I was going to say something very like that in my original post, but was hoping that people would actually find it a good suggestion rather than just a funny one. (no luck there.) There *are* people who know what they're doing, and are using Windows. Many of them are busily engaged *hacking* Windows machines, though, which is why the whole problem of requiring updates arises.
I'm not sure about current training, but when I got my pilot certificate in 1999, *every* student had to learn to use an E6B circular slide rule to pass the written flight test. You can use a calculator or computer when you're flying, but to take and pass the written FAA test, you have to be able to run a mechanical slide rule. By that measure, at least 100,000 Americans know how to use a slide rule.
It seems like there's an obvious way of doing this, already organized with Windows distribution: Windows Beginner, Windows Home Edition, Windows Water Wings And Training Wheels edition, Windows For Dummies, and Windows-Cheapo-Walmart-Box come with updates enabled; Windows Ultimate, Windows Business, Windows Corporate, and Windows Damn I Paid A Lot For This License come with updates disabled but a little pop-up informs users that new updates are available, and Windows Yes I Do Actually Know What I'm Doing lets users update the patches themselves.
Yep. Livejournal recently instituted a new policy where you can't show "female nipples" in your icon. I'm waiting for the angry email telling me that I'm about to be banned, coz when they see the rest of that picture, and what a shemale with plastic surgery can look like, one hopes they'll rethink their stance. (Once they get their jaws off the floor.) I'm sure they won't: they'll just kick me off LJ, but hey, it's worth the amusement value.
This is exactly the kind of problem that caused unions to come into existence in the first place: employers routinely abusing employees as much as they can.
Unfortunately, unions grew the same way that companies grow, expanded to take up all available space, and, more to the point, employers have spent a century producing and supporting propaganda and criticism of unions, sufficiently poisoning the idea in the collective consciousness that most Americans would rather work a lousy, stressful job than join a union. This is doubly the case in engineering and IT, where people pride themselves on individuality and independence, and the idea of unionization is anathema. Every engineer believes he's David and the company's Sampson. As the old sayings goes: the fight doesn't always go to the biggest dog, but that's how you should bet.
I agree entirely with parts of your post: many, if not most executives, work more than the engineers who work for them. Longer hours, more stressful work, more travel.
But do they work 1000 times as much? or as hard? When my dad started working for Hewlett Packard in 1963, Hewlett and Packard were making about five times the salary of an entry-level engineer they were hiring. Now, that ratio is more like 40x, for HP. In that time, has the productivity of a CEO increased 10x that of an engineer? The discrepancy is even worse in many other large companies.
It's possible that executives -- or, to be more specific, the people who are charting out the strategy of the company -- do, indeed, have 10x or 100x the return on their work that individual engineers do. However, that's only obvious in hindsight, and in many cases it's obvious that the return was terrible, often resulting in a loss, rather than any profit whatsoever.
The issue is that executives and boards of directors all vote each other higher salaries, because it's in their collective best interest, and that expectation trickles down to high-level managers. People who aren't in that group see a company's profits being slim and getting slimmer, and their jobs disappearing as a result, and naturally look at where the operating costs are going, and when a significant part of the operating costs are going into paying executive salaries for a company that's not performing spectacularly, they get pissed.
I doubt that. iTunes made a new business plan viable. Now that it's established, going back and redoing it is comparatively inexpensive, because the risk has already been assumed by Apple. It's not the development that's the problem: it's development without recovering costs that makes companies cry. That's one part of copyright/trademark/patent protection that is probably useful.
I'm in the tech industry. I have a firewall/nat box, a 386, that stays on 24/7, but aside from that, all the other computers in the house get shut down every night, and rarely get turned back on until we come home from work. My brother's a Win admin at work, and his systems are all shut down every time he leaves the house for more than an hour, except for his MythTV box. Ditto my cousin, who does CAM stuff: everything goes off when she leaves the house. Combination of cost of power and too many power fluctuations/surges damaging computers. My mom, grandmother, and my girlfriend's family don't turn their computers *on* more than once every two days, and then only for an hour or so. That general usage pattern seems typical of the large majority of people I know.
I'd reluctantly put my money on 'ancient'. From what I've read, there aren't enough geologic processes on Mars -- most notably free water and active transpiration to move the water from lowlands up into highlands for it to flow back down again -- to have any hope of currently active cave formation. But the more we find out about Mars, the more we get surprised, so who knows?
