Google bombing for Fun and Social Justice

So apparently, Amazon.com has recently shot themselves in the foot.

Specifically, they’ve taken to removing sales rank from books that are deemed to have a gay or lesbian theme. This means, among other things, that books with a gay or lesbian theme won’t come up in certain kinds of searches and don’t appear in lists or pages of popular books regardless of their popularity.

Amazon’s given a number of explanations for this behavior, each of which has been contradictory. Their explanations have been all over the map; at first they claimed that “adult” books aren’t ranked or listed by popularity (which is, as any user of Amazon knows, manifestly untrue); more recently, theyre calling it an unintentional “software glitch”. They’ve sent emails to some of the authors of the books that have had their rankings removed, which have likewise been all over the map.

Since the street finds its own uses for things, one of the ways that annoyed Net users have retaliated is with a good old-fashioned Google bomb. A Google bomb raises the Google keyword result for a specific keyword (in this case, “Amazon rank”) by placing links using those keywords all over the place.

So, in the spirit of using Google as a blunt instrument for social change (as former Google engineer Christophe Bisciglia said of MapReduce, “When you have a really big hammer, everything becomes a nail”), I present to you:

Amazon Rank

Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): amazon ranked
1. To censor and exclude on the basis of adult content in literature (except for Playboy, Penthouse, dogfighting and graphic novels depicting incest orgies).
2. To make changes based on inconsistent applications of standards, logic and common sense.

Nooo! The cute, it is too much!

Late last night, joreth arrived in town to visit my cat Liam.

Now, she might have thought she was in town for Frolicon this weekend, and I might have thought she was in town for Frolicon this weekend, but fortunately Liam was able to set us straight on that.

Liam is a benevolent overlord protector, and magnanimously consented to allow me to curl up with her when we went to bed, though he made it clear (in his unmistakeable feline way) that he had dibs.

The cat spent much of the night hugging joreth‘s hand. This morning, as I opened my eyes, I was whacked over the head with a stunning (stunning, I say!) amount of cute, cute that can drop a charging rhino in its tracks:

I’m not quite sure what the LD50 of cute is, but I’m thinking I’d best call a hazmat team to decontaminate the bedroom, because this has got to be a dangerous level of cute. You, Gentle Readers, might want to consider getting a squad to deal with your computers now as well.

iPhone picture of the moon

Last time zaiah was in town, she bought me a cheap telescope from Walgreens. Atlanta being what it is (which is to say, hazy and overcast and generally hostile to Science), tonight is the first opportunity I’ve had to play with it.

Got this picture by holding my iPhone up to the eyepiece. Yeah, it’s a crap photo, but dude, it came from my iPhone.

Atlanta Tourism: Stone Mountain

I’ve had a guest for the past four days, and it’s been a lot of fun, because it’s given me the opportunity to do something I haven’t done in the three years I’ve lived in Atlanta: play tourist.

So the past several days have been spent running all about Atlanta visiting The Sights. Every town has Sights; in Orlando, The Sights mostly involve an anthropomorphic rodent and his whacky team of intellectual property attorneys, whereas in the tiny farm town of Venango where I grew up, The Sights almost always involved cows. Lots and lots of cows. Cows, and wheat, but mostly cows.

Here in Atlanta, The Sights include Stone Mountain, though I still maintain that perhaps the word “mountain” is a little ambitious.

This is Stone Mountain:

Essentially, it’s a ginormous slab of granite jutting abruptly up out of the ground without any warning, or even any of the things like foothills that proper mountains use to let people know they’re coming.

Quite some time ago, a group of people saw this gigantic piece of granite and said “Hey! We could carve something into that!” Here’s a closeup of the carving that’s been blasted out of the rock:

This being Georgia, we can’t have a carving without invoking the War of Northern Aggression, so the people you see here are none other than General Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and “Stonewall” Jackson. Lee looks a little long in the face, as he perhaps contemplates the wisdom of an agrarian society going to war with an industrialized society; Davis, heart heavy, ponders what the history books have to say about the fate of such agrarian societies; and Jackson looks stoic as ever, while his horse, arguably the wiser of the two, looks ahead at the future of the Confederacy with wild-eyed terror.

