Beer Science!

Just in time for me to go pick hops this weekend, a couple of related posts on the history of drinking and brewing beer.

Does Your Beer Glass Matter?

Typically, my beer comes in a pint glass, which seems the standard treatment for this libation: it leaves enough space for a nice head, and allows beer drinkers to appreciate the color and clarity of their beverage. But is it enough to really enjoy the rich notes that fermented barley can produce?

Our relationship with beer dates back some 9,000 years BC when the fermenting process was discovered independently by several cultures. As this is a history that’s fairly accessible, I won’t delve too deeply here. In line with this particular story, however, is the history of “glassware”—the containers that hold our libations reflect the social context of our times. These products reflect the technologies and the knowledge at our disposal through the ages.

Raise your pints to the Patagonian fungus that helped us to brew lager

Ask someone to think of a domesticated species and they’ll probably think of something like a dog, cat, cow or horse. But domesticated fungi are just as close to our hearts or, at least, our livers. The yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiase, has been used to bake bread and ferment wine or ales for centuries. But it’s only partially involved in lagers.

Lager is fermented at a lower temperature than either ale or wine, and the fungus for the job is a cold-tolerant species called S.pastorianus. It has never been found in the wild, and its genes tell us why. It has four of each chromosome, and appears to be a fusion of two different yeast species. One of these is S.cerevisiae but the identity of the second partner has been a long-running mystery. Until now, the best guess was yet another species of cold-tolerant yeast called S.bayanus. But like S.pastorianus, S.bayanus has never been found in the wild.

Now, Argentinian scientist Diego Libkind thinks he has tracked down the real species that merged with S.cerevisiae to help us brew our lagers. And he has found it in a most unexpected place – Patagonia, the southernmost tip of South America.

Enjoy! (Responsibly, of course.)

Be the Village

I miss DuWayne. He used to have more time to come play online, even after he started school. It was limited time, of course, because he missed his kids and had to travel several states away to spend time with them. But with parents, you always settle for the time you can get.

DuWayne's time online is even more limited these days, almost nonexistent, because he now has full custody. That's a good thing. The boys' mother lacked the personal and social resources for parenting. Being with DuWayne and near other family is good for the boys.

It's not so good in that the boys still only have one parent fully involved in their lives. The boys each have their own challenges, and after being raised mostly by the parent who wasn't up to dealing with her own trials, the boys' challenges are worse. On top of that, they now have to deal with an absent parent.

David (three year old) is also starting to finally express his frustration at momma being gone – this started around nine months after he last saw her. He is wanting mommy when he is upset and he is also constructing very complex and idealized narratives that involve his mommy. Sometimes they are specifically about her, while others she is involved in more peripheral ways. One of his most recent involved his alligator friend who apparently bit him in the leg while they were playing (thus explaining some rather nasty bug bites). He then explained that his alligator friend and said friend’s mommy are homeless, so have been staying with his mommy (where he has decided he also lives). Mind you, last I knew and have no reason to assume this has changed, the boy’s mom is homeless and Daver is aware of this – though he often talks about his mommy living in a very fancy house.

On top of this, Caleb is extremely angry, as well as experiencing a wide array of other emotions – many of which are escapist in nature. He has really been pressing hard lately, to fight with me, the way he was fighting with his mom before I got them. He is even using much of the same language his momma used – though often refers to himself, not me. He calls himself a stupid fucking brat, a dumb bitch and in other similar ways. And he has admitted to his therapist and to my mother, that he might well be trying to replicate his relationship with momma – or that maybe he wants me to send him away to be homeless with momma – or that he doesn’t deserve to have a safe, warm home when his momma doesn’t have those things.

I am spending the vast majority of my time on the verge of a complete breakdown. It takes a great deal of effort not to just let go and flip out. But I can’t do that. I can’t afford it and more importantly, my kids can’t afford me losing it.

This is where we come in. DuWayne could use some assistance, and he's figured out how his friends on the internet can help. All he's looking for from us are books, some to help the boys directly, some to help him help them. Most of them are inexpensive. Several of them are science-related. All of them would be useful.

It blows me away to have this opportunity. DuWayne's children are in a situation all too similar to those my brothers faced when I was younger. I couldn't do anything about that, but I can, and have, about this. Join me?

Mock the Movie: Atom Age Vampire

Things are a bit quiet around the blog at the moment. Somehow, running myself into exhaustion every other day working on the house (updating a 70s-era bathroom with some water damage takes a bit of work) doesn't leave me a lot of energy left for writing anything insightful, much less entertaining.

That's going to have to change by Thursday, though. The Journal of Are You Fucking Kidding has started a new Twitter game: Mock the Movie. Think of it as a crowd-sourced Mystery Science Theater 3000. This Thursday, we have Atom Age Vampire.

