Quickies
Skepchick Quickies: Deadly Mushrooms, Friends with Benefits, and the GoldieBlox Hype
It’s February 12th–HAPPY DARWIN DAY EVERYONE! I’m celebrating with my traditional Survival of the Feastest, followed by Common Dessert.
- GoldieBlox Means Well But Doesn’t Live Up to the Hype – I have a background in engineering, and honestly, there are much better building toys for girls than GoldieBlox.
- The Most Dangerous Mushroom – Oh Death Cap, why must you be so alluringly tasty? (Not that I would know, although I do love mushrooms.) On a more serious note, this is a wonderful article about the science behind mushroom poisoning and the current research on therapies to cure people. From Dan.
- More and More Americans Think Astrology Is Science – Hopefully they’re just confusing it with astronomy, right?
- What Happens After Friends-With-Benefits? – Apparently, Hook Up Culture isn’t as bad as some people thought. (Gasp!) From Heina.
GoldieBlox really annoys me in it’s advertising. There’s a lot of them saying things against pink and princesses, acting like there is some sort of revolution but their toy is pink and pastels. It also has a set with a book with “princess” in the title. It just seems a little contradictory to me. All the commercials seem to be shaming anything pink or traditionally girly. So it’s kind of reinforcing the idea that the only way to progress is to be just like a boy. So really they aren’t opening up the range of interests they are just trying to limit them in another direction. Now to find out that there’s not much too it, it’s disappointing all around for me.
I think I’ll stick with just buying the k’nex education kits, legos (all kinds), and that model engine we were looking at.
My friend-with-benefits is now my husband. We’ve been friends for 26 – 27 years (my 29-year-old son doesn’t recall a time when he didn’t know my husband), and after my first marriage ended, we’d sometimes get together. Eventually, we actually got together.
Mary,
Its bad enough that large numbers of Americans still think creationism is science, now I just found out that large numbers of people in this country think astrology is science,
I think we should start talking up alchemy, poor little pseudoscience is being left behind.
I don’t know, phrenology is also being left behind. And numerology. (I know, it’s pseudomath, but still…)
The real problem is that there’s more and more of an antiscience attitude in the MSM. An article was recently interviewing people about scientific ideas that should be left by the wayside (My personal choice: The nature-nurture false dichotomy.) in this one article, so many names you might be familiar with (Mehmet Oz, Andrew Weil, etc.) wanted to chuck scientific epistemology itself in favor of “My feels are just as valid as your experiments.”
I always have at least one FWB going on and only one went “sour” but that had nothing to do with the sex and everything to him being an arrogant asshole outside of the bedroom. So basically he wasn’t a very good friend.
Other than that I’ve had a lot of great luck, but I don’t tend to get overly attached.