http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/10/26/what-startup-lifes-really-like/

The dirty secret about startup founders is they can’t keep marriages together. Part of the reason for this is they are crazy to begin with. And part of the reason is that you have to be married to your company to do a startup. So divorce rates are high, especially among women, because they are much less likely to have a spouse who is willing to stay home and keep the family intact.

So I got a divorce. It was on the cover of the New York Times. And all PR is good PR, of course, but I realized, while I was going through the process, that I wanted a successful marriage more than I wanted a successful career. And then I thought, “No. I want both.” And I became exhausted wondering how women get both. (Until I realized, oh,this is why women don’t do startups.)

A construction worker is putting up a plaque on the wall that says “do not post signs on this wall”, but is interrupted and asks a bystander to hold up the sign in place against the wall while he goes off to do something. A cop comes by, and tells the bystander that they can’t put that here because of the sign. When the bystander puts it down, someone else comes along and puts a sign up and the cop is fine with that because there’s nothing saying you can’t put signs up.

It’s basically an experiment on the psychology of bureaucracy.

Pinker compares the mating habits of various species:

Apes have a wide variety of sexual arrangements. The means, by the way, that there is no such thing as an “ape legacy” that humans are doomed to live by. Gorillas live on the fringes of forests in small groups of one male and several females, and the males fight each other for control over females, the males evolving to be twice the females’ size. Gibbon females are solitary and widely dispersed, and the male finds a female’s territory and acts as a faithful consort. Since other males are off in other territories, they fight no more than females do and are no bigger. Orangutan females are solitary but close enough together that a male can monopolize two or more of their ranges, and the males are about 1.7 times the size of the females. Chimps live in large, unstable groups that no male could dominate. Groups of males live with the females, and the males compete for dominance, which confers more opportunities to copulate. The males are about 1.3 as large as females. With lots of males around, a female has an incentive to mate with many of them so that a male can never be sure that an infant is not his and hence will not murder the infant to make its mother available to bear his own offspring. Bonobo (pygmy chimp) females are almost indiscriminately promiscuous, and the males fight less and are about the same size as females. They compete in a different way: inside the females’ bodies.

Sperm can survive in the vagina for several days, so a promiscuous female can have several males’ sperm competing inside her for a chance at fertilizing the egg. The more sperm a male produces, the greater the chance that one of his will get there first. That explains why chimpanzees have enormous testicles for their body size. Bigger testes make more sperm, which have a better chance inside promiscuous females. A gorilla is four times the weight of a chimpanzee, but his testicles are four times smaller. The females in his harem have no chance to copulate with any other male, so his sperm do not have to compete. Gibbons, who are monogamous, have small testicles too.

In almost all primates (indeed, in almost all mammals), the males are deadbeat dads, contributing nothing to their offspring but DNA. Other species are more fatherly. […] The evolution of male parental investments is helped along by several things. One is external fertilization, found in most fishes, where the female drops her eggs and the male fertilizes them in the water. The male is guaranteed that the fertilized eggs carry his genes […] But in most mammals the cards are stacked against doting fatherhood. The egg is tucked away inside the mother, where some other male can fertilize it, so a male is never certain an offspring is his. He faces the danger of wasting his investment on another male’s genes. […]

When males become devoted fathers, the rules of the mating game change. A female may choose to mate based on his ability and his willingness to invest in their offspring, insofar as she can judge. Females, not just males, compete for mates, though the prizes are different: males compete for fertile females willing to copulate, females compete for flush males willing to invest. Polygamy is no longer a matter of one male beating up all the others, or the females all wanting to be inseminated by the fiercest or prettiest male. When males invest more than females, as we have seen, the species may be polyandrous, with tough females keeping harems of males. (The mammals’ body plan has foreclosed that option.) When one male has much more to invest than others (because, say, he controls a better territory), females may be better off sharing him—polygyny—than each having her own mate, because a fraction of a big resource may be better than the entirety of a small one. When males’ contributions are more equal, the undivided attention of one becomes valuable, and the species settles on monogamy.

