Magic Spot Flowing

I should have known this, but I didn’t: squib is a real English word, with a meaning that lends itself to the metaphorical extension used in the Harry Potter series.

Also, rodomontade and enjambment.

I happened to read today that Stacey’s Bookstore in San Francisco is closing.

Any bookstore closure is kind of sad, but this one has a particular sadness for me because that’s where I bought The Mindbody Prescription, which I used to get rid of my RSI totally. I bought the book in November 2005, on one of my first trips into San Francisco after moving to the Bay Area, and have been totally pain-free since June 2006 (more than two and a half years now). So the bookstore has some personal significance to me, and it’s weird to think of passing by there and not seeing it and being reminded of that lucky moment.

It’s sort of unfortunate when people who may have a point undermine themselves with hyperbole, hand-wringing, and inaccuracy.

I got pointed via BoingBoing to what should have been an interesting article about the people behind the sources of Facebook’s funding. I’m no particular fan of Facebook, especially because it just seems to get more and more annoying over time, and certainly there are and have been privacy issues with it.

But I can’t take seriously an article that

1) originally connected something created in 1999 with “after 9/11″ (there’s a correction on it now, but this isn’t just a misprint kind of error — it’s a fundamental conceptual error of the type that tends to be brought on by a desire to connect 9/11 to everything and/or a desire to see nefarious influence everywhere).

2) spends a lot of time hand-wringing about Facebook being “fundamentally uncreative” and disconnecting us from nature. This is just typical The Children Are Too Connected To Their Computers and What Is The Point stuff. Why use Facebook when there are books to read? he wonders. That’s not the issue. Facebook is completely different from books. If I want to read I read; Facebook is a vehicle for something entirely different — social connection.

3) uses the phrase “anyone can glance at your intimate confessions”. If you’re putting intimate confessions on Facebook (which people do) I must say I don’t have much sympathy for you. Facebook is essentially the public internet — and is basically about sharing and other people seeing what you do — even though there are some ways to limit information distribution. The phrase is used in the context of the ToU’s “if our privacy controls are circumvented we can’t necessarily protect your information” which is certainly unfortunate, but the head bit should be “weak privacy controls” not “anyone can glance at your intimate confessions”.

In general, the article raises the issue of Facebook’s connection to people I would characterize broadly as crazy libertarians, but it also conflates them with neocons (without taking any effort to convince you that it’s a valid connection). It uses rhetoric rather than actual argument to try to convince you that because Facebook was funded by these people and can be interpreted, in a certain light, as an experiment in realizing their world vision, it must be that we are helping them out in reaching their allegedly sinister goals. I wasn’t convinced of either the total sinistry of their goals (they range from the off-the-wall bizarritude of the Singularity to very unpleasant extremist capitalism) or of the fact that Facebook actually serves as either an an experiment or actual realization of them, largely because the points are implied and almost assumed. I suppose maybe for the usual audience of the Guardian that’s enough?

There’s also plenty of hand-wringing about the ad-supported nature of Facebook. I do think that this is a general trend that’s concerning — there are very few online social sites that are not ad-supported, and that basically means that all online community is also an opportunity for people to sell you stuff. But the same is true (as the article’s author indeed alludes to) of newspapers and magazines. Ad-supported media is not new and the amount of “OMG your social relationships are being used as marketing devices” seems excessive to me. I find guerrilla marketing and paid shills who act like sincere product users far more disturbing uses of the social network for advertising.

Maybe I’m too complacent about this, but ad-supported websites of all kinds are de rigeur, and I’m sure most of the ones that have any information about you via login use that information to target the ads (Google does, for example). Facebook does have a lot of people’s personal information, but I’m more concerned about the general availability of the information than about them sharing it with advertisers, honestly. At least I know what advertisers want — my money. The government? Random people? Not so sure about that.

