Breaking the universal speed limit

Neutrinos may move faster than light! The link goes to and article about a CERN project that confirms the results of a previous experiment with neutrinos. In the experiments, the neutrinos arrived at the destination a tiny fraction of a second faster than light would have. Obviously, the ship to Gliese won't be leaving next month, but if this pans out, it could form a solid scientific basis for time travel and FTL space travel.

Just to get this out in the open . . .

There are several reasons why I'm not part of the online "asexual community" even though I technically fit the definition. The main reason is that I refuse to take part in any discourse that labels any women, let alone the vast majority of the women in the world, as "sexuals." That makes me profoundly uncomfortable for reasons of historical and cultural context that should be obvious. Furthermore, I disagree with the idea, popular in self-identified asexual internet circles, that it is politically useful, in our present world, to consider all non-asexual people as a single group opposite asexuals. "Sexual" may be the grammatical opposite of "asexual," but culturally and politically it makes no sense to ignore the reality that the sexuality that is privileged, often compulsory, and represented everywhere is very specifically heterosexuality. Any attempt at real world cultural analysis that lumps homosexuals and heterosexuals together as "sexuals" is as fundamentally flawed as a square wheel. And that's before getting into the heterosexual double standard, according to which sexual activity between a man and a woman means the man wins and has proven his superiority over women and over men who do not have sex with women, while the woman loses and should be ashamed of herself but should not let that become an excuse to avoid sex with men because that would be bad in a different way and being female means being damned if you do and damned if you don't. Yes, there are communities on the internet where being asexual or even just having a low sex drive, limited tastes, or little experience is treated as inferior to being anything else (hi there, Amanda Marcotte and Dan Savage). But that idea does not have anywhere near the political push or cultural inescapability of the idea that male heterosexuality is great and everything else is wrong and shameful but female heterosexuality has to be permitted in certain restricted ways so the men can demonstrate how hetero and manly they are.

Tangentially, the flipside of my annoyance with the "all sexuals have privilege over asexuals" assertion is my annoyance with the much more popular assumption that patriarchy generally and contemporary US mainstream culture specifically are "sex-negative" and anything "sex-positive" is subversive. I think contemporary US culture and many equally or more severely patriarchal cultures throughout history have taken very positive views of certain types of sexuality. It's just everything outside the narrow category of "correct" sexuality that is stigmatized.