Category: Uncategorized

Teach scientists not to rape

I found this New York Times article by a female scientist to be amusing on several levels:

My story is not unique. In July, Kathryn B. H. Clancy and her co-authors Robin G. Nelson, Julienne N. Rutherford and Katie Hinde published a survey of 666 field-based scientists in the journal PLoS One and reported that 26 percent of the female scientists surveyed had been sexually assaulted during fieldwork. Most of these women encountered this abuse very early in their careers, as trainees. The travel inherent to scientific fieldwork increases vulnerability as one struggles to work within unfamiliar and unpredictable conditions, but male respondents reported significantly less assault (6 percent).

I know several women with stories like mine, but more often it is the men of one’s own field team, one’s co-workers, who violate their female colleagues. The women surveyed by Dr. Clancy’s team stated that their “perpetrators were predominantly senior to them professionally within the research team.”

The first level is the way in which the actual behavior of scientists contrasts with the way laymen are supposed to trust them. Remember, we are supposed to believe that these scientists are individuals who will only report the true and proper results of the scientific process without any bias or dishonesty or corruption because they are trained to do so. So, what can we conclude from the fact that they can’t go out into the field without raping their female colleagues? It would appear that they are not being taught not to rape, would it not?

Second, notice the way the woman blithely skips over the fact that the whole reason these “trainees” are brought along into the field in the first place is as science totty. Women in science, particularly attractive women in science, are handed every possible opportunity by their male superiors chiefly because those superiors are looking forward to the possibilities created by spending large quantities of time with them in exotic locations. It’s not an accident that this attractive woman, pictured to the right, “landed a position as a professor before I even started to write my dissertation.” She probably genuinely believes that her rapid advancement was solely because she was so “promising” and talented. This complete lack of self-awareness is perhaps understandable in a large-breasted weather girl, but it is both funny and sad that an otherwise accomplished scientist could be so inobservant.

Third, it would be very informative to know how many of the 74 percent of the female scientists surveyed voluntarily had sex with men “predominantly senior to them professionally within the research team.” Based on what I know of female science majors, I would estimate at least three-quarters of them, and 100 percent of the attractive ones, did.

Of course, the push to encourage women in science is only going to cause more such sexual assaults to take place, which is one more reason why it is a bad idea. Science doesn’t need more women, especially if more women in the field are going to help transform otherwise good male scientists into rapists and sex criminals.

The USAF doesn’t need God anymore

And the long slow decline into military irrelevance continues:

Members of the U.S. Air Force will no longer be required to say “so help me God” during their enlistment oath. A legal review of rules that required the phrase occurred after the American Humanist Association threatened to sue on behalf of an atheist airman. The unnamed airman at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada was denied re-enlistment Aug. 25 after crossing the phrase out of the oath.

It would be interesting to see the USA try to defend itself if Christians simply refuse to serve it any longer. Of course, allegiance to the state is rapidly disappearing as the connection between nation and government becomes increasingly tenuous.

A German knows what Germany is. The Scots, for all their fear of independence, know what Scotland is. What does “America” mean any longer? It’s certainly not “One Nation Under God” anymore.

But the USAF is on the verge of technological irrelevance anyhow. It won’t prioritize the one mission for which it is actually needed, infantry air support, and the combination of anti-aircraft lasers and unmanned drones will supplant its other missions.

Isn’t it amazing how many traditions that have been around for decades, if not centuries, are being belatedly discovered to have been unlawful all along?

The Ebola exponent

This, combined with socionomics will explain why we’ve been seeing all the pandemic-related television shows of late:

Right now we’ve had more than 5,000 cases of Ebola, and at least 2,600 people have died. Some scientists, like Alessandro Vespignani at Northeastern University in Boston, are taking numbers like that and putting them into computer models to see where this epidemic is going. “For instance, in our modeling, by mid-October, we’re already between 10,000 to 25,000 cases,” he says.

Five thousand cases of Ebola is bad; 10,000 to 25,000 is unbelievable. And that’s where the exponential curve comes into play. “Well,
an exponential curve is a curve that doubles every certain amount of
time,” Vespignani says. And with this outbreak, cases are doubling every
three to four weeks. So if help doesn’t arrive in time — and
the growth rate stays the same — then 15,000 Ebola cases in mid-October
could turn into 30,000 cases by mid-November, and 60,000 cases by
mid-December.

Meanwhile, aid efforts are hampered, to put it mildly, by the local fauna:

The bodies of eight people, including several health workers and three journalists, have been found days after they were attacked while distributing information about Ebola in a Guinean village near the city of Nzerekore, according to Reuters.

