Why is Facebook crawling blogs?

Shortly after I post each blog post, I get a hit from something called Facebook Bot, which statcounter says is a bot crawling my site, presumably to index it.

Why does Facebook care about indexing my blog contents?  I know they have a web search function, but that's powered by Bing, so it would show up as a Bing crawlers.  I don't have any Facebook widgets or anything, my blog isn't connected to any Facebook profiles (unless I have an imposter out there), so why would Facebook care about my existence enough to index my every update?

Trading lives to cure jealousy

There's a theory that if you're feeling jealous of someone, you should ask yourself if you'd trade lives with that person.  (For example here's Carolyn Hax recommending this thought experiment.) The idea is that when you think about whether you'd trade whole lives with them, your answer will be "Of course not!", and then your envy will be cured.

However, apart from the fact that there are cases where  the answer is going to be "Hell yeah! Of course I'd love to trade whole lives with them!  I didn't know that was an option!", this approach simply isn't logical.  Not every aspect of the person's life has a causal relationship with the aspect you're jealous of, and suggesting that they do undermines the credibility of the whole approach.

For example, suppose you're jealous of my long gorgeous hair.  So, in an attempt to assuage that jealousy, you tell yourself "Yeah, but her rent is atrocious."  That's absolutely true.  And absolutely unrelated to my hair.  My hair would be just as long and gorgeous if I lived somewhere cheaper - maybe even more so, because I could afford to spend more money on it.

It is true that there are negative characteristics of my life that have direct causal relationships with my long gorgeous hair.  I do spend more than I care to admit on it, and the same genes that produce my hair also caused me to start going grey at 19 and start getting acne at 9 (and the acne will persist for the rest of my life.)  Someone who wanted to make themselves less jealous of my hair might be able to do so by thinking about these aspects.

But the fact that my rent is atrocious, or the fact that I'm not married, or the fact that my feet are larger than standard women's shoe sizes are all completely unrelated to my hair. I could still achieve the same hair if these aspects of my life were different.


What interesting is sometimes you see this in political discussions.  Someone points out a positive aspect of a different jurisdiction or political system, and someone else says "Yeah, but they have [negative aspect] too!" even though the negative aspect is unrelated. 

For example, one person says "Quebec has $7 a day daycare! We should do that here!"  And another person replies "Yeah, but they get weirded out when people play soccer wearing a hijab.  Do you want that?"  But the two aren't related!  You can totally implement a daycare policy without touching soccer uniform codes.


How do they land on the idea that you must necessarily appropriate every aspect rather than picking and choosing what works best?

Is there a name for the opposite of the Dunning-Kruger effect?

In one of my very first translation classes, the prof asked us to think about how we'd translate a short English sentence into French.  The sentence was grammatically simple and contained three words that rhymed. (I'm not posting it here because it will become googleable and ruin my prof's whole lesson plan.)  The point of this lesson was to discuss the various factors that many need to be translated.  Are we after the meaning of the sentence?  Are we after a rhyme?  Do we need to convey its brevity and simplicity?

My classmates seemed to find this a reasonably easy request and immediately began discussing it.  But I was panicking, because I didn't even know how to say one of the three key words in French!  I felt in over my head and desperately out of my league!  It was only the first or second classes ever, and already I couldn't handle it even though every else could!

So I frantically and stealthily looked up the word I didn't know in the dictionary, and discovered that if I used the first word in the dictionary entry and the most straightforward translation of the two other key words, I could have two out of the three key words rhyme.  And if I replaced the third word with another word that would fit nicely into the sentence and create a similar image, I could have all three rhyme.

(As an analagous example, suppose looking in the dictionary led me to "Bite the red kite."  If the rhyme scheme was more important than the meaning of the actual words, I could use "Bite the white kite.")

It seemed so glaringly obvious!  This was quite clearly the correct answer!

But why weren't any of my classmates coming up with the same thing?  They were coming up with all these things that were way different and no one had even touched on the words I had in mind...this must mean there's something wrong with my idea!  So I said nothing the whole class and felt in way over my  head.

This memory came to mind in the shower the other day, 13 years after the fact, with 10 years' professional experience under my belt.  And I realized: my idea was perfectly good!  It may well even be the optimal translation! It was more effective at rendering both the meaning of the original and the rhyme scheme than what my classmates were suggesting, even after 10 years' experience I can't think of anything better, and, even if something better exists, any competent translator would agree that my idea was a perfectly valid attempt.  And I was still a teenager at the time!

I was so afraid at that time.  I was surrounded by people who had been to immersion and on exchanges and could use slang and real-life accents, and I felt so hideously incompetent in comparison.  But I knew my shit, way better than I could even have imagined.

(Which makes the conventional wisdom that teenagers and young adults think they know everything all the more frustrating.)

The lunch money mystery

Conventional wisdom is that you should pack your lunch from home to save money. I've never done this.  There are enough lunch options near my office that I've always just gone out and bought whatever I happened to be craving every particular day.

However, I've been working from home since April, so I'm not buying lunches, and I think I'm spending slightly more money.

I don't keep track of money super closely, but I know that I typically use cash for groceries, household and personal care items, and buying my lunch when I'm at work.  I always withdraw the same amount when I go to an ATM, and I find I'm going to an ATM an average of one more time a month since I started working at home, which means I'm going through cash faster.

I have a certain core set of groceries that I always keep my kitchen stocked with, and a few other core items that I keep in stock under specific conditions.  I'm still doing this the same.  I have a system to determine what my "main" meal will be most days, to be purchased either in the form of groceries or take-out, and I still follow the same system.  I'm actually impulse purchasing less now that I'm working at home, because I'm never hungry or cranky when I do my grocery shopping.

When I worked in the office, I had a standard breakfast at home before I left for work, bought whatever I wanted for lunch, had my main meal when I got home from work, and grazed from the other food I had on hand if I was still hungry.

Now I start my day with the standard breakfast (which I end up eating later in the morning), don't eat a lunch per se, eat my main meal in the early evening (earlier than when I worked in the office), and grace from the other food I have on hand if I'm still hungry. As far as I can tell, I'm eating either less food or the same amount of food depending. And yet I'm spending a bit more on food.

Apart from the fact that I like eating exactly what I'm craving that particular day, I also theorized that I wouldn't save any significant amount of money
by packing my lunch, because I spent so little on lunches.  It was very rare for my lunch bill to exceed $5 and often it was under $3, and I figured that even if I packed my lunch at home, I'd still have to pay for that food.  (Not to mention that it's not worth it under a time=money calculation.)  I guess that turned out to be right.

Poo(p)

I was googling about various digestive-related things, and, since Google generally knows what I need and I don't always act like a grownup when no one is watching, I was phrasing my queries very childishly.  For example, "How long does it take food to turn into poo?"  (Answer: an average of 2 days)

I soon noticed that Google's autocomplete was always using phrases that contained the word "poop", not "poo". For example, if you type "My poo is" into Google, you'll get a drop down full of autocompletes saying "My poop is" every colour of the rainbow.

People who have done more research than me suggest that "poop" is USian, and "poo" is more British.  A site:.ca google (which, I realize, is not the most precise research method ever) gives 298,000 hits for "poo" and 198,000 for "poop", so it seems that "poo" is more preferred in Canada.

However, even if you go to google.co.uk, the autocomplete still suggests "poop" when you type in "poo".  "Poop" also turns up in the google.fr and google.pl autocompletes. (Google.de and google.es retain "poo".)

Which one do you use?

Reconstructing Shakespeare

Dear Prudence,
My girlfriend and I are having a disagreement. I posed to her the following hypothetical situation: Would you rescue from fire and certain destruction the last surviving copy on earth of the complete works of Shakespeare or a single puppy? My girlfriend says that she would rescue the puppy because the puppy is a fellow living being. She is highly educated and claims to have great respect for Shakespeare. But I think my girlfriend’s choice is the wrong one. I would rescue the Shakespeare, not just because of the aesthetic enjoyment we get from his work but also because of all the moral insight it provides us (including possibly the insight that enables the concept of animal rights in the first place). We’ve argued a lot about this. I cannot take her answer seriously, but I find it rather disturbing nonetheless. She never rejected the hypothetical question out of hand or said that the two things aren’t even comparable. She says that preserving a living conscious thing is more valuable than preserving Shakespeare. My girlfriend loves animals, especially her poodle, and is a die-hard vegetarian. I am, on the other hand, obsessed with Shakespeare and rather neutral toward animals. What is the best way for us to diffuse this situation?

A silly letter, to be sure.  But this got me thinking: if we lost all written copies of Shakespeare, could we reconstruct it?

Of course we could.  There are enough people wandering the earth right this minute with bits of Shakespeare memorized that we could get it back within a matter of hours.  Just reassemble all the most recent casts of every play, have them perform their parts, record and transcribe it, you'll be done before last call.

