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Science

Girl Geeks Launch Picosatellite 134

Posted by Roblimo from the does-this-make-oscar-a-grandfather? dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "Girl Geeks Launch Picosatellite Artemis, a team of Girl Geeks at the Santa Clara University have designed and built a pico-satellite. An EE Times article says the Santa Clara women spent over 5000 hours designing and building the satellite. Ham radio operators will be able to tune in and listen to the telemetry from the satellite to be launched from Vandenburg Air Force Base in Lompoc, California. The girls took the name of their team from Artemis, the Greek hunter godesss of the moon."
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Girl Geeks Launch Picosatellite More

Girl Geeks Launch Picosatellite

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  • ASU also has a satellite getting launched at Vandenburg AFB. You can check out the website at http://www.eas.asu.edu/~nasasg/a susat/asusat1.html [asu.edu]. It's got lots of info on the design and stuff. The ground control software is written in Java and the development platform for that is Linux. Pretty cool project.
  • One of the team members (Dina Hadi) worked here as a summer intern last year. I was gone much of the time, so I only knew her superficially.

    Anyway, the idea of the project is to eventually produce arrays of these mini-sats, all communicating w/ one another and mission control.

    I hate to say it... but sounds like (no--don't say it) a perfect application (someone stop me!) for a (Noooooooo!) Beowulf Cluster!

    --

  • I find your remark to be quite trite and vengeful, first of all EE is not easier than ME i know from experence and from what most professors would judge as tough. EE is difficult you would know if you had any real classes in EE. Unless you happen to be Tim from one of my classes which i doubt you are. And if you haven't had any upper division classes in EE then I suggest you keep your mouth shut unless you want to lose some teeth. Yes conceptually EE is easier than string theory or relativity but the level of detail and taking into account all of the physical variables is where the difficulties come in. Personally I am in EE for the money, I want to eventually become fluent in string theory but i have to do this to have a stable career. one last thing only the ignorant belittle things in which they don't understand or are not interested in...Give the girls some credit they did get it sent up...
  • Hmmm...

    I'm not sure this is a myth. Seems like there are those that do computers for money, and those that do computers as a way of life. Or more. For some people, computers are more important than life. Or air. Or food. Or anything.

    I'll submit to you that the 20-odd grad students you know that don't go home and immediately fire up a computer are not serious hackers.

    They are the "for the money" type, not the "way of life" type.

    Just my opinion. I could be wrong.
  • I am discouraged whenever a same sex team accomplishes something.


    You must spend a lot of time sulking, considering the staggering number of accomplishments made by all-male teams ;)

    --

  • You sure that it was a paint chip? I thought it was Armstrong's golf ball.


    +--
    stack. the off .sig this pop I as Watch
  • Why should this suprise any one some of the best engineers are female even though I am male...

  • excellent! (Score:3)

    by Suydam ( 881 ) on Thursday October 14, 1999 @03:48AM (#1615062) Homepage
    I must applaud their choice of acronyms: "The Santa Clara Remote Extreme Environment Mechanism (SCREEM)".

  • how about more ham news?

  • Duh (Score:1)

    by PigleT ( 28894 )
    Since when was 'woman' a different sex to 'girl'?

    And don't be offensive to us pigs, either :P
  • There were women working on sats since the voyager days. So the team that built this one is all female. Big deal. Most of us already knew that women were good at math and science.
  • it's a step up from "smart chicks" I suppose, but what do I know, I'm just a pig, a sexist one at that...
  • (Just to clarify, the parent comment to this is a followup to someone else's, not an original.)

    Otherwise: I noted that one of the goals was to 'encourage women to persue engineering'. Initial thought: "oh no, someone thinks there have to be more females in Engineering". Second thought: better that they encourage women to take part in engineering, than that they tell engineers to make their profession more female-friendly.
    As a general point on this 'equal opportunity' discrimination lark, I'd *much* prefer things to be this way round - rather than arbitrarily imposing ideas like 'must be 50-50 male/female', it should be acknowleged that guys & gals are attracted to different things differently.
    So, that said, good on them for getting there with the satellite!

    Next thought: I'm still searching for a one-liner purpose for the "mission". It seems to have a circular purpose that it goes up there, broadcasting the website (URL? Content?) so that radio amateurs can go visit it. When they get there, check the 'mission' link, they get something that looks to be saying "we put this here so you'd find it"... erm...

    Oh yeah. If it's a team of only "girl geeks", what's someone with a name of Duncan being involved in the computer engineering side? ;)
  • Even as a white male, I take offense to this. The reason is that you use the nature of God for your sexist, racist rant. God is not a republican, democrat, independant, or libitarian. God is God.

    The fact that you used him as a reason for your own shortcomings is appaling.

    Sure, I even posted a sexist comment on this, but more as just a jab. I did not intend to discourage women engineers, nor did I bring the name of God into it.


    +--
    stack. the off .sig this pop I as Watch
  • what a bollocks. Many of your breadwinners in trenches are wasting their time posting to Slashdot while at the same time, the real trenches are the continuing 24 hour care of screaming children (+ cooking, washing, cleaning etc.). This labour (and its considerable cost if it were to be expressed in terms of money) is simply not factored in your trenches attitude.
  • Sucks to be him?

