Bird’s Eye: Yes, Virginia (and the rest of you!) there is a sanity clause. Some things are improving and the media’s focus on bad news sometimes obscures that. A woman is made fun of on the internet, she speaks out, and her mocker apologizes. Surgical intervention is getting better. And two stories about improvements with cars.

* The Sikh Woman Who Stood Up To Online Abuse About Her Facial Hair The Guardian

Earlier this week, an unidentified man surreptitiously took a picture of Ohio State University student Balpreet Kaur and posted it on Reddit, in the Funny section, with the caption: “I’m not sure what to make of this.” Implicit in his words was the invitation that we all gawp at Kaur because she is a woman who has facial hair. Kaur, a student of neuroscience and psychology, was unaware that her picture had been taken until a friend mentioned it on Facebook, by which time her looks, outfit and turban were all being mocked anonymously on the internet.

With a humbling display of maturity, Kaur joined the thread and explained: “I realize that my gender is often confused and I look different than most women. However, baptized Sikhs believe in the sacredness of this body – it is a gift that has been given to us by the Divine Being (which is genderless, actually) and [we] must keep it intact as a submission to the divine will.”

…Well, that shut the “douchebags” up. In their place, the thread was flooded with positive comments, backslaps and a fair amount of personal body image sharing in support of Kaur. Even more impressive, the man responsible for posting the picture offered a tail-between-the-legs mea culpa. “I felt the need to apologize to the Sikhs, Balpreet, and anyone else I offended when I posted that picture. Put simply it was stupid. Making fun of people is funny to some but incredibly degrading to the people you’re making fun of. It was an incredibly rude, judgmental, and ignorant thing to post.”

* Odds Of Surviving Surgery Up Dramatically Vancouver Sun

The risk of dying during or shortly after surgery has declined dramatically over the past five decades, with the rate now about one-tenth what it was before 1970, a new study shows.

And that improvement occurred at a time when patients who were undergoing surgery were, in general terms, sicker, and the surgeries increasingly more complex….Bainbridge and his group explored the issue by amalgamating data from 87 studies other researchers had done to try to get a global picture of what had been happening over the past few decades to rates of deaths during or immediately after surgery. The patient pool in the combined studies represents 21.4 million times people were administered general anesthetic for surgery.

* Driving Safety, in Fits and Starts – Graphic – New York Times

* Solar Power Supercharging Stations – “fills up your tank” for free via Reddit

Constructed in secret, Tesla revealed the locations of the first six Supercharger stations, which will allow the Model S to travel long distances with ultra fast charging throughout California, parts of Nevada and Arizona. 

The technology at the heart of the Supercharger was developed internally and leverages the economies of scale of existing charging technology already used by the Model S, enabling Tesla to create the Supercharger device at minimal cost. The electricity used by the Supercharger comes from a solar carport system provided by SolarCity, which results in almost zero marginal energy cost after installation. Combining these two factors, Tesla is able to provide Model S owners free long distance travel indefinitely.

Each solar power system is designed to generate more energy from the sun over the course of a year than is consumed by Tesla vehicles using the Supercharger. This results in a slight net positive transfer of sunlight generated power back to the electricity grid. In addition to lowering the cost of electricity, this addresses a commonly held misunderstanding that charging an electric car simply pushes carbon emissions to the power plant. The Supercharger system will always generate more power from sunlight than Model S customers use for driving. By adding even a small solar system at their home, electric car owners can extend this same principle to local city driving too.