Kids and Santa

We were probably a little more honest with our kids about Santa than most parents. We had to explicitly tell them to “keep the secret” from some of their cousins. Thus we avoided little unplanned revelations like this (thanks to Rob for forwarding it to me).

But our girls did somehow manage to find the contents of the top shelf in the work room with both volumes of The Kinsey Report and other books that had more photos that words. Which reminds me. I think there is still room on that shelf for this book.

J-cups

Breasts are getting larger in the U.K. Stores are introducing J-cup bras for the first time.

Not that I need a bra or anything.

And I prefer women to not wear bras, or even clothes for that matter. But I thought someone might find it interesting. Some guys are into the big breast thing. Even if I were I don’t think it is worth going to a repressive state like the U.K. for those sort of thrills.

Posted in Sex

Habitat destruction leads to extinction

Via Phil we discover there is a species that has recently been pushed to the edge of extinction in the U.S. and Europe. It has come as a bit of a surprise to officials on both continents. They are comparing it to the Giant Panda and the house sparrow:

“When the bamboo forests that the Giant Panda lives in were cut down, the bear became threatened with extinction.”

“We learned this lesson with the house sparrow. Twenty years ago we thought, ‘why bother to get one?’ since they’re so common,” he said.

“Next thing you know, the sparrow was on the threatened species list and they’re almost impossible to find in the Netherlands.”

Yet despite clear evidence it’s because of the reduction in their habitat I haven’t seen anything in the news or heard of any proposed legislation to protect this endangered species. I can’t imagine it would be difficult for the species to recover and save it for future generations. It would require some enforcement to make sure their habitat was restored but I’m sure millions of people would accept the job of habitat inspector even at minimum wage. I’ll bet some people would even pay to have a job like that.

I don’t know for certain but I have to wonder if the reason for avoidance of the issue is because it’s primarily women that are destroying the necessary old growth vital to the survival of the species. If so, I don’t want to hear how women are more caring and how the planet would be better if women were in charge. Of course women, as is typical, will probably blame it on men anyway:

Did the ‘Brazilian’ kill the pubic louse? [section P134]

The drop in pubic lice in women was around 2000 and coincided with the introduction of new trends in pubic hair removal.

Posted in Sex

Women and guns

Uncle asks, “But, you know, who can’t watch chicks in bikinis firing belt fed machine guns?”

Well, if you must ask… most women probably find that very offensive.

I find it (yeah, I know, I’m weird) a little annoying. Guns and nearly naked women just don’t go together for me. These women don’t really know what they are doing with the guns. They get so few rounds on target and so many in the dirt that I find it irritating.

I could go for some of the groupies (there are some hints of this phenomena at times) at Boomershoot to show their appreciation after the show but not as a part of it. For some reason the simultaneous combination of sex and guns just leaves me a little bit cold.

That doesn’t mean I don’t realize there is a fairly large segment of the male (and some female) population that finds the combination very stimulating. I just don’t get it on the emotional level and I fear it hurts our cause with the majority of women.

Ho hum

Depending on what your definition of a robot is sex with robots is old hat. But what this guy has in mind is a taking it little bit further:

According to Netherlands University student David Levy, robots may become so human-like in the near future that people could fall in love with them, marry them, and have sex with them.

He recently completed his PhD on the subject of human-robot relationships. He stated that “At first, sex with robots might be considered geeky, but once you have a story like “I had sex with a robot and it was great!” appear in a magazine like Cosmo, I’d expect many people to jump on the bandwagon.”

Existing toys include these (not safe for work):

Quote of the day–P. J. O’Rourke

. . . don’t I sometimes get called a Nazi?  Yes, name-calling, in which conservatives such as myself are loathe to indulge, is a favorite tactic of the liberals.  I have often been called a Nazi, and, although it is unfair, I don’t let it bother me.  I don’t let it bother me for one simple reason.  No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal.

P. J. O’Rourke
Give War a Chance
[He has a good point. And on a more practical note you can probably end the name calling if you use this line.–Joe]

Dr. Joe’s cure for infertility

More evidence Dr. Joe’s cure for everything (more sex) works.

Posted in Sex

Pr0nnovations

This weekend I’ll be doing Boomershoot 2008 prep and other chores but some people will be here (San Francisco–of course):

The latest adult industry “‘pr0nnovations” will be on display in San Francisco this weekend at Arse Elektronika, a three-day expo featuring sex machines, brainy talks and weird performances (including the Electric Orifice Orchestra, in which “extravagantly dressed performers use live biofeedback from muscular interior walls of their bodies to create a multimedia interactive show”).

