Month: November 2014

Preparing For the Zombie Apocalypse

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Preparing For the Zombie Apocalypse

The first part of any plan is preparation. This guide assumes that, if you’re reading the “Preparation” chapter, the zombie apocalypse is currently only forecast, not imminent, ongoing, or — God forbid — over. So, you currently have some leisure time to use to preparing for the day when zombies rise up and begin feasting upon humanity’s tasty still-living innards. That means (for the slower amongst you) that you should take the time to purchase necessary gear, make notes, and prepare yourselves mentally for the day when the excrement hits the circular ventilator and the undead horde comes a-growlin’.

Preparation Plans of Vital Importance:
1) This shirt and/or poster from Dinosaur Comics — Buy this shirt and/or poster. Actually, get multiple copies. Like two for each family member. Seriously. Quit looking at me like I’ve gone crazy. The information on these items can act as a very useful reference tool during the zombie apocalypse. It’s a succinct guide to how to cobble together useful modern inventions that you may not be able to find when the local big box stores are looted and/or home to a hungry horde of the undead.


This shirt might save your life. Don’t thank me; thank Ryan North who came up with it (and who I hope won’t be bothered by my borrowing the image)

2) Purchase a composite bow or crossbow — Unless you have access to the materials to make gunpowder, reloading equipment, and knowledge of gunsmithing, chances are that, in time, you’re going to run out of bullets or your gun is going to need repair. After repeated use, guns need to be taken apart and cleaned and you may find that supplies to do so and to keep all of the moving parts oiled are in very short supply. However, a bow and arrows are technology that anyone can learn to maintain. True, today’s composite bows aren’t nearly as durable or easy to maintain as the old English longbows but they are much easier to use and repair. Keep plenty of spare bowstrings with you. Also, learn how to make your own arrows since, during the ZA, you probably won’t be able to stop off at the sporting goods store to pick up extra ones.

A crossbow is great for women since it doesn’t require as much upper-body strength to use. It’s also great for weirdos like me who have to aim out of their left eye but are right handed (meaning we have to use a southpaw bow to have a hope of hitting the target but can’t pull it back because our main arm is the right arm, not the left). It’s also easier to learn to use and aim than a regular bow (though still more difficult than a gun).


Crossbows aren’t just for badasses

3) Store up food reserves — Store non-perishable food like uncooked rice, pasta, boxed macaroni and cheese, Ramen noodles, canned foods (like Spaghetti-oes with meatballs), jerky, salt, and sugar. None of these require refrigeration and they can all be cooked or eaten without needing anything more complicated than an open flame. Keep water on-hand as well — either bottled or in re-usable jugs. You will need to pay attention to expiration dates on the bottles and will need to switch the jugs around every so often. Water doesn’t “spoil” per se but it does become undrinkable after a few weeks/months depending on the atmosphere.

4) Stock up on power reserves — Batteries, solar panels, windmills, waterwheels, and gasoline can all be stored for varying amounts of time. Gasoline with ethanol in it will tend to collect water which, over time, will make it impossible to ignite. You can refine and re-distill it with the appropriate tools and knowledge. You can also use distilled corn whiskey to power a car for a while so you might want to consider adding a still to your list here.


Can double as a fuel-maker in a pinch

5) Gather trade-able hard currency — Paper currency and coins are very quickly going to be worthless for anything other than vending machines. Gold, silver, platinum, and gemstones will wind up acting as de facto currency immediately after the ZA ends while the world is putting itself back together. So, if you can, gather them together and cache them some place. Don’t keep them with you during the ZA — it’s too likely that you’ll either be robbed or unable to trade them for anything useful without losing a lot of value. You might keep some smaller ones with you — just in case.

6) Prepare a safe place to bolt when the SHTF — We’ll go over this in more detail later but, if you’ve been preparing ahead of time, one thing you definitely need is a place to bolt to when things get too bad where you are. This is mostly if you live in the city or in a suburban area near a city. Cities will be the absolute worst places to be during the ZA. You’ll want to be at least an hour from any city larger than 100,000 and two to three hours away from any major urban hubs like Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Austin, Orlando, Miami, Sacramento, Cincinnati, Seattle, Portland, St. Louis, Las Vegas, and Detroit. Getting away from the East Coast and West Coast urban corridors (Boston-NYC-Philadelphia-DC-Baltimore on the East Coast, Los Angeles-San Francisco-San Diego on the West Coast) is absolutely critical. Five hours or more is recommended.

