Humor

I’m Still Here

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I'm Still Here

I’m sorry if I’ve not been posting — I’m working on a few things that will be going up over the next couple of days. Also, there will be some updates to my stories coming soon-ish. However, I’m trying to find some stable gigs to pay the bills and I’m in the middle of finishing up some edits for my publisher (just doing the last of them now, Vic!) So, until tomorrow, enjoy this very cool image that has been gathering dust on one of my drives:

I’m certain that no matter where we fall in the current brouhaha over everything (flags, guns, monuments, media, history, rockets), we can all agree with the sentiments expressed above and can all stand united as one in saying that sometimes, we need to give Mother Nature the finger right back when she gives us crap like scorpions.

Just sayin’.

— G.K.

Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse: The Initial Outbreak

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Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse: The Initial Outbreak

(Earlier posts in this series: Surviving the ZA and Preparing for the ZA)

Okay, so, chances are that you may be stumbling across this guide during the early days of the Zombie Apocalypse. How will you know if there’s a Zombie Apocalypse (ZA) in progress? Well, first of all, it will be all over the news. Secondly, I’ll put up this helpful little graphic that I’m basing on the Department of Homeland Security’s Terrorism warning graphic thingy (totally the official name):

If it goes to OMGWTFZABBQ (aka “Red”) then there’s a ZA in progress. Grab your guns, grab your gear, and get ready to get the hell out of Dodge. Do not go to the nearest Four Seasons hotel and cry because that’s not going to do you or anyone else any good.

The first news reports may be confused because, let’s be frank, journalists are communications majors — not infectious disease specialists, doctors, or biologists. However, even they will be hard-pressed to screw up reports about people who were pronounced dead suddenly reviving and then biting those around them. The civil authorities may attempt to suppress the stories for a short time in order to prevent mass panic or to put their own forces in a position to try to contain the outbreak and keep it quarantined. If they are successful, then the ZA will be averted and the whole thing will probably be classified and we’ll never know about it.

However, the US government can’t even keep the Secret Service Agents Gone Wild under wraps and they can’t keep the Chinese out of their own “secure” networks so color me skeptical that they’d be able to actually contain a ZA itself and keep it secret.

In the early stages, the best play is to follow the advice of the wise Douglas Adams: Don’t Panic. Pack your gear. Pack your guns. Plan your escape route and at least four meet-up locations. Communicate your plans to your friends and family. Go ahead and stock up on non-perishables if the stores aren’t sold out. Continue to report to work but keep a pistol with you at all times and to hell with the laws and any “gun-free zones” because zombies don’t care (this applies only during an active ZA — if a ZA is not in progress, obey the law or work to change it and respect the rules of any private establishment or opt not to enter it unless you can convince the owners to change their policies). Keep your car filled and an extra gas can filled in case you need to split in a hurry.

If you start hearing reliable reports that the outbreak has breached quarantine or see such evidence for yourself, then vacate your home and all populated areas immediately. If social collapse begins to encroach on your region or seems likely, retreat is advisable — sooner rather than later.

How will you know when the collapse is coming or if the outbreak has breached quarantine if there are no reports? Well, a zombie-plague will probably have an extremely high fatality rate — something on the order of at least 80% and probably closer to 95%. Hell, it might even be up there with rabies which has a fatality rate of 100%.* You are going to have a high number of people either sick or dead and thus not reporting in to work. Assuming a rate of 75% (the lowest figure I’m going to go with for a ZA), that’s 75% of people who aren’t there to work in power plants, who aren’t driving delivery trucks, who aren’t running the trains to deliver fuel, who aren’t operating the control stations along the grid, who aren’t monitoring the communication relay networks…


The death toll will look something like this…

The electricity will become unreliable. Internet usage will become unstable and then cut out. The lights will go dark. Television transmissions over cable and satellite will end. Popular broadcasts over the airwaves will cease. The phones will go dead. At this point, communications will fall back to the early twentieth century (at best). Radio and line-of-sight. You may be able to get on the HAM radio network and keep in contact with people or on a CB radio. If you have a UHF device, that will work, too. However, powering those devices is very quickly going to become an issue because, as I mentioned, the electrical grid is going to shut down. It can’t run unmanned for very long. You need to get out of town before the lights go out. I’d suggest getting out as soon as you start hearing reliable reports of a massive increase in death toll or seeing the effects yourself. Chances are that the major metros will be hit first and worst early on. New York will stop broadcasting. When that happens, it’s time to get out.

