Night off

[rolanni]

So the power went down at 4:45 last night, just when I was starting to fill in the DMCA form because Yet Another person thinks it’s Perfectly OK to steal from us.  I was in a foul mood, because, well, people stealing from us — and instead of writing, I’d be form-filling, and it’s not like I have enough time in the day to write anyway. Then the power went off and that was Just. . .Ducky.

Which, as it turned out, it was.  Steve hooked up the reading lamp in the living room to the Big Green Battery and we read together on the sofa for the next five hours.  Very pleasant and cozy.  We should do this more often.  Possibly without requiring the destruction of innocent utility poles as a prompt.

In other news — The Catechism of Cliche — or at least parts of it.  Go, read, enjoy.  Then get thee to the Dalkey Archive Press and purchase for your own The Best of Myles, which collects all the “Cruiskeen Lawn” columns from the Irish Times, giving you access not only to the Catechism, but to the sordid details of the Ventriloquists War, news of The Brother, and all the various schemes launched by Myles na Gopaleen, the Da, to make money.

Also highly recommended are the na Gopaleen novels The Third Policeman and At Swim-Two-Birds.  The former is a science fiction novel disguised as a literary novel.  The latter is a writer’s novel, detailing the adventures of  a young, layabout writer, whose characters, fed up with his sloth and his bad treatment, turn on him.  Both are very, very funny.

And now — no, wait!  Everybody saw the article about the “Rosie computers” during the war, right?  Here, in case you missed it — worth a read.

And now I better get some coffee and get on the road.

Originally published at Sharon Lee, Writer. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[keristor.livejournal.com]

In Arthur C. Clarke's novel "Prelude to Space", written in 1947 but not published until 1953, he mentions rooms of "women computers". To me reading it in the 1960s that was already an odd phrase but I understood what was meant because I was familiar with the concept that people (and especially women) used to do that sort of calculation by hand (as was Clarke: his short story "Into The Comet" (1960) has the crew of a spaceship doing orbital calculations using abaci (abacuses?) after the computer breaks down). Something I didn't know at the time, however, was why "especially women", I had a sort of idea that women were perhaps better than men at doing such maths.

I don't know, perhaps in Britain we were more aware of the work done by women during the War at places like Bletchley Park, but by the 60s it didn't seem to be much of a secret here that women had done that sort of thing and been involved with the early electronic computers. Certainly as computer operators (who in some places were also the programmers) most of the pictures I saw of computers had women using them; that may have been as publicity, of course, but I certainly got the impression that they were involved.

Perhaps that era dropped out of sight later...

Go back to 1877

[(Anonymous)]

There were 'women computers' at Harvard Observatory. The Director (?) - Pickering - hired them to work on the Draper data. The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (traces the correlation between a star's color and its temperature and size), amongst other things, would be completely unknown but for these ladies. Annie Jump Cannon is probably the most famous but Henrietta Leavitt gives her a run for her money. There's more at

http://www.womanastronomer.com/harvard_computers.htm

but searching on Pickering, Leavitt or Jump Cannon will get you there.

Lauretta@ConstellationBooks
PS Apologies for being a geek - but once a female astronomer, always a female astronomer.

Re: Go back to 1877

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Never apologise for being a geek! Be proud of it! Particularly in this sort of thing.

I knew that there were women doing such things earlier, I hadn't however heard them referred to as 'computers'. Thanks for the information and the link. I love the bit where "the director of Harvard Observatory became disgruntled with the sloppy work of his male assistant, saying his housekeeper could do better" and proved it...

So in fact my assumption that women were better at it than men wasn't so far off the mark. By reports they seem to have been more diligent and accurate (possibly the men resented the 'boring' work).

Re: Go back to 1877

[magda-vogelsang.livejournal.com]

When I was taking a computer programming class back in the mid 80s, the teacher said that as a general rule men wrote code faster, but code written by women had fewer bugs, and handled bad input better.

Re: Go back to 1877

[keristor.livejournal.com]

As a (male) programmer myself, and one involved in the testing of code, that fits my experience as well. Men tend to "make it work" as fast as possible (and bodge things until they do work) whereas women tend to spend longer thinking about it and how things might go wrong ("defensive programming"). Women also tend to prefer designs which are more 'elegant' (in the sense mathematicians use it) rather than a mass of 'spaghetti' code.

Obviously not universally true (I tend more to the 'elegant' side myself, and I've known women who wrote inscrutable messes) but as a general tendency I think it's fair.

(And back in the days when we used coding sheets which were then typed up onto tape or cards women had a lot better success rate than men -- their handwriting could be understood! You don't want to see my handwriting *g*...)

Unfortunately many bosses see "lines of code" as a statistic and ignore things like testability, robustness, and maintainability in favour of quantity, because that's the only quantifiable aspect they see. This can then disadvantage those who write slower but more thoroughly.

[magda-vogelsang.livejournal.com]

Saw this comic today, and it made me think of you and your day job.
http://www.savagechickens.com/?p=5000

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Printed out and put it on the office door.

[magda-vogelsang.livejournal.com]

I suspected it would strike a chord. :-)

Hey, Sharon, thank you!

[(Anonymous)]

I meant to say Thank you earlier...that's a cool article on the
'Rosies.' I didn't know they had a documentary.

And then I got sidetracked on how early women got called computers...heh.
Lauretta

[attilathepbnun.livejournal.com]

Poor you ...*offers coffee and tasty pastries*

Rosie...

[meheyjude.livejournal.com]

Saw the article - made a point of adding the documentary to my Netflix queue.

[isabellag.livejournal.com]

I want more info on DMCA & somebody trying to steal from you - what's all that about, hmmm?

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Writers are stolen from with depressingly and increasing frequency. Ebooks make this very easy. Some people are simply misguided. Most (IMHO) are, um, scumbags. This latest nice person is selling on Ebay Kindles pre-loaded with -- was it 6,000 novels? I think it was 6,000. So that the person buying the Kindle wouldn't have to go to the trouble of actually tracking down things to read. As if all things to read were interchangeable. But I digress.

Anyhow he, the vendor, claims to be the "copyright holder or resale agent" of all those books. And some of them are ours, of which he is most certainly NOT the copyright holder and if he's a "resale agent", then damnitohell, I want my royalties.

And Ebay of course, can't police everything that people sell within its precints. And the law puts the burden of proof in the instance of pirated intellectual property on the IP owner. So, if I want this guy to stop selling our books illegally, on Ebay, this week, then I have to file a DMCA notice. For each infringed work.

I need a secretary.

Or possibly a Legal Department.

[isabellag.livejournal.com]

Or a big, big stick. How dispicable.

[isabellag.livejournal.com]

Sorry. That should be 'despicable'. Or 'disgusting'.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

"I need a secretary. Or possibly a Legal Department."

Or a gang of 'boys' to go round and beat the bejaysus out of the idiot? *g*

Of course, it would be quite nice if he were putting the books on the Kindles and paying you royalties up front. But that's not likely to happen.

(I have seen those offers of "large number of books" with e-readers, they hold no interest for me because few of them are books I'd want to read. Now if they said "We'll load a hundred books of your choice" on there it might be an incentive, but some random "bestseller" or "classics" not.)

DMCA Notices

[claire774.livejournal.com]

Could your secretary or legal department work from home? Anybody out there attorney or legal secretary. Perhaps retired. Want to do some pro bono work? Contact Sharon.
Reward: points in heaven.
C.