Arc Tangent

As of the start of November, I have a labret piercing – a piece of metal in my lip, on the right hand side of my lip.

(You can see it there, honest!)

It was something that I thought carefully about having done. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment type thing; I considered it over several weeks. Facial piercings can have very negative connotations among the older generation(s); the prevailing opinions amongst people of a certain age and mindset range from “they look messy” to an innate (and I would say unreasonable) regard of anyone with a piercing as a good-for-nothing troublemaker.

The best argument against the piercing that I could think of was that it could negatively impact my relations with some existing and potential clients.

I went ahead with the piercing, obviously. I chose to get it done as a reminder of a place and a time, the people who were around me and the sort of lessons I’d learnt in the years and months leading up to it. My memory is good (very good, in fact) – but human memory is fallible, it fades and distorts with time. The piercing is a way of externalising some of those memories – a sort of physical mnemonic for those things I want to render important in my recollection.

I often ask other people with piercings or tattoos if they have some special significance, and there’s a huge range of responses. People have these sorts of body modifications done for a variety of reasons. For some, it’s all about the aesthetic. Some get a feeling of pleasure and satisfaction from the experience of having the piercing itself. For others (like me) it’s an externalisation of some internal mental process, or a reminder of something considered worthy of remembering.

The psychology behind body modification fascinates me. Intuitively, I can understand why someone would want to wear an externalisation of a subjective experience or attitude on their body. I struggle explain it in words though.

I think it goes something like this: we (humans) seem to use our expressions of our emotional states both as a signal to others in society (“I’m happy”, “I’m very angry”) as much as a feedback mechanism for ourselves. If you put on a happy face, before too long, you start to feel sort of happy. You can, to some extent, consciously control your emotional state by externalising a representation of what you want it to be.

I think the same wiring is at work with body modifications (at least for me). It’s a dramatic and permanent (well, mostly) expression of something that would otherwise be completely internal. It’s a mnemonic, a key to that experience, but also a sort of scar – a way of presenting physically that a change has occurred in one’s mind, that one considers significant. (Or is it the other way ’round, that I want to induce such a significant internal change, and the piercing presents a way of externalising that desired end-state!? Huh!)

My other piecing (my left ear), was a gift from a close (and very awesome) friend, years ago. It wasn’t initially a mnemonic, or a rite of passage – it was somewhat more whimsical, at least on face value – but it’s come to serve the same purpose. (Though, I wonder about the motivations of the person who got it for me at the time – was it a whimsical choice for them, too, or did the act of getting me pierced have some significance? Huh!)

As for the clients – I decided I don’t care. The sort of people who are going to judge me on the basis of some piercings aren’t the sort of people I want to be working with anyway. I know my skills and abilities, and it’s other peoples’ loss if they want to judge me on the basis of a piercing.

Plus, it looks cool. :P

[Oops! Meant to post this last week. Ah well.]

A link sent to me by klepas: http://giveupandusetables.com/.

There really does come a point, when you’re trying to put a site together, at which all the fussing and prodding you’re doing to CSS becomes irritating beyond belief. You get it working in one browser, only to discover that another implements the box model slightly differently or doesn’t quite like to float things the way the standard says.

It’s disheartening that the web has become such a big part of our lives, and we still can’t get the layout of things right. Joel Spolsky explains why it’s such a problem, sort of, in his article Martian Headsets.

Spolsky argues that there’s no ’standard implementation’ for web developers to test against, and that specs are really hard to read (no argument there). I think he’s got the problem around the wrong way though; the problem isn’t web devs testing against a standard implementation, the problem is browsers handling the standards incorrectly – and we do have a reference implementation for browser developers to work against! The ACID2 tests from the Web Standards Project.

However you look at it, sometimes it’s just easier to give up and use tables. Even if it is a dirty, dirty thing to do.

Inspired by this article: http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/11/atheism-a-posit.html

(A refreshingly positive treatment of atheism by an apparently religious author (Krattenmaker writes prolifically on religion in public life) – though I can’t find any place where he overtly declares his own religious stance.)

Reading the comments on the article (always a mistake) is a scary experience. The utter nonsense some people believe entirely whole-heartedly and with the very best of intentions is enough to make my eyes water.

It’s interesting to see the prevailing understanding of Atheism in action, too. Most believers seem to think of atheism as “completely denying the existence of a supreme being”. My own understanding of our (atheists’) usual stance is that we accept the possibility, however remote, of an omniscient, omnipresent creator of some description – but we find the probability so very unlikely, and the required proof so very extraordinary, and so far have seen nothing that would convince us of the existence of such a being.

Atheism (for me) isn’t a belief, it’s just a stance that says “insufficient evidence, I choose not to alter the way I live my life on that basis”. I don’t believe blindly in anything; and you’ve yet to show me convincing evidence that your brand of religion is correct.

It’s not about destroying or tearing things down. I say you’re free to have your own (non-harmful-to-others) beliefs, however unreasoned I might consider them to be, save on two scores:

• The separation of Church and State – no piece of legislation should ever be purely religiously or purely ideologically motivated. ‘Tradition’ is never an excuse. Legislation and government decisions should be reasoned, considered and take into account the deeper ramifications of their passing. California’s Proposition 8 (the ban on gay marriage), I’m looking at you.
• Brainwashing of Children – most religions teach that it is essential to indoctrinate children in those teachings. While some parents are good educators, and open their childrens’ eyes to other possibilities and allow them to make up their own minds (which is totally awesome), more often than not the child is taught that “this is the truth, the whole of the truth, and anyone who challenges you to think otherwise is a hateful person” – young minds, blinkered to the possibilities. In my book, it’s completely unacceptable to stunt a developing mind thus.

