quick update–
i checked back at the blog where i saw it. i haven’t been there for a while and they’ve migrated their comments to a new platform which has effectively wiped out all of their old comments. then i spent a fruitless hour or so searching youtube and vimeo for it. if i find it again i will definitely post it here.
But you’ll surely need to have a man around to explain it to you.
Extreme pedantry note: the ceilings on a ship are what landlubbers* would call the floor. The floors are the joists that come out of the keel. What you mean is w/t tank tops. (Feel free to hate me).
However, the design of passenger ships is always problematic, largely due to those pesky passengers. How high do you make the w/t bulkheads? Hindsight is wonderful.
For instance, the Germans technically won the battle of Skagerrack/Jutland (thought they lost the war) for a variety of reasons one of which was that their ships had a much better system of w/t compartments. But they were not designed for extended voyages. British battlecruisers were, and this makes it very difficult to have German levels of compartmentalisation. **
As a small scale example, when I had a boat I decided to put a w/t barrier between the engine compartment and the main one up to a height well over the level to which the stern would sink if that compartment flooded. The original height was only up to the bottom of the sump. The downside was that if the bilge pump in the engine compartment failed, the amount of water required to flood and stop the engine was much less. The boat would not sink, but it would cease to manoeuvre. As it was for river use, this was an acceptable tradeoff.
Now extend little technicalities like this on a weekender to a full size passenger ship and start to imagine the tradeoffs. It is not surprising that naval architecture is one of the most demanding professions of all.
(Aircraft too, I guess. The Hudson landing revealed a weakness in design for water landing - nobody thought to include some kind of automatic shutoff or alarm for the rear air vent, so the cabin began to flood from the rear. Had things not gone as well as they did, Sullenberger’s brilliant landing might still have ended in disaster. But, as usual, I digress.)
*No, I have never heard the word landlubber used except ironically.
**Ventilation for one thing, movement of supplies being another.
Not today! I always appreciate accurate pedantry.
Well there are always lessons to learn. Certainly it was good to learn that the state of the art in 1912 had plenty of room for improvement. Bummer it cost so much to find out, though. I devoutly hope the takeaway is that there is still always room for improvement.
I guess the only lesson to learn in engineering is that “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” is actually very bad advice in the long term.
Does that mean that I won’t be shunned for being an accessory to multiple derailings? Now I love this thread even more.
Feminism is intersectional!
All topics relate in some way! 
And men are allowed to join in. Double win.
Someday—maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday—I will quote that back at you. 
I’ve been struggling with something lately, and I’m not sure how to work through it. Are any of you women open source software developers or maintainers of other OS resources (i.e. lessons, technical help forums)?
I’ve been struggling with is the balance between helping people, particularly novices, and also managing workloads for our workers, and protecting our workers’ time and sanity. I’ve always enforced a code of conduct for both people asking for help and the developers. Things like non-harassment, but also things like how a software user can pose a useful question and what needs to be included in the question. For example, how to include a reproducible example of a bug. I don’t include negative examples on the user side, but I do include (made up) examples of violations in the developer notes, including examples of irreproducible questions, and the directive that staff aren’t obligated to interact with those types of questions (I typically handle by copying and pasting in a response about how to ask an appropriate question).
I saw a Twitter dust-up the other day about this exact thing, saying it was unwelcoming to new people to enforce community standards when they ask for help, and that someone must always personally interact with that person and shepard them through submitting a question. The point was also made that women and people of color will be especially discouraged because they’re already more susceptible to feeling like they don’t belong in science.
I’m really struggling with this because, while I agree that no one should be mocked or made to feel bad for asking a question, I don’t think that expecting personal hand-holding is fair, either. And I especially see that the women on my team get a way outsized number of queries directed to them, as opposed to the men. I know, for a fact, that for some women in my social circle, the huge, uncompensated obligations of maintaining open source scientific software caused them to steer towards being involved in fewer projects.
To me, that’s the ultimate point: that increasing the obligations will decrease the amount of women who become leaders in OSS development. I don’t think I should change my community standards to obligate the team to reply to all requests, even poorly formed ones. I think that type of obligation will increase the workload, and disproportionately hit women workers.
Thoughts?
Where I work we are very fond of forms. Fill out the form, which includes helpful instructions every stop of the way. The more filled-out your form, the better quality (usually) help you get. Forms not filled out to minimum standards cannot be submitted, but they will provide more helpful text about what’s left to include and what you can do if you can’t provide those things.
Mind you, mostly it’s IT people talking to other IT people, so we can all empathise.
Writing job aids/wizards is difficult, but can be worth it. I love Service Ontario’s self-service web site. You can do things like renew your driver’s licence, and it’s all super-friendly but precise. Amazing job for a government, public-facing web site.
I think that’s a really interesting issue you are raising. Women do the load of helping work, but might also be the ones most needing of help.
Reminds me a bit of this research I read. Not sure how to advise you except it sounds like you are already handholding them and supporting with good examples you have taken the care to document in advance.
This is a really good distillation of the problem.
It’s worth noting that the phenomenon above isn’t unique to the software team thing. People who advocate for more inclusive spaces get burnout. I see it in academia, too: The noble desire to have more women seminar speakers, on panels, etc. leads to women getting inundated with speaker requests. I try to solve the latter problem by passing on the names of five women, preferably junior, every time I get a request I can’t take, but that’s still semi-uncompensated labor I’m doing for someone else.
I dunno, maybe everything is a pyramid scheme.
Look at the big picture: Yes, technically you’re doing their work for them by providing alternate possibilities. But the reason they contacted you in the first place is because they respect your authority on the subject matter. When you tell them that person A, B, C, D, or E would be an acceptable alternative, those names start being recognized as additional authorities in the field. They’re more likely to get contacted in future. And when they are, and are told that you recommended them, most of them will pay it forward by doing the same thing in turn.
It’s the “old boy’s network”. We have a lot of catching up to do.
Right, I do it because I’m looking at the big picture, but I increasingly doubt that the big picture actually exists. But men (and women, but mostly men) refuse to step up and actually look for speakers on the topics in which I’m an expert. It’s not that these women are hiding - their names are on papers and book chapters, sometimes right next to mine. The only conclusion I can arrive at is that male colleagues want to look like they’re doing something to improve diversity, but foist the labor off onto marginalized people (who they secretly think should be doing it).
That’s a very tiring dynamic, and it’s not one that has measurably improved in the time I’ve been a scientist. What improvements there have been have come from unrepresented people stepping in and improving things.
It deadens me how many people refuse to see the coercion in this kind of bullshit. Romantic, my fat ass.
Well, it amuses me to imagine him playing until his fingers fall off, then packing up and going home, too sad and sore to masturbate. I do hope the lady sticks to her guns. Could very well be she mightn’t have left in the first place if he hadn’t been the type to pull such a mockworthy feat of narcissism out there where everyone can see.
Four months? !!! He’s 34 and they dated for FOUR MONTHS and he’s doing this???
No. When you’re 34 and a four-month relationship breaks up, you get drunk, have a good rant with your closest friends, watch TV until you’re numb, and then get going again. You may not feel like dating for a while if you were really into the other person, but you don’t pull this shit.
As a few posters in that Twitter thread said, I’m heartened that so many people were posting in agreement that this was creepy, manipulative behavior. But I’m also a realist: this particular situation is in Bristol in the U.K. No way the comments would be half as reasonable if it were a media story here in the States.
Any kind of development is fraught with cultural issues. Handholding of any kind for STEM tasks is good, as is refactoring tools so they are less obscure and more accessible.