the only conceptual errors of Einstein,
that I know about -- and this is in distinction
to the rather massive PR and books
in the library & bookstore for him --
aside from the boner of the cosmological constant,
which is part of the Big Bang religion,
is the mere assumption that he had
to reify Newton's nontheory about corpuscles,

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px}p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 12.1px; font: 48.0px Helvetica}p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 7.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; line-height: 12.1px; font: 36.0px 'Rockwell Extra Bold'}p.p4 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify; line-height: 12.1px; font: 16.0px Helvetica}p.p5 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; line-height: 12.1px; font: 18.0px Times}p.p6 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; line-height: 12.1px; font: 16.0px Copperplate}p.p7 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 14.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; line-height: 12.1px; font: 16.0px Copperplate}p.p8 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify; line-height: 12.1px; font: 16.0px Copperplate}p.p9 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 14.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify; line-height: 12.1px; font: 16.0px Copperplate}p.p10 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 14.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; line-height: 12.1px; font: 18.0px Times}p.p11 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 12.1px; font: 36.0px Times}p.p12 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; line-height: 12.1px; font: 11.0px Copperplate}p.p13 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; line-height: 12.1px; font: 14.0px Copperplate}p.p14 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 12.1px; font: 24.0px Helvetica}p.p15 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; line-height: 12.1px; font: 18.0px Copperplate}p.p16 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 3.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; line-height: 12.1px; font: 18.0px Copperplate}p.p17 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; line-height: 12.1px; font: 10.0px Copperplate}p.p18 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 12.1px; font: 30.0px Helvetica}p.p19 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 5.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; line-height: 12.1px; font: 13.0px Times}p.p20 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 9.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; line-height: 12.1px; font: 11.5px Times}p.p21 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; line-height: 12.1px; font: 11.5px Copperplate}p.p22 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; line-height: 12.1px; font: 10.5px Copperplate}p.p23 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; line-height: 12.1px; font: 11.5px Helvetica}p.p24 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; line-height: 12.1px; font: 9.0px Times}p.p25 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; line-height: 12.1px; font: 14.0px Helvetica}p.p26 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 5.0px 9.0px; text-align: center; line-height: 12.1px; font: 8.0px Baskerville}p.p27 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 1.0px 9.0px; text-align: justify; line-height: 12.1px; font: 11.0px Helvetica}p.p28 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 1.0px 9.0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 9.0px; line-height: 12.1px; font: 11.0px Helvetica}p.p29 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 1.0px 14.0px; text-align: justify; line-height: 12.1px; font: 11.0px Helvetica}p.p30 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 9.0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 9.0px; line-height: 12.1px; font: 11.0px Helvetica}p.p31 {margin: 1.0px 0.0px 1.0px 9.0px; text-align: justify; line-height: 12.1px; font: 11.0px Helvetica}p.p32 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 1.0px 9.0px; text-align: justify; line-height: 12.1px; font: 11.0px Times}p.p33 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 9.0px; text-align: justify; line-height: 12.1px; font: 11.0px Helvetica}p.p34 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; line-height: 8.1px; font: 8.0px Times}span.s1 {font: 12.0px Helvetica}span.s2 {text-decoration: underline}span.s3 {font: 18.0px Times}span.s4 {font: 14.0px Times}span.s5 {font: 11.5px Helvetica}span.s6 {font: 11.5px Baskerville}span.s7 {font: 8.0px Helvetica}

I'm a Christmas album aficionado, and my favorite entry so far this season—and I can't see anything else topping it, certainly not in a way that engenders a thousand-word blog post—is A Christmas Cornucopia, by the Scottish pop diva Annie Lennox. This is a really interesting album—but to understand why it's so interesting, we must first acknowledge that Christmas, particularly (but not exclusively) in its secular manifestations, is one of the more fake, manufactured holidays there is. I'm not talking about the commercialism (although there is that, too), but rather, that most of what we think of as Ye Olde Christmas Traditions are not, in fact, all that old. More precisely: there is a significant and distorting lag between the claim to authenticity of most Christmas traditions and the historical actuality that would back up such claims.

Christmas as we know it here in the Anglo-American world is largely a creation of the 19th century—the Victorian era in Britain, the Gilded Age in the United States. Now, there are a lot of factors that went into the 19th-century Christmas revival: the rise of consumerist, commodity-based economies, the sacralization of childhood, the increasing importance of cheap, print-based media to the culture as a whole. But most important, I think, is nostalgia. In the wake of both the Industrial Revolution and the American Civil War, anything that asserted an unbroken connection to an unchanging tradition became appealing, and Christmas thus became a fount of nostalgia. The trees, the caroling, the pageants, the mistletoe, Santa: people started celebrating the holiday as it had been celebrated back in the day. Except that it hadn't—Christmas was never that big a deal until the Victorians made it that big a deal. Puritans in both England and New England had actually banned Christmas back in what was supposedly the good old days. In other words, the modern Christmas emerged out of a nostalgia for something that never really was in the first place.

This is hardly unique to Christmas. Nostalgia—especially this kind of illusory nostalgia—is so common in the industrial world that it's a trope of its own in more radical critiques of modern society. Guy Debord, in his Situationist classic The Society of the Spectacle, talked about the difference between ancient, "cyclical" time—"the really lived time of unchanging illusions"—and modern, "spectacular" time—"the illusorily lived time of a constantly changing reality":

The pseudo-events that vie for attention in spectacular dramatizations have not been lived by those who are informed about them; and in any case they are soon forgotten due to their increasingly frenetic replacement at every pulsation of the spectacular machinery. Conversely, what is really lived has no relation to the society's official version of irreversible time, and conflicts with the pseudocyclical rhythm of that time's consumable byproducts. This individual experience of a disconnected everyday life remains without language, without concepts, and without critical access to its own past, which has nowhere been recorded. Uncommunicated, misunderstood and forgotten, it is smothered by the spectacle's false memory of the unmemorable.

That reads like a cynic's description of the Christmas season. But what I think is so fascinating about Christmas is that the sheer amount of cultural stuff that has been produced around it has conditioned us to approach that stuff with a higher tolerance for a kind of pseudo-authenticity that's unique to the category—which is why Christmas albums are so much fun. The shotgun marriage of every style and genre imaginable with Christmas repertoire doesn't cause the cognitive dissonance it might, because, in a weird way, the incongruity echoes the incongruity of Christmas itself. Because, deep down, we know that the "traditional" Christmas we've been inculcated with so much nostalgia for is largely bunk, an R&B;/doo-wop rendition of "Veni Emmanuel" or a disco version of "O Holy Night" is able to work on its own terms.

But what makes A Christmas Cornucopia better than your average Christmas album is that it charts the authenticity/inauthenticity divide of Christmas nostalgia with such precision that it ends up creating a convincing illusion of authenticity all its own. This is an album about authenticity. The songs are, for the most part, the "traditional" carols, the ones collected and codified in the Victorian era as the baseline of Christmas heritage. (Even the exceptions reference other traditions: "Universal Child" is an original entry in the long line of UK Christmas charity pop singles, and a cheerfully brash version of the French carol "Il est né" is, perhaps, at least a partial homage to Siouxsie and the Banshees.) Do you remember the last verse of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman"? Annie Lennox does:



That gives a pretty good indication of the musical style that Lennox and producer Mike Stevens use for the entire album, which turns out to be another referential layer of the nostalgia in play: it's what might be called the Gothic pastoral strain in British psychedelica. Like-this-combined-with-that descriptions are always a little shallow, but if ca. 1974 Queen and Jethro Tull had teamed up on a Christmas album, this is what it might have sounded like. The Gothic pastoral is another nostalgic style—forever conjuring images of maypole bacchanals and slightly menacing Morris dancers—but what's crucial for A Christmas Cornucopia is that it was a piggybacked nostalgia: it was as much about how the Victorians imagined that long-lost England to be as how it actually was (or wasn't). It was equally referencing Jolly Old England and the Victorian hankering after Jolly Old England.

Think about that for a minute: the album is recasting carols in a style that is nostalgic for the very nostalgia that created the carols in the first place. It's not just a compounding of nostalgia, it's a direct lineage of nostalgia. That's important because, the more precisely targeted nostalgia gets, the less sentimental it seems. It's the difference between the amorphous sappiness "childhood" and the knife-edge focus of Proust's madeleine.

Christmas is, in general, pretty sentimental, mainly because its nostalgia is both manufactured and only vaguely defined. It's the sort of thing that inspired one of the Situationist International's more pointed scolds:

The entire socioeconomic structure tends to make the past dominate the present, to freeze living persons, to reify them as commodities. A sentimental world in which the same sorts of tastes and relations are constantly repeated is the direct product of the economic and social world in which gestures must be repeated every day in the slavery of capitalist production. The taste for false novelty reflects its unhappy nostalgia.

A Christmas Cornucopia sidesteps that by both leveraging the manufactured nature of Christmas nostalgia and doing so with such stylistic efficiency that the sentimentality falls away. It traffics in only those strains of nostalgia that created the modern conception of Christmas, and nothing else. It is exactly as authentic as Christmas is, which is to say, it is inauthentic in exactly the same way. It is, in an enchanting way, that touchstone of holiday shopping: a genuine fake.

Scott Leslie, edtechpost, November 15, 2010.

---

Scott Leslie goes gonzo and offers up a randomly ordered report on the open learning conference in Barcelona. Some good observations here, from the distinction between the academic open educators up on the hill as compared to the more practical Drumbeat participants down below. And, "we consistently reify knowledge when there is only knowing. Knowing always occupies some living condition, living or dead." [Link] [Comment]

guys arguing who believe in a)
Minkowski's pants, and b)
that "photons" are zero-dimensional branes, because
herr doktor-professor, patent-office inspector, said,
So, and the Nobel Cmte. also said, 'Tis so,
we must reify Fig Newtons "theory" of corpuscles
in the year cce 1905 -- praise-be! (just be thankful,

"There are numerous ways of being a good designer. Perhaps the common denominator for all design competences is the ability to reify and prototype. It is important to note that design competences do not constitute good business skills or strategic expertise." (Tuomo Kuosa ~ Servicedesign.tv)

     One of the things that blocks our efforts to learn about the world and the people in it is the nature of the stories we are told, come to believe, and then tell others about how things work. This shared mythology, if it is incorrect, interferes with our efforts to understand ourselves and others and ultimately leads to bad decisions in the same way as if we were explorers attempting to find their way with inadequate maps.
     The opposite of truth is not necessarily the lie. It can also be another form of dishonesty, namely sentimentality. This takes the form of a mawkish oversimplification of the world in which reality is entirely lost. The most trivial form of this tendency can be discerned in the funeral eulogy. Gone is the actual person with his strengths and flaws. He is replaced by a paragon of wit and virtue almost unrecognizable to those who knew him best. What happens to the stories of drunks and wife beaters when they die? They make no appearance on the obituary pages. Nothing, it is said, improves one's reputation more than death.
     If our descent into sentimentality were confined to well-intentioned words of comfort to the bereaved, we could be forgiven. Unfortunately, this particular form of distortion is much more widespread and consequential. In fact, our whole self-help-through-consumption, advertising culture is one long appeal to a sentimental view of the world in which we are just one purchase away from having the life we want. Don't those attractive young people with their new trucks and cold beers look happy? Could life get any better than that? Don't you enjoy those commercials that emphasize how relatively old, fat, and friendless most of us are?
     In a recent poll 81 percent of Americans say that they regularly talk to God. (It is interesting that if someone reports that God is talking to them, they are either seen as prophets or risk involuntary hospitalization.) Whatever comfort people derive from their faith and however much good is done in the name of one religion or another, the stories on which people rely to deal with the ultimate questions - Why are we here? What constitutes a moral life? What happens to us when we die? - are answered by most people by reference to archaic texts containing often contradictory stories that differ from one culture to another. No evidence of the sort that we are accustomed to demanding in other areas of our lives is required to support the truth of any element of faith; we simply believe it. In return we are given the hope provided by prayer and the assurance of immortality, no small gift in a world preoccupied with the fear of death.
     Another arena in which sentimentality holds sway is politics. In choosing people to lead us through perilous times we depend on those who divide the world along the stark lines of good and evil, us and them, and promise to protect us against economic turbulence and terrorists who seek to destroy us. All of us would like to believe that there exist figures so powerful and wise that we can depend on them to care for us. The fact that these people, once elected, almost invariably disappoint us, only makes us vulnerable to the next candidate who promises to do better. The cycle of dependency, credulity, and disillusionment plays out again and again without our learning much from it or developing a real skepticism about the sentimental stories that successive generations of politicians use to get elected. Certainly there are differences, personally and philosophically, between candidates. But we wait in vain for the messiah who will lead us out of the wilderness of confusion and insecurity in which we find ourselves. Such a longing can only beget disappointment.
     If you want to know if someone is telling you a sentimental story, ask yourself, "Does this sound oversimplified? Is he talking as if there were only two alternatives (such as victory or humiliation) to solving this problem?" If life teaches us anything, it is that it's complicated with many possible outcomes, only a few of which we control. If you feel like you're hearing a children's story in which the characters are cartoon depictions instead of real people, run for your life.
     In our efforts to create satisfying and lasting relationships we are at great risk of disappointment if we imagine that any relationship is going to resemble the sentimental and idealized portrayals we see on our movie and television screens. The ambiguity and discernment required by the process of investing our love in someone who will reciprocate and whom we can depend on over time is a long way from the instant attractions and "happily ever after" outcomes that comprise the Hollywood version of reality. The false images of what constitutes a real and satisfying relationship are a source of great confusion to many people who are apt to oscillate between naiveté and cynicism as they search for a model of human connectedness that is realistic.
     Childhood is the only time that a sentimental outlook is adaptive. Most fairy tales are comforting with their simplified characters and morals. As we become more aware of life's complexity, however, we need to relinquish the reassurance implied in the magical triumph of all that is good. If we do not make this transition we are asking for a lifetime of disenchantment as adults.
     Another pervasive form of sentimentality is nostalgia. It seems that everyone is old enough to remember a better time when the world was safer, everyone was kinder, children were more respectful, and where more people looked like us. What happened to that time? Where is Norman Rockwell when we need him? An astonishing number of citizens cling to a belief that we need a return to a fantasized past in order to reify the values that made this country great.
     If we are ever to understand the world we live in and the people who inhabit it, we must develop a capacity for separating truth from sentimentality. We need to apply the same discrimination that we attempt to apply in our financial lives, namely an ability to discern value and a healthy skepticism of those whose job it is to defraud us. We must learn to accept the ambiguity, imperfections, and uncertainty that characterize real life while avoiding the over-simplification that is the hallmark sentimentality. We must, in other words, learn to distinguish reality from illusion if we are to make good decisions about how to live and especially about whom to live with. Our happiness depends on the quality of these choices.

Many technology writers  deify or reify technology.  There is often an assumption that more technology is by definition a good thing.  Nicholas Carr’s recent book challenges that. This is probably why many tech types don’t seem to like it. Looking through my blog archive, I’ve often disagreed with Carr, but rather than just base my [...]

So, the last two posts suggest there is major overhead to using the lazy iterator approach with .lines. I decided to explore this by rolling my own iterator to read a file. First, I suspected the gather / take has a big overhead, so I just tried for a basic customer iterator first:

class LinesIter is Iterator {
    has $!filehandle;
    has $!value;

    method infinite() { False } # or should this be True?

    method reify() {
        unless $!value.defined {
            $!value := pir::new('Parcel');
            my $line = $!filehandle.get;
            if $line.defined {
                pir::push($!value, $line);
                pir::push($!value, LinesIter.new(:filehandle($!filehandle)));
            }
        }
        $!value;
    }
}

That takes 21.7, very slightly more than the standard gather / take version. So much for the theory gather / take is inefficient here!