“The eight bodies were found in the village latrine,” Albert Damantang Camara, a spokesman for Guinea’s government, told Reuters on Thursday. “Three of them had their throats slit.”

Quarantine and closing the borders, as Sierra Leone is doing, would suffice to keep Ebola out of the West. So, naturally, the globalists in office prefer to literally import the disease and expose thousands of soldiers and aid workers to it in Africa, thereby risking a global pandemic, rather than simply leave the independent African nations to their own resources and permitting the epidemic to safely run its course.

And if the World Health reports that the statistics are being underreported are correct, the exponential curve may already be in effect.

An Open Source project

Calling all interested programmers:

We have a potential problem down the road. Our favored means of making ebooks is to construct them manually, which permits us to create very clean, professional ebooks without all the extra HTML trash that is an artifact of converting files from the various word processors. We do this with a program called Sigil, which is open source software, but unfortunately Sigil is no longer being maintained.

Some of the functionality of Sigil is being brought into Calibre, which is an excellent Open Source program, but is not focused on ebook production and has an editor that is more limited in its capabilities. Calibre also now requires QT5, which means those using older OS like XP cannot use it.

Now, other than a few minor features it would be nice to add for the sake of efficiency, Sigil works perfectly fine now. It’s not an immediate problem. But, as the EPUB standard changes over time, that may not always be the case. So, I’d like to find a programmer or two with OSS experience, and one or two programmers interested in gaining OSS experience, to keep Sigil alive. We have the server space that can be used to host it and are quite willing to provide it, so if you’re a programmer who is genuinely interested in helping maintain and improve Sigil, please shoot me an email with SIGIL in the subject.

If you want to have a look at the source code first, you can DL the 12MB file here.

UPDATE: Good news. The project leader, John, says that the project was merely pining for the fjords for lack of contributors. He’s quite happy to advise and so forth. We’ve got six or seven volunteers so far, so I’ll get in touch with everyone via email tonight and we can discuss what to do first.

The big question/problem is QT. John’s current plan is to go foward with QT 5.3, which rules out XP and that user base. So, the question is what is the best way to get the new user features into a version that does not require the latest QT short of a fork.

The Union survives… for now

YouGov announces, on the basis of exit polls, that the Scottish independence referendum has failed by 54 to 46 percent:

YouGov bases its prediction on the responses of 1,828 people after they voted today, together with those of 800 people who had already voted by post. Today’s respondents had previously given their voting intention earlier this week. By recontacting them, we could assess any last-minute shift in views. Today’s responses indicate that there has been a small shift on the day from Yes to No, and also that No supporters were slightly more likely to turn out to vote.

Obviously, this is not an official result. But from the socionomic perspective, it would appear that the Scots made their move for independence too early in the global economic downturn.

Of fraudulent lists and fake “bestsellers”

File 770 sounds a little disappointed to discover that an SF “bestseller” on the NYT Bestsellers List doesn’t necessarily indicate the mainstream adoption of SF:

I’m a science fiction fan, yet I’m constantly being surprised to discover how that shapes my thinking. Although I know bestseller lists are artificial constructs, I also know they are constructs dominated by mainstream fiction and literary biases. Consequently, when a science fiction writer appears on the New York Times bestseller list I don’t ask how, I just shout “Hooray!” But now a Higher Critic has explained why I should be dissatisfied and suspicious about how they got there.

And now I am.

Vox Day unfavorably compared John Scalzi to Larry Correia based on alleged manipulation of the bestseller list. But isn’t Correia’s status as a bestselling author the same reason people believe Correia is the gold standard?

Even here, all Larry Correia ever did was point out two times when his books made the New York Times best seller list. Which they did. But both times the books disappeared from the list the following week. One and done….

I’m perfectly happy that Larry Correia is an NYT bestselling author. (Which I said in the post.) But since Correia and Scalzi both have experienced the same one-and-done pattern, then why would anybody doubt that Scalzi’s listings are also the result of real sales, Vox Day notwithstanding?

Actually, I didn’t compare them. I merely referenced Scalzi’s own comments on the subject. As always, Larry Correia is perfectly capable of speaking for himself. As for me, I answered Mr. Glyer on his own blog as follows: There are two reasons for the difference between Scalzi’s one-week showings and Mr. Correia’s. 1. Correia’s Amazon rankings at the time correlated correctly with his NYT bestseller listing. Scalzi’s Amazon rankings aren’t egregiously off, but they’re not high enough to be credible. 2. Baen Books is not known for attempting to game various awards and bestseller lists. Tor Books, which has won the Locus Award for Best Publisher 27 years in a row, among other things, is.

