karmag | Recent Entries

Catching up on the Wikileaks cables today. (You may have already seen this, but I just had to share.)

This report of a wedding in Dagestan in 2006 is great reading.

Some snippets:

Dagestani weddings are serious business: a forum for showing respect, fealty and alliance among families; the bride and groom themselves are little more than showpieces.

Gadzhi's Kaspiysk summer house is an enormous structure on the shore of the Caspian, essentially a huge circular reception room -- much like a large restaurant -- attached to a 40-meter high green airport tower on columns, accessible only by elevator, with a couple of bedrooms, a reception room, and a grotto whose glass floor was the roof of a huge fish tank.

Though Gadzhi's house was not the venue for the main wedding reception, he ensured that all his guests were constantly plied with food and drink. The cooks seemed to keep whole sheep and whole cows boiling in a cauldron somewhere day and night, dumping disjointed fragments of the carcass on the tables whenever someone entered the room.

Both Gadzhi and Ramzan showered the dancing children with hundred dollar bills; the dancers probably picked upwards of USD 5000 off the cobblestones. Gadzhi told us later that Ramzan had brought the happy couple "a five kilo lump of gold" as his wedding present.

And so on. You really should the whole thing.

(And this Guardian article refers to it and puts it into some context, but doesn't really improve on the story.)

"Hello. My name is karmag and I'm a news junkie. I recently fell off the wagon again..."

It almost seems like "junkie" is an appropriate term sometimes. I started writing an entry about Wikileaks the day before yesterday, when it all started, but never got around to finishing and posting it. It had a couple of phrases like "I guess this means I won't be leaving my bunker for days" that don't seem quite as obviously ridiculous now, after two days of sitting in front of The Guardian's live coverage obsessively reloading the page.

It's mostly just news hunger and distraction for me, I guess, but now and then something comes up that makes me stop and think. Like this thing I just read:

US officials tried to influence Spanish prosecutors and government officials to head off court investigations into Guantánamo Bay torture allegations, secret CIA "extraordinary rendition" flights and the killing of a Spanish journalist by US troops in Iraq, according to secret US diplomatic cables.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that political concerns trump laws, but seeing it being out there and reported on by a major news organization still makes it seem different somehow.

(And at the same time, some politicians in the US – mostly Republicans, it seems – are shouting over each other about how the leaks are "treason", how Wikileaks is a "terrorist organization" and pretty much saying outright that its public figurehead/spokesperson Julian Assange should have the worst things imaginable happen to him. What the hell?)

So the world still sucks, and the analogy holds: obsessively reading the news feeds some need but makes me feel awful in the long run. Great. I need a new addiction. Porn maybe? Or Minecraft?

But first, I'll just go check the live reporting one more time.

Disclaimer: I haven't been keeping up on Diaspora much at all, neither the state of the code nor what audience they're going for. It's probably better to read this as more of general ramblings on the topic of gender, identity, and how you code for the mess that results. And I can't claim any expertise on neither What Gender Is, nor The One True and Right Way To Do Things, so please keep that in mind – I'm not here to force my views on anyone. (as if I even could)

(What I can claim, though, is having a tendency to overthink things, and wanting to get things right.)

So, I saw that emceeaich posted a link about a developer getting out of the Diaspora project over a gender input UI change.

This tickled my interest, I read the post and the comments, saw this post by the developer responsible for the change, and following the trail from there, this great post on the topic, by someone who has been thinking about this sort of thing for some time.

And I couldn't seem to stop thinking about it. I closed the tabs, went for a walk, did some shopping, and couldn't get it out of my head. "Is a free-form text field really the best solution? How does that get stored? What about searching? What does Facebook do? What would I do?"

And so on. So I figured that since it's an interesting topic, I might as well latch on to it, rant a bit and stir up controversy so that I can get some page views and rake in the ad money. (Wait, I don't have ads here? Damn.) Okay, so just to get it out of my head then.

So, who is right here? My take: it's complicated.

