1) If this is the worst problem brilliant young women face, hallelujah— Cathy Young (@CathyYoung63) April 12, 2019
2) Several people have pointed out the comment comes from a woman. Yet here's this tweet a day last, unchanged https://t.co/GQlC0W1NBN
UPDATE: Naomi Wolf has now deleted the tweet that used to display along with Young's ridicule of it. Wolf had shown the picture of the young woman whose work led to what is presented as a picture of a black hole along with comments that included "That's so cool" and something like "She's so cute." Wolf asserted that the "That's so cool" comments were from women and show how women react and "She's so cute" came from a man and that's a problem. It turns out the "She's so cute" commenter, with the first name Shaun, actually was a woman, the Wolf premise of Wolf's expansive generalization was embarrassingly wrong. Wolf subsequently put this up, so you can see she doesn't accept the push-back about the generalization:
Posts
125 comments:
Not to worry. Whatever occurs in the black hole of my mind can't get out.
Black hole, cis-gendered grievance Fest! News at 11:00.
Can’t assume anyone’s sex or gender any more.
Black hole sun wont you come and take away Naomi Wolf
Wolf responded...she ain't letting you take back her umbrage: I stand corrected on gender of Shaun Pursglove, but absolutely do not back down on fact that whatever gender this comes from, a young woman's huge accomplishments are often derailed by trivializing attention to her personal attributes. Also notable: abusive tone in responses.
Now I know Naomi Wolf for 2 things: Working with Al Gore to make him seem manly in his 2000 campaign, and sucking the joy out of a moment of pure happiness for a female science person.
Plus truth is a defense. She is cute.
Hedy Lamar was brilliant and beautiful.
It’s ok to be bright and pretty.
If Steven Hawking looked like Cary Grant people would have noticed.
There's another photo floating around showing the 'team'...
Mostly middle-aged white dudes. Like 90%. But yeah, cute chick and all...
She didn't photograph a black hole.
"a young woman's huge accomplishments are often derailed by trivializing attention to her personal attributes. "
Derailed? Really? A woman's career is derailed because someone called her cute?
How do these people take themselves seriously?
Plus, if Naomi Wolf wasn't cute she'd be a bus driver. Assuming she could operate the machinery.
Sure. When a man does something and gets recognized with a picture, no one immediately considers his appearance.
Also, it's fine to comment on Trump's appearance in the context of a policy discussion because, Trump.
#Tolerance #Diversity
I assumed she was a lesbian.
It's so terrible on the day of your greatest scientific achievement to have people note your other good qualities.
How. Dare. They.
Mostly middle-aged white dudes. Like 90%
When I worked at the hi-tech bomb factory, er, aerospace company, they'd often trot out a woman to apparently take credit for whatever, and sometimes it was a person that nobody who did the actual work had ever seen before.
Tomorrow when someone notes her attractiveness, they'd better not bring up her scientific achievements!
"The feminist freakout over the scientist's 'girly' shirt"
The black hole of my mind has sucked up the windmills of my mind.
Whe you're doing a big data reduction problem, you spend a lot of time at work. It has to be obsessively interesting to you.
Guys have that obsession, girls don't.
So there's something to be explained. Maybe she's in a management position - a social occupation; or she has men's interests in an unusual amount.
Competing with girlfriends is girl-like, but that's going to be about men. This gal isn't apparently interested in men. Maybe lesbian in the most probable.
Or she's just picked out for a story that's supposed to uplifting to girls who would be well advised to ignore it.
Words from guys are always wrong and evidence of barefoot and pregnant patriarchy.
Same words from girls are encouraging and empowering.
Got it.
rhhardin said...
I assumed she was a lesbian.
That's ok, we all do it. You assume you're a funny genius. I assume you're an autistic dog-fucking robot.
As for being surprised by the final result turning up, you would have seen a thousand partial versions before you settled on this one. It's part of figuring out what data reduction is necessary. Fishy story.
@CJinPA "sucking the joy out of a moment of pure happiness for a female science person"
Word. Hadn't thought about that, but it's so true. Let Katie Bouman complain if that's her feeling. Otherwise, who asked you to try to steal her moment?
