A confusing matter, and a Dr Who complaint

When do gay kids start "acting gay"? - By Brian Palmer - Slate Magazine

Prompted by news of a lawsuit in America to do with anti-gay bullying in a school, Brian Palmer looks at the somewhat interesting question of whether a young child acting outside of "traditional gender roles" is an indication of future sexual identity. In brief:

A hefty pile of research shows that boys as young as 3 years old who break from traditional gender roles have a high likelihood of becoming gay adults. Predictive behaviors include playing with Barbie dolls, shying away from roughhousing, and taking an interest in makeup and women's clothing. (Read the Explainer's take on why boys prefer to play with sticks while girls go for dolls here.) The relationship isn't one-to-one, however, and it's certainly not the case that all boys who love Barbie dolls will later identify as gay. The correlation is much weaker in the other direction: A disproportionate number of boys who don't conform to gender stereotypes turn out to be gay men, but lots of gay men played with G.I. Joe as boys and quarterbacked the high-school football team. Neither does the relationship appear to be as strong among girls. Tomboys aren't as likely to become lesbian adults.

Psychiatrist Richard Green conducted the leading study in this field in the 1970s and '80s. He followed 44 boys who defied traditional gender roles from early childhood to adulthood. Thirty of them became gay or bisexual adults while just one child from a 34-member gender-conforming control group turned out to be gay. The subjects who strayed the most from conventionally boyish behavior were the most likely to be gay. Green's study has since been repeated by other researchers with similar outcomes. (Studies on females show that only around one-quarter of gender nonconforming girls grow up to be lesbians.)

The complicated thing about this is that acting outside of normal gender roles is also commonly seen as a sign of future gender identity issues. Why is it that some boys with this apparent inborn inclination to feminine interests will go on to develop a deep unhappiness with their own body to such an extent that they feel they can't be happy unless they hormonally/surgically modify it, and others will go to be "merely" homosexual, with varying degrees of feminine behaviour as part of that?

Of course, lots of people have written extensively about sexual identity and gender issues, but I am not inclined to waste a huge amount of time on reading about it; I just note that it is a matter that I think is obviously complicated, and far from properly understood.

I think I noted recently here that Native Americans (supposedly) saw cross-gender behaviour in kids as a sign they were a special, virtually holy, "two spirits" combining both male and female spirits. According to this article:

Every tribe watched their young carefully to determine if one of their children were two-spirits. If a boy leaned towards female clothes and mannerism, the tribe encouraged his explorations and vice versa for females.

Given the political use to which such anthropology can be put in the gay marriage debate, there is reason to be a bit suspicious about over-statements on this, and indeed, here's a site that claims reverence of "two spirits" was by no means a universal practice:

According to researcher Will Roscoe, former coordinator of the Gay American Indians History Project, there is no single belief about Two-Spirits among the more than 800 tribes in the United States and Alaska, about 200 of which are not federally recognized. Two-spirits may be respected within one tribe and ostracized in another, while the topic of sexuality could be ignored altogether in yet another tribe.

As I said, human behaviour and psychology in this field is very complicated.

It certainly also makes it a bit of a challenge wondering how one should explain "gay" issues to children. I have not yet had to discuss the "gay" question with my own kids, despite the best efforts of Dr Who to continually bring up gay issues again and again. Surely I can't be the only father in the world who finds this annoying. Even after the departure of the gay re-inventor of the show, Russell Davies, who you could clearly see was inserting a subtext of all types of pan sexual behaviour as being cool and normal, the new producer Steven Moffat, who is not gay, is openly going out of his way to keep introducing gay characters. Here's what he said in an interview:

But also someone pointed out to me [that] in the previous Doctor Who, the first one I had run, there were no gay or bisexual characters and I was sort of slightly appalled. I was thinking, I’m not like that at all. I would never have done that. So I was thinking, “Dammit, it’s the one criticism I’ve ever listened to. Good point, Doctor Who should always be…" It’s not because it’s politically and morally correct. It’s right for Doctor Who, isn’t it? It’s cheeky and off-centered. And fun.

Yeah, well, thanks a lot Steve. You've made it into a psyops program aimed at educating kids on sexuality. Yep, that's why we watch Doctor Who, which is, after all, still primarily a kid's science fiction program, just that it is well enough acted with good enough production values that adults watch it too. And, by the way, although I like the cast quite a lot, its stories are not as good as they were a few years ago, before the Davies decline. In fact, it's nearly time to give it a rest again, I think, after this season.

