Woman is a dirty word

I left a comment at Rebecca Watson’s recent post on being objectified; I said that while I face only a fraction of the abuse outspoken women get, lately the most common insult I get is being called a mangina, or worse, a woman.

I now get email accusing me of being a woman.

Think about that. This is the horrible awful insult they want to browbeat me with; that I am a woman. Not even the creationists ever sunk to that; I think it’s part of their mindset that women are lesser beings, but they don’t use “woman” as a dirty word.

It’s bizarre; they don’t even realize that they’re confirming everything I say about sexism and misogyny by treating womanhood as the most degrading term you can apply to a man.

But maybe this will wake them up…at least, maybe it will stir the ones who don’t worship Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck chewed out Obama for having concerns about brain injuries in football.

Beck played a clip from the interview on his online show and interjected the word “girl” in between the president’s statements, before switching into a “female” voice to mock him. When Obama was finished making his rather cautious comments on the matter, Beck began his full-on attack.

“His man card has been revoked by me, and that’s saying something” Beck said. “When I’m saying you’re a girl, you are absolutely 100% girl power.” He proceeded to slam the president for getting too “philosophical” and “complex” in his answers to questions, which according to Beck was further evidence of Obama’s femininity.

Referring to Obama’s nuanced approach to the football issue, Beck continued, “You’re a full-fledged woman. I never heard anybody but a woman say that.” He explained that only women are concerned about the dangers of football and “every guy, even me, says ‘relax.’”

Taking a stern tone, Beck said, “Stop being such a chick, Mr. President. Stop it. You’re commander-in-chief. Not chick-in-chief.”

Watch the video, slimy people: it’ll be like looking in a mirror. That’s what misogyny looks like — it’s the gratuitous assumption that you can belittle someone by calling them a chick.

More professional victims causing deep rifts merely by existing

There really isn’t much I can excerpt from this story that won’t trigger folks pretty fucking hard.

So the capsule summary:

Three 15-year-olds start a rock band. They’re really good. They win a local Battle of the Bands. They receive acclaim. But they’re g-g-g-g-g-g-GIRLS. So the misogynist haters start leaving crappy, abusive, and even physically threatening comments on the band members’ Facebook pages. Eventually the abuse gets to be too much for the kids, and they decide not to perform anymore.

The only thing I can tell you that distinguishes this story from the last six I’ve heard like it is that the girls aren’t accused of being “fake geeks” or “rocker wannabes,” but of contravening the precepts of Islam. The haters are imams and grand muftis rather than basement dwelling cheese puff eaters. The band, Pragash Band, is from Kashmir. There are slight differences in catchphrases here and there, and the fact that Pragash Band’s haters are part of the “Put More Clothes On” tendency of the Church Of The Patriarchy, where those I see more often in the US belong to the “Take More Clothes Off” tendency in the pews across the aisle, where the skeptics and atheists are allowed to sit.

The story seems otherwise very familiar.

If I had slightly more coding chops than I do — which is to say “any at all” — I’d put together a web-based quiz game in which you’d be presented with an odious bit of misogynistic abuse, and you’d have to guess the source: Fundamentalist Muslim Ideologue or Western Male Netizen.

It would be a really difficult game.

New vistas in digital quackery

Apparently, computer-based diagnostic algorithms provided cheaply via a smartphone aren’t reliable. Who would have guessed? There’s a slew of new apps available that allow you to take a picture of your weird mole or mysterious skin lesion, and they’ll then scan it and tell you whether you’ve got melanoma or not. You should be wary. When real doctors actually test their competence, the dermatology apps fail miserably.

Dermatologists are less than thrilled. In fact, they say, the apps are worthless. Writing in JAMA Dermatology, a team of physicians from the University of Pittsburgh put four melanoma apps to the test against 188 clinical images—pictures they’d taken of patients’ skin lesions and later determined, via biopsy, to be malignant or benign. How would a machine stack up against a board-certified dermatologist?

Not so well. Of the three auto-diagnosing apps, the best program missed malignant growths 30 percent of the time; a second performed only slightly better than flipping a coin.

One app, instead of using an algorithm, simply forwarded the photo to an accredited dermatologist, who responded with his considered opinion 24 hours later. At five dollars per lesion, this was the most expensive program, though the e-doctor misdiagnosed just one in 53 melanomas.

They’ve got testimonials from users praising the results, which makes me wonder…if your phone told you you didn’t have cancer, how the hell would you know if it was right or not?