    I dunno, spending lots of time outnumbered by smart, geeky women sounds kind of fun. But then I've always worked well with women, and have had several women managers and co-workers.

    I think it's great that's it was a multidisplinary team. On my two Aerospace engineering class projects ( 4 person business turboprop and experimental solar sail), it was all Aerospace undergrads, we fudged the EE and CS stuff. No women on our teams either, if I recall, you would have had to combine the classes of 88, 89 and 90 to get six women Aerospace undergrads.

    George
  • For their senior project, these kids launched a freakin' satellite.

    Much as I hate hardware (stupid evil sound card of doom sound cards, especially, at the moment), I'm pretty impressed.

    "So, what'd you do last weekend?"

    "Oh, we put our satellite, that we built because we wanted to, into orbit. You?"
  • I for one have always preferred the ease of Pico over vi when it comes to simple text editing. I am thrilled to discover that my chosen text editor now has satellite capability as well.
  • Oh.. the men programmer thing is hardly worth reacting to... the first computer programmer in history was a woman.. just can't come up with her name of the top of my head..
  • at 611 grams for 3(?) picosatellites, these things could easily be launched by a Gerald Bull-type rail gun, at a launching cost of - a few bucks.

    At that point, everyone can have their own personal communications satellite, c/o artemis, and, add in some lenses and a ccd, and everyone can have their own personal intelligence satellite.

    Now my heart pines. Wanted: geek girl who is building a 500-foot Gerald Bull rail gun.

  • Pico is excellent for small satellites. It's small, fast, and stable.
    Have you heard about the emacs satellite? I think it goes by the name "Mir" now. The code is held together with duct tape, it's slow as molasses, and it's huge, but you can do anything with it once you figure out where to get an extra two fingers for those 12-key combination commands. The Vi satellite, sadly, has yet to get off the ground, because nobody can figure out how to put it into command mode. Supposedly vi will be the fastest and most powerful satellite ever, but the difficulty of operating it means that very few are in use.

    pico launch.now
    emacs control-alt-meta-left bucky-shift-escape-L
    vi? launch
    ? take off
    ? blastoff
    ? go!
    ? listen you damn machine!
    ? get going! move!!
    ? launch now
    ? ok, dammit
    ***Smash***
  • I don't think discussions about how reporting is done are off topic. It does make a difference whether you pick a condescending term to describe the six grown up, educated, female scientists.
  • I prefer the Gnotepad+ satellite. Sure, it may require an X Launch delivery system, which is resource intensive and reuires more modern hardware, but it sure is pretty, what with all the colored fonts and italics and all.

    George
  • To all the chauvanist, patronizing, male bastards: grow up
    To all the reactionary, defensive, humorless female bastards: get a life

    go ahead, moderate me down, I had to say it...
  • I've worked on many embedded system software projects. It's a matter of economics as to what hardware and operating system (if any) are used. Most of the projects that used to be designed for single board computers are now done on rack mount PCs with standard operating systems. These are low volume (less than 100 units) systems. Linux is starting to catch on because it is free, reliable and includes source code, software development tools and networking. Memory and processing power are cheap, custom hardware and software are expensive. I could write my own OS kernel, device drivers and IP stack in assembly language or C, but it would be a huge waste of time and money.
  • What I meant about "sucks to be him" was the attention to the "six female" students. There's this one fella that doesn't get any attention/credit to the project, just the rest of his team.

    There are many (that is, isn't not uncommon) student run projects developing, designing, building, and even managing small scale spacecraft/space instrument projects. Check out the Space Grant College [ucsd.edu] and specifically, the Colorado Space Grant Consortium [colorado.edu]. There have been an increasing number of females involved here, I might add.

    And I do not get too upset with general accomplishments of an all male team, but rather get upset at what are specifically advertised as an all particular-gender team. That is, I expect women to be able to do as much as any man would do. Making a big deal out a women doing something tells me that you didn't think they could accomplish the task. It's this mentality I dislike. Apologies, I realize my comment was a little vague.

    Again, I'm glad to see this work. I can't wait until this level of work occurs in high schools. There are some high schools that are beginning to be involved in these projects, so there's encouragement.

    ~afniv
    "Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
  • The windshield on the Challenger was pitted, not cracked. The crew was in no danger. Now if that had been a bolt instead of a paint chip, they may have had a serious problem.
  • I think that using commercial off-the-shelf stuff says something about the rapid adoption of technology into mainstream (though I still would have thought a radiation hardened CPU would be better). Basically, anything which is considered cutting edge will probably be commonplace in another 7-10 years.

    I can see 2050 high school projects now ... design your own hamster cloning project with cells grown on the local school satellite .... :-(

    When we start talking about the good ol' days of Linux hacking, then its time to quit mainstream and find something new to do.

