Lin Daniel @ 148: Even with evacuation point just down the street, cats could not have been evacuated because we couldn't have carried four cat carriers. Thoughts on this include a fold-up dolly like cons use for supplies. Other ideas welcome.
A friend of ours has cat strollers that have two zip-up mesh cages apiece. Each person could push one, or cats could be stuck two to a cage if they don't hate each other. A quick Google Shopping search for "double cat stroller" shows about $250 new from several sources, or $50-60 used on EBay.
Thanks for the reminder that we need to update our go bags.
Re: change.gov changes for the worse
Is it possible their servers got overwhelmed? It was slow and buggy the first day it was up, when I poked around and sent in my contribution, along with possibly everyone else in the country.
I think centrist equals "person who doesn't want to worry about any issue except for the economy." But I don't know many, and I could be wrong.
My reaction to the exchange at 10 PM: "Miles, are you trying to one-up my dead?" I was not impressed with either of them there.
I'm making (frequently) cakes and cookies to feed to people around me when I'm stressed.
I'm making (slowly) a story which includes dinosaurs (and, depending on your definition, sodomy). I'm just at the midbook where I'm making a mess, which is fun. In the back of my head, I'm making angels which may eventually be material for another mess.
This week, I'm helping make a baby into a toddler. Mostly, it seems to involve a lot of swaying.
I'm making (nervously) plans and wishes.
Patrick Weekes @ 49: Ditto for the Chicago Tribune (Obama's hometown paper, yet!). All the reporting was about "violent anarchist protests" and marchers pepper-spraying 80-year-old delegates. The article mentioned the Goodman arrest, so it was ostensibly referencing the same set of events as above.
Can anyone in St. Paul confirm whether there was actual violence on the part of actual protesters? And am I the only person who wonders if that violence might have been incited, or perpetrated, by plants? I'm not usually paranoid, but...
Ajay @ 192: Tempting, but not quite appropriate, given that my primary example of the non-SF-shelf category is Michael Crichton. The actual and exact discrimination in question is between "items that influence the scientific opinions of large numbers of the general, mostly science-ignorant populace," and "items that influence the scientific opinions of SF fans, unless they're badly done in which case they will be nitpicked to death."
Emma @ 193: Also tempting. I think it's been a while since Crichton was fannish, though. One of my throw-the-book-across-the-room moments in Prey was when a character got punished by the narrative and ridiculed by the other characters... for acting like she was in a science fiction novel instead of a bestselling thriller. (There were a lot of such moments--I was reading the book for academic purposes and had to pick it back up afterwards.)
Ursula L @ 164: I think that's what I'm going to do, even though it will sound a little awkward given that the paper mostly focuses on the latter category.
In the battle of man against sentence, this round may be going to the sentence.
I'm poking my lurker head up to ask this question, because while All Knowledge Is Contained On the Internet, more of it is contained in the Fluorosphere than most other places I could look. What's the appropriate term, or an appropriate term, for science fiction that is generally found in the Science Fiction section of the bookstore rather than the Bestseller or Literature shelves? (The statement in question is that while depictions of nanotechnology are common in the former, they show up only rarely in the latter.)
"Genre science fiction," which is what I currently have down, seems redundant. "Science fiction with actual research" is snooty. "Unpopular science fiction" is fallacious, even if Charlie Stross hasn't quite caught up with Michael Chrichton yet. I'm stumped.
Cognitive psychologists call this the availability heuristic. We're wired to judge how common something is based on how easy it is to bring examples to mind. No exceptions if they're easy to bring to mind because one real clip got repeated 50 million times on the news, or because that episode of 24 was really vivid and memorable. Basically, we're set up to assume that the best way to learn about the world is to hear your tribemates telling stories around a campfire.
The photographers have a fighting chance against this, because stories about people being falsely arrested for snapping pictures of national monuments are themselves vivid and dramatic if we can just get a good one circulating. What worries me even more is that on every cop show and every terrorist drama, the "good guys" torture and intimidate accurate information out of the captive bad guys just in time to save the day. The rest is left as an exercise for the student--including the solution, because I haven't got a clue. Reality, in this case, is unfortunately non-dramatic.
Thanks to all for the tips and reassurances on the ceramic stove. I'll give it a few days and see if I grow fonder of it.
Dena @540: My wife is going to be sorry to hear that. She's been wanting to learn canning. Our salesperson reassured me that the ceramic tops could do everything the coil-tops could do, but I guess I can understand why she didn't think of this one. I suppose we can always pick up an old range on Craigslist, if we ever get into it seriously.
