Angelic Eye for the Gendered-Species Individual

natural20 @ 3:29pm: Why Yes, More Politics, Why Do You Ask?
I have no doubt some of you are bored of this, or possibly even raving in anger at my points of view, but I think I wish to put down on electrons some thoughts that I've just been expressing on IRC. I think they're the beginnings, at least, of what I want to see. This is born out of anger, especially at the Criminal Justice (Amendement) Bill passing, with FG supporting FF. And I realise socmot will continue, probably quite sensibly, to advise joining a political party, well, Labour, but I'm not sure I'm there. Whether that's me not being there yet or not ever being there I don't know.

Anyway...

( Because I'm kind and vulgar, this is going under a cut... )

supergee @ 10:30am: Recently, Roadrunner Records refused to promote a video by Amanda Palmer because she is offensively fat. It was kind of them to inform us because I couldn't tell by looking at her. As a further provocation, she has released a set of nude pictures. Some warnings are in order:

1. They are nudes, and thus not work safe fsvo work.
2. Bad Words are written on them.
3. Spiritual descendants of Senator Rosewater need to be warned that the subject has hair on certain parts of the body where post-pubertal human females can be expected to.

Thanx to hughcasey

james_nicoll @ 10:21am: Augh!
Biology in Science Fiction reports on a panel at fabled Readercon:

This year marks the sesquicentennial of the publication of The Origin of Species and the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth. Considering the importance of the scientific idea, This year marks the sesquicentennial of the publication of The Origin of Species and the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth. Considering the importance of the scientific idea, there has been surprisingly little great sf inspired by it. We wonder whether, in fact, if the theory has been too good, too unassailable and too full of explanatory power, to leave the wiggle room where speculative minds can play in. After all, physics not only has FTL and time travel, but mechanisms like wormholes that might conceivably make them possible. What are their equivalents in evolutionary theory, if any? We wonder whether, in fact, if the theory has been too good, too unassailable and too full of explanatory power, to leave the wiggle room where speculative minds can play in. After all, physics not only has FTL and time travel, but mechanisms like wormholes that might conceivably make them possible. What are their equivalents in evolutionary theory, if any?

First off, I question this: there has been surprisingly little great sf inspired by it.

(Bearing in mind that "inspired by" is different from "and understood it and got the details right.")

Secondly, any actual biologists out there feel that the field is so well understood by now no grey areas remain?

Thirdly, Green Door seemed to go over reasonably well and it's all about one toy model that touches on evolution.

drplokta @ 2:55pm: Fire!
Big fire between Dean Street and Wardour Street, right now. Dean Street is partially closed, and flames are coming out the roof of the building.

http://img20.yfrog.com/i/zu0.jpg/

james_nicoll @ 9:34am: Julian Comstock
So, has anyone on my flist read this? I myself have not (although I did read something related in an anthology I will call the Best SF So Morose You'll Plotz SF of 2007. At least, I think it was the 2007 one).

kate_nepveu @ 9:13am: Worldcon preliminary programming etiquette, a poll

So I have a preliminary programming schedule from Worldcon. I've already declined one panel item, but there are two others that on reflection I'm not sure about. Thus, I ask you all: if you were either running programming, or going to a con, what would you want me to do?

Poll #1427778 Worldcon preliminary programming etiquette
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

If my reaction to a panel is, "I'm not sure why I'm on this, but I imagine I could dreg up something to say," there are four people total on the panel, and it is about responses to books, should I decline to be on it?

If my reaction to a panel is, "I feel a bit out of my league on this topic," I am the moderator, and it is about race and discussions thereof, should I decline to be on it?

Ticky?

