Q: How is Spock like a fortune cookie?

A: His major lines are vastly improved when you add the suffix "in bed". For example, in last year's Star Trek movie:

• (To Uhura): "I need everyone to continue performing admirably. In bed."
• (To himself): "Do yourself a favor: put aside logic, and do what feels right. In bed."
• (To himself): "As my customary farewell would seem oddly self-serving, I will simply say: Good luck. In bed."
• (To Kirk): "I will not allow you to lecture me about the merits of emotion. In bed."
• Kirk: "You know, traveling through time, changing history... that's cheating."
  Spock: "A trick I learned from an old friend. In bed."
• Spock: "Furthermore, you have failed to understand the purpose of the test."
  Kirk: "Enlighten me again."
  Spock: "The purpose is to experience fear, fear in the face of certain death, to accept that fear, and maintain control of oneself and one's crew. This is a quality expected in every Starfleet captain. In bed."
• Bones: "You know, back home we have a saying: 'If you wanna ride in the Kentucky Derby, you don't leave your prized stallion in the stable.'"
  Spock: "A curious metaphor, doctor, as a stallion must first be broken before it can reach its potential. In bed."

On the changing nature of software ownership; with a digression on horniness and the troubling interdependence of human beings

Sometime in the late 1990's, I realized that "ownership" of software had become meaningless.

Well, OK, I didn't grasp the full implications at the time. But the seed was planted when I was downloading the third or fourth or tenth macro virus protection patch for Microsoft Word 95 or Word 97. Maybe it was for my family's computer, or a friend's; or maybe it was for mine. I don't remember exactly.

However, I do remember being troubled by the implications of what I was doing. Ownership carries connotations of permanence, and the reassurance of physical possession: You own this, so no one can take this away from you. And I could indeed purchase a disc, containing a piece of software, which no one could take away from me. But this software had bugs, which made it vulnerable to security exploits; and I still needed to open files created by other people. This, in turn, implied that I needed to continue downloading updates for as long as I used the software. Even if I saved all updates available at any given time onto another disc, I would still be vulnerable to new exploits discovered later unless I returned to the mothership for more.

Therefore, unless I was willing to live a completely isolated existence, never accepting anyone else's data, I would always be dependent on the software's manufacturer.

And how long would they continue to provide updates? The answer was clearly "not forever". A few years later, a more precise answer came, in the form of Microsoft's Support Lifecycle Policy, which guarantees security patches for a certain number of years depending on the type of the product.

So, when I "bought" software, I was really paying for an implicit, limited-time support contract with the manufacturer. Without this ongoing relationship, my software would rot to the point of uselessness, as surely as a tomato on a blighted vine.

And the turn of the century also brought a new and particularly blighted vine for your software to rot on: the broadband Internet connection. Whereas before, viruses spread through casual sharing of floppy disks and occasionally file shares on your local network, a broadband Internet connection literally exposes your machine continuously to the cleverest and most malicious hacker in the entire world. And so it is that today, a vulnerable machine becomes infected within minutes of being connected to the Internet (on a non-firewalled network).

Lest the Mac or Free Software weenies (n.b. I am both) start gloating about the inferiority of Microsoft software, I hasten to point out that every nontrivial software system has a similar update schedule. How often must Ubuntu users run sudo apt-get update? How often does Firefox issue a point release? How often do Mac or iWhatever users get told to run Apple Software Update?

Therefore, software updates are an inescapable, relentless fact of Internet-connected life.

And security exploits are just the most obvious and unavoidable source of bit rot. Consider what happens when the organization — company or community, formal or informal — behind your favorite software decides to move on to the next version of a data format or protocol, and you decline to upgrade. New web pages stop being viewable; you stop being able to watch videos, play music, read documents, chat with friends, or really do anything involving other people.

Of course, you can choose to live like a virtual hermit, never sharing anything with anyone. But this comes with the same drawbacks as being a hermit in the physical world. Gains from trade and specialization of labor aren't just abstractions. Buying a jug of milk at the grocery store takes far less effort than raising and milking a cow. In some cases the difference isn't even a matter of effort but of possibility: it is impossible for an individual to manufacture an airplane, or even something as humble as an aluminum can, without relying on a massive infrastructure of manufacturing, transport, and trade provided by society. And likewise it is impossible for you to singlehandedly fork the Firefox source code, in any nontrivial way, if Mozilla takes it in a direction you don't like. (You might be able to publish an initial fork, but there's no way you'd be able to keep up with Mozilla; eventually they'd be adding critical features faster than you, and your fork would fall into the dustbin of history.)

