Well, yeah, but except for reproduction, most of the differences are essentially trivial. The differences we see are primarily of social origin, not genetic. It is often pointed out that the differences within each sex have a much greater variance than the differences between the sexes. Male and female humans are much more similar to each other than they are to individuals of the same sex in the closest related species (the "great apes" such as chimps, bonobos and gorillas.

It has been often pointed out that the top North American and European female athletes in many sports currently have better performance statistics than the top males in the same sport 50 or so years ago. This supports the claim that the differences are primarily of social origin, not genetic.

There's a useful example of the difficulty of using sports to excuse sexism: American basketball gives a strong advantage to taller players. This is why the pro teams are all male (and now mostly black ;-). But it also excludes 99% of the male population along with 100% of the females. The sensible thing would be to do like the boxing sport has done: Establish height-specific basketball leagues. This would enlarge the sport, and give us some very good players who now can't play on the pro teams at all. And it would likely show a familiar pattern: After some years, we'd have female basketball players who are as good as their male counterparts of the same height. (This idea isn't at all original with me; others have also suggested it. But the sports "industry" ignores it. ;-)

Again, aside from questions involving sexuality, there is little if any evidence that these differences are genetic and not social. Human societies tend to impose radical differences in education from birth. If you want to claim that the observed mental differences are genetic and not social, you can't just make the claim without explaining why they can't be the result of social conditions. And again, the larger variance within each sex than the difference between the sexes argues that the observable differences are only slightly genetic, and mostly caused by different socialization and education.

Nah; it's more like 99%. The majority of young men are also not very interested in becoming computer geeks.

The problem is that young women are being systematically discouraged from even trying to be part of the 1%. This is, of course, not restricted to just CS/IT topics.

Sorry, but women aren't interested or not interested in CS, or any other topic. A woman might be interested, and another woman might not be interested. But implying that women as a class are or aren't interested is sexist in the extreme.

No matter what we do, many women will never be interested in such geeky stuff, just as many men aren't. To be successful, we should introduce any subject to young people in general, and encourage those who find it interesting, regardless of their sexual organs (which really have little to do with their mental abilities ;-). And for the others, find subjects that they find interesting and encourage them to follow those.

(Of course, to function well in modern society, we should try to instill a bit of understanding of a lot of topics in any young people able to understand them. But that's a different topic than finding those who can go deeply into a specific topic.)

Yeah, and that's actually an example of another common source of "names for neighbors". In the Slavic languages, the root "slav-'" means "glory". So the Slavs actually refer to themselves as the Glorious People. The other people nearby took the reasonable approach of "Let's call them what they call themselves". In several of the nearby societies, the people who called themselves "Slav" were mostly the ones taken as slaves, so the name took on that meaning in the Slavs' neighbors' languages.

This is a fairly common process for producing names-for-neighbors that are insults.

That's because English-speaking people generally have no idea what "Oklahoma" originally meant.

Going down this path could lead to a lot of problems, though, since the terms in most languages for their neighbors would have to be discarded and replaced by something less offensive to the people described.

Thus, some of my ancestors are Welsh, but they don't call themselves that in the Welsh language, they use forms of the word "Cymru" to refer to their own people. "Welsh" is an old Germanic/Anglo-Saxon word that means "strange" or "foreign" (and still means that in German).

For that matter, the German language has no word similar to "German"; they refer to themselves with various forms of the word "deutsch" (which is related to "teuton" and bsically just means "people"). But my favorite such term is the Russians' word for Germans: "Nemets". Anyone who has taken first-year Russian understands the derivation of this term: it means "no-mind". It's hardly even phonetically reduced; it's just the word "ne" (negative prefix) plus the word "mets" (mind). (The 'n' and 'm' are soft, FWIW. ;-)

While it's hard to be more insulting than that, such names for neighbors are quite common around the world. Often the words go back so far that only a few historians understand the insulting origins. (But the Russian term can't be whitewashed; its meaning is clear to even a beginning student of the language.)

Imagine the fuss if we had to replace all such names that have insulting origins.

