A clear abrogation of our treaty responsibilities.

Doyle’s thrust is that Martin is a raging sexist whose female characters are imprisoned by male conceptions of the proper role for women while being under the constant threat of gang rape, all for our entertainment; in short, J.R.R. Tolkien with Joe Francis’s aesthetics.  Martin’s fans (male) fans devour the misogyny and mayhem with neither examination nor scruple.

To be sure, the people of Martin’s Westeros do have traditional gender roles for women.  These women are, moreover, the victims of a nearly endless series physical and sexual assaults, which Doyle summarizes at length.  The summaries are – in fairness to Doyle – quite funny in how they undercut Martin’s penchant for melodrama.  For instance, her summary of Lady Catelyn Stark, a very serious and important character in the series, begins:

Meet Catelyn! She’s a dutiful, obedient wife and mother. Also, her husband is the hero. She will, therefore, be a sympathetic figure. Catelyn’s an all-around swell gal, and seems pretty sharp and competent, too, except when she is (a) getting all hysterical and non-functional because [of] HER CHILDREN, (b) stupidly kidnapping members of the royal family on a whim because HER CHILDREN, and (c) being a total bitchface to Ned’s illegitimate son because he is not HER CHILDREN.

Taken out of context like this, one can make a seemingly-persuasive case that Martin has issues with women. But as Alyssa Rosenberg argues at ThinkProgress, this analysis fails because it assumes 1) that Martin’s description of such a society is an implicit endorsement of it, 2) that his readers are incapable of rudimentary moral examination, and 3) that there is no literary value for writing about characters struggling against (or within) their society’s expectations, to say nothing of their own identities.

It fails for another reason as well, one Rosenberg either missed or left out entirely: that any society with strict gender roles for women is fated to have reciprocally restrictive ones for men.  Indeed, armed with a perspective equally myopic to Doyle’s,  male characters fare no better than the women (spoilers ahead):

Meet Ned!  He’s the Nice Guy hero.  He’s chivalric.  He’s noble.  He’s just.  He cares for his family and has a good marriage.  But you know what happens to him when he’s separated from his wife for the first time in sixteen years? He starts acting like a complete numbskull and gets his head chopped off!

Meet Drogo!  He’s a barbarian.  A manly barbarian. A man’s barbarian, if you will.  He lives in a manly culture whose manly pastime is rape, you know, that’s what men do when they’re manly. It never once occurs to him to even consider the morality of his actions until a plucky 13-year-old lady comes along to point out the blatantly obvious in a way even his man-brain can fathom.

Meet Jaime! He’s handsomer than the good guys, which means he’s also evil.

Meet Tyrion! Yeah, he’s lecherous, but we can like him because he’s not sexually threatening to the female characters we like.

Meet Bran! Also likable because a) not sexually threatening and b) got shoved out a window.

Meet Joffrey! He’s such a mean, sadistic, and misogynist little bastard that even Joss Whedon would be embarrassed to use him as a filler episode’s villain of-the-week. If only Danerys were there to show him the wickedness of his ways!

Meet Jon! He’s actually pretty likable, but he’s also obsessed with exceeding his father’s expectations and proving his step mom wrong.  That’s what being a 16-year-old dude is all about.

Meet Robert! He’s good for killing, drinking, and wenching, but not much else (mostly because he doesn’t listen to his wife).

Meet Gregore Clegane, the Brave Companions, and the Iron Men! Gaaaaah, if only Danerys where there to tell them — as only a girl can, because men are incapable of independent moral reasoning — that rape is bad.

George R. R. Martin doesn’t have a low opinion of women; he has one of people in general, though also a deep and incitement sympathy for them.  That may make him a misanthrope, but certainly no sexist.

Yes, your eyes don’t deceive you. That is George Lucas on the set of one movie that took a dump on my childhood, wearing a t-shirt celebrating a horrible thing he did to another great movie from my childhood, which he sells for a profit on his website.

Screw you, Mr. Lucas. Screw you very much.

Riker: So, basically, we offer them prize money to make the damn thing?

Data: Pricely, sir.

Picard: Make it so!