And then there's the fact that your hardware will wear out or go obsolete, and your software will need to be ported to new hardware.

In short, your software lives in a continuously changing ecosystem of data. And you are inescapably dependent on other people to evolve that software in response to environmental changes in that ecosystem.

Therefore, while you may still "own" your software in some formal sense, that ownership means little in any practical sense. What matters is the organization that maintains your software, and your ongoing relationship to them. You're not (merely) paying for access to a passive bundle of data; you're actually making a calculated bet on the future behavior of a group of people.

At this point I'll show my colors and claim that, in the long run, open source projects with open governance structures offer more credible maintenance promises than proprietary systems. But that's a subject for a whole other set of posts. In the meantime, I offer two final nuggets, in the way of provoking thought.

First, yes, this post is a stealth followup to my previous post on ChromeOS punditry.

Second, I offer the following excerpt from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, concerning autistic World War II cryptographer and Naval xylophonist Lawrence Waterhouse:

Waterhouse has been chewing his way through exotic Nip code systems at the rate of about one a week, but after he sees Mary Smith in the parlor of Mrs. McTeague's boarding house, his production rate drops to near zero. Arguably, it goes negative, for sometimes when he reads the morning newspaper, its plaintext scrambles into gibberish before his eyes, and he is unable to extract any useful information.

Despite his and Turing's agreements about whether the human brain is a Turing machine, he has to admit that Turing wouldn't have too much trouble writing a set of instructions to simulate the brain functions of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse.

Waterhouse seeks happiness. He achieves it by breaking Nip code systems and playing the pipe organ. But since pipe organs are in short supply, his happiness level ends up being totally dependent on breaking codes.

He cannot break codes (hence, cannot be happy) unless his mind is clear . . . Clarity of mind (C_m) is affected by any number of factors, but by far the most important is horniness, which might be designated by σ, for obvious anatomical reasons that Waterhouse finds amusing at this stage of his emotional development.

Horniness begins at zero at time t = t₀ (immediately following ejaculation) and increases from there as a linear function of time:

σ α (t - t₀)

The only way to drop it back to zero is to arrange another ejaculation.

. . .

Now, when he was at Pearl Harbor, he discovered something that, in retrospect, should have been profoundly disquieting. Namely, that ejaculations obtained in a whorehouse (i.e., provided by the ministrations of an actual human female) seemed to drop σ below the level that Waterhouse could achieve through executing a Manual Override. In other words, the post-ejaculatory horniness level was not always equal to zero, as the naive theory propounded above assumes, but to some other quantity dependent on whether the ejaculation was induced by Self or Other: σ = σ_self after masturbation but σ = σ_other upon leaving a whorehouse, where σ_self > σ_other, an inequality to which Waterhouse's notable successes in breaking certain Nip naval codes at Station Hypo were directly attributable, in that the many convenient whorehouses nearby made it possible for him to go somewhat longer between ejaculations.

. . .

If he had thought about this, it would have bothered him, because σ_self > σ_other has troubling implications . . . If it weren't for this inequality, then Waterhouse could function as a totally self-contained and independent unit. But σ_self > σ_other implies that he is, in the long run, dependent on other human beings for his mental clarity, and, therefore, his happiness. What a pain in the ass!

I leave the connective tissue between the above passage and the rest of this post as an exercise for the reader.

What do polyamory and hexadecimal have in common?

The title of this MeFi post reminded me of two related linguistic curiosities: both polyamory and hexadecimal are hybrid mashups of Greek and Latin roots.

"Poly" is Greek for "many"; but Greek for romantic love is "eros". "Amor" is a Latin root. A more fiddly linguist would have coined the term polyerotics (Greek) or multiamory (Latin).

Likewise, "hex" is Greek for "six"; but the Greek root for ten is "deka". "Decimal" is Latin. In this case, more consistent coinages would have been either hexadecadic/deca-hexadic (Greek) or sexadecimal (Latin).

Interestingly, in both cases, at least one of consistent formations (polyerotics*, sexadecimal) is more sexually suggestive to the modern English speaker than the hybrid coinage. Coincidence?

