True, individuals can succeed where genders as group fail. But how much harder do we, as society, make it? How many barriers do we add without meaning to? (You're right, LWATCDR. I think I'm replying more to the entire debate than to just your post. Sorry about that.)
If I was the only girl showing up in a Calculus classroom full of guys who believed that "girls can't do math?" How would I choose any of them as a study partner? What if the _teacher_ believed_ that girls can't do math? The teacher certainly wouldn't consider me a normal girl. And what if I wanted to talk to my friends about what she learned in class that day? Would I feel like a freak for liking math?
I think it would take an extraordinary person to go through that day after day. And I want to let the ordinary girl who is good at math to be good at math. She shouldn't need to be Wonder Woman to study calculus.
And the truth (as it exists now) is automatically better? Try telling your SigOther that you've noticed they've gained a pound or two.
Living a lifestyle to match biology is what animals do. That path (albeit at the extreme end) leads right to Luddites, Tree-Huggers, and anti-technology. Modifying our environment is what humans do. We're tool users. We need to use our tools to reduce our discomfort until natural selection kicks in (in the next 10000 years or so)
And I'm certainly not saying that all Science is good, and that we don't need some level of environmentalism in our science, before we pollute and/or blow the world up. I don't have all the answers. I vote against my evolution. I vote for progress.
Now, I'm not saying that the US/World is ready for public gene therapies and tinkering with babies to make superbabies yet. Hell, we in the US elected a president who can't say "nuclear." I'm aware I'm not the majority. I certainly don't want to give anybody else control over what "normal" is.
But I think we should be trying to lower gender barriers, not raise them. Even if we're doing it unconsciously.
Well, maybe where you are the men can't feed babies, but my local supermarket (in the US) stocks formula.
It *IS* bad to say "Men are better at hunting, and women are better at protecting the cave," because I feel we need to promote civilization. I don't need to hunt for my food, and my fiancee doesn't need to protect the townhouse against predators or a hostile environment. Hell, I don't need to mow my own grass!
And while my biology might indicate certain trends, I certainly don't want to create institutions (like, say, education or economics) that cater to the biology of a caveman. I want to encourage biological traits that will support my modern society (or an idealized form of it).
I want to promote a society that gives Spatial/Quick thinkers careers that benefits those traits, and gives Planners / Relationship thinkers positions where those skills are needed.
There have been at least 3000 years of socialization based on a caveman's biology, with a few exceptions (From Hapsheput to Hilary Clinton). I don't think that in a quarter century we've managed to recreate society to reflect our still-changing values. Heck, I don't think that in 2105 (a century) we'll stop trying to socialize Men into Hunters and Women into Nurturers.
I'm a big fan of buying beige Boxes and cans of spray paint, myself. Considering how easy it is to do, I'm suprised each time my friends show me their new computers, and they're still beige.
What went so wrong that by the time they were ready to try a launch over an actual ocean (ie, have the missile be non-recoverable), that there was a catastrophic failure so bad that they can't tell where the glitch was?
I understand that with any test, there's a chance of failure. But it seems that those guys on TV building pumpkin-chuckers with junkyard parts would do a better job of working tests, or at least failures that tell you what went wrong.
Early cultures = usually patrilinear. So Hebrew girls married to Egyptian men have Egyptian babies. Jewish descent is matrilinear NOW, and some scholars believe it switched from patrilinear to matrilinear during (and because of) the Egyptian years.
The big argument was that in times of trouble, the Hebrews might join with the non-Egyptians, and overthrow the Pharaohs. So if you kill the potential warriors, you lay the seeds of...
... the fierce Jewish Mother-In-Law. I think Fran Drescher's voice can be harnessed as a sonic weapon like in the first DUNE movie!
Sorry, rambled a bit there!
All this scholarship is, of course, complicated by the complex subjects of "Biblical Archeology," and the whole lack of evidence for the Exodus story, etc, etc, Cross cultural myths, etc etc. YMMV
Except that it's not like a lottery, because you can't decide not to play in some places. I don't have insurance to restore MY life, it's to restore the life of my potential victims, even if there aren't any.
The Insurance laws here in Red State Ohio, USA, say (IANAL) that since people get in accidents a lot, and a lot of people are poor, that the odds are very good that if somebody causes an accident and hits you, they might be too poor to pay your repair bills. Therefore, everybody MUST buy insurance, which will pay the repair bills when you hit somebody and can't pay the bills because you have a crappy job.
