Don’t use data roaming when on holiday in Japan:
That’s a phone bill that cost as much as my last holiday.
Differentiating the Sexes
My higher level maths class for Leaving Certificate (the state exam at the end of secondary school in Ireland) was entirely populated with boys. I think there were one or two girls in the class at the beginning of the year, but they found the subject too time-consuming relative to the six or seven others that students study at that age; they dropped maths to ordinary level pretty early in the year.
My Leaving Cert. physics class was similarly populated.
In my first year of theoretical physics in university, one of my thirteen peers was a lady. In second year, she was no longer around. I studied almost entirely under male lecturers, and I graduated surrounded by male classmates.
My life is one big anecdote in support of the proposition that men are better at maths and hard sciences than women are. It’s particularly important, then, for me to always be aware of that wonderful assertion that “the plural of anecdote is not data”.
In that light, putting away my anecdote and replacing it with real data, we can find out the truth about gender and maths: that poor female performance in maths is strongly correlated with societal gender disparity; that stronger male performance in maths is accompanied by a corresponding weaker male performance in maths (i.e., that us guys push out both ends of the bell curve—for every genius there’s, well, someone less successful); and that young girls are more likely than young boys to inherit the maths anxieties of their teachers, setting them off on a course towards poor maths performance in later life. In short: women underperform in maths when they spend their lives being told that they will.
I’m delighted to see real results based on real data about maths performance. We will desperately short-change ourselves if we continue to discourage half of our potential mathematicians and scientists with baseless stereotypes. Not only that, but we’ll condemn more young men to an academic life devoid of the fairer sex. I moved out of physics into computer science for the girls, which gives you some indication of the sorry state of the physical sciences.
Maybe computer engineer Barbie will help.
Is That All?
I’m happy to live in a world where I can read a blog post about two extraordinarily large stars in orbit around each other; think, “that orbital period makes it sound like they must be pretty close to each other”; and within moments have Google presenting me with the answer that these two stars are a mere 42,000,000km apart. We truly live in the future, but what we’ve got down here is like nothing compared to what’s happening up there.
I Don’t Even Know Anymore
Gawker reports on the introduction of a sarcasm punctuation mark. Well that’s a real useful idea.
Original?
Apparently the Writer’s Guild of America has nominated Avatar for an award for Best Original Screenplay. This is surprising news. I had no idea Avatar even had a screenplay. I thought James Cameron had just organized a big game of charades and Sam Worthington took three hours to mime Ferngully before anyone in the cast or crew was able to guess it.
Also, for reference, here’s a definition of “original”:
Fresh, different, pioneering
I do not think it means what they think it means.
An Unbeatable Scheme
A guide to getting (marginally) rich(er) quick(-ish):
- Take one promotion code offering free gambling credit when you deposit a small amount of cash in an online gambling site.
- Sign up for said site and deposit money, earning yourself a supermarket voucher of equal value as well as credit to use on the site.
- Bet the deposit money and the bonus money, earning at least a fraction (if not a multiple) of the total amount, and almost certainly more than the initial investment.
- Do not become addicted to gambling.
- Cash out all winnings.
- Go out and buy new suits.
Alive?
I dearly hope that the newly announced (at CES) Panasonic 3D camcorder comes to be known as Johnny 5.
No disassemble!
Dara O’Briain and Reality vs. Pseudoscience
Any time you spend reading what I write is time you’re not spending watching Dara O’Briain skewer pseudoscience.
For the sake of “balance”, we must now turn to Barry, who thinks the sky is a carpet painted by God.
A New Hope
Over the few days since my recent post about my hopes for 2020, I’ve come up with a few more ways in which I hope we can collectively improve our situation before this new decade is spent. Just like last time, these aren’t things that I necessarily expect to be fixed by 2020, but they are all things I am still idealistic enough to hope for.
Drug legalization
The UK Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, recently dismissed David Nutt from his position as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) because Professor Nutt had the audacity to quote scientific evidence that contradicted the government’s invented ideas about the dangers of certain illegal drugs. It spawned a movement to impress upon public officials what you would imagine to be the obvious importance of paying attention to what’s actually true when determining public policy.
I hope that governments of 2020 will be more evidence-based in their approach to drug laws. I hope they create laws that actually serve to decrease the danger from recreational use, but which also allow for the use of drugs by informed adults, especially in a medical context.
Nuclear power
Related to my hope that the Earth’s climate will continue to support human life in a comfortable manner, I hope that the public will have overcome its irrational fear of nuclear energy and will be willing to switch from dangerous, polluting, climate-altering fossil fuels to cleaner, safer, more sustainable nuclear power. Research and development in this area has been dreadfully lacking in recent decades due to an exaggerated negative public perception. Maybe one positive outcome of the climate crisis will be a public willingness to reevaluate nuclear energy.
Immigration
I’m Irish. My family is Irish. Many of my friends are Irish, and I lived most of my life in Ireland. In years past I would have lived my whole life there, and would have been unlikely to have many non-Irish acquaintances. Not so now.
Now I live in the UK, with an American girlfriend. Unsurprisingly, none of my immediate colleagues are Irish; but the majority aren’t even from the UK. I have good friends from several continents, and living all over the world. With the Internet, I read about and talk about the thoughts and ideas and lives of people as geographically disparate as people have ever been.
International travel is cheap and widely available. It’s easier now for me to get to know people half way around the world than it was for my parents to meet people in the next county over.
This change has been rapid, and laws have not caught up. Gaining the right to live and work in another country can be ridiculously difficult, even for highly qualified and intelligent young people. Australia evicts travelers after a year. Ireland erects hurdles for hopeful Americans even as it begs the USA to make the tens of thousands of illegal Irish immigrants to that country legal. The UK has backlogs of tens of thousands of applications from prospective university students.
The level of restriction on immigration between first-world democracies is incongruent with the free flow of tourism and communication. I hope that permanent or semi-permanent movement between economically similar countries becomes significantly easier by 2020. The world is now too small to bear so many walls.