"The babies who nap in sub-zero temperatures."

"Nowadays most day-care centres in Sweden put children outside to rest. It's common to see rows of prams lined up in the snow at nap-time, with youngsters fast asleep inside."
"When the temperature drops to -15C (5F) we always cover the prams with blankets," says head teacher Brittmarie Carlzon.
Oh! Sub-zero centigrade. It's not that cold!

"Babies clearly slept longer outdoors than indoors," says Marjo Tourula. While indoor naps lasted between one and two hours, outdoor naps lasted from 1.5 to three hours.

"Probably the restriction of movements by clothing could increase the length of sleep, and a cold environment makes swaddling possible without overheating," she says.

A "concerned sister" gets press petitioning Hasbro to put boys in commercials for Easy-Bake ovens.

"The toy has long been marketed to girls and made in gender specific colors like pink and purple. The calls for Easy-Bake to take on a more gender-neutral stance has been made numerous times in the past."

Funny that it's still okay to call some colors "gender specific." But progress comes incrementally. The day will come when we get our viral video pleading for the end of stereotyping pink and purple as girl colors.

Meanwhile, in Sweden:

Sweden's top advertising watchdog—known as Reklamombudsmannen, or RO—has taken [Toys "R" Us] to task in recent years for catalogs and ads that showcase girls playing with dolls, scrapbooks, and kitchen and beauty toys and boys with guns, cars, trains and tech gadgets....

The Swedish government has been on the front line of efforts to engineer equality between men and women....

"I think it's amazing that they've actually listened to the consumers," [said a female shopper]. "I didn't used to shop here as much before they changed, because I didn't like the way they separated between girls and boys, pink and blue."

Here's what you get with government pressure (and maybe with You-Tube and Change.org):



Somehow, I don't see that photo bringing in any boys that wouldn't have felt drawn to the activity anyway, but perhaps it's intended to make parents feel and act better when their son tells them that's what he wants.

As for the 13-year-old girl's video:



Was that little boy scripted? Leave him alone, and don't put him on YouTube. It seems to me he's already saying he likes to cook and wants a toy oven and the lack of boys in the ads wasn't perceived as a problem. Hold off on the indoctrination and let him discover his own happiness.

Man survives, trapped in a snow-bound car, for 2 months.

This happened in Sweden, where the temperature was as low as -22°.

The man, who was too weak to utter more than a few words, said he had been inside since 19 December. He may have survived by drinking melted snow.

Police say they have no reason to doubt his story.

Hmmm. Isn't his survival, under those conditions, a reason?

One doctor told the newspaper that the man might have survived so long by going into a kind of hibernation.

Hibernation! Can human beings hibernate? That's a good question to ask Google. I came up with this:

A Practice closely akin to hibernation is said to be general among Russian peasants in the Pskov Government, where food is scanty to a degree almost equivalent to chronic famine. Not having provisions enough to carry them through the whole year, they adopt the economical expedient of spending one half of it in sleep. This custom has existed among them from time immemorial.

At the first fall of snow the whole family gathers round the stove, lies down, ceases to wrestle with the problems of human existence, and quietly goes to sleep. Once a day every one wakes up to eat a piece of hard bread, of which an amount sufficient to last six months has providently been baked in the previous autumn. When the bread has been washed down with a draught of water, everyone goes to sleep again. The members of the family take it in turn to watch and keep the fire alight.

After six months of this reposeful existence the family wakes up, shakes itself, goes out to see if the grass is growing, and by-and-by sets to work at summer tasks. The country remains comparatively lively till the following winter, when again all signs of life disappear and all is silent, except we presume for the snores of the sleepers.

This winter sleep is called 'lotska'. These simple folk evidently come within '0 fortunatos nimium sua si bona norint!'

In addition to the economic advantages of hibernation, the mere thought of a sleep which knits up the ravelled sleeve of care for half a year on end is calculated to fill our harassed souls with envy. We, doomed to dwell here where men sit and hear each other groan, can scarce imagine what it must be for six whole months out of the twelve to be in the state of Nirvana longed for by Eastern sages, free from the stress of life, from the need to labour, from the multitudinous burdens, anxieties, and vexations of existence.

Much more on human hibernation if you go to that link or Google as I did, but I'll stop there, because it's so cool. And cold.

When will this blog move out of Blogger onto the independent website at althou.se?

You may be wondering. We're ready to go except for the project of uploading all the old posts and comments onto the new Althouse. (The blog will still be called Althouse. It's just the URL that's changing to althou.se — instead of althouse.blogspot.com.)

Here's what's taking some time. I'm not just starting on a new site and leaving the old posts and comments back here. It will all be over there (and the old stuff will remain here too).  The Althouse blog will remain a single, unified opus at the new site. You'll be able to search, click on tags, and browse the archive and get everything all the way back to January 14, 2004, the day this blog began.

