Calcugirl

Hark! There are not enough women in the sciences! Did you know? Well take it that there aren’t and that’s a problem. Listening to the usual suspects, it’s not just a problem, it’s a big problem.

I’m in science. I was in actual science more when I was in college studying electrical engineering. Now I’m just a systems administrator whose life is a storm-tossed sailboat on the large and angry Microsoft sea, but bear with me. I’m in science.

Once upon a time, your humble correspondent was good enough to be indoctrinated in the engineering honor society, Tau Beta Pi (hi guys!) At the risk of boring you—and it is mighty boring; except that one time when I threatened to kill a fellow “Tau Bate”. That was exciting—let me tell you how I got conferred this high honor: I busted my ass. I became an automaton. For every hour in class (with such scintillating titles as Control Systems 1), I was in the library studying, editing, highlighting, cramming, for 3 sometimes 4 hours. Finals saw me neglecting personal hygiene entirely.

In most of my classes with an average of 25 students, about 10 per cent were female. I’ll just say it’s a sight to behold a half-woman and leave it at that. I am no psychologist, just a patient, but I’ll tell you this: there are very few women who revel in neglecting personal hygiene for hours on end. It’s damned hard work and leaves the worker fried and friendless.

So what do you do to attract the female into such an exciting field as EE?

I read an article some time back that hinted that one perhaps subconscious reason some girls don’t want to enroll in these areas of study is the dearth of … how can I say this without hurting some of my former classmates’ feelings … real men. I cast my aching mind back and look around the classroom. Most of these guys were frumpy, desiccated specimens of manhood. Emaciated and pasty (even the black guys) from staying out of direct sunlight for weeks on end. If that wasn’t enough to deter the average female, the odious lack of hygiene often did the trick. Essentially, they (not me though) were brains dragged around in weak bodies. Not much prospect for a boyfriend much less a husband in that lot. That is, if the girl would like to be defended from actual physical harm anyway.

No sir, the girls were in the Social Sciences, where the Football demigods strutted their stuff. So there you have it, a course of study that didn’t involve killing off whatever social life she deems important (she is a girl) and the prospect of meeting and interacting with hawt boiz. What woman wants a halfling Asperger candidate capable of solving advanced difference calculus when healthy young, good-looking Adonises with all the right words roam the halls of PoliSci?

Game, set and match

Heliocentricism

A story:

Wittgenstein once asked a friend, “Tell me, why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the Sun went round the Earth rather than that the Earth was rotating?” His friend replied, “Well, obviously, because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth.” To which Wittgenstein responded, “Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?”

Nod, nod.

Hampikian’s Mangina

Greg Hampikian (greghampikian@boisestate.edu) is a professor of Biology and Criminal Justice and the director of the Idaho Innocence project. He wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times essentially questioning the necessity of men, if not for basic child rearing then definitely not for reproduction.

You see, according to the many-hatted dick professor at a third-rate university Boise State:

As the Princeton sociologist Sara S. McLanahan has shown, poverty is what hurts children, not the number or gender of parents.

Barring the obvious fallacy of an appeal to authority (just who the fuck is Princeton sociologist Sara S. McLanahan?) this specimen of beta male-ness—I mean, look at this clown-nosed, chinless mangina and tell me different:

uses SCIENCE to push the sex-positive feminist idea that his own children—whom he took care of as a, surprise!, house husband for a year—didn’t need him in any capacity, fundamentally.

Not content with one fallacy, he blunders into another. This time, he asks you to “think about your own history”:

Your life as an egg actually started in your mother’s developing ovary, before she was born; you were wrapped in your mother’s fetal body as it developed within your grandmother.

Yes dear reader, you have always been you from the time immemorial and the only thing you needed for some weird kind of meta-actual-existence was when,

… at some point, your father spent a few minutes close by, but then left. A little while later, you encountered some very odd tiny cells that he had shed.

First, this is a classic case or projection. Just because his love-making lasts “only a few minutes” much to his wife’s consternation, doesn’t mean that every man is so. Dick(-less). Second, and much more important, is this pernicious idea that an egg is a human being.

For a professor of biology (and criminal justice!), this is a strange thing to conclude unless I’m completely off my intellectual rocker. OK, maybe I am and I don’t know squat about biology, but(!) this is a dangerous Philosophical stance to take. If it is as the dick(-less) professor says, then abortion of an egg at any stage is murder of a human being!

There’s some other bullshit floating in that cesspit of an article, but here again we have an all too common case where a self-castrated scientist decides to overreach on his scientific background and starts drawing social engineering conclusions based on that background (yet another fallacy).

