Down the Rabbit Hole with Sketchbook and Camera

I started this post more than 2 years ago, and put it aside after I stalled out in the writing. Then a few weeks later I had back surgery with a couple of months of recovery during which I forgot all about this post. I've patched it up a bit, but it's far from finished. I'd like to get back to it some day, but I don't know when that might be, and in the meantime I'd like to see other people thinking about some of these issues. So here it is; make of it what you will.

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Every once in a while I discover an interesting question that I want to answer (or attempt to answer, at any rate; some of these questions have been hanging around for thousands of years, so it's unlikely that I'm going to figure out anything definitive about them), and in reading or otherwise researching the question I discover other interesting questions, and the subject ramifies into what would be a dissertation if I were in graduate school.  Not too long ago this happened again.  Reading a book that had been on my "to read" list for almost 15 years, I started thinking about some issues that I've been thinking about on and off for most of my professional career.

The book was "Abstracting Craft" by Malcolm McCollough (see the references after the fold for a link).  It argues for a notion of digital craft (such as for computer-based architectural design, or product design)  based on  manual skill similar to the skills of a potter or a draftsperson.  This notion tickles an old interest of mine in just what a tool is, and how we humans form such tight linkages with our tools that we seem to somehow include them directly into our thinking and acting.  It also brought up some ideas for an SF story I've been thinking of writing.

Read on to follow me down the rabbit hole.

Down By Law: Unequal Enforcement and Unequal Laws

I think most people are familiar with the way unequal law enforcement can be used to control and oppress specific groups of people. In the US, people of color are controlled by the the use of Driving While Black and Breathing While Black; I suspect many people who are not affected by those techniques think they're jokes made up by black comedians, but I assure you they're not. Ask any black person (men especially), or anyone from another of the affected groups (brown men with turbans, brown women with hijabs, brown people with Meso-American features, etc.) and they might be persuaded to tell you about being stopped or hassled for their skin color or clothing.

And the use of unequal laws as tools of oppression has been reported, though it seems that not many members of the privileged classes believe or understand just how devastating they can be to a community. The best-known case is probably the US federal drug laws which provide for much greater  penalities for the use of crack cocaine than powder cocaine; this difference results (intentionally, if John Erlichman, Nixon's Attorney General is to be believed) in much longer sentences for lower class people of color to whom crack is much more available than powder than for middle class whites who use powder more commonly. Of course it's never just that simple: unequal enforcement also results in more suspended sentences to middle-class white first-time offenders than lower class POC.

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Unequal enforcement and unequal laws make members of the groups they single out into second-class citizens. We're all aware of how these tools have been used to institutionalize racism (though there are many who refuse to accept that such racism is all around them today), and in the recent election campaigns it was made abundantly clear to anyone with eyes, ears, and a brain that the same tools have been used to make women second-class citizens (and that there is a strong movement to remove even more rights from them).

But there's a special case of unequally-written laws that's not well-known among the privileged classes (that's you and me, white readers), and it's results are more dire than anything else I've mentioned. I'm going to take as settled that the laws and the law enforcement in the area of rape, especially of the rape of women, whether by violence, drugs, or extortion, is one of the primary tools of the oppression of women. Argue it somewhere else if you must; I don't think there's any question about it. There are two groups of women, however, who are more likely to be raped, more vulnerable to rape, and have far less recourse in the law than most, because they are subject to special laws which remove the little protection that the civil laws of the US afford other women.

One of those groups is Native women, especially members of Native tribes who live on reservations, although they're not the only ones at great risk. Native women face the likelihood that between one in two and one in three of them will be violently sexually assualted at some time in their lives (and probably more will be raped by extortion or harassment; there aren't any good estimates of the frequency of that). In many cases the rapists are white, and know that they will not be punished because the law that governs the women does not have jurisdiction, and the law of the surrounding white communities will not cooperate in investigating or arresting white suspects. Only in the last few years has this been reported in the mainstream media, and only in the back pages and smaller blogs at that. But this issue is starting to become better known, and recently has been mentioned in the NY Times and Salon.com. One of the main reasons for recent interest in it is that the Republicans in the House of Representatives have blocked reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act because it would increase the coverage to include LGBT, Hispanic, and Native women.

