I encourage people to go back and look at my old entries. However, I realize that because I've had this journal since 2001, there's quite a bit to get through. I have selected a few posts I think are good starting places, especially if you are just wandering through and want to be entertained. [note 4/3/09 - I don't think this list has been updated in years] [7/28/10 -- argh. I should edit this.]
Note: About half of my entries are friends-locked, including some of my most interesting stuff. 9/10 of that is done to protect my identity from a very small set of people, should they ever go looking for my LiveJournal. Sorry about that -- if I could guarantee that only actual strangers could see certain posts, it would be different.
On the other hand, if I've friended you, it's well worth your effort to dig around for other stuff. Note that while I use filters, I'm pretty scrupulous about not mentioning people in posts they can't see (if I have friended you, I'm pretty darn sure you can see every mention of your name); the reason you aren't seeing a lot of "personal" notes is that the ones about people mostly don't exist. Similarly, there are no "opt-in" filters you are missing out on -- I will either bore or TMI you or not, depending on my whim.
Some people read a lot into whether someone friends them on livejournal. In the interests of not having people feel bad, here's a vague description of what I do.
This is another post I'm pinning to the top of my journal because I think it will be good for people. This is something I wrote on OKCupid (a personals/dating site, of sorts), describing what I was looking for:
I have set up an account over at Dreamwidth. I'm using a new username, since someone else has Ratatosk over there. I am thinking I will migrate the LJ ratatosk journal over to a separate account, to give myself a fresh start. I don't think I will crosspost, since I don't think anyone else is left over here.
Am I mistaken about that, or should I turn off the light and shut the door on my way out?
This is a picture of the capybara at the Stone Zoo, standing in its water dish:
When wispfox and I saw this, we thought "Oh! How sad! The poor capybara hasn't been given any water!"
Surely, I thought, they would have given it at least a kiddie pool or something. And, in fact, they had:
Possibly the kiddie pool had excessively high sides. Possibly it wanted to annoy the llama with which it shares an enclosure. For whatever reason, it preferred its water dish.
My ISP had an email server meltdown, I am guessing due to spam or a DOS, and switched everyone's emails to a new domain. So my main email now ends with .net instead of .com, if you know it. You can deduce my gmail account from my LJ profile information. Either is fine for reaching me. (Lack of writing it out lets me make a public post.)
Kind of annoying since I was relying on them for a stable address, but I also like having something that's neither from a huge company nor a friend's server.
I will be at NEFFA this weekend — you should say hi if you see me. I usually split my time between singing and dancing, and don't go to any of the performances. I expect to be in the contra hall all Friday evening, and at most of the shape note events, but beyond that I might have to make choices.
It usually depends on which parts of me are getting sore at what rate. :P
[EDIT: Yes, this is public on purpose, so that you can share it should you feel so inclined.]
I have not been very active about pursuing this, but mirrored_echo and I are still looking for a third housemate for our apartment near Davis Sq. Lots of space, light. We're within a 6 minute walk to the T and maybe 10 minutes to Tufts. Dishwasher (portable), laundry in unit.
Per-person, rent is $1000 / month (market rate, given the location) and utilities average $100 / month (with high seasonal variance). We are willing to negotiate about that a little given that I really, really don't want to have to move come September. Room is available now. We are looking for someone who will be a long-term housemate and stick around for the next year. (mirrored_echo is unlikely to stick around, so I will probably need someone else in September, too.)
We have no pets (although I have a whole lot of houseplants), but a cat is explicitly allowed by the lease and we like animals.
Actual photos of plants in our actual apartment (Facebook just got a goat on a sheep):
I will be at Arisia from this evening to at least Sunday afternoon. I plan to do as much dancing as possible, and in general try to pick participatory things over passive ones. A million of you are on panels, so there is no way I can make it to more of a tiny fraction of those. Good luck, though!
A question arose in comments to a previous (friends-locked) post. I'm going to paraphrase it as asking which of these is standard Lolcat:
a. I R SRS [NP1], THIS R SRS [NP2] b. I IZ SRS [NP1], THIS IZ SRS [NP2]
My instinct was to go for a., and diatom was going for b. I realized this was empirically testable, because we have access to a massive Lolcat dataset (aka "Google"). Wondering is not a virtue in this situation! Here's what I found:
I R SRS
9550
I IZ SRS
6460
THIS R SRS
62100
THIS IZ SRS
9820
That's an R/IZ ration of 1.48 for the first pair, and 6.32 for the second.
