Gaslight & Steam

This post is in honor of Ada Lovelace Day, an annual day of recognition for women in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and math) who inspire others by their example and enrich our world through their contributions.

After rediscovering my interest in astronomy and getting a membership in the , I’ve been able to start looking at the stars and sharing my hobby with my family. We even got a look at what I think was the recent supernova near the big dipper that was visible from Earth and a really good look at Venus as it’s been making its presence known last month.

I wish I had been aware of Maria Mitchell when I was young and first becoming interested in astronomy. Not only do I think a variety of role models are critical to anyone studying sciences, her words resonate today:
If for four hours a day you studied, year after year, the science of language, for instance, do you suppose you would not be a linguist? Do you put the mere pleasing of some social party, and the reception of a few compliments, against the mental development of four hours a day of study of something for which you were born?

She’s the topic of a book detailing her life and how science became to be a masculine domain from which women were excluded, Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics. Throughout her life, she was a proponent for more women studying science, and well aware of what is lost when the ideas and inspirations of women are absent. She also pointed out the necessity of woman, as with all scientists, to ask questions and to not simply accept those in authority. “The great gain would be freedom of thought. Women, more than men, are bound by tradition and authority. What the father, the brother, the doctor, and the minister have said has been received undoubtingly. Until women throw off this reverence for authority they will not develop. When they do this, when they come to truth through their investigations, when doubt leads them to discovery, the truth which they get will be theirs, and their minds will work on and on unfettered.”

There’s plenty of information about Maria Mitchell and it’s worth reading about her life and her thoughts in her own words.

• Maria Mitchell at Vassar University
• Brief biography at the Dictionary of Unitarian Universalist Biography
• Wikipedia entry
• Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals by Maria Mitchell at Project Gutenberg

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Ada Lovelace was notable for the legacy she left and the inspiration she provided. New generations of women have, in turn, inspired others to enter fields of science and technology, each having an effect that increases over time. Of these, computer scientist Anita Borg stands out as an amazing person who worked tirelessly to provide inspiration and opportunities for other women in computers and technology.

Among her many accomplishments, Dr. Borg founded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, an annual conference that embodies the ideals of Ada Lovelace Day, as well as those of its founder. Be sure to check out the work they do, not to mention the outstanding women recognized by the Anita Borg Institute, the organization that bears her name because of the work she did.

A month ago, I updated my LinkedIn profile to say I was, “…playing and making some games.” I’ve had a few game ideas kicking around and the games I’ve been playing lately have gotten me a bit more motivated to work on my own ideas. My thought was that this small declaration would keep me moving forward and I would actually make some headway on at least one project. As others have noted, ideas are cheap, but seeing a project through to completion is considerably more difficult.

What I hadn’t anticipated was a co-worker asking me what kind of games I was working on. Since my day job is in web development for an HMO, my co-worker was unaware of my background in game design and my continuing interest in doing that kind of work. However, the reason I’m not employed full-time doing game design has more to do with the nature of industry, particularly the crazy hours and my daughter being of an age where she started to think daddy lived in the phone. At the time, people were beginning to take a hard look at some of practices and work environment that went with game development, the most visible being the story of EA Spouse. Just as a case in point, the agency I contracted through gave me vacation time that accrued at a rate of 2 weeks per year based on hours worked. In my first contract, between overtime and the occasional all-nighter, I accrued four weeks of vacation.

So, though I’m not working in the game industry as my day job, I’m still very much interested in games. But my co-worker’s question raised an interesting point: What is the definition of game? Her assumption was that, as a computer guy, I would be turning my energies toward some form of computer game. But even that’s a pretty broad range, given the proliferation of casual games, many of them web-based, alternative reality games, that incorporate many forms of technology including web pages and other technology, and console games, developed on computers despite the hardware being rather specialized.

However, I also play pen-and-paper roleplaying games (Dungeons and Dragons and Ars Magica, among myriad others), I am guilty of having played live-action roleplaying, and I play boardgames, given the opportunity. In fact, about the only thing I don’t play is fantasy football and its real-world team sports analogues.

