Fraser Sherman's Blog

The camel’s hump is an ugly lump

frasersherman — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 23:27:50 +0000

(Title courtesy of Kipling).
I’m beginning to suspect I have a problem with Wednesday, aka hump day.
Back at the Destin Log, Thursday was always my off-day—close enough to week’s end that I felt pressured to get everything done, but far enough away I couldn’t actually finish and relax. Lately I’ve noticed that while Thursday is fine, my focus seems to flag consistently on Wednesday. It was particular acute this week, partly because I got up late (having to rush through my morning routines always throws me off) and partly just … well, Wednesday, I guess (imagine me saying it the same way Jack Nicholson’s partner in Chinatown says “It’s Chinatown.” Just because it’s cooler that way).
That aside, the week went very well.
•Having learned from my writing group that I have a tendency to omit “he saids” and “she saids” to the point it’s impossible to follow the conversation (and believe me, they’re quite right), I went back over my old novel, Questionable Minds with that awareness. While I didn’t find a huge number of glitches, I did find a fair number. Hopefully it will do better when I send it out next month.
•I held a critique session for some of my fellow group members at my house, the subject being The Impossible Takes a Little Longer; the bribe for reading the whole thing being food (chickpeas with tomatoes, garlic and parmesan; white bean soup with pine nuts and peas; and a granny apple crisp). Only one of my cohorts turned up (the food didn’t go to waste, as TYG and I have been munching on it since), but he and TYG (who generously read the novel in the two days before the meet) gave me some excellent critiquing.
I would loosely divide the criticism into a)stuff I hadn’t thought was a problem, but is; b)stuff I that’s a problem because I didn’t set it up right; c)stuff I may decide is not a problem at all; d)a couple of great honking problems which will be a real bear to fix. I will set the critique aside (it’s safe on my computer for now) until some time next month when I take a look, decide what needs changing and figure out how (the “d” problems will be a challenge, but my unconscious may have coughed up an answer by then).
•The only short story I got any work on was Savage Years, but it went great. I didn’t finish it, but I got three quarters through and everything looks better: The individual character arcs, the 1960s background, the level of tension. So, yay!
•I think I mentioned a magazine had expressed interested in an article proposal, then broke contact. They emailed today and said they’re interested in the article. Pay is low. Very low. But I’d like a new magazine clip for my portfolio and for various reasons I’d like to do this article, so I’m going ahead (I’ve scoured the magazines that pay well without success).
•One of my Elance bids (for a film treatment) got a nibble, but I don’t know if we can agree on price. However, even getting interest is cheering.
•I applied for a bunch of other jobs as well: A couple of magazine freelance gigs, an online humor slot and a trivia-question writer. I don’t know if any of them will pay off, but it’s been a while since I came across anything that felt like a good prospect, so I’m encouraged.
And last but not least, eHows:
•What Is Used to Combine and Transmit Data on High Speed Lines?
•What Happens When You Reset IE for Silverlight?
•The Atoh Function in C
•What Is an Antenna Mask Filter?
Torque Problems for a Turntable
•Sirius Display Problems
•How to Read Audio Levels in the Android Developer App
•Just-in-Time Debugging in Adobe
•Allegro Vs. OrCAD
•What Are Linear Programming Computerized Systems?

Bookmarks accumulating again

frasersherman — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:44:11 +0000

So here we go!
•Working on eHow, I’ve frequently been frustrated by discovering relevant papers I have to subscribe to. This article discusses why that is, and why it’s bad.
•Echidne of the Snake explains why the free market isn’t making healthcare more efficient.
•It’s easy to think we were better off 50 years ago if you’re not, say, a black woman. Related blog posts of mine here, here and here.
•This Hathor Legacy post discusses why stock minority characters are a bigger problem than stock white male characters. I touch on the same thing (but not as well) here.
•The US has a new bird species … that may already be extinct.
•Good news: A genocidal dictator we backed for years in Guatemala may be coming to trial. Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald discusses some examples of American jurisprudence.

