Women's History Month: Monissa Whiteley

I'm not going to write about myself, because I don't. I write about other people instead. Other people are more interesting to me, because I know about me.

Last week I wrote a LiveJournal post about a woman from the past, but I didn't write about her. I wrote about the bushranger who denied knowing her, the husband who was hanged for sheep-stealing and the names and dates. Always the names and dates.

( To get past the names and the dates, click here )

Quantum Poets

Helen Lowe has real poetry on Tuesdays on her blog and me, I just report back on what my class is doing, the day after.

Today we got through a full chapter of Quantum Physics for Poets, because it was very straightforward stuff about canons and achieving orbit and a bit more about scientific method. Key words were Galilean and Newtonian mechanics, acceleration, and gravity. We talked for a happy five minutes about the shape of the earth and why different places are better for launching rockets. We rocket-tested (or canon-tested, depending on what we were discussing) both ballpoint pens and scrunched up paper. None achieved orbit. Quantum concepts only came into it at the very end of the chapter, so they only came into the last minute at the class. "Of course, none of this applies at the sub-atomic level," I said insouciantly, hoping no-one was picking up that I was really curious to know what a sub-atomic submarine might be like. "That's when it gets quantum."*

My class didn't pick my thought up, but they caught me on everything else. In fact, one of them turned to the others and informed them, three minutes in "It's Evil Teacher, today." "Oh good," someone else said.



*I still think I can't be getting this right. I'm getting much better at looking confident, however.

Women's History Month: Kathleen Jennings

My childhood, when I talk about it, has strong tones of the Little House or the Billabong books. We had a cattle property, a wood stove, home-made bread, party-line telephone, School of the Air – the works. While the people who would later become my friends at university were memorising the theme to Fresh Prince of Bel Air, my mother read out loud to us in the evenings and my father did leatherwork or smoked his pipe on the steps.


( Read More Here )