wool hats

So I am in the market for a new wool hat.

I volunteered at a homeless shelter on Christmas Day, and a homeless man stole my hat (and my down vest and shearling gloves). I feel guilty about even feeling bad about it, because whoever he was, he obviously needed the warm clothes more than I did. Plus, he left my wallet totally untouched. (Yes, I really was stupid enough to leave my wallet and jacket unattended as I wandered through the bunk beds on the "hard core homeless¹" floor of the shelter, wiping down bed frames and walls with bleach solution. I kinda deserved to have it stolen.)

I am very particular about wool hats. When my mother went to Iceland on vacation, she brought me back the warmest hat I've ever had. It was made from Icelandic wool, completely lined with fleece, and it had ear flaps that you could tie under your chin. Wool is warm, but as I'd discovered during my first Western Massachusetts winter, it doesn't necessarily keep out the wind.

This hat did. The fleece lining acted as a wind breaker, and the fact that I could tie it around my chin created a seal that meant no cold air could sneak in under the edges and disturb my large, sensitive ears. It was wonderful.

And then I lost it.

I searched for a replacement for years, and finally, after deciding I couldn't justify spending $44 plus shipping from Iceland to buy a hat that looked, from a blurry picture like it might be the same, I settled on buying one very much like this (though it cost significantly less). That's the one I lost on Tuesday.

So now what? I live in freaking Maryland. It's 53 degrees outside right now. A fleece lined wool hat with ear flaps is the very definition of overkill.

But I'm attached. And besides, I might not always be in Maryland. Maybe I'll move to Boston (or Canada, if Huckabee gets elected. I'm dead serious about that.) You never know! So I'm once again surfing around looking for a replacement.

Here's my current favorite. I can't decide if I'm willing to be seen in public with cat ears on my head. In college, no problem. But shouldn't I have grown up a little by now? yeah, not really.

(1) According to the director of the shelter, the "hard core homeless" are those who only want to come inside when it's cold enough outside that they risk hypothermia.

Hillary Clinton

Summary of Maureen Dowd on Hillary Clinton: "People really are sexist assholes who harp on her looks too much, and it is unfair that people have fewer problems with aging men than aging women, but I still don't like her. She's too focus-grouped."

Actually, I kind of agree with her. Maureen Dowd has a way of getting on my nerves even when I agree with her, though. Everyone who doesn't like Hillary Clinton but doesn't want to come across as sexist talks about how she's too packaged. I don't trust them.

Maybe that's why this Rush Limbaugh quote caught my eye: “Let me give you a picture, just to think about. ... The campaign is Mitt Romney vs. Hillary Clinton in our quest in this country for visual perfection, hmm?” He's even more poll-driven than she is, and if she comes across as kind of plastic, he's a freaking Ken doll.

On another note, I hope this country isn't stuipd enough to elect Huckabee. I'm really worried, though. I think if they did, I would seriously consider moving to Canada. Particularly if I could get into grad school at Waterloo, but even if I didn't.

w00t.

ham

I heard about this on NPR this morning. :)

pic (and original story) from NancyKay Shapiro.

makeup

All of my female cousins in the area have been conspiring to try to teach me to put on makeup. On Saturday, one of them finally dragged me to the MAC store at the mall.

It's not that everyone else somehow got the "makeup gene" or at least lessons from their mothers and older sisters and I just missed out. Instead, I think most women spend their teenage years learning about makeup through trial and error. Gradually, they catch on that no, bold purple eyelids really don't look good, sparkles should be kept to a minimum, and even if you really wish you were more tan, buying a foundation that doesn't match your skin tone is a bad idea.

I missed out on this formative phase, probably because of where I went to school. It's not even so much that at co-ed schools the girls all doll up to impress boys. It's just that my single sex schools (high school and college) were very casual and since I did not really go to parties or dances, I just had no reason to play with the sparkly eyeshadow.


The other thing, as snooty as it sounds, is that I had (have) vague philosophical objections to makeup. It's always seemed unfair how much work women are expected to do, relative to guys, to have a socially acceptable appearance. Plus, I've always wanted to think of myself as the type of person who isn't concerned with outward appearances, and not wearing makeup helped me do that. Also, wearing makeup kind of seemed like playing dress up. I once read a short story where a woman had a line about how she'd never leave the house without "putting on her face." Why should women have to basically put on a mask (aka hide their true selves) to interact with the outside world?

But the thing is, I get it now. Makeup is fun. I know that I'm probably wrong, but while I was in the MAC store on Saturday, I kept thinking how much fun the makeup artist's job must be. It's marginally creative, because obviously there are guidelines for what colors look best on which complexions, but you basically get to choose how to paint someone's face. Painting is fun! Especially when you get to wear a little utility belt filled with like 75 different brushes. And then, they have these handy little worksheets for explaining what they did, and it's basically like filling in a coloring book. I love coloring!

Obviously the experience of putting makeup on at home is nowhere near as varied, so you might think that it's not as fun. But when I said before that putting on makeup kind of seemed like playing dress up, I was right. And dress up is fun too! Maybe there are problems with feeling like you have to put on a mask to face the world, but if the mask is pretty cool looking, you don't object to it too much.

So for the time being, I'm a (sort of) makeup convert. I bought some stuff at the counter, and for the last 3 days, I've managed concealer, foundation, and lip gloss. That's significantly less than the MAC lady used, but it's something. It looks nice. We'll see if it lasts.

I'll post pictures at some point.

Dumb Sentence

A classic criminology textbook, "Principles of Criminology," notes that crime rates for men greatly exceed those for women "for all nations, for all communities within a nation, for all age groups, for all periods of history for which reliable statistics are available, and for all types of crime except those peculiar to females."

no, really?

To be fair, the larger point that there are more men doing more violent things and ending up in prison is true. but that sentence is still annoyingly question-begging. Yes, if you just look at the crimes men commit more of, you will find that men commit more of them.

link

interesting

This is so cool!

I feel bad for admiring what the spammers did here, but it's really very clever and ingenious. Basically, spam bots were signing up for hundreds of free email accounts on sites like yahoo. So yahoo put in CAPTCHAs, otherwise known as those warped images of letters and numbers that are fairly easy for a human to read, but very hard for a computer to read. Clever way of sorting out the people from the computers, right? Now, presumably this solution wouldn't have worked forever, because it has to be possible to train a computer to become as good at recognizing those images as people are. But we're still pretty far from making that happen.

So what do spammers do in the mean time? They figure out how to get humans to do the dirty work for them. The brilliant stroke? use porn. You download a trojan onto your computer (likely by viewing porn in the first place), and it creates a pop-up ad of a woman who takes off an article of clothing for each CAPTCHA you solve. genius.

p.s. once you type the word porn, somehow all the other words around it seem dirtier: "dirty work" "stroke" "trojan" "pop-up" ...you get the idea.

women in math and science

3 related things I've been thinking about lately (i.e. they're showing up all over the blogs I read):
1. Why are women underrepresented in science and math? (is there an IQ distribution issue?)
2. Why are black people underrepresented basically everywhere where high academic achievement is important? (again, is there an IQ issue?)
3. Why are republicans underrepresented in academia? (okay, no one's seriously brought up the IQ issue here, but maybe it's because the people bringing up IQ in the other 2 cases are republicans, and they can't be the dumb ones, can they?)

There's way too much here for 1 blog post, so I'm going to focus on females in math and science (obviously the one that relates most to my own life) and maybe, hopefully get back to the other two in later posts.

The IQ issue everyone raises with females in math/science is that IQ testing shows slightly different bell curves for males and females, with slightly more males on the tail ends (in the "genius" and "retarded" categories, basically) and slightly more females clustered around the middle (in the "normal" category). And maybe, since you have to be really really smart to become a math or science professor, and there are just more really really smart males than females, that explains the disparity.

This explanation really makes me uncomfortable. I guess people should be allowed to bring it up as a possible explanation,because it would be pretty closed minded to summarily dismiss an entire avenue of inquiry. On the other hand, it strikes me as too pat, and I deeply suspect that most people championing it are latching on to convenient, plausible "just so" story about why men are superior to women, and that's just the natural order of things, feminists be damned. (On another note, I think this is part of an overall resurgence in the popularity of social darwinism, at least among the republicans who believe still in evolution, to levels that haven't been seen since the late 19th/early 20th century. I think someone could do really well writing a book or an article about this trend.)

Part of it is that I am a smart female seriously considering going into academia in science or math. Even though I went to a women's college, I have in fact, been pre-judged as not quite as smart because I'm female. (Not at Smith, obviously, but at one godawful summer internship at an Ivy League school, for example.) So it really irks me that a theory that basically amounts to, "Hey, maybe we have all these stereotypes about men being smarter than women because men really are smarter!" gets taken seriously. It's not true in my case, so I'm naturally disinclined to think it'd be true in the general case.