Also, if it is relevant, I have eight (eight!!) panels total, not counting the one I dropped.

moominmuppet @ 8:41am: Google's image today fills me with glee... (Yay, crazy geniuses!)
Finally back at work. Two days of sleeping, and I could still fall right back in bed. I did make it to my appt with my GP last night, though, thanks to a ride from Casey, and I've got a referral for another sleep study (last one was more than five years ago). Depending on what that turns up, we may look at adding provigil back to my meds (I was on it after the last sleep study, but getting refills was a pain, and I ended up dropping it). Cause of flare this time? Walking less than three miles over the course of an evening. *eyeroll* Also need to get a replacement refill of my Ultram, since it took me so long to go through the first bottle that my scrip for my refills had expired by then. Whoops. Since I need to stop by the main campus lab next week for bloodwork anyway, I'm hoping I can bring the expired scrip with me (I still have the original print-out) and just get them to replace it with a minimum of fuss.

This weekend is IngenuityFest, and I am going to try to make it to a few hours of that without absolutely breaking myself again. Second date with D, and I'm psyched about that. Then I'm going to see Evil Dead: The Musical with Bec and Jer, and am really looking forward to that. Sunday it looks like lunch plans with serpentseye and kitminx. After that, I suspect it'll be an afternoon of taking it pretty easy and trying to keep my body behaving.

And Grafton should be home tonight! Yay!

daystreet @ 7:12am: For The First Time
For the first time, or for as long as I can remember, anyway, I find my birthday today somewhat depressing.

I think it's because the picture on my recently renewed driver's license is without a doubt the worst picture ever taken of me in the entire history of photography, and today is the day I have to start using that license.

The state of New York sent me the new license a few weeks ago. Since then, I have kept it hidden in a drawer, ashamed of it, like it was some dirty little personal secret, a deeply humiliating confession I always knew I would have to make in public someday.

Today is that day.

Today I have to, speaking metaphorically, stand in front of the ladies and gentlemen of the press with their cameras flashing and their klieg lights blinding and admit that I have, more or less, hiked the Appalachian Trail or that I have, you know, asked my parents to pay off some sexual chippie or... and here's the real truth of the matter...

...that I am turning into an old man.

*Sigh*...

Vanity, thy name is me.

supergee @ 7:21am: Eric Berne said that one of the Games People Play is exemplified by the little girl who asked a little boy to make her a mudpie and then laughed at him for being muddy. Berne seemed to think it was a girl thing, but Sacha Baron Cohen is making a career of it, with racism in Borat and now with homophobia in Bruno.

hawkwing_lb @ 11:41am: Remind me that I exist.
It hasn't been a good week. I'm paying through the nose for internet in Reading on this, my day off, and just about to post some more postcards. But someone needs to remind me that I exist, because I feel like the very ghost of myself out here.

Silchester-the-site is physically isolated. And alone among Englishpeoples, most of whom are far closer to home than I am, I'm starting to feel rather emotionally isolated as well.

They're perfectly nice people. But they're not my people. And I begin to detest grubbing in the muck looking for the edge of an Iron Age track, or wheelrut, in a patch of dirt out of which nothing interesting, not even potsherds, has come for days. It is a mindnumbing task.

It may yet improve. But seriously, I need to be reminded that I am not always this isolate.

marnanel @ 5:54am: Davyd Madeley: Documentation BoF
How we're generating documentation in telepathy-doc.

There are three kinds of docs: facing developer (like a tutorial... what tool?), facing user ("how do I format my USB key"... Mallard), and the stuff you format from the API (gtk-doc).

Developer docs
HIG, GTK Drawing Manual, ... etc
Example code, descriptive prose, i18n, multi-programming-language examples (how??), link to the API references

telepathy-doc
DocBook, gnome-doc-tools, svg figures, and a ton of Python to play with the xml.  DocBook purists don't like this (would rather do it in DocBook).

supergee @ 6:39am: The headline CIA LIED TO CONGRESS seemed pretty dog-bites-man, but The Rude Pundit (cleanly) reminds us that Rep. Pelosi got in a lot of trouble for pointing that out.

supergee @ 6:31am: Obama hypnotized by Satanic symbols on his daughter's shirt. Or something.

