• Great discussion chez Hugo on PETA’s dubious tactics and building uneasy coalitions. In particular, Pip weighs in:
  

  What I’m suggesting is that in this case and many others, the absence of “common [ideological] ground” isn’t a barrier to co-operation, it’s the *basis* of it. Both sides are entirely clear-sighted about the nature and limits of the partnership. There’s no dreamy talk of “we all want the same thing really” — the point is, in a specific scenario, we all want *this* thing.

  On the other hand, if you’re not entirely sure where you yourself are coming from ideologically — if you just somehow feel sure the war in Iraq is a BAD THING — then stepping out on a peace march in the company of Islamist fascists may not be such a great idea.

  Now I can put my finger on why I feel uneasy at ANSWER events! They’re always ostensibly about a fairly specific thing, but judging by the people and the signs and the chants, they’re really about the communist revolution and veganism and all sorts of other things. It’s not that I don’t know where I’m coming from - I’m just always too lazy to bring my own sign, so I feel that my presence is being co-opted by movements which I either blandly fail to support (animal rights) or actively oppose (violent revolutionaries of various stripes). And I feel a little bit taken advantage of, too, when this tacit agreement to focus on a specific cause is violated.

  I think I owe Hugo a fuller response on the PETA thing, too. Or maybe I just owe it to myself, I don’t know. Anyway I’d like to write one, but I’ve found myself unable to articulate it yet.

• Distinguishing schools of feminist thought at Alas.
• A discussion on the correct application of science-fu has erupted over at Pharyngula. In particular, I delight in these (woefully out-of-context, but the context is so dull!) remarks from Razib:
  

  kevin drum, who has a degree in math from cal tech, seems at least as able to comment on network dynamics as PZ, a biologist.
  […]
  non-trivial correction, drum went to cal tech for two years and majored in math, but transferred to cal state long beach and graduated with journalism.

  Finally, someone recognizes that a Caltech undergraduate education does indeed give significant additional gravitas to one’s random spoutings-off on all things vaguely sciencey - HAH! Take that, everyone who didn’t like my plate tectonics post!

  More relevantly, the virtues of science-fu are at issue in the upcoming Pasadena school board election. Scott Phelps - a geophysicist turned high school science teacher - writes in the voter guide that “I believe in using my Caltech-science sense to detect unscientific arguments and to not be ’snowed’ by the administration.” Unfortunately for him, he’s running against incumbent Susan Kane, who lists her occupation as “research scientist” - she’s the associate director of research at the City of Hope medical center. I know Scott; he was one of the model teachers in my high school science teaching course. He’s a good guy; I don’t trust his political instincts (he caused a bit of a flap a while back…) but I do trust his take on the gritty details of curricula and testing. Since I haven’t been following local school politics, it’s hard for me to say which of these things is most important.

• I’d like to round this out with a link to something funny, but I haven’t seen anything notably funny today. Say something hilarious in the comments, won’t you?

Not Pr0n - best riddle game I’ve played in a while. I’m currently stuck on level 10… yar!

Safe for work, but does have sound. Wear headphones.

1. The LA Times wrote an article about me! Or at least me considered as a demographic phenomenon:
   

   Iowa suffers from an alarming brain drain: It loses more of its young, single, well-educated adults than any state except North Dakota. In search of bigger cities, hipper crowds and warmer weather, young Iowans flee in such numbers that demographers predict the state will face a drastic labor shortage within two decades.

   Desperate to keep the state’s future from bolting, the Republican leadership in the state Senate is proposing trying to entice young adults to stick around by abolishing the state income tax for everyone under 30.
   […]
   Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, a Democrat, has tried […] holding cocktail parties for former Iowans living in Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C. He boasts of recruiting more than 1,000 people back to the state in four years of aggressive promotion.

   But that’s not enough to offset Iowa’s losses.

   L.A.’s allotment of weather and hipsters is lovely, for sure, but if they had consulted me for the article, they would’ve mentioned the fact that Iowa’s public universities are being systematically torn to shreds by the same people proposing this tax cut. Ditto public arts funding. Ditto public library funding.