Now, where should you go? The suburbs? No. You want to get out further than that. And don’t be stupid and go to Yellowstone or some other major national park. Thousands of people are going to have already thought of that and will be there ahead of you. Get out to the closest rural area you can that has a constant source of free-flowing water — a river, a stream, whatever. If you own the land, great. If you know the owners and they’ll let you stay there, awesome. If no one owns it, fine. If it’s claimed already, move on. You want to find a place where you can forage and hunt, construct a reasonable defense against the zombies, see them coming, but that isn’t so attractive that someone else will kill you for it.

Also, this is the point where you need to start berating yourself for not planning better and promising that, once you’ve survived this thing, you’re going to fix that.

In the next post, we’ll look at who you should consider having in your group and who you should definitely not take along for the ride.

— G.K.

*By the time the disease is identified, the government will have announced how the symptoms can be identified so that people who have it can be placed in quarantine because — believe it or not — the government does actually have a vested interest in keeping things like a ZA from wiping out its citizens. So, taking even a low-ball figure of 75% fatality (and assuming a 75% transmission rate via indirect contact or 100% via direct contact like biting), if the disease breaks out of its quarantine and the dead start rising, there is going to be a very swift exponential increase in body count where the bodies don’t stay dead.

The exact formula to show this is (bN)(S/N)Z = bSZ and was published by Robert J. Smith? in “Mathematical Modeling of Zombies” (University of Ottawa Press, 2014). The key problem is that zombies never reach a stable-state with humans like other diseases do so there is never a drop-off or plateau on their side unless humans kill enough of them or contain them successfully for long enough.

Also, logically, there are only a few forms a zombie-plague can take. It will need to have the infection rate of something like the flu — perhaps a mutant strain of the Spanish Influenza of 1911 — or the measles. It will need to have the fatality rate of rabies. It will need to affect the brain and nervous system like rabies and meningitis. So, it will most likely be a virus or bacteria with a long incubation period (up to 14 days before onset of symptoms) during which it’s contagious and spread through airborne spray (sneezing, coughing) or touch (door knobs, handshakes) the way the cold and flu are now. Then the symptoms set in and the person dies from them. Post mortem, the person reanimates and then continues to spread the disease by biting others (the way rabies is spread).

Oh Good Grief…

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Oh Good Grief...

I found this particular piece of stupidity over at Peter Grant’s site.

I don’t know if Moshe Feder lives in an echo chamber, has difficulty reading English, or what, so, here goes.

Here is why I am no longer going to buy any books published by Tor:

  1. Contrary to Irene Gallo’s statements, I am not a neo-nazi. My paternal grandfather fought the Nazis in WWII and was at the D-Day landings in Normandy, on Omaha Beach. He came over with the third wave in the afternoon, I believe. His force was part of the Big Red One. They were part of the Saint-Lô breakout, the liberation of France, the Battle of the Bulge, the push to Aachen, the liberation of the concentration camps Zwodau and Falkenau an der Eger. He was probably in Germany or Czechoslovakia when the war in Europe ended in May 1945.

    He would have been twenty-one years old on VE Day.

  2. Calling someone a neo-nazi and saying that the works they like are “bad-to-reprehensible” when your own employer publishes those works and then expecting them to keep buying said works is a bit stupid.

