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March 30th, 2008
06:13 pm - House: we can has one now
Ten weeks after renovations started, we finally have a house. Some things remain un done, but that is due on the one hand, to scew-ups with our plumbing order (order an elongated, raised-height toilet, get one that is neither, then the manufacturer insists that they did send exactly what we ordered; order a sink and have it delivered without the necessary mounting hardware), on the other hand to the weather, which was like this for all of February and the first half of March (that door is 2 feet above ground level):
and on the gripping hand, to a few modest miscommunications about our special requirements, such as the need to have the back stairs land on a concrete pad that in turn becomes perfectly flush with the existing driveway, because after she's away from the handrails, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) morgan_dhu cannot handle even a tiny step up or down.
( Shall we take a brief tour, then? )
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March 29th, 2008
07:27 pm - House: Interlude 2 (the right contractor)
Back in November and December, when we were interviewing contractors and then trying to decide which one to hire, my parents had lots of advice for us. Speaking from their position of having done home renovations in rural New York and also in rural Michigan, they felt qualified to tell us not only how much a renovation in metropolitan Ontario would cost ("$50,000 will be plenty!"), but also how, no matter who we hired, no matter how high their reputation or how glowing their recommendations, any contractor we hired would not finish on time ("you need to put a late penalty fee in the contract"), would not work steadily at the project ("He's not going to be there every day"), and would leave a mess behind when he was done ("You'll want to hire a maid service afterward"). They were adamant that I would have to approach our relationship with the contractor in an adversarial frame of mind, making sure, for example, not just to request that workers not smoke in our house, but to put such a requirement in the contract.
In this, as in so many other things, my parents don't know nearly as much as they think they do. Counting everything, the renovation is costing us around $80,000, and the scramble to shake loose the necessary funds (thanks to the parental fecklessness in which they promised things and then clawed them back later) continues. I'd say that on the revised finish date, Shawn was about 99% done, and most of the things not yet finished were beyond his control (eg, we were delivered the wrong toilet, and the sink did not come with all the required parts; the weather had been continuously below zero for weeks, forcing work on the deck to be put off to the very last minute; minor miscommunications about our requirements for the concrete pad leading to the deck also created a couple of extra days of work for him). Aside from the bureaucratic interregnum, Shawn or his crew or his subcontractors were there every working day. Most of Shawn's crew don't smoke, and those that do are chippers who smoke one cigarette a day, after lunch, and (by Shawn's policy) only outside. And not only have they consistently cleaned up after themselves throughout the renovation, when Shawn and his brother finally cleared out all their tools and supplies on Friday the 28th of march (only 4 days late, BTW), they left the house all-but spotless.
Before I talk about the other ways in which Shawn was one of the right people to hire (as opposed to whoever my parents hired who gave them such a negative attitude toward the whole class of contractors),
A Disclaimer If you found this page via Google and are thinking of hiring Shawn Morren to work on your house, please note: morgan_dhu needed a chemically safe, handicapped accessible place to live. We bought the house, and then discovered that the inspector had been wrong, and we had knob and tube everywhere. To make matters worse, my parents then reneged on part of their promises to help us pay for the necessary accessibility renovations. Shawn, like all contractors, has two kinds of clients -- those who can afford what they want, and those, like us, who can just barely scrape together enough for what they need. Shawn went out of his way to cut us some special breaks and did some work for us pro bono, but he made it clear that he was doing so because of our dire situation, and that he doesn't do that for everyone. [end disclaimer]
( More reasons why Shawn rocks behind the jump )
One final note: there's good contractors, and then there's all around good people. On that note, the other day, I learned that Shawn's monster 4-seat pickup is not just his business car, but his only car; he keeps carseats for his two young children in the back. And he makes a point of always fueling the truck with biodiesel.
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02:08 pm - House: finishing
After the incredibly annoying bureaucratic delays discussed previously, Shawn and his team began making rapid progress.
( ETA: Sorry, I forgot to insert a jump here )
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March 21st, 2008
04:59 pm - House: bureaucracy
I am not doing very well with keeping these progress reports up-to-date. Here it is March 21st and our story has been stalled back in January for close to two months. It has to be told, however, so that our RL friends, who have been asking, can be given some kind of idea of How Things Have Gone.
So, we very quickly went from demolition to framing, followed by a period of getting all new wiring, ducting, and plumbing. Things proceeded swimmingly for about three weeks. Then Shawn started trying to get the inspector to come over to look at the structure and the plumbing rough-in. There was some urgency to this, as he had a long-scheduled vacation coming up, and he wanted to have a pass in hand so his lieutenant could start putting up the drywall in his absence. And now let me present you with a little timeline: ( there is too much, I will sum up )
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March 4th, 2008
11:12 am - House: interlude 1 (out with the old)
Less than two weeks into the renovation, Shawn called me: ( The telephone conversation went something like this )
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10:22 am - House: framing
In our last episode, we learned that Shawn and his crew are very efficient at tearing things down. Considering how much practice Shawn got at destroying things on the Holmes on Homes show, this is not surprising. On January 15, after only three or four days of work, the garage, basement ceiling, bathroom, and various walls were gone.