It’s inarguable that you’re giving these people ROI (return on investment) through your use of Facebook, and you may quite legitimately want to avoid doing that. It does squick me a bit for sure, especially since the pointer from BoingBoing was about Facebook hiring Alberto Gonzales’s former Chief of Staff as their general counsel. Yuck. I can’t see that going anywhere good.

But it’s less clear to me that these people’s strange worldview and aims are necessarily furthered by Facebook, or that even if they are, that Facebook doesn’t have other uses that are completely legitimate and irrelevant to that. The guy may have founded PayPal as a way to escape monetary controls (see article for this contention), but most people just use it to send money to friends or people they bought something from, or set up an easy payment system for their website. Likewise he may have invested in Facebook because it instantiates a virtual, borderless world, but most people just use it to talk to their friends and share photos. The article, instead of being a consideration of the implications of the financial relationship (most interestingly through providing potential funding to the guy’s weirder organizations — not that he really needs more money to be effective given how rich he is), is a piece of poorly argued hysteria.

I’m currently having a similar problem with Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which I expected to like. It may be in part that unlike most of the first generation who had the book available, I was initially exposed to history that was being rethought to give more weight to what happened to the groups that weren’t writing all the books. So although some of what he writes about is new to me, much of it isn’t — it doesn’t feel revolutionary.

But even more so, I feel that he retreats from evidence into rhetoric; that he has a definitive agenda into which he’s trying to fit evidence, rather than letting the facts speak for themselves and guide his points. To his credit, he makes that explicit at the beginning of the book — and indeed I almost stopped reading at that point, because I’d been led to believe that it was a history book from a unique perspective, not an extended essay with a particular thesis (“the guys in power actually suck a lot” to put it shortly).

One example is his discussion of Native American social arrangements. While he seems to stick to the facts, there’s a definite gloss of romance over them. They were egalitarian! They cared about the environment! Europeans suck compared to them! He doesn’t, however, address the issue that the progress of farming tends to give rise to greater hierarchy (this is a Jared Diamond idea so it may not have been around when he wrote the book, but it does affect his point), meaning that given their own time, it’s entirely possible that the Native American cultures could have ended up much less egalitarian. And he doesn’t discuss the less savory aspects of various Native American cultures, of which there certainly are some. His evidence about their behavior is valid and I grew up with the new-standard narrative that yes the Europeans were absolutely horrible to Native Americans and that’s putting it lightly, but he tilts it just that little bit too far, undermining his legitimate points.

I need to read more of the book before I make any firm conclusions, but all the chapters have felt like that so far to me. Some very interesting evidence, interesting framework, just pushed a little too far for credibility.

The first e-book reader I’ve ever seen that I actually want.

The content doesn’t sound very interesting (I prefer books to newspapers and magazines, so an e-book reader without a book supplier is less than exciting — and I want to be able to load my own stuff on, so no/minimal DRM and other nonsense) but the form factor is awesome. This is what I feel like everyone has (or at least I have) been waiting for in e-book reading — a device that is cooler than a book. And I’m kind of addicted to touchscreen technology, so the fact that it’s touchscreen is great.

And someday it might be flexible. Even better.

The only thing I want to know is how breakable it is right now. It looks like you could just snap it in half. If you’ve gotta put a huge case on it, the thinness and sexiness goes away.

But dude. Want!

I was just rereading Nightfall, the novel-length expansion of a 1941 Asimov short story. I liked the book moderately well when I first read it, but on this reading, the story failed to distract me enough to suspend disbelief and two points started bothering me. First of all, they ignore all possible positions other than to completely disbelieve that darkness could fall, except that the scientists and university people believe the evidence and the religious people believe the religious explanation. This isn’t completely improbable, but realistically speaking it’s likely that reactions would have been much more mixed. The journalist said to be mocking the idea of darkness is unlikely to have worldwide influence (two different regions of the planet are specifically mentioned; he works for a newspaper in the main city of one of them) so what ever happened to the other part of the world, and why wasn’t the reaction more mixed? This isn’t really developed well at all.

