Author Archives: tacit

Link o’ the day: ACLU intends to take up arms on behalf of polyamory

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http://yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=27865

In response to a student’s question about gay marriage, bigamy and polygamy in certain communities, Strossen said the ACLU is actively fighting to defend freedom of choice in marriage and partnerships.

“We have defended the right for individuals to engage in polygamy,” Strossen said. “We defend the freedom of choice for mature, consenting individuals.”

So polyamory is on the radar for both right-wing conservative religious groups and for pro-rights groups. Interesting times, indeed. This could get really, really hairy for a while.

Faith can move mountains? Not quite.

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You hear it all the time. If a person had as much faith as a mustard seed, then that person can move a mountain. Faith is all you need. Faith can work miracles. Right? Right?

Weeeeeeeellll…no.

Sorry. It sounds nice, it appeals to that part of us that wants dominion over the natural world, but…it ain’t so. Hate to have to break it to you, guys. It just plain ain’t true–at least, not in the way that people think it’s true.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Having a belief that something is possible is a prerequisite to doing that thing; if you don’t think you can do it, you ain’t gonna try. Faith, at least faith of the “I believe this is within the realm of the possible” variety (rather than the Mark Twain “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so” variety) is necessary and essential to anyone who wants to move a mountain.

But it doesn’t stop there. If you have faith that you can move a mountain, but that’s all you got, then the mountain ain’t moving. Ain’t no way. You see, it takes more than faith–you have to have faith the task can be done, but then you also have to do the work. (Moving mountains, just for the record, is backbreaking work. Mountains are big. I mean, really, really big. Tens of millions of tons of rock, and you gotta move it all from here to there.) Faith alone will get you butkis; the way faith moves mountains is by enabling you to do the work it takes to move a mountain, giving you the belief that you can figure out how to get it done.

In the case of literally moving a mountain, having faith that you can do it is what gets you started; but from there on, you still have a whole lot of work to do. It helps to have one of these:

Now, this machine required a lot of faith to build. It took faith that such a huge (and expensive!) project was possible. It took faith that it would work. It took faith that it would work and do so in a way that was more efficient than just spending the same amount of money on a whole bunch of people with shovels.

Faith is the first step, but if you believe faith alone can move a mountain, you’re deluding yourself. Faith without work is nothing; faith without the investment it takes to get things done is pointless narcissism. Faith may get the ball rolling, but it’s work, not faith, that gets the mountain from wherever it is to wherever you want it to be.

Now, this is true of any task, even something a lot smaller and closer to home than activist geology. A person who tells you that faith can make a relationship, for example? Bullshit. Relationships don’t succeed by faith. Relationships succeed because the people involved have invested in good communication skills, a suite of problem-solving and conflict-resolution tools, integrity, trust, honesty, self-knowledge, compassion, and respect. It is those things, not faith, that build a good relationship. It requires a belief that a good relationship is possible and desireable to make the other things seem worthwhile, but it’s not faith alone that does the job.

Faith can move mountains? Hogwash. Faith, of and by itself, can’t move a paper clip.

By the way, if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him. 🙂

Astrologer sues NASA over Deep Impact space probe

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Yep, you read that right. A Russian astrologer has filed a $300,000,000 lawsuit against NASA, claiming that the Deep Impact probe, which intercepted comet Tempel 1, “violated her spiritual rights.”

“The experiment, in which NASA fired a projectile the size of a fridge at the comet Monday, was an attack on “the holy of holies,” Marina Bai’s law suit claims, according to Russian press reports. Her suit, filed at a Moscow court, claims violation of her “life and spiritual values.”

“In any case, it is obvious that elements of the comet’s orbit and associated ephemera will change after the explosion, which interferes with my practice of astrology and deforms my horoscope,” the Izvestia daily quoted Bai as saying.

Folks, you just can’t get enough of this sort of nuttiness for my entertainment dollar!

The weird, weird, weird weekend…and tits!

