Sunday, Day of Links

  • Oh for pete’s sake (via):

    Flipping his badge open, he said, “No, not with that shirt. You’re protesting and you have to go.”

    Beginning to get his drift, I said firmly, “Not before I finish my coffee.”

    He insisted that I leave, but still not quite believing my ears, I tried one more approach to reason. “Hey, listen. I’m a veteran. This is a V.A. facility. I’m sitting here not talking to anybody, having a cup of coffee. I’m not protesting and you can’t kick me out.”

  • Blonde mammoths vs. brunette mammoths
  • I haven’t had time to read any of this stuff on interactional expertise in the gravity wave physics community, which makes me sad. Long story short, a couple of sociologists are able to converse fluently in physicist-ese without actually knowing the math or being able to produce new research. This has implications for sociology, blah blah Sokal hoax blah, but I’m more interested in the resulting description of the scientific community. Of the expertise required to, say, pass one’s qualifying exams, how much is really “contributory expertise” and how much is “interactional expertise”?
  • William Tozier on communicating across disciplines:

    Obvious rules of thumb and tools I always use, unthinkingly, in every case—like random sampling the search set of an optimization problem, or saving a record of every solution tested so I can watch progress of an ongoing search…. well, I may as well have invoked Marx or done a little interpretive dance. And at the same time, the consumers of my products are watching for certain significant passwords, and they’re just not coming. Because I’m not seeing the cues, the raised eyebrows, the head tilted, the muttered “…and—?”

  • Mickle on the Heroine’s journey:

    When you compare stories like A Little Princess to the hero’s journey they fit the pared down structure as easily as anything else, but when you start to ascribe monomyth meaning to the thematic elements of girls’ stories, something often seems a bit off-kilter. This is because, while men’s and women’s experiences are hardly strictly divided along gender lines, the stories that epitomize girlhood in our culture, like girl’s moral development itself, is often a mirror rather than an imperfect copy of the “typical” boy’s journey that we accept as the norm. So instead of looking for the rejection of ego, one must look for the acceptance of self.

    Those of you who enjoy mocking Campbell are, of course, encouraged to do so.

Right, then! The bloggery folder is reduced; I’m off to the mountains; I’ll be back in a week.

Friday Mountain Blogging: Paleotopography of the Sierra Nevada

Bighorn Lake. Photo: Tom Hilton No one quite knows how old these hills are. We know how old the rocks are, of course - it’s easy (or at least straightforward) to grab a chunk of granite, crush it up, and throw it in your handy mass spectrometer for a radiometric date. When dinosaurs roamed the earth 100 million years ago, these rocks were coagulating in a magma chamber several miles below. But when did they reach the surface? And how? And why?
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Isolated Wackiness, Shared By Everybody in the Whole Damn County

Okay, I hadn’t heard about this Jewish family being driven from their home until reading Bitch Ph.D.’s post:

And my first thought was, “blog this.” And then I thought, “what for? The only possible reaction is “those people suck,” and it’s one of those atypical weird cases that, if anything, surely demonstrates that the country as a whole doesn’t think that way.” And, god help me, I thought, “it’ll just fuel the stupid idea that liberals hate Christians, blah blah blah.”

And then I realized, boy, that is some fucked-up thinking going on there. I don’t think I should draw attention to a 21st-century American pogrom for fear of offending Christians? I’m hesitant to stand up and object to anti-Semitism–and by “stand up,” let’s note, I mean only “talk about it on my pseudonymous blog”–for political reasons?

The discussion there goes on about Christian cultural hegemony, and it’s fabulous - what does it mean that entire towns full of assholes in nomine Jesu are routinely dismissed as “oh, they’re not real Christians”? Maybe it’s just that, as a non-Christian, I don’t have much interest in policing the ideological boundaries of Christianity, but I don’t think “can these people be accurately described by the label Christian?” is the important question to consider here.

Though but but, I’m more disturbed by the idea of considering this an “atypical weird case” than I am by the Christian boundary-policing. When I think “atypical weird case”, I think of a guy calling in to the local talk radio show to ask if it hasn’t all got to do with Jimmy Hoffa and Malcom X being undead zombie friends. But you can’t create the environment described by the complainants with just a couple of isolated kooks:
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Boringness

So the point of this post is to include a Bloglines claim verification code. Which is invisible. Doot doot doot doot.