Anyway, back to kids and the "gay" explanation. I spoke to another father who said he simply answered the question "what's a lesbian" by saying it was a woman who loved a woman. Easy peasy. Maybe that is suitable for an 8 year old, but honestly, explaining homosexuality purely in terms of "love" isn't being realistic with a slightly older kid who has something of an understanding about heterosexual sex.

Part of the problem, as I say, is that it's not clear that adults understand it at all properly from a biological, psychological or cultural point of view either. So I don't care what others may say - it's a tricky issue to explain to a child/young teenager.

More calls for realism

Bishop of Derry calls for end to celibacy in Catholic church | UK news | The Guardian

I liked the last paragraph:

The reordination into the Catholic church of married Anglican priests has pointed up the fact that priestly celibacy is not a doctrine, but a discipline. In 1970, the decline in priesthood vocations persuaded nine leading theologians to sign a memorandum declaring that the Catholic leadership "quite simply has a responsibility to take up certain modifications" to the celibacy rule. Extracts from the document were reprinted in January. Not least because one of the signatories was the then Joseph Ratzinger, now pope Benedict.

Debriefing debriefed

Escaping from the past of disaster psychology � Mind Hacks

Here's a fascinating article about how trauma counselling by group debriefing gradually recognized as probably doing more harm than good.

Interestingly, it points out that you couldn't even tell that by asking the victims who had received it:

In one study, 80% of patients said the intervention was “useful” despite having more symptoms of mental illness in the long-term compared to disaster victims who had no treatment. In another, more than half said ‘debriefing’ was “definitely useful” despite having twice the rate of postraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after a year.

Debriefing involves lots of psychological ‘techniques’, so the psychologists felt they were using their best tools, while the lack of outside perspective meant it was easy to mistake instant feedback and regression to the mean for actual benefit.

This sounds a little counter-intuitive, but as the article notes, that the only way to reliably tell its effects is by comparing the future progress of groups who receive it to those who don't.

The Brisbane Space Pants Foundation

Free Shuttle Artifacts! | Space Exploration | Air & Space Magazine

From the article:

Currently up for grabs on a government website: a pair of astronaut pants, a spacewalker’s life-support backpack, a spacesuit glove, and thousands of black insulating tiles from the bellies of the space shuttle orbiters.

Now that the shuttle has retired after 30 years, NASA is having the equivalent of a massive going-out-of-business sale.

While most of the media attention last spring focused on where the vehicles themselves would go on display (Washington, Los Angeles, Florida's Kennedy Space Center and New York) thousands of lesser pieces of shuttle history are still looking for permanent homes. With help from the General Services Administration, NASA is giving away everything from spare main engines to sunglasses worn by the astronauts.

Sounds great. The only catch is in the next sentence:

The artifacts will go to museums, universities, elementary schools, libraries and planetariums all over the country to become part of their permanent collections.

Since there's another Brisbane in California, I think the best I can do is set up the Brisbane Space Pants Foundation, and see if I can score a free set of astronaut pants. Straight to the pool room, they would go. (If I had a pool room.)

I wonder if they have a set of the Japanese space underpants that were worn for 2 months straight? I probably wouldn't even have to pay for postage: give them the address, and they could probably walk their way to Australia.

Hormones are strange

In Study, Fatherhood Leads to Drop in Testosterone - NYTimes.com

The report notes:

Testosterone, that most male of hormones, takes a dive after a man becomes a parent. And the more he gets involved in caring for his children — changing diapers, jiggling the boy or girl on his knee, reading “Goodnight Moon” for the umpteenth time — the lower his testosterone drops.

So says the first large study measuring testosterone in men when they were single and childless and several years after they had children. Experts say the research has implications for understanding the biology of fatherhood, hormone roles in men and even health issues like prostate cancer.

Given that other studies have indicated testosterone can bounce around for all types of reasons, including whether your political party has just lost an election, or if (you are soccer goalkeeper), depending on if you are playing away or at home, I don't know that it is really that surprising.

Testosterone is a bit strange.

Good catches

It was interesting to note from last week's Economist that the TSA, the much maligned security service* in the US that is responsible for airport screening, has a "Good Catch" site up which makes occasional report of all the unusual and potentially dangerous things they have stopped getting on board flights. The TSA blog article about the site contains some of the comments you might expect against the TSA.

This is an entertaining idea for a website. The posts are coming in much too infrequently, though.

