Happy Earth Day! For my Earth Day, I’m attending a seminar on Google Earth (totally hot interactive kmz documents await you, lovely readers) and thinking about the environmental effects of racism, socioeconomic interest, and partisan politics here on the US-Mexican border.

The new ever-so-impermeable border fence will definitely stop endangered bighorn sheep and desert frogs in their tracks, though it probably won’t do much about people desperate to feed their families. Though it’s good to recycle and cut down on plastic bags, the really big problems are going to need really big cooperative solutions.

Check out National Geographic’s photos of life along the border fence. Here’s my favorite – a juvenile mountain lion in southern Arizona.

I confess I’ve been alienated by a lot of the “Female scientists ARE SO totally hot!” action. I’ve never cared much for performing femininity, as the humanities kids say. And being more…shall we say…Bette Midler than Bette Davis makes for a  very different experience, both on the internet and in real life. But the foolishness that’s been going around science blog land lately is ridiculous.

Lisa from Sociological Images (one of my very favorite blogs ever) has insight from an unusual source. A while back, she posted this cover from Vogue Magazine in which Judd Apatow’s chubby actors lounge about in body suits. It’s funny because it’s a parody of another Vogue cover with naked ladies, only the guys get to wear clothes. As Lisa says:

I think we would be unlikely to see a similar cover featuring women, even women comedians, because women are allowed to be rich, nice, or funny but they must ALSO be good-looking and fit.  A cover featuring chubby women would JUST be gross.  It wouldn’t be gross and funny.

Being good-looking and fit is ONE way for men to be admire in our society.  Being good-looking and fit is a REQUIREMENT for women to be admired, no matter what else she brings to the table.

So women MUST be attractive – no matter what else they bring to the table. And if a woman is attractive, that is just as important as whatever she’s actually doing or saying. (Hi, Sarah Palin.) Consider the backlash against Gail Trimble, who dominated UK quiz show University Challenge. Nobody could figure out how to talk about a smart woman, so everyone just argued about whether she was sexy or not, or bitchy or not.

But this could not possibly be true in science, right? Except that a brief examination of scientists on TV bears this out. Are there any women on TV with the slightly pudgy, schlubby looks of the Mythbusters guys? I flipped through Discovery Channel’s shows and couldn’t find any, though to be frank it was a tiny sample size since there were barely any women at all. Anyone have a counter example?

This dialogue over sexiness in science makes me think of female choices in Halloween costumes. Little girls can be a cowgirl or a detective or a “Kimono Kutie” (ewwww) but all of the choices are pink.  Women can be a police officer, a referee, or a detective but all of the choices are sexy. The message for women is “You can be anything (even smart!) as long as you’re feminine and cute! Looking good is THE most important thing for a girl or woman.” Frankly, that is also the message that I get from Danica McKellar’s math book and Dora’s makeover.

I think too much emphasis on “smart is sexy” overlooks the ubiquitous societal message that “sexy is everything if you’re female.” That’s why commenters feel they have the right to ogle female bloggers – why should they pay attention to what she is actually saying when everything that society says is important is right there in her picture? When women in the public eye are free to be funny or butch or dorky or even (shock! horror! omg the world is ending!) fat, then Totally Hot will just be another way for female scientists to be.

I’ve written before about why I think discussing population control became a taboo, but I’m glad to say I have never heard anyone arguing that poor children should just die. Disgusting.

But in case you have heard that argument, Hans Rosling is here to explain why it’s wrong. And he also explains why he thinks that a permanent world population of 9 billion is inevitable.

Via Anna and Think or Thwim

The Intersection and Questionable Authority report that the confirmations of Jane Lubchenco (to lead NOAA) and John Holdren (to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy) have been held up in Congress by multiple anonymous holds.

John P. Holdren, nominated to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Jane Lubchenco, picked for undersecretary of Commerce for oceans and atmosphere, had been expected to receive a quick floor vote. They received an amicable confirmation hearing Feb. 12 and plaudits from the science community otherwise.

But Holdren, a Harvard University physicist, and Lubchenco, an Oregon State University marine biologist, may have to undergo an extra round of review, Senate style.

Multiple senators have placed anonymous holds on the science advisers’ nominations, according to John D. Rockefeller IV , D-W.Va., chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, which has jurisdiction over the nominations.

“It’s infuriating,” said Rockefeller, who backs Holdren and Lubchenco’s hiring. “They’re brilliant scientists.”

This is bad because there’s $21.5 billion dedicated to science in the economic recovery package, and these people need to be in place to funnel it to the right sources. Questionable Authority has details on what you can do to get Congress to stop playing politics with critical science funding.

Is talking about overpopulation and the environment really a taboo? Both Emmett Duffy and Rick MacPherson posted yesterday on the population control “elephant in the room.” Rick in particular wrote about his struggle to broach this topic in the context of coral reef conservation.

