Re:and it's completely useless on OS X because...
on
Blender 2.40 Released
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OS X doesn't really build its interface on OpenGL the same way Blender does. The current iteration of Quartz 2D is a software renderer, everything is rendered to a window via the CPU, and OpenGL is used as a really fast blitter capable of alpha blending and transformations. Blender appears to do a lot more through OpenGL, including using some of its feedback related features. Quartz can do something similar using Quartz 2D Extreme, but that's buggy and disabled by default in 10.4.x.
If you run amd64-compiled software, those 64-bit extensions are good for a nice 10-15% (free!) speed boost. There are some very good amd64 versions of some very good software (Matlab, for example).
The flaunting isn't that it consumes less power -- it's that it consumes ~40% less power, but gives ~95% of the performance. That isn't a small feat, especially without an on-die memory controller.
It's also a $500 chip being compared against a $300 chip, and a next-generation, not-yet-available 65nm chip being compared against a previous-generation, available-for-months, 90nm chip. It is, to say the least, a matter of Apple's and oranges.
It's an interesting article, just to see what potential Intel's new chips have, but for either side to flaunt anything at this point is foolish.
Well, Photoshop isn't exactly the whole computing market:) There is already a 64-bit version of MATLAB, and boy is it fricking awesome. It's up to 50% faster than the 32-bit versions, partly due to the standard amd64 speed-boost on K8 processors (10-20%), and partly due to MathWorks's optimizations to take advantage of the new architecture.
BS. Even MS is coming to the X11 model. We don't need bad advices like yours.
MS isn't moving to the X11 "model". MS is putting graphics in userspace. The latter is a commonality with X11, but it's not the "X11 model". The Vista rendering model is much closer to the DRI than to X11.
I have to agree with you. The people who have been saying "do C, that's what everybody uses" are really missing the point. If you're coding reacreationally, you're not constrained to using what everybody else is! LISP is a great way to expand your horizons, and will teach you a lot of techniques that transcend specific languages. It really is a language that lets you focus on creating something interesting, instead of getting bogged down in micromanaging the machine.
Mario never has sex with the princess. He never shoots dozens of people to get to her. Therein lies the difference between childrens' stories and action movies.
Of course, it's not the shooting and having sex that makes the game (or movie) interesting. Most childrens stories don't have biological experiments gone wrong or international terror plots that need to be foiled. More adult stories are simply more interesting.
It's not a matter of a few examples here and there. It's a matter of the overall library. The vast majority of the "good" games on the Gamecube are for younger audiences than the "good" games for the PS2. On top of that, there are a whole lot of mediocre but still fun games for older audiences on the PS2, which just plain don't exist for the Gamecube.
Naming a few games doesn't change the nature of the gaming library. I've owned a Gamecube for a couple of years (though I'm not really a heavy gamer), and there is just plain not a lot on the Gamecube I want to play, and even less that's Gamecube-exclusive. I uniformly don't like Nintendo's first-party titles, and outside of that, the pickings are just slim.
One thing I tend to find is that Windows users react differently to Linux desktops than do, say, Mac users. Windows has a rather peculier UI (from a strict usability theory standpoint), so not accounting for whether your test subjects are Windows or Mac users can make the results pointless.
One thing might be to get longtime Mac users, longtime Windows users, and complete novices (though, this might be hard, because most people have used a computer at some point, and usually it was a Windows machine), and see how they react to different desktops.
Nintendo games aren't South Park. Nintendo games have childish stories and themes as well, not just childish graphics. That's what turns people off --- you only want to save the goddamn princess so many times. THe fast-twitch set stays with Nintendo, despite the lame stories and environments, for the great gameplay, but not everyone plays a game just for the mechanics of the game.
Yes, Mario Sunshine and Mario Strikers are for children. There is nothing wrong with adults enjoying a children's game (same as movies --- I thought Madagascar was a hoot!), but I play games for the story and atmosphere, and I'd much rather have something like Xenosaga than Mario RPG.
The CPU's ALU, however, was 32-bit, which makes it a 32-bit system. It's just like PCs, where a PIII has a 80-bit FPU unit, a 128-bit SSE unit, a 64-bit external bus, and is still consider a 32-bit machine because of the width of its registers and ALU.
1) There is no secret shorcut key. Just start typing, and it'll accept a URL. 2) I love how the same people who argue "users are smart, they can read the documentation" simultaniously prove that they have not read the documentation.
