I don't think you and I are talking about the same kind of deity.
We are.
What other predictions does your religion make? Does it predict that evolution would never produce homosexuality? Maybe we're talking about some pagan goddess. In that case, is it the goddess that says all homosexuality is evil because the universe was made in a cosmic orgasm, or is it the goddess that says that male homosexuality (whatever a male is) is evil and female homosexuality is perfection (whatever a female is) because the cosmic orgasm was actually cosmic rape?
In either case, it's intellectual masturbation. Reality is, here I am. I'm not either gender. I was never even a guy, because my genitals were mutilated when I was born. I don't even know what being a normal guy is like. I guess genital mutilation works out fine for everybody else. However, mutilated or not, that still doesn't explain why I like guys and why females, while I can imagine what finding them attractive might be like, while I can imagine some theoretical female I might have in bed, why females just don't attract me. I used to hang out with girls in elementary school. But this idea that I'm supposed to find them sexy baffles me in the end. Guys smell sexy; girls smell like a threat. It still doesn't explain why, if I was supposed to have been a boy, homosexual or not, mutilated or not, why if little boys don't play with eww girls and little girls don't play with eww boys, it doesn't explain why a lot of my childhood friends were girls.
Fortunately, I wasn't born in a muslim country. At least over here, we try to turn a blind eye to the obvious signs that something is not fitting the religious narrative until something has to be done about it. God demands it.
I know how it goes. Religion seems innocent at first. One wants to be spiritual and create the narrative that "the world is made for me." Well, how was the world made? "It was made by a sky wizard of course, and the sky wizard made them male and female, just like me and everybody else I know," says the religious person.
It's a nice narrative, but already we're talking about a fantasy land. Give that meme some time to grow, and you begin to think that certain things are just the way god meant them to be. Of course god made four fundamental forces and had the wisdom to create quarks that could combine into other subatomic particles that could form atoms with a menagerie of properties, a handful of which are prefect to build life that can evolve with guidance from the sky wizard that can evolve gender and everything is perfect and nothing can go wrong.
For that matter, why aren't quarks male and female? What's up with this 3 gender^H^H^H^H^Hcolor thing? I thought everything was supposed to be perfect? It was a much better narrative when there were just protons and neutrons, just like boys and girls, like matter and anti-matter. Much better narrative when there was the nucleus and its electron cloud like the sun and its planets like parents and their children or a mother cat and her kittens. Why would god screw up the narrative with quarks?
So you buy into this narrative, and everything is good. Then one day, there's a guy who can't understand what's so great about girls, girls, girls!
This is obviously unpossible, unless there were a source of evil in the world. This source of evil must be eradicated along with everything it's touched. God demands it. God gave you free will, and god doesn't care if you choose to let the evil spread until you have to be thrown into eternal hellfire and damnation yourself no matter how much you thought you were doing the right thing by being moderate.
So, here we are again, with somebody ready to bloody someone else. "The homosexual is already infested with AIDS and evil and misama and all that and going to hell, so he must be killed so the evil doesn't spread. What if the evil spreads to me and I burn for eternity, too? I'd better kill him now. G
Oh good! BYOD! Does that mean that the user who's bringing her own device is now responsible for understanding how it works, and does that mean that she's responsible for taking care of her own crapware that she installs on her own device so she can learn 1 weird old trick instead of me?
You'll also note that if things didn't work out so perfectly, you wouldn't be here to invent god.
How did god evolve? Where did god come from? Why does god exist? Watches don't self-assemble or evolve from grandfather clocks; a watch implies a watchmaker. A being with the power to precisely calculate an asymmetrical space-time manifold where physical laws can come into being that allow something like stars and galaxies to even work must be much more complex than a watch. Who is god's watchmaker?
But as we know it was probably four elephants on the back of a turtle, and then it's a sequence of turtles, each more elaborate than the last to be the watchmaker for the next turtle.
Religion is fun and all until somebody gets hurt. I don't know where things are going with the religious right, but just keep in mind that if religion tells you that the only way to avoid hell and go to heaven is to kill somebody like me, that person might just be carrying concealed.
Probably best to stick to the real world. Fewer people get killed and fewer families get torn apart when there aren't sky wizards involved.
What's really going to bake your noodle later on is that GP probably partied in college, too. Maybe the guy he rejected didn't want to work for hypocrites.
For instance as much as I've posted about being trans here, if a potential employer finds my UID and rejects me on that basis, I don't want to work for them either. Doesn't waste my time with an interview that might end in "you're really a guy?!?!?!omg1111eleven GTFO COPS ON THE WAY." (Similar has happened to me, cops were not amused by the guy who called them.)
After all, if my employer is so worried about what I do in my free time, there's going to be one hell of an awkward conversation when he finds out that my three week trip to Europe is really three weeks of me recovering from sex change surgery. If this boss is female, I could be assaulted and/or accused of rape when she realizes a "man" was using the same bathroom as her for the past say 4 or 5 years or however long it takes me to save up after I move on from my current employer. (I'll need to stock up on popcorn for when I start living as a woman with a female name, even at work. A few sexist women I work with are going to head asplode and the drama's gonna fly.)