The instructions are simple:

1. Start following @MockTM on twitter.
2. Start watching Atom Age Vampire this Thursday, August 18th, at 9PM EST. You can find it on Hulu, Achive Classic Movies or Google Videos.
3. Once you’ve got Atom Age Vampire going, tweet your snarky comments to @MockTM. Directing our tweets to @MockTM will keep our followers from being overwhelmed with our snark!

Won't you come mock with us? I'll try to be on my game by then.

Something Hard and Something Easy

If you haven't already seen half a dozen links from your friends to Gerty-Z's "I gay wrote this post," first, ask your friends why they're letting you down. Then read it.

What I wanted to write about today is what it is like to be out as a new TT academic in the bio-sciences. EcoPhysioMichelle over at C6-H12-O6 has a post up about feeling invisible as a non-heterosexual academic. As she points out, it can be relatively easy to not mention the fact that you are LGBT. I have made it a point in my life to NOT be invisible. In other words, I am fully out. Everyone in my department knows that I am gay: colleagues, administrators, the janitor. All of the students know. My wife comes with me to departmental events and we have the lab peeps over for the occasional BBQ. If you are straight, you may be thinking "well, everyone knows that I am straight". No big deal, right. Wrong.

Why is it hard to be out? Not for the reasons you probably think. However, I think we've had enough straight people speaking for lesbians for a while. Find out from Gerty herself.

Now for something a bit easier. Let me start by noting that I have never in my working life received a raise that was only cost of living. Some of the raises I've received, percentage-wise, have made people's jaws drop.

Awesome, right? Go, me!

Well, that's one way to look at it. It's probably not the best way, though, particularly given that I haven't asked for raises that big. What it really means is that I've been underpaid. When someone gives you a raise to "bring you up to where you should be," that means you started way too low and stayed there until someone noticed. It means I've missed out on significant earning power over my career and only avoided missing out on more by not staying anywhere I didn't have a really good boss.

It doesn't have to be that way. It shouldn't be that way. And my friend Lynne has a post up about three sentences that will go a long way to keep it from happening to you when you start a job.

These are the three most important sentences that I learned in library school:

"I'm really excited about this opportunity. However, the offer is a little below my range. Can we do any better, say [name a number $5000 more than offer on table?]"

These sentences are a simpler version of the strategy that worked for my husband when he recently changed jobs. They worked for Lynne, and she lays out the math on what they can mean for someone else, either as earning power or in other perqs that can make your job or your life more pleasant and successful. Go read, absorb, and put them into action the next time you've already convinced someone you're the best person for the job.

Lady Gamers, Endlessly Editable

If you’ve ever gamed ever, at all, you’ve borne witness to the Eternal Argument. Do women fail to game because their ladybrains make them disinclined to, or is the community so unreceptive that women run screaming in the opposite direction? I come down firmly on the latter side. Let me superficially scratch the surface of this complex issue, while maximizing my SAT word usage to appear really qualified to discuss this matter.

That is Hermitage, who is more than qualified to discuss the care and feeding of gamer dudebros (because that's why women game, right?). Observant, detailed, and snarky, this post really ought to be all one needs on the question. Just in case it's not, however, I present the following.

At Bagram's Joint Theater Hospital

Just before New Year's, NPR ran a short piece on All Things Considered about the advances in the treatment of trauma that have come out of nine years of constant warfare. It was both heartening and heartbreaking.

Old Techniques Discovered Anew

Aggressive use of tourniquets, which have been used on the battlefield for hundreds of years, is helping to stop bleeding within moments of injury.

"The soldier out in the field that encounters an explosion or a gunshot wound, the most important part in his chain of survival from the explosion, until we can get him to Walter Reed [Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.] probably is what his battle buddy does — the guy in the next vehicle or the guy who was 50 meters away," says Benjamin.

Only a decade ago, tourniquets were a last resort, thought to carry serious risks of doing harm. But early during the Iraq War, soldiers began carrying their own tourniquets, and now all U.S. troops carry special tourniquets designed for use with one hand. The change reflects the chilling number of wounds that involve lost limbs.

This wasn't the easiest segment to listen to, but it's stuck with me ever since. I recommend at least reading it, as the entire transcript is available online. However, if you have a few minutes to spare, this is one of the stories where listening does make a difference.

Veganism and Virtue

I posted a link to this article a while ago on my Facebook profile, and it sparked an interesting discussion. Let's see whether that happens again here.

