Mexican guppies sexually harass other fish

NewScientist reports:

Male guppies may sexually harass females of another fish species to prevent them from reproducing, researchers suggest. They believe the guppies -- which have invaded Mexican rivers and lakes -- are using sex as a way of suppressing one native fish population. ...

Guppies, originally from Trinidad, invaded Mexican waters in the 1950s. ...

They put male and female guppies in aquariums with female skiffia and found that no matter how many female guppies were around, male guppies would try to copulate with females of both species.

Their advances were unsuccessful, but Valero and her colleagues believe that the attempts at sex might be harming the female skiffia. ...

The two species have very different ways of reproducing. Skiffia sex is consensual -- males have no extending reproductive organ so the only way for their sperm to reach the females' eggs is for the two animals to line up their genital openings.

Sexual harassment

Guppy sex is more violent. Males have a hooked genital organ known as a gonopodium, which they insert into the females.

The article goes on to say that American minks have been sexually harassing European minks.

Juno

I just watched the new movie Juno. Critics raved about it as a feel-good comedy that is blazingly truthful. Warning: spoilers below.

The movie is about a 16-year-old pregnant girl who struggles with her options. It was okay, but I am a little disturbed about the raves. The title character Juno seduces a classmate and dumps him. She likes him but doesn't give him any say about what to do about the pregnancy. She only considers dating him after she has a jealous fit. She finds adoptive parents based on the most superficial factors, and rejects helpful advice. An ultrasound technician makes a minor comment praising Juno for finding adoptive parents, and we are expected to cheer as the technician gets verbally abused for it. Juno helps to bust up the marriage of the adoptive parents. The adoptive mother turns out to be a nut-case, but she gets the baby anyway.

The writer, Diablo Cody, is a woman who seems to be promoting some sort of feminist message that men should have no say in anything connected to babies. Juno refuses to listen to her father and to the father of her baby. The adoptive mother refuses to listen to what her husband has to say about the adoption, the baby's name, or the house preparations. Both Juno and the adoptive mother are portrayed as women who only need a man to help make the baby, and who can then casually discard the man.

The actress that played Juno, Ellen Page, was also the protagonist in Hard Candy. She also got wide praise for that movie, but I thought that she was creepier than the pedophiles. These are sick movies, and I am disturbed by the raves that they have gotten.

Response to Jonathan: I don't think that the movie Juno is anti-man. The men in the movie are more likable and sympathetic than the women. But the movie is strongly against men having any say about kids. That message is in almost every scene.

Yes, Juno consulted her boyfriend and parents. And then she proceeded to ignore them and insist on making all the decisions by herself. The boy should have met the adoptive parents and signed off on the adoption. The baby is his child also, and he has rights. The parents should have made their own determination regarding whether the adoptive parents were suitable.

I don't blame the 16-year-old Juno for breaking up the marriage of Mark and Vanessa. Juno is just a dumb kid. My objection is to the movie's potrayal of Juno as having done the good and responsible thing. It is clear from the start that Vanessa wants a kid much more than she wants to keep her husband, and that the kid will ruin their marriage. Vanessa was marginalizing Mark by ignoring him, confining his music to one room of the house, and refusing his input on baby names and house preparations. When the kid arrives, Mark will be completely extraneous. If she were really such a good mother, then she would have been figuring out how to get her husband more invested in the baby, instead of figuring out ways to shut him out. Maybe Juno isn't smart enough to see what is happening, but the adoption did destroy the marriage. Also, Juno insists on flirting with Mark even after her parents warn her of the dangers. And finally, Juno condemns her own baby to a fatherless life.

Update: Juno just got Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Actress, Director, and Original Screenplay.

College smokes out student with an opinion

The NY Times reports this about an unnamed university that requires its students to write anonymous evaluations of their professors:

On one evaluation, a student made derogatory comments about a professor’s sexual orientation. The university hired a handwriting expert to confirm the identity of the culprit so punishment could be administered. The university claims the student broke the code of conduct, ...

The handwriting expert confirmed the identity of the student, who was given a formal reprimand and was required to write an essay on how his remarks can affect the gay community, to write a letter of apology to the professor and to meet with a dean of students to discuss enrolling in a program meant to teach tolerance.

I think that the university has a problem tolerating anonymous comments. I have received inappropriate anonymous comments, but it never occurred to me that a university might track down the student and punish him for expressing his opinion.

Law of unintended consequences

The Freakonomics guys write (with comments on their blog):

So does this mean that every law designed to help endangered animals, poor people and the disabled is bound to fail? Of course not. But with a government that is regularly begged for relief — these days, from mortgage woes, health-care costs and tax burdens — and with every presidential hopeful making daily promises to address these woes, it might be worth encouraging the winning candidate to think twice (or even 8 or 10 times) before rushing off to do good. Because if there is any law more powerful than the ones constructed in a place like Washington, it is the law of unintended consequences.

That is true, but there ought to be a better name for this law. The first example was how the Americans With Disabilities Act [ADA] sometimes causes discrimination against disabled folks. I'd be willing to bet that when Congress debated the ADA, there were people who openly and loudly explained that it would cause exactly the sort of problems that are described in the article. There were probably even amendments offered to mitigate these consequences. It appears to me that Congress really did intend those bad consequences.

Back seat sex research

Sex research seems to have very low standards. USA Today reports:

Bisexuality among women isn't just a phase, according to new research that followed 79 non-heterosexual women for a decade and found that bisexual women continue to be attracted to both sexes over time.

Being bisexual is a distinct orientation, not a temporary stage, says the study by Lisa Diamond, an associate professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah. It is being published next week in the January issue of Developmental Psychology, a journal of the American Psychological Association. ...

Diamond suggests that most women "possess the capacity to experience sexual desires for both sexes, under the right circumstances."

So she talked to 79 non-hetersexual women, and then jumped to conclusions about most women. There was not even a control group.

The study also debunks the stereotype that bisexual women aren't able to commit to monogamous relationships because they're always thinking about desire for the other gender.

So how did she determine that these women were still bisexual, if they were committed to monogamous relationships?

"Women's sexuality in general has taken a back seat in terms of research overall."

This academic research sounds about as valid as my personal back-seat sex research on women.

Impersonating the police

M. Carolina news:

The man asked for assistance in locating an item in the store, and, as the cashier helped him, he told her he was an officer with the Marion Police Department, said the document. ...

Melton was taken into custody in Rutherford County last week and charged with impersonating an officer. He was released on a written promise to appear in court.

"Melton admitted that he had told employees that he was an officer," the release stated. "When asked why, Melton said that he did it to impress the ladies. Melton said that he did not know it was a crime and that he thought it sounded better than telling the ladies that he was a plumber. Melton said that he thought it would help him get the ladies to date him."

Is there some list of lies that are approved for impressing the ladies?

I realize that it has to be illegal to make an arrest under false pretenses, or to somehow falsely coerce people under color of police authority, but this guy sounds harmless to me. Does he really have to tell the ladies that he is a plumber?

Mohammedan terrorist convicted

British Muslim computer geek, son of diplomat, revealed as al Qaeda's top cyber terrorist

A computer nerd from Shepherd's Bush, West London, became al Qaeda's top internet agent, it can be revealed today.

Younes Tsouli, 23, an IT student at a London college, used his top-floor flat in W12 to help Islamist extremists wage a propaganda war against the West.

Under the name Irhabi 007 — combining the James Bond reference with the Arabic for terrorist — he worked with al Qaeda leaders in Iraq and came up with a way to convert often gruesome videos into a form that could be put onto the Web.

Lawmaker wants to castrate trucks

Virginia news:

State lawmaker Lionel Spruill introduced a bill Tuesday to ban displaying rubber replicas of male genitalia on vehicles, calling it a safety issue because it could distract other drivers.

Our precious American freedoms are disappearing, one by one.

Higher wine prices boost drinking pleasure

Reuters reports:

STANFORD, California (Reuters) - The more wine costs, the more people enjoy it, regardless of how it tastes, a study by California researchers has found.

Researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the California Institute of Technology found that because people expect wines that cost more to be of higher quality, they trick themselves into believing the wines provide a more pleasurable experience than less expensive ones.

Their study, published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says that expectations of quality trigger activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain that registers pleasure. This happens even though the part of our brain that interprets taste is not affected.