So let's make this harder: we've lost all written copies of Shakespeare, all living people have lost any knowledge or memory we've ever had of Shakespeare (to the extent that we don't even remember that we've lost it), and we've also lost all academic and educational works dedicated to the study and analysis of Shakespeare.  Could we reconstruct it?

We could certainly get a lot, because Shakespeare is everywhere.  The plot of Hamlet was reiterated in the Simpsons, Archie comics namedrop "wherefore art thou" and "to [verb] or not to [verb], that is the question", and Shakespeare is specifically mentioned in many works in all different kinds of media.

I even once read a young adult novel that explicitly stated that West Side Story is a modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. So from that one book that I read in elementary school alone, the people of this mythical post-Shakespearean people will learn that there was once a play called Romeo and Juliet with a plot vaguely resembling that of West Side Story.  Surely there must be other works that specifically mention that something is from Shakespeare too.

This post-Shakespearean population would also quickly catch on to the fact that "wherefore art thou" and "to [verb] or not to [verb]" sound like they come from something, and that a guy talking to a skull and a guy with some kind of disability saying "my kingdom for a horse" are somehow existing tropes, and scholars would try to trace their origins.  I wonder how much they could reassemble?

A public apology to Eddie Izzard

Dear Eddie Izzard,

During one of your May 2010 shows at Massey Hall in Toronto, you asked the audience who or what Massey Hall was named after.  Various people shouted out various things, and, to our utter delight, you picked up on our answer of "Vincent Massey."  You asked who he was, we replied "Governor General", you asked what that was, we replied "Queen's representative", and then you segued neatly into your thoughts on the monarchy, pausing only to remark that some guy on the other side of the audience kept randomly shouting out "Tractors!"

I've only just learned we gave you completely incorrect information.  Vincent Massey was in fact Governor General of Canada, but in the 1950s.  Massey Hall was built in the 1890s, before Vincent Massey was even born. Its construction was funded by Hart Massey, Vincent Massey's grandfather, with a family fortune made by, among other things, manufacturing tractors.

I apologize unreservedly for giving you incorrect information and causing you to repeat it publicly as though it were fact.  All I can say is that it simply never occurred to us that Massey Hall might not be named after the most famous Massey, after whom so many other things are named.   Obviously I should have been more careful.  When we see you again in November, if you should choose to pose any questions to the audience, I promise to only answer if I'm certain, not if I just think I have a logical extrapolation from common knowledge.

I would also like to apologize profusely to the people who were saying "tractors".  You were completely right and we were completely wrong, and yet we stole your moment from you and made your Eddie Izzard experience less perfect. I truly do hope you'll be able to get your own moment in November.  Maybe Eddie will ask the same question again (it seems like the sort of thing that might be part of a standard show-opening arsenal), and you can give your answer and we'll all get a different choose your own adventure.

An idea for "Bad Guy Trying to be the Good Guy" in last week's Carolyn Hax chat

From last week's Carolyn Hax chat:

Several years ago, I abruptly and unilaterally ended an 18-month relationship. I stand firm with my reasons, but my (kind and lovely) ex was understandably upset. We haven't spoken since. I still feel guilty, but that's my cross to bear. Despite a happier relationship since then, I'm pretty sure that The Ex hates my guts. Here's the problem: in a few months, I expect to see The Ex at a mutual friend's event. Being in proximity will be unavoidable. I want to send The Ex an email, saying that I'm sorry how things ended and that I'd like us to be at least cordial at this event, and that I'm willing to keep my distance if they don't want to talk to me. Part of me thinks this is sensible and will allow both of us to enjoy this event without apprehension. The other part of me thinks this email will just sound condescending and melodramatic. What is the kindest way to approach this situation?

I have an idea for something LW can do to be kind to The Ex without imposing on them: don't bring a date to this event.

If The Ex is still in some way hung up on LW, seeing LW with a date will make the event more difficult for The Ex. Not bringing a date will eliminate that difficulty.

If The Ex in is an emotional place where they would get some schadenfreude out of seeing LW dateless, especially if The Ex has a date, then not bringing a date will give The Ex the gift of coming away from the event feeling that they won.

At this point, people usually point out something to the effect that other people's relationships aren't about you and it would be unhealthy for The Ex to be having any of these feelings.  But, be that as it may, they are feelings that do sometimes occur in some people.  If The Ex is having them, LW can give The Ex the best possible experience by not bringing a date.  And if The Ex isn't having any of these feelings, then LW's actions are irrelevant either way.  In any case, not bringing a date will have either a positive or neutral effect on The Ex, without imposing on them in any way.

On top of that, not bringing a date will attend to LW's emotional needs as well.  LW seems to feel the need to do some sort of penance.  Going to the event solo would do that, and it would be generally in line with a natural consequences penance too.  One of the impacts of LW's decision to abruptly and unilaterally leave The Ex is that The Ex was suddenly deprived of the benefits of having a date to wherever they'd normally go with a date. In addition to the various logistical inconveniences of going solo, it's publicly visible, and often feels like a humiliation when you're in mourning for the relationship and can't even answer the question of "What happened?"  So, by not having a date with them, LW experiences that inconvenience and public visibility, perhaps even that sense of humiliation depending on their emotional state.  Then they will come away feeling they have done penance without ever actually bothering The Ex.

In short, if LW doesn't bring a date to the event, any emotional needs that can be affected by LW's actions will be affected positively.  Anyone who has no emotional investment in LW's actions will not be affected either way.  Positive or neutral impact, no imposition or unwanted contact.

How spanking hurts

My parents spanked me when I was a child.

I haven't admitted that before because I'm painfully ashamed of it.  (So ashamed of it I can't bring myself to open comments on this post. If you circumvent this by using other posts, you will be banned.)  I've been sitting on this post for years, and could never bring myself to actually post it.

But yesterday, I saw a lady spanking her child. 

I wanted to run over and stop her.  I wanted to run over and tell her how it affected me, the unintended consequences that coloured my whole relationship with my parents and could have been disastrous if bad things had happened in other areas of my life.

But I was too chicken.

So, as penance for not stopping that lady's destructive habits, I'm going to lay bare my shame.  Here is what I learned from being spanked by my parents:

First, I learned that if someone is doing something you don't like, you should hit them.  Seemed logical.  But then I'd get in trouble if I hit someone else.  So what I learned from that is that my parents are great dirty hypocrites (although I didn't know that word yet). 

One problem with spanking specifically is that it's a smack to the bum.  Your bum is a private part - I learned that very early on.  People aren't supposed to touch your private parts, and if they do you're supposed to respond with "It's my body and I say NO!"  I learned that from a little orange book my parents read to me when I was probably under three years of age.  So the next time my parents wanted to spank me, I said "It's my body and I say NO!"  But that didn't stop the spanking.  From this, I learned that the rule about private parts being private wasn't actually true.  There was some kind of secret other rule that I didn't know and they wouldn't tell me.

For the majority of my life, I've had a sense that the actual rules of society aren't what I'm being taught they are or shown they are - there's a secret other set of rules that I'm left to guess without any guidance.  This feeling has hindered me for decades - sometimes to the extent where I'd receive clear, specific instructions from teachers or employers and automatically assume that wasn't actually what they wanted - and I'm quite sure at least part of its root is in spanking.

Because spanking violated at least two of the major rules I was taught, I concluded that my parents' rule system was inherently injust.  Therefore, I decided that whenever they issued a punishment that I considered injust, it was logical to punish them for it.  I would sabotage things in the house, return to the prohibited behaviour when I wasn't going to get caught, or otherwise stealthily do things that made life more difficult for my parents.  The possibility of punishment being a natural consequence of my actions never occurred to me - it was quite clearly an injustice that I had to counter. 

More importantly, because spanking violated at least two major rules, I concluded that my parents either enjoyed doing it, or enjoyed seeing me hurt and humiliated.  This meant I didn't tell them when someone else was hurting me or humiliating me.  The people hurting and humiliating me were my peers, but this statement would have held even if it was a teacher or other authority figure.  Because my parents had shown me that they like to engage in violent, unwanted, humiliating physical contact with my private parts, if another adult - or anyone at all, for that matter - had tried to touch my private parts in a way that was violent, unwanted, and/or humiliating, I would have assumed that my parents thought I deserved it (and perhaps would punish me even more for being someone who deserves it) so I would never have dared tell them and in fact would have taken active steps to keep it secret from them.  Fortunately, I never found myself in this situation, but, if I had, they results would have been disastrous.

In short, spanking completely eliminated my parents' trustworthiness and credibility in my eyes. It never once even occurred to me that they might want to protect me from outside threats.  It never once even occurred to me that they might have my best interests in mind.  It never once even occurred to me that there might be a good reason for any rules they set out.  It never once even occurred to me that if I was having a big problem with other adults I could go to them.  I never saw them as an ally, always as a threat or an obstacle.  All in the name of...what?  I don't even remember what the alleged infractions were that I was being spanked for in the first place!

