O. On to the other deskbox and more tab ending. And here y’all all thought y’all were rid of me?
First, an article [Link] about how minority students do better economically studying STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Maths.) I have a couple of problems with this. First of all , part of this is built on an underrepresentation amongst STEMS of certain minorities (not Jews, Asians, East Indians) and the perception that beleaguered executives will hire anyone to satisfy Yankee government minority employee demographic requirements. What is missing is that STEMs tend to be strongly self-critical and that laps over to co-workers who can’t meet muster on knowledge, skills, and abilities. So one reason there are underages in minority STEMs in the workplace is that they have a high drop out rate because of shunning.
The second thing somewhat stems from the first. IMHO it is an evil to lure folks into STEM who are not really nerds. Even geeks tend to have a high failure rate, either academically or in career terms. So inducing students who lack capability to do STEM stuff is a waste of academic resources, and overall an evil treatment of unsuspecting innocents. I discount pre-meds here who are not innocent but are increasingly exemplars of what happens when you have people wanting to enter a discipline for the money and not for the satisfaction or who lack the skills and temperament.
Not that I have anything against minority students but because they are minority they may not have good social connections and know the arcana of academic disciplines. I have worked with several very good minority STEMs, and perceive that they lack talent no more than WASPs or any other pseudo-anthropoligical division of humanity. But if someone doesn’t have the bent to be a STEM and doesn’t love STEMery, they shouldn’t study it because they will be pained and maimed.
Next courtesy of work at U Bristol, there is indication that Cattle herders mutations started to arise in Africa about 7 KYA. [Link] This is evidenced by identifiable remains of dairy foods and leads us to one of the great discriminations of the Yankee republic. Among the adult human population of Tellus approximately 0.7+ do not secrete lactase as adults. As a result they are unable to digest lactose, which is present in dairy foods. Of the 0.3- that remain, a majority live in Nawth Amerika where the delusion is practiced that all adult humans can secrete lactase and hence digest dairy. This delusion is so widespread that the general populace consider that anyone who cannot secrete lactase is broken and handicapped and strange rather than a member of the majority component of humanity. This condition of not secreting lactase is called, somewhat meanly, lactose intolerance in children and in Amerika this term is mistakenly applied, again meanly, to normal adults. Mutant adults, in the meantime, refer to themselves as “normal”.
Speaking of normal, we have a lovely article [Link] about Repenomamus, a three foot long Mesozoic mammal that ate dinosaurs. 
I think the implied commentary from the previous but is pretty clear, isn’t it?
And lastly, we proudly and humbly salute the towns of Dull, Scotland, and Boring, Oregon who have formed a city pair. I have added both communities to my bucket list and hope to visit one or both in the near future with an eye to relocating. Both are small communities and seem unlikely to have many STEM so their is a significant possibility I can be the Dull (or Boring) town physicist.
Incidentally, two of my colleagues, Velocity Spin and Magnetic Inductance Force, have updated the old boffin-luvvie taxonomy to contemporary terms as STEM-LEAF (Leiberally Educated Artsy-Fartsy.) I shall endeavor to adopt the taxonomy sine die.
