This is a repost of an article I wrote in 2015. It’s just some good old-fashioned making fun of pseudoscientific nonsense.
Recently, my attention was caught by the idea of the “sexual marketplace”. Specifically, there’s a theory of sexual economics created by Baumeister and Vohs. If you’d rather not read the paper, the Austin Institute* made a fancy video about it:
*Apparently, it’s a think tank run by Mark Regnerus. Yes, that Mark Regnerus.
cn: sexual harassment
A few days ago, I shared a story about Avital Ronell, a professor of literature at NYU, who was investigated and found guilty of sexual harassment of one of her former grad students.
I’ve been somewhat following updates on Brian Leiter’s blog. A few interesting tidbits:
I’m going to make this short, because it’s Breitbart, there’s hardly any point. I’m only talking about it because a friend was quoted in it.
Recently, Breitbart posted an article titled “Asexual” is a Hot New Sexual Identity In the San Francisco Bay Area. Rather than doing their own journalism, they basically copy content from Mercury News, and add insinuations that asexuality is a ridiculous trend that is confined only to recent times, and to the San Francisco Bay Area.
They also spoke to an “expert” from Israel, the author of The Truth: A Pathway to the Subconscious. She says:
My research shows that every person is divided into five different levels of being; the mental body, the feelings body, the emotional body, the spiritual body, and the sexual body. […] The people who define themselves as asexual, most of them are activated from a conditioning that says ‘sexuality equals delete’.
At first it looked like Breitbart quoted an “expert” to invalidate asexuality, but on second glance I believe they were trying to find someone ridiculous to “support” asexuality, in order to make asexuality look ridiculous. But nobody in the ace community would take this woman seriously, and we can all see that it was Breitbart who thought she was worth talking to.
Breitbart also wrote about asexuality last year. What? I don’t follow Breitbart, I get Google alerts, okay?
cn: sexual harassment
I saw a New York Times article titled “What Happens to #MeToo When a Feminist is Accused?” The answer, it turns out, is that academics close ranks and defend their own.
The article is about an NYU professor of literature, Avital Ronell, who was found by a Title IX investigation to have sexually harassed a former grad student, Nimrod Reitman. Some professors circulated a letter in support of Ronell, and a draft of the letter leaked. The letter appears to take the ludicrous position that Ronell should be judged on the quality of her scholarship, rather than the substance of the investigation.
The kicker is that the first signatory of the letter is Judith Butler.
Now I did a bit of research, and I found a small mitigating factor that I thought I should mention first before going into how terrible this is. Apparently, the signatories of the letter were given false information about the investigation. There was another leak of the letter soliciting professors for signatures in defense of Ronell. Signatories were told that Ronell had undergone a long investigation, which had cleared her of sexual harassment, and was moving on to non-sexual harassment charges. Ronell was apparently worried that she would be fired even if found innocent, and the letter was intended to support her under those circumstances.
One can hope that Judith Butler et al. will retract their defense of Ronell once they learn the findings of the investigation. But even if they do, for shame. These professors should know better than to lend their support to some professor under investigation for sexual harassment, when they know little about the case.
The pitch of a note is determined by its frequency, and frequency can vary within a continuous spectrum. And yet, in the western music tradition, we only use frequencies with discrete values. That’s not a bad thing, but it implies a whole world of possibilities not explored. Microtonal music, also known as xenharmonic music, sets out to make use of the unused frequencies.
I recently tried listening to a lot of microtonal music, because I discovered that you can find lots of it through the microtonal tag on Bandcamp. Sure, a lot of it isn’t very good because anyone can put music on Bandcamp, but there were enough gems that I continued to peruse the tag. I’ll share just two examples. First, I selected Brendan Byrnes, because I think his music has the most pop appeal, while also being unapologetically microtonal.
In Bob We Trust – On “Nannette” and the state of comedy (video) – Hannah Gadsby has a comedy special available on Netflix, which I saw recommended several times by different people. But this video is the one that finally persuaded me to watch it, because Bob described it as an anti-comedy. Well, I hate stand-up comedy, and I like deconstruction, so if there was ever a comedy special that I’d want to watch, this sounded like the one.
I thought it was good, but calling it an anti-comedy might be a bit of an exaggeration. I thought there were plenty of jokes and laughs. Perhaps someone who actually likes stand-up comedy might feel the number of laughs per minute is a bit low, but I just can’t see it that way myself.
On Laziness – Ozy talks about the concept of laziness, and why it’s a terrible idea. When people lack motivation, there must be a reason for that, and calling it laziness is a way of halting any inquiry into the causes, and unhelpfully turning it into a moral issue. Nonetheless, laziness is still a compelling concept that I probably use with some frequency myself. I think some parallels could be drawn with the way that “stupid” is used as an insult. We know that there’s nothing morally wrong with having less cognitive ability, and yet “stupid” is still a compelling insult that people have difficulty avoiding even when they understand it’s wrong.
Image source: Wikipedia
The light mill, also known as the Crookes radiometer, is a little curiosity that can be found in stores at science museums, or in the offices of physics professors. It consists of four vanes, each painted white on one side, and black on the other. The vanes are placed in a bulb, under partial vacuum. When you shine light on the radiometer, the vanes spin around, with the white sides facing forward (counter-clockwise in the above image). A demonstration is shown in the video below.
Supposedly, the Crookes radiometer is an educational tool, but I can’t for the life of me determine what lesson it’s supposed to teach. Because if you ask how it works, the correct explanation is far beyond the ability for most people to understand. I have a Ph.D. in physics, and I still couldn’t understand it! There are numerous internet sources that identify “thermal transpiration” as the correct explanation, but fail to explain what that means or why it happens. So instead I found explanations in scientific literature,1 and now I will share the explanation with you.
