I posted this on a MySpace discussion group just this morning, where a sixteen year old preacher’s son told the others that he was being sent to an ex-gay camp. He said he doesn’t want to be gay, that it’s a sin, and that he hated the urges he was having. This is my reply to him.
I’m reposting it here because you have to know that there are many other kids out there just like him, feeling alone and miserable about urges they’re having that they can’t seem to control, and which shame them deeply. It just breaks your heart sometimes. If there’s any shame here, it ought to be falling down hard on the shoulders of the adults in their lives who won’t teach them to reach for that higher ground where urges can become the beautiful desires two people in love feel for one another, because if gay kids can stand tall and proud and love wholeheartedly, then those adults just can’t feel righteous…
Yeah, some people say that simply being gay is a sin. Some people say that it’s just acting on it that’s the sin. And then again, some folks say the universe is less then nine-thousand years old too. Here’s what I say: when the bird and the bird book disagree, believe the bird.
I’m sorry you’re being troubled by urges. That’s not unusual at your age. Gay and straight alike, we all go through adolescence. And it can be a difficult time no matter what your sexual orientation is. It’s the walk from childhood into adulthood. And part of being an adult, is learning to deal with sex and sexuality. In your teenage years especially, that part of you can yank you around like a big yapping dog on a leash, always tugging you this way and that toward whatever it finds interesting, the instant it catches sight of it. It can be really hard to deal with, especially when you’re young.
Straight kids usually get to learn at this stage, about dating, and about love, and about what it means to become a worthy lover, and find someone to love and be loved by. The really troubling thing about how gay kids are often treated, even these days, is that their urges aren’t allowed to become anything more then urges, aren’t allow to develop into anything higher and more noble then lusts. They’re not told that they too can reach for that higher ground where two people can find a soulmate in each other, and nurture and share an intimate body and soul romance between them.
That is one of the most perfect joys of this life there is…to find your other half, and to love and be loved by them. But like anything else important in life, you have to learn how, you have to make yourself ready for it, and become worthy of it, and gay kids are taught only that all they have, and all they ever will have, are urges. A kind of acid is slowly poured over their capacity to love and trust and accept love and trust from another, and the possibility of finding that soulmate, that intimate other, is carefully and deliberately taken away from them. If there is such a thing as Sin in this world, capital S, then doing that to someone has to be a big one.
If you’re worried about being gay, you’re worrying about the wrong thing. Worry instead that you are trustworthy, that your word is good, that your friends can trust you, that you do your share of the work, that you never become the kind of person who takes advantage of other people who are weaker then yourself, or more vulnerable, that you care that your community, and your country are better for your having walked in it, and that the people you take into your arms, whether they’re male or female, are better for having been loved by you, and not worse. That’s the important stuff in life. The rest is detail. I tell you that if you take care of the important stuff, the detail will work itself out.
Looks like I’ll have the pencils for episode eleven done tonight…if I’m not being distracted by this really cute new neighbor that I have that is. I’d hoped to have them done by Sunday night but it just wasn’t possible. But as long as I can start inking on Wednesday I can have eleven up by the end of this weekend.
I hope those of you reading this series get as many giggles while reading eleven as I’ve had drawing it. This one’s been a lot of fun to draw. It’s about something your gay neighbors go through during adolescence…that period of time when (if you’re a guy, say) you start realizing that you’re looking at other guys in a sexual way and it’s embarrassing and you don’t want to and you keep trying to stop you’re utterly unable to stop. Your eyes just keep straying back to that really cute guy, and then they wander all over his body like a pencil sketching out every line and curve…and you catch yourself doing it and you think ‘stop it’ and you look away and then a few moments later your eyes just start straying right back again… I can laugh about it now, but back then it was very, very irritating…
People don’t always appreciate how the fascist right often cloaks its war against political opponents in terms of fighting indecency. The Bush Administration crack down a couple years ago on broadcast indecency was usually taken to be a bone tossed at it’s fundamentalist base. But it was of a piece with the right’s long war on dissent…
You might react by saying that the FCC fines only for exposure of certain portions of skin or particular diction, and it would never punish anyone for expressing a political view. I would respond with three facts.
First, in the 1950s FCC Chairman Doerfer started investigations against TV stations for showing reports done by Edward R. Murrow that were allegedly not sympathetic to famous republican anticommunist Senator Joe McCarthy.
Doerfer was a McCarthy man. McCarthy was such an important figure in the Republican party, similar to Representative Tom Delay today, that his behavior was tolerated by the Republican White House. Indeed, President Eisenhower put two McCarthy people on the commission, among one the Chairman.
Second, while the Washington Post was starting in on the Watergate story, President Nixon’s staff, perhaps at his request, apparently caused his appointed Chairman at the FCC to begin investigations into the Washington Post’s television stations in Florida. The idea, according to then Post publisher Katherine Graham, was to have the investigations cast a cloud on the Post’s continued ownership of the stations, so as to undercut the business model that was supposed to further her initial public offering. Of course, the Post saw this as punishment for its pursuit of the story of the Watergate break-ins.
