Kinsey never said that ten percent of the male population is gay.  What he did was construct a range from the behavior of his subjects, the Kinsey scale, which went from zero, which was exclusive heterosexuality, to six, which was exclusive homosexuality.  It was only later, as gay people began to fight against oppression, that the data for 5s and 6s were combined to come up with a figure of ten percent.  Kinsey never said it, but when you looked at it that way it was a figure that made sense to throw out there.  Ten percent of the male population is exclusively homosexual, or nearly so.

It’s a figure that the kook pews have challenged ever since, because it is in their interest to claim that we are a tiny, insignificant, worthless part of the human family.  Except when we’re the vast conspiracy of militant homosexuality that controls the news media, Hollywood, liberal churches and the democratic party.  Then we’re a looming menace.  But a looming menace mind you, that only amounts to 1, or maybe 2 percent of the human family at most.

Perhaps they need to rethink that…

Almost one in 10 straight men on the `down-low,’ study finds

PHILADELPHIA – Almost 10 percent of men who say they’re straight also happen to be having sex with men, according to a new study, one of the largest ever to specifically address "down-low" behavior.

The study, based out of New York City, found that most of the down-low men did not use condoms and that 70 percent were married. Researchers said they hoped their report would change the way doctors asked patients about their sexual behavior.

"Everyone talks about it, but it’s the first time I’ve seen data on this issue," said Thomas J. Coates, a psychologist who specializes in sexual behavior at the University of California at Los Angeles. Even so, he said the numbers were probably low estimates.

"It’s probably above this, because it’s hard to get people to admit to this kind of behavior."

What’s really interesting about Kinsey’s figures is how well they’ve withstood the test of time, considering what it was he actually looked at.  All he studied was the behavior of his subjects over a three year period.  But why three?  Why not just one?  Why not five?  It’s like Mendel and his damn beans.  Mendel was the monk who did that now famous experiment in which he showed how traits are inherited.  For his subjects, he used a bean plant, and he tested for seven characteristics.  And as it turns out, seven is the most you can cleanly test for, without getting some cross linkage on the genes, because the bean plant only has seven genes.  But Mendel knew nothing of genes.  As Jacob Bronowski once put it, you can be elected abbot of your monastery, you can even be elected pope, but you can’t have that luck.  Mendel had obviously done some background work with his beans prior to his experiment, which told him which traits he could test for.  Kinsey had to have done something similar, that told him three years of sexual history was all he needed to know about his subjects, to have a good idea of the whole.

Clearly, the stigma surrounding homosexuality is still strong here in America, and in particular in minority communities.  While many of us are now able to live lives out and proud, many cannot.  The religious right would like to bring the stigma back down on all of us in the name of righteousness and morality.  But the human identity isn’t a blackboard anyone can scribble their will upon.  Homosexuality they say, brings only disease and pain and suffering.  No.  Shame does.  Here is what shame buys you.

"We found that those who identified as straight but had sex with men were also less likely to be HIV tested within the last year and less likely to use a condom," than men who said they were gay, said Preeti Pathela, a research scientist at the department.

Pride has the power to lift us out of the gutter of self abuse and self destructiveness.  And that is why the religious right hates gay pride.  In the relentless logic of knuckle dragging fundamentalism, if we’re not bleeding, they’re not righteous.

Pluto gets demoted as astronomers approve new definition for planets

After a tumultuous week of clashing over the essence of the cosmos, the International Astronomical Union stripped Pluto of the planetary status it has held since its discovery in 1930. The new definition of what is – and isn’t – a planet fills a centuries-old black hole for scientists who have laboured since Copernicus without one.

…

The decision by the international group spells out the basic tests that celestial objects will have to meet before they can be considered for admission to the elite cosmic club.

For now, membership will be restricted to the eight "classical" planets in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Much-maligned Pluto doesn’t make the grade under the new rules for a planet: "a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a . . . nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit."

Pluto is automatically disqualified because its oblong orbit overlaps with Neptune’s.

Instead, it will be reclassified in a new category of "dwarf planets," similar to what long have been termed "minor planets."

A planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.

 

A dwarf planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.

Pluto is a dwarf planet by the above definition and is recognized as the prototype of a new category of trans-Neptunian objects.
All other objects orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as "Small Solar System Bodies".

 

I dunno…there’s something a tad unnerving about watching a volcano idly blowing smoke rings…

Etna hoops it up

Volcanologists have witnessed dramatic rings of steam and gas being blown out of volcanic vents on the side of mighty Mount Etna in Sicily.

Click on the link to go to the BBC site and see some other absolutely spectacular images of volcanic smoke rings. 

Yes…the Advanced Camera for Surveys went into safe mode last Monday, after an anomaly was detected in the the CCD Electronics  Box.  Basically so I’m told, the voltages went above their high limits.  So the camera went into safe mode.

