Math, Risk, and Cancer

Here's a good article from Slate on the new mammogram recommendations. The article asks, Why can we discuss sports in an intelligent, statistically--savvy way -- but not health?

The Big Picture: Mars

The Boston Globe's "Big Picture" is usually fantastic. They just did Mars. Go.

Via Bad Astronomy.

Where men set foot upon the moon

Back in July, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took amazing photos of the landing sites of the Apollo missions. You could clearly see the footpaths made by the astronauts, and little bumps of the left-behind lower stage of the lunar module.

LRO has now taken much better photos of the Apollo 11 landing site. As usual, Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy does a great job of explaining them. The big white blob is the lunar lander. The four dots around it are the landing legs. The dark streak above and to the left is made by human footprints -- space travelers.

Life's not been the same

Hate Crimes bill passes

Catching up on legislative action: two weeks ago Congress passed the "Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act". Last Wednesday President Obama signed it into law.

The law expands the 1969 federal hate-crime law to include a victim's real or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability. This is big:

• No longer must the victim be engaged in a federally--protected activity like voting. Texas has no hate-crimes statute when James Byrd was lynched; a similar crime now would bring additional penalties.
• The law gives the feds power to prosecute hate crimes when local authorities won't. Also, it helps state and county agencies cover the costs of high-profile investigations and trials. (The trial of Matthew Shepard's killers financially drained a Wyoming county.)
• It requires the FBI to track statistics on hate crimes against transgender people. We don't actually know many transgender folk are attacked and murdered every year, because the feds haven't counted.
  

Fundamentalist Christians have fought hate crimes measures on the grounds that they stifle free speech. That's not true. It is absolutely, 100% legal to stand on the corner and tell the world how much you hate brown people and gay people.

Hate crimes should be punished more severely because such crimes target not only the direct victim, but an entire minority community. A brick through the window of a synagogue is worse than a brick through the window of a 7/11. A lynching is worse than a murder. Therefore, the people who perpetrate hate crimes should face tougher sentences.

US to lift ban on HIV+ visitors

Good news from DC on Friday: President Obama announced that the government would lift a 22-year ban on entry into the United States for people who are HIV positive. The change takes effect Jan. 2010. "If we want to be the global leader in combating HIV/AIDS, we need to act like it," the president said.

The HIV+ travel ban has been embarrassing and counter-productive -- it's prevented the US from hosting major HIV/AIDS conferences, and it's prevented foreign HIV+ activists from speaking in the US. Almost no other countries have such a travel ban.

From CNN: "Today is a great day for human rights and for people living with AIDS, their friends and their families," said Frank Donaghue, CEO of Physicians for Human Rights. "The HIV Travel Ban made the United States a pariah in human rights circles, and harmed our reputation as a world leader of HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and care.

Physics Nobel for CCDs and fiber optics

Professor Astronomy explains how this year's Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for inventions that you'll find at every professional observatory on Earth (and many amateur observatories, too): charge-coupled devices (CCDs) and long-distance fiber optics.

It's not hyperbole to say that CCDs brought a revolution in astronomy -- great sensitivity that lets you find faint, distant galaxies; repeatability that lets you detect the slight dimming of a star as a planet passes in front; and an intrinsically digital format that made it easy to archive and share data.

Trivia, Telomeres, and the Nobel Prize

Once upon a time, a few weeks after the 2000 election, I was on a long Southwest flight full of antsy, pre-Thanksgiving energy. Since the flight attendants for some reason had corporate swag to give away, they decided to hold a trivia contest. A flight attendant announced a question over the PA, and the first person to ring their attendant call button and give the right answer won a prize. The prizes included tshirts, pens, and bottles of Wild Turkey.

I won a pen for the correct answer "William Jefferson Clinton", to the question, "Who is the president of the United States?", which was a trick question, since the Bush v. Gore election still had no clear winner.

One question was, "What is a telomere?" I had no idea, and was embarrassed -- it's rare for me to lose a science trivia question. Afterward, I asked the flight attendant. He gave a quick explanation (the tips of chromosomes, which control aging), and I remembered reading about them in an article about Dolly the cloned sheep, asking whether her short telomeres had caused her short life. I also asked the flight attendant why he knew so much about DNA. He had been a research biologist, got tired of the pressure, and took a job at Southwest.

So that's the roundabout way that I learned about telomeres, which are the subject of this year's Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Pulp Fiction

I stumbled into a neat antiques store here in Purple-state America, with a selection of pulp fiction, men's "physique" magazines from the 1950s, and lesbian pulp fiction.

Back before Stonewall, pulp novels were the way that many a lesbian learned that she was not the only person in the world who felt "that way", that we had a name, places where we congregated, and (in most pulps) a violent death as the wages of sin. Though most lesbian pulps from the 50s and 60s were exploitative and voyeuristic, some were written by working-class lesbians (Ann Bannon and Vin Packer, I heart you) who could have never been published in that era by any "real" publisher. Pulps were a way for lesbians to communicate, learn, and validate their own existence.

Which is why I've begun collecting pulps -- as proof that we existed in, and survived, rougher times than this. Here's the back cover text from my new acquisition, "I Am a Lesbian", publ. 1958:

Stories relating to lesbianism are very numerous today. This is surely proof that people are interested in the subject and its treatment. Lesbians are a part of our society and they will very likely remain so. In this book Lora Sela does not write that its characters have *tendencies*; instead they are *real* lesbians whose hearts are as warm and deserving of understanding as any other segment of our human life.

You are not welcome here.

Visiting a purple state on business, I stopped by a pizza joint, ordered a slice, and sat down with the town's alternative weekly newspaper. I read about the GOP candidate, putting the goober in gubernatorial, and how he thinks that feminists and homosexuals are destroying America. He was asked if that meant he wouldn't appoint a gay judge, and responded "It would depend on his actions." So, if a gay lawyer spends hours fantasizing about smooth pectoral muscles, but never actually goes on a date, then he's a fine candidate for the bench. Right?

I got so mad, reading the alt-weekly, waiting for my pizza. How dare this governor-wannabe force his religion on the rest of us. Do I tell him how to live his life? Which god to believe in? How to pray to her?

Here I am, in one of the few states where astronomy jobs are currently being advertised, and here's the leading candidate for governor, telling me I am not welcome in his state, nor my family, nor our values.

I finished the pizza, walked down the street, past the opposition candidate's local storefront headquarters. I doubled back, walked in, and gave them $20.