( It turns out destruction isn't the only thing they are fast at )
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January 18th, 2008
05:51 pm - House: destruction
So we hired Shawn based on his detailed estimate, with the understanding he would be able to start on January 14th. We asked our draftsperson to finish the drawings so we could get permits. Then the solstice and year end holidays happened. Finally, the drawings were ready, and Shawn found the time to turn his estimate into a formal quote. Last week, I obtained permits, Shawn obtained an electrician's quote and got a plumber to scope the drains.
( then the fun began )
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12:28 pm - House: before
So, as morgan_dhu has chronicled, after 4 months of searching, looking at hundreds of listings and touring at least 50 houses in person, we finally found a decent-sized bungalow in a transit-accessible neighbourhood that we could afford that was in acceptable condition. If that seems a long time to look, recall that 90% of bungalows are small tiny things, because if the original buyer of such a place had the money for a roomy house, then they would have bought a standard 2 storey house instead.
We were lucky that the owner (a 98 year old woman who had finally decided to move into assisted living) was in a terrible hurry to sell and did not leave the house on the market for long, which enabled us to be the only people making an offer by their deadline for considering offers. So we got the house for, I am told, 30k less than what other houses in similar condition in the neighbourhood are going for.
( many more photos below the jump )
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September 29th, 2007
02:11 pm - TV copies from the wrong comics, again
Many feminists wiser than I have commented at length about Heroes, and how the series suffers from the same sexism and lack of non-cookie-cutter female characters that permeates modern superhero comics. I am sure many of those bloggers have already noted that, in last week's premiere, the first new female character for this season -- Lethal Guatemalan Girl -- is essentially a darker skinned version of Multiple Personality Girl from last season -- both have awesome powers not fully within their control, which manifest only when they allow their darker nature to take over (said darker nature then calmly and amorally solves the problem at hand by killing lots of people).
That said, yesterday I caught up on reading Steven Grant's column, and then wandered into the living room where morgan_dhu was watching the series premiere of Moonlight, a cheap knock-off of "Forever Knight" which seemed to have no faith in the interestingness of its basic premise -- it wasn't enough that he's a vampire private eye and she's a journalist and together they solve supernatural crimes. No, he also had to be the detective who was hired to track her down years ago when evil vampires kidnapped her when she was a young girl. I had seen and complained to morgan_dhu about this recent trend of new TV shows loading down each character with enough angst, secrets, mysterious pasts and unlikely coincidences to fully flesh out three or four characters before.
The new Bionic Woman is another prime example: Jamie Summers has a mysterious past (sealed juvenile court records), a lost pregnancy, a delinquent hacker sister, a creepy stalker boyfriend she is too stupid to dump, and a nemesis who wants to kill her for mysterious reasons. It used to be that TV shows would either stick to a very simple backstory (A crew of men and women explore deep space in the future; a ranch family deals with the trials and tribulations of life in the old west), or else they built up a complex mythos slowly over time (X-files, Buffy, Forever Knight, Highlander) -- for instance, I think Moonlight managed to rip off a full season's worth of worldbuilding on Forever Knight into a single 42 minute show.
This time, however, the annoying stupid TV writers collided in my feeble brain with something Steven Grant said recently:
A problem is that the pressures of the market have encouraged a lot of publishers and editors to confuse gimmicks (a badge that exists mainly to set a project apart from other projects) with hooks (elements specifically calculated to arrest a reader's attention and make him want to buy/read the book). It's not surprising the talent pool has become confused about it as well. The desire is strong for material that at least on the surface seems to have something that allows it to bob above the vast ocean of identikit comics out there now, but desire and desperation are easy to confuse, and desperation tends to allow people to talk themselves into believing something that's not true is true, and a lot of missteps get made that way.
I think this has become unfortunately true of TV writing as well. And I think I know why (or at least one why - see endnote for a second why), but it's a complicated multipart why.
1, The huge proliferation of TV stations and TV shows, has made the demand for writers much greater, which in turn has meant that there aren't enough high quality writers to go around. (NB:the problem in comics is quite different, and has more to do with comics creators being increasingly drawn from the tiny shrinking pool of comics fans, instead of from the world of professional writers as a whole).
2, Those writers being hired to do TV today grew up in a society where the typical "avid reader" goes through only five to nine books a year. Which means most of that evergrowing group of writers getting work in TV are not readers; they draw their inspiration, their concepts of storytelling, and their intuitive knowledge of how narrative works, not primarily from full length books (novels, plays, epic poems, sagas, etc), but from movies, TV, comics, and video games.
3, Novels (read that as shorthand for novels, plays, epic poems, sagas, and other long-form narratives) are long. They can display the full range of storytelling possibilities. Movies, TV, comics, and video games are all short: like short stories, they have to use short cuts to tell their stories, and cannot display the full range of storytelling -- stuff inevitably gets truncated, abridged, or left out.
4, If you mistake the abbreviated, abridged form for the complete thing, you get a distorted idea of how it worked. Archaeologists looked at the artifacts from early American hunting camps and concluded that the late ice-age Clovis culture had killed off all of North America's large indigenous wildlife in an orgy of hunting. They forgot that what they were seeing were hunting camps, not full-blown settlements; so naturally there weren't all that many seeds and plant harvesting tools alongside the bones and spearpoints. And then ideas of Pre-columbian origins went down the completely wrong path for 30 or 40 years.
