I agree with you completely. Shared finances changes the present-giving equation in complicated ways...

What, exactly, would the criminal charge be that would send you to jail? The IRS is going to want the money back; that much is clear. But you are not under an obligation to not cash the check. And the IRS will not ask for interest on the money, so you can certainly get interest on the money while they figure out…

Agreed. In public health terms, birth control is generally considered a net gain given the rate of complications associated with pregnancy, but that doesn't mean that birth control is without both personal and environmental consequences (estrogen-laced urine is a real and significant problem). The non-hormonal IUD…

Do we know she was performing fellatio? Or was she kissing his genitals? There is a significant difference.

"The children doing this have been abused at home or elsewhere..." What evidence do you have for this? Is it just that her mouth was on his genitals? Do you know how often children who haven't been abused do that? Of the children who do, what percent have been sexually abused?

Is your interest in requiring condoms for porn actors to protect them, or to encourage safe sex generally? If the former, is there reason to believe that requiring condoms in porn would reduce the (already extremely low) STD transmission rate in commercial porn? If the latter, is there reason to believe that showing…

For an interesting discussion on safety in the workplace, and how it is never, ever, ever the priority: http://www.mikeroweworks.com/2009/03/safety-first-or-just-in-the-top-3/

That is a very good question.

It's true. Sometimes it does seem that humanity has more women in it then men.

The vast majority of studies have multiple independent variables. I've never conducted a study that didn't. It does complicate things, but not unduly. To conduct a study that truly isolates one variable, in the human research world, we would have to do some pretty restrictive things to people, like control their…

The simplest statistical test that uses multiple predictor variables is probably regression, which (broadly, roughly) comes up with the formula for the dependent variable using one or more predictor variables. For example, we might say that weight can be predicted by height and gender, and thus we could imagine a…

It's perfectly OK to have multiple independent variables and multiple dependent variables. Imagine that you want to test whether eating pistachios is related to green poop. You could do this the way that you suggest, and control everything about the people and their diet, and add pistachios to one group's diet and…

There isn't a difference. The research on parenting techniques is quite clear. Things like reward charts, token economies in general, 'the child's game', etc. are all quite effective in shaping behavior. They are also rewards/bribes. I hear what you're saying about 'rewarding something the child was going to do…

One of the key differences is, as others have pointed out, the lack of pads. GET RID OF PADS AND HELMETS IN FOOTBALL. At every level. The opposition to this is interesting, since it's a mix of people who know what it would do to football (can't hit as hard) and football players (they would end up looking more like…

Egg whites are potentially harmful because they're delicious, not because they already have bacteria. They do, of course, have bacteria, since pretty much everything has bacteria, but that's not the point. The point is you're adding another growth medium. As you and others note, we are full of growth media, but…

You're right that blood is probably a better (and more problematic) growth medium, and also that if you have eggs but not bandages you're probably not in the developed world and thus aren't reading this. I can't at the moment think of any set of circumstances in which I would decide to put egg membrane on a cut…

Media drone, here, although probably with a different use of the word media than you're intending. You realize that egg whites are often used to grow bacterial cultures, right? Because they're really delicious to almost everything in the world, from the largest animals to the smallest (like bacteria). So I…

It's fascinating, really - when I re-read my response to alien-she, it does read as hostile. I wasn't hostile when I wrote it; I was genuinely curious. But it is hostile in tone, now that I re-read it. I think that's fascinating (not to mention something I should keep in mind for future writings), and I wonder if…

Your two points are very good ones, and I agree entirely that would have made the original comment much more clearly descriptive and not dismissive.

How precisely could she have described her experience - that she doesn't wear makeup and hasn't noticed any negative consequences - without risking your ire? Or do you presume that your experience must dictate the terms of hers?