Anyone who cares about getting this right must read "Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences " by Rebecca Jordan-Young.

Bottom line: most of the research sucks rocks.

The more carefully you look, the more it looks like overlapping bell curves and not dimorphism.

Isn't it the ancient dream of artists to build a creation that moves and does things on its own? Isn't that what a program is, a sculpture that acts?

That was the title of a book looking at attrition among CMU CS students. It's a death of a thousand cuts for women, and remember that we're talking CMU so these are bright motivated people.

Getting a programming assignment about football scores is a hint that you don't belong. It's not an assault, more like a paper cut, but what happens to you after a thousand paper cuts?

I guess the machine isn't boring after all.

"Hope", "becomes unstable", and "nuclear weapons" are not concepts that belong in the same place at the same time.

The government turned the electricity on so people could watch him being dragged out of the meeting on TV.

At least in part because of the Supreme Court ruling.

The Medicaid expansion was supposed to be a precondition of the states continuing to receive their federal Medicaid grants. The Supreme Court ruled that putting conditions on federal spending was coercive and couldn't be allowed (ponder that for a while).

You're not offended by a legal code which doesn't forbid rape?

To amplify the thought, they could have pitched it for fitness and activity monitoring, or to identify what times of day are causing stress without being particularly noticed.

The histories of the SR-71 program show an irrational, tribalist rejection of anything that didn't drop bombs or refuel bombers. It's more than a little disturbing to read about.

Maybe the CIA should have taken it over. It was their program in the first place (look up "Oxcart").

Fear thrives on ignorance. Imagine where we'd be without spy satellites.

Neither a satellite not a Global Hawk could collect air samples downwind from Yongbyon. The Global Hawk would get shot down.

Mercury, cadmium, and other chemical poisons are poisonous forever. They are also harder to detect.

We've found tolerable solutions to our other toxic waste problems. Spent fuel adds the proliferation problem but is otherwise the same.

Energy policy for nerds:
http://www.withouthotair.com/

As xtal points out, the important thing most people don't get about the numbers is the sheer size.

It is, it turns out, actually possible to get usefully large contributions from what are considered green sources. But you need nation-sized installations.

Stopping the chain reaction is the easy part. What causes meltdowns is that short-lived fission products keep decaying and generating so much energy that there needs to be continued cooling.