Fairness At An Unfair Time

Something stuck in my mind after Swissair crash off Peggy's Cove in 1998. I saw an interview with some of the relatives of victims, and they were blaming the pilots for the accident, saying they could have done more to prevent the accident.

Since the pilots died along with everyone else on the plane, that was a ridiculous and unfair thing to say. But I don't blame them for saying it; it's quite understandable given what they've been through. In sure I'd do no better if someone stick a microphone in my face right after losing loved ones in such tragic circumstances.

Which makes me wonder, do reporters have a responsibility to victims and their families to not quote them when they are in such a state?  We often think of fairness to the grieving in terms of giving them privacy, but perhaps we also have a responsibility to portray them fairly as well. I'm sure those people now feel terrible after what they said about men who tried to save their loved ones, and were consigned to the same fate. A kinder thing for everyone involved would have been to give them some time before taking to them.

Of course, I'm thinking about this because of the continuing coverage of the disappearance of flight MH370. I understand that the poor handling of the situation by the Malaysian government is a big part of the story, and the families of those on the plane would certainly want their complaints made public. But I also worry that they may point blame at someone who doesn't deserve it, just making the situation worse for everyone. 

In this case, it's a fine line between giving a voice to the victims and giving them an opportunity to embarrass themselves.  And frankly, I doubt the media would care about the difference anyway.  So we in the audience are just going to have to approach the story with a lot of empathy.

The Symbol Life

For a while now, superstar athletes have been adopting personal logos. You've probably seen Tiger Woods's "TW" logo on his hat, as well as a variety of Nike gear.

Roger Federer has a logo on a line of clothing too.

Tom Brady's symbol incorporates his uniform number.

Then everyone wants in on it.

It may be spreading outside of sports; Toronto mayoral candidate Olivia Chow has a logo she's using in her campaign.

So I've wondered if I could adopt a personal logo based on my initials. This was my first effort:

 

That looked a bit too phalic. I tried a simpler approach.

Then I thought of incorporating a distinctive picture.  Sort of like the Air Jordan logo, it could show me doing what I do best.  That would be, sitting at a computer:

I think that works better. It's not totally accurate, since I don't have a white hoodie.

The Wisdom Of TV Audiences

I've been using this web site that produces a graph charting the quality of TV shows over their existence.  It takes the ratings that people have given each episode (at IMDB) and uses that to create a line graph of how the show's worth has gone up and down over the years. (See this Wired article for more info.)

So what have I learned from it?

• The best episodes of any series are usually the famous ones you’re expecting them to be.
• The Simpsons was better for the first half of its existence.
• Happy Days did drop in quality after the infamous "jump the shark" episode, but not by much.
• Both Roseanne and Night Court had terrible final seasons.
• The rises and falls off Saturday Night Live are more or less in the expected places. What is surprising is their best overall era: Right now.
• Contrary to expectations, the quality of shows doesn't really change much over time.  And they are often against popular opinion: Buffy didn't go downhill in later seasons, and people thought Battlestar Galactica's last season was it's best.

No One Circles The Vultures Like The Buffalo Bills

Ralph Wilson, owner of the Buffalo Bills, has died at age 95. He was a great leader in the community, respected among his peers for his integrity, and, um... have we mourned long enough yet? Good, let's start the bidding and get this team out of here.

The elderly Wilson announced that upon his death, the Bills would be sold to the highest bidder, with no preference given to keeping the team in demographically unpromising Western New York. And that led to ghoulish speculation and strategizing about the team's future.

In Toronto, they're they're continuing to talk as if they are the leading candidate to receive the Bills. Frankly, I don't understand how you could think so. A big sticking point is the fact that the Rogers Centre is quite small compared to other NFL stadiums. (It would tie with Oakland for smallest stadium in the league.) The rebuttal to that has always been a claim the strong dollar and a rabid fanbase would allow them to make as much money out of a smaller stadium. Well, the dollar is no longer strong, and the enthusiasm of Toronto fans has been disproven by the Bills games that have been played in Toronto.

