"I find that the major objection is that people think great science is done by luck. It's all a matter of luck. Well, consider Einstein. Note how many different things he did that were good. Was it all luck? Wasn't it a little too repetitive? Consider Shannon. He didn't do just information theory. Several years before, he did some other good things and some which are still locked up in the security of cryptography. He did many good things. You see again and again, that it is more than one thing from a good person. Once in a while a person does only one thing in his whole life, and we'll talk about that later, but a lot of times there is repetition. I claim that luck will not cover everything. And I will cite Pasteur who said, 'Luck favors the prepared mind.' And I think that says it the way I believe it. There is indeed an element of luck, and no, there isn't. The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not."
Because it looks weird. Seriously. There is a long list of excellent aircraft like the Long EZ and the Facetmobile that never took off because, at the end of the day, people are willing to pay extra to have something that looks like an airplane.
The largest heist of all time was in 1990[1], which I consider pretty recent. The tools they needed to pull it off (impersonating the police mainly) seem like they could still work today.
FWIW Berkeley does use Python 3 in their intro to programming class [1,2]. This is useful because if I remember correctly, Python 2 does not have things like the "nonlocal" keyword or coroutines.
> First, there is your biology. You might simply not be intelligent enough to become a great engineer.
Biology is overrated. From "You and Your Research"[1] by R.W. Hamming:
"You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, 'How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, 'You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.' I simply slunk out of the office!"
Other anecdotes lead me to believe the primary difference between those that are and those that might have been is hard work.
> You might not have the health and the endurance to work on demanding high-end projects long enough to get really good at those kinds of projects.
Bad health is a rough deal for anyone. But it is possible to succeed in the face of it. Look at Goddard[2]. There's a good argument that he didn't reach his full potential because of his health, but he still did some truly great rocket science.
> Your other obligations, like raising children, can get in the way
Rather than get in the way, I think they are often essential. I imagine it must be hard to do great things if you're personal life isn't in good shape.
There are real obstacles to "greatness", I think. Things like access to education and financial security. But I find it hard to believe that biology, health, and domestic life are enough to stop a dedicated person from performing great feats.
This isn't really sound reasoning, for reasons mentioned elsewhere and because of the following.
You need to know that the probability of acceptance is conditionally independent of the "type" of the applicant given the success of the applicant.
For example, consider the following hypothesis for the First Round data: women are more honest than men. A woman presenting a bad idea to a VC will be rejected whereas a man may be able to weasel his way into getting funding. This will make men have a lower success rate, and correspondingly women will have a higher success rate.
However, this isn't really the same thing as having an across-the-board hidden bias against women.
Not sure what that does for you, but it also seems true.