Your safe house should be in an area where you are not easily seen from any high traffic roads. It should either be set in a clear area where you can see at least a half-mile in any direction or, if you are blocked in one or more directions, those areas should be difficult for vehicles or large groups of people to move through undetected. The house should have a basement or storm cellar with a strong ceiling and a single main entrance with a heavy door that locks on both sides. You’ll want to keep plenty of food in the basement in case a horde of the undead or a group of ne’er-do-wells comes through and you need to hide out. Ideally, you’ll have a tunnel hidden in the basement with a second locking door that will allow you to escape to a camouflaged (and locked) entrance some distance away.

This home should have plenty of fields for planting different crops, pastures for cattle, a barn (with a basement), stables for horses, pigs, chicken coops, water, a fruit orchard, vegetable and herb gardens, and should be defensible with a secure perimeter.

7) Learn some basic medical skills and stock up on medical gear and drugs — This includes local botany and a bit of pharmacology. Take course from the local Red Cross for first responders. Study up on how to set broken bones, sew stitches, perform minor surgery, and perform a C-section. You might also want to learn how to remove teeth safely. Anything more than that is probably going to be beyond your ability without access to a blood bank, a sterile environment, and advanced respiratory and cardiac equipment, and a lot of surgical tools. You’ll want to focus on learning about the most common illnesses and treatments for them. You might also want to learn about some of the now-less-common illnesses such as measles, mumps, rubella, typhoid fever, cholera, and the like.

Just because it will come up: no, there is no such plant, herb, or anything that acts as a “natural” birth control pill. There was such a thing but it went extinct during the Roman era.


If someone had known what they were doing, Lori would still be annoying us with her presence

8) Stock up on purification and sterilization equipment — Get some iodine or water purification tablets and equipment. They will let you purify water when you’re on the go.

9) Get basic survival gear and learn some basic skills — Get a good hiking backpack, a small tent, a sleeping bag, canteen, flint and steel, a compass, and learn to use them all. Learn how to make fire in a variety of ways including making a firebow. Learn to track, hunt, and skin game. Learn to live off the land.

10) Consider purchasing a loom and some old-fashioned sewing gear — When there are no clothing stores, you’ll have to make what you have last and you’ll have to learn to re-purpose some items to fit others.


Loom required to make this poncho. Awesomeness required to make the badass wearing it

Once you have made your preparations and gotten your plans in order, you should be ready to weather the zombie apocalypse. At least, physically. Mentally and emotionally is going to wind up being a completely different story.

— G.K.

Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

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Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

So, I’m a Walking Dead fan. As in I drive out of my way to watch it (I don’t have cable — my parents do). I’ve even read some really bad (and some really good) fanfics. Hell, I get story and character ideas from the show and the buzz around it. And yes, Daryl Dixon is my favorite character. No, not because he’s good-looking or a bad boy or any of that but because he understands the value of silence, speaks only when he has something to say, thinks things through, and is ruthlessly competent. He also doesn’t suffer fools and will go his own way if he thinks it’s right. Ask me and those things are so much more important than looks.


If I had something to say, I’d say it. Otherwise, I’mma just be quiet and do useful things.

He kinda reminds me of the guy I married. In good ways, sweetie, I promise.

Anyhow, The Walking Dead isn’t the first zombie apocalypse thing I’ve gotten into. There was Resident Evil when I was in high school, World War Z (the novel, not the crappy movie that only has the title in common with the book), 28 Days Later (Chris Eccleston was great in that)… But, The Walking Dead has gotten me thinking about the ZA (Zombie Apocalypse) in different ways. Not only are a friend of mine and I thinking about getting together and doing a MST3K-style webshow, but I’ve been thinking about the different types of survivors, the different ways they band together, how they’re impacted by the ZA and the collapse of social order, how many of them have no real useful skills for surviving and how those who do (like Rick, Daryl, Hershel, and Glenn) wind up carrying those who don’t.


Better survival strategy than 90% of people

So, in short, this show has gotten all of my little INTJ lights glowing. So many things to think about. Which brings me to my next point: my latest book idea — “How to survive the Zombie Apocalypse (and rebuild the world after)” (yeah, the title’s rough). I’m going to be posting excerpts and sample articles from it here on the site. If you have a particular topic you think I should include, feel free to suggest it and, if I’m not already planning to cover it (and I’m planning to cover a lot), I’ll add it and give you a mention in the Acknowledgements. Keep in mind I’m just looking for topics — not full articles. So, saying something like “how to re-establish communications overseas” is fine — giving me a point-by-point list on how that should happen is not fine.

Anyhow, with that out of the way — keep an eye out here (or on Twitter, Facebook, G+, Tumblr, or even Pinterest) to see the latest in this weird, random, rambling series!

— G.K.

