Month: April 2012

A reader writes:

I'm far past the age when this procedure would interest me, but I do know that if a potential partner told me I didn't need to worry – he'd been RISUG'd – I'd just laugh and get out my diaphragm. That's the problem with male contraception: if a woman can't see proof, she's a fool to take a chance.

Because she is ultimately the one dealing with an unintended pregnancy. But another reader points to a risk unique to men:

Your reader wrote, "But the more I think about it, the more I'm reminded that male culture ultimately says that the junk is untouchable, and that any modification or interference is somehow emasculating or 'too risky' for the family jewels." Yes, men are babies in a lot of respects. But there's an important difference between men and women when it comes to "junk". Surgical procedures on either can lead to risks in future fertility, but with men there is a risk of future impotence as well. Unless I'm mistaken, women aren't going to lose the ability to orgasm if something goes wrong with their fallopian tubes. But men can lose that ability if something goes wrong with their "junk".

Jonathan Blow takes gaming to a whole new level:

Although video games long ago blossomed into full commercial maturity (the adrenaline-soaked military shooter Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, for example, racked up $400 million in sales during its first 24 hours in stores last fall), the form remains an artistic backwater, plagued by cartoonish murderfests and endless revenue-friendly sequels. Blow intends to shake up this juvenile hegemony with The Witness, a single-player exploration-puzzle game set on a mysterious abandoned island. In a medium still awaiting its quantum intellectual leap, Blow aims to make The Witness a groundbreaking piece of interactive art—a sort of Citizen Kane of video games.

Previous Dish on the subject of gaming as art here, here and here.

Erica Grieder, who stuttered as a child, reflects on the affliction:

Is there a bright side to stuttering? Not in my view. As you would imagine, a number of stutterers have become well-known writers. Surprisinglsy, perhaps, some have gone on to become well-known as speakers (Gray cites a number; I would add Joe Biden, James Earl Jones, Tavis Smiley, and Carly Simon; see here for a clip of the latter two talking about it.) The armchair psychology explanation would be that people with a stutter are alienated from their own ability to communicate, and reminded of that at every opportunity; they may therefore be more sensitive to both the value of speech and its limits. (Another armchair explanation is that suggested by the film The King's Speech, that stutterers lack confidence; this one, in my experience, seems to get the causality backwards.) I would trade being able to write for being able to speak without being miserably self-conscious most of the time, but perhaps people who have the opposite problem have the opposite feeling.

CJ Chivers cautions against overselling their importance:

[F]or the foreseeable future, the roles of traditional military fighter and attack aircraft—flown by men and women buckled inside—remain secure. Drones are a complement, not a replacement, to the aircraft flown by the people within. There are many reasons for this. Stepping past the unsettled questions of morality and law, the restraints on drones are connected to a pair of stubbornly related facts: Technical limits restrict the missions that unmanned aircraft can perform, and drones, for all their abilities, are very vulnerable machines. Whatever futurists predict, in the arena of air-to-air warfare, drones can neither reliably defend themselves nor consistently elude a determined attack.

The latest evidence suggests that a desire for mates is the prime motivator behind chimp violence:

Interestingly, human disturbance did not appear to be a factor in the kills. Indeed the community with the most kills—a group at the site of Ngogo in Uganda’s Kibale National Park—had the least human disturbance. Neither was the ratio of males to females in a group a factor. What did appear to be a factor was the number of males in a group: the higher the number of males in a group, the higher the number of kills. Ngogo, the community with the highest rate of kills per year, also had the highest number of adult males. "The number of males is important because the more males there are, the more competition there is for mates in the community," [a researcher] explains.

Julian Sanchez takes issue with this chart, which purports to show Tumblr eclipsing "blogs" by reference to the number of Google searches for each:

[T]he ubiquity and integration of blogs means that "blog" is a much less useful search term for narrowing down your results … Tumblr, by contrast, is still ultimately one domain, and distinctive enough that if you saw something on a Tumblr, you’re apt to remember that it was a Tumblr, both from contextual clues about the site itself, and because there are still some very characteristic types of content that we associate with Tumblrs. So including "Tumblr" in your search terms is actually a really good way to quickly narrow your results …

His takeaway:

[T]here’s a general point here about how to interpret trends in online activity—whether it’s Google, Twitter references, Facebook likes, or whatever. The frequency trend over time can’t actually be interpreted straightforwardly without thinking a little bit about both broader changes in the media ecosystem you’re examining and how changing user behavior fits into the specific purposes of the technology you’re tracking. With search, the question isn’t just "are people interested in term X?" but also "is term X a useful filter for generating relevant results given the current universe of content being indexed?"

