The US healthcare reform bill that recently passed the House only did so after a controversial amendment was inserted banning any insurance plan which pays for abortion from accepting any federal subsidies, a clause that will probably eliminate abortion from most or all health plans if it goes into law. One reader at TPM had the following thought experiment:

What would happen if a few female members of the House put in (or merely proposed) an amendment to the health care bill which stated that men would be barred BY LAW from purchasing health insurance which covered Viagra, all hair-growth medications or procedures or transplants, etc.?

This thought experiment reminded me of the well known case of the birth control in Japan. Actually, I say well known, but when I checked to confirm the dates, the details were rather more complex than the simplistic version of the story that I had thought I knew, in which the pill was simply never legalized in Japan until a decade ago.

The first birth control pill was approved for that use by the United States FDA in 1960, but was rarely used in Japan until recently. The pill was not approved at all in Japan until 1972, but this was the high-dose formulation that was already being replaced in other countries with a low-dose version of the drug due to safety reasons. Because the safer, low-dose pill was never approved in Japan, oral contraceptives remained little used. Even after the original high-dose formulation was removed from the market in the US in 1988, the low-dose pill remained off the market in Japan.

This changed in 1999, after Viagra was fast-tracked for approval. Viagra first went on sale in the US in March 1998, and only a few months later was already being studied for approval in Japan, where it went on sale in March 1999 – only one year after the US. Feminists complained about a double standard that allowed a drug whose primary purpose is allowing recreational sex for old men to be approved almost immediately, while the safe low-dose birth control pill was still not approved after four decades. At the time, Yoshiaki Kumamoto, president of the Japan Foundation of Sexual Health Medicine, was quoted as saying that viagra was approved so quickly because old men in parliament “want to have that drug.”

The modern pill was finally approved in September of 1999, although women taking it are required to have pelvic exams four times a year, as opposed to once or twice in most countries, and there is still a widely held association with the dangerous side effects of the old formulation. According to a late 2006 study, only 1.8% of Japanese women were using the pill for their birth control needs. This compares with, according to UN figures for the year 2005, 7.5% of women worldwide, and 15.9% of women in developed countries.

On Sunday night, a large earthquake struck underwater off the coast of Japan and gave the entire Tokyo area a good shake. Then, on Tuesday morning, the Tokai region was visited by a much closer earthquake which damaged the main expressway between Tokyo and Nagoya.

Both quakes were around 7 on the Richter scale, which sounded catastrophic to my friends in California, but they would not have been quite as panicked if they were using the Japanese scale. This is because the Richter scale measures the power of an earthquake at its source (magnitude), whereas the Japanese shindo scale measures its power at the surface (seismic intensity). The Japanese scale basically breaks down as follows:

• 1 = Barely noticeable
• 2 = Noticeable but not scary
• 3 = Rattles unsecured objects
• 4 = Knocks unsecured objects over
• 5 = Damages rickety buildings
• 6 = Damages earthquake-resistant buildings
• 7 = The Earth cracks open; demons emerge; everyone dies

Each location would therefore report a different number from the same earthquake, based on the effects on the ground there. The Japan Meteorological Agency publishes a map showing the seismic impact of each earthquake at various locations, as well as its epicenter. Around Tokyo, Sunday’s quake was around 3 or 4 on the Japanese scale, largely as a result of the quake being deeper underground and farther offshore; Monday’s quake was even weaker for us, but folks in the Izu Peninsula area got to experience seismic effects in the 5 to 6 range.

The foreign media, being sensationalists, still love to use the Richter scale for everything, despite the fact that it serves little practical purpose other than scaring my parents.

Geography and cartography is one theme at ComingAnarchy.com, where I regularly create and post maps of areas of the world when I can find no suitable version on the world wide web. Recent examples include the political geography of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Breakup, the modern constituent kingdoms of Uganda, and maps of one day states, among others.

Having traveled across much of Japan and discovered minor peninsulas that don’t appear on major maps, I went searching for a map of Japan’s peninsulas but found none. So, I made my own—it’s not exhaustive, but it does include all major peninsulas, and as many minor peninsulas that I could incorporate into the map under the current narrow graphical specifications. Please note that academic and practicing geography experts disagree with the categorization of “peninsula” for some of the minor peninsulas labeled on this map. (The enlarged map is .png file, and can be easily edited if someone wants to further contribute to the map, correct inaccuracies, or amend to upload to wikipedia.)

