Parents aren't hero material

I was listening to a Geek and Sundry episode a couple days ago and the folks on it were talking about the lack of female heroes in fantasy books.  A big part of the criticism was that female heroes, when they did appear, were pretty much required to be young virgins because any woman who is sexually active and especially one that has children simply isn't hero material.  Heroic fantasy definitely has a standard story that involves a young man in his late teens without stable parents who goes out into the world, discovers his latent magical powers, defeats his evil nemesis, and gets the beautiful girl in the end.   They talked mostly about how women are invisible in this standard tale and especially how women aren't able to do anything but be a mother once they have a child; their other roles or priorities are totally erased.

I agree that standard fantasy narrative places women in a secondary role but I think the idea that mothers aren't allowed to do anything interesting is less of a fact than *parents* aren't allowed to do anything interesting.  Of course if you happen to be both a woman and a parent you get a double whammy.  How often is the hero in a fantasy book a person that has young children to take care of?  Basically never, of course, and I think that is at least in part because we place a very large moral priority on taking care of one's own children.  People who abandon their children are bad, and heroes are supposed to be good, so it becomes very much more difficult to create a sympathetic hero who leads off with a very substantial bad act.  Men do have a little more leeway here because it is more acceptable in the standard tale for a man to run off to fight evil while the woman is not granted the same freedom.

Despite the gloom and doom though there are exceptions.  Paladin of Souls, which I wrote about before, is a fantasy story in which the heroes are middle aged folks whose child rearing days are long past and which does a great job of portraying how a hero who isn't eighteen years old would act.  Another good example of fantasy stories against archetype is a series by Sarah Monette starting with Melusine which has a gay main character.  These stories exist, though they are unfortunately drowned in the sea of 'young man finds magic gets girl'.

I will admit I have a soft spot for the classical story.  I daydream about magical powers and saving the world and I am a fan of beautiful women so unsurprisingly the fantasy of 'young man finds magic gets girl' is going to find a receptive audience in me.  I enjoyed the stories about Belgarion, Rand Al'Thor, Richard Cypher and Sparhawk back in the day but these days I really want something a little less bad.  I guess this is why I like A Song of Ice and Fire so much; the classic hero characters have no particular ability to stay alive more than anyone else and it isn't at all clear who should be considered to be on Team Good anyway.  It is a complicated, messy story with all kinds of people of varying shades of grey doing things that have crazy and interesting consequences.  It feels a little more like a world full of characters than a predictable narrative taking an obvious course.

Sick children

Elli has been sick for six days now.  She has been hanging around home sleeping a lot and feeling wretched.  Sick children evoke really powerful emotions in people that are very much akin to 'cuteness'... at least initially.  When she gets sick I want to take care of her and protect her and watching her find some peace in sleep is incredibly satisfying.  I am perfectly happy to fetch her water, clean up her messes, read her stories, and generally act like a servant.

For about three days.

After six days of continuous illness that satisfaction with helping and waking up five times a night for various reasons has quite gone away.  I should perhaps be a better person, more willing to be patient and able to deal with a sick little one.  I am not, though.  The real issue is that with Elli home all the time and constantly needy I never get my flow time.  I can't focus my mind on anything interesting when I have to be ready to fetch and carry on a moment's notice.

I listened to a speech by John Cleese yesterday about creativity.  He talked about many different ways to encourage creativity and one of the ones that most resonated with me was setting aside concrete blocks of time.  Having a specific block of time, 3:00 until 4:30, for example, allows a mind to really go into flow and to set aside worries and interruptions.  I certainly believe that this is a great way to encourage creativity but I think that is more of a function of finding flow.

I know that when I have someone around the house who is constantly calling me for various things I just can't get myself into a good frame of mind.  I can't really settle in to a deep trance and fully involve myself in things when I know I am likely to be pulled out at any time.  It isn't even a matter so much of the amount of time so much as it is about having certain time.  If I know I must be aware of the world and responsible for what is going on outside my focus I lose my edge and never really get as deeply in as I need to.

Hopefully the next day or so will see Elli fully recovering and heading back off to school so that I can get back to my alone time.  Regardless of what I am doing the ability to throw myself wholly into something, anything, will be most welcome.

Paying the bills

Student debt is a big topic these days.  President Obama recently put on a show where he slow jams the news to talk about keeping interest on student loans low and Quebec has a big protest going on where students are freaking out over tuition increases.  Students obviously feel like they should not have student debt for years and years after they graduate; naturally their self interest lies in having minimal possible debt.  The trouble is that student debt has to be supported one way or another as we can't just wish it away with no consequences; somebody always has to pay the bill in the end.