Many of you know that I have recently been struggling for the first time in my life with health problems. When I discovered that my problems were a direct result of my vegan diet I was devastated. 2 months ago, after learning the hard way that not everyone is capable of maintaining their health as a vegan, I made one of the most difficult decisions of my life and gave up veganism and returned to eating an omnivorous diet. My health immediately returned. This experience has been humbling, eye-opening, and profoundly transformative. To hear the whole story just keep reading…

I've been known to get into arguments with proselytizing vegans online for reasons that are made all too clear in this post. The typical scenario is that a vegan diet is sold as a great moral good because it contains no animals (read "no death") that is healthful because it is good. It isn't hard to find the absurdity in this position. After all, the diet that causes the least death in the world is a starvation diet, containing no food at all. However, despite the existence of those who claim to live on breath alone, we can all generally understand that, well, that diet would kill us.

Yet somewhere in between, proselytizing vegans don't recognize that morally good does not equal healthful. A vegan diet works for some people but not all. It's a less efficient diet, and not all of us absorb nutrients equally well, for a number of reasons.

The problem is that because veganism is viewed as a moral good, the inability to absorb all necessary nutrients from the diet, even with supplementation, is viewed as a moral failing. Read the post to see what the writer was subjected to when she discovered she couldn't live as a vegan.

Then keep reading to see her deconstruct the idea of the vegan diet as a moral good.

A Difference of Opinion

My friend Kelly doesn't often go off on a rant, or at least he doesn't usually write them down. But when he does? Stand back.

One of the things that we as a genre community seem to be most vulnerable to is the idea that our personal favorite type of writing is the only type of writing that other people should love and pay attention to, and that anyone who disagrees that our pet subgenre is the one true form of worthwhile writing is a poo-poo head. This tends to be expressed in one of two ways:

1) I want more of my stuff, and why isn't everyone writing and publishing that? "Waaaaah!" *POUT* It is often accompanied by the stomping of rhetorical feet and tearing of hair. It mostly looks like highly articulate toddlers throwing a tantrum because the world isn't treating them and their pet interests as the center of the universe.

2) How can anyone believe that XXXXX is worthy of their attention and dollars? XXXXX is immoral and anti-intellectual or just plain bad. The people who read/write it are dupes/exploiters or simply uncultured. If people really understood the underlying dynamic of XXXXX they'd realize that and come over and read YYYYY which is the one true way. It mostly looks like even more articulate toddlers throwing a tantrum because the world isn't treating them and their pet interests as the center of the universe.

There's a whole bunch more, and the whole thing is thoughtful, well-reasoned, and delivered with a very entertaining 2-by-4. Go read.

Needing to Think

If the rest of the online universe hasn't already directed you to John Scalzi's post "Things I Don’t Have to Think About Today," allow me:

Today I don’t have to think about managing pain that never goes away.
Today I don’t have to think about whether a stranger’s opinion of me would change if I showed them a picture of who I love.
Today I don’t have to think about the chance a store salesmen will ignore me to help someone else.
Today I don’t have to think about the people who’d consider torching my house of prayer a patriotic act.
Today I don’t have to think about a pharmacist telling me his conscience keeps him from filling my prescription.

It's an exercise in the kind of empathy we can all practice from time to time. Read the whole thing.

Those of you who are bloggers may also appreciate John's first comment on the post, particularly the reference to the Mallet of Loving Correction.

Guests on Quiche Moraine

I haven't posted at Quiche Moraine for the last couple of weeks, but we've got guest authors who are more than making up for it. If you haven't clicked over from my blogroll, you're missing out.

The first is Jim Emery, who worked for the Ashwin Madia campaign in Minnesota's Third Congressional District in 2008. His recollections of the campaign, and the implications of the changing technological landscape for future campaigns, are posted in four parts: Introduction (background on the campaign), The Role of Communication, Framing the Debate, and Epilog (a look back at the difficulties of engaging the electorate). If you are short on time, skip to the second post. There are lots of fascinating observations that could only come from within the campaign from there on out.

The second...well, I'll just say here what I said in the introduction there:

Sometimes being an editor is the best job in the world. In this case, DuWayne Brayton sent me something that just doesn't fit on his blog, because it's fiction. Only fiction isn't quite the right way to describe this either. You're just going to have to read it, and it's my privilege to tell you to do so. I suppose I should also mention that there is a small amount of explicit content, but you won't mind. Trust me.

Seriously, go read it.

Embracing the Slut

Yay! Muse in Vivo is blogging again. She's one of those people I don't always agree with, but I stop and check my assumptions when we do disagree. And what does she do almost immediately upon restarting her blog? Point me to "My Sluthood, Myself." at Feministe, which I might have missed otherwise. Don't you make that mistake.