  3. Calling someone a neo-nazi and then saying “I’m sorry if you were offended” is not an apology. For example, were I to say that Tor’s senior staff consists of a high number of pederast- and/or pedophile-sympathizers in light of their lack of condemnation for Marion Zimmer Bradley’s admitted sexual abuse of her son and daughter and then turn around and say “I’m sorry if that offends you,” would that be considered a sincere apology or an insincere one? Please explain and defend your choice of answer logically and show. your. work.

    For the record, I honestly, hand-to-Albert-Einstein believe that Tor’s senior staff feels nothing other than complete disgust at MZB’s actions and that their lack of statement has to do with the length of time since the events took place and possibly could have something to do with contracts they signed or non-disclosure agreements along with the general tendency people have not to speak ill of the deceased — even when the deceased did despicable things.

  4. I’m also not sexist (I’m an equal-opportunity mistrust-er), racist (my black and Latino friends can attest to it), or homophobic (my gay and lesbian friends would get a real kick out of that one). I’m not transphobic (one of my business partners can vouch for me there) and I’m certainly not parochial (scads of witnesses on that one). I’m probably better-traveled, better-educated, more well-read, speak more languages, and just all-around more knowledgeable in general than most of the senior staff at Tor.

So, about the only thing they can hang on me is that I’m from Mississippi and Mississippi has the something-that-kind-of-looks-like-the-Stars-and-Bars in its state flag. Sort of. If you squint. And look at it through special goggles. Of course, this ignores the whole history of the State Flag* and the history of the “Rebel Flag” as it’s called (btw, the actual Confederate Flag is the Bonnie Blue Flag — a single white star on a field of blue).

If being from Mississippi automatically makes someone a horrible, terrible, no-good person, then, well, the world is in a whole lotta trouble. See, William Faulkner is from here. Eudora Welty is, too. Same with Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Morgan Freeman, James Earl Jones, Jim Henson, Medger Evers, Brandy, Jimmie Rodgers, Tennessee Williams, Tammy Wynette, James Meredith, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddly, Richard Wright, Carl Westcott, Sela Ward…

Just to name a few.

You’re welcome, by the way, for the music and the stories. What can we say? It’s in our blood, black or white, it “don’t make no difference” because we’re all the same under the skin where it matters.

At any rate, I’m sick and tired of being called a horrible person. I’ve made the rational choice not to award my money to someone who calls me a horrible person. I’m quite proud of my grandfather — who fought the Nazis in World War II and would probably take umbrage at my being called a neo-nazi — and I’m also proud of all the women I’m related to who bucked the trends in their lives and lived on their own terms. Some of them got divorces back when a divorce made you a virtual pariah — but better that than living with an abusive drunk. Some of them worked outside of the home and owned businesses when that was Simply. Not. Done. My mom and her older sister are two of the smartest women I know and their older brother is probably the smartest person in that part of our family (I might have a high IQ but I can be a complete idiot in a lot of ways). They’ve all worked hard to fight for equality for all people and to make a world where you’re judged solely on how hard you’re willing to work and on your merits alone and I’m proud of that. To continue to give money to a company that calls me a racist, a neo-nazi, a sexist, or a homophobe would be to spit on my own gay, trans, black, and Latino friends as well as three generations of my family who have fought oppression.

Not to mention to turn my back on all of the people from my state who have worked so hard to make an equal playing field and share our rich heritage with the world.

So no. I’m not going to buy any more books from a company based out of New fucking York that calls me a neo-nazi based on zero evidence and refuses to issue an actual apology. New York has more money than Midas. Tell you what, though. I will up the ante. If all of these so-called “social justice warriors” really want to prove their credibility, how about they quit giving their money to people who can afford to live in New York and start donating it to groups working to provide computers, Internet access, and better educational facilities and economic opportunities to students and recent graduates in Mississippi?**

Time to fish or cut bait, y’all.

— G.K.

