Sunday, February 17, 2013

Thoughts from The Antidote: anti-procrastination

As I blogged about yesterday, I recently read The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman.  I think his thoughts on anti-procrastination are interesting.  As usual, any typos are my own:
The problem with all these motivational tips and tricks is that they aren't really about 'how to get things done' at all. They're about how to feel in the mood for getting things done. [...] The most common response to procrastination is indeed to try to 'get the right emotion': to try to motivate yourself to feel like getting on the with the job.

The problem is that feeling like acting and actually acting are two different things.A person mired deep in procrastination might claim he is unable to work, but what he really means is that he is unable to make himself feel like working [...] This isn't meant to imply that procrastinators, or the severely depressed, should simply pull their socks up and get over it. Rather, it highlights the way that we tend to confuse acting with feeling like acting, and how most motivational techniques are really designed to change how you feel. They're built, in other words, on a form of attachment - on strengthening your investment in a specific kind of emotion.

Sometimes, that can help. But sometimes you simply can't make yourself feel like acting. And in those situations, motivational advice risks making things worse, by surreptitiously strengthening your belief that you need to feel motivated before you an act. By encouraging an attachment to a particular emotional state, it actually inserts an additional hurdle between you and your goal. The subtext is that if you can't make yourself feel excited and pleased about getting down to work, then you can't get down to work.

Taking a non-attached stance towards procrastination, by contrast, stats from a different question: who says you need to wait until you 'feel like' doing something in order to start doing it? The problem, from this perspective, isn't that you don't feel motivated; it's that you imagine you need to feel motivated. If you can regard your thoughts and emotions about whatever you're procrastinating on as passing weather, you'll realise that your reluctance about working isn't something that needs to be eradicated, or transformed into positivity. You can coexist with it. You can note the procrastinatory feelings, and act anyway.
I'm not sure to what extent this is applicable to me (I'd describe my procrastinatory feelings as "I don't WANNA!", not "I don't feel like it" or "I'm not motivated") and I haven't yet figured out how (or whether) to actually apply this in my own life, but I think it's an interesting and refreshing perspective.

Saturday, February 16, 2013

Thoughts from The Antidote: feelings as weather

I recently read The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman.  It contained some ideas that made a lot of sense and some ideas that made very little sense, and I'm going to blog about some of each.

The first idea of interest came from the author's description of his experience at a Buddhist mediation retreat.  Any typos are, as usual, entirely my own doing:

Sounds and smells and tastes, after all, are just sounds and smells and tastes, but thoughts, we tend to assume, are something much  more important. Because they come from within us, they feel more essential, and expressive of our deepest selves. But is that true, really? When you start meditating, it soon becomes apparent that thoughts - and emotions - bubble up in much the same uncontrollable, unbidden fashion in which noises reach the ears, smells reach the nose, and so on. I could no more choose for thoughts not to occur than I could choose not to feel chilly when I was woken by the ringing of the morning bell at five-thirty each day - or, for that matter, than I could choose not to hear the bell.

Seeing thoughts as similar to the other five senses makes non-attachment seem much more approachable as a goal. In the analogy most commonly used by contemporary Buddhists, mental activity begins to seem more like weather - like clouds sand sunny spells, rainstorms and blizzards, arising and passing away. The mind, in this analogy, is the sky, and the sky doesn't cling to specific weather conditions, nor try to get rid of the 'bad' ones. The sky just is. In this the Buddhists go further than the Stoics, who can sometimes seem rather attached to certain mind-states, especially that of tranquility. The perfect Stoic adapts his or her thinking so as to remain undisturbed by undesirable circumstances; the perfect Buddhist sees thinking itself as just another set of circumstances, to be non-judgmentally observed.

Everything I've encountered before in my life about meditation left me with the impression that you're supposed to make the clutter in your mind go away.  I've also heard (quite often in advice column forums) the idea that our feelings are a choice, and you can choose not to feel a certain way or not to let something bother you.

I've always found this idea quite useless, because no one can ever explain how to do it. (They always say something along the lines of "Just tell yourself not to feel that way any more", as though I can just tell myself something and make myself listen.  That approach never works for me because I know that I'm just me telling myself in an attempt to make myself feel a certain way and there's no inherent truth or authority in any of it.)

