The Terminator: Come With Me If You Want To Live

Terminator 2: Judgment Day was re-released this Tuesday. I went to see it, of course, and also watched the 1984 film The Terminator on DVD last week.

The date was significant: The eponymous Judgment Day, the nuclear war instigated by the machine intelligence Skynet, is named as August 29, 1997. So, the re-release was twenty years later to the day.

The 3D conversion was unnecessary and didn't really add much to the experience; but it was great to see T2 on the big screen, when I had been a little too young on the original release. Furthermore, after three additional sequels which were mediocre at best, the first two films are an exhilarating breath of fresh air. Even after more than twenty years, they feel far more meaningful than the lazy attempts by the sequels to exploit their achievement.

Spoilers are ahead; but the films are respectively 26 and 33 years old, so I feel comfortable with revealing plot details. If for some reason you haven't seen them, you could always go watch the DVDs and then read the rest of this blog entry; I assure you it will be worth your while.

Strength versus beauty

This graphic has been circulated on social media for a while:

I must admit, I smiled when I first saw it. But if you stop to think about it, the graphic overlooks a more serious point.

Of course they are both unattainable, idealised body types. But what are they ideals of? Barbie's body represents an ideal of beauty, whereas He-Man's represents an ideal of strength.

Strength is an active quality. If you are strong, you can rescue a child from a burning building. You can build a house, sail a ship, slay a dragon. You can be a hero.

Beauty is a passive quality. If you are beautiful, then at best, you can persuade other people to rescue children, build houses, sail ships, or slay dragons. You can be the decorative reward for the hero.

Moreover, there are many ways to be strong and athletic without looking like He-Man. Mainstream standards for feminine beauty in our culture are much more narrow. Telling boys they should aspire to be strong, and girls they should aspire to be pretty, is one way sexism gets started.

To be clear, there's nothing wrong with a person of either sex wanting to be beautiful. It just doesn't strike me as a great idea to promote it as the most desirable goal in life.

The Downfall of Sir Tim Hunt

A couple of weeks ago, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Sir Tim Hunt made some highly sexist remarks in a speech to the World Conference of Science Journalists. Soon after, he resigned his post as an honorary professor at University College London.

Sir Tim Hunt. Source: BBC News

Hunt is reported to have said:

Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry.

There are two aspects of this I find interesting: The depth of Hunt's cluelessness, and the question of whether he should have kept his job.

Pinups and teaching to code

I did an online programming course recently; in one assignment, the students could choose their own graphics, and someone thought it was a good idea to use "pinup" images of scantily clad women. This has obvious parallels to the incident known as Shirtgate.

It is another indication that Shirtgate wasn't an isolated incident, but part of a general background of sexism in science and computing. The course included peer assessment; one of the other students flagged the photos as offensive, notified the course organisers, and started a discussion in the student forums.

I'm intentionally being vague about the course and its website, so the participants can stay anonymous. I'd been meaning to blog about this for some time, but Shirtgate makes it more topical. (Example pinup graphic is below the fold.)

A Shirtgate challenge to Boris Johnson

I am beginning to think NASA had the right idea, when they expected Mission Control engineers to dress like this:

Ed Harris in Apollo 13, wearing an uncontroversial shirt.
Source: toutlecine

At least it would have spared us the idiocy known as Shirtgate.

The Rosetta shirt incident

This week, the Rosetta mission landed a probe on a comet; but instead of a richly deserved celebration of their achievement, a lot of discussion centred on one man's shirt. This is not just a failing of one individual, but of the European Space Agency as a whole.

The man in question is Dr Matt Taylor, a senior scientist on the mission, and this is the shirt:

"Covered with half-naked women" would be a fair description.
Source: BBC News