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*Actually, "polyerotic" seems to have been adopted by online polyamorist communities as a designation for specifically sexual polyamorous relationships. This is OK, I suppose, although I think the Greeks had it right that romantic love and sexual desire (which they denoted with the same word) cannot be cleanly cleaved in two.

Busting prostitution: An efficient use of police resources

So, today I ran across this from A. Lapite (original source at Gotham Gazette):

Robert Pinter, a 52-year-old gay man who was arrested for prostitution at the Blue Door in the East Village on Oct. 10, spoke at the town hall meeting. He said a young man — a 29-year old undercover cop who, Pinter said, looked even younger — cruised him in the store. He was "charming and persistent, and we agreed to go home for consensual sex, but as we were leaving he said, 'I want to pay you $50 [to have sex].' I didn't respond, but I thought it was strange," Pinter recounted. As the men left the store, Pinter said, a group of men who did not show police identification pushed him against the wall.

"I thought I'd been set up by a gang," he said. "I asked them why they were doing this to me. I was totally clueless. They handcuffed me and said, 'Why the f--- do you think we're arresting you — loitering for the purpose of prostitution.'"

and this, also via Lapite (read the whole thing, it's short):

It was Rocio Palacios who first noticed the woman who appeared to need help.

It was 8 a.m. when she and her husband, Erasmo, dropped their 6-year-old daughter off at school and had picked up their 22-year-old daughter to go out for breakfast when they saw the woman waving her arms at 53rd Street and Kedzie Avenue last November.

The Palacioses, of Chicago, claim the woman approached their car, parked outside Manolo's restaurant, leaned in to the passenger side where Rocio was sitting and asked Erasmo if he wanted oral sex for $20 or sex for $25.

The couple laughed, realizing this wasn't a woman in distress after all.

But within seconds, Chicago police swarmed the family car, hauling Erasmo Palacios out in handcuffs. He was charged with solicitation of a prostitute.

So, in case you haven't guessed by now, the title of this post is sarcastic.

Now, these two incidents don't prove anything by themselves. But both stories suggest that the police departments in question had adopted questionable policing strategies; and note that the NYPD and CPD are the two largest municipal police forces in nation, and doubtless among the best-funded in the world, with budgets of roughly $3.9 billion and $1.2 billion respectively. If the vice units of these highly professionalized forces are doing stuff like this, what happens elsewhere?

Decriminalizing prostitution may be politically unrealistic, but it seems to me that we ought, at a minimum, to be focusing enforcement effort on its genuinely pernicious aspects: coercive trafficking, prostitution-related violence, and underage prostitution. But, of course, busting a trafficking ring requires hard investigative work, whereas paying an individual undercover cop to "solicit" a consenting adult requires minimal skill and energy.

(Which — sigh — is exactly why we should legalize prostitution itself, and criminalize that which is genuinely harmful. Police have a finite budget of time and will allocate that time efficiently by arresting those lawbreakers who can be most easily apprehended. I'd argue banning prostitution per se makes life easier for trafficking rings by giving vice cops something to do besides busting trafficking rings. But whatever, I'm shouting into the wind here. The gates to prostitution decriminalization are guarded by the three-headed dog of social conservatives plus radical feminists plus the large majority of people who simply find prostitution "icky" and I'm pretty convinced that nothing's ever going to fix this problem in the U.S.)

On banning prostitution (of a particular sort)

So, this Spitzer thing. Much commentary from male writers on the broader issue of prostitution and the merits of legalizing it; you may fruitfully begin your traversal with Ezra Klein or T. Cowen or even A. Tabarrok (whom I usually find odious).

My comment is simple and not at all original. There are many different ways of exchanging money for intimacy — physical or otherwise — that are not only legal, but mostly socially accepted, as long as one does them discreetly.¹ Here are some of them:

• It is legal to pay someone to go out on a date with you, and even be physically intimate with you (hugs, kisses, cuddling, etc.), as long as there is no explicit quid pro quo w.r.t. genital contact.
• It is legal to pay someone to give you a sensual massage, as long as the massage does not involve direct prolonged genital contact.
• It is legal to pay someone someone to strap you to a bench and strike you with a whip for your sexual satisfaction.
• It is legal to pay someone to take off their clothes and dance in front of you for your sexual satisfaction.
• It is legal to pay someone to perform arbitrary sex acts on camera with you, and then either sell or give away the video.
• It is legal to have sex with someone who would not be having sex with you if you did not buy them many gifts and support their lavish lifestyle. (Fun personal note: I have a (female) friend who knows a girl who once said, quite frankly, "I am not going to sleep with a man until he has spent at least a thousand dollars on me." See also this Valleywag post. See also all four characters on Sex and the City, none of whom ever dated a $25k-annual-salary social worker as far as I know.)

