Things They Should Invent: divide tone-deaf into two concepts

In general usage, tone-deaf is taken to mean you can't sing because you miss the notes. However, its literal meaning is that you can't hear the difference between notes. If you google for online tests of tone-deafness, they're really ear training tests - they test whether you can differentiate aurally between different notes.

However, there are people like me who can hear music and differentiate aurally between notes just fine, but can't hit the right pitch when singing. I know I'm not hitting all the notes, I can hear that I'm not hitting all the notes, I just...can't make it happen. Similar to how if I try to sink a three-point shot on the basketball court, I'm probably going to miss. I can see the hoop, I can see that the ball isn't going through the hoop, but I can't necessarily make it go through the hoop.

For lack of better ideas I suggest tone-mute for this concept, but I'm wide open to better ideas.

Blast from the past

This song didn't feel nearly so bubblegum when it first came out.

I want these!

Joan Jett, Debbie Harry and Cyndi Lauper in Barbie form.

Those would have been such an awesome addition to my all-blonde Barbie collection.

Currently wondering about anti-vaccine sentiment

Why do people think their immune system is strong enough to fight off a whole disease, but don't think their immune system is up to properly assimilating a vaccine?

Everyone look at the xkcd website today

Even if you normally read it through a feed reader, make sure to click through to the main page today.

It's beautiful!

Thoughts from Big Sort

A while back, I was chatting with my hairdresser and found out that most of her clients are childfree. I thought on this a while, and it led to my noticing that in a great many areas in life, I choose things that are most suitable for me, and find myself surrounded by people who are like-minded in other ways on top of the factor that led me to that choice.

So I was googling around this idea for a while, and found this book: The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop. The book is very US-centric, but parts of it still seem applicable to my reality, and it led to a number of interesting trains of thought, which I'm going to blog about here.

(Note: The book deals with generalized demographic trends, so this post necessarily does to. I started out putting all the necessary mitigative language in everywhere and it quickly became ridiculous, so everything here is to be interpreted as a generalized trend, not an absolute truth, even if it is phrased absolutely.)

How do educated people perceive education?

One of the things touched on in the book is that people who don't have higher education tend to be...suspicious is the best word I can come up with, but that isn't quite precise (I'm foolishly writing this without the book in hand)...of people who do have higher education. They see us as up in some ivory tower completely removed from their reality, with perhaps an undertone of that we think less of them. That's just completely unlike my corner of reality. Round these parts, education is just something you have or have not done depending on your circumstances and inclination. It's morally equivalent to having read a particular book or not. If you've read the book, then you've...read the book. If you haven't read the book, you can always read it later, or watch the movie, or google it, or continue to go about your life without it. No big deal.

But then in some of the recent strikes (TTC, City of Toronto workers), some people were getting really pissed off that these workers were earning a decent living in jobs that didn't require higher education, and even calling for these jobs not to pay a decent living on the tacit basis that they didn't require higher education. That's so totally WTF I can't even begin to speculate.

But this raises a lot of questions. How many people with higher education think it's no big deal like I do, and how many think it's like some sacred golden key like the strike haters do? Do people with less education perceive people with more education as Other because of the strike hater types, (or vice versa, although I couldn't imagine how that would work), or did the two evolve separately? Could we create a better-functioning society by getting more people to think of it as no big deal? Would affordable tuition do this?

Why do people who value self-sufficiency need small-talk from strangers?

One of the points made in the book was that people who live in more rural areas tend to value self-sufficiency and independence. This surprised me, because one thing I have noticed in real life is that people in more rural areas are tend to want to small-talk with strangers, and find it off-putting that city people tend to not initiate conversation unless there's a specific reason to. My reasoning behind not talking to people unless I have a specific reason to is out of respect. I assume they're perfectly competent people with their own lives and their own concerns, and there's no reason why they would be interested in me. And yet, the population that disagrees with this approach correlates with a population that values self-sufficiency. So what's the story?

Are people who value self-sufficiency more actually more broadly competent?