Beyond that, it just seems to be the least verifiable theory. Essentially, I think it's what you're left with after you've ruled out all the other possible explanations. And there are a ton of explanations you have to rule out first. An incomplete list:

What does IQ even measure anyway? Arguably, no one really knows. We think it's good at measuring intelligence, but we're not quite sure what intelligence is, and we're also not sure if we're introducing subtle biases into the testing.

What factors other than intelligence affect IQ scores? There's a really interesting blog post explaining a recent paper on the stereotype threat, which we know does affect test scores here. But we also know things like prior education affect IQ scores. So do things like nutrition. And nobody's satisfactorily explained the Flynn effect which is that everyone's IQ scores the world over seem to get higher over time for no apparent reason.

What about other factors that keep women out of academia? That stereotype effect blog post talks about one of them, the self perpetuating stereotype effect that makes women feel less welcome and less capable simly because there are fewer of them. But what about asshole professors and grad students like the one I encountered at my internship? Or what about subtle messages from teachers in the lower grades who encouraged boys more than girls in math class? There are a lot of other things that could be going on.

And the thing is, even if you think IQ is actually good at measuring intelligence, and even if you think it's good at measuring the type of intelligence you need to succeed in science and math, and even if it is true that there are more genius males than females, you still haven't shown that there should necessarily be more men than women in the math/science fields. What if there are diminishing marginal returns for additional intelligence? Maybe having an IQ over 135 is absolutely vital to being able to understand the science you need to succeed, but beyond that, having an IQ of 142 doesn't help you much, while having something like creativity, or enough social skills to collaborate with your peers really would help?

It's hard to know what the real explanations are. I just really hope the IQ determinists are wrong. Luckily, that seems likely.

video and weekend

So I was just watching this video for national coming out day, and I'm like 95% certain that one of the people in it used to teach at my high school. Exciting! Back in school, I was pretty sure she was gay, but she wasn't really out to the students (then again, what was she supposed to do: make a general announcement?) so if it is her, I guess it means she's become more activist in the past few years? But now I want to verify with someone, and I keep in touch with exactly zero people from high school. How weird would it be to email my old friends and be like, "hey, how are you doing, sorry we haven't talked in a couple years. listen, look at this youtube video and tell me if you recognize X." pretty weird. I'm thinking I might do it anyway.

um, in other words, I was in Chicago last weekend and it was awesome! Yes, yes, I was a lazy bum, and Paige and Sarah and I mostly hung around Sarah's house and watched the discovery channel (which of course was kind of a typical college experience, so it was very nostalgic) but I was so happy to see both of them!

My cousin got married on Saturday evening, and it was a great wedding. The ceremony was super short (15 minutes), and the bride and groom were really cute, because you could tell they were kind of nervous, but they were reassuring each other up at the altar. Everyone had really sweet toasts, and my uncle even got to make a stupid rhyme of "geo-hydrologist and neurobiologist" which we're pretty sure he worked on for months. On Sunday morning they had a brunch, and I got to see some absolutely adorable 9 month old triplets.

I kind of did the tourist thing on Sunday after the wedding brunch. I walked along Michigan Ave and bought Frangos at what would be Marshall Field's had Macy's not taken over the entire world. It was a little sad because there were all these upscale shops that were supposed to be quite the tourist attraction, but they're basically the same shops you see in every city in the US and a whole lot of cities all over the world, too. I did buy caramel corn at garret's popcorn shop, which is actually local, and I ate it in millenium park, got sick from too much sugar, and then headed to the art institute. By the time I made it to the art institute, I'd already been on my feet for a few hours, so I pretty much had museum fatigue before I even went in the door. However, I did manage to see a number of paintings so famous that their reproductions adorn the walls of every dorm room in the country. It was actually kind of interesting to try to force myself to look at those paintings with fresh eyes. Like yes, I've seen that Van Gogh self portrait 80 trillion times so my eyes are glazing over, but hey, it was probably pretty revolutionary when it was first painted. Compare it to the earlier stuff in the other room, and it's pretty different from anything that came before it.

So the art institute was a good time. Actually, the whole weekend was a good time. Of course now I'm exhausted (the flight that got me in at 1am didn't help!) but it was worth it.

Today is October 9th

Why is it 90° outside?

On the one hand, this unseasonably warm weather has let me fool myself into thinking it's still summer, and I'm not over a year out of college still living at home working a boring, dead end job. On the other hand, the delusion only extends so far, because it is once again dark when I leave work every night. Also, jesus fucking christ I'm going to be 23 in 12 days!

the end.

bagels, part II

I tried making bagels again last weekend, and it definitely worked out better. not great, but a step in the right direction.

I spent the greater part of Saturday in pursuit of the very elusive malt powder because I was eager to try a recipe that called for it.

a natural foods co-op, a trader joe's, a giant foods, and 2 whole foods later, I admitted defeat.

Luckily, in addition to stocking a multitude of odd and exotic foods you've never heard of that are not malt powder, Whole Foods has a good selection of cookbooks for sale. I cracked open Baking Illustrated and read what they had to say about bagels. First of all, let me say this book is perfect for me and I covet a copy. They explain everything. There were two pages of exposition on all the different experiments they tried in order to decide on every detail from flour type to water temperature to rising time. I love long, detailed explanations. I'm all about the wordiness. It was love at first sight.

Since I am a cheapo, I did not buy the book, but since I was with my father, a man who has no shame and never gets embarassed, I got some scrap paper from one of the whole foods employees and copied out the recipe. It called for malt syrup, not malt powder, and since whole foods does carry that, I was set.

Here are some interesting things I learned about baking:

1. The difference between bread flour and high gluten flour is that the latter contains 14% gluten, whereas bread flour contains only 12%. If you cannot find high gluten flour in stores (I couldn't), adding in one teaspoon of gluten powder (which most stores do seem to carry) per cup of bread flour approximates the percentages pretty well.

2. You boil bagels for a variety of reasons. It helps make their crust shiny, it stops them from expanding too much in the oven, and it speeds up the action of the yeast on the inside.

3. Despite what most cookbooks say, you really don't need 4 quarts of water to boil your bagels. Baking Illustrated said you only need 3 inches. Which makes sense because if the water is boiling, the bagels should float anyway, so who cares if there are 2 inches or 10 inches of boiling water below them that they're not even touching? Also, most recipes call for anywhere between 5 to 10 minutes of boiling per bagel. 30 seconds works much better.

4. Supposedly, letting things rise in the refrigerator overnight will give your baked goods a better flavor and work just as well as letting things rise in a slightly warm oven for an hour or two. In practice, this doesn't work so well if you forgot whether you used half teaspoon measuring spoon instead of the whole teaspoon one and decide to add an extra teaspoon of salt just in case. It also doesn't work if you're pretty sure you copied down the recipe wrong and you were really supposed to use 1.5 tbsp of yeast instead of 1.5 tsp. However, a little extra salt isn't so bad, and if you're disappointed by how little your baked good has risen overnight, you can still use the warmed oven trick to speed things along the next morning.

mmm bagels

ugh

okay, the way to get through a boring day at work is *not* to start buying things online. even things you arguably need, or things that really are for a good cause.

Here's what's been happening in my life lately:

1. On Saturday I went to the National Book Festival. I got to see Joyce Carol Oates, Diane Ackerman, Joan Nathan, Patricia McCormick, and M.T. Anderson. I did not get to see Terry Pratchett, the whole reason I went in the first place, because
a) I am constitutionally incapable of getting anywhere on time, and
b) You know how when you're driving somewhere, it's good to give yourself at least 15 minutes extra to get there, in case you run into traffic? Well, I'd forgotten when you're taking the DC metro somewhere, the same principle applies, because you never know when you'll run into a FIRE ON THE TRAIN TRACKS! Pretty freaking frustrating.
I also did not get to see the author of Sarah, Plain and Tall, and I didn't get any books signed because I hate lines. Still, I had a good time.

2. On Sunday, I attempted to make bagels. Big Mistake. Okay, more accurately, the mistake was probably using the same recipe I used last time I attempted to make bagels. My mother has this "Jewish Cooking" book that was put together in the '80s by some women at a local synagogue in Iowa. The sheer number of jello dessert (and some jello non-dessert) items should've clued me in to the fact that these recipes are very midwestern and of very variable quality. But I wanted to make bagels. And I was too lazy to turn on the computer. And literally none of my other cookbooks contained a recipe (you'd think at least Joy of Cooking would!). And this book had three. So off I went. My bagels are tiny, dense, kind of soggy, and overcooked. On the bright side, putting the garlic on top of them worked pretty well!
I had a pretty detailed discourse on why I don't think my bagels turned out, but then I realized that really, no one but me is interested in it. So the take-away point is, despite my failure, I am not deterred. I will try again, and this time with a better recipe. Maybe something by Joan Nathan.