Hulk will smash again!

frasersherman — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:54:19 +0000

Last month, I described how the Atlantic’s economics writer Megan McArdle explained that, if Americans are poor, it’s their own fault for making bad life choices—and, in fact, it’s insulting to the poor to think social situations, the economy or bad luck might have anything to do with it.
This month, she goes that article one better, asserting that its a Bad Thing if the poor get to rise above their station and make more money (it’s not a direct link but you can click through to McArdle’s piece).
Why is this bad? Because if the poor get better jobs, they’re taking them from someone in the middle class or better. Do we really want to risk our kids losing out and getting crappy job because the talented poor kids beat them out? Sure, liberals say they want economic mobility, but they’re lying! It’s a zero sum game and they’re going to protect what they’ve got, just like everyone else!
While McArdle insists that she’s really, really concerned about lack of social mobility (and currently in America it’s very, very low), her actual arguments amount to endorsing a class system: It’s perfectly natural and understandable and reasonable for people who already have the money to keep out the filthy unwashed hordes trying to take the nice things away. And everyone who claims to want to change that is lying.
First off, her argument that we can’t all have nice things is false. It’s true “we can’t all be above average,” but we can all be above poverty level: Back in the 1940s and 1950s, we had a country of steadily rising income for the upper, middle and working class alike. The poor were still below average, but the average was constantly rising up.
Likewise, while some schools will be worse than others, that doesn’t mean we can’t have a country where even poor inner city schools (or backwoods country schools) rise above some basic level of quality, so that everyone can have a decent education rather than just swapping which demographic gets in the good school.
Second, why stop with the poor? After all, even if the poor don’t have economic mobility, that doesn’t secure the jobs for the middle and upper classes. Someone in the same class could come along and take the job. Some other rich person’s kid could take the slot in the elite private school you wanted your kid to get into. Why is it that only competition from the poor is a problem? Why isn’t McArdle worrying about that threat? (My personal guess would be because the subtext of her article is “The 1 percent should feel completely justified in hogging everything.” Or it could be that aspect didn’t even occur to her).
Third, isn’t the reason rich people get the big bucks supposedly because they’re the big risk takers? They gamble their money to start new businesses, make investments, open new product lines? Yet according to McArdle, they actually can’t handle the idea of competition: They’re so timid about it, they want a system where they and their kids can’t lose, ever. And that this is actually meritocratic.
This isn’t a new thought. Multiple liberal blogs have tracked the arguments from the business sector that they must have “certainty” in order to run their businesses. They can’t be expected to invest when the economy is uncertain. So government’s priority should be to baby them and make them feel they’re completely secure and won’t lose any money down the road.
The words “free market” and “meritocracy” do not mean what these people think they mean.