Blogger Kevin said...
It's so terrible on the day of your greatest scientific achievement to have people note your other good qualities.
How. Dare. They.
Katie Bouman, God bleas her, is a plain Jane. This achievement is her one chance to attract a man who's not like rhhardin. And that earth-tone scrunt is trying to blow it for her.
Guys, guys, I think you’re all worked up for nothing. It’s not a denigrating comment. The commenter just assumed any “woman” in a STEM field would be unattractive (based on life experience) and the comment was a note of joyful surprise!
We’re so woke and inclusive now, that not only do we have women in STEM, but we have cute women in STEM!
Is there an emoji for “sarc”?
Seriously though, is this whole storyline a qualifying match for the victim olympics or what?
Anything that happens in a black hole, stays in a black hole.
The rules for this sort of thing seem to have been revised. I've always followed the coaching that when referring to a female colleague or superior it was correct to note their work related attributes such as intelligent, strategic thinker, hard worker, leader first and only then could you say something about their appearance. This latter part could only be positive and had to be politely vague; cute, attractive, and so forth, unless, of course, she is not any of those things in which case nothing is to be said.
This woman is cute and is striking a cute pose in the tweeted photo. As someone above said, her career will not be hurt one bit by the compliment about her appearance.
Yeah yeah yeah..but what type of shirt was she wearing?
Paper: We'd like to do a story about an amazing girl in science
Girl: Fuck off.
that's the likely response from anybody slightly competent.
Anything that happens in a black hole, stays in a black hole.
It evaporates out. Hawking radiation I think it's called. A virtual particle pair appears at the event horizon and one particle leaves and the other falls back in.
They wanted to make a Cute Women of STEM calendar but they could only get to March.
Contra naturam Naomi.
She *is* cute. Someone noted it. BFD.
Naomi Wolf is a doctor but not a doctor doctor.
That's why i always tell girls: "You're smart but ugly". It always makes them feel good.
I stand corrected on gender of Shaun Pursglove, but absolutely do not back down on fact that whatever gender this comes from, a young woman's huge accomplishments are often derailed by trivializing attention to her personal attributes. Also notable: abusive tone in responses.
Shorter Naomi Wolf: "That's not funny, you assholes!"
"It evaporates out. Hawking radiation I think it's called. A virtual particle pair appears at the event horizon and one particle leaves and the other falls back in."
The dickens you say! You and she are way more knowledgeable than me! And she's cute.
The cuteness comes from the joy in her face -- a sort of "should I be smiling so much about this?" kinda thing.
Happy people generally look cuter than their unhappy counterparts.
If you look cute doing a pouting face then you are genetically blessed or doing manga cosplay.
And I bet Science Girl might have a Sailor Moon costume at home. For special occasions.
I am Laslo.
MikeR said...
@CJinPA "sucking the joy out of a moment of pure happiness for a female science person"
Word. Hadn't thought about that, but it's so true. Let Katie Bouman complain if that's her feeling. Otherwise, who asked you to try to steal her moment?
--
Fortunately, the responses to Cathy Young's take echo that sentiment, and most are from women. It's easy to forget that (according feminist Huffington Post) only 23% of U.S. women identify as "feminist." But they hold a disproportionate number culturally influential jobs: media, academic, political. So it seems like their numbers are much larger.
It's somewhat comforting to know that most women are not soldiers in the Great Gender Wars, even though recruitment efforts are relentless.
It's an amazing achievement what appeals to the masses. She is cute. Many STEMs are stereotypical nerds- unattractive, anti-social. She's a surprise. If she's as smart as she is she will learn to leverage that to her advantage.
Naomi is ugly inside and out. Probably not all that bright either. If she is she doesn't show it...
Compliments to feminists are like Crucifixes to vampires.
Someone needs to tell Naomi Wolf "Give it a rest, bitch-face."
Naomi Wolf also apparently believes in Chemtrails. What a loon.
BTW, two posts about foxes today. One more makes a trend.
