Summary of Star Trek: First Contact, written by someone who obviously doesn't know Star Trek

"Half-robot Borg tries to sabotage a rocket flight."

- from the Globe and Mail TV guide

Etiquette dilemma

I got on the subway, saw an empty seat, and sat down. This lady got on shortly after me, but there were no seats so she stood up in front of me. Then, several stops later, one of the people sitting next to me got off, so the lady standing in front of me sat down next to me. As she moved to sit down, the way her moved and hung showed me that she was pregnant - at least I think she was pregnant! I didn't notice the apparent pregnancy while she was just standing still. I felt like I should apologize to her for not offering her my seat, but there was the tricky question of what if she isn't actually pregnant? What's the proper thing to do in this situation?

Things They Should Invent: redefine "women's issues" to exclude parenting issues

A number of political issues are often grouped together under the general category of "women's issues," but many of these issues are actually parents' issues. In addition, some reproductive issues that are commonly considered women's issues also affect men who have sex with women. This causes many problems:

- childfree women, infertile/post-menopausal childless women, and women with grown children will look at the "women's issues" section of the website (or whatever medium) and come to the conclusion that women's issues aren't for them, when in fact there are one or two issues hiding in there that are for all of us.

- issues that have to do with parents and opposite-sex partners are listed under a category that tells men "This is not for you."

This means that:

- nearly all women over 50
- all men except for gay and celibate childfree men
- childfree women

are all alienated from issues that concern them, simply because of lazy labelling. I don't have census data or anything here, but that's obviously a majority of the population.

So is it a parenting issue? Call it a parenting issue. Is it a reproductive issue? Call it a reproductive issue. If there are any women's issues left, you can call them women's issues. I don't know whether or not there are any left, because all the stuff for parents told me it wasn't for me so I didn't read it in depth.

"You're just taking the easy way out"

This phrase, like the words courage and cowardice, is often misused as a commentary on virtue. People accuse others of taking the easy way out as though there's some inherent virtue in doing things the hardest way possible. Now sometimes the harder route is more virtuous and the easier route is less virtuous, but they are virtuous or not based on their own merits, not because of their inherent difficulty or lack thereof.

So, in the shower this morning, I thought of a simple rebuttal to show people who make this comment the folly of their position. It won't work for everyone, but it will work for a lot of people: "You have a car, don't you?"

Extremely small countries are cool

There are quite a few countries in the world with five-digit populations. Tuvalu has about 10,000, San Marino has about 20,000, Monaco has about 30,000, etc.

The cool thing about these countries are that if they have an official government correspondence office, they could answer every single letter the gov't receives from citizens. If they have more than one full-time person, they could probably manage to send a somewhat personalized note of condolence from the head of state to the family of every single person who dies. They could probably send a card of congratulations from the head of state to every single high-school graduate. That would be very cool.

Another poll they should do

Some people believe "If I can achieve success, anyone can," and if someone doesn't achieve success it's their own damn fault for not working hard enough or being virtuous enough.

Other people view their own success as a matter of good luck, and feel that things could have turned out very differently due to circumstances completely beyond their control.

I fall into the latter group, and this is because I know and know of a number of people who have the same or better credentials, virtue, and willingness to work hard as I do, but are less successful. (This statement holds for every measure of success I can think of, although the same people don't always count as more successful or less successful by each and every measure.) This is also because I have been in situations where I was unable to achieve a certain success due to circumstances entirely beyond my control; I have also been in situations where I was nearly unable to achieve a certain success due to cercumstances entirely beyond my control, but did end up achieving it by making use of some resource to which not everyone has access (and I had access to said resource because of good luck or a random fluke or other circumstances beyond my control.)

So I'd like to see a poll of the people who think that if you don't achieve success it's entirely your fault. Do they know anyone who has the same or better credentials, virtue, and willingness to work hard, but is less successful? Have they ever not achieved success due to circumstances entirely beyond their control? Have they ever achieved success purely because of good luck? Basically I'm wondering if they have the same range of experiences as me but are interpreting them differently, or if they came from a completely different set of experiences.

