Hasta La Gadget!

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — President Barack Obama is carving out a wide swath the Pacific Ocean for an expanded marine preserve, putting the waters off-limits to drilling and most fishing in a bid to protect fragile underwater life.

The revamped expanded Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument will cover 490,000 square miles — an area roughly three times the size of California — and will become the largest marine preserve in the world. Millions of seabirds, sea turtles and marine mammals live in the bio-rich expanse included by the new monument, which will also add new protections for more than 130 “seamounts” — underwater mountains where rare or undiscovered species are frequently found. The move to broaden the George W. Bush-era preserve comes as Obama seeks to show concrete presidential action to protect the environment, despite firm opposition in Congress to new environmental legislation. At the United Nations this week, Obama announced new U.S. commitments to help other nations deal with the effects of climate change, as world leaders seek to galvanize support for a major global climate treaty to be finalized next year in Paris.

“We hope the steps taken today by the U.S. government will accelerate similar actions by a growing list of coastal nations to protect more of the world’s great ocean treasures,” said Matt Rand, who heads the ocean program at the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Obama will sign a memorandum expanding the ocean preserve on Thursday, said White House officials, who requested anonymity to discuss the plan ahead of Obama’s official announcement. Obama signaled his intent to expand the monument in June and asked for input on the final boundaries from fishermen, lawmakers and scientists. Officials said they received more than 170,000 electronic comments on the proposal.

The memorandum bans commercial fishing, deep-sea mining and other extraction of underwater resources, by recreational fishing will continue to be allowed. White House officials said they decided to allow some fishing in an attempt to preserve and encourage the public’s access to federal areas.

While a major symbolic victory for environmentalists, who long urged Obama to take this step, the designation will have limited practical implications. That’s because little fishing or drilling are taking place in the region even without the new protections.

The expansion also falls far short of what Obama could have done had he used the full extent of his powers.

Maritime law gives the U.S. control up to 200 nautical miles from the coast. Under Bush, the U.S. set aside waters extending about 50 miles from the shore of an array of U.S.-administered islands in the south-central Pacific, thousands of miles from the American mainland.

The islands sit between Hawaii and American Samoa and are divided into five regions. Obama is extending the preserve to the full 200 miles — but only for three of the five regions.

Had Obama expanded the preserve in all five regions, he could have protected more than 780,000 square miles, according to a geographic analysis by Pew.

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AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this report.

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Reach Josh Lederman at http://twitter.com/joshledermanAP

Everybody uses Facebook even if you don’t. Artist Pawel Kuczynski played on the idea of our obsession with the social network and people’s behavior while using it and how Facebook treats its users in these perfectly on point satirical illustrations. They take Facebook’s logo and twist it into something else.

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Another retail shop has been hit with a point-of-sale information breach. Jimmy John’s, a nationwide sandwich shop operating over 1,900 stores, reports they’ve been hacked. Just like Home Depot and Target ahead of them, this one points right back to the point of sale terminal. Jimmy John’s says they learned of the hack on July 30, which prompted them to … Continue reading

India’s space program announced Wednesday that it successfully put a spacecraft into orbit around Mars. The feat not only marks one big step for the space program, but also one giant leap for Martian robot friendship.

After successfully entering Mars’ orbit this week, India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) spacecraft was immediately greeted with a “tweet” around 3 a.m. GMT Wednesday by a fellow Mars explorer, NASA’s Curiosity rover, prompting what may have been the best Twitter exchange ever:

Namaste, @MarsOrbiter! Congratulations to @ISRO and India’s first interplanetary mission upon achieving Mars orbit.

— Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity) September 24, 2014

Howdy @MarsCuriosity ? Keep in touch. I’ll be around.

— ISRO’s Mars Orbiter (@MarsOrbiter) September 24, 2014

“Brilliant! Mars Orbiter interacting with Mars Curiosity. That’s the beauty of Twitter,” commented Twitter user Jitendra Jain after seeing the friendly exchange between MOM and Curiosity.

Meanwhile, a Redditor with the username “oldterribleman,” quipped on Wednesday, “This is the kind of thing that unites humanity and for a moment erases borders. Bravo!”

Within the first four hours of launching its Twitter account, @MarsOrbiter had more than 32,000 followers, BBC News reported. And, the hashtags #IndiaAtMars, #marsorbitormission and #Martian were among the top 10 Twitter trends in India.

This was India’s first attempt to get the spacecraft — also called Mangalyaan, which means “Mars craft” in Hindi — into the Red Planet’s orbit, making the country the first Asian nation to successfully to do so.

