Girls Gone Geek, and a minor rant

There's an interesting, fairly new podcast out: Girls Gone Geek. If your childhood heroines were people like

• Hypatia
  
• Sonia Kovalevsky
• Emmy Noether
• Augusta Ada Lovelace
• Grace Murray Hopper
• Adele Goldberg
• Jean Sammet
• Barbara Liskov

then it might not strike you as really geeky, but it's still very good, and fun, and they've had a pointer to alice.org, a neat way to introduce people to programming... and I hope they do more of that kind of thing in the future.

A bit of a rant... in the past, people have rightly taken the general public to task for its mathematical illiteracy, or, in a term coined by analogy with illiteracy, innumeracy. (See John Allen Paulos's fine book by that title, as well as that classic work on statistical fallacies and deception, Darrell Huff's How to Lie with Statistics.) Alas, it's not clear whether much has improved; people still fall for the Gambler's Fallacy, and misjudge the likelihood of various events horribly, with calamitous results in public policy. (Democracy, like the free market, gives even stupid people what they want... but I'll stick with them, thanks; the alternatives are far, far worse.)

These days, computer illiteracy should be added to the list. If you don't understand at least the basics of how computers function, or better yet know how to program in some language that won't inculcate bad habits, you might as well face up to not being able to participate fully in today's world.

I don't drive. I drove for a while, and then decided I'd be safer if i didn't. Because of that, I can't fully participate in RL. Do I rant about how RL is set up to favor the mobile? No. I face the consequences of my choice not to drive, and do the best I can.

So... if you're not a geek, I urge you to go out and learn about computers. There's been no better time to do so than now. Grab DrPython or DrScheme or Eclipse or Hugs, (or Alice!) and go to it. You'll be glad you did.

Actually... if you're reading this, most likely you are into Second Life. (Duh...) So, give some thought to learning C#. LSL is going to be retargeted to the bytecode that is used for C#, and I wouldn't be surprised if the language of Second Life becomes C# instead of LSL. I hate to suggest a language promoted by the Great Satan, but there is an implementation of it for Linux.

UPDATE: OK... that provoked me to visit linuxchix.org, and there I saw an item about an "(un)conference," She's Geeky. (It sounds like it will be very good.) The urge to do a Rick James filk was almost overwhelming...