But I find the weather analogy much more useful.  It passes, but that doesn't negate the fact that it exists and its impact is real.  To a certain extent we use clothing and other such measure to adapt to weather, but sometimes we just decide it's better to hide out for a while.  Hiding out is not unreasonable, as long as you can get done what you need to get done, and adapting your behaviour when you do go outside is not unreasonable and sometimes outright responsible.  No one would expect you to disregard the weather or will it away - and you do get to take a snow day when conditions warrant - but when you face weather that everyone faces on a regular basis, or when you face a certain kind of weather with some frequency, you need to figure out what to do to adapt.

As I've gotten older and better at life and more certain of what does and doesn't make me happy, I've also been able to purchase items that not only help me adapt to the weather, but also make me happy.  I have an awesome red coat and cashmere sweaters to keep me warm through the winter, a cheerful yellow umbrella and funky Fluevog boots to keep me dry in the rain, breezy skirts and dresses to keep me cool in the summer, and a beautiful, well-built apartment to keep the outdoors out and the indoors in.

The emotional equivalent is basically what I was doing with my 2008 New Year's resolution, where decided to start systematically using worldly comforts to get through dark emotional times rather than push through on willpower alone.  I've gotten better and better at it, and now I know to just buy a pre-emptive bag of chips for PMS week, or pop in an Eddie Izzard DVD the moment I get home from working on an emotionally difficult translation.

This is far better for inner peace and happiness than trying to power through it or will it away, plus it actually feels true to me, unlike every other emotion management principle I've encountered.  However, I don't see why meditation is remotely necessary to achieve this outlook.

Friday, February 15, 2013

I am pleased to report that my brain still works!

One time when my grandmother was in the hospital, before she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's but after she's started showing what we recognize in hindsight to be the symptoms, I had the idea of getting her the gift of a demographically-appropriate sitcom series on DVD, so she'd have something funny at her fingertips at all times.  I mentioned this idea to another family member with the idea of brainstorming which sitcom series she'd like best, and was told that this might not be a good idea for a gift because she has trouble working her DVD player.  It seems she lost the ability to learn how to use new technology.  She'd follow step-by-step instructions if someone wrote them out for her, but she lost the ability to look at the menu items or the manual and read and think and figure stuff out.

This led me to develop the fear that I will one day lose the ability to learn.

A couple of years after this, My Favourite Little Person was born. Watching her play with toys and learn how to operate her body and figure out how the world works, I came to the realization that she is learning at rate several orders of magnitude greater than I am. Her parents have told me stories of how she'd have a play date with another baby and watch the other baby play with toys in a new and different way, then have her nap, wake up especially eager to return to her toys, and start emulating what the other baby was doing.  Her little brain literally assimilated the information during her nap!  Once, when she was 8 months old, I watched her banging two rings from her ring stack toy together, as though she was trying and failing to fit one ring through the other.  Watching this, I realized that she couldn't tell by eyeballing it that the one ring wouldn't fit inside the other - but she was literally in the process of learning this right before my very eyes!  And, I noticed, she was only trying to fit the smaller ring through the bigger one, never vice versa.  So, even though she couldn't tell by sight that the one ring wouldn't fit inside the other, she had already learned that smaller things fit inside bigger things and never vice versa!

This led me to realize I've already lost some of my ability to learn, because it has been a very long time since I've observed the world around me and figured out how things work and developed new skills like MFLP does every day.

I recently bought a new desk chair (from Staples - excellent customer service so far but I wasn't happy with the product. I'll blog about this more once the return process is completed). It came disassembled, so I had to assemble it.  To add to the challenge, the instructions weren't as good as they should be - they showed what connects to what where, but there was no how. Then, after sitting in the chair for a couple hours, I came to the realization that it was unergonomic for me (it actually made my back hurt), so I had to figure out how to disassemble it and get it back into the box, for which there were no instructions.

