Quickies
Quickies: Astrology is Not So Harmless, Documentary About Sexism, and Women “Destroying” Sci-Fi
- What Happens to Liquid Nitrogen Inside a Vacuum Chamber – I love cool science videos like this.
- Blurred Lines: The New Battle of the Sexes (BBC Documentary 2014) – “From bomb threats sent to campaigners for more females on banknotes to sexually explicit pop videos. From extreme laddism at universities to rape jokes in the school yard… Kirsty Wark explores whether there’s a new culture abroad in which it’s acceptable to write about, talk about, and feature women in a sexually offensive, even abusive way. Or whether the female of the species just needs to ‘man up’, learn to enjoy a gag, and get used to the 21st century world.” Bookmark this for when you have a free hour. From Donnie.
- Why Believing In Astrology Is Not As Harmless As You Think – Seriously, why do people even still believe in horoscopes and sign-compatibility?
- Olivia Wilde’s Ass Is Too Nice for Her to Play a Writer – Because we all know smart women can’t be sexy, and vice-versa, right? Olivia responds, here. From Donna.
- Women Are Destroying Science Fiction! (That’s OK; They Created It) – “This month, science fiction and fantasy magazine Lightspeed interrupted its normal publishing schedule to bring readers a special issue: ‘Women Destroy Science Fiction!’ ” I’m definitely going to have to check this out.
- How do I get more info about being a Planned Parenthood clinic escort? – From Amy.
- ‘Wrong, Wrong, Wrong’ With They Might Be Giants – A fun quiz with seemingly easy questions and not-so-obvious questions, featuring one of my fav bands.
I love TMBG and have really taken to Ask Me Another, I think of it as Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me for people under 40. Being over 40 hasn’t stopped me from enjoying the hell out of it though.
I got two questions right! I knew the 46 states one, because I saw it recently on some other quiz thing… =P I flagged 1984 as being way too early for George Clooney, but had never heard of E/R. The 1812 one I would’ve guessed wrong on the theory that it couldn’t be 1812.
It betrays my age but I actually remember E/R (and remember it being fairly good) when it first aired. It was a Norman Lear show and besides Eliot Gould it starred some people who would go on to do OK for themselves including a pre-Dances With Wolves> Mary McDonnell, and pre-Seinfeld Jason Alexander, and a young George Clooney before Roseanne and even before The Facts of Life.
For Amy: As volunteer Admin for the Los Angeles community of http://www.dailykos.com, this morning I sent email to PPLA, asking them to brief me about clinic harassment in Los Angeles and surrounding counties because our group is considering doing stuff. I’m under the impression there is little to none here.
On astrology, an old joke:
“You’re just like every Aries, always stubborn and combative.”
“I am not. I’m actually quite shy.”
“You’re probably not even an Aries.”
“Yeah, I thought astrology was bullshit, but it turns out it’s much simpler: I DON’T KNOW MY OWN BIRTHDAY!”
Thing that I find worst about astrology is the way that I get a fucking fatal disease for my sign. Like what sort of marketing genius worked that one out?
Perhaps we should rename the rest. Instead of Libra, Taurus, Gemini etc, lets call ’em Herpes, Stroke, Angina, Syphilis, etc.
To be fair, Aries (or Ares) has probably killed more people than Cancer; war really is hell, after all.
That seems unlikely to me. Cancer kills ~500,000 people every year in the US, according to the CDC. If we extrapolate that out to the entire world, that implies something on the order of 10 million deaths every year. That means that every eight years cancer kills as many people as both world wars together (about a eighty million). Note that this BOTE calculation makes some fairly outrageous extrapolations from the US to the rest of the world, but I think it’s probably good enough for scaling.
I’ve noticed that pseudoscience (astrology et al) marketing is preferentially aimed at women. This is obviously an example of sexism in action, and I wonder what cumulative effect it has on women’s attitude towards STEM and men’s attitudes towards women in STEM. It seems like it would steer (some) women away from STEM and give (some) men the impression that women don’t really belong there.