As I mentioned above, people who live in rural areas and are more conservative tend to value self-sufficiency, seeing it as practically a moral imperative. This reflects something that has long been baffling me. If I mention that I can't do something or can't do it well enough to bother, certain people I know try to convince me I can - like they try really hard, far beyond social ego stroking, and seem really invested in the idea that I really can do whatever if I just try. After reading the book, I realized the people who do this are among the most conservative people I know. So they view self-sufficiency as more of a moral imperative - if you're self-sufficient, you're a good person; if you're not self-sufficient, you're being a lazy-ass and therefore a bad person. These people generally see me as a good person, so their initial gut reaction is that because I'm a good person, of course I can do whatever it is!

But, of course, the way real life works is that different people are good at or not good at different things to different degrees. So people who value self-sufficiency are going to do things themselves whether they're good at it or not, and are more likely to interpret the results of their efforts as adequate even if they are sub-optimal because they view it as a moral imperative. Meanwhile, people who have no particular problem with the idea of not being self-sufficient are more likely to look at sub-optimal results as "Meh, I'm not very good at this" and hire someone to do it next time.

It would be really interesting to study people who do and don't value self-sufficiency as a moral imperative and see how good they are objectively at various things. The trick is you'd have to control the results for the amount of practice the people have. For example, my parents think it's excessively decadent to hire someone to paint, so they paint themselves, and they've probably painted a whole house a total of four times in their lives. Meanwhile, I'm not very good at painting neatly and the smell of paint nauseates me, so I've painted maybe a quarter of a wall in my life and very much hope never to paint anything ever again. (I would unhesitatingly choose to live with peeling paint if I couldn't afford painters rather than attempt to do it myself.) So if you wanted to study who is objectively better at painting, you'd have to control for the fact that my parents have painted so much more than I have. Maybe they could study what people consider an acceptable result for their effort or something like that

What if we're working with two different definitions of self-sufficient?

One of the major examples the book gives of these attitudes towards self-sufficiency is that the self-sufficiency as moral imperative people view public transit as a waste of taxpayers' money and everyone should just STFU and drive themselves. (No mention either way of how they feel about toll roads - I haven't seen many toll roads in exurban areas.) This made my brain explode a little, because my initial, visceral attitude towards public transit is that it provides self-sufficiency. You can just go anywhere, no need to be dependent on a car or on other people to drive you, life is easy.

This all reminded me of a conversation I once had with my father back when I was a in my early teens. They were thinking about extending a bus route into our neighbourhood, and my father thought it was a waste of money because everyone in our transitless neighbourhood had a car - that's why they chose to live in the transitless neighbourhood. I was all "Um, no, I don't have a car. Kids who are old enough to go places themselves but not old enough to drive don't have cars. Seniors living with their adult children can't necessarily drive." I could think of dozens of individuals in the neighbourhood who would be well-served by a bus route. But my father was like "You don't need a bus, your mother and I drive you places. Kids are driven places by their parents. Mrs. Old Lady down the street is driven places by her adult children." A very disheartening thing when you're at the point where you're starting to want to do things independently of your parents, like all the protagonists in your favourite young adult novels.

But in that conversation, my father and I personify the two different views of self-sufficiency that I think are on the two sides of the Big Sort. I see self-sufficiency as an individual's independence from other individuals. I don't want to be dependent on my parents to drive me around. I see my grandparents also being dependent on my parents to drive them around, and I don't want to live like that either. However, people like my father see self-sufficiency as what I will for lack of a better word call their "tribe" (family, household, relatives, neighbours) being independent from outsiders. I think they feel that they take care of their tribe, and they don't want anyone else meddling with it. And I think they also feel that they're already doing the right thing and taking care of their tribe, so they shouldn't have to take care of someone else's tribe too. So at the crux of the divide is whether you think the tribe should be independent of the government, or whether you think the government should enable people to be independent of their tribe.

How you feel about this isn't necessarily reflective of the quality of your tribe. For example, I once saw someone propose that to save money, hospitals shouldn't give their patients meals, on the logic that hospitals are in the business of medicine, not catering. Patients' families should bring them food instead. Now, if I were in the hospital, my family would totally bring me food. We don't always like each other, we don't agree on most aspects of politics, but I have no doubt they would bring me any and all food I wanted for the duration of my hospital stay. However, I can totally imagine dozens of situations in which this model of the patients' families bringing food would be unsuitable, so, despite the fact that my tribe would totally feed me, I remain vehemently opposed to the idea of leaving people dependent on their tribe for food.

