A thread to discuss the gender discrimination complaint against Columbia University brought by Nungesser, the student accused of rape by the woman with the mattress-carrying art project.

I don't have a terribly strong opinion on the underlying facts of this one; I tend to believe that if there are three people accusing the same guy of assault, there's probably something in it, but that's not conclusive. Legally, it's an interesting question, though, whether (under the assumption that all the facts go plaintiff's way) does Columbia have a responsibility to stop another student from publicly calling this guy a rapist? I don't actually have a feel for the extent to which a college is required to manage one student saying arguably defamatory things about another. And of course I'm disturbed by the idea that a college should be required to, or even entitled to, prevent someone from talking about having been assaulted.

One specific note on the complaint: plaintiff makes a lot of hay of various FB messages Sulkowicz sent him, including one in which she says "Fuck me in the ass", which the complaint refers to as "broach[ing] the topic of anal sex." Something I read on this, and I've lost the page, said that she's responded to that specific allegation by saying that the quoted language was a hyperbolic reference to having had a bad day, as in the Heathers line "Fuck me gently with a chainsaw," and from even the limited amount that's quoted, that looks plausible to me. If what she (I think I read somewhere) says about that allegation is borne out by a fuller context, Nungesser's lawyers didn't do him any favors at all by overreaching like that -- calling that kind of usage raising the topic of anal sex is either a straight up lie or the next thing to it.

Can't quite be certain what Sam Harris hopes to gain from publishing this.

New Thread.

First I tried this on my ipad, and it said I looked ten years older than I am. So I blamed the crappy camera, and tried it on my iphone, and it said I look nearly TWENTY years older than I am. I was all ready to invest in some expensive skin cream after that one. Then I tried a photo where I smiled and it said I was in my twenties. So this thing is pretty inaccurate, or all my sags and proportions change dramatically when I smile.

Two interesting posts from my LiveJournal friend SusanDennis, a woman in her 60s in Seattle. First, a summary of her life using birth control. If I'm doing the math right, the story begins in 1970. And then the backstory, on whether or not she ever wanted to be a mother.

There's no big expose here, but it's fascinating as a straightforward depiction of what it meant to be sexually active straight woman in the last half of the 20th century.

Yes.

IT may sound as if I'm exaggerating when I say that a high-tech, heated, warm-water-spraying bidet toilet seat ruined me for regular toilets, but I'm not. I don't know how you guys do it. I look at your normal toilets, the ones with seats that are as cold as ice, the ones that don't spray and buff your nethers with a soothing shower of cleansing H2O, and I shake my head. I look at your dry-wiping ways, and I wonder how your mom raised you. Don't you want to be clean? Don't you ever feel ... not so fresh?

I've had a Toto washlet for about six years. I even have a travel washlet that's an essential piece of trip gear.

Now, Manjoo and I come from water-washing cultures, so maybe this isn't so convincing. But my wife thought I was nuts when I wanted to spend hundreds of dollars on a washlet, and now she's an evangelist. My completely whitebread in-laws snickered, then used ours, then put one in their house. It's the way and the truth.

I recently became fundamentally fed up with grocery shopping, and figured that if the FreshDirect truck was always blocking my street, it might as well bring me food too. Verdict: terribly convenient, but am I overly fussy or does the food kind of suck? Meat is weird: my not-terribly fussy family has decided that FD ground beef is absolutely unacceptable, and other meats have also been peculiar. And produce is iffy as well.

Also, has anyone done the math on the environmental impact of delivery? I'm figuring that in my case at least, it's the same truck that would be going to a supermarket, it just makes a few (but not many) more stops. But I'm not sure.

--He was refusing avocado and I reminded him that when he was a baby, avocado was his staple food. "But I was thinking, when I grow up, I'm not going to eat avocado anymore."

--Always, always negotiating to watch movies. Also seems to be debilitated by having to take massive dumps that you'd expect to come out of Paul Bunyan, not a four-year-old boy. At the playground today, he was just sitting on the ground, staring into the distance. I said, "You have to poop, don't you?" "If I poop, can I watch a movie?"

--The opening chords of "Welcome to the Jungle" start to play and I say "[Kid!] Do you know where you are?" "In the forest!"

It's a work in progress. What about your kids?

Sifu sends along this article. These two lady-geneticists submitted a paper to a journal, and the not-double-blinded reviewer wrote:

It would probably also be beneficial to find one or two male biologists to work with (or at least obtain internal peer review from, but better yet as active co-authors), in order to serve as a possible check against interpretations that may sometimes be drifting too far away from empirical evidence into ideologically based assumptions.

and other fine remarks.