   Also there aren’t any earthquakes.

   (link via the shiny new LA Times Addict, which in turn was off BoingBoing)

2. If Language Log says it, it must be true: nerds are funny after all! At least for nerdy values of “funny”:
   

   My reasoning, such as it was, involved several steps, or at least the interaction of several vague ideas. First, the phrase ” for values of * that” indexes a subculture that includes programmers as well as mathematicians and others. Second, Michael Silverstein has already used the word metapragmatic to refer to folk reasoning about (reasoning about) meaning in context (in the phrase “metapragmatic ideology”, which also sounds good, though I couldn’t figure out how to use it in the space and time available). Finally, the originally cited remark was based on treating the interpretation of the word neat as if it were the instantiation of a variable. (I presume, FWIW, that it was in response to some remark like “That was a neat party last night!”).
   
   […]
   
   […] I admit that it’s not normal to limit the instantiations of a variable to the contextual interpretations of a word — but the young woman overheard on Fulton St. was using the language of mathematics to express an insight about an aspect of her life not defined by any prior formalism. Our colleagues in the humanities call this a “metaphor”, or sometimes a “joke”.

PZ Myers links to Apostropher’s coverage of graphic cuttlefish gender-bending with the observation that “I thought peddling molluscan sex acts was my job.”

Indignant sniff! Here at Green Gabbro we’ve been peddling yicky mollusc sexuality for just yonks without needing to be all territorial about it.* Mollusc sex, like democracy, domestic responsibilities and the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons, should belong to everyone!
(more…)

Point the First: all this talk about pornogroppression! If I could wave my magic feminist wand at the subject and boil away patriarchy, I think we’d be left with a sticky residue described by Brian Ulrich:

I don’t believe healthy sexuality can exist without an interest in the whole person, which does not and cannot exist in internet porn pictures or with paid performers in a strip club.

I think that’s the nut of it: you believe either that sex can stand on its own, or that it falls down without the appropriate supporting framework of emotional and/or spiritual attachments. Eliminate all the unsavory context you want, porn remains a vision of sex standing (or falling down) on its own.

And that’s all the insight I’ve got. Lynn has been writing a series of meditations on the nature of human sexuality at Noli Irritare Leones; there’s too many (and I’m too lazy) to link to them all individually, just go and scroll down if you’re into that sort of thing.

Point the Second: Beans, lots of beans, lots of beans lots of beans! Beans, like misery, love company. Thanks, Wolfangel.

1. Why did they not have caramel apples coated in M&Ms and/or cookie crumbs and/or coconut when I was a kid? Is this a new innovation in candy, or a cultural problem with the Midwest, or what?
2. No one at Francis’s is answering the question that obviously follows up a question like this:
   

   Have I also mentioned that, cussing aside, I’ve always been sentimental about yuletide, even when I was really too young to actually be sentimental about anything?

   So I’ll bring it up here. Just how old is old enough to actually be sentimental?

3. The Posada was lovely; the incongruities of candlelight on busy stretches of Colorado Blvd. were more than balanced out by the gut-wrenching combination of Architecture! Music! Death! at the entrance to several churches. Thanks to all who donated; the organizers weren’t completely on the internet ball and didn’t send any notices of internet donations until Thursday evening-ish, but I know of at least $50 - way more than I was expecting! Anyone who gave and would like a cute thank-you postcard, send me your address.
4. I bought myself an album of Christmas music the other day. It claims to be chock full of authentic-esque Medieval and Renaissance yuletide hymns, and the cover features a guy in a doublet and sunglasses. Early music with the fashion sensibilities of a cheesy 80s movie! What’s not to like about that, particularly when it’s in the $1.99 bin?
   It doesn’t quite live up to either the pre-Baroque or the 2020s, but at least the generic arrangements are of Gloucestershire Wassail rather than Here We Come A-Wassailing.
5. Happy Hanukkah, to those of you who don’t remember; also to those of us who only remembered because it’s on our office calendar, along with the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party and Eddie Vedder’s birthday.