The political cartoonist Herblock used to draw Nixon’s FCC chairman and cronies with a big sign behind them that said "Fairness Doctrine: If It’s Not Pro-Administration, It’s Not Fair" Even back then attacks on the media by the right wing were fierce and unrelenting. Anytime a story that was critical of Nixon appeared in the press or on TV there were howls from the right about bias. But back then the news outlets had a little backbone. It wasn’t until the right managed to rewrite FCC rules on radio and TV station ownership, rules which once had bipartisan support on the theory that neither party should be allowed to dominate the public airwaves, that the right was able finally to shut progressive viewpoints out of the public debate.
The Center for American Progress and Free Press today released the first-of-its-kind statistical analysis of the political make-up of talk radio in the United States. It confirms that talk radio, one of the most widely used media formats in America, is dominated almost exclusively by conservatives.
The new report — entitled “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio” — raises serious questions about whether the companies licensed to broadcast over the public radio airwaves are serving the listening needs of all Americans.
While progressive talk is making inroads on commercial stations, right-wing talk reigns supreme on America’s airwaves. Some key findings:
– In the spring of 2007, of the 257 news/talk stations owned by the top five commercial station owners, 91 percent of the total weekday talk radio programming was conservative, and only 9 percent was progressive.
– Each weekday, 2,570 hours and 15 minutes of conservative talk are broadcast on these stations compared to 254 hours of progressive talk — 10 times as much conservative talk as progressive talk.
– 76 percent of the news/talk programming in the top 10 radio markets is conservative, while 24 percent is progressive.
Note that those top ten markets are either in solidly blue states, or in blue areas of blue states. The exception being Texas.
Two common myths are frequently offered to explain the imbalance of talk radio: 1) the 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine (which required broadcasters to devote airtime to contrasting views), and 2) simple consumer demand. Each of these fails to adequately explain the root cause of the problem. The report explains:
Our conclusion is that the gap between conservative and progressive talk radio is the result of multiple structural problems in the U.S. regulatory system, particularly the complete breakdown of the public trustee concept of broadcast, the elimination of clear public interest requirements for broadcasting, and the relaxation of ownership rules including the requirement of local participation in management. […]
Ultimately, these results suggest that increasing ownership diversity, both in terms of the race/ethnicity and gender of owners, as well as the number of independent local owners, will lead to more diverse programming, more choices for listeners, and more owners who are responsive to their local communities and serve the public interest.
Along with other ideas, the report recommends that national radio ownership not be allowed to exceed 5 percent of the total number of AM and FM broadcast stations, and local ownership should not exceed more than 10 percent of the total commercial radio stations in a given market.
I bought a satellite radio receiver for my car mostly so I didn’t have to listen to hate radio whenever I took my yearly road trips out west. Anyone who really thought back when the rules were being changed that letting big business rule the airwaves would result in a more consumer choice and more responsiveness to what consumers want to hear either knows now that they were sadly mistaken, or they never listed to radio in the first place and aren’t now. Of course, anyone who’s paid a utility bill recently in a deregulated market knows exactly how much consumer choice big business wants to let us have.
It’s true. Some years ago, after Maryland started allowing us to view our grade school records, I took a trip to my old High School and asked to see mine. Reading all the comments in my file from all the teachers I’d had over the years was a real eye opener. Two of them stood out in particular: one from a fifth grade teacher who wrote Bruce "Takes excessive interest in personal art projects". The other was a write-up by one of my first grade teachers for a discipline infraction. I’d been caught kissing other boys.
It wasn’t until I read her words that I even remembered the incident. Perhaps I’d just shut it out of my mind all those years because the embarrassment was too much for my little first grade sensibilities. Or perhaps I just let the incident slide on by because I hadn’t thought it was any big deal at the time. All I remember of it, was getting scolded for kissing a boy. But that particular teacher was always scolding me and then dragging me into the coat closet, where she dragged all the kids at one time or another to make them pray for forgiveness because of something they did, or that she though they’d done. I still remember how livid she was when the Supreme Court ruled that public schools can’t force the kids in them to pray. Picture a first grade teacher standing stone faced in front of her classroom of small children, and telling them that the Supreme Court had just taken God away from them.
Which is all to say that my sexuality, even at that age, was probably already beginning to surface in various little telling ways, and that some of the adults in my life were already starting to brand me for it. There’s a really interesting article in this weeks’ Village Voice about parents and teachers struggling to cope with developing gender and sexuality in grade school children and younger in a culture that simply doesn’t want to aknowledge that children have any such things. But if there is a bioligical basis to sexual orientation, then its a no-brainer that they do.
But why not? We know almost nothing about gender and sexuality in young children, but what we do know is that they both emerge in children quite early.
"It varies, and development varies from child to child, but awareness of sexuality begins in elementary school," says Caitlin Ryan, a researcher studying LGBT families with the Family Acceptance Project in California. "Even though adults who work with children or adolescents are typically not aware of this as part of their professional training, regardless, it’s happening. It’s very common for young people to have attractions to same-sex peers if they’re young."
