Links: Unexpected results

The looming demise of the 10x developer by Justin Searls. I was braced for this blog post to be terrible, but it acknowledges the unfair advantages of white men right up front, and discusses some interesting ideas about generational differences in programmers.

Justin Searls mentions something that I often talk about when people bemoan the problems with the "pipeline" for women programmers. I started college in 1985.

"I remember asking a computer science professor in 2003 about our school’s gender disparity (we only had a single woman in my class, and she later switched majors). He recounted that before 1990 and the advent of hacker and gamer subcultures, my college touted robust majorities of women in computer science. (Nationally, women’s enrollment in CS doubled in a decade, peaking at 37.1% nationally in 1984 before dropping precipitously.)"

The myth that men hunt while women stay at home is entirely wrong by Michael Le Page.

The idea that men hunt while women stay at home is almost completely wrong, a review of foraging societies around the world has found. In fact, women hunt in 80 per cent of the societies looked at, and in a third of these societies women were found to hunt big game – animals heavier than 30 kilograms – as well as smaller animals.

These findings are likely to be representative of all foraging societies past and present, says Cara Wall-Scheffler at the University of Washington in Seattle. “We have nearly 150 years of ethnographic studies sampled, we have every continent and more than one culture from every continent, and so I feel like we did get a pretty good swathe of what people do around the world,” she says.

‘It was an accident’: the scientists who have turned humid air into renewable power by Ned Carter Miles.

In May, a team at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst published a paper declaring they had successfully generated a small but continuous electric current from humidity in the air. It’s a claim that will probably raise a few eyebrows, and when the team made the discovery that inspired this new research in 2018, it did.

“To be frank, it was an accident,” says the study’s lead author, Prof Jun Yao. “We were actually interested in making a simple sensor for humidity in the air. But for whatever reason, the student who was working on that forgot to plug in the power.”

And a bonus for future reference: Advanced macOS Command-Line Tools by Saurabh S.