I think that this topic is so hard to discuss because it is inextricably entwined with racism and coercion. In a more extensive post a couple months ago, I outlined the unpleasant history of population control movements and detailed how they have fallen disproportionately on poor women of color. Historically, white women have had to fight for the right to limit their fertility, while women of color have had to fight for the right to be fertile.

Just last week, the Hampshire College Population and Development Program recently released a multimedia presentation (available as a free download) called “Stop the Blame: Population Control Imagery (1933-2008).” Though I don’t agree with much of the commentary – the author seems to think that overpopulation problems don’t exist at all – it is a damning indictment of the use of people of color, particularly South Asians and Africans, as the literal poster children of overpopulation. I lost count of the number of posters that used crowded Indian street scenes or Indian mothers with babies to illustrate how These People Must Be Stopped. (As Madhu pointed out a while ago, what IS it about Delhi? Why doesn’t anyone use pictures of Times Square to illustrate crowding?)  And there were also many, many disembodied brown pregnant bellies. As the author, Binta Jeffers, says:

Photographs of pregnancy, birth and breast-feeding are framed as proof of social malaise. Depicting pregnant women of color as evidence of population crisis reinforces racist assumptions about reproductive choices in the global South and the United States. A visual logic emerges– fertility and birth are crises which should be prevented.

My last blog post on this lead to a phone discussion with John Feeney, the organizer of the Global Population Speak Out. I have great respect for John – it shows real class to call up a random blogger up in order to have a polite argument. I do agree with him that talking about human population shouldn’t be verboten, and I appreciate that he added an explicite repudiation of past abuses in the GPSO’s goals. But he saw this repudiation as a “disclaimer” and I see it as inextricably linked to any discussion of population control, particularly with historically disadvantaged and abused populations.

As I wrote in my last post, the best way to reduce population growth is by empowering women. (Check out this data from the Population Reference Bureau.). And access to affordable contraception is critical to that goal. But focusing on contraception alone is not helpful – as Jeffers says:

We need to ensure that resources directed towards women’s empowerment and reproductive health are really providing the services women want and are not part of a narrow, target-driven population agenda.

Environmentalists that speak out on population control without a knowledge of its history risk their messages getting stuck in a big pasty fog of white privilege. If environmentalists want to be good allies and include diverse viewpoints, I think we need to move beyond Depo Provera and find a way to define women’s empowerment as a key environmental issue.

Thanks to Other Miriam (or am I the Other Miriam?)  at Feministing for pointing me to Stop the Blame.

Yesterday, in an article with the spectacularly dull headline “Officials and Scientists Debate the Criteria for Rescuing Animals,” the Washington Post summarized the debate over NOAA’s decision not to rescue a group of 16 dolphins in a NJ river. The dolphins swam up the river in the summer, but didn’t leave when the water iced over and the fish left. Three died and the rest have disappeared, either making it back to the ocean or drowning under the ice.

I understand that’s neat to see wild dolphins in the Jersey ‘burbs, and that it’s tough to watch a sympathetic and charismatic animal slowly die. But the natural world isn’t Seaworld with happy Shamu doing happy jumps for happy kids – adorable animals die all the time. Sometime they starve to death because the parents have two chicks and only ever intend to feed one. Sometimes they get swiftly decapitated. Sometimes they get their tongues ripped out by other cute and charismatic animals, and die a slow and horrible death while their helpless mother watches.  If animals die for natural reasons, like if they swam up a river and didn’t leave even though they could have, then that’s the way it goes.

I find it especially insane that David DeGrazia, the chair of George Washington University’s philosophy department, is quote in the WaPo article as saying:

“We should regard them to having the same moral entitlements as we have,” DeGrazia said. “Even if they’re not human, we’re talking about individuals who matter a great deal, who are in distress.”

Seriously? So will we start prosecuting male dolphins for kidnapping and rape? Or defending harbor porpoises from being beaten to death by rampaging dolphin mobs?

If you care about dolphins – and I admit that while I profess a distaste for charismatic megafauna, I squeal like, well, a dolphin when they surf our bow wave – you should stop wasting your time yelling at NOAA about its eminently sane marine mammal rescue policy. (NOAA will indeed rescue them if they’re endangered or if the danger is human-caused). I also think that getting tied up in Western imperialist knots over that gory Japanese dolphin hunt is a waste of time – while a couple thousand dolphins are killed every year, bottlenose dolphins are not endangered and it’s just one hunt once a year in one place. That single hunt is hardly going to prompt McDonald’s to start selling Filet-O-Flipper.

Instead, here’s some massive worldwide problems that threaten dolphins everywhere – not just 16 in New Jersey and 2,500 in Japan:

• Extinction. The Yangtze river dolphin is extinct, and the vaquita (a tiny coastal porpoise in the Gulf of California) will be next – unless efforts to keep them from drowning in fishing nets succeed.
• Pollution. Mercury levels in dolphin flesh are so high that the Japanese dolphin hunt might end itself. That’s  good for those particular dolphins in the short term, but mercury threatens their long-health of marine mammals everywhere. Fight against coal power plants and for renewable energy.
• Entanglement with fishing gear. According to the National Marine Fishery Service, this is the most common way that small marine mammals are killed by humans. Advocate for controlling & eliminating gill nets and drift nets, and for more responsibility in controlling ghost nets.