I remember my grade school crushes to this day. I often drove my friends back then crazy with my heated emotional attachments. In those days though, strange as it may sound today, a young boy was almost expected to dislike girls and find more emotional gratification in his male pals until he got to a certain age. There was a saying for it "Going through a phase…" As time went on and my male pals began their first tentative efforts at courtship, I would reach for that saying to describe myself and my own emotional responses to the same and the opposite sex, over and over again like a mantra. "I’m just going through a phase…just going through a phase…just going through a phase…" I had no idea what it meant, but it sounded like a good enough excuse to avoid dating girls…something I was really really not interested in.
If only someone had told me that I could date boys instead. Oh…I’d have jumped right on that…
Just ask the parents. "In their kindergarten class, I’ve definitely observed three or four of the boys being flirtatious, with both girls and other boys," says the mother of the little boy who wants to marry his "god brother."
Ryan says that elementary school health teachers have told her that they hear children talking about crushes beginning as early as kindergarten. "Children can describe thinking of Valentine’s day and of having that little special feeling of having butterflies in their stomach," she says. "Why would we think that this is only something that takes place in their twenties?"
And why would we think that only straight kids are getting twitterpated? Is it because we still think gayness is such an undesirable outcome?
Twitterpated. I love it. Describes my schoolboy crushes perfectly. Twitterpated. Except I had no idea what it was all about, because I wasn’t allowed to know that boys could fall in love with other boys. Those years could have been a lot happier for me then they were. Every kid should be allowed to get twitterpated without getting dragged into the closet to pray for forgiveness.
A lot of people who, like me, have hitherto been keen smokers have suddenly started telling me that they are glad the government is stepping in to discipline them. These are people who were until recently aware enough of their own pleasure centres to know that the act of smoking can be, and often is, so much more than feeding a greedy addiction. It does relieve stress; it does deepen the pleasure of a sociable evening, as it relieves the alienation of a lonely one; it does help you think.
That’s actually the first time I’ve ever seen anyone acknowledge that smoking can alleviate the sting of loneliness for a while. Yeah. It does that.
And yes, unlike other intoxicants, tobacco does does help you think. It can also give you cancer and heart disease. But we make these trade-offs all the time in life. You can get heart disease from the regular consumption of certain kinds of food. You can get killer VD from having sex. You can be crippled or killed in an automobile accident. Same thing with any of a dozen or more active sports. There’s this puritan strain here in America, and I guess in places overseas too, that regards any kind of drug use, and nicotine is certainly a drug, as wicked and which admits no limits on its right to stop other people from doing it. Whether what someone is doing is putting other people at risk isn’t the point, although it’s often the rhetoric. The point is that they like doing it purely for the pleasure of doing it and they have to be corrected. It’s not drugs that are evil, it’s pleasure.
Anyone who ever had to deal with an alcoholic or a drug addict knows there are times when you need to step in and put a stop to it. But people who can handle their sinful pleasures responsibly ought to be left alone, simply on the principle that our lives belong, ultimately, to us and not a bunch of finger wagging pinched face nags. That goes for sex, it goes for drag racing, it goes for tobacco, it goes for anything someone might do, purely for the pleasure of doing it. I work twelve hour days sometimes, and weekends through. I’ve postponed vacations when work related matters needed my attention. Sometimes, life just gets like that. I pay my bills, I pay my taxes, I always try to get the best deal for goods and services, but I won’t try to cheat anyone. George Washington could not tell a lie…I just won’t. I respect the rule of law, and I keep an eye on my neighborhood, and I look out for my neighbors. If I want to fucking enjoy a good cigar from time to time I damn well ought to be able to, as long as my smoke isn’t bothering anyone else. I’m fine with the concept of smoke free zones. Not so much with outright bans. Maybe it’ll kill me someday. On the other hand, maybe a mugger or a gay basher will get me first. Life is too risky a business not to have some fun with it while you can, even if it kills you.
If I could live to be a thousand, and smoking was likely to cut nine hundred and forty years off that, then I probably wouldn’t do it.
The walk home…
through the park, then up the hill
90 degrees…hot…
My daypack full of stuff
heavy
Noticing that my usual fast pace is making me tired
again.
Tired
Pausing for a while
to steady myself
I never had to before.
Blue Mountains high and valley low,
I don’t know which way I should go,
One Summer Dream, One Summer dream.
Warm summer breeze blows endlessly,
Touching the hearts of those who feel,
One Summer Dream, One Summer dream.
Bird on wing goes floating by,
But there’s a teardrop in his eye,
One Summer Dream, One Summer dream.
"Microsoft has admitted, in an email to the press, that ‘some customers may be waiting to adopt Windows Vista because they’ve heard rumors about device or application compatibility issues, or because they think they should wait for a service pack release.’ The company is now pleading with customers not to wait until the release of SP1 at the end of the year, launching a ‘fact rich’ program to try to convince them to…
"Fact rich"? "Fact rich"? "Fact rich"? Well that certainly helps me make up My mind about running Vista. Hell will not only have to freeze over, it’ll have to turn into ice cream too.
