University Challenge questions made more difficult so as not to offend anyone

valoren

Speaking of Nobel Prizes. Here's a good UC question.

Discovered in 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a post graduate student observed a repeating pattern of 1.33 seconds from the same point in the sky. Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle would go on to win the nobel prize in Physics for Bell's discovery. The name of her discovery?

Shenshen

valoren wrote: »

Speaking of Nobel Prizes. Here's a good UC question.

Discovered in 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a post graduate student under supervisor Antony Hewish, observed a repeating pattern of 1.33 seconds from the same point in the sky. Hewish and the astronomer Martin Ryle would win the nobel prize in Physics for Bell's discovery. The name of her discovery?

Pulsar!

Good thing you asked the question that way round, cause I can never for the life of me remember her name when asked.
It's a really cool story, first assumptions were that due to the extreme regularity of the pulses, she'd stumbled upon actual extra-terrestial intelligent life.

Dave0301

valoren wrote: »

Speaking of Nobel Prizes. Here's a good UC question.

Discovered in 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a post graduate student under supervisor Antony Hewish, observed a repeating pattern of 1.33 seconds from the same point in the sky. Hewish and the astronomer Martin Ryle would win the nobel prize in Physics for Bell's discovery. The name of her discovery?

Pulsars.

That was a question from a few weeks ago I think? A good example of a women not getting the recognition she deserved.

Grayson

Wibbs wrote: »

Could a woman have come up with the general theory of relativity? Of course, no doubt in my mind. Was it more likely a man did? Yes.

There's a possibility that a woman did come up with it first.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-forgotten-life-of-einsteins-first-wife/

Einsteins wife was a physicist in her own right however papers she wrote were submitted by him, because as a woman she would have been ignored. And she worked with him on the theory of relativity. Was it her inspiration? No-one can say. It can be assumed however that it was a joint effort.

Edit to add: Einstein was a bit of a dick to her.

xi5yvm0owc1s2b

Yep, Elizabeth I wrote Shakespeare's plays as well. :rolleyes:

But don't dare suggest that Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote Frankenstein, despite compelling textual evidence to support that.

Wibbs

Grayson wrote: »

There's a possibility that a woman did come up with it first.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-forgotten-life-of-einsteins-first-wife/

Einsteins wife was a physicist in her own right however papers she wrote were submitted by him, because as a woman she would have been ignored. And she worked with him on the theory of relativity. Was it her inspiration? No-one can say. It can be assumed however that it was a joint effort.

Doesn't surprise me at all. The greatest leaps forward are nearly always collaborative, whether that be a close one or more spread out(the above mentioned Shakespeare almost certainly drew inspiration and lifted lines from his fellow actors and playwrights). She was just as good a student as him, better in some areas and that back and forth dialogue they had almost certainly drove the work. How much of it was hers and how much his? Nobody can say and I would also suggest a fair amount of supposition in that piece. I would strongly suspect that while she was vital in the process it was more his. He continued to operate at the very highest levels of physics after they split up without her input.

I would consider their relationship along the lines of the Curies. Pierre Curie most certainly drove Marie to the heights she attained and was a renowned brain of his own, but her work was much more hers. Though the obvious difference between the two couples is Pierre is and was recognised for his vital input and they received the Noble gong as a couple(though that IMHO was a bit off, as I would see her as the driving force behind it).

s7ryf3925pivug

Dave0301 wrote: »

Pulsars.

That was a question from a few weeks ago I think? A good example of a women not getting the recognition she deserved.

She and Mary Anning are two of seven scientists in Graphic Science. It is a collection of graphical biographies of scientists who were marginalised. It is really good.

Both were marginalised in part due to their gender. Retroactively giving recognition to women who should have already received it is good. Nominal inclusion of women just because they're women is bad.

Dave0301

Hamza Calm Seance wrote: »

She and Mary Anning are two of seven scientists in Graphic Science. It is a collection of graphical biographies of scientists who were marginalised. It is really good.

Both were marginalised in part due to their gender. Retroactively giving recognition to women who should have already received it is good. Nominal inclusion of women just because they're women is bad.

Speaking of recognition, this is well put together...or I am just easily amused

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35FwmiPE9tI

Shenshen

Hamza Calm Seance wrote: »

She and Mary Anning are two of seven scientists in Graphic Science. It is a collection of graphical biographies of scientists who were marginalised. It is really good.

