Sunday, August 2, 2015

Study Notes: Jul 26-Aug 1, 2015: "Sex & Sexuality in the 19th Century"

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading in this time: 
I planned on reading a post by Matt Walsh. Then I saw that it was written by Matt Walsh. I decided to not waste my time or give him another link.
Also check out: 
Homework for the future:
  • Go through at least five entries in in my "P Articles" bookmark folder. Let's go with: (1) "A Neocon Bible: What Would Jesus Say?"; (2) "An Aging God"; (3) "What are Jinns exactly made up of?"; (4) "What are Jinn or Spirits"; (5) "What's a Bodhisattva?"
  • Read the posts linked to by "Responses to the Anti-Reactionary FAQ.". Eventually. 
  • Still on the to-do list: studying the Austrian School of Economics.
  • Finish the reading for "Notes to: Anarchy: Never Been Tried?"
  • Finish the reading for "Notes to 16 Articles on Writing"
  • Read Fenrir's Shrine. 
  • Also on the to-do list: All of those themes that I decide I want to play with, and cool bits that attract me, and things like that? Let's get systematic about that, put them into a single document (might be public, might not) and work with at least one of them every week. Systematic. Systematic. I do it best when I do it systematically. 
  • Also, don't forget to flesh this section out a bit more with goals in general, and maybe include a section on which of those goals were accomplished since the last update.

"Why Germany Has It So Good"
  •  "In his new book, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?, Thomas Geoghegan makes a strong case that European social democracies-- particularly Germany--have some lessons and models that might make life a lot more livable. Germans have six weeks of federally mandated vacation, free university tuition, and nursing care." 
  • "You've heard the arguments for years about how those wussy Europeans can't compete in a global economy. You've heard that so many times, you might believe it. But like so many things, [sic: unnecessary comma] the media repeats endlessly, it's just not true." 
  • Thomas Geoghegan: "Since 2003, it's not China but Germany, that colossus of European socialism, that has either led the world in export sales or at least been tied for first. Even as we in the United States fall more deeply into the clutches of our foreign creditors--China foremost among them--Germany has somehow managed to create a high-wage, unionized economy without shipping all its jobs abroad or creating a massive trade deficit, or any trade deficit at all. And even as the Germans outsell the United States, they manage to take six weeks of vacation every year. They're beating us with one hand tied behind their back."
  • *Thomas: "For a while the bubble of casino capitalism in the US and the UK led to an allocation of capital into the US and UK looking for hot returns. Since the collapse of casino type capitalism in 2008, money has shifted back where it should have been in the first place, to the virtuous economies of the world like Germany, based in manufacturing." 
  • *Thomas: "The Germans had a certain amount of schadenfreude about the whole thing. They're basically a very pessimistic people by temperament, and when they saw a world debacle that they weren't responsible for, they actually became a little more upbeat. They had what they call a good recession. The German government was very quick off the mark, and immediately put in place what they called kurzabeit. Through this short work-week program, the government paid people to stay on the job when they otherwise might have been let go... When the economy recovered, there was no incentive to hold off hiring because the people were already on the job. Their unemployment is now significantly lower than ours and the economy is booming." 
  • *Thomas: "Part of Europe is in trouble to the extent--and only to the extent--that it's involved in the American model. Those countries most resistant to the American model are doing fine." 
  • *Thomas: "To quote a wonderful line from the Lampedusa novel, the Leopard: as the old order is collapsing, the Sicilian aristocrat says to his young prince, 'We have to change so that everything remains the same.' How do you change social democracy so that you preserve it, and maybe even create an opportunity to expand it in a year or two when the wheel of fortune turns again?"
  • *Thomas: "Nobody knows who's going to be laid off next. It's all arbitrary. Chainsaw AI could knock down your cubicle door at any time. So everyone has an incentive to stay five minutes longer than everyone else, and that creates anarchy." 
  • *Thomas: "You're shelling out $50,000 in tuition for NYU law school and your counterpart in Europe is getting it for free. How pathetic for the poor European adding nothing to the GDP. In America we're increasing GDP, but dragging down people's standard of living. It's a very perverse system of accounting. You say it's all addition and no subtraction, but it's not even all addition." 
  • *Thomas: "Co-determined boards are mandated at German companies with 2000 employees are more, the global companies that are beating us, although you can have them in other situations. These are maybe more like super boards that don't do as much day-to-day managing as our boards of directors do. It consists one half of people elected by and from the workers, and one half elected by the shareholders. The chairman of the board is selected by the shareholders and has a double vote so that, if there's a tie between the shareholders and the employees, the shareholders win. But it creates a lot of potential influence over how the debate goes... If the shareholders are divided on who should be the next CEO, the clerks get to pick the king." 