5, The same goes for writing: today's crop of TV writers has formed their ideas of how to tell stories based on comic books and other TV shows, instead of novels. So, instead of understanding, at an intuitive level, why TV shows have certain traits, they just assume that those traits constitute the essence of TV writing... and the result is an endless succession of shows that are bad, poorly constructed and poorly conceived, with characters who come across more as a collection of pitch points (gimmicks in Steven Grant's terms) than as real, believable characters.
Endnote: The above is an intrinsic explanation for a lot of the bad writing that I've seen proliferating on TV of late. A second, extrinsic explanation has to do with pitches. As studios have tried more and more to take the risk out of their business (because they don't understand that all creative industries are inherently and unavoidably crap shoots -- 90% of your products will not sell, and there's no way to predict what 10% will prove popular ahead of time), they have started micromanaging the creative process more and more. At the same time, they are working longer and longer hours, in the grand American delusion that quantity of work is the same as quality. So they no longer have time to even read a proper executive summary of the series ideas they are micromanaging. Instead, they base their decisions on pitch points -- so writers are forced to convey not just the overall concept of the show, but everything about the show in the form of pitches -- 30 seconds worth of talking, or 3 sentences of writing.
Add the two together and I think you've got a pretty good explanation for why TV shows these days seem to want to burden their characters with huge, complex, overwrought backstories, instead of keeping things simple.
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May 12th, 2007
09:10 pm - Men who read romance novels
OK, I was wrong, maybe sorta: according to the Romance Writers of America's market research survey (https://www.rwanational.org/eweb/docs/05MarketResearch.pdf), in 2005 22% of romance readers are male, compared to 7% in 2002. Demographics were ascertained by Corona Research of Denver, Colorado, using telephone surveys and focus groups. "Romance readers" are defined as those who agree that they have read what they would consider a "romance novel" in the past year.
This page: http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6284835.html says the survey is of 1,200 respondents, but no data on whether that is the total sample or the subsample of romance readers. Assuming it's the subsample of romance readers, then the margin of error is only around 3 points, so, assuming the question asked was the same, they're measuring a real increase in males who read something called "romance novels."
I remain firm in my conviction that those men are not reading Harlequin romances. Either the spike in popularity of supernatural romance novels (he's type A-; she's undead. Can they ever manage to get together?) is drawing in men who are reading it for the supernatural stuff, despite the romantic content... or the publishing industry is trying to sell more books by labeling more things as "romances" that aren't, really, in an attempt to sell their books to hard-core romance readers (who buy more books per year than the rest of the book reading public combined, but only if they're labeled as "romance")
[ETA: I've revised this post to reflect my discussion of the news story with morgan_dhu, who is smarter than I am and also wise in the ways of statistical surveys. The thought that the definition of romance is being changed is hers]
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/growf/dwaggins/surprised.gif) surprised
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03:17 pm - Gendered genres and girls who read comics
Johanna Draper Carlson insists that superhero comics aren't for girls, that they are as much of a male-oriented genre as action movies are, in direct contrast to such female-exclusive genres as romance novels (these are her examples, not mine). Joanna has made this argument before (repeatedly), mainly in response to blog entries by feminist comic fans who she feels are being young and foolish when they agitate for Marvel and DC to become more female-friendly.
Her post has provoked some heated dissents in the comments, and a number of angry rebuttals in the blogverse of feminist superhero comics fans, both direct and indirect.
The ensuing internet tempest caused me to do a bit of thinking. In brief, I think Carlson is half-wrong. First, she is incorrect to equate action movies and romance as examples of gendered genres; the two are not equivalent. And by doing that, she stepped into the minefield, because there's a world of difference between saying superhero comics are uninteresting to girls the way romances are uninteresting to boys, and saying that superhero comics are not targeted at girls the way action films are targeted at boys.
(I'm going to natter on for a while about gendered genres; we'll get back to superhero comics eventually.)( Action, Soap, Romance, and Porn )
So, getting back to superhero comics: when Carlson says "superhero comics are for boys" does she mean that women find the superhero genre intrinsically uninteresting (like romances are uninteresting to boys), or does she mean that superhero comics are, accidentally or intentionally, marketed to boys, (like action movies are)?
The numerous feminist comic bloggers who have disagreed so vehemently with Carlson mostly appear to have read Carlson as saying hero comics are intrinsically uninteresting to girls. I think what she meant to say was merely that hero comics are not marketed to girls. Maybe not; her failure to credit the vast difference between the (mostly male) action flick and the (exclusively female) romance makes it hard to tell. Since Carlson has already trotted out the "I have a graduate degree in this subject, so I cannot be incorrect" internet flamewar trope, there's not much use asking her (there have been no Nazi or Hitler sightings yet, so as flamewars go it's pretty mild).
I think it's quite clear that there is nothing intrinsic to superheroes that make them "for boys." There are numerous manga and anime titles that are targeted at and widely enjoyed by girls which are, in essence, superhero stories (Sailor Moon, for example). And there have been several superhero-themed TV shows with large female audiences (Heroes, Smallville, etc).