That's it for right now, I think.

Bible

The most interesting paragraph I've read in a while:

God himself has an equally murky personal history. At the start of the Bible, God is often viewed as just one of many gods. Only later in the book does he become the sole deity. More confusingly, he doesn’t even seem to be the same god throughout the book. Mostly, God is called YHWH, but sometimes, especially in the earlier books, he’s known as El. According to Kugel, these are probably two different deities fused into one: El may have been a god in the Canaanite pantheon, while YHWH may have been a Midianite god imported, via nomads, to the early Israelites, who made him their only god.

Now I want to read the book.

I'm a bit worried.

I am taking the GRE on Saturday. I would like to score all 800s (6's for the writing), but unfortunately that seems quite unlikely, given that my math skills and vocabulary have deteriorated since high school, and I don't think I've written a timed essay since I was 17.

plus, it's at 8am. what the hell was I thinking?

anyway, feel free to ignore this post. I'm just going to type out the definitions of some words I don't know, because hopefully this will cement them in my mind.

abrogate (v.t.):
1. To annul or abolish by an authoritative act.
2. to put an end to; to do away with
derivation: from Latin abrogare (ab = away from, rogare = to ask; also, to propose a law). so abrogare = to completely repeal a law
sentence: The Massachusetts blue laws on Sunday alcohol sales have recently been abrogated.
abrogation doctrine: con law doctrine describing when the federal government can waive states' sovereign immunity.

amortize (v.t.):
1. to liquidate (a debt) by installment payments.
2. to write off an expenditure for (office equipment, for example) by prorating over a certain period.
derivation: Middle English, but eventually Latin: (ad + mors, mort-) so towards death. to deaden.
sentence: He amortized his mortgage over a period of 30 years.

artful (adj):
1. not straightforward or candid; disingenuous
2. marked by skill at achieving a desired end, especially with cunning or craft. (ant = artless)
sentence: The artful dodger was good at both lying and picking pockets.

bilk(v.t):
1. a. To defraud, cheat or swindle.
b. To evade payment of
2. To thwart or frustrate
3. To elude
sentences: He made millions bilking wealthy clients on art sales. OR He bilked his debts. OR “Fate . . . may be to a certain extent bilked” (Thomas Carlyle)

cynosure (n):
1. anything to which attention is strongly turned; a center of attraction
2. That which serves to guide or direct.
3. Ursa Minor (the constillation)
derivation: comes from Greek word kunosoura, meaning "dog's tail,"
which was apparently the ancient Greek name for Ursa Minor.
sentence: Betty, ever the life of the party, was the cynosure of our social circle.

desultory (adj):
1. jumping or passing from one thing to another without order or rational connection; disconnected. aimless.
2. by the way; as a digression; not connected with the subject.
3. coming disconnectedly or occuring haphazardly; random.
4. disappointing in performance or progress.
derivation: Latin desultor = a leaper (de = down from, salire = to leap)
sentence: Their correspondence consisted of the odd, desultory postcard. OR Their desultory conversation touched on many random topics.

encomium (n):
1. warm, glowing praise.
2. a formal expression of praise; a tribute. a panegyric.
derivation: Greek from enkomion = a formal speech/poem of praise (for a victorious athlete, for example). (en = in, komos = celebration)
sentence: The encomiums about "The Sopranos" likened it to Dickens and Shakespeare.


inimical (adj):
1. having the disposition or temper of an enemy; unfriendly; unfavorable.
2. opposed in tendency, influence, or effects; antagonistic; adverse.
derivation: Latin inimicus = unfriendly, hostile (in = not, amicus = friendly)
sentence: Venus is even more inimical to human existence than Mars.
(NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH INIMITABLE)

invidious (adj):
1. tending to provoke envy, resentment, or ill will.
2. containing or implying a slight
3. envious
derivation: Latin. invidiosus = envious, hateful --> invidere = envy --> invidere = to look upon with the evil eye (in = upon, videre = to look at)
sentence: The lover's obsessiveness may also take the form of invidious comparisons between himself, or herself, and the rival.
-- Ethel S. Person

minatory (adj):
1. threatening, menacing
derivation: Latin minatorious --> minari = to threaten. (related to menace)
sentence: The guard gave him a minatory look and he decided not to cause any trouble.

sinecure (n):
1. an office or responsibility that involves little work or responsibility
derivation: Medieval Latin sine = without cura = care (originally described a church office without the care of souls. i.e. an empty title.)
sentence: The position of VP on house council is a sinecure.

traduce (v.t.):
1. to cause humiliation or disgrace by making malicious and false statements; to malign.
derivation: Latin traducere = to lead as a spectacle; to dishonor (trans + ducere = to lead)
sentence: You traduced my good name around the world.

Alberto Gonzales

When I found out Alberto Gonzales was resigning yesterday, my first thought was, "why resign on a Monday?" As all good fans of The West Wing know, when you want to bury stories in the news cycle, you announce them on Friday. Reporters are more likely to go to home early on Fridays so things might not make it into Saturday's paper, the Sunday paper is planned way in advance, and the Sunday shows are booked way in advance, so not much will get said until Monday, at which point the news is stale.

So, strategically, when you must announce things that make you look bad, you should try to slip them in to Friday afternoon news conferences.

It makes the president look bad that Gonzales resigned. He probably knew he was going to resign by Friday. In fact, don't you think he probably knew he was going to resign weeks ago, when the US attorney scandal first broke? So why wait until Monday, when he would dominate coverage for much of the week?

I see two possibilities:
1. Bush thinks it doesn't make him look that bad. After all, everything he does is basically a major fuck-up. Maybe it actually makes him look good to clean out the cabinet of his cronies. like he's actually taking responsibility for his actions. to me, this is the less likely possibility. the more likely possibility is,
2. Bush was trying to bury something else in the news cycle. something that got announced on Friday, but was overshadowed by Gonzales's announcement on Monday. The only thing was, I couldn't think of what it could be.

Then, I read Bob Herbert's column in the NYT($) today, and I have a nomination.

For the past few weeks, Congress has been trying to expand funding for SCHIP (State Childrens Health Insurance Program). This is a program that gives health insurance to poor kids who wouldn't be covered otherwise. Pretty much everyone, democrat and republican, supports it because how can you explain being against sick, defenseless children to your constituents. Bush is basically the only person speaking out against it, and indeed, he's threatened to veto any congressional expansion of the program. But even for Mr Unpopularity, that would look pretty sucky, so what does he do instead? He waits until a Friday night when Congress is out of session to unilaterally impose draconian new restrictions on how states can administer the funds. No need to actually sign a veto, and just for extra protection, he announces the resignation of an unpopular figure the following Monday so no one will pay too much attention.

look at this quote from the Op-Ed.

“We had zero forewarning,” said New Jersey’s Jon Corzine. “It was sprung at 7:30 on a Friday night in the middle of August, the time when it would draw the least fire.”

or this one from yesterday's NYT editorial:

Late on a recent Friday while Congress was in recess, a time fit for hiding dark deeds, the administration sent a letter to state health officials spelling out new hurdles they would have to clear before they could insure children from middle-income families unable to find affordable health coverage.

Emphasis mine, but it looks like the NYT pretty much agrees with me.

Laura Sessions Stepp

Oh, this article pissed me off this morning.

Which, considering the author, is not exactly surprising.

Let's summarize the article below:

Women Talk Too Much
by Laura Sessions Stepp
Conventional wisdom says that girls talk more than boys. I believe conventional wisdom is usually right. After all, just think of any high school cafeteria anywhere. You'll always hear the girls complaining about their latest school, diet, or boy troubles. In fact, you could even say, "While males tend to think their way through problems, females tend to talk their way through."* If you don't believe me, ask the 2 college students I interviewed for this article. (You might remember them as the 2 college students I interviewed for my groundbreaking piece of investigative journalism, Unhooked, a book describing the "hook-up culture" that I argue is pervading college campuses everywhere, and ruining our young girls' chances at ever finding meaningful relationships. What hath feminism wrought?!) They are experts on the conversational patterns of males v. females. After all, one of them's female, and the other is male! How much more expert can you get, people?!

Since my modus operandi is to repackage conventional wisdom with shiny new labels saying, "IT'S SCIENCE," I will now proceed to do. William Doherty agrees with me, and he's a professor. Ignore the fact that he hasn't done any peer reviewed research on this hypothesis, because he has a PhD. Or consider this: Alice Rubenstein is a clinical psychologist and she agrees with me too. She wrote a book for popular audiences called, "The Inside Story on Teen Girls." That's kind of like doing real research, isn't it? And if that isn't enough for you, consider that Louann Brizendine agrees with me. She's a neuropsychologist, and she wrote a popular book about gender brain differences. Never mind that she's been repeatedly discredited or that she's since rescinded her widely quoted assertion that women talk more. No, she said it once, and she used big scientific sounding words, so it must be true.

