Why does NASA's use of the term "science data" sound so weird to me? I mean, sure, it's data collected for scientific purposes, but the turn of phrase just rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it sounds pretentious.

Or whatever you want to call yourselves, you perverted prudes with unhealthy sexual hangups.

In general, those people who want to judge others on the basis of something they consider to be immoral typically have the same problem themselves. Some Christians I have known who speak out actively against homosexuality, for instance, I have had the impression that they had latent homosexual tendencies themselves that they're fighting.

Similarly, we have religious people speaking out against public breastfeeding, and I get the impression that they worry too damn much about having impure thoughts or something. If that's what's really going on, that their own problem, since breastfeeding is a natural thing that we should encourage, and babies get hungry at "inconvenient" times, so you just have to feed them.

One thing I wonder is what would have happened if the women in the photos had been much less attractive. They're both very pretty, which I suspect is further fueling people's worries about being spurred on to have impure thoughts.

As a final note, while I encourage breastfeeding, there are some people who are nazis about it. I think it should be a choice. Moreover, there are some people who have trouble with it. Sometimes they naturally don't produce enough milk. Sometimes, the baby has trouble latching on; for instance, tongue-ties are fairly common.

Yeah, but average human brain size is fairly consistent as well. Well, it varies a lot, actually, but more randomly, not correlated with race.

Just to be clear, I am pefectly well aware that "racial" groups have far more overlap in genetic diversity than they have differences. You can compare individuals in intelligence. You can compare population averages, although the averages aren't all that different. But even if the averages were much different, you couldn't project population averages to individuals, because the population variances are huge.

If Neanderthals were still around (more than some genetic remnants), it would be cool to analyze the differences. I suspect that they wouldn't be generally less intelligent than homo sapiens, but that they'd have slightly different strengths and weaknesses. I could see that being really useful for team building with complementary skill sets. As it is, with all of our "racial diversity" humans are a monoculture compared to what it would be like if we had more high intelligence species.

Anyhow, "Are whites more prone to discriminate against other groups?" isn't necessarily a dumb question. None of those questions is stupid from the point of view of detached scientific inquiry. The answers are all going to be mostly or completely "No," but science is often about asking stupid questions, even if the effect is to provide quantifiable evidence for something we intuitively knew. Also, that the answers are "no" is not intuitive to everyone. Moreover, slashdot has linked to plenty of cases where scientists tested something "obvious" and the results came out different from what we expected.

There IS some basis to say that some populations (on average) are smarter than others, when it comes to variation in specific strengths and weaknesses. Racial groups have been apart long enough that we've all adapted a little bit to slightly different environments. We're all more or less well-adapted to those environments, and since those environments have some differences, we're going to have some differences. An example is skin color. It's likely that humans living in Africa 1/2 million years ago had a medium brown complexion, owing to the higher density of trees, greater moisture, and other factors making sunlight exposure less than it is now. As the environment in Africa became more arid and sunnier, humans there adapted to develop darker skin, while those who migrated to the far north developed lighter skin so as better absorb the more limited UV radiation and generate enough Vitamin D. (Incidentally, Inuits are too dark to generate enough Vitamin D where they live, so traditionally, they would get it from blubber. Now that they have adopted more western diets, they're getting sick due to insufficient calciferols.) Another difference often pointed out (but hot much if it's genetic I'm not sure) is how Africans tend to have superior social ability. Although this doesn't necessarily imply anything about other components of intelligence, it may represent a tradeoff, where different human groups all have about the same average intelligence, and as a result, greater social intelligence will trade off against other kinds of intelligence. One example I recall reading about many years ago pertained to children with cognitive impairment. A white child with an 80 IQ will be generally retarded, while a black child with an 80 IQ will be socially normal.

BTW, I've always argued that social intelligence is a major blind spot for IQ testing. That doesn't mean that IQ is useless. It just means that sometimes, IQ will underestimate someone's over-all intelligence if they are smarter in an area that IQ doesn't test for. There are other kinds of intelligence left out of IQ, such as bodily–kinesthetic.