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Okay, so.

The weekend started innocently enough. Saturday, zensidhe and fangly celebrated the anniversary of their creation in some sinister government laboratory and their birth, respectively; the theme of the party was “Mad Scientist,” which afforded many photo ops I may eventually get around to posting. Alcohol, guns, goth chicks, datan0de in a lab jacket…all the usual things one might expect from a party at zensidhe‘s place.

Now, ordinarily, a party at zensidhe‘s place would provide enough material for several LiveJournal entries, not to mention a couple police reports and a sexual escapade or two of the kind that creates moments you look back on later and plow into a parked car. Sunday, though, brought something that has distracted Shelly and I since, so I can’t really post appropriately about the party.

“What did Sunday bring?” I hear you ask. Well, thanks for asking! Sunday brought this:

Shelly and I went for a walk in the park late Sunday evening. This particular park is in downtown Tampa, and while we were on the back stretch of the park, we heard a meowing behind us. We turn around, and this kitty comes running at us as fast as her little kitty legs will carry her, and launches herself into Shelly’s arms, purring madly. She was skinny to the point of being gaunt and very dirty, and we didn’t have the heart to leave her. We carried her the three quarters of a mile or so to the car, and she never protested except to hiss and spit whenever anyone else walked by. Kind of weird.

Now, I was worried that our other cat, Snow Crash, would cause a big problem. We rescued him as a kitten last Christmas (what is it with national holidays and cats with us???!!), anbd he’s quite aggressive and playful. I needn’t have worried. As soon as we got home, the new cat proceeded to terrorize the living bejeezus out of Snow Crash, even though he’s eleven pounds to her five. We named her “Molly,” after the character in William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

And…and…and…

It looks like she’s pregnant(!).

Monday, Shelly and S and I went to Orlando to visit with S‘s other boyfriend and to connect with nihilus, phyrra, and some friends of theirs for dinner and fireworks. The dinner was good, the fireworks were spectacular, I got one of the very few good pictures I have of S:

And I promised tits in the title. Since everyone1 knows the only way to get people to read large swaths of text is to offer them tits, without further ado, I present phyrra at zensidhe‘s party:

Look! Tits! (Borderline not-safe-for-work, depending on how liberal your work environment is)

Because the search for Truth is a valuable thing…

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…I bring you the next chapter in the ongoing saga of “Is this cool, or does this suck?”

Together, we can find the One Universal Truth!

Ten Things I learned about the Future…

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at Wired’s NextFest, A funny, scathing take on Wired Magazine’s festival of tomorrow. (Which does, by the way, include a reference to flying cars. I keep being promised flying cars in the future. Dammit, I want my flying car now! Where’s my goddamn flying car?

My own favorite news from the year 2100:

The elderly Japanese people of the future will be so desperately lonely for companionship that they’ll purchase slightly creepy android replicas of the drug-addled but brilliant sci-fi author Phillip K. Dick. Why the Japanese, and why Phillip K. Dick? It’s a long story, and I’m not sure I fully understood it all when the android’s makers explained it to me. I think I probably read the wrong books growing up as a kid, or maybe I now watch the wrong TV shows.

Man, the next singularity can’t get here fast enough.

That “Advice to my 16-Year-Old Self” meme

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Okay, okay, c’mon. Everyone wishes they could go back in time–“If I knew then what I know now”–except that the experiences you had because you didn’t know then are the reason you know now. Good judgement comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgement.

Which is not to say that there aren’t things I’d tell my 16-year-old self. If I could go back in time, the things I’d tell my 16-year-old self are:

– When Microsoft goes public, convince your parents to mortgage the house and spend money on stock.

– When Apple goes public, wait ’til after the release of the //c, and buy stock. Sell it just before Steve Jobs gets forced out, then buy a bunch more just before he comes back.