In court

In courtroom dramas, two things always happen:

1. Everyone takes an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
2. At some point, a lawyer forcefully insists that some witness answer a question with simple yes or no, with no further information.

But if you answer a question with a simple yes or no when more specific information is necessary, you're not telling the whole truth, and you're not telling nothing but the truth.

On TV, they always present this situation as the evil witness is cowed into answering with an incriminatory yes or no, and implicates the bad guy, and the good guy wins. But in real life what are you supposed to do if you're on the stand and the lawyer questioning insist that you answer in a way that would be perjury?

A trick of the light

On TV, they have what appears to be a temporary studio set up in what appears to be a hotel room. They're sitting in hotel-looking chairs interviewing people in front of what looks like a window that offers a stunning view of the urban skyline.

Problem: It's a nighttime skyline.

The lights from the studio should be reflecting off the window and showing a mirror image of what's going on in the studio, not a stunning view of the nighttime skyline. Is there any possible way to pull this off with TV studio lights, or is the window just a fake?

Do you wear purple? If not, why not?

I'm finding myself tempted to buy a purple jacket (for outerwear), but I'm hesitant. The colour looks really good on me, as deep jewel tones usually do, but I always think twice about wearing purple because so few people do wear it. Is that just because purple doesn't look good on many people, or is it an old lady colour, or is there some other reason?

The word purple looks really funny now.

Barbershop bunny, free for the taking

In the shower this morning, my brain started playing a barbershop arrangement of King Herod's Song from Jesus Christ Superstar (lyrics) (YouTube). As far as Google can tell me, no one has done this IRL, and since I don't have a keyboard to help me write it out (or a barbershop quartet who can use it) I'm tossing it out here for anyone who's randomly Googling for something new to barbershop. I think it would work in straightforward close harmony, with judicious use of scat in the bassline to allude to what the tuba and piano are doing in the original.

Question for Americans

Why do y'all refer to your amendments by number only? It makes them very hard to learn and seriously hinders my Jeopardy game!

Of airplanes and dull conversation

Last night I closed my windows overnight for the first time this fall. This morning, I notice airplanes sound more noticeable than usual. I'm not particularly close to an airport or anything, but I'm quite distinctly hearing each airplane, which never happened with the windows open. I guess it's because the closed windows block out the sounds of weather and construction and sirens* and cars and people.

Also, I heard a really good quote the other day. I don't know if I've got it exactly, but here's the gist: "Talking about the nutritional value of food while eating is like talking about the anatomical composition of lips while kissing."

I tried googling it, but all I got was advice on how to kiss. Something I wish I'd known back when I was unkissed and terribly ashamed of it: when you do find yourself kissing, it will be with someone you feel safe with and can trust. You know how you can be stupid and goofy around your very best friends and it's okay? The same goes for your kissing partner. It's hard to think of it this way when you haven't been kissed yet - the idea of someone who might kiss you is very Other - but once you get close enough to someone to actually kiss them, you'll be comfortable with them. And they won't be expecting any great astounding lover with The Best Technique Ever, they'll be kissing you because you're you. If you mess up, you'll just catch each other's eye, share a smile and a giggle, then lean back in to try again, no hard feelings.

*television always portrays neighbourhoods with lots of sirens as high-crime neighbourhoods and undesireable places to live. My neighbourhood has a lot of sirens because the police and fire stations are just a block or two away, which actually makes it feel safer.

Fun with semantics

Two sentences whose denotations are almost exactly the same, but whose connotations sound almost exactly opposite:

1. It's not like I have anything better to do

and

2. I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing

Today's roundup

1. Three or four years ago, when the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" first entered common parlance, my first reaction was "But the US has weapons of mass destruction!" But no one of influence was listening to what I thought, so nothing came of it. Today, Keith Knight follows that train of thought through to the logical conclusion.

