Dangerous Ideas

I realized I can’t go to BlogHer on Saturday. Mostly because I managed to convince myself until yesterday that it was happening on Sunday (which, realistically, I probably couldn’t have gone to, either, with all the packing going on).

If you want to go, e-mail me at jennyw at dangerousideas dot com.

I’ve had troubles with Typo (which I’ve been using for my blog) for a while and kept thinking to myself that I’d move to WordPress at one point. Then Mephisto came out and made quite a splash, with the Rails Weblog switching to Mephisto from Typo. So I figured when I got enough free time I’d look into Mephisto instead of moving to WordPress. Of course, I still haven’t gotten to try migrating to Mephisto and now Typo 4.0 has been released. Which just goes to show that if you ignore a problem long enough, sometimes it’ll solve itself. ;-) Hopefully that’s the case this time, and comments and trackbacks work like they should. If not, then I’ll go back to looking at Mephisto or WordPress.

For any other Typo users out there, the upgrade went smoothly. I backed everything up and switched to the default theme (since I figured Origami, which was written for Typo 2.6.0, would break), and upgraded Typo and Rails using svn. After the files had updated and the tables migrated, everything worked. Now I’ve switched to a lighter-weight theme called Scribbish, and the blog seems much snappier.

I just learned that today is National Ice Cream Day. Those of us who live in Bernal here in San Francisco are lucky to have a neighborhood ice cream parlor that serves vegan ice cream as well as regular ice cream, the wonderful MaggieMudd! They often support progressive causes (I remember seeing one of their ice cream carts at Matt Gonzalez’s campaign headquarters), they’re independent and family owned, and they have great vegan (and non-vegan) ice cream. They’re also open late, which is a big plus, too. Some local restaurants and grocery stores carry their ice cream, including the The Bayleaf Cafe and Judahlicious.

I’ve decided to celebrate the day by writing this blog post about why I became vegan.

Ice cream was one of the things that I found hard to give up before I became vegan (I hadn’t tried the soy ice creams yet). And, at the time, I didn’t think it was a big deal – dairy cows aren’t killed for their milk, after all. But I didn’t make the connection that the dairy cows’ calves would become veal. And I’m not alone … I’ve met a lot of people who think veal is just horrible, but don’t connect veal to cheese or ice cream. And, of course, the lives of dairy cows aren’t that great, either – quite a bit different than the “happy cow” ads portray.

I really hope non-dairy ice creams catch on more. Not just for the cows, but also for people. While dDairy may have been a part of European and South Asian diets for centuries, it’s pretty new to other cultures. Most people in the world are lactose intolerant. It amazes me that 90 percent Asians are lactose intolerant, but many of us don’t know that. That’s a testament to the power of the dairy industry’s marketing. They somehow got the concept of the square meal (with dairy forming a whole corner) to be accepted by the U.S., and have continued to convince cultures whose peoples are largely lactose intolerant to start consuming dairy. This, of course, has negative health results.

I also found out that milk often doesn’t help prevent osteoporosis. The dairy industry advocates milk for women to help avoid the bone disease, and many women believe them.

I don’t remember exactly the order I discovered these things, but they all made it clear to me that being vegan not only supports animals, but also supports feminism and multi-racial justice.

Actress Danica McKellar, who played Winnie Cooper on the Wonder Years and Elsie Snuffin on The West Wing, is a big mathematics fan. She’s a co-author of a proof for a theorem and offers mathematics advice on her Web site (which unfortunately uses frames so the first link will look like it’s missing something).

I just read an article about McKellar’s new book for girls, “Math Doesn’t Suck”:

In 2007, Hudson Street Press will publish Danica McKellar’s forthcoming book “Math Doesn’t Suck,” a groundbreaking book that uses hip and entertaining examples to teach middle-school girls and their parents how to master many of the tough concepts that are introduced in middle school – the time when young girls begin to shy away from math.

This sounds like a great book! And it’s a big plus that it’s being written by an actress which should help break the stereotype of math being uncool or unhip. Every once in a while I read a message from a techie woman who’s just discovered that actress Hedy Lamarr co-invented spread spectrum technology, a fundamental part of cellular and wireless networks today. The messages typically express how great it was to discover Lamar’s accomplishments, but sadness that they didn’t find out about this until years after she passed away. I think there’s just something about the glamour of the movies and science that, when mixed together, just seem inspiring. It’s great that in McKellar we have someone who’s currently active as both an actress and a mathematician!

As I was looking for references for this blog entry, I saw a bunch of references to McKellar’s advocacy for girls in science. She was recently a speaker at Stanford’s Women in Mathematics Forum), she’s been interviewed a few times about her interest in math, and she gave a speech in response to a congressional committee’s report on trying to attract more women and minorities to science, engineering, and technology. Here’s an excerpt from that last link:

I have had my share of run-ins with not fitting the “stereotype” of a scientifically-minded young woman. Every day, people approach me, and recognize me for my portrayal of the character “Winnie Cooper” on the television series “The Wonder Years.” And every day people ask me what I am doing now. When I tell them I took a break from acting in order to attend college, they inevitably ask what my major was. When I tell them “math”… Mouths drop open…mixed with stares of horror and confusion… usually followed by a looks of intrigue and newfound respect, but always the incredulous, “Why…?” They were not expecting that to come from me, since I do not fit among the ever popular stereotypical images of math nerds. (At least that’s what I like to think.)