(Edit: Obviously, if your religious beliefs motivate you to kill, hurt or in any way inconvenience or detain others, we’re going to have issues.)

I was lucky on the last point to have parents who allowed me to be well-read and challenge those assumptions, who weren’t afraid to say “I don’t know how to answer that” when they honestly couldn’t answer – and a grandfather who, despite being heavily religious himself, encouraged me to study the facts and belief systems before me and make my own mind up.

So there we are. I’m publically “out”, on the intertubes. I’m an atheist, and proud of it. :)

A discussion on the risks of human extinction, and some measures that can be taken to mitigate it, aia Slashdot (yeah, ew): http://www.upmc-biosecurity.org/website/resources/publications/2007_orig-articles/2007-10-15-reducingrisk.html

An amusing read, if a bit contentious in places. To quote:

There is currently no independent body assessing the risks of high-energy physics experiments. Posner (2004) has recommended withdrawing federal support for such experiments because the benefits do not seem to be worth the risks.

Risks? What bloody risks? Any Many physicists can will tell you that the chances of a high-energy experiment going pear-shaped in a catastrophic way (in a global sense) is so bloody miniscule as to be next to impossible. If it was easy to destroy a planet, we’d see nature doing it a lot more often by pure random chance.

The rest of the article essentially boils down to an argument that we should do our best to delay extinction by colonising space. I’m convinced!

While I was doing some research for my last diatribe, I came across a few heartening/interesting links:

http://defendingscoundrels.com/2008/10/can-labor-implement-clean-feed.html — Via Electronics Frontiers Australia, Dale Clapperton outlines legal reasons why the Fence won’t stand. His whole blog is worth a look.

http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,27574,24641171-15306,00.html — Conroy copping flak on Tuesday for being vague about the plan.

I’ll keep posting such fun things as I find them. Down with censorship!

Urgh.

Senator Conroy’s Internet Rabbit Fence (apt name?) is bringing up a few nasty issues in my mind when it comes to politics. We’ll take it as given that the idea is fundamentally stupid on a technical level – better network types than I have pointed out the flaws.

All this stressing about what people are seeing on the Internet though, that’s a symptom of something deeper, and far more insidious.

A bit of a recap, for those who missed the issue: the government wants to set up a filter on all inbound and outbound internet connections in the country (essentially). This would prevent access to material deemed illegal by anyone, and optionally, prevent access to material deemed ‘objectionable’ (unless you opt out of that filtering list). So no more access to the Anarchist’s Cookbook for us.

Unfortunately, what constitutes ‘objectionable’ material has yet to be readily explained, so we’re not exactly sure what else we’ll lose access to, either.

Senator Conroy’s own website has a choice quote:

“The internet is a wonderful tool that is delivering benefits to increasing numbers of Australian families but the Government wants to find ways to make it safer, particularly for children. This report will assist the Government to deliver on its election commitment to create a safer online environment,” Senator Conroy said.

(DBCDE Minister’s Website, accessed 13 November 2008)

It’s that tired old “won’t somebody think of the children!?” line. The Internet does make it easier for everyone to access information of all sorts, it’s true, and some of that information could be called ‘undesirable’, at best. I certainly can’t argue that young and developing minds should be shielded from some material, or at least guided through any interaction with it by someone of sound mind and good sense.

However – that’s the responsibility of parents and families, not the state. The Internet does not fly into living rooms by magic; data of an undesirable nature must be actively sought out. Gone are the days of porn pop-ups on major sites and search results that contain links to smut – you have to go looking for the bad stuff.

There are consenting adults in Australia who like smut. My generation particularly seem quite comfortable with the idea of pornography (ethical issues aside, that’s a discussion for another day). We are voting, tax-paying adults, many of us of sound mind and good sense. If we say we want smut, then by crikey, smut we shall have.

This filter, as proposed, allows someone in the government – I’m not quite clear whom, yet – to create a blacklist of sites that none of us can see. Better yet, we don’t get to see what that list of sites is; we’re expected to sit quietly by and let the government make those decisions for us. So far, I see no ability for anyone to object to what goes on that blacklist, there’s no way to opt out of it entirely, and no means by which to challenge those decisions.

Any time someone in government starts talking about making these kinds of decisions for you, it’s time to get angry. We’re a nation of adults. Most of us are educated (to some degree or another), at least loosely aware of what we object to, and what we find acceptable.

WE CAN MAKE UP OUR OWN DAMN MINDS.

I’m all for protecting the children; let’s do that. However, let us do that in a way that does not restrict access for every consenting-age adult in the land; make the system opt-in for parents and families who are concerned, and leave the rest of us the hell alone.

It’s a slippery slope from ‘objectionable on moral grounds’ to ‘objectionable because it criticises the government’. This government may, indeed, be well-intentioned. They might not want to use the Rabbit Fence in a way that restricts access to legitimate information. What about the next government? The one after? Once the infrastructure is in place, it’s just a matter of time.

This one needs to be fought, and fought hard, by every legal means. I urge you all to talk about this issue, discuss it, get the word out, and let your representatives in government know that it’s not going to fly – it’s a waste of taxpayer money, and worse, it’s a ridiculous assault on our civil liberties.

I’ve tried this blogging thing before, and I never managed to keep up with it. Lack of commitment was my downfall, coupled with a sense that it wasn’t quite ‘my’ blog (it was hosted on a company website, and therefore, didn’t feel quite right.)

But here I am – domain of my own, wordpress installed, back to have another stab at writing. Hopefully the internet will find my contributions to be more signal than noise (I’ll try, no promises).

I’ll do something with the theme eventually, too – customise it in more interesting ways. Promise!

So. Hello World. Here goes.