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pro-ship-self-ships · 4 years

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Transmasc HCs in Obey Me!

Is this self-indulgent? Yes, but I’m transmasc and there needs to be more trans and queer stuff in the fandom. I simply write partially from my own perspective.

General

If you were already out in some way in your school/workplace, your name was used on the application.

If you came out during the year and wanted to use your new name at RAD, the administration would immediately take action, informing all teachers of the new name.

Gender-neutral bathrooms are built with magic in case you’re uncomfortable with the gendered ones.

If you’re ever worried about whether you’re going to go to hell for being queer, your friends at RAD will remind that no, you’re not a bad person, and you won’t go to hell for being queer. Your queerness is a beautiful thing and you’ll be reminded of that.

Lucifer

He knew already, but appreciates that you came out to him.

If you come to him for name suggestions, he might be able to come up with something more classy than his brothers.

Your bullies mysteriously vanish if you talk about them with him.

He’s the one who helps the most with getting T and surgery (if you plan on going the human route).

Helps to get you emancipated if you have unaccepting family (he has jokingly suggested just murdering them, though it probably won’t happen).

He takes you and the others to Pride every June. He’ll typically ask which places you want to celebrate at (I’d personally choose NYC or LA)

The man to go to for voice training bless you Kazuya Yamashita (although he’d help with a professional later down the line)

Tries to give you lessons on being a “proper gentleman” but gives up if you don’t show interest.

Studies trans laws in different countries in the human world to make sure which ones are tran-accepting in case you travel with him.

Might help you keep track of which documents need to have your name and gender changed

Might start listening to music by trans artists and enjoy them (he better listen to Cavetown sdhkvshdvdh)

He might make the occasional dad joke about your name or about being trans (you can’t tell he doesn’t enjoy dad jokes a little, especially after the credit card debacle)

Mammon

It takes him some time to understand when you come out, but my goodness is he a vocal supporter.

He’s the most likely to accompany you to public bathrooms if you feel uncomfortable. The others attempt to follow suit, but Mammon won’t let them near you.

Do not come to this man for name ideas, he’d probably come up with something like “Mammon 2: Electric Boogaloo.”

With your permission, he and Levi record your journey and post bits and pieces online

Confused if you choose human methods for transitioning, especially because of the price, but will still attempt to save money for any procedures you bring up.

Sends trans memes and might bring it up as an inside joke (if anyone knows the tiktok from jvckass that’s essentially “my chest is versace bro”, i mostly refer to that one)

If you get top surgery, he’ll remind you of some of the wack things you said while on anesthesia

Will comfort you if you bring up having an unaccepting family.

Will probably also start listening to music by trans artists (i will continuously preach the goodness of Cavetown)

Gets the money for it if you need a legal name change, gets surprised if you start crying

Jokingly teaches you about “being a man”

After top surgery, will try to keep the room to just the two of you (unsuccessfully). He’ll still bring up his money schemes as you lie there

Likes buying pride merch for you (flags, pins etc), will deny liking it though hfdigbdkh

Leviathan

If you came out to him and wanted to come up with a name for yourself, he’ll immediately suggest the name “Henry”. He gets a little upset if you don’t like it, but will subsequently throw names of anime characters as suggestions.

Also sends trans memes

Will help you experiment with your look through cosplay.

Records some of the wack things you said when you were still on anesthesia after top surgery

He also just wants to watch anime with you after the surgery. He also finds your chest scars to be pretty cool.

Will try to find anime and other things with trans characters and talk about them with you

He seems to act more like a Japanese otaku than a western weeb, but he would still have to probably unlearn queerphobic language

Satan

Would have probably read at least something on being trans

Would be the one to ask the most questions if they’re not too invasive

Likes to discuss multiple topics such as biology or sociology. Probably will name drop Judith Butler or Julia Serano and have a convo based on that.

Probably might want to watch some shows that have trans characters in them. Buys books with trans characters or by trans authors.

If you’re up for it, he’d give a pet your deadname to help distance yourself from it.

Would be the one to look up “(insert culture here) names for boys” to help pick a name. Gets pissed if teachers can’t pronounce it, regardless of when you came up w the name. Same goes for transphobes at RAD.

If you get surgery, he stays by your bed and reads to you.

Would attempt to make testosterone if you say something about expenses. Also might try to plan forms of surgery

Asmodeus

He’s the one to help with your wardrobe and look (you knew this was gonna be the case). He simply won’t allow you to walk around in that one hoodie. He knows about which shirts and tops makes your chest look flatter. If you want to continue wearing feminine clothes, he’ll help out with the best look. Would get you the rainbow binder as a surprise gift.

Regardless of whether you brought it up, he’d probably buy you a packer. He finds it hilarious.

He might buy a bunch of strap-ons and dildos for you if you don’t get bottom surgery

If you start testosterone in the Devildom, he doubles down on your skincare. Acne gets really difficult, so he’s always there to help.

If you decide to get top surgery, he is going to get you so many pillows. Same goes for bottom surgery.

