Maybe Never and Maybe Tomorrow

In Case of Internet

2011-06-09T15:29:00.002-05:00

Darlings, I am relocating to Tanzania starting Monday. On the off chance that I have internet, posting will continue (under a pseudonym my relatives are already familiar with) at http://tzcoffee.blogspot.com/ on a possibly regular basis, but don't count on it.

Sayonara!

Of the Day's Annoyances These

2011-06-08T10:08:00.000-05:00

I have a problem that I feel bad even calling it a problem much less complaining about it. I have too many people wanting to have social events with me before I leave. This means I am loved so it should not be a problem. Except I am stressed out and already over scheduled for the weekend. I do have time, technically, it is just that I have reached a point where all I want to do is spend that time watching Battlestar Galactica with a big bowl of chocolate ice cream into the which I have mixed peanut butter. In addition to stress and shows, I also have menstrually related agonizing pain, because God hates women. So I'm looking at things on the internet. We have:

Ada Lovelace in graphic novel form! I am so going to start twittering on a fan.

A long, well-written, and terribly thought-provoking essay on sexual harassment in swing and blues dancing. As a social dancer who stopped dancing largely because I spent all my time being upset and angry about the groping but never actually did anything about it, I am part of this problem.

Some people are very artistic about recycling.

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of it's furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

--Rumi

The Continuing Wisdom of a Friend

2011-06-05T10:31:00.000-05:00

A dear friend of mine who hails from China once asked me why abortion is such a big deal in the U.S. I didn't exactly know then, and I certainly don't know now. My employer is a wonderful woman, she's also a type of Christian I respect, i.e., the type who doesn't go to church and studies and thinks about religion on her own. She tries hard not to ever say anything nasty about anyone or be judgmental, which is generally more than I can say about myself. However, she has a 6 month old puppy who may be pregnant, and she does not believe in abortion. Period.

Let's review for a moment. Gestation, parturition, and lactation, are bad for the body. Even when everything goes perfectly (and the reproductive system is highly prone to failure) and the body is very healthy, reproduction is really bad for the body. Internal gestation is a temporary parasitism, and at best requires an tremendous and unhealthy drain of resources along with a forced and uncomfortable rearrangement of internal organs as the growing uterus squishes everything in its path. A still growing puppy does not need to be pregnant. An organism has only x amount of time to grow, and the body's resources need to be used for growth and development during that time in order for such to happen as successfully as possible. Trying to both grow and gestate at the same time is not going to be good for an immature puppy. If the gestation is successful (which is a doubtful prospect for such a young mother) the puppies may suffer problems due to a poor uterine environment followed by poor quality milk, while the mother may suffer problems due to being pregnant at 6 months and then trying to lactate as well. Producing milk in the body is not exactly energy efficient. Then, of course, there is the question of what to do with puppies, since the owner of the mother puppy is neither rich nor inclined to take on more dogs.

Generally, the argument goes that abortion is bad because God. However, if one assumes God, then assuming that such an unhealthy and failure prone system as mammalian reproduction is somehow sacred in the eyes of God, this assumption leads invariably to the conclusion that God holds a special and sadistic hatred for female and immature organisms. Acknowledging the problems of reproduction and deciding that it is not cost-effective to try to save some particular fetus or groups thereof may be a heart-aching decision, but the unfortunate reality of the situation is that there is nothing simple, easy, or safe about bringing (at least mammalian) offspring into the world. The pregnant puppy will get older and be better equipped to have puppies, and she will still have plenty of follicles left to develop into fertilizable ova. If, however, she has puppies now, she may be hurt, and may very well not be able to successfully have the puppies anyway.

If, however, her puppies are not aborted, I pray that this will be one of the occasions in which mother and babies both will be perfectly fine and the babies will be able to find good homes. This does happen, but it doesn't seem a gamble worth making when better odds can be obtained by only attempting gestation a little later in life.

So really, what is the big deal about abortion?

People Online are not Necessarily either Thoughtful or Mature

2011-06-03T12:47:00.000-05:00

I realize this is not exactly breaking news. Mostly, I want to complain about facebook hacking. Not the type that turns people into spambots, nor yet the kind that requires any actual skill or knowledge, but the kind in which people take advantage of others' failures to log out of public computers and then alter the victims' profile in order to imply that the victim is of a different stance on matters sexual than had been heretofore known.

Lyingly outing a friend as sexually promiscuous or homosexual is funny to people over the age of 6, apparently. I'm not sure if it's funny because such sexual behaviours are bad and perverted so no one would ever really engage in them, or if it's funny because people who are actually more sexually promiscuous than they are supposed to be or homosexual are running a nontrivial risk of shaming and persecution (including but not limited to murder) upon discovery.

I have a soft spot for hackers, I really do. Under certain circumstances. I think the type that displays an actual knowledge of and skill using computing devices is interesting. I think the type that does creative things without causing any harm is funny. Breaking into the NSA's website and covering the homepage with duckies would be amusing and non-harmful. Breaking into my facebook and changing my profile picture to that of a teletubby would be amusing and non-harmful. Taking advantage of someone's negligence to mock a persecuted minority is neither interesting nor amusing and reinforces certain harmful tendencies in society.

Word for Wednesday: Petard

2011-06-01T07:48:00.000-05:00

An explosive device used in warfare. More generically any explosive device. Has been known to misfire and hurt the owners of the device, leading to the idiomatic expression "to be hoisted by one's own petard," meaning to be hurt by one's own weapon. Origin 1590-1600 from the French peter coming from the Latin pedere, meaning "to break wind."

I Would that

2011-05-30T20:21:00.000-05:00

Eyes were red only from the smoke of celebratory bonfires.

Sleepless nights came only from wild sex.

Love never led to sorrow.

Won't Someone Think of the Fetuses?

2011-05-26T20:59:00.000-05:00

Recently, I was in a conversation with a Christian-type who is currently attending one of the Christian Colleges that was on the list of Approved Colleges to Send Your Children so They Won't Turn Liberal and Go to Hell at the church I attended growing up (we had an annual Christian College day with a sermon that was equal parts "we are so awesome for doing this" and "if your child goes to a secular school, Hell will be but a step away." Not exaggerating). I did not exactly mean to be speaking with this person, it was a Facebook conversation with a friend and a friend of the friend felt a need to inform me that biologists and physicists spend all their time in labs looking for some grand unifying theory (this I know would be news to my friend who studies light and my cousin who cuts the toes off frogs) and everyone including Donald Trump, Sarah Palin and Stephen Hawking should be more humble.

Such grand insulting and misunderstanding of science is one of the 108 secret reasons I stopped going to church.

This person later went on to announce that no one thought of the fetuses in abortion debates, (this I suspect would be news to the protesters commonly found harassing people around clinics), and he was going to speak for the fetuses. One wonders if a requirement for humility is somehow compatible with the self-aggrandizing announcement that one is the only person who thinks to speak for a group of entities which, conveniently enough, can never actually disagree with any of their self-elected spokespeople.

Word for Wednesday: Quietus

2011-05-25T09:22:00.000-05:00

A finishing stroke, a release from life. Killing. Origin: 1530-1540, from Latin quietus, from which also comes quiet and quit. Usage: The unhappy suicide gave a quietus to his torment and entered the hush of the grave.

An Astute Observation

2011-05-20T08:30:00.000-05:00

I just finished Warriors in Undress by F. J. Huddleston. I think I may love the author madly. It's not just that I am a sucker for an old book with those thick pages of uneven lengths, it is also that I am pantingly attracted to a delightful turn of phrase. Add snarky gossip about people who have been dead for years, and I will make for you the Cheesecake of Love. Of course, the book is from 1926, which means that to the author, women are not worth even grammatical consideration and are baggages in the lives of great commanders. Alas for my love! The author, however, loves books far more than people of any gender, and remarks, astutely, that one of the great advantages of books over people is that "one may shut up a dull book, but it is difficult to shut up a dull fellow." Bravo!

Etiquette versus Selflessness

2011-05-19T17:53:00.000-05:00

It is the tiresome sort of person who insists that etiquette and manners are all about putting another person's comfort ahead of one's own. That would be virtue, not etiquette. Virtue is optional for life, etiquette is not. Etiquette is the set of generally agreed upon rules for negotiating the awkwardness of a world filled with people who say and do all sorts of things. The person with courtesy and decorum is the person who refrains from saying anything unflattering about another person's appearance in public. The person with virtue does not judge another person based on appearance. There may very little public distinction visible between the virtuous person and the person with courtesy and decorum, and that is as far as any with either virtue or courtesy get to speculate. Where the difference becomes obvious is in the pursuit of quarrels. It might be the path of virtue to turn the other cheek,* but it is the path of etiquette that the cheek must be struck with the side of the glove opposite the side with the buttons, i.e., a backhand strike.

*Sometimes. It depends on the blow, really. Some battles really are worth the fight.

Word for Wednesday: Anacoluthon

2011-05-18T09:09:00.000-05:00

A construction involving a break in a grammatical sequence. Example: that party was just--Oh sweet Dijkstra! Origin: 1700-1710 from the Greek anakolouthon [not following]. Usage (from F.J. Huddleston's excellent Warriors in Undress):

But it was a Minister, not a permanent official, who, when his private secretary (let us call him the Hon. Harry Highbrow, afterwards Lord I'amtoadd) casually remarked that he had discovered an anacoluthon in a recently received dispatch, exclaimed with horror and dismay depicted on his noble and intelligent countenance, "Good God! Did you kill it?"

The Unnatural too is Natural

2011-05-17T06:12:00.000-05:00

Once more with feeling: natural does not imply value or virtue, neither does unnatural imply an absence thereof. The polio virus is natural, the polio vaccine is not. I am a huge fan of the latter in that I will never have to suffer the former. (I recently realized that a child I work with has been vaccinated against the chicken pox. One less disease that the succeeding generations must suffer! Science for the win!) The appendix is neither good nor bad, it's just a vestigial cecum. It's there. Sometimes it becomes home to bacteria, which is bad for the host, but good for the bacteria. While I would never suggest that a parasite has the right to the body of the host organism, I don't want to say that we are more special than bacteria. Granted, they are in our gut rather than the other way around, but it's not really our fault that we have mitochondria (which really are more special than we are) and other membrane-bound organelles such that we can grow multi-cellularly. But because we are the host organism, we do get to kill prokaryotes in our vestigial cecums despite the unnaturalness of it all. Anyway, please stop telling me food is good because it's natural or homosexuality is bad because it's unnatural. Nature is not a reason for or against anything.

Word for Wednesday: Flense

2011-05-11T16:14:00.000-05:00

To skin or remove both skin and blubber. First used as a whaling term. Origin: 1805-1815 from the Dutch flensen. Usage: had Captain Ahab succeeded in capturing the Great White Whale he would have flensed it and left most of the carcass to rot. See the incredibly long and boring discussion of whaling at the beginning of Moby Dick which is the first and foremost reason why I have never made it very far through the novel.

My Regularly Scheduled Panic

2011-05-10T08:57:00.011-05:00

I am deploying for Peace Corps Service in Tanzania on June 13, about a month from now. Recently, one of my coworkers who is madly in love with me but whom I find tiresome (he talks to my cleavage and brags that he has worn nothing but jeans and boots since the age of seven) asked me why I was even bothering to try to learn Swahili, after all, won't I have a translator assigned to me?

Umm, no. Sense of entitlement, much? Of course, am I any better? Really, what do I think I'm doing? I'm a spoiled U.S. kid who can't imagine life without running water or electricity, much less the internet. I don't speak Swahili (I'm working on it, and I'll get training, but I am not good at languages. Really, I am quite bad. I'm supposed to teach computer literacy, quite possibly without actual computers, and I don't use the typical Microsoft or Apple products (free software and Gnu/Linux for the WIN!), and I don't know how to explain my typical method of working computers: just try stuff until something happens, and if that fails, ask almighty Google. Except Almighty Google will probably be unavailable.

Be calm. Other volunteers have had these problems. I will have their experiences to draw on. But still, fears.

Also, I supposedly will be getting more detailed information 4-6 weeks before departure, which should be approximately now-ish, but I haven't received this yet! I am being forced by filial guilt to pay a visit to my annoying grandmother this week and she will demand details that I don't know because interrogations are her style and she will be in a flurry of cloying "what is the child doing?!" rhetorical questions and dear sweet Stallman's Beard someone please pass me the rum. Which I can't drink around my grandmother because Sin.

If anyone needs me, I will be quietly stewing in anxiety.

Sexual Harassment is Not Part of my Job

2011-05-09T17:42:00.000-05:00

I love my job. I work at a Renaissance Festival, and I love love love it. Insert hearts and exclamation points, because, really, it's great. I get to dress people up in pretty clothes and see them smile, I get to watch milling throngs of people dressed as everything from monks (with real shaved tonsures! Bravo fair lad!) to dark elves. I take breaks to watch men on horseback hit one another with long sticks, I dance for some of the musicians, I have several fanboys who wave and beg me to shimmy when I walk past, and I am one of the lucky workers who has shade and breeze and a place to sit down. Not to mention the rum and tequila we keep in the back of the shop.
There are, however, problems. I am not talking so much about the shoplifter: she was caught, our stuff was returned, and I am consulting my dear friend the security expert (Narcissistic Vulnerability Pimps all) about how one goes about having a credit card which will appear to be valid, enough so to print a receipt and give the thief time to leave and only five minutes later be declined. This is an interesting problem, I think, and I will report ways and means once I hear back from my dear friend the security expert (and Narcissistic Vulnerability Pimp).

I have two main problems with my job. The Festival is Family Friendly (TM), meaning several things. Obviously transgendered persons are refused admittance, because Turing forbid that the non-heteronormative be allowed to participate in highly capitalistic games of make-believe. Taking the money of someone Not Like Me would cause me to clutch strong men in heteronormative ways (I don't clutch pearls.) Gender presentation must match birth genitalia or you don't have rights! Why is genitalia the business of anyone besides that person, that person's healthcare providers, and that person's lovers? Really, why are bodies public property? We should not be so meddlesome.

Being Family Friendly (TM) also means that the women working at the Festival have a requirement to cover their midriffs unless they are working at belly dance related things. The men have no such requirement, but that is because men are never objects of lust, they are the lusting and can show as much skin as they jolly well please. Given that it is hot, most opt for kilts and tiny vests. Their female counterparts, however, must sweat it out, since this is Georgia in May and June.

Most bothersome to me personally is that being Family Friendly seems to mean that sexual harassment is seen as a hazard of the job that no one cares about. Most of the women who work there, myself included, are dressed as scantily as they can get away with due to reasons of character (I am a belly dancer) and weather. See above. This is Georgia in May and June. This means that men will converse with my cleavage, attempt to kiss me, ask for pictures with me and then grab my derrière, and generally act like they are entitled to my body. I have heard similar complaints from other women working there. But we all, myself included, never officially complain about it, because we get paid from tips and from making sales and we cannot alienate the patronage. It's not just a question of alienating the men responsible for the sexual harassment (and, yes, sometimes women, some women do molest the men in kilts, dear What About teh Menz section of the internets), but it's a matter of knowing that the surrounding populace will likely not support one. If one is dressed in such a manner, what can one expect? Those who complain are likely to be labeled ice queens, bitches, feminazis, or any other word meaning "a woman who does not acquiesce to the sexual advances of any comer." Harassment is also a typical problem for belly dancers at restaurants and clubs, and it is the rare proprietor of the establishment who will take the side of the dancer against a customer. If one is a performing belly dancer, what can one expect, really?

Darlings, women should be treated with courtesy and respect, whether they are wearing zero clothes or fifty. When we accept that all deserve equality and everyone is a person with sexual desires, and no one is merely an object of sexual desire with no agency, it will be a merrier world.

Fantasy for a Feminist

2011-05-05T17:30:00.000-05:00

I do not like Jane Austen. I have read Persuasion, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Pride & Prejudice, as well as seen the four hour BBC version of the last featuring the frilly shirt of Colin Firth. I do not like Jane Austen. I realize that her writing is significantly better than her contemporaries. Compare her characterizations to those of Dumas and there is no question of the superiority of Austen. I realize that she provides a voice to the lives of those who do not have a voice. I realize she is subtly mocking society. I realize that all of her plots being the frakking same is part of that mockery. I realize that feeling trapped in a world of women concerned with marriage and money should teach me compassion for the plight of the actual Jane Austen who could never escape that world. But I do not like Jane Austen. At least Dumas' characters kill stuff and have adventures.

Granted I am not going to look favorably on most plots revolving around marriage. It's a reaction against a childhood spend assuming I had no choice but to get married and being expected to help in the church nursery, where I was treated week after week to a group of women speaking ill of their husbands, who did not ever have to help in the nursery.

There should, however, be nothing wrong with this. I should have a large selection of fiction written by women that doesn't feature marriage and romance as a major plot point, right?

While I'm dreaming, I want a pony.