Naomi Wolf is dumber than a post, as her interview by Ali G (Sasha Baron Cohen) proves, but she makes up for it by being cute.
a young woman's huge accomplishments are often derailed by trivializing attention to her personal attributes. Also notable: abusive tone in responses.
Her accomplishments have been trivialized by your deeming them less important than the opportunity to grandstand. Further the abusive tone in responses is your effort to steal her moment and has nothing to do with her.
Was she almost caught picking her nose??.....with history playing out behind her??
Forrest Gump move over!!
If that's the picture she posted of herself in the moment, I'm certain she doesn't mind being told she's cute. Her happiness was cute!
Also, I can only think about the scientist who got hounded for his shirt. Compare the reactions. Whose moment was ruined and by whom?
It evaporates out. Hawking radiation I think it's called. A virtual particle pair appears at the event horizon and one particle leaves and the other falls back in.
The rate of evaporation is inversely proportional to the mass of the black hole. Thus, asteroid-mass black holes (microscopic in the diameter of their event horizon) — which might have formed in droves during an initial stage of the Big Bang — could have evaporated away entirely by now. Even stellar-mass black holes, however — much less supermassive black holes such as M87's or the Milky Way's — will take basically forever to evaporate.
The greater black holes, moreover, typically have a lot more infalling matter than much smaller ones — which incoming mass would normally overwhelm any evaporation going on, in the larger ones anyway.
I find it kind of demeaning to call her a "young woman" What does age have to do with it?
Maybe, just maybe, Naomi Wolf should butt out let the cute scientist continue her work.....
I'm puzzled by the image. Is it the case that we are looking at a pole face-on?
If you think calling her cute is bad, try calling her ugly.
Soon all the great scientific discoveries will be made by trans women
If she'd have worn a hawaiian shirt with pin up girls on it Twitter would have melted down.
Her happiness was cute!
Yeah, that's what I got from the picture.
In fact her pose covered enough of her face that I could not offer an opinion whether I'd find her physically cute or not.
Perhaps Ms. Wolfe was low on her butt hurt quota for the month.
1. Katie Bouman at moment she photographs a black hole.
2. You are so cute.
As Fernandistein suggests, only one of these is a true statement.
If my pic of the event horizon of a black hole contained a ring of light, I'd check my math.
Even stellar-mass black holes, however — much less supermassive black holes such as M87's or the Milky Way's — will take basically forever to evaporate.
The universe has got forever and forever to spare.
"The universe has got forever and forever to spare."
Not necessarily, if The Big Rip is coming.
Blogger CJinPA said...
Wolf responded...she ain't letting you take back her umbrage: I stand corrected on gender of Shaun Pursglove, but absolutely do not back down on fact that whatever gender this comes from, a young woman's huge accomplishments are often derailed by trivializing attention to her personal attributes. Also notable: abusive tone in responses.
Now for the important stuff: What type of shirt was she wearing while photographing the black hole?
Blogger Curious George said...
They wanted to make a Cute Women of STEM calendar but they could only get to March.
Aw, man ... literally LOL’d!
We’re going to Hell.
Someone on her personal FB page commented that she was cute. I'm going out on a limb perhaps, but is it possible that he is a friend of hers? I'm also going to go further out on that same limb and predict that (regardless of yes/no on that question) that N.Wolf didnt ask that question before she tweeted.
> they'd often trot out a woman to apparently take credit for whatever
Annoying, isn't it. The image is a product of the international Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) consortium, it was an effort that required coordination and planning up front, so there were many people involved -- six named working groups in the organization -- and I expect they knew what needed to be done. Not to take anything away from Ms Bouman, I have no doubt she excelled in her part of the project, but making her the focal point of the coverage is just media creating a narrative. It's a shame, because the end result is that everyone rolls their eyes when women are given credit in these situations.
She misgendered the woman who made the comment.
BUT SHE STANDS BY HER OWN COMMENT BECAUSE OPPRESSION!
What a joyless fucking hag.
> If my pic of the event horizon of a black hole contained a ring of light, I'd check my math.