Both were marginalised in part due to their gender. Retroactively giving recognition to women who should have already received it is good. Nominal inclusion of women just because they're women is bad.

Would that include Ada Lovelace as well? I've always been fascinated by her, ever since I found out she pretty much invented software and coding.

Shenshen

Shenshen wrote: »

Would that include Ada Lovelace as well? I've always been fascinated by her, ever since I found out she pretty much invented software and coding.

Speaking of coding... margaret hamilton and her handwritten apollo code https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist)

I think Katherine Johnson was used to handcheck calcs even after machine computers came into use
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/researchernews/rn_kjohnson.html

Wibbs

Shenshen wrote: »

Would that include Ada Lovelace as well? I've always been fascinated by her, ever since I found out she pretty much invented software and coding.

There's some debate about that SS. Babbage had written up similar notes on what we might call coding for his difference/analytical engine well before they met. She was the first to publish them. What she certainly did do is consider the potential of this type of coding, something others including Babbage hadn't. And she was able and did condense it in "simple" terms. That's a helluva talent, right there.

As far as women in computing goes I'd rate someone like Grace Hopper far higher. There's another woman whose name sadly escapes who worked in the 1960's in NASA and who was a major trailblazer of computing and one of the very few front of house women engineers/programmers. There's the well known story of the African American women who worked in the background at NASA doing computation.

As an aside; mathematics was quite the popular subject for well heeled ladies in the 19th century. It was considered an "appropriate subject" for ladies. Ada Lovelace was one such lady. It remained a popular college subject and hobby up until the 1930's but then the uptake dropped right off a cliff. In the early days of personal computing there were more female faces as a percentage in the mix too. And it was at the hard coding coalface too. These days while quite the percentage of women are in the business, they tend not to be in the hardcore coding end, more the front end design stuff. It is odd to consider that in the days of "there there dear, make me a cup of tea" *pats arse* there were many more women at the sharp end of computing and doing maths than there are today where there's far more equality going on.

One woman that always fascinated me was Hedy Lamarr

Ms Lamarr. Having an oul brainstorm.


Hollywood actress was her main gig, but she was also an inventor. Howard Hughes(before he started peeing in jugs) being of the inventive sort himself was very taken with her mind and encouraged her and helped her with contacts in the aircraft and military industries. During the war she put her mind to coming up with different inventions to help the war effort(she even thought of jacking in the acting gig to join various think tanks. And they wanted her too). She came up with the idea of frequency hopping to make homing torpedoes un jammable. As you do. Frequency hopping has been used in all sorts of security applications since then. She was pretty much self taught too. And could speak a crap load of languages.

Wibbs

bluewolf wrote: »

Speaking of coding... margaret hamilton and her handwritten apollo code https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist)

Yes B! Maggie Hamilton. She was the lass whose name escaped(in fairness my brain has a lot of open doors so...) Serious mind going on there.

lawred2

Irish Guitarist wrote: »

University Challenge is apparently going to change their questions so it won't be possible to tell whether they were written by a man or a woman.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2018/08/27/university-challenge-introduce-gender-neutral-questionsfollowing/

Have you ever watched a quiz and thought "that question was definitely written by a man"? I know I haven't.

It's getting more difficult too because they're throwing in questions about women that no one has heard of.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/25/university-challenge-gender-balances-questions-amid-suggestions/

I used to watch University Challenge and on a good night I'd get maybe three answers correct. I think they should make the questions easier. What about my rights as a stupid person to not be offended?

I'll still presume that the questions were written by men :pac:

Wibbs

Wibbs wrote: »

Yes B! Maggie Hamilton. She was the lass whose name escaped(in fairness my brain has a lot of open doors so...) Serious mind going on there.

It says katherine johnson got her degree at 18,serious minds both.
I think a lot of those nasa women did

Wibbs

bluewolf wrote: »

It says katherine johnson got her degree at 18,serious minds both.
I think a lot of those nasa women did

Yep. It's easy to forget that the men and women who were working at the sharp end of 1960's NASA were on average mostly young people, barely out of college, well under 30.