I’m told that the spec requires that .lines be strictly lazy so you can mix in calls to .get. I don’t know where, and it seems a bit crazy to me. But anyway, by those lights the following potential optimizations are actually illegal, because they break the strict connection between .lines and .get.

Here’s one that does three .gets at a time, cutting the number of iterator objects created by two-thirds.

class LinesIter is Iterator {
    has $!filehandle;
    has $!value;

    method infinite() { False }

    method reify() {
        unless $!value.defined {
            $!value := pir::new('Parcel');
            my $line = $!filehandle.get;
            if $line.defined {
                pir::push($!value, $line);
                $line = $!filehandle.get;
                if $line.defined {
                    pir::push($!value, $line);
                    $line = $!filehandle.get;
                    if $line.defined {
                        pir::push($!value, $line);
                        pir::push($!value, LinesIter.new(:filehandle($!filehandle)));
                    }
                }
            }
        }
        $!value;
    }
}

Clocking in at 15.6 seconds — significantly better than the current .lines implementation, significantly worse than the .get version — this was actually the best variant I came up with.

I tried upping the count to 8, but it actually ran a touch slower then. And jnthn suggested a version which tried to optimize creation of the iterator objects, but it actually ran significantly slower than the naive version.

I’m not really sure where this leaves us…

There's been a lot of fuss made lately over memory inspection and profiling tools for Ruby implementations. And it's not without reason; inspecting a Ruby application's memory profile, much less diagnosing problems, has traditionally been very difficult. At least, difficult if you don't use JRuby. Because JRuby runs on the JVM, we benefit from the dozens of tools that have been written for the JVM. Among these tools are numerous memory inspection, profiling, and reporting tools, some built into the JDK itself. Want a heap dump? Check out the jmap (Java memory map) and jhat (Java heap analysis tool) shipped with Hotspot-based JVMs (Sun, OpenJDK). Looking for a bit more? There's the Memory Analysis Tool based on Eclipse, the YourKit memory and CPU profiling app, VisualVM, now also shipped with Hotspot JVMs...and many more. There's literally dozens of these tools, and they provide just about everything you can imagine for investigating memory. In this post, I'll show how you can use two of these tools: VisualVM, a simple, graphical tool for exploring a running JVM; and the jmap/jhat combination, which allows you to dump the memory heap to disk for inspection offline. Getting JRuby Prepared All these tools work with any version of JRuby, but as part of JRuby 1.6 development I've been adding some enhancements. Specifically, I've made some modifications that allow Ruby objects to show up side-by-side with Java objects in memory profiles. A little explanation is in order. In JRuby, all the core classes are represented by "native" Java classes. Object is represented by org.jruby.RubyObject, String is org.jruby.RubyString, and so on. Normally, if you extend one of the core classes, we don't actually create a new "native" class to represent it; instead, all user-created classes that extend Object simply show up as RubyObject in memory. This is still incredibly useful; you can look into RubyObject and see the metaClass field, which indicates the actual Ruby type. Let's see what that looks like, so we know where we're starting from. We'll run a simple script that creates a custom class, instantiates and saves 10000 instances of it, and then sleeps.

~/projects/jruby ➔ cat foo_heap_example.rb 
class Foo
end

ary = []
10000.times { ary << Foo.new }

puts "ready for analysis!"
sleep

~/projects/jruby ➔ jruby foo_heap_example.rb 
ready for analysis!

So we have our test subject ready to go. To use the jmap tool, we need the pid of this process. Of course we can use the usual shell tricks to get it, but the JDK comes with a nice tool for finding all JVM pids active on the system: jps

~/projects/jruby ➔ jps -l
52862 sun.tools.jps.Jps
52857 org/jruby/Main
48716 com.sun.enterprise.glassfish.bootstrap.ASMain

From this, you can see I have three JVMs running on my system right now: jps itself; our JRuby instance; and a GlassFish server I used for testing earlier today. We're interested in the JRuby instance, pid 52857. Let's see what jmap can do with that.

~/projects/jruby ➔ jmap
Usage:
    jmap [option] <pid>
        (to connect to running process)
    jmap [option] <executable <core>
        (to connect to a core file)
    jmap [option] [server_id@]<remote server IP or hostname>
        (to connect to remote debug server)

where <option> is one of:
    <none>               to print same info as Solaris pmap
    -heap                to print java heap summary
    -histo[:live]        to print histogram of java object heap; if the "live"
                         suboption is specified, only count live objects
    -permstat            to print permanent generation statistics
    -finalizerinfo       to print information on objects awaiting finalization
    -dump:<dump-options> to dump java heap in hprof binary format
                         dump-options:
                           live         dump only live objects; if not specified,
                                        all objects in the heap are dumped.
                           format=b     binary format
                           file=<file>  dump heap to <file>
                         Example: jmap -dump:live,format=b,file=heap.bin <pid>
    -F                   force. Use with -dump:<dump-options> <pid> or -histo
                         to force a heap dump or histogram when <pid> does not
                         respond. The "live" suboption is not supported
                         in this mode.
    -h | -help           to print this help message
    -J<flag>             to pass <flag> directly to the runtime system

<

The simplest option here is -histo, to print out a histogram of the objects on the heap. Let's run that against our JRuby instance.

~/projects/jruby ➔ jmap -histo:live 52857

 num     #instances         #bytes  class name
----------------------------------------------
   1:         22677        3192816  <constMethodKlass>
   2:         22677        1816952  <methodKlass>
   3:         35089        1492992  <symbolKlass>
   4:          2860        1389352  <instanceKlassKlass>
   5:          2860        1193536  <constantPoolKlass>
   6:          2798         739264  <constantPoolCacheKlass>
   7:          5861         465408  [B
   8:          5399         298120  [C
   9:          3042         292032  java.lang.Class
  10:          4037         261712  [S
  11:         10002         240048  org.jruby.RubyObject
  12:          3994         179928  [[I
  13:          5474         131376  java.lang.String
  14:          1661          95912  [I
...

The resulting output is a listing of literally every object in the system...not just Ruby objects even! The value of this should be apparent; not only can you start to investigate the memory overhead of code you've written, you'll also be able to investigate the memory overhead of every library and every piece of code running in the same process, right down to byte arrays (the "[B" above) and "native" Java strings ("java.lang.String" above). And so far we haven't had to do anything special to JRuby. Nice, eh? So, back to the matter at hand: the Foo class from our example. Where is it? Well, the answer is that it's right there; 10000 of those 10002 org.jruby.RubyObject instances are our Foo objects; the other two are probably objects constructed for JRuby runtime purposes. But obviously, there's nothing in this output that tells us how to find our Foo instances. This is what I'm remedying in JRuby 1.6. On JRuby master, there's now a flag you can pass that will stand up a JVM class for every user-created Ruby class. Among the many benefits of doing this, we also get a more useful profile. Let's see how to use the flag (which will either be default or very easy to access by the time we release JRuby 1.6).

~/projects/jruby ➔ jruby -J-Djruby.reify.classes=true foo_heap_example.rb 
ready for analysis!

If we run jmap against this new instance, we see a more interesting result.

 num     #instances         #bytes  class name
----------------------------------------------
   1:         22677        3192816  <constMethodKlass>
   2:         22677        1816952  <methodKlass>
   3:         35089        1492992  <symbolKlass>
   4:          2860        1389352  <instanceKlassKlass>
   5:          2860        1193536  <constantPoolKlass>
   6:          2798         739264  <constantPoolCacheKlass>
   7:          5863         465456  [B
   8:          5401         298208  [C
   9:          3042         292032  java.lang.Class
  10:          4037         261712  [S
  11:         10000         240000  ruby.Foo
  12:          3994         179928  [[I
  13:          5476         131424  java.lang.String
  14:          1661          95912  [I

A-ha! There's our Foo instances! The "reify classes" option generates a JVM class of the same name as the Ruby class, prefixed by "ruby." to separate it from other JVM classes. Now we can start to see the real power of the tools, and we're just at the beginning. Let's see what a simple Rails application looks like.

~/projects/jruby ➔ jmap -histo:live 52926 | grep " ruby."
  29:         11685         280440  ruby.TZInfo.TimezoneTransitionInfo
  97:           970          23280  ruby.Gem.Version
  98:           914          21936  ruby.Gem.Requirement
 122:           592          14208  ruby.TZInfo.TimezoneOffsetInfo
 138:           382           9168  ruby.Gem.Dependency
 159:           265           6360  ruby.Gem.Specification
 201:           142           3408  ruby.ActiveSupport.TimeZone
 205:           118           2832  ruby.TZInfo.DataTimezoneInfo
 206:           118           2832  ruby.TZInfo.DataTimezone
 273:            41            984  ruby.Gem.Platform
 383:            14            336  ruby.Mime.Type
 403:            13            312  ruby.Set
 467:             8            192  ruby.ActionController.MiddlewareStack.Middleware
 476:             8            192  ruby.ActionView.Template
 487:             7            168  ruby.ActionController.Routing.DividerSegment
 508:             6            144  ruby.TZInfo.LinkedTimezoneInfo
 523:             6            144  ruby.TZInfo.LinkedTimezone
 810:             4             96  ruby.ActionController.Routing.DynamicSegment
2291:             2             48  ruby.ActionController.Routing.Route
2292:             2             48  ruby.I18n.Config
2293:             2             48  ruby.ActiveSupport.Deprecation.DeprecatedConstantProxy
2298:             2             48  ruby.ActionController.Routing.ControllerSegment
...

This time I've opted to grep out just the "ruby." items in the histogram, and the results are pretty impressive! We can see the baffling fact that there's 970 instance of Gem::Version, using at least 23280 bytes of memory. We can see the even more depressing fact that there's 11685 live instances of TZInfo::TimezoneTransitionInfo, using at least 280440 bytes. Now that we're getting useful data, let's look at the first of our tools in more detail: jmap and jhat. jmap and jhat As you might guess, I do a lot of profiling in the process of developing JRuby. I've used probably a dozen different tools at different times. But the first tool I always reach for is the jmap/jhat combination. You've seen the simple case of using jmap above, generating a histogram of the live heap. Let's take a look at an offline heap dump.

~/projects/jruby ➔ jmap -dump:live,format=b,file=heap.bin 52926
Dumping heap to /Users/headius/projects/jruby/heap.bin ...
Heap dump file created

That's how easy it is! The binary dump in heap.bin is supported by several tools: jhat (obviously), VisualVM, the Eclipse Memory Analysis Tool, and others. It's not officially a "standard" format, but it hasn't changed in a long time. Let's have a look at jhat options.

~/projects/jruby ➔ jhat
ERROR: No arguments supplied
Usage:  jhat [-stack <bool>] [-refs <bool>] [-port <port>] [-baseline <file>] [-debug <int>] [-version] [-h|-help] <file>

 -J<flag>          Pass <flag> directly to the runtime system. For
     example, -J-mx512m to use a maximum heap size of 512MB
 -stack false:     Turn off tracking object allocation call stack.
 -refs false:      Turn off tracking of references to objects
 -port <port>:     Set the port for the HTTP server.  Defaults to 7000
 -exclude <file>:  Specify a file that lists data members that should
     be excluded from the reachableFrom query.
 -baseline <file>: Specify a baseline object dump.  Objects in
     both heap dumps with the same ID and same class will
     be marked as not being "new".
 -debug <int>:     Set debug level.
       0:  No debug output
       1:  Debug hprof file parsing
       2:  Debug hprof file parsing, no server
 -version          Report version number
 -h|-help          Print this help and exit
 <file>            The file to read

For a dump file that contains multiple heap dumps,
you may specify which dump in the file
by appending "#<number>" to the file name, i.e. "foo.hprof#3".

All boolean options default to "true"

Generally you can just point jhat at a heap dump and away it goes. Occasionally if the heap is large, you may need to use the -J option to increase the maximum heap size of the JVM jhat runs in. Since we're running a Rails app, we'll bump the heap up a little bit.

~/projects/jruby ➔ jhat -J-Xmx200M heap.bin
Reading from heap.bin...
Dump file created Fri Jul 09 02:07:46 CDT 2010
Snapshot read, resolving...
Resolving 604115 objects...
[much verbose logging elided for brevity]

Chasing references, expect 120 dots........................................................................................................................
Eliminating duplicate references........................................................................................................................
Snapshot resolved.
Started HTTP server on port 7000
Server is ready.

"Server is ready"? Damn you Java people! Does everything have to be a server with you? In this case, it's actually an incredibly useful tool. jhat starts up a small web application on port 7000 that allows you to click through the dump file. Let's see what that looks like. Here's the front page of the tool. We see a listing of all JVM classes in the system. If you scroll to the bottom, there's a few more general functions. Let's go with what we know and view the heap histogram again. Here we can see that there's lots of objects taking up memory, and they're a mix of JVM-native types, JRuby implementation classes, and actual Ruby classes. In fact, here we can see our friend TZInfo::TimezoneTransitionInfo again. Let's click through. Pretty mundane stuff so far; basically just information about the class itself. But you see at the bottom of this screenshot that we can go from here to viewing all instances of TimezoneTransitionInfo. Let's try that. Ahh, that's more like it! Now we can see that there's a heck of a lot of these things floating around. Let's investigate a bit more and click through the first instance. Now this is some cool stuff! We can see that the JVM class generated for TimezoneTransitionInfo has three fields: metaClass, which points at the Ruby Class object; varTable, which is an array of Object references used for instance variables and other "internal" variables; and a flags field containing runtime flags for the object, like whether it's frozen, tainted, and so on. We can see that this object has no special flags set, and we can dig deeper into those fields if we like. We'll skip that today. Moving further down, we see a few more amazing links. First, there's a list of all references to this object. Ahh, now we can start to investigate why they're staying in memory, even though we're not using them. We can even have jhat show us the full chains of references keeping these objects alive; a series of objects leading all the way back to one "rooted" by a thread or by global JVM state. And we can explore the other direction as well, walking all objects reachable from this one. This is only a small part of what you can do with jmap and jhat, and they're so simple to use it feels almost criminal. But what if we want to inspect an application while it's running? Dumping heaps and analyzing them offline can tell you much of the story, but sometimes you just want to see the objects coming and going yourself. Let's move on to VisualVM. VisualVM VisualVM spawned out of the NetBeans profiling tools. One of the biggest complaints about the JVMs of old were that all the built-in tooling seemed to be designed for JVM engineers alone. Because Sun had the foresight to build and own their own IDE and related modules, it eventually became a natural fit to pull out the profiling tools for use by everyone. And so VisualVM was born. On most systems with Java 6 installed, you should have a "jvisualvm" command. Let's run it now. When you start up VisualVM, you're presented with a list of running JVMs, similar to using the 'jps' command. You can also connect to remote machines, browse offline heap and core dump files, and look through memory and CPU profiling snapshots from previous runs. Today, we'll just open up our running Rails app and see what we can see. VisualVM connects to the running process and brings up a basic information pane with process information, JVM information, and so on. We're interested in monitoring heap usage, so let's move to the "Monitor" tab. Already we're getting some useful information. This view shows CPU usage (currently zero, since it's an idle Rails app), Heap usage over time, and the number of JVM classes and threads that are active. We can trigger a full GC, if we'd like to tidy things up before we start poking around. But most importantly, we can do the jmap/jhat dance in one step, by clicking the Heap Dump button. Tantalizing, isn't it? Initially, we see a basic summary of the heap: total size, number of classes and GC roots, and so on. We're looking for our friend TimezoneTransitionInfo, so let's look for it in the "Classes" pane. Ahh, there it is, just a little ways down the list. The counts are as we expect, so let's double-click and dig a bit deeper. Here we have a lot of the same information about object instances that we did with jhat, but presented in a much richer format. Almost everything is active; you can jump around the heap and do analysis that would take a lot of manual work very easily. Let's try another tool: the Retained Size calculator. Because our JVM tools see all objects equally, the reported size for a Ruby object on the heap is only part of the story. There's also the variable table, the object's instance variables, and objects they reference to consider. Let's jump to a different object now, Gem::Version. We don't want to have to scroll through the list of classes to find ruby.Gem.Version, so let's make use of the Object Query Language console. With the OQL console, you can write SQL-like queries to retrieve listings of objects in the heap. We'll search for all instances of ruby.Gem.Version. The query runs and we get a listing of Gem::Version objects. Let's dig deeper and see how much retained memory each Version object is keeping alive. Clicking on the "Compute Retained Sizes" link in the "Instances" pane prompts us with this dialog. We're tough...we can take it. Reticulating splines... So it looks like each of the Version objects take from 125 to 190 bytes for a total of 19400 bytes, most of which is from the variable table. What's in there? Ahh...looks like there's a String and an Array. And of course we can poke around the heap ad infinatum, into and out of "native" JRuby and JVM classes, and truly get a complete picture of what our running applications look like. Now you're playing with power. Your Turn This is obviously only the tip of the iceberg. Tools like Eclipse Memory Analysis Tool include features for detecting leaks; VisualVM and NetBeans both allow you to turn on allocation tracing, to show where in your code all those objects are being created. There's tools for monitoring live GC behavior, and many of these tools even allow you to dig into a running heap and modify live objects. If you can dream it, there's a tool that can do it. And you get all that for free by using JRuby. If you'd like to play with this, it all works with JRuby 1.5.1 but you won't get the nice JVM classes for Ruby classes. For that, you can pull and build JRuby master, download a 1.6.0.dev snapshot, or just wait for JRuby 1.6. And if you do play with these or other tools, I hope you'll let us know and blog about your experience! In the future, I'll try to show some of the other tools plus some of the CPU profiling capabilities they bring to the table. For now, rest assured that if you're using JRuby, you really do have the best tools available to you.

