Shirtstorm was more of the same. Rose Eveleth, Vagina Vigilante, might not know much about probes or comets, or have much interest in them. One gets a feeling in her mind aerospace is that icky thing that sweaty, nerdy boys do. So, forced to cover it (or snatching it up as a prize assignment) for her paper, she paid attention to the one important thing in the world: herself. And since she’s female, she projected her prejudices onto all other females, and decided women everywhere would be put off science by a man’s shirt decorated with “space pinups.” A shirt made by a woman. A shirt worn amid a team whose leader was a woman who saw nothing wrong with it. But Vagina Vigilante was on the job! One gets the feeling she didn’t do very well at science, and now she had a REASON. It was the sexism of the field, manifest in a shirt.
Which totally justified making a rocket scientist cry on the day of his greatest triumph. After all, people like him had ruined her life, right?
But it gets worse than that – there was an entire campus filled with supposedly educated (ah!) women terrorized by the statue of a sleep walking man.
And then there’s the ever-elastic definition of “sexual assault” which – I’m not making this up – can now be ratcheted down to “Looked at me in a way that made me feel uncomfortable” or, for that matter “failed to sexually assault me.” Oh, sorry, that last was the definition of racism. Some Palestinian woman looked at rape statistics and found that Israeli women are raped by Palestinian men in much higher numbers than Palestinian women are raped by Israeli men, and immediately concluded this is because Israelis are racist. It beggars the mind.
Another thing that beggars the mind is the progressive image of women as great warriors. You know, in all the movies and half the books (often without supernatural explanation) a 90 lb chick can beat 300 lb men. And women were always great fighters throughout the ages. And, and, and …
And yet, women are peaceful – peaceful, d*mn it. This is why “peaceful planet of women” is a trope on TV tropes. Not just a trope, but a dead horse one.
Attempts to square that circle have included the explanation that women are only violent because patriarchy. There needs be nothing else said because in this context, and with apologies to the ponies, Patriarchy Is Magic. Honorable mention on trying to square the circle must go to Law and Order‘s attempted episode on Gamer Gate where the game the woman designer had written was about Peaceful Amazon Warriors.
Sarah Hoyt, “Give Me My Smelling Salts, Ho! A Blast From The Past From April 2015”, According to Hoyt, 2020-01-22.
May 10, 2020
QotD: “Shirtstorm” and other forms of systematic patriarchal oppression of women
December 26, 2019
The Origins of the Christmas Star?! – December 25th – TimeGhost of Christmas Past – DAY 2
TimeGhost History
Published 25 Dec 2019What did Mark Twain have in common with Genghis Khan and William the Conqueror? And how is this all tied into a Christmas Miracle? Well, much of this can be answered by a bright bulb of light, that astronomer Johann Palitzsch observed on Christmas Day 1758…
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Rune Væver Hartvig and Spartacus Olsson
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Rune Væver Hartvig
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek KaminskiColorizations:
Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/Sources:
King William I (“The Conqueror”), courtesy of National Portrait Gallery
Comet Halley and the Milky Way, courtesy of ESO (https://www.eso.org/public/images/com…)Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
Howard Harper-Barnes – “A Sleigh Ride Into Town”
Leimoti – “The Christmas Thieves”A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
November 13, 2014
Words you don’t expect to hear in the news: 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
European Space Agency fails to harpoon a comet … successfully lands anyway:
In 1998, the Hollywood blockbuster Armageddon asked us to believe that it was possible to land a spacecraft on an asteroid hurtling towards Earth — too far-fetched, right? Not so. Today humanity just achieved the seemingly impossible.
Earlier this afternoon, scientists from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta mission successfully landed the unmanned Philae lander module on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The complexities of this mission are such that a short article cannot do justice to the men and women who made this mission a success, but here are a few of the mind-boggling highlights:
The Rosetta probe launched in March 2004 after years of careful planning. Since then, it has travelled 6.4 billion kilometres through the solar system to get into the orbit of the comet 67p, which itself is just four kilometres in diameter. Comet 67p is orbiting the Sun at speeds of up to 135,000 kilometres per hour and is currently about 500 million kilometres from Earth. After a period during which it successfully orbited comet 67p, the 100 kilogram Philae lander then separated from the Rosetta orbiter, descended slowly and landed safely.
At the time of writing, the latest reports from the ESA suggest there may have been some problems with the lander’s anchoring mechanism. The lander was designed to fire harpoons into the surface of the comet to ensure it stayed in place — this may not have worked. But to be fair, no one has tried harpooning a comet before, so a few glitches are understandable.
Update: BBC News has more on the unexpectedly bumpy landing and the risk that the lander may not be able to stay active very long due to battery limitations. Having landed in the shadow of a cliff, the batteries are not able to be recharged by the solar panels.
The craggy surface of the comet – looking over one of Philae’s feet
After two bounces, the first one about 1km back out into space, the lander settled in the shadow of a cliff, 1km from its target site.
It may be problematic to get enough sunlight to charge its batteries.
Launched in 2004, the European Space Agency (Esa) mission hopes to learn about the origins of our Solar System.
It has already sent back the first images ever taken on the surface of a comet.
Esa’s Rosetta satellite carried Philae on a 10-year, 6.4 billion-km (4bn-mile) journey to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which reached its climax on Wednesday.
After showing an image that indicates Philae’s location — on the far side of a large crater that was considered but rejected as a landing site — the head of the lander team Dr Stefan Ulamec said: “We could be somewhere in the rim of this crater, which could explain this bizarre… orientation that you have seen.”
Figuring out the orientation and location is a difficult task, he said.
“I can’t really give you much more than you interpret yourself from looking at these beautiful images.”
But the team is continuing to receive “great data” from several different instruments on board Philae.
Another problem with the lander — aside from not knowing exactly where it landed — is that one of the landing legs isn’t actually in contact with the surface:
Controllers re-established radio communication with the probe on cue on Thursday after a scheduled break, and began pulling of the new pictures.
These show the feet of the lander and the wider cometscape. One of the three feet is not in contact with the ground.
Philae is stable now, but there is still concern about the longer-term situation because the probe is not properly anchored — the harpoons that should have hooked it into the surface did not fire on contact. Neither did its feet screws get any purchase.
Lander project manager Stephan Ulamec told the BBC that he was very wary of now commanding the harpoons to fire, as this could throw Philae back off into space.
He also has worries about drilling into the comet to get samples for analysis because this too could affect the overall stability of the lander.
“We are still not anchored,” he said. “We are sitting with the weight of the lander somehow on the comet. We are pretty sure where we landed the first time, and then we made quite a leap. Some people say it is in the order of 1 km high.
“And then we had another small leap, and now we are sitting there, and transmitting, and everything else is something we have to start understanding and keep interpreting.”
Photo of the comet’s surface from about 40 metres as the lander made its initial descent.
July 26, 2011
$117,000 for a bottle of white wine
A new record price paid for a single bottle of white wine:
Christian Vanneque fulfilled a long-held dream today by finally getting his hands on a bottle of 1811 Chateau d’Yquem. It just so happens that his $117,000 purchase has also put him in the history books.
His prized bottle is the most expensive white wine ever purchased, breaking the previous record of $100,000 in 2006 for a bottle of 1787 Chateau d’Yquem. Mr. Vanneque’s bottle is also a sweet Sauternes from the same Bordeaux chateau, though his purchase was produced in 1811, a year also known as the “comet year.” Oenophiles throughout history attribute the appearance of a comet for the reason why wines were extraordinary that year.