Lately, I've been reading Tamora Pierce. Sweet YA fantasy about women as knights or guards(police) or mages or whatever. Sometimes, they cross-dress, like the heroines of sweet Handel! They all kick butt, too. They have romance around their lives, as it should be, and it's not all dressed in the trappings of a princess marriage, either. Bekah Cooper sometimes beds young men and sometimes just angsts over whether she is doing romance right, but she gets what she decides she wants without compromising herself or ruining her connections, and it's awesome.

Will Pierce be accepted into the canon beside Austen? Such a thing would be almost an impossibility. But I love her stories, they are nicely written and pleasant, with women that I can love and empathize with in situations I care about it. They all have adventure, danger, and happy endings, and I'll take that over the frilly shirt of Colin Firth any day.

Word for Wednesday: Parsec

2011-05-04T06:14:00.000-05:00

A unit of astronomical measure. One parsec = 3.08568025 × 10¹⁶ meters. Origin: 1913, the distance from the sun to an object which has a parallax angle of one arcsecond. Usage: in Star Wars: A New Hope, Han Solo brags that the Millennium Falcon can make the Kessel run in under 12 parsecs. At first hearing, this sounds inaccurate, as a parsec is a unit of measure, not speed, but making the Kessel run involves maneuvering around The Maw, a collection of black holes. Most pilots leave a great deal of leeway to maintain as much distance between themselves and The Maw as possible, because it's dangerous. That the Falcon can get closer than most is a testimony to her speed, as her inertia has to be great enough to carry her safely past the deadly gravity well of the black holes.

Happy Star Wars Day everyone, May the Fourth be with you!

In Response to News of Death

2011-05-02T07:28:00.000-05:00

Osama bin Laden is dead. People are rejoicing. I'm not sure why. If the war(s), or actually illegal military actions in contravention of the constitutional rule that war can only happen if Congress declares it and the president has 60 and only 60 days for military maneuvers outside of declared war, was going to be over, I would rejoice. As it is, we are barbarically happy over death that changes nothing. One is reminded of the story related by Saa'di in which a king's advisors come to him saying "Rejoice! God has taken the life of your great enemy!" To this the king replied "have you heard by any means that God intendeth to spare me?"

Forsooth.

Dear Women at the Renaissance Faire

2011-04-30T07:05:00.001-05:00

Please stop coming into a belly dance shop and telling me you are fat and could never look like me in a sequined bra. You do not want to look like me, you want to look like yourself. Belly dancers have a story to tell about who they are, and they tell that story using all the parts of their bodies. I do not want to hear your story of wanting to alter your body to meet someone else's expectations. You have lived your entire life in the body you have now, and in that body, you have loved, hated, laughed, cried, and yawned. Your beauty comes from your heart, and it is only the mirror who isn't your friend that will tell you you aren't beautiful. You are star stuff. Contemplate star stuff.

Fact and Fiction

2011-04-29T08:30:00.001-05:00

As concepts go, fiction should not be hard to grasp. Small children play make-believe, usually, even the most literal-minded adolescent is going to have sexual fantasies, even the most boring of adults will dream of what they could do given wealth. To an extent, we cannot not tell stories. As has been demonstrated by spit-brain experiments, there is a part of our consciousness that is constantly explaining our actions and that explanation need not be accurate, it must simply exist. As is well-known, memories are not accessed, they are reconstructed. Thus, every time we remember something, we are telling ourselves once again the stories of our lives, and every time we do we are adding the necessary emotional and whatever outlook we currently have on life. This is a driving force behind consistency bias. The point is that parts of our neural network tell other parts stories at a level below our immediate awareness. This should suggest that storytelling is a natural tendency. Nonetheless, it is startling how many people do not grasp the concept of make-believe. I currently work at a Renaissance Faire, which is wonderfully awesome and I love it. One does sometimes encounter people who do not get the entire concept. Mostly these people are here on Student Days, shipped in on fieldtrips from surrounding schools, annoying children who badger one. Why the fake accent? Why the my lords and my ladies? There is also a certain grounds keeper who thinks me the perfect flower in the meadow of sinful thought, and the poor boy brags that he has never worn anything but jeans and boots since he was seven years of age. (I think years of wearing only one thing is more than enough reason to change, but what do I know?)

My darlings, our lives as we live them are limited. The only way out is to dream of other worlds. Join your fellow dreamers in books and at conventions and fairs. You are not alone in imagining a world that is not this world. We are all the merrier for the dreaming.

Word(s) for Wednesday: of Animals and Other Things

2011-04-27T09:00:00.000-05:00

Sheeplike: ovine
Goatlike: hircine
Horselike: equine
Cowlike: bovine
piglike: porcine
catlike: feline
doglike: canine
deerlike: cervine
fishlike: piscine
godlike: divine
eaglelike: aquiline
falconlike: falconine
swallowlike: hirundine
lionlike: leonine

Magic isn't Magical

2011-04-26T15:10:00.000-05:00

A sometime trope of the fantasy novel is that magic and technology cannot coexist: usually the premise is that magic messes up technology. Fair enough, except this is far too broad and ill-considered. I am willing to accept that magic can mess up electronic things, because anything can mess up electronic things, from rocks to magnets to time to who knows. The things are failure-prone. Toasters particularly as far as I can tell. Why I do not know. How hard can it be to run an electronic current through heating elements arranged on the sides of a metal box? Ovens work on the same principle without failing nearly so often! Anyway, I am willing to say that there is some sort of magical energy in the world or people or all objects that may be manipulated and this can mess with electron flow. However, simply entering a place with such a magical energy should leave most forms of technological things unaffected.

Most things we have are technologically advanced: our clothes for example. There is no reason polyester should fall apart in the presence of magic, and indeed, most authors do not think of modern clothes as technological, even though they are. So let's have some clear technology. Everything in the world is either natural or made using natural ingredients as a base. There is nothing else that can be used to make things. Everything in the universe is a chemical. Everything we have is technology, from the wheel to our pencils. Most things work the way they do because there is no other way to work. Consider the following.

A camera is, at its core, a lens focusing light onto something photosensitive. Digital cameras I will accept not working in a magical universe, but that does not mean a camera couldn't be built in a magical environment. Lenses cannot do other than bend light unless magic makes light somehow fundamentally different. Photosensitive paper is going to react to light because that is what it does. Again, unless light becomes fundamentally different, it will affect the world around it. Clothes will always fade in response to prolonged exposure to sunlight because they are photosensitive. That's how light works. Things respond to light because light is energy.

Likewise, an oxidation reaction is an oxidation reaction. If flint and steel works a gun works. Really. A gun produces a spark which will cause an explosive reaction because that is a property of gunpowder. The bullet is just a projectile launched by a shockwave. Speaking of controlled explosions, there is no reason why an internal combustion engine wouldn't work. When explosions happen near things, those things must move in response to the shock and the pressure differentials.

Getting back to the issue of electronics, magic can, at most, disrupt an electric current. There is no magic that makes sense that would prevent atoms from being structured as they are, and it would be an unlivable world in which electrons cannot flow from a high source to a ground sink. As in, the heart cannot beat without electric signals working as we expect.

In conclusion, saying that magic cannot disrupt technology is far too broad, and fantasy authors need to think carefully through the implications of this.

We are not Wired, and We are not Designed

2011-04-22T09:30:00.001-05:00

Men can't help gazing at women and being sexually aroused by them: they are wired that way. Because we cannot expect men to behave well, we must police women's clothing and behavior. This is the lower left corner on my Feminist Bingo Card(TM). It is dumb for a number of reasons. First of all, because it is a childish excuse used for bad behavior and an argument used for the very nasty game of telling women what to wear. Second, because it insults men by suggesting that they are animals or children, incapable of controlling the urges common to us all. Third, that somehow men's bad behavior is a reason to restrict the rights of women to be able to participate in society as fully as everyone else. Fourth, and most interestingly (to me) it displays a lack of comprehension of the functioning of the human mind.

Not that I know exactly how the human mind works either, but what I do know is that it is not wired, as that would imply some sort of immutably designed pathways and it doesn't work like that. We have a vast, adaptable, and Turing complete neural network: pathways are formed or fall into disuse based on experiences. We are born with many many many connections that are pruned away as we grow older based on the things we do versus the things we don't. Neuroplasticity and synaptic pruning for the win!

We are not "designed" nor does evolution push us toward some "higher" or "better" form. We happened, through luck and pressures, to be the way we are and we will never stop changing until we die.

We may have predispositions, but always remember that we are not either a genotype or an environment alone, we are a phenotype. Men may have a tendency toward sexual objectification, but they have a societal excuse to nurture it. Personally I think that everyone has a tendency toward strong sexual urges, but women are taught that it (and men's bodies) are nasty while everyone is taught that women's bodies=beautiful and are to be looked at.

We are all different, remember that. We all have a different genetic structure and we all grew up differently. We are still the same species so there will be many many similarities, but there is always variation across a species. This is why anecdotes are not data. Life is a distribution, and with too small a sample size there is no way to even guess if we are looking at something near the mean or an outlier.

With all this being said, remember also that natural is neither necessarily inevitable or good. I naturally am a very lazy person yet somehow I have achieved both an advanced degree and bulging biceps. This is, of course, mere anecdata, but we know that we have all overcome natural ignorance to achieve accomplishments in knowledge that combat our flaws and diseases. We can overcome natural things like ignorance and hate, most people manage to overcome lust sufficiently that they can somehow interact with embodied persons. No one who is not demonstrably incapable of functioning in society gets a free pass on behaving towards others with the courtesy and respect to treat them as people rather than sex objects. We are star stuff contemplating star stuff and we are better than that.

The Misery of Employment

2011-04-21T05:43:00.001-05:00

I turned down a job today. A real, actual adult-type job using my scientific training and experience specializing in virtualization technology. I feel privileged guilt over this. A lot of people are having trouble finding work and supporting themselves, and the reason I am turning this down is not because I already have a good job (I work part-time and if I didn't have savings I would qualify for assistance because my income is below the poverty line), nor yet because I don't want to move to California, but because I don't want a real actual adult-type job. Maybe I will eventually, but I want to go into the Peace Corps! I've been thinking about it since undergrad and my misery in grad school pushed me into actually applying in despite of my nervousness, and I have been assigned to a country that's warm and has a pirate problem! So maybe I'm not making money right now, but I like my irresponsible life. I work at a Renaissance festival where I can people watch and see all my geeky friends and go to jousts during my breaks! The tutoring isn't that great, but now that I'm back down to the one kid who actually behaves well and wants to learn, it's fine. Furthermore, I've become an aerialist with sufficient skill that I am seriously considering buying a set of short silks to take with me to Tanzania rig them from a tree. So in other words, I am turning down a good job because I'm currently happy in my geeky poverty and I am leaving it by joining what a dear friend of mine calls the hippie brigade. I'm intending to take a set of aerial silks with me and rig them from a tree. Aerials in Tanzania!

I wouldn't be so twitchy, I suppose, were my father not usually disapproving of things I do that don't make money. In fact, he once told me I shouldn't leave grad school because I would be just as miserable with a real job. This does not reflect well on our view of normal life in the U.S. School is miserable, and then you work a miserable job until you die. Turing preserve us. What good is adulthood if one can't eat ice cream sandwiches for breakfast because you bloody well can now? So the whole point of this post, I think, is that I have very privileged bourgeois guilt.

Happy Judgment Day!

2011-04-20T10:25:00.000-05:00

In the Terminator mythos, today is the anniversary of the day that SkyNet becomes self-aware and sets out to destroy humanity. Celebrate! Smash a computer or make nice to a computer so it won't necessarily hate you. Or just watch Arnold.

Word for Wednesday: Rapparee

2011-04-20T08:57:00.000-05:00

A freebooter or plunderer, particularly the armed Irish highwaymen of the 17th century. Origin: 1680-1690, from the Irish rapairidhe, the plural of rapaire, meaning half-pike. The word is sometimes abbreviated rap, as in the below Secret Garden song. Rapparees are also the Irish guerillas who fought the English during that period.

Universalism

2011-04-18T19:33:00.000-05:00

This is interesting: there do not seem to be many (if any) universal constants underlying language except that languages with grammatical structures exist universally, and really, how significant is that? For all we know gold finches have definite grammar to their language, and they are silly birds.

I wish someone would do a similar statistical study on features of religion looking for universal constants. I suspect, as Joseph Campbell, that there are such, but then I suspected, as Chomsky, that there were such things for language too. On the other hand, religion is less necessary for a gregarious life, and to my knowledge, no other animals exhibit signs of religion, but again, for a good long while, people proudly proclaimed humans as the only tool-users in the animal kingdom, and they were wrong.

What else do all societies develop besides language and religion? Sex customs and/or taboos, some form of alcohol and/or drugs, gender roles with accompanying sexism, what else? Is xenophobia a universal societal trait?

Aerial Silks Show: Cleared!

2011-04-18T08:26:00.000-05:00

I just performed in my first aerial show! I'm awesome!

Mustache: The Plumage of Love!

2011-04-14T09:43:00.001-05:00

To attend a Mozart opera is somewhat akin to being bathed in a sparkling ocean of sound beneath clear stars. This is fortunate, because it means that when da Ponte's plots become too exasperatingly misogynistic, one may close one's eyes and float away in beauty without being overly bothered by how much women are mocked and infantilized.

Cosi fan Tutti, however, is significantly more tolerable than Die Zauberflote, in that the misogyny comes wrapped in a lighthearted Moliere-like farce rather than a self-righteous religious system. In fact, despite the fact that I hate the plot, I really loved the Atlanta Opera's production. Of their entire season, this is the first time they have approached fabulosity. In fact, they could have achieved it with a Dorabella and Fiordiligi who possessed actual stage presence. A costume designer who is not boring would also help significantly. It is all very well to decide to set the opera during World War II, though I would prefer to keep things in their historical context unless there is a very compelling reason not to, but if it must be changed to the 20th century, please channel Bette Davis rather than Teresa Wright.

Bette Davis in The Little Foxes

For all that, the Atlanta Opera departed its normal status of adequate to strive for fabulosity and almost achieved it. They field Jason Hardy as an impressive Don Alfonso, with a slinky contempt for his surroundings and a liquid voice that arrests the mind and pleases the heart.

See what I mean?

Kiera Duffy, singing Despina, steals the show as a sassy maid who steals chocolate, loves her life, mocks everything, and is prepared to be a comic doctor or notary with nasally Latin at a moment's notice. Her voice is nothing special, but her stage presence carries her adequate voice into a superb performance.

As for the principals, always the least interesting part of Cosi fan Tutte, our Ferrando and Guglielmo carry themselves magnificently through the comedic parts, taking poison in style and waving lilies about in the style of dear queer Oscar Wilde. They are largely interchangeable as characters, but we no more demand individualism from them than we would from Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. The hitch in the whole thing comes from our Dorabella and Fiordiligi. They are pretty-voiced, though not spectacularly so, what they lack is any kind of stage presence whatsoever. Normally, I can sit through three hours of Mozart without the aid of the flask I carry in my pretty opera purse (I may have a problem), but the part of the second act that focuses on the ladies' individual reactions to their unexpected suitors got rather boring. Neither of our beautiful ladies can hold the stage by herself. To be fair, I doubt either of their suitors could either, but they aren't expected so to do.

The pity of it all is that the director is trying hard to make this less offensive as a plot, bless him. He seems to be attempting to frame all the lovers as silly people who have never thought of their lovers as people but rather as elevated beings. With Ferrando and Guglielmo's posturing, it almost works. Despite Mozart's intentions, their over the top antics and claims to the godhood of their lover's serves to highlight the untenable hypocrisy of their twin demands to women, to whit, be faithful or be a traitoress vixen, but be soft and yielding to all comers or be a murderously cruel ice queen. The ladies, however, are not up to their more difficult task of maintaining a role of playacting the perfect lovers while in reality being bored ladies who have nothing better to do and are societally forbidden from interacting with men in anything other than an amorous fashion. Particularly since Fiordiligi is also expected to sing heartfelt arias and the switch from the frivolity to the heartfelt happens without any acting from Keri Alkema to make this other than inexplicable. Jennifer Holloway as Dorabella almost pulls off a convincing act, but not quite.

Now it may not be possible to make this not a completely infuriating plot, given that it ends with the ladies begging forgiveness of the men who lied to them and then set out to seduce other women. It doesn't help that Don Alfonso claims that all women are the same and they have an insurmountable nature that men must humor. Nonetheless, this opera is at least a lot of fun and the director is highlighting the fun rather than the misogyny. And with such a wonderful Despina and wonderfully-voiced Don Alfonso, it was well worth my time.

Word(s) for Wednesday: Hennin

2011-04-13T08:20:00.001-05:00

The medieval cone-shaped hats with fluttery things attached to them.

via hatpatterns.com

The Steamy Euphemisms of Alice and Bob

2011-04-10T20:55:00.000-05:00

For reasons I will not go into, I have been sporadically working on a trashy computer-science based romance novel. I have decided to link it here in case anyone is interested. There will also be a link on the sidebar Projects in Progress list. Feel free at any point to send me insults or comments.

Enjoy.

