Shaping thoughts

We’re getting deep into the fall semester. Guess who has exams on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday? That’s right, me! Basically, I should be studying all week. In the meantime, I leave you with a thought I’ve been wondering about.

Whether we realize it or not, the language we use carries our biases. When talking about generic people, we used to just say “he,” but then we realized that women are also people, so now we say “he or she.”

I think it’s pretty clear that it works the other way around. For example, using positive language will help you maintain a positive attitude. And I’d bet that kids who are taught to say “he or she” find the previous usage of “he” at least a bit inconsiderate. (Especially if those kids are girls.)

The Free Software Foundation realizes the power of language to shape our thoughts. It publishes a list of Confusing Words and Phrases That Are Worth Avoiding. I don’t think the list (which includes “cloud computing,” “intellectual property,” and “software industry”) is going to be taken seriously by many people very soon, but the entries raise interesting points that help you get into their worldview. Here’s just one example.

Please avoid using the term “PowerPoint” to mean any kind of slide presentation. PowerPoint is just the name of one particular proprietary program to make presentations, and there are plenty of free alternatives, such as TeX’s beamer class and OpenOffice.org’s Impress.

People who say “a PowerPoint” when they mean “a digital slide presentation” might not be aware that other slide presentation programs exist. If you insist on saying “slide presentation” around them, they should deduce that Microsoft® Office® PowerPoint® isn’t the only player in town. Mission accomplished!

Here’s another example. If someone asks me what an atheist is, and I say, “someone who doesn’t believe in God,” then I’ve presupposed that people only worship one god, whose name is (rather boringly) “God.” But if I tell someone that an atheist is someone who doesn’t believe in gods, I hope to kick open a door in his (or her) mind: we’re all atheists with respect to some gods. Talk about broadening your horizons.

Anyway, this is what I’m getting at: our lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender friends are still getting a bad rap. To be sure, their condition is improving, but they’re still demonized by a large swath of our society and denied their civil rights in many states. It’s no wonder that LGBT teenagers are much more likely to attempt suicide than their straight friends. How can you be well-adjusted when half of the world won’t accept who you are?

A lot of the injustice, I think, stems from the fact we as a society still consider people straight until proven gay (or bi, or anything else). Look anywhere. Gay characters on TV are often reduced to cliches (if they exist at all); only men and women fall in love with each other. We say “homoerotic,” but we don’t say “heteroerotic” because that would just mean “erotic.” A school that my friends went to wouldn’t let students buy their prom tickets together unless they were boy-girl couples. They couldn’t even buy tickets for their same-sex friends.

We can’t presuppose people’s sexual orientation and expect them to stand up to us if we’re wrong. We need to change the way we think about others, and I think the best way to do that is to start with our words. We need some “his-or-hers” to fight heteronormativity. I don’t think it would be as easy as dropping “or her” into every sentence, but there must be words and phrases we can use to train ourselves out of that old mindset and to teach our children what’s taken us so long to learn ourselves.

So, what steps can we take to make our language, thoughts, and attitudes more reflective of our vast landscape of sexual orientation and gender identity? That’s something for you to ponder and discuss here. Right after these links.

From mental_floss: The Strange Summer Jobs of 23 Famous People. (Via The Presurfer)

One of the dumb things about our current copyright system is that you no longer have to file for copyright; works are copyrighted automatically. There’s no way to tell who’s really responsible for a particular work, especially years down the line when it’s no longer being commercially exploited but may be of historical or scholarly interest. Safe Creative hopes to fix those problems by serving as a copyright registry. (Via Jamendo Blog)

Modern times

If you watched the premiere of ABC’s Modern Family on Wednesday night, then you saw my childhood best friend in his first TV appearance.

I met Reid when I started kindergarten at St. Elizabeth’s, where we went to school together through the eighth grade. From the beginning, he could always make me laugh with his irreverent sense of humor. And it usually only went one way: I took pride in the rare moments when I could get him to laugh. Through elementary school, we spent a lot of time together, from the playground to each other’s houses.