Does anyone really and truly believe that whereas OLD MAN’S WAR and THE GHOST BRIGADES did not sell well enough to make the NYT Bestseller list, FUZZY NATION did?

All one had to do was look at the Amazon rankings to see that LOCK IN was not selling well enough to have made the bestseller list without a bulk-sale marketing campaign. And as noted on File 770, I had an inkling LOCK IN would not only be on the NYT bestseller list, but be there for a single week before disappearing.

These faux bestsellers aren’t any great secret. It’s just one of the ways the Big Five publishers promote their favored authors. Talk to a top editor or a publishing executive if you don’t believe me; I’m not making this stuff up. Tor is simply trying to massage public perceptions to bump a high mid-list writer into reliable bestseller status.

And then, as it happened, the Washington Examiner happened to address the issue of the unreliability of this particular list today:

The New York Times Book Review, which has a history of belatedly recognizing conservative bestsellers, has banished conservative legal author David Limbaugh’s latest, Jesus on Trial, from its upcoming best seller list despite having sales better than 17 other books on the list.

According to publishing sources, Limbaugh’s probe into the accuracy of the Bible sold 9,660 in its first week out, according to Nielsen BookScan. That should have made it No. 4 on the NYT print hardcover sales list.

Instead, Henry Kissinger’s World Order, praised by Hillary Clinton in the Washington Post, is No. 4 despite weekly sales of 6,607….

The September 28 list of the top 20 print hardcover best sellers includes one book that sold just 1,570 copies.

Limbaugh, published by Regnery, has been a New York Times best seller, so the newspaper should have been looking out for his high sales numbers. And as a hint, they could have looked at Amazon, where Limbaugh’s Jesus hit No. 1 recently. On Thursday, it ranked No. 6 in books sold on Amazon.

Note first that Mr. Scalzi’s LOCK IN is presently ranked #3,566 on Amazon and did not make the September 28th list. The #20 book to which the Examiner presumably refers is I AM MALALA which is presently ranked #992 on Amazon. Keep in mind that there are two different lists and that non-fiction usually sells more than fiction.

The New York Times bestseller list is simply not what it claims to be. It’s mostly a marketing device manipulated by media ideologues and marketing departments. Some books make it legitimately. Others don’t. Fortunately, Amazon gives us a means of distinguishing between the two.

Scaredy cops

I always find it amusing to read the police responses to a copkiller. You can almost hear their lips quivering when they complain that it’s not fair that someone dares to shoot back at them:

There was a killer on the loose Wednesday night, and the police say he is Eric Frein, who is charged with ambushing two Pennsylvania state troopers last Friday night, shooting them with a rifle. One was killed. The other remains in critical condition.

The police describe Frein as a self-trained survivalist with a grudge against law enforcement who has talked about committing mass murder.

Hundreds of officers are looking for him in a heavily wooded area of Pennsylvania. Searchers have to make their way through rugged terrain with thick underbrush and hills.The man they’re looking for is said to be very familiar with these woods. He is heavily armed and extremely dangerous. Wearing full camouflage and body armor, grim-faced officers geared up for a sixth day of searching the dense forest.

They’re hunting a man who might also be hunting them.

“I want you to know one thing: Eric, we are coming for you,” said Lt. Col. George Bivens of the Pennsylvania State Police.

The 31-year-old Frein is suspected of lying in wait just before midnight Friday in front of the state police barracks in Blooming Grove just as a shift changed.

“It’s a cowardly act,” said Pike County Sheriff Philip Bueki. “The troopers did not have a chance. They didn’t even know what had hit them.”

Keep in mind that these are the very men who gear up in military assault gear to gang-assault grandmothers and infants in no-knock raids. And they’re whining that a copkiller hunting them doesn’t give THEM fair warning? Please.

The police should be grateful that the guy is playing fair enough to only target police officers and not police families. And considering that there are “hundreds of officers” hunting him, about the last thing you can call Eric Frein is a coward. Cowards are those who only have the courage to act in packs. Frein is probably a lunatic and may even be a psychopath, but he doesn’t strike me as a coward.

Never forget: you can’t have a police state without police.

GamerGate and Gameolist

A conspiracy of “Game Journalism Professionals” akin to the infamous JournoList is exposed by Sargon of Akkad:

And The Escapist publishes its Blacklist of game-related publications that are to best avoided as a result of their documented SJW-corruption and lack of journalistic integrity. It pains me to see both Gamasutra and Game Informer on that list; I grew up with the late Paul Anderson and I’ve known Andy McNamara since Game Informer was little more than a few pages of tissue-thin game advertisements.

