A Fairly Silly Art Project I've Been Working On

It's Robb Stark from "Game of Thrones" reimagined as a comic-book superhero!

I made these because someone on Tumblr was asking for fan art of Robb Stark and Jon Snow dressed in revealing superhero costumes, and I figured I could do that.

I made up aliases and powers for them, too, to go with the costumes.

Robb's superhero alias is Grey Wind, and he can fly and control the wind. (Possibly he flies by calling on the wind to carry him?)

I'm still pretty jittery about my skill with watercolors, so I made sure to scan this in stages, so that if I screwed up irreparably at any point I'd still have the linework to fall back on.

(The finished picture is mixed media -- outlined in ink, the figure colored with colored pencils, and the background colored with watercolors.)

Here are the other places I've posted these pictures on the Internet:

On my Tumblr: Stage One Stage Two Stage Three All Together

On my Deviant Art: Stage One Stage Two Stage Three

Bring Me One Large Enough to Ride!

A drawing of myself riding a huge Norwegian Forest Cat, inspired by this post on Tumblr

All Science Is Microbiology

As with any major news story, there has been a wave of editorial cartoons referencing the discovery of the Higgs boson. But I noticed something funny about the way some of these cartoonists have chosen to depict this event: the kinds of lab settings that they draw, from the equipment being used to depictions of (what is apparently supposed to be) the particle itself, suggest to me that the field of science in which this discovery occurred is not theoretical physics but microbiology.

Here is the cartoon (from my own local paper, the Kansas City Star) that made this obvious to me:

I don't know where that speech bubble is supposed to be coming from, but the things inside the circle (which looks a lot like the view through a microscope to me) are obviously cells of some kind. Except for the one on the right, which seems to be a grossly outsized mitochrondrion ...

Once I saw that, I remembered this earlier cartoon, where the visual non sequitur had gone right by me the first time, but after seeing the above cartoon, with the amoeba-looking thing labeled "God particle," it finally clicked for me.

I hope he's using the highest possible magnification on that thing ...

The microscope. The guy in this cartoon is looking through a light microscope. Light microscopes use visible light passed through a series of glass lenses to magnify whatever's on the slide; the greatest degree of magnification possible with this technology is an image 1,000 times the actual size of the object.


According to this webpage, the smallest thing you can see with just your eyes is 0.1 mm (100 micrometers, or 100,000 nanometers) long; that would mean, I think, that the smallest thing you could see at 100x magnification would be 0.001 mm (one micrometer, 1,000 nanometers) long. That same webpage lists the size of the smallest thing visible by light microscopy as 500 nanometers; another website gives the theoretical limit as 200 nanometers, which is approximately equal to the wavelength of visible light.


The webpage I cited first in the above paragraph, the "Cell Size and Scale" page, further states that the most powerful electron microscopes (microscopes that don't rely on visible light, but which use a beam of electrons to illuminate whatever they're pointed at) can resolve individual molecules, even individual atoms.


Here is a page on CERN's website that does a decent job of conveying just how small the particles they're trying to learn about are:

The infinitesimal scale of particle physics is mind-blowing, and rather abstract to imagine. If we enlarge an atom to the size of the Earth, then the protons and neutrons that make up the nucleus of the atom would each measure the length of an Olympic stadium. Smaller still are the quarks. If we consider our hypothetical atom blown up to the size of the Earth, then a quark would be smaller than a tennis ball. 

However, this does not give us a very good idea of the size of the atom itself. So staying with the same analogy, but scaling things in the opposite direction, if an atom was the size of the Earth, then an amoeba would be as big as our solar system. Going even further, the distance from the centre of Geneva to CERN (about 10 km) would stretch across the entire Milky Way galaxy.  

So if, as mentioned above, a single atom represents the smallest thing that can be seen by any microscope, these subatomic particles are smaller than that by many orders of magnitude. So the possibility of seeing even one of the larger subatomic particles through a light microscope makes the idea of me taking off my glasses, peering into a cup of coffee and watching individual molecules of sugar dissolve sound plausible by comparison.

More examples of cartoons showing people looking through light microscopes at the "God particle:

Whatever you do, don't blink!

 Here's one showing the "God particle" in what appears to be a petri dish:

This one is from England, so at least it's not just Americans who don't know how big the Higgs is!

... and, finally, here's one showing it in a test tube:

This one is visible to the naked eye!

(People might associate the test tube more with chemistry than with microbiology, but you can indeed grow cultures in a test tube. Bacteria cultured in a test tube are going to be suspended in a liquid growth medium, rather than spread across a solid one, but they can live there just as well.)