Better to just avoid the whole drama and let employers like that live with their second-rate but squeaky clean employees.
So, in other words, I completely agree with you, and I think the free market will sort it out.
I disagree. In order for this to work, you have to have an out. I'm no luddite when it comes to automated cars. Automated cars will save lives. But this system makes me wonder.
An automated car will be leaving itself an out, making sure other drivers see it, and using all the other keys of the Smith System with more precision than a human could hope for. Is this system tracking all those things too? Is this system up to par with Google's?
Or is this system going to send me into another car because a squirrel runs in front of me and it's only tracking what's directly ahead of me?
Ban lasers and now you will need to keep watch for BOTH, offenses, acquiring them AND firing them at aircraft.
Isn't that the point? More offenses mean more jail time, and hey, maybe you might manufacture a few criminals who now own *gasp* unlicensed "lasers."
Lasers just like in Star Wars, right? Why would anybody but a criminal want one of *those.* They'll probably just use them to *gasp* sell drugs to *gasp* children! OH NOES! We need to ban lasers now! Won't somebody think of the children!
Bah. Idiots think the world is 6 thousand years old, that homosexuality doesn't happen in other mammals, that chopping off foreskins is going to cure cervical cancer. I give up.
Replying to undo a mod. Sometimes I need to remind myself that your religion is the reason my genitals were mutilated, and your religion is the reason I spent 10 years in pain (you know, they physical kind that doesn't go away when you sleep and wakes you up in the middle of the night) thinking that was normal fo a guy. Yeah, basically I just said that I'm anti-Semite. I didn't say that I thought more violence was the answer. Just saying I'll be offering my services to Satan as an expert witness harmed by your religion's genital mutilation if he's this prosecutor dude as soon, as he starts existing anyway.
At any rate, somebody can mod me down, but I'm turning my karma bonus off because this is just a comment for Ledgem. You can have your sky wizards and imaginary prosecutors, but what gives you the right to cut off part of my body and pretend that nothing can possibly go wrong? It did go wrong.
Helps them to be dishonest about results and the research.
Let's look at a good example. The recent circumcision story is still coming up for me when I'm not logged in as a relevant story to a lot of articles. In the comments, many other Slashdotters and I trotted out one of the most pseudoscientific justifications for routine male genital mutilation: a "study" that showed that circumcision somehow reduces the risk of AIDS transmission.
What interesting things might come to light if we had access to the private communications of the AAP when they came to their decision that routine infant male genital mutilation is somehow "good" for men? Why was a woman even involved in the AAP's 2012 statement on routine male genital mutilation when I've been simultaneously told that as a man I have no right to say anything about abortion, something that only affects a woman for 9 months, not permanently? What ties and interests does John Hopkins University have in promoting routine male genital mutilation?
There's a whole lot that could come to light if we knew those things. But that's not science. That's politics.
Science is looking at the methodology employed in that study and going, "Hey... wait a second. WTF?" However, that study is just one glaringly obvious work of pseudoscience in a sea of much more subtle social and psychological and other "soft science."
As others have pointed out already, the only possible purpose releasing private communications (or communications that had been intended to be private) has is service politics. We want our nitty-gritty he said she said. We want that one email that shows that data was modified (the horror) to produce a hockey stick graph, not the hundreds of other emails or the methodology that led to the hockey stick graph.
The scientific method is self-correcting. If you publish something I think is bull, then I can do more research and publish something else.
If I say that routine male genital mutilation has no side effects and that it protects from AIDS and HPV transmission, then I need to run an experiment. Give me a thousand male babies, mutilate 500 of them, and leave the other 500 intact. Now observe. Are the mutilated ones more likely to develop autism or aspergers? Are they more likely to develop emotional outbursts and anger problems? Are they more likely to have an increased pain response during routine vaccinations? How many of the unmutilated control group died from UTI?
Then we keep watching them. Is the experiment group really less likely to contract HIV or AIDS or HPV and transmit those diseases to sexual partners? How do the average number of sexual partners before age 30 compare between the two groups? What about infidelity? Or is one group more prone to suicide than the other?
Now that's science.
Now, if I find myself in a position years later to actually conduct such a study, and if I conclude that the AAP is full of shit, are you going to dig up my anti-mutilation Slashdot posts and call bias in the face of concrete fact?
That's the difference between science and politics.
Re:i never understood this thinking
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Sexism In Science
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· Score: 1
It also says to the next generation that discrimination is A-OK. Perhaps they'd be better treating the disease than proposing a cure that only causes the disease to metastasize to another generation.
Somebody mod parent up. This is a very real thing I get to watch every day since I work in a (less so these days) nearly all female environment. Feminism really has to sit beside itself on a few things if women really want true equality. Being the perpetual victim is only going to get women so far.
