Role models

So, you've probably heard about the Bush tapes, with these quality quotes:

"I wouldn't answer the marijuana question. You know why? Because I don't want some little kid doing what I tried," Bush purportedly says on the tape.

He added: "But you got to understand, I want to be president. I want to lead. I want to set -- Do you want your little kid say, 'Hey, Daddy, President Bush tried marijuana, I think I will?"'

At first I was amused. But then... I started thinking about the idea of Bush as a role model (which hadn't really occurred to me before). Consider the implications-- young, impressionable kids are learning that it's okay to pile up debt, lie to get what you want, and push discrimination while pretending to be compassionate and open-minded. Now that's a role model!

Can anyone fit a line to this plot??

This is what I've been talking about-- check out this chart. As you can see, the number of women in Physics is still increasing. So, at this point, it just doesn't make any sense to draw conclusions about the "natural abilitities" of women to succeed. Check back in 50 years and we'll see how the plot looks.



The article is interesting, too-- it's good to see some hard numbers instead of the usual hand-waving.

Update: Just read a blog post on this topic that I must recommend, and not just because I agree with her. She's hilarious-- like some sort of Ivory Tower version of the Wonkette. Check it out.

Check out Google Maps

This is old news by now, but I have to mention Google's new Google Maps. For the past couple weeks I've used it pretty much exclusively (and being new in town, I have used it a lot). It's still in the testing phase, but I'm very impressed with it. The interface is very nice, especially if you want to zoom in or out or scroll in any direction. It's not perfect, but compared to Mapquest I've found Google Maps much easier to use, faster and less irritating. Worth checking out.

Science and politics

I spent much of last week at a space science conference (hence the lack of posts). The underlying (though rarely discussed directly) theme of the conference was nicely summed up in this comic, which was posted on the overhead projector the last day of the conference.