The Bluestocking, vol 42: Talking to machines and saying no to men
Happy Friday! A nice short newsletter this year, because like Jeremy Corbyn I'm trying to pretend politics hasn't started again yet.
Helen
For Every Yes Man, There's A No Woman
While there are certainly many “no” men, too, there’s a reason I associate this role with women. Even when our job description doesn’t specify that it’s our responsibility to rein in our colleagues, it just tends to happen. A friend who works as a consultant has observed that men “are never the one taking notes! They are never the ones writing out the after-meeting ‘action items’ list.” (Raise your hand if you’ve ever found yourself acting as de facto secretary for male colleagues who are no higher on the org chart than you are.) “Whoever is actually doing the documenting ends up needing to own the fact that no one agreed on a motherfucking thing. If you think your role in a meeting is just to drop your glorious magic genius and then peace out, it’s easy to never have to say no.”
Relatable.
(There's no reason for this, I just liked it)
What should we do about paedophiles?
Once, we cut their balls off. The first recorded castration for psychiatric reasons was performed in 1892 in Zurich, Switzerland, by the psychiatrist August Forel. In his 1906 book, Die Sexuelle Frage, or The Sexual Question, Forel admitted to having “castrated a veritable monster afflicted with constitutional mental disorders, taking advantage of the fact that he himself requested this operation to relieve him of pain in his seminal vesicles, but with the chief object of preventing the production of unfortunate children tainted with his hereditary complaint”. Forel, a pioneer in the field of sexual behaviour, also had a tendency towards eugenicist thinking.
Missed this piece by my former colleague Sophie Elmhirst at the time. She's one of those writers where everything she does is worth reading.
How AI got better at language
He dashed off his own Japanese interpretation of the opening to Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” then ran that passage back through Google into English. He published this version alongside Hemingway’s original, and proceeded to invite his readers to guess which was the work of a machine.
NO. 1:
Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai “Ngaje Ngai,” the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.
NO. 2:
Kilimanjaro is a mountain of 19,710 feet covered with snow and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. The summit of the west is called “Ngaje Ngai” in Masai, the house of God. Near the top of the west there is a dry and frozen dead body of leopard. No one has ever explained what leopard wanted at that altitude.
A (very) long read on Google's adventures in natural language processing.
Quick links: Mapping America's political division through cultural bubbles. A quarter of mass shootings happened last year in the US when a woman tried to leave a relationship. Benedict Cumberbatch imitates Alan Rickman singing Candle in the Wind. Inadequate women's healthcare led to the downfall of Star Wars' old Republic. Sarah Ditum tells you how to keep a reading journal.
Let's be honest, the real star of Sherlock is now this side-parting. WERK.