So to work out this chair, I had to inspect it, see what kinds of shapes and sizes there were and how they might fit into each other, try various things, see that they didn't work, and analyze why.  I had to look at the parts that were already together and analyze why they were there (e.g. "There's something blocking this piece, there's a screw here, could the screw be blocking that piece?"), look at my existing desk chair and extrapolate, and come up with ways to use my body and other objects in my apartment to lift and move heavy pieces into the position I wanted them, and then, when disassembling, to force them to come apart.  I had to take breaks and return to it, I'd sometimes go to bed and wake up the next morning with inspiration I needed to master the next step.

In short, I learned how to assemble and disassemble this chair the same way MFLP learns things.

So I can still learn!

I knew I can still learn things academically, by reading about them or taking classes.  I knew I could still learn how to use computer software the usual way.  But can't remember the last time I learned how something tangible works by observing its properties, experimenting with it, and figuring it out, the way MFLP does.  I'm quite relieved to learn that I can still do it.

Thursday, February 07, 2013

Things They Should Study: are facial expressions informative on people who normally cover their face?

Recently there was a Supreme Court decision about whether people should be forced to expose their faces when testifying in court.  This case originated with a rape victim who wore a niqab and was called upon to testify against her attacker.

One of the ostensible reasons given for wanting witnesses to uncover their faces is that facial expression are thought to be informative in assessing the witnesses' credibility.

But is this also the case with people who are accustomed to covering their faces?  If  a certain method of communication is never available to you, would you be able to use it - and use it in the way the audience is expecting - if it were suddenly made available?  If you only ever used it in private and intimate settings and were suddenly called upon to use it in public, in front of an audience, and under scrutiny, how would your performance be read by people who use it every day?

I know someone who immigrated to Canada as a toddler.  He learned English quickly and easily like one does at that age, but he also retains the language of the old country, which he uses to talk to his parents and such.  However, because he left the old country at such a young age, he still speaks the other language like a toddler.  He has a childish accent, and he's less articulate and nuanced than you'd expect of a successful adult.  If he were called upon to testify in court in the language of the old country, his testimony would not reflect his actual credibility, because he's not accustomed to using that method of communication in the way the jury would expect.  Similarly, I find myself wondering if the facial expressions of someone who normally covers their face might also fail to reflect their actual credibility because they aren't accustomed to using that method of communication in the way the jury would expect.

I myself don't have a very expressive face, and my natural inclination is to keep it neutral. When I was a kid, people would always say things to me like "You look disgusted" or "Don't glower at Mrs. Neighbour like that" when I wasn't intentionally doing anything with my face, or feeling any of those emotions being attributed to me.  I later learned how to modulate my face in the way that's expected - a skill I was still mastering well into adulthood, because quite a lot of it I learned from Eddie Izzard - but it still isn't natural behaviour and doesn't come to me easily.  It's like telephone voice or a firm handshake - a performance I can put on, but not a natural reflection of my thoughts and feelings.  However, I'm not sure whether I'd be able to maintain the performance in so stressful a situation as testifying against my rapist, and if I can't maintain the performance my expressions may well be misinterpreted, like they were when I was a child, and be detrimental to my credibility through no fault of my own.

So if it could go so badly wrong for someone like me who has always been in a face-exposing culture, imagine how badly it can go to someone who isn't accustomed to their facial expressions being scrutinized and is suddenly having their credibility assessed based on something that they have never before had interpreted as informative!

I hope someone can actually do research and get scientific data on this, because the only thing I can imagine more terrifying than being forced to expose more of your body than you're comfortable with when testifying against your rapist is then having him set free and your credibility called into question because the jury is assuming you're more fluent than you are in a form of communication that you never use.

Monday, February 04, 2013

Things They Should Invent (or not): reverse gift registry

The way a gift registry normally works is you make a list of all the things you want and people buy them for you.

The problem with that is you still have to shop.  For me, shopping is the worst part.  I hate having to go out and look at stuff and figure out which thing best meets my needs.  The fact that other people are paying for it is very nearly negligible compared with the tedium of having to do the actual shopping.

If I had a gift registry, I'd want the opposite. I'd want to make a list of everything I need or want - simply describing it in words without having to provide any information on style or model or where to buy it - and as their present to me people would go out and shop for it.  They wouldn't even have to buy it, I'd be happy to use my own money.  It's the shopping that's the hard work.