That’s the story we get sold, right? That women who sleep around are destroying their chances at True Love. Something to do with bonding hormones getting all used up? Or is it that we have so little self-esteem that no one could love us? Or maybe it’s that we’re all used candy wrappers or dirty masking tape. I can never remember.

Thing is: I’ve done it the other way. Until my mid-30s, I was largely a serial monogamist. Not for any grand ethical or philosophical reasons – it was just what felt comfortable to me. That’s not to say that I didn’t have some wild adventures in college, or never went to bed with someone on a first date – I did on occasion. It’s just that when I did, I’d often wake up the next day in a relationship. Let me tell you: not the best recipe for partnership bliss.

I don't think I've ever read a better deconstruction of how romantic relationship/sexuality myths create doomed relationships, and that isn't even the point of the piece, which is also well worth reading. Go. Shoo.

Then, when you're done, read Muse's take on the same topic.

No More "Safe" Guys

Over the last few weeks, I've had a number of conversations with my male friends about them being called "safe," or in one case, a "safety blanket." Don't know what I'm talking about? Celebrate.

This is the phenomenon in which a (generally young) woman dismisses her behavior around a guy as "Oh, that's just so-and-so. He's safe." It always sounds like it's meant to be a compliment, but there's very little like it to bring out the bitter in a guy even decades after the fact. It took explaining the concept of "safe" to the wife of one of these friends for me to really figure out why.

Read the rest at Quiche Moraine.

Pain Research Matters

As someone who recently spent a bunch of time debating whether the pain was worse than the narcotics, as someone who saw my fitness level (and that of others around me) tank because of pain, as someone who literally watched my pain be dismissed because a doctor "couldn't imagine" the cause, as someone who was accused of shirking when pain kept me from something I enjoyed doing, as someone who watched the world go by while I couldn't, I understand how much pain research matters. Do you?

If you need a bit of help, I recommend Zuska's post on her migraines and the failures of available pain treatments.

I am deeply personally acquainted with pain, both chronic and acute, and the list of prescription and OTC meds I have taken over the years in an effort to prevent and control migraines, and treat their pain when they manifest their ugly selves in my life, is stunning even to me: Acetaminophen, acupressure, acupuncture, ambien, amitriptyline, aspirin, chiropracty, coffee with lemon juice, coenzyme Q10, darvocet, demerol, depakote, dilaudid, excedrin, fentanyl, fiorinal, inderal LA, lamictal, magnesium, massage, percocet, petadolex, reglan, seroquel, skelaxin, timolol, thorazine, tizanidine, topamax, toradal, tramadol, verapamil, vivactil, vicodin, vioxx, xanax, zonergran. I am pretty sure this is only a partial list as I did not go through my file with the information on all the meds I’ve ever taken since my stroke odyssey began in 2003 for this post.

Luckily, there are pain researchers who also understand. One of them, JuniorProf, has recently started blogging again.

At McGill 3 very important things happened to me.
1) I was suddenly working in the most dynamic pain research center in the world. The multidisciplinary nature of pain research suddenly became very apparent to me and opportunities to translate basic science findings into clinical results seemed more attainable than in other areas (I’m not saying this is true, just my perception).
2) I started to go to pain clinical rounds. There I finally gained a grasp of the horrific suffering of chronic pain patients. It is one thing to read about it, it is quite another to meet these patients and hear their stories. A consistent story you hear from these people is how they are abused or dismissed by a medical system that all too often does not take pain seriously. This inevitably makes their pain condition worse and by hnb the time they finally start to get relief from their pain they are often out of work, severely depressed and sometimes even suicidal. It is truly heartbreaking.
3) I became a pain patient myself.

Go read the rest. If that's still not enough to understand the importance of pain research, you can move on to JuniorProf's Twitter #painresearchmatters campaign. A few chosen Tweets contributed by others than JuniorProf:

• because migraines are like a part time job without pay
• Because pain is not a gift or a blessing or a lesson. It is pain.
• Pain research matters to me because I'm sick of becoming accustomed to pain as if it's usual, par for the course...
• Because we want the chance to be the best we can be in our lives.
• Because it's not in my head.
• Because pain is not a failure of either morals or fortitude. We never "deserve" to suffer.
• Because there's very little more invalidating than "You shouldn't be experiencing any pain." *shrug*

Of course, there's a good chance, pain being what it is, that you do understand. You may never have experienced the failures of pain management, but you've almost certainly experienced the successes. So what do you do to tell the world you support pain research?

Well, aside from breaking the taboo of talking about pain, I'm not entirely sure. That is important, though, even if you only reach a small audience of family and friends. You can also demand that studies like the one that got JuniorProf so riled up are put in the context of the research they support. And you can keep reading JuniorProf to find out more about pain research.

It should be a fascinating, and hopefully productive, trip.

