Posted 6:30 AM by Angie Schultz

Summers Soldiers

The Larry Summers flap is the Kerfuffle That Will Not Die. Viewing the positions taken by the two sides (strangely, although there shouldn't be, there are essentially only two sides), I find myself recalling the sentiments of somebody-or-other regarding the Iran-Iraq war: Is there a way they can both lose?

In this corner we have MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins, who went into hysterics at the suggestion that maybe possibly perhaps not quite so many women are intrinsically suited to the highest levels of scientific research as men. And in this corner we have the righty blogosphere, in the comments at Chicagoboyz, and Asymmetrical Information and INDC Journal.

As I said before, Hopkins's imitation of a fainting flower of femininity, didn't do her any credit (if she starts a blog, maybe Michele and Ilyka will let her use this banner). However, I don't think the commenters linked above exactly cover themselves in glory either.

Collectively, their comments seem to indicate -- and I write this to provoke thought, as the man said -- that they're relieved that someone's finally said what everyone already knows, and that's that wimmin just ain't no good at sciency thinkin' and suchlike, and we should all just admit it and make 'em go back to birthin' babies (and we can stop havin' to compete with 'em, 'cause it makes us feel small when we can't).

Having now read the transcript (which I didn't think existed -- I thought these were rather off-the-cuff remarks, and there was no mention of a recording), I have a little more sympathy for Hopkins's hysteria.

His remarks on the percentages of men and women in the high end of tests (he refers to Xie and Shauman's book, presumably this one, but he doesn't say what kind of tests he's referring to -- achievment, aptitude, intelligence) sticks to facts, at least as they're known now, and so there's not a lot to say about them.

The early blog reports of his talk stressed the studies. It sounded to me as if he'd made an off-hand remark along the lines of, "The under-representation of women may be due to this, or this, or it may really be innate, and we should study that..." All pretty innocuous.

But in reality he starts to develop the "innate" theme by treading on the uncertain ground of anecdote. One of these dealt with kibbutzes where, despite earnest attempts to diversify people's skills, everyone eventually drifted back into traditional roles. Another (much lamer) was about his toddler daughters referring to the "daddy" truck and the "baby" truck.

Pardon me if I'm unimpressed that adults (he didn't say what timescale was involved; I'm assuming these are adults) will, of their own accord, gravitate to tasks they have become familiar with and competent in, and avoid unfamiliar ones. As for his daughters, this could be a sign of an innate female tendency to classify everything in terms of family relationships, or it could be that they think of "daddy" as a synonym for "large" and "baby" as a synonym for "small".

Still, though, not really material worth pitching a hissy fit over, in my opinion. Until we come to this:

The second problem is the one that Gary Becker very powerfully pointed out in addressing racial discrimination many years ago. If it was really the case that everybody was discriminating, there would be very substantial opportunities for a limited number of people who were not prepared to discriminate to assemble remarkable departments of high quality people at relatively limited cost simply by the act of their not discriminating, because of what it would mean for the pool that was available.

I assume the Gary Becker he's talking about is this one, an economics Nobel laureate.

Orwell once famously said that there are some ideas so stupid only an academic could believe them, and I guess that must scale up: there are some things so fatuous that only a Nobel laureate would believe them.

I'm sure Becker would be absolutely right, if people made decisions based solely on economics. But they very famously do not (or else I wouldn't be a) wasting time writing this because I'd b) be in some field that paid a lot better than science). For example, you'd think financial reasons would ensure that a ball team would be thrilled to have an excellent player, no matter what his skin color:

Jackie Robinson had to be bigger than life. He had to be bigger than the Brooklyn teammates who got up a petition to keep him off the ball club...bigger than the bench jockeys who hollered for him to carry their bags and shine their shoes, bigger than the so-called fans who mocked him with mops on their heads and wrote him death threats.

Sadly for the best-laid theories of economists, people sometimes make decisions on other bases, such as pride, or prejudice. Sometimes they even justify such decisions on the basis of economics, as when white people didn't want black people as neighbors, on the grounds that the property values would go down. Or, as a long-ago female aspiring airline pilot was told (in a book whose name I can't remember, and neither can Google), "If a passenger walks in and sees a skirt in the left seat, he's gonna turn around and walk right out."