It was expected. Now, if you are suspicious that the image shows what was expected, that's something else :)
Ok. I did the two minutes of looking. The person who said she was cute is female, and a Facebook friend of hers. She was also the first to congratulate her on her wedding pic last December. Fake, but accurate I guess.
I read that this woman came up with the algorithm that stitched together the 8 telescopes used. I wish reporters were more literate. She may have come up with the programming/algorithm necessary but my bet is her big accomplishment was designing the data structure so it could be stitched together. It’s my experience that an algorithm is trivial if the data structure is correct.
Blogger Fernandistein said...
She didn't photograph a black hole.
4/12/19, 9:25 AM
I expected more discussion of this here at Althouse.
I'm surprised there are only two comments pointing this out.
chuck said...
> If my pic of the event horizon of a black hole contained a ring of light, I'd check my math.
It was expected. Now, if you are suspicious that the image shows what was expected, that's something else :)
4/12/19, 12:21 PM
A lot of people are misunderstanding what the image is.
Mostly because our media sucks. But also because anytime our media reports anything scientific, it sucks even worse.
Go through every possible contortion to find a reason to get offended about something, Naomi?
Almost makes a guy not want to party with Naomi Wolf, because she might be shrill, horrible, tedious and boring.
Maybe we could construct a pod-like, isolated, Twitter-free space for Naomi where all the other inhabitants are robotic, asexual cyborgs who never notice if someone is attractive or not. But ... She would still know that somewhere outside the pod horrible men were still doing wrongthink and glancing at cute girls' knees and ankles and other stuff like their hair and dimples and waistlines and all the other nice thing about them, and feeling happy at the sight, and she would still writhe with rage and hatred until that sort of evil, evil looking is finally brought to an end!
Maybe it is best to just ignore her, and spare the expense of building the pod.
She clearly is right on the cusp of black hole of The Handmaiden's Tale.
It's a shame, because the end result is that everyone rolls their eyes when women are given credit in these situations.
My respect for the woman who won the physics Nobel Prize this year, they were all women, what a coincidence that the best work of the year was all done by women! Anyway, my respect went up when she expressed surprise because what she was working on was a natural progression in what is basically engineering, same as this was.
Also noted: I'm on twitter.
Speaking of trivialization.
The Ugly Myth
new: woman makes scientific discovery, the left praises
old: man makes scientific discovery: OMG! Did you see his shirt!!!
Hey, Wolf misgendered Shaun, and that's a capital offense this week. To the guillotine with her!
The comments here are very witty. I wonder who the muse of this thread is. Cute astrophysicists and cute, humourless feminists both appeal to man's sense of the absurd.....ln real life, it's probably less hazardous to kid around with cute astrophysicists than with cute feminists.
The Outrage Cunts strike again.
I follow a history account on Instagram that puts up historic pictures. A recent one was of Annie Oakley. She standing with her back to the camera, holding a hand mirror in one hand and a gun over her shoulder. I couldn’t help but notice her tiny waist and said so. I then skimmed the comments and there was the usual harpy pointing out the men’s comments were all about Oakley’s appearance. I’m a woman and I certainly noticed. That was part of her gimmick. An attractive woman that could shoot better than most men. And it was a picture so you couldn’t actually see her shooting skills, just her pose. What people choose to grip about I’ll never understand.
OF COURSE women can be both pretty and brainy at the same time! Ask Meade! Back when I met her my wife was breezing through graduate classes in quantum mechanics and other graduate level physics classes pursuant to her doctorate in physical chemistry. Beautiful and brilliant. One of our dates was spent in the campus cyclotron monitoring one of her experiments.
BTW, the original meaning of "cute" was as a synonym for clever.
a young woman's huge accomplishments are often derailed by trivializing atten to her personal attributes
A young woman's huge accomplishments already means tits.
Women have more obstacles than men.
OF COURSE women can be both pretty and brainy at the same time
Women's problem is not brains but inability to obsess over STEM. They can do STEM but it doesn't hold their interest. So they don't really advance into the highest levels, which requires that obsession to the exclusion of, for example, social life.
Men use STEM as an escape from women. Social life is in the cafeteria writing on paper napkins.
