Links For November 9, 2014

Two Minutes of Walking on the Internet as a Woman

The effect is powerful and useful—“10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman” is a succinct answer to anyone who asks, incredulously, if street harassment is really that bad. People who couldn’t see for themselves—the ones who needed to, at least—now can.

But the video works in two ways: It’s also a neat portrayal of what it is like to be a woman talking about gender on the mainstream internet. This became apparent within minutes of publication, at which point the video’s comment section was flooded with furious responses.... A great number of men, online and off, understand feminism as aggression—they feel as though the perception of their actions as threats is itself a threat.


A Teenager Gets Grilled By Her Dad About Why She’s Not That Into Coding

I wasn’t offered any opportunities to code earlier than high school, or outside of high school. My parents didn’t ask if I wanted to learn to code over a summer or after school. However, I’ve never been a “STEM student,” so I understand why they might not have thought about it.


Make technological utopia easier with this one weird trick

Now, as a card-carrying Harawayian, I am in no way averse to ascribing agency to non-human and/or artefactual subjects; what bothers me about these scenarios is that they largely remove agency from human subjects, being variations on the Software Salvationism which believes that all obstacles might be overcome through the addition of EVN MOAR ALGOS PLZ*, and assumes (falsely, I hope) that people would like less direct control over the way their world works rather than more.


10 Things I Believe About Baseball Without Evidence

The predominant technology we use to perform [sabermetric] analysis is SQL.... This is where I believe that a technological Sapir-Whorf hypothesis applies to baseball. Practically all of our analysis of baseball statistics treats its data an unordered collection of baseball events.... Standard baseball analysis (the public kind anyway, who knows what is being done inside these organizations) treats its data that way because that’s the way SQL treats its data. The available technology guides our conceptualization of the world.


Too Many Echos

(cf. [1] and [2])