Calling all those in the IT, tech, enginering, or the sciences? How many are there here?

[Locut0s]

Just curious. I love science, computers, engineering, and most math based fields. But politically it can be lonely. It seems to me there aren't many on the left in these fields, or at least not many who are vocal.

[Anakin Skywalker]

1. Joe the Plumber

Sanitation Scientist! That's his title.

[Eric J in MN]

2. Me. (NT)

NT

[ddeclue]

3. Proud lefty, aerospace engineer, software engineer and licensed pilot!

:D

:patriot:

:kick:

Georgia Tech, Class of 89

[Manifestor_of_Light]

4. Are you guys all rambling wrecks, like the song says??

And a helluvan engineer???

:rofl:

[ddeclue]

9. Depends on which car I'm driving..

the old one probably qualifies but not the new one.

:D

I'm a Ramblin Wreck from Georgia Tech and a Helluva an Engineer
A Helluva Helluva Helluva Helluva Helluvan Engineer
Like All the Jolly Good Fellow I Drink My Whiskey Clear
I'm a Ramblin Wreck from Georgia Tech and a Helluva an Engineer

sexist lyrics warning for Verse Two:

Oh if I had a daughter sir I'd dress her in White and Gold
And put her on the campus to cheer the brave and bold
But if I had a son sir I'd tell you what he'd do
We would yell to hell with Georgia like his daddy used to do.

alchohlic lyric warning for Verse Three:

Of I wish I had a barrel of rum and sugar three thousand pounds
a college bell to put it in and a clapper to stir it round
I'd drink to all the good fellows who come from far and near
cause I'm a Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech and a helluvan Engineer!

or something to that effect...

The actual alma mater goes Oh Sons of Tech (yes sexist) arise behold...

and after that we in the band would make up our own damned lyrics because we couldn't remember the real ones... ours went something like "the falling of my GPA from 3.4 to 2.6 I got a 1.5 today, the shaft I got in Calculus the ream I got in Physics..." etc.

Our lyrics were funnier than the real ones.

:D

[eridani]

53. I like MIT's version better

http://stuff.mit.edu/people/mrbonk/engineers.html

[MissB]

5. Me.

[TahitiNut]

6. Me ... but retired.

:shrug:

[Swamp Rat]

7. She blinded me with sciii-ence!

SCIENCE! :D

[ddeclue]

10. All my tubes and wires and careful notes...she's tidied up and I can't find anything!

[Swamp Rat]

17. I can smell her chemicals...

*snif snif - snif snif - snifff*

[hootinholler]

18. LOL!

:hi:

Welcome back?

-Hoot

[Swamp Rat]

21. hoot!

:hi: :hug:

[hootinholler]

44. THat's awesome my friend. n/t

[mth44sc]

8. Say what?

n/t

[Ilsa]

11. Me. Nurse. Not practicing at the moment. nt

[RagAss]

12. Me too...lefty and a Buddhist

[NYC_SKP]

13. One divided by phi = 1 / 1.6180339 = .6180339

If you appreciate this proportion, you're my kind of geek.

:hi:

[ddeclue]

14. An architorturist?

:P

[NYC_SKP]

20. Right-e-o!, our B League college team was called the Arrrghitects!

We used to play the Engineering School teams.

Beers at every base.

Over to McSorleys after the game.

The 3rd Ave El is now gone, and CBGB's is gone too (just off the lower left of pic)

[CakeGrrl]

15. Present! n/t

[hootinholler]

16. Hoot the old school programmer

Can turn the knob on Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine to the era of paper tape, drum memory, front panel switches that do stuff and blinken lights. yadda yadda yadda.

-Hoot

[Swamp Rat]

22. dupe

[Swamp Rat]

23. experimenting with ext4 at the moment

:D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4

[hootinholler]

43. My condolences

:P

-Hoot

[Locut0s]

60. I could see that of use in an HD media server!

[Swamp Rat]

77. "Online defragmentation

There are a number of proposals for an online defragmenter, but that support is not yet included in the mainline kernel. Even with the various techniques used to avoid fragmentation, a long lived file system does tend to become fragmented over time. Ext4 will have a tool which can defragment individual files or entire file systems."

Should be interesting to see what is developed.


... fooling around with HFS+ and OS X 10.6 at the moment. :D

[boppers]

69. Scary truth:

I'm a programmer who got my start on paper tape....

...In 1986.

We'd write up on modern (for the time) desktops, and then punch the tapes for production use, since the older boxen didn't have any of that crazy magnetic storage technology.

[demwing]

19. Here, ready for duty./nt

[nuxvomica]

24. I'm in a two-DBA shop and we're both very liberal

There are two others we work with regularly and I know one is liberal but I don't know anything about the other. I work with a lot of programmers who are half liberals, half congenial conservatives but the more outspoken politically are the libertarians. I know two in particular, one is reasonable, the other isn't. Immediate management layer is liberal. Next level is conservative. The level above that, liberal -- I've run into this high level manager outside of work on two occasions: screenings of "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "Loose Change".
Now the systems people, I swear they're a bunch of socialists. Seriously.

