Happy First of May!

Forget National Day of Prayer; you know what to do. I encourage everyone to enjoy May to the fullest.

On Alternatives and Language

I'd like to riff off Andrea for a minute, if you don't mind. She's written a couple of posts lately that have gotten me thinking about language and subcultures.

As you can see in the comments of that first post, we got into a conversation about the accuracy of the word power in reference to a consensual relationship. In my lexicon, power and consent are to at least some extent mutually exclusive, so, while I can see using it in a scene context, where it's understood that it's make-believe, the word just doesn't work for me in the context of a 24/7-type relationship.

In the second above-linked post, Andrea talks about not wanting to use the word slave to describe her bois, while blithely referring to them as her property. I find this especially jarring to my lexicon because the conceptual distance between my (white, female, affluent, Western) life and the reality of slavery is much farther than the distance between my life and the reality of people-as-property. If one of those two words is going to be available for me to redefine away the cultural baggage, it ain't gonna be property. But Andrea's lexicon is different, and that's fine.

These two posts, though, got me to thinking. What's going on is that we have a set of phenomena (inflicting pain, subservience, the control of one person's life by another) that are for all but a vanishingly small proportion of the population thought of exclusively as non-consensual.¹ What this is going to mean is that, for the majority of people, even people who experience these phenomena consensually on a regular basis, the words themselves are going to carry a lot of connotative baggage of non consensuality.

So what are you going to do about it?
It seems to me that there are three options available. First, you can always describe your relationships in multi-sentence terms, referring to your partner as "the person over whom I have been given authority in the matters of X, Y, and Z (and B to a lesser extent), always contingent, of course, on his consent and subject to renegotiation when desired by either of us." Some people will try this option, but it never lasts. Languages evolve not just over generations, but fairly quickly and repeatedly within one speaker's lifetime, and one of the selective forces on language is efficiency. People don't like using multiple sentences to express what they can say with one word. So people will look for a word. Which brings me to option two: neologism. You can just make up a word to describe the kind of power/authority that is contingent on consent. You can call it glogan, and have one partner be the gloganee, and the other the gloganer, or whatever. This eliminates the problem of efficiency found in solution 1, and the problem of connotation found in solution 3 (we'll get to that), but it brings with it its own host of problems. While it's true that languages evolve, they kind of resist deliberate change. People feel uncomfortable and awkward deliberately using invented words.

This leaves solution 3: reclaim, reinvent, and redefine. And this is what people are doing. It is easier for a speaker to take an existing word and alter its connotations slightly than to invent a new one, and the words people choose to apply in these new contexts will depend hugely on the individual's experiences with them, and the connotations they've acquired, and that's fine.

What this doesn't mean, however, is that people get to throw words around willy-nilly, uncritically redefining and re-redefining on a whim, without ever making their meanings explicit or acknowledging that the cultural consensus about what that word means is being violated. That sort of behaviour only leads to the post-modern bullshit known as philosophy, and makes intelligent conversation impossible. It's important, first of all, to have a sufficiently large vocabulary that, if a word already exists to describe whatever it is you're doing, you know about it and, second, if you do have to redefine, to do it explicitly and transparently so that people can still converse meaningfully with you.

What I guess I'm trying to say with this is that, contra Andrea, I think redefinition is a necessary and inevitable aspect of trying to talk about things like BDSM and, in fact, I think she's doing it.

---

1. Yes, I'm aware that pain and power play make it into the sex lives of many, if not most, people who would call themselves vanilla, but since they don't tend to think of their sex lives that way, my point stands. back

Another Book Meme

Via Pharyngula, I came across this list of supposedly pretentious books. That is, the 106 books most often marked unread on LibraryThing. I've started reading 17 of them (italics), and completed 10 (bold):