Women in Science: Doing Some Research

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Women in Science: Doing Some Research

Last week I made the statement that I think that most of the people who choose to go into science are of the Rational (Myers-Briggs NT) temperament. I said that based on population studies of temperament and a gut feeling based on just about every STEM person I’ve known being an NT in temperament (with the odd ST here and there). I believe that, if that is correct, then that explains the lack of women in science much better and more clearly than believing in a sexist conspiracy theory.

 

However, right now, there doesn’t seem to be much hard data to support that statement. So…

 

 

I guess I’m going to have to collect the data myself. So, I’ve been hitting up MILO all weekend when I wasn’t working on my NaNoWriMo novel and have dug up some fairly good articles. I’m going to try to contact some of the sites that have MBTI-type quizzes on their sites and ask about their fees for buying one. Then I’m going to set it up here and invite people in the science world to take it and to note down what their job is. Once I have a fairly large data set on that, I’ll invite non-science people to take it and note down their jobs to see if there is any correlation between career choice and temperament. I have a fairly strong feeling that the two spheres giving SJWs headaches — #ShirtStorm and #GamerGate — will have an over-representation of men and women of an NT/Rational temperament compared to what you would find in the population at large.

 

 

Okay, that’s not really science. It’s data collection and statistics. I will be publishing the raw data once this is done so that if there is anything I missed (or mucked up), it can be caught. And, that’s close enough to science for Rose Eveleth and her ilk so (see how “doxing” came to mean “criticized” for her and her lot), in deference to their love of using words they shouldn’t use, I’m calling this shit “science.”

 

— G.K.

Women in Science: Can We Make Science and Math Non-NT Friendly?

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Women in Science: Can We Make Science and Math Non-NT Friendly?

I honestly don’t think anyone in their right minds is asking this question. However, when we live in a world where an alleged science and tech writer for a major publication gets more caught up in a guy’s shirt than a major historic event, one can’t assume that they’re dealing with a sane populace. And, given how deeply SJWs have penetrated print and film, it’s probably safer to just assume arguendo that you’re dealing with complete morons who barely register as sapient, let alone sane, from the beginning.

So, can the subjects of math and science be changed to make them more readily graspable by non-NT minds? Short answer: no. Longer answer: sure. Just as soon as theorycrafting various sci-fi shows/movies becomes an Olympic event.


And the Golden Pikachu goes to Sam for winning the “Kirk vs Picard” debate

Science and math are abstract disciplines. Science, at least, has some concrete applications and studies that people without the NT temperament can grasp. People who are Sensors and Thinkers (XSTP, XSTJ) can more easily get into those fields. There are also fields were feelings are important (mostly in medicine) so NFs and XSFXs can participate there. Still, on average, even in these less abstract fields, non-NTs are going to have a harder time grasping the fundamental structures and patterns because their minds aren’t geared to it naturally the way that an NT mind will generally be. Science is a bit more accessible because it has many concrete and inductive aspects, unlike math.

For math — advanced and theoretical math — anyone without a “Thinking” in their temperament can pretty much just not bother. XSTXs can probably hack it if they really are interested but XSFXs and NFs probably won’t want to have much to do with abstract and theoretical mathematics. They might be happy in applied mathematics like finance, banking, accounting, and the like but they are probably not going to be found amongst the Nobel Prize crowd or solving the ultimate core model problem in set theory. Math is completely deductive, artificial, and abstract. Math, unlike science, cannot be “observed in nature.” You’re not going to see two numbers mating and be able to figure out what their product would be.

Or rather, if you do see such a thing, you are probably under the influence of some really fun stuff and you might want to check into a psychiatric hospital just to be safe.


I’m going to factor your brains out, baby.

The big problem comes in with math being applied in science. See, math can produce models that scientists can use to demonstrate, predict, or disprove hypotheses. Math is also a way of measuring distances, times, and references precisely. That’s why to advance high in science, you generally need to understand the mathematical statements that prove (or disprove) the theorems. Most anyone who paid attention to the teacher (instead of what the teacher was wearing — Chris Plante, I’m looking at you and Ms. Eveleth over there) in science knows that Newton’s first Law of Motion can be summarized as “an object in motion tends to stay in motion while an object at rest tends to stay at rest unless an external force acts on them.” That’s good enough if you’re just wanting to understand what the law is and how it might apply to simple real-world things (like how to get water to flow through an irrigation ditch) but if you’re going to try to figure out how to predict the path of an asteroid to see whether or not it’s going to hit Earth, you need to really know Newton’s law which is properly stated as:

ΣF = 0 ⇔ dv⁄dt = 0

Plugging that in with the data you have on positioning, spin, velocity, etc is part of how an objects’ path through space might be known. There probably are cleaner ways to figure it out but they’ll involve math that I can’t find let alone get the HTML code for, so we’re just going to stick with something simple.

