Women in Free Software

I have a ticket for DrupalCon Portland for sale at the early bird price of $400.00 USD. Circumstances changed and I'm not able to attend. Contact Katy@seascapewebdesign.com if you would like to buy my ticket.

Women in Free Software India is organizing an online Localization Hackathon for women on Monday 20 May 2013 that is Cultural Freedom Day. Our goal is to include more women in Free and Open Source Software.This event will be good for anyone new or not yet aware of FOSS and it doesn’t require any programming experience. Please join us from 8pm to 9pm tomorrow at #wfs-india channel on http://webchat.freenode.net/ to participate.

Here’s a cool introduction page for the event which you may share along with the poster – http://wfs-india.github.io/

My typical morning news routine is listening to NPR’s Morning Edition while catching up on Twitter from the night before – which can be a hilariously jarring experience. Take the news cycle about removing the no-combat rule for women in the U.S. military, in which dozens of reporters uncritically repeated various military units’ contention that women were not physically strong enough for their combat positions.

I was listening to one such story when I read a tweet from Sarah Robles, the Olympic weightlifter. She often tweets things like:

Front squatting 165 kgs/363 lbs is a good way to wake up in the morning—
Sarah Robles (@roblympian) May 15, 2013

I’ll bet most of Seal Team 6 can’t front squat 363 lbs. Somehow, they assassinated Osama Bin Laden anyway (maybe with the help of, I don’t know, guns and helicopters?).

Or take this one, recently I had the pleasure of watching a strong woman circus act at the Kinetic Arts Center in which the performer climbed – no, rocketed – up a 25 foot long rope, hand-over-hand (look, no feet, ma!), while smiling and holding a girlish pinup pose. She then proceeded to demonstrate vaccuuming and other housewifely activities using an entire adult man as a prop.

And then today I read about Carla Esparza, a 5-foot-1 mixed martial arts champion who won the Invicta Fighting Championships in the “Straw-weight” division. When she’s not competing, she usually trains with men – and beats the crap out of them.

But those are Olympic athletes, circus performers, and martial arts champions – women so rare we can ignore them, right? Then how about my own college weightlifting experience, where I regularly leg pressed twice the weight that my male classmates used? I only ever saw one person at that gym leg press more than I did, and he won the local race to the top of a nearby mountain the following year. As anyone who has ever met me will know, I’m hardly an athlete, but when it comes to physical strength, I have some genetic advantages over many men.

Sarah Robles

Sure, women are, on average, not as strong as men. But strength follows a bell-curve distribution in both sexes, and for all but the most incredibly elite steroid-fueled few men, you can find women who are just as strong. Part of our misconceptions about women’s physical strength is that literal strong women sometimes don’t look like our society’s current stereotypes of “fit women.” If you saw Sarah Robles walking down the street, you’d probably peg her as a couch potato, never knowing that she could bench press the athletic-looking guy walking past her.

But military service isn’t about looks, it’s about ability to get the job done (or it should be). Ironically, the military is already having to turn down more than 75% of applicants – because the (mostly male) recruits of today aren’t fit enough to pass the basic physical fitness tests after a lifetime of too many video games and not enough running around outside.

If this is the competition, women don’t need to be Olympic athletes or martial arts champions to serve in all military combat positions. They just need to train, be determined, and not be kept out by the old boys’ club.

(Sorry this is so late! Life kept happening, and then the blog went down :)

Since this is a book that deserves and rewards attention, and since we all seem to be reading it slowly as a result, let’s just discuss it one section at a time. From the introduction:

Free software hackers culturally concretize a number of liberal themes and sensibilities— for example, through their competitive mutual aid, avid free speech principles, and implementation of meritocracy along with their frequent challenge to intellectual property provisions.

(I’ll get to that “meritocracy” bit in good time.) One of the great points Biella makes early on is that hacking, while recognizably part of the liberal tradition, uses liberal techniques to critique liberalism itself. This restless contrarianism showed up earliest around IP, of course:

The expansion of intellectual property law, as noted by some authors, is part and parcel of a broader neoliberal trend to privatize what was once public or under the state’s aegis, such as health provision, water delivery,
and military services. “Neoliberalism is in the “first instance,” writes David Harvey (2005, 2), “a theory of political economic practices that proposes human well- being can be best advanced by liberating entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong property rights, free markets, and free trade.” As such, free software hackers not only reveal a long- standing tension within liberal legal rights but also offer a targeted critique of the neoliberal drive to make property out of almost anything, including software.

Oh, the 1990s. On the one hand you had a set of corporatist states seeking to exercise ever-more-restrictive controls around, for example, the precious, precious image of Mickey Mouse and music of Metallica; on the other hand you had a ragtag crew of approximately-libertarian hackers still simmering over the injustices handed down in the Unix wars. In between you had every other imaginable nuance of position. Shenanigans, naturally, ensued, and both Biella and I were on hand for the fun. I met her at various Bay Area Linux User Group and EFF events while she was conducting fieldwork in San Francisco around the turn of the millennium.

Those were glory days. The brilliance of Richard Stallman’s GPL was just beginning to make itself apparent. The GPL has radically transformed both the culture and the economics of software in ways that will continue to play out for the foreseeable future. Biella justly celebrates the terrific humor of hackers and hacking – I don’t think I really understood software, or my life partner, until I first looked into the Jargon file – and the GPL is one of hacking culture’s best and subtlest and most effective jokes.