It’s the oldest principle of quackery: tell the patient what they want to hear, and they’ll reward you with agreement.

Only a bird

Another feathered dinosaur has been found in China, prompting Ken Ham to dig in his heels and issue denials.

Yet another supposed “feathered dinosaur” fossil has come to light, again in China. (Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell, AiG–U.S., reported on another Chinese fossil of a supposed feathered dinosaur in April 2012) Now, one headline described the fossil as “almost birdlike,” and the authors of the report in Nature Communications note many features the fossil shares with living birds, particularly those that live on the ground. In fact, Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell and Dr. David Menton (AiG–U.S.) both examined the photos of the fossil and the criteria the authors used in classifying the fossil as a dinosaur. They agreed that it is a bird, not a feathered dinosaur.

Oh, really? It’s just a bird? Take a look at this image of Eosinopteryx, and you tell me.

eosinopteryx2

Notice a few things about this animal: it’s got teeth. The forelimbs have clawed digits. It has a long bony tail. It lacks the bony keel that anchors breast muscles in modern birds.

The only thing that might cause you to question its dinosaur nature (and it’s a criterion that’s proving more and more inappropriate) is that lovely gray fringe of feather impressions that surround the whole fossil. And look at those forelimbs! It looks like it has stubby wings. It does not, however, have the skeletal and muscular structure to allow for extended flapping flight, and the wings are way too short for it to have been an adequate flyer.

But Mitchell and Menton and Ham looked at that and said ‘ALL BIRD’. They’re idiots.

Ham goes on: there are no transitional forms, he squeaks, there can be no transitional forms, transitional forms don’t exist…all while looking at a winged, feathered reptile with teeth and claws and a bony tail.

The fossil record doesn’t reveal any kind of dinosaur-to-bird evolution—and it certainly does not show a molecules-to-man evolution. We have no proof of transitional forms, and we won’t. God’s Word says clearly that He created animals and plants according to their kinds (Genesis 1). Through genetic loss and other factors, new species have emerged over time—but birds are still birds and apes are still apes. Nothing in the history of biology has legitimately shown that dinosaurs could develop the genetic information to evolve into birds.

Pitiful. Pathetic. I’d like to see a creationist sit down in front of me with that illustration and try to defend the claim that it’s only a bird.

Godefroit P, Demuynck H, Dyke G, Hu D, Escuillie F, Claeys P (2013) Reduced plumage and flight ability of a new Jurassic paravian theropod from China. Nature Communications 4, 1394. doi: 10.1038/ncomms2389

Tech industry stories

Another woman, another story, another example of bias. Sarah Parmenter has been getting the usual stuff: photoshopped images, sexist remarks, dismissal of her abilities because she’s a woman.

There’s many questions around why there aren’t more females speaking in this industry. I can tell you why, they are scared. Everytime I jump on stage, I get comments, either about the way I look, or the fact that I’m the female, the token, the one they have to sit through in order for the males to come back on again. One conference, I even had a guy tweet something derogatory about me not 30 seconds into my talk, only for me to bring up the point he had berated me for not bringing up, not a minute later – which caused him to have to apologise to my face after public backlash. I’ve had one guy come up to me in a bar and say (after explaining he didn’t like my talk)… “no offence, I just don’t relate to girls speaking about the industry at all, I learn better from guys”. I could write a book on inappropriate things that have been said to me at conferences about girls in the industry so much so, it’s become a running joke with fellow speakers. I know other girls who could also chip in a fair few chapters but, underneath the humour sometimes found in these situations, lies a very real problem.

It’s no great secret that girls are a minority in this industry, you only have to look at the queues for the toilets at any conference, however, it’s forgotten that it’s not about female speakers, it’s about finding female speakers who have enough of a thick skin to want to stand up in front of an audience of twitter-trigger-happy males and public speak. That’s an entirely different kettle of fish. Then on top – when you finally feel comfortable with speaking, you get put into a big black pot and tarnished with the label “same old face”. This happened to me on my third ever speaking engagement, third? I was tarnished as a “same old face”. Since then it’s become water off a ducks back – I’m not going to let a label stop me from developing and growing my speaking skills, I’m by no means perfect and still have a lot to learn. We should be encouraging anyone who shows an aptitude or love for sharing their knowledge with the community.

Yeah, and we’ll just get the usual responses, that she has to toughen up and stop being a professional victim. How about if people stop being professional victimizers, instead?

