Sociotard

I'm not sure why her playboy appearance was relevant. Or her military service.

This is not a chameleon. This is two women paint.

http://io9.com/this-isnt-a-chameleon-its-two-women-expertly-covered-i-1696527184

Timelapse video of san Francisco.

It says it is a year old, so sorry if this is a repost.

Fishing has no age limit.

Quaid! Start the Reactor!

Quaid! Start the Reactor!

Florida Manatee count is record high

Fishing has no age limit.

Fishing has no age limit.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/justina-robson-women-give-science-fiction-a-chance-10092027.html

io9 has a fun article on female character redesigns.
 

 

As the Token Female Member of This Action-Adventure Team, My Job is to Kick.

As the Token Female Member of This Action-Adventure Team, My Job is to Kick.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVO3sNcJ7A8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVO3sNcJ7A8

The TV show Trolljägarna (Troll Hunter) looks interesting.  Tracks down and exposes online trolls, including those who harass women.

OK, not sure where this really belongs, but ....
 
http://benschmidt.org/profGender/
 
Someone has gone through the Rate My Professor site and done statistics involving word use and the gender of the person being commented upon, and populated a graphical tool to look at the differences.
 
There are certainly gender differences with certain pejorative words
and also less offensive words like "garbage" and "pig", some obvious bias words like "dork" and "geek", but more disturbingly, there are pretty clear biases about complimentary words like "excellent", "delight", "inspired", and "helped".
 
Then there's words like the relative use of "teacher", "professor", "instructor", "assistant", and "syllabus", some of which I have trouble wrapping my mind around (why is "syllabus" all but universally used more in comments about women than men?).
 
NOTE that the horizontal scale changes, so some rarely-used words may have large shot noise fluctuations.
 
Oh, and the word "nurturing" was used zero times about physicists of either gender.

As a long-time but low-intensity contributor to Wikipedia (and my contributions are almost completely limited to my professional bailiwick), my perception is: there has been a drastic ... crystallization ... of how and who passes judgment on contributions there, over the last couple of years. They have in practice drifted away from "all contributions welcome" to a strongly elitist and snobbish "only approved contributions", both in terms of content and in writing style. The old "don't bite the newbies" cordiality hasn't quite had its sense flipped, but a random contributor can expect a pretty rough handling now.
 
I *think* this happened as a result of changes that, frankly, needed to occur because private firms started having paid staff whose duties included making edits to Wikipedia in order to make their clients, or themselves, look good. There was a rash of that done by various paid shills for BP after their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and that stuff has only increased since then. The iron-handed treatment of the Web in general and Wikipedia in specifics by China pointed out that this could be done and provided examples of how to do it. That whole kind of willful manipulation of content for corporate or political gain is an Achilles heel of the entire wiki concept, and there has not been an up-front recognition by the Wikipedia movement that this deep integral philosophical weakness exists, and that they don't have even in principle the tools adequate to maintain their ideal of what they have been building.
 
For those who made heavy personal commitments to Wikipedia, the response has been, IMO, sadly predictable; the development of them-or-us and trust-no-outsiders mindsets and a rededication to their own personal visions of what Wikipedia should be ... but never actually was. This leads to a diminishing population of hardcore believers who may not collectively have strong opinions on most issues, but who rally around those who are part of the hard core when one of them takes a stand on an external controversy: this is what the them-or-us mindset always results in. They have been hemorraging well-meaning contibutors who don't fancy themselves as WikiGods and have been rubbed the wrong way by those who do, and the community shrinks. That's how you end up in the bunker with nobody but Eva and Uncle Adi and the Goebbelses. And, of course, they cannot be made to realize it.
 
That this has happened over an issue about treatment of women in the online geek population ought not be much of a surprise, I suppose, but I am nevertheless deeply disappointed.

http://pando.com/2015/01/19/the-war-nerd-getting-women-warriors-wrong/

http://pando.com/2015/01/19/the-war-nerd-getting-women-warriors-wrong/

At first I wondered which of the Romanovs was severely disabled.  Evidently, that is anastasia, goofing off and putting somebody else's dentures in her mouth.

Saw this, and I just had to shake my head at how tone deaf it seemed.  What about telling them to be careful about keeping their hands empty and in full view with no sudden movements so you don't just shoot them, officer? should we tell them that?
 

Saw this, and I just had to shake my head at how tone deaf it seemed.  What about telling them to be careful about keeping their hands empty and in full view with no sudden movements so you don't just shoot them, officer? should we tell them that?