While many studies have looked at how marketing affects behavior, this is the first to show that it has a direct effect on the brain.

I am not surprised. People like fancy wines for reasons other than taste.

Wacky Frisco intruder story

A Texan is apt to draw a gun if there is a strange intruder in the house in the middle of the night. Here is what can happen in San Francisco:

The new year kicked off memorably for Donald Burnette and his wife, Deborah Martin, when they were awakened by the sound of someone kicking in the back door of their third-story apartment in San Francisco's Upper Haight about 1 a.m. Jan. 1.

Standing in the kitchen of the Stanyan Street flat was a vision out of a sci-fi comic book: a guy in his early 20s whose body, boots and gloves were studded with spikes, some more than an inch long.

The story gets weirder after that. Calling 911 was no help, and the couple had find some cops changing a flat tire down the street to kick the weirdo out of their apartment.

Roger Clemens should get more respect

The NY Times writes this about MLB pitcher Roger Clemens:

Accused by his former personal trainer of taking steroids for several years, Clemens has found his reputation as one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history splintering by the day. He has embarked on a furious and, some say, debatable public relations effort with the spin of his tightest slider. ...

If Clemens is telling the truth about never having taken steroids, Langberg and other experts said, he is failing to leave that impression — and instead leaving himself open to public and legal consequences. His contentions that injections he received were merely of the painkiller lidocaine and the vitamin B12 have not rung plausibly with the public, they said, despite his emotion. ...

Langberg and Marina Ein, a crisis-management consultant based in Washington, said they would have strongly advised against Clemens’s appearing on “60 Minutes” last Sunday and holding a long news conference the next day. They tell their clients to assert their innocence, outrage and commitment to fight the charges under oath only in a brief written statement, rather than in the more uncontrollable forums in which Clemens lost his cool.

In other words, Clemens is being found guilty in the court of public opinion because he did not hire the right PR firm.

Three of the greatest baseball players that I have ever seen are Pete Rose, Barry Bonds, and Roger Clemens. All had long and illustrious careers that should have made them heroes. They share the most impressive records.

And yet they have all been disgraced by innuendo from colleages and associates who have double-crossed them. I am not convinced that any of them are guilty of anything. Considering their many years of outstanding service to baseball, I think that they should be given the benefit of the doubt. They haven't been. Too many people regard them as guilty until proven innocent. MLB is a disgrace for how they have treated their very best and most loyal stars.

In Clemens's case, the accusation just comes from one guy who used it to get more favorable treatment from federal prosecutors. The case looks weak to me. I think that it is unamerican to treat him like a guilty man, even if his PR strategy is not the best.

Hollywood mathematicians

A WSJ blog says:

"I think you could make a movie about a mathematician who is not psychotic or schizophrenic," said Ken Keeler, a PhD in applied math who has written for "Futurama" and "The Simpsons." John Nash, the Nobel Prize winner who was played by Russell Crowe in "A Beautiful Mind," is the latter, and his mental illness served as the bulk of that film's drama, rather than his mathematical innovations.

"Numb3rs," the popular CBS show about a mathematician who helps federal investigators crack cases, would appear to be an exception. But Mr. Keeler notes that even Charlie Eppes, the hero of the show played by David Krumholtz, "is not normal."

Numb3rs portrays math about as well as it can for the audience. Yes, it is exaggerated and simplified, but so is everything else on TV.

Eppes is not normal, but he is not a lunatic like most of the Hollywood mathematicians. Good Will Hunting (1997) and Pi (1998) present particular negative images of mathematicians.

Almost all recorded music is digital

The NY Times reports:

Warner is the third of the four major music corporations to reconsider its use of so-called digital rights management software, known by its initials as D.R.M., and offer its catalog in the unrestricted MP3 format. ...

The move also comes as the industry faces increasing pressure to bolster digital music sales as its traditional business -- selling CDs -- suffers a sharp decline.

The reporter is not very clear on the concept. Music sales went digital about 25 years ago. CDs contain digital music, and they always have. The traditional music business is the digital music business.

The main promoter of DRM music is Apple with its iTunes store. If you buy music elsewhere, in CD or mp3 format, then you can nearly always just copy it to your computer or portable music player without any difficulty. Music from Apple comes with tight restrictions, and can only be played on an Apple computer or ipod.

Update: Here is a Jan. 14 NY Times article that makes the same mistake. It quotes someone saying:

How do I convince them that digital music is a good thing to begin with?

When does anyone ever listen to recorded music that is not digital?

ex Offenders Are Barred From Internet by New Jersey

The NY Times reports:

New Jersey enacted legislation on Thursday banning some convicted sex offenders from using the Internet.

In signing the restrictions into law, Acting Gov. Richard J. Codey, who is filling in while Gov. Jon S. Corzine is vacationing, noted that sexual predators were as likely to lurk at a computer keyboard as in a park or playground.

No federal law restricts sex offenders’ use of the Internet, and Florida and Nevada are the only other states to impose such restrictions.

There are some good comments here.

These laws are really extreme. A lot of sex offender are convicted of minor crimes based on flimsy evidence.

UK dumbs tests down

A UK paper reports:

Pupils should be given as much time as they need to complete crucial national tests, says the Government's exam watchdog.

This would ensure the children, aged 11 to 14 and sitting Key Stage tests, do not become stressed, says a report by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.

The proposal will reignite accusations that examinations are being dumbed down and an "all must have prizes" system is being encouraged.

In the USA, a lot of kids get extra time by claiming to have a learning disability.

Safe sex public health posters

Here are some bizarre French anti-AIDS posters.

Idiots on The View

The TV show The View seems like just a parody of silly women saying silly things. Here is Sherri Shepherd's best in 2007. She says that nothing predated Jesus and Christians, and that she tries not to beat her kid in a rich white kids store.

County lets women out of jail

Wisconsin news:

Sometime next year, La Crosse County might let all its female prisoners out of jail. Instead of sitting behind bars, the women will be in a new community-based program the La Crosse County Board unanimously approved Thursday night. ...

Supervisor Keith Belzer, a criminal defense attorney, said in 15 years he's never represented a woman who was put in jail because she's dangerous.

"I'm not saying there won't ever be a woman in La Crosse County who's dangerous and needs to be locked up for the safety of the community," said Belzer. "I will say that would be the rare exception rather than the rule."

Belzer said women are almost always in the system "because of some kind of relationship with a man."

So if a woman gets convicted of a crime, she just gets treatment on having better relationships with men? Weird.

Humor comes from testosterone

UK BBC reports:

Men are naturally more comedic than women because of the male hormone testosterone, an expert claims.

Men make more gags than women and their jokes tend to be more aggressive, Professor Sam Shuster, of Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, says.

The unicycling doctor observed how the genders reacted to his "amusing" hobby.

Women tended to make encouraging, praising comments, while men jeered. The most aggressive were young men, he told the British Medical Journal. ...

Dr Nick Neave is a psychologist at the University of Northumbria who has been studying the physical, behavioural, and psychological effects of testosterone.

He suggested men might respond aggressively because they see the other unicycling man as a threat, attracting female attention away from themselves.

"This would be particularly challenging for young males entering the breeding market and thus it does not surprise me that their responses were the more threatening."

Somehow I don't think that this clown was really a threat to young men.

Low IQ kids do not get adopted

Steve Sailer analyzes a NY Times story about how Romanian orphanage kids have low IQ. He quotes:

On I.Q. tests taken at 54 months, the foster children scored an average of 81, compared to 73 among the children who continued in an institution. The children who moved into foster care at the youngest ages tended to show the most improvement, the researchers found.

The comparison group of youngsters who grew up in their biological families had an average I.Q. of 109 at the same age, found the researchers, who announced their preliminary findings as soon in Romania as they were known.

It appears that the low IQ kids are gypsies that no one wants to adopt.

Those named K strike out

The WSJ Numbers Guy writes:

For example, major league baseball players with first or last initial K were more likely than average to strike out; and business graduate students with initials C or D had lower grades, on average, perhaps reflecting an unconscious affinity to the grades corresponding to their initials.

There have been a lot of other studies that have found correlations with names and birth dates. This sounds like astrology to me. If these studies are correct, then it seems possible that astrological signs could have some significant correlations.

Mindreading Games

Soon, you will be able to buy mindreading toys.

