Via Richard Eriksson’s (low bandwith, high-content-value) blog comes a link to a MetaFilter post (“Hi.  Whatcha reading?”) that is a link to an article entitled “Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced”

MetaFilter’s gotten better, in that there is higher SNR and fewer trolls, but OMG it’s still MetaFilter and there is just so much content of such varying intermingled quality, and one is hopping between scores of parallel conversations/arguments/rants with some balance of informed contributors, automatic arguers, trolls, and land-mine comments such as the in-line personal rape account that has upset my stomach for the last hour.

I don’t really know what to do with this topic, so I’m putting it there for discussion.  What I can say is that I know I’m big, hairy, and strange, and that, beyond the uncountable number of times I’ve feigned an untied shoelace or an urgent and immediate appointment across the street (in order to avoid a woman’s thinking I’m following her, and to avoid, meta-ly, her thinking that I’m aware that she thinks I’m following her), I actually stay home from events sometimes because I’m worried about sending the wrong messages (e.g., I’ll go to a Tool concert alone, but I won’t go to a Tori Amos concert, let alone a festival moshpit show, alone.)

Am I bitter about this?  A tiny bit, but then I feel guilty about feeling even a tiny bit bitter about this, in a similar way to how I’ll die a little bit inside whenever I lock my car door whenever I see someone with a particular lunging stroll pass, a walking pattern which is not equally distributed among ethnicities in my area.  The fact is: I am absurdly big, I am ridiculously strong, I’m far from clean-cut-and-shaven, and I have this Atlasload of male guilt.

OK.  That’s what I’ve got in me so far.  Thoughts?

In my I-wish-it-wouldn’t-be-continuing series of “learning shit from the covers of magazines at the supermarket”, I was introduced to a (?) Kardashian today, which seems to be a race of bitchy-looking girls with names beginning with “K” (?) with 3cm-deep caked-on makeup (?).

Actually, Wikipedia eliminated a couple of those question marks (the first question mark being “Should I remember you from Deep Space 9?”) and the articles all seem to direct to “Famous for Being Famous”.

I also learned — and I don’t think I will ever be able to unlearn this term, so I might as well inflict it on my readership — the portmanteau celebutante.  This, in addition to being one of the ugliest portmaneaux I have ever encountered, appears to be a portmanteau that applies to some of the ugliest people I have ever encountered.  I mean, I don’t know if they are physically ugly — I think a prep session deflating silicone implants and sand-blasting away foundation would be required — but more like “why do you have to be a bitch?” ugly.

I guess … you can become famous … by stepping in front of cameras, having a sex tape broadcast, and pretending you are famous?

I promise I am not being faux-elitist.  I am honestly curious.  Apparently like Paris Hilton, these KKs had a reality show?  I’m not going to Google for a link, but I think that is true, from what I’ve read.  And I am genuinely inquiring as something I could not learn by Googling: Do people who watch such shows aspire to be these girls/women, identify with these girls/women, hate these girls/women and want to see them be humiliated, are entertained by the antics of these women, or … um … at this point I could randomly insert verbs phrases.

Honest honest honest question: what is the draw?  I don’t imagine many of my readers to actually experience these verbs, but through cultural osmosis against which I have insulated myself … please?  Help?

Dramatis Personæ
Shopkeeper: S.
Patron: JHM

Scene: A., a beautiful young woman, has recently been appearing behind the counter of establishment run by Shopkeeper, frequented by Patron.  A. is not present on this visit.

Patron:  So, A. is your daughter, is that right?

Shopkeeper:  Yes.  Do we look alike?

Patron:  You both have beautiful eyes.

Shopkeeper:  Thank you.  Yeah, A. just got married.

Patron:  Oh, how wonderful!

Scene.

On an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Detective Tutuola (played by actor and rapper Ice-T) walks into a bodega and asks for “Two coffees: one black and one regular.”

Huh?  Question for New Yorkers, please: what is “regular” coffee if it’s not black, drip, American-style coffee?  When I was a barista mumbleteen years ago, if someone asked for “regular coffee”, I’d probably ask them if they wanted “room for milk”.  That’s it.  The black, drip, and American-style would have been automatic.

