Don't men know stopping birth control while continuing to have sex could lead to pregnancy? I was just reading this book Zikora by Chimamanda Ngozu Adichie where it was claimed that it was normal. That men are feed a diet of porn where women are shaved and that was all men know about the female anatomy.
Google is not forthcoming about what men do and do not know so, perhaps one of their problems since they probably don't employ many women.
She does say that some republican man said women can keep their period in, kinda like needing to urinate while sitting in the car but waiting til you can home to use a restroom.  But republican men are well known to be utterly ignorant about women... given how little they know about women's reproduction in general. In my opinion, it's okay to not know something so long as you are prepared to admit you don't know and are willing to learn, yet republican men routinely think they know more than they do. (Can you imagine having Rand Paul as your doctor? And how embarrassing for Yale that he did his degree there?)

I am a huge Star Trek fan and as I watched some TOS the other day it occurred to me that the 'probably' best looking woman on the show was basically a servant, yet the 'probably' best looking man on the show was in-charge.

No doubt she would have been thought to wield soft power, she would have had access to the captain, and figured out a way of getting him to do what she wanted/needed - the kind of power that Joan Harris on Mad Men wielded rather than the power that Peggy Olsen wielded when she sacked the guy who annoyed Joan Harris in one of the earlier seasons (I gave up watching the show - it was boring.)

Regardless, the yeoman on Star Trek didn't last long, no matter how much soft power she wielded and also Kirk said he wasn't interested because he was already married to the Enterprise (the star ship he commanded). So perhaps she was able to get what she wanted sometimes but it was always via some kind of manipulation on her part.

And then one of my moderators was telling me about what modern female engineers look like and I pretty much lost it. I told my husband and even he said: what!?

In my opinion telling me what anyone looks like is the equivalent of racial profiling or some other form of stereotyping. Figuring out the appearance of what a female engineer or scientist looks like means you will necessarily be limiting the amount of science being done, because you assume anyone who doesn't meet your stereotype cannot do science.

I was watching a documentary 'Picture a scientist' where the women complained how much science they couldn't do because they were fighting discrimination. Initially I thought well all scientists are fighting down time, we all need to spend time doing the stuff of being human, like eating, showering, sleeping... But then I thought that what these women were missing out on instead was networking time, something the guys don't have to miss out on when they have downtime.

My husband's day starts by putting on the first t-shirt and shorts (it's summer) he can find and he doesn't even consider whether the colors clash. I start by brushing my hair, selecting matching clothes, checking my face in the mirror, applying moisturizer... who has the jump on the day?

And while I have way more hair than my husband, the yeoman has a very fancy hairdo that would've taken quite awhile longer to assemble than me brushing my hair. Perhaps things are getting better, but as I have gotten older I have noticed the soft power I may have wielded when I was younger only exists in my home when I get my husband to do my bidding. And that is lucky for me but it is useless for many other women who do not have husbands to help them, whether it's because they don't have one, don't want one, he's sick or he left for whatever reason (for instance working away from home).

Why shouldn't all women be able to afford to pay someone to do what she needs doing? But over the centuries money has been deliberately kept out of women's hands - indeed women are still being discriminated against in the workplace by doing the same job but being paid less for it. Of course over the centuries women weren't able to do many of the jobs they are permitted to do today.

Jane Austen, someone who was said to write romances, wrote a lot about the gaining of a living wage for women. The only real way for women to access money at the time, was by risking her life constantly in child birth to give her husband an heir or even cheap labour. This was in a time when women could not refuse her husband sex. When women ever tried to make money independently especially as a prostitute she was constantly labeled, never the man, using her services. Indeed I was reading a meme the other day about women sleeping their way to the top - she gets the label, yet the man favoring a woman with promotion because he wanted sex from her was - what? completely innocent - unable to control himself?

Why do we always give men the pass on sex and women always get the blame? I think this is away of undercutting competition down who might have some soft power. Indeed misogyny is everywhere, even including among other women. 

Essentially women are raised to be cheap or free labor.

I recently finished David Goggin's book Can't hurt me, an excellent book which I recommend everyone read.

He like so many many others has come from a violent home and presumably did not go on to beat up his various wives or kids.

Which made me think about that poor guy who decided to talk to me on twitter one night where he told me his story of his violent father and how he would get between his father and mother to protect her from his father's violence, and that night he was struggling with the same issue.

You can blame the woman for staying - but she and her kids need a home - but why doesn't the father leave if he hates his wife and kids so much?

Clearly the issue is complicated.

Lonnie Athens, a criminologist who also came from a violent home, wrote about the stages of violentization. His work became the basis for a documentary called why they kill based on a book by Richard Rhodes.

