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Can someone explain how the light gets 'absorbed'?

Each time it encounters matter, there's an opportunity for the photon to interact in a way that absorbs its energy. This requires that the material has a resonant mode that matches the energy of the photon, so it can exactly absorb all of the photon's energy; if not, the photon won't interact (i.e., will pass through or get reflected). When a photon is absorbed, its energy is converted into electromagnetic energy in the material (e.g., exciting an electron to a higher-energy state or moving atoms in a molecule apart; this transition must exactly match the energy from the photon). Then that energy eventually gets converted into motion, which is heat (electron goes flying through a material, bumping into atoms and setting them vibrating, or excited atoms move back together and begin vibrating). If the photon bounces around more times, there are more opportunities for it to interact with the material in just the right way to get absorbed. There's a little info on this here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-exactly-does-light-tr/

Holy fucken shit, no climate scientists ever in the history of the world has ever thought of "solar cycles" impacting climate change!
Motherfucker, you're the smartest person on the planet!

Oh wait, no, a few seconds in Google proves you're a moron, here's the first link I clicked on:
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/rese...
and here's the second link:
https://www.scientificamerican...
you may continue to keep clicking on the list, just Google "do solar cycles cause climate change".

Example: "Diversity is our strength" is a nearly universal corporate value today.
Fact: All scientific evidence contradicts the preceding statement.

And that was an example of a lie. A clear and easily verifiable falsehood presented as a fact:

https://www.scientificamerican...

Both of those papers deal with overestimation for a particular 15 year period (1998 - 2013) and the second is based on tropospheric satellite measurements rather than ground temperature measurement like the first study. There have are disputing papers that say the divergence is within the bounds of natural variability, and this nature article seems to sum up the divergence issue: "There is no evidence for a change in the long-term warming trend, he says, and there are always a host of reasons why a short-term trend might diverge — and why the climate models might not capture that divergence."

In any case, there have been multiple developments that indicate that the temperature record was biased low over the period both your papers consider in several areas: ocean warming, temperature coverage at the poles, and systematic errors in satellite measurements. Each of which has been found to have a small, but significant, effect on the temperature record. It doesn't look like Fyfe and company have released a new paper that accounts for those issues, yet.

It is, disproportionally in the Arctic. So there is less sea ice there and the difference between the Arctic air and the more southerly air is less pronounced than usual. A larger differential in air temperatures drives stronger Polar Vortex winds. The Polar Vortex is a circular wind pattern that is strong enough to trap the cold air, keeping it in the Arctic where it belongs. When the Polar Vortex weakens, that cold is able to leak out and freeze the middle latitudes.

The key to note though is that the overall global average temperatures are rising, due to the extreme warming at the poles. Occasional colder than normal weather in more temperate areas are nowhere near enough to put a damper on the rising global average.

Other Polar Vortex related cold spells occurred in January 2014 and February 2015.

Links:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/what-is-this-polar-vortex-that-is-freezing-the-u-s/

https://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/atmospheric/polar-vortex1.htm

http://science.time.com/2014/01/06/climate-change-driving-cold-weather/

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/polar-vortex-explainer/63115

https://weather.com/science/weather-explainers/news/polar-vortex-april-2016-cold-outbreak-east

https://phys.org/news/2014-01-weakened-polar-vortex-blamed-american.html

It could very well be the case that this IS global warming (AKA "climate change" for those who don't understand averages). A hotter climate can power more extreme weather on both ends of the temperature scale. So those sharks might appreciate *less* global warming.

So you envision "conspiracies" of "organized campaigns"

No need to imagine anything, they're very clearly documented.

You have to realize you are in some niche of science and can't speak for the whole. For me, I'm not really in "science" but engineering. Most of my papers are read by folks in industry, not in academia, and as a consequence my citation scores are quite low. However as an engineer I don't care since this isn't a metric I am judged by. Some very important papers go uncited and unnoticed for years before their relevance is observed. For example, read this article: https://www.scientificamerican...

I have also worked in materials science where it seems anything even tangentially related is given a citation just to boost the circle jerk citation ring of science [2][3][15][45]

As another poster mentioned, citations are a rather simple and poor metric. It's a shame more papers aren't published with negative results, in line with the
"scientific method". From my experience it's the "tenure method".