At some point, women need to take responsibility about moms and elementary school teachers, for example, who infuse young girls with math phobia. As a man, WTF do I do about that? Even as a trans girl that most feminists say can't ever really be a woman WTF do I do about that?
There are many issues like that that are starting to boil down to, well ladies, time to learn personal responsibility instead of victim power. Where your glass ceiling sits is in your hands now.
I thought it was funny when I heard that because I was sure that it had been 75% 10 years ago when I was taking a sociology class in college. I have a feeling that neither of those figures are accurate when controlling for experience. There was also another article I read somewhere else I'm too lazy to find again that noted that women don't tend to aggressively negotiate higher salaries, and they look fewer places for employment.
Still, though, why not play statistics to get more women into STEM careers?
Re:That's funny right there
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Sexism In Science
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Well, hey, that also means that STEM careers are less sexist, too! I just heard on NPR the other day that women only make 70% of what men do. But if you're a woman and you go into STEM, run those numbers, and hey! If you're being hired by another women, you'll make 85%, a whole 15% more than other careers. For top score, get hired by a man, and you're up to 89% of what your male colleagues are making!
I'm responsible for maintaining a niche piece of software that's used by call centers.
Oops, that didn't come out quite right. Imagine the vendor is Microsoft, the closed source software is Visual Studio, and I was promoted because I'm a C# programmer.
IOW it's not my software the way that probably makes it sound, but I'm a programmer that uses it to make a living.
(Not to knock Visual Studio. I know we love to hate Microsoft, but Visual Studio is a very good IDE [at least if you're a C# programmer].)
Hi. "Rockstar"/"Brilliant Jerk" programmer here. I'm responsible for maintaining a niche piece of software that's used by call centers, and I'd like to offer another perspective that my current day job has helped me to understand deeply.
So, this piece of software is closed-source. It's also buggy, wonky, inconsistent, breaks basic Windows UI conventions (like using alt-tab to switch between windows), is inexplicably slow, implements its own widget set (poorly), and is a downright piece of crap. For example, to create a formula, it gives you an interface a lot like Crystal Reports if you've used its formula editor, but instead of allowing you to type on your own, it forces you to use drag-and-drop. Want to do len(myfield)? First, you have to browse through a squinty tree of haphazardly categorized functions and operators to find the len function, drop it in your formula, then you have to find myfield in another squinty, non-alphabetical list of every variable in the system and drop it in place as an argument.
Now let's put this into perspective before your (or somebody else's) knee jerks and goes "ah ha! a n00b using len and Crystal Reports, this is obviously the Brilliant Jerk in the wild!" (Incidentally I gave up on Crystal a couple years ago in favor of \LaTeX{} and gnuplot.)
First of all, all but a few of my co-workers (I'll get to those few towards the end) will tell you that I'm the first to admit when I've screwed something up. I screw things up all the time. I'm human, and I'm not perfect. I hold my abilities in high esteem and strive to take pride in my work, but that doesn't mean I think my understanding of programming is the end-all be-all. If somebody points out something I've been doing wrong, I'll correct it and thank them for showing me the light.
The problem is that when things screw up, it's not always something I've done wrong, and sometimes it's not even something I can do anything about. In case you missed it above, the software I use for my day-to-day tasks is closed-source.
I have indirectly dealt with the Brilliant Jerk. You see, the vendor who shall remain nameless that sold my company this closed-source turd that was the reason I was promoted (originally my job was to be temporary, to transition accounts to the new software only) seems to employ a lot of Brilliant Jerks and Rockstars. And yes, trust me, there are reasons I haven't just replaced this software with some kind of Ajaxy Vaadin-ish Web 3.4.2 RC1 portal that are beyond the scope of this post. And also, inasmuch as the user-unfriendliness of this software is the reason I now have a new car and a mortgage, there's only so much bad I can say about it.
The point being, the Brilliant Jerk just about describes, as far as I can tell, the software development staff of this nameless vendor. They're always right, and you're always doing something wrong. If their software can't do something that it needs to do, you're wrong for even wanting it to do that thing! You can't win. For 2 years this software was randomly locking up and losing data, but it took intervention from the owner of the company I work for before they even acknowledged that a day-to-day reality for the folks on the call floor was even happening. Even then, they never really acknowledged it, and they never apologized. It just magically got better release after release until it didn't happen any more.
The reason I called myself a Brilliant Jerk in the start of this post is because that's how some co-workers perceive me. One of the mottos in the call center world is "perception is reality." My counterpoint is that if I perceive that I should fly if I jump off a building, it's not very functional to blame the concrete that splits my head open at the bottom of my "flight."
As I mentioned before, my job was meant to be temporary. It turned into a permanent job, because it turns out that the CTO (kind of a software developer, network admin, and graphic artist all rolled into one, quite the talent
First I'd like to say that I watched your video and really liked it. Thank you for putting together such an interesting visualization of the progress science has made in detecting asteroids. I just fired up Boinc and attached orbit@home earlier today after nearly finishing up Pale Blue Dot, so I found it particularly interesting.
