Come to a book reading! the Minnesota Atheists are sponsoring a reading at the Southdale Libary at 2pm from our anthology, Atheist Voices of Minnesota: an Anthology of Personal Stories
It will be fabulous. And it will be the most exciting thing happening in Minnesota all day long! You must come!
This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly. Careful! Don’t squeeze the platypuses!
Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread
You really should read Jonathan Eisen’s response to a quantitative biology conference invitation that listed 25 male speakers and organizers, and one lonely woman. See? All kinds of geeks turn out to be unthinkingly sexist.
I wondered how this could happen, and then I saw that the first two organizers are named Ditto and Hasty. Well, of course then.
Oh, please dear Gauss, not more of this hyper-adaptive crap.
It appears that men’s preference for more curvy women has quite a lot to do with the fact that curvy figures historically have possessed more of the healthy omega-3 fatry acid DHA, which is essential for proper brain development in children.
An article in the August 2012 issue of Psychology Today explains that men “know” something significant about women’s bodies that women don’t. And it all has to do with nature’s mandate to produce children with great survival skills. In fact, women are usually more like men’s ideals than they realize, and losing weight to meet the standard set by the fashion and modeling industries may not make them any more attractive to men.
Well, gosh then…if I were still trying to raise my kids and feed them a healthy diet, I guess I now know which of the herd to cull out and put on the dinner plate! At least, that’s where the first paragraph was leading me.
Look: if you are a woman eating a reasonable diet, if you aren’t abusing yourself with an eating disorder on either end of the spectrum, your kids will probably be fine. If you’re getting standard dietary supplements, vitamins and cofactors, that are routine in almost all standard pregnancy care situations (but unfortunately not routine for the poorest of the poor), your fetus is getting what it needs no matter whether you are slender or curvy. There is a broad range of tolerance here.
Also, in a normal, healthy relationship, men should not and are not judging you by either a conscious or unconscious assessment of how much DHA is available in your blood supply — if they are looking at you like a cut of meat rather than as a fellow human being who would make a good partner in living, you really don’t want to associate with them.
And this — this bullshit — is rank idiocy.
American children rank 31st out of 64 nations in tests of academic ability. The highest scores are in places like Japan, where women have slender hourglass figures and have four times the amount of DHA in their blood.
So…much…wrong. Not only the racism of categorizing an entire nation of women as possessing “slender hourglass figures”, but reducing academic ability to the product of your mother’s sexual desirability and biochemistry…jebus, let’s forget about tests and ability and background education and just let the children of MILFs into Hahvahd.
Also, guess who he cites as the source of this splendid information about men’s ability to assay DHA levels with a glance? Psychology Today. What, not Cosmo?
Dear Ron Lindsay:
I have to take exception to one small part of your recent post.
Greta Christina and PZ Myers have recently suggested that is it not necessarily a bad thing to be divisive. True, it is not necessarily a bad thing. It depends on what one is separating oneself from.
In her blog post, Greta Christina responded to the charge that the Atheism Plus initiative is divisive by claiming that the secular community is divided already. As evidence for this claim, she offered several deplorable incidents and actions, principally involving hate-filled threats and comments to women, many of which would be familiar to anyone active in the movement. She then asked rhetorically why such vile conduct has not been called “divisive.”
But if hate-filled comments and threats to women have not been expressly called divisive, it’s because such conduct does not threaten to divide the movement. It has already been repudiated, both implicitly and explicitly, by many, if not most, of the organizations in the movement.
I hope I was always destined to grow up as a rational thinker and a questioner of the questionable. And I think I tended this way even as a child, however I recall a defining moment when I was aged 10 that had to have an influence on my world view.
The television series by Tom Holland that was censored in the UK is a serious, respectful look at the history of Islam.
The movie that has provoked riots and murder in Egypt and Libya is a ghastly bit of hackwork associated with Terry Jones, the fanatical Christian pastor from Florida. Follow that link to see a clip: it’s incredibly bad. It’s got terrible acting, inconsistent and bad fake accents, white actors in blackface (poorly applied blackface, even), beards straight out of Monty Python, sloppy greenscreen work, and it goes out of its way to portray major figures in Islam as gloating gay parodies and pedophiles. It doesn’t just criticize Islam (and when it does, it does so with painful ignorance); it criticizes ethnicities, sexual orientations, and nations wholesale. It is simply a calculated, ugly insult with no redeeming qualities at all.
It does not justify rioting or killing people. But let’s not mistake what it is: the movie is the work of a group of incompetent fundamentalist Christian assholes pissing on entire cultures.
Oops, not just Christian assholes. As noted in the article:
the film was in fact directed and produced by “an Israeli-American California real-estate developer who called it a political effort to call attention to the hypocrisies of Islam.”
It seems to have called attention to the hypocrisies and vileness of the Judeo-Christian Right.
