The weblog of the one true paca

Voice Blog - Maintenance

2010-11-22T22:35:00.004-10:00

Finally, got the voice blog up. It's a YouTube video as a workaround for audio. You can view my shining face as you listen.

Anyway, this is a little excerpt from a bunch of word dumping I did around 1995. I would have been 21 or 22 then. I was working on my philosophy master's degree then and living in Oxford, MS, and the evidence of this drips from every slip of paper in the folder. Overwrought expositions on the nature of Being, written up as fiction? Check. Dallying with every southern litfic stereotype written? Check.

It's also quite clear that I was interested in this transition from childhood to adulthood at the time. Of course, when I was living it, I did not think of myself as young and unsure of where I fit in the world. I was just the same old me. But, I was in fact precisely a young thang, with an extended education, but not sure how it could be useful to me or anyone else. I assume in 15 years, I will see what I am now more clearly. None of this is to say that my characters were exactly me. They were not. It's just that I was apparently interested in these issues 15 years ago.

I have also, from the time I first put pen to paper around age 12, explored a female point of view when I write, and here I go at it again. Actually, I suppose this little bit is probably a male narrating a female protagonist story.

Anyway, here you go. Me writing at age 21, but I confess the me at 37 couldn't let the worst bits remain and did edit just a wee bit. But it's 95% the same as then. Okay, 90%.

Datamine this!

2010-11-19T21:29:00.006-10:00

I was reading an article about web traffic on Yahoo! just now and I noticed an ad on the right for Air New Zealand.

Now, maybe, they just posted that ad because it's a US ip address, or there's a Hawaii campaign going on. If so, that's probably fine.

But if they targeted that to me because it's me... then I don't like it at all. I happened to be logged in under my paca-related account. Do my emails mention those key words? I really don't want Yahoo's computers looking for statistically rare phrases in my private messages* and then matching that with ads they can display. You are a computer. You don't need to know about me and give stuff to me that I care about. My friends can do that, because they are actual people that I have an actual relationship with. Honestly, I don't know how Yahoo would know my NZ connection. Do they have some info from Facebook? If so, even more, boo!

Now, I get that some people really do want to have things sent to them that they care about. They like ads targeted to them instead of completely useless stuff. That's fine. Give them a checkbox saying "please send me targeted ads" and then send away. Don't just datamine me though without asking. If I get mad enough about it, I will just stop using your software and you won't even get to send mass ads to me.

But maybe it's just an ad campaign to the U.S. and I'm not personally relevant. If so, this is just a hypothetical rant.

And for the record, no, I don't like cameras taking pics of public streets either just in case someone breaks a law. Yes, we can save money if a camera does it instead of a cop, but that's sort of the point. There's an actual cost when you have a real person watch the public and so the government only can afford to do it when it's possibly important. The lower cost it is to monitor the public, the more monitoring there will be.

We shouldn't completely cede public space to those who wish to make a buck from us or who have a laudable public goal. Yes, there is an important distinction between public and private areas, but just because it's "public" it doesn't mean you can treat me like crap.

So there.

*Yes, I know that emails should not be viewed as truly private, but more like postcards that could be read my someone else. But I don't want a company reading my postcards either, writing down my interests, and then sticking an appropriate mailer in my box either. Wasn't some guy convicted recently for hacking into Sarah Palin's emails? If so, then why do Google and Yahoo's computers get to do it? Yes, yes, it's sort of how we pay them. We get to use their service for free; they get to record what we do and sell ads. But that deal is nowhere near as upfront as it needs to be. Instead, we get a constantly changing deal where what we have given up changes, often without our knowledge or where we have to opt out.

UPDATE:

Just this morning I received an email from Sprint about their privacy policy. Here are paragraphs 2 and 3:

"We collect information about how you use your phone, including the types of Web sites you visit and services you purchase such as ringtones or wallpaper downloads billed through Sprint. We aggregate the information, packaging it in a form that does not personally identify you (does not include identifying information such as your name, address, email address or telephone number). Then, we may share it with our partners. The purpose is to provide you advertisements about goods and services that may be useful to you. For example, based on your mobile purchase of a sports-themed ring tone, Sprint may, along with its ad partners, present an ad about an upcoming sports event on a Web site you visit using your device, instead of a random ad.

If you'd rather we didn't use this information for selecting the ads that you see, you may opt-out. To find out how to opt-out and to learn more about internet-based advertising and your privacy, click here."

Now, I applaud Sprint for actually saying this, and they don't just say it on page 11 of a user agreement. This was a three paragraph email and I copied two of the paragraphs above. So, for honesty, go Sprint. That said, they've got the choosing backwards. It needs to be opt in, not opt out. You don't start recording what I do and then only stop if I say so. If this is so helpful, tell me you can do it for me and let me choose it. Moreover, this is Sprint, I pay them hundreds of dollars a year so that I can use this phone and I would pay more for a data plan. This isn't ad-based broadcast television where I don't pay for the service.

In this case, it doesn't particularly affect me, since I don't use the web on my phone. The phone's getting so beat up and old, I can barely use it as a phone still. But at the end of the email, I did "click here."

voice blog on the way

2010-11-19T09:30:00.001-10:00

Accidentally left the excerpt to be read elsewhere, so I will have to make the recording tonight. So... Saturday for most of you.

Paca

My EE dedication

2010-11-15T16:34:00.002-10:00

Continuing the recreation of 2008, I discovered that this dedication to one of EE's anniversaries was way back then as well. Here's the original with comments that are better than the actual post.

And the post copied to 2010:

Ah, I remember it like yesterday. I was browsing along and umm uhhh somehow I uhhh ended up reading EE's blog. But I don't remember why. Maybe it was uhhh Miss Snark or something? Maybe ummm PubRants. And uhhh.

Well, I don't remember yesterday very well either. So I'll just make something up about my first week on EE's blog, which seems to have been some time in June of 2006.

A handsome young man sits at a desk; papers sprawl around him. He has been working for many hours but his strength and vitality are such that he is as energetic as any a man can be. He fiddles with a pen for a moment and looks at a mass of equations on the notepad in front of him.

"Just about there," he thinks to himself. "I've completed the proofs of each sub-module and the only thing left is to demonstrate the necessary convergence of the two systems into a single equation. And then the world will have it's Theory of Everything. When it's published I should finally obtain that position so I can help feed my family."

He stretches his arms up towards the sky.

"Just a quick breather and then it's off to implement the algorithm, collapsing the systems. Hm. What's this? Evileditor.blogspot.com."

He scans the page without emotion.

Then a corner of the mouth turns. "Heh. AFTER GOYA."

Then a smile. "Brutal eunuchs. Ha ha."

He sips his hot tea and reads further. Suddenly, he spews his tea all over the computer. "Vigilante sorcerors! OMG! That's too much! Oh crap, my ink is running on the proof. Well, that's alright. I know what it said. I'll just umm fix this bit here and- What's this? I can submit a continuation myself? Oooh, ooh. People will laugh at me! With me, with me." Click, click. Type, type. "I'll still remember the final equation even after I submit a continuation. Or two. Or three. Wow, how many are on this site? I must submit something for every single one of them!"

That night Paca is laying in bed after correcting about half of his tea-splattered theory of everything. "Choose mine, choose mine. It's the funniest. I know it is. Please, please."

The next day.

"F-ing Ril. What the hell, EE?! Clearly my clever twist in which the romance heroine is truly a brain-dead zombie is better. That's it. I'll try again." Paca types frantically into the keyboard.

When he goes home that night, his beautiful, hard-working wife asks, "honey, how's the development of the algorithm going?"

"What? Oh, yeah, going well. It'll converge. I'm sure it will. And then he'll choose mine."

"Someone will choose your what?" Paca doesn't answer, but his wife listens to him mumbling something about zombie deathfish all night long. Of course, aren't these academics always coming up with weird names for their ideas?

Next day.

"F-ing Ril! Yeah, so technically I would guess that this one from Ril is in fact, if you want to get into the details of it, actually funny, while mine was a contrived piece of garbage. Dammit!" Paca hurls paper from his desk and then falls onto the floor sobbing. "I'm a horrible writer! I'll never come up with anything funny! Oh, what will I do with my life? It's all been a waste. A waste. Oh god, in just two days this Evil Editor has exposed me as a fraud and a talentless two-bit... something. I can't even think of a way to curse myself creatively. I'm so pathetic."

At 6:30 that evening, there is a knock on the office door. Paca's wife opens it to find Paca sprawling with his pants half-way off, his head dipping over a pail of gin. It isn't clear if he's drinking it or about to vomit into it. She rushes to his side.

"Honey, Paca honey! What's wrong?!"

He mumbles something, but his tongue seems to be as effective as his sense of humor. He tries again. "I'm nussing."

"Nothing?" she asks.

"A human stale. A piece of filth. I've been teprending, te-te-pretending all my life."

"Your work?"

"Not just wok. Work. My bean. My bean."

"I thought we agreed you wouldn't call it that anymore, and you know I don't mind how small-"

"No, no. My being. What I wiv for."

"Oh, the algorithm didn't work? It doesn't reliably converge like you were sure it would and you've wasted 5 years of effort?"

"Algowim? Don't need no fucking algowim. You're crazy. Yes, I think you crazy. What's an algowim? Algowim! Algowim!"

We can see Paca's wife composing herself, repeating innwardly, "it's just the alcohol talking. Don't let it get to me. At least it's not as bad as that time with the silly puddy and tacks."

"I could just die now," the drunk concludes. "Do you think I would die if I sat on my own head?"

"Uhhh-"

"I think I would. Look." Paca starts contorting himself in an attempt to sit on himself. "Watch. I'm gonna be dead once I sit on my own head."

"Hey, at least you can still rhyme even when you're being an asshole. Don't have a fit. Just look at it-"

Paca pops up suddenly awake again. "That's it!!"

"What's it?"

"Dying children! Now that's some funny stuff!"

She stares at him for a moment without speaking. "Maybe you should try the head-sitting thing again."

"No need!" He pops up from the floor, knocking the gin over. "I've got it! Take this, ril! Blogless! Little cute 'oala! Robin, you'll never flirt with EE again! You too, rhinothongbuttchurkodeldin! You'll never usurp my continuation position again!"

Next day.

Paca is scanning over the divorce papers as he hits refresh on his computer screen. Refresh. Refresh.

Refresh.

"YESSSSSS!!!!!"

Happy Anniversary, EE!!

Disconcerting Fact 1

2010-11-14T08:35:00.002-10:00

My current students, who are essentially freshmen in college, were in 4th grade (one said 3rd grade) for the September 11th attacks.

2008 - Redo!

2010-11-14T08:19:00.002-10:00

Following Shona's lead and my laziness (I also just woke up and have a head weighing about 40 pounds), I'm reposting something from 2008 as part of Blogger Nostalgia Week 2010. This is me as a llama reading Freddie's story. It was one of Robin's voice posts.

Education

2010-10-13T10:51:00.002-10:00

Dr. Stanley Fish recently did a blog post about the decline of the humanities on the NY Times blogs. I found his post to be okay, but I really loved a comment on that blog from Peter Power, who appears to be an English and Ethnic Studies prof at Messiah College, which I adored. I even wrote him fan mail saying so. If he can teach his classes as well as he writes blog comments, his students are well served. Anyway, I am copying his comment here for preservation. It makes the most sense in the context of Fish' article, but is worthy apart from it as well.

...

Professor Fish maintains an admirable consistency as he always has in refusing to argue for the liberal arts broadly and the humanities more specifically on the basis of their utilitarian value to society. However, it's unclear on what basis he really does expect leaders of our academic institutions to carry the day politically in their arguments for the liberal arts. The force of their argument can't simply be that they can speak with facility and argue more vociferously for the right to keep humanists employed. In the end this is merely an argument to keep trolley car drivers employed when no one rides the trolley. Even more, facility and force in argument depend as much on having something substantive worth saying as they do on rhetorical skill. And so the question of value can't easily be sidestepped.

There are cases to be made, however, for the utility of the liberal arts for society, and they aren't just Victorian sentimentalities. The pursuit of Truth through rigorous inquiry has been thought to be the foundation of a just Republic since Plato, not since Matthew Arnold. At its root, as I'm sure Professor Fish well knows, the liberal arts are the practices and disciplines appropriate to a free person. And while in Artistotle's day this freedom was rigidly restricted to the ruling classes, there is one strong strain of the liberal arts that suggests that the pursuit of knowledge is not the privileged pastime of the tenured few but the effective means of liberating oneself and others--from ill-considered prejudice, from superstitious ignorance, or, appropriate to our own age, from the onslaught of misinformation, among many other things. When African Americans slaves sought learning, they were not merely seeking a disciplinary delight. They were seeking freedom. I doubt they had time for sentimentality.

Professor Fish is suspicious that these views of the liberal arts have about them the genteel whiff of the nineteenth century gentleman. Perhaps they do. But they speak to an idealism that is missing in our discourse and that has the force to speak to human aspirations that we do not exist solely for the pursuit of bread. We exist also for the betterment of our selves and others. Milton, for whom Professor Fish so often serves as avatar, said that the end of learning is to repair the ruin of our first parents. In short, and in more secular terms, learning ought to serve the purpose of making ourselves and our world better than it is now. A utilitarian virtue in Milton's world, even though not a commercial one. At least part of the problem is that we have ceased entirely to speak in any terms like these regarding the role of learning in our world, and humanists have been at the forefront of our somewhat suspicious sneering at the ideals of education. This is not to say that our current crisis is to be blamed on its humanist victims; but it is to say that we have been poor defenders, and it is clear that no one else can do it for us.

Our president's soaring rhetoric in so many other instances can only say about his educational programs that they will help people get jobs. Important to be sure, but not likely to do much for the humanities. Whereas if we asked what it might take to make us more informed, thoughtful and engaged citizenry, if we asked what it might take to make us a better country instead of simply a richer one, we might actually have to ask whether the humanities and the liberal arts more generally had something to contribute that was of central social value. These are values that must be argued for, to be sure, but at least they are substantial ideals to be championed no matter how imperfectly they have been realized in practice. Without such ideals and without a willingness to embrace the idea that our education can do good in the world beyond the walls of our disciplines and our universities, it's unclear what grounds an academic leader can take to defend the liberal arts with the passion and conviction that will be necessary. I doubt, sincerely, that the desire to save Professor Fish's job, or my own, will be sufficient.

Ways in which ma boy idn't southern

2010-10-01T15:53:00.003-10:00

1)

Walking into after school care with 7yo, we pass the coordinator.

Paca: Howdy
7yo: What's howdy?
Paca: It means 'hello'.
7yo: That's Japanese (he says, proud that his daddy can speak Japanese).
Paca: Uh, no, it's Southern.

2) Plain rice is on plate (with other stuff). I have no sauces today, so bring out some butter.

7yo: what's the butter for?
Paca: You can put some on your rice.
7yo: Butter on rice?
Paca: Uh yeah.
7yo: I want shoyu (soy sauce).
*7yo pours a big helping of shoyu all over the rice while I quietly stir in some butter on my own*

As a note, never try to tell junior high kids from Japan that Nashville is famous for country music and then explain what country music is by naming famous people: Faith Hill, Garth Brooks, Hank Williams, Randy Travis, Patsy Cline. They've never heard of any of 'em.

Aloha and Spice

2010-07-18T12:58:00.002-10:00

We saved up enough money this week to go out to dinner, and go out to dinner we did to this restaurant that I've wanted to try as soon as I saw the sign a few weeks ago.

Soul: Cuisine with Aloha and Spice

Sort of a blend of southern soul food and the flavors of Hawaii. I had a straight up southern dish that I can't believe I found here: shrimp and cheese grits. It was most awesome. Super creamy and TONS of shrimp. It had this fancy stream of black strap molasses going back and forth over the top. 7yo had fried chicken and cornbread a la carte, and both were the best fried chicken and cornbread that I've yet had in Hawaii. N now tells me I need to make my cornbread like THAT and not like the dry crap I make. Well, I try. Both the cornbread and the chicken (oddly to me) come with a side of honey butter.

Not everything was a hit. N chose the chicken, portuguese sausage, and sweet potato gumbo. I think it's pretty good (we have leftovers and I can try again tomorrow), but it's not like any gumbo I've ever seen. It's not just the presence of sweet potato, which is a clever fusion idea, it's just that it wasn't a soup really and had no rice. I didn't taste it in detail yet, but I'm not sure if it was roux-based. I will have to investigate further. It was heavy on the cayenne.

Another negative thing was that some of the prices are up there. My shrimp and grits were $18. I don't know if they have a choice, since there were a lot of shrimp in that puppy. The good thing is that it was as rich as all get out (we literally went walking around a mountainside afterwards to work it off), and you could easily share it with someone, add a side of cornbread, and you're good. We ended up bringing almost all the gumbo home.

Another highlight from the menu that I'm going to have to go back for one day include the vegetarian black-eyed peas chili, cornbread, and "buttermilk cilantro cole slaw" for only $8. Black-eyed peas and cornbread! That's my kind of food. They've got collard greens with ham hocks. Also they have real southern-style sweet tea, which is just iced tea where the sugar was added while the tea was still hot, making it permeate the tea like a syrup. This is special enough in Hawaii that it's the only beverage listen on the menu, though they do have other things to drink.

What's most exciting about the place to me, however, is that Chef Sean is doing what I've thought about. I've talked about creating some southern/asian dishes that I randomly call Cajun Seoul (no, not very creative). I once stuffed some mandoo (gyoza, jiaozi, pot stickers) with andouille sausage and made a cream sauce for them. Chef Sean's really doing it though. Besides the sweet potato gumbo, the special for the day was kalbi po-boys with kimchi, which sounds awesome. You can also get "Carolina Pulled Pork Adobo."

So there you go. Go split some sweet potato gumbo or shrimp and grits with a friend, or just grab the black-eyed pea chili and cornbread for yourself. Then bring some to me. I'll have the pecan pie waiting.

my Old Spice voice

2010-07-16T10:58:00.003-10:00

Sound file (wav file) on top; script below.

Manly Day Plans

Hello readers,

I've decided to read everything in this, my Old Spice manly voice. I'm sure you will enjoy these entries, because I'm speaking lower, and everything lower is better. Who can resist a man with large flapping vocal cords that move slowly yet in a controlled, sinusoidal manner. The answer: No one. A woman who was not attracted to this voice would be like a baby bird that did not wish to consume the regurgitated remains of a worm from its loving mother. In a single word: Impossible. In two words: not possible. In three words: I always lie.

And so, let us blog.

Today, your manly narrator shall work with his son to finish a movie about those beings only slightly less strong than myself, The Transformers. Perhaps if they consumed all the energon available in the sun, they would be as strong as my right pinky, and that is something for which they should feel blessed. This creative endeavor is to be followed by cooking lunch. Macaroni and cheese shall be served, along with fruit. After this, we plan to wrestle on the bed and then make a poster about nutrition to finish the requirements for the Cub Scout belt loop. Nothing says masculinity like finishing the requirements for the Cub Scout's nutrition belt loop. And after that, oh yes after that. Well. I must remain a man of mystery.

I'm on a horse.

Impossible Unholy Compasses of Ember

2010-07-10T22:44:00.002-10:00

One of the main differences between me being in a doctoral program and me finishing a doctoral program is that, in the latter condition, I read more fiction. In fact, I've read 4 actual novels in the last few weeks, which is, well, quite a lot compared to my normal fiction habits. I selected the books I did for a purpose.

Three of them all revolve around my possible writing - that Halia bit you heard. I decided that if I'm going to pretend to write a book for kids, I should read some written for them. Halia is a science fiction novel with an 11-year-old heroine, and I eventually grabbed City of Ember by Jeanne Duprau as an example of middle grade scifi. I also ended up grabbing The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. It's perhaps not sci-fi, but it's speculative fiction and is considered a contemporary classic, so I went for it. I also picked up Impossible by Nancy Werlin. It's classified as Young Adult, but had a blend of fantasy and romance that I was intrigued by.

Finally, I got Unholy Ghosts by Stacia Kane, honestly just because I know Stacia as a blogger and it was about time. Unholy Ghosts is a dark urban fantasy and quite different from the top three.

So, what did I think?

Well, I ended up staying up late to finish all 4 of them. I won't publicly announce how late this was, mostly so N doesn't get mad at me, but let's just say it was unreasonably late. City of Ember I finished in a couple of sittings. The others I would read a couple chapters each day until I was quite into it, and then stay up forever to finish them, because I just had to know what happened.

Based upon this, I would have to recommend all 4. However, I will only go out and buy the sequels or other books by the same author for The Golden Compass and Unholy Ghosts. Going through each one:

The City of Ember remains perhaps the best model for my Halia book. It figures a hero and heroine who live in a City called, um, Ember. The sky is dark and impenetrable. There are no stars or moon, but the inhabitants are not aware there should be. The Builders had left supplies and homes for all the inhabitants to live in, but things are starting to run out or crumble. Our two protagonists wonder if there is any way to leave Ember, or even if there is any other place in existence. It's a fast, enjoyable read. I'm probably not going to pick up the sequel, not because I didn't like City of Ember, but because it appears the author has decided to set a whole series of adventures in this alternate world, and I don't really feel I need to hear about them all. One was sufficient. If someone sends me book 2 in a box, I will certainly read it, but not otherwise.

