Geoff Marcy soon to be retired Professor of Astronomy at UC Berkley.  Pioneer of the search for exoplanets accused serial sexual harasser and perverse sexual assaulter was tried by media this year*.  Now more documents have been released. The problem with trial by media is that accusations often equal guilt.  That is the hallmark of a witch trial, that is the hallmark of a lynch mob, and no one should be lynched in the 21^st century.  Especially now that social media makes it so easy to jump on the pile.   We can do better than that by giving both sides a chance to be heard.

On Twitter #BlackOnCampus is a collection anecdotes of racial aggression and microaggression.  What does science say? What is the context for these tweets?  I am only one person and can only speak for myself.  However, many others on Twitter are sharing their own stories of what it is like to be #BlackOnCampus.   Those who are not from the United States and those who are not black may be surprised to find out that there are still very real issues with racism.  Things have gotten better even during my life time.

Scientist who specialize in sex and sexuality tested a sample of men using a device that measures the reaction of a mans privates to various visual stimuli.   Men who are attracted to transgender women were not turned on by porn featuring two gay men, but they were turned on by porn featuring women only, and three kinds of “shemale” porn (“Man on Shemale”, “Shemale on Female”, and “Shemale on Shemale”).   So a man who likes transgender women (people born essentially biologically male who are sociologically more like women) does not have to be “at least” bisexual, or really gay but hiding it, or any such thing.   What studies like this hi-lite is the sparse vocabulary most of us have in the USA.  Word

SETI has listened to KIC 8462852 for two kinds of signals and found nothing stronger than an intensity of 100 Jy (Jansky). They looked for purposefully broadcast narrow band signals and a wide band omnidirectional signal not purposefully sent.  Their first observational pass lasting two weeks found , in their words, "To summarize these observations, we estimate an upper limit for anomalous flux from KIC 8462852 to be 100 Jy in a 100 kHz band over the frequencies displayed." ¹  Put another way either no one is transmitting, or no one there is transmitting anything strong enough for us to detect at the distance KIC8462852 is from us (about 1500 light years).  

Perversion and sexual assault is what Geoff Marcy is accused of not “harassment” or treating a conference like a “dating market”.  In our collective zeal to protect women from unwelcome but otherwise ordinary advances let us not conflate asking someone at a cocktail party over drinks on a date with doing what UC Berkley Prof Geoff Marcy is accused of.