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November 25th, 2009
 | 01:13 am - Culinary possibilities
Out amidst running various errands today, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) teaotter and I stopped at a nearby farmers market that is normally closed for the year, but had a special pre-Thanksgiving day. I picked up the carrots I'll be using for carrot soup at one of the two Thanksgivings we'll be doing this year (the large one on Thanksgiving day, the other, with less exceedingly social friends, like xtricks & athenian_abroad on Saturday). Wandering around, I saw an odd fruit, I picked it up, realized it was a quince, and was then deliciously overwhelmed by the smell. They have a smell that partakes of both fruit and flowers and is utterly amazing. I got two, and if I see more at any of the stores I'm going to, I may get another. For the Thankgivings I'll make carrot soup, pumpkin pecan pie, a pumpkin pie, and Thai chicken and potato samosa like appetizers. However, a few days after both, I will take the quinces, and some apples, and make this pie or something similar - this one is just for the three of us :) In any case, I've never cooked with quinces before, and they look to be amazing.
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November 24th, 2009
| 02:33 pm - The continuing gender gap in wages
Here's a troubling article about how the gender-based wage gap perpetuates when more women move into a professional field. The most striking point is: "The same gap is often seen within engineering itself. Bioengineering has been growing to the point where we could see a 50/50 split of women and men majoring, and there have been some reports of salary staying flat or going down. Engineering fields where women are less than 20 percent pay more." Arreola says more study is needed to conclusively determine a cause for this pattern, but the implication is chilling: Once women break into a field in noteworthy numbers, its value goes down. Here's one particular explanation for how this occurs, One possible explanation for the average pay going down in fields with more women is that the ladies aren't negotiating their salaries as assertively as men do -- but then, why is that again? Well, there were those studies that showed, as Harvard public policy professor Hannah Riley Bowles put it, "[M]en were always less willing to work with a woman who had attempted to negotiate than with a woman who did not. They always preferred to work with a woman who stayed mum. But it made no difference to the men whether a guy had chosen to negotiate or not." So if men are doing the hiring, women might be less willing to push for a higher salary, for fear of not getting the job at all or being penalized in other ways once they do, while men are free to ask for more with no consequences. However, it seems clear that there's more than this going on, and what we have in part at least is the visible result of the still widespread assumption that a field with a significant percentage of women in it is a field that is no longer as deserving of high wages.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/working.gif) busy
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November 19th, 2009
| 04:08 pm - On Being a Writer
I typically consider my job as being similar to that of the old pulp writers. As I mentioned before, I once had to turn down an opportunity to write an RPG adventure based on a cover that the company had. The mixture of work for hire and writing projects to pre-arranged specifications puts me in much the same position as many of the hack genre authors of the 20s-60s, which I regard as fine company. However, it's also odd and amusing to realize that any of my high school teachers or college professors would be utterly shocked to learn that I ended up as a professional writer. I was someone known for exceedingly high exam scores and moderately well done papers with dubious grammar and utterly uninspired writing. I remember hearing various papers written by skilled writers read aloud to a class and being impressed at amazed at how well the words flowed and how little like mine they seemed. Somewhere between graduate school and my first few gaming projects (mostly the later) I learned how to write moderately well, and time and several million words of practice have further refined that.
