Speaker for the Diodes

5:24AM - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-10-06:

"Wherever the real power in a government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constituents." -- James Madison, The Question of a Bill of Rights, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, October 17, 1788.

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)

5:24AM - QotD

"Brevity demands a sense of ruthlessness." -- Miriam Ruff, The Shortest Distance (2010 Bumbershoot, Inc. Press), on the challenges of writing "ultrashort" fiction -- complete short stories in 150 words or fewer (quoted passage is in the preface).

[I'm pretty sure she doesn't read this journal, but just in case: happy birthday!]

12:54AM - Last-Minute Gig Announcement

Argh! I forgot to mention here:

This afternoon, The Homespun Ceilidh Band will be performing at two o'clock (in the Fiddle Tent) at the Virginia Scottish Games in The Plains, VA (this is the event that used to be held in Alexandria on (usually) the hottest weekend of the summer. Today's forecast is fabulous). Well, temperature-wise, at least; 20 MPH gusts at a fairground full of guys in kilts might present a challenge or two here and there.

5:24AM - QotD

"As for writing using new technologies, IMHO we need to chill. We ridicule the license plate brevity of tweets and text messages, but one person's Facebook update is another's new genre. Most of the writers I know love short forms. An epitaph is a short form: 'To know him was to love him.' The haiku is way shorter than 140 characters. Decades ago, the telegram ruled. Some of the most famous could serve as mini-literature. A reporter writing a profile of Cary Grant sent this telegram to verify the charming actor's age: HOW OLD CARY GRANT? To which he replied: OLD CARY GRANT FINE, HOW YOU?" -- Roy Peter Clark, author of The Glamour of Grammar, interviewed in The New York Times, 2010-08-20

5:25AM - QotD

"I don't feel bad about web surfing at work, bc non-engineers spend the day telling stories about vacations & kids & sports & stuff. Loudly." -- @Redshift42, 2010-08-30 [I get different timestamps in different browsers]

5:24AM - QotD

vvalkyri: "Nearly all of Britain's egg producers started vaccinating their flocks in 1997; check out the precipitous drop in salmonella cases. (It isn't required [in the US ...]"

acroyear70: "oh, we don't want that. What happens when our kids catch autism from the eggs from vaccinated chickens?"

2010-08-31

5:24AM - QotD

"Will this generosity and compassion last in the absence of strong leadership? Will this Administration only ask for sacrifice in a time of crisis? Has dishonesty in politics degraded our national character to the point that we feel our dues have been paid as citizens with a one-time donation to the Red Cross?" -- John Kerry, 2005-09-19

5:24AM - QotD

"Those who say that not everyone who opposes the Cordoba community center is a racist may be right, but everyone who opposes it is supporting a practice that has in the American past been deeply connected to racism, which is the dictation to minorities of where they may live and worship within American cities. Just as today's protesters said that they don't challenge the right of Muslims to build mosques and worship, 'just not here,' so the 'protective councils' in early twentieth century Los Angeles said exactly the same thing to Jews about their synagogues and Japanese Buddhists about their temples. Moreover, the fact is that the building of mosques is being widely opposed and interfered with throughout the country and not just in lower Manhattan. This generalized bigotry is clearly racist, and looks exactly like the prejudice implemented against other minorities in the age of 'separate but equal.'" -- University of Michigan history professor Juan R. I. Cole, "What would Martin Luther King Say? Mosques and the New Jim Crow in America", 2010-08-23

5:24AM - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-03-02:

"The hawks on the program were critical of the publication on the grounds that it undermined confidence in government, but this, of course, is precisely why the publication seems to me so happy an event. It is a very healthy thing for a democracy to be made to realize that government is not infallible and very often consists of exceedingly limited, presumptuous, mistaken and even stupid men. The great lesson, I concluded by saying, is: Don't trust your leaders---until they earn and justify that trust by telling the people the truth." -- Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., from a July 13, 1971 journal entry recalling a televised discussion he had participated in regarding the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Selections from his journals were published in 2007.

