metricula: I found a picture I took right before my first date with GB! Who knew?

Image by HandsLive via Flickr

“It is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.” Animal Farm by George Orwell “Older children wouldn’t like it because its language is too difficult.” Watership Down by Richard Adams “The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the ‘curiosity’ level.” The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank “It does not seem to us that you have been wholly successful in working out an admittedly promising idea.” Lord of the Flies by William Golding “For your own good do not publish this book.” Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence “A long, dull novel about an artist.” Lust for Life by Irving Stone “You have buried your novel underneath a heap of details which are well done but utterly superfluous.” Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert “Neither long enough for a serial, nor short enough for a single story.” A Study in Scarlet (short story) by Arthur Conan Doyle “It contains unpleasant elements.” The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde “A very bad book.” The Bridge Over the River Kwai by Pierre Boulle “If you insist on rewriting this, get rid of the Indian stuff.” The Blessing Way by Tony Hillerman ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.” Unspecified manuscript by Rudyard Kipling “…overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian…the whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. It often becomes a wild, neurotic daydream. I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.” Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov “I do not see anything in this to convince me you can write either narrative or fiction.” one of Zane Grey’s early novels “We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.” Carrie by Stephen King So what’s the secret to rejection?
Don’t let rejections stop you from writing. And submitting.

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Father and Son

metricula: I got a new wig!

Hugh Pickens writes "Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Deborah Blum has an article in Slate about the US government's mostly forgotten policy in the 1920s and 1930s of poisoning industrial alcohols manufactured in the US to scare people into giving up illicit drinking during Prohibition. Known as the 'chemist's war of Prohibition,' the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, killed at least 10,000 people between 1926 and 1933. The story begins with ratification of the 18th Amendment in 1919, which banned sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages in the US. By the mid-1920s, when the government saw that its 'noble experiment' was in danger of failing, it decided that the problem was that readily available methyl (industrial) alcohol — itself a poison — didn't taste nasty enough. The government put its chemists to work designing ever more unpalatable toxins — adding such chemicals as kerosene, brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. In 1926, in New York City, 1,200 were sickened by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following year, deaths climbed to 700. These numbers were repeated in cities around the country as public-health officials nationwide joined in the angry clamor to stop the poisoning program. But an official sense of higher purpose kept it in place, while lawmakers opposed to the plan were accused of being in cahoots with criminals and bootleggers. The chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, one of the poisoning program's most outspoken opponents, liked to call it 'our national experiment in extermination.'"

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When the iPad was unveiled in January, everyone could agree on one thing: it did look a lot like a big iPhone. Begeek.fr extends Apple's consistent design to its logical conclusion in the company's next two revolutionary devices. I hear the iBoard's going to implement twenty finger multi-touch and the iMat's even going to support Flash. [BeGeek.fr]

Nothing says you should quit smoking like conflating sexual assault with the effects of cigarettes. Via the NYTimes, a feminist activist in France speaks out,

But the reaction on the Web site of Droits des Non-fumeurs has been mixed. One comment read, "The campaign trivializes sexual abuse -- worse, it implies guilt on the part of the abused."

Florence Montreynaud, the president of La Meute des Chiennes de Garde, or the Pack of Female Watchdogs, which opposes symbols of sexual violence in films and advertising, called the ads "unbearable" and said "what is most shocking is the banalization of sexual violence."

She is a feminist, she said, and a longtime member of Droits des Non-fumeurs. "But it is terrible to represent in the public space this kind of image restricted to pornography," she added. "I'm appalled. It's a poverty of imagination. When people have no ideas, they use female bodies."

These ads are not edgy to me at all. They are just gross.