Now, if you have a mind/temperament that doesn’t like to deal with abstractions easily and that doesn’t play well with being creative, you’re going to have a bad time trying to be a scientist. It’d be like sticking someone like me (an INTJ) into a counseling office and expecting us to be able to help some overwrought couple make an emotional connection.

In other words, it’s a bad idea all around.

And, while science and math are great — they’re what power the world right now — being good at them is not the only way to be smart. Sure, they’re probably the best way to be smart and do things that will have centuries’ of significance where your name will be remembered by generations untold, but they’re not the only way to be smart. There are ways for NFs (diplomats) to shine — just look at Mother Teresa or Tom Hiddleston. There are ways for SJs to shine — many American presidents have been SJs, after all. Even SPs have their place — most actors and artists are SPs. And these temperaments are not unimportant. They’re necessary. As much as it might seem that the world would be a great place with only NTs, it’d actually get a bit boring and argumentative. Sure, there probably wouldn’t be any wars because NTs are great at finding ways to get what they want even if the other side doesn’t want to cooperate. But, arguing would practically be a spectator sport. There’s also the added minus of the human population undergoing a massive contraction since INTJs and INTPs rarely bother with social interaction beyond our vague (and usually accidental) plans for world domination — which would make getting married and having kids a bit tricky — and the ENTJs and ENTPs would be too busy building their own empires and engaging in spirited debate. Maybe a few of us might engage in sexual intercourse (probably by accident or under the influence of alcohol and hormones) but probably not enough to keep the population booming.

On top of that, our kids would be miserable unless they were Thinkers because NTs are pretty crap at the whole “emotional connection and support” aspect of parenting (we’re also crap at it from the “being the kid” aspect — just ask my mother).

So, you’d have a world with loads of female scientists, yeah, and probably with all kinds of neat gadgets, interstellar flight, off-world colonies, etc…but it wouldn’t have things like Christmas, random barbeques, bars with pool tables, all kinds of different music, romantic comedies, or (and this is probably of supreme importance to Chris Plante and Rose Eveleth) fashion shows with models wearing a plastic Harley-Davidson motorbike front-end for a shirt (yeah, fellow NTs, I’m stumped on why such a thing exists outside of someone really wanting to be a motorcycle for Halloween).


That this actually exists is a bit frightening

Though, on the plus side: in a purely NT world, there would be no SJWs. So, maybe…hmph. I’ll schedule that for next Saturday’s Global Domination Summit meeting with my minions.

— G.K.

Women In Science: Can We Create More Female NTs?

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Women In Science: Can We Create More Female NTs?

Ethically and legally? Probably not. But, if we’re looking at just “is this within the realm of probability with current technology” then the answer is “yes, maybe.” Understand, of course, that it’s not going to be something we could start working on tomorrow and that the suggestions on what to do range from mildly terrifying to downright scary. However, if your end goal is more women in science and you don’t care much about the means used to achieve that goal (which probably makes you part of the crowd clutching their pearls and fainting over a shirt), then consider this ground zero for your completely terrible campaign.


Even the Master is horrified by your callousness

The first thing we’ll need to do is figure out what determines and creates the different temperaments. There’s a lot of debate over this. Temperament does seem to be extant from birth and observable in infancy (though, again, that’s somewhat debatable). It’s unknown if temperament is genetic, if it’s encoded into a specific gene or series of genes, if it’s inherited but not genetic, if it’s a result of chemical washes in utero during fetal brain development, or if it’s just the result of something spinning the Wheel o’ Temperament and bam — you get whatever the arrow’s pointing to when you exit the birth canal. It could also be influenced by various environmental and nurturing factors in infancy. So, the first step is to:

  1. Collect several hundred thousand pregnant women of various races, age ranges, ethnicities, nationalities, sexual orientations, socioeconomic levels, and marital statuses. Note down who is who and then assign each one a random testing number so that a proper double-blind study can be done.
  2. Monitor maternal food and liquid intake and output, noting the times and frequency of hunger, elimination, and strange cravings. Also monitor maternal emotional levels and stress levels.
  3. Figure out a way to determine the exact hormonal levels being washed over the fetus in utero at each stage of pregnancy and note those down.
  4. If the mother chooses to breastfeed, continue to observe intake-output of maternal nutrients until the child is weaned.
  5. Test each child to determine temperament/personality type at an appropriate age (usually no earlier than 17).

That concludes the first part of this process. Once you’ve determined which children are NTs, go back over the data gathered earlier and try to tease out the commonalities in maternal (and paternal) traits. Did the mothers all experience similar hormonal washes during their pregnancies? Did they tend to eat or crave certain foods as a class? Note down all commonalities among the parents and prepare to proceed to the next step.