Women spend much more than men

A Business school publication says:

Women spend $4 trillion annually and account for 83% of U.S. consumer spending, which makes up two-thirds of the nation's gross national product, according to WomenCertified, a women's consumer advocacy and retail training organization headquartered in Hollywood, Fla., which also worked on the study.

The "Men Buy, Women Shop" study is based on a random, national sample of 1,250 shoppers who were asked about a recent shopping experience in telephone interviews conducted from October 20 to November 4, 2007. The sample was dominated, two to one, by females.

Swedes castrate army symbol

News from Sweden:

Protests from female soldiers have led to the Swedish military removing the penis of a heraldic lion depicted on the Nordic Battlegroup's coat of arms.

The armed forces agreed to emasculate the lion after a group of women from the rapid reaction force lodged a complaint to the European Court of Justice, Göteborgs-Posten reports. ...

But the castrated lion has already won the day and is now worn on the arms of all soldiers in the battle group's Swedish battalions.

"We were given the task of making sure the willy disappeared," Christian Braunstein from the army's 'tradition commission' told Göteborgs-Posten.

"We were forced to cut the lion's willy off with the aid of a computer," he added.

I guess nobody cares if the male soldiers don't like having to wear the image of a castrated lion.

Huckabee urges wives to submit

AP reports:

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Republican Mike Huckabee's record on women's rights is coming under increased scrutiny, including his endorsement of the Southern Baptist Convention's stance that women should "submit graciously" to their husbands and his opposition to sending women into combat. ...

The former Arkansas governor and his wife Janet signed a full-page ad in USA Today in support of the statement with 129 other evangelical leaders in 1998.

"A wife is to submit graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ," the convention says in its statement of faith.

Homeschooled kid wins biggest college sports award

Homeschooled kids have been winning spelling bees and other contests for years, but now a homeschooler has won the Heisman Trophy for college football. Florida QB Tim Tebow was homeschooled until college.

Double bubble in calendar

This is from a math calendar.

Bernie Ward indicted

When a right-wing radio talk-show host gets caught in some minor scandal, the news media grossly exaggerates the story. But now left-wing radio talk-show host Bernie Ward just got indicted for distributing child pornography, and everyone is strangely silent.

Bernie Ward sounds like a puppet of MoveOn.org, and is a typical lying Bush-hater. He is a failed Catholic priest, and has the most annoying holier-than-thou attitude when he lectures the public on his own peculiar theology. He claims that he needed the child porn for a book on Hypocrisy that he was writing. I doubt that he deserves the draconian penalties that he faces. I think that he is mainly guilty of being an idiot. But Ward appears to have done something worse than Rush Limbaugh, and Ward is the real hypocrite.

Women want casual but ethical sex

Here is some wacky sex research from down under:

Women 'want no-strings sex'
5:00AM Saturday December 08, 2007
By Simon Collins

Two young women researchers are calling for a new form of sexual ethics that would allow women to have casual sex without feeling that they're "sluts".

They say the popular view of women as either promiscuous or passive victims has failed to reduce incidents of rape and sexual assault.

Instead, they want both women and men to think about what each of them really wants out of a sexual encounter, and negotiate how to get it.

Canadian sociologist Melanie Beres, a post-doctoral researcher at Auckland University, and Auckland doctoral student Pantea Farvid told a sociology conference yesterday that rape prevention efforts should stop just giving women tips to avoid harm and promote an ethic of "self-care and care for the other".

Dr Beres interviewed young Canadians aged 19 to 25 about their casual sex experiences, while Ms Farvid interviewed New Zealanders in the same age bracket. The New Zealand women were more likely to have actively initiated casual sex, whereas the Canadians were more likely to say it "just happened". Drink was used by some as an excuse for their choices.

Studies have shown New Zealanders start sex younger than in many countries and have high rates of teen pregnancies and STDs. By the age of 25, 13 per cent of women have had more than 10 sexual partners.

Dr Beres said some women deliberately challenged society's "double standard" that said casual sex was okay for men. One woman in her study took the initiative in sexual encounters and another had decided that a serious relationship would hinder her career, so she sought casual sex to meet her physical needs.

Ms Farvid said a more open approach to sex would move away from the legal idea that the only issue in sexual morality was consent.

In some highly publicised group sex cases, men had escaped conviction because of doubts over consent. But on the basis of care for oneself and others, it would be unethical to have "four men in a room with a woman".

I guess that the women are still sluts if they have sex with four men at one time.

Free speech on YouTube

A JAMA article complains that the freely available info on YouTube.com does not always match the official govt mandates. The article is not freely available on the web.

Republicans are more sane

A Gallup poll finds:

Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats or independents to rate their mental health as excellent, according to data from the last four November Gallup Health and Healthcare polls. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans report having excellent mental health, compared to 43% of independents and 38% of Democrats. This relationship between party identification and reports of excellent mental health persists even within categories of income, age, gender, church attendance, and education.

Female voting consequences

John R. Lott Jr., author of the book Freedomnomics, writes in the Wash Times:

Studies show that women are generally more risk averse than men. Possibly, this is why they are more supportive of government programs to ensure against certain risks in life. ...

Even after accounting for a range of other factors — such as industrialization, urbanization, education and income — the impact of granting of women's suffrage on per-capita state government expenditures and revenue was startling. Per capita state government spending after accounting for inflation had been flat or falling during the 10 years before women began voting. But state governments started expanding the first year after women voted and continued growing until within 11 years real per capita spending had more than doubled. The increase in government spending and revenue started immediately after women started voting.

Everyone agrees that women should be allowed to vote, but Lott shows that women's suffrage has had a number of undesirable consequences.

Deep-voiced men father more kids

The NY Science Times reports:

Researchers have found that men with deeper voices have more children -- at least among the Hadza, a group of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania.

According to background information in an article published online for the Dec. 22 edition of Biology Letters, most women in Western societies find lower-pitched male voices more attractive, judging them healthier and more masculine. Meanwhile, men find higher-pitched voices more appealing.

The evolutionary reasons for reproductive success are difficult to discover in a society that uses modern birth control methods. The Hadza use no birth control and choose their own spouses; this makes them what the researchers call a “natural fertility population” where hypotheses about human reproductive success can be tested.

Researchers collected voice recordings (the Hadza speak Swahili) and reproductive histories from 49 men and 52 women to determine if voice pitch might affect the number of children.

After controlling for age, voice pitch was a highly accurate predictor of the number of children a man fathered, and those with deeper voices fathered significantly more. The researchers estimated that voice quality alone could account for 42 percent of the variance in men’s reproductive success. The quality of women’s voices was unrelated to how many children they had.

Maybe the women think that the men with the high-pitched voices are gay.

Update: Evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup says the handgrip is more important:

Gallup’s new research suggests that handgrip strength in men is directly connected with reproductive fitness.

People with high grip-strength scores are usually healthier than those with weak grips. "They live longer and recover faster from injury," Gallup says. "They have reduced disability, higher bone density and greater fat-free body mass." And in a study published this year, Gallup and his son Andrew -- at the time an undergraduate psychology major -- found that males with high grip-strength scores reported being more aggressive and dominant and had more masculine body types (broader shoulders, narrower hips). They also had "increased sexual opportunities," which resulted in an increased number of sexual partners, and younger ages of first sexual encounter.

UK rape trial changes not working

The UK has to keep changing the rules in order to increase the rape conviction rate:

Legislation to stop rape complainants from being unfairly questioned about their sexual history in court is not working, a report has concluded. ...

It said there had been "no discernible effect" on reducing the number of failed prosecutions.

Data for 2004 shows the proportion of rape allegations that result in a conviction continues to fall, standing at 5.6% out of 14,000 reported offences.

That is an odd way to report the conviction rate. Many of those reported offenses were withdrawn or not prosecuted for various reasons. The UK govt just wants to boost conviction rates.

The Earth's Moon is unusual

From a JPL news release:

New observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that moons like Earth's - that formed out of tremendous collisions - are uncommon in the universe, arising at most in only 5 to 10 percent of planetary systems. ...

Scientists believe the Moon arose about 30 to 50 million years after our Sun was born, and after our rocky planets had begun to take shape. A body as big as Mars is thought to have smacked into our infant Earth, breaking off a piece of its mantle. Some of the resulting debris fell into orbit around Earth, eventually coalescing into the moon we see today. The other moons in our solar system either formed simultaneously with their planet or were captured by their planet's gravity.

