ScienceNostalgia101

Regarding bonobos: https://www.thedodo.com/sex-girl-power-empathy-and-int-712460354.html

More generally: But it is still down to biology and/or psychology whether or not showing as much skin as bonobos did would induce in us a bonobo-esque response, is it not?

46 minutes ago, TheVat said:

Dress codes in schools should address distraction,  a universal human malady,  not stereotypes about unbridled libidos.   

Pretty sure my GPA in middle/highschool would have dropped a point or two if students had worn swimsuits,  but I would guess after a semester or so I would have adjusted to the new norm.  

Our evolutionary cousins, the bonobos, were surrounded by bare flesh all the time. Instead of "adjusting to the norm" they had massive group orgies. Which sounds fun until you realize that among humans (many of the) broken condoms would end in STDs and/or pregnancy; and we have more to lose from either than the bonobos did.

Ironically, I say this as someone who in my teen years was more excited by my crush in her lifejacket on a boat trip than by the other girls in their swimsuits at the subsequent trip to the pool, but maybe that's because puberty was at the time incomplete. And the fact that those who say we'd "adjust to" it were precisely the people who expected me to be the same kind of horndog I figured other guys were.

Just so I'm clear, I'm referring to the concept of scantily clad clothing as a whole, with dress codes and public indecency laws alike in particular just being more specific examples of things in which this kind of reasoning is invoked. I get that it's not gender-neutral, but human nature isn't gender neutral. A guy who wears something that shows off his chest hair isn't going to be offended when a woman stares at it.

1 hour ago, Peterkin said:

As for what students wear in school, that's up to the school. Their house, their rules. Maybe segregated high schools were not such a bad idea. Maybe school uniforms were not such a bad idea. I'm up for discussing the merits of different approaches to education - but not in psychology.

But isn't psychology the field most relevant to what the effects of scantily clad attire would or wouldn't be? Or would this have been better for the biology forum?

The problem with segregating the sexes is that then what the school has to say about the effects of the opposite sex is no longer tested by personal experience. This isn't to say personal experience is always interpreted to reflect the big picture; ironically, because of reasoning like the kind I invoked earlier in this thread, personal experience has contributed to me seeing myself as the opposite of others in some respects. But it still needs to compete with personal experience lest whatever curriculum will convince parents to vote for a particular school board trustee that week be allowed to fly in the face of reality.

Also, being around girls and discovering for myself what it's like to have a crush on one was still a fun memory, whether I took the right or wrong lessons from who was wrong about it or not. It's always a delicate balance between the medicine that is the learning outcomes and the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down.

A spiritual successor to my Canada's Too Cold thread.

Before I proceed, I want to make as clear as humanly possible; because you know there are some people out there who will strawman anyone who dissents from conventional wisdom; that I am fully aware that it's within one's rights, under the law, to dress how one chooses absent literal violation of public decency laws.

However.

One thing that has bugged me a little; in the context of whether to make said laws more restrictive or less so; or alternatively, whether to make it more restrictive in a school context than in the broader one (as also applied to other free-speech limitations like "young man, that shirt is way too racist to wear in this school") is that one of the most common claims for why one shows so much skin is not to deliberately show off one's figure to entice potential sexual partners or anything like that, but to beat the heat.

Now, it's possible this may be sincere; certainly, the fact that it is also invoked to refute fan theories about fictional characters faking their body image issues based on what they're wearing suggests it at least sometimes is; but it leaves behind a few questions.

1: Wouldn't white clothing reflect away more sunlight than pink (at the very lightest) skin, therefore keeping oneself cooler? Isn't that why white clothing is worn in many Middle Eastern societies? Or does the humidity determine which is more effective at beating the heat? If so, why?

2: Wouldn't, if the heat bothers them, the notion that "Canada's too cold" make Canada more appealing to them instead of less?

3: Why aren't they instead arguing for "warm weather exceptions" wherein the dress code's restrictiveness depends on what is the maximum temperature forecasted for that day?

