Things They Should Invent Words For

You are very limited in life if you lack certain skills.  However, having these skills does not, in and of itself, make you employable.  Examples include literacy, numeracy, driving, and using a computer.  If you don't have these skills, you're at a significant disadvantage - both in the labour market and in life.  But having them gives you no particular advantage. no one would ever hire you simply because you can read, do basic math, drive a car, and operate a computer.

We need a word for skills like this.

New Rules: Natural Consequences Edition II

As an addendum to this post:

6. Sometimes, when you ask for advice on how to find someone to provide a service you've never dealt with before (real estate agent/therapist/plumber/financial advisor), people tell you "Ask around!" or "Ask your friends!"  Even though if you're having that conversation, you're already asking around.  Therefore, anyone who suggests "ask around" to someone who's already asking around, or who suggests "ask your friends" to someone whose friends don't have an answer is thenceforth personally responsible for finding the asker what they need.

Describing people superficially

A while back, Miss Manners printed the following letter:

DEAR MISS MANNERS,

People just don't see my roommate the way I do.

When I look at her, I see the hilarious, kind, goofy, generous, fun-loving, down-to-earth roommate that I've had the privilege of living with this year.

Other people look at her and see only one thing: cerebral palsy. Well, that and the big red power scooter she uses to get around campus.

So, when I'm trying to tell someone who my roommate is, I describe her as Katie: the petite, blonde-haired, blue-eyed freshman Psych major who lives in such-and-such dorm down the hall from so-and-so, or something to that effect. You know, the characteristics you'd use to identify just about anyone: name, major, year, appearance, etc.

In response to this, I get blank stares.

But as soon as I say the word "scooter", most anyone on campus- professors, students, staff, etc- knows exactly who I'm talking about.

She's fine with that; she's been "the scooter kid" in the eyes of the general population for as long as she's had the thing. But I feel I'm being disrespectful to her when I bring the s-word ("scooter") into play, because I'm reinforcing the idea that her disability is her most important identifying characteristic, when that's nowhere near being true. She and I have been attached at the hip-- or, handlebar, if you will-- all year, and I see her in a very different light. Yes, she has CP, but that's not in the top ten or even top fifty things that come to mind when I think of her.

When it's obvious that a person isn't going to know who I'm talking about unless I bring her disability into the conversation, should I do so, or just drop it and say something like "Never mind; I'll point her out to you if I see her," or "I'll introduce her to you sometime." and leave it at that?

This letter attracted my attention because sometimes I have the opposite problem.  I understand that it's insulting to define people by their most visually apparent marked features, but I keep running into situations where I need to identify people about whom I know nothing except their most visually apparent marked features.

I recently had a worker in a store where I was shopping notice that the item I had selected off the shelf was defective and go out of his way to find me a new one before I even noticed the problem, so I wanted to send the store an email thanking them for this worker's helpfulness.  Unfortunately, he wasn't wearing a nametag.  So I tried to describe him.  Medium height, dark hair, probably under 30...this described a number of workers in that store.  The feature that best served to distinguish him from the other workers is that he's brown.  However, I know that you're not supposed to call people brown.  People sometimes call themselves brown, but we can't call others that.  Which is fair enough under normal circumstances, but I honestly couldn't come up with another way to explain the concept (I'm not nearly savvy enough to determine his specific ethnic origin, and I know confusing one ethnicity with another can also be offensive.)  So my choices were to be kind of racist, or to give incomplete information and maybe have him not get credit for his helpfulness.*

This isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened to me.  Once I was buying some clothes, and the cashier asked if anyone had helped me, presumably for commission purposes.  Someone had helped me, but I didn't think to catch his name.  He was rather nondescript - white guy, medium height, brown hair...the most effective way I could have described him was "fabulously gay".

When I worked at my alma mater, I was trying to help one of my new co-workers put a face to the name of a departmental secretary.  Middle-aged, medium build, medium brown hair, all of which describes the vast majority of the departmental secretaries. The most effective way to describe this lady would have been "the one who walks funny".  I don't know the name of the disability that caused her to walk funny.  She didn't use an assistive device so I couldn't say "the lady with the cane". (Which the letter-writer in the Miss Manners letter above would object to, but at least isn't coming across as an attempt to define the person - it's similar to "the lady in the red shirt" or "the lady carrying the iguana".) She wasn't the only one with a disability so I couldn't describe her as "the one with a disability" (which also sounds bad now that I say it out loud). I can do a fair imitation of her walk (which isn't appropriate in the workplace, obviously) but I can't describe it in useful google keywords.