Second and more important, can stars really come out all at once when totality is reached? Well, I thought this was improbable, but the Effects During a Solar Eclipse page says otherwise. However, that raises another question. The eclipse in the novel is supposed to have created 9-14 hours of darkness, but totality on Earth can only last 7 minutes. So it seems like either we can have very rapid progress to totality, and thus very sudden darkness and very sudden appearance of stars (as on Earth) or else it would be a much more gradual event, and could last as long as the 9 hours cited, but the progress to and from totality would be much more gradual (since during an eclipse the light changes are caused by the shadow moving over the planet at a constant velocity dependent on the distances involved), so the stars wouldn’t suddenly appear or disappear but it would be more like a standard sunset. I could be wrong about that; I’m not great at astronomy. If I’m not, though, the actual event described is astronomically odd. And even if I am, it distracted me enough to mentally jar me out of the story multiple times, which is annoying.

I also find it hard to believe that with the smallest sun creating a dusk-like atmosphere in its normal state (described before the eclipse) that some stars wouldn’t also show then. Our stars begin to appear long before we reach complete darkness, and we don’t have as many stars as this planet would (it’s supposedly in a region of a galaxy much denser with stars). The description of the light at the point just before the eclipse is extremely dark and ominous, and doesn’t seem strong enough to eliminate light from the stars.

The single paragraph in Garbage Land: On the Trail of Trash that most annoyed me was this one:

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, which made exhaustive studies of consumers’ environmental impacts, the things that make the biggest differenc to planetary health are transportation, housing, and meat eating. It isn’t worth it, they said, to get worked up over paper versus plastic at the grocery store.

Okay, if your choice is actually only between paper or plastic, whatever — although I have my doubts about the equivalency given the persistence of plastic in the environment. But the thing is, there’s a third, very obvious choice: reusable bags.

It’s true that most of the choices we make have a relatively small effect on our environmental impact, but even in the small choices, sometimes there’s an option that’s clearly much better than the rest. Paper or plastic? Yes, who cares — not because they’re the same, but because you should ditch both and get some reusable bags.

The more interesting thing that I started to think about as I got further through the book is the idea of local waste disposal, especially as a parallel to local eating. One of the common threads of all the waste that the author tracks is that much of it goes a long way away from where it was first deemed to be waste — very much like many things we acquire are first shipped a long way to get to us. Even as far as the other side of the world, in both cases, some of the time.

The author talks to a few people who are devoutly into reducing waste (and others interested in it for financial gain), and one of the common threads, though it’s not mentioned explicitly is that the stuff doesn’t go as far away. Instead of being trucked to a landfill or going to a sewage plant, it goes into compost toilets or to a nearby Freecycler (Freecycle is mentioned briefly, along with craigslist). If we couldn’t push our waste so far away, we’d be more likely to notice that it’s excessive and noxious. Keeping everything local makes you care where it comes from and where it goes to. Local waste may be as important to the environmental picture as local eating.

Overall it’s an interesting book, although it’s a little inconsistent on information value since in many cases the author was denied access to the places that did her waste processing.

Amazon’s free Super Saver shipping has got to be their most clever sales tactic ever. But I’m glad for it because otherwise I probably would never have ordered Pamie’s second book, Why Moms Are Weird. I loved Why Girls Are Weird. I even wrote to Pamie about it (something I hardly ever do, but I’d read her blog for a while and felt I knew her a bit) because it resonated with me so much.

Why Moms Are Weird didn’t resonate with me so much, exactly, but it gave me another opportunity to hear Pamie’s writerly voice, to sort what comes from the author and what comes from the characters, and to appreciate her gift for creating fiction that inhabits the world so much that it seems like her characters must exist somewhere, that they’re people I might actually know, even though I don’t know anyone quite like them.

Pamie (and Sars and the rest of the TwoP and related crew) have for a long time created a space on the internet where it was okay to be smart, to be a geek about some things (even pop culture), to have juvenile humor and grown-up seriousness side-by-side, to be unsure of yourself and sometimes not like yourself very much but to go on being yourself anyway, and to share it out there so we all know we’re not alone.