I finished episode nine of A Coming Out Story last weekend, and I have a road trip coming up in another couple of weekends. I’ll be on the road for most of the month of July, first going to visit some friends in the mid-west, then out to the Four Corners area to explore a tad more, then to California and a visit with my brother, then to Portland Oregon and the O’Reilly Open Source Developer’s Conference. Given my past performance getting out new episodes it seemed a sure bet that I wouldn’t have anything more up until August at the earliest. But I have a head of steam up now, and I really really want to get episode ten up before I leave for the west. It’s one of several upcoming ones I’ve been chafing at the bit to do since I started scripting this series in 2005.
So I’ve been trying hard to push everything else in my life aside for a couple hours every night after work. Naturally several things suddenly popped up that needed my immediate attention and I thought I was once again letting precious drawing time pass on by. But somehow I’ve managed to finish half the pencils on episode ten already. I’m shooting to have all the pencils done by the end of this coming weekend. Then I can have the episode up for sure by the following weekend. Or even sooner.
I’ll probably take my portable drawing board (it has a parallel attached to it), my small scanner, the Wacom tablet and drawing supplies along with me on the trip. I might be able to get another episode out while I’m on the road. It really bothers me that I’ve been working on this thing since 2005 and it’s 2007 I only have nine episodes up.
(Albany, New York) The Assembly passed same-sex marriage legislation Tuesday night, but the state’s highest ranking Republican vowed not to allow it to come to a vote in the Senate.
And what’s hilarious about all this is that a lot of these so-called gay conservatives think all the sexual hedonism of the liberal "gay lifestyle" is wicked and we should all be about settling down and getting married and moving to the suburbs and getting rich. The way they tell it, it’s the socialist-communist urban liberal left that’s anti same-sex marriage. So you’d think it would be democrats who are adamantly against it. But no…
Just remember folks, while you’re busy kissing up to the republican establishment, that Truman Capote once said a faggot is the homosexual gentleman who just left the room.
Republicans have long tried to exploit masculinity images and depict Democrats and liberals as effeminate and therefore weak. That is not new. But what is new is how explicit and upfront and unabashed this all is now. And what is most striking about it is that — literally in almost every case — the most vocal crusaders for Hard-Core Traditional Masculinity, the Virtues of Machismo, are the ones who so plainly lack those qualities on every level.
There are few things more disorienting than listening to Rush Limbaugh declare himself the icon of machismo and masculinity and mock others as "wimps." And if you look at those who have this obsession — the Chris Matthews and Glenn Reynolds and Jonah Goldbergs and Victor Davis Hansons — what one finds in almost every case is that those who want to convert our political process and especially our national policies into a means of proving one’s "traditional masculine virtues" — the physically courageous warriors unbound by effete conventions — themselves could not be further removed from those attributes, and have lives which are entirely devoid of such "virtues."
Not that I’m saying homosexuality is incompatible with masculinity, of course. Consenting biweekly to having one’s duodenum battered with the manic hydraulic fury of a tricked-out V-12 jackhammer manned by an epileptic Con-Ed worker with an ancestral oath of vengeance against asphalt would, I think, tend to butch one up, at least as regards one’s pain threshold.
The post Yglesias links to also has this little gem…
Is Instapundit A Homo? Well, I think I met him three times or something, and he never tried to pork me. Given the fact I’m 180 pounds of rompin’-stompin’ Clydesdale-clompin’ 180 proof sex, I’d say he successfully passed that test.
Or maybe Reynolds isn’t into drunken horse asses. Three times or something. Good thing he didn’t have to use two hands to count them on or he’d probably still be trying to write that post. There’s an old joke about how God gave men brains and dicks and not enough blood to operate them both at the same time. Somehow I don’t think this guy has that problem.
Have you ever wondered how men who feel such a profound contempt for anyone who would allow themselves to be fucked, treat their women during sex? The Ex-Gay barkers generally link male homosexuality to a broken sense of one’s own masculinity. But isn’t it staringly obvious that a broken sense of masculinity is what’s behind male homophobia, and misogyny?
Oh…and this…
Pam at Pam’s House Blend riffs on a column in the right wing World Net Daily from Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, who according to his Wikipedia entry is the founder of a group called The Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny, a group which is dedicated to promoting responsible fatherhood amongst African Americans. His column is a pathetic diatribe against the opposite sex…
Many women I counsel with and have interviewed on my radio and TV shows are quick to point out everything their man is doing wrong, but it’s rare to find one who will honestly admit that she’s screwed up the kids or that she’s driving her mate crazy.
It’s time that we look at the role women play in driving men out of the home and separating them from their children. That’s not to say that men don’t bear the brunt of the responsibility for their weakness. Men need to learn how to deal with women with strength and patience – this is love.
…
Most women themselves don’t understand why they provoke and agitate their spouse to lash out or run away. They don’t understand the subtle control they have over weak men.
Men typically marry for love and to raise children. The mistake they make is that they’re looking for love from the wrong source. Men shouldn’t look for love from women. Rather they should find God’s love and pass that love down to the wife and children.
WTF?? As a gay man, this contempt for the opposite sex you regularly see from the ersatz "manly man" crowd is really striking. The shibboleth is that they’re thumping their manly chests to prove they’re not homosexuals. I think they’re thumping their chests because it’s the only way they know how to prove they’re somebody. Because they’ve lost the person within. There is no there inside them anymore. That’s probably why they don’t know how to love anyone outside of themselves. Sex is a reflex, and they still understand it when it tugs at them. But love is utterly beyond this kind of guy. You need a heart for that, and all he’s got is his…masculinity.