Basically individuals develop as a small child five personalities which they call upon, so it is vitally important to have positive role models available to all small children especially if they live in a home where violence is common. Not much of these personalities was discussed in the documentary I saw and whether they evolve in the individual's psyche, whether new ones can replace old ones, whether the personalities can evolve or mature. Perhaps Athens hasn't studied it enough to know, nevertheless, I assume we all probably have these personalities.

I have been wondering, given that I have written a number of times about how sex is used as a substitute for affection, I was wondering whether violence is also a substitute for affection, except for men it is okay to have sex and be violent, it is not okay for manly men to need affection. We are mammals, we need to touch and be touched; kind of like love and hate aren't opposites, the opposite of love is indifference.

Regardless of your childhood and the cruel hand the universe gave you, read Goggin's book, rather than hurt others as you have been hurt. Find a good role model, talk to that person in your head and ask them what they would do in this situation when you feel driven to purposely hurt another person. What gives you the right to hurt someone else?

Violence is a choice you don't have to make.

Goggin's at the end of his book says that life about suffering. While that may be true, the Dalai Lama says:

Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them.

I believe with all my heart that we find everything in other beings, happiness, a reason to exist, and helping them is our only real reason for everything that we do.

Connection is really the opposite to loneliness and even if we have some connection, work, bosses, colleagues, it doesn't mean we aren't desperately lonely. I was listening to a story of a serial killer who'd invite people back to his place and murder them because he didn't want them to leave - essentially he was so lonely. Narcissistic parents are inclined to raise extremely lonely children.
Nevertheless however you were raised it's unacceptable to behave thus.
Lonnie Athens is a criminologist who developed theories on why people become criminally violent. I thoroughly recommend this documentary. But I think we all have these 5 personalities it's just violent people develop violent ones.

In the past I have said 'everything is connected' and I think I have been misconstrued. Chaos theory originally stated that the butterfly flapping its wings in New York caused tsunamis in Beijing or something like. Apparently the proponents of chaos theory have walked this back some because butterflies flap their wings all the time and don't cause tsunamis anywhere. 
I am always surprised no one tries to walk back this parallel universe theory and I am always aghast when people take it seriously. After all we are constantly making decisions, do I watch another episode of the x-files or do I go to bed? and we are constantly making such decisions all day long. If each decision indeed spawned another universe then where would they all go - after all, dogs and cats and other animals too are also making decisions - is a separate universe spawned for all my decisions, all your decisions and every other being on the planet? So every moment a new universe is spawned for every living creature on earth - or in the universe - every single moment of time. so even if we are talking about seconds - but decisions are quicker than seconds - so we are talking about the size of the universe x the living beings x instances of time. where are these universes stored and this is densely populated. It is born of male solipsism no doubt. It is seriously an embarrassing idea- yet people seem to believe it.
In a classical Newtonian world we live in a universe where everything is abstracted and things aren't connected. This is a frictionless world were experiments happen in isolation from everything else that is happening in the universe. And we have to admire Newton for being able to imagine a world without friction, because here on earth we live in friction world. Friction allows us to walk for example and the air we breathe protects us from cosmic radiation and a lot of space debris.
But we also live in a quantum world where everything has a de Broglie wavelength, even you and I. So while the impact of your radiation may be insignificant at a distance, I am still impacted however insignificantly.
While you might think this is a bit weaselly to say that all things are connected in quantum mechanics when applying it to the world we live in, but the reality it is.
if we can learn, then the universe can learn because we are fundamentally connected to the universe. IE if the universe didn't exist then we wouldn't exist (in this universe). Also we are a product of this universe and we evolved, which is a process we know is fundamental to the universe - because we know the universe evolved, galaxies evolved, stars evolve... we evolved. is there anything - seriously - that did not evolve? we even evolve technology. And we evolve in so so many ways. socially, intellectually, our understanding of the universe... we are not distinct from the universe. indeed, i have not read the article, but i'd say that the way the universe learns is by evolving.
No one builds anything by themselves. A society is only as good as how the least of us is treated. When each of has enough then all of us are better off because, simply, I don't have to worry about my neighbors trying to break into my house to steal my stuff if they already have enough. The single mother who doesn't have to work 3 jobs to feed her family is able to care for her kids herself rather than hope someone else is taking care of them instead.
The pollution in the river is eventually going to make it into the water supply and while the owner of the business polluting the river may be able to afford bottled water, can the employees? can their kids?
Everything is connected.