Stallman approached the law much like a hacker treats technology: as a system that by virtue of being systemic and logical, is hackable. In other words, he relied on the hacker technical tactic of clever reuse to imaginatively hack the law by creating the GNU GPL, a near inversion of copyright law… By grafting his license on top of an already- existing system, Stallman dramatically increased the chances that the GPL would be legally binding. It is an instance of an ironic response to a system of powerful constraint, and one directed with unmistakable (and creative) intention— and whose irony is emphasized by its common descriptor, copyleft, signaling its relationship to the very artifact, copyright, that it seeks to displace.

What the GPL and the Jargon file share with the code itself is the ways in which they resemble literature – celebrating and codifying a culture – and the ways in which they resemble law – functioning as the constitutions of public spaces of the mind. (I think of the Unixes as a kind of Colossal Caves, only somehow more real.) And this, ultimately, is why we talk about coding freedom, and why the freedom part matters. Software systems are at once frontiers, meeting places and societies.

In the words of one programmer who helped me (a novice user) fix a problem on my Linux machine, “Unix is not a thing, it is an adventure.”

That’s the way I see Debian: alive.

This book is reminding me how much I love it here, but it’s also refreshingly blunt about hacker culture’s failings:

Along with the awkwardness I experienced during the first few weeks of fieldwork, I was usually one of the only females present during hacker gatherings, and as a result felt even more out of place.

That said, the answer is right there staring us in the face. Just as hacker culture uses liberal techniques to reform liberal techniques, geek feminists can and do hack hacker culture.

During cons, participants make crucial decisions that may alter the character and future course of the developer project. For example, at Debconf4, the few women attending, spearheaded by the efforts of Erinn Clark, used the time and energy afforded by an in- person meeting to initiate and organize Debian Women Project, a Web site portal and IRC mailing list to encourage female participation by visibly demonstrating the presence of women in the largely male project. Following the conference, one of the female Debian developers, Amaya Rodrigo, posted a bug report calling for a Debian Women’s mailing list, explaining the rationale in the following way:

From: Amaya Rodrigo Sastre
To: Debian Bug Tracking System
Subject: Please create debian- women mailing list
Date: Tue, 01 Jun 2004 22:12:30 +0200
Package:lists.debian.org
Severity: normal

Out of a Debconf4 workshop the need has arisen for a mailing list oriented to debating and coordinating the different ways to get a larger female userbase. Thanks for your time :- ).

Given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow, right? I’m trying to feel my way towards an evidence-based geek feminism, in which my ideas and practices are continually tested and assessed for usefulness or otherwise. Maybe the trick is to be woman enough to cull my ideas when they are bad?

For the last couple of months I’ve been working for Infoxchange, a not-for-profit that provides technology to other not for profit. I’ve been working in the webapp development team, where we mostly work on webapps in the health and community sector using both Perl (for the older stuff) and Python/Django (for the newer stuff).

The government didn’t really work out for me, so this is a nice change. It’s relaxed, people wear jeans to work. We have fair trade tea and coffee and a delivery of CSA fruit every week.

It is busy though. We’ve got a lot going on, and not enough people to do it, so we’re looking for more. So if you’re a committed, talented Perl, Python or Web/Javascript programmer or devops who is in (or willing to move to) Melbourne, who wants to make a difference, you should get in touch with me. The pay is good (you will not be working for peanuts) and the team is fun.

We love open source, we contribute upstream, we have an organisation Github account. You can run what you want on your desktop. Developers have technical ownership over their work. Development is Agile.

Some technologies we love are Perl, Mojolicious, Python, Django, Javascript, jQuery, Bootstrap, Less, NodeJS, AngularJS, Github, Puppet, Debian and PostgreSQL. If you love any of those too, you should totally get in touch. If you love more technologies, bring those along too.

We'll be having our monthly talks and hackfest on Saturday, May 25th at 12pm at Pumping Station: One (3519 N. Elston in Chicago). William Giokas will be giving a talk on systemd, and George Lesica is tentatively scheduled to talk about R. Mike McCune of the Windy City LUG recently added our group to his Meetup page, so you can RSVP there if you like. Talks are usually ~1 hour each, and we will be around till 5pm-ish hacking on projects. Come by and say hello!

• Sometimes I Feel Like I am a Fake Geek Girl: “I know that I’m not really faking anything as I’m pretty up front with the holes in my experience, but sometimes I feel that I shouldn’t even call myself a geek because I’m missing so much ‘critical geekdom’. It feels like geek culture is a competitive and not-inclusive space with invisible hierarchies.”
• How to draw sexy without being sexist: “‘Sex appeal ONLY comes into play when the characters PERSONALITY dictates that as a factor,’ says Anka. ‘The CHARACTER must be first and foremost the inspiration and guideline for all the decisions made when trying to design the clothing.’”
• The Great Debate: Comic about the misguided idea that disabling youtube comments to forestall harassment is censorship.
• ‘Brave’ creator blasts Disney for ‘blatant sexism’ in princess makeover – Marin Independent Journal: “Disney crowned Merida its 11th princess on Saturday, but ignited a firestorm of protest with a corporate makeover of Chapman’s original rendering of the character, giving her a Barbie doll waist, sultry eyes and transforming her wild red locks into glamorous flowing tresses. The new image takes away Merida’s trusty bow and arrow, a symbol of her strength and independence, and turns her from a girl to a young woman dressed in an off-the-shoulder version of the provocative, glitzy gown she hated in the movie.”
• The Latest on the Women in SFF Debate: Roundup of links about the recent debate on recognition for female authors of sci-fi/fantasy.
• Using Python to see how the NY Times writes about men and women: “If your knowledge of men’s and women’s roles in society came just from reading last week’s New York Times, you would think that men play sports and run the government. Women do feminine and domestic things. To be honest, I was a little shocked at how stereotypical the words used in the women subject sentences were.”
• Queer in STEM: “A national survey of sexual diversity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.”
• This 17-Year-Old Coder Is Saving Twitter From TV Spoilers: “Jennie Lamere, a 17-year-old girl, invented the software last month—and won the grand prize at a national coding competition where Lamere was the only female who presented a project, and the only developer to work alone.”
• A Woman’s Place: “Now, almost 50 years after the birth of an all-female technology company with radically modern working practices, it seems remarkable that the same industry is still fumbling with the issue of gender equality.”