4: Last but not least, why if it is sincere do some of the people pressed on talking points like the above and others then backpedal to "well it's within my rights anyway"? As true as the latter point is, wouldn't someone who is sure of themselves that it's about beating the heat prefer to continue defending that notion? I suppose it's possible that they're just tired of arguing, but is there any objective metric whatsoever of whether that, or not having meant it in the first place, is there reason? How would anyone prove it either way?

In theory, all of this probably looks on the surface like it's none of my business. In practice, who is right or who is wrong about this is our first clue as to who is of sound judgment on the issue and who is not, and in turn, who is most likely to be right or wrong about whether it is to blame for distraction, unwanted arousal, etc. Indeed, I used to like the fact that some of my classmates dressed that way until I saw those defending it paint anyone who dissents against them as a guy who gets hardons in class or couldn't multi-task glancing at the girls with thinking about the material. It made me wonder what else they could be wrong about, and have a new sense of pity for those whose self-control is lesser than my own.

I'm guessing the reason it's such a sensitive topic is because it's not just blamed for lesser issues like the above but by a vocal minority even blamed for sexual assaults as well. For the record I think those with that little self control probably belong in an asylum or something. But still, a question of sincerity, even on a matter that is theoretically none of our business, could be a "canary in the coal mine" to who to believe on other things.

Bumping again because I was recently thinking about this Breaking Bad scene.

The increasing magnetic field used to destroy the evidence is strong enough to throw metal objects at the wall and leave lights hanging from the ceiling at an angle. However, wouldn't this also make it strong enough to either brighten or dim the lights, due to the Lorentz forces on the electrons in the current carrying wires and whether they are parallel or perpendicular to the electrons' path? Or are there other factors? If not, is there any formula that can be used to estimate the magnetic field in Teslas from the apparent magnetic force on the objects flung at the wall or hanging from the ceiling (if one were to go by its acceleration or angle) and deduce how significant an effect this should have on the electrons in the wires powering the lights? Or does magnetic force not give one enough to go on in estimating magnetic field?

Pardon the crude illustration, this is just what I have in mind to illustrate the idea.

The blades, theoretically, would be made of whichever material would be as durable as possible both against corrosion and against fracturing, to pay for itself eventually in energy extracted. Within this proposal, there are two varieties.

A: A submarine with the attached blades all immersed underwater until it is directly underneath the eye, such that it comes to surface at the eye and the surrounding counterclockwise winds are forced to exert a counterclockwise torque on the vessel by encountering these concave blades.

B: A non-submarine vessel that encounters counterclockwise curl to the winds merely by approaching it. However, I am not sure how to determine whether it will encounter a prohibitively severe contrast between counterclockwise torque on one side of the vessel and clockwise torque on another. I am thinking of this in terms of Stokes' Theorem; the average curl within a region is proportional to a line integral around its exterior; and guessing the torque will be counterclockwise on the way toward the eye as much as within it. However, I have a feeling there's something I'm missing.

Obviously, there would need to be helium-filled compartments either way (and/or hydrogen-generating electrolysis compartments readily available to both store generated energy and offset the heave?) if only to ensure this same torque doesn't also invert the vessel and in turn the direction of the blades' concavity.

. . .

For the more standard wind turbines, the main issue I hear about is maintenance costs. If one were to mass manufacture mirrors for solar!thermal, one could just plop them in the desert and let them melt salt. Wind turbines, on the other hand, would need to be cleaned of bird guts from time to time to function at adequate efficiency, would they not? However efficiently you could mass-manufacture wind turbines to line the ocean with them, that's still one tedious job of going out to sea and having to clean them all in person. A more concentrated form of wind energy, with more kilojoules per contraption, sounds like it'd save on maintenance.

Bumping once again because of all the storms this hurricane season that formed at sea, and stayed at sea. The only way to intercept them would be to either line the entire ocean with turbines strong enough to harness the power of hurricanes (many of which would probably never see enough wind to pay for themselves), or to send a boat out to intercept them wherever they're forecasted to form.

So I've come back to discuss the latter idea. What if someone designed a boat with turbines on all ends, designed to be rotated clockwise by the winds it encounters as it approaches the developing storm? Would there be any way to harness the associated energy?