In the same way there is real concern that pension plans and healthcare costs for our elderly are going to rise completely out of control over the next decades as our population ages.  We have come out of a time period where many people expect to retire at 55 and are looking at most people wanting to enter the workforce somewhere around 25.  If those people who start work at 25 with student debt don't want to pay much interest on it then they are simply going to have to put up the difference in taxes to the government anyhow.  There is no free lunch.  This panacea of graduating from years of university education, entering the workforce with minimal debt, retiring early and being supported by the government from age 65 to 85 just doesn't add up unless we are all happy paying enormous amounts of taxes throughout our working lives.

It is a tricky sort of topic.  Clearly there are benefits to retiring early and being very well educated but as my Econ 101 prof used to say, what is the cost?  The cost is that the people taking advantage of both of these things have a fairly small part of their life where they are contributing money into the pot and many years where they are taking it out.  It just isn't sustainable as a model for all citizens.  Of course any given person can potentially manage this, especially if they are particularly careful with finances, but to believe that the population at large can all get university educations and retire early is irrational.  That is, it is irrational given our current standard of living.  We can easily survive on a fraction of our current incomes if we pare down our lifestyles and that would have lots of great environmental effects - humans using too much stuff is the driving factor behind our climate change issues and nearly all other environmental challenges.

That isn't the sort of line the government can deliver though.  Students don't want to hear that the government won't support their debts, workers don't want to hear that taxes will go up and retirees don't want to head back to the grind nor give up their benefits.  At some point though we are going to have to address the unrealistic expectation of leisure and wealth combined that people have.  You can have leisure (like I do, say) or you can have wealth (like most people do, say) but there is no way to do both.

What privacy are we entitled to?

I regularly read the rational optimist blog (not matt ridley's) and found an interesting article there today.  Frank Robinson is a libertarian in the US who has many opinions in common with me (religion, mostly) but also is a lot different from me in that he agrees with lots of things the Republicans do, though he also disagrees with many things they do.  He wrote today about how he finds it abhorrent that the government spends time searching around for readers of child pornography because only the creators of child pornography are legitimate targets of enforcement.  In his view the government and law enforcement have absolutely no business looking at the private matters of citizens who aren't actively engaged in hurting anyone else.

I like a lot of libertarian ideals.  I like the idea that the government should never infringe on people's privacy and that people can sort things out by themselves... but I don't think that this philosophy, taken to extremes, makes for good policy.  Child porn is bad.  Really, really bad.  Being sexually attracted to children is not a crime of course, and it shouldn't be, but I do think that consuming child porn should be a crime.  It would be great to not have weapons or soldiers at all on the basis that weapons and soldiers only hurt people but being defenceless eventually leads to catastrophic results.  In the same way it is great to have maximal privacy and have our computers be utterly sacrosanct but I think the benefits of having the government try to clamp down on child porn wherever it is found are too great to be ignored.  It is a bad enough thing that it is correct to punish both the creators and consumers in an effort to prevent the practice entirely.

In Canada even viewing cartoon pornography where anyone involved appears to be under 18 is criminal; this seems utterly bonkers to me.  There is a gaping chasm between using children for porn (which is reprehensible) and clicking on a video you find after googling "Simpsons porn" (which is silly).  Right now our laws don't make a distinction between silly and evil and that is a problem.  People don't get to choose what they find attractive and repression does not eliminate desire.  This, I think, is something that the government has gotten entirely wrong in this picture.  The concept of 'gateway drugs' as a reason to ban marijuana never held water and I don't think 'gateway child porn' does either.  It isn't in good taste and I don't like it but I don't think that being a Conservative is in good taste either and I don't get to make that illegal.

As the regular newspaper reports of child porn can attest there are lots of people out there who are inexorably attracted to this stuff.  They can't help it despite the incredible risk and life destroying punishments that wait for them.  We can't cure them, we can't eliminate them from the populace.  All we can do is try to give them safe outlets that don't hurt anybody and lock up those that do hurt children and toss away the key.

Heal Me

Back when I was working for MedCan, a private medical firm here in Toronto, I often booked people for medical appointments that were utterly unnecessary.  The job, in fact, pretty much required that I spend my time trying to get everyone to be tested for everything as often as possible because the company made money from each test.  Even then I was still regularly in the position of denying people tests that they desperately wanted.  I remember once there was a man in his 30s who wanted a PSA (prostate specific antigen) test done and I continually told him that although the doctor could ask for it if it was necessary we would not be doing it standard for anyone under 40.  There was a long and involved fight back and forth between this man and MedCan with him demanding the test and us telling him we could not ethically give it to him.  I think that rich people demanding healthcare that isn't helping them is a real problem nearly everywhere regardless of whether or not you have universal health care.  The PSA test isn't even particularly justifiable on the populace at large, let alone those who fall outside the normal parameters.