–

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

  “What about 2013? So far, so good. I have been working for Meltwater for more than a month now. I am learning a lot, from Ruby to SCRUM, and having fun. Thanks Meltwater :)”                from http://meltwater.github.io/blog/2013/05/14/developer-spotlight-camila-ayres/ Filed under: Cotidiano, My stuff Tagged: meltwater

To whet your appetite for Thursday’s discussion of Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking, listen to this great interview with author Gabriella Coleman on To The Best of our Knowledge.

This is a guest post by Debbie Notkin, who is the chair of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award motherboard, a co-organizer of WisCon, and a science fiction and fantasy editor and reviewer. She is also the writer (with Laurie Toby Edison) of Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes and (with Laurie Toby Edison and Richard F. Dutcher) of Familiar Men: A Book of Nudes. She blogs at Body Impolitic and on Dreamwidth.

No marginalized group can move forward without allies, and all of us have the opportunity to be allies as well as need allies. So it behooves us to look at what high-integrity, committed ally work looks like. And that’s why I want to tell you about my brother.

When David Notkin’s son Akiva was about two years old, he was fascinated by all games played with balls. (At 15, he still is.) We were on a family vacation together when David and I walked with the toddler past a ping-pong table, and Akiva instantly wanted to see what was up. I asked David why he thought Akiva was so much more interested in balls and ball games than his older sister Emma. David said, “I don’t know. We treated them exactly the same; it must just be something about him.” Having heard this from dozens of parents over the years, and rarely finding a productive response, I just let it go.

Years later, unprompted (if I recall correctly), David told me that he was no longer sure that was true. He had started to spend time with and pay attention to the serious feminists who advocate for more women in technology and the STEM fields, and he had done some listening and some reading. He said, “I think it’s perfectly possible that we responded to Akiva’s interest in balls differently than we would have if it had been Emma.” I had, and still have, very little experience with anyone changing their mind on these topics.

Melissa McEwen at Shakesville differentiates between what she calls the “Fixed State Ally Model” and the “Process Model,”

In the Process Model, the privileged person views hirself as someone engaged in ally work, but does not identify as an ally, rather viewing ally work as an ongoing process. Zie views being an ally as a fluid state, externally defined by individual members of the one or more marginalized populations on behalf zie leverages hir privilege.

The kind of shift that David made about his son’s interest in ball games is as good a step into the Process Model as any.

In this flash talk, given at the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) Summit in Chicago in May of 2012, we see more commitment to process in ally work.

In this talk, David says nothing about what women want, how to bring women into the field, or really anything about anyone except David. Instead, he describes the reasons to take another step on an ally’s journey, and advocates a way for teachers and professors to take that step, by voluntarily stepping into a learning situation where they are in the minority. As he says in the opening frame, he’s in a room full of brilliant women. As he doesn’t say, he knows he has nothing to tell them about being female, or being female in the computer science world, or anything else about their lives. What he can share is his own efforts to understand what it’s like to be marginalized, without taking on the mantle of the marginalized.

The NCWIT talk came in a deceptively optimistic period for David; he had spent the end of 2010 and virtually all of 2011 in cancer treatment, and his scans were clean … until June. In February of 2013, a few months after David’s cancer had spread and he had been given a terminal diagnosis, his department held a celebration event for him. Notkinfest was a splendor of tie-dye, laughter, and professional and personal commemoration. I hadn’t really followed his trajectory as an ally and mentor to women and people of color, and I was amazed at how many of the speakers talked about his role in making space for marginalized groups.

Anne Condon, professor and head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia told a longer story about Mary Lou Soffa, (Department of Computer Science, University of Michigan), who couldn’t be there. Dr. Condon said,

Mary Lou is a very prestigious researcher in compilers and software engineering, and probably the most outspoken person I know. Once a senior officer from a very prominent computing organization proudly unveiled a video about opportunities in computer science. Now in this video, all of the people profiled were white males, except for one little girl.

Mary Lou in true fashion stood up and she did not mince words as she told this senior official what she thought of that video. When she was done, there was total silence in the room. And then one voice spoke up, questioned the choice of profiles in that video and spoke to the importance of diversity as part of the vision of this organization.

And that person was David Notkin.

The speaker list at Notkinfest, aside from Dr. Condon, included somewhat of a Who’s Who in increasing diversity in computer science, including:

• Martha Pollack, soon to be Provost for Academic and Budgetary Affairs, as well as Professor of Information and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, who has received the Sarah Goddard Power Award in recognition of her efforts to increase the representation of and climate for women and underrepresented minorities in science and engineering.
• Tapan Parikh, Associate Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and the TR35 Humanitarian of the Year in 2007. (check out his TedX talk on representing your ethnic background).
• Carla Ellis, member and past co-chair of CRA-W, CRA’s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research , past co-chair of the Academic Alliance of NCWIT. On her web page, Ellis says: “In my retirement, I will be pursuing two passions: (1) advocating for green computing and the role of computing in creating a sustainable society and (2) encouraging the participation of women in computing.”