Channel 4 in the UK made a program called “Islam: The Untold Story”, and got so many complaints and threats that they have cancelled the screening of the show. This is a disgrace: the program is a serious, historical look at Islam, and the protesters are complaining because it takes an objective look at the evidence. We must be able to scrutinize Islam. If they’re going to hide their origins in obscurity, lies, and threats, then their beliefs should be dismissed.
I haven’t seen the program (and at this rate, I never will!), but I can make an informed guess at the content. It’s presented by Tom Holland, author of In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire
It doesn’t make negative judgments about Islam at all, unless, of course, you find reality offensive. I thought it was an excellent book to explain the complexities of Islamic history, and it made Islam more human and more interesting. It’s well worth reading.
It would also be worth watching, if Channel 4 would grow a spine. And if Channel 4 can’t manage it, I don’t know how we can ever hope to see it in the US.
Those of you living in the UK can watch it here. They block us Americans, I’m afraid.
I am getting quite impressed with the progress being made in organ reconstruction. New techniques have allowed amazing improvements in bioengineering that allow whole complex organs to be grown in a dish and then surgically reimplanted — and much of this research is being driven by our military ventures, which provide a steady supply of scarred, damaged, and mutilated veterans who need new body parts. There I read that scientists are developing procedures to regrow penises…how could I not look up that paper? So I did, and now I have the current recipe for building new penises — or at least, corpora cavernosa — in a lab.
It’s got limitations. First, you have to start with an intact penis, preferably from a dead body. Then it has to be delicately decellularized, leaving behind a fragile, ghostly collagen matrix, the connective tissue ‘skeleton’ of the organ. This framework is completely acellular, with no remnants of the donor’s cells, and consisting of just the collagen matrix, so that it will not provoke an immune response.
Then smooth muscle and endothelial cells are harvested by biopsies from the prospective host. This is to be an autologous transplant, a regrown organ built from the host’s own cells, again so immune system rejection will not be an issue. These cells are seeded in multiple steps onto the collagen scaffold, where they proliferate and infiltrate the matrix and reassemble (you hope!) the fully functional organ.
Note the limitations, though: you have to start with a penis. There are relatively few of those to spare, although since histocompatibility matching isn’t an issue, it ought to be doable as part of an organ donor program — we’ll just grab the penis as well as the corneas and kidneys. This procedure does not regrow the entire penis, but just the spongy erectile tissue in the core; this is implanted into the sheath of skin of the normal penis. I know all you body modification fans are dreaming of the day you can have multiple penises, but this isn’t quite there yet, and sorry, I should hope injured people who need the procedure get priority over cosmetic uses.
But here’s the astonishing thing: it works. The procedure has only been tested in rabbits so far, but with amazing success. I know what you are saying. You are saying, “Really? Then show me the bunny penises, with erections.” And I will.
At the top left is an unaltered, unoperated rabbit penis; top right is the case we’re interested in, a rabbit with an implanted, bioengineered penis (say, isn’t it a little larger than the unaltered penis?). At the bottom are negative controls, penises with just the unseeded collagen matrix implanted and with nothing at all to replace the surgical deletion.
The researchers have done experiments in rabbits in which they compare a positive control group (no removal of the corpora) to a negative control group (rabbits with their penises hollowed out and the corpora removed — sad bunnies) to an experimental group (rabbits with their penises surgically cored out, and then replaced with bioengineered neocorpora), and look what happened.
The experimental and control animals were each placed with a female rabbit and mating activities were assessed at 1, 3, and 6 months after implantation. All rabbits with bioengineered neocorpora attempted copulation within 1 min of introduction to their female partners, and this occurred as early as 1 month after implantation. Most control rabbits did not attempt copulation after introduction to their female partners.
The rabbits were ready and eager to try out their new penises! Yay science!
The intravaginal ejaculation rate was determined using vaginal swabs to detect the presence of sperm after copulation and/or impregnation. In the experimental group, vaginal swabs contained sperm in eight of 12 instances, and four of the 12 females were impregnated, resulting in an intravaginal ejaculation rate of 83% (10/12). In the control group without cell seeding, all 12 vaginal swabs were negative.
And it wasn’t all just for fun, those penises worked, they successfully inseminated the females, and, typical bunnies, a third of the females were impregnated! Yay science again!
A difference between experimental and control group without cells in the intravaginal ejaculation rates of 75% was noted, with a 95% confidence interval of 36% to 89%. For the negative control group (excision only), all vaginal swabs were negative, and none of the females were impregnated (0%).
I feel sad for those bunnies with their flaccid, hollowed out penises, but I guess that is the expected result — it would have been far more surprising if the negative controls had inseminated their partners.
The bottom line is that we need more stem cell research and more bioengineering. There are wonders to be accomplished! And don’t let religious nonsense interfere with this kind of work.
Although, to be fair, both Islam and Christianity would be perfectly fine with reconstruction of the holy penis — it’s only when it steps into the task of reconstructing scarred and damaged vulvas that it treads over the line into abomination.
Chen KL, Eberli D, Yoo JJ, Atala A (2010) Bioengineered corporal tissue for structural and functional restoration of the penis. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 107(8):3346-50.