Anyway, I got a huge kick out of these cartoons, seeing as how they unconsciously nudge you toward the conclusion I named in my post title: All Science Is Microbiology. Even when it's theoretical physics. 


I have no idea if anyone besides me finds this funny; of anyone who reads, or might read, here I'd be most confident of thevenerablecorvex sharing my appreciation of it. Hopefully if I name her, she will see this post and laugh, too.

Occupational Hazards

I'm working on a fairly technical post about MMS, and this verse has been running through my head for some time now:


Johnny was a chemist,
He isn't anymore
'Cause what he thought was H₂O
Was H₂SO₄ 

Hilarious.

Don't know how I got there, but I found my way onto this Tumblr and there beheld something truly awesome:

This Avengers cover mock-up.


It originally came from Comics Alliance, concocted by blogger Chris Sims and artist Kelly Callen.


In case you can't see it, the image shows seven Avengers --- Captain America, Thor, Nick Fury, the Incredible Hulk, Hawkeye, Iron Man, and a black-gloved redhead I think is Black Widow (hard to tell since we're just seeing the top of her head, from behind) --- all holding the worst possible gift someone could ever give them. Cap's got a pair of pink socks covered with swastikas; Fury (who has one eye) has a 3-D movie and a pair of 3-D glasses, which he is holding up to his single eye; the Hulk has a chemistry set; Iron Man has a book on running a successful business by his old enemy and competitor Obadiah Stane; Hawkeye (an archer) has a box of bullets; the Russian Black Widow has a DVD of "Rocky IV"; and Thor has a copy of Richard Dawkins's book The God Delusion*.


Captain America's speech bubbles say, "ONE OF US is responsible for these horrible gifts! And nobody's leaving until I FIND OUT WHO!"


I love the look on Thor's face.


*This is especially funny because, not only is the book an argument that gods in general don't exist, but Thor in particular is one of the author's favorite examples of gods no one believes in anymore. (See this video for a collection of clips where he refers to Thor in this way.)

Did You Know ...

(T. S. Eliot, wearing a white rose)

One of my favorite poets, T. S. Eliot, apparently wore a white rose in his lapel to show loyalty to Richard III (whom he is supposed to have called the last legitimate English king, per this article in The New Yorker about him) and the house of York, on the anniversary of the Battle of Bosworth Field (when Richard was killed).

From this, and from the fact that the Song of Ice and Fire is (very loosely) based on the events of the Wars of the Roses, I conclude that, if he were alive today and would condescend to read science fiction or fantasy (which is probably a greater leap than bringing him back from the dead --- the man was a humongous literary snob), he would probably be a Stark fan. :)

Winter is coming!

A Fun Fact About Leo Kanner

I just started reading Roy Richard Grinker's book Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism, and in a chapter on the early history of autism (covering Kanner and Asperger, plus Eugen Bleuler's and Sigmund Freud's use of the term "autistic" to describe aspects of other conditions, and also stories of feral children, whom Grinker believes were probably autistic), I came across this anecdote:

In 1943, a New York psychoanalyst named Abram Blau wrote a paper in which he argued that whereas there were numerous words, proper and slang, for the penis, there were few words, and virtually no slang words, for the analogous organ in women, the clitoris. Based on this assumption, Blau made grand arguments about the universal symbolic importance of the penis to humanity. Kanner, as evidence-based as anyone in psychiatry at that time, was furious about Blau's assumption, based on no data collection at all, and quickly wrote a paper with the dry title "A Philological Note on Sex Organ Nomenclature," which he published in a psychoanalytic journal. In it, Kanner listed dozens of words for the clitoris, from languages all over the world, and all of them, he claimed, from memory. He destroyed Blau's argument.

Grinker included it to illustrate Kanner's prodigious memory, which Grinker believes was one of the "subclinical," autistic-like traits Kanner possessed that may have given him insight into the inner lives of the children he studied.

I'm posting it here because I think it's funny. Male psychoanalysts and their penis fixations never cease to amuse me.

(Unfortunately, the only copy of the article I can find online is here, with the full text only accessible to subscribers to that website. So I can't find any of the words Kanner listed, which is annoying.)

Graphical Humor

Andrea linked to this post on Indexed, a blog whose entries consist of graphs and Venn diagrams making various weird/funny/trenchant comparisons between different categories of things.

I'm not going to reproduce any of the images here --- that would be taking pageviews away from Jessica Hagy, who draws them and who appears to make money from her website, so for her a pageview is more akin to someone walking into a shop she owns, rather than just a way to gauge how many people read her, as they are to me --- but I will link to some of the ones I liked the best:
Please sir, I want some more.
Covens & convents.
We'll just get a new one.
Nothing is for everybody.
A little something for the pagans.