Problem 1: There's nothing to stop people from just picking out any old thing without regard whether it meets my needs. For example, I want an desk chair that is ergonomically perfect for my body.  When I mention this to people, they tell me the name of a store that sells desk chairs and suggest I go there and sit in some chairs.  But that doesn't help me at all. I already know the way to get a desk chair is to go to stores and sit on chairs, and for me that's the difficult and annoying part.  They're basically restating the problem as though it's a solution.  And there's nothing to stop people from doing that with the reverse registry - not actually doing proper shopping, just naming a product that exists and declaring the job done.

Problem 2: I'm never going to be on the receiving end of a gift registry, so with this invention I'm just making my job harder.

Saturday, February 02, 2013

Things They Should Invent: bundle buggies and wheeled luggage that follow directly behind you

Picture a person walking down the street pulling a bundle buggy or a wheeled suitcase behind them.

The buggy/suitcase isn't directly behind them, it's off to the side, on the side of the hand they're using to pull it.  (Look at the people pictured here.)

This is inconvenient in crowded pedestrian areas, because your buggy takes at least half a "lane", if not a whole lane, so it's harder for people to pass you.  It's also harder for you to pass others, because you take up more than a lane of space so you need more passing room.  I've also noticed that, in a crowded grocery store with narrow aisles (**cough cough METRO cough**), something about the way it corners causes bottlenecks when the user is turning in or out of an aisle.

Solution: design buggies and luggage so that they follow directly behind the user's when the user is walking. Off the top of my head, the best idea I have is that the handle should be shaped like a J, L or sideways Z (but with right angles rather than acute angles).  So the part of the handle you grip is at the side of the suitcase rather than in the centre (thus enabling the suitcase to follow directly behind you), but there's some kind of framework/architecture to cause the force to be exerted from the centre of the suitcase or from the whole front of the suitcase evenly, so that it will roll straight.

This would make users of wheeled luggage and bundle buggies less annoying to their fellow pedestrians and make life easier for everyone.

Friday, February 01, 2013

Thoughts from advice columns: the lady who walks her girlfriend on a leash


We live in a family-oriented neighbourhood in the heart of our city. Dozens of kids ride bikes, play soccer and so on while adults chat and watch. Last summer, one of my neighbours (with three sons) told me he saw a woman walking her girlfriend on a leash. I told him he must have been fantasizing. Sure enough, a woman with long dreads and multiple piercings (I’d seen her before; she rents a basement apartment on the street) came around the corner walking her girlfriend on a leash. We’ve seen it many times since then, in the middle of the day. My four-year old daughter asked me why the lady was wearing a leash. I told her that she was pretending to be a dog and that the other lady was playing the owner. My daughter loves inventing her own play scenarios and easily accepted my explanation. This has been going on since last summer, so it’s obviously a happy, long-term relationship. But I don’t love having to explain S&M role-play to my four-year old and would appreciate if the dog-walking happened after, say 9 p.m. What would you do?

I think LW's response to her daughter is perfect and nothing more needs to be said.

However, I was surprised when David Eddie said, in his reply:

I mean, I think you’ve handled your daughter’s questions in a very elegant and clever fashion, so far. But as time goes by, she may come to doubt what you’ve told her – or some older kid will tip her off. And she may resent you for that [...]

I can't imagine the daughter resenting the mother for her answer, because her answer is perfectly true.  Yes, it's simplified and unnuanced, that doesn't make it wrong.  When I was a kid, before I learned where babies come from, my mother would mention in passing that the male of the species has to fertilize the female of the species to produce young.  (I'm pretty sure this first came up in the context of chickens and eggs, but for as long as I can remember I've known it to apply to all animals.)  When I got a bit older and my mother read Where Did I Come From? to me, I didn't feel resentful or betrayed to learn that the fertilization is done with the penis.  I just thought "Oh, so that's how it's done.  Kinda gross." and moved on.

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Flawed analogies for street harassment

There are some people in the world who think catcalling and street harassment aren't actual problems.  For the purpose of brevity, I'll call them harassment minimizers (HMs).

