Shamelessly omitted from the summary:

Well... so far it's been +4 Funny, +2 Insightful, -1 Offtopic, but we can hope.

Okay, you got me; the pinnacle of the gender divide in tech communities on the internet. :)

In Canada it's a little better—most M.D. students in 2010 were female. On the medical front, a lot has changed in the twenty-two years since Dr. Conley walked out.

As for physics—while it's not entirely politically correct to point this out, there is a genetic basis for a gender difference in mathematical ability, the behaviour of which appears to be linked to the X chromosome: girls' math ability tends to be more average, whereas boys (after puberty) show a more extreme distribution and have a higher frequency of great success and great failure.

It's tempting to chalk this up to social pressures, but the same bifurcation is visible in traits as basic as height and appearance, which are known to be the result of a large number of genes acting in concert (in addition to diet and stress.) There's an obvious evolutionary reason for all of this, too, which means at the very least that we've been holding beauty pageants backward all this time. This is nothing to cry over: people will still be whatever they want to be, and algebra is not the totality of human experience, anyway.

But that all being said, it certainly doesn't justify sexism—only headcount ratios, and even then they should be something like 1:3, not the pitiful sausagefests that actually occur. The good news is that we live in interesting times.

I've known a lot of men-pretending-to-be-women, and it's faintly amusing to report that almost all of them went on to identify as transgendered when given a chance. I think the label should probably be laid to rest. (And I'm pretty sure girlinatrainingbra is.)

...but he was a philosopher, not a scientist! D:

Admittedly, the glasses are in the same ballpark.

For what it's worth I had a lot of respect for the PCs—it's the Reform Party elements that get under my skin—and I was really just focusing on that one election. I gave up on believing in the infallibility of the Liberals when I realised Paul Martin very seriously does not know how to make a non-guilty face.

Part of this, also, was that I grew up in a smaller city; I moved to the centre of the universe just this last year and have discovered what a difference it makes. I suspect the behaviour you were witnessing in Ottawa wouldn't have been found in most of Canada.

I understand your perspective, Maya, and it is one that I hold in high esteem—ultimately what we're discussing is the rate at which that stratification is breaking down.

I think it's going a bit far to call it "silly," though—sexual dimorphism is much more about the utility of social and developmental norms than physical sex. It's supposed to create specialists at various tasks who complement and balance out each other. We (as a civilization) should be proud that we are enlightened and resource-endowed enough to shed those conventions, and that those who fit better into a less polar system are no longer being forced to try to obey one, but to say it was a mistake or foolish is to lie about its origins. (Admittedly this is somewhat harder to hold in one's head without having lived through all of human history.)

Yeah, I was in that boat too until doing a bit more research. It looks like the name's last gasp was the TriCaster VT[5], where "VT" stood for "Video Toaster".

The TriCaster is the direct descendant of the Video Toaster. The last hardware product called "Video Toaster" was the Video Toaster Screamer, a MIPS-based machine sold in 1993.

This is an extremely childish and anachronistic viewpoint. Newton entertained many unscientific notions alongside those which bore fruit; the scientific method was an invention of his generation. We owe an incalculable amount of our understanding of the universe to philosophy, and selective ignorance of history changes nothing.

Above all else, the classical scholars gave the Renaissance scientists an intellectual authority with which to question the world; it is absolutely absurd to suggest they were ignored. Aristotle's impact went much further than the details of his assumptions about physical motion.

More to the point, however, they would still be much better basketball players.

Aristotle was (almost) Newton's direct predecessor in understanding of the physical world; it is certain that Newton would have read his writings due to the Renaissance. Newton would be annoyed if he were left off the court.

Moreover, while we don't know much about Aristotle's personal life, Socrates was formerly a soldier and Plato was a seasoned wrestler. It was typical in golden-age Athens for the intellectual to also be physically fit.

In short, the physicists would get schooled, much like the jive suckers of old.

...and now I'm wondering how old a thread has to be before people with mod points leave it for dead.

I'm not sure one's ever been done—although there is this, although it seems impossible to rely upon and, given the nature of the site's core audience, is certain to leave out all tinfoil hat wearers.

Compare the familiarity of the following statements: "Ubuntu is a Linux distribution" vs. "Ubuntu is a GNU distribution" vs. "Ubuntu is a version of Linux."