Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:56 PM

Posting may be scarce for a little while. To explain why, read Ian's account of the dramatic events of last night. [merkcomet is our downstairs tenant, Anna and marquisedea live upstairs.] Read that and then come back here.

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:15 PM

My tradition when it comes to the Harry Potter books is to support my local booksellers (and get immediate gratification) buying it midnight on opening night while also ordering a copy of the UK edition from an online bookseller.

I've been somewhat sloth and haven't yet preordered my British copy. If you're like me, we're in luck. CBBC is providing a price-comparison of the book via major British booksellers! [via Veritaserum by way of QuickQuote]

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:15 PM

The title of Dahlia Lithwick's article on pharmacists refusing to dispense birth control pills?

Martyrs and Pestles

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:00 PM

When fighting a bad policy, be very careful about basing your argument on the marginal cases, the innocents wrongly entrapped by it. Because making such distinctions can also implicitly concede that the law is therefore appropriate against the targetted population, and lends itself to a solution of redrawing the lines rather than rescinding the policy altogether.

Two recent blog posts on different subjects raised that issue in my mind:

Amanda has been writing about pharmacists refusing to fill birth control prescriptions over "moral" issues. In the comments, people point out there are many other medical reasons for taking birth control, and the pharmacist may not have the full story. Amanda responds:

One issue that is worrisome to me me--saying, "But some women don't even take it for birth control!", it de-legitimizes its use as birth control. The woman with acne or cramps does not have more right to her pills or a superior reason or a more moral reason for the pills. Which I'm sure everyone agrees with. To my mind, we've lost ground if we divert the discussion at hand. If I take the birth control pill and fuck half my town, that's as much my right to choose as it's this pharmacist's right to go pray the day away. For all anyone knows, that's my method of worship.

And another writer adds:

I also don't like the idea of stressing that the Pill isn't just used for birth control. That's true, but I chose a different method (the diaphragm), also handed out at the pharmacy counter

In other words, arguing on the grounds of other "legitimate" uses of the pill helps lay a foundation that there is something illegitimate about items used only for contraception. An illusory step forward with a very real risk of losing ground should that frame take hold.

Meanwhile, Jeralyn was criticizing sex offender registries.
It's disappointingly easy to find people who committed nonviolent crimes, pled guilty, and are now stigmatized for life. And a few of these listed criminals have since been victimized themselves by neighborhood vigilanteeism.

Many of the objections to sex offender registries have focused on these unjustly stigmatized individuals. But there are larger, more fundamental problems with Megan's Laws that these discussions don't address.

Arguing on the grounds of a few people illegitimately listed helps lay a foundation that the rest of the registry is therefore legitimate. Again, an illusory step forward which gives up ground.

Does that make sense? Any other places you've seen this kind of flawed reasoning?

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:30 PM

Another post so impressive I feel I must share, this time from Crooked Timber (emphasis mine):

Reverse Turing Tests
Posted by Henry

“Tom B,” commenting at Making Light, points us to the Automatic Computer Science Paper Generator, which uses context-free grammar to generate papers, complete with graphs, figures and citations, which can then be submitted to conferences with low or no standards for the papers they accept. Its creators (MIT pranksters) have already succeeded in getting accepted by one conference – if they can raise the money, they intend, Yes Men style, to go there and deliver the paper with straight faces. It seems to me that pranks of this sort (the Atlanta Nights affair also qualifies) have the logic of a reverse Turing test – any conference (or publishing house, or journal, or whatever) which is stupid or unprincipled enough to accept this sort of nonsense is revealing itself to be a fake.

The site is a bit bogged down at the moment, so if you want to generate your own paper, you'll have to wait. [Still, it's shorter than a PhD!] The creators have also added the following notice to the website, updating the text I've bolded above:

We have more than enough money to make the conference now, thank you everyone! The donation button is still live. With the extra money, we promise to do something awesome for the donors/everyone else that we haven't figured out yet.

Anybody interested in my latest masterpiece, "Controlling 802.11 Mesh Networks and Forward-Error Correction with SardiusSod"?

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:58 PM

Browsing the new books over at Costco on our way home from work, we noticed Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America (with an introduction by Rush Limbaugh).

What fortuitious timing given all the other right-wing attacks on the judiciary going on. Almost as if this were part of a coordinated assault. Oh, wait...

Anyway, took a quick glance at the inside-cover flap, which began:

The Supreme Court Endorses Terrorists' Rights, Flag Burning, and Importing Foreign Law.

Is that in the Constitution?

You're right: It's not.

I don't know what document they're looking at, but he's wrong: it is. At least, it's certainly in my copies of the U.S. Constitution, and those I can find online.

I'm trying to avoid gratuitous slurs on the author's patriotism, but it's not easy given how blatantly wrong he gets it in the cover copy. [If you have less restraint, feel free to share.]

<Looks further at author's bio> Ah. He's a talk show host. Doesn't that just say it all.

