Doctor Science

by Doctor Science

It’s not often that I disagree with either hilzoy or Ta-Nehesi Coates, and rarer still for me to disagree with both of them at once, but today I do.

The source describes this as “1892 woman writing impressionist painting”, but I haven’t been able to figure out who it’s by. It’s in the style of Gauguin, but I can’t find it in any of the Gauguin archives online.

Backstory: V.S. Naipaul, Nobel Prize-winning Trinidadian writer, is known to be a giant, flaming dick. In an interview this week

Naipaul, who has been described as the “greatest living writer of English prose”, was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He replied: “I don’t think so.” Of Austen he said he “couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world”.

He felt that women writers were “quite different”. He said: “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.”

The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world”. “And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too,” he said.I don’t see that there’s any doubt about which body part to compare him to.

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by Doctor Science

Stephen Bridenstine is a grad student at the University of British Columbia studying the image of Indians (aka Native Americans) in non-Native American culture. He noticed (h/t Sociological Images):

Sometime between the first week of February and the last week of May, American Indian reservations disappeared from Google Maps!

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by Doctor Science

Since my last post here about Ogi Ogas & Sai Gaddam’s A Billion Wicked Thoughts we’ve had more Fun Times together. Some of the ensuing discussions have been very helpful for me in clarifying things I "just know", and in spotting the problems with some of other people’s conventional wisdom: for instance, that men are "sexually more visual" than women.

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by Doctor Science

It’s going to be another very, very bad weather day in the Midwest:

From the National Weather Service.

Specifically:

From Weather.com; more details there.

If you are in the zone, please make sure you are never more than 15 minutes from a solid, preferably underground tornado shelter this afternoon. Monitor local TV/radio closely! And when the sky gets that sickly greenish color, you know what to do. I did part of my growing-up in Champaign-Urbana, IL, and I’ve never forgotten what tornado weather looks like.

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by Doctor Science

So, it’s Rapture Weekend! As Fred Clark says at slactivist, it’s not altogether all that funny — the people who really believe are truly suffering, and worse is to come. The formula is clear: half will despair, and half will double down.

A lot of people are posting links to their favorite “end of the world” songs today, and here’s my nominee:

at YouTube
By chagrined, using audio from Great Big Sea’s version of “It’s the End of the World”, video from “Life After People”. Even if all us humans disappear tomorrow, there’s plenty of life to go on.

If you don’t believe the Rapture will happen real soon now, it behooves you to listen to Real Climate Scientists warning that “Earth, unlike Alien, has no sequel”:

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by Doctor Science

In which I follow up some of the discussion in the comments to The Women Men Don’t See, for once disagree with Fred Clark (slacktivist), and talk about sluts and the walk of not-shame.

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by Doctor Science

As you may have heard, last week a Brooklyn Chasidic Jewish newspaper, Der Tzeitung, printed the iconic “Situation Room” photo with the women carefully Photoshopped out:

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by Doctor Science

In my earlier post about the ‘obesity epidemic’ I talked about Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham. This book really changed my thinking about a number of aspects of food, cooking, and human evolution, but the very best part about it is what Wrangham says about BCBs.

BCBs, as every reader of Terry Pratchett knows, are Burnt Crunchy Bits.

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by Doctor Science

This vid, a celebration of (shall we say) a certain lifestyle with which I am familiar, is just starting to go viral:

Roll a D6 from Connor Anderson on Vimeo.

What’s kind of boggling to me is how good the editing and special effects are for something with little money behind it, and how bland and repulsive the high-end pro video it’s parodying seems by comparison:

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by Doctor Science

What many, many of us (myself included) imagine when we hear the word “royalty”:

Via: Screen Rant

The reality:

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by Doctor Science

I’ll get back to some of the topics I’ve kind of left dangling, but first I need to put up a review of Japan’s Medieval Population: Famine, Fertility, And Warfare in a Transformative Age by William Wayne Farris before Inter Library Loan wants it back.

This is what I think of Inter Library Loan, btw:

this image taken, by me, from Dürer’s "Triumphal Chariot of Maximilian I". (I got distracted into putting together a better version of the whole thing, but I’ll post about that later. I digress.)

Japan’s Medieval Population is just the sort of history book I love. It’s a broad, rapid tour through material I knew basically nothing about, but with a framework I’m very familiar with. Farris uses crucial principles from William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples, which is one of the books that’s shaped my thinking, as well.