The upshot is that everything is permitted, except the straightforward transaction of exchanging a modest sum of money for someone else to privately give you an orgasm by applying friction in the genital area. If you're sufficiently rich, or if your particular sexual kink does not require penetration, or if you like to have sex on camera, prostitution is legal for you. Laws against "prostitution" — which is to say, one very narrow subgenre of sexual commerce — are a hypocritical, hairsplitting exercise in moral hysteria and a massive waste of law enforcement resources.

Finally, I want to point out one more thing. The argument that (one narrow flavor of) prostitution should be illegal because it's closely linked to organized crime and human trafficking is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

"Prostitution" is undoubtedly tied to organized crime in part because society frowns upon it so much that respectable businesses don't want to be involved in it. Organized crime is fundamentally inefficient, due to unprotected property rights, unenforceable contracts, illiquidity of capital, and all the other standard problems that come with operating a business without the protection of a well-run modern government. If a business like McDonald's or Starbucks ran brothels, they would drive organized crime out of the market pronto. People like Nicholas Kristof heap opprobrium on "prostitution" and then bemoan the inevitable results, namely that women and girls get exploited by criminals.

This is roughly equivalent to the scam whereby Republicans get elected and trash the government every couple of decades, and then point to their own incompetence as proof of their ideology that government doesn't work. It is like pissing on the rug, and then complaining that the rug stinks of piss.²

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¹ Bonus link: The Purchase of Intimacy, by Princeton sociology professor Viviana A. Zelizer, has been on my to-read list for a long time. Perhaps I will finally order it.

² In fact, I hereby coin a new term for this fallacy of reasoning, akin to "poisoning the well" or "begging the question": "pissing the rug". To piss the rug is to endorse a course of action which leads to a bad outcome, and then blame those who disagree with you for the bad outcome. The grandest example of pissing the rug in recent times is, of course, the Iraq War apologetic wherein liberal war opponents are blamed for the bad consequences that would follow withdrawal. Oh, wait — Kristof did that too. Maybe we should just call it the Kristof Maneuver.

On choosing to refuse parenthood

M. Yglesias comments on a Slate article (the latter, being by Will Saletan, is a thoroughly ignorable piece of piffle, so don't bother clicking his link):

Ah, yes, the time-honored dorm room debate if women can get abortions, why do men need to pay child support? has reached the big time in recent days. This doesn't strike me as an especially difficult question to answer. Insofar as a child is going to be born, that child is going to need to be supported. The resources for doing so need to come from somewhere. Obviously, many of those resources are going to wind up coming from his mother. But given the realities of the world, those resources are often going to be inadequate to the task. There are basically two additional sources of resources -- the child's father and the state. Current policy relies on a mix of the two.

Maybe a respectable case could be made for shifting the mix somewhat in the direction of the state, though one would want to see the details before signing on to this. I don't at all think a respectable case can be made for reducing the quantity of resources getting directed to children.

I had trouble sleeping last night, so I wrote a great deal about the subject, but then I woke up this morning and decided not to inflict the fullness of my ramblings on you all. So here's the executive summary of my response.

First, government's pretty good at collecting general tax revenue, and then mailing checks drawn on that fund to people who need them. On the other hand, it's pretty bad at micromanaging point-to-point transfer payments. Social Security supports widows and orphans via the former model, and it works pretty well, with very low overhead and broad public support. The current child support system uses the latter model, and it works terribly. As a purely utilitarian matter, this argues for making child support work more like Social Security, where society at large picks up the burden rather than non-custodial fathers.

