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Lynn Conway has died

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Re: Lynn Conway has died

#421

Post by dinok »

pseudalopex wrote: post #418
yawpitch wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re asking the wrong question… what we’d need to do is take a girl with the same height and muscle mass as a boy and give them both the diet and training (and societal and economic incentives and rewards) of a Usain Bolt from birth, then look for sexual dimorphism’s effect on their sports performance. Looking for support for your confirmation bias in stats that already are influenced by thousands of years of your…

> You’re asking the wrong question… what we’d need to do is take a girl with the same height and muscle mass as a boy and give them both the diet and training (and societal and economic incentives and rewards) of a Usain Bolt from birth, then look for sexual dimorphism’s effect on their sports performance. The unequal distribution of height and muscle mass is part of sexual dimorphism. > no obvious biological reason…

[flagged]

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#422

Post by oioipo »

valanha wrote: post #388
robjwells wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those skimming, this is the controversy over J Michael Bailey's book The Man Who Would Be Queen. I highly recommend reading Dreger's article. Conway (and others, particularly Andrea James) conducted a years-long campaign of harassment against Bailey. This included (among many other things) repeated attempts to get Bailey fired from his job at Northwestern, a series of vexatious complaints to an Illinois licensing…

I highly encourage not falling into Dreger's article or engage in what is generally dismissed and discredited theory(ies) that surrounded all this. The article reference ends up less about the evidence and scientific rigor and more about the underlying drama. It is problematic, and if you want what I would consider a better take on it (and the subsequent book), I would read this: https://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2015…

[flagged]

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#423

Post by skissane »

valanha wrote: post #388
robjwells wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those skimming, this is the controversy over J Michael Bailey's book The Man Who Would Be Queen. I highly recommend reading Dreger's article. Conway (and others, particularly Andrea James) conducted a years-long campaign of harassment against Bailey. This included (among many other things) repeated attempts to get Bailey fired from his job at Northwestern, a series of vexatious complaints to an Illinois licensing…

I highly encourage not falling into Dreger's article or engage in what is generally dismissed and discredited theory(ies) that surrounded all this. The article reference ends up less about the evidence and scientific rigor and more about the underlying drama. It is problematic, and if you want what I would consider a better take on it (and the subsequent book), I would read this: https://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2015…

Serrano can’t accept that Andrea James went too far in posting online pictures of Bailey’s children with sexualised captions added (quoted from your first link):

> 3) points to instances where some trans activists have supposedly “gone too far” (in her mind, at least) in order to paint us as unreasonable and/or extremist

Given that, I can’t possible agree with your assertion that Serrano presents a “better take” than Dreger’s. At least in this (very important!) respect it is absolutely a worse one. Dreger is right to condemn James’s inexcusable behaviour, and Serrano is wrong not to

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#424

Post by Syzygies »

n the 1980's, Lynn Conway gave one of the two best talks I've heard in my life. She used sociology to understand how to spread radical ideas, starting with the example of birds in England teaching each other how to poke the foil in milk deliveries, to drink the cream. She applied this to teaching a revolutionary approach to VSLI chip design, in schools across the country.

I had no idea she was trans. When I figured this out, it became part of my spiel to students: If being different doesn't destroy you, it'll make you stronger. It's not simply that one can be just as good a scientist while being gay, for example. No, we live in a country so stupid it may reelect Trump, and there are still issues with being different. If the experience can teach you that many people are crippled by convention and full of shit, that revelation can liberate you to do more original work.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#425

Post by zzdil »

skissane wrote: post #423
valanha wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly encourage not falling into Dreger's article or engage in what is generally dismissed and discredited theory(ies) that surrounded all this. The article reference ends up less about the evidence and scientific rigor and more about the underlying drama. It is problematic, and if you want what I would consider a better take on it (and the subsequent book), I would read this: https://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2015…

Serrano can’t accept that Andrea James went too far in posting online pictures of Bailey’s children with sexualised captions added (quoted from your first link): > 3) points to instances where some trans activists have supposedly “gone too far” (in her mind, at least) in order to paint us as unreasonable and/or extremist Given that, I can’t possible agree with your assertion that Serrano presents a “better take” than…

He's a man with a mission.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#427

Post by mattigames »

OtherShrezzing wrote: post #104
mattigames wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Wikipedia has a reference manual which describes this scenario[1]. Lynn was prominently and publicly known for her post-transition work - though her IBM achievements are included, they are the minority of her career's work. She wasn't in the public eye at the time, so her former name is considered a privacy interest & not eligible for publishing to Wikipedia. If a person is notable & in the public eye before transiti…

Fascinating, thank you for providing a logical explanation rather than just downvoting.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#428

Post by musicale »

lksajdl3lfkjasl wrote: post #383
pclmulqdq wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ended up teaching Carver Mead's course in its last year at Caltech, which was quite an experience. In many ways, the course was (and is) horribly out of date, and not just because of the fact that students were using open-source Berkeley tools to draw layouts. The real reason why this course was obsolete was that Mead and Conway so thoroughly won the argument on the idea of creating rigorous abstractions that peopl…

I'm not sure if you are talking about MAGIC for the layout. That is what I used back in the day. I was surprised to find out later in my professional career that this was created by John Ousterhout, the same person who created Tcl/Tk. It's really amazing to me how versatile these early hackers were.

Ousterhout (and/or his students) has kept on hacking: Homa, Raft, RAMcloud...

I also like his software design book.

https://cs.stanford.edu/~ouster

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#429

Post by musicale »

nxobject wrote: post #10

A woman of incredible courage - to be able to rebuild her career after being kicked out of IBM despite her achievements, is inspirational. And, given how even the implementation of superscalar processors confuses me, smarter than I’ll ever be for understanding that AND chip fabbing at the same time, one of humanity’s finest technical achievements.

VLSI and processor design are, like most things in computing, things that you can learn if you have basic logical thinking skills and spend the requisite time.

Mead and Conway's textbook unlocked VLSI design for generations of students. Now you can find videos on youtube, and you can even join tiny tapeout to get your chip design fabricated. And for processor design, you can design something in Verilog or VHDL and run it on an FPGA board.

I also recently discovered Digital, a gate/component-level design tool and simulator for digital circuits (which can also export to Verilog for synthesis), that is similar to the older Logisim.

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