Toxn

That requires no data crunching: http://data.uis.unesco.org/Index.aspx?queryid=131 If you care to look, you'll notice that women beat men pretty much across the board, with a distinct increase in female graduation percentage over time.

Because I am a sucker for exactly this sort of data-intensive request: ratio of male:female university enrollments, 2003-2013 Data from UNESCO: http://data.uis.unesco.org/Index.aspx?queryid=131 Edit: I can do the same for almost any other country you care to mention.

I will now force you to assert your commitment to civil rights at every opportunity. You will understand if I'm unable to do so at gunpoint.

Note the same noises coming from the UK. And pretty much everywhere else as well. If it were just confined to the US then we could all write it off as some sort of strange byproduct of how your education system works/does not work. A rationalist position would seek to determine why discrepancies are justifiable. Actually doing so (for instance; arguing that it is more important to society to have a functioning army than a functioning education system) would be nice. If we're being rationalist and all.

Possibly, but you wouldn't be able to tell from one or two shots because of how variable the overall defeat mechanism is. You'd need to do this one a bunch of times to get an idea of what the important factor for reducing penetration is - again, my hunch is that it is a combination of striking an angled surface and having a penetration path which goes through more material.

We are completely agreed on this point.

We must be on really different wavelengths here. Firstly, the hypocrisy isn't about STEM. It's about embracing the concept of innate differences in men/women to promote the idea that no women should be allowed to apply for combat roles. If so, why are you so complacent about what looks very much like an equally innate difference between men/women in non-STEM* degrees? A person arguing to keep women out of infantry should, if they're being consistent, also be willing to contemplate keeping men out of most university courses^. Again, this also goes the other way: a person who believes that there are essentially no innate differences between men/women should be willing to contemplate some sort of official action designed to get more men into unis. Secondly, your sensitivity about civil rights issues: I could give a fuck about your commitment to empowerment or whatever. Do you really think that my aim here is to try and bait you into saying that [REDACTED] is inherently inferior so that I can "win" on a moral level? Is this really how people are supposed to have discussions? Or am I to assume that this is just an easy way to bail from an argument by anti-PC shaming me for PC shaming you or something? * Disclaimer 1: women kill in biology and other sciences, so this would actually be more like TEM at best. ^Disclaimer 2: note the word "contemplate". I'm not expecting people to suddenly begin applying everything equally, because that's not how people work. But as far as I can tell there isn't even a debate here. Where women are being let into combat branches, it's because of evil liberalism and is a bad thing. Where men are doing poorly in school and getting lowered standards of admission, it suddenly isn't worth commenting on except to bash evil liberalism again for making men mentally weak or something.

I have been stung one too many times before, of course. I am noting that both sides are being hypocritical here, although I obviously judge the "no combat roles for women" group to be more full of it in this case. For the other side, I can't see how looking at the poor performance of men in school/uni wouldn't make you at least contemplate the idea of some sort of remedial action for men. If nothing else, it should make you uncomfortable that such a broad discrepancy exists, as this implies an honest-to-goodness biological difference.

The second option. If the round strikes the body of a cartridge square on it will have the minimum travel through material and deflection to contend with. If it strikes the side of a bullet it will be the opposite case.

Anyway, since I'm actually able to chat (work was a disaster zone until today), let's have at it. How is using a counter-example like this not a good way of looking at the motives of the people debating the issue? Isn't useful to determine that, for instance, none of the people arguing for maintaining standards in the military are going out and arguing that colleges should maintain admission standards? Or that none of the folk arguing for equality as it's own issue are pushing for formal male affirmative action?

So much for stimulating debate via gentle trolling (do note that the links cover all sides of this one).

I do notice that he's solidly on board with the thesis that the Left is omnipresent, omnipotent and determined to destroy the United States before replacing it with the USSR (NewSSR?).

I read some of the dude's other articles. Not all bad, but the quality and specificity of his opinions drop off very quickly whenever he isn't talking about something that sits squarely in his wheelhouse. Per the comments on this article (specifically his conversation with Steven Schwartz), he also can't into research articles or changing his opinions in light of new data.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/03/06/womens-college-enrollment-gains-leave-men-behind/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/13/AR2009121302922.html http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/court-prepares-affirmative-action-decision-softer-standards-men-182205509.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11452589/Have-young-men-become-the-new-educational-underclass.html http://europe.newsweek.com/what-if-colleges-had-lower-standards-boys-achieve-gender-balance-223398?rm=eu Given the above, I wonder how many of the folk participating in the women-in-combat-roles debate would be comfortable with simply banning men from studying anything that isn't maths, engineering or programming?

The fact that you can have an entire civilization rise and fall without ever being noticed blows my mind - partly because I suspect that this how history will remember us.