In conclusion, I am full of bullshit. The end.

*actual quote. boys think. girls talk. presumably mindlessly. boys are smart and girls are dumb. the end.

so cute.

I want a lion.

from the WaPo (where else?)

Jena, LA

This story is crazy.

Summary and quotes from the NPR Story:
At Jena High School in Jena, La., the white kids ate their lunch under a big shade tree in the courtyard, and the black kids ate by the auditorium. Last year, during a school assembly in September, a black freshman asked if he was allowed to sit under the tree. The principal said he could sit anywhere he liked.

Three white boys on the rodeo team apparently disagreed. The next morning, there were three nooses hanging from the shade tree in the courtyard.

The boys weren't expelled or arrested, and the nooses were judged a prank. They were given in-school suspension.

The school called an assembly and summoned the police and the district attorney. Black students sat on one side, whites on the other. District Attorney Reed Walters warned the students he could be their friend or their worst enemy. He lifted his fountain pen and said, "With one stroke of my pen, I can make your life disappear."

That evening, black students told their parents that the DA was looking right at them. Walters denies that.

On Nov. 30, Jena High school was burned down. Each race thought the other was responsible.

The next night, Robert Bailey, a 16 year old black student at the school, tried to attend a mostly white party. He was beaten up, and a guy at the party broke a beer bottle over his head. The incident wasn't investigated until months later, when the white boy who attacked him was charged with battery and given probation.

The next day, a kid from the party threatened Rober Bailey with a gun. Bailey and his friends managed to wrestle the gun away, and he took the gun home with him. For that, he was charged with theft of a firearm, 2nd degree robbery, and disturbing the peace. The guy who pulled the gun on him wasn't charged at all.

The following Monday, a white kid named Justin Barker was bragging in the halls about beating up Bailey at the party that weekend. When he walked into the courtyard, six black students attacked him, and he was sent to the hospital. The injuries were superficial, and he was released later that evening.

The six kids were charged with aggravated assault, but the district attorney increased the charges to attempted second-degree murder. One student has already had a trial, in which his court-appointed lawyer did not mount any defense, and an all-white jury found him guilty. This school football star had a chance at a scholarship to a Division I school, but instead, he's now facing up to 22 years in prison.

So, to review:
White kids:

• Put hangman's nooses in a tree to show black students they weren't welcome.


• Ganged up on a black student and beat him up.


• pulled a gun on the same student

yet somehow, it's the 6 black kids facing jail time and being accused of attempted murder?

how is this happening in 2007?

awww

Aren't bats cute?

education

so I've been reading this washington post forum about AP and IB education, and there's this one lady on the forum who's convinced that IB is this big socialist conspiracy to turn America's children into young pioneers. Also, everything that's wrong with US education today is the fault of the Liberals. (and Californians, but really Californian is a synonym for liberal.)

Her evidence for IB is that it's based in Geneva (those scary Swiss people are corrupting our minds?), it has an association with the UN (I guess some right wingers think it's a clever socialist enterprise to destroy America), and in her son's IB US History class, they had to read Howard Zinn. I really want to respond to her, but jesus christ, do I have to sit there and find sources to prove that the UN is not a socialist conspiracy? I'm lazy. Also, I'd want to be nice and polite about it because I can't post anonymously, but that removes like 98% of the fun, so I probably won't bother.

But the thing is, I was still thinking, "maybe I can prove to her that reading Zinn, as long as you read other history books too, is fine. After all, kids should be taught to evaluate their sources critically, and besides, he approaches history in a way not traditionally found in High School textbooks. For one thing, he remembers that women and minorities exist." So I started googling IB US History reading lists, and a couple things happened. First of all, I started feeling this weird nostalgia for my old history books Boller and Boyer. Let's consider for a moment that I barely even read the Boyer. what? It was boring. I liked primary sources. But still, it was funny to see their names on a bunch of reading lists again. Second of all, I started getting really grateful that I was done with high school. The syllabi had cutesy idiotic word puzzles to teach you the name of random European rivers, dumb map quizzes, and waay too much rote memorization for my taste. My high school wasn't that bad, but I wonder, with the kids all reading just a boring textbook and doing lots of mindless busywork, how does anyone in those classes graduate from high school liking history at all?

verbs

from the TV column in the Washington Post. (at the CW press tour about "Aliens in America," a new TV show about a Pakistani exchange student in the Midwest.)

"You are dealing with people . . . from a part of the world that aren't always very tolerant, you know -- the Danish cartoon thing and everything. Do you have a technical adviser to keep you from getting Salman Rushdied?" another critic said.

We'll pause here so you can reread that question.

link.
woohoo for new verbs. It reminds me of this post.

congress

this post is really interesting. It's about how comparisons of Bush's approval rating and Congress's approval rating are misleading. It makes a lot of intuitive sense when you think about it, but I hadn't really thought about it. The basic idea is that yeah, Congress's numbers are low, but they're *always* low. In fact, apparently in the last 27 years, their approval rating has only gotten above 50% twice. This makes sense because you might like what what your personal representatives are doing doing, but that doesn't mean you'll like what the other 500-odd people you didn't vote for are doing. On the other hand, presidential approval ratings are usually above 50%. This also makes sense because everyone votes for the president and the winner will usually have at least 50% of the vote. Presumably, unless s/he really fucks up, the president is going to keep a lot of that support, and might even pick some up from the other side. So even though Congress and the President are both polling in the 30's, it's much worse for Bush. It's a lot harder to make 65% of the population hate 1 person than it is to make them hate a legislative body of hundreds who are constantly bickering with each other.

The other interesting thing I hadn't thought about was that even Congresspeople run against congress. Everyone wants to be against the "washington establishment," so of course you'll hear the president calling congress "do-nothing" or corrupt, but you're also going to hear congresspeople calling each other "do-nothing" or corrupt. Of course Congress polls low--it's giving itself bad PR!

newest jay mathews column

here.
It's an okay column. A bit contradictory in some places, maybe. (colleges should let the kids know that admissions is a crapshoot, but shouldn't mention that in the rejection letter?) anyway, it's mostly notable because I'm (pseudonymously) quoted.

And he got my gender wrong.

Whatever, though. Still very exciting!

p.s. the Gender Genie is kind of fun. I found it or something like it a couple years ago and pasted in a bunch of my academic papers. yeah, it thought I was male too.

I haven't read a lot about the algorithm, but it does seem like the differences could be due to the disparate topic choice rather than style differences when writing about the same topic. For example, using the pronoun "I" apparently makes you sound female. But I would almost never use "I" in a formal academic paper. It would be kind of neat to try the experiment again, but with a group of papers all on the same topic, maybe a class essay assigned a few years in a row to a large group of college students? If you could discern two distinct styles, it would be interesting to see which style got the higher grades.

2 nytimes articles

"Women who grow up in fatherless homes menstruate at an earlier age than those who don’t, and surely perceive their love affairs differently as well." -David Brooks

You know what we used to do in debate when we wanted to get to a certain conclusion from a premise, but the logic wasn't quite there? We'd say, "but surely, y follows from x. it's so obviously true that it's not even worth explaining."

brooks

Also, I am a little bit in love with this article. I mean "freegans." really? it sounds like an april fool's joke, but in june.

drugs

pretty cool. I sort of think he's being too optimistic about the whole thing (maybe it's my inner depressive speaking) but this is just the kind of direction that mental health treatment should be headed. you know how looking back now it seems absolutely ridiculous that doctors used things like leeches to treat people? I think/hope that 50 years from now, today's mental health treatments will look just as ridiculous. I also think that cancer treatments (especially chemo) will look absolutely barbaric.

you know what would be cool? if you could program mentally ill robots. I bet that would somehow be useful for artificial intelligence research. Of course Douglas Adams was thinking of that many years ago.

okay, enough mind wandering. back to work.

gogs and museums

from the going out gurus:

Washington, D.C.: Not sure you can answer this. Where do the philosophers, writers, artists and dreamers hang out? I want really good conversation. Am I in the wrong city?

Jen: My understanding is they all gather at the Rainbow Connection. At least, that's where you'll find the lovers, the dreamers and me.

perfect.

on another note, my least favorite oft-repeated line in these chats has to be, "we've already done the museum thing."

no. you haven't. I promise. let us count the free museums on the mall:
natural history
air & space
african art
native american history
hirshhorn
national gallery
freer & sackler

I am not even including american history because they are under renovation.