He’s the one to get you pads if you need them.

On your trips to Pride parades and other queer places, he likes to create outfits for them.

Might try to get Solomon to cast a spell or make a potion to make you “more masculine”

He wants to be the one to cut your hair, but is okay with going to a salon with you

If you ask for names, he probably has a whole list already (it’s just a list of male exes)

Overall, he will remind you of how beautiful you are

Beelzebub

If you have have issues joining a sports team, he’s here to help convince any coaches necessary(although do demons have gendered sports teams is the question)

Encourages you to eat more than ever, especially if you’re on T. He understands when you get really hungry. Brings up foods that increases testosterone. Has you eat pineapples before you get top surgery.

Wants to give you a hug after surgery, but the others tell him about the stitches and fragility

Likes to cuddle you if you want to talk about your dysphoria (much to Mammon’s annoyance) and if you bring up height dysphoria, he likes carrying you around on his shoulders so you can feel taller.

Might try to come up with a food name if you ask

Will punch anyone who attempts to bully you over your queerness

Has you exercise with him more often, especially if you’ve talked about gaining muscle on T.

Belphegor

He doesn’t really mind, but he’s still supportive

Might suggest naps as a way of getting rid of dysphoria.

He gets the concept of transness a bit faster since he used to hang out with humans more.

Diavolo

He’s pretty accepting and finds human’s relationship with gender to be fascinating.

Orders the construction of gender-neutral bathrooms for your comfort

Makes dad jokes about being trans and your name (all in good fun, of course)

With your permission, he might plan a gender-reveal party or a debutante ball for you.

Assures you that you won’t go to hell for being yourself.

Barbatos

He was the first to figure out you are trans, as he was tasked with looking into your history for the exchange program.

He’s accepting as well. If you’re worried about your future, he might give you a couple of hints to show you’ll be ok.

Besides telling Diavolo and Lucifer beforehand, Barbatos is willing to help you stay stealth if that’s what you want.

Solomon

Depending on where’s he from, he might be a bit hesitant, but he’s still accepting (he has no reason to discriminate for religious reasons, he practices magic)

Might suggests magic to help transitioning, but will relent if you’re dead fast on human methods.

Also likes sending trans memes

Simeon

Finds it fascinating to find how far human technology has come for transitioning

If you’re really worried about getting into heaven, Simeon is the best one to reassure you that you will

A calming force for when you have dysphoria

Talks about transness to Luke so he’ll understand

If you can convince him, he might write a new series with a trans character as the protagonist (and other queer characters as well)

He and Asmodeus would team up to make a binder you could wear 24/7

Is a little uncomfortable with the hypersexuality of Pride parades, but understands their necessity.

Luke

The one that takes the most talking to about it, but Simeon accepts you, so Luke follows suit.

Likes to make trans flag cookies for you, especially after reaching certain milestones.

Gets jealous if you start growing taller from T.

Joins Levi on watching trans anime with you.

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queer-naruto · 3 years

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What did you want to be in high school? Did you change your mind at all?

Yeah, actually I wanted to be a couple different things. Early high school I wanted to be a medical examiner, little edgy I know. I liked that it freaked people out haha. I also have a fascination with death, dying, and death practices mostly because I think it’s interesting how we handle death in the us. Then I realized that it was a lot of math and science and I’m not particularly good at either. Then in my second half of high school I wanted to be a therapist, I was severely depressed and I wanted to help people like me (a funny concept seeing as though I wasn’t getting help at the time). I loved the psych class I took in high school, so I took one my first winter in college. I hated it, I was miserable and it could’ve partly been the professor but I wasn’t willing to gamble. Then spring of my first year in college I took a general Soc class because I need more social studies for my degree. When I tell you it clicked, I mean it. The professor was ancient and he was a little gone but it didn’t matter, the class work sucked too but I was willing to put up with it. I took another Soc class too on American cultural studies, which was about inequality. I finished my associates degree and transferred to a university. My brother was a Soc major and has he bachelors in it and he suggested I take a class with this certain professor. It was a class called “race and ethnic relations” it’s one of the best classes I’ve ever taken, I had already mostly decided to be a Soc major but this solidified it. Also I’ve now taken 5 classes with him and I’ll do my capstone with him and might even be a research assistant too. A lot of the classes kind of suck, like “Sociological Research Methods”, “Stats for Sociology”, and “Sociological Theory”. I’m in my last year of college now and while I’ve found what I’m truly passionate about, I couldn’t tell you what I want to be anymore. There are paths I can and probably will take, but for now this is enough for me. You probably didn’t want an answer this complex, but no ones ever really asked what I wanted to be then and if I know now so I got excited and a little carried away. Thanks for asking:)

#long post #sorry #I love questions #they make me happy

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francesbeau · 3 years

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The Gay Science - Friedrich Nietzsche

* My Favourite maxims/ideals put forward in the penguins classic edition:

Unconditional Obligations:

- “anyone who feels dishonoured at being an instrument of the prince now wishes to be seen as an instrument in his own eyes and in the eyes of the public.”