I've told all this to a few people before, and one response I often get is "Kids don't think that way or draw such far-fetched conclusions."  So I'd like to make one thing perfectly clear: this is what my actual child-self actually thought and concluded, in real life, based on the input available. It's articulated here in more adult terms than I could express at the time to make it clearer, but it is the absolute truth of my child-self's thoughts, feelings and conclusions.  This isn't child psychology, this isn't parenting theory, this isn't social engineering, this isn't political correctness.  This is what an actual, real-life child actually learned, in real life, from being spanked.

Dear lady spanking your daughter on Roehampton Avenue, in front of the construction site, between 2:30 and 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, August 17: are these the lessons you want to teach her?

Pictures of text

I recently clicked on a trending topic hashtag related to some drama or another in teen pop music fandom (#beliebersareherefordirectioners - I didn't bother to look into what exactly happened to trigger the creation of that hashtag), and I noticed an interesting phenomenon. A huge percentage of the people using this hashtag were writing out fairly long messages in the Notes function on their iphone, then tweeting a screenshot of the message.  Here's the first example that came up when I searched for it just now.

This is fascinating.  This fandom is so entrenched in a medium that only allows for short textual messages that they use images of text to convey longer messages rather than switching to a more conducive medium.

We've seen this before, with the "we are the 99%" signs.  At the time I saw it described as a faster and easier alternative to videos, but it's still longer to produce and no less easy to read than actual text. And some people seem to use it quite often on facebook, sharing images of text - even if it's just a brief saying - rather than typing out the text as a whole, which in most cases would totally fit in a facebook status.

The beliebers obviously chose this method so they could share longer-form messages while achieving their goal of trending on twitter.  And I suspect the sharing mechanisms of facebook and tumblr are more conducive to sharing photos than straight-out text.  I also suspect some of the 99%ers were deliberately trying to add a human face to their stories, although others chose to obscure their faces.  In any case, the goal of sharability within the technical limitations of the social network seems to be great enough that it leads people to engage in the objectively ridiculous act of posting a picture of text rather than just typing out the text.

This has me wondering if someday someone is going to invent a new social media network with robust sharing functions that positions its niche as allowing you to share long-form text.

Brother DCP-7060D: a printer that works

I previously bought an inkjet printer simply because I needed a printer-scanner combo immediately and that was the cheapest one readily available that was small enough to comfortably carry home.  However, it quickly became apparent that a laser printer would be a better fit for my needs, so I decided that when the inkjet ran out of ink, I'd rehome it and replace it with a laser printer.

I looked through the Consumer Reports recommendations for all-in-one laser printers (fun fact: you can access the Consumer Reports subscriber website with your Toronto Public Library card! All you have to do is log in through here!) and a lot of them were huge.  The smallest one (and only one with a remote chance of fitting into the space where I needed it to fit) was the Brother DCP-7060D.  It turned out there was an incredibly good deal on it on NewEgg, so I bought it.

I've had it for a month, and I love it because it does its job exactly right every single time with no fussing or drama!  I plug it into the computer, the USB detects it and installs the drivers and it's ready to go without any intervention on my part. I press print, it prints. I want two-sided printing, it auto-duplexes. I accidentally press print when it isn't plugged in or turned on, it prints once it's plugged in and turned on.  I press Cancel Job, it cancels the job.

It hasn't once given me any stupid error messages or freaked out for no reason or otherwise failed to do exactly what it's supposed to do. This is the first personal printer I've owned that I can say that about!

I recommend it unreservedly if you have the budget and the space and don't need colour printing.

Options for Gmail's "new compose"

I'm completely baffled that Gmail seems to think we want to compose our messages in a little window that hovers over our inbox where you can still see the inbox in the background (even in "full screen" mode).  I've been using email for half my life and not once have I thought while composing a message "You know, it would be really convenient if I could see my inbox right about now!"

However, I have discovered a couple of options for if you find having your inbox in the background distracting:

1.  Ctrl+click on the Compose button.  This will open the compose window in a new tab, with no distracting inbox in the background.

2.  Use Basic HTML view.  You can get to Basic HTML view by clicking on the link at the bottom right of the Gmail loading page (the one with the horizontal blue bar) or by going to https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html. Basic HTML view still has a normal compose page.

Eddie Izzard Canadian tour (and how to convince Massey Hall to sell you tickets)

Eddie Izzard is touring Canada in November and tickets just went on sale with the presale code BEES.

To buy from Massey Hall, you need to go to the Massey Hall site (not Ticketmaster), create an account, and log into the account with BEES in the presale field.  Then navigate through the calendar to the date you want (November 13-16) and that's where it will give you the link to buy.

It wasn't working earlier today when the presale started, but it just worked for me.

On a personal note, this is very exciting for me because I'm completely unspoiled for this show.  For Stripped, I was convinced he wouldn't come to Canada so I sought out bootlegs, and by the time he finally came here I knew the material already - but I was still belly laughing for three hours straight!  This time I have no idea what's coming, so I'll be seeing new Eddie Izzard material for the first time in five years (!) and I'll be seeing it live and in person!

What if myopia makes your social skills worse?

Last night as I went about my evening routine, I took off my glasses to wash my face, and then didn't bother to put them back on to take my garbage to the garbage chute.  As I walked back from the garbage chute, a small group of young men whom I didn't know emerged from one of the other apartments.  I looked in their direction and realized that without my glasses, I couldn't read their facial expressions.  I wasn't sure if they were making eye contact with me or if they were giving me a smile of acknowledgement or if their head just happened to be turned in my direction.

Because of this, I felt I didn't know how to respond appropriately.  I don't like to greet strange men with more enthusiasm than they greet me, but I do like to return neighbours' greetings in kind unless there's a specific reason not to.  Without my glasses on, I couldn't see his face clearly enough to gather the necessary information.

I wonder if this is why I have poor facial expression skills in general? 

I've always been nearsighted, but we didn't catch it until I was 12 or 13.  Maybe in the formative years of my life, I simply didn't receive information from facial expressions, so maybe I don't look there for information as much as other people, and am not as accustomed to using facial expressions to communicate because I'm not as accustomed to them being informative.  I do remember in elementary school, my mother mentioned that she recognizes people primarily by their eyes, which baffled me because I recognized people primarily by their hair.  That would make sense based on my eyesight - eyes are smaller and more detailed, but hair is larger and quite often has a specific shape and a contrasting colour.  (Since I was a child at the time, my peers didn't drastically change their hair nearly as often as people do in adult life.)

When I was walking down that hall last night without my glasses on, I felt a bit frightened and intimidated because I couldn't read the strange men.  This is similar to the sense of fear and intimidation I felt about everyone when I was a kid.  In retrospect, I wonder if it's just because my eyesight didn't allow me to read people?

A royal baby watcher on why the royal baby watch was pointless

As I've blogged about before, I find the royal family interesting because they have this really bizarre job that they have to do and it's interesting to me to see how they do it.  I'm also interested in fashion, so I will totally click through for a picture of a female royal, just to see how they've costumed themselves for this bizarre job.

Despite the fact that I'm childfree, I also think babies are interesting.  They're all little and cute, with these ridiculously tiny (but fully functional!) hands and feet, and it's interesting to me to see what they can do and to speculate on what they must think about what's going on around them.  I will totally click through to see a picture of a baby.

So that makes me totally the target audience for royal baby media coverage, which I unrepentantly consumed when the time came.

However, I think it was a complete waste of time to have media staking out the hospital for weeks and weeks in anticipation of the birth, because there was no story to be had by doing so.

Don't get me wrong, I do think the royal baby is news, objectively speaking.  Under the current system, he's third in line to be our head of state.  His identity is approximately as relevant as the identity of a political party leader. (But he's much more adorable to look at!)  On top of that, there is public interest.  When you've got a large chunk of your audience wanting to know biographical information about a public figure, it is appropriate to report it.

The thing is, what is there to know about a newborn in the first day of their life?  Their name, gender, date and time of birth, weight and length, whether they're healthy, and what they look like.  That's literally all there is.  There isn't any more yet because the poor kid hasn't been around long enough yet.  Even his parents aren't yet able to answer questions like "Is he a good sleeper?" or "How's he nursing?" because they haven't had enough time to find out yet.

All they could get by camping out in front of the hospital was pictures of the baby and maybe a soundbite or two of royals charmingly expressing appropriate delight at the birth of the baby.

All of which the palace would have released anyway.

All that time and effort and sitting out in the hot sun, and it made no difference to us as the interested audience. It just took up a lot of airtime and column inches on "no baby yet", all of which could have been better spent on something else.  We still would have gotten all available information through official channels, and there was simply no other information to be had.

The folly of measuring calories in exercise

Sometimes people talk about calories in terms of how much exercise it would take to burn them off.  There has even been talk of putting the amount of exercise needed to burn the calories on menus. I think this is a red herring, because it might lead people to believe that you have to exercise enough to burn off all the calories you consume.

