Ada Lovelace Day – A Review (by sarah)

Yesturday me and Alaric took part in the first ever Ada Lovelace Day which was a day of international blogging about women in tech who have inspired you or that you admire.

He produced two posts and I produced two:

For this blog Alaric blogged about his Aunt Barbara who pioneered the use of computers in translation.

For Web-Empire he blogged about Grace Hopper the origonator of the COBOL language.

For Salaric Craft I blogged about Mary Dixon Kies the first woman to be awarded a patent in her own right - she had invented a weaving techniques for straw hats.

And last but in my mind not least I blogged about Monica Grady on my Astronomy blog.

There were also lots of fun things happening yesturday like Ada appearing at the Science Museum 🙂

There has even been a webcomic produced for the event 🙂

However, there are some sinister things that I came across whilst trying to encourage my friends to take part in this event - namely that my male friends were far more enthusiastic and my female compatriots are all disillusioned with the world of science and technology.

This is a subject on which I have posted before and I have several drafts I am working on - about glass ceilings that I really hadn't thought were there until I hit them.

But there is another issue - one friend after doing her PhD with a bad supervisor felt that women in science were bitches and this I have to say is something I personally have come across. My biggest hinderance wasn't the letcherous old guy who thought women should be at home but rather other women who had it in their heads that in order for them to help you, you had to be twice as good as the men/boys around you.

Help offered freely to them was denied and an active discuoragement took place - I don't know if this was being done in a 'kind' way with the idea that women have to be tough to survive the field or what.

But like the early feminists found - the biggest barrier to women succeeding does appear to be other women.

This is a sad sad state of affairs and one I hoped was unique to my own experiences. It was so refreshing for me when I went to the Natural History Museums Mineralogy department to find that they just went out of their way to enable everyone reguardless of gender, dissability or anything else that could act as a barrier.

I have seen and am seeing several friends leaving the world of sciecne that they worked so hard to get into becuase they feel so deflated with all of this. In some ways this is probably a bigger issue than getting girls interested in the first place - how do we retain them within the science and tech sectors?

The other thing I didn't appreciate until I tried to do stuff in the 'coporate' world was just how much stupid prejudice still exists. I am in a heavily male subject but as the head of UCL's earth science's himself said to me - this is changing - they did a drive (around the time I was choosing what to do at university) to get women into earth scientists. And slowely the girls from that drive are filtering in to post docs and he hopes with eventually end up in the facalty staff.

My year was the first 50:50 split year ever and this trend is following the year as it progresses. So I am hopeful that things can change with time as long as we can stem this hemorrage of females leaving.

I could write reams and reams on this and I probably will but right now I need to go and read up on lunar mineralogy for tomorrow!

I just thought this was an issue I should raise.

Join me blogging for Ada Lovelace Day (by sarah)

Tuesday the 24th of March is Ada Lovelace Day - this is a day of blogging about women in Technology, ones who have inspired you or that you admire.

Ada Lovelace is known as the first computer programmer in history though she didn't actually have a computer to run them on. She made them all from the description of Babbage's machine which he never finished.

She also saw far more potential in the machine than even he did and was well ahead of her time. Now I am posting this becuase a) we are obviously going to be doing write ups on this for this blog, my astronomy blog and web-empires blog - I'm not sure I can find relevent technology craft/art and cooking cross overs in time for the Salaric blogs but I will try. b) I'm hoping that alot of you lovely people will take up this challenge - from a personal point of veiw it would be nice to see the science side of technology and not just computing to be recognised - so geologists, chemists and astrophysists pull your fingers out, oh and anyone else who wants to off course! c) this will raise the profile of women in technology so that hopefully young women choosing careers paths and those debating weather to rejoin after a the whole 'career break'/having baby/looking after sick people can see that they are not alone and that both currently and in the past there female role models without whom medical advancements and the like may never have been made. (Or at least taken twice as long as there is an idea that you just need a saturation point for idea nucleation sort of thing).

I contacted the organiser and asked what they ment by technology and they said it is perpusfully broad and would include science etc... 🙂

There is a pledge page where you can add yourself to the list of people who will blog. You can follow it on twitter and it has a face book presance. There is also a mailing list and to find tweets about it on twitter its designation is #ALD09.

I am probably far to excited about this and I think you will all be suprised by the one we have on here 🙂

So you lot lets get writing 🙂

The Weather’s Impact (by sarah)

I have been musing on things to do with financial moderlling - why a geologist is dwelling on these things is only obvious to me! Systems are systems and then I look at moderling and think that it all pretty much the same reguardless of what your moderlling as we all exist within the same set of physical laws.

So here are my mad ramblings on the subject of weather and the financial world - it is a topic that I will investigate furthure if I get a chance - if anyone knows anything that would be usefull to know about this then please let me know!

Of Blizzards and Floods (by sarah)

Last night saw a blizzard, this was proper low visibility, swerlling winds the lot. So I got Al up early this morning to go and take photographs of the village.

We didn't get far not becuase it was impassable though I was up to my knees in some places - no what we had failed to factor in was meeting people who talk to you!

Still we found out some interesting things about last time it was like this 1963 (I think don't quote me on that!) and how the schools hadn't closed etc... The village school is still closed - yesturday it was becuase the snow might fall off the roofs and hit the kids - sigh.

But it turns out the village has several farmers with snow ploughs who have been doing their community duty and clearing the roads! Gloucestershire is out of salt so we haven't had salt bin refills. One of ours has also been 'relocated' which is always interesting.

Last night I was a little concerned about the 'pools' of melt water me and dad abserved - these were icing over at the time but today whilst out on our walk we noticed that once the sun was up it was thawing fast and there is a lot of water locked up in that snow.

I have cleared our drain out and things and tried not to panic when one of the old ladies from the village told us of the dams they built last time to stop it flooding down the valley as it melted. By the time we got back to the bakery the road leading down was already resembling a small stream.

Not that I'm paranoid about flooding these days :/

I will try and add some photos later.

Beatrix Potter (by sarah)

Saturday night we got out Miss Potter a film about who the Beatrix Potter books got published and about her life. This was actually really interesting - especially for me as I feel that some of the children's stories I have written are the modern day equivolent of Peter Rabbit and the rest. Well my characters are called Ester Rabbit and Christina Cluckelsworth and so on. But mine live in the now as did her creations - the characters need to be contempory and in contempory language.

Anyway I digress - Jean has the entire works and we tend to read them alot - we are also near Gloucester which obviously makes a big thing out of the Tailor of Gloucesterwith Beatrix Potter mice everywhere etc...

What I had not realised was that she had taken an active role in trying to preserve the country side and mantain the farms - I feel she was a very far sighted women in many respects - I now a an itch to know more especially as Sunday we went to the World of Beatrix Potter - Jean is still running around with her rabbit ears on she liked the place so much!

Unfortunatly she did throw up on route so Lynne kindly bought her some cloths to wear - this included a Peter Rabbit T-shirt which we have had to crow bar Jean out off for a wash! The exhibition was good but I dont think I'd have gone if I hadnt of had a three year old 🙂

Al did notice a few quiet big disgrepencies between the infor at the exhibition and the film - we have not yet investigated to find out which one is correct. I was intreged to find that Beatrix Potter had really wanted to be of a science/art bent and had applied to do botanical art - I think if I'd been born into her society with the same sort of family rank I'd have been very similar to be honest.

The funniest thing I managed was to announce that I thought the film Beatrix was like Bridget Jones - to which I got a chorus of 'well it is the same actress' - I have not seen the Bridget Jones films I was just running from an extract I had read (but I probably saw trailers somewhere along the line so can not claim complete innocence) - sigh - this always happens to me :/

I took alot of pictures of this so hopefully they will becoming soon 🙂