Articles

Affichage des articles du septembre, 2022

excerpt from Hidden Figures + a few questions...

  An extract from Hidden Figures, Margot Lee Shetterly, 2016   Langley’s first female computing pool, started in 1935, had caused an uproar among the men of the laboratory. How could a female mind process something so rigorous and precise as math? The very idea, investing $500 on a calculating machine so it could be used by a girl! But the “girls” had been good, very good—better at computing, in fact, than many of the engineers, the men themselves grudgingly admitted. With only a handful of girls winning the title “mathematician”—a professional designation that put them on equal footing with entry-level male employees—the fact that most computers were designated as lower-paid “subprofessionals” provided a boost to the laboratory’s bottom line. [In 1943]   as the laboratory’s personnel needs reached the Civil Service, applications of qualified Negro female candidates began filtering in to the Service Building, presenting themselves for consideration by the laborato...

end of Kennedy's speech

  T spe/ End of JFK’s speech ‘‘The New Frontier’’  J ohn F . K ennedy , Democratic National Convention Nomination Acceptance Address delivered 15 July 1960, Memorial Coliseum, Los Angeles For I stand here tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch three thousand miles behind us, the pioneers gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build our new West. They were not the captives of their own doubts, nor the prisoners of their own price tags. They were determined to make the new world strong and free -- an example to the world, to overcome its hazards and its hardships, to conquer the enemies that threatened from within and without. Some would say that those struggles are all over, that all the horizons have been explored, that all the battles have been won, that there is no longer an American frontier. But I trust that no one in this assemblage would agree with that sentiment; for the problems are not ...

Space race cartoon Tamer Youssef