The sexual dimorphism of the human species means that there are numerous “hacks” of our bodies created when the various signals regarding sex happen during development. Women’s wider pelvises, the way that their hormone system works, all of that is different from the sort of thing that a male goes through during development and growth. Men are optimized for things like hunting and ranging farther afield, and it’s so subtle that there are even sexual differences you can identify in how the two sexes navigate. Men are more “time, distance, direction” oriented, in general, and women are more “landmark and feel”.
So, that there are differences in injury rates for the same sports, most of which started out as male games in the first place…? Yeah, not surprising: Women are trying to operate on a playing field they are simply not adapted to.
If one were honest, you’d see the same thing in the military whenever some gender-weird decides to integrate women into combat arms elements. Women are simply physically unsuited for the way in which our armies fight in direct combat infantry roles, and their prevalence in guerrilla roles and other things fools the general public into thinking that it’s merely male recalcitrance that doesn’t want them on the front lines. Reality is that it’s these little things like greater propensity towards knee injuries and a far less robust frame that militates towards keeping them out of front-line direct combat.
Mentality? I’m not so sure on that one, but I’d be open to persuasion in either direction, were someone to actually do the research. It’s my opinion that the monthly hormone swing leaves a lot of the female population essentially irrational during the swings, and I’m suspicious of the general ability of the broad class of women to cope with direct combat and/or remain in control of themselves. People joke all the time about PMS and combat, but I’m not gonna do that–What are you going to do when your commander loses her bearings in the middle of things, and calls in fire on militarily unjustifiable targets?
Friend of mine related a situation with a female mid-rank leader in an adjacent unit in Afghanistan, who basically razed a village after one of her troops got hit by fire nearby. He wasn’t sure that the choices she was making in that situation were necessarily rational, or that she was on an even keel, emotionally. From having worked with her for some time, his opinion was that had that soldier been wounded on any other day of her cycle, then that village might not have gotten the treatment it did. Which was, in his judgment, more than slightly excessive…
That, from a guy whose attitude towards Afghans and Muslims in general is basically “…can’t kill enough of them to make me happy…” really makes me wonder what the hell happened that he thought it was over-the-top and not really justified…
Isegoria: I’m getting strong Terminator-future vibes from drones hunting survivors in the rubble.
Bruce: At Monte Cassino, we bombed the stone building to rubble, and the Germans put machine gun nests in the randomly scattered rubble. Pricy getting them out. I expect drones to routinely arrive just after a bomb strike and nest in the rubble. Maybe in Ukraine they already are. Next, they look at the field manuals on fortifications and start sneaking construction drones into inconvenient places. Maybe in Ukraine they already are.
Jim: That is an astute observation, Phileas. Indeed, to abuse Bill Gates, “People overestimate how much decline can occur in one year, and underestimate how much decline can occur in ten.”
Phileas Frogg: When degradation happens universally, at a roughly uniform rate, it’s much harder to detect, and much more likely to be accepted as, “normal,” than genuinely isolated incidents. Isolated asymmetric catastrophes are more jarring for the public and more like to cause a response than universal and uniform ones. “Family of 3 is carjacked and killed,” in a small town is more likely to elicit a response than, “Over the course of 10 years, your small...
Phileas Frogg: The fact that they both arrived at a general method is interesting, and naturally begs the age old philosophical question: “Is reality a mathematical structure? Or, is reality necessarily instantiated with mathematical properties? Or, is reality simply able to be modeled via mathematics?” I lean towards the 2nd, but I can’t wholly dismiss the 1st and 3rd, though this tidbit does seem to argue against the 3rd indirectly.
Phileas Frogg: Unless and until they release an actual sticker price, it’s only prudent to reserve judgement given the inflationary predilections of our bureaucracy.
Jim: Don’t worry, guys, not only would they not have participated, if Our Greatest Ally had somehow received advance notice, they would have helped to stop it.
Bob Sykes: Next thing you know, people will be claiming Mossad did 9/11.
Wanweilin: In the exact place it was upgraded… hmmm.
Jim: How fortunate that they hardened the structure in preparation of a bomb.
Bruce: The March 1971 Air Force Magazine claims a Soviet FOBS passed over the tip of South America and returned to Soviet territory near the Caspian. Got this from ChatGTP, which says the Soviet FOBS were normally passing over southern South America but did not reenter. It would take looking through all South American media reports of strange lights in the sky and comparing them to all Soviet launches of the period to have a better idea of what was happening. Pournelle had good contacts in aerospace...