I've tried to avoid all the clichés here, including any talk of the anglo-zulu war, Omdurman, Mansa Musa, the Masai, Egypt etc. I have been successful some of the time I think. Edit: my views on literature about the continent are spelled out in the tags.

How much of this was due to German designers being very aggressive and forward-thinking, versus American designers (with one or two glaring exceptions) being sort of conservative and production-minded? A lot of the shitty compromises you described in your article were about maintaining existing plant/tooling/ancillary stock rather than being the result of shitty design.

http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/2010/02/02/power-source-for-a-lightsaber/ Note that this should also include at least some mention of the fact that these things would produce a hella lot of backscatter radiation when in use. Note that the beam is running in a loop, so half your radiation is getting scattered straight back towards the user. Better be careful where you point the hilt...

"All I want to do is post a link and a paragraph to get paid. Why do you have to make it so haaaaaaad".

2. Igbo While one way of avoiding outside depredations may be to wall yourself off from them or isolate their influence, another is to have a society robust enough to simply absorb and survive whatever is thrown at you. The Igbo, who have survived as a sizable ethnolinguistic group into the present day, managed to weather the constant depredations of their neighbours by being simply too numerous and too socially durable to crush. The Igbo homeland, centred around the Anambra river in what is now Southern Nigeria, has always been unusually fertile when compared to the area around it. This, when pared with the skill of its tenders, led to the Igbo and their immediate neighbours having unusually high populations for the region. To this the Igbo, who can trace their cultural roots back almost four and a half thousand years, added a remarkably egalitarian agricultural civilization; centred around a very republican system of village governance. The Igbo were (and, as far as I can tell, are) competitive, individualistic and argumentative folk, and their style of government suited their temperament*. It also made for a society which was incredibly adaptable in matters of trade and opportunity. The flip side of individuality and freethinking is, of course, that the Igbo were never unified in the same way as, for instance, the Yoruba. Instead, Igbo cooperation tended to be a temporary thing as the villages united to face a common threat or seek a common opportunity. Even so, the Igbo as a whole remained too cohesive to ever be substantially absorbed or subdued by foreign polities. Instead, their society was only transformed, and even there only in part, by the overwhelming shock of colonial rule. While they chafed under the imposition of 'tribal' structures of authority under the British, the Igbo also rapidly embraced the opportunities that education and industrialization presented. These developments, when combined with a process of ethnic joining and self-identification that was already underway before colonialism, led the Igbo into their present-day role as perhaps the entrepreneurial force on the continent. As a final note: I realise that I am bumping up against some very unhappy topics here in addition to my more usual sin of simplifying/mangling some pretty complex history. As such, if we have any Nigerian folk on this forum (now or in the future) who wish to comment on or add to this part of the series, I invite them to do so. Picture of an Igbo village, as found here (plus inevitable trollish debate) * It says something that some of the most famous and ancient cultural traditions of the Igbo are a harvest calendar, a banking system and the game Okwe (a variant of mancala).

Since our economy began rapidly circling the drain, this song has been stuck in my head a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJr3iRETZFE