And one last thing. In 100 years, hopefully this line of inquiry regarding racial intelligence will be as boring as questions about gender intelligence. Also, hopefully gay marriage will be boring too. We'll have some knowledge about these things, but we won't prejudge people on those basis. We won't assume the neighborbood is going to hell if a minority family moves in, and we won't disown our children if they turn out gay. But at this time, there are many people who would love to pervert science to tell a story that gives them permission to be assholes to other people, which forces us to carefully analyze those questions. (But of course, when science goes counter to their preconceived notions, they'll reject it.)

Who says ageism is okay?

In engineering and academia, I've appreciated those rare black colleagues. For one thing, they were all much more social (and it is well established that culturally and/or genetically, africans statistically have superior social ability to whites and asians), so I could enjoy hanging out with them more. Another is that they had different things to say, making our work environment litterally more diverse in terms of ideas.

However, in many ways, those black colleagues were not extremely "black" culturally. Dialectally, they sounded more mainstream, along with their general comportment.

As others have pointed out here, the biggest barrier to blacks getting into white collar jobs is black culture. Those who manage to escape the anti-education indoctrination demonstrate themselves to be just as smart as everyone else. It's not politically correct to suggest that different genetic sub-groups (i.e. races) might have different intelligence levels (albeit just averages), but it's anthropologically, it's an important question. However, what we find is that the culture dominates so strongly that we can't even begin to explore that question. (And of course, it is both stupid and unethical to assume that every member of a race is equivalent to the average (whatever that is) and prejudge them on that basis.)

Turns out 60% of my class is Indian.

Here's what happened: I'm teaching one of two sections of a CS course. On one of my homework assignments, I borrowed two of the questions from the other instructor. However, I altered them so that the numbers were different. The other section's answer key came out just before mine was due. Nevertheless, about 60% of my class turned in exact copies of the other section's answers, which were not correct for the assignment I gave them.

Call me lazy if you want, but coming up with good questions isn't as easy as you might think, so instructors often reuse their own questions (with some facts altered), and this isn't a whole lot different. This gave me an opportunity to explain to the students the meaning of the term "honeypot."

Anyhow, India isn't unique in developing this sense of entitlement to do what you want and to achieve grades, regardless of what you might actually learn. Some people will spend more time trying to evade learning than actually doing the learning. But some people find the piece of paper to be more important than having job skills.

You seem exceedingly rational, which is actually rare among netizens (male or female). I'm concerned that the abuse you receive may be mild compared to what some people have to deal with, where the abusers intrude on real life or at the very least make it difficult to do anything on the internet without having to wade through tons of crap.

People should not send you threats of bodily harm by any medium, whether we're talking about snail mail, phone, fax, or Internet.

Unlike those other things, religion is something you choose and something you can change. Moreover, religions are responsible for (directly or due to perversion) for countless atrocities. For gender, race, and sexual orientation, it is only bigotry against them that has lead to atrocities (although bigotry applies to religion too). Finally, many aspects of most religions don't make logical sense or are in direct contradition to established scientific fact or well-supported theory.

Therefore, I say that people should be subject to verbal criticism for aspects of their religions that are stupid.

That being said, many religious people are not intellectual enough to be able to question their religions, and due to the all-encompassing role that most religions play, religion is an integral part of their normal function. It's one thing to pick on someone for being intentionally stupid, but what about the cases where people are simply unable to think beyond their upbringing? You're not going to train me to want to eat grub worms any time soon, although it's perfectly normal in some cultures, so maybe I'm stupid in that way. There are some aspects of one's upbringing that are difficult or impossible to shake.

Consider sexual orientation. Mostly or strictly gay people make up only about 10% of the human population. Something we don't think about is the part of the population that is strictly straight. There are cultures where homosexual acts are or have been expected, and some people naturally are unable to bring themselves to participate, making themselves outcasts. Let's say for the sake of argument that that accounts for another 10%. That suggests that there is about 20% of humans who fundamentally have no choice about their sexual orientation. What about the remaining 80%? Some identify as something else (like bisexual, pansexual, asexual, etc.). But most of them identify as straight. Why? Cultural indoctrination. They could have, if raised differently, been more flexible, but they had that flexibility trained out of them. Religion is really no different from that or any other aspect of culture that we take for granted.

