Casting my playlist

I've decided that the person Blue October is singing to in Hate Me is the same person Ani DiFranco is singing about in Fixing Her Hair.

How to test Cuil

Cuil is clearly having teething troubles so I haven't been able to test it, but here are the things to search for when you're testing it.

1. Reproduce the last search where you were actively impressed by Google's results. A while back someone told me about someone they know who lives in Toronto and has two very disparate and very cool jobs. Googling the names of the two jobs with the word Toronto returned the exact person they were telling me about as the first result. Can Cuil compete?

2. Search for something you can't find with Google. I can't find a torrent of the 1973 movie soundtrack of Jesus Christ Superstar. I can't find certain people from high school I've tried to look up. I can't find the French lyrics to the Log Driver's Waltz. Can Cuil do better?

3. Search for some random article or website you read once. I once read a very good Miss Manners column where she lays a smackdown on a LW for attempting to fix up a friend (whose late husband was blind) with another blind man, despite the fact that the friend had quite specifically asked not to be fixed up. It was the first Google result for the keywords miss manners blind date, which was also the first keyword combination I tried. Can Cuil compete?

4. Search for the sort of thing you mindlessly google as part of everyday web surfing. I find legislation by googling its title, not by navigating justice.gc.ca. I go to the smog alert site by googling ontario air quality. I get to the Jeopardy website forum by googling Jeopardy boards. Would you have to change your navigation habits with Cuil?

The thing about aspiring to be a Google-killer is that you have to be not only as good as Google, but consistently and remarkably better. Remember when Google first came out in 98/99, how much startlingly better than the alternatives it was? You'd have to be at least that much better than Google to kill it.

Things They Should Invent: parking space management companies (for urban condos)

Apparently it's really hard to sell a condo that doesn't come with a parking space, even in the city. But there are also lots of people in the city who don't have cars (and general urban and environmental planning wants more and more people to be carfree). So that leaves condo buyers in a dilemma: do they pay for a parking space that they're never going to use, or risk not being able to sell their condo when they have to?

Someone should start a company to fix this problem. The company would buy the parking space off the buyer at market value (no fuss, no haggling) and sign a contract under which they're obligated to sell it back to the buyer at market value upon request, and they're obligated to sell it back at market value to whomever buys the corresponding condo next. In return, the company is allowed to rent out the parking space and collect income from it in the interim.

That way the company gets to make some money by renting and flipping property, and the condo owner doesn't have to dump money into buying this parking space they're never going to use, instead being able to dedicate the money to buying more condo or paying off their mortgage faster.

Yes, the condo owner could rent the space out themselves, but not everyone wants to spend time and effort finding a tenant and making sure they pay rent etc.

Why I want trans fats to be banned

People who oppose banning trans fats say that people should have the right to make their own choices to eat what they want.

That's exactly why I want them ban trans fats, so I can eat what I want.

I want to eat donuts. I don't want to eat trans fats. If they ban trans fats, donut-makers will be forced to find some alternative and I'll be able to enjoy donuts. If they don't ban trans fats, they'll keep making donuts with trans fats.

Alternative: allow products with trans fats to be sold ONLY if similar products without trans fats are sold alongside.

Fun fact

Assuming TranSearch's search engine is accurate and limiting myself to English-language searches because of interference from various conjugations of dire, the verb "to dis" has been used once in the House of Commons, zero times in the Senate, and zero times in Canadian courts.

How to advertise hardcore lipstick

You know how sometimes they advertise lipstick by promoting the fact that it won't kiss off?

Here's what to do: get two people, have one wear bright fire-engine red lipstic, have the other wear pale pinkish nude lipstick. Have them snog for the duration of the commercial. Then at the end of the commercial they stop snogging and you see that the lipstick hasn't budged at all. (If it does, in fact, work as well as they want us to believe it works.)

Why I wear heels

Antonia Zerbisias asks why we wear heels.