I know it seems like we do this a lot, but it’s time to start wringing your hands again about women who go to college. Apparently there are too many of us! And now we can’t get boyfriends!
North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges. Women have represented about 57 percent of enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000, according to a recent report by the American Council on Education. Researchers there cite several reasons: women tend to have higher grades; men tend to drop out in disproportionate numbers; and female enrollment skews higher among older students, low-income students, and black and Hispanic students. In terms of academic advancement, this is hardly the worst news for women — hoist a mug for female achievement. And certainly, women are primarily in college not because they are looking for men, but because they want to earn a degree. But surrounded by so many other successful women, they often find it harder than expected to find a date on a Friday night. Fifty-seven percent female feels “eerily like a women’s college”? Really?
The line “And certainly, women are primarily in college not because they are looking for men, but because they want to earn a degree” is also an instant classic. Way to go, New York Times.
Needless to say, this puts guys in a position to play the field, and tends to mean that even the ones willing to make a commitment come with storied romantic histories. Rachel Sasser, a senior history major at the table, said that before she and her boyfriend started dating, he had “hooked up with a least five of my friends in my sorority — that I know of.” These sorts of romantic complications are hardly confined to North Carolina, an academically rigorous school where most students spend more time studying than socializing. The gender imbalance is also pronounced at some private colleges, such as New York University and Lewis & Clark in Portland, Ore., and large public universities in states like California, Florida and Georgia. The College of Charleston, a public liberal arts college in South Carolina, is 66 percent female. Some women at the University of Vermont, with an undergraduate body that is 55 percent female, sardonically refer to their college town, Burlington, as “Girlington.” It’s “Girlington” because it’s 55 percent female? I think something else is going on here, and it’s not “there are too many ladies around.” I went to New York University, which does skew female. And yes, my female friends and I joked about the dearth of single straight men on campus (NYU is also pretty LGBT-friendly and pulls in a lot of gay students). But when you look at the actual numbers of women vs. men on campus, it’s not so unbalanced that dudes are pulling five chicks a night. It seems to be a problem of perception more than statistics — if there are roughly equal numbers of men and women in a room, or if there are a few more women than men, we perceive the situation as thoroughly female-dominated. The same phenomenon happens with race. We’re used to seeing men (and white men in particular) as the standard; we’re used to them dominating higher education and the workforce. When we up the numbers of non-men in a situation where men have traditionally made up large majorities, the perception is that no more men exist – even though men are nearly half of the room.
So I am hesitant to believe that “Thanks to simple laws of supply and demand, it is often the women who must assert themselves romantically or be left alone on Valentine’s Day, staring down a George Clooney movie over a half-empty pizza box.” It gets even worse than that, though, the Times warns. Not only are college women lonely, they’re also “hooking up,” as the kids say, in an effort to find love:

“On college campuses where there are far more women than men, men have all the power to control the intensity of sexual and romantic relationships,” Kathleen A. Bogle, a sociologist at La Salle University in Philadelphia, wrote in an e-mail message. Her book, “Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus,” was published in 2008. “Women do not want to get left out in the cold, so they are competing for men on men’s terms,” she wrote. “This results in more casual hook-up encounters that do not end up leading to more serious romantic relationships. Since college women say they generally want ‘something more’ than just a casual hook-up, women end up losing out.” W. Keith Campbell, a psychology professor at the University of Georgia, which is 57 percent female, put it this way: “When men have the social power, they create a man’s ideal of relationships,” he said. Translation: more partners, more sex. Commitment? A good first step would be his returning a woman’s Facebook message. Women on gender-imbalanced campuses are paying a social price for success and, to a degree, are being victimized by men precisely because they have outperformed them, Professor Campbell said. In this way, some colleges mirror retirement communities, where women often find that the reward for outliving their husbands is competing with other widows for the attentions of the few surviving bachelors. “If a guy is not getting what he wants, he can quickly and abruptly go to the next one, because there are so many of us,” said Katie Deray, a senior at the University of Georgia, who said that it is common to see six provocatively clad women hovering around one or two guys at a party or a bar. Sidenote: If I could take one phrase out of the English language, it would be “provocatively clad” (or “provocatively dressed”). What, exactly, is a provocatively clad woman provoking? Erections? When I see a dude at a bar wearing one of those white COCKS hats, I feel provoked into punching him (although I restrain myself, obviously); when I see this young man without any pants on, I think, “those are some nice thighs, I would like to see more of that.” Yet I have never once heard a man’s style of dress described as “provocative.” Even when he’s wearing a hat that simultaneously advertises his favorite sports team and his junk. Even when he’s pantless and smoking a cigarette on the potty.
ANYWAY. Again, the ratio of women to men in college is not six to one! And instead of just bemoaning how a 56 percent female population means that we don’t get as many dates as we would like, perhaps it’s worth looking at the fact that women go to college in larger numbers in part because men have more options if college doesn’t suit them. Jobs in construction, the military, factories, the fishing industry… they are all technically open to women, but are often not exactly welcoming. They also don’t require a college degree, but often pay significantly more than minimum wage. Similar pink-collar jobs — jobs that are disporportionately female and don’t usually require higher education — are largely care-related, and pay very little. When preparing to leave high school, young women and young men have different options at their immediate disposal. For young women, college may seem like a better choice, even if they aren’t all that academically motivated or inclined; for young men, it’s easier to see how you could make a decent living without a college degree.
But I suppose that story isn’t nearly as fun and scary as one that ends like this: The loneliness can be made all the more bitter by the knowledge that it wasn’t always this way. “My roommate’s parents met here,” said Mitali Dayal, a freshman at North Carolina. “She has this nice little picture of them in their Carolina sweatshirts. Must be nice.” Ah yes, it wasn’t always this way. In the good old days a lot of schools wouldn’t even let women in, but at least someone’s roommate’s parents could get a date.