There’s an order to life: God in Christ, Christ in man, man over woman, and woman over children. When this order is broken or violated you have "hell" on earth.
…
There’s been a deliberate plan to wipe out masculinity in society. When you wipe out the man you wipe out God, because the man represents God on earth. Then there’s no truth – no light – and no hope for the family.
The man represents God on earth… Well there’s a little Christian modesty for you. None of this meek shall inherit the earth claptrap for this guy. No, no. All you need to do to be the very embodiment of God on earth in his good book, is to be born with that there ‘Y’ chromosome and you’re set. And…to attack masculinity is to attack on God.
And I could almost buy that, in the sense that to demean and degrade anything that is a part of this wonderful universe is an attack on its creator, on existence. To attack femininity is to attack God. To attack sexuality is to attack God. To attack any part of our shared humanity is an attack on God. But I don’t think that’s what this creep has in mind. He thinks his ‘Y’ makes him something. But all it makes him is male. Now to this gay boy, and I’m sure most heterosexual women will agree, that is no trivial thing. But you need to be more then simply male to be attractive. You need to be decent. And the ‘Y’ won’t make you that. You have to make yourself that. That’s the part people like Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson miss.
I would ask the Reverend what the difference is, between holding yourself above women simply because you’re a man, and holding yourself above others simply because of the color of your skin. You can make a case for the proposition that the genders view the world around them in their own way, but that’s not to say that one gender is better then another, let alone that being male makes you God on earth. This is the cop out people take, when the struggle for character becomes too much. Instead of reaching beyond themselves, for that better person they could become, they buy the cheap seat to self esteem. Why bother making yourself a better person, when you’re already the embodiment of God on earth?
And the problem with that is that it leaves an empty spot, a barren patch deep down inside, where a conscience is supposed to develop. The Reverend may think he’s preaching a message of strength to his male flock, but he’s just making them weak. "…what one finds in almost every case is that those who want to convert our political process and especially our national policies into a means of proving one’s "traditional masculine virtues" — the physically courageous warriors unbound by effete conventions — themselves could not be further removed from those attributes, and have lives which are entirely devoid of such "virtues."
As Frank Lloyd Wright said, "No stream rises higher then its source" The cult of masculinity, is more of a dildo. A grandiose substitute for something that’s all well and good just for what it is, but that shouldn’t be made into any more then what it is. A masculinity that feels itself threatened by gay men, let alone the opposite sex, is one that’s probably broken to start with. Your own maleness is a good thing to understand if you’re a guy. But it isn’t what matters. It’s what you make of yourself that matters. The higher ground, the exalted status, is possible to all of us, regardless of our gender, or our sexuality. But so is this:
You need a really good set of brakes to avoid finding yourself in this place. The ancient passions of our tribal past, of the long march of life on earth from the sea to our human existence, can sweep us off our feet in an instant, and deliver us into unmitigated evil before we even know where we’re going. The flesh of our existence is an amazing, wonderful, glorious thing. But to see your personal salvation in it is to walk away from everything fine and noble a human being can be, and bellyflop into the jungle of our past. Real men, like real women, have brains, and hearts, and a conscience that knows where the lines are you cannot cross, without renouncing your humanity.
My little iPod died yesterday. Suddenly. Very suddenly. Just so all you other iPod kids know, they can go without warning.
I’d just got home from work. My place of work is within walking distance of my home and unless the weather is looking really ugly I’ll almost always walk it, with iPod on my hip. Actually, that iPod has become almost a constant companion now on my walks. Also, when I’m busy puttering around the house doing chores. So when I get home I check the iPod’s battery meter and it’s looking about half way drained and so I decide to pop it onto its charging stand so it’ll be fully charged for my evening walk. The moment I sat it down on its charging pad the screen went blank and nothing, Nothing I could do, no pressing or prodding or stroking of any of its controls, could bring it back.
I’m more addicted to that thing then I ever was to my first Sony Walkman. The first generation Walkmans used cassette tapes and were a blessing for those of us who liked to take long walks or hikes in the countryside, and always wanted our favorite music as a companion. Before the Walkmans the best you could do was a small transistor radio and a single earplug with the high fidelity of a tin can. Your only choices were whatever the radio stations you could pick up were playing at that moment, along with all the ads. With the Walkmans you had great sound quality, no static, and you could play whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, wherever you wanted. But you were limited to what a single cassette could hold. That often meant stuffing your pockets with cassettes, and still not having just the right music you wanted to listen to if you changed your mind in the middle of a walk.
When the first CD Walkmans came out they were an improvement, in that you had even better sound quality and the CDs held more music at a time. But CDs didn’t really fit into a pocket very well, and the first clip-on-your-belt CD players often skipped when jarred, like when you were darting across a road or going up and down stairs.