*Mississippi adopted the current flag in 1894 — way before the Rebel Flag became racist. Also, the canton has thirteen stars in the MS flag, not eleven (the nitwits never seem to notice this) because they stand for the original 13 states of the Union, not the 11 states that seceded. Back in 2000, the NAACP sued the state to try to force us to change the flag. Their first argument was that the canton was the Rebel Flag and that since it’s against the law to fly the Rebel flag as an official flag, it violated their right to freedom of speech and due process. However, the MS Supreme Court threw that out because 13 != 11 in base10. Still, back in 1906, the MS legislature did a general repeal of all laws and kind of forgot to re-add the flag back when they re-did the new legal code. So, on that technicality, it was found that the flag in use since 1894 was not the “official” flag and we had to have an election to decide if we were going to make it official or change it.

So, in 2001, we voted to keep it the way it was. Not because we’re all a bunch of racists but because we’re the poorest goddamned state in the Union and we’ve got better things to spend the thirty million dollars it would cost to change the state flag on. Hell, it cost over two million dollars just to have the election on the issue and it was a nearly 70% support to keep the current flag.

Biggest reason? Because it’s a piece of cloth. It’s not even the stupid Rebel Flag in the canton. Because no one freaking cares. Because changing it isn’t going to change anyone’s attitudes. Because we’ve got better things to spend that money on — schools, teachers, hospitals, roads — than what a bunch of rich lawyers in California who may or may not ever set foot in our state get a bug up their butts about.

…but I digress.

**I’mma love to hear the excuses on this one. We already have taxes in-state about as high as we can set them without causing businesses and individuals to flee and we’re already redistributing as best we can but since school funding primarily comes from local property taxes, it’s hard to make that stretch very far without causing taxpayer revolt and our state sales tax is already among the highest and the most widespread in the nation (it even is levied on food) so, yeah, we are already taxing the shit out of ourselves and the rich and still coming up short. However, “rich” in Mississippi would be “can afford to eat cat food every other day and live in a fleabag extended stay roach motel” in NYC so we are talking different orders of magnitude here, folks.

Dear Tor: I’m an evil unicorn, not a robot!

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Dear Tor: I'm an evil unicorn, not a robot!

Dear Tor,

I am an evil unicorn, not a bot. Love and kisses! G.K. Masterson

I mean, I am an INTJ which, I’ve been told, means I have a sometimes robotic personality but I promise you, I’m a real person.

My mother swears I was actually born in the usual way and not hatched, dropped off by wandering aliens, beamed down as part of a reconnaissance mission, or delivered by a very confused parcel servicebeing operating out of the Corona Borealis supercluster who just took a wrong turn at the Sloan Great Wall. And, given that my niece looks exactly like me, I’m inclined to believe that my mother is telling the truth so I’m definitely human.

I know, I’m a bit disappointed, too, Tor, but we have to deal with reality as it is, not as we which it could be.

Now, I’ve been a pretty avid reader since I was about two and a half years old. And, I’m definitely a geek as these photos will attest.

[wppg_photo_gallery id=”1″]

As you can see, I have quite a few Tor books in my library. Over the years, I’ve massed a sizable collection of Tor books that is worth around about $3000. On average, I purchased about $50 worth of Tor books a month on my Kindle. So, while I’m not going to put much of a dent in Tor’s bottom line by myself, I’ll bet the authors whose books I bought will feel it and they might decide to move to a publisher who doesn’t call their customers neonazis and bots. And, ultimately, if Tor doesn’t have books to publish, they have a problem, don’t they?

— G.K.

We Didn’t Start the Flamewar — Part Two

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We Didn't Start the Flamewar -- Part Two

So, some of you might be wondering exactly how this whole thing got started. I posted a brief-ish history earlier. I’m not going to rehash all of that now. Instead, I’m going to focus on the three most recent events in this culture war. I’m not going to pretend to be completely unbiased in this but I am going to try to be fairly accurate. There is a lot of he-said-she-said to some of it so feel free to check out other summaries. Just be aware that everyone has their own agenda so take it all with a grain of salt (including this one).