Okay, here’s what I have at the moment, which passes some basic tests. First, the quad iterator.

class FiniteIntRangeQuadIter is Iterator {
    has $!value;
    has $!max;
    has $!nextIter;

    method infinite() { False }

    method reify() {
        return ($!value,) if $!value ~~ EMPTY;
        unless $!nextIter.defined || $!nextIter ~~ EMPTY {
            if $!value != $!max {
                my $s = $!value + 4;
                $!nextIter =
                    $s < $!max
                        ?? FiniteIntRangeQuadIter.new( :value($s),
                                                       :max($!max) )
                        !! EMPTY;
            } else {
                $!nextIter = EMPTY;
            }
        }
        $!value, $!value + 1, $!value + 2, $!value + 3, $!nextIter;
    }
}

For simplicity and speed, this only works if the number of iterations is divisible by four. So we need some other mechanism to handle the remaining 1-3 elements. Introducing a very simple iterator:

class ConsIter is Iterator {
    has $!value-parcel;
    has $!nextIter;

    method infinite() { $!nextIter ~~ EMPTY ?? False !! $!nextIter.infinite; }

    method reify() {
        &infix:<,>(|$!value-parcel, $!nextIter);
    }
}

This just takes a Parcel and another iterator. When you iterate it, it returns the Parcel first, then the other iterator. The reify method probably could be more efficient, but then, it should only get called once for the entire iteration. Then you just need a way to use the two iterators together:

sub MakeSmartIter($a, $b) {
    return EMPTY if ($b < $a);

    my $mod = ($b - $a + 1) % 4;
    if $mod == 0 {
        FiniteIntRangeQuadIter.new(:value($a), :max($b));
    } else {
        my @parcel-to-be;
        my $i;
        loop ($i = 0; $i < $mod; $i++) {
            @parcel-to-be.push($a + $i);
        }

        my $parcel = &infix:<,>(|@parcel-to-be);
        my $next-iter = $a + $mod < $b ?? FiniteIntRangeQuadIter.new(:value($a + $mod),
                                                                     :max($b))
                                       !! EMPTY;
        ConsIter.new(:value-parcel($parcel),
                     :nextIter($next-iter));
    }
}

There absolutely has to be a better way to build a Parcel, but I wasn’t able to figure it out, and this one works. Again, this code only gets called once for the entire iteration. It’s probably enough of a speed hit that it should only be used for longer lists; more timing is required to figure out where the sweet spot is to switch over. (Though come to think of it, it’s probably worth letting people more familiar with the ins and outs of Parcels go over this code a few times before trying to figure out where that sweet spot is.)

As it stands now, it takes 27.3 seconds to execute 2..10000 in Rakudo. Switching to this iterator, it takes 8.1 seconds. (Note that 2..10000 is the worst case for the slow bits of the new code; 1..10000 shaves a tenth of a second or so off the time.)

It would be fairly straightforward to convert the Range to use this code for Int iteration. The big thing at this point would be generating enough tests for it. This is the sort of code in which off-by-one errors lurk, and this would be a terrible place to let such an error creep into Rakudo.

So, continuing from my last post. Here’s our starting point for the third round of optimization:

for 1..10000 {
    my $a = $_ + 1;
}

That takes 26.5 seconds. (Note that’s already about 10s faster than before optimizing the Int comparisons.)

This requires a more complicated iterator.

class FiniteIntRangeIter is Iterator {
    has $!value;
    has $!max;
    has $!nextIter;

    method infinite() { False }

    method reify() {
        return ($!value,) if $!value ~~ EMPTY;
        unless $!nextIter.defined || $!nextIter ~~ EMPTY {
            if $!value != $!max {
                my $s = $!value.succ;
                $!nextIter =
                    $s < $!max
                        ?? FiniteIntRangeIter.new( :value($s),
                                                   :max($!max) )
                        !! EMPTY;
            } else {
                $!nextIter = EMPTY;
            }
        }
        $!value, $!nextIter;
    }
}

This is basically the current RangeIter with the non-Int bits removed as well as “excludes max” (as that is just the same as iterating to $max – 1 for Ints). Pretty straightforward, and it takes 11.6 seconds to execute.

Unfortunately, returning more than one value at a time is much more complicated for the finite case. Ooo, unless it’s not! You can write the iterator to alway go up by two, and then create a special iterator to handle the first iteration if the overall number is odd. We’re obviously getting into the realm of tricky code here. But the double iterator approach gets us to 9.5 seconds, and an even crazier quad iterator gets it to 7.8. The code is getting ugly, but it’s a big improvement over the our starting point.

What to do with this? Unfortunately, the best of the optimizations are on the tricky side, and code freeze for Rakudo Star is supposed to be in about 15 hours. I’m not terribly comfortable overhauling the Range iteration code this close to the release. On the other hand, 26.5 seconds to 7.8 seconds is a pretty big improvement. And this is a core feature that is likely to be used a lot by people trying out Rakudo for the first time.

I think I’m going to sleep on it.

I wasn’t planning on doing any more work on Rakudo before Rakudo Star, but the conversation on #phasers today got me thinking. On the one hand, I’m somewhat opposed to the idea of the Range-specific RangeIter iterator, as Range and the series operator are supposed to behave identically. On the other hand, the idea of creating a special case for RangeIter to handle the super-common Int iteration case seemed very appealing. So I thought I’d poke around a little and see what I could do.

I’m going to tell this story backwards of the way I actually did it, because I flailed around a lot at the beginning. My goal was to focus on a construct like

for 1..10000 {
   # do something
}

But in the process of my flailing, I thought that switching from before to < made the code go slower, so I thought I might focus on that.

So here’s the first bit of code I’m going to talk about optimizing:

my $i;
loop ($i = 0; $i < 10000; $i++) {
    my $a = $i + 1;  # this line just to give the loop something to do!
}

That took 7.4 seconds to execute on my MacBook Pro. Much faster than a loop using 1..10000, but still awfully slow.

Well, < didn’t have a specific version for Int. It relied on the Real version to convert the arguments to Num and delegate to that version of <. It was very easy to code up an Int specific version of < which calls down into PIR. And with that in place, the above code runs in 4.0 seconds. So, this simple change pretty much doubles the speed of the most basic loop. (That time includes Rakudo’s start up, after all.)

So, sort of the next logical step turns out to be to look at the infinite case. Let’s look at a slightly different piece of code:

for 1..* {
    last if $_ > 10000;
}

That takes 19.1 seconds on my MBP. So, here’s a new iterator type crafted specifically for infinite Ranges:

class InfiniteIntRangeIter is Iterator {
    has $!value;
    has $!nextIter;

    method infinite() { True; }

    method reify() {
        unless $!nextIter.defined {
            $!nextIter = InfiniteIntRangeIter.new( :value($!value.succ) );
        }
        $!value, $!nextIter;
    }
}

Using that instead of the default RangeIter completes the above sample loop in 10.6 seconds.

But wait! pmichaud says iterators will be more efficient if they return more than one value at a time. Basically, the above version constructs an iterator object for each iteration. If we return two values at a time, we can cut the number of objects created in half. Seems like that ought to be a win. Here’s the new source:

class InfiniteIntRangeIter is Iterator {
    has $!value;
    has $!nextIter;

    method infinite() { True; }

    method reify() {
        unless $!nextIter.defined {
            $!nextIter = InfiniteIntRangeIter.new( :value($!value + 2) );
        }
        $!value, $!value + 1, $!nextIter;
    }
}

That’s 9.5 seconds, another 10% shaved off. Returning four values at a time gets it to 8.7 seconds. Eight gets us 8.2 seconds, and it seems like we are into diminishing returns.

But wait! The loop code uses >, which I haven’t optimized yet. Switch it to use the already optimized <, and the runtime is down to 4.8 seconds. Seems like fine progress!

This blog post is probably already too long, so I’ll stop it short here.

This is the third post in a multi-part series dealing with the race questions on the census. It continues looking at the changes in the questions over time by considering the period from Reconstruction through the Great Depression, and what they tell us about American culture.

***

The term "color"--not "race"--first appeared in the 1850 census, with three options: white, black, or mulatto; and these options were repeated in 1860. The American Civil War took place from 1861 to 1865; and with its end the need to count the slave population disappeared. Instead, census terminology retained the color category; and the 1870 census added two additional colors--Chinese and Indian. These same five colors were repeated in 1880; and the 1890 census added another three colors--quadroon, octoroon, and Japanese.

The terms mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon reify the non-scientific American folk concept of blood. Blood is a biological entity, and many people inaccurately believe that it is the same as genes. The following explanation shows why they are wrong.

Suppose that there are eight genes for race, so that a mulatto has four black genes and four white genes, a quadroon has two black genes and six white genes, and an octoroon has one black gene and seven white genes. Now suppose that a mulatto man and a mulatto woman have a lot of children. Each child would get half its genes from the father and half from the mother. One child might get all four white genes from each parent and be 100% white, another might get all four black genes from each parent and be 100% black, and other children might wind up with all the other possible combinations of white and black genes. However, American culture views mulattos as black (e.g., President Obama); and believes that two blacks cannot have a 100% white baby. This is why the folk concept of blood does not act like genes.

Blood is actually another word for ancestry. Mulatto is an American cultural term for someone with one parent who is culturally classified as black; quadroon is an American cultural term for someone with one grandparent who is culturally classified as black; and octoroon is an American cultural term for someone with one great-grandparent who is culturally classified as black (or two great-great-grandparents, etc.).

Although biological races do not exist, folk beliefs like these about why people look different from one another have long been with us. As the census tried to make the folk beliefs countable, inadequacies of classification appeared, and the categories proliferated. The expansion from three to eight colors in the latter half of the 19th century is evident once again in the 2010 census which lists 15 races. At the same time, problems with classification open the door to ever more categories. The current census excludes "Latino" and similar terms from its list of races, even though many Americans would disagree. We know from previous experience that many Americans will self-classify as "other" on the 2010 census, and will write in a term such as "Mexican" for their race. Furthermore, additional cultural terms, such as "Arab," do not appear at all. Conscientious participants can be excused for their perplexity at wondering why Korean and Vietnamese are two different races, but neither Puerto Rican nor Cuban is a race.

The censuses from 1900 to 1940 solved the proliferation problem by allowing the individual to write in a descriptor. At the same time, however, the preexisting color category became "color or race"--this at a time of Jim Crow laws and the marriage prohibitions and forced sterilizations of the eugenics movement. In other words, the introduction of the term "race" to the census emphasized the de facto and de jure segregation and the scientific racism of that period.

Image Source: 1943 Esther Bubley "Colored Waiting Room" sign, Greyhound bus station, Rome GA, September 1943 (Library of Congress)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1943_Colored_Waiting_Room_...

 

Next week the biennial International AIDS Conference comes to Europe again, this time in Vienna. Entitled “Rights here, right now”, it will enable us to turn the world’s spotlight on what is happening with HIV and women in Europe.

Although there are more women with HIV in Europe than ever, scant attention is paid to this by anyone. In W Europe, 29% of all new HIV diagnoses are through heterosexual transmission; in Central Europe the figure is 53%. And 20% of the 400-500 HIV positive babies born annually in St. Petersburg are abandoned for fear of gender-based violence. The global crisis of women and HIV remains enormous. Yet women’s rights in relation to HIV are still ignored by many at UN level and by most governments also. The recently launched UN Plan on Women’s Health  has immediately been criticised for lacking a women’s rights component. Meanwhile, there is lengthy UK press coverage of Barbara Harris, who is promoting sterilisation of women drug users, women with HIV in Africa and poor women in Haiti. We have much to ask of this conference as we seek to right all these wrongs against women.

Why is it so difficult to place women’s rights on the agendas of the UN and  policy makers? Firstly, as Helena Kennedy clearly articulated, laws made by men just don’t work for women and do not begin to do justice to women’s rights. For instance, a custodial sentence can have an even harsher effect on the children of a woman sent to gaol than on those of a man. Families are far more likely to split up if a mother is imprisoned, with lasting and devastating effects on both the woman and her children. Yet laws rarely recognise this.  

Secondly, as Harvard Professor Sofia Gruskin explains, public health policies, whilst supposedly gender neutral, instead may mask a whole range of different qualitative issues which, when subjected to the human rights lens are often found to be badly wanting.  For instance, it is not enough just to count numbers of men and women who receive HIV-medication and then announce that more women than men are receiving this, as WHO’s HIV Department does. Indeed, it is breath-taking that WHO calls women “slightly advantaged” in this respect, when so many also face the attendant trauma of an HIV diagnosis during pregnancy, with all that this implies. Hidden behind this are the facts that it is almost entirely only women of reproductive age who are receiving these drugs through programmes to prevent “vertical” transmission of HIV through childbirth. Moreover, these figures do not reflect the quality of these services, which often lead to women experiencing violence from health centre staff or from their families – or both. Yet because there is, to date, little "formal" documentation of these issues, this information, though widespread and consistent, is dismissed as “anecdotal” because it isn’t yet in the academic literature, so does not form part of the evidence base.

Thirdly, and leading on from this, research agendas for HIV are largely defined, led and funded by organisations in the US and W Europe. These are mainly health-based agendas, designed to increase access of people with HIV to Western health services. However, as with the old adage about statistics, so with the evidence-base: the results you get are defined by the information you feed in. If the questions are not defined by women with HIV, if women with HIV are neither party to what research gets funded or to the ways in which  research is conducted, small wonder that most of the evidence base is actually entirely missing the point about the reality of positive women’s lives. Researchers and health staff may think that increasing positive women’s access to western health services is identical to improving their quality of life – but this is rarely so. As I have explained elsewhere, if health centres merely treat women as vectors of disease and as vessels for producing new babies, not only are the women – but our children also – going to suffer the consequences. Yet no health service, government or Western donor funding these services has, to my knowledge, yet accepted accountability for the gender violence perpetrated directly or indirectly against women – and thereby their children – in the name of these public health policies. Despite their pronouncements that such public health policies are promoted in the name of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, it will be interesting to see what will happen if children who have experienced the many negative effects of these policies on their own families one day claim compensation from their governments – just as the “stolen generation” of Australia have now rightly done.