Of the purpose of science:

- “mitigate and assuage human suffering, you must also moderate and diminish the human capacity for joy”

What is called love:

- “He wants unconditional power as much over her soul as over her body, he wants to be liked exclusively”

- “It’s Astonishing that the concept of love is the opposite of selfishness ...” This whole passage reminded me of the sexual instincts explored by Jacques Lacan whom basically mapped out that sexual fantasy is wrapped up in our fantasies that it is ultimately very narcissistic.

Across The Bridge:

- “In dealing with people who are ashamed of their feelings one must be able to disguise ones own for such people take a sudden antipathy to anyone who catches them in a moment of tenderness, rage or enthusiasm as if their deepest secrets have been discovered.” - This is so true like omg, this is really relatable. I’ve never seen this articulated before but it is literally so true. WOW.

Evil:

- “Can a tree grow proud an tall without storms and inclemency” Even though this is in a section dedicated to the examination of evil, I think this is quite inspirational, I really enjoyed this metaphor.

- “The poison by which the weaker natures perish strengthens the strong - and they do not call it poison” Honestly, in the same vain I found this really inspirational haha.

The Signs of Corruption:

- “As soon as corruption sets in anywhere, a motley array of superstitions becomes prevalent|” - This reminds me of something I studied in Sociology where two sociologists, Norris and Ingelhart, saw that in places were existential security were low ie. Palestine a lot of people turn to religion as an explanation or their suffering and also for emotional security.

BOOK TWO

To the realists:

- “You men who like to make your emptiness a matter of pride, an ornament”

Prose and Poetry:

- “War is the father of all good poetry!”

Schopenhauer’s Followers:

- “These followers must have felt barbaric enough to be fascinated and seduced by him from the very beginning!” - This is referring to his superior culture.

Learning to Pay Homage:

- “Men must learn how to pay this just as they learn how to show contempt”

BOOK THREE

Origin of Knowledge:

- “For immense amounts of times intellect provided nothing but errors” “Intellectual struggle became an occupation, an attraction, a duty and an honour - knowledge and the pursuit of truth eventually became needs in their own right.”

The Four Errors:

- “First he always only sees himself partially, second he ascribed to himself fictitious qualities, third he felt himself to posses a false superiority, fourth he devised new tables of good”

An inconvenient Quality:

- “To find everything deep. it makes us strain our eyes constantly and in the end we always find more than we wish.”

Being Profound:

- “Whoever knows he is profound strives for clarity, whoever would like the crowd to think he is profound strives for obscurity.”

The Envier:

- “One hopes he has no children, he would be envious of them because he can no longer be a child.”

Work And Artist:

- “The artist is ambitious and nothing more; ultimately his work is a magnifying glass which he offered to everyone who looks at him.”

BOOK FOUR

My Dog:

- “I have given a name to pain, my dog - it is just as faithful, just as entertaining, just as clever and just as shameless.”

BOOK FIVE

- This book was really boring, didn’t really resonate with any of the discussions.

#nietszche

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khalilhumam · 4 years

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Is moving to Canada the real American Dream?

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/is-moving-to-canada-the-real-american-dream/

Is moving to Canada the real American Dream?

“American Flag on Canada Day 2008″ by Antony Pranata is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Call it an American’s Canadian moment. Shortly after a remote work meeting at a local café in early February, Victoria Heath, an American living in Toronto, witnessed something extraordinary. A man approached the barista and asked for water. As he turned to reach for a cup, the man snatched the tip jar. Startled, the café staff tried to convince him to surrender the jar, even offering a few dollars and free food. “I’m sorry Sir, but I have no money,’’ the man said, with obvious remorse, and walked out with the jar. The transgression, to Heath’s surprise, produced no further drama. And in a gesture of sympathy, some patrons found an empty jar, and began to fill it with cash. “This was a surreal thing for an American to witness, because there were no threats or aggression thrown at this man. I’m not even sure the police were called,” Heath later wrote on LinkedIn.“There was just the calm understanding that the man meant no physical harm, and probably desperately needed the money.” With its steel-and-glass towers, cadres of emotionless commuters, and die-hard sports fans, Toronto may look just like any American city. Yet it is moments like Heath’s that drive home a fact that’s hardly a secret: Canada can feel like a world away from the U.S. In 2018, I left China, where I was born and raised, to attend graduate school in Canada. I had just ended a seven-year run as a journalist, at a time when the very profession was looking increasingly grim in an authoritarian state. In moving to Canada, I saw a chance of putting down roots somewhere open and democratic. Like Heath, I often find myself—through the mundanity of everyday life as a newcomer—juxtaposing Canada against its neighbour to the south. Both countries—from working with Americans to my schooling in Canada—have left deep imprints on my personality and worldview.

The author at Beijing International Airport on August 17, 2018. Downtown Toronto. Photo courtesy the author. Used with permission.

