Remember Rhawn Joseph, the misogynist creationist crackpot who runs with the wolves? His paper on concubine husbandry for Our Men in Space has just been given a highly credulous writeup by the science and tech news aggregator, Slashdot. Shame on you, Slashdot. I’d encourage others who typically enjoy the site to comment against it being turned into a forum for fringe science and sexism.
Category: Blog
This is not common practice for me, but I have been drawn out of my poetry-opaque shell. You see, John Scalzi is currently running a contest the winner of which will be Tuckerized in his next book. The challenge:
For the contest, write a haiku from the point of view of some who is either about to die or has just died, from one (or more!) of the following:
1. A spider monkey or monkeys;
2. LASERS
3. Poor GPS directions
4. And, of course, Spontaneous Human Combustion.
The most popular choice appears to be a death that combines all of these elements, but I chose to focus on just one. You can see my contribution in the comments at #16.
Time to thin out my browser window.
- I keep meaning to find time to watch Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s presentation on OpenLeaks, his proposed Wikileaks offshoot project.
- Franklin Veaux (who writes a lot about polyamory and BDSM at his site) has made a fascinating map of nonmonogamy. I found this via Dr. Marty Klein’s excellent blog, Sexual Intelligence.
- There is a storm on Saturn the size of a planet. And it was discovered by amateur astronomers!
- Matthew Squair on the affect heuristic. I need to think about this more, as I think it may have implications for Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory. (Also interesting is Haidt’s essay Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion and the responses to it. For the record, while I am not knowledgeable enough about evolutionary biology to have an opinion on group selection, my thinking is most in line with the commentary by P. Z. Meyers. Also, after reading Sam Harris’s recent book The Moral Landscape, I think there is some truth to Haidt’s criticism that Harris’s prose is frequently more flash than substance.)
- “Chiasmus” is one of those words whose meaning I can never reliably remember. Maybe if I put it here it will stick.
- Via Jen Volant, the Declutter-365 Project.
- Finally, I don’t want this to become one of those things that so outrageous and hard to believe that I forget that it really did happen: the Pope explained over Christmas that the clerical sex abuse scandal is really a matter of context, and that “[i]n the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children.” It’s comments like these which inspired Tim Minchin to write a song in his honor. (Warning: contains enthusiastic profanity.)
That last picture I posted was a little graphic. I wouldn’t want anyone to get the idea that my new computer is strictly an opportunistic predator. I assure you, it can be socialized. Here we see it enjoying a glass of gewürztraminer and the composition of some new fiction.
You see? That one little evisceration was an isolated incident. It is, by and large, a gentle little beast. Speak to it in soothing tones and don’t let it see you carrying any Microsoft software, and everyone gets along just fine.
As my Asus Eee netbook committed the kind of suicide that fills the room with the smell of burning plastic, I’ve switched to an 11-inch MacBook Air for on-the-go computing. My background on the Asus was an image from Shaun Tan’s Tales Of Outer Suburbia, made available by Tor.com when he was nominated for the Best Artist Hugo award. It’s a lovely image, but new hardware and a new OS require a new decor. Tan’s drawing was intricately detailed and busy, so for the new laptop I’ve chosen something minimal and clean: the poster from my favorite movie, set against a matching background. (Finding images to use that don’t require background fills is a bit tricky; the 11-in. Air has a 1366 x 768 screen.)
Click to see full-size
So thats my desktop. Anyone else want to show theirs?
On Twitter, Annalee Newitz draws attention to “one of the most heinous things I have ever read.” It’s a paper by a Dr. Rhawn Joseph, printed in the fringe publication “Journal of Cosmology.” The paper is ostensibly about sex in space, but is really about safe handling of the Dangerous Human Sex Object, with its fragile internal gonads and its morale-destroying seductiveness. It contains sober and insightful observations, such as:
- “Biologically, females serve one purpose: to get pregnant.”
- “[T]he human female has evolved the cognitive and intellectual capacity to employ cosmetics, perfumes, colorful clothing, push up bras, high heals, [sic] and so on…”
- “If women accompany men on a human Mission to Mars, are they at risk for rape? Or is the greater risk, falling in love and then pregnancy?”
- “Female primates will also attack and fight among themselves for the opportunity to have sex with a high ranking male,”
- “Unfortunately, although a few women have flown on the International Space Station for periods longer than 100 days (e.g., Sunita Williams, 194 days, Dr. Peggy Whitson, 350 days) privacy concerns have prevented the collection and reporting of data on female menstrual functioning for long duration space missions.”
- “[Were a woman to get pregnant on a long space mission] [s]tress levels would rise, as would irritability, resulting in considerable hostility and anger directed toward the mother and father unless, perhaps, she had sex with multiple astronauts and the identity of the father was unknown.”
