That’s a phone bill that cost as much as my last holiday.

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.

Also, for reference, here’s a definition of “original”:

Fresh, different, pioneering

I do not think it means what they think it means.

1. Take one promotion code offering free gambling credit when you deposit a small amount of cash in an online gambling site.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Do not become addicted to gambling.
5. Cash out all winnings.
6. Go out and buy new suits.

I soon moved it to a self-made blogging platform on those same servers. From there it moved to a professional web host, on yet another custom blogging platform, and with its own domain. Most recently it moved to a new domain, and I finally gave up on maintaining my own software and migrated all the content to WordPress.

I’m quite happy that through all those software changes and server moves I still have every post I’ve ever written for this blog, right back to the very first one.

That first post was about the result of a little Web quiz that took details of my physical fitness, intelligence, education, and lifestyle and, through the twin magics of mathematics and making shit up, informed me that I was worth exactly $2,320,314. I would have hoped my organs alone could fetch that much or more, but I’m not the expert here.

Looking back on my first post I decided to see if that quiz was still online and, more importantly, if my value had changed at all. You’ll be delighted to hear that not only is the quiz still happily digesting humanity into currency, but I’ve gone up in value to an amazing $3,061,316. That’s an increase of nearly 32%. Maybe that’s not the biggest possible return over seven years, but at least it’s going up.

No disassemble!

For the sake of “balance”, we must now turn to Barry, who thinks the sky is a carpet painted by God.

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.