Animals of Glacier National Park

Yesterday we went to the east side of the park and again saw stunning beauty. Here is but one picture of mountains and a glacier:

I also took pictures of some animals. While still in the car we were able to get amazingly close. One of them, with a little coaxing got into the car with me and I took it back to the condo where it spent the night in bed with me. I know it will never be domesticated but even if it is wild it’s fun to have in the bedroom. It’s the last picture below. I call her Barbara.

Interesting use for them

Men have a source of potentially life-saving stem cells between their legs:

A team of American researchers has found a way to easily identify stem cells in the testicles of adult mice that can be coaxed to turn into brain cells, muscle cells, heart cells, blood cells and even blood vessels.

One day, they say, male patients may be able to turn to their own testicles as a source of stem cells to repair an ailing heart or kidney or to fix the brain damage caused by Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease.

The procedure would involve removing a small piece of testicle – about the same amount used for a biopsy.

The first question that comes to my mind is, “Can you repair the damage you did to my testicle?” They don’t answer that question in the article. I presume the answer is yes, but I’d want to make sure before I authorized a major overhaul of my other body parts. I’d hate to have the rest of my body in full working order and then find they had scrapped out my testicles in the process.

U.K. wakes up?

Why didn’t they see it coming before realizing our sex lives are our own business?

But this suggestion from the government’s sisterhood also demonstrates the migration of individuals’ control over their lives to the state and beyond. As more power and decisions are passed to Europe – without our consent – so politicians have to find something to busy themselves with, and what better challenge than 60 million people who fornicate, drink to excess, smoke, eat too much salty and fatty food and harbour all sorts of antisocial and criminal intent?

This is a presumption of a historic scale and arrogance which is best seen in the systems set up under Tony Blair to scrutinise every movement, communication and transaction we make. But at least we now understand the extent of the takeover. According to a YouGov poll released with Liberty’s report ‘Overlooked: Surveillance and Personal Privacy in Britain’ last week, 60 per cent of us believe we live in a surveillance state and only one in five trusts the government to keep our personal details confidential. Unless controlled, a government of long standing is by nature leaky, incompetent and greedy for ever more power.

Although it is often true it is “better late than never” I just wonder that if in this case it is too late to avoid a disaster.

But at least they are seeing and saying the right things:

It is argued that we have the Data Protection Act and the information commissioner, but despite the latter’s agitation, nothing has stopped the 500,000 interceptions of private communication each year, the total surveillance of motorways, the building of the ID card data base, the creepy children’s database and expansion of the police DNA database.

The Canadian system hasn’t worked perfectly, especially since 9/11, but Canadians shudder at what is happening in the UK, at the abandon with which we allow government more and more control over our lives and our futures.

A revolution of thought needs to take place. The personal information of innocent people, their digital footprints, their movements, as well as the things consenting adults get up to must not be allowed to become the property of the state or the subject of regulation by a lot of po-faced, reformed dope-smokers who can think of little but the improvement of their fellow human beings.

Things you maybe didn’t know

There may be a surprise or two here for some people, Fifteen new things to know about sex, but mostly it’s old stuff or stuff you would figure out if you spent a minute thinking about it. But this, exercise unleashes a bounce bras can’t handle–Breasts fly up and down a distance of up to 8 inches, was new to me:

Scurr recruited 70 women, including students and faculty from the University of Portsmouth, with bra sizes ranging from A-cup to extra-large (DD, E, FF, G, H, HH, J and JJ were included).

Each woman walked, jogged and ran while wearing different bra types. During the exercise, Scurr took biomechanical measurements, including the amount of breast movement in three directions: up-and-down, side-to-side and in-and-out.

During walking exercise, the women’s breasts moved relatively the same amount in all directions. But when participants sped up to a jog or run, their breasts moved proportionally more in some directions than others: More than 50 percent of the total movement was in the up-down direction, 22 percent side-to-side and 27 percent in-and-out.

The overall pattern of the movement resembled a figure-8.

I guess I haven’t been watching enough breasts under a variety of situations. I’ll have to put that on my list of things to do.

Posted in Sex

I just love it when they write sexy stuff

Among my daily browsing fare are articles on sex research. I love the tension between the passionate subject and the dispassionate terminology and phraseology. Example:

In addition, male preference for salivary exchange could function to introduce substances such as hormones or proteins into women’s mouths that may influence their mating psychology, and even make them more sexually receptive.