So if that's the remark that turned Nancy Hopkins's stomach, I can't say I'm surprised. Her subsequent fainting spell -- and the collective wave of wailing and gnashing of teeth that went along with it -- is embarrassing. But then so are the self-congratulatory smug banks wafting from conservative blogs.

Posted 3:01 PM by Angie Schultz

Today on Illogical Male

Oh, goodie, the Larry Summers thing is still cooking along. I'm working on a long post on the topic (that is to say, a second one), but I got angry, bored, and frustrated with it about halfway through, and decided to give it a rest. I figured I'd be late to the party, but I guess not.

The short version of the post is: While Nancy Hopkins's fainting spell was decidedly unattractive, the reactions of many blog commenters (largely, but not solely, male) is not any more savory. The collective opinion seems to be, "Thank god someone finally had the balls to stand up and say what we all know: men are different from women. Not better, naturally, just different. Er, except in science, where they damn well are better. It's time you broads accepted that. Now get up and get me a beer, bitch."

I, of course, exaggerate for comic effect. Of course.

Examples to be found here and here (mainly in the comments), among other places.

The reaction from the chromosomally-diverse reminds me of a Dilbert strip (from 12/22/97, which I discovered via this invaluable resource):

Dan: Hi, I'm Dan the illogical scientist man. I'm much smarter better at science than you because scientists have invented many things men are better at math.

Dilbert Angie: But those are *other* scientists men, not you.

Dan: Apparently you don't understand science.

Now if y'all will excuse me, I have to go correct the proofs of my forthcoming math-heavy paper on geometric shapes rotating in 3D.

And make dinner.

Posted 7:42 AM by Angie Schultz

Hand Over the Grant Money or the Planet Gets It

Bill Ardolino surprised me by mentioning the radiation bath we got from SGR 1806-20 back on December 27. (And he got up at 6:50am to do it. Ugh. Man has no sense of decency.)

He links to this article in which astronomer Bryan Gaensler says, ""Had this happened within 10 light-years of us, it would have severely damaged our atmosphere and possibly have triggered a mass extinction." The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (where Gaensler works) is apparently shopping the screenplay:

Forget "Independence Day" or "War of the Worlds." A monstrous cosmic explosion last December showed that the earth is in more danger from real-life space threats than from hypothetical alien invasions.

The gamma-ray flare, which briefly outshone the full moon, occurred within the Milky Way galaxy. Even at a distance of 50,000 light-years, the flare disrupted the earth's ionosphere. If such a blast happened within 10 light-years of the earth, it would destroy the much of the ozone layer, causing extinctions due to increased radiation.

"Astronomically speaking, this explosion happened in our backyard. If it were in our living room, we'd be in big trouble!" said Bryan Gaensler...

Uh huh, and if a volcano erupted across the street from me, I'd be in big trouble, too. But since volcanoes aren't really known to plague southeast Texas, I won't be staying up nights worrying about it.

There are only eleven stars within ten light years, and none of them are ticking magnetar timebombs. Sirius is the biggest, and it's only a little over two solar masses. Gaensler's own research suggests that a star has to be tens of solar masses before it'll form a magnetar.

Now this is embarassing:

"Fortunately, there are no magnetars anywhere near the earth. An explosion like this within a few trillion miles could really ruin our day," said graduate student Yosi Gelfand (CfA), a co-author on one of the papers.

Yes, well, I think we'd have noticed a massive star that was less than a light year away. (A light year is six trillion miles, already more than "a few".)

I'm not quite sure what makes people say these things. OK, yes I am. It's the possibility of getting more grant money. It's apparently not enough these days to say, "Hey, here's some interesting science. Give us more dough." No, in these tight-belted times, you have to put the entire planet in peril.

That must also explain this:

Still, scientists were surprised that a magnetar so far away could alter the ionosphere.

"That it can reach out and tap us on the shoulder like this, reminds us that we really are linked to the cosmos," said Phil Wilkinson of IPS Australia, that country's space weather service.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime event," said Rob Fender of Southampton University in the UK.