Of course, these are hard – way harder than helicoptering some soon-to-die dolphins out to sea – and probably wouldn’t make a good movie at Sundance. Such is life. So let those misguided 16 dolphins perish as nature intended, and let’s focus on saving millions more.

Related: The Southern Fried Scientist has a sense of porpoise.

I consider population control to be the albatross of the environment movement. It usually stinks, but we just can’t get rid of it. Recently, the Global Population Speak Out (GPSO) is attempting to de-stank discussions of population control and the environment. The premise of the GPSO is:

What if a large number of qualified voices worldwide, many of whom might not have emphasized the topic previously, were to speak out on population all at once? The strength of numbers might help weaken the taboo and bring population to a more prominent position in the global discussion.

Oh, good, let’s talk about it! Too bad that the GPSO webpage utterly fails to acknowledge the nasty history of population control. The onus of population control has fallen almost exclusively on women who are either ethnic minorities or poor. In the past, the excuse for population control wasn’t the environment – it was preventing the undesirables from breeding. This is NOT ancient history. Radical Doula says it better than I can:

There is a long history of this [forced sterilization] in the United States. In the 1970s, it was discovered that hundreds of Mexican-origin women were being unknowingly sterilized at an LA hospital. They were being told the operation was reversible and given forms they couldn’t read (because they were in english) to sign.

These abuses promoted a campaign by a group called CESA (Committee to End Sterilization Abuse), spearheaded by Dr. Helen Rodriguez-Trias that was able to pass federal guidelines regarding sterilization–requiring forms in the person’s native language, and a waiting period to give consent. Many times these women were being asked if they wanted the procedure while in labor.

Mississippi Appendectomy has a ton of documentation. In fact, the phrase “Mississippi Appendectomy” was popularized by civil right leader Fannie Lou Hamer, who experienced it herself.

Diagnosed with a small uterine tumor in 1961, Ms. Hamer checked into the Sunflower City Hospital to have it removed. Without her knowledge or consent, without any indication of medical necessity, the operating physician took the liberty of performing a complete hysterectomy.

And forced sterilizations continue. In 2007, the Czech Republic was forced to compensate a Gypsy woman sterilized against her will, and hundreds more were probably also sterilized. In 2005, nine mentally disabled women in Canada were compensated for forced sterilizations.

So okay, that’s population control as eugenics. What about population control as environmentalism? Well, it has been just as nasty. Paul Ehrlich, entomologist and author of The Population Bomb advocated “coercion in a good cause.”  As Madhu at Reconciliation Ecology pointed out, Paul Ehrlich’s and David Duke’s (former KKK Grand Wizard) descriptions of Old Delhi in India are near indistinguishable. Can you guess which is which?

Idealistic Youth #1:

“As we crawled through the city, we encountered a crowded slum area. The temperature was well over 100, and the air was a haze of dust and smoke. The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming… People, people, people.”

Idealistic Youth #2:

“Small animals were not the only beings in great abundance. So were people. Along one long sidewalk, I saw hundreds of wooden shelves about the size of a refrigerator lying on their sides. Each served as home for at least one person. Even less fortunate souls lay on the grass or in the brown dirt with a tattered blanket serving as their only shelter. Some had only rags to protect themselves from the elements. About a block from the YMCA, an old man grunted as he squatted and defecated in the gutter. A little further on, a bony couple engaged in mechanical sexual intercourse while two children sat beside them, taking little notice of their parents as they played in the dust. Millions in India live out their lives on the public streets awash in the dried mud. There they are born, and there they bathe, eat, sleep, excrete and copulate. As attested by the teeming population, the one thing they seem to do best is breed.”

More recently, the racism has taken on anti-immigrant tones. In 2004, the Sierra Club was nearly taken over of by an anti-immigration faction that campaigned under the guise of controlling population growth.  (Burned by this, the Sierra Club now won’t even use the phrase “population control.”). Just this year in California, a group called Californians for Population Stabilization ran ads “blaming California’s social, economic and environmental problems on undocumented immigrants.” The ads included a stereotypical Latino gang member smirking for police photos and made-up statistics.

Anti-immigration sentiment persists, as nicely illustrated by this history of the population control taboo, linked to off the GPSO webpage. Reading it in order to understand the taboo, I noticed that the authors use a lot of right-wing buzzwords, like “politically incorrect” in quotes and phrases like “dared not risk appearing to be racially insensitive.” Turns out that the first author, Roy Beck, is an anti-immigration activist whose organization, Numbers USA, appears on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s listing of anti-immmigration groups.