The Golden Compass, probably everyone knows. I had seen the movie before, and that surely changed how I read the novel. I thought the themes, and even more the language, particularly intriguing in the sense that they seemed particularly adult. City of Ember is a classic middle grade to young adult novel in which the kids are saving their world, but they also are discovering how to be adults, finding their place in society, etc. -- all that stuff YA novels are supposed to have. The Golden Compass, while starring an 11 or 12 year old, seemed to have bigger fish to fry than a coming of age novel. From that perspective, The Golden Compass, makes me want to aim higher in my writing. Say something more than a cute coming of age novel.

Impossible by Nancy Werlin- rather different. This is set in the contemporary world with a 17-18 year old heroine. Her age is important because it appears her family has been cursed so that mother to daughter and so on down the line all go insane at age 18. The old folk song Scarborough Fair is the inspiration for the entire novel. The heroine must complete a set of seemingly impossible (hence the novel's title) tasks set forth in the song in order to save herself from the curse and the one who cursed her. Here's what I found most interesting about this book and I hope it's not a spoiler: The protag has a best friend, a boyfriend, and parents who adopted her. All of them remain supportive and helpful and believing throughout the whole book. She's never betrayed, mistrusted, abused, or ignored by any of these people. Her school doesn't kick her out.... Instead they do everything they can to help her. That seems rare to me -- usually someone turns their back or doesn't believe. Not here. They all act like we hope our best friends, boy friends, and parents would act. So I stayed up again until an ungodly hour to finish this book. But now that it's done, I'm a little "meh" about running to find another by the author. Enjoyed it, but done.

Unholy Ghosts by Stacia Kane. This one is classified as Urban Fantasy, I think. I don't think I've ever read urban fantasy, so I'm a newbie. In this alternate world, ghosts come out to kill the living, or they would except that the Church of Truth knows how to control and combat ghosts. In return for running the entire world, they protect the living from the dead. The protagonist Chess Putnam works for the Church. Her job is to find out whether a reported haunting is real. If not, she reveals the liars as liars. If yes, she performs her magic to get rid of the ghost. It's a really rough world. Chess is addicted to drugs and spends most of the novel trying to stay away from going into withdrawal. Horribly painful things happen to everyone; good and bad alike. A drug lord's enforcer is one's most loyal friend, and one must ignore the kids being abused around the corner to keep oneself safe. Not usually my thing. But as the mystery deepened, I kept turning page after page, wanting to know the answers to the puzzles and how Chess would get through it all in the end. I recommend it and will go pick up the sequel Unholy Magic in a couple months once I have some book spending money again.

What are your thoughts on any of these books?

the barrier that may not be crossed

2010-06-27T08:52:00.003-10:00

When 7yo was 3yo or so, he was very vague about the difference between boys and girls. In fact, for about a year, girls were the ones who had bangs in their hair while boys did not. The fact that he's always had bangs confused me, but such was the rule. Since around 6 though, he's not just become aware of sex differences with body parts, but he's fascinated with gender construction.

In fact, gender is the one line that may not be crossed in imaginative play. When pretending to be something else, one can clearly imagine being a robot, a dog, a crocodile, a mutant, a giant monster, a chair,... but one cannot ever be... a girl.

He's a little director and assigns all of us roles to play. Last night walking along the canal I was variously Superman, War Machine, and our own made-up superhero named Same Old Fish. He was Iron Man, Justice Lord Superman, and more. N of course was Wonder Woman or Spider Woman or Scarlet Witch. None of us are ever allowed to pretend to be a gender we are not.

This rule is even more strict than the good guy / bad guy rule. He must be labeled the good guy 97% of the time. Even if the good guy is chopping off limbs of bad guys who seem to be doing nothing other than standing there. But they're bad so they deserve it. But 97% is not 100%, and I've never heard him pretend to be anything labeled "girl".

Good news is that he's not obsessed with silly rules. For instance, he recently declared that all colors were okay for boys and girls. Blue is his favorite color, but it's okay if a boy wears something pink.

---

Interview because he just sat next to me:

Me: 7yo, how are boys different from girls?

7yo: Girls have 4 private parts. The little dot, their bottom, and they have boobies.

Me: Where did you learn that word "boobies". I don't use that word, Maman doesn't.

7yo: If you want to use the short word for boobies, it's just boobs. Boys only have 2 private parts.

Me: Do they act the same or act different?

7yo: Different. In French Polynesia, girls do this: *starts twisting hips* Boys do the funky chicken dance: *moves knees in an out* (He just went to the Polynesian Cultural Center, where they did a session of Tahitian dance where this is true.

And they have different languages. Some boys have the same language as girls. Some boys don't. (However, he can't come up with any examples of different boy/girl languages. Btw, depends on what you want to call a language, but he's right about different speech between the two in many cultures.)

Me: Any other differences?

7yo: It's what bathroom they go in. The boys go in the boys bathroom; the girls go in the girls bathroom.

Me: Your friend YYY at school. Why is she a cool girl?

7yo: Because she's nice. I ask her for a pencil, she let's me have a pencil.

Me: Anything else you want to say about boys and girls?

7yo: The End.

---

Overall pretty healthy attitudes about girls and boys I think. Nothing crazy in there. But just don't cross that line.

---
Update:

I read the post to them and N says, "it's sometimes okay for me to be a boy."
Me: "Can maman pretend to be Superman?"
7yo: ummmm Spider WomanMan. Half girl, half boy.
---
Barriers are collapsing!!!!

Hanauma Bay

2010-06-25T16:37:00.012-10:00

N just started her vacation today until the 6th of July, which means I am on vacation now as well. Typically each year we go to a neighbor island for vacation, but this year we couldn't see how that would fit in any budget. Therefore, we are doing one of the legendary staycations. Fortunately, we live in Hawaii.

Today was our only day without 7yo, and I talked N into going to Hanauma Bay, which is a really, really popular site for snorkeling. We're talking a million people a year visit this place. Anyway, it's now 1 million and 2. Since I'm still extremely pleased that I have an underwater camera, let's just cut to the chase, shall we.

I SWAM WITH THREE HUMUHUMUNUKUNUKUAPUA'A!! I.e., triggerfish of particular sorts; these are Reef Triggerfish. I like this video, because I'm sitting there following some yellow-striped goatfish, a goatfish!, and then a banded thing and boom! humuhumu shoots into the scene and we are off to the races. Suddenly, I found myself with three of them.

The video is just under a minute.

Anyway, Hanauma Bay is an old collapsed volcanic cinder cone. One side fell down some tens of thousands of years ago and the ocean came for a visit. Later coral did its thing and voila State Park. Here's a couple picks for what the place looks like:

And here are some fish that I (ok, N in the end) have done my (our) best to identify.

This you will be surprised to hear is possibly a humuhumunukunukuapua'a, the Hawaii state fish.

Spotted boxfish under a rock and not under a rock.

The blackspot sergeantfish

Orangespine Unicorn Fish

The legendary yellow-striped goatfish

And the orange-banded surgeon fish

The orange-banded buddies are particularly cool live, because those orange bands just pop out when they swim by. Here's a final 30 second video.

Father's Day Report

2010-06-20T22:57:00.012-10:00

Sunday, the 20th, was Father's Day here in the U.S. I was able to sleep in a bit, received a nice couple presents from a store, plus two homemade ones, and then went out for breakfast. Woohoo. Afterwards, well...

I splurged. For a long time I've wanted a camera that could go underwater for snorkeling purposes. And so eventually we went down to Best Buy and I spent my graduation present, any extra father's day credits I have, and my birthday present budget from August to purchase a little Fujifilm camera that's certified to 10 feet underwater. I'm a bad man.

Therefore, a few hours later, it was off to Lanikai Beach in Kailua, island of O'ahu. It's a famous beach with white sand and pale blue ocean. It's roughly where Obama vacations when he comes here and rents that multi-million dollar home. However, I had never been, so off we go.

Setting the scene:

It would be nice to say the beach is abandoned except for us, but as you can see, that isn't the case. Still very pretty. (There are such beaches on Oahu, but this ain't one of 'em.)

Here come's 7yo with his kickboard, practicing to look ubercool as a surfing teen. However, right now we are taking swimming lessons from the Y and are in the beginner Polliwog group.

And here's me with the 7yo in action photos. I'm functioning as the midsection flotation device. (And, yes, I have a goatee right now and yes there's some gray in it.)

I don't actually have a real swimshirt like little guy. This is a running shirt from back when I was in better shape. Scratch that. Back when I was exercising. I did walk/run 3 miles on Saturday morning, but that's the first time I've run a mile in a few months.

After various other family play time, I put on the snorkeling gear and headed off. First, let me say it's really weird intentionally putting a digital camera into the ocean. You know what the packaging says, but it just feels wrong. Anyway, I took a series of photos, but none are particularly good. I'm both a beginner snorkeler (snorkeled about 6 times now) and beginner underwater photographer. I've got fish pictures, but all you see are gray fish shapes. Here's some of the coral I was swimming around.

And here's a video that's about 40 seconds long. I won't win any nature photography awards with this video. (Right now the whole video is playing in Firefox, while only the first 13 seconds play in Safari. Not sure what's up.)

After a couple spins out there, for maybe 40 minutes, the sun was headed down. You can see that it's quieter now and the shadows are longer. We jumped back in the car, headed over the mountains, and back into Honolulu.

And, tomorrow, (or today for everyone in the world reading this) is N and my 12th wedding anniversary. It's party central at Paca Headquarters.

citizenship

2010-06-14T12:47:00.003-10:00

As people may have heard, there's a movement afoot in the Arizona legislature to find a way to deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. based upon the immigration status of their parents.

It's a clear hot button issue. That Yahoo news article I linked has gotten 21,000 comments, ignoring any and all replies on top of that, within 2 days. Practically, the bill is almost certainly a non-starter. The Constitution itself states that anyone born in the U.S. is a citizen and the 14th amendment made it even stronger: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States..." The authors of the Arizona bill say they will try to write it in a way that isn't unconstitutional, but it's difficult to see how they'd pull it off. We have a long history in the U.S. of finding ways to deny citizenship rights to citizens of the wrong type (usually based on race), and so the Courts have a long history now of seeing that and striking the laws down. In the end, the bill is probably entirely political and feel-good for those of a certain political persuasion.

That said, my opposition to such a bill has mostly been wishy-washy. I like to be nice to people no matter where the person came from, so you know....

That's not much of a thought process. Through a Facebook comment, however, I think I understand why the law is wrong. Someone who supports the bill used the phrase: "denying birth certificates to illegals." However, this is not what the bill proposes.

No one is attempting to give the parent that is in the country illegally an American birth certificate. That wouldn't make any sense; they weren't born in the U.S. (Naturalization being distinct from a birth certificate). Instead proponents of the Arizona bill are attempting to deny American birth certificates to children born in the U.S. whom the Constitution explicitly declares to be American. They are abridging the privileges of American children. The baby is in no way illegal, but they are going to be denied citizenship based upon the legal issues that their parents are involved in.

We don't deny American birth certificates based on any other crime. Your parents can be murderers, thieves, perverts, rapists, cannibals, traitors.... The kids are still American no matter what heinous act their parents did. Moreover, we don't hold the child responsible for those acts. While imperial China did punish entire families when one family member committed a crime, today we don't legally punish an infant for its parent's actions. And citizenship is the fundamental right from which all others follow. The Bill of Rights only applies to American citizens. Take away citizenship from an American child because of the legal problems of their parents, and you've taken away all legal rights. It cuts right to the core.

The purpose of the bill, then, is to remove all rights from some American children who have done nothing illegal so that it is easier to punish the parents who have.

Assundry

2010-06-10T20:53:00.005-10:00

a:

Here's something that makes me very angry: when another adult tries to circumvent the parent and go directly to the child.

Case 1: Random sales person at an open air booth with some sort of light up doohickey. 7yo wants to go over and look at it, but I say, "no we have to keep going." But sales person jumps in with, "oh, it's okay. c'mere, take a look." me: "no, 7yo, we have to go." salesperson: "it's okay, i won't bite." me says: "I know you don't bite, but we are actually going somewhere," but thinking "hey! i'm the kid's parent and I may or may not be right, but I'm the kid's parent, so back the hell off."

Case 2: Guy feeding ducks next to the canal with a loaf of bread. 7yo and I walk by on the way home from 1st grade. Guy: "hey, little one, want to feed the ducks?" me: "we can't; we have to go home." Now, lest I come across as a complete wet blanket, there are actual reasons for this. We had just picked up literature days before from wildlife specialists about how it wasn't good to feed ducks in our area because they interfere with other wildlife we'd like to support in various ways. Moreover, the canal actually has signs posted saying, "don't feed the birds. $500 fine." I'm not joking. Such signs are there. So I said no. Naturally, it's not the end of it. Man: "it's okay. here's the bread." 7yo walks to man to get the loaf of bread as man gives me a "you are such a horrible father" look. me: "I said we had do go." Man pointedly gives the bread to 7yo. I could have forced it and went off on the guy. Perhaps I should have, but at that point with bread in child's hand, we went ahead and fed the damn ducks. Now, the guy wasn't creepy. It's not that. It's just that I'm clearly saying no over and over, and he's determined to do this nice thing for my son, no matter what the stupid parent says. And that's completely wrong. Generally, a good spouse doesn't overrule their mate on parenting decisions in front of the kid unless it's a really bad decision. This should go 50-fold for a stranger, even if he's trying to be nice. Mr. Stranger needed to be fed to the ducks.

b: Did you know that "assundry" isn't an official standard American word? It may be a regional southernism. I had no idea it was so. Seems kinda formalish to me.

c: There was some commercial today where the tagline was "re-imagine possible," or some close thing. My question is: what the heck grammar is that? Is possible a noun there or an adjective? I can say "re-imagine the possible." Possible is a clear noun in that case. Are people in standard American English dropping more articles such that you get "re-imagine possible?" You can also say "re-imagine what's possible," where "possible is now an adjective in the clause "what is possible." Or perhaps it's an adjective in a shortened version of something like "re-imagine possible stuff." I'm mostly curious because I'm wondering if it's becoming more okay to drop articles. Or maybe "possible" can be used as a mass noun. You don't need articles with mass nows. "Re-imagine water," "re-imagine slime," "re-imagine brilliance." All good. But when did "possible" become a mass noun? Thoughts?

d. In Australia, filet as in filet mignon sounds like "fill it". How cool is that?

e. Apparently, there are real live rock wallabies living on O'ahu in Kalihi Valley. Wallabies in Hawai'i. A pair escaped about 100 years ago from some person, and, voila, wallabies. I might have to hike Kalihi Valley soon.

Reading for June

2010-06-03T22:42:00.009-10:00

UPDATE: We have a last minute entry from the one and only Precie! I've added a link to her post below. Definitely worth listening to!

Hi all,

I've got mine up. You may hear a bit of Master Chef Australia in the background, but one records in the conditions one must. This is a .wav file and should play in most any software you've got on your computer, though the file is a good bit bigger than ideal. Let me know if you have trouble hearing it.

This is a bit of the writing I did for Nanowrimo, which is the last fiction writing I have done.

Halia

Sylvia is creating a very nice looking set of links here:
Voices

And here are links to the other readings that I've gotten so far:

Pete
McK
Robin
Sylvia
JaneyV
Aerin
Faerie Hedgehog
Precie

Memorial writing

2010-05-31T19:59:00.003-10:00

We did about as traditional of a Memorial Day as one can do. On Sunday, the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts added small flags and leis to each of the 30,000 graves at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, which is inside Punchbowl crater. Then today we ended up at a park grilling up some hot dogs and playing catch.

And that has nothing to do with reading our stories.

(Best. segway. ever.)

For the reading project, I think we've got: fairyhedgehog, sylvia, robin writtenwyrdd, janeyv, Pete, McK, and Aerin. I think I've got everyone on Facebook as well, so I will send a message there. Others are very welcome to join. If I don't know you, I will get to know you.

To keep things simple, let's try: hosting on our own blog and reading our own stuff. Some reasonable size chunk that takes just a few minutes to ready. And let's aim for posting on Friday. That enough time? Then, Sylvia, can you add links to a nice page like you did once before? People can also post there links in comments here.

Let me know if any details left out.

story time?

2010-05-27T17:21:00.003-10:00

While I am certainly no robin s and never shall be, I would like to suggest we blogger writers do a new audio festival. In particular, how about we do the one where we read each other's story as done before? It may be the only way I will actually write something.

Who's in? If you are in, can you post to your own blogs since not everyone stops here? Someone else might even host the links if that's better and this is just the suggestion.

Whaddya think?

School Year 24 - Check

2010-05-17T21:05:00.003-10:00

I just turned in the grades for my students and with that, Spring, 2010, comes to a close. As everyone knows I also defended my dissertation last week, which could signal the end of me as a student after 24 delicious years of it. I started first grade in... 1978, I think, and it is now 2010. Now, I did take 8 years off between 1996 and 2004, but still, I think that's enough.

I'm not technically done yet. I have to submit revisions to my dissertation, though I don't really have any yet. My own notes for fixes is longer than those from my committee, though I haven't heard from them all. This should mean fairly straightforward revisions and a quick turn in. This lets me graduate in August. However, there is no ceremony, so I will only get a chance to walk if I remain / return to Hawaii in December just for that purpose.

Here I am at the defense with my leis and a few of my committee. (Facebook people can click over to my blog pacatrue.blogspot.com to see the pic.)

What's next? No idea. I've got some applications out that I've got a decent shot at and I may hear from those in 2-3 weeks. I will send more out if they aren't all too late in the next couple of weeks. If none of that's going anywhere, then I'll have to broaden my search out to industry of various sorts. And if that goes no where, I've got waiting skills from back in the day.

On to the next stage of Paca Life....

Draft done

2010-04-18T02:34:00.002-10:00

It is April 18, 2010, 2:35 AM, HST, and I just sent the complete draft to my committee chair. All the way from the title page to the bibliography. 162 pages of yummy academia. (Which, fine, is kind of short for like a humanities dissertation, but experimental ones are often shorter).

So I'm all Hoo-Yaa! and stuff while simultaneously being exhausted. I'm going to celebrate by only working tomorrow evening for the first time in a month. Seriously, I haven't put in less than 14 hours a day in a long while. Average has to be higher.

Not quite done yet though. My chair will have revisions. Then I will defend and probably have even more revisions from the committee which will be finished over the summer.

But... getting there.

I will yell once my defense date is set -- probably early May, which is like 3 weeks or less.

I exist

2010-03-30T20:54:00.001-10:00

Still exist.

Writing.

Emotions and Authors

2010-03-16T06:54:00.003-10:00

Something got me a little bit angry yesterday. I really mean just a little bit. I think it was political, but I don't particularly remember what it was now. Texas School Board, who knows.

I then left to get 7yo while I was in a slightly bad mood, so as I was walking I started thinking back to my experiences with Verizon Wireless. I once had a little local cell phone plan but was going to take a trip, so I called them up and asked about roaming and the like. They offered to put me on a nationwide plan, which sounded great, so I said, "let's do it" and took off. I came home from my trip (to VA and NC) and found they had charged me over $200 in roaming. Turns out my phone can't use that plan, but they didn't tell me that.

Naturally, they refused to take off any of the charges. Charges that only existed because they told me they would change me to a plan they did not in fact change me to.

I spent months calling them and not being called back and them writing threatening letters about the bill, etc. Stupidly, in the end, I folded, paid them, and promised to never go anywhere near Verizon again for the rest of my life. I hope that one of you will also refuse to be their customer in solidarity with me.

What's interesting to me about this is that this all happened almost 10 years ago now. I've never forgotten and never forgiven. But as I was walking I was only minimally living out any actual memories of the situation. Instead I was imaging various scenes. I was creating the phone conversations, the emotions as I screamed at them, the utter frustration and sense of injustice (nothing gets me angrier than someone wrongly accused by the way), and my own emotions were building and building. Someone walked by on the sidewalk and I had worked myself up into such a lather that I wanted to punch them for existing. Literally, I wanted to attack something.

When I realized how angry I had become over nothing that existed anymore, I was able to laugh and finally chill out. It helped that I imagined myself doing "Bret's Angry Dance" from Flight of the Conchords.

Anyway, I was wondering 1) can everyone get themselves worked up like this through just imagining conversations and scenes? and 2) how does it affect you when writing?

The only fiction I've written in a year was that scene Freddy read as part of a Robin-athon, but when I do write, I get into it if it's any good. It makes me a very slow writer. Imagined emotions very often become real ones to me. I can pace around the room after some particularly strong bit, because I'm too wired by the scene in my head. I'm sure this is good in some ways, but it's also a negative. Sometimes the emotions I am feeling due to imagination are stronger than what I've actually written. In other words, I can feel the scene, so I assume that my words have actually created such a scene, which may not be true.

Can you write angry scenes without becoming angry? Tense scenes without becoming tense?

Discuss.

And don't use Verizon Wireless.

tsunami 2010

2010-02-27T08:14:00.004-10:00

8:21 AM

I'm staying off cell phones, since we're doing fine, so I am using the blog to keep people updated.

