What Caught My Eye - Week 11

This one is going to be short and sweet. I've been sucking at keeping track this week, and sufficiently busy and burnt-out that I've not collected as much as usual.

Arts and Culture

  • The Black Hand Files:

    A few months ago, my child came in and calmly announced, "I have a friend named Black Hand. He's here right now. You can't see him."

  • William Shakespeare presents: Terminator The Second

  • Some more on John Roderick's trip to a Miley Cyrus Concert

    John Roderick explains that, contrary to his first impression, he watches the show in utter amazement, slowly understanding that Miley Cyrus is in complete control of every aspect of her career.

    The whole event was completely unironic. There was no cynicism to it. The net result was a total positivity towards the 8-10000 girls all dressed like sex workers. You realize that they are not dressing like that for the male gaze, because there are no men here. They are dressing like that for one another, for their own pleasure, and in homage to Miley, and she's dressing like that for them. And the other amazing thing was that not a single person looked at me like I was a creep. Every single girl that made eye contact with me — which was hundreds and hundreds of them — they all smiled and were like "Hi!" or "Excuse me!" I never for a moment had that feeling of "Omg, What are you doing here?" That was absent from the place.

What Caught My Eye - Week 10

Diversity, Culture, Feminism

  • "When a pipeline leaks, we don't blame the water" is a key theme of this piece by Frances Hocutt, describing how she left her love, chemsistry. This piece, and the next are from a fantastic looking magazine, Model View Culture, which looks to be filled with interesting writing.

    So, someone you know is considering leaving a STEM field and you wish she wouldn't, or you vaguely wish she felt more supported in her current position. You have opinions about the proverbial leaky pipeline. You're sad or angry that you'll be the only woman in the lab once your coworker leaves. You're frustrated that your brilliant, driven mentee quit her job and left the field. You want to get more women in STEM, so you focus your efforts on trying to recruit new women and girls. You're recognized for your outreach efforts -- and your colleague's going-away lunch takes you by surprise.

    So. What can you do?

    You can recognize that our choices to leave are rational decisions that demonstrate self-knowledge and self-respect. We have weighed whether we love the work more than we hate the context we do it in. You can accept our analysis and respect our agency, and not try to convince us that you know better or that we should have worked (even) harder. If you’re part of a majority and we are not, you can acknowledge that we've probably already worked harder than you have to get to the same place.

  • Quantify Everything: A Dream of a Feminist Data Future talks about a historical view of data, and how the definition is changing.

    “Data” has historically been a neglected byproduct of action and interaction, and looking after it has been less a priority than an accident. That data has taken on masculine and technologically essential attributes in recent years is a testament to how quickly and pervasively market semantics can work. For centuries, collecting, caretaking, curating and analyzing data has been the domain of women’s work—look at the histories of librarianship, nursing and programming.

  • TRIGGER WARNING: This is an article about the insidious spread of trigger warnings

    Trigger warnings are presented as a gesture of empathy, but the irony is they lead only to more solipsism, an over-preoccupation with one’s own feelings—much to the detriment of society as a whole. Structuring public life around the most fragile personal sensitivities will only restrict all of our horizons. Engaging with ideas involves risk, and slapping warnings on them only undermines the principle of intellectual exploration. We cannot anticipate every potential trigger—the world, like the Internet, is too large and unwieldy. But even if we could, why would we want to? Bending the world to accommodate our personal frailties does not help us overcome them.

Art and News

Just what it says, guy turns himself into a haybale

What Caught My Eye - Week 9

Diversity and Culture in Tech

  • Laura Hudson writes about The Videogame That Finally Made Me Feel Like a Human Being, which is a recent addition to the game The Last of Us.

    We don’t just need more women in videogames — we need more women who don’t fit in boxes. Left Behind isn’t remarkable just because it meets a quota. Ellie and Riley aren’t just concepts or good intentions. They’re people: fully-realized, quirky, funny, dangerous girls. Ellie isn’t there for anyone – to inspire, titillate or motivate them. Ellie there because she’s herself, and for once, that’s reason enough.