The whole concept of the site reminds me a lot of this old strip from xkcd ...

Now This Is Weird

(If you insist on having some context for this wonderfully bizarre image, it's here.)

So, Antarctic Press has started a new comic-book series featuring Sarah Palin and a suit of steam-powered robot armor.
Chris Murphy at Comics Alliance has reviewed the first (and so far only) issue, which he declares "so bad it's good":

Steampunk Palin hopes to capitalize on the popularity of two things. First, former Vice Presidential Candidate and ex-Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin, whose life story of beauty queen to elected official to media celebrity has captivated a nation, both for those who find her to be an inspiring voice to the Tea Party movement of libertarian-influenced conservatives, and those who derive perverse entertainment from many of her public statements and behavior.

The second thing is steampunk, a literary genre that borrows the notions of cyberpunk and transplants them into an alternate history past or fantasy world, usually influenced by the works of H.G. Wells or Jules Verne. It's often characterized by the use of advanced technology substitutes reliant on non-electrical power, and a visual aesthetic heavy on intricately designed gearworks. ...

And while I'm willing to believe this book when it tells me it's trying to depict Sarah Palin, my response to the idea that it can be characterized as steampunk is more along the lines of "Hold on there." Although to be fair to the book, Steampunk Palin defies classification into any literary genre, unless there's a genre I'm unaware of simply called "WTF?!?"

Some other high points of weirdness: first, Sarah Palin isn't the only contemporary political figure to get the steam-powered robot upgrade: Barack Obama is also turned into a cyborg ("Robama"), and John McCain gets a robot arm, and they all team up to save Alaska from marauding Russians and rapacious energy companies. Second, the nefarious plot to steal all the energy (all of it!) is headed by none other than Al Gore! An evil Al Gore, going by the nom de guerre "Professor Greenhouse."

I figured a publishing house that could produce that would probably have lots of other, equally oddball offerings, and Antarctic Press's website doesn't disappoint.

There's another, even more cheesecake series starring Palin: "Sarah Palin, Rogue Warrior" ...

... "President Evil," in which all the dead U.S. Presidents rise from their graves to feast on the living, and President Obama has to battle them ...
... and, probably the least off-the-wall of any of them, "The Governator," which imagines Arnold Schwarzenegger's tenure as Governor of California as it might have gone if he really were an amalgam of all his action-hero movie characters:
Unfortunately, these politicians are not all lampooned equally in their comic-book representations; Sarah Palin, besides being made into a cartoon character, is also objectified and sexualized in ways that Barack Obama, John McCain, and Arnold Schwarzenegger are not. (About a third of the pages in Steampunk Palin #1 are devoted to pinup art of her; you can see an example at the Comics Alliance post I linked).

That's not going to surprise anyone who's even slightly familiar with either comic books or how Sarah Palin is usually depicted in the media; it's still depressing, though, that we're not yet able to caricature female politicians without turning them into hags, bimbos or sex objects.

Zany Vintage Ads - The Gift That Keeps On Giving!

I have a reproduction of Giant-Size X-Men #1, from 1975 --- this one, to be exact --- that also includes reproductions of the ads that were included in that initial printing.

Most of them are nothing special --- not appreciably different from the ads that run in comic books today, offering mail-order products guaranteed to give you a muscular body, mastery of hypnotism or martial arts, get-rich-quick schemes or collectible comics and/or action figures.

But there was one that made me laugh, not least because of its incredible seventiesness:

Stick-on fake facial hair! So that you, too, can have a sexy Van Dyke beard and mutton-chop sideburns like this guy! (I have no idea what is up with the hair on top of his head, though; the way they've drawn it, it looks more like he's wearing a deflated basketball for a skullcap).

Anyway, here's the copy, in case it's not legible in my scan:

ENJOY AN EXCITING, ROMANTIC

LOOK

IMPRESSIVE ANYTIME!

QUICK CHANGE to suit your mood time:

Send for Mustache, Sideburns and Van Dyke at once! Simply check the color you want or send a sample of your hair and leave the matching to our expert. MAIL COUPON NOW!

Adheres securely ... off and on in seconds ... can be worn as is or trimmed to just the style you want.

They then provide a listing of hair-color options, and a mailing address for "Masculiner Co." somewhere in New Jersey.

Unfortunately, since the ad is actually from 1975, the company probably doesn't exist anymore, and even if it did the offer wouldn't still be valid. (It says that at the bottom of every ad page: "Facsimile advertisement, no longer valid.")

