Friday, April 30, 2004

Helpful household hint: the best way to guarantee the laundry room won't be crowded is to do your laundry during a hockey game.

Note to certain Leafs fans out there: please reserve your honking up Yonge St. for when the Leafs have won a game, not just when they have scored a goal.
Add the appropriate tempo? WTF kind of question is that?
My library card number is 14 digits long. It took me under a month to memorize that.

The part of my bank card number that I need to memorize is 12 digits long. I got this bank card in fall 2000, and I still haven't managed to memorize that number.

Thursday, April 29, 2004

American Woman by Susan Choi. Yet another novel that is a good book, but I am not the best audience for it. It's the story of the daughter of a wealthy family who is kidnapped by a group of radicals in 1970s America, and eventually turns to their cause. The story is told from the perspective of another radical who is in hiding but gets drawn into this incident.

I think it's a novel better appreciated by someone who lived through that time, especially since it's apparently based on a real event (which I wouldn't have known about without Google). There's a good deal of indirect commentary on things like gender, race, and sexuality, but again those aren't Issues in my life like they were at the time. It works if you read it from a historical perspective, but I don't know if it's intended that way.

The story itself is quite good, although it fizzles out at the end. I think the author was going for Meaningful and Symbolic at the end, but it didn't quite work for me. Still worth reading from the library though.
I'm not actively involved in academia at the moment so I don't know how much my opinion on this matter counts, but I've decided I don't like turnitin.com.

It seems to me that there is a finite amount of things that can be said on any given topic, and there is an even more finite (can there be degrees of finiteness?) amount of things that the typical undergrad would be inclined to say on any given topic. There is also a finite number of ways that any given idea can be expressed in a particular language.

If you have every student run every paper through turnitin.com, and you compare all papers to all previous papers, eventually there are going to be some matches that are pure coincidence. I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of using this particular thesis with these particular supporting points in my first essay for first-year English Lit, and someone else writing on the exact same topic might use one or two of the same turns of phrase as I do. The mroe papers are added to the database, the greater the chance of a coincidental match?

So what will happen to the first student who dilligently writes an essay in their own words, but it ends up getting flagged by turnitin.com. How will they convince the prof that they are being honest? Will their academic career be ruined?

Wednesday, April 28, 2004

This is a hugely useful tool for deciding whom to vote for when there's a federal election.

Tuesday, April 27, 2004

Whilst.

Does anyone here say whilst? If so, do you also say while? If so, what's the difference?

Monday, April 26, 2004

[Disclaimer: The following post is about semantics and branding. It also happens to mention abortion. However, it is not intended as commentary on abortion, or to invite commentary on abortion. It is intended only to comment on linguistic issues.]

The problem, from a branding point of view, with the label "pro-choice" is that "choice" is not a very strong word, especially considering that the opposite lobby calls itself "pro-life". "Life" is very strong, meaningful word. It is a Big Important Concept. If you were doing some kind of layout or design thing incorporating words that represent Big Important Universal Concepts, the word "life" would be on there. The word "Choice" probably would not. If we momentarily forgot all knowledge of the significance of these words to the abortion issue and asked, "What is more important, Life or Choice?" most people would probably choose the word "life".

Consider the ubiquitous phrase "a woman's right to choose". Again, if we remove all familiarity with this phrase's significance to the abortion issue, it sounds rather weak. Choosing is a banal everyday activity. Coffee or tea? Apple or orange? "Right to life" sounds much stronger than "right to choose", especially since it would be very easy to argue that even if a person cannot choose whether to terminate a pregnancy, they still have the right to choose many many other things.

The keyword for a label like this should be selected with the target audience in mind. Who is the target audience for the pro-abortion movement? People who don't believe that a woman should be allowed to terminate her pregnancy if she feels it necessary to do so. That's right, people who would consider an abortion are NOT the target audience, people who are unilaterially opposed to abortion ARE. The phrases "pro-choice" and "a woman's right to choose" were doubtless created with respect for the complexity of the issues and the many many factors involved in a decision of whether or not to terminate a pregnancy, as well as respect for the fact that only those directly involved can be fully qualified to make such a monumental decision, and then only for their specific situation. They are very careful, respectful phrases, created with those who could not say they would never get an abortion in mind. The problem is that this is not the target audience. The target audience is much less likely to see it as a complex problem, much less likely to see it as a set of factors to be carefully weighed. The target audience is more likely to see abortion as Something You Don't Do. Period.