The current carving is actually blasted out of the remnants of an earlier and much more ambitious carving, designed in 1914 by Gutzon Borglum, a man who would later leave his mark (in a highly literal fashion) on Mt. Rushmore. Borglum was a gifted artist but suffered the unfortunate congenital condition of being a Yankee, so no sooner had he begun than political rivalries erupted which would ultimately culminate in his design being scrapped, and, er, scraped off the granite face by dint of chisels and high explosives. The rest of the history of this monument is caught up in the frightfully ordinary and frightfully dull sort of petty squabbling that tends to accompany confederacies of all sorts, and it wasn’t until 1970 that the second-rate, lackluster monument you see here was finished.

The backstory actually makes a more fitting tribute to the Confederate States of America than the stone carving itself, but I digress.

Visitors to Stone Mountain can hike up to the top or, if they are of a more reasonable disposition, take the cable car, which is what we did. The cable car is Swiss-made and offers visitors a few moments of sheer terror to go with the view, something the park employees find endlessly amusing

The top of this lump of rock is actually very cool. This chunk of granite is bigger than God and twice as real, and from the top of it, the view is awe-inspiring.

The wind occasionally blows dust and dirt across the mountain, where it sometimes accumulates in cracks in the rock. This gives rise to a thriving ecosystem, like this tree, which must surely be The Most Optimistic Tree In The World. The dirt in this crevasse extends downward about half an inch or so, so the roots of the tree skitter sideways along the rock like John McCain courting a neocon.

Granite, unlike silicone, has a regular stress geometry; when it fractures, it tends to fracture in circles. Wind and rain continue with the basic circular theme, so the top of the rock is studded with rounded depressions.

These depressions fill with rainwater when it rains, and shortly thereafter the miracle of Life blossoms forth with the promise of renewal, tenacity, and hope in the pit of unrelenting despair we call the Universe. Life, in this case, consists of these rather odd plants that look like grass but are actually quillworts, the rarest of all plant life on Earth.

Quillworts grow in only three places on the planet–all of them unreasonably huge chunks of granite. Perversely, they seem to enjoy sprouting from tiny little depressions in solid rock that fill with rainwater, and becoming dormant again when the water dries up. One would think that they might be a lot more successful if they’d perhaps chosen a less inhospitable ecological niche to occupy, but who am I to judge some other organism’s choices?

The hardiness of these bizarre plants and the fact that they can scrabble out a foothold on such a forbidding surface is a testimonial to the difficult engineering challenge posed by wiping out all life on earth. A lot of folks like to say that nuclear war would wipe out all life on earth; those folks have no idea what a tough job that would actually be.

Oh, it might wipe out all life that we like, which basically means all life that either owes us money or is cute and fuzzy, or all life that we fancy eating, but there’s a great deal of life (much of it slimy, or pinchy, or equipped with stingers, or brown and squidgy and generally unappetizing) that we’d actually be pretty hard-pressed to get rid of. And the weird stuff living in undersea volcanic vents likely wouldn’t take much notice of anything we did, though that’s a post for another day.

A List of Linky-Links

Ok, folks, time for another of Franklin’s web browser dumps! Ready? Let’s go!

Old Russian nuclear technology

Two links from the EnglishRussia Web site today, both of them concerning cold-war-era Soviet nuclear technology. Those Russians never met a nuclear reactor they didn’t love.

Abandoned Russian nuclear lighthouses

What do you do if you have a whole lot of Arctic waterfront you need to put lighthouses along, but there’s no power or habitation anywhere nearby? Embed nuclear reactors in the lighthouses, seal ’em up, and forget about ’em!

Russian self-propelled nuclear reactors

Small reactors designed to be driven out to remote villages, available in two different styles–crawler models and tractor-trailer rigs.

Science and Technology

The importance of stupidity in scientific research

The thing about doing real research is that you’re trying to answer questions nobody has answered yet. You can’t look up the answers in a book, because nobody knows them. That’s the point. If that makes you feel stupid, that’s OK.

Yeast-powered fuel cell feeds on human blood

They’re still crude and not very powerful, but fuel cells that can create energy from your blood may one day power everything from pacemakers to insulin pumps to synthetic organs.

Debate about vaccine hilights sexual double-standards

When the HPV vaccine was first approved for use in girls, opponents raised a stink that vaccinating against STDs could cause girls to become sexually promiscuous. Now that the vaccine is being studied in boys, critics talk about its effectiveness and its safety–but don’t seem to argue that it will result in boys becoming promiscuous.

My Bionic Quest for Bolero

One person’s experience with trying to reprogram his cochlear implant to make it high enough resolution for him to appreciate music. (Note: Wired can’t get its act together with HTML doctype and encoding tags, so Mac users will have to click View->Text Encoding->Western (ISO Latin 1) to make the weird garbled characters in the story display properly.)