For example, I learned colloquial English from watching the American TV series, Friends. For my first master’s degree in China, my thesis supervisor was an American from Kansas. I cut my teeth in journalism at McClatchy Newspapers, an American news organization, and worked for The New York Times in Beijing for almost three years. If my native Chinese culture taught me hard work and conformity, Americans introduced me to another value system, one that prizes critical thinking, ingenuity, and personal liberty. For a long time, I thought Canada was just another America, only with nicer people and colder weather. Since moving to Toronto, I’ve been fascinated by the special relationship between the two. Canadians, in my experience, often struggle to articulate what defines their nation, other than multiculturalism, and tend to frame their identity in a we-are-not-them fashion. “Them”, of course, refers to Canada’s next-door neighbour. “We’re just NOT American,” many Canadians would tell me, before rattling off a laundry list of differences: healthcare system, gun culture, and even national character. Yet whatever Canadians say about their southern neighbour, the U.S. still looms large in the Canadian psyche. Consider my campus life. A Canadian classmate often entertained us with his effortless impersonations of U.S. presidents from Donald Trump to Ronald Reagan. One of our professors once boasted that our graduate program had an acceptance rate close to that of top American universities. And despite their disdain for the American way, some Canadians in my cohort followed American politics even more obsessively than they watched hockey.

The University of Toronto campus. Photo by the author. Used with permission.

“Canadians measure Canada inevitably and overwhelmingly against the United States,” Jeffrey Simpson, a former columnist for The Globe and Mail, wrote in his 2000 book Star-Spangled Canadians. “This Canadian measuring produces a kaleidoscope of reactions, ranging from envy to anger, from inferiority complex to moral superiority, from doubt to defiance.” By contrast, Canada barely registers in the American consciousness. When asked to name the Canadian capital, an American interviewee told BuzzFeed News in 2015 that “It’s either Toronto, or Quebec, or there’s something with Victoria in it?” No wonder author Margaret Atwood compares the U.S.-Canada relationship to a “one-way mirror” through which Canadians see the U.S. but Americans barely see Canada. In 1969, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau famously remarked that being next door to America was like “sleeping with an elephant“ whose “every twitch and grunt” would be felt. Despite the lopsidedness, some argue that the perceived differences are overblown. Take Charlotte, an American classmate of mine in graduate school who moved to Canada after studying in Scotland for years. “I knew I wouldn't have to adapt all that much. I got to move closer to home than I had been throughout undergrad, but without actually being back in the U.S.,” she said, “Canadians frame themselves as different to Americans because they don’t want to admit how similar they are.” Indeed, ask what music and movies people from the U.S. and Canada consume, and the lists would be unsurprisingly similar. Both countries are functioning democracies with large immigrant populations. About 70 per cent of Canada’s foreign trade flows through the world’s longest undefended border to the U.S. Ed Grabb, a sociology professor at Western University, says any attempt at dissecting differences between the two countries must factor in regional variances. To him, the differences can be best understood by dividing the U.S. and Canada into four distinctive subgroups: the conservative U.S. South, the politically and culturally left-liberal Quebec, English Canada, and the U.S. North. “English Canada and the U.S. North are very similar in their attitudes and behaviours,” he told UBC News in 2011. Still, the “we are non-American” camp in Canada is just as staunch in their belief, driven by a sense of patriotism and Canadian pride. North America, they say, is not a monolithic concept. And even between the closest of neighbours, nuanced differences abound, from politics to etiquette and mannerisms. A popular 2000 Canadian beer commercial featuring “Joe”, a character in a typical lumberjack-type plaid shirt, was full of jabs at the U.S. “I have a Prime Minister, not a President. I speak English and French, not American,” Joe delivered his rousing monologue behind a big screen, his voice growing louder as the speech marched on. “I believe in peacekeeping, not policing, diversity, not assimilation … and it’s pronounced “Zed,” not “Zee!”… Canada is the second-largest landmass, the First Nation of Hockey, and the best part of North America! My name is Joe, and I. AM. CANADIAN!” [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pASE_TgeVg8] The chasm is reflected in temperament, too. A stereotypical American is brash, arrogant, and opinionated. Canadians, on the other hand, are thought to be deferential, nice, and risk-averse. The differences—at least according to popular narrative—have been centuries in the making. In envisioning a new republic, America’s founding fathers wrote “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” into the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Following the American Revolution—a triumph over the British colonizers—the mantra sowed the seed for unbridled individualism and a deep skepticism of government overreach. Canada followed a different path. Its constitutional mandates—peace, order, and good government—were prescribed in London for a British colony. Late Canadian novelist Robertson Davies went so far as to label his country a “socialist monarchy.” Unchecked liberty and freedom, the thinking goes, risk undermining the greater collective good. Enter the recent government response to the COVID-19 crisis. While the U.S. at times let bitter partisanship undercut its efforts to muster a strong government response, Canadian politicians of different stripes banded together in a largely collective move to tackle an unprecedented crisis. On a per capita basis, the COVID-19 mortality rate in the U.S. is twice that of Canada’s. Had I attended graduate school in the U.S., what would my life look like now? Would I be able to rebuild my life in Trump’s America where foreign workers and international students alike have been targeted by a ruthless immigration clampdown? Unlike the U.S., Canada hasn’t turned its back on immigrants, many of whom arrive in the country nursing different dreams and ambitions. They help build the economy and add to the strengths of the society. According to the latest available official data published in 2011, among the immigrants residing in the host country six to ten years, the average citizenship rate in Canada was 71 per cent, compared to 24 per cent in the U.S.