Let's say that the extremely unlikely is true, and you have actually been to every single one of these museums. Let's further posit that you are incapable of travelling beyond the mall or paying even a nominal admission fee and must therefore miss out on say, the national portrait gallery, the corcoran, or even the spy museum. can you now safely say you've "done the museum thing?"

no.

because here's the great thing about museums: they have exhibitions. and the great thing about exhibitions? they change. museums continually invest their (too limited) resources into putting up new and exciting shows for your viewing pleasure. it's awesome.

When someone says, "I've already done the museum thing," it means they've been to a museum or two once, and that's it. They got their dose of "culture" so now they can move onto something fun. Like eating your spinach, you hold your nose and do it because it's "good for you" and besides, once you're done, you get to have dessert.

What's so frustrating is that museums, especially the free ones on the mall, are designed to counteract exactly that attitude. why do you think they put in all the films, computer kiosks, and hi-tech audio tour equipment? why do you think they had wall texts and actual artifacts in the first place, instead of just saving time and publishing some informative books?

it's annoying.

link

boring

I haven't had anything interesting to say lately, but that hasn't stopped me from wanting to say stuff, so now, in the hopes that a few dull posts somehow miraculously add up to one interesting one, I present 5 posts I started and never finished because they were sort of boring:

today
This Site is why I haven't gotten any work done today.

also, I now have exactly 666 unread messages in my Gmail inbox. spooky.

6/11/07
http://www.janegalt.net/archives/009841.html

a meme that's been travelling around livejournal and xanga sites for years makes it to a serious economics blogger. :)

6/6/07
gah.

6/4/07

Meet Mac McGarry, host of the longest running TV quiz show in the world.

I watch this show somewhat religiously. In fairness, I was on it my senior year of high school, but still, you'd think I would have moved on by now. You'd be wrong. Sometimes I think I've gotten stupider since high school, as I cannot beat any but the worst schools when playing at home. I comfort myself by remembering that I was by far the weakest team member when I was in high school, so probably with my two genius teammates, we could still kick ass. (Great comfort, right? "It's not that I've gotten stupider since high school, I was just as stupid then, too!")

I think my minor obsessiveness rubbed off from my coach. He's videotaped every game since the mid '70s, and has a filing cabinet filled with questions typed on index cards. So really, the fact that I just try to catch it most Saturdays at 10am is pretty sane.

5/25/07
I am so dissatisfied with all of blogger's layouts. I kind of want to spend the rest of the afternoon tweaking, but considering that I'm at work and even if I were going to slack off, pretty much the only tools at my disposal are notepad and paint, I'll refrain. mostly.

for the time being, no more minima or minima stretch. text is black on (almost) white, the color scheme is okay, and the font is readable. rounders is okay. but it looks so out of the box and boring.

in my continuing quest to cite the NYTimes at least 5 billion times a day, here is today's funny book review:
An Assault on Hawaii. On Grammar Too.

Burke is leaving Grey's

fuck.

Okay, for a second there I was really upset, because how upset is Christina going to be when Burke just does not return at all ever? She really loves him. She'll be devastated.

But now I'm thinking it's a good thing.

Because first of all, Isaiah Washington sounds like a homophobic asshole, so I don't feel very sorry for him. But more importantly, I think Christina needed this. With the possible exception of Bailey, she is the most awesome character on the show and the one I root for the most. Her relationship with Burke has been souring for a really long time. Things were fucked up right when Burke got shot and Christina couldn't make a decision for him, maybe even before then (I don't remember). Their relationship kept coming back from the brink of collapse to be closer but unhealthier than ever.

I'm not going to go into all the ways Christina did penance, but the show has been pounding into our heads that Christina is giving up own identity. I got the message when asshole Stanford prof overheard her faking ignorance about some surgery to prop up Burke's ego. He literally said something like "You're not the Christina Yang I knew." If you didn't get the point then, in the season finale, Mama Burke made her wear a freaking choke collar (okay, it was a necklace, but the symbolism was there) to show that she belonged to (was owned by?) the Burke family. The eyebrows thing was just icing.

At this point, I think if Burke came back, the cycle of almost collapse --> increased dysfunction would just get worse. That would be terrible. Now she'll be devastated, but at least she'll have a chance of becoming strong and independent again.

I love Gene Weintgarten

Gene Weingarten: This reminds me of a Style Invitational entry that never got published. We had printed sounds and people had to say what the sounds meant. The sound was "Fizz Fizz, plop plop," and the entry said: What is the sound of two babies discovering Drano?

Sorry.

link.

evolution

Sam Brownback on Evolution

Summary:
"When I said I didn't believe in evolution, what I really meant is that I am a man of faith. Did I mention that people are God's chosen creation? Also, microevolution exists, but the other kind is kind of sketchy because I believe in God. and straw men. Did I mention how much I love God? Blah blah blah faith, reason, I have an eloquent ghost writer. God is good. A lot of evolutionary scientists are actually atheists, and God forbid I trust anything an atheist says! Did I mention how much I love God? And reason? (as long as it doesn't conflict with God?)"

I love the Style section

The main reason I love the Washington Post Style section is: 3 pages of comics, 2 crosswords, and a sudoku. I can be occupied all morning without ever finding out what's going on in the world. And that's before you even count doonesbury on p.2, the reliable source, ask amy, and carolyn hax.

Once you take out all the games, gossip, comics, and syndicated columns, there's not actually much left to the Style section, which is sort of sad because I like fluffy stories, but the fluff that remains does not disappoint.

Today, for example, there was a review of a recent Fortune magazine article calling Generation Y lazy, entitled, and spoiled. You know, what the Wall Street Journal said a few weeks ago. I'm glad someone finally called bullshit.

Generation Y is the media term for people born between 1977 and 1995. Of course, it's a complete fiction: All Americans between the ages of 12 and 30 are no more alike than all Jews or all Asian Americans or, for that matter, all Latvian lesbian taxidermists. But birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, magazines gotta run generalizations about generations. God knows the baby boomers have been hyping themselves for decades.

I want to be a Latvian lesbian taxidermist when I grow up.

Also, today, apparently by the same author, was this profile of the author of The Joy of Drinking.



a quote:

Smiling, she offers her visitor a choice: "You want to go outside and get pneumonia or stay in here and get lung cancer?"

and another:

"There's a local restaurant where, when I show up, they get me a glass of merlot," she says, "and everybody keeps telling me that nobody is drinking merlot any more; everybody is drinking pinot noir. Well, frankly, darling, I'm not sure I could tell the difference."

I want to read that book.

parthenogenesis

You should read this article.
1. it's pretty gay.
2. the shark is cute, isn't it?
3. parthenogenesis is a cool word.

immigration

okay, a short post on the same day as a super long one. (sorry!)

Many who speak out against illegal immigration say that the increased worker supply depresses wages and puts "real americans" out of work.

In the short term, they are probably right.

Many of those same people are scared to death of factories in China or call centers in India because they depress wages and put "real americans" out of work.

I could talk about comparative advantage, but at a very low skill level, they're right again.

But here's where people have a disconnect. Companies will do anything to save money. They can cut labor costs by continuing to operate in the US and hiring (possibly illegal) immigrants, or they can cut labor costs by moving overseas. Those are the options. You can't force companies to spend more money than they want to spend. Well, I suppose you could pass some law requiring them to both stay in the US and spend more. But you know what they could do then? Go out of business.

So you only have two choices: let companies hire immigrants, or let companies outsource. Which is worse? Even if you are totally xenophobic and short sighted (maybe even because you are), isn't outsourcing worse? At least immigrants wages, even under the table, untaxed, and way below minimum wage (descriptions which are not always true), are turned around and spent in the US economy. Immigrants still need to buy food and shelter and transportation. Do you prefer it if those low cost foriegners are contributing to your own GDP or to India's?

I am oversimplifying a lot of things. I'm still right, though.

challenge index

Every year, Washington Post reporter Jay Matthews publishes a list of top high schools in Newsweek called the Challenge Index. He calculates the number of AP/IB/Cambridge tests taken divided by the number of seniors in a school and ranks everyone by that number. Every year people claim that his rating system is too narrow, or too damaging, or even misleading, and every year he writes a column to defend himself.
here is this year's.

His main point is that a school is good if it challenges *all* of its students, not just its highest achievers, and that even if students take an AP class and do poorly on the exam, they have still benefitted from being exposed to college level work. It makes a lot of sense. However, I think he's being too dismissive of his critics. Here's a quote from this year's column:

Recently two education experts, Andrew Rotherham and Sara Mead of the Education Sector think tank in Washington, D.C., said it was wrong for Newsweek to label "best" schools with high dropout rates and low average test scores like many of the low-income schools on the list.