Second, under present legal and social norms (outside of South Dakota, anyway), women possess an unconditional right to refuse parenthood after conception. There are roughly two justifications for this right: first, biological realities (the fetus is inside a woman's body, and does not constitute an independent human life); and second, the value of personal autonomy (a woman should not be forced to become a parent against her will). If you don't believe in the second justification, examine this NOW press release on empirical studies of why women choose to have abortions. The stated justifications are based largely not on the biological burden of pregnancy per se, but on the social, financial, legal, and moral burdens of parenthood. That burden's severe enough that it should not be imposed involuntarily. Therefore, it seems to me that people (both men and women) should ideally possess an unconditional right to refuse parenthood after conception. The means of exercising this right may be technological (abortion, for women) or legal (disavowal, for both men and women), but the option should exist.

Notice that I say "unconditional right". A woman's right to an abortion should not be conditional on whether she used contraception, or whether she talked to her partner about children before sex, or whether some judge thinks she's a slut. Women possess that right unconditionally, for good and obvious reasons. All the same reasons apply to men who wish to refuse parenthood. Advising men to talk to their partners and work out a sensible contraception policy, or live with the consequences, ignores the possibilities of carelessness, disagreement, miscommunication, confusion, accident, deceit, and all the manifold complexities that emerge in actual human affairs.

Of course, until society provides the hypothetical social safety net for all children, it's folly to destroy the current child support system. In some sense, therefore, there's not much point in talking about all this. But still, I think it's incredibly callous to dismiss the concern of men who don't want their only choices to be abstinence or potential fatherhood (Yglesias's post doesn't do this, but this attitude does appear in other things I've read).

Orgasms: Not just for fun?

Via NewsDog, AJ points to a pretty funny, scathing review of Indiana University historian and philosopher (and biologist?) Elisabeth Lloyd's recent book, The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, which generated a fair amount of press when it came out. For those put off by the review's host publication (Evolutionary Psychology), comments at NewsDog point to a similarly critical review in Nature and Lloyd's response in same.

Lloyd argues that the female orgasm is a developmental artifact, like male nipples, and not an adaptive feature, i.e. that natural selection did not act directly on it, but upon its developmental analogue in the other gender (male orgasm). As far as I can tell, most biologists consider this scenario plausible, but some reviewers of Lloyd's book think she represents it as a slam-dunk case, which it isn't. Furthermore, the reviewers allege that Lloyd throws in a bunch of philosophy-of-science cultural criticism to the effect that chauvinism and ideology are responsible for the prevalence of adaptationist explanations of female orgasm. Lloyd, for her part, claims she's just pointing out that adaptationist explanations don't have much evidence going for them, rather than claiming they're definitely wrong.

I have nothing really interesting to add to all this. I'm just engaging in link propagation, since at least 95% of the human population probably has a fairly intimate reason to care about this subject.

On Eric Byler, and Asian-American sex relations

Just got back from a trip to find that Charlotte Sometimes arrived from GreenCine while I was gone. I can't really say that I like it, but it has some virtues, and it's interesting at least. It's a super-low-budget film that, apparently, made a splash on the festival circuit, won a couple of awards, and was championed, with effusive praise, by Roger Ebert. It's also one of the rare American movies with Asian-American lead characters who are distinctive individuals, with real dialogue, complex motivations, etc., rather than stock caricatures or representatives of Archetypal Ethnic Verities.

Anyway, I'm posting about this only because I'm watching one of the DVD extras, an interview by Roger Ebert, from a post-screening session at Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival, with the director, the producer, and two cast members. The director, Eric Byler, who also wrote the film, turns out to be an unexpectedly thoughtful person.

More precisely, it is not the fact that he's thoughtful which surprises me (many directors are), but rather the manner of his thoughtfulness, which seems writerly, almost novelistic. When most film directors give interviews or DVD commentaries, they seem preoccupied with the nuts-and-bolts craft of filmmaking. They'll go on and on about the travails of shooting in some special location, or building some peculiar set, or how the gears of a plot's mechanics mesh together. Film directors also tend, on average, to be primarily visual thinkers, and so --- aside from the obvious fact that they talk more about the visual aspects of a film than its verbal aspects --- they're often pretty bad at expressing complex thoughts in words. For example, I think that Quentin Tarantino, despite his gift for writing dialogue and his extraordinary personal loquaciousness, sounds completely goofy in interviews. Byler's different --- he seems preoccupied, above all, with the interiority of his characters, and he's reasonably articulate at explaining his thinking about them.