4 hours ago, swansont said:

!

I'm confused by this. If it's an "unmistakably disproven myth" what's the myth? i.e. who are you going after - the people who said vaccines were bad, or the people who were blaming it on the left?

The people who were blaming it on the left. Especially the ones who were doing so directly like the creators of the above memes, of course, but also to a lesser extent the ones who were doing so indirectly by not refuting it. I know that word choice isn't the only possible word choice there, but I would think if a lot of conservatives were distancing themselves from it a few of them ought to have landed on that word choice by sheer random chance.

Years ago, at least in the context of Internet culture, it used to be taken as a given that being against vaccines was a leftist thing.

But lately, amidst the deluge of right-wing anti-vaxxers like Tucker Carlson and Lauren Boebert, the myth that the vaccine is bad for you has been challenged aplenty, while the even more unmistakably disproven myth that anti-vax narratives were inherently a left-wing thing has been virtually ignored. How come there are no repercussions for that sort of myth? How come the people responsible for it get to walk away from this as if they hadn't just been caught in a lie?

Now I'm not saying this to try to come across as some kind of science-worshipper; those who are familiar with me here already know it's a little late for that even if I were; nor some dyed-in-the-wool leftist; I've been at odds with them on WHO funding and the like; but it just seems like an underappreciated opportunity to identify who was responsible for this myth, and know who not to believe on other matters.

What say you, Science Forums?

To be clear, the goal for my purposes is to have as many kJ of heat per litre of smoke; or alternatively, as few litres of smoke per kJ of heat; as possible.

So when I use the outdoor fireplace, I often like to flip the logs upside down partway through their burning so that i have fresh unburned wood in direct contact with the flames at least twice as often. An uncle of mine once told me this actually does more harm than good to how well it burns, because the heat drives the moisture to the top of the log, and flipping it would cause the flames to be in contact with wetter wood instead of drier wood. I tried Googling this but I haven't found anything on this either way. To those of you better versed in chemistry does this make sense? Why or why not?

23 minutes ago, swansont said:

Which, ridiculous as this is*, only happens if there are co-ed teams. Can you provide evidence of there being many of these in the good old days?

 

*if this is what motivates you, you deserve to lose, and possibly get cut from the team. It doesn’t require legislation.

But it's not called an "athletics & self-control" competition. It's called an "athletics" competition. Can't self-control be assessed in separate competitions, so as to give credit where credit is due on the otherwise athletically skilled ability of someone low on self-control? If people admire athletic ability so much that they pay to see it, why would they fail to give credit, where credit is due, wherever they see it?

"Brand recognition" through the name of a foreign company?

How did that not piss off the same tens of millions of voters who were xenophobic enough to vote Trump?

2 hours ago, swansont said:

No. Where did you get that information? WTH is “distracted by their opponent?” The problem wasn’t that sports weren’t segregated, it’s that there were only (or mostly) opportunities for boys

In the US this was addressed by title IX, driven by this lack of opportunity 

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

Nothing about tests of athletic skill, or “distraction” nonsense, seeing as it encompasses more than sports. We didn’t sex-segregate classrooms. “distraction” didn’t enter into it.

Possibly because the real "education" they got was on their own minds through close proximity to several members of the opposite sex. You can teach them all the biology you want to (and in some private schools, parents still get to pay to separate them from the opposite sex) but experiencing it for itself tells you what to believe about what applies to you, and what doesn't, and in turn who to believe about biology based on advocates of any narrative get right about you, and what they get wrong about you; who has discredited themselves, and who has not.

Anyway, I don't think we should stack the deck against gender stereotyping any more than in its favour. The "anti-discrimination" legislation may be well meaning, but that doesn't mean the effects of hormones and anatomy should be ignored.

Distraction by your opponent could mean anything from looking behind yourself during a race to get a better look at her and tripping up, or subconsciously being unwilling to give it your all because you'd deep down rather look at her from behind than win.

3 hours ago, swansont said:

Did this happen?