Offhand, it looks like they hit on the two big ways that a school could game the ratings system. I'm sure Matthews would argue that his index isn't influential enough for people to bother gaming it. He's probably mostly right, but the issues they raise are still worth considering.

First, there's the issue of low average test scores. He's absolutely correct in pointing out that standardized test scores overwhelmingly correlate with parental income levels (and have a small additional correlation with race, I'd add), so that if you don't believe that richer (or whiter) kids are simply smarter, you're seeing the lifetime effects of a second class education reflected in those scores. In other words, schools are doing the best they can to play catch up, and we should reward them for trying.
I agree.
However, the reason Matthews counts AP, IB, and Cambridge tests, but not community college or honors classes, is that the first 3 have universal, independently evaluated standards while the last 2 do not. A big program in high schools is "course title inflation," where "senior calculus" is really nothing more than first year algebra, or honors english never has you writing a paper longer than two pages. AP, IB, and Cambridge are less prone to title inflation because there's an exam at the end, so if the whole class fails the exam, you know something fishy is going on.
Except when you don't. because the kids are poor.
See the problem? I don't think you'd find a school deliberately enrolling kids in a faux AP European History class so that they sit through a 3 hour long exam, score their 1's, and improve the school's challenge index rating. I do think you can find schools willing to offer comprehensive, challenging AP Euro classes, until the teachers realizes how underprepared their students are and start assigning 2 page essays and diorama projects instead.

Second, there's the issue of dropout rates. This is really simple: If your formula is (# of tests)/(# of seniors) you can make yourself look good by raising the numerator OR by lowering the denominator. I don't know if this actually happens outside of Pump Up The Volume, but concievably a school could push its problem students out, if not by expelling them, then by making school a place where they really don't want to be. Even if nothing sinister is going on, a school with a high dropout rate is certainly not helping all its students succeed. It's giving up on a lot of them. I think the formula should be reworked to take this into account. Assuming incoming class size stayed static from year to year, you could calculate (# of tests)/(# of freshmen) so that you're measuring the AP participation rates based on a class's original size. or maybe continue to calculate (# of tests)/(# of seniors), but then multiply the result by (1 - dropout rate).

Matthews responds to criticism with a great movie analogy:

The adjective "best" always reflects different values. Your best movie may have won the most awards; mine may have sold the most tickets. In this case, I want to recognize those schools with the teachers who add the most value, even in inner-city schools where no one has yet found a way to reduce dropouts or raise test scores significantly.

Great, but not sufficient. You've just shown me that it's possible to have different, equally valid rating systems for the same product, but you've yet to prove that your system is one of the valid ones. I'll take that movie analogy and respond with a (somewhat tortured) television one:
What are the "best" TV shows? Are they the ones that win the most Emmys or the ones that have the most viewers? Maybe you think the latter is true, so you rank your shows by Neilsen ratings. But take a closer look at Nielsen ratings. People self-report what they watch and do not always mention when they change a channel or leave the room or mute the commercials. You don't know the real quality of a viewer's watching experience. Furthermore, Neilsen doesn't count shows recorded on DVRs unless they're watched within 24 hours, so you're not getting the true number viewers. What Neilsen tries to measure is worth measuring, but that doesn't mean its doing a good job of capturing it. The same could be said of the challenge index.

gonzales

James Comey Testifies before House Judiciary Committee

My favorite part of this story is how Alberto Gonzales is such a dirt bag that he actually manages to make John Ashcroft look like a good guy. Okay, I'm using a very broad definition of the word favorite.

I also love how Arlen Specter tries to praise Bush for not letting Gonzales utterly disregard the Justice Department. Because Bush has too much respect for the Justice Department. Which is why he promoted Gonzales to head the department after Ashcroft resigned.

Other absolutely awesome things:
As soon as paul McNulty resigns, Gonzales tries to pin all the US Attorney firings on him. Just like he did with Sampson when Sampson resigned. Also, is it just me, or was McNulty not the first bush official to cite the rising costs of college tuition in his resignation letter? I wonder if saying that is secret code for "I'm the sacrificial lamb" or something?

grammar lesson

caché != cachet != cache

A lot of people write cache because they don't know how to make an é, but usually caché is wrong too!

for reference:

cache is an English noun that means hiding place or storage place.

caché is the past participle of a french verb. It means concealed.

cachet is an English noun meaning mark of distinction.

they are all derived from the same root, but you are still wrong.

thank you.

I just booked a flight to go to Smith graduation. which means I paid about twice what I could've if I'd gotten my shit together 2 weeks ago. still, I'm positively giddy. I'm literally sitting at my desk laughing. and getting strange looks. so back to work.

quality freaks

This essay is about books, not TV, but my fellow elimidate fans should still relate. In particular, this paragraph needs to be on a t-shirt or something:

Most of us are familiar with people who make a fetish out of quality: They read only good books, they see only good movies, they listen only to good music, they discuss politics only with good people, and they’re not shy about letting you know it. They think this makes them smarter and better than everybody else, but it doesn’t. It makes them mean and overly judgmental and miserly, as if taking 15 minutes to flip through “The Da Vinci Code” is a crime so monstrous, an offense in such flagrant violation of the sacred laws of intellectual time-management, that they will be cast out into the darkness by the Keepers of the Cultural Flame.

I love people who rant about "The da Vinci Code." They take themselves so seriously it makes me smile. It's this awesome attitude which essentially amounts to "how could you like that?! Stupid people like that!" as if the stupidness is in imminent danger of rubbing off.

Marilee Jones

She's my favorite news story of the week. In case you haven't been paying attention, here's the relevant background info:

Marilee Jones was the dean of admissions at MIT. She's become quite the big name among circles of striving suburban parents because she speaks out against the high stakes/high pressure college admissions process. MIT still rejects 9 out of every 10 applicants, but because of her influence, they've made tweaks like not weighing the SAT quite as heavily. Anyway, it turns out that this spokesperson for easing the pressure on high school seniors to have increasingly impressive resumes lied on her resume. big time. She claimed to have 3 college degrees that she just didn't have.

Anyway, that story was great enough, because it looked like she didn't have a college degree at all (she wasn't providing evidence of one). So here's this high powered Administrator at one of the most selective schools of the country, making or breaking the dreams of thousands of college applicants, and she doesn't even have a diploma.

But this article says she does have a degree. It's from some small Catholic school in Upstate NY. This raises the question of why she even lied in the first place. After all, the first job she applied to at MIT only required a Bachelor's, and it turns out, she had one. The even better question, though, is why didn't she mention this degree when people asked her if she had any degrees at all? Because you see, MIT found out about this one through an anonymous tip.

My only conclusion is that there must be some glamorous story behind it all, possibly involving the witness protection program, mob connections, and a savant-like ability to pick up and master new professions at will à la The Pretender.

duck phallus

most random article of the day.

just read this paragraph:

When she first visited in January, the phalluses were the size of rice grains. Now many of them are growing rapidly. The champion phallus from this Meller’s duck is a long, spiraling tentacle. Some ducks grow phalluses as long as their entire body. In the fall, the genitalia will disappear, only to reappear next spring.

plus, the picture is sort of adorable.


caption: Patricia Brennan, a behavioral ecologist, examining the phallus of a Pekin duck.


and for the record, the image is named 01duck.xlarge1

meta

I was going to post about much more serious things, but given the title of this blog, I couldn't resist sharing this map.

This seems like as good a time as any to describe the thought process behind the naming of my blog, so I'll do that too. The url is strongai.blogspot.com, as in Strong A.I. Look it up on wikipedia if you want to, but I guess, put simply, if you believe in Strong A.I., then you think that it's theoretically possible to build a machine that's conscious in the same way that humans are conscious. A lot of people are really uncomfortable with this concept--I certainly am--but I also don't see any way around it unless you introduce a vaguely religious sounding concept of higher consciousness that I instinctively mistrust. Anyway, that's my Armchair Philosopher take. But even though it's disconcerting to think of some computer essentially having feelings and being creative and basically being human in a way we think is unique to us, it's also pretty damn cool. And I want to help design that computer. Also, wouldn't it be cool if I was that computer? or if one of the thousands and thousands of blogs out there was actually written by him/her/it? So I kind of wanted the url iamarobot, but that was taken. so I took this instead.

and now onto the title. writing a "hello world" program is one of the first things you tend to do when you're learning a new programming language. I don't know how it became such a widespread practice, but it definitely is one. and it's so ingrained in me now that whenever I'm learning any new application, "hello, world." tends to be one of the first things I type. That's what happened here. exciting, no?

free trade

summary of this fascinating nytimes article:

So, have you guys heard of the labels "organic" or "cruelty free" or "sustainable"? Well guess what, there's a new touchy-feely label in town! These days, all the hip coffee shops in Brooklyn are selling this cool new* product called "fair trade" coffee. Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, and McDonalds have recently** picked up on this trend! It's not mainstream yet--after all, Maxwell House doesn't sell it, and there are like 30 people in Middle America who still drink Maxwell House. Besides, it's vaguely European.

