Our corporate news media is very good at keeping inconvenient facts away from the public eye. A six minute video, by definition, cannot provide many startling revelations, but rather a starting point to become informed and hopefully take action.
Étude Op. 25, No. 11 is a study for developing stamina, dexterity, and technique – essential skills for any concert pianist. It begins with a piano introduction of the main melody. The first theme follows, consisting of tumultuous cascades of semiquaver-tuplets (sixteenth-note-tuplets) and a leaping figure for the left hand in the relative major, C major, which shortly segues into a repetition of the first theme. It finishes with a short development into a fortissimo coda, and ends with one final statement of the theme.
Clearing up some of the confusion about socialization and being ‘born that way’, Ruth Hubbard in this excerpt tackles the nature/nurture question head on. Read the whole article here.
“We can visualize this kind of interaction or transformation by thinking about the interplay between biological and cultural factors that affects the ways boys and girls grow up in our society. If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences.
We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them for all traits except those directly involved with procreation. Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like “Men are stronger than women.” We should be asking: “Which men?“ and “What do they do?” There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”
Star Trek writers have fun with the technology in their universe. CGP gray takes a look at some of the issues that transporters bring to the table.
Physics? On a Monday? Eeek!
This speech, by Sojourner Truth, was delivered at the Akron convention was not officially recorded; it survives because it was written down by Frances Gage –
“A’int I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?
Then they talk about this thing in the head’; what’s this they call it? [Intellect, someone whispers.] That’s it honey. What’s that got to do with women’s rights or negro’s rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and your holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?
Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from?? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them!”
Sojourner Truth saw how religion and patriarchy fit together, one reinforcing the other. Her reference to the ‘man in black’ demonstrates her keen intellect as she was aware of the part played by organized religion in maintaining the oppressive state of affairs – she addressed the problem of religious interpretation directly in this quote focusing on the power of the female role in the biblical story.
Funny how big an issue translating the bible into common languages has been throughout history, almost like those who did the interpreting had something to lose (or something to hide) in the process. But that is the cynic speaking, I’m sure that the religious authorities had nothing to gain by keeping the masses ignorant and dependent on their self-serving interpretation of the bible…
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