Author Archives: dsmarley

iTopia, Limited

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I learned a new word the other day: iPerbole.

This review of the iPhone (plus this addendum) seems more cool-headed than most, though — neither all gee-whiz about it nor venting hatred of everything Apple just because it’s Apple.

They tell me a few things about the iPhone that make me more certain that I’m better off without one, though, at least until some improvements are added.

The iPhone can display, but not edit, Microsoft Word and Excel documents and Portable Document Format files. Conversely, iTunes doesn’t provide you with a computer-editable copy of any notes you jot down in the iPhone’s Notes program (although it does back them up automatically).

One of my main uses for a PDA is as a portable notepad, but I have to be able to send my notes back and forth between the PDA and my laptop and modify them in either place, or it’s not any more useful to me than carrying around a paper notebook and pen (which I often do anyway).

Switching between iPhone programs happens almost instantly, but moving data between them is just about impossible without copy or paste commands.

Ugh. For me, anyway, an important part of processing my email is quickly filing away any info I may want to refer to later, which means cutting and pasting into my note organizing software or into Address Book or whatever, so that I can get the email message out of the inbox and into the archives.

Spending time online will, however, expose the sluggishness of AT&T’s barely-faster-than-dialup Edge data service.

The USB modem I bought to use with my laptop uses 3G, which is much faster, about as fast as a low-end DSL connection.

Typing a Web address or an e-mail message reveals another awkwardness: text entry. Without a real keyboard, you have to tap on an onscreen substitute that offers no tactile feedback and puts punctuation and letters on separate screens.

I’m a touch typist and have found that I get frustrated writing on a PDA, whether it’s by way of Graffiti or a touch-screen keyboard or whatever.

An awful lot of my computer time is spent during my long commute by way of BART and CalTrain, or while sitting at a café somewhere, where opening up my laptop usually isn’t any hassle. So as beautiful a piece of equipment as the iPhone certainly is, it doesn’t seem to suit my needs right now well enough for me to justify the price and the two-year commitment.

And Still Another Thing: If Prison Time is Too Harsh for Obstruction of Justice for a First-Time Offender, Why Didn’t Bush Commute Martha Stewart’s Sentence, Too?

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Someone on the WELL pointed out a good reason why Bush commuted Libby’s prison sentence but didn’t grant him a full pardon: Libby can now still plead the Fifth in future testimony. If he had a full pardon, he couldn’t.

And another thing: If Bush is opposed to “activist judges” who are allegedly reinterpreting law rather than just following the given guidelines, what is he doing saying that Libby’s sentence is too harsh when it falls smack in the middle of the range of possible sentences for what Libby was convicted for?

Waiting for the iPhone

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Just got back from a short walk to stretch my legs. It’s around 3:30 pm and the iPhone goes on sale at 6:00 pm and there are already 40 or 50 people lined up in front of the AT&T store on the corner near where I work.

I love the look of the iPhone but it just doesn’t do enough that I can’t already do for me to want to add one more electronic device to carry around. I’ve got a cell phone on a cheap pay-as-you-go plan that rarely costs me more than $20 a month — I just don’t use it that much. I have an iPod with 30 GB, don’t want to switch to one with just four. I have a modem for my laptop now so I can do email and surf the ‘Net anywhere I can get a cell phone signal. I have a PDA and have learned from it that I hate doing long emails without a proper keyboard I can touch-type on, and for short emails I can text-message on my cell phone. The iPhone doesn’t do anything much that I don’t already have covered. Sure is pretty, though.

Now, if it were a real full-featured PDA that was based on OS X and could run a wide variety of programs and synced well with the Mac, I’d be more tempted. My PDA is Palm-based and has kind of a crappy sync interface with the Mac, and that has kept me from using it more. But I have Mark/Space’s The Missing Sync now which makes it a lot less of a nuisance, and I’m starting to make more use of it again.

Think We Can Persuade Them Now to Start Up an Ex-Homophobe Ministry?

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According to SFGate:

Three former leaders of a ministry that counsels gays to change their sexual orientation apologized, saying although they acted sincerely, their message had caused isolation, shame and fear.
The former leaders of the interdenominational Christian organization Exodus International said Wednesday they had become disillusioned with promoting gay conversion.

