[Edu-sig] Microsoft's KPL

[Kirby Urner]

> This is part of the chemistry story.  it attracts women who say the only
> important reason for them to become chemists is that 'there were a lot
> of women in it'.  Which is rather hard on those of us who would like to
> spread the succcess elsewhere.  It means that if we could get even
> moderately successful, we could probably snowball, but the first
> step seems as hard as ever.
> 
> Laura

Hey Laura, I enjoy your bold pen stroke sketches of a female psyche and find
the descriptions quite compelling, even in the presence of so many
exceptions, i.e. women who don't fit that mold.  That's not the point of
stereotypes, and stereotypes have a way of being useful even as they quickly
get obsolete (we diss them so strongly because they do, in fact, become
highly misleading, as a culture evolves away from them).

The movie and music club cultures that knit young people around memepools,
have ways of changing the mix pretty significantly over fairly long periods
of time.  TV audiences of the 1960s would have been shocked at the antics on
The Simpsons, but by now these characters treasured members of our human
family.  Generations fly by, and the dance between the sexes changes in the
flow.

Some futurists paint this ship-style ethic with males and females in unisex
uniforms, the hierarchy just as obviously unisex, and blind to other such
superficial differences (skin color, eye shape etc.).  That brand of
futurism reflects a present that's now past.  Been there done that.  Now
we're more likely to see ourselves surviving in a remote, reality-TV
wilderness, more like Indiana Jones than Star Trek, or more like Jacques
Cousteau, with lots of high tech (aqua lungs and so forth).  No, not
neo-colonial. More like the aliens have landed (i.e. a next generation has
come to mommy, aka to our shared Spaceship Earth).

Happy landings kids.

Kirby