| Not everyone uses our calendar but most have a word for December |
[Dec. 17th, 2009|08:17 am] |
Clarification / correction - when I ask "can you read" in the poll (which of course I cannot edit now) I meant "can you see the letters clearly", not "can you read and comprehend"!!!
Poll #1500085
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 43Which of these various languages can you read? (The word in question is, I think, the word for December in the most widely spoken language using that alphabet - so no Farsi, Urdu, Marathi, Ukrainian or Yiddish I'm afraid)
For those languages marked with asterisks, I couldn't find or didn't like the word for 'December' so used 'Christmas' instead.
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| Livejournal v Dreamwidth |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|09:21 am] |
Musing a bit more on yesterday's kerfuffle, I think Livejournal come out of it rather well and Dreamwidth rather badly.
Livejournal's senior manager responded to me with the words "this was a mistake" and assured me that the proposed change was not being implemented. Their Customer Care folks then followed up with an explicit statement that "We understand that gender is not binary, and intend to respect that understanding for our users." That seems to me entirely satisfactory. Someone wrote something which did not suit the organisation for which they work, and it is therefore not being used. In the public policy environment where I work, that happens all the time, particularly if (as I suspect here) there are people of varying linguistic and cultural backgrounds involved. Indeed, what is unusual here is the level of transparency at the drafting stage - a rather courageous approach for which one sometimes (as in this case) pays a price.
The whole kerfuffle began with a post by one of Dreamwidth's co-owners, a former Livejournal staffer, which inaccurately presented the coding change as a done deal, an irreversible decision. You will note also that in the comments on yesterday's post, a Dreamwidth staffer accuses Livejournal of lying to me, without evidence; and also makes the shocking assertion that Livejournal has been listening to its users, as if this were in some way outrageous.
Dreamwidth have gained a number of extra customers from Livejournal out of all this, based on a report from their own leadership which turns out not to be true, with the flames of this controversy being further deliberately fanned by their own staff even after Livejournal had resolved it. It is very easy to whip up fears of oppression among people who experience it regularly. It is more difficult in such circumstances to admit that you were wrong. I don't think this affair looks very good for a company which was supposed to represent a more ethical approach to the business of blogging.
I am also perturbed by comments I have seen here and there about this somehow being the fault of the Russians, including the fact that the senior Livejournal manager who responded to me and to many others does not write perfect English and has a foreign name (which looks Ukrainian rather than Russian to me, but what do I know). Really, folks, get a grip. You have no idea how privileged you are to be native speakers of the world's main language of communication. In any case I seem to remember that the frequency of Livejournal screwups was much greater, and that they were handled far more ineptly, when it was owned by Americans. SUP are running a tighter ship; the President of Russia is one of their customers.
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| Four counties, rather than six? |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|04:06 am] |
An occasional correspondent emails me to ask about this passage from the memoirs of H.H. Asquith, the British prime minister, of 24 July 1914 (which I have transcribed on my website: Later we had a meeting at Downing Street - Redmond [the Irish Nationalist leader], Dillon [Redmond's deputy], Ll[oyd] G[eorge], Birrell and I. I told them that I must go on with the Amending Bill, without the time limit: to which, after a good deal of demur, the Irishmen reluctantly agreed.' I should explain that for some enthusiasts of Irish history, rerunning the partition of the island is a favourite pastime, and the most significant point of departure is the conference held at Buckingham Palace in July 1914, to try to get agreement on what parts of Ulster should be excluded from the jurisdiction of an autonomous Home Rule government in Ireland. Unionists wanted the permanent exclusion of all nine counties of Ulster; Nationalists were prepared to accept the temporary exclusion of the four counties with Protestant majorities. Asquith, as prime minister, rapidly settled on the six-county unit we have today as the obvious compromise, largely because the Unionists indicated that they too would settle for it. But the passage above indicates that on the day the negotiations broke down, Asquith was instead heading for "county option" the holding of referendums in each county. My correspondent asks: As I read this, Redmond and Dillon were prepared to agree to 'County Option' permanently, rather than for only 6 years. I think that, if implemented, this would have led to a 4-county Northern Ireland. It does seem strange that this concession was not revisited when Lloyd George carried out his negotiations in 1916 [when he was asked to find a way of implementing Irish Home Rule immediately after the Easter Rising, but failed]. I would be interested in any comments you might have. My reply:
I think it's pretty clear that Carson et al - the Unionists in Ulster - were prepared to go to civil war - which they would have won - rather than give up Tyrone and Fermanagh. So Asquith would have been unable to sell such a deal to them and the British Conservatives in 1914. In any case I wonder how solid Redmond and Dillon's agreement was - I don't read it as more than assent that Asquith should try this course, but they had probably made the same calculation as I do above, ie that it would not fly with the Unionists. Having said that, of course your interpretation may be correct; there was a Nationalist delusion that any Northern Ireland state of any size would be economically unviable and would wither away. (Similar arguments were successfully used in Cyprus in the 2004 referendum campaign, but in both cases they proved incorrect.)
