Quickies

Quickies: Astrology is Not So Harmless, Documentary About Sexism, and Women “Destroying” Sci-Fi

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Mary

Mary Brock works as an Immunology scientist by day and takes care of a pink-loving princess child by night. She likes cloudy days, crafting, cooking, and Fall weather in New England.

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9 Comments

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

    1. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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!”

  5. 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.

      1. 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.

  6. 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.

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