I said there are no known kinds of acoustic phenomena that can produce the precise combination of symptoms that are being seen here. Especially the brain damage.
And there you are wrong, sorry.

https://www.scientificamerican...

Sonoluminescence and Cavitation are real effects. No idea where you spent your time the last 50 years.

> Sexual harassment is about using your gender as a way to to pull power from someone else of a different gender.

Please, review your terms. Not only do I beg to differ, I can find no example of a dictionary that agrees with this definition. Sexual harassment is not gender specific. Treating one gender differently from aanother in unjustified ways _is_ gender discrimination. If you're convinced that sexual harassment is defined by distinct genders, then I'd encourage you to review the history of same sex sexual harassment by Catholic priests recently, and by prison guards throughout history.

In case you are being confused by some political analysis that merges those two abusive activities, there is a recent article in Scientific American at https://www.scientificamerican.... According to CDC statistics cited there, men are *more* likely to be sexually harassed, especially rape. Much of that reported rape is by women. And for both men and women who are in prison, same-sex rape is commonplace, mostly by other inmates.

With no statute of limitation either.

This is one thing that is horribly wrong about sexual harassment.

Putting a limit on this would help to remove the stigma and political blowback that often comes with reporting it.

Nope. It would do absolutely nothing to remove the stigma and blowback that comes with reporting it. There's still people who insist that the only legitimate rape is something that somehow prevents pregnancy.

Sorry, but there's a lot of things that are HORRIBLY WRONG about sexual harassment. It's a long list.

It would also get rid of people coming forward with ancient sexual harassment claims that are often viewed as relevant as dragging 90-year old men into courtrooms for World War II war crimes.

Been there, done that.

And we'll do it again until the last Nazi is dead, and even then, they'll still be anathema.

And we'll also declare the falsely accused to be innocent.

Don't like it? Tough.

Our models predicting a curvature have been proven wrong every year since 1993 when we started satellite tracking of sea level rise. The actual data shows an impressively linear 3mm per year. There is no evidence refuting that linear rise. There is no evidence supporting the model's prediction of a curvature.

Recent research has found some problems with earlier satellite tracking of sea level rise:

Satellite SNAFU masked true sea level rise for decades

Not sure when it was published but the Antarctic graph animation shows ice loss up to June of 2014 so it's not that old. The one in the OP was dated October 2015. The problem with the study showing net gain in ice is that it was trying to measure it by changes in surface elevation of the ice sheet by measuring it with radar altimeters from satellites which has issues with things like the density of the snow it is measuring which needs to be confirmed by ground studies which are difficult in most of East Antarctica. Here is a story from Scientific American published July 6, 2017 about it: What to believe in Antarctica's great ice debate

No, Snakes too

There's nothing wrong with reasonable amounts of salt

https://www.scientificamerican...

Just google: "alzheimers research accumulation junk"

First hit:
https://www.scientificamerican...

Yeah, that never happened.

"Yeah, that never happened" is correct! Anonymous Coward says something accurate for a change.

There was no scientific consensus nor prediction by scientists that the Earth was "entering a global cooling phase."

Citations: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1
http://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.8199/full/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-global-cooling-story-came-to-be/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-global-cooling-myth/"
http://www.factcheck.org/2015/03/cruz-on-the-global-cooling-myth-and-galileo/

In this case the big difference seems to be in network topology:
"However, the layered structure of the whale neocortex is known to be simpler than that of humans and most other mammals. In particular, whales lack cortical layer IV, and thus have five neocortical layers to humankind's six. This means that the wiring of connections into and out of the neocortex is much different in whales than in other mammals."
( https://blogs.scientificameric... )

The source also mentions that (some) cetaceans have (much) larger neocortical surfaces than humans. We are also not the top scorer when it comes to neurons in the cerebral cortex:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Our brain apparently contains a fairly minor difference with that of other advanced mammals which clearly gives us a huge advantage. According to Wikipedia, the following characterizes layer IV:
"Neurons in layer IV receive the majority of the synaptic connections from outside the cortex (mostly from thalamus), and themselves make short-range, local connections to other cortical layers.[10] Thus, layer IV is the main recipient of incoming sensory information and distributes it to the other layers for further processing."
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )

There are many guesses to be made as to what that difference is:
- attention?
- dynamic encoding of concepts?
- consciousness?

The day we find out (and we will) will be both enlightening and sobering, I believe.