Blacklist:
Ars Technica: 50.31.151.33
Destructoid: 23.29.115.146
Eurogamer: 94.198.83.18
Gamasutra: 192.155.49.228
Game Informer: 72.52.14.115
Gameranx: 65.75.153.171
Games On Net: 203.16.214.132
Gamespot: 64.30.228.81
IGN: 54.209.144.209
Kotaku: 23.235.43.192
N4G: 67.228.244.148
PC Gamer: 89.167.143.59
Polygon: 216.146.46.10
Rock Paper Shotgun: 80.87.130.179
VG247: 94.198.83.26

Milo Yiannopoulis has more at Breitbart:

High-profile editors, reporters, and reviewers from heavyweight gaming news sites such as Polygon, Ars Technica, and Kotaku use the private Google Groups mailing list, which is called Gaming Journalism Professionals or GameJournoPros, to shape industry-wide attitudes to events, such as the revelation that developer Zoe Quinn had a sexual relationship with at least one prominent games journalist — a journalist who had mentioned her and her products in his reporting….

The GameJournoPros emails appear to confirm widely-held suspicions that
video game journalists operate with one voice and collude on major
issues to distort coverage of ethics violations and to support figures
to whom they are politically sympathetic.

A call for independence

Alex Salmond calls upon his fellow Scots to choose freedom:

Scotland’s opportunity of a lifetime arrives tomorrow.

It is a date with destiny, and a day when Scotland will be sovereign for the first time in more than three centuries.

It is a precious and historic opportunity, and a moment which is rare in the life of any nation.

In these final hours of this historic campaign I want to speak directly to every person in this country who is weighing up the arguments they have heard.

I have no doubt people in Scotland will look past the increasingly desperate and absurd scare stories being generated daily from Downing Street.

Those have no place in a sensible debate.

So in these last days of the greatest political campaign Scotland has ever seen, I want to ask you to take a step back from the arguments of politicians and the blizzard of statistics.

For every expert on one side, there is an expert on the other.

For every scare tactic, there is a message of hope, opportunity and possibility.

That message is of the opportunity for our national Parliament to gain real job-creating powers, the ability to protect our treasured National Health Service and the building of a renewed relationship of respect and equality with our friends and neighbours in the rest of these Islands.

But for all that, the talking is nearly done. The campaigns will have had their say. What’s left is just us – the people who live and work here.

The people of this nation will, for a few precious hours during polling day, hold sovereignty, power and authority in their own hands.

It is the greatest, most empowering moment any of us will ever have….

I believe in independence not because I think we are better than any other country but because I know we are just as good as any other.

A whole 307 years on from the Treaty of Union, we don’t need to rise and be a nation again – we just need to believe in ourselves.

If not us, then who? If not now, then when? This is about you. Your family. Your hopes. Your ambitions. It’s about taking your country’s future into your hands.

Don’t let this opportunity slip through our fingers. Vote Yes tomorrow, with your head and your heart – and put Scotland’s future in Scotland’s hands.

If I was a Scot, I’d vote “Yes” without a moment’s hesitation. This is what generation after generation of Scots fought, bled, and died for, the right to be sovereign, independent, and free from English rule.

Scalzi spins his merry way

One of the stranger metaphysical theories I’ve encountered is presented on Twitter:

There’s a dude out there who every time he asserts I’m failing,
something cool happens for me. Suspect this is karma punching him the
face.

I find it amusing that Johnny is trying to claim that I assert he’s failing. I’ve never asserted anything of the sort EXCEPT for the fact that the sales of LOCK IN are obviously a) no better than they were for REDSHIRTS or FUZZY NATION despite b) considerably more marketing effort on the publisher’s part. I don’t think that Scalzi is failing. I think that Tor Books is failing.

Scalzi’s success doesn’t bother me at all. It certainly doesn’t harm me in the slightest. (To be honest, although I very seldom think about it, if there is one person whose success bothers me, it is Jensen Huang’s.)  I certainly wouldn’t want to trade places with the strange little guy. Aside from everything else, I’d want to kill myself if I ever saw that weird flabby body in the mirror. Anyhow, I think Scalzi is much better suited for writing
television scripts than novels, as he’s not a good novelist, but his one-dimensional snark routine should go over very well with the TV-watching Trekkie crowd.

It’s also typical that Scalzi tries to act as if he’s not the one who has repeatedly attacked me, as if he’s not the one who put pressure on SFWA to expel me from the organization. He is always trying to pretend that things are going so wonderfully well for him that he doesn’t care about the fact that I routinely expose his fraudulent efforts to market himself.

Anyhow, the point is that I haven’t repeatedly asserted that he is failing, (except, of course, as a self-respecting man). I have repeatedly asserted that he is lying. And I have backed up those assertions with conclusive evidence.