French people love dropping consonants, which makes their English accent the worst of any culture's.
You've obviously never heard a hot girl with a French accent. Those dropped consonants are so ridiculously sexy!
I went to college with a guy like you, one thing that bugged me, though, he took an Anglic name, Steve, something about his given name being an easy target for ridicule.
It's a fairly uncommon occurance among Indians. You see it more often with southeast Asians.
Don't pretend you work for Dell Tech support and answer to "Bob," okay? It's degrading.
I'll agree with you, but with the qualification that for some people degrading is better than grating. People have a very difficult time pronouncing most foreign names. Mine isn't even Indian (it's a spelling variation on a Norman name), and its very phonetic, yet people still have trouble with it. If my name was 8 syllables long, I'd be tempted to go by something else as well.
Perhaps if improvements were made to the portrayal of women in video games, we would have lower divorce rates in the USA than countries with arranged marriages.
Divorce is a blessing. Marriages in countries with low rates of divorce aren't any happier, they are just socially constrained from breaking up.
Every time a talking Barbie says into her cell-phone "Math is tough!"
In what decade are you living? In my decade, we have "Teacher" Barbie.
(and a thousand other examples) we just spoiled mathematics for another young girl.
Right. Yet, boys, whose toys have no more redeeming intellectual content than Barbie dolls, still manage to become engineers and physicists! Every time a little boy hears a talking X-men action figure, we've created a vigilante super-hero? The toys of children, are, well, for children. We're talking about grown-ups, fully capable of making decisions for themselves. FYI: I don't know when you went to school, but in my elementary school, girls were better at math than boys up until middle school or so. It's not the Barbies doing it...
I don't think it's a red-herring to apply your argument to another minority.
It is the definition of red-herring.
It points to the obvious deficiency in your case that women are held back by themselves despite all the best intentions of whites, I mean men, and not by the institutions of society (and the culture that molds it).
Don't put words in my mouth. I never said men had the best intentions. All I said was that universities are trying to get more female students into science and engineering, and they aren't signing up. I didn't say that women are holding themselves back (the very phrase "holding back" is misleading!). I said that women aren't interested. If they were, they would enroll. How hard is it to understand?
This would be telling to your stance, does "affirmative action" work or not? If yes, how, by affecting culture?
Affirmative action can work. However, it doesn't work by affecting popular culture. It works by affecting the personal culture of people and families. Every black/hispanic (let's be honest about the term "minority" here) that gets an education as a result of affirmative action is another potential parent that can potentially pass on the value of education to his/her children. The fact that by consequence a bunch of white people were exposed to the "diversity" of being around a black person is so marginally benificial it's not worth discussing.
Get real, culture has everything to do with it.
I didn't say otherwise. Your assertion, however, is that "pop culture" has to do with it. I think that's bollocks. "Pop culture" (the superficial ideas and beliefs of the society as a whole), has little to do with the behavior of any one person. What effects people are the beliefs of family and friends. Little Jenny doesn't avoid going into math because Barbie said "math is hard" when she was little. She does it because her mom never went to college and didn't pass along to her the value of mathematics and science. She does it because her friends tell her that she'll never get a guy that way. That's why I think the focus on pop culture is so pointless. It gets attention, and it stirs up debate (which is really what these writers want), but it solves nothing. Changing pop culture will do nothing to help women. Only changing the attitudes of women will do that. Convince Jenny that her mom is an uneducated moron, and her friends are teenage mothers in training, and you've won the battle. Trying to indirectly affect Jenny's thought process through images in the media, that's, well, not exactly the surest way to a solution.
I hope all fathers will one day be as enlightened as your grand-dad. Not only allowing their girls to pursue higher education, specifically in science, but encouraging them to do so even in the face of the 'brain-washing' (or should I say, the marketting of gender roles and preferable consumer behaviors).
There is a very interesting amount of brain-damage in that statement. First, he sent all his kids (all 12 of them) to university. The fact that some were girls and some were boys was irrelevent. The important thing here is not encouraging girls, but encouraging children. An environment that h
So, when you proclaim "women aren't interested" in being "engineers or scientists or mathemeticians" which of these do you believe to be the cause?
Nurture, of course. At least, nurture has such a big effect that any possible effects of nature cannot be properly studied until its confounding effects are eliminated.