He clearly stated that on average women are more neurotic and less able to deal with the demands of engineering jobs. He claims that this is due to biology..

He did mention women were more neurotic and there are scientific papers that agree..

But most of his memo was about interests, not abilities and even in interests part, he mentioned that there was a big overlap.

And said wastes are toxic in vanishingly small quantities, so it's not some "laugh it off" scenario; the LD50s can be less than a billionth of a gram, let alone the effect threshold. Furthermore, if you actually get a situation of heavy corrosion and leaching of fuel rods, you have the potential for a lot more than just "trace" amounts.... We try to do better with modified bitumen membranes, but when you're talking such long time scales... who the bloody heck knows?

I think we can answer that last question empirically.

https://www.scientificamerican...
Here's another act to pollute the air and cost consumers $10.3 billion a year.
See a pattern yet?

How do we know that distant galaxies are composed of matter rather than anti-matter?

First, I'd like whoever decided an 'all-male' species could be a thing without cloning or somesuch to take a basic biology course.

On our own little blue speck, Komodo dragons will reproduce via parthenogenesis, asexual reproduction. Female dragons held in captivity without access to a mate have been known to lay eggs where all of the viable ones are male. Another species of lizard has members that are all female.

On that note, I'd say that the 'all male' alien species actually isn't. One, since the show revolved around there being females of their race, and two, the male-appearance aliens would fit the definition of hermaphrodites since they can both lay eggs and fertilize them.

... It can deal with hidden information.

So you mean something like poker? AI beats pros at Texas-Hold'em.

then some intelligence appeared

I think you miss the point of an eternal god. Like you say "it doesn't make sense to ask for the 'before' the big bang". Just as it doesn't make sense for god at some point to 'appear' if it is eternal. It was always there. Saying there is no time before the big bang is the same as saying there was a before god or that god appeared from nothing.

However, if time is not limited to the universe then an outside viewer would understand a concept of 'before the big bang'. If god is eternal then it always was. If it wasn't then it isn't god.

IIUC, the standard model does allow for something to happen from nothing or from virtual particles. https://www.scientificamerican...

In either case, honestly both positions sound about the same; "in the beginning there was nothing and god created existence" vs "there was nothing and then a big bang that created existence". The only difference is how they got to those statements and the supporting evidence.

No. Hell no. Grameen Bank is a wonderful program to allow small businesses access to capital. To become capitalists.

  The 40% reduction in poverty was due to third-world countries embracing globalization. China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Belarus, etc.

No. Hell no. Grameen Bank is a wonderful program to allow small businesses access to capital. To become capitalists.
  The 40% reduction in poverty was due to third-world countries embracing globalization. China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Belarus, etc.

The Grameen Bank was written up in the November 1999 issue of Scientific American.

NAFTA came into force in 1994, so most of the benefits from Grameen happened *before* the push towards globalization.

And for the record, bringing people out of poverty through globalism is temporary, because the root cause of poverty is corruption and globalism doesn't change that.

Most of the wealth to China went first to the people, then to the government. The government now has all the money, and the people would return to poverty in a heartbeat if the global demand dried up.

Not so much with the Grameen bank.

China is throwing tons of money at worthless projects: cities with no residents, massive investment in research with no accountability for quality, and huge state-sponsored projects that regularly fail - such as bridges and dams.

All that wealth coming from the US has gone to waste.

What's worse is that globalism is pulling us down into poverty. Highly trained Chinese can come to this country and get jobs, but highly trained Americans can't similarly go to China. You can't become a Chinese citizen even if you marry a Chinese citizen.

Globalism is one-sided, and makes our country weaker in every possible way. The wealth flows from the richer country to the poorer, where it is wasted.

At any rate, the Grameen bank was an idea that actually worked.

Even if you are philosophically opposed to capitalism, you have to admit that the Grameen Bank, as an idea, works.

I wonder how fast a quantum computer executes and infinite loop?

It depends on how big the infinity is. Some infinities are bigger than others.

And thus, installed solar capacity can't be counted on to be there at any particular point in time and requires fossil fuel capacity as a backup.
Or you do what others do: you have a back up solar plant. Wow that was so simple again.
When was the last time that whole Africa was under clouds? Or whole USA?

