Interesting week December 12

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In September of 2015, 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed showed up to his high school with a clock he’d made himself. A science nerd who loved to tinker, he brought in the clock and got some praise from his engineering teacher. But later that day, when the clock beeped in English class, school officials thought it was a bomb and called police, who arrested him. It seemed clear that Ahmed, who is Muslim and whose father immigrated to the US from Sudan, was being targeted for his ethnicity or religion—hard to imagine teachers responding to a homemade electronic device with such panic if the boy who brought it in was named Tommy instead of Ahmed. By now, that story of Ahmed and his clock is famous. In a photo that went immediately viral, Ahmed looks the consummate geek, a skinny kid in glasses and NASA t-shirt—but he is also scared and handcuffed.

Who Gets to Be a Science Nerd? | New Republic

The figure below shows just how dramatic these changes have been. In 1970, the US had 52,000 fatalities compared to 102,000 in 16 other peer countries that, collectively, had a combined population 70 percent higher than that of the US. By 2012, the number of fatalities in the USA had fallen to 33,500, largely due to improvements in health care, emergency response, and vehicle technology. In comparison, the total in those same 16 countries fell to just 24,500. 

As a result, we now have traffic fatality rates per person that are three to four times greater than those in the best-performing peer countries — including Sweden, the UK, and the Netherlands.

Why America’s roads are so much more dangerous than Europe's - Vox

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Only half of Republicans would accept Clinton, the Democratic nominee, as their president. And if she wins, nearly 70 percent said it would be because of illegal voting or vote rigging, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Friday. Conversely, seven out of 10 Democrats said they would accept a Trump victory and less than 50 percent would attribute it to illegal voting or vote rigging, the poll showed. The findings come after repeated statements by Trump that the media and the political establishment have rigged the election against him. He also has made a number of statements encouraging his supporters to fan out on Election Day to stop ineligible voters from casting ballots.

Half of Republicans would reject 'rigged' election if Clinton wins - Business Insider

I asked O'Keefe if he would release the raw footage he used for this video and the others he recently issued. His targets, claiming they are victims of biased editing, have called on him to do so. No, he said. O'Keefe's supposed exposé, which Bill O'Reilly promoted on Fox News, rests on a mistaken, jumbled, brief anecdote told by a fellow with no direct link to the 47 percent video—who admits he got it wrong. And there was no effort to substantiate this account. "A lot of reporting is what people say," O'Keefe told me. Not in this case.

James O'Keefe's New Story About the 47 Percent Video Is Totally False | Mother Jones

Recently I met a man whose wife is a pilot for American Airlines. Occasionally, he told me, she flies with a female co-pilot. At those times, in certain parts of America, a male passenger will board the plane, see that the cockpit contains two women, and turn around and get off. He would rather not fly than travel in a plane in female hands. Hillary had liabilities, of course – chief among them the fact that she seemed to be a known quantity. But it is hard to believe that a man with her track record and resources would have fallen to an opponent of such staggering inexperience and personal deficiency. We’ve watched Hillary bear, with dignity, her husband’s public sexual infidelities, her bitter loss to President Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary, and now her shocking defeat by Donald Trump. She is a consummate leader: wry, forbearing, mature. But I rage at the unfairness of what has happened, and dread the wreck that may follow.

'We are witnessing the politics of humiliation' – Siri Hustvedt, Joyce Carol Oates and more on the US election | Books | The Guardian