'Zat true? I'm aware of several trademarks that include the phrase "Honky Tonk", and a quick google check verifies them. But I don't seem to find a trademark on just "Honky". Of course, I'm not very clear on how to use the USPTO's system, so maybe I'm missing something. Can you point us to the evidence that "Honky" by itself is a valid US trademark? (Maybe you can also teach us a bit on how to successfully look such things up. ;-)

There was also the recent kerfuffle over someone using the term "niggardly", which some people (mis)interpret as derived from "nigger". That was even stupider than this story.

Well, considering that among themselves, US dark-skinned folks do routinely refer to each other as "nigger". It'sonly considered an insult when a paleskin uses the term.

So maybe we'll see a team formed by (mostly) black players called "The <town> Niggers". It could be fun seeing the reaction to that.

As a USian of mixed ancestry, including an Ojibwa great-grandmother, I have a bit of trouble seeing how a team calling itself "Redskins" is disparaging. Even if they mostly don't have Native-American ancestry, it's still hard to see an insult in the name. So far, I haven't read an explanation of this supposed "disparagement".

I also wonder what people who have a twin think of the Minnesota Twins. Is there anyone out there who's a twin, and feels insulted by this?

It's presumably because the finches called "cardinals" are notable for the males being mostly bright red. Catholic Cardinals' formal dress is bright red, and the birds were in fact named after the Catholic dudes who wear similar colors for official occasions.

Granted, this is a rather tenuous connection, and it's not obvious how there's any disparagement to either the birds or the priests in the names. It's just a mental connection based on a superficial color similarity.

But some people can infer disparagement from almost anything you say.

Yeah, but crippled by a crappy GUI designed for a 3" screen and hands that can't touch type or use a pencil.

Doing this with tariffs might be more difficult than US, EU and UN administrators might think. The Chinese management system (government + industry) has a documented history of faked economic reports. This is due in part to the general practice of promoting/demoting managers based on the production figures from their own areas of control, with little or no independent auditing of the data. The fishing example was documented by outside researchers about 15 years ago, but as the (rather well done "neutral" phrasing of the) wikipedia article hints, the catch figures still show numbers that are discounted as "probably mostly fictional" by the FAO and various other international organizations and researchers.

It can be rather difficult for outsiders to collect verifiable data on economically or politically important subjects within China. The same problem will arise with the proposed tariffs. They will presumably be based on available data on emissions, which will mostly come from within China, and will be produced by people whose jobs and pay levels rely on their organizations producing the "right" data. There will be little or no truly independent auditing of the data; auditors will also be similarly rewarded or punished based on the acceptability of their reports to the higher-ups. As with the fishing industry, the pollution-emission data could show decreasing levels while the actual numbers are increasing, and this could continue for decades.

Collecting data on the pollution from outside will be attempted, of course, but China is a big chunk of territory, and there are practical limits to the accuracy of data data collection from outside that territory. Most of the monitoring will have to be done from orbit, and while that's improving, there are still many ways that interested parties can confuse the issue. Just read the ongoing political debates over climate change/warming to get a feel for how easy it is for interested parties to confuse and mislead our political and industrial leaders.

They seem to be saying that, in addition to displaying the content on your screen, your browser also writes a copy into its cache, and that's two copies.

I wonder what they'd say of, say, a RAID1 file system, which makes two copies of the cached page, on two different disks. Would that mean two violations of the copyright? And if, after sending it from the screen to your eyes, the information in your brain is a third violation?

And there's also the copy from short-term to long-term memory that occurs in your brain when you read an article and actually remember it the next day. Soon they'll be quizzing readers about last-weeks news, and every correct answer means they can charge for the extra copy in your long-term memory.

Lest you think this is a joke, remember that companies did try to claim that computer backups are legally "copies" that must be paid for to be legal.

Actually, I'm surprised they didn't handle it this way from the start. That way the "private citizen" wouldn't even know that another department had "seized" their documents.

But maybe I've just been working on the Internet too long. I tend to be surprised when someone wants to deal with hard copy.

All Your Doors are Open to US.

We're eagerly awaiting your detailed instructions on how we might do this.