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The reality is unfairly that testosterone does give males a huge athletic advantage when it kicks in. Similarly, most professional level sports are extremely dependent on athletic ability. Speed is included in that. There is a reason that the male world records for every sprint are faster than those for females. That reason is genetics and it doesn't care about political correctness or being fair.

In HS our senior girls basketball team had much better game sense, court awareness and overall basketball IQ, than the boys junior team. Those of us on the senior guys team were getting tired of the lack of respect the junior guys were showing for the senior girls and so we arranged a game between them. Knowing how much smarter and aware the girls were on the court we figured it'd be very humbling for the young guys to get beat. We were unpleasantly surprised to watch the younger guys simply running circles around the girls from one end of the floor to the other. They were just plain faster, a lot faster, and all the smarts in the world just didn't make up that difference.

It may not be fair, but that's the way it is. If smarts could make the difference, Michael Jordon would still be getting better every year, but realistically as age cuts into his athleticism smarts just aren't enough anymore and the torch is passed on to those in their prime.


>> ^Sepacore:

>> ^Stu:
>> ^Sepacore:
There is no reason a female couldn't achieve the same at teen or pro level. Speed and balance (and timing) is all it takes to be highly competitive.

There's a huge reason. If a female were to play in college or some how make it to the professional level. She may have tons of skill and balance like you say, she might even be the next Barry Sanders, but even he got hit. you put a 140 pound-150 pound girl in at running back, she will get injuries that would end the career as soon as it starts. Quickness is a lot, but men's natural ability to have that extra muscle and padding is why they keep men and women in different leagues.

If we were focusing entirely on brute-force forms of football, I agree. Except I wasn't, I was thinking more in the direction of how she could continue to utilize her honed skills.
I'm not disputing that males have a significant muscle advantage for handing out and taking impacts, but nor was I forgetting there are multiple versions of football, given that I loosely referenced such as a precursor to my point. My statement was an alternative to the 'testosterone wins everything' view.
To clarify, I specifically had Touch Football in mind when stating there would be no reason females couldn't effectively play with men post-puberty.

They make this high-pitched squeal/screech when they attack, too. When I was in HS, living at my dad's house, I had a basketball hoop in the driveway. I was out playing one day and the ball rolled into the yard by the humming bird feeder. As I bent over to pick up the ball, I heard EEEEEEEE!, along with that harsh buzzing noise their wings make, shoot over my head.

As I stood up and looked around, I spotted the little guy hovering about 8' up. He made the screech again and darted back and forth. I got the ball and got the hell out of there. I'm sure he couldn't seriously injure me, short of taking an eye out, but who wants to be poked full of little holes?

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Ryan looks like Eddie Muster.

Eddie Muster images

@bmacs27 Mostly the costs, TEGs aren't cheap, so I would wager the low end on the cost scale is about 50 bucks or so for the stove version give or take about 20 bucks. And indeed you are right, improving the state of being for billions is what the cry of energy is about. Costs are important as it dictates how many people we can help via our limited abilities. If we wanted to help ALL of them RIGHT NOW, it would cost 100 billion or so, which isn't a huge sum. But it is only access to 2 Watt/hours. This is very back of the envelope, so there are many other factors, but lets say we used that money instead to buy power plants. Let's even get something fancy, some high tech CCGT plants. They cost about .6 bucks per Watt hour. For 2 billion people consuming 2W/hs of electricity, that is about 4 gigiwatts/H which on our stoves cost us about 100 billion. Now a .5GW CCGT plan will run you about .3 billion per unit, but you only need 2.4 billion in funds to supply that level of electricity. If you spent the same kind of cash on CCGT plants, you would go from 4GW/H to 166GW/H. Basically, you can help 2 orders of magnitude more people if you invested in other technology, or help that same amount that much more. Now, that isn't completely accurate, power infrastructure costs money, but it is money well spent, even if you burn up an entire order of magnitude. It wouldn't hurt if a few thousand people had one of these, but if you wanted to help 2 billion, it would be a huge mistake. The only reason I keep harping on this is because they marketed themselves so heavily as some wide solution for the third world. A good third world solution doesn't always look like a first world solution, so I am not suggesting there is no merit here, but it would help very few people and to a relatively low level compared to other options. Perhaps small progress, though, is a good way to go about it, I can't say. I would guess they would be better off dropping off some steam system that burns wood and let them power their entire houses instead of a cellphone. There is an older paper about using rice husks in developing world in steam engines to generate electricity, and husks have a bit less energy density than wood fiber. They seemed to think it was pretty viable. There are some technical challenges, but I think those are easier to overcome than spending 100billion for 2W/Hs for 2 billion people. But I digress.

