Kitten

Your argument is invalid.

Burbleburble

Bleah. Here's a pic.

Al's birthday thing, Jan 19. I need more blood sugar. Or maybe I'll try sweating through 48 hours of cold-turkey no-coffee again.

Chimamanda Adichie TED talk, the danger of a single story

I too grew up reading Western books. I've occasionally used baseball metaphors even though I've never touched a baseball in my life. And I despise Filipino literature, it's all barrios and Spanish architecture. Well, Nick Joaquin's ok, I liked Leon Ma Guerrero's translation of Noli Me Tangere. But literature should be an escape to wider worlds, not a retreat into provincialism. Growing up, I wondered what lembas tasted like. I went as far away from provincialism as possible, to philosophy and science fiction.

So that is how to create a single story: show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.

Adichie overestimates the power of media, underestimates human stupidity. Even when there are multitudes of different stories presenting different perspectives and facets, like on the internet, with Google and Wikipedia and armies of bloggers on either side of everything, many people just hear the story they want and shear away complexity, nuance, context.

The single story happens in people's heads, it's intellectual laziness. So yes, Adichie's roomate was a terrible person for making assumptions about what Africans must be like. Any group, Americans, Palestinians, blacks, Eskimos, gays, Aztecs, whatever: some are stupid, some are smart, some are heroes, some are bastards, etc. This should be blindingly obvious to anyone by the time they're a teenager. Stereotyping, thinking any group is a monolith that thinks with one mind, speaks with one voice, is immediately stupid, no research or travel required.

Random reading

Finally tracked down a copy of John M. Ford's The Final Reflection. Not finished yet, but kinda disappointing, after all the hype I've been hearing about it. Spoiler, the sensei grandmaster of the game dies fairly early on, there's almost none of the bildungsroman mentoring I was expecting. (Same reason I was disappointed with Meet Joe Black.)

I've now gone through about 70% of the Questionable Content archive. Not straight through, jumping around a bit, with some navigation form the QC wiki. Yelling Bird's twitterstream (NSFW) is hilarious. A masochistic part of me thinks it would be cool to have Yelling Bird and GLaDOS voiceovers insult-narrating my life.

The battle for geek culture continues

Came across the Portlandia Nerd PSA video on Youtube:

First I think, ehh, this crap again. A while back, Joe Peacock wrote Booth babes need not apply, prompting John Scalzi to post Who Gets To Be a Geek? Anyone Who Wants to Be. And there's the bizarre battle over "Fake Geek Girls."

Mostly I agree with Scalzi, and Penny Arcade said it well: there is no gate, you're not the gatekeeper. And yet, there's something there worth parsing to get to. Here's Maddox's blistering rant on You're not a nerd, geeks aren't sexy and you don't "fucking love" science.

Again, as a general strategy it's often helpful to get used to thinking of things in terms of fuzzy sets and points on a spectrum, in this case ranging from very geeky/nerdy, to medium, to mainstream, to- well, the opposite of geeky/nerdy is stupid, mindless, lazy, sloppy.

If some trendroid wants to wear an Avengers shirt, fine. More money for a good franchise, Joss Whedon can do more cool stuff. What pisses some geeks off is outsiders appropriating the surface appearance without understanding the underlying depth, and that's not a dilemma unique to geekdom, it's a common, near-universal thing in all fields. This isn't a gender thing, or a geek thing, there are posers, posers everywhere.

What I empathize with is the hardcore obsessive's disdain and contempt for the dilettante. But not for the beginner! If you love what I love, I'll give you my books, babble on incessantly, subsidize your descent into addiction to the thing we love, you are my brother. What's frustrating is the dabblers who will forever just skate on the surface and never go any deeper.

PS, as with most things, self-selection is weak evidence; if you call yourself a geek, well, talk is cheap. When other people call you a geek, then that's the real nomination.

Free will and neuroscience

From Ted Chiang's  short story "What's Expected of Us:"

By now you’ve probably seen a Predictor; millions of them have been sold by the time you’re reading this. For those who haven’t seen one, it’s a small device, like a remote for opening your car door. Its only features are a button and a big green LED. The light flashes if you press the button. Specifically, the light flashes one second before you press the button.

Most people say that when they first try it, it feels like they’re playing a strange game, one where the goal is to press the button after seeing the flash, and it’s easy to play. But when you try to break the rules, you find that you can’t. If you try to press the button without having seen a flash, the flash immediately appears, and no matter how fast you move, you never push the button until a second has elapsed. If you wait for the flash, intending to keep from pressing the button afterwards, the flash never appears. No matter what you do, the light always precedes the button press. There’s no way to fool a Predictor.

