Please. Boys nowadays already are femalized way too much.

according to you? ok, according to me, boys are not "femalized" enough. why should i take your word over my own?

i stand corrected on your reading, but huh. i see left hand of darkness as pure sci-fi in that it examines the social consequences of different ways of structuring society. specifically it raises questions about the ways we construct gender and the power relations embedded in gender, by posing a fictional set of biological constraints different than our own. to me the story raises questions, not sure what was preachy in it.

the lathe of heaven i would place in a genre of sci-fi related to fundamental challenges to individual epistemology along with works by p. k. dick, and o. butler.

In other words, the criticism does not appear to be that the movie is addressed to the interests of teenage girls specifically, but that in order to address those interests and broaden the audience this "sci-fi" movie has become "too fantasy."

again raising the question: why the double standard? how many hollywood sci-fi movies have ignored "hard sci-fi" in order to appeal to sterotypical teenage boy fantasies? (unrealistic explosions, blasting and transit sounds in space vacuum, gratuitous and unlikely representations of violence, kirk dangling off the edge of yet another cliff...) yet these stylistic inclusions do not merit the same cries of alarm, that the stereotyped fantasies of teenage girls do.

the atomic radius of silicon is about 110pm, or about 0.11nm, or a little less than 1/36th of 4nm.

i think you've overly invested in capital letters.

clearly you haven't read le guin's left hand of darkness, the dispossessed, the lathe of heaven, or any of the books in her hainish cycle.

also you clearly missed the point i was making: just because den of geek finds the interests of teenage girls more objectionable than the interests of teenage boys doesn't sci-fi catering to the former any less sci-fi.

most emetic of the artwork plastered over teenage girls' MySpace pages

sure... while teenage boys' fantasies get exalted into "real sci-fi"? (like, say the recent star trek movie?) mayhap den of geek should adjust his testosterone obsession by reading ursula le guin, c. j. cherryh, octavia butler, dorris lessing, joanna rush, emma bull, oh and heck, anne mccaffrey. i can't help but imagine that it would nicely leaven the quality of questions about sci-fi he poses.

While the article does a good job of raising the question of the fuzziness of the boundary between male and female sexes, it leaves unopened the question of what role sex (or gender) should play in competitive sporting events.

For a totally hypothetical example, given their population genetic disposition to dimunitive size, should pygmies be granted their own event categories (i.e. pygmy and non-pygmy events)? Should sexual distinctions be eliminated, so that events are unisex, and we simply see asymmetric distributions of performance along gender lines by the type of event? (i.e. females generally under-performing males in strength-burst events, more parity in endurance events, and possibly more over-performance in events entailing a high degree of coordination? Of course transies kick everyone's asses at everything? ;)

I write as a jock and as a transsexual, so the questions are personal for me (although I tend towards non-spectator and less competitive jockosity).

Craigslist is mostly free, yet i wonder if they are threatened by the kind of live by/die by scenario proposed by Cuban? Or will they simply die, when someone comes along and offers a free real estate database competitive with their own, and thereby knock out their revenue?

everything looks like a nail: steve runs a company that does its business by patenting. it's no surprise that he thinks of things in his life in terms of patents.

namely, technology to encourage consumers to part with their cash, to develop brand loyalty (so that they part with their cash in the future), and to commit mindshare (so that the idea of parting with their cash to the makers of brand x is socially worthy).

if you were to create a technology to do these three thing, people would call it marketing.

Why do you assume that social engineering is not a technological solution?

A black hole that happened to be created would likely be moving in a random direction at a speed well above escape velocity, and would quickly fly off into space and we'd never hear from it again.

Yeah! I random direction! Like, say, towards the sun!

;P

My Etch-A-Sketch has knobs.

"But a cloak that made an object invisible to light of only one color would not be of much use." If the color corresponded closely with the wavelength of laser weapons resistant/protective eye-wear could be developed of such materials. If one has need of a band-omit cover, say in the controlled protection of frequency-specific photosensitive material. Those are just off the top of my head, and I ain't an engineer.