What I Owe Bora

You probably don't realize this, but if you're reading this blog and enjoying it, you owe a small debt to Bora Zivkovic of A Blog Around the Clock. I owe him a much bigger debt.

While Greg Laden has certainly done the most to promote this blog, and many, many others (too many to link) have played a part in that, without Bora, I would probably never have managed to talk myself into promoting it. When I started reading A Blog Around the Clock, I was still commenting on other blogs without leaving a link back to this one. What can I say? I'm Minnesotan, introverted and all too aware of the risks of social interaction.

Bora, on the other hand, has been consistently forthright on the subject. What good does writing a blog do if no one ever reads it? Not linking, not connecting people to your thoughts isn't discretion or politeness. It's stopping the conversation dead. And Bora is all about the conversation.

So now I link myself. I take part in the conversation when I have something to add. (Yes, those of you who wish I wouldn't now know who to blame.) I let people know when I'm writing on one of their pet subjects. I promote myself and my work, and I owe it to Bora.

I owe him more than that, though. I owe him for ScienceOnline.

I'm a geek. I've attended science fiction and fantasy conventions for, oh, about the last two decades. I've gone to programming, but until recently, I hadn't participated in programming.

See, while I'm a geek, I'm hardly the biggest geek in the room, no matter what room I'm in. I'm not actually an expert on any subject, at least not by comparison to the people around me. In geek culture, I'm a dilettante. So why would anyone want me to sit at the front of a room and talk?

I almost didn't go to ScienceOnline2009. I didn't think I had anything to contribute there either. I'm not a scientist. I'm not a teacher. I'm not a journalist. I'm not a science blogger. Just a geek who writes science fiction sometimes. But there ended up being too many people I wanted to meet and too many sessions I wanted to see, so I put my name on the list.

Then Bora, dear Bora, immediately drafted me for the Science in Science Fiction session, where I'd expressed the tentative thought that maybe I could contribute something. And I do mean immediately. I was so gratified that I busted my butt to put together materials to talk about. Peggy Kolm did too, although she wasn't able to make it to ScienceOnline in the end. So I moderated the session on my own.

Turns out I'm pretty good at it. Good enough that people made a point to compliment me on it (for moderating? who knew?). Good enough that I was inspired to interview for Atheists Talk radio instead of just hosting, starting with interviewing Bora, of course. Good enough to have turned it into a panelist gig at Skepchickcon. Good enough to have put together a panel for ScienceOnline2010 and to be thinking about what niche I can carve out for ScienceOnline2011. Good enough to be working on becoming enough of an expert on something (no hints until I see how it turns out) to submit a paper proposal for TAM9.

And I owe it to Bora.

There are plenty of other things I owe Bora, of course. He's been a consistent champion of conversation, even in the midst of argument. He encouraged me to be thoughtful about my blogging and what I want to accomplish with it. He's written those massive posts that bring together thoughts and subjects in new ways that make me think very hard. He introduced the blogging world to his lovely wife, Catharine, who has been very good to me indeed and whom I would have missed if I'd never managed to meet her. He's also responsible for me meeting SciCurious, for which I'm much richer in many ways. He took part in Jodi and Jason's proposal trail, which is partly responsible for their coming to Minnesota last month for CONvergence. He championed blog carnivals, through which I've come in contact with a ridiculous number of cool people.

I'm forgetting things, of course, but it's only because there is so much I owe Bora that I can't keep track of all of it at once.

As I said at the start of this post, if you enjoy my blog, you owe Bora something too. There are a few ways in which you can do something about it. You can blog or Tweet about it (use the hashtag #IOweBora). You can help connect ScienceOnline and potential sponsors in order to help the conference grow. You can also recognize the fact that most of what Bora has done, he's done with very little in the way of remuneration. Abel Pharmboy is working to rectify that, since the Zivkovic family is currently dealing with disability and underemployment. If you have a little something you can contribute, you can show him directly that you understand how much you owe him.

Because we all do.

Blogrolling

Time to update my blogroll. Actually, it's been time for a while, but the exodus from ScienceBlogs has made the current status ridiculous. While I'm at it, enjoy a few posts from people's new sites, plus a couple from what is, for now, temporary exile.

A Blog Around the Clock: A Farewell to ScienceBlogs

Of course, I started (in 2003/4) in political blogging where much is a matter of opinion, stakes are high, tempers are short, speed of blogging is important, and stating things confidently and even ferociously is important as a persuasion method. If I have heard some useful factoid somewhere, I would often boldly claim it as true without checking first.

