Newt spent a couple of years hauling around a hank of pink velvet as a blankie. This has not translated into any particularly gender-transgressive behavior in later life, at least not up until age 9.
Obviously the boy is trying to increase awareness of breast cancer.
I know tons of straight dudes who did the nail-painting thing on occasion, beginning in HS.
It is impressive how strongly people believe that a boy who is detectably gender-inappropriate is going to get punished for it (and how certain they tend to be that the punishment is going to come organically, from peers, so there's no way to avoid it by persuading adults not to be assholes.)
My mother once got rid of a jacket of Newt's because it had a very small, stylized, butterfly logo on it (you really had to stare to figure out the butterfly, rather than just seeing it as swirls). He'd been wearing it for a year without another kid mentioning it, but Mom's rationale was that other kids would give him a hard time.
And Mom really isn't unusually hide-bound on this front: she's all for treating girls in non-gender-stereotyped ways, and not obviously more attached than most to men being manly.
IIRC, Tedra/Bitch's kid is way relaxed on the gender-appropriateness front, and I haven't heard her say anything about it being socially difficult for him.
Deadlines deadlines deadlines, I love deadlines. Maybe, while I'm thinking about it, I should put up a post linking to Kevin Drum on multitasking. La la la. Anyone know any good webcomics where I should read all the archives? Dr. McNinja, which someone mentioned last fall sometime, is great.
The 2008 elections used up the last of my tolerance for the "other people will behave poorly" argument (specifically: "He's the candidate I want, but we can't choose him because other assholes won't vote for a black guy). I'm just done with that argument. If you are going to be an asshole, speak for yourself and I'll take that into consideration. Otherwise, I refuse to listen to that whole concept, since often, other people don't turn out to be as bad as predicted.
...and J. Crew is getting shitloads of free publicity by deliberately stirring up a shitstorm among the geriatric punditsphere. Not an accident.
At least they didn't go the more traditional 'violence against women' route, or the 'ephebophilia shading into pedophilia' one. There may even be a bit of an upside to this.
7. None you don't already know, I imagine. But you're quite right that happening on an unfamiliar web comic with a few years of archives to go through is the most perfect time sink ever invented.
It is impressive how strongly people believe that a boy who is detectably gender-inappropriate is going to get punished for it(and how certain they tend to be that the punishment is going to come organically, from peers, so there's no way to avoid it by persuading adults not to be assholes.)
It's going to come from (a) asshole adult and (b) those of their peers who are imitating asshole adults (usually the children of asshole adults). And the appropriate response to call out the asshole adults on it.
My 4 year old's favorite color is pink. He has always loved it. I have no idea why. His grandfather (my FIL) recently made him cry telling him that pink was a color for girls. I wanted to break his nose.
That's unlikely to make him stop crying, urple.
And I bet if you called your FIL on it, his excuse for making your son cry would be that he was just trying to keep him from getting made fun of by other kids. Feh.
I do think there's a strong tendency for kids to comply with whatever their peers see as gender appropriate, I just haven't seen a whole lot of hostile enforcement coming from kids, compared to what I've seen coming from adults.
It is impressive how strongly people believe that a boy who is detectably gender-inappropriate is going to get punished for it
It's also impressive how strongly a significant number of people seem to believe that being detectably gender-inappropriate is going to somehow make a boy gay.
At age five when my parents were out of the house I once broke into my mom's make up supplies, did my nails and added some smears of stuff onto my face. From what I remember my parents' reaction was mostly amusement combined with an admonition not to mess up mama's stuff anymore. My mom also once got angry at my doctor for saying it was inappropriate for four year old me to have a favorite doll. Somehow none of these forms of dangerously proto-homosexual behaviour prevented me from suddenly thinking 'girls!' rather than 'boys!' at age thirteen.
ObLanguagePolice: how about using 'gender-unconventional' instead of the normative 'gender-inappropriate'?
Anyone know any good webcomics where I should read all the archives?
Nothing off the top of my head, but there are a number of comics on this list that I haven't heard of.
Has anybody here read nobody scores? It looks promising.
14: Yeah, as though there's a causal relationship.
Although, anecdotally from gay friends and stuff written by gay men, it seems to be not terribly uncommon for gay men to remember being aware of themselves as gender-unconventional as kids, well before they associated it with sexuality. I find this really odd, to the point where I'd probably dismiss it if I'd heard it from people who I thought had a gender-norming agenda, but as it is I'm just puzzled by it.
16: Fair enough.
7.last: yeah it is.
On the OP, at the seder we went to last night there was this high school sophomore (invited by the son of my friend who was hosting) who was just all the way over on the gender unconventionality front. I kept feeling sort of proud of him, but I also got the sense that he couldn't imagine acting any other way.