Capt'n Midnight

sliabh 1956 wrote: »

Love watching UC some amazing brains on display though I feel much more at home watching Eggheads It would be gas to see if the BBC could arrange a challenge between the Eggs and the winners of UC

I hate eggheads. It's not just the smugness it's that every time I've seen it the questions seem to be biased in their favour. Not that the questions are harder more that they match their demographics more.

Capt'n Midnight

Obvious Desperate Breakfasts wrote: »

It doesn’t really work that way. Prizes are usually given out years after the work was done, presumably to ascertain its true importance.

I suppose the point here and with Bell is that the men got the prize based on the work of others.

Linus Pauling was also chasing down DNA and had already proposed a triple helix structure. Roslyn had better pictures.

All Watson and Crick had to do was join the dots.

Capt'n Midnight

Wibbs wrote: »

One woman that always fascinated me was Hedy Lamarr

Blazing Saddles was a great film.

Governor Lepetomane: Thank you, Hedy, thank you
Hedley Lamarr: It's not *Hedy*, it's *Hedley*. Hedley Lamarr.
Governor Lepetomane: What the hell are you worried about? This is 1874. You'll be able to sue *her*.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/BlazingSaddles

The famous Running Gag regarding Hedley Lamarr's name is lampshaded by the governor when he points out that it's 1874, meaning that "You'll be able to sue her!" Made even funnier by the fact that she did in fact sue Brooks (they settled out of court; Brooks' view on the lawsuit was, "It's HEDY LAMARR! Just give her whatever she wants!").

paleoperson

Lorenzo Bumpy Rake wrote: »

Yep, Elizabeth I wrote Shakespeare's plays as well. :rolleyes:

But don't dare suggest that Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote Frankenstein, despite compelling textual evidence to support that.

I love Frankenstein, easily my favourite classical novel, but I always felt it was strange that it was written by not only a girl but when she was 18-21 years old and also that she never produced anything else noteworthy for the rest of her life. That makes a LOT more sense - a notable writer husband at 26 years old who then passed away three years later meaning there would be no reason for it to ever be uncovered. I don't mean to commit confirmation bias but sometimes the odd-sounding thing really is not what happened. Considering that according to wikipedia she apparently failed to credit him for the preface or 4,000-5,000 words of the novel it's hardly a major jump on the face of it, but the politics of our time likely means it won't see the light of day.

goose2005

Lorenzo Bumpy Rake wrote: »

I genuinely don't think it's the case that university courses systematically ignore all of the prominent female philosophers and mathematicians throughout history. The blunt reality is that there just haven't been many influential women in some fields. Certainly we can debate why that's the case -- but it's just not true that universities are ignoring all of the prominent and important women. Quite the opposite, in many instances, where relatively minor achievements are elevated to an almost absurd level of importance because of the person's gender or race in a university system obsessed with identity politics. You'd think Ada Lovelace singlehandedly invented the entire discipline of computer science the way some people talk about her in the interest of "celebrating women's contributions." In reality, she's a relatively minor historical footnote.

I'd imagine that 95% of those mentioned in these questions come from middle- or upper-class backgrounds. Why is there not fair representation for working-class people?

CrabRevolution wrote: »

I noticed something similar during the 1916 Rising commemorations. In the name of "balance" they had to play up the female participants of the rising, which is fine and well, I doubt anyone has much of a problem with that.

What did seem ridiculous though was how many of these pieces contained lines about "the forgotten women of the rising" and how "Ireland shamefully didn't remember them as they did Pearse and Connolly". This ignored the obvious reason that these women were just grunts in the Rising, and history doesn't remember the names of grunts whether they be male or female. Random female footsoldiers were being made out to be just as notable as the leaders.

I wouldn't call it rewriting history, but it's certainly a twisting of the truth.

they weren't even footsoldiers, they were auxiliaries like nurses and messengers for the most part. On the rebel side, 66 died and 16 were executed, all of them men. Only one woman (Margaret Skinnider) is known to have been wounded in action.

pleas advice

They were hardly going to execute a woman though, in fairness

s7ryf3925pivug

Shenshen wrote: »

Would that include Ada Lovelace as well? I've always been fascinated by her, ever since I found out she pretty much invented software and coding.

chemistry who gave oxygen its name, Lavoisier was a wealthy man who found himself on the wrong side of a revolution and paid the price with his life.

Mary Anning: a poor, working-class woman who made her living fossil-hunting along the beach cliffs of southern England. Anning found herself excluded from the scientific community because of her gender and social class. Wealthy, male, experts took credit for her discoveries.

