There's strong evidence that the people who built the pyramids were not slaves, it was a religious pilgrimage where the worker received accommodation and food for their entire family. In other words, the whips and shackles are an artifact of hollywood, not ancient egypt.

It's not that easy. At QFC and Safeway, EVERY bread they sell is overly sweetened. The only bread I've found without too much sugar is Trader Joe's rye.

Gas was promoted as a bridge between coal and renewables, it has served it purpose to some degree but the efficiency gap between renewables and coal has ceased to exit in the last year or two. There is simply no technological or economic reason to build new coal plants, reducing gas consumption would be the next logical step to get emissions under control. Emissions do not need to be zero, the biosphere is said to be capable of absorbing about 3Gt of CO2/yr, roughly 1/10th of what we emmit right now

Umm, the "rest of the world" have waited 20yrs for the US to stop obstructing international negotiations on climate change, all of a sudden it's now the rest of the world not pulling their weight?

Yep, and some people think vaccines cause autism, both groups are factually incorrect and were initially motivated by a morally warped version of financial self-interest. Piers Corbyn uses "secret methods" to scam money from people who are mathematically/scientifically illiterate, he claims to be able to predict earthquakes and the weather but his track record does not match his claims. That you fall for such obvious technobabble just betrays how little you know about human nature, science, and maths.

"ingrown follicles" - lol, wish I had mod points.

What's the difference between pumping water uphill with coal/nuclear vs solar/wind. I don't have anything against nukes besides time and cost but "base load" is propaganda invented by the coal industry and supported by the nuclear industry. The demand curve of a modern city is not flat, the flat supply curve generated by "base load" is made to fit the demand curve using dams and gas turbines as fast switching, rechargeable "batteries". Solar and wind can use the exact same technology to manipulate their supply curve into fitting the varying demand. As for air-conditioners, they are at peak use during peak solar generation times, meaning they actually have a better natural fit to demand than "base load" in some specific scenarios.

That was definitely true in 1980. In the 1990's we chose gas as the bridging tech (re: fracking boom), however we have now clearly crossed the gas bridge and arrived on the other side. The massive efficiency gap between generating electricity with FF vs renewables that existed in the 1980's no longer exists. Today the "smart money" is on renewables becoming cheaper than coal in the near future. Here in Australia it's already a "no-brainer" to put solar panels on a new home, and that's with a far-right government that is openly hostile to the renewable industry.

This is FUD spread by the coal industry, they are trying to make you believe "base load" does not need batteries. The truth is that coal and nuclear already have a network of giant batteries called "hydroelectric dams", that they recharge during off peak times when the plant is generating too much electricity. They need dams and gas fired turbines today because their output curve is flat whereas the demand curve of a city is not. In fact all forms of large scale generation need "batteries" for the simple fact that none of them have a supply curve that comes close to matching the demand curve, without fast switching "batteries" such as hydro a grid simply won't work.

Scale: Every coal plant in use today was built in my lifetime, many have been built and rebuilt. If someone had predicted/planned that rate of expansion back in 1960 people would have told them they were nuts. Solar and wind is cheaper than nuclear and in many places on par with coal, extrapolating the current trend in costs, renewables will be significantly cheaper than coal in the next 3-5yrs (coal itself is significantly cheaper than nukes). India is in the process of providing 400m people with electricity (and toilets), they are doing it with renewables because it is cheaper than importing coal from my country (Australia).

There's no economic or technical reason that the current coal infrastructure cannot be replaced with renewables in the next few decades, we don't need better battery tech to get it done, we don't huge subsidies, we don't need resources from hostile nations, and in most locations we don't need (expensive) nukes, we just need the political will to force the electricity industry to clean up it's act, legally define (and require) "clean energy", phase in the punishment for non-compliance in a predictable and achievable timetable then let the engineers within the energy companies sort out the practicalities of implementing it. I'm advocating regulatory "force" here because their 150yr track record of fighting reasonable environmental law strongly indicates they won't do it voluntarily.

Off course if you want to eliminate the grid altogether, then you will need better battery tech.

Types "Microscope Toy" into Amazon and the first few results are:

http://www.amazon.com/Educatio... Boy.
http://www.amazon.com/Educatio... Girl.
http://www.amazon.com/Educatio... Girl.
http://www.amazon.com/NSI-150x... Boy.
http://www.amazon.com/My-First... Neutral.
http://www.amazon.com/Learning... Boy.
http://www.amazon.com/Magic-Sc... Girl Girl Girl Boy Girl.

