
Mapping with the stars: Nuns instrumental in Vatican celestial survey - michaelsbradley
http://www.catholicnews.com/services/englishnews/2016/nuns-instrumental-in-vatican-celestial-survey.cfm
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objclxt
> At the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, for example, they even were referred
> to as "lady computers"

I don't know how accurate that is - in the early 1900s I believe the majority
of computers were women, so the distinction wouldn't have been made.

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johansch
Celebrating women's "important contributions to history" feels so weird in
contexts like these. They were human computers, following very specific
instructions sequence by sequence. Why would this be something to celebrate?

Maybe I'm just extrapolating from the many similar stories from Bletchley
Park. Still feels really weird to me, though.

And before you accuse me of misogny: The reason I point this out is that
there's surely more interesting historical news involving women (if gender is
suddenly a critical factor) than people essentially doing mindless drudgery
over and over again some time in the past?

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steve19
It's an interesting story that would have also been interesting (to me) if it
had been male monks dedicating over a decade of work to cataloging stars
manually.

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ortusdux
This reminds me of the Harvard Computers. The Memory Palace podcast did an
amazing episode about them titled "400,000 Stars".

[http://thememorypalace.us/2014/03/400000-stars/](http://thememorypalace.us/2014/03/400000-stars/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Computers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Computers)

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jlev
Read the Nine Billion Names of God, by Arthur C Clarke, for a reason why they
might have been counting.
[http://www.sffaudio.com/podcasts/TheNineBillionNamesOfGodByA...](http://www.sffaudio.com/podcasts/TheNineBillionNamesOfGodByArthurC.Clarke.pdf)

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f2f
at los alamos during the manhattan project there were whole divisions
comprised entirely of women who did the physics calculations. they were called
the "computers".

[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/comput...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/computing-
power-used-to-be-measured-in-kilo-girls/280633/)