I remember when I “upgraded” from a backpack to a messenger bag / briefcase type thing.  I felt so grown up.  “It’s in my briefcase,” I’d say with half-hidden glee.

Well, now I’m old.  And you know what?  Backpacks are better.  You can ride on your bike with them, they hold more, there are special ones designed for notebook PCs, and what the hell do I care what other people think?  So I’m switching back to a backpack.  So there.

Passed on to me by my brother: Time of day calling it quits at AT&T – Los Angeles Times

The service traditionally provided by telephone companies, the free reading of time-of-day, which figures humorously into a Douglas Adams novel, is ending in California.

I remember calling 853-XXXX for the time at many times.  Back when we referred to a phone service.

Another pop culture reference was found in the 1993 Wolfgang Petersen film In the Line of Fire (if you haven’t seen it, add it to your queue.)  While in Southern California, a driver tells Frank Horrigan (Clint Eastwood) that he remembers a phone number as being U-K-E-L-E-L-E.  Call that number in Southern California, and you used to get the time of day — a safe use of a number in a film.

Years ago I asked the author of 555-LIST (”Mind-numbingly comprehensive”, according to Entertainment Weekly, and frequently the object of much scorn) that he should add this as an honorable mention.  I emailed him more recently and asked if he was planning on doing anything with the site (there have been no updates since 2002.)  I think I’d like to take over the job from him.

I was on hold to 911 for three minutes today.  This is unacceptable.  That is more than enough time to mean the difference between life and death.

I remember several years ago I found a book on Amazon called Dial 911 and Die, via a review the author had written about a legal humor book I had purchased.  His conclusion, as far as I can determine, is to equip oneself with a firearm.  While I’m a lefty gun control advocate, the three minutes gives one pause.  This time I was reporting a witnessed auto accident — but next time?

The book, by the way, is distributed by Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, self-described as “America’s Most Aggressive Defender of Firearms Ownership.”  Their website includes the essay Some Judaic Sources on the Right to Bear Amrs:

The common thread in [Biblical] narratives is that being disarmed when danger threatens is seen as a national disaster and a cause for lament. Disarmament of individual citizens is a problem — not a solution … We indeed yearn for the time of the Final Redemption when “They shall beat their swords into plowshares” but it is a very poor idea to do this unilaterally before that point in history!

(Oh, to clarify, I’m not the “fact-checking police” who originally posted the comment.)

I think somwhere in the fog of high school biology I may have been exposed to the correct information, but the plot lines and theme songs from two decades (60’s & ’70’s) of television seem to have used up all my long term memory slots.

Think I’m joking?  Try this:

Sing the theme songs to Gilligan’s Island, Green Acres and Mr. Ed (extra credit for the closing themes). Good, now (without looking it up) tell me the periodic table symbols for Sodium, Potassium and Silver.

Not feeling so smug right now, are you?

No clue about the TV theme songs.  I think the Gilligan’s Island theme lists the people on the island, and says something about a fateful trip, but when I try to hear it in my head I just get fragments of “A Whale of a Tale” from Disney’s version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.  I had to look up what movie that song’s from just now.  Mr. Ed: something about “a horse, of course, of course?”  Hell if I know about Green Acres.  But the elements are Na, K, and Ag, and I’m not a chemist.

I’m also not a child of the 60s and 70s, but I’m not sure I could do much better with more recent decades.  If Cheers’s theme indeed has just the one verse that I’m thinking of, I could probably do that. Faced with the choice of recitation or immediate execution, I could probably come up with The Brady Bunch’s song.  But not Friends, which had its theme song on the charts for a bit — or, well, anything else for that matter. Maybe TV show themes don’t have lyrics as much as they used to. Alias, X-Files, and Mythbusters don’t, anyway.

I’m not “feeling smug” right now, but it doesn’t strike me as a hard question.

Well, maybe I know bits of Thundercats, one of my brother’s old shows. And everything else I’ve forgetten. If you come up with songs you’re sure I’m forgetting, go ahead and ask. But let me state for the record that I have Gold, Antimony, Tin, Lead, and Tungsten down pat.   [Not enough emoticons in my posts of late. Any time it seems like I'm being a dick, mentally add a smiley. That will work, unless I'm actually just being a dick.]

