March for Science 2017 Reflections

I feel guilty about missing the Women's March because it was raining that morning, so I was determined to make it to the March for Science.  I made a sign.  I marched.  I saw lots of other good signs.  Some of the best, text only because I did not have a camera:

• "Science created ice cream.  Science is awesome."  As someone who often eats ice cream for breakfast and does not regret this in the slightest, I am in total agreement.  Also, science gave us refrigerators to keep the ice cream cold so we don't have to mix a batch every time we want some.
• "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."-Marie Curie
• "Science is true whether you believe it or not."     
• "The oceans are rising and so are we."
• "There is no planet B."  We've found a lot of exoplanets now, but even if we find another Earth-parallel planet, getting there is still a problem.  The dark between the stars is staggeringly vast.  As Phil Plait says, mind crushingly big.   
• "Remember polio?  I do/I don't" (by generation).  Because vaccines!  I met a polio survivor.  My grandfather is a polio survivor.  I never worried about polio, or tetanus, or whooping cough, or measles, or mumps, or diphtheria, because science!!!
• "All brains are biased.  Correct for this" with a second much larger sign listing references.  Good scientific practice: cite your sources!

 A friend sent a picture of the best sign for a mathematician:

Alas that my sign was not nearly this clever!

I have no regrets about spending an afternoon marching for science.  

Votes for Certain Women

It came to my disgusted attention recently that there is a person on a news show who is willing to say almost in so many words that young women are too vapid to vote, and should really be dismissed to go get back to their online dating sites.  Her defense of this statement against the criticism it has received seems to miss, at the least, two obvious points.  First, that young men are not, in my experience subjected to hearing that they don't have the life experience to vote, much less with a side of condescension about what they do on the internet (and, frankly, their multitasking abilities.  These days portable internet-enabled devices are purchasable, so presumably, the presumed vapid young women could take them into places of polling without excessive loss of dating site time.  And given voting lines, why not?).  Second, that voting is a right that does not come subject to other people's judgy-ness.

This news person's justification is that deciding who to vote for is hard.  As I recall, on this ballot there were never more than three choices, and in several cases, no more than one.  Each person had a helpful indication of political party alignment, which is usually enough to give a good starting indication of the way the candidate, if elected, would go about being an elected person.  As a young woman, I face a far more bewildering variety of choices, with far less information, every time I buy lipstick.  I can't even imagine the hard choices I'd have to make if I used online dating sites.  Even if I eschewed information entirely and voted for the people with the silliest sounding names, Bruce Schneier (who is rather a hero of mine) postulates in Liars and Outliers that the most advantageous approach to voting for both the voters and the democracy is for people to vote, but without being informed.  No one would, I think, accuse Schneier of either lacking experience or being on dating sites, though I rather wish he would go in for investigating dating sites.  I'm sure he could break them fabulously and be entertaining and informative about their security flaws.