The first of the three events to take place was GamerGate. Know Your Meme has a pretty thorough coverage of it so if you’ve got no clue what it is and want a play-by-play, I’d suggest checking it out. The long and short of it is that the whole thing started over a game developer (Zoe Quinn) who cheated on her boyfriend. Her boyfriend posted an expose of it showing that she’d supposedly slept around to try to get good reviews of her game. It morphed from a movement to improve ethics in gaming journalism to a big thing about feminism and gaming in general. The anti-GamerGater side (populated by Social Justice Warriors or SJWs) tends to think that gaming is sexist and that the tech sector is sexist. They think that the way women are depicted in games is sexist and that games should tell a more “socially just” message. The pro-GamerGater side thinks that games are fine and that if the antis don’t like them, they’re free to make their own games and see which sell better. The antis have, so far, managed to get some of the pro-GG groups like the HoneyBadgerBridage (a group of female gamers and game developers) thrown out of conventions because they “made the [antis] feel threatened.”

That’s the level of maturity we’re dealing with. The antis can’t actually argue anything rationally and can’t be bothered to make their own games with their own message. They want to force current gaming companies to make the games they think should be made and force the rest of us to play them whether we want to or not. And, when we say that’s stupid, we’re told we’re threatening them and harassing them and that we’re being sexist. We also get lumped in with the PUAs like Roosh (who isn’t actually a bad guy — I’ve talked with him and he’s nice in person) and some of the really crazy MRAs who do hate women which would be like us lumping the antis in with groups who want to raise all children as girls and kill or force all males to undergo sex reassignment surgery *eyeroll*

The next big event was ShirtStorm. Back in November, the European Space Agency landed the Philae lander on a comet for the first time in human history. One of the guys on the team was wearing a shirt that a female friend had made for him — the shirt was a bowling shirt that depicted comic-hero women with laser guns and tight outfits. He was interviewed briefly (he wasn’t the spokesman for the team or the team lead — the team lead was a woman, in fact). Rose Eveleth, a journalist for The Atlantic, managed to miss the big news item (the historic comet landing) and, in a stereotypically womanish manner, focus in on what the guy was wearing instead. She made a big deal about the shirt that caused the historic comet landing to be forgotten as everyone on Twitter got the vapors over the women on this guy’s shirt. She later claimed she was “doxxed” (meaning her personal information was posted and she was getting harassed at home) but there was absolutely no evidence this happened (whereas there was plenty of evidence that this happened with anti-GamerGate people). I personally spent the better part of four days checking the usual doxxing sites AND the deepnet/Tornet for any trace of it and there was nada. The only way I could dig up her info was to hit up a contact I have who can get that kind of stuff and all I asked that person was if they could get it. Unsurprisingly, the answer was “yes” but that does not mean Rose Eveleth was doxxed any more than it means that oh, say, the Governor General of Canada’s direct line (bypasses switchboard, bypasses secretary, no voicemail, rings through even if phone is turned off) was “doxxed.”*

ShirtStorm managed to die down with most of us women realizing that some women were never going to get the whole science thing because they just couldn’t be rational. I wrote my long series on ShirtStorm and Women In Science (Feminism Is Dead, Why Don’t Women Go Into Science?, Why Don’t Women Go Into Science? Part II, Women In Science Part III: Can We Force More Women to Become NTs?, Women In Science: Can We Create More Female NTs?) and things seemed to go back to their uneasy truce where the minority of us wondered just when the majority of slavering crazed fems were going to find something to go batcrap crazy over again.