I think a problem with the tribe-centric view is that it doesn't always allow for the possibility that individuals do need to operate independently of the tribe. For example, I have seen several cases where right-wing fathers (I've only ever seen it with right-wing fathers, although I'm not discounting the possibility that other people do it too) have opposed some political measure because they think it would make it harder for them to provide for their children. However, they either didn't notice or didn't care that said political measure would make it easier for their children (who were either already or almost launched) to provide for themselves.

It would be interesting to study this self-sufficiency/tribe-centricity thing to see if the attitudes correlate with a person's position in their tribe. For example, cities are full of people who have left their tribe of origin upon reaching adulthood, which means that their only role without the tribe has been one of dependence. This would lead one to conclude that the people who value the individual's independence from the tribe are those who would be dependent upon the tribe, and the people who value the tribe's independence from outsiders are those with provider roles within the tribe. However, there are still people who stay in the more rural/conservative areas by choice despite their dependence on the tribe, even though they could live as independent individuals with the greater amenities available in urban areas. So there must be some other factors going on there, but I can't see them at the moment.

So how do we unsort ourselves?

As the book points out, people don't choose where to live because of the presence of like-minded individuals. We choose where to live because it suits our various needs. It's a reasonable commute to work. The quality of the housing is as close to ideal as we can manage. The distance from or proximity to various things is as close to optimal as we can realistically manage. Similarly, I chose my hairdresser because she specializes in long hair, not because she and her clientele are childfree. I chose my job because the work is a good match with my strengths, not because I'd be working with people with a similar family immigration history.

So how can we unsort ourselves? I don't know about you, but I'm not about to move to a less suitable neighbourhood, job, or hairdresser, especially not in service of spending more time with people whose political opinions I consider somewhere between sub-optimal and repugnant.

Or should we?

One thing that has really baffled me about Toronto municipal politics is people who live in Toronto proper, but don't want the trappings of urban life. They don't want bus service on their street or a subway stop in their neighbourhood or mixed-use zoning. They want to be able to park three cars on their property. I honestly do not understand at all why they choose to live in Canada's most urban municipality when they don't want urban life, and when the lifestyle they do want is readily available (at a significantly lower cost) just over in 905. As I've blogged about before, I chose my neighbourhood of highrises specifically for its urban nature, and it's very frustrating when people who live in houses outside our highrise neighbourhood try to stop the building of new highrises. So maybe we'd all be happier if we sorted ourselves fully.

But it doesn't seem right to position ourselves so we're completely disregarding a whole chunk of society just because they prefer a different lifestyle.

What would happen if all stimulus money was spent directly on creating government jobs?

In real life, there's obviously be too much political/ideological backlash, but let's just play with this idea.

The different levels of government cooperate to create a whole bunch of jobs in the positions where they're most likely to have use for them for long term, and they hire as many unemployed people as funding will bear to fill these jobs. If they can't find candidates with suitable qualifications, they either train them or give them full ride scholarships to go back to school, with a guaranteed job at the end. The jobs are all full-time Good Jobs, not contract hell, with decent salary, benefits, pensions, unionized if that's the standard, etc. The arrangement is that they will do their very very best to keep all these people employed for their entire careers; if their current position becomes redundant, they'll find them another suitable position, and train them if necessary.

So how would this affect the economy? Primarily, the consumer confidence of the people who get these new jobs would skyrocket. They would buy a house if they're into it and can find a suitable one at a price that's commensurate with their salary. They would buy a car if they need one. They wouldn't put off going to the dentist since they now have coverage. They wouldn't scrimp on groceries or haircuts or internet service or any number of everyday expenditures. So this would in turn help the housing market and the car market, as well as businesses like optometrists and hairdressers and coffee shops. If you've got enough confident consumers patronizing these businesses, the business owners and employees will themselves become confident consumers.

The big questions which I don't know how to calculate: 1. How many jobs would be created? 2. How many confident consumers are needed to restore the economy?

Thanks in advance

From the second letter in this Miss Manners column (bolding mine):

You could assist an entire profession if you would advise undergraduates on how to compose e-mail messages to their professors.