Wow, this statement must be taken to mean you believe it's genetics -- if they weren't made that way, they'd already be equals! It's just their own faults! Of course, any belief that tendancy to education, ambition, or intelligence is genetic leads us straight down the slippery slope.
Hardly. My statement simply means women are less interested in entering the hard fields, as evidenced by the fact that they do not do so, despite ample opportunity to do so. Whether this is cultural or innate is a seperate issue entirely. I personally choose to believe it is a cultural issue, or rather, that there is so much obvious cultural baggage, that it overshadows any innate differences that may be present.
All kidding aside, our culture --pop culture or not-- predisposes girls against science and especially math.
Are we observing the same pop culture? I don't see anything that would predispose girls against science and math any more than it does boys. Pop culture, as far as I can se, predisposes boys and girls fairly equally against science and math. Yet, despite pop culture, boys make it into the hard sciences, and girls don't.
Well, if we can agree that our American culture is patriarchal (and increasingly anti-intellectual) then we could agree that men are the arbiters of culture (and increasingly anti-intellectual men). Hence, men decide for the most part what little girls want to be when they grow up, whether overtly or subtley. This will [probably] change with time as America slowly conforms to its dream of equality, i.e., liberty and justice for all.
Arguing about subtle arbitration of destiny is a futile argument. It's an exercise in laying blame, and doesn't actually help the situation. Modern women do a lot of things against their fathers' wills. Why not choose their own career?
You couldn't be more wrong. The portrayal of people in popular culture is what reinforces the status quo or leads to progress. Your own post gives examples of this for Jews, Muslims, and Indians. Look at how Jews were portrayed in the early parts of the 1900s, or Indians under colonial rule. Why did these stereotypes change? Because culture changed.
You're argument is self defeating. You're merely showing that pop culture is a reflection of society, a point that I'm not arguing. It's quite a step to go from there to saying that pop culture changes society. That I can't agree with, and haven't seen any decent evidence that would make me agree with it. Certainly, I cannot accept that pop culture has such an enormous impact on perception that the best way to solve problems is by changing pop culture!
If blacks are dissatisfied by their place in the world, only they can change it...
Oh, and your "numerous examples to the contrary" is a bullshit point. We're speaking in generalities --- individuals are irrelevant here. The generall trends are that the enrollment of women into the subjects I mentioned is far smaller than anybody would want. The fact that there are women who do enroll into these fields doesn't change the point.
And given that, here's my wild, hasty assertion: women aren't holding themselves back.
Well, you're right about the wild and hasty part. Let's review the facts (and it seems to me that you don't even disagree with the facts I've presented).
1) Men vastly outnumber women in the "hard" sciences, as well as the fields of engineering, economics, and history. 2) Universities in this country are actively courting more female students for these fields. 3) Universitie
Well, no. Take your example of the lack of female scientists. Maybe women are as a group less interested in science; I haven't read the latest studies. But while the genetic cause for female disinterest in science is debatable, the cultural one seems pretty obvious to most of us. If young girls are only presented in pop-culture with images of women as singers, dancers, teachers, nurses, homemakers, etc., what do you think they're going to picture themselves as becoming when they grow up?
That argument cuts both ways. When was the last time you saw scientists and engineers glorified on the media? Little boys are exposed to images suggesting they should grow up to be fire fighters, SWAT agents, action heros, etc. How many little kids do you know that want to be a chemical engineer when they grow up? Yet, somehow, men find their way into these fields.
Hell, until very recently science textbooks only featured pictures of boys doing experiments, not girls.
If by "recently" you mean in the last couple of decades. I haven't seen such a book during my education, and in elementary school, we used books dating from the mid 1980s. Yet, in my generation, the gender gap in the sciences is still as big as ever.
If girls aren't even presented with the idea of going into science when they're young, is it such a surprise that men outnumber women in hard science in higher education?
I went through most of my general education in the 1990s. Trust me, girls are being exposed very heavily in school to the idea of going into science. The problem isn't the system, the problem is the girls, and the culture around them. The problem is their own beliefs, and the beliefs of their friends and parents.
Wow. What does that leave out, everything related to literature and the arts? There are different types of intelligence, and hard sciences aren't intrinsically better (or even harder) than poetry or architecture.