And that series of Bills games in Toronto is the mind-boggling thing about people hanging on to the Bills-in-Toronto dream. To my knowledge, it's unprecedented for a city to get a "test drive" of the sports franchise they want to adopt. The closest thing I can think of was when Oklahoma City got to temporarily host the New Orleans Hornets in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, then later became the new home of the Seattle Sonics.  And in that case, the adopted team was popular in the temporary city.

When we had the fortune to see how Toronto reacts to the presence of the Bills, it wasn't promising. Even with a small stadium, they had difficulty selling all the seats. After seeing that, it's hard to believe anyone would still be interested in owning a team in Toronto.

I know, you can make the case that the public would feel greater ownership of the team if it's permanently part of the city. That may be, but remember that it's not a question of whether the Bills could be successful in Toronto. It's a question of whether they can pony up the cash to win the auction. When your proposal is built around doubt like that, you're not going to win against investors from American cities who know the franchise will be successful.

Once More, Without Feeling

If you'll permit me one more look at Rob Ford, here's another interesting aspect of his phenomena that doesn't directly involve crack.

People have made a big deal over the fact that he still has non-trivial support levels. And more to the point, if the non-hothead/crackhead vote is split enough ways, he might even win. But it occurred me that there's a much more mundane oddity here: it's not often you see so much enthusiasm for anyone's re-election.

Obviously, politicians get reelected all the time, but usually the base undergoes a big change for the pragmatic (and smaller) during that first term. President Obama is a good example. When he was first elected, his supporters were about as enthusiastic as any voters I've seen in my lifetime. When he was reelected, most of those same people voted for him again, but were far less happy about it. A lot of his votes were against the opposition rather than for him, and a fair number were probably based on devil-you-know reasoning. And that's how it usually works. You might get reelected, but don't expect anyone outside the party's strongest supporters to be happy about it.

But Ford's supporters - fewer though may be now - do seem to be bringing the enthusiasm to his re-election that one normally only sees for a leader that has yet to be sullied by reality.

The explanation is pretty obvious, really. If you're still supporting Ford, it could only be because you whole-heartedly accept his version of events, and the schtick that the police and media are against them. And if you believe Ford when he says he's clean and sober, you're also going to take his word for it that he's single-handedly saved the city billions and that life under his predecessors was relentless hell.

Ford is the ultimate in the modern political approach of media manipulations. Other parties may have a newspaper or news network on their side, bending the truth in their direction. But Ford goes one better: by building his support on the premise that even media is part of the problem, he doesn't need anyone to manipulate the news for him, he is the news source. It makes you wonder if other politicians will try the extreme confrontation/persecution strategy in the future.

This Post Is Just OK

You may have seen the recent to-do in which Maple Leafs coach Randy Carlyle dammed goalie James Reimer with faint praise in a post-game interview. That lead to much discussion in the media about the coach not having confidence in his goalie.  This seems to have coincided with the start of a slump by Reimer, which is bad for a team that typically gives up a lot of shots.

That leads me to wonder how is it that coaches are so bad at dealing with the Toronto media. It's no secret that:

• Canadians are obsessed with hockey.
• Toronto is obsessed with itself
• Toronto has many media outlets

You can add to that the fact that Leaf fans have an ugly tradition of singling out one player to blame for the team's troubles, however obvious it may be that the whole team is playing bad. Carlyle has to know that if he makes a remark that even hints at being unsatisfied with the goaltending it will set that as the topic for the next week throughout the city.

He has, of course, gone through the traditional blaming the reporters for what's happening. I don't want to sound like I'm letting the media off scot-free here: they are obsessive and simplistic. But when the coach knows this is going to happen, he has to take some blame too. Yet Toronto coaches continually make this mistake. It's like they're too stubborn to acknowledge that they can't control the media. Too bad it's the players who keep paying the price.

