Delicious LiveJournal Links for 11-23-2010

[andrewducker]

• Software developers more likely to suffer insomnia, quality of life strongly impacted.
  (tags: sleep it software development)
• An Experiment in Accurate But Misleading Movie Descriptions
  (tags: movies scifi funny)
• Germany is to suspend conscription in July 2011 and switch to a volunteer military service - cutting Army by 25%
  (tags: germany military)
• Dropbox offers some extra free space if you follow them on Twitter. So far they haven't abused the privilege.
  (tags: free storage twitter dropbox)
• Metallica's Lars Ulrich 'I'm The Hugest U2 Fan — I Would Borderline Call Myself A Groupie' (on video)
  (tags: video u2 Metallica unlikely)
• NHS allowing Google, Facebook, others to track you. They know you've been looking at testicular cancer advice...
  (tags: facebook privacy google nhs uk)
• eBooks sales have doubled - now 9% of total consumer books.
  (tags: ebooks 2010 ereader statistics trends technology books)
• An atheist answer to the BBC's question "What does faith mean to you?"
  (tags: atheism faith religion uk bbc)
• Women in the Netherlands work less, have lesser titles and a big gender pay gap, and they love it.
  (tags: women culture netherlands work career economics feminism)
• Will wearing pink make me look gay? (The second question on the linked page)
  (tags: homophobia sexuality lgbt fashion)
• When Tintin met Cthulhu. Very nice mock covers in a very convincing version of Herge's style.
  (tags: comics tintin cthulhu hplovecraft)
• Social costs of school success are highest for African Americans.
  (tags: society school education race usa)

Comments

[recycled-sales.livejournal.com]

I used to work with the chap who did those Tintin covers - he's an amazing illustrator!

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

So how should Kate Middleton dress once she is Princess Catherine?

You know, I didn't know anything about Kate Middleton either. And I agree popular newspapers obsessing over her choice of clothes is awful. But one thing I do know is that -- so long as it's marginally decent -- she's entitled to wear whatever she likes and doesn't need a condescending tongue-in-cheek justification in order to do so.

Have the newspapers not fucking read Cinderella? Would it be ok with them if William married someone working class, or someone in the nobility, but not someone middle class? Who the fucking hell did they think he was going to marry?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I've just bought a pink T-shirt but I'm worried it might make me look a bit, ahem, gay and give off the wrong signals.

I agree with the scathing rebuttal of people who hate the though of people being gay-attracted to them (although I agree more with its vehemence than its accuracy).

But to be fair to this anonymous questioner, they might equally well have meant "what if people of the correct gender don't hit on me because they think I'm gay" not "what if people gay–hit-on-me?" Which is still wrong to think, but might be handed by a simple "no" or "it doesn't matter", rather than an evisceration.

[andrewducker]

Well, yes. I've heard that The Daily Mail is working itself into a complete state over this. But then they're barking.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I managed to avoid it by getting most of my news online. I mostly managed to avoid any mention of the engagement, other than its existence.

But in retrospect, I should have known the Daily Mail was being obnoxious about SOMETHING in it.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

> Very nice mock covers in a very convincing version of Herge's style.

Meh. That's because they've photoshopped the Herge characters of existing covers.

[andrewducker]

And done a very nice job of merging the new stuff into it. Looks seamless to me.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Hmm possibly grumpy due to being ill :/
Was expecting original drawings of Tintin!

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

I completely took them at their word when they said they were worried they might be taken for being gay and not that they were necessarily homophobic. To which I also thought a "no" or a polite explanation of why it doesn't (or shouldn't at least) matter would have been much more appropriate. Nowhere did it say he thought loads of gay people would suddenly come onto him, which the journalist thought he was implying.

Venemous, belittling attacks aren't going to win over anyone's point of view. A little bit of understanding that some people don't have a choice as to which background they're bought up in, nor the awry social conditioning they might have gone thorugh, might offer a better start for changing people's points of view. It makes me look down on the journalist far more than the misguided question writer. I think asking stupid questions is a very valid route to knowledge (though maybe he could have Googled it first).

[andrewducker]

The idea that "gay" is a look, or that having people think you were gay might be a bad thing is, at the very least, a treating of gay people in a negative fashion, and is certainly verging on homophobia.

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

But he didn't say that looking gay would be a bad thing. Maybe an inconvenient thing for him (were someone to think he was gay and either come onto him or want to beat him senseless because of it), but certainly not explicitly a bad thing. If you take simply what he said without projecting your assumptions onto it, then it's pretty agnostic about the relative qualities of homosexuality.

I don't doubt there is likely a correlation between people who worry about being mistaken for being gay and people who are adverse to the gay lifestyle, but it's not a 1:1 mapping. For instance I occasionally worry about being mistaken for being gay, simply because I have been in the past and I've gotten myself into some socially tricky situations where I feel guilty afterwards in case I led anyone on. It doesn't mean I'm homophobic.

The fact he correlates pink clothing with being gay is naive on his part, but then I wouldn't even say that worry is completely without merit. There being (in my personal experience) something of a larger percentage of gay men that wear pink, than non-gay men (though I think this trend has become less clear cut since the advent of metrosexual fashion, but maybe he didn't get the memo).