Although, anecdotally from gay friends and stuff written by gay men, it seems to be not terribly uncommon for gay men to remember being aware of themselves as gender-unconventional as kids, well before they associated it with sexuality. I find this really odd, to the point where I'd probably dismiss it if I'd heard it from people who I thought had a gender-norming agenda, but as it is I'm just puzzled by it.
I don't find it that odd (which may just mean I haven't thought about it enough), and it (mostly) conforms to my (limited) anecdotal experience. But there are an awful lot of people anecdotally who see that sort of correlation and think that somehow means if they don't want gay boys they shouldn't let them play with dolls. Which is... very hard to understand.
anecdotally
Not sure what that was doing there.
19: A couple of unconvincing hypotheses: A: everyone's gender-unconventional to start with, and straights generally eventually conform and suppress the memory of nonconformance. B: proto-gay males select role models who share their interest in male affection, who are usually straight women.
My 4 year old's favorite color is pink. He has always loved it. I have no idea why. His grandfather (my FIL) recently made him cry telling him that pink was a color for girls. I wanted to break his nose.
I want to break his nose, all the way from over here.
Christ the violence around here! He was four years old for God's sake.
22: I guess what seems weird to me about it is that gay men aren't women -- what they have in common with straight women, as distinct from in common with straight men or with people generally, is sexual attraction to men. I can see why, in adults, this turns into a social association of gay men with femininity, which was stronger back when being gay was more of an underground thing.
Why, in a boy who was going to turn out gay when their adult sexuality kicked in, that should be linked with a preference for stuff gender-marked as feminine rather than masculine outside of a romantic context, I don't get. There's no social pressure explanation, because the kid's not visibly gay at the outset -- why would a future sexual attraction to men be related to liking pink and sparkly stuff?
I've sort of wondered if the phenomenon is mostly retconning -- lots of boys have some gender-unconventional behavior, ones that grow up straight don't think about it in later life, and ones that grow up gay remember it as "Huh, guess I always knew on some level."
He was four years old for God's sake.
Well, his nose should heal quickly, then, at least.
Pwned by 24 on A, and I hadn't thought of B.
Anyone know any good webcomics where I should read all the archives?
MS Paint Adventures! Start with Problem Sleuth.
I love Scarygoround/Bad Machinery. New readers start here.
27: Maybe being gender-unconventional is what makes being gay problematic [to Fox News et al], rather than the other way around?
Like if we as a society just allow men to wear pink, grow their hair long, have husbands, etc., then how will we know which people are supposed to be in charge?
Anyone know any good webcomics where I should read all the archives? Dr. McNinja, which someone mentioned last fall sometime, is great.
Well, Dr McNinja would have been my first suggestion. Actually, it may have been me who mentioned it. After that, I'd go for xkcd and Dinosaur Comics, but you probably know those already. The ace Hyperbole And A Half got a post here, I think, but just in case you missed it, there you go
If this doesn't sell you on Nedroid, then there is a problem.
Start with Problem Sleuth.
Uggh that was frustrating.
Oh, and of course there's Tom Tomorrow, but going through the archives could be a highly depressing, if funny, experience.
Actually, it may have been me who mentioned it.
Nuh uh! It was me!
Uggh that was frustrating.
Explain please.
Maybe NickS's PULCHRITUDE is too low to command the loyalty of MSPA!
My gay brother was extremely gender-unconventional as a child (to the extent that I'd say he identified as female as a child). I don't have any particular insight into why there would be any connection here to future attraction to men, but it sure seems that way sometimes.
I love Scarygoround/Bad Machinery.
I like it quite a bit. Though saying this once got me a really tedious lecture from a guy about how no one who knew actual women could possibly find the characters in Scarygoround convincing and therefore it was antifeminist to like it.
I saw an interesting talk once which included a list of ways in which gay men, rather than being feminized, are actually hyper-masculine. This was then related back to scientific work on hormones and sexual orientation.
Unfortunately, the only example I remember of a way in which gay men are hyper-masculine was in attitudes to casual sex.
are actually hyper-masculine.
"THIS, IS, SPAAAAAARTA!"
re: 44
A friend of mine wrote his MA* sociology thesis on representations of masculinity, comparing magazines aimed at women, magazines aimed at straight men, and magazines aimed at gay men. And yeah, his take was along the 'hyper-masculine' line as well.
* Glasgow, so this was an undergrad MA**
** which I'm semi-surprised he passed. His thesis was good enough that he got a letter of praise from one of the examiners, but it was also pretty scabrous, and more like 'lefty satirist totally skewers Cosmo and Loaded' than a formal piece of academic work.