The thing about sinkholes is: they're usually new caves that have collapsed because the ceiling finally got too thin. But, that does argue for at least somewhat recent development. Maybe there's a whole network of caves with free water (or seasonally free...) just under the surface of the planet. Wouldn't that be cool?
Likely for the same reasons that terrestrial caves aren't all filled, even though we have a lot more erosive, mass-wasting, and probably as much aeolian redistribution (which is to say: water, landslides, and duststorms.) Caves usually form from water flowing downhill, dissolving out the underlying rock, and eventually escaping, which means a lot of caves go upwards from where the entrance is. If the cave doesn't have much or any wind blowing through it -- if it's dead-end -- there's no reason for wind to blow into it. The entrance will fill, but the rest of the cave has very little air communication with the outside. The primary air exchange system in caves is daily/seasonal heating/cooling, which leads to expansion/expulsion and contraction/indraw of air. Four meters inside the cave, there could be a hurricane outside and you'd never know it. Lots, perhaps most, caves have the entrances mostly filled with debris, but it's mostly from material sliding down and building up a pile of junk just under the overhanging lip of the top of the cave entrance. I'd expect something similar, but much more slow, to be happening on Mars, since there is very little, if any, water-based erosion and no tectonic activity to raise mountain slopes above the angle of repose.
That's always been my reaction to the copyright-motivates-musicians argument, actually: people have *always* composed music, art, and writing, and no amount of copyright or lack thereof is going to alter the creative instinct.
The argument at hand, however, is that women in the 1800's, although professionally trained in music, didn't 'compose' at all, which he used as supporting evidence that women try and create stuff for narrow/deep connections rather than shallow/broad ones. My contention is that society wasn't predisposed to accept women composers, so whether or not they wrote, A: they weren't going to be recognized as major composers, and B: they weren't writing in efforts to become major composers, because of A. That doesn't mean they didn't write, and it doesn't mean the stuff they wrote wasn't just as good as what men wrote. It means that it was received differently by society, and was written differently as a result of its expected reception.
Nobody likes a snitch because a snitch is betraying "the brotherhood" (such as it is) -- but the snitch assumes that snitching will gain more than it'll lose. If that's not true, if there's very effective social pressure, you get a situation like the 1930's Chinatown or Mafia situations, where people won't break ranks, because the cost is too high. But if the cost is low, as it is in office situations and with a bunch of kids on the playground, they'll compete to put each other down as part of a larger power struggle. It sucks, but you even see this behavior in dogs and rabbits.
That's true: if you can reason out what you're looking at, disruption is more difficult (although apparently not impossible: the first British Navy ship painted using disruptive coloring kept getting hit by other RN ships who misjudged where it was.) My point was mostly that apparently color-matching, particularly green-color-matching, is not as effective as image-alteration. There's an interesting essay about this by Steven Gould. Basically, Thayer, the guy who came up with countershading, overextended his argument to claiming that almost all animals used countershading camouflage, and as an edge case, said that flamingos were colored the way they were so they'd fit in, if viewed from alligator-eye-level, against sunsets, ignoring that A: alligators don't live in the same environment flamingos do, and B: flamingos get hunted at other times than night. It's an interesting essay, and it ends up being about scientific method in general, and testability in particular; it's in "Bully for Brontosaurus", I think.
I was recently reading some research on teaching and gender bias. The people running the study would record a teacher interacting with students, and measure how much time the teacher spent talking to and responding to different kids. Both male and female teachers, even when they were consciously trying to spend equal times talking to boys and girls, were spending more time talking to the boys. When they carried timers and actually timed how much time they were talking and forced themselves to spend as much time talking to girls as boys, everyone -- researchers, particularly the boys involved, the teachers, and the girls, all thought the teachers were spending way too much time talking to boys. One of the researchers said that as far as she could tell, the amount boys talked was compared to the amount other boys talked, while the amount girls talked was compared to the amount they didn't say anything at all. It was a depressing article.
>Some of the worst cases of anti-female bias I've seen have been driven by other females. I'm not sure what that means.
If you're interested, read "The Narrative Of Fredrick Douglass" by Fred himself, and "Woman Warrior" by Maxine Kingston. Neither explicitly talks about this, but both have it in there if you read between the lines. In a culture where one group has a lot of power and another doesn't, what happens is that the group without power self-polices. They become their own enemies: they inform on each other, compete, and generally act horrible towards one another, trying to curry favor with the people who have power. Classic example: watch a bunch of ill-behaved kids when a parent walks in the room and they fall all over themselves trying to point out what the others did wrong. In the same way, slaves watched each other and reported on each other, immigrant Chinese abused and berated others who were doing a bad job of learning English or not working hard enough, and in many cases, women are far more competitive with each other than they'd be with men or than men would be with other men.
