LeliaThomas.Com

Del.icio.us Tuesday, June 20, 2006

• Islamic fundamentalist, you say? Go swimming this summer in a suit–an effing suit!
• Workrave is a program that assists in the recovery and prevention of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). The program frequently alerts you to take micro-pauses, rest breaks and restricts you to your daily limit.
• Connection Keeper will prevent your net connection from appearing idle or inactive. Uses almost no bandwidth or system resources. If connection is lost, Connection Keeper can automatically dial back in. H4wt.
• I’ve decided that this LiveScience.Com article, Women’s Brains React Surprisingly Fast to Erotic Images, was led by a team of sex-starved male chauvinist pigs scientists. OF COURSE women’s brains react quickly to erotic images. Just because the outward appearance of the very pants we wear doesn’t give away our sexual feelings does not mean we don’t have them. Damn researcher assholes. Why is it so surprising that we have reactions as quickly as men? Perhaps if these researchers spent as much time with their wives in the bedroom as they do around testing labs, they’d be less surprised by results such as these.
• The irresistible rise of cybersex makes my skin crawl. “Gamers can write programs to give their characters unique hairstyles and outfits, as well as useful objects like boats and aircraft. …Now some gamers are using these programming tools to give their avatars genitalia and erotic outfits, and to have them engage in animated cybersex.”

Special Thanks

I’m currently in the process of moving to Melbourne, Australia, so my close friend Kavita is kindly posting my pre-written entries on a daily basis. Without her, this site would be on hiatus until I get settled in and have net access again! To support her, why not check out her comics?

About Del.icio.us Tuesday

Every Tuesday, I post unique and fun links that may be of interest. Most of these links have been found via del.icio.us, though not always. If you have a link that you’d like me to add or mention at any point in time, drop me a line at leliathomas@gmail.com and I’ll consider it.

Comments ordered from oldest to newest.

michaelpanda

hey!

i actually came to your blog via your comment on conbinibento and i just had to leave a comment because i really like the job you did designing this site! Simple, fast loading, yet engaging and professional looking. Wonderful! I had a glance through the other sites you did on the web design gallery and can see the same design asthetic carried through to those as well - very nice!

On a slightly unrelated note however, I was wondering if maybe you didn’t jump to a conclusion on livescience.com article about “Women’s brains react suprisingly fast to erotic images”? I read the article and it seems that the “surprisingness” of it is is not that women’s brains react quickly to erotica, but that they react much more quickly to erotica than all the other images they were exposed to.

As far as I can see, there is on basis for gender comparison at all, and certainly no grounds for throwing around loaded words like “sex starved” or “chauvinist”. In fact, the article didn’t even mention whether a similar test was conducted on men - we don’t know, for example, whether men’s brains react “20 milliseconds faster to erotica than non-erotic pictures” the same way as women’s do. What about if this was the first time such an experiment has ever been conducted in either men or women? In that case, wouldn’t the label of “surprising” be appropriate, especially as it is used in the article, to indicate that certain imagery provokes a much faster neural response than most others in the human brain (male or female)?

There simply isn’t enough to go on in that four paragraph “article”, I feel, to justify your rather harsh words. To illustrate my point, imagine that all the gender roles in the article were flipped: male brains were found to react “surprisingly fast” to erotica and the lead researcher was female. (incidentally, you don’t know if most of the researchers on the team were male or female - just because the lead is male, doesn’t mean most of the scientists who actually conducted the experiment weren’t female). What about if I then posted a blog entry decrying the scientists as “sex starved female femi-nazis”. Wouldn’t it offend you and inspire more than a bit of outrage?

As the saying goes, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If you don’t feel there is basis for me to libel the scientists and make speculations about their sex life if they were females, then why on earth is it okay to do the same just because they happen to have a penis? Does that suddenly make it open season for words like “sex-starved” “asshole” and “chauvinist” which have no basis whatsoever on the innocent research being conducted (and poorly reported by livescience, i might add)?

Anyway, not trying to start a flame war but just thought I’d share a perspective from the other side.

Good luck with your move to Australia! Mmm… sunny beaches would be great right about now!!

(though i suppose it is technically winter down there at the moment…)