I'm not entirely sure what to do with this. On one hand, I want to propose a rule that grants leeway in situations where a superficial description is genuinely more useful and/or is all you could reasonably be expected to provide. On the other hand, that sounds perilously close to people who say racist things and then argue that it isn't fair that they're being thought of as racist.  And I don't want to be one of those people.  But I do want to be able to accurately describe the worker who helped me, even when I don't know his name.

*Update: karin points out on twitter  that I could have identified him as "South Asian" and it would have done the job.  I was initially reluctant to do so because of the possibility that he might be Middle Eastern (my dentist, for example, is from Iran and has the same colouring), but I now see that "South Asian" would still have communicated his colouring, and worst case they just have a good laugh at the ignorant white girl, rather than using slurs or referring to anyone by the ethnicity of one of their culture's historic enemies.

Things They Should Study: does sibling resemblance run in the family?

I recently saw a picture of a large family where all the children are blond, and my first thought was that it was kind of creepy but I couldn't articulate why.  After some thought, I realized it's because I'm not accustomed to seeing a whole family of blonds.  All the blonds in my own family, as well as nearly every blond kid whose siblings I knew growing up (I can only think of one exception), have at least one brunette sibling.

Siblings tend not to resemble each other especially closely in my own family.  My sister and I don't share colouring, shape, bone structure, or any distinguishing features.  Among my relatives, siblings who share colouring don't share bone structure, and siblings who share features have them in different colours. If you put us all together collectively you can see that some people might be related to others, but you'd never be able to tell who is siblings with whom.

And yet, siblings with strong resemblances do exist.  And sometimes, like with the family of eerily similar blonds, all the siblings in a given family resemble each other.

It would be interesting to see if there's some kind of genetic reason why some families have strong sibling resemblance and others don't.

Teach me about self-cleaning ovens

I only recently noticed (after living here for five years) that my oven is self-cleaning.  And just the other day I spilled a significant amount of food in it (turns out "bake uncovered" doesn't mean "bake covered"!)  So I'm considering using the self-cleaning feature.

Anything I should know?  I know that it heats the oven up really hot until the spilled food apparently just flakes right off or something.  Do I need to supervise it?  Does it get smelly?  Any does or don'ts?

Teach me how to make my taskbar behave

I'm using Windows 7, and I have a few of my most commonly-used programs "pinned" to my taskbar, just to the right of the Start button.

Previously, when I'd open one of these programs, it the pinned icon would disappear.  It would kind of turn into the active taskbar button.

However, this hasn't been happening lately.  Now, the icons continue to appear next to the start button in addition to the taskbar buttons.

Here's a screenshot of my taskbar:

I have Firefox, Sims and iTunes open, and the buttons for those programs appear to the right of the pinned icons.  Previously, the pinned icons would have turned into buttons, so the icons and the buttons would not both have been present at once.

How do I make it go back to the way it was before, or what can I google to find it out?  What's the proper name of this icons turning into buttons phenomenon?

Plot hole in my childhood

I've blogged before about my most vivid memory from the single year I did at Montessori school.  I wanted to play with these beads, but the teacher told me I couldn't because I couldn't count to ten.  This confused and frightened me.  I genuinely thought I knew how to count to 100, so I didn't understand why this teacher was telling me I didn't know how to count to 10.  How could I be so wrong about my own ability to count? 

Looking at it with adult hindsight, I see that she expected me to respond by showing her I could count to 10 by counting to 10 then and there.  However, as a 3 or 4 year old child, I wasn't able to draw that conclusion.  I thought she was telling me that my counting wasn't good enough.  Which baffled me - I got to 10 every time, I used the same numbers every time, I could carry on past 10 all the way to a hundred, the numbers followed the same pattern all the way through, how could I be wrong?