[Juche]

25. There are tons of people on the left in STEM fields in my experience

I have a degree in a scientific field. Most people I know who have educations or jobs in STEM (science, technology, engineering & math) fields are either leftist liberals or if they are conservatives they are fairly rational libertarian types, not braindead misinformed wingnuts.



http://politicalwire.com/archives/2009/07/09/most_scientists_support_democrats.html

Most Scientists Support Democrats

A new Pew Research report on American attitudes toward science finds that 55% of scientists identify as Democrats, while 32% identify as independents and just 6% say they are Republicans. When the leanings of independents are considered, fully 81% identify as Democrats or lean to the Democratic Party, compared with 12% who either identify as Republicans or lean toward the GOP.




People with backgrounds in science are not going to support Sarah Palin, idiots in their 70s who are on medicare who oppose socialism, creationism or the moron majority.

[alarimer]

26. I think that education tends to make people more liberal.

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.

[Juche]

27. Somewhat

People who have very little (less than high school) or tons of education (post graduate) tend to lean dem. Everyone in between (high school, some college, college) are pretty much even between the 2 parties.

[kimmylavin]

28. Former Database Programmer/IT Consultant

Now I work with non-linear film editing software.
Perfect merging of art and software - makes me very happy! :hi:

[LynzM]

29. Me, and my husband.

He's an electrical engineer, and I'm a database programmer, with some EE and math background. :)

:hi:

[nilram]

30. gee, most all the geeks in the shop I was laid off from were liberal

Will code Java for, um, Java.

[girl gone mad]

31. What do you mean??

98% of the scientists I know are liberals.

[Name removed]

32. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[rucky]

33. IT here. (unemployed)

my last supervisor was a dem. Other than that, pretty apolitical bunch until I friended a few on Facebook after the company closed down. I used to hang around with the marketing department - the only lefties you'll find in the financial services world.

[HughMoran]

34. Proud lefty engineer jack of all trades

I can't get enough of it - electrical, mechanical, digital control, software - heck, I even like talking about chemistry with chemists.

[NutmegYankee]

50. Engineer here!

nt

[Control-Z]

35. computer geeks

tend to be liberal/progressive, I have found.

[jberryhill]

36. What's Nu? C Over Lamda, of Course!

I watched Lassie with great frequency, because it was a Furrier series.

[tex-wyo-dem]

37. Here!

MSEE...been working in microekectonics field for years now.

[t0dd]

38. Me. Computer Science. nt

[IDemo]

39. Electronics tech

[inna]

40. actually, you're 180 degrees off, as far as this post of yours is concerned.

science, etc., is absolutely dominated by the left/progressives.

[BlooInBloo]

65. "actually, you're pi radians off"...

Typo corrected. You're welcome.

:P

[wroberts189]

41. We all changed jobs. H1B killed us off. nt

[bridgit]

42. lighting tech

[DLnyc]

45. There are three kinds of mathematicians:

Those that can count and those that can't.

If you laughed at that, you might be in the same field as me.

Also:

A mathematician, a physicist and a statistician go hunting. They see a bear on the other side of the river and the mathematician aims, fires and hits two feet to the left of the bear. The physicist aims, fires and hits two feet to the right of the bear. The statistician jumps up and shouts, "We got him!"

[bridgit]

48. hahahaha, that's phunny!

:rofl:

[eridani]

55. A mathematician, a scientist, and engineer and a computer programmer were asked

--to prove or disprove the theorem that all odd numbers are prime.

Mathematician: 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is not prime. Therefore the theroem is false.

Scientist: 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is not prime, but that could be an experimental error. 11 is prime, 13 is prime--well, that's quite a few data points. The theorem may be true, but more research is needed.

Engineer: If that were true, it would certainly be convenient. 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime, 11 is prime, 13 is prime, 15 is prime, 17 is prime. The theorem is true for all practical purposes.

Programmer: The only way to know is to write a program that can examine large numbers of possibilities quickly--here's the printout. 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 7 is prime, 7 is prime, 7 is prime, 7 is prime, 7 is prime, 7 is prime,-----

[armyowalgreens]

67. Why did the computer scientist die in the shower?

Because he read the instructions on the shampoo bottle, “Lather, rinse, repeat.”

[BlooInBloo]

70. A Polish mathematician and a Hungarian mathematician were passengers a 3-person plane...

On their way to a conference in Prague. Halfway, the pilot keels over with a heart attack - dead.

The Polish mathematician takes the helm, and is doing ok for awhile. Then they hit inclement weather - they decide they can't fly through it, so the Polish mathematician tries to land. He succeeds, but it's a very hard landing - landing gear breaking and everything.

They get out of the plane, and make sure they're both alright. Then the Hungarian mathematician launches into the Polish mathematician - yelling at him for landing so poorly.

The Polish mathematician responds: "What do you expect? I am but simple Pole, in complex plane!"


Delivery aid: Be a spaz Hungarian mathematician with a tenuous grasp of the English language.

[yowzayowzayowza]

46. Present.

Computer geek circa TRS80 Model II.

[drm604]

47. IT guy here.

Currently self-employed, but my experience in the past has been that my coworkers were are mostly left or moderate, with a few tighty righties here and there.

Maybe it's geographical. I'm in the Philly area.

[ThoughtCriminal]

49. Programming for over 28 years

If anything, there are few scientists on the right:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/10/only-six-percent-of-scien_n_229382.html

[Manifestor_of_Light]

51. YO, sorta.

I have a B.A. in pre-med. Never used it.

My sweetie has a BS in math/physics, Oklahoma Aggie. He started in EE and got bored.
MS in physics from Tulsa.

And he's FABULOUS at changing light bulbs! And explaining short-cycling in the AC to me. And motion detecting lights. And telling me all about relativity.

Engineers need love too. :D
I do my part. :D

[Duppers]

52. WTF?!! Most Scientists Politically Liberal

Most Scientists Politically Liberal - Reality Must Have a Liberal Bias

From a Pew poll:

Only 9% of the scientists, meanwhile, consider themselves conservative, while fewer still (6%) identified themselves as Republicans. It's just speculation, but the party's hostility towards the basics of modern biology, global warming, and evidence-based reasoning may have something to do with this.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/141264/most_scientists_politically_liberal_%28reality_must_have_a_liberal_bias%29/

[Matariki]

54. Really. I'd be surprised if there were any republicans at all at the tech firm i work at.

although we are a very blue state - they might just be quiet about it if they are.

[SemiCharmedQuark]

56. Scientists vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Jonathan Alter was just talking about this today.

[Ohio Joe]

57. Programmer here

20+ years on mainframe :D

[eridani]

Retired chemist here

Techies may not be what many of us on the left consider really left, but only 6% are Repubs.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/10/only-six-percent-of-scien_n_229382.html

Only six percent of America's scientists identify themselves as Republicans; fifty-five percent call themselves Democrats. By comparison, 23 percent of the overall public considers itself Republican, while 35 percent say they're Democrats.

The ideological discrepancies were similar. Nine percent of scientists said they were "conservative" while 52 percent described themselves as "liberal," and 14 percent "very liberal." The corresponding figures for the general public were 37, 20 and 5 percent.

Among the general public, moderates and independents ranked higher than any party or ideology. But among scientists, there were considerably more Democrats (55%) than independents (32%) and Republicans (6%) put together. There were also more liberals (52%) than moderates (35%) and conservatives (9%) combined.

[Maru Kitteh]

58. Medical science here.

[Indenturedebtor]

59. I work in healthcare IT in Arizona and most of my office is lefty

;) We're far from outnumbered in this field. Most of the college educated people in this country are lefties.

[lysosome]

61. Most scientists are left leaning...

But there are right leaners in the NDRA. Yes, the national death ray association.
You will get my death beam when you brush my cold disintegrated fingers off it.

[TransitJohn]

62. Geologist here!

:hi:

[BlooInBloo]

63. Mathematical programmer here. Some think I'm vocal.

:P

[armyowalgreens]

64. I'm a tech nerd. It isn't my major. All of my friends are chemistry, bio, or engineering majors

And most of them are extremely liberal.

[Locut0s]

66. To clarify my point....

The connection between higher education and liberalism is well documented and not something I'm arguing against. I speak only from limited personal experience. It's just that sadly the majority of the self professed "geeks" I've met in real life have usually turned out to be rather highly aggressive, often narrow minded or cold, and fairly conservative. I don't doubt that the majority of people working in the sciences ARE liberal, I just don't have much personal experience with this.

Perhaps it has something to do with the fields I'm most interested in, Mathematics and Physics. Perhaps this is a cultural thing as well, Canadian here.

[BlooInBloo]

68. Almost all of the mathematicians and physicists I know are at least reasonably liberal...

(approx 100 and 50, respectively)

[lostnfound]

71. Engineer by training.,

I've had fun with finite element analysis, fatigue testing, polymer processes..does that count?

[ProgressiveProfessor]

72. Most techies are pragmatic and not particularly political.

I teach geek stuff, and there are few political side discussions in class. Very very few are religious, with the most identifiable group being muslims.

[reflection]

73. mechanical engineer reporting for duty, sir

:hi:

[MindPilot]

74. IT guy

unemployed right now but most of my coworkers were at least Democrats if not full tilt lefties.

[jtrockville]

75. DU'er and activist who's a software developer, math background.

[MadMaddie]

76. Hi I am an IT Project Manager and I thoroughly enjoy

hearding the (cats) devs and dbas in the correct direction (my plan and my schedule)!!:woohoo:

[Odin2005]

78. I'm working on a biotechnology degree, as in GMO stuff...

So, lets just say that the technophobes don't like me very much...