Halfway through, however, someone says "jobs".

It immediately cuts to over-the-top offices and handsome employees relaxing on chaise longues in the sun, and it sucks. This turns the discussion from "programming is an amazing, accessible thing everyone should want to do" to "programming is a trade like being a mechanic," important only "in the right context, for some people". These comments come from the people who seem as though they would support this type of education.

Taking the idea that you should know how to make a computer do your will, then framing it as something intended merely for a job, does a massive disservice to the discipline. It bogs down the conversation with ideas of what, specifically, is worth teaching, or the products that students will make, instead of the concepts and fundamentals that can be applied anywhere in life. Listen instead to Gabe Newell at the very end: Even the most basic understanding of programming makes you a wizard. It is the most direct conduit between knowledge and power.

Understanding computers and programming enables you to talk to people around the world, conjure fantastic images from nothingness with a few well-placed keystrokes. You can pull just the things you're most interested in from an endless torrent of wonderful new things people create constantly or scry deep into the past. You can make your own art or stories or tools faster and easier than you could before, and share them with everyone you know and millions you don't and change all their lives as well as your own. You can do things no one has ever done before on a daily basis. Why everyone isn't clamoring to access all this I'll never know.

So don't learn about coding or software because it'll get you a nice job in an office full of toys and free food, or because you have some vague notion of wanting to play with robots. You can do those things, too. But understanding how to make computers do what you want is far more than that. It's the freedom to turn what you know into anything you want.

But I didn't own a single comic book until I was 19.

In fact, I'm not sure my parents or friends even knew I liked comic books. All my reading, for nine years, was done in secret. I'd slip into the comic book aisle at the bookstore when nobody was around to see, grab an anthology off the shelf, and spend the next two hours nestled in a corner somewhere — with the comics safely hidden behind a magazine or large book. I did the same thing at the public library. Never even checked one out. If I couldn't finish a library comic anthology in one afternoon, I'd hide it in a seldom-used section and come back the next day. (My apologies to the librarians of the world for that.)

Partly, that shame and fear came was about being labeled a nerd, in general. But there was, for me, also a pretty heavy gender component. Tall, clumsy, nerdy, ignorant of fashion or makeup, and definitely not "attractive" in the way that sheltered pre-teen and teenage society defines it, I spent a good chunk of my adolescence paranoid about my identity as a female. Where and when I grew up, there weren't a lot of good role models for diversity of female experience. My parents always supported who I was, but society and my peers seemed to have a pretty strict definition of who girls were and what they liked ... and I didn't fit. Admitting that I was into comics felt like it would be just one more thing I did wrong. That's why I really, really love Women Reading Comics in Public Day, an unofficial holiday started by the bloggers at DC Women Kicking Ass.

I fully acknowledge that boys got flack for being comic book fans, too. Basically, it's hard out there in junior high for anybody who doesn't fit in — or can't at least make their peers believe that they fit in.

But guys, at least, never had to feel like they were doing something wrong, as a member of their gender, by being into comic books. There's apparently not a lot of comic reader data publicly available online, but Johanna Draper Carlson at Comics Worth Reading worked for DC in the mid-1990s and has posted about what she learned from the surveys they commissioned back then.

In 1995, as I was busily hiding X-Men behind the latest issue of Seventeen, 92 percent of DC's readers were male. Surveys like this one came out in single-issue comics, the kind you purchase weekly, not the thick, bound volumes carried by the library or stocked at Barnes and Noble. It's unlikely that a reader like I was would have ever seen (or answered) a comic book reader survey.

I was ashamed of reading comics in public because comics were a boy thing. Because I was ashamed of reading comics in public, I wasn't counted as part of the readership — a fact which, multiplied over lots of ashamed little girls, only made comics look like even more of a boy thing than they actually are. Shame perpetuates shame.

That's why I identify with Women Reading Comics in Public Day, and why I think it's important. Kids growing up today need to know that simple customer surveys don't always reflect who the audience actually is — and they definitely don't reflect who an audience should be. When you fall outside the norm, you need to know that you're not alone. You need to know that it is, in fact, perfectly normal to fall outside the norm. "Average" and "Right" are not the same things.