This isn't the case.  A lot of calories (probably even the majority of our caloric intake) are burned by our baseline metabolism and the activity of everyday life. When I had my dysphagia incident a couple of summers ago, I was being as sedentary as possible to preserve what precious few calories I was able to consume. I didn't exercise at all, I took elevators and escalators instead of stairs, I took the subway to the next stop instead of walking. Despite that, I still lost about a pound a day because of the calories burned in the course of everyday life.

I'm concerned that if you present food to ignorant people in terms of hours of exercise to do, they might think that in order to be healthy, they have to go out and jog for three hours to burn off their dinner.  Then they might feel the need to exercise the point of unsafeness, or to eat unhealthily little, or otherwise deliberately exercise off a greater percentage of their caloric intake than necessary and thereby not leave enough for everyday life.  (And, of course, non-ignorant people can calculate how much they need to work out for themselves.)

Faking it

Dear Carolyn: 

In the mid-1990s, when I was 22 and my brother was 18, our family took a Caribbean cruise. It was fun, but not so much fun that I cared to go back again.
Now that my parents are in their late 60s and retired, my mom has gotten it in her mind that all four of us should take another cruise together as a family. They have even offered to pay. 
 
Aside from not having an interest in the cruise, I am also not interested in taking a family vacation. I am single and in my late 30s, and a family vacation smacks of desperation, a way of saying, “Oh, how sad, he didn’t want to go by himself, so he went with Mommy and Daddy.” Also, traveling anywhere with my parents is never a simple process (I suppose that can be said of a lot of people, though). In short, a cruise might be a vacation for my parents, but it would be anything but one for me.

I have repeatedly explained that neither a cruise nor a family vacation (wherever the destination) interests me. Nevertheless, the badgering continues. 

For the record, I take my own vacations, usually by myself. I also see my parents about once a month, so it is not as if I ignore them and am being “guilted” into a vacation. Any thoughts?

 I was surprised to see not only Carolyn, but also a huge number of people in the comments, suggest that LW would regret not going on the cruise after their parents die, because they'd feel bad about missing an opportunity to spend time with their parents.

This surprises me because if you asked me in a vacuum "What if they die and you don't get to spend any more time with them?" my immediate visceral answer would be "Then it's even more important not to spend what time we have left together doing something that makes me resent spending the time with them."

This also makes me wonder if there are people who actually enjoy spending time with their loved ones doing something that their loved ones don't actually have interest in doing.  Because I hate it!  It makes me feel so awkward and just want to run away and go home.   When I was a kid, my parents would sometimes on their own initiative try to take me to something that I was interested in but I knew they had no interest in, and it just felt awful and cringey and dreadful, and generally not worth doing at all.  Even when I invite my friends to do something that I'm not completely sure if they're into, and they accept my invitation of their own free will,I still find myself worrying in the back of my mind that they might not actually be into it. So, in this context, I just can't fathom how someone can enjoy an activity if their loved ones don't actually want to be there and are going along just to humour them.

Actually, I wonder if there's a correlation between this group and the people who want others to go through the motions of being religious?  As someone who takes religion seriously (which is why I left the church and started living as an atheist in the first place), I've always felt it's terribly insulting to the deity to go through the motions and not mean it.  But if there are people who genuinely enjoy having their loved ones go through the motions of things they actually hate doing, maybe they'd think their deity would feel the same way?

The tale of the GO bus skeptic

The scene: I'm sitting in a GO bus, putting on my seabands in the hope of warding off motion sickness.

Guy next to me: "What are those things?"
Me: "They prevent carsickness. I put them on my wrists, and this sticky-outy plastic bit presses into an acupressure point that relieves nausea."
Guy next to me: "Those are a scam, you know!  They're totally unproven, they don't do anything at all, it's all in your head!"

Now, it is true that I can't say for certain that the seabands work.  I've never thrown up while wearing them, but I also haven't thrown up on many many occasions when I wasn't wearing them.

But this guy was about to sit next to me for a long bus ride. If it were true that the anti-nausea measures I'm taking are entirely psychosomatic, he would have an immediate personal investment in my believing in them!  Why would you try to convince the person next to you on a long bus ride that their psychosomatic anti-carsickness measures are all in their head?

Thank you Blogger!

I recently blogged about a Blogger error message that prevents you from posting or saving posts unless the post has a title.

It seems this error has gone away.  I can now once again save and post messages without a title!

Given the recent spate of Google decision that hindered my user experience and disregarded my needs, I'm very glad to see Blogger is responsive to this!

Analogy for why social media is not a replacement for RSS

One of the things I found most bizarre in all the discussion surrounding the cancellation of Google Reader is that some people (including, apparently, some who work at Google) seem to think that social media is a suitable replacement for a feed reader.  As though we're perfectly content with reading whatever our internet friends choose to share and have no need whatsoever to curate our own reading list.

Today my shower gave me an analogy:

I've just caught up on the Inspector Gamache series, and am waiting with bated breath for the next book to come out in August.

So suppose, on the release date in August, I walk into a bookstore and ask "Do you have the latest Inspector Gamache book?"

The bookstore worker answers, "Here are some books I read and enjoyed recently!"

That doesn't solve my problem, does it?  I want to know what happened with Inspector Beauvoir.  I want to know how (or whether) Peter and Clara's marriage is holding up. I want to find out who leaked the video.

The books the bookstore worker read and enjoyed recently won't address these needs.  They may well be good books, I may well enjoy them, they may well end up being new favourites that I end up following diligently.  But, even if I read and enjoy them all, I will still want to read the next Inspector Gamache.

New Rules: Natural Consequences Edition V

9. If you tell someone (or say about someone) that they should just get a job, as though it's that simple, you're required to hire them.  You must hire them to do something they're capable of doing (or that you're willing to train them to do) and pay them enough to make it worth their while.

Oh, what's that?  You don't have any work that needs doing?  Or you couldn't afford to pay them reasonable compensation for the work that does need doing?

Exactly.

People who don't have preferences

Quite often, if someone mentions that they don't like a certain food, someone else will reply with something like "Oh, you just haven't tried really good [food].  You have to get it fresh, in season, organic and locally grown, and eat it raw, not cooked.  Or if you have to cook it, just steam it lightly, make sure you don't overcook it."  They give all this advice that is ultimately aimed at getting the most flavourful [food] possible.

But when I don't like a food, it's because of the flavour.  I don't like olives because they taste like olives.  I don't like cantaloupe because it's so cantaloupey. Making it more flavourful would just make things worse. 

Are there really people who want some flavour, any flavour, no matter what it is, and would only dislike a food because it's lower in flavour?

You see something similar in nutrition advice from time to time.  They recommend that you reduce your salt use by shaking spices on your food instead of salt, or you put lemon juice on your salad instead of salad dressing.  As though you're after a flavour, any flavour, rather than a specific flavour.  (But, somehow, the flavour of actual food won't do.)

I also see this sometimes when I'm complaining about my annual apple drought.  I'm all "I can't find Cortland apples!" and people respond with "You should get some blueberries, they're in season now!"  My complaint is about the absence of a  specific variety of a specific fruit.  Why would someone think this need can be addressed with a fruit, any fruit?  And if it could, there are plenty of kinds of fruit commercially available, including other kinds of apples right where my beloved Cortlands should be. Don't you think I'd have already bought some other fruit and stopped complaining if some other fruit would solve the problem?

Actually, this also reminds me of the Google Reader shutdown.  One of the arguments in favour of the shutdown was that people allegedly don't need RSS in this age of social media.  My social media certainly does provide me with things my friends think are worth sharing (and is useful in this respect because it isn't all stuff I would have stumbled upon myself), but I still want to read the things I want to read.  Having a steady stream of things to read is insufficient; I also want to read specific  things.

Are there really people like this, who don't have specific preferences and think anything will do interchangeably? Or do people who like to give others advice on the internet just think there are?

Things They Should Invent: emergency information robocalls for power outages

My power didn't go out in the storm earlier this week, but, being a bit of a Twitter stormwatcher, I did occasionally look at Toronto Hydro's Twitter feed to watch the show.  However, as many people have noted, using the internet for primary method of communication during a power outage is problematic.  People's personal internet access is going to be out, so only those whose cellphones have internet (and haven't run out of battery yet) and those who aren't currently in the power outage area can access the information. This means that the information is going to be less available to more vulnerable people (elderly, poorer, etc.) who are also likely to be less resilient to difficulties of a power outage.

Here's a simple solution: if there's a power outage, Hydro automatically robocalls affected customers telling them the status, the size of the area affected, and the ETA for power restoration.  When the status has changed significantly (ETA has changed, or area affected is significantly smaller), they send out another robocall.

People could opt in or out of emergency robocalls, so those who do have smartphones without landlines wouldn't have to use up valuable battery life fielding phone calls that give them no new information.

Perhaps they could also have mass text messaging (for people who don't have data plans - or if data isn't working due to the outage) since that's less of a drain on the battery than a ringing phone.

