Tuesday evening roundup

Coll and Reidel on Syria.

Richard Cohen is even more pathetic than we thought. Do read the Slate piece (linked) but not his stupid-beyond-words column, which just speaks to his own irrelevance. I read Ariel Levy's New Yorker piece when it came out; it doesn't support what he thinks it supports.

With so many anti-feminists attempting to co-opt feminism, let's talk about what it is. On a personal level, it means having the power to decide what's right for you without social interference. That goes for make-up, education/career, grooming, style, sexuality, marriage, name change, family (whether/how), feeding (breast- and otherwise), spousal division of labor, etc.). Having those choices on a personal level implies certain requirements on a social level, i.e., social structures that facilitate those choices (workplace and education fairness laws, birth control, etc.). It does not mean having to minimize signs of one's gender to exist in the world, nor does it mean making choices that may not be right for you in adherence to ideology (e.g., not breastfeeding your baby because it makes you more of a primary caregiver than your spouse).

Now that I've thoroughly addressed gender in other contexts, I'll skip over it with regard to this article about women in science and just quote something unrelated from it:

Students show greater gains when they are taught that the mind, like a muscle, gets stronger with work, as opposed to being told that talents are fixed and you’re born either quick or slow.

“It’s a uniquely Western phenomenon to say, ‘I’m no good at math, that’s O.K. and I can stop doing it,’ ” Dr. Chow said. “I grew up in Hong Kong, and no parent would say, ‘You’re right, just give up.’ ”

Don’t give up, budding scientist. One day you’ll look in the mirror and proudly embrace the term nerd. Whatever that means.

The universe hasn't been around forever, or why the night sky is dark.

Another Scientific American piece on GMOs, mostly vouching for their safety but also acknowledging their limits and the validity of some concerns about them:

How Bt crops threaten insect ecosystems and the environment is much less straightforward than whether they are safe enough to include in our diet. The massive mat of monoculture rolled across the U.S.—vast adjacent fields, each consisting of a single crop—is a relatively new kind of man-made ecosystem that has replaced much more diverse wild habitat.

Ah, but here comes the usual argument: this is preferable to heavy use of pesticides. But are GMOs a longterm solution, and are pesticides the only other choice?

Far more worrying to farmers—and ultimately to ecologists as well—is how quickly destructive insects become impervious to Bt crops. "Any entomologist would be stupid to say you’re not going to get resistance," says Brian Federici, an entomologist and Bt expert at the University of California, Riverside. Whenever farmers fight pests the same way over and over again, pests adapt and outwit that strategy. Consider one of the oldest methods of pest control: crop rotation.

Read also about the socioeconomic toll of biofuels.

On a lighter note: whatever your junkfood, be glad it's not this. Also be grateful for the unavailability of deep-fried soup at KFCs near you.

CTFD is great for life in general and wedding-related issues in particular.

If I could pick which monkey to be, I'd definitely go for the muriquis, not least because the dudes have "oversized testicles," and yet, there are no alpha males.