Ada Lovelace Day

[jinian]

Ada Lovelace Day recognizes women in technology. (I wonder if the reason men don't need male role models isn't because there's no shortage of them, personally.)

I haven't seen her on my friends list yet, so please recognize the technological awesomeness of Rear Admiral Grace Brewster Murray Hopper, discoverer of the first insect "bug" in a computer and legendary balancer of checkbooks in octal (oops). Wim and I determined that to be a memorable scientist I ought to come up with something quirkily distinctive to do in lectures -- he remembered that Hopper used to pass out 1-foot lengths of wire to represent nanoseconds, and of course Sewall Wright and the guinea pig erasure are one of my favorite stories/legends/controversies.

I love that there is a ship named after her!

Comments

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

Maybe you can pass out trilobites?

In honor of Ada Lovelace (not really, I didn't read about the day til I got home), I dusted off my very very rusty DOS skills and figured out how to get a program we usually run on individual harddrives to run on the (shared and backed up) server.

[cantkeepsilent.livejournal.com]

Beyond the fact that men have to put up with infinitely less shit in tech, I don't have a male role model because he would have to be cooler than Admiral Hopper. I had the honor of meeting her a few decades back, and what doesn't come across in these articles is how approachable she was (especially considering that she was a flag officer in the Navy and one of the foundational characters in the history of digital computing) and how dedicated she was to getting kids into science and engineering.