I haven’t watched much of either the British or American versions of the show, but am nevertheless going to recommend three posts by Venkatesh Rao which use the American version to illuminate interesting aspects of office life:
Long, but definitely worth it.
While I don’t really believe in stupidity as an intrinsic characteristic, and while I’m skeptical of analyses of the world that place blame for ills on non-systemic causes, I still found Carlo M. Cipolla’s “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity” amusing and worth reading.
In summary, the five laws are:
While not a scientific study, this list of geek behaviors present during conversations strikes me as fairly useful both for “geeks” and “non-geeks”.
[more...]
Articles bewailing “these kids today” (or especially “these girls today”) seem disturbingly frequent at the moment, and it’s not clear to me whether there’s a real problem of some kind or it’s just pundits waxing wroth about the next generation Doing It All Wrong. I suspect it’s both: the sexual culture out there is problematic, although not necessarily for the reasons you hear about, and most of the pundits are really talking not to the next generation but to the next generation’s parents. This article by Rachel Simmons is an earnest but fairly typical example; this response by Kate Harding is worth reading. I don’t think Harding says anything revolutionary—she just says a lot of things that seem like common sense to me but which often get lost in the noise.
While reading over some of my morning pages from about ten years ago, I encountered a reference to Evan Mather’s short films, and had no idea who he was, what the films were, or why I might have liked them. It turns out that I was referring to his Kenner action figure Star Wars shorts, which he has up, along with other interesting things, on www.evanmather.com. Godzilla Versus Disco Lando is still just as bizarre as it was back then…
Recently Clay Shirky wrote “A Rant About Women”, a piece essentially claiming that women needed to act more confidently, even or especially in situations where confidence would be unwarranted, in order to be more successful. There’s more to it than that, but that was what I took as the core message. I think there are some valid points in there, but I also think that Shirky radically underestimates the ways in which women are frequently punished for acting confident, and that he appears to assume that a system which promotes self-aggrandizers is something that we all (not just women) should accept as the natural way of things.
I might write up a longer response to “A Rant About Women” at some point, but right now I want to bring some attention to a piece that’s probably more important than my response.
[more...]
This post at Yes Means Yes! is an excellent overview of how the profoundly unhealthy culture of American high schools socializes boys to have negative and domineering attitudes towards women. The post is a review of Dude, You’re a Fag, an academic study of student ethnography and behavior at a Northern California high school. While the degree to which the behavior in the school is typical can be debated, it certainly seems to me that it’s certainly not a total aberration. I think a key paragraph is this one:
[Male sexual aggression in this context] has little to do with sexual orientation or desire and everything to do with a gender performance that positions the boys in relation to other boys.
—Thomas. “Compulsive Heterosexuality And Rape Culture”. Yes Means Yes!, 13 January 2010.
I don’t think this is all that controversial, but I do think it’s important.
[more...]
Dodgy misogynistic lyrics, proprietary software—but still absolutely fascinating. Via MetaFilter I found this YouTube video on how to make The Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up” using Ableton Live:
Given this, I start to think that the key lyrics are actually “change my pitch up”.
I’ve come across what feels like another wave of articles related to bullying recently. I previously wrote about my thoughts on institutional responses, but this time my focus is on some of the causes, as well as how technical rules are unlikely to eliminate the problem.
[more...]
I went to see see Chomsky speak last Saturday night at Oakland’s Paramount Theatre. The speech was on “Obama, the Middle East, and Prospects for Peace”.
It felt like a somewhat low-key talk, in the sense that there weren’t many revelations in it. Plenty of interesting information, and perhaps most illuminating in the way that even thought I knew many of the broad outlines, I was still surprised by some of the specifics that he cited.
[more...]
But rather, a very safe and rather normal, indeed innocuous and beneficial, activity. Via MetaFilter I came across a series of sociological essays on attitudes towards cycling, most of them concerned with the idea that cycling is a dangerous activity. The series, by Dave Horton, is titled “Fear of Cycling”:
Not real cheese, but the cheese of amazing overacting. I got this from my friend John Summerlot, and had to share it due to the sick fascination it engendered. It’s a compilation of David Caruso’s one-liners from the beginning of CSI: Miami episodes. (Note: I can’t stand CSI, or CSI: Miami, or the other offshoots, but that didn’t seem to impede the pull of this particular set of clips.)
I always thought that the explosion of personal writing (email, instant messaging, blogging, microblogging) as the internet has gained acceptance would of necessity lead to an improvement in writing skills; it’s difficult to see how a massive increase in the amount of writing people do would fail to have that impact.
