Ah, the good old days

July 16, 2008 in geekiness, links, thought

Back in the days of the Ministry of Supply Signals Research and Development Establishment, when stodgy old phoneticians like Peter Ladefoged deemed it not only appropriate but necessary to make sweeping generalizations and to explain what formants are (“regions of the auditory spectrum in which there is a relatively large amount of spectral energy”), in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, no less [pdf].

Of course, those were also the days when people didn’t think twice saying “him” or “he” when they really meant “an arbitrary person”, before people realized that maybe women are underrepresented in the sciences not because of an intrinsic lack of aptitude but because of social and cultural factors than can and should be changed, like the male-dominated, gender-exclusive discourse of the Academy.

Still, there’s something romantic about the image of a bunch of be-tweed-blazered British intellectuals taking their tea in some wood-paneled Fellows’ lounge somewhere, full of books and overstuffed armchairs, all wrapped in leather.