I hope it wasn’t taxpayer money dispensed as research grants to “discover” that a French kiss might make a woman “hot”–even if does provide me with considerable reading enjoyment.

Quote of the day–Clayton Cramer

A politician has to wear a mask that hides who he is really is–to be different people to different interest groups–in order to get elected. For a lot of homosexuals, unless they choose to be open about it, they also have to wear a mask that hides who they really are. Perhaps all these gay politicians are the consequence of people who get used to wearing a mask about their sexuality–and find it very easy to then leapfrog into politics, a career that does not require, but certainly encourages equivocation, shading the truth, and flat-out lies.

None of this would matter if Craig had either been discreet, or intelligent. But he managed to fail on both counts with this stunt in Minneapolis, and made all of this relevant.

Clayton Cramer
August 29, 2007
I Just Noticed That Larry Craig’s Three Kids Are All Adopted
[I disagree with a lot of Cramer opinions about gays, but I think he has it right this time.–Joe]

Shudder

I HATE being shocked. I really, really, hate it. Mild shocks that some people find “interesting” or “entertaining” cause me to question their sanity. Even therapeutic use of electricity puts me in a really grumpy mood. Don’t bother to remind me about having two degrees in electrical engineering. I am in control of electricity. It goes where I want it to and it does what I want it to do. It doesn’t flow through any part of my body unless a doctor or therapist prescribes it.

With that background imagine the response I had when reading this report (found via DrX):

It was obvious that the couple was engaged in sexual relations when they died. The deaths apparently were related to the use of an elaborate apparatus utilizing electrical current for stimulation. A heavy metal rod measuring 22 cm in length and 2.5 cm in diameter was inserted 18 cm into the male’s rectum. A small wire was attached by a rubber band leading to a Variac voltage regulator. There was a metal rod 20 cm long with a rounded tip 1 cm wide tapering to 0.75 cm in the shaft. A metal ring was attached to the exposed end and the male partner’s index finger was touching it. The rod was inserted 18 cm into the female’s rectum with a similar wire attached and leading to the voltage regulator. The regulator was set at 90 volts, but the dial could be turned up to 130 volts. In the room nearby were other stimulation devices, including a La Vida vibrator on a bed table and a Niagara type vibrator found under the bed. On the bed table was also noted a 1-lb. jar of lubricating cream. The couple was last seen alive more than 24 hours before. Third-degree burns were found in the rectum and vagina with perforation of the posterior vagina and anterior rectum in the female victim. In the male victim, third-degree burns were noted on the tip of the left index finger, the rectum, and the penis. The voltage regulator was plugged into a wall socket when the police arrived.

Sex numbers again

I already explained this but apparently some people didn’t get the memo–Sex survey numbers don’t add up, mathematicians say:

But there is just one problem, mathematicians say. It is logically impossible for the mean number of partners for men to be different from the mean for women in any given population with equal numbers of heterosexual men and women, although the mean, or mathematical average, can differ from the median, the middle point of a range. Surveys typically report the median.

Still, mathematicians should set the record straight, said David Gale, an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of California.

“Surveys and studies to the contrary notwithstanding, the conclusion that men have substantially more sex partners than women is not and cannot be true, for purely logical reasons,” Gale said.

Sevgi Aral, who is associate director for science in the division of sexually transmitted disease prevention at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said there are several possible explanations, and all are probably operating.

One is that men are going outside the population to find partners, to prostitutes, for example, who are not part of the survey, or are having sex when they travel to other countries.

Another, of course, is that men exaggerate the number of partners they have and women underestimate.

Aral said she could not determine what the true number of sex partners is for men and women. “I would say that men have more partners on average,” she said, “but the difference is not as big as it seems in the numbers we are looking at.”

Gale is still troubled. He said invoking women who are outside the survey population cannot begin to explain a difference of 75 percent in the number of partners, as occurred in the study saying men had seven partners and women four. Something like a prostitute effect, he said, “would be negligible.” The most likely explanation, by far, is that the numbers cannot be trusted.

Ronald Graham, a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, San Diego, agreed with Gale. After all, on average, men would have to have three more partners than women, raising the question of where all those extra partners might be.

It’s easy to explain, there is no mystery, other studies have shown the “prostitute effect” is not negligible. Read my previous post for an example that makes it all clear. These guys are professors in California. You shouldn’t expect anything but crap for brains from people like that.