The Obvious News News Channel

2011-04-10T12:51:00.000-05:00

Rape culture is alive and well. Lawrence Krauss, of all people, is cheerfully defending his friend who is accused of raping 13-year-old girls on the grounds that no one asks women for driver's licenses to verify age in intimate situations. Those little 13-yr-old sluts lying to his dear friend about their age! Also, he's a scientist, yo, therefore he is totally credible about this. He has confirmed that he really meant exactly what he said exactly the way it sounded.

Ray Comfort is still an idiot. I tried to listen to all of this, I really did. I think that since I do not mention Mr. Comfort without scorn I should be familiar with his arguments. Once he claimed that you know electricity better from shocking yourself and being in awe of its power than from actually knowing stuff about it and why it is important in the world. Emotion: still more important to Comfort than knowledge.

The Things We Have to Lose: Plumbing

2011-04-08T14:42:00.000-05:00

Back in a simpler day, we had no computers, cell-phones, or toilets that flushed. I also would not have had the right to vote, own property, or not get married back in a simpler time, so I'm very much not in favor of it. I am also not in favor of a world in which only the privileged have access to information; no one should be in the position of being forced to accept whatever knowledge someone else deigns to share.

I am sympathetic to those who claim that too much connectivity is bad. I don't think it is inherently bad in and of itself, and I generally chalk most of this up to change-is-bad fearmongering. It can, however, be stressful, and no one should ever be on-call without respite, as that is unhealthy. I have been known to dispense with both phone and computer for periods of time, and explore the world alone and without a sense of obligation to report my whereabouts and doings. It was nice, but I wouldn't want to do it all the time. I can be quite the gregarious animal, and I like talking about things even as I like solitude. It all depends.

Modern plumbing is another matter. In the U.S. we cannot live without it. Really, we can't. If we have no flushing toilets, we have no where else to dispose of metabolic waste. Really, we don't. At least not in the city. (Or sometimes just not if we are women: in Dublin, Ireland, seeing men urinating against the railings of the river Liffey was not uncommon.) There are many places in the world without flush toilets: Greece, for example. I like flush toilets, I really do. I love them. I also am sometimes forced to realize that when they do not work it sort of ruins your whole life. Your activities come to a crashing halt while you wait for the opportunity to pay someone to wade through the more unpleasant aspects of humanity in order to restore your life to its blissful state of being shielded from those unpleasant aspects. Then you have to clean all the things.

The Romans had the right idea; they had a goddess for their sewer. America, I am told, is a Christian nation, gods forfend. Were this true, I'm not sure we could pray to the Christian god for our sewers, since He has an historically-noted tendency to smite His people for complaining about things like hunger or thirst, so I'd rather have a different God to bother about the toilets.

Better than prayer, however, would be to rely on some plumbing system in which there was a backup plan for failure.

Word for Wednesday: Metastasizing

2011-04-06T08:00:00.000-05:00

Spreading injuriously, as a disease or illness. Origin: 1580-1590, from the Greek metastasis, a changing. Usage: add to insults for bonus fun. You, sir, are a metastasizing indignity.

My Religion that Kills Folk is Better than Your Religion that Kills Folk

2011-04-05T16:35:00.000-05:00

Recently my mother decided she wanted new clothes. She has difficulty finding things that she likes in malls. This is not surprising. She hates wearing skirts, or more accurately, she hates wearing pantyhose. This is understandable. There are hair shirts more comfortable than nylons. She does not, however, feel that she has a choice, as Women Wearing Pants to Church are Liberal. She is, however, familiar with salwar kameez, and regards them as a good compromise, a dress-like thing over comfy pants. I told her about my favorite store, a wonderfully cheap place run by an absolute sweetheart who needs more custom because she is too honest to be a rich merchant. My mother loved the store, had a blast shopping there, and found a number of beautiful clothes. When telling her friends about this cheap store with a proprietress who addresses all her customers as sisters, my mother encountered hostile Christians concerned that she had converted to Islam.

Sigh. The answer to, "I found a wonderful place to shop with all these gorgeous beautiful things" is "I am happy for you!" The wonderful lady who runs this shop extends sisterhood to all comers regardless of religion, we should learn from this.

Unfortunately, it is fashionable to hate Muslims in the U.S. (and Europe). The incident that caused me to inform my parents I was not going to church with them again, even out of politeness and filial guilt, was the Sunday School speech on the evil viciousness of Muslims, Shintoists, and Buddhists. Newt Gingrich, a proud graduate of the Christian College that my parents attended and that is supported by their congregation, is fear-mongering the possibility that the U.S. will be run by atheists and "radical Islamists[sic]," two groups not heretofore known to get along or comprise more than about 15-20% of the population, and not just because there is no such thing as an Islamist.

Then, of course, we have Terry Jones inciting violence so he can paint all Muslims with as violent and irrational. Members of Congress are supporting this racist infantilization of several billion people by trying to make free speech involving blasphemy against Islam illegal. Please note that I consider Terry Jones' actions to be tasteless and in direct contravention of both doves and outreach, but it is still a protected form of speech.

Islam as a religion is not immune to criticism. No religion is. What is not acceptable, however, is people who are devout and uncritical followers of one religion insulting members of other religions for following that religion. That isn't a critical analysis of religion, it is tribalistic xenophobia.

The Fun of Not Worrying about Fitness

2011-04-03T15:30:00.000-05:00

In the U.S., it is fashionable to cultivate a vapid and classist concern for bodily appearance. I call it vapid because beauty comes from the heart, not the mirror, and I call it classist because only those above the poverty line can afford to eat well and take the time to exercise. (As a side note, why do people get upset about the poor using welfare money to buy alcohol? Beer is significantly better nutritionally than insta-ramen.) As a result, everything is about losing weight, and Dijkstra forbid you do something that might be healthy because it's fun without an eye to the health benefits.

Losing weight is also sufficient reason to be clueless and internally inconsistent, apparently. Hence, the large numbers of obnoxiously Christian women that I know engage in yoga. I happen to know they would never countenance attending a religious service of another faith, but it seems to have somehow slipped their attention that yoga is a spiritual practice. They, however, treat another belief as well as their own professed faith with a complete lack of respect by engaging in yoga to lose weight.

I am an aerialist and a professional Middle Eastern dancer. Before that I was a martial artist and an equestrienne. The first reaction I typically get to any of the above is "oh, that's really good exercise." That is an entirely unimportant side effect. The important things about the above are that I love doing them. Treating me as a person who does things entirely or mostly to conform to the unhealthy body image that is the U.S. ideal of beauty is disrespectful both to me and to what I do.

If you are willing to go through the bruises, aches, soreness, and constant hunger of being a serious athlete, along with countless hours of time and money invested, just for a body ideal, you may want to reexamine your life. Then do something that you actually really enjoy, rather than something you do from fear of fat.

Life is to be lived, enjoy the wine and the song in the company of wonderful people. 'Twould be a merrier life.

Thank the Gods of the Dance for Old Women

2011-03-31T08:29:00.000-05:00

I recently attended a belly dance studio show. It was awful. I mean, the dancing, technically, was quite fabulous and crisp. The staging could have been improved, since having someone talk before every act is never not obnoxious. Explanatory notes are what the program is for, darlings. Quit interrupting the flow of the performances and boring us to tears.

The real problem was that all the dancers were young and skinny and depressingly alike. They all wore the same jewelry and applied cosmetics in the same way. And they were all young and skinny. Except for the student groups (who did not even get their names written in the program) who were older and larger, though the very old or large ones were carefully choreographed to the back of the group out of notice. Holy Handel, it was shocking.

Holy Handel, before he completely abandoned his attempt to button his coat.

Holy Handel, after he abandoned his attempt to button his coat.

That dance which is called "belly" though it uses so many more parts of the body than just the belly, this is not what it is about. Where are the old women here? Where are Leila Gamal and Raqia Hassan? This dance is about the dancer and how the dancer feels about being a woman with a woman's body. We all have different stories to tell, and the older women will usually have far more interesting stories, having been around a bit more. Women who are all young with all the same type of body can only tell us one story, and if they are being forced into having that type of body (which I actually know is true, being friends with a troupe member) then they don't even get to tell their story. They are being forced to show someone else's idea of what it is like to have that body.

As Leila Gamal said to me, "the beauty of the dance comes from what you see in your heart, not what you see in the mirror."

Word for Wednesday: Excruciating

2011-03-30T08:32:00.000-05:00

Extremely elaborate or intense, often used to mean extremely intense pain. Origin: 1560-70 from Latin excruciatus [to torment], from cruciare [to crucify].

I'm going to the dentist in about 10 minutes.

All the Better to Judge People with, my Dear

2011-03-28T21:32:00.000-05:00

I am to visit my grandmother before I leave for Tanzania. My motivation is guilt-driven filial piety. This leads to roiling resentment which will destroy the fine art of conversation. Since she always asks lots and lots of questions about what I do this is a problem and it is my problem. I don't really want to talk too much about Tanzania because my grandmother, she is given to racist comments, and she would no doubt prefer I work for humanitarian organizations in such a way that I do not come in contact with any who are not white and Christian. I cannot talk about my wonderful job as a middle eastern dancer since dancing=sin. Because Salome. (Though I assure you I would never accept a severed head in payment because I could not then use it to pay the rent. Case in point for why arbitrary currency is better than barter.) I can't really talk about my aerialist hobby because she gets all worked up about safety. (My driving long distances at high speeds does not seem to concern her.) I don't want to talk about my job tutoring fifth grade children because I can't stand the petulant whelps. Other than that I don't do much. I hang out with friends and drink (alcohol=sin!) and eat sushi (foreign=probably dangerous and unhealthy). I read a lot, but I read fantasy novels, and anything featuring magic=sin.

So, Grandma darling, what fun sins have you heard of people doing recently?

La Brea Tarpit Key Lime Pies of Carnage

2011-03-24T08:25:00.000-05:00

I am insanely happy about this, not only did it turn out yummy, but I get to eat the leftover animal crackers!

Word for Wednesday: Proprioceptor

2011-03-23T08:15:00.000-05:00

A receptor located in subcutaneous tissue that responds to stimuli produced within the body. Proprioceptors provide the sense of proprioception: the sense of one's own body. Coined 1905-1910, from Latin proprius[one's own] + receptor. Usage: Her sense of proprioception was such that she did not have to look at her feet to be sure that she was walking.

Oliver Sachs reports cases of people who have lost the sense of proprioception and feel disembodied. I find this a frightening thing to contemplate.

None of us have any proprioceptive sense of our own mental states: we do not know the shape of anger or how far it extends. One of the reasons it is difficult for the mentally ill to seek help is because it is difficult to know that help is needed: there is no sense of what is a normal mental state versus an abnormal mental state.

Why I am Better than a Missionary

2011-03-20T13:46:00.000-05:00

There may be a lot of posts on my upcoming Peace Corps service because that is what is on my mind at the moment. If I have internet access and the Tanzanian Peace Corps policies permit, there will be regular updates, possibly in a different blog that I link to from here, otherwise, this site may be dead for 2 years. Whichever.

I have been talking to lots of my friends about this. The conversations have been everything from my fellow belly dnace troupe members telling me that they can hold a benefit show for computers for Tanzania to advice on how to smuggle alcohol onto fundamentalist-controlled airlines with accompanying anecdotes of Egypt Air + vodka. There have also been a number of people responding with stories of people they know who have served in the Peace Corps, and also anecdotes of people working as missionaries. Mission work is not the same thing as Peace Corps service at all.

The Peace Corps is a service provided in response to a specified need and that on an official level. The government of the U.S. asks various countries if volunteers may be sent and if so, what types of volunteers are needed. The government of Tanzania has requested people qualified to teach computer literacy in English, and I am being sent at the behest and expense of my government in order to fulfill a specific role subject to certain restrictions. I will be given three months of pre-service training in the language and the culture of the country, as well as training in how to teach in a classroom environment before I am allowed to go out to my site and work. During my service I will be acting as an official of my government and should I fail to conduct myself accordingly I am subject to censure and discipline.

In contrast, missionary work is provided in response to a need that the missionaries have taken it upon themselves to decide that it exists and that they can fulfill it. Not to be too solipsistic about this, but the need for religion is a completely subjective thing; there is no way for anyone who isn't me to tell whether I need religion or not. Furthermore, decreeing that one's own religion is more needful than someone else's religion is a species of ethnocentric arrogance.

As a side note, telling people that they "need" your religion is just as offensive as telling people they need to either have or abstain from sexual activity. Unfortunately, all of the above are commonplace elements in society.

Furthermore, the qualifications for missionary service are, as far as I can tell, the willingness and the ability to raise necessary funds from people. Any training will be conducted by people who may or may not have any qualifications whatsoever. Any disciplinary actions are far from transparent and may not exist at all. See the Christian missionaries behind the homophobic homicidal hatred in Uganda who are not facing any strictures or censures whatsoever.

Deciding in a dream that the Macedonians need your preaching, as in the Biblical account, is all very well. However, it is the honorable person with respect for others who takes care to ask the Macedonians what they themselves need and want and being gracious about rebuff.

Storytime for Justcurious: Death of a Tree

2011-03-18T19:08:00.001-05:00

Shall you truly go to this wedding of people you do not like on the off chance of meeting beautiful women? Let me tell you a story.

I was young, and in pursuit of the beautiful and clean-limbed men, the youthful men, and so I went to a party of people I did not like for there would, I thought, be men to be found. It was a dreadfully dull party, full of dreadfully dull people clad in dreadfully dull clothes, sipping tasteless wine and nibbling soggy sandwiches.

I snuck away from the party, for I was bored and I was too young for even the manners of alerting the hostess to my departure. I slid through an open window, crawled through the shrubbery, and made good my escape in the battered car I owned at the time.

I drove through the rapidly darkening night, spirits and music high. I drove, and drove, and was not alarmed, for I lived some distance away. Then I drove and drove yet more, and became alarmed, for in the gathering gloom it became apparent that I was lost. Though one can be lost perfectly well in sunlight and in cheer, there is yet a God in this world who hates the creatures walking upon it, and so those who are lost must be so in the dark and it must rain.

I drove and I drove, no longer playing music, no longer feeling myself clever, only wanting home and an end to this drive. The road was becoming more and more deserted, but finally I saw wavering through the rain the flashing neon of a restaurant sign. There would be people, there would be coffee, and there would be direction. I stopped, and disembarked and approached.

Restaurant there was none. Beneath the neon of the sign was a large umbrella, red as blood, beneath it, the abandoned cart of a street vendor, dripping with the grease that smelled of cheap meat from strange sources. Warming their hands above it there stood a large man in a colorful shirt, a medium-sized woman in a dark dress, and a small man in colorless clothing. They looked up at me as I approached, and I said unto them "I am lost, how may I find such and such a place?" They smiled at me and walked toward me, and the woman said to turn right and then to turn left, and the large man made gestures with his large and ham-like hands, and the small man said nothing at all. I thanked them and walked away but they walked toward me and toward me, and faster and faster, the woman's directions growing more hurried, the gestures from the ham-like hands ever more expansive, and the small man still said nothing at all.

I ran, and they ran, and I fumbled at my car for my keys. The large man grabbed at my wrist, and I whispered the name of a Forbidden God and from my hands came the white fire which is bale fire, Baal's Fire, and the man was not. Then I fled from there in my car hearing still the woman telling me to avoid traffic, seeing still the small man who had never spoken.

I drove, and I was afraid, and I had called upon a Forbidden God, and I had no right then to call for any other Gods, yet the Gods help me, I was fool enough to follow the directions of the medium-sized woman in the dark dress. I turned right, and then I turned left, and I avoided traffic and found ever and again more trees upon either side of the roadway. The rain it rained harder, and the drive stretched on forever, and I crested a hill that fell away down and down in curving falls upon its other side.

The rain battered my hearing to dullness and the windscreen to opacity. Yet I kept driving with my foot upon the brake and my heart in my mouth, as I went down and down and down that hill, expecting surely that the next puddle or runnel I would hydroplane down and down the curving hill until I flew airborne and end over end into a tree. All the while the trees pressed closer and closer, branches lashing at my car as I crept by. Then and then and then--!

Then I leveled out in a valley free of trees, save for the one dead tree. It was no longer raining, and there was light without a sun, illuminating a valley filled with nothing except mist, and populated by nothing but the one dead, twisting and clawing its way toward the sky which was empty of hope.

I turned my car, somehow, and I fled and fled and fled, driving through endless streets of rain until the dawn came and showed me that I was but a few miles from my home. I spend a day and a night waiting in fear for I know not what, but when no threat was forthcoming, then or ever, I became calm, and resumed my living, albeit with less willingness to sojourn forth alone from parties.

I fled that dead tree in its valley of mist, for I was young, and I was afraid. Now that I too old to be afraid, I set out to satisfy the nagging curiosity even horror could not blunt, but I could not find my way back. Perhaps you will have better luck at this wedding, my darling, but walk warily.

Word(s) for Wednesday: Divers versus Diverse

2011-03-16T08:43:00.000-05:00

Diverse: of a different kind, unlike. Of various kinds or forms, multiform. From Latin diversus. Usage: the university photoshopped its publicity materials in order to make the student body appear more diverse.

