Monday evening roundup

You guessed it: I'm going to talk about lab-grown meat. In a minute.  Let's start with international news. Actually, I only have one thing on that: Is Putin marginalizing himself out of relevance? Now, onto science.

Satan planted a 15-million year-old whale skull on the banks of the Potomac to test our faith. I'm not sure whether he also gets credit for the wild rice growing along the Anacostia.

Eggplant seeds are the bane of my existence, so I'm all over Japanese eggplant.

Some dude in a plane is keeping track of pollution on the ground (spoiler alert: coal sucks; but that's not all he's watching for).

The downside to having a brain is that you're difficult to teleport on account of it.

I did not initially want to get into the should-scientists-advocate debate, at first because I found the first volley neither sophisticated, nor applicable in the U.S. (it was written in Britain, about Britain). I've since seen some very decent rebuttals and a really bizarre, confused post that was specifically about science-based advocacy in the U.S.

I question the quality of science in this study on narcissism, for the same doubts expressed in the article (assertiveness is narcissism?), but I took the quiz. I'm somewhat less narcissistic than the mean, but more vain (and yet, less exhibitionist--how does that work?). So much of these things strike me as personality differences that carry little pathology unless taken to extremes.

Speaking of (alleged) vanity, do you love clothes as much as I do but want more sustainable and ethical consumption?

Remember that talking Barbie in the 80s whose lines including "math is hard! let's go shopping!"? Well, The Children's Place decided to resurrect that theme.

Room for Debate is a pathetic waste of time as usual, but I feel the need to comment on this one because I wish my friends had been more willing to point out that I was dating an asshole. Then again, (1) he had them fooled as well and (2) I probably needed to see it for myself. But there were specific concerns that I brought up (with certain friends) and looking back on it, they saw them as red flags even then, even though their responses to me were that those issues were surmountable.

Oh, while we're (kind-of) on gender issues, I want to say that not for the first time, a nice man offered me his seat on the metro. I--and the next woman to whom he offered his seat--said "no, thank you," with an emphasis on the "thank you," in that we both made clear that although we didn't need to sit, we thought it was great that he asked.

Now then, what do you want to discuss about fake meat? Some of the questions that have popped up are, "is it okay?" and "is it vegan?" Let me start with a step back: whether or not the lab-grown meat is good, the debate over it is great because it draws people's attention to the consequences of farmed meat. Even calling into question, in the public discourse, the longterm sustainability of the way we eat now, is a step forward. The default position is reflected in the cluelessness of this post (in Scientific American, no less): but the lab meat has antibiotics! but it's expensive! Um, you won't need to search far on this blog or on the internet as a whole to find out about the debacle of antibiotics in farmed meat. And if you factored into farmed meat its actual cost--take away subsidies, add in environmental damage--it would cost quite a bit. As for "is it vegan?" I'll defer that debate to Erik Marcus, who is handling it very competently:

@vegan @apersonalvegan here we go.Bickering amongst eachother a/ a hypoth product.I understand #culturedbeef as a mind shift away from meat
— Michael Knaepen (@michaelknaepen) August 5, 2013

I'll also refer you to this morning's link to his take on honey, because it's the same argument: let's pick our battles. You can grasp at ideological purity, or you can make more of a difference for animal rights, the environment, and public health.