One Friday after school, Reid and I were with a bunch of friends, and, using our imaginations the way kids do, we improvised a Star Wars/sci-fi parody. The next day, we all went to Reid’s house and reprised our roles in “Dumb Wars” for his video camera. Other videos soon followed, mainly starring Reid, me, my sister, and a couple of our other friends (shout-out to Casey, a WoS reader). We would meet at Reid’s house, come up with a plot, and then shoot it, using the house for scenery and anything we could find for props.

By the time we were in junior high, Reid was starring in children’s theater productions. Our class would take field trips to see him in plays like Sleepy Hollow and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In the latter, he shared the stage with Dan Marino‘s son. Everyone thought that was cool. I was spending most of my time with other friends by then, but we were still friends.

After eighth grade, I didn’t see him very much. He went to an arts high school up in West Palm Beach. I would get invitations to his plays with the children’s theater, and I went to them when I could. I also made it to one of his school productions. Although I caught up with him at least once, contact was sparse.

Thanks to Facebook, I’ve been able to find out what Reid’s been up to since high school. Recently, he moved to California. Last year, I got word that he had starred in a (live-action) pilot for Toon Disney (now Disney XD, apparently). And a few weeks ago, I heard he’d be in a pilot that was actually going to air on network TV: a show called Modern Family. He was even in the show’s trailer, which I watched online.

I was thrilled to see the pilot episode on Wednesday night. The show is a mockumentary (my favorite genre) that follows the antics of an extended family. Reid plays Dylan, a high-school senior who comes to visit the teenage daughter, and hilarity ensues. He doesn’t have a lot of lines, and he’s only in a couple of scenes, but he’s got some good moments. I liked the show.

Reid told me he’s in a few more episodes for the season, so be on the lookout. In the meantime, you can check out his IMDb page, where somebody’s even started a discussion thread. The pilot episode is available (for now) on Hulu; you can watch it here. Or maybe you just want to watch his scenes (with context): 1, 2.

I’m really happy for Reid. He’s doing what he’s always wanted to do, and I’m sure that’s not the last you’ll see of him.

And now, the links:

Wikipedia has a list of tri-state areas. I thought it was kind of interesting.

passiveaggressivenotes.com features photos of funny notes posted for people to read.

License and registration

Last Wednesday, September 16, my roommates and I each got a notice from the management:

This letter is to inform you that as of Thursday, September 17, 2009 in the afternoon, Pavlov Media will be changing its network formatting. As a result, you will be required to register. Registration is a simple, one-time only process that takes anywhere from five to fifteen minutes. …

The letter went on to give a URL for registering and a phone number in case there were any problems or questions. Naturally, I thought this sucked. I was looking forward to getting away from these shenanigans when I moved out of my dorm.

Pavlov, the company that provides cable and Internet service for my apartment, doesn’t actually seem that bad. Prior to last week, I ran the Glasnost test to see if they were screwing around with BitTorrent traffic, and it seemed that they weren’t. But still, having to register your hardware is a bad idea. Real ISPs don’t make their users do it. (Oooooh!)

Nonetheless, I had to do it. It actually took longer than 15 minutes. Registration consists of identifying yourself and the devices you plan to use to connect to the Internet. And apparently, you can have only two devices authorized to connect at any given time. You have to provide their MAC addresses, which you’re told how to find on Windows, Mac OS X, and every Internet-capable smartphone and video game console in existence. Yep, that covers it!

Despite this infantile infantility, I haven’t noticed a degradation in service since handing over my information. I was going to repeat the Glasnost test right now for the purposes of journalistic integrity, but they’ve changed the test so it takes way longer. I’ll do it later.

I write about a lot of stuff all the time, and sometimes I don’t tie loose ends, so I’d like to do that here. Almost a year ago, I wrote a letter to a Marine in Iraq. The followup: well, there was none. I never got a reply, and that makes me sad.

Is the Internet making our kids dumb? Wired‘s Clive Thompson points out evidence that they’re better writers than previous generations.

