Maybe, but if he's not bugging me about it, why should I care?
However, I've noticed that most of the geek guys who have been attracted to me in the past weren't really attracted to me, just some idealized version of me... and when they finally realized that I was just a regular socially-inept and rather unattractive geek girl, they stopped bothering me and found someone more suitable.
Maybe this is just because I'm not particularly attractive (bad skin, bad hair, small breasts, etc.), but I've never had that problem.
Ok, so there were a couple of guys in highschool who remained obsessed with me after I turned them down, but they weren't particularly creepy about it, and I was at least as bad back when I was lonely and desperate for even a tiny bit of male attention, and the vast majority of people manage to grow out of that phase sometime in university if not before.
I've found that guys (geek and non geek) will, by and large, at least grudgingly accept it if I turn them down firmly. It helps if I'm willing to be friends with them too -- often the best way to cure a guy of his obsession is to let him see who and what I actually am. I'm no innocent and perfect angel: I'm just a regular geek with plenty of faults of my own.
We just have to make sure that we remember that these are indeed averages. I am one of those female counterexamples of which you speak, and it gets kind of irritating when people act as if I'm overcoming great hardships by going into computer science... even though I'm really just a regular geek (yes, complete with bad social skills and a worse fashion sense) who happens to have a second X chromosome instead of a Y chromosome.
I think we're a lot better off just avoiding/ignoring the gender issues and letting people go into whatever field they want. Girls like me will end up in computer science because that's where we want to be, and "average" girls (along with "average" non-geek guys, for that matter) will not.
When I code, it's certainly not the mathematical part of my brain that I'm using -- I view it more as an art. The similarities between writing a program and writing an essay are just so obvious to me that I can't understand why so many people refuse to acknowledge them. Sure, for some people coding is purely mathematical, but a lot of us really don't do it that way. To me, it requires too much creativity (even when much of the structure is pre-defined) to think of it as anything other than a linguistic exercise.
Hmm... I'm not overly ambitious, but I want to live comfortably and do work that I enjoy, so I intend to strive for whatever kind of job will let me do that.
Currently, I intend to become a programmer, ideally one with a fair amount of influence, on a project that I find fun and interesting. I like to code, and I'd rather do something enjoyable than get promoted and end up doing boring paperwork/administration for the rest of my life, no matter how good the pay is.
My alternate plan is to go on for a masters and maybe even a phD and do academic research (and/or become a prof, but I'm not sure how I feel about having to fail people and ruin their lives), but I may never do that if I find a fun coding job first.
All my friends are male, and although some of them will jokingly hit on me from time to time, I have a sense of humour so it doesn't bother me. In fact, I'd rather have a guy make inappropriate jokes around me, as he would with his male friends, than guard his tongue purely because I'm a woman.
I'd rather see programs that reach out to kids in general, not just girls. Maybe I'm just weird, but the only time that I feel discriminated against is when somebody assumes that just because I have a vagina, I need some kind of special treatment and I can't possibly succeed on my own. It's like... "Oh, you're just a girl. Don't worry, I understand that you can't do that hard math! Here, you can do an easy course instead!"
My highschool actually tried to set up an all-girls programming class one year. I doubt any girls signed up. The whole concept was incredibly sexist and smacked of segregation -- the implication was that us poor stupid little girls just couldn't handle having big smart intimidating boys around, and that we needed extra time and attention if we were ever to learn the terribly difficult concepts involved in programming "Hello World" in Pascal.
If people want to reach out to girls, they need to reach out to boys too. You can't teach people about equality by treating either gender as if it needs special attention.
Oh, and incidentally, I do hate math, I just don't think it would be fair for the powers that be to allow me to do softer courses because of my gender. I'd rather suffer through calculus, possibly even failing it (which is quite likely given how unprepared I am for my final tomorrow morning), than do a bird course and graduate with a degree that is somehow less valid than that of a male student.
People keep telling me that I'm being denied equal access to something (I don't even know what) in computer science... but I have yet to see any such denial.
I have never seen any "No Girls Allowed" signs on classroom doors, I have never had a mark taken off for anything other than a mistake, and I have never even been excluded from a predominantly male study group or other social gathering because of my gender. What more can I ask for? I'm treated as an equal, and the presence of dangly bits between the legs of most of my professors certainly isn't enough to magically make me unable to get a degree or succeed in the field.
I'm sure that at least a few girls at some universities do get discriminated against, but that doesn't mean that it's happening everywhere. Perhaps we should start dealing with the isolated incidents rather than scaring girls away from the field with tales of glass ceilings and rampant sexism.
Calc 3 certainly is. I have a final on it tomorrow morning, and I can barely do the practice questions.