Notkinfest was David’s next-to-last professional appearance. Here’s what he said at the open reception:

It’s important to remember that I’m a privileged guy. Debbie and – our parents, Isabell and Herbert, were children of poor Russian Jewish immigrants, and they were raised in the Depression and taught us the value of education and how to benefit from it.

Mom, especially, taught us the value of each and every person on earth. I still wake up and – You know, we have bad days, we have bad days, but we have plenty to eat and we have a substantive education, and we have to figure out how to give more back. Because anybody who thinks that we’re just here because we’re smart forgets that we’re also privileged, and we have to extend that farther. So we’ve got to educate and help every generation and we all have to keep it up in lots of ways.

When I spoke at his funeral, not three months after Notkinfest, the main thing I did was repeat that plea.

Three tips to help new Google Summer of Code applicants and interns, some of which all remote workers could stand to remember:

1. Never let yourself get stuck on a technical question or problem for more than half an hour. Take a break, ask questions in IRC or a mailing list, find a technical book to read like The Architecture of Open Source Applications, look at some other codebase to see how they do it, eat a meal, or do something else, then come back to the problem.
2. Never let yourself get stuck waiting for someone's reply for more than 2 business days (Monday through Friday). Escalate -- ask your mentor. If your mentor isn't helping, ask your org admin. If the org admin isn't helping, ask on the GSoC discussion forum, or email Carol Smith.
3. Ask yourself at the start of every day: what did I accomplish yesterday? What will I try to do today? What are the obstacles I think I will run into? If you ask yourself those three questions and answer honestly -- especially if you let your mentor and team know the answers -- then you will prevent long delays and help keep your morale up.

I am sorry, Lakshmi Singh! I am one of those people of South Asian heritage who criticized your pronunciation of your name. I was wrong and I'm sorry.

Don’t have enough worries keeping you awake at night? How about worrying about being woken up by a glowing floating ball of light barging into your bedroom in the middle of the night?

At 1:36 a.m. this morning I awoke to find the room bathed in a dim orange light. Whether it was the light that woke me or the violent thunderstorm I cannot decide, but at first I thought someone had come into my bedroom. It was only when I rolled onto my back that I noticed an orange sphere floating some 60 cm [2 ft] from the window and about 1.6 m [5 ft] off the floor near the foot of my bed. I wasn’t sure if I was awake, asleep, dreaming or what – but I started counting.

That’s what happened on June 8, 1974 to P. M. Bagnall, network director of the British Meteor Society. Bagnall had heard of ball lightning before, but never expected to see it himself. He watched the glowing orange ball, about the size of a large grapefruit, slowly float around his room for about 50 seconds. When he put his hand near it, he felt heat radiating from the ball. Here’s what happened next:

Finally the ball moved upwards towards the ceiling, at about the same velocity as it had crossed the room, and passed through it like a Hollywood Ghost. [...] I turned the light on but there no signs of burning or any other damage. I hope to God I never see another – at least not under those circumstances!

If you’re thinking, “Hmph, just another deluded ghost story,” you should know that Bagnall’s story is a fairly typical of the thousands of reports of an unexplained atmospheric phenomenon called ball lightning.

Ball lightning looks like a floating glowing fuzzy ball of light, usually a few inches to a few feet in diameter. It floats or moves around rooms, airplanes, open areas – and occasionally through solid objects. It usually lasts for a few seconds or, rarely, minutes, and then disappears, silently, or with a popping sound, or sometimes even a loud explosion and a surge of electricity through nearby objects. This surge often sets on fire, blows up, or electrocutes nearby objects – everything from cows to VCR players to people. Ball lightning usually appears under in the same circumstances as regular old lightning: during major storms, flying through clouds in planes, etc.

Ball what?

If you’ve never heard of ball lightning before, you’re in good company. I’m the kind of person who thinks reasonable small talk includes things like, “I read an entire textbook on ball lightning during my vacation,” so you can imagine what my friends are like. But most of them had never heard of it, making it difficult for me to gush about it.

Since I did, actually, read an entire textbook on ball lightning during my vacation
(Ball Lightning by Mark Stenhoff), and the Wikipedia article on ball lightning is less than riveting reading, I wrote this post to explain why I find ball lightning so freaking fascinating. Most of this post is based on Stenhoff’s remarkably comprehensive, readable, and expensive book. If you don’t have $200 to blow on a textbook and are more interested in the stories than the (very limited) science of ball lightning, I recommend the free ebook of Camille Flammarion’s 1905 opus, Thunder and Lightning.

Ball lightning: myth or science?

Ball lightning is an extremely rare phenomenon – so rare that until recently, most scientists explained it away as afterimages from lightning strikes, clouds of electrified flying insects, or (my favorite) a regular lightning flash “viewed end-on.” I first learned about ball lightning as a little girl from reading the children’s book series Little House on the Prairie, a semi-fictionalized diary about settler life in the American midwest during the 1870′s. During a major snowstorm, Laura and her sisters are playing games in their farmhouse, when:

The stovepipe sharply rattled. Laura looked up and screamed, “Ma! The house is on fire!” A long ball of fire was rolling down the stovepipe. It was bigger than Ma’s ball of yarn. It rolled across the floor as Ma sprang up. She snatched her skirts up and stamped on it. But it seemed to jump through her foot, and it rolled to the knitting needles she had dropped. Ma tried to brush it into the ashpan. It ran in front of her knitting needles, but it followed the needles back. Another ball of fire had rolled down the stovepipe, and another. They rolled across the floor after the knitting needles and did not burn the floor.