Why I read what I read and watch what I watch

frasersherman — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:31:51 +0000

In theory, what I read and watch should reflect what I like. In practice, it reflects my life just as much.
Not in the sense that I read to make sense of life or my personal dilemmas, because I don’t do that. It’s more that my taste shifts and adapts to what’s available.
When I was in my twenties and dead broke, for example, what I read depended on what was available in the library, and what turned up at the used book store. A lot of standalone novels, partial series and obscure authors in my collection come from those days. Buying new was something almost unthinkable, except for a few favored authors.
During this period, I didn’t have anything but basic cable, so I wound up watching lots of crappy recent films that showed up syndication (slasher films, horny teen comedies, etc.).
As my situation changed, so did my entertainment. When I acquired more cable, including TNT and American Movie Classic, I watched more classic films (TNT, when it started, ran the same kind of fair TCM does now). When I had enough money for The Movie Channel, I watched more recent films (but better quality than syndication). When I had Bravo, I watched foreign films and indie stuff (AMC and TNT having dropped most of the movies I liked). Then I got Turner Classic and it’s back to classics.
I no longer have cable, but between Netflix and my own DVDs—well, there’s not really any pattern. I watch Shakespeare. I watch horror. I’m working my way through James Bond and Woody Allen. There’s actually more available than I can hope to watch (which, while frustrating, is a Good Thing).
With books, it’s not quite the same. With more money and a wide array of used-book services over the Internet—not to mention Durham’s excellent library, and my own collection to reread, my options are pretty much unlimited (unless I decide I want a mint copy of Action #1 or a first edition of Tale of Genji). Yet my reading overwhelmingly skews toward history and fantasy—apparently my tastes are a lot narrower in print than in video.
Perversely, now that I can afford to select what I want, I’m also slightly overwhelmed by the options. The days when I had a serious chance at reading all the published fantasy (at least from the big publishers) are gone. Interestingly, without that impetus, I don’t feel quite as eager to read new fantasy at all; except for a few favorite authors, I’m just as happy reading what I’ve already got.
Comic books, on the other hand, are definitely a money thing. I stopped buying all but a few books because I had limited funds (back when my previous employer was underpaying me) and I could get more entertainment with a Showcase Presents or Marvel Essentials than spending the same amount of money on new books. So I shifted accordingly.
Oh, plus the DC Reboot has now wiped out the few comics I was still buying.
I’m not sure there’s any lesson to draw from all this. Other than that what I read isn’t as simple as “I know what I like.”

Undead sexist cliches: There’s only one way for goverment to support marriage

frasersherman — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:19:18 +0000

David Brooks has stated, repeatedly, that the government’s top priority in the current economic crisis should be cutting the deficit by cutting Social Security (though taxes on the rich is also very important).
That makes it a little surprising that David Brooks actually favors increasing welfare—as a way to make it easier for guys to get married.
In an earlier January column, Brooks asserts that one of the things he likes about Rick Santorum is that Santorum understands that “If you believe in the centrality of family, you have to have a government that both encourages marriage and also supplies wage subsidies to men to make them marriageable.” I can’t find any reference to Santorum supporting such a thing, so maybe it’s just what Brooks imagines he’d say, but either way, Brooks clearly thinks it’s a fabulous idea.
It is true, as James Taranto notes, that poor guys are more likely to stay single than guys with more money. It doesn’t follow that therefore having more money will make them more marriageable. If a woman’s only objection to marrying a guy is that he doesn’t make enough to support her (or that combined, they couldn’t afford kids), maybe; but there are an awful lot of reasons people don’t get married and finance is only one of them.
The idea government should intervene to create traditional 1950s marriages has been around for a while. Back in the late 1980s IIRC, a writer arguing that we needed to boost the native American birthrate asserted that the government should start paying women to stay home with kids. Pat Robertson expressed a similar thought a couple of years later. Pat Buchanan has demanded white women stay home to boost the birthrate but didn’t suggest paying them extra.
Almost all these ideas seem to rest on the principle that what this country really needs is a return to 1950s nuclear family life. Man at work. Women at home raising babies. I see a whiff of that in Brooks’ argument too: There are a variety of ways the government could structure an aid program to support families but the one he focuses is on seems specifically designed to make men the breadwinners.
Alternative family structures are not on the table. Nobody has suggested (that I’m aware of) financial aid for men who stay home and raise the kids while the mother works. Nor are Brooks, Robertson or Buchanan advocating that government should make daycare more affordable or come up with other approaches that would make life easier for two-parent working families. A number of right-wingers actively decry programs of that sort because they run against traditional gender roles: A family where the mother works outside the home isn’t the right sort of family to deserve help. The only fit place for a woman is in the home.
I guess when Brooks discussed his love for Victorian morality, he wasn’t kidding.