"Russia's Terrifying 'Nuke Trains' Will be Roving The Rails By 2018"
  • "Banned under the previous STARTII treaty, but not excluded in 2011's New START treaty, Russia is pulling from its Soviet strategic playbook and reviving the intercontinental missile toting, hiding in plain sight, 'Nuke Train' concept."
  • "The Combat Railway Missile Complex (as the Russians call it) is somewhat akin to a ground-based nuclear ballistic submarine, although it is much less expensive to operate. Its constantly moving nature and 'hiding in plain sight' camouflage represents a survivable, hard to target, land-based nuclear second strike deterrent. The idea is that a portion of the Combat Railway Missile Complex fleet will roam the countryside at any given time, operating among similar looking passenger and cargo trains, thus making continuous satellite tracking by Western powers extremely difficult."
  • "This new railway based missile platform is said to be named 'Barguzin' after the strong eastern wind that blows off Lake Baikal."
  • "The fact that these ICBM toting train cars will look exactly like normal refrigeration cars will make them nearly impossible to track, even by informants on the ground." 
  • "Each of these new Railway Missile Complexes will hold six RS-24s, which are each capable of carrying four Multiple Independently Targeted Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs). This means that each train, of which five are currently planned, could hold 24 thermonuclear warheads, each able to take out a town of its own." 
  • "Russia's renewed interest in Nuke Trains is said to be a response to America's Conventional Prompt Global Strike project, which looks towards a cocktail of hypersonic air-breathing missiles and aircraft as well as possibly ballistic missiles, and even space-based weaponry, to hit a target within an hour, anywhere on the globe." 
  • "A Nuke Train masquerading perfectly as a commercial train would be much harder to detect and can literally hide in plain sight, only transforming moments before launch." 
  • "These capabilities take a lot of money to develop and to sustain and along with Russia's recent investments in long-range aviation, its nuclear submarine force and ground-based nuclear forces, it is a very strong sign that Russia sees there may actually be a need for such a deterrent in the first place." 
  • "After seeing the Kremlin's absurd denials during the Crimea invasion and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, even a manufactured Cold War-like crisis may be yet another tactic in Putin's playbook aimed at maintaining strong nationalist sentiment and popular support for his fiscally failing policies." 

"BDSM Questions, Answered"
  • Answers to five questions posed by C.K. Egbert of Feminist Current. Questions are in red. 
  • How would you teach women that they are owed bodily integrity, freedom from violence, and mutually pleasurable activities if they are also taught that it's normal for sex to be degrading, painful, and non-mutual? 
    • "I want to turn this around into another question: how would you teach women that they are owed bodily autonomy, freedom from domination, and activities they find pleasurable, if they are also taught that those rights only extend to activities no one finds sufficiently gross or incomprehensible?" 
    • "My thoughts here are closely tied to neurodiversity activism. One concept arising from the intellectually and developmentally disabled people's rights movement is dignity of risk... If you're not allowed to make bad choices, you're not actually allowed to make choices. Actual autonomy involves the ability to take risks, to decide what costs you'll accept for what benefits, to make decisions your guardians or peers disapprove of, to make mistakes, to fail, to fuck up. Otherwise it's meaningless."
    • "I think we should, at the very least, default to the position that, when a person's choice is not directly hurting other people, you don't have to like what they choose, you don't have to understand it, you don't have to want it for yourself, but they are making understandable choices given their own life circumstances, and you shouldn't limit their choices without a damn good reason." 
    • "It's pretty hard to draw a hard line between the intentional infliction of damage on one's body that we accept and even approve of, and the intentional infliction of damage on one's body that we pathologize. Therefore, the line shouldn't be drawn around acts, but around the relationship people have to particular acts." 
    • "If someone wants to not work while they're sick but has panic attacks whenever they try to stop, or it's making them unhappy or making it harder for them to reach their goals or harming their relationships, then they have a problem. If someone cuts, and it calms them down and is a useful tool in their emotion-management toolkit and generally improves their life, and they're taking appropriate safety precautions, then they're fine. The best thing is to provide nonjudgmental, harm-reduction information that allows individuals to make the best decisions for themselves." 
  • How do you expect to prosecute and prevent domestic violence when you promote controlling relationships, sexualized abuse, and psychological and physical abuse as part of 'healthy' relationships? 
    • "The context of the relationship is not a minor detail. It is not something you can handwave past. It is not something you can leave out for simplicity. It is literally the entire difference between an abusive relationship and a nonabusive relationship."
    • "Abuse is not a particular set of behaviors... Abuse is, at its core, the act of maintaining power, control, and domination over your partner; hitting is just a popular strategy for doing so."
  • How would you teach men to respect women and want to engage in mutually pleasurable activities if they are also taught that it is sexy to hurt, dominate, and coerce women?
    • "Well, uh, to begin with, I don't support teaching men that it's sexy to hurt, dominate, and coerce women." 
    • "I think one of the great things about the internet is how polymorphously perverse it's allowed human sexuality to be... The faster we get out of this vanilla/BDSM binary where the only alternative to cunnilingus and cuddles is bondage and flogging, the better, I say." 
    • "People in the BDSM community are probably at higher risk of experiencing sexual violence, although it's confusing. However, the BDSM community also has a lot of casual sex. In a monogamous community, Jane Rapist will get married and rape her wife; in a sexual-sex-heavy community, Jane Rapist will rape three, or four, or a dozen sexual partners- greatly pushing up the percent of people who have survived rape." 
  • How do you expect to teach men about affirmative consent when BDSM practices themselves do not embody affirmative consent--including situations where consent in physically impossible?
    • "If we applied the same standards to non-BDSM sex that this question applies to BDSM, we are all going to be celibate for the rest of time. The vast majority of rapes are not BDSM-related. The vast majority of rapes are oral sex, manual sex, anal sex, and PIV, because of the simple fact that most sex is oral sex, manual sex, anal sex, and PIV." 
    • "The author fails to mention that what Millar calls 'shit happens' are technical errors and emotional landmines. While those may have awful emotional and physical consequences, they are clearly not the same thing as actual rape. Millar does not dismiss the consequences of those acts; he compares the effect of an accidentally tripped emotional landmine to a tsunami. He simply points out that it's no one's fault, which is true.[]As someone with a hell of a lot of emotional landmines, the idea that my partner accidentally triggering me is the same as rape is absurd."
    • "Millar is not talking about 'feeling unsafe expressing her feelings'--he would most certainly agree that making someone feel unsafe expressing their feelings so they can't say 'no' to sex is an act of sexual violence. What he's talking about is that for many people BDSM induces an altered state of consciousness."
    • "The idea that nonverbal people can't communicate is regularly used to ignore the preferences and consent of disabled people, and you should not put it in your feminist blog post."
    • "Now, it is a defensible position that it is unethical to knowingly have sex with someone in an altered state of consciousness. Indeed, many people have a similar position with alcohol: if your partner is sufficiently drunk, you shouldn't have sex with them... However, I disagree. I believe that if I say to my partner 'honey, when I'm really drunk, you can have sex with me if you want', and my partner respects my limits and my drunken 'no', then this sex is ethically fine... Riskier? Perhaps. But I don't think it's a risk that it's wrong to knowingly take."
  • How would you prevent emotional and social coercion into these practices? 
    • "I don't think anyone has come up with a satisfying answer about how to prevent emotional and social coercion into sex. But that's the thing--there's nothing special about BDSM. The feeling of being socially coerced into a flogging you didn't want is really not a whole lot different from the feeling of being socially coerced into cunnilingus you didn't want." 
    • "One important step, I think, is to get rid of the bullshit status games around sex... Not being into kink doesn't make you a prude. Not being interested in penis-in-vagina sex doesn't mean you aren't liberated. Not wanting to orgasm doesn't mean you aren't liberated. And not wanting sex at all is perfectly fine- for whatever reason you don't want it." 

