"Just imagine how handy it would be if musical notes were color-coded. Learning to play an instrument would be a snap. You'd never have to wonder if you were in the right place for a chord, for example."
In college, I was in a sketch comedy group that also did some musical bits (parodies and the like). Our musical director one year had synthaesia, probably since birth. It had helped her learn to play the piano and, more usefully, meant that she could more easily tell all of us when we were (not) in tune or (not) sounding right, because she could see the colors associated with different musical passages. She described some musical note to me once as sounding "white". Very cool.
"Most of them have lost familly to whoever they are attacking,"
What, the five year olds shot in their beds by Palestinian gunmen had it coming to them? The kids blown up in their strollers? The pizza-place diners and the marketplace-shoppers and the people sitting on the bus?
If you bothered to look at the actual statistics of who gets killed by Palestinian terrorism, you'd see that the vast majority, something like 80%, of the dead were *civilians*, not IDF soldiers. By and large, they target *civilians*, not the military. Get it?
"and they feel it is the last resort to stike back"
Have you ever actually read the PLO constitution? It specifically states that violence and armed resistance and, yes, suicide bombings are considered the *only* valid means of securing a Palestinian state. "Martyrdom" is *not* being done as a last resort by a beaten-down people, it is considered a duty and an honor and the only valid way to fight back against those eeeeevil Israelis. Also, it guarantees their families money from Saddam Hussein and elsewhere, and promises that the bomber will get nookie in the eternal afterlife.
If there's a more fucked-up philosophy out there, I don't know what it is.
"I think, perhaps, the poster meant that with the amount of assumptions being made, and the unlikelyhood of being able to do anything with the fact that "oh, there is alien life out there", the idle cycles could be used more efficiently..."
Now this is an interesting point. Suppose we do find out that somewhere out there is intelligent life. Would it *really* change things that much?
I mean, the assumption that the discovery of alien life would radically change human behavior on an indivdual and international level is just that: an assumption. It presumes the aliens are some sort of messianic figures, the answer to all our petty Earth problems.
I don't see it that way at all. Human nature being what it is, I find it much more likely that we'll all oooh and aaah over the discovery for a while, and then go back to being the squabbling low-brow folks we usually are. Once the novelty wears off, we've still gotta go about our mundane lives.
This is the more likely scenario: if we find life, it's probably going to be very, very far away, so unless there were the possibility of trade between our planet and theirs or one of us threatening the other in some way, we'll probably just shrug, sit back, and wait for a loooooong time for the most basic information to flow both ways. Meanwhile, we'll still pick fights with one another, still watch bad TV, still have corrupt politicians, still have yokels claiming to have been picked up by UFO's and given proctological exams. Life goes on.
To be clear, I do support the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and have been running SETI@Home for a few years now- over 1000 data units processed. And I think the discovery of alien life would be way cool. But is it going to radically change my outlook on the world? Nope. And that's because I already assume it's out there--which is why I'm running SETI@Home in the first place.
I was one of the measly 2% of the survey respondents who was female. (Yes, guys, geek girls do exist- now wipe the slobber off your screen and move along please, nothing to see here.) But where oh where are all the other female open source folks? I mean, I know female CS types are rare, but are they rarer still in the open source world? If so, why?
I'd also be curious to know which *types* of open source projects seem to attract larger-than-usual numbers of women to the contributing ranks. From personal experience, I can say that Post-Nuke, an open source fork of PHP-Nuke, has a fairly high percentage of female participants/developers. But why? Maybe because it's modular and women can go off and work on a module on their own and then go back and submit it later, and thus feel less pressure to need to know all of the ins and outs of every little system. Or maybe it's because it's tempting to play around with modifying the themes/skins (not to get all stereotypical about women being attracted to the GUI end of things while guys do the coding of the guts of the program, but some stereotypes have a good basis in reality). Or maybe because it's a content management system, and women have long had a foothold with online personal publishing or personal communication systems (blogs, online diaries, IM'ing, plain ole personal home pages having long had a sizeable female early adopter contingent- geez, maybe we womenfolk will only pick up a technology if we can use it to *talk*?).
> Miranda's murder was never solved because the suspect invoked his right to remain silent. Now that's ironic.
