+50 this. If you want a real foundation that can make you a really damn good programmer in college and beyond, try to get an intro into Discrete Math. I'm sure that through iTunes U and other places online there are likely videos and instruction on Discrete Math if there are not any courses available to a HS student.

Computer Science != chugging out code. Anyone who has actually gone through a Computer Science degree (I'm nearly done with mine) will tell you that it's not purely writing code. Analyzing algorithms and computational complexity, doing Math up to or beyond Linear Algebra, Set Theory, and Theory of Computation, and possibly (depending on chosen electives) learning about Cryptography, Database Design, and Artificial Intelligence indicates that learning about how computers work, what code does, how important it is to have efficient algorithms, and the real life applications of coding all is encompassed in Computer Science.

I think there is a gross misunderstanding in society of what skills a CS Grad takes from their degree. To be honest, when I was in High School (96-00) there was no such thing as an AP Computer Science class or test (at least not at my HS) so I don't know how much the class focuses on stuff other than coding, but I can tell you that if someone goes from HS to College expecting a CS Degree program to essentially be a bunch of classes about chugging out a bunch of lines of javascript, they'll get a nice swift kick in the ass the first time they take an Algorithm Analysis class and realize all of the math and proofs involved.

Don't disagree that CEOs are too highly compensated for their jobs more often than not in large corporations. What's that got to do with women in STEM?

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.

As someone who tutors in CS while finishing up his bachelors, I think this is great. Too many times I see women who have the skills to be a good programmer but don't have someone pushing them hard to be a great programmer because it's assumed that the field just "isn't for Women." Women can be just as good at engineering, programming, math and science as men and I think the industry as a whole can stand to get a bit more even in terms of gender representation. If anything, encouring the women in our country to get into these more technical fields could help drive the men who are competing with them to work harder and perhaps we'll be importing less tech savvy people from other countries. My $0.02.

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.)

I get to my desk around 7:30am, I might start actually working sometime after the 9:00 stand up. :) Maybe.

Well, let's think about that for a minute. Let's guess that on average filling up your tank from near empty to near full is around 13 gallons. An extra 12 cents per gallon will come to around $1.50.

If people fill up weekly, that'll be about $6/month. I don't think that'll impact the poor so very much...

Also, wealthy people tend to drive bigger vehicles, such as SUVs, and tend to commute longer distances from expensive suburbs. This will certainly cost wealthier people more money (but still probably not enough to matter).

This proposed 12 cents per gallon tax increase is peanuts, but be prepared for republicans in congress to scream and holler and shout about how it'll destroy America, cause more homosexuality, etc.

Guaranteed death in a car accident -- what's not to love?

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.