At first glance, it looks like the 'R' variant is somewhat more common. However, the full Google search might not be a good test, since Google's advanced search doesn't let you restrict results to Lolcat. So some of these hits are probably English speakers borrowing what they think is a catchy Lolcat phrase, regardless of whether an actual L1 Lolcat speaker would ever utter it.
So I decided to not only deliberately restrict it to Lolcat, but to break it out by register. I think we can agree that cheezburger.com is a good source for Standard Lolcat — the written equivalent to the kind you'd hear on TV.
Here are the results after adding site:cheezburger.com to the search:
I R SRS
68
I IZ SRS
13
THIS R SRS
16
THIS IZ SRS
14
Those are dramatic results. Now we see an R/IZ value of 5.23 for the first pair and 1.14 for the second. Given the low N and small ratio, the "THIS" phrases seem like a statistical tie, and the first pair has the lopsided ratio here. The high ratio of "I R" to "THIS R" might suggest that the original example a. is a colloquial catchphrase or just isn't idiomatic in Standard Lolcat. I'm not sure how to analyze that — it would be nice to have a larger corpus here.
So, that's standard Lolcat. However, we also have a very nice corpus of Literary Lolcat in the form of the Lolcat Bible. If we restrict the search to lolcatbible.com, however, we get one instance only, in the sentence "i r srs huzband." from 1 Samuel 1:8.
Well, maybe this is unfair, since lot of the Bible is in the past tense. So if we search for the word "srs", do we get any other instances at all of the form "[Pronoun] [DO+TNS] SRS [NP]"? I would only judge Acts 25:7 to count ("Paul came n Joos from Jooroosulum were srs cat and charged Paul n sed he wuz bad."). Literary Lolcat seems to have much more varied syntax than Standard, and consequently it's harder to find multiple instances of any given n-gram in there. I think we'd need a larger corpus to draw any conclusions about Literary Lolcat.
Anyway, to repeat my disclaimer: THIS R NOT SRS BLOG. THIS R NOT SRS RESIRCH.
I am still looking for two housemates, so I'm reposting this. The only change is that my outgoing housemate had his fiance move in for a little while, so not finding anyone for September was fine since it gave her a place to stay. They will be moving once renovations are done at their new place (any time now, maybe, hopefully), but there is some flexibility about move-in dates. I think realistically we can have one room available November or earlier, and the other by December, maybe earlier. If there were a housemate candidate I really liked and time was an issue, we could do something. Anyway, the rest is the same:
I would like help finding people! Here's an unlocked post you can link to! I have a much more detailed version in email that I can send to anyone who's interested.
I'll post separately to Facebook -- please don't link my LJ to Facebook or vice versa. This is the LJ version, so I'm not going to bother saying much about myself, since nothing I could write would be as useful as actually stalking me via my public posts.
The Tech Squares Fall Class starts tomorrow night at 8 PM in the MIT student center (see link if you actually need directions). If you are a club member who has been away for a while, it would be a good time to show up and at least pretend to keep your squares from breaking down. If you know actual current MIT students who can be convinced to try it, that would be nice too, since MIT is always bugging its clubs to keep up the percentage of student members.
If you have wanted to try it, this is one of two single points of entry (the other is in February). There's no obligation to come back if you don't feel like it, but you really really shouldn't miss the first class if you want to take the class at all. The full class is 13 weeks (Tuesday nights), but there's no commitment, and it costs $4 a night. Just to be clear, this is completely open to the general public, although we can't advertise it that way. You don't need to be MIT-affiliated at all, and anyway at least some people there will know you, so you'll look like you belong.
Standard disclaimer / reassurance: If you think it will be too hard for you, that is probably the wrong reason to not come, especially the first night. If you just don't think it will be fun, or don't have time, those are totally legitimate (especially the time, which nobody has). If you are reading this, though, you can get help from friends -- as much as you need -- if you have trouble with the class. Some people are intimidated by Tech Squares' reputation (I talked to several this weekend, actually), so I feel the need to be reassuring.
It turns out that I am looking for two housemates come September (there is some flexibility about dates). I would like help finding people! Here's an unlocked post you can link to! I have a much more detailed version in email that I can send to anyone who's interested.
I'll post separately to Facebook -- please don't link my LJ to Facebook or vice versa. This is the LJ version, so I'm not going to bother saying much about myself, since nothing I could write would be as useful as actually stalking me via my public posts.
[from a sticky note -- I might post this elsewhere eventually, perhaps with edits]
I wanted to try to make a list of wrong assumptions about restaurants, and food in general, that I have seen people make. This is partly inspired by the famous list of falsehoods programmers believe about names. These mostly apply equally to manufacturers and restaurants, but I'm not always going to be precise about which.
