On the basis that X-ray crystallography DEFINITELY falls into the acceptable definition of the word technology, especially when you design and build your own equipment, I am going to use Ada Lovelace Day to do a short blog post about a woman I admire immensely, and who is absolutely CRIMINALLY sidelined by the mainstream media when they talk about the DNA revolution. Even Uncle David failed to mention her in his Tree of Life (Darwin was awesome!) programme.

But for Rosalind Franklin, Crick and Watson would never have made their startling model. They are credited with discovering the structure of DNA, but this is a gross oversimplification: they worked from Rosalind Franklin's photographs, they used her data, and they systematically sidelined her when they published their research, and they published a day after she published hers. The purposeful snubbing of Franklin by the nobel Prize committee is an enduring scandal, and the fact that most of science in general would rather venerate a racist arsehole than give a woman her due credit speaks volumes about how far feminism still has to go.

Further reading: The Rosalind Franklin Society and Other People's Ada Lovelace Day Posts. I can't tell you how much it has made me squee that one of the most popular ladies being posted about today is Delia Derbyshire :D

Ah-LAY-DEEEEEZ AND GENNEL-MEN! Roll up, roll up, and purchase your tickets! This is a once in a LIFETIME opportunity to witness the strange, the weird, and the illiberal! To ride the rollercoaster of the British legislature! To experience the stomach-churning terror of the food stalls...

GASP at Mr Goldacre's Amazing Hydra in the Freak Show! Marvel at the gall of David Milliband on the Hook-a-Duck stall! SWOON as the beautiful, ethereal Madam Mortimer tells the future with uncanny accuracy (and salty language!)!

Enter the Carnival if you dare...

( ... by clicking the cut )

The travelling funfair is over now; hopefully your goldfish will survive the night, and you won't be sick from all the candy floss. Next week's ringmaster is probably going to be Matt Wardman, and if you want your ride showcased, the application form is here.

Farewell, young friend! Live in peace and freedom! If you can...

(I think I might have taken the carnival metty-for a bit too far, mightn't I? Oh well...)

... or ibarw for short. Hence my new default icon, featuring the awesome Brigadier Winifred Bambera. Doctor Who seems to specialise in awesome Brigadiers, and Bambera is no exception. She's cool, calm, and collected. She's brave and resourceful, smart and assured in her command position. She can handle herself, and she can handle a variety of weapons. And she's black.

In modern Who, we don't blink at the thought that Martha can be promoted to a high position within UNIT (although, of course, her commanding officer is a white man in his fifties); in the eighties, the commanding officer was a black woman, and this was SHOCKING. In some ways, the eighties were much worse than now; in others, they were much better. Even though the situation in general was much more racist than now, the racism there was seemed much less insidious, much more defeatable. There was hope then, where there is often resignation now. There is pressure now that some advances have been made for people of colour to accept their position: a subtle implication that They should be grateful They have been "allowed" to progress as far as they have towards equality, but They can never have true equality.

Needless to say, I abhor this. And I will be adopting the theme of racism for the week - for one thing, it'll be a change from sexism for you all. For another thing, as a white person, racism is my responsibility. It's not enough for white people to not be racist, we need to speak out against racism too. In that spirit, I give you this video, with a hat-tip to innerbrat



If you want to participate in ibarw, the info is here.

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In other news: Kiera Knightley is awesome and Michael Gove is unintentionally hilarious.

G'night, all.

Paul Anderson's post for Bloggers Unite (mine is here) is an excellent and interesting examination of intellectual property rights as they apply to blogs, and why it's important for them to be enforced - not only for us small fry, but for the MSM as well.

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Work/Life balance in the sciences and engineering puts women off. No shit Sherlock. It does that in LOTS of professions - I don't think it's science and engineering that need reform, particularly, but our society. Any profession which wants you to work stupidly long hours and have no life is going to put most people off. The only people that are NOT going to be put off are very macho competitive people, who are often, but not always people who identify themselves as members of the male gender. This applies in science and engineering, yes, but also in politics, the law, city finance, etc. etc. etc.

What needs to change is the idea that working part time, or flexible hours, is seen as bad and wussy, while working all the hours Cthulhu sends is seen as laudable and impressive. That's what causes ALL the problems IMHO: people who live to work, rather than work to live.

The thing is, in science, living to work, seeing it as a vocation, is often what gets the results...

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Much argument has been had about my preferred colour schemes for websites. I find that dark backgrounds hurt my eyes lots less than bright ones; other people have the opposite reaction. Well, at least now I have greenery on my side!

Just as a matter of interest:

Poll #1189357 colour preference
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 16

I prefer

Today is human rights blogging day. There are a lot of human rights issues that I could blog about but I have chosen reproductive freedom simply to tie in with the Coalition for Choice campaign currently going on at LC and elsewhere.