Huh. That's what people said the last time a magnetar blowed up real good, back in 1998. It, too, reached out and touched the atmosphere. (Hey, maybe we can title Harvard's screenplay Revenge of the Magnetar.)

I heard about this most recent burst later the day it happened, and Niles and I tried to figure out whether the timing was right for the burst to have triggered the tsunami (no). (Not that it would've.) We can still probably pin it on George Bush, though. (It was 19 years between the 1979 and 1998 bursts, but only six years between the 1998 burst and this most recent one. Global warming is affecting the magnetars!) I'll see if jkrank wants to work on a screenplay.

Posted 1:11 PM by Angie Schultz

Star Trek and the Enemies of the Good

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And Enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

--- Wm. Shakespeare, on the decline of the Star Trek franchise
(Hamlet, Act III, Scene I)


Stephen Green considers Adam Yoshida's plan for a new Star Trek series (which he dubs "Star Trek: Smallville): showing the original series characters as Starfleet Academy cadets. Yoshida says this idea has been around at least since before Star Trek VI, but it's been around a lot longer than that: early '80s rumors of a new Star Trek series revolved around this idea. I remember it well, because at the time I thought it stunk. I didn't want to see the crew played by different actors, and I didn't want to see them in their own pasts; I wanted to see the future's future, for heaven's sake!

Anyway, Yoshida has a few other ideas for possible new series, and Stephen's commenters add facetious suggestions (dorkafork offers "Sex and the City on the Edge of Forever" and Mike M considers "Klingon Fear Factor" -- now, if there were going to be a Star Trek series in production, you might well get another whole series out of people competing to be on it). They also offer reasons why Enterprise has sunk so low as to be actually cancelled, leaving no Star Trek series in production -- the first time that's happened in nearly twenty years.

I wrote here and here about my suggestion that Star Trek reflected the liberal zeitgeist (adapting the idea from Lileks -- always steal from the best).

Specifically, in Star Trek we are not allowed to have enemies, and in the first of those two posts, I went on at length at how the Federation's enemies had either been de-fanged in some fashion or have quietly faded into the woodwork.

Those posts were written before we knew how the whole Xindi-9/11 scenario would play out, and the same thing happened: Earth was the victim of an unprovoked attack, and we spend a whole year chasing the perpetrators across Hell and Creation, and finally we catch them in the act of building their genocidal planet buster and -- whoops, all a mistake. The three cuddly Xindi species were misled by the reptilian Xindi (with some help from the insectoids), who were in turn being manipulated by some shadowy creatures from beyond the eighth dimension.

In the gripping finale of last season, Captain Archer almost single-handedly wrests control of the weapon from its masters, detonating it and --

LOOK OVER THERE! NAZIS!

Yes. We immediately go from the mind-boggling explosion to a (as I recall, dumb) three-episode time-travel tangent involving: Nazis. And Xindis. Nazis and Xindis. Together. On Earth. In the 1940s.

My interpretation is that the liberal zeitgeist always returns to that one precious moment when the use of force was right and just, when the cast o' thought only rosied up resolution's cheeks, and conscience made heroes of us all (if only in misty retrospect).

The reptilian Xindi killed seven million people in an unprovoked attack, and would have wiped out all humanity, but let's not be hasty. After all, they worship the time-travelers, so in their culture -- which is just as valid as ours, remember! -- when the time-traveling pests told them that the humans would one day destroy them, they did not question it.

See, there? Now how can we condemn them? Tout comprendre est tout pardonner, after all.

But then they went and allied themselves with the Nazis, and that's going too far!

Contrast this to Star Trek's treatment of humanity's failings.

From time to time in the Star Trek universe, various superbeings have popped up to chide the humans for their brutish ways. The angelic Metrones made Kirk fight the Gorn in "Arena", the elusive Melkotians made the Enterprise crew fight phantasms from Kirk's imagination in the awful "Spectre of the Gun", and the godlike Sargon et al start fighting the crew themselves in "Return to Tomorrow". (I detect a pattern: if you're a pure and holy superbeing, eschewing violence, you like to watch a good scrap now and again, especially if you don't have to do the scrapping).