In any case, methods of immediate and automatic information distribution that aren't dependent upon electricity do exist.  They should make use of these during power outages.

Things They Should Invent: car alarm that goes off if a child is left in a car seat

Recently in the news, there have been a number of cases of babies and toddlers dying after being forgotten in a car on a hot day.  This makes me think they should invent something to alert parents if they walk away from the car with the kid still in the baby seat.

Some of the media coverage (can't seem to google up the exact article) mentioned that there are some alerts that work with smartphones, but those depend on the parent having a smartphone and having the app installed and the smartphone being on and charged.  If your battery's dead, or you've turned off your phone for a meeting, or it's just at the bottom of your purse and you're in a noisy environment, you might fail to notice the alert.

I propose something simpler and more immediate:  if the car is turned off, there is weight in the carseat, there is no weight in the driver's seat, and all the doors are closed, the annoying horn-honking car alarm goes off.  (Proposed added bonus feature: rather than the usual horn honky car alarm sound it produces the sound of a baby crying.)

The advantage of this model is it draws attention to the car, even if it for some reason it fails to attract the parent's attention.  I know people generally disregard and curse out the source of car alarms, but someone walking past might take a peek in, and if the car is parked somewhere staffed, the staff might notice.  This increases the chances that someone will notice the baby's presence and intervene.

Ideas for how this could be engineered: cars could have a built in attacher thingy for baby seats (baby seats have to be physically attached to the car by more than just a seatbelt. The ones I've seen are attached by a bolt-like thing behind the back seat.)  The attacher thing recognizes when a car seat is attached (the same way the seatbelt detector detects when the seatbelt is fastened) and then there could be a weight detector in the seat of the car (maybe there could be a button to press to "zero" it to an empty baby seat).  The car would therefore know when there's a baby seat present and when the baby seat is occupied.

The other advantage of this model is it wouldn't require any proactiveness or diligence on the part of the parents.  If it doesn't occur to the parents to take precautions against accidentally leaving the baby in the car, the car will do so anyway, much like how some cars already warn you if your seatbelt isn't done up or if you've left the lights on.

"Required field must not be blank"

Lately, when I type up a blog entry, I've been getting an error message "Required field must not be blank".  Through trial and error, I've determined that the required field is the title field.  In other words, Blogger has made post titles mandatory.

Problem: Blogger also will not permit us to save posts unless we have typed something in the title field.  Which is problematic, because I like to write my titles last, after the whole post is composed. Yesterday I started writing a good post that required some precise choice of language and some careful composition.  I didn't finish it last night (not unusual for more mindful posts) so I clicked Save. I got a "This page is asking you to confirm that you want to leave - data you have entered may not be saved" error, but I knew I'd just clicked save so I told it to go ahead and navigate away.  And then, this morning, my careful work was all gone!

Dear Blogger:  If you're going to require titles to post (which strikes me as completely unnecessary, BTW), there's no need to require a title to save a draft.  The draft is, by definition, not finished.  It's okay if it doesn't have all the required elements.  In fact, it will save you a small amount of storage space if you don't force people to fill out a field they don't need to fill out just yet.

Edited to add: I've just discovered that the post body field is not a required field, just the post title.  That's a wee bit ridiculous...

The choreography of conversation when not everyone understands the language

From David Eddie: 

Every spring my mother-in-law arrives from Europe. While she stays in her own home we see her often, usually for meals and then a four-day visit to the cottage with us. Although she speaks English very well, she seems to feel we should all be learning her language and accommodating her, to the point that she will often speak her language at these meals. So instead of saying “pass the butter” which is hardly a complicated matter in English, she will revert to her own language and then she hooks in my husband and they begin talking and no one has a clue what they are saying. I know it’s a power grab so she can control the conversation and cut me out but my husband is afraid to stand up to her because she has quite a temper, and because he says that at 78 you get to do what you want to. This causes untold friction in my family and, judging from the number of mixed marriages in Canada, for many other families, I am sure. Is it rude to speak a foreign language in front of people who don’t understand?

My credentials: I was born into a bicultural family, where some family members don't speak the local language very well, and still others choose to talk among themselves in the heritage language despite being functionally bilingual. I am fluent in the local language, but for most of my life I understood nary a word of the heritage language.  (I understood it as a toddler as well as a toddler understands anything, then lost it when I began school and started learning it in adulthood, but I'm still nowhere near fluent and can  follow along only sporadically.)  So I grew up immersed in this situation, but nearly always as a unilingual party who didn't understand half of what was being said.

In this capacity, I propose that the best approach is for the husband to translate the conversation for his wife.  He doesn't have to do every single word, he can just say "Mum's asking about our vacation, so I'm telling her the story about the elephant and the guy with the hat." If his mother's receptive English really is fluent, perhaps he can even respond to her in English so his wife can follow along, and his wife can participate in the conversation too. Then when his mother responds in the heritage language, he can translate her statements.

While all this is happening, the wife should feel free to participate in the conversation in English even if she doesn't understand every word that's being said.  For example, after the husband says "I'm telling her the story about the elephant and the guy with the hat," the wife could chime in with "And make sure you tell her what the weather was like that day!" - regardless of whether he's already told her that part. 

As an added bonus, if the mother can in fact express herself in English as easily as LW thinks she can, she will naturally begin using more English in this context.  It might be to speed things up, but it quite often even happens through normal code-switching patterns.

This will achieve the same result but make the mother feel like it was her idea, all without having to have an awkward conversation trying to convince her not to converse with her child in the language in which she naturally converses with her child.

Journalism wanted: how on earth do fish die in a flood??

Mentioned in passing in an article about the exciting adventure of Calgary zookeepers trying to rescue giraffes from a flood with hippos the loose:

On Tuesday, several of 140 dead tilapia that zoo staff couldn’t save were still scattered on the muddy, wet floor of the giraffe and hippo building. Six piranhas and at least two of the zoo’s 12 peacocks also died in the flooding.

Tilapia and piranhas are fish!  How on earth do fish die in a flood???

It says they're scattered on the floor, which suggests that the water receded and left them behind.  Is that normal?  Does that mean that fish in the ocean have to follow the water when the tides move?  Why didn't the force of the water pull them along?

In any case, you can't just mention in passing that fish died in a flood and not explain.  It's a great big question mark, even if it's not nearly as exciting as rescuing giraffes from hippo-infested waters.

"What do you think you can do about it?"

From Carolyn Hax:

Dear Carolyn:

My second-grade son was upset yesterday because his best friend at school told him to toughen up (my son was crying over something) and also told him he was not one of his best friends anymore. What do I say to my son?

 Carolyn's answer starts with:

Next time — since they’re both probably over this already — it’s hard to go wrong with a 1-2 plan of acknowledging his feelings — “I can see you’re really upset, I’m sorry,” plus hug — and directing him to come to his own way of dealing with it: “What do you think you can do about it?” 

I've heard this parenting advice before - that you should ask kids "What do you think you can do about it?" - and it seems unhelpful to say the least.  My own mother has tried it on me (one of those times when you can tell your parent totally read something in an article), and I just found it infuriating.  If I had any remotely productive ideas what to do about it that I hadn't tried already, I'd be trying them!

I think this is even worse to say to a child, because when parents ask children leading questions like that, it quite often implies that the parent thinks the child is supposed to know what to do.  I'm old enough to be his mother, and I don't even have any idea what he should do.  Sitting here in adulthood, we have the luxury of saying "Okay, you're welcome to leave then," but that doesn't work when you're a kid and it's more difficult to function in the classroom and the playground when you don't have someone present whom you can claim as your best friend.  Actual friendship aside, the social logistics of school require having people you can call friends. (This is something I keep meaning to blog about but haven't gotten around to yet.)

I've seen Carolyn Hax give this advice to parents before, and I think it's even worse coming from an advice columnist.  The kid doesn't know what to do, so he goes to his parent.  The parent doesn't know what to do, so they write to an advice columnist.  And the advice columnist tells the parent to ask the kid?  How is that useful?

At this point, people usually ask me "Well, what advice do you expect her to give?  Do you have any better ideas?"  First of all, advice columnists (for whom this is their whole job) should be able to give better, more effective advice that gets better results than anything I could ever think of.  The fact that I don't know the solution doesn't mean an advice columnist wouldn't be able to come up with one, just like the fact that I can't make my hair stay curled doesn't mean that a hairdresser wouldn't be able to.

But, more importantly, advice columnists get a lot of letters.  If the columnist can't come up with a solution to one of the problems, they should run another letter where they can come up with a solution to the LW's problem rather than taking up valuable column inches being one of these people and telling the person who asked for help in the first place to think of the answer themselves.

Google's "unnatural link" detector is broken

I recently had a comment from a webmaster of a site I had linked to (who appears to check out as a real person) asking me to remove the link because they'd been hit by an "unnatural link penalty" from Google due to their being linked from my blog.

