In transmutation news:

I know, I know. We’ll be glittering beings, richer than God, with hats and shoes and mattresses all made of gold.

Ah. Bugger.

And I suppose there’s the small matter of the electricity bill, running costs, maintenance, staffing, and so forth. Roughly $1 billion a year.

You may resume your dreary, humdrum lives, with mattresses made of foam rubber, springs, and polyester.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Or, The Thigh Straps Were To Ensure Comfort. 

One for ladies of child-bearing age:

And so, obviously,

This patented invention from 1963 was designed to help women give birth easily

📹Hashem Al-Ghaili pic.twitter.com/VBrlB6N1L7

— Game of X (@froggyups) January 11, 2025

I can tell you’re impressed. The net and bell combo is a lovely touch. “In case medical personnel are momentarily distracted.” 

The patent, from 1963, can be found here.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

And is therefore much more special than you:

That’s it, I’m joining Westboro pic.twitter.com/3CFGnrKDyJ

— Katie Herzog (@kittypurrzog) June 5, 2024

In this hour-long podcast, Hannah McElhinney, above, and her equally self-preoccupied associate Rudy Jean Rigg – “teacher and creative” – can be heard blathering at length – and sometimes seemingly at random – about “queer temporality” and “how LGBTQ+ people experience time differently to straight and/or cisgender people.”

Though conscience compels me to warn you, it’s an hour you won’t get back. Indeed, the sheer arse-chafing tedium of it is difficult to put into words.

Among the deep wisdom on offer, this:

This is the rhetorical pattern for much of what follows. There’s no shortage of self-reference, and paying attention to one’s queerness, and much airing of niche woes – the endless agonies of being a “creator,” a “creative,” and an “influencer.” And of course the terrible burden of being so much more complicated and interesting than all those other people. The ones who experience time in a humdrum, heteronormative way.

The whole thing – which I endured, heroically – calls to mind some kind of therapy session for the terminally tedious and inadequate.

We also learn,

So. Much to chew on.

Or choke on, should you happen to be a physicist.

When not experiencing time differently – and showering the credulous with tales to “validate” and “inspire” – Ms McElhinney and her fellow Bringers Of Arcane Knowledge feel a need to,

So, clearly, the rumblings on offer are entirely free of conformity or modish pretension of any kind.

Via Katie Herzog.

The subject of pretentious timekeeping has cropped up here before.

Come, dear reader. Let us visit the publication now laughingly referred to as Scientific American. In particular, an “analysis” piece by Juan P Madrid, in which we’re told,

Dr Madrid, an assistant professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, begins his attempt to persuade with a tale of poetic drama:

I know. The very stuff of amazement. Brings a tear to the eye.

Apparently, the word collision is, for Dr Madrid, much too brutal and masculine when referring to the unstoppable convergence of two galaxies, and the ultimate merging of the supermassive black holes at their centres – an event that will entail the sling-shotting of countless stars and their orbiting planets, and which may release energy equivalent to around 100 million supernova explosions, and subsequently be detectable halfway across the universe.

A mere hug, you see. All that kindness.

Here, Dr Madrid’s own use of language – specifically, the word reconsider – is somewhat misleading and just a little coy. The reconsidering he has in mind would of course be enforced by those suitably enlightened, much like the author himself – as hinted at with enthusiasm later in the piece:

So, not so much a reconsidering, then, as a coerced neuroticism. A mandatory affectation, on which career progress may very much depend. But hey, where’s the fun in being a pretentious and neurotic scold if you don’t have the power to make others jump through hoops?

And so, when not detecting neutron stars and gravitational waves, astronomers will be expected to submit their findings to someone of “a different gender or ethnicity” to sift out any language that may conceivably cause distress to those determined to seek it out. “This type of conscious engagement,” we’re assured, “can only be beneficial.” And not, say, a farcical waste of time that’s better spent elsewhere.

Terms deemed “needlessly vicious,” and which render Dr Madrid indignant and reaching for tissues, include cannibalism, harassment, starvation, strangulation, stripping and suffocation:

It’s all terribly oppressive – for the implausibly faint of heart, I mean. And should a colleague carelessly refer to a planet being stripped of its ozone layer by a catastrophic gamma-ray burst, this is obviously “misogynistic language” and a basis for the sternest of hands-on-hips chiding.

Given the unequal distribution of interest, aptitude, and cognitive wherewithal, one might wonder why. Alas, as so often, the mystery persists.

The implication being that hearing an occasional use of the word cannibalism or stripping in reference to astronomical phenomena will somehow, in ways never quite specified, deflect an otherwise promising astronomer from their calling, despite an uncommon focus and years of study. Because female astronomers, and brown astronomers, and especially female brown astronomers, are so immensely delicate and likely to be traumatised by such descriptive terms.

At which point, readers may wish to ponder whether the best people to be doing astronomy, or teaching astronomy, or to be making workplace rules for astronomers, are the kinds of people who mouth dogmatic assertions without any trace of supporting logic, and who are distracted, even distressed, by hearing the word collision being used to describe a collision.

The strange trajectory of Scientific American has been mentioned here before.

Update:

Before anyone quibbles, the phrase “halfway across the universe” is merely a figure of speech. The actual estimate for how far away the gravitational waves could be detected by beings with technology comparable to our own is 3.25 million light years. So, for a hug, plenty of oomph.

Via Darleen, in the comments. Which you’re reading, of course.

Scrolling through X, formerly Twitter, two items caught my eye. The first, from the publication laughingly referred to as Scientific American, where we are told, in no uncertain terms:

I’ll give you a minute to process that. Let it roll around your mind. And do note the loaded, rather question-begging word inequity.

The second item, some terribly modern sporting news:

A trans-identified male student seized the title of "Fastest Sophomore Girl" at a cross country championship in Maine this past weekend.

Soren Stark-Chessa, who beat the female racers by 90 seconds, previously ranked 172nd in the Freshman Boys category.https://t.co/xiwRuPJI2J

— REDUXX (@ReduxxMag) October 23, 2023

In videos of the race, several spectators can be heard shouting, not without cause, “Way to cheat, bro.”

In sports that are dependent on skills other than speed, endurance, and raw power – say, archery or shooting – the difference in peak male and female performance may be negligible. But where such things are decisive – as in most sports – to not concede the obvious requires a feat of ideological contortion – a kind of learned stupidity.

And as seen by the inclusion and near-inevitable triumph of Mr Stark-Chessa, our “Fastest Sophomore Girl,” pretending at an Olympic level is very much in fashion.

See also:

As performance coach Steve Magness notes here,

And cheating, as seen above, would presumably become an applauded norm. Or a heckled farce. I suppose it could go either way:

But hey, pride.

It turns out that those inherent biological differences are quite important. In terms of elite sprinting and endurance running, they result in a male advantage of around ten or twelve percent. Ditto cycling, swimming, high-jumping, skating, and many other sports, where performance differences by sex range from around five percent to, in long-jumping, around twenty.

For elite male and female weightlifters – in the same weight class – the difference in performance is around thirty percent. It’s also worth noting that men have greater grip strength than similarly trained women, about sixty percent more, and have vastly greater punching ability – more than double.

As Mr Magness adds here,

But as we’ve seen – and seen quite vividly – we mustn’t expect too much from the current, scrupulously woke, editor-in-chief of Scientific American.

Updated via the comments.