Via Sociological Images, we bring you Butch Bakery.

Text reads: Butch it up Buttercup, These ain't your grandma's cupcakes. Our objective is simple. We're men. Men who like cupcakes. Not the frilly pink frosted sprinkles and unicorns kind of cupcakes. We make manly cupcakes. For manly men.

With that kind of name (and located in NYC) I half expected it to be a super gay bakery catering to Butch lesbians and gay men.

I guessed wrong.

These cupcakes seem to be in line with our new era of anxious masculinity. We saw it layed out in the Docker's ad campaign Vanessa posted, and further reiterated in the series of Super Bowl commercials that Jessica covered.

Butch Bakery has had so much success so far they've had to postpone the delivery of new orders.

Indeed this tendency to shift the responsibility for the disease on others by giving it their name, appears all through the early references to it. The Italians called it the Spanish or the French disease; the French called it the Italian disease; the English called it the French disease; the Russians called it the Polish disease; the Turks called it the French disease; the Indians and the Japanese called it the Portuguese disease. And, as we shall see, the first Spaniards who recognized the disease called it the disease of Española, which meant at that time the disease of Haiti.

– W.A. Pusey, “The Beginning of Syphilis,” Journal of the American Medical Association, June 12, 1915

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In 2006, AOL made an epic misjudgment. As part of a research project headed by Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, AOL made available to the public a massive amount of search data, releasing the search history of 650,000 users over a 3-month period. That totaled some twenty one million searches. Before releasing the data they anonymized it, stripping away user names and replacing them with numbers. Yet because of the nature of the data, people very quickly linked real people to abstract numbers--a massive violation of privacy and confidentiality. Within days AOL realized its mistake and withdrew the data. But already it had been copied and posted elsewhere on the internet where today it lives on in infamy.

Some searches were dark and disturbing, others unremarkable in every way, and still others strangely amusing. Often you could reconstruct a person's life, at least in part, from what they searched for over a period of time. Consider this user:

shipping pets 2006-03-01 16:36:48 does ata ship pets 2006-03-01 17:10:35 shipping pets 2006-03-01 21:33:30 continental.com 2006-03-01 21:34:53 pet shipping 2006-03-01 21:35:11 cat with broken bones diarreah and looks like blood 2006-03-04 03:14:52 broken bones in cat 2006-03-04 03:31:53 cat has broken bones above base of tail vet said it will heal on its own 2006-03-04 03:32:53 cat broken bones and diarreah 2006-03-04 03:58:24 do cats menstrate 2006-03-04 14:09:09 cat health 2006-03-04 14:10:22 cat has broken bones wasn't bleeding before but now is and now she can't defecate too 2006-03-04 14:16:35 mucous blood diarreah in cat 2006-03-04 14:22:47

The moral of this particular story seems to be that you don't want to pay for cheap shipping for your new cat.

This AOL data raised an endless number of questions and concerns. Primarily, it brought awareness to the fact that search engines know you better than you might like. Actually, they probably know you better than you know yourself in some ways--you forget what you search for; they don't. We may like to think that our searches are just searches, harmless and pointless inquiries known only to us. But the fact is that search engines keep all of that data and they keep it forever. Google has recently begun to strip personal identifiers from the data after a certain time period has elapsed, but from the AOL searches we can see that this is sometimes still not enough.

