Author: hearseeno

salon:

Researchers polled over 15,000 men on the length and girth of their manhood, and the results are…surprising

According to the study, published this week in BJU International, the average penis is 5.16 inches long and 4.6 inches around when erect, and 3.6 inches long and 3.7 inches around when flaccid. The 15,521 participants in the 20 compiled studies ranged in age from 17 to 91, and exhibited quite a range in size. Only about 2.28 percent had abnormally small penises, which the researchers classified as being two standard deviations below the mean; the same percentage of men had abnormally large penises, two standard deviations above the mean.

A final interesting tidbit: The study finds no correlation between a man’s foot size and penis length.

I just… what? Did you seriously just report that only about 2% of men fall 2+ standard deviations below the mean as if this were a new research finding? And not just simply how normally distributed data works? On any type of normally distributed data that we collect? Ever?

You’ve just essentially reported something equivalent to “Look! 9 out of 10 researchers agree. Men who are 6 feet tall are 72 inches in height.” *headdesk* Oh, dear.

Please, Salon, I love you for many things. But if you want to report on science results, find a writer who knows something about how basic statistics work.

yarnyfan:

amyrat151:

yarnyfan:

trai-all:

crippled-bowties:

So I was recruiting for my schools annual blood drive today at lunch. I asked my friend if he would donate and he said, “I can’t, I’m gay.”
Since we are good friends we male fun of each other and make jokes at our own expense and I thought he was joking. But no. He was dead fucking serious. And I looked it up to verify.

In the US you are not allowed to donate blood if you are gay, bi, or lesbian.

I honestly have been pissed about this all day.

So what you’re saying is some moron with medical training thinks you can catch gayness through blood transfusions?

I’d be angry too if I wasn’t trying to suppress laughter.

Lesbians and bisexual women are, actually, allowed to donate unless there’s some other reason they can’t – the rule dates back about 25 years and specifically targets, essentially, any man who has ever had sex with another man (so not necessarily limited to gay and bi men – if you’re straight but you fooled around with a guy that one time, you count!). The assumption was that any man who has ever had sex with another man has a high enough chance of having AIDS and either not knowing it or not revealing it that it would put the safety of the blood supply at risk. 

I think the American Red Cross is looking into updating the rule…which really should have been done years ago. The Department of Health and Human Services turned down a proposed rule change a couple years ago. The American Red Cross website sounds like they support a rule change but they have to get the government to agree. The rule right now is “any man who has had sex with a man even once since 1977 is ineligible”, among a few other factors that increase your risk for AIDS.

I keep thinking that for someone who’s 18 right now looking to donate blood, he or she might not have even heard of AIDS. It’s such a generational thing. I don’t know if they even still teach it in schools. To them it might seem quite archaic to them.

I think they’ve heard of it? In places where they have comprehensive sex ed, factual information about STDs is going to be taught, and in places where they don’t have comprehensive sex ed, it’s a Big Scary Disease You Can Get From Sex Do You Want To Die No I Didn’t Think So So Don’t Have Sex so they’d probably at least mention it. What would seem strange, I think, at least to the comprehensive sex ed crowd, is the idea that it’s an automatic death sentence, because it really isn’t to someone with access to the proper medication. The original lifetime ban rule dates back to a time when there was no test and no treatment, and it needs to go.

I did a little more googling and found that the FDA may change the limitation on men having sex with men from “not even once since 1977” to “not in the past 12 months” (which is the same as the current restriction for female partners of men who have/had sex with men) which is a good step but a behavior-based risk assessment system would be better – to start out with, define “have sex with”…

Oooh.  I’m finding the perception of AIDS as a generational thing that seems archaic a little scary. 

Via the CDC: The highest rate of HIV infection is among 20 to 24 year olds here in the States.  The peak age of diagnosis is in your early 20’s.  

Via the National Institute of Health: The estimated mean time between infection and diagnosis ranged from 37.0 months among men who have sex with men to approximately 53.0 months among heterosexual men.  That means that the average amount of time between the time you were exposed to HIV to when it’s discovered is about 3 to 5 years.  Which means that many of those young 20-something year olds were exposed to HIV in their teen years.  

And in case there’s still the perception that it’s a “gay man’s disease,” here’s some more statistics:   In 2010 about 20% of new HIV infections are in women.  The vast majority of them were exposed during heterosexual contact (84%).  Only 16% were exposed due to use of injection drug use.

It’s a generational thing, all right.  It’s just that it’s young people, both male and female, who have the highest rates of infection and diagnosis.

hoodfuturism:

frantzfandom:

shadesoffantasy:

classictrek:

Nichelle Nichols talks to a group of students at NASA Mission Control in 1977 and visits the Lewis Research center that same year.

In the mid-1970s, Nichols has given a speech that criticized NASA for not selecting women and people of color as astronaut candidates. The agency’s response was to hire her to find and recruit talented minorities and women, and she did exactly that. In her tenure as a recruiter, she helped the agency bring five women, three African American men and an Asian American male on board.

if you don’t think this lady is the best. You’re lying to yourself and we can’t be friends

I love the way that history works behind the scenes

You got Lucille Ball pushing to make Star Trek happen

You got MLK pleading with Nichelle to stay on the show

And then you get Nichelle helping motherfuckers get jobs at NASA

that is the tightest shit and if you don’t like you can get off my blog

this is so crucial omg

Source: classictrek

salon:

Dr. Deborah Azrael explains what decades of research can tell us about guns, women and myths of self-defense

Women in the United States are 11 times more likely to be murdered with guns than women in other high-income countries. The presence of a firearm during a domestic violence incident increases the likelihood of a homicide by 500 percent. Guns are also regularly used in non-fatal incidents of domestic violence, with researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health concluding in a study from 2000 that “hostile gun displays against family members may be more common than gun use in self-defense, and that hostile gun displays are often acts of domestic violence directed against women.”

And yet the myth that guns make women safer persists.