Tobacco kills 400,000 Americans every year. Illegal drugs kill less than 40,000. Cannabis kills virtually no one.

Do you think it's acceptable to sell tobacco (that kills 400,000 people) but not illegal drugs (that kill 40,000 people)? Or the illegal drug cannabis, which kills no one?

I prefer the criminals who sell cannabis to the legal killers who sell tobacco.

In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.

40% of chemistry PhDs were women.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

Soviet Russia Had a Better Record of Training Women in STEM Than America Does Today
Perhaps it's time for the United States to take a page from the Soviet book just this one time
By Rose Eveleth
smithsonian.com
December 12, 2013

Between 1962 and 1964, 40 percent of the chemistry PhD's awarded in Soviet Russia went to women. At that same time in the United States, that number was a measly five percent. In 2006, that number was still lower than the Soviets' from the '60s—just 35 percent, according to the American Institute of Physics Research Center. In 2012, still only 37 percent of chemistry PhDs in America went to women.

Take this letter from a girl from Ukraine to Yuri Gagarin:

Since tobacco kills 400,000 Americans every year, and I forget how many millions worldwide, I don't get very upset about a drug like cocaine or heroin which kills only about 20,000 Americans a year.

I wouldn't blame the nanny state for wellness incentives. That started out from the HR departments of the big corporations, as a way to cut health costs. I remember reading about that in BusinessWeek in the 1980s. More recently, I've seen studies of wellness incentives in the New England Journal of Medicine. They vary between being totally useless and having a small effect. Science doesn't know enough about diet to tell you that eating specific foods will improve your health (and cut your employer's health care costs).

(Do you want to have fun? Ask your employer to show you the publications in the peer-reviewed literature to support those "suggestions.")

Of course BusinessWeek didn't want to recommend the non-corporate ways to cut health care costs. http://www.openmedicine.ca/art...

That's not what's happening. Medical schools are admitting as many women as men now. https://www.aamc.org/newsroom/...

The route to medical school and nursing school are completely different. They draw different people.

Medical school is a much more intensive course, with more years of clinical training. Most medical students that I know come from upper-class families, where their parents could send them to top K-12 and undergraduate schools, and as we know, family income is the factor most strongly associated with school performance. I know doctors who didn't have loans because their parents could pay their tuition and expenses in cash.

Nursing school is shorter and less intense. Nurses are more often working-class. It's less expensive (that is, more attainable) and the payback time on your investment is shorter. It's less competitive. It's also easier to take time off from your career and come back. It's less of a career commitment.

Most nurses I meet are pretty smart. Nurses catch doctors in mistakes. Some of them manage departments, go into research, get PhDs, MBAs, law degrees, etc. (Do you have any idea how hard it is to manage an operating room?) But it's a different career track.

Actually, back in the 1970s and 1980s, there was some discussion in the nursing profession about the overabundance of women. One of the nursing associations had a logo with a stylized design of a nurse, that looked female. After some discussion, they changed the design to make it more androgynous. But the ratio of male to female nurses hasn't changed much.

I would hypothesize that there was a strong movement to move women into more desirable male occupations. But there was no corresponding movement to move men into more desirable female occupations, like nursing. I don't remember any men suing a nursing school or hospital for not giving equal opportunity to men.

Another occupation that was female-dominated and highly-paid was secretaries, especially legal and medical secretaries, who were often making more than their fathers. There are fewer secretaries now, but there is still a female predominance.

I felt then and I still feel that we should encourage people to go into professions that they enjoy and are good at, regardless of sex. But it hasn't happened. It used to bug me that probably half the male nurses and secretaries were straight, but the other half was gay. They were just strongly female occupations. There do seem to be biologically-based preferences.

I once worked in a company that evaluated new technology for investors. We were writing reports in a Wall Street office. One of my co-workers was a woman with an engineering degree. After she graduated, she got a job in engineering. The way she described it, she sounded like a parody of Cosmopolitan. "I had to go out on the factory floor! I had to wear a helmet!" The kind of thing that I thought was cool, she thought was horrible. So she got a desk job with us.

There are good women engineers, but they're rare, and hands-on women engineers are even rarer. Many male engineers move into management or support roles, and they're useful too. But every female engineer I've met was in a management job where they didn't do things hands-on.