"The Quest for an Archaeology of Sea Otter Tool Use"
  • "Sea otter archaeology is ephemeral. Physical records, indicating how past generations of sea otters employed stone as both hammer and anvil--and how they shared this ancient craft--don't exist." 
  • Dora Bito, Zoologist at the University of Oxford: "Tool use is itself rare. Animals like [sea otters], who use percussive stone-tool technology, who pick up a rock and develop the skill to strike things with it, that is even rarer." [brackets original]
  • "Stone-tool technology is of interest to primatologists because it provides the earliest surviving evidence of the beginning of human tool use." 
  • "The ability to use stone as tools is not hardwired. Bearded capuchins are the only monkeys to use stone tools to crack open nuts, and it may take them three years or more to perfect their skill. The same holds true for sea otters. Pups learn how to use tools from their mothers when they are young, but it takes time to develop their techniques to efficiently open prey." 
  • Jessica Fujii, Monterey Bay Aquarium at California: "We see pups pound their paws on their chests without prey, so that behavior seems to be almost instinctive." 
  • Tim Tinker, Western Ecological Research Center at California: "If they don't [use tools by that age] then they won't... and we see no difference with age after that." [brackets, ellipsis original]
  • "A key factor in whether a sea otter becomes a tool user appears to be diet. In the rocky habitat of a kelp forest, sea otters tend to prefer sea urchins. They quickly process these thin-shelled animals by first shoving aside the spines with their paws. Then they bite open the shell and suck out the insides. No urchin specialists use tools to open their spiky prey... Conversely, snail specialists that use tools to crack open their thick-shelled prey ten to apply those tools to all the prey that they eat, even when they bring up urchins or other prey that other sea otters don't use tools for." 
  • Tim Tinker: "You know that old saying, 'If all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail?' If you are a tool user and all you have is a rock, then everything looks like a snail."
  • Tim Tinker: "If you are a young sea otter in California who is eating black turban snails and you are surrounded by a lot of other tool-using snail specialists, then you have a much higher likelihood yourself of learning to use tools. But if you happen to be a young sea otter in southwest Alaska who eats snails and most of the other sea otters you see swimming around are eating urchins and not using tools, then you are much less likely to use tools yourself, even if you are eating just as many snails as that snail eater in California." 
  • "Sea otters show impressive capacities to innovate and improvise. 'Like ripping off a crab's claw and using it to pry open the crab's own shell,' says Tinker. Some sea otters in Monterey's harbor, for example, pound shells against the hulls of boats or ship ladders. And inventive food gathering techniques don't stop at the level of mothers and pups. Sometimes they spread across many sea otters in a region." 
  • "Researchers reveal that tool-using primates bring their food to one site and use both the site and their stones over and over again. In one 2007 study, for example, archaeologists working in Tai National Park in Ivory Coast announced the astonishing discovery of stone tools used by chimpanzees to crack nuts 4,300 years ago. The tools show use and wear patterns consistent with stone tools used by modern chimps to crack nuts, indicating that this behavior has been transmitted over more than 200 generations." 
  • "Contrary to popular belief, sea otters do not have favorite stones that they tuck under their arms for repeat use." 
  • "Sea otter teeth are two and a half times more resilient to chipping than human teeth thanks to the microstructure of the enamel that coats them. Even so, they are no match for the rock-hard surface of a seashell."
  • Tim Tinker: "There is clearly a selective force there and if [sea otters] were eating these thick-shelled snails a million years ago, and their teeth were no different than they are now, then it is hard to see how they would have done that without cracking their teeth if they weren't using tools. So... if otters lived to a certain age in the archaeological record and were eating snails, we can pretty much assume they had to be using tools." [brackets, ellipsis original]
  • "Seth Newsome, an animal ecologist at the University of New Mexico, is willing to bet that otters have been using tools to process turban snails far longer than people have been on the Channel Islands or even in North America." 
  • "Seth believes sea otters have been using tools for most of their existence. 'Sea otters have lived in the ocean for millions of years. They are small and they live in cold water. They need to eat constantly,' he explains. 'To do that, they've evolved novel and fascinating ways of efficiently catching and processing large quantities of hard-shelled invertebrates. Tool use probably evolved early on in their evolution into the nearshore-ocean niche that they occupy." 
  • "Piecing together the archaeology of sea otter tool use is a nascent endeavor. Like dance or song or any other behaviors that archaeologists study, the action of hitting a rock against a shell is transient." 
  • Dora Biro: "Culture is one of the hottest topics in behavioral biology. With culture, you see different behavior in different groups. Knowledge is passed on socially between individuals. Individuals learn things socially from their mom and others. Many of these things vary regionally." 