Posts that get attention

Interesting. My most recent post about the TSA is getting more and more attention. Most recent is this mention in a forum:

If you really need to believe that you’re safe when you get on a plane, don’t read the above. If you want to realize what a bullshit fantasy “safety” through a “security” agency is, then take the red pill and click the link.

I like how he expressed that. Very nice. I remember one time not too long after 9/11 Ry was having Thanksgiving dinner with us and our extended family at my parent’s place. Somehow Ry (software tester extraordinaire–finding flaws is what software testers do) and I started talking about all the vulnerabilities in our country that someone could use to cause us great damage. We were rattling things off so fast that someone had to raise their voice to get in a command to “STOP”. People didn’t want to know. They wanted ignorance. This is baffling to me, but whatever.

Anyway, on to what makes particular posts interesting…

Uncle and Existing Thing (via Uncle) linked to my TSA post. I was thinking Uncle would link to it when I made it. He links to almost anything of mine that is a little out of the ordinary (honest, I have only made him one offer for a free position at Boomershoot–which he hasn’t acted upon. I don’t think that constitutes bribery). Thinking about what makes a post interesting I made the connection to the recent career advice from Scott Adams (via Kim). I have expertise in more than one field and combining that expertise with a somewhat rare political viewpoint (pro-freedom) increases my “value”. In this case it was my expertise in explosives and (computer) security.

I keep wondering if there is a way to combine all my hobbies in an interesting way. But at least for me guns, explosives, and sex just don’t mix.

237 reasons to have sex

It’s mildly interesting and somewhat amusing but I hope it wasn’t funded by some government grant. As much as I’m interested in sex I don’t see much point in this study. I also find it annoying that some of the reasons are duplicates; Example, #7 “I’m addicted to sex”, and #9 “I am a sex addict”. Probably the most interesting part of the survey was this paragraph:

Another perspective comes from the literature on sperm competition (Baker & Bellis, 1995; Shackelford, Pound, Goetz, & LaMunyon, 2005). From this perspective, a man whose partner might have been sexually unfaithful might seek sex, which functions to displace the sperm of the rival male. Or a woman might deplete the sperm of her partner, leaving few available for insemination of rival women. None of these hypothesized functions, of course, need operate through conscious psychological mechanisms.

Posted in Sex

Quote of the day–Daniel J. Solove

The “nothing to hide” argument speaks to some problems, but not to others. It represents a singular and narrow way of conceiving of privacy, and it wins by excluding consideration of the other problems often raised in government surveillance and data mining programs. When engaged with directly, the “nothing to hide” argument can ensnare, for it forces the debate to focus on its narrow understanding of privacy. But when confronted with the plurality of privacy problems implicated by government data collection and use beyond surveillance and disclosure, the “nothing to hide” argument, in the end, has nothing to say.

Daniel J. Solove
“I’VE GOT NOTHING TO HIDE” AND OTHER MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF PRIVACY
George Washington University Law School
[A rather “dry” intellectual essay. Some of the better points are that government survelance changes the power balance between the individual and the politically powerful and data can be used for purposes beyond what it was orginally intended for. For example (my example, not the authors) 4473’s are intended to enable finding the user of a gun associated with a crime but can also be used to confisicate firearms from everyone. But if you want a snappy answer for someone who claims they don’t have anything to hide tell them to drop all their clothes, you want a picture. Then you want to know all their sex partners and from this point forward you want a live video feed of all their sexual encounters.–Joe]

Amazing–and from the land of the Kama Sutra

There are people that want to ban sex toys in India:

Saying that the sale of sex toys in India would have “severe consequences in society”, a Madhya Pradesh minister has urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to convene an all-party meeting to discuss the issue.

Even as a condom with a vibrating ring continues to stir controversy in the state, Public Works Department (PWD) Minister Kailash Vijayvargiya urged in a letter to Manmohan Singh that the import and sale of products like sex toys be banned.

“The Madhya Pradesh government stresses yoga shiksha (yoga education) instead of the centre’s yon shiksha (sex education). There is an urgent need to rise above party lines in this matter,” Vijayvargiya said.

About six months ago, HLL started to sell Crezendo – a three-condom pack with a vibrating ring – at a price of Rs.125. The Madhya Pradesh government is contemplating a ban on its sale in the state if Crezendo is proved to be a sex toy.

“The sale of such toys will lead to severe consequences in society. And they should be banned. But the union government is turning a Nelson’s eye despite such sale taking place openly in the national capital,” according to Vijayvargiya.

And it was from India we have one of the oldest books written on sex–the Kama Sutra.

Posted in Sex