Modern Man

Part of being a modern adult is owning a cell phone.  You look patently ridiculous when you have to ask to borrow somebody else's phone and then stand there staring at it with no clue how to operate it - I am not incompetent, really!  Somewhere along the way not having a cell phone went from being a thing some people do to being absurd and I don't know exactly when that was.  I do know that when we went to the hospital the receptionist didn't believe us that neither of us had a cell phone which kinda says a lot about how far behind the times we are.

Today Wendy and I went to visit a couple stores to check out phones.  We ended up signing up for a 3 year contract to get sexy Galaxy S3 phones for free and the ugly, ancient phone on my desk is going to get the Office Space treatment.  It is a strange thing, mucking about with phones in stores.

How do I type in a search term in Youtube?

Uh, sir, you click that thing right there.

Well, that is easy!

Because of course everything on my new phone is easy as soon as you do it and often maddeningly difficult until I do.  All kinds of random fools figure these things out though so obviously it can't be the slightest bit challenging but there is a real intimidation factor there when you just don't know the trick.  So now you can call me anytime.  You know, like when I am sitting at my desk reading things on the internet, you can totally call me on my cell phone.

Also for those of you who know me IRL my phone number is not changing, it is just being ported over on Wednesday.  If you want Wendy's number then contact her or me.

Until then I will be editing my contact list.  Hooray for all the work associated with extra convenience.

Thought crimes

In the past few weeks there has been a lot of coverage of the cannibal cop in the US.  The short summary is this:  He planned to torture, kill, and eat several women.  He made specific plans to do so and abused his power as a police officer to forward those plans in ways that were illegal.  However, he never actually hurt anyone and his legal defence has revolved around the claim that he was merely pursuing a fetish with no intent to follow through.  That defence failed so he has been convicted of a number of serious crimes and will be in jail for a damn long time.  I certainly don't debate that he should be convicted but his case is a very interesting one in terms of setting policy.

How far, exactly, are we as a society willing to push this?  If we push too far we will be jailing half the population for looking up porn with kink equipment, BDSM, or (fake) coercion involved.  If we don't push far enough we could end up watching some truly horrible things unfold because we didn't stop them in time.  While the cannibal cop and those like him are scary sorts of people I personally am more worried about prosecuting people too much rather than too little.  The government resorts to violence to curb lifestyle choices that aren't significantly harmful (protesting, using marijuana, listening to copyrighted music) and that, I think, is the far more serious threat.

A good example of where these sorts of things become really tricky is pedophilia.  Obviously the act is heinous and needs severe punishment but prosecuting people for looking up information on their sexual desires is a really awful thing to do.  Unlike, for example, rape porn (which I find highly disturbing personally but which can be made without hurting anyone) pedophile porn necessarily causes extreme harm.  This is why I think actual child porn should be severely punished while animated child porn should be legal - we should not be the thought police.

When you hand the government the power to lock people up because they look at the wrong information or think the wrong thing you have to be completely certain they will never abuse that power and put other things on the 'wrong list' and I do not have faith in that at all.  Until recently that could easily have included gay sex, for example, and we can all agree that we don't want *our* sexual desires criminalized.  I just hope that cases like this don't lead governments to conclude that they need to monitor what we do and think more - sensational crimes tend to go that way with people demanding action and government delivering stupid policies in response.

A Quilt

My family likes to make things.  This is an excellent quality to have in a family as it can lead to you having lots of really well made, durable objects in your home that are custom built.  Sure, you can buy stuff in a store, but can you help choose how it will be made and get it exactly right?  No you can not!  Yesterday my brother showed up at my place with a brand new quilt for Wendy and I made by The Quilter.  It is most awesome, what with being full of bright colours and being expertly made.  I am most pleased, yes I am.

Elli approves.

The cat also approves.

This is the backing of it, which is quite nice but not as pretty and colourful as the front.

And now I have an excellent new quilt that I love the look of.  The old one was getting really ratty and the colours were fading to greyish brown so the timing is excellent.

This came with the quilt.  Numerous and amusing details on the construction.  Man, that is a lot of sewing.

Feminism vs. Health: FIGHT!

I found a very interesting article the other day about the messages we send children.  The article was written by a mom who found a list her 7 year old daughter had written.  The list was a bunch of healthy foods to eat and exercises to do and was titled "Diyet"; there were no end of other cute misspellings.  The mom freaked out and went on a tear criticizing our society for telling her very young daughter that she was fat and needed to lose weight.

My take on it is pretty different.  The list wasn't entitled "I am too fat" nor was that implied anywhere.  All that was on it was a list of healthy food and activities like push ups, jumping jacks, and bicycling.  Moreover the words healthy diet are used quite regularly in education and even on TV.  Does a 7 year old who eats healthily and who has a high activity level need to have such a list?  No.  However, teaching kids that they should think about what they eat and try to get lots of exercise is a great idea.  Elli's school has a big book for each kid they use as an organizer and record.  Each of these books is packed with advice on getting exercise and eating healthy food as well as other 'be nice to people' type messages.  This seems to me to be a fine thing as encouraging a healthy lifestyle is a useful thing for schools to do.

There is no denying that unrealistic models of attractiveness are a particular problem our society struggles with.  We are making strides towards basing our valuation of women on who they are rather than how they look but by no means are we there yet.  It is important to do our best to make children, especially female children, understand that being extra thin is *not* necessary.  Obviously the issue isn't limited to women but there is no denying that they are judged more harshly and pressured more on that front.

I have a lot of mixed up feelings on this whole issue.  I generally find runway models to be way too thin for my preferences and I just think "Eat some cake or something..." and though Wendy oftens feels like she would like to be thinner I look at her and think "Do not lose those curves!"  Not like my approach is objectively better of course; saying to women that their breasts are too small is just a different sort of unfair standard than telling them that their thighs are too large.