Links for a Sunday

frasersherman — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 17:02:43 +0000

•Newt Gingrich, the man who once asserted it was important to mention Monica Lewinsky at every public appearance, now feels it’s despicable for people to bring up his own infidelities. Of course, Rush Limbaugh has explained it’s not Newt’s fault because he was brainwashed by the sexual revolution.
•Despite protests from religious conservatives, employers will have to offer contraception in their health-insurance plans (churches and other religious bodies excepted).
•The best way to help the poor is to condemn their immoral lifestyles!
•Would Antony Bourdain get to lecture people on healthy eating if he were a woman?
•And finally, my latest And column, on why “pragmatic” foreign policy usually isn’t.

Movies and Books

frasersherman — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:14:45 +0000

LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1961) is the art film other art films probably laugh at for its artiness. The story has a man recounting to a woman at a resort their passionate meeting the year before, which she claims not to remember—but it’s the arty visuals that have the real impact, such as the odd, mannered way people seem to stand in every scene, as if it were a protracted dream sequence. Memorable, but not in a good way. “You knew it was possible and now there’s nothing else for you to do.”
Having treated myself to Universal’s Frankenstein Legacy collection, I kicked off with FRANKENSTEIN (1931), in which Frankenstein (Colin Clive) sets out to create a living body from dead tissue and thereby brings Boris Karloff cinematic immortality. Old-fashioned in some ways, but memorable, with its eerie sets and solid performances: Karloff is awesome even under heavy makeup, but Clive and Frederick Kerr as Frankenstein’s father are both excellent too. Some plot elements are less effective—the idea the Creature’s brain is defective doesn’t add to the plot (would a normal person tolerate the treatment Karloff endures any better?) but it’s understandable how this film became a template for so many others even at a mere 75 minutes. The audio commentary is also excellent. “So far he’s been in complete darkness—wait until I bring him into the light.”

IN GREAT WATERS by Kit Whitfield is an alt.history fantasy involving a power struggle for the British crown in a world where the monarchs of Europe have intermarried with merfolk (security to prevent the mers destroying their shipping) and over the years have become heavily inbred. Well done, and interesting in that it’s one of the few fantasies where someone wanting to be king or emperor isn’t automatically proof of villainy.
DEEP SECRET reworks a lot of Diana Wynne Jones’ favorite tropes, such as a covert cabal running the world behind the scenes, parallel worlds and parents forcing their kids to become what they don’t want to be. As usual, Jones never lets them feel like formula as she tells the story of a Magid (the wizard equivalent to the Green Lantern Corps) tries to recruit a new apprentice (ruling out one young woman who’s so Obnoxious and Irritating—why, he can’t stand her!) only to discover a sinister conspiracy to conquer an empire which he has to fight while in the middle of an SF convention (amazingly, Jones manages to make that entertaining too).Well done.
EVERY LIVING THING: Man’s Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life From Nanobacteria to New Monkeys by Rob R. Dunn traces human efforts to study biodiversity from Linnaeus’s classification efforts through one researcher’s dream of identifying every species in a square mile of Costa Rica to the constant history of unexpected discoveries such as life on the ocean floor, gathered around volcanic vents or living in oil deposits (raising the question of how deep into the Earth the bacteria go, and whether they could be under the rocks of Mars as well). Interesting, though it could have been better written (Dunn’s habit of guessing what drives various scientists to their obsessions gets old fast).
ELFLAND by Freda Warrington is a dreary novel about the relationship between an Ideal and a Troubled Family (both elvish and living in a small English country town), complicated by the Troubled Patriarch’s role as guardian of the gates into faerie, and his Obviously Crazy insistence that he can’t open them because of the terrible threat on the other side … About two-thirds mainstream novel and one-third fantasy and none of the thirds worked for me (DWJ’s otherworld trip in Deep Secret was vastly more effective than anything here.

