In 2019, something I did just happened. Perhaps it was the years spent idolizing men in literature, or maybe it was my intersectional feminist view from videogames leaking into my reading list, but I couldn’t as quickly buy books by white men. Something in me subtly gave, and it was as if I’d hit my likely lifetime quota. To preface this, I have a Literature BA with a focus on Literary Theory. I am that much of a bibliophile. I can’t sleep without reading at least 50 pages of something or other. My dream home overflows with books. This obsession…
Last night, I logged into twitter to notice my account had been suspended. Why? Because I advocated damaging and destroying a building owned by the Sultan of Brunei in a central London protest being held over the enacting of laws making the punishment for being an LGBTQ+ person in Brunei a slow, painful, public, barbaric death. The royal family of Brunei has done this as a political move, and it is being argued, that it is being done to clean up their reputation. …
Ada Lovelace invented the idea of programming in the mid 1800’s and started a revolution in the process. Her bold mathematical ideas lead the way for early innovations in computational mathematics. In 1880, she joined Columbia University as the first women to lead the Mathematics faculty. While there, she supervised the work of Herman Hollerit and collaborated with him on the creation of early punch card commuting. Ada died surrounded by her loving family of old age in 1905 in upstate New York.
In the 1940’s, a “computer” was what you called a person who did mathematical calculations for a…
Academia as a Feminist in STEM Part 2
I’m three years into my academic career as a permanent lecturer and I am anxiety. After five years of working as an Adjunct Professor, I thought once I got this far, it would be easier. Somehow, I believed that not worrying if I had a job constantly would stop the dread spreading through me each term. However, I was mistaken. I think now I am seeing academia clearly for the first time. Fear is an inherit trait within this system.
Over the next several months, I am expecting serious upheaval and change…
Over the last years I have remained silent about my job and my experiences in STEM as a women who struggles with disability. My job has a policy which forbids me to speak about the internal workings of the school on social media.
When hired, the first thing the department asked me to leverage my following to promote it as a welcoming place for women. When I authored a follow up post months later more speculative in nature, my views meet hostility. Neither of these posts ran against the terms of my employment. They discussed my subjective feelings, not the…
Hey liberal friends I need you to put the latte down and take 2 minutes before you pick your kids up and take a beat. I know your life is busy and stressful. However, if we keep trundling down this path, we are headed to a critical junction. We need your help to stop this situation before we end up in a global war. In order to do that, we need to crib you up on social media trolling and how it has evolved to work over the last couple of years in the geopolitical landscape.
I know what you’re…
Dear Machine Learning,
You know I have been talking about you. You would like me to stop. You say it’s hurting your new relationships. I’m sorry but I just don’t care. The people you are around deserve to know exactly what you are capable of doing.
When we met, I was really excited. You promised me answers to problems I’d been wrestling with for years. I has so many questions for you. How can I make music with my body? How can I play my drawings? Can you help me get rid of the noise ruining my interactions and experiences?
…
Ok so where was I? Yes! I remember. I was in college. While I was focusing on my BA, I had been doing a cable access TV show called Corrosive Material.
On this channel I showed really great video art from my friends, some of whom were local and some of whom I’d met online. Given this was 1995, this was more surprising than you might think.
Also, I’d started doing a audio visual sensory experience event in town. …
Part One
Last night I spent 3 hours blissfully designing in an uninterrupted flow. It reminded me just how much I love my escape valve into the arts from CS and Engineering. As of late, my exhaustion with some of the nastier parts of my field have left me asking why I do this again. This has sparked me thinking about the ping pong relationship I have with the sciences.
Sadly, the tales in this series will get more and more depressing and noxious as I go. These posts are going to be dark. I’m not going to sugar coat the reality…
Recently, I was suckered into watching the Hobbit with my niece. Warning now, this post is kind of hilarious, sad and hopeful all at once so here it goes. I’ve always been a fan of the Elves in his books but something resonated with me more this time than other times I’ve read his books and watched the films.
It’s that when Tolkien created the Elves, in many ways he was creating an archetype for the people in our culture no one really has good name for. You find us in every walk of life. We’re thoughtful, empathetic, socially motivated…
