I've been playing with some new tools in Google Docs, including this Motion Chart widget. Let's see if this publishes right...

Here you can see the rate of abortion in Canada plotted against the rate of live births in Canada, from 1991 to 2006:



I must admit that I'm quite surprised at the rates! Over those years, anywhere from 18–24% of pregnancies (live births + abortions) were aborted. To me, that says there's a hell of a lot of women getting pregnant who don't want to be. Is there a problem with access to birth control? Education about adherence issues with birth control? Are women being put in positions where they can't insist on birth control without facing other risks?

It does seem to be turning around lately though. The rate of live births seems to be holding fairly steady, while abortion rates are falling.

For more incredible charts like this, watch this video with the ever-entertaining Prof Hans Rosling:

Labels: abortion, charts, google

David Foster Wallace, Influential Writer, Dies at 46 (he hanged himself):

His father said Sunday that Mr. Wallace had been taking medication for depression for 20 years and that it had allowed his son to be productive. It was something the writer didn't discuss, though in interviews he gave a hint of his haunting angst...

James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor's suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful. The elder Wallaces had seen their son in August, he said.

"He was being very heavily medicated," he said. "He'd been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn't stand it anymore."

Excerpt from Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace's big novel:

The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

How many people do I know on anti-depressants right now? How many times do I wonder about my own mental health? I think of depression as a nuisance, a frustration. But then I remember: it is a killer. My uncle, my friends, many authors and musicians I admire, they all jumped out of that burning building.

I realised yesterday that depression works much like HIV. HIV attacks your immune system, your body's mechanism of defending itself. Depression attacks your will to defend yourself. Eventually it's a small thing that gets you, whether it's the pneumonia that you can't quite fight off, or that quiet thought that becomes deafening.

And here's how electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) feels for some people:


DFW memoriam thread at MetaFilter

Labels: depression, dfw, suicide

Yeah, not sure what to do with the blog. Here's some of what I've been reading lately:

Zuky - Satire of the Stupid

The New Yorker cover, despite its intention and despite being sarcastic, is not satire ... It does not interrogate the validity of those racist stereotypes, but rather accepts and gleefully embraces their marginalizing and dehumanizing power, then implies that it's ludicrous for conservative yahoos to think that the Obamas are those kinds of blacks; the Obamas are good blacks, not scary militant blacks or Muslims; the Obamas do not sport Afros or turbans, they are not reminiscent of dangerous Sixties radicals, no sir, they are down with the program, they are safe for whites...

The lives of people with Afros, the lives of people who wear turbans, the actual legacies of the Black Panthers and 60s social justice activists, are all distorted, discarded, and mocked in the service of asserting the palatability of the Democratic nominee to provincial white sensibilities. And there's nothing even remotely cosmopolitan or sophisticated or iconoclastic or hip about that.

Feminist Economics: An interview with Susan Feiner

Feminist economics differs from mainstream, orthodox, plain vanilla economics in a couple of major different ways. First, or at least first for me, is that feminist economics is deeply influenced by feminist "science studies," the scholarship that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s (continuing today) which shows the deep flaws in the idea that knowledge is "objective."

Through most of the 19th century and until quite late in the 20th economists always talked about "rational economic man," and they did mean MAN. Through these often (but not always) unconscious moves mainstream economics excluded women and women's activities from consideration. This reinforced laws that excluded women from owning property, entering contracts, or taking jobs.

That's the first major difference - feminists reject the idea that all of human productive behavior can be reduced to the exchange of goods for money, and money for goods. The economy is larger, much larger, than THE MARKET.

The second difference is that economics completely abstracts from power. In all the textbook models the default assumption is that markets are impersonal, and no one buyer and no one seller influences the outcome. This is patent nonsense. Feminist economists in contrast explicitly incorporate power—who has it, how it's used, and why it's important—into their work.

Poise - So you think you wanna elope

You should elope. Every single one of you who has a person they love and who they want to spend the rest of their life and they want legal and financial rights that one gains by getting married should elope. Every one of you who wants those things but doesn't want the ceremony, the conventions, the pressure, the decisions, the drama, the details should elope. But, you should only elope if . . .

The Trouble With Spikol - Is suicide preventable?



Ask Metafilter:
- Who are some great comedians I've probably never heard of that I can watch on youtube?
- Book recommendations for introductions to feminist thinking.
- Were produce and meat really better in the old days? How can we be sure?

Labels: random

Awwwww!!! The little baby kitten is CRYING!! Baby, you have to save him!!

Sometimes I have to resort to extreme reminding tactics. I'll report back on effectiveness. :)

Labels: christopher, dune, neglectful cat owners

Yesterday, 4pm:

Christopher: Is there some kind of big football game today or something?
Me: Dude, it's Superbowl Sunday.
Christopher: Are you sure? I thought that was near the end of February or something.
Me: No, I'm pretty sure it's today. All my recipe blogs have been preparing snacks for it.

Why I Love Him, #8754: Doesn't abandon me for football.

Labels: christopher, relationship