Technology/sex columnist
Violet Blue (
previously) has been
reporting from this year's Macworld trade fair for ZDNet; among her reportage was
a photograph of a woman sitting in a booth, labelled as "The Saddest Booth Babe In The World". Later it emerged that the woman in question was not, in fact, a booth babe (i.e., a model hired to smile, hand out flyers and appeal to the heterosexual male gaze) but rather an iOS developer presenting her products, hence her less-than-effervescent demeanour. Blue's
response was
somewhat evasive, suggesting that her (and, in her opinion, the average attendee's) expectation upon seeing a woman at a booth at a technology event would be that she would be there for decorative purposes.
posted by acb
on Feb 2, 2012 -
160 comments
Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism? by Larry Sanger of Wikipedia fame.
[via]
You don’t really care about knowledge; it’s not a priority. For you, the books containing knowledge, the classics and old-fashioned scholarship summing up the best of our knowledge, the people and institutions whose purpose is to pass on knowledge–all are hopelessly antiquated. Even your own knowledge, the contents of your mind, can be outsourced to databases built by collaborative digital communities, and the more the better. After all, academics are boring. A new world is coming, and you are in the vanguard. In this world, the people who have and who value individual knowledge, especially theoretical and factual knowledge, are objects of your derision.
posted by destrius
on Jun 7, 2011 -
157 comments
"Sometimes the hardest part of a story is getting there. Sometimes it is getting around. Sometimes it is obstructive intelligence agencies and soldiers. Sometimes it is lawlessness, sometimes overattentive law enforcement. Sometimes it is lack of transport, poor communications, power blackouts, accreditation difficulties or a hostile local population." In Cairo it's been all of the above. Stephen Farrell learns to pack a smaller camera kit:
New York Times lens blog
posted by Mister Bijou
on Feb 9, 2011 -
3 comments
Greetings, Programs! This is enough to make the hearts of every sci-fi geek everywhere go pitter and patter (yes and no, like a bit!). Space Paranoids was "invented" by a young programmer named Kevin Flynn back in 1982. Now it's finally come to life!
[more inside]
posted by zooropa
on May 8, 2010 -
21 comments
"Text Utilities" is a useful browser-based tool for geeks. It's a web page that does all sorts of operations on text, e.g. escape/ unescape, hashing, regexp testing.
posted by grumblebee
on Jun 24, 2009 -
33 comments
The Geek ABCs. A is for Alignment, which is why I stabbed you... G is for Grue, likely to eat you... R is for RuneQuest where old people roll the dice.
posted by GuyZero
on Oct 15, 2008 -
47 comments