* usually by right wing libertarian types with psychological problems about their "junk" being vaguely seen by some bored screen watcher in another room, or brushed against during a pat down

McDonalds in the spotlight

Employment: Defending jobs | The Economist

According to the chart at the link, McDonald's is the world's 4th largest employer (following the US Dept of Defence, China's army, and Walmart. There must be a lot of Walmarts in America.)

On the weekend, I went to McDonalds and had their "birthday special" of the return of the McFeast and Shaker Fries. I actually don't recall shaker fries, but the disappearance of the McFeast two or three years ago has been a matter of deep regret. Its replacement, the "Angus" burgers, often feel a bit too heavy for lunch for me. The McFeast is their "just right" burger.

I seem that someone else in the blogosphere has done a detailed culinary review of the return of the McFeast, and gives it a big "fail". But then, he starts with an admission that he never liked it in the first place, as he doesn't like tomato on a burger (?) The bad review also notes that "the salad was too cold" and with the shaker fries " the shaking was embarrassingly loud." U-huh.

I see from his blog that he is from England (culinary heartland of the universe - ha) and has an entry about a Dr Who birthday cake that starts with what I hope is a joke, but I'm not sure:

I love Doctor Who…my lounge room is full of Doctor Who paraphernalia and my wedding cake had two Daleks on the top.

His taste in anything is, I'm afraid, not to be trusted...

Adventures in dioramas

You wouldn’t believe how long this diorama took to put together.  My son showed great talent in painting the tiny mining figures we found by good luck at a hobby shop, and he’s pretty good at construction with matchsticks and a hot glue gun too.   The trees are made from green scouring pads which are pulled apart and stuck onto a twig with appropriate “branches” (something I learnt from the internet.)

Yes, it took me half a century to learn how to make a diorama to primary school level.   (I don’t recall ever doing one at school.  It was all project posters with lots of words and illustrations in my day:  these seem to not be popular now.)

Great moments in Japanese politics

Radiation gag backfires on trade minister | The Japan Times Online

Trade minister Yoshio Hachiro crossed swords with the media Thursday by attempting to rub his body against a journalist after touring the stricken Fukushima power plant, sources said Friday.

"I'll give you radiation," he reportedly said to the journalist.

Dear Gillian

Change agent | Gillian Anderson

She's not looking bad, the older Agent Scully. (I bet she hates that. Mind you, I always get the impression from interviews that would be a bit intimidating to meet.)

Analysing people analysing Julia

As my regular reader Jason has an intense and somewhat irrational hatred of both Julia Gillard and Richard Glover, I'm sure he's happy to note this morning's column by Glover which starts "Can someone explain to me why people hate Julia Gillard with such intensity?"

I basically agree with all of it.

Elsewhere, I note that reaction to At Home With Julia has varied widely. It is, let's face it, a silly show that does not attempt to paint a realistic picture (someone somewhere said it's a bit like a human version of the old Rubbery Figures puppet show, extended out for 30 minutes, and I think that's about right.) But still, as I wrote before, as I was very pleased to be hearing some really good politician impersonations again, and found it pleasingly not mean spirited, I liked it.

Yet some on the Left thought it was awful: Mike Carlton hated it (and, I see from the same article, he's another Lefty who has joined the "Julia will go, and Rudd replace her" school of unreality. Why Kevin would be forgiven for the carbon tax, but not Julia, is a bit of mystery to me.)

The most over the top condemnation for the show came from Larvatus Prodeo, where it interpreted purely on feminist principles. Apparently, showing a male partner as feeling left out, ignored, or tormented by teenage boys for being a househusband means you are showing him as emasculated, and that just is so offensive. Yeah, whatever. As much as I can't stand where much of the Right is at the moment, I do not find myself being at all attracted to the dour feminism and sociological waffle of the prominent females at LP. (I like it when Anne Winter does a withering takedown of CL or someone else at Catallaxy occasionally, but I'm not unrealistic enough to think she doesn't hold me in low regard too.)

Oddly, on the Right, I heard Andrew Bolt on his radio spot say that he liked the show more than he expected, and in a way it made him more sympathetic to Gillard. Yet it seems as if he might be gearing up to criticise the ABC on his show tomorrow for trying to help Gillard this way. Again, whatever.

Anyway, it certainly is a show that has received a diverse reception.

UPDATE: I see Annabel Crabb confirms what I have said about Kevin Rudd for a long time. (Maybe I got the idea from her in the first place, I can't quite recall now.)

There's a fascinating, almost mathematical equation going on here.

With Julia Gillard, the probability that any given person will support the Prime Minister decreases with distance from the subject; she is supported by a majority of Cabinet and Caucus colleagues and viewed benignly in the public service, but despised by voters who have never met her.

