Biella Coleman: Nerds, Geeks, and Nerd/Geek Grrrls
I have not sat behind the helm of teaching for very long but I already have a few tricks up my sleeve. One of them is that I assign some of my favorite readings at the end of the semester so as to counter the downtrodden and tepid spirit and mood (not to mention attention) of my students, which drops precipitously with each passing day. Let’s face it post Thanksgiving, we are all a little tired and I try to find the readings, which uplift, intrigue, and challenge cherished assumptions about marriage and sex.
So far it seems to pay off and I often can tell because the conversational pitch and excitement in class is high and the student writings are good, great, even exceptional, which, again, is hard to produce/induce this late in the semester. Readers of this blog would probably be most interested in one of these lively readings, Ben Nugent’s American Nerd (and it might be interesting to hear how the European Nerd story would diverge or converge with this one).
One of my students, an audio geek and Free Culture President/Free Software junkie, by the name of John Randall produced a very nice little response (not research) paper on the Nugent reading as well as a short piece by Sarah Seltzer from Bitch Magazine
The(Girl) Geek Stands Alone (and thanks to Joe> for cluing me into this piece). Seltzer piece basically argues, in her own words, the following:
The(Girl) Geek Stands Alone (and thanks to Joe> for cluing me into this piece). Seltzer piece basically argues, in her own words, the following:
Imagine this scene from a comedy: a group of female friends sit around smoking a bowl and working on the Wikipedia page for Lord of the Rings. Their fashion sense is decidedly iconoclastic and several sport thick-rimmed glasses. Without a trace of self-consciousness, they have a hilariously ribald discussion on the relative traits of elves and orcs.So John’s whole response paper is here and here is the pdf. In the paper, he makes a number of excellent points but what I loved most about it was his very geeky move at the end of the paper to prove Sarah (somewhat wrong) by listing all the girl geeks that do and have appeared in mainstream (and not-so mainstream) entertainment venues/shows, etc. They are as follows and in his own words:
Awesome as it is, you’ll never see this scene onscreen. No mainstream movie or TV series would dare group so many female nerds together, or celebrate them so unabashedly
I will now showcase my own geekiness through my knowledge of geeky female characters. Why? Because I can. But also because I want to demonstrate that if you look hard enough for representations of female geekyiness in pop culture, you will find plenty. Moreover, if you pick the right ones, you can make them support your argument about gender relations, whatever that argument might be. Some of these charters and personalities are hardly gendered, some are hyper-sexual. Some are incredibly attractive but completely asexual. Some undergo a transformation into/out of geekiness, while others to not. Some are powerful, while some are powerless. Some (most?) celebrate their geekiness, others are tortured by it. They are all geeks take your pick: Aeon Flux, a sexy geek who’s technological gadgets give her super powers (Comic drawings then Charlize TheronAeon Flux) Wonder Woman, attractive pilot of an invisible plane Lara Croft, a female Indiana Jones in short shorts, wielding guns and cracking computer codes (CGI and then Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider) She-Ra, who was way smarter than He-Man (Masters of the Universe cartoons) Gadget Hackwrench, beautiful chipmonk technician for Chip and Dale (Rescue Rangers cartoon) Velma, featuring eyeglasses, awkwardness and brains (Scooby Doo), Hermonie Granger, a geek who is temporarily rejected because she is a geek, remains a geek, and finds love and happiness (Harry Potter) Barbarella, who, through comic strips and a 1968 film, helped introduce science fiction and sex to young women (Barbarella) La Femme Nikita, a skillful, savvy, and very feminine girl who doubles as a covert spy Kate Libby, aka ‘Acid Burn’, uber-sexualized hacker (played by Angelina Jolie in Hackers) Kathryn Janeway, smart and powerful captain of the USS Voyager (Star Trek Voyager) Starbuck (Battlestar Galactica), Dana Scully, FBI agent with encyclopedic media knowledge. The bizzare subtex of non-realized sexual tension was part of the magic The X-Files. Willow Rosenberg, geeky sidekick turned geeky supervillian (Alyson Hannigan in buffy the Vampire Slayer) Michelle Flaherty, hyper-sexual band geek (Alyson Hannigan in American Pie series) Dr Ellie Sattler, heroniene scientist (Jurrasic Park) Ellie, scientis hero (played by both Jenna Malone and Jodi Foster in Carl Sagan’s Contact) Dawn Wiener (Heather Matarazzo in Welcome to the Dollhouse Enid and Rebecca (Thora Birch and Scarlett Johanson in Ghost World) just about every charater ever played by Jenna Malone (Donie Darko, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, The United States