Kids Stuff

Saw How to Train Your Dragon over the weekend. Very enjoyable movie. If you like cats you'll call in love with the main dragon. I'm pretty sure it's a cat in disguise. Plus, even though it revolves around a geeky guy (like what movie doesn't these days?) the peripheral heroine is a badass axe wielding strong and independent person. Finally some armor I can get behind.

 

If you like fun and games, there's this genetic algorithm of a car (h/t Pharyngula). I don't know that I quite understand it, it's not precisely a game but presumably up and down votes should make it more than just programming you are watching. I think the key is to leave it alone for a while and see what it comes up with.

 

However, if you're really angling to avoid doing some work this morning check out this paper plane flash game called flight (h/t avoision). Just don't blame me when it's Friday afternoon and you haven't gotten anything done, ok?

Selling Science

What gimmicks do you use to market your science or engineering blog? I'm a fan of adorable fluffy animals or weird machines or sea creatures. Most engineers I know are visual people and a compelling photo with a hopefully interesting headline just might reel 'em in.

Scicurious recently posted Let's talk about sex (in science). This brought up a rehash of the Science Cheerleaders (or the pretty girls can do science, but remember your number one priority is to be pretty in a traditional way, and by pretty we mean fuckable). You see a lot of bloggers posted about how they either get unprofessional comments on their appearance based on a blog profile headshot or how as professors they get unwelcome attention to their gender and body from students or other professors even. But the verdict was using sex or sexy themes might bring more attention to something, but it does not necessarily do a good job at selling said thing.

One of my fav commenters, jc (when you going to get your own blog and put all your great stuff there?) came out and said something perfect:

"Well, how many women WANT to come forward and say "You were called hot, I was called fat and ugly"?"
...
The Disturbance Hypothesis definitely holds up. Women are a disturbance to men, PERIOD. If you are too smart, you're fucked. Too pretty, you're fucked. Ugly, fat, brown, lesbian…fucked fucked fucked fucked. If you don't wipe some moron's ass, fucked. If you overshadow some moron's ass with your brilliant study, fucked. Whatever the goalpost is for whatever whiny douche, you have to exist below it as a woman, or you are fucked.

Ain't that the truth. I feel angry and left out and margianalized no matter how you throw the dice. I love Dr. Isis but every time she shows a picture of some hot woman it is like shoving my body hate right in my face when I least expect it. Believe it or not I think sciencey blogs do a good job at sheltering me from society's ridiculous expectations. And I know she's trying to present who she is without judging anybody else, but those pictures make me feel judged.

When I talk with coworkers about the douchebag mucky mucks who work here and get away with harrassment and skeeviness and mysoginistic behavior I'm angry that some of my female colleagues have to deal with this kind of unwanted attention. I'm angry the guys who do this have enough power to get away with it and that pretty much any young pretty woman can be a target. But then I'm reminded I don't get this kind of attention and nobody is referring to me as "pretty" and that they don't think of me that way. Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not "one of the guys" I'm pretty sure that's a myth. It's just that my not-as-standard level of female attractiveness or femininity puts me in the category of other.

An object to be ignored rather than objectified, and I don't like either option. I'm angry that my male colleagues accuse women of bringing it upon themselves by dressing a certain way when I know that that doesn't help but I feel disgusted that my own modest clothing choices are judged or publically applauded like it's some ridiculous fucking contest of what ways we all meet or fail to meet the boys' standards. It shouldn't fucking matter how we all choose to dress, so shove it! This is my personal style not because exposing more or less skin means I think a man has any right to objectify me or any other woman. And I'm not talking about noting attractiveness inside one's head, I'm talking about how there are engineers and there are women and some neanderthal male brains can't allow anyone to fit in both categories, or are unable to just have a single category: engineer.

My senior project group members were talking with our company sponsor about purchasing materials. Most so far have come from Home Depot. My group is 75% female and they and the male sponsors started relating stories about either themselves or people they know walking into a hardware store and suddenly getting a ton of male attention. Or walking into a video game store. I nodded and laughed. But I felt like the quote from jc's comment: to paraphrase, you were given attention but I'm so fat and ugly I wasn't even noticed. And I felt sad. Sad that we stereotype that "pretty" women need extra help in a hardware store. Sad that like jc I get simultaneously sexually objectified but also rejected for unfeminine features or for my weight. Rarely do I walk the middle ground of being noticed and respected for my personality or my skills. Everytime I think I'm having a conversation with a colleague I get a cutting comment that reminds me I am at core a woman. And like all other women, I am an incorrect woman who does not meet their perfect standard.