If you're the King you don't have to behead people: your toadies will do it for you. That's part of why sexism, racism, and many other isms can be so insidious: because it's a power structure that looks like the people who don't have power are all fighting, squabbling, and being crappy to each other, which helps justify the idea that they need to be directed and controlled.
Yeah, I read that blog post too. It was interesting, but it has some problems. Basically, he is arguing that X chromosomes tend to influence towards tight distribution of behavior, and Y towards broad distribution. That's fine and all, but if a guy only has daughters, how's his Y chromosome going to pass on the characteristics about him that make him so aggressive and alpha-male? This is almost Lamarckian reasoning, and while there *are*, as we've found, ways in which parental characteristics and even grandparental characteristics influence children non-genomically, he's specifically claiming genomic inheritance transfers characteristics, but there isn't a reliable way of doing that (that I know of.)
Much of his reasoning can be equally well explained by social conditioning, especially the networking issues. I like what he's saying, I just think he's far overstating his case, and proposing unlikely mechanisms for how it happens, when it seems possible that it's just due to how people are raised and what expectations they absorb from society. If women musicians don't have any reasonable expectation of becoming famous through their compositions -- or indeed becoming famous at all -- why would they expend much effort composing? Johann Bach's wife composed a lot of wonderful music, and it wasn't until 200 years later that anyone even realised they were her compositions, rather than her husband's.
Other people have already done a reasonable job of discussing why academic journals seem to be more prone towards accepting papers written by men. I'd add, that there have been a lot of articles lately discussing the content and frequency of paper production vs. sex/gender distribution, and the general consensus seems to be -- and unfortunately I don't have a link coz it's to articles I read in New Scientist and The New Yorker several months ago -- that men write papers based on less research. They are more aggressive in trying to get papers published, so produce more papers, earlier in the research, than women do. That's not to say that writing papers is biased against women. What it says is that men have a different goal than women do, and if the measurement of goodness is 'number of papers written' and men tend to have a goal that results in writing more papers, then you see more papers written by men.
While I agree with what you're saying, the thing is: politicians aren't ignoring facts, they're misinterpreting them. People tend to assume that processes are basically linear, that if you push something twice as hard it'll go twice as far. I don't think the general public, in most countries, is in favor of legalizing drugs, so there are going to be some laws about/against drug sales. If you go from no enforcement at all, to some enforcement, you'll see a drop in drug sales. That establishes the idea in people's heads that all we need is more, stronger enforcement, to stop drugs once and for all. The problem is that it's probably a high-order exponential relationship between enforcement and drug usage: to absolutely stop any and all drug usage would require a nightmarish police state. But, fundamentally, the underlying idea isn't *wrong* -- if you fight drugs harder, you will reduce drug use. The problem is that the demand for drugs is so very high, that someone will always be willing to risk being caught, and no amount of money, cops, or laws will be able to *stop* the drug trade. Trying to fight a largely inelastic demand means spending stupid, wasteful amounts of money for microscopic gains. Meanwhile, cops and politicians are being pushed by people who believe that if you try hard enough you can do anything, so they *have* to keep doing what they're doing. They're not ignoring the facts: they're doing what a large part of the public wants them to do. The fundamental problem is, that large part of the public does not understand and does not wish to understand the drug trade and the supply/demand issues, so they push the cops and politicians to try and do impossible things.
>the most logical camouflage colour would be green, right?
Actually, the most logical camouflage color is countershading, which the Wikipedia link does a terrible job of describing. Essentially, countershading says animals are darker on the top than on their bellies, fading from one to the other -- like thousands of species of fish, many or most mammals, and a fair number of insects. What happens is that when light is falling from above, on something that is darker on top and lighter on bottom, it appears to predators' eyes as being flat. It doesn't disappear: its distance and size information is obscured.
There are three general types of coloring in animals: camouflage, warning, and disruptive. Most animals exhibit one of the three patterns. Countershading seems to be the most common camouflage technique, from what I've read.
About two months ago Iceland legalized prostitution, while simultaneously illegalizing (effectively) strip clubs. They did so by a very interesting idea: they said prostitution is legal, but it is not legal to profit off someone else's sexual behavior or conduct. Meaning: no pimps, no procurers, no madams, and, by extension, no corporate- or not-stripping-strip-club-owners. Presumably a coop (like one strip club in Seattle, I'm told) would be legal.