At the recent Washington “Women Deliver” maternal health conference, the Gates Foundation announced new large funds to address women’s maternal health. This is great news in part, but the role of HIV in relation to maternal health and mortality was barely addressed at “Women Deliver”, despite recent reports that the largest cause of maternal mortality, in Southern Africa at least, is HIV.  The difficulty with all these funding strategies and related policies is that they still view women just as bio-medical beings rather than in our entirety as people who are equal but different to men.  Focusing on women’s bio-medical health is of course a good thing globally, hard enough though that is to achieve. But focusing on this alone is the “illusion of inclusion”: there is still a huge gap between sex-disaggregated approaches and gender-disaggregated approaches in the world of science, clinical research, policy formulation and practice.

So there are many deep questions at stake in Vienna around women’s rights. Vienna only has one openly positive woman, despite being one of the world’s most cultured cities. It also hosted the UN World Conference on Human Rights in 1993, when women's rights were first recognised as being human rights. As Charlotte Bunch, founder of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership, explains:

“Women were primarily seen as part of the social and economic work of the UN, and women’s rights were only rarely addressed in the human rights arena before the 1990s. The change in this perception came most forcefully at the UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993.  With the cold war over and the issue of rape in war gaining media coverage in Bosnia, women seized the opportunity to demand attention to women’s rights as human rights.  They organized across the North-South divide …. to ensure that the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action included a strong affirmation of the rights of women as universal human rights, and in particular for the recognition that all forms of violence against women are a violation of human rights"

The Conference led to the appointment of a UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women in 1994, who challenged governments to outlaw this. Moreover, gender integration has since been incorporated into human rights treaties. The issue of sexual rights has also been addressed, through the Vienna, Cairo and Beijing World Conference documents.  So it is fitting that we come back to Vienna now for this conference entitled “Rights Here, Right Now.”

However, with the firm hold of the “objective” evidence base discourse on HIV, how realistic is it that an international AIDS conference can be open to such debates? Sadly, as Columbia Professor Ida Susser also argues, we hope for much but still fear not. Six scientific tracks drive the main conference programme, all resolutely committed to showcasing presentations which adhere to the “formal evidence base”, rather than to a human rights agenda. Thus, for reasons explained above, we are likely once more to experience a conference which feels as if it is two parallel tracks of a railway line, with the train and all its passengers which depend on these tracks, hurtling without any connecting points, into a bleak future. The track lines on which we run seem destined never to relate to one another – and the train is destined for violent derailment for women in particular, rather than gentle future travels for all..  

What can be done to encourage these two lines – “science” and the relentless rhetoric of the formally constructed “objective” evidence base on the one hand – and the reality of women’s lives in their messy, holistic, wholesome rich entireties on the other – to link to one another, to connect and to recognise their equal and complementary roles? Without an evidence base at all, we would indeed be lost in a quagmire of uncertainties, and would have nothing on which to defend our belief in Darwinian evolution, for instance, or our defence of harm reduction programmes. A certain taxonomical classification of the world around us is, therefore useful – a creation of some sense of order out of random chaos. At the same time, however, we in the West especially have become slaves to such taxonomies, believing them to have an objective existence of their own, rather than recognising that an evidence base is only as good as the questions researched by those who have created it. Scientists, donors and policy-makers alike are over-committed to a belief in the objective neutrality of scientific research, instead of encouraging us all constantly to question our assumptions about the political dimensions to what we reify and deify as “science”.

This is where the human rights agenda comes in because this does offer us a way forward, in that doctors and scientists might just listen to lawyers (ie fellow professionals) when they traditionally find it difficult to listen to lay people - especially their clients. This may sound harsh – and thankfully there are a goodly minority of serious exceptions to this rule. Yet the traditional male hierarchies of medicine, the law and the UN run deep in all our societies, and courageous are those individual (female) clients of either profession who dare to question those whose services they seek. 

There is also the good news that the International AIDS Conferences also have a parallel, free “Global Village” where different “Networking Zones” have the freedom to explore these and many other complex social, economic, political and psychological issues, liberated from the more narrowly defined confines of the conference “proper”. In our Women’s Networking Zone, there will be 4 and a half packed days of over 50 sessions, full of lively debate, sharing of experiences, film, workshops and stories, which will enable women from around the world, sex workers, drug users, positive women, lesbians, married women, widows and young women – and a whole mixture of yet more “categories” – or at least those who can afford to come – to share and celebrate our own lived experiences of what works for us, rather than approaches pre- and pro-scribed for us by others. One early session brings  together academics and women’s rights activists, to explore the issue discussed here. Its working title is “More than just a pound of flesh? – Beyond the Evidence Base:  Rights and Justice for Women”.  Although Portia won’t be with us herself, we hope that her wise words of caution to the court in Venice, that not a drop of blood should be spilt in the extraction of a pound of flesh, will be heeded by the conference delegates of Vienna also. Portia was a wise woman indeed. There are many of her offspring around the world. We just need to remember to listen to them all.

 

 

 

The riots can't just be pinned on dissident republicans. Unionists squandered a chance for to engage in reconciliation after Saville

Observers of Northern Irish politics might be forgiven for thinking that it's deja vu all over again, but in fact the scale of the recent unrest has taken many by surprise, following as it does upon last summer's relatively peaceful marching season. What has made this July so turbulent?

This summer's parades follow the publication of the Saville report, which exonerated the victims of Bloody Sunday. The report was welcomed by victims' groups and nationalists, and was gracefully acknowledged by David Cameron, who formally apologised to the victims and their families. However, despite the report making headline news nationally, on the day of publication only two unionist representatives, Reg Empey and Gregory Campbell, commented on Saville's findings, and both spoke critically of the report, its cost, and the dangers of creating a "hierarchy of victims", without acknowledging the report's conclusions. Peter Robinson, the first minister, remains the sole unionist politician to publicly acknowledge Saville's findings.

Saville provided a unique opportunity for unionists to engage in reconciliation, but that opportunity was squandered and as result division between Catholics and Protestants has intensified. What is interesting about this, though, is not just that an opportunity for reconciliation was missed (a depressingly predictable pattern of events in Northern Ireland), but that it went unremarked by the wider media, whose uncritical adoption of the "two divided communities" paradigm meant that the political debate was allowed to continue along predictable sectarian lines, regardless of the new historical evidence that Saville put forward.

One of the unfortunate consequences of this longstanding failure to engage meaningfully in reconciliation has been the rise of dissident republicanism. But placing the responsibility for Monday's violence solely with dissident republicans (as Sinn Féin and others have done) masks the widespread nature of opposition to Orange marches within the wider Catholic community. The Orange Order is an explicitly sectarian organisation, dedicated to protecting Protestant ascendancy in Northern Ireland. This is generally ignored in debates about contentious marches in Northern Ireland, which tend to characterise the conflict as between two extremist factions.

Rather than actively challenging the sectarian basis of Orangeism, the establishment has instead normalised Orangeism and even sought to promote it as a source of tourism. This often requires that the media adopt a somewhat incoherent attitude to reporting parades. Monday's local BBC news, for example, which concentrated on the widespread violence surrounding contentious marches, was followed by a programme entitled The Twelfth, which documented the parades as a national carnival and effaced any reference to their controversy or the violence they provoked.

Monday's violence demonstrates the futility of seeking to forge a peaceful future in a deeply divided society without challenging the underlying basis of those divisions. It is madness to encourage Catholics and Protestants to maintain their own competing versions of what is in reality a shared history, or to use public funds to promote exclusive cultural activities such as Orange marches. Rather than tolerating intolerance, an approach that merely serves to legitimate and reify sectarian cultural identities, politicians and the media need to address the underlying causes of social division in Northern Ireland (segregated schooling, housing and cultural activities). If Monday's scenes are not to be repeated, we urgently need to make a start on that much-vaunted, but still-elusive, project of building a shared future.

Using a decoy to nab the bad guy (or girl) is a lot like like fishing, you put your lure on the line, wait for the bite, and reel in your catch. Vice cops have been using the decoy method for years. It's nothing new for police to dress up as prostitutes and homeless people in order to fight crime in major metropolitan areas.  Yes, but is it good for the Jews?

A Morrocan politician thinks so and has suggested Amsterdam police dress up as "decoy Jews," to be planted in areas of the city where hate crimes are being committed against Jews. Police would put on their yamulke, but instead of celebrating Chanukkah, they'd be capturing Anti-Semites. Evidently all it takes in some areas of Amsterdam is to walk down the street with a skullcap on your head, and, WHAM!, you will be spat upon or, worse, have the crap beaten out of you.

According to reports, the decoy plan is under consideration. No final decision has been made as to whether it will com to fruition. What we do know is the acting mayor of Amsterdam, who is Jewish, supports the notion of having the police put on the payot and hit the streets. Yes, but is it good for the Jews?

The Dutch, The Morrocans and the Jews all seem to be behind the plan, as representation from each group agrees the tensions in the Netherlands are rising, and all of the citizens living in the Netherlands should be able to walk down the street without fear of intimidation. But like any proposal, there will be those who support it, those who don't, as well as those who question if the proposed plan will even make a dent in putting a stop to the physical and emotional attacks happening on the streets of Amsterdam.

Bloggers React to Tensions in the Netherlands

Sylvie Stein from Passport brings forth the argument of whether the proposed plan will serve to resolve the problem of bigotry in Amsterdam, or if it is merely allows politicians an opportunity to tell their constituents, "Hey, look, we're addressing the Anti-Semitism."

A debate persists in the city over whether the police force's proposed clandestine operations are really capable of tackling the underlying prejudice festering in Amsterdam, or whether they merely reify superficial stereotypes and circumvent the rudimentary issues at stake.

The Lesbian Conservative expresses irritation that the plan is nothing more than a political move meant to make people think something is being done about Anti-Semitism, but maybe it's really not about the Jews at all, but about the Muslims:

So now, the great liberal fathers of Amsterdam, home to the Anne Frank museum, believe they can cope with these naughty outbursts of ignorance by flooding the streets with police officers disguised as Jewish men wearing skull caps. Well, after all, this is just a minor little blip on the progressive radar screen, nothing to get too excited about. An arrest here, a citation there, and before you can shout Long Live Diversity! our progressive utopia will be as right as rain once again....It appears from the footage of the undercover video that these attacks are being perpetrated by those of ‘immigrant origin’. Hmmm. I wonder what ethnic group of immigrants they might be alluding to? Can anyone make an educated guess as to the religious affiliation of these misguided immigrant moppets? Dare we say the M Word?

Carolina over at Brinkbeest in English gives an historical perspective on the idea of using decoys:

Because of the increasing anti-Semitism and violence against Jews in Amsterdam, the use of ‘lure-Jews’ (police officers dressed as Jews to catch anti-Semites red-handed) was suggested by a Dutch political party.

But the police in Amsterdam has no intention to use ‘lure-Jews’ in their fight against Anti-Semitism. Although they have in the past used: lure-cars, lure-bicycles, lure-houses and lure-grandmothers. They have also used a lure-homosexual once.

So do you think this sort of crimefighting plan is Kosher? Or is it just a bunch of politicians putzing around?

The last time I got a glimpse of the wretched new book from Marilynne Robinson, the review was sufficient to dissuade me from bothering to ever read it. Now we have a positive review from Karen Armstrong, and I am now convinced that if ever I am confronted with this work, the only appropriate response would be to unzip my fly and piss on it, on the spot. Only my deeply ingrained social conditioning would hinder me. Dammit, why can't I live freely and express my primal impulses without these nagging voices in my head?

Once again, her thesis is that her own twisted version of science, which is always reductionist and ignores the forest for the hadrons, baryons, and mesons that make it up, is a curse upon civilization that destroys all beauty and aspirations. How dare we turn a critical eye upon good ol' subjective superstition? And besides, science completely ignores the mind and art and strangeness and doesn't encourage people to ever think long, long thoughts.

How's your bladder holding up?

This, of course, is entirely copacetic with Karen Armstrong's views. It isn't civilized if it isn't wallowing in the subjective and whining piteously about all those investigators of the real with their bright lights and poking fingers harshing her mellow and demanding that she say something sensible, clear, and objectively verifiable. In order to make her complaints justifiable, though, she has to lie about science. Oh, wait — perhaps I should be more charitable. She is obstinately ignorant of science, so she isn't exactly lying…she just makes fantastic nonsense up about it.

In the past, the voices that say "there is something more" have always been right. The positivist approach would not only marginalise religion, but also the arts, culture, history, and the classical and humanist traditions. Most prescient of all is Robinson's contention that "it is only prudent to make a very high estimate of human nature, first of all in order to contain the worst impulses of human nature, and then to liberate its best impulses."

I wish she had developed this crucial insight, because it is urgently needed at this moment of crisis in human history. If we are indeed completely in thrall to the selfish gene, why not throw all constraint to the winds and just be selfish — individually and collectively, in our politics, social arrangements, financial and economic dealings?

There's always something more? What? It seems to me that this belief in something beyond the natural and material world has always been wrong — at least, it's been in constant retreat for the last half dozen centuries, fading into worship of ever more petty and intangible deities. It takes a truly deluded mind to translate a perennial collapse of a world view into a pattern of unending victory.

I should think she should also realize that we happy 'positivists' are also trying to contain the worst impulses of human nature, but those sorry worst include the fuzzy tendency to reify wishful thinking into a collection of demanding gods and indignant priests. They don't include art and culture and history. We aren't the philistines. We aren't the ones mangling a deep-rooted historical endeavor with an enviable record of alleviating human suffering and liberating the human mind, science, in order to justify lotus-eating ignorance.

As for that inane argument that the path to progress is by closing our eyes to an ugly reality and focusing on the best and most beautiful, I offer one counter-example: public health. You can appreciate that cholera, for instance, is an ugly, cruel disease that has destroyed millions in unpleasant ways, ripping through whole families, killing children in their mothers' arms by making them shit themselves to death. It's doctors and public health scientists that stared that ugly death in the face and fought it who made progress and reduced its ravages. There is no illusion that because it is natural, because it has plagued us for ages, because we were in thrall to merciless epidemics, that we must therefore surrender to it. We would not have gotten the answers we do have if we'd turned a blind eye to the suffering because it would demean our view of the world, and if we'd chosen instead to simply celebrate the bright, healthy, happy people who had escaped the disease (so far…oh, but please, do not disturb our opium dreams with possible unpleasant futures!)

Those selfish genes are real, but they aren't quite what Armstrong imagines they are — when her understanding is a millimeter deep, perhaps it's understandable that she would leap to the silly midgleyesque conclusion that it means that we are ruled by genes for nastiness and spite and evil, when it only refers to a pattern of inheritance and selection for genes that promote their own perpetuation…which can include genes that enhance cooperation and altruism, as well. But even if it were such a grim story of bad genes thriving, it does not imply in any way that scientists are cheering on selfishness, or that they advocate giving up and becoming short-sighted brutes.

On the contrary, only by understanding reality can we deal with it and apply our minds to aspire to that ambitious human world filled with art and culture and science and reason and ethical behavior that Armstrong and Robinson probably want, too. The only way to accomplish that, though, is by working harder at mastering reality, a key part of the formula that they seem to miss as they so busily languish in their dreams.

I'm still not buying their books, not even for pissing upon.

Read the comments on this post...

Ruminations of a Programmer

Some readers commented on my earlier post on Thrush implementation in Clojure that the functional way of doing stuff may seem to create additional overhead through unnecessary iterations and intermediate structures that could have been avoided using traditional imperative loops. Consider the following thrush for the collection of accounts from the earlier post ..