Divers: several, various, sundry. Also from Latin diversus. Usage: the university photoshopped its publicity materials in order to make the divers student body appear more diverse.

Is all clear now?

I am a Failure as an Educated Adult

2011-03-14T09:53:00.000-05:00

I overslept this morning and failed to take the trash out. I blame this on the time change; normally, my kittens wake me up promptly at 7am, but they have failed to realize as yet that 6 is the new 7 so, I awoke to the sound of the trash truck going past at 8am. In an excessive flurry of self-inflicted guilt, I mopped the floors to make up for this.

Ever since getting my Peace Corps assignment I have been in a fluttery state of discomposure made up of nerves and excitement. This, coupled with the physical exhaustion of preparing for my very first aerial show, in which I will be performing as a soloist and with a trio, has left me feeling both tired and wide awake with a curious inability to focus. But I'm going to Tanzania! Tanzania! And look what I can do!

I have also realized, thinking of Tanzania, that my clearest and most persistent mental images are from Far Side cartoons. It apparently does not matter that I have friends from South Africa, a friend who is an RPCV (Namibia), have studied under people who have been to Egypt and Morocco to study the dance forms, have studied epidemics in school, and have seen all the liberal-approved horror films such as Hotel Rwanda and have read Waris Dirie's accounts of the horrific practice of female genital mutilation (which is close to impossible to bring up online without hordes of idiot men saying circumcision is comparably bad). Despite all this I have this, I cannot shake the deeply-rooted and ridiculous conviction that the cheetahs of the Serengeti drink coffee and that rhinoceri recite poetry in which "azure-colored skies" is rhymed with "tsetse flies."

The Stars Will be Different

2011-03-12T19:48:00.000-06:00

After a little over half a year of struggling with partial employment, bureaucratic red tape, and the accompanying sense of aimlessness with a side of cold viruses, I finally have an invitation to serve in the Peace Corps. I will be leaving for Tanzania in June.

Tanzania!

Most likely I will be in a rural area, meaning that I will be able to see the stars. And the stars will be different stars! Tanzania!

I am excited. I am also terrified.

Congratulations to the White Man with the Turing Award

2011-03-10T16:05:00.000-06:00

This is really, seriously awesome work, and the Turing Award is being awarded.

Thus far, exactly 2 women have won a Turing Award. This is worth noting.

Word for Wednesday: Ferhoodled

2011-03-09T07:54:00.000-06:00

To be confused, upset, addled. From the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect, which is really a German and broken English dialect (the word Deutsch became mistakenly translated as Dutch.) Usage: I moved last week and everything is still in boxes or spread on the floor and I can't get internet hooked up and I am so ferhoodled I am going to give up and take a hot bath while drinking a glass of wine.

The Imaginary Cave People of Evolutionary Psychology

2011-03-06T08:33:00.000-06:00

Trying to study how ancient peoples lived is valuable. Trying to justify sexism with stories about how ancient people may have lived is not. First of all, such things are usually based on absolutely no evidence and second, they are usually nonsensical. Recently I heard that men's special place in ancient times was based on the fact that all else being equal (though it never is) men on average are capable of developing more muscle than women.

This should clearly be idiotic for several reasons. First and foremost, averages do not often translate to individual advantage. Saying that men on average can jump higher than women does not mean that you can pick a man off the street and send him against the women of the Olympics. Capability of muscle means nothing, what matters is who has actually trained and developed muscle. Speaking of training, anyone who has ever trained for anything should be well aware that muscle mass is by itself meaningless. The body may be that of Atalanta or Hercules, but without the ability to use that body well, the Atalantas and Herculeses of this world shall lose to the people with skill and brains, notably what's his name with the golden apples and Nessus.

In particular, saying that muscle gives important places in tribes is an assertion made without any consideration of the social structure of the tribe or physical demands of the tasks performed. As is fairly well-known (common knowledge or I would cite my sources) in many early societies that are hunter-gatherer + some farming, typically women perform gathering plus simple agrarian duties while men perform hunting tasks. The former is more physically intensive than the latter. The reason the duties are segregated in such a way is because hunting is usually seen as "man's work" and farming as "women's work." Later on, when hunting falls from fashion and societies become completely agricultural, men perform agrarian duties while women perform housekeeping duties. This may be seen today among the Pennsylvania Dutch, one need not even leave the U.S. In other words, duties, when segregated by sex, are being segregated by cultural constructions of gender not biological differences, which are less significant than the people making arguments from muscle seem to think.

Stop the Presses: Equality has been Achieved!

2011-03-03T18:29:00.002-06:00

Today a man told me there has not been sexism in the U.S. since the 1960's! We can all go home early today.

I Hate Gershwin Even when the Living is Easy

2011-03-03T15:19:00.000-06:00

I hate Gershwin with the passion I normally reserve for mushrooms and people who let their alarm clocks go off multiple times in my hearing before 7am. Nonetheless I went to the Atlanta Opera's production of Porgy and Bess. I did this because this is the only opera in town, and I have not had a chance to go to a theatre to be fabulous in a while. Also, my dear friend and opera partner (I have someone to go with me to the opera, yay!) is from Charleston and his grandmother saw the original production. Thus there was some historical interest. I also brought a flask in my purse for when the above reasons should not be sufficient. It was a good call.

Musically, it is not dissimilar to Ruggiero Leoncavallo and Cab Calloway having a steel cage death match. Since some of the arias are actually quite nice when performed by actual jazz artists my take on it is that Gershwin should have stuck with either verismo or jazz, rather than trying to meld them. The whole thing just seems forced, nonfabulous, and as though he is trying too hard.

This, however, I expected. And as expected, the singers were adequate, but not memorable. This is consistent with the budget of the Atlanta Opera. It was the staging which was far worse than anticipated.

I had a sinking feeling during the overture, when various chorus members began performing swing era dances as choreographed by someone who has clearly little if any familiarity with swing era dances. I am probably going to be more critical than most audiences about this because I am a swing and blues dancer. Nonetheless, it isn't as if we don't know very well what old swing would have looked like. Frankie Manning only died a year or 2 ago and he made sure that tap routines like the shim sham shimmy got passed down. Furthermore, we have documentation in old movies. African-American films like Blood of Jesus show African-American clubs in which dancers are performing the Lindy Hop. It doesn't even need to be, say 20's Charleston, I will accept anything that looks like swing, really. This wasn't. The only exception being that toward the end, Sporting Life performed three boogie backs. So that's 30 seconds out of a 3 hour production that would not have made Frankie Manning sad.

The sinking feeling turned to a feeling of rapidly plummeting when it became apparent that the set consisted largely of 2 gigantic screens upon which digital images were projected. I am as interested in the technological challenges of creating images which can be seen well from all angle as the next nerd, but unless the show is a touring show I find forsaking physical props to be cheesy. Specifically, I found that having giant pictures of bottles or houses overhanging the actual physical set added nothing and was slightly odd and cognitively dissonant.

In addition to the music and staging being bad, the opera itself doesn't hang together as a coherent whole. It is ramblingly overlong (why are the honey man, the strawberry girl, and the crab man in it?), and has nothing it really wants to say. I could regard it as the verismo slice-of-life opera it is trying to be, but in the multiplicity of characters, depth of personality is swallowed into caricature. There is much mockery of the god-fearing women, but at the same time the god-fearing women have a magical miracle line to heaven for healing. There is some attempt to Noble Savage-ify Porgy. He is shown as incredibly innocent in that he doesn't know how to spot a con man lawyer or the location of New York but he is held up as the compassionate person who offers unconditional love and acceptance to a pariah. This attempt is spoiled slightly by a not-supported-by the-staging claim of the libretto that he was a very unpleasant person who hated children before Bess. The noble savage effect is later completely spoiled when Porgy triumphantly names himself a man for accomplishing the manly feat of murder. (Why can't men ever shout, "I'm a man" in response to making sushi or writing a program in LISP? To be fair, a photographer friend of mine says he does yell "I'M A REAL MAN!" upon getting a particularly good photo. Also an aspiring chef friend has promised to yell the same thing, with bells, when he makes sushi. I love the manly men in my life. )

The one thing the opera does agree with itself about is that women are worthless. From women being called "things" and only sometime things at that, we get to see that women are supposed to have men, and only get money from men, and cannot do anything for themselves but must call angrily for a man, and if they are with the wrong men they become liquor-guzzling sluts. This is also the only time they wear bright clothing. I took a swig from my flask in solidarity with the liquor-guzzling sluts. At least in all the misogyny of Mozart, the dear man has characters not defined by their relationship with men (e.g. the Queen of the Night). With that being said, I will still complain about Mozart's misogyny when I see Cosi fan Tutti in April.

One more thing before I stop complaining about this opera: Clara sees her husband's boat upside down in the river. She sees this from Catfish Row (actually Cabbage Row off Church street) which is nowhere near the harbor of Charleston. Imaginary geography for the win! Even if it isn't nearly as impressive as Manon's demise in the deserts of Louisiana.

I get it. It's not like there are any other operas in the very very white world of the opera canon that are about African-Americans. It's not like there are any other U.S. operas in the very very European world of the opera canon. This should not in any way be taken to mean that the opera is good. Gershwin is trying very very hard to fuse together musical styles and be taken seriously and the result is something unlovely and forced. The U.S. has no particularly good music to offer the world, but we would be better off accepting this or working to correct it then trying to shove Gershwin into the breach while singing his undeserved praises.

Word(s) for Wednesday: Prone vs Supine

2011-03-02T07:37:00.000-06:00

Prone: having the ventral part downward. Supine: having the ventral part upward.

I found out only this week that they are different. I am a little slow that way.

The Dancing Palm Trees of Rahim AlHaj

2011-02-27T08:37:00.000-06:00

Last night I went to the Baghdad in Exile Concert at Georgia State University, to hear the great oud player Rahim AlHaj. I went, not because I was so familiar with oud playing (I actually wasn't sure what it was) but, of all the vapid and shallow reasons, I had met one of the musicians a few nights previously and found him excessively attractive and he invited me.

For the record, an oud resembles a lute, but a lot bigger. The excessive tuning required is the same across both instruments.

Caravaggio, "The Lute Player"

Oud. via.

Fortunately, in this case my lust led me to something wonderful. (This seldom happens.) Rahim AlHaj is an absolutely amazing man. He escaped Iraq after torture during the reign of Saddam Hussein. He cannot go home. He said that he spoke to his nieces and nephews recently and asked them what they dreamed of. The answer? Going to school. Having electricity. Clean water. These are the dreams of Iraqi children. Then he played, unaccompanied, a song he wrote about dreams. He turned pain into music and gave it to us. The pain of the music is great, but the face of the great musician is lined only from smiling. I saw him, in fact, outside the recital hall as I was walking in. He was hanging about at the side of the building and he smiled at me then as well.

Rahim AlHaj, via www.rahimalhaj.com.
Such a person has the spirit of royalty.

He then played a song called the dance of the palm trees. He told us his spellbound audience of the two million palm trees destroyed in the Iran-Iraq war. How at the close of the war he imagined the palm trees dancing. Bellisimo.

Informing us that he knew his music was "depressing" he moved to some Iraqi folk songs. Joining him for this was a 12 piece string orchestra, 2 percussionists, and a flutist. The audience, many of whom were refugees and that recent, were invited to sing along. I do not know Arabic, much less Iraqi folk songs, but the recent refugees smiled as they sang, and Rahim Alhaj smiled back at them. I am happy I could be there, if only as a quiet outsider.

The concert moved on, through lovely pieces for oud and string, through more traditionally orchestrated pieces with doumbek (yay, doumbek!), and one jazz fantasia based on a traditional lament. The jazz piece did not work for me though parts of it were pretty. The more jazzy sound of the saxophone was cognitively dissonant. Also, one of the percussionists was sporting a Lenin look with shaved head, goatee, and scowl, accentuated with a tight black tee shirt and bulging biceps. This was fine for playing the doumbek, but not so much for the triangle.

There was also a short interlude for the flutist to perform on a ney. This left me slightly disappointed. I was amazed, exceedingly, since the flutist had only started practicing on that instrument for the first time a few days before, but it still sounded uncertain. I love love love a ney taksim so I was a little sad that it didn't quite sound like my recorded ney music.

The concert ended with a rollicking song with vocals, performed by amateurs, but enthusiastic and smiling amateurs. Several GSU students with drums joined for a wonderfully full sound. Rahim AlHaj graciously accepted an outpouring of love and applause from the audience and asked us, the Americans in the audience, to accept and love and help the beautiful people here from Iraq. They are, he said, our people now.

Peace be unto you, Rahim AlHaj, and have a beautiful life, for you bring beauty to the lives of others.

Word(s) for Wednesday: Words that Sound Like they Should have an Antonym that can be Found by Removing a Prefix

2011-02-23T07:42:00.000-06:00

Incorrigible
Disgruntled
Invincible
Inadvertent
Indentured (yes, I know one can be dentured, but it does not mean the opposite of indentured)
Indefatigable

Ethics Versus the Westboro Baptist Church

2011-02-22T13:59:00.000-06:00

In the U.S., Christians have quite the persecution complex for being members the majority religion to which all politicians who know what's good for them pay lip service unto and pass laws based upon. The only Christian group I can think of that actually might have a justifiable persecution complaint is the Westboro Baptist Church.

I don't want to side with them. Like everyone else, I think they are a bunch of vicious wankers bereft of wit and wisdom, screaming at the world for attention. At the same time, they are the targets of laws designed specifically to curtail their legal activities. By this I mean laws passed against picketing of military funerals. I hate to say this, and I don't want to say this, but picketing funerals is legal, the attempt to make it illegal is troubling, and making it illegal in order to target one specific group is unconstitutional. Then there are incidents like this. Vandalism is just wrong, and while it is hard to criticize business people for refusing to do business with them, that is a tactic historically (and currently) used to deny the benefits of society to women, minorities, and the homosexual. Also, as a young woman who sometimes needs prophylactics and erotic materials, if I start supporting denial of service attacks, I will be one of the first to suffer.

Recently, however, they may have decided actual persecution is not enough and manufactured an assault on themselves from the hacktivist group Anonymous. Possibly. The jury is, technically, still out, but I'm going to say that due to the cognitively dissonant nature of a claim to protect freedom of speech by stifling it, I am reasonably convinced that Anonymous is truthfully denying sending the first letter. Hackers tend to be very much attached to freedom of speech and know a lot about freedom of speech laws. They are likely fully aware that the WBC is scrupulously legal in their activities. This is unfortunate, in that we as a society cannot do anything to them and still be ethical ourselves. This means they continue with their disgustingness. Sometimes, the choices are just all bad.

How do you turn the mind of a barbaric stranger?

~Epica

Divine Chickens

2011-02-21T08:58:00.000-06:00

I recently learned from Heard's Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan of the many different ways in which people interpret religious stories. Take the deity Kotoshiro Nushi no Kami, for example. Back in the day, he was in the habit of carrying on an affair and relied on his rooster friend to wake him so that he could make good his escape. This went on for many many years without a hitch. One day, however, the rooster failed to wake him and the husband found them and became angry and all sorts of drama fell out. Kotoshiro Nushi no Kami then declared chickens a hateful abomination to him. This seems rather harsh, after all, 1 mistake over a course of at least several centuries makes for awesome reliability. Be that as it may, the point is that God hates chickens. Given chickens, this does not seem so unreasonable, unless, of course, the God happens to be a God of Chickens, and maybe not even then, if we consider our own model in which many of our human Gods seem to seriously hate us.

There are two villages Hearn found that worshiped Kotoshiro Nushi no Kami and took the chicken-hating seriously. In one of these villages there was nary a chicken to be seen ever in life or in food. In the other village, the villagers ate chicken and chicken products almost constantly, on the theory that if God hates chickens there can be few things more pious than to eat the enemies of God.

Sometimes I really love religion.

The Patriarchy Hurts Everyone: Distrusting Strangers

2011-02-20T09:34:00.000-06:00

Contrary to what we are told, there is usually nothing wrong with trusting strangers. For example, asking a stranger in a coffee house to watch your laptop while you use the restroom is a perfectly fine strategy. For the exceptionally paranoid, asking two different strangers to watch your laptop provides an additional layer of security. The proviso to this is, of course, that a stranger volunteering to watch your laptop is to be regarded with suspicion.

I normally do not have a problem having long conversations with strangers. There are, however, exceptions. For example, if I am walking along the street coming home from work, a car honks as it goes past me, then performs a u-turn and comes back toward me, and the driver claims to have met me on a train a year ago and wants to know where I live so he can give me a ride home, I have a problem. This is, in fact, slightly creepy. I don't remember him, at all. This in itself means nothing: I do talk to a lot of people and seldom remember names or what they look like.

However, I do not trust a man that I do not know enough to get in a car with him. Sorry. If he is not a rapist and/or a murderer, he is probably insulted that I clearly did not trust him. What, however, am I supposed to do? If I don't trust him I'm overreacting and men hate being treated as potential rapists. Understandably. Men, however, do not come labeled as "rapists" vs "harmless," and if I trust him and get in the car, and he is a rapist, then I am sure I will be told it is my own fault for not exercising caution, because that's how it goes. I don't like looking at a man and trying to evaluate his trustworthiness (on the one hand, he has a small cute girl in the back of the car, on the other hand, abusive men often get custody of their children...) because it puts me into a position where I am having to judge people's morals based on assumptions from their appearance. This makes me a bad person. There is no way for either of us to win unless either rape culture is eradicated (yeah, right) or men learn that in a world in which women grow up hearing the How Not to Get Raped Like that Hussy Over There speech, they have to take pains not to be creepy (which is also probably a yeah, right, since it involves an acknowledgment of male privilege). I would have been so much happier with the situation if he'd just given me some contact information and left without wanting my contact info so that I am clearly the one with the power to make a decision.

In the meantime, we are left with a situation in which I was scared and he was probably insulted.

More Thoughts on Watson

2011-02-18T12:01:00.000-06:00

Despite what I see people saying on Facebook, Watson is not performing some sort of "Advanced Googling," for many reasons, not least of which being that Watson does not connect to the internet. Performing a search on an unstructured space of 15TB is in itself not something to be sneezed at, but since IBM parallelized Teh Shit out of that thing, it is conceptually not that bad. The interesting problems that Watson solves are in the space of natural language processing. From an oddly worded Jeopardy! question, Watson must extract the information being asked for, search for that, and extract the answers from more natural language. This is hard. In fact, this is really really really hard. For example, (an example given by Dr. Murdock at his Emory talk) there are lists of "U.S. and Canadian cities" which Watson consults. However, in the title sentence of those lists, there is nothing grammatically that would let us know that this is one of those cases in which "and" is being used to mean "or." Natural languages are ambiguous and understanding requires a lot of background knowledge, not just a handle on grammatical structure. Not that grammatical structure of a natural language is in itself easy.

IBM actually did consider the possibility that one of Watson's opponents would give a wrong answer which could be used to eliminate a possible answer. The reason they implemented no system to deal with this is that they concluded that it probably wasn't worth their time. The odds of this situation being a deciding factor in the game are too low to be worth diverting resources from the natural language processing problems and probabilistic analysis from which Watson's answers are derived. Furthermore, from a research perspective, the latter are the interesting problems, the former is just a matter of implementing known things. The implementation, however, can prove to be a headache, and as the actual gameplay shows, IBM's implementation choices led to a winning performance even with them failing to address one possible scenario.

Watson has been successfully designed to succeed in a specific environment and handles all challenges with high accuracy and precision. Who among us can say the same?

Holy Logistic Regression, Batman!

2011-02-17T09:26:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending a talk by Dr. Bill Murdock on the architecture and algorithms of Watson, IBM's new supercomputer. Later that day while I was supposedly tutoring a child in math, I declared that we needed an extracurricular activity break to watch Jeopardy! so we could see Watson compete against humans. I am impressed and delighted by the design and performance of Watson, and I hope the good folk at IBM are taking the week off for some serious celebration. They have solved an interesting research problem fabulously, given a delightful proof of concept demonstration, and incidentally made a lot of money that they gave to charity. Good on them! Computing power for the win! Alan Turing, are you proud of us?

What I particularly liked about the talk was Dr. Murdock showing us examples of questions Watson missed and discussing what made that particular question was hard. It is in considering how computers reach decisions that I realize I have no idea how I make decisions. Watson has no way of considering which concepts are "odd" versus which concepts are "normal." I have some automatic cognitive process telling me that a gymnast with a wooden leg is "odd" but I can only have reached that conclusion by somehow knowing that it is outside whatever a typical gymnast leg is, and that in itself is difficult to explain. I know very little about gymnastics. I have never thought particularly about it. There are some situations in which I would conclude that having a wooden leg would be perfectly normal. So while I would consider a gymnast with a wooden leg odd, if I saw a pirate in a movie performing a backflip with a wooden leg, would I consider that odd?

Bonus points for Dr. Murdock saying logistic regression was used because the machine learning team said nothing else they tried worked as well. That's how machine learning is done folks. It's how I did my machine learning project.

Now in news according to the Facebook statuses of my friends, there is a certain hostility toward Watson, ranging from people who find the supercomputer "creepy" to those who say they hate it and with a few who want to actually destroy it. The general majority, including Ken Jennings, are speaking of computer overlords. This I do not understand. I have a few disconnected and poorly thought out hypotheses which I shall expound upon below.

The pathetic fallacy is running amok and we have all seen too many bad movies. When we see a machine that we can possibly anthropomorphize, we will. Furthermore, we have learned from Hollywood that computing machines will hate us or at least have weird Hal 9000 style breakdowns. Either way, we are doomed.

The concept of a computing machine is strange and thus othered; people miss the connection between and its creators and regard it as a magical thing completely alien to humanity. People have a tendency to fear and hate things that are different or that they don't understand. This is problematic.

Humanity has a tendency toward an inferiority complex. We feel a need to explicitly say we are superior to animals in various ways. People try to "conquer" extreme wilderness type challenges. The idea that machines can do things better than people makes people feel existentially insecure. Would a group hug and a good stiff motivational speech help?

The hostility toward Watson may be some combination of the above.

I also recently read (only now, to my shame) Alan Turing's 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." Where I still disagree with him is that machine capability is measured by the ability to imitate a human successfully. Why should thought, that ambiguous and essentially meaningless term, be restricted to human processes? Our mental states are going to be the way they are because of the organic matrix in which they occur. A computer's mental (or whatever term makes you happy) states are going to be different because they are discrete rather than continuous and do not occur in the same matrix a human's does. This does not in any way imply that the only mental states that can occur (and be genuine mental states) are those that occur in humans. Turing, however, does an excellent job of pointing out the meaningless of many people's discussion of the impossibilities of machine thought. Including his take down of "can machines think?" as a somewhat meaningless question.

Regardless of all this, Watson is ushering us into a brave new world in which natural language processing works well enough and searching for specific answers through an unstructured and massive knowledge base can be done quickly and with good enough accuracy. Bravo IBM!

Word for Wednesday: Philtre

2011-02-16T07:07:00.000-06:00

Also known as a philter, if you aren't British. A drink supposed to cause love or lust. A love potion. Origin: circa 16th century. From Latin philtrum from the Greek philtron(to make oneself beloved). Those pesky philtres distributed by Shakespeare's Puck cause all sorts of trouble. Tsk!

Evelyn Pickering, "The Love Potion"

With kitty.

The Wondrous Sleeping Beauty

2011-02-14T15:11:00.000-06:00

I like performing, but there is something about being an audience member that is just fabulous. I get to dress in pretty and impractical ways and have a stress-free outing that is not exhausting and beauty is presented to and for me. It makes me feel wonderfully important. Now, based on my disappointment in the Atlanta Opera (decent, but not fabulous), and memories of my French Horn teacher's account of her hideous experiences with the ballet orchestra before the whole orchestra went on strike, I was not expecting great things of the Atlanta Ballet. Fortunately, I was wrong. Their Sleeping Beauty was a marvelous confection of glitter and glittering dances.

The staging was very classic, dancers in the typical costumes and backgrounds of the typical palace scenes. This is good. The classic ballet costumes are elegant and wonderful. With first rate dancing in an elegant setting to the Tchaikovsky. The ballet has apparently mended things with its orchestra and so the dancers once again have live music.

The ballet, of course, opens with an array of faeries dancing their gifts to the newborn princess. This they do with cuteness and grace and delightful gestures, all perfectly with their music. The choreographer here is to be commended. The show is then stolen by the Evil Faery Carabosse, who was not invited and that was a snub. She retaliates by breaking in with her ghoulish minions and cursing to death the guest of honor. (I would have a similar reaction, darlings). Oh Carabosse, with her vulture-like minions descending from the ceilling! Her gigantic sheer black veil! Her lovely divided black skirt! She also has a grand battement to pierce the soul.

This and all photos from atlantaballetblog.com

After the usual mitigation of the curse from death to sleep, we move on to an intermission, wherein, in the cutest thing ever, we see the baby ballerina princess being taught to dance.

16 years then pass without so much as a montage (thank relevant deities), and the princess is introduced to four eligible men in hats who present her with flowers in the famous rose adagio. The men of ballet, they have wonderful plumed hats. The princess herself is a vision in pink, tiny and graceful, with the long thin arms that always amaze me in ballerinas. They form such a perfect graceful ornament above her head.

The prima rests in a beautiful pink princess tutu with gold rosets.

Alas! The rose adagio comes to an end, and with it the party, when Carabosse appears with a spinning wheel and the princess' finger prick plunges the kingdom to 100 years of sleep. One wonders what is with the fatality of spinning wheels. Aurora and those Catholic saints torn on spiked spinning wheels. Where did this come from?

Switching gears (not to mention 100 years), we have Act 3, with Prince Desire hanging out drinking with his hunting party in a woods, with vines and forest fixtures draped about. The man is feeling moody despite the alcohol, chugged from a silver cup and tossed cavalierly over his shoulder (how I adore men who drink so gracefully!), and dismisses his party in despite of the rousing music from the horns, who are playing their hearts out. After some dancing he sees a vision of the sleeping princess, vows to rescue her, and runs afoul of Carabosse's ghouls, who defeat him in a leaping fight that leaves him bound and helpless and dying. Fortunately, the Lilac Faery shows up in the nick of time, good deus ex pointe that she is, and heals him. Carabosse then shows up to do in the prince herself, with the aid of what I assume was a dagger, but from the balcony appears as a slightly twisty stick. Remembering Dracula, one must never underestimate the pointy stick. The Prince approaches the situation with due caution and after an epic struggle with beautiful lifts, succeeds in stabbing Carabosse with her own stick. She proceeds to die with lightning and smoke, as well she should.

The prince is then in a position to kiss the princess (who magically appears? Or maybe the prince was transported to her? I'm a little unclear on the transition here) and they promptly dance a glorious pas de deux together in the woods.

With the forces of fate defeated, there is nothing left to do save party, which is carried out in grand style with a bunch of people from other faery tales invited. Puss in Boots and his lady carry out a hilarious pas de deux with much ear scratching and batting at one another. Red Riding Hood and the Wolf make an odd, but delightful couple. Blue Bird and the Princess Flordelisa appear in a rich sapphire blue to dance together in a moment of pure beauty. Tom Thumb (who I thought was Peter Pan) does split jumps. Nor should we forget the dancing gems, men and women of the company who show us that it isn't simply the principals here who are more than fantastic.

The guests of honor finally show up, but before getting married, they have to dance, together and separately. I always love the way the men of ballet can jump so high with such seeming ease, and this Prince Desire performs seven--seven--entrechat-quatres. Bravo! Aurora continues to be a vision of perfect poise.

They are lovely, the men and women of the Atlanta Ballet. Bravo and Brava to all!

Farewell Redwall

2011-02-13T08:30:00.000-06:00

I'm a little late on this, but Brian Jacques is dead.

He was famous for writing the Redwall books. Now, after the first four books (Redwall, Mossflower, Mattimeo, Mariel of Redwall) the rest in the series are essentially all the same and moral issues are reduced from any possible complexity into a strict good versus evil based on species, which is a little offensive. There are also unexplained issues of scale throughout: for example, Redwall Abbey itself is a difficult climb for a squirrel but also habitable for mostly mice. There are mice fighting a wildcat and a pike fighting a water rat in Mossflower.

That all being said, I read Mossflower obsessively over and over throughout several years of my childhood. I was entranced by the lonely heroics of the starving prisoner Martin who bore his father's broken sword. I loved the rhyming clues for the great quest to the flaming mountain Salamandastron and the death or glory heroics. Such things appeal not to the rational, but to the part of me that believes epic struggles in all their unlikelihood are somehow more satisfying and more real than things that actually make sense. It all makes for a thumping good read, at any rate.

Farewell Mr. Jacques, you made at least one child happy.

We Must Know, and We Shall Know

2011-02-12T09:28:00.000-06:00

Happy Darwin Day, my darlings. This is the anniversary of the birth date of dear Charles Darwin, who defied his theological academic background in order to put together a comprehensive model of the way in which species change over time, a proposition which may be thought of as the grand unifying theory of biology. In doing so, he incurred the wrath of various people who have not yet learned from Galileo and Dietrich Bonhoeffer that insisting that religion provides literally accurate explanations for the world is a losing proposition.

Recently, I had a child I was tutoring demand the use of math in the real world. Way to push all my buttons, kid. Real world is a meaningless phrase and the value of math? Well, it's largely up to you. Do you want to be at the mercy of what others tell you, or do you want the ability to think logically and rigorously evaluate what you are told?

In this is the value of the scientific method, not just mathematics as a field. It teaches us to think logically and algorithmically. It gives us the ability to face the world with confidence in our own strengths coupled with exact and detailed knowledge of our own weaknesses. That which is real consists of far, far more than we can sense or even conceive. We know this. We know that our own feelings and intuitions are useless for considering the nature of much that exists and is interesting, but we know science. We know how to describe and explore the world, not just the seen world, but the world that is really there. We know how to share this and most importantly, we know the tools we must have in order to be able to truly think for ourselves.

Darwin refused to let the teachings of the church think for him and described an important model for the way that the world works. He did us all a favor and we honor him for taking an important step in freeing us from mindless dogma and taking us a step closer toward intellectual freedom.

Word for Wednesday: Surfeit

2011-02-09T07:51:00.000-06:00

A superabundance or excess of something. Often used as a polite way to describe the rather disgusting consequences of eating far too much. Henry I, King of England, is said to have died of a surfeit of lampreys. Origin: circa 1300 from the French surfaire which is a compound word of sur (over) + faire (do) from the Latin facere (to make).

A surfeit of the best kind.

On Not Knowing

2011-02-08T15:28:00.000-06:00

It's okay not to know stuff. Really, it is. In fact, if you have all the answers, I will lay odds you are lying or selling stuff. Having said that, there is yet another Religious Person Writes Article about Atheists These Days story floating around. This one focuses on the theory of evolution and the author seems to think a lack of specific knowledge poses a problem.

But the early atheists had a huge problem –- how could they explain the existence of the Cosmos? Without a clear answer to that question, their arguments for atheism failed to gain much traction.

Some examples of specific atheists having specific problems would be helpful to support the claim here, but that aside, I disagree. In fact, I disagree with the entire thesis that the theory of evolution gives atheists some special reason not to believe. I realize that in doing so I am disagreeing with dear Darwin himself but I am not Darwin, he is not me, and we would still probably get along swimmingly. That being said, I do not think that any particular answer gained from human reason and science is an answer against belief. Rather, I think it is the process of human reason and science that is the answer against belief. Say we did not understand how species change over time (which they very manifestly do) because dear Charles Darwin had never proposed the model of natural selection to support darling Erasmus Darwin's theory. Believers are still proposing their story for the origin of the cosmos (or Cosmos?). The lack of any good answer is not an argument for a bad answer. We believe everything exists because an undefinable being made it and we believe that because an ancient text says so and everyone else we grew up with believes the same thing is a really bad answer. Really. A better answer would be to say we do not know, but we can work on that. Admission of ignorance is a good answer. It is an answer which admits of further questioning and further conversation and learning, which the answer "because I believe" does not. For God to do something is the end of the question and the end of the questioning and a limit beyond which humans are forbidden to trespass. For us to admit ignorance is an invitation to further reasoning. The value of the conclusions reached is, of course, a strong supporting argument for the goodness of the process of research, however, it is in the research that disbelief shows its worth, not in any specific conclusions.

My Dreams, they are Pretty

2011-02-08T12:05:00.000-06:00

Well, last night's weren't, but sometimes they are. For example, some time back, I wrote this. It's a short and grim little story based on a dream I had and then written with style and a certain amount of editing to get rid of too-personal detail.

A friend of mine who is currently majoring in art was creating an illustrated book of dreams as a senior project and requested submissions, so I sent the story to her, and this is the result, more of which can be seen at her blog.

Surfeits: the Ailment of Kings

2011-02-06T20:24:00.000-06:00

I am recovering from a late night sushi extravaganza. Friends who make sushi for friends accumulate much merit and forgiveness of sin. Those who make unagi and tamago sushi are guaranteed rebirth in the pure land. Those who eat eel and tamago sushi are guaranteed a day of happiness. Consequently, I am happy. Why not? I slept late and have a kitty curled up against my leg. The other kitty is curled in front of the window looking excessively adorable. Pandora is playing a mix of Elis and Sirenia, the sun is shining, and I have a mug of coffee and nothing particular to do right now.

Even better, I have a new part-time temporary job. I tutor a few days a week at a nearby high school. I can walk to it! The kids are reasonably well-behaved, and as usual, tutoring has a very good hourly wage for a very low amount of hourly work. I am celebrating by making an eye doctor appointment so I can get new contacts because I am out. Being an adult comes with boring rewards. I also went to a used bookstore and picked up a book of Ghibran poetry with line drawings of naughtiness, an illustrated Kama Sutra, the complete plays of Marlowe, and The Little Book of Afternoon Teas, which includes a recipe for crumpets. Crumpets, darlings, crumpets! And a Victorian sponge cake with a jam and buttercream filling and a dusting of powdered sugar. I may convert this into a cupcake recipe.