But then I gradually switched to blogging about science. This is the domain of verifiable facts. The goal is education, not so much political action. I wrote about my area of expertise, and I wrote in a way that built on that expertise and made it accessible to the lay public. I wrote about things I knew a lot about and was very familiar with the literature. So I referenced, cited and linked to a lot of supporting documents – peer-reviewed scientific papers.

Are You SciCurious?: Sex, Stress, and Neurogenesis

Sci couldn’t help but notice all the tweets going around the other day talking about how sex stressed you out but was ultimately good for you. She contemplated saving it for a Friday Weird Science, but it’s not THAT weird (though it is interesting), and anyway Sci has something brewing for teh weird skienz.

So this is going to be a post for today. Let’s talk about sex. And let’s talk about stress. And then let’s talk about how increases in glucocorticoids are not the be all end all of psychiatric pathology.

Thus Spake Zuska: How Not To Sell Me Your Fancy HVAC System

Third dude came today and did a long presentation after having measured all sorts of shit and went on about importance of proper installation, bla bla, explained all sorts of bla-di-bla about the equipment, how their employees are carefully screened and drug tested and they don’t allow any convicts to work for them because in prison they teach convicts plumbing and HVAC and here’s a picture of brown dudes in prison uniforms studying to come rape and kill your wife in your own home under the guise of installing your new furnace and ac, and you can get a heat pump too to further reduce costs, and bla bla more tech stuff, and voila! four options for your consideration, good, better, best, wow, ranging from $11k to $16k.

And I said, “WTF?”

White Coat Underground: Reminder: Whooping cough is serious business

I shouldn’t see any cases of pertussis (“whooping cough”), but I do. We have a safe, effective and affordable vaccine. But still, people are getting this disease. In the age group I see (adults), immunity has often waned, and if they haven’t been revaccinated, they can get the disease and pass it on. In adults it often looks like a cold, but not in kids. Most properly vaccinated children are immune and remain so until there little airways are large enough to cope with the illness. But a certain percentage of kids either don’t get vaccinated or aren’t successfully vaccinated, leaving them vulnerable to a disease that shouldn’t even exist at a measurable rate.

DrugMonkey: Blog collective

In the current upheaval of ScienceBlogs, however, I’m seeing a trend by which if people are thinking “blog collective” they are thinking inward toward their respective -ology domains.

The re-launch of geoblog Highly Allochthonous is a case in point. Notice the domain name “all-geo.org”? Gee, I wonder who they are intending to collectivize? Also see the genomesunzipped collective started by Daniel MacArthur who may or may not be closing his Sb shop (hasn’t said, so far as I know).

Greg Laden: Can you train an adult brain?

It is often said that the human brain develops and improves up to a certain age, then becomes stagnant for a while, then slowly (or not so slowly) deteriorates over time. This is an old conception that developed before we knew that neural connections are being modified constantly, and that it is even the case that new neurons can develop in an adult brain. So, it should not be too surprising to find that it is possible to purposefully train the brain to be better at certain functions, even if you are already old and decrepit.

Hypocrisy Part II

Side note: anyone who wants to talk about how they don't like Zuska, etc. can please stay the hell out of this comment thread.

There's some confusion over the intent of my last post, enough that I think it's worth a follow-up post to clear some things up. I'll start with Zuska.

Stephanie, are you really inviting your readers to honestly let you know if they think you behaved in a hypocritical manner? Or are you just hoping to hear a chorus of "nuh uh, no way, you are the best!!!"

I really am asking. Outside perspective is good for, well, perspective. I'd also like to hash the issue out a bit.

To be transparent, I don't really expect to get answers that indicate hypocrisy. I do, however, expect answers that will illustrate what people object to when they're calling me hypocritical. In particular, I wanted to draw becca out on the topic in a forum where we could discuss it with less sniping going on. Controlling the sniping didn't work so well, but at least I got an answer from becca.

I think there's a bit of hypocrisy inherent in tolerating shit from out friends we wouldn't from strangers. But without that, few of us would have friends.

I think becca's characterization here is part of the problem. I'm pretty sure it's a big part of the answer to my questions about why people see hypocrisy in my behavior. In the press to "win" bloggy arguments, we've lost track of what "hypocrisy" means.

a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; especially : the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion

Hypocrisy is not failing to be perfectly consistent in the application of ideals one actually has. It's not even having different standards for different people. It's a form of dishonesty that prompts the wrath we reserve for people who lie to us. Describing behavior that doesn't meet that definition as "hypocrisy" started as a way of invoking that wrath to back up a failing argument. What someone online means by it now is anybody's guess--unless you ask.

This is why I rarely use labels when I'm pointing out fallacious argumentation and the like. This argument effect is starting to render them meaningless. I'd much rather say to someone, "Your opinion of me is very interesting, but do you have anything to address my reasoning?" than accuse them of argumentum ad hominem. When people no longer understand what the problem is from the name, we need to address the behavior directly.