I don't think that has anything to do with me being female, though. I find math hard because... well... it just is hard for me. I can never remember the formulae, I make stupid arithmetic errors all over the place, and I keep deriving when I should integrate (and vise versa). I know plenty of girls, many of whom are also comp sci majors, who find the same material easy, and plenty of guys who I can count on to share my pain.
*raises hand* ME ME ME!
Ok, so I'm not a professional yet, but I enjoy my programming courses and generally get good marks in them. That's gotta count from something, right?
Unfortunately, it also goes the other way around -- if a male geek is just ineptly trying to be friendly, a female co-worker might misintepret it as interest. Because, y'know, if a guy is trying to talk to a girl as an equal or even as a friend, he obviously just wants in her pants! Especially if she's ugly and he's already found himself a cute geek girl. Yeah, really.
Of course, if the girl has any kind of brain in her, she'll just talk to the guy, say "Sorry, I'm not interested" and whether he was actually interested or not, that will be the end of that. It's always worked for me anyway (when dealing with both geek and non-geek guys).
One thing that I'd like to know is why there seem to be quite strong racial elements to the gender gap as well. I'm in Computer Science at UBC, and there are a lot of girls in my classes... but at least 90% of them are Chinese. It seems that among the Asian students, there's barely any gender gap, but female students of other races (eg. myself -- a white girl of British descent) are much more rare.
The reason I'm asking this is that the Chinese (and the inhabitants of at least a few of the other East Asian countries) seem to have figured out something that us Westerners haven't. The only explanation that I can think of is that the Chinese (at least appear to) obsess less over what gender dominates what field.
I don't know about other girls, but I get kinda irritated when people, be they men or women, exclaim "Good for you!" or "You go girl!" when I mention my major, as if I'm overcoming some incredible hardship by just -- get this -- interacting to guys and *gasp* doing my coursework without female encouragement!
I also get sick of people going on and on about how comp sci is desperately lacking in women and it's masculine and discrimination is rampant and hard for girls to get into and blah blah blah... and then they wonder why the hell girls are being driven away from the subject "despite" all that advertising. I mean, seriously: do you think you could get more men into nursing by saying something like "Nursing: not just for girls anymore! Not girly at all! You won't be laughed at for doing it! Trust us!"? So why does anyone think that strategy would work on women?
Oh, and incidentally, as a 3rd year student, I have never been harassed, excluded or otherwise treated in a negative manner based on my gender. I have never felt that I was intruding into any kind of boys-only club, and I have never found myself wishing that I had more female friends to talk to. Oh, and my grades are pretty decent too (with the notable exception of math, but I've always been weak in that area).
Dude, I'm a 3rd year computer science student, I know how to network 4 computers (I've got 3 at my disposal right now), set up a high speed connection and use wifi... but if someone told me to make my network secure, I wouldn't even know where to start. Well, I suppose Step 1 would be pulling up Google, but I'd still be out of my depth -- all I know about networks (beyond what I need to know to get through a basic network setup wizard) is that they have layers and... uh... stuff. Something about connecting things... and sending packets that look kinda like mRNA when you draw them. And opening sockets has something to do with it as well. I can do that in C.
In any case, the guy may still be guilty, but I'm just saying that basic knowledge of some aspects of computing does not necessarily mean that he has ANY knowledge of network security, and he may well consider himself a novice in part because of his lack of knowledge in that area.
Unfortunately, with only a couple of spaceflights per year... the tech really is relatively untested. I mean, how safe would you feel about your car if automobiles as a whole had only been tested in their usual working environment at a couple of times per year since the 60s?
Of course, there's also the issue that the current vehicles are really too old for continued use, particularly those intended for human transport/habitation, but what I'm trying to say is that we're still at the beginning of the space technology wave. A few decades really isn't enough to learn all about a totally new environment and perfect technology that's still in its infancy, and it certainly isn't enough time to properly test that technology if we can only use it infrequently.
Singing AND dancing for science
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Singing Science
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· Score: 1
In highschool, my extremely flamboyant chemistry teacher used to dance around the classroom. He called it the water molecule dance -- he'd barely move at all for the frozen part, bop around more merrily for liquid, and be all over the place for gas.
And while it isn't exactly a real science, one of my computer science profs has been known to sing "Lambda Bound" to the tune of "Homeward Bound" and has promised us that he will sing us some other unspecified song by the end of the year, presumably at the party he's holding after the final.
... probably because it would be hard to pick just one blog.
There are literally thousands of bot-driven spam blogs out there that just steal articles from other sources, be they blogs or mainstream news articles, and post them as their own to benefit from ad revenue.
Plagiarism of other kinds is amusing to find sometimes, though. I remember doing a project on Hayao Miyazaki when I was in highschool. I found what appeared to be a pretty legit (based on other sources that I'd read) biography of him online... and then found it again, and again and again on numerous different legit-looking sites, all credited to different authors. I even found one that was translated sentence by sentence into French. Needless to say, it made writing my Works Cited section difficult.
