Yesterday was International Women's Day. It doesn't get a lot of publicity, but there seemed to be quite a few people and organizations making note of it. As someone interested in science and technology, a lot of my chosen media streams focussed on women's contributions to those fields. That's good, since those are often overlooked.
And generally, they did a good job getting publicity to women in science. By that, I mean that we're slowly discovering that there are women in science other than Marie Curie. I was also glad that Hedy Lamarr's contribution to communication technology was portrayed more accurately. In recent years, I've seen some people describe it as her inventing Wi-Fi in the 1940's.
But I have to take issue with the treatment of computer scientist Grace Hopper. Everyone focuses on her finding a moth in an early computer, leading to the terms, "bug" and "debugging." Yeah, that's nice and everything, but she also invented the compiler! Yes, I know hardly any non-programmers know what that means, but it doesn't change the fact that it's really important, and worth mentioning ahead of some cute anecdote. After all, we all know that Einstein came up with the Theory of Relativity, and endlessly quote E=mc2, even though hardly anyone one knows what it means.
Other than that, nice work. Maybe next year we can practice saying "Crick and Watson and Franklin."
Did you know you can create short urls with AdFocus and make money from every visit to your short urls.
ReplyDelete