We have a redundant power supply circuit we can switch to, and I understand preparations are being made to activate it.  But they want to fully understand what happened to cause the safe mode first.  They’re going to do this slowly and methodically, look at all the data, run a few tests, look at the data some more, one step at a time until they are satisfied they understand what happened.  I’m told there is no cause for alarm, and we’ll probably get back to doing science with it by the end of the month.

Something else from Cosmic Variance that caught my eye…  Physicists are eagerly awaiting the first collisions from the new Large Hadron Collider…

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator which will probe deeper into matter than ever before. Due to switch on in 2007, it will ultimately collide beams of protons at an energy of 14 TeV . Beams of lead nuclei will be also accelerated, smashing together with a collision energy of 1150 TeV. 

But they need to be a tad careful in turning it on… 

Now for the reality check, as presented last week by the LHC project manager Lyn Evans (insert drumroll here): The machine will be closed in August 2007 and first collisions will occur in November 2007 at center of mass energy 1.8 TeV. The same energy as the previous run (known as Run I) at the Tevatron! It seems that this decision is very prudent. In 2007, only a couple sectors of the LHC will be fully commissioned to handle 7 TeV proton beams. The remaining sectors will not be commissioned until early 2008.

Let’s think about this for a moment. Commissioning (starting) new colliders is frought with numerous unintentional aborts of the beam. And when a beam is aborted, it has to go somewhere (it’s called dumping the beam). Hopefully it aborts as planned, otherwise….much energy is dumped somewhere it should not be! At full throttle (7 TeV beams), the energy stored in the LHC beam is 700 MegaJoules, or 10 TeraWatts. How big is that? Well, 10 TeraWatts is about half of the world’s total energy output. No wonder the accelerator folks are a bit jittery! They don’t want to dump 10 TeraWatts of beam just anywhere…

Here’s a picture (courtesy of Tom LeCompte) to illustrate this point. The kinetic energy of battleship guns is 300 Megajoules, or just less than half that of the full LHC beam. Now we understand why the machine folks want to be a bit cautious…

Yeah…I think I’d be careful with that too.

Daily Kos diarist Darksyde give me a link to another good one, Cosmic Variance.  Jo Ann blogs on the topic of who owns the data, and should it be made public…

…Tao Han brought up a push-your-buttons topic during his presentation: he proposed that the LHC data should be made available to the community as maximal openess would only benefit the physics. He admitted that while us non-LHC experimenters could not comprehend the raw data, he proposed that LHC- experimenters store their data in ASCII and make it available to the public. First a gasp and then audible silence swept the audience as this has been a controversial topic for years.

Han’s public data proposal completely dominated the lively and sometimes heated discussion afterwards. Joe Lykken called Maria Spiropulu up to the podium to defend the bastion of the secret data experimental world, noting that the astrophysics community does make its data public (although I could not find a site while looking tonight – anybody know a URL?). Maria stood silent for a minute, then turned directly towards Tao and said a single word: “ASCII?” It brought the house down. Then she started on the usual diatribe on how their data would be useless as us theorists don’t understand the detectors, their data format, blah blah blah. Frankly, I think she (and experimenters in general) misunderstand the point and underestimate us. Tao Han did not ask for raw data – nobody without the proper background or code can comprehend that – he asked for the 4-vectors (the energy and momentum read-outs) in ASCII. In other words, he asked for the data after it had been processed and sifted, and churned into a useable format. It is the form of data that us particle theorists deal with in our Monte Carlo codes and is what the experimenter works with in the end. It is a reasonable request, but not likely to happen.

So, just who “owns” this data anyway? The experimenters feel that they worked hard and suffered to build the detector (and they have indeed), so the data and any discoveries are theirs. But, who came up with the theories that are being tested? Who did the calculations to see what type of machine should be built? Who convinced the politicians to build the machine? And last, but by no means least, who footed the bill to pay for the machine? So who really owns this data and why is it kept under lock and key?

Even better then the data being made public would be making public the process of arguing and debating what the data means.  When scientists hide their work behind closed doors, they shouldn’t be surprised when the general public becomes suspicious that they don’t really know anything, and begin to embrace superstitious claptrap like Intelligent Design.  Why does it matter if they do?  Well…

MJ: How did we get to this point, where science is so blatantly abused for political purposes?

CM: Well, I think it’s part of the history of the modern conservative movement, and you see it coming to fruition recently with that movement’s total control of the Republican Party and of the government. Here you have a movement anchored in, among other things, a distrust of big government. And of course a lot of science is funded by government, and a lot of science takes place in government agencies. This is also a movement that has plausibly been accused of having anti-intellectual tendencies, that thinks big universities and the academic elites are biased against ordinary folks.