Of course he might actually be a massive homophobe. I can't say for certain. I just don't assume he is.

[andrewducker]

You don't worry about X if it's a good thing.

I'm not saying he's hugely bigoted, out there at night bashing gay heads.

But he's clearly wanting to avoid being mistaken for part of a group, to the point where he's emailing newspapers about if for advice on how to manage that. That indicates, to me, that he's got issues about it.

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

I agree he has issues about it. Maybe this is about how we view the word homophobia. I don't think of it in terms of people who find it a bit icky or if it makes them uncomfortable or who are just a bit weirded about by something alien to their experiences. I reserve it for people who actively dislike or hate the variety of people that fall under that category (having just looked it up on wikipedia I'm not 100% sure where the boundaries lie :)

I don't know where the person who asked that question falls compared to those two categories. Whether it makes them uncomfortable ("would my friends think I'm gay and act differnlty towards me?") or whether they are against it. Would you differentiate the two / would you differentiate differently?

[andrewducker]

I'd view them on a continuum. They're both homophobia, but one is a lot more severe than the other.

And I agree that the article was over the top - but I thought that as (a) it was humour and (b) it was anonymous I was fine with that. If it had had the name of the person who wrote in on it I'd have felt it was unfair to an actual person.

I'll just occasionally leave these here

[robhu.livejournal.com]

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge333.html

Re: I'll just occasionally leave these here

[robhu.livejournal.com]

The whole flat earth thing makes my teeth grind btw. Especially to see EDGE, who really should know better, parrotting it. Charles Simonyi makes the point:

I am of course aware of the currently popular belief that "flat earth" was somehow a widely held "scientific" idea, but I do not know what evidence supports this belief. It was certainly not part of the Antique inheritance (who had pretty good estimates for the diameter of the earth and excellent estimates for the ratio of Earth's and Moon's diameters); It was not part of Aristotle, or Aquinus, or any of the authorities that the Church relied on. No doubt, there were some creation myths or fanciful publications that might have illustrated the world as being flat but it is a stretch to call these "scientific" even by standards of the age, when learned men would have been able to refute such a thesis easily — and probably did as part of their exams.

With the geocentric world it is a different matter — geocentrism was indeed scientifically held (with Ptolemy being the best proponent) and it is indeed false — but not to the same extent as the Peripatetic Mechanics. The real issue was precision of prediction — and the complicated system of Ptolemy gave excellent results, indeed better results than Copernicus (which made the breakthrough idea of Copernicus a difficult sell — just put yourself into the shoes of someone in his time.)

Real improvement in precision came only with Kepler and the elliptical orbits which were arrived at in part by scientific genius, by being a stickler for accuracy, and in part by mad superstition (music of the spheres, etc.) From his point of view, putting the coordinate system around the sun simplified his calculations. The final significance of putting the sun into the center was to be able to associate a physical effect — gravitation — with the cause of that effect, namely with the sun. But this did not really matter before Newton.

Re: I'll just occasionally leave these here

[robhu.livejournal.com]

OK, it annoyed me so much I ended up making a post about it :)

Re: I'll just occasionally leave these here

[andrewducker]

Yeah - it's one of those things like "People only use 10% of their brain" or "Easter is named after the goddess Eostre" which have entered the popular consciousness, but are complete rubbish.

Re: I'll just occasionally leave these here

[andrewducker]

Very happy to have links dropped here.

You can email me at andrew@ducker.org.uk if you prefer - it's up to you.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I wonder if that's really fair. There certainly are certainly ways of looking that are correlated with people thinking you're gay... including just dressing particularly well! I'm not particularly bothered what people think about me, for the most part, but I can see a number of more-or-less practical reasons why some people might prefer people not to jump to the wrong conclusions about their sexual preferences.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

(as a man with long hair and no particular interest in heavy metal, I'd probably have at least a mild impulse to avoid clothing that people strongly associate with ROCK for somewhat similar reasons...)

[zz]

i'd interpreted the question to be about avoiding having others (i.e. narrow minded joe public) attack/hassle/think less of them for appearing to be gay through a stereotype. acknowledging that lots of people still are homophobic and being a coward about that isn't homophobic.

[zz]

shortly after i discovered the goth/metal/etc looks, i was disappointed to discover that they were largely tied to forms of music i wasn't especially interested in, and that a lot of the people were even more judgmental about music taste than the mainstream. :\

[andrewducker]

It's weird, that. I remember being utterly fascinated by a poster that turned out to be an Iron Maiden album cover, a good five years before I knowingly heard any of their music. The trappings clearly had me fascinated long before I had any interest in that kind of sound.

[lproven.livejournal.com]

Ta for the linkage! Flattered to be included. :¬)

[andrewducker]

I liked the post. It was a good rant :->

[lproven.livejournal.com]

I always start off with the best of intentions and end up ranting. :¬(

[andrewducker]

I have to rewrite chunks of mine half the time to take the ranting out :->