Mr Rudd's equation is precisely the inverse; the warm support he continues to enjoy in the populace at large tails away sharply, the closer you get to the 2600 postcode. Outside Parliament House, voters might wonder why they can't bring that nice Kevin fellow back again. Inside it, people talk vigorously about chewing their own arms off before doing anything to hasten such a return....

I don't think I'll ever forget the conversation I had with one backbencher a few months after Rudd's overthrow. "I agree with Kevin on just about every policy inclination he has," the backbencher said. "In fact, there probably isn't another person in the party with whom I am more in line." There was a pause, and then the backbencher added, calmly and without even the mildest hint of melodrama: "It's just that I hate him so very much."

Warming water problem

Warming seas could smother seafood - New Scientist

All a bit of a worry:

More than half of a group of fish crucial for the marine food web might die if, as predicted, global warming reduces the amount of oxygen dissolved in some critical areas of the ocean – including some of our richest fisheries.

The prediction is based on a unique set of records that goes back to 1951. California has regularly surveyed its marine plankton and baby fish to support the sardine fishery. "There is almost no other dataset going back so far that includes every kind of fish," says Tony Koslow of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, who heads the survey. The survey records also include information on water temperature, salinity and the dissolved oxygen content.

Koslow's team studied records of 86 fish species found consistently in the samples and discovered that the abundance of 27 of them correlated strongly with the amount of oxygen 200 to 400 metres down: a 20 per cent drop in oxygen meant a 63 per cent drop in the fish. There have been several episodes of low oxygen during the period in question, mainly in the 1950s and since 1984.

Global climate models predict that 20 to 40 per cent of the oxygen at these depths will disappear over the next century due to warming, says Koslow – mainly because these waters get oxygen by mixing with surface waters. Warmer, lighter surface waters are less likely to mix with the colder, denser waters beneath.

It's complicated...

Switching from coal to natural gas would do little for global climate, study indicates

Maybe the Greens with their distrust of going heavily into gas as a stopgap on the way to completely clean energy have a point after all. It's all very complicated and debatable though, I'm sure.

Bee will

Backreaction: Predetermined Lunch and Moral Responsibility

Physicist Bee has been thinking and writing about free will. It's a long post that I have read yet, but I am sure it will be worthwhile. I'll get back to it later.

Fake meat not so palatable

I'm reminded via another blog that lab grown meat has been in the news lately, with an upbeat (more of a beat up, actually, as you will see) article in the SMH with an absurdly misleading headline "how synthetic sausages could be on our plates in six months time."

Err, no.

The report notes the work in the Netherlands that is hoping to make enough lab grown cells to make a hamburger in 6 months time.

People who want to know more about their work should read this interview from the Science Show earlier this year:

Joel Werner: So how long will it take you to produce the mince for a hamburger? I mean, you're talking about small muscle strips, but the hamburger patties I like to eat anyway are relatively large.

Mark Post: Right, so that requires making about 3,000 of these small pieces, and of course that takes time, so we estimate that it will take a year to make that first hamburger, and it will also cost 300,000 euros.....

Joel Werner: So what are the stumbling blocks to reaching that future?

Mark Post: Well, there are a couple of scientific issues, technological issues. One is to get the protein content higher than it is right now, it's now about 70%, and it needs to go up to 90%, 95%. Then there is of course eventually the scaling up of the whole process and quality control, because you don't want these cells to go into a cancer mode or anything like that, so you need to quality control it. And finally we need people to accept the concept....

Mark Post: For many of them it would. We actually spoke to the chairperson of the Vegetarian Society here in the Netherlands and she said, 'I wouldn't eat it because it still requires animal cells, but I'm sure that more than 50% of my constituents will start eating meat.' We still need donor animals to get the adult stem cells. We need a supply of donor animals, but we figure that a factor of 1 million less than we are using right now, and we may be able to improve that even more.

So, let's get this straight: at the moment, they have small pieces of pale, not high in protein, strips of cells that don't taste like meat. (Towards the end of the interview, they mentioned that someone did taste a bit.)

Also, as you still need the stem cells to grow it, vegetarians are still capable of objecting to it.

The other point to note is that, according to another Science Show interview on the topic, you are not likely to have any lab grown meat that resembles a steak any time soon:

....they never tell you when you're a kid that meat is muscle, and if you take a piece of muscle it is not just beef cells. You've got mostly the striated muscle cells, as they're called, which make up the bulk of the meat, probably 85% of it. They are called striated because if you look at the muscle cells under the microscope, each cell grows like a long fibre, like a ladder if you like or like a railway track, because across it are these very, very fine lines, like the sleepers or the rungs of a ladder. And those are the little lines that slide into each other and cause the muscle to contract. Those are the striated muscle fibres...

