With so much conflict in the world, space exploration can be a beacon of hope. No one cares about race or religion or nationality in space travel. We’re all just part of Team Human.
Once again I felt isolated and inadequate for not understanding Wookiee-speak.
The fact that I wanted to be a scientist–an astrophysicist–was hands-down the path of most resistance through the forces of society.
Until we can find if anything is going to damage this community, we shouldn’t sign any paper.
I went to Binghamton! Glad they’re still doing vital research like this. –Sam
If you still miss the crew of Serenity, if you want to know what ever happened between Mal and Inara, if you’re curious about why Shepherd Book knew so much about the Alliance… well, it’s basically because your brain processes these people as your friends.
And, understandably, you miss your friends.
[A]lthough there are sex/gender differences in brain structure, brains do not fall into two classes, one typical of males and the other typical of females, nor are they aligned along a ‘male brain–female brain’ continuum.
Just because you’re the world’s coolest scientist doesn’t mean you can get through “the talk” with a straight face.
“I thought you guys were scientists. This is sad.”
If conference speakers were being chosen by a system that treated gender fairly (which is to say, gender was never a factor at all), then in any conference with over 10 speakers, say, it would be extremely rare to have no female speakers at all—less than 5 percent chance, depending on one’s assumption about the percentage of women in mathematics as a whole.
Turning that statement around, we conclude that any such conference without any female speakers must have come into being in a system that does not treat gender fairly.
The baby shower was just a natural outgrowth of story for us…What would happen next? The new mother would probably be thrown a shower. Okay, how would a shower for a baby with Down Syndrome be different? Well, it probably shouldn’t be any different but would some guests feel anxious or sad or precious and say inappropriate things? Probably. Okay, who would be most likely to say something completely inappropriate? Probably a woman of science. And then we realized we got to engage in a pretty interesting debate about eugenics and ask questions like ‘Do we want to eradicate difference? Why? Is difference necessarily a bad thing? Do we have to adhere to the notion that faster/stronger/smarter is better?’ And that’s a pretty radical question that I’m proud to say I’ve never seen raised on any other show.