There is so much hype about Artificial Intelligence (AI) that we think it is solved and nothing much needs to be done. But the problem is the technology it is based on, especially neural networks (what is currently called Deep Learning) is based on ideas from the 1940s when Hebb came up with the concept of neuro-plasticity. Which is the idea that neurons are continually learning. So if a person becomes blind, for instance, the neurons previously devoted to processing vision are reassigned to processing sound as the person has a heightened sense of hearing, and presumably other senses become heightened. This is called Hebbian Learning.
When it comes to neural networks, or deep learning, a fixed size network is repeatedly exposed to input data whether it is vision or some other kind of data. The network is randomized (and this is where it stops being science because science demands repeatability) and then learning commences. The data is shown over and over again usually in a random sequence because we as humans may learn stuff at random because there is no way we can guarantee when we'll be exposed to something we have to learn, and the network adapts to the input producing some output that is meant to match the desired output. The error in the output is the difference between whatever the output is and the output of the network. That error is feed back through the network and it's values are changed, perhaps millions of times.
So you show the network a picture of a car and it is meant to output something that represents a car.
The real problem is what is a car. If 1 means car, 0 means not car, but the output is in the range of 0 to 1 and may output .5. In other words it's nothing better than a coin flip. However the corporations say the network is saying the network has learned to distinguish cars, because they use numeric rounding, IE anything larger and including .5 is a 1, and anything less than is not a car. OUCH! And if the network had previously learned about trucks it is possible the network will completely forget trucks once it learns cars, because of this Hebbian scheme of learning.
And this is not true. We don't forget the letter 'x' because we don't see it as often as 'e' and just because people might lose their sight, it doesn't mean they completely forget how to process images if their eye sight is later restored.
This is a terrible model to base AI on.
But the hype is so strong people believe this this technology can now recognize people's faces and people have been thrown into jail based on basically a computer doing what humans could achieve as accurately with a coin flip.
Then there was the Google woman who was in-charge of ethics who lost her job because their face recognition software called a black woman an animal ! The ethicist lost her job - yet it's not her problem - it sounds like the actual 'state of the art' or rather the 'tech' and the tech is appalling.
Prof Marvin Minsky once said 'no one knows what's going on inside a neural network' and they still don't. And the problem is the gradient descent algorithm employed in neural or deep learning networks. But Adkodas does, Adkodas knows what's going on inside a neural network.

We all know about survival of the fittest but a little less known is the idea that the female is the gateway to immortality when it comes to reproduction.

So the male will adapt more to what the female wants than merely so it can survive - the best examples of those are the Irish elk which bred itself into extinction (possibly) because the female elk selected for the males with the biggest antlers and so the males couldn't hold it's head up and thus perished without reproducing. But it's only a theory because a lot of mega fauna died off.

Another better example is the peacock. Male birds that have this massive tail for displaying and thus impressing females. The theory is that this massive tail of feathers makes it more difficult for the male bird to survive because it can't move out of the way of predators quickly. The trivial idea is that peahen with their small female bird brains are only selecting for the prettiest tail. I disagree. What the female bird sees when she sees this impressive tail is that this bird is still alive, he has to be cleverer than the average peacock to evade those predators, he has to be agile and strong and still be able to fly enough to evade predators despite this bird's impressive tail.

Perhaps this is not precisely what is going on inside the mind of the peahen, but it is a symphysis in nature. It wasn't on the mind of the male bird to grow it's tail either, it just knows it must survive.

So often we are doing stuff that perpetuates our species without ever being aware that this is what we are doing such as pair bonding in our society - did you marry to have kids knowing it's primary focus was to perpetuate the species?

So I called this entry DNA - because I think there is way more encoded into our DNA than merely the information encoded down the chromosomes. In my opinion, the chromosomes form something probably more like a hologram. That the information package is read across the chromosomes as well as down and potentially more ways than that. And seeing the resultant organism is something more like seeing the hologram rather than merely chemical markers.

This is my primary reason for being skeptical about GMO products. We are only at the very beginning of understanding DNA yet there are people who feel willing to tinker with this? As a scientist I say tinker, but not at the expense of our environment because we do NOT know what we are doing. Tinker in labs but be sure not to let those experiments into the environment.

The big problem with corporate science is that it is in such a hurry to make a fortune without considering consequences of it's experiment, and then corporations are quick to protect their cash cows even at the expense of our human existence with buying politicians and rigging laws.

What is good to know is that if an organism's DNA is broken the organism usually will not survive gestation and cooking destroys DNA however what happens when the organism 'kinda' works but not really? Are you willing to eat that?

I put the word 'women' into my google search bar and got the usual, you know, 'well dressed women'... Yes society does permit women to be ornaments, it is okay to look at women, and it is pretty much the only thing women are allowed to be apart from mothers.

Still.

In an article published last year, a third of men and women think it is okay for men to beat their wives, 90% of people are biased against women and there were other statistics of other things of inequality. We live in a world where too many women think men are better than women. Perhaps these women think that they are in fact equal to men, or indeed it was only a specific class of women who might be equal, or perhaps not - I don't know - but I would love to know how these women's opinion of their equality to men and their opinion of other women's equality.

In that article it said that the opinions of women's equality is getting worse, in general too, even in more 'liberal' countries. I suspect this is part of the right-wing narrative that the world has been enmeshed in, where the right have taken too many liberties with reality which results in driving the hierarchical social system.

