Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts clara raubertas design. development. consulting.

End of 2009 Books

Backlash - Susan Faludi - This book was amazing. Well written, well researched, and terrifying. Faludi convincingly argues that not only did the 1980s show a cultural backlash against the progress made in womens’ rights in the 1970s, but that the same pattern has been visible historically every time women have made social progress.

Seed to Harvest - Octavia Butler - actually 4 books (Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay’s Ark, Patternmaster)

Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

Witness to Roswell - Thomas Carey/Donald Schmitt - for book club. This book argues that extraterrestrials really landed at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. While I wasn’t fully convinced that that’s the case, the book did put up a pretty compelling argument that something really weird happened there, and was covered up by the military.

A Tour of the Calculus - David Berlinski - kind of like if Tom Robbins were teaching Math 152

The Atrocity Archive - Charles Stross - This book had me at “Turing-Lovecraft Thesis”. A neat science fiction book seamlessly integrating otherworldly horrors with the day-to-day responsibilities of a government sysadmin.

2010 Books

1. Concrete Jungle - Charles Stross - the sequel to Atrocity Archive. A shorter, lighter book but still a good time.

2. The Tao is Silent - Raymond Smullyan

3. VALIS - Philip K. Dick - this book is intense! Even crazier than your average Dick book.* Dick’s main character in this book may or may not be a hallucination of the narrator (Dick himself), who may or may not be schizophrenic, having had a mystical experience (identical to one Dick himself actually had) that either is a hallucination that means he’s crazy or an insight into the nature of the universe.

4. Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem

*tee hee**

**I am 12.

After years of making social networking sites for other people, I’ve finally launched one of my own! Stemming.org is a networking/community site and collaborative blog for girls and women interested in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). I’m super excited about this — I think it has a lot of potential to support and connect women and girls who are often minorities in their fields or discouraged in their interests.

So far, I’ve done all the design and development (in Rails) for the site — it’s been cool to be my own client and get a chance to explore some technical things I might not otherwise have learned. (And being my own client gives me added appreciation for my clients’ perspective when we’re working on other projects like this!)

Stemming welcomes blog posts from anyone who has something to say that would be of interest to women and girls in STEM; I’d also love for people to share the link and send me their suggestions/improvements!

Several of these are from the science fiction course my partner Jesse is teaching this semester; I decided to read along with the syllabus. Getting (back?) into scifi has been really rewarding so far, and I feel inspired to check out more science fiction writers (suggestions? leave a comment!).