I got to thinking of this, because while waiting for my next assignment to begin (I should get the assignment early next week), I agreed to help a good friend create a write-up for a series of presentations they are giving. This friend is exceedingly intelligent, has a college degree, and a well-paying professional job. However, they also have little experience writing, and have been exceedingly impressed at how I have edited, reorganized and reworked their text. In addition to being quite a pleasant ego-boost, this experience also helped me realize that I have actually learned to be quite a good writer. I'm certainly not a brilliant writer or someone whose prose is worthy of acclaim, but I write solidly, smoothly, and clearly, which is clearly a rarer talent than I most often realize.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/thoughtful.gif) contemplative
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| 03:52 pm - Physiological Privilege
One thing that's odd for me is dealing with illness, especially in other people. I'm exceedingly healthy. I got to thinking about this because teaotter is still recovering from a moderately bad H1N1 flu, while amberite had a mild but lingering flu, and predictably, I didn't get sick at all. Most people I know get minor illnesses far more often than I do. On those few occasions that I have gotten the flu, it rarely lasts for more than 4 days, and it's often over in 3 (except for a cough that lasts a few additional days), & (very thankfully from my PoV) both I and my parents seem to be in the approximately 20% of the population who is immune to the stomach flu (none of us have ever gotten it). Also, until I was an adult, I though that the entire phenomena of "sugar highs" and "sugar crashes" was some sort of puzzling cultural myth, since I've never experienced either one and neither has either of my parents – to my knowledge no relative has ever had either diabetes or hypoglycemia.
My general health is similarly excellent, with the sort of blood pressure normally found in athletes and equally good cholesterol levels. I'm certain that diet and exercise have something to do with my health, but mostly I'm fairly certain that most my health is genetic. On both sides of my family, I have grandparents and other older relatives who lived into their mid 80s or older (mostly older, including a relative on each side of the family who lived to be slightly more than 100). I also recently learned that the only relative who has ever had cancer almost certainly got it because she worked as a dental x-ray technician in the 1930s & 40s, and got breast cancer where she held the poorly shielded x-ray source to her chest to position it. I have a few minor health problems, but they are all inherently very minor. I know a number of people my own age and younger who already have significant health problems and I worry about them, in large part because the entire concept of illness is so alien to me.
Of course, none of this stops me from being a hypochondriac (which I suspect comes at least partly, if not mostly from the fact that I am so healthy).
Current Mood: thoughtful
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November 14th, 2009
 | 11:27 pm - Dubious science in an excellent good show
I've very much enjoyed the first two part's of Nova's 3 part exploration of human evolution, Becoming Human. So far, they have not only kept up with all the recent data that I've heard of, but they have also mentioned several things that I hadn't known, such as the fact that australopithecines had more ape-like arms and shoulders and so almost certainly climbed a lot as well as walking, and that one very likely reason for these creatures experiencing a significant growth in brain size was adapting to exceedingly rapid periods of drastic climate change in East Africa, which seems to have gone from arid scrub to deep lakes or back again in a thousand years, followed by a stable period and then another rapid climate change. I was also interested to hear more about the discovery of hominids (whether you call them late australopithecines or early homo erectus is merely a matter of terminology) in Dmanisi in Georgia.
So, an excellent show, but with one annoying flaw. Genetics is a vital part of all modern paleontology, we can use it to tell how closely two modern species are related, and if we have ancient DNA we can look at how closely that extinct species was to modern species. We can even use to to form a relative timeline of whether two species diverged before or after one of them diverged from another species. However, what it cannot reliably be used for is absolute dating. I've seen a number of cases that when it's been compared to the fossil record, the molecular clock hypothesis is wrong, because the rate of genetic change varies not just from one species to another (often drastically), but within a single species over time. Researchers are naturally fascinated with what genetics can do - the current work on reading Neanderthal DNA is fascinating, but the rate of radioactive decay is a stable dating tool, the rate of changes in DNA is not. Once again, it's a case of the new shiny tool being used for well more than it's good for.
Current Mood: busy
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| 10:43 pm - Peculiar TV Oddity
A couple of night's ago, teaotter and I saw an ad for a new show on the Travel Channel, Meet the Natives, which is about 5 men from remote Tanna island in the tiny island nation of Vanuatu (a location that for some reason always reminds me of the Cthulhu mythos), who fly to the US and travel around. The rather horrifying (at least to me) ad makes the show look exceptionally offensive and condescending, with extra helpings of noble savage clichés for all and much other badness.