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
• Anna Karenina
• Crime and Punishment
• Catch-22
• One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Wuthering Heights
• The Silmarillion
• Life of Pi : a novel
• The Name of the Rose
• Don Quixote
• Moby Dick
• Ulysses
• Madame Bovary* (this I started and failed to finish both in the original French and in the English translation)
• The Odyssey
• Pride and Prejudice
• Jane Eyre*
• The Tale of Two Cities
• The Brothers Karamazov
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
• War and Peace
• Vanity Fair
• The Time Traveler’s Wife
• The Iliad
• Emma
• The Blind Assassin
• The Kite Runner
• Mrs. Dalloway
• Great Expectations*
• American Gods
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Atlas Shrugged
• Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• Middlesex
• Quicksilver
• Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
• The Canterbury tales
• The Historian : a novel
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Love in the Time of Cholera
• Brave New world
• The Fountainhead
• Foucault’s Pendulum
• Middlemarch
• Frankenstein
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• Dracula
• A Clockwork Orange
• Anansi Boys
• The Once and Future King
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
• 1984
• Angels & Demons
• The Inferno
• The Satanic Verses
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Mansfield Park
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• To the Lighthouse
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles
• Oliver Twist
• Gulliver’s Travels (I read an abridged children's version of this when I was little, but I hardly think that counts)
• Les Misérables
• The Corrections
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time


• Dune
• The Prince
• The Sound and the Fury
• Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
• The God of Small Things
• A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
• Cryptonomicon
• Neverwhere
• A Confederacy of Dunces
• A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Dubliners


• The Unbearable Lightness of Being*
• Beloved
• Slaughterhouse-five
• The Scarlet Letter
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves
• The Mists of Avalon
• Oryx and Crake : a novel
• Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed^
• Cloud Atlas
• The Confusion
• Lolita
• Persuasion
• Northanger Abbey
• The Catcher in the Rye
• On the Road
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (seriously overrated. If you didn't already know that correlation != causation then you might give it a look, but otherwise it gets a resounding "meh".)
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
• The Aeneid
• Watership Down
• Gravity’s Rainbow
• The Hobbit
• In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
• White Teeth
• Treasure Island
• David Copperfield
• The Three Musketeers

*books that I was required to read for school. It's amazing how few I managed to get through!
^this one isn't in the abandoned pile yet. I had to put it down because I don't really have time to read nonfiction during the school year, but I fully intend to pick it up again over the summer.

Rachel Maddow is My Fucking Hero

I've mentioned Maddow on the blog before; I like her a lot. She doesn't giggle or pull punches or defer, like so many women on news-like TV. She always makes her point eloquently and accessibly, and she's always right. So I've liked her.

But today she became my hero.

Seriously. Check her out in this clip from Crooks and Liars. On TV, in the middle of a heated discussion, being condescended to by an asshole older man who obviously doesn't respect her, and she manages to:
1) keep her cool, stay cogent and articulate, and make her point,
2) shut him the fuck up long enough to do that, and
3) in the heat of the discussion, without missing a beat, eloquently call him out on his condescending bullshit, to whit: "Let me make my point and then you can dismiss me."

What I wouldn't give to have her superpowers. Where do we sign up for the Rachel Maddow lessons?

You Have Got To Be Fucking Kidding Me

Seriously. I can't even bring myself to wonder what the justification is. I'm sure all manner of mirth and hilarity will ensue once it goes to trial.

UPDATE:
It's been pointed out to me that not everybody has the same wacky obsessions that I do, and some context might be useful. Here it is:

Premise Media is the production company behind the ID creationism movie Expelled. XVIVO is an animation company that created a rendition of some intracellular processes for Harvard University. ERV has the whole nasty story, but basically Expelled uses a copy (as in forgery, not as in Xerox) of the XVIVO/Harvard animation. XVIVO's lawyers sent Premise a don't-do-that letter and have filed a lawsuit. Now, according to the first link up there, Premise is suing them back, on what twisted pretext I can't even imagine. Hence the hilarity. (I'm fresh out of outrage. These guys aren't competent enough to warrant it.)

New Discovery -- Curry in a Can

Did you know that curry comes in a can? It's quite possibly the most exciting discovery I've made all year. Before now my sources of curry have been Indian restaurants and making it myself. I knew that you could get those carboard boxes of stuff that you add water to and heat, but they made me nervous because dry stuff you add water to is never any good.

