Top Ten Geek Girls 560
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.
Leah? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://leahculver.com/ [leahculver.com]
*hawtness*
Also, Flickr Account (Score:4, Funny)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/leahculver/ [flickr.com]
I'm not a stalker or nothin, just wanted to post that before I go back to hiding in the bushes with my binoculars.....
Re:Leah? (Score:4, Insightful)
No Emmy Noether? (Score:5, Interesting)
Marie Curie but no Emmy Noether [wikipedia.org]?
Pshaw.
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Second, Marie Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Third, she was awarded it twice. Only three other people were so honored, four if you count Warburg [wikipedia.org] (all of them: male).
Fourth, she was the first female Nobel Prize laureate. To have been given such a distinction and be accepted by the academic community in those days, she had to be many
Re:No Emmy Noether? (Score:4, Funny)
The list is an insult to women (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:The list is an insult to women (Score:5, Funny)
And also interesting is the fact that there's no mention of how much cock any of the others sucked. Quite shoddy standards, if you ask me.
You are correct. (Score:4, Funny)
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".
Re:The list is an insult to women (Score:5, Funny)
Uh, yeah, ABOUT that.
>The only thing this list proves, it the author's inaptitude as a journalist.
You spelled "asshole" wrong.
Maybe Paris Hilton is on that list to give Mary Shelly new ideas?
Re:The list is an insult to women (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll say -- fuck that list and just read something like this [wikipedia.org].
Where to find real women scientists and engineers (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:The list is an insult to women (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Leah? (Score:5, Funny)
Real geeks only please (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Real geeks only please (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Real geeks only please (Score:5, Funny)
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10 Say "Yes, I'll have sex with you" 20 GOTO 10
-Eric
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Re:Foregone conclusions.. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Real geeks only please (Score:4, Funny)
Unless you're measuring her promiscuity in Millions of Insertions Per Second.
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Did I say width? There's a joke in there somewhere.
Re:Real geeks only please (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, that just insulted girl geeks everyone,
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Re:Real geeks only please (Score:4, Insightful)
On the flip side I don't see anything wrong with the occasional silly entry. Say if this list was a solid 9 geeky women and one Lisa Simpson that's cute. If its 5 solid women and 5 fluff women, then its silly bordering on insulting.
Re:Real geeks only please (Score:5, Insightful)
It must be very empowering to women to know that it's apparently impossible to compile a list of even ten prominent geek women without padding it with fictional characters and vacuous celebrities.
-Eric
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Re:Real geeks only please (Score:5, Insightful)
Geek is very chic nowadays, lots of people who are not geeks *wish they were*. Geek is in.
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I disagree. It's chic to say geek is chic, but it's not actually cool to be a geek. Never has been, never will be.
Some geeks may manage to be cool, but that's in spite of their geekiness, not because of it.
Well, Let's Fix It (Score:3, Funny)
Obviously this article needs help. Let's nominate some replacements.
Re:Real geeks only please (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, you go to space, you blog about it, the blog gets slashdotted. And you don't even beat Paris Hilton in geekiness? Nothing to see here, move along.
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She was only eighteen and a "popular girl" when she started writing the book. i.e., she's that bitch in the hall who pointed at your nerdiness, giggled and made rude comments about your "high waters" and Teva sandels with socks.
KFG
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Frankenstein is her magnum opus, reductio ad absurdum attack on geeks.
I read it as an attack on the potential for immorality inherent in science, rather than an assault on those who enjoy science, make use of science, or are scientists themselves.
She was only eighteen and a "popular girl" when she started writing the book. i.e., she's that bitch in the hall who pointed at your nerdiness, giggled and made rude comments...
I'm not sure if you're being facetious here or not, but it sounds like you kno
Re:Real geeks only please (Score:5, Funny)
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http://www.discover.com/issues/nov-02/features/fe
Cally
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Lisa Simpson is clearly a girl-geek role model, even if she's a cartoon.
Aleks Krotoski spends a lot of time advocating 'girl-video gaming' according to her Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org], though I've never heard of her.
I have yet to RTFA, but I'm wondering how they drew the line. For example, many geek guys are fans of Ripley from the Alien movies, but SHE is more of a strong female character than a geek per se. Same
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Lisa Simpson? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lisa Simpson? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Lisa Simpson? (Score:5, Funny)
Hedy Lamarr (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Yes, Hedy Lamarr also deserves to be mentioned because she was the actress who invented frequency-hopping spread spectrum radio technology. During WWII, with the help of Peter Antheil, she worked on using a frequency-hopping radio to create a jam resistant control system for "guided" torpedoes.
Before that, as a teenager, she made headlines and shocked Europe by doing few nude scenes in the Czech film, "Ecstasy". She later married a merchant who was selling munitions to Germany. She did learn some about
Plutonium? Unlikely (Score:5, Informative)
What is interesting, in a disturbiung way, is that Marie Curies workbooks that she used while discovering radium are still considered dangerously radioactive.
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What is interesting, in a disturbiung way, is that Marie Curies workbooks that she used while discovering radium are still considered dangerously radioactive.