41: Well, yeah, there are loads of anecdotes from people who really don't seem to have an ax to grind, which is what makes it so puzzling.
Given how complicated attraction is, it would be extremely unlikely if there were a single cause of homosexuality. It's not that implausible that there could be something that causes both gayness as an adult and gender-nonconformity as a kid. So perhaps it's just a causation/correlation error to be surprised that they go together.
Explain please.
It lost me with:
... Nonetheless, a guy this hard boiled doesn't go messing around with totally unmanly things like knobs.
You send your meaty fist glass-ward.
Not my taste. That reads as far too precious for me.
33. My Unconvincing Hypothesis C is that the underlying fear/logic is "if we don't normalize the curb-stomping of gays, we might get raped by them." See 44 and hyper-masculinity, the use of male-on-male rape in war, terror, and torture, and the single most tightly focused verbal expression of aggression in the English language, "fuck you"
Whoops, lost the tail end of 50 to HTML. Should have read:
"fuck you" <- "I will fuck you".
You stopped on the fourth page as a result of intentional overwriting?
"fuck you" <- "I will fuck you".
That was not the analysis of Quang Phuc Dong.
doesn't go messing around with totally unmanly things like knobs.
Unmanly, or hyper-manly?
My reaction to that ad was similar to the take by The La/st Ps/ychia/trist. The pink nailpolish is nothing. It's an ad by the president of the company starring herself and her accessories, which happens to include her kid. About on par with Oprah having a magazine with herself on the cover every month or Gwyneth P's fashion tips for the masses that include $1000 boots. Rich people, still good kindling.
Hey, only a few more weeks until the release of Hobo with a Shotgun.
You stopped on the fourth page as a result of intentional overwriting?
No, I continued to the 8th page, or so, before stopping (the point at which he discovered the combination to the safe on the back of the piece of paper), but that was the point at which it started to lose me.
I agree with the hyper-masculinity...
...whatever the fuck that could mean, since I consider women to be as aggressive, competitive etc as men, though constrained by cultural and social systems into differing forms of expression.
24A is perfectly convincing to me. Hell, we don't even have to go to "straights suppress" the memory of gender nonconformity. If, in fact, gay men remember more gender non-conformity at an earlier age than straight men do, it may be less because the straight men suppressed the memories than because the memories took on greater significance in gay men's lives and have remained stronger as memories for that reason. (If two little boys playing dress-up with feather boas and heels are told, "You guys are so gay," it would make sense that the kid who actually is gay would spend more time ruminating about -- and therefore remembering -- the experience, right?)
That isn't the combination to the safe, though.
More generally, I try to be careful to recognize that "free to be anything to you want to be" is also in itself a kind of "blank slate" essentialism.
Ursyne gets it exactly right in 33. Hence why lesbians aren't as much of a problem - who cares what women do? They are basically unimportant.
Not to, like, co-opt anyone's oppression, or anything.
61: Also a crappy album that many of us got tired of long before our parents stopped trying to convince us that it was all right to cry.
||
Anybody have access to Oxford Journals? I'm looking for this, and would reward a person who snagged it for me with my undying gratitude.
|>
Winging its way to you even now, Jesus.
63: It's got some very interesting bits. If you remember the fairy tale, about the princess Atalanta who ties in a race for who gets to marry her with the poor boy and then they don't get married? I listened to that with my kids, and the narrator (Alan Alda. It's 70s-tastic!) keeps on describing her with lists of adjectives. And never says she's pretty, or beautiful, or anything about her appearance. And I kept on filling that in as the next thing he was going to say, and he didn't.
I never noticed that as a kid, but it was surprisingly noticeable as an adult.
62: Yeah, I actually edited 59 to refer exclusively to men. Because girls gender non-conform all the time without getting shit for it (unless being called a "tomboy" counts as shit, but it's always rung as a label more than as a judgment to me). Ursyne's theory seems to explain that.
66: I saw Alan Alda the other day! He looks a little older in person, but his affect/presence, even while walking down the street, is so warm and pleasant that other famous people ought to take lessons. I feel happier just recalling the sight.
62: Mara got asked whether she was a boy or a girl on her first day of preschool, which may well have been a genuine question given that three-year-olds are big on categorizing. I heard that a lot as a kid, though, and it was just meanness because I had short hair but I do think it had an ongoing impact in how I thought about giving into and resisting feminized self-presentation.
Mara has worn a dress ("princess") to school every day this week and seems to be deliberately constructing a more feminine identity or at least presentation. She also periodically insists that she's a little boy, but I think this is about learning to pretend rather than having sort of proto-trans stuff going on. While I think she might get a little more social pressure to be feminine because she has gay moms, she definitely hasn't gotten the kind of responses from adults that urple's son has.