• The Soloist - Steve Lopez - For book club. A Los Angeles journalist’s true account of his friendship with a schizophrenic homeless man who is also a brilliant musician. Brings up a lot of difficult, unsolved issues about the best ways to help people who are severely mentally ill.
• Galatea 2.2 - Richard Powers - A sci-fi novel about creating a computer program that can read and understand literature. The book itself is fairly literary in style — and occasionally a little overwrought (the protagonist is kind of emo, and named after the author(!)) — but does pursue some interesting ideas about the role of literature in the formation of a personality. As with most sci-fi that deals directly with Artificial Intelligence, I was irked by the implausibility of the programming process; I know I should be able to suspend my disbelief, but for some reason I have a hard time with that.
• Orphans of the Sky - Robert Heinlein - Is this Hisland?? Women are basically invisible in this young adult adventure story set in a society (in space!) where women are literally property. This book is kind of hilariously bad, actually.
• Nudge - Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein - A sensible, engaging economics text. The basic premise is that many economists analyze the world as though everyone always acts totally rationally — but in real life, humans don’t think through every decision that carefully, and are influenced by default options/where on the shelf a product is/what it seems like everyone else is doing. The authors propose a philosophy of “libertarian paternalism”: they believe people should be able to make their own choices about almost everything (hence libertarian), but that since people will be influenced by the way the choices are framed and structured, governments (or other organizations) should try to structure the defaults and the presentation of the options so that people will be more likely to choose a “good” option (hence paternalism). I like their combination of sensible economic analysis with acknowledgement that people are human and influenced by subtle “nudges” whether they consciously realize it or not. And it’s always fun to read books by University of Chicago economists who use restaurants I know in their examples :).
• Her Smoke Rose Up Forever - James Tiptree Jr. - OK, so this is a short story collection, and I’ve only gotten to a few so far. But so good. Tiptree was actually a woman writing under a pen name, and her stories have something of a feminist slant. They combine imaginative explorations of gender, sex, and technology with emotional nuance and an incredibly compelling writing style.
• Gateway - Frederik Pohl - From the seventies. Alternates the protagonist’s space explorations (using an ancient technology that humans don’t understand) with his sessions with an electronic psychiatrist; explores issues of choice and agency.
• Engine Summer - John Crowley - This book is a lot of fun! Like Gateway, it depicts a society of humans making use of technology left over from a more advanced civilization; however, the tone and attitude are completely different. Where Gateway depicts a barren earth and a bleak future focused on capitalism and scarcity, Engine Summer describes a happy group living commune-style, who have forgotten what money even is, and traces the protagonist’s coming-of-age journey in lyrical terms. This book really draws you into its world — and its world is a fun place to be!
• Murder Yet to Come - Isabel Briggs-Myers - A mystery novel written by one of the originators of the Myers-Briggs personality typing system. It’s fairly cheesy — almost a parody of the traditional British country-house mystery — but includes some fairly sophisticated fleshing-out of the characters’ personalities, which makes it a pretty good read. It’s fun to guess the characters’ types, and their respect for each others’ differing skills and interests links thematically to the objectives of the Myers-Briggs system (Gifts Differing is Briggs-Myers’s most famous book).
• Neuromancer - William Gibson - Ick. I know I’m supposed to like this book — it’s cyberpunk! I’m a hacker! — but this is the second time I’ve read it, and I just can’t get into it. The technology is inconsistent, and the author fails to explore its potentially interesting social ramifications; the characters are bland, and their motivations uncompelling; and the plot, which is supposed to be epic, just didn’t seem to mean much.
• Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ichiguro - Another sci-fi book. I loved this! This is a gripping, suspenseful, emotionally powerful tale. It’s really well-written, and it’s a subtle take on some very interesting and difficult social and ethical issues.
• Skinny Legs and All - Tom Robbins - For book club. As a story, it’s a fun read, with some magical realism thrown in (like a can of beans that ponders religious history). But it’s a little overwritten, and longer than it probably needs to be. Robbins explains his metaphors in detail and tries to use the book to convey some somewhat dubious philosophical ideas, saying that a lot of what humans do is just a “veil” over the real truth. (Not very pragmatic of him!)

When I first heard about the Ruby on Rails workshops for women organized by Sarah Mei and Sarah Allen in San Francisco, I was jealous that they were on the opposite coast. But lo and behold — the very same event came to Boston last weekend! (Yet another reason why Boston is awesome — the academic/technical community is conducive to cool events like this.)

The event was targeted at women (though some men attended, too) who were either new to programming or new to Ruby; I volunteered as a TA to help answer students’ questions (along with a bunch of super friendly and knowledgeable people from the Boston Ruby community, which is awesome; too bad their meetups generally conflict with improv classes for me). The whole thing was awesome! I loved getting to meet/know better people in the Ruby community and meeting new people who were just getting started with Ruby. There were people from a wide variety of backgrounds there — i loved helping people get their code to do stuff! Some of the students I worked with were clearly smart enough to follow the install instructions and workshop handout on their own, but they just needed some hand-holding and moral support as a motivation to actually do it — which is why events like this are so key to getting people involved in Ruby/programming. I also loved when students got really excited about their code doing stuff — a reminder of why I got into programming in the first place, because I love the high that comes from seeing code you’ve been tweaking suddenly work.

Teacher Sarah and organizer/TA Liana both blogged about how well the event went. A lot of the students, TAs, and organizers tweeted about it too, mostly saying great things!

Unfortunately, I can’t attend the followup Open Source Code Crunch activity organized by Liana, because I’m already involved with a project at the Free Software Foundation on Wednesday nights. (Why yes, I am a huge nerd!)

Through Parallactic, I was commissioned to work on a Ruby project with the Facebook Data Store. As far as I could find, there wasn’t already a client in Ruby for this (the official Facebook-provided client is in PHP, and the useful Facebook Ruby client facebooker hasn’t added support for the Data Store), so I wrote one!

This is the first (but hopefully not the last!) piece of potentially-useful code that I’m publishing under an open-source/free software license, so I’m pretty psyched. You can download the code on GitHub! It’s licensed under the MIT license — which means you can do pretty much whatever you want with it — and it doesn’t require Rails.

