so. it's been cold outside, huh? the kind of cold that freezes the interior contents of your nose into a crystallized fountain pouring down your upper lip; the kind of cold that makes you tear up, except you don't know you've teared up, because the liquid your eyes are emanating in response to the extreme polar weather has actually glued your eyelids together; the kind of cold that causes somebody who has never in fact lived above the mason-dixon line to whine unendingly on her blog.

and it was during the first real cold weekend of the year that i had an altogether wonderful time, despite the fact that i had to wear, like, sneakers and sweaters and scarves instead of flipflops and the slutty tank tops that i like to characterize my days off work. ah well. we all make sacrifices.

Since Catherine and I are both suffering from some serious writer's block, let me take the current blogospheric football and run with it -- but in the opposite direction from my right-minded friends. Girls stink at math! (At least to a small but statistically significant degree more than boys).

Okay, so for those of you with something better to do during the day than follow every micro-controversy: Harvard president Larry Summers has irritated a lot of folks by suggesting that the lack of female scientists may be due, in part, to biological differences.

Some people are making good criticisms of Summers' comments, pointing out that other factors figure in: the career-derailment frequently entailed by having kids, or simple discrimination from male-dominated academic committees. That seems perfectly right -- everyone seems to agree that female professorial candidates in the sciences lose out more than they ought to.

But that doesn't invalidate Summers' point that there are relevant differences between the sexes. To admit that there's a statistically relevant phenomenon going on here is not to deny the excellence of individual women in science, or to justify discrimination of any sort.

If I maintain that men have a biological advantage in terms of (non-endurance-based) muscle strength, does that mean that a given man -- let's say me -- is stronger than any woman? Or that, given a need for, say, jar-opening that must be satisfied by either myself or an unspecified female candidate, I should be given preferential consideration? Of course not! There are plenty of women who could kick the hell out of me. But that doesn't make the more general "men have a strength advantage" position invalid.

There are good reasons to think men and women perform differently on different types of mental tasks. Guys do better on tests of spatial reasoning; women are better at some types of verbal tasks. These differences aren't huge, but they do seem to exist.

Now why, you might ask, is this line of reasoning any less objectionable than the usual Bell Curve-style justifications for discrimination? How can differences in mathematical ability be disentangled from other contributing factors? Maybe girls don't get called on as much in physics class... Fair enough, but this ignores the fact that women have surpassed men by many -- probably most -- academic metrics. They've got higher GPAs, and there are between 5 and 10 percent more women in college than men. So I think there are good reasons to question the significance of institutional barriers to female academic success -- at least at the levels where the aforementioned tests are administered.

I don't mean to impugn the intelligence of any woman. Certainly, such slight disparities in specific kinds of mathematical ability are the sort of things that any fair-minded person ought to ignore completely at the level of individual performance. I'm ready to believe that, say, different levels of childhood exposure to Number Munchers is far more relevant than the presence of a Y chromosome. But to me, different in-built biological advantages seem like a perfectly reasonable way to explain trends at a population-wide level. The differences are small, but they seem to be there -- and given that, I don't see anything wrong with acknowledging them.

I love reading Dan's Data. No other site so reliably rounds up useless but impossibly cool scientific gadgetry. I can't justify buying all this crap, so I'll just throw it out here. If you're looking for something science-y to put on your desk that's a little more interesting than a set of those goddamn clicking chrome balls, these should fit the bill:

• An electromagnet that can lift 500lbs -- running off two D batteries. That's got to be useful for something, right?


• Or are you looking for finger-breaking fun but hate replacing batteries? Well why not buy yourself a gigantic rare-earth magnet? Besides the broken finger part, I mean.


• It would be irresponsible to imply that at-home science is exclusively about hurting yourself. There are also large parts of it devoted to ruining your furniture. So how about some ferromagnetic fluid? It's a freaky black liquid that changes shape in a magnetic field. These guys have a starter kit that's only sixteen bucks.


• Alright, so magnetism's awesome and all, but if you'd prefer using a different sort of invisible force to amaze and terrify your coworkers, you could just get one of these. "Like being punched by a ghost." Cool.