I heard of the tsunami warning this morning at about 2:30 AM (Yes, fell asleep on the sofa again; woke up at 2:30.) Tsunami waves have been generated and are expected to arrive at the Big Isle at 11:19 AM Hawaii time; at Oahu at 11:25AM. After waking up N, we decided to go back to sleep and check in the morning.

At 5:30, N woke up and heard they would blow the evacuation sirens at 6:00 AM. In case there were traffic jams, we decided to get up and leave right then. We got the important papers, cans of food, huge thing of water, key stuffed animals, this laptop, the guinea pigs, and all humans in the car right as the siren started. After this we waited in a line for gas, and then waited in a line again at Safeway for some fruit and such. Now we are up on campus, guinea pigs and all.

The most likely scenario is that various waves will come ashore this afternoon and we will head back home some time tonight. However, if there is significant damage in Waikiki, we might be stuck at one of our workplaces tonight. Can only wait and see at this point. There's no point in getting a hotel room because almost all hotels are either in Waikiki or on another beach. I can only think of one on the whole island that doesn't fit that description.

Since we are up here, there should be no risk to us personally. Our apartment is on the first floor of a building in Waikiki. Parts of Waikiki are evacuation zones, though out particular bit is not. So, the water is not supposed to reach our place. However, we decided to be safe than sorry.

Will report again later.

12:36 PM

So far, it appears that small tsunamis did indeed come this way. Places like Hilo Bay (BIg Isle) keep swinging in and out as if the tide were going in and out every 10 minutes. Heard reports of reefs that are normally not seen at this time of day being exposed. Also the canal went down and up and then the wrong way. However, so far, none of the return swells became flooding.

Hope it stays like this way.

4:30 PM.

Left for home again at 2:30. Never got any worse than the above, so all's good. After some chores, I am now either taking a nap or grading papers. Mostly likely I am grading papers and unintentionally taking a nap about 10 minutes in.

CIT believes in the passive

2010-02-07T17:39:00.002-10:00

When you use an active sentence, you are forced to give a sentence a subject in English.

Mary kicked the ball.
The Saints won the Super Bowl.
The executives of major financial companies either made serious mistakes or presided over wide-scale fraud leading to the collapse of the world financial network and the disappearance of millions of jobs.

If you work on Wall Street, you apparently do not like the active voice. Instead you prefer the passive.

The ball was kicked (by Mary but only if you can prove it).
The Super Bowl was won (but no particular people were responsible for that).
The collapse of the world financial network and the disappearance of millions of jobs ummm just happened. (The executives at the time certainly didn't do anything to bring it on.)

And so CIT group has just hired as their new chairman and CEO the former head of Merrill Lynch, John Thain. You may remember Merrill Lynch. Last time we saw it, it was collapsing into bankruptcy. A stalwart financial company of over 100 years, a bellweather and safehaven, dying quickly with billions in unsecured investments about to go poof. The government pushed it off to Bank of America and then Bank of America was bailed out to keep it all going. Who was the head of Merrill Lynch during this catastrophe?

John Thain, of course.

Here's his resumé from the Yahoo AP article:

"Thain, 54, served as chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch until its sale to Bank of America was completed in January 2009. He resigned under pressure from the combined company after reports he rushed out billions in bonuses to Merrill employees in his final days as CEO, while the brokerage was suffering huge losses and just before Bank of America took it over.
Prior to Merrill, Thain served as CEO of the New York Stock Exchange and president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs."

It's an impressive resumé no doubt. Particularly since no one at NYSE, Merrill Lynch, or Goldman Sachs did anything wrong. So there you go. For presiding over the destruction of Merrill Lynch, he gets hired to direct the new CIT group.

That financial collapse was just so unfortunate. No one really did anything to bring it on and there's no one to blame. And so on we go... in the passive.

My other life

2010-02-03T20:18:00.002-10:00

So I have a confession. I have been unfaithful. Yes, unfaithful to my blogging friends. You see, one of the reasons I haven't been around as much is that I started playing Second Life (SL) over the holidays.

From what I know of my readers here, my guess would be that few of you are Second Life personalities. (I can imagine one of you being there, however....) Unfortunately, I am. I can live in my imagination quite well -- for better or for worse. But here are some of the things I've done in my time playing in that world and some observations:

1) Meeting people around the world. Because my only pseudo-free time runs from about 9:00 PM to midnight, most of the people I have met have been in Europe or Oz, with a few American West Coasters who are night owls. So I've got "friends" from Portugal (I can only speak with this person through a translator), France, Holland, Scotland, Israel, England, and more. I've met, bizarrely, two other linguists and am friends with some guy in Washington state working on his PhD. He's got one son, and I swear we are living parallel lives. One time I was "dancing" with a French woman and made a joke about Occitan (I'm sure you all have at least one Occitan joke [it's another Romance language spoken in a region of France]) and she announced she was Occitan and started speaking in it. To me, that's a great treat.

2) One of the main things I do is go "dancing". Most of my favorite clubs have DJs who play jazz and standards. Oh, and one 80s rock club. The DJ is a person who is playing music on their computer which streams in to the simulated region you are in. The DJ also has an avatar who stands in the DJ booth while playing music. I then chat at the club with friends I've made there and periodically dance. Dancing involves asking a person to dance and then choosing dance animations for the avatars on the dance floor. This could be considered weird, but I enjoy it fairly well. The dancing really functions as an excuse to chat. It's strange to walk up to someone you don't know and ask them about their life. But you ask them to dance and then chat away while the avatars do their thing. Of course, one does not need have dancing animations to speak, but they serve as an ice breaker for me.

3) I attend live music events. These are technically done the same way as the DJing and dancing. Some real person performs on their computer at home. This is then streamed into the simulation for everyone to hear. The musician will also have some avatar with a singing or instrument-playing animation going. These events are live and done by a real person, but, since they are mostly by someone just at their computer, they can be limited. This most common music event is a singer singing in front of backing tracks. In other words, it's glorified karaoke. I've also heard a couple guitarists and a pianist. Often I use SL as a juke box. You stick your avatar in a sim with a music event and then do work while you listen.

4) I've been to two readings so far. This naturally could be of the most interest to my author readers here. In one, we all gathered at the top of this tower, had our avatars sit on pillows, and he read the first chapter of his sci fi work. You can turn on voice chat, so the reader just reads into his computer's mic while we listen. I've joined another group that has great potential. The sim is of a coffee house, so there are all these couches lying around to sit on. They do poetry readings, and I've talked to the sim's owner about getting play readings going.

5) You can watch movies inside SL as well. One of the oddest but fun experiences was a sim I found that's dedicated to showing Mystery Science Theater 3000 movies. For those who do not recall, Mystery Science Theater 3000 is a show where they play bad old movies and crack jokes through-out. In this Sim, all our avatars sit in a movie theater and crack jokes about the movie as well. It's a sort of meta-MST3K.

6) For me, SL has really spurred my creative ambitions. I've started singing to backing tracks for fun again. I created two characters once and brought them both into SL, where I practiced dialogue for some fictional scenes in my head. In theory, one could use SL to develop parts of your writing. And in theory one could really create fictional works of art in the SL medium. In theory. I was dreaming tonight of learning to play the piano again. I imagined trying to create the fictional world from that NaNoWriMo novel inside SL. My biggest idea was doing live theater inside SL. A hundred issues with it, but in theory one could have people perform a show and invite an audience. Your "set designers" are people who build the sim for the show; your costume design is done by people creating avatars and clothing, etc. If you built up a whole program, you could sell tickets and have people come for a night on the town. I don't know if I will ever do any of these things -- perhaps I will just wander around places listening to music and cracking jokes -- but it's always good to be inspired.

7) Maybe it's the places I go, but I've found it intriguing that, if they are telling the truth, most of the people I've met are like my blog readers -- intelligent women with a mean age of about 44 or so. The stereotype of online games is that they are dominated by people in their 20s. Perhaps if I was in rave clubs, not jazz clubs, I would be meeting different people, but so far the people in SL are not the stereotype.

8) Other sims have allowed me to go surfing in Kauai, do a go-cart race, walk in the sewers of a haunted island, search for a hobbit's missing items, and solve puzzles in a weird dystopian Myst-like world.

There are drawbacks to the place as well.

1) The major one for me is time. I have enjoyed myself immensely, but I don't have time for enjoyment. I seriously have to watch time I spend doing anything, including SL.

2) Lots of people are looking for love in SL. Some want real life love, meeting people there, and others want second life love. I've got in my profile now that I'm married and only making friends, but you still have to watch what you are doing. This is particularly a drawback when you are "dancing". It means I meet more women than men (though my male friends list is slowly growing). But my blog readers are 80% female, and there's nothing weird here, to it must be navigable in SL, too.

3) In the same vein, I haven't figured out yet how my second life relates to my first one. Some people are in there just as themselves playing around and we happily discuss their families and children. Other people take the completely opposite tack. They play characters in Second Life and make no connection to their real life at all. The most common avatar is a fantastically beautiful human (you only rarely see an avatar that's been made dumpy), but there are all sorts of other creatures running around as well -- vampires, trolls, bunnies, foxes, human-animal hybrids, robots, monsters and demons, etc. (A couple days ago I was at a jazz club doing homework and one of the couples dancing was a bunny and fox. I thought it was really cute. You may have other opinions.) I've swung back and forth between real me and character. I've met a number of people just being me (not using my name and such, of course). Then I will decide I don't like this and try to create a character. And then I'll decide again that I like meeting people as the real me. I can't figure it out. It's the same issue that most of us have with a blog -- just how anonymous or how personal shall I be?

4) Of course, one can ask -- why not just do these things in real life instead of second life? Watching an animated avatar is not actually dancing. (But reading a book about war is not the same as being a soldier, and yet I assume no one here thinks that reading is inherently weird and bad. Though I have met such people in my life who can't see the purpose to imagination.) There's a fundamental point to that, but notice that I have been giving examples of how the second life fantasy has inspired real life things, such as singing and playing the piano. A few days ago I wandered by a new Waikiki night club. I've never been to a night club in my entire life. I've been to bars but was horribly bored. I prefer 4 friends in a coffee house making jokes to 40 people in a bar standing around screaming over the music. But, if I enjoy my chatting and dancing in SL, I was wondering if I might like it in real life, too. Maybe I will be inspired to drag N out on the town some night.

I can guess how my second life adventure will end. Possibly, I will become bored, or, more likely knowing myself, I will finally decide I've spent too much time and uninstall everything.

Anyone else here ever ventured into these virtual worlds? Post anonymously if you wish.

Polls

2010-01-31T20:14:00.000-10:00

Polls from PhD Comics

Immoderate political rant

2010-01-21T09:16:00.004-10:00

Alright. Usually I try to take a moderate approach to things, even though I'm generally left-leaning. My long earlier post about global warming for instance was about the science of it, not the politics. Be productive and understanding and such.

Today I will rant. I may even allow myself to curse.

Been a lousy few days for political and social issues. First up, thousands of people showed up at the Hawaii Legislature to protest a bill allowing same sex couples to form civil unions. Organized by one of these "family" organizations whose main purpose is to decide for others what families they are allowed to have. That family group is in turn composed mostly of various churches, catholic and evangelical. It's not even a damn marriage bill; it's a civil unions bill that allows people who love each other to get benefits and see each other in the hospital and such without carrying a lawyer with them. You know, to support and love one another. Apparently, this is evil and unacceptable. I literally flipped off the newspaper with the story.

I'm not really even Christian anymore, but I get the impression that these people have never really read the Gospels. Yes, I know you can find some comments from St. Paul and Leviticus against same sex relationships, but how much time did Jesus go around worrying about this issue? I love me some Leviticus, but if I'm going to be a Christian, I'm going to worry about what Christ said and did first. Priorities. I'm well aware that many churches do in fact do tons of stuff that relates to the life of Jesus. In high school, I worked in a soup kitchen in the basement of a Catholic Church. Catholic charities are everywhere and doing great things. Many evangelicals do the same thing.

But if you can only get thousands of people to show up for something one time in a year... Really? Same sex civil unions is it? Not the homeless. Not children on the street. Not abandoned seniors. You're going to set your foot down politically only one time and it's about keeping gay people from seeing each other in the hospital.

Supposedly, these thousands of people had signs saying "I vote" to show there would be political consequences. Well, you know what? I vote too. Not only will I vote against a politician who votes against this bill; I vote against churches who choose to use their political power to tell others what legal contracts they can sign. Jesus spent most of his time, as I recall, trying to bring others to God. Above all else, that's the most important thing. Well, you, idiotic "family" organization, are driving people like me away from God. I will never walk through your doors. If you think civil unions are bad, fine. But use your time and money on something that Christ would have spent his time on. Not on the three phrases you've latched onto in 800 pages of text.

Next up, Democrats lost a Senate seat. Whatever. I'm too angry to really worry about this one at the moment.

And then today the Supreme Court virtually declared that corporations are covered under the First Amendment. My understanding has always been that the First Amendment is about people. You know, American citizens, not pieces of paper. It's undoubtedly going to make the nation worse. No matter what political stance you have, well unless you are fascist, one of the greatest problems our government faces is corporate influence. Corporations and unions practically write the legislation already. The Dems were planning to give the unions an exemption on some health care taxes for no real reason, but only because they support the Democrats and so it's payback. The major 5 or so financial institutions largely control financial regulations. After all, the former head of Citibank is the one in the government handling these issues.

And for over 100 years, laws have been created to limit corporate influence on politics by banning them from political ads and campaigns and such, originating with Teddy Roosevelt (a Republican who mostly rocked, for the record). But today the Supreme Court threw out almost all of these restrictions. (Remember that the most recent round of restrictions was written by John McCain and Russ Feingold.) They still cannot directly fund a national party or a federal candidate, so that's good, but otherwise it appears they can say whatever they want whenever they want. Basically, the argument to strike the laws down is that they violate the First Amendment, but as I recall, the First Amendment guarantees rights to people, not pieces of legal paper.

This could be really, really bad. By giving free speech to major corporations, the potential effect is to render the free speech of actual physical people meaningless.

Remember that Goldman Sachs, for instance, gives out billions of dollars in bonuses in a single quarter. The entire Obama campaign for the Presidency, the richest in history, was like a billion or something. Chump change. McCain's was similar but a bit smaller as I recall. That's like one department's bonus at Goldman. Again, they can't directly fund the candidate, but they can do entire campaigns that just copy what the candidate they like says as long as they remain "independent".

Why in the world would a candidate give a damn about any random person's opinion, or even that of a billionaire like a Forbes or Soros who spends tens of millions, when they can get some company to make their campaign for them "independently"? It's a recipe for corruption.

But fine. Companies are people, too. If we ever shut one down, we should prosecute the culprits for murder. Whatever.

I think the only way to save ourselves is to make the participation of corporations in politics so damaging financially to them that few will want to. Therefore, a company can blow whatever money it wants to on an ad, but every 10 seconds a big title must appear in all caps saying,"

THIS AD ABOUT ISSUE X IS PAID FOR BY JOHNSON & JOHNSON. REMEMBER THAT. EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU BUY ONE OF OUR PRODUCTS YOU ARE FUNDING THIS AD CAMPAIGN. I HOPE YOU AGREE WITH US. IF YOU DO NOT, YOU ARE STILL FUNDING THIS.

And then there's a warning label on every product. Above "lunch" at McDonald's it says,

"BY BUYING LUNCH HERE, YOU ARE FUNDING OUR CAMPAIGN AGAINST SAFE FOOD REGULATIONS. ENJOY YOUR MEAL."

Maybe we could end up with political restaurant chains. If you are Democrat, you go eat at TGI Friday's and fund climate change campaigns. If you are Republican, you eat at Applebee's and fund restrictions on abortions.

Sounds like a great world and I know I'll enjoy every product I buy more knowing that each one has a direct political consequence. It also sounds wonderful for corporations. They used to only have to worry about finding the best salespeople or computer programmers or financial analysts. Now each one of those employees gets to worry about the company's political stances before choosing to join.

Eat up!

Be grateful, you wretch!

2010-01-18T20:17:00.003-10:00

I imagine that all parents have their favorite threats. I guess they're not really threats as ways to point out that one's lousy life could be a lot lousier. When my sister, brother, or I refused to do something beneficial to us, such as tie our shoelaces or eat vegetables, my mother always threatened us with "you know, no one cares if you fall and break a leg at the orphanage" or "no one cares if you grow to be healthy and strong at the orphanage." We all naturally thought the orphanage must be a paradise. Much food has been eaten to the refrain about starving children in Ethiopia.

Yesterday when 6yo (new name for B) refused to do some simple chore such as taking his plate to the sink, N delightfully came up with "you know, some children have to work in coal mines."

That's awesome. The coal mine threat. Do your damned homework or you're going to be shipped to the coal mines and be forced to address me as "gov'ner".

So, stop putting off writing that next 1,000 words and be grateful, because, you know, some children have to work in coal mines.

Anyone care to share their favorite "be grateful, you wretch" line?

Christmas Pics

2010-01-11T10:39:00.009-10:00

In this space I provide unto thee, dear ladies and gentlemen, a wondrous collection of life-like portraits electronik from yon month of December.

Cub Scout Pack before the Kaimuki Christmas Parade (I usually don't post pics that contain other kids, but, since we are always dressing up in uniforms to be in newspapers or on TV, I decided it was okay.)

Here we are, living it up at the 3 hour Cub Scout Christmas bonanza.

Every year, the City and County of Honolulu puts up their huge City Lights display. They pack City Hall, i.e., Honolulu Hale, with Christmas trees, plus lots of displays outside. Here we have some Menehune on a Xmas train.

Over Christmas, the mother-in-law, who's actually a very nice person whom I get along with well (and please notice the use of "whom"), visited for a week and a half. We took our semi-annual Christmas Eve around the island tour. Two years ago, we ate Christmas Eve dinner in some random park in the rain. This year, we first stopped at this beach, which might now be our favorite new beach.

You can see how slowly the beach slopes, making it perfect for little ones.

(For the Hawaii folk who might read, I have forgotten this park's name as I always do (ends with "kahana"). It's up past Ka'a'awa, and a good ways before Lihu'e. When you are driving around the windward side, you get to this sort of inlet, where the road has to go in and around, before heading back out again. It's on the Lihu'e side of that.)

(For the non-Hawaii folk, if you ever do visit Oahu, there are indeed peaceful beaches with only a handful of other people on them, but you have to drive far away from Waikiki. Basically, you will want to go up the Windward side, to the North Shore, but go West from Haleiwa instead of East to the famous surfing spots, or way up the leeward side.)

After lunch at this beach, as is Christmas tradition, it started to rain on us. I, however, was stubborn as a mule and forced everyone to continue up to a beginner's snorkeling beach at the Turtle Bay Resort and went snorkeling as it rained and the sun fell. However, I did manage to see some fish, including the legendary humuhumunukunukapua'a, wedgetail trigger fish, which is the state fish of Hawaii. This is not my pic, but here is a humuhumunukunukuapua'a.

I choose to imagine a team of them pulling a little Santa sleigh.

Fireworks

2010-01-09T16:43:00.006-10:00

Every Friday night the Hilton Hawaiian resort does a 5-10 minute fireworks show. When I grew up the only fireworks show was shooting bottle rockets at your friend. Now I'm at a place with fireworks every night and a good 4-5 aerial shows in different places on the island on the 4th. On the 4th, you can sit at one fireworks show and watch 2 others going off in the distance.

Anyway, last October, N, B, and myself had fun with our new digital camera. It has a special "fireworks" setting which keeps the aperture open for a while to nice effect.
(pics here Facebook people)

It was also fun to play some. When the camera kept the shutter open, you could deliberately move it around to get some funky effects.

The above are things like the Hilton's large tower of rooms, a lamppost, a party in the distance.

I tried to draw with the moon here. This is the moon solo as I moved the camera around.

This is the little guy kinda fuzzy. If he was a phantom, maybe this is what he would be like:

Puzzles for the ages

2010-01-06T00:14:00.004-10:00

Paca to the 6yo: How was your first day of [After School Program]?
6yo: Well, I got into a little trouble.
Paca: Oh?
6yo: So I had to do a lot of thinking. It took several minutes and it was hard thinking. How do I solve this problem? To not get in trouble anymore?
Paca: How did you solve it?
6yo: Stay sitting.
Paca: Good solution.

Reviewing 2009

2009-12-28T02:46:00.002-10:00

Each year I come up with yearly goals with little consideration and reason and post them to this blog. Time to review the junk I posted last year and see how I did.

