Ada Lovelace, confidence and the Digital Economy Bill

[libellum]

At Women's Question Time last week the first question was about the lack of statues commemorating the achievements of women. The audience struggled to think of any. Boudicca, okay. Queen Victoria, yes, although the female figures around her representing abstract virtues don't really count. Queen Caroline. Florence Nightingale. Umm ... we ground to

Comments

[sashajwolf]

We have a statue of Edith Cavell in Stratford, and there's another outside the National Portrait Gallery. There's also one of Emmeline Pankhurst near Parliament. I agree there's a heavy bias in favour of men in public memorials, though! Also in favour of white people - Mary Seacole deserves a statue as much as Edith Cavell and Florence Nightingale, but AFAIK there isn't one.

[friend_of_tofu]

I was about to mention Edith Cavell as her statue on St Martin's Lane is the venue for the Women In Black's anti-war protests. Queen Anne also has at least two statues of herself in London (St Paul's & Queen Anne's Gate being the most prominent.)

Should Cavell's be considered a 'military' statue? It's tricky.

Law is way more complicated and difficult than technology, and we all cheerfully opine about that. YES, AND I WISH TO FUCK PEOPLE WOULDN'T

[sashajwolf]

My feeling, based on *gulp* seventeen years' practice now, is that understanding legal principles is not intrinsically difficult; it requires a certain amount of research skills, which can be taught, and it requires thinking time, and teaching and time are more available to those with greater privilege, but with those things in place I don't think it requires more inherent intellectual ability than, say, an average A-level syllabus. People with good Google-fu and time on their hands can often approximate the black-letter legal knowledge of quite a long-standing practitioner, provided the research question is sufficiently narrow.

Where non-lawyers tend to fall down, in my experience, is either in thinking they've found the whole answer when they've actually only found part, or in trying to apply the principles they've discovered

[friend_of_tofu]

Yes, yes, this is an excellent comment

[taimatsu]

I will look out for statues around Reading, now you've mentioned it. We have a town-centre one of Queen Victoria, which is a bit standard. The other one I remember is in Eldon Gardens and is some Viceroy of India (male, with ginormous cloak). There's a lion in Forbury Gardens but I think no people; there's a rather odd bas-relief thing outside the civic centre which is something to do with Dresden and has an athlete on it, who may be male but isn't (iirc) a specific person. I'll keep my eyes open - it's an interesting thing to think about.

[cigogne]

On the thing about feeling confident with tech, I find that having expert status makes me very comfortable - I mean, when I'm the only person with a depth of experience in a given subject, and then if I don't have to judge or influence - if I can just say, if you do X then Y will happen. My old job was like that. I *really* don't like having to argue my case, but that's as much of a working class/heavy industry thing as a woman thing I think. You know, you get paid your money, it's up to someone else what they get you to do...

What SF are you into? I went through Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke when I was a kid, loved all that stuff. From this century I like greg egan (writes a lot about identity and stuff) and Alastair Reynolds is pretty good. erm, I will love William Gibson forever. So much so that when I re-read Pattern Recognition and compared it to my slash writing, I realised I'd completely ripped off his writing style. Oh well, might as well copy someone I actually like.