of Leland, Saved!, etc) half of the charaters played within the last decade by Jodi Foster (Panic Room, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, Flightplan, The Addams Family half of the charaters played by Christina Ricci (Mermaids, The Addams Family, Little Red Riding Hood, The Ice Storm, Buffalo ‘66, Prozac Nation, Pumpkin, Speed Racer) half of the characters played by Natalie Portman (The Professional, Mars Attacks!, Star Wars, V for Vendette, The Darjeeling Limited, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, Garden State) Molly Ringwald. characters played by Molly Ringwald. Rock musician Ani DiFranco and geeky Riot Grrls everywhere. Sarah Vowell, NPR commentator celebrating her geeky life. Voiceover for geeky cartoon characters. Rachel Maddow, for being Rachel Maddow.First, awesome list, though he forgot a few (like one of my favorites, Bionic Woman and a more recent one, Juno) and it is nice to have it in one compact place. But, I have to say, I still agree to some degree with Sarah Setlzer, though I also agree with John. On the one hand there are representations and it is as important just to strut this stuff publicly as it is to claim that there is not enough female geeky representations in mainstream media. This is what John has done quite nicely. One the other hand, as he himself says ” if you look hard enough for representations of female geekyiness in pop culture, you will find plenty.” I think those words, “if you look hard enough” also speaks volumes of the continued disparity that does exist. One should not have to look “hard,” and the only blockbusters, so to speak, which feature a female geek, is Tomb Raider, which for being so hyper-sexualized is not so geeky to me, no matter how good she is with the gadgets. That said, what I find so important, and have emphasized in different contexts, is the need for what I think of simultaneous positive and negative form of critique, the former being about pointing to already exisitng examples to get people jazzed and excited and to put things in perspective. The later form of critique, negative critique, identifies a lack, a void to fill, just the type of excellent commentary in the Seltzer piece… But now for the most important question, who has John overlooked?
Whilst building more and more packages into Emdebian Grip, I came across gettext 
I just received this email:
I've always installed the 
What started with 
The image above gives some idea of how it works. We can examine
relocations with the readelf tool.
As shown above, the GOT ensures the abstraction required so symbols
can be diverted as expected. Each entry is essentially a pointer to
the real data (hence the extra dereference in the code above). Since
the GOT is at a fixed offset from the program code, it can use an IP
relative address to gain access to the table entries.
This extra reference is obviously slower; however for the most part
I imagine the overhead would be essentially immeasurable and is
required for "generic" operation. If you have figured the cost of
indirection through the GOT is the major bottleneck of your program, I
imagine you wouldn't be reading this and would already be considering
strategies to remove it!
The next question is why this works on plain old x86-32.
Inspecting the code reveals why:
Since everybody is posting pictures of the first snow of the year, I can't stay behind. Quickly popped out this morning to make this snap of my favorite habitat, the valley of the "Grote Nete":
I've found myself writing this several times recently in the context
of Telepathy, so I thought I'd make a blog post that I can refer people to.
D-Bus is defined (by 
While a few developers have the chance to be paid for their job on Debian, most of us are doing it on our spare time, for fun. Yes, we are making the best operating system out there, for fun. Yet a large number of developers are taking this project way too seriously. To say it in other words, they have a carrot up the ass. I happen to prefer the French expression though, since it conveys better the rigidity of their attitude: they have 
I saw 
I live in one of a cluster of a dozen or so houses. As far as I can tell, none of them have any micro-generation capability (I think one has working solar panels and one has defunct panels), but we have an electricity substation and a small patch of land fenced off next to it. I’ve heard it said that the power distribution company would be open to selling the land. Surely we could do something here, with the stronger sun (compared to the most of the UK anyway) and the blustery winds? If only there was some model for grouping together for microgeneration…
That’s what I understand as the idea behind 
This might be a good message to write in Spanish... But then again, a long time ago I decided 
It is often argued that companies have to work with the FOSS community and
there are good reasons for doing so. I've tried to collect a number of
case stories of good and bad community interaction that may help as a
starting point for further exploration of this topic:
