The last two posts on my personal blog were of the sort that I would usually have put here, if not for YLTLSWC. Here are links: Don’t Marry Career Women? and Guess Who?. The “guess who” is a good one, I think.
Maybe it’s a sign of how jaded I’ve become, but I thought Over-the-Counter Plan B was a lost cause. Happy to be corrected.
(Via Crooked Timber)
FYI, we just moved over to a new hosting company. We stopped leeching off of our friends and got an account with Network Redux, who (so far) I like very much. But you always like a new hosting company a lot for the first month or two, so we’ll see how that goes. One interesting thing is that they have a very active forum, and all of the long-time users there seem pretty pleased. They also host ImageMagick and Adium — two fairly important open source projects — which is good for a ton of brownie points in my book.
Anyway, I think everything should be in place and working smoothly, but please let me know if anything seems funny.
Carl Zimmer is talking crazy talk:
The scientists propose that several centuries ago, a histiocyte cell in a dog or a wolf turned cancerous. A mutation may have caused the cell to become abnormal–perhaps that LINE-1 element that marks Sticker’s sarcoma cells today. But natural selection would have favored other mutations as well that allowed its descendants to become more effective at growing into a tumor. During mating, some of the cancer cells managed to spread to the dog’s partner, where they could continue to proliferate.…
So here’s the big question which the authors don’t tackle head on: what is this thing? Is it a medieval Chinese dog that has found immortality? If so, then it resembles HeLa cells, a line of cancer cells isolated from a woman named Henrietta Lacks who died in 1951. After her death, scientists have propagated her cells, and in that time they have have adapted to their new ecological niche of Petri dishes, acquiring mutations that make it grow aggressively in the lab. One biologist even suggested that the cells should be consider a new species.
Seriously, read the whole thing.
In just a few weeks, Ruth and I will be leaving from my mom’s house in North Carolina, headed for Irvine, Califronia. We’re taking 40 most of the way, and if you know of anything interesting along that road, we’d love to hear about it. We got a copy of Roadfood, but we’d give even more weight to recommendations from people we know, and we want stop and see as many interesting sights at we can. Unfortunately, the world’s largest ball of twine is in Kansas and the House on the Rock is in Wisconsin, but surely there’s something good along the way.
Belle Waring at Crooked Timber links to a couple of posts about a woman who was raped and murdered in New York City last week. The first post is about how the New York Post changed the victim’s eye color to make the story seem more racially charged. The second — by Amanda at Pandagon — is a response to the general trend of the comments to the first, and in particular a number of attempts to blame the victim. Apparently it’s her fault because she should have known better than to go out partying.
Amanda’s post is great, which is typical for her, except that the pentultimate paragraph starts like this:
The guy who killed Moore threw her body in the trash like it was a Kleenex. He did that because he lives in a society that endorses treating women like less than human beings but simply masturbation toys and/or baby incubators for male use.
Really? Are you sure? Because I’m thinking maybe it’s because he’s a sociopath. I agree that, to some extent, we live in such a society as she describes, and that this is a bad thing. But is that really all you think is going on in this case?
[A short pause while Todd goes off and reads the comments at Crooked Timber.]
Damnit. It looks like my points have already been made.
Once:
As to “how society perpetuates rape,” I’m equally at a loss: I don’t think stranger rapes are any less disfavored in society than bank robbery, and yet people still commit bank robbery. I don’t know how I would comment on the proposition that “society perpetuates bank robbery.” This is not to say that you couldn’t have a more particularized discussion about aspects of misogynistic violence and its social background—Catharine MacKinnon, for one, has a lot to say about that—but it seems unlikely that a particular case of stranger-rape/murder would provide an useful or interesting angle on that subject.
And again:
From the Pandagon post: [Quotes the same sentences I did]This is bullshit with a captial ‘B’. The guy who killed Moore wasn’t only a rapist and murderer—he had a long criminal record. Did he commit his earlier robberies because ‘he lives in a society that endorses treating passersby like ATM machines’? No—he committed all of his crimes because he just didn’t give a damn what society endorsed or condemned.
Personally, I’ll settle for a lowercase ‘b’.