blake johnson

World of Warcraft arrived two days ago, and it has pretty much taken up all my free time when I'm home. I guess this isn't such a bad thing: I've basically traded watching TV, movies, and my nightly reading for the game. But, my level 10 night elf hunter is named Kires, and you can find him in the Dalaron realm.

In order to be able to play with Sunil also, I now have a human priest in Draenor. The priest is a bit more of a struggle to start with. But, hopefully that will change soon.

I upgraded to MovableType 3.15 today. The upgrade was sort of a pain because it required making many changes to the way comments and trackbacks are handled. And I couldn't just copy the code from the default templates because my stylesheet doesn't have all the new layout tags. Anyway, I hope everything is working.

As part of the upgrade, I removed my reverse-Turing test (CAPTCHA) requirement on comments. Instead, you must either be a registered TypeKey user, or your comment must be approved before it will show up. If I start getting a lot of comment spam again, I'll consider reverting to my old method. But, I hope this will be sufficient for now.

the cold day of skiing
Originally uploaded by bjohnson00.

My mother just emailed a bunch of photos to me from our trip to Deer Valley just after New Year's. There were a number of very cold and windy days, as you can see in this photo!

Lawrence Summers' remarks have been released. I haven't had time yet to read them myself, but it sounds like this issue isn't going to die anytime soon among the Harvard faculty.

UPDATE

I've read through Summers' remarks and they say almost precisely what I expected them to. Which is, that in referring to women's innate aptitude in science, Summers based his argument on differences in the variability of aptitude between men and women.

Various news stories this morning (e.g. NYTimes) suggested that upon the release of Summers' remarks, some Harvard professors felt vindicated in claiming that Summers thinks women aren't as good at science as men. Summers never makes this claim, and I don't think he ever would. Summers is claiming that due to the larger variance in aptitude for men than for women, if you limit yourself to only selecting people at the very top end of the aptitude distribution, you will find more men than women.

Maybe more Harvard professors need to enroll in a basic statistics class.

And to add to my belief that by stirring the pot, Summers has done more for women in science than by not saying anything, look at this quote from the end of his remarks:

Let me just conclude by saying that I've given you my best guesses after a fair amount of reading the literature and a lot of talking to people. They may be all wrong. I will have served my purpose if I have provoked thought on this question and provoked the marshalling of evidence to contradict what I have said. But I think we all need to be thinking very hard about how to do better on these issues and that they are too important to sentimentalize rather than to think about in as rigorous and careful ways as we can.

Salon.com reviews Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Fashionable Nonsense. I have previously been entertained by Sokal's critique of postmodernism; I even have a quote as an AIM away message from Sokal's explanation of the gibberish he published in Social Text. Consequently, I might find this book quite amusing. However, this article makes a valid argument regarding the nature of Sokal and Bricmont's critique: that postmodern authors frequently misuse or completely bungle mathematical or scientific analogies in their work does not refute their theories. It certainly means that postmodern authors often write in a manner which obfuscates rather than clarifies, but it does not mean that they have nothing of value to say.

I don't know... anybody read this book and want to share their opinion?