I was totally fascinated by this vignette, but I was never quite sure: Did balls of fire really run down settlers’ stovepipes in storms, or was it just a story? After all, “Little House on the Prairie” was heavily rewritten by the author’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, to promote Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy, so a little fictionalization (or a lot) is to be expected. Since Wikipedia didn’t exist then, the truth about ball lightning remained a tantalizing mystery for most of my childhood.

Personally, I am a sucker for anything thought to be mythological that turns out to be real, like giant squid, or the entire continent of Antarctica. So I was thrilled to discover that not only was ball lightning was real, it’s also as yet poorly understood by scientists. With any luck, scientists will figure out the physics behind ball lightning during my lifetime, a discovery I look forward to as eagerly as most people do the next episode of “Mad Men.”

Ball lightning kills

The ball lightning Laura and her family saw was as fuzzy, playful, and harmless as a kitten. But some ball lightning is fatal:

The last Lord’s day (July 2 1665), as Mr. Hobbs was preaching in his Parish Church of Erpingham, in the afternoon, there did arise a great storm, and there descended the appearance of a great grey ball [...] It left a great smoke and stink behind it, and upon the breaking there was a great and hideous outcry in the Church, and in the confusion there was one man found stark dead and many others lamed, who yet continue so. [...] One Mr. How who sat above the chancel is lamed and about the top of his thigh in the groin, is [a] round red place and down from that about the breadth of a finger, a red streak to his foot which is very painful and his stocking on the inside is seared, but not without. (Stenhoff, page 74)

Reports of ball lightning slaying terrified parishioners left and right are surprisingly common during the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe.

On July 11, 1809, about eleven o’clock in the morning, a fireball penetrated into the church of Chateauneuf-les-Moustiers (Basses-Alpes) just as the bell was ringing and a large congregation had taken their seats. Nine persons were killed on the spot and eighty-two others were wounded. All the dogs that had got into the church were killed. A woman who was in a hut on a neighboring hill saw three fireballs descend that day, and [was] sure they would reduce the village to ashes. (Flammarion, pages 60-61)

Undoubtedly, many people thought that the ball lightning was some kind of punishment from their god (or their devil). But there’s a better explanation for ball lightning’s predilection for churches. Ball lighting often happens during violent thunderstorms, and people often report seeing it heading straight for tall pointy things like chimneys. Churches in that time and place had tall pointy steeples, and people often go to church even during thunderstorms. In retrospect, it’s not too surprising that so many church-goers witnessed (or were killed by) ball lightning. Reports tapered off sometime in the 18th century; my personal suspicion is that a combination of lightning rod adoption (invented in 1749 by Benjamin Franklin) and changes in construction are responsible.

Ball lightning is fucking scary

You probably know enough about ball lightning now to be scared shitless of it – as you should be, given that it’s totally unpredictable, floats through walls, and occasionally kills people. But not to worry – ball lightning is extraordinarily rare. You have basically zero chance of ever seeing ball lightning yourself, unless you live in an abandoned 17th century English church, like to take walks in thunderstorms, or pilot aircraft through bad weather on a regular basis (more on this later).

The only quantitative estimate of the frequency of ball lightning was created using automatic photography of the night sky in several midwestern U.S. states for 10 years. The cameras recorded two probable ball lightning events during that time, yielding a frequency estimate that is hilarious just for the units involved: one ball lightning event per “4800 km² night-years.” (Stenhoff, page 157)

If that’s not rare enough for you, the simplest way to avoid ball lightning is to avoid regular lightning – they are highly correlated, and some scientists believe that most of the major damage ascribed to ball lightning is actually from regular lightning flashes.

Not everyone who sees ball lightning is terrified:

In 1944 when I was 13 years old… We lived about 100 ft [30 m] from a water tower which was struck frequently by lightning. During one storm in the evening, my mother, my two younger brothers, and I saw a ball descend from a chandelier in our living room and settle onto the floor. It was pale yellow, about the size of a football or volleyball, perhaps smaller, and threw off small sparks. [...] We wanted to play with it, but my mother told us to keep away from it. It was not all frightening. (Stenhoff, page 171)

Personally, I’d seriously consider donating my left kidney for the chance to see ball lightning, even with moderate chance of death. But I also read 300 page textbooks for fun.

Theories about ball lightning

As Stenhoff delicately puts it, “Ball lightning research remains an immature field of study.” Another commentator is a little more direct: “Unfortunately, a significant fraction of the theoretical literature on ball lightning could best be described as rubbish, so the uninitiated reader should read the literature with more than the usual level of skepticism.” (Stenhoff, page 179) After plowing my way through three chapters of Stenhoff’s reviews of current theories and their shortcomings, I completely agree.

