The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by debcha:

OtterB, #453: I have a week with two Mondays this month (and another one next month).

Xopher, your point is well-taken.

I'm always interested in what the lacunae in our language says about our culture. Older women who go after younger men are cougars - what are younger men who go for older women called? What do you call someone who has a sugar daddy? Why is there no feminine form of 'cuckold'? There are many more examples, I'm sure.

David Harmon, #431: I'm not sure I'd consider "cougar" an insult as such. Cougars are gorgeous, powerful, and charismatic.

I appreciate the sentiment, but I think that you're being disingenuous. Millions of Americans love their female dogs, but 'bitch' is still an insult.

But I do agree that it's primarily, but not unambiguously, pejorative - see the range of Urban Dictionary definitions.

Elliott Mason (#401), quoting Kevin Marks: the interesting thing linguistically about MILF is the intentionality embedded in it. I suspect there's a madonna/whore split in MILF vs Cougar.

I think there is an important question of whose intentionality. My understanding of the 'cougar' vs 'MILF' distinction is this:

If an older woman wants to have sex with a younger man, it's 'cougar', and an insult.

If a younger man wants to have sex with an older woman, it's 'MILF,' and, at least nominally a compliment.

Note that both of these are from the male perspective. In other words: same old, same old.

miriam beetle, #323: yes, in twilight, the nonwhites are half-animals. how very coincidental.

Nice. As if I needed another reason not to read the books.

I was in Forks earlier this year, during a roadtrip on the Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver Island - photos (with commentary) here, here and here.

John Mark Ockerbloom, #100: Thanks! It looks like that site may be more amenable to licensing a digital version. And it really is strikingly similar to the one from Punch, which I rather imagine came first (1988). And Joel (#101), I laughed out loud at your take on it.

Also, thanks for sharing the male programmer privilege checklist and other resources in #102.

xeger, #99: My experience has been that women get pushed into and towards management, and have to actively resist to stay technical. Nothing at all to do with ambition, and everything to do with unspoken assumptions about which gender is better at dealing with which things, and/or more valuable as a technical resource.

In fact, I have data collected by my colleagues of this happening in a first-year engineering project course: men spent more time than women doing things like modeling and prototyping, and women spent more time doing 'administrative' stuff.

They showed the data to the class, and the students were dismayed, to say the least. One woman responded, "I didn't come to [elite engineering school] to make the coffee!"

Xopher, glad you found them!

KeithS, #849: There's a lovely sinking feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you think you've lost things like that.

Last week I was going through security at Frankfurt, on my way back to the US, when I realized that my green card was no longer tucked into my passport (they had made me put both into an x-ray bin).

Now I know what my brain is like at DefCon One.

Fortunately, the checkpoint was small, quiet and friendly (ie not at all what I'm used to), and the security personnel found it in the bin, which had gone back around to the front of the machine.

Andrew, #88: As the programming joke goes, now I have *two* problems. Where is the prejudice, and how do I learn to see it?

There's an anthropology joke/saying that 'Culture is all the stuff you do that you don't think about why you're doing it.'

There are many, many answers to your question, but a good place to start might be with this checklist of male privilege.

Thanks, Xopher!

I just sent them an e-mail explaining who I am and what I do, and asking if it would be a possible to get a digital copy to use to illustrate a research talk (rather than paying seventeen pounds plus shipping for a print). Although given how stringent the site seems, I don't know how amenable they'd be to supporting educational/nonprofit uses.

Ahhhhh!

Yes, that would be the one.

[prostrates herself on floor in front of the master]

Terry: One of the things I noticed was the sense of discounting they gave her. I, a non-engineer; but former machinist, could talk about things in which they were training, and be believed. She could say something, and be discounted; until I chimed in. At which point I'd be agreed with, and have to point out she had said it.

I've seen a cartoon about this. It's a bunch of people around a conference table. Standing at the head of the table, in a suit, is a man saying, "That's an excellent suggestion, Miss [Smith]. Perhaps one of the men here would care to make it?"

All knowledge being contained in Making Light, and certainly people with better Google-fu than me...if anyone else can find info on or a pointer to this cartoon, I'd be deeply grateful. As I mentioned upthread, I do research in engineering education, and I'd love to use this cartoon in my talks.

And also, Terry - thanks for being the guy who stands up when he sees this sort of thing happening.