Before that, however, the lovely ladies over at Skepchick.org are running an On the Origin of Quiches recipe contest for Darwin Day. I am considering a pie with peanut butter chocolate Dove candies mixed with butter and eggs and vanilla and enough flour to hold it together, topped with a layer of chocolate ganache and peanut butter icing on top of that. I'm not sure how this is related to Darwin but I'm sure I can make up something along the lines of the Descent of Man into Obesity. Incidentally, everyone should be celebrating Darwin Day instead of Valentine's. No one has any idea who St Valentine was or what he did to get martyred, and now the Almighty Forces of Advertising has decreed that you must either feel guilty about not doing enough for your lover, or you must feel inadequate for not having a lover. All to celebrate the death of someone you know absolutely nothing about. Darwin Day, on the other hand, is a day to celebrate whatever you find awesome in the world which is a result of human reason and ingenuity, whether that be evolution, cheese, computers, or the luxury of sleeping in a bed designed for human comfort. Truly, this is the Zombo.com of holidays, and I would like to use it to remind everyone that science says that in stressful situations, men should be giving me their coffee.

The Children are our Future

2011-02-03T05:18:00.001-06:00

The other day, I overheard a high school child being told by a guidance counselor "don't question, just do it."

This illustrates one of my criticisms of both post-secondary education and religion.

Word(s) for Wednesday: Definitional Terms Used in Ways that Annoy Me

2011-02-02T07:06:00.000-06:00

Classical-when used to describe all ancient music whether it is or not. If it is not between 1750 and 1830 ish with room for argument about Bach and Beethoven, it is not classical. Opera is its own genre that has its own terms for the various stylistic periods, some of which overlap with non-operatic ancient music and some of which do not.

Uncountable/innumerable-when used to describe sets of things which are countable when the speaker really means "something that I, personally, cannot count." Abraham's descendants, if they are "as the stars of heaven in number" are totally numerable. They are, in fact, only a finite set. Uncountable sets are infinite and a scheme for enumerating them provably cannot exist.

The Vulgarity of Food: Continuing Fabulosity from the Heike Monogatari

2011-01-31T15:05:00.000-06:00

Truly, this is the opera of literature, a rich fabulosity of courtly love, of joy and sorrow, of fights to the suicide for glory and honor between men (and sometimes women) in horned helmets and colorful hitatare and rattan wrapped bows.

Heian Japan is in many ways exactly the opposite of current U.S. culture. By and large and typically, Art is not revered here, and learning is not expected. To admit to admiration for art or high education, one is expected to make self-deprecating comments about being a nerd, or a snob, or some such foolishness. In Heian Japan, it was the vulgar and ridiculous person who did not have refined sensibilities. Here, the politicians forsake poetry and moon-viewing in favor of golf and hold up as paragons some vaguely defined average person who likes simple things.

One exception to this is that U.S. citizens will cheerfully admit to admiring food. 'Gourmet' is usually much too highbrow a term so people will call themselves foodies instead, but the intent is the same. They want to enjoy fine food and drink, and it is no shame to be an expert on such. Heian Japan, however, in all their poetic descriptions, do not spend much, if any time, admiring food. The splendor of the imperial court is never illustrated by a list of the magnificent dishes present. The only time food is mentioned is if there is a shortage, and this is described briefly.

I like food. I really like food. I am more motivated by food than any mature person should be. I like to cook, too, though this marks me as a rather vulgar person in either the sensibilities of Japan or the U.S. (until around the middle of the last century, when employing help fell from fashion.) Yet I also like the Heian ideal of refined sensibilities: of being able to fully appreciate the beauty of beautiful things and to speak with wit and brevity in moving ways.

A Tale of Two Sarahs

2011-01-28T13:29:00.000-06:00

The Divine Sarah

Sarah Bernhardt, painting by Clairin

The somewhat less than divine Sarah is currently Palin. I like to make fun of her as much as the next liberal, but I'm not really sure why. Yes, she displays ignorance and bigotry, but in this, what doth she more than other politicians? The most serious charge that I could level against her would be that she has neither style nor class, and again, what doth she more than other politicians? I could complain that for some reason her speeches get equal time with those of the presidents, but let us be honest with ourselves, she is fascinatingly more interesting than not only the president, but probably every politician in the U.S. right now. In fact, I will go so far as to say that is the most studly and entertaining person in politics since Teddy Roosevelt. President Obama, while attractive and a good orator, isn't really that interesting as a person. The only thing I know about the man's hobbies is that he plays golf. This, while possibly diverting for the people engaging in it, is terminally boring for everyone else. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, shoots things and has family drama.

Word(s) for Wednesday: Transcendental Numbers

2011-01-26T06:20:00.000-06:00

A number which is not an algebraic number. In other words, there is no equation with rational coefficients for which this number is a solution. Origin: in 1844, Liouville devised a number which relied on non-zero digits arranged in a factorial pattern and proved that this number was transcendental. Since then, the best known proven examples of these numbers are π and e.

Proving that no algebraic equation exists of which a number is a solution is extremely difficult. Consequently, there are very few well-known examples of these things sculling about. Here's the weird thing: it has been proven (by Cantor) that not only is the set of transcendental numbers larger than the set of real numbers, it is very very very very much larger than the set of real numbers. The great majority of possible numbers that exist are transcendental. Yet we have trouble discovering these numbers, and we have difficulty actually conceiving of them. We could not conclusively prove they existed until 1844!

I found this out yesterday. I saw the proof, and I was amazed. I feel the same way I did when I realized that the light we can see is only a puny fraction of the light that exists. The real numbers that we can find examples of and conceptualize are a puny fraction of the numbers that exist. Truly, we live and die as pathetically limited flesh, straining at a world we can barely sense. Cavil, of Battlestar Galactica, rages at his creator, crying out "I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear x-rays, and I want to smell dark matter! I don't want to be human."

Swords for Glory Part II: the Scars of the Cleaning Lady

2011-01-24T20:57:00.000-06:00

Today has been my semiannual day to clean and oil all my bladed weapons. I have never been so pleased to accidentally cut myself. The cleanliness, deepness, and painless nature of the cuts is a tribute to the respect I show my blades and the quality of the care with which I maintain them.

Swords for Glory

2011-01-24T13:09:00.000-06:00

In today's installment of Things that Deeply Distress me While No One Else Cares, I have realized that most middle eastern dancers seldom, if ever, clean the swords that they dance with. I came to this realization while trying to remove layers of rust from a dancers' blade that I borrowed from a dear friend.

These are dancers' swords. They are meant to be pretty and to be balanceable. I understand that. I understand that the steel is unsharpened rubbish. I will never take up these swords and put my energy into them and seek others' lives while holding my own in my hand.

At the same time, why cannot people take care of their swords properly, or at least oil them every once in a while?

Harm, Irrational Nonsense, and Cupcakes

2011-01-22T10:21:00.000-06:00

I like tarot cards. I really do. They are pretty and fun to play with. I have a basic deck and I've always sort of wanted more and more specialty decks, but they've never been a priority and I don't have a lot of money left after food and opera. Nonetheless, I like mt deck. I asked a friend whose mother reads tarot cards to show me some basic layouts and principles because I believe in being rigorously correct about my irrational nonsense when I do readings in which I predict gruesome and unlikely tragedy. I have also been known to lay them out and chant in order to exorcise a friend's computer. For the record, this computer was an ancient and horrible windows box that tended to freeze if the user did too much too fast, and usually all problems could be fixed by leaving it alone for a few minutes. It is, however, more fun and more impressive to fill the idle time with pompous ritual than making it clear that you are doing absolutely nothing and waiting for computer to heal itself without intervention from you.

Also, fortune-telling cards lead to some great story-telling. It's not tarot, but the card scene and aria from Carmen is beautiful and moving. So I said all that to say that some friends began telling me about a wonderful card reader friend of theirs. All well and good, I'm a skeptic, but my general approach to irrational nonsense is to avoid comment unless I think there is a good possibility that the irrational nonsense is harmful, or that they are suggesting I spend time and money doing something dumb, or it involves religion. I'm not trying to sound superior, I love these people, they provide me with wine and cupcakes. They are older than I and have been through a lot more. Being a skeptic is hard and not for everyone. This reader sounds awesome, an old southern lady who provides casual dismissal of ex-husbands' bed performance with hand-gestures and "honeys" and is generally hilarious. Of course, she is essentially a dishonest person by pretending to mystical knowledge instead of just being really really good at cold readings (from the description). She is not, however, charging for this, and everyone who has gotten a reading from her loves her and sounds happy when talking about her. It annoys me professionally that when she tells people to refill birth control prescriptions promptly so as not to skip days and then take multiple pills a day to make up for it these people listen to her. These people may not follow advice on medication from people qualified to give it, but they'll believe a psychic. Grr. I believe in the value of education, idealistically. Despite having dropped out of a PhD program with only a master's I really do believe in education and credibility of sources. So this annoys me. Nonetheless, what am I going to say? It is more important for people to take contraceptives correctly than for me to be annoyed.

I am going to drink my wine and eat my cupcakes and not say anything in such a situation.

From Letters to my Imaginary Baby: Blog for Choice Day

2011-01-21T10:09:00.000-06:00

Today, dear zygote, you became a blastula. Or is it the other way around? I never remember. Either way, the number of your cells is countable and all of them visible under a microscope. There is no easily discernible physical evidence in my body of your existence, but the thought of you being there concerns and frightens me such that I badly need a drink. Which I can't have without risking the sanctimonious disapproval of Margaret Mitchell and the more vulgar disapproval of a society whose only warning label on alcohol is aimed at pregnant women.

It is NARAL's Blog for Choice Day, and this year, participating bloggers are asked to reflect on the current anti-choice political atmosphere, from the Stupak amendment to John Boehner, or whatever. As far as I can tell, being as I am a not terribly expert arm-chair expert, the strategy of those who oppose abortion is to make it too expensive to be accessed by anyone except the rich. This makes no sense: if a woman cannot afford an abortion, how can she be expected to afford, oh, I don't know, pre-natal care? Or a child? Or even the missed time from work?

I do not understand the hysterical anti-abortion attitude of those who hold it. I also don't understand where they get their disgusting pictures from, since they can't take pictures of the proceedings without signed consent from the patients. Maybe that's why all disgusting abortion photos are not cited.

Anyway.

I grew up in a community of highly conservative Christians. Growing up, I understood that the only acceptable narrative of my life would be to go to a Christian college to meet a Christian man, marry him, and have children. The realization that I did not have to do any of this was an incredible relief. Yet every time I talk to people from my parents' church, which is, thank God, seldom now that I have had the courage to inform my parents that I will no longer attend their religious ceremonies, the only questions I get ask relate to my marital plans. Growing up, I was told that I was the future and I would be an elder's wife or a preacher's wife. I was expected to help in the nursery (boys never were, but all the girls took their turn).

Now I am an adult. I have not married, and I am confident enough in myself to express my general dislike of children. Those my own age generally agree that I am temperamentally unsuited to raising them, but the old guard of my parents' friends do not or will not understand that this is an option. To depart from the narrative of marriage and childbirth is so unspeakable it isn't spoken of. The women terminating their pregnancies are never spoken of, it is only about the fetuses. Some of them are, in fact, transported by traveling preachers to exhibit to congregants as a visual aid to the "abortion is sin" sermon. How a fetus can have the right to life (or, actually, parisitism, since technically speaking, they are no more alive than a virus) without the right to have its remains treated with decency is yet another thing I do not understand.

There is and always has been misogyny, and hence the sanctioned political attitude that women do not have the right to autonomy and privacy in their medical decisions. A Chinese friend once asked me why abortion was such a big deal in the U.S., and I honestly had no good answer, but I do blame it on the Christian religion as practiced in the U.S. Despite a lack of textual support from the Christian holy book, it has been decided that fetal destruction is hideously horrible, with uncited pictures to match. How or why this happened, I don't know. I am, however, reasonably certain that the more the world changes, the more the Christian old guard will react defensively. There is always a tendency in changing times to cling desperately to a world that used to be, particularly when this is a world that one believes is the only form of right possible. As a Japanese professor asked, how can a monotheistic culture comprehend multiple working hypotheses?

The world has been changing rapidly in ways that are sinful. Gay marriage has made more legal progress than marijuana. There is a backlash from those who don't want the world to change. Pregnant women exercising their right to not be mothers are an easy target, unfortunately, because women are too often not seen as people. Women "make important contributions" the self-righteously patronizing men of my parents' church remark. These important contributions never include departing from a script of being wives and mothers, and a long tradition of preacher men has and will continue to foster an unholy horror of any change that could include women having a voice or autonomy.

Whatever the current situation on Capitol Hill, may there continue to be rights to decisions and privacy so that those who find themselves pregnant may make the best decisions in a society that respects and loves them for who they are, not which stereotype the engender.

Word for Wednesday: Chaplet

2011-01-19T08:03:00.000-06:00

A wreath or garland for the head. Origin: 14th century Middle English chapelet, meaning wreath. Seen in one of the Chapters of Coming Forth by Day (Egyptian Book of the Dead) is the Chapter of the Chaplet of Victory, a spell to be recited when placing a chaplet on the deceased's head. Speaking of Egyptians, Pliny claims that a chaplet made with specific flowers is the "Egyptian Chaplet." This being Pliny, take that as either truth, rumor, or made up detail.

The term has come to mean a string of beads pertaining to the rituals of the Catholic church.

Waterhouse's Ophelia makes herself a chaplet

Heike Monogatari: Classic Literature is Fabulous

2011-01-18T14:25:00.000-06:00

I've tried to read the Heike Monogatari a time or two previously, and found it difficult to get past the first several pages. There are too many people with too many different names holding too many different ranks in a complicated social system that I don't understand. Nonetheless, I love the tales of Heian Japan and have ever since I read Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book. So I made another stab at the Heike Monogatari via a translation by Helen Craig McCullough that is very readable and includes pictures. I just finished Chapter One and I could not believe it has taken me so long to realize how awesome this thing is. It starts slow, but becomes more and more amazing.

The background of the Taira clan (which we are apparently just supposed to somehow know are referred to as the Heike) is given with many genealogies, omens of the Gods' favor as indicated by fish, and anecdotes of overcoming courtly disapproval. This being Heian Japan, disapproval is shown via poems employing witty wordplay comparing the Taira to broken wine bottles followed by assassination attempts. The first must be suffered, but the latter is foiled by an ostentatious show of a dagger gleaming like ice. Fortunately, at the imperial scolding for having weaponry, it doth appear that the dagger is really wood coated with shiny paper (Shiny!). The story progresses with poetry, scandal, dancers becoming nuns, child emperors abdicating in favour of one another, and more political maneuvering for status in a massively complicated court system. Things come to scandal when an emperor takes for consort the consort of the former emperor, even though the lady is, at 22, "past her prime." The emperor then dies in the prime of youth at 28. Misogyny: it never goes out of fashion.

The gravity of the dead emperor's funeral is marred when one group of monks places their ceremonial grave offerings out of turn and another group of monks smashes up their grave offering. Things really get out of hand among the fighting monks when Kannon's shrine gets burned down. People insult the shrine and defend it anonymously via a message board using references to classical sutras. I love Heian Japan so much. Scarcely has the dust settled from all this but an important post comes up vacant and an official who wants it engages a bunch of monks to pray for him. In response, three doves peck one another to death and a monk chanting in a hollow tree is struck by lightning. Your smarter Buddhist will recognize these as Bad Omens.

Chapter 1 concludes with an incident in which a deputy governor insults yet another bunch of monks by riding a horse through their sacred bath, or something like that. In response, three thousand rampaging monks attack the imperial palace. Wisely enough, they attack the side that's lightly defended. The commander, however, goes to parley and in the greatest speech ever, tells the monks that they will get more glory from attacking the heavier force on the other side of the palace. The monks are hesitant, but then remember that this commander is a respected poet and that respectful persons do not attack poets of refined sensibilities. One of the monks even quotes the commander's celebrated poem! Then all the monks go off to the other side of the palace, are routed, and life continues as normal for the court.

It is possible that the Heike Monogatari was not intended to be as fascinatingly entertaining as I am finding it. In fact, given the repeated references to how dreadful things were in those "latter days of law" (like all cultures at all periods, Heian Japan regarded the Good Old Days as gone forever with the world going to hell. In specific they believed that the 10,000 years of moral degradation that the Buddhists preach had begun already.) it seems unlikely. Nonetheless, I am enjoying it immensely. More wonders from Chapter 2 to follow.

