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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'm glad to RTFA and see people like Eugenia or Steph the Geek not on the list, HOWEVER, wtf is Paris Hilton, LISA FSCKING SIMPSON, or Aleks Krotoski on the list? Did they run out at 6 or 7 geeks, and needed filler? Paris Hilton is described as "She might look trendy on the outside, but inside this girl is all binary." WTF?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Isn't it a little bit sad when one of the Top 10 geek "girls" throughout history has to be a cartoon character. Are there really that few women geeks to choose from?
Plutonium was created in the 1940's. Marie Curie died in the 1930's.
What is interesting, in a disturbiung way, is that Marie Curies workbooks that she used while discovering radium are still considered dangerously radioactive.
I'd have gone for Willow Rosenberg instead.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Forgot to add, here's a link to her Flickr acct:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/leahculver/
I'm not a stalker or nothin, just wanted to post that before I go back to hiding in the bushes with my binoculars.....
Chums up, let's do this!
is morgan webb?
wud
A woman invented COBOL? This does not surprise me. *ducks*
It's a shame they missed her: http://web.media.mit.edu/~cynthiab/
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Ah, CNet. Just when one thought you couldn't get any less useful, you squander a potentially really neat article idea on tired Simpsons and Paris Hilton jokes. I hate to say this to anyone.. but you are really not funny.
A girl geek friend of mine works for CNet. I wonder how well her and her fellows are taking this.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Did I just see Madame Curie and Rosalind Franklin compared with Paris Hilton and Lisa Simpson? One two time Nobel Prize winner and another near Nobel Prize winner compared to a coke snorting self promoting gamer and a cartoon character.
I give up.
Paris Hilton is the loveable hateable icon of absurdity. She should be on every list. Sexiest woman (#47 Paris Hilton), best actress in a foreign film (#23 Paris Hilton), world's strongest man (#97 Paris Hilton), most downloaded interent video star (#3 Paris Hilton), most likely running mate for Barak Obama (#2 Paris Hilton), and people who remind you of the Olsen Twins (#1 Paris Hilton).
We laugh today... but I wouldn't be surprised if Paris isn't the first female US president... and most likely will be the first president to put electrolytes in the water supply.
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.
Now that's hot, Paris.
Plutonium was created in the 1940's. Marie Curie died in the 1930's.
Holy shit... are you saying Marie Curie could travel back in time!? WTF? OMG?!
I'd include Sophie Germaine[wikipedia.org] Germain was particularly interested in Joseph-Louis Lagrange's teachings and submitted papers and assignments under the pseudonym "Monsieur Le Blanc", a former student of Lagrange's. Lagrange was so impressed by the paper that he asked to meet Le Blanc, and Germain was forced to reveal her identity to him. Lagrange apparently considered her a talented mathematician and became her mentor. On a lighter note, how about Britney spears[britneyspears.ac]? ;)
P.S. I don't post much at /.. Could someone tell me how to post a comment without replying to an earlier comment?(i.e. Reply to This).
Kari Byron from MythBusters.
I want to know what the hell the author was smoking when this was written, beause that's some really potent stuff!
Why the f**k is Darryl Hannah on this list? She not a f**king geek! She's a left-wing, activist actress! Oh, wow, she made two board games. So what? That does not qualify her to bear the category of "geek" in any way, shape, or form.
Lisa Simpson? Paris Hilton? Others have discussed the stupidity of these entries, so I'm not going to bother reiterating them.
Why the hell are two of the most prominent girl geeks around not on this list -- Aluria Petrucci (aka Cali Lewis) and Amber McArthur? Cali Lewis is one of the most famous tech geeks out there with her GeekBrief.TV video podcast that gets tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of downloads every day. Even if she's just a nice-on-the-eyes presenter, she still has far more qualifications than Hanna, Simpson, or Hilton. And Amber McArthur is just about every geek's wet dream - intelligent (holds several college degrees), co-host and producer of several tech podcasts and TVs shows, host of commandN video podcast, clearly has a love for tech, and is incredibly easy on the eyes.
I certainly can agree with Marie Curie, Ada Byron, and the others. I'll even give the nod to Mary Shelley. But some of the entires in this list completely destroy the credibility of whoever the person is who made this list.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Well she had to get plutonium back to herself somehow. I'm sure in 1985 you can get plutonium at your local conrer store but in the 1930's it's a bit harder to come by.
Sophie Germain was quite the math geek - even has a type of prime number named after her. Had to use a psedonym because women weren't supposed to be mathematicians back then. Clearly the folks who wrote the article didn't do any real research.
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.
I can't believe that they omitted Emmy Noether, one of my role models and possibly, IMO, the greatest geek girl of all time.
Despite the incredible sexism and rise of the nazi rule that she faced during her day, she was brilliantly accomplished, contributing huge amounts to the fields of commutative algebra and theoretical physics.
...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
You read descriptions of what she and her husband would do with samples of radium and you want to cry. They had no idea what they were doing to themselves.
Clear, Dark Skies
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".
The list is an insult to women, and in particular geek women.
Having filler like Lisa Simpson is bad enough, but Paris Hilton?
If the list were of the top 10 men, would it include Dilbert and some-random-male-gameplaying-celebrity?
Honestly, there are lots of girl geeks (a lot have been mentioned in other posts, I'd like to add Jeri Ellsworth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeri_Ellsworth)) that would far better fit the list.