Boy, do I give them points for this. Exodus contributes to the brainwashing of queer people to feel ashamed and afraid of their own feelings, and it must have been a long, difficult, and painful journey for these three to get from there to here, to a place of sufficient self-acceptance that they can make an apology like this. Taking some responsibility for the harm they have caused to others, however unintentionally and misguidedly, is a profound step toward wholeness.

About Failure

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During a discussion on the WELL, a pointer came up to this article from the New Yorker about the Citicorp Building in New York. Seems that the engineer who designed the unusual structure of the Citicorp Building discovered, after it had been completed, that a last-minute change had been made without his being notified, a change that under ordinary circumstances would have made no practical difference, but in the case of this building’s unusual design meant that the whole thing could have toppled over in a severe wind — a level of wind that weather records showed hit Manhattan about every 16 years.

It’s a fascinating article, so it’s petty of me to pick nits, but as a technical editor I’m going to pick one anyway. The writer at one point refers to “the word ‘failure’ being a euphemism for the Citicorp tower’s falling down”. This is quite a bit of overstatement. The word “failure” is standard engineering talk, and not so much a euphemism as a matter of practicality.

For one thing, any time you design anything — say, a bridge — you figure out two numbers: how much weight or other kind of force that it needs to be able to resist at the worst (the plausible worst, not the once-in-a-millenium freak-accident worst), and how much force will cause it to fail.

In a complicated structure like a building, you make this calculation over and over again in countless different ways; since a structure is only as strong as its weakest part, you need to know how strong every last part is in relation to how much force might be put on it.

So you need a couple of short words you can use over and over to label those two ideas. Engineers use “design” and “failure” — the “design load” is how much force we’ve calculated the structure needs to withstand, and the “failure load” is how much force we’ve calculated will cause the structure to fail. You have to know both numbers, and in fact building codes typically set a “safety factor” so that the failure load has to be two or three or five or however many times the design load.

The other thing is that failure does not just mean toppling, it can mean deformation. In the case of the Citicorp Building, since the parts that would fail first would have been bolts, toppling might well be how it would fail; but ordinarily when you’re building something out of steel the point of failure is the point at which the steel bends out of shape, not at which it collapses.

In fact, if your structure is made out of a combination of materials — like concrete with steel reinforcements — it’s required practice to design it so that the steel will fall first. That way the bridge starts sagging noticeably long before it collapses. It seems like it would be the case that the more steel reinforcement, the better, but in fact the result of too much steel is a beam that gives no warning when its weakest part — which is now the concrete — is about to fail. Steel fails by deforming and concrete fails by shattering to pieces, so you don’t put so much steel in the beam that the concrete will fail first.

Plurally Plural

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The most common way for an English noun to form its plural is by adding an s: bed, beds; toaster, toasters; suitcase, suitcases.

Another common way for an English noun to form its plural is by changing a vowel sound: tooth, teeth; mouse, mice; foot, feet.

I just now noticed that there is a reasonably common unhyphenated, uncapitalized English word that forms its plural by doing both: It changes a vowel sound and adds the letter s. This is the only plural for this word given in three dictionaries that I’ve checked, including the Merriam-Webster Tenth Collegiate. The word isn’t archaic or obscure or in a dialect or anything like that, though most of us probably don’t have occasion to use it very often.

I can’t think of any other word in English that does this. So I’ll pose it as a puzzle: What’s the word?

Too Bogged to Blog

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I haven’t been blogging much this last month, mostly because I’ve been busy. Work has been busy, and then in the last six weeks I’ve been to two Billy Club gatherings (one of which, the May Day gathering, I was ritual coordinator for, which means organizing the construction of the maypole and the rituals around it) and two Body Electric workshops. As soon as I finished the second of the workshops, it was time to start planning for the SF Pride Parade, for which I help manage some behind-the-scenes operations, so that will keep me hopping through weekend after next.

Hopefully after that I will return to a better state of balance between having a life and having time to write about it.

If Your Very Point Is That Too Many People Don’t Feel Included in Political Discussion Nowadays, How About, You Know, Including Them?

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There’s some discussion on the WELL this morning of a line from Al Gore’s new book that is apparently quoted in David Brooks’s New York Times column today as an example of muddled thinking:

“The remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way — a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.”