(defn savings-balance
  [& accounts]
  (->> accounts
       (filter #(= (:type %) ::savings))
       (map :balance)
       (apply +)))


Is it one iteration of the collection for the filter and another for the map ?

It's not. Clojure offers lazy sequences and the functions that operate on them all return lazy sequences only. So in the above snippet Clojure actually produces a composition of the filter and the map that act on the collection accounts in a lazy fashion. Of course with apply, everything is computed since we need to realize the full list to compute the sum. Let's look at the following example without the sum to see how Clojure sequences differ from a language with eager evaluation semantics ..

user> (def lazy-balance
      (->> accounts
           (filter #(= (:type %) ::savings))
           (map #(do (println "getting balance") (:balance %)))))
#'user/lazy-balance


lazy-balance has not been evaluated - we don't yet have the printlns. Only when we force the evaluation we have it computed ..

user> lazy-balance
(getting balance
getting balance
200 300)


Had Clojure been a strict language it would have been stupid to follow the above strategy for a large list of accounts. We would have been doing multiple iterations over the list generating lots of intermediate structures to arrive at the final result. An imperative loop would have rested the case much more cheaply.

Laziness improves compositionality. With laziness, Clojure sequences and the higher order functions on them essentially reify loops so that you can transform them all at once. As Cale Gibbard defends laziness in Haskell with his comments on this LtU thread .. "It's laziness that allows you to think of data structures like control structures."

Clojure is not as lazy as Haskell. And hence the benefits are also not as pervasive. Haskell being lazy by default, the compiler can afford to make aggressive optimizations like reordering of operations and transformations that Clojure can't. With Haskell's purity that guarantees absence of side-effects, deforestation optimizations like stream fusion generates tight loops and minimizes heap allocations. But I hear that Clojure 1.2 will have some more compiler level optimizations centered around laziness of its sequences.

Laziness makes you think differently. I had written an earlier post on this context with Haskell as the reference language. I have been doing some Clojure programming of late. Many of my observations with Haskell apply to Clojure as well. You need to keep in mind the idioms and best practices that laziness demands. And at many times they may not seem obvious to you. In fact with Clojure you need to know the implementation of the abstraction in order to ensure that you get the benefits of lazy sequences.

You need to know that destructuring's & uses nthnext function which uses next that needs to know the future to determine the present. In short, next doesn't fit in the lazy paradigm.

The other day I was working on a generic walker that traverses some recursive data structures for some crap processing. I used walk from clojure.walk, but later realized that for seqs it does a doall that realizes the sequence - another lazy gotcha that caught me unawares. But I actually needed to peek into the implementation to get to know it.

Being interoperable with Java is one of the benefits of Clojure. However you need to be aware of the pitfalls of using Java's data structures with the lazy paradigm of Clojure. Consider the following example where I put all accounts in a java.util.concurrent.LinkedBlockingQueue.

(import '(java.util.concurrent LinkedBlockingQueue))
(def myq (new LinkedBlockingQueue))
(doto myq (.put acc-1) (.put acc-2) (.put acc-3))


Now consider the following snippet that does some stuff on the queue ..

(let [savings-accounts (filter #(= (:type %) ::savings) myq)]
     (.clear myq)
     (.addAll myq savings-accounts))


Should work .. right ? Doesn't ! filter is lazy and hence savings-accounts is empty within the let-block. Then we clear myq and when we do an addAll, it fails since savings-accounts is still empty. The solution is to use a doall, that blows away the laziness and realizes the filtered sequence ..

(let [savings-accounts (doall (filter #(= (:type %) ::savings) myq))]
     (.clear myq)
     (.addAll myq savings-accounts))


Of course laziness in Clojure sequences is something that adds power to your abstractions. However you need to be careful on two grounds :

• Clojure as a language is not lazy by default in totality (unlike Haskell) and hence laziness may get mixed up with strict evaluation leading to surprising and unoptimized consequences.
• Clojure interoperates with Java, which has mutable data structures and strict evaluation. Like the situation I described above with LinkedBlockingQueue, sometimes it's always safe to bite the bullet and do things the Java way.

Sean O'Brien is moved by a quest for the meaning of life

In the dark abyss of time, the Incredible String Band had a number called "Hedgehog's Song", containing the lines: "Oh, you know all the words and you sing all the notes, / But you never quite learned the song." The context was the narrator's failure to connect fully with the various girls he encountered, but the problem could be rendered more generally as that of authenticity. The teenage Andrew Greig was one half of a sadly unrecorded duo called Fate & Ferret, who made contact with the Incredibles' management and were encouraged to send in tapes, to which the legendary Joe Boyd listened with tolerant amusement. Music was not to be Greig's vocation, alas: he turned out to be a poet with a hard road ahead.

Most of the signposts on that road seem to have reiterated the lines from "Hedgehog's Song". Going to university to study philosophy while having a strong interest in the meaning of life rather than of language was perhaps a sign of quixotry to come. An attempt to "face reality" through marriage and work in copywriting (attempting to keep poetry as "a hobby", dear God), led to attempted suicide and breakdown. There followed the long, dedicated, hand-to-mouth scramble of the writing life, interspersed with mountaineering expeditions and love affairs. His considerable success as a poet, a novelist, a writer on mountaineering and other matters including golf, vindicates his decision to follow instinct rather than economics; but books, he makes clear, are not life, and life is what counts, the arena in which we are tested. He may sound like a Buddhist at times, but really he's a Protestant, carrying the guilty accumulation of should-if-and-buttery everywhere he seeks to be free of it.

In order to meet the test, Greig searches for a way of occupying the present. The pursuit verges on the frenzied. What has he to show for his openness to life? No child; no wife when this book opens. As Louis MacNeice observed, "the mind [is] by nature stagey", and Greig keeps facing himself with set-pieces: here it is a fishing trip, an attempt to fulfil a task conferred on him by a dead friend, a landscape made for symbolism, a proposal of marriage.

The friend was the poet Norman MacCaig (1910-96), doyen of Scottish literature, a poet loved by the Scottish public. While the Scots in the street are on the whole more literary than their English neighbours (hard not to be so nowadays, you might think), it is nonetheless a great achievement to enter the national consciousness. Inevitably this was as much a matter of MacCaig's perceived character as of his writing. While I was reading Greig's book there was an eerie inevitability in finding myself in a taxi in Edinburgh listening to the driver as he explained MacCaig's appeal – straight talk about matters of common concern. It would have been discourteous of me to argue that MacCaig's work is often slant and subtle and that he did much to create the areas of interest that his audience came to view as common property. That would be to privilege the poet and his art in such a way as to arouse the scepticism that accompanies the Scots when in direct mode: neither the driver nor (it might seem) MacCaig would have liked that.

Greig's own journey is born of love and admiration and during it his view gains in depth and realism with the knowledge that MacCaig was in the first place a fellow human, brought low in old age by the death of Isabel, his wife of 50 years, and by illness which meant he could no longer travel to the place that gives the book its title. If it could happen to him, Greig implies, it's a grim lookout for the rest of us.

On Greig's last visit to MacCaig's legendary Edinburgh flat, the poet asked him to go and try to catch trout in the Loch of the Green Corrie (in Gaelic, Lochan a Choire Ghuirm), in the hills above Assynt in the Western Highlands, where the older poet spent many summers fishing with friends. Should Greig succeed, and in the unlikely event that the afterlife existed, MacCaig would be greatly amused. It is the sort of mission a John Buchan character would feel both honoured and obliged to undertake (and indeed Greig has remade parts of Buchan's world in his fiction). The first problem is to find the place, which MacCaig helpfully observes is not called by the name he gives it.

Greig, of course, is in no position to leave matters alone. MacCaig is presented as his literary exemplar and seems also a second father, to whose wisdom and self-possession the younger man aspired. So the journey to Assynt with two friends, intended as a spontaneous approach to the real, is, even by Greig's standards, burdened with an almost disabling load of duties: assess the past, enter the here and now, discover meaning, balance the contradiction between the intense pleasures of the landscape and the fact of death. And catch the fish.

He has four days in which to do this, as though in some crazed and un-commissionable reality show about how men finally grow up. It is completely absorbing, though the reader is aware of Greig the novelist, literary descendant of RL Stevenson, giving Greig the seeker a steer away from loose ends and inconsequence. The initial refusal of the hidden loch to match his idea of its beauty or to grant him a fish becomes metaphorical, despite his avowed mistrust of language's embroidery of the actual. And fortunately the intense self-scrutiny is matched by landscape writing worthy of Stevenson himself. Over and over, Greig makes place into an event in its own right: "Today the lochan was two-toned, cornflower blue then gleaming platinum, with a sharp divide where the wind halted. Lewisian gneiss and quartzite scree overhead, in our ears the non-silence of wind and water. It was an Assynt within Assynt, a small cradling, a stand-alone excerpt from a larger work."

When an acquaintance casually describes a solo return journey to Assynt as escapism, Greig is furious. The West Highlands, he elsewhere explains, are the location for the great geological controversy which led the way for plate tectonics and an understanding that continents themselves have travelled the globe to reach their present positions. Nothing is fixed; the Earth remakes itself in deep time. We may sense that Greig is distrustful of irony, perhaps doubting the distinction between its active imaginative function (more prevalent in English poetry than Scots, perhaps, but see MacCaig) and the complacent knowingness which can make everyday life so wearisome.

It is in part because he looks for a place where they do things differently that Greig is drawn to Assynt, close to the site of his own childhood holidays, and some of the best of this fine book is taken up with attempts to face down his tendency to reify glimpses of the ideal. With an east coast Protestant lowland background, he longs to connect with the older Gaelic world, to find a home for his intensely felt but relentlessly analytical romanticism. His conversations with the now-elderly women who remember MacCaig and his local friends in the days of fly-fishing, whisky and all-night music and recitation reveal people with no need to idealise their own experience.

There were great days but they passed, as earlier incarnations of Highland life passed, under the pressures of mortality and economics – or, let us be frank, the greed of owners in a world in which hitherto the most important possessions had been a name and the songs that preserved it. The restlessness with which Greig walks the ground of the "good place" will for the most part have to be its own reward: "Everything is clear and sharp now – the travelling slash of ripples, cool breeze over my hands, my own roughened skin, smell of turf and heather. I've escaped not from life but out into it." It is Greig's habit to set literature aside in favour of life, but the rich contradictions involved in doing so require him to exercise all his considerable art.

Sean O'Brien's novel Afterlife is published by Picador.

Over at Salon they are chattering about the old porn/romance novel debate. It started with this anonymous story about porn being blamed for destroying a marriage.

Hmmm. Yes... ummmmm.

Please grow up people? Porn, romance novels, fashion, shopping, sports, and most techno-gadgets all come from the same place. It is a place that we try and reach, where the world is more the way our feelings would want it to be. We try and reify that sense, or consume the reification of others. We want to make the evanescent fantasy moment, real before our eyes and senses. In its rarified form, it is art, literature. In its more pragmatic form it is life. In its tawdry form, it's porn, the celebration of being able to consume on camera. I've done a lot of porn, and the one question that men always want to have answered is "do you feel it? does it get you off?" They are always looking for a woman who reifies their cravings, because, honestly they want the craving without having to work, the mango that just falls from the tree.

However to blame the creation for the urges of creating it, or less still to blame the creation for the urge to consume the creation, is getting it backwards. The National Review Online's anonymous gets it so wrong... her husband, and she in all probability, ruined their marriage. Porn was just the fixation, the compression, of what was missing: visual appeal, sexual freedom, and a release from all the realities of a marriage with five children.

It is not that the pain of loss is not real, and it isn't that anyone should have much, if any, sympathy for a man who shares in creating five children, makes promises of forever, and then runs out. I certainly don't. He'll find the make up peels, the boobs sag, and probably his new porn girl will find he has moved on. If anything the post is an excellent argument for garnishing wages for child support, not about porn, because there are millions of stories of a man running out, and they don't all revolve around porn, but they all revolve around the man running out.

Recently I experienced a break up, where the guy was sort of making noises about marriage, but in reality, he didn't really consider it. Many of my friends spent their twenties with boy friends who were just not going to get married to the first girl they met. I'm sure there are big picture problems that are contributing to what, from here, seems like an epidemic. But as far back as we read human literature, there are stories of a man chasing and catching a woman, getting her pregnant, and then running on to the next woman. It's classic mythology. In some stories he runs, and in others, he gets caught in one way or another. So if the people of forever ago antiquity saw this, it's a pretty good wager to say that it will be with us for a while yet.

So the whole whose porn is worse is missing the reality: Mr. Anonymous is an awful human being with not a shred of decency. Mrs. Anonymous, if she looks at herself, will probably see some imperfections that contributed to this sorry situation. What Mr. Anonymous' excuse to himself for running out is totally beside the point. It could have been an African American girl with a round ass, it could have been a blond boy, it could have been a slinky thing with fishnets, it could have been anything. Reading between the lines, it seems like he had checked out of the marriage a while ago, and was simply waiting for his chance to leave.

If there is a discussion worth having here, it is why we spend sooo much time in this society talking about marriage, supposedly celebrating permanent monogamy, celebrating child rearing, and do so little, both as a collective and as individuals, to make it all work. Fantasy is neither [...]

Yofi Tirosh of Tel Aviv University has just posted a paper online entitled 'A Name of One's Own: Gender and Symbolic Legal Personhood in the European Court of Human Rights'. This is the abstract:

Legal regulation of surnames provides a fascinating venue for examining how women negotiate their interests of autonomy and of stable personhood vis a vis a patriarchal naming structure. This is a study of 25 years of adjudication of surnames and personal status at the European Court of Human Rights. It explores the intricate ways in which legal norms governing surnames (and their judicial interpretation) sustain, shape, and reify social institutions such as gender, family, and citizenship. As a pan European court, the adjudication of the ECHR operates within the framework of human rights. The universal characteristics of human rights principles allow for an analysis that goes beyond the jurisdiction-specific doctrines of the different countries in Europe, relying on a more general protection of basic rights such as equality and privacy. All of the cases studied here originated in civil law countries. Unlike the common law, the civil law has a highly regulated approach to name-giving and name-changing, a fact that results in litigation in cases that would not reach courts in contemporary common law countries. The rulings in such cases provide a unique opportunity to learn about judicial assumptions regarding gender roles and their symbolic representation through names. This study is part of a larger project that explores the legal treatment of “external” personal markers such as clothes, hairstyle, names, and accent. Adding an important comparative dimension to the overarching project, this article further illustrates the difficulty of modern legal logic to be humble about its ability to classify and categories legal subjects in fixed rubrics of identity. Employing theoretical tools from feminist jurisprudence, semiotics, and textual analysis, this article lays out an alternative legal approach, which would perceive the subjects of law as multidimensional and complex persons, engaged in an ongoing project of finding ways of expressing themselves meaningfully.

With the start of the March Madness and stories of “aggressive female athletes” making national headlines (i.e., Elizabeth Lambert, Brittney Griner), a question I have heard asked and debated a lot lately is–”Are females athletes becoming more aggressive?” I don’t have the answer. The best I can say is a cautious–”maybe?” I don’t think there are any data to prove or disprove this question, but the fact the incidents are caught on video and replayed makes it seem like it is more frequent.  I am hesitant to say overly aggressive acts of female athletes is on the rise at the risk of reifying outdated gendered stereotypes and double standards. The New York Times journalist Jere Longman, wrote a balanced piece which contained perspectives of some of the best critical thinkers and brightest sport sociologists. The story titled “Pushing Back Stereotypes” featured a particular quote from colleague and director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota Mary Jo Kane, which I thought was spot on.  She stated, “Only time will tell if this is an aberration, but what I think is a clear trend, as the stakes get higher in women’s sports, you see more pressure to win….This could be a natural progression to women entering into big-time college sports. You take the bad with the good; you take sold-out arenas with academic scandals. For us to think that women would enter the big time and have it be pristine and without controversy is naïve.” What do you think about this issue? I wonder if the NCAA Women’s Tourney will conclude without any such incidents and ensuing media coverage.