  1. Collect males and females with traits most likely to create an NT child (if there are any).
  2. Impregnate the females with sperm carrying only the X chromosome.
  3. Monitor each pregnancy to ensure that the proper foods, drinks, and in utero hormonal washes occur, terminating any that seem likely to be an non-NT temperament.
  4. Ensure that the parents use only child-rearing methods that were found in homes with INTJ children from phase one.

There, you should have a new generation of pure NT females now. Provided, of course, that temperament is determined this simply. If you repeat these steps over the course of enough generations, you might be able to extinguish all of the non-NT temperaments in the human race, leaving a world only of Rationals. Of course, at future steps, you will need to breed some male children (after all, it’s hard to reproduce sexually when there’s only one sex and even if you can, that has its own problems) but you should be able to figure out how to create male NT children and how to ensure that their children will be NTs.

Also, added “bonus:” you should be able to use the data from phase one to determine the commonalities for the other three temperaments so if you decided that one of them needed a greater population, you could selectively breed them.


And if we add more of this, we’ll get a batch of nice ESFPs…

Of course, if you actually try to do this, you’re probably a terrible person. You’re completely eliminating choice and freedom in mating and reproduction for both men and women but you will get more female scientists. If that is your end goal and you don’t care how ethically it’s achieved, then you’ll be okay with placing restrictions on humans having sex with partners of their own choice at times of their own choosing. You’ll get what you want but only at the price of virtually enslaving millions of women and making reproductive decisions on their behalf.

Which probably makes you a feminist and a social justice warrior but almost absolutely precludes you being a Rational.

— G.K.

Women In Science Part III: Can We Force More Women To Become NTs?

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Women In Science Part III: Can We Force More Women To Become NTs?

Short answer: no, probably not. Longer answer: are you out of your cotton-pickin’ mind? I have heard some crazy questions in my time but this one…this one takes the cookie, the cake, and gets a special ticket for the short bus. Honestly, I know that it’s impolite to say that a question is stupid but I’m going to have to agree with DI Alec Hardy here and say:

Temperament does change over the course of a life. But, not drastically (absent drastic events) for most people. Most of the time, it’s pretty clear if you’re an I or an E (introvert/extrovert) by the time you start school. By the time you hit middle school, it’s usually clear if you’re an NT, NF, SP, or SJ (though there are arguments that parents can detect temperament in their children by the age of one year). By the time you’re in college, you have the personality type you’ll carry the rest of your life. Sure, you might be able to superficially act like a different type. You’ll be able to work on developing your intuition or your sensing, your thinking or your feeling. But using a cognitive function that is not your default setting will always require a bit of effort on your part. It’s not going to “come naturally” to you no matter how hard you try.

I’m an NT (INTJ). I can take all of the public speaking courses on offer and none of them are going to magically make me draw energy from hanging out with a large crowd of people. I can read all of the touchy-feely frou-frou crap out there and none of it is going to magically make me a feelings-oriented person. I can know how to use my five senses but all of the sensing tutorials on Earth aren’t going to get me to use S instead of N as my primary information-gathering resource. I have always gotten tired hanging out around a lot of people (with a handful of exceptions for relatives). I have always been a person who lives inside her head and is happy there. I have always been interested in seeing the “big picture” of things. I have always been curious, loved to learn things, a voracious reader, and unafraid of questioning anything (even when it got me in trouble. Younger INTJs with non-NT parents are cautioned not to stake a Devil’s Advocate position on the existence of God with your more traditional parents unless you want them to punish you by not letting you read encyclopedias).

I’m pretty sure I must have driven my mother crazy as I grew up. My mother is an ESFJ which is about as opposite INTJ as you can get. Even an ESFP would have been closer because the “P” would have meant she would have been more curious and open than the “J” which means being a bit more structural and wanting things done in a certain (preferably her) way. As an adult, I can deal with my mother better now than I could when I was a kid and, over time, she’s just learned to put up with me. Of course, knowing that she is ESFJ has made it a lot easier for me to figure out how to communicate with her and what things she assigns priority to. However, when I was growing up, my mother wanted to mold me into an ESFJ because, to her, that was the “best” way to be and I wanted to turn her into an INTJ because, to me, that was the “best” way to be. My (I’m guessing here) ISTP father often had to get between us to stop our fights from escalating into the verbal equivalent of nuclear war (at least on my end — my sarcasm was practically inborn).

