Interesting If True: Episode 81: Careers Dying Hard...
Description
Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that’s kicking 2022 off right — by taking the piss out of the ’80s!
I’m your host this week, Aaron, and with me are:
I’m Shea, and this week I learned that there are literally no rules saying your New Year’s resolution can’t be for evil.
I’m Steve, and you should rewatch Highlander too.
Round Table
Round table this week starts with a very good Happy New Year to all our fantastic listeners.
It’s pretty cool that we’re still able to do this and despite changes in hosts, branding, topics — really all the things — you’re still with us. Thanks to everyone who listens, shares, and supports the show! Your support means the world to us of course, but it also allows us to donate to a good cause like WyoAIDS. If you’d like to find out how to join the ranks of our good year-having, charity-helping, supporters check out https://www.patreon.com/IIT and, for as little as a buck a show, you’ll get a patin-exclusive story each week! It’s basically twice the weekly us, and that is, apparently, something you enjoy ;)
And with 2022’s inaugural Patreon pitch out of the way, let’s have a beer!
Headlines!
Speaking of new things, it’s Headlines 2.0!
I wanted to restore the headline segment to talk about the nonsense, of course, there will be a bunch of that in 2022 I’m confident. But also to talk about some cool stuff. So, in keeping with the format of the show, these will be brief, fun, and hopefully, not entirely depressing.
That’s No Moon…
An international team of astronomers has released an image of what, at first glance, is a star-filled night’s sky.
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<figcaption>It’s (not) Full of Stars</figcaption></figure>The image is actually of some 25,000 supermassive black holes! The giant star-eaters live at the center of galaxies. Now, I know what you’re thinking — how do you take a picture or something that devours light? Well… you watch the stars it eats and image the accretion disk around it with a network of 52 radio telescopes using LOWFAR (Low-Frequency Array). Then you spend years working the data out.
This is the result of many years of work on incredibly difficult data. […] We had to invent new methods to convert the radio signals into images of the sky.”
Francesco de Gasperin
Lead researcher Francesco de Gasperin, Universität Hamburg, Germany.
The LOWFAR signals can be in the 3MHz range and distorted by signals up to 30MHz.
It’s similar to when you try to see the world while immersed in a swimming pool, when you look up, the waves on the water of the pool deflect the light rays and distort the view.”
Reinout van Weeren
Study co-author Reinout van Weeren, of the Leiden Observatory.
The image, which is massive but still only makes up 4% of the night sky in the northern hemisphere, was created with supercomputers correcting each portion of the image, every 4 seconds, over the course of 256-hour observation.
American Gods…
The Pew Research Center has released new figures on American religiosity and, surprising no one I’m sure, it continues to wane.
Basically, the Trump administration and their brazen bigotries combined with god’s apparent impotence in the face of Covid have left folks questioning organized religion.
In 2007 16.1% of Americans were “nones” those without specific religious affiliation though often still wary of labels like “agnostic” or the much-reviled “atheist.” In 2014, Pew released what we considered then to be a groundbreaking study totaling the nones at 22.8%. Now, in 2021, we’re sitting at 29%!
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<figcaption>Charts!</figcaption></figure>The chart is a bit deceptive though as it lists Christians as a large, homogeneous, block when in reality followers of Jesus have been schisming all over the place for more than 2000 years.
In terms of single groups that it makes sense to group, the nones are now the single largest “religious” demographic in America.
This is great news for science education, LGBTQ rights, reproductive justice (we’re gonna need some of that soon), racial justice, sex-ed, and reason-based legislation… if we could get equivalent representation in government, which at the moment, is left to a single out-and-proud non-believing representative.
Doctors Don’t Take Women Seriously
This may as well be an ongoing story.
A massive UK-based study has just been completed and found — surprising no one who has ever been a woman, or with a woman, at a hospital — that women are much more likely to die after surgery if their doctor is a dude.
I’ve had some annoying doctor’s visits, but nothing like my wife. In working with doctors for her chronic illness we’ve been dismissed, horribly patronized, and one doctor in Colorado insisted he only speak directly to me despite Ashley being in the room. After all, I’m “the head of household.”
Gross.
Now, in a first-of-its-kind study, we have some idea of what causes women’s medical discrimination: guys.
In our 1.3 million patient sample involving nearly 3,000 surgeons, we found that female patients treated by male surgeons had 15% greater odds of worse outcomes than female patients treated by female surgeons,”
Dr. Angela Jerath
Dr. Angela Jerath, Associate Professor and Clinical Epidemiologist at the University of Toronto.
A co-author of the findings.
Which sounds bad, but it gets worse. The study also found that women have a 32% higher risk of death if their surgery is done by a man, rather than a female surgeon. The differences are measured in 1.2% vs. 0.9%, so this doesn’t mean women have a 30% chance of dying outright, just 30% more which is still significant but not exactly the 1-in-3 death sentence it sounds like initially.
The authors conclude,
We have demonstrated in our paper that we are failing some female patients and that some are unnecessarily falling through the cracks with adverse, and sometimes fatal, consequences.”
While the Royal College of Surgeons of England said the findings were “interesting” but that “much more detailed research” is required because, just going out on a limb here, most of them are curly wig-wearing dudes.
PBR Continues To Be Terrible
I’m not above drinking a PBR, but if it’s all that’s available, I’d rather be sober.
The cheapest beer on the market had to issue an apology today, and frustratingly, it’s not about clinging to an old-timey, “congrats on not being ditch water”, blue ribbon.
Nope, apparently, it’s because PBR tried to be edgy with their socials but forgot that they’re the worst. The company was already on thinnish ice with its “Wet January” ad campaign, then their social “associate” decided to give folks doing Dry January another option — butt holes.
“Not drinking this January?” the original tweet asks. “Try eating a–!”
Try eating ass!
When bewildered Twitter followers asked what they were talking about, Pabst’ replies were simple enough:
It’s about ass and eating it
To critics, they offered:
[You’re] Clearly not getting [you’re] ass ate
And when it caught headline attention:
Suddenly eating ass is on-brand
Though I would argue it’s always been on-brand for Pabst, how else do you explain what their beer tastes like?
… And to other Twitter users who conflated the two, Pabst shot back with mom jokes until the associate was fired.
Quiz Time!
Shea, wh
United States