I'm going to give a 5 minute talk on the future of design on Friday to spark conversation within a terrific group of design thinkers from around the world. Banny Banerjee, director of the Stanford Design Program is putting it on. I first met Banny at a conference in India put on by the National Institutes of Design.

Here are my thoughts on where Design/Thinking is going and should be going--and what is needed to get there. They are designed to provoke. Let me know what you think.

Point of View: Designing A Post-Liberal Arts Paradigm—Innovation Arts

The creation of a new belief system—Innovation Arts—to replace the prevailing Liberal Arts paradigm should be the next stage in the evolution of Design/Thinking. A world of constant, cascading change and the failure of existing social organizations requires a shift from the prevailing Liberal Arts paradigm that trains individuals how to make sense of an existing world based on past knowledge and reifying society to a new paradigm that trains people how to build new social systems based on deep knowledge of current cultural rituals and behaviors while embedding action in social, economic and political context. An Innovation Arts paradigm would also form the foundation of a post-Neo-Liberal economic theory that reconnects elites to real business context rather than the quantified financialization of business functions, focuses on value in network relationships and group social behavior and educates people to make rather than consume.

Three Future Directions for the Advancement of Design

1—Develop a mature culture of criticism. If it is to evolve into a mature intellectual system of thought, Design has to create a critical, self-reflexive literature. Design’s public discourse remains aspirational, narrow and secretive. Despite an emphasis on the importance of failure in prototyping and learning, little actual discussion of failure exists. Despite a focus on practice, very little is revealed of what really occurs in consultancy or corporate design practice. The RCA and SVA have just started MFAs in Design Criticism. We need more challenging conversations on both Practice and Theory. And we desperately need a powerful HBR of Design Thinking, anchored in an academic institution. Suggestions? Business or Design School?

2- Build Human Centered Design Tool Kits for Political Policy Makers. Design has focused recently on creating how-to design kits for NGOs to operate at the Bottom-of-the-Pyramid level in Asia and Africa. Building how-to kits for policy-makers at the Top-of-the-Pyramid level in the US, Europe, Latin America and Asia is equally important and challenging. The First World is the new Third World and needs Design Thinking to redesign itself. Design’s venue is expanding from product to experience to systems to policy. Policy is the new edge in Design and it speaks to domestic as well as foreign human needs.

3- The “as if….” perspective of ritual, serious play and the making of the new embodied in the Innovation Arts paradigm is already dominant in much of Generation Y culture. Gen Y has much to teach and much to do. In an effort to understand and activate the Gen Y demographic, Parsons is launching a Gen Y Research Institute. It will focus on deep understandings of Gen Y culture as represented by the global student body at Parsons and provide a public stage and financing for the products and services created by these students. A global collaborative of Gen Y research efforts would be hugely productive.

Even before Mrs. Obama became the FLOTUS race based attacks were aimed at her from White conservatives.   They continue on even as pundits like Chris Matthew forgets on air that Barack Obama is Black because despite the lie of the so-called post racial world, Whiteness refuses to give up its undeserved privilege.

Walt Baker, the prominent CEO of the powerful Tennessee Hospitality Association, called Michelle Obama Cheetah the monkey from Tarzan in a supposed joke e-mail last Thursday.

From: Walt Baker To: Albie DelFavero, Bruce Dobie, Butch Spyridon, Joe Hall, Peter Heidenreich, Terry Clements, Toby Compton, Chuck Creasy, Rob Moorefield, Ken Whitehouse, Paul Brown, Bob Davis Date: March 4, 2010 9:18:29 PM CST

Quoting Larry the Cable Guy...I don't care who you are, this is funny...

I was at the store yesterday, and I ran into Tarzan! I asked him how it was going and if he was into anymore movies.

He told me that he could no longer make any more movies as he had severe arthritis in both shoulders and could no longer swing from vine to tree.

I asked how Jane was doing, he told me she was in bad shape, in a  nursing home, has Alzheimer's and no longer recognizes anyone, how sad. I asked about Boy, and he told me that Boy had gone to the big city, got hooked up with bad women, drugs, alcohol, and the only time he heard from him was if he was in trouble or needed something.

I asked about Cheeta, he beamed and said she was doing good, had married a Lawyer and now lived in the White House!!!

He sent the following apology after it became that Whitehouse called the e-mail disgusting and the a public backlash began.

"Thursday night I spontaneously forwarded -- to a small group of people -- an email that had been sent to me as political humor. As I forwarded it, I did not think or consider its implications, other than that it was political humor. I am saddened that anyone misinterpreted the sentiments behind the email. I deeply apologize to anyone who is offended by this action. I hope that those who know me realize that the message was not intended to be malicious or hurtful in any way and can find it in their hearts to forgive me."

Only in a white supremacist world could comparing a Black woman to a monkey be considered political humour.   I understand that such an attack was used against George Bush; however, White men do not have a history of being called animals to reduce their value and humanity. Racism is what differentiates George Bush being called a monkey and Michelle Obama being called a monkey.  During slavery Blacks were frequently referred to as apes to justify that horrendous institution and because racism continues to be institutionalized, actions like this help to reify White supremacy.

It is even more problematic that this construction is aimed at Black women because we have traditionally been understood as the ultimate un-woman.   No matter how hard Black women have struggled, we continue to be considered less than by many who pay lip service to equality. Reducing Michelle Obama, the first Black FLOTUS, and suma cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, teaches all Black women that no matter our struggle, White men continue to wield a significant amount of social power.   Such is the power of Whiteness that no matter our achievements, Whiteness is always able to use race to immediately gain an advantage and use power coercively. 

It may comfort some that his actions were loudly chastised; however, the fact that this power still exists it what we should be focusing on.  We cannot claim that things are getting better because despite the chastisement these racial incidents continue to happen thus reifying the racial divide.  If even an incident as clearly racial as calling Michelle Obama a monkey can be justified under making political commentary what hope is there that the more covert actions of Whiteness to demonize Blackness will be recognized as the assault upon the soul that they are?

H/T TransGriot

“Spartacus Blood and Sand” is a historical fiction based on a Roman gladiator that started a slave uprising.  It has the right amount of blood, gore, sex and beautiful bodies to be somewhat compelling.  Ancient Rome allows an uncomplicated view of human sexuality.   It is not uncommon to see women objectify men and in a world in which femininity is often more object than subject, this is definitely a gender reversal. 

In the early episodes we are introduced to a gay relationship between Barka the beast of Carthage and his lover Petrus.  We are first introduced to the pair in a brief camera glimpse as they engage in sex.  Slowly, it is revealed that more exists between the two – love.  In moments both sweet and tender we see affection shared between Barka and Petrus, as they begin to dream of a life together free of slavery and violence.  There is no moral dilemma regarding the relationship , unlike many media representations of gay romance, that are not specifically targeted at a GLBT audience.   Their love is not sanitized and is depicted as graphically as the heterosexual relationships on the show.   Their relationship is even more unique because it displays love between men of colour.  Often the face of the LGBT community in the media is white and affluent.  Though it is problematic that people of colour are once again reduced to the status of slaves, when we consider the time period in which the show is set, this is a fair characterization.

Just as I had begun to ponder why it is, that it seems that only in period pieces, that love between people of the same gender is depicted without artifice or problematic elements, Barka the Beast of Carthage was summarily killed, leaving his lover alone and despondent.  It seems old habits die hard for Hollywood. Unlike cable, HBO does not have the same limitations and yet on two of its hit shows, gay men have been killed off.

 On the show “Big Love,” which is about Mormon polygamists, for the first time after years of anonymous sex, Alby Grant found love with another Mormon man.  Though their relationship was complicated by homophobia within the Mormon faith and Dale’s marriage, the love between them was obvious.  Like all gay love on television it was doomed to end in tragedy.  In an apartment rented so that the two could have a space away from prying eyes, Dale hung himself leaving Alby to find his dead body.

Each time there is a new GLBT relationship on television, gay activist celebrate the representation because there is no doubt that the media continues to overwhelmingly focus on heterosexual love and romance.  These representations are not  cause for celebration and in fact represent a pyrrhic victory. These relationships tell the viewer that unlike heterosexual love, romance between people of the same gender is destined for failure or death and this in and of itself continues to maintain heterosexual privilege.  It speaks of something unnatural because these relationships when featured in a mainstream show are never destined to blossom and grow the way that heterosexual ones are.

Blacks are continually portrayed as thieves, rapists, drug dealers, prostitutes and gang bangers in the media.  In an evening of watching television one is most likely to see a Black face; however, the roles that they are given to play often upholds White hegemony.  What celebration can be found in this stereotypical, self-serving representation?  Should Blacks do a dance when they are once again cast as the dregs of humanity?  Just as the media maintains racism through its portrayal of Blacks in a position that is decidedly “othering” so to are BLGT people and their relationships stigmatized.  It is not enough to celebrate a TLBG representation without critically examining the portrayal.

To get the rainbow stamp of approval, the media is continually increasing its representation of the LGBT community; however, in so doing a dangerous trend is occurring because of the repeated death of characters or of stereotypical portrayals.  On the highly popular “True Blood,” where the character of Lafayette is a genuine fan favourite, he is a drug dealing prostitute, even as he delivers what are arguably some of the best lines on the show. We can perhaps commend the writers of the show for taking the character further than Charlene Harris, the author of the Sookie Stackhouse series; however, change certainly did not apply to refusing to cast a Black same gender loving man in a role that ultimately reifies many of the negative stereotypes attached to Black gay men.  While it is exciting to see a Black gay male on television, his role as a prostitute and a drug dealer only helps to reify the image of gay men as predators

As long as these characters continue to be written by straight people who are determined to hold on to their heterosexual privilege, these stunted portrayals of the LGBT community will continue.  It is time to stop squealing with joy every time we see a new character who identifies as GLBT and demand that these characters be normalized.  It is time that gay love not only be represented but be portrayed in the same explicit fashion as heterosexual love, without the characters dying or being portrayed as problematic.  As long as we are willing to settle for any face, as long as it is a TLBG face, the media will continue to uphold heterosexual privilege.  Don’t young BLGT teens deserve to see themselves accurately represented?  Don’t they deserve more than to believe that every mendacious characterization that they have heard is true?  Just as the Black community has made a point of being critical of media portrayals of Blacks, so to must the TLGB community.  The media is an agent of socialization and therefore the message that it sends cannot be ignored.

 

Yesterday, Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou inadvertently referred to the ROC Government as the 'Chinese (adjective) Government'. Here's how the Taipei Times reported it:

President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday morning thanked the outgoing Solomon Islands ambassador at the Presidential Office, but referred to his administration as the “Chunghua government” (中華政府) or “Chinese government.” Expressing his gratitude for the Solomon Islands’ assistance following the devastation wrought by Typhoon Morakot in August, Ma said the “Chunghua government” and its people thanked the Pacific ally’s parliament for passing a resolution expressing concern over the destruction.

Solomon Islands Ambassador Beraki Jino has been posted in Taiwan for six years and will move on to Australia to serve as high commissioner.

Realizing his mistake, Ma immediately corrected himself and said he meant the “government of the Republic of China.”

For those not sure of why this should be an issue some clarification is required. The term Chungguo means China whilst the term Chunghua means, broadly, 'of Chinese culture' or 'of the Chinese diaspora'. The full title of the ROC is Chunghua Mingguo which means 'the Chinese Republic' which is usually translated as the Republic of China. So, to refer to the ROC Government as the Chunghua Government essentially absents the term 'republic'. For the President to make an error of speech is only human but in Taiwan's political climate such a mistake can carry very serious implications, especially when the President has been busy downgrading Taiwan as a region of China (ROC) and claiming that the PRC is still under the umbrella of sovereignty of the ROC. One is therefore left with the following interpretations:

1) An innocent mistake
2) A Freudian slip - Ma has Chunghua on his mind and has been attempting to reify the idea that Taiwan is Chinese through stressing that Taiwanese are Chinese culturally and part of the Chinese diaspora - hence his accidental confusing of terms.
3) An insight into Ma's real conception of his Government and the status of Taiwan - that it is only Chunghua (after all there cannot be two Chinas): a convenient articulation that eases the political process of downgrading the ROC in preparation for integration into the PRC.

You choose. No doubt many Taiwanese will not be impressed by his 'slip of the tongue', if that was what it was.

  Christine Taylor became light headed after a conversation with her estranged husband and fell down a flight of stairs.   Paramedics who arrived on the scene declared her fit; however, Ms. Taylor decided to go the hospital to confirm the health of the fetus.  While there she had a conversation with a nurse, in which she admitted to having thought about an abortion or adoption.  The nurse relayed the conversation to a doctor on staff, who in turn questioned her.  The medical staff then notified the police and Ms. Taylor was charged with attempted feticide.  It seems the doctor and the nurse believed that Ms. Taylor had intentionally thrown herself down a flight of stairs.

According to Iowa state law, attempted feticide is trying "to intentionally terminate a human pregnancy, with the knowledge and voluntary consent of the pregnant person, after the end of the second trimester of the pregnancy." At least 37 states have similar laws.  The district attorney declined to prosecute when it became apparent that Ms. Taylor was at the end of her second trimester rather than at the beginning of third as the hospital believed. 

Ms Taylor is currently unemployed with two kids already and is estranged from her husband, is it any wonder that she considered not having this child?  Abortion is a legal medical option and yet we do not speak about the times we have considered abortion or when we have had the procedure.  There is still much shame around this issue, even in womanist/feminist circles where the right to choose is considered to be of paramount importance.

This story rang a particular bell with me because of  the story of a former acquaintance.  She is in her forties and pregnant for the first time.  When the child is born she will be a single mother.  The road ahead is daunting for her.  I have two kids and I am in my thirties.  Mothering is the hardest thing that I do each day; however, I have the good fortune to have a spouse who is equally engaged and committed to sharing the work load with me.   When it became known that she at one time had considered not having this child, she immediately became shamed within the community.  The fact that she considered abortion is enough for many to declare that she will be a terrible mother. Part of what makes her situation so terrible, is that much of the shaming and the judgement is being done by women.

The decision to abort or to have a child should never be made lightly and if a woman has truly considered her options, it means that whatever decision she has made is what is best for her.  Even though abortion is a legal, it has become this deep dark secret that we can never talk about.  Even acknowledging that one thought about abortion, after successfully giving birth, is enough to cast aspersions on one’s ability to mother.

Pregnancy does not always happen at the most convenient time in ones life.  Despite the social myth that a uterus means one automatically craves becoming a mother, there are numerous women who opt out every year.  Sometimes an abortion happens because of a struggle to support the children a woman already has.  This decision is not seen as one based in love; it is almost always constructed as a selfish act. We can always find a reason to shame a woman for considering an abortion because we privilege a fetus over the lives of those who are already living. 

We shame.  Even those who believe in the right to chose will shame and this is why abortion remains one of those rights we simply do not speak of.  When I became pregnant with my first child, I was terrified.  Even though I had a good job and was in a very stable long term relationship, I worried whether I had the skill set to be a good mother.  Abortion is something I seriously considered.  I know that the decision that I made was the right one because I took the time to consider all of my options.  My child is a wanted child, simply because I had the right to choose.  I know that I could never admit this to even my closest friends because despite the fact that many think I am a good mother, the mere fact that I once thought about forgoing motherhood altogether would be enough to cast doubt on how I raise my children.