Heck, I might even get myself some stick-on '70s-style sideburns if I could find them for super cheap. They look fun.

(I have some teeny-tiny, baby sideburns of my own that I kind of wish were bigger and more noticeable. They are a shade or two darker than the rest of my hair.)

Fun With Gender Genie

Over at Left Brain/Right Brain, the bloggers and commenters are having fun with J.B. Handley's assertion (at Age of Autism) that LB/RB blogger Sullivan is really Bonnie Offit (wife of Autism's False Prophets author Paul Offit) wearing the cyberspace equivalent of a fake beard.

In this post from yesterday, Kevin Leitch (the primary LB/RB blogger apart from Sullivan) ran samples of both J.B. Handley's and Sullivan's writing through a web-based gender-guessing algorithm called Gender Genie, which prompted many of the commenters to submit some posts of their own for gender analysis.

I thought I would join in the fun myself, but then I had the idea to compare my results by category of post --- is Gender Genie more likely to think me female if I write about some things than if I write about others? --- and realized that reproducing those results would take up a lot more space than a typical blog comment.

So I'm posting it here.

My hypothesis: the more technical posts will be judged male most of the time. Autobiographical posts, literary posts, and probably feminist posts will be judged female most of the time.

Posts about research articles:
"Through a (Brain) Scanner, Darkly" - 1557 words
Female Score: 1004; Male Score: 2112
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Who's That in the Mirror? Autism and the Developing Sense of Self" - 2091 words
Female Score: 3093; Male Score: 3036
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... female!

"These Are Not the Eternal Verities of Biology - Part II" - 831 words
Female Score: 884; Male Score: 1374
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Fever Dreams: Autism Research and the Changeling Myth" - 1010 words
Female Score: 1311; Male Score: 1520
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Thoughts on the 'Extreme-Male-Brain' Theory of Autism" - 921 words
Female Score: 682; Male Score: 1467
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Autism, Alexithymia, and Empathy" - 1673 words*
Female Score: 1524; Male Score: 2132
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Say What?!" - 1061 words
Female Score: 997; Male Score: 1771
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"I Wanna Be Sedated" - 2518 words
Female Score: 2895; Male Score: 3922
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Autism and Genetics: It's Complicated" - 1526 words
Female Score: 1657; Male Score: 2295
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

Average scores for this type of post: 1485 female; 2181 male
Average post length in this category: 1465 words

Posts about my life:
"Doubly Deviant: On Being Queer and Autistic" - 2497 words
Female Score: 3343; Male Score: 2881
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... female!

"An Act of Shameless Emotional Exhibitionism" - 1025 words
Female Score: 1841; Male Score: 857
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... female!

"Gender Variance in Autism: How Much of It Is Just Sensory?" - 1100 words
Female Score: 1317; Male Score: 1647
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"A Brief Experiment in Communal Living" - 1129 words
Female Score: 1488; Male Score: 1462
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... female!

"Addendum" - 716 words
Female Score: 709; Male Score: 958
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Employment Issues in Autism: Finding and Holding a Job" - 792 words
Female Score: 1122; Male Score: 968
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... female!

"What's It Like to Be You?" - 677 words
Female Score: 660; Male Score: 1040
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Bringing the Doctor-Patient Relationship Into the Bedroom"** - 991 words
Female Score: 1642; Male Score: 1581
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... female!

Average scores for this type of post: 1515 female; 1424 male
Average post length in this category: 1116 words

Book reviews/literary criticism:
"Totally Unexpected Gender and Disability Awesomeness from Larry Niven" - 1500 words
Female Score: 1844; Male Score: 2266
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"In or Out? Using Spatial Metaphors to Describe Autism" - 2459 words
Female Score: 1936; Male Score: 3877
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"A Flash-Flood of Feminist Fiction" - 2299 words
Female Score: 2242; Male Score: 3720
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"More about Jude the Obscure" - 1423 words
Female Score: 1980; Male Score: 1956
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... female!

"Autism in the Not-Too-Distant Future: Thoughts on Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark" - 641 words
Female Score: 658; Male Score: 934
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Metaphor at the Expense of Characterization: Autism in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake" - 1166 words
Female Score: 1310; Male Score: 1360
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Comparing Feminist Dystopias" - 1005 words
Female Score: 1053; Male Score: 1417
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

Average scores for this type of post: 1575 female; 2219 male
Average post length in this category: 1499 words

Posts about feminism:
"Oh No, an Analogy!" - 678 words
Female Score: 537; Male Score: 1145
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"But What About the (Aspie) Men??!" - 1504 words
Female Score: 2464; Male Score: 2675
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"A Bit More on Reproductive Choice" - 1234 words
Female Score: 1167; Male Score: 1439
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Disability Rights and Bodily Autonomy" - 694 words
Female Score: 1216; Male Score: 842
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... female!