Does anyone have a Spanish I textbook I can borrow? I'm trying to learn!
7: Good webcomics?
I like Oglaf (mostly nsfw) and Platinum Grit (mostly sfw).
Hmm, I'm pretty sure I typed those links correctly.
I'm pretty fond of the webcomics Sinfest and Sheldon. The latter is about a 10-year-old genius who lives with his grandfather, a pug and a talking duck. The former has a less domestic scope, but it still features the occasional strip about the artist's dog and cat. I particularly like Sinfest's inking -- very strong, but graceful.
I've sort of wondered if the phenomenon is mostly retconning -- lots of boys have some gender-unconventional behavior, ones that grow up straight don't think about it in later life, and ones that grow up gay remember it as "Huh, guess I always knew on some level."
All, without exception, all of the openly gay adults I knew as children were sufficiently gender unconventional to be noticeable. The inverse is not true.
76: How much of that would you ascribe to the "I knew all long" tendency? (I ask because whenever I have heard about a former classmate/distant cousin/etc. coming out, I have never had the slightest inkling. Perfectly reasonable to ask whether I pay much attention to other people, of course.)
Also a crappy album that many of us got tired of long before our parents stopped trying to convince us that it was all right to cry.
Caroline, singing to her brother:
"It's all right to cry
But do you have to
Cry so loudly"
If there's any therapy-inducing trauma to be found in this kid's life, it's being named "Beckett". Qua qua qua.
Thinking about guys I knew in high school -- one of my best friends was unconventional enough in his gender presentation that I always kind of wondered if he were going to come out. He's straight. My first real boyfriend wasn't particularly gender-unc., although nerdy enough that I suppose someone picky could have cavilled at his manliness, came out in college, and still identifies as queer, although he's bi enough to have been married to a woman for a long time now. And another couple of guys I knew less well, neither of whom was noticeably gender-unc., came out in college and are solidly gay.
Of course, there was the guy who wore a dress to prom. I'm not sure what happened to him.
77: Possible that you just hadn't had much to do with these classmates, etc., in a context in which sexuality was relevant? Knowing my friend's aunt for a few years whilst she was a single lady, I never had any inkling that she might be gay. But the minute her now partner started hanging out, it was pretty immediately obvious (to me, anyway; not to my friend's extended family) that they were a couple. I just can't imagine devoting much mental energy to wondering about anyone's orientation unless there were some particular reason to.
80: Consider the inevitable (if not already extant) linguists' offspring named "Ghoti" and "Diphthong."
Of course, there was the guy who wore a dress to prom.
That's the sort of thing I can totally imagine my prom date doing just to provoke a reaction.
How much of that would you ascribe to the "I knew all long" tendency?
If any of them "knew all along", they were very good at hiding it and/or supressing it. Then again, there were precisely zero positive role models available to gay youth in our part of the world in those days, and local attitudes were such that Rock Hudson / AIDS jokes were told without self-consciousness by our schoolteachers in the classroom. So I can see how self-hatred could drown out erotic longing.
I do have absolutely terrible gaydar, as 81 establishes. Not that I don't make guesses, but they're generally wrong. I've learned to assume someone's straight or gay when they mention the gender of a partner, or I notice an unambiguous tattoo or something, but not really before.
84: Well, yeah, I didn't know him all that well, and don't recall whether the dress was about his sexuality or a look-at-me-being-unusual stunt. It was the kind of school where the latter was pretty low-stakes.
85: Sorry, I meant the tendency of observers to claim to have known all along, not the persons whose sexuality is relevant. I asked because I just spoke with a high school classmate who was a veritable fount of having-known-all-along claims about various classmates' sexuality, career prospects, parents' inevitable divorces, etc.
82: I just can't imagine devoting much mental energy to wondering about anyone's orientation unless there were some particular reason to.
Idle curiosity wouldn't be enough motivation? I suppose people who have jobs that involve thinking might be more frugal in expending mental energy.
I can think of at least three guys I knew growing up who came out who were totally conventionally masculine . Indeed, one guy was a hypermasculine football star who was also into things like hunting and Lynyrd Skynyrd.
But then I can also think of a few guys who were extremely non-masculine, whom everyone assumed were gay, and then came out as soon as it was remotely socially acceptable to do so. So, in conclusion, who the fuck knows?
So, in conclusion, who the fuck knows?
Not me, apparently.
Maybe I can hire myself out as a sort of idiot consultant on questions of gender identity: "Don't you think painting this boy's toenails pink could make him look gay?"
"What's gay? ... What's a toenail?"
89: I suppose maybe I just don't have a great deal of curiosity. Or mental energy.