This article got me thinking about the matter again and really showed how bad private healthcare can be.  The author talks about how in a hospital he worked at a woman came in with the complaint that her breast had fallen off and asked to have it reattached.  Clearly the individual case is horrifying but far worse is the note that the hospital didn't particularly panic because this wasn't out of the ordinary.  Poor women who get breast cancer have this (automastectomy) happen on a semi regular basis because the cancer goes years without treatment and the hospital was used to dealing with it.  That is the reality of private medicine; the rich getting tests that stand to make their lives worse, treatment that doesn't help, and fancy sandwiches in waiting rooms while the poor die of treatable illnesses.  Even in Canada we have the issue of administering tests and 'cures' that simply aren't justified even if the cost were zero but it gets much worse when you have patients who are desperate and uninformed and the system is run for profit.

Innumeracy is as much at the heart of this as anything.  People don't understand statistics and so they want treatments and tests without understanding that once false positives and other certainty issues are factored in that many things we do in medicine aren't producing any statistically significant benefit.  I don't have a lot of hope in that situation ever being resolved though because if we can't get people off of credit card and payday loan debt I can't see how the much more complicated issue of medical statistics is ever going to be understood by the average person.

Cold Hands

Do you have problems with cold hands after blowing up bad guys? 

Loved ones push you away because of your frozen appendages?

Bitter about not clicking fast enough with chilled fingers?

There is a solution:  Gamer Mitts!

Everybody needs a pair of Gamer Mitts!

I get cold hands when gaming and I never really knew why until recently.  I knew that Wendy shrieked and told me to go away when I touched her after playing WOW and I knew that my hands felt like ice during games but the cause was not something I actively sought.  Wendy knitted me some Gamer Mitts and they worked as advertised:  My performance was better because my hands stayed warm (warming up before playing computer games is apparently a thing?) and there was much less pushing away and shrieking.  

On tuesday night I was out gaming and Guitar Salesman finally filled in the blanks for me; while doing any really demanding mental task the brain gets all the blood and extremities get less.  The harder the game is and the more I have to think about it the worse the colds hands will be... which makes sense, since my hands aren't frozen all the time, or even all the time when I am at the computer.  I do wonder how much further that goes though.  There are days when I spend 6 hours playing really intense video games and if my brain is being pushed hard enough to deny much of my body proper circulation I might be doing other things to myself.  I have been really tired since I started playing a lot of Mass Effect and it is definitely an intense experience... perhaps I have been making myself exhausted simply by using my brain too much.

That's a new one for you.  Video games don't rot your brain, they wreck your extremities and make you tired because your brain is working *too* hard.

Going mining

It looks like Star Trek fever isn't restricted to Newt Gingrich or failed French presidential hopefuls; Google founders Larry Page and Eric Schmidt and filmmaker James Cameron are planning to get out into space and mine asteroids for rare resources within just a few years.  Their plans involves building a bunch of powerful telescopes to check out nearby asteroids and eventually mine them for platinum and gold primarily.  NASA is trying the same thing and will spend 1 billion to get 60 grams of material; last time I checked gold wasn't worth a 500 million dollars an ounce and that is the cost *if* it works.

What boggles my mind is that people want to mine rare resources from objects so incredibly far from home.  It isn't just a matter of hoisting things into orbit because on earth if something breaks you just buy more parts and get some person to fix it while up in space if something breaks you chuck millions or billions in the bin to replace it.  It isn't as ridiculous as colonizing space of course because until Antarctica and the ocean floor are completely colonized the idea of space colonization is preposterous; it is actually possible that at some point getting resources from asteroids could be economically viable as resources on earth run dry.  We aren't there yet, nor anywhere near it, but it it an eventuality that humans will someday face.

It is simply a matter of the relative costs of stuff and energy.  Stuff is cheap right now.  Anything that can be dug up out of the earth is dirt cheap compared to something that must be gotten out of space and there just isn't anything up there that we can use that isn't available here on earth.  This equation will change as energy costs do; with no new innovation the price of energy will go up and up as fossil fuels become harder to get to and things in space will become even more costly.  If we develop fusion in the next decade or so or perhaps find some even more amazing energy source then we could potentially arrive at a point where the geographic availability of resources becomes the limiting factor instead of  the colossal energy investment required to get into space.

Unfortunately for space adventure when energy gets cheaper it gets easier to dig deeper and refine more and get more resources from the earth itself.  There is certainly a point where there is so little of a resource on earth that heading out to space makes sense but before it becomes economically sensible the price of energy needs to drop by an order of magnitude or three.  Not that I object to billionaires building telescopes and thinking about big projects of course; better than buying a dozen yachts.  I just think it has no chance whatsoever of actually turning a profit barring us inventing magic wands.