Canadian Bacon Barbie

My xylem v-neck noro sweater pattern is now available here.

I wil add it to my Ravelry page shortly.

I’m a bit of a science nerd, and I’ve recently been attracted to microscopic images. This sweater was inspired by images of xylem, which are part of vascular plants’ circulatory systems (see below).

Xylem is knit top-down. After casting on, you first knit back and forth, increasing for the sleeves and the v-neck, and then join and continue in the round. While I’ve used a garter stitch pattern on the yoke and body, you could also choose to save the garter ridge pattern for the bust area if you’d rather emphasize that.

I chose to finish the sweater with garter stitch rows around the sleeves, hem, and neckline.

This sweater takes 5 skeins of Noro Kureyon (or 550 yards) on size 7 needles.

This New York Times article reports that teenage girls are more prolific content providers than teenage boys–they are more likely to create and contribute to blogs, online networking profiles, or web pages. The article suggests that this imbalance is not likely to translate into greater representation for women in the computer science field, which remains largely male-dominated. Providing content is not the same as the “hard core” activities of coding and programming, apparently. Might it be that the assumptions behind the content vs code division are part of the problem?

The article states

It is possible that the girls who produce glitters today will develop an interest in the rigorous science behind computing, but some scholars are reluctant to draw that conclusion.

I know programming requires math, but it is also a kind of writing. After all, we refer to different computer “languages,” scripts, syntax, and so on. Separating coding out from “content development” might not be as effective as drawing parallels between the two, perhaps.

I don’t know much about computer science curricula, but the very fact that technical communication remains a separate profession suggests that computer scientists are not required to do a lot of content development. I think this is changing; endeavors like Carnegie Mellon’s Women in Computer Science program are trying to use women’s and young girls’ interest in content development, graphics, and so on to attract more of them to computer science. Too bad that stuff wasn’t around when I was a teenager. I actually enjoyed programming but got in trouble in computer classes for creating girly quizzes in Turing (a language that I believe is now defunct?) like “Do you have knee fat?” and “What kind of girlfriend are you?” when we were supposed to be programming a caterpillar to move across the screen on our Icon computers (also now defunct). Speaking of which, does anyone remember these:

For better or worse, I live right next to a thrift shop and am often tempted to wander in on my way home from the coffee shop. I usually look for wool sweaters I can recycle, or the occasional kitschy item from the “art” department, but I had never gone downstairs to the book section before today. I assumed it would be a jumbled mess of cheap paperbacks, but I was wrong. The thrift shop in question has organized its book section like a used book store–everything is categorized and arranged on shelves. There’s a section for older hardcover books, but they still only cost 50 cents to a dollar. This is where I happened across Carpenter’s book, and heeding Sharon Crowley’s advice about building your own archive, I added it to my pile.

My particular copy was used by a Mary Richardson in 1911.

I have yet to take more than a cursory glance, but I did encounter this snippet from the introduction, which might interest some of you body/athletics and rhetoric people. Carpenter is distinguishing rhetoric, as an art, from sciences like chemistry. Among the arts he lists engineering, as well as “music, dancing, painting, swimming, and many similar kinds of activity”:

The engineer,–to a very great extent,–and even the swimmer,–to a very small extent,–must understand the principles on which their arts rest, and these principles may be considered as constituting the science of engineering and the science of swimming; but the success of the practising engineer and the practical swimmer depends upon the skill with which they apply these principles. Now, rhetoric is essentially an art. In order to write well we must, of course follow–consciously or unconsciously–certain principles; but theknowledge of these principles is not the main thing. The essential part of rhetoric is that we shall act, that we shall acquire skill in the application of the principles we study, in the practice of the art we are learning.

Carpenter doesn’t go so far as to enumerate some of the bodily aspects of rhetoric except for a section on handwriting (p.15), where he says that bad handwriting can be due to “tremor or stiffness in the muscles,” defective eyesight, or “a deficiency in the writer’s power of visualizing” (15).
Also, in his section on “barbarisms,” Carpenter notes that the term “dude” appeared “about fifteen years ago,” which would place it in 1895. Who knew?