At this point in the process of exporting the blog, the great people who are doing all the technical work for me have done nearly all the posts, but there are a whole lot more comments to go. They've exported 23,549 out of 23,599 post, but only 15,262 out of 989,369 comments. It's a big deal to move that much stuff, but moving it all is important to me. Not just the posts, but also the comments. We could go to the new blog much more quickly if I exported only the posts, and preserved the posts with the comments Blogger site, but I don't want that. There are tons of wonderful comments, and they're all coming with me to "Sweden." I'm not going without them. Which means we can't go live until next week.

Isn't it cool that there are nearly 1 million comments on this blog? I wonder what the best comment of all time. The most momentous one for me is: "Meade, this is HUGE! Meade....?" (Explained here.)

I think I will be able to identify the millionth comment, by the way, so keep commenting.

Let's talk about URLs, specifically: althou.se

As you may have figured out by now, especially if you hang out in the comments here, I'm working on moving this blog out of Blogger. My recent troubles with Blogger/Google, which are still not completely solved — old posts are still missing their comments — pushed me to do what I probably should have done long ago.

One thing we've had to do is pick a URL. The obvious choices, althouse.com and annalthouse.com, are not available. Whoever owns them is demanding a ridiculous amount of money — $33,500 and $888, respectively (with no mechanism for making a counteroffer). I don't know what is going on there, but if the point is to squat and then sell, shouldn't you make the price something within reason? I don't accept switching the .com to .net for either "althouse" or "annalthouse," because I think people would accidentally go to the .com, and who knows what horrible things someone might put there. In any case, I don't want to drive traffic to those bastards, whoever they are.

So the predicament of the unavailability of the obvious forced us to brainstorm. When I IM'd my son John about it, he immediately suggested althou.se. I didn't even know what the .se meant. Well, it means Sweden. But who cares? There's no embarrassing association with Sweden that concerns me. There's the issue of giving the false impression of being Swedish, but that's a very retro concern, I think. (Am I wrong?) The hip approach — am I right? — is to look at all those country codes as a source of letter combinations to form short, spiffy URLs like althou.se.

Discuss!

ADDED: In the comments, there's a lot of fretting about using .se, but check this out:

Following in Twitter (T.co) and Overstock’s (O.co’s) footsteps, Amazon has picked up the domains A.Co, Z.Co, K.Co and interestingly enough Cloud.co in a deal made with Colombia-based domain registry .Co.

While .Co originally gave Twitter the T.Co domain name for free in order to spread awareness about the brand, Amazon has actually purchased these from .Co for an undisclosed price. In comparison, Overstock’s O.Co rebranding was the first negotiated .Co purchase deal, for $350K...

The genesis of the .Co domain is through Colombia, and while country codes usually take a hit in Google rankings, .Co is part of a unique set of cclds (.tv .me .co) which are treated like gtlds or generic domains like .com .net .org.

.Co is about to hit its 1 millionth domain registered in little under a year of service (.com is at over a hundred million) and is about to set up a stable pricing plan for one letter and two letter domains....

A.Co,  Z.Co, and K.Co will probably be used for Amazon, Zappos, and Kindle. But, anyway. You see my point. The country-based top-level domains — I'm told "country codes" isn't the right term — are being used now for their letters. This is the trend. I'm on trend, people.

"[I]t’s important to counter the 'haha sex by surprise those crazy Swedes' media narrative..."

"... with the fact that actually, non-consensual sex is assault and should be recognized as such by law. Consenting to one kind of sexual act doesn’t mean that you consent to anything else your partner wants to do; if it’s agreed that the only kind of sex we’re having is with a condom, then it does remove an element of consent to have sex without a condom with only one partner’s knowledge. To use another example, if you and your partner agree that you can penetrate her, it doesn’t necessarily follow that she has the green light to penetrate you whenever and however."

Feministe wants to talk about that "sex by surprise" charge against Julian Assange.

Eliminate cash and you eliminate (much) robbery.

It would also cut down on street musicians and panhandlers. And what else? Privacy:

"If it's impossible to pay cash when you buy stuff, it's also impossible not to leave electronic footprints behind you, and the electronic footprints from what you buy put together can tell the entire story about your life. This can be very sensitive information... Most people don't want this total surveillance society."

A masculine tear makes a nation gasp.

The man is Danial Westling, who married Sweden's Princess Victoria of Sweden today.

Heating with bunnies.

In Sweden.

"Bird-chasing guards rip palace painting with bamboo sticks."

"In their attempts to apprehend the flying fugitive, the guards ripped a hole in Fredric Westin's 1838 portrait of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, who reigned as King Karl XIV of Sweden February 5, 1818 until his death on March 8, 1844."

When robots attack.

Good luck suing in Sweden.

In 2007, a muscular robot programmed to lift heavy stones malfunctioned in a factory near Stockholm, Sweden, and some poor devil—who thought he'd turned off the power—nearly got himself killed when the robot grabbed his head and shook him around. He ended up with four broken ribs, but managed to "defend himself" and live. The judge awarded the guy 25,000 Swedish kronor, which sounds nice except that it's only about $3,000. The judge also reprimanded the guy for being at least partially at fault, if I'm reading the Swedish translation correctly.

Get robot insurance: