It was the fourth Ada Lovelace Day on Tuesday this week (juuuust missed posting on the day), celebrating women’s achievements in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) fields. Did you go to any Ada Lovelace Day events this year? Tell us about it if you did.
Pax Dickinson, whose employment as CTO at Business Insider was abruptly terminated when the board’s attention was drawn to some of his bigoted jackass tweets and the potential liability risk they could present to the company, had an interview in nymag entitled Pax Dickinson on His Regrets, the Media ‘Witch Hunt,’ and What Women Need to Understand About Men (so not doubling down in any way at all) where Pax shares his fear that “turning [tech] into a politically correct wasteland” will take away “the freewheeling nature of [tech that] leads to innovation [which is] really important to this country and to the world”.
Matt Yglesias calls bullshit…
Info on certain last minute Coalition announcements: the now-rescinded opt-out Internet filter and the very much not-rescinded proposal to investigate “increasingly ridiculous research grants” by the Australian Research Council
This week I turned 50. Various nice people are doing nice things for me, which is nice.
If you too would like to do something that will make me feel warm and fuzzy …
A short while ago Anita Sarkeesian published another video to her Feminist Frequency YouTube channel. Within an hour it was taken down by YouTube because it had been flagged as containing objectionable content. Feminist Frequency appealed the takedown, and it was quickly restored. Good on YouTube for restoring the video so quickly, but why doesn’t YouTube have a better mechanism for immunising known target accounts against vexatious complaints?
Last week’s news of plans to clear up humanity’s space-junk, aka orbital debris, currently cluttering up Low Earth Orbit, alarmed quite a few folks. In better space news, the many non-junk bits and bobs we’ve got floating around up there are busy gathering data so that we can learn more about our planetary and stellar neighbours.
We seem to have lost the last few days of posts/comments, at least for the moment (thus the choice of ‘meh’ image to accompany this post). So if something you said recently is still moving you, by all means repeat it here.
Fun and games with a Nook.
Here she is bonding with her Dad over the Christmas break by doing a little gadget construction. Bonding with your daughters doing electronics, woodwork, mechanics or baking: A very feminist thing to do over the holidays and there should be a lot more of it.
My biggest problem with transhumanism as a movement is it seems to be largely about the extremes of techno-neepery on the part of a lot of IT and engineering nerds. Now, that would be fine, except IT and engineering nerdery share a couple of rather crucial traits which make them, and the resulting transhumanist movement, somewhat dodgy.
Hoyden About Town 