Byler also has interesting things to say about Asian-American inter-sex relations (he is mixed-race, by the way):

EBERT: You mentioned, at Hawaii, that there were what you felt were specifically Asian-American gender issues in the film, which you doubted that would be obvious to every audience. You said something about that.

BYLER: Yes.

EBERT: Could you talk about that?

BYLER: You know, I didn't, I didn't really think about the audience very much in any of the artistic choices that I made. But what sort of inspired the beginning, and I have to go all the way back to there to talk about it, 'cause I don't like to, myself, deconstruct the movie, but when I started, the way that I saw the world was, I saw a lot of couplings between Asian-American men and Asian-American women that were platonic, or that's what they called them. But there was always this tacit understanding that, uh, he would pretend not to love her, and she would pretend not to know.

And it's not necessarily an Asian-American thing, I betcha everybody here has been in a situation like that. But there's sort of a suspicion among Asian-American men, I think, that somehow the choice as to whether this new person who comes into your life is gonna be a lover or a friend is somehow contingent upon race. And, you know, I'm thinking about, you know, I was growing up south of the Mason-Dixon line on the East Coast, before I moved to Hawaii. I looked a lot more Asian when I was young, and the, uh, well there's a certain sense of isolation when there's only two other specimens in the whole school. And, of course, there's a little bit more isolation when you're not the same race as your, either one of your parents. So then your siblings, if you have them are the only, you know, the only being that you know when you're a child that's like you. But, you know, as you come of age and you start to say well, how, what kind of sexual being am I gonna be? You look at the images that you see on television. And you know, usually an Asian man is a technician, and he's never a lover. And if he does express sexual desire, it's ugly or unwanted. So if you're an Asian boy and you're growing up in this country, and you're thinking how do, where do I fit, as a sexual being, the message is the more you repress your sexual desire the more you'll be able to be accepted, or be able to fit in.

And, if you think about the messages that Asian girls get in this country, watching the images that we have on television and movies of Asian women, it seems as if sex is the only thing we want from them. The more sexy, the more beautiful you are, the more we want you. And so they misinterpret, I guess what we'd call exotification, as acceptance.

And so these two creatures, this Asian-American boy and this Asian-American girl grow up, and he's a little bit more tied to traditional values, and not surprisingly, because the traditional values, whether they're Christian or Buddhist or Shinto religions, those values are more in line with what, I guess, mainstream society wants from Asian men. And Asian girls are sort of encouraged to be more sexual, and so they're sort of breaking through into another more, I guess, Western set of values, or more like, Greek or, you know, the hedonistic sense of values that have overcome Christian values here. And so these, these creatures don't know how to interact very well. They sort of slide into this, they're attracted to each other, they want to be together, but they slide into this friendship thing. And I think there's a fundamental lie at the core of that friendship. And it often leads to some very difficult emotional situations.

Now, I should make a few things clear. First, I usually try to avoid generalizations about Asian-Americans as a whole. Second, I usually feel that I, personally, am pretty atypical for almost any recognizable subgroup of Asian-Americans, or stereotypes thereof (for those who don't know me, this claim probably sounds incongruous coming from an Asian-American grad student in computer science, but if you knew me better I hope it would seem less so). Third, I've never been the male half of the above-described quasi-platonic unrequited-infatuation friendship situation.

Nevertheless, I find Byler's statements very astute. Byler's saying, out loud and in public, things that are rarely said, even though (I think) nearly all young, adult Asian-Americans today recognize them on some level, whether they consciously acknowledge them or not.

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Note, by the way, that one should be wary of confusing the view Byler expresses with a superficially similar sentiment that is unfortunately rather common among Asian(-American) men: the belief that Asian(-American) women are effectively a form of racial property, and therefore for an Asian(-American) woman to refuse an Asian(-American) man is an infringement on that property right, and a form of betrayal. This sentiment is, of course, reprehensible for all sorts of reasons that should be obvious.

The superficial similarity to Byler's view is that both views describe circumstances that seem potentially frustrating for Asian-American men. The difference, however, is that Byler doesn't indulge the racist, sexist premise of racial ownership of women. He merely acknowledges the obvious fact that sexual attraction, like all human emotions and behaviors, can be modulated by cultural influences, including racist assumptions embedded in the culture, and that the results can be painful for all involved.

"Learning to stimulate the sex drive of crocodiles has proved more difficult."

This article is brilliant. Funnier than anything The Onion's written in the past year.

