Interesting Links for 10-6-2011

[andrewducker]

• Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system
  (tags: science technology charlesstross space physics)
• Time for that Lib Dem tax cut in full?
  (tags: libdem tax uk)
• Government’s own report admits welfare cuts will increase divorce and push people out of work
  (tags: welfare government uk disabilities)
• Does religion belong at Alcolics Anonymous? Fight over 'God' splits Toronto AA groups
  (tags: religion addiction alcohol canada)
• You can now include/exclude LJ user's posts from your friends list based on their tags. I've wanted this for years!
  (tags: livejournal web2.0 EpicWin tagging)
• Large-scale early education linked to higher living standards and crime prevention 25 years later
  (tags: education society crime usa)
• All of life’s questions. Answered by three magic words. They are "I don’t know."
  (tags: questions answers life webcomic)
• Patriotic Millionaires ask Obama to raise their taxes
  (tags: taxes economy politics usa)
• How to Know If You’re Cheating
  (tags: relationships JohnScalzi)
• How To Drink Absinthe
  (tags: absinthe alcohol drinking webcomic)
• Netherlands first European nation to adopt net neutrality. Yaaaaay!
  (tags: epicwin netherlands law internet)

Comments

[matgb]

Impressive--the UI on the LJ tag filtering appears slightly better than DWs, that's unusual.

But, y'know, about time they caught up.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Really not a great definition of "cheating."

I'm in an open relationship, but Rome Girl has exactly zero interest in hearing me talk about people I hook up with/talk dirty with on the Internet, etc... and I really have no interest at all in hearing about her playthings.

Not because either of us are jealous, I just don't find it particularly interesting. Mostly because when I've met her playthings I've found them to be boring dudes and she is convinced that other than her I'm only attracted to crazy women and she doesn't find crazy particularly interesting or compelling.

That said, if she comes home from a trip happy or some dude sends her a present and it makes her happy, I'm happy for her. And, she did buy me a ticket to Madrid and paid for a hotel room for me as my birthday present last year - knowing that I have a lover there.

[laplor.livejournal.com]

I think a better test question would have been 'will you act to hide this action from your partner?'

You and Rome Girl don't necessarily actively tell each other about each partner, but I don't get the sense at all that either of you is secretive about your actions either.

If you were 'cheating' there would be the sort of shame or guilt that would lead you to at least try to hide what you do.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Right. The best question is "would what you are doing end your relationship if your partner found out."

I honestly have no idea when she gets laid. I assume there is a reason she goes to rome every couple of months and I know she did two trips to paris last month to meet up with ex bfs - but whether or not they knocked boots, I don't know and don't really care about.

[steer.livejournal.com]

The best question is "would what you are doing end your relationship if your partner found out."

Nah... I agree the previous question is deeply flawed but so's your replacement because then it becomes impossible to cheat on a sufficiently needy partner.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Fair point. Perhaps the question can't, really, be improved.

[steer.livejournal.com]

The statement as it stands would count an intense one-on-one therapy session or a heart-to-heart conversation with a close friend as cheating if you kept them secret but not a long covert sexual relationship with someone underage. I think it's a pretty flawed definition of cheating.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

I agree.

[andrewducker]

I'd say that keeping the existence of heart-heart conversations secret from your partner is a kind of emotional cheating. I certainly wouldn't do that - and I'd clear up-front with Julie that she was ok with me doing it and not telling her what we talked about.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I agree it was innacurate, but I thought it was pretty good -- yes, "hiding" rather than "not telling" would have been a lot better, but I think anyone who is an exception because they already know their partner is ok with what they're doing and don't want to be told, knows perfectly well they're an exception. It somewhat marginalises polyamorous people, but I think it clearly wasn't aimed at us.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

More than somewhat.

I know that there are plenty of poly people who tell their partners about every encounter, but most of the poly people I've met in real life, are more discreet and only bring up their extra curricular stuff if it effects their primary partner in some way.

For example, the reason I've met a few of her lovers is that she got stuck in New York for an on-site freelance project for four months a few years back.