‘Trek’ tricorder could win $10 million

The objective of the project, currently being explored by the X Prize Foundation and Qualcomm, is not just to create one more cool gadget for “Trek” fans … although the idea of a hand-held, automated medical diagnostic device is pretty cool. The objective is to extend the reach of health information and services to billions more people in the world.

“We believe this is a fundamental step in helping people become true ‘health consumers’ who can have as much say in assessing and accessing health care as they would any other service or product,” Don Jones, vice president of wireless health strategy and market development at Qualcomm Labs, said in this week’s announcement about the project. “Qualcomm believes the value of this X Prize is also in changing the cost structure and focus of health care. By having consumers take the initial actions to obtain health assessment data, the use and the quality of physicians’ time is improved.”

The competition is modeled on earlier incentive programs such as the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private-sector spaceflight, or the $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize for super-efficient road vehicles. The basic idea is to encourage the development of mobile devices that can diagnose patients at least as well as a panel of board-certified physicians.

“The goal obviously is to drive a lot of innovation toward this narrow goal of easy-to-use, low-cost, minimally invasive, rapid, portable and scalable diagnosis,” Jones told me during a follow-up interview.

H/T: Instapundit.

I wonder if Uhura ever told Kirk…”Yeah…there’s an app for that.”

WASHINGTON – Tractor beams, energy rays that can move objects, are a science fiction mainstay. But now they are becoming a reality — at least for moving very tiny objects.

Researchers from the Australian National University have announced that they have built a device that can move small particles a meter and a half using only the power of light.

Physicists have been able to manipulate tiny particles over miniscule distances by using lasersfor years. Optical tweezers that can move particles a few millimeters are common.

Andrei Rhode, a researcher involved with the project, said that existing optical tweezers are able to move particles the size of a bacterium a few millimeters in a liquid. Their new technique can move objects one hundred times that size over a distance of a meter or more.

The device works by shining a hollow laser beam around tiny glass particles. The air surrounding the particle heats up, while the dark center of the beam stays cool. When the particle starts to drift out of the middle and into the bright laser beam, the force of heated air molecules bouncing around and hitting the particle’s surface is enough to nudge it back to the center.

I haven’t decided what is cooler: That we now have fricken tractor beams, or that they were invented by Aussies.

Captain Kirk might want to avoid taking the starship Enterprise to warp speed, unless he’s ready to shrug off interstellar hydrogen atoms that would deliver a lethal radiation blast to both ship and crew.

There are just two hydrogen atoms per cubic centimeter on average in space, which poses no threat to spaceships traveling at low speeds. But those same lone atoms would transform into deadly galactic space mines for a spaceship that runs into them at near-light speed, according to calculations based on Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

The original crew of “Star Trek” featured as unfortunate examples at a presentation by William Edelstein, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University, at the American Physical Society conference in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 13. The physicist showed a video clip of Kirk telling engineer Scotty to go to warp speed.

“Well, they’re all dead,” Edelstein recalled saying. His words caused a stir among the audience.

This pseudo-scientist has clearly failed basic Warp Theory, Astro-navigation and Elementary Starfleet Engineering. In the first place the deflector array is there to take care of these issues while at impulse and at pre-warp speeds. At Warp Speed they are dislocated from the normal space time continuum inside a subspace bubble.

Duh!

Nice try, Mr. Scientist.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m locking my doors, boarding up my windows, and staying in for the rest of my life.  My only consolations is that — whenever they come to murder me — it will all be over soon.

To prove that they had really created the trios, called Efimov trimers, the researchers produced one set of  three lithium atoms bound together, and then reproduced it with a binding energy 515 times the first one. (Essentially, binding energy indicates how tightly the particles hold onto one another and how much energy it would take to pull them apart.)

The researchers used a setup called a Feshbach resonance that allowed them to tweak the energy levels of their atoms. They found that when they hit multiples of 515, the particles would bind, but at other energies they wouldn’t, proving that the trios really were Efimov trimers.

“It’s an amazing effect, really,” Hulet said. “A lot of people didn’t believe [Efimov] at first. It was a very strange prediction.”

That’s right! They created the substance used to wipe out entire star systems.