Insurance companies have sort of been forced into being a public service. OF course, they get no tax revenues for being a public service. Their profit comes from maximizing income (rates) and minimizing costs (payouts)
So My Insurance company now has a mandate to look for whatever reason it can claim in court to NOT pay out, to cover my mistakes. Was I 1 MPH over the limit? I wasn't following the rules: no payout. Was I driving a red car? Red cars are ticketed more for speeding. My Bad. Was I driving when I was tired? I Should have slept on the side of the road. Am I guy that falls into certain demographics? I should have picked my friends and interests more carefully.
No matter how good of a driver I am, the more information the Insurance Company has, the more excuses it can find to NOT to cover me, ESPECIALLY those that my behavior can't change.
The same goes for medical insurance. I don't want my insurance company to say "well, your great grandfather and grandfather both had heart attacks, so you're at a higher risk. You're Jewish, so you're more likely to get certain diseases. You're short, so you'll more than likely have back and knee troubles. BTW, being short, you're off the far end of our height/weight charts, so you're obviously overweight and therefore to blame for your own bad health, see you next life.
If I need to drive over the speed limit in order to sail through the green lights, then all the police need to do is park a cruiser and catch folks sailing through. Instant Income.
It all depends on what they(*) are managing your traffic flow for. Some places would probably design the system for "increased" gridlock, as it would, in theory, mean safer driving. Some places would design it for maximum throughput, on the theory that the less time a driver spends at an intersection, the less time they have to get in an accident.
(*)Yes, this is the mysterious They who set fashions, determine the ratings of TV shows, decide what's cool, and all the rest. Wear your Tinfoil Hat when reading this Post (wink)
I agree. So why didn't the book cover this? It seems to be a "history of T$R products," instead of a collection of D&D's influences on (and reactions to) the RPG gaming industry.
Of course, that would be "30 years" of Fantasy Gaming, maybe, and not a way to sell the back catalog of WotC Merchandise.
The whole book has a metaplot that's about how, supposedly: Young Billy Goldman's father read this fantastic adventure to him, and when he was older, he gave a copy to his child to read. The Child was unimpressed. Later on, he looked at it and realized that his father had only read him "the good parts," so he "wrote" the "edited" version of the story and got it published.
Great Meta-story, if completely false...
Anyways, the "asides" about what he "edited from the original" are, indeed, utterly uninteresting to kids, and often funny to adults.
1. And now I'm seeing the Bush girls in the Princess Leia outfits (one in white w/hair buns, one in the chain mail bikini).
2. We've already seen from the movies that Yoda's facts are clearly up his ass as regards the Sith. Otherwise, Count Dooku wouldn't be able to claim the title of Darth Sidious, now could he? Or are we assuming that Dooku unlocked all his Force Powers in the 8 or so years since Episode 1, and in the same time, Obi-Wan barely learned anything? Maybe Dooku used a script to help him level faster....
Yeah, she got that way from mastering her powers. But she just as easily could have gotten that way from any other skill, normal or super, that she had learned to use.
SPOILER ALERT
There are a number of ways, with those powers, that she could have "tricked" her way through that scene. A quick force field causing Tony to "bump" into her. Invisible spying to learn that he didn't really like movies, but loved, say, bicycles, and then asking to go bike riding with him. Both Invisibility and Force Fields to bump a rival girl into the mud so that she's the most attractive girl there.
But the movie didn't go there, which I like. She didn't have to use her powers to get a date with the guy. An thematic argument could be made that her powers are all about avoidance of contact, and mastery over them let her know when to use avoidance and when to allow contact, but that's a little deep for a Slashdot discussion, ya think? And Elastigirl and Dash come out the worse for wear in that discussion.
Syndrome: They were gadgets, but a Radio Controlled Robot isn't that cool. People on Battlebots build RC robots, just not on that scale. But he could have ripped it apart with his "Zero point" energy, or attacked it with a stickyball gun, or some other gizmo. Heck, knowing it's AI programming could give him a boost. But he didn't want to actually fight it, and risk anything. He kicked it, and then sent signals to disable it. He faked the fight. Very unSuper.
Excepting, of course, the "backdoor draft" of automatically re-enlisting Nat. Guard and other troops when their tours are finished, because we are in a state of active war right now. The "War on Terror" indeed.
I'm terrorfied, how about you?
If you want the Great Wealth or the Great Power rewards, then you need to use the skills that will get you to those rewards, the aforementioned ass-kissing and nut-kicking. Are those opposed skills to ass-kicking and nut-licking?
