Wednesday: Hoo Ha’s, Xenophobes, House Hunters, Male Egos, and Aliens, oh my!
Posted: June 20, 2012 Filed under: just because 24 Comments
Good morning, news junkies! Here’s your A.M. link dump…
This marks the first time in more than 20 years that a Nobel Prize has been given to a physician who specializes in all that stuff downstairs. Committee members praised Lazoff for helping to stem the frightening epidemic, which last year killed more women than ta-ta and derriere cancer combined.
- Election 2012 newsbit: Obamelot surrogate Caroline Kennedy scheduled to campaign in NH next week. According to Politico blogger Alexander Burns:
The Kennedy name doesn’t have the reach it used to, but New England’s lone presidential swing state (along with the Massachusetts Senate race) may fall within that orbit, and in any case it’s not like the president has a line of surrogates stretching out the door.
- The National Review adds another xenophobe to its payroll [ThinkProgress]. Are we really surprised? Here’s a sample of this lunatic’s commentary:
In a 2006 article, Yerushalmi lamented in the inability to engage in “a discussion of Islam as an evil religion, or of blacks as the most murderous of peoples (at least in New York City), or of illegal immigrants as deserving of no rights” without being labeled a racist. He also wrote that the American founders were on to something when they limited the vote to white men. “There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote.”
- Why It Matters That House Hunters Is Fake [Slate’s Double X]…here’s the portion of interest:
So what’s the problem? By now, the onus is on the viewer to consume all “reality television” with a chuckle and a grain of salt. The genre’s underlying appeal is often rooted in its escapist, aspirational qualities (or, at other end of the spectrum, its indulgence of our basest schadenfreude). But House Hunters was always much more about showing us an attainable reality than a fantasy. The show (and its many iterations), in which people just like us (juggling budgets, worried about school districts, pulled between city and suburb), go shopping for the best home their money can buy, not only glorifies the dream of home ownership, but makes it seem achievable. (If that IT guy and his elementary school teacher wife can successfully get out of their dingy apartment and into a new home with the requisite granite countertops, “marriage-saving” double vanities, and bedroom-sized walk-in closets, so can I!) This plays right into our inexplicably unwavering attachment to home ownership: Despite the collapse of the housing market, polling continues to demonstrate that we regard owning a home as the cornerstone of the American Dream—a perception that undoubtedly played a role in the home-buying craze prior to the bubble’s burst.
Showing houses that aren’t even for sale at prices divined by its producers, House Hunters is presenting dangerous misinformation about the home-buying process and deleting all of the accompanying complications and consequences. It’s turned what is actually a messy, frustrating, often dead-end process into a seamless (and perhaps necessary) path toward fulfillment. What’s more, it seems likely that viewers use the prices, locations, and home criteria discussed on the show as barometers for their own house hunts because the information is presented as fact. No, House Hunters does not explicitly condone selling one’s soul for a white picket fence, and other HGTV shows like My First Place and Property Virgins do delve into money and home-inspection woes from time to time. But doesn’t HGTV have some obligation to portray the housing market as it is, or, at the very least, offer a pronounced disclaimer about the producers’ creative and logistical liberties?
Maybe they could fix this whole mess and wipe the slate clean with a good old fashioned “where are they now” episode, showing us the truth after those mortgage payments start taking a toll.
- To paraphrase SciAm, The social construct of ‘the male ego’ lends itself to immorality:
One of the most notable risk factors for ethical laxity is one that all of the above offenders share: Being a man. A number of studies demonstrate that men have lower moral standards than women, at least in competitive contexts. For example, men are more likely than women to minimize the consequences of moral misconduct, to adopt ethically questionable tactics in strategic endeavors, and to engage in greater deceit. This pattern is particularly pronounced in arenas in which success has (at least historically) been viewed as a sign of male vigor and competence, and where loss signifies weakness, impotence, or cowardice (e.g., a business negotiation or a chess match). When men must use strategy or cunning to prove or defend their masculinity, they are willing to compromise moral standards to assert dominance.
Shall we blame it on testosterone, the Y chromosome, or other genetic differences? The current evidence doesn’t point in that direction. Instead, a recent series of studies by Laura Kray and Michael Haselhuhn suggests that the root of this pattern may be more socio-cultural in nature, as men – at least in American culture – seem motivated to protect and defend their masculinity.
