What I’ve Noticed

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Frank Fenner thinks we’ll go the way of the Easter Islanders in the next 100 years.  I disagree that humans will go extinct, but I agree that we’ve waited far too long to address energy and population issues to avoid dramatic and involuntary reduction in our population.  And it’s already happening: resource competition, exacerbated by climate change, is at the root of bloody ethnic clashes in Kyrgyzstan.

Our past greed for sperm oil hurts our current ability to survive the consequences of our greed for another kind of oil.

One response to an honor killing sums up the state of women’s rights in India: “If they wanted to kill their daughter, that’s okay. But they shouldn’t have killed our boy.”

Oogmerk glasses ad

Oogmerk glasses ad, via Flowing Data

Don’t like to be taken advantage of? Learn a little history.

A recent study says that eating organic, local food won’t save the world.  Of course, perhaps we wouldn’t be facing such enormous problems if our food supply didn’t encourage overpopulation.

On the challenges of queerdom:

So, as I wandered the isles, eventually finding everything I needed, I started for the checkout line when all of a sudden I felt the bump in my pants start to hang a tad lower than he should be. I continued walking, a bit slower though, in an attempt to assess this situation. By the time I had decided that this could become a potential issue I realized that my detachable disco stick had completely jumped the tighty whities ship and was now slowly crawling down my left leg a little bit more with every step.

I stopped walking, obviously, right in the middle of the isle. My face clearly expressed concern as I can never find anyone in that store to help me but now, of course, with my leg bent up to stop the AWAL lovelance at my knee, threatening to flop onto the ground and roll away into the gardening section, I had two guys asking me if they can help me find anything. Without actually making eye contact I mumbled “Uh…no, that’s cool, thanks though. I’m just… uh, thinking… um, about some stuff.”

Louisiana’s legislators be doing jack shit to deal with the oil spill, but reminding themselves that they own women’s bodies seems to make them feel better.

Manolo describes the next women’s exercise craze, Catholic Yoga:

‘This position is known as St. Catherine on the Wheel,” you say as you splay your arms and legs into the unnatural pose, “take the awareness of Catherine’s suffering inward, hear her cries of agony, revel in God’s grace.”

To be followed by the St. Lawrence on the Griddle, in which you exhort the students to “feel the burn,” as you turn the room heat up to it’s highest setting.

A huge step towards better designed cities, less pollution, and less fossil fuel energy devoted to transportation: the US government decides that pedestrians’ and cyclists’ needs must be considered to get federal money for infrastructure projects.

Having books around makes your kids more likely to succeed.

Insight into the Israeli flotilla killings:

Why did Israel choose to murder nine peace-seeking foreigners in broad daylight? Although it claims otherwise, this had little to do with “restoring Israel’s deterrence” or capping the peashooters in Gaza. Instead, one must listen to Moshe Yaalon, then chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, who said in 2002 that “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people”. By massacring the Mavi Marmara’s activists — whose names and religion are still unknown — Israel wants Gazans to know that even the international community cannot save them.

Most colleges handle plagiarism badly: this essay has a more realistic take on the situation:

How, precisely, had working with hundreds of student writers changed me, as a teacher, a writer, a person? I’d seen them in five years’ worth of classes and in the writing clinic where I worked as a consultant. I saw them baffled by what teachers said they wanted (“compare and contrast ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ and ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’”), which often seemed to mask what they really wanted (“elegantly analyze these stories and compose, in formal prose, a well-supported argument that will not only engage the ambiguities without resolving them but delight and surprise me”). And over and over I saw how the nature of the institution and its agents reduced the complexity of student experience to neat bureaucratic decision trees (“Was the student intoxicated? If no, then refer to disciplinary committee. If yes, then refer to police”). One way to do this: make a moral issue out of a moment in a life, to graft a forking path (and therefore a high road not taken) onto a moment when there’d been no choice at all. Only later would I see such moments for what they were and try to wrest them back from the machine. But when Haley plagiarized, it was safer for me to act as a junior bureaucrat. I saw no other choice.

Sweden gets how to fix gender equality:

“Society is a mirror of the family,” Mr. Westerberg said. “The only way to achieve equality in society is to achieve equality in the home. Getting fathers to share the parental leave is an essential part of that.”

Racism in AZ

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I’ve written a few times now about Arizona’s new immigration law.  What I haven’t focused on so much is the very acceptable racism in Arizona.  I’ve noticed it most at coffee shops when I overhear conversations.  From the Bible study group to the AA accountability partners to the crunchy granola hippies, I’ve heard Hispanic people blamed for just about every problem we have or talked about in a disparaging way, always with an added “but they do work hard!”