Morning commuters in Toronto, one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world. Photo by the author. Used with permission.

Of course, Canada is not perfect. Many problems plaguing the U.S., including racism and homelessness, also afflict Canada. Still, the country feels different—safer and more accepting. I feel at ease speaking Chinese on Toronto’s Yonge Street, in a multicultural city where one’s skin colour and accent rarely bring frowns. And while people expect me to be respectful, no one forces me to “act Canadian.” As I set out to plan my life in Canada during an unprecedented pandemic, I’m also watching anxiously from afar the escalating tensions between and my birth country and the U.S., as Beijing and Washington jockey for greater influence globally. Now the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating a nasty race between the two powers, with each side touting their self-proclaimed exceptionalism in governance. Sadly, aggression is emerging as the new currency in global geopolitics. It has bruised Canada, following its arrest of a Chinese tech company executive in Vancouver in 2018 on behalf of the U.S. In the aftermath, Ottawa is confronted with both Beijing’s ire and indifference from Washington. For many immigrants living in the U.S., the aggression can be just as excruciating. A Chinese friend, who is about to start his PhD at an Ivy League university, packed all his belongings in preparation for the worst when the Trump administration recently threatened, unsuccessfully, to revoke visas for international students whose courses were entirely online due to the pandemic. Last week, he reached out to me with an unusual request. “Many of my Chinese classmates in D.C. want to immigrate to Canada. Do you have time to chat?” he asked on Facebook messenger. Over a one-hour Zoom chat, he, along with his peers, some of whom work for international organizations like the IMF and the World Bank, showered me with questions about life in Canada—as well as its immigration policy. To them, neither the U.S. nor China feels like home. Now, two years into my new life in Canada, I still think back to these parting words from a former American colleague: “Congratulations, you’re achieving both the Chinese Dream and the American Dream—moving to Canada.”

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makingscipub · 4 years

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Making Science Public 2019: An overview

Every year I think: This will be the last year I write something for this blog… and each year I write a bit more. And so it was this year. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I really don’t know. But it distracts me from life’s increasing troubles and keeps me sane.

As usual, I have written about biological topics, such as gene, genome and germline editing and epigenetics, about climate change (a bit), and about metaphors. I have also ventured out or rather back into a bit of history of science and even history of linguistics, a territory I had left behind decades ago. And, of course there is a bit of science communication sprinkled over all this like Christmas glitter.

When I had no time or had no inspiration, a few guest bloggers filled in some blogging gaps for me. Thank you!

Gene drive

Let’s start with biology. My focus this year was on ‘gene drive’, as I was lucky enough to be a co-applicant on a Wellcome Trust funded grant directed by Sarah Hartley that focuses on how we talk about this new biotechnology intended to, amongst others, deal with mosquitoes that spread malaria, dengue fever, Zika and so on. I wrote a post about the project overall, based on its press release.

However, my interest in gene drive started before that, when I listened in to a radio programme and tried to trace the etymology of the drive in gene drive – and found it actually stems from a metaphor relating to the driving of locomotives! Talking to people about gene drive, in English, German and French, I also discovered how many roadblocks there are to what one may call ‘gene drive communication’, over and above the obscure etymology.

Once the project started, I tried to gain a better understanding of the concept of ‘gene drive’ and the more I looked the more confused I got. So I wrote a post about the link or not between gene drive and GM mosquitoes and another about the link or not between gene drive and microbes like Wolbachia. GM mosquitoes and Wolbachia have been used in the wild to deal with the threat of malaria and other diseases, but actual gene drives not yet.

When starting to do some media analysis with Aleksandra Stelmach, the research fellow working on the gene drive communication project, I discovered a confusion or rather disruption of a different kind relating to the reliability of a database that we normally use for our research. The blog also delves, like my first one, into the beginnings of what one may call ‘gene drive talk’, which began in the 1990s, but has accelerated since 2014.

While I was exploring confusions and probably confusing people in the process, Aleksandra wrote an excellent, clear and non-confusing blog post about the emerging metaphors around gene drive which she extracted from a 2019 Nature article. This complements nicely an earlier post I had written about metaphors and mammals and gene drive.

Epigenetics

Another topic that preoccupied my thoughts this year was, or rather continued to be, epigenetics, which has been appropriated not only by people who want to sell wellness products but surprisingly also by people who want to establish a new way of studying biology and society. I thought this through a little bit in a post on epigenetics and the solid fundamental science that’s going on but is competing with fantastic expectation.