"Portlander Ursula K. Le Guin is Breathing Fire to Save American Literature"
  • "At age 85--five decades into an almost comically illustrious writing career that has seen her reinvent entire genres, sell millions of books, and win the outright worship of literary peers from Margaret Atwood to Zadie Smith--Le Guin is unquestionably old now, with fogged olive eyes and a stooped (if still bustling) gait."
  • "Just behind her, two great bookshelves contained row upon row of her 50-plus books in their various editions and translations." 
  • Ursula K. Le Guin: "We need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize profit... is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship." [ellipsis original]
  • Molly Gloss, novelist: "I think she's gotten more daring, more feminist, more political. She's more willing to rattle cages. At the National Book Awards, there's a whole table full of Amazon folks, and she looks right at them and tells them what she thinks of how they're trying to take over publishing. And then she looks right at her own publishing house and says their policies are making it impossible for libraries to lend e-books. These aren't the kinds of things you imagine other writers being willing to say out loud." 
  • "For years, she churned out stories and novels, without much publishing luck."
  • Neil Gaiman: "She made me a better writer. And I think much more importantly, she made me a better person who wrote." 
  • Ursula K. Le Guin: "If you want to talk to other writers, it's a great book town and there are lots of good writers here. But if you don't want to play the celebrity, this is a really great town. And I never wanted to play the celebrity." 
  • "Stories, which once flocked to her mind like ducks to bread crumbs, have stopped materializing--which she says is just as well." 
  • "Her cache of awards, medals, titles ("Grand Master," per the Science Fiction Writers of America), and honorary degrees forms a glittering hoard that a dragon could plausibly guard."
  • Ursula K. Le Guin: "If you live long enough, you sort of get stuck there whether you deserve it or not. I have tried to say the truth insofar as I have any grasp of it. I have tried to be an honest woman. So if I can say anything useful, that would be great." 
  • "Foremost among her concerns these days, it seems, is what Le Guin considers a worrisome literary shift whereby writers--squeezed to make a living in a world that attaches less and less financial value to their profession--view themselves more as brands and 'content producers' than artists."

"French Design Firms Imagine An Arcology In The Sahara"
  • Images here.
  • "The La Tour des Sables would be a self contained city that rises 1,400 feet above the ground, and would be [sic] contain living, agricultural and working units."
  • "Sculpted to look like a rock jutting out of the sand, it's doubtful that the tower will actually be built - this looks more like a conceptual thought experiment, but it has some interesting features included in it." 
  • "The building would have a total floor space of 192 acres, and would feature an internal tower hosting a vertical garden. Over 20% would be given over to office space, while hotel and living quarters would take up an additional 17% and 15% respectively. The building would also collect rain water (an estimated 45,000 cubic meters annually), which would be stored kilometers underground, where it would be turned to steam and used to help power the structure. Additional power would come from solar panels." 
  • "The firms imagines [sic] the construction of the building beginning in 2025, and would be completely in a half century." 

"This academic debate about worms has an important lesson for the future of global poverty"
  • "This past week, the international development and global health community has been torn apart by a debate about parasitic worms that has grown so fierce it's been dubbed the 'worm wars.'... Within the academic community, it's a fight over the validity of an academic study suggesting that distributing pills to kill intestinal worms would not just improve health but also have all sorts of knock-on effects such as improving education. But the reason this has caught mainstream attention is that the worm wars are threatening one of the holy grails of international development: the idea that somewhere out there is a simple, easy intervention that will have a huge positive effect on a complex, difficult problem."
  • "While there had been questions for years about whether de-worming's miraculous effects were really supported by good evidence, the debate exploded into the full-fledged 'war' just recently, when other researchers tried to replicate the original paper's findings. They concluded that some of the data was flawed or incomplete, and that the original paper's most exciting findings about deworming's miraculous effects on education melted away under the new analysis." 
  • "There's a lesson here, but it's not one we're going to like. Everyone likes easy solutions to hard problems. But when we become too focused on finding them, we lose sight of the truth: that the most effective solutions are often complex and difficult to implement."

