Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Persuading engineers just takes too damned much time." -- Sheepie

Starting with some grumbly items this time, but there's some sweet/nifty/funny stuff along with the politics.

• Reverse Robin Hood, by Bob Herbert (thanks to vvalkyri for bringing it to my attention) describes how a provision the Senate had added to Bush's tax bill to extend the bill's increased child tax credit to low-income families was deleted in House/Senate negotiations, for apparently no good reason. The article does mention that the tax changes will already be considerably more expensive than advertised, but says this provision would amount to a small fraction of the rest (about 1%), and, more damningly: "to really get a sense of the scandalous nature of this G.O.P. tax-cut scam, consider that the House and Senate negotiators also got rid of a number of measures in the Senate bill that would have saved billions of dollars by closing abusive corporate tax structures." Something's wrong with this picture.
• angiej pointed out an article about a study of teacher pay in Education Next, "a school-reform journal published by the Hoover Institution, a conservative-leaning think tank at Stanford University." The study's author is quoted as saying, "the typical school district is paying too much to elementary teachers and not enough to teachers in high-need areas," because, according to the hourly rate he calculated, teachers are paid more than computer programmers, accountants, and nurses. This is based on teachers' "shorter workdays" and long summer break. Excuse me, but don't most schoolteachers wind up with a fair amount of work to do outside of the classroom that's not being counted in that "shorter workday"? We're facing teacher shortages and the answer is to cut teachers' pay? Go read angiej's quite justified rant on the subject and the followup comments to it.
• Microsoft granted US patent for "interactive entertainment" (Embedded-Watch.com) Or as Fred and speaker2animals put it, "All your TV are belong to Microsoft". " Indeed, judging by the summary description included in the patent filing, it looks like Microsoft may have locked up rights to any system which offers up time-shifted movies or television programs over cable, broadband, or satellite systems."
• ysabel posted a pointer (with commentary) to an article by Lynn Conway about a dangerous new textbook. "This guy's transphobic, homophobic and sexist drivel is probably going to be used, starting this fall, as a textbook in undergraduate psychology courses. This is a bad thing, and Lynn explains why. Bailey essentially puts forward a thesis based on a very limited set of purely anecdotal data, and then asserts that anyone who presents counterexamples is lying." What makes this scary, rather than just hateful, is Ms. Conway's explanation that "The reason for our greatest concern about this book is not that is was published, but that it was published by the National Academy. If the publisher had been any other, we would not have raised this alert. Instead it would have been business as usual, we would have complained within the trans community, and the book would have languished as a sorry piece of pop-psychology as other such academic caricatures of trans women have done in the past. However, as we'll see, the influence of the Academies spread far and wide across the academic and intellectual elite of the nation. It's imprimatur gives the appearance of a stamp of approval on its pubiclations, with far reaching implications - including being widely read and taken seriously within the Academy, i.e., within the elite elected intelligentsia of the nation."
• Interrobang posted a list of ironic [fictional] organizations, such as the John Ashcroft "Right to Privacy" Foundation and the Donald Rumseld Fund for the Preservation of Mesopotamian Culture. Of course, much of the fun is in the followup comments.
• This is related to something I posted before, but I don't think I've included this particular article here yet: Taking a New Look at Pain (Newsweek, 19 May; MSNBC) "Thanks to advances in brain science and medical technology, the research is exploding. Harnessing high-tech imaging equipment and stunning advances in genomics, scientists are detangling the pain system at its molecular level. Researchers are isolating genes associated with pain and uncovering the influences of emotion and gender. Specialists are devising more targeted treatments. And engineers are creating more efficient drug-delivery systems."
• An oldie but goodie: Celestial Grammar, by Celeste of alt.sex.stories fame, is a grammar primer for ... well, I was going to say, "would be porn authors," but really for anyone who needs a refresher and is not offended by her examples. As a bonus, you get parenthetical comments such as, "This is grammatically correct, but it may constitute a social faux pas." (Not quite as amusing as the erotic story I ran across a while back which explained proper use of quotes and reader-friendly formatting all within the dialogue of the story -- I'll have to go find that one again.) Celeste comments, "Believe it or not, there is at least one college instructor in the United States who uses my grammar notes with his class. He says it's the best way he's ever found to make grammar interesting." I can believe that. I'd have been surprised if there were not at least one professor using it.
• Interrobang's version of link-sausage, posted 29 April (sorry, I got a bit behind) contains a whole bunch of interesting stuff that I've looked at and a whole bunch of interesting-looking stuff that I haven't gotten to yet. Some of those links will eventually show up here, but you may find different items interesting than I do.
• This item is here 'cause a few particular people will get a special kick out of it, but I don't expect it to be everyone's cup of tea. "The Rescue" is collaborative Buffy fanfic, deliberately on the silly (actually, surreal or absurdist or both, technically) side. Thing is, a member of The Homespun Ceilidh Band makes a cameo appearance in "part IV continued". (Just a single mention in a stage direction, but he's in there.) As the band member in question summarized the story in email: "The basis for the fan fic is that someone realized that Joss and crew badly misused the scoobies, causing them untold pain and suffering whenever anyone fell in love with them. So they realized that Joss wanted them for himself and that he did horrible things to those who dared love them, such as Tara, etc. So they started a movement, MOLOJ, to rescue the scoobies from the clutches of Joss and crew." My personal favourite line was, "He could be keeping the entire 'Firefly' cast."
• Sweet story about gay penguins (not really related to the rest of the post it's <lj-cut> in).

Here's a potentially useful (if it really reflects reality as much as it seems to at first glance) or harmful (if it perpetuates a mistaken idea of how minds work) combination of a meme and a useful phrase to describe that meme: "chimping out".

Rowan T. Hamilton wrote in talk.bizarre back in 1999:

"[...] if you raise a human baby and chimpanzee baby in exactly the same environemnt, then the two infants progress intellectually at the same rate until a certain point. After this, the chimpanzee infant's progress rolls off, while the human infant continues on to whatever we call intelligence.

"I immediately recognized that this was a pattern I'd seen throughout my life. People 'chimp out'. That guy you knew in Junior High who ate locusts to gross chicks out and went on to be busted for child molestation - he chimped out at fourteen. That girl in highschool who got a job at the cineplex 8, and later became the manager. She chimped out seventeen.

"It's not a value judgement - it's a fact. I've had professors who obviously chimped out in their early thirties. Some people just stop learning, stop growing, at some age. They lock in, and lock out. I hope this never happens to me - hope it hasn't happened to me.'"

When I first read it, I thought it seemed to explain a lot, but wondered whether it was a) too simplistic, or b) just a new spin on a geek-superiority-complex. While I'm still not sure about either of those, the more I think about it, the more it does seem to fit many observed behaviours.

The rest of the thread contains, in addition to a good quote from merde, interesting musings on the effects of chimping-out or not chimping-out on long-term relationships, and the idea that one can sort of "stall" -- chimp out for a while but start growing again later.

I'm still pondering. But if you hear me say the phrase "chimped out" in the future, this is where it comes from.

(I saw a link to this someplace maybe a month or two ago -- probably in somebody else's journal -- and had been trying to decide whether it was something to comment on and post a link to (maybe in a "link sausage" entry). But I got sidetracked. Then a recent-ish thread on a mailing list made me think of it again; that it would explain something somebody else had just mentioned. But I didn't get around to finding it again, and now I've forgotten what thread that was in. Having just rolled around to this window in Opera on my Win95 box, I decided I had enough I wanted to say about it to post it as a separate entry, not as part of the next link-sausage.)