There is nothing that is not awesome about Ada Lovelace

Today is Ada Lovelace Day. The internet said it, so it must be true. And that means that we get to spend some time celebrating one of the single most awesome people in history. Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, for those who haven't heard the tale, was the daughter of Lord Byron, the famous dissipated aesthete. Under the careful tutelage of her psychotic mother (you'd have to be pretty crazy to hate poets and have Lord Byron's kid, though then again the two might be related), she grew into both the manic-depressive romantic heroine any child of Lord Byron should be, and a hero of SCIENCE! in an era when this was not a thing that happened.

A decade or two after Mary Shelley invented science fiction with Frankenstein, Ada Lovelace was working with Charles Babbage on figuring out the World's First Computer. By virtue of this she became, by most counts, the World's First Computer Programmer. The fact that the computer didn't actually exist doesn't really diminish this at all; in fact, it makes it even greater, since it does exist now and we know it actually would have worked. This is both 1) the most steampunk thing ever and 2) incredibly awesome. Somehow I guess there are still people who believe the "women can't do computer science" thing out there, despite such sterling examples as Grace Hopper, Barbara Liskov, and my own advisor. So, for those poor benighted people, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG. And for boys and girls in CS looking for someone to admire, it's hard to do better than Ada Lovelace. Happy Lovelace Day!

P.S.: Also, there is an amazing webcomic miniseries about Lovelace and Byron that you all should read.

What we talk about when we talk about business

Every once in a while, my Japanese class delivers an irritating reminder of just how ingrained sexism is in language. Of course, this is at least as true in English as in Japanese -- it's nearly impossible to talk about a person in English without using gendered pronouns like "he" or "she". Japanese, thankfully, generally doesn't have this problem, but it has its own set of issues.

I have the misfortune to be taking "business Japanese" this semester, and today's scenario was a discussion between a V.P. and some subordinates. When men and women are expected to say the lines differently, the teacher writes the changes on the board (usually, though not always, the lines in the textbook are the "male" versions). Usually, these are just small modifications to sentence endings; casual Japanese has distinct "male" and "female" speech styles, though as far as I can tell it's acceptable in modern Japanese for anyone to use the "male" style, or something in between. Today, though, we had a particularly egregious change: in the textbook, the V.P. referred to a subordinate with the familiar suffix -kun, but the teacher asked the female students to use the more respectful -san, and when a student used -kun anyway she was "corrected". Apparently it's disrespectful for a woman to use a familiar term of address to (presumably) a man, even if he's working under her.

Of course, I don't know how representative our teacher's opinions are, or what would be considered acceptable in a real modern Japanese business. I suspect that, just as during my stay in Japan my host family all spoke in the "male" style, there are places where these rules don't apply. But it was an interesting, and to me rather blatant, example of how sexism comes across in language, even when the subject of gender is nominally unrelated. When speaking or writing in our native language, we're often too close to see the assumptions we make, but when we take a step back they come across loud and clear. Maybe next time I'll try reading the "other side's" lines; after all, it would still show that I understood the dialogue. If I do, I'll let you know how it goes.

a tangled issue

The New York Times recently ran a fascinating opinion piece on the legal issues surrounding same-sex marriage and transsexuals:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/opinion/12boylan.html

It's hard to think of a more omnipresent dualism than gender. It's almost impossible for most people (I know it is for me) to interact with other people in any way at all without classifying them as either male or female. In the majority of cases of real-world interaction, the classification can be made fairly easily, though, as the article points out, not always consistently or coherently.

It's equally complicated in the case of online interaction. When the only clues one receives are written text, and possibly an avatar which may be genderless or intentionally different from the person it represents, the decision becomes very arbitrary. I've convinced people that I'm of the opposite gender before on the internet, often without even trying (is that an embarrassing thing to admit? I'm not sure). And people tend to attribute gender even to genderless constructs like AIs, based on clues that in this case are completely spurious.

So, what's my take on all this? I'm really not sure. I'm as deeply tangled in it as anyone. Part of me wants to say that gender is another irrelevant distinction that'll become obsolete with the advance of technology. Another part sees it as an important part of our culture, albeit one that should be under our control rather than used to control us. And of course there's the backwards-looking part that keeps pointing out that this distinction has a biological basis. For now, the most I can say is that it's something that merits further thought. Oh, and if you're interested in this sort of thing, my good friend ekblack often writes about gender issues and other fun stuff. Check it out!