In my previous tellings of this story, I criticized the teacher for not being able to make it clear to me what she expected.  If you're an adult in a conversation with a 3 year old, it's primarily incumbent on you to communicate in a way that the kid can understand.  Especially if you're an early childhood educator!

However, there's another, even more egregious problem here: why didn't she take this opportunity to teach me how to count to 10?

You're an adult and a teacher.  You're faced with a small child who needs to be able to count to 10 to play with the toy she really really wants to play with.  You believe this child does not know how to count to 10.  So why not take 30 seconds of your life and teach the child how to count to 10?

What kind of teacher says "Oh, you don't know that" in a blamey tone of voice and walks away rather than teaching???

How to conduct a garbage audit for plastic bags

From time to time, news coverage of discussions of plastic bags contains the results of various garbage audits, where they look at a sample of garbage and see how many plastic bags are in it.   These numbers are often used to support the author's thesis about which measures do and don't help, but I find that the garbage audits I see cited tend to be less thorough - and therefore less useful - than they  need to be.

Here are the questions a plastic bag garbage audit needs to answer in order to be truly informative:

- How many shopping bags are being used as garbage bags?  These would likely be replaced with garbage bags if shopping bags were banned, and therefore would not be eliminated from the total landfill plastic.

- How many garbage bags are there in total (including shopping bags being used as garbage bags)?  If the audit counts shopping bags being used as garbage bags, it also needs to count garbage bags being used as garbage bags.  If there's a reduction in the number of shopping bags but a corresponding increase in the number of garbage bags, banning shopping bags didn't change anything.

- How full are the garbage bags?  I empty my kitchen garbage every day, for a minimum of 365 garbage bags a year.  They aren't always full, I just don't leave food waste overnight for sanitary reasons.  If a significant percentage of garbage bags aren't full, the smaller shopping bags would actually be a better choice because there would be less plastic.

- What is the total quantity of plastic?  Remember how plastic grocery bags got bigger when they introduced the five cent fee?  Suppose I was using 400 bags a year for my garbage before they got bigger (because I occasionally have more than one bag of garbage).  Then suppose the new, bigger bags are always big enough for my garbage needs, so I'm using 365 a year.  If the new ones are 20% bigger, that's actually the equivalent of 438 of the old bags, so I'm throwing out more plastic.  If, in the future, I'm forced to use the even-larger kitchen catchers, that's even more plastic being thrown out.

- How many plastic bags are in the recycling stream? Sometime after we started talking about plastic bags, I became aware that plastic bags are recyclable.  I don't know offhand if they first became recyclable then or if they were already recyclable and I just found out then, but the fact of the matter is that awareness of their recyclability has increased in recent years. If there are, say, 100 fewer bags in the landfill but 100 more bags in recycling, nothing has changed in terms of what we throw out.  Obviously it's better for things to be recycled than to go in the landfill, but you can't claim a reduction in usage if the same things are just being recycled now.

- What is the condition of plastic bags that are in the landfill or recycling but not being used as garbage bags?  I have heard some people complain that they hate plastic bags because they rip.  This is not my experience.  However, regardless, it would be informative to see how many of the plastic bags not being used as garbage bags have ripped. If, for example, 87% of the thrown-out bags have ripped, that suggests we have a high reuse rate and people aren't throwing them out as trash unless they can't be reused normally.  It might be worth investigating whether it would be more efficient to manufacture higher-quality bags.  (Obviously they take up  more resources to manufacture and have more plastic in them so there's a tipping point in here somewhere, but it should be looked into if it turns out to be applicable.)

Holding babies

If you have a baby,  it is, quite literally, the most valuable and precious thing in the world to you.  Babies are also very breakable.  Especially when they're newborns, clumsiness could kill them.

This is why, if you think about it, it's surprising that parents let people hold their babies.

Not all parents let people hold their babies, of course, and not all babies tolerate being held by randoms.  But if a friend or relative or immediate co-worker has a baby, it's certainly not unreasonable to think that they might let you hold the baby.


It almost seems to be part of the normal introduction process.  If the parent expects you to be a long-term presence in the baby's life, they'll hand you the baby to hold so you can get to know each other.  But I've also had people let me hold babies because I thought the baby was cute.  I've had people let me hold babies because the baby keeps staring at me. I've had people hand me their baby because they know I'm childfree and want to see what happens when you make the CFer hold a baby (answer: baby holds onto my hair like a little monkey and/or starts crying, I babble like an idiot and/or stick out my tongue). There even a picture of me, not yet three years old, holding my newborn sister for the sole reason that my parents thought it would make a cute picture.