This is my secret.  It is one I can never share.  I have too often been involved in conversations with other women who claim to support abortion; however, it is always understood as something that is fine for others.  We separate ourselves from the decision as much as possible.  It’s always I support abortion but I could never have one.  It is this separation and shaming that cause women to hide their stories from each other, thereby; affirming the social desire to control female reproduction.   If you are considering terminating a pregnancy, it can be the loneliest time of your life and this is incredibly sad when we consider that this is a time in which support is greatly needed. 

We need to start to talk to each other about our reproductive decisions without shame or judgement.  When we separate ourselves from each other, we are participating in the process that denigrates women for taking control of their reproductive lives.  It is dishonest and cruel.  Not everyone immediately starts to glow the minute it is revealed that they are pregnant and to have this as the social myth belies the fact that women are cognizant that motherhood is the most difficult, under appreciated job that they will ever take on. Many women quite rightfully approach the role with great trepidation.   I love my babies and I have no regrets; however, my decisions are not applicable to everyone else and I owe other women my truth because though each story is different, each one is tied together in the struggle to reify women's reproductive autonomy.

 

It was noted recently on the Project Lambda mailing list that allowing arrays of function type would undermine the type system. The reason for this is a combination of Java's covariant arrays, the natural subtypes among function types (they are covariant on return type and contravariant on argument types), exception checking, and the erasure implementation of generics. We certainly can't remove covariant arrays or checked exceptions, and removing the subtype relationship among function types really reduces their utility. Unfortunately, it is almost certainly too late to reify generics too. Although you can't have an array of function type, there is no problem having, for example, an ArrayList of a function type. So while we might prefer not to have this restriction, it won't be much of a problem in practice.

Java.net blogs

We've just published a java.net new article, in our Java Tech series: Web Service Simulation Using Servlets, by Adhir Mehta. In this article, Adhir demonstrates the concept of using servlets during the project development stage to simulate the responses that a live web service would provide. Adhir explains:

Web service simulation is a growing need for every web service based assignment. Many of the assignments do not have the ready-to-use web service available during development stage, so the developers try to write their own mock implementation.

Typically, the developers will write a simple web service that returns a properly formatted result, deploy it to a web server, and use the simple deployed service as part of their development test bed. However, it's time consuming to do this, especially if you need to simulate lots of different web services.

Adhir presents an alternative to this approach:

Let's go into the basics of web services and soap envelopes. The intended message resides in the soap body and is based on the message/content of the body; the response from the file system is picked up and can be returned to the caller. This task simply can be achieved with servlets using following steps.

1. Extract the soap envelop from input stream.
2. Retrieve the first node of soap body.
3. Apply the algorithm to generate the response file name using input message. (I'll discuss one of the algorithm in following sections).
4. Read the response from file system.
5. Prepare the soap envelop and send it to the caller

Adhir presents and discusses a SOAP-based algorithm for generating a file name based on an input message, as an example application. Then he makes the algorithm configurable using XSD XML, and shows how to apply the code, resulting in the simulated web service.

If you're in a situation where you need to simulate web services as part of your development process, take a look at Adhir Mehta's Web Service Simulation Using Servlets. His SOAP and servlet based web service simulation method may save you and your team time and effort.

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In Java Today, Neal Gafter discusses A Syntax Option for Project Lambda (Closures for Java):

It was noted recently on the Project Lambda mailing list that allowing arrays of function type would undermine the type system. The reason for this is a combination of Java's covariant arrays, the natural subtypes among function types (they are covariant on return type and contravariant on argument types), exception checking, and the erasure implementation of generics. We certainly can't remove covariant arrays or checked exceptions, and removing the subtype relationship among function types really reduces their utility. Unfortunately, it is almost certainly too late to reify generics too...

The NetBeans wiki is featuring JavaFXComposerNewInPreview2. The page contents include: JavaFX Shapes, Animations on States, Improved Data Support, JavaFX Effects, Colors, Templates, Charts (experimental), New Samples.

On Twitter oracletechnet reminds people who are interested the future of Java that they should "Remember to land at otn.oracle.com tomorrow at 10am PT for my live chat with Mark Reinhold. We want your questions!" That's 18:00 GMT.

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In today's Weblogs, Fabrizio Giudici presents My Oracle wishes (1): SwingX:

With this post, I'm starting a short series of thoughts about what I hope Oracle will do for a set of popular Java APIs, that haven't been dealt in detail in their strategic keynote. Today I start with SwingX. I think it's really good to see Oracle's commitment with Java on the desktop, a thing that in the past Sun started to do, but near to the beginning of their decline. Now the initiative could have a better success with fresh resources, but there are many things to do...

Sahoo addresses the question of How to embed GlassFish in an existing OSGi runtime?:

Typical users of GlassFish use GlassFish in a separate process and they start GlassFish by using commands like the following: java -jar glassfish.jar or asadmin start-domain. The above commands first launch an OSGi framework and then deploy the necessary bundles. What if you want to embed GlassFish in an existing OSGi runtime? The bootstrapping code was slightly complicated IMO. Recently when Apache Camel committer Charles Moulliard asked me some questions around embedding GlassFish v3 in an OSGi runtime, I decided to revisit the bootstrap module in order to simplify it so that I had less explaining to do...

Markus Karg presents Unicode™: Write Once, Read Nowhere:

Back in the early 80ies "of the past millenium" (As journalists call it these days - don't you feel as old as I do when reading that phrase? For me it is just "Childhood" and feels not so far ago. At least not a Millenium ago.), when I was a young boy, I teached myself BASIC programming on my father's Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K and started coding small arcade games (what else will ten year old boys do with a micro computer? The web was not invented back then.). That wonder machine unfortunately had everything but not the possibility to do pixel or vector graphics in pure BASIC. You had to learn Assembler for that...

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In the Forums, ossaert has a problem where Glasfish v3 Webservice does not work after restart: When I deploy a webservice to GFv3 then I can see the WSDL-file. When I restart the server, nothing comes (resource not found) until I restart the application manually. What is wrong with the Webservices? ...

In the Metro and JAXB forum, soysalyu is Rewriting a web service with Spring and JAXWS: Hello, I am trying to re-write a web service which is build by Weblogic's jwsc task. Since there is a WSDL file created by Weblogic already, I have to preserve this WSDL and use it in my new web service. I am using Spring 3.0 and...

In the ME Interest forum, digitalsol has a General question regarding mobile browser apps: Hello all, I was wondering something, I've heard that there is a tendency to create browser applications directly which will run on the browser of any smart phone, instead of writing J2ME apps for example. Some people think this is the future...

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Our current Spotlight is the Intel Software Network's Parallel Programming Talk: Parallel Programming Talk is a weekly broadcast onjava.net topics related to parallel programming (including Java) for multicore processors. Listen to Parallel Programming Talk LIVE every Tuesday at 8:00AM Pacific Time on Blog Talk Radio. Watch Parallel Programming Talk LIVE every Tuesday at 8:00AM Pacific Time on Intel Software Network Television.

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Our current java.net Poll asks Do you think you'll be attending JavaOne 2010?. Voting will be open through the end of the week.

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Our latest java.net Feature Articles include Adhir Mehta's new Java Tech article, Web Service Simulatino Using Servlets; Maven Repository Managers for the Enterprise, by John Smart; and Jeff Friesen's Reading Newsfeeds in JavaFX with FeedRead.

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The latest Java Mobility Podcast is Java Mobile Podcast 92: MIDP 3.0 in Depth: Tutorials and Demonstrations: Excerpts from the JavaOne 2009 MIDP 3.0 In Depth: Tutorials and Demonstrations session with Roger Riggs, Lakshmi Dontamsetti and Stan Kao.

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Twitter: @kevin_farnham

Neal Gafter discusses A Syntax Option for Project Lambda (Closures for Java):

It was noted recently on the Project Lambda mailing list that allowing arrays of function type would undermine the type system. The reason for this is a combination of Java's covariant arrays, the natural subtypes among function types (they are covariant on return type and contravariant on argument types), exception checking, and the erasure implementation of generics. We certainly can't remove covariant arrays or checked exceptions, and removing the subtype relationship among function types really reduces their utility. Unfortunately, it is almost certainly too late to reify generics too...

Ceaseless flows the river, water ever changing; bubbles in still pool gather and subside, impermanent: so in this world are we and all we devise.

–Kamo no Chōmei, Hōjōki

A couple of sunspot cycles ago, a soi-disant Zen teacher warned a student against high expectations when using mental repatterning to help people withdraw from tobacco. His thesis: smoking encompasses a broad range of internal states, internal processes and external behaviors, each providing its own satisfaction, relief or distraction. Unraveling the complex of social interaction, personal ritual and biochemical dependency therefore requires an almost unattainably concerted effort. This assertion was delivered, somewhat ironically, within the pale of “Mad Russian” Yefim Shubentsov, who for decades has claimed to cure 80% of incoming smokers with one deft wave of a bioenergetic placebo.

While none tasteful enough to be reading this tastiest of blogs could ever be tagged an addict of any sort, it is true that for most of us, it is no single aspect of the tea experience, but a veritable congeries, that drives our ongoing engagement. Consider, for example, a few elements:

• Learn: read, watch videos, attend workshops, sit with veterans)
• Buy: in shops, on-line, via telephone and post)
• Manage inventory: un/pack, inspect, admire; look, sniff, handle
• Exchange: share, trade, re-sell, swap samples
• Criticize: write and speak, assess and review

–and infusing all of these, we hope: Drink! Alone in placid contemplation, convivially as a common focus, tangentially as a quenching and revivifying beverage, integratively as a complement to food, tactically as a stimulant, ritually as a foundation for or embodiment of some broader binding practice.

To hold a delicate creature too closely is to risk choking it, and to reify one transient experience is to constrain the space in which the next will appear. A great part of any mindful exercise of sensuality must therefore be what the Japanese recently call mono no aware, the bittersweet (like a good gyokuro) poignancy of the transient suchness of things. It is a benign expression of wabi-sabi, the gentle communion with transiency itself: the anicca of Gautama; panta rhei attributed to Heraclitus; tides of Tao that do nothing, but through which all things are done. Love each sip and let it go. This is one reason that so many of us, when the illusion of time permits, enjoy gongfu brewing: ten, twenty, even thirty thimbled aliquots of liquor taken in evolving, modulated yet never “controlled” succession from one broad pinch of admired leaf. Taste memory, unpacking the various synaethesias and comparing this tongue-wash with the last, and the one before that, and many much previous—that is part of the maven’s pleasure. But even without the neurological zeroing-out that sends unvarying stimuli into limbo, the limits of our attention make clutching at any one moment’s sensation futile. Better to accept Ovid’s dictum: omnia mutantur, nihil interit: everything changes; nothing is lost. Experiences we cannot remember, even in dream, retain the power forever to alter, amplify and enrich the experiences that follow. So let it be with this morning’s cuppa.

With taste and aroma evanescent, circumstance and company variably fugacious, and the mystic leaf itself a living thing whose maturation and senescence may encompass from weeks to a few score years at best, where do we find our concrete exemplars, our durable symbols, the persistent artifacts of our chosen pleasure? Fortunately, perhaps, there requires but a minimal equipage for the heating of water, moistening of leaf and delivery of effusions. So little is enough, to warm a Dalesman’s pre-dawn fingers, lubricate a conclave of Odessan elders or Nyhavn knitters, take each of us—in mind, at least—to reclusion or refuge in our own ten-foot square hut. (Though Thoreau, in his splendid renunciation, apparently found no room for our leaf in his life: “...I did not use tea, nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so did not have to work to get them...”) It is only the conspicuously wealthy, the bored and sated, those requiring expressions of formality to construe meaning in lives set too remote from Nature, who require more. But we are not a species that limits choice according to requirement, so...

With desiderata well in hand, we may wish more carefully or elegantly to store our leafy or lumpy taels, temper water, measure and manipulate the various substances at their various stages. Most often we provide drinking cups, rather than sucking from a common spout (or aiming streams throatward as camel-riders might pass a skin of koumiss), which in turn invites the fair-pot. And then a splashable tray or “tea ocean” on which to perform all these operations, and whisks, picks, funnels, spoons, scoops and other small tools, and perhaps dishes on which to display fresh and spent leaves. Und so weiter, right up to digital thermometers and scales and timers. As though the savory camellia could be pinned to objective time! People of a collecting temperament will have favorite objects, favorite classes of objects, favorite materials, styles, countries of origin; and otherwise establish personal taxonomies of acquisitiveness. And in contrast to the usual European aesthetic, aficionados of the Asian schools are free to mismatch gear according to any personal scheme, or none at all. At a certain state of tea-drunkenness, every object looks good; and even before that, the manifest exercise of discrimination and pleasure affords any soul’s accretion of gear its own special flavor. My own favorite pieces, modest though they be, span five cultures, four countries and three centuries, and have little in common past a high silica content.

Yet while proclivities vary, as do budgets, access to suppliers, storage and display space, tolerance of cohabitors, threats from light-fingered adults and rambunctious pets or children, most “tea freaks” tend to focus their collecting on the core unit operation—brewing—and therefore acquire a multiplicity of pots and cups even when they have few or none of the many other optional items. In some cases, collecting is itself the main passion, to which the making and serving of potable beverages is mere justification or occasional distraction. For techies, the search for that perfect pot (perhaps one for each type of tea, time of day, class of company, style of service, etc.) is both drive and excuse. For crafts appreciators, the elegance of shape and construction, melding of material to form and function, may incite a desire for great diversity, or conversely to subtler variations around chosen sameness. (Someone in my past collected Art Deco photographic light meters. Go figure.) Utility, sensuality, investment... For whatever reason, ownership of teapots may quickly become a self-reinforcing cycle.

Though having grown up on free-leaf tea, and in recent decades somewhat expanded my scope of knowledge and appreciation, I have safely evaded that unseemly addiction. A recent inventory of my shelves showed just 46 teapots, of which a good quarter are mainly retained for the memories they decant, unusual form, specialist applicability or just to complement other displayed items. In fairness, this does not count a smaller number of in-use gaiwans, plus another three dozen vessels kept on hand for gifts to neophytes who have yet to develop their own preferences. (I would no sooner give a pot or gaiwan unasked to a serious tea-drinker than I would an unsolicited reed to a saxophonist. On one hand, I would not presume to be able to guess another’s tastes, and would not want to put either of us in an awkward position; on the other, I cannot afford teaware of a quality that would constitute a meaningful addition to most of my friends’ collections. But that first Yixing pot or glazed gaiwan is almost always welcome.) Yet even with so sparse a collection, one may eventually find a piece to be surplus to my needs (and even wants). In this case, I usually give the spare to a friend. Like a piano or a sense of humor, a cared-for teapot improves with use. So there is collective benefit in acquiring many pots and keeping few.

Occasionally, though, a pot is not fit to be either used or donated. One such came my way during an expedition to San Francisco’s Chinatown incident to a nearby photonics conference. Not much attractive teaware to be found there at all, and tea of notable quality pretty sparse as well. So it is with our degraded Disneys; real people and the real tea they drink tend not to be featured on the tourist maps. But my Geiger counter did perk up in a basement-level knicknack shop, where I found a bad implementation of a bad rendering of one of the most delicious pots I have ever had the pleasure to see, handle and use, at The Tea Gallery in NYC. Alas, the proprietors of the latter establishment would not sell at any price. The imitation: rudely trimmed after clumsy slip-casting, with an ill-fit lid and spout too narrow for our lightning steeps, I still found the form compelling. Not $32 worth, but the tag was marked down by half, and it was sitting on a half-price table. Before I could ask for both discounts to be applied, the clerk performed another binary fission. For $4, it was beyond a bargain, even if not quite pretty enough to display or pourable enough to use.

So it sat on the kitchen counter for a few years, begging for a useful role.