Those conversations aren’t pretty, but it can get a lot uglier.

An Arizona elementary school mural featuring the faces of kids who attend the school has been the subject of constant daytime drive-by racist screaming, from adults, as well as a radio talk-show campaign (by an actual city councilman, who has an AM talk-radio show) to remove the black student’s face from the mural, and now the school principal has ordered the faces of the Latino and Black students pictured on the school wall to be repainted as light-skinned children.

I bet you didn’t think Dr. Isis could be literal when she asked “How white?”

The decision to whiten the children’s faces has since been reversed, but as Roger Ebert puts it:

How would I feel if I were a brown student at Miller Valley Elementary School in Prescott, Arizona? A mural was created to depict some of the actual students in the school.

Let’s say I was one of the lucky ones. The mural took shape, and as my face became recognizable, I took some kidding from my classmates and a smile from a pretty girl I liked.

My parents even came over one day to have a look and take some photos to e-mail to the family. The mural was shown on TV, and everybody could see that it was me.

Then a City Councilman named Steve Blair went on his local radio talk show and made some comments about the mural. I didn’t hear him, but I can guess what he said. My dad says it’s open season on brown people in this state. Anyway, for two months white people drove past in their cars and screamed angry words out the window before hurrying away. And the artists got back up on their scaffold and started making my face whiter.

We went over to my grandparent’s house, and my grandmother cried and told me, “I prayed that was ending in my lifetime.” Then there was more news: The City Councilman was fired from his radio show, the Superintendent of Schools climbed up on the scaffold with a bullhorn and apologized for the bad decision, and I guess the artists went back up and started making my skin darker again, but I didn’t go to see, because I never wanted to go near that bullshit mural again.

Are we really doing this again?

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John Tierney guest stars on xkcd

John Tierney thinks that women just can’t measure up to men when it comes to math and science.  His column is infuriating, but I’ll let Female Science Professor, Dr. Isis, dana at EotAW, and PZ Myers take it apart for me.

FSP summarizes the article snarkily and succinctly:

There are flawed studies that show that females and males have similar quantitative skills and better studies that show that more males than females are extremely talented at math. This is one reason why men are more successful in math, science, and engineering. If women were good at math and science, perhaps they would understand these scientific studies with all the numbers in them.

Dr. Isis does a hot little data dance in the holes in his arguments, like so:

He then continues to outline the evidence that boys tend to be the top scorers in math and science when measured via standardized aptitude tests, even if there is no difference between the means.  Yet, he clearly has ignored the fact that this phenomenon is unique to the United States.  Indeed, in countries with more gender equal cultural norms, the divide disappears.  In Iceland, girls out perform boys in math and science.  Japanese girls out perform American boys.

Dana at EotAW, my favorite philosopher feminist, points out some logic issues:

This argument apparently only works for math. If we’re talking at the level of the facts people normally pull out here, there’s some research that suggests that at the tip of the tail, the brightest men are better at math than the brightest women, and the usual argument proceeds from here to conclude that this explains why men are more likely to be PhD’s in math, etc.  But similar research shows that the best female communicators are better than their male counterparts, and that women are natural consensus builders and yet no one suggests that top literature and political science departments are and should be female-dominated, because here we can easily see that innate tendencies can be overrun by other factors.

And PZ Myers uses the same reasoning as Tierney to show that we should be using wealth to determine who gets the best jobs in science:

By the same reasoning, we can also argue that wealth differences in abilities should not be dismissed, since they tend to be perpetuated over many generations. We can just stop wasting time and money trying to educate poor children or correcting the inequities of poverty in our schools, because the data clearly says that it’s highly unlikely that any of them will succeed in science.

Since there is far too much awesomeness to copy/paste, I advise a quick visit to FSP, Dr. Isis, dana at EotAW, and PZ.

Escaping the dog

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From Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog:

We are good primates, so we spend most of our time maintaining and defending our territory, so that it will protect and gratify us; climbing – or trying not to slide down – the tribe’s hierarchical ladder, and fornicating in every manner imaginable – even mere phantasams.  Thus we use up a considerable amount of our energy in intimidation and seduction, and these two strategies alone ensure the quest for territory, hierarchy and sex that gives life to our conatus.  But none of this touches our consciousness.  We talk about love, about good and evil, philosophy and civilization, and we cling to these respectable icons the way a tick clings to its nice big warm dog.