So how does this connect to GPSO?  GPSO says again and again on their website “there exists today a taboo of sorts against public discussion of the population issue” but they never say why. I’ll hazard a guess – it’s a taboo because those who advocate for population control are so often racist. If GPSO wants to lead a global conversation on population control that includes everyone – not just middle class white people – they’ve got to acknowledge population control’s sordid history and explicitly repudiate it.

But I’ll do believe that human population is a factor in environmental decline. And I do want to talk about it. In fact, I’ll call my plan “feminism.”  Check out the data (from Population Reference Bureau):

So no need to fear the population issue taboo. Just add a dollop of legal rights, add some education, throw in some job training and childcare and voila! The birthrate drops!

Dear John McCain,

Please stop using the $3 million study of Montana bear DNA to illustrate out-of-control government spending. Didn’t you claim to support basic research? And not only was the bear study good science, but the scientist running it (a former cheerleader, incidentally) can kick Sarah Palin’s moose-hunting patooty.

Sincerely,
Miriam and Eric

Alaska has voted for gold instead of salmon. The Pebble Mine will be located right on the headwaters of one of the last great wild sockeye salmon runs. The salmon would have run for thousands of years, bringing at least $300 million to Alaska’s economy each and every year, but Alaska has traded them for 40 years of enriching foreign investors. Alaska seems to be hell-bent on becoming Nauru writ large.

The most painful and ridiculous part of the NY Times article was this quote:

“Perhaps it was God who put these two great resources right next to each other,” said John T. Shively, the chief executive of a foreign consortium that wants to mine the copper and gold deposit. “Just to see what people would do with them.”

I expect that God would weep. (I’m not a Christian, but I can Google like one!) From Christian Ecology:

Lev. 25:23-24. The land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants. Throughout the country that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land.

Ezekiel 34:17-18. As for you, my flock… Is it not enough for you to feed on good pasture? Must you also trample the rest of your pasture with your feet? Is it not enough for you to drink clear water? Must you also muddy the rest with your feet?

Luke 16:2,10,13. And He called him and said to him, “What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your stewardship, for you can no longer be steward. He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much; and he who is unrighteous in a very little thing is unrighteous in much. You cannot serve both God and mammon.

Title quote from Shakespeare’s Henry the Fourth.

Mark Powell posted today about a Greenpeace boat that dropped 150 3-ton granite slabs into the North Sea. The slabs are supposed to prevent trawling by catching or breaking the nets. Greenpeace was confident that they didn’t crush anything (which seems like hubris to anyone who has worked on the ocean), but even if that’s true, Greenpeace just put prime invasive species habitat in the middle of a sensitive area.

Invasive species looooove unoccupied artificial habitat. They often aren’t good enough competitors to invade an existing diverse community, but put down a nice blank granite slab and they’ll trash the place. Of couse, ripping up the ocean floor with a trawler ALSO creates a lot of vacant space for invasive species to come in (that may be one of the causes of the tunicate invasion on Georges Bank), but Greenpeace doesn’t have the right to make that judgement by itself. Even environmental restoration projects have to undergo review to weigh possible unintended consequences. Greenpeace’s illegal dumping could conceivably prove to be more damaging to the ecosystem than fishing.

By the way, you know that substantial earthquake that just hit southern California on Tuesday? The moderately strong 5.4?

I MISSED IT! I was out diving from a small boat and couldn’t feel a thing! Oh, my bitterness knows no bounds. I SO wanted to experience a nice, not-too-big-yet-perceptible earthquake.

Despite the enormous flow of money into new solar projects (the free market, trying to work), this has been a rotten 12 months for solar energy. Last year California Sen. Dianne Feinstein led the effort to increase fuel efficiency standards to 35 mpg by 2020, and in the process she dropped provisions that would have extended  tax breaks for solar and wind power development. Still, as the manager of millions of acres of desert land, companies flooded the BLM with applications to construct big solar power projects that could potentially provide enormous quantities of clean electricity for electricity-sucking SoCal, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and the rest of the region.

But today we learn that the Bush administration has placed a moratorium on all new large solar projects on Bureau of Land Management property, which, of course, means millions of acres of desert in the southwest which happen to, you know, get a lot of sunlight. They argue that they need to do an environmental assessment of the impact of large solar projects, which could take up to two years. I can’t be alone when I lean my head out the window and belt out a hearty, “AAARGH!”

OK, look, environmental assessments are a good idea. It’s good to know what damage is being done to property when you take up a new project. But this is Bureau of Land Management here, the single most extractive branch of the federal government.

Consider: Last year, Miriam went on a class camping trip to Anza-Borrego State Park, a protected piece of desert property here in southern California. But it also happens to border property managed by BLM. All night, Miriam had to listen to the roar of ATVs tearing up the desert landscape (they also were shooting their rifles in the air for no apparent reason, but that’s neither here nor there).

Hunting for more thoughts on the BLM, I contacted a friend of mine, Chris Len,  the legal director for an Oregon-based environmental advocacy group called the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, and a colleague of his, Joseph Vaile, who is the campaign director.

