Transgender science?

Hello,

Is being transgender scientific? I shared my heart and soul in this essay, which is beautifully written if I do say so myself.  :)

http://www.youandmemagazine.com/articles/how-could-i-be-a-woman

Please let me know what you think about it.

xoxoxo,

Michelle

More Evidence?

There are climate change skeptics, but the publisher of Skeptic flipped on the issue. Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, used to believe that climate change was not happening or, at least not human caused. He's changed his mind on this.

Katrina and the superdome. Sandy, with New York City streets under feet of water.

And I'm published in Skeptic, again, with vol22, n2. Reviewing books about fraud and cons. Obviously unrelated. One of the points, in one of the books: the most successful con is the one that is undiscovered.

And I've flipped over Skeptic.

What Nancy Drew on

Did you ever read any of the Nancy Drew mysteries? I read book after book, more than fifty of them. I think I learned as much about writing from those books as from English class. But when I recently rediscovered them, I fell in love for a new reason: the cultural currents she "Drew" on. (forgive me).


The earliest volumes were published in the 1930s, when the US was a different place. Did you know that the first two dozen books in the mystery series were rewritten in the 1950s and 1960s to make them more modern? The original versions of the Secret of the Old Clock and its dozen or two follow-ups had Nancy wearing gloves and hats, and this was changed when the books were revised.

Racist stereotypes were also changed. Irish servants. References to a (stupid) black woman as a "negress."

The first detective story, of any type, is generally credited to Edgar Allan Poe in the 1840s. Children weren't really a market for them (or for anything else) until at least half a century after that. Oh, and in the 30s and 40s, Nancy as a strong female character, and a youth, was controversial.

Since the first Nancy Drew novel appeared in the 1930s, and are still being produced, it is now obvious that "Carolyn Keene" is a pseudonym. But it always was: no such person ever existed. Nancy Drew stories were contracted from a publishing company from the very start, with a clause taht the actual author could not receive credit or compensation beyond a small fee.

Some people dream of being given a new car (if not a blue roadster). I dream of being given a bunch of old (or new) Nancy Drew books. I'm a bibliophile and not wealthy (this is not a good combination). Hey, a girl can dream, can't she?

I'd type more, but I want to go back to reading Nancy Drew mysteries. They're really fun!

"Whether" prediction works?

Much more snow was forecast. On the news they talked of a foot or more for NYC. We have less than they forecast.

Is this unusual? My very first review for Skeptic magazine, written under my male pseudonym, talked about this. The book was William Sherden's _The Fortune Sellers_ and his persuasive argument was that predicting the future doesn't usually work. That even with better equipment and better training, weather prediction is not going to _ever_ be more accurate than an estimate, and that not for more than a day or two ahead.

Sherden makes the same argument for stock market prediction. People pay big money for stock market prediction, and how often is it right?

Try it: maybe write down for, say, a week, what weather forecasters say, and then write down what happens. How right are they for seven days ahead? For the next day?

Do you own stock? Would it give you confidence to write down what the predictors say, and then, six months or a year later, compare it with what happened?

Societal knowledge

Of course human beings continue to learn more about the world: the ancient Greeks couldn't put a human being on the moon, the germ theory of disease wasn't fully accepted by doctors until, what, a  a century and a half ago?

But we also lose knowledge:
*archological sites give us new knowledge of human origins and the timing of human accomplishment. Bombs obliterate this, as was done in the first US Gulf War a quarter century ago, and more recently in Syria.
*the notion that everything is made up of atoms --which led eventually to the atomic bomb and plastics, amongst many other things--- was first proposed hundreds of years BC: but, by luck,  Democritus's writings were lost, and Plato's (among others) were preserved, all by accident. What if it had been the reverse? (From Charles Van Doren's _History of Knowledge_).
*I read, somewhere, in English, that there are languages that are only spoken by a few senior citizens, that once they die, the language may too.
* So-called primitive people sometimes know that an obscure plant will treat a particular symptom. Pharmaceutical companies investigate this, and it can be the origin of some new wonder drugs. If the peoples, or the plant, go extinct, so does that knowledge.
*The Pinkerton Detective Agency protected the President of the United States before the Secret Service did. The Pinkerton detectives were also involved in a vast array of issues, from labor strikes to investigating fake psychics. So is the burning of their records insignificant?
*Which isn't as bad as the case of the massive scale of records destruction in the Chinese cultural revolution. Historians of China are at a loss: the records of earlier times were systematically destroyed.
*Houdini was one of the highest paid entertainers of his era, and remains an icon 90 years after his death. Too bad he was buried with some of his family correspondence in his coffin.

Can you think of other examples of knowledge that was destroyed, permanently, by accident or on purpose?


(Note: Source: the concept of "lost knowledge" was introduced to me by Peter Burke's _Social History of Knowledge_. I don't know if he discusses any of my examples).

A "Hedy!" experience

The inventor of your cellphone was a Hollywood star.
Called the most beautiful woman in the world,
Her name was Hedy Lamarr

From the famous Louis B. Mayer she chutzpah-ed a better contract,
but complained that her looks always did distract
in film she was a star, but in real life,
Being judged only by her looks caused her strife.

She escaped boring husbands and helped out in World War II,
performing and serving and hugging for USO,
and co-patenting a technology used by me and by you.

She meant it to save lives in the guidance of missiles
but the smart woman's invention of radio wave frequency hopping
eventually was used from cell phones to wireless online shopping.


OKAY I'm not a great poet, but I am giddy after seeing a play that I enjoyed more than any I can remember. "Hedy! The Life and Inventions of Hedy Lamarr" had me laughing almost non-stop, and thinking too, so enjoyably. It's fitting that Richard Rhodes, who could make physics a narrative, wrote a history of Hedy Lamarr and her technological contribution to the world.

It didn't come out that she was Jewish until her death, and her technological research was only declassified (?) in like 1985?

My friend Heather Massie wrote and stars in "Hedy!" I was worried that I might not like the play but I LOVED it.

The next performance is in November, so you have plenty of time to plan for it. Seriously, the audience laughed out loud through the whole performance today. And it made me think, and it wasn't even idolatry: she made some bad decisions about who to marry, and then did it again. And in addressing her life, the play addresses glamour culture, technological dependence, bureaucracy, sexism, the horror of war, the importance of self confidence. In the advance preview I saw today, Ms. Lamarr scolded a patron whose phone went off, the audience cracking up in the process. Ms. Massie's Hedy! is charming and smart.

"Hedy! The Life and Inventions of Hedy Lamarr" will be performed on November 9th, in the cool days between Halloween and Thanksgiving, in New York City.

EDIT: THE SHOW IS ON NOVEMBER 9TH. Buy a ticket. :)

Houdini publication!!!

Probable fraud in the roaring 1920s! A woman claimed that her dead brother (did I mention that he was dead?) could not only move physical objects, but overhear distant conversations (which is kinda creepy, if you ask me). Scientists investigated, and there were charges of sexual compromise and other betrayal. My review of The Witch of Lime Street: Seance, Seduction, and Houdini in the Spirit World was the feature article in the March 16, 2016 issue of eSkeptic, http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/16-03-16/
 the edited weekly email newsletter published by The Skeptics Society, which also publishes Skeptic magazine. I'm excited!