Thanx to Shakesville

supergee @ 6:22am: Once again channeling the living, Gen. J.C. Christian gives us Senator Ensign's hopes of some day putting on his Big Boy Pants.

supergee @ 6:12am:

I think the pope's got the right end of the stick this time--Michael Frayn

Ezra Pound said that we should do a man the courtesy of considering his ideas one at a time, and Thumper said if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all, so all I will say about the pope is that his new economic encyclical makes a lot of sense. tnh at Making Light has some thoughts on it, including the National Review idea that the former Grand Inquisitor was too gentle a soul to keep the powerful forces of liberalism that secretly run the Vatican from inserting a lot of their evil unchristian stuff about healing the sick and feeding the hungry.

supergee @ 5:14am: Happy birthday, daystreet

natural20 @ 9:25am: Musings On Green Electibility
So, a question to those of you in my mostly liberal, mostly left-leaning lj bubble. I'm kinda pissed off at the way the Green TDs are acting right now, especially over the Criminal Justice Bill. I know there are arguments that they can do more in power than out of it, but I think voting for this along with FF pushes them over the edge and shows the parliamentary party just aren't listening to the grass roots any more. So, with an incredibly unscientific and probably badly written poll I want to test the waters.

Poll #1427704 Green TDs
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

If there was an Irish General Election tomorrow, would you vote for a sitting Green TD?

jinian @ 11:01pm: Final Fantasy music
Okay, that was just about the best thing ever. Had a good time with labmate M, watched video selections from almost all the main-series FF games on a giant screen, heard live orchestra and choir performances, and got to see Nobuo Uematsu (somewhere between biker and monk in attire; head-bandanna with grand piano design representative) bounce and grin and sing in the choir. Also, big-band style chocobo theme! I did wish they had repeated less of the game footage between numbers, but overall it was wonderful. Rush tickets for students and seniors were $25, and we got reasonably good seats on the orchestra floor.

In other news, cats appear to hate ginger ice cream.

xkcd_rss @ 4:00am: Form

http://xkcd.com/608/

polyfrog @ 10:04pm: Laurel & Hardy Moving Co.
I have this evening seen the stupidest thing I have ever seen anyone try to do with my own eyes.

As I got out of my car to eat dinner, I saw that across the street, some people had a sofa on the sidewalk; they had clearly just removed it from a truck that was nearby. Then from the third floor balcony, they threw down a rope. A stout rope, like one might use for rock climbing. They tied the rope to one end of the sofa. "They can't really be thinking to...."

They were. Up top, two burly Russian-looking dudes start pulling on the rope. The sofa starts to lift up. The end with the rope lifts up. The other end starts to scrape along the sidewalk as the sofa goes from horizontal to vertical. Finally the sofa is completely free of the ground. I see now that it is a sleeper sofa. It starts to swing a little...against the plate-glass window of the store on the ground floor. BONG! Bong! It continues to rise until the legs of the sofa get hung up on the framing for that plate-glass window.

So let's review:
We have the sofa. Hanging suspended against a plate-glass window, 6 feet off the ground. It's stuck.
We have the two Russian-looking burly men with the other end of the rope. The rope is just in their hands, I must specify. Not belayed around anything even, and forget about things like jackpoles and pulleys.
We have the guy who came down to stand under the sofa to try and jostle it free.

Luckily, they were able to get it unstuck. Apparently at this point they started rethinking the merits of their plan, because they put the sofa back on the sidewalk and threw the rope down. Then they came down and carried the sofa inside.

I was really looking forward to seeing how they got the sofa the last of the way onto the balcony....

truepenny @ 10:03pm: wailie, wailie
I have lost the index card on which I kept track of the submission history of the zombie coyote story. Now, as I never throw anything away (just ask my poor long-suffering spouse), I know it's here somewhere. But, on the other hand, as I never throw anything away . . .