So here's how fair trade works: coffee distributors buy coffee beans from farmers at fair prices. Get it? fair trade = fair prices? Clever, right? You might be wondering, who decides what a "fair" price is? Well, we wondered the same thing. Unfortunately, it turns out, no one really knows or cares. We asked a couple people, and they just looked at us funny, so we stopped digging, because, well, it's not like we're hard-hitting news reporters. We work for the style section for crying out loud! Besides, it's not like distributors would lie to you and claim to be more ethical than they are just to jack up prices. So just trust us. After all, we are totally hip, with a finger on the pulse of the "green revolution!" (P.S. We totally stole that phrase from Tom Friedman. He's a middle aged father living in suburban Maryland, but sometimes he shares a page with Maureen Dowd, so you know, he has street cred.)


*in 1998
**in 1999

Why I miss Smith

I was reading this blog post at the NYT today.

Since it's only available to TimesSelect subscribers, I'll summarize.

It's a stream of consciousness rambling that starts out talking about the romantic comedy film class she took at Dartmouth last quarter. She moves on to analyzing how romance has changed in the age of facebook. Apparently, it's likely that no guys signed up to take the romantic comedy class because if they put that class on their facebook profiles, they'd look gay. Right, because everyone lists classes on their facebook profiles. She then starts talking about the possible long term consequences of people getting bashed on websites when they're young and then having those hurtful remarks show up years later on their "google resumes."

Here's a quote:

For example, Dartmouth students have recently had to deal with the construction of the Web site boredatbaker.com (which has cousins at the other Ivies, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University and Stanford). Intended as a community tool, this Web site has mutated into a forum for the anonymous publication of very personal attacks on students who must try their best not to be emotionally affected when people publicly question their sexuality, comment on their physical appearance and speculate about their value as humans.

I just don't see anyone at Smith ever getting offended at someone questioning her sexuality. Flattered, maybe, but mostly just indifferent. Why can't the rest of the world catch up?

I mostly liked the post. Social networking sites and "google resumes," to borrow her term, are a popular topic to report on at the moment, and while she didn't say anything new, it was nice to actually hear the opinions of someone who uses the sites she talks about. Also, the writer seems smart and articulate, but self conscious, and not always cognizant of when she needs to edit down her own work. I can definitely relate to that.

This is probably offensive somehow, but I wonder if the VA Tech shootings are going to help DC get voting representation in congress? As I understand it, the reason the bill to give DC & Utah a vote died last time was that some republican congresspeople attached a rider to repeal DC's super strict gun laws. Given the awful demonstration of gun violence that just occurred, I think they'd be much more wary of trying something similar if the bill comes up again. On the other hand, at this point the DC voting rights issue is so buried in the news cycle that maybe the bill will get lost in the shuffle. Who knows?

trend

the lady behind the counter at subway just called me sir. in fairness, she was looking at the counter at the time, but still. oh, and I got new glasses. they are blue and shiny, and though metal, they look vaguely like horn rims. there will be a picture once I locate a camera.

♥, HRG

now with extra gender ambiguity

Today at Starbucks the server called me sir. so I just stood there and stared at him for half a minute. he probably didn't even realize that he had said "sir" and was mad at me for holding up the line, but whatever, I don't feel bad about it.

I have a little history of people absentmindedly addressing me as male. It's happened when boarding an airplane, when visiting a museum, when judging a debate round, and at more than one cash register. These are just examples from after puberty.

I was an androgynous little kid. It didn't help that from age 6 to about 14, I always had really really short hair. (At 6, I got my hair cut because I idolized my ballet teacher, and I wanted short hair just like hers. This has to be the girliest reason ever to chop all your hair off.) One time at day care, another girl tried to kick me out of the girls' bathroom because she was so convinced I was a boy. The fact that I have a gender neutral name did not help. (The only other Sasha she knew was male.) She and her friend were taunting me and what the hell was I supposed to do to prove I was a girl? Thankfully, I guess, considering the surroundings, the only thing we could come up with was for me to wear a dress to school the next day. It's not like I even saw her at school the next day, but I did wear something pink and frilly.

I'm used to people getting my gender wrong, but I still have very mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I went to Smith College for 4 years, and after being around a fairly sizable number of females who favored men's clothes and male haircuts, I've learned how unobservant people can be. Especially outside of Northampton proper, where I think a fairly visible trans population has made some people wary of referring to gender at all, if you have a buzz cut and a men's cut polo shirt, a lot of people will overlook the fact that you have breasts or a completely female sounding name and think you're a guy. But the thing is, I don't have a buzz cut or wear polo shirts. My hair is short, but still longer than most guys' hair. I've got broad shoulders, but also breasts. And it's not like I have an adam's apple or a 5 o'clock shadow.

So there's always this sneaky little insecurity that maybe all those bored servicepeople are right, and there's something about me that on first impression reads male. I think a lot of people secretly fear that they don't quite fit in: maybe within your group of friends you wonder if everyone really likes you or just tolerates you. maybe you get accepted to a prestigious college and wonder if the admissions office made a mistake. It's so common that it's boring, and when you think about it rationally, you realize it's ridiculous. Still, it eats at you a little bit. And the gender thing is just this insecurity writ large: It's like the world telling you, not only do you not quite fit in with your friends, or at your job, or at school, but you don't quite fit into one of the least exclusive peer groups in existence: your own gender.

I mostly don't let this get to me, but sometimes a random server at starbucks can rekindle the nagging insecurity. I guess the ironic thing is that even as I feel inadequate for being not quite female enough, I also sort of take pride in it. If you're different, you're special, and how special must you be to not even fit in with your own gender?

cognitive dissonance

Ted "the Hulk" Stevens was on NPR today talking about global warming. (link)

a few choice quotes:

The causes [of global warming], if there are causes, are caused in Chicago and New York and not caused by our small population in Alaska.

emphasis mine.

Oil and gas doesn't have anything to do with global warming!

To be fair, he does go on to specify that it's not oil and gas per se, it's the fact that we use them.

Also, he says that if we don't get the oil and gas from Alaska, we'll get it from somewhere else, just at higher prices. Honestly, that's kind of the point. He's a republican and they're supposed to like markets, right? This is simple supply and demand. Higher prices lead to lower consumption and lower consumption leads to less pollution.

I know it's the internet, but...

so there was this article in the NY Times last weekend about "Amazing Girls" who all have next to perfect SAT scores, take tons of AP classes, are the president of 12 different clubs, and have solved world hunger in their spare time, but still can't get into Harvard. article here. Versions of this article get written all the time (hello, Alexandra Robbins.) but this was a particularly compelling one. I read it, I liked the cute little description of Smith College's Ivy Day that one father gave, and I moved on. I have a lot of opinions about college admissions, but none of them are new or original, and in fact, I was beginning to thing that there wasn't anything new or original to be said. Today, however, Judith Warner of the NY Times, managed to do just that. link here.

The big idea she came up with was that it may actually be good for these girls to not be part of the 9% accepted to Harvard or Princeton or whatever. They've been striving towards and achieving these incredible goals since a very young age, and it's probably good for them to fail for once. maybe they'll learn to base self worth on something less fleeting than outward success. to be sure, she said some things that unsettled me, like:

I think this is partly why so many grown-up amazing girls with high-earning husbands find themselves having to quit work when they have kids. They simply can’t perform at work and at home at the high level that they demand of themselves.

On the one hand, I think she's right. People expecting perfection from work & family life are unlikely to get it. On the other hand, I think it's too easy to interpret her as saying people are wrong for wanting accomodations to be able to work and raise families simultaneously. whatever, I'm not going to get into this now, but suffice it to say, I don't agree with everything she said, but her blog post definitely got me thinking...

and then I read the comments. They were filled with so many self-congratulating platitudes that I actually felt my capacity for original thought shrink as I slogged through them. A few people had interesting or at least valid things to say. For example, when anyone posts an article like this, it is good to point out that hey, most of the kids in the US don't have the opportunity to be this overachieving, even if they want to. Still, there were far too many comments of the form, "Judith, I totally agree with you! That's why when my kid got a B once, I was totally okay with it! He still got into [insert highly selective school here], and yeah, it's not Princeton, but he's so happy on his path to become this generation's great theoretical mathematician that we're glad we didn't push him to re-take the SATs when he only got a 1520. And he's so polite and caring, too! I always knew it was the right decision to make him quit Lacrosse and Karate so he could focus on becoming a world class Badminton player. Other parents should just lighten up!"

okay, I'm exaggerating. but not much.

cat

Okay, so a cat who lives in a library in Iowa is not as exciting as a marmoset or a Scottish Highland Cow, but this cat (named Dewey...aww!) is quite adorable.