They told me a tale of  BLM and Kelsey-Whiskey Timber Sale. The 530 acres along the Rogue River and its tributaries in the Zane Grey Roadless Area consist mostly of  old-growth forest managed by the BLM. In 2003, the BLM proposed logging it (Vaile says logging old-growth almost never happens in the 48 contiguous states).  In this instance they did an environemntal review, and they invited, as the law requires, public comment. KSWild’s webpage says that of the 144 comments on the project, 140 opposed it, or at least proposed doing it on a smaller scale.  The BLM reviewed the project and decided instead to massively expand it. A staffer at the KSWild called the BLM to ask why they made that choice, and the person said that it was because the comments were so negative, they wanted to be able to build future roads in other areas without going through another comment process.

This is the culture of the suddenly protective BLM.

“People, like environmentalists and other groups, have been fighting them tooth and nail to get them to do environmental reviews for years,” Vaile said. “Now suddenly they think they need to review solar energy projects? Did they think of that themselves, or did someone encourage them to do this?”

Well, this is the Bush administration, right? And in the last month, the Bush administration has turned up the volume on one of its favorite songs, the “Drill in Protected Areas Waltz“.   If the solar projects in the southwest succeed in producing a lot of clean power, then there won’t be any need to drill  or off the coast of Florida, now will there? So, the cynic in me says, they ordered the BLM to create the moratorium.

Perhaps you’ll all join with me now when I say again, with feeling this time, “AAAARGH!”

[Thanks to Scott for passing on the link.]

Broadsheet linked to a Newsweek article on the Nerd Girls, a group of female engineers at Tufts. According to the article, The Nerd Girls are:

challenging the notion of what a geek should look like, either by intentionally sexing up their tech personas, or by simply finding no disconnect between their geeky pursuits and more traditionally girly interests such as fashion, makeup and high heels.

Well, it’s nice that they are trying to recruit more women into engineering, and I hope they have fun building their solar race car. (Cause, dude! Solar race car!) But damn, I think their message sucks. I don’t think nerd girls with dorky glasses are going to think, “Wow! Engineering looks fun, and I can wear 3″ pink heels to work!” I think they’re going to think, “Wow. Engineers look and act just like the popular girls at school who make fun of me, and female engineers seem to be required to be Sex in the City-type hot. And their web site lacks functionality and has no content. *click* Oooh! Ancient Roman D20 up for auction!”

The Nerd Girl message reminds me of that standard movie trope, the hot woman who eats a ton and never exercises yet magically remains thin. (e.g., the Gilmore Girls.) A Sexy Lust for Steak is supposed to demonstrate bold nonconformity while never actually not conforming (by being chubby, for example.) The Nerd Girls seem to be cut from the same cloth – the sexy fashion thing is supposed to demonstrate that they’re different from those Other Really Nerdy Ugly Girls while they still conform to societal expectations to be hot above all else. This is not a nerd revolution, it’s a permutation of “Just be yourself! Ummm…as long as yourself is perky and thin.”

Then again, maybe I’m not being fair. Maybe I should pay more attention to fashion and footwear. After days and days of pondering Vogue and watching Sex in the City, I believe that I’ve hit upon the perfect outfit. Knee-high boots, distressed jeans, fashionably draped coat – soon oceanographic fashion will TAKE PARIS BY STORM! (erm, hopefully not literally.) Can I join the Nerd Girl reality show now?

Greg F, quite fairly, called me out for criticizing “The Big Bang Theory” before seeing an episode. Last night, I finally had the time and internet speed to watch two full episodes. In an utterly unsurprising turn of events – DO NOT WANT. The nerds are the standard nerd-stereotypes: there’s a horny nerd, a lovelorn nerd, a socially aloof nerd, and a South Asian nerd. (Notice that the South Asian character needs no actual personality traits other than a funny accent.)

The hot blonde neighbor character is hot! She has boobies! She likes parties and fun! She bribes the horny nerd by telling him how to get into her “easy” friends’ pants. Every girl needs a friend who will sell her insecurities (in the show, the friends were a formerly overweight girl and a girl who hated her father) to the highest bidder!

There is a brief and actually funny scene with a female grad student (played by Sara Gilbert from “Roseanne”), but all in all the show is indeed about nerdboys drooling awkwardly over unattainably hot women. In other words, having seen the show, I stand by my former opinion. Two episodes (yes, yes, df=1) may not be a good sample size, but I really cannot bear to waste more of my life being mildly irritated and very, very bored. As Ny said on the last post: “I was going to give it a Revise & Rewrite, but no, this is just a Rejection.”

UPDATE: I saw two episodes.

