What’s going on over at Popular Mechanics?

First, the magazine rains on the idea of using the international space station as an interplanetary vehicle (an idea I had applauded).

Then, on the unveiling of Richard Branson’s much-ballyhooed space-tourism plane, the magazine runs a slightly negative review—which, in the Popular Mechanics context, is an extremely negative review.

Unfortunately, the arguments look pretty convincing. Or, at least, I’m convinced. But we do need something to revitalize the human imagination with the dream of space. And the new headline in Discover magazine, “Mars Phoenix Lander Wrestles With Sticky Dirt,” just isn’t going to do it.

Over at City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple writes about the case of the student who, taking a national exam in Britain, answered the question, “Describe the room you’re in,” with “F—k off,” and received a grade of 7.5 percent.

The examiner explained, “it would be wicked to give it zero because it does show some very basic skills we are looking for.” To which Dalrymple replies, “Unfortunately, my knowledge of English expletives is not sufficiently extensive to compose a sentence that would have attracted marks of 100 percent.”

We’ve mentioned the Canadian Human Rights commissions before on our blog, and the most recent issue of First Things has an article on the topic by Douglass Farrow called “Kangaroo Canada” (subscription required). But today I discovered videos of testimony Ezra Levant gave before a member of the commission. Levant, you may recall, was the publisher of the Western Standard and had a complaint filed against him by an imam for reprinting the controversial Danish cartoons of Muhammad. That complaint has since been dismissed, but one filed by the Edmonton Muslim Council still stands.

Much of his testimony is spent in repeated, and understandable, outrage that he has been brought before a Canadian court–part Kafka, part Stalin, he calls it–that would try to restrict his freedom of speech. This is marvelously summed up in his closing statement:

There’s also a thirty-nine second video in which, after some of his remarks, the commissioner says, “You’re entitled to your opinions.” To which Levant immediately responds, “I wish that were the fact.”

It would be funnier if he weren’t right.

I used to enjoy reading the journal of the Association of Women in Mathematics. Then Lawrence Summers happened. The valiant female mathematicians weren’t really discouraged, but they were angry. Angry and vocal, filling the editorials of the next couple years’ worth of issues with their outraged protests. As a female math major, I couldn’t helped feeling a little miffed. So maybe men did tend to gravitate toward and perform better in math and science. I didn’t need my advanced statistics course to confirm at least the former. But didn’t that make us female mathematicians special—the few, the proud, the non-Euclidean, or something like that?

City Journal ‘s Heather Mac Donald takes up Summer’s hypothesis this week and offers some mathematical evidence that he was right, contra a recent Title-IX waving article from the New York Times:

The New York Times is determined to show that women are discriminated against in the sciences; too bad the facts say otherwise. A new study has “found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests,” claims a July 25 article by Tamar Lewin—thus, the underrepresentation of women on science faculties must result from bias. Actually, the study, summarized in the July 25 issue of Science, shows something quite different: while boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, boys outnumber girls among students in both the highest and the lowest score ranges. Either the Times is deliberately concealing the results of the study or its reporter cannot understand the most basic science reporting.
. . .

Far from raising the presumption of gender bias among schools and colleges, the Science study strengthens a competing hypothesis: that the main drivers of success in scientific fields are aptitude and knowledge, in conjunction with personal choices about career and family that feminists refuse to acknowledge.

The same reality-denying feminists are itching to subject college science and math departments to gender quotas. They have already persuaded Congress to require university scientists to perform Title IX compliance reviews—a nightmare of bean-counting paperwork—covering everything from faculty composition to lab space. Misleading reporting like Lewin’s will only strengthen the movement to select cancer researchers and atomic engineers on the basis of their sex, not their abilities.

The Wall Street Journal, it should be noted, had no difficulty grasping the two main findings of the Science study: that “girls and boys have roughly the same average scores on state math tests,” as Keith J. Winstein reported on July 25, but that “boys more often excelled or failed.” That the New York Times, in an article over twice as long as the Journal’s, couldn’t manage to squeeze in a reference to the fact that boys outperformed girls at the top end of the curve should put its readers on notice: trust nothing you read here.