On the other hand, superhero comics today are, I think, clearly marketed to boys, and not to girls -- a brief glance at the way women are portrayed in many comic book collectables or a glance at how women are often portrayed on the covers of comics shows that to be the case.
So, the next question is, are they marketed to boys like action movies are -- designed with males in mind, but at the same time being careful to not actively drive away the minority female audience -- or are they marketed to boys the way prick-centric porn is -- by cultivating an air of active hostility to women readers?
Back in the 60's and 70's, Marvel and DC tried to hit all the bases -- they published horror comics, humour comics, and romance comics in addition to a variety of action-adventure comics (war, western and SF as well as superhero stories). Most of the action-adventure comics published during the silver age continued to suffer from the "blood-curdling masculinity" that William Moulton Marston complained about in the 40's. They were designed to appeal to boys; there was no mushy stuff to be found, and female characters were few and far between. But at the same time (sticking to DC because I don't know enough about other publishers) a look at 60's Wonder Woman, Lois Lane or Supergirl comics reveals stories about women with whom girls could identify, dealing with plots and themes that they would not find alienating. Trina Robbins argues, based on circumstantial evidence, that Wonder Woman, at least, was read by at least as many girls as boys.
So I would say that while DC in the 60 and 70's's knew that boys were the main buyers of their action-adventure comics, they also knew that they had a significant minority of girl readers (nobody knows how many), and were careful to, on the one hand, provide comics (including hero comics) that those readers would particularly enjoy (Wonder Woman, etc), and on the other hand, to not do things in their comics in general that would actively drive what girl readers they had away.
Today, DC knows that about 10% of their readers are girls (Carlson posted the results of an internal survey done in 1995), which I would call a significant minority; 10% lost sales is enough to make heads roll in any company. But DC today doesn't seem to give a flying fuck about their female readership, and often instead appears to be doing its best to drive that readership away, not only with the kinds of comic covers and merchandise I linked above, but also with boneheaded editorial cluelessness, and a corporate culture that either encourages or tolerates misogynistic, frat-boy attitudes on the parts of its creators and editorial staff.
So, basically, over the past few decades, DC has been moving from an action-film model of marketing to boys (welcome what girl readers you get, be open to having them), to a prick-centric porn model (strengthen the attachment of boys to your product by driving the girls away). Which is hardly sound marketing practice, and hardly good for the boys whose attitudes towards women it poisons, or for the girls who are told "you aren't welcome." And that's why I think Carlson's griping about feminist comic geeks who agitate against such misogyny in superhero comics, and in favour of making superhero comics more friendly to women, is horribly wrongheaded.
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March 24th, 2007
05:05 pm - James Tiptree, high society girl
I've just finished "James Tiptree, Jr: the double life of Alice B Sheldon," by Julie Phillips. It's a terrific book, which tells a very sad story.
It's a biography, though, and aside from speculating the Alice suffered from a mild form of bipolar disorder (where the highs stop short of paranoid mania, but the lows as just as lethally low), the author avoids drawing conclusions about the social sources of Alli's emotional troubles and torments. So let's do that, shall we?
Alice Sheldon was an example of the tragic kind of person best described as an "intense artist": lots of "emo," lots of sturm und drang, plus setting impossibly high standards for oneself. She desperately wanted to paint, to write masterpieces... but every time she set brush to canvas or pen to paper, the result wasn't as good as the idea in her head, and fell far short of her exacting standards of accomplishment, so she gave up on painting, and gave up on writing, too, until late in life she found that she could write by pretending to herself that it was only SF, it wasn't serious, it wasn't Literature or Her Life's Work, and what's more, she wasn't writing it anyway, it was the work of her male alter ego, a mask she wore that enabled her to write without worrying about whether what she wrote was good enough.
She was also, by orientation, a stone butch lesbian, a woman who desired women but didn't feel comfortable being a woman herself. The sort of butch who, today, would at least consider taking testosterone and transitioning to male:
My god in so far as I am an artist I can wish for women beautiful women women women with soft asses (arses to you) and breasts goddamn I want to ram myself into a crazy soft woman and come, come, spend, come, make her pregnant Jesus to be a man to come in coming flesh I love women I will never be happy. [p. 85, from a note probably scribbled while drunk]
And here is the tragedy: she was born to wealthy parents who (when they weren't taking her with them on African safaris) brought her up as a high society girl in the 20's and 30's. High society, as in conspicuous consumption wedded to noblesse oblige; for a woman, it meant (and still means, for some) wearing silk gloves while handing out charity, total selflessness and self-sacrifice without ever dropping the mask of gentility and reserve.
And I think it was that total mismatch, between her reserved, genteel high society upbringing, and her "intense artist" personality, between the extremely restrictive role she had to play as a debutante and socialite, and her inner nature as a queer: this mismatch was, I think, what prevented her from ever claiming her writerly voice in her own person. Once she started writing as Tiptree, that same upbringing made it impossible for her to drop the facade and tell the truth. Tiptree could acknowlege his pain, his anger, and talk about them, at least a little, in correspondence; could access them, and incorporate them into stories. Alli Sheldon could not; she had to stay on her pedestal, keep her gloves on while giving herself to others until she had nothing left.
