Can't be a science nerd post 'cause this ain't science!

I'm foaming at the mouth over a recent story on the AP wire. The header reads "Sex and financial risk linked in brain"; doctors' orders or not (mouth-foaming not being an approved activity), I had to read on.

Why do I do these things?

My first reaction, discounting the rabid-animal imitation, is simple disbelief: Let me get this straight: my non-hermit friends work their buns off trying to get press coverage for their latest fantastic opus, and this makes it onto AP?

This isn't science. This isn't even fuzzy science. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, nonsense.

When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler

Okay, I'll buy that. Of course, young men aren't exactly known for either their disinterest in sex or their sense of financial responsibility. Hmm. How young were these guys? Old enough the reasoning pathways were fully formed? (Teenagers really are different, though maybe not quite a separate species...) Article says hetero men, but what if you were to study men with stapler fetishes? Or those guys who are, you know, really fond of snakes...

Giggling, I read on. And choked. Their sample size was 15 college-aged men

Fifteen? That's not a study, that's barely a start. Deep breath. No women? Do women not take financial risks? Of course. Was this an all-male school? No. So
why no women? Because

they didn't know what pictures aroused women

Where should I begin? Granted, the actual study isn't nearly as silly as the AP article makes it sound, and, yes, there is a link provided to some actual almost unbiased news coverage, but it's still irresponsibly sensational reporting.

Or maybe I'm just upset because chocolate didn't get a better mention. Or, for that matter, sex. –g–

As always,

pxj

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Don’t know about you, but that wouldn’t be good for me...

And you thought “every flavor” beans were bad! How ’bout condoms flavored like rotten Limburger and burnt sugar? Read on...

I’ve been accused of having rather a greater interest in condoms than is quite normal. Might be true—normal’s never been my goal in life. But I swear, I was not seeking condom info today. It’s just that my RSS feeds offered an article on a San Diego building that simply begged to be the spur for a host of bad jokes.

And it reminded me of this photo, that I’d seen online but apparently neither saved nor bookmarked—hey, who knew I’d ever need the thing? Besides, I knew it’d be out there somewhere. So I sent my search-bots out into the aether.

My first search for that photo turned up an archived news-byte (photo not stored); I got to this part—

[Picture] - SAFE FLAVOUR: A businessman giggles after a model hands him a free durian-flavoured condom in Bangkok yesterday, World Aids day. Condom maker Suretex said it would distribute 100,000 of them to create more awareness about Aids prevension and of course, to boost business.

—and I squicked. Durian?

If you don’t know durian, consider yourself lucky. This theoretically edible “thorny fruit” has such a strong aroma that it’s banned from airports in some countries, and taxi drivers will refuse to accept passengers who are carrying or have recently come into contact with the things. I’m told that they’re an acquired taste, but you’ll have to take that on faith; it’s not a taste I’m ever going to acquire.

Not even in the interest of safer sex.

One of the less biased descriptions of the fruit says:

“The durian, although malodorous, has an aril (an extra seedcovering) that tastes like a combination of banana, caramel, and vanilla, with a slight onion tang.”

Yummy—not! And I thought the banana-flavored condoms were in poor taste!

Okay, fine, I’ll shut up, go write or something.

Peace and (safe) x-rated joy,

pxj

Bonus condom news:

Did you know there’s a company making “the world’s first touch-free male condom”? I know that sounds silly, but for some segments of the population, there’s actually some health benefit possible. 1) Harder to put it on wrong. 2) If your hands aren’t clean...

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Whole, giant hives of squick!

Doing some publisher support today, in a small way—well, they took a chance on my work, the least I can do is drop by the odd loop day and say hi—and one of my old friends there referred to me as the Science Nerd. It’s not an insult; I’m proud to claim that title. Thing is, it made me realize that I haven’t written anything particularly nerdish in a bit. So I migrated over to the overloaded science section in my RSS feeder, and found...

Scientists claiming that termites are “social cockroaches.”

I nearly lost my lunch.

Not entirely sure I could explain that so-extreme reaction. Termites have never affected me that way before! I don’t exactly like termites, or insects generally, with the exception of those six-legged sea creatures cooked and swimming in drawn butter, but, at least from a distance, I can appreciate the design of some of them. I even appreciate some insects, the ones I know are beneficial, so long as they stay outside where they belong. But cockroaches?

No.

Not the little ones, not the giant sort we call waterbugs or Palmetto bugs out here, none of them. A cockroach is a pest is a pestilence, and must be destroyed—unless it’s a giant outdoor one and it really is out of doors, in which case it’s sometimes easier simply to run. And if you think I’m kidding, then I hope that someday you’re out when the damned things take flight, wearing shorts and a tank top or some similarly abbreviated outfit. They will knock into you!

Nasty things.