Like my colleagues, I've received peremptory messages from undergraduates, even entering freshmen, the tone of which might have been used by an aristocrat to a particularly lax and unpleasant waiter. After the remonstrances, there's often a transparent attempt at manipulation, as in "Have a great weekend!" or "Thanks in advance for your understanding."

The thing is, I was specifically taught to use those so-called "transparent attempts at manipulation" in the various business and professional writing courses I took in university. I've been using them for years, both in my own correspondence and in translations of other people's correspondence, under the supervision of instructors and professors and trainers and managers and senior colleagues of every generation, and no one has every suggested that these formulas are ever inappropriate. I've even had people compliment me on managing to work these kinds of phrases in.

It might be the influence of French on my profession. It is perfectly normal and unremarkable in French to close with something like Avec mes remerciements anticipés, je vous prie d'agréer, Madame, l'expression de mes sentiments les meilleurs. I yoinked that sentence right out of my advanced French writing textbook (i.e. advanced French writing for non-native speakers). When I first encountered that in French, I thought "Ooh, isn't that a good idea!" and started thinking how to incorporate it into English. It's quite possible that everyone who has trained or taught me went through the same process.

So what do you think? Are "Thanks in advance" and similarly manipulative structures inappropriate? (Or inappropriate when writing to superiors etc.?)

I've posted so many analogies in my blog that it has become an analogy

There are some people who have the attitude "I can do X, so anyone should be able to do X." This often comes with connotations that the people who can do X are just being lazy, and if they'd be diligent they'd be able to do X just fine.

So here's my analogy:

I average two blog posts a day. (Yes, I've been lazy lately, but two a day is the mathematical average.) Approximately 50% of my posts (based on a random sampling of several archive pages) contain original creative or critical thinking (as opposed to being links, quizzes, youtubes, diary entries, liveblogging, or emotional angst). I've been keeping up this pace for years.

So before you go assuming that because you can do something anyone can, I'll ask you this:

Where's your blog?

Now I know that there are several people reading this who can blog at a steady rate. But I think we've all seen enough dead blogs to get the point.

"The older you get, the smarter your parents get": two possible perspectives

I've been very frustrated with my elders lately, because they aren't being smarter than me in the ways I need them to be. I'm not talking professional knowledge or knowledge specific to certain hobbies and interests, I'm talking life knowledge and skills that you absorb or figure out just by living life. How to remove a stain. How to invest your money. How to answer the "Tell me about a time when you had a conflict in your workplace" job interview question when you haven't actually had a conflict in your workplace. I keep finding my elders know no more than I do in these areas, and sometimes are two steps behind me. It's very frustrating, and also utterly baffling. I came into the world in 1980 knowing literally nothing. Since then, I've had to learn how to walk and talk and eat and read and socialize and balance my bank account. And during this time, I also developed a certain amount of expertise in stain removal and investing and job interviewing. But my elders, who had already figured out how to do all the walking/talking/bank account stuff long before 1980 and have been removing stains/investing/job interviewing since well before 1980, don't seem to know anything more than I do.

So my first theory is that they have some huge amount of extra knowledge in areas that I can't even see, can't even begin to imagine. So I was wishing that there was some way to tell how much of a person's knowledge you aren't seeing. In the Sims, if a person has five personality traits but you only know three of them, you can see that there are two other traits you don't know. I was thinking it would be so helpful if we could see something similar for people we're talking to in real life. I don't know if it's the same for everyone, but when I talk to someone I tend to get the impression that what I'm getting from them is representative of the whole person. It would be far easier to respect an elder who tells me "wash your clothes inside out" as though that were panacea, as though I haven't already been doing that for a decade, if I knew that I was only seeing 10% of what they have to offer, rather than thinking they had lived for decades and decades and the best they have to offer is that I should wash my clothes inside out.

In a fit of frustration, I tweeted that I've learned more from my elders about what not to do than about what to do. But that ultimately led to my second theory: our elders don't actually have decades of experience on us, because in living alongside them and observing them we're constantly absorbing the lessons they've learned from their decades of experience. I'm not even talking about stuff our elders try to deliberately teach us, I'm talking about lessons that they learn when we're kids - we learn right along with them.