I shouldn't have to say props to the men in my life or the men in the blogosphere who do not objectify and do encourage and do not verbalize inappropriate comments and are able to see past all that shit. But I will say it because I hope these men can be the drivers of a culture shift as I don't think we women can do it alone. So thanks allies and fuck off everyone else.

Wimminz in STEM

A lot of brilliant and smart people have been speaking their minds lately about "women science bloggers" post Science Online 2011 and some other traffic. There's too many to hit all the great responses, but here's a list anyways:

Even when we want something we need to hide it - Kate Clancy

Self Promotion Tour 2011 - Dr Becca

Women and Science Blogging - Daniel Lende

Where are the female science bloggers? - scicurious

It brings up a lot of things Cherish the Scientist and I have been thinking about as we go forward with our new blogging collective EngineerBlogs (am I plugging this enough? GO THERE AND READ! ADD OUR FEED!). How do you make sure you are achieving diversity and looking beyond the people like you tendency we all have. I mean, it's easier for me, I'm a female blogger so naturally I'll gravitate towards other female bloggers. So how do you convince other people that intentionally recruiting for diversity is a good thing? I like Tenured Radical's post on affirmative action and the idea that merit is actually a system, or even better, the myth of merit. The idea that certain groups don't have distinct advantages from an early age or that our tendency to befriend, to recruit, and to reward people who are more like ourselves doesn't come into play with a historically white/male dominated world. This might be less obvious on the blogosphere, but it's certainly no less obvious in my life. Zuska also wrote a great and succinct post as well on the whole I want to earn this on my own when none of us really accomplish anything purely on our own merit.

It looks like they'll be hiring another female engineer here. The holdup now is she is supposedly "asking for too much" and negotations are occurring. I applaud her for asking for too much. And I wonder if a guy with similar education and experience who had asked for that much would have been categorized in the same way. No way of knowing really, I'm not that involved with the hiring process. Hiring her will bring the department representation of female engineers from 2.7% to 3.3%.

She's replacing a woman who left a while ago to teach. Sometimes I think because the last woman was so successful the people in charge thought let's hire someone like her and that's the only reason we're getting another woman. That if the last person had been a man, and good at his job, it would have been a man like him we'd be bringing in. Due to the other woman's leaving to pursue an alternate career (leaky pipeline? too limited sample size) she was asked somewhere in the offer stage whether there was anything she wanted to disclose, anything that might take her away from here. She mentioned then that she had just had a kid.

One of the people that interviewed her balked that she hadn't told him that, that throughout the multiple interviews she had failed to mention that. Clearly she should have said nothing. Sure, mentioning a pregnancy or future birth of a child might be appropriate by the presence of already born children certainly shouldn't be. She was already holding down a job, clearly she had it worked out. Not to mention the person who balked at it has a grown kid and presumably worked at some point in his career with a child just born. Or not to mention other higher level people in the group have little kids at home. We are reminded it is only a factor for women.

Some of my colleagues are dreading her being brought on and worrying whether she will be demanding or a tyrant of those she works with. But I'm not worried. I'm not one of those women who thinks it's hard to work with other women. I can't say every woman I've ever worked with has been my ally but many have and I've had fantastic peers and mentors that were both men and women. All the women I've worked for and with have had the same spectrum of the men I've worked for. I've yet to work under a real tyrant of a boss, but the ones I know about are all men. I suspect though that's an institutional thing and that the men in charge just wouldn't tolerate a dictator in the form of a woman, they'd make sure to encourage her out of the organization.

I look forward to meeting the new engineer. I hope we will get along and secretly I will try to help her and encourage her, even as the underling I am, as I have tried to do so for other women, minorities, and talented employees who I feel don't get the support they should for whatever category management thinks they don't fit into. Sometimes the things I hear or when I am called a bitch or labelled or put into a box makes it feel like death by a thousand cuts and I feel like giving up. But sometimes I feel like I'm a secret agent and my mission is to seek out these people and help them in whatever little ways I can. Maybe my little contributions will make up for the thousand cuts.

