The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by J Greely:

When I worked in a university CompSci department in the Eighties, we offered degrees through the Engineering, Arts & Sciences, and Business colleges, with different requirements. Almost all of the first-year Engineering students were male. I'd say about thirty percent of the first-quarter Arts & Sciences students were female, but the percentage dropped rapidly. The Business classes were usually pretty even, but all their upper-division stuff was in their own college, so we didn't see them in our labs after the first two years.

We had thousands (~4000, IIRC) of students taking classes each quarter, and averaged across the entire department, I'd be surprised if more than 10% were women. And we didn't supply much in the way of positive role models, with only a handful of female grad students and TAs.

Fast-forward to today, where I'm in a small Silicon Valley startup that's not quite a boy's club, but there is only one female software developer, and she's a recent hire. Her presence at meetings and in the middle of the cube farm is slowly affecting the locker-room culture; the female PM has just been putting up with it for so long in her career that she just lets it go by...

-j

Perky @ 200: Japanese prose piles on modifiers in ways that should almost never be translated literally. I skimmed through the first few pages of Amazon's excerpts from the first and third D novels, and Kevin Leahy's attempt to faithfully preserve every modifying clause and nuanced word choice really sticks out. Book 3, paragraph 1: "The tiny village obstinately refused the blessings the sunlight poured down so generously upon it."

Amazon Japan doesn't have any excerpts of the original text from the D novels, so I can't say if his word choices are good matches for the originals ("Limning an elegant arc quite different from the straight blades cherished by so many other Hunters..."). Probably.

I vote for sending Kevin a case of commas and a sturdy pair of clause clippers.

-j

I refuse to go looking through boxes for the actual book, so I had to dig this one up from back when I still followed rec.arts.sf.written. I give you Alan Dean Foster, Diuturnity's Dawn:

Botha assured him that upon contact with the materials to be spread by the multiple explosions, foams and liquids intended for combating out-of-control blazes would themselves be turned into a substance suitable for supplementing the very conflagrations they were designed to quench. By the time a sufficiency of nonreactive chemical retardants and suppressants could be brought from Aurora City, much of the glorious but debauched fair should be reduced to wind-blown cinders among which would drift the carbonized components of as many baked bugs as possible.

I think the "baked bugs" at the end sets the rest off beautifully.

-j

Just stumbled across another one while cleaning: Harold G. Henderson's "Introduction to Haiku". The general background information on the poets looks solid, but his translations of the actual haiku are unreliable. The occasional mistranslated word isn't too bad if you can read the romanized Japanese originals he includes, but the thing that really hurts is that he tried to make them all rhyme.

-j

On Japan, anything by the prolific and vigorously biased Boye Lafayette De Mente. Also Conrad Totman's "History of Japan", which at first glance looks like a serious history book, but abandons reality before you reach the first chapter.

-j

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