A lot of things about the Earth-Moon system are very unusual, and they may even be essential for life on Earth. I think that scientists overestimate the possibility of intelligent life on other planets.

Deadbeat dad avoids felony conviction

Michigan news:

A jury found a 36-year-old Eastpointe man not guilty of felony child support for late payments following a 2-day-trial in Macomb County Circuit Court.

Corey Flener wiped away tears after the jury delivered the verdict Thursday afternoon and said he felt relieved to have the burden of a potential felony conviction lifted. If convicted, he would have faced a sentence of up to four years in prison and a fine levied by Judge Tracey Yokich. ...

Flener still owes $60,000 but claims he was behind $45,000 in 2000 before he realized he owed any money because he was unaware his now ex-wife, Tammy, filed for divorce. The amount has climbed also because of accumulating interest.

These prosecutions are outrageous. It does no good to throw a man in jail, just because he cannot pay the interest on some dubious old debt to his ex-wife.

Child custody evaluations

NPR All Things Considered (afternoon radio news) had a segment (audio here) on how child custody evaluations are bogus, and ought to be abolished.

The host finished with

In other words, perhaps the best thing that parents can do is: Skip the child custody evaluation, sit down, and figure it out themselves.

No, that is not really the lesson here. The child custody evaluations are ordered by the court; parents almost never submit to them voluntarily. What we need is for the courts to stop ordering them.

Cops overreact to toddler's story

The Las Vegas Sun reports:

Authorities: Girl, 4, Invents Abduction

Santa Ana, Calif. (AP) - Deputies began a search and even questioned a man after a 4-year-old girl reported an attempted abduction before she admitted she made the whole thing up, a sheriff's spokesman said.

The girl said a man with spiked hair and a dragon tattoo approached her on a playground Tuesday and showed her a gun tucked in his waistband, sheriff's spokesman Jim Amormino said. Authorities dispatched eight police cars, a helicopter and a dozen armed officers to find the suspect and even interviewed a man with spiked hair during a four-hour hunt, he said.

But the child's story changed repeatedly during the day and she finally admitted to inventing the attempted kidnapping to get back at her mother, Amormino said. The mother had briefly left her daughter unsupervised in a gated playground in mobile home park where the family lives and the child was scared, he said.

Amormino said authorities were stunned that a child so young could provide such vivid details about something that didn't happen.

"In 28 years in law enforcement, I have never had a 4-year-old make up a story like this," he said Wednesday. "It says something about what television is doing to our children."

Investigators cannot charge the child, but may suggest that her parents get her counseling, Amormino said.

It would be better to send the cops into counseling. Children commonly make up stories.

Using Caller ID

Why is it that so few businesses use Caller ID? It is very annoying to call a business, and then have to orally give my phone number. Caller ID technology has been available for 20 years. It only costs about $2 per month. It saves a lot of time, mistakes, and lost numbers.

Successful blacks

Black Harvard prof Henry Louis Gates Jr writes in the NY Times:

I have been studying the family trees of 20 successful African-Americans, people in fields ranging from entertainment and sports (Oprah Winfrey, the track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee) to space travel and medicine (the astronaut Mae Jemison and Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon). And I’ve seen an astonishing pattern: 15 of the 20 descend from at least one line of former slaves who managed to obtain property by 1920 — a time when only 25 percent of all African-American families owned property.

Someone observed:

There's nothing "astonishing" [his word] about Gates's statistic. If we go back to great-grandparents (as Gates does in his Winfrey example), then four relevant families exist (by hypothesis) in 1920. At that time, according to Gates, 25% of black families owned property. The probability that "at least one" of the four relevant antecedent families held property in 1920 is thus 1.0 - (0.75 x 0.75 x 0.75 x 0.75) which is about 68%. Gates's sample of 20 yielded 75%.

He is correct. Gates's argument is bogus.

Executions save lives

The NY Times admits:

According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented.

The effect is most pronounced, according to some studies, in Texas and other states that execute condemned inmates relatively often and relatively quickly. ...

To economists, it is obvious that if the cost of an activity rises, the amount of the activity will drop. ... To many economists, then, it follows inexorably that there will be fewer murders as the likelihood of execution rises.

It is amazing how many otherwise intelligent people say that they are against the death penalty because it has been proved not to be a deterrent. In fact, nearly all the research for decades has shown that the death penalty is a deterrent.

There are other arguments against the death penalty, but people should realize that saving the life of a convicted murderer could result in some other innocent person getting murdered.

The NY Times reports:

Doctors cannot diagnose attention deficit or any other psychiatric disorder with imaging technology

I've met people who have told me that their kid has ADD or autism or dyslexia or something else, and that they are sure of it because of an MRI or some other brain scan. It is just not possible with current technology.

The main point of the article is to say that misbehaving kids are not doomed:

Kindergartners who interrupted the teacher, defied instructions and even picked fights were performing as well in reading and math as well-behaved children of the same abilities when they both reached fifth grade, the study found. ... The findings should also put to rest concerns that boys and girls who are restless, disruptive or withdrawn in kindergarten are bound to suffer academically. ...

About 80 percent of those with attention problems were taking or had taken stimulant drugs, and the researchers did not know the effect of the medications on brain development. Doctors consider stimulant drugs a reliable way to improve attention in the short term; the new study is not likely to change that attitude.

So your kid will do fine without the drugs, but your pediatrician will want to drug him anyway.

Shapely women have smart kids

NewScientist reports:

Curvier women may have smart children because hip fat contains polyunsaturated fatty acids critical for the development of the fetus's brain.

Using data from the US National Center for Health Statistics, William Lassek at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania and Steven Gaulin of the University of California, Santa Barbara, found a child's performance in cognition tests was linked to their mother's waist-hip ratio, a proxy for how much fat she stores on her hips.

The study authors claimed that they accounted for other factors, but I don't believe it. Men prefer women with small waist-hip ratios. So do women. So all they really found was that female success in one area is correlated with success in another area. Maybe these women are smarter or healthier, or marry smarter husbands, or have more money, or less likely to be drug addicts, or a lot of other things.

Gay jokes could be banned

A gay lawyer brags:

Yesterday the House passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. The vote was 235-184, with 35 Republicans in favor and 25 Democrats against. It's the first time either house of Congress has ever passed a gay civil-rights bill.

The gay lobby has mixed opinions. In the UK, a similar law could make gay jokes illegal.

Once again, Congress is telling us to do what it won't do itself. Congress passed a law allowing the armed forces to discriminate based on homosexual activities.

If they are not trying to ban gay jokes, why don't they just put a clause in the law explicitly saying that the right to tell gay jokes is not being restricted?

New book on Duke rape case

Someone recommended this PBS interview:

Legal journalist Stuart Taylor discusses his new book, "Until Proven Innocent," which takes a deeper look at the controversy surrounding the Duke University Lacrosse team rape case.

Their innocence is old news. I named the accuser back in April 2006 because I had concluded that they were innocent.

I am sure that Taylor and K.C. Johnson do a fine job of documenting the innocence of the Duke lacrosse players, but I doubt that the book goes far enough in exposing the evil behind the prosecution.

Taylor places most of the blame on the "rogue District Attorney Mike Nifong". The blame should really go primarily to the justice system that is fundamentally tilted against anyone accused of a sex crime.

What saved the Duke boys was not the justice system, but modern technology. Without digital cameras, cell phones, ATMs, video surveillance, DNA tests, and bloggers, they would be in jail today. Even when they presented overwhelming evidence of their innocence to the judge, the judge still refused to dismiss the charges. It still took overwhelming public pressure, and documentation of mistakes by the accuser, police, and DA.

There are many others in jail today for sex crimes based only on flimsy evidence. The rules of evidence for sex crimes is very one-sided, and the public has no patience with accused sex offenders.

Disbarring Nifong was really a fluke. I bet that prosecutors in every state have done worse things, and nothing happened to them even when they got caught.

No, this is not just a story of a rogue prosecutor. It is the story of how hard it is in our society for anyone to prove himself innocent of a sex crime.

The difference myth

Here is some science news from the Boston Globe paper:

Scientists have turned up some intriguing findings of anatomical differences between the sexes.