See, to my mother, my introversion meant that I was “shy” and she kept telling me that “if I would just be more friendly” or “act better” then I would “have a lot of friends” because, to her, having a lot of friends and being well-thought of was important. I, on the other hand, didn’t want “a lot of friends.”* I wanted particular kinds of friends who I could talk to about the weird things I was interested in and who would read books with me. My mother wanted me to be more affable, approachable, warm, and thoughtful when it came to dealing with people whereas I wanted her to be more objective and open-minded and less likely to use “guilt by association” judging my friends (though, to be fair, she was right more often than not when I was a teenager). My mother (and my father) thought that “because I said so” or “because that’s the way it is” were acceptable conversation enders whereas I wanted to know why. I wanted to know what they thought about big events and the big picture (space exploration, could we build colonies on the moon, time travel, would either of them ever sign up to get on an interstellar space ship, what would have happened if the South won the Civil War, should there be a Federation-style global government…) whereas they were both more practical-minded and probably felt that my questions and obsessions were hare-brained and frivolous since none of them could make money, provide security, etc. My mother and I did (and still do, sometimes) a lot of talking past each other because neither one of us had the first clue how the other saw the world or how they thought. Looking back now, there were things my parents could have done to give me the answers I wanted and to stop the fights we had if they had known I was INTJ and what that meant. Also, if I were to be sent back a la Replay, I would have a better idea how to deal with both of them and communicate with them than I did growing up.

Thank God they had my little brother who (again, guessing here) was an ESTP. Otherwise, there might have been a mushroom cloud over our house by the time I’d turned fifteen.

So, I had two non-Rational parents and a non-Rational brother growing up and, despite the pressure, I didn’t magically change temperament. I also grew up in an area (the Deep South — specifically Mississippi) where Rational traits were not desired (not discouraged — just not considered desirable) in a woman (on average). Chances are that I went to school with only a few dozen other Rationals (school population was ~2000) and, despite being constantly around and under peer pressure and social pressure to conform, I stubbornly remained an NT.

Therefore, I doubt that it would be possible to take non-NT girls and somehow change them into Rationals for the purpose of having more women in science. I was unsuccessful in instilling an NT-temperament in my mother. I doubt that my niece (with whom I would have a disproportionate influence due to being an authority figure and “cool”) will be a Rational (she shows a lot of signs of being either an SF or an NF). And, even if there were some way to “force” a temperament change to NT, it probably wouldn’t be ethical or legal since you’d either have to brainwash a child (like Borg assimilation) or you’d have to place someone in severe psychological and emotional distress with development of NT traits being the only way for them to survive.

Now, can we “create” more NT women without violating laws on assault, kidnapping, and torture? Honestly, I’ll have to think about that one for a bit.

— G.K.

*Of course there were points where I wanted to be well-liked and respected. The thing is, I wanted it to be for things I knew or had accomplished, not for things like how I dressed or looked. I wanted to be popular because I wrote a great story or had the coolest science project or something (actually, winning first place in the Science Fair in fifth grade still counts as one of my Top Five Coolest Events from when I was a kid). I wanted to be known for what I had done or learned, not just for status-signaling or something stupid like that.

Why Don’t Women Go Into Science? Part II

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Why Don't Women Go Into Science? Part II

Another reason that women aren’t commonly found in science is one that is really difficult to overcome. It’s not sexism. There’s no government program that can fix the problem. There’s no amount of social pressure that can ease it. You can shove a million girls into science and math education and you’re still not going to come out with a 50/50 mix in the scientist gender pool unless you start killing a lot of men.

The reason is temperament. As in the kinds outlined by Myers-Briggs. There are sixteen personality types and four temperaments. The four temperaments are SF, SP, NF, and NT. People who go on to become scientists will generally be of the NT temperament with the odd ball from one of the other three thrown in there (usually an ISTP or ISTJ). Now, out of these four temperaments, NT is the rarest in the general populace. It’s the second rarest for men and the rarest for women. Additionally, not all NTs are going to be interested in science and math. A good many will be interested in other things like law, writing, language, history, computers, etc.

NTs are called the “Rationals” because well…we are. I speak now as one of those rare evil unicorns (a female INTJ). We’re not touchy-feely. We don’t care how something makes you feel. We don’t care if it hurts your feelings or makes you unhappy. Your emotions are completely irrelevant unless, for some reason, we’re trying to subject them to testing or modification (like if we were testing psychiatric drugs). We’re not out to deliberately make you feel bad but we’re not going to sugarcoat things and if you can’t keep up with us, well, that’s your problem. Not ours. For those of us who have survived to adulthood and are at peace with being NTs (especially us INTs), we honestly couldn’t care less about the “in” crowd or what anyone outside of our extremely small circles of acquaintance — friends — family “feels” about anything.

