Ever wonder why there are so few women engineers? Well, wonder no more, because carchamp1 over on the Men’s Rights subreddit has the answer! It’s apparently his wife’s fault, or something. In a comment with two dozen upvotes at last count, he explains:
I put my wife through four years of college to be an engineer. That’s four years worth of college tuition and expenses, plus not having any income from her. She got a great job and worked for a couple years. She decided she didn’t want to work anymore so she could be a “stay-at-home-mom”. When I urged her to work she said if I didn’t like it she would take our kid and I could leave.
Women don’t want to be engineers that’s why there are so few. It’s too hard. It’s a lot easier doing the “hardest job in the world”, you know, be a mom and living off your husband.
End of story.
Yeah, it’s not like there might be any other reasons beyond laziness and ingratitude, or anything.
<I.@POlliwog: Very true (“pets new Android, Wally, lovingly”) but I admit to some grumpiness myself about OMG no holdeck, no transporter, and no flying cars! The Jetsons promised me flying cars!
Hehe, I sympathize. Speaking as someone whose relationship is long-distance at the moment, I cannot even count the number of times I have whined about the lack of teleportation devices. There is supposed to be teleportation by now! Hmph. :-p
(Grr, broken html tags…)
I don’t want teleportation! I’m too scared it will kill the original me and the new me reconstructed in the new place won’t really be me. (Although sometimes I worry this happens anyway and my consciousness isn’t really continuous.)
Maybe this is the real reason women haven’t built you a teleporter, DKM.
@HOlly: I’d vote to send DKM through an early prototype transporter, hoping he’d end up on one of the Klingon planets where MAN ARE MANLY and even the women would chop him into small pieces with a bathlith! (I may or may not be remembering my Klingon weaponry and vocabularly correctly–two solid days of grading essays will do that to a person).
I don’t want teleportation! I’m too scared it will kill the original me and the new me reconstructed in the new place won’t really be me. (Although sometimes I worry this happens anyway and my consciousness isn’t really continuous.)
Sometimes I worry about this, too. And then I stop and think, “But…hot boyfriend sexings anytime I want.” And that pretty much settles it. 😉
I used to think my parents were appallingly deprived for growing up without TVs.
But my kids now regard me with absolute bafflement when I tell them that when I was growing up, we had three TV channels and you couldn’t record, pause or rewind them, or indeed supply your own video material. And even if you wanted to change the channel you had to get out of your seat. And the picture was black and white. And you had to wait five minutes for it to appear because the valves needed time to warm up.
My daughter recently referred to my childhood as “the olden times”, and I’m not sure she was being sarcastic.
I didn’t say that “NO progress has been made”. I said that less, indeed far less progress has been made given the advantages that the mid twentieth century (and later) had, compared with previous periods which had no such advantages.
My suggestions were far from “utopian”! I didn’t even mention man-machine integration, controlled (or at least predictable) ESP, immortality (either by indefinite extension of one’s physical and mental integrity or by “uploading” individual consciousness into a permanent and indestructable container), some form of time travel (at least enabling the psychic observation different times and space, if not physical presence); restructuring the genome so as to render possible the complete and permanent immunity to all forms of disease or disabities, both physical and emotional/spiritual, communication (or at least a kind of empathic ‘mind-meld’ with other forms of life, both terrestrial and (when discovered) extraterrestrial, and fundamental scientific proof of the existence of the immortal soul…
All of these should be possible, all of these would be far beyond any projected “science” or ‘technology” of today,or of the recent past, and could be reasonably called “utopian”. I carefully avoided mentioning them, and confined myself to what was often mentioned in the popular entertainment of the second half of the twentieth century. The only exception was the example I used to illustrate the superhuman breakthroughs of Michael Faraday, Heinrich Hertz, James Clark Maxwell, Charles P. Steinmetz, Nikola Tesla, and on a slightly more pedestrian level, Alessandro Volta, Thomas Edison, S.F.B. Morse, Einstein (Photoelectric effect) and George Westinghouse et al…
NO such breakthroughs in over a century regarding gravitation or inertia, despite scientists–even female ones–having (one would think) far more to work with now then the explorers of electromagnetism had then! I may add that the opportunities for commercialization in the near future for safe and efficient gravity and inertia control would be comparable-especially for space travel and manufacturing–to the commercialization of electricity by the dawn of the XX century!
