Mabel's Fables

A close friend of mine recently had a baby, and, as self-proclaimed fairy godmother, I wanted to do better than just getting something that I think is adorable, I also wanted it to be something the baby (and her parents!) would enjoy and appreciate. Unfortunately, I don't actually know stuff about babies or new parents or baby gifts, I just know what I think is cute.

Googling around for ideas, I learned that Mabel's Fables, a children's bookstore in my neighbourhood, has gift baskets of books especially for brand new babies. I've passed by their store many times and it's all colourful and fun-looking but I never had a reason to go inside, so I decided this was the perfect excuse to go check them out.

I had enormous fun looking at all the toys and books (I kept picking stuff up and going "OMG, I remember this!"). The employees were friendly and helpful, and when I told them I have no idea what I'm doing, they asked me some questions and used their expertise to come up with an appropriate variety of books for the gift basket. (I got the impression that you can also have a say in which books to choose if you feel you know what you're doing.) The books that go in the baby gift basket are absolutely gorgeous, and align with specific child development outcomes that I can't explain well because they're way over my head. Mabel's Fables had the gift basket shipped right to the new parents' house (I believe they ship by CanPar, but is isn't an issue because new parents tend to be home), and the parents and the new baby all loved it!

Best of all, I got a picture in my email of my favourite little person (not even three months old when the picture was taken) holding one of the books I got her, looking just like a regular person reading! While the setup, with the book open vertically in front of her, resting on the high chair tray, her itty bitty baby hands holding onto the cover, might have been the result of some parental intervention, the intent look on her face as she stares at the pages cannot be faked. I totally get fairy godmother points for that, and I could never have picked anything so suitable on my own. I look forward to going back to Mabel's Fables again and using their expertise to choose more books for my favourite little person as she and her reading needs grow and develop.

Failure dreams

Many many people (including me) have dreams that they didn't finish high school. If you tell someone "I had that dream where I didn't finish high school," it's quite likely they'll know exactly which dream you mean.

I wonder if there's a similarly pervasive dream in culture that don't have high school? I wonder what people who actually didn't finish high school (but are no longer in school) have in place of it?

Things They Should Invent: career guidance that asks you what DON'T you want to be when you grow up?

At lot of the career advice I received as a child led me to respond "No way! I do NOT want to do that!" The usual response by the grownups around me was to try to convince me that I should be more open-minded about such things, or to try to convince me that I really could do it if I work hard and put my mind to it.

What they really should do when a student is resistant to a particular career path is determine what exactly they don't like about it, and use that information to guide them towards something more suitable.

For example, many adults tried to convince me to go into engineering. If they had thought to ask, I would have told them that I didn't want to go into engineering because you had to make actual things that actually worked. With suitable leading questions, I could have given the example of enrichment workshops where we had to make bridges or rube goldberg machines out of paper and glue and cotton balls and string, and while I had a solid grounding in the necessary theory and some innovative ideas, I found making the things actually function was impossible, and far more frustrating than anything else I faced academically. A knowledgeable teacher or guidance counsellor could then point me towards something that uses the same strengths that lead them to think I'm suitable for engineering, but is less tangible.

Aptitude tests kept giving me a set of possible career paths that included psychologist and clergy person. I didn't want to do either of those because they're such intense people work that need far more emotional intelligence than I have (plus, for the clergy thing, I'm an atheist). My guidance counsellor's next step should have been to look at things that use the same aptitudes, but don't require people skills.

For a time, it was trendy to encourage students to go to college instead of university. While I have nothing against college in principle, college programs train you in a specific career, and none of those career appealed to me. Meanwhile, university programs train you in an academic subject, so I could study something I like and am good at rather than train for a career I find unappealing. For example, college-encouragers would always tell me "You don't have to go to university, you know. You could go to college and do Travel and Tourism! You like languages!" Yes, but I hate travel and tourism! Why would I want to commit at 18 to a career in something I hate rather than spending the next four years studying something I love? In any case, a useful response would have been to either identify college programs that would be more appealing to me, or to recognize that I'm well-suited to university and look for useful programs there.