    LL
  • Comparatively speaking, programming is really goddamn easy. That's why I (a guy, by the way, not that it matters to anybody with a brain) went into programming instead of hardware engineering: I work hard, but working that hard isn't my idea of fun.

    I don't understand this comparative statement. If you're good at it and enjoy it, practically anything is easy. I do both hardware and software design for a living (embedded systems) and as such you find days where the hardware just flys by and days where you are scratching your head trying to figure out why the software just ain't working, and then later on it reverses...

    It's all relative to what you like and what you're good at.




  • Comparatively speaking, programming is really goddamn easy. That's why I (a guy, by the way, not that it matters to anybody with a brain) went into programming instead of hardware engineering: I work hard, but working that hard isn't my idea of fun.

    I don't understand this comparative statement. If you're good at it and enjoy it, practically anything is easy. I do both hardware and software design for a living (embedded systems) and as such you find days where the hardware just flys by and days where you are scratching your head trying to figure out why the software just ain't working, and then later on it reverses...

    It's all relative to what you like and what you're good at.




  • Many of your breadwinners in trenches are wasting their time posting to Slashdot while at the same time, the real trenches are the continuing 24 hour care of screaming children (+ cooking, washing, cleaning etc.). This labour (and its considerable cost if it were to be expressed in terms of money) is simply not factored in your trenches attitude.

    Amen! and I'm a men! :-)

    As I said to my wife the other night... it's a team effort... she gets kind of upset (ninth month pregnant, etc.) and starts sorrowing about how she can't work and she feels useless and everything, but it's a team effort. She keeps the house and makes it a home, and I enable us to have the house. She feeds me and keeps me healthy, and I use that to keep us fed and sheltered.

    She can 'tolerate' our three year old where I find myself getting angry when he's not doing what he is supposed to. She diffuses an arguement between a 3 year old and a 23 year old before I make an ass of myself. Somehow she manages to keep a good demeanor on almost no sleep and makes sacrifices for the family. I get my sleep because of it, and can work hard to bring home extra money to help the family.

    The world will never be 100% equality, because men and women are different. Different strengths, different abilities (physically speaking), different ways of looking at things to solve problems.

    So no, your 5'4" 98lb woman will never be a fireman (er.. person), but it's not sexist... she can't physically do the work. Simiarly a man will never be a true mother, nor have the abilities to become one (freakish medical science apart from this).

    I lived in my house by myself for a few years... it was where I lived, but it wasn't quite a home... more a three-story computer lab. When she came into my life things changed...fast. And despite my dislike of having to squish things into smaller spaces, the house -- and myself -- are better for it. I now have a home and a family. :-)
  • I see your point.

    I looked all over the Artemis web page, and couldn't find much more on Duncan.

    I'm guessing here, but I'm thinking the seven women designed and built the hardware, and Duncan did the software part, thus, the women didn't work much with Duncan, and they became the focus of the third party stories.

    Maybe one of those eight people read slashdot, and they can illuminate.

    George
  • And _I_ thought that the Artemis satellite would be a powerful smart space mine to protect the solar system from invaders.

    ;)

  • Why? (Score:2)

    by ryanr ( 30917 )
    Why some much emphasis on the fact that they were female, when the technology is quite interesting on it's own?
  • Comparatively speaking, programming is really goddamn easy. That's why I (a guy, by the way, not that it matters to anybody with a brain) went into programming instead of hardware engineering.

    I've found the exact opposite to be true. I started out designing embedded systems (both hardware & software), but found the hardware design so unchallenging & unrewarding that I gave it up to concentrate exclusively on software development, and I haven't looked back since.

  • Well, it's not like they're building a million of these things. Whether it fits in 8192 bytes or 128 Meg, doesn't really matter on a one-shot project being done for fun/experience.


    ---

  • Ah, Linda Lovelace. No wait, she was famous for polishing rockets, not programming and launching them. Perhaps you're thinking of overbloated-overspecced-defense-department-program ming-language-from-hell Lovelace? No wait, that's not it, either. Even the thought of C++ Lovelace troubles me too much. C Lovelace. Yes, that has a nice ring to it. I think if I ever have a daughter, I will name her C. C Sloppy. See Sloppy run. Run, Sloppy, run!


    ---
  • The launch that takes OPAL up is the same launch taking ASUSAT up. There are three other birds going up at the same time too. JAWSAT - from Weber State University in Ogden UT has experiments from their school, Marshall Space Flight Center, and some Ham radio stuff too. This is the bus for the entire launch. Bolted to it are all the other satellites. (This is out of order, Falconsat is the last to leave I believe.) Once in orbit, Falconsat a satellite from the Air Force Academy will pop off the top of the stack. ASUSAT, OPAL, and OCS (Optical Calibration Sphere from the Air Force Research Labs) will all pop off the sides. Then JAWSAT will leave the launch vehicle last and float around up there for approx 40 years. The launch vehicle is a Minuteman II ballistic missile with a Pegasus fourth stage. It's nicknamed the Minotaur. WSU's Center for Aerospace Technology [slashdot.org]
  • There's often good ham news at Bruce Perens' Technocrat.Net [technocrat.net]. Bruce has been an avid ham for a while, so he makes sure to post the important stuff there. Not much on there today, but a couple of weeks ago there were several ham articles.

