In the early 80s, some 35% of Computer Science students in the US were women. Today, that figure is under 20%.

This graph, from NPR’s Planet Money, shows the turning point when women, when gender equality in computer science programmes stopped improving and took a nosedive.

Until the mid-80s, female students had been forming an ever-increasing percentage of CS classes, as in other disciplines. For a while, CS was less male-dominated than medicine or the hard sciences.

Then computers entered the home, and around it grew a male-dominated geek culture, along with an attitude that computers were toys for boys:

In the 1990s, researcher Jane Margolis interviewed hundreds of computer science students at Carnegie Mellon University, which had one of the top programs in the country. She found that families were much more likely to buy computers for boys than for girls — even when their girls were really interested in computers.

Belgium has been getting attention for its snub to France, in the form of a €2.5 coin commemorating the battle of Waterloo.

It’s a brilliantly snarky piece of coinage. But there are plenty of other odd denomination coins floating around. Portugal already has several €2.50 pieces, though they stick to fairly harmless topics like football.

Then there’s Jersey. The island had previously layered its own oddness on top of the already baroque British currency system, leading to coins worth one thirteenth of a shilling.

Then came decimalisation — the introduction of some form of sanity into the British currency. Out went shillings, but Jersey managed to keep a little strangeness. The Queen’s silver wedding anniversary fell in 1972, giving Jersey an excuse to mint a commemorative coin. A commemorative

£2.50 coin

. Then, obviously fearing things were still too straightforward, they stuck a crab on the back. Go Jersey!

A final shout-out, though, goes to Argentina, for its utterly baffling 36 centavo note:

A while back, The Toast published a list of sexist comments aimed inflcited on women working in technology. What I find really sad is how utterly unsurprising this is. If anything, I would have expected it to be even worse:

“How did you learn to do all this?!”

The ancient Spider-Goddess Llorothaag came to me in a harrowing blood-soaked vision. In exchange for perpetual servitude as her handmaiden, she imparted knowledge of IP subnetting.

“It’s not ‘P.C.’


to say this, but…”

Thank you for this helpful preface alerting me to the fact that I can spend the next thirty seconds fantasizing about

Star Trek

without missing anything important.

“It’s got to be a girlfriend-proof system.”

I picture an unruly mob of murderous girlfriends descending upon your Brooklyn apartment, seeking to sate their dark desire for living flesh. They scream and gibber as they prepare to devour all that lies within. You block the door with your home theater system. Thank god: it is girlfriend-proof.

“No, when I complain about ‘geek girls,’ I don’t mean you. You’re a

real

geek.”

All attend! The Arbiter is speaking. In his wisdom, he can tell who is a

real geek

and who is

fake

, and especially who is a

bitch

.

“But—you’re way too nice to be a lesbian!”

If the other lesbians that you’ve met have seemed like they were being assholes to you, I

might

have a theory as to why.

Quick plug for Nick Quah’s Hot Pod, an excellent newsletter on podcasts. It has an acknowledged bias towards emotionally-driven, story-based non-fiction podcasts — the archipelago that has formed around

This American Life

,

Radiolab

and the like. But even though that’s not really my thing, I’ve found a number of interesting podcasts through it.

I hope by now we all accept that Mallory Ortberg is the funniest person on the internet. Or at the very least, the funniest writer whose schtick involves heavy doses of art history.

Latest case in point: Two Medieval Monks Invent Bestiaries:

MONK #1: do birds have meetings

MONK #2: absolutely

they have a Meeting Hat and everything

MONK #1: what do they have meetings about

MONK #2: mostly who gets to wear the meeting hat

On this day in 1953, Aldous Huxley opened the Doors of Perception. By taking mescaline he loosened the perceptual filters that separated him from the world around him, an experience he recorded on one of the most precise and inspiring descriptions of the hallucinogenic experience:

I took my pill at eleven. An hour and a half later, I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers….At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation-the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

Huxley was one of the most intellectual and serious of the mid-century psychonauts. He combined the erudite sensibility of the Bloomsbury Set with a long interest in comparative religion and the nature of mysticism.

Ken Kesey saw acid as a tool to build the counterculture. Hunter S Thompson treated it as fuel for the determined hedonist. But Huxley is a child of the Enlightenment, drawn to reason even in the search for creativity and spirituality:

We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.

Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else’s.

….

How many philosophers, how many theologians, how many professional educators have had the curiosity to open this Door in the Wall? The answer, for all practical purposes, is, None.

The Aargauer Zeitung reports on foreign spies being trained in Switzerland.

Wavecom advertises its products in the USA as a “COMINT solution” for military intelligence services, telecoms authorities and other government agencies…

I do not learn where the customers come from. Wavecom has, though, put a list of its branches on the internet. Besides countries such as the USA, Germany and France, the company also advertises its business in totalitarian states like Russia, China and Vietnam.

Do you dream of architecture?