Well, I don’t think the sentence is all that bad. I certainly don’t think it shows muddled thinking. I do wish Gore were plainer spoken, but I wish that were true of all politicians, and I’m sorry to say especially the ones on our side, who have a tendency to write as though they were trying to impress their college professors or something.

But Gore’s sentence is no worse than most such writing, and the only problem I can see with it is that it uses college-reading-level vocabulary and sentence structure to express an idea that doesn’t require it. The thinking isn’t muddled, it’s just not expressed as plainly as it could be.

But boy, I gotta say that I’d sure like it if just once in a while I could hear Gore or any other Democratic politician say something like, “You know, folks, our democracy here in America is in terrible shape, and we’re going to lose it if we don’t do something. I think there’s only one way to get it back, and that’s to get a real, honest discussion going again between our citizens and our leaders, like we used to have in this country. Americans need to be able to say what they think, and make suggestions, and come up with good ideas, and then they need to know that the people who are running this country have heard what they said. Our leaders have to start responding in ways that mean something, not just in empty cliches and form letters.”

Same idea, just different words. Republicans don’t shy away from writing and speech-making at an eighth-grade reading level, and it looks to me like a lot of Americans vote for them not so much because they agree with the Republicans more than with the Democrats but because the Republicans are the only politicians these people can make sense of. I think a lot of this “culture war” crap boils down to the fact that a lot of Americans feel like liberals are more concerned about showing off their college-level vocabularies than they are about the country. Hell, I get to feeling that way sometimes myself, and I’m generally in agreement with these blowhards. And I sure don’t know what else you could expect people to think about politicians who refuse to bring what they’re saying down to their level. It’s got to give the impression that Democratic politicians don’t care a whole lot about folks like them.

Granted, Democrats are usually trying to put across more complex ideas than the easy but false answers the Republicans tend to be selling nowadays. But if more lefties could learn to explain themselves better to the less well educated, I think we’d start capturing the hearts and minds of a fair number of people who are at the moment solidly in the Republican base. My hunch, anyway.

But Then I Would Say That, Me With My Sun in Virgo and All

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Jon Carroll writes in his column today about his overall experience of the 1960s, and it includes this paragraph:

I did try to get with the program, but there were obstacles. The biggest one was astrology. Why did that have to be part of it? I understood tipis and yurts; I got why getting loaded was fun; I loved the utopian ideals even though I was skeptical of their practical applications. But what did that have to do with your sun being in Jupiter?

This paragraph led to a few comments on the WELL, as any mention of astrology is fairly certain to do, mostly from people chiming in that they didn’t get it either.

When something sweeps the popular culture, even if it’s something that looks dumb, it’s generally an indication that there’s some human need or desire that isn’t being otherwise satisfied in the culture so that lots of people are seizing on this something instead, even though it may turn out not to be such a healthy or long-lasting way to satisfy the need.

The key to getting astrology for me was when I started noticing how people actually used it. Nine times out of ten, when I heard someone refer to astrological signs it wasn’t in regard to what their horoscope had said that day, it was in regard to the personality types that were supposed to be associated with the signs — “He is such a Capricorn” and “I’m an Aries and I just can’t get along with Geminis” and “Libra, right?”

Astrology gave laypeople a fairly simple language with which to talk about and explore personality traits, plus it had all the trappings of fortune-telling and antiquity and fun silly stuff like that. I was two years old at the end of the 1950s so I don’t know it firsthand, but I get the impression that in the 1950s there wasn’t a lot of interior exploration going on in the popular culture, not a lot of thinking about different personality traits, not a lot of attention paid to people’s emotional lives. I get the feeling that people were hungry to look at their own mental and emotional processes and hungry to talk about them and compare notes — psychology and psychoanalysis had broken into popular awareness in the 1940s, but it was specialized and expensive and you had to master a lot of difficult concepts that none of your friends would understand anyway, and until popularized accounts of the ideas of Jung started appearing (which didn’t happen until a little bit later than the time when astrology was catching fire, if my memory is right), mastering psychological ideas tended to be a dry and colorless and bookish and not-much-fun endeavor.

Astrology in its popular form may be a cheap and shallow way of fulfilling the desire to examine our inner workings and those of each other, but the desire itself seems to me to be universal and legitimate. And the healthy food that would nourish ourselves more lastingly never does seem to sell as well as cheeseburgers and fries.