"Violence Against Disabled Women" - 1660 words
Female Score: 2610; Male Score: 2365
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... female!

"Where Neurodiversity Meets Feminist Theory (Part III)" - 607 words***
Female Score: 1021; Male Score: 1121
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"On Patriarchal Medicine: The Intersection of Feminist Critique and Anti-Vaccine Crackpottery" - 588 words
Female Score: 695; Male Score: 1078
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

Average scores for this type of post: 1241 female; 1363 male
Average post length in this category: 995 words

Other political/philosophical posts:
"Human Diversity and the Surveillance State" - 606 words
Female Score: 663; Male Score: 860
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"More Focus on Compliance: An Addendum to My Last Post" - 518 words
Female Score: 646; Male Score: 840
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"A Tale of Two Epidemics" - 677 words
Female Score: 949; Male Score: 1269
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Employment Issues in Autism: Trends" - 770 words
Female Score: 800; Male Score: 1172
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"New Concept: Context Disorders" - 465 words
Female Score: 857; Male Score: 808
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... female!

"Is Bullying a Feature of Our Culture, or a Bug?" - 663 words
Female Score: 1155; Male Score: 1144
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... female!

Average scores for this type of post: 845 female; 1016 male
Average post length in this category: 617 words

While I've tried to pick posts that are either free of quotations entirely, or have a fairly high proportion of my writing to other people's writing (this ruled out some of the research-article posts that I'm quite proud of, and would otherwise submit as representative of my writing), or were purged of overly long quoted passages, the samples I gave were still not 100% written in my voice. Especially the literary and science-related posts: if you're writing about another piece of writing, whether it's a book or a research article, you're probably going to have to quote it at some point.

I can't tell the extent to which this has biased the gender classification of my posts; with the research-article posts, I'd expect the gender of the lead author not to have much of an effect since research articles are written in such a uniform, dry, trying-to-be-objective style. With the book posts, it turns out all but one of them are judged to be written by someone of the opposite gender of the author whose book I'm reviewing. (The lone exception is the post on Larry Niven's The Integral Trees, which Gender Genie determines was written by a man).

(Also lumped in with those book posts is a more generic literary-type post about the use of spatial metaphors to describe autism; in it, I cite and quote from an article by the philosopher Ian Hacking. The Genie also decided that post was written by a man, but it had a pretty high ratio of my writing to Hacking's writing that I'm less likely to think quoting from him biased that reading than I am to think my liberally quoting Larry Niven's book might've biased the gender-determination of that post).

Something I expected, since I noticed that all of the pronouns seem to read as "feminine" words to Gender Genie, was that my autobiographical posts would tend to be classed as female-written. This turned out to be the case: of the eight posts I chose to run through the program, five came out female and three came out male.

Both my posts about feminism, and my posts about political, philosophical or cultural topics in general were overwhelmingly judged male. I separated out feminism from the other political/theoretical writing to see if Gender Genie seemed to consider content at all; I guess it doesn't.

For the most part, it does seem to think I'm a man, though.

*There is a lengthy quotation near the end of that post that I omitted from the text I sent through Gender Genie, so this figure falls a bit short of the actual length of the post.

**This post could just as easily be considered a literary or feminist post: it's a comparison of a dynamic I observe in my (heterosexual) romantic relationship to similar dynamics in books --- F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper --- bookended with a little bit of feminist history/theory. So it has all three elements; I just figured the autobiographical element was most prominent.

***Again, excluding a fairly long quotation.

Wow, A Blog Award!

Clay and Corina have both decided to give me the Versatile Blogger Award. Thank you, to both of you. You are both good writers, and you both handle such a broad range of subjects so well, it's an honor to be chosen by you.

Anyway, this award, like so many others, comes with a meme: now that I have it, I have to share seven things about myself and then pass the award on to seven other bloggers I like (and, presumably, think are versatile).

Seven weird, random fun facts about me:

1. If you follow pop psychology at all (and I do --- we all need something to snicker at), you'll have heard something about digit ratio; if the ring finger is longer than the index finger, it means you're more masculine. Simon Baron-Cohen has also tried to tie digit ratios to autism, as per his theory that autism = hypermasculinity.

