Archive for October, 2009

In the US and many other countries, today is National Coming Out Day. I thought this might be a good chance to talk about the experiences of LGBTQ geeks and how they intersect with the ...

The problem At technical and other geek conferences and events it’s becoming increasingly common to either video talks by default, or in some cases to refuse to allow any speaker to opt out of being ...

Rachel Walmsley is the head of documentation for Dreamwidth Studios. She’s also a geek, a gamer, and a transwoman. Hi, I’m Rachel, also known as rho, and I am — amongst many other things — ...

These are the voyages of the starship Adorable, presented as a unicorn chaser to yesterday’s awfulness.  Last weekend at miniSoOnCon, the Southern Ontario hackerspace festival, I got to meet and work with with a couple ...

TRIGGER WARNING: this post discusses sexual assault, threats of violence, and actual violence against women. If you link to this post, please include a similar warning. See below for more information on how/why to do ...

The Finding Ada blog says an upcoming biopic of Ada Lovelace needs support from people willing to publicise the film, especially inside the United States. There’s been discussion on feminist blogs about the interpretation of ...

Per Meli in comments, with the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this year another women laureate has been named: Ada Yonath, with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz, “for studies of the structure ...

It’s been a couple of weeks since our previous open thread, so it’s time for a new one.  We create these from time to time so that there is an opportunity for general discussion in ...

A couple of days ago Skud linked to the Women in Science introduction to women potentially eligible for Nobel Prizes. Now the awards have been announced and there are two female laureates this year: Elizabeth ...

The do’s and don’ts of being a good ally Ring around Saturn: Jennifer Ouellette at Twisted Physics profiles astrophysicist Carolyn Porco and her work on the Cassini probe Liana Leahy asks SRSLY? at claims of ...

Anna Martelli Ravenscroft reviews the common reasons why women don’t submit talks to conferences and urges women Pythonistas to submit to PyCon. Mel Chua talks about androgyny and womanhood online in Hi. My name is ...

I thought this point was worth bringing up from the comments: as we talk about tech conferences enforcing standards against use of sexualised imagery, we’re hoping to replace the “ho ho ho, we’re all het ...

This video was launched today at the Grace Hopper Celebration, and tweeted and retweeted by about half the people I’m following, it seems. Enjoy!

I’m involved in two very cool things tomorrow at GHC09 that I’d like you to know about: I’m a late addition to a panel entitled “Open Source Community Development” — I just met most of ...