Is there anything shell scripts can’t do? Linux Baby Rocker. (Via The Presurfer)

The Beatles again

The Beatles’ entire catalog was reissued on CD on September 9. Each track has been remastered, supposedly to make it sound better in digital formats (and, no doubt, to keep up with the loudness war). I’d been looking forward to the release for months. It coincided with the release of The Beatles: Rock Band, which is probably what more people were looking forward to. As for me, meh.

Anyway, I was anxious to hear the new albums since whoever did this remastering job supposedly spent four years teasing out an unprecedented amount of detail from the original tapes. As it happened, one of my roommates bought Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road the weekend after the remasters came out. He let me have a listen.

First, a disclaimer. The following comparisons are meaningless. I listened to the new discs through headphones, while I usually listen to lossy copies of the 1987 CDs through speakers.

I didn’t notice a new level of detail at all. Also, the new mixes are very faithful to the older ones. The only real difference is that they sound somewhat louder and possibly a little punchier, but not distractingly so. I’m (possibly) known among my friends as the crazy guy who can discern compression artifacts. My overall conclusion is that if I can’t notice a real difference, then nobody else will.

But come on, some of you can tell a low-quality MP3 from a high-quality one, right? I can’t be the only one.

Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road are among The Beatles’ later albums, so maybe that accounts for the sound quality not being very much improved. (In fact, Dolby noise reduction was used on Abbey Road, prompting George Harrison to decry the sound of the album as too harsh. Also, I know too much about The Beatles.) If I had to guess optimistically, I would say that the earlier albums should sound proportionately clearer. But I don’t know.

On Abbey Road, I did notice that some anomalies were fixed. Most notably, in “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” the distortion on the microphone during John Lennon’s “Yeeeeaaaah” has been (mostly) removed, with only a faint patch of background noise to suggest it was there. I’m a bit disappointed about that. Everyone knows that if you sing loud enough to cause distortion, you’re doing it right.

I’m looking forward to hearing the other albums, especially the White Album because the original CD version wasn’t very well done. Also, the first four albums are finally available in stereo, and I’m interested in finding out what they did about the few songs that only exist in mono.

The packaging for the albums is also kind of interesting. They’ve done away with jewel cases in favor of cardboard sleeve-like cases. In keeping with standard CD case dimensions, this leaves a little extra space on the left side of the front cover. They stuck The Beatles’ and Apple‘s logos there, which is kind of lame. Imagine if The Beatles had to put their (second) logo on every album cover back in the day. The impact of Sgt. Pepper, the White Album, and Abbey Road just wouldn’t be the same. If I were in a band, I’d make sure we wouldn’t have a logo. It’s too limiting.

As it happens, I did get to see The Beatles: Rock Band in action yesterday at my friend George’s apartment. I didn’t feel like playing, but I got to see other people play some songs. My first impression was that The Beatles looked kind of creepy as video game characters. My next impression was that having people “play” the song made the listening especially enjoyable (well, it was either that or the layer of reverb added to some of the songs).

One thing really confused me. On “Come Together,” the singer is supposed to say “Shoot me” where John Lennon does the “shh…”/clapping thing. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve heard people claim that John was saying “Shoot me,” but I’ve always wondered what they were smoking. Is that in Lewisohn? He wasn’t right all the time.

There’s a “sh,” a clap, and that’s it. No vocalization is audible. And, as I recall, in the liner notes for Love, Beatles producer George Martin states that John made the sound by clapping his hands and breathing into the microphone, or something like that.

The Beatles: Rock Band might get me to play Rock Band, but it’s still kind of a weird idea.

A really trippy video: 8-Bit Trip. Do not watch under the influence of drugs. (Via waxy.org)

The Wall Street Journal asks: How Long Does It Take an Athlete to Make 100 Grand? The answers may depress you. (Via J-Walk Blog)

There’s nothing to it

The Esperanto Club at UF kicked off its second year on Tuesday. Andy and I presented the story of our summer and how we used Esperanto.