2. The City of Toronto bought a dump near London, Ontario, and London politicians aren't happy. The same thing happened with Michigan - there was a lot of rhetoric from local politicans to the effect that Toronto was forcing its trash on them. But that isn't what's really happening. Toronto bought the dump with permission from whoever owned it before. It's a legitimate, completely legal business transaction conducted with all the necessary permission - not bullying or strongarming. It seems to me that the problem is that people can privately own dumps and sell them to whomever they want without authorization from local authorities.

3. Peel police allegedly assaulted some guys who took a video of police having a drinking party behind a strip mall. But why are police officers drinking behind a strip mall? They're grown adults with professional salaries - surely they can go to a bar or a private home to do their drinking! Why would behind a strip mall be desirable or preferable?

4. A Canadian Medical Association Report "recommends Canadians assume more responsibility for their own health care." No further detail is given and, as of the time of this posting, I can't find any greater detail (or the report itself) online. I would really like to know what they mean by this! I try very hard to take responsibility for my own health care but I'm thwarted at every turn! I think I have strep throat and I waited three days to make sure? The doctor can't see me to give me antibiotics for another four days! I followed medical news to find what Gardasil would be approved in Canada and was proactive in seeking it out? Can't have it because the receptionist has never heard of it! I'm female and childfree? Can't have a tubal because I'm under 35 and don't have kids! (Because I'm really good at being childfree, doy!) So how do they want me to take more responsibility when I can't even take the responsibility that I want to take???

Worst. Child. Ever.

And I thought the kids that trapped me in the elevator were bad. This kid (and the associated parenting) is much, much worse.

Now I'm far more forgiving with children than most people. I think they should be allowed to eat whatever they want instead of whatever food their parents arbitrarily choose. I have no problem with creating an environment that boosts children's self-esteem. I don't mind if they call me by my first name. I don't mind if they get a bit noisy. And if you say anything that even hints at the thought that spanking is appropriate, you are going to get an earful from me.

But holy shit people, if your kid walks up to some quadriplegic lady and MOVES HER ARM, thus leaving her helpless, you drop everything and explain to the kid sternly WHY THAT IS A VERY BAD THING TO DO! This isn't minor, this isn't something to laugh off like when a child asks an unknowningly inappropriate question, this is your child not only violating someone's personal space, but leaving them utterly helpless! The kid should be wide-eyed and stammering for an apology!

From the news

A Globe and Mail commentator insists that Kimveer Gill is not a victim.

This happens whenever there's a big atrocious crime - someone cuts off any attempt to figure out why the perp did what he did by saying that the perp isn't a victim, the victim is.

The problem is that this attitude hinders investigation and discourse about what might lead someone to commit a crime like this. And we need to understand where this comes from - we can't just stop at "He's bad" or "He's crazy." We need to be able to look at the situation and say "Yeah, I can see why he did that" so we can take measures to prevent similar crimes in the future.

Being able to see why a perp did something doesn't mean you think it's good or justified. Can you see why someone might rob a bank? Sure - there's lots of money in there, and it belongs to a big faceless corporation. You can understand the reasoning even if you're not a bank robber yourself. Can you see why someone might strike someone else out of anger? No one who has ever been a child can honestly say they can't. But that doesn't mean you think it's acceptable to go around hitting people. And we need to understand these things. We couldn't have appropriate security in banks if we couldn't understand what would lead someone to rob a bank. We couldn't defuse tense situations if we couldn't understand what might lead someone to hit someone else.

And similarly, we need to understand what would lead someone to shoot up a school. Is it a certain kind of bullying experienced in school? Once we understand that, we can focus on training teachers to eliminate the conditions that make schools conducive to bullying. Is it a certain kind of mis-parenting? Once we understand that, we can disseminate the fact that that isn't appropriate parenting and provide parents with alternatives. But if we just write him off as a Bad Guy and use that as an excuse not to look into it in greater depth, we're doing ourselves all a disservice.

Meanwhile, one would-be head of the Toronto police union wants to give police the right to sue people who make false accusations against them.