That brings me to another theory of mine as to why Canadian teams never win the Stanley Cup. We have rather specific ideas about what a winning hockey team looks like, and our teams tend to get built according to that vision. Vancouver is another good example. As a team built on skilled forwards and a laid-back goalie, we always diagnosed them as too soft. So the team tries to compensate by hiring a combative, butt-kicking coach, ignoring the fact that his style doesn't fit the team's talent. Toronto keeps hiring tough-talking coaches and can't figure out why their youngsters and goalies never develop.  Silly as it sounds, coaches should take some courses in Public Relations.

Bossyrants

There's a movement afoot among many women to ban the word "bossy." The reasoning is that the word only gets used to describe women, and primarily for behaviour that would hardly be noticed coming from men. Women have long complained of subtle double-standards in how we perceive behaviour.

I can understand where they're coming from. We shouldn't have double standards, in language or elsewhere. But there's one aspect of this that I don't think they've considered: they've assumed that because the behaviour is acceptable in men, that it should be acceptable in women. But couldn't it also be the other way around: behaviour unacceptable from women shouldn't be acceptable from men? Perhaps no one should act in a way that could be considered bossy.

So I propose that instead of banning the word "bossy," let's expand its use to include men. That co-worker who tells you how to do your job? Call him bossy. The politician who tries to micromanage the entire government? Write a letter to the editor calling him bossy. The coach who bad-mouths one of his players in the press? Phone in to sports radio and call him bossy.

Let's Hear It For Bosses

There was a recent incident that has people in silicon valley concerned.  Julie Ann Horvath, a programmer at popular tech company GitHub, quit, complaining of harassment and intimidation.

This was a disappointment on a lot of levels. First, technology - among with all of geekdom - is having a great deal of difficulty dealing with the increasing number of women. Horvath had worked on a project to encourage women in technology.  And GitHub was thought to be a progressive company, with a flattened hierarchy and a fresh attitude.

But Wired then had an interesting alternate look at how that flattened hierarchy can work. We may think of such a set up as being inherently level and equal, but it may not work that way in principle. After all, another way to look at it is anarchic. If there is no imposed hierarchy, them an informal one will develop, and it may be fueled by some unpleasant things, from intimidation to stereotypical expectations as to who will be in charge.  In other words, there will always be a hierarchy, it's just a question of whether it will be held to some rules and standards.

The concept is a weird ideological mixture, so one way or another this situation will go against your hopes and expectations: the lack of regulation in the role-less workplace reflects poorly on libertarian principles. But at the same time, an equal workplace resembles the communist ideal, and add the article points out, communes have had all the same problems.

But it also casts doubt on radical feminism. That's the idea that the structures of society are inherently unfair, and gender equality can only be achieved by rebuilding them. But as difficult as it has been to achieve equality within the system, it seems that a lack of a system can make equality even harder to get.

NCC-420

I found several lists of theories about TV shows and movies. It's surprisingly fascinating. I’d heard some of them before, like the Gilligan's island characters representing the seven deadly sins, and Ferris Bueller being imaginary. But the new ways of looking at SpongeBob were new and disturbing concepts, even without being high.

So of course, I'd like to contribute my own pop-cultural mind-blowing theory. But give me some leeway, since mine piggy-backs on another.  You may have heard the speculation that the main characters of the original Star Trek represent the parts of the Freudian psyche.  That is, Kirk, Spock, and Bones represent the Id, Ego, and Super-ego, respectively.

That's interesting on its own, but here's my contribution.  It occurred to me that the same is true of Trailer Park Boys.  In this case, Ricky, Julian, and Bubbles represent the Id, Ego, and Super-ego, respectively.  Of course, you can just watch either of these shows, and think about the Freudian psychology of it, but it's better when you watch one show and think of the parallels with the other, with the pairings of Kirk-Ricky, Spock-Julian, and Bones-Bubbles.

But the real mind-blowing aspect is that because Star Trek takes place centuries in the future, you can say that Kirk, Spock and Bones are descendants of Ricky, Julian, and Bubbles, respectively. I'm not that well acquainted with Trailer Park Boys lore to explore this idea any further (Mr. Lahey as Khan?) so I'll leave it to others to extend it as they see fit.

