Miscellaneous roundup

[juliet]

Links, and other stuff:

• Various people I know are doing LEL (London-Edinburgh-London) on bikes this week:twitter link here.
• Other cyclists have been going rather faster round France for the last 3 weeks: some v good photos here. Also, Cav's sprint yesterday was bloody amazing. As was Bradley Wiggins' ride up Ventoux on Saturday. (I really felt for him on seeing the shots of him afterwards, sat on the floor slumped against a fence with his head down, looking like he was either about to throw up or had done already.)
• My cycling friend Gerald was on the plinth in Trafalgar Square dressed as a dinosaur, playing swingball, and stomping on a model London.
• Rats playing musical instruments!
• Climate Camp this year is 26th Aug - 2nd Sept & will be somewhere within the M25, with good transport links. Video here explaining why you should come along!. I spent yesterday helping to build a bicycle generator which will be used to provide power for the London neighbourhood. The secondary aim was to produce a decent design that can be made from stuff you can find in a skip or for very cheap, & doesn't require a dedicated bike/bike frame or any more than basic DIY skills & tools (saw, drill, screwdriver). Success was achieved, but Version 2 (new & improved!) is already on the drawing board. Anyway: Climate Camp is going to be awesome, come along & check out all the exciting workshops!
• Different sort of activism: damned_colonial did what looks like a fantastic keynote speech at OSCON on the topic of women in open source (slides here). The comments on this positive writeup of the talk have been getting rather toxic, in the customary ways[0]. Randal Schwarz being a particular culprit (sigh). Some of you may be interested in the discussion; zorkian has also suggested writing to Linux Fund about it.

Myself, I have mostly been trying to sort out work stuff (in the sense of getting existing commissions in on time & deciding What Else I Do Next); trying to get rid of stuff on Freecycle; and trying to remain calm and not hide under the bed. Spent the weekend doing climate camp stuff (direct action workshop on Saturday, which was excellent and very interesting, and raised some practical & emotional issues for me which I need to sit down and think about; and then the bike generator thing yesterday as above) and visiting my parents, which was nice.

Intermittently grumpy about what is (for me) a shocking lack of fitness: far slower than I should be on the bike, and spinning downhill is bumpy (no souplesse...). I am however aware that a) this will improve the more I get out there, & b) my standards are slightly abnormal. If I can still ride 25 miles in a day I'm not doing all that badly, really, even if it does make me unduly hungry atm.[1]

Oh yes, and Glade last weekend was fun despite the fairly wet weather, due to excellent drainage & the fact that it helpfully didn't rain after dark at any point after Thu evening. Not keen about the fact that you can see passing cars on the nearby road from the middle of the site, though - it kind of reduces the 'special getting-away-from-things' feeling. We did however have cubical jam[2], which is a superior foodstuff of the future and makes everything better. Or at least slightly more waxy.

[0] "We do X because it's what sells, so tough shit"; "if more women participated then these negative behaviours would stop"; "you're only 4 (5, 6, whatever) voices, I speak for the majority". BLAH BLAH BLAH ignorant sexist crap. I was teeth-grindingly furious by the time I was 1/3 through & am going to have to finish the thread now so I can comment [sigh].
[1] This is related to fitness, because the higher your heartrate the more blood glucose you need (as opposed to running off body fat, which you have loads of), and the less fit you are the higher your heartrate goes, roughly.
[2] Shot Bloks. Eaten by the pros, apparently. Maybe they like wax. It's a lot like eating a candle made out of jam.

Comments

[aquaeri]

Thanks for the heads-up (or not so much) about the sexist reactions to OMG Women Can Be Programmers Too.

[marnameow.livejournal.com]

I had to stop reading that comment thread less than halfway down, because RAGE!

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

I felt pretty similarly by that point.

I had to unsub from one of the two melbourne linux users groups a few months ago because of some twerps there who really didn't get stuff, like, "how can we get girls interested in linux?" type discussions that is so, so off the mark you're scared they haven't fallen off the edge of the world yet

[uon.livejournal.com]

CUBICAL JAM WILL SURPASS ALL INFERIOR EARTHLING FOODSTUFFS

EARTH HAS 8-CORNER 6-SIDE SIMULTANEOUS

JAM CUBE

YOUR ALIEN MASTERS DEMAND THAT YOU SOLVE UNIVERSAL EQUATION OF CUBICAL JAM:

JAM + WAX = CUBE

ALL HAIL THE CUBICAL JAM IN NOMINE DOMINI OM NOM NOM NOM

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I went to re-read Time Cube after this in order to make some sort of witty reference, but Earth's Wisest Human is just too overwhelmingly mad!