The fundamental problem seems to be that women seem to be playing catch up all the time. And that men are all naturally better at anything/everything they turn their hands to whether it is business or academia... whatever - the only thing women can be better at - is being an ornament, being a mother, and if they are a mother - if they aren't the best mother ever then they are worthless human beings. Indeed, this article suggests women (in India) are raised to be selfless - but I wouldn't say it was only India. For centuries women have given up their lives to give birth and that is treated like it is expected. To this day women routinely die as a result of childbirth.

I find this when I see statements like: men shouldn't write computer code, because in general, men aren't good at all the details. The men get upset about being told they are incompetent, and I have seen women attack women who make such statements. Damn, men stick up for men - as we see all through out our legal system. It is time women stick up for women. And on that note, I believe Evan Rachel Wood and her allegations against Marilyn Manson and the other women who have made similar claims too.

And I believe this article too - that the research women do is thought to be inferior to the research men do. I have seen women trash women in academia too often - instead of taking them aside and asking them - turning them into the butt of jokes. Women can be truly awful to other women.

The irony is is that men do all the worst things - pollute water, start wars, do most of the murder, stealing yet women must be exceptional at the few things they are allowed to be good at. And even then women are ignored.

One of the things we learn quickly in our society that it is vastly important to be right.

Being wrong is a way you are pushed down the hierarchy in our society - being wrong is shameful - it makes you vulnerable to those who know - and knowing means being right first time and always. Because as this NYTimes article says, being wrong means you have to apologize - and is there anything more defacing in the social hierarchy than having to apologize?  Being right means you've always known what is right - that you personally have never been wrong.

There are so many things you can be wrong about - like knowing which clothes to wear, what to say and do, being the wrong gender, having a 'subpar' body, what to think, which books to read, what is cool, who else is wrong... it goes on and on and on...

Being right is pretty stupid. It's hubris.

It is also anti-science.

Because any (good) scientist knows that being wrong and being okay with being wrong is awesome when it comes to science. Science is about evolving the right answer, it is about being wrong until we figure out how to be right about a theory and even then theories are never proven right, they can only be proven wrong but running with it until we find out what is wrong about it (Popper).

This is how evolution works. It's about constantly evolving a theory until it works, whether it is social policy or thinking about gender in society, for example. How we think about marriage has changed so much during my lifetime.

But we also see this with things like television too - what we think of as a television has changed so much since the days of rabbit ear antennas to flat screen monsters we now have on walls. Computers have evolved and evolved again, storage devices have changed from open reel tapes to USB flash drives. There are things that haven't changed much and that includes things like artificial intelligence, unless you believe the hype. Music and even religion has evolved.

What was right before is wrong now, or at least not as good.

The problem with right and wrong is when we apply the words to ethics, behavior and morality. There are things we can do that will always be wrong, like hurting others. But what if ... we learn something via doing the 'wrong' thing? Hopefully. Imo the best politicians are those who know what it feels like when life has given them lemons. Yet they are the ones we disqualify because converting lemons to lemonade is often a messy business.

There is no moral judgment when it comes to science and being wrong and right, despite the ethics of some experiments. When is it wrong to inject radioactive isotopes into someone? In some rare medical experiments for diagnostic purposes it is still done, where the diagnosis out-weighs the damage the experiment might do.

Sometimes right and wrong are sometimes seen as perspectives that allows men to wiggle out of ethical dilemmas using sophistry.

There is no clear cut line between the binary of right and wrong. Sometimes it's quantum mechanics all the way down with all that uncertainty.

The other day we ejected someone from our science Facebook group because they violated our primary rule: no politics.

They made a number of posts about how COVID-19 was a hoax and that we had to "wake up" because "the government doesn't care about us".

I can only assume if the person telling us to wake up and believed COVID 19 is a hoax is also a republican voter, and in this case, I agree, republican government doesn't care about anyone - but themselves and their rich donors.

With republicans telling people to die for the economy, or that they should be infected, and Trump bleating about the election being stolen only to raise money from his supporters to fill his own pockets and filing endless law suits to over turn the election, including thinking about martial law! While not doing anything like the job he applied for and got, which is to care about us (did he ever?) Meanwhile thousands of people are dying in the US from COVID 19 and he says nothing about those people.  Yet there are people who are in denial about this virus and the devastating affect it has on some of our most vulnerable.

If you think COVID 19 is a hoax, why are they doing this? So people can panic buy toilet paper and make manufacturers rich? So corporations who manufacture vaccines can make a huge profit? So many people will lose their homes because they cannot pay rent and put so many people out of work and other businesses in financial jeopardy... Seriously?

Some science shows like to talk about Occam's razor and the simplest theory is that COVID 19 is real.