Tag Archives: science

Reckless Rogue Sperm Donor or Altruist?

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Just when I thought I’d heard and seen it all…

A man from the San Francisco Bay area has fathered 14 children in the last five years through free sperm donations to women he meets through his website — and is now in trouble with the federal government.

The case of Trent Arsenault of Fremont has drawn attention to the practice of informal sperm donation, which physicians and bioethicists call unsafe but some people say is a civil liberties issue…

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration sent Arsenault a cease-and-desist letter late last year telling him he must stop because he does not follow the agency’s requirements for getting tested for sexually transmitted diseases within seven days before giving sperm. The FDA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Violators of FDA regulations on human cells and tissues face up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine, according to guidelines published on the agency’s website.

Now, Arsenault states that he does get tested regularly, but even more compelling…

Arsenault says he donates sperm out of a sense of service to help people who want to have children but can’t afford conventional sperm banks. The 36-year-old minister’s son has four more children on the way.

“I always had known through people praying at church that there’s fertility issues,” Arsenault told The Associated Press on Monday. “I thought it would just be a neat way of service to help the community.”

Sounds incredibly reasonable, doesn’t it?

I mean, how many Don Juan types are out there right now, impregnating women left and right the old-fashioned way, and here’s a guy who simply wants to help people, and he’s facing a year in prison and a hefty fine?

His website is loaded with information about himself — his medical records, his lifestyle and diet, even a criminal background check — so it’s hard to argue that he’s being reckless. What emerges is a picture of a pretty extraordinary guy. He’s the son of a pastor and states he’s a churchgoer himself, and yet…

He says he believes his case comes down to constitutional issues of a right to privacy and reproductive choice.

On his website, he includes this quote from the Guttmacher Institute, and he emphatically added the underlining:

…women, in consultation with their physician, have a constitutionally protected right to have an abortion in the early stages of pregnancy—that is, before viability—free from government interference.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Trent will sell out and end up with his own reality TV show, but for now I’m inclined to admire him for his desire to do good.

Tweet of the Day: @arstechnica

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Somehow, I don’t think the question is whether or not lab-grown meat will ever make it to the supermarket. Rather, the question I think of first is whether or not people would actually buy it and eat it if it did.

Star Trek Freaks Me Out With iPhone Scene

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So, I just came through a few days of self-imposed bed rest in order to fight off one of the many bugs going around, a fight, I’m happy to report, that I won, and for kicks during my non-sleeping hours, thanks to Netflix streaming, I went back in time and watched some Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes.

And there I was, watching Season 3, Episode 8, and in one scene Commander William Riker is sitting alone at a table in Ten Forward, the Starship Enterprise bar and lounge, he’s sipping on a shot of the hard stuff, and he’s staring down at a tiny device on the table, poking at it with his finger, reading and stroking his beard, and…

…it just utterly freaked me out, because that’s exactly what I look like everyday at lunch, only I’m assuming the same posture, making the same motions, totally absorbed by technology in a room full of other people, using the latest iteration of a device that was first sold in 2007, 18 years after that Star Trek scene was broadcast.

Like the iPhone itself, the theme of this post is hardly original. Just Google “Star Trek + Apple” and you’ll see. Rather, this is merely how I experienced this topic.

Summary: Not long after the iPad came out, Trekkies and Apple Haters posted YouTube clips from Star Trek episodes showing crew members and other characters using tablet devices, like this one:

 

Now, that scene came just three episodes before the scene I mention above, I also watched it during my convalescence, but I didn’t react to it nearly the same way only because I don’t own an iPad.

Anyway, along with the clips were articles and blog posts making the claim that Apple simply stole the idea for the iPad from Star Trek. But then someone went back a further 20 years in time and discovered that the iPad was first brought to life by Stanley Kubrick in his 1969 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey:

 

The latter got considerable attention, when Samsung, who was trying to bring their own tablet to market, but were being blocked by Apple who claimed they got there first, sited that scene from 2001 as proof that Apple stole the iPad design from Kubrick and had no right to claim it was their original idea.

