Bits and Pieces - December 10, 2014

I don't have much to say about the Senate Torture Report. Maybe later. I need to do some assimilating. Here's as much as I can write now, with links to resources.

The association between exaggeration in health related science news and academic press releases: retrospective observational study. This is a scientific study looking at how scientific results get distorted by the time you read them in the newspaper.

Women Resisting Heterosexuality In Western Art History. Very funny readings of female reaction to male privilege in the painters and characters.

Noah Berlatsky in The Atlantic:

Over here is Le Guin, taking a stand for science fiction on the grounds that "we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope."
....
It's no accident that the most ubiquitous, overwhelming sci-fi sub-genre around is the one that has the least to do with the future: superheroes. Much of the superhero genre, in fact, is devoted to the fantasy that we don't need to wait for technological marvels, but can experience them right here, right now. More, we can do so, magically, without the comfy old familiar world we know changing that much at all.

How fear plays into the frequency with which white cops kill young black men. Fear is a common thread through this story, the need some felt for torture after 9/11, and other pathologies. We need to get away from it.

Political correctness enhances creativity. Nice quote:

When men aren’t thinking about being politically correct, they can sometimes be too, for lack of a better word, bro-y (or afraid of coming off as such). “And the flip side of men being jerks is that women worry that they’re going to be a target of that behavior,”

Best article around on the situation in Ukraine.