You would think that would be obvious. The article goes on to argue that brain differences are either insignificant, or should be ignored anyway.

From a UK Times column:

With increasing frequency, women in their twenties, thirties and forties take a pragmatic, postfeminist view that sex is something over which they have no need to negotiate. In the bedroom, there is no compromise. If a man has a higher sex drive than a woman, then he can sort himself out. If he wants to try something new and she can’t be bothered, tough luck to him. ...

Having researched my new book, as well as talked to thousands of men and women over the years, I now firmly believe that too many women see the sexual side of their lives as something to be claimed completely and utterly as their own. ...

Does she really want to take out the rubbish in the pouring rain? No, but partners in relationships do such things because they know that it makes the other happy. Sex should be seen in the same light.

More amusing is the feminist outrage to this. They don't believe that a woman should satisfy her husband, and they don't believe that men have greater sexual needs anyway.

More cell phone hype

The Google Android gPhone has become the move overhyped product since the Apple iPhone. Google brags that the big advantage will be its spyware capabilities:

Android does not differentiate between the phone's core applications and third-party applications. ...

With Android, a developer could build an application that enables users to view the location of their friends and be alerted when they are in the vicinity giving them a chance to connect.

This makes a lot of sense for Google. With the ability to spy on everything you are doing and everywhere you are going, it can sell more targeted ads. Soon your cell phone will light up with a Google ad that says, "You are a block from Macy's and your friend Jenny bought shoes there last week. Click here for a map and prices."

Meanwhile Time mag declared the Apple iPhone the Invention Of the Year. Time said that it was pretty, cool, and may someday be replaced with a product that is cheaper and more useful.

Krugman lies again

The lying Bush-hater Paul Krugman writes:

"My chance of surviving prostate cancer — and thank God I was cured of it — in the United States? Eighty-two percent," says Rudy Giuliani in a new radio ad attacking Democratic plans for universal health care. "My chances of surviving prostate cancer in England? Only 44 percent, under socialized medicine."

It would be a stunning comparison if it were true. But it isn’t. ...

Mr. Giuliani got his numbers from a recent article in City Journal, a publication of the conservative Manhattan Institute. The author gave no source for his numbers on five-year survival rates — the probability that someone diagnosed with prostate cancer would still be alive five years after the diagnosis. And they're just wrong.

You see, the actual survival rate in Britain is 74.4 percent. That still looks a bit lower than the U.S. rate, but the difference turns out to be mainly a statistical illusion. The details are technical, ...

So Krugman calls Guiliani a liar because he got a statistic from an article that does not cite its source. But Krugman does not cite a source for his 74.4% figure either.

On Krugman's blog, he cites this:

Five-year survival rates were 95 percent in the U.S. and 60 percent in the United Kingdom, which includes Britain, in 1993-1995, the most recent time period with data to compare, the group said.

Today, rates are higher -- 99 percent in the U.S. and an estimated 74 percent in the U.K.

Assuming that this is Krugman's source, he is falsely presenting the 74% figure for the UK as being comparable to Guiliani's 82% figure for the USA. It is not. Even by Krugman's own measures, USA prostate cancer survival rates are much higher than the UK's.

Study on risks of toddlers watching TV

USA Today reports:

Study: Educational TV for toddlers OK

CHICAGO (AP) — Arthur and Barney are OK for toddler TV-watching. But not Rugrats and certainly not Power Rangers, reports a new study of early TV-watching and future attention problems.

The research involved children younger than 3, so TV is mostly a no-no anyway, according to the experts. But if TV is allowed, it should be of the educational variety, the researchers said.

Every hour per day that kids under 3 watched violent child-oriented entertainment their risk doubled for attention problems five years later, the study found. Even non-violent kids' shows like Rugrats and The Flintstones carried a still substantial risk for attention problems, though slightly lower. ...

Previous research and news reports on TV's effects have tended to view television as a single entity, without regard to content. But "the reality is that it's not inherently good or bad. It really depends on what they watch," said Dr. Dimitri Christakis, who co-authored the study with researcher Frederick Zimmerman.

Also, WebMD reports:

Dimitri A. Christakis, MD, MPH, tells WebMD that a 3-year-old who watches TV for two hours a day "has a 20% increased risk for attention problems at age 7 compared with a child who doesn't watch any TV."

Christakis says that the risk increases as TV watching increases so that "for each additional hour of television watched, the risk is increased by almost 10%."

But that is not what the actual research article concluded:

RESULTS. Data were available for 184 boys and 146 girls at both time periods. Adjusting for baseline Behavioral Problem Index scores and age, parental education, maternal depression, and cognitive and emotional support, violent television programming was associated with an increased risk for antisocial behavior for boys but not for girls. Neither educational nor nonviolent programming was associated with increased risk for boys or girls.

CONCLUSIONS. Viewing of violent programming by preschool boys is associated with subsequent aggressive behavior. Modifying the content that is viewed by young children may be warranted.

So the news article says that nonviolent shows can be a problem, but the research says not. The news article says that TV leads to "attention problems such as difficulty concentrating, being easily distracted, impulsiveness, or restlessness." The research article says that TV leads to "aggressive behavior".

In my opinion, you should ignore all of this and just use common sense. This is an example of supposed experts giving opinions outside their expertise. Pediatricians are experts on child medicine, but have no expertise in TV watching.

If watching Rugrats is really correlated with later attention problems or aggressive behavior, then there are several possible explanations. Maybe kids who inherit an attention problem have parents who don't pay attention to what the kids watch on TV. Maybe kids who already have an attention problem are bored by Sesame Street and prefer the faster-paced shows like Rugrats. Maybe the kids with the aggressive behavior are the healthy ones, and it is the kids who did not watch Rugrats who are overly-docile and have the problem.

The Pediatricians officially recommend that no children under the age of two be allowed to watch TV. I don't agree, and I believe that some TV shows can be beneficial.

The Subjectivity of Wine

Jonah Lehrer reports on various experiments to prove that wine-tasting is subjective:

In 2001, Frederic Brochet, of the University of Bordeaux, conducted two separate and very mischievous experiments. In the first test, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn't stop the experts from describing the "red" wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its "jamminess," while another enjoyed its "crushed red fruit." Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine.

The experts also cannot tell the difference between expensive and cheap wines, and can be fooled by just putting a fancy label on the bottle.

Nazi attempt to control tobacco

Devra Davis claims that there is some sort of conspiracy to suppress knowledge about cancer prevention, and writes:

During the Nazi era, the Germans tried and failed to enact stringent policies to control tobacco. Their conquerors, despite having full access to German research on tobacco, didn't even try.

Usually people cites the Nazis as an example govt overreaching. This is someone arguing that the Nazis did not go far enough to control the Germans.

TV writers may strike

The Hollywood writers are scheduled to go on strike, and the TV show "The View" might have to suspend broadcasts.

I didn't know The View had writers! I thought that it was just over-opinionated women babbling on random topics.

McDonalds food is nutritious

From John Tierney:

Here’s the response from Mr. Taubes, a correspondent for the journal Science, to Jeff’s assertion that McDonald's food is certainly unhealthy:

I have two comments about Jeff's post. First, anyone who can tell you "with certainty" that MacDonald’s is bad for us is the kind of zealot who can be dangerous if taken seriously. He might believe it, and he might have good reason to believe it, but telling us "with certainty"? I don’t think so. I can give him numerous examples of populations with epidemics of obesity and diabetes that were fast-food-restaurant free. McDonald's may be serving up foods or nutrients that are bad for us (as may be Starbucks, for that matter), but the negative effects will depend entirely on what people order and what they then eat.

One commentator said:

First, I’m astonished by Mr. Taubes' comments in suggesting that McDonalds is actually food, as I’m not so sure that is the case. Trans-fats kill, and they have no nutritional value–they are simply used to make things taste fresher, but they clog arteries.

Trans-fats should only be consumed by people who are OK with the idea of having a stroke or heart attack.

We also eat too much sugar and the wrong sugars, ...

That last comment may represent popular thought, but it is wrong. Of course trans fats are nutritious, and there is no proof that any other food is better than McDonalds food.

Che Guevara hair lock sold

You might think that an article Che Guevara might mention what murderous commie he was.

