Ada Lovelace Day 2012 Coming Soon!

Howdy folks! Just returned from a sojurn in the woods of the Great White North, where I laboured like the noble Canadian beaver on The Book. You’re doubtless sick of my hinting that there will be comics soon, so, I will remain as silent as the tundra under a blanket of fresh snow on a windless February… oh, patient ones! Believe how keenly I feel the lack of posts! Like an elk unsuccessful at the autumn rut without a single cow! Up where I was staying we have a truly horrendous collection of early-to-mid 20th century Canadian adventure stories for young people, can you tell?

I do have a couple of announcements however!

Ada Lovelace Day 2012, the institution to which we owe our genesis, falls upon OCTOBER 16 this year (it is a moveable feast)! I’ll be giving a little talk at the star-studded Ada Lovelace Day Live! where I’ll be sharing some of my favorite primary docs; it’ll be live-streamed and I’ll give a link closer to the day. So sharpen your keyboards and blog or tweet or merely reflect fondly on your favorite women in tech and sci! I’m also working up a poster of the above image for the Ada Lovelace Day fundraiser.

Speaking of, uh, speaking, I’ll be dropping into the Thinking Comics evening at Gosh on November 14th, where they’ll be discussing Lovelace and Babbage and Logicomix. Should be fun and I see they repair afterwards on occasion to the very appropriate John Snow pub.

That’s about it for the moment.. keep the RSS feed and go about your lives, citizens! One bright day a low rumble and the dam will burst! Or, um, be constructed. Mixed dam-building metaphors. Anyways! And don’t forget, when in Canada, keep your bear-spray inside your coat lest it freeze and be rendered useless against the wolves! Not making that up!

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14 Comments

  1. Brian on October 17, 2012 at 4:35 am

    Mary Ellen (et al): It’s not the face that reminds me of Wonder Woman, it’s the pose. I feel certain I’ve seen that pose before, with (of course) the string of punch cards replaced with the golden lasso. Unfortunately, an image search failed to turn up the thing I (think I) am remembering. Can anyone here back me up?

    • sydney on October 17, 2012 at 8:48 pm

      You’re quite right of course! I didn’t really use a specific image but just did a ‘wonder woman’ search and gazed upon them until absorbed..

  2. Mari on October 15, 2012 at 5:27 pm

    That would make an awesome T-shirt.

  3. chicgeek on October 10, 2012 at 6:52 am

    Oh, that’s a great image!

  4. Mary Ellen on October 6, 2012 at 9:42 pm

    Welcome back from the northern territories, Sydney! Sounds like it was one of those great vacations from routine that stokes and clears the brain simultaneously.

    I’m not a superhero comic expert, I haven’t looked at a Wonder Woman comic since way back in the last century, so I probably have no business speculating, but I will anyway. I have a feeling the face of Our Ada in the drawing above came out of Our Cartoonist’s mind, not from another source. If it seems to resemble some other artist’s take, I expect that’s one of those convergence things. She does look powerful — and cheerful!

    It’s interesting to speculate how the RL Ada’s life might have differed if she had decided to wear trousers, like George Sand. Not that clothes make the human, but that they have a continuous, often subliminal effect on how the human perceives their options and capacities, moment to moment. She loved to gamble; maybe, without the corsets and petticoats, she would have loved to gambol, too.

  5. Stephan Brun on October 4, 2012 at 6:17 pm

    Re: the bear spray used for wolves.

    Of course, wolf spray is used for bears. It’s all down to a mislabelling that happened in the 19th century. It then got entrenched, and when people discovered that the two animals were confused they couldn’t change it because of all the mislabelled tins. Yeah, that’s it.

  6. Carolyn on October 4, 2012 at 12:07 pm

    Right on–will be at Ada Lovelace evening, as I’ll be returning from the Great Welsh Railway Caper (may be a little late to the festivities, hopefully that won’t be a major problem). Also I put a plug in for you here:

    http://www.steminist.com/2012/10/03/carolyn-dougherty-project-engineer-tata-steel-projects/

    Just in time for any curious link-clickers to see your new Ada Lovelace drawing.

  7. John on October 4, 2012 at 3:07 am

    I…feel like there’s something inherently wrong with a universe where bear spray is used to defend against wolves. That bothers me much more than the freezing thing, for some reason.

    Brian, good catch, I didn’t catch the Petersish change to the face.

  8. Leifbk on October 4, 2012 at 1:03 am

    You should be proud of the image you’ve given to Ada Lovelace. Thanks to you, she’s not the anemic 19th century mistress that we used to know anymore, but a powerful and self-esteeming woman in a world free of space/time boundaries. You’ve really liberated her.

  9. Brian on October 3, 2012 at 11:37 pm

    PS: That is Ada as Wonder Woman, no? What’s the source of the original image?

  10. Brian on October 3, 2012 at 11:35 pm

    I will remain as silent as the tundra under a blanket of fresh snow on a windless February

    My RSS feed shall keep me appraised; I need no other reassurances!

  11. Kaazz on October 3, 2012 at 10:56 pm

    Well, no comic, but you have given us a new and delightful image of our Brave Heroine! For that, I thank you! And, while I’m certainly missing your (semi-)regular comic installations, the hope of a (gasp!) BOOK keeps me getting up every morning to face another day! (Well, that and the dog waking me up…)

    Glad you had a productive stay in the Great White North. I hope I can catch you on one of the web events!

  12. Rico on October 3, 2012 at 10:19 pm

    Glad to hear you were productive while near my neck of the woods. But there was no real danger of your bear spray freezing was there. The weather was way too warm for that. Why it was so hot the lawyers prowling Calgary streets were positively bedraggled – their pelts are now worthless. So much for my September trapping season.

    • Ken on October 9, 2012 at 1:01 am

      Second that — it’s a step above your usual sterling work, which is sterling. The composition, draftsmanship, and Ada’s expression are all top-notch.

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