"I retired at 30. The best part isn't leisure--it's freedom."
  • "For anyone familiar with the principles of personal finance and investing, my trick was unimpressive and easily reproducible: Just spend much less than you earn and pour the difference into efficient index funds. When your collection of investments reaches 25 times your annual spending, you're done."
  • "Leveraging our frugal 1970s upbringings in a less wealthy country and our new above-average incomes, we decided to live below our means and save for financial independence before becoming parents ourselves."
  • "What if work were something that you did only when it worked for you? If you could go at it with gusto on certain days, or even certain seasons or years, but then shift to other things for a while when your priorities changed? You might spend most of your 20s burning up the corporate ladder or being the workhorse that keeps a startup company in the black. But then your 30s might be mostly consumed by bringing up young children, your 40s might see you starting more companies or reclaiming your youth as a touring rocker, and your 50s and 60s are yet to be charted. Now that I've met a large number of people who have actually followed this path, I can see that financial independence isn't so much about freedom from work. It is more about freedom to do your best work, without money getting in the way."
  • "This is what I'm really describing when I talk about early retirement. It's not really retirement at all, but that's because I don't think anybody should truly retire in the old sense of the world--swearing off all forms of paid activity in favor of a dramatic increase in television watching and golf playing."
  • "Other ventures have come and gone, but none of them were done because we needed the money. That is my definition of a modern retirement: the activities you pursue once you are done searching for money." Why not make organ donation Opt-Out, and DDR Opt-In? 

"Dead Enough"
  • "The Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon suffered a haemorrhagic stroke in 2006. Although he had no chance of recovering consciousness, there was no specific point at which a neurologist could say that his death was imminent. He lived in a prolonged coma until his death in 2014."
  • "Experts have introduced the so-called Dead-Donor Rule (DDR), which stipulates that donors must be dead before vital organs can be taken from their bodies for transplantation. The DDR is intended to protect severely ill patients from harm by ensuring that they are not killed for the sake of their organs, regardless of whether this action could save the lives of other patients in organ failure." 
  • "In a protocol developed by the transplant surgeon Paul Morrissey at Brown University in Rhode Island, for instance, kidneys can be taken from patients while they are alive because doing this does not cause brain death or heart death. Death is declared after the kidneys, and then life-support, are removed. This scheme applies only to kidneys, though, and is thus limited." 
  • "Why apply the DDR to patients who are imminently dying? Even if conscious, such patients could be given analgesia or anaesthesia to prevent pain during organ procurement--and their organs could be put to good use."
  • "We could also withdraw the DDR from patients who will live for years in a coma or a disordered conscious state. If a comatose patient lived for years without any capacity for consciousness, then it is difficult to understand how he would be harmed if his organs were taken from his body before a declaration of death. The same could be said about patients in a permanent vegetative state and those in a minimally conscious state with a poor prognosis... In some cases, a patient can emerge from a coma and regain consciousness. But this becomes less likely the longer the coma persists. And whether a patient is likely to remain in or emerge from a coma can be predicted through imaging scans showing structural and functional features of the patient's brain."
  • "In some circumstances, when donation is a high priority for an individual, we could even remove organs from those with full capacity for consciousness whose lives might go on and on in deep suffering and pain." 
  • "We need to get over the idea that death always harms a person and, more controversially, that taking organs before, rather than after, declaring death always harms the donor." 
  • "Some might ask how such a position is any different from taking organs from political prisoners or criminal offenders, as practised in China and other countries. The difference is that prisoners have not consented to organ donation. Their organs have been conscripted against their will."
  • "Abandoning the DDR could create public distrust in the transplant system and cause some people to opt out of organ donation for fear that they would be treated instrumentally as nothing more than a source of transplantable organs and killed for them."

"Aromanticism"
  • "'Primary' is intended to indicate a very committed relationship; common traits of primary relationships include sharing finances, living together, legal marriage, raising children together, taking care of the other person when they become elderly or disabled, and including the person in all major life plans. 'Secondary' is intended to indicate a somewhat committed relationship; common traits of secondary relationships include making an effort to spend time together, missing the other person when they're gone, making an unusual effort to make the other person happy, and sharing your secrets with the other person. Primaries and secondaries may be platonic or romantic." 
  • "Alloromatic people are those who have at least some primary or secondary relationships in which they desire more sensual behavior (e.g. kissing, hugging, cuddling, massages) than their baseline. The bit about 'baseline' is important--a very cuddly aromantic is still aromantic."
  • "The reason that romantic relationships are so cuddly is that one trait of passion is a desire to touch your partner a lot." 
  • "One interesting result of this definition is that a whole lot of romantic allosexuals are in relationships they consider to be romantic. In our culture, a sexual primary relationship is typically understood to be romantic; unless you're at least on the peripheries of the asexual community, you have no concept that those things might be different. I wonder how much cynicism about romantic love is actually aromantic allosexual people engaged in the typical mind fallacy."

"Could a Massive Collision Produce a Subsurface Ocean on Pluto?"
  • "The most popular theory for how Pluto ended up with a moon nearly 1/10th of its mass is through a catastrophic collision between two equal-sized bodies. The collision must have been a glancing blow, knocking the surface off what is now Pluto while more substantially decimating the impactor until Charon was the largest of the intact shards. Some theories look as if the smaller moons--Nix, Hydra, Styx, and Kerberos--could be remnants of debris from the same collision." 
  • "One of the things we've seen with icy moons around the solar system is that the tidal pull of their massive gas giant parents can be enough to drive geological activity." 
  • "If we look at the time after Pluto and Charon settle into a synchronous state but have not yet reached a dual synchronous state, then the distance between the worlds is small, the mass ratios nearly on-par, and the mismatch between Pluto's spin period and Charon's orbital period is going to be severe. The result is a perfect combination to not just subject Charon to a tidal massage, but also Pluto. In theory, this could be enough to push an initially warm and mushy Pluto over the edge into generating a subsurface ocean in a brief bloom of activity." 
  • Barr Mlinar: "If we find tectonics that could indicate that Pluto had an ocean in the past. It is my personal opinion that if an icy satellite has an ocean ever, it is very difficult to get rid of it. As the ice freezes, all of the anti-freeze materials (salt and ammonia) are excluded. So as the ocean freezes it gets salty and richer in anti-freeze stuff, until eventually you're left with a thin, deep layer of briny/ammonia-rich liquid." 
  • "The result is that even though the Pluto-Charon collision must've happened millions of years ago for it to be in its current tidally-locked dual synchronous state, any subsurface ocean that formed during the collision could potentially still be clinging to liquidity today." 