In my experience, there's only really one way to deal with the religious: just walk away. It looks like YouTube's like/dislike system is functioning, and when I watched the Islamist video, there were 484 dislikes compared to 22 likes, and your comment about giving no permission is the top comment with 267 likes.
It seems like the religious have a peculiar view of science: they take anything that seems to agree with their views completely out of context and trumpet it as science confirming some strange verse in their holy book. Then, when science challenges notions such as the earth being many factors of 10 older than their 6,000 year guess or that humans might not be special little snowflakes to some sky wizard, the religious go ballistic on science. The religious can't seem to decide whether to accept observations about the reality around us or to reject reality entirely.
As others have pointed out, if you really want to pursue legal action further, you're going to have to put up some money and hire a lawyer. If fruther action really is necessary, though, I think I like the idea of mocking the Islamist video. Trying to fight people who choose religion over reality tends to only have the effect of proving to potential followers that "scientists" really are these big bad bogeymen sent by Satan. Fighting against them legitimizes them. Mocking them, though, I think is the appropriate response and conveys the message that their delusion is too stupid to even engage, but not too incoherent to feel sorry for.
Why do I care about Pussy Riot? Men don't even have a voice in whether their genitals are mutilated or not. They can have a Pussy Riot when people are discussing mutilating infant girls.
You're forgetting that the female breast is a highly offensive body part. In fact, if children under the age of 2 are exposed to the uncovered female breast, they could be traumatized for life.
While we're waxing nostalgic, I remember when I was in middle school and wanted to start a computer club. And so I did. There were only 3 or 4 of us, and things went ok for the first year.
Next year rolls around and we have to find a different teacher to sponsor the club, and so we do. So we showed him how we were accessing qbasic, and he sat in every meeting (more like coding session) for a whole semester.
Then one day, we're all in deep doo-doo. We're being told we're lucky that they didn't call the FBI on us. Our crime: using a netware command to allow a file to be opened by multiple users (or something inane like that). Well, so it seemed logical to appeal to the teacher sponsor since he had just spent 5 months watching us "hack the network," and suddenly he didn't know anything about it.
Lying bastard.
The real kick to the nuts was years later there was a blurb in the newspaper about how a girl (omg a woman in computers!) had founded that school's first computer club. The netware administrators who had their panties in a bunch about my club's activities were all female. I guess I just didn't have the right body parts back then. Just goes to show that men aren't the only gender capable of being sexist pigs.
Oddly, though, higher levels of testosterone are associated with easier weight loss. Just my $0.02, not that I'd want any more than 50 ng/ml in my body. ymmv.
Here are the two constraints I have right now: no degree and not fitting in with the gender dichotomy.
Once I get the degree and I'm ready to leave my current job, I'll keep those 3rd world countries in mind. I've found I have a knack for human language as well as computer language, and I've considered it many times before. The degree thing is kind of a brick wall (glass ceiling?) when it comes to those opportunities.
I am not independently wealthy, though, so it would need to be something that pays, and obviously any native cultures that would refuse help from somebody who doesn't fit in that culture's gender boxes would be out of the question.
Just had to point this out since I'm replying anyway
What you want is recognition. It has and always will be about "you" until you learn to put the ego away.
No, I don't. I want a.) survival and b.) a sense that what I'm doing is serving a better purpose. I honestly don't know what I'd do if I were famous. One of the most uncomfortable things for me at work is when somebody knows my name because of my position, but I don't know theirs.
The point is that Elon Musk makes jobs. If there were more in the "1%" like him, we'd live in a better world. I don't need to be one of those people. I'd be perfectly happy being a faceless Space X employee. Maybe once I get my degree, I'll apply for a position.
It makes me wonder if you and DogDude might just be projecting some of your issues on to me. Maybe mentioning Elon Musk sparked some kind of inadequacy and need for recognition in you. I don't know.
Well, here's the thing. The conditions that led to the spreadsheet were mostly a.) it was being used by 3 people in the same office and b.) partly because Excel is the modern office's golden hammer. The problem is that I need to take that data and roll it into an absentee call script that around 50 call center agents will be using, including agents working from home, and to also design metrics reporting that sometimes involves doing part of the client's absentee policy. Also, it's being computerized because I was told to computerize it. They pay me by the hour, so I'm more than happy to mop up messes.
In general, though, I agree with your sentiment. Computing for the sake of computing is often very counter-productive. What you wind up with is a half-assed computer system that gets ignored in lieu of a much more appropriate sheet of paper and a pencil.
A few months ago, my boss had me computerize the process that agents use to trade shifts with each other. I argued against it because the main problem they were trying to solve was the problem of agents requesting trading shifts more often than they were supposed to. So, I took about two days or so and wound up with a system. A couple days ago, I found out that the system had been dismantled and the old essentially pencil and paper system was in place.
So, good enough. I guess I won the argument about whether or not to computerize that process in the end.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you and I are talking about the same kind of deity.
We are.