Uh, no. Miranda was the *suspect*'s last name. And he confessed. But he hadn't been warned or told of his right to remain silent, so his confession was later ruled inadmissible by the Supreme Court. So the Miranda warnings ("...anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law...") are to prevent another murderer getting off the hook because the police didn't let him/her know his/her rights.
Nothing really shocking here, but the essay is worth reading.
"Nothing really shocking here"?!? Jeez, have we really become so numbed to the idiocy that passes for "the other side"'s case that even a clear-cut case of censorship won't turn our heads?
It's one thing to, oh, say, barge in and arrest some smart teenage kid in Scandanavia who did something that's perfectly legal where he lives, even if it's iffy in the US. Or even to, y'know, try to prevent people from using their own legally-purchased DVD players just because they use a slightly unusual operating system on their computers. Oooh, or then there's the part about going after anyone who links to some source code, which was actually derived because of the incompetence of some previous contractors. Yeah, that'll be fun.
Hey, and maybe while they're at it, all the TV's in Australia should be confiscated when the Australian chapter of 2600 does its upcoming broadcast. Wouldn't want people learning, now would we?
Tell them we'll force Christian Slater to star in "Pump Up the Volume 2" unless they back off...
Heeeeey now; I actually liked "Pump Up the Volume"! Cheesy 80's movies are fun! Besides, wasn't Christian Slater's character a lot like your stereotypical geek? Shy, repressed, quiet...until you got him into his element (in his case, radio). Great soundtrack, too.
Well, it's been known for years the legend that princess Anastasia of Russia survived the slaughter of her family in 1916.
Yes, but DNA evidence has already been used to prove that the woman who surfaced in the 1920's claiming to be Anastasia was *not* the princess, but rather a Polish peasant look-alike, being "marketed" to the public by some rather unsavory types. However, when the Romanoff mass grave was discovered a few years back, all of the bodies of the family were found *execept* for one of the sisters, determined later to be either Anastatia or her close-in-age sister (Marie, I think?). So there probably was a basis to the rumor that Anastasia survived, but DNA hasn't found a match, yet.
>Feminazi propaganda, propaganda forcing the Homosexual Agenda
Nope. *This* is the *real* feminazi and homosexual (make that feminist and bisexual) agenda:
8:00 AM- Alarm clock goes off for 9:00 AM class. Turn it off and go back to bed. 8:30 AM- Alarm rings again. Turn it off for good and sleep through first class of the day. 9:00 AM- First class ("Real Estate Law, Finance and Ethics") starts. Meanwhile, dream of Natalie Portman. 10:29 AM- Roll out of bed for second class. 10:30 AM- Second class ("Ethics in Business") starts. 10:40 AM- Walk into second class late; run to a desk in the back of the room to hide. 12:00 PM- Leave class. 12:01 PM- Plot planetary takeover, dismantle the heteropatriarchy, pass laws banning sexual orientation discrimination, remake the meaning of the word "majority" into what the majority actually is (i.e. female), dispense clues and whacks upside the head to jerks and bigots. If time remains, dispense clues and whacks upside the head to members of NOW and the Human Rights Campaign. 12:02 PM- Lunch. 12:30 PM- Read Slashdot.
When I saw this, I thought, are there many homosexual male hackers? Has there been any studies or reports on this kind of thing? I'm asking because I geuinely want to know if geekdom is also a primarily a heterosexual male domain.
I would think that geekdom, which has been traditionally been mostly unconcerned with age/race/gender/religion/appearance/whatever in favor of quality of idea/code/implementation/whatever, wouldn't have much of a problem with sexual orientation, either.
But then again, I have seen *quite* a number of overtly homophobic comments on/. and elsewhere. Could it be that sexual orientation is the one area where geeks *don't* bring the same amount of automatic tolerance to the table? And if so, why? Surely no one would argue that choice of sleeping partner would impact upon ability to churn out code or skill at implementing a new hack.
Also, do stereotypical homosexual male traits preclude them from being geeks?