Then, I looked up the show on Wikipedia, and found out that this is a remake of a British version of the show, which is mentioned under an entry about a bizarre cargo cult on Tanna island called the Prince Philip Movement, which reveres Prince Philip of Britain as a god. As mentioned in this article, the visit by this group of people from Tanna Island to Buckingham Palace is to them, visiting an important sacred site to meet with a living deity.
OTOH, there's no hint of anything like that in the US version of the show. In any case, it definitely looks to be an offensive show, but I may well see if I can download a version of the UK show, since I have no idea if it's offensive or not, but it definitely sounds exceedingly odd.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/happy.gif) surprised
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November 12th, 2009
 | 08:57 pm - Fascinating sounding book
A friend of mine just recommended a fascinating sounding book to me. Here's what looks to be an excellent review of "Love of Shopping" is Not a Gene": Problems With Darwinian Psychology by Dr. Anne Innis Dagg. With an M.A. in Genetics & a Ph.D. in animal behavior, Dr. Dagg looks extremely qualified to discuss this issue, and this bit of the review already inclines me to like the book: Dagg opens the book with what seems to be an issue of personal affront: the story that "many" animals practice infanticide as a means of eliminating the genetic competition. This claim originates in part with Craig Packer, who seemingly lost his head when Dagg dared to point out that the overall data suggested that lionesses, not lions, were apt to kill cubs, and not cubs born to other lionesses, but their own progeny, to give the remaining offspring a better chance of survival. When Packer was sent a paper to review, he sent Dagg a threatening note promising to go public with a "harsh" characterization of her as a "fringe scientist" with a "bizarre obsession." Meanwhile, Dagg's investigation of the references cited in support of infanticide among other animals, especially primates, finds them to be just as specious as the claims of infanticide among lions. It's definitely very nice to see a biologist discuss the fact that so much of evolutionary psychology is a mixture of just-so stories and reactionary ideology that's dressed up as science. Definitely on my too read list.
Current Mood: pleased
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November 10th, 2009
| 02:30 am - Economics & Also Rainforests: data, both surprising & unsurprising
First, economist Paul Krugman demonstrates that the much acclaimed benefits Ronald Reagan and his wacky economics actually resulted in an economy that has been growing more slowly. In a follow-up, he provides hard data: Take the United States, which wasn’t damaged in the war. Take per capita real GDP. Give hostages by taking data from 1950 to 1980, which means including the 1980 recession, but stopping at 2007, so that the current slump isn’t included. Then here’s what you get:
Growth in per capita real GDP from 1950 to 1980: 2.2 percent per year
Growth in per capita real GDP from 1980 to 2007: 2.0 percent per year
Oh, and if we look at real median family income instead, we get:
Growth from 1950 to 1980: 2.3 percent per year
Growth from 1980 to 2007: 0.7 percent per year
Sorry: there’s no measure I can think of by which the U.S. economy has done better since 1980 than it did over an equivalent time span before 1980. One again, we see how Reagan and the neocons have done their best to weaken the middle class, while making the rich richer, but also less rich than they would have been under a less vile and idiotic regime.
Now for the surprising news, the following NYT article was mentioned in Stewart Brand's fascinating new book Whole Earth Discipline. In the article we find These new “secondary” forests are emerging in Latin America, Asia and other tropical regions at such a fast pace that the trend has set off a serious debate about whether saving primeval rain forest — an iconic environmental cause — may be less urgent than once thought. By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster. A bit later on we read “Is this a real rain forest?” Dr. Wright asked, walking the land of a former American cacao plantation that was abandoned about 50 years ago, and pointing to fig trees and vast webs of community spiders and howler monkeys.
“A botanist can look at the trees here and know this is regrowth,” he said. “But the temperature and humidity are right. Look at the number of birds! It works. This is a suitable habitat.” I'm ultimately rather unsurprised that given time and people not continuing to mess with it, the Earth heals itself quite well. I rather suspect that global warming would also slow down well faster than we expect - if (and this is a non-trivial if) we significantly reduce our CO2 output.