So I guess the tragedy of Alice Sheldon, from one side, is the tragedy of someone who imbibed the lessons of femininity too well. And from the other side, the tragedy of all women brought up in the culture of high society, of debutantes and evening gown charity balls.
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December 11th, 2006
04:42 pm - I sense a lack of parity
Via the 8th blog carnival of Feminist SF and Fantasy, we have Cnet's list of the Top ten Nerds and Geeks (ten men, naturally), and their belated followup of the Top ten girl geeks.
The reordered list of (boy) nerds and geeks (and what they did):
Steve Wozniac (co-founder of Apple)
Alan Turing (cryptographer, invented the first computer)
Bill Gates (founder of Microsoft)
Charles Babbage (19th century designer of mechanical computing calculator)
Linus Torvalds (founder of Linux OS)
John Von Neuman (mathematician, atomic physicist, early computer designer)
Nicola Tesla (inventor of alternating current)
Rob Malda (founder of the website Slashdot)
Heath Robinson (cartoonist who draws Rube Goldberg contraptions)
Diogenes (ancient Greek philosopher)
Cnet offers no definition offered of what it is that makes someone a geek, but clearly you have to be either a famous computing pioneer (the first six above), an electrical engineering pioneer (Tesla), or someone who is famous/cool/has lots of fanboys because of their connection to cool websites/interesting gadgets/reputation for being smart and eccentric (Diogenes allegedly lived in a barrel).
And now for the girl geeks:
Ada Byron (collaborator with Babbage on mechanical computer)
Grace Hopper (early computer designer and programmer)
Marie Curie (physicist, discoverer of polonium and radium)
Rosalind Franklin (biochemist, uncredited co-discoverer of the structure of DNA)
Aleks Krotoski (journalist, expert in online communities)
Valentina Tereshkova (first female cosmonaut)
Mary Shelly (early science fiction author)
Daryl Hannah (movie actor)
Paris Hilton (celebrity without discernible talent)
Lisa Simpson (cartoon character)
WTF? I'd take a wild-assed guess that the list of girl geeks was not based on nominations by Cnet's readers. Instead of seven pioneers of computing/science/engineering and three other people, we have two pioneers of computing, two nobel-winning or should-have-won scientists, and six other people.
If Rob Malda belongs on the boy list, I guess Aleks Krotoski can belong on the girl list (both are internet celebrities). If you're going to dig up Diogenes and prop him up as an early geek, then I guess Mary Shelly might as well be similarly honored, but I really don't see what either of them is doing on the list at all. Valentina Tereshkova is a hero and role model, but a geek? Daryl Hannah might belong on the list of top male geek masturbatory fantasies, but I don't see how playing a sex-toy android in Blade Runner and designing board games puts her on the same plane as Grace Hopper or Rosalind Franklin.
Naturally, calling Paris Hilton a geek is an insult to geeks everywhere.
And evidently, from the testosterone-laden "no gurlz allowd" treehouse where the editors of Cnet spend their time, women are so invisible that they are unable to come up with a tenth female person to put on their list, so they put Lisa Simpson on instead.
Since the Cnet boys have obviously are unable to see women (like Steven Colbert can't see black people?), perhaps we should do them a favour: nominate a list of real top female geeks, "geek" being defined as: famous or ought-to-be-famous computer designers, computer programmers, engineers, or scientists.
( My nominations )
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November 18th, 2006
07:59 pm - Torture begins at home
Some time back, morgan_dhu asked how it could be that Americans were not engaging in mass protests in response to the news that their government was flouting international law and giving itself permission to torture anyone they deemed to be an "enemy combatant." Maybe the answer is that inurement to torture starts at home.
On Wednesday evening, UCLA Campus police were called in to ask Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a student, to leave the library. Library use at UCLA late in the evening is evidently restricted to students with ID only, and Tabatabainejad did not have his ID with him. He wouldn't leave when asked by Library staff, so they called in the campus cops.
The campus cops arrived as Tabatabainejad was walking out the door (evidently his refusal to leave earlier had been only temporary). The campus cops tried to escort him out, putting their hands on him. He didn't like having them touch him, and by the time the Youtube video begins, he was screaming at at them, "don't touch me." At that point, the cops tasered him and put handcuffs on him. Then, in front of a growing crowd of students brought to the scene by Tabatabainejad's screams of agony, they told him to stand up, and when he did not stand up (quite possibly at that point he could not stand up), they tasered him again, at least two more times, once when he was at the top of a staircase, causing him to fall down the stairs.
The cops also threatened to taser a student bystander after the bystander demanded to be told their badge numbers.
You can't see much on this camera phone video, but you can clearly hear the entire incident, including officers telling the student "stand up, or we'll taser you again" and threatening the student demanding badge numbers.
Here's a comprehensive write-up, including the account of the bystander who was threatened for asking to be told badge numbers. And here's the student newspaper's account.
Almost certainly race was a factor in this; on the one hand, Tabatabainejad might have felt he was being treated differently than a white student would be treated, and responded by refusing to cooperate; on the other hand, library staff and campus cops might have interpreted his response as hostile or threatening not because it was but because he was not white.