I have to go now and see what kind of damage the very small UFO did to my car last night, so I don't have time to double-check my memory for my favorite Shakespeare bits. Instead, I'll ask what authors most successfully write the bard himself as a character? Kage Baker is one of the few who gets away with it, IMO. And the data is sparse until July, but I've gotten the impression Elizabeth Bear can manage it too. (I'm trying to remember if Mike Ford ever made the attempt. He certainly wrote in-the-style-of with great success, but I don't recall off the top of my head him ever using Shakespeare as a character.
Terry @ 531: Actually, my father-in-law lit the fire... but I suppose that goyim in-laws aren't exactly traditional either. And I certainly did plenty of things clearly identifiable as "work" in the preceding hours. While the Sabbath would have made a great excuse to foist it off on everyone else, I too was relieved that I wasn't worrying about those rules.
Don @ 532: That's good to know that they'll let you do that with birth certificates. Our semi-hypothetical children are all going to have four names, and one of them may have five if we lose an argument.
My wife's family has a tradition of using otherwise defunct maiden names as middle names.* This tradition pleases me, and delights my mother (who is an only child and changed her name, and I think regretted it later), but I'm not willing to give up on putting in a "normal" middle name alongside.
*This is the only sensible thing that my wife's family does with names. Her grandmother turns out to have had two brothers named John. Both living into adulthood. At the same time. My wife never realized they were different people until she started asking questions for a family tree.
Xopher @ 513: Well, that's essentially what we did for the seder, since we didn't have a working oven on Saturday.
Admittedly, the fire was in a grill. But the grill was in the back yard. This could be seen as either not very traditional, or extremely traditional, depending on how far back you go.
I hold the minority opinion of hating gas ovens, but that's probably because I've never used one that wasn't decades old and provided by a stingy landlord.
Also, with respect to computer systems and last names: The computer system at my work cannot make any distinction between the full legal name in the payroll system and the use-name that goes in directories and on office doors. So my options were either A) lose my original last name when I already had publications under it (bad for career), B) keep my maiden name with no new name (didn't want to; it's a name my family picked a generation ago because the Ellis Island name was still too Jewish for them to get hired under), or C) legally become Mrs. Emrys space-no-hyphen Oldname (first half of the last name can be bumped into the middle name slot on the computer system). I knew from Teresa exactly how much of a PITA this would be, and it still seemed like the best option.
Per CJ @ 381: In the case of the SPE, the expectations were heavily reinforced by the experimenters. But I also have an article on my floor right now about how new prisoners in the Netherlands form (incorrect) expectations about prison life and behavior based on American media.
Albatross @ 400: No kidding. Sometimes when I'm procrastinating I mentally narrate my life as a science fiction novel for a reader from 1900 or 1950.
Re Lunar society, I interpreted it as you describe. But it was interesting to me the ways in which the narrator seemed much less reliable than when I first read it at 20, and I don't think all of that was deliberate on Heinlein's part.
Another thing about MIAHM is that computers screwing with the election results For the People's Own Good seems a bit more sinister than it did a few years ago.
New topic: I just got a new stove today. It has a smooth ceramic top, because I was sick of cleaning all the finicky little nooks in a coil-top. But the warnings about how hot it gets and what you can and can't put/leave on the burner are all on the order of "Do not taunt happy fun ball." Translated: if you don't use the stove, you can't sue us. Also, I'm discovering what a pain it is to try and center a pan on the burner with only visual feedback (i.e., with no friction, putting the pan off-center doesn't feel any different than having it on-center). Does anyone here have experience with these? Any insight into what really shouldn't be done for safety reasons, or tips for making them easier/more pleasant to cook on? Have I just done the equivalent of buying an oven with Windows Vista instead of Unix?
Xopher @ 366: I hesitate to keep arguing about this, because it's obvious that the books pissed you off massively and I can't really blame you. Whenever I read NT, I end up jumping up at regular intervals to complain at whoever's nearby, because men aren't like that, and language isn't like that, and the Nobel Prize committee isn't like that... But I think you're missing the degree to which things like LGBT might have been less visible to someone of an older generation living in the Ozark mountains in pre-internet days. Or the degree to which universities were still bastions of male privelege 30 years ago, such that a female professor might be less inclined to think well of male flexibility by being there.
Her experiences with gender roles, at home and in academia, make me profoundly grateful to live in a time and a culture in which those experiences seem profoundly alien. I end up not so much angry at the books, as deeply sorry that anyone has had to live in a world that could make those premises seem reasonable. And grateful that my worries about my academic job have nothing to do with being a woman, and grateful that I can live openly with my wife and only occasionally have problems because she's my wife and not my husband, and grateful that if I did have a husband I could reasonably expect him to treat me as an equal...