Specifically, this is "things I have learned about polyamory from a 'things I have learned about polyamory' article", which was a sort of review of Showtime's "Polyamory: Married and Dating". The article is in the form of a bulleted list, most of which are uninteresting. But these caught my eye:
- If you find yourself in any kind of group that refers to itself as a "pod" and isn't made up of whales, you might find yourself suddenly drawn to the "namaste" section at Pier 1 Imports. Don't fight it, and while you're there, we're running low on pillar candles and useless shit to tack to the walls.
- While engaging in coitus with your "pod" among your pillar candles and exotic sheets and useless wall shit, be sure to frequently verbally reaffirm the sexiness of the situation, lest the audience at home (understandably) get confused.
So, poly people who use the word "pod" also tend to shop at Pier 1. I feel like there is some sort of cool sociological discovery lurking in there, but I'm not sure how to get at it.
For maximum points, your comment should include the phrase "Tchotchke-Industrial Complex".
This post is inspired by looking at an issue of Bay Windows, which is our local GLBT-something newspaper. I noticed that nearly all the articles were about problems that I expect to be resolved, for good, in the next few decades (same-sex marriage, other forms of equality under the law). Then I tried to think of similar political issues that have been resolved with finality during my lifetime, and mostly blanked. I'm sure they exist, and it bugs me that I can't come up with more examples than Lawrence v Texas.[1]
So I'm looking for examples of reasonably major political issues that have been resolved during your memory (or lifetime), across the US as a country (not just in particular states, but not all), and with enough finality that they are exceedingly unlikely to come back (imagine a political equivalent of eradicating smallpox). It can be via a Supreme Court case, legislative activity, social change, whatever -- I'm too pragmatic to care. Feel free to be creative about what counts as a political issue (or a major one), if you think of a neat example.
[1] While the specifics of the holding of that are disputed, I'd say that case forbids criminalizing consensual sex outside of situations where consent is declared unobtainable by statute (e.g. age, kinship, mental incapacity, etc., so long as those categories don't vary based on whether something is heterosexual or not). Lawrence v. Texas is a particularly nice example because I'm also old enough to remember Bowers v. Harwdick coming out, holding that states could criminalize homosexual sodomy. Bowers wasn't necessarily a popular ruling; I remember that comedians thought it was hilarious at the time, and made jokes about how you could "still commit Gomorrah". The issue was definitely not a completely dead one at the time Lawrence v. Texas rolled around, despite states picking away at it one by one in cases based on state constitutions, but I think after Lawrence it is genuinely settled (I think most Supreme Court cases have a much higher susceptibility to later reversal, but it's difficult to imagine circumstances under which Lawrence would get reversed).
From Ginsburg's opinion in the health care case (citations omitted):
"The commerce power, hypothetically, would enable Congress to prohibit the purchase and home production of all meat, fish, and dairy goods, effectively compelling Americans to eat only vegetables. . . . Yet no one would offer the “hypothetical and unreal possibilit[y],” . . . of a vegetarian state as a credible reason to deny Congress the authority ever to ban the possession and sale of goods."
An outright ban would probably be politically infeasible, which is presumably why they went with serving size limits.
The serving size limit has some serious practical problems. Quoting Gary Becker: "Suppose that drinks come only in 10 and 16-ounce sizes. If the 16-ounce size were banned, enough consumers might substitute 2 10-ounce drinks for 1 16-ounce drink to increase total consumption of these drinks." That sounds plausible to me.
Now, you might ask why the cities wouldn't just tax sugary drinks to a level adequate to offset the health care cost externalities and then just call it a day, instead of bothering to ban anything outright. The answer seems to be that neither New York state nor Massachusetts lets their municipalities levy random taxes without the state legislature approving it (please let me know if this is wrong). They're allowed to levy certain types -- property, etc. Just not completely novel things like a soda tax. But they have a lot more leeway to regulate businesses for health reasons, so we see bans instead of taxes. If all that you have is a hammer . . .
I personally see this as an argument for more home rule, not less, but reasonable people may disagree.
The Coalition has challenged the Greens to clarify their position on multiple partner marriage, accusing the party of "trying to walk both sides of the street" so as not to lose the votes of the polyamorous community.
This is in the online version of The Australian, which purports to be Australia's only national newspaper. No idea if it will be in the print edition, or how to find that out (also, the International Date Line means it was posted tomorrow).
How did this happen?
