Ok, this one made me laugh out loud.
I still prefer stupid Republican tricks below the fold.
I had never fully understood the expression "like watching a train wreck" until recently. But a few days ago I happened upon a train wreck and I found it very difficult to turn away. This despite the fact that I had fun things to do. I suppose I should feel bad about myself. It's not as though those passengers deserved it.
Oh my that's funny. Stupid non-pregnant women, hogging all the abortions.
He should be totally ok with giving abortions to non-pregnant women because it doesn't kill any baby Jesuses.
What if giving an abortion to a non-pregnant woman causes a potential non-child to be manifested and then snuffed out in the alternate dimensions of possibility? It might be a method of collapsing the world-lines to eliminate all the nearby Earths in which that woman is pregnant but doesn't know it yet. My gods, it's a means of murdering baby Jesii from entirely other universes.
Do they think that because it gives a weird type of cover for religious parents? "Yes, my daughter went to have an abortion, but .."
It's the new "I didn't inhale".
The hell? Does he not know about pap smears, and just assume any form of reproductive health care is abortion? I wonder who's in charge of giving Akin The Talk as debate prep.
I heard the bit about giving non-pregnant women abortions last night, and I thought "Well, I suppose that it's sort of possible." It's possible in this sense, D&E procedures are done when a fetus is no longer viable, and the remains are a threat to the mother. I guess that they're rotting. The woman isn't really pregnant anymore, but the procedure is being done. I think that women can die without it. So, Akin: objectively pro killing women.
The complaint was inelegantly worded, sure, but the idea is that women who think they're pregnant and go to the clinic for an abortion have "fake" procedures done and then are charged for the abortion. Not that non-pregnant women literally have abortions.
I.e., the complaint is about abortion providers defrauding women.
I have no idea if this actually happens with any frequency; I doubt it. But it's not some sort of biological ignorance on Akin's part.
BG and Urpie are Akin-apologists!
Because of the generous rates public and private insurers pay for abortions. Oh, wait.
I don't think it's a defense of Akin, but surely a substantial number of people who take the morning after pill -- which people of Akin's stripe consider abortion -- are not pregnant.
That imaginary fetus? You didn't build that.
11, 12: Surely it's some kind of ignorance about the availability and accuracy of home pregnancy tests? Like, how does he think these non-pregnant women ended up in abortion clinics?
As long as we are all agreed that there is nothing weird about saying a "culture of death" leads to "not following good sanitary procedure," which is a kind of "law breaking."
Could be the whole, "Women are two weeks pregnant every cycle" thing.
Wait, not everyone asks for an abortion every now and then just to make sure?
19: He's referring to abortion clinics. Where not following good sanitary procedures presumably is a kind of law breaking (one hopes).
8: availability and accuracy? I doubt he's confused. Number of women who skip that step and go straight to the clinic when they miss their period? He might be confused about that.
No, no. Good sanitary procedures = sanitary napkins and menstruation. He hates tampons!
He's probably not actually that upset about cheating on taxes, depending on who is cheating.
Am I going to have to admit that these are just ordinary unsubstantiated allegations, and not the incoherent ravings of a madman?
Am I going to have to admit that these are just ordinary unsubstantiated allegations, and not the incoherent ravings of a madman?
I certainly have no intention of being fair-minded about it.
Sounds like he heard about one of the medicare fraud cases, where doctors perform unnecessary surgeries on healthy patients in order to bill medicare and/or insurance, and pretended it involved abortion. There are a few cases reported every year. The worst one I heard of involved real chemotherapy on healthy patients. The patients generally loved the doctor, since they did end up cancer-free (athough hairless andwith the other side effects).
I doubt anyone would do this with abortion because the whole point is to bill medicare, not generally available for abortion.
and I thought "Well, I suppose that it's sort of possible." It's possible in this sense, D&E procedures are done when a fetus is no longer viable, and the remains are a threat to the mother
Except that what you're describing is not an abortion. I know you're not defending Akin, but I think we have to be really on guard about letting the definition of abortion get broadened.
Except that what you're describing is not an abortion.
Is it something that gets threatened by anti-abortion laws? Genuinely asking out of curiosity.