Here's what that says to me: suppose something happens in my building and a police officer has to come to my apartment, then he decides to take advantage of the fact that we're alone in my apartment to rape me. Or suppose I'm falsely arrested for something, and the police don't much like my protestations of innocence so they decide to beat me. (There have been beatings and sexual assault cases involving the Toronto police in the past few years, and nothing has been done to give me reason to believe that it won't happen again.) What I'm hearing from this article is that if I so much as utter a word about it, if my dentist asks how all my teeth got knocked out, or my optician asks how my glasses broke, or my doctor asks why I'm suddenly requesting STD testing when I've been monogamous for my entire adult life, and I say that a police officer attacked me, the police will then sue me, take everything I have and leave me without a safety net, and garnishee my future wages so I'll have to live somewhere distant and infested in a high-crime area that will have cops coming to my building even more often and the whole thing starts over again. That's what this article says to me.

Now I can see how false accusations may be of concern to a police officer - there are certainly some good nefarious reasons why a perp might want to falsely accuse a cop - but the Toronto Police don't have enough public trust to do this. They've had a lot of scandals lately, so they're in no position to be demanding protection from us when we still feel like we need to be protected from them. I couldn't even reassure you with absolute certainty that they won't come and attack me just for blogging this.

The problems of website design in bilingual cultures

As a translator, I spend a lot of my time looking at bilingual websites, as they make for excellent parallel texts. This being Canada, we have plenty of bilingual websites, as well as bilingual packaging on all our products, so I have grown accustomed to the graphic affordances of bilingual texts.

But this can be a problem when website designers don't consider how the omnipresence of bilingual material might affect how users scan the page.

I was just looking at this page. I read about this gizmo in the paper, and wanted to see how much it costs. So I went to the page I have linked, scanned it quickly, but didn't see a price. I could see a link for the money-back guarantee and a link to the Time article, but I couldn't see any other links that might help me find the price. I clicked around the title and the graphics in vain, but there were no other links. Then, after far too long a time, I noticed the "Buy your sleeptracker today!" link on the bottom-right.

Why didn't I notice this right away? Because the layout of this page suggested that it might be bilingual. There are two relatively equal-sized columns of text separated by a wide space, and two relatively equal-sized links. This is consistent with the standard design of bilingual front pages, like this. My eye automatically went to the left-hand column, saw that it was English, read it, and saw the warranty link below. I then subconsciously assumed that the right-hand column said the same thing in French, and the link was the equivalent in French.

If the text had been all in one block instead of in columns, I would have been able to navigate the page easily. However, the two columns and two links, while possibly appropriate in a print ad, gave me the impression that it was a bilingual page so I should ignore the right-hand column.

Web designers: keep this in mind! Translation and tech writing students: you could get a text analysis exercise out of this!

Anyone out there have Zonealarm and Sympatico?

I find I'm getting way, way, way fewer Zonealarm alerts than usual. When I first set up this computer a year ago, I got so many alerts that I had to disable the little box that tells you you have an alert; most of these alerts were inbound. I happened to look at my alert log just recently, and found that I had way fewer alerts than I expected. It says it has blocked 168 intrusion attempts since I upgraded on Aug. 1. That's less than 5 a day! Since my last reboot, most the alerts have come from svchost.exe attempting to access DNS servers, which is odd because a) I didn't know that was blocked (I was under the impression svchost was important), and b) I'm still connecting just fine. I've only had two incoming alerts, both from a router URL. This is very odd and bizarre. Even when I was on resnet, behind a firewall, I still got the occasional stray alert. It makes me worry that my firewall isn't blocking what it should, but it's still passing various online firewall tests with flying colours.

Sympatico users: are you getting fewer Zonealarm alerts than usual? Is this something I should be worried about?

Thought experiment

There are people who think that making birth control available, will make people more likely to have sex. I think I have come up with a thought experiment (to borrow a term from Scott Adams) to prove why this is not true. Follow along and see if it works (note: for simplicity's sake, we are only considering birth control here, not STD protection):

The year is 2006. Consider a sexually active opposite-sex couple who does not want to get pregnant right now, so the woman goes on the pill. This makes perfect sense. The pill is one of the most effective forms of temporary birth control, it prevents the ovaries from releasing ova so there are no eggs floating around to get fertilized, so society in general will consider this a reasonable and responsible course of action. If they get pregnant, people will be surprised.