There's also a big difference between high school and nursery school. Even for a twelve-year-old who doesn't end up coming out until twenty-two, it doesn't seem all that odd that their sexuality would affect their gender presentation -- twelve-year-olds are developing sexuality. What throws me is the idea that gender unconventional four and five year-old boys are going to be more likely to be gay.
twelve-year-olds are developing sexuality
Ain't that the truth.
Further to 93/94: I am enjoying (?) the contradictions that abound with a 12-year old who is into makeup, worries that her tops aren't sufficiently tight, and then declares herself a tomboy and rails against things she considers to be "girly-girl."
I'm sort of hoping that at some point Sally will develop enough of an interest in either the opposite or the same sex to keep her hair brushed without nagging. Or get it cut short, whatever -- the insistence on maintaining long flowing locks that mat up into big knots at the nape of her neck drives me batshit.
Yeah, it's been pretty excellent not having to nag Rory to take a shower, brush her hair, wash her face... Of course, the flip side is that she has become a much bigger nag about my (lack of) fashion sense. "You're wearing *that*?"
I should note that there exists a picture of me at the age of like 6, wearing jeans and a wife beater at the end of a dock, holding a fishing pole, and squinting aggressively over my shoulder. I have never seen anything gayer.
98: There is a nearly identical fishing photo of me hiding in my parents' basement. The other dominant childhood photos of me fall into the categories: (1) grinning with pony-tailed hair tucked into softball cap, and (2) barely-veiled resentment with pretty, curled hair and a dress or some blouse with one of those frou-frou collars.
OT, except as it relates to evil geniuses and nefarious plots: the iPhone 4 tracks and logs all of your movements, and you can't turn it off.
That is just exceedingly creepy. I really fucking hate apple. I wish I hadn't bought so much stuff from them.
I used to love getting mistaken for a boy as a child. Never wore skirts out of school and had my hair as short as my mum would let me. Can do maths. Turned out straight.
OT - I am at my parents' house. My mum is complaining that every morning my dad wakes up and immediately tells her his dreams, thus making her forget her own. And now they're talking about lightbulbs. I should twitter this shit, it's adorable (as my 14 year old says).
100: ain't no thing.
Seriously, though, it isn't. The file doesn't get sent to anybody. Encrypt your local backups and the only additional risk is that somebody will steal your phone. As far as law enforcement goes, they could already get access to all this information (without a warrant) from cellphone companies. Apple should have disclosed this -- and you should be able to turn it off -- but it really isn't that big a deal. Also, running that software and watching your travels over the time you had your phone is really neat.
(Also, it's not just the iPhone 4. My 3GS does it to; I assume any iPhone will.)
I never got mistaken for a boy until my late teens, an age at which I was decidedly straight, although not getting much action. Never minded it that much, although getting chased out of a ladies' room by an irate woman was annoying.
although getting chased out of a ladies' room by an irate woman was annoying
Yeah, I hate when that happens.
102: Having it automatically saved seems peculiar to me -- what's the point of having the phone keep a log of its location?
105: I assume they intend(ed) to use it for some as yet unreleased feature.
If they were trying to be devious needless to say there are any number of things they could have done that would have been more useful to them (like sending the information to apple, or storing it in an encrypted file so it couldn't be easily found/accessed by researchers, for a start). I think they just miscalculated people's reactions to this.
Could be pretty dang useful in private litigation.
108: assuming it's reasonably accurate, which I'm not sure it is (since it's based on cell towers, not GPS). But that's not the kind of thing you can subpoena from phone companies in private litigation? I'm somewhat surprised by that.
As far as law enforcement goes, they could already get access to all this information (without a warrant) from cellphone companies.
Okay, this is going to seem really inconsistent with my position on the license plate camera thingy, but... Whaaat? My phone is recording my movements without my knowledge and the police can get this information without a warrant? And this doesn't violate the Fourth Amendment? I mean, I imagine the legal analysis probably deals with whether the cellphone company is collecting this data as an agent of law enforcement or not and if my brain weren't the big useless mass of fuzzy mush that it's been lately I'd try to think that through. But viscerally, I find this hugely disturbing.
It wouldn't have occurred to me that cell phone companies have long-term logs of the locations of all of their customers on file. It probably could be subpoenaed if you knew it existed, but not otherwise.
110: technically the base stations are recording the data (I mean, unless you have an iPhone), but yeah. Whenever you get into range of a cell tower your phone's unique ID, the location of the cell tower, and a timestamp is logged, and generally phone companies have been willing to give that information to law enforcement without a warrant. This has been the case for a long time.
108, 111: Time to go update some discovery requests...?
111: oh, who knows how long they keep them, but it's pretty cheap-to-store data that could be otherwise very useful for analysis of service quality (among other things).
As far as law enforcement goes, they could already get access to all this information (without a warrant) from cellphone companies.
