Statistics is collecting data and then make statements about the general characteristics of the data.

It's far away from wild guesses. Yes, you can do awful things that might appear to someone not looking closely like Statistics, but they really aren't. And you can draw conclusions from Statistics that are not really supported by the data, but again, it might look like Statistic, but it isn't.

Statistics are a very valuable tool for Science. Science is of course not just Statistics, it is much more. But Statistics have their uses in Science, and in many cases, there is no replacement. Thermodynamics for instance are purely Statistics.

And even Europe is not exactly Europe. Many people are used to call the E.U. and its member states Europe, but that's not really true. About half of the territory and about a third of the inhabitants of Europe are not in the E.U..

And you want to hammer this "GMO food is safe" factoid into people's heads by not telling them? Somehow I miss the logic behind that argument.

There is a subtle difference between selective breeding and outright GMO, and there are the hybrids inbetween. And some people choose to ignore the differences.

1. Selective breeding works only on the allels. Genes come in different expressions, called allels. Selective breeding chooses sets of allels. The actual genes remain the same. Thus you can revert most of the selective breeding by randomly crossbreeding different strands, and you get something pretty close to the original wild organism.

   If you need an analogon, selective breeding is like changing the configuration file of a customable program.

2. Hybrids are crossbred between different species of the same genus. Some are fertile, most are not. Many traditional agricultural crops are hybrids. In most cases, the genes of the species within a genus are pretty close to each other, thus a combination of them can yield an working organism, albeit not necessarily a fertile one, so you have to hybridize every generation of the agricultural crop from their respective species, or you have to use asexual reproduction. (An interesting case in point are apples. You can't actually breed a typical apple, the ability to do so has been lost at least 2500 years ago. All strands of apple you can buy at a grocery store are engrafted and asexually reproduced.)

   The analogon would be using some program parts that were written for a different version of the same program.

3. GMO introduces genes from completely unrelated species into an organism. It can thus combine genes that have evolved in different species for more than 500 million years. You can add virus genes into plants, bacterial genes into vertebratae, monocotyledonous genes into dicotyledons.

   An analogon would be cut and paste program code from completely different programming projects into your code and just hope it still compiles afterwards.

Actually, the five classical planets (which we call Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) were known to all cultures we know of, thus we can call them "general knowledge", It has nothing to do with "European Aryan Übermensch". We can speculate that at least Uranus might have been discovered by other people than just Europeans, as the oldest known hint to its existence can be traced back to Hipparchos in 128 BC, but he didn't notice its planetary character. The discovery of Neptune with an apparent magnitude of 7.7 requires an optical instrument, as it is to dim to be discovered by a bare eye. Thus discovery of Neptune is restricted to cultures which were looking at the sky with optical instruments, which, as far as we know, leaves the Arabs and the Europeans.

Thus, you are wrong. Planets (at least the above mentioned five) were discovered by about any culture we know of, and rightly assumed to be different from stars.

Water has a 14 times higher Reynolds number than air, so it's better to have most of the ship not having to move through water. But that's a completely separate issue. We don't want the train to bore its own tunnel each time it goes from San Francisco to L.A.. We build the tunnel just once and then keep it. Thus what we have is the friction between the wheel and the rail, if we use a rail based system. Or we use a maglev system, which indeed needs to be powered and thus creates additional energy cost compared to a wheel-rail-system. It's then a question of speed if the cost for the friction or the cost for the maglev is higher. We could get the cost for the maglev to be close to zero if we manage to use superconductivity, but that would add to the installation cost.

The main difference between a ground based and a flying vehicle is the transport cost. A flying vehicle has to invest energy in lift, a ground vehicle does not. So in the end, the higher energy cost for flying from San Francisco to L.A. might offset the lower initial cost of "boring airplanes".

(This might beneath lots of other reasons also be one of the main causes why we don't have flying cars yet in every garage.)

According to the article, the resolution to arrest him was already clear before the police even knew how he would react.

Traffic fatalities barely outnumber peacetime firearm fatalities. Actually, we are talking 32,000 traffic related deaths vs. 30,000 gun releated deaths per year.

The UN definition of GENOCIDE also includes using force. So do you want Amnesty International now to investigate burglary?

Still thinking someone just wants to sling mud.

You got it reversely. At first, it's the parents and the grand parents and other relatives who gives princess clothes as presents and then act gleefully. Only after that positive reaction, girls show interest in being a princess, and then parents and grand parents give new girlish presents and again show happiness if the girl smiles. Don't underestimate the amount of impression you make on a child until it conciously expresses interest in some thing and disdain for others! Each toy shop with "girl aisles" and "boy aisles" enforces the gender disparities. Each clothing shop with pink clothing for girls and blue clothing for boys enforces the disparities again. You radiate a message to the child with your bias, which behaviour you consider normal and acceptable and which one you would rather classify as non-typical.

I've seen it unravelling with my daughter. At first she showed interest in the stuff her older brother played with, and in the neighborhood, there were (just by chance) mainly boys. Then a new family moved in with two daughters, and suddenly princesses and horses were all the rage. But when the family left again, the interest in both diminished, princesses were forgotten very soon, horses were of interest until age 9, and now she's mainly interested in computer games, watches countless "lets play" videos, bought a Wii U and a PS4 from the money she begged from the relatives instead of birthday and christmas presents, refuses to wear dresses at all, and in junior high, she took Robotics as optional topic. She likes dystopial novels and movies. And no, she doesn't want to go into STEM, she wants to become a writer for a living (I don't know how this will work out in the end).

People who discount the enormous environmental influences on the choices of young people and who believe in a "natural" interest of boys into STEM and of girls into everything non-STEM seem to be oblivious of the actual situation.

Of course people are also researching the bias leading to medical schools with 90% women. You just don't hear too often about them, because you are not working in the field. Your disdain is mainly fed by your confirmation bias. One of my main customers is a large health care provider with about 15,000 employees, and if I am on site, I see the information announcing research papers about exactly that topic: Where does the gender disparity in the health care professions come from?

And thus I conclude, that there is similar research in the field of construction workers or garbage men, you just don't know about it, because you are neither a construction worker nor a garbage man.

Rather than concluding that the current situation is somehow normal and will never change, we should look in the past and in other regions of the world, where the biases were and are different and thus the numbers of men and women in particular jobs differ from what we see here. And then we wouldn't blame it on "girls and boys are different", because then we would know that it has not so much to do with the differences between girls and boys but more with the choices we as parents, as relatives, as teachers, as classmates and as a society make conciously or inconciously for our children.

As I have a daughter, I know better. Of course bias is a big part of it, expressed verbally and non-verbally. Parents and grand-parents who give their daughters princess dresses for christmas and act gleefully if the daughter wear it, express a bias. Parents who at the same christmas complain if the daughter plays to much on the new computer express a bias. Television programming where the only computer affiliate is a dorky guy who might be brilliant at computers but is awkward at anything else expresses a bias.

Yes, you can actually spark interest in computer science. Yes, you can actually kindle the awakening interest and encourage it. Yes, you can actually make a point in not mentioning that interest in computer science is not a typically girlish thing.

Pretty well actually. As in your class, there were only a few women to begin with, chances of you to find a spouse there were minimal. Same for your wife, who probably hadn't had many men being in the same class.

While many of your female co-students found a mate in the engineering class, and many of the male nursery students are now probably married to a nurse.