Thursday morning roundup

Scientists share their own blow-ups in support of Kiera Wilmot.

People have a right to know what they're eating, period, whether or not their "fears" are founded. Some people are allergic to MSG, so MSG should be labeled. Look, I'm the first to get annoyed at ubiquitous "gluten-free" advertising, but I'm not going to declare myself the arbiter of what it's okay to keep from people. People also have a right to know how their clothes (and electronics) are made, but make sure your conscious consumer efforts don't backfire (Bangladesh needs a garment industry; it just needs a safe one). On a related note, Stephen Hawking can boycott whatever he wants to, even though that particular conference may strike us as an odd choice.

China has a tragicomically absurd legal system.

Immigrants do assimilate.

It's not hard to guess that mom fits the "all up in your business" variety, and the diagnosis fits:

Description: She was all up in your biz all the time — what you ate for lunch, who you talked to at lunch, what you wrote about lunch in your private diary (which she went through your drawers and read). She had an opinion on what you should do and how you should do it all the time: HER WAY! This was her way of showing she cared, even if it felt overbearing.
Your Issues: Because of all this attention which was unwanted at times, you need lots of privacy and alone time. Freedom and independence are as essential to you as oxygen. You freak out when anyone tries to get you under their thumb and you’ll always find a way to wriggle free.
Your Strengths: You got a lot of attention growing up, so you’re not looking for any from the world. You’re self-assured, confident and you don’t need anyone’s approval about anything.

But here's a more empirical mom article that also has explanatory power: tiger mothering backfires. I was so glad to see that article because I had actually been wondering (and feeling appropriately cheated)--if mom was so critical, shouldn't I have more to show for it in the way of skills and success? I thought maybe mom just wasn't tigerish enough, but it turns out that all that criticism does not engender achievement after all.
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It was raining yesterday so I thought about taking a bus to the Kennedy Center. It takes not-quite 45 minutes to walk there from my office, and I found out that the bus would take perhaps 5 minutes of walking to and from bus stops and 28 minutes of bus time (with 21 stops!), assuming nothing went wrong (which you never assume on DC buses). That's a difference of less than ten minutes, with lesser flexibility and reliability: DC buses in a nutshell.

"The Sun Also Rises" was very enjoyable. The dancing and music were phenomenal, and the audience was pretty good about letting you actually enjoy it. At times if felt more like scenes from "The Sun Also Rises" than a coherent story ballet, but that did not detract from the overall quality of the show.