Enjoy! And drop me a line if you find it useful :).

A couple weeks ago I attended Boston’s Software Freedom Day event — a day-long meetup/conference for local free software users, developers, and supporters.

I’ve been using and thinking about and talking about and installing and writing about free software for a few years now, but this was my first experience meeting up with a group of people who I could already assume subscribed to the free software philosophy, understood the motivations behind it, and used free software in their daily lives. Which was awesome! The feeling of community in the room was quite cool.

The event was set up so that pretty much anyone who had something to say could give a short talk at some point; there were also pre-planned longer speeches and a keynote by RMS (which was pretty ranty and non-technical, and included a characterization of using “their” as a gender-neutral third-person singular as “absolutely disgusting” — I’ve been losing some respect for RMS lately). Most of the speeches were super-interesting; there was a talk about antifeatures, with some pretty egregious examples from a variety of fields, and I learned about OpenLibrary — psyched to have an API to access book info without being forced to use Amazon’s API!

There were also a heartening number of women there &mdash about 20% of the audience, and a few of the speakers (only about 1.5% of F/OSS participants in general are women — way fewer than even the small number of female programmers in general). I got to talk to FSF membership coordinator Deb Richardson about some of the interesting initiatives being taken to increase women’s participation and comfort in F/OSS, which I definitely hope to get involved in!

What I’ve been reading this summer:

• Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day – Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin: One of the main takeaways from both this book and my own experience is that it helps your search ranking a lot to have a lot of indexable pages with different titles and content — like a blog! In fact, many of the visitors to this site come through the blog first, since there’s a lot of interesting content there for searchers to find. Other than that, the book mostly covered the technical basics that I already knew — page titles, h1 tags, etc. — but it’s nice to be reassured that I’m not missing something crucial.
• Shop Class as Soulcraft – Matthew B. Crawford: For book club. This is basically a polemic about how the author finds his work repairing motorcycles more satisfying than the white-collar jobs he’s tried, and he thinks everyone should consider the value of manual labor. Even though I agreed with some of its points, I found this book very frustrating, mostly because I thought it was intellectually dishonest and lazy. The author rails about the pointlessness of academia, yet is trying to write an academic treatise; it seems like he gets around this hypocrisy by not doing a very good job of organizing his argument and applying academic rigor, as though writing a sloppy philosophical book is his rebellion against the problematic institution of philosophy. He critiques all white-collar jobs based on a soul-sucking cubicle drone experience; and while such jobs certainly exist and aren’t beneficial to anyone, Crawford doesn’t put in the thought to consider whether this problem applies to all white-collar jobs, a particular type of them, or just some small random subsection. While this book’s assertion that manual labor and vocational education are undervalued in our society is well worth exploring, I don’t think Crawford does a very good job writing about it.
• Herland – Charlotte Perkins Gilman: My partner Jesse is a teaching assistant for a course in Science Fiction this fall, so I decided to read along with some of those books; this one we read aloud in the car during a summer roadtrip. It’s an early feminist utopia (written in 1915!) about a remote land that’s been populated only by women for the last 2000 years (they reproduce through parthenogenesis). The writing style is engaging, and I was impressed by the sophistication of feminist ideas Perkins Gilman had almost a century ago (though also somewhat depressed by how little has changed in society in some respects, sigh). One of my main critiques would be that she doesn’t distinguish the characteristics of her general social utopia (progressive education, communal child-rearing, no war or conflict ever) from those that she thinks would naturally follow from a land of women specifically — we don’t get much of a sense of how a similarly isolated and progressive-minded “Hisland” would be different. But her points about many of the supposed “defects” of women actually resulting from their societal disadvantages and oppression are spot-on. Overall a fun and thought-provoking read (and not too long).
• The Second Sex – Simone De Beauvoir: Early feminist theory; De Beauvoir is one of the first thinkers to systematically analyze the “othering” of women in society (the default person is male, and woman is just a counterpart to him, defined by her relation to him while he has his own status). 700+ page monstrosity, so this was my major reading accomplishment for the summer (OK, so I like really abstract beach reading). De Beauvoir tries to say basically everything there is to say about women — and comes pretty close, with sections/chapters like “The Data of Biology” (she starts with insects and works up), several historical chapters, “Myths: Dreams, Fears, Idols”, “The Young Girl”, “The Lesbian”, “The Married Woman”, “The Mother”, “Prostitutes and Hetairas”, “The Woman in Love”, “The Independent Woman” — and I am only naming a few. While it’s sort of more like a huge infodump than one argument running throughout the book, each chapter is jam-packed with interesting thoughts and analysis.
• Ubik — Philip K. Dick: Another book from the science fiction course. I thought it would take longer to read, but I got engaged in the story and blew through it in a day — oops! I don’t want to give spoilers, but this is a fun, creepy, trippy thriller/mystery/dystopian fantasy. Recommended for spending an afternoon creeping yourself out for the fun of it.