Not that I know of. I'm just wary of broadening the definition at all.
I thought it was considered a big deal that in countries with absolute abortion bans (El Salvador comes to mind) doctors wouldn't perform that kind of D&E, lest they be accused of performing an abortion on a not-dead fetus. So it's not that far out to consider it threatened by anti-abortion laws.
A D&C post-natural fetal death is in no way an abortion. Some state reps may think that women should just have to expel the remains naturally like cattle, but even here in crazy pro-life state, someone who miscarries is allowed to have medical intervention.
It wouldn't surprise me if mr. magical juices didn't know that and thought D&C just mean "abortions!"
A D&C post-natural fetal death is in no way an abortion. Some state reps may think that women should just have to expel the remains naturally like cattle, but even here in crazy pro-life state, someone who miscarries is allowed to have medical intervention.
It wouldn't surprise me if mr. magical juices didn't know that and thought D&C just mean "abortions!"
All due contempt for Akin, but this makes me curious but am I right in thinking that if a woman gets a positive pregnancy test and goes to the doctor, the doctor will re-test to reduce false positives?
29: Akin's probably talking about the doctor in Kentucky.
the doctor will re-test to reduce false positives
I think that there are virtually no false positives in pregnancy tests, (but there are women who missed their period and assume incorrectly that they're pregnant), but yes - the first thing the doctor does is have you pee in a cup to measure proteins and other things that can be going wrong. And to see if you're still pregnant - maybe the fetus died since you took your pregnancy test.
At an abortion clinic, I don't really know, since I live in a mandatory trans-vaginal-rape state, which has the side effect of confirming your pregnancy.
I was certainly given a pregnancy test before my abortion, but I don't know if it's required by regulation or just sensible good practice.
Over on SLOG, a doctor wrote in to say that the statutes on trans-vaginal ultrasounds were making their lives more difficult at their abortion clinic. They ordinarily give one (with consent, without forcing women to look at the screen) as part of their good practices, but with the media coverage of the laws forcing women to look at the ultrasound, people were wondering whether they were doing the ultrasounds as part of a conservative anti-abortion practice. That sounds to me like they ordinarily confirm pregnancies before an abortion.
Considering that I've been given a pregnancy test when I've gone to an emergency room for a broken arm (they wouldn't sedate me to set my munched bones without confirmation that I wasn't pregnant), and was refused an MRI for something else because I was in the two week period when I might be pregnant but before a test could detect it, I am inclined to think that standard medical practices are accutely attentive to whether the patient might be pregnant.
Yet again, Pictures For Sad Children is basically the most perfect thing on the Internet.
It's good to see you, and I hope all is relatively well. You've been missed. No pressure, mind.
OT: Can someone explain to me the weak topology of the diffeomorphism group of a compact manifold? I'm a little stumped by the Wikipedia entry.
32
Is it something that gets threatened by anti-abortion laws? Genuinely asking out of curiosity.
Potentially. I once read a old (pre Roe v. Wade) mystery in which part of the plot involved a doctor who was performing abortions but recording them as removals of dead fetuses.
OT cont: I can accept that a family of metrics (though I don't really understand the motivation for the particular metrics they use) induces a topology, but I have no idea what that function d(f,g) is doing or what it's used for.
Trying maybe without success to reconstruct this by staring at the first couple pages of Chapter 2 of Hirsch: if we were just talking about continuous functions C(X,Y), the compact-open topology would be the thing generated by the sets of functions that take compact sets K in X into open sets U in Y (for arbitrary choices of K and U). This is a useful definition to use in point-set topology for reasons I don't really remember anymore.
Then one generalizes it to sufficiently smooth functions between manifolds C^r(X,Y) (i.e. the r-times differentiable functions) by asking that not only the function but its first r derivatives fall in an open neighborhood. Here they're accomplishing the "open" part by explicitly evaluating some norm on the result and requiring it to be within epsilon. That lets you define the weak topology on C^r(X,Y).
For smooth (C^\infty) functions, you pull back the weak topologies on C^r(X,Y) for all r to topologies on C^\infty and take their union.
The function d(f,g) appearing in the Wikipedia page with the sum over n doesn't appear in the discussion in Hirsch. So... no idea?