What other predictions does your religion make? Does it predict that evolution would never produce homosexuality? Maybe we're talking about some pagan goddess. In that case, is it the goddess that says all homosexuality is evil because the universe was made in a cosmic orgasm, or is it the goddess that says that male homosexuality (whatever a male is) is evil and female homosexuality is perfection (whatever a female is) because the cosmic orgasm was actually cosmic rape?
In either case, it's intellectual masturbation. Reality is, here I am. I'm not either gender. I was never even a guy, because my genitals were mutilated when I was born. I don't even know what being a normal guy is like. I guess genital mutilation works out fine for everybody else. However, mutilated or not, that still doesn't explain why I like guys and why females, while I can imagine what finding them attractive might be like, while I can imagine some theoretical female I might have in bed, why females just don't attract me. I used to hang out with girls in elementary school. But this idea that I'm supposed to find them sexy baffles me in the end. Guys smell sexy; girls smell like a threat. It still doesn't explain why, if I was supposed to have been a boy, homosexual or not, mutilated or not, why if little boys don't play with eww girls and little girls don't play with eww boys, it doesn't explain why a lot of my childhood friends were girls.
Fortunately, I wasn't born in a muslim country. At least over here, we try to turn a blind eye to the obvious signs that something is not fitting the religious narrative until something has to be done about it. God demands it.
I know how it goes. Religion seems innocent at first. One wants to be spiritual and create the narrative that "the world is made for me." Well, how was the world made? "It was made by a sky wizard of course, and the sky wizard made them male and female, just like me and everybody else I know," says the religious person.
It's a nice narrative, but already we're talking about a fantasy land. Give that meme some time to grow, and you begin to think that certain things are just the way god meant them to be. Of course god made four fundamental forces and had the wisdom to create quarks that could combine into other subatomic particles that could form atoms with a menagerie of properties, a handful of which are prefect to build life that can evolve with guidance from the sky wizard that can evolve gender and everything is perfect and nothing can go wrong.
For that matter, why aren't quarks male and female? What's up with this 3 gender^H^H^H^H^Hcolor thing? I thought everything was supposed to be perfect? It was a much better narrative when there were just protons and neutrons, just like boys and girls, like matter and anti-matter. Much better narrative when there was the nucleus and its electron cloud like the sun and its planets like parents and their children or a mother cat and her kittens. Why would god screw up the narrative with quarks?
So you buy into this narrative, and everything is good. Then one day, there's a guy who can't understand what's so great about girls, girls, girls!
This is obviously unpossible, unless there were a source of evil in the world. This source of evil must be eradicated along with everything it's touched. God demands it. God gave you free will, and god doesn't care if you choose to let the evil spread until you have to be thrown into eternal hellfire and damnation yourself no matter how much you thought you were doing the right thing by being moderate.
So, here we are again, with somebody ready to bloody someone else. "The homosexual is already infested with AIDS and evil and misama and all that and going to hell, so he must be killed so the evil doesn't spread. What if the evil spreads to me and I burn for eternity, too? I'd better kill him now. G
Oh good! BYOD! Does that mean that the user who's bringing her own device is now responsible for understanding how it works, and does that mean that she's responsible for taking care of her own crapware that she installs on her own device so she can learn 1 weird old trick instead of me?
You'll also note that if things didn't work out so perfectly, you wouldn't be here to invent god.
How did god evolve? Where did god come from? Why does god exist? Watches don't self-assemble or evolve from grandfather clocks; a watch implies a watchmaker. A being with the power to precisely calculate an asymmetrical space-time manifold where physical laws can come into being that allow something like stars and galaxies to even work must be much more complex than a watch. Who is god's watchmaker?
But as we know it was probably four elephants on the back of a turtle, and then it's a sequence of turtles, each more elaborate than the last to be the watchmaker for the next turtle.
Religion is fun and all until somebody gets hurt. I don't know where things are going with the religious right, but just keep in mind that if religion tells you that the only way to avoid hell and go to heaven is to kill somebody like me, that person might just be carrying concealed.
Probably best to stick to the real world. Fewer people get killed and fewer families get torn apart when there aren't sky wizards involved.
What's really going to bake your noodle later on is that GP probably partied in college, too. Maybe the guy he rejected didn't want to work for hypocrites.
For instance as much as I've posted about being trans here, if a potential employer finds my UID and rejects me on that basis, I don't want to work for them either. Doesn't waste my time with an interview that might end in "you're really a guy?!?!?!omg1111eleven GTFO COPS ON THE WAY." (Similar has happened to me, cops were not amused by the guy who called them.)
After all, if my employer is so worried about what I do in my free time, there's going to be one hell of an awkward conversation when he finds out that my three week trip to Europe is really three weeks of me recovering from sex change surgery. If this boss is female, I could be assaulted and/or accused of rape when she realizes a "man" was using the same bathroom as her for the past say 4 or 5 years or however long it takes me to save up after I move on from my current employer. (I'll need to stock up on popcorn for when I start living as a woman with a female name, even at work. A few sexist women I work with are going to head asplode and the drama's gonna fly.)
