My mouth literally dropped open when I read this article on the “gender bending” birth control pill that stops periods.
It’s unclear whether women will embrace this new pill, which contains the same formulations of estrogen and progestin used for birth control pills for decades, but its arrival marks yet another step toward the blurring of the genders.
As 21st century women dominate the universities and continue to climb the executive ladder, and metro-sexual men explore their feminine side, it’s harder to define what it means to be a woman.
If being a woman doesn’t mean being discriminated against, bleeding every month whether you want to or not, and having a monopoly on caring what you look like, what DOES it mean? I’m having an identity crisis here.
(H/T Amanda.
Congratulations to me - I took my last final exam of my second year on Saturday!
I don’t think I’m going to count myself as halfway through yet, though. For the next two and a half weeks, I’ll be studying for Step 1 of the US Medical Licensing Exam, more commonly known as “the boards.” After that I’ll go visit Cleveland and celebrate.
Today I’m studying biochemistry, starting with nutrition. I just took a break to read some news articles, and came across this (via BoingBoing), in which one of the congresspeople doing the food stamp challenge had his peanut butter and jelly confiscated by the TSA:
You aren’t going to believe this, but all I have left is cornmeal.
I was doing SO well! I had everything rationed out perfectly and knew that I was going to be able to stretch my food out until the end. That was of course, until the TSA decided to step in….
Sure enough the very nice TSA agent explained to me the 3-1-1 regulations for liquids. … He politely put the peanut butter and jelly to the side, closed my bag and gave it back to me. I was too astonished to talk. I took my bag and walked towards the gate thinking about the 4 or maybe 5 meals that she had taken from me. What am I going to do now? It’s not like I can just go to Safeway and grab another jar. I have .33 cents and a bag of cornmeal to last today and tomorrow.
My reaction: He’s going to get pellagra! It’s a deficiency in niacin, also known as vitamin B3. Historically it’s been associated with eating a corn-predominant diet, though I believe now corn is actually treated to make niacin bioavailable (and you wouldn’t get the disease from a few days of living on cornmeal anyway). The classic presentation is the three D’s: diarrhea, dermatitis, and dementia. I love when I get to apply what I’ve learned.
Nerdity aside, this is ridiculous:
I’ve been laughing about this all day, it’s one of those funny little “Murphy’s law” moments you have to take with a bit of humor. I’d like to thank the TSA for doing an exceptional job protecting our nation’s airports and allowing me to illustrate that not even Congressmen get any special treatment at the airport.
I guess the starvation is getting to his brain, because I don’t see any other way he could seriously believe that the nation is any safer because the TSA took away an elected official’s sandwich ingredients.
I knew I had too many cookie recipes to bake each and every one. So like any good geek, I averaged the recipes to make the best cookie recipe ever, or what I call a Mean Chocolate Chip Cookie. Get it? Mean? Ha ha ha.
It gets funnier. And I think I might actually make these cookies!
I don’t have anything to say about high apartment rents in NYC but I loved this part:
Students on tight budgets find it especially tough to find housing. Last fall, Kate Harvey, a part-time nanny and a junior at N.Y.U., and eight friends saved on rent by camping out in vacant offices at Michael Stapleton Associates, a downtown explosive-detection security firm. For nearly three months, they told the guards at 47 West Street that they were interns, even as they trudged in near midnight or pattered through the lobby at 10 a.m. in pajamas and slippers.
Ms. Harvey’s father, George Harvey, who is the chief executive of Michael Stapleton Associates, had lent them the space, which included two kitchens and two baths, after his company moved into a new office before the lease on its old one expired.
They sneaked furniture into the 11th floor on the freight elevator, squeezed three beds into the former chief executive’s office and turned filing cabinets into clothing drawers. One student pitched a tent. They brought their cat, Sula, past the front desk. They knew pets were allowed, they said, because the company had allowed bomb-sniffing dogs.
While most of the students who were interviewed said that they came from families that were fairly comfortable financially, they said that area rents were so high that they could not afford both housing and tuition.
“It was nine girls and a cat,” Ms. Harvey said, sipping on steamed milk in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse.
That’s kind of adorable. I can’t help thinking of my college-student sisters; it seems like the kind of thing Ellen would do!
Tim convinced me that I should start using a newsreader, so while I’ve been procrastinating, I mean taking study breaks, I’ve been setting up an account at Bloglines. It does make it a lot faster to keep up with my regular reads, especially those (coughScienceBlogscough) that load really slowly. And it’s so easy to add new subscriptions! I think that might end up outweighing the time savings by encouraging me to follow many more blogs.