So why do women, who now run companies, wear shoes that they can't run in?

I can run in them actually, in a sort of mincing tripping way. But I don't want to run. I don't like running. It's not fun and it's not dignified. If I ran a company, I would certainly see to it that there's someone to do any necessary running for me. Not being able to run in my shoes is just as much of a problem as not being able to scale an ice cliff in them.

But I'll tell you why I wear them.

Because I like being six feet tall and having every step I take click authoritatively. Because I like asserting my adulthood by wearing things that are grownup. Because I feel kick-ass when I move furniture or carry eight bags of groceries or physically wrestle with the giant printer at work while dressed girly. Because when I was a kid my parents would rarely let me dress girly on the basis that it's impractical, so now I'm making up for lost time and asserting my independence.

But it's mostly because whenever I succeed at looking feminine, it's a victory. My internal gender identity is very femme - the more I think about it, the more I'm surprised by just how femme it is - but my genetics aren't so very. I'm hairy and oozy and smelly with loud bodily functions. I've never been dainty or petite. I walk too fast and say the wrong thing and move clumsily and speak with a harsh voice. I've never been swept off my feet by a lover because I've always been too big and heavy. I learned the truth at seventeen; I'm simply not destined to ever be pretty.

And then, as I entered my 20s, I started to figure out how to make myself pretty. I slowly figured out how to make the makeup work. I slowly figured out how to put together clothes that are actually flattering to my body (part of which is wearing heels) rather than just being funky clothes in and of themselves. I discovered the virtues of underwires. I came up with a trick or two to do with my hair. I got a decent pair of glasses, then a better pair of glasses. And every so often, when the stars and the laundry cycle and my hair's free will all align correctly, I look like a woman! Something that should be just a small pleasure but one I figured would always be denied to me, I now achieve on a regular basis. I totally win!!! And as I strut down the street, heels tapping, hemline swinging, hair bouncing, face perfectly made up, I am declaring victory.

The heels are a part of that. I can wear whatever I want - I have a few pairs of flats and a good pair of athletic shoes and my job has no dress code - but most days walking down the street declaring victory is far more appealing than walking down the street marginally faster and more comfortably.

Things They Should Invent: seasonal storage for the homeless

A lot of my local homeless people wear coats, even in the summer, even during heat alerts. I assume this is because they need their coats in the winter, but they have nowhere to put them in the summer.

Can't we do something about that? Yeah, I know, ideally we should be ending all homelessness at all ever, but we clearly haven't worked that out yet. So until we do, can't we just give them somewhere safe to put their coats so they don't have to lug them around for months?

Things They Should Invent: birth control pills that cause your sex drive to wax and wane over the day

Birth control pills can affect the user's sex drive. Depending on how the hormone levels in the pill interact with your body's natural hormone levels, they can cause your sex drive to increase or decrease, both of which can be either convenient or inconvenient, depending on your situation.

But sometimes having the same sex drive 24 hours a day is inconvenient too. A high sex drive is fun when you're at home with your partner, but inconvenient when you're at work (and vice versa). Unfortunately, the way current pills work is they give you the same sex drive the whole time you're taking that particular hormone level, so it's the same for a week or three weeks or all the time depending on the kind of pill and how you're using them.

To address this, they should come up with a pill that gives your sex drive a peak and valley. They tell you on the package that your sex drive will peak X hours after you've taken the pill and bottom out Y hours afterwards, and you can time your doses accordingly so that you peak when you're home with your partner and valley when you're at work.

These wouldn't be intended to replace existing pills - you wouldn't want to lose the option of being ON for your whole honeymoon, or killing your sex drive to keep yourself for doing anything foolish after a devastating breakup. I'd just like them to exist as another option.

(Also, I wish doctors were a bit more open to patients swapping around through different pills to game the side effects in our favour. If you know from firsthand experience that a certain pill has a certain effect on your sex drive (or your acne or your weight or whatever) and you want that effect for whatever reason, I don't think you should have to go through the Spanish Inquisition with your doctor.)