Some vital clues about which theories are worth paying attention to come from reports of ball lightning that forms near aircraft. Here’s a report from a flight attendant in a passenger plane on the way from Berlin to Stuttgart:

Suddenly, a bright, luminous ball appeared inside the pantry on the starboard side, apparently from the service door. It was bluish with a fuzzy edge, about the size of a melon (16 – 18 cm [6 - 7 in] diameter), and traveled quite rapidly about 70 – 80 cm [27 - 31 in] from the floor. It swung down the passenger aisle and having traveled about 3 m [3 ft] down the aisle, it disappeared, seeming to pass through the port side of the aircraft. Passengers seated in the front row saw it. (Stenhoff, pages 115-116)

Ball lightning reports from aircraft are remarkably consistent, and also totally cool. The ball forms in front of or inside the forward part of the aircraft, hangs there for a while, and then often travels towards the rear at about the same speed of ball lightning on the ground (relative to the aircraft itself). It often passes through the metal cockpit door and is independently sighted by passengers or crew as it travels down the center aisle and out the tail, or veers off to exit over the wing. Occasionally it will singe a pilot’s eyebrows.

Here’s another story, from a Russian plane flying near the Black Sea. Shortly after taking off, a ball of fire about 10 cm [4 in] across appeared, touching the plane in front of the cockpit:

It disappeared with a deafening noise, but re-emerged several seconds later in the passenger’s lunge, after piercing in an uncanny way through the air-tight metal wall. The fireball slowly flew above the heads of the stunned passengers. In the tail section of the airliner it divided into two glowing crescents which then joined together again and left the plane almost noiselessly. (Stenhoff, page 115)

Ball lightning around planes forms in the same conditions associated with normal lightning strikes to planes, just like on the ground. Irritatingly, most ball lightning theories don’t even attempt to account for the formation of ball lightning inside what is basically a hermetically sealed Faraday cage, much less its travel through a metal cockpit door.

One of the few theories that is actually consistent with most of the commonly observed behavior of ball lightning – passes through solid objects, moves sideways or hangs in the air, forms inside metal aircraft – is Handel and Leitner’s model, described by Stenhoff this way: “A maser-caviton ball lightning model in which ball lightning is a nonlinear, localized high-field soliton, known as a high-pressure caviton, forming a cavity surrounded by plasma. The source of VHF energy in the model is an atmospheric maser.” (Stenhoff, page 235)

A maser-caviton what? I don’t even pretend to understand this theory, but Stenhoff points out that one of its interesting qualities is that it predicts that ball lightning that forms inside aircraft or other closed spaces will have very low energy content and be unable to cause much damage – which indeed, matches most reports. Since most theories are incompatible with ball lightning forming inside an airplane at all, much less why it would be less powerful, this theory has more going for it than most.

Since ball lightning in aircraft is relatively well-documented, safe, and slightly more predictable than other forms, I wonder: Could ball lightning be systematically reproduced and studied safely by flying well-instrumented drones in the weather conditions that are known to produce ball lightning? Getting the budget to do so is another matter entirely, but learning how to produce glowing balls of light that float through walls? Seems worth it!

The sociology of ball lightning

I’m just as interested in the sociology of the scientific study of ball lightning. Why did it take so long for scientists to take seriously reports like this one?

On September 10, 1845, at about two in the afternoon, in the course of a violent storm, a fireball came down the chimney into a room in a house in the village of Salagnac (Creuse). A child and three women who were in the room suffered no harm from it. Then it rolled into the middle of the kitchen, and passed near the feet of a young peasant who was standing in it. After which it went into an adjoining room, and disappeared without leaving any trace. The women tried to persuade the man to go in and see whether he could not stamp it out, but he had once allowed himself to be electrified in Paris, and thought it prudent to refrain. (Stenhoff, page 80)

Stenhoff points out that ball lightning shares one characteristic with meteorites: they are rare, short-lived events that can’t be reproduced on demand, and are rarely observed by scientists. The vast majority of the witnesses are of low social status: peasants, housewives (gendered term used intentionally), children, etc. While we now accept meteorites as an established fact of science, scientists sneered at illiterate peasants’ reports of stones falling out of the clear blue sky for decades. It wasn’t until the early 19th century that scientists started taking meteorite reports seriously. (Stenhoff, page 177)

Ironically, Stenhoff commits the sin of disregarding eye witness reports even as he argues against it. While discussing the reliability of eye witness reports of a major meteor strike, he mentions as an example of unreliability that many observers report a sizzling noise at the same time they saw the meteors traverse the sky. That was believed to be impossible in 1999, when this book was published – after all, sound travels much more slowly than light, and the meteors are dozens of miles away. However, in 2001, scientists realized that meteors create very low frequency (VLF) radio waves as they travel through the atmosphere. These waves can cause things near the ground to vibrate – like hair – creating a sizzling or fizzing noise.

One can argue that reports from scientists should be more highly regarded because scientists are trained to be better observers. But that argument doesn’t apply to minor nobility such as the Marquis of Malaspina (Stenhoff, page 90) or the former Emperor of Brazil (Stenhoff, page 177), whose reports were also given greater weight than those of dozens of “peasants.” I myself appealed to your respect for higher status observers by starting this article with a report from “the network director of the British Meteor Society.”

Diversity and respect make for better science

Stenhoff encourages scientists to take seriously consistent eyewitness reports of phenomena that doesn’t match current scientific theory, for both science’s sake and for their own careers. He quotes from The Furtherance of Medical Research by Alan Gregg:

One wonders whether the rare ability to be completely attentive to, and to profit by, Nature’s slight deviation from the conduct expected of her is not the secret of the best research minds and one that explains why some men turn to most remarkably good advantage seemingly trivial accidents. Behind such attention lies an unremitting sensitivity.

It would be a shame if our prejudice and bigotry prevented us from discovering the science behind such extraordinarly interesting and cool phenomena as ball lightning. Yet one more reason why diversity of scientists and respect for the dignity of all human beings produces better science.