Fuddled-Up Beyond All Recognition

On Facebook I once joked that if I ever went into politics, I'd make sure to have many pictures taken of myself, in a wide variety of poses. That way the oppositions attack ads wouldn't have to keep using the same tiresome image over and over, as Conservative attack ads against Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff did.

Of course, I realize that the reason the Tory ads always used the same picture was not a lack of choice. They were repeating the same image to make sure that was the picture you had of the Liberal leader. In each case it was a photo carefully chosen to suggest your worst suspicions of the given leader. The awkward intellectual Dion was shown shrugging his shoulders with a look of confusion. The accomplished academic Ignatieff giving a stiff royal wave with a smug look on his face.  Those ads were highly successful.  Sometimes I hear people say they weren't that effective, because they were weak leaders to begin with.  Think about that, the campaign to make you think they are weak leaders wasn't necessary, because you think they are weak leaders.

So now they're going after Justin Trudeau, and they've apparently decided that the Achilles heel of his public face is a clip of him in a T-shirt on the runway at a light-hearted charity event. It may not hit home just because it's so unusual and outside the political realm that it won't connect to his political persona. That is, I don't think that voters are going to see him speaking in a suit, and subconsciously associate it with a guy in a bachelor auction. Though admittedly, the Tories are going to have some trouble with Trudeau to begin with, since he already is an emotional choice for voters to begin with.  That is, his reputation is already based on the public's desires and hopes, rather than being a less-known blank slate.

But what's really interesting is the selection of quotes they're using to tarnish him.  The "deficits take care of themselves" quote is pretty quick and out-of-context, even by the standards of attack ads.  But what's really interesting are the other two.  The quote where he muses about the origins of terrorists is only going to be damning to people who are already pretty paranoid about terrorism.  And then the legalizing pot statement is actually liable to win over a few voters for the Liberals.  It's not going to scare many people away from Trudeau, outside of people who would not consider voting Liberal to begin with.  So assuming that the Conservatives haven't totally miscalculated, this round of ads is more about shoring up Conservative support.

The Awkward End

Word is, Fred Phelps is dying.  If the name doesn't ring a bell, he was the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church, and if that name doesn't ring a bell, they're the ones that picket funerals telling people they're going to hell.  My reaction - which seems to be shared by many others - is, well... that's happening.  It's hard to know how to react to the death of a hated person.

This brings up memories Osama Bin Laden's death.  I certainly wasn't sorry to see him go, but I also wasn't comfortable with the celebrations following his death.  I'm okay with the idea that killing someone is sometimes the least-bad option. But even when it is your enemy, it should be done with a sense of regret, not cheerfulness.

So how do you react when a really bad person dies?  I think it can be summed up in a quote that I saw after Bin Laden died, attributed to Mark Twain: 

I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.

That is, asking for someone's death seems wrong, but rejoicing in the absence of their evil is perhaps more appropriate. 

A Note Before I Enter My Green, Drunk-Proof Bunker

A couple of years ago, St. Patrick's day parties in London, Ontario got out of control and resulted in a riot big enough to make the BBC World news crawl. As a resident of rival Kitchener-Waterloo, I have to admit to a sense of schadenfreude. But like the schadenforde from watching Toronto struggle with Rob Ford, an honest person has to admit that it could happen anywhere. London students are no more unruly than anyone else's, and here in a city with two universities and a college, it could just as soon happen in KW.

And sure enough, it is. It turns out that St. Patrick's day parties near KW's universities have been growing, to the point that police are taking notice. It's much like the end-of-school-year parties that used to trouble the same neighborhoods. So now they're trying to reduce the St. Patrick's parties using the same strategy: by setting up a more organized rival party to encourage less anarchic revelry.

But as with the Ford situation, there is also some genuine schadenfreude, and that comes from watching a problem blow up in society's face, after we collectively looked the other way for so long. We know that underage drinking is epidemic, and teens get trained early on that recreation means drinking, and drinking means drinking 'til you pass out. Then we send them away from supervision for the first time, and it's to a place where there's lots of stress and little time for relaxation, and where alcohol consumption is a big joke.

