Most likely a sadist or a psychopath. ;)

You should try it without sauce, putting coarse salt on the meat before cooking. When I grill, I know people are in it for the red beauty, so I cook something pure and leave dressings for the salad or potatoes.

Agreed.

I lived in Argentina and Uruguay, where grilling is a cultural thing. Even vegetarians know how to cook meat in a grill (yeah, I happen to know one). I've been to a lot of "asados" with geeks, and the best tools you can have are an eyeball and a tongue. Any gadget is needlessly baroque; an article on this is shameless advertising on useless gadgetry.

How on Earth this comment gets modded "5: Insightful" is beyond me. It essentially suggest that women are paid less because it was the result of a concerted strategy to dump salaries.

The only problem is that the statistics are there and nobody wants to recognise them.

A single slashdotter read the summary?? This should be the next Slashdot story of the day!

Diversity in gender has been shown in papers to have mixed results: sometimes it's for the better, sometimes is for the worse, and sometimes it doesn't matter at all. Diversity in race usually is worse: it's better to have little groups with the same race than everything mixed up. Interesting, isn't it?

The argument for diversity is more about politics than economics or productivity. It's not a bad argument, but should be framed correctly.

Well, there's this inny-tiny issue with ethics...

What a weird comment, but I'll join the fray.

Do you have raw data, at least interviews? I only count with my personal experience: I had to pave my way into computers with blood, sweat and tears. I wasn't precisely "encouraged" when I blasted the family's PC those few times. My sister just didn't have the same sociopathic disposition to mess up. My girlfriend indeed said she was discouraged from Mechanics because "it was not girl stuff", but his father is schizophrenic and her mother is ultra-conservative. Go figure...

If they are going somewhere shady, men don't go alone: they travel by car, go with someone else, or both. I've heard a few reasons and seen a few papers on the topic: having men because of troubled neighbourhoods has never been mentioned.

While I agree that experience is a highly valued asset, rotation in this line of work is really high and it's highly doubtful that anyone will make it to the top that way. It's much more feasible to do it by setting shop on your own. There are only a few companies like IBM where you can find people working there for over ten years (coincidentally, IBM has a woman at the top and she DOESN'T come from IT but from sales). What's really valued in positions of power is connections and people skills, not so much hands-on experience or even leadership skills like the PHBs you mentioned. Now, I speak from my limited experience, but I know more women TLs and PMs than men.

I studied enough of sociology, philosophy and history to know that that sentence doesn't have any sense. There's a reason futurologists fail after all.

Like before, I've never seen a paper cite sexual harassment in IT as an explainer in my life. Can you provide? I've been hit on by colleagues, and hit on colleagues, all my life. The only thing I see unhealthy about this is when they break up and the team suffers for a while. I really can't say what the standard for sexual harassment is, other than saying "no" enough times, one being the boss of the other or someone "paying back". I am at a loss here...

tl;dr Indeed, there is.

Check Chapter 13 of "Making Software. What Really Works, and Why We Believe It", which contains a healthy amount of papers about why there aren't as many, if it's a problem at all and, should it be so, what can be done about it. While the lack of women doesn't have a single cause, there's a societal/cultural element that a priori predisposes them not to choose this line of work, which can be camouflaged as "choosing their own career choices".

Check this quote, for instance:

That's awful. I hate loopholes even more than bad laws.

Watch pr0n, I presume? In fact, doesn't that give you endorphins and all kind of goodies?

It's disingenious to say that aborting a launch is a success. A success would have been getting the Falcon 9 to space (the original objective), instead it failed to launch . Maybe it's a success for the safety systems, which averted a disaster, and that is great. Maybe it's a cheaper failure than blowing up. Neither is a success you'd report on news.

I hope next Tuesday/Wednesday it launches successfully.

Under certain circumstances, two particles like electrons or photons (that's light) get related in such a way that, if you look at a certain characteristic on one particle, you'll know for sure not only the value for your particle, but also which value the other particle has. Thing is, most scientists, but not all, think these characteristics are random and don't have a "real" value until they are measured, so they say that, when you know the value on one particle, it "teleports" the result to the other particle, so it can know which value should have. There's another problem: this teleportation is faster than the speed of light, something that physicists don't like.

Let's say that you have bunnies that can be GOOD or EVIL, and behave like those particles. Let's say they are in a box and, before you see them, they can be either GOOD or EVIL. Once you open the box and check them, you can say "This bunny is a GOOD one!" or the EVIL bunny jumps at your face. Now, let's say that two twin bunnies are born and put in separated boxes, and you know that one is the GOOD one and the other is the EVIL one. They have become "entangled". You keep one and give another one to a friend. Now, when each is on their houses, you open your cage and check your bunny. Let's say is the GOOD one. Now, you know for sure that your poor friend has the EVIL one: it has "teleported" that knowledge.

If you are thinking the bunny knew all along whether it was GOOD and EVIL, well, a few scientists also think that way, but for that to work out (there's some heavy math behind it), information *must* be able to travel faster than light, so we can't solve the problem this way (who knows, maybe Einstein was wrong!).

I remember a few days ago someone submitted a story about piracy for "The Avengers" being low compared to potential profits from them. A few high-ranked comments were like "This is yet another proof that [insert common /. parlance here]". I saw very few comments that stated the most plausible reason: a camcorded action film, with crappy audio and a shaking image, can't compete against the real thing. I thought the same thing: confirmation bias.

People do it all the time. If something can somehow support their views (specially if they don't RTFA) they'll use it as yet more confirmation. "I still don't get why this piece of evidence is discarded by everyone else! They must be delusional or have bad intentions". For example, I imagine this article will be used as evidence for: lack of funding, falling standards in the US, the demise of education, lack of scientific reasoning (maybe they'll even extend it to scientists themselves), and other common /. utterances. I wonder how many of them will actually say what I found out after RTFA...

So, everyone is playing the same game, and scientists are no exception. But hey, that study has numbers on it. At least you can try to replicate the findings, if only the entry barrier wasn't so high: these tests are *hugely* expensive. More collaboration may be a good idea. Shared laurels are better than none, right?

P.S., a nice article on confirmation bias (and other goodies) here.

People in Estonia, for more than a decade.