Help Gary Farber

Gary Farber of Amygdala is in a crisis, both financially and in his health. This is such a waste: Gary is one of the all time great online raconteurs with a long history of bloggy productivity and the respect of swarms of other internet personalities. If someone were setting up a weblog franchise similar to scienceblogs, they ought to snap him up to anchor their site—he’s that good. And at this point, the tiny amount he’s asking for means he’ll work for cheap.

Help him out however you can. And if you’re looking for an interesting and provocative commentator, hire him!

Scientific optimism!

Edge has this annual question, where they ask a lot of smart people something general and provocative, and collect the essays into a webpage. This year, the question is “What are you optimistic about? And why?“

There are a lot of answers, many of them very specific—people are optimistic about the new supercollider, or climate change, or something specific to their discipline—while others are so general that they don’t say much (Humans will survive, somehow!). What I thought interesting, though, is that there was a bit of a trend to one particular kind of answer. Some of the people who answered in this particular way are:

In short, what all of these writers have in common is that they all believe people are going to WAKE UP. They’re going to appreciate evidence and rational thinking and skepticism and generally, science more — they’re going to develop more demanding standards for truth, and they’re going to look at what people tell them more critically.

What a splendid hope! It’s about time we had a new Enlightenment.

I’m not quite so optimistic about the possibility of it actually happening, but I can join in the wishful thinking — yes, these would all be grand changes to see occur. Let’s all work towards making it happen.

Your hydrogen bond angle is 10° greater than ordinary water (114°)!

Quacks have no shame, but once reputable science and engineering magazines should have some vestiges of it. Popular Science magazine will take money from anyone for the ad revenue, as Cyde Weys demonstrates with a scan of an ad for energized water. It will cure cancer and diabetes, and kills bacteria. It’s crazy and stupid.

Your blood is 94% water and billions of people flush their diseases along with medication into the ground water 4-5 times/day and it ends up at a faucet somewhere. If you have well water and people in the area have cancer, you have a good chance of getting cancer! S.D. Woman: “All around me they have MS, but they all drink pure water from ordinary distillers, filters, ozonators, reverse osmosis and alkaline water machines. The water is pure, why do they have MS?” People in the area with MS flush their diseases into the ground water and you pump the water up to your faucet, proving that the products don’t work!

Wow. So much stupid packed into so few words. It’s an ad that relies on ignorance to generate fear and hysteria so people will buy their product: cancer (with some exceptions) and multiple sclerosis aren’t infectious diseases that you catch from your water. And how about this?

How about the AIDS dentist on CBS 60 Minutes? They all use pure water along with 4,000 dentists surveyed, and yet their purest water can’t even kill pathogenic bacteria! Ours does!

Those dentists! Those bastards! They’re all out to give you AIDS unless they use our magic water!

It has to be seen to be believed. It’s plain ol’ snake oil sold with a full page ad in Popular Science.

Women who read SF should not be bug-eyed monsters

We have more internecine warfare going on at scienceblogs: in this case it’s a matter of casual sexism. Should someone be surprised at pretty girls reading science fiction, or even being nerdy?

As someone who has been immersed in the nerd culture of the university since the mid-1970s and has also hung out in the science-fiction culture even longer (anyone remember Escape Books in Seattle? Been to Uncle Hugo’s or Dreamhaven in Minneapolis?), and is a heterosexual male who usually notices the hot girls, I will say with great emphasis, NO! In my generation, women in biology were a minority, but really, they looked fine. The students in my classes now are mostly women, and they are lovely, although I tend to see them with a more fatherly (or grandfatherly, sad to say) eye nowadays. Science does not attract the unattractive, so could we please end that stereotype?

We also shouldn’t judge the attractiveness of individuals on the basis of such shallow parameters. True male nerds all know that intelligence is a +2 bonus to charisma, and SF fannishness is an additional +1. Heck, if I were on the market right now (oh, but I’m so glad I’m not), the first places I’d choose to hang out in to meet attractive ladies would be the bookstores, and the SF and fantasy section in particular, but not exclusively.

Not that SF is a prerequisite—my wife is both a hottie and not particularly interested in genre fiction; I’d probably find her in the science section, or math/statistics, or social sciences. And that’s OK, and defies the stereotype, too.

One last datum: my daughter‘s bookshelf looks like a subset of what you’d find at Dreamhaven. If you want to argue that she ought to be homely, you’ll find me looking pissed off at you.

Finally and in general, these expectations about how women should be expected to look, and what set of irrelevant traits ought to be correlated with desirability, and how we guys ought to tie the preferences of women’s minds with our definitions of the sexual properties of their bodies, is more than a little annoying, and something women ought to be rightly irritated about. These unwarranted assignments of roles on the basis of irrelevant characteristics can hurt people.