Top Ten Girl Geeks, or C|Net Completely Misses the Point
Slashdot has linked to a C|Net UK article that purports to list the top ten girl geeks. No mention of the book, and for some unfathomable reason it mentions Paris Hilton. I have no idea how to react to this trainwreck. While I’m encouraged by the mere existence of such a post, I cringe over some of the choices. Lisa Simpson? Darryl Hannah? Ooookay. Wither Willow Rosenberg, then?
Also, I’m completely in agreement with those comments nominating Hedy Lamarr and Mythbuster Keri Byron instead.
Who would you add to the list?
November 22nd, 2006 at 9:53 pm
I’m almost speechless. Who comes up with this stuff?
November 23rd, 2006 at 11:51 am
I predict that 2007 will be the Year of the Geek Girl.
November 26th, 2006 at 12:10 pm
i can see daryl hannah.. depending on the criteria (famous first, geeky second?) because she has diligently been working away on her video blog for some time, and it’s good stuff and fits the internet. it’s not mainstream format shoveled into the internet. and for that, i’ve been very appreciative. few people who started in mainstream seem to get what’s good about internet media.
November 26th, 2006 at 4:24 pm
Women missing from the list:
Barbara Simons, first woman president of the Association for Computing Machinery and a tireless advocate for voting machine reform.
Cynthia Breazeal, director of the Robotic Life group at MIT’s Media Lab.
Nancy Kanwisher, neuroscientist who discovered the “face recognition” center of the brain
Xiaoyun Wang, cryptographer who discovered collision attacks on the supposedly unbreakable SHA-1 hash function
November 26th, 2006 at 7:46 pm
Neither of the following may be “as geeky” as Annalee’s suggestions, but they immediately came to my mind as women prominent in the media who I’d sure pick over Paris Hilton as being positive role models for girls in math and science…
Danica McKellar - the actress (”West Wing,” “Wonder Years,” and more) who has a B.S. in math from UCLA and is this year’s national spokesperson for Math-a-Thon. Her web site even has a math section.
Kim Comando - with 10 million listeners to her weekly call-in radio show, in my book she deserves the title she’s claimed as “America’s Digital Goddess.”
November 27th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
So… I would name ANY, and I mean, ANY Frag Doll as famous Girl Gamer instead of Paris Hilton.
April 9th, 2007 at 4:48 pm
[…] Intardetritus 09Dec06 So there’s a Slashdot thread about the 100th anniversary of Grace Hopper’s birth. Hopper’s one of the few actually geeky women who got onto that lame top-10 list a while ago. She was a Rear Admiral in the US Navy and an accomplished computer scientist who developed COBOL — serious geek cred there. (You’ve probably heard about how she coined “debugging” after she found a moth inside the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator.) […]