    ----
  • In some sense, I agree with your attitude. The fact that a group of talented young engineers have built a picosat that will soon be launched should be the story.

    But welcome back to the real world. Some of us know that women are good at math and science, but not every young woman knows that yet. Many are still (either subtly or overtly) steered away from productive and valuable careers in math or science. The reporting of such achievements can serve as examples to young people (especially young women) of what they can achieve.

    On the achievment itself, it's _damn_ cool. I look forward to tuning in to the little bird.
  • In some sense, I agree with your attitude. The fact that a group of talented young engineers have built a picosat that will soon be launched should be the story.

    But welcome back to the real world. Some of us know that women are good at math and science, but not every young woman knows that yet. Many are still (either subtly or overtly) steered away from productive and valuable careers in math or science. The reporting of such achievements can serve as examples to young people (especially young women) of what they can achieve.

    On the achievment itself, it's _damn_ cool. I look forward to tuning in to the little bird.
  • "The world will never be 100% equality, because men and women are different."

    That's true to some extent, though I would say *people* are different. Some males may have a knack for nurturing and some females may do better as firefighters. There are 5'4" 98lb men, and 6'6" 250lb women, right?

    People shouldn't be directed away from a profession due to their sex unless there is some objective reason it matters. If they're too short and weak to be a firefighter, fine, use that as the reason. To say *no* women can/should be firefighters, and *no* single men can/should be parents is what gets folks upset, there is no reason to use sex as the discriminating factor.

    Let people find the direction that suits them without having statistical proof of unsuitability thrown in their face. We don't need strict roles for sexes, but rather job qualifications to determine if individuals, regardless of their demographics, are well enough suited to the task.
  • Heh, this should be moderated up as 'Fucking HILARIOUS'! This is the funniest post I've read here in 2 or 3 days!

    Kintanon
  • what a bollocks. Many of your breadwinners in trenches are wasting their time posting to Slashdot while at the same time, the real trenches are the continuing 24 hour care of screaming children (+ cooking, washing, cleaning etc.). This labour (and its considerable cost if it were to be expressed in terms of money) is simply not factored in your trenches attitude.



    Ok... I've thought quite a bit about this, and I just can't figure out. Could you please explain this to me, Who is forcing you to have children? I just don't see it...

    Personally I work full time (I'm a tech, if it don't break I ain't busy) so that my GF can develop her webdesign/hosting business along with the female half of another couple, the male half of which also works full time. I would expect the same of her if I was working on a business idea that I thought could get off the ground and needed her to support us for a few months. I don't see anything wrong with this, and I STILL can't figure out who's forcing people to have children...

    Kintanon
  • Where did this come from?
    This group was students. The article talked about juggling classes, part time jobs and this project. I saw no indication that these women were being supported by male breadwinners. (As students they may well be supported by parents, but that's irrelevant to your point and as likely to apply to male students).
    There is probably a certain amount of truth in you r theory, but it's off-topic and not really a new development, other than the stuff done changing. It's mostly an upper/upper-middle class thing. In the past it's mostly been volunteer work etc. I don't any real change here.
    Now women being breadwinners so men can 'do stuff' (code open source projects?), That would be more of a change.
    thejeff
  • And then you get men that not only work a full day (and it's lunchtime for me, that's why I'm posting), and then spend all their time t home doing the cooking, cleaning, child caring, etc while the wife sits on her ass in front of her computer.
    Geralizations and assumptions do nothing more than make you look stupid. And as for the above statement, that is the EXACT situation I'm in most of the time, so kiss off.

    Luckily for me my GF loves to cook (she was going to be a chef but didn't like 12+ hour days) so I get GREAT meals, I do all the cleaning and work full time (more like play with 'puters all day). I love it, we have a great relationship. So it IS possible for it to work. Unless 1/2 of the couple is a jackass...

    Kintanon
  • Last year, I was walking through Benson Memorial Center(read: The Place That Shoves Surprisingly Decent Slop Down Our Throats), and I saw a sign inviting us to go check out the Picosatellite.

    Unfortunately, I saw the sign a few days too late. I had missed a major golden geek opportunity.

    Santa Clara actually does have a damn cool engineering program--I know, I go there. My kudos to these very ambitious students, and those faculty who (I assume) helped them get their project into orbit.

    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com

  • 010 Women are good at math
    007 Women are used to breaking barriers
    006 Many would argue that it takes a rocket scientist to understand men
    005 Perhaps Rush Limbaugh is right and there are Feminazis - and they'll target him from space!
    004 Actually, size does matter
    003 Communication satellites: More Lifetime, less WWF
    002 Better priorities: first cargo would be an array of women's toilets in space - if they can't get a reasonable number on Earth they'll get 'em in space!
    001 Launch vehicles that look like giant breasts or vaginas finally get some real consideration.
    000 Female piloted satellites won't get lost since they'll actually ask for directions (and listen to them) before making a manuever.