In the end I think I must side with the health advocates on this one.  Telling children to exercise more and eat healthily is going to send a message that slender and athletic is better and round and soft is worse but I don't think we can avoid that.  Those habits need to be reinforced and as long as we are always careful to emphasize that this is for health rather than beauty we will be doing the best we can.

At the speed of politics

Today a teacher at Elli's school sent around a notice to parents talking about Health Education, which doesn't really include explicit sex education at Elli's age but does start to touch on those topics.  The notice talked about something fairly interesting:  The curriculum has not been updated since 1998.  Fifteen years isn't enough time to change the fundamentals of sex but it sure is too long for much of what children are taught.  Consider that since that time gay marriage has been legalized and communication, instead of being restricted to letters and phones for most people, now involves twitter, facebook, and email for all.

Technology changes rapidly and is continuing to change ever more quickly as time goes by.  These changes propagate through our social systems with remarkable speed and it is important that we understand how the new ways of doing things affect us and educate our children appropriately.  The trouble is that politics does not move at the speed of technology; politicians and high level bureaucrats usually take huge amounts of time to change things.  Taken together this means that when our curriculum is tightly controlled by a central agency it is going to continue to lag behind society.

Of course Not all of that can be tossed at the doorstep of politicians because when changes are brought in right on the heels of a social shift people complain.  Changing the curriculum to support gay marriage will inevitably end up running afoul of religious fundamentalists who demand that their children not be taught such things.  The point at which a new idea is recognized as a good thing to teach and the point at which criticism of that idea can be easily ignored are too far apart and this means that those who feel they must pander to anachronistic bigotry resist change for quite some time.

To avoid this whole mess requires significantly empowering teachers and stepping away from a centrally designed curriculum.  When individual teachers are given the authority to change what they teach based on what is happening they can respond to new ideas efficiently in a way that a central bureaucracy simply cannot.  It will inevitably lead to a few teachers that teach things badly in their own special way but that is a small price to pay for all the rest of the teachers being able to teach far more effectively because their shackles have been removed.  We do want all children to get a good education but enforcing mediocrity on everyone is not the way to do that.

Feeling a little more strongly about cooking

I used to be really ambivalent about cooking.  All I wanted was a tremendously precise recipe to follow so I could stop paying attention and just do as it said.  It also freed me from actually being responsible for my 'creations' since as long as I follow the recipe perfectly it is not my fault.  Somehow in the past few years I have gotten a lot more possessive about cooking than that.

For Christmas Wendy and I got some 'soup cooking aids' which were essentially a tube of beans/peas/lentils and some spices with instructions on how to turn them into soup.  They look like this:

I started off suspicious at the extremely high cooking times and large list of ingredients I was supposed to provide.  I didn't have everything on hand so I ended up fudging a lot and making things up and the soups ended up sucking.

Damn soup mixes
They suck
I make great soup, and I just wanted to use them up, and I got bad soup
Not my fault
Blame the soup mix!

Kinda weird, playing the blame game with a random pile of soup mixes.  I never got this way before though, so I guess somehow cooking has become something I am defensive about.  It is a big part of my job at the moment so I guess that makes sense but still I never really thought I would get invested in cooking.  Somehow it always seemed like my attitude would forever remain "Meh, I won't die from what I make.  Good 'nuff."

On making people productive

I just finished reading Drive by Daniel H. Pink.  It talks primarily about how to motivate people and get them doing their best work, primarily in business.  It was a quick read but solidly written and I think both businesses and people would do well to incorporate its lessons into their lives.  The message is that the old way of thinking that you can motivate people to do their best work by simply dangling monetary incentives or threats in front of them simply doesn't work for most jobs.  People digging ditches or making sales calls can be usefully motivated by these sorts of rewards because their jobs are very mechanical in nature but creative work is stifled by it instead.  The idea is that work involving imagination is best attempted with a lot of freedom to choose how to do the work, who to do it with, and what work to do.

I completely buy into the idea and having been in commission based jobs I am intimately familiar with the messes that get created when the wrong incentives are in place.  When it comes to things like making outgoing sales calls there is very little imagination or creativity so you pretty much have to pay by performance... and you can, because you can usefully measure performance day by day.  When doing work like writing however you can't just expect to pay 25 cents a word and get anything at all good out of people. More than that if you tell people exactly what to write, when to write it, and how it must be written you are going to get crap out the other end.  Tell me I have to push out 500 words about coal mining in China between 3 and 5 oclock and you will get your 500 words but tell me to write something awesome as soon as possible and you will get 1000 words and they will be better.

This is very well demonstrated by the constant messes that executives get into when they have huge bonuses associated with specific performance targets.  They shift the entire company around to put up a specific amount of profit for the last day in March instead of working to make the company successful five years from now.  When you have someone in a job with a lot of creativity and flexibility you need them to look at long term goals; your company is not defined entirely by the sales logged in March specifically so why are you trying to make sure that is the only thing the people in charge care about?  Moreover the size of their paychecks simply doesn't get you better people; while some CEOs are better than others you can't actually improve the quality of the person you get once you get past a couple hundred grand a year.  I saw this constantly both in mattress sales and medical sales - doing ridiculous and damaging things to get an order delivered before month end just to hit targets was the norm.

The great thing about unleashing people's potential through autonomy and general goals rather than bonus targets is that not only do you get better results in creative jobs but you also have much happier people.  It isn't just a way for an organization to get more out of workers but also a way for society itself to improve as everyone enjoys their work more.  Admittedly it doesn't do much for those flipping burgers or operating a widget machine but it is a big step forward for everyone else.