This I Just Had to Post About.

 

In which rocket scientist and blogger Zoe Brain writes about women in science, and why post-modern feminism is Intelligent Design for the Maoist crowd.

1. Speaking as someone whose father was a computer systems engineer for IBM, who learned Boolean Algebra at age 7, I can say with confidence that mathematics is a specialized language, much like musical notation. Math is the language that *precisely* describes the operation of what is observed. Reflect for a moment on the difference between “3.141592653...”, “three and small change” and “a few” and you’ll see what I mean. The usefulness of math rests on precision and logical proof of what is described.
   Given that, the paragraph given from Hayles work is a quite eloquent statement of why people afflicted with her (I’m assuming “her") type of thinking don’t get anywhere in the hard sciences, regardless of their gender, race or anything else. Accusation is no more equivalent to proof than pi is equal to a few.
   As for why solid mechanics are so much better understood than fluid mechanics, hmmm.... even the smallest piece of matter visible to the naked eye is likely to contain several million molecules. Perhaps it’s just a matter of it being easier to precisely describe the dynamics of something that doesn’t have millions, if not billions or trillions, of parts *all in constant motion*? Ya think, maybe?

   Naah, couldn’t be that simple.

   Posted by GrumpyOldFart       03/31/2008  at  05:11 AM  



2. Thanks GoF, you said it for me. Fluids aren’t “deprivileged’ because they’re feminine, they are less understood because they are so incredibly complex. And chaotic. And while you can predict the behavior of all the water in the pipe, any one drop could do anything.

   Ack, is Hayles at least a little correct, in that fluids seem feminine in nature?

   No, because these same attributes apply to males as well. Well, they could.

   Posted by Drew458       03/31/2008  at  07:14 AM  



3. Uh, isn’t the condition of believing everything is 1) against you and 2) the result of one specific mindset - called paranoia?

   While a premise that many fields - have discounted and/or dismissed females/the female state for a number of reasons - does exist - the World - does not and should never center around any one specific group, gender, country, belief -

   Which is another reason I lost any trust in the ‘feminists’ movement - men are not evil or even the root of it.

   Posted by wardmama4       03/31/2008  at  07:46 AM  



4. She’s liquid all right. She’s wet and drippy. The title of the paper says it all : “Gender encoding in fluid mechanics: masculine channels and feminine flows”. Pure bumfluff, or Feminist Lysenkoism.

   Posted by DWMF       03/31/2008  at  11:05 AM  

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