A student's disinclination towards a particular field is just as informative as their enthusiasm for a particular field, and it shouldn't be written off just because it's negative. Especially when combined with the What can you do better than others? method, asking students what they don't want to do and why could go a long way towards pinpointing the right field for them.

Open Letter to Toronto City Councillors

Dear Toronto City Councillors:

Thank you for your very sensible vote to restore LRTs yesterday. I immensely appreciate seeing political cooperation to do what's right for our city, and look very forward to seeing more of the same in the future.

In the interest of achieving that, I have something I'd like you all to think about. Rob Ford unilaterally announced that Transit City is dead on December 1, 2010. Your successful vote to reverse that decision came yesterday, on February 8, 2012. That's over 14 months. Even if everything goes absolutely perfectly from now on, the best possible outcome is we're 14 months behind where we should be.

So here are two questions you need to think about quietly to yourselves and then brainstorm together until you get workable answers:

1. Why did it take you 14 months to reverse such a destructive decision that the mayor had no authority to make?

2. What will you do to make it possible to prevent or reverse future destructive decisions in a more timely manner, so we don't lose a year every time the mayor does something stupid?

I'm not posing these questions to make you defend yourselves. (If anyone posts spinny damage control in the comments I will be very unimpressed.) They are not for answering immediately, or slapping together a talking point for a briefing note and checking off the list. I'm posing these questions so you'll actually think about them, at length and over a period of time. Let them fester in your brains, think of ideas, share them and build on them with other councillors, and ultimately come up with a way to prevent this problem from happening again.

Miscorrected mondegreens

The OED Online twitter feed has been talking about mondegreens today, so I thought I'd blog my contribution since I can't get it down to 140.

I'm lyric-deaf, so I mishear lyrics more often than I hear them correctly. Because I'm used to mishearing lyrics, I tend to recognize when what I think the lyrics are must be wrong, and I try to determine the correct lyrics using logic. Unfortunately, this doesn't always work out properly. For example:

1. The song: You Shook Me All Night Long
What I heard: "She was a fax machine"
What I thought: "That can't possibly be right. The song is clearly sexual, it must be "She was a sex machine"."
Actual lyric: "She was a fast machine"

2. The song: Lookin' Out My Back Door
What I heard: "Memories and elephants are playing in the band"
What I thought: "Memories must be tambourines, but I can't figure out what elephants is."
Actual lyric: "Tambourines and elephants are playing in the band". The elephants are actually in there!

Update: just remembered a better one:

3. The song: Land of Hope and Dreams
What I heard: "This train carries whores and camels"
What I thought: "Why on earth would you have passengers on the same train as livestock? And why would it be so specifically limited to prostitutes? That can't possibly be right. It must be horses and camels."
Actual lyrics: "This train carries whores and gamblers"

What problem are they trying to solve with airline gender ID rules in the first place?

The changes to airline screening regulations have gotten a lot of attention for their impact on transgender people. The problematic change in wording states an air carrier shall not transport a passenger who "does not appear to be of the gender indicated on the identification he or she presents."

But in all the (rightful) focus on the impact of this change on transgendered people, there's one question I haven't seen asked yet:

Why are they making this rule in the first place?

Impersonating someone else and using fake ID is already against the rules, so introducing the gender rule doesn't add anything.

Logically, the gender rule sounds like it's intended to prevent people from getting through security by pretending to be someone of another gender. But that sort of ploy would only work if they weren't screening people of all genders. If that's the problem, what they need to do is screen people of all genders properly.

The new rule contributes nothing, and I'm really curious how it managed to get through the extensive legislation scrutiny process.

Concepts we need: origin of knowledge

I blogged before about why I know how vaccines work: my mother told me when I was a small child who needed to get a needle, her father told her when she was a small child who needed to get a needle, and he would have learned in university. So what was part of a university education to my grandfather became part of general knowledge to me.

A couple of things I have read recently lead me to think that it's a useful exercise to figure out exactly how and why each of us knows the things we've always known as general knowledge.

