Surveys are helpful. Sometimes.

Today I was at the Hospital for Sick Kids with Elli.  (Don't fret, it is just followup stuff from things that have gone before.  Nothing to worry over.)  I really appreciate how much effort they put into making things work for kids there.  I was concerned that the test we were going to do would be a problem because six year olds aren't as disciplined as adults but they were very supportive and obviously had a system in place that assumed the patients would be young kids.  Makes sense, of course, but it is such a relief to see that since normal medicine often doesn't work well for children.

They were doing a survey to find out how much money people spent to be there and how hard it was for them to get to the hospital.  Evidently they are interested in trying to reduce the difficulty and cost for families who want to go to Sick Kids - an admirable goal.  I had some information for them because my trip to Sick Kids was a frustrating and unpleasant one indeed.  I don't know that they found my recommendations particularly useful though.

First off, when I have to be downtown at 9:00 for an appointment with a child it is a mess.  People on the subway are completely jammed in because of rush hour and keep trying to mash into Elli because she is so short.  All they can see is an empty space and I had to keep telling them to stop shoving other people into my kid.  So my advice is this:  Don't be downtown, and/or don't book appointments that require travel during rush hour.

I would also suggest that they make sure to only book appointments on days when transit is running.  Carrying a child halfway across downtown because the subway isn't functional and buses have lines hundreds of people long is poor and causes sick adults to become grumpy.

So yeah, get to work on that guys.  Fix transit and move your hospital next to my house or something.  Other than that, good job I guess?

The freedom to be annoying

Reading the Dan Savage article from this past week made me think a lot about how our freedoms often end up causing trouble for other people.  The scenario he wrote about was straight drunk women making out with each other in clubs or bars to attract men and particularly how this makes some lesbian and bisexual women angry.  The comments after the article were all over the map but the two main camps seem to be centered around arguing either women's rights or freedom of expression.

I can definitely see the issues with women's rights.  When women make out with each other just to titillate men the men in question likely do feel that the stereotype that women's sexuality is just for male entertainment is being reinforced.  It is important that men come to see women's desires and their choices in sex to be independently valid and important regardless of the impact it has on a man.  The trick is that I think this isn't a problem with the drunk straight girls so much as a problem with the men.  We don't need to force women to stop making out with each other.  What we need is to educate the men so that they see it as fun play instead of a show only for their benefit.

We all need the right to do whatever we want sexually speaking with other consenting adults.  Gay folks didn't have that right for a long time and still don't have it in many parts of the world.  Even though drunk straight women may cause trouble for other people their right to do so unmolested is critical to the attitude that everyone can do what they want.  It is similar to my strong feelings on freedom of religion in the sense that although religion is wrong I want that freedom to be very strongly enforced so I won't lose my freedom to *not* be a particular religion.  Same thing applies to sex; any time you agitate for somebody's sexual expression to be controlled you give the censors more power to prevent *your* sexual expression.

Oh my aching back

I have memories of learning to ride my bike without training wheels for the first time.  I recall zipping along the road with my dad behind me holding onto the bike seat to keep me from falling.  I know that I did fall a few times but it didn't take long before I picked up the skill and was riding around everywhere.  I am sure I whined about it ahead of time and didn't want to take the risk of removing the training wheels - I was that risk averse sort of kid.

This week Elli drove her bike to Sparks and on the way back somehow we damaged a training wheel.  I can't tell if it was gradual leaning or a sudden smash but either way suddenly one of the wheels was tilted very much sideways.  I ended up on the sidewalk trying to bend the steel back with my bare hands.  I got it back in place enough to ride but not enough to work quite right.  The rubber on the training wheels was already half gone so I decided it was time and tossed them.  Elli had to join the big leagues, like it or not.

Over the past couple days she has been riding to school and back.  Initially I figured this would be fun but it has been absolutely killer on me.  In my memories my parents jogged behind our bikes comfortably and easily keeping us up.  In my reality though I am bent nearly double trying to hold on while Elli careens across the sidewalks and I am learning just how hard it is to run in that position.  She takes great glee in riding really fast and I end up doing a crazy crabwalk half-run along the street trying to keep up with her.  I don't remember my parents complaining about how awful this is but perhaps they were simply in better shape than I am.

I also don't remember them having to worry quite so much about me crashing into things.  I learned on a dusty dirt road with nothing to be seen in either direction and Elli is learning on a crowded sidewalk at rush hour.  We zip between buildings and pedestrians with no space on either side and I have to practically stand on top of her for the two of us to fit through the gaps.  Then she almost crushes me into a pole after trying to drag me into the street in front of a car.

I need a big ole green field.  That, and a new back.

I love the big meat

I don't normally get steak.  For one Wendy doesn't much like a meal that revolves around a huge chunk of meat.  For two big steaks are expensive.  For three I feel like eating huge amounts of meat is a bad idea from an environmentalist perspective - I should eat just enough meat to be happy and then load up on veggies.

My mom was in town a few weeks ago though and heard me talking about how I never eat steak or roast and decided to buy me a big ass chunk of meat.  She is awesome.  Wendy is out tonight so it seemed like the ideal time to cook up my big meat.  It was odd though because I have never actually cooked a steak before.  My usual Internet Aggregate Cooking method doesn't really work here because I am not mixing ingredients so I relied on the advice of some ladies at school to get my cooking instructions.  I know that as a man asking a woman how to cook meat is problematic; it violates the Man Code.  I am supposed to know these things just based on DNA alone.  Please don't take my Dude licence away!