1) Finish Dissertation. OK, no. Working on it. I won't say more or I will go into a dissertation on the dissertation's state.
2) Submit 2nd paper with J-W. Actually did this. Check!
3) 25 minute 5K. I was running again for the first half of the year or so, but it's been sporadic to non-existent this second half. Try agin next year.
4) Average 7 hours of sleep per diem. At night. Falling asleep on the floor of an office doesn't count. Hmm... Probably not, but could be 6 and a half or so.
5) More recipes! I think I did this. I haven't posted as many, but I've been cooking.
6) Read two fiction novels. I actually think I did this, but I'd have to scour around to figure out what they were. Pretty sure. Check!
7) Paca and N night once a month. Um, no, but I've been doing better about couple time. Just not great.
8) Attend 2 parties/dinners with classmates. No cafeterias can be involved in this. Borderline. I have to count meeting a former classmate for coffee for half an hour and a movie in the conference room with the Psycholinguistics Interest Group. But they were social-esque.
9) Watch Titans win Superbowl. Let's not talk about sports.
10) Spit out that paper on poverty of the stimulus and causation finally. I wrote another 7,000 words this last summer, but it's not resolved. It's basically a philosophy paper, so I've put it on hold again.
11) Pursue 2 of the most worthy research projects from the acquisition class' work. No.... and that's all I have to say about that.
12) Be organized for almost all classes I teach each day. Yeah, I did okay here. I never went in blind.
13) Get B enrolled in some sort of activity. Not really. He's done some stuff, but it was all in the service of child care so that we could work. Non-check.
14) Attend sister's wedding. Completely did this and did it in style. Double check.
15) Work through first Korean language book. Uhhh... no. I was sitting in on a Korean class for about 6 weeks. Then I got the flu and then my dissertation called me. "Hellooo, Pacaaaaa. Write meeeeeee." It does that a lot.

I count that as 7 of 15, using my special math, which puts me right under 50%. If you take out the Titans winning the Superbowl thing, since I technically can't really do that for them, it puts me at exactly 50%, same as last year.

Myuh.

I will come up with 2010 goals in a couple of days. Now off to get that 7 hours of sleep. Or... looking at the time... 4. My bad.

Chance

2009-12-22T13:06:00.002-10:00

I am not sure I know what is predictable and what is a miracle.

One of the common arguments against evolution is to list all the things that would have to be just right for life to emerge. It's just so so improbable. You start listing all the parameters and it does come to 1 over billions or something.

But what is the chance that I'm writing this post to you now? An entire universe had to happen just so for this event to occur. My parents had to attend Tulane in the 60s. Their parents had to meet in whatever way they met. I know my grandmother took a teaching job in northern Louisiana. Without that, no blog post.

Each of their parents had to meet, and theirs before that, and what if Genghis Khan had turned right instead of left so that my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandma doesn't hide in the same bush as that nice guy. So I'm writing this to you now because Genghis Khan turned right. Thanks, Genghis!

Of course, it doesn't stop there. While I have been thinking about chance for a few weeks, it was reading a related post over at Mother Reproduces' blog that made me write today. What if she'd had a headache that day on March 21, 2008, and not written that post. And I was reading that entry because I was at McK's where she linked to Whirl and then Mother wrote a comment on Whirl's blog.

In short, billions of people over thousands of years had to do just what they did, a vast conspiracy, for this amazing event, this blog post, to occur.

Yet here it is.

And it's such an ordinary blog post at that.

For the record

2009-12-18T16:24:00.002-10:00

I've been making a lot of progress with the R statistical software package and programming environment over the last 6 weeks. The frustrating part about programming is that you always at some point come to what seems like it should be such a simple task and yet nothing works. I lost about 3 hours today to trying to remove some rows from a table. For the record, it appears I needed this:

u1=d10.s[!(d10.s$Condition=="badikiba.wav"&d10.s$ExpL=="3D"),]

Not:

u1=d10.s[(d10.s$Condition!="badikiba.wav"&d10.s$ExpL!="3D"),]

Nor:

u1=d10.s[-c(d10.s$Condition=="badikiba.wav"&d10.s$ExpL=="3D"),]

Nor:

u1=d10.s[-(d10.s$Condition=="badikiba.wav"&d10.s$ExpL=="3D"),]

Nor:

u1=d10.s[-()d10.s$Condition=="badikiba.wav"&d10.s$ExpL=="3D"),]

Nor:

u1=d10.s[d10.s$Condition=="digubati.wav",]$X
&
d10.s=d10.s[-u1,]

Now back to my life.

Not learning

2009-12-17T09:20:00.004-10:00

A couple of days ago a 20-something year-old man here on Oahu was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He had been racing his car around 100 miles per hour on suburban streets when he lost control, killing one of his friends in the car and disabling another for life.

Yesterday Cincinatti Bengals wide receiver Chris Henry fell out of a pickup truck and this morning he died.

Yesterday a 4-year-old on Oahu was struck and killed by a car.

And last night, some of my neighbors came flying around the driveway in a pick-up truck, swinging the back around as hard as they could like they were doing stunts in a movie for a thrill - with several people in the back. I heard a woman almost in dry heaves she was so panicked that she was going to die. It took her about 2 minutes before she could regain control of her breath to get out of the pickup's bed.

And of course the driver and his buddy thought it was all awesome.

What I learned from Nanowrimo 2009

2009-12-14T09:07:00.003-10:00

First up, I know I've abandoned my blog. Just insanely busy. I will try to update soon. In the meantime, here are a few things I learned from doing Nanowrimo, the National Novel Writing Month extravaganza.

1) One really can't write a novel on the side when trying to write a dissertation. Even if all your cool friends are doing it.

2) I'm not really a Nanowrimo personality in that I don't see any point of writing all willy-nilly. I'm not a serious planner in my writing. I will "outline" but the outline is a bare sketch of notes about a page long. Then I sit down to write, see what I come up with, and then perhaps sketch some more notes. In short, I plan just enough to write a few pages and that's it. But I really do want to think about what I'm going to write. If I'm going to write a story of a migrant family fixing wind turbines in 2150, which was the setting, I'm going to read about wind turbines. I can't just skip that in order to get some word count up.

3) I really, really liked writing my 3,000 words of mediocre stuff, reading it to B, and seeing that he enjoyed it. I think I could have a children's novel voice. However, I don't have that voice yet. The stuff I wrote on Day 2 sounded very different than the stuff I wrote on Day 1.

4) When I say I could write a children's novel, I really don't have in mind the current publication genres. Instead, I'm writing the stuff I remember loving as an 8-year-old. The stuff filed in the classic section for kids at B&N. Narnia, Kidnapped, 20,000 Leagues under the sea, etc. Does that stuff even have a genre anymore? It's too adult in language compared to today's middle grade, but it's also supposed to be enjoyable for 9-year-olds. Of course, if I really do write this for publication, I will have to find a way to make my interests fit with business interests.

5) Overall, the experience was good in that, while I only wrote about 3,000 words, that's 3,000 words more than I wrote in any other month of 2009.

6) I still like my idea. A girl and her family travel around the countryside fixing the tens of thousands of wind turbines that power the world she has no chance to participate in, mostly power for The Dop, the amazing transportation system that can take you anywhere in the world in an hour. Of course, one day she steps on one of those "trains". She also learns to fly with the help of a Hawaiian boy and saves her family's livelihood. Now, if I can just get my career out of the way, I'll "write it up".

Coconut Pancakes

2009-11-28T21:34:00.001-10:00

These coconut pancakes were super easy and quite nice.

http://www.recipezaar.com/Coconut-Pancakes-204519

If only we'd had some coconut syrup. As it was, I made do with honey.

In the be careful what you say department

2009-11-28T18:55:00.002-10:00

Yesterday N and B went out to buy Christmas hats and glow sticks for our upcoming march in the Kaimuki Christmas Parade with the Cub Scouts. B ended up with a hat with fake elf ears and so he was pretending to be a Christmas Elf during dinner. I told him he should be careful at the Parade because he looked so much like an elf that Santa might think he really was an elf and take him off to the North Pole.

At the parade last night then, we watched the various high school bands, the military band, the two semis for Ohana Concrete Pouring, some clowns, etc. Suddenly B rips off my and his Christmas hat and hides behind N. Apparently, Santa was coming on his fire truck and B didn't want to be taken away.

So he spent much of the time of Santa's passing cowering behind his mom so he wasn't swept off to build toys in Santa's Slave Elf factories.

Oops.

Of flags and religion

2009-11-20T00:26:00.002-10:00

Apparently, a Council of Islamic nations at the U.N. has started lobbying for >a treaty banning certain types of religious blasphemy. They clearly have in mind the old Danish cartoon from a couple years back. This flies right in the face of freedom of speech, of course, and I am opposed to it.

However, it made me think back to the old flag burning Constitutional amendment that periodically crops up. The idea is identical. Many Americans believe that the flag is such an important symbol that to defame it is a moral outrage they will not stand for. And so they will put aside freedom of speech for it.

I also disagree strongly there.

But what's interesting to me is that the U.S. flag is the only symbol in the country that is being treated this way. It's true that you often can't burn a cross, but that isn't because it is an attack on Christians. It's because of the history of cross burning and racial violence in the nation. No Star of David amendments being batted around by Jews; no figurines of Christ amendment, no Buddha statue amendment. Just the flag.

And this makes me think that, for many, patriotism (chauvinism in the original sense is even better) is their religion. I'm fairly patriotic myself. I care how people think about my nation; I want it to do good things; I have affection for my home nation; I would defend it if attacked. But love of country is nothing like love of God.

Something seems askew....

The base rate fallacy

2009-11-15T15:21:00.003-10:00

I had reason to look up the base rate fallacy a few minutes ago. Here's a very nice example of what it is and why it is relevant to our real lives today. This is a total copy and paste job from Wikipedia, with some corrections:

***
In a city with 100 terrorists and 1,000,000 non-terrorists (total population: 1,000,100), there is a surveillance camera with automatic face recognition software. If the camera sees a known terrorist, it will ring a bell with 99% probability. If the camera sees a non-terrorist, it will trigger the alarm 1% of the time. So, the failure rate of the camera is always 1%.

Suppose somebody triggers the alarm. What is the chance he/she is really a terrorist?

Someone making the base rate fallacy would incorrectly claim that the false alarm rate must be 1 in 100 because the failure rate of the device is 1 in 100, and so he/she is 99% sure to be a terrorist if the device rings. The fallacy arises from the assumption that the device failure rate and the false alarm rate are equal.

This assumption is incorrect because the camera is far more likely to encounter non-terrorists than terrorists. (Paca: This is the key sentence in the whole thing. While the machine only falsely tags 1% of the people it sees, it sees non-terrorists relentlessly and only sees an actual terrorist once in a blue moon, giving it a chance to make an error on non-terrorists a lot more often than it has a chance to make an error on a real terrorist.) The higher frequency of non-terrorists increases the false alarm rate.

Imagine that all 1,000,100 people in the city pass in front of the camera. About 99 of the 100 terrorists will trigger a ring — and so will about 10,000 of the one million non-terrorists. Therefore the camera will claim that 10,099 people are terrorists, and only 99 of them are in fact terrorists -- despite the fact that the camera only fails 1% of the time. So, the probability that a person who triggers the alarm is actually a terrorist is 99 in 10,099 (about 1/102). (Paca: So, practically, the camera is almost always wrong.)

The base rate fallacy is only fallacious when non-terrorists outnumber terrorists, or conversely. In a city with about 50% terrorists and about 50% nonterrorists, the real probability of misidentification won't be far from the failure rate of the device.
***

Paca: The same is true for something like a medical test as well. Image a test which examines a bit of tissue and gives a breast cancer diagnosis. The machine is well made and only makes a mistake 1% of the time. However, breast cancer only occurs in about 13% of American women. This means that a machine that only makes a mistake 1 in 100 times will still actually tag more women who do NOT have breast cancer as having breast cancer than it will tag women who actually do have breast cancer. Not because it's a poorly made machine, but because 87% of the women it sees do not have breast cancer.

If you are into the math (because I know you are), what we want to know is the probability of cancer given a positive diagnosis. This is P(Cancer | Diagnosis = Yes). The error rate of the machine is actually (simplifying) the probability of a diagnosis given cancer ( P(Diagnosis = Yes|Cancer)), i.e., when cancer is present in the tissue sample, it correctly says yes 99% of the time. These are not the same thing.

P(Cancer | Diagnosis = Yes) does NOT = P (Diagnosis = Yes | Cancer)

but

P (Cancer | Diagnosis = Yes) DOES EQUAL** P(Diagnosis = Yes | Cancer)*P(Cancer)

That last term, the P(Cancer) is the probability that someone has cancer regardless of any medical diagnosis or other evidence. It's called the "base rate" or "prior probability".

The base rate fallacy is also inherent in funny statistical claims such as: Did you know that 99% of murderers eat bread?! It may be true, but the base rate of any person eating bread is probably also around 99%.

Returning to the cancer diagnosis machine, let's say we have a machine that tests 1,000 American women for breast cancer. Because the overall base rate of breast cancer is approximately 13%, we know, before any tests are done, that 130 of these women will have breast cancer while 870 will not have breast cancer. (13% * 1,000 women). How will the machine do? Let's assume it's still got an error rate of only 1%. So it will falsely say that 1% of women who do not have breast cancer do in fact have breast cancer, which is 1% * 870 or 87 women. It will also get 99% of the women who really do have breast cancer or 99% * 130 = 129 women. So, it will claim that 216 women have breast cancer when only 129 actually do. 40% of its claims of breast cancer will be false positives -- despite only making the wrong actual diagnosis 1% of the time.

This is the case with a disease that's fairly common. Over 1 in 10 women are likely to get breast cancer in their lives. The problem only compounds as the disease gets more rare.

**Technically, proportional to, since I'm ignoring the denominator)

Stop. Circle Time.

2009-11-12T02:01:00.003-10:00

13 years ago now I finished up a Master's degree in philosophy. I was decently good at it. I was given this graduate award that almost never goes to an M.A., but only to a Ph.D. However, I decided not to apply for doctoral programs because

1) I had spent my entire life taking classes. Really had no idea what else one could do in the world. I thought it was time to pick my head up and look around a bit.

2) I was able to write papers that got an A, but I really had nothing to say. I was 22 when I got the M.A. degree and just didn't have any wisdom at all.

3) I wasn't sure that writing yet another philosophy paper would really mean much to anyone. It's a field based on logic and rhetoric, and nothing is as easily manipulated as those two things. It's easy to spend your time being clever instead of productive. If I was going to be a scholar, I wanted to have real empirical data to show that I was right or wrong with a theory. All research can spin its wheels with bad assumptions, but please give me some data. (It's easy to do meaningless work in experimental research as well, but that's another topic. Really, the take home point is that research that's good and that matters is few and far between and the fact that it ever appears at all should make you appreciate those scholars who do it even more.)

I say all this, because I am in the middle of getting materials together for a post-doc at the University of Oslo, where I would do research in... wait for it... linguistics and philosophy. I'm actually kinda qualified for this one in a way that isn't a complete stretch. And it's one of the possibilities that's more exciting than others.

Suffice it to say, it would just be freaky if I ended up spending 2 years doing philosophy again.

However, maybe I'm just applying for the job because it's freaking Oslo! I could hike me a fjord, eat me a bunch a smoked fish, stay up to midnight with the sun, and go around doing the Swedish chef voice as if I can't tell the difference between Sweden and Norway. Really, that last one makes it all worthwhile. I'm sure the Norse love being considered Swede.

My two big questions are: 1) If I get the job, do I have to wear the helmet with the little horns? and 2) If I do, can I please change my name to Hagar the Horrible?

You can't touch this

2009-11-06T10:14:00.001-10:00

Has no screens that you can touch. Or if you touch it, it's for your own benefit, not because it does anything.

Planet Claire

2009-11-05T11:51:00.000-10:00

I've been enjoying this tune a lot lately.

Planet Claire

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWqI_a7YHvM

The yearbook photo

2009-10-17T00:36:00.002-10:00

In my school, the senior class members were allowed to choose what their photo would be and you could have small groups.

Here I am at 16 with my three friends. Hopefully, people can figure out which I am. My son got it wrong though.

On my hometown

2009-10-15T14:18:00.002-10:00

I've been planning to do a post of comments on my old hometown in Northeastern Louisiana for a while, but I keep putting it off because it's a difficult subject with no conclusions.

But I just came across this almost News of the Weird article in which a Justice of the Peace in Tangipahoa Parish, which is north of New Orleans, was caught denying a marriage license to a couple because there were "interracial," meaning she's white and he's black, in this case.

On the obvious and negative side, the reaction is:

?!@#&$#%@#$$($%? REALLY? STILL TODAY IN 2009?!!!!!! C'MON LOUISIANA!!!!!!

The other side of things is that at least this guy is becoming more and more of a minority. I get the impression most Louisianians are also going: ?$%@#$#@%^

This was enough of an inspiration to finally write my article about the Boro, which is Winnsboro, LA.

My family has deep roots there with my great grandfather moving there over 100 years ago. He was a Methodist minister for a very short span in the early 1900s. My grandfather, father, and mother were all Presidents of the Chamber of Commerce at one point, with my mother being the first female president they'd had. My dad is the only family member remaining in the town, but the Paca family was a leading family, you could say, for a century.

I was born and raised there, and it was the only world I knew until I was 12, when I left to New Jersey for a boarding school. I spent a few summers there in the mid-80s, but by senior year or so, I would stay with my mother in other places in Louisiana and Mississippi. And so, I only know of the town from a child's point of view and I have not spent more than a few days at a time there in 20 years.

It's a farming town as virtually all small towns in the area are, on the border of the Mississippi Delta. When I was growing up, the crops were cotton and soybeans. The cotton market fell apart later when I was in college and lots of people moved to corn.

The racial makeup was stereotypical for the area as well. White and black. And that was almost it. Everyone could count the number of families of any other ethnicity on two hands, maybe one hand. I'm only coming up with 4 families right now.

As far as I remember as a child, almost all the elected leaders and such, with only a couple exceptions, were white. I always thought that this was basically because the town was about 60% white, 40% black and there was enough racism that only a small number of whites would vote across the color line.

However, I recently came across some interesting demographics about the town. I had the racial makeup reversed. It's actually 60% black / 40% white. Whites are the minority. (I don't know if this is a change over the last 20 years or not.) Puts the lack of black elected leaders in a slightly different perspective. Here are some other interesting demographics:

Of the households with children, only 35% are headed by a married couple. Another third have a female head with no husband present, and the final third are labeled "non-family". I'm not sure what that means exactly. Could be non-married, could be a combination of families.

The median income per household for the town is... get this:

$17,500 per year.

That's median, so 50% of the households make that amount OR LESS. Not one person, the entire household. This then implies the next stunning fact:

Almost 60% of the town lives below the federal poverty line.

This is not going to be the whole picture, because I know well that there are many poor whites, but one also can't notice the close connection between the town being 60% black and just about 60% of households being below the poverty line.

Things are changing, as I understand it. Here's a lovely video of Freddie Cole, a world famous jazz musician, brother of Nat King Cole, playing a couple years back in town at the Princess Theater. The band stayed with my dad while visiting. The Princess Theater is something of a high spot for Winnsboro with well-known artists coming to play and productions being mounted.

But in the comments to this video, someone stated how wonderful it was to see this, not just because it's a great jazz musician in a tiny town, but because black and white citizens were sitting together and playing music together. And this was not true when I was a kid. In the early 80s still, blacks had to buy their movie tickets at a side door and then sit in the balcony. I confess I had forgotten, but it's completely true. Clearly, it was illegal, but segregation continued on at the Princess just 25 years ago. Good news is that that's gone. Bad news is that it's so close in memory.

I periodically wonder: Why is Winnsboro in such economic troubles with a full 60% below the poverty line? A large part of it is the general decline of rural America. People are leaving the country for the city all over the nation. At the same time, not all rural places have to collapse. I've never actually been there, but Vermont has a reputation of being simultaneously rural and yet decently educated and, if not prosperous, getting by alright. The Delta soil is very rich. Why can't Louisiana be like Vermont?

My best idea is that it's this lingering racism and history of slavery. While the Princess is no longer segregated, it sure seems like most whites and blacks still live rather separate lives. Here are two examples I've found:

The town has one major festival each year: The Franklin Parish Catfish Festival.

I've never actually been, as it started sometime when I was in boarding school. I always hear good things, though, and it became a pretty big deal for a while with thousands of people attending. I encourage my readers down Baton Rouge way to try going some time. Interestingly, though, if I look at the photos on the official site, I can only find one single African-American in the pics. In a town where 60% of the residents are African-American. (I'm sure things are more mixed in reality, because this is a big event and town celebrations like parades had everyone attend when I was a kid. Even so, there's at least under-representation of the black citizens in the way the celebration is presented online.)

Simultaneously, blacks in Winnsboro will celebrate the Juneteenth Festival. I'd like to pretend I was all in the know on this but I hadn't heard of Juneteenth. It's a holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in Texas and has slowly spread across the nation. Here's a little home video from YouTube.

Nothing in particular to see there except that I don't see a single white person hanging out. A Juneteenth festival is never mentioned as a cultural event on the town web site. People are still living in their own racial worlds.

And this has immediate political consequences. I just dug up the parish election results for 2008. (A parish is like a county and include more than just Winnsboro.) The parish voted 67% for McCain, 32% for Obama. Got those numbers? 67 McCain, 32 Obama.

Now here's the racial makeup of the entire Parish: 67% white, 32% black. I'm not making this up. It looks for all the world like a straight race-to-party-line.

So what? I can only think that this two worlds approach to race that persists is still killing the rural South. Not just black Louisianians, but white Louisianians as well. No society can truly prosper without them all working together, or at least consistently with one another. Until that cycle is broken, the median income will stay as low as it is. I don't know what it will take. All the old guard dying off leaving the younger people who see all of the citizens as one group, not just those of their own color? I don't know. I welcome your ideas.