It's obviously a recipe for disaster. Rather than be surprised at the London riot, we should be surprised it doesn't happen more often. But instead we look the other way and pretend it's not a problem, or at least not a problem that affects us.

1,400 Words You Can Never Say On Android

I'm a big fan of the swipe-typing keyboard on Android phones.  So I was interested when it came out a few months ago that the swipe recognizer has a long list of words it won't recognize. There are the usual suspects, like "dock" and "shoot" (at least, that's what comes out if you try sweeping them.) But there is also a curious collection of other words that are verboten. For instance, many times I've tried to type "geek", which comes out as "Greek" or "feel" regardless of how careful my typing. The list of banned words seems arbitrary, so I decided to investigate:

A lot of sex-related terms don't work, including "sex" itself, which becomes "sec" or "seed."  Here's what I got for a few others:

• Menstruation: menageries, menagerie
• Erection: Ervin
• Uterus: yetis, iri
• Yet it accepts "menopause" and "puberty." Or "udder" for that matter.

For the following words, it won't recognize the word automatically, but will offer it as one of the alternate possibilities the swiper can choose:

• Condom: condition
• Penis: permits, pennies
• Vagina: basins
• Testicle: twiddle, sickle
• Vulva: bulbs, villa

It won't recognize "gay", instead suggesting "gassy," "Gary," or "hay." Yet "lesbian" and "homosexual" are accepted.

Religious terms are just odd. Consider the branches of Islam:

• Sunni: Sino, sunk
• Shiite
• Sufi: studio

You'd think Shiite would be the one it would avoid. Lots of other religious terms worked, though: "Eucharist," "Hajj," "Imam," "Rabbi," "Kosher," "Halal."

How about Google's competitors?

• Samsung: Samsung
• Microsoft: Microsoft
• Lenovo: Kenobi

All in all it's quite silly.  I could understand if they have it biased so that when there's some doubt, it chooses the less embarrassing word.  And yet, I've lost count of the number of times it's interpreted "thing" as "thong."

...But Go Ahead And Discuss Religion

I realized recently: I hate talking about politics. That's quite a surprise. After all, the "politics" tag in the cloud in the margin is one of the larger words.

So why do I like writing about politics, but hate talking about it? For one thing, the discussions go rather differently. Generally people just state their opinion on things.  Fair enough, you've got opinions, but it doesn't really do anyone any good to hear opinions.  Unless you can give the reasoning behind them, opinions themselves are useless. 

Here in the blog, I try to take an even-handed view and not promote a political agenda. I do have such an agenda, but people promoting a political viewpoint are all too common, even outside of the Internet.  So instead, I'm trying to analyse things, taking a more objective look at the world.  But not many people talk about politics that way, so when the topic of a group discussion turns political, I cringe, and look for an excuse to get out.

I guess I don't mind talking about politics, but I hate people telling me their politics.  

Best WWWishes

You may have seen that today was the twenty-fifth birthday of the World Wide Web.  That's quite an anniversary.  And I've been using it for twenty-one of those years.  Wait, that means I've lived longer with the Internet than without.  Wow, I think that makes me one of those digital natives who can't imagine a world without being connected 24/7.

And speaking of old people trying to look comfortable with technology, I've spent all day listening to news readers misstating that the Internet is twenty-five today.  I'd like to write a long diatribe about how incorrect that is, except that, well, I can't be bothered.  I tired of correcting people's misconceptions about the Internet around the seventh of my years on the web.  And it would kind of defeat the purpose of the web.  Instead I'll just link to someone else's explanation of what the difference is.  I'll just add that the way technology is developing, some people are saying that the web is dead.  I don't really buy it: a universal flexible way of presenting information is too useful to disappear just because there's an app for everything.

Blessed Are The Mecha

There's a new video game that's hotly anticipated called Titanfall. I don't really follow console gaming closely, but as far as I can tell this must be a really amazing game, since it's hotly anticipated, but it's an all new game, not part of any other series.