The iPod is one of those little gizmos that shows how a lot of incremental improvements on a theme can suddenly add up to a revolution given just one more logical step. Capacity. I’d never pictured how things might be when I could take damn my whole music library with me everywhere. Well I can now. Almost. I don’t think even 80 gigs is enough to hold all of mine, and half my library is on LPs so converting that is still going to be a bit of work. But now I can go for a walk, or for a road trip, or on a business trip, and I don’t have to think about what music I should take along. I just take the iPod with me and I have it all. It also means I can back it all up so I need never loose any music I’ve bought due to breakage or theft. No more heartbreak over a broken or lost record. I can take all my music with me to work. I can take it with me grocery shopping. I can take it with me anywhere. Of course, I still need somewhere to plug in and recharge the little dickens.
I use my iPod now more then I use my big vacuum tube/solid state stereo system, and that thing used to be on constantly when I was home. But now when I’m busy with household chores I’ll almost always have the iPod clipped to my belt. I never did get around to wiring up the whole house for sound, and now I don’t need to. I can wash dishes, do a laundry, iron my shirts, work in the back yard, paint my porch railings, refill the bird feeders, cook dinner, with the iPod clipped to my belt, feeding my ears any music from my library I want to hear.
So when I saw that screen go utterly blank my heart sank. Nooooo…! I can wait for a repairman to come fix my washing machine, but I need my iPod, Now. Luckily there is an Apple Store not far away from my house. But all they could do was confirm that the thing was dead, and to fix it would take weeks possibly, and cost a tad more then half of what a new one would cost anyway. Since the fix was just to replace the old iPod with a reconditioned one, I was a bit nonplussed that it would take over a week. Erm…why don’t I just hand you my old one and a hundred and fifty bucks and you just hand me a reconditioned one…?
So I have a new iPod now. It’s the fifth generation video player one (I really don’t see the use of playing video on an iPod, but maybe that’s because I’m not really watching much TV anymore as it is…). For the same price as the old one cost me two years ago, the new one holds about 10 gig more, and has a bit more battery life between charges. And it’s thinner and lighter, so it was a bit too loose in the old one’s hip case. The new Incase case I bought is a bright electric blue (I’m thinking now I should have bought the pink one…) and protects the iPod inside a bit better then the old ones. I asked the lady at the Apple support counter to look at the charger for the old one, to make sure it wasn’t the culprit. She said it was okay, which was a good thing because as it turns out they don’t supply separate chargers with the new iPods. You’re expected to charge from the computer’s USB port, but I turn Bagheera, the art room Mac which also holds my iTunes library, off when I’m not using it. So I need the charger.
It’s a bit frustrating that the only fix for these little gizmos is to just completely replace them. You can’t just open the back, diagnose which part failed and replace it and close it all back up again and hand it back to the customer. It’s all one little board inside those things, and even the damn battery in an iPod is hard wired into place. Apple will give you a small discount on a new one if you let them recycle the old one, which eased my mind a bit from an environmental standpoint. But I still didn’t like it. At least it’s not all just going into a landfill, but two years isn’t all that great of a lifespan. My iPod was a forth generation, and I was hoping to at least leap frog over a generation before I bought another one.
Massachusetts lawmakers on Thursday took less than a half hour to kill bid to amend constitution to ban gay marriage.
Because the marriage amendment was citizen-based it required only 50 votes. The final vote was 151 – 45. That means the issue cannot be put to voters in 2008, and will force supporters of the measure to begin collecting signatures all over again.
If proponents of the amendment do gain the signatures needed the measure would again have to go to two consecutive sessions of the legislature.
The earliest it could be put to voters would be 2012. With public opinion polls showing Massachusetts voters becoming increasingly comfortable with same-sex marriage it is considered unlikely any amendment would be approved.
Going into today’s joint session of the legislature it was anyone’s guess how the vote would go…
I was so deathly worried about this. They only needed 50 votes to get it out there. And I could easily see it passing with a simple majority vote, even if a majority of voters weren’t in favor of turning back the clock. The haters are enthusiastic in their hate. Support for our rights is often in word only. It could have happened. Massachusetts could have cut off our ring fingers, even if a majority of its people weren’t really all that interested in cutting off our ring fingers. All they needed was fifty votes out of two-hundred. But in the end, they could not manage even that.
It was because they’d had a chance to see people, to see loving, devoted couples, apart from the scarecrows that the haters have been waving at them for decades now, that this happened. Because of that, I think many of them simply could not in good conscience remove the rings from our fingers after all, despite what the haters were screaming at them. Thank the courts for that. Somewhere, whether it was in Massachusetts or another state, same sex marriage had to be ushered in by the courts. Because until people could see for themselves the substance of our lives and our hearts, and our devotion to our mates, all they would know about us, was what the haters keep on screaming at them. The wall of prejudice had to be broken by the courts somewhere, because the statehouses simply do not stray very far from the prejudices of their voters.
But now that it’s been broken, and especially now that same sex marriage has been defended by such a significant majority in one American statehouse, I would expect to see other statehouses follow. Perhaps not this year or the next. But soon. We are finally on the threshold of our dream of equality. In one birthplace of the American revolution, the revolution still lives after all.
