I never know what you are thinking

What's the nerdiest thing about you?

I have a secret love in my heart for science writing for the lay person.  In particular, I love writings about quantum physics.  I haven't dived very deep into the pool, but recently I have read QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter and last year it was In Search of Schrodinger's Cat by John Gribbin.

Sometimes, I prefer analyses of complex adaptive systems and I thumb through passages in The Quark and the Jaguar by Murray Gell-Mann.  Or, I like to think about what would have happened had I not abandoned my archaeology degree in favor of Comparative Literature?  Might I have been part of the team which recently discovered the fragments of Euripides?  It had always been my dream to discover some heretofore unknown Euripides play, translate it* and write criticism on it.  Such a thing would have been the perfect synthesis of my interests, circa 1992.

The final nerdy thing about me is that I enjoy reading technical manuals.  From designing PHP applications for the web to a technical guide to physical archaeology, I'm in reader heaven. I believe this love also stems from college years, during which time my notes on classes were stellar and included detailed, color illustrations.  People would consistently borrow my notes--sometimes to the detriment of my own performance on exams (which ultimately clinched my decision to switch to a Comparative Literature degree--in none of those classes did I need to illustrate my notes).

* When I finally saw facsimiles of the fragments I realized I don't have a translator's eyes.

This is possibly one of the more offensive articles I've read recently.

Edit:  It appears that Forbes may have pulled the article.  Here is the original:

Guys: A word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don't marry a woman with a career.

Why? Because if many social scientists are to be believed, you run a higher risk of having a rocky marriage. While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it. A recent study in Social Forces, a research journal, found that women--even those with a "feminist" outlook--are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner.

Not a happy conclusion, especially given that many men, particularly successful men, are attracted to women with similar goals and aspirations. And why not? After all, your typical career girl is well-educated, ambitious, informed and engaged. All seemingly good things, right? Sure…at least until you get married. Then, to put it bluntly, the more successful she is the more likely she is to grow dissatisfied with you. Sound familiar?

Many factors contribute to a stable marriage, including the marital status of your spouse's parents (folks with divorced parents are significantly more likely to get divorced themselves), age at first marriage, race, religious beliefs and socio-economic status. And, of course, many working women are indeed happily and fruitfully married--it's just that they are less likely to be so than non-working women. And that, statistically speaking, is the rub.

To be clear, we're not talking about a high-school dropout minding a cash register. For our purposes, a "career girl" has a university-level (or higher) education, works more than 35 hours a week outside the home and makes more than $30,000 a year.

If a host of studies are to be believed, marrying these women is asking for trouble. If they quit their jobs and stay home with the kids, they will be unhappy ( Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003). They will be unhappy if they make more money than you do ( Social Forces, 2006). You will be unhappy if they make more money than you do ( Journal of Marriage and Family, 2001). You will be more likely to fall ill ( American Journal of Sociology). Even your house will be dirtier ( Institute for Social Research).

Why? Well, despite the fact that the link between work, women and divorce rates is complex and controversial, much of the reasoning is based on a lot of economic theory and a bit of common sense. In classic economics, a marriage is, at least in part, an exercise in labor specialization. Traditionally men have tended to do "market" or paid work outside the home and women have tended to do "non-market" or household work, including raising children. All of the work must get done by somebody, and this pairing, regardless of who is in the home and who is outside the home, accomplishes that goal. Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker argued that when the labor specialization in a marriage decreases--if, for example, both spouses have careers--the overall value of the marriage is lower for both partners because less of the total needed work is getting done, making life harder for both partners and divorce more likely. And, indeed, empirical studies have concluded just that.

In 2004, John H. Johnson examined data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and concluded that gender has a significant influence on the relationship between work hours and increases in the probability of divorce. Women's work hours consistently increase divorce, whereas increases in men's work hours often have no statistical effect. "I also find that the incidence in divorce is far higher in couples where both spouses are working than in couples where only one spouse is employed," Johnson says. A few other studies, which have focused on employment (as opposed to working hours) have concluded that working outside the home actually increases marital stability, at least when the marriage is a happy one. But even in these studies, wives' employment does correlate positively to divorce rates, when the marriage is of "low marital quality."

