Occamstypewriter Domain Overview🔒 SSL Verified

Table of Contents

• ↓ Condescension
• ↓ Alexander Borodin and the Education of Women
• ↓ Mentors in Passing
• ↓ In which generative AI interferes with scientific training – potentially
• ↓ Steamboat Ladies
• ↓ The Dissing of Summer Lawns
• ↓ Top Alternatives to occamstypewriter.org

6-Month Traffic Trend Estimate

Visual representation extracted from occamstypewriter.org

Content Snippets from occamstypewriter.org

"Janet Taylor’s (1804-1870) was not a name I was familiar with until rather recently. She was quite the pioneer, however, despite the hurdles she had to face as a woman committed to delivering improvements in navigation for British sailors. A biography of her life, Mistress of Science: the story of the remarkable Janet Taylor, pioneer of sea navigation  enlightened me. She set about improving the lot of the British sailor, by setting up a ‘Nautical Academy’ which offered training in those subjects a mariner would need. This included “a complete course on Navigation, including Trigonometry, and its application to Navigation”, but also how to use the instruments and tables that mariners of the time needed to understand. Furthermore, she published a number of books to provide more accuracy in these tables that were used across shipping to establish a ship’s position."

"The first book she published about this, Luni-Solar and Horary Tables, was designed to permit an accurate calculation of longitude using the so-called lunar method, but with the improvement of allowing for the earth’s spheroidal shape, which she was one of the first to highlight (as opposed to a simple sphere). The book was given an anonymous review in the Nautical Magazine, which highlights the way people approached her work. To put it mildly, it was not favourable, referring to the book as ‘useless’ and of ‘disproportionate accuracy’. But, her gender had undoubtedly played a part in the reviewer’s mind, as he (it must have been a he!), commented:"

"The work before us being the production of one of the fair sex, and, we believe, a first effort, disposed us to treat it, as in gallantry we were bound to do, with every indulgence…."

"This condescending statement, as well as all the other criticisms in the review, did not go down well with Taylor, who wrote a lengthy rebuttal which in turn provoked a further rebuttal of the rebuttal….Over a difficult career of many years, her persistence paid off and she gained increasing stature within the field, and her Academy proved successful despite the odds. (It was not for nothing it was originally labelled with her husband’s name, to try to overcome suspicion of work led by one of the ‘fair sex’, although George Taylor was more the logistics lead rather than the brains of the operation.) That sort of condescension towards the ‘fair sex’ still can be found today in most walks of life. I was reminded of it by a reference I saw to Rebecca Solnit’s book Men Explain Things to Me, and the original 2012 essay which provoked the book’s title, in which she recounts how a man tried to tell her all about Eadweard Muybridge, having read a review of a book about him. On and on this man went, despite interjections that Solnit was indeed the author. That story, and others like it, in time provoked the new word ‘mansplaining’, but there are of course many ways in which condescension plays out."

Key Topics & Focus Areas for occamstypewriter.org:

Condescension

Alexander Borodin and the Education of Women

Mentors in Passing

In which generative AI interferes with scientific training – potentially

Steamboat Ladies

The Dissing of Summer Lawns