Marriage Research - Volunteers Needed

I did check up on this study, and it does seem to be legitimate.  If you're interested in participating, you can email Cristina here for more information.

WTF: Massive Oil Spill Was No Big Deal?

So were we just dumbshits to get all upset over that ginormous oil spill in the Gulf?  Did the BP fairy godmother wave her magic wand and poof! make it all disappear like a big, greasy pumpkin?  Have we all just been big, screaming drama queens about this trifling little incident?

Your Head Trucker is no oceanographer or marine biologist, so he can't answer those questions.  But here's an excerpt from an article by the folks at Nature who quote some experts in those areas, so read and judge for yourself, fellas:

More scientists have come forward to criticize a US government report on the fate of the oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexico during the recent Deepwater Horizon debacle.

Earlier this month the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration stated that only 26% of the 4.9 million barrels that spewed from the BP well was “residual” in the Gulf. A number of scientists interviewed by Nature (see: Upbeat oil report questioned) and Science questioned the positive spin put on this report .

Now researchers from the respected Georgia Sea Grant programme have joined the fray. In their report they say that up to 79% of the oil from the spill remains.

“One major misconception is that oil that has dissolved into water is gone and, therefore, harmless,” says Charles Hopkinson, director of Georgia Sea Grant a researcher at thee University of Georgia Franklin College of Arts and Sciences (press release).

“The oil is still out there, and it will likely take years to completely degrade.”

The UGA report is available here.

And here's a CNN clip about what scientists at the University of South Florida in St. Pete have discovered:

Keeping Up with the Bonobos

And the albatresbians.  The New York Times Magazine features a thoughtful, well-written piece on "Can Animals Be Gay?" that you should read.  Excerpt:

Various forms of same-sex sexual activity have been recorded in more than 450 different species of animals by now, from flamingos to bison to beetles to guppies to warthogs. A female koala might force another female against a tree and mount her, while throwing back her head and releasing what one scientist described as “exhalated belchlike sounds.” Male Amazon River dolphins have been known to penetrate each other in the blowhole. Within most species, homosexual sex has been documented only sporadically, and there appear to be few cases of individual animals who engage in it exclusively. For more than a century, this kind of observation was usually tacked onto scientific papers as a curiosity, if it was reported at all, and not pursued as a legitimate research subject. Biologists tried to explain away what they’d seen, or dismissed it as theoretically meaningless — an isolated glitch in an otherwise elegant Darwinian universe where every facet of an animal’s behavior is geared toward reproducing. One primatologist speculated that the real reason two male orangutans were fellating each other was nutritional. . . .

These ideas generally aim to explain only particular behaviors in a particular species. So far, the only real conclusion this relatively small body of literature seems to point to, collectively, is a kind of deflating, meta-conclusion: a single explanation of homosexual behavior in animals may not be possible, because thinking of “homosexual behavior in animals” as a single scientific subject might not make much sense. “Biologists want to build these unified theories to explain everything they see,” Vasey told me. So do journalists, he added — all people, really. “But none of this lends itself to a linear story. My take on it is that homosexual behavior is not a uniform phenomenon. Having one unifying body of theory that explains why it’s happening in all these different species might be a chimera.”

The point of heterosexual sex, Vasey said, no matter what kind of animal is doing it, is primarily reproduction. But that shouldn’t trick us into thinking that homosexual behavior has some equivalent, organizing purpose — that the two are tidy opposites. “All this homosexual behavior isn’t tied together by that sort of primary function,” Vasey said. Even what the same-sex animals are doing varies tremendously from species to species. But we’re quick to conceive of that great range of activities in the way it most handily tracks to our anthropomorphic point of view: put crassly, all those different animals just seem to be doing gay sex stuff with one another. As the biologist Marlene Zuk explains, we are hard-wired to read all animal behavior as “some version of the way people do things” and animals as “blurred, imperfect copies of humans.”

What I Say:  Your Head Trucker is mildly amused by the convoluted attempts of scientists and philosophers to fit homosex into some rigid, all-encompassing Grand Theory of Life; which to me seems just as silly and irrelevant as the fundamentalists trying to fit all the messy, multiform variety of the cosmos into the straitjacket of Biblical literalism.

Both attempts are very short-sighted and missing the point:  namely, that there is a divine and jovial mystery at the heart of things whose depths no one can plumb. 

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

--Hamlet, Act I.

As I see it, one might as well try to explain why Australia is where it is and not, say, in the Gulf of Mexico.  Or why the sky is blue, or why stars twinkle but planets don't, or why we say the sun rises in the east when we could if we wanted to just as easily say it rises in the west.  Or why in certain cases the precise compound curve of a lip, a shoulder, a hip, or a buttock makes another person weak at the knees.

Very clever fellows have, indeed, long since come up with explanations for some of these things; but I submit that these delightful events would still be occurring and giving daily joy had no explanation ever been devised.  Explanation is not the same as justification; and some things need no justification at all.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty:  that is all ye know, and all ye need to know.

--Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn.

LGBT Marriage Research Study

Your Head Trucker has received a request from Cristina Reitz-Krueger, a doctoral student at the University of Virginia, to post this invitation to participate in a research study she is conducting.  I've checked her out and verified that she is indeed a legitimate researcher, so in the interest of advancing scientific knowledge, here you go:

Engaged volunteers needed!

I am looking for volunteers for a study of attitudes towards marriage and parenthood among engaged couples. The study consists of a 25-30 minute online survey. To qualify for the study, you must be 20-35 years old, live in the U.S., and plan to marry or have a commitment ceremony within the next 365 days. You and your romantic partner must not have children, and this must be the first marriage for both of you.

You can:

- Help a doctoral candidate;

- Increase the pool of scientific knowledge;

- Support research on marriage and families; and

- Spend some time thinking about your relationship!

I am working with Dr. Charlotte J. Patterson, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. This study has been approved by the University of Virginia Institutional Review Board #2009025800.

If you and/or your romantic partner are interested in participating or want further information, please email me at survey.couples@gmail.com. I will send you a link that you can use to access the study.

Thanks!

Meanwhile, for those of you who would like to do your own cruising research, seems there's a new iPhone app called Grindr that makes it easier than ever to find tricks subjects for study everywhere you go.  What won't they think of next?