That, of course, is part of why we’re drawn to science and research or other cerebral areas like law or writing. Even those of us who don’t go on to become scientists tend to appreciate the field and keep track of research that interests us. Science fits nicely in with how our minds work. It’s abstract. It requires careful thought. It seeks to tease meaning out of what seems, to most people, to be random noise in nature. It’s about looking beyond the surface and figuring out the deeper meaning of things. It’s something you can do on your own. Science doesn’t care about who has the fanciest title. It doesn’t care about who’s the oldest, the youngest, who went to the “best” schools, whose father is related to someone important, or if you look like a runway model or a run-over armadillo. None of that matters in science. The only thing that matters is the continual search for the answer to the greatest question ever asked: “Why?”

The most famous scientists in history weren’t part of a “team.” They were individuals working on their own. They communicated mostly with other like-minded sorts. They didn’t check opinion polls. They didn’t listen to tavern gossip. They couldn’t have told you if a woman’s dress was from Paris or London or one of the Jovian moons. And they gave us things like the Laws of Motion. Perturbation theory. The law of gravity. The theory of evolution by natural selection. Calculus. Geometry. Telescopes. Genetics. AC power transmission. They bequeathed to us the modern world and all of the mini-miracles we up-jumped hairless great apes take for granted every day. They gave us the tools to survive and thrive. And, for the most part, the non-Rationals have treated these great personages like crap. Many of them died penniless.

Now, set aside thoughts of utility, prestige, success, wealth, or recognition of any sort. How many of you can confirm that you are non-Rationals (having a non-NT temperament) and would be perfectly happy sitting alone in your office doing nothing but reading technical books and developing theories with nothing more than your brain (no computer simulations)? How many of you would be perfectly happy to stand in front of a whiteboard with a marker and run through decades’ worth of accumulated knowledge to try to tease out an equation that would define how silicon-based proteins might fold? How many of you would be content to sit in a legal library working on a treatise about the evolution of marriage as a legal institution?

Remember, you’re doing this alone. You don’t work with other people. You’re not soliciting opinions. You’re not even really interested in finding out what anyone thinks about what you’re doing. You’re working your ass off out of pure curiosity. You might never accomplish anything. Your work might sit on a shelf for five hundred years, unread. You might die poor and friendless, your passing noted by nothing more than a hasty engraving of your name, date of birth, and date of death on a charity marker. You’re not guaranteed anything — money, success, status, respect.

Nine out of ten of you will not be interested in this at all. You’d want something practical. Or concrete. Or that let you work with people. Or that involved something physically tangible. And that’s fine. But that means that you’d make mediocre scientists at best. You haven’t got the makings of an Einstein or Newton in you. And that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. Out of the one of you left, for every three of you, one will be a woman. It’s not because women can’t do the things that men do in science — it’s because most men can’t do the things that scientists do and it just happens that, by nature, there tend to be a few more men who can do it than there are women.

And, none of those women is going to give a damn what shirt some guy was wearing. They’ll care more about that guy landing a probe that is sending back valuable information on a comet. They’ll wonder if they could get a probe on another comet and if it would be shorter to do that in order to get information on Kuiper Belt Objects than to wait for Voyager (or a similar probe) to get out there. Pictures on a shirt won’t interest them at all because they have their minds set on more interesting and enduring matters instead of that petty kind of gossip columnist tripe.

— G.K.

Why Don’t Women Go Into Science?

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Why Don't Women Go Into Science?

This is one of those questions where the answer is going to take a good bit of explanation because it’s a multi-part problem. One problem is that scientists tend to focus on abstract problems and theories — especially in disciplines like physics and astronomy. They are looking for patterns that are damned difficult to detect and that requires a kind of mind and intellect that is rare among men and rarer still among women making scientists a minority among the human populace.

And if there’s one thing that humans love to destroy, it’s a minority population.

We’re social creatures (for the most part). We enforce conformity through social norms, laws, mores and folkways, ostracism, shaming, and praise for good (conformist) behavior. That means that people who do not observe and obey those norms tend to be punished early on and taught not to express those non-conformist behaviors and to suppress their native values in favor of what society values.

Now, society’s values aren’t always good things when it comes to scientific and technological progress. To break mankind out of the Neolithic took visionaries and inventors who had the personal fortitude to ignore the social shaming conventions (gossip, peer pressure, ostracism, etc) and move forward into a direction that the Neolithics had never considered. That’s hard for anyone, male or female. But, it happened. Some crazy fool invented writing. Some other crazy fools figured out how to heat metal and hit it so that it developed into a certain shape. Other fools figured out how to sharpen it. Some fools figured out how to use sand to make a road and suddenly a bunch of fools could talk to other fools faster than ever.

