Ever since Phil Torrone showed me how to use a bluetooth dongle to take control of my Roomba – a little round vacuum cleaner robot — I’ve been following the growth of Roomba hacking. Roomba manufacturer iRobot released its specs earlier this year, thus making it clear that people weren’t breaking some obscure copyright law by taking their vacuum cleaners apart and turning them into fighting machines (or whatever). In fact, the relatively simple controls on the Roomba make it an excellent device for beginners to get into robot hacking.

Now there’s a book devoted to Roomba hacking, which is great for those of us who still enjoy the form factor of this venerable but vanishing print medium.

What’s interesting to is the way Roomba hacking has turned what was once a “woman’s thing” — the vacuum cleaner — into something that has very little gendered subtext. Sure, hacking is associated with boy’s play. But hacking a vacuum cleaner? Not so much.

Robotics is also a less male-dominated area than computer science, and one of our era’s most famous roboticists is Cynthia Breazeal. Now if only we could create the perfect artificial womb, we could all get together and hack childbirth too.

This blog is the perfect place for me to share this with you. I am probably the only person in the world who has a bra made from a voltmeter-ammeter panel.

Last year I was walking through the Castro neighborhood near where I live in San Francisco when I came upon an estate sale. Many of the belongings I found inside the house leaned toward the campy animal print ilk, but on the mantelpiece were three metallic brassiere sculptures. The mechanical one with propellers on the nipples was already spoken for, but to my delight I was able to take away this electrically-themed beauty for a hundred bucks.

Too bad the artist didn’t sign her (or his) work. Most guests to our house notice and comment on it, though, so it clearly makes a statement!

Does anyone else have girl-geek-themed artwork or artifacts? Or imagery that confounds received notions in our culture about how girls and women are supposed to relate to science, technology, and other geeky fields? Please share!

Margaret Atwood admitted she likes science fiction at a Barnes & Noble reading, according to Bookish Love. Asked whether she considers herself a feminist writer, though, she got “subtly indignant.”

…not towards the woman who asked the question, but towards the need for the question in the first place. She said terms like that were “filing mechanisms.” Then, she addressed the audience as a whole, saying, first we have to talk about what you mean by feminism. Are we talking about driving all the men off a cliff, wearing overalls, or equal rights under the law? She said if she held a tally right now, she would guess we all were feminists. First, she said, the question would be do we think women are human beings or animals? She guessed we’d all say human beings. Then, she continued with a list of several questions in her hypothetical survey, do we think women should be able to learn to read and write, to vote, and then to the “more sticky” question of should women earn and equal amount as men for the same work, in the same position. Her final point being, implicitly, we should all be considering ourselves feminists if we understand our definitions correctly.