This being Dreamwidth, I am guessing that many will agree that changing to a free-form text field for gender is a good thing. But I will disagree. (see also: stirring up controversy)

First of all, you have to know what it is that you are trying to accomplish when you ask for personal data like this. There are a bunch of potentially valid reasons to ask users for their data, such as targeting ads to those for whom they will be most relevant, enabling users to find people, restricting community memberships, or enabling site owners or users to communicate with some subset of people. And, of course, just letting people tell the world something about themselves.

There are likely many other reasons; those are only a few that came to mind. And not all apply at all times, of course.

Getting more specific, what is the reason for asking people about their gender when signing up? In this case, it's not for targeting ads – I can't see how that would be even remotely relevant or possible with something like Diaspora. That is in contrast with many other places on the web for which ad revenue is everything (and almost certainly the reason behind DeviantArt's recent dick move).

Restricting community membership? Maybe. But it's so easy to get around that it seems almost pointless. Searching on user data? That seems like a fairly reasonable thing to have though ("no, the Andrea I'm looking for is a guy!")^[1]; and telling the world I'll take as a given in social networking software.

Being able to adress people with the correct term ("X posted a new entry to her journal", etc) is another neat thing you can do, but is IMHO less important and isn't something that can always be made consistent across translations either^[2].

I basically see two options, given that "searching" and "telling" are the things I can realistically think of:

1: Drop-down, and a freeform description. Give a couple of default gender options; I'm thinking "Prefer not to tell", "Male", "Female" plus "It's complicated", giving people a small text entry field to give further details if they want to. Not a perfect solution by any means, but it might be good enough for helping search work better even when you're not 100% certain on how to spell a name^{[1, again]} – as long as most people choose to stick to the pre-defined options.

2: Don't ask at all. If you expect significant variation on the answers people give, from enough users, the benefit to search starts to disappear; and translating answers becomes more difficult, if not outright impossible. So just get rid of it. For telling the world there is always the possibility of having a larger "about me" field, which comes with the added benefit of letting everyone that wouldn't have used a free-form gender field tell what they think is important to know.

So. Is it really necessary to have someone's gender set apart as a separate item on their profile? A lot of the time, just the name will give you all you need to know after all. And if it's not obvious from the name, won't actions speak louder than pronouns? What if they don't want to tell at all? Is it even right to assume that there is a short and simple answer in the first place?

Yeah, I don't know either. But I know that at least I got all those words out of my head, for now.

Note 1: With fuzzy matching on names, it can quickly get really hard to find people if you get the spelling wrong. What if the guy I was searching for above wasn't named "Andrea" but "Andreas"? I don't have perfect hearing, you know. And I'm still getting 20 pages of women instead of the guy I met at the party.

Note 2: And as a side note, something approximating "X posted an entry to their journal" would be the natural way to put it in my own first language (which is not English). "Her" would be wrong. Other languages will have their own ideosyncracies, and adding more things to keep in sync over multiple translations doesn't seem like a good idea unless you really have to.

Haven't posted in a while, so I figured I'd surface briefly and wave my arms around a bit so that ... no, wait. That was in the university computer lab actually – the lights turned off after no movement was detected in the room for a while.

(I found myself surrounded by sudden darkness, apart from the glowing rectangle in front of me, quite a few times.)

Anyway, and speaking of light, this weekend was the one when daylight savings ends here in the EU, and we went from "sommartid" to "normaltid" (or "vintertid" which is what people actually call it); from CEST to good old CET.

I'm not a fan of daylight savings myself, and the older I get the less sense it makes. As a kid, it was just a pain – for no good reason I'd have to get up an hour earlier in the morning – but as an adult the idea is just absurd. If you take a step back from things and try to see it as if for the first time, in the an-alien-lands-on-the-Earth kind of way, what we do is more or less just pretending that the time is something else than what it actually is, except we organize to do it together, and because someone in charge tells us to.

Seen that way, it looks pretty kooky. Still, despite the inherent kookiness, almost everyone apparently does exactly this without ever reflecting about it much.