"Megapolisomancy, Or Why All Cities Are Haunted"
  • "Your city seethes with ghosts. Its impossibly twisted streets stream with magic, and its chimneys exude smoke of a decidedly hallucinatory nature." 
  • "For every piece of city magic, there is some kind of real-world analogue. Take, for example, the urban vampire... Why are vampires' mythical, bloodstained faces hidden in trashed alleyway shadows in your city? Because most cities aren't just packed with people. They are layered in history--sometimes many thousands of years of it. Even in relatively new cities like San Francisco or Toronto, several dead generations have walked the streets before you. They've lived in your houses, and gone to your favorite shops." 
  • "When you go into the buildings they built, buy their used clothing at the Goodwill, and eat in the dining rooms where they once did, you brush shoulders with the dead." 
  • "More frightening than a conspiracy is a coherence that comes out of nothing except random parts connecting. Immigrant neighborhoods come into being without design; corporations ooze into other corporations; riots erupt; artist subcultures take over buildings intended for general use." 
  • "Cities are covered in a million eyes--and they all watch each other. Windows look into windows; crowds are a morass of furtive glances; and surveillance cameras adorn every surface. We pretend we have privacy in cities, but always doubt it. There is something uncanny about this feeling. You split into two selves: The self you perceive yourself to be, and the self you perceive other people are always watching. Who are you?" 
  • "If there are two versions of you, it makes sense that there is a secret other city beneath the surface of the one you inhabit." 
  • "Cities can be so vast that walking through them is akin to hallucinating. The road we just went down seems to have disappeared. There are three streets with almost exactly the same name, running parallel to one another. People in strange costumes are congregating on a street corner for no reason. Elsewhere, a sea of people in matching business suits fill the streets with a freakishly uniform charcoal grey." 
"Why We Were Totally Wrong About How Boa Constrictors Kill"
  • "A new study reveals that these big, non-venomous serpents, found in tropical Central and South America, subdue their quarry with a much quicker method: Cutting off their blood supply. When a boa tightens its body around its prey, it throws off the finely tuned plumbing of the victim's circulatory system. Arterial pressures plummet, venous pressures soar, and blood vessels begin to close." 
  • Scott Boback, vertebrate ecologist at Dickinson College: "The heart literally doesn't have enough strength to push against the pressure." 
  • "As interesting as his revelation is, Boback says there's still much we don't know. For instance, there's evidence that boa constrictors have a tougher time killing ectotherms, animals such as lizards and snakes that rely on external heat to regulate their body temperatures." 

"Snake proteins have gone through massive evolutionary redesign"
  • "A new study by Todd Castoe and Zhi Jiang at the University of Colorado has shown that the lifestyle of serpents is so unique that some of their core proteins, which vary very little in other animal species, have gone through massive changes. These bursts of evolution have been so dramatic that Castoe and Jiang refer to them as 'evolutionary redesigns.'"
  • "The proteins in question are all involved in aerobic metabolism, the breakdown of molecules like sugars or fats in the presence of oxygen to release energy." 
  • "Swallowing leaves the previously torpid serpent with a hefy meal to break down, and it does this by shifting its digestive processes into an extra gear. Take a large python, for example. After feeding, its metabolic rate shoots up by 40 times and it goes through a drastic interior redesign. Within two days, its intestines and liver double in size, and its stomach, pancreas, and kidneys follow suit. This expanded digestive system demands so much oxygen-rich blood that its heart becomes 40% larger." 

"Chimps Are Eating Clay to Detox Themselves"
  • "A group of chimpanzees living in Budongo Forest in Uganda have spent at least part of their days visiting clay pits. once they're there, they scoop up clay and eat it, or use leaves as sponges for the muddy water. They will chew the leaves, then dip the leaves in the water and bring them back up to their mouths, wringing the liquid from the wet leaves before bringing the leaves down to the pools once again." 
  • "In this case, the chimpanzees are probably trying to deal with the many tannins in their diet. Tannins come in many varieties, but they all bind to and precipitate proteins, including amino acids. Tannins are usually used as plant self-defense. Their bitter or astringent taste puts animals off their feed. Other animals develop a tolerance for tannins, or even a taste for them in small quantities. Wine, tea, and chocolate all have different kinds of tannins in them... The chimpanzees eat fruits and leaves filled with tannins all day long, and they've developed another way of dealing with them." 
  • "Aluminum binds to tannin. It's naturally present in a lot of different kinds of soil, including the clay from the pits at which the chimps were eating. The chimps probably have always made stops by the clay pits to neutralize the tannins in their diet. But the clay also contains other minerals--minerals which are also found in the decaying pith of the forest palm tree. Lately, humans have been eliminating many of the forest palm trees in the park where the chimps live, and the chimps are visiting the clay ponds and clay termite hills more frequently. Scientists think that... they might be seeking minerals in the clay that they can't get in their regular diet anymore." 

