Shelley’s effort to understand why there is such a large discrepancy based on gender in the computer sciences. She mentions the fact that female students were made aware of their experiential differences from the male students, and this undermined their confidence, generating feelings of self-doubt, isolation, and inadequacy. This, in spite of women performing as well or better than the men. I’ve got to wonder why it is that women tend to allow their self-confidence to be eroded like this. Shelley says:

This does beg the question: why do men say something such as “you should know this”? This is really nothing more than a non-productive putdown. Perhaps women should be taught to say in response, “Because I learned other things you don’t know, dickhead.”

That is exactly the comeback that is warrented. Guys don’t just say stuff like that to women, they also say it to other guys and that is the sort of comeback a guy would throw back.

Over at Backup Brain Tom is asking the same thing that I’ve been wondering for a while. If Islam is the religion of peace that we are told by the peaceful muslims that it is, then why a reporter in Nigerian reporter living under a death threat that is endorsed by a part of her country’s government? Why are over 250 people dead because of a short paragraph that she wrote about a beauty pagaent? Why aren’t any US or European Muslims condemning this action that their fellow muslims are doing in the name of Allah?

Yeah, I know, you can find Christians responsible for a like mindset and capable of the same degree of violence all in the name of God but you can also find Christians ready to condemn any of this type of action by other Christians. I don’t recall ever hearing Muslims denouncing other Muslims over anything like this. I’m sure there are Muslims thinking that this is wrong so why don’t we hear any of them taking a public stand to condemn this violence and the death threats? Is it the news media not publicizing the condemnations? I don’t think that’s it. The news media isn’t as monolithic as a lot of folks would have us think. I just don’t see the condemnation by fellow Muslims happening.

Until reading this blog I didn’t really get the power of CSS and how it really enabled XML. I knew it could be done but I had been too overwhelmed by all the discussions to really grasp the simplicity of it all. I’ve got some more exploring to do with this stuff but I think my eyes have just been opened. Thank you, Sam, for pointing this out. Thank you, Scott, for starting down this path.

Excuse me now, I have a style-sheet to study and another one to create.

Heh, a free version of the Telezapper. Of course I personally prefer this sort of approach. My favorite was asking the telemarketer what she was wearing and then mentioning that I wasn’t wearing anything.

Smoking is a horrible habit. Tobacco, in general, can have a stronger hold on one than heroine. Still I think some anti-smoking groups go way to far in their opposition to tobacco. Pierce Brosnan took James Bond from a three-pack a day smoker to one that enjoys one cigar in all the time that Pierce has played the role. That is very, very significant. I think that Bond enjoying a cigar while in Cuba is not only appropriate but a necessary prop.

Keeping with my motto of everthing in moderation, including moderation, I really can’t see where an occasional cigar could hurt anyone.

Mark Pilgram is back for two days and he’s managed to thrill me and also to get me looking into some standards that have me pretty disenchanted. It all has to do with the "a" element and it’s "name" and "id" attributes. In XHTML 1.1 there is no "name" and the value for the "id" attribute cannot start with a numberic character. Guess where that puts me with my permalinks.

For now I’ve given all my permalink anchors an ID of “entry-$id” where "$id" is the id number used in the "name" attribute now. I’ve also changed all my links to now point to the "id" value instead of the "name" value. That isn’t going to help where I’ve been linked to with just $id and not entry-$id in the past. At some point, though, I’ll probably have to move to XHTML 1+ and at that point all the old links will quit working.

(sigh) Well, it’s not like I’ve ever had anything really important to say anyway, but there has to be other folks out there that are going to find themselves in the same boat and they have been heavily linked to and what they have to say is important. Don’t you just love these standards?

Mark Pilgram has come up with a new toy for us to play with. He’s got a little utility that will give you a list of weblogs that you might like to read based on your weblog. It’s already recommended this journal to at least one person trying it out. The interesting thing I found to do with it, though was to feed other folks weblogs into it and see how their recommended reading list differed from the one generated for me.