Sex

New Scientist: Spanking and BDSM bring couples closer together

The title says it all, really.

Art

From drjon, who has a habit of posting links that cause me to waste tremendous amounts of time:
Naked Urban Exploration.

Not safe for work, but quite lovely. If you like the (female) human body and you like urban decay, this site’s for you. I’m especially fond of this photo.

Colorful high-speed photos of air rifle pellets hitting stuff

I have an entire essay brewing about the physical world we live in and how it’s only a tiny, crude approximation of all that exists on the back burner right now, inspired by these pictures.

My Little Pony gets a Hollywood makeover

My Little Pony, re-imagined as Slave Leia, Edward Scissorhands, the alien from “Alien,” and more.

Houdini Chair Ensure Your Guests Will Stay for Dessert

One part functional utilitarian object, one part bondage, one part art.

Humor

50 reasons why nobody wants to publish your book

“The world isn’t quite ready for an illustrated children’s book called SOME MOMMIES ARE INTERNET PORNSTARS” and 49 more.

World of Warcraft: The Lich King in IRC chat

Spider pride!

Some thoughts on fairness, polyamory, and relationships

“It’s not fair!”

Below a certain age, we hear people say this all the time. Past a certain age, people rarely say it any more. It’s not just because it gets beaten out with the litany of “life’s not fair” that almost always follows “it’s not fair!” (and in truth, I’ve always thought “life’s not fair” is a pretty lame way to follow up a complaint of unfairness anyway); rather, as we get older, and our vision gets longer, we learn that fairness operates best on a global, not a local, scale. Sure, if you did the dishes last night and it’s your sister’s turn to do the dishes tonight, but she isn’t doing the dishes because she just got back from the dentist, it may seem unfair to you from a purely selfish perspective…but really, would you want to trade places with her? And if you were the one who’d just been through the root canal, wouldn’t you appreciate it if you could give the dishes a miss tonight yourself? These things tend to even out in the end; sometimes, compassion dictates that the rigid schedule of dishwashing responsibility should change.

By the time we’re adults, we’ve all pretty much figured this out. That, or we’ve just given in to exhaustion and stopped worrying quite so much about what’s “fair” on such a granular level.

Yet in relationships, and especially in polyamorous relationships, the little whisperings of our five-year-old selves sometimes poke through our consciousness and say “It’s not fair!” when things don’t go the way we expect them to go.

Even when we don’t talk about our expectations. Even when we know our expectations are silly. Hell, sometimes even when what’s happening is not only fair, but most excellent as well.


When you’re dealing with human beings, issues of ‘fairness’ sometimes go right out the window. People change, needs change, but often our notions about what is ‘fair’ remain static. Sometimes, our notions of what’s ‘fair’ become so deeply buried that we’re not always even aware of them, or aware of the expectations we carry around with is in regards to what’s fair and what’s not fair.

It pays to remember this, especially when your inner five-year-old starts saying “It’s not fair!” in your ear. Most especially when you’re polyamorous.

I’m not even talking about the obvious situations that make people say “It’s not fair!”, such as situations where one person is an extrovert who finds it easy to meet new people and one person’s an introvert who finds it difficult to meet new people, though I’ve certainly heard many folks cry “It’s not fair!” in situations like that. (“It’s not fair that he seems to have prospective partners lining up around the block and I can’t meet anyone!”) It’s certainly true that some folks find it easier to go out and interact with people than other folks do, but that’s something we all have a measure of control over, after all. At the end of te day, wht would be more fair? Forbidding one’s extroverted partner from being an extrovert?

Nor am I talking about situations where a person who is perhaps of a more monogamous bent says of a polyamorous partner, “It’s not fair that she gets to have two lovers and I only have one!” If you want more than one lover, that’s up to you; if you don’t want more than one lover, then it’s hard to cry “unfair” when you’re involved with someone who does; and in the end, it pays to start relationships with people whose goal in relationship is similar to your own.

I’m talking about the “It’s not fair!” monster that’s far more subtle, and wriggles its way deep into the murk of your default, unexamined assumptions and unvoiced expectations.


This sense of fairness can sneak up on you when you don’t really expect it, during times when you feel that you’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty for a relationship partner and you think that either your own efforts aren’t being rewarded the way you expect (even if you might think you don’t have any expectation of reward at all!) or that someone else is somehow benefitting from your work in ways you didn’t expect.