Listen pal, some bits of advice: stop smoking the blue grass and concentrate on satisfying your wife sexually. Although I’m sure that’ll be difficult since you’re dickless.

Evolutionary Truth

An interesting book recently published, contains:

Notice something else. The atheist naturally thinks that our belief in God is false. That’s just what atheists do. Nevertheless, most human beings have believed in a god of some sort, or at least in a supernatural realm. But suppose, for argument’s sake, that this widespread belief really is false, and that it merely provides survival benefits for humans, a coping mechanism of sorts. If so, then we would have additional evidence—on the atheist’s own terms—that evolution is more interested in useful beliefs than in true ones. Or, alternatively, if evolution really is concerned with true beliefs, then maybe the widespread belief in God would be a kind of “evolutionary” evidence for his existence.

You’ve got to wonder.

Indeed.

The Banging Gong

It never fails that on the days I most need my brain cells, they take a rousing drinking vacation, damned things.

Here’s a quote from a post on a blog which shall remain nameless for now, dealing with the Big Bang and whether the ‘material universe’ either (1) may not have started at the Big Bang or (2) may not actually have a cause and therefore, needs no explanation.

That’s assuming, of course, that the Big Bang is indeed the beginning of the material universe, which might not be the case. Even if the Big Bang should turn out to have a material cause, though, the general principle will still hold true: time is a property of material reality, and the law of cause and effect is bound to time (since the cause must occur before the effect in order to be an actual cause), and therefore there will never be a time when material reality, in some form, does not exist. Ultimately, material reality must be an uncaused cause, which has no beginning, no cause, and no “explanation.”

If wading through my mental miasma will allow me, it seems there’s something intrinsically wrong with this quote, perhaps an equivocation—or maybe an obfuscation—of the meaning of time and of causality. It seems it’s asserting that the presence of time is a necessary and sufficient factor for causality so that if it doesn’t exist (as it doesn’t before the Big Bang) it is impossible to have causality.

What’s wrong with this, if anything?

Who Made God?

Professor Edgar Andrews on answering that question:

The question "if God made everything who made God?" is an unanswerable question only because it is a nonsense question because it fails to define what it means by God. If you define God as I do as the God of the Bible, the uncreated creator of all things then you can see how foolish it is to ask who created the uncreated one.

H’m, makes sense to me.

Complexity

Quote of the day:

No, the real lesson is that under conditions of true complexity—where the knowledge required exceeds that of any individual and unpredictability reigns—efforts to dictate every step from the center will fail. People need room to act and adapt. Yet they cannot succeed as isolated individuals, either—that is anarchy. Instead, they require a seemingly contradictory mix of freedom and expectation—expectation to coordinate, for example, and also to measure progress toward common goals.

My takeaway from this is the idea of managing from a center.That's what'll end up kicking your but.
Buy and read this book, it's truly excellent.

Environmentalists Are Anti-Human

Science And Philosophy

In my youth, I’d always thought fondly of Philosophy—not as I did of hot crossed buns or any other deliciousness, but as a hobby of sorts. What one did when one didn’t have anything actual to do. A pastime if you will and off I went to Physics class.

With time, I began to realize something: Philosophy as a discipline, is one of the fundamental underpinnings of all knowledge. Everyone does Philosophy whatever their calling or occupation. Dr. Frank Turek explains in this article that:

… some scientists and many in the general public fail to understand is that science cannot be done without philosophy. All data must be interpreted.

Additionally, in the debate between proponents of Intelligent Design and reptiles people like Richard Dawkins, the debate is not over evidence (“everyone is looking at the same evidence”), but over philosophy. “It’s a debate,” he says, “over what causes will be considered before we look at the evidence.”

When you consider that even the “unjustly called ‘primitive’ amoeba” (according to Dawkins) contains enough information content to fill 1,000 volumes of an encyclopedia, it is difficult for the layman to think that kind of complexity was the reason of an unreasoning, completely random process without a need for any intelligent directive.

Read the whole thing, it’s at least thought-provoking.

Why I Believe We Evolved

Darwin’s theory of evolution, far from undermining the evidence for supernatural design, actually strengthens it. The question that may occur to anyone looking at Darwin on its surface is, doesn’t evolution contradict the claims of the Bible?

Let us look carefully at what the book of Genesis actually says. We read in Genesis 2:7 that

"the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life."