Basically, Women Reading Comics in Public Day is awesome for the same reason that Bronies are awesome. You shouldn't have to be ashamed of liking the things you like — even if those things aren't "made for you".

I didn't feel that way until I was 19, when I met a great group of friends in college who helped me learn to feel comfortable with myself. The Sandman series were the first comics I ever read in public — surrounded by friends, male and female, all of us devouring the illustrated word. The copy of Brief Lives I'm reading in the photo is the first comic I ever owned. My friend Max bought it for me in January of 2001. My hope is that, if I read comics in public today, some other little girl won't feel like she has to wait so long to publicly enjoy the things she enjoys.

See more Women Reading Comic Books in Public

Four years ago, Jana Mackey, one of my college roommates at The University of Kansas, was killed by her ex-boyfriend. When I lived with Jana, I knew her as a music major and a really fun person. But she had a serious side that came to the forefront over the next few years. Jana went to law school, got involved in domestic violence activism, and became a lobbyist at the Kansas State Legislature trying to bring attention to women's health and safety.

Her work made her death tragically ironic, but it also drives home a point. Domestic violence (whether physical or emotional) isn't just something that happens to the naive, or the weak. It's not something you can write off as "somebody else's problem."

There's a picture going around Facebook right now, of a young woman holding a sign that says, "Society teaches, 'Don't get raped' when it should teach 'Don't rape.'" I think the same thing is true here. There's too much focus on finding reasons to criticize or distance ourselves from women who have been abused, and not enough of a focus on preventing abuse from happening—by teaching kids how to have healthy relationships, by encouraging family and friends to step in when they see someone they know being abusive, and by making sure cops and courts take domestic violence seriously.

Jana's family is trying to rectify this through a nonprofit called Jana's Campaign. The Campaign put out this video last winter. On the anniversary of Jana's death, I wanted to share it with you. There's a message here. Take it to heart. Together, we can stop asking people, "Why did you let that happen to yourself?" and, instead, find ways to change the social values and incentives that allow abusers to go unchallenged, untreated, and unpunished.

Visit the website for Jana's Campaign

It's an awkward situation where the science hasn't yet caught up to the personal need. In a perfect world, you might not want to mess around too much with this until we can learn more. But on the other hand, you're left with families that clearly need help now—like the family profiled in the story that must navigate how to deal with a nine-year-old who oscillates between violent tantrums and creepy, logical chill.

When I first met Michael, he seemed shy but remarkably well behaved. While his brother Allan ran through the house with a plastic bag held overhead like a parachute, Michael entered the room aloofly, then curled up on the living room sofa, hiding his face in the cushions. “Can you come say hello?” Anne asked him. He glanced at me, then sprang cheerfully to his feet. “Sure!” he said, running to hug her. Reprimanded for bouncing a ball in the kitchen, he rolled his eyes like any 9-year-old, then docilely went outside. A few minutes later, he was back in the house, capering antically in front of Jake, who was bobbing up and down on his sit-and-ride scooter. When the scooter tipped over, Michael gasped theatrically and ran to his brother’s side. “Jake, are you O.K.?” he asked, wide-eyed with concern. Earnestly ruffling his youngest brother’s hair, he flashed me a winning smile.

If the display of brotherly affection felt forced, it was difficult to see it as fundamentally disturbed. Gradually, though, Michael’s behavior began to morph. While queuing up a Pokémon video on the family’s computer upstairs, Michael turned to me and remarked crisply, “As you can see, I don’t really like Allan.” When I asked if that was really true, he said: “Yes. It’s true,” then added tonelessly, “I hate him.”

Glancing down a second later, he noticed my digital tape recorder on the table. “Did you record that?” he asked. I said that I had. He stared at me briefly before turning back to the video. When a sudden noise from the other room caused me to glance away, Michael seized the opportunity to grab the recorder and press the erase button. (Waschbusch later noted that such a calculated reprisal was unusual in a 9-year-old, who would normally go for the recorder immediately or simply whine and sulk.)