I realise that reproductive freedom in general and abortion in particular are 1, subjects I go on about a lot, and 2, somewhat heavy going. In situations like this, the Sainted Mortimer has taken to inserting calming pictures of cute puppies. I realise that this is probably not effective for you lot: partly because some of you are definitely Cat People, and partly because I think I have come up with something that will be more effective: Pictures of cool geek furniture! The first one comes via pickwick:



Reproductive Freedom is something we tend to take for granted in the UK. We have free contraception, and we have abortion available to us, even if it is only available through the arcane and byzantine systems put in place by the 67 Act (yes, we DO still need to obtain the permission of two doctors before we are allowed an abortion; the only other thing which needs two doctors is being sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Oh the irony). Therefore when nutters like Dorries and Cardinal Cormac O'Murphy want abortion restricted, there is a tendency for those of us who quite like the status quo to shrug and say meh, they'll never change THAT... Such complacency is dangerous.



The anti-abortion campaign is getting more vocal as the internet enables any old fool to set up a website. They are propagating lies (the Hand of Hope is springing to mind) and misinformation in the hope of getting people on their side. And they must be fought. NOT with further mudslinging and misinformation, but with cold hard fact.

- any restriction to abortion rights disproportionately affects the poor and disadvantaged.
- any restriction to abortion rights means more unwanted children.

It wouldn't be so bad if most of the anti-abortion activists were not also anti-contraception. This is a special sort of cognitive dissonance. It seems obvious to me that the best way to stop people having abortions is to stop them having unwanted pregnancies. This means lots of sex education and lots of access to free, good quality contraception. We've managed the second half of that, but the first half is sadly lacking, partly due to our peculiar British attitude to sex, and partly the ability of parents to withdraw their children from sex education (and indeed, homeschool them entirely).



I do not want a return to the bad old days where rich ladies could get a sympathetic doctor to arrange something, but everyone else had hot baths, gin, and knitting needles. I do not want us to sleepwalk into having our fundamental freedoms restricted by idiots like Dorries.

But, as usual, what I want isn't what matters. What do YOU lot want?

So, I made a commitment to the blogswarm that I would post about the war in Iraq today. The war that was supposedly over almost five years ago, having started five years ago tomorrow... And I'm finding it hard, mainly because I don't have any solutions to offer.

- Over a million Iraqi people have died
- countless more have been maimed and scarred and lost family members
- Thousands of British and American soldiers, and soldiers of other nationalities have died, been wounded, lost their livelihoods.
- politicians on all sides have been exposed as venal, self-serving hypocrites.
- Many members of the armed forces have turned out to find torture entertaining.
- Our oldest, strongest ally has turned out to be in favour of kidnap, torture, imprisonment without trial, kangaroo courts and the execution of men convicted on flimsy evidence. We have no room on the moral high ground.
- the political system of the country I love has been irrevocably damaged by the bare-faced lies told by our politicians, the contempt with which they ignored public opinion, and the consequent utter disenfranchisement of the anti-war majority. The breezy paternalism with which we were all ignored still rankles with me.
- all of this has resulted in a bonanza of recruitment for the extremists and people who hate everyone who does not share their religious convictions on both sides.

There's no point in handwringing and bemoaning the fact that nobody listened to Winston Churchill, but what else can we do? It's all a big horrible mess. And, at this point, whatever we do can only make things worse. For some time now we have been part of the problem in Iraq, not part of the solution. But if we withdraw, the place will further descend into civil war and more people will die. If we stay, we continue to be the focus of the ire of the Iraqi people and all of us, Western and Iraqi, continue to die.

The point of this blogswarm is supposed to be to show the mainstream media and the political elite that anti-war feeling still exists and is not going to go away. I suspect that is also why Mitch Benn has chosen tomorrow to release his new single. But they didn't listen to us then, and I can't see them listening to us now. If we could offer a solution, then maybe they would. But we can't, because there isn't one.

It's times like this when I feel glad for my disbelief in deity. Because if I did believe in God(dess)(es) I'd be rather worried about what their judgment would be on me, because I could have done more to prevent this. I wonder how the people in decision-making positions feel?

You know my post on Darwin Day? If I was eloquent, and gorgeous, and a paleobiologist, I might have written a post as good as this one by innerbrat:

You may believe the world is 6,000 years old and was created in a week. You might believe that all the terrestrial vertebrate tetrapod* populations were subjected to a massively crippling bottle neck some 4,000 years ago. You can believe in fairies and spaghetti monsters and Harry Potter. You can believe in things as far out as the fundamental goodness of humanity for all the fossil record cares, because the fossil record doesn't care. What the majority of religious/spiritual beliefs have in common - be they Christian, Muslim or Pagan - is that they invoke supernatural forces. It doesn't matter if this force is divine, magical, karmic or whatever. If it's supernatural, it has no place in natural science.

That post there? That is the best deconstruction of the Intelligent Design "Theory" I have ever seen.

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I reckon there's a few on the f-list who might be interested in signing up to this:


I am fully of the opinion that what we are doing in Iraq, what we have /always/ been doing in Iraq, is more harm than good. More on this when I join in the blogswarm.

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And I couldn't NOT link to this. Are you sick of having (the prospect of) an enlightened fella? Heterosexual ladies, there is a solution! We can continue to listen to those who insist that we are in "Post Feminist" times, go back to doing things not for ourselves, but for our menfolk, and Take Back The Loser! Because sometimes, all you want is a life on unfullfilling, unloved drudgery ;)