Welfare is not insurance

Why do the S-CHIP promoters keep calling it insurance? Here is a typical definition of insurance:

promise of reimbursement in the case of loss; paid to people or companies so concerned about hazards that they have made prepayments to an insurance company

It is not insurance, it is just a welfare program to give free medical care to middle class kids.

Grandmother gives advice in a letter

More goofy advice in the newspaper advice column:

DEAR ABBY: Our 23-year-old son, "Jason," told me yesterday about a letter he had received from his grandmother. In it she complained that she's embarrassed by his having fathered a child out of wedlock and said the situation is "very difficult" for her. ... Our younger son, "Connor," spent last summer in jail for stealing from us and possession of a controlled substance, but he did not receive a similar letter. ... Should I tell this woman that if she can't be supportive, she should keep a respectful distance? ... -- IRATE IN NEW YORK

DEAR IRATE: Let's view the situation from your mother-in-law's point of view for a moment. ... From a "contemporary" point of view, having a baby without being married is no longer the shock and disgrace that it was when your mother-in-law was a girl. ... The fact that your younger son did not receive a similar letter from his grandmother is a reflection of her skewed sense of priorities.

The son who spent the summer in jail does not need a letter to tell him that he did wrong. It is the son with the out-of-wedlock child who might be helped by getting some advice from someone other than his overly-supportive mom.

Dear Abby also fails to give good advice to the next writer:

DEAR ABBY: I have a big problem. My sister keeps telling me not to use a lot of water because in the future my great-grandchildren are not going to have enough water. Now I feel like I should never have sex because I do not want my great-grandchildren to suffer.

Yeah, I know I am only 13, and I am already thinking about my children. Should I just forget it or never have children? Please, I need your help! -- WHAT ABOUT THE FUTURE, ROCKFORD, TENN.

Someone should tell her that all water is recycled, and her water usage will have nothing to do with the water available to her great-grandchildren.

The Science Education Myth

Vivek Wadhwa writes in Business Week:

Political leaders, tech executives, and academics often claim that the U.S. is falling behind in math and science education. They cite poor test results, declining international rankings, and decreasing enrollment in the hard sciences. They urge us to improve our education system and to graduate more engineers and scientists to keep pace with countries such as India and China.

Yet a new report by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, tells a different story. ... the report finds that our education system actually produces more science and engineering graduates than the market demands.

Here is an example of the myth, from the Si Valley paper's Sunday editorial:

High-tech chief executives have been warning for years that America is not turning out enough scientists and engineers to compete in a knowledge-based economy. ...

The state starts testing students in science in fifth grade, but the results count for less than 10 percent of a school's API score - a disincentive for teaching it.

The editorial doesn't say how it thinks that science scores ought to be weighted.

A utility function is really a value function

Statistician Andrew Gelman argues that economists should use the term "value function" instead of utility function.

He has a point. The word value can mean an objective or subjective value. The word utility means the usefulness to somebody, but that is not necessarily what is important. The purpose of the function is to just capture consumer preferences. A consumer might prefer an item because it is more useful, or for other reasons. Whatever the reasons, preference for an item means that the item has more value to him.

My guess is that economists don't like the word "value" because it suggests a dollar value. Their utility functions are often ordinal-valued, meaning that the function can rank preferences, but not give numbers that be related to other contexts, such as the preferences of other consumers. Also, differences between preferences may not be quantifiable.

But an ordinal value is still a value.

I think that the economist concepts of ordinal utility and cardinal utility are also confusing. Ordinal numbers have the property that for any given ordinary, there a is next larger ordinal. But utility theory does not use that property. Economists are always assuming that given two choices, there is something else that is better than one but worse than the other.

Cardinal utility is for those economists who think that utility can be measured. But that doesn't make much sense either. Besides the problem of cardinal numbers not being divisible, as ordinals are not, cardinals are never negative. But measuring utility necessarily results in some things having negative utility. The utility functions are always real-valued.

Rejecting restraining orders

happened to listen to KGO (a popular California talk radio station) when the host was outraged by a local judge that had a rubber stamp for rejecting motions for restraining orders. The appeals court said that the judge had to give a more specific reason. He asked for people to call with stories about restraining orders working.

Amazingly, all the calls were about the orders not working.

In one case, a woman tried to get a restraining order because she thought that her uncle was not treating her aunt well enough. The aunt was voluntarily living with the uncle, and the judge said that he did not want to break up a 50-year marriage. Another calling tried to get an order to stop financial abuse. Several callers told stories of women getting restraining orders for purely vindictive purposes.

I think that if I were a judge, I would want a rubber stamp for rejecting restraining orders. Many of these requests are so obviously ridiculous and so clearly outside the bounds of what the law allows, that no detailed explanation should be necessary.

UK requires gay propaganda

A UK newspaper reports:

ut Vincent and Pauline Matherick will this week have their latest foster son taken away because they have refused to sign new sexual equality regulations.

To do so, they claim, would force them to promote homosexuality and go against their Christian faith. ...

Officials told the couple that under the regulations they would be required to discuss same-sex relationships with children as young as 11 and tell them that gay partnerships were just as acceptable as heterosexual marriages.

They could also be required to take teenagers to gay association meetings.

When the Mathericks objected, they were told they would be taken off the register of foster parents.

We can expect more of this in the USA, if we pass more anti-discrimination laws favoring sexual orientation and gender identity.

Scaife has nasty divorce

The Wash Post brags that right-winger Richard Mellon Scaife is being sued for divorce, and he didn't have a pre-nuptial agreement:

Unfathomable but true, when Scaife (rhymes with safe) married his second wife, Margaret "Ritchie" Scaife, in 1991, he neglected to wall off a fortune that Forbes recently valued at $1.3 billion. This, to understate matters, is likely going to cost him, big time. As part of a temporary settlement, 60-year-old Ritchie Scaife is currently cashing an alimony check that at first glance will look like a typo: $725,000 a month. Or about $24,000 a day, seven days a week.

Wow. You would think that would be enough, but she complains to the court:

"Defendant has and continues to unlawfully hold in his possession six pairs of asparagus tongs manufactured by Mappin & Webb, Birmingham, 1926 weighing 10 ounces total," reads one of dozens of paragraphs. "The last-known location for these items was at 'Vallamont,' 132 Pheasant Circle, Ligonier, Pa. 15658. The estimated cost for these items is $1,800."

I am not sure what to make of this. He is supposedly part of the vast right-wing conspiracy that investigated the Clintons in the 1990s.

Abortion issue not dominant to Republicans

People are always saying that the Christian Right is preoccupied with the
abortion issue, but CNN reports:

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney narrowly won a straw poll of mostly Christian conservative voters at the Family Research Council's Values Voters Summit held this weekend in the nation's capital.

Romney is not even a mainstream Christian and he has a pro-abortion record. Meanwhile, the candidate with the rock-solid anti-abortion record is John McCain, and he only scored 1%. If the abortion issue were really so important, then McCain would be the leader.

Dentist fondled woman six times

AP reports:

WOODLAND, Calif. - A dentist accused of fondling the breasts of 27 female patients is trying to keep his dental license by arguing that chest massages are an appropriate procedure in certain cases. Mark Anderson's lawyer says dental journals discuss the need to massage the pectoral muscles to treat a common jaw problem.

Police say Anderson said during recorded phone calls that he routinely massaged patients' chests to treat temporo-mandibular joint disorder, or TMJ, which causes neck and head pain. ...

Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Phillips gave Lew three new complaints, including one from a 31-year-old woman who said Anderson fondled her at least six times over two years.

She took to wearing tight shirts with high necklines, "and Anderson would still get in under her shirt and bra," according to a police report.

Six times?! Okay, this is a little wacky, but she went there five times with a clear expectation of what was going to happen. She could have objected, or switched to another dentist.

Porn and the Iraq occupation

Northwestern University law prof Andrew Koppelman writes in an academic article:

Schlafly’s preeminent concern is to preserve a pattern of gender-specific roles and relations that, she thinks, have helped protect women and children from desertion and abuse. She wants to suppress pornography because it helps to reinforce a vernacular masculine culture that is indifferent or hostile to the needs of women and children. Schlafly’s worries about this culture are legitimate and valid.

But then it gets really wacky. He concludes his article with this:

But if censorship is a bad idea, moral criticism of pornography is an urgent necessity. ...