But Dave and I discovered an Indian grocery store in our neighbourhood last week, and today when we were there, trying to decide what would be the most efficient, non-budget-breaking way to get meals during exams, we discovered that curry comes in cans! And it's yummy! And enough food (if you make rice) to feed two people for 1.99$. 1$/person is seriously not bad as meals go. I almost never average better than that even when cooking stuff from scratch.

This is Me

I don't know why, but I feel a strong sense of identification with this cat.

I See You!

Sitemeter tells me all about you. The two most interesting things it tells me are how you find me and whence you read me. Let's do the latter of those:

Of the last 100 visits to this site there were:

• 38 from Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• 5 from
  • Montreal, Quebec, Canada
  • Somervill, Massachusetts, USA
• 4 from
  • Georgetown, Ontario, Canada
  • Avon, Indiana, USA
• 3 from Jamaica, New York, USA
• 2 from
  • Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
  • Edison, New Jersey, USA
  • Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA
  • 60 N, 95 W (where the Nunavut/Manitoba border touches Hudson Bay)
  • 38 N, 97 W (middle of nowhere, Kansas)
• and 1 each from:
  • Baltimore, Maryland, USA
  • Detroit, Michigan, USA
  • Mcallen, Texas, USA
  • Avon, Indiana, USA
  • Rainford, Lancashire, UK
  • Richmond, Texas, UK
  • Calgary, Alberta, Canada
  • High Point, North Carolina, USA
  • Brampton, Ontario, Canada
  • Los Angeles, California, USA
  • Village of Nagog Woods, Massachusetts, USA
  • Tempe, Arizona, USA
  • Providence, Rhode Islande, USA
  • Oshawa, Ontario, Canada
  • Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
  • Louth, Louth, Ireland
  • Delft, Zuid-Holland, Netherlands
  • San Jose, Costa Rica
  • Seattle, Washington, USA
  • Berwick, Pennsylvania, USA
  • Kuala Lumpur, Wilayah Persukutuan, Malaysia
  • Chatham, Ontario, Canada
  • Dublin, Ireland
  • Kiev, Kyyivs'ka Oblast', Ukraine
  • New York, New York, USA
  • Mountain View, California, USA
  • London, UK
  • Joensuu, Eastern Finland, Finland
  • Hillard, Ohio, USA
  • Lafayette, Indiana, USA
  • Helsinki, Southern Finland, Finland

Of course this all depends on none of you spoofing your IPs, and your ISPs telling the truth.

Breakfast Smoothies

A recipe of my own invention. All amounts approximate. Vary proportions and ingredients with wild abandon.

• 400mL orange juice


• 75g (that's 1/4 of a 300g container) silken tofu


• 3 large spoonfuls plain yogurt


• 1 3/4 cup frozen fruit (last week we used strawberries and mango, this week it's mixed berries)


• a generous half cup quick oats


• 2-3 tsp flax meal


• 1 banana

Combine all the ingredients in a large bowl. This can be done the night before if you prefer, and left in the fridge over night. In the morning, take a handblender and whrrrrrrrrrrrrr until the texture is quite liquid.

Makes a filling breakfast for 2.

I find this recipe to be a bit acidic. If you agree (and you're rich) feel free to substitute some or all of the oj with soy milk (or real milk if you have a high tolerance for dairy). I use orange juice only because it is the most cheaply available real juice.

The Word Dumb Has Long Ceased to Cover It

IDiots do something massively stupid and hypocritical.

Sciencey bloggosphere acts surprised

Well, no, not really. But now that I've interspersed all those letters with links, I'm not exactly inclined to go back and change my phrasing, so you're stuck with it.

Amazing

Everyone needs to go watch this speech by Barack Obama.

I can't help it. I ought to know that every step in an election campaign is choreographed. That I should make no assumptions that a politician's words in any way reflect their beliefs. I know that, but I just can't help it. This speech gives me hope. Maybe it's just that I've never heard Obama speak before. I have heard that he's an excellent orator and it could be that that's all this is, but I don't think so.