From Metafilter:

It was a week before Xmas in 1989. I, my girlfriend, and a friend from out of town had gone out to a Sunday brunch … When we got home, we found that our apartment had been burglarized. The back window was smashed , the Xmas tree … was knocked over, all the presents had been opened, and everything wearable or electronic was stolen. We called the police. They showed up and came in to inspect the scene of the crime. They took statements from us, looked at the broken window, tsked-tsked about the rising crime rate in our neighborhood, congratulated us on having the foresight to have renter’s insurance, and were preparing to leave when one cop turned around.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to my three-foot-tall bong pipe leaning against the couch.

As he came back in the apartment and I watched in horror as my life dissolved, his partner put a hand on his shoulder and said the coolest thing I’ve ever heard come out of a cop’s mouth:

“When we catch those burglars, we’ll be sure to ask them why they left that there.”

“[T]he next morning, courtesy of Tim, I had 23 pictures of the house, the cars in the driveway (with license plate numbers) and the neighborhood. I’d like to see a Dell user do something like that at 4:30 in the morning for a complete stranger a thousand miles away.” This guy, a Mac fanatic, sought vigilante internet justice against an online con artist, and succeeded.  He fantasized about killing him.  But at least he didn’t.

Chris Marquis, a disabled loser teenager, operated an online radio equipment scam within full view of his kleptomaniac mother. Until, that is, his mom signed for a UPS package bomb and carried it to her son’s room. His fatal mistake was trying to cheat obsessive truck driver Chris Dean. Marquis had tried to trade radio equipment with Dean. Dean’s equipment was worth twice as much. Why did Dean go for it? Because Dean, who packed his Anarchist’s Cookbook pipe bomb in hex nuts for maximum fragmentation damage, had stolen the gear to begin with. Nice when a story has so many sympathetic characters, isn’t it?

You can read an account of the Dean case if you don’t mind subjecting yourself to the worst piece of journalism ever penned.

It’s painfully self-aware pop art, and I love it.  Check out the globe.  Everything is, unfortunately, sold out.

Some weeks ago I received an unsolicited phone call asking me to participate in a 15 minute telephone computer-related survey.  If I participated, I was told, they would send me $50.  I agreed, and took the survey, which ended up taking 20 minutes.  I asked, “So you will send a check?”  They said yes, and I hung up.

Shortly after hanging up, I felt very foolish.  I realized they had not even asked for my address.  I felt very gullible and was sure I had been had.

Much to my surprise, the check showed up today, from Innovative Processing, Inc., a company that (according to their website) offers “Quality personalized fulfillment including Sweepstakes Management, Contests, Internet Promotions, Premium and Refund Programs” (kind of a neat market niche, I think.)  So if you get a call like this, there is at least the possibility that it is legitimate.

I have been reading the September/October 2002 issue of the great Skeptical Inquirer magazine and have learned a very cool word.  The word is syncretism, defined as “Reconciliation or fusion of differing systems of belief, as in philosophy or religion, especially when success is partial or the result is heterogeneous.”  Very cool.

Less cool is yet another SI demonstration of how stupid people are.  This is one of those bang-your-head-into-concrete ones.  I mean, we all know people are stupid, but fuck, people are stupid.  I would give up my car and house and job and live in a fucking cardboard box if that could suddenly stop people from being this stupid.

Try out Clifford Pickover’s ESP Experiment and see if you come up with the same “explanations” the other visitors did after trying to fool the computer.  Many visitors are convinced the computer is psychic (one was impressed that emotional excitation “does not even seem to interfere, as would be expected if one looks at Sufi literature.”)  One is convinced the computer scans eye movement and tracks pupil dilation resulting from concentration.  Another is impressed that the English-language site can read his mind even though he thought of the card in Finnish.

The Safeway was completely empty save for us and a few other Microsoft people just like us — hair-trigger geeks in pursuit of just the right snack.  Because of all the rich nerds living around here, Redmond and Bellevue are very “on-demand” neighborhoods.  Nerds get what they want when they want it, and they go psycho if it’s not immediately available.  Nerds overfocus.  I guess that’s the problem.  But it’s precisely this ability to narrow-focus that makes them so good at code writing: one line at a time, one line in a strand of millions.

                Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

I should have picked a point, preferably a simple one, and hammered it over and over like White did.  Instead, I was self-censoring, getting bogged down in the complexities, uncertain what distortion to correct.  Most people watching the show probably read me the way the producers wanted — as a pointy-bearded civil libertarian and a paid corporate apologist trying to talk down to a concerned mom.

It can be very difficult to explore complex issues in a Phil Donahue world.  If I ever go on a talk show I want a lapel pin that reads “Slow down, think, and listen for a minute.”  This story by MIT professor Henry Jenkins on what passes for debate in this nation follows a frustratingly familiar pattern but makes for interesting reading nonetheless.

“We should have done a better job in these areas, and we’re committed to doing a better job in the future.”

McDonalds takes full blame for sneaking beef fat into their “vegetarian” french fries and being unwilling to admit this for years.  As part of the settlement with litigators, McDonalds will donate $10 million to Hindu and Vegetarian charities.

In 1984, a cloud of the extremely toxic methyl isocyanate escaped from a pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India.  The company was fiercely criticized for its safety, media, and legal policies in the aftermath.  To address this the company launched a huge PR campaign.  The company owns Bhopal.com and uses the site to disseminate information.  One report is entitled Union Carbide: Disaster at Bhopal, written by the retired VP of Health, Safety, and Environmental Programs at Union Carbide.

The essay is a classic piece of spin (some might say propaganda.)  The report will say one thing, then say a second thing a page later that casts it in a different light.  The two statements are sufficiently separated that the report avoids sounding overtly contentious in spots, but a reader with a memory longer that one paragraph sees Browning talking out of both sides of his mouth, apparently taking a mea culpa one moment and denying responsibility the next.

For instance, the “tragedy continues to be a source of anguish for Union Carbide employees”, but the incident was caused by a “disgruntled plant employee.”  Union Carbide Corporation “took the heat”, but it owned “just over 50 percent” of the subsidiary Union Carbide India Limited.  The Bhopal plant caused the deaths of thousands of people but “ironically” the plant was intended for a “humane goal” (namely, the production of highly toxic chemicals.)  Yes, UC is an American company, but at the time of the accident “the last American … had left two years before” and “the entire work force … was Indian.”  The toxic cloud enveloped a shanty town, but the town’s very existence was the fault of zoning decisions by “local officials.”

Union Carbide employees showed their “personal concern and compassion” by setting up a relief fund.  A little arithmetic division shows us that the fund’s coffers swelled to an average of a $1 donation per UC employee, and that the relief payout was under $7 per dead or injured person.  As a corporation, Union Carbide had originally offered $2 million as reparation (a bit over $100 per victim), then increased the offer to $7 million (under $500 per victim.)  The Indian government filed a claim for $3 billion ($200,000 per victim.)  After the Indian Supreme Court accepted a settlement of $470 million ($30,000 per victim), the new administration rejected the offer, returning to the original request of $4 billion.  Understandably this “outraged” many at Union Carbide.  Why?  Not because this would put a dent in profits, surely.  It was because UC, “from the first day … had been moved by compassion and sympathy”, and could not tolerate the government’s “apparent indifference to the plight” of the victims.

I was reading the opinions of a well-informed poster at a technical site, a man who signs himself by the somewhat pompous title “software craftsman” (presumably contrasting a homespun, artistic, pride-in-one’s-work approach to all the ‘engineers’ doing impersonal number grinding.)  His posts were good, though, and I was sufficiently curious about the “software craftsman” bit to visit the homepage he linked to.

The gentleman is one Eric Sink.  The name did not originally spur my memory, but reading his About Me page I learned he was the original architect (er, craftsman) of the AbiWord project, a terrifically important and impressive semi-clone of Microsoft Word for Linux.  I have used this program extensively, and finding this, thought I would read more on his site.  I turned my attention to his Weblog.  On the navigation bar to the left of the page, there was a link to a post called Rebuttal to Richard Dawkins.

The thing I can truly thank Mr. Sink for is the pointer to a Guardian editorial by Richard Dawkins, published four days after the World Trade Center attacks.  Although I am an avid reader of The Guardian (as regular readers of this blog will know) I had somehow missed this article.  I read the editorial before reading Mr. Sink’s response.