The other reason a career can hurt a marriage will be obvious to anyone who has seen their mate run off with a co-worker: When your spouse works outside the home, chances increase they'll meet someone they like more than you. "The work environment provides a host of potential partners," researcher Adrian J. Blow reported in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, "and individuals frequently find themselves spending a great deal of time with these individuals."

There's more: According to a wide-ranging review of the published literature, highly educated people are more likely to have had extra-marital sex (those with graduate degrees are 1.75 more likely to have cheated than those with high school diplomas.) Additionally, individuals who earn more than $30,000 a year are more likely to cheat.

And if the cheating leads to divorce, you're really in trouble. Divorce has been positively correlated with higher rates of alcoholism, clinical depression and suicide. Other studies have associated divorce with increased rates of cancer, stroke, and sexually-transmitted disease. Plus divorce is financially devastating. According to one recent study on "Marriage and Divorce's Impact on Wealth," published in The Journal of Sociology, divorced people see their overall net worth drop an average of 77%.

So why not just stay single? Because, academically speaking, a solid marriage has a host of benefits beyond just individual "happiness." There are broader social and health implications as well. According to a 2004 paper entitled "What Do Social Scientists Know About the Benefits of Marriage?" marriage is positively associated with "better outcomes for children under most circumstances," higher earnings for adult men, and "being married and being in a satisfying marriage are positively associated with health and negatively associated with mortality." In other words, a good marriage is associated with a higher income, a longer, healthier life and better-adjusted kids.

A word of caution, though: As with any social scientific study, it's important not to confuse correlation with causation. In other words, just because married folks are healthier than single people, it doesn't mean that marriage is causing the health gains. It could just be that healthier people are more likely to be married.

What bothered me the most was that the author said this (in regards to health/marriage correlation):

A word of caution, though: As with any social scientific study, it's important not to confuse correlation with causation.

While at the same time, his entire article was one which suggested correlation implied -- even meant -- causation.

There were also examples where data which, as worded, seemed to apply to both men and women, was only applied to career women.  This was especially offensive with regard to the higher statistics of infidelity attributed to higher education.  The data implies that both men and women with advanced degrees are likelier to cheat, but the emphasis on career women in the article implies some sort of moral or character defect in career women, a stance which has often permeated traditionalist arguments against women taking up careers.

Also, a red-flag for me is raised when I read that women polled about their happiness with being stay-at-home wives polled happier even when they possessed "feminist" outlooks.  What does feminist mean in the context of this article, in the context of the study?  How was it defined for the women polled?  Whose scare-quotes are those?

Ultimately, though, it's the stance that career women are somehow pariahs in the grander social scheme that I find most offensive.  Even if the studies indicate it, data alone and especially data interpreted by an author for a magazine which caters to the larger business community (which, while relaxing, is still predominantly male-dominated and oriented) doesn't begin to examine why women in careers may be happier -- it entirely ignores the difficulties career women face balancing families and their jobs, difficulties that women often have to deal with alone without encouragement or assistance from their employers or the society in which they live.

Today, I wondered how much of you to include in these stories; do I want you to recognize yourself? I considered the ethical implications of it, how your life was already partly damaged as a result of the things I'm writing. Whether or not I think that these consequences are your own making (and I do think that) is it fair to manipulate these memories, especially private ones, into something else, known by anyone?

And then I saw a truck that said Herzog Glass and I had my answer.

I have too many blogs as it is and I'm pretty happy with LiveJournal's sense of community and HTML support.  However, this book thing's pretty cool too.  I wonder if there is a limit to how many books one can post about; I use library thing (link) currently, but as a free user there is a limit to how many books I can catalog and review. 

So I guess I need to think about how to use this new site--perhaps something entirely different than anyplace else I hang my e-hat.  Book reviews, or drafts of them, would be a good place to start.

I did a quick review of Ron Rash's Eureka Mill, which I recommend highly.