All of this works fantastically as a social lubricant, but, if you think about it, it's really rather high stakes.  Is there any other social lubricant where you surrender your immediate ability to protect what is most valuable and precious to you?

Post your Sitemeter alternatives here

My Sitemeter hasn't been working for weeks, my email to them hasn't been answered, and I can't find any status information.  So I've decided it's time for an alternative.

I'm looking for not just a hit counter, but something that gives me link and search engine referrals.  Anyone have any recommendations?

Is it legal to steal back something that was stolen from you?

Recently in the news: a guy finds his stolen bike and steals it back.

I wonder if that's legal?


He accosted the guy who was riding the bike and demanded that he hand over the bike.  I think, technically, that's mugging. If the guy riding the bike wasn't actually the thief and had just bought the bike on craigslist or something (he said his friend gave him the bike), he might have no idea it was stolen. And suddenly some guy drives up in a car and insists that he hand over his bike?

In this particular case, they were certain that it was the right bike because the serial number matched the police report.  But if he hadn't been certain, if he hadn't been able to check the serial number immediately, this could have been a mugging.

In the article, the police say he shouldn't have approached Bike Guy and should have called the police instead, citing personal safety.  But what's the actual legal status here?  Is it legal to steal back something that was stolen from you?  Is it legal to coerce, intimidate, or threaten someone into returning something that was stolen from you?  What if you break into someone's home to steal back what is rightfully yours?  And what if the guy on the bike wasn't the thief?  What if he had actually bought the bike on craigslist or something?  Is it illegal to have stolen property in your possession even if you didn't steal it yourself?

The Ahh Bra is good for sleep, but not recommended for everyday

At the more sensitive parts of my cycle, I like to wear a bra to sleep.  I'd always used old sports bras for this purpose, but they've gotten stretched out enough that they're useless even as sleep bras.  So I was once again in the market for something wireless and not too confining, but also not too expensive.  I saw the Ahh Bra advertised on TV and thought it was basically the right idea, and I was able to find one on eBay for under $5, so I decided to give it a try.

It is extremely comfortable and holds everything reasonably in place without being too confining, so it's ideal for sleep.  It fulfilled the need for which I purchased it and I certainly feel I got my money's worth given the very low price I paid for it.

However, I do not recommend it for everyday wear.  I didn't feel sufficiently supported in it for daytime wear (my first instinct was to fold my arms under my breasts), even though my breasts didn't end up moving as much as I felt like they were going to.  It also does nothing for my figure.  I don't know if it compresses the breasts or if it's just the shape they land in, but my bustline certainly looks smaller than it does in a regular bra or even without a bra.  I also found that the material of the cups is too thin to disguise the nipples in a white shirt, which is the whole reason why I started wearing bras back when I was 11 in the first place.

I should add, as context, that I like wearing a bra.  Based on the advertising, the target audience of the Ahh Bra seems to be people who find it irritating to wear a bra.  It might still be a useful product for the target audience because it is, quite literally, better than nothing.  It provides some support, and it has none of the characteristics that, the commercials claim, make bras annoying.  It would be comfortable enough for my 11-year-old self, who absolutely hated having a band around her ribs, although it doesn't obscure the nipples enough to meet her needs.

If you want lift, shape, support, or modesty for everyday wear, this is not for you.  If you want a sleep bra without regard for appearance, or otherwise want to limit your breasts' range of motion without wire or tight elastics, this may be for you.

New Rules: natural consequences edition

1. People who talk about marriage as though it's something a person can do unilaterally should be forced to marry the last person they dumped. If they haven't dumped anyone, they should be forced to marry the last person they rejected, even if it's that homeless guy who shouts crude suggestions at everybody.

2. Everyone who says "can't you take a joke?" is deducted one good laugh from their life for every time they utter that phrase.