(Hint:Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc. is a US company, now headquartered in Plano, TX

I lived in Canada for a few years and had trouble getting an auto bought in the US getting warranty service because the US company and Canadian company were different entities)

Is it at all affiliated with its Japanese counterpart, though? If not, why use the name?

5 minutes ago, zapatos said:

I imagine that at some level profit will always be a factor. And while the primary reason men and women are segregated today is due to physical differences, there are some women who are making inroads into traditional men-only sports. I watched a woman compete in men's NCAA football for the first time this past season. That was surprisingly exciting even though she didn't do much.

I'm kind of left wondering how many of her opponents attempted to get themselves tackled by her on purpose at the expense of winning the game...

1 minute ago, zapatos said:

The NCAA is full of publicly funded schools, not private investors.

https://ftw.usatoday.com/2021/03/ncaa-tournament-womens-weight-room-unequal-access

Suggesting women need to wear smaller shorts is misogynistic whether there is private or public funding.

My bad on the mixup; the acronym NCAA reminded me of those used by actually profit-driven sports institutions such as the NFL.

Still, one doesn't need to believe women "shouldn't" be playing sports so as not to be as inclined to actively funnel tax dollars toward their sports as to those of male athletes. The voters are notoriously stingy with tax dollars; they opposed funding abortion instead of letting the customer pay, even though low-income women need it most, but stopped short of banning it altogether. They opposed funding embryonic stem cell research, even though the alternative is to leave it in big pharma's hands, but stopped short of banning it altogether.

Etc... the gulf between supporting something and supporting government funding thereof is even wider for conservatives and libertarians than it is for progressives; and I get the impression from your takes on politics that you fall primarily into the third category.

I'd also be curious whether or not profit is still a factor even though it's a public service. It certainly is with the use of tourism revenue to justify taxpayer funding for the UK's fake monarchy.

It's possible that the belief that men "need" sports more than women do is driven by the notion that, in addition to all the other motives people of either sex have for participating in sports, male athletes are motivated partly by the longing to impress women, whereas women have a wider variety of ways at their disposal of impressing men. Of course, I'm also somewhat skeptical of the assumption that guys who suck at sports aren't desirable to women, but I can still see the direct relevance of the genitals to the motives involved that doesn't require one to believe women would hurt themselves playing sports, much less feel justified in attempting to protect them from themselves.

How the hell were politicians even allowed accepting campaign contributions from companies headquartered in foreign countries in the first place?

I mean, by rights, they shouldn't be allowed accepting campaign contributions from domestic companies either, but foreign companies? How was that not stomped out if only by public pressure from corporate-power opponents from the left and globalization opponents from the right combined?

EDIT: To be fair, I get that a lot of people have a soft spot for Japan in particular because anime's cuteness tugs at people's heartstrings, but that never stopped them from opposing the Japanese whale hunt, or criticizing the way Japan gets a pass for its own xenophobia, so I'm not sure why an exception would be carved for them on this one.

2 minutes ago, zapatos said:

I played soccer on a co-ed team, and I wouldn't say the policies have changed all that much. Did you happen to follow the controversy surrounding the accommodations for men's NCAA basketball vs that of the women? It was embarrassing. Brazil has long had a great women's soccer team and arguably the best woman player in the world, yet the funding for the women is minuscule. One of the men in charge of the men's league suggested the women needed to wear smaller shorts. 

The misogyny has not gone away.

Care to link to what in particular you're referring to? I'm not much into sports, I'm just going by the explanation that seems the most directly relevant to the... anatomical notions of male and female. The rest are just murkier hormonal reasons that could go either way and are not as widely accepted in other settings.

Funding in particular is directed at expected return on investment, not skill. If customers would rather watch a mediocre man than the most skilled woman in the world, it's not some private investor's job to impose the latter on them.

On 7/1/2021 at 8:09 AM, swansont said:

I thought we were discussion science. Maher will never be confused with being a scientist; he's more of a crackpot.

To support an hypothesis you need evidence rather than innuendo.

Wouldn't one expect biases to get cancelled to at least some extent if funding comes from multiple, independent sources?

Forgot about this thread until recently.

