Don’t Know Much About A Science Book

This would normally be a Don’t Know Much About Biology post, but the library angle pushed it to a different line in the song …

The Sentinel has a post up titled Johnson County libraries to provide feminine hygiene products in men’s restrooms.

Johnson County libraries will soon provide tampons and other feminine hygiene products in the men’s restrooms. Male visitors to the various Johnson County Library branches who find themselves in need will soon have no problem finding feminine hygiene products in the men’s restroom.

At the August 10 Johnson County Commission meeting, the commission voted to allow the libraries to spend $375 in library operating funds in partnership with non-profit “Strawberry Week” to provide containers for “period” products in “all public restrooms” across its 14 locations.

The briefing sheet provided to commissioners from Deputy County Librarian Kinsley Riggs, stated the $375 would actually be a savings — despite the fact that the “Johnson County, KS Facilities Department does not currently provide period products to any Johnson County, KS government buildings.”

An email seeking further information from library staff and obtained by the Sentinel sought to clarify why these products would be in men’s restrooms.

County Librarian Patricia Sullentrop responded “We don’t want staff to assume why or why not someone needs access to period products, and we acknowledge that there are fathers, grandfathers, husbands, and more who may need confidential and quick access in order to enable a child, partner, or other person in their care to remain in the library.”

Umm, but wouldn’t women go to a women’s restroom to use feminine hygiene products in privacy, and couldn’t they find them there without male assistance?

STEM v. LGBTQ

The NY Post has an article headlined Researchers condemn rise of ‘fascist ideologues’ after students send mocking responses to LGBTQ survey.

Academic researchers condemned students’ irreverent and offensive responses to an LGBTQ survey, claiming the pushback indicates “fascist ideologues” are “living ‘inside the house’ of engineering and computer science.”

In an article for the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, academics from Oregon State University wrote about their shock at receiving sarcasm and mockery in response to their research into undergraduate LGBTQ students studying in STEM fields.

The researchers were bothered by the responses on 50 out of 349 questionnaires.

STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. While math can be a theoretical exercise, the other three are grounded in the Real World. If the Real World results of an experiment fail, the Scientific Method sends you back to refine your hypothesis, and engineers and technologists can’t use wishful thinking to force a design to work in spite of the limits imposed by Nature. As Scotty observed, “Ye cannae change the Laws of Physics.”

Transgenderism clearly rejects the biological basis of sex. It is anti-scientific, so I’m not surprised that many of the STEM students responding to the survey were derisive.

The research team declared that the mockery they received “had a profound impact on morale and mental health,” particularly for one transgender researcher who was “already in therapy for anxiety and depression regarding online anti-trans rhetoric.”

Profound impact on mental health? Really? On a transgender person who denies the objective reality of his or her DNA?

The scholars concluded the “malicious responses” indicate that fascism has become a common ideology in engineering and computer science academia.

So it’s now fascism to believe the Real World limits biology places on our lives.

The Truth is out there, but I doubt that it can be found in the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies.

Crazy People Are Dangerous™

My podcasting partner Stacy McCain has piece over at The American Spectator about staying sane during Pride Month. (When will greed, envy, lust, wrath, gluttony, and sloth get their months?)

Words have meanings, however, and “phobia” denotes an irrational fear. The person who accuses you of harboring a “phobia” — in regard to gay or transgender people, or anything else — is claiming the authority to make a psychiatric diagnosis. The obvious question is, what are their credentials to make such a diagnosis? As a critic or opponent of the LGBTQIA2S+ political agenda, do you really fear or hate people based on their sexual preferences? And whatever your beliefs or opinions may be, are they really irrational?

Read the whole thing.

Maybe the real problem is that too many people are suffering from kanonikophobia, the irrational fear of normal things.

Don’t Know Much Biology

The Western Journal reposts that two Australian women have been told by Twitter a “government entity or law enforcement agency” had informed the company the women had committed a crime by criticizing a male who was trying to breastfeed a baby. The male “identifies” as a women. Twitter has been forced to hide the content from Australian users.

The philosophy department of the University of Woolamaloo was unavailable for comment.

I’m So Old …

… I remember when we only had a few years to save ourselves from the next Ice Age.

Meanwhile, the UN has a new report out reminding us we have a few years (less than a decade this time, I think) to keep the world from—checks report—”catastrophic climate change.” That apparently still means global warming.

But Isn’t Stove Gas Methane?