Here is an AOL user whose searches tell a sad story (for sake of space I have stripped out a large number of searches):

body fat calliper 2006-03-01 18:54:10 curb morning sickness 2006-03-05 08:53:23 get fit while pregnant 2006-03-09 18:49:37 he doesn't want the baby 2006-03-11 03:52:01 uou're pregnant he doesn't want the baby 2006-03-11 03:52:49 online degrees theology 2006-03-11 04:05:24 online christian colleges 2006-03-11 04:13:33 foods to eat when pregnant 2006-03-12 09:38:02 baby names 2006-03-14 19:11:10 baby names and meanings 2006-03-14 20:01:27 physician search 2006-03-23 10:20:04 best spa vacation deals 2006-03-27 20:04:09 maternity clothes 2006-03-28 09:28:25 pregnancy workout videos 2006-03-29 10:01:39 buns of steel video 2006-03-29 10:12:38 what is yoga 2006-03-29 12:17:31 what is theism 2006-03-29 12:18:30 hindu religion 2006-03-29 12:18:56 yoga and hindu 2006-03-29 12:32:05 is yoga alligned with christianity 2006-03-29 12:33:18 yoga and christianity 2006-03-29 12:33:42 abortion clinics charlotte nc 2006-04-17 11:00:02 greater carolinas womens center 2006-04-17 11:40:22 can christians be forgiven for abortion 2006-04-17 21:14:19 can christians be forgiven for abortion 2006-04-17 21:14:19 roe vs. wade 2006-04-17 22:22:07 effects of abortion on fibroids 2006-04-18 06:50:34 abortion clinic charlotte 2006-04-18 15:14:03 symptoms of miscarriage 2006-04-18 16:14:07 water aerobics charlotte nc 2006-04-18 19:41:27 abortion clinic chsrlotte nc 2006-04-18 21:45:39 total woman vitamins 2006-04-20 16:38:16 engagement gifts 2006-04-20 16:57:04 engagement rings 2006-04-20 16:58:37 mom's turning 50 2006-04-20 17:51:13 high risk abortions 2006-04-20 17:53:49 abortion fibroid 2006-04-20 17:55:18 benefits of water aerobics 2006-04-20 23:25:50 wedding gown styles 2006-04-26 19:37:34 recover after miscarriage 2006-05-22 18:17:53 marry your live-in 2006-05-27 07:25:45

This woman goes from searching about pregnancy, to realizing that the father does not want to keep the baby, to researching abortion clinics, to researching whether she can, according to her faith, choose abortion, to dealing with a miscarriage. And at the end of it all, life goes on and she seems ready to be married.

What is so amazing about these searches is the way people transition seamlessly from the normal and mundane to the outrageous and perverse. They are, thus, an apt reflection of real life. The user who is in one moment searching for information about a computer game may in the next be looking for the most violent pornography he can imagine. Back and forth it goes, from information about becoming a foster parent to the search for incestual pornography. One user went from searching for preteen pornography to searching for games appropriate for a youth group. Others, spurned lovers, sought out ways of exacting revenge while still others grappled with the moral implications of cheating on their spouses. These searches are a glimpse into the hearts of the people who made them.

This all raises two great questions in my mind. First, would I be prepared to have my searches revealed to the public? There are searches that may be private but not immoral--I may be looking for information on a medical condition, for example. That information might be embarrassing but I could remain unashamed before God. But there may also be searches that are private precisely because they are immoral. In such case shame would be the proper reaction. The second question is whether I would be prepared to address my search history with God. What would I say to him if he were to ask me about the things I have gone looking for online. Could I tell him with confidence that what I have sought is an indication of a heart that is aligned with his purposes? Or would I have to confess that my searches point to a heart that is drawn to what is evil and perverse?

While the search engines may never forget, I am grateful that God does forget. He forgets the sins of those who turn to him and confess those sins. Psalm 103 promises that "As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us." In Hebrews 8:12 God promises "I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more." There is virtue in forgetting.Sponsor:

The stools huddled together, braced for another one of his incoherent solo poetry slams. (Photo: Noah Webb; Dwell)

Via Sociological Images, we bring you Butch Bakery.

Text reads: Butch it up Buttercup, These ain't your grandma's cupcakes. Our objective is simple. We're men. Men who like cupcakes. Not the frilly pink frosted sprinkles and unicorns kind of cupcakes. We make manly cupcakes. For manly men.

With that kind of name (and located in NYC) I half expected it to be a super gay bakery catering to Butch lesbians and gay men.

I guessed wrong.

These cupcakes seem to be in line with our new era of anxious masculinity. We saw it layed out in the Docker's ad campaign Vanessa posted, and further reiterated in the series of Super Bowl commercials that Jessica covered.

Butch Bakery has had so much success so far they've had to postpone the delivery of new orders.