While trying to title this post, I came upon this list of Supreme Court quotes. There are some real gems in there, many disturbingly relevant! I'll close with this one:

It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.
           -- John Marshall 1803

Added later: I just (re)discovered Dahlia Lithwick's review:

I use the word "book" with some hesitation: Certainly it possesses chapters and words and other book-like accoutrements. But Men in Black is 208 large-print pages of mostly block quotes (from court decisions or other legal thinkers) padded with a foreword by the eminent legal scholar Rush Limbaugh, and a blurry 10-page "Appendix" of internal memos to and from congressional Democrats-stolen during Memogate. The reason it may take you only slightly longer to read Men in Black than it took Levin to write it is that you'll experience an overwhelming urge to shower between chapters.

Oof! I half wonder if I shouldn't submit the article to dot_cattiness.

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:25 PM

This post on weblogg-ed (a recent discovery) was so fascinating, I felt I had to post it verbatim:

Mainstream Media Meltdown

(via BoingBoing) Chris Anderson at The Long Tail offers up these stats about the continuing shifts in our media consumption:

Flat to Down to Way Down:

• Music: sales last year were down 21% from their peak in 1999
• Television: network TV's audience share has fallen by a third since 1985
• Radio: listenership is at a 27-year low
• Newspapers: circulation peaked in 1987, and the decline is accelerating
• Magazines: total circulation peaked in 2000 and is now back to 1994 levels (but a few premier titles are bucking the trend!)
• Books: sales growth is lagging the economy as whole

Up:

• Movies: 2004 was another record year, both for theaters and DVDs
• Videogames: even in the last year of this generation of consoles, sales hit a new record
• Web: online ads will grow 30% this year, breaking $10 billion (5.4% of all advertising)
  

In that spirit, don't forget that April 25-May 1 is "TV Turnoff Week." Spend it blogging (not journaling) instead. (I just can't help myself...)

Now, it's probably not that difficult to find flaws in these stats. Differing scales, no mention of MP3s as alternate access to music or library use related to books... Still, it's interesting.

How does that map to your information/entertainment choices?

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:58 PM

"I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him..."

This has been a bad year for deaths. Different notables, each beloved by different groups, many of them controversial in one way or another.

I've found it interesting to watch how people respond, particularly in the blogosphere where the personal voice interacts with the public news.

When the pope died, I saw some bloggers ask for a moratorium on criticism, while others saw this as their last opportunity to make the case against him.

Perspective changes when it's your own favorite ox getting gored.

And where it may have been fair game to savage yesterday's death announcement, today's deserves more respect. Same blog, different days. Sometimes it's hard, as a reader and potential commenter, to know where you stand.

I've found in interpersonal conversations that it's extremely useful to state what you need upfront: "I need to vent!" or "Can anybody help me with advice?" or "I just want a sympathetic ear; I'm not ready for constructive criticism yet."

It may be valuable to do something similar when writing eulogies, particularly about controversial figures.

Adding a prefix that "I really admired <so-and-so> and am not in a mental state where I want to deal with negative comments right now. Can you please save those for later or for elsewhere?" may go a long way towards keeping discussions manageable and directed, without having to resort to heavy-handed moderation of the resulting threads. Letting potential readers know what to expect before they enter the door can also prevent a lot of hurt feelings on both sides, keeping an admirer from stumbling into a lions' den of harsh critics, or vice-versa.

Just a thought on ways to keep things civil.

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:54 AM

Live San Fran Peregrine Cam, courtesy of the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group.

According to the nest diary, the first chicks (eyas?) were born early yesterday morning. Right now, it's too dark to see, but last night I saw one of the parents moving about the nest in a manner that suggested it might've been feeding the chicks.

For other ornithophiles, there are also a Washington State burrowing owl cam expected to launch later this spring and another New Mexico burrowing owl cam already running, and I'm sure dedicated searchers can find many more bird cams. [Yup, just a quick Google turned up loads of links at EarthCam and WildWebCams.]

Enjoy!

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:40 PM

Andrea Dworkin died Saturday night. Most American papers didn't actually publish obituaries until today (Tuesday). And a few people seem to be interpreting that delay as some kind of calculated insult or slight.

It's not. It's just the vagaries of how the newsmedia operates.

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:25 PM

I've always known that America in the 1950s was an aberration which has further been widely misinterpreted.

I'm currently reading Something from the oven: reinventing dinner in 1950s America and came across the following, which I hadn't quite realized:

In the mid-'50s, the very heart of the era best known for enshrining motherhood as a career, more than one-third of all women with children under eighteen had jobs.

The author follows this statement with further statistics and surveys supporting this, showing middle-class women were actively interested in careers, rather than being driven by financial need, and then this gem:

What interested [economists and government officials] was the mounting evidence that working women were crucial to America's postwar boom times. By the early '50s more than half of the nation's families owned their own homes, thanks in part to women's paychecks, and many of the families out shopping on Saturdays for new refrigerators, cars, television sets, and lawn mowers could afford them precisely because there were two wage earners in the house. Nobody with an eye on consumer spending really wanted to turn off that spigot. "Working wives are one of the great factors in making Americans the most prosperous people on earth," proclaimed Sinclair Weeks, Secretary of Commerce, in 1954. [...] It was clear to experts throughout government and academia that women's employment was an undeniable fact of American life, that it showed no signs of letting up -- quite the contrary -- and that it was crucial to the nation's economic well-being.