Anecdata (if DKM can do it then so can I):
Lately I’ve noticed a trend for people in the field of hard sciences to be going back to school and learning Humanities-based topics. The reason given by two people I know (an AI research scientist and a climate change scientist) is that it’s all very well having the evidence but if you want to change anything you have to convince people en masse, and many people are not convinced by evidence (witness DKM, NWO and their ilk). In AI, you have to understand the social implications of releasing strong AI into the wild (including the arguments for/against open source AI development – ie what will people do with it and will we have a say or will the AI just put us all through a meat grinder and how do we ensure this doesn’t happen etc etc blah blah.
Enter Humanities as a field that has some clues about these topics. Oddly enough, my esteemed hard science colleagues are finding their Humanities studies equally as challenging as they did their engineering/science studies, particularly in the area of there being no objectively correct answer and therefore having to make a compelling argument to support a thesis statement, rather than just throwing facts out there and expecting them to speak for themselves.
DKM on the other hand could not argue his way out of a paper bag, AND fails at producing facts. Therefore, much like the others, he too can kiss my arse.
I’m really sorry ladies haven’t given you flying cars and magic wands, DKM, but I’m not seeing any evidence that men would have either.
Also, I’m typing this on a multi-touch screen and beaming it to you from an open field hundreds of miles away in a split second. So there’s that.
Meller: I have a piece of plastic that’s smaller and lighter than almost any book in the world that can hold 3000 books. Three fucking thousand books, in less space than a modern hardcover. How is this not the most amazing fucking thing in the world? Not only that, my Kindle facilitates my tangential learning addiction by giving me always on 3g internet access. I can get song lyrics, look up words, and do a zillion other things on this hunk of plastic that even I had never thought of (outside Star Trek) fifteen years ago. No invention? You’re being an asshat. Again.
And! My Kindle has built-in speakers. The media player is a piece of shit, but if I want to, I can cram my music on it and not have to worry about an mp3 player. I say again, this thing is fucking awesomesauce,/i>!! (though not related to function, decalgirl.com sells these beautiful vinyl sticker that basically cover the original surface – my Kindle now has van Gogh’s ‘Blossoming Almond Tree’ adorning it.)
Also, DKM, half the stuff you named–time travel, ESP, curing all diseases, um, mind-melding with animals?–isn’t technology at all. It’s impossible. It’s MAGIC.
If you were better at science you’d understand that.
damn you html! damn you to hell!
A new DKM gem:
o_O?
WE ARE THE NANOBOTS STAR TREK WARNED US ABOUT
Good luck on your exams, Manboobers who are students! Even MRAL!
I’d like to point out that the same could be said(and should be said)for women at the workplace. (straight)Men and women together in the workplace, or sometimes even in an academic setting, results in sexual tension which is bad for moral and productivity. And yeah, I’m sure some folks have the self-control and self-discipline to ignore it but these people aren’t the majority.
I will say that sensible employers should discourage, or even prohibit their employees from wearing tight or revealing clothes in the workplace(with a few exceptions). Did you folks know that a law has been passed in a Georgia college town banning the public display of undies(no saggy pants with boxer shorts hangin’ out, AND no “whale-tails” LOL)? I wish more college campuses and work environs where people must be sitting down would adopt such a policy.
Holly: If our thoughts are nothing but electrical impulses wandering through the brain, it should be possible to invent a gadget that can translate those impulses from someone else’s brain into something we can understand. Of course, we’d probably need a computer as advanced as a human brain to do that, but it’s possible. Just not likely.
Nameless: People who can’t control their reactions to tight clothes shouldn’t be around other people. Period. If you can’t deal with the fact that my shirt might show some cleavage or my pants might be a little clingy around my hips, that is totally your problem.
Personally, I think the Internet in general and the World Wide Web in particular is the biggest communications revolution since the invention of printing several hundred years ago.