Catching up on my journals, this Science Magazine fluff interview (sorry, subscription only) with experimental particle physicist David Saltzberg caught my eye. Dr. Saltzberg is the science advisor to the TV show The Big Bang Theory, in which *gasp* nerdy male physicists nerdily woo *double gasp* their sexy and unattainble blond bombshell neighbor. He’s pretty defensive about criticism that the show is sexist:

Most of the show’s detractors, he notes, have never seen a whole episode. Prady stresses that The Big Bang Theory means no ill will. “If the scientific community is concerned with how we depict them, be gentle and be patient,” he says. “We are you; we love you.”

Ok, I’ve never seen an episode, but I might just based on this challenge. Still, no matter how he spins it, there’s nothing new about the male-geek-chases-popular-hot-girl trope. And I, for one, am really sick of it. Clearly, Saltzberg does not understand how condescending this is:

Saltzberg views the show as a tool for science education: PBS’s NOVA with rim shots. During an awkward date, Leonard gets an olive to rotate inside a glass–and corrects Penny, and likely most viewers, that centripetal, not centrifugal, force explains the trick.

This may say “physics is cool,” but it also strongly says that “men do the science, women are the pretty.” There’s just as much gender indoctrination as science education in that scene. In the words of the inimitable Zuska, I puke on The Big Bang Theory’s shoes.

I am bit raw on this, having just been accosted by a drunk American tourist who accused me of computing on my vacation. When I explained that I was, in fact, a (baby) marine biologist at work, he laughed uproariously and said, “Yeah, and I’m a NASA rocket scientist!” while walking away.

So many of our problems would be solved (and our lives made more interesting) if people were sequential hermaphrodites. (Much credit to Ursula Le Guin for that idea, of course.)

A monkey is not a good solution to empty-nest syndrome. No, not even if your monkey is in $500 clothes.

Many self-described “monkey people” don’t dare call them pets. They are playfully referred to as “monkids” and reared in a world of pierced ears, monogrammed clothes, a seat at the dinner table and their own bedrooms.

Oh, except for when they become violent at sexual maturity.

Little Buddie went everywhere with one couple, including trips to sit on a mall Santa’s lap. When Buddie started biting, though, neither owner felt safe, Bagnall said. A biting attack by the second monkey, Vinny Jr., sent his owner to the hospital.

Some owners go to great lengths to force their critters to behave, Bagnall and animal-rights activists said. Some pull out the animals’ teeth. One monkey arrived at Jungle Friends with a clipped tail — because it got in the way of diapering. Others come in with health problems stemming from too much junk food and not enough sun.

I was going to make this a funny entry – because, hey, “monkids” is hilarious. But then I started to get mad. Just think all the good these disturbed people could have done if they spent all that time and energy on foster children instead of traumatizing a monkey.

There’s abundant evidence that monkeys treated like people end up as poorly socialized, mentally ill monkeys. A book just came out about Nim Chimpsky, the chimp who was raised in a New York brownstone due to a bet with Noam Chomsky. Guess what? The chimp came to a sad end, still not human. Likewise, the chimps used in show business are raised like people, but only have a few years of cuteness before they become too aggressive and are sent away to do they best they can at learning how to be chimps. (Here’s a This American Life segment on a chimpanzee sanctuary for them.) “Monkids” should absolutely be outlawed.

As if you needed another reason to have a giant brain-crush on NPR’s Peter Sagal. Read this amazing rant on the new subplot of “Horton Hears a Who,” in which the 96 daughters of the mayor of Whoville sit around while the one son learns and grows and saves the day. (I suppose this is the opposite of the vanishing female bees in Bee Movie.) Sagal’s whole rant is fantastic, but here’s the best part:

We got into the car outside the cinpeplex and I was quite in lather, let me tell you. How come one of the GIRLs didn’t get to save Whoville? I cried.

“Yeah!” said my daughters.

“And while we’re at it, how come a girl doesn’t get to blow up the Death Star! Or send ET home? Or defeat Captain Hook! Or Destroy the Ring of Power!”

“That’s rotten!” cried my daughters.

“How come Trinity can’t be the One who defeats the Matrix!” I yelled.

“What are you talking about?” they said.

“You’ll find out later,” I said. “But here’s one: how come a girl doesn’t get to defeat Lord Voldemort!”

“Well, wait a minute, Papa,” they said. “None of us would want to mess with him.”

I took their point. But I still wanted to grab that fictional, silly mayor of Whoville by his weirdly ruffled neck, and say, you see those 96 people over there? Those girls, those women, those daughters? You know what they’re saying to you, every minute of every day that you waste thinking about anything else?

They are shouting at you. They are shouting:

“We are here! We are here! We are here!”

Oh, how I hate the lack of decent female characters in movies and many books. Though I think the world of scifi has much improved since I was a wee geek, I used to get all depressed by Lucy not being allowed to fight in the “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” Eowyn getting all mushy and becoming a healer at the end of LOTR, and even had a small Anne McCaffrey-related existential crisis in 6th grade when I realized that I didn’t WANT to ride a lame golden non-fire-breathing dragon & run the Weyr, I wanted my dragon to breathe fire, dammit.