Robyn Williams: Are you saying that they are so complicated that you can't actually culture them?

Brian J Ford: No, you could culture those as much as you want, but all you are going to get is a culture of striated muscle and that's not meat, that is most of meat but it doesn't look like meat, it wouldn't have the texture of meat, it would be soft and slimy and mushy and slippery because those striated muscle fibre cells are held together in layers of what are called fibrocytes, fibre producing cells. And the fibrocytes produce thin...I don't know, like a cross between a piece of polythene and a piece of tissue paper. You see that kind of tissue when you take a piece of meat and lay it down on the kitchen slab, it's the surface coating of each part of the meat.

Frankly, it sounds like the future of lab grown meat is only going to be in something resembling mince, and even then it sounds like a hell of a lot of work is to be done to make it taste like beef.

It does sound to me like a ridiculously pie in the sky scheme, when you can just kill a cow instead.

One other interesting thing which I had never heard of before from that interview with Ford is this:

...it was in 1976 in a book called Microbe Power that I said how in a few square miles of countryside one could actually produce enough microbial protein to feed the entire world. That is true, and it has almost become true because...I don't know whether quorn is particularly popular in Aussie?

Robyn Williams: It is not necessarily so.

Brian J Ford: It's a vegetable protein which is very popular in England and now very popular in the United States as well, and it's produced by taking a fungus, which was originally discovered growing on barley in a field in the midlands of England about 30 or 40 years ago, and you grow this fungus so that it produces a sort of a rubbery, chalky mass which you then texturalised to be like meat, you add flavours to it to make it taste like meat, you mince it up or chop it into little cubes so that it looks quite like meat, and it is used as a substitute for meat.

This is grown in factories, and it seems to me to be very paradoxical, this. Quorn is particularly popular amongst natural food addicts, people who are vegetarians and others love quorn.

And here I'd never heard of it before. But Googling around, and it looks like Quorn based products are indeed available in Australia.

So we apparently already have a vegetarian based "fake meat" that is apparently better tasting than soy based products, and it could easily supply the world's protein needs? If anything, Quorn sounds like a much better solution to the "feed the world" issues that lab grown meat are fancifully suggested as answering.

I'm going to go looking for Quorn when next near a health food supermarket.

Bad news for Queensland

NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center: La Nina is back

La Niña, which contributed to extreme weather around the globe during the first half of 2011, has re-emerged in the tropical Pacific Ocean and is forecast to gradually strengthen and continue into winter. Today, forecasters with NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center upgraded last month’s La Niña Watch to a La Niña Advisory.

It happens...

BBC News - Drunk Swedish elk found in apple tree near Gothenburg

Apparently:

Drunken elk are not an uncommon sight in Sweden during autumn, when there are plenty of apples about.

Other residents of Saro had seen the elk on the loose in the preceding days.

Mr Johansson said the elk appeared to be sick, drunk, or "half-stupid", the Associated Press reported.

Record smashed

Only In It For The Gold: Daily Rainfall Record Exceeded By 60%

Michael Tobis notes (from Weather Underground) an extraordinarily record breaking amount of rain in one hit that happened the other day in the US:

An extreme rainfall event unprecedented in recorded history has hit the Binghamton, New York area, where 7.49" fell yesterday. This is the second year in a row Binghamton has recorded a 1-in-100 year rain event; their previous all-time record was set last September, when 4.68" fell on Sep 30 - Oct. 1, 2010. Records go back to 1890 in the city.

Tobis asks:

Have we been underestimating the extent to which climate change will drive extreme events?

All further grist to the mill of my recent comments that extreme flooding events may well be the most damaging, expensive and convincing early sign that future AGW induced climate change is not something you can easily adapt to.

A helpful article

Dessler Demolishes Three Crucial 'Skeptic' Myths

People who follow the AGW science issue would all know about the fight going on at the moment between the recent Spencer & Braswell paper and its apparent rebuttal by Dessler.

I've been finding the technical arguments over this to be very hard to follow, but Skeptical Science does a pretty good job at making it more understandable and noting its general importance for what are (as SS notes) the only two recent articles by skeptical scientists that argue for a very low climate sensitivity.

It is important to read the comments too: Spencer thinks he found an important error in Dessler; it seems that the error, if it's there, is not as big as Spencer claims.