Then one day I noticed a general resemblance to ancient Mediterranean oil lamps. Though for actual vision I prefer electric lighting when the sun is in flight, a butane camping torch when the power is out, or a candle lantern if vapors be exhausted, there is something delightful about an old-style lamp. Especially if one happens to keep a lot of extra-virgin cold-press olive juice around; that makes for a rather pleasanter aroma than, say, kerosene, tallow, or rendered whale-blubber. With needle-nose pliers, I carefully snapped out most of the internal clay screen. When a cotton string proved to transport fuel too slowly, and commercial fiberglass wicks were all too big, I teased a bundle of just the right size from a spare bit of wood-stove door gasketing (available anywhere that wood and cold meet, probably at no charge for the snippet required) and threaded it down the spout. Here is the result:


Is it perfect? Not hardly, at least in this relative world. Classical lamps often have a shallow cup surrounding the wick, so that oil—which, as we all know, tends to be pulled away from the flame by a thermal variant of the same Marangoni Effect that engenders wine tears—does not drip down the spout. You can see a hint of this in the photo; though it has not progressed beyond a slight slick, I still keep the lamp in a small saucer. (Japanese porcelain with a blue fugu design, per the crossing of styles mentioned above.) Is it useful? Useful‽ How did that get in there? It is pleasing to eye and nose. Alas, it would not suit for warming o-cha no mizu, or even brightening a tea-table: the aroma, though delicious, would overpower most brews. Perhaps I’ll make another with an orange-yellow flickering LED in the spout and a fake-flame cellophane tassel above. Or perhaps not. How does burning tea-oil smell?

In the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha reminds us that

... this is how to contemplate our conditioned existence in this fleeting world:
Like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream;
Like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.
So is all conditioned existence to be seen.

Sometimes it takes a dream to reveal dream, an illusion to reveal illusion, a flickering lamp to reveal more persistent and immanent illuminations. It is said that of the four million words put into Buddha’s mouth since the Council of Arhats, the only surviving ones that actually came out of it were his last, beginning with

Atta dipa viharatha: You are the light itself; here abide.

Until we each and all arrive at that non-place of no-attainment, we need all the illumination we can find. In that spirit, this Yankee-thrift tip for turning an object of limited utility into another of equally limited but different utility—like Gaiman’s werewolf who treasured “a small bone that he had carved into the shape of a small bone”—is offered in humble hope that it may bring pleasure and, in these parlous times, help to generate honorable employment for out-of-work teapots everywhere.

Just like any other identity, a disabled identity is highly disciplined. Those that are able bodied highly discipline the identity by attempting to decide who has the right to take this label, thereby justifying their disableism.  Last week I wrote a post entitled, “Disability when Accommodations are Imperfect”.  I am going to highlight a few comments on this post as an example of discipline.

There are countless millions dying of starvation around the globe.
This one American thinks she has it hard because her obesity (whilst I concede it is a disability, its a disability you gave yourself, sort of like if I were to cut of my legs little by little everyday, despite various health warning and people telling em to stop) makes it a little difficult to get on buses.
I know swearing is the sign of an inferior intellect, but seriously fuck you. Fuck you, and your bullshit.
You should be GRATEFUL that you live in a country where there is so much food, you can eat yourself to death. You should be grateful that whilst you are doing this, in the face of the dying millions, your government still has the heart to help you out as much as it can.
Again, I hate to be vulgar most of the time, but seriously, fuck you.

The above is but one of many that I received on that post.   We often look at an illness and decide whether or not we are going to have sympathy for a person based on whether or not we believe that they are responsible for their sickness, for e.g. few would have sympathy for a smoker who had lung cancer. While this position is extremely problematic, this is a subject best left for another day.

The Calvinism in our approach to health and well being is based on fear.   We believe that if we eat right, exercise, get enough sleep and somehow manage to avoid stress, that we can avoid disability.   No matter how socially accepting we claim to be towards those that are differently abled, our bodies are still understood to be irrevocably damaged and there is a real and concrete fear of a loss of able bodied privilege.  When someone is both fat and disabled, then fatness for many serves as a mitigating factor, even when the condition is not known to the person judging/disciplining.

When someone can point to fatness, suddenly it is believed that a person did not do all that they should have to avoid becoming disabled.  The fact that fatness is an indicator of illness is ignored to push a disableist Calvinist agenda.  We ignore the fact that medications like prednisone, which is a steroid can lead to massive weight gain no matter what a person eats or how much they exercise.  We don’t care that many anti-depressants will also have the same effect.  This is not a chicken and egg situation; the cure/treatment in many cases increases the likelihood that a spoiled identity will indeed attach itself to the disabled person.  Is it really better to be skinny and extremely ill than fat and healthy?

I suppose that having to exert yourself in a way besides using one of you fat fucking whale flippers to shove junk food in to your pig disgusting face is worst that the holocaust.
Eat heath you disgusting beast. You do not exercise and eat right and that is why you are a cancer to society.
I am an EMT and you fuck fat assholes break our fucking backs. Think about somebody besides yourselves for once. Plus you all have a shit-ton of medical complications which cost a shit ton.
For real, kill yourself, you're a plague on humanity.

When fatness and disability combine it is enough to make society attempt to force someone to closet themselves.  Fatness is perceived by many to be grotesque and disability reminds everyone that able bodied status is temporary for us all.   We hate because we fear.  The stark reality is that no matter how hard we work to achieve the mythical perfect body, some conditions are unavoidable. 

It is further ironic that cost is often cited as justification for hatred.  In a society that is based on consumption, it is quite ironic that when it is convenient we will discipline based on this factor.  The cost of dealing with the medical complications of obesity or even disability pale in comparison to those that we willingly burden ourselves with to support the ruling bourgeoisie.  This is not about real cost, this is about denying certain bodies the right to take up space.  If we were truly concerned with cost, our current predatory mode of exchange would long ago have been dismantled.  The fat person does not impoverish; however, the boss that daily pays you less than the value of your labour week after week most certainly does.

One of the most pervasive false rights that we daily act upon is the right to oppress another.  In so doing, we reify a hierarchy of bodies that traps us all into supporting the idea that those with privilege are necessarily valuable bodies.   If we engage in ‘othering” and false identification, it is most certain that these ideas will continue to flourish, thus ensuring that each person in time will be subject to some form of social discipline.  It is quite simple really, karma awaits for us all.  That which you send into the world will certainly be visited upon you.  

Above is a photo taken by  Questlove, drummer for the Roots, NBC employee, and leader of the Late Night With Jimmy Fallon band.  He posted the image on twitter. Well, it didn’t take long for the Black History month racism to begin did it?   I wonder where the watermelon and malt liquor is? Also, I think Black folk put cayenne in their cornbread and not jalapeno.

I suppose the other eleven months a year they serve White food.   Of course White food consists of what everyone really eats.  It has been so normalized that there is no need to label it White food, it is simply understood as such.  Everyone knows that White people don’t eat fried chicken.

Kevin Goldman the NBC's vice-president of communications had this to say on twitter, "The sign in the NBCU cafeteria has been removed. We apologize for anyone who was offended by it."

He apologized so it’s all better right?  Here’s the deal, every year we celebrate Black History Month and every year Whiteness finds a way to center itself in the conversation through racist thoughts or deeds.  Instead of elevating Blacks, more often than not, Black History Month has become a tool which is used to denigrate Blacks.

Ideally Black History month should be a time to give voice to those whom society has chosen to silence, however; it is regularly used to assert difference thereby reifying an outsider status for Blacks.  “Othering” is not celebrating or uplifting.

I am quite sure the special meal was planned to give White people a warm and fuzzy feeling.   Gee look how progressive we are, we’re going to eat Black folk food and herein lies the problem.   For the other eleven months of the year there isn’t even the slightest pretence of equality and the one month  that is dedicated to uplifting Blacks is still centered quite a bit on Whiteness.  There isn’t even a real attempt to get it and by doing these racist displays of inclusivity, it forces Blacks to once again be on the defence.  Not even during Black History month do we get a break from explaining to Whiteness about the racism that it engages in daily.  Whiteness does not intend to learn from Black History month but it will take the liberal street cred for pretending to care.  I can just here it now, we promote racial diversity, we even served black eyed peas in February.

Enough already. 

Sægreifynjan Guðbjörg Matthíasdóttir í Vestmannaeyjum virðist hafa farið einna best út úr íslenska bankahruninu í samanburði við þá sem voru í flokki íslenskra auðmanna fyrir haustið 2008. Guðbjörg á fleiri milljarða króna í traustum eignum eins og ríkistryggðum markaðsbréfum og aflaheimildum.

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Lesa meira →

Those who have paid close attention to Taiwanese politics since the change in ruling parties in 2008 may have noticed a change in nomenclature.

Sean at Sportsbabel was kind enough to send along this article entitled "Basketball league for white Americans targets Augusta."But the title confused me. A white basketball team was going to protest Augusta National which still won't allow women as members and has a lovely history of racism? How would that work?So naive. But it so clearly illustrates my thought process!Anyway, no what is happening is that a whites-only basketball league is trying to establish a team in Augusta. The city, not the golf course.I guess, given my initial interpretation of the headline, it wasn't too out of the realm of possibility for me that there would be such an organization. And it isn't. Basketball has always been rife with racial tensions. There have always been the subtle reactions to the prevalence of Black people who play the game professionally and in college. Have I recounted here before the story of sitting at a UIowa women's game against Rutgers when the older white man next to me talked about how he couldn't differentiate between the Rutgers players on the court? Because they were all black. Well now I have. (This was pre-Imus, by the way.)Such incidents may be subtle but they are nonetheless damaging because they reify a belief in Black inferiority and generally relegate Black basketball players to roles as entertainers and money-makers for, primarily, white people.This league, however, is an overt manifestation of the ongoing racism in basketball. This new league will only allow white, American-born players who have two white parents. These "minority" (as they call themselves) whites are going to take back basketball. Play a non-street-ball style game, they say.Says the league founder about why there should be a whites-only league: "Would you want to go the a game and worry about a player flipping you off or attacking you in the stands or grabbing their crotch?"First, one of most infamous crotch-grabbers, in my mind anyway, is former professional tennis player Jimmy Connors. He would adjust his package after every point, similar to the way Nadal pulls his shorts out of his crack. I think the crotch thing is more a guy thing and not so raced.And second, I don't condone the illegal behavior of anyone, athlete or not. But I think that much of the violence is due to the long-standing racism in athletics and in American society generally. Players--some of them--may make a lot of money, but they know it's temporary and they have to, on some level, know that they are being used to make someone else even more money. It is just exemplifies a lack of respect of athletes, particularly Black athletes, and their diverse backgrounds.

The following video includes full female nudity and may not be acceptable for work.

Once again PeTA reveals that its true objective is not ending cruelty to animals but debasing women.  When we consider that there has never been a female president, putting a woman in this mock situation and showing her stripping off her clothes to the cheers and jeers of a mostly white male audience is highly problematic.   Black women in particular have been historically constructed as Jezebels.  Our femininity is often soundly rejected, unless the goal is to paint us as sexually depraved.

If PeTA cared about how Black women have historically been treated, it would never have staged a mock up with one taking off her clothes in front of cheering White men.   To justify the rapes that occurred in the slave cabins, Black women were said to have tempted White men with our uncontrollable sexuality.  Even though the power dynamics clearly favoured the White males slave holder, it has him that was constructed as powerless. This ad  promotes the idea that Black women exist to perform for White men thereby asserting that Black women's bodies are ultimately consumable for the purposes of sexual pleasure.

PeTA recently ran an ad featuring Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Tyra Banks.   They used the first ladies image without prior approval causing the White house to demand that PeTA cease and desist.  Simply because someone does not wear fur, does not mean that they support PeTA.  It never occurred to PeTA to ask beforehand because it does not value women’s bodies and after viewing this video, it is even more clear that they put even less importance to the bodies of WOC and how they are perceived.

At the end of the video, PeTA has shocking images of animal abuse.    If their real desire was to end animal cruelty, these images are more than enough to make a significant point.  The truth is, PeTA’s objective is to paint all other marginalizations as secondary to that faced by animals and that is why they routinely features ads that are sexist, homophobic, racist, transphobic etc.,  The oppression Olympics engaged in by PeTA only serves to reify the very same hierarchy that PeTA claims to be against.

PeTA is simply a predatory organization whose message gets lost because it is intent upon reductive tactics.  It is their belief that any publicity is good publicity and therefore; they will not acknowledge that continually demeaning marginalized bodies is not only harmful but extremely dangerous.  If certain groups are not seen as human, it is much easier to target them for violence, hatred, rape etc.,

I have been asked why I always spell PeTA with a lower case e and the answer  is quite simple,  they can never be understood to be ethical as long as they continue to  use such reductive tactics to get their message out to the public.  No PeTA ad I have ever seen, has convinced me of anything other than the fact that isms hurt people. 

In a previous weblog a suggestion for reifying lambda types was given. The previous weblog give examples but no formal description of the process. This weblog gives a more formal description.

Every culture with a gender binary imposes gender onto all aspects of human appearance and behavior. This is done in order to reify that binary and make it appear to be "natural," rather than arbitrary. As an example, let's look at handwriting. Most people can make a better than chance guess at someone's gender identity based on a handwriting sample. But why?

A couple of years ago, a reader asked me how she could make her handwriting more "feminine." I had a general sense that in the US, "feminine" handwriting is neater, more loopy, and in its most mockable form has little circles or hearts dotting each letter I. It turns out it's much more complicated than that, and the entire field of inquiry can easily devolve from legitimate forensics into quackery like "graphology" and "evolutionary psychology." The section has become the most popular part on my how-to site for transgender people, as there is considerable general-market interest in the topic, even in our age of texting and IMs. I include 30 handwriting samples (worth reading because they are cute aphorisms). Learn about gradient, structure, concavity, and maybe even make your chicken-scratch a little more legible, no matter what your gender.

Handwriting and gender cues (via Transsexual Road Map)

Recently, at Devoxx, it was announced that Java would get lambda functions (a.k.a. anonymous functions or closures). There are many ways of implementing these on the JVM. This post proposes that reifying lambdas is a good choice.

The above photo was taken by David LaChappelle.  Is it ringing any warning bells for anyone, or is this just another example of how we celebrate the wonderful post racial world that we are supposedly living in?

We have evolved so much that showing a Black man looking like a zombie in a jungle carrying a naked blonde is no longer problematic.  We will just ignore the fact that he does not look human and his body has clearly been photoshopped (sorry Kanye those are NOT your abs), thus creating him as a mindless creature. For her part, GaGa plays a wonderful helpless White woman trapped in the arms of the mindless savage doesn’t she? There are certainly no tropes  played out in this photo that continue to be socially relevant are there?

The Black man is not constructed at losing his mind at the sight of naked White females.  He is not understood as a predator and a rapist.  White women don’t perceive Black men as a threat and all is honky dory in make believe land.  This is not just a piece of performance art, it is an affirmation of all of the negative stereotypes associated with Black masculinity; no wonder a brother still can’t catch a cab. 

To ensure that the message is clear, they are in a lovely jungle setting.  Gee, I wonder where they got that ever so original idea?  Certainly it couldn’t be from the social understanding that Blacks are savage animal creatures?  Are we supposed to just admire the flora and the erupting volcano and forget the message that this sends us? I am surprised they didn’t have a monkey swinging from a tree to complete the look.   Oh careful Missy Ann, a Black man will overwhelm you.

I am so sick of images like this from supposedly liberal people.  There is nothing ironic about the perpetuation of racism.  It does not show a level of understanding about how painful racism is and the fact that it continues to be the foundation of undeserved White privilege.  Reifying harmful social tropes only serves to substantiate the second class standing of Blacks.  Using art which has historically been a means to challenge social conventions in this way renders it useless as a form of transformative social commentary.