As an introvert also, one way that I've tried to explain it to some of my friends and acquaintances who are extroverts is to say that I'd draw a distinction between anti-social and asocial. Certainly some introverts can be anti-social -- they generally dislike social situations, usually because they feel uncomfortable in them.

In contrast, I'd say that my definition of asocial is someone who is essentially neutral on social situations; they feel no compulsion to go seek out social interaction, but they aren't necessarily opposed to it when it does happen.

I have been asocial as long as I can remember. I was always perfectly happy doing my own thing by myself when I was a kid. Only child, living in the country, no neighbors in walking distance. In grade school, I had lots of friends and was fairly "popular", but I didn't feel any specific need to hang out with other kids all the time; I'd still run off and do my own thing. Around grade 7-8, I was still the same me, but I started to notice that the things I was and had been interested in weren't popular or acceptable anymore.

That didn't initially bother me, until the cliques and pressure cooker that is High School kicked in. The standard High School struggles pushed me way further into the realms of being anti-social. I basically decided that 95% of people were scum, and that figuring out who the 5% of people who weren't scum wasn't worth the effort.

I think that a chunk of that gets better in the senior year of High School, and then the difference between HS and going to college is night and day. I could have been comfortable returning to socializing right away in college, but I was still pretty shell-shocked. I still had a pretty grim outlook on humanity, which is a shame because I now realize that I should/could have been quicker to adjust my attitude.

By now, I'm still fully asocial in that I feel essentially no need to seek out social interaction, but I do enjoy meeting and getting to know new people and find that there are very few people that I dislike -- almost the exact opposite of my old 95%/5% evaluation. I'll never be the type that wants to go out and hob-nob with friends or random people every day, but I certainly wouldn't describe myself as anti-social anymore.

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This week I taught my first classes with a new set of Thai HS Seniors (the semesters start at a different time here). I always start out by getting a roster with the students' full names in Thai and having them write their nicknames in English, then taking roll call to make sure I am pronouncing the names correctly. There is no set way to write Thai sounds in English, so there is a lot of variation in how to spell things.

Anyway, one boy on the list wrote his nickname as "Kok". I correctly assumed that he wanted that to be pronounced "Coke", but then explained to him that if he goes with the other spelling an average westerner will probably call him "cock" which is rather unfortunate...

In 5 years of being here I've seen a lot of semi-unusual or unfortunate names and nicknames.

Odd: Dollar, Bible, Bird (hordes of those), Blue, Oil, Dump, Bomb, Gun, Nuke, etc.
Unfortunate: Fook, Fluck ("fluke"), Gook ("guck"), Poo, Poopae, Dodo, Porn (loads of this one also), Titee (girls name)

The worst and/or funniest one I've seen was a girl who converted her full Thai name into an English spelling of "Titteeporn Suksonmanee". Considering Thailand's ... reputation, that one is particularly unfortunate, although the actual pronunciation of the surname is more like suke-sawn-MA-knee.

On the flipside many western names translate phonetically into rather unfortunate things in Thai, or are commonly mispronounced into something bad in English. For example, Jim means "pussy" in Thai, Chris will usually be pronounced by Thais as "Clit", etc. etc.