[…]In some species of birds, a third of the offspring contain the DNA of a male other than the female’s consort. The male bird is adulterous because he tries to raise the offspring of one female and mate with others, hoping that her offspring will survive on their own, or best of all, be raised by a cuckolded consort. The female bird is adulterous because she has a chance of getting the best of both worlds: the genes of the fittest male and the investment of the most willing male. The victim is worse off than if he had failed to breed at all, because he has devoted his worldly efforts to the genes of a competitor. So in a species whose male invest, the male’s jealousy is directed not only at rival males but at the female. He may guard her, follow her around, copulate repeatedly, and avoid females that show sign of having recently matted.

Pinker (but actually Trivers) on the difference attitudes towards sex between males and females:

Trivers has worked out how all the prominent differences between males and females stem from the difference in the minimum size of their investment in offspring. Investment, remember, is anything a parent does that increases the chance of survival in an offspring while decreasing the parent’s ability to produce other viable offspring. The investment can be energy, nutrients, time, or risk. The female, by definition, begins with a bigger investment—the larger sex cell—and in most species commits herself to even more. The male contributes a puny package of genes and usually leaves it at that. Since every offspring requires one of each, the female’s contribution is the limiting step on how many offspring can be produced: at most, one offspring for each egg she creates and nurtures. Two cascades of consequences flow form this difference:

First, a single male can fertilize several females, which forces other males to go mateless. That sets up a competition among males for access to females. A male may beat up other males to prevent them from getting to a female, or compete for the resources necessary to mate, or court a female to get her to choose him. Males therefore vary in reproductive success. A winner can beget many offsprings, a loser will beget none.

Second, the reproductive success of males depends on how many females they mate with, but the reproductive success of females does not depend on how many males they mate with. That makes females more discriminating. Males woo females and mate with any female that lets them. Females scrutinize males and mate only with the best ones: the ones with the best genes, the ones most willing and able to feed and protect her offspring, or the ones that the other females tend to prefer.

Male competition and female choice are ubiquitous in the animal kingdom. Darwin called attention to these two spectacles, which he dubbed sexual selection, but was puzzled as to why it should be males that compete and females that choose, rather than the other way around. The theory of parental investment solves the puzzle. The greater-investing sex chooses, the lesser-investing sex competes. Relative investment, then, is the cause of sex differences. Everything else—testosterone, estrogen, penises, vaginas, Y chromosomes, X chromosomes—is secondary. […] In a few species, the whole animal reverse the initial difference in investment between egg and sperm, and in those cases females should compete and males should choose. Sure enough, these exceptions prove the rule. In some fishes, the male broods the young in a pouch. In some birds, the male sits on the egg and feeds the young. In those species, the females are aggressive and try to court the males, who select partners carefully.

Pinker on why there are 2 sexes:

Why do we make one big egg and lots of little sperm, instead of two equal blobs that coalesce like mercury? It is because the cell that is to become the baby cannot be just a bag of genes; it needs the metabolic machinery of the rest of a cell. Some of that machinery, the mitochondria, has its own genes, the famous mitochondrial DNA which is so useful in dating evolutionary splits. Like all genes, the ones in mitochondria are selected to replicate ruthlessly. And that is why a cell formed by fusing two equal cells faces trouble. The mitochondria of one parent and the mitochondria of the other parent wage a ferocious war for survival inside it. Mitochondria from each parent  will murder their counterparts from the other, leaving the fused cell dangerously underpowered. The genes for the rest of the cell (the ones in the nucleus) suffer from the crippling of the cell, so they evolve a way of heading off the internecine warfare. In each pair of parents, one “agrees” to a unilateral disarmament. It contributes a cell that provides no metabolic machinery, just naked DNA for the new nucleus. The species reproduces by fusing a big cell that contains a half-set of genes plus all the necessary machinery with a small cell that contains a half-set of genes and nothing else. […]

Once an organism has taken that first step, the specialization of its sex cells can only escalate. A sperm is small and cheap, so the organism might as well make many of them, and give them outboard motors to get to the egg quickly, and an organ to launch them on their way. The egg is big and precious, so the organism had better give it a head start by packing it with food and a protective cover. That makes it more expensive still, so to protect the investment the organism evolves organs that let the fertilized egg grow inside the body and absorb even more food, and that release the new offspring only when it is large enough to survive.