One story that dominates American popular culture, from R-rated movies to Disney cartoons, is a struggle between good guys and bad guys, in which the problem is solved in the end by the death of the bad guy. ...

The same narrative appears to have played a large role in the biggest foreign policy disaster since Viet Nam: the failure to plan adequately for the occupation of Iraq. President Bush and his advisers desperately wanted to prevail there. They doubtless feared above all that Americans would die unnecessarily if they did not properly prepare for the war. Yet somehow none of them could get their minds around the idea that their difficulties might not be conclusively solved by the defeat of Saddam Hussein. Chalk another one up to the corrupting effects of bad literature.

So if it weren't for Disney movies legitimatizing the struggle against bad guys, then we would have been better prepared for the occupation of Iraq?

Yes, there are bad guys in the world. The Mohammedan jihadists who support suicide bombings are definitely bad guys.

What Sex is Your Computer?

Here is a funny joke about whether computers are male or female.

Advice columnist encourages extramarital affair

Dear Abby advises a writer who wants support for having an extramarital affair:

DEAR CONFUSED: If you're honest with yourself, I think you already know the answer to that question. Your friendship with your girlfriend did not start out as sexual, but rather evolved from a deep emotional connection. Look at the bright side. At least you finally understand what has been missing.

The writer claimed to have a "wonderful" spouse, and was having a secret affair. So why does Dear Abby approve? Because it is a homosexual affair.

A couple of days before, readers pointed out her bad advice to a man considering marrying his stepmother. She told him to go ahead, even tho it is against the Bible and illegal in Texas where they lived:

DEAR SMITTEN: What you have in mind is unusual but not unheard of. You are not her biological son, so there is no reason why you could not marry if you wish. In fact, it could work out very well since your feelings for each other evolved from an already-established friendship. I say, go for it -- but be prepared for some teasing.

Yes, there are reasons. The risk of genetic defects in not the only argument against incest.

Why basketball is boring

Baseball statistician Bill James writes:

Take the problem of what we could call NBA "sluggishness." In the regular season, players simply don't seem to be playing hard all the time. Some people attribute this to high salaries, but the other major sports are choking on money and don't seem to have the problem to any comparable degree. ...

The NBA's problem is that the underlying mathematics of the league are screwed up. In every sport, there is an element of predetermination and an element of randomness in the outcomes. Who will win the championship next year is not entirely a crapshoot. We know that Kentucky has a better chance of winning the NCAA basketball title than Nebraska does - next year, or in 2019. If we knew with certainty who was going to win the title next year, then we could say that the championship was 100 percent predetermined, 0 percent random.

In the NBA, the element of predetermination is simply too high. Simply stated, the best team wins too often. If the best team always wins, then the sequence of events leading to victory is meaningless. Who fights for the rebound, who sacrifices his body to keep the ball from rolling out of bounds doesn't matter. The greater team is going to come out on top anyway.

A fan can look at the standings in December, pick the teams that will make the playoffs, and might get them all. This has a horrific effect on the game. Everybody knows who's going to win.

Here is another view.

I agree with James. Basketball has the most screwed up rules of any major professional sport. It is a wonder that the league ever got to be successful.

Legal Status Doesn't Deter Abortion

AP Medical Writer Maria Cheng writes:

LONDON (AP) -- Women are just as likely to get an abortion in countries where it is outlawed as they are in countries where it is legal, according to research published Friday.

In a study examining abortion trends from 1995 to 2003, experts also found that abortion rates are virtually equal in rich and poor countries, and that half of all abortions worldwide are unsafe.

The study was done by Gilda Sedgh of the Guttmacher Institute in the United States and colleagues from the World Health Organization. It was published in an edition of The Lancet medical journal devoted to maternal health.

"The legal status of abortion has never dissuaded women and couples, who, for whatever reason, seek to end pregnancy," Beth Fredrick of the International Women's Health Coalition in the U.S. said in an accompanying commentary. ...

"The only way to decrease unsafe abortion is to increase contraception," said Sharon Camp, president and chief executive officer of the Guttmacher Institute.

If that is true, then abortion law is irrelevant. The legality and subsidization of abortion has nothing to do with the availability, frequency, and safety of abortions.

Men and Women pretty similar, research finds

A new book says:

These writers all subscribe to some version of what Cameron dubs the Mars-Venus myth, which holds that women are more verbal than men, that women talk more about people, relationships and feelings, while men talk more about things and facts, that women use language in a co-operative way, whereas men use it competitively. Oh, and that these differences mean that men and women routinely fail to communicate, but can learn to do better — which might explain why Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus has sold more than 10m copies in 37 languages.

For Cameron, this is simplistic eyewash, best countered with a few well-aimed stats. She cites the meta-analysis of Janet Hyde, a psychologist who has collated masses of research findings on male-female communications. Hyde's number-crunching suggests that the difference in language use between men and women is statistically negligible. Women don't interrupt more than men, nor are they more talkative or empathetic in conversation, less prone to assertive conversation, or any better or worse at verbal reasoning. The headline for Hyde's discovery could read "Men and Women pretty similar, research finds".

Yes, males and females are more alike than different. I suspect that this research was not effective at focusing on the differences.

The book is The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages? by Oxford U. English prof Deborah Cameron.

Md. court considers rape suit

The Baltimore Sun paper reports:

Maryland's highest court heard arguments this morning in a closely watched case regarding whether consensual sex can become rape if a woman says no during the act. ...

Defense attorney Michael R. Malloy argued that if intercourse is consensual under existing common law it can't be rape. He argued that the jury that convicted had faulty instructions from the judge. ...

The victim, who had met Baby that night, testified at the trial that she told him that "as long as he stops when I tell him to" she would have sex with him.

As he began, she told him to stop because he was hurting her, but he kept going for five or 10 seconds, she said.

Baby, who was tried as an adult, denied any wrongdoing.

During deliberations, the jury asked Judge Louise G. Scrivener whether sex that begins consensually but continues after the woman tells the man to stop constitutes rape. The judge replied that was "a question that you as a jury must decide."

Maouloud Baby is the guy's name. He was 16 years old. She was 18.

This is just crazy. I don't know what that jury was thinking.

I think that the net of effect of convictions like this will be to de-stimatize rape. If I hear that someone served 5 years in prison for rape, I really have no idea whether he was the perpetrator of a serious violent crime, or whether it was a trivial misunderstanding or a false accusation.

Study: Bad marriage might literally hurt the heart

USA Today reports:

CHICAGO (AP) — A lousy marriage might literally make you sick.
Marital strife and other bad personal relationships can raise your risk for heart disease, researchers reported Monday.

What it likely boils down to is stress — a well-known contributor to health problems, as well as a potential byproduct of troubled relationships, the scientists said.

In a study of 9,011 British civil servants, most of them married, those with the worst close relationships were 34% more likely to have heart attacks or other heart trouble during 12 years of follow-up than those with good relationships. That included partners, close relatives and friends.

The study, in Monday's Archives of Internal Medicine, follows previous research that has linked health problems with being single and having few close relationships. In the new study, researchers focused more on the quality of marriage and other important relationships.

It seems just as likely to me that bad health ruins marriages. Or maybe smoking, trans fats, and obesity cause both divorce and heart disease. More research is needed.

Democracy Left Behind

I just watched a PBS documentary called Democracy Left Behind. It is an attack on No Child Left Behind, the Bush administration policy of testing schoolkids in math and reading. It was made by Santa Cruz filmmaker Bob Gliner, and it interviewed local educators. Bruce Fuller, a UC Berkeley professor of Education and Public Policy, complained: (18 kin. into a 1 hour show)

It depoliticizes the education process. I mean we have adolescents around this country that know about political problems. They watch Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. In the media, in music, they talk about racism and about inequality. Yet they walk into a classroom, and somehow this is antithetical to what education now looks like under NCLB. So it is this disconnect between kids' daily lives, their consciousness, what's going on in a social class and unequal society. It is that disconnect between their daily lives and what they hear from their teacher which I think leads to understandable alienation and high rates of drop out.

About the only response in defense of NLCB was from Kati Haycock, director of The Education Trust, who said:

In focusing in particular on things like reading and writing and math,we are somehow depriving young people of the skills that they need to participate in a democracy -- I mean that core idea is just nuts.

She is right. That was the core idea of the film, and it is just nuts.