The other group is women in the military. Since 1995 hundreds of incidents of rape, sexual assault, or rape by extortion have been reported in the military, and most have gone uninvestigated or unindicted. Again part of the problem is a different set of laws: the military is governed not by civilian law but by the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). A great deal of the control and workings of the UCMJ are given to the commanding officer of the unit in which an offense is reported, and the culture of company and field grade officers in the military includes a strong feeling that "boys will be boys" and that one of the purposes of women in the military is to provide sexual service to the men. I can attest that that was the culture when I was in the Army many years ago, and what I've heard from soldiers who've been in service more recently indicates it hasn't changed for the better.

Others have marshalled the facts around these issues, and argued the morality of them, far better than I can. I just want to provide a nudge to people, to tell them that there is a great injustice being done, and to provide some links to more information. I hope that all of you are as outraged as I am at the use of unequal enforcement and unequal laws to perpetuate violence against these groups of women, and to keep them vulnerable to it.

Links to more information:

Indian Country Today Media Network: Law Enforcement Gaps Leave Native Women Vulnerable to Rape and Domestic Violence
The Guardian: Sexual violence is tearing Native American communities apart
Dailykos.com: Hey, House GOP—How many Native women will be raped today?
Jezebel.com: Rapes on Indian Reservations Reach Epidemic Proportions

The Guardian: Rape in the Military: exposing the shocking truth
Cnn.com: Why rapists in military get away with it
New York Daily News: Special Report: Rape in the armed forces
The Daily Beast: Service Members Sue Defense Secretary Over Alleged Military Rapes

Way to go Curiosity!

NASA'S Curiosity Rover touched down on Mars at 0531 UTC (1031 PM my local time) today, after completing the "7 minutes of terror" landing procedure which ended by hanging from a crane attached to a hovering rocket engine*. JPL has received and posted on the web pictures of the ground beneath the rover, as proof of life and landing. That's six large wheels for an SUV-sized machine.


* If you were wondering, you now know where the jet packs we were promised have gone.

Oh, Too Bad ... It's Illegal

In my last post I proposed a life insurance scheme with which to bedevil our plutocratic overlords and make a little money on the side.  I got a few comments to the effect of, "Good idea, let me know if you implement it," so I did some research to see what it would take to set it up, and found out that it won't work. It turns out that about 10 years ago people started noticing that companies were insuring their employees without telling them or giving their heirs any part of the payout. And then other people started doing pretty much what I'd hoped to do: buy insurance on people they'd never met and had no direct interest in (and often inflated the earnings figures on the policy in order to get larger coverage).

So, several associations of insurers started lobbying campaigns to get the state governments, who have jurisdiction and regulatory power over the insurance business, to pass new laws to prevent what they felt was a kind of fraud.  The result is that since then, most of the states (including the state where I live and most of the surrounding states) have outlawed what they call STranger Originated Life Insurance (STOLI). Interestingly, the corporate behavior is still legal in most states, what they've outlawed is insuring someone whom you have no "direct financial or familial interest" in. So if the insured is your employee or your relative, even if they don't know you, it's OK as long as you don't sell the policy to someone in order to make money for the sale. But if the insured is a batshit-insane billionaire set on destroying the economy and society of America, and not related to you, forget it.d

Oh, well, back to the drawing board.  Maybe I'll come up with something else that will work.

A Message the 0.1% Might Not Like (but the rest of us would)

Are you angry about the increasing inequity of income and wealth in the Western world, and especially in the USA? Does it piss you off that our Galtian Financial Overlords have privatized the profits from crazy pyramid schemes with convoluted financial instruments and socialized the losses from their risky bets? Are you tired of playing heads-they-win/tails-we-lose?

I think I have a way to get back a little of the money they stole it from us, while also publicly making it clear what we think of them. And not only is it legal, but they've been using the same technique in their corporations for years, and never could understand why we objected to it.  Well now they'll know, and so will you if you go below the cut.