I'm currently reading Robert Cialdini's Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. I am really enjoying the refresher on many of these concepts, which I encountered in classes at Stanford. The book is particularly useful because it provides very concrete advice on applying the concepts. I've already started using some of the ideas in the Disaster Preparedness 101 class I'm collaborating on developing for the Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety.

We'll be handing out an action checklist, so people will have an idea of what to do, and they will be able to check off two items before class ends. By presenting the list as already partially complete, participants are more likely to continue to work on the tasks and feel less overwhelmed.

Another technique will be to explain that "most people like you, who care about getting prepared for disasters, also care about helping getting their neighborhoods and community prepared. And we've got just the program for you!" We then present the follow-on course, and provide a sign-up that they can do. Using the phrase "people like you, who care about" (as long as it's true), is a combination of the "labeling technique", which is simply another way of saying that people live up or down to your expectations of them, and the "bandwagon technique" explaining that "most people like you do x". Emphasize the qualities and behaviors that you want to reinforce, (rather than the ones you don't want) and people are more likely to conform with those expectations.

Another technique that I've incorporated is the simple one of writing down and sharing a goal. For the closing activity, attendees will be asked to write down one action they will complete within a week, and then share it with the group. Both making the commitment in writing and sharing it out loud with others increases the likelihood of someone following through on it.

Simple techniques, yes! But effective.

I recommend the book for everyone - after all, we all need to persuade others at times.

Finally, things are taking shape. We got a very few but dedicated people interested to promote FOSS among women in India. After the first two meetings we decided to have this online event where

• we will have an online digital art competition
• a Mediawiki hackathon
• an event on localization.

Everything is in planning stage right now. But we want to make FOSS attractive for girls/women in India to first use it and then contribute to it. When they hear about this event or attend it, they should feel – yeah, it’s cool – I want to do this.

Have to plan some cool promotional materials for it.

There’s one big obstacle though. People, especially women in India think of FOSS as something “geeky” – not to be touched by everyone. That it is not easy to use.

If we do not address these myths, they will continue using third grade proprietary software without even trying any other alternative!

Please share your ideas/suggestions on how to make this event interesting and appealing to women in India.

In case you want to help, please join http://wfs-india.dreamwidth.org/ an participate in the irc meetings.

Owing to a relentless succession of Life Events and despite her best efforts, your correspondent was unable to finish Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking this week. But she wants to; it’s really good. Grab your own copy and let’s reconvene next Thursday, May 16.

I currently own a 20" rolling carry-on bag that has met my airline & train travel needs for years (I switched to it a year or two before airlines started charging for checked bags), and it's perfect for a week-long conference where I'm coming back or going out with a lot of stuff, or when I'm visiting my parents for close to a month at Christmas, but it seems excessive when I'm going for a weekend trip or a job interview.

I'm considering getting a smaller suitcase for those shorter trips, so I'm working out my requirements. This thread covers more or less what I have in mind, but here's some personal preference/requirement notes:

1. Must have wheels. I used to do backpack+purse for shorter trips, but I've been finding that I often pinch a nerve during travel and I'm pretty sure carrying my camera/laptop on my back is a factor.

2. Can fit my laptop and possibly SLR camera + 2-3 days worth of clothes. Thankfully my clothes are pretty small. Camera may be optional: I'm trying a downgrade to a point and shoot for short trips.

3. Preferably I'd like something that can fit into the overhead bin on the smaller regional jets, since often my flight will have one hop with those. A search says that this means the bag will have to be around 18Lx14Wx7D. Sounds like you can fit larger, but I'd rather not have to argue it out with the gate staff / flight attendant every time. I am perfectly ok with being given a checked tag and then "obliviously" carrying my bag on the plane anyhow as long as it will fit, though.

4. Butnot arguing with the gate/flight staff every time I fly would be awesome. This may mean going with something more backpack-like so I can just put it on my back when I walk on the plane, but mostly it just reinforces "small" and "looks like it holds a laptop." Briefcases should work.

5. Should have an open clothing section as opposed to a bunch of filefolder divider things that will make it harder to pack.

6. Should open fully, at least for the clothing section. Pure preference on my part.

7. I'm not too picky about laptop sleeves, although something I can easily slip a laptop out of for the TSA or in case I do have to check the bag is good. I basically never use my laptop on the plane, I just don't want to skycheck it.

8. If at all possible, not black. Something like 90% of the suitcases I see are black and I don't want to be worrying about someone grabbing mine by mistake.

9. But (and i realize this may contradict the "not black" thing) something that looks more business traveller-y would be good. I have a *lot* of trouble with TSA reps assuming I'm young or an infrequent traveler which is especially frustrating when I go somewhere with J and they immediately assume he's an expert while I get the "oh, hon, you know our machines are perfectly safe?" talk-down-to-the-little-girl spiel. (My new response: "My sister is a physicist who works in health and safety; I'd like to opt out." which is factually true but irrelevant and calculated to throw them and possibly nearby travelers out of their default headspace without getting into an argument.)




I've been finding that
(a) A disturbing number of online sites don't give pictures of the inside of the bags.
(b) A disturbing number of online sites don't give dimensions or even pictures that could help me guess the dimensions
(c) Bags are expensive (duh)
(d) There is an entire market for "women's suitcases" which I find somewhat strange. Particularly given that the "women's briefcase-bags" seem pretty much identical to the non-women's ones.



I don't have any short trips scheduled, but I'm hoping to find some bag options I like and catch a sale (luggage goes on sale quite frequently, so it's a bit ridiculous to pay full price if I've got time to spare).