First, I read this article about Attawapiskat

I’ve met Oji-Cree people who would really just like to know how to operate a buzz saw, after spending the past few millennia hunting and trapping in the boreal forest before being catapulted into residential schools and then bounced back into the birch trees. They know about Jesus, but they have no clue how to insulate prefab modular housing units shipped up by a federal bureaucracy that prohibits them from logging on “Crown land.”

My first thought on reading this is "But I have a clue how to insulate housing!" I don't know exactly, but I have a clue - a rough idea, a starting point, some thoughts on how to refine that rough idea.

So why do I know this?

Because my parents' house came with an unfinished basement, and when I was a small child they finished it. And part of the process of finishing the basement was putting in insulation. I haven't yet talked to my parents and traced how they learned to put in insulation, but for the moment we know that I know about insulation because I saw it being done around me, and the people described in the article don't because they've never seen it done around them, which, as the article describes, is the root of many problems in Aboriginal communities.

Then I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which tells the story of the HeLa cell line and Henrietta Lacks, from whom they originated. The book described how Ms. Lacks and her descendents had cultures taken from their bodies and tests conducted without their consent and understanding, and, despite the fact that Ms. Lacks' cells have contributed so much to medical science, her descendents still receive insufficient medical care due to lack of medical insurance (they live in the US). One of the points made in the book is that her descendents don't (and Ms. Lacks didn't) understand the situation very well, and this is portrayed as due to their lack of education.

But this got me wondering: why do understand it? My education didn't cover any of this stuff!

I learned what cells are in grade 9 and/or 10 science class, and that surely contributed to my understanding. But I never took biology, and really learned very little about health stuff in school. So why do I understand it? Part of it is related to my vaccine story above: my parents were able to answer my health questions when I was little, so I've always had the idea that understanding the answers to my health questions is within my grasp. I look stuff up if I don't understand it - and I do understand that I have more resources at my fingertips than the Lacks family did - but ultimately my understanding of the health issues discussed in the books can be traced to the fact that I read newspapers. For probably about 20 years, I've been reading health-related articles that either explain things down to my level of knowledge, or give me the vocabulary to look things up. Sometimes newspaper articles mention interesting-sounding books (like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks) which I then read and learn even more about medical stuff, but the original input seems to be newspapers.

I blogged before about how I read newspapers just because we always had them around the house. My parents read newspapers because their parents always had them around the house. I don't know my great-grandparents' precise habits of media consumption, but my grandparents have told me stories that involved them as children looking at newspapers that were around the house. So the origin of my newspaper-reading habit predates living memory.

At this point, some people are probably thinking that these things are a result of how I was parented. But they aren't exactly. The influence did come from my parents, but they weren't doing these things to produce good outcomes for their children. Rather, they were just living their lives with me in the general vicinity. They renovated and read newspapers before they have children, and they continue to do so today with their children grown and moved out.

It's more about the context in which one lives. Fifty-five years before Henrietta Lacks was born, her ancestors were slaves. Fifty-five years before I was born, my grandparents were children, looking at (and not entirely understanding) the newspaper they found lying around their parents' houses. And, because of this, I understand her medical records, while she never even thought to ask.

This is something everyone should think about a lot. It really gives you perspective.

Things They Should Study: what percentage of the population can read on trains but not on buses?

One of the reasons why Transit City is of particular interest to me is that I get carsick reading on buses but have no problem reading on trains. A trip in any kind of rail vehicle - even the old-fashioned streetcars they have downtown which are nowhere near as awesome as LRTs - is an opportunity to relax and get some reading done. A trip in a bus, it's at best lost time, and at worst a struggle against nausea. Transit City maximizes the number of potential trips that can be taken by rail, thus maximizing multitaskability.

As I've blogged about before, multitaskable commutes increase productivity, and multitasking in a vehicle generally involves reading of some sort. I'm not the only one who is more prone to carsickness in buses than in trains, but I can't find any data on the percentage of the population to whom this applies. If it's a large percentage of the population, this should be a factor in transit planning - or at the very least it should be public information so we can make an informed decision about whether to take it into consideration.