Indeed, the Stanford Study of Writing documents just such an improvement, as Clive Thompson reports in Wired. (Via SarahM.)
Despite voice communication, video, and online gaming, the internet is still primarily a text environment, and will continue to be so. The technical restrictions that forced it to be almost text-only at first may have been around just long enough to force a sufficient mass of people to use text and realize how powerful and efficient a medium it can be—a realization limited to a vastly smaller number of people in the pre-online era.
Timothy Snyder has an interesting article on how contemporary understanding of the Holocaust is tilted towards Western victims in the New York Review of Books, which includes an overview of mass death in the period around World War II. Upsetting, as you would expect, but worth reading.
(Via Who Is IOZ?)
The title is somewhat inflammatory, and look, there’s nothing wrong with someone taking their partner’s name when they get married. There are plenty of practical reasons to do so, and it’s an individual choice in any case and doesn’t require justification.
However, pressuring women to change their last name when they marry is another matter, and I find it both disheartening and surprising that 70% of Americans think that women should take their husband’s last name when they marry. I just don’t think there should be any social pressure to do so. It gets worse, too.
[more...]
In a recent MetaFilter thread about some more expanded Taser us after a judge ruled it was okay to Taser an uncooperative suspect in order to get a DNA sample from them (with passing mention of some grandmother tasering thrown in), I came across a comment that I thought was fantastic:
Remember when you could tell that Spock’s political system was eeeevil because of his willingness to use the agonizer?
—mwhybark, comment on ‘Niagara County Judge: tasing a suspect into compliance with DNA test = okay’, metafilter.com, 05 Jun 2009
After my brother passed on Blood or Whiskey’s “Your Majesty” (because I mentioned Flogging Molly’s If I Ever Leave This World Alive due to its being used on Weeds), I was reminded of the unpleasant fact that both Bob Geldof and Bono accepted induction into the Order of the British Empire.
[more...]
Apparently the modern-day version of outlaw living includes stealing a country singer‘s tour bus while on the run… and escaping from custody repeatedly. Maybe he deserves punishment for fraud, but I hope a) that he doesn’t get killed (he’s been designated “armed and dangerous” despite there being no evidence he has weapons) and b) that he makes a boatload of cash from the movie apparently being made about his exploits.
My favorite part of the article:
After being nabbed for stealing an RV in Alabama, Gay was being extradited to Tennessee to face the bulldozer charge when he escaped the first time, using a paper clip hidden in his mouth to unshackle himself from both handcuffs and leg irons.
During his 2007 run, he stole Gayle’s tour bus not by hotwiring it, but by walking into the management company’s office and asking for the keys. “He hasn’t gotten through life killing people, but outwitting them,” says Prof. Mihm.
—Patrik Jonsson, Tennessee’s ‘Little Houdini’ revives the outlaw legend, Christian Science Monitor, 9 Mar 2009
There are plenty of reports that the afternoon nap is good for you, and that it increases alertness and clarity of thought.
I’m not a great sleeper generally, and I’ve wondered whether or not sleeping in the afternoon would help. Now that my schedule is more flexible, I’m going to try a 45-minute nap at 15:00 most days and see whether or not that makes any difference. Anyone out there tried similar experiments?
I think that Katharine Mieszkowski is being overly optimistic predicting the demise of the Hummer, but I’d really love to see that damn thing disappear. Being utterly obnoxious and ugly (which it is) is one thing, but the sheer deliberate wastefulness is simply appalling. I know that’s part of the point for many owners, but that doesn’t make it any better.
[more...]
Ah, the “American Family Association”:
I really wish this stuff were a joke, but no. It remains really difficult for me to accept that people find other people’s private sexual behavior so frightening.
Over the last month or so, via various references on forums and in articles, I’ve somehow become aware of a television ad, or set of ads. They’re part of the Toyota “Saved By Zero” campaign, and people hate them.
Toyota have apparently come up with television ads so irritating that not only do people go to the effort of making the clip below, but people who don’t watch television (like me) nonetheless have enough cultural awareness of the ads’ nature to appreciate it.
(Vaguely on the subject of cars, I think that a buy one truck, get another truck free” promotion clearly indicates the arrival of financial/economic apocalypse.)
While Obama’s election is a sign of racial progress in the United States, Bernard Chazelle presents some interesting demographic statistics about how his victory came about.
Here’s one number that might surprise some people: whites voted for McCain 55% to 43%. (Note: I don’t buy into the suspect concept of “whiteness”, but this kind of breakdown is still significant given how many people categorize themselves, and others, this way.)
[more...]