The debate is over a same-sex marriage bill in the the Australian senate. The Coalition referred to in the article is made up of four center-right parties. Right now Labor has the government, but only 31 out of 76 seats in the senate (the Coalition has 34, collectively). So, in order to get anything done, Labor needs the support of at least some of the Greens, who have 9 seats. The poly community in Australia is -- by some means completely opaque to me -- able to exert some pressure on the Greens, and thus the issue of poly marriage is propelled to the politics section of The Australian.
Today's question is about what counts as a "nice round number". Don't ask me what that is supposed to mean -- that's what's in dispute in the first place. I am only asking about the number that came up in conversation, since testing this exhaustively would tax the attention span of most people.
[Note: I started writing this post long before a friend of a friend jokingly suggested "Positive TV", and I am finishing it long afterwards, but I think it is in the same spirit! Somebody took at least one relevant domain and is trying to do something with it, but I can't tell what the inspiration for it was, and I don't feel like checking for anyone trying to do the same thing.]
There was a time back in the Bush era when the Republicans had gone so egregiously over the line on so many things that even pox-on-you-all small-l libertarians like me were willing to say "okay, through great effort one party has managed to be more evil than the other for a while. Huh." And people threw around the word "liberaltarian" a lot, referring more or less to an alliance of convenience given the realities of American politics at the time. Now that Obama has had time to disappoint people, it's inevitable that you hear it less often.[1]
Someone asked me tonight to explain the comment about about Linear B jewelry in this thread. I'm not sure I was at all coherent when explaining it in person, so I hunted down the actual source.
"Linear B jewelry" was a reference to this post of mine from many years ago. If you read my exchange with dilletante in the comments you will see that history has caught up with that post, and the thing I was complaining about has since been remedied to my satisfaction.
How does this work? You write porn. You make sure it's, at most, thirty words long. You post it in a comment to this post, or you e-mail it to me, or you drop it in my ask-box on tumblr, or whatever. In a few weeks, I collect them all, scramble them, and post them for all the world to enjoy. And it is awesome. You can get a pretty good feel by reading the tag "Lessthan31words".
The porn you submit may be anonymous. It may be fanfic. It may be silly. It may be sexy. It may be written in languages I don't speak (so far: Spanish, Russian, and Japanese.) It may be simple. It may be elaborate. It may be story based. It may be PWP. It may be kinky. It may be *really* kinky. It may be loving. It may be missionary between married people with the lights off. The only rule is that it must be short, at most thirty words. Thirty-one is too many, and thirty-two is right out.
I thought some of you might enjoy trying your hand at that, or at least would be entertained by past years' entries. Maybe if enough people enter, my voice will be less recognizable, and I will feel comfortable writing something in a language other than Chicken.[1,2]
So, as you no doubt read on Thursday, Punxsutawney Phil issued the following proclamation:
"As I look at the crowd on Gobbler's Knob Many Shadows do I see So six more weeks of winter it must be."
Huh.
Now, the historical record of groundhog predictions is full of strange little notes hinting that the doings of the people of Punxsutawney are secretly far more interesting than what is reported in the news.[1] Here is a nice stretch of years from that file:
1934 No Shadow. 1935 Saw Shadow at 9:11 AM. 1936 Saw Shadow at 10:27 AM. 1937 Saw Shadow at 9:09 AM; Unfortunate meeting with a skunk. 1938 Saw Shadow at 9 AM; Blackest shadow in history. 1939 Saw Shadow at 9:10 AM. 1940 Saw Shadow at 9 AM; Pictured with first Groundhog Day Queen, Miss Margaret Hunam. 1941 Saw Shadow at 4:25 PM; Six Groundhog Girls. 1942 Partial Shadow at 7:40 AM; "War clouds have blacked out parts of the shadow." ("The Spirit," Feb. 2, 1942). 1943 Groundhog didn't make an appearance; need to rely on Quarryville's prediction. 1944 Saw Shadow at 9:10 AM.
The Punxsutawney Groundhog Club are people comfortable with a little weirdness -- they make their living off of it, even. By the time you have taken an old folk belief about burrowing mammals and turned it into a huge affair that requires a dozen men in top hats to pull a marmot out of a stump, and when you have committed to the assertion that there is Only One Groundhog to the extent that you ritualistically feed it a longevity elixir every summer -- at that point it's not such a big leap to all sorts of things.
