Ada girl (day 208)

It's been a bit harder to blog these days because I have many other duties in the evening, including making cards for my niece and nephew who are turning 4 and 2 this weekend.  But even though it's late here I have to at least fulfill my duty to Ada Lovelace.  Today is Ada Lovelace day, a day to recognize women in science.  I made a pledge to blog about women in science.

Many have blogged about unrecognized women in science, overlooked because the people doing the looking just weren't looking for them.  Rosalind Franklin comes to mind for me.  In fact, reading the story of how DNA was discovered was an eye opener in terms of the cut throat nature of scientific discovery.  She played a major role in the discovery of the double helix nature of DNA through her X-Ray analysis but much of her work went unacknowledged or attributed to her colleague Wilkins.  She died before the Nobel prize was awarded for the structure of nucleic acids.   I read the account of the discovery of DNA in the book "The Double Helix" written by the protagonist James Watson.  There is another book written by Anne Sayre about Rosalind's story: "Rosalind Franklin and DNA".   I recommend reading both.

I'd like to finish on an upbeat note.  I've had my share of shocking stories as a woman in computing science but there have also been many supportive professors along the way -- Dr. Patrick Keast, and Dr. Michael Shepherd to name but just two.   Dr. Carolyn Watters also made a big impression on me.  She was the only woman prof in the department at the time and was different and interesting.  I remember thinking then that if she could be there I could too.  My PhD supervisor Dr. David Fracchia was and continues to be very supportive.  I've made my own way through the maze of career paths and even though I am not in a computing science department I still look fondly on all the years spent there.  I am grateful for all the help along the way.

A song for this post.

New is beautiful (day 92)

I get a special little thrill when I think about learning something new.  It's a similar thrill to opening up a novel already in progress.  The moment of anticipation of something unexpected and engaging.  It's different but similar to the thrill of creating something which feels exciting and risky all at once.  Learning something new feels hopeful and young.

I know a lot of people don't have this experience but I liked school so much when I was a kid that I would miss it in the summer.  I would ask for extra homework.  I would read books from the grades above me.  I particularly loved looking at algebra books and later calculus books so I could figure them out.   I loved things that had answers and were self-consistent.  Playing with coloured shapes and grouping them together was fun too.  Anything that was well framed and logical.

Looking back now, it doesn't seem crazy that I ended up in computing science.  Though at the time it wasn't such an easy decision.  The hard sciences like Chemistry, Biology, and Physics were much more respected.   And computing science (I'm not even using capital letters), in my mind, was for play...not serious business.  I was so serious.

I still love cracking open a computing science book though I would never immerse myself back in the field as I was.  I love the frame of a system that is logical and responsive.  It's a refuge from the open-ended and much more arbitrary art world (I don't say this pejoratively...I mean arbitrary in the same way that the law is arbitrary...complex systems built over time and highly contingent).

This weekend I'll learn something new about GLSL.  I look forward to it.

A song for this post.