– All that time you spent teaching yourself everything about CP/M? Spend it learning more about Unix instead. Pay particular attention to networking. Pay extra special attention to IP networking; in a few months, the Arpanet is going to change over to TCP/IP, and the new network will be dubbed “the Internet.” It’s going to be a big deal, I promise.

– The Illinois Lotto numbers on the week of your sixteenth birthday will be 09-11-36-37-39-40. Buy more Microsoft stock.

It’s the user interface, stupid!

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or, why the iPod is raking in the dough and Linux is still a non-issue on the desktop

I hate my cell phone. It’s a modern, Kyocera flip-phone with a color LCD and a camera and an Internet connection, and I hate it. But it’s a step up; I hate it less than I’ve hated any other cell phone I’ve ever owned.

The first cell phone I owned had a user interface so abysmal that in order to access the built-in contacts list, I had to press nine buttons. Considering that here in the US, a phone number is only seven digits long without the area code and ten digits long with the area code, that’s almost unbelievably lame.

For some reason, every cell phone in the world has a crap user interface. It’s a testament that I hate my new cell phone least of all, and consider it a great leap forward, because its interface is merely awful and not abysmal.

The Apple iPod is, by any measure of the word “success,” a wild success beyond what even its creators could possibly have predicted. It’s selling like mad; it’s become a cultural icon; car manufacturers are putting iPod docks in their dashboards, purse manufacturers are making purses with iPod slots. Yet for all that, it’s a simple gadget. It plays music, that’s it. It’s expensive; it llacks the fancy features (such as radio tuners) of cheaper MP3 players; what’s the big deal?

The big deal, as Apple understands and everyone else seems to have forgotten, is that user interface matters. The iPod is a runaway success because it does one thing and does it well. The user interface of the iPod is a marvel of simplicity and elegance; all the other MP3 players on the market seem awkward, clunky, and clumsy by comparison.

Nobody gets it, except for Apple. Nobody understands that the way a person interacts with a device is as important as what the device does.

Take my car stereo (please!). It’s a Pioneer model, and it’s a microcosm of bad design. I can see my car stereo being used to teach a class in “How to Fuck Up a User interface 101.”

It does two things: it plays CDs and it plays radio stations. The power button is also the button that switches between radio and CD; you want to turn it off when you’re listening to a CD, you hit POWER POWER. Intuitive, right? Uh, no. But the controls won’t tell you this; the power-cum-radio-cum-CD button is labelled “Mode.”

Not that you’ll ever be able to read it. It’s labelled “Mode” in five-point light-gray type on a dark-gray background. It’s difficult to read if you’re sitting nose to nose with the faceplate; from the driver’s seat, two and a half feet away, it might as well not be labelled at all.

It has a number of different controls and modes. Many of these are reached by pressing a “Shift” button, also labelled in five-point type; the button is tiny, about as big around as the guts of a cheap disposable pen, and you hold it down wat the same time as you press one or more other buttons to access various functions.

These people were not thinking. Not even a little bit. They clearly did not think about the fact that the operator would be sitting too far away to read microscopic print, nor about the fact that the operator would be working the device while driving a moving vehicle in traffic. And, like my cell phone, my car stereo has a user interface which is actually better than most. Shelly’s car stereo has an auxiliary input mode which you get to by pressing the power button; to turn the stereo on and off, you press the power button and hold it down for two seconds. To insert or eject a CD, you remove the stereo’s face plate. (No, it’s not a CD changer; strictly one disc at a time!)

User interface matters. User interface on an MP3 player makes a difference to the user’s experience with the gadget; user interface on a car stereo can make the difference between life and death. Yet every day, we are surrounded by devices, from stereos to cell phones to fax machines to microwave ovens, that have a crap user interface. Manufacturers think that what attracts us to their products is a long list of features–“Look! This car stereo pulls in stations from Kenya, and then translates them into English while piping them directly into the brain of the driver!” They add functions to their gadgets without ever thinking about the way people use their gadgets.

