We could be into the beginning of a condom boom

by Paul Keller

If Drug-Slathered, Erection-Enhancing Condoms Won’t Lead Men to Safe Sex, Nothing Will
[Via Discoblog]

For men who find that condoms sometimes, um, lessen their enthusiasm, some good news: Durex may soon be selling erection-enhacing condoms with a pharmaceutical boost.

The condoms, developed by UK biotech company Futura Medical, are lined with a gel that increases blood flow. The gel’s active ingredient, glyceryl nitrate, has been used for as a vasodilator for over a century. The tricky part was getting the gel to stay in the condom without degrading the latex, but the company found a way (and quickly patented it).

Men who enrolled in the clinical trial took the condoms home and gave them a test run (the things we do for science!). Both they and their partners reported longer, larger, and harder erections, presumably while grinning.

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Modern technology is a wonder. We may now have condoms that can produce larger, longer and harder erections. What man is going to want to say no?

I wonder just how popular they will be? We will have to go to Europe to get them The FDA wants more trials.

There are all sorts of ways to politically balance the curriculum

by Francisco Antunes

California Town’s School Board Wants Politically “Balanced” Curriculum On Climate Change
[Via DeSmogBlog - Clearing the PR Pollution that Clouds Climate Science]

And the headdesk moment of the week goes to Los Alamitos Unified School District, who recently decided that teachers in the school district would have to prove that their curricula have political balance when teaching controversial subjects, including global warming. Reminiscent of the creation of the universe debacles, teachers will now be required to teach “opposing views” because conservative board members are “concerned that ‘liberal’ faculty members could skew lessons on global warming”, according to local news coverage.

This could potentially become a dangerous trend, considering that several other districts, including the Texas board of education and South Dakota public schools, have taken similar views as well. It might be okay to teach climate skepticism if it indeed was taught and identified as climate misinformation that industries deliberately use to confuse the public, not as just a “dissenting opinion”. However this doesn’t appear to be the case here. Just listen to what one of the school board members has to say:

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Think about all the scientific theories that are obviously kept out of the curriculum for political reasons.

The Phlogiston theory to explain combustion. Using miasmas to explain disease. The luminiferous aether to explain the propagation of light.

So many physics, chemistry and biology lectures provide such unbalanced views. If it was good enough for Aristotle or Ptolemy, it should be good enough for our students. Perhaps if we examined the bumps on their heads we would know which ones were smart or not.

As one of the board members stated, he wants his political views to be represented in the material that is being taught. Because apparently there is a liberal or conservative reason for why the sun shines or the tides rise.

As an example, while most of us were taught the apparently liberal position that the moon causes the tides, Bill O’Reilly provides the conservative reasons.

I know, this is all hyperbole but since the liberals get tarred with the craziest members of their side, I think the conservatives should be tarred with their craziest.

And O’Reilly, the school board administrator and others – such as the Texas Board of Education – are about as crazy as can be.

Science is about trying to create models that come the closest to describing the world around us. Teach different models because neither does an adequate job or one explains things the other does not.

But never teach different models for political reasons. And never state that your political view must be represented.

I think we have a better example than bad teachers for why the school system is so screwed up – the screwed up school boards putting their political beliefs  – both conservative and liberal – over the education of students.

When denialists actually do science they bolster climate change

Anthony Watts contradicted by Watts et al
[Via Deltoid]

Last year Anthony Watts said that it was a certainty that siting differences caused a warm bias:

“I can say with certainty that our findings show that there are differences in siting that cause a difference in temperatures, not only from a high and low type measurement but also from a trend measurement and a trend calculation.”

“The early arguments against this project said that all of these different biases are going to cancel themselves out and there would be cool biases as well as warm biases, but we discovered that that wasn’t the case. The vast majority of them are warm biases, and even such things as people thinking a tree might in fact keep the temperature cooler doesn’t really end up that way.”

Now that Watts et al has been accepted for publication we find that his paper says the opposite and gets the same result as Menne at al:

Temperature trend estimates vary according to site classification, with poor siting leading to an overestimate of minimum temperature trends and an underestimate of maximum temperature trends, resulting in particular in a substantial difference in estimates of the diurnal temperature range trends. The opposite-signed differences of maximum and minimum temperature trends are similar in magnitude, so that the overall mean temperature trends are nearly identical across site classifications.

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After spending so much time claiming that the data collected in the US was inaccurate and should not be used in discussing AGW, their peer-reviewed paper shows the opposite.

There may be problems with individual sites but it appears that the law of large numbers overcomes these. In fact it does not matter if only the best sites are used in the data analysis or not. The results are the same.

And they show that both day and night temperatures are rising at the same rate. This suggests that the sun itself is not totally responsible. If t was, nighttime temperatures – with no sun – should have a different trendline than daytime temperatures. The same thing must be affecting both temperatures, making increasing carbon dioxide levels the most likely culprit.

So, the scientists that have been disparaged by many of these denialists were actually right.

How options makers manipulate Apple’s stock price

How the market in Apple ‘weeklys’ is rigged
[Via Brainstorm Tech: Technology blogs, news and analysis from Fortune Magazine » Apple 2.0]

If you’re looking for evidence of manipulation, Friday’s close was picture-perfect

Volume rose sharply and Apple’s share price collapsed in the last half hour

“The easiest way to think of options,” wrote The Market Skeptics‘s Eric deCarbonnel in a prescient 2009 post, “is as a type of insurance. Investors pay a premium to protect themselves against sharp swings in the market. If these sharp swings don’t happen, those selling options (option market makers) keep the premiums as profit.”

“In a legitimate free market,” he continues, “every single option market maker would have already gone bankrupt, especially with the volatility over the last two years. Luckily for option market makers, U.S. markets are neither legitimate nor free.”

If he were looking for a case to make his point, deCarbonnel couldn’t do much better than the trade that started last summer in Apple “weeklys” — puts and calls that expire every Friday. As we saw in Thursday’s post, Apple’s (AAPL) share price tends to gravitate with uncanny accuracy toward the closing price that causes “max pain” to option buyers and maximum profit to option sellers — often in a burst of last-minute trading.

In that respect, Friday’s close was picture-perfect.

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It appears that a big reason Apple’s stock is not as high as it should be, and perhaps why its P/E ratio is so much lower for a company growing as fast as it is, could be due to manipulations by a small segment of the financial arena that uses options to leverage their influence.

They manipulate the weekly price of Apple for their own benefit and to produce ‘maximum pain’ for everyone else. People can now predict where Apple’s stock price will end each week purely by looking at the options market, not the stock market.

Average people in the US cannot trade options. You have to demonstrate that you are a well-educated investor to be allowed to trade them. Now we can see part of the reason why – it is not really an open market but one where some are free to manipulate the price. Then throw in the ability of certain media to provide cover by producing fake rumors /just in time’ and you have a hermetically sealed system where they control the stock price of Apple that the rest of us pay – all for their own benefit.

You know something is wrong when people are able to predict the weekly closing price.