Right away we notice something significant: the Bible says that the universe was created out of nothing but it does not say man was created out of nothing. Rather, it says that man was made or shaped from the existing substance of nature. "Dust thou art and to dust thou shall return:' So the Bible is quite consistent with the idea that man is made up of atoms and molecules and shares the same DNA found in earthworms, whales, and monkeys.

It is true, however, that the creation account in Genesis does not prepare us for the discovery that man has about 98 percent of his DNA in common with apes. In his Descent of Man, Darwin writes that "man ... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin." My resistance to this is not religious; it is because I sense a significant chasm between myself and chimpanzees. Of course Darwin is not saying that man is descended from chimpanzees, only that apes and man are descended from a common ancestor. Whatever the merits of this theory, there is no reason to reject it purely on biblical grounds. Christians since medieval times have agreed with Aristotle that man is an animal—a "rational animal," but still an animal.

What makes man different, according to the Bible, is that God breathed an immaterial soul into him. Thus there is no theological problem in viewing the bodily frame of man as derived from other creatures. The Bible stresses God's resolution, "Let us make man in our image." Christians have always understood God as a spiritual rather than a material being. Consequently if man is created in the "likeness" of God, the resemblance is clearly not physical. When Jared Diamond in his book The Third Chimpanzee refers to humans as "little more than glorified chimpanzees." he is unwittingly making a Christian point. We may have common ancestors with the animals, but we are glorified animals.

But didn't the main opposition to Darwin's theory of evolution come from religious people, specifically Christians? Actually, no. Hindus, Jews, and Muslims have never really had a problem with evolution because they have always understood their creation stories as parables.

One also has to understand that despite its title, Darwin’s book does not document the origin of a single species—evolution cannot explain the beginning of life. Darwin didn’t even try. He assumed the first living thing, and then he tried to show how one living thing could be transformed into another. Nevertheless, Darwin’s theory remains correct. However, If we ever discover the fossil of a single reptile in a rock so old that fishes had not yet arrived, or if we find human skeletons at the time when dinosaurs also lived, then Darwin's theory will be proven false and biologists will have to come up with a new one. Until this happens—and I don't think it will—evolution remains the best and most persuasive account of our origins.

My sincere thanks to Dinesh D’Souza for source material on this.

Work

NASA?

Since the NASA administrator recently regaled the world with the news that the most important goal for NASA is now increasing Muslims’ self-esteem, Fred (great name) Fry come up with the above new NASA logo … it’s a beaut!

More from Michelle Malkin’s call.

Human Capability

Bruce Charlton—Professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham, UK—writes to assert that human capability peaked about 1975 and that as for now, we no longer are capable of doing many things we used to be able to do.

The fact is that human no longer do - *can* no longer do many things we used to be able to do: land on the moon, swiftly win wars against weak opposition and then control the defeated nation, secure national borders, discover ‘breakthrough’ medical treatments, prevent crime, design and build to a tight deadline, educate people so they are ready to work before the age of 22, block an undersea oil leak...

50 years ago we would have the smartest, best trained, most experienced and most creative people we could find (given human imperfections) in position to take responsibility, make decisions and act upon them in pursuit of a positive goal.

Now we have dull and docile committee members chosen partly with an eye to affirmative action and to generate positive media coverage, whose major priority is not to do the job but to avoid personal responsibility and prevent side-effects; pestered at every turn by an irresponsible and aggressive media and grandstanding politicians out to score popularity points; all of whom are hemmed-about by regulations such that – whatever they do do, or do not do – they will be in breach of some rule or another.

I agree, alas.

Supersonic Shockwave Phenomena

Your Chair Is Your Enemy

That is the opening sentence of an article on the New York Times’ Opinionator dealing with obesity and exercise. According to this enlightening article by Olivia Judson,

It doesn’t matter if you go running every morning, or you’re a regular at the gym. If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting — in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home — you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death. In other words, irrespective of whether you exercise vigorously, sitting for long periods is bad for you.

That last sentence is a bit alarming, most especially for those of you who, like me, don’t exercise but do sit for long periods. So, what’s wrong, specifically, with sitting?

The answer seems to have two parts. The first is that sitting is one of the most passive things you can do. You burn more energy by chewing gum or fidgeting than you do sitting still in a chair. Compared to sitting, standing in one place is hard work. To stand, you have to tense your leg muscles, and engage the muscles of your back and shoulders; while standing, you often shift from leg to leg. All of this burns energy.

There’s more in the article that makes me very worried, especially as I’m already a fatso.