Being a big, butch, queer autistic woman, I naturally wanted to see if I displayed the expected masculine pattern of finger lengths, so I measured mine --- all the while taking it about as seriously as a newspaper horoscope or a fortune cookie, mind --- and found that each of my hands has a different digit ratio. On the left hand, the ring finger is longer than the index finger; on the right, they're the same length.

2. I have enormous trouble telling right from left. At *best*, I have to hold up my hands in an "L" shape and see which one makes the "L" point the right direction to determine right from left; at worst, I forget which way an "L" is supposed to point so I just pick one at random.

This runs in my family; my grandmother and sister are like that too. (My grandmother would always get teased at work about "Polish lefts").

3. I've flown an airplane! A Cessna 172. It was one of those introductory flying lessons, where the instructor helps you do the pre-flight checks and sits next to you while you take off and fly around, then takes over when it's time to land.

4. I love M&Ms, but have "rules" for eating them. I eat them in groups of 3, 5 or 6, either all the same color or one of each color. (If its groups of three different-colored ones, lately I've been only eating primary colors. Other colors I just eat in single-color handfuls).

5. When I was a kid, I was terrified of bees and wasps. Like, if I saw one I would freeze up and have to go inside RIGHT AWAY. I am still jumpy around wasps, as they seem to be less predictable than bees.

6. All Gatorade tastes green to me.

7. My oldest T-shirt, which has a design of a cow skull on the front, a bald eagle carrying off a diamondback rattlesnake on the back, with red, blue and black tie-dye on the sleeves and sides, dates from when I was 8 years old. This is impressive when you consider how large I am now --- I bought begged my mom to buy the shirt not in the size I wore then, but in a bigger size I could grow into. That bigger size was a men's large; as a kid I had the notion I would grow up to be as big as my father. (Yes, I knew I was a girl, and knew I would not grow up to be a man. I still thought I would grow up to be just like my father, only female).

So, now, seven people I think are versatile bloggers!

Urocyon
Amanda Baggs (probably a bit hubristic for me to name her, since her writing helped make up the foundation of online neurodiversity, but she practically defines "versatile blogger," so I'd feel weird not naming her)
Clarissa
Astrid
Daisy

... and two more who don't seem to be writing for the general public anymore, but who are both terrific writers who tackle a broad array of topics with aplomb: Anemone Cerridwen and Kowalski.

Why Are So Many Awesome Bloggers Named Amanda?

Seriously, it seems like a whole lot of wonderful feminist and disability-rights bloggers have that name.

There's Amanda Baggs, of course, autism/neurodiversity/anti-oppression blogger extraordinaire; she and Michelle Dawson were the first online writers I ever read, and if anybody can be said to have inspired me to do online writing, it's probably those two.

There's also Amanda Marcotte, whom I love for combining feminist blogging with atheism, skepticism and Bad-Science debunking; Amanda W. of Three Rivers Fog, whom I mostly read on FWD/Forward; Amanda Hess, who writes The Sexist; and now, most recently, I find Amanda Forest Vivian, an autistic American college student living in England, who wrote this amazing post* about an ABA school she interned at over a summer, where the staff were directed to try to stop students from stimming, or from being weird in the most harmless of ways:

...I started out thinking: wow, ABA is so cool. I've heard negative things about it from other Not Really Autistic people, but who am I to talk about what these Really Autistic kids need? They can't even talk. They might bite themselves or something. What the hell do I know about that?

And then I met Danny and the other kids in his class. High-functioning kids. Verbal kids.

Tony, who had been nonverbal a few years before, was incredibly hardworking and sweet. When he went into the school director's office and turned out the lights as a joke, I laughed, but she said, "Tony. Look at my face. How do you think that made me feel?" She stood there looking grim until he apologized.

James was stressed out and upset; one of his teachers leaned towards him, staring
fiercely into his eyes, talking with cold, strained-sounding words, the kind of voice I called "static" when I was a kid. James looked scaredly back at her, wriggling his hands around in his lap. "James," she said. "I know you're upset. But what you're doing with your hands looks silly." This boy, all the tension in him being channeled into something harmless, something she had to look under the table to see. His tension was silly. His discomfort was an inconvenience. He was eight or nine years old.

And Danny with his words. ...

Danny just liked words. When he was using his special words, the weird words he scrounged for or made up himself, he would find himself jerkily hopping across the room, speaking in a squeaky voice, his small face tense with excitement. "Presentation" was a weird word for movie, "document" was a way to talk about the letter he had typed on the computer for his parents. "I went to the barber," he said when I commented on his newly short hair, and then, with a rush of joy, "but I like to call it the hair shop!"