To be honest I think it was a lucky escape for all of us. The experience of such referendums elsewhere has not been happy. The very prospect of the vote would have been a spark for horrible violence, probably not restricted to Fermanagh and Tyrone. Since the UVF were better prepared than the Nationalists or the British Army in 1914, a referendum proposal would certainly have triggered mass displacements of Catholics by Loyalists from all over what would probably have become the Six (or Five and a Half) counties. The Upper Silesia plebiscite of 1921 shows what can happen. The Unionists had no interest in allowing due process to separate Tyrone and Fermanagh from the other four counties. The border as it was established reflected the balance of potential coercive force at the time it was drawn - as do most borders.
You also ask about 1916. Lloyd George was after a quick fix, and holding six county option referenda in the middle of a war is not a quick fix. He needed something that the leaders could agree to, and implement, right away. I imagine that if he had succeeded, there would have been no elections until after the war was over but Redmond would have been put immediately in charge of a 26-county administration of some kind.
That was my reply to my correspondent. The one point I should have added, of course, is that Asquith was rather prone to changing his mind, and what he thought he would do on 24 July might well have been a different matter even without the distraction of war breaking out in Europe.
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| Livejournal *doesn't* screw up shock |
[Dec. 15th, 2009|09:00 am] |
Like a number of you, I imagine, I woke this morning to find news of the latest livejournal screwup in several places on my friends list. Users, we were told, were henceforth to be forced to specify their gender as either "male" or "female", with no allowance for those who do not want to be identified by gender, for shared accounts, for robots or for Elder Gods. Shocked by this news, I did a post of my own, and emailed one of the higher-ups at LJ to register my dissatisfaction. I got this reply: thank you for your feedback.
However, the code update that you refer to is not live and did not have any chance to go live. That was a beta release, we always push code to beta to see if everything works correctly. In many cases it does not and we either fix bugs or pull the code from the final release plan.
We were going to add a gender field to the sign up user flow, which is fine, but by mistake it became a mandatory "female/male" field for everyone. This is why this is not going live. And this is what beta releases are for, to see problems and solve them before any user faces a problem.
I would appreciate if you share this information with your friends that are also concerned. I am sorry that you were misinformed. The source of the original story was here, which is an entry on the Dreamwidth account of a former Livejournal employee who is one of the founders of Dreamwidth, which is in direct competition with Livejournal for customers. Just sayin'.
Edited to add: I also received this response from LJ's feedback team: Thank you for taking the time to contact us with your concerns. We understand that gender is not binary, and intend to respect that understanding for our users.
At this time, the code you reference is not live on the site, and will not become so in the future. We know that you, and many other users, have serious concerns about any requirement to specify gender, so we'd like to take a moment to explain events and our position further.
The intention of this code was to change the sign-up process to include a field for the selection of gender; that the code would completely disable the "Unspecified" option at the same time was deemed unacceptable. While the code in question had gone to our beta (testing) server, it had not gone to our production server, and will not do so due to this problem. Furthermore, we'd like to clarify that code posted to the changelog community is not always final, as such code must then go through the beta testing process and can often be changed before actual implementation.