NIH under attack for sex research

WaPo recently reported that the NIH is under attack. The backstory emerges in paragraph four:

But a recent one-two punch has put the NIH on the defensive. Late last fall, a conservative religious group released what it said was evidence that the NIH was financing scientifically useless studies of morally repugnant behavior, triggering a congressional inquiry. In December, an article in the Los Angeles Times suggested that improprieties were occurring in collaborations between NIH scientists and drug companies. Those claims prompted a fresh round of congressional questions.

ScienceNOW goes into more detail (non-free subscription required):

NIH began a sweeping review of its human sexuality research portfolio after the House came close to eliminating funding for four sexual research grants in July, and some lawmakers raised more questions at a 2 October hearing. A House Energy and Commerce committee staffer then forwarded to NIH a list of about 198 grants compiled by the Traditional Values Coalition, a conservative advocacy group (Science, 31 October 2003, p. 758). The research topics ranged from research on AIDS and risky behaviors, such as drug use, to preventing teenage pregnancy. The Coalition's Andrea Lafferty called the studies "smarmy" and a waste of taxpayers' money.

Not so, says Zerhouni in a two-page letter sent to Commerce Committee chair Billy Tauzin (R-LA) and two senators. "The peer review process ... worked properly," and "I fully support NIH's continued investment in research on human sexuality," Zerhouni wrote. An attached six-page summary by institute directors provides detailed justification for three specific grants, including a study of prostitutes and truck drivers that NIH says will help prevent spreading HIV from truckers to their wives, and a conference on sexual functioning that could "improve the lives of millions of Americans" and shed light on dysfunction.

C'mon, if we can't count on government to fund scientific research into sex, then what the hell can we count on the government to fund? Is there anything that the average taxpaying American citizen cares more about than sex?

Pop quiz: What is the rate of mistaken paternity?

Everyone knows that men can never really know that their children are biologically their own, short of a DNA test. But most people think that, well, cases of mistaken paternity are rare freak cases, and the people we know couldn't possibly be cases of mistaken paternity; and most men figure that when they have kids, of course the woman they choose will be trustworthy and faithful, so it's a problem for freak-show losers to worry about.

Heh.

While reading Gigerenzer's Law of Indispensable Ignorance on Edge.org's Edge Annual Question (this year, "What's Your Law?"), I came across the startling sentence:

The estimated 5 to 10% of children and their fathers who falsely believe that they are related might not lead a happier life by becoming less ignorant; knowledge can destroy families.

"Holy crap! 5-10%? That's got to be a mistake," I thought. Is it? Like any lazy researcher, I did a quick Google search, which turns up a thread from the sci.anthropology newsgroup archives with the rather insensitive, albeit humorous, subject "How many bastards are there, anyway?". At first, it seems, we can breathe a sigh of relief, as Lee Rudolph writes:

Yesterday I was talking to a bioethicist who studies genetic counseling, and when the conversation turned to folklore, she brought up an issue she'd recently investigated. She told me that essentially all genetic counselors believe that there is a "false paternity" rate of about 5 percent--yet few if any counselors encounter a rate nearly that high in their own practices. This discrepancy having piqued her curiosity, my friend had tried to track down just why the rate is believed to be 5 percent. One source after another said the scientific equivalent of "it was published by a friend of a friend". Eventually the FOAF-chain terminated, in a single paper whose author does not think it supports the interpretation it is popularly given! Appendix 1, immediately below, represents the present state of her research into this possible piece of genetic folklore.

... [skipping to appendix] ...

A historical search and a conversation with Dr. James Neel, one of the deans of human genetics, led us to what may be the source for the high estimate: a 1962-65 study of blood typing in a small Michigan town (1). That study found discrepancies between biological and stated parentage in 109 of 2507 nuclear familes. Many of these may have been unacknowledged adoptions, including step-parent adoptions.

...[skipping to cite]...

(1) Sing, CF et al (1971) Studies on genetic selection in a completely ascertained Caucasian population II. Family analysis of 11 blood group systems. American Journal of Human Genetics 23(2) 164-198.

