natalie pont's List: zFacts

• a majority of mass shootings ― defined as incidents where at least four people are killed, not including the perpetrator ― involve domestic violence.
• Everytown has also found that in nearly half of these cases, the perpetrator exhibited warning signs before the shooting, such as threats of violence, violations of protective orders, or evidence of ongoing substance abuse.
• “American gun violence is inextricably linked to domestic violence: More than half of American women killed with guns are killed by their current or former partner,”
• Unless the shooter is targeting random people or is believed to be motivated by terrorism, they go virtually uncovered

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• THERE IS WIFI ON EVEREST.
• only half expecting that an interview can be conducted from this oxygen-deprived soaring wasteland that occupies both earth and space.
• It seems super chaotic, and to a degree it is. For people like Keith [Kenton’s cameraman] who have never been here before, it must be super hard — all the things going on, the chaos, the shouting in the dark.
• It’s dark, so seeing where to go is difficult, but above you is a line of head torches from other climbers who have already left.
• Describe the actual summit — what is the physical / mental environment like?
• Physically it’s quite small. The very, very top is covered with prayer flags left by the Sherpas. There is room only for one or two people to sit on the top. If there are more than that, people will gather on the south side where the slope is less steep.
• Mentally…that’s a hard one. For me the summit means so much — yet it means nothing at the same time. It’s a junction for me, a turning point in the expedition. It represents success, but it’s also the beginning of the end, and in the case of this expedition, it’s the end of a wonderful two years of adventure.
• They have lived in high-altitude locations for generations and have developed genetic allowances for low-oxygen environments.

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• Things that would never be done under normal circumstances can end up saving lives—police cars broke protocol after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and put bleeding victims into the back seats of their units and drove them to the hospital themselves, rather than waiting for ambulances. This move, which had also occurred after the Aurora, Colorado, shooting, likely lowered the death toll.
• Man-made mass casualty incidents seem increasingly common. But are medical teams actually learning enough from them? Are we really getting any better? The answers are unclear because in the United States since 1996, there has been an effective ban on federally funded research on firearm injuries.
• Today, there are hundreds of federally funded studies on opioids, compared with approximately a dozen on gun injuries, says Megan L. Ranney, associate professor of emergency medicine at Brown University’s Alpert Medical School, even though opioids and guns kill roughly the same number of people.
• The entire topic is “political” and therefore untouchable.
• In order for a hospital to function smoothly in the face of a large influx of unidentified patients, something as simple as a standardized naming system can help treatment teams keep track of each unidentified patient and avoid confusing them.
• Our inability to have a reasonable conversation about guns in this country has also hampered our ability, as medical professionals, to be as prepared as possible to save people’s lives during mass shootings. If we are going to have guns in our society, shouldn’t we at least know how to best treat those harmed by them? In reality, these are not warring propositions. But according to the gun lobby’s current lock on our lawmakers, the right to bear arms remains more sacred than their victims’ right to the best chance at life after a shooting, too.

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• Florida, home to around 1.3 million alligators, is believed to have more human-alligator interactions than any other state. And yet alligators are only known to have killed 24 humans (including the latest casualty) there since such data was first recorded by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, in 1948.
• By contrast, more than 1,000 Floridians — who are still reeling from a massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando in which a gunman left 49 dead — were killed by a firearm in

  2015,
• The total number of alligator deaths per year in the U.S. is unclear, according to alligator experts. However, it is thought to be far smaller than the toll from spiders, which kill around seven people each year in the United States. Cows kill about 20. Dogs, known as "man's best friend," kill an average of 28. 

• Alligators, Ross said, are all over the state. Any lake, pond or roadside puddle might have one. 

   

  Yet they're also generally shy, Erickson said, and they're "very uncomfortable on land."