  • What are you talking about? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Where did they "play the gender card" in terms of the engineering they did? And what makes you believe they're not good enough to succeed?

    You seem to think that acknowledging their gender somehow excludes competence. That's idiotic. Evaluate their work on its own merits, okay? What's so hard about that?

    Quite frankly, our culture has a ubiquitous awareness of the fact that guys can do this stuff; if women are doing it too, a little PR is a fine thing. If there's no PR, people will claim that no women are doing engineering; if there is PR, people (like you) will try to use it against them . . . They're damned if they do, and damned if they don't. Well, hey. I guess what they're doing is whatever they damn well want to do (primarily engineering), just as if they were free citizens instead of women. And they probably don't really give a damn what you think about it.

  • They failed to mention... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you go to the site and check out the About Us...
    you'll notice that all the programming was done by ...
    yup you guessed it.
    Men.

    -- snip --
    DUNCAN LAURIE is the God of Computer Engineering. He is responsible for the flight code of the three picosatellites, along with interns, Erik Jonsson and Robbie Schingler. Duncan likes to go days without sleeping. Erik doesn't like frogs or slurpees, Robbie likes frogs, and Duncan's pet snake eats frogs.
    -- snip --
  • Could this Pico [drtoy.com] sattellite possibly improve the performance of existing Sega Pico [drtoy.com] systems. I for one would love to be able to network such an amazing drawing/storybook-esque console gaming system!
  • So it's an all female team? According to their home page they are a group of "six female undergraduate senior engineers". It's a little misleading, suggesting the team is made up of only these engineering students. The total number of students is seven. Look at the Team List [scu.edu]. There is one guy: Duncan Laurie, self proffessed "God of Computer Engineering".

    I'm all for women in engineering, there is plenty of room for more. However, let's be team players and all work together. I am discouraged whenever a same sex team accomplishes something.

    Good luck to the group. I certainly had fun doing similar work in college.

    ~afniv
    "Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
  • Why the hell was this made flaimbait? Jeesus. Get a grip. Ham radio was what he meant. Some decent and good moderator fix this.
  • Good thing you posted as AC, moron, because if you had bothered to actually read about the team [scu.edu], you'd see that Duncan Laurie is a guy.
    • DUNCAN LAURIE is the God of Computer Engineering. He is responsible for the flight code of the three picosatellites, along with interns, Erik Jonsson and Robbie Schingler. Duncan likes to go days without sleeping. Erik doesn't like frogs or slurpees, Robbie likes frogs, and Duncan's pet snake eats frogs.
  • Why is this myth still perpetuated? I'm not talking about men in particular, but engineers in general.

    I'm working with 3-4 other graduate students very closely and know at least 10-20 others very well. There's not a single one I know who, after a hard day's work of hacking, goes home and immediately fires up a computer. And grad students tend to be pretty serious hackers.

    Everyone I know here has hobbies that have little or nothing to do with electronics. Volleyball, fishing, music, dancing, acting, you name it.

    Society seems to view engineers as very one-dimensional people. I submit that engineers are some of the most well-rounded individuals around. They're just very dedicated to their work and thus seem to be completely immersed in it.

    --

  • Re:My POINT was . . . (Score:3)

    by Kintanon ( 65528 ) on Thursday October 14, 1999 @08:37AM (#1615139) Homepage Journal
    Ummm... ok, I THOUGHT your first statement was a joke, and a damn funny one. Now I think your an insane biggot with no clue whatsoever and an IQ of around 75.
    Have you ever bothered to even SPEAK to a female engineer? They are competent bastards! I've YET to see a Fem programmer or engineer make a serious mistake. They are VERY VERY good at what they do. And guess what, a lot of them do it without and sometimes inspite of parental or societal guidance. A good female friend of mine, despite her insane mother, is an excellent programmer and techie. As is my GF. You are just insane. And should I ever meet you I would be hard pressed not to maim you and leave you in a ditch to die to make sure your DNA was never propogated.

    Kintanon
  • Well I thought the best part was clearly the:
    Antenna:

    Half wave dipole
    Untreated Stanley Tools tape measure
    Now that's Real Engineering!
  • Roughly 15 or 20 out of 43, I think.

    [BTW, I'm on the software team for the ASUSat1 project.]

  • Interesting point...

    I bet if we built a tower several miles high, it would make launching satelites, etc. much easier. :)
  • These prefixes are horribly inflated. There is nowhere near a factor 1000 between nanosatellites and picosatellites. Won't be long before we get femtosatellites now.

    -Lars
  • just a technicality i'm sure..

    but didn't Alan Shepard hit the golf ball
    off the surface of the moon..

    "Miles and miles..!!!"


  • People shouldn't be directed away from a profession due to their sex unless there is some objective reason it matters. If they're too short and weak to be a firefighter, fine, use that as the reason. To say *no* women can/should be firefighters, and *no* single men can/should be parents is what gets folks upset, there is no reason to use sex as the discriminating factor.