That said, there are a couple of things about becca's friends versus not friends idea that I want to dig into. The first is that you don't, and won't, see a lot of my interaction with my friends. I'm just not that exhibitionistic (bloggerfail?). That's doubly true on those occasions when I want to work to change their minds about something. Turning that discussion into an adversarial interaction in public with people taking sides or being happy to see a disagreement is about the least productive tack I could possibly take. There is no point.

Secondly, I think that much of what is being seen as double standards is a difference in the level at which we understand others' behavior, kind of an extension of the actor-observer bias. We are privy to much more information about why our friends do what they do. We understand it better. We see a wide range of behavior from them. We have the context to understand why they do what they do--and to empathize.

People who aren't our friends, however, or even those who are our friends but are new friends or are at some distance from us? Them we don't know as well. We see a smaller range of their behavior, and we see less of the circumstances that provide context for the behavior. We just don't have the same basis for empathy, even though we might well offer it if we did.

Of course, even though it isn't a double standard, this effect is still something to be wary of. It can make you very, very wrong.

And, finally, because this is important to me, back to Zuska.

I thought we were friends.

Me too. I still think we're friends.

We're friends at a distance and both of us busy with other things, which makes it a hell of a lot harder when we have disagreements. It makes it hard to even know when we're disagreeing. Making it harder yet is the fact that people keep telling us we have lots of disagreements. We're primed to see them even in places where they don't exist. And we just don't talk enough to sort out what's real and what's not.

Take the idea that I called anyone, much less you, a bully in the comments on Jason's post. It didn't happen. I did get angry enough at the presence of "so-and-so deserved it" comments that I wasn't clear that "junior high" wasn't meant as a descriptor of all the comments I objected to, and for that, I'm sorry. I still disagree that you would apply the same simple argument about power to other circumstances, but I wish I had been more careful of your feelings.

Something similar happened with your post, wherein people thought you were attacking me as a bully. I didn't know what to think, so I set it aside until it got sorted out on its own or I had time to sit down long enough to ask. I'm glad you clarified.

For the record, I don't think we have that many disagreements. Those that we do have mostly have to do with our perceptions of other people, where I think more priming bears a lot of the blame. We simply don't get the same things from the same words.

Aside from that, I don't see much in the way of disagreement usually. I'm appallingly focused on tactics a lot of the time and your focus is different, and that's cool. I get slightly annoyed when people mistake venting for tactical work, but that isn't you. I also love it when you do get tactical.

So yes, friends. And I'm glad you asked and hope you will again if you ever doubt it.

I, Hypocrite?

Still in the middle of a couple of insanely busy weeks, but I'm enjoying them immensely, due in no small part to my honeymooning Canuckistanian friends. I'm terribly sad CONvergence is done, as intense as it was, and I'm missing too many people terribly already. Hooray for TAM coming up.

Something interesting happened while I was busy, though. I discovered someone was talking about me. Several someones in fact. The bits I found interesting:

Right, completely unrelated dumbass....did you miss the participation in each tale by Greg Laden and Stephanie Zvan? The point, for the slow types, is their hilariously self-serving hypocrisy. Such arbitrary standards of conduct make it clear they don't believe a damn bit of their structural and linguistic critique. It is being deployed disingenuously and need never be taken seriously as an argument.

What it is ABOUT is that THESE SAME PEOPLE (Greg and Stephanie Z. particularly, but there are others too) who are now reveling and celebrating their meanness in this episode were, just barely a week before this hit the tubes, finger-wagging and attacking Zuska and Isis for being ZOMG SO MEEN to GMP, and calling them "internet bullies" and suggesting that feminist bloggers should be nice or STFU.

THAT's what it's about. What sockmaster did was douchy and reprehensible, and no one is objecting him taken down or being taken to task. However, when some of THESE SAME PEOPLE judge and attack Zuska and Isis for being less than sweet to someone whose thoughtless casual racism had actual effects IN REAL LIFE, it is what's called "hypocrisy".

Interesting, of course, because, um...WTF? So I asked for specifics of said hypocrisy. The responses? DeviantOne decided that these two statements were incompatible:

Yes, social interaction is really a sporting competition, that kid who dared to go up to the jock table at lunch had it coming, people should really have something better to do than think about people's feelings, nobody down the totem pole a bit ever has any power over those further down, and the popular kids have a responsibility to show everyone else how they don't measure up to local, temporary standards. Did I miss anything?

No, I really don't miss junior high school.