Is there caselaw you know about on the "(without a warrant)" bit? While it's disturbing, I guess I wouldn't be surprised if that were how the cases came out, but I am surprised that either there wasn't a law-blogs flap about it or that I missed the flap when it happened.
113: Pssst, Di, you have a case this might be useful in. Thanks Tweety. This may be billable commenting!
Hmmm. My knowledge of Law and Order leads me to believe that the police need a warrant for this kind of thing.
115: it seems to be sort of a mixed bag.
111, 114: A country with thought-out - not even necessarily well thought out - privacy laws would have rules governing how long that data can be kept (at least so long as it contains personally identifiable information). So in the US, it's probably up to the company.
120: there was a scandal recently where it came out that Deutsche Telekom was storing tracking data on all sorts of people, but specifically politicians.
Incidentally, if you have any iPhone and haven't run the tracking-visualization software, you totally should. It's really fun. You can watch a movie of your movements from the time you got your phone 'til the present.
You mean I could watch myself go from home to work and back daily for the last year and a half. I'm not sure if that sounds fun or suicide-inducing. ("Oh, look, I went someplace else. That must have been when my uncle died.")
I tried it this morning but it said it wouldn't run on my version of OSX (10.5, I think?). And I'm not going to teach myself to compile the XCode thingie from github, at least not until next week when I'm procrastinating writing a paper.
123: well, right, mine was mostly pretty boring, too. But then I drove to Maine! And then I flew to California! Both very exciting moments! It was a bit like watching Warhol's Empire.
124: Me too; I'm guessing it works only with 10.6.
The ars technica piece was underwhelming. Your jealous spouse could get hold of your phone! If had access to the info, mostly I'd feel like LB. I've been out of state maybe three times since I got my phone? Christ.
Your jealous spouse could get hold of your phone!
That was my immediate thought -- affair tracking.
105: The most reasonable explanation that I saw was speculation on TechCrunch that you could pair the location with cellphone strength to map signal strength/call quality.
128: I decline to believe that either AT&T or Verizon cares so much about call quality as to burn a single calorie in the pursuit of mapping same.
Also, I don't recall ever making a call from the middle of the Hudson.
130: If the body every turns up, that's not a very good alibi, Flip.
131: I operate a legitimate blog-commenting business.
Oh hey, webcomics rewarding long delves:
Family Man (with annotations!)
For politics, A Girl and Her Fed (a lot of beginner's art in the middle which is slowly being replaced).
Finally, I second the recommendation of Nobody Scores!, and add that the joint consideration of elements within this, this, and this can only lead to one conclusion.
A little quick googling suggests that the cell phone companies only store the location-identifying information for 60-90 days, which would make the information usesless in most private litigation (which almost always takes place more than 90 days after the events you care about occurred). If what's stored on the Iphone stays current for longer than that, it could be very useful indeed in private litigation, as well as (potentially) a lot more privacy-infringing than the records kept by the cell phone companies. Obviously could be very useful in divorce cases.
[disclaimers about not really knowing anything about this topic should apply]
128: I don't think they're storing the information necessary to find that.
Most of the entries in their database are self-explanatory. The ones that might not be are MNC, LAC, CI, and MCC, but those are just Mobile Network Code, Location Area Code, Cell Identity, and Mobile Country Code.
As far as I can tell, new entries are only (or at least most often) created when location based services are being used.
As far as I can tell, new entries are only (or at least most often) created when location based services are being used.
That's the sense I got, yeah. I wonder if they want to use it to improve non-GPS based location services?
The iPhone location data seems disturbingly error-prone. My track includes a couple of camping trips near Auburn, CA, but along with lots of plausible data points for that trip there are a couple of stray markers way out I-80, all the way to Lake Tahoe, 60 miles away from anywhere this phone has actually been.
54, Dong himself says his analysis "offer[s] only a tentative conjecture" as to the deep structure of "fuck you". Most of his allowed constructions for fuck[2] parse well if "I will fuck" is substituted for "fuck". His claim that fuck[2] disallows adverbial elements is mistaken; "sideways", "up the ass", "painfully", and "with a chainsaw" are all attested. Assuming an implicit "I will" makes more sense to me than inventing a "quasi-verb".
I had a friend in college who absolutely everybody assumed was guy until he mentioned something that indicated otherwise, and not necessarily even then ('she's pretty hot, don't you think, 'yes' (oh come on)). He had classic gay mannerisms and speech patterns, was very fashion conscious and neat, and was a ballet dancer. At his pre wedding dinner with friends, family and friends of the family, everybody apparently mentioned that, with the older folks expressing relief that they had been wrong.