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>> ^bareboards2:

Bible. Bullshit. Same paragraph.
Snit fricking fracking fit.
He used profanity. He didn't phrase his argument in a way in which you wanted him to phrase it.
So what? The guy cusses. He used shorthand to make his point. I understood him perfectly.
You want context? Read anything he has ever written. Watch more than two minutes of any video. The guy has a potty mouth.
And?
The question becomes why can't you hear the LOGIC of his statements? Well, no question really. This is why I have chosen not to engage in any protracted argument about this. YOU AREN'T LISTENING TO HIM. There is no point in arguing when you never heard him to start with.
You heard Bullshit blah blah Bible. Ginger Ginger Ginger, my man.
If you don't know what I mean by that, read my little anecdote above about Gary Larson.
I will grant you that there are some people who can rightly claim that he attacked their faith.
They are the persons out there who stone women for not being virgins on their wedding nights, who don't mix fibers, who refuse to eat shellfish or pork.
They exist.
Super Orthodox Hassidic Jews. Extremely conservative Muslims. A tiny tiny subset of Christians.
But I guarantee you, no Christians in that room. Any Christian who follows EVERY SINGLE WORD of the Bible does not send their children to school. They lock them up and home-school them.
Anyone else who claims that Dan Savage is attacking the Christian faith of anyone in that room is as incapable of reasoning thought as Ginger Ginger Ginger.
Damn. And here I am arguing anyway. Damn it.
@dirkdeagler7. Now I am REALLY done.


TLDR: I actually agree with his overall sentiment so you are OUTRIGHT wrong in saying I did not listen to him, you in fact do not listen to other people it seems.

Now you really do sound like the people you are criticizing. You say I dont listen yet you ignored the fact that i said, in so many words, that I agree with his overall message in this segment (as I said I'm not against the gay lifestyle, rights, or marriage. I also said sexual preference is no one elses business which means I disagree with bullying or ostracizing homosexuals). I never criticized the LOGIC in his statements merely the manner in which he gave them and the context (this goes beyond his lecture topic and includes the fact that these are HS students at a lecture about bullying).

Not only did you not listen and create an argument that is apparently at someone else other than me (i actually had to double take to make sure this was directed at me...full honesty), but you go on to drop these gems:

"But I guarantee you, no Christians in that room. Any Christian who follows EVERY SINGLE WORD of the Bible does not send their children to school. They lock them up and home-school them."

"Anyone else who claims that Dan Savage is attacking the Christian faith of anyone in that room is as incapable of reasoning thought as Ginger Ginger Ginger."

At this point Im actually feeling badly for picking on you and stupid for arguing with you. It's apparent that your argument and stance are not processing anything anyone has said in this comment thread...it shouldn't be a surprise now that I realize you posted the vid to begin with.

So here you are: disregarding fact (the apologies by him and the organizers), dismissing and attacking any opinion that is counter to your own, twisting and misinterpreting (or just not listening) to what I'm saying and then disagreeing with me and using laughable attempts to belittle me and my thought process, and using wide based and unfounded arguments/beliefs (ie my quotes above) to prove your point

You sound just like the people you seem to hate on, just on the other side of the coin and you sit on your high horse unable to see this very basic possibility...that you might be wrong in this matter.

Was this a convention or lecture about the validity of religion or Christianity? Was it a lecture about how religion has impeded the gay rights movement? The title indicates it's a JOURNALISM convention which means that anyone launching into an anti-religious agenda is already in a questionable position. Bully or Hero or Awesome are merely labels people will apply based on their personal beliefs on the topic of religion/homosexuality.

Please note that he does not restrict his criticism of religion to homosexuality, so even making an argument that it is relevant because of his personal life or the topic of religion/sexuality/journalism isn't completely kosher. It is very apparent that he is not criticizing the stance on homosexuality by Christians but their faith out right.

In a convention full of HS students, he calls a book and religion bullshit, would you all have said it wasn't bullying if he said that Islam and Muslims were bullshit? What about anything else people strongly believe believe which are social/cultural choices? What if he was saying that people who think women should not be beaten are bullshit and some battered women walked out...is that bullying?

In my eyes he abused his moment to speak about topics that all attendees volunteered for to push a personal agenda and he did it in a confrontational and heavy handed manner. Students who did not come to get a bible lesson from someone in a journalism convention walked out, shame on them right? Regardless of whether you agree with him or not, you just sound ignorant if you say that what he said is completely understandable/respectable given the audience and context.