Yeah, lets completely ignore the energy loss due to transmission. Europe hasn't been able to economically transmit electricity from solar power stations in Africa. That's changing through new power line technology and system upgrades. But if they can barely get energy to Europe from North Africa, what makes you think that they can transmit energy to the US?

http://blogs.worldbank.org/ene...

http://www.reuters.com/article...

https://www.scientificamerican...

Hard to trust anything now. Gotta just trust your gut.
That's a pun, but it's often true.

It's not just a pun, your guts actually make decisions. And what's more, they seem to be pretty good at it.

As long as our universe's time doesn't run 1:1 with the simulator's universe,

For all we know, "time" may only be a side effect of the simulation and not exist in the real universe at all. From here:

"One could, however, ask the question in a slightly different way. By putting together G (Newton's constant of gravity), h (Planck's constant) and c (the velocity of light), one can derive a minimum meaningful amount of time, about 10-44 second. At this temporal scale, one would expect quantum effects to dominate gravity and hence, because Einstein's theory links gravity and time, to dominate the ordinary notion of time. In other words, for time intervals smaller than this one, the whole notion of 'time' would be expected to lose its meaning. "

In other words, the universe of the simulator is processing increments of 10-44 second in the simulation, while that universe itself runs on a continuous non-quantized level -- simply because simulating our universe is too computationally complex for them to do it all in one step.

Physical modelers (atmospheric, ocean, etc) select their time steps carefully so as to not create artifacts that draw the results too far from the ground truth. Would someone "living" in an ocean circulation model, e.g., even have a concept of "time" shorter than "hour" or "six hours", when the model is run with such large time steps? Would such a denizen even think of needing to "anti-alias" his world to one minute intervals? What would it mean were he to try to do such mathematical processing? It would not create any additional reality for him, it would only create time(s) for which no real data is available.

There is some evidence that neurons are not important as people generally believe. https://www.scientificamerican...

This doesn't make sense to me either. Under WTO rules, retaliation is permitted against dumping and subsidies. But there is no retaliation permitted just for low prices.

Uh yeah, where do you think those low prices come from? The Chinese government provides subsidies to disruptive industries...

True, A link to back this up:
https://www.scientificamerican...

An interesting article about floating panels, plus a comparison of US vs China investments:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda...

I initially disliked the tariffs, fearing trade war and escalation of prices - I'd rather us start investing as much as China and beat them at their own low-price game. But after reading the WTO Anti-dumping and subsidy rules, I think this isn't supposed to start a trade war - it's the legal and appropriate reaction to China subsidies (and dumping I guess). I'd still like to increase US government investments in research and subsidies anyway.

Another study says it will take until 2300 AD for the C02 levels to rise to that of 420 million years ago, when life flourished. Sorry levels in 2100 aren't going to end the world. https://www.scientificamerican...
I am for GW but can we stop acting like the end of the world is just around the corner.

DNA as a 'mark of the beast' works until you discover chimeric people. Genetic mosacism is a problem for determining identity. Depending on what you sample you get different DNA.

As creepy it is to think of babies eating babies in the womb, this is very common for domestic cats. Among felines some types of coat are not suitable for show just because they indicate absorption of a litter mate. The task of pure-breeding cats for show is to breed them. So you need to predict what the kittens will be before you start stirring the genetic pool. That is already hard enough with the complexity of cat genetics.

You can't predict anything when your animal or person is effectively a Frankenstein's monster built by nature (or God, or whatever.) Even re-running the birth twice is likely to produce divergent results.

Salt is actually super healthy food, don't listen to big pharma.

It's Time to End the War on Salt

For decades, policy makers have tried and failed to get Americans to eat less salt. In April 2010 the Institute of Medicine urged the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to regulate the amount of salt that food manufacturers put into products; New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has already convinced 16 companies to do so voluntarily. But if the U.S. does conquer salt, what will we gain? Bland french fries, for sure. But a healthy nation? Not necessarily.

This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urineâ"an excellent measure of prior consumptionâ"the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.

Shaking Up the Salt Myth

Salt has been the subject of controversy in recent years, and has increasingly been blamed for a number of poor health outcomes, such as high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke. Salt is ubiquitous in our modern diet, with Americans consuming an average of 10 grams per day.

Most of what we read and hear these days is telling us that salt consumption needs to be reduced, and it has even been referred to as âoethe single most harmful substance in the food supplyâ.

But is salt really as dangerous as we have been led to believe? Or is there a healthy, even beneficial range of salt that we should be eating? And could the governmentâ(TM)s low salt recommendations actually be harmful to health?