I think it's an interesting, and probably good, idea. The only question is whether it's degrading and/or entrapping because women (or men) choose it because it's the only way they can make financial ends meet, but I think in any primarily capitalist society that's always going to be the case for some jobs.
My last ex-gf moved to Germany for a job as a technician. She *started* with nearly six weeks of vacation per yer, which she promptly spent hiking. Now she has even more.
My ex-gf from before that joined the Peace Corps and went to China to teach English for three years, saved up a lot of money, and is now hiking/biking across Siberia.
My dad saved up his vacation and took regular leaves-of-absence from his job, so he could spend three months, every two years, doing something fabulous (riding his bike across Australia or Canada.)
I had a job I didn't much like, so I worked lots of overtime, quit, and spent a year driving all over the US, riding my bike in places I'd never been, learning glass art and welding.
What it comes down to is how you want to live your life. If you've structured your life so you have a job you *have* to keep, well, you'll benefit from that down the road: you'll have a great 401K and a comfortable retirement. If you've structured your life so you have no commitments -- which is a choice, entailing giving up some other things -- well, then, you can drop everything any time you want and just go do things.
Now I have a mortgage so I can't just up and quit and go off and do something. But I'll have the house mostly paid off soon, and then I'll be right back to applying for leaves-of-absence and if they say no, quitting, going and doing what I was going to do, and finding a new job, because I live cheap and have plenty saved up for retirement so I don't really have any reason to hold a steady job once I can meet my financial commitments for a year out.
It just depends on how you put your life together (and what you want to look back on and remember when you're 70.)
By the way, I'm *particularly* glad my dad lived his life the way he did. He died of a heart attack on his 63rd birthday. If he'd worked like a dog his whole life, it would've been, in my opinion, wasted. As it was, he went to every continent, rode his bike on every one except Antartica, had a half-dozen patents for stuff unrelated to his job, wrote a book, and taught twenty years' Sunday School classes. More than a thousand people showed up for his funeral, and afterwards six people told me that he was their closest friend. That's a large part of why I'm living my life similarly to how he lived his.
Every time I go to a library book sale, there are people there with scanners hooked to their PDA's, madly scanning ISBN's to see if the books sell for more online than the library book sale price + handling&shipping. You don't even need the back-end software: just quickly scan the ISBN's, go home, and look them up on amazon, alibris, and half.com. This poor kid just got caught doing it the old-fashioned way because it's slower.
I love local bookstores, and support them when I can afford to, but that doesn't extend to college textbooks, and frankly, the Internet is going to destroy most of them because it levels the distribution asymmetry.
Neil Postman wrote a book called "How To Watch The TV News" in which he proposed that if a media commentator doesn't have a degree in the subject under discussion, a big flashing red sign should be displayed in the background, that says "I don't know what I'm talking about."
Reporters aren't scientists, and they don't know science. What they know is how to write stories that people want to read, because that's their business. I'm not exactly blaming the reporters: they're doing what they're paid to do. The problem is that the people reading the material don't know that reporters don't actually understand the issues, or that the people watching the TV shows let themselves be biased by reporters who don't actually understand the issues.
Carbon fiber/epoxy aircraft can burn, sure. They release toxic compounds when they burn. So does aluminum, and aluminum fires, while rare, are devastating. Carbon fiber has excellent fatigue characteristics: aircraft built from it will probably put 100,000 hours on airframes without any problems, since some carbon fiber fatigue testing setups have had the steel test setup fatigue-fail before the airframe under test while there are lots of aluminum aircraft out there which have failed catastrophically because of fatigue.
People often claim that carbon fiber fails catastrophically while aluminum fails softly. That hasn't been my experience. I spent years racing mountain bikes, and the majority of aluminum failures I had -- although in every case the crack had started well before the failure -- went from imperceptible to completely broken far faster than I could react to, when I was going comparatively slowly at net-near-zero elevation. (RMS elevation on a mountain bike during a race is roughly +1cm, I think...) In contrast, I've had two carbon fiber components fail just as suddenly and one fail comparatively slowly: from the point where it started to break to the point where I got the bike stopped was maybe ten seconds and it was still hanging together by threads of carbon.
When I build a plane it's going to be welded steel tubing, which can be designed with no fatigue limit, but I'd prefer carbon fiber over aluminum if I had to choose.
Slashdot Mirror
I was going to say something very like that in my original post, but was hoping that people would actually find it a good suggestion rather than just a funny one. (no luck there.)