That's my experience. I wonder if anyone has done a formal scientific study.

You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry.

I did some research into K-12 science education. Science magazine had a lot of good articles.

I thought the most important thing that professional teachers knew, that I didn't know, and that most non-teachers don't know, is figuring out what's age appropriate.

Science magazine gave some examples of some fairly important, sophisticated ideas that you can teach to kindergarten kids -- if you know how to do it. OTOH there were some ideas that I thought were obvious, that even high school kids had trouble with.

What works -- one lesson for kindergarten kids was to learn the difference between living objects and inanimate objects. They give the kids a collection of small objects -- seeds, pebbles, etc. Then they plant the objects. A few days later, the seeds sprout but the pebbles don't do anything. That demonstrates what it means to be living. This is actually a point of confusion for kindergarten-age kids, and this is a good way of teaching that lesson.

What doesn't work -- DNA. Molecules. Kids can't understand the concept of molecules even in the lower high school grades. How could they? Science is the study of your observations of the natural world. How can 6th grade kids observe molecules? How can they do anything but learn by rote and parrot the textbooks? I took my niece to a museum, and they had an exhibit of DNA, with plastic CATG codes and evrything. After she saw the exhibit, I asked my niece what DNA was. She didn't know. I asked some other kids. They had no understanding of what that exhibit was all about. The best they could do was pick up a few buzzwords from the labels, like "Code of life." If I told them that angels were linking peptides together, they would have believed me.

Gerard Piel, the founder of the modern Scientific American, defined science for me. (1) A scientist has a theory. (2) He figures out an experiment to test that theory. (3) He performs the experiment. (4) The experiment confirms or rejects his theory. That's science. He said that every Scientific American story repeated that model. Rosalind Franklin thought DNA was a double helix. She did X-ray crystallography and confirmed it. That's science.

Cooking is not chemistry. Memorizing facts about things that you have never seen is not chemistry. Richard Feynman explained this very well.

Here's the best science teaching story I ever heard:

  A kindergarten teacher was teaching her class about birds. She explained how different birds ate different food, and other age-appropriate facts. Then it was a nice day so she decided to take her class on a walk through the woods.

Along came a woodpecker. It started pecking on the tree. She hadn't mentioned woodpeckers, because woodpeckers weren't a common bird in their area. None of them had seen a woodpecker before.

A little girl said, "Oh, I know what he's doing. He's eating bugs."

Fuck computer science. Fuck coding. Get a good science teacher to take her kids on a walk through the woods, or whatever she thinks is good. Leave the science teachers alone. They know how to teach. They know about computers. If they need your help, they'll ask you.

If computers fit into it, fine, but don't go mandating computers and tell them, "Here, fit this into your science classes."

Read what Feynman has to say about science education, and ask yourself, "How would Feynman apply this to computers?"

In New York City, I don't need a Spanish dictionary. I just stop a pretty Spanish girl on the street, say, "Hable espanol?" and ask her to translate the word.

I wish I had known that when I was younger.

Germany invests in a student's education, and gets that money paid back in taxes after 5 years (just like CCNY did). With that return on investment, any business would keep expanding.

If Sanders got his way, anybody who was willing to put in the academic effort could go to college.

Even if a kid only goes for 1 year and drops out, you've still increased his lifetime earnings and tax contributions. It's free money.

Germany BTW has one of the best systems of trade schools in the world, so students can also choose vocational training if they prefer.

That's the kind of vocational education system the US used to have before the Reagan Revolution. We did it before, we can do it again.

Maybe the Germans have decided that the last time they had a military big enough to bully everybody else it didn't work so well.

And let's not use euphemisms like "defense." The reason the U.S. has a military as big as the rest of the world put together is so that war wimps like GWB and Cheney can push other countries around. We would have been better off without it. They wouldn't have been able to evade Iraq.

o Spend $3 trillion invading Iraq. That's the one I can do without.

Bernie Sanders, who got a free education at Brooklyn College, supports a European-style free education system. He also wants to forgive college loans.

FTA:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...

Research shows that the system is working, says Sebastian Fohrbeck of DAAD, and that 50% of foreign students stay in Germany.

"Even if people don't pay tuition fees, if only 40% stay for five years and pay taxes we recover the cost for the tuition and for the study places so that works out well."