The photo-within-a-photo you see there was taken while I was lining up to give a greeting at the Cultural Language Festival, which was part of the International Youth Congress of Esperanto in the Czech Republic. I’m on the far right; the others, from left to right, are South Korean, Togolese, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. And yes, people from Togo are Togolese. I looked that up. (Hint to geography-types: if feel you have to add an extra letter when tacking on -ese, try a different suffix. I would have guessed “Togoan.”) Incidentally, Andy had at least one good conversation with the South Korean, and I later hung out with the Ukrainian in Berlin (also mentioned in the aforelinked post, which is extremely long and thus covers a rather long time period).

And apparently, this photo was published on the cover of La Ondo de Esperanto (The Wave of Esperanto), a magazine I used to subscribe to but, alas, don’t any longer. I’ll try to hunt down a copy.

In my last post, I discussed my ambivalence about eating Krishna Lunch on campus. In the end, I didn’t feel so ambivalent about it at all, and my sister and I enjoyed Krishna Lunch together yesterday. I think they have something different each day of the week. I hadn’t had Krishna Lunch too many times before, but I must have had it on a Thursday because I recognized the food: rice and some yellow stuff with salad and some sweet blueberry-flavored mashed-potato-looking thing.

This didn’t occur to me before, but I’m surprised that Aramark, the company that monopolistically runs all eating establishments on campus, allows Krishna Lunch to operate. It wouldn’t surprise me if Aramark had considered giving the Krishnas the boot—they do siphon off Aramark’s business, after all—only to realize that there would be rioting in the streets if students didn’t have their $4 “karma-free” plates. (I say “karma-free” in quotation marks because karma isn’t real.)

Also, I mentioned Krishna Lunch in 2006, when the price (technically, suggested donation) was a mere $3. It rose recently to little indignation.

For the nerds: song lyrics as pseudocode. (Via The Presurfer)

Art: the Preamble of the Constitution of the United States, spelled out on license plates from each state. (Via The Presurfer)

Brain damage

My right brain and left brain need to sit down and have a chat sometime.

Sometimes I’m caught having to choose between what’s logically sound and what feels good. It doesn’t have to be anything big; even little things can tear me to pieces.

For a while now, my parents have been giving me scratch-off lottery tickets as small gifts. Playing the lottery is a bad idea if you want to win. It is a system designed to make money; otherwise, it wouldn’t exist. As I’ve been more and more concerned about saving money, I asked my parents to stop buying me lottery tickets and to maybe give me the money they would have otherwise spent on the tickets instead. Of course, I regretted it as soon as the words came out of my mouth.

But scratch-offs were fun, they said. They didn’t sound too happy, so I backpedaled. I had wanted to categorically reject all gambling because it’s a bad idea that makes people lose money, but I compromised myself because my emotions got the better of me. I feel like I should be able to say, “Please don’t buy me lottery tickets, do something useful with your money instead,” but on the other hand, I want my parents to be happy. Also, seeing if you’ve won can be entertaining, and the proceeds of the Florida Lottery fund education.

There are always two sides to every issue. Why do they both have to have merit? It only makes life more difficult for those of us who want to make principled decisions.

And then there are the Hare Krishna types who serve lunch at my university. Krishna Lunch is considered an institution because they’ve been doing it for many years. People like the food, and it comes at a competitive price. Every day around lunchtime, students line up on the plaza to be served while Hare Krishnas play their Hare Krishna music and chant Hare Krishna.

I’ve had Krishna Lunch once or twice. It was pretty tasty. I might like to take advantage of their cheap lunch offers more often, but I’m concerned about who I give my money to and what it says about me. I’m obviously not too keen on giving my money to a religious organization because then they have that much more of an ability to spread their religious nonsense.

In my research, I’ve found that Krishna Lunch is a nonprofit, which puts me at ease somewhat. But there’s still another issue that I think is important. I feel that if I’m caught with one of their paper plates full of unidentifiable food, there should be some kind of disclaimer above my head stating that I don’t necessarily endorse the beliefs or practices of the organization.

I guess I might as well go through with it; I don’t think anyone would judge me. I should be more concerned about whether I would judge myself. And I did eat at a Chick-fil-A recently, which is like giving money to a church (and getting a crappy sandwich and delicious fries in return). But what would you do if you were me?