This accomplishment was obviously a complex team effort with lots of participants. Someone had to click or push the button.
Kudos for being a member of a successful team effort.
So someone thought the moment required a photo...Science!
Naomi Wolf is embarrassing, even and perhaps especially to other grievance-monger type feminists. The more plainly she reveals that the better.
This was just more feminist grievance-mongering. I've seen the photo of Dr. Bauman reacting to the meme-ification of her discovery, and it IS cute. Not in a "I want to sleep with her" way, but just a human reaction to seeing people react to her discovery.
"Dr." Naomi Wolf? When did she get her M.D.?
She didn't photograph a black hole.
I know. I've cringed every one of the hundred times I heard it. But my faith that a reporter or editor can get the science part right is approaching zero.
"How dare someone respond 'abusively' to my hectoring AND my misgendering of them based on stereotype?!"
Wolf has always been an awful partisan hack, and she remains one.
Occasion worthy of "a Biden".
If my pic of the event horizon of a black hole contained a ring of light, I'd check my math.
It's called an accretion disc. It's brighter on one side than the other because it is spinning so quickly that the side moving toward us is blue-shifting while the side moving away from us is red-shifting.
Given the angle, I'm a bit surprised they did add an x-ray "camera" to the mix. There are giant x-ray "beams" coming out of the black middle (they originate outside the event horizon, which is actually a sphere, of course) due to stuff getting torn apart as it falls in.
Of course creating a planet sized observing instrument is way too complicated for the press, hence "taking a picture".
I was going to mention the shirt thing, but that has been amply covered, already.
It's not like girl astronomers don't get coverage. Adding to my growing collection of awful grade B disaster films, sort of the Hallmark division of armageddon,
San Francisco becomes a target for waves of destructive meteors after a rogue comet orbits the earth… For astronomer Michelle Young, what was meant to be a once-in-a-lifetime celestial event turns into her worst nightmare as thousands of meteors break the surface of the atmosphere and bombard the city of San Francisco.
What about the “abusive tone” in her tweet?
Wolf subsequently put this up, so you can see she doesn't accept the push-back about the generalization:
Is "wrong, but not wrong" the new "sorry, not sorry"?
Remember, Wolf belongs to the "party of science" so it's highly likely the debate over whether men are inherently sexist toward women in science has long since been settled.
It's not her data which are in error, but your need for it.
Cathy Young is awesome.
Wolt should’ve said something along the lines of In the immortal words of Emily Litlella, never mind.
Are people saying there is no black hole in the picture? What's the dark space amidst the orange?
What's the dark space amidst the orange?
It is nothing. No light can escape a black hole, so there is, literally, nothing to see.
I've been wearing neutrals and brown suits ever since I saw Naomi Wolf take firm control of directing how Al Gore presented himself in a Presidential campaign a long, long time ago. This was before Justice Kavanaugh was shown to have started a gang rape squad, and before the Lt. Gov. of the State of Virginia was handed a free Dem-pass to assault women.
She seems to know what she's doing, though I don't recall hearing from her on that Virginia issue.
Oh...excuse me...DR. Naomi Wolf. But of course.
I love the black hole in my mind and nobody is going to take it away from me.
Approach my event horizon at your own risk.
To all these young women who get offended when they are told they are attractive.
Don't worry - it won't last forever.
Exiled suggests: To all these young women who get offended when they are told they are attractive.
Don't worry - it won't last forever.
Enjoy it while you can. :-)
There's no "light" coming from the accretion disc in front of the black hole. Only on the sides of it. So it seems to depend on having the right angle on the galaxy, the idea being that there's nothing there to accrete.
So there is a black hole in the picture, you just can't see it. It's the only kind of picture of a black hole you're going to get so you might as damn well like it.
200 scientists -- 40 of them female -- collaborated to produce the black hole image. NYT has a photo of a Dutch woman who was part of the project. She's young and good-looking too.
Shep Doeleman (male) of Harvard was the lead scientist. He looks pleasant but dorky.
> 200 scientists -- 40 of them female
Women in astronomy is something of a tradition, going back to William and Caroline Hershel.
