My mom was a comptometer for a railroad. Teaching me the value of getting in way over one’s head and succeeding at it, she worked her way up to being the first woman Wire Chief of a railroad, responsible for monitoring and fixing all signaling equipment along it.
I was thrilled when she told me boys can be programmers, too.
“You hit like a girl!” My daughter played varsity softball. You couldn’t pay me enough to pitch to her. She also pitched, and “you throw like a girl” in my experience means you better have that glove up and ready to catch before the ball left your hand. I have spider veins on my thigh from when I wasn’t ready and her fastball bounced off my leg.
Sorry, but biology kind of agrees that telling a weak boy that he "hits like a girl" is a valid snark. There may be weak boys and strong girls, that doesn't mean that, on average, the boys tend to be much stronger.
No, there isn't. In fact, since girls have puberty a bit sooner, there's some amount of time when you can expect a similarly-sized girl to be stronger.
There's some indication that there is, though more research needs to be done, here's a video detailing some of what's already reported in the literature: https://youtube.com/watch?v=xqxvgfFMdEo&t=3m46s
At first glance that video looks like a reaction to transgender sports issues and I have no interest in that as I cannot trust the presentation to be unbiased as it is a hotbutton cultural issue.
The first slide is specifically referencing studies which claim that there is no difference pre-puberty and has a heading labeled 'the problem'.
I hope you can understand why I am not going to watch the rest of it. I prefer a study or a meta-study so that I don't have someone reaching conclusions for me while cherry picking data points.
That's unfortunate you would disregard the presentation at the first slide based on how it's worded. Regardless of how one may feel about the issue of men in women's sports, it's an interesting walk through a wide selection of research on this topic, all of it appropriately cited, by an academic who has himself published many papers in the field of sports science.
Boys tend to be more active and do more sports, which causes a bit of a virtuous cycle where because they're more active, they get better at things like sport than girls simply because they're practicing. Girls raised with brothers tend to also be more active and better at sports.
I recently read Pink Brain, Blue Brain by Lise Eliot, which explores a lot of these differences, where they come from, and to what extent we can find biological causes for them. It's really interesting, and she gets into a lot of details analysing various studies and theories.
My daughters are competitive sailors. On the back of one of their regatta shirts is a semaphore message that, when decoded, reads “always sail with the confidence of a mediocre white man”. Ouch? :)
This seems like a weird example considering girls play softball because for some reason they can't or don't want to play baseball, not even women's baseball.. which seems like they do play baseball 'like a girl' by playing softball.
It’s a different sport but in no way the “lite” version. A softball team walking onto a baseball field would probably lose. A baseball team playing softball would get annihilated.
But my point is that “hit (or throw or run) like a girl” isn’t the insult it’s meant to be.
My wife, a doctor, was in ROTC and graduated from Army Airborne School and has her jump wings. We taught our daughters (and sons) that “women’s work” is whatever they want it to be.
The problem is, if given time to practice, men would become atleast statistically average at softball yet women would have no hope in real baseball.
Similar to how the women's USA national soccer team got crushed by a state level 15 year old boys team.
I'm all for telling women they can work their but off to become top 3% of women, at which point they'll be better than many men at most physical activities.
> Similar to how the women's USA national soccer team got crushed by a state level 15 year old boys team.
Not this nonsense again. It was a low-level training match for the USWNT where they were trying out different tactics (playing players out of position, etc.) before a real match against Russia.
You can phrase it however you want. If you're going to meet to try tactics, against a group of boys that don't even play like the women's Russian team, you must care somewhat. And they got crushed. End of story.
> If you're going to meet to try tactics, against a group of boys that don't even play like the women's Russian team
That's not the point of trying out new tactics, though - it's to see whether your players can cope with the systems and being played out of position. The opponent almost doesn't matter because when you're playing unfamiliar tactics and out of position, you're likely to lose against
whoever you play.