Tomorrow is Monday and I’ll have to go to school—Mcgill University; at least three classes; math in the morning, and two more I can’t recall; I need to become more organized, I haven’t printed out my schedule yet—but I am filled with despair and loneliness. I said tomorrow, but it’s today. It’s 3 AM, or some other ungodly hour of the night. I’m not keeping track, and time flows strangely as I sit in the corner of my dark room. I get up and leave.

Outside, it’s cold and quiet, with a slight breeze. The sky is pitch dark, and I can’t tell if it’s cloudy or clear from all the light pollution here in the city. I call my mom. After two rings, she answers, but the first half of the sentence is cut off.

“—o you want?”, she asks.

“Nothing,” I respond.

“Ok, bye.”

“NO, WAIT!”, I shout. My voice cracks a little, because I’m cracking. I can’t take another rejection, not from my own mother. I don’t know where to begin. “I wish you wouldn’t just hang up…”

“You said ‘no’.”

“No, I said ‘nothing’,” and I don’t even know if I want to continue this line of digression, as despite the claims that neurotypicals have a better theory of mind, in my experience, my mother doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to hold meta-analysis of “I thought you said”, “I thought you thought that I said”, “I thought you thought that I thought you said”, etc. I start to cry a bit. “I’m lonely, and I’m going through this existential angst, and I want to come over.”

She’s silent.

“And I forgot where you live.”

I hear an exasperated sigh on the other side. “I’m at the corner of Penfield and St. Mathieu,” I mention looking at one of the street signs.

“Okay, just keep going down Mathieu” she says, then adds after a beat, “Until you reach Gagneur”.

A little further, I pass by a park, and I see three kids—white kids, I guess I should mention due to what happens next—lying in the grass. One of them has a large rifle, and he’s prone as if on some sniper mission. Around him are various other smaller hanguns, all with their nozzles bright orange. Toys, probably… hopefully.

I don’t stop, but a quick look and I don’t see what he’s aiming at. Hopefully an imaginary target.

Further, I have to pass under a wooden scaffolding that spans the width of the sidewalk. A group of kids—this time black—are headed in the opposite way. I move as far to the right side of the sidewalk without my shoulder actually brushing against the wall, in the vain hope that they do the same, but they remain an amorphous blob of pedestrians. Viscous, they only very reluctantly pass through the narrower funnel created by my presence.

I make a point to not give in to “my” side of the sidewalk. It’s only really wide enough to support two lanes of people, one in each direction, so really they should be walking single file. They’re in the wrong here, not me. But I’m scared, and I figure it’s racist of me to be scared.

I have some good friends who are half black—I’m not saying this to claim I’m not racist, but to explain this next scene I’m imagining. I imagine I’m with one of them, and I’m telling her racists jokes, and she’s laughing. I don’t know why this scene pops into my mind right now, except that it’s topical and it allows me to escape from my fears of getting stabbed. “I’m a gangstar,” I proclaim to her in my imagination, miming the appropriate body stance “My name is ganstar. I don’t know my last name ‘cause my daddy left me.” It’s terrible. And it’s funnier if you could hear the voice. You have to hear the voice.

The kids have passed now. None of them stabbed me. Of course they wouldn’t. They look to be 9 to 12 years old, some of them girls. I move on.

That’s when I bump into Her.

We used to date, sort of. It was nothing official, and now the relationship is over and I’m alone and she’s happy. That’s what pains me the most: that she’s happy.

I can’t remember what was said—it was all a blur—but now I am in the lobby of an apartment building, with the ceiling lights too glaringly artificial, my eyes start to hurt. It’s a slightly lower middle class—or upper lower class, I never know how these things work—and the walls are a medical-gown-green with trace amounts of graffitti—ball point pen, not spray cans—and the floor is beige with a salt-and-pepper texture, if salt were yellow and pepper were red.

She takes me door on the 2nd or 3rd floor, and I’m wondering if I had asked, or if she had offered, a place to stay for the night. I would make sense: I would have jumped on such an offer, the pathetic man that I am. In foreboding contrast to the rest of the building, the door we’re at is not that well lit. It’s perfectly visible, at about the brightness level of a room with no lights on in mid-afternoon, but this is certainly darker than the almost blinding level of lights everywhere else in this building. The door also has a word spray painted on, striking because it’s the only piece of spray painted graffiti I had seen so far, and it was painted on via a stencil, rather than free form text. It said “ANTI-SLUT”.