Read the full story at the New York Times

I didn't know it at the time, but Peggy McIntosh's Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack is kind of a classic of anti-racist thought. The basic idea goes something like this: Racism does not begin and end with Jim Crow and the Klan. It's not just about obvious exclusion and oppression. Fighting racism isn't just about overturning blatantly discriminatory laws or cracking down on hate crimes. Racism, unfortunately, can be a lot more subtle than that.

Racism is also about whole social systems that confer privileges on some people, and deny those privileges to others. What's more, if you're one of the privileged people, the privileges you receive—simply for looking the way you do—are often completely invisible to you. So invisible, in fact, that you don't even think of those things as privileges, and you don't notice how they've made your life easier and better. So, when people who don't have access to those privileges don't live as easily and well as you, it's easy to blame that on some inherent moral or intellectual failing, rather than on the system that denied them privileges you've received since birth.

In the United States, there are many privileges that I get, simply for being white, that are denied to people with different skin tones. That's racism. And this system leads otherwise kind and decent people to act and think in racist ways, without even realizing that's what they're doing. Acknowledging this privilege—realizing that subtle racism exists and that you benefit from it—is the first step privileged people need to take if they want to be effective allies of the un-privileged. Here's what McIntosh says:

I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks. ... As far as I can see, my African American co-workers, friends and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place and line of work cannot count on most of these conditions:

• I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
• I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
• When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
• Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of my financial reliability.
• I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
• I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, or feared.

There is more where that came from, just read the whole piece. And yes, this idea does apply to other problems besides just racism. And yes, people who are privileged in some respects can be un-privileged in others, and vice versa. But acknowledging where you are privileged is important. Whether you're fighting racism, classicism, sexism, or any -ism.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a story for ArchitecturalSSL magazine about people installing solar-powered LED streetlights in remote villages in southern Mexico. Tying these places into the larger electrical grid would have been extremely difficult. But solar LED streetlights allowed the people who lived in those places to get the night light they wanted.

Now there's similar work happening in refugee camps in Haiti, where many people displaced by the 2010 earthquake still live. The change is undoubtedly useful: LED streetlights don't have to be powered by expensive gasoline generators, they're better on the lungs than fires, and the light level is bright enough to allow people to work and live far more easily. But what about physical safety? Surprisingly, there turns out to be a decent amount of debate over whether or not the extra light actually reduces violence and makes people safer. It's an interesting case study in how "common sense" doesn't always match up with reality and how difficult it is to attribute cause and effect in complicated social environments. From at story Txchnologist:

In recent months, the lights have come on at two camps through the efforts of aid groups, the Haitian government and the particular expertise of the Solar Electric Light Fund, or SELF, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that uses renewable energy to provide light and power in developing countries.

The nexus between public lighting and safety is hotly debated in Western countries.

Some studies show a decline in crime after an area is illuminated while other research has found that crime actually increases after lights are installed, though it may be because crime is more visible. These studies are of little value, however, in places with collapsed infrastructure like Haiti, which plunged into darkness after the magnitude 7.0 earthquake flattened entire neighborhoods and killed untold thousands.

The security improvements were immediate. The lights function at full power from 6 p.m. to 12 a.m. and at 50 percent between 12 a.m. and 6 a.m. Reported acts of violence, including sexual assault, declined from about six per week when the installations began in June to one or zero per week when streetlights came online in August, according to J/P HRO data provided by SELF. While it’s possible to attribute this drop to other factors – the population of the camp had declined to 23,000 by September and community-based “protection teams” have increased patrols – residents reported feeling an increased sense of security. Increased usage of the latrines also improved Sanitary conditions “significantly,” according to J/P HRO.

Consider, if you will, the issue of sex and the single ant. Male ants are born into what is, essentially, a giant sorority house, vastly outnumbered by female workers. But that doesn't mean male ants are living out some Hugh Hefner harem fantasy. Most of those many, many females in the ant colony are completely uninterested in sex.