People in the hard fields command a different kind and level of respect. As they should --- very few people in literature and the arts spend their higher education buried up to their neck in differential equations. Look on any college campus --- on average the engineers and science majors simply work more than the liberal arts majors. They study longer for tests and finish school with a lower GPA. While there may be "different types of intelligence", the people in the hard fields simply put more hours into their higher eduction.
That aside, remember, we're talking about building respecet. The idea of women in liberal arts fields is fairly well accepted, and women in these fields do command a certain level of respect. Certainly, I don't see women writers getting slighted relative to their male counter parts. Women are also not completely underrepresented in these fields. However, the "hard" fields clearly command a different level and kind of respect, as they should, because they are generally more difficult (and depend less on talant and more on hard work). In these fields, women are vastly underrepresented, despite the fact that very significant overtures are being made in their direction.
I thought this article was a pretty awful pseudo-intellectual rehash of identical articles on the subject that have been written for at least the last ten years, but that doesn't mean the subject itself isn't important.
I'm not saying the subject is unimportant, I'm saying its irrelevant. You're not going to solve the problem of getting women to stand as intellectual equals with men by analyzing pop culture. Its an intellectually interesting, but practically unimportant way of approaching the problem. The only way to solve the problem is figure out why girls are not following all the opportunities available to them. This work will be done by sociologists, of course, but not these specific ones. They're barking up the wrong tree.
In high school, I was in a club that hosted, among other things, events where neighborhood children could come and lea
This psychoanalysis of popular culture is really grating. If you're shallow enough to define yourself based on pop-culture, you're every bit the female stereotype that you're rebelling against. If you aren't, then why do you care?
Everybody deals with their stereotype, except perhaps those who are actual models of that stereotype. For example, there are about as many Muslims as Jews in the United States (~5m). When was the last time you saw a Muslim on TV just playing a regular role, that didn't have anything specifically to do with them being Muslim? In contrast, Jews are all over the place, in many roles where (gasp!) you're not even made aware that they're Jewish! There are over 1.5m Indians in the United States. A lot of them are second-generation. When was the last time you saw in Indian on TV that spoke unaccented English? I am an Indian (well, Bengali), who speaks without an accent (I've been here since I was five), and M. Night Shyamalan's "Signs" cameo was weird even for me!
So what's my point here? Everybody is stereotyped in pop culture. Pop culture is superficial by its very nature! The portrayal of people in popular culture is more or less irrelevent. If women are dissatisfied by their place in the world, only they can change it. Yes, there are still boundaries, and yes, those must be broken down, but the bottleneck to womens' advancement today is in many cases women themselves. Consider, for example, higher education. There is an enormous dearth of women in the "hard sciences" and in engineering. Who can be blamed for this state of affairs? Men? Male students have little control over admissions, and male administrators are falling over themselves trying to increase female enrollment. The opportunities are there, yet a female is still a rare sight on an engineering campus. Why? Simply put: because females aren't interested! Women, it appears, don't want to be engineers or scientists or mathematicians, or even philosophers, or historians, or economists, for that matter. These are the professions in which people are respected for their mind. If women don't enter these professions, despite the opportunities available to them, how can they expect to be respected for their intellectual capabilities?
It's always interested me that for some reason people think that the male idealization of women is the boyish waif. It is my opinion that the image of women prevalent in Hollywood is not so much what men desire, but rather, what Hollywood tells men they should desire. Seriously, does anybody know any guys who think the post-anorexia Lindsay Lohan is hotter than the pre-anorexia one? How about Monica Belluci? She regularly makes the top-5 "hottest women in the world" lists --- does anybody think she's dangerously skinny?
It's crass to say this, but I'll do it anyway. If you want to know what men desire, look at pornstars. They, at a very basic level, model what men desire. Most pornstars do not fit the model of what women think men want women to look like. Jenna Jameson is one of the most popular and visible pornstars out there, yet by the standards of most womens' beauty magazines, she'd be on the pudgy side!
This was not a hard-hitting expose on Google's employment practices. It was a business-type article aimed at business people. You see them all the time in magazines like Forbes. There is no place for "hard questions" here, because its not that kind of interview. I'm sure such an interview would be interesting, but that wasn't the purpose of this one.
Slashdot Mirror
OS X doesn't really build its interface on OpenGL the same way Blender does. The current iteration of Quartz 2D is a software renderer, everything is rendered to a window via the CPU, and OpenGL is used as a really fast blitter capable of alpha blending and transformations. Blender appears to do a lot more through OpenGL, including using some of its feedback related features. Quartz can do something similar using Quartz 2D Extreme, but that's buggy and disabled by default in 10.4.x.