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)

5:24AM - QotD

"In a world with Furries in it, anything is possible." -- Þorvald of Confed (mka Nick Hyle), 2010-08-14 or 2010-08-15[*] (at Pennsic)

[... including, apparently, a RW shock-jock with a shaky understanding of history, invoking powerful symbols of the civil-rights movement and MLK in a fit of messianic egomania]

{*] Pretty sure it was 2010-08-15</small>

5:24AM - QotD

"Music has become really important now. It's helped me to open up more and take a chance on loving people. Music is a good reason to care. It's just a vehicle though. It's a way to try and give somebody something that you feel. If trying the best I can isn't good enough, I'll just have to try harder next time ... it's all I can do. If I do the best I can, then at least I did the best I could in this life The way I like to look at it is ... if that's the last time /I ever got to play, I'd better give it everything I've got." -- Stevie Ray Vaughan (b. 1954-10-03, d. 1990-08-27)

5:24AM - QotD

"A man without a vote is man without protection." -- Lyndon Johnson (b. 1908-08-27, d. 1973-01-22; US President 1963-1969)

[In light of what happened on this date ninety years ago, it's probably best to amend this to make it clearly gender-neutral: a person without a vote ... And on that note, let us continue:]

"Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences." -- Susan B. Anthony (b. 1820-02-15, d. 1906-03-13), On the Campaign for Divorce Law Reform, 1860

"Feminism is the radical notion that women are people." -- Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler [For a long time, this has been my very favourite definition of feminism.]

2:45PM - Where did I see a good discussion about improving the dreaded gender question?

[Oh, forgetful me ...]

So, for the umpteenth time, I got ticked off at a web site that required new registrants to pick a gender of "male" or "female" before leaving a comment, and for the several-th (but less than umpteenth) time, I fired off a note to the contact address for the site, asking why that was a mandatory field, and if it was mandatory then why didn't it include the right answer.

Uh, unlike most other web sites I've prodded about this, instead of getting completely ignored, or getting a patently insincere "to serve you better" with no farther explanation, or a buzzword-based brush-off, I got a polite note from a manager, explaining (acceptably vaguely) why the question is there^[1], promising to take it up with the relevant director when he gets back from someplace-else^[2], ...

... And asking for suggestions for labels to add to the list for that field, other than "other", which I had already pointed out was, by definition, 'othering' when it's the only option shown beyond M and F.

I want to make sure I'm giving good advice.

I remember reading some useful discussion of exactly this question sometime in -- uh, the last eighteen or twenty months? -- but can't remember where. It was the kind of discussion where folks supported their opinions and tried to take into account data-analysis messiness as well as the feelings of us folks with not quite "standard" gender (and, IIRC, at least part of the conversation looked specifically at "understand our readership better" and "tell advertisers what our demographic is" reasons for collecting the data in the first place, as opposed to medical situations or dating sites, for example.) Do any of y'all happen to remember where that/those discussions took place, or maybe even have them bookmarked? One of the trans-issues sites? Folks trying to get LJ to improve the gender field in user profiles? DW trying to decide how to set up the same field?

I'm mostly looking for a pointer to the discussion I remembered seeing before, rather than wanting to hash it all out from scratch in comments here, but I'll take folks' thoughts here too.

Off the top of my head, I'm inclined to suggest "male", "female", "both", "neither", "other", as a reasonable (though imperfect) starting point, assuming that they want to keep a pull-down list, don't want to try to list every gender-identity label currently in use, and think too many people would pick "decline to answer" if that were offered^[3]. But I've got this nagging feeling that there were some problems with that scheme that came out in the last discussion, that I really ought to remember.

[1] "This helps us better understand and define our audience which will in turn define and shape the future of our business. This is primarily a research question." This makes me wonder just what they think the gender info is really telling them -- are they working from a stale (or exaggerated) list of expected behaviours/tastes based on gender, or keeping careful track of how what correlations there are change over time, or just tweaking their content by trial and error to try to keep the male-identified:female-identified ratio in a range that makes their advertisers happy? But ultimately, not my problem. I just want the gender field to be made more inclusive, optional, or both. Whether they're being smart about what they do with the data, I'll probably never know.