The epiphany of NYTimes-unreliability aside, Mac Donald’s note about women’s “personal choices about career and family” rings especially true. Several women that I know could have pursued careers in theoretical math or the hard sciences, but they didn’t want to be working in front of a computer or in a laboratory all day. Of the few who did pursue studies in engineering—and I was almost one of them—the majority specialized in its more “living,” less mechanistic divisions such as environmental or biomedical engineering. They wanted a career with a visibly human, interpersonal dimension. And often, they wanted a career that would meld easily into family life.

You hear a lot about Summers’ fatal faux pas in noting that men are more number-oriented. Yet you’ll never see the headlines: “Summers fired for Saying Women are More People-Oriented.” Who decided that playing with numbers is the higher calling? As a female mathematician, I don’t think it was a woman.

The Claremont Institute’s Bradley C.S. Watson has an article on ISI’s First Principles web journal on the need for a federal amendment defining the nature of marriage. The heart of his argument is twofold. First, Watson predicts, judicial fiat will override the decisions of voters in individual states, as we have already seen in Massachusetts and California. Then, he writes:

Same-sex couples mar­ried in one state will invariably seek to have those marriages (and the incidents thereof, including child custody decrees) enforced in states that do not rec­ognize such marriages. For traditional marriage to survive, at least in some states, these states must ignore the court orders of other states, which will likely not be constitutionally possible. As Lincoln said of another fundamental moral question, “this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. It will become all one thing, or all the other.” In short, for both marriage and self-government on marital questions to survive, a federal constitutional amendment will be required.

Watson also has an interesting aside on the way in which the California Supreme Court claimed a right not only to grant benefits and governmental recognition to same-sex partnerships, but to change the actual meaning of the word marriage:

Furthermore, in requiring that same-sex couples have the right to call themselves married, courts have engaged in a kind of nominalism that is unknown to the common law. The material benefits of marriage can be conferred through civil union status rather than actual marriage. This means that the courts in Canada, Massachusetts, and California have asserted a stunning claim: the right to a noun. The arguments advanced by the courts’ majority opinions have less to do with constitutional documents or constitutional reasoning, and more to do with the Orwellian desire to police the English language, allowing parties the legal entitlement to label themselves as they see fit. This revolutionary development in effect gives courts the right to control the contents of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Another reminder of why the definition of marriage is what’s at stake.

Some of the oddities and abominations of the English translation of the liturgy are about to go extinct, reported the Congregation for Divine Worship last week. Of course, Cardinal Francis Arinze, prefect of the Congregation, didn’t relay the Vatican’s formal approval in precisely those terms. But his pleasure was scarcely masked: The Congregation reported “no little satisfaction in arriving at this juncture.”

The changes of “this juncture” will unite the English liturgy more fully with the universal Church, with more theologically accurate–and, in many cases, more faithfully beautiful–language. It’s amazing how those two attributes go together. The more noteworthy changes include:

* At the Consecration, the priest will refer to Christ’s blood which is “poured out for you and for many”–an accurate translation of pro multis–rather than “for all” in the current translation.

* In the Nicene Creed the opening word, Credo, will be correctly translated as “I believe” rather than “we believe.”

* When the priest says, “The Lord be with you,” the faithful respond, “And with your spirit,” rather than simply, “And also with you.”

* In the Eucharistic prayer, references to the Church will use the pronouns “she” and “her” rather than “it.”

* In the Agnus Dei, the text cites the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world,” rather than using the singular word “sin.”

* In the preferred form of the penitential rite, the faithful will acknowledge that they have sinned “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.”

* Throughout the translation of the Offertory and Eucharistic Prayer, the traditional phrases of supplication are restored, and the Church is identified as “holy”–in each case, matching the Latin original of the Roman Missal.

While the new translation will probably not be completed in its entirety until 2010, the most common liturgical prayers and texts are now in place. Formally, at least–they will be implemented gradually by local bishops to give clergy and the faithful time to adjust. In the meantime, we can certainly share with the Congregation “no little satisfaction.”