One thing I take away from this and other stories of inappropriate taser use, is that while using a taser on someone is an act of violence, an assault, cops and security guards don't treat it that way: I've gotten the impression that they are much more likely to Taser someone than they are to hit them with a nightstick. It's the same fallacy that morons in the Bush Administration have applied to torture: they claim that something isn't that bad, it's not really assault/not really torture, and then use that lie to justify policies that encourage the casual use of assault and torture.
Nightsticks are physical: the wielder has to swing the stick, hard, and when they hit someone they feel the impact. With a taser, you just push a button and watch the person fall down. It seems less brutal, cleaner, and so the campus police felt it was OK to use it on Tabatabainejad repeatedly. Waterboarding doesn't raise bruises or draw blood, so Dick Cheney can claim that it's "really" torture. Sorry Dick, sorry campus cops, but it doesn't work that way. Torture is torture, and assault is assault, whether it's clean or dirty.
[ETA: I've deleted an unreadably unformatted anonymous comment by someone who pasted in an "email this to everyone you know" petition to take tasers away from the UCLA campus cops. Hello anonymous, you are a boneheaded idiot for not realizing that I am not a student and do not live anywhere near LA.]
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/growf/dwaggins/angry.gif) infuriated
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November 17th, 2006
06:33 pm - SF Books meme and sexist SF fanboys
The Science Fiction book club's "Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953-2002":
[Bold: I've read it.
Italic: started but lost interest/never finished.
Asterisk: loved it at the time.
Two asterisks: love it still.
Strikethrough: did not enjoy it then, OR would rather have my eyes plucked out than have to read it again.]
1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien **
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov *
3. Dune, Frank Herbert *
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein ** (it's a love-hate relationship)
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin **
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke *
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury *
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr. **
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov *
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison *
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams **
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice (But I've read other Vamp books by Rice, hence the strike through)
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin **
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut *
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein ** (see above re: love-hate relationship)
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer
Well, it's pretty clear this list was drawn up by a member of the "no gurlz allowed" branch of SF fandom. I mean, really, Terry "talentless hack" Brooks' "Tolkien Puree of Shanarra" qualifies among the "50 most influential" but nothing by James Tiptree does? Give me a break!
(And the same could be said of JK Rowling: yes, she's sold a zillion books, but I don't think she has been "influential" in the same way as Heinlein or James Tiptree.)
Blatantly omitted authors/works (same key as above, maybe not be super-famous, but all have been far, far more influential on the field than Terry fucking Brooks with his Crapstorm of Shanarra drivel):
James Tiptree: Brightness Falls from The Air, and/or Warm Worlds and Otherwise **
Russ: The Female Man **
Octavia Butler: Xenogenesis Trilogy
Tanith Lee: The Flat Earth Series **
Suzy McKee Charnas: Walk to the End of the World & Sequels ** (the series has a name now, but I forget it)
Lois McMaster Bujold: Miles Vorkosigan Series
Chelsia Quinn Yarbro: Saint-Germain series
Vonda McIntyre: DreamSnake **
Neil Gaiman (just about anything he's written) **
John Varley: The Ophiuchi Hotline **
Peter S Beagle: The Last Unicorn *
Current Mood: aggravated
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May 24th, 2006
07:06 pm - All your computers are belong to us now
Background: when morgan_dhu's employer set her up with VPN so that she could work from home, the company IT guy was very firm: we could not install a software firewall on the work computer, and we could not put the work computer behind a router. The reasons didn't make much sense to us, but it was their computer, so they got to make the rules (she was also told that due to licensing issues, she could not install Mozilla on her work machine -- no seriously).
So we paid the cable company an extra $20 per month for 2 extra IP addresses so we could connect all our computers to the internet using a hub, instead of a router. And ever since then, the work machine has been naked to the internet, totally unprotected save for the frail figleaves provided by Norton Antivirus and Windows Update.
Since that time, all of the tech support and IT people at the company have been replaced with new people. The new people have a somewhat different philosophy than the old people: for instance, it is now permitted to install Firefox on one's work computer.
For a couple of years, we had one IP for each machine (my computer, morgan_dhu's computer, and her work computer) and they were all connected to the cable modem with a hub. Our personal computers were and still are protected by software firewalls; in addition, a few months ago, I decided I was tired of sending ridiculous amounts of money to the cable company each month, and bought a router. That enabled me to cancel one of the two extra IP addresses. So for the past few months, we had connected our personal computers to the router, and connected the router and the work computer to a hub, which connected to the cable modem. Yes, there was an unholy mess of cables behind the desk; we suspect the cables of developing their own form of intelligence and plotting world domination.
So, anyway, this afternoon, morgan_dhu started experiencing weirdness on her work machine. The mouse started moving around by itself, downloading a file, installing something, clicking past some kind of "are you sure you want to install this thing" warning, and the like. In short, it had been taken over by some kind of remote control software, and someone out there was merrily installing their little rootkit on it. The only question, really, is why it took so freaking long (unless of course it had been suborned years ago and only today the hacker had the bad judgement to start doing stuff when she happened to be using it).