3. People who disparage others' preferences with "it's only a phase" are banned from indulging their own equivalent preferences until the alleged phase is over. For example, someone who says that your being childfree is only a phase is banned from having children until you do (or, if they already have children, they're banned from having grandchildren). Someone who says that my being vegetarian is only a phase is banned from eating meat until I do. Someone who disparages their kid's taste in music is prohibited from listening to their own favourite music until their kid's taste changes.

4.  People who state as a given that something exists without providing a suitable concrete example are banned from using their equivalent of the something until their interlocutor gets the promised something.  For example, someone who says "There must be plenty of jobs for someone with your skill set" (or even someone who says "Just get a job" as though you can just get a job) is banned from enjoying the financial and social benefits of having job until their interlocutor finds a job.  Someone who says of their friend's relationship "You can do better" is banned from having any sort of sexual or romantic relationship until someone enters their friend's life who is better (by the friend's definition) and is interested in a relationship with the friend.  The people who criticized It Gets Betters that advised moving to the city are required to live with all the hell of adolescence until the it gets better for the rural kid who's reading It Gets Better.

5. Adults who refer to kids as "little" when the kid doesn't want to be referred to that way are to be treated with exactly as much respect as they have for the child in question for the next 24 hours. (This was inspired by a relative who referred to her children's friends as "their little friends" even when the friends in question were all in their teens.)

Things They Should Invent: teach emergency response in school

Every once in a while there's a newspaper article saying that not enough people know CPR.

So why don't they teach it in school as part of required health classes?

I learned mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in swimming lessons.  I learned some first aid, some fire safety stuff including the theoretical part of how to use a fire extinguisher and some stuff about calling 911 in a baby-sitting course I took when I was 12 (and you had to be at least 12 to take this course).   I learned RICE and such for sports injuries in one of my middle school health classes. I took first aid and CPR training when I was 17 (and you had to be at least 17 to take this course).

But why not teach all this stuff in Grade 7 or 8 health class, at a point in the school career where everyone is still required to take the class?  I don't know why you have to be 17 for formal first aid courses (or had to 14 years ago) - it seems well within the reach of a young teen.  So teach everyone first aid and CPR, how to use a fire extinguisher and what you should and shouldn't to do put out a fire if you don't have a fire extinguisher, things you  need to know about calling 911 (What information do they need in what order?  If I'm out of town and call 911 from my Toronto cellphone, do I get connected to the local 911 or to Toronto 911?  If you don't speak English, what exactly should you say or do to get them to connect you to an interpreter?), what to do if you're in a car accident (even as a passenger), what to do if someone ingests poison - basically all the helpful information people need to know to handle emergency situations.

If everyone learned all this early on, we'd have a whole society that knows how to respond in an emergency.  Surely this is more useful than all the naming of parts that we had to do in middle school health class.

Plot hole in the 6th season of How I Met Your Mother

I've just finished catching up with Season 6 of How I Met Your Mother, and there's a major plot hole in the whole season.

In Season 6, Episode 5, Architect of Destruction, Ted develops a crush on Zoey, who is protesting the new building he's designing because it will require tearing down the Arcadian.  So Ted comes up with a design that incorporates the Arcadian's facade.  Then, when he learns Zoey is married, he throws out the design that incorporates the facade.

However, Zoey continues to cause trouble for Ted's client throughout the season, getting them bad press and putting the completion of the building at risk.

So why doesn't Ted ever offer his client the design that incorporates the facade?

Things They Should Invent: WhichFontIsThis.com

I've been making very good use of Google's reverse image search function lately.  It comes in handy not only when people post unsourced  funny photos whose backstory I'm curious about, it's also useful for my work.  If a text to be translated includes an uneditable diagram of some commonly used model or schema (like Maslow's pyramid or that circly thing from Six Sigma), I can sometimes run it through reverse image search and find an English equivalent that I can then paste into the document I'm translating. Plus, every once in a while, (this function is still rudimentary) I can run a picture through it to find out what the thing in the picture is called, which comes in handy for things like mechanical parts where you can translate them without fully understanding as long as you have the correct terminology.

I'd like someone to invent the same thing for fonts.

Sometimes I receive texts that are faxed or scanned.  I'm supposed to duplicate the formatting of the original down to the font, but I can't always recognize which font is being used.  When I'm translating a powerpoint with an uneditable diagram that contains texts, I sometimes put textboxes over the text in the diagram and type my own translations in there.  However, if I can't tell which font is being used in the original, I can't duplicate the exact look.