Which is why it's unethical (I didn't say it should be illegal) to discriminate on the basis of religion. That being said, facts are facts, and when someone is wrong (regardless of how deeply ingrained it is), they should be subject to criticism. The rest of us should not be contrained by other people's backward cultural hangups, just because we apply the label "religion."

As I have been coming to understand, you have a good point. What I don't know is if these components have well-documented interfaces so that they can be swapped out.

Systemd is also modular in that it is comprised of multiple components that run in isolated processes, which avoids having one service crash due to bugs in another. It's also not as spaghetti as people say it is. As I said in another post, the high level differences between systemd and sysvinit are:
- sysvinit starts a whole bunch of services whether you need them or not sequentially at boot time, and the startup is controlled by shell scripts.
- systemd starts services entirely on demand, only when they are needed, automatically managing dependencies, and the startup is controlled by C code.
So basically, they're a lot a like, except that systemd maintains more components internally to the project, and it's smarter and faster.

Wow. The usual complaint is the myth that systemd is monolithic. It's not. But now you're complaining that it's broken up into too many services? And how is this any different from sysvinit, which also starts any number of different binaries?

All they've done in systemd is write C code to start up services that used to be started instead by shell scripts and added the ability to make dependency resolution automatic so that services are only started when they need to be. So basically, they made it smarter and faster. The complaint that it's got too many binaries is moronic and a complaint just as well against sysvinit.

Systemd is modularized into a number of different binaries, each of which handles a different service. Thus, different functions are isolated from each other. This enhances stability and improves startup performance when not all need to be running first thing at boot time.

Oh, and all of systemd's config files are written in ASCII, in the traditional UNIX way. One cool thing they've done is made a single parser implementation (in a shared object library) so that all of the config files have the same syntax. Also, when you debug a problem with parsing for one service, you automatically debug it for all others at the same time.

We're talking about low-level system services here, where it's not really necessary to have swap-out options. Ok, sure, we have nano and vim, less and more (which nowadays are just the same program), variations on cron, etc. But a any one time, we just need to pick ONE. Moreover, most of us don't care which cron was chosen, as long as it does the right things at the right time.

With systemd, there is CURRENTLY less choice in some cases, but probably for ones that don't matter. Most components are already optional, and sooner or later, there will be multiple choices for a given service. (The lack of that is due to the young age of the project.)

As for duplication, you're not getting it. In a good system, common functionality is bundled into shared object liibraries so that they can be dynamically linked into multiple programs that need the same capabilities. Those are mapped to the same physical memory pages, so it saves memory too. It's also good to avoid reinventing the wheel. How many different config file parsers do we really need?

This sounds like a bug. Systemd is new, so it will have bugs. This is not, however, a design flaw. It is merely something that needs to be fixed. It's only a major problem if the devs refuse to fix it on the grounds that they don't think it's a bug. However, I've mostly only encountered that attitude when reporting Chrome bugs to Google.

Systemd is modular:
    - It's broken up into multiple independent processes, each of which handles one major thing well.
    - It's broken up into libraries so that commonly used code (such as parsing config files) is implemented once and shared among the services, saving memory (because you know how shared object libraries work, right?) and ensuring that there's only one implementation of any one thing that needs to be tested and debugged.
    - Interdependence among services is minimized, although as with any real, complex system, there are chains of dependencies.
    - Dependencies on and among services are handled on-demand so that only the services you need are running (often started well after boot). As a side effect, boot time is shortened.
    - Process 1 (init) is very small, with minimal functionality, in order to minimize the chances that it will crash.

The above are all true, or at least they are consistent with claims made by the developers. Sure, I have negative things to say, which are also true, but I don't want to add to the noise of all the false negative claims floating around.