Dubious concoctions - Goldfish tenderloin

2009-10-14T20:27:00.003-10:00

Several weeks ago, we had these pork tenderloins. They always come two in a package. I had cooked both the first night and so later in the week it was time for the second one as leftover. I didn't want to have the exact same thing, so... I had this idea.

N invented Cheez-It Chicken several years ago. You basically crush the Cheez-It crackers into crumbs and then use them like bread crumbs. So I figured I would try to do this but with a pork tenderloin.

Unfortunately, we didn't have Cheez-Its; we only had Goldfish crackers. But those are cheese crackers, right? So same diff.

Except that we only had rainbow colored Goldfish crackers.

However, I was not to be daunted, so I crushed them all up. Dipped the already cooked tenderloin in some sour cream, stuck it in a bag with the smushed Goldfish crackers, and then fried it up in a skillet with some oil.

Um....

It wasn't that bad actually, though I don't think this is a recipe anyone needs to recreate. It certainly looked... interesting, however.

the big idea

2009-10-14T15:19:00.004-10:00

I've been working on a Big Idea in the back of my head for a few weeks now. I call it the LIMIT model of language, which stands for Language as Integrated Motion in Time.

I've always been rather good at writing prologues to stories and mediocre at following through. I just wrote the intro to my idea and it has a nice ring to it.

LIMIT: Language as Integrated Motion in Time

This is a work of synthesis. The method was this: First, there's a goal. The goal originates from the simple thesis that time is a critical component of cognition, and that time must be a component of any understanding of our knowledge of language. The goal was then to discover how to stop saying that bits of language are to the left and right of each other and profitably say that they are before and after. Next, it examines available research programs, selecting the ones that most benefit that goal. As such, it is an active selection, not a passive one. Then, it modifies those research programs to make as coherent of a whole as could be achieved when they are integrated. The research programs that are used, then, are not taken as wholes, but shaped and modified to fit the purpose. Finally, a set of predictions is made based upon this integrated model.

I go through this explication of synthesis, because this process is also the model itself. Language is created through a set of parallel mental components, each with its own goals, that integrate information from other components in a way relevant to itself, and then each process builds an expectation for the future based upon this integrated information. This process is continuous and time-dependent. In sum, a language is integrated motion in time.

Columbus Day and Judging the Past

2009-10-12T23:05:00.004-10:00

Columbus Day has come and gone in the U.S., and there's just no way around it: it's a controversial holiday.

I don't view Columbus Day as really about Columbus himself. It's about the modern contact between the Old World and New World and marking that event in history.

There's always a tendency to oversimplify what it means. Not too long ago, Columbus Day, if recognized at all, was only a celebration. More recently, the coin has flipped and people only discuss all of the horrific things that occurred.

And that list of horrific things goes on for a long time:

The destruction of hundreds of cultures
Languages disappearing forever
Million upon millions of innocent people dead
dead through war, disease, genocide, neglect
The spread of slavery across the globe....

But at the same time, many amazing things have come about as well because of this contact. Here's just a partial list (and apologies to the other Americas for the undeniably U.S.-centric list):

Literature:

Harper Lee

Truman Capote

John Steinbeck

Walt Whitman

Toni Morrison

Michael Chabon

Jhumpa Lahiri

Zora Neale Hurston

David Henry Hwang

Louisa May Alcott

Robert Frost

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Maya Angelou

...

Performing Arts / Film

Rodgers and Hammerstein

Cole Porter

Arthur Miller

Tony Kushner

George Gershwin

August Wilson

Orson Welles

Gene Kelly

Fred Astaire

Ginger Rodgers

Jim Henson

The Godfather

Casablanca

Marlon Brando

Kathryn Hepburn

...

Music (this might be the biggest of all: imagine music today without the New World....)

Louis Armstrong

Ella Fitzgerald

Billie Holiday

Dizzy Gillespie

Charlie Parker

Duke Ellington

Benny Goodman

Muddy Waters

Robert Johnson

Bessie Smith

Howlin' Wolf

Elvis

The Beatles (well aware, they are Brits, but they were performing Elvis and Chuck Berry; same concept goes for pretty much every single modern musical act. I bet if we all tossed away every CD we had that had some sort of New World post-Columbus influence, we'd end up with about 6 items, 4 of which you picked up on world travels (ok, fine, I know some people for whom this would not be true, but I think my points is clear. Even if your collection is stacked with stars from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, almost all of them are doing New World music reflected back through their own culture and artistry)

Chuck Berry

Simon and Garfunkel

Kathleen Battle

the Met

bossa nova

Antonio Carlos Jobim

tango

salsa

meringue

son

ki ho'alu (Hawaiian slack key guitar)

songs of Queen Liliuokalani

bluegrass

Western swing

...

Athletics

baseball

football

basketball

Jesse Owens

Jackie Joyner Kersey

Carl Lewis

Jackie Robinson

Duke Kahanamoku (at least not his exact life)

Michael Jordan

Ichiro Suzuki

Wilt Chamberlain

Yao Ming

Tiger Woods

Mary Lou Retton

Michelle Kwan

Kristy Yamaguchi

Just major world events / innovation

the telephone

the Moon Landing

television

the Marshall Plan

the Declaration of Independence

the internet

Martin Luther King Jr.

the lightbulb

Henry Ford's plant

Susan B. Anthony

the cotton gin

the "green revolution" that saved millions from famine in this century

And that's all just scratching the surface.

One can say that some of these things would have been created by others if people in the New World, operating in the cultures created by the contact initiated by Columbus, had not done so. Sometimes that's easy to see, such as with the incandescent lightbulb. Clearly opera would be okay without the U.S. Other things are extremely unlikely. It is exactly the mixing of European and African cultures in the U.S., put through the minds of individual geniuses, that created jazz. Anyway, if we go down this road of "well, someone would have done it," then we are just dealing in hypotheticals within hypotheticals. The facts are that all these people in the Americas did do it.

Of course, if we hadn't had these things created, because the settlement from Europe, Africa, and Asia into the Americas never occurred in the pattern that it actually did, we'd all be celebrating other cultural achievements. Playing the game of "well, it was worth it" is hopeless. Who knows what would have existed. The fact that we got MLK and can celebrate that doesn't mean that segregation was good. Instead, people just do the best they can with what they've got.

You can rarely judge an individual's action by what happened due to it 100 years later. Columbus did set in motion the world of Cortez, but, if we simply blame Columbus, then we are letting Cortez off the moral hook for the conquest of Mexico, and surely he's the one to blame there. Cortez could have said 'no'. Columbus should be morally judged on his own actions (and I'm aware that he had a very mixed/dubious character), not for what others did in his footsteps.

Now, that last paragraph sounds good to me (which is nice since I wrote it), but it's assuredly a flawed view. The actions of a single person can be basically harmless when only one person does it, but when a million people do the same thing, it can be devastating. The clearest case is in natural habitats. One besotted nature tourist walking a beach where sea turtles are born does harm to no one. But cover the beach with those tourists and the habitat is destroyed. One carbon-emitting car: no problem. 100 million carbon-spewing cars: big problem. The same thing happens with cultural contact. It does little harm for an English speaker to meet and become friends with a group of Choctaw speaking people. But swamp the nation with English-speakers and the Choctaw language is fighting for its life.

Those wiser than me must take it from here. I think all you can do with Columbus Day is say that it changed the world. That makes it worth marking. And then teach children what happened as a consequence. The good things, the terrible things. And then maybe they will take whatever actions they can as they grow up to keep as much of the good and mitigate the bad as can be done today. If I were to stay in Hawaii permanently, for instance (which is not likely since there are no jobs here without killing someone in my department), I would have failed if I don't take actions to keep Hawaiian culture and language alive.

Accordion Vivaldi

2009-10-12T16:58:00.001-10:00

It is Vivaldi, right? (I said Bach at first, hat tip to Akiemi.) Hat tip to Heather

See more funny videos and TBT Videos at Today's Big Thing.

http://www.todaysbigthing.com/2009/10/05

Overcoming your limitations in writing

2009-10-11T10:43:00.002-10:00

How do you overcome your limitations in writing?

I've mentioned before on this blog that I have a lousy visual memory. N corrected me once on the color of our house. (I assumed it had white siding, but it apparently was a sort of tan or something.) I didn't know the color of my own mother's eyes once. Apparently, they are blue. I only remember this because I remember the conversation. I mentioned once how I didn't know anyone with blue eyes with my mother there and she said, "well, perhaps me." I couldn't tell you if my wife has a big nose or a small nose, even though we've been together for 19 years now. If a sketch artist started placing different noses on her face, I would know if it's right or not. I just can't take the nose off of her face and stick it mentally next to some other nose and make a decision. Unless it's Pinochio or Cyrano.

And so, when I'm reading fiction, I often start to skim when I get to those big paragraphs describing the room or the person's clothes. I have an interest in women, I assume from this whole heterosexuality thing I've got going, so I sometimes do care what a woman looks like in a book, but I don't particularly care about everyone else, and I often actually forget the physical description of the female characters as well. If the monster has pointed ears or flat ones? Whatever. It's a monster. That's all I need to know.

I'm currently reading Kate Elliot's Spirit Gate and the color of hair is only important on one woman, a slave named Cornflower. She has blonde hair and is viewed as an object of desire and possibly a demon by others. But the much larger character of Mai, a major POV character and heroine in the novel, well, I can clearly infer she's not blonde, but otherwise, I've totally forgotten, and it really makes no difference to the plot what her hair color is. People react to her as beautiful, so I know she is. But I have no image of her in my head at all.

Largely, I just don't care. Descriptions for the visual senses are not part of the enjoyable experience for me, like a good one-liner is.

And yet, I know many other people do care. It's these detailed descriptions of sight that brings the character and world to life. I think it ties into the way people find different arts appealing. For some, the structures of music are just not all that interesting. For me, that's definitely the most fascinating of all the arts. Others can stare at a painting for half an hour. I can easily put on headphones and disappear into music for an hour, but a painting? Not so much.

How do you compensate for your own weaknesses in writing? Someone once told me she maintains a five senses check list. I haven't written anything in a couple years now, but the last few times I did, I would draft with whatever came to mind, which is always dialogue, emotions, and wit. Then I'd go back in the revisions and continuously look for places I could satisfy the other senses and add something in. Are there places where a normal person would want to visualize more? Should there be a sense of smell here? I think it did help.

Are there things that you know are important that you just don't do naturally? How do you overcome it?

artefact versus artifact

2009-10-09T10:29:00.002-10:00

I just wrote these two sentences in my paper:

"There is some tendency for these harsher critiques of the family members to be directed more towards female members of the family than male ones. However, this may by an artefact of the scenarios more than anything else."

And old MS Word underlined "artefact" and wants me to spell it "artifact". So off to Google I went and there seems to be no consensus on this. It could be a UK/US spelling difference, though there's evidence that both forms are used in both nations. However, to me, I don't think of these as the same word, though it's hard for me to pinpoint the difference.

If an archaeologist digs up a piece of pottery, that's a definite artifact with an "i" in there. But, well, that's not the kind of artifact I am talking about in my sentence. This sort of an artefact is an accidental construction of other features. My sentence example is a better explanation than my definition here.

What are your thoughts? I expect people to have opinions on the spelling, but what about the difference in meaning? Are these really two different, though related, words? Or is my inability to articulate the difference between an artifact and an artefact evidence they're really the same thing?

My guess right now is that these are the same word, but that I've encountered this "accidental feature" use of artefact among stuff written by people who happened to use the artefact spelling. It's a probabilistic meaning for the linguist readers.

Why is shortly a word but longly isn't?

2009-10-01T19:55:00.001-10:00

As in, "I will have a beer shortly," but not "I will finish this paper longly."

Just asking.

A Bad Science / Poor Logic / What a Maroon Rant

2009-09-30T22:41:00.004-10:00

I've mostly avoided political rants like I did in my old days. Instead, when I have stated something governmental as of late, I've tried to be constructive overall. But some stupid quotes have hit the blogosphere from a columnist at National Review Online, John Derbyshire, who, in short, would be happier if women couldn't vote, since all they want is for the state to take care of their babies. You can get the details here should you be in a fighting mood. I posted two comments on The Moderate Voice blog and I've copied them here:

1) I'm not up in my political pundits and have no idea who Derbyshire is, but it would seem like such a view would push him to the fringes of conservative punditry.

2) Decided to come beat this horse a bit. I've been reading articles by Derbyshire on his web site and columns at the NRO. Odd character. Novels, non-fiction books on Reimann, self-published stuff. His mathematical non-fiction has gotten awards so I assume it's quite worthy, but at the same time his article >Will Obama Kill Science? is a horribly simple-minded understanding of the current state of the "nature/nurture" debate.

That piece really isn't about science, it's about one tiny piece of research, which he thinks is best exemplified by that old book The Bell Curve. You see in Derbyshire's world, all the liberals (and cultural Marxists, a term he uses) are trying to shut down any research that doesn't show people to be the same, again exemplified by The Bell Curve, and if that happens we will have shut down the search for the Truth. Since identifying how various groups are different is the sum of all interesting science. Curse those liberals!

This seems to connect to the opinions expressed in the quotes here in that he has these ideas of what people are like, and apparently he's very drawn to ones that group people by gender and ethnicity -- at least that's all he cites. Haven't read his works, but I bet he doesn't go study up on differences that don't fall along these lines.

In the quotes here, women all want to nurture, because that's how women are you know, and simultaneously they want someone else to take care of "their" kids. How they want to nurture and yet not take care of their kids is a bit confusing, but I'm sure he'd make it clear to us given the opportunity. Perhaps women are also lazy or have no ability to follow through with their desires? (Not as rational as men, I suppose, but I probably am putting words in his mouth now, though it's certainly suggested since in Derby-Land women are driven by these biological needs that few can resist so as to vote like men.)

And, of course, women don't want to take care of "their" children. Derbyshire's a big fan of biology, so he might want to be reminded that it takes two to create one of those things we call children, so there really aren't any children that are just from women (artificial insemination exempted, I suppose).

But men aren't inclined to help out much. I find that interesting as I pick my son up from school and drop him off. Naturally, it's just the two of us when my wife has a meeting or trip. When the Vice-Principal calls, it's me who goes to find out what he's done, and when the nurse calls, it's me who usually stays at home. (I don't mean to say that I do everything and N doesn't. Due to the fact that I study on Sundays and one night a week, she probably ends up with more B time overall. The point is I and many dads are in fact involved in our children's lives.) Perhaps I'm the exception that proves the Derby Rule, however.

But is Derbyshire upset with the men who created this child they don't want to help take care of? Seemingly not. It's "their" kids after all, "their" being women.

The real killer, however, is indeed in what Colmes points out (at least as quoted here). Derbyshire thinks he's a believer in freedom and yet doesn't really want any groups of people to vote unless they more often agree with him politically. That thought is the death of democracy and freedom. Women vote differently than him, and so they really shouldn't vote. Who else? He doesn't want slavery, but African-Americans vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Perhaps the world would be a better place if we took away their votes as well? Jews?

Derbyshire actually hints here that women are incapable of voting well, due to this supposed need to nurture and simultaneous laziness. (I feel like someone needs to create "Need to Nurture" t-shirts.) And this highlights one of the reasons some people do get worried about research looking into differences between the sexes or different ethnic groups. It's because people such as Derbyshire aren't trying to get a complicated, in-depth picture of the human race. They instead like to seize on some result that matches what they think and then use that to justify what they already believe.

The large majority of scientific studies that find differences between groups of people don't find anything categorical (some developmental work with children might be an exception; there are certain things that kids really don't get at all until a certain age, then, bam, they all get it). Instead, they find a higher correlation between one variable (attitude, intelligence measures, problem-solving behaviors, linguistic features, whatever) and another, such as gender identification. Both groups display immense variability, but on average there's a slight sway one way or another. The partisan then grabs that as evidence of what women are like and recommends cutting these funds or doing away with this program or whatever. Because now "it's based on science". But of course that's a silly way to understand the result.

Then, a few year's later there will be a follow up study which shows that it wasn't gender identification which was the best determining factor, but some other feature, often behavioral, which happened to be more common in the women who participated in the study. In other words, it wasn't a gender thing at all, but a cultural one that may or may not be common across cultures.

But it's too late, because the program was cancelled.

This doesn't mean that research on gender and ethnicity shouldn't be done. In fact it is done all the time. I'm just spelling out why some have political reservations about it.

Rant done.

Moral for the Trivia Game and in General

2009-09-30T09:40:00.003-10:00

I was about to post this to the Trivia Game notes, but I decided it has a ring to it, so I will post it here:

What I couldn't accomplish through intelligence or skill, I accomplished through persistence.

Not key lime pie strictly speaking

2009-09-28T21:28:00.006-10:00

I bought these limes at the Kapiolani Community College farmer's market about a week ago and so I needed to do something with them. Well, key lime pie of course!

Except they aren't key limes; they're just limes of some other umm non-key sort.

So...

yeah.

I made the pie anyway.

Graham cracker crust:
1.5 cups of crushed graham crackers
4 TBs of butter, which wasn't enough, so I poured in some pecan oil until it looked moist enough to press. Press into pie pan.

Bake the crust for 10 minutes at 350, then let cool.

Filling

4 egg yolks
one can of condensed milk
1/2 cup of lime juice.

Mix the egg yolks together with the condensed milk until well blended. Add in the lime juice. Pour into the pie crust.

Topping

Every topping for this that I found online involved either whipped cream or a meringue. I've never made a meringue before, but I had these 4 whites in a bowl from the filling, so I gave the meringue a try.

4 egg whites
1 cup sugar (supposedly superfine is better, but I made it through with granulated sugar, sugar mama (John Lee Hooker reference))
1/4 tsp of cream of tartar

Now, I actually have a big powerful Kitchen Aid mixer that N's dad sent to us as a present a few years ago, but it was behind all this stuff, and it sure seemed a pain to get that thing out from the back corner, so I decided to just whip the meringue by hand.

Do not do that.

Well, unless you are trying to lose weight in your forearm. Seriously, how did those French pastry chefs in the 19th century whip out meringue pies all day long? They must have had forearms that weighed more than the rest of their body. I can clearly tell that they moved about by bouncing on the forearm muscles from one place to the next. You just flex one of those puppies and bounce to the next location. I think I spent half an hour whipping this thing, and I had to get N to jump in at least 2 times to give me a break.

So just get out the mixer. Don't do it by hand unless you're going for meringue bragging rights.

Which I am. I rule. You suck, you electric mixer meringue people. You call that a meringue?!

Electric pansy.

Whip the egg whites slowly so that they are full of bubbles. Add in the cream of tartar and continue whipping until soft peaks form. This should occur right around the time that American Idol 22 crowns the winner. Good news: you won't have missed a single episode by living your life. Now, add in the entire cup of sugar... wait for it... 1 TB at a time. That's right. A cup added one TB at a time. Because you have nothing else to do and, when it comes down to it, your life is a puddle of emptiness seeping into a void over an abyss.

Add the TB and whip some more. Add another, whip. You get the idea. Just whip it. Into shape. Shape it up. Get straight. Go for it. Move ahead. Try to detect it. It's not too late. To whip it.

All together.... Whip it good!

Whip until you give up or the soft peaks become stiffer peaks. (Actually, you can get away with softer peaks if you are doing a pie and not one of those baked meringue confections. So I am totally still manly even if I may not have been as stiff as others had wished for. It's totally natural and happens to most men at some time or another. It doesn't mean we aren't attracted to pie anymore. It's a physical reaction and you really shouldn't read so much into it. About meringues I mean.)

Spoon the meringue on top of the pie and place the pie in the oven that is still preheated at 350. Bake for, like, 15 minutes or something. The meringue should be browning on top. Remove. Cool on a rack for a while, then cool in the fridge for 8 hours.

This is what it looked like in rather fuzzy pics:

I may have a little too much meringue there, but you know how I loooove making meringue by hand. Uh huh.

Punditry with Real-Time Polling

2009-09-28T14:16:00.002-10:00

Another brilliant satire video from the Onion. Why does this not feel inaccurate to me, however?

Seeing numbers

2009-09-25T15:06:00.002-10:00

Yahoo's Live Science just posted an article about scientists using brain imaging to see the neural representation of numbers and patterns of dots in people's brains. I added a comment in the "Buzz Log" about why this could be a really big moment in science, and so I'm copying that here:

This is very, very cool, and could be seen as a breakthrough in cognitive science. The way most psychology works as of today is that the scientist thinks of a pattern that fits data, and then we guess that something like that pattern is what's actually in our minds. But this is because we've had no direct way to see what the mind was doing. We could only see general areas in use before with brain imaging. However, if they can truly see the way the brain is representing certain objects, then that could let us study how those objects are manipulated by the brain, which then let's us stop guessing about the mind and start observing how thought works.

Super cool!!!

Dress Like a Pirate Day

2009-09-23T13:01:00.003-10:00

20 years ago next Spring, I was a 16 year old senior in high school and I appeared in our Spring production of the Pirates of Penzance. I was a lovely pirate in Act I and a policeman in Act II. A friend of mine posted some pics of that production on Facebook, and I've charmingly stolen them and posted them here. I am pretty sure I have the exact same pictures stored in a warehouse in Louisiana.

That's me with the black pirate hat right in the middle of the boat with the arm in the air. I believe the lovely pirate ship had just rolled on stage and the Pirate King in shadow behind me will soon sing, "For I am a Pirate Kiiiinnnnggggg!"