Another myth bites the dust.

Nifty book.

Two other lessons learned (from the half of the book I've read so far):

Something important to consider when evaluating historical periods: who is pushing any particular "popular" notion, and how much support does it really have among the population? [Actually, the same holds true evaluating current public opinion.]

I've placed a library request for her previous book, Perfection salad: women and cooking at the turn of the century, which seems like a natural followup to Inside the Victorian home, which I just finally finished and will hopefully soon find time to review.

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:45 PM

By way of LeanLeft, I discovered that the evangelical outpost weblog is running an essay contest:

For this quarter, I?ve decided to broaden the topic around the theme of Judeo-Christian morality in an ethically pluralistic society. Entries can explore the history of the concept, the applications toward public policy, the best means of arguing for it in the public square, or anything else that you choose.

Here is the response I've written in his comments:

I wish to disagree with the entire notion of any such thing as "Judeo-Christian morality."

Judaism and Christianity are such different religions that I see little point in trying to mush them together in this manner. In fact, I consider such phrases to be detrimental to both religions by blurring the very real distinctions.

I actually have written an essay about the history and uses of the term but I don't think it qualifies for your competition, since I composed it over four years ago, originally for Usenet.

Nonetheless, I do hope you will consider what I've written and possibly reconsider your use of the phrase, particularly in terms of modern beliefs.

Thank you.

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:45 PM

What can I say; there's a lot catching my eye at the moment.

Chris from Interesting Times:

The central tenet of Republicanism is that government is the problem. And every time they gain control of the government they do their best to prove it!

Josh over at Talking Points Memo:

Perhaps it is time for the Democrats simply to embrace their destiny as the party of grown-ups. No members of congress threatening judges. No gonzo federal legislation cooked up in the middle of the night to game a family struggle in Florida. Borrowing money and saving money are not the same thing. A reasonable respect for the rules under which the country has long been governed. Congressional staffers will neither steal work material from members of the opposition party nor stand on principle when caught. Bribes tendered on the floor of Congress will be frowned upon ...

And if you like these, take a look at this post by Mark Kleiman showing how even conservatives are noticing and growing disillusioned with their party's hooliganism.

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:15 PM

Something I wrote in response to Digby that I think is a good general rule to keep in mind, independent of any particular issue:

In order to gain a political majority in this country we need 51%. We have 49%. This question of where we are going to get that majority could be answered in any number of ways or any combination of ways.

One important point about choosing a strategy:

Changes in policy/approach cut both ways. Any new direction that could attract some people, will almost certainly upset other existing members into leaving.

The trick is to make sure that your choice will result in a net gain: more people joining the coalition than are alienated away.

And don't fall for claims that a subgroup will stay put because they has no place else to go. Third parties are becoming more common and there's always the option of staying home from the polls.

I'm just sayin'.

Posted by Lis Riba at 5:54 PM

• It's snowing.
• On the radio, I heard somebody use the word "incentivize" (by a rep for the RIAA or MPAA (I forget which whose comments were generally unpleasant)

Also, word to the weather forecasters: If tonight we'll see "rain with temperatures below freezing," that's no longer considered rain...

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:10 AM

I've been trying to promote/evangelize RSS at my workplace, and somebody just asked me a surprisingly basic question which I couldn't answer off the top of my head. So I'm passing it on to you guys:

What RSS readers do you recommend?

I publish RSS for my blog, and read a handful of feeds through my Opera browser, but I haven't used a dedicated RSS reader since Feedreader crashed and took out all my read/unread marks a couple years ago. [Mostly I prefer reading blogs in their native formats.]

So, if you read RSS feeds, what aggregators do you prefer and why?

Any other sites I should check with downloads or evaluations?

PS: I am looking at Tucows, but would love to hear more personal endorsements.

And, as long as I have a work-related reason to blog during business hours, I simply must share the latest from Piled Higher and Deeper:

                    Copyright Jorge Cham

I do feel obligated to share my research on pilers vs. filers in defense of piling as an alternate and acceptable organizational strategy for some people -- though maybe not quite to the extent displayed here.

But otherwise, it paints a quite accurate picture of my desk -- and I'm not even in grad school any more...

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:20 PM

I don't feel like registering on Ain't It Cool News just to make a comment, but doesn't this news:

A 1911 big-budget Italian adaptation of Danté's 'The Inferno', remastered with creepy Tangerine Dream Music. Disturbing and surreal.

remind anybody else of the ill-fated Giorgio Moroder release of Metropolis in the mid-eighties?

That was certainly my first thought upon hearing the news, and I'm surprised none of the commenters have mentioned that yet.