If you run amd64-compiled software, those 64-bit extensions are good for a nice 10-15% (free!) speed boost. There are some very good amd64 versions of some very good software (Matlab, for example).
:)
Not everyone is stuck in Windows x32 land
The flaunting isn't that it consumes less power -- it's that it consumes ~40% less power, but gives ~95% of the performance. That isn't a small feat, especially without an on-die memory controller.
It's also a $500 chip being compared against a $300 chip, and a next-generation, not-yet-available 65nm chip being compared against a previous-generation, available-for-months, 90nm chip. It is, to say the least, a matter of Apple's and oranges.
It's an interesting article, just to see what potential Intel's new chips have, but for either side to flaunt anything at this point is foolish.
Well, Photoshop isn't exactly the whole computing market :) There is already a 64-bit version of MATLAB, and boy is it fricking awesome. It's up to 50% faster than the 32-bit versions, partly due to the standard amd64 speed-boost on K8 processors (10-20%), and partly due to MathWorks's optimizations to take advantage of the new architecture.
R300 also supports many R400 cards, since an R400 is basically a RV360 with extra pipelines.
BS. Even MS is coming to the X11 model. We don't need bad advices like yours.
MS isn't moving to the X11 "model". MS is putting graphics in userspace. The latter is a commonality with X11, but it's not the "X11 model". The Vista rendering model is much closer to the DRI than to X11.
I have to agree with you. The people who have been saying "do C, that's what everybody uses" are really missing the point. If you're coding reacreationally, you're not constrained to using what everybody else is! LISP is a great way to expand your horizons, and will teach you a lot of techniques that transcend specific languages. It really is a language that lets you focus on creating something interesting, instead of getting bogged down in micromanaging the machine.
Mario never has sex with the princess. He never shoots dozens of people to get to her. Therein lies the difference between childrens' stories and action movies.
Of course, it's not the shooting and having sex that makes the game (or movie) interesting. Most childrens stories don't have biological experiments gone wrong or international terror plots that need to be foiled. More adult stories are simply more interesting.
It's not a matter of a few examples here and there. It's a matter of the overall library. The vast majority of the "good" games on the Gamecube are for younger audiences than the "good" games for the PS2. On top of that, there are a whole lot of mediocre but still fun games for older audiences on the PS2, which just plain don't exist for the Gamecube.
Naming a few games doesn't change the nature of the gaming library. I've owned a Gamecube for a couple of years (though I'm not really a heavy gamer), and there is just plain not a lot on the Gamecube I want to play, and even less that's Gamecube-exclusive. I uniformly don't like Nintendo's first-party titles, and outside of that, the pickings are just slim.
One thing I tend to find is that Windows users react differently to Linux desktops than do, say, Mac users. Windows has a rather peculier UI (from a strict usability theory standpoint), so not accounting for whether your test subjects are Windows or Mac users can make the results pointless.
One thing might be to get longtime Mac users, longtime Windows users, and complete novices (though, this might be hard, because most people have used a computer at some point, and usually it was a Windows machine), and see how they react to different desktops.
A steam loop can be more or less closed. You don't need a constant supply of it.
Are you on Linux or Windows? What version are we talking about? I'm on Ubuntu Breezy, and it sure does do what I just said.
Nintendo games aren't South Park. Nintendo games have childish stories and themes as well, not just childish graphics. That's what turns people off --- you only want to save the goddamn princess so many times. THe fast-twitch set stays with Nintendo, despite the lame stories and environments, for the great gameplay, but not everyone plays a game just for the mechanics of the game.
Yes, Mario Sunshine and Mario Strikers are for children. There is nothing wrong with adults enjoying a children's game (same as movies --- I thought Madagascar was a hoot!), but I play games for the story and atmosphere, and I'd much rather have something like Xenosaga than Mario RPG.
The CPU's ALU, however, was 32-bit, which makes it a 32-bit system. It's just like PCs, where a PIII has a 80-bit FPU unit, a 128-bit SSE unit, a 64-bit external bus, and is still consider a 32-bit machine because of the width of its registers and ALU.
Um, wtf?
/etc/fstab)
I just tried it:
(CTRL-O)
/ e t c / f s t a b (ENTER)
(starting at
Are you sure you don't just have a buggy copy of Firefox?