Via InstaPundit comes this news:

Rioters burned down a Nigerian newspaper office today in protest at an article suggesting the Prophet Muhammad might have favoured marrying a contestant in the Miss World beauty contest.

Well, it’s very likely that he might have.

Will someone please explain to me why this is news worthy? On my ride home from work last night, while I was shaving this morning and now while I’m browsing the online news Michael Jackson dangling his infant son from a 5th floor balconey has been dominating the news with (currently) 217 related stories being tracked by Google News. We’ve got major oil spills off the coasts of Spain and Portugal, the EU wanting to take the US to the WTO court over trade disputes, and the Venezuelan army taking control of Caracas from the civil police and we have radio talk show hosts and tv morning shows fixating on MJ and his worthyness as a parent. Sheesh, most likely he isn’t a very worthy parent but that should not be earth shaking news garnering this much attention.

If people had not committed crimes they would have nothing to worry about.

It truely amazes me how people in english speaking countries still see this as a justification for unreasonable searches.

Well, it looks like the President got his Homeland Security bill passed. There is one thing that bothers me about this. The Democrats got rightfully trashed over their opposition to this bill based on special interests but now, after the Republican election victories, the Republicans pushed in some extra special interest portions in the bill that was passed. Someone needs to do some serious trashing of them now.

Mike Golby, like a lot of other online journalers, is taking a break. It might just be for a day or two or it might be extended but he says he needs to do something other than just comment on the things going on in South Africa and the world. I can understand that. I hope that he understands that he isn’t just pissing in the wind with his weblog.

Yeah, he makes me made at times when I read what he writes but he also makes me think about things. I might not come to the same conclusions he’s come to but I come to conclusions where I haven’t before and generally, there is some agreement between us when I do. I’m going to miss his writing while he’s gone. I guess I’ll have to find someone else to piss me off and make me think.

Now, I’ve had shitty coffee before but I’ve never paid a premium for the stuff.

The Indonesian palm civet — a catlike carnivore also known as a luwak — prowls the coffee plantations of Sumatra and eats only the ripest cherries from the trees. It digests the juicy red fruit covering the beans but not the beans themselves, which pass undisturbed through the creature’s gastrointestinal tract.

I’ll be the first to admit that I have eaten things that probably should have been left on the plate… or never put there in the first place, but this is not one of life’s finer things that I’m in a hurry to try.

In a discussion with a friend the other day I told him about the original plans for the mooring mask on the Empire State Building. I thought I’d put this here so I could easily reference him to it.

One depression-era scheme didn’t work out — the plan to make the Empire State Building a blimp port in the sky. A dirigible mooring was built on what is now the base of the television tower. The idea was that passengers could fly directly into Manhattan, getting off at the ESB, rather than landing in one of the boroughs or New Jersey. Only one blimp ever successfully docked with the Empire State, and that was only for three minutes. Near disasters, unpredictable winds, and the thought of passengers walking a catwalk 1,350 feet above the ground scuttled the plan.

For some reason he didn’t believe anyone ever seriously considered doing something like this.

The Guardian Unlimited Observer has an article about Great Britain looking at implanting surgical tags under the skin of sex offenders. These tags would be used to monitor the activities of convicted pedophiles and would include tracking their location and monitoring their vital signs for indication of another possible attack. Think of this as sort of a LoJack system for child molestors except the alarm system is installed on a likely offender rather than on the victim I love the technology being put into play here but I have some reservations..

I have very little tolerance for true pedophiles. Actually, I have none. If there is one group of people that I could support the wholesale abandonment of their civil rights that group would be pedophiles. That said, this program scares the hell out of me.

If this program becomes successful, and with time I have no doubt that it will, how long would it be before other groups started being looked at as candidates for inclusion. How long would it be before the US Department of Homeland Security started considering the implantation of one of these devices to be a requirement prior to obtaining a visa to visti this country?

Perhaps there is a place for this technology and I have no problem with it being developed, but this idea of having one of these devices permanently implanted in a person, after all prison time and all probationary time has expired, even on a group as loathsome as pedophiles, troubles me greatly.