- “Naturally, if a few males monopolize the available females, the other male astronauts will respond negatively and this may lead to violence. This can be avoided by a rule which relieves the monopolizer of command in cases of sexual monopolization, thereby stripping any male of the high status which made female astronauts prefer him to the other male astronauts.”
- “Although male and female astronauts could be trained to “share and share alike” so that sexual favors are provided equally to one and all, perhaps a better solution might be to send two space craft, one with an all male crew and another with an all female crew.”
I’m just scratching the surface of this masterpiece, but to summarize: women (or, as Joseph seems to almost prefer, “female primates”) will endanger space missions by selfishly manipulating the (inevitably male) mission commanders to put inadvisable babies in their irradiated wombs, and the only safe way to include them is to either teach them to equitably provide sex to all interested men, or else to shoot their divisive breasts and vaginas to Mars in a special convent rocket.
The paper lists around 100 references, and only a mere twenty of them are the author referencing himself. What’s more, the place it was published has the word “cosmology” in the title. This is clearly serious scholarship; I must know more about this man and his work. Fortunately for me, he has a website. Tucked away between the artful pictures of himself staring significantly into the distance, his poetry, and his proud republication of his Amazon reviews, there is a 2300 word personal essay titled, “A VERY BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH NOTE,” which concludes:
Dr. Joseph is single and is not married.
Although he has certainly had his wild times, chasing women and carousing late at night, Joseph lives the life of a scholar and scientist who sometimes runs with the wolves.
He is an artist, musician, has written screenplays, and has authored short stories and books under other names, co-wrote a highly successful off-Broadway play, and has created over 60 documentary films which have been viewed over 20 million times.
When he is not working, Dr. Joseph spends a considerable amount of time walking in the mountains, in the woods, and near the sea…thinking. Always thinking.
What an amazing man. He must be very strong to have successfully resisted all of the female primates who want to better themselves by birthing his offspring.
This is Hermine, who came to visit Bexar county today. Thank you for not destroying the car I bought yesterday, Hermine, like you did several other people’s cars. And power lines. And houses.
First time in 25 years I’ve lived in San Antonio that we’ve gotten a direct hit from a tropical storm.
Clever, Google. Very clever.
Here’s a roundup of some things that are worthy of note.
• The very best thing to happen recently is Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, overturning prop 8 and granting homosexuals the right to marry in California. The whole decision can be downloaded here, but there are articles all over the place dissecting the good bits. The most important part, though, is this:
Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.
Thank you, Judge Walker, for doing your job well. And, as C. E. Petit notes, for being willing to take a correct position that will probably make you permanently unable to ever be confirmed to an appellate court.
• It is not a good thing at all that Christopher Hitchens has esophageal cancer which has metastasized and will likely soon kill him. But his essay in Vanity Fair on the experience of learning about it and getting treatment is as powerful as anything he’s written. Speaking simultaneously about the side effects of chemotherapy and the militaristic language which is so frequently used when discussing cancer, he writes, “In the war against Thanatos, if we must term it a war, the immediate loss of Eros is a huge initial sacrifice.” It’s a piece well worth reading. “Tropic of Cancer.”
• Charles Stross has been thinking some very clever thoughts about the hard limitations of space colonization. Most recently he has written an excellent explanation of why the practice is fundamentally incompatible with libertarian ideology. It’s an important reality check against having read too much Heinlein. (And yeah, I love me some Heinlein, but that joke is spot-on.)
• RadioLab is one of the best programs on the radio, and lately they are increasingly on the internet as well. To go with a recent podcast they have released a beautiful video exploring the concept of a moment. Utterly lovely.
Driving down the highway yesterday I passed a man riding a sufficiently unusual device that I pulled my car off the road and walked back along the shoulder to investigate. The man turned out to be John MacTaggart, the CEO of Pterosail Trike Systems, and he is in the process of riding one of his company’s products from San Diego, California to Saint Augustine, Florida.
John’s company makes wind-powered recumbent tricycles. When I passed him John had the sail stowed and was getting along by pedaling, but there are sailing videos on his website. Difficult to see in this picture is the flexible solar panel over John’s head which serves as dual sun shade and iPod charger. The website also shows a camping add-on where the mast serves as the central pole of a teepee-style enclosure (claimed to be able to sleep six, though that seems like overkill to me for a one-person vehicle).
I’ve read plenty of stories that feature sail-powered land transport, but this was my first real world encounter with the concept. I can’t quite decide if it felt more like seeing a glimpse of a techno-optimist sustainable energy future or a Bacigalupian calorie economy dystopia. Strange to think that the Venn diagram of those two milieus may have some overlap. But it’s an elegant and fascinating device. Continued good luck to John on his trip across the country.