Bob Sykes: In modern American textbooks, Newton’s notation for derivatives (f’) has displaced Leibniz’ (df/dx). A step backwards, in my opinion. As much as I found the calculus interesting and useful (I am an engineer.), complex numbers and the vast simplifications that follow from them were an astonishment.
Felix: “The average gun owner owns about 5.2 firearms…” That looks like a number that should represented by the median, not the mean. Ah, from the PDF, page 27, the median is 3. Graphs on page 29, figure 12.
McChuck: And at least half of all actual gun owners reported, “None of your business!”
Bob Sykes: China offers other countries real and substantial economic benefits. The US offers colonial subjugation, military intimidation, and exploitation and poverty.
Jim: This terrifying uptick from years prior resulted in the FAA and NTSB convening safety summits in March and May, respectively. Whether they dared to discuss root causes seems unlikely. Take it from me: the “aviation safety” “people” would rather disown their family than restore flight to the exclusive province of high-IQ young and youngish white men. That is not hyperbole—read it literally.
Bob Sykes: I see that I, myself, have provided a funny proof. Oh for an editing function. [Fortunately we have a Natural General Intelligence editor.]
Bob Sykes: It is claimed that 20% of American adults are illiterate, and that perhaps as many as 40% of Gen Alpha are illiterate. Elite colleges like Harvard and Berkeley are finding out that some of their freshman are illiterate and innumerate. We have entered a new Dark Age of illiteracy and superstition. Slavery and tyranny will soon follow.
Jim: Attention isn’t all you need. There is something else waiting to be discovered. And there is probably something genuinely irreducible about organic existence that will require the superintelligent silicon layer to be grafted on top of a carbon-and-water foundation. Plus, organic beings have a temporal gravity that cannot be simulated. Large language models are created by a Darwinian process that is a pale shadow of billions of years of the real one.
Isegoria: Longevity definitely has a genetic component: Three decades ago a famous study of Danish twins found that our genes “only moderately” influence how long we’re likely to live. Longevity, the authors estimated, was about 25 percent heritable, meaning the remaining three quarters was determined by environmental factors and lifestyle choices, such as diet and exercise. Most subsequent studies found heritability to be somewhere in the 20 to 25 percent range, and 25 percent is now widely accepted....
Women are at higher risk of knee injury in sports because of the way they cut and plant. Seems this is especially endemic in women’s soccer.
The sexual dimorphism of the human species means that there are numerous “hacks” of our bodies created when the various signals regarding sex happen during development. Women’s wider pelvises, the way that their hormone system works, all of that is different from the sort of thing that a male goes through during development and growth. Men are optimized for things like hunting and ranging farther afield, and it’s so subtle that there are even sexual differences you can identify in how the two sexes navigate. Men are more “time, distance, direction” oriented, in general, and women are more “landmark and feel”.
So, that there are differences in injury rates for the same sports, most of which started out as male games in the first place…? Yeah, not surprising: Women are trying to operate on a playing field they are simply not adapted to.
If one were honest, you’d see the same thing in the military whenever some gender-weird decides to integrate women into combat arms elements. Women are simply physically unsuited for the way in which our armies fight in direct combat infantry roles, and their prevalence in guerrilla roles and other things fools the general public into thinking that it’s merely male recalcitrance that doesn’t want them on the front lines. Reality is that it’s these little things like greater propensity towards knee injuries and a far less robust frame that militates towards keeping them out of front-line direct combat.
Mentality? I’m not so sure on that one, but I’d be open to persuasion in either direction, were someone to actually do the research. It’s my opinion that the monthly hormone swing leaves a lot of the female population essentially irrational during the swings, and I’m suspicious of the general ability of the broad class of women to cope with direct combat and/or remain in control of themselves. People joke all the time about PMS and combat, but I’m not gonna do that–What are you going to do when your commander loses her bearings in the middle of things, and calls in fire on militarily unjustifiable targets?
Friend of mine related a situation with a female mid-rank leader in an adjacent unit in Afghanistan, who basically razed a village after one of her troops got hit by fire nearby. He wasn’t sure that the choices she was making in that situation were necessarily rational, or that she was on an even keel, emotionally. From having worked with her for some time, his opinion was that had that soldier been wounded on any other day of her cycle, then that village might not have gotten the treatment it did. Which was, in his judgment, more than slightly excessive…
That, from a guy whose attitude towards Afghans and Muslims in general is basically “…can’t kill enough of them to make me happy…” really makes me wonder what the hell happened that he thought it was over-the-top and not really justified…