It's like my head

Gabriel is a grown up. I am not. When I do grown up things like pay the mortgage or make an appointment at the doctor’s office or go the entire night without pooping the bed, I want to jump out of my chair (or bed) and yell “YEAH! I DID IT! I’M A BIG GIRL!”

Gabriel doesn’t do that. And not just because he’s not a girl.

I’m not particularly nostalgic about childhood, but I’m a little confused about when that ends and adulthood begins. I don’t feel like an adult… ever. Never ever. Gabriel does. And he thinks it’s pretty bad ass.

Not only that, but he doesn’t mention boobies once in this article! (He does mention gin, though, so I knew it wasn’t a forgery.)

Something strange is afoot in the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan, according to data sent back from the Cassini mission. Data returned from a spectrometer on Cassini indicates that there’s a large flux of hydrogen in the moon’s atmosphere, with the gas forming in the upper atmosphere and being removed from the atmosphere at Titan’s surface. We don’t currently know what process is ensuring its removal, but the amounts of hydrogen being taken out of the atmosphere are consistent with an earlier proposal of methane-based life.

Titan’s atmosphere is rich in hydrocarbon compounds, and chemical changes in the upper atmosphere are driven by the arrival of ultraviolet light from the sun. One of the expected results of the UV exposure is the liberation of molecular hydrogen from methane via a process that produces more complex hydrocarbons. With little oxygen to react with, the molecular hydrogen should remain stable. Some of it will escape into space, but a new paper indicates that a substantial amount of that hydrogen migrates down through the atmosphere towards Titan’s surface.

Since it’s not accumulating there, some chemical process must be removing it from the atmosphere; right now, we don’t know what that process is, and, as NASA’s own news piece on the topic notes, the first option for scientists is to consider simple chemistry.

A nearly 25-year study concluded that children raised in lesbian households were psychologically well-adjusted and had fewer behavioral problems than their peers.

The study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, followed 78 lesbian couples who conceived through sperm donations and assessed their children’s well-being through a series of questionnaires and interviews.

Funding for the research came from several lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender advocacy groups, such as the Gill Foundation and the Lesbian Health Fund from the Gay Lesbian Medical Association.

Dr. Nanette Gartrell, the author of the study, wrote that the “funding sources played no role in the design or conduct of the study.”

“My personal investment is in doing reputable research,” said Gartrell. “This is a straightforward statistical analysis. It will stand and it has withstood very rigorous peer review by the people who make the decision whether or not to publish it.”

A Canadian study has found that staff in health food stores routinely give advice aimed at selling expensive supplements instead of supporting the health of the consumer.

The study, published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, was conducted by Athabasca University between 2002 and 2008.

University students visited 192 health food stores and 56 pharmacies across Canada seeking advice on supplements and specific medical conditions.

This morning, while reading webcomics in my Google Reader, I came across this little gem of an ad in my Questionable Content feed.  “Nerds and lady-nerds”.

You know, I usually don’t feel the need to append my gender to any identities or titles I might claim.  I’m a geek, a nerd, a writer, a gamer, a Witch.  Not a lady-geek, a lady-nerd, a lady-writer, a lady-gamer, and a lady-Witch.  So any ad that starts out by reminding me that I can’t just be a nerd, but must instead be a lady-nerd, distinct and different from “regular” nerds…yeah, if that’s how you’re going to approach me, I’m just really not. interested.

But I think we can have fun with this.  Let’s play opposite day with it!  We can talk about the “man-gamer” as if he is the rarest of endangered species, and giggle dismissively at the thought of the positively mythical “male programmer”.  See?  Default gender assumptions can be fun, when you’re on the privileged side of it!  /snark

Of course, we could just drop the assumption that male is the default, and advertisers could speak to nerds, knowing that the term includes those women who identify as nerds without having to address us separately…

(My intention is not to marginalize our male allies, but to poke fun at the gender assumptions our culture starts with; I’m mocking the idea, not the actual people.)

Evolution is, undeniably, a science. It is not only science, it is a robust and highly successful line of research and a powerful explanatory model.

But there remains confusion in the public as to exactly what it means to be scientific, on both sides of the evolution/creation debate. Even, at times, among proponents of evolution. The following comment to a recent blog post expresses some of this confusion.

On June 11, 2009 Dr MargaretChan, the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the H1N1 flu that was then spreading around the world was an official pandemic. This triggered a series of built-in responses in many countries, including stockpiling anti-viral medications and preparing for a mass H1N1 vaccination program. At the time the flu was still in its “first wave” and the fear was that subsequent waves, as the virus swept around the world, would become more virulent and/or contagious – similar to what happened in the 1918 pandemic.

This did not happen. At least our worst fears were not realized. The H1N1 pandemic, while serious, simmered through the winter of 2009-2010, producing a less than average flu season, although with some worrisome difference.

Continued reliance on oil is risky and expensive for business, say the authors of a new report from Lloyd’s global risk assessment department, 360 Risk Insight, and UK think tank Chatham House.

The way forward for businesses, the report says, is renewable energy - but the chaos and uncertainty following the Copenhagen climate summit has stifled investment.

Antony Froggatt and Glada Lahn warn businesses that oil prices are set to soar over the next couple of years due to increasing demand. Rising car ownership and subsidised fuel prices in developing countries, they say, will contribute to the increase, along with a demand “rebound” once we’re out of the recession.

In a “business as usual” scenario, the authors predict global energy demand will increase by 40 per cent by 2030. But it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to meet these demands.

The authors point out that we’re still in the dark as to when oil production will go into irreversible decline, and the supply from top-producer Iraq is unreliable. “A supply crunch appears likely around 2013,” says Paul Stevens, a researcher at Chatham House, in the report.

Let me make it clear that I am not saying their sentence is ungrammatical. I am saying that it is an example of very poorly chosen style with respect to constituent order. And it appears that it does not represent an isolated slip. As Chris Potts noted on Language Log way back in 2003 (“A ban on quotative inversion?”), The New Yorker apparently has a house-style prohibition on (if I may use the technical terms employed in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language) subject postposing in a parenthetical report frame for directly reported speech, even when the quoted speech is preposed.

They ban “said NP” even when the subject NP is long and complex. In fact they ban it even when the subject contains additional parenthetical interruptions and thus cries out to have a place at the end of the clause. Chris cites this sentence: