This Lego Microscope Actually Works

This working Lego microscope was built by Carl Merriman, a Lego artist who's been building for over 27 years. It's sleek, functional and even though you couldn't use it to study Ebola or the T-Virus, it's still a pretty sweet piece of kit.

The build was inspired by Lego X-Pod sets (now discontinued):

While trying to find a use for the pod itself, I realized that it was very close to a deep petri dish. I used a planetary gear system to allow both coarse and fine adjustment of the objective “lens”. A little more tinkering and I connected the focus to a magnifying glass and fiber optic light in the eyepiece, so adjusting the focus knobs would actually bring the writing on a LEGO stud in and out of focus.

Clean lines, simple construction and wonderful little details. I could totally see this becoming a CUUSOO set. [Flickr]

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Sex After Dementia

ulrichkarljoho/Flickr

Earlier this year, a sex worker in Sydney, Australia -- I'll call her Emma -- got a call from a woman whose 93-year-old father was confined to a nursing home with dementia.

"You could tell in her voice that she was really nervous. But you could also tell that she knew what she wanted for her dad," Emma said. He missed the intimacy of sex.

Emma works a day job in elderly care, but she has also been a sex worker specializing in working with people with disabilities, including dementia, for 30 years.

This nursing home resident had been an "openly sexual" person in his later life and had now asked his daughter to find him a woman. The nursing home staff was supportive, welcoming Emma into the facility and assisting her to move the elderly man into a comfortable position.

Many of Emma's clients don't have long to live. The man died within a month and a half of her visit, but his daughter said he was more relaxed, less agitated, after seeing Emma. She remained grateful to her for her services.

"I've got something to give," said Emma. "I've got the most intimate gift of all."

How residents in care facilities should receive this gift is an ethical minefield. Astudy by Australian researchers found that nursing home residents "including those with dementia, saw themselves as sexual beings and with a continuing need and desire to express their sexuality." But a further study in the Australian Journal of Dementia Care by some of the same authors found that only 20 percent of Australian nursing homes had policies about sexuality or sexual health. Most of them framed intimacy among residents as disruptive or problematic behavior.

According to the World Health Organization, 35.6 million people have dementiaworldwide and that number is projected to double every twenty years. A large proportion of those people with dementia will die in a residential aged care facility. While the elderly are free to do what they like in their own homes, once in facilities, their sex life is regulated by staff. Far from all of them are as sympathetic as the nursing home that Emma described.

The study in the Australian Journal of Dementia Care found that staff were anxious about addressing sex among their residents. They were chiefly concerned about the reactions of a resident's family, as well as the legalities of the arrangements.

Dementia can be caused by a range of pathology -- most commonly Alzheimer's, as well as small blood clots in the brain, and abnormal proteins called Lewy Bodies, among others. In some cases the frontal lobe, which is responsible for sexual drive and interest as well as inhibition, may be affected. As Carmelle Peisah, New South Wales branch chair of the faculty of psychiatry and old age at the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, told me, it can affect "the part of the brain that stops people from acting on their sexual urges in public, such as masturbating. People have thoughts that they wouldn't act on without dementia, but with dementia they might act on it because of this lack of impulse control."

In instances where residents might express their sexuality inappropriately -- say, by masturbating in public spaces of a nursing home, Peisah says that it is crucial for staff not to chastise the person. Instead they should be redirected to a private space, or be provided with an appropriate outlet for the expression of their needs and behavior -- or both.

Other aspects of sexuality, such as emotional feelings like intimacy and warmth, are driven by the limbic system of the brain. "The needs and importance for social and physical relationships and in particular intimacy continue well into the moderate to severe stages of dementia," Peisah said.

Then there is memory loss -- the most infamous and obvious symptom of dementia, eventually including the diminished ability to recognize people. Residents may not know who the object of their erotic interest is. "Sometimes people can't tell the difference between their spouse, the care worker, or a fellow nursing home resident," Peisah said.

In Alice Munro's 1999 short story "The Bear Came Over The Mountain," which was subsequently made into the critically acclaimed film Away From Her, the protagonist has to cope with his Alzheimer's-stricken wife entering a nursing home and falling for another resident, forgetting about her husband. The scenario is not uncommon in real life.

Last year, my own grandmother entered a residential aged care facility with vascular dementia. When I visited, she had little interest in talking to me. Instead, she held hands with Eric, a cheerful fellow resident with a room across her corridor. He introduced my grandmother as his wife. In Russian (she spoke no English), she told me that he was a neighbor from Belgorod, our hometown. I hope for their sake that whatever they had -- if they wanted it to -- extended beyond handholding, because within six months both of them had died. Neither Eric nor my grandmother had living spouses, and situations like Munro's story can be very distressing for living partners who feel they have been replaced. Still, considering the importance of the happiness and well-being of your loved one in their current, new reality, can be reassuring.

Facility staff are also often unsure about the legalities of sexual activity with someone who is unable to consent. However, Peisah and other Australian experts agree that people with dementia can often make choices about sexuality.

"It's not possible to make blanket statements that anyone with dementia lacks capacity and that they can't make decisions about things. People with dementia do make decisions on a daily basis. Taking medication for example, if they don't want to swallow a tablet they will let you know in some way -- they may spit it out, you can see they don't want it in their mouth," said Michael Bauer, a senior research fellow at La Trobe University and an author of the studies about attitudes to sex among care workers and residents with dementia.

Bauer suggests that staff need to look for non-verbal cues such as facial expressions and other body language to identify whether a resident is comfortable and wants to be with someone. "The staff need to take in a whole range of factors about the person, the sort of person they are now and were and the behaviors at this point in time with dementia. Behaviors can also fluctuate from moment to moment," he said.

Saul Isbister, a sex worker and president of Touching Base, a non-profit organization that helps people like Emma connect with disabled clients, has mentioned that memory loss can be a concern. "We have had cases where people have forgotten that they've been visited by the sex worker, and they feel like the staff are lying to them," he said.

In one case, a token system was set up for the client, where a sex worker would leave the resident a token as proof of the encounter.

In Australia, the closest thing to formalized guidelines around these issues is theCharter of Residents Rights and Responsibilities, which essentially intends to ensure that every older person be treated with dignity and respect, and live without exploitation and abuse. According to the charter, residents in elderly care facilities have a right to social and personal relationships without "fear criticism or restriction." Furthermore, residents have a right to privacy. Peisah says that carers should consider the charter before making a decision about intervening in sexual activity. "Nursing homes facilities have an obligation to support and facilitate intimate and social relationships of their residents," she said.

Nursing specialists say this doesn't always take place. Rhonda Nay, a registered nurse and an Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University, who also contributed to Bauer's studies, believes that in a significant proportion of cases, sexual situations among dementia patients are not managed well. "There is a long tradition of not knocking when staff look into an older person's room. That has improved to the extent that the nurses knock but they tend not to wait for an answer," Nay said.

Emma has also had experiences with limited privacy: "They walk across the room and I'm draped across an elderly gentleman's lap while he's in a wheelchair and I'm dressed in stockings and suspenders."

Dealing with confronting situations is something that nursing home staff may have to get used to. The Parliament of Australia is conducting an inquiry into the care and management of Australians living with dementia. The National LGBTI Health Alliance submitted that homosexuals and transgender people have "unique challenges" in aged care facilities. The Alliance says that currently same-sex partners are not always consulted about care decisions, even when they have provided power of attorney. In nursing homes, same-sex couples are also often restricted in the way they can express affection.

The Alliance also wants staff in residential care facilities to be trained in the needs of transgendered people, such as trans-specific health needs. "For example, trans women living with dementia and BPSD will require daily vaginal dilation, if they have had vaginoplasty," the submission says.

Isbister, from Touching Base, has not noted a rise in older clients from non-heterosexual backgrounds. "It hasn't become obvious yet through our referral system, but that is an inevitability with an aging population who are more comfortable expressing their diversity and sexuality," he said

"There are fears associated with aging that obviously may include death or loss of sexual function," Isbister said. "When you have an opportunity to allay those fears I think it brings a lot of psychological comfort as well as physical relief."

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That Time an Astronaut Got a Pie Sent to the International Space Station

Would you like pie with that? (NASA)

Peggy Whitson was the first female commander of the International Space Station. In October 2002, she was living on the Station. And during STS-112, the shuttle mission that sent astronauts to help build out the Station's infrastructure, her husband took part in a time-honored tradition: he sent her a care package.

One of his gifts? A pie. 

In a talk about Station life at the Aspen Ideas Festival yesterday, astronaut Jeffrey Ashby told the pie-in-the-sky story. Traditional gifts that shuttles delivered to Station-bound astronauts tended to be things like books and movies and DVDs, he said -- things to help astronauts living on the Station keep connected to the people and cultures back on Earth. 

In Whitson's case, though, the gift was a pecan pie -- a gesture from her husband. "I don't know how he got it past the food people," Ashby said.

There was a problem, though: in order to make it up to the Space Station, the pie had to be, you know, launched into space. Even stored in a locker aboard the shuttle -- and even being pecan, one of the hardier types of pie -- the baked good was subject to g-forces. So by the time it arrived, Ashby said, "the pie was in about half the shell."

That was okay, though. In this, as with most gifts, it was the thought that counted. And, fortunately, Whitson's husband had also included in his care package a foodstuff that is less delicate and, in tastebud-challenging space, even more valuable than pie: hot sauce.

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The Gay-Marriage Fight Could Change How People Think About All Marriages

Joel Page/AP Images

It is impossible to talk or think about same-sex marriage without talking or thinking about marriage in general: what marriage is, what marriage used to be, who should marry, who should not, what constitutes a good marriage or a bad one. The Supreme Court suggested as much in its ruling on the DOMA case. In the majority opinion it observed that views on marriage are swiftly evolving and that the citizens and elected representatives of New York (the state where the plaintiff, Edith Windsor, lived with her late wife) had sought in permitting same-sex marriage to correct what they perceived to be "an injustice that they had not earlier known or understood." The Court suggested that until recently most people did view marriage as between a man and a woman, but that now this view is changing as many people develop a "new perspective, a new insight."

Reading the opinion, I couldn't help but think about the fact that New York, in the 19th century, was one of the first states in the U.S. to pass a law permitting women the right to own property in marriage. Perspectives on marriage were changing then, too, away from an idea that wives should be submissive (and financially dependent) and husbands authoritarian (and financially empowered). The same-sex marriage movement represents an evolution in our understanding about marriage and roles within it. The fact that overall the move has been toward greater egalitarianism may be one reason why more women are in favor of same-sex marriage than men. According to the latest polling by the Pew Research Center, 61 percent of men and 71 percent of women, support legal agreements for gay men and lesbians that would give them many of the rights of heterosexual married couples.

The question then becomes: How will people in their personal lives be affected by this prolonged and emotional national conversation? Earlier this year, I walked door to door in Maine to try to get answers to this question. Some months before that, in 2012, a small army of canvassers had fanned out in the streets and neighborhoods and cul de sacs of that state. They knocked on doors and stood in living rooms, lingered at evening and weekend barbecues. In an effort--ultimately successful--to convince a majority of Maine voters to support gay marriage, the canvassers engaged the entire state, or much of it, in a conversation about the institution in both broad and intimate terms. I revisited some of these households, curious to see how people's thinking was affected: What had been the psychic impact of the gay marriage movement?

The street I walked down was in Biddeford, a former mill town that like most former mill towns has experienced its share of economic adversity. The street encompassed modest stand-alone ranch houses and two- and three-floor apartment houses in varying states of repair. In one ground-floor apartment, the woman answering the door was watching out a window as two small children played in a snow bank; she did not speak English, but her husband did, reporting as he multitasked on his cell phone that he was married and supported gay marriage. At one rooming house, an extended family of itinerant carnival workers had just moved in; they too were supporters not only of gay marriage but of marriage, period. Two young men were unemployed, but both were happily married. "It's been great," said one, whose wife of a year was helping him lug a heavy cabinet up some outside stairs in the freezing February cold. In one renovated bungalow, a stay-at-home mom also said she was in favor.

"Personally, I think it's a business union," ventured one man who answered the door of a two-story condo; it was his suspicion that many gay people wanted to marry mainly for health insurance, but if they did, it didn't really bother him; after all, straight people could do the same. Another woman was more hung up on the benefits issue. "I have quite a few nephews that are gay and they're wonderful people," she said. "I have nothing against them, but this whole marriage thing to me is going to end up with complications. They want benefits to go along with it, and I wonder if it's going to be costly down the road. I don't know what more they want."

A woman in her 70s sat on a glassed-in front porch of a second-floor apartment, flanked by a row of collared shirts she had ironed for her husband, who was inside, watching TV. "Marriage has been very good to me," she said: this, despite the fact that (as near as I could make out from a fond and rather meandering narrative) her first husband had suffered from a mental illness, her second and third husbands had died, she'd almost lost this one to a heart ailment, and throughout it all, she was grateful to be part of the institution. She had worked running a bed and breakfast, so the point of marriage to her was not economic support; it was companionship. She had a lesbian daughter and was inclined to support her right to marry. Down the street, a nurse answered to say her own daughter had left her heterosexual marriage to live with another woman.

It was striking, on that street alone, how many people had gay members of their family and were willing to say this to a stranger. It was also striking how many of them respected and valued the institution of marriage overall.

Some people respected it so much that they did not consider themselves yet worthy. "I need to save up a little money," said a tall, polite man who answered the door in his stocking feet; he supported gay marriage and wanted to marry his girlfriend, but felt too broke to ask her.

"Right now, I'm just working on my student loans," said another. Asked if he felt financial stability was a pre-requisite for marriage, he said, "Absolutely."

Perhaps most affected were the canvassers themselves: men and women who joined the effort, sometimes as paid staffers, usually as volunteers. Many were straight. Some were married, but many were not. Some were feminists who felt skeptical about marriage as a historically unequal union but found themselves growing more sympathetic, more appreciative of marriage and its virtues. Some were armchair Marxists who went through a similar philosophical evolution. Some were just young activists who wanted to get involved in a fun communal project and had not given a lot of thought to the topic at hand. "I don't really care about marriage," one guy had whispered as he was being trained to phone bank. Some skateboarded to their assignments; some shared cigarettes with the voters they were canvassing. But as a result of all the talking, their own thinking changed to the point where one canvasser confessed to a household of voters that he was planning to ask his girlfriend to marry him. Later, when the tape of that interaction was played during a training session, he sheepishly confirmed it was true.

"I think that we have had a profound impact. We changed a significant portion of our voter base on this issue," said Maria, a thoughtful, soft-spoken thirtysomething who was one of the star canvassers of the campaign. "We were talking about really personal, private details about marriage and relationships, and family, about religion and faith. Every area of a person's life is impacted by marriage--if they are married. And if they are not married, there's impact there, too."

During her months of canvassing, and supervising other canvassers, Maria got very, very good at talking to strangers about marriage. First she tried talking to them about their own marriages, but as she went along she refined this, also talking to people about their parents' marriages or friends' marriages or really any marriage they had experienced. Because everyone has experienced marriage--or even its absence--in some way. She talked to people who had been in toxic and abusive marriages, and to people whose marriages had been the mainstays and central comfort of their lives. She talked on the phone with a woman dying in hospice. The woman wanted to tell her how she and her family always opened one present on Christmas Eve, in honor of the fact that it was the date she and her husband had married. She talked to men who described their love for their wives in a way, she suspected, they rarely confessed to the women in question. Sometimes people would stand at the door in the Maine summer, talking about the qualities they loved in their wife, or their husband."You would see the spouse peeking and laughing at the stories they were sharing. People were saying these beautiful heartfelt things that maybe they didn't say to each other."

And as result of daily conversations like that one, Maria broke up with her long-term boyfriend. The collective impact of all that inquiry and examination persuaded her that her own relationship did not have what it took to work. She is not sure what the crucial elements are. "I figure I'll know it when I see it," said Maria. So perhaps one consequence of the national conversation has been to reinforce a respect for marriage, and long-term committed unions, to the point where people are moved to re-evaluate their own relationships and come to any number of conclusions. Earlier this month, when Maria and I emailed again, she reported: "My team is still seeing some fallout in both campaign breakups and engagements/commitments. Of course some of that is just life, but it's true that thinking about this issue so much changes how we think about our own relationships. One of my canvassers emailed me today and said that she just graduated college and is moving in with her fiancé. She had always felt like marriage equality should happen, but that marriage just wasn't something she would ever do. She met her fiancé while she was working on the campaign and they got engaged last August."

Maria's next message, which arrived yesterday, reported that that canvasser is now married.

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Technology Mythology: No Red Phone Ever Connected the White House to Moscow

Not how it really looks (Pete Souza/Rebecca J. Rosen)

If there's one symbol that conveys the power, secrecy, responsibilities, and brinkmanship of the modern presidency it's the red phone, the direct line of communication from the White House to Moscow. Funny thing though: It's a myth. There never was any red phone.

Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which messages traveling between the two superpowers could take half a day to reach their destinations, American and Soviet leaders agreed that they needed a faster and more secure way to communicate. In a memorandum from June 1963, the two powers agreed that "for use in time of emergency the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" ought to "establish as soon as technically feasible a direct communications link between the two Governments." But the result was not a red phone. As Tom Clavin writes at Smithsonian:

The use of the word "direct" in the memo's title was a bit misleading; there was no red phone involved. Messages sent to the Soviet Union on the wire telegraph circuit were routed on a 10,000-mile-long transatlantic cable from Washington to London to Copenhagen to Stockholm to Helsinki and finally to Moscow.
Still, it was a start. Soon after the agreement, four American-made teletype machines were flown to Moscow and installed in the Kremlin. An equal number of machines manufactured in East Germany were shipped to the Soviet Embassy in Washington. They were delivered not to the White House but to the Pentagon, which has remained home to the "hotline" ever since. The two sides also exchanged encoding devices so that the Americans could translate received messages into English and the Soviets could translate messages into Russian on their end.

The hotline was up and running by the end of August of 1963. John F. Kennedy, assassinated just three months later, never had cause to use it. The first president to do so was Lyndon Johnson, who used it to communicate with Alexei Kosygin during the Six Day War between Israel and the surrounding Arab states. In the years since, the hotline has been updated with a satellite connection (1971), a high-speed fax capacity (in the '80s), and a fiber-optic link for email and talking (in 2008). The original teletype link was severed five years after the fax came online.

As for the red phone, that's a creation of Hollywood, says Clavin:

The myth of the red phone hotline, that the president could call the Kremlin whenever it suited him, came from a wide-range of pop culture sources. A duo of movies from 1964 lent immediate post-Crisis credence to the visual of a phone. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb features a memorable scene of Peter Sellers' President Merkin Muffley warning Soviet Premier Dimitri Kisov about the pending arrival of American bombers. In Fail-Safe, a film with a similar plot, Henry Fonda's nameless President delivered equally horrific news by phone (called a red phone, despite the movie being in black-and-white.) The most well-known television portrayal of a hotline system was the red "bat phone" in the "Batman" series of the late 1960s. It was also an object of humor in the show "Get Smart." In one episode in "The West Wing," Martin Sheen's President Bartlet mentions that the "red phone hotline" was canned before he took office.

Clavin adds that politicians too have perpetuated the myth, such as Mondale's ad in the 1984 Democratic primary, in which a gleaming red phone rotates in the shadows, as an ominous voice intones, "The most awesome, powerful responsibility in the world lies in the hand that picks up this phone." Hillary Clinton too evoked the great weight of this non-existent phone with her infamous 3 AM ad from the 2008 primary, though no red phone appears in the ad at all (at the tail end Clinton appears talking into a gray receiver). Any red phone in that commercial was entirely in the mind of the viewer.

As was, it turns out, any red phone in the Oval Office at all.

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It's Okay to Call a Guy Creepy

Be handsome. Be attractive. Don't be unattractive.

These are the three steps men should take to avoid a sexual harassment lawsuit, according to a now-infamous 2005 Saturday Night Live sketch. More than eight years after it first aired, the YouTube video of the skit still gets cited in online discussions of sexual harassment as "evidence" that our culture is deeply hostile to socially awkward and homely men.

In the sketch, NFL quarterback Tom Brady and SNL regular Fred Armisen play office workers trying to pick up female coworkers played by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Armisen's character is shy and nerdy. Even his most tentative moves result in a charge of creepiness - and the prompt filing of a sexual harassment complaint. Brady, famously easy on the eyes, is physically aggressive, even pinching Poehler's breasts as she offers an appreciative, welcoming smile. The take-away of the spoof is obvious: What gets a man rejected by women (or slapped with a sexual harassment suit) has nothing to do with how he behaves and everything to do with what he looks like.

What SNL played for laughs, many men (and some women) took - and still take - seriously: Some men can't win with women, these people believe, no matter what they do or say. This attitude is best observed in the recent backlash against calling men "creepy." "Creep is the worst thing you can call a man," wroteJeremy Gordon for the Hairpin, pointing out it's an impossible charge for a guy to disprove. As Gordon writes, "creepy is a vibe you can't define... you just know it."

Others argue that "creepiness" connotes something specific: male homeliness. Men's rights activist Robert Lindsay titled a post "Creepy" is Woman Speak for "An Unattractive Man Who Shows Interest In Me," while Thought Catalog's Johanna de Silentio wrote that "there are also a lot of guys who are labeled 'creepy' just because they happen to be really unattractive." I often hear something similar in my gender studies classes. (It was in a "Men and Masculinity" course years ago where an anguished young man first drew my attention to the Brady skit.) Whenever the subject of sexual harassment or "creep-shaming" comes up in class, someone--almost always a man--makes the case that SNL was right: the only way for straight men to safely express sexual interest in women is to do so while following the skit's three rules. With almost invariable bitterness, these young men complain that unless a guy has won striking good looks in the genetic lottery, he's doomed to be rejected and seen as overstepping his boundaries, no matter what he does.

It's been nearly 50 years since Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 introduced the first federal laws prohibiting sexual harassment. (Just this week, the Supreme Court handed down two decisions that impose troubling new limits on when sexual harassment claims can be filed.) At the heart of the original legislation was the idea that sexual harassment was conduct that was "unwelcome" to those who were its targets. Desire mattered, Congress in essence declared. What is welcomed and enjoyed is, by definition, not harassment. (This can get complicated: there is a separate concept of third-party harassment, which declares, for example, that someone upset by witnessing sexualized banter between a boss and an employee might have grounds for a complaint, even if the employee with whom that boss was bantering welcomed his or her flirtatiousness.)

The fact that the law centers on women's subjective experience is what makes so many of my students and countless men's rights activists so indignant. (While sexual harassment law was and is intended to be applied regardless of sex, the popular perception is that these laws exist primarily to protect female employees from predatory male colleagues and supervisors.) Last year, a young man in my women's studies course criticized an article I'd written for Jezebel defending the use of the word "creep," and did so by boldly misappropriating Martin Luther King, Jr.'s most famous speech. 

A society where people are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, he declared, should also be a society where men are judged "creepy" solely on the basis of their words and actions rather than their looks. He got cheers from several other guys in the classroom.

My student's mistake is an obvious one: Enjoyment can't be coerced. Congress can't pass a law requiring people to be delighted by the advances of others they find unattractive. I can get my children to eat broccoli by alternating promises of rewards and punishments, but I cannot do anything to make my daughter love vegetables as much as she loves ice cream. Similarly, no law can compel "Ashley," a barista at the local coffee shop, to feel the same way about the advances of an older co-worker whom she finds repellant as she does about those of the young hottie who joins her on the opening shift.

Until recently, however, few women could make sexual choices based primarily on physical desire and emotional attraction. In a world where few women had the opportunity to prosper without a man's protection, marriage was about survival. The more educational and economic opportunities women acquire, the more opportunity they have to choose based on what they want rather than what they need for survival. As Daniel Bergner's bestselling What Do Women Want?argues, once you level the economic playing field, women are just as likely as men to make sexual decisions based on desire alone.

