Month: July 2012

by Doctor Science

Or, Why is an election 4 months away more newsworthy than a crisis right now?

My parents, who live in Connecticut, recently got back from a trip to the Midwest for a family reunion. They left on Thursday, June 29, and came back on Tuesday July 3. This past Friday my mother called a cousin who lives near Gaithersburg, Maryland, to tell her about the reunion, since she hadn’t been able to make it. Mom was shocked to learn that her cousin had been without power for five or six days, after a huge windstorm on June 30th.

My parents were especially shocked because they had no idea — they had heard nothing about this outage from the news. Admittedly, while they’re traveling their access to news is a bit haphazard, and depends mostly on what other people choose to have on TV, but they would have expected the travails of people in the DC area to be considered significant enough to make it onto screens.

Instead, all they happened to see were heads talking about the Presidential election, the Supreme Court Obamacare decision, and the effect of the Supreme Court decision on the election. To quote my Mom, “election blah blah blah.”

Read more

by Doctor Science

The Giant’s Causeway is a rock formation on the northern coast of Northern Ireland: interlocking basalt columns that look much more like a construct than like the products of volcanic eruption millions of years ago. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is by far the top tourist attraction in Northern Ireland.

The biggest fight the Giant’s Causeway has seen since Fionn mac Cumhaill (aka Finn MacCool) went after Benandonner is now shaping up, because one of the exhibits at the visitor’s center credits Young Earth Creationism and its “debate” with “current mainstream science”.

Read more

by Doctor Science

There’s been a lot of ink, pixels, and electrons spilled this week over a CBS News report about Chief Justice Roberts switching his vote to uphold Obamacare. For me, the weirdest thing about this whole circus is that conservatives apparently think the article makes the four dissenting Justices look good, when — to me — the article shows them as petulant judicial activists too scared to engage with other people’s opinions.

Read more

by Doctor Science

Ingrid Robeyns at Crooked Timber says my brain needs to know your sex:

I find it difficult (at quite an unconscious level, it seems) to correspond with someone I’ve never met without attributing a sex to that person, whereas I don’t think this holds for ‘race’, age, disability or something else.
…
Do you recognize this phenomenon? And if my self-analysis is correct, then I wonder: why is it the case that my brain needs to know the sex of unknown correspondents, but doesn’t seem to have the same needs with other personal and bodily characteristics?

There’s a pretty good discussion in comments, covering the gamut of explanations: evo-psycho, linguistic gender, privilege, etc.

Here’s my answer: it’s difficult because you haven’t practiced.

Read more