I would love to hear first hand testimonials from any of you who travel with a bag that might meet my needs, though. It was a recommendation from Linuxchix that drew me to my current bag which has done me pretty well although it's starting to show its age now.

comments

Installing fresh hot Debian 7.0 on a shiny new ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop turns out to be easy as cake. You just need to make sure to grab the wifi firmware from unstable instead of the all-in-one firmware tarballs, which contain a version that is missing a couple required files.

wget http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/7.0.0/multi-arch/iso-cd/debian-7.0.0-amd64-i386-netinst.iso
dd if=debian-7.0.0-amd64-i386-netinst.iso of=/dev/sdb

(Make sure /dev/sdb is really the usb stick you want to overwrite with the installer!)

wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/f/firmware-nonfree/firmware-iwlwifi_0.38_all.deb

And put that on a second usb stick for the installer to load the firmware off of.

As far as I can tell, everything works. (Did not mess around with the fingerprint reader, don't care.)

In January, we shared with you the call for papers for the Celebrating the Achievements and Legacies of Ada Lovelace conference:

CALL FOR PAPERS
Celebrating the Achievements and Legacies of Ada Lovelace
18 October 2013
Stevens Institute of Technology, College of Arts and Letters (Hoboken, New Jersey, USA)

An interdisciplinary conference celebrating the achievements and legacies of the poet Lord Byron’s only known legitimate child, Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace (1815–1852), will take place at Stevens Institute of Technology (Hoboken, New Jersey) on 18 October 2013. This conference will coincide with the week celebrating Ada Lovelace Day, a global event for women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). All aspects of the achievements and legacies of Ada Lovelace will be considered, including but not limited to:

• Lovelace as Translator and/or Collaborator
• Technology in the Long Nineteenth Century
• Women in Computing: Past/Present/Future
• Women in STEM- Past/Present/Future
• Ada Lovelace and her Circle

Please submit proposals or abstracts of 250-500 words by 14 May 2013 to: Robin Hammerman (rhammerm@stevens.edu).

Submissions are still open, and organiser Robin Hammerman shares more about the conference and her interest in Ada Lovelace:

Q. Tell us a little about yourself.

Robin: I teach Literature and Communications at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. Most of our students major in STEM. To me, it is amazing to see how well our students build on their strengths and face their challenges in humanities courses. We are a relatively small school of only around 6,000 students with a strong spirit of collaboration. Our College of Arts and Letters is an ideal venue for hosting the upcoming Ada conference. We are a warm and welcoming part of the Stevens community, dedicated to mindful exchanges and – in my estimation – a perfect match for the Ada world. My research interests include science fiction, comics and graphic novels, and British Romanticism. I am chiefly a Byronist, so my initial connection to Ada was forged through my exposure to her father’s life and works. Additionally, it has been my honor to serve the Byron Society of America as its Director of Membership and Academic Services since 2007. As you might imagine, we have many Ada fans in our membership!

Q. What motivated you to create a conference about Ada Lovelace?

Robin: The time is definitely right to bring Ada to campus. Stevens was a male-only school until 1971 and now we have a flourishing community of women on campus. We are constantly generating fantastic opportunities for women so that they might thrive here, and it has definitely been working. Within the College of Arts and Letters alone we developed an excellent Gender Studies program, and our new program for Science and Technology Studies – also within CAL – strongly anchors women in STEM. Additionally, in 1982 Stevens became the first major educational institution in the U.S. to implement a personal computer requirement for its students. Back then, a pioneering technology project resulted in the networking of the entire Stevens campus, creating one of the nation’s first Intranets. Clearly, Stevens is well-positioned to host a conference celebrating Ada’s legacies and achievements.

Q. Who should speak at or attend this conference?

Robin: I anticipate an interdisciplinary extravaganza of past/present/future with people of varying interests represented in the audience and the speakers. Really, all are welcome – faculty, students, independent and rogue scholars, enthusiasts…the call for papers is rather open. In addition to topics on women in STEM, the history of computing, etc. we are interested in developing panels on new media. I would really like to hear some work at the conference on Ada’s collaboration with Charles Babbage as well as Ada’s larger circle. She had some very interesting friends, including Charles Dickens. While we are on the subject of literary topics, we are developing a panel on Ada’s iconic status in Steampunk Literature – so you see, there is hardly a limit to what we might include. You don’t have to be a passionate supporter of women in STEM to attend or speak at this conference, but it helps!

Q. What is your favorite Lovelace fact or story?

Robin: To me, the coolest ever Lovelace fact is that NASA named its first computer program after her. As a Byronist, I think that Ada never meeting her father is an interesting part of her story. Nevertheless, this fact seems to say more about her father than it does about her.

Q. What are your plans for next year?

Robin: I am interested in seeing how our Stevens community and beyond will be enriched by the conference proceedings. Next year will provide us with unique opportunities to expand our Ada-inspired knowledge bases. If it seems appropriate, perhaps we might consider developing a publication including papers from the conference. Most of all, this conference will bring together people who might otherwise not have met. From this act of coming together, I anticipate long-term benefits in our collective thinking about what it means to have true, interdisciplinary engagement.

The Gnome Outreach Program for Women is launching  another round of FOSS internships, to start on the 1st of May.

Since OPW doesn't have the cool advertisement video they deserve to have, I think I let Sabah sing to lure the ladies to the show, she has practice and casts the summoning spell so beautifully:

Gabriela Gibson | Gabriela's Coding Blog | 2013-05-07 21:43:51