Life update. Blog update to follow.

I took about a month off from this to come home and settle myself.  I've found some work for now and am mostly settled in, so here I am again.  

There are a few interesting ideas on a post-it that I need to find and get started on, but here is an update.

Your regularly scheduled ranting will resume shortly.

Lies and lack of concern, or "why does no one care about lesbians?"

All of the following "research" was done on 12/23/09, when the following was originally written. It is unlikely that there have been significant changes in the posted data since then.

Over a few years of taking psychology classes and many more years of watching TV (particularly shows such as Law and Order: SVU), I have come to realize a simple fact: there are a disproportionately low number of psychological, medical, and other studies done with an eye to lesbians. No one seems interested unless the phrase "hot action" is employed

Nobody seems to care what makes them tick. Perhaps they assume that it's the opposite of whatever 'makes' men gay that 'creates' lesbians. [Yes, I'm running with the Freudian experiences-in-youth create personality line here.] I find that extrapolation completely unsatisfying.

It is definitely a marginalized group.
On Logo, the channel oriented towards the LGBT community, there is practically no lesbian-oriented advertising. The mere fact that I find the phrase "lesbian-oriented advertising" incredibly awkward is telling.

There are plenty of studies that report, for example, that having a distant father makes men more likely to be gay, but no one bothers to look at distant parents of lesbians.

A google scholar search for "Lesbian psychology" returned 52,300 results, while the same search for "Gay psychology" gave 163,000. Over three times as many!

A search for "Lesbian psychology -gay" gave me 12700 google scholar results and "Gay psychology -lesbian" returned 79,200.
A much wider margin, but the fact that all lesbians are gay but not all gays are lesbians skews the data because it is extremely likely that "lesbian" results also contain the word gay.

It is still important to note that the gay without lesbian search gives over 50% more results than the original lesbian search (results that may include the word "gay."

Does being a daddy's girl make you more likely to be into men, or women? I personally have no idea and can argue either way.
1) You might love your dad so much that you want to grow up and marry somebody just like him.
2) You might take after your dad and like the ladies
3) It may have no measurable effect at all, or these effects may cancel out.
I'm actually leaning towards #3 on this one.

Even when studies try to include lesbians, comparing them to gay men and straight men and women, the lesbian data is skewed. There are a few reasons for this.
1) Lesbians are hard to find and often bisexual women are put in the same category, which skew the data. [believable]
2) Lesbians don't exist and are just straight women going through a phase. [mostly bullshit]
3) Lesbians are hard to find, so the sample sizes are very low and samples often contain straight women going through a phase. [somewhat believable/bullshit]


I was once in a class in which I had to conduct a study involving sex and orientation differences. Admittedly, we did not do a very good job. In my group's study, we had people of different sexes and orientations write paragraphs, which were then judged by others on masculinity/femininity and straightness/gayness. I was the only lesbian I could get to provide a writing sample, and there were only two samples by gay men. The other LGBT people were all self-proclaimed bisexual women. I don't remember if we got any straight women, but there were ten straight men. Needless to say, we got some pretty strange data.
This ridiculous anecdote's purpose here is to point out the importance of getting good samples.

Maybe if someone runs a study with a good lesbian sample we can see if people are actually reporting their sexual orientation correctly.

The type of study that I would recommend for this is one in which the participant looks at a screen and is told to fixate on a cross ( + ) in the center. They are told to report on which side of the screen a shape appears by pressing one key for left and another for right. On one side of the screen, a nude image of either a man or a women will be flashed for an amount of time below the perceptual threshold, so that the participant has no idea that it was there. The shape then appears on one side of the screen.

-If the nude is of the participant's preferred sex and the shape appears on the same side of the screen as the nude, then the reaction time will be quicker.
-When the participant's nonpreferred sex is on the same side as the shape, they take longer to report.
-In cases where the nude of one's preferred sex is on the opposite side of the screen from the shape, the report time is longer.
-And if the nude of one's nonpreferred sex is on the opposite side from the shape, the reaction time is fast.

Long story short: one subconsciously looks towards the nude that they like and away from the nude that they don't like.

This kind of study has a lot of drama around it because it is a very accurate way to predict (or confirm) sexuality. Of course, in results that I've seen of this type of study, the data on lesbians is shaky. They responded well to both male and female nudes. (Hence #1 from why lesbian data might be bad.)

At any rate, this peeves me and I would really like for people to fix it. Get on it, psychologists!

Apple forgot this note at the end of the ads.

*Usefulness Not Included.
Of course I'd be a bad nerd if I didn't have anything to say on the topic of the iPad. It's probably a little late to jump in, but here's what I think.

As a college student who just got a netbook (love it!), I know a little about portability-related goodness. As a general dork who thinks about gadgets a little too often, I know a lot more about what I want in a device. Since this thing is allegedly a new category of device and it's supposed to be ultra-portable, it seems appropriate that I chime in.

