The Montreal Massacre - in memory

On this day in 1989, a man walked into a mechanical engineering classroom at the École Polytechnique in Montreal with a legally obtained rifle and told all the men to leave the room. He claimed he was fighting feminism: "You're women, you're going to be engineers. You're all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists." He then shot all nine women in the room, killing six of them, then moved through the hallways and killed another eight women. Fourteen women killed, ten women injured, and four men injured.

This is not an event that's well-known outside of Canada - I was still a baby when it happened, but as a woman studying science in Montreal, this is a tragedy that looms large. I'm sure there are going to be a lot of articles today pointing out the dangerous idiocy of the Conservatives tearing down the very same gun-control laws that emerged as a response to this massacre, and while it's important to keep in mind the political consequences of this tragedy and the political motivators behind it, that's not what any of this is really about. This is about the fourteen women who were killed for the crime of studying engineering while female.

Geneviève Bergeron, 21, civil engineering
Nathalie Croteau, 23, mechanical engineering
Anne-Marie Edward, 21, chemical engineering
Maryse Laganière, 25, budget clerk in school's finance dept
Anne-Marie Lemay, 22, mechanical engineering
Michèle Richard, 21, materials engineering
Annie Turcotte, 21, materials engineering
Hélène Colgan, 23, mechanical engineering
Barbara Daigneault, 22, mechanical engineering
Maud Haviernick, 29, materials engineering
Maryse Leclair, 23, materials engineering
Sonia Pelletier, 28, mechanical engineering
Annie St-Arneault, 23, mechanical engineering
Barbara Klucznik Widajewicz, 31, nursing

If this isn't something you'd heard of, please consider reposting on your own journal. These women - and the circumstances of their deaths - deserve to be remembered. In Canada, today is the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. You can read more here.

Edit: Holy shit, please remind me never to read comments on articles about something like this. "The vast majority of violence that occurs in the world is against men. Why is there no day of action on violence against men?" Nononononono. I think I just broke my back-button, I hit it so hard. And so many otherwise solid articles saying "But these women may not even have been feminists!", apparently ignorant of the implication that if they were feminists, the violence was justified. What the shit.

Some common misconceptions about Kepler-22b (plus a rather stretched metaphor about eggs)

You've probably heard by now that NASA has confirmed the existence of a planet in its sun's "habitable zone" - that is, the distance from the sun where liquid water could exist. It's called Kepler-22b, it's about 2.4 times the size of the Earth, and has a mean temperature of around 22C (for comparison, Earth's mean temperature is around 13C). Here are some things people (and articles) have been getting wrong lately.

1. "Habitable" means "inhabited".
Alas, this isn't proof of alien life (although the possibility for life as we know it to exist on that planet is higher than anywhere else we've observed). Mars is within the habitable zone of our own sun, to put that into perspective. That said, the Curiosity rover could be on-track to discover simple life on Mars.

2. There is water at the surface.
We have no data on the planet's atmospheric composition. As I understand it, the mean temperature quoted above is merely an estimation based on physical proximity to its sun. For all we know, the planet could be in the grips of a runaway greenhouse effect and turn out to be a scorched hothouse like Venus, covered in poisonous gas.

3. This planet would make a great, habitable substitute for Earth.
If we did find some way to traverse the incredible distance between us and Kepler-22b, we might find some strong differences, even assuming it turns out to have similar atmospheric composition to our own. Depending on the composition of the planet's interior (another unknown, although we should have more data on this when the planet transits its sun again this summer), the larger size of the planet could indicate crushing gravitational forces. The planet's rotation could be strange, or skewed, or totally unknown to us. Very little is known about these so-called "super-Earth" planets (larger than Earth, but not too much larger), since we have none in our own system, and observations of them have only been coming in since around 2006.

Okay, so what's the point in getting excited over this?
Everything I said up there is just pointing out uncertainties. There are two different kinds of criteria for a planet to support life: the necessary conditions and the sufficient conditions. If you have the necessary conditions, you've got the possibility of life - think of it as going out to buy the ingredients in bulk you need for a cake, a dozen eggs, a gallon of milk, whatever. If you have the sufficient conditions, you've got the guarantee of life - think of it as knowing exactly the right amounts of each ingredient. In terms of extraterrestrial life, the sufficient conditions are still largely a mystery, but we are familiar with the necessary conditions. One of the necessary conditions has never been met before Kepler-22b: the location of the planet's orbit with respect to its sun. We may not know yet how many eggs we need to make this cake, but we do know we need some number of eggs, and this is the first time we've actually opened our fridge to find a carton of eggs waiting for us.

It's a first step, and it's a step we've never taken before. That's big news! And the fact that we still have 48 other candidate planets in the habitable zones of their respective stars is a Big Deal. But it's news in a way that a lot of the media seems to be missing out on.