GLFoster's artWorks

08/13/2026

Finally finished a project! Last summer I painted a Barn Quilt and decided to hang it on the front of the quanset hut. This summer I decided I wanted to paint the door using elements from the quilt block design. We took the door down only to find it was old and rotten. So, we ordered a new door and I got busy.

08/12/2026

I havent posted any paintings in quite a while. Diana and I went to Dead Horse State Park with the Arizona Plein Aire painting group here in beautiful Yavapai County. The group meets on Tuesday mornings to spend time painting outdoorss.

03/17/2026

mansplaining

I like this cartoon so much we paid the New Yorker the fee it requested to include it in my book.

We’ve not even had the vote 100 years. Let’s not let thing backslide.

Happy International Women’s Day, one and all.

03/16/2026

03/16/2026

She was the kind of child who filled jars with fish.
Sylvia Earle grew up on a small farm in New Jersey, spending hours beside the pond in her backyard — catching tadpoles, collecting specimens, filling notebook after notebook with careful observations about the natural world. Neither of her parents had gone to college. But they gave her something more lasting than a degree: they gave her permission to be endlessly, fearlessly curious about the living world around her.
Her family moved to Florida when she was thirteen. The farm pond became the Gulf of Mexico, and Sylvia's curiosity scaled up accordingly.
She graduated high school at sixteen. Earned a scholarship to Florida State University, studied botany, graduated at nineteen, certified herself as a SCUBA diver so she could study ocean plant life in person rather than in a laboratory. By twenty, she had a master's degree from Duke. By thirty-one, she had a doctorate — earned while raising children, going on expeditions to the Galápagos Islands and the Indian Ocean and the Panama Canal Zone, and serving as resident director of a marine laboratory in Sarasota, Florida.
All at the same time.
Her doctoral dissertation alone was a landmark — she personally collected more than 20,000 samples of algae to catalog aquatic plants in the Gulf of Mexico, making her one of the first scientists in history to use SCUBA to document marine life directly rather than from the surface. The study remained a reference point for decades.
But she was just getting started.
In February 1968, she descended 100 feet below the surface of the Bahamas in a submersible vehicle and entered an experimental underwater habitat as part of the Smithsonian Institution's Man-in-Sea project — the first woman scientist ever to do so. She was four months pregnant at the time.
In 1970, when government officials decided they didn't want men and women sharing an underwater habitat for the Tektite II Project — despite the fact that no one on earth had more diving experience than Sylvia Earle — she didn't argue. She simply assembled an all-female team of scientists, led them fifty feet underwater, and spent two weeks conducting research. When they surfaced, they were received at the White House and given a parade in Chicago.
In 1979, she did something no human being had ever done before — and no one has done since.
Carried in a submersible to a depth of 1,250 feet, she detached from the vehicle in a specially pressurized suit, stepped off onto the ocean floor, and walked there alone — in complete darkness, under crushing pressure, in one of the most inhospitable environments on Earth — for two and a half hours.
The record for the deepest untethered walk on the sea floor still belongs to Sylvia Earle.
In 1990, she became the first woman appointed as Chief Scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — the agency responsible for the health of America's oceans and atmosphere. She has since authored more than 200 scientific publications, lectured in more than 80 countries, and led more than 100 marine expeditions — logging over 7,000 hours underwater across a career spanning six decades.
Time magazine named her their first Hero for the Planet in 1998. The United Nations named her Champion of the Earth in 2014. She has received 27 honorary degrees and more than 100 international honors.
She is now in her eighties. She is still working.
Her current mission — through the Mission Blue alliance she leads — is to build a global network of "Hope Spots": protected ocean sanctuaries designed to preserve the biodiversity on which all life on Earth ultimately depends. Because after 7,000 hours beneath the surface, Sylvia Earle knows something most of us are only beginning to understand: the ocean is not a backdrop to human civilization.
It is the reason human civilization is possible at all.
A little girl who filled jars with fish.
A scientist who walked where no human had ever walked.
A voice still calling us back — before it is too late — to protect the deepest, most essential world we have.
Her name is Dr. Sylvia Earle. And the ocean she loves is still down there, waiting.

03/14/2026

I've posted before about the Matilda Effect, but this is about Margaret Rossiter, the woman who named it. "She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papers—and every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history.

"Yale University, 1969. Margaret Rossiter was a graduate student studying the history of science. She was one of very few women in her program. Every Friday afternoon, students and faculty gathered for beers and informal conversation. One week, Margaret asked a simple question: "Were there ever any women scientists?"

"The faculty answered firmly: No. Someone mentioned Marie Curie. The group dismissed it—her husband Pierre really deserved the credit. Margaret didn't argue. But she also didn't believe them. So she started looking. She found a reference book called "American Men of Science"—essentially a Who's Who of scientific achievement. Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont. There were names. There were credentials. There were careers.
The professors had been wrong.

"But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing. Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams. But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official histories—those same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased. It wasn't random. It was systematic.

"Women who designed experiments watched male colleagues publish results without giving them credit. Women whose discoveries were assigned to supervisors. Women listed in acknowledgments instead of as authors. Women passed over for awards that went to male collaborators who contributed far less.
Margaret realized she was witnessing a pattern that stretched across centuries. Women had always been present in science. The record had simply pushed them aside.

"She needed a name for what she was documenting. In the early 1990s, she found it in the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage—a 19th-century suffragist who had written about this exact phenomenon in 1870. In 1993, Margaret published a paper formally naming it: The Matilda Effect. The term captured something that had been hidden in plain sight for generations. Once you knew the term, you saw it everywhere.

"Her dissertation became a lifelong mission. For more than 30 years, Margaret researched and wrote her landmark three-volume series: Women Scientists in America. She examined letters, institutional policies, individual careers. She gathered undeniable evidence that women in science had been consistently under-credited and structurally excluded.

"Her work faced resistance. Many dismissed women's history as political rather than academic. [Don't I know it.] Others insisted she was exaggerating. Margaret didn't argue emotionally. She presented data. Documented cases. Patterns repeated across decades and institutions.

"Eventually, the evidence became undeniable. Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased:
•Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structure—credit went to Watson and Crick.
Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission—omitted from the •Nobel Prize.
•Nettie Stevens, who discovered s*x chromosomes—received little credit.
•Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogen—initially dismissed.
And countless others whose names had nearly vanished.

"Margaret changed the narrative. Science was no longer just the story of solitary male geniuses. It became a story of collaboration that included women who had been written out.
The Matilda Effect became standard terminology. Scholars used it to examine how credit is assigned, how authors are listed, who receives awards, who gets left out." Systematically.

https://x.com/MrPitbull07/status/2031825148744253780

03/14/2026

Ricky Gervais calling out all the new kids on the block.