I like words, too. It was hard to watch Danny's teachers nudge him, sit down with him, say, "Danny, the word 'presentation' is a little weird; you need to say 'movie'." It was hard to watch the way they looked at him, pointedly, until he stilled his hopping and lowered his voice to a more standard pitch. When Danny found out my middle name is Wood, he completely tripped out on it, hammering pretend nails into my stomach and giggling, "I'm gonna build something out of you!" "Danny," a teacher said, "Don't be weird. You and Amanda were talking about names."
...
So from specific to general, from Danny to James and Tony, to Max and John. John's teacher made him walk, in stiff, clean steps, and if he started doing anything that looked like skipping or jumping, she grabbed his arm, said "No," forced him again and again. Max liked to move his arm in circles while he was watching TV, so he was hauled off into an office, pushed down into a chair, had mouthwash forced into his mouth until he cried. They told me they were narrowing it down, he was moving less and less. Max and John didn't talk. James and Tony didn't talk as well as I do. But I move too much, and I move wrong, especially when I was a kid, and in that school I saw what they do to kids who move wrong.

While I am not categorically anti-ABA --- I think it can be a valuable teaching tool, since it breaks down complicated tasks and skills into discrete, simple components --- that post (like this older post of Chaoticidealism's) does a great job of showing how some uses of ABA (yes, even without aversives) can be cruel and harmful.

In a Pedantic Linguistic Aside to this earlier post, I explain why I hate the common use of "learning" or "education" to describe methods that are essentially authoritarian in nature:

While the mental and behavioral adaptations people make to survive in a prison/institution environment ... might be called "learning," in the Skinnerian sense of that word, they also tend to sabotage a person's capacity for any other kind of learning. You get really good at surviving that hostile environment, but the price you pay is that you lose those parts of yourself that don't help you do that.

I think this also happens to kids in really intensive ABA programs. You lose initiative; you become afraid to try something before you've been told how to do it, because you're used to the teacher/therapist/whomever criticizing your attempts, telling you "No, that's wrong" whenever you do something that differs even a little bit from the response they're looking for.

So, I think that, since there is a significant cost to the kid who undergoes such training (in time if nothing else --- how're you supposed to have a childhood if you're in therapy for forty hours a week?), parents considering an ABA-based school or camp or other structured activity should ask themselves what their kid is likely to get out of it. Will they master important motor, executive, social, emotional or coping skills they've been having trouble picking up on their own? Will those skills help them become more independent (or, if you raise a skeptical eyebrow at the "independence" ideal, more productively interdependent)? Will your kid actually get something out of it that ze can use, or are you just hoping to make hir look more normal?

*Thank you, Sarah, for linking that post; I wouldn't have found it otherwise!

How *NOT* to Do Superhero Halloween Costumes

CaitieCat at Shakesville linked this somewhat hilaristurbing Comics Alliance article about Disguise Costumes' new line* of Marvel-superhero-themed women's Halloween costumes.

What could be more awesome than having a wider selection of ready-to-wear Marvel superhero costumes? Well, like Comics Alliance's Nick Nadel writes, it'd be a lot more awesome if these costumes actually looked much like the characters they're supposed to portray.

For example, there are three characters in the Marvel universe who might be considered female equivalents of Spider-Man: first, there's Spider-Woman**, who looks like this:

There's also Spider-Girl, who was introduced in a "What If?" one-shot comic, as the superpowered daughter of Spider-Man and his true love Mary Jane Watson. She dresses more or less exactly like her father does, in the blue-and-red spider suit:
Finally, there's Araña (Spanish for "spider"). She's a teenage girl with spider powers, and she dresses in street clothes with a spider motif:
None of these amazing characters look even a little bit like this, however.

This is more or less the pattern for all the characters featured in this line: make a standard-issue Sexy (Whatever) costume, with short skirt, bustier/crop top, and tall, vertiginously high-heeled boots, and add little details to evoke the character. Thus, Spider-Girl here looks more or less like the Black Cat looks more or less like Emma Frost looks more or less like American Dream. Only in Emma Frost's case is the resulting costume anywhere near resembling something the character in question would actually wear: hers is, if anything, a bit more modest than the outfit she wore for all those years as the White Queen of the Hellfire Club!

But the most WTF-inducing part of that article, for me at least, was this.

Sexy Venom?! That really, really does not compute.

It does not compute, because Venom looks like this:

You try to make that cute and attractive, and I'd argue you lost sight of the essence of the character a long time ago.

(In answer to your no-doubt-unasked question, "What's even more hilaristurbing than a Sexy Venom costume?", I give you a commenter at Comics Alliance's assertion that the blonde young woman modeling the Sexy Venom costume is none other than Carrie Prejean, Miss Anti-Gay California herself. How weird is that?)