How do we know these are mutations? Well, it's actually quite simple: we have seen them arise from parents (or a single parent cell in the case of bacteria) who do NOT possess the mutation. In my second bacterial example in particular, where the bacteria are induced to undo a man-made mutation, we KNOW that every bacterium has a broken version of a gene, and the suspected mutagen's job is to mutate it back the way it was.
We also know the sequences of many mutated and non-mutated genes. We know what mutations are likely (based on extensive observation and experimentation), and sure enough, they can and do occur.
There are actually three varieties of commonly recognized mutations: nonsense, missense, and silent. In a silent mutation, there is no observable change. The gene sequence is modified slightly, but the modified section still codes for the same amino acid. In missense, the amino acid changes, but the protein produced still mostly works. In nonsense, the modified nucleotide changes a codon to a STOP codon, truncating the amino acid and greatly reducing its chances of functioning correctly.
Sickle Cell Anemia is a missense mutation -- according to this site, "the replacement of A by T at the 17th nucleotide of the gene for the beta chain of hemoglobin changes the codon GAG (for glutamic acid) to GTG (which encodes valine). Thus the 6th amino acid in the chain becomes valine instead of glutamic acid."
Yep, that's right, ONE replacement is the cause of this genetic disease, and replacements really ain't that rare. There are plenty of commonly-found mutagens in our environment that do that kind of thing, in addition to good old radiation from the sun. So yes, we know it's a mutation, we even know what KIND of mutation it is and what mutated, we can prove that it's possible, and we know that it is indeed likely that it has arisen in at least a few people whose parents did not carry the gene. Of course, it probably entered the human race very early on, given how simple a change it requires, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a mutation.
Actually, the modern chicken, while far from "perfect", is supremely adapted to its environment, perhaps moreso than most other animals.
Now, before you write me off as a raving lunatic, hear me out. In order for a species to be "well suited for its environment", it needs to be able to live long enough to breed and thus pass on its genes. That's it, that's all. It doesn't need to be able to live well, live long, prosper, or do any of that. It only needs to avoid going extinct. That's it, that's all.
What characteristics make it so adapted, then? Simple: chickens are tasty, stupid, easily domesticated, easily bred in captivity, and tough enough to survive horrific farm conditions. That's right, the modern domestic chicken is adapted specifically to the farm environment... and there, it thrives.
When I was in elementary school, I had a project that involved drawing a bird skeleton -- I think I was making a poster, and as a burgeoning artist, I wanted to try copying a picture in a bird book that I had. It took an awfully long time, but by the end of it, I was quite familiar with the bone structure. I don't remember what kind of bird it was, but probably a peregrine falcon since I know I did a project on them.
A few days later, I went to the local nature museum where they have a dinosaur exhibit. I'm sure you can imagine my reaction when I looked at a tyrannosaurus rex skeleton and saw almost the exact same bone structure, but thousands of times the size. The hips, the breast bone... the similarities are so obvious, and yet they seem so impossible when you look at a chickadee or sparrow and try to imagine its ancestors.
Incidentally, as far as I know, the current theories state that not all dinosaurs are ancestors of modern birds. The bird-hipped ones are almost certainly related to 'em (as the name suggests), but the reptile-hipped dinosaurs are another branch. I may be wrong, though. I'm no paleontologist, just a biology geek who reads too much.
How's this then: what if the chance of the first piece falling into place was incredibly slim, but with each successive correctly-placed piece, the probability of the next piece correctly falling into place became higher? What if there were billions and billions of proto-cars, and the only ones who got to the next step were the ones who already had previous steps right? This changes the probability a fair bit, doesn't it?
The theory of evolution does not suggest that it all happened at once, not does it suggest that nature got it right the first time, or even that it was one simple linear progression from ooze to human being. The fossil record is littered with failures, and even our own bodies show plenty of "false starts".
While the majority of mutations are indeed bad, there are plenty that are relatively harmless.
For example, have you ever seen a cat (or other creature) with extra toes? That's an example of a minor mutation which, although it does no good that I know of, also does no harm to the creature. There are plenty of others like this as well, as well as mutations that cause only a small amount of harm but provide the mutated creature with some sort of protection against death or disease. In this latter category you get things like sickle cell anemia, which is incredibly common in parts of Africa. This is an unpleasant condition to have if you get the homozygous form, but in the heterozygous form, it increases your chances of surviving malaria, so many of the people who don't have it die, and the mutated gene gets passed on. Incidentally, this mutation occurs in other populations, but to my knowledge, it is only beneficial in places where malaria is or was common, so it is only prevalent in those locations.