And here I am with our hero, Frederick. The person playing Frederick went on to a substantial career in theater, such as helping found 2nd Generation in NY, and I've talked about him in the past.

Singing in the Rain

2009-09-18T21:38:00.002-10:00

B and I watched Singing in the Rain tonight. Think it's the first time I've ever actually seen the whole movie, and it had B up and dancing. And so, I thought I'd repost this item I wrote almost 4 years ago now:

Ever since I was a kid I've always had the idea that being able to tap dance would be really cool. I don't know if it's the rhythm thing or what. I've had little desire to learn to do any other form of dance and I have no actual natural talent at dancing. I took a movement class as part of a theater camp at the U of Texas, when I was a junior in high school so... 1989, and in our little recital they put me in the far back corner. In college I studied Tai Chi from my Chinese prof and thought I was doing OK, so when I was in China I showed my friends the first few motions I had learned and they burst out into laughter. Similar results when I was learning to do some Japanese Noh-style movements once in an audition - I was asked to be the stage manager. I have no accelerated ability to dance. But regardless one day, maybe when I'm 40 and have tenure and a bit of free time, I'm going to take a class, strap on my shoes, let all the 21 year old jazz dancers giggle at me, and do my best Fred Astaire. So there.

The Great Division....

2009-09-13T14:35:00.003-10:00

Terrific post for the economically innocent such as myself over at The Moderate Voice blog today. It's a simple report on economic tendencies with two remarkable items. The first is the less politically charged one, which is the unravelling of the so-called "Great Compression". This Great Compression is when America transformed through WWII from a land of haves and havenots into a land of the middle class, the world which most of us grew up in. Since the mid to late 80s, about the time I was in high school, wealth has divided again. It's hard to know exactly why this has happened, but I would hazard that it's part of the change in economic focus from manufacturing to service more than anything else. It is also the dismantling of many LBJ social programs, but I don't know if that's important or not.

The more politically controversial fact is that the recent Bush administration has the dubious distinction of being the only two-term President to preside over a decline in income since WWII as well. And, and this is the important part, it is not because of the recession that started in 2007. Even when the economy was growing overall from 2000 to 2007, the average income was falling. The bottom just fell out even more then.

What to do about it is of course a very good question, and I cannot answer it. But it's the right question to be asking.

My fave garage rock / pop band

2009-09-11T08:41:00.001-10:00

The Donnas

And for those on Facebook where the links don't show, let's try this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIgJ5KhlzVc

Yurihwa 유 리 화

2009-09-04T23:34:00.003-10:00

I think I got my Hangul right there, but I can't quite see it clearly.... Anyway, I have finally finished watching my first ever Korean drama, i.e., soap opera. Yurihwa or Stained Glass. I think I watched Episode 1 sometime in June and just watched Episode 18, the last, tonight.

For those new to K-drama, they are not quite like any format on U.S. television that I'm aware of. They're many episodes long, 15, 20, 30, so much longer than a miniseries, but they don't go on forever like an American soap opera. Instead there's one story that takes place over 20 hours.

In this one, I got to watch the travails of Ji-Soo, Dong-Wu, and Gi-Tae in a long and dramatic love triangle. Is Dongwu the arrogant rich jerk that he shows when he's in Japan as Yuichi, or is he the kind, loyal, and romantic Dongwu in Korea? Will Ji-Soo choose Gi-Tae, the friend who's been by her side for years taking care of her after he parents died when she was a teen, or Dong-Wu, the new man that she can't stop thinking about? And do we really know who Dong-Wu is anyway? Secrets abound! Coincidences coincidence! And what of her father.....

You get the idea. Here's a video containing various clips from about the first 5 episodes.

Many people say that this is not the best of K-drama. My co-author really enjoyed one called, in English Palace or Princess Diaries or something similar. You can get them from Netflix if you've got 20 hours to spend.

Creative grooming

2009-09-02T09:35:00.002-10:00

Via moonrat

Here's my email

2009-08-31T14:26:00.003-10:00

Decided to remove this, since it's a small world.

Henovins - recipe

2009-08-29T21:17:00.004-10:00

I mentioned in my grocery posts that I found some Cornish hens, split in half, for $4.99 last weekend. So I cooked them up for the mega birthday lunch today. Oh, yeah, I am now the lovely age of 36.

I haven't done Cornish Hens in several years, so I had to look up recipes again, then I merged three of them together into something that came out quite nice if I do say so myself. The key was that N has these stacks of leftover bottles of wine from a wine tasting her company did like a year or two ago. Because we had the wine for free, the following recipe was possible. It's basically a sort of coq au vin, or Hen au vin, um, hence my Englishized (yes, I know anglicized is the correct term. if a linguist can't make up words to please himself, who can?) title Henovins. Isn't henovin a liquor?

Where was I?

2 Cornish game hens, split down the middle. Ours came this way, so I can't offer advice on how to do it.
garlic powder
salt
pepper
paprika
"italian seasonings"
red wine
2/3 cup flour
2 T butter

I stuck all of the above seasonings and a bunch of red wine into a bag. Then I added the hens inside and let it marinate for about an hour. I am sure a longer marinade would have been better. Oh, and put a whooole bunch of the italian seasonings in.

Melt 2 T butter in a big big pan with a cover. Put 2/3rds cup flour in another bag with salt, pepper, and more italian seasonings. Mix the seasonings and flour in the bag. Take the half-hens from the marinade and place in the flour bag. Shake your money maker until it's covered in flour. Place in the skillet and brown on both sides. Add 1 cup red wine into the skillet and cover. Simmer for 45 minutes until super tender. I cooked some rice to go with it. After removing the hens and putting on a serving plate, you can put a little flour or corn starch into the remaining wine and make a gravy. Pour the gravy over the rice and hens as desired. Munch. You'll need napkins, cause picking the hens with your fingers, the only appropriate way, is messy.

the magic number is... 100

2009-08-26T23:22:00.003-10:00

I've had this bee in my bonnet the last couple weeks to attempt to feed our family for a week on $100. What this really means is that I only spend $100 at the grocery store for the big week's shopping. In fact, we've spent more than $100, because I pay $1.90 for a lovely elementary school breakfast each morning, usually buy a tea from a vending machine during the day, and B's lunch money is not part of it. Oh, and we usually eat out somewhere once a week. But, at least, the major shopping has a direct $100 limit.

Mixed results so far. It would be quite easy to do if we lived on ramen and oatmeal, but I'm trying to do actual balanced meals with, you know, a starch, a vegie, and usually a meat, for dinner. We want to eat "regularly" just affordably. We pulled it off quite handily in week one, but we ate most of our meats out of the freezer. Those are now gone. Due to my meticulously adding up each item, I've been able to concentrate more on just where the money is going. Turns out I can get a whole bunch of vegies and fruits (well, not exotic ones) for $30 or so. Really not bad. Then the Crystal Light drink mix was $7. Meats are butt expensive. It has caused us to experiment a bit more there, such as the cubed steak, and they bizarrely had 4 frozen guinea hens on sale for $4.99. I've also been a bit creative with the exact meal. For instance, today and tomorrow's lunch is red potatoes, inch-long asparagus, and a can of salmon with a vinaigrette.

Not sure yet how I'm going to handle big multi-week purchases. For instance, the only real way to have salmon regularly without paying 7.99, 8.99 a pound and such is to buy the big package of frozen filets at Costco. Since we eat them, it's definitely a good deal over time, but the initial purchase is a bit hefty. The obvious solution would be to have, like, $400 for a month rather than $100 a week.

So what little money-stretching gimmicks have you found for the grocery aisle? Any favorite, cheap recipes?

Perhaps I should start watching Clara and her Great Depression cooking show again. Mmmm... dandelion salad.

Movie - Precious

2009-08-23T16:26:00.003-10:00

Just the trailer to this movie makes me bawl like a baby. There's no way I'd be able to see the movie.

It's apparently based on the novel Push by Sapphire. Maybe I can read the book; I don't know.

Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey

2009-08-21T10:48:00.002-10:00

I'm spending all of my days copying and pasting data from one spreadsheet to another, so in the meantime, I bring you this enlightening quote from Doctor Who Season Three about the nature of time.

Incidentally, it is from the episode Blink, which is one of the best episodes in seasons 2 and 3, so I recommend watching it. If you have Netflix, you can watch it right now on their Instant Play feature.

Hoppin Paca

2009-08-20T12:25:00.003-10:00

This is my pseudo sorta kind of take off on Hoppin' John um -esque.

Package of the 15 bean soup. If no 15 bean, black-eyed peas
Package of Hillshire Farms sausage
one onion
half a package of frozen okra
paprika
cayenne pepper
black pepper
salt
garlic powder
rice
sriracha or tabasco

Soak the beans in 6 cups water over night. Drain. Slice up the onion and cook it 5 minutes. Slice up the sausage and toss it in. Brown. Add the beans, seasonings, and 6 more cups water. Bring to boil and simmer for one hour. Add in the okra and simmer for 30 minutes. Cook some rice up. To eat, one scoop rice, ladle over the beans, splash in some of your favorite hot sauce.

The End.

I believe in you

2009-08-19T10:06:00.001-10:00

Lambchop performing a cover of the classic tune "I Believe in You", most famously recorded by Don Williams.

They are in some alley in France.

CAE Lamchop #2 - "I Believe In You" from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

Not looking good enough

2009-08-18T15:54:00.003-10:00

I have to analyze a whole bunch of data and then report back. I'm about to go on an Excel and Graph bonanza for the next few days.

It's looking better

2009-08-17T01:16:00.002-10:00

My exciting committee meeting isn't until tomorrow (Tuesday), but I spent a lot of time in the lab this evening and things are suddenly looking a lot better.

I've t-tested and ANOVAed and Levene'd and Welched it; I've standard deviationed it and meaned it; and suddenly my results are looking a lot more promising. The key was to remove the two outliers more than two standard deviations from the mean.

Oh, the results aren't clean at all. No, there's one experiment that's just come out wacky and I still have no idea why, but everything else is tending towards my predictions. Tending means usually there's a 85-90% chance I'm right. The random threshold in the social sciences is that there has to be a 95% chance you're right, and it's pretty categorical. 95% chance = publish and get a job! 94% chance = education is its own reward!

Anyway, I've now gone from having almost no idea what I wanted to say to my committee other than "help!" to having a pretty clear idea what the three next best steps would be. So I'm happier now.

:)

Academic Rock

2009-08-15T02:35:00.002-10:00

It's 2:30 AM on a Friday night / Saturday morning, but I finally - finally! - resubmitted this paper to a journal that's been lingering far too long. I think it's much better than the first submission, so I hope it makes it.

Moreover, while revising the Forever Paper, I discovered a little bit of theory that might help me finally publish this set of data I've been sitting on for 4 years. If I am right, I should be able to whip that publication up pretty quick, since all the data gathering and analysis is done. I just need to tell people now why they care.

So today I officially rock academically.

In seemingly more important news, I meet with my dissertation committee on Tuesday. I don't know what's going to happen. No matter how bad they think the results are, they aren't going to kick me out of the program. The question is only what the next steps would be, and how big. That will determine when I graduate.

We will see....

Random idea number one billion

2009-08-12T12:52:00.002-10:00

Yet another random idea.

You know how a blogger named Julie (something, yes I could google it) fixed every recipe in Julia Child's cookbook, later wrote a book about it, and then it got turned into a movie? There are similar other stories of someone doing something exhaustively: living biblically for a year, living on so odd many dollars, etc., etc.

Well, after I brought you that delicious "chicken in a can", I thought, hey, each week I should try some new thing at the store. Something dubious. Not necessarily gross, just doubtful. So I bought some kippers, those little fish in a tin. In many places, those are still eaten regularly, but I myself have never opened a can of sardines, kippers, or any tinned fish.

Um, they're still in that tin, though.

Anyway, after hearing about Julie and Julia, I declared that I would:

TRY EVERYTHING IN THE GROCERY STORE!!!

Notice the big font with the big concept. Then I remembered that there are things like $75 bottles of balsamic vinegar and the like, so the new concept became:

TRY EVERYTHING IN THE GROCERY STORE THAT COSTS LESS THAN $5!!!

I think about it some. But there are practical problems:

1) there must be 50,000 things in a modern American grocery store. What should the actual scale be?
2) How do I keep a list to see what I've done? And they change things. I was wondering if I could get Safeway to sponsor me. Hee hee. Seriously, though, if there was a very popular blog featuring the foods and variety of a brand every few days, that seems worth something.
3) I need to figure out better photography.

Maybe I should just start with the fruits and vegies. I've eaten the same 5 vegetables for 35 years.

But I do have a name for this amazing blog.

SMOOCHIE, I'LL EAT ANYTHING umm dot com

There's a family story there. Smoochie was my grandmother and she told the story each holiday for years. As her mental abilities declined later, she would often tell the story several times in a single meal. The story is simply that my older brother was being picky about foods and not eating this or that. In Smoochie's words: "And Paca just go soooo disgusted with Pacabro that he said, "smoochie, I'll eat ANYthing."

The thing is that I don't. I'm only not picky compared to some incredibly picky siblings. Different types of chicken breast were beyond the pale for PacaBro. In fact, however, I eat the same collection of foods over and over again. I have no idea what to do with a dragon fruit, for instance. Entire sections of vegetables that look shady have never crossed the threshold of my lips.

So there's the latest dumb idea. Advice appreciated.

Conducting an interview

2009-08-11T09:11:00.003-10:00

I'm currently in the waiting room at the dentist waiting to get a filling. Wahoo!

In other news, I am hoping to conduct an interview in the future. A few of my intrepid blog readers have conducted interviews on their blogs in the past, such as on BookRoast or elsewhere. What did you use to conduct the interview and what was the procedure? Email, gmail chat, phone? Did you edit the interview for space, grammar, coherence, etc.? How did you do it?

Paca's Long Term Balanced Budget

2009-08-06T21:12:00.003-10:00

This is really rough, but I need to do real research to make it better, so let's go with this for now.

With regard to budgets, we in the U.S. are typically offered two choices: 1) no balanced budget rules or 2) an annual balanced budget. Currently, 32 states have a balanced budget amendment in their constitution while 11 more have statutory rules. That's 43 of 50 states. Meanwhile, the federal government has none. As is obvious to anyone watching, there are problems with both solutions.

The major problem with no balanced budget rule is clear: government has a huge tendency to spend for the now and end up with a growing permanent debt. The current national debt, according to this debt clock is about 11.5 TRILLION dollars or $38,000 a person. It could be worse. In WWII, the debt was even higher than now as a percentage of GDP, so we can recover, but that doesn't mean this is good. I'm getting some different numbers depending on where I look, but it seems that we currently pay around 500 or 600 billion dollars every year just on interest payments for the debt. Just 2 years of that interest pays for the entire trillion dollars over 10 years proposed health reform package currently being debated. That's more than the budgets of homeland security, education, HUD, energy, VA, EPA, FDA, and more combined. If I'm reading this correctly, the amount that the U.S. spend on paying interest on our debt is about the size of the UK's entire budget. The whole thing. pdf link, page 12 We could pay interest... or fund the entire government of a major European nation. (Crap! I just remembered that's pounds, so it doesn't work, but it sounds so good that I'm leaving it.) An annual balanced budget rule prevents a government from getting into a hole like we have over the long term by preventing deficit spending.

But there are problems with an annual balanced budget as well. Often we think of deficit spending as inherently bad, but it's actually a very common occurrence among the most fiscally responsible people. The greatest example of routine deficit spending is called retirement. When you retire, you often spend more money than you bring in. However, this can be just fine assuming you have saved enough to make up the difference. The problem with deficit spending comes, of course, when you have no savings.

What an annual balanced budget essentially does is force state governments to operate paycheck to paycheck. Yes, they can save under such requirements, but the motivation to do so evaporates, because you aren't allowed to use those savings when times get tough later. It's like telling people they should save for retirement, but by the way, when they are retired, they can never spend more money than they are bringing in while retired. The motivation for saving would be greatly reduced, because it enforces privation whenever temporary revenues fall. I think this is an important point. Why would someone save for retirement if there's a rule in place saying they can only spend what they earn in social security? Saving for retirement become useless.

Moreover, cutting during bad times, which all the states are doing, can feed right into increasing the bad times. Revenues are down, so you cut all the workers who then don't buy anything, which then decreases revenue, so you cut more workers....

So what's the solution? Why not a longer term balanced budget? Something greater than a year. Here's a guy who says it should be five years. Instead of trying to find the magic year though, it might be better to require the right behavior: Force the government to save when times are good and then allow them to spend when times are bad. How can you do so?

How about requiring a certain percentage of growth in revenue during times of GDP growth to go into savings, and then allowing those savings to be spent only when 1) GDP is declining, 2) there is a major war of national security with a state of war formally declared by Congress (so nothing post-Korean War would count, I don't think), or 3) reasonable leverage, a term to be "defined" later.

Easy ideas so far, but exactly how much are you required to save and how much are you allowed to spend? That's the million dollar question, and not one easily answered. One way to tackle it is to specifically save so as to replace the drop in revenue during a recession cycle. We need three main numbers: 1) percent drop of revenue per annum during downturns, 2) number of years of typical recession, and 3) the distance between recessions. Add 1) and 2) together to get the amount you need to save, and then save a percent in growth years based upon 3), so that it matches 1) and 2). This gives the savings requirement.

OK, I just spent longer than I should have trying to figure out the formula, which it turns out is exceedingly difficult for little old me who's never taken an economics course, but I think the principle is clear. The government is required to save a percentage of growth in good years to replace drops in bad years.

But what about the spending requirements? How much over current yearly revenues can be spent? One answer is that you can spend whatever was saved beyond current revenues, and that's it. Apart from savings, you operate entirely on a year-by-year balanced budget.

But that's a limited answer, because it assumes the government will never have a justifiable reason to take out a loan, even though we allow individuals and businesses to do so all the time. Reasonable leverage is an accepted part of most business models. But what is "reasonable leverage" and what is "stealing from our children"? I haven't figured out the answer, but I have a few ideas. First, reasonable leverage must be deficit neutral over the long term. I have in mind here something like using money now to make medical records electronic which will save more money later. But you can't just say that and let it go, hoping it turns out okay. There has to be a real plan that can be tracked. You must write up a plan saying when the savings will come and then monitor that progress. If it's a 10 year plan and you haven't gotten the money back within 10 years, then the gig is up and you've got to find the lost money from increased revenues or cutting spending. If the program is so vague that nothing can be tracked or it might help our general economy one day... well, that's not "reasonable leverage". That's just something you think is a good idea and must get funded without running a deficit for it. The next requirement is that it must meet some standards for being a safe amount of leverage. I have in mind something like the ratings given by Moody's or Standard & Poor. I have no idea how those work; the key is that reasonable leverage is safe and deficit neutral in the long term.

What I'm ending up with here is not really a balanced budget, but a small set of requirements that all together keep the financial house in order:

a) The government CAN run a deficit, but only in three ways: 1) it can use savings to do it, 2) it must be trackable, verifiable, and small "reasonable leverage", or 3) there's some national emergency such as a state of war (I mean a real state of war per the Constitution, not a police action) when deficits just pale in comparison.

b) When the economy is growing, the government MUST save a portion exactly calculated to compensate for drops in revenue during inevitable recessions.

c) Everything that isn't covered under a) or b) must follow some sort of PAYGO model.

23 years and nothing

2009-08-04T16:15:00.002-10:00

I've spent 23 years of my life in various levels of school, earning a masters in philosophy and becoming a doctoral candidate in linguistics, and, yet, I just spent some time looking at positions in independent secondary schools, and all evidence indicates that I am qualified to teach nothing.

Prove it!

2009-08-03T22:05:00.003-10:00

I have until Friday to convince my chair the dissertation is going somewhere interesting. After that, it's committee time.

Fun fun!

And if you think my chair is tough, you should talk to my table (he says with his best Groucho Marx impression).

Movies better than the books?

2009-08-01T19:39:00.004-10:00

It's a cliché that movies made from books are always worse than the book. But I do think there are exceptions. For instance,

I really enjoy the movie The World According to Garp, with Robin Williams (and transgendered John Lithgow!) from the early or mid 80s. It's a weird movie in that you can interpret it entirely differently depending on your mood at the time. Is it a comedy with some serious moments or a tragedy with a little quirk? It goes back and forth. But then I read the John Irving novel, and, well, I never even finished it. I think I gave up when the bears at the hotel jumped on unicycles. Or something.

And there's The Razor's Edge with Bill Murray. Another great movie that really challenges one's world view. Is it a tragedy or a Buddhist meditation on non-attachment or what? Many layers. I read M. Somerset Maugham's original, but it didn't live up to the movie.

The Jurassic Park movie was better than Crichton's novel, too. Crichton stretched the chaos theory metaphor far more than it could be stretched. When you've got dinosaurs running around eating people, it's hard to step back and worry about chaos.

One theme here is that I saw the movie first and read the novel later. But despite very well regarded authors (at least for what they do) in Irving, Maugham, and Crichton, I won't re-read these books, but I will see the movies again one day. I wonder if there are any books/movies where I read the book first, but liked the movie better. I'll have to stew on that.

How about you? Any movies from books where you like the movie better?