The third event is HugoGate or PuppyGate or whatever you want to call it. That really deserves its own entry — which it is going to get. However, I’m going to give it a quick rundown here anyway so here goes. This year was the third year that Sad Puppies ran a list of people they thought should get nominated for the Hugos. The last two years Larry Correia ran Sad Puppies — this year it was Brad Torgersen. Larry started it because he believed that worthy folks were being ignored or left off the ballot due to the authors’ political beliefs. He said that if any right-wing author got nominated, the Powers That Be with WorldCon (the group that owns and organizes the Hugos) would throw a fit of epic proportions. Thus far, he’s been proven right. The first two years, Sad Puppies wasn’t very successful but this year it was. There’s some argument as to why that is the case and I’m still reading up on it myself. However, the end result has been that Larry and Brad (who are really nice guys and good writers) have been slandered, libeled, threatened, and harassed. A lot of other good authors have been harassed as well just because they were nominated by Sad Puppies and some even felt they had to withdraw from being nominated. The PuppyKickers are threatening to vote No Award in every category where there are Sad Puppy candidates (I think) which would prove Larry’s point completely and would prove that the Hugos are pretty much worthless. The PuppyKickers claim that the Sad Puppies are all a bunch of white, sexist men who nominated nothing but white, sexist men even though SP3 consists of women, Latinos, blacks, Asians, gays (I think?), and people of all political backgrounds and nominated writers of all colors, genders, and backgrounds. Also now, according to the PuppyKickers, those of us who are sympathetic to SP are neonazis.

So you can see why some of us are finally getting a bit fed up with this whole thing.

In the next part I’ll do a more in-depth history of Sad Puppies so stay tuned!

— G.K.

*No, it’s not the Governor General and I’m not going to reveal whether or not it’s a government agency I could get access to or who my friend is or how I know them or what but, suffice it to say that just because this person can get their hands on the information does not mean it’s in the wild. This person once had a pepperoni pizza (paid for by an anonymous BitCoin account) sent to a friend of theirs who was in Israel and that friend, to this day, still has no idea who sent them the pizza. And no, my posting this won’t give the game away because that friend has no clue who I am or that I know this mutual contact.

Holy Daikatana! An Update?

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Holy Daikatana! An Update?

Yeah, I know. I fell off the face of the Earth. In my defense — shit happened. Good shit, but shit nonetheless. Back on New Year’s Eve, my former employer pretty much told me that I could either go 1099 or be fired. I went 1099 and I’ve been setting up my business and trying to line up additional clients so that my current primary client (my former employer) isn’t such a dominant factor any longer. I’ve also been completely tied up with two other projects: The Watching Dead and Rooster and Pig. However, I’ve managed to get both of those whittled down to “acceptable levels of no longer having complete control over my life” and I’m making more money now that I’m on 1099 status (the getting to set my own hours helps beaucoup as well) which means that I might be able to actually start maintaining a presence here again.

 

Shocking, I know.

 

I do have some other pretty big announcements that will be coming out soon so stay tuned. Good news incoming, guys.

 

— 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.

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.

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.

Misadventures in Computing

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Misadventures in Computing

…or why I vanished for like two weeks.

 

First of all, let it be said: I am a horrible blogger. I do have plans to remedy that but I gave up making promises long ago because no sooner do I make one than I break it. So, no promises but a solid hope that I’m going to get better about keeping this place updated. That said, here’s why I completely vanished from the Intarwebz for a while.

 

1) Moving is hard, yo — A while back, I pretty much decided it was time to move back to Mississippi. There were various reasons for this but the main one had to do with wanting to see my family and spend time with them more than once a year (if I was lucky). So, since around the beginning of May, I’ve been making plans to move. This took up an extraordinary amount of my time and energy. So, the little time and energy I had left over went into my writing instead of my hanging out on Twitter or blogging. Then, near the middle of June, the actual move itself took up all of my time and energy (and money). Now that I’m settled in, though, things should be smoother from here on out.

 

2) Writing is energy and time consuming — I have discovered that I can either write, watch TV, play games, or hang out on the Intarwebz but not all of them. So, I no longer play games outside of some strictly controlled scheduled game time. I do watch TV but only after I’ve hit a certain writing goal for the day. I don’t hang out on the Intarwebz as much because I spend most of my non-writing time working on the Internet and because the Internet is like one big field full of distractions for me. I can go and intend to hang out on Twitter for an hour and then find myself digging through various arcana on Wikipedia six hours later.

