No one has thrown feces at my house, but when the weekly news email from my place of work came along one easter with the "quote of the week" attributed as "referring to Jesus Christ overcoming sin and death when he rose from the dead on Easter Sunday after being crucified on Good Friday" I raised bloody hell. Fine to quote the bible or any other literary source, fine to reference the holidays that were not going to be at work during, but not fine for an organ of the institution to claim anyone rose.

The military is only a reflection of our society (fortunately --- we live in a country where it's not a different caste). We all need to defend our liberty.

Damn, I've read this book more than twice & I hadn't noticed the Shaw character / father parallel until Salon highlighted it here...

I actually am a scientist and I don't have a problem with the basic survey methodology. But note asking whether a woman RUNNING FOR office is a problem and asking whether a woman HOLDING an office is a problem are two different things. Women have already run for office, thanks.

I agree with the Hilary effect comment too, but it obviously applies to both questions and doesn't in itself explain the discrepancy.

First, science journals are not old and stodgy. The two biggest in the field, Nature & Science, are actually more like magazines than journals & will turn down research not because it isn't important, but because it isn't sexy enough or they published too many articles on that topic lately. If you find them difficult to get through, you probably just haven't spent enough time picking up current vocabulary and concepts.

There are of course stodgy journals -- and also ones so radical they are full of crap & die within a few years. There are also many excellent journals well worth reading.

Second, lots of journals make money, and some publishers (notably Elsevier) make a fortune by buying up the "must have" journals for a field then cranking up the subscription rates. The American Psychological Association produces the Journals of Experimental Psychology & uses the proceeds to support themselves --- and they cost very little to subscribe to. So I can't believe it costs Elsevier $1000 a year per subscriber to publish its leading journals.

I think it's fine for journals to charge reasonable rates to pay their publishers & maintain their service. It is useful to have a centralized organization for peer review (though notice the reviewers and most of the editors are not paid!!) and a regular index of good articles. But I also think scientists have to be allowed to publish their articles in electronic form on preprint archives, on their web pages, etc. Nearly all science is paid for with public money, and deservingly so, since open access to knowledge helps boost our economy.

I bought Annie's because it was in the `right' super market, but I could never actually like it (unlike "home made" mac & cheese with velveta(TM) or Kraft's) & I finally actually read the box one day and thought "is this all some huge scam to rip off hippies or what?" There's no reason this costs more than Kraft's except for the recycled cardboard.

I've seen studies that show that people in Virtual Worlds tend to be way more aggressive and rude than the same people interacting in real worlds. It may be that because we evolved to communicate face-to-face, when we are in a situation without facial expression and tone of voice, we lose our ability to monitor ourselves, to normalize our behaviour.

Actually, the researcher I saw talk about this had hoped VR would help young adults become less inhibited & more self-fulfilled. But she came reluctantly to realize that the socially-inhibited self is actually a real self, as I said, the evolved self, and the uninhibited loner is not the psychological norm.

I bring this up not so much to explain letter writers, but to try to get at why writers will necessarily be affected by having that quicker feedback. In developing their craft, they learn to work with delayed & minimal people, and the reason we bother to read them is that they *are* exceptional, different from a conversation you would have at the bus stop. And that *will* change as they start to "see the faces" of all those people at the bus stop. It isn't because writers are wimps afraid to meet real opinions; it's because they are humans --- animals, evolved to behave this way. It will take a while to create a new concept of writer, and it will be different.