Sometimes, when the HMs are male and straight, they'll make some comment like "I don't know what you're complaining about, I'd be thrilled if whenever I walked down the street, groups of women would shout how hot I am and how much they want to have sex with me."

However, this is a flawed analogy.

What do we know about the harassers?  We know two things:

1.  They're harassing people.
2.   They're male (because they've only ever been male in my experience, and this conversation only ever happens with male HMs talking about male harassers).

We know nothing else about them because all the harassment is in the way of us knowing about their hopes and dreams and aspirations and deepest innermost souls.

If I were to evaluate the harassers as viable sexual candidates, I'd see one benign factor and one dealbreaker.  The fact that they're male is benign; the fact that they're harassers is a dealbreaker.

If a straight male HM were to evaluate the harassers as viable sexual candidates, he'd see one benign factor and one dealbreaker.  The fact that they're harassers is benign (since, being a harassment minimizer, he doesn't see harassment as a problem); the fact that they're male is a dealbreaker (since the HM is a straight male).

So the HM's analogy where he'd be happy to have women shouting at him in the street is flawed, because he's taking the one factor that's a dealbreaker for him and changing it to something that isn't a dealbreaker for him.

For the analogy to be sound, he needs to retain one dealbreaker factor and one benign factor.  Therefore, the more apt analogy would be to keep the characters and behaviours the same.  So a straight male HM trying to analogize himself into the shoes of someone being harassed by male harassers should also envision himself being harassed by male harassers.

To change the gender to female would be like if I said "I don't know why it bothers you to have strange men on the street loudly speculating on your sexual proclivities and rudely propositioning you, I'd be thrilled to have kind, gentle, charming, gallant men expressing their esteem for me in ways that I feel are wholly appropriate and not at all uncomfortable."

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Things the Library Should Invent

1. Automatically set your holds list to "inactive" after you have a certain number of books in transit 

I add every single book that I think will be of passing interest to my library holds list, so I usually have somewhere between 40 and 50 books on the list. However, I don't want them all to come in at once, because I won't have time to read them all. So, once I have enough books checked out, I set all the remaining books on the list to "inactive". This means I keep my place in the hold queue for each book, but the library won't send it to me until I set it to "active" again. (If I should reach the front of any book's queue, the library will send it to the next person in the queue until I reactivate it.)

When I start running low on reading material, I reactivate my list. However, I still don't want all the books on the list to be waiting on the hold shelf for me, I only want a few at a time. This means that when my list is back in active mode, I have to monitor it throughout the day. Recently I reactivated my holds list with the intention of getting about 5 more items. However, I neglected to check it for about three hours, and when I finally did check it there were 10 items in transit for me, which is entirely too many since we can only keep them for 3 weeks and I do have a full-time job.

I would love for the library to provide the option of having your holds list automatically deactivate once you have a certain number of items in transit and on the hold shelf. This wouldn't be mandatory, of course, but I'd love to be able to tell the computer "Send me 5 more books - whatever comes in first - and then don't send me anything more until further notice."

2. List series name and number at the beginning of the book title field 

When I read a series, I add the whole thing to my holds list at once and set them all to inactive. Then, when I'm reactivating my holds queue, I only activate the next book in each series. This way I can read the books in order without having to wait for a long line for each.

The problem is that the title field of the library catalogue listings doesn't include the series number, or sometimes even the series name. So when I'm reactivating, I need to remember which series are in my list, google up the reading order for each, and scroll through my list of book titles to find the next book in each series.

 I'd like the library catalogue to list the series name and number at the beginning of each title, so it's visually obvious which titles belong to which series and what order they go in. You sort by title, and all the series are laid out for you.

 For example, I'm currently reading the Inspector Gamache series. The next book in line is listed in the library catalogue as "The cruellest month". This isn't informative - I don't know where it is in the series, and, when I'm scrolling through my whole holds list, I don't even know that it's part of the Inspector Gamache series as opposed to being a standalone novel. If, instead, they listed it in the title field as "Inspector Gamache #3: The cruellest month", it would be readily apparent what this book and whether or not I want to reactivate it at any given time.