In this series, Shaking Up The Salt Myth, I explore the history of salt in the human diet, as well as the physiological requirements for salt and theories on the âoeoptimalâ dietary salt range. I present evidence for the dangers of too little and too much salt, and give recommendations for the type and amount of salt to include in the diet.

This series will present the bare facts about a highly misunderstood but essential part of the human diet.

If they actually worked as antidepressants... https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/are-antidepressants-just-placebos-with-side-effects/

If you had a half-decent education, instead of what passes for one today, you'd know that chromosomes are not the be-all and end-all. For example, the woman who was kicked out of the Olympics because genetic testing said she was not a woman, and went on to have a baby.

About 1% of all people have genetic abnormalities. Unless you want to pay for mandatory genetic testing of everyone, we'll never know how many of those abnormalities would fail genetic testing but still be able to have children. The average person has between 60 and 200 mutations unique to themselves, so are we going to say that none of them are human, they're all mutants? It would be more accurate, since we're evolving at a very high speed, and with an ever-growing population base, even the pace at which we evolve is increasing.

In other words, we're all freaks of nature, and classifying strictly based on genes leads to errors. We already have many different combinations of sex chromosomes

Also, let's not forget genetic chimeras and genetic mosaics. And people who have had their bone marrow destroyed as part of cancer treatment and get replacement bone marrow from a donor of the opposite sex - blood samples will test as being of the donor's sex. One day we'll be able to do that with every cell in the body. Then where will you draw the line?

It's underdiagnosed because the symptoms are different in girls. And marrying someone and being their fuck toy while you sit at home doodling and painting is an option for women that isn't available to men.

Studies seem to show that attentive listening and HAND-WRITTEN notes have the highest retention

Here is a study that supports this: The Pen is Mightier than the Keyboard ... and an article about the study in SciAm: Don't take notes with a laptop

I wonder why.

It isn't clear, but the researchers hypothesize that laptop users tend to transcribe the lecture verbatim, while pen & paper users rephrase into their own words, which requires thinking about what is being said.

And nuclear power has been estimated to have saved 1.8 million lives, but it doesn't stop the anti-nuclear folks from complaining about the horrible subsidy of government-underwritten insurance (which hasn't actually cost us anything).

By the way, you want to take renewables-enthusiasts with a grain of salt.

I agree arresting kids who had no ill intent with their food is overboard. Use of peanuts as a deadly weapon is quite another issue.

However, the British have > 90% effective treatments for desensitizing people with peanut allergies. Since 2009-ish.

https://blogs.scientificameric...

and other articles. Why is the FDA not jumping on this treatment and allowing it in the USA? Is it because we can't give credit to the results of other first world countries' studies? If so, this is dumb as rocks.

Treatments exist today that could relieve as much as 90% of the severe peanut allergy burden in this country.

--PeterM

So, Obama got elected in both 2008 and 2012 we made amazing progress on wind, solar, and other renewable energy as result of the Obama administration energy policies.

Define amazing.

so all he could do was flush a bunch of money down the toilet with grants to supposed renewable energy companies that ended up burning through the taxpayer dollars and then going bankrupt.

Your statement is provably false. You don't get to chide one person for hyperbole and imprecision, then make them yourself.

Sorry, try again. You input your post into a quantum device. All transistors depend upon quantum effects to work.

You're an idiot.

a) First both NASA and Russia originally used pencils. Pencils leave a lot of electrically conductive dust when you write which you don't want on a space ship in microgravity.

b) The Fisher company spent $1 million developing their zero gravity pen on their own. They had nothing to do with NASA, public money was not spent on the development. They created a pen that could write upside down, under water, in extreme hot or cold. And it was created to sell to the public at a profit.

Starting in 1968 both NASA and the Russian space agency started buying them for $2.39 (retail price was $3.98).

https://www.scientificamerican...

The myth is that NASA spent millions developing the pens. Not true. They were developed privately, and NASA replaced mechanical pencils costing $130 each with pens costing <$3 each.

False equivalence much?

> women are less suited to have tech jobs

[[Citation]]

> because of inherent differences between men and women.

You DO realize there are biological and social differences, right?

Hell, even the brain is wired differently.

Lastly, I don't hear anyone complaining about the low number of male nurses because everyone else is too busy just trying to get their job done instead of making drama over reverse discrimination issues of bullshit "diversity" issues.