Some might discern a passing resemblance to a certain ill-natured feline named Bob/Boris who graced the couches & classrooms of Green Street, Northampton, but the article about him claims that he's been living in the small town of Spencer, Iowa for the past 19 years. All I know is that Bob supposedly moved away at the beginning of last year, and all of a sudden, a year later, his doppelgänger shows up in the New York Times. Coincidence? I think not.

Also, as the article mentions, Dewey/Bob/Boris now has a book deal. Apparently this will be the next "Bridges of Madison County." I guess because they're both set in Iowa, or something.

cooking

tonight I am going to a passover seder. here is my favorite charoset recipe (from memory):

1 apple
1 lemon
.25 cups pine nuts
.5 cups walnuts
.5 cups ground almonds
.5 cups sugar
1 hard boiled egg
cinnamon to taste

chop everything that can be chopped into small pieces (a food processor works well) and mix together. oh, and obviously remove things like seeds, but leave the lemon peel.

I'm not really sure where the recipe originated. I got it from a packet on passover that included "charosets around the world" that my sunday school passed out in 2nd grade. each kid in the class made 1 recipe and then we had a big communal seder where we got to try them all. this one was "north african" and it was by far the best.

why don't I make charoset more? I guess it's not that great a topping for anything but matzah, but I could eat large quantities of it plain. in fact, I did for breakfast today.

I also made a sephardic charoset recipe out of the NYTimes. It had McIntosh apples, pecans, almonds, wine, and dried dates. I had to go to 3 different stores to find dried dates, and they cost $7 for 10 ounces! and then they were too tough to be cut up in the food processor, so I had to chop by hand. all in all, too labor intensive & expensive to justify the good, but not great final product. still I am going to heavily market this recipe tonight at dinner, because the more they eat of this, the more north african charoset for me. also, it does taste better after a night in the fridge, as my breakfast this morning confirmed.

by the way, my cousins wanted me to make challah for passover. I make fantastic challah, but I had to remind them that despite being a very jewish food, it doesn't really fit in with the whole "unleavened bread" theme of the evening.

and here's what I really wanted to make: torta divina. This tastes really really good, and it's surprisingly easy to make. (the hardest part was not spilling water when I was pouring some into the casserole dish I used as an improvised "bain marie.") The best part is that it's kosher without trying too hard. there aren't any awkward substitutions of matzoh meal or potato starch or other ingredients that are only used because the first choice is not available.

the hosting cousins have not tried this dessert yet, so they declined to have me prepare it. When I make it for my uncle's birthday in 2 weeks, they will realize that they missed out.

marmosets

Today I pretty much only have one thing to say. marmosets are very cute.

random

link

people are so stupid.

favorite quote:
"A bunch of people come here and put peace on you. a fluffy peace thing. a fluffy children thing. you know, there's no reason for this kind of stuff. it's wrong wrong wrong."

also? the "communist" UN declaration of human rights? put together by an American.

just saying.

in happier news, Panda Poop.

oh, also Small resigned. It's about freaking time.

this post is so typically washington. there's inside the beltway political snobbery, fixation on pandas, and bitching about the Smithsonian.

feminism

So I was going to ridicule this NYT review of a show of feminist art. It starts out pretty terribly. What kind of sentence is this:

The false idea is that there really is such a thing as feminist art, as opposed to art that intentionally or by osmosis reflects or is influenced by feminist thought, of which there is plenty.

You know what I call art influenced by feminism? Feminist art. easy to say, easy to understand, very straightforward.

Anyway, I had a lot more to say on it, and of course I wanted to mention this lovely little sentence,

Study “The Dinner Party” close enough and your bra, if you’re wearing one, may spontaneously combust.

Yes. because feminists burn bras.

But slowly, throughout the review, she started to redeem herself. Don't get me wrong, I still think her writing is unclear, and she did a poor job of articulating any central idea. Still, I couldn't stay too mad, because I fell in love with her last sentence:

The word feminism will be around as long as it is necessary for women to put a name on the sense of assertiveness, confidence and equality that, unnamed, has always been granted men.

Smithsonian

2 days ago
yesterday
today

So, the Smithsonian has been in the news a lot lately.
Before the current secretary, Larry Small, got there, the Smithsonian was this sort of large, disorganized, somewhat dysfunctional nonprofit. The board of regents wanted a good fundraiser who could run the place more like a business, probably to help stem the endless seas of bureaucracy, so they hired someone from the corporate world. But, according to many people within the organization, Small has had sort of a tin ear about what practices are worth bringing over from the corporate world and which ones really harmfully dilute the entire mission of the organization. For the record, the Smithsonian was founded for the "increase and diffusion of knowledge among men." So clearly, scholarship was meant to be a big part of what the institution does. But it's been clear from the beginning that it was not one of Small's priorities. In fact, it's becoming increasingly clear that Small's priorties pretty much started and ended with providing a very nice lifestyle for himself and his cronies. But that's not what I want to talk about. The Washington Post is doing a fine job of that.

I want to talk about his attitude towards research. I think his position reflects something common in the general public that is really sort of troubling. I'll start out by saying that I don't think I've thought through this issue completely, so I may revisit it in a later post, but here are my preliminary thoughts:

First of all, museums have two broad goals that can sometimes come into conflict: to learn and to teach (or as SI puts it, to increase and diffuse knowledge). I suppose in this way they're sort of like universities. Both hire scholars with PhDs and expect them to do original research (learn) but both also expect them to impart some of their knowledge to other people (teach). Universities (even small liberal arts colleges) can focus more on the research, because the people they're teaching have already expressed some interest in being taught (after all, they've enrolled), and so on average, professors are probably expected to learn (publish) more. Also, in universities, academics are teaching the next generation of academics, so the new research (learning) they do is more easily translated to teaching.

Museums, on the other hand, must focus more on the teaching. In an ideal world, their audience is "Joe Sixpack" off the street. And if you're going to try to teach to someone that didn't even sign up to learn, your biggest challenge is just getting that person through your doors. So instead of just having a lecturer with a slideshow, museums organize shows. They try to be heavy on images and somewhat light on wall text, because honestly, as a frequent museum goer myself, I can tell you that people have a certain "museum stamina." It doesn't seem like it would, but a couple of hours standing around gazing at works of art really tires you out. To further induce people to go through those doors, museums try extra incentives. The Smithsonian has a particularly good one: its shows are free. Other incentives include multimedia displays (people are endlessly fascinated with dumb games on touch screen computers) and blockbuster shows (people never ever ever get tired of impressionists).

So you have two major problems. One is that an outsider like Small is really only familiar with the "teaching" side of museums. Granted, this is the bigger side, but research cannot be ignored, especially since at a minimum, someone should be verifying that what's being taught is correct. Curators are more than glorified fact-checkers, but they're also not just show-organizers. The other is that in solving the "getting people through the door" problem, museums can lose sight of the reason they wanted to get people through the door in the first place. If there's too much superficial fluff (both in terms of popular, but overdone shows, and in terms of stupid multimedia presentations) there's not enough teaching going on. An additional problem, not as much for the Smithsonian, but for almost every other museum out there, is that getting people through the door isn't only what allows you to teach, it's also what allows you to exist. Museums survive in part off of ticket sales and gift shop purchases.

These problems are worse because Small is from the business world. He was brought in to run the organization efficiently but he had no idea of what a amount of research spending would be efficient. So while he was off spending thousands of dollars on limo services and first class airplane flights, museum curators sometimes didn't have the budgets to even travel to see collections whose works they might borrow, or visit archives that they needed for research. Also, as a businessman, he was used to very concrete ways of measuring success. But the problem is, there's just not a good way to do that with museums. Is it better to have 5 million people walk in your doors to be able to say they've seen the Mona Lisa and buy a post card, or 5,000 people to walk through your doors and gain a deeper understanding of the Dada movement and discover for the first time, DuChamp's L.H.O.O.Q. A museum's goal is to teach, right? But you can't measure how much people have learned. What you *can* measure is how many people have gone through the museum's doors and how much they've spent. So that's what Small's been measuring. And the result? The one set of museums best situated to actually focus on original learning and teaching because of their unique position as a publicly funded institution have become increasingly less able to do what they were designed to do.

shazza

Oh, I thought I'd share one more thing about my amazing haircut. When I asked for an appointment, I had to give them my name: Sasha. Not a terribly common name, but definitely not unique. The lady asked me to spell it, so I did: s-a-s-h-a. Exactly like it sounds. which somehow on her piece of paper became s-h-a-z-z-a. That is an unbelievably awesome name, but if you're going to ask me for the spelling, why don't you listen to my response?