I did some googling around, and discovered that the "unnatural link penalty" is intended to reduce the page rank of websites that have spam posts linking to them, to render that kind of spamming useless.

The problem is, my link wasn't spam.  My link was a natural link in the truest sense of the word.

I'm not going to link to the post in question because apparently it causes trouble for this person's business, but it was one of my posts from during the financial crisis, where I was trying to figure out money-related stuff.  One aspect of what I was talking my way through would vary greatly from person to person, so I provided a link to an online financial calculator so everyone could calculate their own number for themselves.

This was absolutely natural.  I'm just a regular person who writes about what's on my mind. I was writing out my train of thought, partway through my train of thought I realized that everyone would have a different number and it was complex to calculate, so I googled up an existing online calculator and provided a link.  This is the very purpose of hyperlinks dating back to the earliest days of hypertext.  I had no interest in the particular business I linked to, they were just the first googleable result providing that particular kind of calculator.

The thing is, this is the very basis of Google's PageRank system - that people will link to thinks that are useful to them.  Google Webmaster Tools support says:

The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.

The site I had linked to had created relevant content that was useful to me and valuable to my readers, so I linked to it.  And now they're apparently being penalized for it.  Why?  Because I'm a blog?  Because there are people who use blogs for spam?  I don't even know.

From a purely algorithmic point of view, Google should be able to tell that I'm a human being, not a spambot.  My blog has been around a lot longer than most spam blogs have.  I don't update on any particular schedule.  My posts vary greatly in length and nature.  Quite a few of my posts have no links in them whatsoever.  I change my template every so often, and there are posts with the word "template" in them around the time of these template changes.  There's a twitter feed in my right-hand column, and it's updated on no particular schedule with the majority of tweets not containing any links.

On top of all that, Google owns Blogger.   I'm sure they have access to information that will show them that I delete spam posts, I have drafts of posts in my drafts folder, and I hardly ever make scheduled posts.  They could probably also see that I use the account I blog with here to comment on other blogs.  That's not the behaviour of a spambot!

I know there has been a lot of blogger spam lately, but you have a system where a website creates useful content, a blogger thinks "That's just what I need!" and links to it, and then the website gets punished for this, your system is broken.  Google needs to fix this!

Things They Should Invent: tell the neighbourhood what movie they were filming after they finish filming there

I'm pretty sure they're shooting a movie in my neighbourhood.  I've seen movie-ish pylons and trucks and trailers, and some lighting and camera equipment standing around with people milling about.  I think they might even have redecorated the smelly alley.  (Although there were also about half a dozen cop cars there, one of which said "Forensics", so it's possible it was in fact a crime scene.)

The internet won't tell me what they're filming, and there's no indication on site.  Which makes sense - if you're filming something with big stars in it, you want to keep it quiet so people don't flock to your location and swarm around seeking autographs.

But it would be nice to let us know after the fact.  And it could even be used to promote the movie!  What if they distributed a little note to residences and businesses in the area saying something along the lines of:

Dear Neighbours,

Thank you for your patience and understanding while we used your neighbourhood to film Awesome Movie, starring Big-Name Actor and New Up-And-Comer. Watch for us in theatres in summer 2014, when you'll be able to see your neighbourhood in the zombie apocalypse scene and the big dance number!

It would assuage curiosity, create goodwill, and probably lead a certain percentage of people who receive the note to go see the movie even if they wouldn't have otherwise. 

Building a Better Senate redux

I previously blogged some ideas for improving the Senate, building on the advantages of the existing model by making it less partisan.

While reading this article (although not directly related to its content), I came up with a simpler way to do the same thing.

First, we make senators non-partisan.  They can't be members of a party, they don't identify themselves as "Conservative senators" or "Liberal senators", there are no Senate party caucuses.  They're just senators.

Then comes the important part: government of the day cannot appoint any senators who are or have ever been members of its political party (or any of that party's predecessors).  It can appoint people who are or have been members of other political parties, it can appoint people who have never been a member of any political party, but it can't appoint from its own party.

Possible corollary, depending on what percentage of the people who are good senate candidates have ever been members of political parties: each government must appoint a minimum number of senators who are or have been been a member of another political party.  I can see pros and cons of this.

But, either way, it would be the political equivalent of having one sibling cut the cake and another choose the slice.

Zap2it vs. TV Guide online TV listings

For as long as I can remember, I've been using zap2it.com as my primary TV guide.  They could be customized to my TV provider so they'll tell me what's on the channels I actually get and they tell me the actual channel number (unlike the TV listings in the newspaper, where they say it's on channel 5 in the listings and then I have to look it up in the chart to see that channel 5 is really channel 6 on my TV).

However, Zap2it's advanced search function recently stopped working, which makes it significantly less useful to me.  For example, as you may have noticed, I'm an Eddie Izzard fan, so I like to know when Eddie's going to be on TV.  So I'd use Zap2it's advanced search function to search for "Izzard" under "Cast & Crew", and I'd get a list of every program Eddie's in for the next two weeks.  In the absence of this function, I'd have to either look up every single entry on Eddie's IMDB page separately (which is a wee bit inconvenient) or miss opportunities to see Eddie on TV (which cramps my style).

Fortunately, it turns out TVGuide.com's listings aren't powered by Zap2it (as many TV listings are), and they have celebrity-specific listings (like this) that fulfill the function for which I'd previously been using Zap2it's advanced search (and with a much nicer interface too - TV Guide lists every appearance in chronological order, whereas Zap2it would only list the titles of the shows the performer appears in, and I'd have to click on each one to see when it's on.)  However, I've noticed a variety of pros and cons of each system:

- TV Guide lets you add movies, or even celebrities (which basically means anyone with an IMDB entry - Jane Austen is in there), to your watchlist, whereas Zap2it only lets you add TV shows.  This means that, on Zap2it, if I want to watch The King's Speech, I need to search for it every couple of weeks to see when it's on, while on TV Guide I can just add it to my list and they'll let me know.

- TV Guide's celebrity pages also show you episodes of TV shows that have that celebrity in it, whereas Zap2it's show you every episode of any TV show that has that celebrity in it.  For example, Wil Wheaton has been in a few episodes of Big Bang Theory.  If I look him up on TV Guide, it will show only the episodes of Big Bang Theory in which he appears.  However, if I look him up on Zap2it, it will show Big Bang Theory as a whole, even if the episodes he appears in aren't airing any time soon.

- Unfortunately, TV Guide's watchlist is set up so that it only shows you the next instance of each list item, which is problematic when the item added is a celebrity, who may appear in multiple movies or TV shows. So if Eddie's in one show tomorrow morning and another tomorrow afternoon, the watchlist will only show me the one he's in tomorrow morning (unless I click through to his individual page).  But it will still show me the next airing of King's Speech even if it's a week from now.  In comparison, Zap2it's "My Calendar" function is set up like a calendar, and tells me which things are on each day. (Unfortunately, it's only limited to TV shows, not movies or celebrities or other search results.)

- TV Guide allows you to add as many channels as you want to your "favourites", so you can have a grid that consists of all the channels you get.  Zap2it limits you to 100 (which is frustrating when you get more than 100 channels but nowhere near all the channels).  Note to Zap2it: it's not about wanting to watch my "favourite" channels, it's about what's on the channels I get in my cable package. If I just wanted to watch my favourite channel, I'd turn the TV on to that channel.

- However, TV Guide's watchlist shows you what's on all the English-language channels offered by your cable provider, even if you've meticulously set up your favourite channels list.

- The problem is the "English-language" part - TV Guide doesn't show non-English channels (even if they're part of a basic cable package) in those celebrity-specific page.  If Eddie is on a French channel, I'll never know unless I try to deliberately search for the French title of everything he's ever been in.  Note to TV Guide: some people who speak English do speak non-English languages too!

- Another advantage of TV Guide's watchlist is there's a checkbox that says "New Airings Only", so you can only see episodes that aren't reruns.  This is useful if you're interested in  new episodes of the Simpsons, for example, but don't want to be informed of every single rerun.

- A disadvantage of TV Guide in general is it doesn't show the end times of programs in search results - you have to look them up in the grid.  This is particularly annoying for movies.  It will tell you that the runtime of a particular movie is 120 minutes and it will tell you that the movie is on a 9:00, but it won't tell you whether it's on from 9:00-11:00 or 9:00-12:00.  As we all know, such things do vary because of editing for television and commercial breaks.

- I think both systems could use a more robust category function.  Zap2it used to have a particularly good one, where one of the categories was Fitness.  So I used this to find exercise programs on TV (my preferred method of exercising).  But they later eliminated the category.  (When I switched to Rogers I started using my on-screen guide for this, but lately it's less useful because they're putting entirely too many things in the Fitness category, like reality shows about people giving birth and programs about alternative medicine, so I have to click on every unfamiliar title to see if it is in fact a fitness show.)