The first page of google results gives numbers ranging from 33% to 90% of the population being prone to motion sickness, so the number of people affected is probably not negligible. Someone really needs to research this so we can get some real numbers.

Controversial things that I would like to be available if I were one of the people affected

1. Sex-selection abortion. I was a wanted child, conceived quite mindfully and intentionally, and life is still hard. I have wished that I hadn't been born, but I've never been glad that I was born. (Long before I even knew what abortion was, I realized that I hadn't been born, I wouldn't mind not having been born). I'd imagine it's far worse if your parents don't think you're worth having because of your biological sex, but you would be worth having if you had a different biological sex. If my parents had wanted to abort me for being a girl, I would have wanted that option to be available to them.

2. The option of committing suicide when in prison. I always thought that part of the punishment of prison is that they prevent you from committing suicide, so you live to be raped and tortured another day. So, if I were in prison, I'd be very glad to have the option of ending it. However, I don't think the senator's proposal of providing rope for hanging is ideal. Nooses look hard to tie (I wouldn't know how to do it without googling, and I don't think they're allowed internet in prison) and I don't know the results of hanging with a poorly-tied noose. In addition, your bladder and bowels release when you die, and if the body's hanging from the ceiling that would all spray around the room and then someone would have to clean it up. A cleaner and more reliable method would be preferable. On top of all that, it isn't right for people who have been convicted of crimes to have the right to suicide when euthanasia isn't yet available to the general public. Nevertheless, I do support the general principle of suicide being an option, both inside and outside of prison.

I don't expect many people to agree with me on these points. I'm be the first to admit that I'm more nihilistic than most, and I'm certainly not saying that others should feel the same way just because I do; I do very much see where people who disagree with me are coming from. However, the fact remains that, if I were one of the people affected first-hand by these questions, this is what I would want.

Things They Should Invent Words For

I once saw some photos from a Harry Potter premiere that named every actor, the character they played, and the character's blood status. For example, "Rupert Grint, who plays pure-blood wizard Ron Weasley, arrives at the premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."

Apart from the fact that they're politically incorrect within the Potterverse (I doubt even the Rita Skeeter would be so crude as to mention blood status of an actor at a premiere!), the problem with those captions is that blood status is only meaningful to fans, and fans would already know the character's blood status. If you don't know that Ron Weasley is a pure-blood wizard, the fact that Ron Weasley is a pure-blood wizard is inconsequential to you.

The name of the actor is relevant if you don't know who the person in the picture is, the name of the character might be relevant if you've read the books but aren't familiar with the movie actors, but there are no circumstances under which the blood status of the character is relevant to a reader who wouldn't already know the blood status of the character.

We need a word for this kind of situation, when if you could use the information you already have it, and if you don't have the information it's not useful.

Things They Should Invent: WhereCanIBuy.com

Last summer I bought a full-length mattress wedge. I ended up buying it online (from overstock.com) because I couldn't figure out where to get one in real life. I searched for it in real life by going to the websites of every store I could think of that sells mattresses and seeing if they had any mattress wedges listed on their site. None of them did. I did a bit of fruitless googling, then ended up just searching sites that sell general merchandise. I'm happy with the product I got, but I seriously doubt that there is nowhere to buy a mattress wedge in Toronto. There has to be an easier way.

They should invent a single comprehensive website where you enter your postal code and the item you want to buy, and it finds stores in your area where you can buy it. You can search either by general type of item ("mattress wedge") or by your specifications ("four-cup coffee maker with timer") or by a particular brand and type("Touche Éclat #2"). It would also be interesting to list the prices and whether the item in question is in stock. To make this as easy as possible on merchants, the website's database should be compatible with the most common inventory management systems, so they can all batch upload their inventory for us to find.