I wonder if it might also be possible to combine these two ideas and tell the computer "Activate the next book in each series, plus all non-series books. Send me the first five that come in, and then deactivate everything." They'd need to put additional fields in their database for "Is this book part of a series?" "Series name" and "Series number", but that does seem like the sort of thing a database can handle.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Things They Should Invent: baby improv

My Favourite Little Person, who turned 1 in November, loves to talk.  She holds forth at length about the issues of the day, uttering surprisingly long and complex sequences of phonemes, complete with modulation, intonation, and gesticulation, that have everything in common with fluent human speech except for the fact that I don't understand a word of it. However, it is great fun to have a conversation with her anyway, asking her questions, seeing how she responds, ascribing intention and motivation to her vocalizations.

It occurs to me that this would be a good improv game.

You put a babbly baby on stage with the improv players, and cast the baby in a key role in the scene.  For example, if the scene is set on a ship, the baby is the captain.  Then the other players have to play out the scene in response to whatever the baby happens to say or do.

It would have enormous entertainment value, although I suspect most parents aren't willing to volunteer their babies as props in improv shows.

Monday, January 21, 2013

Things eBay Should Invent: sort by price+shipping per unit

Normally, I sort eBay search results by price+shipping, lowest to highest.  However, sometimes there are some sellers who are selling only one of the item, whereas others are selling it in a pack of two or four.  The pack of four might be a better price per item, but it isn't going to show up on the first page of my search results.

I'd like eBay to provide the option of sorting search results by price+shipping per unit.  So if widgets cost $2 each (including shipping), but a lot of four widgets costs $7, the $7 lot of four will appear above the $2 single widgets.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Turns out the North is actually empty

A while back, I asked "Is the North actually empty?"  I'd seen maps that suggest large swaths of completely uninhabited land, and I was wondering whether they're genuinely empty or just sparsely populated.

Today I stumbled upon this cool map of North America showing a dot for every person reported in the Canada and US censuses.  Based on this map, it appears that large swaths of the North are actually completely devoid of human habitation.  You can zoom in and get a full page of white, with no dots whatsoever.

That's awesome, in both senses of the word.

Friday, January 18, 2013

Things They Should Study: proportion of childfree vs. non-childfree people who change their minds

I've blogged before about how I used to want to have children, but then grew up to realize that I am in fact childfree.

Conventional wisdom is that people who are childfree may well change their minds (which is why it's so hard for those of us who have never had kids to get sterilized), but I find myself wondering if it might be the opposite.

Your worldview is first formed by your surroundings when you're a kid.  You first think that your surroundings and experiences are baseline human reality, and then gradually your worldview broadens as you grow up and learn more.

And, when you're a kid, the primary adults in your life are, necessarily, adults who are raising children.  So your very first impression of what you consider to be baseline human reality is that adults raise kids.

To arrive at the idea that you never want to have or raise kids, you have to put thought into the matter and question the basic assumptions you grew up with and conceptualize a reality that you may never have actually witnessed.  Critical thought goes into it - it's not a decision made mindlessly.

Because of this, I wonder how many people who are childfree actually change their minds compared with those who previously wanted children and then changed their minds.  This would be interesting to research.

When the fans ruin a fandom

I've been watching and enjoying Big Bang Theory for several years (thank you Poodle!).  After I watch a new episode of any TV show, I like to have a look at TV review sites to see what they have to say.

Apparently, a while back, the TV show Community was scheduled in the same timeslot as Big Bang Theory.  When this happened, fans of Community started infesting the comment threads of Community reviews, dissing everyone for watching Big Bang Theory instead of Community.

I found this put me way off the idea of watching Community, especially since it was in the same timeslot as Big Bang Theory.  Why would I forgo something that I know I enjoy to watch something whose most remarkable feature that I've seen is that its fans go into spaces dedicated to discussing other shows and diss people for discussing the shows to which the spaces are dedicated?

However, the Comedy Network recently started airing Community in syndication, so I decided to watch it and see what all the fuss is about.  I found I enjoyed it, and I'm now caught up on the whole show.

