I may be unconventional, or even silly, but neither of those things have ever stopped me before. I'll be away from all computers this fine Wednesday night, but I want to draw attention to a yearly event, and my contribution to the whole thing.
The subject of my essay this year is Radioactive Women & Lise Meitner.
Follow the glow below the fold.
Meitner co-discovered nuclear fission while exiled in Sweden, along with her nephew Otto Frisch, via correspondence with Otto Hahn in Nazi Germany. (I hope the 'Otto' tip jar works.)
From my own essay:
In the 21st Century, women fill many more jobs as scientists than have ever done before – like schoolteachers, these jobs require high degrees of training, pay on the low end of salary schedules, take enormous sacrifices of time and energy, and suffer from capricious funding. Economic forces after WWII brought educated women into workforces throughout America and Europe, and even in Asia and India after awhile.
The old "Man’s World" institutions retreated here and there, but were never defeated. The days of one-in-a-hundred-million geniuses like Emilie du Châtelet, Madame Curie, or Lise Meitner standing in the back of the hall at the sufferance of mighty males — as if these women were radioactive — may be memories, but they are all-too-recent memories.
This is the second year of Ada Lovelace Day a worldwide blogfest which honors women in Science and Technology.
From the organization's website:
The first Ada Lovelace Day was held on 24th march 2009 and was a huge success. It attracted nearly 2000 signatories to the pledge and 2000 more people who signed up on Facebook. Over 1200 people added their post URL to the Ada Lovelace Day 2009 mash-up. The day itself was covered by BBC News Channel, BBC.co.uk, Radio 5 Live, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Metro, Computer Weekly, and VNUnet ...
So who is Ada? The name is used for a computer language set up for so-called Artificial Intelligence, but:
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was born on 10th December 1815, the only child of Lord Byron and his wife, Annabella. Born Augusta Ada Byron, but now known simply as Ada Lovelace, she wrote the world’s first computer programmes for the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose machine that Charles Babbage had invented ... she translated Luigi Menabrea’s memoir on Babbage’s Analytical Engine, appending notes that included a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the machine – the first computer programme ... the very first description of a computer and of software.
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