So we can imagine that eventually we'll see:
2012 Saw several Shadows at 7:26 AM. 2013 No Shadow. 2014 Saw multiple Shadows at 8:12 AM; Unusual weather predicted. 2015 Saw Shadow at 7:50 AM; Not shaped like groundhog. 2016 No Shadow. 2017 Saw Shadow; Looked like Phil, but gestured frantically. Very bad weather predicted. 2018 No Shadow. 2019 No Shadow. 2020 No Shadow; Longest streak of early spring predictions on record. 2021 Saw Shadow at 3:17 PM; Missing shadow had been stolen by Quarryville and recovered through subterfuge from town hall basement. Delay due to last-minute difficulties with reattachment. New locks put on Phil's room in the Punxsutawney library; background checks required for all employees.
[1] I love this kind of presentation of information. Note the nice summary at the end:
SAW SHADOW 98 NO SHADOW 15 NO RECORD 10
The wikipedia article for Phil starts out with the pleasingly Wikipedian sentence "Punxsutawney Phil is a groundhog resident of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania." Unfortunately it just doesn't rise/descend to the level of sincere weirdness in presenting information that you get elsewhere. I had been hoping for something like the timeline and statistics in the article on the Gävle Goat (you really should go look at that, especially the wonderful table at the end), since all they would have to do is copy Punxsutawney's own records. But no, they cleaned the weirdness out of it (presumably it was "not encyclopedic") and failed to put the summary in a table. Darn. At least we learn that, by one calculation, Phil is correct a stunning 39% of the time. Unless the calculations were overly screwy, after 115 years, that's probably significant, right?
The poll in my last post produced the results that I expected -- people mostly went with the third option -- but I don't know if that's a result of how I phrased the question.
faerieboots came up with an example that I think neatly encapsulates what I was looking for, and I wish I had had it before posting the poll: I was looking for the difference between asking whether people are safe drivers in general, and whether you treat that car right there as if it were driven by a safe driver. Not as a matter of precaution or defensive driving or what you think you ought to do, but how you would treat random specific people if you weren't thinking too much about it.
So, for example, you might say "sure, driving is very safe" but in reality act as if all other drivers are completely crazy (e.g. that car right there has its turn signal on -- how much will you act like you trust that?), and in that case you would trust humanity in general more than identifiable individuals. The important thing there, which I think is something faerieboots said I was unclear about, is that I'm asking about situations where you don't know any special facts about the person in question, but they are a real person you can point to. I was trying to get at how you treat other people by default, not what you come up with by going down your friends list and averaging.
Not sure if that changes anyone's idea of what I was trying to get at -- feel free to go change your answer if you feel compelled to do so (but I totally don't expect you to care that much).
I feel like a lot of people I know tend to have very little faith in People, or Humanity in general, but are pretty willing to give the benefit of the doubt to individual humans they meet. Maybe I'm wrong, and most of my friends are really the other way around? Or neither? I'm curious whether this is something I can get at in a poll, and have been meaning to try for ages now.
When I say faith in Humanity as a whole, I mean things like "people are basically good", "yes we will get a human on Mars some day", "in a few hundred years, most of today's problems will be long gone and hard to explain", "everything will pretty much be okay because humanity will work stuff out". That kind of thing. This is about people as a group.
Faith in individuals is how much do you trust specific people, maybe especially people you don't know much about -- how much are you emotionally or intellectually able to say "this random person is more likely than not to do the right thing, or to be nice to me, or be my friend", or "unless I have some specific reason to doubt them personally, I would trust this person with XYZ". The same applies to friends where you have limited actual knowledge about what they will do in a given situation. This also applies to specific people even if they are anonymous.
[EDIT: faerieboots came up with an example that very neatly captures the distinction I had in mind: It's the difference between asking whether people are safe drivers in general, and whether you treat that car right there as if it were a safe driver. Not just as a matter of precaution or defensive driving, but at a sort of gut level.]
Note that this is about balance -- you can be a total cynic who thinks everyone is evil and should die, or you can love everyone, and still come out pretty balanced on this metric. Imagine scales, not a graph with one or two axes. I think trying to measure each axis separately would be much harder.
There are a couple of things I suspect these tendencies might correlate with, but I'll refrain from speculate wildly until after the poll:
Yes, I expect you to quibble with the poll question. This is the Internet -- you're practically obligated to quibble.
trust humanity and individuals about the same? (Again, this is regardless of degree of trust -- you can still pick this if you trust both a lot or not at all.)
8(21.1%)
trust individuals more than humanity as a whole?
18(47.4%)
not see one of the above three options that jumps out at you as obviously correct for you?
4(10.5%)
I expect lots of people will pick option 4. This is a purely subjective, "how do you see yourself" poll. Answer the way you think you actually are, not how you think other people would answer or how you think you should be. I have no idea whether any of the options is the "sane" one, so I won't judge you.
So, not only are the strawberries being passionate, but they want to make sure everyone knows about it?