But, even though I enjoy the show, I have no interest in participating in the fandom because of the fans who kept intruding upon Big Bang Theory space.  Because my experience with the fandom is people who come barging in on something I'm enjoying and dissing me for enjoying it and telling me to do something different instead, I don't want to spend time with those people or participate in their activities.

Not only that, but the annoyance of the Community fans who ran around intruding upon and dissing Big Bang Theory fans has triggered my "Don't let them win" reaction.  Even though I enjoy Community, I now wouldn't even consider signing a petition to save the show, because I don't want this assholic fan behaviour to get results.  And, if Community once again airs opposite Big Bang Theory, I will watch Big Bang Theory in my time zone and Community time-shifted, just to spite them.

Things Google Should Invent: show the number of results with verbatim search

Way back in university, one of my translation profs mentioned a concept called a "Google vote".  If you're trying to figure out which of several constructions is more commonly used, a quick and dirty method is to do a Google search for each and see which one has the most hits.  It isn't always 100% reliable (Sometimes there are regionalisms, and sometimes a sequence of words doesn't mean what you intend it to mean. For example, when I was researching this post and googling for "prom baby",  most of the hits were "Prom, baby!")


Since then, Google has become more flexible in response to search terms, using conjugations and declensions and synonyms in an attempt to help lead users to what they're looking for.  All of which is useful if you're searching for information, but less useful if you're using Google as a linguistic corpus.

Fortunately, Google has also introduced the Verbatim search function.  Do your search normally, then, on the results page, click on "Search Tools".  Then, under "All results", select "Verbatim".  This makes Google search for exactly what you typed, without trying to help you.

For example, the inspiration of this post is that I was trying to figure out if the present indicative of the verb that gives us "dissing" and "dissed" is "dis" or "diss".  Normally, Google results would show them interchangeably on the assumption that they're both intended to mean the same thing.  So, to do a Google vote, I used the Verbatim functions so I would only get results for "dis" or "diss", not for both.

The problem is that Google doesn't show the number of results on the Verbatim search results page like it does on other search pages, which renders my Google vote useless.  This is particularly irritating because the vast majority of the times I use the Verbatim function, the hit count is part of the information I'm seeking.

Dear Google: please put the hit count on all results pages, just in case someone needs it.  You know the number of hits, so why not just serve it up?

Saturday, January 12, 2013

What bugs me about Apple products

What I don't like about Apple devices is that whenever I have trouble with them, there's very few things to do.  With PCs, there's always at least half a dozen options, ranging from rebooting to tinkering in the registry, but with every Apple problem I've had it's always power off and back on, do a restore, and go to the genius bar, who inevitably tell me they can't do hardware support because isn't a new device.

That's my second annoyance - hardware support and spare parts simply cannot be obtained through official channels for non-new devices, not even for money.  In contrast, Dell is quite happy to sell me spare parts and tech support for anything I've ever bought from them, even if it's out of warranty.  They don't always have the best prices, but they're at least willing to provide it.  At Apple that isn't even an option - the best they can do is give you a discount on a new device or a replacement of the same kind of device.

This focus on novelty also extends, most irritatingly, to software and operating systems.  If you restore your ipod, it automatically installs the latest software, and there's no possibility of rolling it back.  If one of your apps isn't compatible with the new iOS or it's otherwise worse than the previous version, you're stuck.  In comparison, Windows lets you uninstall any updates and service packs without even having to do a system restore (although that's totally an option).  I could even take my old Windows 98 CD and install Windows 98 on my current computer.  Microsoft wouldn't support it any more, but it's not like they have technological measures in place to stop me.

Apple's general philosophy seems to be that the products are intended to just work without the end user having to worry about fixing them. But I've had my fair share of problems, and not being able to get at the guts like I can with my PCs is irritating.

Friday, January 11, 2013

Why would you write a newspaper article if you don't have enough to say?

Recently in the news: school board director Chris Spence plagiarized parts of an article he wrote for the Toronto Star.

Here's what I don't get: if he had to resort to plagiarism, why was he writing a newspaper article in the first place?  Unlike students who plagiarize, he didn't have to write an article.  It wasn't an assignment.  He wouldn't flunk if he didn't do it.  Unlike Margaret Wente, it wasn't his job.  He has a whole job that, I'm sure, keeps him fully occupied. How did it even occur to him to write an article if he had so little to say that he had to plagiarize?