Less money, mo’ problems.

Slate asks: Why Do We Call Galileo Galilei by His First Name? (Via J-Walk Blog)

This chart could be handy for me now that I’m dabbling in buying perishable food: The Table of Condiments That Periodically Go Bad. (Via All About Me – And Then Some)

Bed

My new apartment came furnished, and my bedroom has a full-size bed. It’s been kind of hard to get used to. I’ve been sleeping in a twin-size bed for as long as I can remember, and I can’t imagine why a normal person would need or want a bed wide enough for two people. Well, I can, but still.

I have two pillows on my new bed, so there’s a potential for an ever-raging debate over which side I should sleep on. I’ve decided to sleep on the side of my nightstand when I have to wake up at a specific time in the morning and on the other side when I don’t. It makes a sort of sense. Still, I feel like I shouldn’t have to make that decision every night.

Also, every day without fail, I’ve made my bed upon waking up, which is something I never used to do. Is this the beginning of OCD?

But seriously, I guess it is nice to live in a reasonably clean-looking space. That’s a good attitude for me to have since I’ll have to keep this place reasonably clean.

39% of Americans want the government “to stay out of Medicare.” In other words, 39% of Americans don’t know that Medicare is a government program. It has a cheesy name, so what do they think it is? (Via J-Walk Blog)

Here are 21 Oddly Named Places and the Stories Behind Them. I live near the first one (Boca Raton, Florida). (Via J-Walk Blog)

Blue tape

During my freshman year, I was hanging out with some members of Gator Freethought after a meeting, and I mentioned my plan to start an Esperanto club. The president of Gator Freethought offered me a word of caution.

It’s a lot of work to start a club, he said. “There’s a lot of red tape.”

One thing that student organization presidents have to do is attend a training session at the beginning of each year. They mostly just go over the rules that you had to go over yourself to renew your club’s registration a week or two ago. But, in any case, there are a few morsels of new information.

As I found out at a training session on Wednesday, one of the new rules for this year is that organizations can bring “outside” food into meetings as long as it doesn’t have to be temperature controlled. Previously, clubs had to rely on the student union’s catering service for all their food needs. (Their pizza is the worst I’ve ever had, so that’s a welcome change.)

The woman explaining the new rules mentioned as an afterthought that we couldn’t bring non-Pepsi products to meetings.

Wait, what? Yeah. You should have heard the uproar in the room.

Apparently, since UF has a deal to sell Pepsi everywhere on campus and tout it as the official soft drink of the Gator Nation or whatever, student organizations—which, as the presenter stressed in another part of the program, are not part of the university—are bound by that sponsorship deal as well. Capitalism rears its ugly head, stifling consumer choice and common sense.

Where does it end? Are Coca-Cola’s Hi-C juice boxes out of the question? If I want to bring oatmeal to a meeting, does it have to be made by PepsiCo’s Quaker Oats? How much money is the university getting from this stupid deal, and could it be had without making personae non gratae out of those who have the good sense to spit in the face of its stifling provisions?

Since then, I’ve noticed that the ubiquitous Pepsi machines around campus say “Thanks for Choosing Pepsi.” Some choice we have, all right.

So, the university gives everybody some free web space. Not many people know about or take advantage of the offer because it’s not 1996 anymore, but I thought I’d put my own space to good use.

As viewed from a campus IP address (and forwarded to my screen by SSH tunneling):

And from off-campus:

A real ’50s instructional film: Dating: Do’s and Don’ts. It’s in color, too! (Part of the film is missing, hence the lack of an introduction.)

Famous films edited down to (about) five seconds: 5 Second Movies.

And finally, I know this site isn’t new, but I’ve never linked to it here before: Will It Blend?

PR blitz

I was sick last weekend (for the millionth time, I did not have the swine flu), and then I had a busy week.

Why was my week so busy? I’ve been preparing for the Esperanto Club’s first meeting of the year. Per a reader’s request, I’ll answer some questions about the club here.