Whew! OK, so it's one small study, and it may not have counted adoptions properly. But hold on --- a few messages later in the thread, Joe Quellen writes:

The statistics are covered in a very engrossing book by Jared DIamond, called *The Third Chimpanzee*, 1992, Harper Perennial, Chapter 4, The Science of Adultery. He describes a study of blood typing and genetics which had unexected results and was quashed. It was done in the 1940s at a "highly respectable" US hospital. The study found that fully 10 percent of babies were not the biological offspring of their legal fathers.

Oh. Diamond was citing a different study. A couple of messages later, "sgf" writes:

I just picked up Timothy Taylor's _The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture_ (Bantam: 1996). Here's his summarization of the subject:

(pp 77-79)
"...In tests of genetic paternity recently conducted by Robin Baker and Mark Bellis [1], they found that around 10 percent of children had been sired by someone other than their ostensible fathers -- although the fathers consciously believed these children to be their own.

...[skipping to cite]...

[1 Baker, R. and M. Bellis. 1993 "Human sperm competition: ejaculate adjustment by males and the function of masturbation." _Animal Behaviour_ 46: 861-65]

And just to pile on a bit, the next Google hit is a working paper by anthropologist Kermyt G. Anderson titled "How well does paternity confidence match actual paternity? Evidence from worldwide nonpaternity rates" (abstract; DOI) (UPDATE 2010-02-17: fixed linkrot), wherein we learn:

The median nonpaternity rate for the high paternity confidence sample is 1.9% (range: 0.4 - 11.8), while median nonpaternity for the low paternity confidence sample is 30.2% (range: 14.3 - 55.6). The median nonpaternity rates for these two groups are significantly different (Wilcoxon sign-rank test, z = -6.112, p < 0.0001), which is not surprising since the two distributions do not even overlap. Thus, men with high paternity confidence are less likely to be incorrect in their assessment of paternity than men with low paternity confidence. In other words, men with high paternity confidence are more accurate in assessing paternity.

The median nonpaternity of men whose paternity confidence is unknown is 16.7% (range: 2 - 32). This is significantly greater than the high paternity confidence sample (Wilcoxon sign-rank test, z = -4.349, p < 0.0001), and significantly lower than the low paternity confidence sample (Wilcoxon sign- rank test, z = 3.528, p = 0.0004).

When the high and unknown paternity confidence samples are combined, the median nonpaternity is 3.9% (range: 0.4 R 32). This is significantly less than median nonpaternity for men with low paternity confidence (Wilcoxon sign-rank test, z = -6.053, p < 0.0001). Thus, men with low paternity confidence are the least accurate in assessing actual paternity.

In other words, interpreting the results rather cavalierly, if you're fairly confident that the child is yours, it is probably yours (although, interestingly, nearly 1 out of 50 such men are still mistaken). If you've got suspicions, then the probability that it's not yours is nearly one out of three. Intuitively, this makes sense: men don't just doubt for no reason. If you have reason to doubt, then it's probably with some justification.

Anyway, the 5-10% number seems to be a bit of an overestimate; the actual number from the most comprehensive survey seems to be in the 2-4% range. Still disturbingly high, in my opinion.

The Wages of Sin

PP points to a post by one of his friends, HK, who writes:

"Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I do not reject Christianity because of my desire to go around sinning without any guilt; I reject Christianity because I have closely examined its claims and I have found them to be unsubstantiated."

This sounds rather like something I posted in PP's comments some time ago. (Maybe it is.) But actually, upon reading this today, I realized that one of my reasons for rejecting religion is that I do want to go around "sinning" without any guilt --- if "sinning" includes such acts as doing work on Sundays, having premarital sex, and the whole host of other ordinary human activities that are arbitrarily prohibited by Christianity. It's an affront to human dignity to be forbidden to do something "just because", and that's a large part of what religions do.

One could argue that the prohibitions on ham and cheese sandwiches or tattoos are relatively benign (although still offensive in their arbitrariness), but when the control extends to things as important as people's sex lives, it becomes monstrous. We're on this Earth for a short and often lonely time. Physical intimacy answers one of our deepest needs: the need to narrow the gap between us and our loved ones, however temporary that narrowing may be --- as Rushdie writes in The Moor's Last Sigh, "defeated love ... is greater than what defeats it". To exhort people to forego sex without the blessing of archaic contractual rituals is no less immoral than telling mothers not to hug their children.

The Bible claims that the wages of sin are death. If you define "sin" as "anything prohibited by the Bible", I believe that the wages of sin are something far less morbid: happiness.