Blogaround

An adorable fluffy puppy. Image source.

1. Beijing bustle (posted April 16) "When the next train arrived, the doors opened and everyone raced to grab a seat, like an extremely aggressive game of musical chairs." Yes this is EXACTLY what it's like living in China.

2. To diagnose autism, we should be watching the eyes (posted April 2) Hmm. This is interesting and definitely worth researching further. But I'm pretty skeptical of the idea there could just be one simple test that diagnoses autism.

3. An Open Challenge To Ken Ham (posted April 8) This is an interesting idea, because it would force creationists to give a definitive list of all the "created kinds"- which means they believe all animals evolved from these "created kinds" that were on the ark in less than 6000 years. This forces young-earth creationists to admit that they do "believe in evolution" at this scale- and I bet if we look at the differences among animals in each group that supposedly evolved from the "created kinds" in 6000 years (oh wait, actually 4000 because the flood was some time around then, right?) we'll see that there are actually a lot of new, complex features that must have appeared after the flood. [Because even if the animals in each "kind" are all similar, they must have some big differences when you really look deeper into the biology.] If these kinds of features can appear (in only 4000 years! evolution never claimed to be THAT fast!) then that really calls into question the whole "microevolution can't ever really amount to anything" which is a fundamental tenet of creationism.

4. 6 Women on How the TRAP Laws Changed Their Lives (posted April 5)

5. 3 Ways To Tell If You’re Dating Mr. Right (Or Mr. Wrong) "Remember, if you miss God’s perfect will for your life, you fail at being a person."

6. Film Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age "Lines available to women who are over 40 years-old decrease substantially. For men, it’s the exact opposite: there’s more roles available to older actors."

7. So Long, Self: How Christianity Teaches You to Hate Yourself (posted April 3) "This is not good news. This is psychological abuse, sugar coated as it is with the vocabulary of love, and it’s made all the more sinister by its pretty packaging and by its inevitable marketing toward children before they are even old enough to say, 'Wait a second, these are awful things to say to a person!'"

8. After Staying a Virgin Until Marriage, I Couldn't Have Sex With My Husband (posted April 2) "I had worked so hard to remain a virgin for my husband, and now that I was married I was rewarded with nothing but stress and anxiety."

9. a story of becoming sick (posted April 6) "It’s so hard to fight against the message that being “healthy” means hurt yourself, that people who really care about their health can “push through the pain” and “feel the burn” and hold to the old adage of “no pain no gain.” That my attempts to avoid pain really just make me lazy. Selfish. Worthy of public ridicule."

10. What ‘white folks who teach in the hood’ get wrong about education (posted March 28) "I always say, if you’re coming into a place to save somebody then you’ve already lost because young people don’t need saving."

11. Profiting From the Myths About Black Women’s Bodies (posted April 6)