I don't care, I'm not moving back

Apparently Stevens Point, WI was named the 6th best place to live in America. This is apparently from RelocateAmerica, a real estate website. According to this, Stevens Point is "Conveniently located in the center of the state". Yes, it is in the center of the state. But I would not call its location convenient, unless by convenient you mean "able to shoot deer from your back porch". My main experience with Point is driving up to the Play It Again Sports for hockey equipment, Belts, and my mom's insurance agency. So maybe I just haven't experienced the magicalness that is is Stevens Point.

Via Ursula.

Friday Insect Blogging

This is a fly in the family Celyphidae. This little guy is pretty neat looking.



*Photo from the Tree of Life website

Mother's Day

This Mother's Day post is a couple of days late, because I've been sick as a dog. I'm still slightly delirious with fever, so this may not be cogent. I may have thought my mother was the Queen of Evil when I was growing up, but as it turns out I'm grateful for the way she raised me. I love my feminist mom.

She doesn't enforce patriarchal beauty standards on me, or herself. She doesn't wear make-up and looks good anyway. Of course, society did a fair job enforcing it on me anyway - my mother is stronger than I am in that she's more able to resist societal mandates. But she let me get dirty and didn't make me wear dresses and she never once did my hair. It's not that I was unhygenic, it's that my mother was totally uninterested in whether or not I looked like a girl. My utter lack of style may have contributed to my pariah status in junior high, but I think my mother laid the foundation for the healthy body image I have today.

She never told me I couldn't do something because I'm a girl. She never enforced gender norms or sex segregation - I played with the toys I wanted to play with and did what I wanted to do. There weren't any ridiculous ideas about X is for boys and Y is for girls or that girls and boys need to learn differently or need to be apart. Because she doesn't fear invertebrates, I never learned to. She even told me to sack up a few times in hockey when I got hurt. She wasn't always allowed to do what she wanted because she is female, so she made sure that didn't happen to me.

She's got a lot of education and common sense. She impressed upon me the idea that I need to be able to support myself. She is a very good example for me because she herself has graduate degrees and has done well. The short time she spent at home after we moved to Rapids, she was unhappy. She's a lot better with money that I am, which is something I need to learn from her. She doesn't attend church and thus I am a godless heathen. Don't tell my grandma.

If I'm ever a mom, I hope I'm like my mom.

Memristor

Apparently researchers have found a new basic element to electronic circuits. It is called a memristor. This was something that was hypothesized 30 years ago, but until now nobody knew how to make it. I don't know anything about electrical engineering, so what I gather is that it will do the job of both RAM and hard drives. That is, it will provide both fast data access without losing the data once the power is shut off. That way you don't have to sit around waiting for stuff to boot up, and it will save power. The other cooler thing is that it will make it easier to structure computers to act like human brains - recognize patterns, faces, and learn from experience. The next question is, when can I order my iRobot?

Wizard!

Surely you've all heard by now about the substitute teacher that was fired for wizardry. Yes, wizardry. He did a magic trick where he made a toothpick disappear and reappear. In my opinion they shouldn't have fired him until they found out if he weighs the same as a duck. It's a good thing he makes so much money from his part in those Alltel commercials.

Just think about how much stupid there had to be in the system for this guy to get fired. First, some dumb little shit had to think it was sorcery. Then some even dumber administrator said "OMG wizards!" instead of "Wizards don't exist, go away". Then the idiot substitute teacher supervisor had to be stupid enough to think that claims of wizardry was worth more than a "Sure, I'll tell Harry Potter to lay off the sorcery, whatever you say." It's one giant clusterfuck of stupid. I'm surprised that much stupid doesn't violate some law of physics and cause the space-time continuum to implode.

Recently on Feministe there has been this crusade against common sense when it comes to profoundly mentally disabled people. We're all supposed to be horrified that some parents think their severely mentally handicapped children are a burden. And we're all supposed to think that it's just fine for people who lack the capacity for consent to have sex and also babies. Well, I don't buy it.

Unconcious Bigotry

We all do it. This article from Scientific American shows just how prevalent and insidious it really is. It makes me wonder what I've done. It makes a pretty good case for being politically correct, as much as certain segments of the population love to mock that concept.

Nature is not perfect

It seems as though there is a movement of sorts to get "back to nature" with things like organic produce, free range meat, and naturalistic cures. I have slightly more tolerance for earth mother hippy crystal power woo than mainstream religious woo. On the other hand, there are some gross misconceptions about the underlying nature of nature (can I say that?) that need to be remedied.

It should be obvious that nature is not perfect, but I don't think it is. For one thing, the state of science education in this country leaves most people with a dismal grasp of evolutionary theory. This picture from Berkeley nicely sums up one of the misconceptions that people have:

The other thing a lot of people don't understand is that evolution only makes things good enough. It doesn't optimize, it survives. So if you think that nature comes up with the best possible solution, you would be wrong. Nature comes up with the most cost effective solution for that particular environment. (Sexual selection is an exception.) Evolution has no master plan, no morals, and it isn't really even a force. It's simply the change in allele frequency in a population over time.

And really, why not? Beyond limiting our activities for practical reasons, like a desire to have functioning planet to live on, why not bend nature to our will? We have the knowledge and the ability, and we're learning more and getting better every day. What was so great about the days before we had bacteria to produce human insulin? Nothing.

State mandated rape

Oklahoma has just passed a law that requires women to get an ultrasound before they have an abortion. The ultrasound must be the kind that takes the best picture, whether that is vaginal or abdominal. The woman can't opt out of it, the doctor can't opt out of it, and neither the woman nor the doctor gets to choose which ultrasound to use. So basically, if the woman says "I don't want that medical instrument in my vagina" too bad. If you want an abortion, you slut, first you're going to have to be humiliated and violated by the government. And for those who would say "Well, she can opt out of it by not having an abortion!" That's like saying it's ok for the government to mandate everybody have a speculum shoved up their asshole for no reason before they get an appendectomy.

The first women who has this done to her should file rape charges against the entire Oklahoma legislature.

This Just In: Women work more than men

Research shows husbands create an extra seven hours a week of housework for wives.

Things have gotten better; the amount of hours/week women spend doing housework has decreased since 1976 while it has nearly doubled for men. But that doesn't mean things are cleaner, it just means women have said "Fuck you, I'm not cleaning if you're not cleaning". Which is why the clothes are in a big pile on our floor. Apparently men with children are the worst lazy slobs:

Married women with more than three kids recorded an average of about 28 hours of housework a week, while married men with more than three kids logged only about 10 hours of housework a week.

Depressing.