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://​give​u​pan​duseta​bles​.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​.usato​day​.com/​o​p​e​d​/​2​0​0​8​/​1​1​/​a​t​h​e​i​s​m​-​a​-​p​o​s​i​t​.​h​tml

(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://​defend​ingscoundrels​.com/​2​0​0​8​/​1​0​/​c​a​n​-​l​a​b​o​r​-​i​m​p​l​e​m​e​n​t​-​c​l​e​a​n​-​f​e​e​d​.​h​tml — 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.