Better to just avoid the whole drama and let employers like that live with their second-rate but squeaky clean employees.
So, in other words, I completely agree with you, and I think the free market will sort it out.
I disagree. In order for this to work, you have to have an out. I'm no luddite when it comes to automated cars. Automated cars will save lives. But this system makes me wonder.
An automated car will be leaving itself an out, making sure other drivers see it, and using all the other keys of the Smith System with more precision than a human could hope for. Is this system tracking all those things too? Is this system up to par with Google's?
Or is this system going to send me into another car because a squirrel runs in front of me and it's only tracking what's directly ahead of me?
Ban lasers and now you will need to keep watch for BOTH, offenses, acquiring them AND firing them at aircraft.
Isn't that the point? More offenses mean more jail time, and hey, maybe you might manufacture a few criminals who now own *gasp* unlicensed "lasers."
Lasers just like in Star Wars, right? Why would anybody but a criminal want one of *those.* They'll probably just use them to *gasp* sell drugs to *gasp* children! OH NOES! We need to ban lasers now! Won't somebody think of the children!
Bah. Idiots think the world is 6 thousand years old, that homosexuality doesn't happen in other mammals, that chopping off foreskins is going to cure cervical cancer. I give up.
Replying to undo a mod. Sometimes I need to remind myself that your religion is the reason my genitals were mutilated, and your religion is the reason I spent 10 years in pain (you know, they physical kind that doesn't go away when you sleep and wakes you up in the middle of the night) thinking that was normal fo a guy. Yeah, basically I just said that I'm anti-Semite. I didn't say that I thought more violence was the answer. Just saying I'll be offering my services to Satan as an expert witness harmed by your religion's genital mutilation if he's this prosecutor dude as soon, as he starts existing anyway.
At any rate, somebody can mod me down, but I'm turning my karma bonus off because this is just a comment for Ledgem. You can have your sky wizards and imaginary prosecutors, but what gives you the right to cut off part of my body and pretend that nothing can possibly go wrong? It did go wrong.
Helps them to be dishonest about results and the research.
Let's look at a good example. The recent circumcision story is still coming up for me when I'm not logged in as a relevant story to a lot of articles. In the comments, many other Slashdotters and I trotted out one of the most pseudoscientific justifications for routine male genital mutilation: a "study" that showed that circumcision somehow reduces the risk of AIDS transmission.
What interesting things might come to light if we had access to the private communications of the AAP when they came to their decision that routine infant male genital mutilation is somehow "good" for men? Why was a woman even involved in the AAP's 2012 statement on routine male genital mutilation when I've been simultaneously told that as a man I have no right to say anything about abortion, something that only affects a woman for 9 months, not permanently? What ties and interests does John Hopkins University have in promoting routine male genital mutilation?
There's a whole lot that could come to light if we knew those things. But that's not science. That's politics.
Science is looking at the methodology employed in that study and going, "Hey... wait a second. WTF?" However, that study is just one glaringly obvious work of pseudoscience in a sea of much more subtle social and psychological and other "soft science."
As others have pointed out already, the only possible purpose releasing private communications (or communications that had been intended to be private) has is service politics. We want our nitty-gritty he said she said. We want that one email that shows that data was modified (the horror) to produce a hockey stick graph, not the hundreds of other emails or the methodology that led to the hockey stick graph.
The scientific method is self-correcting. If you publish something I think is bull, then I can do more research and publish something else.
If I say that routine male genital mutilation has no side effects and that it protects from AIDS and HPV transmission, then I need to run an experiment. Give me a thousand male babies, mutilate 500 of them, and leave the other 500 intact. Now observe. Are the mutilated ones more likely to develop autism or aspergers? Are they more likely to develop emotional outbursts and anger problems? Are they more likely to have an increased pain response during routine vaccinations? How many of the unmutilated control group died from UTI?
Then we keep watching them. Is the experiment group really less likely to contract HIV or AIDS or HPV and transmit those diseases to sexual partners? How do the average number of sexual partners before age 30 compare between the two groups? What about infidelity? Or is one group more prone to suicide than the other?
Now that's science.
Now, if I find myself in a position years later to actually conduct such a study, and if I conclude that the AAP is full of shit, are you going to dig up my anti-mutilation Slashdot posts and call bias in the face of concrete fact?
That's the difference between science and politics.
It also says to the next generation that discrimination is A-OK. Perhaps they'd be better treating the disease than proposing a cure that only causes the disease to metastasize to another generation.
Somebody mod parent up. This is a very real thing I get to watch every day since I work in a (less so these days) nearly all female environment. Feminism really has to sit beside itself on a few things if women really want true equality. Being the perpetual victim is only going to get women so far.
At some point, women need to take responsibility about moms and elementary school teachers, for example, who infuse young girls with math phobia. As a man, WTF do I do about that? Even as a trans girl that most feminists say can't ever really be a woman WTF do I do about that?