Slavery II In responding to the thorny problem posed by the slave trade, West-African societies were not necessarily locked into the miserable cycle of ruining your neighbours to obtain the weapons needed to prevent your neighbours from ruining you. Our next to examples found ways out of the trap. 1. Dahomey Dahomey started when the Yoruba of Oyo was conquered by the trade state of Nupe. Fleeing his native land, the Alafin (king) of Oyo returned with the nucleus of an army (originally a thousand men) based around cavalry and patterned on their northern neighbours. To this conceptual core was added the concept of professional, long-service troops maintained directly by the state, rather than the quasi-feudal levies and self-financed noble armies of before. By this means the Yoruba of Oyo made themselves masters of their grassy northern frontier, which in turn provided a stable base of power for holding the more populated and productive woodland country to the South. By around 1600 this system had produced the core of an empire which stretched Westwards to engulf their Yoruba cousins of Dahomey and the Fon people (who we will return to). Located in fertile land along an existing North-South trade route, the Yoruba of Oyo were able to play the part of intermediaries between the nations to the forested East and the trade centres of the North. To this they added their own productive capacity, becoming in the process rich enough to sustain a standing cavalry arm by purchase of Sudanese horses (horses in this part of the world die by Tsetse fly at such a rate that local breeding simply was not an option). In this way, the Yoruba of Oyo were able to maintain a powerful and cohesive empire for two centuries. Sitting in the Western shadow of the Yoruba of Oyo, the Fon people began to build their own state from atop the rather isolated Abomey plateau. Lacking initial access to trade or resources, the little Fon kingdom developed a taste for raiding and centralised government that would stand it in great stead as the slave trade increased. By the 1720s, the kingdom had developed into something resembling a proto nation-state, with all European trade isolated and concentrated at their trade port of Ouidah. This isolation allowed the development of import-export trade to be tightly controlled from the top, an approach which neutered the issue of petty chieftains making separate deals with European traders. This effectively shielded the greater part of the kingdom from the most corrosive effects of the slave trade, while still allowing the kingdom to reap the rewards of access to firearms and other goods. Another innovation of the Fon, which should perhaps be added to the developments brought in by their former masters, was the creation of a hierarchy based entirely on state (specifically military) service. With a strong military tradition and secure supplies of weapons, the kingdom of Dahomey made a concerted bid for independence during the 18th century. By the end of the century Dahomey forces were marching Eastward into Yorubaland, having secured the trade centres of Ardra and Jakin. This both brought them into direct contact with European merchants and effectively ended foreign depredations of their own people. This independence lasted until nearly the end of the 19th century, when the kingdom was defeated and subjugated by the French Empire. Militarily, the only thing about Dahomey that anyone cares about is the Amazons, who were effectively an elite, parallel army structure made up entirely of women. They acted as a sort of royal guard unit, had good equipment and morale and generally performed very well on campaign. They also effectively met their end fighting the French during the Battle of Aldégon, which was one of a series of inexplicable battles where similarly-armed French and Dahomey forces came to blows; the French consistently inflicting massively disproportionate casualties. The reason, upon closer examination, becomes clear. The one thing that the French had and Dahomey did not were machineguns (Dahomey did have some cannon, but these never saw action in the field). If anyone had been paying attention, this was a sign of things to come.

Only brown coconuts are an abomination, and then only if I'm the poor fool who has to open them up and sliver the meat to add to my muesli. Green coconuts, on the other hand, are divine.

The joke is that many archaeologists now think that bows were developed from spear throwers precisely because the projectiles don't need to be as accurately made to get consistent results. Arrows can vary in weight by as much as 15% without drastically affecting their performance over the very short distances that you need to use to successfully hunt an animal. As for understanding, I am always amazed that things like beer and cheese ever got invented, much less perfected. Developing a bow seems a lot more simple when you can imagine a first use as a toy or novelty before real innovations took off (not as much of an option where food is concerned). My guess is that, as bows have been invented multiple times, it just didn't take too long to discover that tying a stick to itself could be useful in a limited sense as a means to shift a stick or small spear. From there you have thousands of years (at least 50 generations) to experiment and tinker with the concept. Fifty lifetimes is a lot of time in which to improve something so long as you have that first spark of invention down.

I don't know how representative he is of HBD in general, but the dude is a population geneticist so his understanding is likely to be the most nuanced of the breed. Basically he conflates a few measured values (IQ, WORDSUM scores, GRE scores and so on) with an objective measure of intelligence as a whole, and then assumes that differences in said values are driven primarily by genetic rather than environmental or interaction factors. He further relies on a view of race which takes a no- biological species concept (some blend of phonetic species concept and phylogenetic species concept) as axiomic for humans. Finally, he commits what I feel is the greatest fallacy of this sort of thinking (and something he should be well aware of) in taking the whole bundle together without then formulating the most obvious of variance hypotheses. Essentially, even if you feel that IQ measures overall intelligence (it doesn't) and African Americans form a genetically distinct and homogenous group from the rest of the American population (they don't) then testing the hypothesis "there is a measurable difference in intelligence across races" should begin by trying to assess the effect of environmental and interaction factors by comparing distinct groups. Here the entire concept breaks down because it is an incontrovertible fact that there is more genetic diversity in Africa than anywhere else. Accordingly, one would expect an objective measure of intelligence to find the greatest variance in intelligence when comparing African-origin groups against other groups. As such, both the highest and lowest IQ groups should be found in Africa, with African populations showing a greater variance than European or Asian groups. I see no evidence of this. Instead, we have a lot of speculation which conveniently confines itself to the United States and compares distinctly non-homogenous groups against each other. Even here, however, one would expect African Americans to have a much higher variance than white Americans or Asian Americans. Black folk in the US, being on average 30% European and drawing from a number of African-origin ethnic groups, should have a much wider distribution of IQ than White folk, who in turn should have a wider distribution than Asian folk. Basically, black people should have both more morons and geniuses than white people, and Asian people should have the most narrow range of IQs In real life the distributions for all groups are very similar, which points to the idea that there simply isn't much genetic variation in intelligence in humans. This makes perfect sense from an evolutionary standpoint, because intelligence should be strongly selected. As such, I see nothing which would dispel the null hypothesis that differences in overall intelligence are both very hard to measure and highly dependent on environmental and interaction factors.