Month: July 2011

by Doctor Science

DC Comics is launching a “reboot”, for which they state that The target audience are men age 18 to 34 though they do realize that they have readers in other demographics. Leigh at the Hathor Legacy is only one of many female comic fans wondering

why DC is marketing toward an audience they seem to already have, and why marketing to expand their female audience isn’t a higher priority.

I hypothesized:

I agree that this is perplexing if their goal is to sell comics. It is, though, quite comprensible if they are changing their business model, and now intended to sell *advertising*. In that case, a renewed commitment to that elusive 18-30 y.o. male demographic may be just what the actual customers (the advertisers) are looking for.

My idea is that if they make comics more like “porn that bears no relation to the laws of physics”, they might sell highly-targeted ad space: “getcher impulse-driven young males here! No additives, no paying for eyeballs you don’t want!”

And they might be planning to get more revenue from online ads, as well, and using the comics to generate a demographically pure product.

It’s either that or a “cootie” theory.Here’s what I mean by porn:

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by liberal japonicus

While the post on Michael Irvin was pretty open thread-y, form demands that when the sun's rays cross the international dateline, an appropriately labeled open thread should be offered up to the ObWi gods, which, in order to not inflame the atheist/skeptic crowd here, is strategically placed below the fold.

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by Doctor Science

I shall attempt to make a brief post about the debt ceiling meltdown, despite barely knowing what I’m talking about.

I’m basically a Krugmanite, because

• I figure he knows more than me
• we live near each other(comparatively speaking)
• our life choices were inspired by the same writer.

No, this is not the *real* cover, this is Mighty God King’s version. But it sums it up pretty well.

Anyway, one of the things Krugman often talks about is the confidence fairy theory, which states that businesses aren’t hiring (despite record cash reserves and low interest rates) because they lack “confidence”. The way to give them “confidence” is to cut government spending; once that happens, businesses will regain confidence, hire more people, and the economy will recover.

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PZ Myers is a Minnesota zoologist who studies squid professionally, and who also blogs at Pharyngula as a scientist, skeptical atheist, and opponent of creationism. He has also demonstrated that he is a mensch.

PZ demonstrated menschlichkeit as the atheist/skeptic/rationalist blogosphere has *exploded* over the weekend. The spark of the explosion was almost unbelievably small, but apparently there was a lot of gas hanging around just waiting to go up.

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by Doctor Science

There’s been a high-profile debate the past week about sex-specific abortion and the problem of “missing women” in Asia. When I put my evolutionary biologist hat on, the striking thing about the problem is that it happens at all. I believe it proves that human beings do not, generally speaking, have children for the purpose of reproduction. Children are not “offspring” as biologists think of it.

Unbalanced sex ratios IMO occur because, in many societies across time & space, children are social security more than they are offspring. Faced with a choice between having support in old age and grandchildren, people generally choose the support and ditch the grandchildren. From an evolutionary POV, human awareness of our impending old age makes us too smart for our own reproductive good.

There’s an actual bright side to this view of sex-selection. It turns out to be much easier and faster to remove the pressure for an unbalanced sex ratio than I would have expected. If a society has a real, non-familial social security system, the sex ratio can snap back to 1:1 in only a generation.

It’s really hard to find pictures to illustrate “female infanticide”. This is a picture of the Wilis from the ballet Giselle. They remind me of the Chinese custom of ghost marriage, the only kind of marriage many Chinese men can look forward to, given that country’s distorted sex ratio.

Let’s start by looking at the current debate.

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