"NK Jemisin"
  • NK Jemisin: "It doesn't make any sense to write a monochromatic or monocultural story, unless you're doing something extremely small--a locked room-style story." 
  • "Her novels are anything but monochromatic. The first, titled The Killing Moon, is set in a multicultural sort-of alternate Egypt, where a patriarchal monarchy committed to order and peace, and a semi-egalitarian oligarchy, vie for power in a complicated web of shifting alliances and dreams." 
  • "In 2010 she published her first novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, a sweeping story about a wide-ranging, heterogenous empire whose ruling family has enslaved the gods--at least for the moment." 
  • "Stereotypical fantasy series like, say, The Lord of the Rings, usually present a virtuous status quo threatened by a dark and eventually defeated outsider. But Jemisin's stories almost always involve a flawed order, and the efforts (also flawed) to overthrow it." 
  • NK Jemisin: "As a black woman, I have no particular interest in maintaining the status quo. Why would I? The status quo is harmful, the status quo is significantly racist and sexist and a whole bunch of other things that I think need to change. With epic fantasy there is a tendency for it to be quintessentially conservative, in that its job is to restore what is perceived to be out of whack." 

"The 7 Biggest Myths about Abortion"
  • Myths are in red. 
  • Women regret their abortions.
    • "Concern trolling is one of anti-choicer's favorite methods for attempting to shut down arguments in favor of reproductive rights." 
    • "In study after study, when women who have had abortions are allowed to speak for themselves (and really, they should know better than anyone), the opposite turns out to be true." 
    • "It's extremely rare for women to feel post-abortion regret, and when they do, they still identify their choice as having been the right one. A 2000 study conducted by UC Santa Barnara found a full two years after having abortions, '72 percent of women were satisfied with their decision; 69 percent said they would have the abortion again; 72 percent reported more benefit than harm from their abortion; and 80 percent were not depressed.'... Another 2013 study found 90 percent of women reported feelings of relief following an abortion, while 'those denied the abortion felt more regret and anger...and less relief and happiness.'"
    • "A three-year study from just this month with an assessment of factors including age, race, education and socioeconomic background found, across the board, '95 percent of participants reported abortion was the right decision, with the typical participant having a >99 percent chance of reporting the abortion decision was right for her.'"
  • Abortions are unsafe.
    • "A 2012 study assessing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Guttmacher Institute found that actually giving birth is far likelier to kill a woman than having an abortion. In the words of researchers, 'risk of death associated with childbirth is approximately 14 times higher than that with abortion.'"
  • Abortion causes breast cancer.
    • Basically, there is no effect, and there is a wealth of information backing this up. 
  • Abortion, particularly multiple abortions, can cause infertility.
    • "While abortions up until the late 1960s used D&C (or dilation and curettage) to terminate pregnancies, by the early 1970s, vacuum aspiration became--and today remains--the predominate abortion method. The reduction in scarring and other complications that resulted from this shift helped eliminate infertility as a risk of abortion."
  • Abortions are happening more than ever.
    • "Women are having fewer legal abortions than they've had in 25 years. The number of legal abortions performed across the United States each year has been dwindling since the 1980s, and is currently down 12 percent from as recently as 2010. The Atlantic attributes this decline to a number of possible reasons: expanded access to birth control and sexual health resources and information; a precipitous drop in the teen pregnancy rates; millennial attitudes toward abortion (one study finds a surprising 42 percent against); and the astonishing number of recent anti-abortion measures put in place." 
  • Outlawing abortion means women will stop getting abortions.
    • "According to a report by the Guttmacher Institute, '[e]stimates of the number of illegal abortions in the 1950s and 1960s ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year.' Because these abortions were primarily conducted in secrecy through underground channels, they were impossible to regulate, and the back alley abortion industry often employed methods that sound horrific to modern ears." [brackets original]
    • Guttmacher Institute: "In 1930, abortion was listed as the official cause of death for almost 2,700 women--nearly one-fifth (18 percent) of maternal deaths recorded in that year... By 1965, the number of deaths due to illegal abortion had fallen to just under 200, but illegal abortion still accounted for 17 percent of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth that year. And these are just the number that were officially reported; the actual number was likely much higher." 
    • *Guttmacher: "Highly restrictive abortion laws are not associated with lower abortion rates. For example, the abortion rate is high, at 29 and 32 abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age in Africa and Latin America, respectively--regions where abortion is illegal under most circumstances in the majority of countries. In Western Europe, where abortion is generally permitted on broad grounds, the abortion rate is 12 per 1,000." 
  • Abortion is racist.
    • "African Americans comprise 15 percent of Planned Parenthood's clients, which approximates their percentage in the U.S. general population (and anyway abortion accounts for only 3 percent of PP's services offered)."
    • "It's true that black women, followed by Hispanics/Latinas, have the highest rates of abortion... but considering what we know about the relative wealth of black and Hispanic homes compared with white homes, the disparities fit into a more comprehensive picture. With less access to family planning, health insurance and financial resources in general (most women cite lack of money as the motivation for terminating their pregnancies), the result is a predictable and correlating high number of unintended and unwanted pregnancies. Conservatives don't talk about unwanted pregnancies in this way, because it would mean acknowledging structural racism." 