Oedipus, thanks for the zip file. I really wanted those comments from the puppets to hang around. There's a certain argument to be made that we are the people we act like when we think no one's looking, and I think people ought to know who they're offering support to when they tell YNH to keep blogging.

And skeptifem pointed at a thread where she claimed I both objected to being called Greg's sidekick (as a belittling gendered insult) and defended Greg calling someone a bitch. Of course, what I actually did was agree with someone who objected to a third party (not Greg) calling someone a bitch.

She also, as far as I can tell, seems to think that if I suggest that some defenses of uses of power happen at a junior high reasoning level (power has an on/off switch, someone asking a favor of a person with more power deserves whatever they get) and I suggest that efforts to reduce your effective power when disagreeing with someone isn't typical high school bullying behavior, I'm a hypocrite because both conversations involve school references.

Since that point, the hypocrisy discussion has basically dried up in favor of talking about how bad my writing is (and, of course, the obligatory "this woman I'm disagreeing with must actually be controlled by a guy" moment). So, what do you think? About me, that is--I'm not looking for another round of "So and so's a creep." Whether you think it applies in this situation or not, Zuska has a point about gendered standards for behavior.

Today's question: Am I being hypocritical in the stances I've actually taken in this (as opposed to those taken by someone in the same thread I've been in? And if I am, where specifically does this hypocrisy lie?

It's Alive!

Blegh.

I'm laid up with a cold and feeling neither particularly creative nor entertaining. Instead of hanging out here, go check out The Thoughtful Animal, where Jason is talking about social capital and online bullying in the beautifully titled "The Blogosphere Is Alive With The Sounds of Bullying." The discussion in the comments about why something may or may not constitute bullying is also quite interesting.

Or if you're feeling about as energetic as I am and that sort of thing doesn't pick you up, here is the best argument I can find for why Siouxsie Sioux should record the next James Bond movie title song.

Here Comes That Day

You wanted life uncomplicated, only pleasantries
And like a fool, you thought life could be cheated of life's realities

Objective Values

It is June, which means we're due another installment of Are My Values Based in Objective Reality? Not sure what I'm talking about? Start with this discussion of skepticism:

I deeply and strongly disagree with the separation of ways of thinking (including scientific skepticism) and political perspectives. It is part of the progressive political perspective to be a rational thinker. Explicitly. It is part of the Republican Tea-baggging Yahooistic political perspective to be .... well, something else. Somewhat explicitly. It would be perilous to ignore this. It is explicitly part of the modern Atheist movement to think skeptically. A religious person is not thinking skeptically about that aspect of their lives, and if they were, they'd be some form of atheist or agnostic, and so on.

Don't miss the argument in the comments, which strikingly captures the opposing view, or the comments sections of the linked blog posts. It was a rather debateful April.

May brought us reactions to Sam Harris's claim that science can provide a foundation for morality.

I think Harris is following a provocative and potentially useful track, but I'm not convinced. I think he's right in some of the examples he gives: science can trivially tell you that psychopaths and violent criminals and the pathologies produced by failed states in political and economic collapse are not good models on which to base a successful human society (although I also think that the desire for a successful society is not a scientific premise…it's a kind of Darwinian criterion, because unsuccessful societies don't survive). However, I don't think Harris's criterion — that we can use science to justify maximizing the well-being of individuals — is valid. We can't. We can certainly use science to say how we can maximize well-being, once we define well-being…although even that might be a bit more slippery than he portrays it.

Once again, there is little agreement, except, perhaps, that the concept is intriguing.

And now it is June, and Greta Christina is taking a shot at the argument that some values are intrinsically and objectively more ethical.

Goldstein's argument is this. The basic philosophical underpinning of ethics (as opposed to its psychological and evolutionary underpinnings) are:

(a) the starting axiom that we, ourselves, matter;

and (b) the understanding that, if we step back from ourselves and view life from an outside perspective, we have to acknowledge that we don't, cosmically speaking, matter more than anyone else; that other people matter to themselves as much as we matter to ourselves; and that any rules of ethics ought to apply to other people as much as they do to ourselves. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," and all that. (Some version of the Golden Rule seems to exist in every society.)

In other words, the philosophical underpinning of ethics are that they ought to be applicable to everyone. They ought to be universalizable.

And liberal values -- fairness and harm -- are universalizable.

As usual, Greta does an excellent job of laying out her ideas without making overreaching claims. Go read the rest.

Why Prayer Is Nonsense

Jason has written a blog epic at Lousy Canuck. After a stray comment about prayer being useless in a particular situation, and the argument that ensued, he's taken a systematic look at the arguments for and against prayer. Go check it out.

• Introduction
• First, define prayer
• Know your deities
• But everyone knows prayer works!
• Even if it IS useless, what’s the harm?
• So why pray?