- While I was on the plane reading my copy of the Economist this past weekend (yes, Dr. Dakinikat, you’ve rubbed off on me in a serious way!), I came across this fun little piece of intrigue:
The search for alien life
Twinkle, twinkle, little planet
An undervalued optical trick may help to find life in other solar systems
Jun 9th 2012 | from the print editionMOST astronomical telescopes employ reflection to focus starlight. A concave mirror creates an image from this light using a design pioneered in the 17th century, by Sir Isaac Newton. Those telescopes that do not employ reflection use refraction. They have a system of lenses, an idea first used to look at the stars by Galileo.
But there is a third way to focus light. A century and a half after Newton, and more than two after Galileo, a Frenchman called Augustin-Jean Fresnel worked out that you can do it using diffraction. A set of concentric rings, alternately transparent and opaque, will scatter and spread light waves in a manner that causes them to reinforce each other some distance away, and thus form an image. The rings are known as a zone plate. And Fresnel’s countryman, Laurent Koechlin, of the Midi-Pyrénées observatory, thinks zone plates are the way to find out if there is life on other planets.
Seeing oxygen in another planet’s atmosphere would be a giveaway of biological activity because the gas is so reactive that it needs to be continuously renewed. That would almost certainly mean something akin to photosynthesis was going on, for no known non-biological process can produce oxygen from common materials in sufficient quantity. Looking at such an atmosphere, though, is tricky. Stars are so much brighter than the planets which orbit them that their light overwhelms the small amount reflected from a planet’s surface. And this is where Fresnel comes in.
Read the rest! It’s fascinating.
Well, that’s it for me… Your turn, Sky Dancers! Have a wonderful Wednesday.
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
ecocatwoman
mablue2
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Reblogged this on Let Them Listen.
Morning 🙂
Rofl. MoveOn today (asking whether to endorse O over Mitt)vs MoveOn during the ’08 primaries (endorsed Obama over Hill…)
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I got a message when I chose Hillary, they asked if I wanted to vote again??????
They should stick to policy, yup the policy that their members were complaining about, mainly that their causes were forgotten while MoveOn sat silent and didn’t press their issues.
Now, they are trying to allow choice for both parties… 😆
Council to consider strip club fee to fund rape kit testing: http://mobile.chron.com/chron/db_273428/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=GFRm3bCW
Good morning, Mona!
Hiya bb 🙂
Leading off with the Onion was an inspired choice. Good thing you named the source, or I would have accepted it as real news. At this point the wingnuts have gone so far off the rails that I’ll believe just about anything.
The heat index is climbing here in Western MA with a promise that the next 3 days the temperature will be in the high 90s and that, coupled with the stupidity that envelops the daily discourse of what passes for “politics” is exhausting.
But the picture you chose for today’s post is lovely! A bucolic scene that is so restful I just want to lay down on the hillside and drink it in.
That photo is gorgeous.
I just went out and watered and pulled some weeds and came back inside with sweat running down my face. I’m happy for some warm weather, but why does it always have to be such a sudden temperature rise? I haven’t had a chance to get acclimated to warm weather yet, and now it’s going to be a two-day heat wave.
I guess I shouldn’t complain. A few days ago, it was in the 50s.
Hi Mona great post!
Matt Taibbi’s hilarious and splendid take on the Senate Banking Cmte douche nozzles.
Senators Grovel, Embarrass Themselves at Dimon Hearing
Speaking of edited clips, MSNBC is not alone 🙂
Fox News Almost Pulled A Fast One On Jon Stewart
Of course. I expect this kind of stuff from FOX. I just didn’t know MSNBC was doing it too. My mistake.
Re the business about the association between being ethically challenged and male. Fits right in with the other recent research showing the correlation between being ethically challenged and powerful. In the high and far off times, aristocrats were famous for being more ethically challenged than the little folks with middle class morality. All social, none genetic.
It’s the entitlement, stupid.
I mean, duh, right?
