Ignoring MMM's post (which, as always, has some good points, but tends to drawn them in aggressive words and feelings), I'd still say that your feelings don't solve the problem. Maybe you're sorry for the children and also for the pigs, and so am I. But the question is: do you have a better solution? An education program is not going to work, and I don't see any big movement of Farm Sanctuary activists travelling to Nepal with money to both save enslaved girls and create sanctuaries for farm animals.

Solutions are about what can be done now. Olga Murray's solution of replacing children with pigs solved the problem now, at a fairly low cost.

Don't get me wrong. I had a pet pig for a while when I was a child, and I know they are quite intelligent animals (very similar to humans in their internal organs by the way). Yet,

if the choice is between pigs and children -- and can you realistically say it wasn't? -- then I'd still say kill the pig. And I don't see how you could choose otherwise.

Let me add that I meant 'an education program won't work' as a short-term solution that would have allowed those 3,000 girls to be saved now. In the long run, education is always the best solution -- though I'd still like to see what exactly the PETA and Farm Sanctuary people would propose for the Nepali situation. A lot is necessary, from economical resources, a lot of people ready for long-term commitment (it's not solved in a year or two), and a deep awareness and knowledge of the local culture, its possibilities and difficulties.

Most women I know are bad at math, but then again so are most men I know. In my own carreer (which involved a lot of advanced math, way past calculus) I have met many intelligent men and many intelligent women (I remember a great female researcher in the area of group theory -- Lie algebras, to be exact -- who had a deep and wonderful way of finding the important thread of truth inside a complicated theorem and then making it shine so bright even the phisicists, who are always so agnostic with respect to math, found it beautiful...). So I have never doubted that talent for math is really an individual ability that should be nurtured and supported, when it exists, in both men and women. Just like any other special talent, for that matter.

Yet I'd like to mention one thing, with respect to Lawrence Summers and the controversy he evoked. What he said is indeed perfectly compatible with women having talent for math -- in fact, what he said should make one expect to find, like Ms Gorman, godmothers who are economists and wonderfully talented female classmates and tutors who understand math.

What he said was that the variance (measured in standard deviations) of IQ's was higher for men than for women -- while the averages were pretty much the same. Having higher variance means that there are more men at both extremes of the bell curve -- so more men than women with very high IQs, but also more men than women with very low IQs. In principle, one could use it to "argue" that men are both better, or worse, than women are at math, depending on which extreme of the bell curve one takes as "representative". (Note this also means that there are more women than men in the 'normal' range of intelligence, IQs from 90 to 112 -- about 2% more females than males there).

Lawrence Summers, as I recall, suggested that this might be a secondary reason for more men in high-end science and engeneering job (after lifesyle choices, high time commitment demands, etc.; an OK claim), and that this might be intrinsic (speculation -- no evidence yet). I don't find this claim so offensive, even though I'd like to see the second part duly researched.

Note also that the studies on which Mr Summers based his argument talk about IQ (a controversial measure of intelligence in itself), not specifically math ability. (For the register, some of these studies are Hedges & Nowell 1995, Deary et al. 2003, Irwing et al. 2005; they're not hard to google.) So the study that Ms Gorman cites here and the studies that support Mr Summers claim simply measured different quantities -- possibly related, but in a way that is not immediately obvious. Not every person I think of as smart and intelligent is good at math.

To conclude, let me hasten to say I am 100% in favor of allowing women to follow math and science carreers -- please, let there be more of them! But let us also not despise the studies that show differences as 'politically biased'. If well done, they are simply showing facts that we have to take into account, facts that need an explanation (the researchers offered none). My fear here is that mere results of statistical research could be misused to "prove" sexist theorems, or also misunderstood as implying "biases". You see, all these things could be right at the same time -- men could have a slightly higher variance than women in IQ tests (this meaning that they are either more, or less, intelligent than women, or even just as intelligent -- the numbers would support any of these claims, i.e. in the end they prove nothing), and still lots and lots of women could have an enormous talent for math which should be cherished and encouraged.