This would not only be convenient for customers, but would also be good for smaller, more local businesses. If we haven't the slightest idea where to buy something, we tend to gravitate towards large department or discount stores, or relevant chain stores. (When I was talking about mattress wedges, you were probably thinking The Bay, Sears, Sleep Country, Walmart.) But what if some little storefront nearby has the product in question, but you've never noticed it before because it's in the opposite direction of your commute? A single central directory would direct customers to the store that's best positioned to serve them, not just the best-known. Win-win.

Clothing drop boxes

I was very surprised and disappointed to hear that some city councillors are considering banning used clothing drop boxes.

I like them. They're convenient for me. Someone who wants my unwanted stuff is giving me a convenient location to drop it off at my leisure. They say some of the boxes aren't for charity, but that doesn't negate their convenience. They also say some of them don't give the clothes to the needy, instead selling them to recyclers to use to make recycled textiles. That doesn't bother me either, because it means I can put things like holey old underwear and stained t-shirts and odd socks in the box instead of throwing them out.

All the problems listed in the article seem to be that existing laws and regulations aren't getting enforced. There are already rules about who can and can't operate them. There are already rules against putting big boxes on other people's property without their permission. To ban the boxes because existing rules aren't getting enforced would be to fall into this trap.

In the meantime, there's a very simple first step to solving this problem that they could have taken in that very news article: name the two organizations who are actually licenced to run clothing drop boxes. Every article I've seen on the subject says there are two legit and licenced organizations, none of them name them. Naming them would cost nothing, take up only a few minutes of time, and allow us to make informed choices about where we drop off our old clothes. The news media could even do this themselves without having to wait for city council to act.

Nivea Soothing Care lip balm is not dishwasher-friendly

Nivea Soothing Care lip balm (the one in the light green tube) is no better or worse than any other drug store lip balm. However, the lip prints it leaves on drinking glasses don't come out in the dishwasher nearly as well as other lip balms. Therefore, I don't recommend it for dishwasher users who don't like having to touch up their dishwashing by hand. A very similar product that comes out easily in the dishwasher is Nivea Hydro Care (the one in the light blue tube).

"You're welcome" vs. "No problem" revisited

I've blogged before about the nuances of "you're welcome" vs. "no problem" as a response to "thank you".

But reading this story from Not Always Right gave me some sudden insight on why the "you're welcome" people don't like being told "no problem": they want it to be a problem!

They seem to be interpreting "you're welcome" as "you are welcome [in the sense of "entitled"] to impose upon me by making this request of me", and see a "no problem" as implying that they are not entitled to that. "No problem" is equalizing, "you're welcome" is subservient.

I use "no problem" specifically because it is equalizing, in an attempt to neutralize the burden of gratitude in the other party. I'm saying "It's okay, we're cool, you don't owe me any gratitude, I'm not putting this on your tab." This is what I like in customer service and in life in general, so I try to give it to others.

It makes me feel welcome in the literal sense, the same way I'm welcome in, say, my parents' home. I'm totally allowed to walk in and fix myself a drink and rummage through the fridge. In a customer service context, it makes me feel like they're giving me good service because I'm just as cool as they are, not because I'm above them. Because they like me, not because they are obligated to serve me. They're saying "Hey, it's you! How are you doing? Do you want a coffee?" rather than doing their job and rolling their eyes at me when I leave. And, while it is totally their prerogative to just do the job and roll their eyes at me when I leave, I'd much rather have them like me.

But the "you're welcome" people don't seem to care about that, they seem to prefer to be treated with deference, liked for their position rather than for themselves.

Things They Should Invent: DoINeedToStartAtTheBeginning.com

Lately I've been thinking that Downton Abbey has started sounding interesting to me, but I don't know if it's something that you can pick up in the middle or if I have to go back to the beginning of the series and catch up.

They need to make a single comprehensive website for every series ever - TV, books, and anything else that comes in series form - tell you whether you need to start at the beginning or whether you can just jump right in. They could take user votes and comments, and it could work like Rotten Tomatoes.

For TV series, they could also incorporate a feature that gives you alerts whenever certain series is starting to air from the beginning on a TV channel in your area, so if you want to catch up the old-fashioned way you can.