Not profitable, but productive

frasersherman — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 00:52:58 +0000

So Wednesday, as I sat down to work on eHows, I discover the network is down. It turned out to be a statewide problem: Time-Warner says it fixed everything but 9 a.m., but our network, at least, took a lot longer to return.
Between that and the Monday holiday, my eHows were low again, but writing overall went well.
•I reached the point in Brain From Outer Space where I’ve been stuck for so long, and with my latest changes, didn’t feel the dread Warning! voice that says I’ve already screwed things up. More analytically, I think I’ve fixed a lot of the problems that were bugging me about previous drafts (of course, I’ve said that before). From this point on, it’s forward to the end before I go back to the beginning. Of course, after all the changes, I have only a vague idea what happens next …
•The opening chapter of my elves-in-Georgia story, Southern Comfort, really improved thanks to the changes I made last week. When I started thinking what comes next, however, I realized how bad the rest of my previous draft was—lots of talky scenes, arguments with cops, romantic banter and backstory on the town—and no action for three or four chapters. My protagonists need to take action, but I honestly have no idea—yet—how they’re going to do that (without going into detail, the villain isn’t exactly easy to find).
•I did a quick review of The Savage Years and Hi-Diddle-Diddle (the more-likely-to-keep-the-title version of Dum-Dum-Diddle). There’s definite improvement. Room for more improvement, of course, but I think I’m heading in the right direction. I still haven’t got the personalities of the leads in Savage Years quite as sharp as I want them, though.
•I impulsively started a new story, a P.G. Wodehouse-esque fantasy. The intro sounds funny (if I do say so) but I’m not sure where it goes from here. Time will tell.
And now, the eHows for the week:
•What Is a Maize Database?
•Dual HD Vs. Blu-ray DVD
•The Effects of Video Refresh Rate in Flight Simulators
•Are VLANS Routable Across a WAN?
•How to Connect Two Subnets With a Pix
•How to Handle Multiple Projects in Parallel
•Intelligent Network Application Protocols
•Working in Python: Permission Denied
•How to Troubleshoot ColdFusion
•How LinkedIn Uses Memcached
•What Is Disk Spacing?
•Sharing Computers & Lawsuit Risks
•How to Make Calls Through a Cisco TSP
•HLA Syntax Types
•Headend Network Evaluation & Testing
•What Is a Parse Error?

Too many bookmarks

frasersherman — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 08:16:38 +0000

Firefox won’t take any more, so——links!
•The American Thinker explains that we’re on the brink of war with Russia unless we re-elect the Russian puppet, Barack Obama, to do the Kremlin’s bidding.
•One of the arguments against Obama’s health-care plan is that the individual mandate requiring everyone carry health insurance is unconstitutional. Here’s a counter-argument.
•And a counter-argument on another topic: Does the Supreme Court really think campaign contributions equal free speech?
•A blog post on Santorum, the anti-birth control candidate. And here’s one on Ron Paul, the anti-civil rights candidate.
•A good blog post on why Ron Paul is not a magnet for liberals. While Glenn Greenwald has argued that liberals ignore what the war on terror and the war on drugs are doing in order to support Obama——and thereby sell out minorities——the timwise post argues the same can be said for liberals advocating for Paul.
•The effect of U.S. economic policy on Mexico, and Mexican immigration.
•If men are so totally horny and crazy for sex, what’s the point of lingerie?
•A conservative claims that to question the need to invade Iran or that Iran wants nukes is anti-semitism.
•Is there as much fraud in credit-cards as in foreclosures?
•Alicublog has observed in the past that some conservatives feel oppressed because they can’t throw around the n-word. Here’s an example.
•The media rejoice that Romney’s a flip-flopper. More rejoicing here.
•Eyewitness testimony isn’t reliable, but the Supreme Court’s not going to fuss about that.
•As you’ve probably heard, SOPA and PIPA are bad for the Internet. And don’t bet that if they go down this time, they’ll never return. Hollywood’s paying big money and politicians are frequently willing to sell out (case in point).
•The Israeli religious right is showing itself just as anti-woman as the Islamic and Christian right (in one example, a woman receiving an award at a government ceremony is told a man will accept for her as a woman isn’t allowed onstage).
•Slacktivist discusses a recent Supreme Court non-case (it let a lower-court decision stand) that a teacher at an Evangelical Lutheran school isn’t protected by disability laws because the church considers her a minister (and therefore exempt from a lot of the usual anti-discrimination protections).
My immediate thought was that this is a great loophole for churches to fire all kinds of people, but Slacktivist makes a good case that having secular job doesn’t mean you’re not a “minister” even though you’re not clergy. The pagan blog Wild Hunt argues (here and here) that this is an important protection for minority religions that don’t follow a conventional priest/laity structure.
•Rutgers University shrinks the doctoral program while buying a football coach a house.
•In yet another display of defending traditional marriage, Rush Limbaugh explains that when Newt Gingrich cheated on his wife, it was Gingrich who was the victim! Limbaugh’s explanation of how society forced Newt to cheat ranks with Newt’s explanation that Obama mind-controlled him into criticizing Mitt Romney’s “vulture capitalism.”

