Viewing profile — tempest67

I wonder if being able to code while listening to music has anything to do with gender; I am a female developer, and can't listen to any kind of music at all while programming -- I…

I agree with j_baker -- I was thinking that this document was kind of nice until I got to the part where everyone has to take a holiday together. No matter how you tweak this, what…

/* >If, before a test, you imply that the women should expect to do a little worse than the men, that hurts performance. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. This sounds like a specifi…

That's correct, in the USA, at least -- although they seem to think better of him in Germany (at least, they did a decade ago). He did pioneering work on using computers for design…

True and good advice for girls! This revelation came to me over a decade ago, as I recall, when my male roommate bought a modem, and was about to install it in his room. I (female)…

Hrm. This doesn't ring true to me; in fact, it seems almost more like a guy bragging about his victories than a helpful message about failure. It isn't true that every door closing…

"Reading a newspaper is not possible currently..." It may be painful, but it should be possible; yes, you'll have to look up the kanji, over and over -- writing them down as you lo…

I don't have a rigorous source, but there is a marvelous historical-fiction account of Ignatz Semmelweis's discovery of the importance of hygiene in 19th century Vienna, and the ri…

Another good question -- some of it definitely might be, but I also did find the behavior at Ivy League School was characteristic of the entire school. Then again, I did some grad-…

Good question! I have tried to answer this before, and always fallen flat -- I think that the reason is that if it could be transmitted by writing, I would have picked it up withou…

I find it interesting that the reports tend to consistently state that college prestige is indeed important for students from lower income families. I found that to be enormously t…

Representing the 309! Not there now, but grew up in Rock Island... many moons ago!

I see this has been answered several times already, but I'm not sure it has been laid out plain and simple: The first $250K any American makes gets taxed at exactly the same rate. …

"If the goal of communication is having other people understand you, why would you deal in words that are notable precisely because they are difficult to understand?" One important…

Oh, like Brecht -- Verfremdung! I should have gotten that -- sorry. I love the Milton quote (and I wonder what it means in the age of technical hyper-reproducibility online...). I …

Great point about the explosiveness of transition periods -- the Renaissance comes to mind as well, powered both by new intellectual openness and the thuggish Medicis. But calling …

Temple Grandin also famously speaks of thinking in pictures; could this + Einstein be related to Simon Baron-Cohen's thesis that autism can be defined as an "oversystematizing" bra…

I completely agree with this -- I am bilingual too, but the words seem to spring out of the flow of thought, not to "be" the flow. And when I'm learning a new language (or enough r…

That's interesting -- I never thought of it in terms of context, but I had similar issues when I returned to the states after 7 years in Germany -- I would go into shops and order …

If you drop out now, you're basically handicapping yourself for the rest of your life -- unless you get lucky. You say you "mastered several scripting languages" in the last two ye…