The OP (rinukuzu) made an excellent observation -- that this is not limited to a single profession. The obvious implication is that this is a problem with our whole society, yet Jawnn assumed the GP was somehow trying to claim the problem doesn't exist. That isn't supported by what was posted.

Yes, I know Jawnn wasn't responding to me -- I hadn't posted anything. I was just struck by the completely negative tone, with Jawnn making a failrly obvious faulty assumptions about what the OP said.

I'm not sure what I'm projecting. I say there's a big problem with violence against women and it's not limited to academia.

What I don't support is poor reading comprehension. Both you and Jawnn seem to have that in spades. Geez Louise! get a grip.

I am late to the party here, but want to leave one last tidbit: read astronomy journal articles. Many you will not understand, many, you will understand the language, but not the math (especially articles, they omit many many steps since they are so short), but ultimately, you will understand some, and understand the data they took to arrive at a conclusion, and maybe even question the data, the measurement, or the data processing. Maybe even enough to contact the authors and ask for clarification, or suggest alternate methods. At this point, you are doing astronomy. One added bonus to being a college student: Awesome libraries that can access all these journals at no cost to you (except your tuition of course).

Some suggestions for more hands on stuff:

Kewl book: Exoplanet Observing For Amateurs, by Bruce Gary (free! courtesy of the author)

edX Courses: They actually teach from journal articles! Math is at the high school level.

Citizen Science projects:

Find Exoplanets
Dicover and measure KBOs

Age? Phooey on that. Upon completing my 2nd M.S. degree in my mid 50's, I got letters of recommendation for PhD school (which I chose not to pursue).

This is also a good argument that applies to the United States, too. It explains why the 17th Amendmennt was a mistake.

Wow! Just wow! I was thinking the same thing myself, except I put "this is a societal problem, not one just in the academic community," after 'Makes one wonder'. Way to go in projecting your fears and negativity on others.

My son is 8 and has been playing Minecraft for 2 years. I've seen him go from just throwing stuff together to really putting thought into design and ascetics.

We started him out on Minecraft Pocket edition.. He can play with friends on the same lan but internet play is not all there yet so you don't have to worry about online strangers. We bought the PC version for him last year and started playing on the Reddit servers. Overall it's a good community.

The best description of Micecraft I've heard is Digital Lego.

In creative you can build anything.. My son and I built the Great Pyramid of Geza to scale on the Reddit creative server.

Play with redstone.. lean the basic electronic circuits with switches and logic gates.

Then switch to survival, join a community.. work with others as a team.. So many things you can do in one little game..

Well not to call it little.. the map can have more land than 9 million earths.

No, no Bono. You're confused.

"Music that cannot be pirated" != "Music that won't be pirated"*

*because it sucks donkey balls

Those foolish over-65s.
They voted reflexively, after reviewing trivial issues like:
- the SNP's assurances that Scotland would be a member of NATO and the EU were completely wrong (both the EU and NATO rebuffed the 'automatic membership' that the SNP was asserting they were entitled to)
- losing their currency (The British public was 2/3 against letting Scotland keep the pound. The Exchequer had said no, and most economists said the 'Sterling Union' proposed by the SNP was a stupid idea)
- The departure of most major Scottish business southward - hell, even the Royal BANK OF SCOTLAND was leaving if "Yes" won the vote...
- SNPs domestic agenda that pretty much amounted to a Socialist Utopia funded entirely on North Sea oil that they felt they would automagically inherit without contest (never mind revenues have been falling there for a decade or more)

Essentially the SNP's platform was "if everyone does what we say should happen, with the most optimistic interpretation of everything possible, nobody disagrees, and Britain pays for everything, it'll all be hunky-dory...probably" was an exercise in extended political farce that only had currency because Cameron (stupidly) gave it credibility.

Let's remember too that the referendum was NON-BINDING. There was promised a referendum, and then "we would act in the best interests of the Scottish people"....that's all.

Maybe - as has been abundantly proved in many other contexts - the 16-18s that got to vote were easily swayed by emotions, having not thought through the issues seriously and more likely the 65s just barely countered them?

FWIW, I think this would be a brilliant time to do as some conservative MP suggested and re-write the 1707 Act of Union to enfranchise each 'kingdom' within the UK equally, and no longer allow a bunch of whingers in Glasgow to play the tune.
I admire much about Scotland, but this referendum seemed to be playing to their stupid side.

I always thought it was an awesome idea to have a bigass set of computers at home... Ya well now I get paid to manage a bigass set of computers professionally and I'd rather just leave them there, thanks. Also there's no compelling reason to want my own servers for the sort of things I do, VMs work so well. I'll just lease one from somewhere, or spin one up at work.

At home, all my gear is related to, well, home use. More than a non-geek would have for sure but no data center.

Just to represent another side to the argument, and because I like getting modded down for expressing my opinion - I don't think Oracle deserves ALL the flak it gets. Just to make it clear - I work for them as an engineer, so I may come with a certain bias, but I also have more actual insight than most on /.

Firstly, I don't think anybody can deny that Oracle RDBMS is top notch; I have worked with many other databases - MS SQL Server, Informix, DB2, MySQL, and I still prefer Oracle. The documentation is better than what you get from the competition. DB2 is the only one that comes close. Plus, you can legally download even Oracle Enterprise Edition for free and use it for development and testing. I think it is excellent.

Secondly, Oracle was amongst the first of the big companies to come out in support of Linux with version 8 of their database. I think that was before IBM came out with an official port of Linux to their mainframe. To me that counts for a lot in terms of street cred.

Thirdly, in my experience Oracle is a very decent company to work for. They are not hugely generous, but they have some good benefits and I feel valued as an employee. I don't whether Larry Ellison is good or bad; I don't expect to find out for myself, but so far I have no complaints.

The fact is that we have too little evidence to guide us, and we can all speculate to some extent. My favourite, based on nothing more than my own wishful thinking, really, is that dark matter consists of not just 1 kind of particle, but of a whole 'phylum' (to borrow a word from biology) of particles that interact with themselves much like the particles we know; there may be several phylums (or phyla, if you prefer). The reason I like the idea is simply that it allows me to fantasize about a kind of parallel universe that we can't see - even life; a sort of ghost universe. Wouldn't that be cool :-) ?

Did you read the original article rather than just skim over it? One of the surprises is that there is a third component in European ancestry. Another surprise is that the blue eyes apparently came with dark skin and the lighter skin colour came with brown eyes.

The third interesting thing is that two of our lineages are very old, but a third contribution came in around 7000 years ago, just at the same time as agriculture. It makes sense, IMO - agriculture meant that this particular group became dominant and thus contributed disproportionately more to the gene pool in a relatively short time.

If you want to post goatses as a surprise to people, don't do it in slashdot, because

1. We have all seen him enough times to find him a bit trivial,
2. The way slashdot presents links gives it away by attaching [goat.cx]