It looks great to me, because it fixes another of my annoyances with modern video games: boring wars. Shoot-em-ups have been a big part of gaming since Spacewar!. But recent games have looked like straightforward military simulations, intended for people who would join the army if only it weren't for all that discipline stuff. Even in games where you're fighting aliens, there doesn't seem to be much that's novel about it. Don't these game developers notice that when past generations envisioned fighting aliens, they always added something cool, like lightsabers or aliens jumping out of people's chests?

Well, finally they've figured it out and added their own cool sci-if battle thingy: big friggin' robots. Admittedly, big friggin' robots is not a new science fiction element, but I appreciate the breakthrough.

But that brings me to my one complaint, which I have touched on before. Can we finally decide what these robots are called? So far they've been called Mecha, Labors, Mobile Suits, Jaegers, and now Titans. I know, this is probably a result of modern trademarking, no one would be allowed to call their robots the same name the last movie used.  It's a good thing storytelling didn't always have that problem, and created some creatures that are now in the public domain.  Imagine how many names we would have made up for Vampires if everyone was trying to avoid a lawsuit from the estate of Bram Stoker.

Panic! In The Winter

Remember readers? I don't mean people who read, I mean those books we were given for English class in elementary school. They were filled with a selection of what I now realize were really short stories.

One time, around grade seven or eight, we did a brief unit on science fiction, using the four or five stories in our reader's sci-fi chapter. I loved science fiction, but that was a little awkward to me. Most of my English teachers thought Stephen King was the epitome of science fiction. And the selection of SF stories in the readers was never good. It's hard to write science fiction in such a short form, and the editors of the reader were constrained by the need to keep it accessible to young people who may not be familiar with the tropes of the genre. And in our case, there's the further constraint of finding Canadian short science fiction.

In one story, I don't really remember anything about it, except one line.  It was a throw-away reference to the fact that there were very few wooden items in the home of the protagonist, because they were sacrificed in "the panic winter of '96." (I may be wrong on the year, but it was some time in what was then the future, but is now the past.) That line bugged me for a variety of reasons that I couldn't articulate at the time. But I'll try now.

First of all, it seems to be a betrayal of sci-fi principles. Contrary to non-fans, SF isn't really techno-utopian, and indeed, is open to the possibilities of science and technology not overcoming challenges, or even being the challenge that does us in. But envisioning humanity being sent into disaster by bad weather? That just seemed silly and unrealistic, like a non-SF writer accustomed to historical fiction would resort to.

But worse, the line is just so damn Canadian. It's been observed that Canadian literature is centred around (some would say contained by) the idea of survival against the elements. This seemed to be the most grievous example possible. Even in a science fiction story set in the future, they found a way to fit survival in as a theme.

Of course, about ten years later, there was the ice storm in Quebec that crippled the power supply for days in the dead of winter, and forcing millions to find improvised ways of getting heat.

Then I was just walking through Victoria Park here in Kitchener. With the weather warming up, crews are getting to the work of cleaning up the damage from this year's ice storm. Seeing the trees that have been removed or cut back, I'm only now realizing the extent of the damage. So, although I have not been pushed to burning my furniture for warmth, I guess a severe winter storm can have a lasting impact on even our modern world.  My apologies to you, Canadian science fiction author I don't remember the name of.

Uncivil Twilight

That's it! I can't take it any more!  Every daylight savings shift, people start saying we're just kidding ourselves, we're moving time around and thinking we're getting more.  I've become accustomed to that, but I expect better from Neil deGrasse Tyson:

What would aliens say if told that Earthlings shift clocks by an hour to fool themselves into thinking there's more sunlight
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) March 9, 2014

Sure, he's probably intellectually exhausted after weeks of talking Seth MacFarlane out of writing fart jokes into the new Cosmos.  But still, usually he's the one convincing the great unwashed that experts know what they're doing. Now he's contributing to it.

So let me explain.  Here's a chart showing how the hours of daylight change through the year.  Daylight hours are in orange, night in blue.  This is based on New York, but the principle is the same anywhere:

Now I'll overlay the typical person's waking hours (represented by the black striped hours.) I've picked 7:00am to 11:00pm.

