Month: October 2010

All last week were reports on a new "goldlilocks planet."  Lee Billings throws cold water:

Imagine, for a moment, standing on the surface of Gliese 581g, and you’ll quickly appreciate just how unearthly it is. Its sun, though much smaller than our own, would loom far larger in the massive planet’s sky due to its close proximity, and light would filter down through a thick atmosphere to fall upon a landscape flattened by the world’s stronger gravitational field. But half the globe would never see the sun at all; tidal forces raised by the nearby star would quite likely have sapped the planet’s rotational energy until it spun once for every orbit, so that it perennially showed the same face to its star. One hemisphere would be bathed in light, sputtered by solar flares and harsh ionizing radiation, while the other would be forever shrouded in darkness. Perhaps only the thin ribbon of twilight encircling the planet from pole to pole would be hospitable.

Driven by the temperature difference between the two sides, high-altitude winds would whip around the planet in an eternal circulating storm. Or, if the atmosphere somehow lacked sufficient amounts of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, it could conceivably freeze out into a massive ice cap on the dark side, rendering the entire planet uninhabitable. A global ocean could act as a heat reservoir, preserving the atmosphere, but only if sufficient amounts of water were somehow delivered to the planet during or after its formation. Any way you slice it, this isn’t exactly home sweet home; you wouldn’t want to live there.

Matt Labash takes aim at the medical marijuana industry in Michigan. Will over at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen shrugs:

[I]t’s worth remembering that the best way to end the charade of over-prescribing medicinal pot is to legalize marijuana. Labash seems to think that his subjects’ tenuous connection to the health care industry is some sort of blanket indictment of marijuana use, but fake prescriptions and opportunistic bouts of carpal tunnel syndrome are actually symptomatic of a ridiculous legal system that outlaws marijuana use at the federal level while state and local legislators – who, incidentally, are best positioned to judge the costs and benefits of decriminalization – attempt to look the other way. The irony is that many of the individuals Labash lampoons actually sound like reasonably productive, responsible citizens – the best jokes the author lands come at the expense of silly nicknames designed to escape legal scrutiny and the lengths these businesses go to navigate our Byzantine drug laws.

Jacob Sullum also pushes back:

[I]t's certainly true that the most common use for marijuana is not medical, and demand for the drug would not be much affected even if a cheap, equally effective pharmaceutical alternative were readily available to patients. So it is hardly surprising that a medical marijuana regime like Michigan's or California's would invite a lot of pretending. But the root of this dishonesty is the continued federal and state prohibition of marijuana, which exposes even bona fide medical dispensaries to the risk of raids, forfeiture, arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment. (Michigan, like California, does not explicitly allow over-the-counter sales of medical marijuana.) Everyone associated with contraband is a little shady by definition. Labash would have had a grand time documenting drinking-related fakery during alcohol prohibition (which included religious as well as medical excuses), but such an account would not have been seen as evidence in favor of prohibition.

Well this is a man-bites-dog story:

A wide-ranging study of Americans’ sexual behavior, based on the largest nationally representative survey since 1992, finds that condom use is becoming the norm for sexually active teenagers. Indeed, they are more responsible than adults about using condoms, the researchers report in a study coming out on Monday.

More proof that the next generation appears saner about sex than any previous ones. The uptick in teen use is considered bad news by the Vatican, of course. I can't find if the study includes gay male teens (any help?). Then, of course, this breaking news:

The study also finds that "while most men said they had experienced orgasm the last time they had sex, and 85 percent believed their partner had also, only two-thirds of the women surveyed said they had achieved orgasm the last time they had sex."

This issue is not so common among gay men. Orgasm is not something you can really fake very well. And men tend to know men's bodies. Because, as Seinfeld had it, we have access to them 24 hours a day.

