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The Staff was really just a big stick…Anyway, it was capped by an elaborate headpiece with a carving of the sun at the top. What you had to do was take the Staff to a special map room in Tanis--it had the whole city laid out in miniature on the floor. When you placed the Staff in a certain spot in this room, at a certain time of day, the sun would shine through a hole here in the headpiece and then send a beam of light down here—to the map--giving you the location of the Well of the Souls...
2 comments:
Addressing Mr Bad on brain differences: certainly subtle physiological brain differences between male and female humans have been demonstrated. What has never been conclusively demonstrated are significant sex-linked differences in, for example, math ability. In addition, a close look at the demographics of students in higher education reveals that both a higher percentage of men and a higher percentage of women are going to college than twenty years ago or so; it's just that the percentage has been increasing faster for women. This came up in the thread at Hugo's on this topic not long ago, and Amanda wrote about it at Pandagon around the same time.
Thus, with no real evidence of difference in performance or innate ability, the studies looking for physiological causes of these differences are at best premature, at worst completely misguided. This has been a line of argument from feminist science studies for thirty years now, and one that has consistently been ignored by, eg, Steven Pinker, Christina Hoff-Sommers, and Larry Summers.
Responding to Mr Bad and alexander, on the pay gap in academia: The 2002 study by the Department of Education I preferred to there seems to indicate a pay gap, even after controlling for the factors you describe. You're welcome to dig into the study to correct my interpretation -- which is based on just skimming through a few sections -- or offer a general critique of such studies, whether it's something original to you or a citation to, say, Warren Farrell's work.
I would also echo the lines of argument by Brenna and evil fizz further down the thread: the fact that women make career choices that reflect an accommodation of childraising, while men do not, may itself reflect unjust male privilege in the structure and culture of academia.
As I say in my first comment, without evidence of differences in performance, it's premature to investigate causes of difference -- trying to find a theory to explain a phenomenon before we're sure there's anything that needs to be explained. This doesn't forbid someone from investigating neurological differences, of course, just asserting that they provide an explanation for the 'well-known fact' that boys are better at math than girls.
There are a number of problems with your glib reaction to the second quotation. Just for starters, it takes for granted that women must face a dilemma between raising children and pursuing a career; the fact that men generally do not face a similar dilemma is precisely what I and the others are getting at here. Thus, your reaction is either circular or a non sequitur: it rejects a presumption of equality as desirable because there is a lack of equality in fact.
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