Geometry As An Interactive Design Space

I've been somewhat coy about the software project I'm working on; that was exacerbated by my having to take a break from working on it for some months to deal with other aspects of Real Life ; now I want to talk about it in some detail, and show you why I'm interested in it, and what I hope will come out of it. If you haven't yet read my previous post on "The Geometry of the Many-Angled Ones", please follow that link and read it; there's a very basic description of Geometric Algebra there, and that's the basis of the software I'm designing. When you come back, jump past the cut for the rest if this post.

If You Want War, Prepare For War.

I realize it's been a long time since I posted an entry in this blog.  There are a lot of reasons for the silence, and most of obstacles have gone away now so I was planning to start posting again in the next couple of weeks.  This morning, however, I read this article on wired.com and I have to comment on it.

The gist of the article is that the US Air Force is deploying aircraft in the region around Iran with the ability to rapidly destroy Iran's anti-aircraft capability in order to allow either bombing of nuclear facilities identified as possibly involved in the nuclear weapons project that Washington alleges Iran to be working on, or, less probably (I hope), an invasion of Iran by US and Israeli forces.

The first thought I had was of deja vu: shades of 2003 and the preparations for invading Iraq while the US government lied to the US people and the world about the non-existent Iraqi nuclear and biological weapons programs. Now that the US military involvement in Iraq has finally ended, and the conventional military involvement in Afghanistan is scheduled to begin winding down, the US military is in danger of not having any wars except the drone wars the CIA and the Defense Department's Joint Special Operations Command are waging in Yemen (where the drone war has just been escalated), Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Somalia. So it's not surprising that they're hoping to start another one in Iran.

After the cut I'll talk about why this is an extremely bad idea, and why the American people should demand that it not happen.

Stop SOPA Before it Stops the Internet!

Steve Jobs: Say What you Want About Him, He's Left the World Changed.

Steve Jobs is gone now, but the engine of change he built is still there, and still changing the world.

Two Movies: of Beauty and Evil

A couple of weeks ago I watched a movie called Water, and a couple of days later I watched another one called Never Let Me Go. Although they're very different movies in many ways: Water was made in India, and takes place in Varanasi on the Ganges in 1938, and Never Let Me Go takes place in an alternate history late 20th Century England, they are visually and dramatically beautiful films made with great craft. and they are both about societies which accept, even profit from, great evil. I was deeply moved by both films, and couldn't escape being seriously disturbed by the evil in both. Strangely, I had not heard of either one before watching them (I usually at least read a review in the local paper of any new movie, though I've been missing them more lately because we've been going to the theater perhaps once a year), but after watching the second one I immediately thought of their similarities. I'll talk more about the films and why they are alike after the cut. Caution: there are spoilers for both movies.

Snarks in a M*****F****** Text!

Via Pharyngula, a generator for Lorem Ipsum babble text in the mode of Samuel L. Jackson.  After the cut, because, after all, it sounds like Samuel L. Jackson.

Congratulations Are In Order!

I just got an email from my older son, telling me that he and his wife were both unanimously voted tenure by the members of their department at LSU.  It's not official yet, there's lots of administrivia yet to be done, but that was the most critical step in the process.  This has been one hella summer for them: first the baby and now a major step in both their careers.  We're incredibly proud of them.

More Pictures of Ellie

I've uploaded all the pictures I took last week of Ellie to Picassa.  There are two albums, "Ellie #1" and "Elllie #2". Link here.

My Grandchild ...

My grandchild is, of course, the cutest baby in the universe.  She's just shy of 4 months old, and already knows all about performing, and holding the attention of the crowd. She's a happy baby, only cranky when she gets overtired or hungry.  She's good with strangers, and strangers (or at least the grandparents she's never seen before) graduate to friends and family very quickly.  Here's one picture, to give you a sense of why she's the best baby there is :-)

That's Eva (Grandma) holding Ellie. As you might expect, I've got about 60 or 70  more pictures of her, and I'll probably take a bunch more before we go back home on Monday.  I'll start putting them up on the net, on either Flickr or Picassa most likely, in the next day or two.