A divinity school professor shares:

Using a much less welcoming tone, Dan Savage goes after a religious reader:

The dehumanizing bigotries that fall from lips of "faithful Christians," and the lies that spew forth from the pulpit of the churches "faithful Christians" drag their kids to on Sundays, give your straight children a license to verbally abuse, humiliate and condemn the gay children they encounter at school. And many of your straight children—having listened to mom and dad talk about how gay marriage is a threat to the family and how gay sex makes their magic sky friend Jesus cry himself to sleep—feel justified in physically attacking the gay and lesbian children they encounter in their schools. You don't have to explicitly "encourage [your] children to mock, hurt, or intimidate" gay kids. Your encouragement—along with your hatred and fear—is implicit. It's here, it's clear, and we can see the fruits of it.

In Africa: A Biography of the Continent, John Reader asks why "the out-of-Africa [human] population grew from just hundreds to 200 million in 100,000 years, and rose to just over 300 million by AD 1500" while the African population itself only "increased from 1 million to no more than 20 million in 100,000 years, and rose to only 47 million by AD 1500". Dr. Science at Obsidian Wings answers:

The only part of the world to which human beings are truly native is sub-Saharan Africa. Ecologically, there are no "native peoples" anywhere else in the world, because outside of Africa Homo sapiens is always an invasive alien species. You'd think that the fact that we're adapted to Africa in a way we aren't adapted to anywhere else would be an advantage, but it turns out not to work that way. The overwhelming factor, for H. sapiens as well as stink bugs, is that our native range is adapted to us – humans or bugs become dangerously invasive when we can escape not just the limited space of our native range, but the constraints on our population that come from other co-native species: predators or parasites (including diseases).

Dan Savage alerts us with this CBN report:

Savage suggests:

Hey, Hollywood? Really wanna fuck with their heads? Put some gay Christian characters on TV. Now that [Modern Family's] Cam and Mitch have finally kissed—in the background, with a straight couple kissing down front—maybe they could join an affirming church, get Lily baptized, and help their new church's choir cut loose.

That seedy scene between Cam and Mitch after the jump:

Aylin Zafar breaks down the ground-breaking episode.

The subject is financial reform:

I’m not a big fan of attempts to mix ethics and aesthetics, but when it comes to politics and economics, I definitely think less is more.  I was reminded of this when frequent commenter Malavel sent me a new Swedish regulation requiring at least 15% down-payments on all mortgages.  That’s it, no bells and whistles, just 15%.  Check out the simplicity of this press release.

Ditto income taxes. If we could end all loop-holes (and I mean all), and have three or so effective rates, can you imagine how cleaner our politics would be? And how much more efficient our economy?

Or put more concisely, WEIRD. Here's why it's an important acronym:

Almost everything experimental psychologists believe about the human mind comes from studies of the Weird. But perhaps you've guessed the problem: from a global standpoint, Weird people may be really… what's the word? Yes: odd. As Henrich et al show, many phenomena we've assumed are universal probably aren't: we can only really say they're universal among Weird people, who make up 96% of subjects in behavioural science, or Americans, who make up 68%, and often only among US college students, who provide US researchers with a supply of guinea pigs. And the Weird, they say, "are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species".

This research has been bouncing around the blogs for a couple months now, no doubt due to the catchiness of the acronym. Here's Greg Downey's criticism of the paper (pdf) from July:

Although WEIRD is terribly catchy and quite manageable, it may not even focus us on the most important distinctions, nor may it reflect a good starting point for a truly trans-cultural psychology, carting our own self-conceptions and obsessions, surreptitiously, into the cross-cultural comparisons. …

For example, when I brought one of my Brazilian subjects to an American university at which I previously taught, his characterization of the American students’ differences from young Brazilians with whom he had more contact focused on none of these traits (W. E. I. R. or D.). He was more struck by their large size (both height and BMI, to put it nicely), their frumpy androgynous clothing (anyone here not wearing a sweatshirt?), their materialism, their clumsiness and physical ineptitude, and their ethnic and personal homogeneity. If my Brazilian colleague were to characterize the oddness of the WEIRD, he wouldn’t focus on the traits Henrich and colleagues have chosen in their designation.