Things They Should Invent Words For

We've all heard the expression "privatizing profit and socializing risk". The phenomenon I want to make a word for is similar, but I can't seem to structure an analogous expression. It's a sort of socialization of the requirement for expertise, but not precisely.

One example of the phenomenon is pensions. They seem to be moving away from defined benefit pensions, where experts manage it for you, to defined contribution pensions, where they give everyone a little bit of money and tell them to go manage it themselves.

Another major example comes from from job searching. Based on what my parents and grandparents tell me, employers used to be willing to hire unskilled labour or workers with a lot of potential but no particular experience in the area (and they tended to look upon university degrees as potential), and then let them learn on the job or train them up so they could eventually move up the ladder and do better-paying work. But in my own job hunting experience, I find that most employers want workers who already have the very specific skills and experience required for the position - even when it's something easily learnable like proprietary software. And, on top of that, employers have been known to reject applicants who have education that isn't strictly required for the job.

This also reminds me of how every once in a while you hear employers in the news saying that they can't find enough skilled workers, but these complaints about the lack of skilled workers seem to be reaching my ears far more readily than information about what kind of skills which employers need, and how to go about acquiring these skills, and how to figure out which of those jobs you'd be a good fit for rather than picking some skilled trade at random.

Anyway, the general concept I want to coin a word for is this sort of increasing expectation over time that individuals who are not involved in organizations or fields of expertise are independently responsible for developing knowledge of the needs of those organizations or the skills of those fields of expertise, whereas historically the larger organizations were more willing to make the effort to integrate and orient people.

I'm not explaining this as well as I should be. Coinages and better explanations welcome.

Journalism wanted: why are burqas made from synthetic fibres?

Over the past decade or so, I've read several different articles by different journalists visiting Afghanistan who described their respective experiences wearing a burqa. (Most recently here.) And most, if not all, of these articles mentioned that the burqa was made of some synthetic fibre that doesn't breathe.

How did that come about?

Conventional wisdom is that Afghanistan doesn't have much in the way of infrastructure. A lack of infrastructure should make manufacturing synthetic fabrics difficult, so I would expect people to wear natural fabrics made in traditional ways - whatever it was that people did in the centuries and millennia before industrialization. Synthetic fibres also seem inconvenient for burqas (something that breathes would be better), and more convenient for other things. So why are they using it for burqas? This would suggest that synthetic fibres are more readily available than natural fibres. How did that happen in a country with so little infrastructure?

Obviously not all burqas are made of synthetic fibres. Some of the burqas available for sale on the internet in English are available in cotton and sometimes even silk, although I'm certainly not assuming that what I can google up in English is representative of the general burqa market. I've also seen a number of newspaper articles mentioning in passing (for the purpose of explaining to readers what a burqa is) that they're made of cotton; it's quite possible the people writing these articles have no first-hand experience with burqas or are just repeating what they've googled up. But every article I've read by a journalist who actually wore a burqa in Afghanistan has them describing it as made of synthetic fibres that don't breathe. (Unless they're purposely giving synthetic ones to journalists for some reason?)

There's a story in there somewhere. Even if it turns out to be obvious to those familiar with the Afghan garment industry, there's a story in there for ignorant westerners like me.

Whatever happened to cable shows on regular TV channels?

A couple of years ago, TV shows that normally only play on the movie networks were showing old seasons on normal basic or extended cable channels. For example, the first two seasons of Dexter were on Bravo, and the first two seasons of Big Love were on Showcase.

Then they stopped doing that. Why didn't they continue doing that? Both these shows reached five seasons (and Dexter is still going on), but they never showed more than the first two on the channels that I get.

I know they're available on DVD (as well as all the usual unofficial methods), but I find it very easy to procrastinate TV and movies when I know I can watch them any time. If they're on at a specific time, I'll tune in and watch; if they're on DVD or on my computer, I always feel "Meh, I can watch that any time."

SOPA protest idea

I don't know offhand how technologically feasible this is, but just putting it out there: what if the major sites going dark to protest SOPA instead blocked access to their sites from users at .gov addresses? It seems like it could be done on the same principle as geoblocking.