tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6374266320411149509.post9070857238431086445..comments2024-03-25T10:22:36.277-04:00Comments on Women In Astronomy: AASWOMEN Newsletter for December 19, 2014Amanpreet Kaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08734178178113146899noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6374266320411149509.post-49982819378603299832015-01-01T20:46:39.418-05:002015-01-01T20:46:39.418-05:00To the Editors from Sethanne Howard:
I remind us ...To the Editors from Sethanne Howard:<br /><br />I remind us that women have been active in STEM for over 4,000 years<br /><br />http://www.astronomy.ua.edu/4000WS<br /><br />People keep forgetting that we have been part of the process from the beginning. Our numbers were usually not as high as the mens (except perhaps in the Dark Ages where the numbers were more equal, interestingly enough). But even so we persisted, and accomplished great things. Some struggled against prejudice. Some were lucky. Having a family was usually not a hindrance. <br /> <br />There is a book called "The Hidden Giants" where I give brief comments about 400 women from our past 4,000 years. It is available on Amazon. In the latest edition of the Hidden Giants I have a chapter on how the status of women has evolved through the millennia. <br /><br />Sethanne HowardAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6374266320411149509.post-87591823015730897502015-01-01T20:39:57.318-05:002015-01-01T20:39:57.318-05:00To the Editors from Jay Pasachoff:
I am always gl...To the Editors from Jay Pasachoff:<br /><br />I am always glad to read about Henrietta Leavitt, and to help push Leavitt's Law as a name for the period-luminosity relation, in analogy to using Hubble's law as the name for the redshift-distance relation. But I was disappointed to see the article posted, in massmoments.com (http://www.massmoments.org/moment.cfm?mid=358) making the same mistaken that I had just graded as wrong for several of my Astronomy 101 class's final exams: the post credits her with finding a "critical relationship between a variable star's brightness," while the relation is only valid for the very small (but important) subclass of variable stars known as "Cepheid variable stars." The post should have read "between Cepheid variable stars' brightnesses...."<br /><br />To emphasize the distinction, in my class and in my textbook (The Cosmos, Astronomy in the New Millennium), I have started showing light curves of 10 variable stars, only two of which are Cepheids.<br /><br />Jay Pasachoff<br />Williams College<br />eclipse@williams.eduAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com