Here are some women that are smarter than Lawrence Summers
I hope someone alerts Lawrence Summers to this achievement. Recently a female Chinese mathematician, Xiaoyun Wang, along with two others (one female, one unspecified) broke a very strong hash algorithm used in cryptography (SHA-1). "Breaking" one of these algorithms means finding a way to produce a collision in hash value in less time than it would take with a brute force method. In this case, she reduced the number of tries from the order of 2 to the 80th power, to 2 to the 69th.
But that's not all. After that, she worked with another pair of researchers, again one female, one of unspecified gender, and reduced it further, to 2 to the 63rd. Take that, Mr. Summers!
The condescension of religion
So, that was the good news. Here's the bad news. A very interesting article in Science News about the Piraha Indians of the Amazon. They have no words for numbers or colors, no compound sentences, rarely use pronouns, etc. They don't do math at all. They tell no creation myths and don't make up stories or draw pictures. All of this is very interesting. But then the researchers throw in this tidbit of information. These people believe in spirits, "but there's no great god who created all the spirits." Um, since when is this a requirement of an "advanced" civilization? Seriously, what the hell does that mean? Is that some sort of "great truth" that they just haven't discovered yet?
Bullshit.
4:26:05 PM 
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