This recent NY Times article, A Split Emerges as Conservatives Discuss Darwin, had me rolling my eyes.
First of all, I find it a bit strange that the author followed the conservatives’ lead in referring to the theory in question as Darwinism. Leaving out direct quotes and references to social Darwinism, I count 12 uses of “Darwinism” and similar phrasings, with 8 uses of “evolution” or “natural selection” (three of those were in the same sentence as “Darwinism” and presumably chosen to avoid repetition). I have no objection to using a variety of phrases, and “Darwinism” isn’t particularly wrong, since the guy was, after all, brilliant and current theory bears great resemblance to what he came up with. But the current theory is generally known as “evolutionary theory” (with natural selection being one piece of it). So I don’t understand why that phrase wouldn’t be used, especially to provide some variety given that the conservatives quoted almost invariably use the eponym.
Second and more importantly, it drives me crazy that so many prominent thinkers appear not to have a basic understanding of philosophy. I was fully able to grasp the is/ought problem when I read Hume in high school; I think that people who make a living pontificating on the relationship of science and politics should educate themselves on it.
Mr. West made a similar point, saying you could find justification in Darwin for both maternal instinct and for infanticide.
It is true that political interpretations of Darwinism have turned out to be quite pliable. Victorian-era social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer adopted evolutionary theory to justify colonialism and imperialism, opposition to labor unions and the withdrawal of aid to the sick and needy. Francis Galton based his “science” of eugenics on it. Arguing that cooperation was actually what enabled the species to survive, Pyotr Kropotkin used it to justify anarchism.
It’s certainly true that an understanding of science can inform policy decisions, but it’s important to understand that what science can tell us involves how things are now, how they were in the past, and how they got from there to here. It may be able to make predictions about what will happen if we make certain changes, though it should also remind us that such predictions are often wrong because the real world is complex. It has nothing whatsoever to say about how things ought to be.
This confusion exists on both the pro- and anti- evolutionary theory sides. I think Darwin would be shocked to learn that Mr. West believes his theory provides “justification” for maternal instinct and infanticide. The theory may be able to explain why those things exist, but it’s silent on their moral status. Then, Mr. Arnhardt thinks that “human nature” is a reason to push policies like an all-male military or traditional social sex roles. He’s making the added mistake of believing that because certain trends (like males being more powerful) evolved in the past, they must continue to be helpful now. A better understanding of the theory would show that fitness depends on the current environment; now that for humans, physical strength is dwarfed in importance compared to attributes like intelligence, it’s not at all clear that males will continue to be dominant or that traditional divisions of labor will even make sense.
Thankfully, the article does point out that “nature is morally neutral” and cite writers who understand this. John Derbyshire, whatever his other failings may be, is doing good work:
As for Mr. Derbyshire, he would not say whether he thought evolutionary theory was good or bad for conservatism; the only thing that mattered was whether it was true. And, he said, if that turns out to be “bad for conservatives, then so much the worse for conservatism.”
A Simple Need, All Too Often Unmet
I’ll never forget what I saw years ago from my Times Square office window. It was not yet theater time and all the nearby restaurants had signs saying “Restrooms for customers only.” A well-dressed woman standing near Shubert Alley had an accident in the middle of the sidewalk and collapsed in tears in her companion’s arms.
No one should have to suffer such humiliation. The expression “When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go” is more often true than not. But where?
I am so glad there are people out there pushing for more access to public toilets. When I went to Germany as a high school student, I remember being shocked at how hard it was to find a restroom (oases: department stores and train stations, both of which do require payment). Until fairly recently, I thought it was another manifestation of how the Germans have evidently adapted to require less water than Americans (see also: no water fountains, rare free water at restaurants, and only beer comes in large sizes when you’re dining out). Once I started spending more time in American large cities, though, I realized that we have a problem too.
The author of the article lists some suggestions for finding restrooms while you’re out and about. Her experience generally lines up with mine, although I’ve actually been thwarted at a McDonald’s (in San Francisco, where we also found one of the public toilets she mentions and couldn’t get it to open up). In general, though, the only reason I ever patronize McDonald’s is the fact that they have toilets (I do always buy something once I’ve taken care of needs). And I have to say, one of the major pluses about the recent expansion of relatively upscale chain stores is that they almost always have bathrooms. Target, Barnes and Noble, and Starbucks have all saved me from possible embarrassment more than once.