She may have come up with the programming/algorithm necessary but my bet is her big accomplishment was designing the data structure so it could be stitched together.
I would strongly suspect all the algorithms, and data structures are well documented in a software library. I suspect even the 8 camera stitching was available in the library.
Wolf cried wolf.
I dig smart chicks.
They're usually stable and self-secured to take an easy ribbing.
> I suspect even the 8 camera stitching was available in the library.
Probably not, it wasn't like stitching together ordinary photographs. See the examples at this page. BTW, I'm a maintainer for one of the libraries cited in the paper.
I'll also point out that in these situations a significant effort will go into cleaning up dirty data and finding/organizing the relevant bits. I don't know how it went down with this project, but that is my experience. Dealing with five petabytes of data acquired from multiple sources at different times and places is nothing to sniff at.
I prefer to call it brown sugar...less vulgar
I say this with all serious aplomb and consideration, but Dr. Naomi Wolf can go fuck herself.
I give her no points and may God have mercy on her soul.
The dorky nerd guy at JPL got fired because he was on TV with a chicks are hot tee shirt. The US is great because we are all equal under the law.
I bet she gets really offended if you don’t call her Dr. Wolf.
Wild how this stuff gets politicized by the Ignorant.
Earlier today, got to spend more time talking with the CEO of my org and another volunteer, originally from Bolzano, who is currently raising polyglottal twins. The Italian Lady was recounting about how she had to catch up with her six year olds' questions about Science, and how she found a good precis of Einstein's theories about time and space vis a vis a black hole, and how tired she was thinking about this stuff.
My response was, "OMG, YOU HAVE KIDS? HELP ME TRANSLATE TO MY CATS!!"
A fun conversation ensued. Next time I see her, I'm going to ask if she or her partner (or f#ckbuddy according to that Gilbar Asshair) is associated with CERN.
The dorky nerd guy at JPL got fired because he was on TV with a chicks are hot tee shirt. The US is great because we are all equal under the law.
He didn't get fired, he was just publicly shamed. The eminent scientist (Dr.) Tim Cook was fired for cracking a bad joke about women in laboratories. Funny is a capital offense: imagine what they'd done to him for a good joke!
And to add to the irony, the shirt the dorky scientist wore was from a female friend who made the pinup style printed shirts.
Tim Hunt, not Tim Cook.
Here is an excellent article by Jazz Shaw that seems to cover all the aspects of this sad affair. To the lefty trolls trying to build Katie Bouman up as the genius behind the picture and to the righty trolls trying to tear her down, Mr. Shaw offers a money quote of great sanity:
"So in the end, Dr. Katie Bouman was a valuable, contributing member of a 200 person team that developed the black hole photo. And after posting one innocent photo of herself enjoying the team’s moment in the sun she was turned into a feminist hero and then a glory-grabbing monster, all in the space of a few hours."
These days most science is done by large teams, and in the 21st century it surprises no real scientist to find women as contributing members of the team, and even pretty women as contributing members of the team. In this century the women are there to do more than make coffee, and that should be accepted as a matter of course -- not as something to be celebrated but something that happens where people live in the present century (unlike Naomi Wolf).
I wait outside the Math Olympics and yell for press whenever a young girl looks at a guy with those lusty eyes full of hope. It’s horrible.
That’s how I sell books and stay relevant.
I was right *in spirit*, they always say.
These female scientist mascottings help no one (same with that woman smiling next to binders full of apollo computer-related printouts). Competent women programmers and scientists exist. We all know that.
Shorter Naomi Wolf: "Look at me! I'm still relevant! Really!"
Also, anyone who presents himself as "Dr." anything is a stuffed shirt, and obviously insecure as hell. People in STEM typically only refer to themselves as "Dr." on the day they receive the last signature on their dissertation. After that, pffft.
Why on earth is this such a perennial issue? I'm 77.
The girl I took to the junior prom at my small-town Midwestern high school has for many years been a professor of medicine at a major university. Women have been achieving in the sciences for generations, but every successive generation still seems compelled to exclaim over it as a new and controversial development. Time we grew up.
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