    I never ever meant to imply that men couldn't be caring parents and women firefighters. I was trying to make a point that there are a lot of (I'm gonna use the word stupid) politically-correct people out there who seem to think that it's their god-given right to equality, regardless of extenuating circumstances. I used the 5'1" 98lb firewoman as I believe there was actually a case like that here in Canada a while ago. I want a firefighter capable of carrying my sorry unconscious ass out of a fire, not helplessly trying to drag me out and having to call for help.

    I agree with you completely that people should find work for themselves in whatever fields they desire. But if they don't get it because of some valid reason, don't wave the flag of discrimination.

    I dunno; I guess I'm a bit touchy this subject, being a white male and all.
  • I go to SCU, undergrad comp eng., and I have heard about this project. I think it's pretty cool. -There is no spoon-
  • > who is the stronger, in terms of capacity to do
    > work required to maintain society, man or woman?
    > Big Lie=Man. Women make babies, carry 20 lbs. of
    > child on one arm and 20 lbs. of groceries on the
    > other, manage the books of a household, and do
    > it continuously 400 months straight on 4 ounces
    > of food and 4 hours of sleep. This regime would
    > kill a man. To man, a 4-minute mile, or a 4-hour
    > marathon, is a test of physical "endurance."

    Silly exaggeration, that'd kill anyone. Dare I say society needs both sexes? I'm a guy. Since when was that a crime? That's beside the point, I know. The point is, which sex is stronger. I've known girls who are greatly smarter than me. And others who weren't. Same with physical strength, endurance, speed at learning. Some more, some less.

    And since when is stronger better? Aren't we all geeks here?

    > whose brain is more efficient, prehaps even
    > intelligent, in terms of ability to indentify
    > information, gather it, organize it, store it
    > and retrieve it? Big Lie=Man. Like myself now,
    > men are constantly blasting off, focusing on
    > this point or that point, while women listen,
    > gather sort and organize information about
    > everything else going on in the room.

    Oh, I'm a listener, just in a talkative mood right now. Maybe if I talk reasonably instead of in an insulted way, I can improve the reputation of guys as a whole? Worth a shot. There are women who think all guys are jerks, pigs. Maybe I can show them that's not so.

    As for the "more intelligent" part, it used to be quite socially acceptable to talk about how a Hispanic or Asian brain was genetically incapable of matching the superior Caucasian intelligence. Of course now, we know how ridiculus that is. Now some women are using the same argument against guys. It'll blow over, I'm sure. If it doesn't, I'll manage to get a good job anyway, I'm sure.

    > In term's of brain structure, men's neurons are
    > organized in cubes, women's in tetrahedrons. The
    > timing differences of these two shapes, and the
    > smaller cellular packing, i.e. in terms of
    > neuron timing, the faster neuron spacing, makes
    > the brains of women "faster" than that of men,
    > in that their brains respond to a higher
    > frequency of information.

    Pardon me while I sing along to "Alive and Kicking" on the radio - love that 1980's rock. :) o/Whatcha gonna do when the love burns down, whatcha gonna do when it all goes up... whatcha gonna do when... whatcha gonna do when... Stay until your love is... Alive and Kicking... love is... love is.../o

    I know this is wild blue yonder off topic, but I have *got* to get that on cd... anyone know what group did that song?

    Oh, yes - brain structure - yeah, I was reading in "Escalante" by Jay Mathews, (good book, btw) how it used to be very fashionable to talk about the inferior brain structures of Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. Don't flame me, I know it's ridiculus. But back then, they scientifically "proved" how blacks, asians, and hispanics couldn't hope to keep up with a caucasian. They used that to excuse why the research labs and engineering classes were full of whites. Then Jaime Escalante taught advanced placement calculus to a bunch of inner-city hispanics. Anyone can be whatever they want to be, if they believe it and work hard for a long time.

    > God did not write men out of the picture. He
    > gave them higher capacity for physical impulse,
    > and their "slower," i.e. the longer timing
    > synchronicity of their brain structures, gives
    > them an inclination to see a more distant
    > horizon than women's brains can in general
    > perceive.

    Gee, if that was a compliment, I think I may have missed it... are you saying men are workhorses, good for physical strength and endurance?

    > On the way out fringes of feminism, the long
    > range challenge for geek women, i.e. for the
    > survival of "mankind" in space, is to figure out
    > a way to steal from the seed of their fathers,
    > i.e. to clone-breed women only, eliminating the
    > inefficiency and imbalance, and vision distance
    > or creativity, of men.

    Stealing sperm and raising women only? What are you going to do with the women who disagree with your methods?

    To say nothing about what you'll do to the men.

    Look, I won't deny any of that. I'm imbalanced, inefficient, imperfect. Comes with being human. I'm sure there are plenty of women who've locked their keys in their car, or slept through an alarm, or been late for a deadline. I don't like perfect people, they're arrogent, proud... just please, let everyone be human? Forgive people for not being perfect, okay? No man, and no woman could live up to the standards you list.
  • Who ever designed the embedded control system for this thing was obviously a novice. I couldn't believe my eyes when I looked at "Rev. 1" and saw them actually using a BASIC Stamp 2! The BS2 is a toy. It's designed to interpret a language called PBASIC (even worse than real Basic), and it's very slow. The BS2 doesn't even have interrupts or support for negative numbers.
    Thank goodness someone with some knowledge got to them and put a 68HC11 microcontroller in "Rev. 2"! That's a real controller, with real features. (Yes, you can even get C compilers for it.)