--
SJW, noun, Stupid Juvenile Whiner.
 

"The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years"

Ok, and there were glaciers down to what like Ohio less than 10,000 years ago. Pretty sure humans had nothing to do with the warming of the last 9900 years, where is the evidence that we affected the last 100 years of warming? (Hint: CO2 levels are flat if you don't cherry pick the historical data).

Hint, no they are not

That, at least, is the story told by a new paper published in Nature on April 5 that reconstructs the end of the last ice age. Researchers examined sediment cores collected from deep beneath the sea and from lakes as well as the tiny bubbles of ancient air trapped inside ice cores taken from Antarctica, Greenland and elsewhere. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) The research suggests that—contrary to some prior findings—CO2 led the prior round of global warming rather than vice versa, just as it continues to do today thanks to rising emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

"We find that global temperature lags a bit behind the CO2 [levels]," explains paleoclimatologist Jeremy Shakun, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fellow at Harvard and Columbia universities, who led the research charting ancient CO2 concentrations and global temperatures. "CO2 was the big driver of global warming at the end of the Ice Age."

IOW (non-anthropogenic) CO2 played a major role in the end of the last Ice Age, but in the 10,00 years before your cherry picked 10,000 years-ago starting date for that end.

Statistical analysis by function, creates groups. It's interesting that we group numbers, genes, animals... however it's somehow evil, in a new century way, to group based on gender The reality is men tend to process spatially where as women tend to process verbally. that is biology. These are not absolutes, as varying individuals on both sides of the spectrum cross. However, generally it's true... and yes, I'm grouping. Anyone who claims different is a liar or misinformed. There's no debate, men and women are wired differently. https://www.scientificamerican... I'm sure most people on this forum have seen those ads or politicians stating "everyone needs to learn to program" and smirk to yourself or get upset knowing it's ludicrous as well This is the same. People have predispositions to specific tendencies and processes that make some professional trades ideal, where as others, not so much. Given that mathematics, and computer programming via extension, tend to favor those who process information spatially, this biologically implies males would be more likely to perform these tasks and drawn to them. Again, I'm not saying "all", just general tendencies. But we as reasonable people need to stop going apesh*t when someone suggests that the everyone is not the same or some people can not perform tasks as well as others. .

Yet mathematics and computer programs are written in text. Wouldn't you say strange for something that strongly favors those who process information spatially?

Women tend to do better in science and mathematics classes in college and universities. Why doesn't their lack of spatial processing power doesn't hinder them at those levels?

Are you sure that you are not really suggesting your own opinions by finding facts to support your opinions?

An interesting question for discussion might be whether we agree or disagree with what the fired employee said

Good idea. To address your two questions:

do you think women are "neurotic" and show "a lower stress tolerance"

Neurotic is a lousy word because it's poorly defined, but he clarified it as "higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance." Do women have higher anxiety and lower stress tolerance than men? Scientific American says they have higher anxiety: "experts believe this difference arises from a combination of hormonal fluctuations, brain chemistry and upbringing." I don't know, but that is what Google's search engine dragged up.

their careers suffer because women are "agreeable" rather than "assertive"

At least one study says that women are "warmer," but no less "assertive" than men. That matches my narrow realm of experience.

I think it's important that we stick to actual research, instead of postulating wildly.

Statistical analysis by function, creates groups. It's interesting that we group numbers, genes, animals... however it's somehow evil, in a new century way, to group based on gender

The reality is men tend to process spatially where as women tend to process verbally. that is biology. These are not absolutes, as varying individuals on both sides of the spectrum cross. However, generally it's true... and yes, I'm grouping. Anyone who claims different is a liar or misinformed. There's no debate, men and women are wired differently.
https://www.scientificamerican...
I'm sure most people on this forum have seen those ads or politicians stating "everyone needs to learn to program" and smirk to yourself or get upset knowing it's ludicrous as well
This is the same. People have predispositions to specific tendencies and processes that make some professional trades ideal, where as others, not so much. Given that mathematics, and computer programming via extension, tend to favor those who process information spatially, this biologically implies males would be more likely to perform these tasks and drawn to them.
Again, I'm not saying "all", just general tendencies.
But we as reasonable people need to stop going apesh*t when someone suggests that the everyone is not the same or some people can not perform tasks as well as others. .