Currently I'm using Zap2it's calendar and basic search results primarily but TV Guide's more advanced search results and celebrity pages.  I'd probably switch back to using Zap2it exclusively if they reinstated the advanced search function and let us add movies, celebrities, and search results (i.e. anything with Star Trek in the title rather than having to add each Star Trek separately) to the calendar.  I'd probably switch to TV Guide exclusively if the watchlist was truly chronological, if they included non-English channels in search results, and if they included program end times in search results.

I'm glad that the two systems complement each other and mostly fill in each other's gaps, but it would be awesome if one of the sites (or both, or a third, completely new site) could add the features it's missing so it meets all the needs I've listed here.

Machine translation FAIL

One of the things I like to test translation software with is formal French complimentary closings.  French uses long, gorgeous, wordy passages where we'd just say "sincerely" in English, so it's useful to determine whether the software recognizes the function of the text.  I was recently demonstrating this, and got the following result (click to embiggen):

For those of you who don't read French, the phrase input here is a French complimentary closing, appropriate to a formal business letter. With the exception of one serious error, the English is a reasonable literal translation.

There are two problems here, one macro and one micro.

The macro problem is that the French is a complimentary closing, and the English is not.  English complimentary closings are things like "Sincerely," or "Yours truly," and that's how this sentence should be translated.  The actual words don't matter; the message is "This is to indicate that I am ending the letter in the prescribed letter, and the next thing you see will be my signature."

And the micro problem is that, on a word-for-word level, it translated the French "Madame" (i.e. Ms. or Ma'am) with the English "Sir", thereby addressing the recipient as the wrong gender.  Not only is this clearly unacceptable, it's something even the most simplistic machine translation should be able to handle. Even if an individual text in their corpus got misaligned, they should have some mechanism to recognize that "Sir" is not the most common translation of "Madame". Even a calque of the French ("Madam") would be a better translation than "Sir", which is a sure sign of a particularly bad translation. I'm quite surprised to see this happening in 2013.

Happy birthday, same-sex marriage, happy birthday to you!

Today is the 10th anniversary of the legalization of same-sex marriage in Ontario!

I've already blogged the best tribute I can write to it here.

Dog euthanization ethics

In the Toronto Star's ethics column, a reader wrote in pondering the ethics of euthanizing a dog whose medical bills have become prohibitive.

I'm not going to presume to rule on the question itself, but I take issue with a couple of things in the columnist's answer:

The real question is: Is it ethical to spend so much money — and put yourself in debt — to keep a dog alive?

The answer is no.

I don't think you can go so far as to say it's not ethical, even if you can't afford the money.  It may be ill-advised, but ill-advised spending isn't unethical.  Mr. Gallinger previously wrote that Chief Theresa Spence's hunger strike is perfectly ethical, because we're allowed to make self-sacrifices for what we consider to be a good cause.  If sacrificing one's own health is permissible, surely sacrificing one's finances is equally permissible!

But you still have to pay for housing and food, so where would this six grand come from? Money you might otherwise give to help other human beings?

OK, I take back what I said about sunshine listers. Regardless of economic status, anyone with an extra six grand does far more good spending on starving kids, AIDS research, a cure for cancer — rather than a dog unable to discern the difference between kibbles and a baseball.

Again, spending money in a way that does less good than it possibly could isn't unethical. At best, it's suboptimal, as are many things in life.  Holding people to the standard that spending money in ways that don't optimally help other people is unethical would be untenable.  It would even make charitable donations to all but the single most optimal charity unethical!

I'm not a person who would say that you must never euthanize a pet or must prolong its life über alles - I'm pro-euthanasia even to the extent that I want to it be available to me and those I care about - but you should be able to make a solid argument for why it's not unethical to euthanize in a particular case without fudging the definition of "unethical".

Also, I'm surprised that neither the columnist nor the letter-writer got into the question of trying to find another home for the dog.  If you're so uncertain about putting the dog down that you're writing to an advice columnist, why not post on Craigslist "Free to a good home: awesome doggie with an unfortunate habit of eating balls and then requiring expensive surgery" and see if you get any takers?  Worst case, you've still got the same decision to make, but you can feel better about having explored every possible avenue.

Why board up houses when you're going to tear them down anyway?

A group of houses on my street have been bought by a developer who plans to tear them down to build condos.  I have no objection to that - it's a highrise neighbourhood.  However, they've boarded up the windows of the houses, which makes them look run down and derelict and creates a dead zone on the street.  (This is particularly frustrating since they hadn't even submitted their development application to city hall when they started boarding the houses up, so they created this dead zone without making any progress towards renewal.)

Why would you board up houses that you're going to tear down anyway?  Are you worried that someone will break in and start wrecking them before you can start wrecking them yourself?  Why not just put plain solid white cheap blinds/curtains in the window (or even board them up on the inside with a piece of wallboard or something else white) so they won't look so conspicuously abandoned to passers-by?  That would actually probably reduce the likelihood that people would mess around with them - if you see a house with the blinds closed and no one going in or out at that exact moment, you assume someone is home and just not going in or out at that exact moment.  You'd have to pay close attention and perhaps even stake it out to notice that it's empty, whereas the boards make it look abandoned from a distance.

I don't care that they're tearing down houses or that they want to build a big condo tower, but I really resent that they're doing this in a way that makes it look so empty and abandoned.  My neighbourhood feels very safe at all hours of the day and night, and this is because it's alive. There are people walking around, going in and out of homes and shops and restaurants.  When I'm walking around alone after dark, if I ever feel unsafe, I can duck into any of the many businesses that are still open or even into another residential building if I can manage to follow someone in.  If a bad guy is following me, they don't know where I might be going, which door might have witnesses behind it who are expecting me.  But these boarded-up houses are clearly not where I'm going.  They clearly don't have someone inside waiting for me.  They're just a dead zone that doesn't contribute to the life of the street.

Why go to all the trouble of boarding up the houses and making them look derelict when you could just do nothing and leave them looking unremarkable?

Diluting shredded paper

They make paper shredders that shred paper to different sizes, and the smaller it shreds the paper, the more expensive the paper shredder.  Presumably this is because it would be harder to reassemble the paper if it's shredded smaller.

I find myself wondering if you could also make it more difficult for someone who wanted to reassemble the paper by diluting the shredded paper.  What if only 10% of the paper you shredded was important documents that actually needed to be shredded, and 90% of it was random unimportant documents?

What if you physically mixed up the shredded paper before dumping it in recycling?  What if you put shredded paper from the same batch of shredding in multiple recycling containers?

Before I owned a paper shredder, I'd rip up sensitive documents and put parts of them (usually the parts with my name) in with my kitchen garbage.  I figurde if someone is going to dig through the dumpsters and try to reassemble my documents, I can at least make it as unpleasant as possible.  What if you put a portion of the shredded paper in the green bin?  (Apparently paper in the green bin is allowed - my parents use newspapers to line their organics garbage can, then throw the whole piece of newspaper in the green bin with the garbage enclosed.)

I don't know if the additional security gained from doing any of these things would be worth the effort, but it's fun to think of ideas.

Lesen auf Deutsch

I'm currently reading a book in German (Der Knochenmann by Wolf Haas, published in English as The Bone Man - no spoilers please, I'm only partway through).  This is noteworthy because I haven't done any long-form reading in German in 13 years, and even then German has always been a difficult language for me to read.  When I was in school, I'd be sitting there with my dictionary looking up every single word I don't understand, then using my grammar rules to decode how the elements in the sentences relate to each other.

But I was surprised to discover that now it's much faster going!  Not because I understand more German, but because I seem to know intuitively which parts I don't need to understand.  Based on the words I do understand and my knowledge of how a novel works, I can tell "Okay, this is a soccer game, these few paragraphs are describing gameplay, anything I don't understand is soccer-related, no need to look stuff up." So I skim over those paragraphs with little understanding except that the local team won and the goaltender was awesome, and don't reach for my dictionary until we're back into the main plot.

Similarly, I find I'm not analyzing the grammar to figure out how the elements in a sentence relate to each other.  I'm thinking "How would these elements relate to each other logically?" and only digging down to the grammar if the logical interpretation doesn't make sense in context.

Surprisingly, this works!  I looked up an English excerpt to make sure I haven't missed anything important, and I haven't! Everything I glossed over contained exactly what I expected it to! It could be I missed a gun on the mantlepiece, I don't know yet, but worst case I'm surprised by the ending rather than seeing it coming like I usually do in mysteries.

I think this is all a result of translation brain.  When you're translating, you have to render not the words per se, but rather the truth of what the text is saying.  The vast majority of the time, it doesn't matter whether the author of the text used a word that translates as "however" or "moreover", what matters is whether the relationship between the two ideas in question is "however" or "moreover".  (I've always thought fill in the blank exercises for linking words would be useful for translation students.)  It doesn't matter that the source text used the pluperfect, what matters is which tense most accurately represents the idea being expressed in the target language.