The Rights of Those on Welfare

2011-01-17T08:22:00.000-06:00

A friend recently asked me what I thought about making drug tests mandatory for those on welfare. Apparently and based on Facebook's likable positions, this is a position that some people hold. I think it is a violation of Constitutional rights. Fourth Amendment, specifically.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

I know that some people cheat the government out of money using welfare. Actually, I don't know that, I have only hearsay anecdotes, which at most means that I am reasonably certain it's possible and probably not that difficult, but what I do know is that this does not matter. Unless there is reasonable suspicion that a person is violating drug laws, and the proper authorities have secured warrants via the proper channels, then drug tests are a violation of a person's right to be secure in their persons. This applies not only to those seeking welfare, but professional athletes, those applying for jobs, and everyone in high school, not that anyone seems to care.

Things aren't as Bad as they Could Be

2011-01-13T09:54:00.000-06:00

Post-snowstormed Atlanta has power, which makes it an improvement over post-hurricaned Houston. I can, for example, read the internet. I always find many fascinating things and it's a good way to keep out of the way of my sister, who is fussing at me for not cleaning as well or as much as she does. It's true: as an angel in the house, I fail, and after a prolonged effort which is not terribly prolonged by most standards, I require a good stiff drink.

Speaking of, let us laud humanity for getting drunk via mass production since at least 4000 BCE! I'm proud of us.

The U.S. Postal service gets on board with the Bowdlerizing of history by removing cigarettes from famous images. I would like to take this opportunity to add that I love the USPS and I'm still happy that the government subsidizes them because I love being able to send a letter anywhere in the world for a fraction of the actual cost to do that. That being said, trying to create a dystopian past in which no one smokes is stupid.

Everyone has heard about the shooting of a federal judge, a child, and a member of Congress. While we are busy figuring out who to blame, we should remember that referring to someone suspected of mental illness as "psycho, crazy, schizo" or other pejorative is not only still not okay, it is not meaningful in discussing motives.

If anyone wants to join a community of people reading the Bible in a secular way, there are several people blogging their reading of it. Having, in my wholesome youth, won trophies for my knowledge of the Bible, I am now slightly tired of it and would be more interested in finding people blogging their way through (a translation of) the Koran, since I've never made it past the first few chapters. Or the Bhagavad-Gita. Or even the Heike Monogatari which I swear I will read one of these days. Really.

Absolutely everyone should be watching Hetalia Axis Powers! The countries of the world are personified in the most stereotyped ways possible and relate the tale of World War II with many angsty flashbacks and sometimes background music from Austria, who expresses his complete anger and disgust using the piano.

Word for Wednesday: Zounds

2011-01-12T20:52:00.000-06:00

An expletive. An interjection indicating surprise or anger in profane terms. Origin: 1590-1600 as a contraction of His or God's Wounds, 'swounds. Usage: Zounds! The Klingons doth burst forth upon our starboard bow!

God's Wounds, I'm a blogger, not Shakespeare!

The Emotional Cookbook: Cute Little Tarts

2011-01-11T18:03:00.000-06:00

The cranberry and white chocolate chip Cute Little Tarts of General Discontent at being sick and snowed in and trying to get fat off cooking desserts which cannot include milk as an ingredient because I was just too superior to run out and buy milk and eggs and now I really really want custard.

Bowdlerizing Mark Twain

2011-01-07T08:31:00.000-06:00

Huckleberry Finn is to be published with all racist terms expurgated. I do not approve. However, I would like to stress that this is legal, and this is also completely ethical. We have and should have the right to alter non-copyrighted material for our own purposes provided we do not claim others' original work as our own. Actually, under the fair use clause, we have the right to alter copyrighted material for our own purposes provided we do not claim others' original work as our own. So even though I disapprove of what this man is using his right to do, I will defend to the death his right to do it, in despite of how he is using his right to do something so silly as has been heretofore only seen from the likes of Bowdler and Ray Comfort.

However, I disapprove of censoring source materials to cater to modern sensibilities. Offensiveness, it is offensive, and many antiquated works are highly offensive. Censorship is still wrong. We all have the right to decide for ourselves what (non-private) information we wish to peruse. Furthermore, I read this as an attempt to alter perceptions of the past. Why? We do not and never have lived in a happy G-rated wonderland in which everyone loves one another. To pretend otherwise is an insult to our own understanding and to those who came before. They existed. They lived, as best they could, in a world that was awful. Both those who suffered and those who caused suffering existed and they have the right to be remembered as they were, not altered to make those who came after think differently of them. We are not the ancient Chinese, to cause entire words to disappear from the lexicon, nor are the Soviet masters of the cutting room floor, to make people who fell from favor literally disappear. We are mature adults. We have the right to attempt an understand the world as it is, and make our own criticisms thereof and conclusions therefrom. If all we have is censored material we can only see the world through the eyes of someone else and we did not consent to this.

I am overreacting here. I have no reason to suppose that the expurgated version of Huckleberry Finn will in any way replace the original version (although given how often the original version is banned, I am justified in suspicion, but anything more would be the slippery slope fallacy). But I will repeat that though this is a right I will defend to the death, I also have the right to greatly disapprove and only read the original while railing against expurgation.

I am Deeply Disappointed in Humanity

2011-01-06T10:59:00.001-06:00

I am a starry-eyed optimist. I believe that unfettered access to information will lead to a more informed populace capable of better living via education. Then I start talking to people. As dear Richard Dawkins points out, one of the most startling things about the world is that people usually actually believe what they say they believe. So when I jokingly asked on Facebook for bizarre folk remedies for my cold, I was expecting joke responses. What I was not expecting was for people to seriously recommend non-FDA regulated substances, drinking vinegar, drinking specific types of alcohol, gargling with salt water, or ingesting vitamin C to boost my immune system.

Stallman's Beard, people actually believe "boosting the immune system" is a meaningful phrase. For the record, from a credible source, it isn't. This is the sort of idiocy I would expect from someone like a former roommate of mine who thought that an appropriate response to bronchitis was fasting and that vaccinating animals against rabies was a bad thing. Illogically, I am less surprised by complete ignorance than partial ignorance. This probably means I have a tendency to overgeneralize people, which is a problem. It indicates that I may not be perfect. Bollocks.

Getting back to my recommended cures: in all fairness, the gargling with salt water and drinking an antiseptic astringent (it doesn't really matter which one) will probably lead to temporary symptom relief. I would be more impressed if the people recommending such things actually seemed to know why these are probably going to be beneficial for most people, but I don't think they do. Of course, offhand, I'm not sure I could tell you why either. My guess would be that since saline solution nasal sprays are recommended for nosebleeds, saltwater is just especially good at moisturizing tissues. Since saltwater is more or less the same osmolarity as blood (scrub with saltwater to get blood out of clothing), it makes sense that it would be better at moisturizing the internal parts of the body than water. Astringents like vinegar and alcohol are going to temporarily reduce mucus discharge. I think. Take that for what it's worth, because I really don't feel like looking it up right now, but having some sort of vague idea how things might work is at least better than "this relative/friend/lover of mine swears by this substance as a cold-cure." Why anyone would swear by apple-cider vinegar puzzles me. Says the woman who swears by Stallman's Beard.

Vitamin C will probably do nothing for you. After a certain amount of reading with help from one of those wonderful papers which are summaries of other papers, I finally think I know why everyone is so convinced it helps colds. Back in the 70's, a 2-time Nobel winner named Linus Pauling claimed spectacular (~45%) improvement in cold symptoms for people taking vitamin C in contrast to a control group. No one else has been able to replicate these results. In subsequent experiments there are sometimes small but statistically significant reductions in cold duration for people on vitamin C vs the control group. So there is a small chance it may help, a larger chance that it won't, but the good news is that something about colds means that people who take massive amounts of vitamin C while experiencing cold symptoms usually do not experience diarrhea as is more normally typical of taking large amounts of vitamin C. Otherwise, the whole thing is one of those cases in which one study is hyped but none of the subsequent rebuttals receive any attention. I may hate science journalism.

If one really really believe that some useless thing will help a cold, it might through the placebo effect. However, let us not overestimate placebos. They can cause improvement, that is very well documented. That improvement will be significantly less than the improvement shown by taking actual medication, e.g., a cough suppressant is going to work much better than something one just thinks is a cough suppressant. This is a matter of definitions. For a medicine to be demonstrated as effective, studies must show the medication is a significant improvement over a placebo. Such studies should be available to the public, Dijkstra bless the internet. A good thing to remember when looking at product information is that it is illegal for non-FDA regulated substances to make specific claims about their ability to treat disease. FDA approval is full of sexist politics (see patriarchally-privileged wankers who feel entitled to restrict access to contraceptives because it might encourage women to have sex), but empirical evidence is at least included in the decision and standardized ingredients are enforced (I cannot stress enough how important this is. Illegal drugs would be so much less dangerous if there were some mechanism regulating exactly how much of the active ingredient was present in each dose).

The conclusion to the story is that I am experiencing symptoms of the common cold. No matter what I do, I will continue to experience them for several days and there isn't much that can be done about this. I want to believe in a cure for the cold as much as the next person, but I believe in scientific research a lot more.

Word for Wednesday: Astringent

2011-01-05T10:04:00.000-06:00

Contracting or constrictive. Any substance that contracts tissues causing a reduction in discharges such as mucus or blood. Origins 1530-1545, from the Latin astringens, meaning drawing together. Usage: I have a cold and I have been advised, among other folk remedies, to ingest either vinegar or some form of alcohol as an astringent that will make me less phlegmatic.

Wish for the New Year

2011-01-04T08:18:00.000-06:00

Can we quit with the Gregorian calendar and use something that actually makes sense? For example, redefining hours such that they divide evenly into the amount of time it takes the earth to complete one rotation would be great. It would also be nice to have the week redefined such that the number of weeks in the year will divide evenly into the amount of time it takes earth to complete one revolution. If these new units could work like the metric system in nice powers of ten, that would be great. I would be even happier if all months of the year had the same number of days.

One more thing, why do we pick January first as the start of each year? It doesn't really matter which day we pick since the earth's orbit is an ellipse so any point may be arbitrarily selected to use as a start point for a calendar system, but why January first? We already have lots of parties this time of the year, we need a party in one of the more boring and depressing months, like March.

I'm a Big Girl Middle Eastern Dancer Now!

2011-01-03T10:44:00.000-06:00

This New Year's Eve I did a two-hour gig all by myself for a party of awesome Indians in beautiful clothes who liked to get up and dance all by myself. There was the requisite annoying guy who kept telling me he'd seen better middle eastern dancers in Detroit, but the adorable child who dropped by every time I took a break to ask if I was going to dance anymore made up for that.

Once I relaxed and started enjoying myself it was so awesomely fun I can hardly believe it was a job that I was getting paid for. Sometimes my life is amazing. My teacher, who sent me the client's number, told me she was a very proud dance mom.

I have degrees in computer science and I'm a professional dancer. Weird.

Rational Belief

2010-12-30T21:17:00.000-06:00

I have had a much better life after leaving religion behind. For one thing, I no longer have nightmares about Hell, which is beyond delightful. It also creates a conversational hole that my parents and I talk awkwardly around, but it's a significant step up from going to church with them and hearing (and I quote verbatim) that:

"Women who wear the pants lose their femininity."
"Islamics[sic], Buddhists, and Shintoists are vicious and evil and want to kill us."
"If evolution was such a good idea, why didn't Aristotle think of it?"
"Lord, we thank thee that we are not like other denominations."

I'm not opposed to religion in general. Usually. I don't participate in it and just sort of accept in rosy optimism that some religion that I don't find objectionable exists. I think the existence of such a thing as God is highly improbable, but the literal existence of God is probably not why people believe. I also think that once one stops dealing in objective reality there is no meaningful way to distinguish between beliefs, and so interfaith conflicts puzzle me. Why is one God any more likely than any other God? Intersectional conflict is even weirder: they worship the exact same God! Surely that is a point in common?

A topic which has been floating about among skeptical atheist communities is what evidence, if any, would convince an atheist to become religious. Atheism is a position based not on belief, but on rational consideration of evidence. So it would be reasonable to say that were there some meaningful (and empirically falsifiable) definition of God and there were patterns of evidence supporting the existence of that definition which were occurring in predictable ways and coming from large numbers of credible sources, then the reasonable atheist should become religious. Note that since atheists are not the ones making a positive claim for the existence of God, they are under no obligation either to propose a definition or present evidence before or against such a thing as God.

Rational belief is something of a misnomer, however, for to accept the existence of God based on evidence is not a belief in God and therefore not a religion. So a better way to phrase the question would be: what would cause someone who prefers to work on evidence and reason to simply believe in something fundamentally irrational? Some, P.Z. Myers, for example, states that nothing would cause them to believe in something irrational. This is reasonable. There are also people (most of the world, in fact) that do prefer to believe in something irrational. Now if we discount the influence of culture and childhood conditioning and also the threat of physical harm and social stigma, and assume that everyone religious is religious by conscious and informed choice than this is, if not reasonable (by definition, I don't mean it as a slur), it is certainly understandable.

Some people claim a deep personal comfort or some other feeling of happiness from religion. Based on this study, slightly over a third of people who attend a church regularly report extreme satisfaction with life as opposed to only about 20 percent of those who don't attend church at all. This isn't an argument for attending church regularly because your odds of being in the other 2/3 of regular church goers are good (about 2/3, in fact), but it is an indication that some people (albeit a minority) who are going to church are really happy about it. Good on them. People being happy is a good thing. I have also heard that irrationality has many personal benefits. The people telling me this are always vague about what these benefits might be and focus their elocutionary efforts on the trying to get me to go to church, but presumably someone somewhere experiences a benefit. It's also possible that this (these?) benefit(s) is difficult if not impossible to express in words. Natural language is not infinitely descriptive; while it is true that a natural language can generate (uncountably) infinite constructions, it is also true that there are things which a natural language cannot express and these might be (uncountably) infinite as well.

So for me to become religious I would have to become convinced that the religion would be of benefit to me. It is perfectly possible that there may exist a religious organization that would I would like. It would have excellent music and services would not be boring and there would be many people with whom I could be friends. However, my personal feelings of satisfaction are not enough to justify belonging to an organization. I am an honorable person, with certificates from the World Sword Federation to that effect. I am a representative of the organizations with which I am affiliated. This means I must not do anything to besmirch their honor, nor may I represent organizations whose name would besmirch my own. So if I am going to participate in a religion, the religious organization in question must fulfill some requirements as listed nonexhaustively below. Note that I do not expect perfection of those who strive to attain it, but I do expect a serious effort made toward meeting these requirements.

There must an absence of sexism, racism, and generalized xenophobia.
There must be an absence of politicking. Preachers should not use the pulpit to tell members how to vote.
There must be a sincere effort made toward understanding the religious positions at hand. This includes creating an environment in which questions may be asked which fall outside of the realm of orthodox. To demand orthodoxy stifles freedom of thought and inquiry and also disallows consideration of the possible wrongness of orthodoxy.
It is inevitable that there will be evil people in a religion as there are evil people in all organizations. An organization must deal with its evil members in ways which are ethical toward both accused and accusers, transparent, and result in convicted evil doers being removed from the power which allowed them to work evil. Furthermore, comments about the evilness of members in a religious organization should be met with informed mea culpas that include the steps taken in response and, if possible, a knowledge of the motivations for evil that nonetheless lay the blame for evil upon the evil people themselves.
Proselytizing may only be carried out ethically and nonobnoxiously. I'm not sure what this means because I really can't imagine an evangelical effort that isn't obnoxious.
It would be understood that the rules of the religion do not apply to those who do not believe in this religion.

This mostly all boils down to a demand that religion must not only be of benefit to me, it must not be a detriment to society. Ideally, it would be a benefit to society as well, but one could always take the view that making better people automatically leads to a better society. I'm just not sure that's necessarily true.

I have one more caveat. Even if I become convinced that religion is of benefit to me, this must be a benefit that cannot be achieved more optimally via secular means. This is the same way I feel about beer. I do not like beer. There may and probably does exist a beer that I like. However, there are many types of alcohol that I know I like or think I probably would like. It is not cost-effective for me to spend a great deal of time and effort trying all sorts of beers when I could be trying things that I know I am far more likely to like or even reverting to things I already know I like. So by analogy, while it is possible that a religious service would have some unspecifiable benefit which would justify the time and effort I would need to put into it, I prefer to invest my time and effort in things which I seem more likely to provide some personal benefit.

Quick Hit: Bad Science

2010-12-29T18:16:00.001-06:00

This is the sort of thing that really tingles my amygdala. Conservatives have larger fear centers in their brains! The correlation is found from 2 members of parliament + some unspecified number of students with no hint of demographic information beyond that. Good Grace Hopper, nonrepresentative sample much?

Furthermore, what exactly does this mean, really? The brains functionalities aren't as well known as all that and comparing head sizes and brain sizes has a long history of justifying unpleasantness. Racism and sexism spring to mind. Be very, very careful when doing it. Of course, such cautions really only apply to drawing conclusions from actual data, which based on the brief description here, this isn't. If I could get the actual published findings, I'd love to see if there is more to it than this.