You know, I always have a secondary layer of surprise when racist/sexist people are also flabbergastingly tone-deaf about their offensiveness. Obviously the underlying bias is the actual problem, but the overtness is always a bit surprising. Like, "How dumb are you, on top of your sexism problem?"

Consider this video

And these pictures.

Apparently at yesterday's Supreme Court arguments on gay marriage, Justice Ginsberg, in response to an argument that the fundamental purpose of marriage is biological procreation, asked about why we do now allow couples in their seventies to get married. I can't believe that John Bursch (the Michigan assistant attorney general arguing against gay marriage) passed up the opportunity to note that the law has traditionally recognized the fertile octogenarian as a live possibility.

Sifu Tweety writes: Blume asked me today "what do we do" to support the protesters in Baltimore and elsewhere, and I had no idea. Stay out of the way, obviously, present hard-ish truths to terrible-ish facebook friends, sure, that too. But somebody must need money, right? Who? Who can we just send cash, that will support the painfully exposed, desperate people on the front lines of the protests in Baltimore? We can help that way, maybe; how? Who? The NAACP? The Nation of Islam? Do they even take donations? My enwhitled ass is at a loss.

Heebie's take: Good question! I don't know!

Khamenei chiding the US for police brutality and racism is some next level trolling.

I found this so stupid that I took a photo. It's on all bathroom stall doors in my building.

"Which ones only smoke when they drink?

If you can't tell, neither can anyone else. A smoker is a smoker."

WHAT NO.

Pres Anonymous asks: Since all Unfogged commenters live, or have lived, in either Pittsburgh, Boston, or the exurbs of Chicago, I want to beg of you this favor. Help a brother find a place to live in the exurbs of Chicago? It would be for 1 or 2 years only, ideally a studio apartment, ideally with a very short commute. The job is near the "Great Lakes" Metra station. Do people commute on "Metra"? If so, where from? If not, why not? Also, how frozen and snowy is this area really, wasteland-wise?

Thanks a lot for your help!

Heebie's take: I have no take!

Will says "What a great list to have access to!"

Heebie's take: I was mulling over what a great word "two-timer" is this morning, having caught Do It Again on the radio.

But not really just Baltimore, because this is clearly a national problem.

Hawaiian Punch got her ears pierced yesterday. There is definitely a class component of when you get your kid's ears pierced, ranging from the baby/toddler side of things to the tween/onset of puberty side of things (and we have friends who feel strongly on both extremes). Since this was for Hawaii's 6th birthday and I did not have much of an opinion beyond "jewelry is fun!", I think we're squarely in the middle.

I'm reading Rivka Galchen's American Innovations, which is not for everyone, but is very smart and skillfully done. Galchen grew up in Norman, Oklahoma, the daughter of secular Israeli immigrants. She's under 40, writes for the New Yorker, has an MD, and has already written one award-winning novel. What kind of crazy tiger-immigrant parenting turns out someone like this? I'll let Galchen tell it.

First, this article on the benefit of college is stupid. It's taking two large studies demonstrating that borderline students have better life outcomes if they end up going to college, and implying that everyone would get the better life if everyone went to college. Obviously the haves will always disassociate from the have-nots, and those who can barely make the haves current hurdle will benefit. But if you try to get everyone to play by the haves' rules, they'll just ratchet the game up a notch and find a new segregating tool.

But more importantly, AM I WRONG? The article mentions "undermatching":

Undermatching is the term that describes when an academically qualified student chooses to attend a higher education institution that is "less selective," than their academic ability. The term "less selective" not only describes the academic profile of the students at an institution but it also describes a college's retention rate and graduation rate. "Open access," institutions, like community colleges, tend to have poorer retention rates, graduation rates, and lack the support systems necessary to address many of the barriers faced by low-income/first-generation college students. The evidence from studies shows that students who undermatch are less likely to graduate from college. Research also shows that high/higher achieving students of any socio-economic group should go to the most selective school that will admit them and that, once there, graduate at higher rates.

I've long advocated that students should dodge crazy debt by undermatching, although I never used that word. I suppose I should reconsider that. Also the last sentence in the blockquote has weird grammar.

Dairy Queen writes: Polyphonic overtone singing explained visually. And a series of how-tos here. She's so sweet faced! A good look with the eerie sounds. Show the videos to your children and the splitting of voice frequency may come to a shower near you...