There's a goofy explanation, every Predictor is a micro time machine that reverses causality or something. The punchline is that this proves once and for all that free will is an illusion. The meta-punchline is that you don't need time travel, just neuroscience. We have similar results already, Benjamin Libet's landmark experiments established that there's a detectable readiness potential before an action.

We'll probably have something similar to Predictors in the near future. It's worth meditating on, take Chiang Predictors out of the mental category of "science fiction/never gonna happen," and imagine they're real, because they will be soon. Try and get ahead of the curve, think about the implications. Our conscious selves are the ghosts in the machine, like cloistered bosses who find out after things are already decided.

Adventure Time ;_;

Saw this comic on knowyourmeme, image-searched to find the original, it's "A Distant Memory" by Matsu-sensei. Part 1, Part 2 on deviantart. Breaks the feels meter, this should be canon.

Amazing, I love her husky voice. Now I need to find Pitch Perfect. Did due diligence, listened to Anna Kendrick, Lulu and the Lampshades, Mainers Mountaineers, but Anna Burden really nails it as an acapella solo.

Reddit's pretty cool. Found The Oatmeal's amazing post about their house burning down. Man, I can relate, been there myself. Lost a cat too. :(

Reminded me of Hyperbole and a Half, pinged the blog, still quiet. Thought maybe Allie's still prepping for her book launch, but then found the Reddit thread where Allie talks about her continuing struggle with depression.

Got nothing to post, and here I am posting it. The Notepad++ site hadn't been working for a while, but finally got that downloaded and working. Then decided I didn't like it, went looking for some other lightweight text editor with a word count function. So yeah, there's gedit for Windows. ("The Easy Way: Step 1 and done. The Cool Way: Step 1... code code code... Step 25..." are you fucken kidding me?)

Thought I'd try signing up at Reddit, click register, tried username "nicdevera," bzzt, try another. Motherf... No wait, that's me, I signed that up a while back but haven't used it. Reset password, and I'm in. Looking around.

Nate Silver's as gay as he wants to be

Ron de Vera's "On Gay Labels and Gay Memories." He's my cousin, let's say my respect is taken as read. But I think this is the wrong move for The Cause.

Guy Branum's "Yes, Nate Silver, You Are a Gay Statistician." Flawed on the face of it, and the commentariat doesn't disappoint. From BlkAth3st:

What disturbs me is that people within the LGBTQ community feel as if the LGBTQ community is some vestige of happiness and inclusion, when in fact we are quite the opposite. Nate Silver has the right to identify as sexually gay, but may have no connection whatsoever to the LGBTQ "community." Some people feel comfortable with having their identity determined by their class, gender, race, or sexual identity and others just want to be human, which is the position I think Mr. Silver has taken. Irregardless of his position, I think it is important to understand that for a community who is constantly seeking acceptance and inclusion from the heterosexual world, that we not recreate and perpetuate some of the very ideologies of heterosexism that we ourselves attempt to escape- such as defining a persons identity because of their behavior.

 Brian In Philly:

The premise of the article is that Nate has a Sacred Duty to be a self-sacrificing activist for our collective benefit -- something I don't really buy.

I think most of us want to be known as the brilliant researcher, hardworking teacher, awesome mechanic, or great neighbor... who happens to be gay. The minute I start getting pegged as "the gay fill-in-the-blank," I push back, because guess what -- I'm me.

I'm not representative of everyone else. I've got an aspect of myself that is identifying. Some will hold it against me (to their ultimate detriment). But Nate, and me, and everyone else, is so much more than "the gay fill-in-the-blank." 

 There's a lot more good stuff in the comments, where Guy Branum's thoroughly taken to task. The gist of the article is that gays need to speak up because unlike race, homosexuality is (often) not readily identifiable, so the default cultural presumption is that you're straight. That last part is where it goes off the rails. No it's not right to presume someone is straight, this is where real progress is currently being made, and IMO this is is where we should be directing our efforts.

A few weeks ago we were watching Cloud Atlas, and we're introduced to Robert Frobisher, in bed with another man. Later Frobisher is shown seducing his boss's wife, and the person I was with said "But I thought he was gay?!" My point is, I made no such assumption. And I never do.

I suspect this is the growing trend, moreover that this is How Things Should Be. Anyone who's watched a lot of anime knows not to make assumptions on gender or sexual orientation, likewise for fans of the better kinds of science fiction. (I've been thinking that "Bonobo Utopia" would be a good title for a post on how bisexuality is the default assumption in a lot of Utopian fiction).

I read Silver's The Signal and the Noise last month, didn't know or care about his orientation, found out he was gay on the Wikipedia page about him a week later. I started reading Clive Barker back in high school, found out he was gay only about 3 years ago, which changed nothing at all about how I think of him or his books.