Dawkin’s writing was (as usual) powerful and lucid, and I admired his bravery in discussing something that I have been somewhat reticent to discuss in mixed company: that it could be said to be an accident that the hijackers were fundamentalist Muslims.  In describing the zealous brainwashed state of the hijackers and the origins of this state, the reader is keenly aware that the words could apply to zealots of any denomination.  I think the his main thesis may be summarized in this excerpt:

Promise a young man that death is not the end and he will willingly cause disaster

Could we develop a biological guidance system with the compliance and dispensability of a pigeon but with a man’s resourcefulness and ability to infiltrate plausibly?  What we need, in a nutshell, is a human who doesn’t mind being blown up.  He’d make the perfect on-board guidance system.  But suicide enthusiasts are hard to find. Even terminal cancer patients might lose their nerve when the crash was actually looming.  Could we get some otherwise normal humans and somehow persuade them that they are not going to die as a consequence of flying a plane smack into a skyscraper? … [C]ouldn’t we sucker them into believing that they are going to come to life again afterwards? …

It’s a tall story, but worth a try.  You’d have to get them young, though… If death is final, a rational agent can be expected to value his life highly and be reluctant to risk it… [I]t would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from.

It came from religion.  To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns.  Do not be surprised if they are used.

I half forgot that there was an attempted rebuttal waiting for me, so I went back to see what the software craftsman had to say.  The tone of the attempted rebuttal was rather insulting, but I expect that Richard Dawkins is used to this, even if it offends me.  In his third paragraph, for instance, Mr. Sink writes “Beginning in paragraph eleven, may I assume that your local village idiot finished the article for you?”  Later in the essay he writes “As my eyes glazed over, I found myself unable to proceed past paragraph thirteen.”  I intend to extend to Mr. Sink two courtesies that he found unnecessary to grant Dr. Dawkins: politeness, and bothering to read a short article to its completion.  Let me begin with one of Mr. Sink’s statements:

First, you categorize all religions together, as if all people of spiritual beliefs are equally capable of the heinous acts committed last week… Did you really intend to dump Orthodox Jews, Christians, Mormons and others into the same contrived pigeonhole?

Well, yes (by the way, this is stated explicitly in the unread last paragraph of the essay.)  Breaking the argument into steps might give us a good place to start.

1. Valuing one’s own life is natural (except perhaps in extreme cases in which the life of one’s offspring is more likely to bring about survival of the agent’s genes; consider the fabled lioness protecting her cubs.)
2. Therefore, external education is necessary to have a rational agent select death.
3. The hijackers received an education that taught that death is not final and led them to choose death.
4. Therefore, this education devalues life in the eyes of the agent.

It follows that all religions that offer such an education devalue life to one degree or another.  Mr. Sink’s insertion of the word “equally”, as in “equally capable of the heinous acts”, is his introduction and does not appear in the original argument.  Sink maintains that the

willingness of an individual to sacrifice their own life for a cause is not evidence of the cheapness of that life.  On the contrary, martyrs understand the value of that which they are giving up.

One clarification: all that is necessary is that the value of an agent’s life is devalued in the agent’s eyes.  However, the main point that martyrs are making a considered personal sacrifice is not borne out by the evidence in this case, nor indeed in most cases of religious martyrdom.  In a non-theistic framework, or a theistic framework that teaches life to be finite, such acts may evidence altruism.  But this is not necessarily (and not likely) the case if the agent is expecting a reward.  An argument that an “eternal life” argument does not contribute to a person’s likelihood to martyr himself defies credulity.  Mr. Sink writes:

You offer no indication that you understand any of the actual intended functions of religion in society.  The world’s religions have brought hope and assistance to billions of individuals for several millennia.