There *are* people who know what they're doing, and are using Windows. Many of them are busily engaged *hacking* Windows machines, though, which is why the whole problem of requiring updates arises.
I'm not sure about current training, but when I got my pilot certificate in 1999, *every* student had to learn to use an E6B circular slide rule to pass the written flight test. You can use a calculator or computer when you're flying, but to take and pass the written FAA test, you have to be able to run a mechanical slide rule.
By that measure, at least 100,000 Americans know how to use a slide rule.
It seems like there's an obvious way of doing this, already organized with Windows distribution: Windows Beginner, Windows Home Edition, Windows Water Wings And Training Wheels edition, Windows For Dummies, and Windows-Cheapo-Walmart-Box come with updates enabled; Windows Ultimate, Windows Business, Windows Corporate, and Windows Damn I Paid A Lot For This License come with updates disabled but a little pop-up informs users that new updates are available, and Windows Yes I Do Actually Know What I'm Doing lets users update the patches themselves.
Yep. Livejournal recently instituted a new policy where you can't show "female nipples" in your icon. I'm waiting for the angry email telling me that I'm about to be banned, coz when they see the rest of that picture, and what a shemale with plastic surgery can look like, one hopes they'll rethink their stance. (Once they get their jaws off the floor.)
I'm sure they won't: they'll just kick me off LJ, but hey, it's worth the amusement value.
Methinks if he wants to get a hold on the judge, he could try to spend more time hanging out in airport bathrooms?
This is exactly the kind of problem that caused unions to come into existence in the first place: employers routinely abusing employees as much as they can.
Unfortunately, unions grew the same way that companies grow, expanded to take up all available space, and, more to the point, employers have spent a century producing and supporting propaganda and criticism of unions, sufficiently poisoning the idea in the collective consciousness that most Americans would rather work a lousy, stressful job than join a union. This is doubly the case in engineering and IT, where people pride themselves on individuality and independence, and the idea of unionization is anathema. Every engineer believes he's David and the company's Sampson. As the old sayings goes: the fight doesn't always go to the biggest dog, but that's how you should bet.
I agree entirely with parts of your post: many, if not most executives, work more than the engineers who work for them. Longer hours, more stressful work, more travel.
But do they work 1000 times as much? or as hard?
When my dad started working for Hewlett Packard in 1963, Hewlett and Packard were making about five times the salary of an entry-level engineer they were hiring. Now, that ratio is more like 40x, for HP. In that time, has the productivity of a CEO increased 10x that of an engineer? The discrepancy is even worse in many other large companies.
It's possible that executives -- or, to be more specific, the people who are charting out the strategy of the company -- do, indeed, have 10x or 100x the return on their work that individual engineers do. However, that's only obvious in hindsight, and in many cases it's obvious that the return was terrible, often resulting in a loss, rather than any profit whatsoever.
The issue is that executives and boards of directors all vote each other higher salaries, because it's in their collective best interest, and that expectation trickles down to high-level managers. People who aren't in that group see a company's profits being slim and getting slimmer, and their jobs disappearing as a result, and naturally look at where the operating costs are going, and when a significant part of the operating costs are going into paying executive salaries for a company that's not performing spectacularly, they get pissed.
I doubt that. iTunes made a new business plan viable. Now that it's established, going back and redoing it is comparatively inexpensive, because the risk has already been assumed by Apple. It's not the development that's the problem: it's development without recovering costs that makes companies cry. That's one part of copyright/trademark/patent protection that is probably useful.
I'm in the tech industry. I have a firewall/nat box, a 386, that stays on 24/7, but aside from that, all the other computers in the house get shut down every night, and rarely get turned back on until we come home from work. My brother's a Win admin at work, and his systems are all shut down every time he leaves the house for more than an hour, except for his MythTV box. Ditto my cousin, who does CAM stuff: everything goes off when she leaves the house. Combination of cost of power and too many power fluctuations/surges damaging computers. My mom, grandmother, and my girlfriend's family don't turn their computers *on* more than once every two days, and then only for an hour or so. That general usage pattern seems typical of the large majority of people I know.
>I love being from and living in the USA, but christ we have NO tatse in beer
If tatse is *anything* like goatse, I'm really glad we don't have it in beer. Even if it's like tsetse, I'm *still* glad it's not in our beer.
I'd reluctantly put my money on 'ancient'. From what I've read, there aren't enough geologic processes on Mars -- most notably free water and active transpiration to move the water from lowlands up into highlands for it to flow back down again -- to have any hope of currently active cave formation. But the more we find out about Mars, the more we get surprised, so who knows?