Additionally, some erroneous information has been spread regarding the potential public display of the gender field. We would like to clarify that gender is not currently publicly displayed on the profile, nor anywhere else on the site, and there are no plans to change this behavior.
Regards,
LiveJournal Community Care Team See also sensible contributions from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) uitlander in comments below. |
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| The Sowerby resonance |
[Dec. 15th, 2009|04:14 am] |
I've been encountering a lot of fictional people called Sowerby lately. The Sowerby family - Martha, Dickon, and their unnamed mother and ten siblings - play a large role in The Secret Garden. Farther south, Mrs Sowerby is one of a number of characters living in Stockbridge played by Susan Brown in Plague of the Daleks the latest Big Finish audio in their main Doctor Who series. And farther south again, I'm also reading Trollope's Framley Parsonage, where there is a villainous Sowerby who I hope will come to a sticky end.
I don't think I've ever met anyone of that name in real life. |
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| Some jars are harder than others to open... |
[Dec. 13th, 2009|10:40 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Tubeway Army's Praying To The Aliens... | ] |
Amazing, the year nearly over and so quickly it seems. Got L. hooked up with all this neat stuff, and still gotta pick up all kinda sweets and various trinkets. Got L. the X-mas tree today from the old guy's lot. No 1930s delicate glass ornaments, no little glass psychedelic wonderland, nothing breakable, young cats and all. Plastic that looks like glass, candy canes, stars and snowflakes. Kids like Christmas. Eddie Dingle likes bread. I hate plastics.
Still all snotty and congested, as everyone is. Gonna squat heavy tomorrow as if my life depends on it. Wednesday, Friday and all the little missing things in between more or less all but wasted efforts. I was so wheezy and congested that I couldn't even properly sleep in, all rattling and feeling unhealthy, unclean and dysfunctional as a human being. I'm getting fat again, but my strength is up and my spine isn't much of an issue. Been playing some bass everyday, and some guitar here and there with just my fingers. Wrote some quiet songs.
Got this amazing book in the library stash on old bungalows that makes me sick in a few instances. Quarter sawn oak and a few amazing mantles. Amazing houses. Also gonna get around to reading Osamu Dazai. It's a drag at the workplace during lunch, as it's too cold to sit outside and read, smoke and generally lose myself for an hour each day. There are too many people around inside, too much noise and movement. It's so grey and gloomy and perfect other than the temperature.
End.Transmission.From The Land Of Me! I Disconnect From You</i>... |
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| Gibbon Chapter XII |
[Dec. 14th, 2009|12:05 am] |
-
Ten years in which at least five emperors reign (Tacitus, Probus, Carus, Carinus and Numerian), with the usual litany of war and murder, though in fairness most of them are relatively good generals and administrators. But we finish with the ascent of Diocletian, of whom we will hear more.
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| December Books 4) The Jesuits, by Jonathan Wright |
[Dec. 13th, 2009|02:47 pm] |
This is not a terribly impressive book. It is a more or less chronological account of details of history featuring the Jesuits, with no deep analysis and rather few hard facts - nothing at all to explain their internal structure, miserably brief accounts of how they were founded in 1534 and re-established in 1814. Wright is slightly better on the various political controversies that Jesuits have been involved in, though even here his analysis basically amounts to there being two sides of the story. He is good on the Jesuits' contribution to science. He is wholly inadequate on their contribution to colonialism. I can't really recommend this book.
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| Paul McGann on Susan and the Doctor |
[Dec. 13th, 2009|09:52 am] |
I found this interesting discussion between Paul McGann and one of the Big finish team (not good at recognising voices and he doesn't introduce himself) in the bonus track to "An Earthly Child", the new Big Finish play with him as the Eighth Doctor and Carole Ann Ford reprising Susan. (download extract here): ( transcript ) Funny that McGann, though obviously very aware of Hartnell's Doctor, had never before heard the Susan parts of the back story. But I think he and the other guy successfully identify why the Doctor has never since been portrayed as having a family.
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| AKICILJ |
[Dec. 12th, 2009|08:46 pm] |
What is the difference, if any, between overalls and dungarees?