But it looks as though there’s a more sinister aspect to sitting, too. Several strands of evidence suggest that there’s a “physiology of inactivity”: that when you spend long periods sitting, your body actually does things that are bad for you.

As an example, consider lipoprotein lipase. This is a molecule that plays a central role in how the body processes fats; it’s produced by many tissues, including muscles. Low levels of lipoprotein lipase are associated with a variety of health problems, including heart disease. Studies in rats show that leg muscles only produce this molecule when they are actively being flexed (for example, when the animal is standing up and ambling about). The implication is that when you sit, a crucial part of your metabolism slows down.

Some of the solutions some people have advanced are, according to the article:

Some people have advanced radical solutions to the sitting syndrome: replace your sit-down desk with a stand-up desk, and equip this with a slow treadmill so that you walk while you work. (Talk about pacing the office.) Make sure that your television can only operate if you are pedaling furiously on an exercise bike. Or, watch television in a rocking chair: rocking also takes energy and involves a continuous gentle flexing of the calf muscles. Get rid of your office chair and replace it with a therapy ball: this too uses more muscles, and hence more energy, than a normal chair, because you have to support your back and work to keep balanced. You also have the option of bouncing, if you like.

Or you could take all this as a license to fidget.

This has got to be a wake-up call to people like me (and you!) who work in IT, sitting for most of the day. Get moving!

Proof!

Luca Turin On The Science Of Smell

Global Warming

I observe, with a considerable smirk, that the Global Warmers (including both Presidential candidates, no less) are no longer referring—or should I say screeching about—Global Warming, but rather Climate Change.

Sure. Climate change is what is known in less-educated parlors as weather, but what do I know?

I believe the reason these apologists are changing their tune is that it is rather rapidly becoming evident that we're v. far from a global warming trend. On a personal note, Boise recently had quite a massive snow shower last week.

"So?" I hear you mutter under your breath.

Well, that shower was ... the earliest ever in recorded history.

Recorded. History.

H'm.

Lorne Gunther dishes more bad news for the GW loons.

What Am I Doing?

Busy … amazing, isn't it?  Got a new PC with Vista Home Basic installed that promptly started throwing up its hands with a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death—I thought these were a thing of the past with Vista?).

Luckily, I'm a systems administrator for a large Windows installation which means I can really mess up my new computer … so off into the wild blue I go: every kernel crash—which is what a BSOD actually is—craps a dmp file which in Vista resides in C:\Windows\Minidump.

Using the Windows debugger, I saw that a driver related to the network card was misbehaving.  After an upgrade from Intel's site, finito!  I shudder to think what the average computer user would think about this kind of error.  For shame, Microsoft.

Global Warming Cooling

H'm.  So it seems that the earth is actually cooling after all.  China experienced its coldest winter in 100 years.  For the first time in recorded history, the snow flies in Baghdad and the US mainland gets the most snow cover in 50 years and various temperature records are broken.

According to this article, all that above is anecdotal however we now have some empirical data from the usual suspects (NASA, etc.) that strengthens the evidence.

I wonder what that blowhard Gore has to say about this?  Who cares is the better question.

The Goracle

Here are Saint Alphonsus Gore's credentials as an environment scientist:

First, he has a BA in Government, which is a requirement for advanced geophysics.

Second, let's look at his earlier performances in science (from The Education of Al Gore; Washington Times):

Mr. Gore's high school performance on the college board achievement tests in physics (488 out of 800 "terrible," St. Albans retired teacher and assistant headmaster John Davis told The Post) and chemistry (519 out of 800 "He didn't do too well in chemistry," Mr. Davis observed) suggests that Mr. Gore would have trouble with science for the rest of his life. At Harvard and Vanderbilt, Mr. Gore continued bumbling along.

As a Harvard sophomore, scholar Al "earned" a D in Natural Sciences 6 in a course presciently named "Man's Place in Nature." That was the year he evidently spent more time smoking cannabis than studying its place among other plants within the ecosystem. His senior year, Mr. Gore received a C+ in Natural Sciences 118.

At Vanderbilt divinity school, Mr. Gore took a course in theology and natural science. The assigned readings included the apocalyptic, and widely discredited "Limits to Growth," which formed much of the foundation for "Earth in the Balance." It is said that Mr. Gore failed to hand in his book report on time. Thus, his incomplete grade turned into an F, one of five Fs Mr. Gore received at divinity school, which may well be a worldwide record.

This is your Messiah! What do you think of him now?

If I were you, I'd crucify the bastard upside down. His only use now is as a martyr.

More here, thanks to Hudnall.