So, while I’m not planning on creating something like BASEketball any time soon, I’m casting my net considerably wider than trying to develop the next version of Duke Nukem Forever (figuring whatever game I work on still probably has a better chance of seeing the light of day).

There have been many game designers and creators of game systems who I admire, but few as much as Dave Arneson. So I was saddened to hear he had passed away last week on April 7th. For someone like me who remembers the original three book Dungeons and Dragons books (as do many others), the Blackmoor supplement remains one of my favorites of all time and the first setting to really capture my imagination and to hold it more than the many others over the years.

Matt Blum wrote in his Wired Magazine column, “It was Arneson’s spark that transformed Gygax’s game Chainmail into the first edition of D&D, and begat everything that followed.” In his career, he was a man of many talents, combining a love of games not just as the developer of D&D, but as a teacher and creator in other mediums including computer games. In the Star Tribune (article no longer available), his daughter said, “…her father enjoyed teaching at Full Sail University in Winter Park, Fla., in recent years, where he inspired future game creators, and taught students to make a solid set of rules for their games.” His approach to games makes more sense to me than that of other designers and probably why some of my earliest favorite computer games tend to resemble computer versions of Arneson’s Temple of the Frog, among them games like Telengard, Temple of Apshai and Wizardry. There are some great insights in this previously unpublished interview with Dave Arneson from 2004.

Though’ll he’ll be missed, we’ll always be grateful for the person he was and the legacy he left. It’s truly a great one.

The inaugural Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.

The concept of blogging about women in technology and increasing their visibility is important to me because of my daughter. Even though she’s only five, she already has dreams and aspirations. One of the most important things is that she have positive role models and, my wife and I being math and science geeks, encourage her interest in these areas while trying to give her the broadest view of life’s possibilities in a realistic fashion. In my daughter’s constantly changing panoply of career choices (that have included scientist, rock star, doctor, firefighter and many others), as of this morning, she wanted to be a hair-dresser and a medical examiner (blame the former on her friends and the latter on too much of the tv show NCIS). Both. Along with amateur-level ice skating. All I can think is that my daughter really wants to be a version of Buckaroo Banzai, combining the skills necessary to be a rock musician, a neurosurgeon, and quantum physicist. As much as I would like to encourage her to have fictional characters like this as a career goal, I also want her to be somewhat realistic and capable of supporting herself financially. With my daughter’s burgeoning interest in astronomy and medicine, perhaps there’s someone in those fields who’s also doing something else interesting?

There are so many great unsung women who are great role models for women in science and technlogy. For example, Xiaohang Quan, a physics student at Princeton, who discovered a miscalculation in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, a part of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Or Dr. Alice Huang, a noted virologist who’s done so many things since earning her PhD at Johns Hopkins University that I can’t even begin to list all of them. It’s definitely worth reading what Dr. Huang says about her work and the importance of role models.

But I think someone like Dr. Chung-Pei Ma, a Professor of Astronomy at UC Berkeley is perhaps closest to a scientist who’s also a rock star. Not only does she have a PhD from MIT in physics and studies thing like dark matter and superstrings, she’s also a violin player and was the first prize winner in the Taiwan National Violin Competition in 1983. And she does some other stuff also like being a scientific editor for the Astrophysical Journal and also has a pretty good sense of humor (at least, to judge by the links from her personal academic website). She also talks about the importance of role models for women in science.

From an article in the Berkeleyan about Ma, she sounds very much like my daughter: ‘Her mother’s fears that her daughter might be lured into a life of music may have stemmed from the fact that Ma began playing violin when she was five. Then, at the tender age of nine, Ma found herself at a crossroads. Her violin teacher asked if she wanted to be a musician. “He said if that’s what I wanted, I should go to Vienna or New York to study,” she recalls. “I told him, ‘No, I want to be an astronaut.’”‘ My daugher hasn’t expressed a strong interest in being an astronaut yet, but there’s still time.

Turns out I keep much the same daily schedule as Ben Franklin without the long lunch.  More or less.  I thought that, “early to bed, early to rise” meant going to bed by 7 PM or something.  Turns out it’s more like 10 PM.

Here’s Benjamin Franklin’s Daily Routine and there are plenty others on this site that make for some pretty interesting reading.