What "traits" would those be? If you mean, "does the (surprising?) level of homophobia in a supposedly ultra-tolerant cultural group like geeks adversely impact gay geeks?", then I'd have to say that yes, it probably does. If you mean "is there something inherent in queer people that would prevent them from becoming geeks?", then I'd have to say no. Besides, if the stereotype of gay guys being limp-wristed were true, you'd think that would be an *advantage* in playing Quake...:-)
And as to the question of "well, if there *are* gay geeks out there, then where are they?", I should point out that several of the main Linux kernel hackers are queer, as is the author of this reply, as are many geeks I know. In fact, I would posit that a larger percentage of queer people are geeks than the members of the general population as a whole are geeks. However, if a large percent of queers = geeks, large percent of geeks != queers.
If you're looking for a more precise percentage count, take a look at "Peer2Peer" over at UserFriendly (http://personals.ufies.org/) and check out the number of gay/bi/lesbian/queer/transgendered personals over there. Or notice how almost all large techie companies have a gay employees group? Even good old Microsoft has GLEAM.
Ergo, gay geeks exist. The question now is, when do we see a Jon Katz article on this?:-)
Yowza! Looking sharp, boys! :-)
on
Geeks in Suits
·
· Score: 1
Well, well, well! Hemos and CmdrTaco in *suits*? Will wonders never cease?:-)
Serriously, y'all clean up real nice. This here geekgirl thinks you guys looked pretty darn cute.:-) Hope you had fun at the wedding, and good luck and best wishes to the happy couple!
Slashdot Mirror
"Just imagine how handy it would be if musical notes were color-coded. Learning to play an instrument would be a snap. You'd never have to wonder if you were in the right place for a chord, for example."
In college, I was in a sketch comedy group that also did some musical bits (parodies and the like). Our musical director one year had synthaesia, probably since birth. It had helped her learn to play the piano and, more usefully, meant that she could more easily tell all of us when we were (not) in tune or (not) sounding right, because she could see the colors associated with different musical passages. She described some musical note to me once as sounding "white". Very cool.
"Most of them have lost familly to whoever they are attacking,"
What, the five year olds shot in their beds by Palestinian gunmen had it coming to them? The kids blown up in their strollers? The pizza-place diners and the marketplace-shoppers and the people sitting on the bus?
If you bothered to look at the actual statistics of who gets killed by Palestinian terrorism, you'd see that the vast majority, something like 80%, of the dead were *civilians*, not IDF soldiers. By and large, they target *civilians*, not the military. Get it?
"and they feel it is the last resort to stike back"
Have you ever actually read the PLO constitution? It specifically states that violence and armed resistance and, yes, suicide bombings are considered the *only* valid means of securing a Palestinian state. "Martyrdom" is *not* being done as a last resort by a beaten-down people, it is considered a duty and an honor and the only valid way to fight back against those eeeeevil Israelis. Also, it guarantees their families money from Saddam Hussein and elsewhere, and promises that the bomber will get nookie in the eternal afterlife.
If there's a more fucked-up philosophy out there, I don't know what it is.
"I think, perhaps, the poster meant that with the amount of assumptions being made, and the unlikelyhood of being able to do anything with the fact that "oh, there is alien life out there", the idle cycles could be used more efficiently..."
Now this is an interesting point. Suppose we do find out that somewhere out there is intelligent life. Would it *really* change things that much?
I mean, the assumption that the discovery of alien life would radically change human behavior on an indivdual and international level is just that: an assumption. It presumes the aliens are some sort of messianic figures, the answer to all our petty Earth problems.
I don't see it that way at all. Human nature being what it is, I find it much more likely that we'll all oooh and aaah over the discovery for a while, and then go back to being the squabbling low-brow folks we usually are. Once the novelty wears off, we've still gotta go about our mundane lives.
This is the more likely scenario: if we find life, it's probably going to be very, very far away, so unless there were the possibility of trade between our planet and theirs or one of us threatening the other in some way, we'll probably just shrug, sit back, and wait for a loooooong time for the most basic information to flow both ways. Meanwhile, we'll still pick fights with one another, still watch bad TV, still have corrupt politicians, still have yokels claiming to have been picked up by UFO's and given proctological exams. Life goes on.
