Supporters

Worth reading: short post plus a chart.

Man, today is nothing but sf novels come to life: DARPA Is About to Start Testing an Autonomous, Submarine-Hunting Ocean Drone

In fact, I think I’ve read this one. Doesn’t it sound familiar?

And this is a vignette from a Philip K. Dick novel, a chapter called “Deputy Florida Man.”

And if you give the religions exotic names, this clear conflict is seen in many a novel placed in other worlds.

When reality fails to respect ideology: Sex-ed division

Jen Hayden has an excellent post at Daily Kos. From it:

Who could’ve seen this coming? When you don’t teach kids about safe sex, they tend to have sex anyway, minus the safe part: . . .

And later she quotes:

Abstinence-only programs have been an enormous failure, despite heavy funding from the George W. Bush administration and conservative legislatures:

Abstinence-only-until-marriage programs don’t work.

To date, 11 states have evaluated the impact of their abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. None has been shown to reduce teen sexual activity.

Virginity pledgers have found “loopholes” to keep their pledges intact—engaging in risky oral or anal sex—and neglecting to use condoms when they do begin to have vaginal intercourse, according to research from Peter Bearman at Columbia University.

A 2007 federally-funded evaluation of these programs found that youth in the control group were no more likely to have abstained from sex and, among those who reported having sex, had a similar number of partners and had initiated sex at the same age.

Very cool: Glitch art. (Obligatory: But is it in fact art?)

Take a look. Interesting. But art? But what about a photograph of a barn, tractor, and person: can that photograph ever be art?