Obsidian Wings

Some demographics are more equal than others

by Doctor Science

DC Comics is launching a "reboot", for which they state that The target audience are men age 18 to 34 though they do realize that they have readers in other demographics. Leigh at the Hathor Legacy is only one of many female comic fans wondering

why DC is marketing toward an audience they seem to already have, and why marketing to expand their female audience isn’t a higher priority.

I hypothesized:

I agree that this is perplexing if their goal is to sell comics. It is, though, quite comprensible if they are changing their business model, and now intended to sell *advertising*. In that case, a renewed commitment to that elusive 18-30 y.o. male demographic may be just what the actual customers (the advertisers) are looking for.

My idea is that if they make comics more like “porn that bears no relation to the laws of physics”, they might sell highly-targeted ad space: “getcher impulse-driven young males here! No additives, no paying for eyeballs you don’t want!”

And they might be planning to get more revenue from online ads, as well, and using the comics to generate a demographically pure product.

It’s either that or a “cootie” theory.

Here's what I mean by porn:

Your separated by a common culture Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

While the post on Michael Irvin was pretty open thread-y, form demands that when the sun's rays cross the international dateline, an appropriately labeled open thread should be offered up to the ObWi gods, which, in order to not inflame the atheist/skeptic crowd here, is strategically placed below the fold.

Bravery?

by liberal japonicus

Not sure if this is front page stuff, but Michael Irvin, former member of the Dallas Cowboys and Hall of Fame member, just appeared on the cover of Out Magazine supporting gay marriage and pledging his support to any pro football player who is in the closet and wants to come out. 

"I don't see how any African-American with any inkling of history can say that you don't have the right to live your life how you want to live your life," Irvin is quoted as saying. "No one should be telling you who you should love, no one should be telling you who you should be spending the rest of your life with. When we start talking about equality and everybody being treated equally, I don't want to know an African-American who will say everybody doesn't deserve equality."

Irving isn't the first football player to support gay rights, Brendon Ayanbadejo, Ravens linebacker, wrote supporting gay marriage, and  Scott Fujita, who I think I mentioned earlier and who has a fascinating back story, immediately stood with Brendon. Because Fujita was a New Orleans Saint and it was just before their Super Bowl winning season, it focussed a lot of attention, but I think that was as far as it got.

This had reminded me that in May of 2010, Sports Illustrated ran a story about Gareth Thomas, a gay Welsh rugby player. This is probably not news to many of you, but what interested me was that I remembered that cover teaser for that article was, 'Gareth Thomas, the World's Bravest athlete', which got me to wondering. 

The Chinese character for bravery is 勇 and the character appears to be a man 男 and the element that provides the phonetic reading. At least that is what I assumed. However, looking up the etymology of the character, I was surprised to find that the meaning element was 力 and the phonetic element is the upper part and it is only by chance that the character for bravery would look like the character for man.

Was Michael Irvin 'brave' and what precisely is bravery? Certainly, it is a bit different from the bravery of Gareth Thomas. It seems we need a word for that type of bravery that, were it taken up, would make what was done not brave but mundane. Whatever we call it, here's hoping we see more of it.

Phone hacking and the Murdoch rot

Doc Science mentioned in passing that we need more political content here, and, as I probably know less than anyone of the other front pagers about the current US political zeitgeist, in the best traditions of blogging, it stands to reason that I should be the one to deliver.

As I mentioned in the comments, my attention has been absolutely taken by the News of the World/phone hacking scandal in the UK. Your one stop shop is the Guardian page on this. (as a side note, the Guardian, with its live blogs of breaking events, and podcasts and integration of video talks, seems to me like what the future of media should be if we are lucky, so if you'd rather talk about that, go for it)

I've heard it said that the story was initially treated like a parochial concern, but has recently began to catch fire in the US, but I'm not sure how to gauge that. As much as I'd like to be wrong, I'm afraid that the Atlantic ocean will provide a sufficient strong enough firewall, so that Murdoch's American empire will be untouched. I also think that News of the World seems to have trafficked more tittilating revelations about folks. The wingnut right in the US flirted with this (remember the Frost family's granite countertops?), but it seems not to have caught hold, though I may be wrong. 

One other point, a number of people have noted that New Labour was equally complicit in the rise of Murdoch, with one writer pointing out that Tony Blair's decision to support Bush in Iraq was given the final push by Murdoch. I don't know how true that is (one problem with the Guardian for me is the division between news reporting and editorial opinion is blurred, or at least not clear to me.), but I think that one reason why New Labour was complicit is that Murdoch appears to be a person who is not interested in which side he is on, as long as it is the winning side.

Anyway, what's the scandal look like from where you are sitting?

Confidence or Customers

by Doctor Science

I shall attempt to make a brief post about the debt ceiling meltdown, despite barely knowing what I'm talking about.

I'm basically a Krugmanite, because

• I figure he knows more than me
• we live near each other(comparatively speaking)
• our life choices were inspired by the same writer.

No, this is not the *real* cover, this is Mighty God King's version. But it sums it up pretty well.

Anyway, one of the things Krugman often talks about is the confidence fairy theory, which states that businesses aren't hiring (despite record cash reserves and low interest rates) because they lack "confidence". The way to give them "confidence" is to cut government spending; once that happens, businesses will regain confidence, hire more people, and the economy will recover.

PZ Myers: Scientist. Atheist. Mensch.

PZ Myers is a Minnesota zoologist who studies squid professionally, and who also blogs at Pharyngula as a scientist, skeptical atheist, and opponent of creationism. He has also demonstrated that he is a mensch.

PZ demonstrated menschlichkeit as the atheist/skeptic/rationalist blogosphere has *exploded* over the weekend. The spark of the explosion was almost unbelievably small, but apparently there was a lot of gas hanging around just waiting to go up.

Your highly intrusive social engineering Friday open thread

Cause we know where you live! Free nachos for the best definition. Offer void where prohibited.

What Sex-Specific Selection Reveals about the Purpose of Children

by Doctor Science

There's been a high-profile debate the past week about sex-specific abortion and the problem of "missing women" in Asia. When I put my evolutionary biologist hat on, the striking thing about the problem is that it happens at all. I believe it proves that human beings do not, generally speaking, have children for the purpose of reproduction. Children are not "offspring" as biologists think of it.

Unbalanced sex ratios IMO occur because, in many societies across time & space, children are social security more than they are offspring. Faced with a choice between having support in old age and grandchildren, people generally choose the support and ditch the grandchildren. From an evolutionary POV, human awareness of our impending old age makes us too smart for our own reproductive good.

There's an actual bright side to this view of sex-selection. It turns out to be much easier and faster to remove the pressure for an unbalanced sex ratio than I would have expected. If a society has a real, non-familial social security system, the sex ratio can snap back to 1:1 in only a generation.

It's really hard to find pictures to illustrate "female infanticide". This is a picture of the Wilis from the ballet Giselle. They remind me of the Chinese custom of ghost marriage, the only kind of marriage many Chinese men can look forward to, given that country's distorted sex ratio.

Let's start by looking at the current debate.