The club is simply called the Esperanto Club. We sometimes use the qualifier “…at UF” to distinguish it from other Esperanto clubs. Our Facebook group is our online source of information. We post announcements and relevant links there. We typically teach the language at our meetings, but we’ll probably branch out to other topics once people get the hang of it.

For this year’s first meeting, Andy and I are going to talk about how we got around Europe with Esperanto. I wrote to my friend at a student-run newspaper asking her to write a story (she hasn’t responded), I submitted a short description for the newspaper’s “What’s Happening” column (it was published yesterday and will probably continue to run), I submitted a 500-word guest article to the newspaper (nothing has come from that, of course), and I submitted a description to the daily e-mail newsletter for honors students (it was published yesterday and will continue to run) and to the general university e-mail newsletter (which goes out on Mondays). Oh, and Andy and I manned a table at the Student Organization Fair all day Thursday.

Our presentation, “Breaking Down Borders with Esperanto,” will take place on Tuesday evening. On the off chance that a UF student or Gainesvillian is reading this and hasn’t heard of the event before and would be interested in going, here’s the event page with more details.

The New York Times has an interactive graph showing How Different Groups Spend Their Day. (Via J-Walk Blog)

After the recent death of John Hughes, a woman wrote about how she had been the Hollywood director’s pen pal when she was a teenager. A touching story. (Via waxy.org)

When could you tell your relationship was over? It Was Over When… (Via J-Walk Blog)

Hello September

Things have been going here in Gainesville. Over the summer, my friend Evan decided to get a band together with me, my former suitemate Cameron, and one of his other friends. We got together for a practice last Tuesday (except for Cameron, who was getting ready to go somewhere). We tried to decide on a song to play and picked “Hotel California.”

I brought my Epiphone hollow-body guitar, a low-end version of a Gibson. The other guitarist, the guy I don’t know too well, had an actual Gibson hollow-body. Now I think I know how a girl feels when another girl wears the same dress as her to a party. But this guy has mad guitar skillz, so it’s all good.

I haven’t been in anything that could be loosely termed a band since some of my junior-high buds and I played in public for the last time four years ago. I’ve been in some fruitless and abortive attempts to start or join bands since then, so I’d like to see things turn out differently this time.

By the way, this new group has a name: Rubber Band. Evan doesn’t care if the name is already taken, which, given my past experiences, is an admirable quality.

For one of my classes, I have to use a program called MATLAB (I guess you’re supposed to shout it). You may have heard of the program. Turns out it’s proprietary and expensive. Actually, I don’t have to use MATLAB!!! per se, but the code I write has to work with it. I know that free alternatives exist, but to be absolutely sure, I really should use Matlab. What to do?

The professor suggested going to the university’s computer labs because Matlab is installed on the computers there. But I don’t have the time for that. I wondered if it might be installed on the so-called CPU servers, which I already had remote access to. (These things come with taking computery classes, of course.) It turns out that I can log in to one of those computers and use X11 forwarding over SSH to run Matlab. In English: I can run the program on a different computer and have its window show up on my computer as if it were any other program of mine.

Running Matlab this way is slow because the remote computer has to handle a bunch of other people’s stuff at the same time, but it’s definitely better than having to go to the labs whenever I want to do my homework. And it makes use of a cool feature that will make Windows users salivate even though it’s been available on Unix-like operating systems for 20 years. To top it off, I made a launcher for Matlab in my Applications menu (the command is “ssh -CtX [my user name]@[server] matlab“) so I can access it about as easily as program I actually have installed. I am clever.

Here’s a mesmerizing video of the Milky Way rising over the Texas sky. (Via J-Walk Blog)

The New York Times has a graph showing sales of different music formats between 1973 and 2008. Looks like the music industry’s sales are down. Yes! Maybe now they’ll get some common sense. But probably not. (Via J-Walk Blog)

Do you like baseball or statistics? I like at least one of those, and I find these baseball-related graphs to be interesting. Example: How often have the Canadian MLB teams played a game with “O Canada” as the only national anthem? (Via waxy.org)