Interesting Links for 27-04-2014

[andrewducker]

• In which an idiot accidentally captures everything wrong with sexism and the comics industry
  (tags: sexism comics )
• The problem with using reptiles as phones
  (tags: phones funny )
• An open letter to the head of Google from the head of Europe's largest publisher. (The issues here are vital!)
  (tags: europe google monopoly internet thefuture )

Comments

[drdoug]

The pain and sex article is bloody depressing, is what it is. A bunch of researchers have deliberately inflicted pain on a load of mice, and it tells us very nearly nothing about human sexuality. Hell, I'm not sure it tells us very much about mouse sexuality, but that's not a field I know much about. But you can see how poor a model murine horniness is from the aside near the end of that writeup where they mention that a known mouse aphrodisiac doesn't work in people. Duh!

From direct personal experience, I can attest that human responses to pain and sex span the entire range from absolute turn-off to absolute turn-on, and from being entirely separate things to things that are completely intertwined. With an awful lot of complexity, nuance and context-dependence in the middle.

This is the sort of research that gives animal experimentation a very, very bad name. I prefer people to animals, if push comes to shove, and there are some sorts of research that absolutely require animal research to improve things for humans. But this is so not that sort of research.