Only queen ants breed. During the course of their lives, they will produce all the baby ants born in the colony. In fact, in some (but, contrary to popular belief, not all) species, the drones' options are narrowed down to exactly one queen—effectively turning that sorority house into a sausage fest. A virgin queen goes on her mating flight, and the drones will get one shot to pass on their genetic material. Afterwards, the males die, and the queen uses their seed to give birth to daughters upon daughters ... most of which will be sterile workers.

On the surface, that system doesn't make a lot of sense. Evolution works because of natural selection, right? And that's based on sex—who manages to survive to adulthood and who manages to find a mate or mates. It's all about passing on your genes to the next generation.

So why would any species evolve a whole class of individuals who never have sex, and never have offspring?

That was basically the question posed by anonymous reader who asked, "If only the queen ant breeds, how does natural selection work for the other ants?" And it's a damn good question, something that confuses people far older than toddler age. In fact, that very conundrum stumped Charles Darwin himself and, today, it sits at the heart of a knock-down fight within the fields of evolutionary biology and social insect studies.

First, a quick reminder about how evolution works.

It starts with natural selection. Different traits improve an individual's chances of surviving to adulthood, finding a mate (or mates), and producing offspring. Other traits diminish those chances. Selection favors those randomly generated traits that help themselves be passed on to the next generation. Over time, some of those traits might prove beneficial enough that they get incorporated into a species gene pool in a fundamental way.

Environment matters, too, because natural selection is all about what works in your physical and social environment. The traits that help a fish survive and reproduce are different from those that help humans. Those that help humans in a desert are different from those that help humans in the Arctic. Selection happens at the level of individuals, but it can alter populations.

If you keep things this simple, then ants really don't make a lot of sense. How can natural selection happen, if the designated breeder is chosen by birth, and not by fitness? And how does not breeding benefit all the individual female workers enough to make that trait stick, as a fundamental aspect of a species?

The answer, of course, is that evolution is a lot more complicated than the simplified explanation makes it sound.

Kith and Kin

Ever since Darwin's time, scientists have looked for ways to reconcile the theory of natural selection with the weird lifestyles of bees, ants, and other social insects. Today, the generally accepted explanation goes something like this: When your relatives benefit, you benefit, too.

That's because, to some degree, you and your relatives share genes. If you don't have any children, but you help ensure that your sister's children survive to adulthood and have kids of their own, then you've scored a point or two in the game of natural selection. Some of your genes got passed down.

Sure, your score would be higher if you'd had kids of your own who carried more of your genes. But natural selection isn't all-or-nothing. Your nieces, nephews, and cousins are better than no genetic descendants at all.

That's kin selection, and it's the mechanism behind something called inclusive fitness theory. The idea there: Species will evolve traits for cooperation—even traits that force them to sacrifice themselves for others—if the benefit outweighs what they loose. So, you might forgo having kids of your own if, by doing that, you enable enough nieces and nephews to survive and breed. You can see already how this relates to the ant problem.

"Any gene that rendered you sterile but enabled you to make other copies of that gene would survive," says Jerry Coyne, a professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago. "If you become sterile but you help your mother produce more workers and make bigger colonies, that would have an advantage. It seems maladaptive but it would be actually adaptive."

Worker ants, the maiden aunts of the ant kingdom, make sense because they enable their mother, aunts, or sisters (remember, colonies often have more than one queen) to produce hundreds of other workers and drones, and to produce the next generation of queens.

But not everybody buys that explanation. One of the most interesting things about this particular Science Question from a Toddler is the way it ties into current events. The tiny ant turns out to be the perfect tool for reminding us that science doesn't happen by reputation alone. Even the biggest names can, and will, be called out if they publish easily disproven research.

Move That Rubber Tree Plant

Among the minority of researchers who think kin selection and inclusive fitness aren't the right way to explain the existence of worker ants: Edward O. Wilson.

You probably recognize that name, and with good reason. Wilson is one of the most well-known names in science, certainly the most well-known researcher of social insects. The man has two Pulitzers. When science journalists talk about "what E.O. Wilson thinks" we usually assume that he's right.

But I can't do that this time.