*I was only able to find one of the costumes --- this one, the Sexy Cheerleader version of Captain America with the shield maybe a third the size of the one the model is holding --- on Marvel's own website, so it looks like the Women of Marvel line is mostly Disguise Costumes' brainchild. The Comics Alliance article gives the impression that Marvel is involved, but Disguise's website just says the costumes are "inspired" by Marvel superheroines, and you'd think that if Marvel had any role in designing the costumes, that they'd also be selling them on their site, which they're not.

**There have been multiple Spider-Women over the course of Marvel canon, but I am referring to Jessica Drew, the first, current and --- I believe --- longest-running holder of the title.

Covered!

Gonzo tagged me with this meme, so I'm going to post videos of a couple of my favorite cover songs. (I don't have a Worst Cover, at least not that I can think of; there's quite a few that I just feel "meh" about, but I don't think I've ever come across a really, truly awful one).

Here's Jimi Hendrix doing Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower":

And here's Save Ferris doing "Come on Eileen" by Dexy's Midnight Runners:

I think both of these pretty much blow the originals out of the water.

(Some runners-up: Evanescence's cover of Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box," Fear Factory's version of Gary Numan's "Cars" ... and I had a third runner-up but can't come up with it now. Whatever).

I'm not going to tag anybody; just, as always, whoever feels like doing this, knock yourselves out.

The Sound and the Furry

(Hey, I warned y'all about me and puns).

My sister took this video of one of our cats:

He does this semi-routinely.

This should be on the list for this year's Ig Nobels

Is there an Annals of Just Plain Silly Research?

From the What Sorts of People blog, here's a lovely article from the Daily Mail (complete with file photo of a temperamental toddler --- 'cause that's what autism is, y'know, all autistics are children and we are always throwing tantrums) describing a study comparing the waist-to-hip ratios of women judged attractive by fathers of autistic children and by other men.

Waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) has come into vogue in evolutionary-psychology circles as some kind of numerical proxy for Ideal Womanhood, being an indicator of higher estrogen levels and (the theory goes) higher fertility and greater ease of childbirth. (And, of course, everything men find attractive in women is firmly rooted in reproductive biology *snort*). Preference for low WHR is also claimed, by these same evolutionary psychologists, to persist across cultures, though Echidne casts some doubt on that:

[T]he 0.7 waist-to-hips ratio was initially established in a study done in the U.S. Its supposed international applicability was based on the fact that some of the students used in the study had roots in various other countries. It's possible that later studies have been done to prove this one, but but Anne Innis Dagg (in "Love of Shopping" Is Not a Gene) reports on several studies on nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes in Tanzania and Peru which found that the men in those tribes preferred women shaped big and tubular, not like an hour-glass, because the former shape was associated with a fatter woman and hence a better worker. Once some of these men got into contact with Western lifestyles their preferences changed. --- This suggests that it is very difficult to disentangle "evolutionary" explanations from the cultural hegemony the Western nations currently have.

Why would anybody expect that to have anything to do with autism? Well, if you recall Simon Baron-Cohen's theory that autism is an extreme case of normal male brain wiring, and thus related to higher levels of testosterone exposure in utero, you might go on to suppose (as Baron-Cohen has done) that autism's persistence in the gene pool results from assortative mating of strongly "systematizing" --- though not necessarily themselves autistic --- types of people. Since he has equated that cognitive style with high testosterone levels, it would make sense in the context of his theory that the women fathers of autistic children are attracted to would show signs of having high testosterone levels (i.e., higher waist-to-hip ratio).

In this study, researchers the men's (52 fathers of autistic children and 65 fathers of NT children) preferences by showing them photographs of five women, each woman's image shown both as is and digitally altered to have a noticeably lower or higher WHR. The men were shown images in pairs and asked which was more attractive. Pairings could include either two different women or two versions of the same woman, differing only in WHR. There was no difference between the two groups of men in which of the five women they rated most attractive, but when comparing the Photoshopped images of any given woman, the fathers of autistic children tended to prefer versions of her with a higher waist-to-hip ratio than did the men in the control group.

They also found, in the course of asking demographic questions to the study participants, that the fathers of autistic children had more sons (the ratio of male children: all children was 0.68 for that group and 0.47 for the control group). That's somewhat interesting, since it takes into account non-autistic children of the same parents, and does suggest there might be something more to the gender imbalance than mere diagnostic invisibility of female autistics. However, this was not an epidemiological study, and a sample of fifty-two families is hardly adequate material for one.