I bumped into the same thing in a subtler way rereading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress last week. Lunar women are described as having all the power in social relationships--except that the men all talk to the women like children, and the women all act flattered by it. And you want to shake Heinlein and point out to him that when society changes, people will change with it. And not just by having more sex, either.
FTR, my point here is not so much, "Don't hate the Native Tongue trilogy," as the more tangential, "It's easier to imagine flying cars than people who are different from the people you know... but if we could only have one, I'm awfully glad we have the people." So perhaps not so much arguing with you after all, and more working out these things for my own edification.
Xopher @ 265: I had a lot of the same problem with the portrayal of men in those books. Nobody questions the assumptions of their culture? And it creeps into the language--one of my main issues with Laadan is that the words for "love" all mean things like "sexual and emotional attraction without respect" and variations thereof--the assumption being that women love men and will probably choose them as lifemates, but that there's unlikely to be real communication between them.
But having read other works by women and men of the same or older generations, and having spent time talking to same, I am forced to the conclusion that more men used to act in these inexplicable and to-me-absurdly-rude ways. Which makes me A) extremely grateful to live when I do, and B) impressed by the degree to which cultures can change for the better over time. And also makes it easier for me to see why someone growing up with those boundaries to inter-gender communication might not realize that men also questioned.
Suzette, btw, is herself a wonderful person who is quite aware that these things have changed over time. I recall a panel at a Wiscon a couple of years ago where she in fact came to the same conclusion re Klingon vs Laadan popularity that you mentioned (i.e. that it helps to have the Star Trek franchise backing you). And her Livejournal hosts a terrific ongoing salon focusing on communications, linguistics, gender relations, eldering, etc., and attended by people of a wide range of genders, ages, and linguistic backgrounds.
Albatross @ 161:
The SPE was badly designed, chiefly in that Zimbardo set himself up as the prison warden. So the guy running the experiment was "on the side of" the guards, and the instructions he gave them emphasized the kind of excessive power they'd have over the prisoners. So it seems likely that a lot of the bad behavior was because of bad leadership. The BBC did a partial replication a couple of years ago, much better designed and without the confounds. Without strong leadership, the guards were nervous about excercising any sort of power and mostly retreated to their end of the prison. Eventually, realizing that neither side was happy, guards and prisoners got together and renegotiated the rules to create an egalitarian commune-type set-up.
...which quickly started to devolve into the unpleasant sort of heirarchical set-up they'd been trying to avoid in the first place. The experimenters halted the project before they could implement the fairly severe and potentially abusive rules they'd created.
In spite of the SPE's problems, there are a lot of other experiments that show people's vulnerability to group pressure (like Asch's work) and authority (like the Milgram shock experiments), so Zimbardo's original conclusions aren't entirely unsupported either.
Paul Lalonde @ 94: We've been considering getting a real shoemaker
for a while. Do you have any advice about how to find/identify a good
one?
Lee @ 104: My parents are late adopters; I typed papers on a
typewriter for most of my childhood, and finally an electric typewriter
for the latter half of high school. I have not a shred of nostalgia for
either of these devices.
Another good source of deep value items is Amish furniture stores.
We discovered these when we went bed shopping last year. Our new
four-poster is made of solid oak, and we know the name of the guy who
built it. If our hypothetical grandkids snap one of the posts in 40
years, someone will come to our house and fix it for free. The only way
we'll ever need to replace it (for certain definitions of need) is if
we actually save up the money for the canopy bed from the same store
with secret compartments in the footboard. Apparently the Amish are
very fond of secret compartments; who knew? Not that I blame them. If I
can't have a bookcase that swings out to reveal a hidden layer, secret
compartments in the bed are the next best thing.
For those forgetting their shopping bags at home, a recommendation. I use one of these
that I picked up at a co-op. It folds up wallet-sized and fits in my
purse, so I don't forget it (unlike the five string bags and the big
canvas bag that lives in my back seat). If I didn't have a purse, it
would snap around my belt loop. Since I got it, my disposable bag
consumption is down to what I need for my recycling and my lunch.
On sewing machines: I have an electric sewing machine that's a
couple generations old (human generations, not tech generations) and
much sturdier than the modern ones. I love it, but if I didn't have
electricity I think I'd just go back to needle and thread. Whereas I
would probably have to invent a treadle-powered word processor rather than go back to either manual typewriter or pen & paper.
Krinn DNZ @ #11: Consider, for example, America, and wonder how, once the idea of critical analysis [of the Bible] takes off, how people might start saying "But we don't live in a desert."
Where I grew up, we called that "Reform Judaism."
This type of movement doesn't wipe out fundamentalism. But it does make things more comfortable for the non-fundamentalists, and give them room to grow.
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| 2008 | 21 |
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