Success, on the other hand, is a generic word. It means achievement of the goal. I can acheive success in my goal of building a model rocket without putting NASA out of business. If I want to outdo NASA, I better start working on the X-Prize (or whatever the next stage is called). Choose your goals carefully, because with effort, you will reach them.
That said, there are enough Pointy-Haired Bosses and Paris Hiltons that make my statement pretty much Ivory Tower Nonsense. YMMV.
Potential Spoilerage I'd like to point out that Violet achieved her reward by being confident, assertive, and, well, cool. She didn't need to use her powers at all for that scene.
And I point out that Syndrome didn't use any nifto keen gadgets in his plan to defeat the robot, he tried to rig the contest with the gauntlet.
And, if I read it right, it uses Euler angles to do the transforms, not angle/axis or quaternions. It's obviously flawed!
Actually, the patent might stand up on Hardware issues. While the method of transforms is basic matrix math (and has been around pretty much since Descartes invented the Cartesian plane), the idea of putting a "graphics card" into a computer was, IIRC, revolutionary in 1988. I remember that you had to change your whole monitor if you wanted to go from EGA to VGA, but the beige box was untouched.
The hard part comes in defining *all* the things. You need to define addition, equality, and you assume (or define) discrete units.
For non-maths examples, if I am singing a song, and someone has a harmonizing melody, and we sing at the same time ("adding") them, we do not have two discrete songs, but only one song.
Similarily, if I add one leg, one arm, one torso, etc, I will not get a person, no matter how many body parts I stitch together.
(Dr. V. Frankenstein's work notwithstanding)
What makes "1+1=2" important, to me, is that as long as I define what I mean by "1", "+", "=", and "2", then "1+1=2" will always be true. I won't get 1+1=3 tomorrow, or get 1+1=0 because I'm in the US and not Turkey.
Your identity can be copied, damaged and inconvenienced. Technically, I suppose the crime would be "Reputation Theft," but that's not as cool sounding as "Identity Theft."
Slashdot Mirror
True, individuals can succeed where genders as group fail. But how much harder do we, as society, make it? How many barriers do we add without meaning to?
(You're right, LWATCDR. I think I'm replying more to the entire debate than to just your post. Sorry about that.)
If I was the only girl showing up in a Calculus classroom full of guys who believed that "girls can't do math?" How would I choose any of them as a study partner? What if the _teacher_ believed_ that girls can't do math? The teacher certainly wouldn't consider me a normal girl. And what if I wanted to talk to my friends about what she learned in class that day? Would I feel like a freak for liking math?
I think it would take an extraordinary person to go through that day after day. And I want to let the ordinary girl who is good at math to be good at math. She shouldn't need to be Wonder Woman to study calculus.
And the truth (as it exists now) is automatically better? Try telling your SigOther that you've
noticed they've gained a pound or two.
Living a lifestyle to match biology is what animals do. That path (albeit at the extreme end) leads right to Luddites, Tree-Huggers, and anti-technology. Modifying our environment is what humans do. We're tool users. We need to use our tools to reduce our discomfort until natural selection kicks in (in the next 10000 years or so)
And I'm certainly not saying that all Science is good, and that we don't need some level of environmentalism in our science, before we pollute and/or blow the world up. I don't have all the answers. I vote against my evolution. I vote for progress.
Now, I'm not saying that the US/World is ready for public gene therapies and tinkering with babies to make superbabies yet. Hell, we in the US elected a president who can't say "nuclear." I'm aware I'm not the majority. I certainly don't want to give anybody else control over what "normal" is.
But I think we should be trying to lower gender barriers, not raise them. Even if we're doing it unconsciously.
Well, maybe where you are the men can't feed babies, but my local supermarket (in the US) stocks formula.
/Quick thinkers careers that benefits those traits, and gives Planners / Relationship thinkers positions where those skills are needed.
It *IS* bad to say "Men are better at hunting, and women are better at protecting the cave," because I feel we need to promote civilization.
I don't need to hunt for my food, and my fiancee doesn't need to protect the townhouse against predators or a hostile environment. Hell, I don't need to mow my own grass!
And while my biology might indicate certain trends, I certainly don't want to create institutions (like, say, education or economics) that cater to the biology of a caveman. I want to encourage biological traits that will support my modern society (or an idealized form of it).