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•  Being killed by an animal also isn’t that common — especially by predators like alligators. You’ve probably heard that mosquitoes are the world’s deadliest creature to humans. In the United States, bees and other insects kill far more people than alligators. So do cows.
• there are two main categories of man-eating animals: large predators that view people as food and are willing to hunt them, such as lions and bears, and animals that might seize an opportunity to grab small people but are unlikely to attack an adult unless provoked, including hyenas.
• Pigs — These animals aren’t usually considered predators. But they’re open-minded about their food, and in rare cases, it’s included children,

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• Though these animals look like the outlaws of the outdoors, raccoons are very clean creatures. They are known to wash their food in streams and even dig latrines in areas they frequent regularly. 
• When it comes to meat, raccoons consume more invertebrates than vertebrates, according to the ADW. Some of the raccoon’s favorite animal treats are frogs, fish, crayfish, insects, rodents and bird eggs. When food is scarce, raccoons aren’t above scavenging human trash or eating roadkill. 
• Baby raccoons are called kits or cubs
• Females have one to seven offspring after a gestation period of 60 to 73 days. As a group, a mother and her baby raccoons are called a nursery.
• Raccoons can run up to 15 mph (24 km/h) and can fall 35 to 40 feet (11 to 12 meters) without injury,
• One theory is that the black mask around a raccoon’s eyes helps deflect glare and helps with night vision,

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• Late last week, a judge in the small town of Newport ordered that a 7-month old boy’s name be changed from Messiah to Martin, saying that “it’s a title that has only been earned by one person … Jesus Christ.”
• “Parents enjoy extraordinary autonomy in raising their children,”
• In ordering the name change, Child Support Magistrate Lu Ann Ballew argued that the Tennessee boy lives in a heavily Christian area where a name like Messiah “could put him at odds with a lot of people.” But Murray and other experts say whatever perceived harm comes from a name like Messiah isn’t enough to justify a judicial order. Indeed, plenty of babies would be in legal limbo if Ballew’s theory stood.
• More than 800 American children born in 2012 were named Messiah,
• nearly 4,000 were named Jesus; about 500 were named Mohammed; and 29 baby boys were named Christ.
• is the nature of Ballew’s justification. “The judge made it clear that her primary motivation was religious … the child’s name offended her Christian beliefs,” she says via email. “Thus her decision violates the First Amendment.”
• The bigger problem,
• it “seems like the court really is overstepping its bounds in terms of imposing the court or the community’s beliefs … on the child.”
• When and whether government officials can object to baby names is often dependent on state law. In 2009, three-year-old Adolf Hitler Campbell made headlines when a New Jersey bakery refused to decorate a cake ordered by his father. The business may have been within its rights to refuse service, but the state had little ground on which to object. New Jersey law allows parents to confer any name on a child so long as it doesn’t include obscenity, numerals or symbols. “If the Campbells had named their son ‘R2D2,’ state authorities would have intervened,”
• The baby naming laws of individual states, Larson’s study found, vary widely. In California, baby names cannot contain umlauts or accents.
• Roman numerals are allowed for suffixes in Texas, but not Arabic ones, so a boy could be Rick Perry III but not Rick Perry 3. In Massachusetts, the total number of characters in first, middle and last names cannot exceed 40. New Hampshire, meanwhile, prohibits all punctuation marks except for apostrophes and dashes.
• Spain bans “extravagant” names while Portugal outlaws those that “raise doubts about the sex of the registrant.” And in New Zealand, a judge in 2008 spared a girl of being called Tulula Does The Hula From Hawaii;
• A 1995 act states that “unreasonably long” names are “undesirable in the public interest” in New Zealand.
• While reactions to the Messiah order have centered on the questions of religious freedom and free speech, the inspiration behind the name seems to be a common one: the appeal of alliteration. Martin said she thought the name was unique and complemented the names of his two older siblings: Micah and Mason.
• • usiness 
   
