YetAnotherPersonalHomepage

It took six months for vandals to find and deface NEDoD Wiki. Chris B. was right. Restoring from backups won’t solve the lack of user security beyond that provided by Apache, so I’ve moved to new software and recreated the site.

It’s still readable by anyone but if anyone wants to edit, they need to contact me for a username and password.

Read the full text yourself, available at The Crimson. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

I’m certain that his observations regarding the lack of certain religious, ethnic or racial groups in particular jobs, which is to say that there is a preponderance of some other easily identified stereotype in those fields, will cause hoots and howls. Regurgitating stereotypes is an easy target but you need to read far enough into his remarks to find him skewering anti-discrimination practices because of the “quality of marginal hires … when major diversity efforts are mounted” to really get something to whip up a mob but anyone who found that objectionable should be equally irate over his reasoning about girls and boys. He asserts that women are poorly represented in top positions because, in summary:

• high-powered jobs demand sacrifices and commitments women don’t make.
• the availability of aptitude at the high end.
• socialization and discrimination.

He has it neatly wrong. The first and third artifacts of socialization– job demands and discrimination are part of its expression and reinforcement. This continues with much qualification toward:

… there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations as well.

All of which is simply an elaborate and defensible way of saying that girls aren’t good at Math and Science because they are intrinsically not good at them. Whatever the intention, this is regression from the status quo to the justification. That’s rather good rhetoric but awfully bad thinking for the leader of a university.

Upgrades are fairly painless on OpenBSD:

• grab the ports tree using cvs
• check the prerequisites or let them auto build
• make the php4 core
• make the extensions, excluding nearly everything with env FLAVOR="no_x11 ..." make
• uninstall the existing packages
• install the newly built ones
• Restart apache

Whee!

Things just keep getting better. :)

Now here are two books with nothing more in common than the printed word:

• Dark Star by Alan Furst. A great espionage story set in 1937 Europe. Very atmospheric and remarkably realistic but I felt a little cheated by the unlikely tidying up, in near monologue, of the background story by the German spymaster Von Polanyi.
• Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott. A daily journal of her first year as a mother, it is funny, angry, witty, desperate, hopeful and a sometimes painfully intimate account of just how very badly damaged the author is. Still, I loved reading it.