There are many issues like that that are starting to boil down to, well ladies, time to learn personal responsibility instead of victim power. Where your glass ceiling sits is in your hands now.
I thought it was funny when I heard that because I was sure that it had been 75% 10 years ago when I was taking a sociology class in college. I have a feeling that neither of those figures are accurate when controlling for experience. There was also another article I read somewhere else I'm too lazy to find again that noted that women don't tend to aggressively negotiate higher salaries, and they look fewer places for employment.
Still, though, why not play statistics to get more women into STEM careers?
Well, hey, that also means that STEM careers are less sexist, too! I just heard on NPR the other day that women only make 70% of what men do. But if you're a woman and you go into STEM, run those numbers, and hey! If you're being hired by another women, you'll make 85%, a whole 15% more than other careers. For top score, get hired by a man, and you're up to 89% of what your male colleagues are making!
So good job, STEM!
Arg! I wasted all my mod points yesterday! Will somebody else do the honors?
Dr. Horrible, is that you?
I'm responsible for maintaining a niche piece of software that's used by call centers.
Oops, that didn't come out quite right. Imagine the vendor is Microsoft, the closed source software is Visual Studio, and I was promoted because I'm a C# programmer.
IOW it's not my software the way that probably makes it sound, but I'm a programmer that uses it to make a living.
(Not to knock Visual Studio. I know we love to hate Microsoft, but Visual Studio is a very good IDE [at least if you're a C# programmer].)
Hi. "Rockstar"/"Brilliant Jerk" programmer here. I'm responsible for maintaining a niche piece of software that's used by call centers, and I'd like to offer another perspective that my current day job has helped me to understand deeply.
So, this piece of software is closed-source. It's also buggy, wonky, inconsistent, breaks basic Windows UI conventions (like using alt-tab to switch between windows), is inexplicably slow, implements its own widget set (poorly), and is a downright piece of crap. For example, to create a formula, it gives you an interface a lot like Crystal Reports if you've used its formula editor, but instead of allowing you to type on your own, it forces you to use drag-and-drop. Want to do len(myfield)? First, you have to browse through a squinty tree of haphazardly categorized functions and operators to find the len function, drop it in your formula, then you have to find myfield in another squinty, non-alphabetical list of every variable in the system and drop it in place as an argument.
Now let's put this into perspective before your (or somebody else's) knee jerks and goes "ah ha! a n00b using len and Crystal Reports, this is obviously the Brilliant Jerk in the wild!" (Incidentally I gave up on Crystal a couple years ago in favor of \LaTeX{} and gnuplot.)
First of all, all but a few of my co-workers (I'll get to those few towards the end) will tell you that I'm the first to admit when I've screwed something up. I screw things up all the time. I'm human, and I'm not perfect. I hold my abilities in high esteem and strive to take pride in my work, but that doesn't mean I think my understanding of programming is the end-all be-all. If somebody points out something I've been doing wrong, I'll correct it and thank them for showing me the light.
The problem is that when things screw up, it's not always something I've done wrong, and sometimes it's not even something I can do anything about. In case you missed it above, the software I use for my day-to-day tasks is closed-source.
I have indirectly dealt with the Brilliant Jerk. You see, the vendor who shall remain nameless that sold my company this closed-source turd that was the reason I was promoted (originally my job was to be temporary, to transition accounts to the new software only) seems to employ a lot of Brilliant Jerks and Rockstars. And yes, trust me, there are reasons I haven't just replaced this software with some kind of Ajaxy Vaadin-ish Web 3.4.2 RC1 portal that are beyond the scope of this post. And also, inasmuch as the user-unfriendliness of this software is the reason I now have a new car and a mortgage, there's only so much bad I can say about it.
The point being, the Brilliant Jerk just about describes, as far as I can tell, the software development staff of this nameless vendor. They're always right, and you're always doing something wrong. If their software can't do something that it needs to do, you're wrong for even wanting it to do that thing! You can't win. For 2 years this software was randomly locking up and losing data, but it took intervention from the owner of the company I work for before they even acknowledged that a day-to-day reality for the folks on the call floor was even happening. Even then, they never really acknowledged it, and they never apologized. It just magically got better release after release until it didn't happen any more.
The reason I called myself a Brilliant Jerk in the start of this post is because that's how some co-workers perceive me. One of the mottos in the call center world is "perception is reality." My counterpoint is that if I perceive that I should fly if I jump off a building, it's not very functional to blame the concrete that splits my head open at the bottom of my "flight."
As I mentioned before, my job was meant to be temporary. It turned into a permanent job, because it turns out that the CTO (kind of a software developer, network admin, and graphic artist all rolled into one, quite the talent
First I'd like to say that I watched your video and really liked it. Thank you for putting together such an interesting visualization of the progress science has made in detecting asteroids. I just fired up Boinc and attached orbit@home earlier today after nearly finishing up Pale Blue Dot, so I found it particularly interesting.
