Unlike some pursuits, in science new information sometimes means having to revise your conclusion. Just after snarking about how unscientific congress is, I read that Bill Foster, another physicist, has been elected to fill Dennis Hastert’s seat.
So the raising operator has been applied by the good people of the 14th district in Illinois, at least until November, when the measurement gets redone.
Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?
An interesting article on the gender-representation issue in the sciences. Many assume it’s all sexism, but whenever somebody checks to see if that’s really the case, two things seem to happen: they come to the conclusion, “Not so much,” and they are often attacked for raising the question. Congress has gotten into the act, with a push for a “Title IX for Science.” I’m all for removing barriers that might prevent women from pursuing a career in a science discipline, or shunt them into some other discipline against their desire, but if you don’t ask the question of how we know it’s sexism, such a path is, well, unscientific. (of course, that’s not surprising, since politics and political-correctness is involved). But the Title IX analogy fails, because science doesn’t have a men’s league and women’s league.
There is another essential difference between sports and science: in science, men and women play on the same teams. Very few women can compete on equal terms with men in lacrosse, wrestling, or basketball; by contrast, there are many brilliant women in the top ranks of every field of science and technology, and no one doubts their ability to compete on equal terms.
I think one of the problems in this issue is that some people are taking “men and women are equal” and subtly (or not-so-subtly) taking that to mean “men and women are identical.” And assuming that because the former is true that the latter must be as well.
via Twisted One 151
There’s also a new book, reviewed at the NY TImes, related to this topic. The Sexual Paradox by Susan Pinker.
Pinker parks herself firmly among “difference” feminists. Women’s brains aren’t inferior, she argues, but they vary considerably from men’s, and this is the primary explanation for the workplace gender divide
Over at Physics and Physicists, ZapperZ has a short post on an interference experiment that looks like a useful apparatus to demonstrate some of the quirkiness of QM. It shows both single-photon interference and, since it’s a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, it’s also easy to show the “which-path” effect that washes away the fringes.