1) There is no secret shorcut key. Just start typing, and it'll accept a URL.
2) I love how the same people who argue "users are smart, they can read the documentation" simultaniously prove that they have not read the documentation.
French people love dropping consonants, which makes their English accent the worst of any culture's.
You've obviously never heard a hot girl with a French accent. Those dropped consonants are so ridiculously sexy!
I went to college with a guy like you, one thing that bugged me, though, he took an Anglic name, Steve, something about his given name being an easy target for ridicule.
It's a fairly uncommon occurance among Indians. You see it more often with southeast Asians.
Don't pretend you work for Dell Tech support and answer to "Bob," okay? It's degrading.
I'll agree with you, but with the qualification that for some people degrading is better than grating. People have a very difficult time pronouncing most foreign names. Mine isn't even Indian (it's a spelling variation on a Norman name), and its very phonetic, yet people still have trouble with it. If my name was 8 syllables long, I'd be tempted to go by something else as well.
Perhaps if improvements were made to the portrayal of women in video games, we would have lower divorce rates in the USA than countries with arranged marriages.
Divorce is a blessing. Marriages in countries with low rates of divorce aren't any happier, they are just socially constrained from breaking up.
"Quack" is correct.
Every time a talking Barbie says into her cell-phone "Math is tough!"
In what decade are you living? In my decade, we have "Teacher" Barbie.
(and a thousand other examples) we just spoiled mathematics for another young girl.
Right. Yet, boys, whose toys have no more redeeming intellectual content than Barbie dolls, still manage to become engineers and physicists! Every time a little boy hears a talking X-men action figure, we've created a vigilante super-hero? The toys of children, are, well, for children. We're talking about grown-ups, fully capable of making decisions for themselves. FYI: I don't know when you went to school, but in my elementary school, girls were better at math than boys up until middle school or so. It's not the Barbies doing it...
I don't think it's a red-herring to apply your argument to another minority.
It is the definition of red-herring.
It points to the obvious deficiency in your case that women are held back by themselves despite all the best intentions of whites, I mean men, and not by the institutions of society (and the culture that molds it).
Don't put words in my mouth. I never said men had the best intentions. All I said was that universities are trying to get more female students into science and engineering, and they aren't signing up. I didn't say that women are holding themselves back (the very phrase "holding back" is misleading!). I said that women aren't interested. If they were, they would enroll. How hard is it to understand?
This would be telling to your stance, does "affirmative action" work or not? If yes, how, by affecting culture?
Affirmative action can work. However, it doesn't work by affecting popular culture. It works by affecting the personal culture of people and families. Every black/hispanic (let's be honest about the term "minority" here) that gets an education as a result of affirmative action is another potential parent that can potentially pass on the value of education to his/her children. The fact that by consequence a bunch of white people were exposed to the "diversity" of being around a black person is so marginally benificial it's not worth discussing.
Get real, culture has everything to do with it.
I didn't say otherwise. Your assertion, however, is that "pop culture" has to do with it. I think that's bollocks. "Pop culture" (the superficial ideas and beliefs of the society as a whole), has little to do with the behavior of any one person. What effects people are the beliefs of family and friends. Little Jenny doesn't avoid going into math because Barbie said "math is hard" when she was little. She does it because her mom never went to college and didn't pass along to her the value of mathematics and science. She does it because her friends tell her that she'll never get a guy that way. That's why I think the focus on pop culture is so pointless. It gets attention, and it stirs up debate (which is really what these writers want), but it solves nothing. Changing pop culture will do nothing to help women. Only changing the attitudes of women will do that. Convince Jenny that her mom is an uneducated moron, and her friends are teenage mothers in training, and you've won the battle. Trying to indirectly affect Jenny's thought process through images in the media, that's, well, not exactly the surest way to a solution.
I hope all fathers will one day be as enlightened as your grand-dad. Not only allowing their girls to pursue higher education, specifically in science, but encouraging them to do so even in the face of the 'brain-washing' (or should I say, the marketting of gender roles and preferable consumer behaviors).
There is a very interesting amount of brain-damage in that statement. First, he sent all his kids (all 12 of them) to university. The fact that some were girls and some were boys was irrelevent. The important thing here is not encouraging girls, but encouraging children. An environment that h
So, when you proclaim "women aren't interested" in being "engineers or scientists or mathemeticians" which of these do you believe to be the cause?
