Month: August 2012

In his review of Juliet Eilperin's Demon Fish: Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks, Theo Tait observes that when it comes to horrific sex, sharks give bedbugs a run for their money:

Larger male sharks have to bite or trap the females to keep them around during courtship; marine biologists can tell when a female has been mating because her skin will be raw or bleeding. The process is so violent that, come the mating season, female nurse sharks will stay in shallow water with their reproductive openings pressed firmly to the sea floor. Otherwise they risk falling prey to roaming bands of males who ‘will take turns inserting their claspers in her’ (the clasper is the shark version of a penis, found in a pair behind the pelvic fins). A litter of fifty pups will have anything from two to seven fathers.

Recent Dish on sharks here, here, here and here. Bonus slow-motion footage of Great Whites leaping out of the water here.

In the first installment of a series that deconstructs illegal drugs, Puff the Mutant Dragon analyzes why people snort cocaine but smoke crack:

Solid cocaine HCl contains positively charged cocaine ions and negatively charged Cl ions. They’re held together by the attraction between opposite charges, which is very strong, so vaporizing cocaine HCl isn’t easy. In fact, you’d have to heat it high enough you’d kickstart some chemical reactions that would destroy your cocaine, and now you just defeated the whole purpose of the experiment. So that’s why you can’t really smoke coke.

In crack cocaine, on the other hand, the molecules don’t have any charge, so the forces that hold the crack cocaine molecules together are much weaker and you can vaporize it at a reasonable temperature. Inhaling the vapor puts it into circulation much more rapidly and the maximum blood concentration or Cmax that you reach is generally higher.

First soda, now baby formula:

Mayor Bloomberg is pushing hospitals to hide their baby formula behind locked doors so more new mothers will breast-feed. Starting Sept. 3, the city will keep tabs on the number of bottles that participating hospitals stock and use — the most restrictive pro-breast-milk program in the nation. Under the city Health Department’s voluntary Latch On NYC initiative, 27 of the city’s 40 hospitals have also agreed to give up swag bags sporting formula-company logos, toss out formula-branded tchotchkes like lanyards and mugs, and document a medical reason for every bottle that a newborn receives.

Over to you, Hanna:

The question here is not whether breastfeeding is better or worse, we can all agree that breastfeeding infants is somewhat better than not breastfeeding them. The question is, as I have written many times before, that we do not want to feed into a culture that has made the failure or lack of desire to breastfeed seem like a shameful and even criminal affair. By the statistical odds, that woman those nurses are talking down to at the hospital probably has to go back to work in less than a month.  … Take away infant formula and the millions of women who fuel our economy would no longer be able to work, because American employers are certainly not going to pay them to stay home and breastfeed.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon lays out more reasons a mother might prefer formula:

Some cannot breastfeed because they must take anti-depressants or other medications that prevent healthy breastfeeding. Several women I know simply could not make breastfeeding work because a battering of infections and their body's inability to produce sufficient milk made it both painful and unworkable. Others insisted on breastfeeding, only to find that they could not give their baby enough milk to help them put on weight and grow.

But that is not the point. … The real reason the Gotham policy is so objectionable is it infantilizes women by telling them they are no longer adult enough to decide for themselves what is best for their families and themselves. It is strange. Somehow we have reached a point where people who speak angrily of the "war on women" when it comes to family planning do not hesitate to exercise suffocation of choice when it comes to breastfeeding.

If you missed Hanna Rosin's 2009 Atlantic cover-story, "The Case Against Breast-feeding," it's here.

Matt Stopera sees a silver lining in #NBCFail:

It Finally Happened

This makes all of the NBC drama (kind of) worth it.

From the Guardian:

Ann Romney's horse fails to win dressage but avoids offending British

Doug Barry flags a story of a bullied teen:

CNN profiled a 14-year-old girl named Nadia Ilse, who said her "elephant ears" … made her an object of relentless "Dumbo" taunts. A charity called Little Baby Face Foundation that provides free corrective surgery to children with facial deformities (think cleft palates) offered to give Nadia [an] ortoplasty. The charity flew Nadia and her mother from their home in Georgia to New York, where Nadia not only had her ears pinned, but also had a rhinoplasty (reduction of the nose) and a mentoplasty (altering the shape of the chin), which all-in-all constituted about $40,000 of surgery.

It seems to be a trend. Jessica Valenti disapproves:

In a lot of ways I’m glad I was considered unattractive as a kid—there is an upside to ugly. I developed a sharp sense of humor, a defense against the taunts. I thought more deeply about how good and bad people can be.