Miscellaneous
  • Matthew Yglesias, "The one thing that makes me take Donald Trump seriously as a candidate--Rush Limbaugh": "And it's not obvious that Rush and his fellow talk radio stars especially share a conventional politician's cynical interest in winning elections. Trump versus Clinton would be a heck of a show, and a Democrat in the White House is probably better for ratings anyway. David Frum has long worried that conservative talk radio has this kind of perverse incentive to push the GOP in tactically unsound directions."
  • Kevin Sabet: "When you look at cigarettes, there wasn't an underground market until we started taxing it really highly. And now there's a very robust underground market for cigarettes--something like 50 percent of the cigarettes consumed in the Bronx are from a quasi-illegal source... I think if the government keeps the price [of marijuana] low, you can imagine in four or five generations, or three generations maybe, the underground market would be substantially reduced. But then that means you're making the barrier of entry into abusing marijuana really, really low, because you're making it cheap."
  • Kurt Vonnegut: "Until recent times, human beings usually had a permanent community of relatives. They had dozens of homes to go to. So when a married couple had a fight, one or the other could go to a house three doors down and stay with a close relative until he or she was feeling tender again. Or if the kids got so fed up with their parents that they couldn't stand it, they could march over to their uncle's for a while. Now this is rarely possible. Each family is locked into its little box. The neighbors aren't relatives. There aren't other houses where people can go and be cared for. When we ponder, 'what's happening to America--" "Where have all the values gone?" and all that--the answer is perfectly simple. We're lonesome. We don't have enough friends or relatives any more. And we would if we lived in real communities." 
  • Shatrujeet Nath: "The difference between wanting to write and having written is one year of hard, relentless labour. It's a bridge you have to build all by yourself, all alone, all through the night, while the world goes about its business without giving a damn. The only way of making this perilous passage is by looking at it as a pilgrimage." 
  • Max Fisher, "I can't get over this giant contradiction in Iran hawks' case against the nuclear deal": "This is all pretty inconsistent, but it's inconsistent in a very telling way. A small delay to Iran's nuclear program via war is great; a large delay via diplomacy is bad. It certainly gives the appearance that hawks' actual reason for hating the Iran deal is not that it insufficiently forestalls a nuclear program, but rather that it forestalls war... For a number of hawks, the only really viable solution to this problem is to permanently militarize US-Iran relations, to have the threat of war constantly on the table, and maybe even use it. Fear of an Iranian nuclear program is the best way to keep relations tense and, if necessary, trigger war. But if it looks like Iran is complying with the deal, not only will hawks have lost one of the easiest mechanisms for war, but they will see US-Iran relations become significantly less militarized." To give them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they doubt the efficacy of diplomacy over warfare. Still, it doesn't really look good on them, I have to agree. 
  • Robert Farley, University of Kentucky: "These groups have shifted, almost effortlessly, from whining about Iran achieving nuclear capability in '18 months,' to whining about Iran achieving nuclear capability after the sunset of the current inspection provisions in ten years. This isn't even an accurate characterization of the deal, but that's beside the point; the threat of a nuclear Iran has never amounted to more than a side-show for the hawks. What the hawks want is indefinite militarized confrontation between the United States and Iran. From the perspective of Israel and Saudi Arabia, this is hardly irrational. Iran supports terrorist groups and other non-state actors that like to mess with the Saudis and the Israelis, and both the Saudis and Israelis would like to have the military capabilities of the United States at their disposal... And for someone who really wants a semi-permanent guarantee that the United States will threaten to bomb Iran, only nukes work, even if nukes aren't the central concern. As Fred Kaplan has noted, the really big problem for Israeli, Saudi, and US hawks is that the deal might work, that Tehran might take nukes off the table, and the [sic] Iran might integrate itself back into the community of nations."
  • Michael Doran: "For a time the Iranians certainly believed all options were on the table. They abandoned their weaponization program, or they put it on hold, in 2003. Well, what happened in 2003? The United States went into Iraq, and I think they were probably very concerned at that point about all options being on the table." 
  • In an article on a Japanese company developing self-driving taxis, someone pointed out the idea of driving subscriptions. 
  • Ted Schienman, "What lies beneath": "The fossilized remains of a sea-serpent are much more interesting when you call them a dragon."
  • *Ted: "Holier still is the relic that Charlemagne donated to Pope Leo III as thanks for the crown of the Empire. I am speaking of the sacrum praeputium, the Hole Prepuse--Christ's supposed foreskin, a powerful dual emblem of the Mosaic and Pauline covenants."
  • Trevor Noah: "We are in an era of full outrage. We live in the Internet age. Everyone wants clicks. Clicks are what sells. News doesn't so much anymore. So now you work for what used to be considered a news agency, but now you're really an advertising platform." 
  • Sonia Saraiya, "'I don't strive to be offensive': Trevor Noah tells Salon how his 'Daily Show' will be different from--and similar to-- Jon Stewart's": "In his stand-up, Noah spent several minutes on the idea of "Racists Anonymous'--a rehab, of sorts, for admitted racists like Hogan and former L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling. Racism, he said, is like a disease, like alcoholism. But we lack the apparatus or even the willpower, maybe, to treat that disease... Is it possible to rehabilitate a racist?... Noah responded, 'We don't know, because we haven't tried. But I genuinely believe it's possible.'"
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