I don’t want a video game console that plays CDs. I guaranfuckingTEE you that if I’m buying a video game console, I already have a CD player. If for some reason I don’t have a CD player, I am not going to have a set of external speakers either, which means I’ll be listening to my CDs through…what, the shitty speakers in my TV set? I don’t think so. I buy a video game console to play video games. If the console plays the games I like, I buy it. If it does not play the games I like, I don’t buy it, and making it play music CDs will not make me buy it, okay?

Ditto for MP3 players. If I buy an MP3 player, it’s because I want to fill it up with songs I like. If I want to listen to the radio, which plays commercials and lots of songs I don’t like, I can do it for a whole lot less money than an MP3 player–and if I’m giving the choice between listening to songs I like and songs on the radio, I’ll take the songs I like, mkay? Every supposed new “iPod killer” that comes out, and falls flat on its face, fails for the same reason: they take an MP3 player, add something else on to it, and glue it all together with a crap user interface–all without the slightest thought to how people use the goddamn thing.

I just put the new Fedora Core on my Linux machine. Linux, once the choice only of hard-core technogeeks, really has come a long way. But it still has very serious interface problems.

Every Linux enthusiast I’ve ever spoken to raves about Linux’s functionality, its price (free), its power, its features. Why, they all lament, do people continue to use Microsoft crapware, when a better and more secure operating system is available for free?

It’s the interface, stupid. I’ve been using computers since 1976, I’ve been using Unixes of various flavors for almost as long as Unix has existed, and it’s still a pain in the royal fucking ass for me to install and configure a Linux system.

It’s worlds better than it was. Good Linux distros come with bootable CD-ROMs that take you through the installation in a graphical environment; indeed, the installer for Fedora Core is now prettier and more elegant than the installer for Windows XP.

Prettier and more elegant, but fragile, so very, very fragile.

When I ran that pretty, elegant installer, it got about a third of the way through the install, then suddenly disappeared to be replaced with several screenfuls of decidedly un-pretty and unfriendly text. Error messages, stack backtraces, exceptions…yuck.

Restarted the installer, same thing again. And again.

I finally puzzled out from the cryptic exceptions and backtraces that the installer was having a heart attack over a piece of hardware in my system; pulled the network card, and the install worked. (Strangely, when I put the card back, it was recognized and worked without a hitch.)

It’s the user interface, stupid. I don’t care how many features you have or how powerful you are; I don’t care if you’re cheaper than an iPod or cheaper than Windows. It’s the user interface, stupid! Even today, the Linux interface still feels unnecessarily clumsy and awkward compared to the Mac’s or (God forbid) even the Fisher-Price interface Windows XP offers us. For a long-term Linux user, the various awkwardnesses and clumsy design choices of the interface are not an issue, because the long-term user has learned ways to deal with, or occasionally work around, the shortcomings in Gnome and KDE, and of course he can always drop down to a terminal window (it’s the user interface, stupid!) to get things done.

Back to my cell phone. It does not do the things I think it should. It offers me call-waiting, for example. I’m on a call and another call comes in; it seems to me that pressing the “answer” button will let me talk to the new caller. But it doesn’t. It brings up a menu asking me what I want to do. Put the old caller on hold and answer the new call? Ignore the new call? (If I wanted to do that, I would not press any button, goddamnit!) Hang up the old call and take the new?

Now, when I end the new call, and want to go back to the old, I can’t press the “answer call” or “hangup” button. Instead, I press the “options” button. Do I want to hang up? Do I want to swap calls? Do I want to disconnect both calls?

Now, you might think that swapping calls would put caller #2 on hold, and give me #1, but no. It puts both calls on hold, then gives me another menu. Do I want to release #2 and pick up #1? Release #1 and pick up #2? Hang up both? No, goddamn it, I want to swap calls! You know, swap one for the other! Trying to figure all this out quickly is a pain in the ass, especially in a darkened room.