    A comment for the "Does it run Linux?" people:
    Many embedded controllers do not run any operating system at all. On reset, they just jump to the program people load into their memory. You don't need an operating system for most embedded devices. If you need multitasking, you can use timer-based interrupt vectors yourself to run routines, or you can use a "realtime executive" (very small multitasker) on them. This is why I sometimes laugh when I hear CompSci-types designing an embedded device to run Linux. Why do you need it? Build a standalone program, and save money on memory and processing power.
  • If you looked at the projected lifetime, I think the odds of space junk hitting it in the week or two that it's alive are pretty remote.

    Of course, there's always a first time.

    George
  • So what is the 2 meter frequency they intend to use....and the callsign too.

    I'm going to get my EME array and blast that girrrrrly thing out of orbit!!!!!!!!! (just kidding).

  • Re:So the team's all female... (Score:4)

    by lari ( 96750 ) on Thursday October 14, 1999 @04:34AM (#1615157)
    Maybe most of you already knew that women are good at math and science, but there are still plenty of people, including plenty of women, who haven't quite caught on to that. I'm writing this from the a women's college, and I've met a startling number of women here who struggle through their math and laboratory requirements, and while they will never say that math and science aren't a "girl thing" still don't believe that the statement can hold true for them. Most women I see majoring in sciences tend to be drawn toward softer sciences, like biology and psychology, as well; there's still a relatively prevalent feeling that areas like engineering are pretty much the boys' domain. Being a "geek" as a girl (in junior high and high school, especially) is very strongly discouraged; there was a lot more pressure for me as a teenager to "get away from that computer and get a life" than I saw in any of the guys I knew.

    I freely grant that we've come a long way from my mother's adventures as a chemistry major in the late 60's and early 70's; most women don't get asked "You mean you want to be a chemistry teacher?" or told by their guidance counselors that they have no chance and should maybe look into something that they can handle. This doesn't mean that girls are quite convinced that this can be their realm, too. So to speak.

    I'd be really, really happy if a group of female undergraduates designing a satellite wasn't a really big deal, or at least wasn't a big deal primarily because they were women... because things like that happened everywhere. But they don't. The fact that the final team was not, in fact, completely female (replacing the woman who left, I suppose) and the way that this was ignored by the news article does certainly say something. Basically, it's reflecting a desire to get a story about "girls and science" out, because "girls and science" is still news. That's why it's good to hear about things like this... not everyone quite gets it yet.
  • Actually, normal spacecraft almost never get hit by space junk. The only incident I know of was when Challenger took a paint chip moving at God's own speed on its windshield. The windshield cracked so badly that it had to be replaced, and the crew was lucky to survive.

    In general, any space vehicle that's hit with space junk is not going to survive it well.
  • I thought it was quite strange that the discrimination was made in the article between the "skilled professionals" and the "six women", I hope this was due to poor grammar.
  • Actually, normal spacecraft almost never get hit by space junk. The only incident I know of was when Challenger took a paint chip moving at God's own speed on its windshield. The windshield cracked so badly that it had to be replaced, and the crew was lucky to survive.

    Tell me more. Did NASA have comprehensive glass coverage on the shuttle, and how much did their premiusm go up? Did the insurance company take their word on it, or did they want to see the damage? Did a glass shop fly up into orbit to replace it? Was the shuttle able to pass inspection as long as the crack wasn't in the pilot's line of site?

    Thanks,

    George

  • Still, not there yet (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 14, 1999 @04:45AM (#1615163)
    Notice how all the the girls have things they do in their "free time"; like hiking, dancing etc, while they guys apparantly don't? This is the fundamantal difference, one which I don't think will go away for quite a while - for many guys, computing/hacking/electronics etc IS what you do on your free time (and in school, at work, at night, while eating etc). Sure, there are exceptions (there always are) but this holds true for most... //Sasq (sasq@c64.org) [A.C. cause password forgotten :]

  • Some of the best engineers are male, as well.
  • just looked it up.. Ada Lovelace.. I knew she had a language named after her.. pretty neat.. wouldn't mind that myself in a century or so :)
  • I wasn't suprised as in "holy cow! Girls can be funny!". I was just suprised as in "hey! that's funny". DOn't be so quick to jump to conclusions.

