Bechdelenalia

If you have an interest in The Bechdel Test (which a piece of media passes if it contains:
1) At least two women.
2) Who talk to each other
3) About something besides a man
)
then you might be interested in these two blogs:
http://thebechdeltest.blogspot.com/
http://bechdel-test.dreamwidth.org/

It's fascinating how much discussion is about whether a movie just about scrapes by...

(thanks to purpletigron for pointing me that way)

Delicious LiveJournal Links for 5-11-2009

• Optimistic Sci-F
  I'd been meaning to write this post myself. Thankfully someone else saved me the trouble.
  (tags: scifi Trek)
• How a smart meter works
  I want one!
  (tags: electricity gas UK)
• Why can't we concentrate?
  Which highlights, amongst other things, that Facebook, Twitter (and Livejournal) are _novelty producers_, and that these will dripfeed you tiny bursts of satisfaction that distract you from concentrating on anything more productive.
  (tags: culture mind concentration)
• Rapture Ready
  Screenshots from a forum for those who believe that the Rapture will be here any second now... Funny _and_ scary.
  (tags: christianity usa internet forum)
• Interesting piece on culture, feminism and uneven distribution
  The feminist critique of society started when some women systematically looked up at the top of society and saw men everywhere: most world rulers, presidents, prime ministers, most members of Congress and parliaments, most CEOs of major corporations, and so forth â” these are mostly men.
  
  Seeing all this, the feminists thought, wow, men dominate everything, so society is set up to favor men. It must be great to be a man.
  
  The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who's in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. Who's homeless? Again, mostly men. Whom does society use for bad or dangerous jobs? US Department of Labor statistics report that 93% of the people killed on the job are men.
  (tags: gender psychology culture feminism sociology men women)

Star Trek

Did anyone else make the connection between Red Matter and The Mueller Device?

My new favourite MP3 player

I've had a range of MP3 players, starting off in 1998 with the first ever portable MP3 player - the MPMan F10 (32MB of memory!), and going through a variety of different ones since then.  Until recently my favourite was the iPod Nano, which took a decent amount of music and had a lovely interface.

After that I had a Sandisk player which was _almost_ great, but let down by some terribly shoddy interface choices (the worst of which was that if it put itself into low power mode then it would forget where you were up to, meaning that when I came back to my player I'd find myself back at the start of the album.  This is _unforgivable_).  Oh, and when it's charging it can't also play music.  Which is ridiculously dumb.

Anyway - I decided to give my Nokia N85 a go as an MP3 player.  I could, at the least, use it as a backup when the Sansa was charging.

And it's great.  It has the nicest possible interface for finding a track I want - text input.  No more scrolling up and down until I hit the right track - just type "L", "E" and then I'm sitting on Lemon Jelly.  It has volume controls on the side of the phone, and music controls on the other end from the keypad, if I just want quick access to play/pause/next/prev.

The only disadvantage it has so far is that it's only 8GB.  And I can upgrade that to 16GB for £44.

Dunno why I didn't do this months ago.

Pics

(from the usual place)

Julie just got her paints out and spread them over the living room floor.  Her keyboard is also set up in here.  I am intrigued to see what happens next...

She also has a cold and managed to pull her neck last night, so it's not _all_ good, but it is nice to see her being artistic.

Right, time to make some spaghettie bolognaise!