 

3) Sometimes, I think my computer wants to kill me — This is the main reason I vanished recently. Now, I’m the kind of person who generally knows how to avoid getting viruses and whatnot on my computer. I have up-to-date virus scanners and spyware searchers continually on the lookout for things that I don’t want on my computer. I have set up my cookie folders so that it’s hard for me to be tracked by websites who don’t explicitly ask my permission or who I don’t want tracking me. GeoIP places hate my guts because I do randomly send them information that screws up their carefully gathered intel on me.

 

However, like every person on this Earth, I have fits of weakness where I’m so certain I know what I’m doing that I do something incredibly stupid. Such as disable my anti-virus because it keeps bugging me whenever my Curse client updates itself and then proceed to hit a Trojan-laden email from a USPS-cloned phishing site that installs a rootkit and a virus to my Master Boot Record. I nuke and rewrite the MBR thinking that would solve the problem but instead got a computer that blue-screened on Winload. So, I did what anyone would do. Bought a recovery image, tossed it on a USB drive (that subsequently died), and tried to recover without a reinstall. Two days with about three hours’ sleep into that, I got a recovery tool that would let me do a full disc back-up, copied everything I could to a 1 TB external drive, nuked my hard drives, struggled over which to load the new OS on (one had over 10k bad journaling warnings which means it’s dead, Jim), found a site that would let me get a digital download purchase for Win7 (because my eyes bleed at the thought of Win 8 on a desktop), reinstalled the OS, redownloaded and reinstalled every application I could, rebuilt my iTunes library, redownloaded all my games, updated all of my major applications, and then nuked my external hard drive and did a full image back-up with files of my new computer so that once I install my brand new hard drive, I can copy everything onto it, nuke the Windows on my old (but still working) hard drive, and install ubuntu for dual-booting to see if a switch to Linux is in the cards.

 

On top of that (as if having to buy a new USB thumb drive and a new USB 1 TB external drive to replace the ones that are bricked, plus a new copy of Win7 and the recovery software + the paid upgrades to Photoshop Elements), my Lifeproof case proved to no longer be waterproof (this after I tested it thoroughly in my sink) and my new iPhone 5s I purchased in November is now a very expensive piece of garbage. Apple decided that AppleCare didn’t cover it since the water damage wasn’t “accidental” and Lifeproof told me that it must have been user error and that the extra warranty I’d gotten only covered the case, not the phone. So, I had to get a new iPhone 5s at midnight which meant shelling out more money and getting saddled with a two-year contract. However, I grilled the people at AT&T, recorded them, and had it written (I almost demanded it be written in blood but then I decided to be reasonable) down that they would replace the phone immediately for free if ANYTHING happened to it that wasn’t a deliberate attempt on my part to destroy the phone. So, score one for AT&T and nil for Apple and Lifeproof when it comes to honoring their warranties, I suppose.

 

I managed to get my computer back up and running on July 4th, declaring my independence from sitting here nursing the thing back to health. Of course, that meant I spent most of July 4th going around and resetting my passwords EVERYWHERE but, hey. Them’s the breaks. It also meant that I didn’t get much writing done last week and I’m now playing catch-up there and on a couple of other things. But, at least the worst of it is behind me (knock on wood) and I made valuable friends at the local liquor store since the guys there totally understood what I was talking about when I launched into a spiel about my computer. They even recommended some cocktails that were strong (but not too strong) so I could unwind a bit while not getting so smashed I couldn’t operate the computer.

 

Now I just pray to the Lords of the Bytes that I suffer no more BSoDs and that I be delivered from Trojans and led not into rootkits for like…forever. Or at least a couple of years. I’m not as young as I used to be and pulling multiple all-nighters takes much longer to recover from than it did when I was in college.

 

So, there you have it. My explanation for my vanishing. Here’s to hoping that it all works out in the future and that I’m not as absent from the Intarwebz as I have been.

 

— G.K.