Word for Wednesday: Meretricious

2010-12-29T06:02:00.000-06:00

Alluring by show of flashy or vulgar attractions. Tawdry. Implying both prostitution and deception. Usage: I love drag queen fashions in all their meretricious fabulosity. Originating in 1620-1630: from meretrix, meaning of or pertaining to prostitutions. Meretrix from merere meaning "to earn."

A meretricious bird if ever there was one. Flashy for no better

reason than to attract mates and they will drink from anyone's feeder. Tsk.

Back when I was but a wee bairn, my daddy saw fit to expand the horizons of my vocabulary by using a long word in a sentence and then asking me if I knew that word. If I said yes, I was then called upon to give a definition. If I said no, he would define it for me. Meretricious was one such word and his definition for it was "gussied up like a painted whore." I find this as a definition both offensive and strangely hilarious.

I Wish I was a Heartbeat

2010-12-28T20:07:00.000-06:00

I recently watched Run, Lola, Run. It is either incredibly optimistic, or a glimpse of Hell.

Either way it is a beautifully filmed rendition of the venerable science fiction trope of chaos theory that a tiny alteration in the world brings huge changes. That Good Doctor Isaac Asimov wrote it up some time ago as The End of Eternity, in which Engineers of time travel into our world to do something small, like hide a set of keys, to make the course of fate branch. Hollywood, being Hollywood, did a very boring rendition of the idea of small changes leading to very different universes in Sliding Doors. Hollywood should take notes from Run, Lola, Run on how to do this better. Actually, based on my experience watching Ironman recently, Hollywood should be attacked by a mob of angry scientists wielding pitchforks. Unfortunately for the intellectual quality of cinema in the U.S., scientists don't do mobs very well; they get distracted by side issues. Is the first derivative of a pitchfork a tine or a rake?

So we have Run, Lola, Run, a film in which a man and a woman who love each other have 20 minutes to not lose all their happiness forever. The man is waiting for Lola or fate to save him, Lola is running to him, the clock is ticking, and this is illustrated in a 3 way split screen of tense anxiety to a pulsing techno rhythm. The cinema gets even better as Lola encounters people along the way: with every encounter we see the person's future laid out for us in snapshot stills.

After 20 minutes, Lola dies. As the light fades from her eye, the world turns red and she speaks to her lover in red-tinged flashback, pondering the meaning of love when it is so patently true that should he not have loved her, he would have loved someone else just as much. Then she decides that even so, love is worth it and brings herself back to life 20 minutes earlier to try again.

This time, as Lola runs to her lover, she is slightly later by a few seconds or minutes to get to everything and thus all the people she encounters have slightly different futures. She does not die at the end of this 20 minutes, but her lover does, and they have another red-tinged flashback conversation in which her lover remarks that once he is dead she will find another lover to love just as much. Lola, however, declares that he is not dead yet and restarts time again from the same 20 minute earlier point.

One hopes that Lola and her lover actually have the option of giving up at some point, because to be trapped in the same 20 minutes, repeated over ad infinitum is Hell and also an episode of Supernatural.

Third time is, however, the charm. Sort of. Lola manages to arrive in good time (having passed people whose snapshots show yet a third future) having fixed the problem such that she and her lover can live in happiness. But she finds that in this attempt her lover has fixed the problem without her and calmly, even brusquely, waves off the tension and horror that has hung over the rest of the movie They walk off together, but Lola does not smile.

The ending it is happy, and yet it is not. We are unsure of her lover's feelings, but is Lola truly happy, knowing that 20 minutes earlier her lover yelled at her with a sort of triumph, exclaiming that she was finally out of ideas in this impending doom, and now this selfsame lover Manni is dismissing her almost miraculous efforts, her breakneck run, her fear and anxiety, and acting that infuriating way of pretending he was in control the entire time. With a helping of "oh you silly woman to worry so!" on the side.

At the same time, Lola has been reflecting on the nature of love. It is true and frightening to know that to love one person and one person only forever and always is monumentally improbably. There are approximately six billion of us. Even assuming strict heterosexuality and interest only within an age range, there are at a conservative estimate at least 1 billion people that would be eligible suitors. If one had one and only one True Love/Soulmate type one would more than likely be foiled by geographic inconvenience. It is far more likely that there are many people in the world that we are capable of loving if we should so happen to meet them and spend time with them. The love of one's life is as much a product of probability as the color of one's eyes. Does that make love less special? Less wonderful? When risking life and limb thrice over by moving heaven and earth to turn back time for love, is that truly then worth it? Love is a beautiful thing, but Lola's lover proves that he is perhaps not so beautiful as her love in his casual dismissal of her efforts. Knowing as we do that she would likely have done the same heroic thing for another man had this one not chanced to enter her life, is it less special?

Would it have been worth it, after all?

~T.S. Eliot

We are the Lucky Ones

2010-12-25T14:37:00.000-06:00

I am experiencing a white Christmas. In Georgia, of all places. This might be exciting if I weren't anxiously awaiting the plane carrying people I love who have already been stuck in Germany for over 24 hours and may now be diverted to Savannah. Add that probably the only thing in my life that isn't flaky right now is my damn pie crust and you can probably get that I'm not terribly happy right now. A group of rigorously alcoholic scientists are helpfully informing me that I can't absorb enough vodka through my bare feet to get drunk. Bollocks.

Nonetheless, I exist right now. We all do. Stacked against us as the odds are in this bizarrely chaotic casino, we exist. We are born flawed and destroy our bodies in the living on this earth inhospitable that we are killing to feed ourselves. We don't live by merit, but by chance. Through no flaw, other organisms died. Through no skill, we took their niche. Through no excellence of potential, we come into the world from the chance encounter of this sperm with that ovum, and by the grace of the dice, this sperm and that ovum were well-made enough for meiosis to occur and our maternal environment was in sufficient health and luck for gestation and parturition. We mature to adulthood against a world swarming with bacteria and viruses and random accidents. We come to our independence with a host of emotional baggage and physical shortcomings. Yet somehow, we are alive. We live to think, to reason, to discover, to build things and to break things. We survive on top of an accumulation of others' efforts at thinking and building, and we have the incomprehensible privilege of adding nothing to the accumulation of labor that has given us an affluent society where we all have television and shoes.

We are alive briefly as the decomposing fallout of an unstable nothingness. We have a moment filled with distractions and pain to bask in the light of a dying sun. We drew the royal flush in the game of life. We're still losing, but we are losing excellently.

Is it enough? You tell me.

This world of dew,

it is only a world of dew.

And yet.

~Issa

Issa on Going Home

2010-12-22T21:30:00.001-06:00

Even the flies

In the village of my birth

Draw blood with each bite.

~Koyabashi Issa

Word(s) for Wednesday: Nontrivial Subset

2010-12-21T09:27:00.000-06:00

A subset of a set which is neither the empty set nor the entirety of the set. Reptiles are a trivial subset of the set reptiles as would be a crocoduck. Turtles are a nontrivial subset of reptiles. To demonstrate nontriviality of a subset it is necessary and sufficient to demonstrate that the subset contains at least one element and that there is at least one element of the superset which is not contained in the subset.

Usage: What is the difference between a bracelet and a bangle? Bangles are a nontrivial subset of bracelets.

The Emotionless Cookbook: Unbeatable Chess Pie of Cold Logic

2010-12-19T12:48:00.000-06:00

#DEFINE
eggs=4
sugar=2cups
milk=1/2cup
butter=1/2cup
flour=1tbsp
#optional, fill in values if desired
vanilla=NULL
coloring=NULL #for Deep Blue chess pie

def main():
shell=uncooked_pie_shell

node=[eggs, sugar, milk, butter, flour, vanilla, coloring]
filling=minimax(node, len(node)

pie=shell+filling

return baked(pie)

def minimax(node,depth):
   if depth <=0:
   return value(node)
   alpha = -INFINITY
   for child in node:
   alpha=max(alpha, -minimax(child, depth-1)_
   return alpha

def baked(pie):
   temp=350
   while(!node.golden_brown):
   oven(node, temp)

Sex with Virgins

2010-12-18T19:33:00.000-06:00

I have heard men say that they would only sleep with virgins, and I have heard men say that they would never sleep with virgins. I'm not sure which attitude I find more creepy.

A few things to be entirely clear on: I hate the term virgin. It falsely dichotomizes people, usually women, into two classes based on something fairly meaningless and arbitrary and then value judges are made about those classes for no purpose that is ever good. The worth of a person has nothing to do with how many lovers that person has or has not taken. As for the practice of defining virginity based on whether or not one specific sex act has occurred is just dumb. The whole virgin vs nonvirgin is one of the most pointless and uninformative labels one could ever come up with and it could be laughed away except that women have been slandered, persecuted, and murdered over this label.

Now then: it bothers me a person will refuse to take another person as a lover solely due to previous experience. That is creepy. Really, really creepy. On the opposite side of the spectrum is the person who will refuse to take another person as a lover solely due to a lack of previous experience. This is unkind. There are few people who will succeed at something on the very first try. Like everything else, sex requires a certain amount of practice. The experienced lover who is compassionate should recall a time of less experience and be considerate. It is only the arrogant and unkind lover who will not.

Note that I have no moral judgments to make over casual trysts vs weddedness. A wedding vow shouldn't be broken but other than that, it isn't my concern what arrangements people make amongst themselves which are consensual and safe. I just want to live in a world where we are all compassionate enough to neither stigmatize those who are attempting to remedy their ignorance and we are not inclined to be cruel about things that don't really matter.

Soleil de Ma Vie

2010-12-16T21:20:00.000-06:00

I love circuses. I've been hooked on Cirque du Soleil since Quidam and I have been attending every touring show that comes to Atlanta ever since. This year Ovo was my Christmas present, fortunately, since I am still a lady of funemployment. Alas! But Ovo! In despite of black ice and cold cold rain, Ovo!

This and all subsequent images in the post from www.cirquedusoleil.com

The world of Cirque du Soleil is never non-surreal but it is sometimes non-happy. Fortunately for my present mood Ovo did not fall into the category of non-happy. It is a cheerful world of beautiful dancing bugs with happy music. It is a delightful world from the opening dragonfly handbalancer of the fabulous pants to the rain of autumn leaf colored tissue paper butterflies that fell to the stage for the finale.

Dragonfly handbalancer of the fabulous pants

The only disappointment was that the aerial silks was not an act but an intro, and a boring one at that. Standing on a hammock knot to gesture emphatically while being raised and lowered by a winch is not fabulous. I can do more fabulous things in aerial silks than that! Climb for myself, just for example. I can climb in multiple different ways, no less. The aerial silk moment was presented as a metamorphosis and intro to the butterfly Spanish web pas de deux. I thought it was a slightly too short act. Yes, leave the audience wanting more, and it did indeed, but the audience should be satisfied and wanting more. Nonetheless it was cool. I don't know how they manage to spin around one another without collisions.

Butterflies in their web. Moment of immaturity: watching him hook her

hands and feet into the web at the beginning was rather hot.

Quibbles disposed of, I loved it. How delightful it is to see cute ants juggle one another and foodstuffs on their feet! How amazing it is to see a tarantula cast of his coat of glowy lights and perform on a slackline with panache and perfect balance! How joyful to see the scarabs, sacred to the gods, fly through the air! One scarab fell (safely, thank the gods for nets), reminding us all that we are watching live performances of stuff that is really hard. Good on the flyer for remounting the ladder and continuing.

Scarabs in flight. It never ceases to astonish me how fast trapeze artists are moving.

The perfectly balanced tarantula doesn't even need tension in his wires.

Then, of course, there are the clowns, a ubiquitous cirque presence demanding audience participation. They open the show by wandering around, and those near me spread love and joy (and possibly the Christmas spirit) by taking popcorn from those who had and giving to those who had not. The ladybug stood out as the only character in the show with a bad costume. That there is only one costume throughout the cast that I disliked is to the credit of the designer. She and a bug not easily identifiable were engaged in an awkward courtship. After they had a spat, another bug (a Japanese beetle?) decided to offer the not-identifiable bug various women from the audience. For humorous effect, the beetle also offered a man. Homosexuality: it is funny because it could never possibly happen. I disapprove.

I do, however approve of the not-identifiable bug's little insecticide-huffing habit. This caused him to see a giant dancing slinky that will haunt my nightmares forever.

I will never look at a slinky the same way again.

The rest was fantastic, a beautiful spidery contortionist who uses both flexed and pointed feet to great effect, a wonderful firefly playing with diabolos (diabolo acts always fuel my sneaking suspicion that circus acts are invented by people with too much time on their hands) and a finale of grasshoppers leaping across a tumble tramp and fleas and spiders crawling artistically across a rock wall in the background.

Alas that all things must come to an end. And some rude people always leave slightly before the end, may they go to hell. During the mad rush for the door after my sister and I paused and lingered so that we could go down to the stage and pocket some of the tissue paper butterflies that had fallen like rain. I'm thinking about gluing them to my laptop lid in a fan pattern to remind me to be happy and bizarrely surreal and not to huff insecticide.

Ovo, my darling cirque, au revoir. Come back on schedule.

Word(s) for Wednesday: Pairs of Things that are Actually Just One Thing

2010-12-14T21:33:00.000-06:00

Pants
Scissors
Glasses
Pliers

I just think it's strange.

Now is the Time to Channel Isadora Duncan

2010-12-14T09:01:00.000-06:00

'Tis the season, in certain latitudes of the northern hemisphere, to be very cold. This is no reason not to dress fabulously. Break out the beautifully draped scarves and dance!

via

Sluts: A Review

2010-12-13T20:48:00.000-06:00

The other day I had occasion to request/order a small group of men not to refer to women they were describing as "sluts" or any related terms. I think it went over decently well. Such things are always awkward, but I was not told I was overreacting, couldn't take a joke, or shouldn't worry about sexism in the U.S. One gentleman even asked my opinion of a situation in which a friend of his had been banned by Facebook for posting breastfeeding photos.

I am, however, disappointed in my slightly ad hoc description of the problems with the term slut. I should be more articulate about things that I think should be obvious because, well, they should be so obvious I should easily be able to describe them. So.

1) Slut is a word used to label women as being unworthy of respect for being seen as too sexually forward (toward men).

2) This is not only a dumb reason to judge people, it is a hideous double standard.

3) While men can do whatever they want sexually and not acquire labels that affect their social standards, women are placed on a continuum between those poor wallflowers and those awful sluts. When labels are applied based on perception of dealings with men, not only is there no way to win, there is no way to even be an individual worthy of consideration as an individual.

4) To be called a slut is hurtful and it has real social impact. Women seen as sluts are often ostracized and, in the uncivilized world that is often the halls of learning, alas, bullying. What's the harm? Ask Phoebe Prince. My story is far less important but I can assure you that being called a slut is unpleasant and leads to angsty second-guessing of every action and how it may be perceived. I had done nothing wrong, there was no need for me to live in such a way. Yet it hurt to know that people I thought were my friends thought of me as a slut.

5) Of all the things about a person, the way that they have sex, and with whom, is of trifling importance, and only important to the intimately involved parties. We are people, all of us, we cry, laugh, yawn, and do all the things necessary to live happily as best we can. We deserve to be seen as who we are, not who we do.

6) To focus on a person's sexuality in unkind ways is not becoming of the civilized person and indicates a petty and shallow attitude.

Navel-gazing incumbent upon all who would declare themselves right

Because the virtue of speaking up for one's ideology can never be more virtuous than that ideology. One must occasionally engage in angsty self-reflection. Particularly in situations in which one is doing things at least similar to things one complains about in others. I hate it when the religious begin going on about the wonders of God in conversations because it is awkward for those without religion and also kills the conversation. So why is it acceptable for me to interrupt a conversation with my ideology? First, because I am not pointlessly gushing, I have something to say. Second, what I have to say is about something that demonstrably exists. Third: what I have to say is addressing a problem which is a serious problem for the reasons outlined above. Fourth: the current conversation is not fine and dandy before my interjection; it is making 1/4 of the participants (me) extremely uncomfortable due to personal associations with being labeled a slut in my youth. These are my friends. I would be concerned about saying something hurtful and offensive to them and it is not unreasonable to expect the same consideration. Fifth: I am not killing the conversation. It continued, I was asked my opinion about another feminist issue, they brought up related things and seemed (I hope) interested about related issues and the topic turned naturally and without awkwardness (again, I hope) to other subjects. Furthermore, I am not holding forth from a position of privilege with an air of authority. This may be a slightly disingenuous claim in that I am the oldest with the most degrees and this was brought up earlier in the gathering as "she puts us all to shame" so I cannot say that I do not have a certain social rank in this gathering but I am not monopolizing the conversation, one of my friends demonstrates clearly a more thorough knowledge of the Supreme Court than I have, so I think this is probably fine. It is, however, something to be concerned about in that I have been exposed to feminist language and theory more so I do have more authority on the issue and I should not use this to become obnoxious in what I believe to be a perfectly reasonable grievance with the language. Sixth and finally, my complaint shouldn't be as much of an issue as religion. Changing religious beliefs can be a big deal; changing word choices is usually not seen as a difficult or unreasonable demand.