To be clear, I do support the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and have been running SETI@Home for a few years now- over 1000 data units processed. And I think the discovery of alien life would be way cool. But is it going to radically change my outlook on the world? Nope. And that's because I already assume it's out there--which is why I'm running SETI@Home in the first place.
A beaker bubbling over with a radiation symbol superimposed on it, i.e. cold fusion?
An aerial shot of crop circles?
A Windows box showing over three months of uptime?
As Gertrude Stein once said about Oakland, CA:
"There's no there there."
Capitalize that last "there" and there ya go.
The American version is referred to as "the ookie cookie".
:-) )
Or so I've heard; being female, I've (thankfully) never had cause nor ability to partake in that game.
(Besides, I'm allergic to gluten.
I was one of the measly 2% of the survey respondents who was female. (Yes, guys, geek girls do exist- now wipe the slobber off your screen and move along please, nothing to see here.) But where oh where are all the other female open source folks? I mean, I know female CS types are rare, but are they rarer still in the open source world? If so, why?
I'd also be curious to know which *types* of open source projects seem to attract larger-than-usual numbers of women to the contributing ranks. From personal experience, I can say that Post-Nuke, an open source fork of PHP-Nuke, has a fairly high percentage of female participants/developers. But why? Maybe because it's modular and women can go off and work on a module on their own and then go back and submit it later, and thus feel less pressure to need to know all of the ins and outs of every little system. Or maybe it's because it's tempting to play around with modifying the themes/skins (not to get all stereotypical about women being attracted to the GUI end of things while guys do the coding of the guts of the program, but some stereotypes have a good basis in reality). Or maybe because it's a content management system, and women have long had a foothold with online personal publishing or personal communication systems (blogs, online diaries, IM'ing, plain ole personal home pages having long had a sizeable female early adopter contingent- geez, maybe we womenfolk will only pick up a technology if we can use it to *talk*?).
[sigh]
> Miranda's murder was never solved because the suspect invoked his right to remain silent. Now that's ironic.
Uh, no. Miranda was the *suspect*'s last name. And he confessed. But he hadn't been warned or told of his right to remain silent, so his confession was later ruled inadmissible by the Supreme Court. So the Miranda warnings ("...anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law...") are to prevent another murderer getting off the hook because the police didn't let him/her know his/her rights.
Shuttle software is written in a language called HAL/S...
HAL?! A system with an acronym like HAL is running the space shuttles? Oh, you have got to be kidding me...
[droning monotone voice:] "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do..."
- Asapargirl, rather disturbed
Nothing really shocking here, but the essay is worth reading.
"Nothing really shocking here"?!? Jeez, have we really become so numbed to the idiocy that passes for "the other side"'s case that even a clear-cut case of censorship won't turn our heads?
It's one thing to, oh, say, barge in and arrest some smart teenage kid in Scandanavia who did something that's perfectly legal where he lives, even if it's iffy in the US. Or even to, y'know, try to prevent people from using their own legally-purchased DVD players just because they use a slightly unusual operating system on their computers. Oooh, or then there's the part about going after anyone who links to some source code, which was actually derived because of the incompetence of some previous contractors. Yeah, that'll be fun.
Hey, and maybe while they're at it, all the TV's in Australia should be confiscated when the Australian chapter of 2600 does its upcoming broadcast. Wouldn't want people learning, now would we?
- Asparagirl, fuming
Tell them we'll force Christian Slater to star in "Pump Up the Volume 2" unless they back off...
Heeeeey now; I actually liked "Pump Up the Volume"! Cheesy 80's movies are fun! Besides, wasn't Christian Slater's character a lot like your stereotypical geek? Shy, repressed, quiet...until you got him into his element (in his case, radio). Great soundtrack, too.
- Asparagirl
Well, it's been known for years the legend that princess Anastasia of Russia survived the slaughter of her family in 1916.
Yes, but DNA evidence has already been used to prove that the woman who surfaced in the 1920's claiming to be Anastasia was *not* the princess, but rather a Polish peasant look-alike, being "marketed" to the public by some rather unsavory types. However, when the Romanoff mass grave was discovered a few years back, all of the bodies of the family were found *execept* for one of the sisters, determined later to be either Anastatia or her close-in-age sister (Marie, I think?). So there probably was a basis to the rumor that Anastasia survived, but DNA hasn't found a match, yet.