1. Been meaning to link to two posts as Mousewords on feminism as a frame for the Democratic party: I: bouncing off the marginalization of women in the punditry and II: a succinct followup:
   

   You cannot reply to accusations that your side doesn’t have a vision of family and sexual morals with morals involving economic justice and war. Yes, those are moral values. But the war seems far away and economy too far out of control. Gender issues and family issues are things that are part of every person’s life.

   Liberals can’t see [the Republican success from endorsing machismo (I mishmashed the quotes a bit here, one paragraph from each post –y)] because of the distancing of liberalism from feminism. Liberal men are invested in the male mystique, too, and don’t want to openly align themselves with “feminized” politics of equality. We don’t speak the essential language of gender and we get our asses kicked repeatedly.

   Not much to say other than “Yaaaaaa! Grr!” - it’s an oversimplified framework, but I’m not giving in to the urge to marginalize feelings of righteous anger in favor of fitting this post into the conventional point-counterpoint. It’s a bullshit dialectic, yo.

2. Dad went to high school with Mike Johanns, and I’ve been thinking of ways to parlay this tenuous connection into something sparklingly witty or even just a few moments of attention. But no one seems to be very excited about the USDA, so it’s been tricky. Sigh.

…but it’s for a good cause. I just now signed up for a candlelit fundraising walk this Saturday, with an ambitious goal of five bucks over the minimum sponsorship. The money goes to the AIDS service center and Elizabeth Glasier pediatric AIDS foundation - and you can sponsor me on the Internet! Which I hear they have on the broadcast spectrum now.

1. Arrr, even me landlubbin aunties is talkin like pirates today! But they be not tellin such salty riddles:
   

   Q: Whom did the pirate vote for in the Haitian election?
   A: ARRRistide.
   Q: Wait. Why did they let a pirate vote in the Haitian election?
   A: Remember, the nation was taking its first halting steps toward democracy, and balloting procedures were rather chaotic. The pirate just slipped in somehow. Arrr.

2. The scurvy maggots of urban sprawl be opposin’ residential construction for me sainted grandmama! The bilge-waters of the Pasadena Star-News online don’t have the booty, but from the paper swag, it seems that West Covina, Baldwin Park, and the rest of the shark bait suburbs in the East San Gabriel Valley be tryin’ to scupper a bill requirin’ cities to allow small second units or “granny flats” to be built with only reasonable zoning restrictions. We’ll be keelhauled under our own boat, me hearties, if we don’t smartly scrape the barnacles of sprawl. Arr.
3. ARRRRRRR!

Who among you allowed me to go without reading Pedantry on at least a quasi-regular basis? I mean, really, what else have you been holding out on?

In any case,
Towards a Critical Theory of Physics is kinda tangentially related to the old post-structuralist/physics connection, except it actually has to do with, you know, physics. And contains a sage reminder to anyone interacting with a wannabe grad student:

The ugly truth is that science is full of arguments that were never resolved by falsification, consensus or rational argument. The ultimate decision maker in the hard sciences is graduate students. Arguments are resolved when old physicists die without convincing any grad students to continue to work on their theories. Graduate students in the hard sciences need to understand that their profs need them desperately, because it is only through grad students that their work has a future.

Which sounds nice, but - this grad student wannabe isn’t just after thesis problems of sexy scientific merit. She wants funding, too, in quantities not often doled out by fellow grad students. Which of course is the point: these decisions aren’t made in a vacuum. Funding, too, is a social decision, but it’s probably best not to gloss over the role the Old Guard’s purse-strings (not to mention the public’s purse-strings, which moves us briskly out of the purist realm of scientific argument) can play in the establishment of scientific orthodoxy, lest one disrupt the academic hierarchy entirely. Chaos! Would! Ensue!

Note to professors still in need of a new generation of crackpotty standard-bearers: evidence of financial stability will be considered on even standing with evidence of empirical or theoretical soundness, please direct all inquiries to the author.