George Washington Carver: born a slave, Carver become one of the most prominent botanists of his time, as well as a teacher at the Tuskegee Institute. Carver devised over 100 products using one major ingredient – the peanut – including dyes, plastics and gasoline.

Alfred Wegener: a German meteorologist, balloonist, and arctic explorer, his theory of continental drift was derided by other scientists and was only accepted into mainstream thinking after his death. He died in Greenland on an expedition, his body lost in the ice and snow.

Nikola Tesla: a Serbian American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, physicist, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system. A competitor of Edison, Tesla died in poverty despite his intellectual brilliance.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: a Northern Irish astrophysicist. As a postgraduate student, she discovered the first radio pulsars (supernova remnants) while studying and advised by her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish, for which Hewish shared the Nobel Prize in physics while Bell Burnell was excluded.

Fred Hoyle: an English astronomer noted primarily for the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis – the process whereby most of the elements on the Periodic Table are created. He was also noted for the controversial positions he held on a wide range of scientific issues, often in direct opposition to prevailing theories. This eccentric approach contributed to him to being overlooked by the Nobel Prize committee for his stellar nucleosynthesis work.

Any one of these figures could have been awarded a Nobel prize. Not every scientific discoverer was lauded in their time, for reasons of gender, race, or lack of wealth, or (in the case of Lavoisier) being too wealthy: in the 21st century, there are many more reparations and reputations to be made.

Quoted text from:
http://myriadeditions.com/books/graphic-science/

Shenshen

paleoperson wrote: »

I love Frankenstein, easily my favourite classical novel, but I always felt it was strange that it was written by not only a girl but when she was 18-21 years old and also that she never produced anything else noteworthy for the rest of her life. That makes a LOT more sense - a notable writer husband at 26 years old who then passed away three years later meaning there would be no reason for it to ever be uncovered. I don't mean to commit confirmation bias but sometimes the odd-sounding thing really is not what happened. Considering that according to wikipedia she apparently failed to credit him for the preface or 4,000-5,000 words of the novel it's hardly a major jump on the face of it, but the politics of our time likely means it won't see the light of day.

I'd agree with that suspicion if Percy Shelley's writings weren't so markedly, entirely different from Frankenstein.
And the "One Novel Wonder" isn't all that rare - look at the likes of Emily Bronte, Margaret Mitchell, J.D. Salinger or Boris Pasternak.

ohnonotgmail

Shenshen wrote: »

I'd agree with that suspicion if Percy Shelley's writings weren't so markedly, entirely different from Frankenstein.
And the "One Novel Wonder" isn't all that rare - look at the likes of Emily Bronte, Margaret Mitchell, J.D. Salinger or Boris Pasternak.

Pasternak was a poet who wrote a novel so not terribly unusual that he only wrote the one. Plus the novel caused him a great deal of grief in russia so that probably put him off writing another.

xi5yvm0owc1s2b

paleoperson wrote: »

I love Frankenstein, easily my favourite classical novel, but I always felt it was strange that it was written by not only a girl but when she was 18-21 years old and also that she never produced anything else noteworthy for the rest of her life. That makes a LOT more sense - a notable writer husband at 26 years old who then passed away three years later meaning there would be no reason for it to ever be uncovered. I don't mean to commit confirmation bias but sometimes the odd-sounding thing really is not what happened. Considering that according to wikipedia she apparently failed to credit him for the preface or 4,000-5,000 words of the novel it's hardly a major jump on the face of it, but the politics of our time likely means it won't see the light of day.

Totally agreed. Charles E. Robinson has already published Percy Shelley’s over 5,000 known amendments and contributions to the text -- but there's evidence that PBS may have had an even deeper involvement. When Mary Shelley revised the text for subsequent editions, after PBS's death, she absolutely butchered it, showing little understanding or sensitivity for why the text was constructed the way it was. And yet to suggest that PBS should be regarded as at very least a co-author, if not the originator, of Frankenstein would be regarded as heresy in feminist literary circles.

xi5yvm0owc1s2b

Shenshen wrote: »

I'd agree with that suspicion if Percy Shelley's writings weren't so markedly, entirely different from Frankenstein.

Back in Shelley's day, it would have been a mark of shame for a noted poet to write a novel, especially a sensationalist gothic novel like Frankenstein. So he would have been more than eager to hide his authorship.