In my experience, there's only really one way to deal with the religious: just walk away. It looks like YouTube's like/dislike system is functioning, and when I watched the Islamist video, there were 484 dislikes compared to 22 likes, and your comment about giving no permission is the top comment with 267 likes.
It seems like the religious have a peculiar view of science: they take anything that seems to agree with their views completely out of context and trumpet it as science confirming some strange verse in their holy book. Then, when science challenges notions such as the earth being many factors of 10 older than their 6,000 year guess or that humans might not be special little snowflakes to some sky wizard, the religious go ballistic on science. The religious can't seem to decide whether to accept observations about the reality around us or to reject reality entirely.
As others have pointed out, if you really want to pursue legal action further, you're going to have to put up some money and hire a lawyer. If fruther action really is necessary, though, I think I like the idea of mocking the Islamist video. Trying to fight people who choose religion over reality tends to only have the effect of proving to potential followers that "scientists" really are these big bad bogeymen sent by Satan. Fighting against them legitimizes them. Mocking them, though, I think is the appropriate response and conveys the message that their delusion is too stupid to even engage, but not too incoherent to feel sorry for.
Thanks
Why do I care about Pussy Riot? Men don't even have a voice in whether their genitals are mutilated or not. They can have a Pussy Riot when people are discussing mutilating infant girls.
You're forgetting that the female breast is a highly offensive body part. In fact, if children under the age of 2 are exposed to the uncovered female breast, they could be traumatized for life.
Why does the link need to be 100% live? Wouldn't 3G do? I'm assuming a bus implies a metro area.
While we're waxing nostalgic, I remember when I was in middle school and wanted to start a computer club. And so I did. There were only 3 or 4 of us, and things went ok for the first year.
Next year rolls around and we have to find a different teacher to sponsor the club, and so we do. So we showed him how we were accessing qbasic, and he sat in every meeting (more like coding session) for a whole semester.
Then one day, we're all in deep doo-doo. We're being told we're lucky that they didn't call the FBI on us. Our crime: using a netware command to allow a file to be opened by multiple users (or something inane like that). Well, so it seemed logical to appeal to the teacher sponsor since he had just spent 5 months watching us "hack the network," and suddenly he didn't know anything about it.
Lying bastard.
The real kick to the nuts was years later there was a blurb in the newspaper about how a girl (omg a woman in computers!) had founded that school's first computer club. The netware administrators who had their panties in a bunch about my club's activities were all female. I guess I just didn't have the right body parts back then. Just goes to show that men aren't the only gender capable of being sexist pigs.
Mod parent up. Better than I could have put it.
Oddly, though, higher levels of testosterone are associated with easier weight loss. Just my $0.02, not that I'd want any more than 50 ng/ml in my body. ymmv.
Here are the two constraints I have right now: no degree and not fitting in with the gender dichotomy.
Once I get the degree and I'm ready to leave my current job, I'll keep those 3rd world countries in mind. I've found I have a knack for human language as well as computer language, and I've considered it many times before. The degree thing is kind of a brick wall (glass ceiling?) when it comes to those opportunities.
I am not independently wealthy, though, so it would need to be something that pays, and obviously any native cultures that would refuse help from somebody who doesn't fit in that culture's gender boxes would be out of the question.
Just had to point this out since I'm replying anyway
What you want is recognition. It has and always will be about "you" until you learn to put the ego away.
No, I don't. I want a.) survival and b.) a sense that what I'm doing is serving a better purpose. I honestly don't know what I'd do if I were famous. One of the most uncomfortable things for me at work is when somebody knows my name because of my position, but I don't know theirs.
The point is that Elon Musk makes jobs. If there were more in the "1%" like him, we'd live in a better world. I don't need to be one of those people. I'd be perfectly happy being a faceless Space X employee. Maybe once I get my degree, I'll apply for a position.
It makes me wonder if you and DogDude might just be projecting some of your issues on to me. Maybe mentioning Elon Musk sparked some kind of inadequacy and need for recognition in you. I don't know.
Well, here's the thing. The conditions that led to the spreadsheet were mostly a.) it was being used by 3 people in the same office and b.) partly because Excel is the modern office's golden hammer. The problem is that I need to take that data and roll it into an absentee call script that around 50 call center agents will be using, including agents working from home, and to also design metrics reporting that sometimes involves doing part of the client's absentee policy. Also, it's being computerized because I was told to computerize it. They pay me by the hour, so I'm more than happy to mop up messes.
In general, though, I agree with your sentiment. Computing for the sake of computing is often very counter-productive. What you wind up with is a half-assed computer system that gets ignored in lieu of a much more appropriate sheet of paper and a pencil.
A few months ago, my boss had me computerize the process that agents use to trade shifts with each other. I argued against it because the main problem they were trying to solve was the problem of agents requesting trading shifts more often than they were supposed to. So, I took about two days or so and wound up with a system. A couple days ago, I found out that the system had been dismantled and the old essentially pencil and paper system was in place.
So, good enough. I guess I won the argument about whether or not to computerize that process in the end.