I had a friend in college who absolutely everybody assumed was guy until he mentioned something that indicated otherwise
"I'm female!"
I corrected the awkward bit in the first sentence of 140 as "a guy" rather than as "gay", which made for for an even better story.
It may just be that any correlation there may be between gender-unconventionality and eventual self-identification as gay (or bi) is a function of a willingness to be unconventional, period. I tend to think that there are many people who are gay or bi who don't acknowledge it, so there are a lot of self-identified straights who conform not only in terms of presentation but in terms of professed preference.
The single best webcomic to have existed, which no longer does so, is certainly A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible.
7: Maybe, while I'm thinking about it, I should put up a post linking to Kevin Drum on multitasking.
Possibly, the thread at CT was so very dispiriting to me in a predictable way (but it's probably just me; I should stay off the 'net for a while or CT at a minimum). You just knew they'd all be a bunch of motherfucking multitasking whizzes--the ones who can really do it, you know, not like the others (but to be fair not that many people posted in that thread). Me grumpy.
146: What, you need a hand? Next thread up, bub.
People really underestimate the costs associated with context switches.
You just knew they'd all be a bunch of motherfucking multitasking whizzes
I hadn't gotten to the comments on that thread yet, perhaps I should just stay away. I'm inclined to doubt human's ability to multi-task, and to find the results convincing.
149: You will find I overstate.
Oh boy, the great multitask vs context switch debat. Last time I saw that was on Usenet in the late nineties. Guaranteed to get outraged replies from special snowflake geeks.
Good webcomix:
Irregular Webcomic -- Ozzie nerd doing about five different regular strips, updates every day, huge archive, slightly complicated by now to get in. Lots of geek jokes and awful puns and most strips are done using a combination of LEGO and other props.
Questionable Content: twentysomething slice of life revolving around a coffeeshop, veryb ad art at the start, but you can watch it improve dramatically over the years.
Shortpacked: life in a toy store, gets weird sometimes, part of a whole universe of not very interesting to me other comics. The guy writing it is a huge transformers nerd and that's partially why I like reading him, to get that glimpse into an entirely different fandom than mine.
Something Positive: not very positive at all with about the same amount of cynicism as yer more grizzled unfogged commentators.
Unshelved: slice of life in a library, with the weekdays being alright but nothing special, but every Sunday (iirc) they do a strip about whichever
book has caught their fancy recently.
Dresden Codex: updates irregularly, very good art, stories are hit and miss.
XKCD, Penny Arcade, Sluggy Freelance -- you know them.
Original topic: Really? professional, grown up people getting paid to have opinions worry about whether painting a boy's toenails pink makes him gay later? Is there nobody in America who can tell these people to grow the fuck up?
146: There was an interesting bit from Dsquared in that thread talking about brokers' ear -- guys with a trained ability to eavesdrop on every conversation within earshot as they do something else, because it's all relevant and necessary to what they're doing.
I've probably mentioned this before, but I had an experience that sounds similar. While I was in Samoa, I was rarely around conversations in English that I wasn't a participant in -- if it was in English, it was probably something I needed to pay attention to. And when I came home, for a couple of weeks I couldn't tune anything out: if there was a conversation within earshot, I was consciously listening to it. If there were six conversations in earshot, I was consciously listening to all of them, I couldn't not.
And it was horrible -- maddeningly overwhelming. It wore off after about three weeks back in NY, but for that three weeks I felt like I was losing my mind everytime I was someplace crowded. Hopefully brokers can turn it on and off at will.
Is there nobody in America who can tell these people to grow the fuck up?
I thought Jon Stewart did a fairly nice job of that (link @ 21), but a lot of people who are otherwise sympathetic to Stewart's positions seem to find his style overly shout-y or something.
So, pretty much no. We're doomed.
Two web comics recs, in case LB is still looking for distractions this morning:
pictures for sad children — wonderfully dry and gently misanthropic.
Patches — probably an acquired taste, but I love it
Heartily second the recommendations for Nedroid and Bad Machinery.
133.last was just plain eerie. It's as if other people can read what's written here.
I thought Jon Stewart did a fairly nice job of that (link @ 21)
All Daily Show videos on line are regionally coded so that they can't be viewed outside North America (Why?). Since Martin lives in the Netherlands I assume he can no more watch that link than I can.
re: 157
As it happens, by sheer chance, I saw the Stewart bit on the pink nails. The Daily Show is on a few of the higher up the numbers freeview channels.
There was an interesting bit from Dsquared in that thread talking about brokers' ear
That reminded me of the bit in the truck stop in 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould, which illustrates thinking polyphonically by showing him tuning into four conversations simultaneously. Relatedly, I don't buy the idea of a music exception; doing things while listening to music generally entails tuning out a certain amount of the musical information.
