Olympic Influence

Recently the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that wrestling would be cut from the Olympics.  There are a bunch of sports clamoring to replace it like baseball, squash, and roller sports !! and while the linked article is obviously biased in favour of wrestling I don't see their point as being particularly valid.  Saying that a sport is really old is hardly a compelling argument for its inclusion in an international athletic competition - beating people's heads in with clubs is pretty old too.

'Chasing the money' is a charge levelled at the IOC regularly and although I think it is true I don't especially think it is a problem.  They want to showcase sports that have a big following and which people care about and surprise! that ends up being the sports that are financially successful.  There are plenty of Olympic sports that mostly just get watched when your home country has a medal prospect involved and it doesn't seem like a problem to ditch small scale sports like that for big ones. It is impossible to include everything so basing some of the decision on viewer popularity is entirely sensible.

What is unfortunate, I think, is that so much of the support for a sport is contingent on the approval of what is essentially a private corporation.  When a sport isn't featured in the Olympics countries don't fund it, people don't watch it, and there is a lack of enthusiasm for it on the basis that it isn't important.  Imagine how popular the hammer toss, javelin throw, etc. would be without that badge of Olympic inclusion.  Not that I dispute that the IOC should make these calls because they certainly have to make decisions, but rather it is irritating that so much importance ends up being placed on their decisions which often end up being rather arbitrary.

If I were the one choosing new sports I think a lot of viewers would enjoy my selections but I would get utterly roasted by the critics.  I figure I would include women's roller derby (the men can compete too, but I wouldn't bother watching...), dodgeball, mixed martial arts, and starcraft 2 (casted by day9, of course).  You know, things that are serious athletic endeavours but which would be accused of pandering to the lowest common denominator.  Which, in this case, I guess I am.

Picture from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_derby

Women and sports

I have been mulling over the difficulties of women's sports after reading this article.  The thing is, women's sports are caught in a very difficult situation.  They get very little TV coverage and drastically lower monetary as well as cultural support than men's sports and this holds back their ability to field truly top notch teams.  Nearly all the coverage out there though is covering the top notch teams and the leagues they play in so you can't get attention without being awesome and you can't get awesome without attention.  Clearly some of the difference is attributable to pure sexism but a lot of it is rooted firmly in the desire to watch only the best teams play.

Do you know about the Houston Aeros?  I sure didn't up until now, and that is entirely attributable to the fact that they aren't good.  I don't know much about hockey but I sure can recognize the major teams.  It doesn't matter whether or not the Aeros have great sportsmanship, put on a fantastic display, or have sparkly jerseys.  They aren't the best so hardly anybody cares.  It is the same reason that you see so many people in Thunder Bay with Toronto Blue Jays gear ... the local team isn't playing in the big leagues.

If the rules of the games were changed to get rid of men's primary advantage I think this trend could be changed dramatically.  That primary advantage is size.  Hockey, football, and basketball players who are fast are great and all but being really big and strong is powerful.  Imagine if the team were limited by weight instead of by body count though.  Shaquille O'Neal and titans like him might well make way for two skilled female athletes at half his weight, but while size and strength are very important and we limit teams by person rather than by mass women have a nearly insurmountable disadvantage.  At the extreme top end the largest and most powerful female athletes are dwarfed by the men and that isn't changing any time soon.

One thing the article I linked suggested was removing the gender divide in sports, specifically the Olympics.  While this would be good in that it would remove difficult questions about transgender, intersex, or other folk who don't fit easily into gender norms it would, I think, demolish female participation in the Olympics.  I always found the gender divide strange (especially in things like chess!) but it certainly serves to increase female participation.  I don't think you can reasonably have women competing against men in most physical disciplines without really gutting overall female representation and I feel like the segregation is the better of the two options.

I would like to see more equal representation in sports and I would like to see mixed gender teams and competitions at high levels of play.  What I don't see is a path to get from here to there.  The sports we as a society like to watch massively favour males at the very highest levels of play and encouraging and supporting female athletes can only partly mitigate that.  We can remove barriers to female participation and provide all the support we can but I don't think we can fundamentally change the desire to only pay attention to the best of the best.

Innovate!

Patents get pretty ridiculous.  The fact that major companies spend millions on litigation to fight about patents that claim to describe the shape of the corners of a tablet should tell us that the current system is idiotic.  Another clue we should not fail to miss is that there are a slew of companies out there whose only purpose is to try to register ridiculous, overbroad patents and then shake down as many other companies as possible.  Of course they aren't actually using any patents nor do they even want to end up in court.  They just want to scare people into thinking they have to pay up to make it go away.