I went and stayed with her for the last month and a couple of times before we went to parties and/or met people at bars she'd tell me if one of the guys in the group was someone she'd hooked up with - just so I'd know and not feel socially awkward and/or ask the guy if he had a gf or some other question that would make him feel socially awkward.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I agree it's common, but the point to me is did Scalzi's word choice make people in that group feel "oh, he wasn't clear, I should tweak the phrasing" or feel "society in general and scalzi in particular hates and fears us and tries to pretend we don't exist and will turn on us with ostracism and persecution if they notice us"?

The latter is a real problem for many groups (eg. people who don't identify as straight-up "male" or "female", or gay people, or poly people in other circumstances), when people's casual exclusion of them really reflects a systematic problem. However, my first instinct was that Scalzi probably has heard of alternative lifestyles and is fine with them, and just didn't express himself very clearly because that's not what he was talking about, and it probably won't contribute to any greater marginalisation than there is already. However, I admit that was a guess from someone not exactly in the excluded group, so someone who is can probably speak more authoritatively on how they _did_ feel...

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Well, how I felt was "Bullshit. Yet another example of people slut shaming what are otherwise normal activities for some people simply because they assume that eternal binary pairings are the ideal and/or assuming that poly people are all into some hippie dream of openness and TMI oversharing."

[matgb]

See, I got the exact opposite reaction, I thought from the wording that he was definitely aware of the idea that to some people an action is cheating, to others its perfectly acceptable or even expected behaviour, and that it's up to the people in a relationship to work out what the boundaries are.

And I basically read "would you tell your partner" as being "would they object to you doing this" not "tell them all the details", which might explain the different reaction?

SB's at a film festival with Other Boyfriend, they got together at last years festival and he's likely moving in this year (or, more accurately, we're moving to a bigger place so there's space for us all). There're no secrets between us, but we don't go into much detail really, she just knows I don't mind (and him moving in was my idea not hers as it'll be easier).

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Then I should retract my guess, sorry

[firecat]

I posted a comment over there saying that I thought "intimacy a partner expects to be theirs alone" should be changed to "intimacy you've agreed with a partner should be theirs alone."

Of course a lot of people don't have detailed conversations about this, they assume "we'll be monogamous" and then they privately have all sorts of varying expectations about what that means. I think that's a poor way to run a relationship.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

> Does religion belong at Alcolics Anonymous? Fight over 'God' splits Toronto AA groups

When I saw that headline on twitter I thought it was about AA-style groups to help people recover from religion... hahaha.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Gah. LJ keeps eating this. Re: Stross comments.

The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern.

Presumably he donates to "the campaign to save the whale up until 2090 or so at maximum after which sod the whale". Everyone else who donates, however, donates to "the campaign to save the whale" and would be cross if said whale savers had put a "don't give a stuff after" date on whale saving. People are provably concerned (to the extent of parting with cash) with the preserving of species past their own lifetimes. Why should they not be so concerned with humans?

WTF is with the units in the article? Inches, cm, miles, km, AU and light years, together at last. I had to rip out the metaphor and convert everything back to AU to understand what he was on about. When he thinks he's making things easier by trying to imagine travelling a number of centimeters in a time unit and then having to travel a number of miles I just can't do the unit conversion. Is it hard? Is it not? I don't know.

He makes the basic error of forgetting that we're only forbidden from going faster than the local speed of light. FTL expansion (beyond causal limits) of the early universe is pretty much accepted in standard cosmology. Proposals like the Alcubierre Drive have been around for ages (first idea I read on the web that boggled me, back in 1994). That particular geometry is impractical others may not be. It's hard to estimate the status here, the science community is at the "tis/tisn't" stage on plausibility. The wikipedia article is fascinating.

We could end up with really weird situations -- for example any super-light journey has to be made sub-light (by remote operated or autonomous vehicle) first. Sure, you can get to the planet in a short amount of time but you have to start in 2000 years from now.

[andrewducker]

If you have an audience that includes people from the US and Europe then you need to explain in both imperial and metric in order for them to understand. And yes, I can instinctively grasp units in sizes I am used to, better than I can in AU.

And yes, we could have some breakthrough that allows Star-Trek-like travel, but I'm not seeing much mainstream acceptance of its possibility at the moment. The wikipedia page is fascinating, but when we're talking about building tunnels to the stars (which, after all, move relative to us) I'm not about to take it too seriously as a proposal.