Today on the Dish, Andrew damned Richard Nixon for giving us today's GOP, discussed the politics of Roe v. Wade with Douthat, debated Obama and the Buffett Rule with readers, discovered Romney's appointment of an openly gay Republican as his national security spokesman, dressed Mitt down over dressage (reader corrective here), and dozed off at the Republican nomination. We situated Romney on the extreme end of the Afghanistan drawdown debate, cast doubt on the idea that his unfavorables would sink him, bet on minorities turning out for Obama again, explained the partisan gender gap by reference to "big government," and chuckled at Obama photoshops. Ad War Update here.

Andrew also explained how our choices determine who we are, issued a disclosure addendum to the "Nepotism Watch" on Chelsea Clinton, crossed his fingers over Iran negotiations, and went another round on imperial war and atrocity. We hoped Iran's nuclear program might follow history and collapse on its own, listened to readers on divergences between Israel and America and Jennifer Rubin, checked on an alternative to the war on drugs, and explored the causes behind the drop in American gun ownership. S&M wasn't intrinsically anti-feminist, a sex life with herpes wasn't all bad, legal prostitution had a mixed record, and male contraception celebration was premature. We continued discussing the character of consciousness, found that self-control was likely finite, and pondered good religion. The notion of "Facebook loneliness" got complicated, cell phone spam annoyed, bicycles used oil, tiny houses came in vogue, and prospective employers gave resumes only cursory examination. Ask Jennifer Rubin Anything here, Quote for the Day here, VFYW here, MHB here, and FOTD here.

– Z.B.

New research measures how practice physically manifests itself in the brain: 

Just about everything we do modifies connections between brain cells—learning and memory are dependent on this flexibility. When we improve a skill through practice, we strengthen connections between neurons involved in that skill. In a recent study, scientists peeked into the brains of living mice as the rodents learned some new tricks. Mice who repeated the same task day after day grew more clusters of mushroomlike appendages on their neurons than mice who divided their attention among different tasks. … “I think it is a very active process,” [Yi] Zuo says. “The neurons work very hard to form clusters, to place spines close to one another. Even after a short training period on the first day, a mouse makes of a lot of new spines—they might make double what they make in an ordinary day, but these spines are not clustered. Only after repeated training are they clustered.” 

I find this fascinating because it reflects what one might call a conservative truth: we become what we do. We are not Etch-A-Sketches, blank slates on whom a new abstract idea can simply and easily be applied to turn our lives around. We are constantly evolving organisms, each choice leading to another fate and another choice and all of these creating us, slowly, by will and habit. One is reminded of Orwell's assertion that "at age 50, every man has the face he deserves" (something he conveniently avoided by dying in his forties). I'm also reminded of Pascal's rather controversial dictum that merely practicing faith will instill it. Acts become thoughts which become acts, and habits become personality which becomes character. There can be no total rupture – which is why I am not a fan of "born-again" Christianity. It only takes if it reorients practice.

We like to think of the brain as some kind of separate part of the body. It isn't. And what exercize and diet and sleep do for the body, thought and practice and sleep do for the brain. And when this kind of practice of something becomes effortless, when it becomes second nature, instinctual, it becomes part of you and you of it. You simply cannot describe the great skill of a craftsman, or a cook, or a priest, or an artist except by observing how he or she has become what she creates and does. Julia Childs' cook-book can never replicate an actual Julia Childs meal. It can merely abstract from it, copy it. But the itness is hers and hers alone. At that point, where the idea and the practice and the person simply become one, human activity takes flight. It becomes integral.

The neurons merely prove what every truly wise man has long known.

(Painting: The Music Lesson, Jan Vermeer.)

A fact that doesn't make it into the Washington Post. But I'm in no way outing Ric. He has lived with his partner, Matt Lashey, for the past nine years, and is a frequent advocate for Republicans and gays. Which is why this pick is interesting. For Romney to have an openly gay spokesman is a real outreach to gay Republicans, a subtle signal to moderates, and the Santorum faction's reaction will be worth noting.

Don't believe matchmaking websites:

[A]s it stands now, online dating sites can pretty much claim whatever they want without fear of retribution. The "scientific" algorithm behind eharmony, for example, has never been tested against other algorithms to measure whether or not it makes any difference in the quality of relationships experienced by users. Basically, you might be better off just going to a bar and introducing yourself to a bunch of dudes who don't appear to have girlfriends. Or just playing World of Warcraft for awhile. Or just go onto OKCupid and find someone with a weird tattoo, for free.