Epigenetics in academia and advertising

Seeing the nuanced way that epigenetics is discussed by scientists, I was surprised to see how much less nuanced the uptake of epigenetics has been in social science academia, let alone by advertisers and marketers. So I collaborated with Aleksandra Stelmach and Cath Ennis on an article detailing the way in which epigenetics can be used to do things, be it advertising alternative wellness products or promoting alternative ways to do sociology, in particular to explore the so-called ‘biosocial’.

Our article, exploring all this in detail through the lens of social representations theory and metaphor analysis, has now appeared online and will be part of a special issue that will be published in print early next year.

Epigenetics in popular culture, advertising and academia

Some of the other epigenetics posts focused on the over-hyping of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, others zoomed in on epigenetics in popular culture: for example turkey dinosaurs and pancakes, the emergence of he metaphor of witness marks in a popular article, epigenetics on Pinterest.

This last post was written in collaboration with Cath Ennis who also wrote two important guest posts. One dealt with the use of epigenetics as a metaphor or analogy to think with, i.e. to think about cultural phenomena like sacred texts or even inequality; the other explored the way epigenetics has been portrayed in science fiction (and it has the best image!).

In the middle of the year, a confluence of events, brought about by blogging, led to a brief collaboration with the historian of science Andrew Reynolds, which led to him giving a joint paper (but I really didn’t contribute a lot) about chromatin landscapes at a history and philosophy of science conference. I wrote a short post about this venture.

And finally, I also wrote a post about the great way in which some scientists, in this case doing research on epigenetics and worms, use twitter threads to make their research public. I still haven’t done that myself! For another great example of how threads can be used in science communication, here is one by Ewan Birney on ethnicity and genetics.

Other biological posts

One post continued my interest in gene editing which dominated my posts last year and also tapped into my fascination with the interaction between science and culture which also came through in some of my own and others posts about epigenetics. In this post I tried to look more closely at the interaction between CRISPR and culture and the longstanding or novel tropes that are used to link the two.

Two other posts dealt with collaborative projects, one undertaken with Achim Roseman on heritable genome editing and the national and international governance challenges and policy options posed by this new biotechnology; another undertaken with Carmen McLeod and Rusi Jaspal on emerging media and social representations of faecal microbial transplants, an emerging treatment of diseases of the gut and microbiome, such as Clostridium difficile.

I also returned to one of my longstanding topics, namely the military metaphors used in the context of drug resistant infection, also called antibiotic resistance or AMR.

As I was in a mood for reflection and restrospection this year, I also wrote a post summarising all my articles published in the journal New Genetics and Society. These include papers on cloning, genomics, the human genome, the microbiome, synthetic biology, epigenetics and faecal microbial transplants.

Many of these NGS articles were written in collaboration with other people, such as Aleksandra Stelmach, Carmen McLeod and Rusi Jaspal, but in particular Iina Hellsten. 2020 will be, in a way, the twentieth anniversary of our various collaborations over time, from genetics and genomics to climate change, to bird flu and beyond.

Metaphors, science and cells

Of course, I couldn’t resist meddling in metaphors. This year I focused on metaphors relating to cells in particular and wrote one post on machine metaphors for life, another about an orgy of metaphors for organelles, and one asking when in all this is a metaphor actually a metaphor?

Climate change

I still wrote a few posts about climate change, although this is no longer my research focus. It is however a topic that has finally become the focus of public debate even public movements.

I wrote one post about a now vanishing, i.e. no longer needed icon or symbol of climate change, namely the polar bear, inspired by the work by Saffron O’Neill on climate images. I wrote another on the now longer controversial, but increasingly important, topic of extreme weather.

Despite the fact that climate change is now speaking for itself, some climate change communication experts still feel the need to debate the best ways to communicate climate change, with some opposing the setting of deadlines or targets and others contesting the usefulness of strategic messaging. So I wrote a blog post about that.

And finally, I came back to a topic that interested me at the beginning of my blogging career a decade ago, namely ‘climategate’. This November was the tenth anniversary of this attempt to misdirect climate communication and in my post I came back to some of the issues I had raised in an article published in 2010, especially the denigration of experts, consensus and truth through using the metaphor of ‘science is religion’. This is still going on!

History of science and history of linguistics

This year I came back, briefly, to some of my really old passions, namely the history of science in general and the history of linguistics in particular. One post dealt with the first ever article published in the journal Nature, 150 years ago, an article by Huxley on Goethe’s aphorisms on nature. It was fascinating to explore this whole episode in more detail, including the language and style used, the connections with Darwin and so on.

I also wrote a post about a rather forgotten woman philosopher of speech and language: Grace Andrus de Laguna, one of the fore-mothers of pragmatics as a field of linguistics, a field that studies language in action. That was the topic of my PhD and my first job here in England as a JRF at Wolfson College, Oxford. Ah, the good old days….

Science communication

I also tried to write something on the way new insights into DNA have been communicated from the 1960s onwards, focusing in particular on the mystery as to why cybernetics, so influential in the creation of molecular biology, did not inspire more metaphors.