The only one of the entire lot that *is* gendered is gendered purple for girls. "Nancy B's Microscope".

To be clear % is a bullshit statistic. In the 1980s CS was teeny tiny. In the 90s all of my friends wanted to go into CS because they wanted to make video games. So in the 80s there was probably a broad academic interest which attracted both men and women just like chemistry or biology or engineering. And then in the 90s you suddenly had a huge influx of video game geeks wanting to learn how to make a video game. That large influx of programmers who probably would have been screwed got the luckiest break in 100 years and an entire industry exploded around them giving them employment opportunities outside of programming game engines.

I can't think of anyone who went into CS who I went to highschool with who was talking about how excited they were to go into CS and learn how to program mobile apps.

In my degree program (Visual Effects and Animation) it was almost exclusively male. The women in the program joined because they loved pixar movies and wanted to do animation. The men mostly loved star wars and wanted to blow shit up. Almost all of them will end up green-screening corporate talking heads. A lot of these niche industries like CS are similarly bait and switch teasing a career in something awesome and then delivering a homdrum run of the mill job.

We need to find the CS equivalent of "Video Game Developer" to attract women. Because "Hey you can work on the database that drives Facebook!" isn't really attractive to highschool boys let alone higschool girls looking to pick a major and doubling down on recruiting using purely practical factors doesn't work.

So to answer the original headline's question. I would say no, probably not. CS has successfully attracted a lot of men by using Boy-Focused games (guns and explosions). So I would suspect the best approach to women is exactly the same... deception and trickery to make CS seem relevant to the things they already like.

There is a great article on how you shouldn't get a degree in the 'hot' career field because most likely by the time you graduate it'll have been devalued. I disagree since generally that takes more than 5 years. But the point is dead on.

The reason tech pays well is because a bunch of geeks got lucky. Tech pays well *because* of the social status was 0 for programmers. Social status was so low for programmers that almost nobody pursued it. So when suddenly there was demand for tens of millions of skilled workers in a field that was ostracized the handful of people who accidentally happened to have the skillset in spite of the lack of social status made a shit ton of money and gained a lot of social status.

By the time we get the gender balance equal there'll no longer be any money to go along with it because it'll no longer be a lack of labor.

I think everyone should have strong skill with technology, technology isn't going away--it is a new form of literacy. But if someone is in highschool today or even worse as the OP is talking about, play toys for toddlers--don't expect a high paying job for knowing how to program just like knowing how to read and write is no longer a shortcut to a better paying job out of highschool.

Notice how nobody complained about the lack of women being pushed into computer programming 20 years ago. Why? Because it was a low paying job with no social status. Now in retrospect that it happened to explode it's something that should have been important 20 years ago. No shit. Hindsight is 20/20. But it's a bit like saying that it's unfair that a bunch of comic book nerds have 1st edition Superman comics and it's unfair that they're making all this money. Yeah... I wish I had a 1st edition million dollar comic book--but they deserve every penny for being uber nerds with no promise of reward for half a century. It's ultimately a lottery.

Trying to predict though the winner is ultimately a losing strategy because even if you could pick as soon as you made the magic winning formula public then you would have to share the pot with 10 million other people. It's like stock picking, you can't successfully pick stocks and if it was possible then everyone else would also pick that stock and you still wouldn't get rich. A nerdy low-status activity won a bunch of geeks a lot of money. But as soon as everyone starts doing it (and they will) the money and the status will disappear.

Yeah I got into a debate with my Fiancee who is a professional dancer about Homeopathy because she insisted that she took a homeopathic medicine regularly for joint pain that worked great and I insisted it was just snake oil. She showed me the bottle and I read the ingredients list and it had Arnica Montana in a 50% concentration and was like "Oh, this isn't homeopathy, this is straight up mainstream medicine."

I'm not sure if it's a case of Manufacturers trying to cash in on the Homeopathy hype, or homeopathy manufacturers cynically trying to toss in some working examples to sell more snake oil.

You mean the phony who shamed the world into forgiving Africa the crippling cold war debts that were foist upon it. The phony who personally persuaded Bill Clinton to dismantle the IRA's Boston based funding? The Irish phony who stood up in Boston and definitely screamed "fuck the revolution" at the IRA leaders and financiers in their home town? I don't know what TS has done to make the world a better place but criticizing Apple is just not in the same league as Bono's "good deeds".

The MSO is very popular here in Melbourne, tickets are not cheap and shows are often sold out.