Current Mood: thoughtful
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November 9th, 2009
| 01:58 pm - A hopeful story about dealing with gender
I'm joyfully childfree, but here's a story about raising a child that made me smile. Times are changing. The reaction of the child's parents was positive, but isolated incidents only do so much. However, the reaction of the other parents at the school and of many of the children was a joy to read. This is how culture changes - I'm very hopeful as to what it will look like in 10-15 years. This would not have happened when I was a child, and 20 years ago it would have gone far less well.
Current Mood: pleased
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 | 02:35 am - Why I game
If anyone is interested in what I think a truly excellent RPG session looks like, here's a well-written RPG.net post about a wonderful gaming session someone just posted. I very much recommend it. The first comment to this post is my response, which includes a brief recounting of two incidents in my own gaming that struck me as similarly wonderful. That's was good gaming is to me. I've had many similar incidents and hope to have many more.
Current Mood: pleased
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November 8th, 2009
 | 02:05 am - Joyful Poly Evening
Tonight, Becca needed to re-dye her hair with henna (a lengthy and remarkably gloppy experience, I'll stick to conventional dyes when I bother), and so Alice helped her, it was very cute and very loving. As Becca put it in a very pleased & proud tone of voice, "Alice put mud in my hair". Seeing my two wonderful partners together, happy, and being very loving towards one another is one of the greatest gifts my life has given me.
Current Mood: giddy
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November 7th, 2009
| 01:44 am - Watching V + odd realization about heroic black characters on TV
So, we watched the premier of the new V series tonight. Before I watched it, I saw that teriel mentioned seeing an utterly hilarious and seriously damning review of the premier, and I was mostly watching to see how true it was, and definitely wasn't expecting much.
Not much is what I got. It mostly wasn't as bad as the above review stated, but it wasn't much better, and this bit was (horrifyingly enough) completely accurate:And then we have the subtext. V is an hour long, completely insane comparison between the Visitors and the Obama Administration, as seen through the eyes of Glenn Beck. In fact there should probably be a subtitle appearing periodically at the bottom of the screen informing the viewer that 'This is what Glenn Beck Actually Believes'. The show spends most of its ending minutes hammering its message through your face with a giant wooden club when the leader of the aliens (naturally a Super-Model) explains to the human reporter that the Visitors are going to open up centers to deal with the sick in every single city across the globe and cure millions of people with cancer and disabilities for free.
Naturally the reporter, thinking about how all those poor insurance companies will lose profits, looks aghast:
"Do you mean it will be like....UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE?!"
The Diabolical Space Woman looks at him with a sense of emotionless, alien, evil, that can only be found in the heart of a socialist.
"Uh-yeah." It not horrible, but it's far from good, we'll likely watch the next episode simply because premiers can often be considerably worse than the rest of a series, but if the political commentary continues, that's it for us. Once again, it's clear that anyone who thinks mass media has a liberal bias is delusional, TV is often disturbingly centrist, at least given where the center of US opinion currently is.
In any case, Becca and I did notice one interesting thing while watching it. Becca wondered if the actor who played Ryan Nichols (Morris Chesnut) was the same actor who had played Principle Wood on the last Season of Buffy. It turns out that Principle Wood was played by D.B. Woodside. However, it's also clear why Becca wondered this. We did some looking and turned up this photo of Morris Chesnut on his IMDB page. Compare it to this photo of D.B. Woodside on his IMDB page. Now compare these two photos to this photo of Richard T. Jones on his IMDB page (Jones played Agent James Ellison on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles). Part of the similarity is clearly the rigid but unspoken rule of the last 15 years that all actors playing non-old heroic adult male characters must be pretty darn buff. However, it's also clear that heroic black men on TV must have shaven heads and goatees. I don't know if black men's hair is considered threatening or what, but it's pretty darn odd when you think about it. Then again, for the last 15-20 years, all TV characters (at least in the various geeky shows that make up essentially all TV I watch that isn't science or cooking shows) contain characters who fit into one of a few very narrow physical types, and attractive buff black man with shaved head and goatee very clearly one such type.