  • I’m an Engineer, not a Cheerleader

    One major problem, gender stereotypes, appears in the most mundane magazines, television programs, or music tracks. In toy stores, girls are relegated to the “pink aisle” with dolls and pretend ovens while boys wander into the “manly aisle” with train sets and toy cars. As a child, I loved to play with Legos, spending hours fitting the pieces together to build any structure I imagined. I adored dolls, but I could never find one that exactly mirrored my enthusiasm for science and engineering.

  • Kids' images of Scientists, before and after meeting one.

Science

  • As part of the investigation after the Columbia a plan was explored as to how Columbia could have been saved. Lee Hutchinson summarized the plan for Arstechnica.

    His rememberance of the memorial ceremony is touching.

Culture

  • Dirtbag Hamlet

    DIRTBAG SHAKESPEARE imagines modern remakes of Shakespearean plays with a teenage dirtbag cast. The rest is pretty self-explanatory.

  • Deer Jesus, ...

Life Goes On

The game Life Goes On, made by some good friends (and their partners!) is now available for preorder.

Try it out by playing the demo, and then pre-order it at their site, via the HumbleStore, or through Steam.

Life Goes On will launch April 16th! Visit our website to pre-order for a 25% discount! http://www.lifegoesongame.com/ Life Goes On is a comically morbid puzzle platformer game, where you send a series of dauntless medieval knights through a trap-ridden gauntlet, sacrificing them one by one to make progress.

What Caught My Eye - Week 8

A bit late. Took off Friday for a Snowshoeing trip, so I missed the Friday posting.

Culture

  • The new Little Dragon single, Klapp Klapp is an exciting direction.

As usual, I have no idea what the video has to do with the song. 

Resuscitating a Love of Space

Like many young people, I wanted to be an astronaut when I was young. Space exploration was the coolest thing imaginable, and being an astronaut was, to a young person, the only acceptable entry. That I was raised on a steady diet of space exploration science fiction also helped, of course.

When I believed that various minor health issues made space travel an impossibility for me, that particular dream died. I never completely lost touch with space, but it slowly faded into the background of my interests, rekindled on occasion by an interesting project or discovery. Unfortunately, just as NASA was neglected, as was my own love of space travel.

It's funny to me what brought back my love of space: it was these guys:

image.jpg

or more specifically, the game in which they star: Kerbal Space Program (KSP). 

KSP is a game which is still under development, but available for purchase today if you're interested in what it has so far: 

  • A Sandbox: The game gives you rocket parts, plane parts, engines, fuel, wings, lights, antennae, struts, I-beams and more. Build what you want. Blow things up. Visit other planets. Visit one of the two moons of Kerbin. Visit both moons of Kerbin. Build a speedboat, just for fun. Build a flying suspension bridge: 
Flying Suspension Bridge- it's KSP, so why not?

Flying Suspension Bridge- it's KSP, so why not?

  • A career mode: Start with only the simplest parts. Do experiments, in different places to earn science, and more parts. 

Playing KSP is a balance between fun, and literal rocket science. Blowing stuff up, and apoapsis and periapsis, retrograde and prograde, gravity turns, and delta-V. Lots of learning, but also, lots of fun. 

I didn't really realize how much I had loved air and space as a child, nor how much I had revived that love with Kerbal Space Program until we went to the national air and space museum in Washington, D.C.   

Andrea noticed it before I did, as I excitedly named almost everything I saw. When a tour guide approached, asking if we'd like some guidance, Andrea waved him off: "Apparently Matt has Wikipedia in his brain". 

The trip to the Air and Space museum was my personal highlight of our trip to D.C. I was a little sad that we didn't get a chance to visit the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, which has some of the largest artifacts. Another time, I promise myself that.