Once we realised what was happening, I pulled the power plug on the computer, unplugged its Ethernet cable, and then we called the tech support at morgan_dhu's company. One of the first things he asked me to do was to plug the work machine into our router, enable VPN on the router, and reboot the work machine so that it would connect to the corporate network through the router.
Then he let me through several rounds of trying to find the freaking rootkit, to no avail. Ad-aware found zilch, msconfig.exe found zilch, and after he said goodbye, I downloaded a "rootkit revealer" from sysinternals.com, and that found zilch. Reviewing running processes also revealed nothing that didn't seem to belong. So Morgan's work computer is probably still suborned. Fortunately it's only turned on about 8 to 12 hours a day, so while it may be part of a zombie farm (although I'd think zombie farmers would really prefer to take over machines that are left on around the clock), it's at least not a very efficient zombie.
On the upside, we can now save ourselves another $10 a month by cancelling all the extra IPs and just going with basic highspeed service. We can also cut back the cable forest behind Morgan's desk, from "enough to stretch to the moon" to merely "enough to stretch around the block."
Advertisment: Anybody who can help me figure out where the rootkit/remote control malware is hiding on morgan_dhu's work machine may claim a lightly used 4 port linksys hub, free.
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February 20th, 2006
08:57 pm - Who needs intelligent design?
Lately I've been slowly making my way though "How the Leopard changed its spots" by Brian Goodwin. It's an anti-reductionist book, showing how organisms cannot be reduced to mere containers of their genes (pace Dawkins). Interesting but rather dense, I've been reading it a few pages at a time.
The point of this post, however, is one of the really neat organisms that Goodwin picks as an example:
Meet Acetabularia acetabulum, a species of sexually reproducing single celled algae found in the Mediterranean.
That's right, single celled, sexually reproductive -- each of those little parasols is a single cell, consisting of a "root" base that attaches to the rock, a stalk 3 to 5 centimeters long, and a parasol about half a centimeter in diameter. The parasol is the reproductive part, which releases hundreds of flagellum-bearing haploid gametes. A patch of Acetabularia will release their gametes all at once; when two gametes meet up in the water, they fuse into a diploid zygote, attach to a rock, and grow a new stalk and parasol.
It turns out A. Acetabulum is not the biggest species of acetabularia; A. major, found in the waters around Hawaii, grows 10 centimeters long.
Acetabularia have been around for almost 500 million years, but today they're not very common because multicellular seaweed is able to outcompete them in most marine habitats. That's because a good designer would never have tried to make a macroscopic, 5 or 10 centimeter long plant out of a single celled organism. Fortunately for lovers of the unusual and wonderful, life on earth was not designed but rather evolved, scattershot and happenstance, with half-assed rube goldberg designs like panda's thumbs and giant single celled algae.
In closing, another picture:
These acetabularia are growing in an aquarium. They look greener because the water is softer; they're whitish in the first picture due to calcium buildup.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/growf/dwaggins/up.gif) Intrigued
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October 26th, 2005
09:50 pm - Computers in Hollywood, 70's edition
Suppose it's 1977. You're writing for a TV show and you want to show how technologically up to date your villain of the week is, so you decide that in an opening scene he's reading a book on his computer.Do you arrange for a TRS-80 to be placed on the set, have it load up some Lorem Ipsum on its copy of Wordstar, and show him reading that? Of course not. Don't be silly. Instead, you make arrangements with the opticals department, and have them do this: 
The pages on the screen get turned by an invisible hand. And then, after some chit-chat establishing that the villain, who is a page at a glance reader, only has a few more pages to go, you show this:
And now, the villain, who is telekinetic as well, picks up the remote control to turn off his computer:
(Screen captures from Wonder Woman season 3, episode 12, "Gault's Brain.")
Pretty snazzy for the era of CP/M, Wordstar, and monochrome CRT's in your choice of green or amber, don't you think?
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October 19th, 2005
04:05 pm - As the UK becomes a police state, George Orwell spins in his grave
Two articles, second one excerpted. I know there isn't any viable party in the UK other than Labour right now, but how much more of this is it going to take to force a change of party leadership?
http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/hampshire/southampton/news/SOTON_NEWS_NEWS0.html
M-way photos fall foul
by Ushma Mistry
A HAMPSHIRE student was stopped and warned by police under new anti-terror laws - for taking pictures of the M3.
Matthew Curtis had been gathering images for the website of a design company where he works part-time when he was stopped, searched and cautioned.
The 21-year-old was told that he was in a "vulnerable area" as he snapped pictures of the M3 and was made to account for his actions before he was issued with a warning and told not to do it again.
Officers, who had quoted the Prevention of Terrorism Act, today apologised for causing concern but say they were just being vigilant.
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,17909-1829289,00.html
Two wheels: good. Two legs: terrorist suspect
By David Lister, Scotland Correspondent
WITH her year-round tan, long blonde hair and designer clothes, Sally Cameron does not look like a threat to national security.
But the 34-year-old property developer has joined the ranks of Britain’s most unlikely terrorist suspects after being held for hours for trespassing on a cycle path.