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by Doctor Science

A few months ago, I read Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham. Wrangham marshals many lines of very good evidence to argue that humans are physically adapted to cooked food. One unexplored prediction of his theory is that, when proto-humans starting eating cooked food, they must have experienced a true "obesity epidemic".

I’m cutting this because discussions of weight, etc., are so fraught.

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by Doctor Science

The Public Religion Research Institute’s recent report, Catholic Attitudes on Gay and Lesbian Issues (pdf) was widely linked — I heard about it from Andrew Sullivan first, IIRC.

As someone raised (mostly) Catholic who has many, many Catholic relatives, I was all fired up to love this report. Alas, I believe it to be meaningless — or at least, to not have the meaning ascribed to it by the authors, Robert P. Jones and Daniel Cox.

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by Doctor Science

Yesterday President Obama ordered the Justice Department to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act. In honor of the occasion, I decided to read the copy of What Is Marriage? by Robert George (and two male grad students) I’d downloaded when I saw various people talking about it as a serious, intellectual defense of the DOMA position. Robert George is a Princeton politics full professor who is supposed to bring the big guns in conservative thought, a guy who can argue for natural law like a latter-day Aquinas. Or so they tell me.

Now I’ve read it, and if this is the best they’ve got, no wonder the Traditional Marriage people are in trouble. No wonder the defense in the trial against California’s Proposition 8 was unable to field a single witness the Judge found “expert”. This paper is, technically speaking, bunk.

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by Doctor Science

This post is about the attack on Lara Logan, and rape as a weapon of war and policy.

Summary: Sexualized violence, rape, and even gang rape are not just signs of bestiality, barbarism, or boys inevitably being boys: they can be military and police tactics, and they are part of the toolbox of U.S. as well as Egyptian military/intelligence forces.

SERIOUS TRIGGER AND RAGE WARNING.

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by Doctor Science

There’s been an interesting conversation about sex education going on in the comments to the previous post, which I invite you-all to roll over into this one, to leave the abortion discussion over there.

I’m starting off with something I wrote a few years ago. I’ve tacked in one cite where I could find it; if there’s anything else in here that strikes you-all as needing supporting evidence, please point it out — most of it seems incredibly self-evident to me.

I think “abstinence until marriage, faithfulness afterward”, far from being “the only 100% safe approach”, is a proven formula for disaster.

As far as I can tell, “abstinence” in this sense includes never having any orgasm-related contact with another human being before marriage. That is, it encourages ignorance, clumsiness, and lack of knowledge of self and others. For women in particular, this means that they are much more likely to find marital sex unsatisfying, as neither half of the sketch has enough hands-on knowledge of female sexual response to get her where she wants to go. Unsatisfying marital sex is a Bad Thing, not least because it leads to more divorces, a Really Bad Thing.

Abstinence-until-marriage also naturally leads to earlier marriages, as young people get married so they can legitimately have sex. Early marriages lead to more divorces, which, again, a Really Bad Thing.

Abstinence-until-marriage also encourages the mindset in which certain behaviors are labeled “sex” by adults, and so teenagers indulge in other behaviors because they “don’t count”, but without taking appropriate precautions either medically or emotionally.

For instance, oral sex is a *really* effective contraceptive, but there are still disease risks — which is why teenagers could stand to learn about flavored condoms — and it has emotional/relationship risks if it doesn’t go both ways, if it just becomes a power trip. Exploitative sex is also a Really Bad Thing.

One of the worst things about “abstinence until marriage, faithfulness afterward” as an educational program is that it is so patently hypocritical. Kids aren’t stupid — they look around at the behavior of the adults they know and the ones depicted in movies, TV, and ads, and they will infallibly conclude that AUMFA is not standard, normal adult behavior. “Do as I say, not as I do” is a Bad Thing, because it leads kids to assume adults are always lying, even when we say “don’t mix downers and alcohol” or “don’t drive 70 on that twisting road”. And those are Really, Really Bad Things.

AUMFA makes adults feel good, but it is a disservice to young people on multiple levels, and I’m against it.

Some comments re sex ed from the earlier post that I think are particularly good jumping-off points:

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by Doctor Science

I wanted to do a round-up of the recent surge in Republican/conservative attacks on abortion.