The broader context, though, is that my Urge to Blogtinkery is on an uptick. If you’re not one of those types who never leaves their RSS, you may have noticed the new theme - do you like it? It’s got Google ads, which I have so far found to be entertainingly surreal - have you found them offensive? I’ve already filtered out one Republican campaign, I’ll filter more if I see any.

How’s your week going?

How Avis and the University of California are Destroying the Environment

The corporate customer agreement between Avis and the UC system doesn’t include the “intermediate SUV” class. So the only way to get a vehicle with four-wheel drive and decent clearance, and be covered under UC’s insurance policy, is to rent in the “nonsensical gas-guzzler” class. (Note: there is a further class of SUV, the “giant honking monster powered by baby seal blood”, which is also not covered.)

Much as I mock SUVs, there are times when you need to drive on shitty-ass dirt roads, and it’s nice to have a vehicle that doesn’t scrape bottom on every washboard. But I don’t have that much equipment; I need a CR-V (22 mpg), not a Trailblazer (14 mpg). Will any of the major car rental companies lend me a CR-V? Noooo.

Gallons of gas wasted for this field trip: 16-20 ($50-$70)
Capitalism: sucks
Capitalism as modified by my dictatorial whims: would be much awesomer

Friday Rock Blogging, Interplanetary Breakfast Edition

Pancake domes from Venus, blueberries from Mars, and a molasse basin from Earth… I need to go grocery shopping.
pancake domes in Eistla region, Venusblueberry concretions on Mars
Molasse Basin, Bavaria

Images to Amend the Constitution By

I’d like to send a hearty “fuck you” to Dianne Feinstein, whose views on the acceptable bounds of free speech were formed with all the careful consideration and sound judgment you’d expect from a middle school student:

For me–at that time as a 12-year-old–and for the Nation, the photo [this one, of troops raising the flag on Iwo Jima] was a bolt of electricity that boosted morale amidst the brutal suffering of the Pacific campaign.

This photo cemented my views of the flag for all time.

Well. If we’re going to amend the Constitution - or even waste time in the Senate talking about amending the Constitution - on the basis of emotionally significant photographs, I propose that we use the following:
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Blissfully Unaware of my Peril

Perhaps Kyso Kisaen will be a bloggy guide and muse through the Rite of Femminess otherwise known as getting hitched; she seems to have her priorities straight:

I already know shit like “less booze = less money” or “borrow stuff or make it, teehee!” Any dumbass knows that skipping a 4-tier cake-orgy in favor of a simpler cake is a cost-saver.

What I need to know is stuff like “How sanitary would it be to have an ice sculpture the guests can do shots from?” or “Do I need to get separate insurance against the damage my drunken guests will assuredly do to your building?”

So on the strength of her review I grabbed a copy of Wifework: What Marriage Really Means for Women from the library today.
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Inconsequentialnesses

Of passing amusement:

  • Everybody, giggle with me now: Nimrod orogeny! Hee hee hee hee hee.
  • Eco-art experiment? Or overly abundant faith in that axiom about trash and treasure?

    SUNDAY June 25th - YIPPEE! Somebody almost took the futon today! It was rolled up and moved from the curb over to the edge of the sidewalk. Looks like it was just too heavy, what with the water and drool and urine and oil. So it’s still available, simply seething with friendly earthworms, snails, slugs, and perhaps a salamander or two. Experience Oakland’s sub-sidewalk ecology, with layers of fauna and flora which you might never have known would grow in a dark, dirty, wet places. So the value of your futon is enhanced by a slice of urban ecology!

  • I was sauteeing a portobello mushroom cap for dinner (mushroom + bell pepper + sharp goat cheese = sammich!); it was gills-down in the pan when I decided to smush it down a little with my spatula and lo and behold, it made fart noises! Farty-sounding enough to bring my housemate into the kitchen, wondering if I was going to die. Hee hee.

How I Rescued My Blog from Google’s Cache

Detail-oriented readers may have noticed the sudden appearance of a full-fledged category list, which, if you explore, is the gateway to a fully populated set of archives stretching once again back to the misty pre-9/11 world of innocence and laughter.

After the cut: nerdy details of how I recovered, just in case anyone else has a sudden blog database failure.
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