It seems that the New Yorker got temporarily banned from Facebook for violating their community standards on “Nudity and Sex,” by posting a Mick Stevens cartoon showing a post-coital Adam and Eve. Here’s a snapshot of the relevant section of the aforementioned guidelines:

Reassuring to know that male nipples are ok, isn’t it?

From The Atlantic.

Thirty-five years ago, NASA launched a spacecraft known as Voyager 1 into the skies over Florida. That space-traveling appliance has now traveled farther than any other man-made device — some 11.3 billion miles or 121 times the distance between Earth and the sun. It is now hurtling through the boundary of our heliosphere (the farthest reaches of our sun’s winds) at a speed of 38,000 miles per hour. Soon, nobody quite knows when, it will break into interstellar space, the first creation of life here on Earth to do so.

Puts things into perspective.

Lovely evisceration by James Fallows of Niall Ferguson’s ludicrous attack on Obama.

Three years ago, I got crosswise of Niall Ferguson when I noted his remark that President Obama reminded him of Felix the Cat. Like Obama, Ferguson observed, “Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky.” A little earlier I had a testy on-stage exchange with him about the United States and China. He said that U.S. budget deficits would lead to the certain collapse of the U.S.-China relationship, since China would cut off further credit to the spendthrift Yanks. I said that might sound like a neat theory but reflected no awareness of actual Chinese incentives and behavior, and that the showdown he considered “inevitable” in fact would not occur. As it has not.

Again, anyone can be wrong, and I often have been. But scholars are supposed to be different from mere pamphleteers and journalists. We give the judgments of academics — like those of doctors, scientists, renowned jurists, etc. — extra weight because we assume that scholars have considered evidence, precedent, and probabilities more carefully before offering conclusions. Think: E.O. Wilson on ants and ecological patterns.

The big claims and conclusions Ferguson has offered in recent years, with the extra authority of his academic standing, have been attention-getting and mostly wrong. Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider has an analysis here (and please also see this from Noah Smith). For instance:

– U.S. budget deficits were going to lead to a US-China breakup. They didn’t.

– U.S. budget deficits were going to drive bond rates sky high. The opposite has occurred.

– U.S. budget deficits would make us like Greece. They have not.

– A year ago, Ferguson warned that we were on the verge of a damaging new round of inflation. We were not.

You can say these things if you’re a talk-show host or a combatant on some cable-news gabfest. To me this is not what the tradition of Veritas and the search for scholarly enlightenment is supposed to exemplify. Seriously, I wonder if one of Ferguson’s students will have the panache to turn in a similar paper to see how it fares.

Spot on. I can’t understand why anyone takes Ferguson seriously. Like many an historian before him, he has become a media whore. As Daniel Pat Moynihan famously observed, everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not to his own facts. If Ferguson were a Fox News commentator then nobody would turn a hair. But — as Fallows observes — he’s trading on the credibility derived from occupying a Chair at a major university. If I were a Harvard academic I’d say he has now got to the point where he is bringing the university into disrepute.

This Guardian editorial nails it IMHO.

It is to avoid questioning by Swedish prosecutors that Mr Assange battled extradition orders for almost 18 months with the best legal representation money can buy – before finally jumping bail two months ago. It is to avoid being confronted with accusations of rape and sexual assault that Mr Assange is now holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy – and was forced to say his piece from a diplomat’s first-floor balcony, for fear of otherwise being collared by the police. Yet to listen to the speechifying from his supporters, you would never have guessed at any of this; their remarks concerned western Europe’s “neocon juntas” or the political change sweeping Latin America. And when it was Mr Assange’s turn to speak, he allied his struggle with Russian punk protesters Pussy Riot, with the New York Times, and indeed “the revolutionary values” upon which America was founded. This is his traditional method of argument: to conflate a number of causes – big and small, international and individual – into one, so that Mr Assange is WikiLeaks, which is freedom of speech, which holds powerful states to account; and so on, ever upwards. Yet Mr Assange is not facing a show trial over the journalism of WikiLeaks; he is dodging allegations of rape. To confuse the two does no favours to the organisation he created, which has done so much excellent work.

I give up. An iPhone case that tries to pretend that your phone is actually a vintage screw Leica.

[Source – NYTimes.com.]

From today’s Guardian:

The increase in tuition fees to a maximum of £9,000 a year has led to a “clear drop” in the number of English students applying for university places this autumn, an independent analysis of the impact of the coalition’s controversial reform has found.

There are 15,000 “missing” applicants who might have been expected to have sought a place on a degree course this academic year but did not, according to the Independent Commission on Fees.

Well, you don’t say.