• A Catholic hospital de-Catholic-ed for saving a woman’s life with an abortion
• An Idaho pharmacist who cited the “conscience clause” in refusing to fill a prescription to control bleeding — because the Rx was coming from Planned Parenthood, apparently.
• The many-faceted attacks of H.R.3, the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act.
  • HR3 originally included a provision to restrict the “rape exception” of the Hyde Amendment to “forcible rape” (or what Whoopi Goldberg calls “rape rape”), but that has been dropped.
  • For over a week, Sady Doyle has been blogging, twittering, and organizing against HR3. She was big force behind making it not re-define rape, and she’s not stopping. The bill also affirms “conscience” clauses — now extended to include a hospital’s right to refuse to save a woman’s life.
• Anti-abortion activists tried to scam Planned Parenthood by pretending to be child traffickers. PP reported them to prosecutors immediately after the visits, but somehow this is supposed to make PP look bad, anyway.
• I would be more surprised that those activists were willing to cynically exploit child sex trafficking (as though it’s something that doesn’t deserve to be treated seriously), except that Republicans have been blocking the Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking Deterrence and Victims Support Act of 2010. The deeply conservative Concerned Women for America opposed the bill because they think child sex slaves should be arrested as criminals, not supported as victims.
• The return of the back alley

There’s lots more, but I’ll stop for the moment.

Now, the post I wanted to write was about abortion, sexuality, and women’s rights in America — but I realized that that post and the ensuing discussion would fall apart into derailing flames without *another* post, first. This is my post about some premises.

I can only call a person or organization “anti-abortion” if they are also pro-contraception.

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by Fiddler

I’ve been watching the coverage of the protests in Egypt on Al Jazeera and CNN the last few days. Throughout this, it’s impossible to avoid seeing varying levels of relationship between Egypt and the United States.

I’m glad that the Egyptian Army has refused to fire on protesters. Instead of shooting, army officers are trying to persuade the protesters to go home and resume normal life, on the 12th day of protests. It’s not working too well; people keep coming back to the crowd despite the last few days’ violence.

For the past two days, while Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron (whom I saw on Al Jazeera) and others have pushed for an orderly transition of power, the pro-Mubarak forces have done their best to crush protest with clubs, machetes, and any force possible, even while military personnel in the streets have stood aside to let these armed enforcers past. I’m not sure how the army justifies this as non-interference with the protesters.

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by Doctor Science

Your ObiWi front-pagers are doing some re-shuffling, again, as various people find they have less time for blogging than they’d hoped. I’d like to introduce a new candidate, “Fiddler”, and her first post.

I’ve e-known Fiddler under another pseud for years (since before the ’04 elections, IIRC) — she was long one of my main sources for news and links on politics, energy, art, feminism, and interesting stuff. She lives in the DC area, very broadly speaking, and has worked in the newspaper business (when there was one) and politics. She’s also a musician (guitar, cello, fiddle), hence the choice of pseud for Obsidian Wings. And of course, there are cats.

In terms of the political landscape, Fiddler is on the lefty side (as am I, of course), but with a *really* solid understanding of the nuts & bolts of policy — much of what I know I’ve learned from her. Give us your usual forthright yet civil feedback, and we’ll see how this works out. Herewith:

Paging Charles Dickens, by Fiddler

Back in the 1980s, I spent a time working for a daily newspaper in a small city in New York state. The newspaper was part of a media chain owned out-of-state, and the pay scale was set for the other state, which didn’t have New York’s higher taxes. Because of this, as a single working person, I was qualified to receive government assistance for food in the form of free cheese and other occasionally available food products. I won’t deny it came in very handy at the end of the month, particularly in midwinter with sub-zero temperatures and high heating bills. But at the next desk, the reporter was a man who made the same money I did and who was married and had children. He and his family were on food stamps in order to keep food on the table all the time, although he, like me, was working full-time. In a different industry, we might have been able to work overtime to make up some of the difference, but according to company policy none of us were allowed overtime except on election night, which didn’t pay for a lot of groceries.

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by Doctor Science

I’ve spent days now starting posts about the Tucson Massacre and then stopping because someone else was saying it better. Examples: Sady Doyle: “The Arizona shooting FAQ”; Esquire: “The Voices in Jared Loughner’s Head Shall Not Be Respected; Julianne Hing: Loughner, Lovelle Mixon, and Our Quest for Narratives; Conor Friedersdorf: Tone Versus Substance and many, many more.