By way of one real-world example, many years ago I met a lovely young woman with whom I became close friends…eventually.

I say “eventually” because when I first met her, she was extremely introverted, had difficulty opening up to others, and had a lot of trouble communicating or trusting folks around her. She was unpartnered at the time, largely because of this. There were a lot of things about her I liked and admired, so I spent a considerable amount of time and effort in getting to know her and encouraging her to open up to me–a nontrivial investment in a relationship with a person who was never even a lover.

Some time later, at least partly because of the experiences she had with me, she found it much easier to talk to people and to extend herself to others, and she ended up finding a boyfriend. Would it have been reasonable for me to be upset, and to say “Hey, look, I put in all the work here, and now someone else gets the benefit?” No, but I do know people who seemed to feel that I should have responded that way.

Another real-world example: Some people I’ve spoken to online were part of a polyamorous triad that included a woman who was facing major upheaval in her life. She’d just come out of a bitter divorce, and was feeling emotionally and financially vulnerable. She needed, and asked for, a great deal of support from her partners, which they offered without question. Later, when she found herself on more solid footing and felt emotionally ready to engage the world again, she began exploring a new relationship, which made her partners feel put out; they felt that since they had supported her through her divorce, they should have some more input in how quickly and to what extent any new partnerships formed.


The common thread in these examples is the idea “I have done something for someone, and I should be the person who benefits from that work.” Or, perhaps more simply, “It’s not fair! Look at what I had to go through to get what I got; why should other people get it more easily? How come I had to do all this work and the next person to come down the pike didn’t?”

And the answer, of course, is “nobody owes you for the experiences that you have had. In fact, you have done something wonderful; you have helped to bring down barriers in someone’s heart, and helped that person find a place where they can now experience the world more fully and engage others in a way that they couldn’t before. Go you!”

In other words, you’ve made a positive difference in someone’s life…and you’re now upset because you feel it’s not fair that other folks get to benefit from that? Well, that’s what happens when you make someone’s life better; the whole world gets just a little bit brighter. Why would anyone want to be stingy about that?

I think, when feelings like this arise (and they do in lots of little ways, all the time), the key thing to keep in mind is this: “Have I done what I did because I expected something in return? Would I go back in time and tell the other person, ‘I will only help you if you give me something I want’?” If the answer is “no,” then let it go.

It’s sneaky, sometimes, how the things we do can come attached to expectations we might not even realize that we have until they’re not met. And it’s important to guard carefully against these unspoken, unacknowledged expectations.


I’m not saying that issues of fairness have no place in relationships, mind you. The fairness that is important in relationships isn’t the tit-for-tat “I did the dishes last night, and we’re supposed to take turns, so it isn’t fair that I have to do them tonight too!” or the “I worked hard to carry Sally through a difficult emotional time, so it should be hard for anyone else to get close to her too!” variety.

In fact, sometimes a tit-for-tat approach to fairness creates a situation that’s decidedly unfair. Another real-world example, which I’ve used before: Many years ago, I knew a married couple that was exploring polyamory. The wife had a girlfriend for many years, but when he finally found a girlfriend, the wife became overwhelmingly, irrationally jealous. After dealing with this jealousy in the typical fashion for a while (you know, passive-aggressive acting out, that sort of thing), she finally went to him and told him, look, I want you to dump your girlfriend. I’ll dump my other partner too, so it’ll be fair.

Three broken hearts for the price of one is a peculiar definition of the word “fair” in my book; which illustrates yet another important point: symmetry is not the same thing as fairness.

Personally, the kind of fairness that really counts is the kind that begins with compassion. Doing the dishes two days in a row because your sister has just had a root canal is compassionate (I’ve had a root canal, and believe me, the last thing you want to be doing when the anaesthetic starts to wear off is standing upright). On the other hand, saying “I’ll dump my partner of many years just to get you to dump yours” is hardly compassionate.

Fairness matters. Symmetry is not the same thing as fairness; fairness means saying things like “I realize that my own insecurity belongs to me, so I will not use it as a blunt instrument on you, nor expect you to plot your life around it. I may, however, ask you to talk to me while I’m dealing with it.”

This isn’t the kind of fairness our mental five-year-old understands. Our inner five-year-old is far more likely to be worried about someone else getting something that we don’t have, or getting something for a lower “price” than we paid for it. At the end of the day, though, our mental five-year-old isn’t really likely to make our lives better, no matter how much of a fuss he puts up.