Asexuals Among Us

Scientific American:

[S]ome scientists believe that there may be a fourth sexual orientation in our species, one characterized by the absence of desire and no sexual interest in males or females, only a complete and lifelong lacuna of sexual attraction toward any human being (or non-human being). Such people are regarded as asexuals. Unlike bisexuals, who are attracted to both males and females, asexuals are equally indifferent to and uninterested in having sex with either gender. So imagine being a teenager waiting for your sexual identity to express itself, waiting patiently for some intoxicating bolus of lasciviousness to render you as dumbly carnal as your peers, and it just doesn’t happen. These individuals aren’t simply celibate, which is a lifestyle choice. Rather, sex to them is just so … boring.

(Hat tip: 3QD)

In Defense Of Brain Drain

Michael Clemens and David McKenzie want to scrap the term:

Conventional wisdom once held that the wealth of a country declined when it imported foreign goods, since obviously cash was wealth and obviously buying foreign goods sent cash abroad. Adam Smith argued that economic development — or the "wealth of nations" — depends not a country's stock of cash but on structural changes that international exchange could encourage. In today's information age, the view has taken hold that human capital now rules the wealth of nations, and that its departure in any circumstance must harm a country's development. But economic development is much more complex than that.

But thanks to new research, we have learned that the international movement of educated people changes the incentives to acquire education, sends enormous quantities of money across borders, leads to movements back and forth, and can contribute to the spread of trade, investment, technology, and ideas. All of this fits very uncomfortably in a rhyming phrase like "brain drain," a caricature that would be best discarded in favor of a richer view of the links between human movement and development.

Brain competition?

How To Write Badly Well

An instructional blog. For example, always use a thesaurus:

She manipulated the garment in a cogitative mode. ‘Hmm,’ she vocalised. ‘This attire is verifiably marvellous. What is it constituted from?’ ‘From the most meritorious velveteen,’ defined her interlocutor, simpering coincidentally. ‘Is it?’ iterated the party of the first part. ‘That’s felicitous.’

‘Additionally, this specified object has the property of being subdivided in terms of its defining mercantile characteristic, and can be taken possession of for the diminutive quantity of merely a half-dozen currency units,’ the retail employee informed. ‘Exoneration?’ supplicated the protagonist appropriately.

The commercial tertiary sector worker eyeballed her perspicaciously. ‘I said it’s five ninety-nine. Do you want it or not?’

(Hat tip: Kottke)

Batting Its Eyelashes

FU Penguin is Baby-bat Baby Bat, you are destroying my ability to successfully categorize safe animals and animals that want me to drop whatever I am doing and make sure they are comfortable and happy.

You are supposed to be trying to suck my blood or finding your way out of a cave using radio waves or Google maps or whatever. Instead you are like a big-eyed baby deer crossed with a webbed monkey sucking on a pacifier. You're really little, too, aren't you? There's nothing in this picture that I can compare you to, but I get the sense you're something disgusting like a pound and a half. I bet you would fit in my hand and then look up at me and I wouldn't even be able to check to make sure you aren't going to turn into a vampire.

Fucking bats.

And while we're at it, F U dolphin.

After Dede, Ctd

A reader writes:

A good showing in 2010 may lead the Republican party to espouse radical right ideas that will lead to a debacle worse 2012 than Goldwater's in 64. Hoffman doesn't even live in the district. He had no ideas on local issues when interviewed by the local newspaper. His consort, Dickie Armey, called the newspaper's questions "parochial."

I guess Hoffman is supposed to represent Sarah Palin and Dickie Armey and not the constituents of his House district. We'll see how far this tactic takes the Republicans in 2012.