K.G. Anderson, #7: Yes, that would be one practical effect of women, on average, having lower self-confidence than men.

xeger, #9: Yes, some of it is likely to be culturally-inculcated gender differences. But there is almost certainly a component that derives from the specific (male-dominated) environment.

Oh, look - the paper on gender differences in academic self-confidence among engineering students that we presented a few weeks ago is now online [PDF].

Joel Polowin, #8: Suckitude might not correlate with gender, but you can bet that if you're an underrepresented group and you suck, majority members of that group will be happy to make that correlation. Did we mention this xkcd cartoon?

David Harmon, #811: You're welcome! World Spice Merchants' storefront is in the Pike Place Market here in Seattle. As you may imagine, it's a fantastic place to visit.

Earl Cooley III, #807:

Thanks for the suggestion. I shot her a quick e-mail saying that we were discussing it, mentioned that there was some confusion about the nature of coloured salts, and included a link to salts at the World Spice Merchants. I also pointed out a couple of minor errors in the article. But it's clearly up to her to decide what to include (although I think that if she includes, say, dairy salt, including something that you can buy at Trader Joe's isn't really a stretch).

Terry, #805: Thanks for the pix! I'm pretty sure I've only ever seen them from above.

...aaaaand I totally just realized you already linked to the xkcd cartoon. Apologies.

Randall Munroe, as he frequently does, nailed it.

I do research on the engineering student experience, and I've heard similar things from students (for example, women 'go underground' when they need help, finding resources other than the instructor or their male peers).

The other thing that I want to point out, though, is that female engineering students have lower self-confidence in their technical skills than their male counterparts, even when they have equal ability (and, in aggregate, they usually get higher grades etc.)

Along the lines with your 'permission to suck,' I've often joked that I'm working to make engineering education safe for mediocre women.

Ah, Terry, I take your point. I seem to recall that (inexpensive) Trader Joe's red and black Hawaiian salts are made like that, and I wasn't that big a fan.

I should have been clearer - the About article suggests that all coloured salts are like coloured sugars; that is, artificially tinted with food colouring. At least some colours occur because of natural impurities (like the Himalayan stuff, which is mined).

I'm a fan of the TJ's sea salt in a grinder as my finishing salt (which I may refer to as the final insalt from now on - thanks, Serge!) for foods like edamame - the pieces are nicely irregular (so a high surface-area-to-volume ratio) and a good size. I also like smoked sea salt.

The salt ponds - these are the beautifully-coloured ponds on the wast side of the Bay, yes? I've seen them from a plane many times, but I hadn't realized they were for salt.

David Harmon, #793: That dismissal of coloured salts is flat-out wrong (I note that the author also talked about salt 'melting'). While it's clearly possible to artificially colour salt (like sugar), coloured salts normally result from natural contaminants.

(Alternatively, of course, she might just have omitted to include coloured salts, which seems like an even more serious error.)

Here's the pink Himalayan salt, and you can look under 'salt' in the index to the left to see various other kinds of coloured salts.

I drove from Cambridge, MA to Seattle, WA last year, and will be doing the return drive in two weeks (although I plan to go up to Vancouver and go through Canada, which will add an extra day - those Great Lakes are big!).

When I was a very little kid, my mental model of the world was that all the countries were stacked vertically, separated by clouds. This was actually kind of plausible if you were the child of immigrants in the jet age, since it explained why you had to get on a plane to go between places, as you needed to go up or down.

So last year, I arrive by car in Chicago for the first time - a place I had been many times, always flying in - and it was surreal and surprising. I realized that at some deep level I hadn't really registered that there was, in fact, a ribbon of road that led there, and still thought Chicago was floating on its own cloud.

On salt:

I second Terry's point about some salts being 'finishing salts,' in that their taste experience derives from their geometry, not their composition. In particular, fleur de sel has a lacy, dendritic structure. The high surface-area-to-volume ratio means that it dissolves quickly in the month, which leads to an 'explosion' of saltiness. I knew someone once who cooked with fleur de sel, which I'd describe as conspicuous consumption if it wasn't utterly inconspicuous, indistinguishable as it is from cooking with regular table or sea salt.

And a minor quibble: in cooking, we're talking about salt dissolving in water, not melting. Salt melts at about eight hundred degrees Celsius.

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