Thomas de Quincey did, although he blamed it on dope. The original English Opium Eater, de Quincey found his drug-induced dreams were of elaborate buildings:

In the early stage of my malady the splendours of my dreams were indeed chiefly architectural; and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as was never yet beheld by the waking eye unless in the clouds.

de Quincey then makes an extraordinary leap, linking his fantasies to the only artwork that adequately described them. Extraordinary, because he

hadn’t even seen

the pictures in question:

Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by [Piranesi], called his Dreams [actually,

Carceri d’Invenzione

, “

Imaginary Prisons

“] and which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever

The sensation which de Quincey imagined in Piranesi was one of “endless growth and self-reproduction”, buildings growing to giddy heights, full of immense machinery and with a menacing air of entrapment.

In describing Piranesi, de Quincey was bang on the money. The Imaginary Prisons are something like a gothic-industrial Escher

avant la lettre

.

The visions are, as de Quincey suggests, something from an intense dreamscape. Not benign, but not quite nighmarish. There’s even a faint echo of this architectural reverie in the work of Coleridge, de Quincey’s counterpart in drugs as in art appreciation.

Kubla Khan

, the most famous product of his opium-induced dreams, operates mostly in a mode of pastoral mysticism. But even here there are occasional irruptions of architecture — the

pleasure-dome

, the

walls and towers

enclosing its twice five miles of gardens.

What’s more, Coleridge makes explicit something implied by Piranesi and de Quincey. These buildings have not been, could not be, built by humans. Only nature and gods operate on these rules of unstoppable, incomprehensible self-replication. To build the pleasure-dome, Coleridge’s dreamer must transcend humanity, become a god who inspires in others the dread which de Quincey found in Piranesi:

I would build that dome in air, 
That sunny dome! Those caves of ice! 
And all who heard should see them there, 
And all should cry, Beware! Beware! 
His flashing eyes! His floating hair! 
Weave a circle round him thrice, 
And close your eyes with holy dread, 
For he on honey-dew hath fed, 
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Coleridge, de Quincey, Piranesi: all are approaching some kind of architectural analog to the Uncanny Valley. Buildings in themselves are not frightening, nor is nature. But buildings behaving as nature —

that

is a source of ecstatic, hallucinatory horror.

Piranesi’s work all but transposes Kafka into architectural fantasy. “Imaginary Prisons” are by their nature part Metamorphosis, part Castle. They turn civilisation into cancer — rudderless, irrational, merciless and self-perpetuating. And, as with Kafka, reality echoes fantasy well enough to give it extra propulsion.

Aldous Huxley managed to pin down some of that beautiful, bureaucratic horror, in terms that could almost come from a back-to-nature critique of industrial civilisation:

The most disquietingly obvious fact about all these dungeons is the

perfect pointlessness

which reigns throughout. Their architecture is

colossal and magnificent

…. on the floor stand

great machines incapable of doing anything

in particular, and from the arches overhead hang ropes that carry nothing except a sickening suggestion of torture. Some of the Prisons are lighted only by narrow windows. Others are half open to the sky, with hints of yet other vaults and walls in the distance. But even where the enclosure is more or less complete, Piranesi always contrives to give the impression that this colossal pointlessness goes on indefinitely, and is

co-extensive with the universe

.

Piranesi is now somewhat less striking now than he must have been two hundred years ago. He was working one hundred years before Kafka, two hundred before Escher, developing a style that somehow anticipates not just the artistic but also the economic currents that would come generations after his death. And yet his prisons seem as though they could appear in my dreams, just as easily in the dreams that once touched de Quincey.

Maid in London is a blog by a cleaner in a London hotel, about work conditions and her efforts to form a union. It’s excellent, if depressing, reading.

A recent study by a major UK union found that out of 100 housekeepers they surveyed, 84 said they used painkillers every day before coming to work.

Nipping downstairs to the locker room, I realise why so much of the linen is marked or lacking altogether. There’s one guy on the laundry chute. One guy dealing with what a former Linen Porter told me is about four tons of laundry hurtling down a single metal chute from five floors into a massive pile every day. He wears a dust mask.

There used to be two porters on the job, but now there’s just one. The guy struggling with it all is from Romania. His eyes are spritely behind his white mask. He must be about 21. We smile and say hi to each other.

Via Daniel Davies, a side-effect of the UK housing crisis I hadn’t thought of: it’s screwing small business startups.

Business loans in the UK have, apparently, tended to be secured by re-mortgaging the founders house. That kluge has worked moderately well — entrepreneurs have typically been white men in the forties, often with professional experience. These are people who, in the past, have been likely to have bought their own house and largely paid down the mortgage.

Not any more. Even the professional classes can no longer afford their own homes, at least in London and the South-East. So there is no equity to secure a business loan. So businesses which require capital just don’t get started…

And if you have a generation of businesspeople who don’t own houses, and who therefore can’t be fit into the historic template of British small business lending, then you’ve got the impetus for a total reinvention of small business finance in the UK. The banks which realise this first will do best, and if the incumbents don’t then entrants will. Arguments of the form “this problem has to be made worse to heighten the contradictions so that real change will come” always sound a bit Leninist, and have a pretty bad track record as either predictions or policy advice. But in this case, all of the contradictions have already been heightened, as the result of other policy choices made which had very little to do with industrial policy at all. Nobody has really given much serious priority to the need to re-engineer business finance in the UK, but we’ve now reached a point at which the old way of doing things is no longer possible.