Month: March 2012

Recent reports claim that the flatworm could hold the key to immortality. Stephen Cave summarizes:

[T]he cells in our human bodies can only replicate a certain number of times before the bits which protect our DNA (called telomeres) become frayed. The resulting unreliability in the replication process is thought to be a crucial part of what causes ageing. Flatworms, on the other hand, use an enzyme called telomerase to protect their telomeres, so their cells can replicate indefinitely. All we have to do is learn how to perform this trick for ourselves and we too will be immune to the ravages of time.

Cave tempers the excitement:

Making cells immortal is a risky business. Some of our cells already start producing telomerase so that they can replicate indefinitely—we call this cancer. 

Question? askandrew@thedailybeast.com Video archive here.

Fred Clark recalls some recent history:

In 1979, McDonald’s introduced the Happy Meal. Sometime after that, it was decided that the Bible teaches that human life begins at conception. Ask any American evangelical, today, what the Bible says about abortion and they will insist that this is what it says. (Many don’t actually believe this, but they know it is the only answer that won’t get them in trouble.) They’ll be a little fuzzy on where, exactly, the Bible says this, but they’ll insist that it does. That’s new. If you had asked American evangelicals that same question the year I was born you would not have gotten the same answer.

Max Schlickenmeyer remixed astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s answer to the question, “What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the Universe?”:

Gay theologian Fr. James Alison compares being gay to being left-handed:

There is a distinction between left-handedness and the act of writing left-handedly. For most of us the distinction remains exactly that, and has no moral consequences. We would understand that a left-handed person forced to write right-handedly owing, say, to having their left arm in a plaster cast, or a right-handed person forced to write left-handedly for analogous reasons, would, with some difficulty, be able to learn to do so. These people would in some sense be acting contra natura. But the use of the hand appropriate to their handedness would be entirely unremarkable.

Now, imagine that, involved in a Catholic discussion, you find yourself addressing a left-handed person.

You say: "Any left-handed writing you do is intrinsically wrong; and in fact the inclination we call left-handedness must be considered objectively disordered." The only justification for using the distinctions in this way is if you have received, from quite other sources, the sure knowledge that right-handedness is normative to the human condition, anything else being some sort of defect from that norm, and yet you don’t want entirely to condemn the person who has a strong tendency to left-handed writing.

No, it seems to me quite patent that here we have an unwieldy bid to fit a reality into an acceptable framework, rather than learning from reality how to adjust a now unreliable framework. Any left-handed person, faced with the above logic, would know that the one addressing them really does regard them as a defective right-handed person, rather than a normal left-handed person. Any insistence on the part of the one who is addressing them that they are not calling them "disordered" as a person would be seen to be the humbug that it is.

According to an upcoming HBO series, yes:

Ray Downs shakes his head:

I am concerned that Hollywood’s depiction of sex is going from unrealistic romance and passion to exaggerated awkwardness. And this can have a similar, if not more damaging effect on the image of sex. While the over-romanticized sex of Hollywood’s past probably gave many young people unreasonable expectations of what to expect, this new "sex is awkward" theme that they’re projecting seems just as disingenuous. Just because sex might have been awkward for a few people who have been lucky enough to pen their own TV series, does that mean we should be marked as a sexually awkward generation?

Look, I have a lot of problems with my generation: we’re selfish, pretentious, and superficial. But one thing I like about us is that we’re the coolest sexual generation there has ever been in quite a while.

Think about it: interracial sex is totally cool, homosexual sex hasn’t been as publicly accepted since probably Greek times, and premarital sex is pretty much obligatory. All the boundaries that were set in stone merely a few decades ago are gone and we’re a lot freer than we were. And it’s my belief that we’re better at sex — not more awkward. How do I know we’re better at it? Because there are cool sex toy stores like Babeland that have helped make it acceptable and even praiseworthy to make sex better for you and your partner with the help of fun-colored inanimate objects. That’s progress!