I want to promote a society that gives Spatial
There have been at least 3000 years of socialization based on a caveman's biology, with a few exceptions (From Hapsheput to Hilary Clinton). I don't think that in a quarter century we've managed to recreate society to reflect our still-changing values. Heck, I don't think that in 2105 (a century) we'll stop trying to socialize Men into Hunters and Women into Nurturers.
But I think we should.
I'm a big fan of buying beige Boxes and cans of spray paint, myself. Considering how easy it is to do, I'm suprised each time my friends show me their new computers, and they're still beige.
What bothers me is: Where did QA fail so badly?
What went so wrong that by the time they were ready to try a launch over an actual ocean
(ie, have the missile be non-recoverable), that
there was a catastrophic failure so bad that
they can't tell where the glitch was?
I understand that with any test, there's a chance of failure. But it seems that those guys on TV building pumpkin-chuckers with junkyard parts would do a better job of working tests, or at least failures that tell you what went wrong.
Early cultures = usually patrilinear. So Hebrew girls married to Egyptian men have Egyptian babies. Jewish descent is matrilinear NOW, and some scholars believe it switched from patrilinear to matrilinear during (and because of) the Egyptian years.
The big argument was that in times of trouble, the Hebrews might join with the non-Egyptians, and overthrow the Pharaohs. So if you kill the potential warriors, you lay the seeds of...
... the fierce Jewish Mother-In-Law. I think Fran Drescher's voice can be harnessed as a sonic weapon like in the first DUNE movie!
Sorry, rambled a bit there!
All this scholarship is, of course, complicated by the complex subjects of "Biblical Archeology," and the whole lack of evidence for the Exodus story, etc, etc, Cross cultural myths, etc etc. YMMV
Except that it's not like a lottery, because you can't decide not to play in some places. I don't have insurance to restore MY life, it's to restore the life of my potential victims, even if there aren't any.
The Insurance laws here in Red State Ohio, USA, say (IANAL) that since people get in accidents a lot, and a lot of people are poor, that the odds are very good that if somebody causes an accident and hits you, they might be too poor to pay your repair bills. Therefore, everybody MUST buy insurance, which will pay the repair bills when you hit somebody and can't pay the bills because you have a crappy job.
Insurance companies have sort of been forced into being a public service. OF course, they get no tax revenues for being a public service. Their profit comes from maximizing income (rates) and minimizing costs (payouts)
So My Insurance company now has a mandate to look for whatever reason it can claim in court to NOT pay out, to cover my mistakes. Was I 1 MPH over the limit? I wasn't following the rules: no payout. Was I driving a red car? Red cars are ticketed more for speeding. My Bad. Was I driving when I was tired? I Should have slept on the side of the road. Am I guy that falls into certain demographics? I should have picked my friends and interests more carefully.
No matter how good of a driver I am, the more information the Insurance Company has, the more excuses it can find to NOT to cover me, ESPECIALLY those that my behavior can't change.
The same goes for medical insurance. I don't want my insurance company to say "well, your great grandfather and grandfather both had heart attacks, so you're at a higher risk. You're Jewish, so you're more likely to get certain diseases. You're short, so you'll more than likely have back and knee troubles. BTW, being short, you're off the far end of our height/weight charts, so you're obviously overweight and therefore to blame for your own bad health, see you next life.
Follow the $$$.
If I need to drive over the speed limit in order to sail through the green lights, then all the police need to do is park a cruiser and catch folks sailing through. Instant Income.
It all depends on what they(*) are managing your traffic flow for. Some places would probably design the system for "increased" gridlock, as it would, in theory, mean safer driving. Some places would design it for maximum throughput, on the theory that the less time a driver spends at an intersection, the less time they have to get in an accident.
(*)Yes, this is the mysterious They who set fashions, determine the ratings of TV shows, decide what's cool, and all the rest. Wear your Tinfoil Hat when reading this Post (wink)
I agree. So why didn't the book cover this? It seems to be a "history of T$R products," instead of a collection of D&D's influences on (and reactions to) the RPG gaming industry.
Of course, that would be "30 years" of Fantasy Gaming, maybe, and not a way to sell the back catalog of WotC Merchandise.
Check out "Princess Bride" by William Goldman.
The whole book has a metaplot that's about how, supposedly:
Young Billy Goldman's father read this fantastic adventure to him, and when he was older, he gave a copy to his child to read. The Child was unimpressed. Later on, he looked at it and realized that his father had only read him "the good parts," so he "wrote" the "edited" version of the story and got it published.