Back to On Gay Labels and Gay Memories:

 However, I will keep calling myself a gay writer. If I wear a rainbow shirt and use a fluffy pen when writing about gay characters, it would be of little to no consequence. What matters is that I am a passionate writer who also happens to be proud of his sexual orientation. And if I become successful, I would prefer to be remembered as a successful gay writer and not simply a successful writer. Perhaps, when the time comes, I would figure out how I can be a gay freethinker, a gay photographer, or a gay teacher. For now, I am happy being a gay writer.

Such self-pigeonholing seems an almost appalling waste of talent. I'm an atheist, a group recently polling as more reviled than gays or Muslims. Of course this isn't "my group's more oppressed than yours," but I've never thought of myself as an atheist writer, or any kind of X-ist writer/blogger/person/etc.

I have a dream. That someday, there will be openly gay characters on Cartoon Network, Sesame Street, and the Muppets. (Heck, the Muppets would probably be first.) The road to that isn't with gay characters, but with characters who also just happen to be gay.

Phoning it in: photos

One post every day, they're not all gonna be quality. Next post will be longer.

Skyfall

Great movie, my favorite Bond film after Casino Royale. But it occurs to me that Silva hacked MI6 three times. First, the gas explosion, then MI6 is understandably spooked, they relocate operations to the underground bunker. Presumably at this point the incumbent Q is fired or retired, and Ben Whishaw's Q is promoted to head tech and hacker in residence. Later, Silva reads off Bond's performance evaluations and psych report. Those evaluations were post-explosion, so Silva's already cut into the bunker's systems. After the island sequence, Bond tells MI6 that their network security got rogered yet again, they change passwords or whatever, then Silva's laptop Trojan pulls their pants down one more time.

John C. Wright

I'm 7 chapters into John C. Wright's The Golden Age, and I'm surprised at how... amazingly good it is. I first heard of Wright when David Brin pwned Wright's Luddite foolishness. Later, wandering around, I read about Wright's apparently famous anti-gay blog post, which he soon deleted. But here's Hal Duncan's epic curb stomp on Wright, still high up on the Google search results.

I want to believe that this guy is an asshat. And certainly there's asshattery here: "If Vulcans had a church, they'd be Catholics." Really, Wright? Seriously? To add to Wright's sins, he even panned Ted Chiang's brilliant "Stories of Your Life and Others."

But it's the tale, not he who tells it. Obvious example, Lovecraft was a racist, and while not a Lovecraft fan, I respect the mythos.

EDIT: In the comments below, John C. Wright (seems legit) bizarrely claims David Brin was making it all up. So here's the link to Wright's Luddite blog post.

In Paul Di Filippo's Ribofunk, there's a short story where two kids down neuropharms for chemically induced satori:

The tropes had been expertly reverse-engineered from a sampling of
meditating monks: in the case of Jinx's drink, from the mind of the Dalai Lama
himself. In a minute or so, the world took on a shimmering translucence, and I
felt connected to the whole universe. Nothing mattered, but everything
counted. All my problems were non-existent.

 "Nothing mattered, but everything counted," that's the smartest, Zennest thing I've read in a long time. Still savoring it.

Mindfulness hack

The Pomodoro Technique is a popular productivity hack, but looking into it, I hated how arbitrary the basic idea was. So 25 minutes of uninterrupted focus, why 25? Because the inventor's kitchen timer had 25 minutes on it. But why not 15 minutes, or 30? Haven't there been any studies on optimal timeframes or upper limits for concentration and flow?

So, I've read a lot of praise for Vipassana and mindfulness meditation, but I hate sitting still and not doing anything. Cutting through to the science, it's really all about metacognition and antisphexishness.

Another piece of the puzzle, I've always preferred wristwatches with an hour chime, it's a good way to knock yourself out of zombie mode and bring you back to the present: beep, it's X o'clock, what am I doing? But wristwatch chimes are never very loud, so they only work in quiet environments. But this is the 21st century, surely there are other options. And yes, there are apps for that. Caynax Hour Chime can set alarms not just for the hour, but also 15, 30, and 45 minutes past. I imagined 15-minute chunks of focused work alternating with 15 minute breaks.

After about a week of this, 15 minutes is too short. I chose a particularly piercing, high-pitched chime, but it happens so frequently that I still often tune it out. So upon consideration, maybe 20-minute chunks would work better: chime at top of the hour, 20, and 40 minutes past. And so far there's no app for that.

How to waste a life: one day at a time. Don't wanna do year in review. Looking forward, use the New Year momentum. I'm gonna try daily blogging, no matter what, deadline midnight every day, try and get started around 1800.