(no subject)

also, until last night I had no idea that the endnotes of Pygmalion contained a massive and pointless digression about Clara's adventures in HG Wells fandom, making fandom friends and being a stan and stalking HG Wells. Why am I reading Pygmalion? Well. :) I was going to go through plucking out whichever bits were relevant to my interests but that turned out to be pretty well all of it.

i am doing this, bb! I have one half-sentence so far but it feels so good.

i am lounging at home again today, can you tell

from here, via direcritic:

Some of the sloppiest, shoddiest, most biased, least reproducible, worst designed and most overinterpreted research in the history of science purports to provide biological explanations for differences between men and women. Eminent neuroscientists once claimed that head size, spinal ganglia or brain stem structures were responsible for women’s inability to think creatively, vote logically or practice medicine. Today the theories are a bit more sophisticated: men supposedly have more specialized brain hemispheres, women more elaborate emotion circuits. Though there are some differences (minor and uncorrelated with any particular ability) between male and female brains, the main problem with looking for correlations with behavior is that sex differences in cognition are massively exaggerated.

Women are thought to outperform men on tests of empathy. They do—unless test subjects are told that men are particularly good at the test, in which case men perform as well as or better than women. The same pattern holds in reverse for tests of spatial reasoning. Whenever stereotypes are brought to mind, even by something as simple as asking test subjects to check a box next to their gender, sex differences are exaggerated. Women college students told that a test is something women usually do poorly on, do poorly. Women college students told that a test is something college students usually do well on, do well. Across countries—and across time—the more prevalent the belief is that men are better than women in math, the greater the difference in girls’ and boys’ math scores. And that’s not because girls in Iceland have more specialized brain hemispheres than do girls in Italy.

Certain sex differences are enormously important to us when we’re looking for a mate*, but when it comes to most of what our brains do most of the time—perceive the world, direct attention, learn new skills, encode memories, communicate (no, women don’t speak more than men do), judge other people’s emotions (no, men aren’t inept at this)—men and women have almost entirely overlapping and fully Earth-bound abilities.

*i love never existing srsly

incidentally, decadence from yesterday afternoon:

1. Slice strawberries, put them on a bit of foil at the bottom of a cake tin
2. Make a half-mix of this cake and add random giant chocolate chips. Pour this on top of the strawberries.
3. Bake for liek way longer than predicted, about an hour i think
4. Take it out of the tin, foil and all. Remove the annoying pointy bit at the very top of the cake. Eat it immediately.
5. Flip upside-down onto a plate while still hot. Remove foil gently. Scrape foil clean with spoon because baked strawberries are so goddamn tasty.
6. Melt more chocolate chips in a bain-marie and spread them over the layer of strawberries with a knife.
7. Eat with cream WELL OBVIOUSLY

I'd take a picture but it's almost all gone now.