Another post explored early efforts to foster public understanding of science in the 1960s, triggered by finding an old magazine squirrelled away in my husbands office.

And finally, I wondered whether social science (jargon) helps or hinders science communication. This musing was provoked by a wonderful tweet by Alice Bell in which she said: “Drunk suit fell over getting on the tube, exclaimed ‘Gravity! That’s physics! That’s the cleverest thing!’ and then started asking people in the carriage if they love physics and whether or not it’s better than biology.” And went on to ask: “Sci commers: You can facilitate all the fancy pants coproductions of upstreams you want, but drunk middle aged men arguing with strangers about whether it was gravity, vodka or the Northern Line that made them fall over is public engagement with science and technology.” (Italics added) Think about it!

Other

I wrote a few blog posts about subjects and topics that are not easily classifiable, for example about metaphors, society and Brexit, about the division of social knowledge and its breakdown, about the exposome (not to be confused with exosomes), about astrogenomics, about black holes, about space as solace for the soul and about science and poetry

Guest posts

This year was and continues to be quite fractious. There were quite a few family and other crises I had/have to deal with. It was therefore a relief to find that other people wanted to contribute guest posts to the Making Science Public blog – some of which, by Alexandra and Cath, I referenced above under epigenetics. Beyond that:

Chris Toumey wrote interesting reflections on his new book about nanotech and the humanities, followed by description of the value of qualitative methods, prompted by a comment to the previous blog post. Joachim Allgaier wrote a wonderful overview of his article/research dealing with science, science communication and YouTube. Penny Polson, Carmen McLeod and Eleanor Hadley Kershaw wrote a report on their workshop on the circular economy. Jim Dratwa and Barbara Prainsack discussed a call for a moratorium on germline editing, and Michael Morrison contributed to the debate surrounding a controversial tweet relating to genome editing and human enhancement.

I would like to thank all my colleagues and friends who have helped me with this blog and much more. I would also like to think my readers, especially those who have emailed me with comments and thoughts. I wish you all a healthy and happy 202o.

The post Making Science Public 2019: An overview appeared first on Making Science Public.

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Polymath Stephen Wolfram Defends His Computational Theory of Everything

Stephen Wolfram seems to see himself as Newton upgraded with programming chops and business savvy, but it’s not hubris if you back it up. As he points out on his website, he published papers on particle physics in his mid-teens, earned a Ph.D. in physics from Caltech when he was 20 and won a MacArthur “genius” grant at 22. In his late 20s he invented and began successfully marketing Mathematica, software for automating calculations. Wolfram contends that Wolfram Language—which underpins Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, a knowledge engine he released in 2009—represents a “new paradigm for computation” that will enable humans and machines to “interact at a vastly richer and higher level than ever before.” This vision dovetails with the theme of Wolfram’s 2002 opus A New Kind of Science, which argues that simple computer programs, like those that generate cellular automata, can model the world more effectively than traditional mathematical methods. Physicist Steven Weinberg called the book an interesting “failure,” and other scientists griped that Wolfram had rediscovered old ideas. Critics have also accused Wolfram of hyping his computational products.* Yet Wolfram, when I saw him speak last fall at “Ethics of Artificial Intelligence,” exuded confidence, suggesting how Wolfram Language might transform law and politics. We recently had the following email exchange.–-John Horgan

Horgan: Can you summarize, briefly, the theme of A New Kind of Science? Are you satisfied with the book’s reception?

Wolfram: It’s about studying the computational universe of all possible programs and understanding what they can do. Exact science had been very focused on using what are essentially specific kinds of programs based on mathematical ideas like calculus. My goal was to dramatically generalize the kinds of programs that can be used as models in science, or as foundations for technology and so on.

The big surprise, I suppose, is that when one just goes out into the computational universe without any constraints, one finds that even incredibly simple programs can do extremely rich and complex things. And a lot of the book is about understanding the implications of this for science.

I’ve been very happy with the number and diversity of people who I know have read the book. There’ve been thousands of academic papers written on the basis of it, and there’s an increasing amount of technology that’s based on it. It’s quite amazing to see how the idea of using programs as models in science has caught on. Mathematical models dominated for three centuries, and in a very short time, program-based models seem to have become the overwhelming favorites for new models.

When the book came out, there was some fascinating sociology around it. People in fields where change was “in the air” seemed generally very positive, but a number of people in fields that were then more static seemed to view it as a threatening paradigm shift. Fifteen years later that shift is well on its way, and the objections originally raised are beginning to seem bizarre. It’s a pity social media weren’t better developed in 2002, or things might have moved a little faster.

Horgan: Can the methods you describe in A New Kind of Science answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing?

Wolfram: Not that I can see so far.

Horgan: Can they solve "the hard problem"? That is, can they explain how matter can become conscious?