  •   Tec

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• Here's the crazy upside to crying around a man. Your tears -- specifically the "smell" of them -- physically lowers his testosterone. Now, almost every site that's ran this story has gone the obvious, buttfuck stupid route where they've proclaimed that a woman's tears reduce a man's sex drive (no shit -- for what kind of fucking psychopath wouldn't it?). But what none of them have pointed out has been this: Testosterone is an empathy inhibitor.
• So knowing those two factors, the math is pretty simple: Tears lower testosterone, which in turn makes a man more empathetic to your problems. And that's why so many men drop a phat hug when they're around a crying woman. It's the go-to comfort measure for us because it's intimate and requires no life-changin

• The USPS, as Alexis points out, has long been an early adopter. The system that laid, literally, the groundwork for a growing nation wasn't just about mail; it was also about connection. It was "the sole communication lifeline of the newly formed nation.
•  Until the USPS was reorganized in the 1970s, the final position in the presidential line of succession was, yep, the Postmaster.
• "post offices themselves were important community centers, where townsfolk met, heard the latest news read aloud, and just lounged about." (The offices played that role, in part, because the Postal Service didn't offer home delivery, even in large cities, until after 1860.)
• When everything else was closed but the local church, post offices were places you could go not just to pick up your mail, but also to hang out.
• "Men would rush there as soon as the mail had arrived," Fischer writes, "staying on to drink and play cards." 
• Post offices, as a result, were also sources of controversy
• The more pressing argument for Sunday delivery, however, was economic. "The 1844 invention of the telegraph would eventually put an end to the commercial need for daily mail,

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• The expression “huh?” is practically universal,
• Most languages sound dramatically different from each other because words aren’t tied to what they stand for—dog and chien both represent a four-legged canine, for example—and each language is basically limited to a finite number of possible sound combinations.
• “The likelihood that there are universal words is extremely small,” the authors write. “But in this study we present a striking exception to this otherwise robust rule.”
• “Huh” was unlike other question words in those languages—it was always one syllable, consisting of a short vowel sometimes preceded by a glottal consonant sound (one made deep in your throat). It also almost always had a rising pitch, the intonation most languages use for questions
• every language has a “huh,” and it’s almost always used for clarification (or “repair,” as it’s called in linguistic circles).
• Here’s their theory as to why it happens: Languages may be specific to place, but conversations serve the same purpose everywhere. Our chatter works kind of like traffic: There’s a set of rules we’ve agreed to follow, and everyone generally tries to make the whole operation run smoothly.

• If we know we don’t understand or didn’t hear something, there’s an incentive to say something—“huh?”—as quickly and decisively as possible in order to get the other person to repeat themselves. No time to formulate an “excuse me?” or even a “pardon?”—this theoretical chat has places to be.

  And because “huh” sounds so unlike the other words in most languages, it immediately captures the attention of the speaker.
• The researchers also speculate that words like “oh,” “ah,” and “um” might be, like "huh," universal stoplights in our conversation flow, since iterations of those appear across languages, as well.
• But “huh” seems to indicate that, around the world, we really all just want to interact as smoothly and clearly as possible. And also that life is full of tiny misunderstandings, no matter where you live.

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• All-men groups aren’t a good idea. Women typically are more supportive than men in their interactions with other group members, and all-male groups can be more competitive,
• mixed-gender crews do better than all men because adding women to an all-male crew can make men less territorial and rude.
• it’s possible that all-female groups aren’t as good as mixed-gender groups because women tend to focus very much on building interpersonal relationships, and having men around might make them focus more on the specific task at hand.
• There should be a range of ages too because younger people tend to be more flexible in their thinking, while older ones have more experience and perspective,
• though large groups of more than 30 people tend to break off into small groups, she adds. This creates an “us and them” mentality
• During a trip to Mars, communication with Earth would probably have a 20- to 40-minute delay.
• astronauts can gaze out the window and look at the Earth. On a trip to Mars, there’ll be a time when our planet will look like a tiny star. No one knows how people might react to that.
• But flying in space can also be a positive experience, of course. Astronauts who have viewed the Earth from space have reported deep psychological changes, which is often called the “overview effect.” It’s been described as a sense of mental clarity and a feeling of a new kind of perspective and self-awareness.

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