I can't endorse the speech unqualifiedly -- there were three things in it that I found objectionable -- but three things in a 37 minute speech is not bad, and for the bulk of it I was amazed. Obama was saying things that are necessary, things that I think every American (and Canadian) needs to hear, but as important as the content of the speech is, more important is the fact that Obama delivered it, and delivered it now. He could have left it a desk drawer (or more likely a file on his computer), waiting for the day when he was retired and had nothing to lose.

I honestly didn't think I would live to see the day that a serious politician who has a real chance of winning the American presidential election would stand up and speak an uncomfortable truth to people who might not want to hear it, people who he hopes will nonetheless vote for him. It sets a heartening precedent. Obama's courage (and, one hopes, success) in delivering this speech opens the door to something resembling honest discussion about oppression. It makes room for women politicians to speak up about back-alley abortions and the necessity of reproductive rights. It makes room for gay and lesbian politicians to talk about the days before Stonewall and the ongoing oppressions they face.

I'm not so naive as to think that this is going to start happening regularly, or right away. But it's happened once, and that means it can happen again.

Update: Pam Spaulding at Pandagon has written a post saying much of what I was trying to say, and more, much more eloquently than I did. Just go read that.

It Just Seems to Me

Without saying a word against the gentleman who was actually doing the job -- as far as I could tell his behaviour was completely professional and above reproach -- it just seems unlikely to me that the Athletics Department couldn't find a single woman with the skills to install an automatic opener on the door to the women's changeroom. I'm not sayin', just sayin'.

(Non) Naming NPs

Looking back through Q. Pheevr's archives, I rediscovered his post about the naming of He Who Must Not Be Named. I think Q might not be entirely right about this.

While I'm not disputing the assertion that He Who Must Not Be Named is, in the Harry Potter books, actually a name, I don't think the invariant case is the reason.

When I check my own judgements, I find that I'm perfectly happy with, for example,

You'll have to get those numbers from she who approves the budget

even if "she who approves the budget" is a one-time innovation and not a common nickname for the accountant. On the other hand, I can't think of any context where I could use

*her who approves the budget

as a constituent NP.

In fact, it seems to me that nominative is the only acceptable case in definite descriptions that start with pronouns. Maybe this is required for the pronoun to govern¹ the rest of the NP?
Further, if the invariant case were simply a result of the description being a name then we would expect it to be possible to have a name/description with a different invariant case, for example

*Him who was thrown down a well came home today

but I don't think you can. There might be some sem/prag issues interfering here though. When you have Someone Who Cannot Be Named, usually it's because they hold some sort of power over the people who Cannot Name them, and such people tend to find themselves (or at least the NPs that refer to them) in agent positions in sentences.

So what do y'all think? Do people's judgements differ from mine?

---

1. Apologies if this is not the word I'm looking for. It's been four years since I've done any syntax, so I'm counting on the linguists in my readership to just kind of know what I mean. (back)

Evolution: Really Damn Cool

Go check out this post by Abbie about what plasmids can do. You know what a plasmid is? Just DNA. C'est tout. I'm serious, go read Abbie's post and marvel.

Note to Self

When you're manipulating objects in space, you actually have three dimensions to work in. Use them all.

Lack of Blogging

Apologies to those who care that I'm not blogging. I've got four midterms and one assignment in a two-week period and I'm a little swamped. Other than a lovely dinner with Sex Geek and fam, my reading week consisted of, well, reading.

Have I mentioned that I hate psychology? With a fiery passion, I do. But five more weeks of classes, one final exam, and then I will never have to think about it again. This gives me a little bit of pleasure.

Well, time to do a major cleaning in the bedroom, since the new bed just arrived. And then back to the books.