Suppose the woman isn't on the pill, and they use some kind of barrier method. That's generally not considered as responsible. The general consensus is "Yeah, I know, sometimes hormonal methods wreak havoc on some women's bodies, but really it's better to be on the pill if at all possible." If there's no good reason why the woman can't be on the pill, the general consensus is "WTF are they doing? Condoms break, you know, and the rhythm method is not at all reliable!" If they get pregnant, there will be an unspoken undertone of "Well, what did you expect?"

But let's go back in time a bit. Now the year is 1936. The pill has not been invented yet. So an opposite-sex couple who does not want to have children (it being the Great Depression and all) goes to a controversial newly-opened family-planning clinic, where they are issued the latest in birth control technology: condoms and spermicide. They use these, perhaps in combination with the rhythm method. Again, moral detractors aside, this is generally considered responsible. They do not want to have children, they can't afford to have children, so they use the very latest technology available to keep themselves from getting pregnant. They aren't on the pill, but they're still considered perfectly responsible. Why? Because the pill hasn't been invented yet. Maybe an experimental version is in a lab somewhere, but practically speaking there's no possible way for them to get their hands on it, so they are still being as responsible as possible despite the fact that they're not using it.

Now let's go forward in time. The year is 2036. The male pill has been invented, and is mainstream and widely available. So now both members of our couple are on the pill. She's on the female pill, which prevents the ovaries from releasing ova, and he's on the male pill, which prevents sperm production. This is generally considered the responsible course of action for when you don't want to have children.

Now, still in 2036, suppose the man is not on the pill for whatever reason, but the woman is. The general consensus would be something like "Yeah, I know the pill wreaks havoc on some men's bodies, but it's really better for both people to use a hormonal method if at all possible." If there's no good reason for the man to not take the pill, the general consensus will be "WTF are they doing? They'll get sperm everywhere!" And if they get pregnant with only the woman on the pill, there will be a general undertone of "Well, what did you expect?"

Our 2036 couple is generally considered irresponsible for not using the male pill, but our 2006 couple is not because the male pill is not available in 2006. Our 2006 couple is generally considered irresponsible for not using the female pill, but our 1936 couple is not because the female pill is not available in 1936.

The 1936 couple is not considered irresponsible for not holding out until they can get a female pill, and the 2006 couple is not considered irresponsible for not holding out until they can get a male pill. Overall, it is considered responsible to use the very most effective birth control available, regardless of what it is. Overall, it is considered unreasonable to expect a couple to avoid sexual contact until a better form of birth control becomes available.

You with me so far?

Okay, now let's go to a dystopia where the anti-contraception lobby has won. There are no hormonal, chemical, or barrier methods of birth control available through doctors or pharamcists. Now we have an opposite-sex couple who does not want to get pregnant. So what do they do? They go to their doctor and/or pharmacist and ask about their options, and perhaps they are informed about the rhythm and withdrawl methods. Wanting to be as responsible as possible, they use the rhythm and withdrawl methods. Because they are using the best methods available, they do not feel like they are taking any unnecessary risks, any more than we today feel that we are taking unnecessary risks by not using a male pill. They won't feel any particular need to avoid sex, any more than we feel it necessary to avoid sex because the female pill is only like 99.9% effective and the male pill is not available. However, they will still have a higher unwanted pregnancy rate than we do, just as the unwanted pregnancy rate was higher in 1936 than in 2006, and just as it will doubtless drop once the male pill becomes available. It's just like people didn't feel unsafe for not having seatbelts before seatbelts were common, or for not having cellphones before cellphones were widely available.

People feel like their behaviour is unrisky when they are using the best precautions possible. Eliminating precautions from the realm of possibility is just going to lower people's risk acceptance threshold.