The first allegation about the iPad is that's an overgrown iPhone, what with the structure and the unitasking and such. I agree that it is very similar, with one caveat: I would never want a phone this big and expensive-looking. Friends of mine have expressed that they would be interested in an ipad with phone functionality, but when posed with the situation of walking in a bad neighborhood and needing to call a taxi, they get antsy and say they would want to use a normal cell phone or even a pay phone.
So, the device fails as a phone because you will get mugged for it and because it's too big and unwieldy.

The second allegation is that the iPad is a fancy peripheral and not a stand-alone computer. As a netbook owner, I've heard this before, and I actually have a snazzy set of peripherals for it (mouse, keyboard, external hard drive and disk drive, and my tv actually doubles as a monitor), but the only peripheral I use regularly is the mouse. Sometimes I'll hook it up to the monitor when people want to watch youtube videos in a big group, but that's pretty rare.
Since one of the biggest complaints I've heard on the iPad is the lack of a kickstand to make it into a proper monitor, I'm already inclined to agree. On hearing how awkward it is to hold and use the keyboard, or to lay it flat while trying to type and look at the screen at the same time, that's a big ten-four. It's also my understanding that it hurts your neck if you try to place it on your lap and it's too heavy to hold up to eye-level for an extended period of time. As far as I know, it doesn't even have USB ports to connect these things, so you'd need something to convert the standard apple device charging port into usbs, which is ridiculous.
It sounds like a pain in the neck (hah!) to use and that it definitely needs something else to make it tolerable. With that in mind, I know that I wouldn't want one as my main computer, while my netbook serves that purpose just fine.

Flash Support! This is just ridiculous. I recently got a firefox app that would block everything using flash and give me the option to activate them or not, as a trick to save RAM. This exercise, in addition to freeing up my RAM, has drawn to my attention that flash is everywhere. I would be so irritated to not be able to see flash.
This is a no-brainer, and given its prevalence, Flash is not going away very soon: certainly not by the time they come out with a 2nd generation iPad.

Price. People who can afford to have 2+ computerish devices per person and already have smart phones and mp3 players and psps and such will buy this. People who can afford one computer per person or per household will not, because it is not sufficiently useful and is not particularly unique.

My overall assessment is negative, in case you hadn't caught on to that by now. I may make a post at some point about my ideal portable device, but this certainly is not it, for reasons of size, lack of function, and unnecessary flashiness.
In conclusion, bring it on, apple fanboys.

i.e. you're doing it wrong.

I've recently had revealed to me that I have a new pet peeve. It's simple, but bears clarification. The conflation of the expressions "e.g." and "i.e." has really been getting to me lately.
Standard American English requires that a comma follow both abbreviations when they are used mid-sentence. It is my understanding that there is no such requirement when using British English.

e.g. stands for "exempli gratia," which is Latin for "good example."

Simply, you use it when you're giving an example of something you've already been talking about.

"I really hate artificial chocolate milk, e.g., Yoohoo. That stuff's shelf-stable."

i.e. stands for "id est," Latin for "that is." I prefer to think of it as being short for "in essence."
"i.e." should be used when you want to be more specific or clarify a point.

"Two wheeled, pedal-propelled vehicles, i.e., bicycles, are environmentally friendly."

Note: i.e. does not stand for "in example." The incorrect belief that it does indicate an example may be the source of this whole problem.

However, this does not explain why people would use e.g. when i.e. would be appropriate. Any thoughts on that, other than "they don't care" would be welcome; I'm aware that people generally don't care about language.

There's a browser for that.

I'm just going to say it: I don't understand apps.
Applications, sure, on a computer, but the fascination with apps is just beyond me.

My main concern is that they're just unnecessary.
Almost all of the app-friendly devices also support web browsers. I could sort of understand apps if a browser is unavailable, but as far as I know, most people have them.


The over-specialization of apps is a real problem. You have dozens, including one for ordering pizza hut, one for mafia wars, one for your Facebook status, one for twitter, and one for Geico. You can access all of those things from a browser, and it will be better from a browser!


Waah, I need to access all my favorite stuff in three seconds or I'll just die!
That's what bookmarks are for.

Better yet, a browser (on a netbook, which I think is the current ideal device) has tabs! Tabs are the ultimate in multitasking. You can have each of the above 'apps' open at once, in the form of websites!

The worst app of all has to be email.
Yes, email is important; there's no way that I'm denying that. However, you don't need to be alerted by your pocket vibrating every time eBay says "don't miss out on your watched items!"

Apps clutter up your desktop. Pages and pages of little icons: how infuriating to page through to find what you want with no organization. As far as I know, you can't make folders on a device like an iPod touch the way that you can on a computer... and since something like the iPad functions much the same as an iPod touch, again, you have a lack of clean desktop space.

So, Apps don't have any special function that a browser & website don't already. They're far too specific, so that you end up with way more of them than you need. I would not be surprised if most apps on a device are used less than 5 times. Then, you end up with a cluttered device and don't get to enjoy your snazzy background.

Conclusion: Apps are stupid and we'd be better off without them.

Image from ismashphone