In fact, I still remember the precise moment when I was surfing the web in 1995 when I realized the magnitude of what I was participating in, and its potential. I’ve never felt a thrill like that before, and I haven’t since.
nameless: And the same applies to me. The fact that people walking around with their pants around their knees makes me twitch violently is my problem – I joke about telling them to pull up their fucking pants, but I would never dream of doing so to someone’s face because what other people wear is none of my fucking business. However I feel about it in my own head, I have no right to dictate other people’s sartorial choices.
Am I wrong in thinking that developing sentient robots to ultimately replace(and eliminate)humans is something that, while widely unpopular…………Well, seems like those tiny few who would seriously consider working to implement such an idea would surely be men and not women? [If I am mistaken please do correct me :-P] Sometimes it actually seems as though women have more faith in humanity then men do on average and have a more positive view of people.
I’m bringing this up because this thread made the movie T2: Judgement Day pop into my head and I was reminded of Sarah Connors monologue to the creator of skynet:
BlackBloc–December 13, 2011 @ 1:17pm
Are YOU behind the times!!
Zero-point energy, Low Energy Nuclear Reactions/Chemically Assisted Nuclear Reactions, Hydrino power (see Blacklightpower.com), applications of massfree energy (www.aetherometry.com)–also discussing why Einstein’ relativity (both special and general) were of limited utility in its description of gravitation as ‘curved space’– and many, many other extremely challenging ideas, theories, and models,
www. infinite-energy.com is a good place to start.
Sufficient to say that the same people who told you that “cold-fusion” was a fraud in 1989 were the people who lied to you about everything else! Didn’t someone suggest that scepticism about what he reads or hears about is the first tool of a good scientist?
I’m sure that you will be pleased to know that CANR/LENR have been repeatedly peer reviewed, and authenticated by impartial observers not only in the USA, but in labs around the world over the past 20+ years! Bet you didn’t hear about THAT in your physics class!
Happy Exploring!
To those who raised the point–I deliberately refrained from mentioning teleportation, because I don’t know if the science is even there! This was YOUR idea, not mine. I never imagined (with apologies to Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek) that “teleportation” was possible, given the quantum level of uncertainty regarding velocity, momentum and position on the atomic levels of matter and energy. How could your reconstitution be secured? How could you be reliably teleported from point A to point B? How would the Heisenburg uncertainty principle come into play with both you–at each point–and the machine(s) doing the transmission? What about the inevitable background noise during your quantum state?There are two dozen other questions which any undergraduate in physics could think up without difficulty…
IF teleportation should be possible, it would almost certainly be along a much less obvious path; say some kind of Extrasensory “transmission of consciousness” akin perhaps to “out-of-body experiences”, dream travels, or something even more exotic. We don’t even know how to ask the right questions yet, much less search for answers intelligently!
And yet, millions of straight men and women manage to work together every single day without sexual tension being an issue. The vast, vast majority of people I’ve worked with are able to control any sexual tension they feel at work, because they are professional. If you can’t handle working with people you’re attracted to, that’s your issue; don’t project it onto “the majority” of people.
True……However, an employer DOES have a right to impose a dress code for employees @the workplace and such could mean that tight fitting clothes are not permitted(along with “whale-tails” which any employer with an ounce of sense would forbid in the office). What I’m saying is that I really wish that more employers would demand modesty in clothing from their employees while on the job.
Holly Pervocracy–December 13, 2011 @ 1:45 pm
And you KNOW about its fundamental impossibility HOW??
I am the first to admit that it is far beyond the horizons of existing (or foreseeable) technology. After that–How do you KNOW that it is impossible–i.e. contravening fundamental laws of reality–when it is very unlikely that today we even know which questions to ask, much less how to search for the correct answers!
“Magic is simply tachnology that we don’t yet understand”–Arthur C. Clarke
Nameless dude: While most of the people I know who are working in the field of strong AI are men, I suspect a lot of that is an artefact of the same situation that has caused women to be a minority in engineering. And as in the other fields, more women are becoming involved as time goes by.
I know that one of the discussions in the ethics/impact area of AI research is on the feminist perspective – something that would not have been considered a few years ago because it was all men and nobody had thought to consider how an AI created purely by white men would interact with those who were not white men. Nowadays it’s a bit more balanced but there’s a long way to go.
I suspect that the “women are more nurturing and therefore likely to create friendly AI” argument is crap.