I just read an interesting article suggesting that patents should go away altogether.  Ending patents completely doesn't seem like it would actually work politically because so many huge companies would stand to lose so much but I really like the idea.  It would dramatically open up the marketplace and let real competition loose rather than forcing anyone without a huge legal team to just pack up to bullying from powerful interests.  Letting small innovators come up with new ideas and create niche products without being shut down by a silly patent would be a great step forward for all of us.

There is a significant downside to losing patents entirely of course; a lot of funding for research is only justifiable because the potential result can be so lucrative and if patents were not enforceable some research would not get done.  Of course the research that wouldn't get done might not be that valuable; when patents are in place research focuses only on things that can be patented.  While large pharmaceutical research firms do come out with nice new innovations here and there an awfully large percentage of their new products are barely helpful, or not helpful at all.  Research is also regularly tainted by the fact that it is being pursued within a huge company.  Scientists in hospitals and universities are not perfect but their research is a *lot* less biased that labs within private industry.

We have known for a long time that monopolies generate very undesirable effects in economic situations.  The consolidation of too much power in the hands of a single entity always creates abuse.  Patents contribute mightily to this because patents promote companies that have enormous legal teams and huge bankrolls rather than multiple small companies.  As we saw in recent years when companies get so big that their collapse would destroy entire marketplaces they are a huge threat to independent government and to stability, not to mention creating serious wealth inequality.  I think we will all be better off with a few less weapons in the arsenal of huge corporations.

Tazer me not

I have spent much of today reading the back articles on Popehat about police and the terrible things they do sometimes.  After a few hours of reading about cops beating the snot out of people who photograph them, tasering people who are just standing around being strange, and outright being criminals because they will get covered for I am in a mood to hate all of humanity.  I suppose I shouldn't really let anecdotal data decide my positions on political issues, particularly when it is anecdotal data from another country, but all that reading has totally changed my mind about tasers.

When I first heard about tasers I thought they were a great idea.  The theory goes like this:  Cops shooting people is bad.  If cops have tasers, they can use tasers to stun people who are wielding bats, knives, or guns and avoid shooting said people.  This seems like a great thing because although tasers can be dangerous they are a hell of a lot less dangerous than a gun.  Who could argue with cops getting better tools to take down armed criminals safely?

Unfortunately tasers end up exacerbating the issue with cops having guns at all; when they have ready access to non diplomatic solutions they end up using them.  When all you have is a gun you had better be sure that it is worth killing someone if you pull it out.  A taser though is something you can just fire at anybody anytime you like because it shouldn't do permanent damage.  So giving a cop a gun and a taser tends to mean that they simply choose which tool is appropriate for the job and forget that it is by far better to use neither.

Not that cops set out to be jackasses or thugs by and large.  The trouble is that when you get in a tense situation and things are getting heated you tend to not have the wherewithal to make reasoned judgements.  Having that weapon on hand means it gets used even if in retrospect it wasn't a good idea.  Obviously there have to be SWAT type cops that have access to serious weaponry when it becomes necessary but the great majority of police interactions need no weapons at all.  Moreover in those normal reactions police will see more genuine respect and less fear if people know they are enforcing the law through authority and reason and not immediate threat of force.

V is for

Today I got a vasectomy.  The experience was a weird one because as usual I was far more preoccupied with my conformity or lack thereof with social expectations instead of the actual business at hand.  When I fly I am not afraid of the plane crashing but I can't sleep because I am worried about missing the flight.  It turns out that when I am getting a vasectomy I am not worried about the knife but rather whether or not I should have shaved my own scrotum ahead of time or not.

I didn't, it turns out, because the doctor told me that no preparation was necessary.  The doctor and nurse talked about it a bit but in kind of an oblique way so I still don't know if they expected it or not.  Normally when you get into a situation where you may have screwed up and not done what you are supposed to do it resolves itself and at least you know better for next time... but not here.  Of course I don't expect to *need* this information later on but it would feel good to actually have the answer.

Wendy and Elli appear to be having much more of a reaction to it that I am.  I think the finality of not having more children hadn't really settled in for Wendy yet and that change is something that needs to work its way through.  Elli unfortunately desperately wants siblings that she isn't going to get so this whole situation is really stressful for her.  There is a lot of pressure to be a normal family and have two kids in our society and that really trickles down to nearly everyone.  Both of them seem to have that sense that there is something wrong, that we don't yet have a sufficient number of children in the house.  I don't have that in me anywhere as far as I can tell.  I would be perfectly content with zero kids but one is also fine.  More... not so much.