Biases wouldn't get "cancelled," just combined. If you'd mixed hydrochloric acid with sodium hydroxide you'd get saltwater, but that's not necessarily a good thing if pure water were what you were looking for.

In theory, if every bias and its opposite were equally "cancelled" you'd be left with objectivity. Trouble is I doubt there's any objective metric of what constitutes the opposite direction of a bias, let alone its opposite magnitude. A better idea would be to have as much variance in biases possible and see how these biases affect the conclusions. Pure objectivity is an unrealistic ideal. Independent thought is a more believable one.

1 minute ago, zapatos said:

Yes, they did that too. Women were not allowed to study science and instead were taught to cook and sew in school.

And yet, even after that policy changed, sex-segregation of sports has not.

1 minute ago, zapatos said:

No. It was 'sex-segregated' due to misogyny. Women and girls were considered unfit for sports that might kill them. Later on it was not considered a good use of resources to fund women's sports.

Ever hear the term "you throw like a girl"?

Yes, yes I have. But even the notion that sports in particular are not necessarily women's forte in general wouldn't necessarily be enough to make or break whether or not someone opposed funding women's sports at all any more than, let's say, the notion that cooking isn't necessarily men's forte in general wouldn't necessarily make someone oppose funding home ec classes that male students are eligible to attend. If people disagreed with the former statement, they'd distance themselves from it more often. If they opposed male students' eligibility for home ec classes, they'd find a school board candidate who made opposition to it the central plank of their platform.

In every other setting, the idea of protecting anyone from themselves would be unthinkable. If sports are still segregated, something else happened.

On 7/1/2021 at 11:28 PM, CharonY said:

That is a cliché that US Americans believe and which is unlikely to be true. Idea of free speech and related concepts are ancient and did not start with the USA. Moreover, the US had many, many issues with it. McCarthy, anyone?

 

Not that the US under the last administration did not try that. Instead they muzzled the agency responsible for keeping folks safe. I am not saying that China did the right thing, but at least eventually they openly declared that the outbreak was an issue and did something (whether it was the right thing might be debatable).

In the US meanwhile, the officials offered mixed messages and were not able to clearly communicate the severity of the disease. The differences in countries that did that and the US is clearly visible in the death counts (which is even worse when one also includes undercounted cases).

In short, freedom of speech is an ideal that many American hold dear in principle. In effect, there are many mechanisms that undermine it, which tend to show up when the system becomes more authoritarian. 

This is basically also true for Europe, looking at some countries who recently have become more authoritarian (e.g. Hungary or Poland), some of the measures almost always include limitations of freedom of expression of some sort.

I'm referring to Europe as a whole, compared to the USA as a whole. Obviously there will be a few European countries that are exceptions, just as there are a few U.S. states that are exceptions.

Wasn't part of the point of sex-segregating sports to make sure it's primarily a test of athletic skill, rather than of skill at not being distracted by one's opponent? Is it possible the introduction of athletes who are still anatomically of the opposite sex might make their opponents subconsciously realize this, and in turn, be a confounding factor in the extent to which it's about athletic skills?

1 minute ago, CharonY said:

We have seen that depending on leadership, the US is not even transparent to its own citizen. So would the magic entity be? The other issue of course being that folks need to have a good system to detect diseases in the first place.

And considering how bad the US and Europe were in detecting and tracing cases, it seems that we need an organization led by a coalition of NZ, Taiwan and Vietnam. I do suspect that this is not what you had in mind.

East Asia in general; except for China; handled this pandemic well based on learning from what they got wrong with SARS. One decade's basket case is another decade's champion. Perhaps next time it'll be the US that comes out on top. Who knows?

Each democracy has its flaws, but they're all leagues more trustworthy than the origin country that could've saved millions of lives if they cut this off at the source, but decided to prioritize saving face instead. We need an alliance specifically of democracies.

If you want to find out what's going on in China, espionage is your only option anyway, they're never going to be transparent of their own accord without at least a complete replacement of everyone involved in the current government. (A replacement that probably isn't about to happen on its own in the near future, and probably couldn't be forced from outside without risking a large-scale conflict.)

Makes sense, then. Thanks!