Lonelyguy15million. (via 2Blowhards) Never trust a picture on the internet. If people kept in mind this The New Yorker cartoon, guys wouldn't have to worry about falling for beautiful girls who turn out to be dweebs blogging in their underwear. As for Sailer's hypothetical take on what goes on in an Asian girl's mind--heh. I don't know what other Asian girls think about this, but all that internal dialogue gives me a headache. Besides, I don't feel it's very honest to fake being interested. (As for whether or not I would fake an interest in physics, see the paragraph below.)
Getting along vs. fixing the problem. Janet Stemwedel has a good deconstruction of the discussion involving the physics "pipeline problem" I mentioned in a previous post. One of the commenters asked: "Has anyone actually talked to women who were considering physics but ended up choosing a different discipline instead?" I had once considered double majoring in physics and biology. In my first semester as an undergrad, I even chose to take a physics elective rather than the biology one. All I can say is, I realized at the end of the term that I was a lot more fired up about biology than physics--i.e. my degree of interest--which had nothing to do with class difficulty or skewed ratios. Or even the professors--I've met some really nice physics professors and some really temperamental biology profs as an undergrad. As for math--three words: creepy teaching assistants.
Addendum: Now that I'm on the subject of teaching assistants, that brings up one particular incident involving a class on quantum chemistry. A couple of other female students and I went to the TAs (who were all male) for help but all they told us was to "figure it out yourself." So we ended up camping outside the prof's office door until the next morning in protest. Needless to say, those TAs were chewed out for being unhelpful.