As you can see, that has the effect that in the summer, there is a fair amount of daylight that goes by before this person even gets up.  That's rather unfortunate, given that the person also has several waking hours after the sun goes down.  How can we take advantage of that extra "wasted" daylight?

One way is to change your waking time through the year, getting up with the sun.  But that's inconvenient, since we are creatures of habit, and many parts of our days can't be easily shifted (like working hours.) 

Another way would be to shift our entire day forward.  Wake up at, say, 4:00am each day throughout the year, then going to bed at 8:00pm, and splitting our non-working hours between before and after work.  But that doesn't seem to fit human nature: for whatever reason, we have a strong preference to doing our work first and recreation afterwards.

So the only remaining approach is to shift our day forward in the middle of the year.  That moves our waking hours earlier, so that we're awake for more of the daylight.  Here's what that looks like, again with the black-striped area representing a typical set of waking hours:

See?  Now less of the daylight hours goes unused.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying daylight savings time is perfect, or even that it's a good idea.  For instance, one could argue that we should just shift the day an hour or two forward and be done leave it there all year, and we just learn to deal with getting up in the dark in the winter.  Just stop it with the obtuse arguments that science/the government/Ben Franklin thinks we're getting free daylight.

Duly Noted

Whenever I had to write essays in high school or university, I had trouble with the footnotes.¹ The impression I got from teachers' instructions was to footnote anything that I got out of a book or any other source. But that always led to dozens of notes; far more than anyone else. And, far more than the teachers expected, since they would dock marks for using too many.

Occasionally I would back off and try to footnote fewer things, but without fail I would then get an angry message that I hadn't noted enough things. This was made worse by the fact that teachers and profs would always deliver that particular message through an abstruse accusation of plagiarism.²

I think now I have a better handle on it: you're noting anything the reader should know the original source of, whether it's a little known fact, or the ideas and opinions of others. Too bad I don't have a chance to ever use that knowledge now.

I mention this because it occurs to me that the web can be seen as a big set of essays, with the links as the footnotes. And often those notes are added for the same reasons: credit where credit is due, our backing up facts.

Usually in this blog I've added links to other topics to provide background for readers who may not be familiar with a topic. Sometimes I've used a link to provide evidence of a fact I've mentioned. I wonder if I should do more of that. In the throbbing vortex of misinformation that is the Internet, the definition of "disputed information" is much bigger than it would be in am academic essay.³ It might be a good idea if we all started working harder to link to sources just to stop the nightmare scenario of everyone providing their own facts and simply trying to out yell each other.


1. Or endnotes
2. Keep in mind that in those pre-internet days, actual plagiarism was rare, so the teacher could do this schtick with everyone understanding the accusation wasn't real. I don't know what they do now that real plagiarism is much more common.
3. Consider how many web sites and the communities around them would consider evolution, global warming, or equality of the races and genders to be open questions.

From Russia With Insecurity

When the Soviet Union collapsed, i was still in high school. I had just learnt about world war ii in history class, and it seemed there was a disturbing parallel: we learnt about how the Treaty of Versailles, which ended WWI, had set putative terms on Germany, and that sense of victimhood had fuelled the nationalism the Nazis drew on.

The Russians hadn't lost a war, nor was there one-sided treaty. But they were plunged into hardship and wellness just months after being a world power. It seemed there was fertile ground for extremist politics there. I was quite disappointed that there wasn't more concern over this in the west. I wasn't expecting a new Marshall Plan or something, but it seemed to me that offering the Russians a little help making the transition to capitalism would have been a wise investment in world stability.

When hard-right Vladimir Zhirinovsky appeared on the scene in the mid 90's, I thought my worst fears were playing out. Fortunately, only a few Russians took the bait.

But now, it occurs to me that I was right, it's just that Russia's lashing out wasn't nearly as dramatic as I had assumed. Instead of a transition to radical politics, it has played out as a angry streak in their dealings with others.  Putin seems to understand this, and is good at exploiting it.  If the results never get worse than the Crimean invasion, we'll be pretty lucky overall.