- Asparagirl
Penn is one of the most dangerous centers of radical left-wing propaganda in the world today.
Not from me, it ain't. I'm one of the *many* College Republicans on campus- voted for Katz and everything. :-P
But it's got Koch's Deli nearby, which forgives everything.
Koch's rocks. The guys behind the counter are the best, and their whitefish salad is fantastic.
- Asparagirl
You only had to spend a minute to plot a planetary takeover? Man, you feminazis have good organizational skills.
Thanks! We aim to displease. :-)
(And would you believe that I'm also a registered Republican? Talk about subversive... :-) )
- Asparagirl
Smells like a troll to me! But still...
:-)
>Feminazi propaganda, propaganda forcing the Homosexual Agenda
Nope. *This* is the *real* feminazi and homosexual (make that feminist and bisexual) agenda:
8:00 AM- Alarm clock goes off for 9:00 AM class. Turn it off and go back to bed.
8:30 AM- Alarm rings again. Turn it off for good and sleep through first class of the day.
9:00 AM- First class ("Real Estate Law, Finance and Ethics") starts. Meanwhile, dream of Natalie Portman.
10:29 AM- Roll out of bed for second class.
10:30 AM- Second class ("Ethics in Business") starts.
10:40 AM- Walk into second class late; run to a desk in the back of the room to hide.
12:00 PM- Leave class.
12:01 PM- Plot planetary takeover, dismantle the heteropatriarchy, pass laws banning sexual orientation discrimination, remake the meaning of the word "majority" into what the majority actually is (i.e. female), dispense clues and whacks upside the head to jerks and bigots. If time remains, dispense clues and whacks upside the head to members of NOW and the Human Rights Campaign.
12:02 PM- Lunch.
12:30 PM- Read Slashdot.
After that, it's all up for grabs...
- Asparagirl
When I saw this, I thought, are there many homosexual male hackers? Has there been any studies or reports on this kind of thing? I'm asking because I geuinely want to know if geekdom is also a primarily a heterosexual male domain.
I would think that geekdom, which has been traditionally been mostly unconcerned with age/race/gender/religion/appearance/whatever in favor of quality of idea/code/implementation/whatever, wouldn't have much of a problem with sexual orientation, either.
But then again, I have seen *quite* a number of overtly homophobic comments on /. and elsewhere. Could it be that sexual orientation is the one area where geeks *don't* bring the same amount of automatic tolerance to the table? And if so, why? Surely no one would argue that choice of sleeping partner would impact upon ability to churn out code or skill at implementing a new hack.
Also, do stereotypical homosexual male traits preclude them from being geeks?
What "traits" would those be? If you mean, "does the (surprising?) level of homophobia in a supposedly ultra-tolerant cultural group like geeks adversely impact gay geeks?", then I'd have to say that yes, it probably does. If you mean "is there something inherent in queer people that would prevent them from becoming geeks?", then I'd have to say no. Besides, if the stereotype of gay guys being limp-wristed were true, you'd think that would be an *advantage* in playing Quake... :-)
And as to the question of "well, if there *are* gay geeks out there, then where are they?", I should point out that several of the main Linux kernel hackers are queer, as is the author of this reply, as are many geeks I know. In fact, I would posit that a larger percentage of queer people are geeks than the members of the general population as a whole are geeks. However, if a large percent of queers = geeks, large percent of geeks != queers.
If you're looking for a more precise percentage count, take a look at "Peer2Peer" over at UserFriendly (http://personals.ufies.org/) and check out the number of gay/bi/lesbian/queer/transgendered personals over there. Or notice how almost all large techie companies have a gay employees group? Even good old Microsoft has GLEAM.
Ergo, gay geeks exist. The question now is, when do we see a Jon Katz article on this? :-)
Well, well, well! Hemos and CmdrTaco in *suits*? Will wonders never cease? :-)
:-) Hope you had fun at the wedding, and good luck and best wishes to the happy couple!
Serriously, y'all clean up real nice. This here geekgirl thinks you guys looked pretty darn cute.
- Asparagirl