But most importantly you have raw politics, or catering to your constituents. With the conservatives, you have industry, which is coming up against science all the time, and religious conservatives, who come out against science any time [it conflicts with] their moral view of the world.

So, you combine all of those things—not liking government, distrusting universities, catering to your base—and then you get control of the government and I think what you get is exactly what you’d predict.

MJ: How far back do you have to go to see this coming together?

CM: There are good indications that these tensions were mounting [in the 1950s] for instance, when William F. Buckley attacked Yale, or when Barry Goldwater ran for President in 1964 and was attacked by the nation’s scientists for his anti-intellectual tendencies. Of course, they were fighting over different issues then, particularly arms control, but I think that the tension was clearly present.

But I think it really becomes a political phenomenon with Reagan. He was the [conservative] movement’s president and so of course he did a lot of this pro-industry and pro-religious stuff. He spoke favorably of creationism as well. So I think that’s when it really hit the political mainstream.

That’s an excerpt of the Mother Jones interview with Chris Moony, author of The Republican War On Science. 

What blogging is doing for the political dialog, it can do for science.  Science can speak for itself directly to the world.  It doesn’t have to have it’s voice filtered through the corporate republican friendly news media. It should.  It must.  What Jacob Bronowski wrote back in 1956 is so terribly true today:

The world today is made, it is powered by science; and for any man to abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes toward slavery. 

I have now in my browser’s bookmarks list about a half dozen or so good science blogs that I visit often.  I’m going to create a separate blogroll list for them, and add to it as I happen across new ones.

They call it the Valley of the Gods. 

You can suppose from my banner, and if you’ve been following this blog for a few years and know how often I go there on road trips, that Monument Valley is a recurring theme in my life.  I spent the morning of my 50th birthday in the heart of Monument Valley, timing it just so I could be there, looking up at the stars, during the hour of my birth.  If any physical place on earth could be said to be my spiritual center, the cathedral of my heart, it is there.  I knew it the moment I first set foot in it back in 1974.  It draws me to it in a way nothing else on earth does.  The Navajo rightly regard it as sacred.

Wil Wheaton tipped his readers off on his blog recently, that a NASA "picture of the week" was a composite 3-D image of Monument Valley as seen from high overhead.  According to the NASA site, it was "created by draping ASTER image data…over digital elevation data from the U.S. Geological Survey National Elevation Dataset."  An experiment in planet rendering then.  So here is planet Earth, in one of its surreal moods:

Click on the image to go to the NASA site and download the full resolution image.

It kinda blurs some of the features of the rock formations, taking the strangeness out of them (see my banner for a better view of one of the formations in this image).  But in this composite you can better grasp the general way the area formed.  As NASA says, it isn’t so much a valley as a low plain, the last remenants of a region of sandstone layers formed from massive sand dunes created at the edge of an inland sea millions of years ago.  The dunes compressed over time into sandstone, which was later covered with several more layers of harder gravel and agates, and then the entire area was uplifted and volcanic activity covered it over yet again with an even harder layer of lava.  It’s that hard rock over soft that creates the odd erosion shapes you see throughout the Valley.  The whole thing has eroded over tens of thousands of years, leaving behind this vast desert space, framed by distant plateaus and rises, and punctuated by the most surreal buttes you have ever seen. 

To get an appreciation of the massive forces involved in the region’s uplift, enter the valley from the north and the little town of Mexican Hat, so named for a huge balancing rock formation that looks just like an upside down Mexican hat perched on a tall pillar of stone.  You can literally see these massive layers of rock all around you taking these sharp bends from horizontal to near verticle, as if they were clay in some giant’s hands.

In the NASA image you are looking somewhat to the south.  The center of the Valley is in the foreground and you can almost make out the road that winds to Kayenta.  The platau in the distance is the southern edge of the uplift zone.  I think I can make out Church Rock there in the distance.

Somehow, I don’t know why exactly, this place is where my inner compass points.

Via Slate, more evidence that sexual orientation is hard wired into a person…

Lesbian brains differ from straight women’s brains. Last year, a study showed that gay men, like straight women and unlike straight men, processed a male pheromone in a sex-related part of the brain (the hypothalamus) but processed a female pheromone in a scent-related part of the brain. Now the authors of that study report differences among women: 1) Lesbians, like straight men, prefer the female pheromone and find it less irritating than the male pheromone. 2) Straight women find the female pheromone more irritating. 3) Straight men and women process same-sex pheromones in the scent area but process opposite-sex pheromones in the hypothalamus. 4) Lesbians process pheromones of both sexes in the scent area. Interpretations: 1) Sexual orientation is biologically based, not a choice. 2) Sexual orientation is more biologically based in men than in women. (For a summary of the study of gay men, click here. For Human Nature’s take on gay marriage, click here.)

Coming soon: Exodus president Alan Chambers discusses why breathing leads to sexual brokenness.