Another form of beneficial mutation occurs in bacteria all the time. I assume you've heard of drug resistant bacteria -- do you know how that happens? Basically, if an antibiotic is applied to a colony of millions of bacteria and even one just happens to have randomly mutated in a way that stops the antibiotic, every bacterium will die except for the resistant one. Given how fast bacteria reproduce, it doesn't take long before even a statistically improbable mutation is pretty much guaranteed to happen... and usually, it does. Next thing you know, you have a whole colony of resistant bacteria because any who lack that mutation just die.
Here's another example of beneficial mutations involving bacteria: when scientists test potential mutagens, one way of doing it is to genetically engineer a batch of bacteria that lacks the ability to produce some essential nutrient. Such bacteria can only be grown on a special medium (one which contains the nutrient that they cannot produce) and will immediately die in any other environment. These genetically engineered bacteria are then brought into contact with the potential mutagen, and the colonies are transferred to a normal growth medium. Then the scientists count the number of colonies that survive. They're seeing whether the potential mutagen has the ability to reverse their genetic engineering... and if the tested compound -is- a mutagen, they will almost certainly see bacteria growing happily in their new home.
So yes, it -is- possible to have a mutation specifically where and when you need it because if it doesn't occur, the population may well die out. We only see the lucky ones who were able to mutate in the "right" way... the ones who didn't are dead.
Of course, in this case, it'd be awfully hard to actually play D&D without a Player's Handbook at the very least. The course seems to be basically a guide to reading and understanding the PHB, so we can hardly fault them for saying "... and you might want to buy this book."
Granted, I use my DM's extras in my weekly game, but that's only because my own books are currently on the other side of the country.
I agree with you, but I'm not sure who should be allowed to define pornography. The US legal definition is, as I recall, largely grounded in the community's morals. However, with the internet a global phenomenon, there are an awful lot of communities with many different moral outlooks.
It would be nice if there was a way to objectively define such things, but off hand, I can think of a number of issues that would probably be disputed within North America, and there are certainly more that would affect the rest of the world. For example, there's homosexuality. To a conservative Christian, even a picture of two men kissing might be labelled pornographic content, whereas to others, it's just a kiss. Nudity is another issue -- how much must be shown to make a picture pornographic, and where do we draw the line between artistic and pornographic nudity? We can say "I know it when I see it" all we want, but in this case, -we- aren't going to be the only people seeing and judging this material.
Re:I would agree with this
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Hooked On The Web
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Porn may be addictive, but this is most likely at least in part because (most) humans are predisposed to want sex. Before taking heroin or some other drug, we are VERY unlikely to have any physical or psychological need for it, but this isn't the case with sex -- I've wanted it on some level since I hit puberty at age 10, although I didn't seek either pornography or the real thing until I was an adult.
Also, you mention the evils of pornography as "desensitizations, misrepresentations of sexuality, corrosion of relationships, etc.", but I would argue that there are some issues with this representations. Desensitizing myself to sex and nudity was one of the best things that ever happened to me. As an amateur artist, I occasionally draw nudes, and I have been much happier since I stopped feeling guilty for merely drawing little nippley dots on cartoon breasts or feeling dirty when I caught a glimpse of another woman changing in a swimming pool changeroom. Yes, I was indeed a prude in my youth, and online depictions of nudity, both sexual and nonsexual, helped me get over it.
As for the misrepresentations of sexuality, that is very subjective: the "proper" representation of sexuality will depend on who you ask -- a conservative Christian might say that porn misrepresents sex as an act of carnal pleasure, not reproduction, a feminist might say that it misrepresents sex as a process of objectifying women, and there are so many other views on what sex and sexuality are or should be. Since the internet allows us to see so many conflicting views, for any piece of pornographic material, you can guarantee that somebody is going to view it as a "misrepresentation".
I will not deny that porn can corrode relationships, but it isn't always because porn is innately a bad influence -- if there is a pre-existing communication problem in a relationship, one partner may well be aghast upon discovering that the other partner looks at porn on occasion, and that might be enough to end the relationship, but it isn't because porn is some horrible horrible thing. If porn is, however, a true addiction (ie. the person cannot help him/herself, and the porn viewing takes up an excessive amount of time), then it may indeed put stress on even a healthy relationship, and it should be viewed as similar to any other harmful addiction.
Note that I'm not addicted to porn, nor am I even a particularly big fan of it, whether it's of the online or offline variety -- I'm just sick of being told over and over again that porn should offend me as a woman. As an artist, I'm sick of being told that a naked body is an awful, horrible thing, and that it gets even worse in certain poses. As a net geek, I'm sick of being told that the internet is enhancing "vices" purely because it allows a wider range of information than some people are comfortable with.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe, but if he's not bugging me about it, why should I care?
