SciShow!

I would like to call your attention to one of the most fascinating, well-made, and generally awesome YouTube series I know: SciShow.

These short videos are packed with an extremely wide variety of excellent information, and the personality delivering them paces himself well and enjoys his work. Deadly poisons, lethal diseases, Martian habitability, and many other topics have all made it into his broadcasts. Occasionally his topics might make some blush, but his frank delivery in these cases is refreshing. 

Needless to say, I enjoy his show. 

Sure he's not exactly precisely perfectly right sometimes (according to my microbiologist wife, who loves the show); however, to (rather terribly) paraphrase Zombie Feynman, "[By teaching people to value basic scientific knowledge and application, SciShow] is doing more to drag humanity out of the unscientific darkness than a thousand lessons in rigor."

I am also quite proud of the currency of his videos. He generally comments on research that is very recent while also going back in time to research the history of his topics quite well.

If you haven't watched any, go watch one now. 

No, really. I'm about to make a whiny little point, and the awesomeness of his work ought to be appreciated before reading my comment on one of his videos (NASA Needs You).

Back? Well, here goes:

-- begin misanthropy --

If you are going to venture into the political realm, please do so completely responsibly. Government economics is a fascinating field, with opinions all over the board. I would be happy, I think, to see a shift in our budgetary priorities towards science and away from pork. I am also of the opinion that we can't spend more than we have, so if everything gets cut then science probably should too, though perhaps by a smaller proportion. (According to our dear President, this was actually the case when budgets actually decreased.) "OMG, the NIH will be cut by $1 billion!!!1!" is entirely insufficient in this case, when what appears to be the 2013 budget is $30 billion. One Billion is a scary number, as my wife, several students, and an experienced professor would be going to China to do oncology work this summer on a measly $100,000 (that's its own story), but the sheer scale of the NIH's work shouldn't be so blithely understated.

Oh, and "These budget cuts cannot be reversed"? Really? Sure these budget cuts won't as per their designs, but do you really think the NIH, NIST, NSF, or DoE budget is a monotonic sequence?

-- end misanthropy --

That said, I'm happy to hear that NASA got $200 million more than they asked for this coming year. I would love to hear about the NIH's budget increasing too; PubMed is an awesome resource whose growth I am proud to say my tax dollars support.

The Collector's Box

Reconstruction after the war had been difficult, but it had been approached with a renewed rigor among the lassaiz faire policies following the outbreak of peace.

Reconstruction of the ISL's Golem, on the other hand, was not.

Calvin had been working on the project for quite some time, and figured he had seen it all: The Alliance's indifference to the project had left it massively underfunded and, consequently, understaffed. The Golem's AI core was unresponsive to even the most skilled psychotronic engineers. Only about a fifth of the original superstructure of the Golem had been recovered, and they only had enough resources to run one dilapidated salvage ship on shot-in-the-dark missions into the Void, where the war-ending cataclysm had occurred. The nature of the recovery missions meant that extensive shoreside leave on Terra was required for each crew sent out, and this did not please the bean counters.

After some time in this state, that lone salvage crew had crawled back into the Niffleheim system, barely towing a sizeable chunk of the Golem back. While the loadmasters were identifying and inspecting the prize, Calvin asked the lucky vessel's captain what had happened:

"Well, as per standard operating procedure," the captain grimaced, since such words were only used as a nod to the Senate, "we used the ship's reactor's radioactivity to generate a set of random jump coordinates constrained by the expected target space and known stellar obstructions. When our Drive popped us through, we found ourselves heading into orbit around one of the Darkened Suns." The captain paused, waiting for Calvin to urge him on. Those suns had been extinguished in the Golem's contrapuntal feedback event, and physics didn't quite work right around them.

Acknowledging the captain's obvious dismay at this detail, he urged him on. "We were sixteen AUs or so out, so we started the regular ten-light-minute scans, and stepped them up to full system scans. Something in the far hemisphere interfered with the Oort cloud's return of the FTL probe, so we cautiously microhopped over to see what it was..." The captain droned on about the routine details of crossing the star system. Heh. Microhopping was basically the least cautious approach that could have been used...it set off tachyon flares visible for about a lightyear. "...and when the Golem architecturalist on the crew identified it as a fragment, we started dragging it in. It's about four times a massive as it should be, but, with some ingenuity on our engine man's part, we got it here."

"Did you run much more than the simple architecture analytics on it?" Calvin probed.

The captain narrowed his eyes. "Are you not telling me something about my cargo? After fifteen of these missions, jumping blindly into who knows where, we find something, and all you can ask is whether I ran a few extra ********* scans?! Of course we didn't, sir, we were worried enough about getting it back here without a catastrophic drive failure of our own!"

That...was not what he had expected. He guessed that more unexpected things would follow quickly enough... "Captain Morris, you know everything I know. I just had a hunch and wanted to know if you had any small details that might be useful later. We both know it was a drive-related explosion, so I was just worried about contamination from that. The repair crews aren't daft; they know too and they'll be careful."

After a few more questions about the return trip, the captain left, still somewhat frazzled, and Calvin began pacing his office.

Why do Feminist Rants (usually) Bug Me?

(Savannah and Brett, I look forward to your feedback. Feminist Frequency, please read all of it and consider it carefully before dissecting me before the world.)

Let's be honest:

I'm not sure.

This post is both a fairly early attempt to understand my position AND a reaction to recent inputs from the vast ocean of YouTube.

Feminism is an interesting, complex idea. What I understand of it seeks to address deep-rooted and rather disturbing trends in society, and I'd like to think I agree with a large subset of feminist goals. Here I must plead ignorance (and risk accidentally addressing a Straw Feminist).

The video essay I just overheard (#3 The Smurfette Principle (Tropes vs. Women) by Feminist Frequency) was interestingly shallow. It was, as I experienced it, simply a long list bemoaning the fact that there are dozens of instances of Smurfette Principle trope. (I use 'principle' and 'trope' in deliberate redundancy.) The next (#4 The Evil Demon Seductress (Tropes vs. Women)) is similarly a list of complaints against films in which female sexuality is portrayed...far less than correctly.

I believe her complaints are legitimate, if poorly delivered. The Bechdel Test is a cool acid test for complex plots to strive to pass, and it is sad that we need to name the test because it is not already passed by most plots. In the same way, I believe that my view of women growing up would have been positively affected by #3 and #4 being less prevalent while I was growing up.

That which bothers me may be the fact that both of these essays end with a negative: "Sure females can be ___ in well-written plots, but 'you' should stop writing them as ___." It's "stop it, stop it, stoppit, stoppit!!!1! But FYI you can do certain stuff sometimes" rather than a wider and more careful understanding of the problem. Transformers 2 is used in both essays and disturbed me with its portrayal of its one significant female character, yet it grossed $200 million in its first five days. The problem is not just in script writing, and treating those responsible with active contempt is not likely to change much. It certainly won't endear you to me, even if I agree with you.

So, in a vain attempt to not suffer from the same problem:

If:
* you are going to write a feminist rant,
* you want to include a long list of data points, and
* you don't want me mad at _you_ afterwards,
then please:
* avoid ad hominem and straw man attacks, (yes, it's a negative...)
* present a clear argument, and
* state where you notice your own biases.