So go Peter Sagal for demanding faces for those poor faceless 96 daughters. Maybe next time one of them will get to go Balrog-hunting or at least elephant-chatting.

Via Feministe

The Department of Homeland Security has a crack team of highly trained…science fiction writers. They’re called SIGMA, and according to National Defense Magazine, they are a “fixture at Department of Homeland Security science and technology conferences.”

My first thought was – great! Who knew that DHS was so concerned about avoiding the perils of a techno-dystopia? In my fevered imaginings, the panel included China Mieville, Neal Stephenson, Ursula Le Guin, and perhaps even Octavia Butler from beyond the grave.

Hah. Beneath my crusty exterior, I am apparently a foolish idealist. Because the members of SIGMA don’t want to avoid  a 1984-esque scenario – they aspire to it. Here’s Larry Niven on health care:

Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants.

“The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren’t going to pay for anything anyway,” Niven said.

Or how about Jerry Pournelle (who I’ve never heard of) on the joys of mob rule?

Pournelle said that once mobile phone technology and the devices tacked on them to take pictures and record video become more ubiquitous, then ordinary citizens will be empowered to take security into their own hands — a prediction some have said already has come to pass.

Fortunately, it seems like these Big-Brother-loving sycophants are their own worst enemy.

The 45-minute panel discussion quickly deteriorated as federal, local and state homeland security officials, and at least one congressional aid, attempted to ask questions, which were largely ignored.

Instead the writers used their time to pontificate on a variety of tangentially related topics, including their past roles advising the government, predictions in their stories that have come to pass, the demise of the paperback book market, and low-cost launch into space.

David Brin, keeping on the topic of empowering citizens with mobile phone technology, delivered a self-described “rant” on the lack of funds being spent to support citizen reservists to back up the military, homeland security officials and first responders in times of crisis.

“It is impossible for you to succeed without us!” he shouted at the assembled officials, while banging his fist on the table and at one point jumping off his chair to wave a mobile phone in their faces.

Let’s hope that the Feds don’t consult Orson Scott Card on gay issues or Dave Sim on women.

Via Boing Boing

I’ve been looking forward to 21 for a while – it’s a movie about MIT students gaming blackjack tables at Vegas. The true story is chronicled in the book Bringing Down the House.  Now, I expected the actors to be way hotter than 99.999% of MIT students, because beating people with the hot stick is what Hollywood does. But I didn’t really expect them to sink so low as to cast a white dude as the East Asian team leader. As ultrabrown says,

Are you kidding me? A movie about math, MIT and gambling, and the lead was made white? Have you ever seen the pai gow tables in Vegas? And this after the success of Harold and Kumar. One step forward, two steps back.

Via Racialicious

Look what I found in the spam filter. Oceana, an ocean conservation nonprofit, has been posting that exact same comment, word-for-word, all around the blogosphere. Check out this google search. On the heels of the poorly received “edgy” Stinky Fish campaign from World Wildlife Fund (Blogfish has the story: 1, 2), is Oceana engaging in cutting-edge Web 2.0 marketing or are they dirty, dirty spammers?

I’m leaning towards dirty spammers, myself. The amount of self-promotion in that comment leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Also, virtuous though the cause may be, I think Oceana is setting a dreadful precedent. If the amount of paper mail I get from environmental non-profits is any indication, they are world-class address-sellers & spammers – I can only imagine the sheer quantity of comment spam that would spew out if they decide that this is the way to reach people. In my opinion, comment spam is NOT the best way to reach blog readers, but it is the best way to alienate sympathetic bloggers, many of whom are conservation’s most vocal allies.

[Update: For more on abortion as a human right, see Are Women Human?" on Pandagon.]

Today is the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. NARAL is celebrating with Blog for Choice Day. Since I believe that having a choice about whether to be pregnant is a critical human right, here’s my contribution.

One of the hoary old tactics of anti-choice activists is to equate abortion with murder. They claim that killing a fertilized egg, no matter how old, is the same as killing a toddler or an adult. So the argument over abortion has been about when life begins – is it Sperm Magic (the moment an egg is fertilized) or is it “quickening” (when movement can be felt) or is it birth itself?

Since nobody can objectively determine the beginning of life, there can be no compromise. That is, IF anti-choice activists really, truly think abortion is murder. But they don’t.

This truly fantastic chart from Alas, a Blog opened my eyes. It lists actual policies proposed by anti-choicers, and whether it is consistent with abortion=murder…or whether it is consistent with punishing women who have sex.

Say goodbye to those delicious Old Bay spiced crabs – Chesapeake blue crabs are at historic lows. They are only at a third of their 1993 population. Mind you, this is not the usual comparison to pre-industrialized fishing populations, say from the 1950s – crabs have declined two-thirds in only 14 years.

And why is this? Certainly the incredible pollution of the Chesapeake is a factor. The sewage of much of the mid-Atlantic cities, chicken and hog farms, and the chemical lawns of countless subdivisions all run off into the Bay, causing oxygen depletion and massive dead zones. But you need to read deep into this Washington Post article to get to another shocking reason: the watermen are targeting spawning females.

Now, fishing is a hard life. I know they’ve got boat loans and house loans and families and everything. But catching females on their way to spawn? That is not only madness, it’s a dishonorable refusal to take care of their own livelihood. I don’t think they should get any governmental help or bailouts until they implement some kind of sane limits (similar to the notching of female lobsters in Maine). Until they can play nicely with the Bay, let them go bankrupt.

Via blogfish

Even places that most people think of as “natural” aren’t. The New England forest was clear-cut only 100 years ago, the Alaskan wilderness is managed for game (which means killing wolves), the southern California kelp forests are denuded of otters, abalone, and big fish, and on and on. So when a truly natural place is found, wouldn’t it behoove us as a species to protect it, if only to say, “Here is one place in the world that does not reflect us?”

Yeah, right.  Melting sea ice recently uncovered two vast canyons in the Bering Sea, home to slow-growing deep sea corals, crystalline barrel sponges, crinoids, baby king crabs, and on and on. Hard-bottom habitat is scarce in the deep sea, so these are special places. But of course the fisheries eager to trawl for valuable groundfish like rockfish and sable.

I don’t have an inherent problem with fishing – I love seafood. But I have a serious problem with shredding delicate, rare creatures hundreds of years old. Trawling devastated the ocean floor – it’s the equivalent of clear-cutting a forest to flush out a couple deer. Worse, it’s short-sighted. Trawling destroys the very habitat that nurtures commercial species. If all the three-dimensional corals and sponges are ripped up, there’s no hiding place for baby king crabs or tiny salmon.  Check out these before-and-after trawling photos collected by the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition.

But, since fisheries are a hugely powerful lobby, the National Marine Fisheries Service claims that the Bering Sea canyons are not “habitats of particular concern” and has no plans to protect them. Apparently we indeed must leave our mark everywhere.

While I’m on the topic of “wrecking beautiful creatures with heavy objects,” Deep Sea News has a great series on anchor damage on the Saba Bank in the Netherlands Antilles. Here’s a photo of what an tanker anchor does to a coral reef.  And here’s two underwater movies. Remember that coral takes hundreds of years to grow – even those sponges are probably 50 years old.

A quick follow up to my previous rant on Seinfeld’s Bee Movie. The movie is getting so-so reviews. And Dana Stevens of Slate picks up on the “Hey! Worker bees aren’t male!” issue (though not on the actual fate of honeybee males.)  While waiting for a non-biologically-egregious bee movie, I’m going to read Clan Apis.

Between skinnier and skinnier celebrities and fatter and fatter everyone else, I expect our culture to explode in a fiery rain of fad diets and rib bones any day now. Today’s news is a classic example of the perfect fat-storm engulfing the nation. Essentially, everyone hates fat people, even as more and more people become obese.

Though obesity is a health issue, the dialogue is a finger-shaking moral one. If you are fat, you are slovenly and bad. Let me tell you how disgusting you are, and then you will want to lose weight! In this article, the researchers seem to think that there is insufficient social pressure to lose weight. I highly doubt telling someone how repulsive they are makes them want to overhaul their lifestyle.

There are plently of massive social sanctions against obesity – in fact, I got the above article from Shifting Baselines, who saw fit to illustrate their point by contrasting a John Singer Sargent (I think) painting with an actual photo of a real woman, held up to be scorned. Clearly, there is plenty of social sanction against obesity when it is ok to post an obese person’s photo to your Serious Science Blog for public mockery. [EDIT: In response to my comment, Shifting Baselines changed the photo to a more anonymous one.]

Finally, remember my post a while back on how BMI does not really correlate with what we think of as fat? NPR reports that your friendly corporate overlords are ready to use your health (and that of your children) to reward or punish you.

Companies are cracking down on the health of their employees. IBM recently said that starting next year it will pay employees $150 if they sign up their kids for a program to fight childhood obesity.

Clarian Health recently revised controversial plans to penalize workers for smoking, having high blood pressure, or body mass index over a certain limit.

The moves are part of a trend among a growing number of employers to monitor their workers’ health. After all, it costs more to insure smokers and overweight people.

Now, in my happy-land everyone is healthy and active, and a certain degree of obesity is usually incompatible with that. But this moralizing has got to stop. It’s making everybody insane. I mean, is this how people really eat? Obsessing about food all the time, doing every fad diet, and eating all the highly processed but “low-cal” food under the sun?

I think that half our problems would be solved if people ate only real food. If you don’t know what an ingredient is – sulfur dioxide, anyone? – don’t eat it. I’m fully aware of the class implications here – preparing food takes time, fresh ingredients cost money, etc. – but don’t you think that subsidizing healthy food is cheaper than subsidizing diabetes? Or worse, docking people’s pay?