The orbiter is expected to circle Mars for at least six months, using solar-powered instruments to collect scientific data from the Red Planet’s atmosphere.

Several years ago, I was dining out with a friend when he asked about my love life. I confessed there was nothing to report — I hadn’t dated anyone in ages. So he did the thing people do when confronted with a person who is single-not-by-choice. He asked what the problem was.

If you’re a romantically unattached person who’d prefer not to be, you’ve probably had some form of this conversation: the earnest, well-intentioned attempt by a friend or family member to solve the riddle of you. Are you afraid of intimacy? Do you have low self-esteem? Are you so self-sufficient you’re not leaving any room for love? Or are you so desperate to find a partner that your raging neediness is repelling all prospects?

On this particular night, I had been on my own for about six years, and I was fed up with these kinds of questions.

“There’s nothing wrong with me!” I said, a little too loud, waving my hand and knocking a salt shaker off the table.

My friend raised his eyebrows and picked up his menu. “Okay, Sara, whatever you say.”

Cut to: ten years later. I have just published a book, It’s Not You, in which I address all of the irritating clichés singles confront on a regular basis. I’m also married.

At my readings, I’ve met many intelligent, thoughtful singles who have clearly experienced the same frustration and doubt that I did. They have asked interesting questions, but one in particular has stuck in my head: “Would your book be different if you wrote it when you were single?”

The answer: Not really. And that’s a problem.

The premise of my book is that most single people don’t have to fix themselves to find love; they just need the good fortune to meet the right person, the one who adores them even if they still get anxious at parties or hate their thighs. I reached this conclusion when I was single myself, after many years of reading self-help books and answering workbook-type questions about my emotional baggage and my fear of commitment. At a certain point, I realized this was silly. There was nothing wrong with me, or any of the single people I knew — or at least nothing so wrong that it was keeping us from a relationship. There was no standard of self-actualization that separated the single from the married. It was just dumb luck.

The observation was liberating, but I mostly kept it to myself. I was quite sure the general response would be like my friend’s: Sure, sweetie, you believe whatever gets you through the night. I worried that by revealing my heartache, self-doubt and — yes- – anger, I would disprove my argument in many readers’ minds, prompting the age-old refrain No wonder she’s single!

So I stayed quiet. Many years later, from the safe perch of my happy marriage, I published a book firing back at all the inane comments singles hear about being “too intimidating” or “too available.” For the most part, the book has been received warmly. Of course, I’ve had detractors criticizing my writing or my ideas, but overall it has been very civil.

There is one interesting exception. After I published an excerpt that challenged the perennial idea that intelligence, independence and career success hinder a woman’s chance of marrying, I received a lot of criticism. Many readers challenged my logic or my research, which is fair enough, but there were also comments like this:

“Sounds like the author’s mother called again today and wanted to know when she’d get to be a grandmother.”

“If these ladies are so smart, why is she telling them this? It sounds to me like she might be trying to convince herself.”

“It’s quite obvious that the author needs some [expletive deleted].”

I’m sure you can guess the detail that was not included in the excerpt. For the first time since publishing It’s Not You, I didn’t make clear that I was married. And for the first time, I was attacked personally, my ideas dismissed and attributed to my unhappiness or insecurity.

This, I believe, is why single people often go to great lengths to assure everyone around them they are completely delighted with their solo life. Of course, we all know that many single people are extremely happy, just as we know that many married people are utterly miserable.

But only single people are compelled to present their life satisfaction as evidence that they’re worth listening to. When couples experience marital discord, we accept it as a normal cost of being an adult; we even admire them for their willingness to stick it out and do the necessary “work.” But when a singles express wistfulness with their unattached state, they risk being branded with that deadly word, “pathetic.” As opposed to, say, human.

At my events, readers often ask me very personal questions about their dating lives, and I sometimes find myself in an awkward role–the married advice lady. The single people who attend my readings have been patient as I stumble through my responses to the 45-year-old who just quit internet dating or the college student who wants to know how to get her crush to answer her texts.

Conversations like these might have been easier if I was still in the game, still navigating all that uncertainty myself. And sometimes I wish I’d had the courage to publish my book when I was single, but mostly I’m glad I didn’t. To be single is to subject oneself to an outrageous amount of scrutiny, from the well-meaning to the trollish. The single person must constantly field queries and gentle prompts about why she is alone. So I did the best I could: I said nothing.

Sara Eckel is the author of It’s Not You: 27 (Wrong) Reasons You’re Single. You can get a free bonus chapter of her book at saraeckel.com. You can also find her on Twitter and Facebook.

This post originally appeared on Daily Life.