Wibbly-Wobbly Ramblings

A Swedish woman hitting a neo-Nazi protester with her handbag. The woman was reportedly a concentration camp survivor. [1985]

Volunteers learn how to fight fires at Pearl Harbor [c. 1941 - 1945]

Maud Wagner, the first well-known female tattoo artist in the U.S. [1907]

A 106-year old Armenian woman protecting her home with an AK-47. [1990]

Komako Kimura, a prominent Japanese suffragist at a march in New York. [October 23, 1917]

Margaret Hamilton, lead software engineer of the Apollo Project, standing next to the code she wrote by hand that was used to take humanity to the moon. [1969]

Erika, a 15-year-old Hungarian fighter who fought for freedom against the Soviet Union. [October 1956]

Sarla Thakral, 21 years old, the first Indian woman to earn a pilot license. [1936]

Voting activist Annie Lumpkins at the Little Rock city jail. [1961]   (freakin’ immaculate)

Now with more awesomesauce!

Female pilots leaving their B-17, “Pistol Packin’ Mama” [c. 1941 - 1945]

The first basketball team from Smith college. [1902]

Filipino guerilla, Captain Nieves Fernandez, shows a US soldier how she killed Japanese soldiers during the occupation. [1944]

Afghani medical students. [1962]   (man, screw fundamentalism.)

A British sergeant training members of the ‘mum’s army’ Women’s Home Defence Corps during the Battle of Britain. [1940]

and just to wrap up…

Nina Simone, one of the most talented vocalists of the 20th century.

A Swedish woman hitting a neo-Nazi protester with her handbag. The woman was reportedly a concentration camp survivor. [1985]

Volunteers learn how to fight fires at Pearl Harbor [c. 1941 - 1945]

Maud Wagner, the first well-known female tattoo artist in the U.S. [1907]

A 106-year old Armenian woman protecting her home with an AK-47. [1990]

Komako Kimura, a prominent Japanese suffragist at a march in New York. [October 23, 1917]

Margaret Hamilton, lead software engineer of the Apollo Project, standing next to the code she wrote by hand that was used to take humanity to the moon. [1969]

Erika, a 15-year-old Hungarian fighter who fought for freedom against the Soviet Union. [October 1956]

Sarla Thakral, 21 years old, the first Indian woman to earn a pilot license. [1936]

Voting activist Annie Lumpkins at the Little Rock city jail. [1961]   (freakin’ immaculate)

Now with more awesomesauce!

Female pilots leaving their B-17, “Pistol Packin’ Mama” [c. 1941 - 1945]

The first basketball team from Smith college. [1902]

Filipino guerilla, Captain Nieves Fernandez, shows a US soldier how she killed Japanese soldiers during the occupation. [1944]

Afghani medical students. [1962]   (man, screw fundamentalism.)

A British sergeant training members of the ‘mum’s army’ Women’s Home Defence Corps during the Battle of Britain. [1940]

and just to wrap up…

Nina Simone, one of the most talented vocalists of the 20th century.

16 Amazing Women Who Made History — That You’ve Never Heard Of

Happy International Women’s Day, weirdos. Go celebrate some women!

Today in Computer Scientists You Haven’t Heard Of: Margaret Hamilton

This is Margaret Hamilton, standing next to one of her earlier projects: The Apollo Guidance Computer’s main operating program.

I’m going to let that sink in for a moment. Look at your image of NASA in the Apollo days. Look at miss Hamilton.

Now, I’m sure you’ve heard the story about how the computer crashed on Neil and Mike on their descent, leaving Neil to make the landing by hand. This story has only the barest grounding in reality.

During the descent, a checklist error left the rendezvous radar - normally used for keeping track of the Command Module in orbit - turned on. Radar is a computationally hungry beast, and the computer unhappily told Neil and Mike that it was being overtasked. It kept right on going, even though it was being overworked. It kept the truly important numbers - altitude, descent rate, fuel consumption - up to date perfectly as they descended, which allowed Neil to fly safely above the lunar surface to find a landing site.