So after 13 years of thinking this way (coincidentally, the same amount of time since I last read in German - my last German class was the year before my first translation class), I seem to have developed intuition for which unknown words or syntax is ripe with meaning and which parts will end up saying exactly what I'd expect them to say.

So why isn't it acceptable to submit the same paper for multiple courses?

From The Ethicist:

When I was in college, I’d sometimes write a single paper that would satisfy assignments in more than one course. For instance, I once wrote a paper on how “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” expressed satire; I submitted it for assignments in both my poetry course as well as my completely separate satire course. I did not disclose this to either professor. When I share this with people, half call the practice cheating, and the other half call it genius. My niece told me it would certainly be grounds for expulsion at her college. In my mind, I was adding a level of intellectual complexity to my studies. Was this an ethical practice, or was I cheating?

The all my universities made it quite clear that this is not allowed, but I've never understood why. It's your own work, so why does it matter if you've done the work a little earlier before the deadline than perhaps they anticipated? 

Some people in the comments thread suggested that it's because schools want you to do a certain amount of work to get your degree, but I don't think that's actually the case. You get your course credits, and by extension your degree, by demonstrating mastery of certain material or skills. They evaluate this mastery through projects and exams, but the amount of work you put in is irrelevant.  If you can knock off an A+ term paper in half an hour, you have clearly mastered the material and deserve your A+.  Conversely, if you do the standard amount of work - even if you do twice the standard amount of work - but still can't produce a paper that meets the standards for a passing mark, you haven't mastered the material and don't get to pass. If you can prove to both professors that you have mastered the material of their respective courses by turning in the same piece of work, the fact remains that you've mastered the material.

Other commenters suggested that a single paper could not possibly meet the needs of two assignments, and, before we even get into the question of ethics, would need to be rewritten from the other perspective to be suitable for the other course.  This may well be true, but that doesn't make it a question of academic ethics.  If a student chooses to submit a project that doesn't meet the project requirements as perfectly as perhaps it could, they'll get a lower mark.  Voilà, natural consequences.  No need to bring the code of ethics into it.  

The professor who taught my humanities gen. ed. course, an older, bearded, sweater-wearing gent who called male students by their surnames and female students "Miss Surname", had a policy that you can go to the washroom whenever you wanted during the exam, unescorted.  His reasoning was that if you can find answers in the washroom, more power to you.  His exams were designed so students have to analyze and to make cogent arguments supporting their point - things you can't put on a crib sheet.

Similarly, the attitude should be if you can reuse work, more power to you.  If schools want to discourage this, perhaps they need a more robust anti-requisite system, or more stringent academic standards, or a system that permits students to test out of courses where they've already mastered the material. But if you have two courses that are asking students to submit similar assignments to prove similar bodies of knowledge, then there's no reason not to permit them to do the same work.  And manipulating the academic code of ethics to ban this so they don't have to address flaws in the curriculum is kind of, well, inethical.

Analogy for why you don't need to give up your stuffed animals

I previously blogged about how when I was a kid I thought I'd need to give up my very favourite stuffed toy just because none of the adults around me used stuffed toys, but once I grew up I realized that you don't ever need to give them up, even if you don't need to use them any more.

Today my shower gave me an analogy:

As we grow up and grow older, we need our parents'  help less and less.  When we're well into adult life, sometimes months or even years go by when we don't need their help at all.

But we don't respond to this development by murdering them, or by casting them off on an ice floe to die.  We respond by leaving them mostly to their own devices while we handle our own problems without interrupting their well-deserved retirement. But (as long as they're still alive) we still retain the option of going to them if we need their help.

Dr. Morgentaler

When Dr. Morgentaler was awarded the Order of Canada, I wrote:

What astounds me about Dr. Morgentaler is he had no particular reason to become an abortion activist. It didn't affect him personally, he was older when he got into it (late 40s, if I remember correctly), no one would have noticed if he hadn't done anything. No one would have said "Hey, you, Mr. middle-aged holocaust-survivor doctor man, why aren't you loudly and publicly performing a controversial medical procedure for which you could be sentenced to life in prison?" If he had just quietly gone about his family practice, no one would have cared. But he stepped up

In a discussion of the age at which people learned about abortion, I wrote:

I learned how pregnancy happens around the age of 8 or 9, I reached menarche at 10, and I learned (on a theoretical level, fortunately) that rape exists at 10 as well.  So, starting at the age of 10, I had a quietly ever-present fear of being forced to gestate my rapist's baby, and hadn't the slightest clue that pregnancies could be terminated.  (I was thinking solely in terms of a rapist because I was still years away from being able to even imagine wanting to have sex voluntarily, even in a distant and hypothetical future.)

Several years later, I read something (I don't remember if it was an article or a work of fiction) where a girl who was pregnant thought that if she skipped rope for hours and hours, she'd have a miscarriage.  (I don't remember if she actually tried it or if it actually worked.)  This was my first exposure to the idea that miscarriage could be induced.  I was relieved to learn that such a thing might be remotely possible, and started brainstorming other ways to force myself to miscarry so I wouldn't have to gestate my rapist's baby.  I considered the possibility of simply stopping eating and drinking, thinking that if it didn't cause a miscarriage it would at least kill me, and, by extension, also gave some thought to suicide as a solution.  I was probably under the age of 16 when this happened

I didn't know that at the time, but my 10-year-old self needn't ever have worried about having to gestate her rapist's baby.  Because Dr. Morgentaler stepped up, long before I knew such things existed, I - and millions of others like me - have no reason to lie awake at night pondering whether starvation would be sufficient to induce miscarriage or whether self-harm would be necessary.

Help write the next New Rules: Natural Consequences Edition!

I have a series of posts called New Rules: Natural Consequences Edition, in which I propose natural consequences rules for various behaviours that really should have consequences.

There's one behaviour for which I really would like to introduce natural consequences, but I haven't been able to think of anything yet.  That behaviour is:

Lying to people about their own thoughts, feelings, motivations, or experiences.

This is probably my greatest pet peeve, so I want to give it a really good consequence.  But nothing is coming immediately to mind.  Any ideas?

Living in the future

Sometimes, when I'm walking down the street, I look around and imagine what a person from the past would think of what I'm seeing and doing and experiencing.  What would look familiar to them and what would look impenetrable to them?  Which changes would they think are a miracle and which ones would they think are a tragedy?  How would this live up to their expectations for the year 2013?  Would they be disappointed by the lack of flying cars, or amazed at the computing power in our handheld devices?

So I was walking down the street, thinking these kinds of thoughts, and I saw a Future Shop.

And I found myself wondering what people from the past would think of the fact that, in the future, we have a Future Shop! 

It seems like something out of a mid-20th-century scifi B-movie, doesn't it?  "I need a new space phone.  Better go to the future shop!"

When you add in the mid-20th-century retroish vertical signs on some of the urban locations (like this one) it almost comes across as something created in the 1950s in an attempt to fit into the future as imagined in that era. (Even though the internet tells me it was founded in the early 80s, and most stores don't have those retroish signs - they seem to be used where the stores open right onto the sidewalk instead of into a parking lot as they do in most big box locations.)

Evoluent Mouse-Friendly Keyboard

I was having some mousing-related ergonomic issues, so I went and bought the Evoluent Mouse-Friendly Keyboard.

Ergonomically, it does the job fantastically.  I started using it in mid-March (and started working at home in April) and haven't had any ergonomic owies whatsoever!

My only complaint is I really wish the spacebar extended about a centimetre further to the right.  In the existing configuration, the right edge of the space bar lines up with the space between the J and K keys, which means that my right thumb lands right on the very end of the spacebar.  (Unfortunately, my Grade 9 typing class, which I took for an easy A as I already knew how to type, drilled into me the habit of using only my right thumb for the spacebar, so using my left thumb greatly slows me down and creates hilarious typos.)  I understand that the abbreviated spacebar is a result of trying to cram all the assorted crt-alt-delete-insert-windows keys into the bottom row so the keyboard doesn't need extra columns for all those keys like you have in a standard keyboard

One thing that hasn't caused any problems but seems a bit worrisome is that the keys are very shallow and the mechanisms seem kind of delicate.  This means that if a crumb gets into the keyboard, you can feel it under the key right away and it's more likely than with a standard keyboard to interfere with typing.  This is good in some ways, because you can detect and remove crumbs immediately rather than having them accumulated like they do in deeper keyboards, but it always seems like the keys are so delicate that something might snap when I'm prying them off.  Nothing has snapped yet, so I have no empirical evidence supporting this claim, but it is a general feeling I get. I will update this if anything actually goes wrong, so if I haven't updated it's just me being paranoid so far.

However, it does have a one-year warranty, and it seems to have completely eliminated the sporadic ergonomic issues I was previously experiencing, so even if it turns out it is more fragile than other keyboards, I'd say it's still worthwhile overall.  (Although I'd still very much prefer that it be made to last.)