The phrase "a woman's right to choose" alienate the target audience in two ways. First, it gives the impression that they mean "right to choose whether to have an abortion", which, to someone who is opposed to abortion, would give the impression that they trivialize the importance of abortion. "Choosing" might make it sound like they're eeny-meeny-miny-moing rather than weighing a complex set of factors. After all, we also "choose" whether to have a bagel or a muffin for breakfast. Upon further reflection it becomes clear that "Right to choose" means "right to choose whether to be pregnant, whether to be a parent for the rest of my life, whether to burden an innocent human being with this set of problems", choosing one's path in life more than choosing one single action, but people aren't likely to put this much analysis into something they firmly believe is unconditionally wrong. To the target audience, "choice" would seem rather trival compared with the other factors at play.

The other way the phrase "woman's right to choose" alienates its target audience is by its reference to a woman's right. Of course, we all know that, as of this writing, only women can become pregnant so therefore only women can have abortions, but the emphasis on the concept of women serves to alienate men from the pro-choice lobby. The pro-life lobby has no such alienating phrases. Now I know that there are a great many men who are pro-choice even though it doesn't involve them as directly, just as a great many people everywhere in the world campaign for causes that do not involve them directly. But I'm sure there are also some men who perceive pro-choice as A Women's Issue, and therefore do not pay it as much attention. This isn't because of misogyny or bigotry or ignorance, but rather a sort of mundane everyday selfishness that we all have. For example, I think having the option to send one's child to daycare or to stay home and raise one's child oneself is important, but I'm not about to get up and march at a demonstration about it because it simply does not affect my life. Similarly, marking pro-choice as A Woman's Issue probably makes some men, even if the fully believe that it is important for abortion to be available, less inclined to actively do something about it.

So how should pro-choice brand itself? I don't have an answer to that. But to compete with the Big Idea of "LIFE", they need a word that's stronger than "choice". Something freedom-esque perhaps. But the most important thing in such a rebranding would be to keep in mind that their target audience is NOT the people who are already on their side.
Insomnia

Sunday, April 25, 2004

The weird cartoonish/videogamish stuff that's going on on the Simpsons right now - what's it an allusion to?
How the fuck am I supposed to know what key it's in when the key signature isn't even a key that's related to the key in the title, and the final chord makes no sense with any of the keys in question, and I don't have any musical instruments so I can't just fucking play it and hear what it sounds and feels like, and I'm sorry but I was trained as an instrumentalist and can't sight sing????

Perhaps it's reasonable to assume that a theory student might have access to an instrument, but you can't bring instruments into the exams (or start singing in the middle of an exam) and this book does say it's for exam preparation, so they should provide us with the tools to work out the example without an instrument! GAH!
From the Cool Ideas That Would Be Impossible To Implement file:

Countries should decide whether to get involved in any particular military action through a secret-ballot referendum of all the members of its armed forces. The members of the armed forces are given all the information available, even that which is not available to the general public (because that's what security clearance is for), and then they decide for themselves whether it's a worthwhile cause.

Possible variation: votes are weighted based on how close to the action the voter would be (although that does take away some of the secrecy of the secret ballot). So the votes of people whose job is to be cannon fodder would be worth more than the votes of people whose job is to sit in an office in another continent.

Saturday, April 24, 2004

A weird thing about The Sims is that the option to tickle people shows up quite often. IRL, why on earth would one adult tickle another adult? Possibly within a very intimate context, but it's hardly a standard social interaction like "talk" or "joke".
OMFG. The Toronto Star is spelling the word "grey" as "gray". I don't know if this is new or if I just noticed it today, but it's SACRILIGE!!!! This is disgusting and obscene! Grey is spelled with an E in Canada, and that's final! Get a CANADIAN style guide already!

Friday, April 23, 2004

Sometimes it's quite handy to have a simple, clear, one-word job title.

Thursday, April 22, 2004

I don't know how it does it, but this sportsbra I bought (of which I'm not going to mention the name because it's been discontinued and I don't know that there aren't people my size reading this) a) prevents anything from moving around, at all, ever, even while kickboxing (yes, I tried a slightly toned-down form of kickboxing in the dressing room), b) makes my breasts point upward, hence making my whole torso look slimmer, and c) looks completely smooth under a tight t-shirt. So obviously they have to discontinue it. I found one in my size, but I really want a second so I can have one for exercising and one for normal wear, rather than having to wear a sweaty bra whenever I want to wear an unforgiving top.
Two unrelated items of note:

1. Charmin Ultra trumps all other toilet paper sampled to date.

2. Rosemont Estates Diamond Chardonnay trumps all other white wines sampled to date.
Idiots!

It's a break, it's in the winter, why is this an issue? Why do they have to even have a big meeting about it? I'll bet if they just quietly printed "winter break" on the calendar, no one would even notice.

And newsflash to Ms. Scott: ceasing to exclude non-xians does not equal excluding xianity. She sounds a tad insecure in her xianity.
They aren't killing off BD, they had him lose a leg. Somehow that's even more poignant...