Wolfram: One of the core discoveries that I discussed in the book is what I call the Principle of Computational Equivalence—which implies that a very wide range of systems are equivalent in their computational sophistication. And in particular, it means that brains are no more computationally sophisticated than lots of systems in nature, and even than systems with very simple rules. It means that “the weather has a mind of its own” isn’t such a primitive thing to say: the fluid dynamics of the weather is just as sophisticated as something like a brain.

There’s lots of detailed history that makes our brains and their memories the way they are. But there’s no bright line that separates what they’re doing from the “merely computational.” There are many philosophical implications to this. But there are also practical ones. And in fact this is what led me to think something like Wolfram|Alpha would be possible.

Horgan: The concept of computation, like information, presupposes the existence of mind. So when you suggest that the universe is a computer, aren't you guilty of anthropomorphism, or perhaps deism (assuming the mind for whom the computation is performed is God)?

Wolfram: The concept of computation doesn’t in any way presuppose the existence of mind... and it’s an incorrect summarization of my work to say that I suggest “the universe is a computer.”

Computation is just about following definite rules. The concept of computation doesn’t presuppose a “substrate,” any more than talking about mathematical laws for nature presupposes a substrate. When we say that the orbit of the Earth is determined by a differential equation, we’re just saying that the equation describes what the Earth does; we’re not suggesting that there are little machines inside the Earth solving the equation.

About the universe: yes, I have been investigating the hypothesis that the universe follows simple rules that can be described by a program. But this is just intended to be a description of what the universe does; there’s no “mechanism” involved. Of course, we don’t know if this is a correct description of the universe. But I consider it the simplest hypothesis, and I hope to either confirm or exclude it one day.

Horgan: What's the ultimate purpose of the Wolfram Language? Can it fulfill Leibniz's dream of a language that can help us resolve all questions, moral as well as scientific? Can it provide a means of unambiguous communication between all intelligent entities, whether biological or artificial?

Wolfram: My goal with the Wolfram Language is to have a language in which computations can conveniently be expressed for both humans and machines—and in which we’ve integrated as much knowledge about computation and about the world as possible. In a way, the Wolfram Language is aimed at finally achieving some of the goals Leibniz had 300 years ago. We now know—as a result of Gödel’s theorem, computational irreducibility, etc.—that there are limits to the scientific questions that can be resolved. And as far as moral questions are concerned: well, the Wolfram Language is going in the direction of at least being able to express things like moral principles, but it can’t invent those; they have to come from humans and human society.

Horgan: Are autonomous machines, capable of choosing their own goals, inevitable? Is there anything we humans do that cannot—or should not—be automated?

Wolfram: When we see a rock fall, we could say either that it’s following a law of motion that makes it fall, or that it’s achieving the “goal” of being in a lower-potential-energy state. When machines—or for that matter, brains—operate, we can describe them either as just following their rules, or as “achieving certain goals.” And sometimes the rules will be complicated to state, but the goals are simpler, so we’ll emphasize the description in terms of goals.

What is inevitable about future machines is that they'll operate in ways we can't immediately foresee. In fact, that happens all the time already; it's what bugs in programs are all about. Will we choose to describe their behavior in terms of goals? Maybe sometimes. Not least because it'll give us a human-like context for understanding what they're doing.

The main thing we humans do that can't meaningfully be automated is to decide what we ultimately want to do.

Horgan: What is the most meaningful goal that any intelligence, human or inhuman, can pursue?

Wolfram: The notion of a “meaningful goal” is something that relies on a whole cultural context—so there can’t be a useful abstract answer to this question.

Horgan: Have you ever suspected that God exists, or that we live in a simulation?

Wolfram: If by “God” you just mean something beyond science: well, there’s always going to be something beyond science until we have a complete theory of the universe, and even then, we may well still be asking, “Why this universe, and not another?”

What would it mean for us to “live in a simulation”? Maybe that down at the Planck scale we’d find a whole civilization that’s setting things up so our universe works the way it does. Well, the Principle of Computational Equivalence says that the processes that go on at the Planck scale—even if they’re just “physics” ones—are going to be computationally equivalent to lots of other ones, including ones in a “civilization.” So for basically the same reason that it makes sense to say “the weather has a mind of its own,” it doesn’t make any sense to imagine our universe as a “simulation.”

Horgan: What's your utopia?

Wolfram: If you mean: what do I personally want to do all day? Well, I’ve been fortunate that I’ve been able to set up my life to let me spend a large fraction of my time doing what I want to be doing, which usually means creating things and figuring things out. I like building large, elegant, useful, intellectual and practical structures---which is what I hope I’ve done over a long period of time, for example, with Wolfram Language.

If you’re asking what I see as being the best ultimate outcome for our whole species---well, that’s a much more difficult question, though I’ve certainly thought about it. Yes, there are things we want now---but how what we want will evolve after we’ve got those things is, I think, almost impossible for us to understand. Look at what people see as goals today, and think how difficult it would be to explain many of them to someone even a few centuries ago. Human goals will certainly evolve, and the things people will think are the best possible things to do in the future may well be things we don’t even have words for yet.