On Peer Review

Recently somebody goofed. Bad. The journal Proteomics (which I had never heard of but I understand was heretofore reputable) published (Epub, ahead of print) an article that, if Myers' excerpts are representative, has conclusions that not only don't follow from any data, but are in fact unfalsifiable. This is bad. It's not only bad for the journal and the authors, it's bad for science. It is the “one peer reviewed article” that we've been smugly demanding from IDiots all this time. Bad.

It is also being held up as a failure of the peer review process, and I can see why. But there's something important that's getting lost in the (justifiedly) panicked shuffle, and I want to talk about it. My intention is that this post be a reference that people can point to in the fight I know is coming. So here it is.

There are two things that peer review can mean. I'll call them peer review(S) and peer review(G). Peer review(S) is what people normally think of when we talk about peer review. It's the process whereby a journal sends articles to just a few experts in the field, and those experts read and evaluate the article to recommend whether it should be published and, if so, what changes should be made first. When a reviewer is reviewing an article, she is looking for two things. One, she is looking for good science: Is the methodology sound? Is the measure valid? Do the conclusions actually follow from the data? and so on. And two, she is looking for integrity: Is the methodology well enough described to be reproduced? Are potential sources of error disclosed? Do citations accurately represent their sources?

This is an incredibly important process. Whatever I may say later in this post, I want it understood that one cannot overstate the importance of this process. It serves several functions. Firstly, it keeps out the rifraff. Writings from the likes of John A. Davison don't generally make it as far as a reviewer, but some less gibbering nonscience will, and the reviewers can keep it from getting published. This is good, not only because it keeps the rest of the community from having to slog through mountains of nonsense, it also means that nonexperts reading the journals (such as science reporters) are less likely to come away from them believing the nonsense, which is good for everyone.

Secondly, it helps the editor to keep her biases from dictating what gets published. As important as it is to keep gibbering idiocy out of a journal, it's equally important to let legitimate disagreement in, and that's a big part of what peer review(S) is for.

But here's the thing. Not everything that has ever passed peer review(S) is still believed today, and the reason for that is what I'm calling peer review(G). The review process doesn't stop once the article is sent to a typesetter.

Once an article gets published, it doesn't just sit there in some sciencey archive, revealed truth to be believed from here on out. It gets tested. This is where the real strength of the scientific institution lies. Many more people will read the article than reviewed it. Most will read it with a critical eye, asking themselves if the conclusions follow from the given data. Some will check the sources to see if they say what they're claimed to say. And a few will check the results. They'll re-run the numbers, redo the experiments, do different experiments to check for convergence.

Peer review(G) is what allows someone (but not everyone) who publishes books rather than articles to still be taken seriously as a scientist. It's what decides how reliable a journal is.

As important as peer review(S) is (and dammit, it is) peer review(G) is more important. Peer review(G) is how hoaxes get identified. It's how knowledge moves forward. The real test of the strength of a conclusion is whether it stands the test of time and rigorous retesting, not whether it can make it past a couple reviewers.

So while I agree that what happened with Proteomics is an obscene failure of peer review(S), at best a truly embarrassing mistake and at worst an apalling miscarriage of the process, ultimately this is a success story for the peer review process. A process which "Mitochondria, the missing link between body and soul: Proteomic prospective evidence" is failing, by the way.

I Am So Old

Life is not fair. Wikipedia just told me that the xkcd guy is almost two years younger than me. Why don't I have a talent?

This Week is Christ Awareness Week

No, seriously. I anticipate next week will be Straight White Men Awareness Week.

When the fresh-faced girl first got up in front of my Chemistry class to announce it, and I later saw the people tabling with big posters and everything, I couldn't decide if they were just incredibly stupid and couldn't grasp the principle behind the culturally dominant group not getting its own week, or if they were intentionally antagonizing my school's large and vocal non-Christian (largely Muslim) population. Now that Google has informed me that this is an international phenomenon, I'm completely at a loss. Why did it start? What's the point? And does the Campus Crusade for Christ (I assume it's them since they're the only noisy Christian group on campus) really think that anyone at UofT doesn't know about Jesus?

In Case Anyone was Wondering

Olive oil works quite well for removing bubblegum from glasses.

That is all.