Yes, the weekend is almost upon us. Time to relax, unwind, and do your taxes. You haven't done your taxes yet? Procrastinator.
What a horrible death notice: Actress hit in face by volleyball in 'Meet the Parents' dead at 31. On the other hand, if they simply said "Nicole DeHuff, actress, dead at 31", nobody would ever read the article.
I also find my reaction to the news to be remarkable. Part of me feels bad that someone so young had the misfortune of catching a mean bug and dying, but the rest of me can't bring itself to care much. Why is this news? Why make a private tragedy public? "Woman who landed some bit roles dies" strikes me as a little cruel, but it's the essense of the story. This, on the other hand, well.. Heh.
Microsoft has a 'technology sandbox' version of a web RSS aggregator: Start.com. Quite the slick application AND it works in Firefox, which scores some big points with me. It also integrates web searches and image searches into the same interface. All of this begs the question: why does MSN Spaces suck so much?
It's not quite up to the level of Bloglines, which is the aggregator I currently use (no full text feed displays?), but I may start using it as a sort of search/info aggregator since MSN search has vastly improved. Speaking of which, this is a reminder to myself to help fulfill my role as Regal's UFO advisor: UFO Evidence. Delightful.
There is such thing as a good fatwa. Who knew?
For some reason, I can't stop belaboring the point -- Here's an article from a Harvard Professor of Psychology about the Larry Summer's gender comment "controversy". Clip, speaking of fatwas:
The analysis should have been unexceptionable. Anyone who has fled a cluster of men at a party debating the fine points of flat-screen televisions can appreciate that fewer women than men might choose engineering, even in the absence of arbitrary barriers. (As one female social scientist noted in Science Magazine, "Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works.") To what degree these and other differences originate in biology must be determined by research, not fatwa. History tells us that how much we want to believe a proposition is not a reliable guide as to whether it is true.
Let's do some more hot-button type stuff: Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee. Note that this isn't about the equivalence of groups like "MoveOn" or "Swift Boat Veterans", this is about the laws that helped create them.
I've said quite enough, except to mention the weather. Every once and awhile Mother Nature turns into a rampaging, hormonal lady-of-the-night -- and March in Minnesota is ground zero. Have a nice weekend.
Posted by eric at March 11, 2005 02:15 PM
Comments
Just in case you were wondering ...:
Posted by: Alex at March 11, 2005 05:33 PM
Lots of stuff here. Being the huge feminist I am, though, guess what I'm gonna comment on?
Women making comments like that piss me off. I may not care how every household appliance works, but neither do a lot of men. Dismissing areas of study as "masculine" or "feminine" just allows people to keep playing stupid about gender equality.
My 9 year old niece likes drawing and is good at. She also likes science and animals. Even though I'm a musician and into art a lot, I make a point to encourage her scientific side because I know what happens to girls in science in math classes.
It's not that they're not being taught in a way that is interesting to girls, its that teachers don't hold them to the same standards as boys, and don't call on them, etc. etc. Plenty of studies have been done on that. When I think about my own teachers, almost all of the science and math teachers were men, all of the art and english teachers were women. It's just a big cycle.
Posted by: Silver Turtle at March 11, 2005 06:24 PM
So you believe that gender differences are all cultural -- we're raised as boys or girls BY those who were raised as boys and girls and that biological differences are inconsequential? That if students, professionals or academics in a field are not represented 50% each, right there is evidence of sexism?
I think you're missing the point here, which is not to draw a line and say.. well, men are interested in field X and women field Y with X and Y mutually exclusive. The point here, and the point Larry Summers was trying to make was that there could be many reasons for unequal representation in certain fields. Sure, sexism still exists -- but to what extent?
As the article points out, many people are unwilling to even ask this question. Feminists have a particular stake in this because part of the driving force behind gender equity efforts assumes there ARE no differences -- men have been forcing women into roles that they don't want and were created by men to begin with. Same with the gender inbalance in the fields of science and engineering; if the genders aren't equal then it's obvious that there is a patriarchy in place that needs to be dismantled.
But, if there are indeed innate biological differences that contribute to this difference in representation, then the feminist argument is considerably weakened. So, it cannot afford to ask the question.
This lack of scientific questioning or openness is what the article is arguing against:
What are we to make of the breakdown of standards of intellectual discourse in this affair--the statistical innumeracy, the confusion of fairness with sameness, the refusal to glance at the scientific literature?
Posted by: EB at March 11, 2005 07:03 PM
You might expect me--as a soon-to-be Ph.D. chemist female--to have a strong opinion about this. I don't. In my 9-year scientific career, I've never faced discrimination. To the contrary; I've been offered extra fellowships because I'm female. Even the fellowships/awards that were offered to both genders...if I won, I wondered if it was partly because I'm female. We're so far into affirmative action that it's like REVERSE sexism.
I think the rest of your points are perfectly valid. I celebrate womanhood, especially the ways that it's different from manhood.
Oh yeah...and SORRY ABOUT MSN SPACES. I'm just gonna have that tattooed on my head. :)
Posted by: d2ana at March 11, 2005 07:57 PM
Unfortunately, I can begin to corroborate some "reverse discrimination" -- at least, as applied to the corporate world. Some people familiar with the HR inner-workings of a couple of Fortune 500 companies have told me, in as many words, I would never be hired: They have too many white males.
Doh!
As much as MSN Spaces sucks a big, shiny rocket -- I have to say that Blogger has been much worse off the last few days. I haven't been able to leave comments anywhere.
Posted by: Eric at March 11, 2005 10:52 PM