Her name is Ellie, short for Ellanor (combining Ella Fitzgerald and Nora Jones, two of her parents' favorite singers.  She seems to be quite at home in the heat and humidity of the Louisiana summer (which is more than I can say for myself).  She really wants to get up and boogie, or at least crawl, and not being able to frustrates her sometimes. I think she's going to be a great kid, even discounting my prejudices.

UPDATE: There are more photos on my Flickr photo stream: Ellie at 3 1/2.

Travels and Home Maintenance

Just so you know why my posts and comments are going to be coming in sporadic bunches: we're simultaneously getting ready to go to Louisiana for a week to meet our brand-new grandchild and boxing up everything in the bottom floor of the house so we can move it all out and have the floors redone. What we have right now is really crappy grey carpet, which picks up dog smells like you wouldn't believe, and is currently several shades darker than it was when we first moved in (and cleaning it helps only temporarily). And since kids and grandchild are coming to visit us here in a month or so, we need to toss the carpet. Also, because our TV set is an old CRT model that weighs more than 150 pounds, and even together the two of us can't move it, let alone carry it upstairs, we're going to replace it with a flatpanel and let the recyclers haul it off. So there'll be lots to do in RL here for the next couple of weeks, and not much time to push electrons around. But if nothing else I'll post some pictures from Louisiana by the time I get back.

Give Me That Old Time Politics (A Modest Proposal)

Unlike half the (semi-)civilized world I haven't yet posted anything in my blog about the political singularity¹ in US politics that occurred a little while ago in the Great Deficit Debate². That's mostly because I'm thoroughly disgusted by the sheer stupidity, cupidity, and general malfeasance our political "representatives" have shown.  But I have a modest proposal that might prevent such disasters in the future, one I first came up with many years ago, in a simpler time, when the crimes of our masters were simpler and perhaps more easily dealt with (and I didn't think my proposal was entirely justified.  Now I do).  After the cut, I'll give you the grisly details.

^1. Where "singularity'is defined as a change in technology or culture so great and so rapid that no one trying to forecast its effects beforehand can possibly do so.  I think I can safely say that no one was crazy enough to predict as recently as a year ago the particularly insane and unnecessary game of "button, button, who's got the nuclear button" on the Republican side of the deficit debate countered by the response of "we win by caving in" that the Democrats and the President replied with.

^2. It's clear to me that the deficit is in their intelligence, not in our budget.

Seniority

So last week I officially became a senior citizen: I turned 65, and am now on Medicare (thank Ghu: it's hundreds of dollars a month cheaper than the previous health insurance¹ I had, with pretty much comparable coverage).  Of course this happened in front of the backdrop of OHNO DEBT DISASTER THROW MEDICARE AND SOCIAL SECURITY RECIPIENTS TO THE WOLVES!!!!  I was beginning to wonder if there would be any Medicare by the time my eligibility kicked in, but luckily my coverage started Aug. 1, before Standard & Poors could downgrade US Government credit and turn us into a Third World nation.</sarcasm>

Oh, and another landmark: I am now a grandfather.  My older son Alex and his wife Melissa now have a bouncing baby girl, Ellanor, born about a month ago.  Because they're in Louisiana, we haven't seen her in person yet, but we've seen lots of pictures, and she is, of course, the cutest grandchild ever.

^1. And why, he asks rhetorically, do we need health insurance?  Just give me health care, and we can eliminate the 15 or 20% of the health care expenses in the US the insurance companies eat without providing any useful good or service.

A Geometry for the Many-Angled Ones

You may know (or not) that I've become quite fond of the science fiction of Charlie Stross, a British writer living in Scotland, especially the "Laundry Files" series.  The Laundry is a highly-classified British Intelligence and Counter-Espionage agency whose primary brief is the protection of the United Kingdom against the depredations of evil extra-dimensional beings who wish to invade, possess, destroy, and otherwise prey on humans and their world.