It was really strange to sit there knowing my very delicate parts were being neatly sliced in twain and being able to feel the tug and poke but not actually having any sensation of pain.  I guess doctors get used to the whole separation of pain and damage but it felt very weird to me.  There are plenty of horror stories of men being in incredible pain and spending days on the sofa with ice on their genitals after a vasectomy but I guess I am really lucky since it has been less of a hassle than a mild headache.  Maybe some of that is due to me being totally blase about the whole thing; I am sure that having an existential crisis while dealing with pain can't make things any easier.

Also, why do they provide a privacy curtain and leave the room so I can change?  You are planning on operating on my genitals while I wear a backless gown!  What could I possibly have left to hide?

Science is full of boring

There is a strong temptation to sensationalize science for public consumption.  New sources do this constantly (see "Einstein was wrong!" from the faster than light neutrino fiasco last year) but they aren't the only ones.  Entertainment is unfortunately full of relatively harmless pretend science from Star Trek to CSI where reality is ignored but nobody really believes that stuff is real and if they did ... so what?  Dr. Oz, though, is another thing entirely.

The real trouble is that if people like Oz report the real science behind medical news it sounds really boring.  They have to include a lot of 'in animals only, might not apply to humans at all' and 'insufficient sample size' and 'proven to affect markers of disease, but not the actual disease'.  All of these things are completely critical to evaluating the efficacy of a treatment but make crappy television so demagogues like Oz just make stuff up instead.  Nobody is going to listen to 'needs more research' when 'instant miracle' is available.  We don't need miracles.  We need boring old broccoli and walking!

Every week Dr. Oz appears on the cover of Woman's World magazine at the grocery store pitching a new and guaranteed instant weight loss program.  You would think that after he did this 30 times in a row that people would wonder why they listen to a guy who is so consistently wrong but apparently that doesn't happen.  He pitches unproven medicine, supports charlatans, and generally does his level best to completely undermine people's understanding and respect for actual medicine.

The thing that the average person just doesn't get is that science and research is full of boring.  It contains lots of doubt and uncertainty.  At the end you can have spectacular and amazing but an awful lot of the time all you have is data that shows that nothing new or interesting is happening.  That is useful and necessary but it isn't getting anybody's attention, while anti oxidants and fat free diets are miracle quick fixes that are totally useless in reality.  Sadly the thing that should really make people believe a statement is true is bunch of complicated and (to the average person) indecipherable references to study size, statistical sampling, and long term side effects while instead it just puts them to sleep.

Magical flying sparkly princess ponies

Elli is addicted to My Little Pony.  She watches episodes any time she can and seems completely satisfied, after viewing every show ever made, to start again at the beginning and watch them through again.  There is a lot to like in these videos; they are about a group of friends that have disagreements and difficulties that they work through in realistic ways.  Well, realistic ways emotionally... they are a bunch of flying magical talking ponies so strict realism is not always observed.  I generally like the messages they send about tolerance, being a good sport, helping people, etc. but there are a few things about the show that I find really disquieting.

First off, there is a huge emphasis placed on the wonders of hereditary monarchy and the inherent superiority of those in power.  The big boss is Princess Celestia and she is shockingly wise, unflappably self controlled, and universally loved.  Normal ponies get to have wings, a magic horn, or nothing at all but Princess Celestia has both wings and a magic horn (more powerful than anyone else in the world, naturally) and is also twice as big as anybody else and incomparably beautiful.  Of course everybody in the world bows and scrapes around her and gasps in awe that she would deign to grace them with her presence.  It is all very icky, especially when you consider that obeisance to authority figures seems to be given a higher priority than any other behaviour.  I just don't like the idea that we should teach kids that the folks in charge are inherently better than they are and that the masses of humanity exist only to obey.

Secondly but on a related note is the emphasis on faith.  I have no respect for faith being placed on a pedestal and would rather see it as a vice than a virtue.  Optimism and hope are fine and necessary things and they should not be confused with a certain belief in that which is obviously false, which is indeed what faith is.  A recent episode saw a life lesson imparted that can be summarized as "When people say things that are obviously wrong you should just believe them anyway because science doesn't tell you the truth, faith does."  Because, of course, believing what anybody says is what a nice person should do!  Unfortunately they utterly failed to deliver the correct lesson which is that we should let people think whatever damn fool thing they want but that does not extend to letting them harm others on the basis of their damn fool beliefs.

In practical terms I can't imagine that watching this stuff has any serious impact on children long term.  I watched endless reruns of He Man and Thundercats and other garbage when I was young and I though I could tear them apart now I doubt they did any real harm.  Still, I am going to continue to cringe when I see another animated pony say "Oh no, we better not let Princess Celestia see the mess us normal ponies made of things.  She is obviously perfect and not sullied and debased like all of us who were stupid enough to be born commoners."

Picture from:  http://www.avclub.com/articles/my-little-pony-friendship-is-magic,55168/