Beard Of Wisdom.com

Bjorn Lomborg reacts to Gore’s Peace Prize:

With attention and money in scarce supply, we should first tackle the problems with the best solutions, doing the most good throughout the century. If we focus on solving today’s problems, we will leave communities strengthened, economies more vibrant, and infrastructures more robust. This will enable these societies to deal much better with future problems - including global warming. Committing to massive cuts in carbon emissions will leave future generations poorer and less able to adapt to challenges.

Gore has an unshakable faith that climate change is the world’s biggest challenge. To be fair, he deserves some recognition for his resolute passion. However, the contrast between the Nobel winners could not be sharper. The IPCC engages in meticulous research where facts rule over everything else. Gore has a different approach.

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Well at least if there is demand. And, apparently, there is demand.

“Demand is the smallest hurdle,” says Elaine Lissner of the Male Contraception Information Project, part of Our Bodies Ourselves, a Boston-area women’s health-education organization. “Basically a majority in pretty much every country is interested in male contraception.”

Yep, that’s right a “male pill” may soon be coming.

Researchers are having difficulties though.

The male machinery that produces sperm — at a rate of 1,000 per heartbeat — is incredibly hard to disable.

So how long until men achieve equality with women in this overlooked area of gender unbalance?

“I’ve been saying ‘five to seven years’ for about 20 years,” Bremner [chairman of the UW School of Medicine] admits. “I will again say ‘five to seven years.’ I just want to give you a dose of reality.”

If the demand is there, it’s only a matter of time until it happens.

Exit question:  When it becomes available, will you use it?

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This is old, but so ridiculous I had to share it.

The press release from the University of Texas details how the researchers came to their conclusion.

Refuting the popular stereotype that females talk more than men, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have found women and men both use an average of 16,000 words each day…

For more than a decade, researchers have claimed that women use far more words each day than men. One set of numbers that is commonly tossed around is that women use 20,000 words per day compared to only 7,000 for men…

For eight years, the psychology researchers have developed a method for recording natural language using the electronically activated recorder (EAR). The unobtrusive digital voice recorder tracks people’s interactions, including their conversations.

The researchers analyzed the transcripts of almost 400 university students in the United States and Mexico whose daily interactions were recorded between 1998 and 2004. The research participants could not control the EAR, which automatically records for 30 seconds every 12.5 minutes, and did not know when the device was on.

At the end of the  study, the researchers examine one potential criticism.

A potential limitation of our analysis is that all participants were university students. The resulting homogeneity in the samples with regard to sociodemographic characteristics may have affected our estimates of daily word usage. However, none of the samples provided support for the idea that women have substantially larger lexical budgets than men. Further, to the extent that sex differences in daily word use are assumed to be biologically based, evolved adaptations, they should be detectable among university students as much as in more diverse samples. We therefore conclude, on the basis of available empirical evidence, that the widespread and highly publicized stereotype about female talkativeness is unfounded.

Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune published a great response that is amusing enough for a full read through. Some of my favorite lines were:

All I can say is that if the average male is putting out 16,000 words every day, then I’m living in a verbal desert. Some guys I haven’t met must be gushing verbiage like Old Faithful to make up for the ones I know, many of whom might easily be mistaken for victims of lockjaw. That is not a description I would apply to many women of my acquaintance…

We revere Abraham Lincoln because he made the greatest speech in U.S. history while uttering just 269 words and taking up only two minutes of his audience’s time. (His predecessor on the platform at Gettysburg, famed orator Edward Everett, gassed for two solid hours, and nobody remembers a thing he said.) We’d gladly give up cell phones for a return to Morse code.

Our motto is, “Talk less, think more.” Our hero is Calvin Coolidge, known as Silent Cal, and our favorite story is the time a woman sat by him at a dinner party and said she had made a bet she could get three words out of him. “You lose,” he replied. In a more talkative moment, he confided that “nothing I never said ever did me any harm.”

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The typical conservative responses to homosexuality often rely heavily upon how “unnatural” homosexuality is. Dr. Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, for example, posted these comments on his blog (posted July 30):

Our language has reached some important natural limits of meaning. A recent media report considered the increasing number of homosexual couples, both male and female, who are now “having babies.” Well, these same-sex couples are not “having” babies in the sense that language has customarily been used. When a same-sex couple “has” a baby, everyone knows that there is more to the story. A homosexual couple simply cannot “have” a baby the same way that a heterosexual couple can. This is a matter of the natural order and biology, not mere social custom.

And a little later on the same post:

This is a very important observation — and a crucial reminder that the natural order of things has a way of asserting itself in the end. Mr. Young [the author of an article to which Dr. Mohler is responding] wants people to “understand that gays are utterly normal.” And this would mean that the issue “never crosses people’s minds” — that no one notices anything unusual when two men hold hands or if a man says “meet my husband.”

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A couple of years back, Dr. Woo Suk Hwang of South Korea published false stem cell/cloning research. While his initial claim to have successfully performed the first stem cell extraction from a cloned human embryo turned out to be false, however, a BBC article indicates that he might have stumbled upon another discovery. Apparently, the stem cells that he worked with “may be the first in the world to be extracted from embryos produced by the so-called ‘virgin birth’ method, or parthenogenesis.”

The article continues:

Professor Surani [from the University of Cambridge] said Hwang’s unwitting step forward might actually prove more useful than efforts to clone human embryos, which he had claimed fraudulently.

“I’ve always promoted the idea that efforts should be made to produce embryos from human eggs - it is far less ethically challenging, and the efficiency of these cell lines is likely to be higher than those produced from cloned embryos,” he said.

“Far less ethically challenging”? Now I am no scientist, but I find it hard to believe that forcing parthenogenesis in a lab is any less ethically challenging than cloning a human in a lab. The same questions remain over whether it is ethical to actually extract stem cells from embryos in the first place (regardless of whether the embryo is created through the traditional sexual reproduction, through in vitro fertilization, cloning, or parthenogenesis). The same questions remain concerning whether it is ethical to create or force the creation of someone in a lab, even if it is something that has happened naturally in other species of animals. At root, the exact same questions are raised concerning the beginning and sanctity of human life.

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