  • I disagree. Moore's law has made it possible to design production embedded systems from COTS components including a real-time operating system, various special libraries, and advanced chips. This explains the success of eCos, pSos, VxWorks, etc. Like in all systems, embedded systems are starting to suffer the costs of completely dedicated design, and using proven components seriously reduces the chances of selling broken goods.
  • What I hate is that scientifically-minded high school girls are encouraged by their teachers and guidance counselors to enter engineering programs. I'm not sure why this is, but engineering people tend to have rather specific life goals, and most engineering washouts simply weren't engineers. (A little education in liberal arts is a litmus test. Non-engineers lose their drive after taking political theory or philosophy.) I'm not so sure that graduating senior girls actually see the engineering profession as their lifestyle, and the often wash out of hard science completely. If the damn teachers would just realize that a successful female scientist is equally as impressive as a successful female engineer, the college-level courses could have more even populations.
  • Hello everyone i am currently a student at santa clara university, I met some of the girls who worked on the satellite and i know some of the girls working on the new satellite the emerald and let me just tell you one thing, they aren't geeks!!!!!!!!!!! They party like muther fuckers every weekend and they are anything but nerds they are popular, and somewhat intelligent they have lots of help and not to mention a large group. see all of us at SCU have to do a senior design project for EE especially so they happen to pick the satelite project but in class i would rate them as average i know other girls who are much smarter than most of them combined, yet don't get half the recognition these satellite chicks get.
  • Hello since you obviously think "men are always blasting off" I will try to present a viable rebuttal. Taking an evolutionary biological approach, one may see that we are products of a dimorphic split that occured way before the gene frequency of pheonotypic attributes were tied with race, might account for the differing brain structures of men and women, which are of greater difference than that of the respective genders compared across races. The racial differences (if any) are minimal due to the recent(evolutionary wise)distinction into races, so we may leave the minutia to when an adequete theory of AI comes along. Due to the fundemental and very essential differences between men and women the brain structure difference may be pronounced and been seen as an adaptation to differing enviormental pressures. Men, due to the fact that we have had to sustain and create a viable society, in which the safe and viable propogation of offspring is possible, have had the selection mechanism biased towards linear thinking, creating, planning, sustaining, and logic (think about it men usually hunted for food have had to think and plan how to catch prey, when to act, how to use tools to aid in catching prey etc.). Hence men brain's and thinking tend to follow this evolutionary pattern. One might say that due to the low bandwidth and reletivly low processing power of each indvidual linear command the structures might be simpler and slower, but here is the catch, due to the linear, spatial, and logical nature of the commands one could construct a system which is primarly dedicated to the processing and interaction of linear, spatial, and logical events. Since the events are logical the system implements this logic and hence may be able to extrapolate or construct new events according to logic hence men for a long time have exceled in math and science. From a core level. Women on the other hand as the core of societies exsistence where selected by other criteria, women have had to deal with other women in groups or socieites to adequately survive hence women think more of relationships and how things fit together as a whole rather than individual pieces. But due to the fact that taking in large amounts of information and processing as a whole takes not only more bandwidth but more processing power women developed faster processing centers (for this type of logic) but due to the fact that their brain system is optimized for this method of processing but for detailed and logical calculations it might not be optimum. For instance women may see the relationship between things and the logic is implemented to process and extrapolate new events dealing with relationships. Since math and science have elements of relationships but are much more spatial, linear, and logical the relationship logic is not optimum., but this doesn't mean you can't learn math or even be good at it all it means is that all one has to do is present math and science in a relationship based format. Now due to the fact that both men and women now are not under such a strict enviormental pressures much of the criteria has become lax. You as a hardcore feminst may argue that men have outlived there role as defenders, sustainers, and creators of society and hence are not needed but eliminating an entire gender carries grave moral responsibilites. Now that men have constructed a civilization that depends less on muscle and more on brain power, not to mention one that has advanced so far in science and math that both at a core level are nearly complete the extrapolation of technology is simple, women can now fully and functionally become equals with us due to the loosening of the criteria dimorphism is demphasized both the role of the woman as producer and the role of the man as sustainer have become blurry and will mix into one. Artifical womb technology will really rule out women as bearers of children considering one could implement much better conditions in the womb than any woman could provide. We are heading for asexual beings as a second evolutionary step.
  • Simply knowing a number of undergraduates have designed and built an intrinsicly complex sattelite would make this submission worthy.

    Given quite a bit of talk about women's role and contribution to the technical world around here lately, though, I wonder if that's the reason for it's posting.

    In previous discussions on /. we find comments about not having the women's perspective, we (men) are not even conscious of what we're missing in our projects if we don't have the women's perspective, etc. As I read through the links I noticed that these women faced and overcame the same technical challenges, answered the same technical questions, and completed a technical project in much the same way any man would.

    I applaud them for their amazing work. I'm just a software developer, I couldn't comprehend developing a project of their scope as an undergraduate, and certainly not in 10 months with other classes and projects to take care of at the same time. Perhaps our concern with underrepresentation of women in the technical fields is unwarranted. We all face the same challenges and overcome them in similar, analytical ways.

    - Colnago

  • I agree more HAM news would be good, it's nerdy enough for /. isn't it?

    -73's de Max G7UOZ
  • It helps to have that male breadwinner working at Micron or something so you can actually do stuff. This is definitely a phenomenum of the 21st century. Men winning the bread but instead of cleaning house, the women build stuff at home. They still depend on men for financial means but it's a progressive dependance.

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