To an extent I agree with Mr. Sink’s second claim here.  It is true that the role of religion at all times and in all places has not been to create homicidal sociopaths.  For instance, it has frequently served as a rapidly-instilled substitute for education (e.g., “allow your fields to lay fallow because you sin against a deity otherwise” versus “allow your fields to lay fallow because this will increase crop yields.”)  It has served as justification for social support by a community.  It has served as a convenient method to instill personal morality, using inexpensive fear as a motivator rather than time- and thought-intensive analysis and deliberation.  It has inevitably and largely unintentionally been passed as a meme along with other elements of group knowledge (”this is how to speak, this is how to make a fire, this is how not to piss of a fierce creature in the sky”).  But the only point where these considerations come into play is in a cost-benefit analysis, namely, “Are the benefits of religion worth the evident costs?”  It is not the case that Dr. Dawkins does not recognize the broader impact of religion in the world; his cost-benefit analysis convinces him that the world would be a better place without it.

Consider the following also:

You  identified yourself as a person who does not know the difference between religion and faith. And, you appear to be a person who is afraid of both.

I admit to some confusion here myself.  However I am in some company.  The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the terms as follows:

faith: belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion; firm belief in something for which there is no proof

religion: commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance; a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices

Considering that the terms are mutually referential, the question is far from settled.  I have re-read Sink’s article and I cannot determine which he is eschewing and which he wishes to be associated with.  Would it be too obvious to note that “you disagree with it, you must be afraid of it” is a less-than-impressive argument?

On to another argument.  Those versed in formal logic will recognize the term Argumentum ad baculum, an appeal to force.  This is the classic but reprehensible technique showcased in “I’ve got a knife to your throat, still disagree with me?” arguments.  So when Mr. Sink writes the following, his argument inevitably deteriorates from unsubstantiated and rude to simple bullying:

I’ll defer discussion of [an afterlife] for the time being, but I would enjoy the opportunity to discuss this concept with you in person.  Let’s meet over coffee in a thousand years or so.  I’ll be living in a large city that is extremely well-lit.  If you need directions to get there, you should probably ask me soon, because you might want to get started on the journey.

The reader will surely recognize an irony here:  Religion is not here to brainwash people nor manipulate them with tales of a glorious afterlife.  Religion is not violent.  If you do not accept this, you will burn in hell forever, whereas I will be treated to an eternal life of luxury.

I cannot credit Mr. Sink with the invention of brute-force, logically fallacious arguments.  But we would be doing ourselves a disservice not to notice one here.

This is creepy.  There is a charity auction going on now at Yahoo! Auctions in which one can pay obscene amounts of money for the outfits Britney Spears wore in the recent Pepsi “Now & Then” ad campaign.  The auctions specifically note that the clothing items are “unwashed” since the filming of the commercial.  I was surprised that this high-profile auction was happening at Yahoo! rather than eBay until I discovered the unwashedness of the clothing; such items are specifically prohibited under the latter’s rules.

Yes.

Beyond the limitation of adopting middle-class blindness as an artistic platform, the problem is that neither Britney Spears nor her fans are innocent.  Sexual innocence is an open sham here, and everyone knows it.  They may be virgins in a strict sense, but this is a mere technicality that relies on a limited physical definition of virginity.  Britney’s song lyrics and dance performances are quintessentially anti-virginity … Together with her smile and thrust-out breasts, Britney Spears’ midriff is a calculated sex substitute: sexual purity meets pure sex … [Virginity] is the physiological point of heteromasculinist title claims and insidious demands for a verifiable female ‘purity’ …

Britney Spears has her political-world analog in Jenna Bush, whose good-girl sham as a presidential daughter falls apart anew with each court appearance for underage drinking.  The public stage appearances of Jenna and Britney both profess a clean-living morality that is too good, too clean …  Jenna nor Britney have any real purchase on public credulity; they are party girls and everyone knows it.  This is the good-time conservatism of the Days of Dubya, where social proprieties are honored rather than practiced …

None of this is new … Given the near-complete civil disenfranchisement of women, this celebration of female chastity might be more dryly discussed as a property management strategy …

Every come-take-me move Britney makes says that she learned early what too-proud Lily Bart [of Edith Wharton's House of Mirth] discovered too late: sex is everything.  As her albums and videos spin to their finish, Britney Spears subverts her own official message: she testifies that even while sexual Victorianism persists as an idea, her world has moved on.

                  - Joe Lockard, “Britney Spears, Victorian Chastity and Brand-name Virginity”, Bad Subjects Magazine