[2] But no promise that anything would actually get done, because he doesn't know whether they have the ability to alter that part of the form -- which I'm guessing means that the registration/comments section of the site is a package they bought somewhere else or a setup hosted by someone else, rather than a system developed in-house.

[3] LiveJournal, which has "male", "female", and "unspecified", appears to have about 28% of users listed as "unspecified" (though the stats page makes the male & female numbers add up to 100% and ignores the unspecified precentagewise). InsaneJournal, with the same list of options (and the same way of counting percentages), shows about two-thirds of users picking "unspecified". Dreamwidth, with "male", "female", "other", and "rather not say", shows 39% under "rather not say" and 1.6% under "other". I'm guessing that the folks I'm talking to aren't going to like the idea of having one to two thirds of the answers to the gender question fall into a "myob" category if they do change the registration form.

5:24AM - QotD

"I find it interesting that whenever you hear about a crime, some mention is made of both the victim's and the perpetrator's Facebook pages. Looking at some of the things people put on there, do they really want that as their final message to the world should they fall victim to a crime today?" -- DaBroad, June 2009

5:25AM - QotD

"Originalism is a pretty weird ideological phenomenon from a Canadian point of view. It suggests that the Founding Fathers had some sort of super-human knowledge and foresight. Canadians like their national heroes, but I don't think that we tend to imbue any of them with godlike powers. But a significant portion of Americans place a faith in the infallibility of these men's documents that I can only compare to the passion of the most doctrinaire of Marxists." -- sabotabby, 2010-08-18

5:24AM - QotD

"Sure the guys who did this were Muslims, acting out their own particular interpretation of Islam. But they were also young men. And being a young man is probably a much stronger predictor of proclivity toward violence in our society than being a Muslim. Should we also prohibit young men from polluting the hallowed ground of Ground Zero with their unholy testosterone?" -- Dan Kervick, 2010-08-17

"[A]ll I can say about this matter is: build it. Build anything. And continue building.

"This is New York! New York should not tolerate boarded up buildings or unused empty lots. The fact that the WTC site was/is a big f-ing hole in the ground</u> for years after the fact enrages me much more than anything anyone can build near by. New York can build sykscrapers in a matter of months... The fact the even with all the opposition, this cultural center will probably still be finished before the WTC site is complete is much more offensive to me than any religious affiliations it may have."

5:24AM - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2010-01-01:

"Twitter offers the danger of instant gratification masked as real writing." -- Roger Ebert, posting on Twitter, about Twitter.
[http://twitter.com/ebertchicago/statuses/6753320451]

(submitted to the mailing list by Bob Bruhin)

5:24AM - QotD

The entirety of an entry by xpioti, 2010-08-18:

I just saw a pop-in ad: IQ Test! Today's High Score: 127! See if you can beat it! [Next]

I clicked the [x] to close the pop-in. I win.

5:24AM - QotD

"My serious writing energy, when I have it, goes into books and articles. I've always been better at brief summations or long explorations. The in-between size of blog posts is more of a challenge. I really admire people who do it well, [...]" --

5:24AM - QotD

"I wonder if this is just a property of a given audience and their worldview, and what attributes they can either accept in passing without much attention. If your background assumption is that gays are very rare and exotic, then having a gay character in the story feels like having a pistol hanging on the wall--it should be an important part of the plot, somehow. If your background assumption is that gays are part of the world that just show up now and again, then having a gay character in the story feels like having a painting on the wall--it could conceivably be important, but there's no need for the story to turn on that painting.

"And somewhere in here is the notion of visibility of differences. For all its brokenness, modern USian society doesn't hide away its gay members, handicapped members, black members, etc., as it once did. And that means that you can have a minor character in a wheelchair without justifying it by making the story about her struggles with life in a wheelchair, or a gay couple as important characters in a story, without the story being *about* them being gay. It's just another detail to bring those characters to life, like having someone with red hair or something."

-- albatross (commenter at Making Light), 2010-07-21