This is hardly the Fall of Carthage, as tragedies go, but it means that I no longer have a record of where I have and have not subbed that story. And since it was teetering on the verge of being trunked, that means there's an awful lot of markets to which I can no longer say with certainty whether I submitted it or not. (Memory like a steel wossname, yes.) And this in turn makes me feel grumpy and incompetent and who told me I was fit to be let out on my own?

lutin @ 8:02pm:  I had a beautiful 5-hour long hike up and across most of Mt. Diablo today, up Donner Canyon to the "Falls" across Prospector's Gap down a bit and then down and up Back Creek. Something like 8 miles? I was running the last bit and had to stop because a man was standing there, staring. What's there? A rattlesnake! You finally startled him enough to move. I've been waiting 10 minutes. We started talking, and he told me about mines and plants. I have mugwort now, and black sage to burn. He showed me wild rosemary, too, which might be fun to eat. The tire on my sister's bike blew coming home, and I ended up having to replace both tubes ($50, including the labor and the green stuff to protect them from thorns). I'm wiped out from all the sun but can't sleep. I keep on thinking about drinking...........and then eating, instead.

.

I think this is the most I've ever weighed. It's very strange to have boobs again. It's very, very strange - also to be heavier than I was when I left CA two years ago (I'm near 130lbs now, and think 110-115 suits just fine). I've been at the low end of the spectrum these two years, so I guess this is a sort of.........balancing, a sort of making up for so many months of underweight. I got used to that; to the flexibility and immense inner space; the clear mind and quickening that came. It was good to 45 or 46kg, but less than that and I would stupefy. I avoided that as much as possible, tending to rest at 46-7kg, building, or still.

Now, 57 or more. There's no stillness, no space. Empty, but full. // I'm still having parasite problems. I chalk a lot that, even my intense, nightmarish dreams, this silence-less which follows me around. It's three hours of walking before I hear trees, four before I hear mantra, five before I'm still, inside breath. I ran today, up, across, down, sunbleached, the mountain sinking into my being. I haven't meditated in weeks. I almost forgot my gurumantra. I have no memory for hte food I eat; only for this feeling of "full, full."

womzilla @ 10:44pm: Goldman Sachs's terrible, no-good week
Goldman Sachs is in the news a lot this month, and it's about time. Matt Taibbi's sweeping article "The Bubble Machine", describing Goldman Sachs's position inflating every American economic bubble of the last twenty years, is in the current Rolling Stone, and it's a great introduction to the company. It's also available on the Internet.

Then on Friday (July 3), a Russian-born programmer was arrested for stealing vast amounts of the source code for the Goldman Sachs program trading systems . It's not clear to me how much of the code Sergey Aleynikov had himself written, though apparently it's built from his ideas.

This in turn has lead to a thread of discussion about the possibility that Goldman Sachs has possibly been frontrunning* pretty much every trade on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). There's info on this DailyKos diary, with links to and from everywhere.

Frontrunning is one of the simplest scams in stock trading. Here's an exaggerated example. Let's say Microsoft is currently trading at 26.75. If you try to buy a million shares, the price will go up while you're executing the trade--you might get the first 100K at 26.75, then 200K at 26.76, then 50K at 26.77, and so forth; and by the time you're done a few seconds later, it'll be up to 26.80 and you might have paid an average of 26.7887 per share. If I know about your trade and buy a hundred thousand shares one-tenth of a second before you start to buy your million, I can buy all mine at 26.75. I can then sell it back to you at 26.76, making a quick penny-per-share for $1000--not much money, true, but it only took me one-tenth of a second, and had no risk. If I do this ALL DAY LONG with EVERY STOCK, I can make hundreds of millions of dollars. And if I get caught--oh, sorry, getting caught is for peasants.