Remember the Milk

2009-07-31T20:48:00.003-10:00

I've been trying out a new web app, basically an online To Do list, named Remember the Milk. I use it pretty simply. I type in a task with a due date. It then emails me each day with all the things to do that day and, if there is an exact time, emails me a reminder some amount of time before the due time. Currently, I am using two hours before. I always have my email open. It can also send Instant Messages, though I've gotten out of that world, and share lists with others or assign lists.

All of this is free.

There are some fancier features for you real techies so that it can send messages to your Blackberry, iPhone, Twitter, etc. Some of those require the non-free version, which is $25 a year. It also syncs with things like Google Calendar, iCal, and can be a widget right in gmail.

I don't do any of those things. I just type my task in and get an email. But I'm liking it so far. I just finished editing a paper and got to hit the delicious "complete" button on that task.

I think I will add writing this blog post as a task into it.

Complete.

The Most Important Event in America

2009-07-30T09:48:00.002-10:00

The most important event in America is this flap between a cop and a yelling professor in Cambridge. The. most. important. thing. I am happy that our media and government are focusing their energies so continuously on this event.

Not as important as Michael Jackson, but really damn important.

Sarcasm is evident, right?

I can sum up my views on the case in three words.

MMMMMAAAAAAKKKKKEEEEE IIIIIITTTTTTT SSSSSTTTTTOOOOOOOOPPPPPPPPPPPP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Paca's Logical Guide to Global Warming Denialism

2009-07-27T19:54:00.008-10:00

I made the mistake of getting in debates over global warming with others online in the past few weeks. The arguments over global warming are perhaps as interesting to sociology as they are to climate science. I am here to produce a set of watch points that could be useful or of interest to others moving forward.

Global warming has three basic claims: 1) the globe is warming, 2) it is warming in a pattern that doesn't match any cycles we've been able to reconstruct in the past, and 3) this abnormal fluctuation is caused by various heat-trapping factors, such as CO2 and methane CH4.

I cannot assess the scientific validity of these claims through my understanding of the research. Nevertheless, there are certain logical / argumentative issues in the denial of these claims that do not work. For instance

1) As evidence grows of warming, a claim is put forward that, yes, we are warming, but this is due to natural temperature cycles. Many of the same people will put forth another claim, which is that we have been cooling or steady for a decade. (More on this claim in a bit.) Such claims are possible if they occur at different time periods or in different places, but if they are supposed to be happening now, then they don't make any sense. It's a claim that the earth is both warming and cooling in the same place and at the same time. That's incoherent, and it is only entertained because each of the claims serves a rhetorical purpose at different places and times. Not all people who deny global warming make this mistake, but very many do, so you can be alert for it.

2) George Will, generally a very smart man, recently approvingly quoted social critic and columnist Mark Steyn, saying, "If you're 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you're graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade." That sounds really bad for global warming doesn't it, particularly if accurate? It does sound bad (well, for the argument; good for the world), but what does it really say? If I am 29 and I became an adult at 18, then that's 11 years. 2009 - 11 = 1998. OK, now if I'm a senior in high school, and there's been no warming since first grade, that's 12 - 1 = 11 again. Huh, 1998 again.

So removing the rhetorical devices, it's a claim there's been no warming since 1998.

But I wonder, what if I'm 30? Has there been warming since I became an adult? The answer is yes. What about if I'm 31? Yes. 32? Yes. How about the other way? What if I'm 28? Yes, warming since you became an adult. 27? Yes. What's going on here? How could there be warming for people of every age around 29, but not 29? The answer is that 1998 was a very anomalous year. Here's a graph of temps for the last century.

It may be hard to see on that graph, but 1998 is that black dot that jumps really far out from all the averages, and all the years around it. Every year in the entire 2000s has been hotter than every year on the entire chart except for 1998. Even the very last dot, 2006 which has a slight dip (yay!) is hotter than 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999, and 2000.

The obvious point is "don't fall for the 1998 gimmick". The bigger point is "be wary of any argument that hinges on selecting just the right example.

3) Beware of a set of arguments where mistakes are never corrected when they are pointed out. For instance, there is a myth floating around that in the 1970s, all the scientists thought there was an ice age on the way. Clearly they didn't know what they were talking about then, so they must not know now. First, there's an obvious problem, which is assuming that scientific knowledge never improves. If someone said, "In the 20s, they didn't know how to land a man on the moon, so they must not know now," you'd laugh at them. Science has changed a lot since the 20s and in fact we landed someone on the moon already. Now, from the outside we don't know if climate science has gotten better or not (it has), but that's just our ignorance from not knowing the field. It's entirely possible that mistakes that were made 20, 30, 40 years ago would not be made now, because we know more.

All that aside, the real point here is that this "scientists all thought the ice age" was coming is just a myth. There never was a consensus at that time. This fact has been pointed out by the American Meteorological Society. Here's one of the most relevant quotes:

... despite active efforts to answer these questions, the following pervasive myth arose: there was a consensus among climate scientists of the 1970s that either global cooling or a full-fledged ice age was imminent ... A review of the climate science literature from 1965 to 1979 shows this myth to be false. The myth's basis lies in a selective misreading of the texts both by some members of the media at the time and by some observers today. In fact, emphasis on greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature even then.

There have been other analyses of the myth as well. What's important is that even when the myth is proven to be false, it continues on. No retractions, nothing. You just keep reporting the myth. This is how political arguments work, repeating the talking point to get traction, not scientific ones. The fact that evidence doesn't change arguments is an indication that one side is really presenting a political argument.

4) Beware the great conspiracy of peer review.

Most denialist literature exists on web sites, in white papers from think tanks, books from non-academic publishers, and other non-peer-reviewed formats. Not all, but it's certainly dominant. Moreover, you can't find any large scientific bodies who are skeptical of climate change. Why is that? Either peer reviewers are rejecting such papers for valid reasons or... they are rejecting them because they control what does and does not get published and they will never allow a competing view to appear. In other words, it's a conspiracy, covering journals and scientific bodies around the world.

Now, am I saying that peer reviewers never have their unjustified biases? Certainly not. It's not uncommon for a reviewer to have a biased view for whatever reason, usually to protect their own reputation. Sometimes these biases can spread to large number of reviewers. This happened in my field of linguistics in the late 60s to early 80s, when Chomskyan linguistics dominated everything. If you didn't work within those assumptions, it could be tough to get in the top journals. What did the field look like then? The so-called top journals were dominated by Chomskyan linguistics, and many of the top departments were as well. Yet at the same time, there were other smaller journals publishing fine stuff. There were other departments who had non-Chomskyan interests. There were members of departments who disagreed with Chomsky, but were still around and getting tenure. Non-Chomskyans had their conferences and all. Chomskyans thought they were wrong, but alternate research programs continued on.

This isn't what the state of climate research looks like. There are only a small number of researchers out there skeptical of global warming who can actually write something good enough to pass peer review, and, oddly for a conspiracy, they do get published sporadically. The number is small, and refutations are often published soon thereafter. In other words, the picture is neither one of a global conspiracy where everything that doesn't tow the party line gets banned nor one of a bias among mainline researchers. The picture is instead that the majority of climate research supports global warming and only a few skeptics write decent enough stuff for acceptance.

5) Beware the great conspiracies in general. There are a million claims about great conspiracies among "lay" skeptics, i.e., your average conservative Joe. This is a conspiracy by liberals who want to destroy the economy. It's a conspiracy by liberals who want to seize power. It's a conspiracy of funding. Cap and trade is a hoax for Al Gore to make a 100 million dollars (often the same round number is repeated). In many minds, Al Gore seems to be a great puppet master making the world dance for him. You think I'm kidding? Read the 200 plus comments that were posted on Yahoo after an astronaut dared to mention shrinking ice caps.

People in general are quite incompetent. A conspiracy involving more than six people wouldn't make it a week.

6) Organizations which are trustworthy when you cite them are not trustworthy when they disagree with you. It is very common to quote a scientific source in a skeptical argument as much as possible, since it lends credibility to your point of view. But what happens when that source you quoted disagrees? They suddenly become part of the conspiracy or are brainwashed.

7) Smart people don't know everything because they are smart. It's always really tempting in an argument to quote someone who's really smart who agrees with you. For instance, Steven Hawking believes that man-made climate change is possibly the greatest issue facing humankind today. Dang, it's Steven Hawking! I mean, it's Steven Hawking! So clearly that means something. Well, maybe, but it's hard to know. Has he ever really researched climate science? No real idea. Similarly skeptics can pull out a name periodically. There's a guy who got the Nobel on Physics in the 70s who made some skeptical remarks at a conference once. But, as far as anyone can tell, he's never done any actual research on climate science ever. No articles of any sort. I don't doubt the man's smart, but that doesn't mean he's educated on this topic. Larger point: Just quoting someone cool doesn't add much weight to anything. You need to know if they've ever actually done research on this.

Social occasion!

2009-07-24T09:43:00.004-10:00

JaneyV and I had the exact same idea on the same day, or at least we went to post about it the exact same day.

The "minions-but-not-Minions(TM)" site on ning, created by the lovely Aerin, has a Chat facility. This means that we could actually get together and talk a little bit every once in a while, and not in a "refresh the 200 entry comment trail over and over" way.

I had in mind a simple social occasion. JaneyV had in mind something actually productive, like assistance with writing. Either way is worth a try. Anyone interested?

The really impossible thing is going to be a time. Here's how bad our time zones are:

When it is 9:00 AM in Hawaii, it is:

12:00 PM (noon) on the U.S. West Coast

3:00 PM on the U.S. East Coast

8:00 PM in London

9:00 PM in Madrid

5:00 AM the next day in Sydney.

If we try to meet in the morning my time, it's in the middle of the night in Australia. If we try to meet around noon my time, it's 8:00 AM in Sydney, which might be okay, but 11:00 pm or midnight in Western Europe, and if we meet in the late evening my time, it's (crap, my head just exploded), um, in the middle of the night for the rest of the U.S., but decent times in Europe and Australia.

My only solution is to alternate times, so that different groups can join in on different days.

Anyway, is there any interest in a Chat session? I suppose, leave a comment on the Minions-but-not-Minions(TM) web site under JaneyV's post there. Once we see who is interested, then we start the great time debate. Of course, people can show up at any time on that site and chat away. The point of this is just to organize things so that someone else actually shows up.

For the first session, the topic can simply be the new name of the site?

MinionsSansTM

Or maybe it should be, "The Knights who say Ning"

Depressing or wonderful?

2009-07-23T20:19:00.002-10:00

Researchers in Vienna have identified two more pieces by Mozart. Reading the article reminded me that Mozart died at 35. I'm 35 and will be 36 in one month.

So Mozart had created music that has made him live in people's memories for 200 years, regarded as a genius, by the same age I am currently. His entire life's work was done by this time in his life.

I should think, "that's awesome of Mozart," but sometimes I think, "that sucks."

RINO

2009-07-23T00:17:00.004-10:00

Let's see if I can pull this post off.

I don't think it's any surprise to people that I basically vote Democratic and would be classified as liberal. I've toned down the politics on this blog a lot since back in 2006 or so when I was really, really angry about the Bush administration and Republican-controlled Congress all the time, but still, basically liberal.

And yet I'm not really as liberal as one would think. In many ways, I fit a very common model of the independent who is socially liberal and fiscally conservative. In fact, I've spent some time wondering if I could reinvent myself as a Moderate Republican. What do I mean by that?

I agree with Obama that the economy, the environment, and health care are the major domestic issues today. But I also think the debt level is equally important. On Twitter, I follow various blog friends, one celebrity, and... the Concord Coalition. This is a non-partisan group focused on the nation's fiscal health with the rising debt being the supreme issue.

Moreover, I have become increasingly wary of the federal government as the solution to problems, though perhaps not for the normal reason. It's not that I hate all government. Instead, 1) our nation is simply gigantic: 300 million people in 50 states with differing cultures and economies. There is never going to be one best solution to a problem for all. There needs to be room for local variation that fits one's own place. 2) The more local power there is, the more individual people are able to truly influence their life, and the more they must take responsibility for their own community. It's really hard to make one vote in 300 million count. But one voice that tries hard enough can be at least heard, even if then ignored, by local government. Taking responsibility for your own community breeds strength and connection.

In short, a robust, strong federalism has tremendous appeal.

Of course there are reasons that many people are afraid of strong state independence, and the best one might be the way that certain states treated their minority populations for decades. They took away voting rights; they sent people to work in mines on trumped up charges; they wouldn't allow their own citizens to be full citizens and respect basic human dignity. And it was only the federal government stepping in that put some end to it.

So my federalism works like this. Constitutional rights cannot be farmed out to local communities. The federal government must enforce these rights and it trumps any state individualism. This is quite a strong claim already, because many of the most controversial issues of the day come down to constitutional rights: abortion, affirmative action, religion and the state, privacy, etc. But I see no alternative. If the Supreme Court says those rights are in the American Constitution then all Americans must have them. This will disappoint some conservatives since they, for instance, would like to have abortion be decided on a state level. But that's the way it is.

What's left then for states? Implementing and designing policy. I would like for the federal government's job to be to give a set of requirements on a topic, say health care, the environment, etc., and then let each state decide on their own how to do it. For instance, the federal government might pass legislation indicating that carbon emissions must be cut by 15% by 2015. Each state then can decide how they wish to accomplish this: cap and trade, direct regulation of pollutants, etc. As long as the requirement is indeed met, the state can accomplish it as they please. Failure would have consequences, probably either monetary or through the fed seizing control of that operation. The Fed can also have a role in promoting "best practices" to use some corporate speak. Part of the federal governments job would be to ensure states know how others are doing it, have data on success and failure, and coordinate the implementation of another state's plan in a state interested in it.

Perhaps it's more "networkism" than federalism.

Of course, does this mean I'd be a moderate Republican? Federalism, fiscal restraint. These are supposed to be classic Republican values. One can make a good case that they are not actual current Republican values. The last Republican administration showed little fiscal responsibility and typically only cared about state's rights when they couldn't win a federal level victory. However, if one is going to try new ideas, perhaps the Republican party would be more open to them at this moment in history. They seem rather lost philosophically to me. There's a hardcore social conservative base, but that group by itself is not going to win a national election. They need a wider tent, so maybe they would be interested in thinking of new ways to go about things. Moreover, there's something of a Nixon to China element to it. Oh, I'm not Nixon. But if the Republican Party could ever get on board something like alternative, renewable energies, perhaps for national security reasons, then that issue might really move forward.

However, I then will read about something a Republican leader or group has done or said, and it drives me insane. They called a special meeting of the RNC to label the Democrats socialist. A special meeting. That's not leadership, it's name-calling. Or they deny basic scientific facts. Or they lead an often thinly disguised charge against some minority (gay rights being a prominent issue for me). And I just can never see myself finding common ground there.

As I'm not politically active and actually dislike all parties, this party decision will likely never come. Even though I've typically voted Democratic, I only became an actual member of the party last year when I wanted a say in the Democratic Caucus. I actively dislike most of the emails I now get from them. I really have no interest in politics. It's governance that's appealing.

So let me bounce an idea off of you with my stunningly informed "networked" government model. Two ideas. Health care reform is one of the biggest issues today. First, do you think it could work to set requirements for each state, universal coverage and reduce costs, and then let them handle it as they see fit? If one state wants to tax the wealthy to fund private care for the uninsured, another state wants to introduce single payer health care, and a third wants to fund "a public option" as a competitor to private care, then they can. Let's see which works. The biggest problem with this approach is money. Who collects it and how is it distributed? Secondly, we are really doing two things at once: reforming health care to reduce costs and expanding coverage to millions of Americans who currently do not have it.

The great problem with both, but particularly with expanding coverage, is that you have to pay for it, and we are trying to find this money in the middle of a deep recession and loads of debt before the recession even began. How about, though this is highly over-simplified using money that comes from actually realizing savings to expand coverage. As 1 billion is saved through reforms, that money is then spent to implement the expanded coverage. Another billion saved later, and that money too goes to coverage. Of course, it does mean that the coverage will only expand slowly over a several year period, but we are in a recession, and as Obama himself argues the long-term health of the economy is tied to health care reform. If we only successfully expand coverage without actually reducing costs, then it will be a huge drag on our economy going forward and that future terrible economy would eventually reduce our ability to continue the coverage that we added for the short term.

Test test

2009-07-22T01:29:00.003-10:00

김 지**

Is this the word kimchi? Might be. If so, yay!, it means I've figured out the exciting 2-set Korean keyboard. Well, how to turn it on at least. Now, I just need to learn Korean.

I think I've mentioned before how cool the Korean writing system is linguistically. The consonants are quite systematic. The vowels are systematic too but based on philosophical principles, not linguistic ones. But going back to the consonants, let's review how various consonants are made. To make a p or an m sound, you put your lips together. Here is how to write those sounds in Korean:

ㅂ ㅁ

p m

They are basically little diagrams of pursed lips.

Then, you can make a whole bunch of consonants with your tongue pressing against various parts of the top of your mouth. Imagine the roof of your mouth is a horizontal line. To make a t sound, you place the tip of your tongue forward and up to either your teeth or, more commonly, unless you're French, to the ridge a little behind and above the teeth. Here's the Korean symbol for the t sound.

ㄷ

It's a diagram of the tongue position. Tongue forward and up.

The k sound is done with the back of your tongue pressing against the soft palate further back in your mouth. Here's the Korean for that:

ㄱ

Pretty cool, and then there are varieties of these things based off the basic position. n, for instance, is done at the same place as t and its symbol is

ㄴ

One of the hardest things about Korean for English speakers is that there are essentially three varieties of t, three varieties of p, and such, that each differ mostly on when precisely you start vibrating your vocal cords. They are a real nasty thing to learn to say, but at least the written sign makes them clearly connected.

ㄷ - so-called unaspirated t

ㅌ - so-called aspirated t (there's a puff of air)

ㄸ - so-called tense t

So, go Korean, for being scientific about these things, even if they are impossible to say and hear.

When writing, you then put these things together in little syllable blocks. Remember

ㄱ = k

ㅣ= i

ㅁ= m

Now put them together and you have 김 or kim.

And that's how Korean writing works. It's completely different than both Chinese and Japanese. Chinese uses characters entirely. 你好. That's ni hao or hello (literally, 'you good'). There's some meaning to the characters. I know three of the four components there. The first half of ni is the common symbol for humans. And then for hao, you have a woman on the left and a child on the right. With a woman and a child, everything's good.

Japanese I don't know much about, but it uses a combination of characters, kanji, and two different syllabaries. The latter means simply that each syllable has an entire symbol for it, unlike Korean which takes each sound and creates syllable symbols on the fly. Here's come complete gibberish in Japanese hiragana: かやらて

These are just random symbols (to me) after turning on my Japanese keyboard, so hopefully it doesn't insult anyone. The main point, however, is that each symbol is 1) related to sound like Korean and English writing, but not Chinese (by and large), and 2) an entire syllable, not individual sounds like Korean or English. Korean and English (really the Latin alphabet) then differ because syllables are not marked in English, while they are in Korean. If one writes "kimchi" in English, you just have to know that there's two syllables there from knowing how to speak. But in Korean, each syllable is its own block.

And that's all I got to say about that.

** The kim of kimchi might in fact be: 킴. I'm too lazy to look it up right now.

Ethnicity in your writing

2009-07-20T16:23:00.004-10:00

First, I should say that I hate almost all discussions of ethnicity, because they always seem to end up going in circles, trying to break out of treating people as groups and always consider them as unique individuals, but not wanting to deny the importance of culture, ethnicity, or appearance in real life and hence some group identification, but, a focus on group identification can easily devolve into stereotypes at best, and yet completely ignoring differences can become an attempt to wipe out other cultures or backgrounds where everyone is assumed/forced to be the same as the majority group, and, well, you see the circle.

That said, I am going to talk about ethnicity in your writing. I also should say that this post sort of wanders around this topic with no real point.

Moving forward...

How do you handle ethnic identification and backgrounds in your writing?

There are easy mistakes to avoid such as making everyone good be of some identifiable real ethnicity and everyone bad be of another. I love C.S. Lewis, as people know, but several of his Narnia books revolve around basically Turks as bad guys with the English as good guys.

Apart from such things, how do you decide what ethnicity to make your characters? Naturally, it will depend upon the type of novel you are writing. Let's start with real world settings:

As everyone knows, I haven't actually written fiction in a couple years now, but when I did, I did end up with one story involving a white American character and a Vietnamese-American character. This was sort of accidental. I've never been good at plot, so I like to borrow them as much as I can. I happened to read a brief romance between an "Asian" woman and a white man, and I liked the general idea of what the person had done, but I wanted to do such a story in my own way. In the end, I dropped virtually every detail of the original, except their very approximate ethnicities. Next I wanted to make her character more precise and developed, since, in the original story, the heroine was just vaguely Asian and it didn't seem the author had any real idea what specifically. As I was brainstorming, I thought about setting the story in a suburb of Minnesota, and I knew from my college time there, that there's a sizable ethnically Vietnamese population there, so, bam, she was suddenly Vietnamese by ancestry.

And so now I have a story about a Vietnamese character without ever setting out to write about a Vietnamese person in particular.