And I don’t imagine that we’re all losers. Sure, I sometimes say I’m hideous and dorky, but I assume we’re all operating under the same notion that in real life we’re basically interesting, attractive people. Online we can be honest and tell each other that we’re scared of looking like idiots. –Why Girls are Weird, p. 206

They made the internet awesome and human at the same time.

And it’s neat to have a new little capsule of that in book form.

Back at the beginning of this blog’s existence I wrote some about Barry Schwarz’s book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. Recently I’ve thought that maybe he should have written a bit more about when more is less. He does devote some space to the subject of how meaningless some of our choices turn out to be, how they are not really different from each other. In those sorts of cases he advises that you spend as much time as the thing’s importance merits (usually not much), pick something, and stick to it. But sometimes you can’t because there are no options that are remotely like what you want. This really came home to me in two cases recently.

In one case, I was at a grocery store near work, looking for pita crisps to eat with lentil dip. This store has about a third of one side of an aisle devoted to crackers, but the vast majority of these crackers, probably 2/3 of the total, are either Wheat Thins or Triscuits. There are also smaller satellite brands like Cheez-Its and Ritz and a small section of more gourmet brands like Kashi, Stoned Wheat Thins (not at all like normal Wheat Thins; also, not drugged), Carr’s water crackers, and other oddities. However, none of the oddities includes pita or bagel crisps. There really is very little variety in the offerings unless what you want in variety is endless types of Wheat Thins and Triscuits. Low Sodium, Low Fat, Herb, Parmesan…any flavor and variant you want, but they’re all hard, square, plain or flavored small crackers. Where is the actual variety, the different kinds of crackers? Confined to a tiny portion of the section, and not even including anything other than standard crackers. I wandered through the store looking to see if they had hidden them somewhere else. No luck.

In the second case we were at Target looking for straps that go on the back of your sunglasses and keep them from falling off. Despite offering three racks of sunglasses and a rack of reading glasses, Target does not stock these things. At all. Not in jewelry & accessories, not in pharmacy, and not in sports. I went all over the store looking for this very simple thing which would take up hardly a foot counter space next to the sunglasses if they would just freaking buy some and put them there. There are three racks of sunglasses that all look basically identical and block 99-100% of UV light. Do we need three racks of sunglasses, or could we maybe add one rack of glasses straps? Why not? Target has practically everything except fresh food and extremely large specialty items. Glasses straps do not fall into either category; they should stock them and offer customers one more actual choice, instead of three dozen more identical sunglasses.

As it turns out, if you want glasses straps for kayaking, you should go to the kayak place and buy them there. And I guess if I want pita crisps I have to go to the giant new Safeway, or buy pita at TJs and make my own! It’s not that there aren’t options, but there sure is poor offering of true options at many large stores.

There’s been some kerfuffle around lately after an NYT article on “literary deal-breakers” — that is, what books, or lack of, would make you run away from a date or relationship? Two of the websites I read have a thread devoted to this. Some of the conversation has inspired interesting thoughts about people’s attitude to books and their interest in reading and how that affects compatibility for people who are readers, but a lot of the discussion seems dismissive and shallow to me. You dared to read Dan Brown or Ayn Rand? AWAY WITH YOU!

Here’s what bugs me about this: it means prejudging what the person thinks about the books that are on their shelves.

People have books on their bookshelves for many reasons. Slacktivist is reading Left Behind to do theological analysis on them. I own several books I probably would not have bought that were given to me as gifts and I feel reluctant to get rid of for that reason. Other people buy popular books to see what the hype is all about, and may not have even read them yet. If someone has a lot of self-help books, maybe they’re interested in them for critique, or comparison or systems, or they liked one or two of them but not the rest, or they found a little bit of each interesting but don’t have any fundamental problems that needed to be solved by any of them. One person might like Alexander McCall Smith because he writes about Scotland (or Africa), and another because he writes mysteries. I’ve read several of Larry Lessig’s books and I’m interested in the issues of digital intellectual property, but if I owned the books (I don’t, because I can’t casually buy every hardcover I want to read) it still wouldn’t mean I was a Larry Lessig groupie or agreed with him on everything. At one point in my life I owned a Michael Moore book. I kept it around for a while because he made some good points, but I still think Moore is off-base on a lot of his wilder rhetoric.