The only thing this list proves, it the author's inaptitude as a journalist.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Back when computation and observational astronomy were considered "women's work," Henrietta Swan Leavitt discovered the standard candle which lets us judge the distance of galaxies. At the time, many believed that the other galaxies were just nebulae.
She expanded our universe from a large number of stars, to an enormous multigalactic system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Leavitt
I call the left nostril!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
She was originally married to a German weapons supplier. Consequently, she knew about things like tanks and torpedoes.
Came up with what we now call frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology, trying to make a torpedo which could be directed after launch, but couldn't be jammed.
Reasonably good actress. Brainy as all hell. Drop-dead gorgeous.
Now THERE'S a Geek Girl rolemodel who simply needs better publicity.
... by the Dew of Mountains the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning
Hey! Maybe Paris can come over to my house and we can play games together. I've got a great joystick.
I believe what you meant was that she come over to your house to play with you Wii.
Take-off every
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.
Whoever put Paris Hilton on the list needs to be shot. If you want a REAL geek girl who also shows the goods go for (SFW), the self-described "nerd of porn."
I swear, Slashdot's taggers are a harsh crowd. The minute something hits that isn't hard news, they're all over it with that depressing "slownewsday" tag-in-the-face.
You could have a day that goes like this:
Microsoft opens complete Windows source code
Steve Ballmer Resigns from Microsoft, Will Become Carpenter
Nintendo Asks: What Makes a Good Game
Bill Gates and Larry Ellison Announce "Domestic Partnership."
Steve Wozniak bests Steve Jobs in UFC
And that Nintendo story will get a slownewsday tag before the electrons dry...
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
"North America was created in 1492."
Yes, Christopher Columbus "created" North America in a supercollider (in his parents' basement, I'm sure). It wasn't until decades later that trace elements of North America were found naturally occurring in extremely small amounts, thanks to North America's extremely long half-life combined with one-in-a-million occurrences of natural plate tectonics.
There's an entire chart of about 100 famous women scientists in history up on the web, which is only a tiny fraction of the total number of real geek women. I'd say that there are probably in the order of a thousand plus who are TRULY famous and TRULY geeky (although there are many many more than that who are "merely" really good geeks).
I'd say that it might be much more interesting to compile a comprehensive list and then allow for ranked voting to find the most famous (now) of the truly amazing geek women who live (or have lived) truly amazing lives that go as far beyond what most would call hardcore geek as the hardcore geeks go beyond the mundane in "real life".
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Great. 'Cause being hot is the quality we should be concerned with when identifying the best geeks.
There are lives at stake here!
I agree that this list is insulting. It sure makes me feel like all of those years I spent in graduate school working on my Ph.D. in physics were a total waste. I've been involved in a lot of public outreach projects aimed at improving the visibility of women scientists, but apparently these public outreach programs have not had any effect on the perceptions of the general public.
The person who came up with the CNET list certainly didn't try very hard at all. If they really were interested in creating a list of women who have contributed to mathematics and science, there are a lot of organizations and web sites where they could have found better information. For example:
The Women of NASA
The Society of Women Engineers
The Association of Women in Science
The Committee on Women in Science and Engineering at the National Academies of Science
And of course, there are also many Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Programs at colleges and universities throughout the United States.
People always wonder why more women do not pursue careers in science and engineering. The persistence of the misconception that only men can be successful in science and engineering, as well as stupid garbage like this list, are definitely not helping. Reading the CNET list made me feel as though women's contributions to science are completely unappreciated. On the other hand, reading some of the Slashdot comments mentioning prominent women who should have been on the list, gives me a little bit of hope that things can change.
They should have chosen grandmaster Judit Polgar. You don't get much geekier than chess, and you don't get much better than Judit Polgar.
Let's see here:
Ada Byron: Worlds first programmer on Charles Babbage's computer.
Val Tereshkova: Cosmonaut, Hero of Russia, Crater named for her on the moon.
Grace Hopper: Inventor of the Mark 1 Calculator; COBOL; really found the first computer "bug"
Rosalind Franklin: Expert in DNA and crystallography; probably should have receive a Nobel prize.
Marie Curie: Won TWO Nobel Prizes discovered Radium & Polonium.
Mary Shelley: Author of Frankenstein the archetypal geek gone mad story.
A fairly impressive list.
Next Up
Daryl Hanna: Acted in Blade Runner & Attack of the 50 foot woman, designed two board games.
Lisa Simpson: Fictitious, doesn't count. get it off the list.
Aleks Krotoski:Expert in the social psychology of virtual worlds, writer for the Guardian
Paris Hilton:Huh?
Aleks might be able to stay, on the list but the rest gotta go. DAryl might be a geek but come on top ten?
Here are some suggestions for additions to the list:
Maria Mayer: Nobel Prize in Physics. Determined the "shell" structure of the atom.
Jewel Cobb:Studied the effects of chemotherapy non-cancerous cells. Received 41 honorary doctorates.
Evelyn Granville:Second woman in the USA to receive a PhD in mathematics. Worked for IBM on the team that developed the formulation of orbit computations and computer procedures for NASA.
Or to go OLD school:
Theano: Wife of Pythagoras. Worked on the formula to derive Golden Rectangle.
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