Curiously, given this story, there is a similar story floating around about Paris Hilton, albeit not involving science workbooks.
Re:Plutonium? Unlikely (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Her notebooks are horrifying. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Rest of lyrics here [ovff.org].
Re:Plutonium? Unlikely (Score:4, Funny)
Holy shit... are you saying Marie Curie could travel back in time!? WTF? OMG?!
Re:Plutonium? Unlikely (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Plutonium? Unlikely (Score:5, Interesting)
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Actually, the most common (and useful in bombs) isotope of plutonium is Pu-239. This is primarily an alpha emitter. Unless you eat it or inhale particles of it, it's unlikely to kill you terribly quickly unless you put a neutron reflector around it and cause it to rapidly fission (as happened to a few unfortunate experimenters at Los Alamos in the 40s).
-b.
Re:Plutonium? Unlikely (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Paris Hilton??? W - T - F (Score:5, Interesting)
where the hell (Score:4, Insightful)
Where TF is.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:where the hell (Score:5, Insightful)
It annoys me that these were the 10 women (Paris Hilton, et al) they chose. It must be really insulting, when they leave out so many serious 'girl geeks' that actually did have a positive impact on the world.
Grace Hopper (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Grace Hopper (Score:5, Informative)
Me and my joystick (Score:2, Funny)
I've got a great joystick.
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Come one... this
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I believe what you meant was that she come over to your house to play with you Wii.
What about... (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.fiorella.com/fiorprofile.htm [fiorella.com]
Cynthia Breazeal! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cynthia Breazeal! (Score:4, Funny)
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Huh? (Score:2, Redundant)
I wonder... (Score:2)
And to be kind, the "facts" about Grace Hopper can be disputed. Contrary to the layman's belief, she didn't invent COBOL. There is a dispute about whether she invented the compiler (there are many people who give credit to John Backus at IBM), and certainly she didn't discover the first "bug" nor did she popularize the term. Now Grace Hopper was brilliant, but I always got the fee
Yuck. (Score:5, Insightful)
A girl geek friend of mine works for CNet. I wonder how well her and her fellows are taking this.
Paris Hilton or Madame Curie... hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
I give up.
Paris Hilton should be on every list (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Mother of the Internet: "CNET, to go to your room" (Score:2, Interesting)
Hedy Lamar (Score:4, Informative)
Now that's hot, Paris.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blazing_Saddles [wikipedia.org]
Can we replace? (Score:2)
Can we replace Paris Hilton with Jerri Ellsworth [wikipedia.org], please?
VAVOOM!!! (Score:2)
Umm... What About... (Score:3, Interesting)
Mena Trott?
Barbara Broccoli?
J.K. Rowling?
Zoe Lofgren?
This seems like so much of the usual CNet feature-story drivel....
Jeri Ellsworth (Score:3, Interesting)
Jeri Ellsworth Lectures about the C64 & C-One at Stanford Uni. [google.com]
Paris Hilton? (Score:3)
Where the hell is Kari? (Score:5, Insightful)
WTF?! Some of the entries are total bullsh*t. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [tv.com]? 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.
No Emmy Noether? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
This list seems to be a joke. (Score:3, Interesting)
2. While Grace Hopper (who I met twice) was been frequently accused of fluffing her own legend, and enjoyed telling the story of the "first computer bug", she never claimed to have found the moth that got caught in the Mark II - the machine operators did, and taped it to the operations log.
3. I'm sorry but Curie could not have possibly carried plutonium in her pockets, since she died in 1934 and plutonium wasn't discovered until 1941.
4. Darryl Hannah?!? Paris Hilton?!? What about Sally Ride? Judith Resnick or any of the other female astronauts?
What About... (Score:5, Interesting)
Adele Goldberg (Score:3, Interesting)
Jeri Ellsworth -- Retrocomputing Goddess (Score:3, Interesting)
Where the hell is Radia Perlman? (Score:3, Insightful)
Spanning Tree algorithm...she even wrote a poem about it- and she is not a top ten geek girl? And Paris Hilton is? You sure this list isn't the top ten Greek (screwing) girls?
I think this list is meant more for entertainment than fact- even if it is just someone's opinion.
Roberta Williams Paris Hilton (Score:5, Interesting)
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".
What about Delia Derbyshire? (Score:3, Interesting)
Henrietta Swan Leavitt (Score:3, Informative)
She expanded our universe from a large number of stars, to an enormous multigalactic system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Leavitt [wikipedia.org]
Rosalind Franklin? (Score:5, Interesting)
"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.
Paris Hilton? BAH! Asia Carrera! (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdot's taggers are harsh... (Score:4, Funny)
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...
Margaret Hamilton (Score:3, Informative)
Margaret Hamilton [nasa.gov]. In charge of the NASA Apollo Flight Software from 1963-72. Coined the term "software engineering". Created the field of high-reliability software. "No software bug was ever found on any manned space flight Apollo mission."
Good-looking, too; I met her once.
If they were looking for a "gamer" (Score:5, Insightful)
You've got to be kidding (Score:4, Informative)
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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