Nurture, of course. At least, nurture has such a big effect that any possible effects of nature cannot be properly studied until its confounding effects are eliminated.
Wow, this statement must be taken to mean you believe it's genetics -- if they weren't made that way, they'd already be equals! It's just their own faults! Of course, any belief that tendancy to education, ambition, or intelligence is genetic leads us straight down the slippery slope.
Hardly. My statement simply means women are less interested in entering the hard fields, as evidenced by the fact that they do not do so, despite ample opportunity to do so. Whether this is cultural or innate is a seperate issue entirely. I personally choose to believe it is a cultural issue, or rather, that there is so much obvious cultural baggage, that it overshadows any innate differences that may be present.
All kidding aside, our culture --pop culture or not-- predisposes girls against science and especially math.
Are we observing the same pop culture? I don't see anything that would predispose girls against science and math any more than it does boys. Pop culture, as far as I can se, predisposes boys and girls fairly equally against science and math. Yet, despite pop culture, boys make it into the hard sciences, and girls don't.
Well, if we can agree that our American culture is patriarchal (and increasingly anti-intellectual) then we could agree that men are the arbiters of culture (and increasingly anti-intellectual men). Hence, men decide for the most part what little girls want to be when they grow up, whether overtly or subtley. This will [probably] change with time as America slowly conforms to its dream of equality, i.e., liberty and justice for all.
Arguing about subtle arbitration of destiny is a futile argument. It's an exercise in laying blame, and doesn't actually help the situation. Modern women do a lot of things against their fathers' wills. Why not choose their own career?
You couldn't be more wrong. The portrayal of people in popular culture is what reinforces the status quo or leads to progress. Your own post gives examples of this for Jews, Muslims, and Indians. Look at how Jews were portrayed in the early parts of the 1900s, or Indians under colonial rule. Why did these stereotypes change? Because culture changed.
You're argument is self defeating. You're merely showing that pop culture is a reflection of society, a point that I'm not arguing. It's quite a step to go from there to saying that pop culture changes society. That I can't agree with, and haven't seen any decent evidence that would make me agree with it. Certainly, I cannot accept that pop culture has such an enormous impact on perception that the best way to solve problems is by changing pop culture!
If blacks are dissatisfied by their place in the world, only they can change it...
Sorry, I'm not playing that game.
Oh, and your "numerous examples to the contrary" is a bullshit point. We're speaking in generalities --- individuals are irrelevant here. The generall trends are that the enrollment of women into the subjects I mentioned is far smaller than anybody would want. The fact that there are women who do enroll into these fields doesn't change the point.
And given that, here's my wild, hasty assertion: women aren't holding themselves back.
Well, you're right about the wild and hasty part. Let's review the facts (and it seems to me that you don't even disagree with the facts I've presented).
1) Men vastly outnumber women in the "hard" sciences, as well as the fields of engineering, economics, and history.
2) Universities in this country are actively courting more female students for these fields.
3) Universitie
Well, no. Take your example of the lack of female scientists. Maybe women are as a group less interested in science; I haven't read the latest studies. But while the genetic cause for female disinterest in science is debatable, the cultural one seems pretty obvious to most of us. If young girls are only presented in pop-culture with images of women as singers, dancers, teachers, nurses, homemakers, etc., what do you think they're going to picture themselves as becoming when they grow up?
That argument cuts both ways. When was the last time you saw scientists and engineers glorified on the media? Little boys are exposed to images suggesting they should grow up to be fire fighters, SWAT agents, action heros, etc. How many little kids do you know that want to be a chemical engineer when they grow up? Yet, somehow, men find their way into these fields.
Hell, until very recently science textbooks only featured pictures of boys doing experiments, not girls.
If by "recently" you mean in the last couple of decades. I haven't seen such a book during my education, and in elementary school, we used books dating from the mid 1980s. Yet, in my generation, the gender gap in the sciences is still as big as ever.
If girls aren't even presented with the idea of going into science when they're young, is it such a surprise that men outnumber women in hard science in higher education?
I went through most of my general education in the 1990s. Trust me, girls are being exposed very heavily in school to the idea of going into science. The problem isn't the system, the problem is the girls, and the culture around them. The problem is their own beliefs, and the beliefs of their friends and parents.
