Turnabout: Still fair play (2012/03/16)
Proposed restrictions on Viagra
[read more...]Balance in journalism (2012/03/15)
NPR has some new standards up, which “clarify” the way in which they pursue balance.
[read more...]Silly Texas (2012/03/14)
Possibility that an innocent unborn life with no central nervous system might be ended: It is necessary to legally mandate raping the mother with a device in order to prevent this risk.
[read more...]Autistic people and phones (2012/03/14)
Hi! If you don’t normally follow my blog, someone probably forwarded you this link because you asked an autistic person to call you on the phone, or have some service or interaction for which your only provided contact information is a phone number.
[read more...]Health care, and why fraud-prevention is suicide for someone else (2012/03/13)
So, a friend of mine is on government-provided health care. And while it’s great that this exists, I’d like to point out just how horrendously broken the system is.
[read more...]Important not to be distracted (2012/03/07)
It’s important not to let those two particular words Rush Limbaugh used to describe a law student woman distract you from the message. Okay, just ignore those two words. Pretend he didn’t say “slut” or “prostitute”.
[read more...]Followup: Why a vacation might not be relaxing (2012/03/01)
It occurs to me that it’s really hard for non-autistic people to understand sometimes why something that sounds relaxing wouldn’t be, as in the example of the family taking their autistic child on a family vacation to a strange place.
[read more...]Why parenting matters (2012/03/01)
Having an autistic child wrecks your life, says a writer whose column on the Daily Mail is apparently “no longer accepting comments”.
[read more...]The reverse-Bechdel test (2012/02/27)
The “Bechdel test” is a test which categorizes movies based on a simple criterion: At some point in the movie, is there a conversation between two women which is not about a man?
[read more...]Cognitive sickle-cell anemia (2012/02/12)
Sickle-cell anemia has been a favorite example of biologists for years, because it’s an obviously harmful trait which is strongly selected for by evolutionary pressures. The gimmick is simple; it’s a recessive trait, so you only get the anemia if you have two genes for it. If you only have one gene for it, you’re effectively immune to malaria. In circumstances where lots of people die from malaria, this can be a marvelously useful trait to have – useful enough to make up for losing a few kids to anemia.
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