However, I've noticed that most of the geek guys who have been attracted to me in the past weren't really attracted to me, just some idealized version of me... and when they finally realized that I was just a regular socially-inept and rather unattractive geek girl, they stopped bothering me and found someone more suitable.
Maybe this is just because I'm not particularly attractive (bad skin, bad hair, small breasts, etc.), but I've never had that problem.
Ok, so there were a couple of guys in highschool who remained obsessed with me after I turned them down, but they weren't particularly creepy about it, and I was at least as bad back when I was lonely and desperate for even a tiny bit of male attention, and the vast majority of people manage to grow out of that phase sometime in university if not before.
I've found that guys (geek and non geek) will, by and large, at least grudgingly accept it if I turn them down firmly. It helps if I'm willing to be friends with them too -- often the best way to cure a guy of his obsession is to let him see who and what I actually am. I'm no innocent and perfect angel: I'm just a regular geek with plenty of faults of my own.
We just have to make sure that we remember that these are indeed averages. I am one of those female counterexamples of which you speak, and it gets kind of irritating when people act as if I'm overcoming great hardships by going into computer science... even though I'm really just a regular geek (yes, complete with bad social skills and a worse fashion sense) who happens to have a second X chromosome instead of a Y chromosome.
I think we're a lot better off just avoiding/ignoring the gender issues and letting people go into whatever field they want. Girls like me will end up in computer science because that's where we want to be, and "average" girls (along with "average" non-geek guys, for that matter) will not.
I definitely agree with you on that.
When I code, it's certainly not the mathematical part of my brain that I'm using -- I view it more as an art. The similarities between writing a program and writing an essay are just so obvious to me that I can't understand why so many people refuse to acknowledge them. Sure, for some people coding is purely mathematical, but a lot of us really don't do it that way. To me, it requires too much creativity (even when much of the structure is pre-defined) to think of it as anything other than a linguistic exercise.
Hmm... I'm not overly ambitious, but I want to live comfortably and do work that I enjoy, so I intend to strive for whatever kind of job will let me do that.
Currently, I intend to become a programmer, ideally one with a fair amount of influence, on a project that I find fun and interesting. I like to code, and I'd rather do something enjoyable than get promoted and end up doing boring paperwork/administration for the rest of my life, no matter how good the pay is.
My alternate plan is to go on for a masters and maybe even a phD and do academic research (and/or become a prof, but I'm not sure how I feel about having to fail people and ruin their lives), but I may never do that if I find a fun coding job first.
Does that make any sense?
Or just not worry about it :P
All my friends are male, and although some of them will jokingly hit on me from time to time, I have a sense of humour so it doesn't bother me. In fact, I'd rather have a guy make inappropriate jokes around me, as he would with his male friends, than guard his tongue purely because I'm a woman.
I'd rather see programs that reach out to kids in general, not just girls. Maybe I'm just weird, but the only time that I feel discriminated against is when somebody assumes that just because I have a vagina, I need some kind of special treatment and I can't possibly succeed on my own. It's like... "Oh, you're just a girl. Don't worry, I understand that you can't do that hard math! Here, you can do an easy course instead!"
My highschool actually tried to set up an all-girls programming class one year. I doubt any girls signed up. The whole concept was incredibly sexist and smacked of segregation -- the implication was that us poor stupid little girls just couldn't handle having big smart intimidating boys around, and that we needed extra time and attention if we were ever to learn the terribly difficult concepts involved in programming "Hello World" in Pascal.
If people want to reach out to girls, they need to reach out to boys too. You can't teach people about equality by treating either gender as if it needs special attention.
Oh, and incidentally, I do hate math, I just don't think it would be fair for the powers that be to allow me to do softer courses because of my gender. I'd rather suffer through calculus, possibly even failing it (which is quite likely given how unprepared I am for my final tomorrow morning), than do a bird course and graduate with a degree that is somehow less valid than that of a male student.
People keep telling me that I'm being denied equal access to something (I don't even know what) in computer science... but I have yet to see any such denial.
I have never seen any "No Girls Allowed" signs on classroom doors, I have never had a mark taken off for anything other than a mistake, and I have never even been excluded from a predominantly male study group or other social gathering because of my gender. What more can I ask for? I'm treated as an equal, and the presence of dangly bits between the legs of most of my professors certainly isn't enough to magically make me unable to get a degree or succeed in the field.
I'm sure that at least a few girls at some universities do get discriminated against, but that doesn't mean that it's happening everywhere. Perhaps we should start dealing with the isolated incidents rather than scaring girls away from the field with tales of glass ceilings and rampant sexism.
Calc 3 certainly is. I have a final on it tomorrow morning, and I can barely do the practice questions.