The thing about sinkholes is: they're usually new caves that have collapsed because the ceiling finally got too thin. But, that does argue for at least somewhat recent development. Maybe there's a whole network of caves with free water (or seasonally free...) just under the surface of the planet. Wouldn't that be cool?
Likely for the same reasons that terrestrial caves aren't all filled, even though we have a lot more erosive, mass-wasting, and probably as much aeolian redistribution (which is to say: water, landslides, and duststorms.) Caves usually form from water flowing downhill, dissolving out the underlying rock, and eventually escaping, which means a lot of caves go upwards from where the entrance is. If the cave doesn't have much or any wind blowing through it -- if it's dead-end -- there's no reason for wind to blow into it. The entrance will fill, but the rest of the cave has very little air communication with the outside. The primary air exchange system in caves is daily/seasonal heating/cooling, which leads to expansion/expulsion and contraction/indraw of air. Four meters inside the cave, there could be a hurricane outside and you'd never know it. Lots, perhaps most, caves have the entrances mostly filled with debris, but it's mostly from material sliding down and building up a pile of junk just under the overhanging lip of the top of the cave entrance. I'd expect something similar, but much more slow, to be happening on Mars, since there is very little, if any, water-based erosion and no tectonic activity to raise mountain slopes above the angle of repose.
That's always been my reaction to the copyright-motivates-musicians argument, actually: people have *always* composed music, art, and writing, and no amount of copyright or lack thereof is going to alter the creative instinct.
The argument at hand, however, is that women in the 1800's, although professionally trained in music, didn't 'compose' at all, which he used as supporting evidence that women try and create stuff for narrow/deep connections rather than shallow/broad ones. My contention is that society wasn't predisposed to accept women composers, so whether or not they wrote, A: they weren't going to be recognized as major composers, and B: they weren't writing in efforts to become major composers, because of A. That doesn't mean they didn't write, and it doesn't mean the stuff they wrote wasn't just as good as what men wrote. It means that it was received differently by society, and was written differently as a result of its expected reception.
Nobody likes a snitch because a snitch is betraying "the brotherhood" (such as it is) -- but the snitch assumes that snitching will gain more than it'll lose. If that's not true, if there's very effective social pressure, you get a situation like the 1930's Chinatown or Mafia situations, where people won't break ranks, because the cost is too high. But if the cost is low, as it is in office situations and with a bunch of kids on the playground, they'll compete to put each other down as part of a larger power struggle.
It sucks, but you even see this behavior in dogs and rabbits.
That's true: if you can reason out what you're looking at, disruption is more difficult (although apparently not impossible: the first British Navy ship painted using disruptive coloring kept getting hit by other RN ships who misjudged where it was.) My point was mostly that apparently color-matching, particularly green-color-matching, is not as effective as image-alteration. There's an interesting essay about this by Steven Gould. Basically, Thayer, the guy who came up with countershading, overextended his argument to claiming that almost all animals used countershading camouflage, and as an edge case, said that flamingos were colored the way they were so they'd fit in, if viewed from alligator-eye-level, against sunsets, ignoring that A: alligators don't live in the same environment flamingos do, and B: flamingos get hunted at other times than night. It's an interesting essay, and it ends up being about scientific method in general, and testability in particular; it's in "Bully for Brontosaurus", I think.
I was recently reading some research on teaching and gender bias. The people running the study would record a teacher interacting with students, and measure how much time the teacher spent talking to and responding to different kids. Both male and female teachers, even when they were consciously trying to spend equal times talking to boys and girls, were spending more time talking to the boys. When they carried timers and actually timed how much time they were talking and forced themselves to spend as much time talking to girls as boys, everyone -- researchers, particularly the boys involved, the teachers, and the girls, all thought the teachers were spending way too much time talking to boys. One of the researchers said that as far as she could tell, the amount boys talked was compared to the amount other boys talked, while the amount girls talked was compared to the amount they didn't say anything at all. It was a depressing article.
>Some of the worst cases of anti-female bias I've seen have been driven by other females. I'm not sure what that means.
If you're interested, read "The Narrative Of Fredrick Douglass" by Fred himself, and "Woman Warrior" by Maxine Kingston. Neither explicitly talks about this, but both have it in there if you read between the lines. In a culture where one group has a lot of power and another doesn't, what happens is that the group without power self-polices. They become their own enemies: they inform on each other, compete, and generally act horrible towards one another, trying to curry favor with the people who have power. Classic example: watch a bunch of ill-behaved kids when a parent walks in the room and they fall all over themselves trying to point out what the others did wrong. In the same way, slaves watched each other and reported on each other, immigrant Chinese abused and berated others who were doing a bad job of learning English or not working hard enough, and in many cases, women are far more competitive with each other than they'd be with men or than men would be with other men.
