Hedy Hopper Lovelace

A gendered timeline of technology Women have played a gigantic role in the history of computing. Their ideas form the backbone to modern technology, though that has not always been obvious.

For an overview of the contributions of women over the centuries to the study of computation on International Women's Day see our gendered timeline

cs4fn.blog/2023/05/07/a...

There is no sense in which a chatbot can "help" with your schoolwork by making it easier; if it is easier, it is less useful for actual learning (effortful practice is HOW WE LEARN) and therefore the chatbot has not helped, but has only hindered.

Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible History was unmade last year, as engineers began the massive project of ripping the first-ever transoceanic fiber-optic cable from the ocean floor. Just don’t mention sharks.

TAT-8 is currently being pulled up and sent for recycling by Subsea Environmental Services, one of only three companies in the world that’s made cable recovery and recycling its entire business.

This image presents a series of line graphs showing the Google Search Volume for various social media platforms from 2004 to 2024. Each graph represents a different platform, including Myspace, Friendster, Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Vine, YouTube, Snapchat, LinkedIn, BeReal, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, WhatsApp, and Pinterest. The graphs illustrate the rise and fall in search interest for each platform over time, highlighting the cyclical nature of social media trends.

All things must pass... except perhaps Reddit.

(by @chartrdaily)

Notice reading: "Important: If you're located in the UK, you may be part of an experiment where your information will be processed by an age-assurance vendor, Persona. The information you submit will be temporarily stored for up to 7 days, then deleted. For ID document verification, all details are blurred except your photo and date of birth, so only what's truly needed for age verification is used."

Discord advises UK users that they "may be part of an experiment" where instead of their age verification data never leaving their phone, it will now actually leave their phone
www.eurogamer.net/discord-advi...

I need people to grasp, PLEASE, that “writing the code” is only a very small part of the software development lifecycle

I’ve tried to make 6-7 uncool for my Y9s by using it.
Didn’t work. Not a bit.
Backfired actually. They think I‘m cool now. 😑

Happy Women in Science Day! Drop some of your favorite Woman in Science accounts right here in the comments! 👇🏻
This is not meant to be a contest for who’s THE BEST but rather as a source of inspiration for who to follow. I’ll start with OG Real Scientists @upulie.bsky.social & @helenalb.bsky.social

FBI Couldn’t Get into WaPo Reporter’s iPhone Because It Had Lockdown Mode Enabled Lockdown Mode is a sometimes overlooked feature of Apple devices that broadly make them harder to hack. A court record indicates the feature might be effective at stopping third parties unlocking some...

New from 404 Media: the FBI has been unable to get into the iPhone of raided Washington Post journalist because the phone had Lockdown Mode enabled. Apple markets Lockdown Mode mostly to stop spyware like NSO. Here, a real world example of it stopping access too www.404media.co/fbi-couldnt-...

The "Turing Test" is not an actually relevant test for ... anything really.

Turing came up with a massively important theoretical concept (the Turing Machine). Helped with the Enigma machine. All impressive. "The Turing Test"? Not so much.

Dr. Gladys West, Mathematician Whose Work Made GPS Possible, Dies at 95 ALEXANDRIA, VA — Dr. Gladys West, the pioneering mathematician whose work laid the foundation for modern GPS technology, has died. She passed away

Dr. Gladys West, the pioneering mathematician whose work laid the foundation for modern GPS technology, has died. She was 95.

This is when it all went wrong

[typing what I am doing and the exact time and location I will be doing it into Google calendar and then sending that invite to seven more people, all within the data of one company that controls 99% of the information I see including advertising]

This is so convenient I can’t believe this is free

A graphic showing the layers of a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk. A top shell, a woven liner, a magnetic disk with a hub in the middle, a second woven liner, and a bottom shell. A piece called a shutter holds all the layers together.

The problem here is that "disk" is actually referring to the round, magnetic disk on the inside. That disk is actually "floppy" whether it is covered by the flexible 5 1/4 inch case or the hard 3 1/2 inch case.

an excerpt from the book "Why doesn't my floppy disk flop"

WHY INDEED

a photo of a 3.5" floppy disk

there is a woman on TikTok who has been arguing for months now with randos that keep insisting that nobody called 3.5" disks "floppy disks" or "floppies" at the time. it's weird. no matter what kind of proof she provides or how many agree with her, people are coming out of the woodwork to disagree

ethical hacking
this teacher approves

The differences between Python and Perl pretty closely mirror their creators personalities. It's kinda funny. Guido is calm, good sense of humor, but serious when needed. Larry is Weird Al but with a QWERTY keyboard.

The National Videogame Museum Sheffield | UK School Trips The National Videogame Museum is the UK’s only museum dedicated solely to videogames with a mission to collect, preserve, exhibit and interpret videogames for

At the National Videogame Museum, students can explore over 100 playable games, from retro arcades to modern consoles, learn how games are made, and dive into STEAM workshops in a way that’s fun, creative, and relevant.
www.ukschooltrips.co.uk/the-national...
@nvmuk.bsky.social
#STEM

Here's a fun Perl program:

while (<>) { print; }

Good luck guessing what it does unless you've worked with Perl. It's a great example of how you could do things kinda funky in the language and people actually did exploit some of this at times.

This program is a reimplementation of the UNIX 'cat'.

Apple for scale.

Apple for scale.

When a chatbot gets something wrong, it’s not because it made an error. It’s because on that roll of the dice, it happened to string together a group of words that, when read by a human, represents something false. But it was working entirely as designed. It was supposed to make a sentence & it did.

I cannot tell you how many tech journalists at prominent media organizations do not understand this

Sister Mary Celine Fasenmyer: She Wrote the Algorithm Before Computers Existed to Run It Sister Mary Celine Fasenmyer shares how a quiet nun in mid-century Pennsylvania conceived the algorithm behind today’s computer algebra, decades before computers arrived – her method’s erasur…

Sister Mary Celine Fasenmyer: She Wrote the Algorithm Before Computers Existed to Run It
voxmeditantis.com/2025/10/27/s...

#WomenInSTEM #STEM #Combinatorics #Hypergeometric #ComputerAlgebra

When Face Recognition Doesn’t Know Your Face Is a Face An estimated 100 million people live with facial differences. As face recognition tech becomes widespread, some say they’re getting blocked from accessing essential systems and services.

“There are few things more dehumanizing than being told by a machine that you’re not real because of your face"

For the last month, I've been speaking to people living with facial differences and disfigurements about how face verification tech is failing them. Spoiler: things aren't going well

8-inch, 5,25-inch, and 3,5-inch floppy disks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#/media/File:Floppy_disk_2009_G1.jpg

From lectures by Stephen Hawking to the letters of British politician Neil Kinnock – it's a race against time to save the historical treasures locked away on old floppy disks.

By Christian Kriticos

www.bbc.co.uk/future/artic...

#digital_dark_age

Abacus making a comeback with Japanese kids in an increasingly digital age Who needs hacking? We got clacking!

Some early computers, e.g. ENIAC and at least one IBM model, didn't store numbers as binary, they used a method similar to an abacus, with ten binary flags to represent the digits in each "column" (e.g. units, tens, hundreds, etc.) of the number being represented.
soranews24.com/2025/10/05/a...

(solemnly) You've had mail.

Examples Explore the possibilities of p5.js with short examples.

Have you come across p5js? I really enjoy teaching it to my Year 9 classes.

p5js.org/examples/