Physical Theories as Men, a tit for tat response to Physical Theories as Women. Go ahead, you know you want to click on both of them.
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A warning: if you are a survivor of sexual assault you may just want to skip this post and the ensuing ugly comment thread it is sure to engender.
A week or so ago the redoubtable Dr. Isis wrote an open letter to me.
In part she wrote:
The pragmatic part of me wants to agree with you that there…
Welcome to our discussion of The Gender Knot by Allan Johnson. This is the second post in the discussion series. We will be discussing Chapter 1 "Where Are We?" You can find all posts connected to this discussion here.
As noted before, there is an updated edition of the book now available. In…
Final Update: Victory Day! In response to Shelley's request I've removed the text of the original email.
Update III: Shelly has another post on what she wants out of this:
Some have called for the boycott of all Wiley journals. While I appreciate the sentiment (more than any of you can know), I'm…
As a writer, there are few nicer things than reading a lucid and thought provoking response to an article you've written. PZ Myers, in responding to my article on the controversial theories of Joan Roughgarden, has written a gem of a blog post. Much of his post is devoted to scrutinizing and…
Quantum mechanics sounds about right.
"Winwood Reade is good upon the subject," said Holmes. "He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician."
Sherlock Holmes, in "The Sign of the Four"
Isaac Asimov carried that out to many corollaries, the The Foundation. As the number of people approaches a mole, cooperative quantum effects dominate. In his last year, Asimov added a caveat about Chaos Theory. But he remains the definitive definer of Dirty Old Men for the 20th Century, remarking (for instance, that poet/courtier/gamer Sir John Suckling had the perfect name for a Dirty Old Man).
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Sir_John_Suckling.aspx The Columbia
Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition
Sir John Suckling 1609-42, one of the English Cavalier poets. He was educated at Cambridge and Gray's Inn. An accomplished gallant, he was given to all the extravagances of the court of Charles I. He was a prolific lover, a sparkling wit, and an excessive gamester. The antiquary John Aubrey credits him with having invented the game of cribbage. Subjected to a humiliating defeat in Charles I's Scottish campaign of 1639, he was said to be more fit for the boudoir than the battlefield...
"Statistical Physics works in the secretarial pool. While you suspect she went through "issues" in her teenage years, she is now coolly competent, the level-headed person in any room. You thought her social mores dated to the days when women's suffrage was a hot news item — much like those of her older sister, Kinetic Theory of Gases — but then you discover that every weekend, she and General Relativity get tied together in String Theory's dungeon."