It's PMS week, that explains everything

Yesterday I got all pissed off because someone was wrong on the internet. Today I'm getting all pissed off that random people aren't taking into account things that I've already diligently and thoroughly explained in my blog.

Yes, this blog, read by like five people, written by me with all my stellar credentials of um...er...that is...yeah.

I think during PMS week I shouldn't be allowed to do anything on the internet except look at cute puppies, watch funny youtubes, and read good fanfiction (but only good fanfiction because bad fanfiction pisses me off too.)

Frustrated

Yes, I'm still up. Because someone is wrong on the internet!

I'm kind of frustrated. In a community I lurk in (but don't post in because the people there are so smart and cool they're eons out of my league) someone posted something that's wrong - the kind of wrong that Snopes would normally debunk, but Snopes hasn't touched it yet. And they're planning to take action based on it.

I know this thing is wrong from knowledge that I happen to have but have no formal training in, combined with critical thinking, but I'd need to make a big massive long cited essay to prove it to someone with whom I have no particular credibility. And that's not exactly the politest way to delurk, especially not in a community full of people who are way smarter and cooler than me.

It's just very frustrating seeing a normally very smart person be misled like this, and watching other similarly smart people be similarly misled on the basis of the first person's usual credibility, and I just can't come up with any way to swoop in and announce that a credible regular who's normally way smarter than me is just wrong wrong wrong.

My kingdom for a Snopes link.

Things They Should Invent: secular penance

In the Catholic church, you confess your sins to the priest, he gives you penance (usually prayers to say), and then you are absolved.

There should be something similar IRL. If you've done something you feel guilty for (something that you can't just undo), you go to some authorized absolver, they assign you a suitable penance that's commensurate with your misdeed, and once you have completed your penance you are officially absolved and don't have to feel guilty for it any more.

However, unlike church penance, you get to decide which things you think you need to do penance for, rather than having it imposed on you.

Things They Should Invent: unrespectively

Respectively is a useful word. Toronto and Quebec City are the capitals of Ontario and Quebec, respectively.

But you can't always get things to come out in the respective order. Sometimes when you're talking verbally and unscriptedly, things come out in a less organized order. Sometimes when you're constructing a complex sentence, it would be less unwieldly (more wieldly? wieldlier?) to put things in a different order.

So Toronto and Quebec City are the capitals of Quebec and Ontario, unrespectively. (This sentence doesn't demonstrate the need, but I forget the context where I first realized the need.)

Alternative coinage: disrespectively

This is awesome (like 47,013 hot dogs)

Language Log discusses British attempts at American accents.

In the comments, a number of people (who I assume are British speakers of non-rhotic dialects) discuss how you know where to pronounce the rhotic R in American dialects. It takes several comments before they establish that you pronounce the R where a letter R is written. Then they briefly hypothesize on WHY American dialects would do such a thing.

That completely blew my mind! I'm familiar with the concept of non-rhotic R and I've been exposed to a reasonable variety of British accents, but I never consciously realized that their pronunciation of R does not directly correlate with the presence of a written R! In my dialect, R is one of the few reliable letters that is always and consistently pronounced as written. (Unless, of course, you can think of some exceptions that I'm blind to, although R is one of the phonemes I had speech therapy for so I am more aware of it than I am of the average phoneme.)

The mother who drew a swastika on her child

There was a story a couple weeks ago about a woman who drew a swastika on her 7ish-year-old child's arm and then sent the child off to school that way.

I just wanted to point out one little thing about this story. I don't know if it's meaningful given the larger context, but it is a weird thing: she drew on her child! That's WEIRD! Parents don't usually draw on their children. It doesn't make much difference here because of the net weirdness of the story already, but in any other context people would be going "You DREW on your CHILD? WTF?"