It’s the user interface, stupid. You want my money, think about how I am going to use your gadget. Don’t make me read your mind. Don’t get clever by making the Power button do a whole bunch of other stuff as well. Don’t present irreleavnt choices when it should be clear from context what I’m trying to do. Use your head. Think about the environment where your device will be used.

You want to know why Apple came in and overnight 0wnz0r3d the entire MP3 market? It’s the user interface, stupid!

Ah, the perfect evening…

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Blade Runner on the TV, a wireless high-speed Net connection from the computer in my lap, and Shelly teaching herself crochet on the couch.

Next weekend is zensidhe‘s Mad Scientist Birthday Party, and Shelly and I have found the perfect gift. Or, at least, the perfect gift that doesn’t require batteries, difficult-to-obtain radioactive materials, or inconveniently large quantities of goat’s blood…but I digress.

Speaking of Blade Runner, though–when I was a kid in elementary school, they kept telling me that when I grew up, I’d have flying cars. I’m still waiting. Where the hell is my goddamn flying car??!

Some thoughts on being special

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I’ve known many people in polyamorous relationships who have a need to feel special, and try to meet this need by reserving certain activities to specific partners, or by placing limits on activities which their partners are permitted to engage in with others. The feeling is that by reserving certain special activities to one relationship, that relationship has something about it which is special.

I think that’s a dangerous idea, and I think that if you’re not careful, that idea can bite you in the ass.

The fact is, every relationship is special simply by virtue of the fact that every relationship is unique. It is not possible for a relationship not to be unique; every person is unique, and the interactions between any set of two people is also unique. Even if I were to date a pair of identical twins, and do exactly the same thing with both of them, and take them both to the same restaurants, and have sex the same number of times in the same position with each, those relationships would be unique. There’s no way for them not to be! Even identical twins aren’t the same person, and the quality of my relationships arises from who my partners are, not from what we do.

Preserving some kind of unique action as a symbol of that specialness is not necessary; the relationships are special, and no two relationships are interchangeable or replaceable. The value I get from my partners has nothing to do with those things we do together; person B can not rob person A of value by doing the same things that person A does.

The danger of relying on some kind of special activity in order to make a relationship feel special comes from the fact that any sense of specialness that arises from an activity or from a symbol must always be a specialness that is fragile and unstable. If my partner feels special only because I do thus-and-such with her and her alone, then she must always know, somewhere deep down inside, that that specialness can be taken away from her; if I do that same thing with another person, then her sense of specialness is gone.

On the other hand, specialness that comes from who she is rather than from what she does can never be taken away. It’s a sense of specialness that is cast in iron; it can never be destroyed and can never be dispelled; it’s rock-solid, because it does not depend on anything outside of her. Nothng I do with her or with anyone else can shake that sense of specialness, because it does not rest on anything which depends on me.

Symbols are tricky things. People often confuse the symbol with the thing the symbol represents; look at all the people who want to pass an anti-flag-desecration amendment to the Constitution, for example. These people do not realize that a flag is only a symbol; destroying a flag does not damage or in any way harm the thing that the flag represents.

It’s the same thing with relying on unique activities and other symbols of a relationship’s specialness in order to feel that the relationship is special. If that feeling of specialness relies on some tokenor symbol of that specialness, then that feeling of specialness is vulnerable, and easily damaged; it’s not a feeling of specialness that you can ever really be secure in. On the other hand, a sense of specialness that relies on no external factor is a sense of specialness far more secure.

Now, I think this is not obvious to many people, particularly to people already struggling with security to begin with. If you have invested some specific activity with your sense of specialness, and your security relies on feeling special, then giving up that specific action seems terrifying, because you may feel that if you lose this special action, you may also lose your specialness, and with it your sense of security. It’s not intuitively obvious at all that you’ll actually be more secure, both in your sense of specialness and your relationship, if you do not rely on some external factor to make you feel special.

But there it is. Relationships aren’t always intuitively obvious.