Elli only wanted pasta so this is the amount of meat I was cooking up for myself:

I should note that this is a really seriously thick steak too.  I gave it a go and seared the steak and then broiled it as per my instructions.  My favourite thing to pair with a steak is potato with tons of butter, salt, and pepper so I cooked that up too.

It turns out that after eating half of the potatoes I cooked and 1/4 of the steak I was absolutely stuffed and feeling like my stomach had a close encounter of the cement kind.  It tasted great but it was a dinner of a weight I am not accustomed to.  The great side is I have enough steak to have it for my next 3-4 meals at least.  Steak and potatoes, steak sandwich, steak on bagel, the possible variations are endless.  Yom yom.  I guess I can advertise that I now know how to cook a steak.

Dangerous purple rock

A purple rock ended up on my desk.  It was very small, about the size of my finger from the last knuckle to the tip, as well as being bright and shiny.  Being that I am a compulsive fiddler (not to be confused with someone who actually knows how to use a fiddle) I constantly played with the rock, rubbing it between my hands, tossing it, turning it, and polishing it.  I would regularly tap it against my lip or chin while thinking about my writing or while reading online.

After a short while the rock began to invade my thoughts.  I worried that I would accidentally end up swallowing it and choke on the rock and die.  My imagination wound up being very concerned with whether or not I could give myself the Heimlich maneuver in order to dislodge a rock from my windpipe.  I wondered if I dialed 911 but could not talk if they would show up and save me or just ignore it.  There were moments of hilarity where I thought about people hearing the news of my death and the confusion when everyone wondered how the hell I choked to death on a small purple rock while sitting at my computer desk.

I threw the rock in the garbage.  Now it is gone.  I don't have a purple rock to play with anymore but I no longer have any worries about accidentally putting a rock in my mouth and dying.  This is strange since there are lots of rocks of virtually identical sizes sitting in the plant pots within my reach as I write this; I could very easily start fiddling with one of them but for some unknown reason I do not do this.  Apparently my strange little episode with obsession over a rock is done and I am back to fiddling with pens again.

People are really weird.

Bad data

People who use crappy data to support their claims make me crazy.  In theory people reporting on events in major news publications would at least make a cursory attempt to verify data that at a glance makes no sense whatsoever but theory is, in this case, not very similar to practice.

Today's example is the age at which women enter into prostitution.  I keep seeing articles popping up on Facebook about how prostitution needs to be cracked down on because the average woman getting into it does so at the age of 13.  This is obviously completely preposterous; plenty of women get into it in their late teens or early 20s (not to mention later...) so there would have to be huge numbers of 8 year old prostitutes running around.  Have 8 year olds been used illegally for sex?  Yes.  Are they a major demographic in prostitution?  NO!

I followed links and discovered these articles tended to cite other articles talking about how the magical number 13 was the average age at which prostitutes were trafficked into the profession.  Again, this still implies that there must be a very large number of girls being brought in at ludicrous ages and that simply bears no resemblance to the truth.  The vast, overwhelming majority of prostitutes are adults and would not tolerate children being abused this way.  Most people freak out when kids are abused and this just in - prostitutes are people.

I finally figured out where the magical 13 came from.  It turns out that when underage girls are trafficked into prostitution the average age is 13.  So yeah, for girls that are illegally forced into it who aren't 16+ the average age is 13.  Which means approximately nothing in terms of the great majority of people who get involved with prostitution.

And that is how people who want to crack down on prostitution use numbers drawn totally out of context to justify their ridiculous position.  You don't help people by criminalizing a harmless profession.  You don't fix things by putting marginalized people in jail.  You fix it by legalizing it, taxing it, and regulating it.

If only using science this badly were limited to just this one issue...

You will be gross and then you will die

I have been reading You Will Die, a book by Robert Arthur.  It seems custom built for me since it has the delectable combination of denunciation of religion, trashing of right wing moral politics, and frank discussions about sex and drugs all from a historical perspective.  The book is about taboos and talks at length about a variety of taboos against things like sex, snot, farts, poop, drugs, prostitution, and other things that we aren't supposed to talk about in polite society.  The basic premise is that we need to be careful what we do and how we regulate our society and the best way to do that is not by making decisions based on tradition but rather on facts instead.

Arthur presents each topic not as a rant about what the laws and norms should be but rather as a list of what they are, what they used to be, how we got from there to here, and what science and medicine tells us about the topic at hand.  He does go pretty hard against religion and blames it for much of the current misinformation and stigma associated with sex and drugs in particular; it is rare to find an author that decries religion even more stridently than I would.  That said, the book is well written and informative and honestly he presents a pretty strong case that religion has made a real mess of things by trying to police individual lifestyle choices in essentially random ways.

It isn't a fun book.  Reading about medieval torture mechanisms and facing just how foolish we all are every day to appease completely random and sometimes devastating social norms is depressing but valuable.  Learning all this isn't going to be a magical journey filled with rainbows and unicorns but accepting it and improving ourselves through critical thinking will make us better people and slowly but surely contribute to the freeing of society from pointless shackles.

Not everything is depressing, to be fair.  The sections on farting and spitting make our taboos seem silly but I don't feel like lifting them would actually change much.  The demonization of drugs and prostitution and the corresponding disaster that is the War On Drugs and the criminalization of sex on the other hand are both serious and important.  Regardless of the level of entertainment provided the information contained within is critical and I recommend everyone read this book even if only to skip to the most interesting and relevant parts.