Of course, the archetypal superior beings are the Q. Every now and again throughout Next Generation, Q would spring up and torment Picard for a while, taunting him that humans were just so godawful -- so savage, so barbaric, so inferior -- that maybe the universe wouldn't be better off if they were just erased from existence. I got to wondering why the Q never bothered the Klingons with this nonsense. I mean, here the Klingons traipse through rivers of blood, swinging their batleths as they sing of the sweetness of battle, and it's humanity that's dangerous and savage. Why?

Well, we got a glimpse of the answer a couple weeks ago, when the Organians invaded the Enterprise. The Organians were first introduced (along with the Klingons) in the original series's "Errand of Mercy", where -- by the end of the episode -- they seemed unimpressed with the difference between the reluctantly violent humans and the gleefully bloodthirsty Klingons. On Enterprise, two Organians occupied the bodies of crew members in order to study how the crew handled an exotic virus. The Organians had been letting other races blunder onto the contaminated planet, observing their various reactions, for ten thousand years. The idea seems to have been that only races who are intelligent enough to defeat the virus are worthy of contact by the Organians.

The Enterprise crew doesn't quite accomplish this, but the junior Organian starts to argue that maybe intelligence isn't everything, that compassion counts for something (although they're supposedly looking for intelligence, throughout the episode the senior has been expressing disgust at the way the Klingons, among others, callously killed their infected crewmates to keep the disease from spreading). At one point they're arguing, in their borrowed bodies, and the junior asks the senior why he's harder on the humans than on the far more violent Klingons.

The senior starts to reply something along the lines of, "The Klingons don't pretend to be anything but bararians, but they humans say they're..." At that point they're interrupted, but the cat is already out of the bag: one swallow may not make a summer, but one smell does make a sewer. Humans espouse noble ideals, but don't always live up to them, so their aspirations to be better than they are condemn them to be worse than they are.

It's the creaking old virgin/whore dichotomy, applied on a civilization-wide scale. But only for human civilizations: alien civilizations get a free pass.

I trust I don't have to point out any contemporary parallels.

Posted 11:27 AM by Angie Schultz

Narcissism Is Hard!

You know, you read about (or possibly even know) people who think everything is about ME ME ME. Case in point: Elizabeth "Who?" Wurtzel, author of Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, which I picked up on the impression that it was about the difficulty that women have being assertive without seeming bitchy, or something like that. Instead it was about the beauty, the wonder, the glory that is Elizabeth Wurtzel, and the small-minded pettiness of those who cannot recognize it. (Fortunately, I put the book down before walking out of the book store, and thus was only a little worse for the experience.)

Aside from astonishment, disgust, ennui, and irritation, the saner reader feels a twinge of jealousy. How easy one's life must be, we think, if we could just swan around imagining that everyone else on Earth is placed here for our comfort and convenience (even though there are those who do just a terrible job of it).

But I read something yesterday that made me think that Olympic-caliber narcissism wasn't just a walk in the park. That would be the day's ration of La Cucaracha, a simplistic, badly-drawn, self-absorbed, political comic "drawn" by Lalo Alcaraz.

Since the ink marks add virtually nothing to the action, I'll give you the words, to save you the trouble of clicking on the link. The main characters are driving around, listening to a report on the radio:

1st panel: CBS News plans to go ahead and replace Dan Rather's top anchor spot with a team of news anchors spread out all over the U.S.

2nd panel: CBS officials say:

3rd panel: Locating network news anchors all over the country should keep Latino news anchors guessing and off the air, in the proud CBS tradition.

Just imagine the hard mental labor that went into that comic! Alcaraz hears the news that the "Voice of God" single anchor paradigm is crumbling, and the very first thing that pops into his head is apparently, "How can I fit this into my comics' sole theme, 'WE ARE LATINOS AND WE ARE OPPRESSED!'?"

It can't have been easy. A lesser man might have greeted this with a simple, "Huh," and turned to the sports pages. A man less devoted to incessant whining might've thought, "Surely a variety of news anchors will mean a variety of colors, genders, and species -- although, thank heavens, not political viewpoints. This can only be a boon to Latinos!" But not Mr. Alcaraz! He's not afraid of hard work! He's willing to go the extra mile in finding something to offend him in the most innocuous news item. I salute you, sir!