The internet is a thing of beauty

Wikipedia has an article on inherently funny words. This article falls within the scope of WikiProject Philosophy. And contains a warning thingy that this page may contain original research or unverified claims.

I am SO GLAD that I was born at a time where I get to enjoy the internet!

The problem with the mosquito tone

So this place in BC is playing this really high-pitched noise to keep Kids Today from loitering around. Apparently only people under 25 are supposed to be able to hear this noise because you lose the top part of your hearing range as you age.

There's a sample of the noise here. Can you hear it? How old are you?

Now even if this is a reasonable and justifiable means to keep Kids Today from loitering around, there's still a couple of major problems:

1. I'm 27, I can hear it, and it HURTS! It isn't just unpleasant, it's painful, like fingernails a blackboard. My whole body tenses up, my blood pressure skyrockets, and I get a tinge of nausea. You could torture me with this noise. The oldest person I've tested it on who could hear it was 31 at the time, and it hurt for him too. So if we can hear it and it HURTS us, how many other people outside the target demographic would be adversely affected as well? Not just being able to hear it, but it being painful. I listened to it for just a couple of seconds about 10 minutes ago (to make sure I can still hear it because I last tested it a year ago), and I still haven't gone back to neutral - I'm still a bit tense and feeling the remnants of that tinge of nausea. I'm not sure whether it's equally painful for younger people - I'd imagine if it hurts kids like it hurts me some parents would have complained by now - but what if it's more unpleasant for adults than for the kids who are the target? I've got half a dozen respectable adults with important jobs and disposable income and yuppie tendencies and all kinds of traits that you want in your downtown area, all of whom are going "OMG it HURTS!"

2. How do you know the only people who will hear it are loiterers? What if there are homes in the area? Apartments above the bars? People who are at work and trying to do their job? Parents who can't hear it with kids who can hear it in tow? What if animals can hear it? Does it hurt them? (I haven't been able to get anyone to test it on pets, probably because I keep introducing the subject with "OMG this hurts me! Does it hurt you? Now test it on your pet!") I don't think keeping loiterers away is worth subjecting area residents and nightclub employees who are trying to close up and the people working the Tim Horton's next door and local taxi drivers and other people who are in the area for perfectly legitimate reasons to all the hurtiness.

If you want to get people out of cars, target well-dressed women

The key to getting people out of cars and into transit or on foot or onto bicycle lies in making the alternate modes of transportation easy and comfortable and workable for a person wearing a skirt and heels and carrying nothing but a handbag.

On a busy, mixed-use urban street, where all the storefronts open up right onto the sidewalk and most people walk from place to place within the neighbourhood, you wouldn't look twice at a woman in skirt and heels walking down the street. She's unremarkable and going about everyday life with no problems whatsoever. However in one of those "power centres" where you have a bunch of big box stores each surrounded by their own giant parking lot and no sidewalks to speak of, if you saw a woman in a skirt and heels walking in between stores you'd think she's planned poorly or is doing something foolish or something, perhaps briefly wondering if she's having car trouble or needs some help.

This is the make or break for getting people out of their cars. There are dozens of different factors involved, but essentially it comes down to whether a person would do the desired activity or mode of transportation in a skirt and heels, carrying nothing but a handbag. If they will, it will get people out of their cars. If they feel the need to carry a backpack or put on their New Balance or wear a wicking shirt, it isn't going to get people out of their cars. If they look strange and out of place in a skirt and heels, it isn't going to get people out of their cars.

In Amsterdam, it's perfectly normal to see women riding bicycles in whatever it is they happen to be wearing, a purse on their shoulder and their shopping in the bicycle basket. In Toronto, you'd be laughed off the street (and fined for not wearing a helmet). The key to getting more people in Toronto to bike lies in the difference that makes Torontonians wear special clothes to bike while people in Amsterdam wear whatever they happen to be wearing.

