Jet Lag; Virginity Pledges; Lab Grown Meat

July 9, 2005

I'm painfully aware that I've not wrapped up, even in my own mind, my trip to Korea. Let me tell you, jet lag is for real. My sleep has been disturbed all week and there has been plenty to distract me from spending more than a few minutes on the computer in the evening. But I promise I'll soon finish that story.

In the meantime, read Sex and Significance: How the Heritage Foundation cooked the books on virginity from Slate. A careful explanation of how the Heritage Foundation, one of the "premier" think tanks in D.C., misused statistics (that is, used them in a fashion counter to the agreed standards used everywhere, including their own work) to attempt to show that virginity pledges in teenagers correlate to a lower frequency of sexually transmitted diseases. It is a useful lesson in statistics and in some of the important factors in the life-or-death issue of how to teach sex ed in America and abroad.

Also read Fighting Global Warming With Lab-Grown Meat. Title says it all.

2 Comments

as usual, e-stephen, thanks for educating me on cool stuff that i would otherwise never know about. :) hope you're getting over the jet-lag...

Hi Nas! You're welcome. I've been thinking that maybe I shouldn't have posted this politically-charged issue without a little more context. Its probably fine, but for any future readers: I just want to point to the underlying issues of various topics, in this case, "virginity pledges." This whole topic of sex ed and sexually transmitted diseases really deserves its own treatment. Could make for an interesting discussion here. But right now I'm bogged down at work and shouldn't even be typing this =).