I realized I was talking to her, and had been talking to her the whole time. Fragments of the conversation start to rise up to my conscious level, assuming that the me that I am now is the conscious me.

“Who’s place is this?” I had asked earlier, when we were still climbing the stairs.

She had coyly avoided the question.

“I don’t think I could take sleeping in the same room as your boyfriend” I explained. We were at the door now. My memory had caught up with the present.

“Whatever you do, don’t knock on the door,” she said, paused, and then “‘Knock knock.’”

I guess she had worried that her message might ambiguously be taken as an imperative order rather than the opening of a joke, but now it had me worried as to what was behind the door. “Who’s there?”

“Um… ten red, angry fingers.”

The door opened.

It was another girl behind the door, with a plain, average figure, dark blonde hair, slightly curly, and a white lab coat, green dish washing gloves and chemistry goggles in a band around her neck. Is she a science major working on a project, or a cosplayer?

We step inside, and the two share a cryptic conversation that I’m unable to follow. Glancing around, the “apartment” seems to be more of a loft: a single big room, with a large wall dividing in the middle, so I guess it’s more U shaped. We’re at the bottom left corner of the U, and the right branch is relatively well lit, with a couch, which is where I assume I’ll be sleeping if indeed I am correct in assuming that I’ll be sleeping here at all, but the left is dark.

My eyes adjust and I notice a figure on the couch, though I can’t quite make out whether it is male or female. They notice that I notice, and from the background processing of the keywords I managed to overhear, it seems like I’ve stumbled upon a somewhat clandestine operation.

The two say their goodbyes to each other, and She leaves, the labcoat girl closing the door, and turning to me. I guess I am sleeping here. She says something about perverts in a derogatory manner which leads me to assign to her the label of feminist, in a derogatory sense. I respect some feminists and some forms of feminism, but not the forms in which men (and only men) are dismissed as sex-driven creatures, and in which all sex is rape.

I tell her I’m going to have to call my mom… then add that she can monitor the call if she wishes. She nods, but says that the radiation from cellphones give her headaches. I try to think of how I could make the call, and have her listen in, without being close to the device. If I plug my headphones into the phone, would she be able to hear, and would the cable be long enough? The figure on the couch sits up.

I’m startled, and the labcoat girl starts laughing. The couch-creature’s silhouette—more specifically the bone structure in his shoulder—leads me to conclude that he’s male, but he his curly, coquettish red hair (think Carrot Top), and something about the gown he’s wearing is disturbingly female. Plus, is he wearing claws?

She pushes against my back, towards him, egging me on to get a closer look, but her anxiousness makes me think Something will happen, so I resist. I find myself backing away from the dark couch, into the right half of the U, where things are better lit. The figure raises from the couch, and starts walking towards me, and now I am genuinely afraid.

My backwards stumble had led me to naturally become seated upon the lit-couch, and as the figure himself enters the light, I see now that “he” has a very feminine face, a modest but unmistakable pair of breasts, and is wearing a sundress. The only real sense of maleness remaining is the broad shoulders and height.

He…? She…? It advances towards me, then kneels down in from of me, spreading my legs. The labcoat girl is speaking—was speaking, now laughing and encouraging me to accept and enjoy the upcoming blow job—but I’m distracted. The message conveyed to me is “This is what we do to perverts. We turn them into sluts.”

When I open my eyes, I’m in the hallway of that apartment building. From the ambient light, I figure it must be around 5PM. It’s less bright, ironically in mid day than at night, as the artificial ceiling lights are off, and all illumination is coming from the sun through the windows.

I’m sitting, my back against the wall, and so I stand up. 5PM means I’ve already missed my classes, and anyway, I don’t seem to have my textbooks with me. I don’t think I had in fact brought any with me when I left the house.

I’m on the second floor, and I know this isn’t the right floor, so I head up to the third, and there it is. The door still says “ANTI-SLUT”, but the paint seems to aged and started to become faint. Not that I think I’ve traveled thirty years into the future or anything: it was dark last night, and so I might just not have noticed how aged this paint was.