Great Meta-story, if completely false...
Anyways, the "asides" about what he "edited from the original" are, indeed, utterly uninteresting to kids, and often funny to adults.
1. And now I'm seeing the Bush girls in the Princess Leia outfits (one in white w/hair buns, one in the chain mail bikini).
2. We've already seen from the movies that Yoda's facts are clearly up his ass as regards the Sith.
Otherwise, Count Dooku wouldn't be able to claim the title of Darth Sidious, now could he?
Or are we assuming that Dooku unlocked all his Force Powers in the 8 or so years since Episode 1, and in the same time, Obi-Wan barely learned
anything? Maybe Dooku used a script to help him level faster....
Yeah, she got that way from mastering her powers.
But she just as easily could have gotten that way from any other skill, normal or super, that she had learned to use.
SPOILER ALERT
There are a number of ways, with those powers, that she could have "tricked" her way through that scene. A quick force field causing Tony to "bump" into her. Invisible spying to learn that he didn't really like movies, but loved, say, bicycles, and then asking to go bike riding with him. Both Invisibility and Force Fields to bump a rival girl into the mud so that she's the most attractive girl there.
But the movie didn't go there, which I like. She didn't have to use her powers to get a date with the guy.
An thematic argument could be made that her powers are all about avoidance of contact, and mastery over them let her know when to use avoidance and when to allow contact, but that's a little deep for a Slashdot discussion, ya think? And Elastigirl and Dash come out the worse for wear in that discussion.
Syndrome:
They were gadgets, but a Radio Controlled Robot isn't that cool. People on Battlebots build RC robots, just not on that scale.
But he could have ripped it apart with his "Zero point" energy, or attacked it with a stickyball gun, or some other gizmo. Heck, knowing it's AI programming could give him a boost.
But he didn't want to actually fight it, and risk anything. He kicked it, and then sent signals to disable it. He faked the fight. Very unSuper.
Excepting, of course, the "backdoor draft" of automatically re-enlisting Nat. Guard and other troops when their tours are finished, because we are in a state of active war right now. The "War on Terror" indeed. I'm terrorfied, how about you?
I agree with you... to a point.
If you want the Great Wealth or the Great Power rewards, then you need to use the skills that will get you to those rewards, the aforementioned ass-kissing and nut-kicking. Are those opposed skills to ass-kicking and nut-licking?
Success, on the other hand, is a generic word. It means achievement of the goal. I can acheive success in my goal of building a model rocket without putting NASA out of business. If I want to outdo NASA, I better start working on the X-Prize (or whatever the next stage is called).
Choose your goals carefully, because with effort, you will reach them.
That said, there are enough Pointy-Haired Bosses and Paris Hiltons that make my statement pretty much Ivory Tower Nonsense. YMMV.
Potential Spoilerage
I'd like to point out that Violet achieved her reward by being confident, assertive, and, well, cool. She didn't need to use her powers at all for that scene.
And I point out that Syndrome didn't use any nifto keen gadgets in his plan to defeat the robot, he tried to rig the contest with the gauntlet.
Point!Point!Point!
And, if I read it right, it uses Euler angles to do the transforms, not angle/axis or quaternions. It's obviously flawed! Actually, the patent might stand up on Hardware issues. While the method of transforms is basic matrix math (and has been around pretty much since Descartes invented the Cartesian plane), the idea of putting a "graphics card" into a computer was, IIRC, revolutionary in 1988. I remember that you had to change your whole monitor if you wanted to go from EGA to VGA, but the beige box was untouched.
I want an Adrian Barbeau-bot!
And, tiger-bots for everyone.
Dr. Quinn, get on that right away!
The hard part comes in defining *all* the things. You need to define addition, equality, and you assume (or define) discrete units. For non-maths examples, if I am singing a song, and someone has a harmonizing melody, and we sing at the same time ("adding") them, we do not have two discrete songs, but only one song. Similarily, if I add one leg, one arm, one torso, etc, I will not get a person, no matter how many body parts I stitch together. (Dr. V. Frankenstein's work notwithstanding) What makes "1+1=2" important, to me, is that as long as I define what I mean by "1", "+", "=", and "2", then "1+1=2" will always be true. I won't get 1+1=3 tomorrow, or get 1+1=0 because I'm in the US and not Turkey.
Your identity can be copied, damaged and inconvenienced. Technically, I suppose the crime would be "Reputation Theft," but that's not as cool sounding as "Identity Theft."