What I taught today: Axis specification

We began today with chocolate. Always a good thing at 8am, I think — so I brought a candy bar to class. Then I told the students that I loved and respected them all equally and that they all had equal potential, but that I was going to mark just one person as special by giving them that candy bar*. So I asked them how I could decide who should get it, telling them right off that dividing it wasn’t an allowed solution, and that yes, this could be an openly unfair process.

There were lots of suggestions: we could do it by random chance. I could throw it into the middle of the room and let them fight over it. We could analyze everyone’s DNA and give it to the most average person…or the most genetically unusual. I could just give it to the first person to raise their hand, or the person closest to me, or the person farthest from me. We could have a competition of some sort, and the winner gets it. I could give it to the person who wants it most, or who needs it most.

The point I was making is that this is a common developmental problem, that you have a potentially uniform set of cells and that somehow one or a few have to be distinguished as different, and carry out a different genetic program than another set of cells. One cop-out is to invoke mosaicism: that is, they aren’t uniform, but inherit different sets of cytoplasmic determinants that make them different from the very beginning, but that even in that case, these determinants aren’t detailed enough to specify every single cell fate in most organisms. Even with an initial prepattern, you’re eventually going to end up with a field of cells, like the dorsal side of the fly wing, and within that uniform field, some cells will have to be programmed to be epithelial, others to be bristles, others to be neurons. And that means that in every organism, even the most classically mosaic, you’ll reach a point where cells have to process information from their environment and regulate to build differential structures.

And with that I went on to talk about some animals that were judged as being mostly mosaic in character: molluscs, tunicates, echinoderms, and nematodes. Even here, these animals all required complex molecular interactions to build their embryos.

For example, I’d earlier used echinoderms as classic examples of regulative development. You can dissociate them at the 4-cell stage and each blastomere can go on to build a complete embryo. But at the 8-cell stage, when the cleavage plane separates an animal half from a vegetal half, that’s no longer true: the top four cells when isolated are animalized, forming only a ciliated ball, while the bottom four cells are vegetalized, only making a static blob with a bit of a skeleton inside. Clever experiments can quantitatively juggle these cells around, removing just the bottom 4 cells (the micromeres) at the 16-cell stage, or assembling composite embryos with different ratios of the different tiers of cells, and get different degrees of development. Even when you’re discussing an organism in which you’d call the pattern of development mosaic, it absolutely depends on ongoing cell:cell signaling at every step, and the final form is a consequence of interactions within the embryo. It’s a mosaic-regulative continuum.

I also described very superficially the work of Davidson and Cameron on specification events in echinoderms. These interactions can be drawn as a kind of genetic circuit diagram, where what you’re seeing is the pattern of genes being switched on and off. We can describe a cell type as the output of mappable gene circuitry, and we can even identify modules of networks of genes associated with a particular kind of cell, and that we can also see a limited number of genes that mediate interactions.

Next week I promised to start going into more detail, when we start talking about early fly development and axis decisions. The next class we’re actually going to switch gears a bit and discuss Sean Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful.

Slides used in this talk (pdf).

*Yeah, I lied again. I brought enough candy bars for everyone, and after we’d generated a list of ways to share just one, I gave them to everyone. They’ll never trust me again.

The best and worst review of yesterday’s Superbowl

It fits my perception of the event. Tom Shales reviews the Superbowl, and talks about the half-time show, the pregame show, some weird interruption in the game, the announcers, and, of course, the commercials, and nowhere anywhere in there does he talk about the game. I don’t know who played or who won, and I don’t care, and neither, apparently, does Tom Shales. Football teams are just floating corporations whose purpose for existence is to scoop up specially fast meaty people, give them a brief period of pampering and unwarranted glory, and in return, grinds them up and gives them brain damage for the entertainment of the people.

And now the hype surrounding this Superbowl nonsense has grown so huge that it has completely drowned the game. I’m not going to watch it ever, and for that matter, I’m not interested in watching any football game.

Aryan Jesus

This isn’t Thor, it’s Jesus.

aryanjesus

There is a lot of cheesy Christian art that looks like this, and I get the same message from all of it. At worst, it’s freaking racist — these are people trying to draw the Ideal Man, and every time they fit him into the western, north European mold. Most charitably and at the very least, it tells me that Jesus isn’t a historical figure to these people, his reality isn’t a concern, and they need make no effort to put him in a place and time and people. He’s a legend, and so he’s a plastic figure with no strong attachment to history…but he can be freely warped to fit the ideology of the individual.

Either way, I feel no need or desire to worship or even respect a cartoon.

(via Zeno)