Even more telling, was an experience I had in the 9th grade.

After our first test, my science teacher pulled me aside and expressed surprise at my high score, exclaiming how unexpected it was that I would be a good student in science. “You just seem so outgoing and you wear such brightly colored earrings… I just didn’t think you would be very smart.” All based on appearances, the teacher was judging me according to the stereotypes that are so deeply ingrained in our society: the socially inept, nerdy looking guy who doesn’t care about fashion. Here’s the most interesting part.

The teacher was a woman.

Go Danica! Wait, I seem to have written just that for another Danica not long ago … ;-)

I love that my company has such a diverse client base! Some days are all about social justice, some days we work next to fire engines, some days we help businesses recover from disasters, some days we help people give money where it’s needed. And some days, we help people enrich their sex lives. ;-)

I was at Babeland today meeting with them about their Web site (parts of which we’ll be redoing in Ruby on Rails). While I was there, I got an update on Project Sex Toy, a contest that they created that’s kind of like Project Runway (one of V’s favorite shows!) meets HBO’s Real Sex.

Contest entries have been up on their Web site for a while with the event culminating in the final day at Babeland’s Los Angeles store where celebrity judges chose the winner. A lot of press folks went, and photos of the event will be published soon. Unfortunately, there’s no video! I so wish I had been down in LA for this with my new MacBook and a video camera … Maybe next time!

Stanford neurobiologist Ben Barres has an article in Nature about how women scientists face additional pressure. His article relies in part on personal experience (from the Washington Post:

After he underwent a sex change nine years ago at the age of 42, Barres recalled, another scientist who was unaware of it was heard to say, “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister’s.”

And as a female undergraduate at MIT, Barres once solved a difficult math problem that stumped many male classmates, only to be told by a professor: “Your boyfriend must have solved it for you.”

“By far,” Barres wrote, “the main difference I have noticed is that people who don’t know I am transgendered treat me with much more respect” than when he was a woman. “I can even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man.”

The examples that Barres gives of his treatment before and after his transition from a woman to a man are great to read – there’s no better apples to apples comparison than comparing your own skills to your own skills.

Barres wrote his article in response to the controversy that started with former Harvard President Larry Summer’s comments that women have a different “intrinsically aptitude” than men, which Summers thought was the cause of differences in representation. Barres thinks that more good could come out of continuing the discussion than thinking of it as resolved by Summers’ departure from Harvard.

Exactly what made Sony think having a black and white model fight was a good way to promote their products? What were they thinking?

What’s even more disturbing than the ad itself is the response from some people. Some people are slamming Leland Yee and the NAACP saying they shouldn’t care what happens across the Atlantic.

Then there are the people who think that any publicity is good publicity and Sony is going to benefit from the controversy. I’d hate to think this was deliberate, but who knows?

Back in April, Alan Kay and Guido von Rossum participated in the Shuttleworth Summit (sponsored by Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu and space tourism fame). I saw a few blog posts then about cooperation between the Python and Squeak communities since the two were exchanging ideas, including an article on Shuttleworth’s blog. It sounded good, but I wondered if there would be followup. Then I saw this link to a post by Guido on a keynote by Alan at Europython. I love the prospect that the work done with Squeak and kids might be expanded to a bigger audience through Python programmers (there are a lot more Pythonistas these days than Squeakers). Of course, it also occurred to me that what they Guido wrote about Python could be said for Ruby, too. Then I read the comments and saw one from Alan that mentioned both Ruby and Python as targets to broaden the ideas in Squeak and eToys.

I really hope something comes of this. Avi Bryant wrote an article about the advantages of implementing Ruby in a Smalltalk a while ago, and it’s clear that a lot of people are interested in something like this. Squeak has also inspired projects like MetaRuby, an attempt to implement Ruby in Ruby.

It’s ironic: One of the great promises of object-oriented programming was reuse, yet today, Python and Ruby are still converging with ideas that have been in Smalltalk for 25 years. Of course, I can’t wait for it to happen …

This comes in the category of things that we probably shouldn’t be able to do, but now that we can (from the Guardian)…

Prof Nayernia also hopes to create sperm from female embryonic stem cells, and eventually, eggs from stem cells.

If he is successful, the work could give single men and women the possibility of providing both sperm and eggs for embryos - effectively allowing them to mate with themselves. Gay couples would be able to have children which are genetically their own.

Wow. I don’t even know where to start with this. This is still in the nascent stages, but I could see this being applied in the next 20 years or so. It probably seems like a dream to many, and a nightmare to many, also (and there’s probably a lot of overlap in the two camps).

The Internet changed society in ways that it would have been hard to predict twenty years before the Web, but twenty years from now? The human species could be completely changed. Some government, somewhere in the world is going to let this technology be applied. And then we’ll have the same things with humans that we have with GMO crops … there will be cross fertilization ad then … wow, just wow.