What’s On My Mind

Despite the widespread and increasing availability of sexually explicit materials, according to national FBI Department of Justice statistics, the incidence of rape declined markedly from 1975 to 1995. This was particularly seen in the age categories 20–24 and 25–34, the people most likely to use the Internet. The best known of these national studies are those of Berl Kutchinsky, who studied Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. He showed that for the years from approximately 1964 to 1984, as the amount of pornography increasingly became available, the rate of rapes in these countries either decreased or remained relatively level. Later research has shown parallel findings in every other country examined, including Japan, Croatia, China, Poland, Finland, and the Czech Republic. In the United States there has been a consistent decline in rape over the last 2 decades, and in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined. Significantly, no community in the United States has ever voted to ban adult access to sexually explicit material. The only feature of a community standard that holds is an intolerance for materials in which minors are involved as participants or consumers.

In terms of the use of pornography by sex offenders, the police sometimes suggest that a high percentage of sex offenders are found to have used pornography. This is meaningless, since most men have at some time used pornography. Looking closer, Michael Goldstein and Harold Kant found that rapists were more likely than nonrapists in the prison population to have been punished for looking at pornography while a youngster, while other research has shown that incarcerated nonrapists had seen more pornography, and seen it at an earlier age, than rapists. What does correlate highly with sex offense is a strict, repressive religious upbringing. Richard Green too has reported that both rapists and child molesters use less pornography than a control group of “normal” males.

Now let’s look at attitudes towards women. Studies of men who had seen X-rated movies found that they were significantly more tolerant and accepting of women than those men who didn’t see those movies, and studies by other investigators—female as well as male—essentially found similarly that there was no detectable relationship between the amount of exposure to pornography and any measure of misogynist attitudes. No researcher or critic has found the opposite, that exposure to pornography—by any definition—has had a cause-and-effect relationship towards ill feelings or actions against women. No correlation has even been found between exposure to porn and calloused attitudes toward women.

Interesting look at the numbers behind pornography, crime and male attitudes toward women. Of course, all of this is just correlation. I'm not sure this is any stronger evidence that porn is good for society than that bandied about by the 't3h pr0n is 3val!!!' crowd.

CALLER: If the health care bill passes, where would you go for health care yourself? And the second part of that is, what would happen to the doctors, do they have to participate in the federal program, or could they opt out of it? [...]

LIMBAUGH: My guess in even in Canada and even in the UK, doctors have opted out. And once they’ve opted, they can’t see anybody Medicare, Medicaid, or what will become the exchanges. They have to have a clientele of private patients that will pay them a retainer and it’ll be a very small practice. I don’t know if that’s been outlawed in the Senate bill. I don’t know. I’ll just tell you this, if this passes and it’s five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented — I am leaving the country. I’ll go to Costa Rica.

The vocal opponent of health-care reform in the U.S. steered largely clear of the topic except to reveal a tidbit about her life growing up not far from Whitehorse.

“We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada,” she said. “And I think now, isn't that ironic?”

Ironic indeed. Freaking hypocrite.

In Lake County, a vacant lot sits where IEDC claimed Plasmatronics would bring 221 new jobs. The company canceled its project to build a $2.3 million facility in Crown Point less than a year after the governor attended Plasmatronics' celebratory announcement.

In Perry County, you'll find a quiet boat ramp where the state announced Tell City Marine would create 243 jobs. All of those jobs sunk when company investors decided to take their plans across the Ohio River to Kentucky.

In Tipton County, a massive factory is empty and padlocked despite the state's claims of 1400 new jobs. Getrag Transmission Manufacturing declared bankruptcy before it could hire a single Hoosier to assemble dual clutch transmissions.

Indianapolis NBC affiliate 13 WTHR's 13 Investigates team did a fine piece of investigative reporting and looked into Mitch Daniels' and the Indiana Economic Development Corporation's claim of 100,000 new jobs created in Indiana in the last five years. What they found was that "many of the state's 'economic successes' aren't really successes at all."

In fact, in some cases, they were the exact opposite of a success with jobs being lost, not gained. For instance, in Bartholomew County, the IEDC reported successes that had various companies adding 1,500 new jobs but the reality was that those same companies laid off 2,000 workers.

13 Investigates was only able to obtain detailed information on 285 of the "Indiana Economic Success" stories but of the 43,495 jobs committed to by those companies, 40% are either dead or at risk of not happening according to company and county officials.

As always, the whole story is more complex so please do read it all at 13 WTHR's site but shouldn't we know how many actual jobs were created?

But it's otiose to point this out, of course; jeers like 'atheists are no more rational than anybody else' are part of the Sarah Palinization of discourse. Nyah nyah, you read too many books; neener neener, you think you're so smart; you New York latte-drinking elitists think you know everything.

Atheists aren't any more rational than anybody else.

I'm not sure what prompted Ophelia Benson's ire here. Probably some internecine blog fighting, or moronic remark by the likes of Madeline Bunting or Stanley Fish, of which I'm unaware. There are certainly enough people looking to get their digs in on atheists and for all I know, this may be one of the latest talking points by the usual crowd of apologetics who find no value in disbelief.