I don't think that has anything to do with me being female, though. I find math hard because... well... it just is hard for me. I can never remember the formulae, I make stupid arithmetic errors all over the place, and I keep deriving when I should integrate (and vise versa). I know plenty of girls, many of whom are also comp sci majors, who find the same material easy, and plenty of guys who I can count on to share my pain.
*raises hand* ME ME ME! Ok, so I'm not a professional yet, but I enjoy my programming courses and generally get good marks in them. That's gotta count from something, right?
Unfortunately, it also goes the other way around -- if a male geek is just ineptly trying to be friendly, a female co-worker might misintepret it as interest. Because, y'know, if a guy is trying to talk to a girl as an equal or even as a friend, he obviously just wants in her pants! Especially if she's ugly and he's already found himself a cute geek girl. Yeah, really.
Of course, if the girl has any kind of brain in her, she'll just talk to the guy, say "Sorry, I'm not interested" and whether he was actually interested or not, that will be the end of that. It's always worked for me anyway (when dealing with both geek and non-geek guys).
One thing that I'd like to know is why there seem to be quite strong racial elements to the gender gap as well. I'm in Computer Science at UBC, and there are a lot of girls in my classes... but at least 90% of them are Chinese. It seems that among the Asian students, there's barely any gender gap, but female students of other races (eg. myself -- a white girl of British descent) are much more rare.
The reason I'm asking this is that the Chinese (and the inhabitants of at least a few of the other East Asian countries) seem to have figured out something that us Westerners haven't. The only explanation that I can think of is that the Chinese (at least appear to) obsess less over what gender dominates what field.
I don't know about other girls, but I get kinda irritated when people, be they men or women, exclaim "Good for you!" or "You go girl!" when I mention my major, as if I'm overcoming some incredible hardship by just -- get this -- interacting to guys and *gasp* doing my coursework without female encouragement!
I also get sick of people going on and on about how comp sci is desperately lacking in women and it's masculine and discrimination is rampant and hard for girls to get into and blah blah blah... and then they wonder why the hell girls are being driven away from the subject "despite" all that advertising. I mean, seriously: do you think you could get more men into nursing by saying something like "Nursing: not just for girls anymore! Not girly at all! You won't be laughed at for doing it! Trust us!"? So why does anyone think that strategy would work on women?
Oh, and incidentally, as a 3rd year student, I have never been harassed, excluded or otherwise treated in a negative manner based on my gender. I have never felt that I was intruding into any kind of boys-only club, and I have never found myself wishing that I had more female friends to talk to. Oh, and my grades are pretty decent too (with the notable exception of math, but I've always been weak in that area).
It shouldn't, because they didn't donate that money to their own charity -- they donated it to this one.
Dude, I'm a 3rd year computer science student, I know how to network 4 computers (I've got 3 at my disposal right now), set up a high speed connection and use wifi... but if someone told me to make my network secure, I wouldn't even know where to start. Well, I suppose Step 1 would be pulling up Google, but I'd still be out of my depth -- all I know about networks (beyond what I need to know to get through a basic network setup wizard) is that they have layers and... uh... stuff. Something about connecting things... and sending packets that look kinda like mRNA when you draw them. And opening sockets has something to do with it as well. I can do that in C.
In any case, the guy may still be guilty, but I'm just saying that basic knowledge of some aspects of computing does not necessarily mean that he has ANY knowledge of network security, and he may well consider himself a novice in part because of his lack of knowledge in that area.
Unfortunately, with only a couple of spaceflights per year... the tech really is relatively untested. I mean, how safe would you feel about your car if automobiles as a whole had only been tested in their usual working environment at a couple of times per year since the 60s?
Of course, there's also the issue that the current vehicles are really too old for continued use, particularly those intended for human transport/habitation, but what I'm trying to say is that we're still at the beginning of the space technology wave. A few decades really isn't enough to learn all about a totally new environment and perfect technology that's still in its infancy, and it certainly isn't enough time to properly test that technology if we can only use it infrequently.
In highschool, my extremely flamboyant chemistry teacher used to dance around the classroom. He called it the water molecule dance -- he'd barely move at all for the frozen part, bop around more merrily for liquid, and be all over the place for gas. And while it isn't exactly a real science, one of my computer science profs has been known to sing "Lambda Bound" to the tune of "Homeward Bound" and has promised us that he will sing us some other unspecified song by the end of the year, presumably at the party he's holding after the final.
... probably because it would be hard to pick just one blog.
There are literally thousands of bot-driven spam blogs out there that just steal articles from other sources, be they blogs or mainstream news articles, and post them as their own to benefit from ad revenue.
