Rantings, indeed.

To wit:

Are you aware of Sotomayor's dissent in which she defended the 1st amendment rights of a white NYPD employee when he was fired for having sent blatantly racist and anti-Semitic replies in response to charity requests he received in the mail?

That she ruled against the plaintiff in 80% of race discrimination cases?

That in her famous speech she also said stuff like:

I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.

There is always a danger embedded in relative morality, but since judging is a series of choices that we must make, that I am forced to make, I hope that I can make them by informing myself on the questions I must not avoid asking and continuously pondering.

The horror!

I am so sick of people taking one fragment of a speech or one ruling and rushing to judgment based on their own biases and agendas. Take a deep breath. Read Ricci. Read the Pappas dissent. Then let us know what you think.

False.

The law sets certain efficiency standards, that standard incandescent bulbs will never meet.

But that does not preclude innovations such as this one.

Sometimes, regulations are actually written in a way that is sane.

I can't be bothered to provide a serious reply to a post such as yours.

I explain:

1. It is logical that it is more egregious for a member of a historically dominant group (that previously denied other members of its society from voting, considered other members of its society as property, etc.) to make statements that appear to support reasons for that dominance.

2. Larry Summers is currently one of the most powerful people in the US; his comments didn't exactly torpedo his career (many people at Harvard hated him for reasons far beyond his gender comments; the latter were just the spark the kindling needed).

3. Sotomayor did not assert "there are fundamental differences between both the genders AND races[1] as if it were a settled fact." In the quote that everyone is hot and bothered about, she spoke about how her experiences that were due to her gender and ethnicity might shape her decisions. If you don't get why such experiences might matter, I ask you this- what would have happened if Frederick Douglass had been on the court for Dred Scott v. Sanford?

4. Here are some key excerpts from Sotomayor's speech:

Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown.

However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.

5. Horrified by #4? How about Justice Alito, during his confirmation:

When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account. When I have a case involving someone who's been subjected to discrimination because of disability, I have to think of people who I've known and admire very greatly who've had disabilities, and I've watched them struggle to overcome the barriers that society puts up often just because it doesn't think of what it's doing -- the barriers that it puts up to them.

I know some white males (full disclosure: I am a white male) like to pretend that we live in a race- and gender-blind society, but we don't.

The benefits of a white roof are less the farther north you go.

I have seen a study that shows a white roof still provides some benefit in Canada (I think it was the maritimes, where it's not quite as cold as the upper Midwest, but still pretty farking cold), but much less than in a Southern location.

But a black roof is still a pretty ineffective way to heat a house.

The best setup would probably be to have evacuated solar heating collectors mounted on a white roof.

I presume you are being sarcastic.

So- epic logic win, right back at you:

In the winter, you want the heat in the house. Heating the attic via a dark roof doesn't get the heat into the house very effectively.

In the summer, you want to get the heat out of the house. If the attic is hot, the difference in both temperature and air density is large. So hot air doesn't flow up from the house as much as it would if the attic were less hot. It's called stratification.

I concede that I could have phrased the "which retards flow of heat/hot air in the house" better- I meant it retards the flow of heat up and out of the house.

Epic logic win for me and Sec. Chu.

Actually, a light-colored metal roof is a really good thing- sheds snow, much better energy characteristics.

Your post seems to omit a link to said study with the precise language, "it was way past too late for us to do anything about it now."

Red herring.

Chu said nothing about painting existing roadways. This is about new/replacement pavement, and its color.

In the winter, a dark, hot roof doesn't heat a house very effectively (heat rising and all that- plus there's less incident solar energy).

In the summer, there's a lots of solar energy hitting your roof; and a hot roof leads to a hot attic, which retards flow of heat/hot air in the house (heat rising and all that).

So, a light-colored roof has a much more profound impact on cooling than on heating.

A metal roof will help both heating and cooling- and snow slides off them- but they are not cheap!

You're competing for the visibility and publicity, not prize money.

Do the former make development worth one's while in this case? Beats me.

> Where are the posts comparing Obama to Hitler?

I'll get you started:

And don't forget Glenn Beck, et al.

Just read it recently as well.

I think your summary is correct. I don't think Gladwell did a particularly good job wrapping up the rest of the book, which was otherwise excellent. I feel like he got too worn out or ran out of time before being able to put together a concise conclusion.

First, who's the "you" you are addressing here?

And you are making the case that Gladwell basically starts with- that successful people are successful simply because they have some unique talent (like having good judgment).

No example of an "outlier" success story in this book isn't immensely talented. But in addition to their talent, they had other supplementary skills (i.e. not just intellectually smart, but also people-smart, and/or creative, etc.), worked hard, and were in the right place at the right time.

Gladwell doesn't really do a great job of summarizing his main argument, in my opinion, but it boils down to this: Highly successful people are pretty smart (but Gladwell argues that you only have to be "smart enough"; success doesn't track linearly with intelligence once you hit the "pretty smart and higher" region), have supplementary talents, work hard, come from the "right" background (though what "right" means here is typically only clear in hindsight) AND were in the right place at the right time.

Not mentioned in the review is the work of Lewis Terman, who identified a cohort of really smart California kids ("Termites") in the 1920's and tracked them for years. The outcomes of the "brightest of the brightest" were not particularly notable; Gladwell explains some of the reasons why.

Except that Bill Gates himself acknowledges that he had very, very unique opportunities that allowed him to be in the right place at the right time.

You are falling right into the mindset that Gladwell very effectively unwinds in his book.

Plenty of people have a killer business instinct. Few are in the position to capitalize on it the way Gates did.

Gladwell never claims that it's all blind luck for guys like Gates and Joy. Rather, it's talent PLUS practice PLUS temperament PLUS blind luck. Gates had it all. Take away one of these elements, and you end up like some of the other case studies in the book (brilliant but wrong temperament, brilliant but bad timing, etc.).