For me, it’s a lot more about what people think about the books they have, and if I saw someone with a Left Behind or Ann Coulter book, the first thing I would do personally wouldn’t be to run — it would be to ask whether they’d read them and why, what they thought of them, and all that.

I own a shelf of fantasy books (and more in boxes in my dad’s garage), some of which make up the whole of a series that I used to really, really love but which could legitimately be considered candy-ish and a little trite. But the thing is, I know they’re not high literature. They do, however, have a lot of good world-building, intriguing ideas about morality and government, and interesting characterization. And I’m not one of those people who goes on and on about a fantasy world in real life anymore, even if I was when I was 14. :) They’re not a big part of my life; the fact that I own the entire series is due to my habit of accumulating books and my old fondness for them. I own all the Harry Potter books in hardcover and the first one in three languages, but I’m a lot less interested in the Harry Potter world than some people who own them, and more so than others. I still read a fair bit of fantasy because many fictional worlds are interesting in themselves, and also because I don’t know many better ways of illuminating the way our reality shapes our beliefs and lifestyles than to read a book set in another reality.

If a guy ran away on seeing my book collection without asking me why I own the books I do, I can tell you we wouldn’t be well-matched, but it would not be because he doesn’t like fantasy, but because he’s hastily judgmental in a way that I dislike. Much as I dislike reading some of the content of these discussions, which often sound a lot like literary pissing contests. Oh — your dealbreaker is Dan Brown? Well mine is Jane Austen. He thinks men who read self-help books are wimps. She can’t believe anyone wouldn’t read fiction.

It’s not really about the books, it’s about why you own the books, why you read the books, and at that point it’s more about what you think anyway. Literary dealbreakers aren’t literary, they’re philosophical. And you can’t assume philosophy from simple ownership.

One of the books I got for Christmas is The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. It’s an interesting book, which helped illuminate for me some of the struggles I’ve had, mostly since returning from Scotland, when I left school and entered the “real world”. One of the problems I had when I got back is that I was afraid of grocery shopping. I knew that at the grocery store I would find not only a lot more different kinds of things than I had in the small Tesco in Scotland, but also totally different things. I’d have to start over from scratch figuring out what I wanted to buy and it would be a pain. Little did I know I was having my first problems with the paradox of choice.

As great as it may be that when I went to Target to buy a mop, I was able to choose from half an aisle’s worth of mops and got a nice wet/dry one with a washable microfiber pile, I did wonder — do we really need so many different kinds of mops in this world? Why did I spend several hours browsing the web to figure out which small form-factor digital camera I wanted, and come away feeling like I needed to be an expert critical reader to successfully navigate the world of Amazon reviews? And why on earth has it been so hard for me to find my place in the world? I don’t know that I have found it now, but having been settled in the same apartment and job for more than 18 months now, and involved in several activities, I feel a lot less lost than I did when I first came back. It’s nice to learn from the book that given the multiplicity of options it’s not surprising that I felt overwhelmed.

But it’s also important to find out how not to be, because choice isn’t going away. Each of us cares about some things, so the choices multiply. Some people care a lot about mops. I don’t, so it’s probably more important that I grab a mop that looks okay to me and not worry about it. Some people don’t care a lot about cameras so maybe they should just buy the one that their friend bought that they like the look of, but it probably is worth it for me to invest some time into that decision — albeit perhaps not as much as I eventually did, although I am quite happy with my new Fuji Finepix F50fd. It’s nice that the book provides practical and well-described ways of dealing with the onslaught.