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May 1997 Girl Math In today's news currents the world's first computer programmers are unveiled 50 years after their feat and, surprise, they're women! Turns out the brains behind of one the world's most important inventions were six women categorized merely as "clerks" at the time. Before the ENIAC computer was programmed by these women during World War II, the task of calculating ballistics trajectories was accomplished by hand by a group of 80 female mathematicians. This puts an entirely new spin on the Rosie the Riveter motif. I hope somebody is busy rewriting the history books. I guess it turns out girls ARE good at math after all, always have been. So here's another group of women we can thank for helping win the war: Kay, Jean, Betty, Marlyn, Frances and Ruth, as well as the mathematicians who redefine women's work of the era. In other news, a survivor's testimony moves the prosecutor to tears in the Oklahoma bombing trial, Israel says a "mega" misunderstanding fueled reports of a spy scandal, and the FCC approves sweeping telephone regulation changes that will subsidize Internet installation in schools and prevent local phone companies from charging by the minute for Internet access, but will up the charge for the second phone lines many of us have installed. In our town, mug shots of two more methamphetamine arrests dot the front page of the local newspaper, one of them a woman with a black eye. An alert sheriff's deputy noticed a vehicle in the driveway of a home he knew to be unoccupied. A search turned up numerous bits of evidence as well as a fully loaded sawed off shotgun. Is methamphetamine the plague of the 90s? This is at least its third mention in a month of columns here. Today's web outing is a c/net feature on computer viruses. www.webcurrent.com |
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Julie Wolpers dba Webcurrent Communications |
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