monday metametafilter

[sciatrix]

It occurred to me that I've been having some interesting chats on metafilter, so I thought that I might as well archive a few things here, too.

I got very angry about gratefulness lists as a first-line treatment for struggling people, agreeing with the original author:

Like, fuck you, world! Sometimes being depressed and drowning isn't my fucking fault, sometimes it's a totally normal response to external fucking stress, and if a therapist wants to give me some help coping with that she has to acknowledge that I'm dealing with it!

I don't like bars as a locus of queer community, which is something of a sidebar to the original article (which discusses fundamental sustainability of queer media). I'm responding here a little more directly to schadenfrau, who has a particularly good point about media directed at queer media:

I’m sad and dismayed to hear that Autostraddle is apparently looking to be acquired in order to stay alive, but not super surprised. This seems to sort of miss the point:

Lesbian and queer women's media has particularly struggled when it comes to revenue, in part because lesbians are stereotyped as frumpy shut-ins who don’t care about nightlife or fashion — unlike their glamorous male counterparts — which can dissuade advertisers.

They don’t have any goddamn money.

Biologist MeFites have coalesced around discussing the weirdest things we've collectively done for science. I had fun describing the special hell that my efforts to distinguish variation in fine motor skill among singing mice turned into. Highlight:

The problem with this idea is that, well, singing mice are both considerably less docile than lab mice and also considerably more athletic. I have observed a singing mouse leap five inches to the edge of a cage and in the next instant fling itself off the blind edge of a three foot table, apparently without pause. I have watched a determined mouse leap ten inches from a standstill, and seen one with a good head start achieve two feet in a single bound.

I imagine that running them on a traditional rotarod would be something like an exhibition of murine popcorn.

I got really frustrated about the way that this discussion of one man's experiences with precocial puberty got derailed around whether or not he should have screened for the mutation in his children. The article was very fascinating; the discussion... well, put it this way, I wound up missing disability-focused spaces like Feminists With Disabilities and access_fandom here with an almost physical ache. Between T making connections with the Deaf community in town and some things going back and forth with my own history, I might need to start reconnecting with disability-informed perspectives a little more in my day-to-day. I miss them.

MeFi brought me hagfish! This one is less great for discussion and more great for the links folks brought. Also, HAGFISH.

I countered, of course, with turtle dick. Hat tip to kaberett, who is I think where I originally saw this. (MeFites helpfully dug up a version of the original link with photos of the dicks in question.)

Also via me, the brittleness of children and the egos of driven men, which has some interesting discussion about a recent IRB failure in the comments:

In the fall of 1938, Wendell Johnson recruited one of his clinical psychology graduate students, 22-year-old Mary Tudor, who was avid but timorous, to undertake exactly that experiment. She was to study whether telling nonstuttering children that they stuttered would make it so. Could she talk children into a speech defect? The university had an ongoing research relationship with an orphanage in Davenport, Iowa, so Johnson suggested she base her study there. And thus, on Jan. 17, 1939, Mary Tudor drove along the high, swooping bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River to the Soldiers and Sailors Orphans' Home. The study she began that morning became the subject of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the State of Iowa and the University of Iowa.

Comments

[staranise]

I have a silly question that Google isn't answering: What differentiates a singing mouse from an ordinary lab mouse?

[sciatrix]

Not a silly question at all! The short answer is: species.

The long answer is that ordinary lab mice are domesticated Mus musculus, which is the usual house mice you might find in your home and is native to Eurasia (where exactly in Eurasia is complicated). You might also find some labs working on Peromyscus species, which are what we'd call "deer mice" here in the US, are not domesticated, and are native to North and Central America depending on species. And there are a few folks working on wild M. musculus too, who are much less docile than the usual lab mice.

My guys, by contrast, are distant relatives of both of them: Scotinomys teguina, native to Central America, and interesting largely because they... well. Sing a little like birds do. (Link goes to a colleague's youtube channel, specifically to a video of a mouse singing.) I study them trying to understand how they adjust to their energetic and social context and change their singing behavior in response.

I can't speak to wild-caught and wild-derived house mice, but I have had the unsettling experience of calling one of the research center vets to look at a singing mouse I thought was in a bad way--it let me poke it! without moving away at all! and seemed clearly stunned or exhausted--and having the vet on staff handle it slightly, turn to me, and express confusion because the mouse was acting perfectly normally. I've worked with domestic rats, although never domestic mice, and the difference is something like... oh, like working with a dog and working with a wolf, except that you're dealing with a prey species that is nevertheless also somewhat predatory and very, very active.

(Singing mice seem to be largely insectivorous. The natural history research is... not as extensive as I would like, and they do eat some plants, too, but we feed them on dry cat food supplemented with mealworms and they do fine with that. Less protein and fat and more carbohydrate does not suit them. And they are, as I mentioned, very capable insectivores in captivity.)