Historical database of known or suspected sundown towns. So far I haven't come across a town that I have much personal knowledge of, but there sure are a lot.

Hurricane Ian? The British economic turmoil?

Idk, I'm finding this semester very tiring and demoralizing.

We talked about baby powder being carcinogenic back in 2016. It seemed so counterintuitive: talc seems so safe, that how could it be so bad? It seemed less nefarious that it took so long to deal with than, say, cigarettes.

I didn't fully understand then, but the problem is that it's easy for talc to be contaminated with asbestos. So this isn't actually a situation where people were struggling with the cognitive dissonance. This is a situation of executives deliberately hiding the fact that their talc is contaminated with a very famously bad carcinogen, for decades. There is no cognitive dissonance for anyone who hears "talc contaminated with asbestos causes cancer".

In our 2016 thread, there's a lot of eye-rolling that the increased risk isn't that much. I'm imagining that probably asbestos contamination isn't even, and some parts of mines are more contaminated and some are less. So it may not be "a little increased risk across the board, for everyone" so much as "sometimes people used baby powder that had a lot of asbestos in it".

Anyway, I'm newly irate because despite that news breaking in 2016, they kept it on the market in the US until 2020, and are just now planning on discontinuing it worldwide in 2023. (And of course, I feel nauseated because of course we used baby powder for years on all our babies. Probably nearly everyone did.)

I think I was reading a paywalled WSJ article about all of this, which now I can't access so I'm not sure. But the legal move - "The Texas Two-Step" - is the one where they made a new corporation in Texas, gave it all its lawsuits, moved it to North Carolina, and had it declare bankruptcy. It's not a new move, but the speed and scale in which they did it was particularly unprecedented and gross.

This is a delightful video, but I hate videos, and so I was even more delighted to discover that the author has a blog where he covered the topic.

Here's the original math problem:

A 5th grade math exam in China had the following question (translated to English):

"If a ship had 26 sheep and 10 goats onboard, how old is the ship's captain?"

The question baffled students and parents, garnering headlines around the world.

Everyone lost their shit and was very cranky about this question. Answer under the jump, plus a lot more to the story.

The question was originally written by French researchers in 1979, and the answer is supposed to be, "There's not enough information to answer this question."

Anyway, that's not what students answer when you give them the question. They just try to use the numbers any old way they can and come up with a numerical answer. Maybe it's 26+10=36! He's 36 years old. Etc.

For example, an answer to a variation on this question:

"There are 125 sheep and 5 dogs in a flock. How old is the shepherd?"

...Most students produced arithmetic answers again. One student reasoned along the following lines: 125 + 5 = 130 is too old, and 125 - 5 = 120 is also too old, but 125/5 = 25 sounds about right. So the shepherd is 25 years old.

Similar results were found with French, German and Swiss students.

So there seems to be something about math education that students don't think about the question critically: they expect the problem must have an answer solvable from arithmetic operations.

It's so interesting to me, although it's also exactly what my experience would tell me.

(And yes, occasionally people spin out complicated-but-grounded theories, deriving the captain's age:

"The total weight of 26 sheep and 10 goat is 7,700kg, based on the average weight of each animal," said one Weibo commenter.

"In China, if you're driving a ship that has more than 5,000kg of cargo you need to have possessed a boat license for five years. The minimum age for getting a boat's license is 23, so [the captain is] at least 28."

But really, there just isn't enough information.)

I imagine you all have insightful (or not) things to say.

I'll need to take the site offline for a few minutes today. Don't panic!

And: We're back.

This is intended to be our system for checking in on imaginary friends, so that we know whether or not to be concerned if you go offline for a while. There is no way it could function as that sentence implies, but it's still nice to have a thread.

Episode Kobe thirty seven