Wow. What does that leave out, everything related to literature and the arts? There are different types of intelligence, and hard sciences aren't intrinsically better (or even harder) than poetry or architecture.
People in the hard fields command a different kind and level of respect. As they should --- very few people in literature and the arts spend their higher education buried up to their neck in differential equations. Look on any college campus --- on average the engineers and science majors simply work more than the liberal arts majors. They study longer for tests and finish school with a lower GPA. While there may be "different types of intelligence", the people in the hard fields simply put more hours into their higher eduction.
That aside, remember, we're talking about building respecet. The idea of women in liberal arts fields is fairly well accepted, and women in these fields do command a certain level of respect. Certainly, I don't see women writers getting slighted relative to their male counter parts. Women are also not completely underrepresented in these fields. However, the "hard" fields clearly command a different level and kind of respect, as they should, because they are generally more difficult (and depend less on talant and more on hard work). In these fields, women are vastly underrepresented, despite the fact that very significant overtures are being made in their direction.
I thought this article was a pretty awful pseudo-intellectual rehash of identical articles on the subject that have been written for at least the last ten years, but that doesn't mean the subject itself isn't important.
I'm not saying the subject is unimportant, I'm saying its irrelevant. You're not going to solve the problem of getting women to stand as intellectual equals with men by analyzing pop culture. Its an intellectually interesting, but practically unimportant way of approaching the problem. The only way to solve the problem is figure out why girls are not following all the opportunities available to them. This work will be done by sociologists, of course, but not these specific ones. They're barking up the wrong tree.
In high school, I was in a club that hosted, among other things, events where neighborhood children could come and lea
This psychoanalysis of popular culture is really grating. If you're shallow enough to define yourself based on pop-culture, you're every bit the female stereotype that you're rebelling against. If you aren't, then why do you care?
Everybody deals with their stereotype, except perhaps those who are actual models of that stereotype. For example, there are about as many Muslims as Jews in the United States (~5m). When was the last time you saw a Muslim on TV just playing a regular role, that didn't have anything specifically to do with them being Muslim? In contrast, Jews are all over the place, in many roles where (gasp!) you're not even made aware that they're Jewish! There are over 1.5m Indians in the United States. A lot of them are second-generation. When was the last time you saw in Indian on TV that spoke unaccented English? I am an Indian (well, Bengali), who speaks without an accent (I've been here since I was five), and M. Night Shyamalan's "Signs" cameo was weird even for me!
So what's my point here? Everybody is stereotyped in pop culture. Pop culture is superficial by its very nature! The portrayal of people in popular culture is more or less irrelevent. If women are dissatisfied by their place in the world, only they can change it. Yes, there are still boundaries, and yes, those must be broken down, but the bottleneck to womens' advancement today is in many cases women themselves. Consider, for example, higher education. There is an enormous dearth of women in the "hard sciences" and in engineering. Who can be blamed for this state of affairs? Men? Male students have little control over admissions, and male administrators are falling over themselves trying to increase female enrollment. The opportunities are there, yet a female is still a rare sight on an engineering campus. Why? Simply put: because females aren't interested! Women, it appears, don't want to be engineers or scientists or mathematicians, or even philosophers, or historians, or economists, for that matter. These are the professions in which people are respected for their mind. If women don't enter these professions, despite the opportunities available to them, how can they expect to be respected for their intellectual capabilities?
It's always interested me that for some reason people think that the male idealization of women is the boyish waif. It is my opinion that the image of women prevalent in Hollywood is not so much what men desire, but rather, what Hollywood tells men they should desire. Seriously, does anybody know any guys who think the post-anorexia Lindsay Lohan is hotter than the pre-anorexia one? How about Monica Belluci? She regularly makes the top-5 "hottest women in the world" lists --- does anybody think she's dangerously skinny?
It's crass to say this, but I'll do it anyway. If you want to know what men desire, look at pornstars. They, at a very basic level, model what men desire. Most pornstars do not fit the model of what women think men want women to look like. Jenna Jameson is one of the most popular and visible pornstars out there, yet by the standards of most womens' beauty magazines, she'd be on the pudgy side!
This was not a hard-hitting expose on Google's employment practices. It was a business-type article aimed at business people. You see them all the time in magazines like Forbes. There is no place for "hard questions" here, because its not that kind of interview. I'm sure such an interview would be interesting, but that wasn't the purpose of this one.