I step in—was the door ajar or merely unlocked? I can’t recall—and am greeted by an a pair of men in their 80s. Excited to have visitors, they invite me to sit down at the coffeetable for some conversation and tea.

They’re a gay couple, Christian, and trying to combat promiscuity, especially in teenage girls. I don’t ask about the “ANTI-SLUT” graffiti, nor their being simultaneously gay and Christian. They tell me a scare-story about how there are drugs out there, like Rohypnol, which can wipe out one’s memories of the events of the night before.

In this experimental short story, I’m trying to go beyond the limits of most “stream-of-consciousness” tone I’ve seen this far. While vocalizing your thoughts, you can think a keyword, and this keyword triggers an explosion of thoughts, but to actually explore and translate these thoughts into words would give the impression of a dwelling on the thought, whereas it were just a flash. I’m trying to solve this via the medium of hypertext by linking, rather than inlining, these explorations, though obviously this won’t work for printed text. For printed text, I guess I would be reduced to including footnotes, like so:

Neurotypicals: Links to a wikipedia page explaining that “neurotypical” is a term that autistic people use to refer to non-autistic people.

Theory of mind: Links to the wikipedia page explaining the concept.

Her: Links to another one of my stories, making explicit the reference and how they tie together.

Pains me the most: Links to a google search on “the best revenge is to live well”

Happy: Links to a blog post citing a study “Discontented people in a happy place may feel particularly harshly treated by life […] This result is consistent with other research that shows that people judge their well-being in comparison to others around them.”

Ten red, angry fingers: I have no idea where this knock-knock joke was going. The only thing I can think of is a interview in which Will Smith uses “The hot 4” as a euphemism for a slap.

Pinker explains the evolutionary origin of sex:

Why is there sex to begin with? […] Why don’t women give virgin birth to daughters who are clones of themselves instead[…]? Why do people and other organisms swap out half their genes for the genes of another member of the species[…]? It’s not to evolve faster, because organisms are selected for fitness in the present. It’s not to adapt to environmental change, because a random change in an already adapted organism is more likely to be for the worse than for the better, there being vastly more ways to be badly adapted than to be well adapted. The best theory, proposed by John Tooby, William Hamilton, and others, and now supported by several kinds of evidence, is that sex is a defense against parasites and pathogens (disease-causing microorganisms).

[…] An evolutionary arms race goes on between hosts and pathogens, though a better analogy might be an escalating contest between lockpickers and locksmiths. Germs are small, and they evolve diabolical tricks for infiltrating and hijacking the machinery of the cells, for skimming off its raw materials, and for passing themselves off as the body’s own tissues to escape the surveillance of the immune system. The body responds with better security systems, but the germs have a built-in advantage: there are more of them and they can breed millions of times faster, which makes them evolve faster. They can evolve substantially within the lifetime of a host. Whatever molecular locks the body has evolved, the pathogens can evolve keys to open them.

Now, if an organism is asexual, once the pathogens crack the safe of its body, they also have cracked the safes of its children and siblings. Sexual reproduction is a way of changing the locks once a generation.

When I was a kid, I snuck into my parents’ bedroom and put in the tape of Terminator 2. 10 seconds into the movie, there’s a pile of skulls and some sort of caterpillar tracks rolling over them and crushing them. Too terrified, I immediately stopped the movie and ejected it, and never watched any of their videos again.

I have trouble understanding people who call out market research as sexism. The author is complaining about the selection of video games that Amazon has listed as recommendations for mother’s day gifts. She points out that the games are mostly exercise or simulations (in the sense of simulating cooking, simulating raising a family, etc.), and that they are primarily games for the Nintendo DS or the Wii.

Amazon is a multi billion dollar company. Their core business is tracking demographics and doing predictive analysis on what each demographic will likely purchase. If Amazon is recommending cooking games to mothers, it seems to me that the conclusion “Mothers are more likely to buy cooking video games than other types of video games” is far more likely than “Amazon intentionally propagating sexist stereotypes against women.”

To imagine that there is some upper level management in Amazon who wants his or her personal views and biases about the role of women’s society to override the secret formula that has made them billionaires is about as absurd to me as the idea that there is some upper level management in McDonalds who will use his or her personal views on animal cruelty to strike all non-vegan items from the menu.

Felt like I took an “easy” way out, though.