However, sometimes I will just randomly change the ethnicity of a person (if it's a main character, of course I have to genuinely develop it) solely for the point of having people of different ethnicities. There's no particular reason a never-met ex-girlfriend or an old P.E. coach or whoever must be, say, Indian (as in India), but why not? There's no reason they have to be white, black, or anything else unless the world demands it. (This last bit is sort of the crux of things I think.)

But is that right? I don't know. There's a famous saying from Checkov that if there's a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I, it needs to be fired by Act III. Of course, this idea is based on the notion that something like a gun is going to catch people's attention, and so it needs to be part of the story. But there's no comparable saying that if there's a poker by the fireplace, someone must be hit with it. Pokers are assumed to be naturally next to fire places and don't need to be a part of the story. If I make an ex-girlfriend Indian, is that ethnicity choice a poker or a gun? I often want it to be a poker, because the idea is that America (and most places in fact) are multi-ethnic and people need to get used to that being represented in fiction. Am I writing a story about the Indian-American experience? No, course not. But I am writing one deliberately set in a world where ex-girlfriends are periodically Indian (or whatever). In the end, it really comes down to the reader. Some readers expect the presence of any non-standard (I deliberately chose that term) ethnicity to require an Important Reason.

Of course, all of this has been written as if I must justify the ethnicity of anyone who is not white, but I don't need to justify a white ethnicity. Well aware of that, but, well, this post has to end some time, so I won't go into that issue.

Then there's so-termed speculative fiction, such as fantasy, urban fantasy, sci-fi, etc. How do you handle ethnicity there? It's interesting because in theory the world is entirely created by the author. How is this handled?

As always, it will depend upon the sort of world being created. Ello's shopping her novel set in a mythic ancient Korea, so I assume most of her characters will naturally be Korean-ish. Classic fantasy worlds a la Tolkien are really a mythical, never existed sort of medieval Europe. Rohan is basically Vikings on horses for example. And in such a fantasy Europe, I assume it actually does make sense for most people to be European-looking, even though in theory the world is not the real one, and so could be anything. Would it be wacky to make everyone in Rohan look Tahitian? Culturally Vikings, but Tahitian in appearance? I think this would knock most readers off, even though since Rohan is fictional, it could be just so.

But what if you want to create a world that isn't a modified / mythicized version of some part of the real one?

However, we rarely truly do this in fantasy at least, do we? Characters are almost always human, or a modified human. It's a conceit that they speak Modern English (really the reader's language) as the Common Tongue. If they didn't, the reader couldn't read the story. The technology is modified real world technology of some real culture. So we are back with modified humans as characters, which means you have to make the choice of ethnicity again. Is that what's wrong with Tahitian Vikings? Ripping the technology and culture from one place, but the physical appearance from another? (OK, Tahitian Vikings might be a bad example, since there's an actual biological association between climate and skin color, but we can just change the example to Tahitian Mayans or whatever.)

I'm done wandering aimlessly through this minefield. What choices do you make?

No appropriate title for this one

2009-07-19T22:49:00.004-10:00

Hey,

I am back in Hawaii as of this morning and looking forward to some sleep soon.

In all my hours on the plane, I've finally been reading that history of the 100th battalion and 442nd regimental combat unit (larger than a battalion; in fact the 100th later became part of the 442nd), which were the two units formed during WWII manned almost entirely with Japanese-Americans, about 2/3rds from Hawaii and 1/3rd from the mainland.

Anyway, many of you may have heard of Sen. Inouye who is currently serving his 8th term as the senator from Hawaii, and you may have heard that he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service in WWII. But now I know what he did to get the medal. Get this:

1945 in Italy. He's a second lieutenant in the 442nd and his unit needs to get up yet another hill defended with German machine gun nests. There were three nests in this case. So he rises up with his tommy gun and grenades and is immediately hit in the stomach. But he keeps moving up, taking one nest out with a grenade, then a second one all by himself with another grenade and the machine gun. He pulls the pin on the third, remember he's already been shot once, but suddenly an enemy grenade with shrapnel takes off most of his right arm. But his grenade is already live because he's pulled the pin. So he reaches down with the one remaining hand, pulls the live grenade out of his own detached hand that is now lying on the ground, and then takes out the third German machine gun nest with it. Then he's shot again in the leg and finally goes down.

By the way, people might also be interested in Young Oak Kim (Yeong-ok Kim). He's from Los Angeles and was a captain in the 442nd and later became a colonel during the Korean War. Fascinating biography in itself. I only knew the WWII stuff, but this guy must be a major figure in the U.S, or should be. Here's the wikipedia bio. And here's a better one, which is his obituary from just three years ago.

Koalas who aren't Mc

2009-07-16T18:13:00.014-10:00

With this post, let's skip the story and move right to the good stuff:

All together, awwwwwwwwwwwww

Little joey there sticking out of his mum's pouch.

Here's my best wallaby shot

And another pretty good 'oala.

So the only true tourist thing I've done is visit Phillip Island, which is about 2 hours southeast of Melbourne. Phillip Island is most famous for the "penguin parade". A large colony of fairy penguins live there and hundreds of people go to see them return from the sea and a day of fishing as the sun goes down. I was only on Phillip Island in the morning and saw no penguins, but I did visit the Koala Conservation Center.

They basically have preserved a little eucalyptus grove and built walkways about.

A koala, as I learned apparently spends about 20 hours a day just sleeping. This is largely because there's not really that much energy in eucalyptus leaves, so they just rest all the time. At night they come down from the tree, climb up some new tree, and then go back to sleep. Ok, I guess the eat some, too. The "rangers" walk around each morning and find where the koalas are that day and put a sign there.

A couple of the koalas were at a level pretty close to humans, but many can get way up there. Here's a young but independent koala. See that ball way way up there?

This one was particularly high, but all were at a fair distance.

And then I used my camera's zoom lens to get a decent view of them.

They also had black wallabies, possums (supposedly, never saw one), and tons of birds that are common in Australia, but funky outside of it.

Here's the famed kookaburra sitting in the old gum tree.

Here's a few more pics of the proud mum and the joey hiding progressively further into the pouch. I wonder if those claws hurt in there, the same way children kick their moms inside the stomach.

And, finally, just to prove that I was there... The koala behind me is the one right near the top of this post who doesn't have the baby. (And to answer clothing questions, the answer is Nashville Predators ice hockey).

Driving Miss McKoala

2009-07-16T03:34:00.011-10:00

So...

I did make it to Kiama, found a lighthouse, found a blowhole

Unfortunately, to my great disappointment, no matter where I looked around here, I just could never find the legendary McKoala. I had a pretty decent idea what she looked like, but just... she wasn't there.

However, quite bizarrely, I did run into McKoala's very good friend Shona. Shona had with her Mr. Shona, Boy Shona, and Princess Shona as well.

It wasn't McK, but I decided to make do with this group, and so off we went to watch the blowhole semi-blowing, more like the sniffling hole today, and then off to find lunch.

For lunch, I did get to learn all about sports clubs that have slots in them. Apparently, they rake in money this way and so end up supporting lots of sports teams. As I understand it, you can only eat in these clubs if you are a member or you live sufficiently far away so that you can become a temporary member. So temporary members we became and then we were able to feast upon sausages and mash, octopus salad, chicken sandwiches, chicken nuggets and a couple battens of chips.

Yay, I used "batten of chips". I learned this lovely phrase from my extensive petrol station dining over the first three days. More on that soon.

As you might expect, it turns out that Shona and clan are quite nice people, easy to get along with, have lovely smiles, and are just generally a winning bunch. You would only expect this, of course, because McK would never choose someone for her close friend if they were not like this.

Princess Shona did a dance for me, Soccer Boy Shona discussed the midfield position, and the adult Shonas filled me in on all sorts of things.

And here's what you've been waiting for. Most of the clan in front of our new favorite church.

After the first Minions Down Under Meet, I jumped back in the car to race south about 5 hours to beat my next hotel's reception closing time in Eden, New South Wales.

Australia becomes quite rural not too long past Kiama, and it stays that way until you hit some towns getting close to Melbourne. It's farm land for a long long time with a whole lotta cows and sheep. Eventually that switched to 2-3 hundred kilometers of eucalypt forest. Here's a little country road off the main one inside these forests.

And a massive field of flowers somewhere in Victoria. This is just one piece of the pasture.

Life is real quiet in these parts and half of the vehicles you pass in the forest are either logging trucks or caravans, i.e., campers.

Here is my beautiful Hyundai Getz that has been getting me around. It's a beast.

These forests continued for a long, long time with periodic watch for kangaroo signs, watch for wombat signs, and one boring old watch for deer sign.

Apparently, leaping roos and wallabies are a real hazard, and I was warned by both Bernie and Mr. Shona. They are big enough that slamming one of them can hurts your car by a thousand or more easy.

But for me, I couldn't wait to see some creature. I did see something hunched over and munching plants in the late afternoon, and then another something hopped out of the way of an oncoming car just as I got there. Finally the next day I managed to pull to the side of the freeway ans capture a pic of this one.

I can tell you with some confidence now that this is not a kangaroo but a black wallaby. Works for me. Tomorrow/later I have better pics of wallabies but they were at a nature conservatory, while this was a real wallaby living in the bush, so that's cool for me.

Eventually, I did make it all the way around, about 1100 kilometers from Sydney to Melbourne. I managed to eat nothing but gas station food all the way, with the exception of the Shona meet-up of course. So I can tell you all about meat pies, pepper steak pies, "massive sausage logs" (That's what she said), vegie pasties, chikitos (actually still don't know what that was), salt and vinegar chicken tenders, and battens of chips either with salt shaken on top or "chicken" which appears to be some sort of freaky chicken bouillon mix. I don't think a vegetable other than the potato passed my lips for 72 hours.

Tomorrow / later: Phillip Island

The wrong side to Kiama

2009-07-15T01:46:00.005-10:00

Well, here I am in Melbourne. Presentation is tomorrow, so while I delay practicing the presentation, I will post about the trip.

The first three days of this trip were almost all about driving.

But first things first. It's an 11 hour flight to Sydney from Honolulu, which, sure, it's long, but Honolulu to Houston was 9 or 10, so this is really just a consequence of living in the middle of the Pacific. Of course, for all my mainland and European friends, it would have been longer.

The Australian people have truly been embarrassingly friendly so far. I mean, the whole lot of them have been at worse neutral and most seem happy to give advice of any sort. I spent my 11 hours with Bernie, a bloke from South Sydney who's in his early 60s or so and just coming back from 3 and a half weeks in the USA. Bernie's so dang friendly, he's either the nicest man ever or a serial killer. He's in a "big brother" type program where he meets periodically with a 17-year-old whose dad has been gone for years, and so he tries to do 17-year-old type things with him like going jet skiing. He's the kind of guy who met the American family in the rows behind us near the bathroom and so spent a while writing up a list of tourist attractions at all their destinations for them. I've got his card as well, so that I can call him if I have any troubles or just to report how I am when the trip is done.

More normal Bernies have been everywhere from the construction guys looking after a big lost dog to the dad from Canberra who chatted with me about the Big Reds (kangaroos) and AFL (Australian Football League) games in Melbourne to the guy in the toll booth in Sydney who gave me directions. I do find myself saying, "I'm sorry?" repeatedly because I didn't understand something, but that's my issue not theirs.

As I said, however, most of my life pre-conference revolved around the Australian freeways. I'm hanging in there now, but, boy, was I having issues the first night.

My entire job was to get from the Sydney airport to my hotel just outside City Center. With normal traffic, it should be a simple 20 minute drive in a northeasterly direction on one of the main "freeways" with a simple turn on one road.

Two and a half hours later, I made it.

There was no one thing that got me, but put it all together and I was wandering, just hanging on for dear life. Of course, Australians drive on the left side of the street and the driver is on the right side of the car. They've got the blinker on the right as well, and the windshield wipers on the left, where an American would expect the blinkers to be. I also rented a standard transmission, which is no big deal by itself, since I drove a standard transmission for several years, but it gave me one more thing to think about. I had no map, but I did have Google travel directions.

Unfortunately, none of the roads by the airport actually had names that one could catch, at least not while trying to stay in the correct lane and turning one's windshield wipers on and off in attempts to turn. I swear I followed sign after sign for "City" or "City Centre", but soon I was in some area called Ramsgate. Maybe I had gone too far and missed the city and was now in North Sydney? I pulled into a petrol station and asked to buy a map. He didn't have maps, but I did learn that Ramsgate was in the opposite direction that I needed to be going in. I wasn't in North Sydney. I was southwest and headed in the opposite direction from the one I thought I was going in.

I managed to get back on highway 1, this time headed towards the city, looking in vain for a way to turn right on Williams St. to get to the hotel. After seeing no signs for William St., I hit the toll booth and ask how much further. Apparently, I'd already missed it. But if I just go up here, turn left and then left and then.... I will be right there. But downtown Sydney is not a calm and peaceful place on Saturday night. One cannot look at tiny little blue street signs hidden in the corners because there are leaping pedestrians hoping to be run over by Americans on every block. I need all concentration to not kill anyone, including myself, and so soon I'm just driving in circles around downtown Sydney having no idea what road I am on nor the direction I'm headed in, but as long as I haven't mowed anyone down, I'm at least still legal. I spent about an hour doing this. Since it's downtown, one can't just pull over and ask someone. There's no place to stop.

Somehow I finally ended up heading back south into neighborhoods and finally turn around... about 6 kilometers north of the damned airport where I started an hour and a half earlier. This was almost my third trip to the airport for the evening. I then end up back on the freeway, back at the same toll booth I was at before, still looking for the mythical Williams St. Okay, so this time I do a left and a left and a left and a I don't know, where the hell is this damned Williams St. I might just die going in circles in this damned city and it's hopeless and oh! I'm on Williams St.! How did that happen?

So I made it.

I called McK to find out the arrangements for our next day's meet-up. We are supposed to meet in Kiama, which has a lighthouse and a legendary blowhole. It should take about an hour and a half. With my experience driving, I left about 2 and a half hours early and was still 10 minutes late.

I got to Kiama and did indeed find a lighthouse

and a blowhole, not much blowing today

but....

It looks like you will have to wait to see more since blogger will not accept any photos for about an hour now. I'll finish the story later, blogger willing.

Off to the Land Down Under

2009-07-09T15:52:00.004-10:00

I'm leaving tomorrow morning for Oz. Since there's a 20 hour difference between Hawaii and Sydney, the 11 hour flight will turn into a 31 hour flight, getting me in Saturday evening. The good news is I arrive about 10 hours before I leave on the way back. I'm taking my laptop, so I might be around. But then I might not.

I guess I will have pics of both Australia and Kaua'i when I return the following Sunday.

Take care.

Oh, and Yes! I am scheduled to meet Ms. Koala and Mr. Koala for lunch on Sunday.

Lion head on tree

2009-07-08T10:02:00.004-10:00

Lion head on tree? New exhibit at MOMA?

You never know, but not yet.

A couple years ago when N was away for a business trip, B and I hatched a crafts project. In general, I don't do craft projects. That's entirely N's responsibility. But B was into Chinese lion dancing at the time, so I decided the two of us would create a lion costume. I knew I couldn't create a real one nor did I have enough money to do so, so instead we devised an idea where we'd cover ourselves in Hawaiian aloha fabrics and then the person in front would hold a lion head made of cardboard on a stick.

The two of us in fact did make the lion head through paints and scissors, but never actually got around to sewing together the fabric we purchased, largely because I don't know how to sew and I got lazy. So the only lion dancing we did was in just one piece of fabric on top of us with the sides never attached.

The lion head then sat around for months on end, finally ending up near the garbage cans getting rained on, and the fabric got turned into some curtains by N and her maman. Last night I finally took the lion head to the street to have it taken away by the garbage trucks.

This morning I went out to bring the garbage can back in and discovered this:

It appears that someone pulled the lion head out of the garbage can, and then tied it to the palm tree near our house using the straps that cinch a garbage bag together, having pulled them out of some bag. It's possible that the garbage collector guys were in a fun mood, but more likely, it was one of the people who go through trash every night looking for 5 cent recyclable bottles and cans.

Turning into my... mom!

2009-07-07T18:36:00.001-10:00

I spent many teenage and college years encountering the following scene:

I'm sitting on a sofa reading a book. My mother would walk through the room and turn on the lamp next to me so I wouldn't ruin my eyes.

I just did that to N.

Karaoke night

2009-07-06T20:38:00.004-10:00

This is another pic I stole from Facebook of my sister's wedding. After the wedding, we went out to a karaoke bar. Maid of honor on left, bride, me, groom. You can see that I'm being my normal crazy self; the other three can barely contain me, but you guys already know how absolutely crazy I am. We are singing Love Shack by the B-52s. Other lovely items which I serenaded the crowd with included Hey Hey We're the Monkees with my sis, You Can Call by Al by Paul Simon with the killer llama (who almost none of you know anymore), and Anthem from the musical Chess all solo and all. This was the first time I've done karaoke in front of people since I got dragged up around 199...6 or something?

Know your viral videos: Web Site Story

2009-07-05T14:17:00.002-10:00

Web Site Story, created by College Humor. My favorite line at the end, "I can't wait to read about me later on your blog."

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Twitter ... is a woman

2009-07-02T16:10:00.003-10:00

I came back on Tuesday but I've been absolutely swamped with getting ready for the conference in Australia. I leave next Friday. Ugh. But today I accidentally signed up for Twitter, even though I vowed not to. I stumbled across the fact that Papa Nez (Michael Nesmith) is on Twitter and apparently even says stuff. So I signed up. But I'm not sure how it works. Will I get an email when someone I'm following says something? I'm not going to bother saying anything myself unless someone's listening to me. So, um, I guess, please tell me in a comment if you are on Twitter and I'll follow you or something. I think WW is on there. You will be shocked to hear that I am "pacatrue" on Twitter.

Who's Michael Nesmith you might ask? Here's a video using one of his better songs from the early 70s. And here's another where I discover that the lead guy from one of my fave bands ever, lambchop, was guesting on one tune on the new, now no longer new, Nez album. OMG! OMG!

Anyway, here's a video of one of lambchop's tunes called "...is a woman". It is very peaceful and quiet. Don't click on it planning to rock-out. The lyrics do word painting more than anything else.

To the Garden

2009-06-23T19:07:00.002-10:00

I keep intending to do one large rant blog post, and then another video, and other things, but I never do them. Apologies for that. Instead, I've just been working on the conference paper that I'm still behind on.

However, I do have interesting news, which is that Paca and Pack are headed to Kauai on Thursday. One of the great virtues of living on Oahu is that you can hop a flight to Kauai for $45. The hotel room is far more than our tickets. So we will be gone to Kauai, the Garden Isle, from Thursday to Tuesday.

Catch people on the flip side.

Random 808

2009-06-18T19:03:00.003-10:00

808 is just the hawaii area code; I'm running out of non-random random numbers.

1) I got an eye exam today and the conclusion was that I am borderline for reading glasses. She gave me some eye exercises and recommendations and said we could decide on the glasses in a month. I always appreciate it when a doctor-like person does not recommend purchasing one of their remedies, be it medicine, glasses, dental work, etc.

2) I am spending most of my days prepping the paper for the conference in July. That's pretty much where I've been this week.

3) It occurred to me for the first time that I will be giving my first ever talk in front of a bunch of profs not in my department, but so far it hasn't stressed me out. I think it's because I've never considered pragmatics/sociolinguistics (which is what this apology work is) my field. Also, I've given a talk in front of 250 clients of my former company before. I will probably freak out when the date gets closer.

4) If my dissertation experiments about language learning don't turn out, maybe pragmatics will accidentally turn into my area. Which would be ironic since I've never taken a single course in this. Not one.

5) One of my favorite past times is playing Guess that Language or Guess that Dialect. As such, I'm really stoked that my co-researcher in Seoul tells me that I was correct in realizing that Miss Korea 1961 was not speaking the standard Seoul dialect even though I myself can only say three words properly in Korean and one of them is the word "ah". She tells me Miss Korea starts off sounding almost North Korean, and then later sounds almost like someone from Pusan, which is the far south. No idea what to make of that, though the two Koreas hadn't been separate for that long in 1961, but as long as it wasn't Seoul dialect it means I win. One point: Paca. 5874 points: all the other languages I can't identify.

6) Speaking of which, the U.S. military is on alert in case North Korea decides to lob a missile at Hawaii. The good news is that they don't expect any such missile to reach here.

7) I've accepted a Facebook friend request from someone who graduated high school at the same time as me (um, same school, too), but I have no idea who she is. I sometimes decline those, but the whole name change thing that women get up to, a curse upon them, makes it so you can't always tell who's who.

8) Next year is my 20th high school reunion. Yes, I am 35 and next year is my 20th. Moreover, 2010 is the 200th anniversary of the school, and so I've always planned on attending this one. It's in central New Jersey. I have only attended one reunion, which was the 10th. Wonder if I will really go?

9) It's never occurred to me in a serious manner to attend my college reunion, even though I liked the school very much. I did go see it one time when I was on a business trip to Minneapolis. (College is about 40 minutes south.) My impression was that I had attended this place but left no mark at all. I don't know what I expected, a statue of a furry camelid in the student union?

10) Not only was there no statue in my honor, I was told that the Mongolian BBQ that existed near the U of Minnesota was no more. What is the world coming to?