Americans Abroad

By -
My charming medieval city of X (hey, I set Joseph the task of guessing my location, so I can't just go and name it!) is presently filled with American university students -- on winter break, no doubt. The puzzle for me is that the female / male ratio seems to be about nine to one. (And I am pretty sure it's not because I only notice the females, so check your dirty minds at the door.)

Why would this be? Any explanations?

Comments

  1. traumerei6:26 PM

    It always seemed like my female classmates were always going on about traveling. Also, I took an art history course on medieval/Renaissance Rome and the ratio was similar. Maybe there's a connection? Survey them and do tell!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous10:08 PM

    I guess Rob beat me to it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Daniel10:34 PM

    Well college attendance for women is higher, although not by a whole lot so that won't give you too much if you figure students are more likely to be there during break.

    It might also be gendered social behavior. A gang of girls are more likely to stay in Paris or Venice or wherever, while a gang of guys may be more likely to go cross-country. Figure mixed gangs are split between destinations, and that could increase your ratio.

    It's also entirely possible that while your mind is not in the gutter, they are inexorably drawn to you, Gene.

    ReplyDelete
  4. gcallah7:49 AM

    "It's also entirely possible that while your mind is not in the gutter, they are inexorably drawn to you, Gene."

    Well, of course, but I figured that only explained about half the disparity. (I did some regression testing.)

    ReplyDelete
  5. gcallah7:52 AM

    traumerei, do you think my wife will buy it if I tell her it is just sociological work?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more