He’s a centrist, they’re idiots

frasersherman — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:23:29 +0000

Reading Dana Milbank’s column this week, I thought of what media critics have pointed out about the role centrism plays in journalism’s view of the issues, and themselves.
Journalists, according to this theory, see two sides to every story (and only two), both of them irrational and extreme. The center, the median position between them, is always right (I offer a dissenting view here). And journalists themselves are centrists, cool, unbiased thinkers who see things free of ideology, ergo the true center is whatever they believe.
Milbank’s column is a textbook example. His position is to look out at all the Roe vs. Wade protests (it’s the anniversary of the decision coming up), pro and con and conclude that he’s seeing “fact-free spectacles that have less to do with abortion than with raising money for advocacy groups on both sides … If these groups cared as much about the issue as they claim, and didn’t have such strong financial incentives to avoid consensus and compromise, they’d cancel the carnivals and get to work on the one thing everybody agrees would be worthwhile — reducing unwanted pregnancies.”
More specifically, the pro-life side should stop fighting to make it harder for women to obtain birth control, or allowing pharmacists the right not to dispose of it. The pro-choice side should stop “sky is falling warnings about Roe” and acknowledge the other side’s legitimate objections to abortion. In short, both sides are crazy, Milbank is the voice of sanity.
But maybe it’s just me, but there seems to be something off in Milbank’s efforts to equate the two. Pro-life groups (or many of them) are actively working to restrict access to birth control. Pro-choice women are … saying the other side is wrong. One of these things is not like the other (see another example here).
Even setting aside Milbank’s centrist pose, his argument is crap. Some pro-lifers don’t agree reducing unwanted pregnancies is worthwhile unless it’s done by not having sex: As I’ve mentioned before, Rick Santorum thinks any effort to prevent pregnancy is unnatural. Some pro-choicers work hard on preventing unplanned pregnancy, or hasn’t Milbanks heard about an organization called Planned Parenthood?
Nor are warnings about Roe “sky is falling” irrationalism. It’s eminently possible that given enough presidents appointing enough conservative Supreme Court justices, Roe could be overturned. It’s also possible that by slapping on regulations on abortion clinics, states could make abortion unavailable in practice (which is presumably what Milbank refers to when he mentions Roe as irrelevant). And those of us on the pro-choice side don’t believe the pro-lifers are expressing legitimate concerns. I don’t think abortion is murder, I do believe it’s a woman’s right and I think a lot of pro-lifers (not all) are motivated, in part, by a general distaste for women being able to have sex freely.
That said, plenty of right-to-lifers do believe they’re fighting to prevent the murder of innocent babies. The protests over Roe aren’t a carnival for them either: They see abortion as a national tragedy, not a minor distraction from the issue of family planning (I disagree with them completely, but at least some of them are sincere).
The fact Milbank disagrees with both sides doesn’t make him right.
It doesn’t even make him logical.