Simon sent me this transcript to read and asked for my commentary. It's not by him, please be advised. He just wanted to know what I thought

Is There Anything Good About Men? by Roy F. Baumeister.

Just to give you a clue of what's in store for you should you decided to fight your way through the entire address:

That's an important first clue to how culture uses men. Culture has plenty of tradeoffs, in which it needs people to do dangerous or risky things, and so it offers big rewards to motivate people to take those risks. Most cultures have tended to use men for these high-risk, high-payoff slots much more than women. I shall propose there are important pragmatic reasons for this. The result is that some men reap big rewards while others have their lives ruined or even cut short. Most cultures shield their women from the risk and therefore also don't give them the big rewards. I'm not saying this is what cultures ought to do, morally, but cultures aren't moral beings. They do what they do for pragmatic reasons driven by competition against other systems and other groups.

So this is a treat;

Usability specialist, tech writer and "female", Kathy Sierra had to withdraw from being a workshop chair at ETech when people started trolling her blog, uttering death threats and in fact started a whole new set of "meanblogs" just dedicated to posting hateful, humiliating or offensive material about notable people in the blogosphere.

Kathy was one of their targets and subject not just to rude material, but shockingly vulgar and violent material. What surprises me is the sophomoric hatred leveled at this woman, who is clearly only threatening to people because she is intelligent, successful and powerful.

Okay.. it's time for a feminist rant.

Hugh who is dear to my heart in more ways than I can name and who got me the job I love has just done something that generally makes me see all shades of red.

What did poor Hugh (who has no idea I am taking the piss out of him as we speak) do?

He made a list of cool Montrealers doing stuff and 90% of the list-makers are dudes.

It seems so obvious, it oughtn't be a problem, but then if I truck on over to Julien's post about cool tech stuff happening in Mtl, I get the same feeling, 41 comments and not counting AJ (boy, girl you tell me?) there is but 1, not counting mine, from a lady.

Do chicks n'existe pas in the tech scene? I know some of our number (Maya MK, Sophie) did leave this fair isle for other islands where people eat sheep guts and ride tubes. But still...

I should really check my stats more often.