As a sort of self-portrait, I decided to stack up and photograph all the books I have in my house that I’ve read for the first time since moving here (in August 2006, so this is just about 3 years of reading).

Fiction

Nonfiction

All the books, stacked up evenly

Click to get huge versions, where you can zoom in and see the titles and authors clearly, or comment if you’re curious about any of them!

I realized I missed a few — like Hackers and In The Beginning Was The Command Line — and some, like Feminism is for Everybody, are loaned out — and though I can’t think of examples, there must be books I’ve read without owning — but this is the bulk of them. As I suspected, I’ve been reading a lot more nonfiction than fiction, even when you count Gravity’s Rainbow.

Some friends of ours who had originally planned to get married in San Francisco this fall changed their plans at the last minute to get married in Seattle a couple of weeks ago, so Jesse and I hopped a plane for a whirlwind vacation — well worth it! Neither of us had seen the Northwest before. We only had a day and a half in the city, but we made the most of it with whirlwind tourism; we walked and took buses to a couple of different neighborhoods, climbed a water tower in a park to get a great view of the city, drank delicious coffee, and kayaked on the sound. Seattle struck me as a very chill city; everyone there seemed to be doing their own thing and not really trying to be “cool”, but in a friendly way. (Several strangers struck up conversations with us during our short time there — you don’t get that in New England!) Oh, and the weather was gorgeous — apparently the famed Seattle rain is mostly a fall/winter/spring phenomenon.

The wedding itself was on a lake on an island off the coast — an extremely picturesque setting. Several of our college friends were there — I love that even though we live in places that are far away from each other, we still find ways to meet up and spend time together a couple of times a year. And the ceremony was beautiful and inspiring. Thanks, Laura and Jesse F.!

Then last weekend, we biked to Government Center (it’s always fun to bike downtown on a nice day), took the train to the Orient Heights T stop (on the blue line) for the first time and went to Constitution Beach. The beach was pretty full of a wide variety of people; we sat on the sand and read and watched planes take off and land (the beach is right across the water from the airport).

Books! Kind of like websites, but you can take them outside and sometimes they have complex ideas in them.

What I’ve been reading:

• Metamagical Themas - Douglas Hofstadter:
  Hofstadter is one of my all-time favorite authors — I love his broad range of interests, smart analysis, and clever writing. This book is a collection of his Scientific American columns from the early ’80s; thought-provoking and fun (even if his strong concern about the possibility of nuclear war doesn’t seem as urgent today as it must have then).
• All The King’s Men - Robert Penn Warren:
  This classic is a dense political novel; I read it after Jesse taught it for a course on Southern Literature and Culture this spring. Fantastic prose, intricate structure and plotting, complex ideas conveyed through fiction - highly recommended!
• The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan:
  A classic, obviously. Friedan’s analysis is straightforward and chilling; despite the amount of time that has passed, the concepts ring true; although it isn’t as strong as it was a few decades ago, the feminine mystique of relegating woman’s function to the sexual still exists.
  She more or less leaves out queer women, women of color, and lower-class women, but even with these problems, the ideas are still valuable. (This book was also fun to read while watching through the first season of Mad Men; the character of Betty is obviously based on Friedan’s examples.)
  I’m in the middle of The Second Sex right now and both books share a key takeaway for me: it’s impossible to fully develop yourself without a role in the world that involves meaningful interaction with other members of society, something that’s been denied to women in a lot of times and places. Finishing up The Feminine Mystique actually helped inspire me for another project that’s in the works — stay tuned!!
• The Drunkard’s Walk - Leonard Mlodinow:
  Read this one for the book club, and it was a lot more interesting than I expected it to be. Mlodinow gives clear explanations of key ideas in randomness and probability along with straightforward examples of their application and engaging anecdotes about the mathematicians who discovered them.