Margaret Wente once wrote a column where she took the TTC to work for a week. One thing she mentioned was that she had to wear sensible shoes and carry a backpack to do this. I found this incredibly bizarre, because I take the TTC to work every day and have no problems with wearing heels and carrying just my purse. But the key to getting more 416ers out of their cars and onto the TTC lies in the difference that makes Margaret Wente wear sensible shoes and carry a backpack while I don't hesitate to wear heels and carry just my purse.

There was a trend a few years back where everyone should try to walk over 10,000 steps (equal to about five miles) every day as a general public health thing. There was all kinds of advice (walk to the next bus stop! park at the far end of the parking lot! go for a nice lovely 30 minute walk after dinner!) I was recently given a pedometer, so I wore it a couple of days, and found that I consistently exceeded 10,000 just from normal life. Now I'm not huge on walking as a philosophy or principle. If you asked me if I want to go for a walk, my answer would be "Of course not!" but apparently I do five miles a day without even noticing (and I don't even have a dog!). So the key to getting people to walk more for health purposes lies in the difference between me walking five miles without noticing and other people having to make a specific effort and alter their lives to get their 10,000 steps in.

Conversely, the plastic bag ban people keep lobbying for could also end up being one of these make or break factors. The fact that stores provide bags every time your shop there makes it possible for you to do your shopping as one of many stops as you go about life carrying nothing but your purse. Grab your purse, leave the office, walk into the supermarket, do your shopping, walk home carrying your shopping with your purse over your shoulder. Effortless. But if you had to bring bags with you every time you shop, either carrying them around all day when you plan to shop after work or stopping in at home to pick up the bags then going back out to the store, you'd be more likely to take the car.

There are a lot of factors at play here, not all of which planners and policy-makers can address. One is the weather. I doubt people would bike as much in Amsterdam (regardless of what they're wearing) if their winters were like ours, or if their summers were as humid as our for that matter.

Related to weather, there's also the psychological aspect of being indoors. I'm sure the reason I managed to walk five miles without noticing is because a lot of it was indoors (around the office, around the mall). If you were at the West Edmonton Mall, I'm sure you'd walk to the other side rather than leaving the mall, getting into your car, and driving to the other side (unless you have real problems walking). But (the internet tells me) the West Edmonton Mall is 48 blocks. You wouldn't walk 48 blocks outdoors in the city, you'd go "OMG, 48 blocks! Too far!" and drive or take the bus or subway. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who has walked all the way from the Eaton Centre to Union Station completely by accident from getting lost in the PATH, even though if someone said "It's only three subway stations, let's walk," I'd totally reply with "THREE WHOLE SUBWAY STATIONS! I'm not walking that far!"

There's also the critical mass issue. If you're the only person walking down the street, you feel out of place and vulnerable no matter what you're wearing. (Because a bad guy can grab and abduct a pedestrian, but that's hard to do to someone in a car.) But if the street is crowded, your walking is unexceptional. There's also the convenience issue. If the parking lots are hard to get to, people are less likely to drive. But if you have to walk across an parking lot with no provisions for pedestrians just to get to the store, you're more likely to drive. There are all kinds of factors.

But the crux of the matter is this: when planning a way to get people out of their cars, think to yourself "Will people do this while wearing a skirt and heels and carrying nothing but a purse? Will they look out of place? Will they be uncomfortable or vulnerable? Would it be impractical?" Then solve whatever problems come up, eliminate any real or psychological barriers to doing the activity in question in skirt, heels, and a handbag, and you will be successful at getting people out of their cars.

Why is the subway called the subway?

The world's first subway (i.e. underground rapid transit) was in London. But they don't call it a subway at all in London. The call it the Underground or the Tube. (Someone once told me that the word "subway" in England refers to underground walking tunnels, but I don't feel confident enough in that factoid to present it as an unqualified declarative statement.)

So how did the subway get to be called the subway in North America? They speak English in London, what made them decide to NOT use the English word coined for the first-ever one and instead coin their own word?

I've already looked in the OED and it was unhelpful.