Space News reports:

The fully stacked Starship vehicle, consisting of a Super Heavy booster designated Booster 7 and a Starship upper stage named Ship 24, was filled with liquid oxygen and methane propellants during the test at SpaceX’s Starbase test site in Boca Chica, Texas.

Emphasis added. How did this ever pass environmental review?

<science>It passed because methane is a cleaner burning fuel than the RP-1 kerosene used in most other rockets, including the SpaceX Falcon series.</science>

<engineering>While liquid methane is very cold, its temperature is much warmer than the liquid hydrogen used in NASA’s SLS. It’s in the same range as liquid oxygen, so the thermal stress in the rocket’s plumbing is less severe.</engineering>

Safe Cooking

According to a report published on the National Institutes of Health website, there is an association of cooking over an open flame and asthma, but the effect depends upon which fuel is used. The report’s abstract states:

Background: Indoor air pollution from a range of household cooking fuels has been implicated in the development and exacerbation of respiratory diseases. In both rich and poor countries, the effects of cooking fuels on asthma and allergies in childhood are unclear. We investigated the association between asthma and the use of a range of cooking fuels around the world.

Methods: For phase three of the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC), written questionnaires were self-completed at school by secondary school students aged 13-14 years, 244,734 (78%) of whom were then shown a video questionnaire on wheezing symptoms. Parents of children aged 6-7 years completed the written questionnaire at home. We investigated the association between types of cooking fuels and symptoms of asthma using logistic regression. Adjustments were made for sex, region of the world, language, gross national income, maternal education, parental smoking, and six other subject-specific covariates. The ISAAC study is now closed, but researchers can continue to use the instruments for further research.

Findings: Data were collected between 1999 and 2004. 512,707 primary and secondary school children from 108 centres in 47 countries were included in the analysis. The use of an open fire for cooking was associated with an increased risk of symptoms of asthma and reported asthma in both children aged 6-7 years (odds ratio [OR] for wheeze in the past year, 1·78, 95% CI 1·51-2·10) and those aged 13-14 years (OR 1·20, 95% CI 1·06-1·37). In the final multivariate analyses, ORs for wheeze in the past year and the use of solely an open fire for cooking were 2·17 (95% CI 1·64-2·87) for children aged 6-7 years and 1·35 (1·11-1·64) for children aged 13-14 years. Odds ratios for wheeze in the past year and the use of open fire in combination with other fuels for cooking were 1·51 (1·25-1·81 for children aged 6-7 years and 1·35 (1·15-1·58) for those aged 13-14 years. In both age groups, we detected no evidence of an association between the use of gas as a cooking fuel and either asthma symptoms or asthma diagnosis.

Interpretation: The use of open fires for cooking is associated with an increased risk of symptoms of asthma and of asthma diagnosis in children. Because a large percentage of the world population uses open fires for cooking, this method of cooking might be an important modifiable risk factor if the association is proven to be causal.

Funding: BUPA Foundation, the Auckland Medical Research Foundation, the Health Research Council of New Zealand, the Asthma and Respiratory Foundation of New Zealand, the Child Health Research Foundation, the Hawke’s Bay Medical Research Foundation, the Waikato Medical Research Foundation, Glaxo Wellcome New Zealand, the NZ Lottery Board, Astra Zeneca New Zealand, Hong Kong Research Grant Council, Glaxo Wellcome International Medical Affairs.

Note the finding of no evidence of an association between the use of gas as a cooking fuel and either asthma symptoms or asthma diagnosis.

The report was originally published in Lancet Respir Med in 2013.

But It’s OK When They Do It

Joe Biden is in the US Virgin Islands for a year end vacation, so the omnibus funding bill is being flown from DC to St. Croix so he can sign it. Several tonnes of carbon will be emitted because of his vacation schedule.I’ll worry about the carbon footprint of my VW diesel as soon as … oh, never mind.

Thermodynamics Wins

According to OilPrice, a wind farm in Germany will be dismantled to make room for an expansion of an open-pit lignite coal mine. One wind turbine is already being torn down. The German energy company RWE says that lignite, or brown coal, has been mined from the coalfields for over 100 years.

The company also said that three of its lignite-fired coal power plants that had been on standby would return to the grid. Each plant has a capacity of 300 megawatts.

BTW, wind mills, whether modern turbines or not, are not a source of renewable energy. How does one renew the wind? They are an archaic, intermittent source.