If you're the King you don't have to behead people: your toadies will do it for you. That's part of why sexism, racism, and many other isms can be so insidious: because it's a power structure that looks like the people who don't have power are all fighting, squabbling, and being crappy to each other, which helps justify the idea that they need to be directed and controlled.
Yeah, I read that blog post too. It was interesting, but it has some problems.
Basically, he is arguing that X chromosomes tend to influence towards tight distribution of behavior, and Y towards broad distribution. That's fine and all, but if a guy only has daughters, how's his Y chromosome going to pass on the characteristics about him that make him so aggressive and alpha-male?
This is almost Lamarckian reasoning, and while there *are*, as we've found, ways in which parental characteristics and even grandparental characteristics influence children non-genomically, he's specifically claiming genomic inheritance transfers characteristics, but there isn't a reliable way of doing that (that I know of.)
Much of his reasoning can be equally well explained by social conditioning, especially the networking issues. I like what he's saying, I just think he's far overstating his case, and proposing unlikely mechanisms for how it happens, when it seems possible that it's just due to how people are raised and what expectations they absorb from society. If women musicians don't have any reasonable expectation of becoming famous through their compositions -- or indeed becoming famous at all -- why would they expend much effort composing? Johann Bach's wife composed a lot of wonderful music, and it wasn't until 200 years later that anyone even realised they were her compositions, rather than her husband's.
Other people have already done a reasonable job of discussing why academic journals seem to be more prone towards accepting papers written by men. I'd add, that there have been a lot of articles lately discussing the content and frequency of paper production vs. sex/gender distribution, and the general consensus seems to be -- and unfortunately I don't have a link coz it's to articles I read in New Scientist and The New Yorker several months ago -- that men write papers based on less research. They are more aggressive in trying to get papers published, so produce more papers, earlier in the research, than women do.
That's not to say that writing papers is biased against women. What it says is that men have a different goal than women do, and if the measurement of goodness is 'number of papers written' and men tend to have a goal that results in writing more papers, then you see more papers written by men.
While I agree with what you're saying, the thing is: politicians aren't ignoring facts, they're misinterpreting them. People tend to assume that processes are basically linear, that if you push something twice as hard it'll go twice as far. I don't think the general public, in most countries, is in favor of legalizing drugs, so there are going to be some laws about/against drug sales. If you go from no enforcement at all, to some enforcement, you'll see a drop in drug sales. That establishes the idea in people's heads that all we need is more, stronger enforcement, to stop drugs once and for all. The problem is that it's probably a high-order exponential relationship between enforcement and drug usage: to absolutely stop any and all drug usage would require a nightmarish police state.
But, fundamentally, the underlying idea isn't *wrong* -- if you fight drugs harder, you will reduce drug use. The problem is that the demand for drugs is so very high, that someone will always be willing to risk being caught, and no amount of money, cops, or laws will be able to *stop* the drug trade. Trying to fight a largely inelastic demand means spending stupid, wasteful amounts of money for microscopic gains. Meanwhile, cops and politicians are being pushed by people who believe that if you try hard enough you can do anything, so they *have* to keep doing what they're doing. They're not ignoring the facts: they're doing what a large part of the public wants them to do. The fundamental problem is, that large part of the public does not understand and does not wish to understand the drug trade and the supply/demand issues, so they push the cops and politicians to try and do impossible things.
>the most logical camouflage colour would be green, right?
Actually, the most logical camouflage color is countershading, which the Wikipedia link does a terrible job of describing. Essentially, countershading says animals are darker on the top than on their bellies, fading from one to the other -- like thousands of species of fish, many or most mammals, and a fair number of insects. What happens is that when light is falling from above, on something that is darker on top and lighter on bottom, it appears to predators' eyes as being flat. It doesn't disappear: its distance and size information is obscured.
There are three general types of coloring in animals: camouflage, warning, and disruptive. Most animals exhibit one of the three patterns. Countershading seems to be the most common camouflage technique, from what I've read.
About two months ago Iceland legalized prostitution, while simultaneously illegalizing (effectively) strip clubs. They did so by a very interesting idea: they said prostitution is legal, but it is not legal to profit off someone else's sexual behavior or conduct. Meaning: no pimps, no procurers, no madams, and, by extension, no corporate- or not-stripping-strip-club-owners. Presumably a coop (like one strip club in Seattle, I'm told) would be legal.
