Thursday, November 15, 2012

Usual Thursday....

First the parrots...They are plotting to take over the world!

What can happen to women denied abortions.

Scary muslim pictures.

Mass shooting for the last 30 years... brought to you by the NRA, the gun companies, and a cowardly Congress.

High Fructose Corn Syrup... apparently not even related to corn anymore:
While “trans-fat free” and “no MSG” are widely misused in the food world, nothing seems to come close to the ultra popular “natural.” With no definitive guidance from the FDA as to the meaning of the term, food manufactures slap it on products with abandon. Author and blogger Bruce Bradley, a 15-year veteran of the food product marketing world, says, “There is no FDA definition of ‘Natural,’ and in that vacuum, processed food companies have filled the void with their own, self-serving interpretations.” As an example, Bradley cites high fructose corn syrup, which he describes as “anything but natural…the result of an extraordinarily intensive process involving a series of enzymatic and chemical reactions. In fact, as one pro-HFCS group states, ‘the corn undergoes so much processing, and the products of the processes are so removed from corn that there is no detectable corn DNA present in HFCS.’” As the litigation lingers on, it will hopefully have the side effect of informing all those still clueless shoppers out there that what they see advertised about a food may bear little or no relationship to what they actually get – and in that way, can and will “benefit the public” after all.
Belly buttons.

Doggies and video game dragons.

Teaching girls to become engineers.

5 comments:

Steve Bates said...

When I studied electrical engineering at Rice, 1966-1971, there was exactly one engineering prof who was openly prejudiced against women students. He was inevitably confronted with the fact that women engineering majors were superb students... you know how it is (or was), a woman had to be twice as good just to counterbalance the prejudice... and by the time I graduated with an M.Eng in electrical engineering, I crossed the stage in a line with several women, most of whom took honors (yes, so did I [/brag]), among at most a few dozen graduates with an M.Eng in EE.

Those women had to face the prejudices of the job market, and... worst of all, and there are vestiges of it today... the pay differential between genders. If I were a woman, I'd be hopping mad about that; I'm mad enough even as it is.

Perhaps your daughters... one can always hope...

ellroon said...

Yes, I pray my daughter will have more of a level playing field. Otherwise what use were all those Lego purchases I made in her childhood for?

(And wow to you surviving electrical engineering!)

Steve Bates said...

"(And wow to you surviving electrical engineering!)"

Some of it was hard. But the main reason I pursued EE is that this was so long ago that Rice did not yet have a Computer Science department. Would-be computer science majors enrolled in either electrical engineering or mathematical sciences (= applied math). My background suited me more for EE than Math.Sci.

Don't worry about all those Legos. Occasionally, engineering is about building something, but frequently enough it's not, or only distantly related. Stella's brother has some sort of eng'g degree from TAMU (every bit as respected in eng'g circles as Rice), and our personal knowledge bases hardly overlap at all. Not to mention our politics... :-D

ellroon said...

I think it's assumed that how your child play with Legos (and other building items) that wires their brain to think in problem solving ways... leading to science and engineering and the Nobel Prize...

And if not, then you have terrible parenting techniques, didn't buy enough Legos nor play Mozart to your baby in utero and your child will end up in the gutter drinking Windex....

As to your degree, my step son followed a very similar path to get to the computer job he has now.

Steve Bates said...

I've heard that at least the in utero Mozart has been debunked. :-)

Playing with Legos, Tinker Toys etc. is bound to be good for developing the brain's ability to visualize in 3D, an absolutely essential skill for every kind of engineer (yes, even electrical).

(Did you know the brain's "3D" imaging really is a mathematically bizarre kind of hologram, i.e., actually on a 2D surface? How in the world did THAT evolve!)