The fact that other people can listen to music in the background while they work really puzzles me. I find music a huge cognitive load (which is probably why I don't listen to it much).
All Daily Show videos on line are regionally coded so that they can't be viewed outside North America (Why?)
That's annoying, and, while I lack any specific technical knowledge, I'd be surprised if someone across the pond hasn't figured out a workaround that's quietly providing the videos somewhere.
It depends a lot on the music. I used to listen to a lot of 'coffee table' drum and bass -- LTJ Bukem, some Photek stuff, that sort of thing -- while I was an undergrad as it was just enough to tune out distracting background noises but, in terms of its demand on my attention, little more than white noise. Some classical music still functions that way for me today. Anything I really like, however, tends to take over.
re; 159
I don't think that's how playing polyphonic music really works though, or at least that's not my experience of learning to play Bach on the guitar.
I find that the type of music makes a huge difference. Mellow classical music is good for deep concentration. Pop or rock that I am familiar with is good for doing visual tasks like designing things. For mechanical tasks that require attention to detail an audiobook read by someone with a soothing voice is ideal. Outside of those situations I find music distracting.
pictures for sad children -- wonderfully dry and gently misanthropic.totally emo
164: You say that like it's a bad thing.
162: The idea of maintaining a sense of independent lines seems essential to a lot of Bach, specifically the fugues, though I think it comes across more clearly on piano than on most other instruments.
I have a playlist of beatless (or at least mostly drumless) music that I use for working, but I have to turn it off somewhat often to focus.
re: 166
I know that. I can play fairly advanced Bach on the guitar. I mean that you don't learn it in a way that begins with the individual voices, or which requires being able to play the individual voices as individual voices. I was talking about the mechanical/conceptual process of learning the music, rather than the outcome, which is indeed about creating the sense of independent lines.
Guitar is nearly perfect for Bach's music for cello and guitar as it can produce the counterpoint in a way that bowed instruments almost never can, although obviously keyboard instruments can play more complex fugues and contrapuntal pieces.
re: 168
That should have read 'cello and violin'.
168 sounds snooty. Bah. Anyway ...
166: But they're not really independent.
I think you Euro folks can stream the past week's Daily Shows through Channel 4's web site: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart/4od
168: I wasn't thinking specifically of the mechanics of learning a piece, but I suspect that people approach it in various ways. And even musicians who don't have individual lines in mind when they're getting their fingers around the music have to get there eventually, as you say. People who are steeped in that stuff probably think in lines even when they sight-read, don't you think? Even in broken counterpoint for solo wind instrument, which is mostly what I'm familiar with playing, you see the lines in the score and articulate accordingly.
171: Well, sure. But it's the essence of imitative counterpoint that they seem that way. Horizontal music! (...laydeez.)
156. Darwin Carmichael is Going to Hell.
174: I was reacting to the comparison of counterpoint to tracking multiple conversations, which seems to downplay the common structure of the various melodies that help me track them.
176: Well yeah, in other venues that would have been subject to an analogy ban. But the scene got the point across, however loosely.
analogy ban
You have no idea how hard it was for me to resist the comparison to that test of chess grandmaster's ability to memorize positions of randomly placed pieces.
I mean that you don't learn it in a way that begins with the individual voices, or which requires being able to play the individual voices as individual voices.
?? I certainly do. Or did, when I practiced.
Thw fingering for the voices pkayed as individual voices would be completely different from the fingering of them played together, though. You can't learn all the bits of a fugue individually and put them together, although that mighr be useful as a way of hearing how the parts will sound, when it comes to playing it you need to learn it as an integrated thing. Like a sequence of chords and connecting notes (not literally but you know what I mean).
175: Ooh! I'd found that one before and then lost it. Thanks!
Are you talking about piano or guitar or something else, dsquared? I know only piano myself, but it's possible there's a difference in the learning of a piece. In my own experience, the initial learning and practicing was all about putting it together, even if I saw in reading the music, without playing it, the individual voices. Later, once the piece was learned, the performance was about again separating the voices.
157: actually, I was in a place where they don't pay me to watch videos, so the encoding was a mute point at the time... But they do that so they can sell Daily Show International Edition through CNN to us.
Re background music: I find that usually it is quite possible to read a book or do some work with music or television on in the background, e.g. right now as I let that Scottish guy off Coast natter on about the Roman invasion of Britain while writing this comment and still pick up most of what little new information he gives out, but I get some interesting tyops that way as I start to write one word and write whatever somebody is saying on tv if it's close enough.
When I have to do some difficult writing (e.g. any sort of music or sound distraction is irritating, but so is not having anything on in the background at all, so the search is for some compromise sounds -- Radio 4 works well for that.