For example, both of my grandmothers are still living in their own homes, but they need their kids to drive them places and help with stuff around the house. I look at that and think that's not what I want my golden years to be like (especially since I won't have kids), so I've already altered my life accordingly by choosing to live in a highrise in a high-density, walkable neighbourhood. My parents were constantly painting and fixing up their house, and I hated it. The smell, the mess, the instability...so because of that, I'm never going to buy a fixer-upper or go charging starry-eyed into a DIY redecorating project only to end up weeping on the floor of a half-ruined room. My parents also took us on a lot of trips, and I hated it. Close quarters, carsickness, lack of control over food and accommodations, and I simply don't get any pleasure out of sightseeing or being on a beach or whatever. So because of this, I'm never going to waste thousands of dollars and a year's worth of vacation time and ruin a relationship on some idealized "OMG, travelling = sexy!"

But I think part of the problem is that our elders think that we're in the same place they were when they were our age. I'm pretty sure at least one of my grandmothers thinks I don't realize that, in being childfree, I won't have any kids to take care of me when I'm old. I'm pretty sure she and her husband bought their house when they were in their 20s without giving any thought to what life will be like at 80 so she assumes I'm doing the same, whereas in real life I learned about the long-term unsuitability of car-dependent housing at the same time that she did.

Analogy: Our elders are like pure mathematical theorists coming up with new proofs and equations. We're the math students decades later casually using those proofs and equations in our applied math textbooks. I certainly could never come up with a way to calculate or prove derivatives, and I promptly forgot the long-form equation as soon as we started learning the product rule and the quotient rule. But I can still use derivatives in physics for velocity and acceleration, etc. Unfortunately, a lot of my physics work is being discounted because the senior academics think my theories on velocity and acceleration are worthless because when they were my age they didn't have a way to calculate derivatives.

Mashup bunny: Shut Up And Drive My Car

vs.



You'd need to tweak the tempos a bit, but that's doable for people who know how to do that sort of thing.

More later

I have multiple posts festering in my brain and in my drafts folder, but I'm too cranky today. I spent the whole day feeling disproportionately pissed off at non-immediate assholes and my make-up feels heavy.

So here's a kitten who thinks her food is yummy:

When, why, and how did classroom learning start being unsuitable for boys?

I've heard it mentioned as a given quite a few times in quite a number of places (examples off the top of my head: this and this) that boys are ill-served by the traditional classroom model of school. Apparently they find it way harder than girls to sit down, sit still, listen, pay attention, read, write, buckle down and do their work, etc.

But there's a great big neon blinking question mark here that I haven't seen addressed or even mentioned anywhere: the traditional classroom model, complete with sitting, listening, paying attention, and diligently doing work, dates back to when school was for boys only. Off the top of my head and limiting myself only to Anglo-Saxon culture (because that's the only one I have pertinent information from off the top of my head), I know that the traditional classroom model was around in the UK in the middle ages, because the Catholic church used it (at Oxford and elsewhere) to train boys up to be priests.

So when did this model, which was originally conceived for a male-only context, become unsuitable for boys? Why and how did this happen? If someone could figure this out, maybe we could address it or undo it.

Open Letter to panhandlers

Dear Toronto panhandlers:

A number of your have recently been approaching me as though you're about to ask for directions, only to ask me for money. You're going to have to stop doing this, because it's going to ruin our city.

I totally get that innovation is required in tough economic times, but you're going to have to find something else. If you keep approaching people like you're asking for directions, we're going get desensitized and start ignoring genuine direction-askers on the assumption that they're just panhandling. (I, personally, have gotten about twice as many panhandlers as genuine direction-askers in the past month.)

We don't want to be the kind of city where people don't stop to give visitors directions, but we do have a limited tolerance both for being asked for money and for being tricked. Please, for the good of the city, leave the asking-for-directions body language and related conceits to people who are genuinely asking for directions.

Severance pay poll

From this article:

A study by Barry Fisher, a prominent employment law mediator, found that courts have awarded an average of 2.6 months' notice per year of service to employees who have been with a company for just two years. This means that on average, an employee with two years' service receives over five months of notice on termination.

Then later:

A written contract could limit the entitlement for a two-year employee to as little as two weeks, for example.

(Bolding mine.)

This is completely inconsistent with my corner of reality. I would feel very fortunate indeed to get over two weeks, and five months (for any tenure of employment) is unheard of. I have seen a number of collective agreements for different professions and different employers, and they tend to hover around one week per year of employment.