I agree with you about caring about the human species. If people want to care about whether we outlast the planet then I'm entirely happy for them to do so.

[steer.livejournal.com]

If it makes you any more comfy about the reputation od the idea it is all from peer reviewed papers in respected journals.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I can instinctively grasp units in sizes I am used to, better than I can in AU.

The point really is it's unhelpful to grasp the unit sizes though (that's pointless as the sizes were scaled) but their respective largeness. Let's run a quick test.
Place these jumps in size in order of "difficulty" -- which is the largest ratio:
a) You have travelled 2 inches, you wish to travel 4km.
b) You have travelled 1 yard, you wish to travel 40 miles.
c) You have travelled 0.1 cm, you wish to travel 1 mile.
Now place these jumps in size in order of "difficulty" (which is the largest "ratio")
a) You have travelled 0.5 AU, you wish to travel 600 AU.
b) You have travelled 1 AU you wish to travel 2000 AU
c) You have travelled 10 AU you wish to travel 10000 AU.

My point is the familiar units give you a false sense that you understand the situation (oh, I know how big 1cm is and I know how big one mile is). It's a question about ratios (how much you have to scale up your journey) so the article is effectively performing a confidence trick because placing it in distances you understand isn't useful, you need to understand how many times bigger one is than the other. Understanding that a cm is quite small and a mile is quite big is all very well but thinking that has helped you understand the ratio between them is crazy.

[andrewducker]

You keep switching between imperial and metric. Charlie was careful to use both in all of his examples, so both are available.

And telling me something is 2000 times larger than something else is still hard for me to grasp emotionally. Going from 1 AU to 2000AU sounds big, but if you'd made it 20000 AU I'd have felt much the same way about it. Tell me that I'm going from 1cm to 1km, or 1cm to the moon and I have a grasp as to the massive difference between those two distances.

People that are thinking mathematically already understand this stuff - they don't need Charlie to talk about it. It's for people that _don't_ think like that - who need an emotional jolt to make them _feel_ the difference in size.

[steer.livejournal.com]

You keep switching between imperial and metric. Charlie was careful to use both in all of his examples, so both are available.

Suggest you re-read. He interchanged both units wildly and inconsistently -- that's what I object to. Some were given only metric, some only imperial, rarely both. Sometimes units for the real distance were light-years, sometimes AU and sometimes km in scientific notation. For example the earth-sun distance is AU and metric only but Gilese 581c is imperial and light years only and Sun-Jupiter is imperial only.

Tell me that I'm going from 1cm to 1km, or 1cm to the moon and I have a grasp as to the massive difference between those two distances.

I would argue that you have been fooled by the writer into believing you have such a grasp without actually having such a grasp. It's a nice trick but it remains a trick. It's like (but worse than because ratios are more complex than absolutes) the journalistic cliche of giving you the feeling you have understood how large an area is by expressing it as multiples of Belgium.

The 1cm to 1km example is a particularly good one where you've clearly been sort of "fooled" (I don't mean that in an offensive "you fool" way) as it's only a relatively small scale up (factor of 100).

[andrewducker]

Clearly we're using different meanings of the word "grasp". I'm meaning "an emotional realisation that the distances are big. Really big.", whereas you seem to think that numbers are important.

[steer.livejournal.com]

you seem to think that numbers are important.

Yes, when dealing with ratios especially I think the technique he uses is obfuscation more than explanation. Let's test your intuitive "emotional grasp". Is the jump from 1mm to 10km that much different from the jump from 1cm to 1km? The reason I pick these numbers is that one is a factor of 100 and the other a factor of 100x100. If I obfuscated the units a little you might not even notice this.

Consider 12th century Sir Charles de Stross attempting to convince you that it would always be impossible to travel to the moon. He could perfectly well use the same sort of "it would take you a week to travel 200km if you're a good walker, scale this to 1cm, you now have to travel 20km to get to the moon" *. Obviously as you understand that 20km is very big and 1cm is very small then the earth moon journey is and will remain impossible no matter how transport technology improves. How is this argument different to the one he makes in his essay?

*OK, he would use imperial units, but that would confuse my point here.