Click to enlarge

Think you know Japan’s peninsulas like a real expert? Then take the Yahoo! games 日本半島検定 exam, in which you take 8 questions to test your mettle! All the information required to pass is contained in the picture above.

Continuing the alien theme started by Curzon:

Close to midnight on August 5, 1952, four American air traffic controllers walking across the tarmac at Haneda Airport (then a US military base) spotted a round, bright object in the sky over Tokyo Bay. They went up to the tower and took a look through their binoculars, and noticed a larger dark ellipse surrounding the light.

Over the next few minutes, the controllers tried to get visual confirmation from an airborne observer plane, which couldn’t see anything. They were able to get a radar fix on the UFO, though, and so they had a scrambled fighter jet intercept it. The pilots didn’t spot the UFO, though, and shortly after the radar intercept the UFO disappeared.

The original US Air Force report is available in scanned format here. Nobody was ever able to explain what happened; my personal theory is that the aliens were coming for Kenzo Tange so they would have someone to do their design bidding on Earth.

From the Cape Cod Times:

WOODS HOLE — A federal appeals court recently upheld a ruling from a lower court that dismissed a lawsuit from a former Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution researcher, who claimed he was unjustly fired for not believing in evolution.

Nathaniel Abraham, who was hired as a postdoctoral investigator in fall 2004 for his expertise in working with zebrafish, sued WHOI for discrimination in 2007. Abraham claimed he was fired after admitting he was a Christian who believes in creationism and the infallible word of God.

However, WHOI officials told the Times that Abraham’s job description clearly stated he would have to apply evolutionary theory in reviewing the results of research.

A U.S. District Court judge dismissed the lawsuit in April 2008 because Abraham did not file his discrimination claim within three years of being fired.

On Jan. 22, the U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court’s ruling.

Abraham’s last known job was teaching biology at Liberty University in Virginia, a college founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. He could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Academic freedom is a grand thing, but to deserve academic freedon, one should probably be doing academics-and of course fulfilling the actual job description one agreed to when hired. As a personal note, I’ve spent a lot of time near the WHIO, located in Woods Hole, Cape Cod, Massechusets as Woods Hole is a division of Falmouth, where my father’s parents used to live when I was a child, and where my father now owns a second house. The aquarium was a lot of fun as a kid, as well as the tiny bridge that opens for passing ships, which I thought was the coolest thing ever when I was small enough for the bridge to seem big.

Friday food for thought:  I think a lot of people didn’t really need a university study to tell them that some people are just wilfully ignorant. But just in case you needed proof, here is an article from last month:

Robert Proctor doesn’t think so. A historian of science at Stanford, Proctor points out that when it comes to many contentious subjects, our usual relationship to information is reversed: Ignorance increases.

He has developed a word inspired by this trend: agnotology. Derived from the Greek root agnosis, it is “the study of culturally constructed ignorance.”

As Proctor argues, when society doesn’t know something, it’s often because special interests work hard to create confusion. Anti-Obama groups likely spent millions insisting he’s a Muslim; church groups have shelled out even more pushing creationism. The oil and auto industries carefully seed doubt about the causes of global warming. And when the dust settles, society knows less than it did before.

...Maybe the Internet itself has inherently agnotological side effects. People graze all day on information tailored to their existing worldview. And when bloggers or talking heads actually engage in debate, it often consists of pelting one another with mutually contradictory studies they’ve Googled: “Greenland’s ice shield is melting 10 years ahead of schedule!” vs. “The sun is cooling down and Earth is getting colder!”

I notice this all the time. On the one hand, Wikipedia has effectively made asking people questions obsolete—for any given factual question, Wiki is almost always going to give you a more reliable answer (with sources!) than any of your friends. And Google Maps and the like have destroyed the art of giving directions.

But at the same time, the human mind has an instinct to filter out unnecessary information. Sometimes you just have to ignore stuff you don’t care about, but at other times, for example, I find myself subconsciously avoiding looking up the history of bands, and the only reason I can think of is that I like believing in the image of the band better than I would knowing the actual facts.

After the jump due to size issues.

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