No, actually, frontrunning is one of the things that FINRA and the SEC take really seriously. If this is true, and Goldman Sachs has been caught, there will be many people going to jail. Frontrunning is not just theft, it's the type of theft that destroys confidence in markets. (One of the amusing sidelights of the Madoff ponzi scheme is that apparently everyone on Wall Street assumed Bernard Madoff was a crook, but with few exceptions, they all assumed that his "hedge fund" was frontrunning orders. Turns out that he was a different, lower-tech kind of crook.)

There are a few additional points worth mentioning. First is that Zero Hedge has been making a lot of noise about the end of NYSE's daily program trading report (DPTR), because the DPTR was one of the best sources of visibility into the high-volume trading that allows companies to make $100 million per day on less than a penny per share. It's possible that the discontinuation of the DPTR is part of a conspiracy to hide Goldman Sachs from the world, but I don't think so--at least, not directly. I dealt with the DPTR at my department until it was handed off to a different department, so I have been paying attention to it for a while. Shutting down the DPTR has been in the works for at least 3 years, and it kept getting delayed; if Goldman (and Morgan Stanley) really were pushing NYSE to stop the DPTR, I don't think it would have taken them so long to succeed.

I will also say that there are a lot of technical errors in the Kos diary linked above--for instance, conflating an Indication message for an Advertisement message. This is pretty comparable to mistaking Before for After--an indication is a statement that you want to trade a stock, and an advertisement is a statement that you have just traded a stock. They're linked, but the diary seems to think they're identical. That said, the scheme outlined (reading the electronic order messages before they're passed to the Exchange) is technologically feasible, if audacious, and would indeed work exactly as described, especially if you have access to the vast amounts of liquidity and computing power Goldman Sachs has. (They trade about 1.6 billion-with-a-b shares a day on the NYSE.)

If this is proven true, as I said, it will lead to a lot of prison sentences. It could destroy Goldman Sachs--and if this is true, it bloody well should. It could also destroy the NYSE, which, admittedly, is in the process of making itself obsolete anyway.

rivka @ 10:12pm: I just read an interesting article by a mathematician, lamenting the way his subject is tortured and murdered in schools. (Article is here, in a PDF.) Here's his basic thesis:

All this fussing and primping about which "topics" should be taught in what order, or the use of this notation instead of that notation, or which make and model of calculator to use, for god’s sake— it’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic! Mathematics is the music of reason. To do mathematics is to engage in an act of discovery and conjecture, intuition and inspiration; to be in a state of confusion— not because it makes no sense to you, but because you gave it sense and you still don’t understand what your creation is up to; to have a breakthrough idea; to be frustrated as an artist; to be awed and overwhelmed by an almost painful beauty; to be alive, damn it. Remove this from mathematics and you can have all the conferences you like; it won’t matter. Operate all you want, doctors: your patient is already dead.

The saddest part of all this "reform" are the attempts to “make math interesting” and "relevant to kids’ lives." You don’t need to make math interesting— it’s already more interesting than we can handle! And the glory of it is its complete irrelevance to our lives.

He's passionate, furious, despondent, and very funny, producing gems along the lines of:

All metaphor aside, geometry class is by far the most mentally and emotionally destructive component of the entire K-12 mathematics curriculum. Other math courses may hide the beautiful bird, or put it in a cage, but in geometry class it is openly and cruelly tortured. (Apparently I am incapable of putting all metaphor aside.)

The article is long, but I found it a quick read. It's worth reading to the end, if only to get his truth-in-advertising summary of the K-12 math curriculum ("TRIGONOMETRY. Two weeks of content are stretched to semester length by masturbatory definitional runarounds.") I was one of those people who was very good at plugging numbers correctly into formulas but never felt like I had a good conceptual grasp of math. This article makes me feel sad about what I missed.

farwing @ 9:55pm: I really really really sincerely hate fireworks. Thanks ever so much for extending the fireworks season, oh crappy weather gods.

Going to bed now, I guess.