I feel so good right now. Better then I thought I’d ever feel about my country again after six years of George Bush. Man…I am gonna have me some fireworks for This 4th…
There’s a kind of primitive variable that probably everyone who writes computer code knows and understands these days…the Boolean. Unlike other variables which can hold a range of values, be they numbers, or strings of ascii characters, the Boolean is a relentlessly either-or variable. And for that reason, it maps pretty well to the fundamental logic by which all digital computers operate, and to their smallest unit of data, the bit. But humans have been considering their world in Boolean logic ever since our minds first emerged from out of the biological background noise.
Yes-No. True-False. Right-Wrong. Good-Bad. Even as we admit to ourselves that there are often only shades of gray, we persist in reducing our experiences to these terms. It’s as basic an evaluation as can be. The second postulate of Aristotelian logic is that of ‘either-or’. A thing cannot both be, and at the same time not be. Either yes, or no. Either true, or false. Either right, or wrong. Either it is, or it is not. It must be one or the other.
Well…tell it to Schrodinger’s cat. It’s probably no coincidence that our machines are made in our image, that they resemble the way our minds like to think. The canvas always speaks of the artist. But as it turns out, that’s not actually the way our brains operate. It may not even be the way nature, at its most elemental level, works. There’s this intriguing tri-position logic in the natural world that I keep seeing raise its hand and wave at us from time to time. But it seems to go unexamined most of the time, and I think that’s because like the extra space-time dimensions physicists keep telling us are there, it’s hard for our minds to wrap themselves around it. And that’s really interesting, because one place you really see this tri-position logic is in how our brains actually physically work.
Consider the humble synapse. It is the gap between brain cells, across which two different kinds of chemical "messages" can cross. One kind of chemical causes the cell on the other side of the gap to fire. The other chemical inhibits the cell on the other side of the gap from firing. So far, so good. We’re still comfortably in the basic Boolean logic of things. Fire-Don’t fire. Yes-No. Off-On. Either-Or. But there’s a third thing that synapse can do: Nothing.
So synapse logic has three states, not two. Fire, don’t fire, and…what? Here’s where it gets interesting for me. What is the word here. We don’t really have one. And that I think, is because the concept is difficult for us. The state itself seems foreign enough to the way our minds naturally work, that as far as I know, humans don’t really have a good enough word for that third position. Neutral doesn’t quite do it. It isn’t that it isn’t engaged, like a gear shift you put into neutral, say. It’s connected, to the rest of the brain. ‘Off’ isn’t quite it either. Each half of the synaptic gap has a current state that influences the state of the cells on either side of the synaptic gap depending on the direction of the message, or the absence of one. So there are really three states possible here: Fire, don’t fire, and a third, that is neither fire or don’t fire. Depending on the state of the synapses it’s connected to, a brain cell may or may not fire. So the cell itself may have just two states. But the synapses have three.
Our minds just don’t seem to grasp that third logical state very well, and we fumble to describe it. It’s a between state. No…it’s a middle state. Wait…a transitional state… Uhm… No…it’s…it’s… (shrug) I dunno…
Maybe ‘zero’ is the right way to think about it. But I can only say that because I write software code and I understand how zero is actually something distinct from a positive value, is distinct from a negative value. But that seems to be a non-intuitive concept for us humans. Consider that the Arabic invention of the zero as a form of notation actually came well after a lot of other very basic mathematical concepts. Well of course everyone knew that you can have a zero quantity. But expressing it abstractly seemed to be a difficulty. And in many programming languages, 0 evaluates to false anyway, and any other value is true (except in Basic, where –1 is (was) true, which I think is right from a bitwise NOT sense…but don’t get me started…). And…this third position isn’t really a ‘nothing’. It’s more of a ‘neither’.
Another place you see this tri-position logic is natural selection. In the grand scheme of things, the winners are those organisms that are best adapted to their environment. Variation then, that gives an organism an advantage tends to be passed on, and variation that puts an organism at a disadvantage tends not to be passed on. Over time the advantages accumulate, and the disadvantages get culled out. Either-Or. But there is a third thing that can happen. Nothing. A variation can simply be neither an advantage nor a disadvantage. Those variations it seems, get placed in the genetic portfolio right along with the advantages too…
The most detailed probe yet into the workings of the human genome has led scientists to conclude that a cornerstone concept about the chemical code for life is badly flawed.
The ground-breaking study, published in more than two dozen papers in journals on both sides of the Atlantic, takes a small percentage of the genome to pieces to draw up a "parts list," identifying the biological role of every component.
For the international team of investigators, the four-year project was the computer-equivalent of passing a fine-toothed comb through a mountain of raw data.
Reporting in the British journal Nature and the US journal Genome Research on Thursday, they suggest that an established theory about the genome should be consigned to history.
Under this view, the genome is rather like a ribbon studded with some 22,000 "nuggets" in the form of genes, which make proteins, the essential stuff of life.
Genes — deemed so valuable that some discoverers of them have been prompted to file patents over them for commercial gain — amount to only around a twentieth, or even less, of the genetic code.
In between the genes and the sequences known to regulate their activity are long, tedious stretches that appear to do nothing. The term for them is "junk" DNA, reflecting the presumption that they are merely driftwood from our evolutionary past and have no biological function.
