Blathr Wayne Lorentz

We went to an ancient Mayan archaeological site called San Gervasio. Hereʼs the basics, as told by our tour guide:

• Everything was wonderful in Mexico until the Spanish arrived.
• The Mayans used to have a vast city here.
• The city was so vast it needed roads that were in perfect alignment with the moon.
• Women were only allowed to come to the island and its city when they had their periods.
• Everything was wonderful in Mexico until the Spanish arrived.
• something something mumble mumble
• A treasure hunter bought this site from the Mexican government when it was too busy fighting a civil war to care about treasure hunters buying historic sites.
• The treasure hunterʼs tool of choice was dynamite, and he blew all of the historic buildings to pieces looking for gold he never found.
• Some of the chips from the dynamite explosions ended up on the tour guideʼs shoulder.
• Everything was wonderful in Mexico until the Spanish arrived.

At one of the entrances to Cruise Port Falmouth there is a series of signs telling the history of Falmouth. I donʼt think anyone ever reads them. The small fraction of people who leave port on their own and find their way back through this gate are too tired, hungry, and sunburned to care much about history.

I took photographs of some of them, and I leave these here in the name of posterity so that maybe someday someone will read on the internet what they didnʼt read in real life.

Sadly, the URLs printed on the big signs donʼt work. This is a good example of why you never print web addresses on anything thatʼs expected to last longer than a leaflet.

I donʼt know what building this is, but I like the way it looks. It feels like a slice of Caribbean history during a more interesting age.

I suspect the building is actually a historic landmark, because Falmouth puts up maps that look like theyʼre from pirate days next to its historic buildings. But this building has no sign telling you what it is.

Lots of Gulf Coast Texans visit the San Jacinto Monument as children on school field trips. But few visit it after that. Which is a shame, because it is as adults that we can best appreciate it.

When youʼre a child, this is just another great big building and what did your mom put in your lunch and what kind of bug is that and Mikey stop pulling Jennyʼs hair or youʼre going back on the bus.

As an adult, you can marvel at the geometry of the enormous star at the top; appreciate the reliefs of the people who laid the foundation for what Texas is today; and study the fossils embedded in the limestone base.

The San Jacinto Monument is 13 feet taller than the Washington Monument. The Texas state capitol in Austin has the same 13-foot supremacy over the U.S. capitol in Washington, DC. But for some reason, while Texans have the remarkable ability to regularly manage to mention the Austin capitolʼs height advantage over the DC capitol, they never mention the monumental difference. Perhaps because it was taught to them as children on a field trip, and theyʼve since forgotten OK thatʼs enough back on the bus Mikey you have detention for the rest of the week.

For a short while today, Iʼm keeping the battleship Texas company in its slip in Deer Park, off of the Houston Ship Channel.

The battleship was built in 1912, and decommissioned in 1948. It is now a museum, but in such a state of disrepair that it is going to be towed somewhere to be refurbished. That is, if someone can figure out how to do it, and find someone willing to do the repairs. But itʼs my understanding that the money has already been lined up for the project, and usually thatʼs the hardest part.

What is strange to me is that today is December 7^th. Itʼs Pearl Harbor Day. But thereʼs no one here but me and my wife. This is a decorated World War II warship. I expected bunting, and a brass band, and veterans in wheelchairs with gleaming medals.

But itʼs just us.

I got a new Atari cartridge today. Itʼs Checkers, the Sears Tele-Games version of Atariʼs Video Checkers.

Sears wins for having the better title here. Sure, it is played on a video screen, but calling it “Video” checkers is one of those “No shit, Sherlock” situations.

As checkers go, I think it must be a very good game. I say this because I always lose.

The yammering yabbos on the internet are wild about this game because it was programmed by Carol Shaw. I have nothing against Ms. Shaw, and from what Iʼve read, she seems like a very nice person. But she is repeatedly cited as — in the words of Wikipedia — “one of the earliest female programmers.” This is only true if you ignore the hundreds of women programmers who came before her.

A lot of those programmers were nuns. Nuns played an oversized, and under-recognized role in the early days of computing. There are a few reasons they were involved.

• First, nuns were highly educated. They taught every level of education from kindergarten to college.
• Because they were educators, they were deeply embedded in academia, which is where so much of the early development of computers happened.
• Nuns could think and reason and plan. The average person today doesnʼt know enough history to understand that the first C.E.O.ʼs were nuns. They ran massive hospital systems and orphanages. They invented what today we call the logistics industry, because they needed to support complex systems. Even today, 26% of the planetʼs healthcare facilities are run by the Roman Catholic Church, which means there are nuns in charge of all sorts of things.
• And hereʼs the big one: nuns could type.

In old photographs of people working in mainframe computer rooms in the 1960ʼs and 70ʼs, there are always women around. The men are thinking and looking at printouts and working with slide rules and pencils, but itʼs the women in the pictures doing most of the actual computing. Women were far more common in the computer industry in the early days than they are today.

And even before electronic computers, if you go back to the earliest day of computers, when a “computer” was a person who computes, there were women. Big businesses had rooms full of people clicking away at various mechanical tabulating machines. These people were the companyʼs “computers,” and very often those rooms were full of women. Not men.

When computers first showed up in my school in 1980, the nuns steered the girls to them, while the boys were discouraged from using computers. Why? Because typing was a skill for girls. “Boys donʼt type,” I was told.

This continued into my high school years. I wanted to take a typing class because I had a computer at home. I was told that boys werenʼt allowed to take typing classes.

Even into the 1990ʼs, parts of the business world were still organized around the notion that men were the bosses, and women typed for them, and having the women run the computers was a natural extension of that. My mother worked in Manhattan for the vice president of a mid-sized regional bank. He never used e-mail. Each morning my mother would print out his e-mails and give them to him to read. He would then dictate the responses, which she wrote in steno, and later typed into the computer and sent the responses.

But nuns arenʼt cool today, especially on the internet, so they get ignored. Nuns are one of the types of women that otherwise enlightened people still think itʼs OK to marginalize. Sister Mary Kenneth Keller was the first person in the world to earn a doctorate in computer science, but there are plenty of people on Wikipedia, and elsewhere, who try to suppress knowledge of her contributions in the field.

A complicating factor is that a lot of the work that nuns did in computing was before Atari even existed, and itʼs hard for many people on the internet to imagine there were programmers before the internet, let alone before Atari. And certainly not women programmers. They didnʼt exist until the STEM campaigns of the late 1990ʼs, in their minds.

Still, some day Iʼd like to take Ms. Shaw to coffee to hear her stories about the early days of video game programming. I think her memories are probably worth bottling and saving for posterity.

One room of a 1,400 room Anasazi complex. Thereʼs another one a mile away thatʼs 1,100 rooms; but archaeologists re-buried that one after studying it to prevent it from being damaged.

Historic graffiti inside the old Navajo County Jail.

Here we see Darcie holding a piece of pottery she found at an abandoned Anasazi city. A few days later we learned that the Navajo believe touching Anasazi pottery shards is super duper bad luck.

There really should be a sign or something.

The Anasazi had all kinds of minerals from copper to aluminum to uranium out the wazoo, but never learned to make metal tools, or even arrowheads.

Back in dinosaur days, this was a muddy clay lake shore. It got silted over, and fossilized eighty brazillion dinosaur footprints. I almost lost my shoes in the muck, too.

Wikipedia has 1,408 words about historical inaccuracies in the children's television show F-Troop.