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University Challenge questions made more difficult so as not to offend anyone

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  • #122
    pleas advice
    Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 2,492 ✭✭✭pleas advice


    They were hardly going to execute a woman though, in fairness


  • #123
    s7ryf3925pivug
    Closed Accounts Posts: 4,007 ✭✭✭s7ryf3925pivug


    Shenshen wrote: »
    Would that include Ada Lovelace as well? I've always been fascinated by her, ever since I found out she pretty much invented software and coding.
    chemistry who gave oxygen its name, Lavoisier was a wealthy man who found himself on the wrong side of a revolution and paid the price with his life.

    Mary Anning: a poor, working-class woman who made her living fossil-hunting along the beach cliffs of southern England. Anning found herself excluded from the scientific community because of her gender and social class. Wealthy, male, experts took credit for her discoveries.

    George Washington Carver: born a slave, Carver become one of the most prominent botanists of his time, as well as a teacher at the Tuskegee Institute. Carver devised over 100 products using one major ingredient – the peanut – including dyes, plastics and gasoline.

    Alfred Wegener: a German meteorologist, balloonist, and arctic explorer, his theory of continental drift was derided by other scientists and was only accepted into mainstream thinking after his death. He died in Greenland on an expedition, his body lost in the ice and snow.

    Nikola Tesla: a Serbian American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, physicist, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system. A competitor of Edison, Tesla died in poverty despite his intellectual brilliance.

    Jocelyn Bell Burnell: a Northern Irish astrophysicist. As a postgraduate student, she discovered the first radio pulsars (supernova remnants) while studying and advised by her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish, for which Hewish shared the Nobel Prize in physics while Bell Burnell was excluded.

    Fred Hoyle: an English astronomer noted primarily for the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis – the process whereby most of the elements on the Periodic Table are created. He was also noted for the controversial positions he held on a wide range of scientific issues, often in direct opposition to prevailing theories. This eccentric approach contributed to him to being overlooked by the Nobel Prize committee for his stellar nucleosynthesis work.

    Any one of these figures could have been awarded a Nobel prize. Not every scientific discoverer was lauded in their time, for reasons of gender, race, or lack of wealth, or (in the case of Lavoisier) being too wealthy: in the 21st century, there are many more reparations and reputations to be made.

    Quoted text from:
    http://myriadeditions.com/books/graphic-science/


  • #124
    Shenshen
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 9,453 ✭✭✭Shenshen


    paleoperson wrote: »
    I love Frankenstein, easily my favourite classical novel, but I always felt it was strange that it was written by not only a girl but when she was 18-21 years old and also that she never produced anything else noteworthy for the rest of her life. That makes a LOT more sense - a notable writer husband at 26 years old who then passed away three years later meaning there would be no reason for it to ever be uncovered. I don't mean to commit confirmation bias but sometimes the odd-sounding thing really is not what happened. Considering that according to wikipedia she apparently failed to credit him for the preface or 4,000-5,000 words of the novel it's hardly a major jump on the face of it, but the politics of our time likely means it won't see the light of day.

    I'd agree with that suspicion if Percy Shelley's writings weren't so markedly, entirely different from Frankenstein.
    And the "One Novel Wonder" isn't all that rare - look at the likes of Emily Bronte, Margaret Mitchell, J.D. Salinger or Boris Pasternak.


  • #125
    ohnonotgmail
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 40,922 ✭✭✭✭ohnonotgmail


    Shenshen wrote: »
    I'd agree with that suspicion if Percy Shelley's writings weren't so markedly, entirely different from Frankenstein.
    And the "One Novel Wonder" isn't all that rare - look at the likes of Emily Bronte, Margaret Mitchell, J.D. Salinger or Boris Pasternak.


    Pasternak was a poet who wrote a novel so not terribly unusual that he only wrote the one. Plus the novel caused him a great deal of grief in russia so that probably put him off writing another.


  • #126
    xi5yvm0owc1s2b
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,325 ✭✭✭xi5yvm0owc1s2b


    paleoperson wrote: »
    I love Frankenstein, easily my favourite classical novel, but I always felt it was strange that it was written by not only a girl but when she was 18-21 years old and also that she never produced anything else noteworthy for the rest of her life. That makes a LOT more sense - a notable writer husband at 26 years old who then passed away three years later meaning there would be no reason for it to ever be uncovered. I don't mean to commit confirmation bias but sometimes the odd-sounding thing really is not what happened. Considering that according to wikipedia she apparently failed to credit him for the preface or 4,000-5,000 words of the novel it's hardly a major jump on the face of it, but the politics of our time likely means it won't see the light of day.

    Totally agreed. Charles E. Robinson has already published Percy Shelley’s over 5,000 known amendments and contributions to the text -- but there's evidence that PBS may have had an even deeper involvement. When Mary Shelley revised the text for subsequent editions, after PBS's death, she absolutely butchered it, showing little understanding or sensitivity for why the text was constructed the way it was. And yet to suggest that PBS should be regarded as at very least a co-author, if not the originator, of Frankenstein would be regarded as heresy in feminist literary circles.


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  • #127
    xi5yvm0owc1s2b
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,325 ✭✭✭xi5yvm0owc1s2b


    Shenshen wrote: »
    I'd agree with that suspicion if Percy Shelley's writings weren't so markedly, entirely different from Frankenstein.