And yet there's plenty of evidence that he was the primary author of the book. See John Lauritsen's 2007 book The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein for an extensive discussion.

Shenshen

Lorenzo Bumpy Rake wrote: »

Back in Shelley's day, it would have been a mark of shame for a noted poet to write a novel, especially a sensationalist gothic novel like Frankenstein. So he would have been more than eager to hide his authorship.

And yet there's plenty of evidence that he was the primary author of the book. See John Lauritsen's 2007 book The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein for an extensive discussion.

If I recall correctly, the story was not intended for publishing in the first place. It was a private competition between Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and John William Polidori, after having spent days cooped up in a house in bad weather, reading ghost stories to each other and discussing experiments that seemed to re-animate corpses using electricity.

I don't find it too far-fetched to think the two would merge in the mind of a young girl.

xi5yvm0owc1s2b

Shenshen wrote: »

If I recall correctly, the story was not intended for publishing in the first place. It was a private competition between Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and John William Polidori, after having spent days cooped up in a house in bad weather, reading ghost stories to each other and discussing experiments that seemed to re-animate corpses using electricity.

I don't find it too far-fetched to think the two would merge in the mind of a young girl.

There's a long way from the ghost story conceived in the summer of 1816 to the fully accomplished and complex novel completed a year later and published in January 1818. There's also a marked difference between the quality of the writing in the 1818 edition of Frankenstein and that of anything else written by Mary Shelley in her lifetime. If you haven't heard of her subsequent novels Valperga, Perkin Warbeck, The Last Man, Lodore, or Falkner, believe me, there's good reason for that. So how does a young woman go from being a preternaturally brilliant novelist in her late teens, writing a book that is still widely read and loved today, to writing tripe that even scholars of the period struggle to finish?

There's also the issue of subsequent revised editions of Frankenstein, in which Shelley blundered her way through the original text with seemingly limited understanding of its careful textured architecture and style, often botching up many of its finer aspects with her poorly conceived emendations and additions. The 1818 edition remains far superior to the 1823 or 1831 revisions, even though many publishers today make the mistake of regarding the last edition as the definitive one, just because it was the last one its author touched. That makes sense if you believe Mary Shelley to be the sole author, but not if you acknowledge the authorial role of PBS.

Shenshen

Shenshen wrote: »

If I recall correctly, the story was not intended for publishing in the first place. It was a private competition between Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and John William Polidori, after having spent days cooped up in a house in bad weather, reading ghost stories to each other and discussing experiments that seemed to re-animate corpses using electricity.

I don't find it too far-fetched to think the two would merge in the mind of a young girl.

Ye, national geographic article happens to be on front page reddit about it today:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/archaeology-and-history/magazine/2017/07-08/birth_of_Frankenstein_Mary_Shelley/

Only the year before she'd given birth and her baby had passed away - serious parallels going on there I suppose! and the horror of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley#Percy_Bysshe_Shelley

Another famous figure who was interesting and thought i would post here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabetta_Sirani

And a top painter of her generation
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_Gentileschi

xi5yvm0owc1s2b

Anyone interested in the genesis of Frankenstein can check out the Vintage Classics edition The Original Frankenstein (2009), edited from the Bodleian Library manuscripts by Charles E. Robinson.

This allows the reader to see both Mary Shelley's early draft and the extensively revised text by PBS. The extent of PBS's amendments and additions is undeniable, as are his many important stylistic and thematic changes.

Robinson is also the first to ensure that the authorship on the title page reads "Mary Shelley with Percy Shelley," properly representing the huge role that the brilliant poet played in creating one of the most enduring novels of the past two centuries.

Obvious Desperate Breakfasts

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

I suppose the point here and with Bell is that the men got the prize based on the work of others.

Linus Pauling was also chasing down DNA and had already proposed a triple helix structure. Roslyn had better pictures.

All Watson and Crick had to do was join the dots.

Franklin’s lab partner, Maurice Wilkins, also got the prize, not just Watson and Crick. Had she been alive, she would have too. The process takes years and sadly she wasn’t around. That’s really all there is to it. People read too much in to it.

ToddyDoody

How about institute of technology challenge? (It's mainly colouring inside the lines)

pleas advice

It's a blackboard jungle out there