I’m going to just talk about one aspect of the Massacre and the resulting discussion. In brief:

a) we have too many guns, and the guns are too big

b) a major reason for this is that guns are more important as fantasies than as tools

c) in particular, guns have starring roles in our filmed fiction (TV & movies), and those roles are what we think of when we imagine “guns”.

In not-so-brief:

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by Doctor Science

The “Best/Worst Movies of 2010” lists are popping up all over, and “The Social Network” is on a lot of them. Here’s the review I drafted when it came out: dusted off, completed, and edited.

I went to see The Social Network the second weekend it was out — the 10:40AM Saturday show at the googlePlex, because that’s only $6 instead of $10 or more. Afterward, the group who’d gone sat around and talked about it: did you like it, did you not like it. When it came around to my turn, I couldn’t really say “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”. I can only say: “it’s complicated”.

On the one hand, there’s the unmistakable zip of Aaron Sorkin dialogue: snappy, but with the sound of real people actually talking, not just characters expositioning. On the other hand, the story that’s presented isn’t as close to the real events as it’s trying to seem. On the other other hand, there are important aspects to the way historic events were broken apart and re-assembled to make the movie, especially the way women are included (or not). And on the fourth hand, I can see things in the movie — about Facebook, and about the way we live now — that Sorkin and David Fincher (the director) may not have realized they were putting in, but that are there nonetheless.

In a nutshell: The Social Network uses some historical documents, but it’s not a documentary; it references historical events, but it’s not historical fiction. It’s in the genre known as RPF, for Real Person Fic — along with, say, The Beatles’ movies, especially A Hard Day’s Night.

Detailed and comprehensive spoilers behind the cut, along with several embedded videos.

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by Doctor Science

In the discussion to Sebastian’s post celebrating the end of DADT, commenter avedis took issue. I found avedis’ comments more honest and comprehensible than most defenses of DADT, but they raise disturbing questions about rape culture in the military.

WARNING: POTENTIALLY TRIGGERY DISCUSSION OF RAPE AND RAPE CULTURE

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by Doctor Science

M.S. at the Economist talks about The lonely 6%: as Daniel Sarewitz discussed at Slate, the Pew Research Center found that while 23% of the general public identify as Republican, only 6% of scientists do. M.S. suggest three possible, testable hypothesis to explain this:

The first is that scientists are hostile towards Republicans, which scares young Republicans away from careers in science. The second is that Republicans are hostile towards science, and don’t want to go into careers in science. The third is that young people who go into the sciences tend to end up becoming Democrats, due to factors inherent in the practice of science or to peer-group identification with other scientists.

A month ago, Nils August Andresen posted a series at Frum Forum about why the educated young are shunning the GOP:

To simplify: Republicans have gone from having a clear advantage among top students in the decade following the Eisenhower administration, to being competitive under the Nixon and Ford administrations, and from being an energetic minority during Reagan and Bush Sr. to being almost eradicated today.
..
while students have fled the Republican Party, they do not seem to have moved very far to the left. The Weathermen are long gone. Hippies, utopian Marxists, socialists, anarchists – groups that were prominent in the 1960s and 1970s – are marginal today. Rather, today’s best students identify as slightly to the left of center, policy-wise liberals who massively prefer the Democratic party.
…
Let me advance another hypothesis. Today’s top students are motivated less by enthusiasm for Democrats and much more by revulsion from Republicans. It’s not the students who have changed so much. It’s the Republicans.

The 20- or 30-point advantage the Democratic Party has among educated young people pretty much matches what the Pew Center found for scientists as a whole — even though Pew’s sample was drawn from AAAS members, who are mostly middle-aged or older.

I’m not going to say that I know for sure what drove this historical process, but I can talk about what it was like.

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by Doctor Science

On Monday, zunguzungu posted a widely-linked and ground-breaking analysis of Julian Assange’s stated philosophy behind Wikileaks:

to summarize, [Assange] begins by describing a state like the US as essentially an authoritarian conspiracy, and then reasons that the practical strategy for combating that conspiracy is to degrade its ability to conspire, to hinder its ability to “think” as a conspiratorial mind. [bold mine]

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