I'd like to be able to input an image of some text, and have the computer tell me which font it's written in.  OCR technology can already recognize all different fonts.  Maybe they could reverse that somehow to tell me which font it's recognizing?

Clothing and harassment

Krista Ford's unfortunate tweet got me thinking about the clothes I wear and creeps' reactions to them. I've never been raped, but, like everyone, I receive a fair amount of street harassment. After thinking about it some, I noticed a clear pattern in which clothes correlate with more harassment, but it isn't what you'd expect.

The one outfit that has correlated with the most harassment is a white sleeveless t-shirt, a long flowered hippy skirt, and off-brand birkenstocks. It has no redeeming qualities except that it's completely comfortable on a hot day. Only my arms, face, and toes are showing, the shoes make my feet look manly and my ankles look fat, the shirt is a size bigger than I'd normally wear so it does nothing for my figure, and the colour makes me look like the undead.

Number 2 on the list is my now-defunct green sundress. It's one of those hippy-style dresses from the 90s that you'd crumple up and tie in a knot after you wash it to make it all crinkly. The colour was flattering, it was incredibly comfortable on a hot summer's day, but the shape was, quite literally, like a burqa with the arms and head exposed, falling all the way to the ankles and doing nothing for my figure. It started getting holes around the seams so I had to stop wearing it, unfortunately. I do miss it, but I did get yelled at by men in cars an awful lot when wearing it.

Number 3 on the list is my black trenchcoat, which is also notable for its shapelessness. It's a giant shroud of black that falls to mid-calf and reveals no hint of my curves. I wear it when my bright fucking red raincoat (which is so bright fucking red that the profanity is in fact necessary) is inappropriate. Its only redeeming qualities are that it's a raincoat and it isn't bright fucking red.

Number 4 is a black pinstripe jacket that was originally my mother's before it got handed down to my job-seeking, office-clothes-lacking university student self. I received it 10 years ago, it was in my mother's closet for years before that, and she was middle-aged when she bought it, most likely at an age-appropriate store. It is not unflattering, but its style betrays its era and target audience. I wear it because there's a narrow window in the fall when, despite my best efforts, no other article of clothing I've acquired in my life does the job nearly as well.

All these clothes reveal less of my figure than my usual clothes. All of them are older (both in objective age and in age of the target wearer) than my usual clothes. I'm usually wearing low necklines and high heels and fitted tops. On non-work days when it's hot out, I wear camis with spaghetti straps. Most of the summer I'm wearing skirts that fall to the knee and show my legs to their best advantage. The vast majority of the time, including right this minute as I sit here typing a blog post with a cliché gunky green mask on my face, I'm dressed significantly sexier than any of the outfits described above. I wouldn't look at myself twice in these clothes, but the creeps always do.

So it seems the creeps do have some kind of clothing preferences going on there, but it isn't dressing like a whore, and it isn't even dressing sexy. It seems to be shapeless and frumpyish clothes that looked like my mother picked them out (and, in some cases, that my mother actually did pick out.)  I can't imagine what they might be thinking, but it doesn't seem to be anything that outsiders can predict.

Have you noticed any patterns in your own life of which clothes correlate with more street harassment?  Are these patterns at all predictable?

Solving ethical dilemmas with helpful kitchen tips

I recently had a party and afterward had quite a few large bottles of leftover wine (they were opened and wouldn’t keep). There is a particular corner in my neighborhood where benign “drunkards” hang out and drink. They have done so for years, and everyone accepts this as part of our neighborhood. My question is, Should I drop this mother lode of wine off on their perch for them (because who am I to judge their choices?), or pour it down the drain (which would be a “waste”)?

Solution: pour the wine into ice cube trays and put them in the freezer. Then you can defrost it in easy and manageable portions next time you want wine. If the wine is red and the idea of drinking red wine that has been cold offends your delicate sensibilities, you can use it to make sangria. (Or to cook, of course, but I'd assume that people who are savvy enough to cook with wine would already do so as a solution to leftover wine.)

On the death of a TTC worker

This is what I blogged after a TTC worker died on the job in 2007. I think it still applies today.