A Tight-Knit Community

I've seen a yarn bombing in downtown Kitchener.

I applaud their efforts, though I'm not sure we can say it fully detonated.  Hopefully our phantom knitters will work their way up to covering some other local items, like the old city hall clock tower, or Onkel Hans.

It Gets Mediocre

You may have seen the "It Gets Better" campaign. It's an initiative by sex advice columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage. The idea is to tell gay (and bi, trans, etc.) youths that their school experiences are not necessarily an indication of how the rest of their lives will go. That's especially true for gay kids in small towns, red states, or conservative families. Certainly, when I look back at the on-average one student in every class who wasn't straight, I can't imagine what they went through. The shift from that experience to a modern gay neighborhood in a big city would have to be a huge positive change in one's life.

When I think about that, I find myself thinking, I wish I was gay. Can you imagine what that would be like: you become an adult and don't just move out of your parents' place, you move to a place where suddenly everyone understands you and accepts you?

We should all have our own gay community. You suffer through high school, but then you get to move to the jock neighborhood, or the goth neighborhood, or geek town. There, you're surrounded by people who accept you and appreciate you for who you really are, even more than your closest friends and family did. Of course, for those of us who grew up in the pre-internet era, modern life is kind of like that. Online, you can find that personal community.  So if you're over forty, you have something in common with the homosexual community.

Let's See Who's On Fallon

I watched tonight's interview with Rob Ford on Jimmy Kimmel Live!.  Well, I only watched part of it.  Eventually I grew sick of watching that amoral clown who'll do anything for attention.  And Rob Ford was annoying too.

This incident really crossed a few lines:  First, from Rob Ford's perspective.  It's one thing to be the butt of jokes.  That's part of being a politician (not usually this big a part, but always a part.)  But actually going out of your way to go on a show to be the butt of jokes is something else.  He seems to have transitioned from mayor to full-time publicity-seeker.

And for Jimmy Kimmel.  Sure, comedians often joke about liking politicians who provide them with material.  But they don't actually help those politicians out.  They may say they're going to vote for Anthony Weiner, but they don't actually do it. Yes, I know Kimmel didn't volunteer to work on his re-election or anything, but a softball interview in which Ford is allowed to repeat his usual lies without challenge certainly helps him out more than a campaign contribution.  Even Ford's former allies in the Sun wouldn't do that much for him.

When a comedian makes fun of a person, it should be because that person has done something to genuinely deserve it. And if that person genuinely deserves to be targeted, we want to see them actually get ridiculed. Suddenly giving them a free pass makes it seem like you're not a comedian so much as a jerk who'll strike out at anyone when it's convenient, and it's not satisfying to watch that.

The irony is that Kimmel famously disliked Jay Leno, and yet this sort of ideologically empty comedy was something Leno was often accused of: He'd make any joke about any public figure, no matter whether it was fair or accurate or contradicting the joke he made the night before.  But now Kimmel seems to have taken up the anything-for-a-laugh (and ratings) mantel.

Back To The Brink

I mentioned earlier that several countries seemed to be tearing themselves apart because large blocks of voters can't agree. Since then, we've seen Ukraine get even more polarized, eventually leading to a new government and Russian military intervention.

I thought it was interesting that during the Ukraine crisis, there seemed to be a real case for splitting the country, since the Ukrainian west and Russian east seemed to differ on culture, politics and economics. But all politicians shrank away from the idea, saying that such a young country (~23 years) didn't want to open that can of worms.

Well, Putin's troops seem to have imposed the separation idea. And at the risk of sounding Chamberlain-y, I'm optimistic that it won't escalate.  Some sort of autonomy for the country's two sides was probably the only way out of the impasse, but too scary to choose voluntarily. Of course, that's assuming Putin isn't crazy enough to grab more or all of the country than the Russian-dominated areas just to spite/embarrass the west. And I don't know too much about make-up of the country; if there are large Russian/Ukrainian minorities on the other sides, it could lead to Balkan-style retribution, which is the country argument to my give-separation-a-chance philosophy.