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 | 12:52 am - Comments about the Fort Hood Shootings
I can't think of anything to say about the Fort Hood shooting that isn't said at least as well in this brilliant post. I am also deeply upset by the level of racism in US media, and by headlines like the following Most significant, officials were not prepared to say whether the attack was the act of a lone and troubled man or connected to terrorist groups, foreign or domestic. I have yet to see anything similar mentioned when one of the identical shootings by white Christian soldiers occurred. Racism was almost certainly one of the causes of this horror and racism is also all to clearly one of the results.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/angry.gif) angry
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November 6th, 2009
| 03:00 pm - Impressive political speeches
Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson reads the names of the people who have died due to lack of health insurance in every Republican-controlled district in the US. Read this article and watch the video clips. I'd like to see exerpts from this on every news broadcast in the US. This is politics as it should be. Wow.
Current Mood: impressed
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November 5th, 2009
 | 01:18 am - Gadget Lust
Wow, the SmartQ V7 looks like my ultimate ebook reader/web tablet. A capacitance touchscreen would be nice, but given that I'd use it far more for reading, than web-browsing, it's a minor point. Not too large to hold comfortably (I find many of the larger tablet computers to be far too large for comfortable reading), with enough RAM and processor speed to deal with my gaming PDFs, and with a screen big enough to read anything I want to read including my gaming PDFs (at least in portrait mode). Also, not a bad portable movie viewer. Definitely something to save my money for. At least one site is already willing to ship to the US, but I'll wait for slightly lower prices, as well as some reviews of the build quality.
Current Mood: impressed
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November 4th, 2009
| 01:02 am - Elections both good and bad
The bad new of the night was clearly the defeat of same-sex marriage in Maine, right-wing scum remain inexplicably persuasive on this issue. However, closer to home, Washington State's Measure 71, which gave same-sex partners the same rights as marriage (but sadly, not marriage) passed.
The two gubernatorial races were both disappointing, in the way that every Republican victory is. However, from reports that I've heard from Virginia, the Democratic candidate ran such an impressive horrible campaign, that winning against him took remarkably little effort. The situation in New Jersey was a bit more problematic, but the incumbent Democrat made himself fairly unpopular and was surrounded by allegations of corruption.
OTOH, the wonderful news is that in New York's 23rd congressional district special election, Democrat Bill Owens got a surprise victory. This seat has been held by a Republican hands since 1890, but after the moderate Republican appointee was hounded by accusation of being a socialist or a Marxist by the likes of Sarah Palin and Glen Beck, the far right endorsed a 3rd party candidate, far-right lunatic Doug Hoffman, and gave him vast amounts of money and air-time. Eventually, the Republican candidate withdrew from the race after polls consistently showed her coming in 3rd after the reactionary independent and the Democratic candidates, and she threw her support behind Owens. I'm almost sad that Hoffman didn't win, because I'd love to see the Republicans continue to believe that their ideological purge of moderates is a winning plan, since that would lead to overwhelming landslides to the Democrats in 2010 & 2012, but my guess is that the far right will take this as a sign that further ideological purity is required. I very much hope that I'm seeing the collapse of the current Republican Party.
Current Mood: busy
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| 12:40 am - Eastwick and Images of Women
I've been enjoying Eastwick, it's well written, very well acted, fun, and unlike much TV, not particularly offensive to either the female or the male characters. However, there's something else that I'm seeing on this show that is also surprising and positive, the choice made for the female actors. We have three female leads and one female supporting actress. Two of the leads are typically ultra-thin, but Roxie is played by Rebecca Romijn, [[1]] who is slender and very attractive, but also definitely not as exceptionally (and usually quite disturbingly) skinny as most women on US TV, and also playing a character who is clearly in her mid 30s.