So I ask whether, maybe, there is some group of people like furries, except with fruit, who like to dress up as strawberries or something, read graphic novels about anthropomorphized fruit, and go to cons to meet with like-minded people. gee_tar, unsurprisingly, had no idea.
Now, we didn't think to try this at the time, but a Google search -- with quotes -- of the form "sexy ______ costume", where the _____ is some fruit or vegetable, appears to reliably turn up examples (I gave up after "broccoli"). But, at least to my untrained eye, none of those really have the feel of costumes you would wear to a con for people who are specifically interested in anthropomorphized fruits and vegetables.
In any case, my question sent gee_tar on a wild goose chase across the Internet to discover what you called furries (or an analogue of them), who were interested in anthropomorphized fruit, or more generally just plants. This resulted in failure. My attempt to repeat the experiment likewise resulted in failure. But, but, this is the Internet, right? I'm just missing some obvious search term, right? It must exist, and there must be a widely-accepted word for it!
If you would like to satisfy my curiosity while wasting an awful lot of time learning things you maybe did not want to know, your mission is clear -- go find that word!
In the case of fruit, my first idea would be "drupeys"[*], but that would require too much explaining and is also underinclusive.
This article about the Iowa caucuses turned up in my Google news "Elections" section. Normally I would not have clicked on it, save for the headline:
"Two Iowa conservative leaders pick Rick Santorum, ask other candidates to merge"
The "other candidates", in this case, are Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann. If you are like me, you will have two reactions to this, in quick succession:
"Wait, you mean form up like Voltron?", and "OMG Santorum/Perry/Bachmann 3-way fanfic OMG!"
No?
Bonus grammatically-odd Santorum quote, in response to the endorsements the article refers to:
"I think it shows that we’re the candidate right now that has the momentum, that has the message that’s resonating to the people of Iowa."
I realize many candidates refer to themselves as "we" to make themselves seem like part of a movement that is sweeping them along or something -- Bachmann does the same thing in a quote later in that article, even. I just think Santorum managed to produce a particularly twitch-inducing line there.
I have been seeing some links to a state constitutional amendment currently proposed in Mississippi. As you can probably guess, the lack of links to original texts drives me up the wall. Here's what I found, cross-posted from a comment:
Time to find the actual text of the amendment -- under three minutes. (I spent much more time writing this comment.)
“Be it Enacted by the People of the State of Mississippi: SECTION 1. Article III of the constitution of the state of Mississippi is hearby amended BY THE ADDITION OF A NEW SECTION TO READ: Section 33. Person defined. As used in this Article III of the state constitution, “The term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.”
What I learned from this exercise:
- Not only does the amendment do what your sources report it does, but it also applies to human clones. Working theory: The State of Mississippi is planning on making an army of clones. Alternatively, the bill was written by lobbyists for would-be evil overlords.
- The amendment appears to be circular, because "human being" is not defined. Working theory: No clue. Bad drafting?
- The text of the amendment can only be reached through the legislature's site by those who know enough to try correcting backslashes in URLs to forward slashes. Working theory: the site was coded by hand by someone who does not know the difference.
leora linked to a site called "Not Always Right", which is a collection of stories from various customer service situations. Some of them involve customers who are obviously confused about reality in some fundamental way, some are reports of things that had to have been pranks, some are regular people making stupid errors, some are people getting angry about things other people do not ordinarily get angry about, and some have the customers doing things that are just baffling. But there is this whole category (not an official tag or anything, just by my reckoning) that amounts to "customer asks stupid question."
I'm going to invent an example so that no one gets bogged down into fights over the details of a real one, where we don't actually know enough facts to make sense of it:
[at a fast food place]
Customer: Can I get a hamburger with cheese on it?
Me: You mean a cheeseburger?
Customer: Is that the same thing?
And you will get countless variations on that, like "Does it have meat in it?" and so on, put forth as examples of stupid customers. Another kind that comes up is variations on customers failing to treat signs, websites, phone messages, and the like as reliable sources of information. You can find your own examples in a few minutes, if you care.
I'm not so sure "stupid" is a helpful characterization here. A lot of the stories on Not Always Right make perfect sense if the customer thinks the company they are dealing with is completely insane and unpredictable. Now, the cynical reply to this is that surely, they have come to expect the world to be insane because they are too ignorant or stupid to make sense of the world, and so their expectations are constantly violated. In turn, one response is that if you are very familiar with something, like, say, the product you are selling, you won't necessarily know what aspects of it will confuse other people (this is why games have play-testers, for instance).