On a somewhat similar note, Elaine Blair explains why we find so much sexual humiliation in American fiction written by men:

When you see the loser-figure in a novel, what you are seeing is a complicated bargain that goes something like this: yes, it is kind of immature and boorish to be thinking about sex all the time and ogling and objectifying women, but this is what we men sometimes do and we have to write about it. We fervently promise, however, to avoid the mistake of the late Updike novels: we will always, always, call our characters out when they’re being self-absorbed jerks and louts. We will make them comically pathetic, and punish them for their infractions a priori by making them undesirable to women, thus anticipating what we imagine will be your judgments, female reader.

Then you and I, female reader, can share a laugh at the characters’ expense, and this will bring us closer together and forestall the dreaded possibility of your leaving me.

That's how Laurie Penny characterizes the recent rise of websites connecting well-off men with hard-up younger women:

The idea of having a financial hold over another creature has become a fantasy on its own merit. The key to that fantasy is the idea that the young people willing to offer their physical and personal affections in exchange for hard cash are not "pros" or professional sex workers — they are "ordinary." Students and single mothers were particularly in demand, as women who were assumed by definition to be financially abject. …

What about sugar mommies?

[Brandon Wade, owner of SeekingArrangement.com] says that only a tiny fraction of his "generous" clientele are female –  in fact, the sugar daddy dynamic seems to be almost exclusively a heterosexual fantasy of male dominance, at least as it is played out online. Both on the "official" websites and on Craigslist, there are few women looking for sugar babies, and few men looking to buy a young boyfriend. One thing that crops up time and again, however, is these men’s desire to be considered "normal" — where ‘normal’ means not the kind of guys who’d buy sex. Or at least, not just sex. As I scrolled through more and more offers of cash for sloppy fellatio and walks in the rain, it became clear that some of these men were looking to pay thousands of dollars a month for something approaching love.

Jonathan Heaf also spoke with Wade:

"[O]ne of the things I truly believe – and why I set up this site to help others – is that if people feel a relationship isn't born out of love, then there has to be something wrong with it. Why? The truth is, in my opinion, love is a concept that's been invented by poor people." I tell Wade I'm not entirely sure I follow his bonkers philosophy.

"Calling women 'prostitutes' who want something more out of a relationship than just this abstract notion of love is a comment and a stigma that is born from pure jealousy. These people aren't wealthy, they aren't beautiful, they aren't the cream of the crop – so what do they have? They have love. For everyone else there's our website."

Oy. Previous dispatches from the sugar daddy economy here and here.

Waikiki, Hawaii, 6.36 am

Alex Tabarrok wishes education dollars were invested more wisely:

The focus on college education has distracted government and students from apprenticeship opportunities. Why should a major in English literature be subsidized with room and board on a beautiful campus with Olympic-size swimming pools and state-of-the-art athletic facilities when apprentices in nursing, electrical work, and new high-tech fields like mechatronics are typically unsubsidized (or less subsidized)? College students even get discounts at the movie theater; when was the last time you saw a discount for an electrical apprentice?

Evolution may explain why we get songs stuck in our head:

Modern humans have been around for some 200,000 years, but written language may have been invented only around 5,000 years ago, Levitin says. So through much of human history people memorised important information through songs. That practice continues today in cultures with strong oral traditions. [Daniel Levitin, an expert in the neuroscience of music] says the combination of rhythm, rhyme, and melody provides reinforcing cues that make songs easier to remember than words alone.

Cari Nierenberg recently identified some other possible causes:

The most common one was music exposure, either recently hearing a tune or repeatedly hearing it. A second reason was memory triggers, meaning that seeing a particular person or word, hearing a specific beat, or being in a certain situation reminds you of a song. The third reason for earworms [is] your emotional frame of mind, or "affective states."  Feeling stressed, surprised or happy when you hear a song may make it stick in your head. And a fourth cause was "low attention states."  A wandering mind, whether from daydreaming or dreams at night, can set off this involuntary musical imagery.