In August of 2010, Wilson published a paper with two other colleagues that aggressively dismissed inclusive fitness theory entirely. The paper was, to say the least, not well received. The formal rebuttal, published in March, was co-signed by no fewer than 103 different scientists, including Jerry Coyne. I'm not sure whether that's the most people to ever co-author a rebuttal together in a scientific journal, but it's got to be close to the record. Clearly, E.O. Wilson has hit a nerve.

Why? Thats where things get complicated. Nearly everybody agrees that E.O. Wilson was wrong, but there's some disagreement on why he was wrong and just how wrong he was. Meanwhile, Wilson's co-author, Martin Nowak, thinks the people critiquing the paper aren't actually understanding his and Wilson's point very well. This is not a particularly easy debate to summarize.

"I think, honestly, no one understands their arguments, including themselves," says Terry McGlynn, associate professor of biology at California State University Dominguez Hills, and the current president of the North American section of the International Union for the Study of Social Insects. He didn't co-sign the rebuttal, but agrees that Wilson's paper was worth rebutting.

As McGlynn sees it, there are two key problems with the Wilson paper: First, it makes claims about the scientific research surrounding kin selection and inclusive fitness that are demonstrably false.

One of the key mistakes is that the paper claims there's no empirical evidence to support inclusive fitness theory at all. That's blatantly wrong, say McGlynn, Jerry Coyne, and all those co-authors on the rebuttal paper. The truth is that inclusive fitness has been an important part of understanding a range of real-world behaviors, from cooperation to cannibalism.

However, that doesn't mean it's perfect. The Wilson paper stresses that predictions made about ant societies based on inclusive fitness—i.e., how related a group of ants ought to be in order to make the workers' sacrifices make sense—aren't usually correct.

That's true, say McGlynn and Coyne, but it's a matter of degrees, not a matter of the ants turning out to be completely unrelated.

"Inclusive fitness works. Relatedness matters. What you see is that we theoretically expect the ants to be 66% related, but they're only something like 14% related," McGlynn says. "There are clearly benefits to relatedness or these colonies wouldn't be even that related.

This is what brings us to the second problem. The Wilson paper sets up inclusive fitness as a stone fortress to be assailed. It assumes that most other researchers think inclusive fitness is the only explanation you could possibly need for how social systems like those of ants evolved. Then, the paper says that because inclusive fitness doesn't explain everything about ant society, it must be fatally flawed.

And that's just a straw man argument, McGlynn says. Because nobody denies that there's more going on than just relatedness.

For instance, he says, the ants that share a colony have more in common than genetics. "They're living in defensible, constructed nests. The fact that they all live together and have shared defense and shared the benefits of foraging matter," McGlynn says.

Without those things, eusociality—the scientific term for cooperative social systems where labor is divided into strict castes and some of those castes don't breed—doesn't evolve. Kin selection is important, McGlynn says. But it's likely that these shared risks and benefits mattered a lot, too.

Of course, not everybody would agree with McGlynn, either. The last thing you really have to to understand about this debate is that it's really rooted in another—between researchers like McGlynn, who think that the evolution of eusociality has a lot to do with both kin selection and the shared risk/benefit scenarios of what's called "group selection," and researchers like Jerry Coyne, who think that group selection doesn't explain anything that isn't already explained by kin selection. Coyne, and a lot of other evolutionary biologists, pretty much wrote off group selection a long time ago. In fact, that position is well-established enough to often be the default in college classes. But, in recent years, there have been plenty of other researchers—particularly social insect researchers—who've challenged that status quo.

And, while it's very clear that E.O Wilson's paper is wrong—kin selection is important and has not been disproven—it doesn't look like we can say, with as much certainty, that the idea of group selection is wrong.

This should give you the basic overview of the debate. In future stories, I hope to delve more deeply into why group selection is a controversial idea, and why it refuses to die. For now, tell your toddler about kin selection. There's plenty of time to add complexity to the explanation when they're older.

Image: Adrian A. Smith, used with permission and deep gratitude.]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/08/25/science-question-from-a-toddler-how-ants-evolve.html/feed 41