Personally, dealing with my food allergies means I ask a lot of questions that come off as annoyingly obvious to someone who already knows about the food they are selling, and that also seem like the wrong questions to friends who know about my allergies but not about my past experiences with restaurants. So I can easily see myself being the "annoying customer" in a lot of the stories! (This is why I found the site unsettling enough to bother posting about.)
I think, at least in the culture I live in, people assume they know too much about each other, and furthermore assume that society would grind to a halt if they didn't know as much about each other as they think they do. Personally I think one right question here is "Why are so many people so emotionally brittle that they are upset by the mere idea of the confusing, unknown, or unknowable?" But, in the absence of specific data to look at so that we are all talking about the same thing, it's all kind of a big abstract topic that people Fight About Pointlessly On The Internet, which I do not actually wish to encourage. :P
1. contradictacat and I saw a raven in the Fells. Like, a real one, that was enormous and said "kruk" and everything. My bird book doesn't show them coming south of New Hampshire or west of, say, Springfield, but on the map it says "range expanding southward" (one old bird guide says everyone assumes ravens used to live around here and were driven out, but no one can really prove it). At any rate I look forward to them reproducing in vast numbers, hanging around Davis Square begging for handouts, and saying "kruk" a lot.
2. Squirrels don't chase laser pointers. They don't even notice them.
3. derspatchel, who is sort of an animal, can sleep straight through "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima" being played at full volume one room over. The cat, however, absolutely hates it. derspatchel suggested trying him with other things. The results of further research into feline responses to classical music will be duly reported.
4. I accidentally left the screen open on the living room window for a while, and remarked to nurrynur that it seemed like everything was okay, since the apartment wasn't now Full of Squirrels. She and I got into a dispute over how easy it would be to actually get a squirrel into the apartment. I asserted it would be absolutely trivial, and threatened to try some time. (I also asserted that the cat would probably enjoy watching it, but would be too lazy to actually chase it if the squirrel was coming to him instead of the other way around.) nurrynur pointed out that the apartment was big enough that I could probably lose a squirrel in it (with the implication being that this was undesirable). For some reason I found this hilariously funny.
I recently learned that the results of the Somerville Tree Survey are online, and went to check them out. The site the city chose to host the data does a very, very nice job of presenting everything, although most browsers won't be able to use all the features.
There are a few things I don't think it does well, though, including getting a handle on overall biodiversity, which trees are native, which are invasives, and so on. I decided to play around with the data myself a little, and am sharing it here before sending it to my alderman, or whoever else I think of.
"Indeed, it’s doubtful that any further sliding down the slippery slope would be necessary to get to polyamory: unlike the novelty of same-sex marriage, the polygamous version of polyamory has been widely practiced throughout history (and is therefore arguably up the slope from same-sex marriage)."
This isn't a slippery slope argument. Is there a name for it?
UPDATE, taken from comments:
In comments, docstrange gives the not-colorful but helpfully clear answer of calling it "a non-sequitur with an unstated (and false) premise." He goes on:
"Sort of thus: Since poly marriage is historically non-novel, any progress that takes us to historically-novel forms of marriage would necessitate it.
(Unstated premise: historically novel forms of a social institution will include any historically non-novel forms)."
That looks like exactly the right answer from a logic standpoint.
I still want a nice metaphorical name, though.
Restated metaphorically, it's not about how slippery the slope is, but what slope, if any, we are on at all. So, how about "Phantasmal Slope"? Landscape metaphors seem idiomatic, but "Imaginary Landscape" won't do, since that's the one where gay marriage leads to poly people all owning lots of record players.
Summary: I'm looking for advice on back-up strategies. If you do not feel like being opinionated about computers on the Internet today, you may safely skip everything below. :)
I have been getting less and less able to keep disk space free on my MacBook, and need to start doing drastic archiving so I can do stuff like install updates. Mostly I have used DVDs, but my CD/DVD drive is dead. I have an external hard drive -- from my last laptop, since it was miraculously the only part of it that survived me spilling tea on it. But the external hard drive is pretty full too, and there is only so much tar-ing and gzip-ing I can do of things I don't need to get at anytime soon before reaching a point of diminishing returns.
So anyway, yesterday I went into Costco, and got a reminder that the world was, in fact, insane. At Costco, for $50, you can get a 3-pck of 8Gb flash drives. For $100, you can get a 2Tb external hard drive. This is not quite a sign of the impending apocalypse, but it's certainly puzzling!
My first computer was an Apple IIgs -- bought around 88-89 -- which had something like a whole Mb of memory and no hard drive at all. My current laptop has a 100Gb drive (the analogous model today starts with a 500Gb drive). As far as I can tell, cost of storage is increasingly related to the type of storage, and increasingly less related to the capacity. Huh.