I think it's an interesting, and probably good, idea. The only question is whether it's degrading and/or entrapping because women (or men) choose it because it's the only way they can make financial ends meet, but I think in any primarily capitalist society that's always going to be the case for some jobs.
My last ex-gf moved to Germany for a job as a technician. She *started* with nearly six weeks of vacation per yer, which she promptly spent hiking. Now she has even more.
My ex-gf from before that joined the Peace Corps and went to China to teach English for three years, saved up a lot of money, and is now hiking/biking across Siberia.
My dad saved up his vacation and took regular leaves-of-absence from his job, so he could spend three months, every two years, doing something fabulous (riding his bike across Australia or Canada.)
I had a job I didn't much like, so I worked lots of overtime, quit, and spent a year driving all over the US, riding my bike in places I'd never been, learning glass art and welding.
What it comes down to is how you want to live your life. If you've structured your life so you have a job you *have* to keep, well, you'll benefit from that down the road: you'll have a great 401K and a comfortable retirement. If you've structured your life so you have no commitments -- which is a choice, entailing giving up some other things -- well, then, you can drop everything any time you want and just go do things.
Now I have a mortgage so I can't just up and quit and go off and do something. But I'll have the house mostly paid off soon, and then I'll be right back to applying for leaves-of-absence and if they say no, quitting, going and doing what I was going to do, and finding a new job, because I live cheap and have plenty saved up for retirement so I don't really have any reason to hold a steady job once I can meet my financial commitments for a year out.
It just depends on how you put your life together (and what you want to look back on and remember when you're 70.)
By the way, I'm *particularly* glad my dad lived his life the way he did. He died of a heart attack on his 63rd birthday. If he'd worked like a dog his whole life, it would've been, in my opinion, wasted. As it was, he went to every continent, rode his bike on every one except Antartica, had a half-dozen patents for stuff unrelated to his job, wrote a book, and taught twenty years' Sunday School classes. More than a thousand people showed up for his funeral, and afterwards six people told me that he was their closest friend. That's a large part of why I'm living my life similarly to how he lived his.
Every time I go to a library book sale, there are people there with scanners hooked to their PDA's, madly scanning ISBN's to see if the books sell for more online than the library book sale price + handling&shipping. You don't even need the back-end software: just quickly scan the ISBN's, go home, and look them up on amazon, alibris, and half.com. This poor kid just got caught doing it the old-fashioned way because it's slower.
I love local bookstores, and support them when I can afford to, but that doesn't extend to college textbooks, and frankly, the Internet is going to destroy most of them because it levels the distribution asymmetry.
Neil Postman wrote a book called "How To Watch The TV News" in which he proposed that if a media commentator doesn't have a degree in the subject under discussion, a big flashing red sign should be displayed in the background, that says "I don't know what I'm talking about."
Reporters aren't scientists, and they don't know science. What they know is how to write stories that people want to read, because that's their business. I'm not exactly blaming the reporters: they're doing what they're paid to do. The problem is that the people reading the material don't know that reporters don't actually understand the issues, or that the people watching the TV shows let themselves be biased by reporters who don't actually understand the issues.
Carbon fiber/epoxy aircraft can burn, sure. They release toxic compounds when they burn. So does aluminum, and aluminum fires, while rare, are devastating. Carbon fiber has excellent fatigue characteristics: aircraft built from it will probably put 100,000 hours on airframes without any problems, since some carbon fiber fatigue testing setups have had the steel test setup fatigue-fail before the airframe under test while there are lots of aluminum aircraft out there which have failed catastrophically because of fatigue.
People often claim that carbon fiber fails catastrophically while aluminum fails softly. That hasn't been my experience. I spent years racing mountain bikes, and the majority of aluminum failures I had -- although in every case the crack had started well before the failure -- went from imperceptible to completely broken far faster than I could react to, when I was going comparatively slowly at net-near-zero elevation. (RMS elevation on a mountain bike during a race is roughly +1cm, I think...) In contrast, I've had two carbon fiber components fail just as suddenly and one fail comparatively slowly: from the point where it started to break to the point where I got the bike stopped was maybe ten seconds and it was still hanging together by threads of carbon.
When I build a plane it's going to be welded steel tubing, which can be designed with no fatigue limit, but I'd prefer carbon fiber over aluminum if I had to choose.