But, and I'm sure this comes as no shock to most of you, I happen to be one very vocal atheist who finds it necessary to make this statement all the time. In particular, because there is a subset of atheists who do conflate atheism with rationality. It's not. It's just plain old lack of belief in gods. Why a person doesn't believe, and whether or not they are active disbelievers, are whole other questions that have myriad answers depending on the actual person in question.

And even if a person does come to their disbelief through rationality and honest skepticism, it doesn't mean they apply that rationality and skepticism evenly. For example, there are a lot of atheists who believe very silly pseudo-historical things about the origins of Christianity (Dorothy Murdock aka Acharya S being the leader of one such school of nonsense).

So I don't think taking issue with the tendency of some atheists to conflate rationality with atheism makes me part of the "Sarah Palinization of discourse." Rather the opposite, I see myself as being firmly among those striving to maintain nuance and complexity against oversimplification and tribalistic "us vs. them" group-think.

Oh man, I loved Radio-Electronics growing up but by the time I was reading it in the early 1980s it was just a shadow of its former glory.

A new ABC7 investigation shows Campbell's "Healthy Request" and "Low Sodium" tomato soups contain the same nutrients and exact same amount of sodium as regular tomato soups, but they cost more. "Eek! Waiter! There's a scam in my soup!"

FINDINGS:
* Both the "LOW SODIUM" and normal tomato soups contain the same amount of sodium, 480mg.
* The "HEALTHY" and regular tomato soups are nutritionally exactly the same
* Except "HEALTHY" contains 1.5 grams of fat while regular has 0 grams of fat.
* Normal soup costs $.99
* Ostensibly "healthier" costs $1.49

Campbell's response? Oh, the Healthy Request Tomato Soup really does have 25% less sodium. Just not compared to regular Tomato Soup. But if you compare it to all of Campbell's regular condensed soups, it does have, on average, 25% less sodium. Oh, and we make it in smaller batches and put in more fat to help you absorb the nutrients (and make it palatable).

I agree with the Consumerist. Incredibly deceptive marketing, and we live in a culture where everything is perceived as unhealthy.

Take it from me... Real tomato soup is really easy to make, provided you have a hand blender - I don't anymore :( - and once you taste it you'll never want to go back to the condensed crap. It can also be much cheaper if you make it with canned tomatoes. Here's a good basic recipe for creamy tomato soup. You can get by with half-and-half or even evaporated milk if you don't want the heavy cream or you don't have any on hand. It'll taste differently, natch. Not bad. Still really good. Just different.

Click on through to Consumerist to see the ABC7 video.

Wireless Charging

A new prototype charging system from Nokia could enable a mobile phone to power itself on nothing more than the waves around us, charging itself using the weak radio waves emitted by TV’s, mobile phones and radios.

Instead of harvesting a few microwatts of power from dedicated transmitters, it is thought that Nokia’s prototype can conduct large amounts of power from signals that individually are tiny but mount up when harvested across a wide range of frequencies.

The resulting charge is quite small but is enough to power a mobile in standby mode without ever having to plug the handset into the mains, according to researchers from the Nokia Research Centre.

A nice survey of futuristic low power electrical sources and improvements. But the above entry on wireless charging got to me to thinking again about how we live in a sea of radiation (chiefly thanks to that big yellow glowy thing in the sky). In recent years though (recent being defined as roughly a hundred) we humans have been adding to that great big swimming pool of radiation we're all wading through; dramatically so in the last twenty years. We love our wireless gadgets and we want more.

Now, I'm not going to go down the road of the fools who think cell phones are causing cancer. Consumer radio devices are very low power emitters and the inverse-square power law insures that, unless we embed cell phones in our brains, there's no way a cell phone or any consumer RF emitter can be considered a health hazard. Oh, and then there's the fact that we're talking about non-ionizing radiation. Unlike ionizing radiation (again, see that big yellow glowy thing up there?), non-ionizing radiation doesn't knock electrons out of their orbits so it doesn't damage our DNA. At its worst, it can only heat us up but thankfully we don't live inside microwave ovens.

But what if we did? I'm thinking of Fred Pohl's Heechee, the enigmatic aliens from his series of Gateway novels. When the Heechee's abandoned ships were discovered inside the tunnels running through the Gateway asteroid orbiting Venus, it was a mystery why all the seats had v-shaped indentations. Were they some sort of insectoid race?

Not quite. Later on, after finally meeting some Heechee (inside a black hole, natch) humans discovered that they all wore trapezohedron-shaped microwave emitter packs between their legs. The reason is that the Heechee evolved on a planet close to a large naturally occurring microwave radiation source. They were dependent on the radiation without which they would become sick and die.

As humans continue to swell the microwave seas, and as we move out into space where radiation exposure is unavoidable, will we adapt? Will we become dependent on the added radiation? I don't know. It seems unlikely to me. More likely, if the radiation exposure is great enough to drive evolutionary selection (i.e. kill enough people over a long enough period of time who can't handle the added radiation before they reproduce), I think that selection would simply favor those who can withstand higher doses. On the other hand, maybe there could be some sort of clever mutation that could make use of the radiation, perhaps even as an energy source. I can't imagine what it might be though.

Still, it's fun to imagine how humanity's technology is changing us.

Now you can receive email notifications about new and updated waves in your inbox! To test it out, just use the dropdown menu by the Inbox link:

Go to your Inbox, drop down the menu - et voila !

It's about time. Now if they could only improve the Wave interface...