Whiptail lizards are a fairly ordinary-looking bunch, but some species are among the strangest animals around. You might not be able to work out why at first glance, but looking at their genes soon reveals their secret - they're all female, every single one. A third of whiptails have done away with males completely, a trick that only a small minority of animals have accomplished without going extinct.

Some readers might rejoice at the prospect of a world without males but in general, this isn't good news for a species. Sex has tremendous benefits. Every fling shuffles the genes of the two partners and deals them out to the next generation in new combinations. Sex creates genetic diversity and in doing so, it arms a population with new weapons against parasites and predators. These benefits are so big that sex is nigh universal among complex life. Only a few groups, like the incredible bdelloid rotifers, have found ways of becoming permanently asexual.

Doing away with sex is even rarer for vertebrates (back-boned animals). The whiptails of the genus Aspidocelis are a flagrant exception. Their forays into asexuality started when two closely related species mated. For some reason, these encounters produced asexual hybrids. For example, the New Mexico whiptail (Aspidocelis neomexicana) is a hybrid of the Western whiptail (A. Inornatus) and the little striped whiptail (A. tigris). In the hybrid species, the females (and there are only females) reproduce by laying eggs that have never encountered any sperm.

The problem is that this really shouldn't work. Sperm and egg cells are created through a process called meiosis, where a cell's chromosomes are duplicated before the cell divides twice. This produces four daughter cells, each with half the DNA of the original. This means that egg cells only contain half the total number of chromosomes that most other cells in the body do. It's their union with sperm, which are also genetically half-cocked, that restores the full balance of chromosomes, ready for the next generation.

So how do the lizards get their full set? The answer is deceptively simple. They start off with twice as many. Aracely Lutes from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research showed that all-female whiptails have a subtly different style of meiosis. They double their chromosomes twice before everything kicks off, creating eight copies of each. During the normal two rounds of cell division, these copies are partitioned two apiece among the four daughter cells.

Lutes measured the amount of DNA in the egg cells (oocytes) of two closely related whiptails, just before they went through the first round of meiosis. She found that, at this stage, the chromosomes of the asexual checkered whiptail (A. tesselatus) take up twice as much room as those of the sexual Texan spotted whiptail (A. gularis), even though both species have similarly sized genomes. Under a microscope, Lutes even managed to count twice the normal number of chromosomes in the oocytes of checkered whiptails.

Having eight sets of chromosomes rather than four might seem like a big deal, but it doesn't actually take very much to make this happen. There are two possible routes. The cell could duplicate its DNA but fail to actually split into two, or two cells could fuse together. This seems to have happened in other asexual animals too, including some salamanders and one species of grasshopper. Having extra chromosomes may be a common solution to the problems of ditching males.

Reference: Lutes et al. 2010. Sister chromosome pairing maintains heterozygosity in parthenogenetic lizards Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature08818

More on asexual reproduction:

Bdelloid rotifers - 80 million years without sex Rotifers find answer to parasites by blowing on the wind Snails get sexy when parasites are around Sand dollars avoid predators by cloning themselves Aphids get superpowers through sex

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We have been following the first weeks of the Melbourne Zoo's charismatic elephant calf closely. During her public debut, the calf faced off with media photographers. In particular, this AFP/Getty lensman brings out another facet of her quirky personality we just had to share. 

Look out for that trunk Mom! ...Narrowly escaped!

(Photo Credits: AFP/Getty Images)

Rep. Charles Van Zant wants to criminalize abortion

Oh, Florida.

Sponsored by Rep. Charles Van Zant (R-Palatka), HB 1097 would criminalize abortion, and make for no exceptions for rape or incest. And then there's this:

Except in cases where a woman's life is considered in danger, doctors who perform abortions would face first degree felonies punishable by up to life in prison and civil fines.

Now obviously I don't think anyone should be put in prison over abortion, but I do find it interesting that this bill focuses on abortion providers - not the women obtaining abortions.

It reminds me of this video that asked anti-choice protesters how much prison time a woman should get for procuring an abortion. The protesters pretty much couldn't answer not only because some had never even thought about it (!), but also because the general anti-choice sentiment is that women are victims of abortion. That we're too stupid or naive to realize that when we're getting an abortion, we're getting an abortion. (Hence all of the ultrasound laws that exist to "remind" us.)

In any case, if you'd like to let Rep. Van Zant know what you think of his bill, you can email him here.

Pow!