Category: Thoughts

Amazing what women can do, huh? Clueless boys like me and Larry Summers might be behind the times on things like this, but apparently there are women using the internet.

See, a job search or an instant message or a plane ticket is genderless, and therefore without a lot more intrusive data, I can’t tell whether women and men are using them in relatively equal proportions. Even if they are, I still can’t tell whether the businesspeople behind those products and services were thinking about both men and women in their audiences, or whether women are, as they so often have in the past, doing stuff despite the fact that it’s built for, designed for, tested on, men. On the internet, nobody knows if that dancing food was made to dance by a boy or a girl.

The odds, however, indicate that it was a boy. If you’re reading this you’re probably not a technologically impaired person, and it probably seems odd to you that such people exist. But they do, and they are more likely to be women than men. In my life, I know several people who barely get the email thing, all of them women. And of the techies I know… well, let’s just say my office is a total sausagefest. I don’t know why that is, and I don’t care to speculate.

But when there is a web service just for women, then you know who its users are. Duh.
— I just welcome signs that web developers are thinking about and caring about women in their audience, whether the software is gender-specific or not. (I have no idea, of course, whether the authors of OvuSoft or FertilityFriend are women, although I do know that mencal was written by a boy as a birthday gift for his girlfriend.)

The following things seem to me to be inevitable steps in a slow progression: someone is making a muscial from the music of The Smiths, and that Chicken Soup for the Soul now has a magazine,, and that I told you so! Denver’s housing market is falling! Falling!

Check out the LiveWrong parody bracelets. The customer reviews are the best part.

According to Yahoo News, 2/3 of US adults believe in creationism. OK, that’s a little surprising, but also fair: probably 2/3 of the US is pretty religious and that means in most cases a creationist outlook: “God directly created mankind.”

What amuses me about the survey is that it opposes “Creationism” and “Intelligent Design” as though they were two distinct things. Participants were asked “Do you believe that humans evolved from earlier species, that humans were created directly by God, or that humans are so complex that something else must have created them (i.e. God, or maybe Xenu.)

So, you could really rephrase one of their subsequent questions “Which of the following things do you think should be taught in our science classes: “God,” “Something godlike,” or “Science.” If you chose “Science should be taught in science classes” you were apparently among the minority. Or, perhaps, just perhaps, the poll was totally broken.

I’m gonna guess it’s the polling. Because the alternative– that people don’t want science to be taught in science classes– is really just too terrible.

A lot of people are convinced that vaccines caused their babies to develop autism. The belief is that thimerosal, a vaccine preservative that contains very small amounts of mercury, could damage the brain or the immune system at a crucial time in child development. It’s plausible– but the amouts of mercury are so tiny that they don’t really do anything. And the evidence is against it: countries where thimerosal has been removed from vaccines have not seen any decline in autism. So, the evidence is more or less that babies show signs of autism around the same time they are being vaccinated. Maybe it’s caused by television, or breast-feeding, or sunlight, or solid foods? How about cute little hats? Maybe it’s caused by cute little hats.

Autism is definitely in the news, though, and a lot of people think we’re having some kind of epidemic. Probably not: we’re just diagnosing more severely retarded kids as autistic. Previously, they’d have been given other diagnoses. So, autism isn’t any more widespread than it used to be.

Lesson the First: vaccinate your kids, dumbass. Things like polio and rubella suck and are really caused by not vaccinating, whereas autism is unlikely to be affected by anything you do. People who refuse to vaccinate their kids based on this hysteria are no better than the superstitious folks in the third world who refuse to vaccinate their kids because they believe that the vaccines are a CIA plot to sterilize Arab babies.

I wish there were some kind of superstition about me, one involving me kicking your ass unless you give me lots of money. Not that I’d do it– I just want people to believe that I have supernatural powers and need to be appeased.

For awhile I’ve been wondering when the Boston Globe and the New York Times, now that they’re under the same corporate management, will begin to move their news coverage together– when the Globe will begin to look like a regional edition of the Times, basically. Well, they’ve started with the web sites: The Globe now uses an annoying registration system, just like the Times! Whoo!

And you’ll need to register to read this article about how the Boston-area foreclosure rate is way, way, way up: nearly fifty percent in the past year. That’s more than the price of homes, you’ll note, which up some slightly-less-astronomical percentage.

And to round out the trio, news about how people are angry about the way some people fuck: people hate gay people in the US and also in Spain, which is not entirely the fun-loving kinkster’s paradise that Pedro Almodovar always made it out to be.

Gay romance novels are starting to take off. I wonder if Mary Cheney’s Memoir will be as taut as the abs and pecs of gay gay gay bla bla bla. Market data: “According to Romance Writers of America, the Houston-based professional association, which has 9,400 members, romance novels are read by 51 million people each year and account for 49 percent of paperback sales. In 2003, the most recent year for which figures are available, sales of romance novels totaled $1.41 billion.”

If you’re willing to pay for the Albuquerque Journal you can read an article here about how rents keep dropping as Californian investors are flooding the area’s investment-property market. (I remember bumper stickers in Colorado complaining about folks coming over from the coast and yuppifying everything. They said “Don’t Californicate Colorado.”)

See also NYT on the global housing bubble amd on increasing price resistance and a slowdown in the NYC market.

Thx to Fleck for the tip on the real estate, and to the inestimable Bookdwarf for the romance novel article.

No, probably not. Something would be obviously wrong, but you wouldn’t know it was you: someone’s out to get me.

A brief psychotic episode is usually triggered by a traumatic event such as death… Huh. I thought that was one of the things that didn’t happen after death.

Last night I dreamed I was a Rwandan refugee.

My belief that this dream matters enough to go online is shocking to me. But there it is.

Charles Darwin Has A Posse. Oh yeah. That pesky educated element in our society seems to be waking up to the threat of ignorance and is now evangelizing against it.

Finally.