Plagiarism of other kinds is amusing to find sometimes, though. I remember doing a project on Hayao Miyazaki when I was in highschool. I found what appeared to be a pretty legit (based on other sources that I'd read) biography of him online... and then found it again, and again and again on numerous different legit-looking sites, all credited to different authors. I even found one that was translated sentence by sentence into French. Needless to say, it made writing my Works Cited section difficult.
How do we know these are mutations? Well, it's actually quite simple: we have seen them arise from parents (or a single parent cell in the case of bacteria) who do NOT possess the mutation. In my second bacterial example in particular, where the bacteria are induced to undo a man-made mutation, we KNOW that every bacterium has a broken version of a gene, and the suspected mutagen's job is to mutate it back the way it was.
We also know the sequences of many mutated and non-mutated genes. We know what mutations are likely (based on extensive observation and experimentation), and sure enough, they can and do occur.
There are actually three varieties of commonly recognized mutations: nonsense, missense, and silent. In a silent mutation, there is no observable change. The gene sequence is modified slightly, but the modified section still codes for the same amino acid. In missense, the amino acid changes, but the protein produced still mostly works. In nonsense, the modified nucleotide changes a codon to a STOP codon, truncating the amino acid and greatly reducing its chances of functioning correctly.
Sickle Cell Anemia is a missense mutation -- according to this site, "the replacement of A by T at the 17th nucleotide of the gene for the beta chain of hemoglobin changes the codon GAG (for glutamic acid) to GTG (which encodes valine). Thus the 6th amino acid in the chain becomes valine instead of glutamic acid."
Yep, that's right, ONE replacement is the cause of this genetic disease, and replacements really ain't that rare. There are plenty of commonly-found mutagens in our environment that do that kind of thing, in addition to good old radiation from the sun. So yes, we know it's a mutation, we even know what KIND of mutation it is and what mutated, we can prove that it's possible, and we know that it is indeed likely that it has arisen in at least a few people whose parents did not carry the gene. Of course, it probably entered the human race very early on, given how simple a change it requires, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a mutation.
Actually, the modern chicken, while far from "perfect", is supremely adapted to its environment, perhaps moreso than most other animals.
Now, before you write me off as a raving lunatic, hear me out. In order for a species to be "well suited for its environment", it needs to be able to live long enough to breed and thus pass on its genes. That's it, that's all. It doesn't need to be able to live well, live long, prosper, or do any of that. It only needs to avoid going extinct. That's it, that's all.
What characteristics make it so adapted, then? Simple: chickens are tasty, stupid, easily domesticated, easily bred in captivity, and tough enough to survive horrific farm conditions. That's right, the modern domestic chicken is adapted specifically to the farm environment... and there, it thrives.
When I was in elementary school, I had a project that involved drawing a bird skeleton -- I think I was making a poster, and as a burgeoning artist, I wanted to try copying a picture in a bird book that I had. It took an awfully long time, but by the end of it, I was quite familiar with the bone structure. I don't remember what kind of bird it was, but probably a peregrine falcon since I know I did a project on them.
A few days later, I went to the local nature museum where they have a dinosaur exhibit. I'm sure you can imagine my reaction when I looked at a tyrannosaurus rex skeleton and saw almost the exact same bone structure, but thousands of times the size. The hips, the breast bone... the similarities are so obvious, and yet they seem so impossible when you look at a chickadee or sparrow and try to imagine its ancestors.
Incidentally, as far as I know, the current theories state that not all dinosaurs are ancestors of modern birds. The bird-hipped ones are almost certainly related to 'em (as the name suggests), but the reptile-hipped dinosaurs are another branch. I may be wrong, though. I'm no paleontologist, just a biology geek who reads too much.
How's this then: what if the chance of the first piece falling into place was incredibly slim, but with each successive correctly-placed piece, the probability of the next piece correctly falling into place became higher? What if there were billions and billions of proto-cars, and the only ones who got to the next step were the ones who already had previous steps right? This changes the probability a fair bit, doesn't it?
The theory of evolution does not suggest that it all happened at once, not does it suggest that nature got it right the first time, or even that it was one simple linear progression from ooze to human being. The fossil record is littered with failures, and even our own bodies show plenty of "false starts".
While the majority of mutations are indeed bad, there are plenty that are relatively harmless.
For example, have you ever seen a cat (or other creature) with extra toes? That's an example of a minor mutation which, although it does no good that I know of, also does no harm to the creature. There are plenty of others like this as well, as well as mutations that cause only a small amount of harm but provide the mutated creature with some sort of protection against death or disease. In this latter category you get things like sickle cell anemia, which is incredibly common in parts of Africa. This is an unpleasant condition to have if you get the homozygous form, but in the heterozygous form, it increases your chances of surviving malaria, so many of the people who don't have it die, and the mutated gene gets passed on. Incidentally, this mutation occurs in other populations, but to my knowledge, it is only beneficial in places where malaria is or was common, so it is only prevalent in those locations.