Even better, the supporting character Penny, played by Sara Rue, at first glance looks like the typical not-particularly skinny female sidekick, of the sort who on most shows who are fairly pathetic and never has any sex or romance, because on most TV, women who are not skinny are written as sexless and pathetic. However, on Eastwick, Penny is becoming a more important character and is also romantically involved with Jamie who is arguably the sexiest male character on the show. So, in addition to the other good things about the show, there are two female characters who look like (attractive and by no remote stretch of the imagination even slightly overweight) human beings rather than like famine victims or people with a wasting illness. It's sad that this is progress on US TV, but it most definitely is.
[[1]] As stated in her wikipedia article, Rebecca Romijn is widely considered to be extremely beautiful, which clearly demonstrates that many people think that women need not be exceptionally thin to be impressively attractive, thus making the great prevalence of ultra-thin women on US TV somewhat puzzling.
Current Mood: pleased
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November 1st, 2009
| 03:46 pm - Halloween
For the first time in a while, we actually did something for Halloween. While teaotter used to opportunity to start working on her novel, amberite, xtricks, athenian_abroad, Aaron, and I all went to see a live performance of Nosferatu. Here's, info about the show, which continues on Fridays and Saturdays until November 21. It is put own by the same people who performed the Star Trek in the park show I went to see in July.
The show was 70 minutes of fun and well done theater. It wasn't brilliant, but it was quite enjoyable, with a very good performance by the actor playing Count Orlak. It was also interesting that the play explicitly follows (except in the name of the vampire) the version of the story from Werner Herzog's brilliant 1979 remake Nosferatu the Vampyre , rather than Murnau's original film from 1922, which given that I love the Herzog version made me very happy indeed.
The evening was also fun because Alice & I got somewhat in costume as the 4th and 3rd doctors from Dr. Who respectively & I was fairly pleased with the pumkin I carved. This was also our first Halloween in Ladd's Addition, and for the first time in Portland, we actually got a fair number of children doing trick or treat. I was very glad to see that hysteria & fundy lies about the (utterly nonexistent) threat of strangers giving children poisoned candy and all the other paranoia that surrounds children today has not entirely killed this off. This year we didn't buy candy, because Alice won a very large jar of chocolate candy eyballs (along with a book) at the The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, by having the closest guess as to the number of chocolate eyeballs in the jar. She came up with her guess by counting the eyballs on the bottom and counting the rows and estimating, and so announced to all the children last night that "I won this candy using math".
All in all, a good day. Here are pictures of Alice & I (which is definitely not the best picture of me) and of the pumpkin I carved.
( pictures behind cut )
Current Mood: busy
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October 31st, 2009
| 04:28 pm - Public action, hopeful signs, and things yet to be done
If anyone ever needed proof that public action matters here it is. Scholastic Books (the world's largest seller of children's books) initially refused to sell this book including a child with two lesbians as her parents unless the author made the character's parents a het couple. Much letter writing resulted, and Scholastic Books reversed its decision. I'm fairly certain that their initial decision wasn't homophobia nearly as much as it was fear of getting lots of complaints from hate groups like Focus on the Family. Thus, the obvious response was for reasonable people to inundate Scholastic with polite but firm letters & phone calls. The result was a change in policy. It will be worth keeping an eye on Scholastic to see if their policy remains changed on other children's books involve LGBT characters, but so far so good
Then, there's healthcare. The House now has a final healthcare bill & the Senate's is relatively similar. Significantly expanded coverage for the working poor, subsidies for lower income people, and an actual public option. (Here's the text of the actual (exceedingly long) bill
No, this isn't perfect, but it's vastly better than the mess we have now, and it will help many people and save many lives. Paul Krugman has an opinion piece about it and support for it Also, the existence of a public option means that that it can gradually be expanded until we eventually have private insurance as something that is used only by a few rich people. So, now is an excellent time to write your Senators (passage of this bill in the House is fairly guaranteed, but is far less certain in the Senate). In addition to supporting the bill, telling Democratic Senators that you support passing it using budget reconciliation (a process that completely avoids the possibility of a filibuster) would likely also be helpful.
Current Mood: hopeful
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