And let’s not even think about the Madagascar Hissing Cockroach, okay? (Though at least they don’t fly.) There’s an old theory that fear of sharks is hard-wired into the human brain, from the days when we, too, were sea-creatures. Perhaps cockroaches share some ancestor, or perhaps they give off ultrasonic threat-signals; whatever the reason, a great many more people are disturbed by cockroaches than seems logical, and I’m among the more severe sufferers.

They make my skin crawl. And apparently, it’s enough to label something a cockroach—because termites never used to squick me out! Actually, I’ve always found them rather interesting. They build amazing structures, at least some of them eat literally twenty-four hours a day, archaeologists and environmental scientists find them useful... Do a search for termites and “biomolecular archaeology”; you’ll be amazed. And, just because I like the article title, check out “Termite Guts Can Save the Planet”

But now that they’re being classified as cockroaches, I can’t think of them without getting queasy. Ain’t the power of suggestion a wonderful thing?

What I find strangest about this is that I know the mantids are related to roaches, but I don’t have that same response to them; in fact, I kind of like the praying mantis. Why, then, should I be so freaked out about what’s really nothing more than a slight shifting in classification that puts termites in pretty much the same degree of relationship to the so-scary cockroach that the mantid has?

Maybe I’m neophobic? No, that can’t be it; I like (some) new things. Maybe I’m just disturbed by people messing with the classifications? No, it’s probably not that, either; this is hardly the first re-classification I’ve been around to see. Maybe it’s just that damnable phrase. “Social cockroaches.”

Yep. By the full-body shudder as I typed those words, that’s the issue. Imagine if cockroaches learned from their newly acknowledged cousins and ganged up on us!

Oh, ick. I really wish I hadn’t said that...

pxj

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Who said you could pave my Moon?

A little background, for those of you who don’t semi-obsessively follow NASA’s doings: assuming the agency’s funding isn’t cut, the Space Shuttles are due to be retired in a few years (2010) with a lunar orbiter going up sometime next year (2008) and serviced during a couple of the last Shuttle missions. Their next planned lunar landing isn’t until 2020, but the Lunar Airborne Dust Toxicity Advisory Group is racing to find a way to keep those astronauts who do get up and out from inhaling.

Wait, that didn’t come out right. Lunar dust, it seems, is toxic to humans—they’ve known that at least since Apollo 17. And as technology improves, they keep finding more evidence of just how toxic it is, to the point that they’re considering some things I, for one, find rather excessive.

Like “paving” parts of my favorite satellite. Technically, the proposal is to use microwaves to melt particles into lunar glass and then using those paved areas as landing pads and foundations for structures. It’s an idea that actually sounds pretty neat, as in SF, but that I don’t think I appreciate in real life. Too, it wouldn’t prevent dust from being stirred up, as anyone whose ever driven through dry country can tell you. While the moon doesn’t have much in the way of wind to do that stirring, vehicles do a fine job of that, and even suited people can kick up more than a bit.

I’m no rocket scientist, but...it’s the finer particles that would tend to move most, isn’t it—those same ones they’re most concerned with? With reason, I hasten to say. Breathing tiny little mineral particles is never a good idea, as any number of black-lung sufferers would tell you if they were around to do so. Plus, many of those tiny particles have jagged edges which cling to lung tissue worse than mine-dust or asbestos ever could, and they’re so small a person might not actually be able to tell when they were present. And it’s not only the lungs that are vulnerable; some lunar dust particles have the rather appalling property of being able to displace iron in the bloodstream, with effects I don’t care to contemplate. Not to mention all the usual SF-nal concerns about substances to which humans have no natural defenses... So, yes, it’s a real concern. But paving the moon?

Some of the Group’s other plans, like the giant magnetic vacuum cleaner, seem more reasonable to me. (Okay, so it’s more like an industrial air filtration system. Once they get to the bits about tubes sucking up dust...) At least it would be inside the modules, instead of messing with a perfectly innocent celestial body that was just minding its own business!

I vote we send the whitecoats and their engineer compatriots back to the drawing board. Not, of course, that anyone asked me. They didn’t even invite me to their lunar dust workshop this spring, and I was just up the road. But they did have the kindness to put a bunch of their results up on their website (nasa.gov), during the reading of which, I came up with a new official job title for a character in my perennially unsubbed SF series: I think I’ll make someone a Regolith Disposal Engineer. So much classier than Space Janitor, no?

Of course, if they paved over the all the celestial bodies, there wouldn’t be any extra-terrestrial soil to be disposed of. And all those wonderful SF classic titles with Stardust and so on would have to be changed.

Nope, can't have that.

In this activist society of ours, surely there’s a group out there somewhere protesting the industrialization of our nearest extra-terrestrial resource? Not that I have any objection to NASA—or their equivalents in other governments, or the private space exploration societies—landing, exploring, running tests. I just think they should leave the land unspoiled for the next visitor.

Who knows? It might be me.

pxj

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