Another form of beneficial mutation occurs in bacteria all the time. I assume you've heard of drug resistant bacteria -- do you know how that happens? Basically, if an antibiotic is applied to a colony of millions of bacteria and even one just happens to have randomly mutated in a way that stops the antibiotic, every bacterium will die except for the resistant one. Given how fast bacteria reproduce, it doesn't take long before even a statistically improbable mutation is pretty much guaranteed to happen... and usually, it does. Next thing you know, you have a whole colony of resistant bacteria because any who lack that mutation just die.
Here's another example of beneficial mutations involving bacteria: when scientists test potential mutagens, one way of doing it is to genetically engineer a batch of bacteria that lacks the ability to produce some essential nutrient. Such bacteria can only be grown on a special medium (one which contains the nutrient that they cannot produce) and will immediately die in any other environment. These genetically engineered bacteria are then brought into contact with the potential mutagen, and the colonies are transferred to a normal growth medium. Then the scientists count the number of colonies that survive. They're seeing whether the potential mutagen has the ability to reverse their genetic engineering... and if the tested compound -is- a mutagen, they will almost certainly see bacteria growing happily in their new home.
So yes, it -is- possible to have a mutation specifically where and when you need it because if it doesn't occur, the population may well die out. We only see the lucky ones who were able to mutate in the "right" way... the ones who didn't are dead.
Of course, in this case, it'd be awfully hard to actually play D&D without a Player's Handbook at the very least. The course seems to be basically a guide to reading and understanding the PHB, so we can hardly fault them for saying "... and you might want to buy this book."
Granted, I use my DM's extras in my weekly game, but that's only because my own books are currently on the other side of the country.
I agree with you, but I'm not sure who should be allowed to define pornography. The US legal definition is, as I recall, largely grounded in the community's morals. However, with the internet a global phenomenon, there are an awful lot of communities with many different moral outlooks.
It would be nice if there was a way to objectively define such things, but off hand, I can think of a number of issues that would probably be disputed within North America, and there are certainly more that would affect the rest of the world. For example, there's homosexuality. To a conservative Christian, even a picture of two men kissing might be labelled pornographic content, whereas to others, it's just a kiss. Nudity is another issue -- how much must be shown to make a picture pornographic, and where do we draw the line between artistic and pornographic nudity? We can say "I know it when I see it" all we want, but in this case, -we- aren't going to be the only people seeing and judging this material.
Porn may be addictive, but this is most likely at least in part because (most) humans are predisposed to want sex. Before taking heroin or some other drug, we are VERY unlikely to have any physical or psychological need for it, but this isn't the case with sex -- I've wanted it on some level since I hit puberty at age 10, although I didn't seek either pornography or the real thing until I was an adult.
Also, you mention the evils of pornography as "desensitizations, misrepresentations of sexuality, corrosion of relationships, etc.", but I would argue that there are some issues with this representations. Desensitizing myself to sex and nudity was one of the best things that ever happened to me. As an amateur artist, I occasionally draw nudes, and I have been much happier since I stopped feeling guilty for merely drawing little nippley dots on cartoon breasts or feeling dirty when I caught a glimpse of another woman changing in a swimming pool changeroom. Yes, I was indeed a prude in my youth, and online depictions of nudity, both sexual and nonsexual, helped me get over it.
As for the misrepresentations of sexuality, that is very subjective: the "proper" representation of sexuality will depend on who you ask -- a conservative Christian might say that porn misrepresents sex as an act of carnal pleasure, not reproduction, a feminist might say that it misrepresents sex as a process of objectifying women, and there are so many other views on what sex and sexuality are or should be. Since the internet allows us to see so many conflicting views, for any piece of pornographic material, you can guarantee that somebody is going to view it as a "misrepresentation".
I will not deny that porn can corrode relationships, but it isn't always because porn is innately a bad influence -- if there is a pre-existing communication problem in a relationship, one partner may well be aghast upon discovering that the other partner looks at porn on occasion, and that might be enough to end the relationship, but it isn't because porn is some horrible horrible thing. If porn is, however, a true addiction (ie. the person cannot help him/herself, and the porn viewing takes up an excessive amount of time), then it may indeed put stress on even a healthy relationship, and it should be viewed as similar to any other harmful addiction.
Note that I'm not addicted to porn, nor am I even a particularly big fan of it, whether it's of the online or offline variety -- I'm just sick of being told over and over again that porn should offend me as a woman. As an artist, I'm sick of being told that a naked body is an awful, horrible thing, and that it gets even worse in certain poses. As a net geek, I'm sick of being told that the internet is enhancing "vices" purely because it allows a wider range of information than some people are comfortable with.