Try new things

I did some welding for the first time this week. Though that might be an exaggeration of what I actually accomplished, but I did something new and learned something.

I found a new blogger I like, Dr. Kathryn Clancy, and she blogged about a panel they had at Science Online 2011 and specifically about how when women want something they have to hide it. She talks about the moment I have been through many times where you are going along with your life and a colleague suddenly objectifies you and you realize you'll never be just another coworker to them, that your primary function is to be a woman. You can be smart for a woman or skilled for a woman but like Billy Joel sang, you're always a woman.

She also talked about women's tendencies not to promote themselves and a commenter had an insightful comment that despite attending the same conferences as men on "always negotiate" or "always promote yourself" that the message she took home to be aggressive was not nearly the same as what the men took home. She also talked about something I feel strongly about: we need to build an old girls club. I take this seriously here as well as in the workforce (which I'll probably talk about soon on EngineerBlogs). That we need to promote others as well as not be afraid to promote ourselves. So I did it. I joined twitter.

Two new things in one week, the hardware and the software, the yin and the yang.

Design Fridays: That's a big prop

The small UAV market is smoking hot. Boeing has a high altitude long endurance (HALE) they'd like to sell to someone. And they're not exaggerating in taking on the HALE acronym, it can reach an impressive 65,000 ft altitude and supposedly stay aloft for up to four days. It's doing some final ground testing now before actual flight testing commences so we'll see the truth in their claims rather soon. Powered by two engines it will also have two really big propellers. 16 ft in diameter big. It dwarfs the not insignificant 2.3L engine that powers it. Here's a video of their ground testing with the prop:

I'd like to see the prop map on that. What's a prop map you ask? Well when designing a propeller the contour of the blade lends itself to a certain efficiency at certain airspeeds and altitudes. There is no one blade that will work for every aircraft so you take a known propeller and its efficiency curves and map it out into little efficiency islands.

Then you can take this information and figure out where your aircraft would perform and how efficiently the prop is doing at various airspeeds and altitudes (air density is what's important here) and compare how efficient your prop is at your max takeoff speed or at your high altitude cruise speed as in the table below.

Given Boeing's Phantom Ray has two engines and two props I wonder if the redundancy allows it to stay up in the air if one engine fails like many larger military or passenger aircraft. At the least I think this is the start of higher expectations for UAVs where once 20-30 hours was considered an endurance flight I expect that will be too short of flight time going forward.

On the shoulders of heroes

Twenty-five years after and the airwaves and blogrolls are a mix of personal memories, trying to define what it meant to us, and what it means now for us and how we can best honor and pay homage to seven people. A lot of the commentary talks about Christa McAuliffe the first teacher in space. I wanted to highlight the story of Ronald McNair, Ph.D., and MIT graduated physicist. He was only the second African American in space. His brother Carl spoke about him briefly on StoryCorps and it's worth listening to. He talked about his brother's curiosity and risk taking. His intelligence and the barriers he overcame.

DARPA Thursdays: Underwater Sensors

A lot of DARPA's interesting marine projects relate to anti-submarine warfare, like this pilotless ship I talked about last year. Now they're looking for an underwater sensor array. I've done some quick CAD of what this might look like, as seen in the photo above. Underwater arrays are nothing new. They can look like buoys, capsules floating underneath the surface, they can even be disguised in something that looks and floats like kelp.

Here DARPA has in mind something that would be in deep ocean, at or near the bottom. This brings to mind my rough idea for a series of pressure resisting domes you could drop to the ocean floor. Sensor arrays are kind of a neat thing to begin with, a bunch of nodes communicating with each other and sharing information. So its a two fold problem of designing something that's mechanically hardy in not only high pressure environments but also cold, corrosion and have to be long lasting or incorporate some clever mechanism to surface itself and be easy to replace.

Working in the ocean is not unlike working in space; you can send your hardware into it but if something fails it's best to have as many possible methods of fixing it from a distance as possible. Meaning communication between nodes and to your surface point would not be trivial. And by the way the FBO is written you can tell DARPA's not looking for amazing innovation, they're just looking for something that works. Seems like a good opportunity for a small interdisciplinary unit to make something effective.