Slashdot Mirror
Top Ten Geek Girls
TurboPatrol writes "CNET have published a list of the Top Ten Girl Geeks throughout history. The winners include the elegant Ada Byron (the world's first computer programmer), Grace Hopper (invented the compiler) and Lisa Simpson (invented the perpetual motion machine — well, in the world of cartoons). Some of the entries are fascinating, for example Marie Curie apparently used to carry plutonium in her jacket pockets. Have they missed anyone out?" At least two entries on the list are stupid. I guess someone thought they were funny.
I'd have gone for Willow Rosenberg instead.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I havn't visited her old rooms (in the basement of the Sorbonne) myself, but I've met a few people who have. If you turn off all the lights, you can see the walls, glowing in the dark.
They had a big scare a few years ago, when they were auctioning off some old furniture. Turned out some of it dangerously radioactive.
It was probably Polonium and not Plutonium. However since she did work with pitchblend there where possibly trace amounts of plutonium in some of her samples but none that really amounted to anything. As far as the Geek girl list goes yea Paris Hilton should be booted. Isn't her 15 minutes of fame over yet? They missed one of my all time favorites Hedy Lamarr. She invented spread spectrum radio. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
...Hedy Lamar? She looks infintely hotter than the real geek girls on that paltry list and she was responsible for co-inventing Frequency-hopped spread spectrum technology used in WiFi today...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Marie Curie but no Emmy Noether?
Pshaw.
Roberta Williams belongs on this list. Married to the brash and brilliant programmer and founder of Sierra On-Line, Ken Williams, the mousey Roberta wrote fantastical good-natured interactive tales in the form of text adventures. In the company's infancy she also "manned" the only customer support phone, and took great delight in hearing direct praise and personally coaching players through her games without giving direct hints. She later went on to author the Kings Quest series which won countless critical and commercial accolades.
Her games challenged the technologies of the day, with Kings Quest V being the company's first entirely mouse-driven adventure title, and Phantasmagoria being the first adventure game exclusively portraying filmed actors and locations. Despite her mild manner and reserved tongue, Phantasmagoria broke ground as one of the first wide-release PC games unabashedly targeted at mature audiences with scenes of graphic gore and even an infamous rape scene.
Perhaps most important of all, Roberta Williams wrote games for people - not specifically men or women - who enjoyed a good story with strong characters. She is remarkable for excelling in a mostly male-dominated industry without having to resort to the image of "PC game princess".
I've always admired Rosalind Franklin, the oft-overlooked molecular biologist who did much of the actual science (intricate lab work) that led to the discovery of the structure of DNA. She died at a young age (37)in 1958 and thus did not share in the nobel prize that was awarded to Watson and Crick in the 1960s. From accessexcellence.org (http://www.accessexcellence.org/RC/AB/BC/Rosalind _Franklin.html) we have:
"After discovering the existence of the A and B forms of DNA, Rosalind Franklin also succeeded in developing an ingenious and laborious method to separate the two forms, providing the first DNA crystals pure enough to yield interpretable diffraction patterns. She then went on to obtain excellent X-ray diffraction patterns of crystalline B-form DNA and, using a combination of crystallographic theory and chemical reasoning, discovered important basic facts about its structure. She discovered that the sugar-phosphate backbone of DNA lies on the outside of the molecule, not the inside as was previously thought. She discovered the helical structure of DNA has two strands, not three as proposed in competing theories. She gave quantitative details about the shape and size of the double helix. The all- important missing piece of the puzzle, that she could not discover from her data, was how the bases paired on the inside of the helix, and thus the secret of heredity itself. That discovery remained for Watson and Crick to make.
After Randall presented Franklin's data and unpublished conclusions at a routine seminar, aspects of her results were informally communicated to Watson and Crick by Maurice Wilkins and Max Perutz, without her or John Randall's knowledge. It was Watson and Crick who put all the pieces of the puzzle together from a variety of sources including Franklin's results, to build their ultimately correct and complete description of DNA's structure. Their model for the structure of DNA appeared in the journal Nature in April, 1953, alongside Franklin's own report.
Rosalind Franklin never knew that Watson and Crick had gotten access to her results. At the time of the Watson and Crick publication and afterwards, Franklin appears not to have been bitter about their accomplishment. In her own publications about DNA structure, she agreed with their essential conclusions but remained skeptical about some details of their model. Franklin moved on to work on an even more challenging problem: the structure of an entire virus, called the Tobacco Mosaic Virus. Her subsequent publications on this topic would include four more papers in the journal Nature. Rosalind Franklin was friendly with both James Watson and Francis Crick, and communicated regularly with them until her life and career were cut short by cancer in April of 1958, at the age of 37. She died with a reputation around the world for her contributions to knowledge about the structure of carbon compounds and of viruses. After her death, Watson and Crick made abundantly clear in public lectures that they could not have discovered the structure of DNA without her work. However, because the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously, Rosalind Franklin could not be cited for her essential role in the discovery of the physical basis of genetic heredity. "
Rosalind Franklin, in my opinion, is one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century that few people know about.
1) Ellen Hancock, First with IBM (hired as a programmer in the mid 60s, then led the network team [SNA, Token Ring under her watch] first woman Senior VP at IBM), then with Apple (as CTO, she killed Copland... and pushed for the NeXT buy out... in some respects, she may have saved Apple... and then fired by Steve)
2) Kim Polese: Product Manager of original java team, co-founder of Marimba, poster girl of the DotCom(bomb) era.
3) Kari Byron (MythBusters) would be better mass media geekdom icon than Paris or Lisa, at least she sometimes shoots things, ignites stuff, dabbles in ballistic trajectories, welds stuff, and dresses GyrlGeek;-).
YMMV, but those would be my Candidate Substitutions.