The same principle works for sexual harassment: the Civil Rights Act of 1965 didn't conjure the concept out of thin air. Women had always been sexually harassed in public spaces. What the government did was give the problem a name -- and a remedy. It also formally recognized a woman's right to decide for herself what conduct was welcome and what wasn't.

Men's rage about sexual harassment regulations and "creep-shaming" may well be rooted in an unwillingness to accept these cultural changes that have given women unprecedented power to say "no" to the lecherous and the predatory. Complaints that unattractive, socially awkward men are unfairly labeled "creepy" miss the point. "Creepy" describes having "the creeps;" it's a word that centers on women's own feelings. It's no more "unfair" for Ashley the hypothetical barista to be "creeped out" by the advances of an older, unappealing co-worker than it is for her to be excited by the same approach from the man to whom she's attracted. In that sense, the SNL sketch got to an important truth: Women's subjective experiences and instincts matter.

The freedom to act on those instincts doesn't just lead to romantic fulfillment. In his indispensable 1997 bestseller The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker encourages women to rely on their own intuition to keep themselves safe from violence. There are few things more risky, de Becker argues, than overriding one's own sense of real danger ("the creeps") for the sake of preserving a relationship - or simply being "nice" to a stranger. Crucially, de Becker points out that people-pleasing and the urge to avoid causing offense put more women in danger than acting on sexual attraction. Women are more likely to be assaulted because they were too polite to someone whom they sensed was creepy than because they were too responsive to the charms of someone who turned them on.

When men complain about being "creep-shamed," or insist that the Tom Brady sketch accurately reflects reality, what they're really lamenting is a culture that is increasingly willing to honor women's right to be sexual -- and women's right to be safe.

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You're Interacting With Dark Matter Right Now

Shutterstock/Paul Fleet

Here's a little experiment.

Hold up your hand.

Now put it back down.

In that window of time, your hand somehow interacted with dark matter -- the mysterious stuff that comprises the vast majority of the universe. "Our best guess," according to Dan Hooper, an astronomy professor at the University of Chicago and a theoretical astrophysicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, "is that a million particles of dark matter passed through your hand just now."

Dark matter, in other words, is not merely the stuff of black holes and deep space. It is all around us. Somehow. We're pretty sure.

But if you did the experiment -- as the audience at Hooper's talk on dark matter and other cosmic mysteries did at the Aspen Ideas Festival today -- you didn't feel those million particles. We humans have no sense of their existence, Hooper said, in part because they don't hew to the forces that regulate our movement in the world -- gravity, electromagnetism, the forces we can, in some way, feel. Dark matter, instead, is "this ghostly, elusive stuff that dominates our universe," Hooper said.

It's everywhere. And it's also, as far as human knowledge is concerned, nowhere.

And yet, despite its mysteries, we know it's out there. "All astronomers are in complete conviction that there is dark matter," said Richard Massey, the lead author of a recent study mapping the dark matter of the universe, and Hooper's co-panelist. The evidence for its existence, Hooper agreed, is "overwhelming." And yet it's evidence based on deduction: through our examinations of the observable universe, we make assumptions about the unobservable version.

Dark matter, in other words, is aptly named. A full 95 percent of the universe -- the dark matter, the stuff that both is and is not -- is effectively unknown to us. "All the science that we've ever done only ever examines five percent of the universe," Massey said. Which means that there are still mysteries to be unraveled, and dark truths to be brought to light.

And it also means, Massey pointed out, that for scientists, "the job security is great."

You might be wondering, though: given how little we know about dark matter, how is it that Hooper knew that a million particles of the stuff passed through your hand as you raised and lowered it?

"I cheated a little," Hooper admitted. He assumed a particular mass for the individual particles. "We know what the density of dark matter is on Earth from watching how the Milky Way rotates. And we know roughly how fast they're going. So you take those two bits of information, and all you need to know is how much mass each individual particle has, and then I can get the million number. And I assumed a kind of traditional guess. But it could be 10,000 higher; it could be 10,000 lower."

Which is a nice metaphor for our approach to learning more about dark matter overall. It's a lot of educated guesswork. When it comes to the bulk of the universe, "we have no idea," Massey said. "And that's what makes it exciting."

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