Ms Cameron was being hailed yesterday as Scotland’s answer to Walter Wolfgang, the 82-year-old heckler manhandled out of the Labour Party conference last month. She was arrested under the Terrorism Act for walking along a cycle path in the harbour area of Dundee.
[snip]
Keith Berry, the harbour master at Forth Ports Dundee, said yesterday that Ms Cameron had been seen as a “security risk”. Speaking about the incident, which took place in May, he said: “We contacted the police in regards to this matter because the woman was in a secure area which forbids people walking. It was seen as a security risk. We were following guidelines in requirement with the port security plan set up by the Government.”
A spokesman for Forth Ports said: “We will robustly prosecute anyone who breaches these new security measures because they have been introduced by the Government and we are obliged to enforce them.”
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October 9th, 2005
05:25 pm - Dialect and accent in novels
Suzette Haden Elgin (ozarque) posted about her use of dialect in her blog, saying that what she posts is written in Ozark English. One anonymous reader responded that what Suzette posts didn't seem to be written in dialect, saying "When I think of dialect use in books, I think of something more like the character Joseph in Wuthering Heights, whose dialog is a chore to decode."
Suzette answered, in part, that "the characters in my Ozark Trilogy speak Urban Ozark, and I don't think reading that dialog is troublesome in the way that reading Joseph's dialog in Wuthering Heights is troublesome -- but I had to fight my copy-editors for every single "would of" and "could of" and "should of" from beginning to end."
Which caused me to think about the difference between dialect as portrayed in most 19th century novels, and dialect as portrayed in contemporary novels.
The difference between dialect in a novel like Wuthering Heights and dialect in Elgin's novels is that WH tried to represent the subtle phonetics of a dialect. Elgin's novels (wisely, I think) ignore most of the phonetics and instead focus on the syntactical differences. Possibly that's why the anonymous poster didn't think Elgin's books were written in dialect: "dialect" means to them "dialog with creative misspellings and lots of odd contractions."
The 18th and 19th century authors who first started using phonetic spellings and abundant contractions to represent dialect in dialog were nearly all well educated middle or upper class Standard English speakers. They tried very hard to represent exactly how they heard their servants talking in a way that their fellow middle and upper class readers would recognize as authentic. But nearly always, they didn't understand the dialectical rules being used by the people whose speech they were trying to convey. They interpreted what they heard not as a legitimate dialect but as "the way poor uneducated people who don't know better talk."
So on the one hand, these middle and upper class authors only heard those features of the lower class or regional dialect which were most obviously different from the Standard English of the time. On the other hand, they heard, and took pains to represent in detail, a lot of trivial differences in accent and pronunciation which, while spectacularly colorful, were not key features of the dialect.
And so we get passages like this (opening Wuthering Heights at random, this is from chapter 13, Joseph speaking):
"Gooid Lord! [...] If they's tuh be fresh ortherings -- just when Aw getten used tuh two maisters, if Aw mun hev a mistress set o'er my heead, it's loike time tuh be flitting. Aw never did think tuh say t'day ut Aw mud lave th' owld place -- but Aw daht it's nigh at hend!"
It's difficult for me as a reader to figure out what Joseph is saying because I have to spend so much time parsing his pronunciation. The fact that his rural Yorkshire speech also uses a different grammar than Catherine's Standard English gets lost along the way. I don't remember WH well enough to say if that alternative grammar is represented in a consistent way, but I doubt it. Unfortunately, representing the speech of poor or uneducated people like this became a rigid convention, so much so that even writers who were native speakers of a dialect ended up portraying that dialect in the same way upper class writers would.
For instance, Zora Neale Hurston. As a trained anthropologist, she probably had an excellent analytical understanding of the dialect of poor Southern Black people, and she was also definitely a native speaker of that dialect. Here's a bit at random from "Their Eyes Were Watching God," chapter 6 (Joe speaking):
You'se Mrs. Mayor Starks, Janie. I god, Ah can't see what uh woman uh yo' sability would want tuh be treasurin' all dat gum-grease from folks dat don't even own de house dey sleep in. 'Tain't no earthly use. They's jus' some puny humans playin' round de toes uh Time.
It's hard to convey the feel in just a brief quote, but reading the novel, you do get a sense that Hurston's characters don't just talk with an accent that's hard to read, they also use a different grammar, one with clear and consistent rules.
Because this way of conveying dialect has been so overused by upper class authors who are looking down their noses at how poor uneducated peons talk, it has also become a conventional way of connoting that a character is uneducated or stupid. So, thankfully, today writers who know a non-standard dialect no longer feel constrained to represent that dialect phonetically. Here's something at random from Nalo Hopkinson's "Brown Girl in the Ring" (chapter 5, Ti-Jeanne's grandmother talking):
"And so? Ain't you done left he already? Best thing you ever do. Live here with me and give your baby a good home. You could help me more with the healing and so. I go teach you what you need to know. For if Prince of Cemetery decide to ride you again before your head ready, I 'fraid you go go mad for true."
Hopkinson doesn't try to convey Mani's pronunciation except in one or two key places. As a reader, instead of having to spend my time figuring out what the hell is being said, or puzzling out how the character speaks their words, I can instead get a clear sense of what the character sounds like.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/growf/dwaggins/idea.gif) scholarly
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