And, of course, these fools let the Neolithics they’d dragged kicking and screaming out of the caves have access to these cool things and what did the Neolithics do? Use them to beat the ever-living crap out of future visionaries. But still, visionaries who could take the beatings were born and continued to pull the rest of humanity forward even while the gifts they left behind were used to discourage more of their kind from expressing their own visions.

See, visions are okay — so long as they fit to cultural norms or what the Neolithic elites want. So, today, that means that walking around the Vatican topless is fine — it fits what the elites want. It means that wearing a dress that resembles something out of Picasso’s nightmares is fine (but men had best stick to suits that make them look like tall penguins or else). It means that peeing in a jar and dropping a cross in it is fine. See, avant-garde is cool. Worship of a time period from a half-century ago is cool.

But putting a probe on a comet is so not cool. Especially if you don’t look like David Tennant or Thomas Hiddleston (who are acceptably good-looking male representations of “okay geeks” that the elites will tolerate so long as they genuflect before their Neolithic masters and don’t do anything too geeky). Especially if, like most visionaries, you don’t pay much attention to the fashion dictates of the day and instead wear things you think are cool or that a friend made for you. If you insist on being below average in looks, nerdy in fashion, and brilliant at science, your historic achievement will be overlooked by the Neolithics in favor of what you were wearing.

Because, you know, that’s so much more important than learning more about our universe.

Now, everyone’s sensitive (on some level) to that kind of social pressure. Women, on balance, are more sensitive to it (or rather, more women possess temperaments that allow such tactics to work — the rest of us who don’t have those self-isolate anyway and usually discount what the Neolithics say about anything). So, when an entire generation of girls sees a scientist getting ripped to shreds over his shirt after he’s just landed a freaking probe on a comet, those girls are going to say “hey, obviously all this stuff that feminists have been saying about how we shouldn’t judge people on looks or their clothes is bull. If I were to make a historic discovery, those same people would be more concerned with what I was wearing and how I looked than they would be with the implications of my discovery so why should I bother?”

So, congratulations, Rose Eveleth, Chris Plante, and Arielle Duhaime-Ross and others of your Neolithic ilk. You’ve just done more to discourage girls who have native scientific temperaments (NT females) from bothering to tackle difficult subjects because you’ve shown that, once again, achievements matter not at all to you flea-bitten primitives — it’s how you look and what you wear.

— G.K.

Feminism Is Dead

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Feminism Is Dead

I’m happy to announce that, as of today, November 14, 2014 Anno Domini, feminism is dead and we can all go about our lives without having to worry about anything other than its raging specter wailing away in the attic. That means that all the anti-GamerGate folks can rest easy and game company owners no longer have to worry about firing 50% of their game designers and stuffing the teams with Uterine-Americans in order to appease the feminists.

Because feminism is dead. The corpse of sexism and misogyny hangs from yon tree like the bloated, putrid thing it is. Or was. Because it’s dead now and no threat to anyone.

I’d really like to thank the woman who had the ovaries to stick a stake in its heart: Rose Eveleth of The Atlantic. I mean, without her there to point out that the most pressing problem women interested in STEM research and careers face is that some guy might wear a shirt that has a buxom blonde in lingerie on it, we’d all still be held hostage to the crazy clutches of feminism. However, thanks to her fearless pontification upon sartorial hygiene among the aerospace engineering crowd, we can safely assume that sexism is over, feminism is no longer necessary, and we no longer need to worry about being judged on what we look like, what kind of attire we’re wearing, what kind of make-up we use, what hairstyle is “in” at the moment, or, you know, shallow things like that instead of our achievements.

Such as landing a #$!?@ probe on a #$!?@ comet going at ridiculous speeds in outer-#$!?@-space.

Which, I’m certain, is not that difficult compared to writing about science on the Internet and then claiming to be getting death threats over the Internet which will, if the same pattern holds as has held for the vast majority of other cases, be traced to a random troll unconnected with critics (like what happened with Anita Sarkeesian) or to allies looking to discredit anyone who says anything critical of the woman who was “brave” enough to say she didn’t like a shirt some guy was wearing — an event, I’m certain, that has never happened before in history and will definitely not happen during the course of any modern, heterosexual marriage.

— G.K.

P.S. — If anyone out there wants to send me death threats, fine. Whatever. I do, however, own a handgun and have access to rifles with precision scopes on them. Most of my neighbors, likewise, own firearms. Normally, we keep them holstered but, should the occasion arise… And no, Rose, I’m not talking to you or any of your vaporish wilting lily lady friends so you can put your smelling salts away now, dears, and go lay on the settee while someone fans you lest you swoon. Maybe some big, strong man will come along and protect you from the meanie heads on the Internet so that you don’t have to learn how to handle an inanimate hunk of metal and protect your damn self.