But the work by the ENCODE (ENCyclopaedia of DNA Elements) consortium implies that this nuggets-and-dross concept of DNA should be, well, junked.
The genome turns out to a highly complex, interwoven machine with very few inactive stretches, the researchers report.
Genes, it transpires, are just one of many types of DNA sequences that have a functional role.
And "junk" DNA turns out to have an essential role in regulating the protein-making business.
Previously written off as silent, it emerges as a singer with its own discreet voice, part of a vast, interacting molecular choir.
"The majority of the genome is copied, or transcribed, into RNA, which is the active molecule in our cells, relaying information from the archival DNA to the cellular machinery," said Tim Hubbard of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, a British research group that was part of the team.
"This is a remarkable finding, since most prior research suggested only a fraction of the genome was transcribed."
Francis Collins, director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), which coralled 35 scientific groups from around the world into the ENCODE project, said the scientific community "will need to rethink some long-held views about what genes are and what they do."
"This could have significant implications for efforts to identify the DNA sequences involved in many human diseases," he said.
Another rethink is in offing about how the genome has evolved, said Collins.
Until now, researchers had thought that the pressure to survive would relentlessly sculpt the human genome, leaving it with a slim, efficient core of genes that are essential for biological function.
But the ENCODE consortium were surprised to find that the genome appears to be stuffed with functional elements that offer no identifiable benefits in terms of survival or reproduction.
The researchers speculate that there is a point behind this survival of the evolutionary cull. Humans could share with other animals a large pool of functional elements — a "warehouse" stuffed with a variety of tools on which each species can draw, enabling it to adapt according to its environmental niche.
IMO, there’s that third logical position at work again. The variation is neither good, nor bad, it’s just there. At some future point, say a rapid change in the organism’s environment, and that gene might be a handy thing to have all of a sudden. Or, conversely, it might turn into a complete disaster for the organism. But for the moment, it’s just there, evaluated to position three. Zero, let’s say. Neither positive nor negative. It has the potential to be either one, given a chance to express itself.
From somewhere deep in the physical fabric of the universe, Schrodinger’s cat licks its chops and smiles. Or doesn’t. Or both. Just don’t open the box.
The science fiction writer Larry Niven once averred that giving gay people what we want would be the quickest way of breeding us out of the population. But then, he didn’t get the fact that his Ringworld needed attitude jets until some real engineers pointed that fact out to him. I happen to think that having a gay minority does in fact provide a survival advantage to the human line. But as it turns out, homosexuality can fit comfortably into our gene pool just fine, along with a bazillion other random variations on a theme that simply are, and do no harm.
I don’t need to pass on my gay genes. My heterosexual brethren probably have them too…they just aren’t expressing them. For some reason, I expressed mine. But I’m fine with that, and so is nature. I happen to think it’s a plus. But the point is that a variation only gets culled out if it’s a minus. A really big minus. And this one isn’t.
LOS ANGELES — Don Herbert, who as television’s "Mr. Wizard" introduced generations of young viewers to the joys of science, died Tuesday. He was 89. Herbert, who had bone cancer, died at his suburban Bell Canyon home, said his son-in-law, Tom Nikosey.
"He really taught kids how to use the thinking skills of a scientist," said former colleague Steve Jacobs. He worked with Herbert on a 1980s show that echoed the original 1950s "Watch Mr. Wizard" series, which became a fond baby boomer memory.
In "Watch Mr. Wizard," which was produced from 1951 to 1964 and received a Peabody Award in 1954, Herbert turned TV into an entertaining classroom. On a simple, workshop-like set, he demonstrated experiments using household items.
"He modeled how to predict and measure and analyze. … The show today might seem slow but it was in-depth and forced you to think along," Jacobs said. "You were learning about the forces of nature."
Herbert encouraged children to duplicate experiments at home, said Jacobs, who recounted serving as a behind-the-scenes "science sidekick" to Herbert on the ’80s "Mr. Wizard’s World" that aired on the Nickelodeon channel.
When Jacobs would reach for beakers and flasks, Herbert would remind him that science didn’t require special tools.
"’You could use a mayonnaise jar for that,’" Jacobs recalled being chided by Herbert. "He tried to bust the image of scientists and that science wasn’t just for special people and places."
He modeled how to predict and measure and analyze… Yes. Just so. He also modeled for adults, how to behave toward kids. He never talked down to the kid by his side at the experiment table. The assumption that they could understand the concepts he was teaching them was always a cheerful given. Whatever he was showing the kid at any given time, the first thing was always that they could do it too.
If the kids on that 1950s through early 60s TV show seem a tad too squeaky clean for this day and age, consider how different the man looks compared to most adults you encounter now. He was decent. He treated kids with respect, not condescension. And he understood that a kid’s instinctive curiosity is something an adult cultivates and trains and sharpens, not something you snuff out the moment it starts asking questions. If we had more adults like that in the world now, we’d have more kids like those in the world now.
Thank you Mr. Wizard, from a kid who used to watch you back in the day, and who later became a software engineer working on the Hubble Space Telescope project.
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