I look forward to reading your strips on how the selection of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General will set the cause of Latinos back 100 years.

(For all I know, Alcaraz has already done this. I don't usually read his comic. Long ago, he did a strip about an Anglo fellow who was, of course, a complete redneck. He was upset about some TV show, so much so that he wrote the network to complain. But he still watched the show, and his wife asked him why, since he hated it so much. The general theme of the strip was, "Well if you don't like it, turn it off." [Oh, and WE ARE LATINOS AND WE ARE OPPRESSED!]

I don't remember what the man answered, but I know what my response would be: La Cucaracha is taking up space that would be better used for other purposes. The chunk of comics real estate it currently occupies could be used to house Over the Hedge, or 9 Chickweed Lane (recently evicted from the Houston Chronicle in favor of Brewster Rockit), or some restful white space. Wouldn't that be nice -- a rectangle of perfectly blank, virgin newsprint, rather than La Cucaracha? Yes.)

Posted 1:37 PM by Angie Schultz

Criss-crossing Jordan

(I was tempted to title this post "Double-Crossing Jordan", but that would sort of imply that Mr. Jordan was on "our" side, and had betrayed us. He would probably deny he has a side. But if he does, it's not ours.)

No doubt you've heard of the latest Eason Jordan contretemps when Rony Abovitz, covering the Davos forum (which I can't help thinking of as the Davros forum), posted that Eason Jordan, Chief News Exec at CNN, had claimed that US troops were "targeting" journalists. This, naturally, raised a great ruckus there on the scene and in the blogosphere afterwards. Everybody seems to have understood Jordan to mean "deliberately targeting" (i.e., knowing they were journalists).

But then Jordan released a clarifying statement saying he meant merely that they had been deliberately shot at, presumably in the belief that they were the enemy. This came up, he says, because Barney Frank has asserted that journalist deaths had been "collateral damage".

However, Powerline points to a 2002 interview with Jordan which seems to believe, again, that journalists, as journalists, were being deliberately killed.

I was going to post on this yesterday, and point out that the sort of "targeting" that Jordan says he was talking about -- that is, journalists being mistaken for enemy combatants -- wouldn't be too surprising given this sort of thing (see the photo on the right): "An Iraqi Shi'ite militiaman takes aim at a US Apache helicopter flying above a cemetery in the Holy city of Najaf on Sunday."

That photo is credited to Reuters. As I said at the time, that photo, by Akram Saleh, and another by Hadi Mizban of AP, were virtually identical. There were two photographers -- one from an American news service -- cozied up with jihadis who were aiming at Americans.

Seems to me that if you're going to get this chummy with the enemy, you're going to have to expect to catch a bullet or two. (And, of course, the same sort of thing goes for reporters embedded with Coalition forces as well.) I hope Jordan doesn't think journalists should act as human shields, preventing US forces from firing on "militiamen" just because there might be a cameraman lurking nearby.

Roger Simon says "...there are three possibilities, my dear Watson: 1. Jordan is right. 2. he is delusional. 3. he is lying.

Sorry, Holmes, but you are forgettng a fourth possibility. To quote another fictional character: It's extraordinary how one yields to that fatal temptation to swank. It undoes the best of us. (Bertie Wooster in Chapter 2 of Joy in the Morning by P.G. Wodehouse.) In the Davos context, swanking means waxing indignant over American perfidy. The crowd eats that sort of thing up. It makes you feel brave and important. Then some smarty-pants killjoy wants to know where you get your information.

Oopsie! You forgot, just for a moment, that there might be people in the room who do not share your world view 100%. Then you have to backtrack a bit, because a) now you're in danger of being criticized, and b) you're talking out your ass. Uh oh, now your fan club wants to know why you are denying the brave truths you spoke a moment ago. Are you a tool of the US government after all? Are you afraid to speak Truth to Power? What will the lads down at the Woodward and Bernstein Old Empire Topplers' Club say?