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These awards are given out for "the biggest breach of the Ninth Commandment in pursuit of the Creationist cause", i.e. lying through your teeth in support of the notion that "God did it". This is only the second annual Crocky award, the 2008 Crocky going to Kent Hovind. Yes, the Kent Hovind whose college education (Bachelor, Master's, and Doctorate, all three) comes from a non-accredited degree mill, who offered $250,000 for anyone who can prove "Evolution" — according to his definition, which conflates the Big Bang theory, Nebular hypothesis, Abiogenesis, and Evolution, and judged by him and him alone — who issued false DMCA claims to get YouTube to remove videos debunking Creationism that containing segments from his uncopyrighted "education" videos, who started the Dinosaur Adventure Land theme park without even getting a building permit, and is currently on year two of a ten-year prison stay for tax evasion to the tune of $600,000.
The 2009 Crocky winner is right up there with Hovind:
(Yes, first-runner-up Eric Hovind is Kent Hovind's son. Apple didn't fall far from that tree.) Tags: pseudoscience, religion, science
Current Location: La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina
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You've got to be kidding me:
"I made a mistake and I sincerely apologize," the statement said. "I deeply regret the comments I made [not the affairs themselves, apparently, nor the apparent corruption] in what I believed to be a private conversation. This is a private matter and I ask that everyone respect the privacy of all involved."
If this had been a simple affair, I'd agree, but a lawmaker sleeping with lobbyists, especially those from companies who stand to benefit most from his position on certain committees, reeks of quid pro quo. You want us all to just go away? Fuck you. You forfeited privacy the minute you behaved like a corrupt little cretin. (Why the fuck do we allow corporate lobbyists, anyway?)
See now why I limit the List O' Corrupt Jackasses to governors and national office-holders? Fucking thing would get big enough to swallow the internet whole if I included corrupt shits from the state legislators. Tags: corruption, politics
Current Location: La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina
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Body Mass Index, which is simply mass (in kg) divided by height (in m) squared, is a tool ostensibly for estimating if a person is in a healthy weight range or not. It was designed for use in studies of populations, but has become widely used in individual diagnosis.
There's some obvious failings in this system. Since it ignores body type, it can penalize people who are muscular or have larger than average bones, or rate perfectly healthy people who just have higher than average metabolic rates as "underweight". Scaling with the inverse of height squared makes it rate tall people as fatter than short people.
Despite these caveats, BMI is used by doctors (who should know better!), many insurance companies in the US — with people with high BMIs being strapped with higher premiums or denied coverage — and many laypeople looking for a quick way to estimate if they need to diet or not. (I'm guilty of that last one myself.)
A big problem, particularly for laypeople, is that the categories are poorly named. They are: Underweight (BMI <18.5), Normal (18.5—25), Overweight (25—30), and Obese (>30). Studies, however, have found that so-called "overweight" people are actually more healthy on average than "normal" people. (An at-a-glance example, and a more in-depth example.) Without knowing that, someone may do herself a disservice by dieting her way out of the misnamed but actually healthier "overweight" category.
Of course, while the biological mechanism dictating what we instinctively find attractive is healthiness, our perception of what is attractive — like almost anything in human nature — can be (heavily) modified by culture. Humans have a pretty solid track record of doing crazy things in the interest of fitting into their cultures' definition of attractive. This is the Hollywood and Supermodel Age, where thinner is viewed as more attractive, so what we find attractive should be the Normal BMI range, even if optimal health is actually a little heavier, right? I'll let you be the judge, with this gallery of photos of mostly women labeled with corresponding BMI category.
Personally, I'd hit all of the "normal" and "overweight" women. In fact, I think "slender" and "normal", respectively, would be better category names. Additionally, a lot of the self-deprecating remarks I've heard women, some of them smoking-hot, make about themselves when they find out I'm a leg man suddenly make sense: they probably think I'm after this. (I'm in agreement with the stream owner: those are the typical movie legs, i.e. what girls are being conditioned to think attractive legs look like.) For the record: that girl's legs are too thin for my taste. My taste is both heavier and the range a lot broader than most people seem to think: what few legs are visible in the "normal" and "overweight" girls are just fine by me.
We come in a broad range of size and shapes, and we wouldn't have gotten that way if our natural idea of attractiveness was as narrow as media pretends it is. That's just basic natural selection: unattractive people wouldn't get to reproduce as often, causing those genes to slowly fade out. You look the way you do because your features were attractive, so stop fretting so much about your looks. Tags: body image
Current Location: La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina
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