Historically, I am sure you are correct. But these studies controlled for any factors except gender. (I’m assuming they did or they wouldn’t have gotten by peer review). And they still seem to show males more unethical than females. Hey, I believe it. BTW, the difference between men and women is only a little genetic.
Really? Will you please cite sources for the difference between men and women being “only a little genetic?”
There are vast numbers of gender differences ranging from brain structures to temperament, to personality traits. Evidence for the mix of genetic vs. environmental effects differs across all these gender differences. Genes and environment also interact during each individual’s lifetime.
No one can completely separate the effects of genes and environment on any complex human characteristic, but there is certainly a great deal of convincing evidence for a number of innate gender differences in humans.
Thanks for the opportunity to expand on what I mean here.
What I am thinking of is that a difference of only one chromosome determines a male or a female, genetically. Of course that difference sets off a whole cascade of differences in hormones, body structure, etc. But strictly speaking, even many differences between males and females aren’t directly genetically determined. We know this by a variety of sources, including experiments of nature such as males who are insensitive to androgens, just to pick one, and are pretty much indistinguishable from females in body type, and it seems psychologically. To be a male you have to have exposure to testosterone in a sensitive period before birth, and of course to more testosterone at puberty. (I used to turn little girl hamsters into little boy hamsters and vice versa, routinely, by manipulating this).
Then you have the whole business of social influence on gender typical behavior, on another level.
People think development is a matter of genes or environment, but it isn’t that simple. I was reacting to the statement “all social, none genetic”, and suggesting that there is a lot that goes on that is neither, or between these realms if you prefer.
Yes there are male female brain differences, at least in the hypothalamic control of gonadotropins, and probably in higher areas as well. Women seem to have a thicker corpus callosum, and less laterality with respect to their cerebral hemispheres. These differences are not directly genetic either, as far as can be determined.
So saying that the difference between men and women is only a little genetic is pretty much true. After all we are the same in our other 47 chromosomes. It is not to say that there is little difference. Just most of the observable differences between genders is attributable to differences in circulating hormones, which does not necessarily correlate with genetic sex.
Forgive me if I seem hypertechnical here, but I went to grad school in this, and it makes me take notice when people confuse “genetic” with hormonally determined factors.
Oh, for a reference, any beginning physiological psychology textbook will do, say Carlson. I also liked a book called Neuroendocrine differences and sexual behavior, or something like that.
I don’t want to get into dueling credentials, but I have a Ph.D. in developmental and personality psychology, and I don’t find your comment particularly “technical.”
I don’t mean by technical in any sense difficult. I mean one might argue that all innate differences are genetic at the root, and I’m saying that they aren’t technically genetic.
That’s all.
And I’m saying that almost every human characteristic is the result of the interaction of genes and environment. In other words, not “neither,” but both. You seem to be focusing on physiological characteristics, but the discussion was about psychological ones. I’m saying that human behavior is quite complex and is almost always influenced by both genes and environment.
God, it’s good to see you here Wonk (Mona). I get uneasy if I don’t see signs of you for a while.
I second that!
Hillary 2012
I’ve always suspected the Bush-Cheney Crime syndicate was lying about the 9/11 intelligence and they were.
New NSA docs contradict 9/11 claims
“I’m saying that human behavior is quite complex and is almost always influenced by both genes and environment”.
What? no free will? 🙂
No argument there. I was, apparently foolishly, trying to inject a little nuance into the discussion, and point out that genes and environment are not all that exists. And genes don’t generally directly interact with the environment.
For example, did you ever wonder how a zygote manages to grow into a whole human being with many different kinds of cells? Why does it not just divide into a million identical cells? The fertilized egg has all the genetic material a human is ever going to have, and the environment is a womb. The answer is an epigenetic process called cell differentiation. These epigenetic factors, mostly where the particular daughter cell is located in the developing embryo, serve to turn on and off genes, and tell them what they are supposed to grow into. Epigenetic meaning above the level of genetic. There are a zillion other examples of processes that are neither strictly genetic nor dependent on environment. Psychological traits are obviously much more distant from their direct genetic underpinnings.
But if you want to use genetic as shorthand for all possible innate characteristics of an organism coming into contact with its environment, I won’t argue with you (anymore). Thanks for making me think on this hot, stultifying day.