To be clearer: the norm in Hirsch, at least, is based on restricting to maps between atlases (K, U contained in a given atlas) and using the usual Euclidean distance on the coordinates in the charts in a given atlas.
I haven't absorbed the rest of your comment, but I just found that same formula described elsewhere as a product metric.
All things considered, I think I'm glad I no longer have to care much about such details.
Ah, right. Hirsch is a differential topology book, not a differential geometry book, so he isn't fixing a metric, which is why he does the atlases-and-charts stuff to talk about Euclidean distances. The Wikipedia page is fixing a metric on the manifold to give distances.
I'm not being very useful, but I am having unusually vivid memories of late nights in college.
56: I get that sometimes too, but it's not triggered by math, usually.
51.2 is very helpful. I'm still working through it slowly.
I had a D&C at PP which turned out not to be an abortion, although it was semi-meant to be. I went in to have an abortion, and no one could find the embryo with ultrasound. At that point the options were an extremely early pregnancy or an ectopic one, and the doctor recommended that if I didn't want to have a baby, he would perform a D&C and then monitor HCG levels to see if I was still pregnant. (It turns out I was, and the pregnancy was ectopic.) I don't fit Akin's criterion of being not pregnant, but I suppose you could say the D&C turned out in retrospect to be for shits and giggles.
Britta--That sounds awful. So, basically they did a procedure, and then you were still pregnant, because it was an ectopic pregnancy. I'm so sorry.
I'm sorry to hear that too, Britta. I don't know how else that could really be resolved if you're not at a point where anything is showing on ultrasound. It sounds to me like the medical decisions were appropriate, but what a scary and unpleasant experience that must have been.
Thorn & Bostoniangirl,
Thanks a lot. Yeah, it was one of the points in my life where everything was just really shitty, so this was almost humorous adding to just how much was going wrong. I think the decision was the right one, in that it was the only way to know very quickly that the pregnancy was ectopic. The one thing that I am extremely grateful for was how awesome PP was in all respects and that I was in very blue area of a blue state and had insurance which covered abortions. I've donated a little money, but once I have a Real Job I plan to be a regular donor to PP for the rest of my life.
The metric on the Wikipedia page is two standard tricks mushed together. You want C^infinity functions to be "near each other" if the function and all of its derivatives to be near each other. You can impose that on a compact set by just adding up the distance between the function and all of its derivatives.
If your manifold is compact, you're done. If it's not compact, then you have to use the second trick. Here you want to consider a family of conditions that get progressively weaker: the two functions are closer to each other on a small compact set, the two functions are close together on a slightly bigger compact set, the two functions are close together on an even bigger compact set, ... until you reach the whole manifold. Of course as the set gets bigger, the extent to which the two functions are "close" will get weaker. This metric, with the weighted sum and the denominator, is just a trick that lets you do this.
But they already defined the weak topology as the one induced by the given family of metrics. Then "d(f,g)" is defined, but its relation to that topology is never stated. Is the claim that the metric topology with respect to d(f,g) is the same as the previously defined weak topology?
That was my confusion too. Any two functions that are close to each other according to the summed metric will be close in all the compact subset metrics. What have you gained by summing them? Also, by "a sequence of compact subsets" do they mean Kn is a subset of Kn+1 as Walt (I think) is describing? I was kind of assuming it was just a countable set of subsets (whose union is the manifold).
Anyway, thanks for responding guys. I was playing around with some math and had decided that it could be described as a diffeomorphism group on a compact topology, a determination that was hindered by my not knowing what a diffeomorphism group was. Or a topology, for that matter. Now I just need to figure out what in God's name that can tell me.
The sets are normally taken to be increasing: Kn is a subset of Kn+t. (If you look at the Wikipedia page for smooth function, they require that.) I'm not sure what happens if you drop that requirement.
You don't need to sum them. You can work with each metric individually, no problem. (They're not quite metrics in that the distance between two functions under one single metric will be zero if the functions agree inside the compact set, but this doesn't matter too much.) The significance of the metric is that a metric exists at all, which means you can apply the Baire category theorem -- a countable union of small sets can't be a big set. A bunch of theorems in functional analysis rely on this argument.