Yesterday, Reuters reported that Obama had authorized covert assistance to the Syrian rebels:

Obama's order, approved earlier this year and known as an intelligence "finding," broadly permits the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide support that could help the rebels oust Assad. This and other developments signal a shift toward growing, albeit still circumscribed, support for Assad's armed opponents – a shift that intensified following last month's failure of the U.N. Security Council to agree on tougher sanctions against the Damascus government. The White House is for now apparently stopping short of giving the rebels lethal weapons, even as some U.S. allies do just that.

Today, Kofi Annan quit his job as the UN and Arab League's peace envoy for Syria, citing "finger pointing and name calling" in the Security Council. Meanwhile, Juan Cole catches us up on the battle for Aleppo:

The BBC speaks of a ‘stalemate’ in Aleppo, with the regime so far unable to oust the rebels from key neighborhoods. I was told by a young activist from Aleppo, in telephone contact with family & friends, that the rebels were taking new neighborhoods and police stations. That these actions were being taken mid-week was confirmed from Aleppo by Kim Sengupta. The fighters appear to hope to take and keep Aleppo, which can be resupplied easily with arms via the Turkish border.

Massacres are occuring on both sides. Earlier this week, rebels in Aleppo executed some leaders of a local Alawite ghost brigade death squad. [Human Rights Watch]  warned them that this kind of thing could get them charged with war crimes. On Thursday, the regime was accused of carrying out executions of rebels as it went door to door in Damascus, where it killed dozens.

James Miller passes along the following video, which is said to be of families grieving over the bodies of those killed in that massacre:

The Guardian has more details about the situation in Aleppo, including analysis of a video that purports to show the Free Syrian Army (FSA) executing regime combatants. The newspaper also just built a remarkable tool to help understand the escalating death toll in Syria, while Aj Jazeera has their own tool to track regime defections. Food is running out inside Syria as well, and the nation's banks are coming to a standstill. Meanwhile, the composition of the anti-regime forces continues to be of great concern, as foreign jihadists and Al-Qaeda are clearly operating in Syria. Two kidnapped journalists were rescued by the FSA last week after being mistakenly led into a jihadist camp and captured:

The jihadist group is believed to have arrived in the area only days earlier and is believed to be made up solely of men who identify with a salafist jihadist world view, a more puritanical version of Islam."There wasn't a Syrian present," [journalist Jeroen] Oerlemans said. "They were all youngsters from other countries, African countries, Chechnya. They said they thought we were CIA agents. But then it quickly became apparent they wanted to trade us for ransom."

(Photo: Rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters capture two policemen who the FSA allege are "Shabiha" or pro-regime militiamen, on July 31, 2012, as the rebels overran a police station in Aleppo. A watchdog said that rebels killed 40 officers and seized three police stations during the pivotal battle for the commercial capital. By Emin Ozmen/AFP/Getty Images)

A reader writes:

I enjoyed your mixed appreciation of Vidal, as it mirrors my own ambivalence with regards to the quality of his work frequently failing to match his considerable talent. I also loathed his relentless name-dropping. Especially frustrating was his insistence on approaching homosexuality as a cultural anomaly even as it continued to encroach on the mainstream of American life. That said, I was struck by this quote of his I ran across online this morning after reading of his passing:

We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

Another writes:

I thoroughly enjoyed Mr. Vidal's historical novels.  When Lincoln came out in paperback, I read about a fourth of it, then, having found so many errors, returned to the beginning and marked my editorial revisions right on the pages of the book. I sent it to Random House, they forwarded it on to Vidal, and Vidal sent me a (barely decipherable) letter on fine blue stationery from his villa in Italy. It was a lament over the state of publishing in the 20th century. He even took the time to explain some of his literary and stylistic choices (with which, he noted, others had taken issue).

"I sent your comments on to Random House," he wrote. "Who knows?" I never heard from Random House, but I treasure the blue letter in its hand-addressed envelope.

I would have read Lincoln anyway, because it was, to me, a definitive history of that era, and I’ve never forgotten Vidal’s point of view and his compassion toward his characters.

Schrödinger's dance party:

(Hat tip: Metafilter)

As Reid doubles down on his weasel-y rumors against Romney, several readers inadvertently back up Ariely's findings:

Yes, Reid's a bit icky. But, frankly, Romney encourages this with his secrecy. He could clear all this up by releasing his returns. Until then, we all get to speculate about what could be so terrible in them.

Another:

Come on. Reid has the distance from the Obama White House / campaign to hold Romney's feet to the fire – even via a wild-ass claim (and possibly, a lie). The tax return issue seems to have lost some momentum, so lobbing a grenade into the room will bring it nicely back to the fore. Is this a coordinated effort on some level? Would it be at all shocking if it was? Romney clearly has something he's hiding, and there are those rightly determined to flush it out into the light. In this case, the end justifies the means.

Ugh.