The basic conceit is that H. P. Lovecraft's writings are true: there are beings of great power lurking just around the corner in a higher-dimensional multiverse, beings who can be called forth using forms of geometry and computer software.  In the world of the Laundry, Alan Turing didn't just invent the mathematical underpinnings of the theory of computation; the secret part of his work that the rest of the world didn't get to see shows how mathematics and computer programs can be used to do what amounts to "magic".  Stross' hero, Bob Howard, is a middle-echelon IT sysadmin and secret agent, recruited into the Laundry just before his university computer graphics project could invite in beings that would have leveled the city of Wolverhampton¹.

Now it happens that I've been researching modern geometry in the last year or two.  One of the subjects I've been studying intensively, for use in a software project I hope to blog about in the near future, is a field called "Geometric Algebra"².  And Geometric Algebra just might be the geometry that Lovecraft's "Many-Angled Ones" use in navigating their sinister travels through the universes..  I'll explain more after the cut.  Don't be too bothered by the mathematical terms; I'll try to summarize the meaning of it all so you won't have a mathematician to get it.  And I'll try not to get eaten by the Great Old Ones before I finish.

... and One More Thing ...

Eek, yet another thing to take away time and energy.  A couple of weeks ago I noticed a bump on my back that was rather tender.  Went to the doctor and she diagnosed an infected cyst, so I went to a surgeon (who just happened to be the surgeon who performed Eva's lumpectomy last year, someone we both really liked and respected after that) who set up an outpatient procedure a week later, and pumped me full of antibiotics.

Still Here After All This Time

It's been a really long time since my last post on this blog.  That was caused by a number of things: recovery from surgery was slower than I expected, at least in terms of getting back the energy to do things during the day.  For awhile there it was all I could do to go to the park and sit for an hour while the dogs walked around.  It took almost six months to get up the energy to walk any distance myself, but once I started doing that, my energy started coming back at a faster pace.  Now I can do 3 or 4 hours of (mostly non-physical) work a day after walking the dogs.

But once I had the energy, more things intervened.  Our Lhasa Apso, Jemma,  suddenly (over the course of 2 or 3 weeks) went blind.  We spent some time going to vets and not getting a definitive diagnosis until we saw a veterinary opthalmologist.  He diagnosed SORD (Sudden Onset Retinal Disorder), a disorder whose etiology and mechanism are pretty much unknown, but whose prognosis is 100% blindness in almost all cases, and which has no treatment.  Jemma has been blind now for several months, and has mostly acclimated herself to it.  Dogs aren't as strongly affected by blindness as humans, because smell and hearing are so much more acute for them.  Jemma's only serious problem (aside from a non-related eye infection that lasted several weeks) is that when she gets excited or upset she gets disoriented and gets stuck in loops between obstacles, going back and forth until she accidentally goes off at an angle and misses one of them.  We''re working with her on that, but she is a very stubborn dog (a breed quality) and is having trouble taking direction when she gets that way.  Spencer, our Rat Terrier, has been very solicitous of her, following her and trying to help her (though not very consistently). He has come to get us a couple of times when she got into trouble in the back yard.

The other thing that's been keeping me from the blog is a project I've started.  Now that I'm able to do useful work at least part of the day, I've decided to come partially out of retirement and create software that, with a little luck, I can sell to bring in a little extra money; at least enough, I hope, to pay for the additional hardware and software I've had to buy for the development work (that's not really a lot, but retirement hasn't been quite what it was supposed to be, thanks to the Current Financial Unpleasantness).  I've got a project that I think I can do myself, one that I've been thinking about off and on for a year or so.  It will start out as a Macintosh application, sold through Apple's Mac App Store, and if that's successful, I plan to port it to the iPad. Details in a near future blog post.

I'll continue to post here, but probably not as often as I was doing last fall.  I'll be spending about 20 hours a week on the software project, and that will include some postings on a new blog I'm setting up now along with a website for the company that will sell the software.  I'll post the details for the new site and blog here soon.