As an example of something that they'd like to teach instead of math and reading, the film showed an elementary school class on South African apartheid.

The show just convinces me that our public schools are run by crazy leftist political ideologues who will sabotage the educational process at every opportunity. Only standardized testing, as required by NCLB and also by state law, forces them to stick to the curriculum and actually teach something useful.

Ice cream is good food

The NY Science Times reports:

In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. Alluding to his office's famous 1964 report on the perils of smoking, Dr. Koop announced that the American diet was a problem of "comparable" magnitude, chiefly because of the high-fat foods that were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments.

He introduced his report with these words: "The depth of the science base underlying its findings is even more impressive than that for tobacco and health in 1964."

That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book meticulously debunking diet myths, "Good Calories, Bad Calories" (Knopf, 2007). The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Häagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros.

It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn't it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus. He, like the architects of the federal "food pyramid" telling Americans what to eat, went wrong by listening to everyone else. He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade.

There are more diet comments here.

Koop was also controversial for promoting condom use and for urging explicit sex education in the early elementary grades. But he seems to have gotten a free pass for giving bogus diet advice.

Third World backwater names

Jonathan writes:

Guess I disagree with you about "Myanmar", tried to comment on your post but have forgotten my Blogger password again ... so I'll comment on your thoughts in an update to a recent post of mine about Myanmar, er, Burma and just pass on a few thoughts here.

My question is: Didn't we start calling "Russia" the "USSR" and/or the "Soviet Union" after the commie thugs took it over from the Romanov thugs? Why do you treat "Burma"/"Myanmar" as a special case? Your methodology seems to be that if a junta takes over, they are not to be encouraged by us "falling in line" with their preference. IMHO, Might Does Not Make Right, But Sometimes Causes Efficient Temporary Conformity. I also note that we referred to Nazi Germany as "The Third Reich" in newsreels and history books, basically because that's what it was. I see no reason why we can't harbor a "good feeling fondness" for all things Burma, like the Burma Road, Burma Shave, etc. and simply face reality by harboring a "bad feeling revulsion" while calling it Myanmar. If the junta is overthrown, we can call it Burma again.

"Many Americans are not familiar with the word Myanmar'" was what First Lady Laura Bush said last week when she was asked to reflect on the current situation therein. I understand the nostalgic sentiment, as well as wanting to use lingo that more, rather than less, folks understand. However, Mrs. Bush came off looking like a real piker when she told the reporter how recently she learned about Aung San Suu Kyi. Mrs. Bush said that she learned about the Nobel Laureate "a few years ago" when one of her (Mrs. Bush's) cousins, or similar relatives, had become active in some sort of international social work. And I thought: Wow. I first read or heard news coverage about Suu Kyi's imprisonment about twelve years ago, evidently she's been under detention for over fifteen years. If folks who are comparative newbies when it comes to the recent historic problems in "Burma" want to tell me what to call it, I think they need to sharpen their pencils and show more than a recent passing familiarity with the case of Suu Kyi.

Like, we don't refer to the country of "Tibet" anymore, do we? When we speak of Tibet now, it's either as a geographic region only, or are speaking of a time when Tibet was still an independent country or an autonomous region.

No self-respecting country would want to call itself a name like Myanmar anyway. It makes them sound like a Third World backwater. The name sounds as if it wants to join a club with Bangladesh, Côte d'Ivoire, Djibouti, Kampuchea, Timor-Leste, and Zimbabwe. Would you want to vacation in any of those places?

Besides, we don't necessarily adopt the names of our enemies. There is a country that calls itself Democratic People's Republic of Korea. We call it North Korea.

DNA profiling

Wired mag reports on DNA profiling:

On July 16, 2002, a survey crew from the Department of Transportation found Pam Kinamore's nude, decomposing body in the area along the banks of the Mississippi known as Whiskey Bay, just west of Baton Rouge. The police tested the DNA and quickly realized that they were dealing with a serial killer: the same man who had killed two other white, middle-class women in the area.

The FBI, Louisiana State Police, Baton Rouge Police Department and sheriff's departments soon began a massive search. Based on an FBI profile and a confident eyewitness, the Multi-Agency Homicide Task Force futilely upended South Louisiana in search of a young white man who drove a white pick-up truck. They interrogated possible suspects, knocked on hundreds of doors, held frequent press conferences and sorted through thousands of tips.

In late December, after a fourth murder, police set up a dragnet to obtain DNA from some 1200 white men. Authorities spent months and more than a million dollars running those samples against the killer's. Still nothing.

In early March, 2003, investigators turned to Tony Frudakis, a molecular biologist who said he could determine the killer's race by analyzing his DNA. They were unsure about the science, so, before giving him the go-ahead, the task force sent Frudakis DNA swabs taken from 20 people whose race they knew and asked him to determine their races through blind testing. He nailed every single one.

Still, when they gathered in the Baton Rouge police department for a conference call with Frudakis in mid-March, they were not prepared to hear or accept his conclusions about the killer.

"Your guy has substantial African ancestry," said Frudakis. "He could be Afro-Caribbean or African American but there is no chance that this is a Caucasian. No chance at all." ... The task force followed Frudakis' advice and, two months later, the killer was in custody. ...

But even those who believe this can be done are conflicted about whether it should be done. History is replete with examples of injustices and inequities that were conscripted into law based on racial classification. The Civil Rights movement of the 1960's succeeded in ending legal racial discrimination, in large measure, by downplaying the significance of race and racial differences. By the mid-1990s prominent academics and sociologists even went so far as to say that race did not exist at all.

"Race is a social construct, not a scientific classification," said an editorial in the May 3, 2001 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, adding that "In medicine, there is only one race -- the human race."

Then, along comes Frudakis with a science that seems to be saying the opposite.

A comment says:

If this is racial profiling, then video camera footage is racial profiling. There both technological means of determining your race and what you look like. To make this real clear... if you think this is profiling, you're a moron.

Rules for understanding people

Here are Four Rules to Understand What Makes People Tick: People Mostly Care About Themselves, People are Motivated by Selfish Altruism, People Don’t Think Much, Conformity is the Norm. It explains:

By studying primates, researchers noticed four main categories of selfish altruism. I believe they are the same categories we use, even if slightly more sophisticated:

1. Dominance -- Some primates will give help as a way of asserting dominance in the group. It is as if they are saying, "Look at how powerful I am that I can give some of my resources to help you."
2. Reciprocity -- You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. The idea is that I do a favor for you with the assumption it will be returned one day. If the cost to me is less than the benefit towards you, I might help you even if I can’t predict an immediate payback.
3. Trade -- If we both have something the other person wants, we have a reason to interact. While reciprocity is vague on the details of a payback, trade is direct.
4. Familial -- It makes sense, from an evolutionary perspective, to help those who might share your genes.

By looking through this lens of selfish altruism, you can better make decisions. Viewing people as completely uncaring or selfish is incomplete. But expecting people to think of you constantly and do nice things for free is dangerous.

Duke issues lame apology

Duke U. president Richard H. Brodhead has now given the apology that was apparently required by his out-of-court settlement with the lacrosse players, and he just further illustrates what an irresponsible racist he is. Here is the AP story.

He says that the guilt or innocence of the students are just different "versions of the truth". He blames Michael B. Nifong, the Durham County prosecutor.

For his own personal responsibility in the matter, he says:

First and foremost, I regret our failure to reach out to the lacrosse players and their families in this time of extraordinary peril. Given the complexities of the case, getting this communication right would never have been easy. But the fact is that we did not get it right, causing the families to feel abandoned when they most needed support. This was a mistake. I take responsibility for it, and I apologize.

So he is not really apologizing for punishing innocent students, but blaming it all on a miscommunication. In essence, he is saying that it is everyone else's fault for misunderstanding him.

He goes on to blame others for he himself did:

Second, some of those who were quick to speak as if the charges were true were on this campus, and some faculty made statements that were ill-judged and divisive. They had the right to express their views. But the public as well as the accused students and their families could have thought that those were expressions of the university as a whole. They were not, and we could have done more to underscore that.

Could have done more?! He did everything to support those unfair accusations. He terminated the lacrosse team and kicked the accused students out of school, instead of punishing the racist and libelous professors.

Broadhead is a disgrace. This wasn't the first time he falsely accused innocently people for political purposes, and Duke should not allow it.