Much like getting a Bridge team to use a bidding system they've never used before - doesn't matter if it's Omar Sharif and Pierre Zimmerman, they'll probably lose against mid-level opposition AND IT MEANS NOTHING.
What is the point? That people lie to young girls telling them they can do anything a man can do, without any negative repercussions? Tell that to all the women in their late 30s on anti depressants sad they basically can't have kids and tired of getting ran through on tinder and bumble.
> The next generation will also find it interesting that a "computer programmer" used to be a person.
There is no reason to discuss one part of the automated pipeline unless you are troubleshooting it directly. It just collapses into one if it is truly automated.
I've been in an elevator that was being operated by a human.
Some event was letting out, and the bank of elevators had human operators until the crowd cleared. Apparently the automated algorithms aren't quite as efficient in that sort of specialized situation, maybe because they can't talk to the passengers ("Room for two more!").
I've been in an elevator that was being operated by a human.
And that was the norm, until about the 1950s or 1960s when electronics became good-enough to allow those lowly passengers to control lifts for themselves, and save the wage-cost of several full-time employees for each lift. I think the last time I saw a human lift-operator was around the 1980s.
A good lift-operator could judge the lift well enough that there was no lip at all between the lift's floor and the building's floor. Some couldn't and there might be a 6-inch step to make, and that was dangerous. Today, electronics has removed that problem almost entirely and we never think about it.
And then indicating what was on each floor: 'Going up. First floor: home appliances, credit department, crockery and glassware.' And that was apart from listening to questions, being able to tell you which floor you wanted for your purchases, and telling you that you had arrived at that floor.
Of course there were all those lift operator jokes: 'Going up. ladies' dresses. Going down, ladies' underwear.'
I don't get it. The implicit scenario described by the OP is that people are talking about “computer programmers” as a matter of practical necessity since they would be surprised when someone mentions the history behind it—they can't be surprised by something if they are discussing it for the history as such.
> The next generation will also find it interesting that a "computer programmer" used to be a person.
I think it's more likely we'll redefine 'programmer' to mean the person who prompts and evaluates LLM outputs. At least for as long as we need someone to do that; one day we won't, but that means full AGI.
Seeing that old Friden mechanical calculator under it's cover take me way back. We used them to do basic statistics on data sets in an NSF summer research school I attended after my high school sophmore year. What a sound a roomful of them could make.
At the time there was one computer on the college campus where the program was hosted - all batch, all punched cards, of course, and too valuable to be used for mere number crunching of undergraduate research. By the time I matriculated a year later, the physics department had its own PDP 8, and we did our number crunching on data sets punched onto paper tape, on that. Given the challenges in getting a data set properly punched and the cost of debugging, I'm pretty sure the PDP only saved net people time if you had to run the same computation at least several dozen times.
I think 5 seconds for an 8bit binary add seems fair, so 1/12th instruction per second per 'girl', so 1000 * 1/12 = 83.33 instructions per kilo-girl per second.
If we aren't doing 'instructions' and can get rid of binary and do decimal adds, say its 1/s, so 1k-g is 1000 'operations' per second.
No, it wasn't. That was only a joke by Shapely [1]:
> Pickering’s successor as director, Harlow Shapley, jokingly quantified the work in terms of the number of ‘kilo-girl hours’ it would take
Pickering himself was teased for having a "harem".
What is true is that there were a lot of human computers, and most of them were girls. I think Feynman, as you would expect from him, played a role in organizing some computer girls for the Manhattan project [2]:
> So we set up this room with girls in it. Each one had a Marchant. But she was the multiplier, and she was the adder, and this one cubed, and we had index cards, and all she did was cube this number and send it to the next one.
> We went through our cycle this way until we got all the bugs out. Well, it turned out that the speed at which we were able to do it was a hell of a lot faster than the other way, where every single person did all the steps. We got speed with this system that was the predicted speed for the IBM machine. The only difference is that the IBM machines didn't get tired and could work three shifts. But the girls got tired after a while.
I was thrilled when she told me boys can be programmers, too.