So my question for anyone reading this: are these number for severance pay (five months being typical, two weeks being characterized as "as little as") typical/normal in your corner of reality?

Anonymous comments are welcome, you don't have to identify yourself or your profession, but please indicate if you are outside of Canada. (You don't even have to say where, just that you're outside of Canada.)

Public Health message we need: stay home sick even if your illness isn't H1N1

Some members of the general public seem to be getting the idea that the public health message that you should stay home sick because of H1N1/swine flu means you should stay home if and only if you have H1N1.

I'm not a health professional or anything, but shouldn't people be staying home sick no matter what they have? If you're sick, your resistance is down so your body won't be as able to fight off any flu that might come its way. If you go to work with a common cold and spread your cold around the office, you'll have a whole office full of people who are less able to fight off any flu that might come their way. But if you stay home for a day and sleep your cold off, you aren't just avoiding weakening other people's immune systems, you're making your own immune system strong again.

If this line of thinking is valid, I think the public health people need to emphasize that you should stay home sick even if you don't have swine flu!

Debt ratios

Thomas Walkom on Canada's deficit.

I'm not quite knowledgeable enough to comment on this or any other theory of paying off national debt. (I do have opinions, but they're generally based solely on my experience managing my personal finances.) However I think it's interesting to compare these debt ratios to what they would be if they were an individual's personal debt. Again, I don't know enough about managing a nation's finances to know if this is a valid comparison, but it's interesting so I'm blogging it.

This year's federal deficit is expected to represent just 3.7 per cent of Canada's gross domestic product

So let's assume you're an individual who earns $50,000. (Q: Why $50,000? A: It makes the math easy and is close to Canada's household average.) So suppose in a given year (after several years in the black) and in response to a legitimate and temporary problem, you spend more than you earn to the tune or 3.7% of your salary. 3.7% of $50,000 is $1,850. (Aside: the great advantage of blogging over translating is I don't have to circumlocute starting a sentence with a numeral.) So one year you spend $1,850 more than you earn. Not a huge problem. You do need to pay it off, you probably want it in a credit instrument with a better interest rate than a credit card, but you'll be fine. If you have a Good Job, you'll make it up in raises in the next year or two.

Nor is Canada's total national debt (the sum of past government deficits) dangerously out of whack. At just under 30 per cent[...]

So you make $50,000, and your debt is 30% of that. 30% of $50,000 is $15,000. Again, not a huge deal. You do need to pay it off, you do need a payment plan, but basically all you have to do is stick with your payment plan. If it's good debt, it's barely even a problem - if it's your mortgage, you're golden! If I had a mortgage that was only $15,000, I'd be dancing!

I don't know if there are different issues when we're talking about national debt, but it's an interesting way to put impossibly large numbers in perspective.

Wanted: cap-sleeved or short-sleeved v-neck fitted t-shirts

I'm looking for cap-sleeved or short-sleeved fitted v-neck t-shirts. Solid colours (black, red, etc.), longish in keeping with current fashion, not loose and flowy, for the specific purpose of being worn under sweaters like how you'd normally wear a cami.

(Q: Why not just wear a cami? A: They don't cover my armpits and I don't much want to have to hardcore wash knit sweaters after every wear.)

Anyone know offhand of anywhere that currently has something like this in store? (Not places that "should" have them, not "Oh, you can get that anywhere", somewhere where you've seen them with your own eyes so I don't have to run around and shop.)

Analogy

There's a school of thought that if you're renting, you're completely throwing your money away. I don't feel that way. I think I'm getting my apartment in exchange for my rent. Yes, I have to keep paying for it, but I also have to keep paying for food and utilities and toilet paper. But some people from this school of thought have told me that it's a waste to rent since I do want to own a condo someday, and I should buy something - anything - so my money is going into building my own capital. I prefer to live in the most optimal conditions possible even if I have to rent for longer before I can afford to buy, but people from this school of thought think I should buy something - anything, anywhere - and I can always move or upgrade later when I can afford it.

Here's an analogy for that line of thinking:

"You're wasting money taking those birth control pills! After all, you do want to have children someday. So you don't have enough money or a big enough home or a partner who's interested in parenting any children you might pop out? No biggie, you can always get those later."