While the late Steve Jobs was no doubt a visionary, his company’s considerable accomplishments were less about inventing than about bringing long-envisioned dreams to life, as Jonny Evans at ComputerWorld points out:

With its claim that the iPad looks like the tablets used in “2001: A Space Odyssey”, Samsung has conceded that Apple is transforming science fiction into science fact…

After all, it’s one thing to make a prop for a movie or a TV show, and it’s another thing entirely to make a working device, and I can’t recommend highly enough a great Ars Technica piece from a year ago that traces the history of the original Star Trek designs, including a discussion with the designers themselves, who talk about the gadgets in relation to the iPhone and iPad.

Of Debt and Dicks

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With the interwebs dominated by news of the head-banging-on-brick-wall drama going on in Washington, D.C. over the debt crisis, where U.S. governmental dysfunction has reached farcical levels once again, leading the country to the brink of financial disaster, a disaster that could have disastrous repercussions all around the world…

…well, I never thought I’d say this, but…

I’m grateful to have come across this story at Salon:

Welcome to the world’s largest penis collection

HUSAVIK, Iceland — Three years ago when a local fisherman found a dead walrus on his property, he cut off its penis and called Sigurdur Hjartarson.

“I’ve taken it off. Do you want it?” he asked, figuring Hjartarson, the curator of the phallological museum located conveniently a few miles away, might be interested in the genitals of what he described as an extremely old, two ton walrus.

Hjartarson was thrilled. His Icelandic Phallological Museum, which houses the world’s largest collection of penises and penile parts, had scored another valuable specimen.

Thank god for comic relief!

The article vacillates between cringe-inducing:

But not all of the penis specimens on display in Husavik are so frighteningly large. That’s especially true for the organ filed under the code “D15b.”

This one belonged to a human male, a renowned womanizer named Pall Arason who died in January at the age of 95 after claiming to have bedded 296 women (he kept a “gentlemen’s scorecard,” naturally).

In 1996, Arason agreed to have his penis donated to the museum after his death. He kept his word, although right before he passed away he regretted it had “shriveled embarrassingly” in the last years.

Today the specimen, hair and all, sits among the smaller mammal pieces — rats, rabbits and hamsters whose bits, humiliatingly enough, come with a magnifying glass — in the transparent case with the caption: “Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Member whole, with scrotum and both testicles. In formalin.”

…and guffaw-inducing:

“Collecting penises is like collecting anything. You can never stop, you can never catch up, you can always get a new one, a better one,” Hjartarson said as he reached into the museum’s penis-shaped cash register to return some change to a customer, before picking up a phone of the same shape.

…and though I do not harbor a phallus phetish, Iceland has now inched up — so to speak — my travel wish list.

Feelin’ Like Tantalus Blues

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Remember the story of Tantalus, from Greek mythology?

No? Well, there’s a reason why Tantalus is the source of the English word tantalize, for when Tantalus murdered his own son, Pelops, chopped him up, boiled him, and served him as a feast to the gods, he was punished by being made to stand in a pool of water, above him was a fruit-bearing tree branch that moved out of reach every time Tantalus reached for it, and every time he lowered his head to drink from the pool the water receded, leaving him perpetually hungry and thirsty.

Given that we’re running out of water here on Earth, I was reminded of Tantalus when I read the following, via Wired:

Black Hole Holds Universe’s Biggest Water Supply

Two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever found in the universe. It’s 12 billion light years away, and holds at least 140 trillion times the amount of water in all the Earth’s oceans combined.

It manifests itself as a colossal mass of water vapor, hidden in the distant APM 08279+5255 quasar. Quasars are bright and violent galactic nuclei fueled by a supermassive black hole at their center.

Ok. Great. Tons of water, more than we could ever need, only it’s 12 billion light years away.

I laughed out loud when a Wired reader commented: “Does anyone have a really, really long hose?”