I'm pretty sure that people have to proactively submit op-eds to newspapers rather than the newspaper soliciting them, so he could have just not done it and no one would have noticed.  Even if the paper did solicit an article from him, he could have just said "I'm terribly sorry, but I'm afraid I'm just too busy with my duties as director of TDSB to write an article.  However, I'd be happy to give an interview."

So why did he do it?

Sunday, January 06, 2013

Poll: how old were you when you first learned about abortion?

How old were you when you first learned that abortion is a thing that exists, and in what context did you learn about it?

I'm asking because I've heard stories of people (especially, but not limited to, catholic school teachers), both in the present day and when my peers were kids, lecturing kids about the evils of abortion when the kids were at an age when I myself hadn't yet even heard of abortion, and I find myself wondering if these lectures would end up teaching the kids that it's even an option.

I don't remember exactly when I first learned about it.  I know it wasn't specifically mentioned in the sex ed I received from my parents or my schools, and I can extrapolate from what I know of my learning curve that it wasn't in my sex ed book.

I learned how pregnancy happens around the age of 8 or 9, I reached menarche at 10, and I learned (on a theoretical level, fortunately) that rape exists at 10 as well.  So, starting at the age of 10, I had a quietly ever-present fear of being forced to gestate my rapist's baby, and hadn't the slightest clue that pregnancies could be terminated.  (I was thinking solely in terms of a rapist because I was still years away from being able to even imagine wanting to have sex voluntarily, even in a distant and hypothetical future.)

Several years later, I read something (I don't remember if it was an article or a work of fiction) where a girl who was pregnant thought that if she skipped rope for hours and hours, she'd have a miscarriage.  (I don't remember if she actually tried it or if it actually worked.)  This was my first exposure to the idea that miscarriage could be induced.  I was relieved to learn that such a thing might be remotely possible, and started brainstorming other ways to force myself to miscarry so I wouldn't have to gestate my rapist's baby.  I considered the possibility of simply stopping eating and drinking, thinking that if it didn't cause a miscarriage it would at least kill me, and, by extension, also gave some thought to suicide as a solution.  I was probably under the age of 16 when this happened, because I don't remember looking up ways to induce miscarriage on the internet and I'm pretty sure I would have if I'd had internet access at the time.

I became aware of the existence of abortion, as a medical procedure, sometime before the end of high school.  Weirdly, I don't remember any single moment of relief at the realization that you can just go somewhere and get it done professionally. There was a time when I knew it existed but didn't know the details of the laws governing its accessibility (I remember mentally debating whether it would be more effective to tell the doctor that I would commit suicide if I couldn't have an abortion or to actually attempt suicide, completely unaware that you don't need to convince them of that particular level of desperation) but I figured it out by the time I was in university.

All of which is to say that if, in middle school or early high school, someone had lectured me about the evils of abortion, they would have been teaching me that it is possible to end a pregnancy and that it is possible to do so with a proper medical procedure.  And if someone had taken my child or teenage self to an abortion clinic to protest, they would have taught me "This is where you can go to get an abortion."  It's likely this information is more accessible to the youth of today, but some of the stories I heard that inspired this post were about people who were older than me, who surely would have learned a thing or two about how to get an abortion if lectured on the evils of doing so in Grade 6.

What about you?  When and how did you learn that abortion exists?  If people had lectured your young teenage self on the evils of abortion, would they have been teaching you about its existence?

Tuesday, January 01, 2013

Things They Should Study: does exercise have the same benefits for those whom it angers?

There's a lot of research about how exercise is allegedly good for non-physical things, like mood or cognition. 

Articles about this research often state as a given that exercise makes you feel good emotionally and boosts your mood.

However, for me, exercise makes me angry with no positive mental or emotional effects. I've blogged about this before, and over the years it has attracted the attention of others who are angered by exercise.

Someone should study whether exercise has the same alleged non-physical benefits for people whom it angers as it does for the general population.  What if being made angry by exercise is a sign that it doesn't have those benefits for you?