    Back in Shelley's day, it would have been a mark of shame for a noted poet to write a novel, especially a sensationalist gothic novel like Frankenstein. So he would have been more than eager to hide his authorship.

    And yet there's plenty of evidence that he was the primary author of the book. See John Lauritsen's 2007 book The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein for an extensive discussion.


  • #128
    Shenshen
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 9,453 ✭✭✭Shenshen


    Lorenzo Bumpy Rake wrote: »
    Back in Shelley's day, it would have been a mark of shame for a noted poet to write a novel, especially a sensationalist gothic novel like Frankenstein. So he would have been more than eager to hide his authorship.

    And yet there's plenty of evidence that he was the primary author of the book. See John Lauritsen's 2007 book The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein for an extensive discussion.

    If I recall correctly, the story was not intended for publishing in the first place. It was a private competition between Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and John William Polidori, after having spent days cooped up in a house in bad weather, reading ghost stories to each other and discussing experiments that seemed to re-animate corpses using electricity.

    I don't find it too far-fetched to think the two would merge in the mind of a young girl.


  • #129
    xi5yvm0owc1s2b
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,325 ✭✭✭xi5yvm0owc1s2b


    Shenshen wrote: »
    If I recall correctly, the story was not intended for publishing in the first place. It was a private competition between Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and John William Polidori, after having spent days cooped up in a house in bad weather, reading ghost stories to each other and discussing experiments that seemed to re-animate corpses using electricity.

    I don't find it too far-fetched to think the two would merge in the mind of a young girl.

    There's a long way from the ghost story conceived in the summer of 1816 to the fully accomplished and complex novel completed a year later and published in January 1818. There's also a marked difference between the quality of the writing in the 1818 edition of Frankenstein and that of anything else written by Mary Shelley in her lifetime. If you haven't heard of her subsequent novels Valperga, Perkin Warbeck, The Last Man, Lodore, or Falkner, believe me, there's good reason for that. So how does a young woman go from being a preternaturally brilliant novelist in her late teens, writing a book that is still widely read and loved today, to writing tripe that even scholars of the period struggle to finish?

    There's also the issue of subsequent revised editions of Frankenstein, in which Shelley blundered her way through the original text with seemingly limited understanding of its careful textured architecture and style, often botching up many of its finer aspects with her poorly conceived emendations and additions. The 1818 edition remains far superior to the 1823 or 1831 revisions, even though many publishers today make the mistake of regarding the last edition as the definitive one, just because it was the last one its author touched. That makes sense if you believe Mary Shelley to be the sole author, but not if you acknowledge the authorial role of PBS.


  • #130
    Chad Broad Piece
    Posts: 0 CMod ✭✭✭✭ Chad Broad Piece


    Shenshen wrote: »
    If I recall correctly, the story was not intended for publishing in the first place. It was a private competition between Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and John William Polidori, after having spent days cooped up in a house in bad weather, reading ghost stories to each other and discussing experiments that seemed to re-animate corpses using electricity.

    I don't find it too far-fetched to think the two would merge in the mind of a young girl.

    Ye, national geographic article happens to be on front page reddit about it today:

    https://www.nationalgeographic.com/archaeology-and-history/magazine/2017/07-08/birth_of_Frankenstein_Mary_Shelley/

    Only the year before she'd given birth and her baby had passed away - serious parallels going on there I suppose! and the horror of it.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley#Percy_Bysshe_Shelley


  • #131
    Chad Broad Piece
    Posts: 0 CMod ✭✭✭✭ Chad Broad Piece


    Another famous figure who was interesting and thought i would post here:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabetta_Sirani

    And a top painter of her generation
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_Gentileschi


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  • #132
    xi5yvm0owc1s2b
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,325 ✭✭✭xi5yvm0owc1s2b


    Anyone interested in the genesis of Frankenstein can check out the Vintage Classics edition The Original Frankenstein (2009), edited from the Bodleian Library manuscripts by Charles E. Robinson.

    This allows the reader to see both Mary Shelley's early draft and the extensively revised text by PBS. The extent of PBS's amendments and additions is undeniable, as are his many important stylistic and thematic changes.

    Robinson is also the first to ensure that the authorship on the title page reads "Mary Shelley with Percy Shelley," properly representing the huge role that the brilliant poet played in creating one of the most enduring novels of the past two centuries.


  • #133
    Obvious Desperate Breakfasts
    Closed Accounts Posts: 8,474 ✭✭✭Obvious Desperate Breakfasts


    Capt'n Midnight wrote: »
    I suppose the point here and with Bell is that the men got the prize based on the work of others.

    Linus Pauling was also chasing down DNA and had already proposed a triple helix structure. Roslyn had better pictures.

    All Watson and Crick had to do was join the dots.

    Franklin’s lab partner, Maurice Wilkins, also got the prize, not just Watson and Crick. Had she been alive, she would have too. The process takes years and sadly she wasn’t around. That’s really all there is to it. People read too much in to it.


  • #134
    ToddyDoody
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 4,417 ✭✭✭ToddyDoody


    How about institute of technology challenge? (It's mainly colouring inside the lines)


  • #135
    pleas advice
    Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 2,492 ✭✭✭pleas advice


    It's a blackboard jungle out there


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