So, here you have a computer, easily the most powerful computer for its size ever made as of 1969, controlling a flying machine above the lunar surface, and correctly juggling multiple real-time processing tasks by priority. This is something that modern computers, fifty years later, still struggle with. Margaret built it and got it right at the very dawn of the multi-tasking operating system. It was something done by Serious Computers - fridge-sized monsters with names like PDP-8 and System/360… and a series of tiny boxes that flew to the moon and back.

And then she went on and did other things. Ever heard the term “Software Engineering”? Margaret’s invention. More technically speaking, she’s responsible for parallel and asynchronous computing (which now is key to every supercomputer and major website), priority scheduling, end-to-end testing, and a huge chunk of human-computer interface theory.

She’s still active in software engineering today.

This is what a space wizard looks like.

In her own words:

“Due to an error in the checklist manual, the rendezvous radar switch was placed in the wrong position. This caused it to send erroneous signals to the computer. The result was that the computer was being asked to perform all of its normal functions for landing while receiving an extra load of spurious data which used up 15% of its time. The computer (or rather the software in it) was smart enough to recognize that it was being asked to perform more tasks than it should be performing. It then sent out an alarm, which meant to the astronaut, I’m overloaded with more tasks than I should be doing at this time and I’m going to keep only the more important tasks; i.e., the ones needed for landing … Actually, the computer was programmed to do more than recognize error conditions. A complete set of recovery programs was incorporated into the software. The software’s action, in this case, was to eliminate lower priority tasks and re-establish the more important ones … If the computer hadn’t recognized this problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was.”

This woman programmed a computer smart enough to prioritize tasks and make sure essential functions were carried out first even if other tasks were going on - she’s the one who made the moon landing possible, more than anyone else. If her programming hadn’t been able to prioritize, the mission would’ve been aborted. 

She’s also published a ton of papers and basically I’m so tired of people never hearing about all the brilliant coding women. Like, when it was first getting off the ground computer programming was a woman’s field - like they specifically looked for and hired women. There were also a ton of female mathematics BS and PhD candidates in the 30s-50s. 

And for the record: all the programmers who created the first general-use computer were women. Wanna know why? The men thought actually building the computer -as in, the design of the machine itself - was more important than programming the computer - as in, actually making it work and telling it how to run, y’know, enabling it to actually be useful.

Men didn’t think programming was important so they relegated it to women, and once they realized programming was the MOST important part of computers they yanked those jobs away, made it a boy thing, and failed to highlight the huge role women played in pioneering the computer age.

roses—and—rue:

Zitkala-Ša, also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, was the most amazing woman you’ve never heard of.

A writer, editor, musician, teacher and political activist, she was born on February 22, 1876 on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Her mother was Sioux and her father, who abandoned the family when she was very young, was European-American.

When she was eight, missionaries came to the res and took Zitkala-Ša along with several other children to the White’s Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana, one of many such institutions where Native children were forced to assimilate into white American culture. She studied piano and violin and eventually took the place of her teacher when she resigned. When she received her diploma in 1895, she delivered a speech on women’s rights.

She earned a scholarship to Earlham College, where she continued to study music. From 1897-99, she played with the New England Conservatory in Boston and played at the Paris Exposition in 1900. She collaborated with composer William F. Hanson on the world’s first Native American opera, based entirely on Sioux melodies that had previously existed only as oral tradition. She would play the melodies and Hanson transcribed them. The Sun Dance Opera debuted in 1913 to warm reviews, but I can find no recordings of it, and it seems it’s never performed.

Zitkala-Ša also wrote a number of collections of Native American stories and legends. She wrote them in Latin when she was at school and then translated them into English. She was the first Native person to do so in her own words, without a white editor or translator. In addition, she wrote extensively about her schooling and how it left her torn between her Sioux heritage and her assimilation into white culture. Her writings were published in The Atlantic Monthly and in Harper’s and she served as editor for the American Indian Magazine.

Unsurprisingly, most of her writings were political. She was a fierce yet charismatic advocate for Native American rights. Her efforts helped pass the Indian Citizenship Act and the Indian Reorganization Act. Having founded the National Coalition of American Indians, she spent the rest of her life fighting to protect our many indigenous communities from exploitation.

Her accomplishments were incredible- but have you ever heard of her? I had never heard of her either. Just another example of a history-changing woman omitted from the history books.