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| 2009 memes I: the first post of each month |
[Dec. 12th, 2009|09:22 am] |
This is the simplest of the end-of-year memes: post the first sentence of your first post for each month of the year. I add a short explanation though this is not traditional.
January: We had a rather quiet New Year's Eve last night. A post about the turn of the year.
February: A story of a young boy who becomes involved in a secret romance - some similarity with McEwan's Atonement, though the outcome is quite different. My review of The Go-Between, by L.P. Hartley.
March: Big Finish have returned to an old theme in Who: the search for the Key to Time, as originally carried out by the Fourth Doctor and his Time Lady companion Romana in 1978. Review of three Doctor Who audio plays.
April: Not mine, but papersky's of Bujold, starting here, and kate_nepveu's of The Lord of the Rings, starting here. Two series of Tor.com blog entries about rereading great sf/fantasy.
May: Dreamwidth: nwhyte. My little-used Dreamwidth account.
June: When you see the word "pasties", do you think of: food? nipples? both? neither? One of my occasional linguistic polls.
July: Locked entry about an encounter with a weird person.
August: AP piece about my work - would be interested to know if it is in the print as well as the on-line version of the New York Times: (link). Big media story about my job.
September: Okay Then: Health Care : Whatever. My link to Scalzi.
October: Pathetic Motorways. My link to another cool site.
November: Sit down for breakfast. Local vegetation by the Nile.
December: More often than not, I complete the last leg of my morning commute by train, arriving at the railway station at Brussel/Bruxelles-Schuman, which is within a hop, skip and jump of my office. forensic railway archæology.
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| Is maith é sin! |
[Dec. 10th, 2009|06:52 pm] |
Well, there's a bit of etymology I had never considered: that the usage of "smashin'!" in English to mean "that's very good!" originates from the Irish phrase "is maith é sin!" which has the same pronunciation and meaning. Glorious.
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| December Books 3) Decalog, edited by Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker |
[Dec. 7th, 2009|06:48 pm] |
Surprising to read that this was the very first anthology of Doctor Who short stories, published back in 1994 (other than the various annuals and fan publications). There is a supposed framing narrative of the Seventh Doctor visiting a California psychic to get readings of objects from his pockets, thus providing the stories, but it is not quite necessary enough to be convincing. Some contributors have since gone on to great things; some have disappeared completely. My favourite was Jim Mortimore's "The Book of Shadows", about Barbara Wright marrying one of Alexander the Great's generals and ruling Egypt - particularly interesting to come to this so soon after Farewell Great Macedon which has a very similar theme. Also I gave a cheer for David Auger's "The Golden Door" which features Dodo, though it is not very special otherwise. Hoping to read a few more Who anthologies rather than novels this month - you have been warned.
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 7th, 2009|02:59 am] |
thick as hardened snot! blade the paper! color the water! cold my eyes! pale the heart! un collect the data! save the muse! give her milk from her teats! |
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| SAMUI! |
[Dec. 6th, 2009|03:26 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Tamio Okuda's イナビカリ... | ] |
So cold, the hands are dry and sore and nothing's better than cursing this crumbling edifice with all it's drafts and cold chills. I love an old house, but only in gentle temperatures.
Ms Miles Low is doing well, toothless and all. She had a bathe today and was forced out temporarily into the land with the rest of Kappa Alpha Tau. I'll let her hide up in the back of the house for at least a few more days. I can tell she still doesn't feel well, but she was quite pleased to spend all that time wrapped up in a towel and propped up in T.'s lap.
I'm so tired, for no reason other than the cold weather. Being holed up indoors is a drag, but all of our running around this afternoon was even more unpleasant. I was very impressed with the stairwells of the old State House, though. But yea, cold weather makes me not the least bit eager to do anything out of doors.
End.Transmission.From The Land Of Arctic Hell Amidst The Gentle Yet Frostbitten Winds. |
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| Pronunciation poll |
[Dec. 6th, 2009|10:39 am] |
Poll #1495214
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 138How do you pronounce the consonant in the middle of the word "Asia", when speaking English?
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