The trouble with a hard drive is it's a single point of failure. Flash thumb drives might not be cost-effective. Tape drives are really expensive.
Replacing the optical drive is iffy in terms of benefit, since my laptop is getting to the place where further repairs might not be worth it: aside from the optical drive being dead, the hard drive is smallish relative to the stupid things I try to store on it, the memory is limited to to 2Gb, and one of the two cooling fans is dead, leaving me at risk for catastrophic failure should the other one go. I could afford a new one, and sooner or later I will have to (preferably before it bursts into flame), but I really hate being wasteful with that sort of thing.
I do not need a back-up medium I can retrieve from easily or often. I just want data preservation at least as good as CDs (i.e. middling, but good for 5-10 years at least, if kept safe in my filing cabinet). What am I backing up? Lots of photos, occasionally my music library, mail, a bunch of text files.
Question: Is the following controversial among anyone whose opinions I might possibly care about? [Edit: By this I mean "any of you people reading this" and not anything complicated.]
. . . the only rational conclusion to draw is that an industry which can have an accident at the extreme top of its possible internationally agreed accident scale without killing a single person is already so safe that it probably deserves to relax its costly precautions quite a lot – rather than having them cranked up yet further, as seems all too likely.
If nuclear were allowed to be as dangerous as gas – that is, perhaps somewhere in the region of 400 times as dangerous in terms of deaths per terawatt-hour – there can be little doubt that electricity would become extremely cheap, maybe indeed too cheap to bother metering it for most users. Waste could be dealt with and supplies extended by many times by simply reprocessing fuel, something which the fearmongers have already managed to ban in many countries.
That would not only mean realistic prospects of low-to-zero carbon emissions: it would also mean no need to much care about the opinions of various unsavoury regimes around the world, or to funnel revenue to them to spend on weapons. Cheap nuclear energy would hugely boost economic performance. It would also offer effectively unlimited fresh water supplies, and realistic options for space travel beyond low Earth orbit.
Some of us at least are getting a bit sick of the idea that you simply aren't allowed to tell frightened people quite bluntly to act their age – and we're getting more than just a bit sick of irrational or unscrupulous fairytale-spinners making them frightened in the first place.
Lewis Page, in an article at The Register that even I would describe as "snarky".
Background: Overhearing kdsorceress explaining that couples looking for a "hot bi babe" for a triad are sometimes said to be looking for a "unicorn", depending on the specificity and unrealisticness of their requirements.
Here's how I imagine this must go in terms of personal ads:
Are you our unicorn? We'll be your faerie prince and princess, and ride you into the sunset.
Kinky ponyamorous couple seeks unicorn. Kicking and biting are okay, but must be housebroken. Please be parasite-free and up-to-date on your shots.
Nice poly couple seeks narwhal to perform in our "nature documentaries". We will protect you from Japanese research vessels. Must be willing to move from the arctic.
Elite private school seeks unicorn to live on our grounds. Come frolic in our "Forbidden Forest"! You will primarily be looked after by a nine-foot-tall hairy man, but children will be sent to you for "detention" when they have been naughty.
Dark Lord seeks unicorn for blood play. Must accept my unusually close relationship with my partner; we are a package deal.
Notes:
- nurrynur is responsible for several things here, including the bit about the nine-foot-tall hairy man and for introducing me to the term "ponyamory".
- I advise you against seeking further explanation of "ponyamory".
- In the Harry Potter universe, unicorn blood has healing properties. Several unicorns were killed by the villain while he was possessing a teacher at Harry's school.
- The narwhal bit is partially inspired by the Jules Verne-themed Google logo the other day, which had some narwhals in it.
- nurrynur asked me how they would keep the narwhal, and I suggested they would have a narwhal enclosure outdoors, like aquariums sometimes do with seals and sea lions. nurrynur remarked that "narwhal enclosure" sounded like a piece of hardware ("my car was rattling -- they said my narwhal enclosure is shot and needs replacing"; "damnit, I love my MacBook, but the narwhal enclosure keeps overheating"). "Enclose the Narwhal" is a square dance call, but you don't learn it until C-4, after you are already solid on "Enclose the Unicorn" and "Narwhal Circulate".
Slashdot links to an article on Ars Technica about a California Court of Appeals case, in which a subscription based porn site sued an advertising supported site and its advertisers, alleging various causes of action along the lines of unfair competition. There are some legal aspects of this case that I find interesting, and which the articles didn't quite get into.