[azurelunatic]

Perhaps this is more to your taste.

[juliet]

This is awesome.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

AHAHAHA OHMYGOD

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

*has flashback*
*dies laughing, again*

[juliet]

It made me immoderately happy :)

I tried Cubical Jam when, ahem, unassisted. It is still very very peculiar indeed.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

I want to love the rats, but the pictures make me a bit sad, i think :-(

[juliet]

why? I am fairly sure nothing's been done to the rats to get the shots, if that's your concern - I used to know people who do some of this sort of photography informally, and getting rats to put things in their mouths is pretty straightforward :) (you do need to take a *lot* of photos, mind)

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

There's just a whiff of epic tragedy about it, which mars the cuteness a little.

It's not exactly Anne Geddes (KILL! KILL!) but...I dunno, I can't explain it.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

mjg59 has made several sensible contributions to the open source sexism debate lately.

I'm not sure if things are getting better or worse. What I am sure is that 5-10 years ago we didn't have multiple arguments over whether what X did or said in public was a pile of sexist crap (at least three this year so far, I think?); what I'm not sure about is whether that's because it wasn't happening or because nobody was kicking up a fuss about it.

(FTAOD I'm aware that women have been reporting less-public bad treatment for many years and I've no idea whether this getting better or worse; I specifically mean the recent kind of cases where someone is a jerk in front of hundreds of people at once.)

Some of it's puzzling, actually. “Hey, a girl, we don't see many of these round here”, asking for dates, etc could perhaps be put down to plain immaturity; one might hope that it would decline as people grow up or when the gender balance improves. Some of it's doubtless just defensiveness, and while I think those people ought to get a grip, it seems like a second-order problem, i.e. if the sexism went away so would the complaints about it, and then there'd be nothing to be defensive about.

But you also see active hostility, more than seems explicable as just defensiveness. and I'm not sure where it comes from.

In other fields one might imagine an economic basis for it: the assumption that (for instance) if a woman gets hired or promoted to some job then a man must be “missing out” (wrong-headed for all sorts of reasons, which I'm sure we don't need to go into) or that she must have exploited, or worse been favored because of, her gender (ditto wrong-headed).

But I can't see how any of these possibilities would apply to open source. While there are jobs available in the field they're the exception rather than the rule, and code (or anything else) contributions don't earn you money. They don't get get you much status outside of a very small circle unless you're one of a handful of superstars. What they do do is benefit the common weal. And if you don't like them, they are easy to ignore.

[juliet]

what I'm not sure about is whether that's because it wasn't happening or because nobody was kicking up a fuss about it.

The latter. Fewer women around (so harder for those who were around to stand up against it), fewer men who were even remotely aware, more uncritical acceptance. The whole 'booth babe' culture & general sexism of that sort has absolutely been around for a long time; sexist imagery as part of presentations ditto.

“Hey, a girl, we don't see many of these round here”, asking for dates, etc could perhaps be put down to plain immaturity; one might hope that it would decline as people grow up or when the gender balance improves.

But part of the point is that the gender balance *won't* improve (or will do so only very slowly) while this sort of behaviour is going on -- it's not OK for people (especially male people) involved in open source to say "well, it'll get better as more women show up. Come on women, show up and make things better for yourselves!". *Everyone* (and, again, that includes the *male* part of 'everyone') needs to act to improve things *now*, by noticing when even this milder variety of intimidatory sexism happens & calling people on it.

The active hostility: well, this most often shows up when someone says "hey, the open source community has these problems with sexism". And my guess is that it is in part because people don't like being called on their bad behaviour; so they turn on those who are doing the calling.

And then there's the more general stuff about privilege & the ways in which people who *have* privilege defend that privilege, and are not interested in contributions from unprivileged groups unless they choose to disguise their group membership. We live in a culture where men have privilege (google for "invisible knapsack" for more information), and the hostility and defensiveness on this issue in the OS community is just a manifestation of the same stuff elsewhere.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

it's not OK for people [..] involved in open source to say "well, it'll get better as more women show up

Sure, I didn't mean to imply that anything would magically change by itself, simply that once it does I'd hope for a self-reinforcing effect.

I have little doubt that there's currently an equivalent self-reinforcing effect in the other direction.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Yeesh, even I know that Randy Schwartz is an asswipe.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Kudos to Gerald, especially for the doom wrought on the bendy bus.

I can't help thinking, though, that it would have been improved by the presence of more tentacles...