(But if that's not kooky enough, the Wikipedia article on the subject even mentions a few proposals for "permanent daylight savings", and even one for having the clocks one hour ahead in the winter and two hours ahead in summer. Argh.)

Up here at sixty degrees north, the seasonal differences in light are pretty extreme. Daylight savings does sort-of work, it does "give you extra daylight in the afternoon" in late spring and late summer, but in between it doesn't really get dark here at all for a couple of months, and what the hands on the wall clock say become less relevant. (On the opposite side of the year, people go to school and to work in the dark, and don't come back until after the sun has already set.)

There's less and less reason to observe daylight savings, in my opinion. I do see that it made sense back when industrialization and factory work set most of the daily routine for large parts of the population; you'd actually pretty much have one central (pretend) knob that you could turn to modify people's waking hours. Now, though, things are looking a bit different, at least from where I stand. Office work is the norm, and it has made it possible for a lot of people to have more flexible working hours. The pretend knob is less effective.

The biggest single thing that seems to still be on a fixed time has, for a while now, been TV – and even that is starting to lose its grip, with PVRs and bittorrent on one hand, making it possible to watch when you want, and with people spending more "entertainment time" not watching TV on the other. I don't have any actual numbers, but there was reports a few years ago that The Internet (that homogenous single thing; that hive of scum and villainy) has taken a decent bite out of TV watching here. And that was before Facebook.

So with fewer things keeping us nailed to a fixed schedule, I'm hoping people will start paying more attention to what goes on outside the window, and pay less attention to some increasingly arbitrary numbers on a dial or on a screen. Let's stop pretending.

And don't make the kids get up an hour earlier for no good reason.

I picked a name for this journal. It has to do with nothing in particular.

More specifically, it has to do with idling brains, and what they are doing when they are doing nothing in particular. Brought to my attention via this MetaFilter post, an article in the L.A. Times serves as my introduction to the subject that now has given this journal its name:

Until recently, scientists would have found little of interest in the purposeless, mind-wandering spaces between [actual tasks] — they were just the brain idling between meaningful activity.

But in the span of a few short years, they have instead come to view mental leisure as important, purposeful work — work that relies on a powerful and far-flung network of brain cells firing in unison.

Neuroscientists call it the "default mode network."

Default mode network? Yeah, I guess that's something that gets a lot of exercise in my case. Welcome, new name for an old familiar thing.

Well OK, it really is a bit more complicated than slacking off or letting your mind wander; this default mode network thing apparently is vital for our sense of self, but it was just to good a silly connection not to mention.

(The LAT article is worth reading in full, despite the brief forays into the "Topic-at-hand A may one day help treat relevant-condition B, C, and D" standard format.)

I've been hacking JavaScript the last few days, and a while ago it just struck me how natural using regular expressions has become, for so many things. (And it even mostly works!)

Doesn't seem like long ago at all when I could barely pull out the exclamation mark from "Hello, world!" without poring over man pages and lots of trial-and-error, and now it all pretty much comes naturally. It's as if I've transformed into that guy that suddenly stands up and shouts "Stand back, I'm going to try ~~Science~~ Regular Expressions!". When did that happen?

Kind of makes you wonder what else is out there that could solve all sorts of problems – if you only knew about it.

I've been thinking on and off of getting my own place to blog at for a while. Never happened though, partly because of laziness and partly because I wasn't sure I really had anything worth sharing. At the same time, I've been shooting off emails with random thoughts at to my friends, so maybe there is something that wants to get out after all.

Yesterday I saw Dreamwidth being mentioned on Metafilter in a thread about Vox being shut down. People talked about LJ in the comments, specifically about how they're supposedly losing users, and all that they have been doing wrong lately, and DW was mentioned as a less sucky alternative.

That was while having one of the aforementioned thoughts bouncing around in my head, so I figured I might as well sign up here. For some reason I had been thinking of LiveJournal as a place to blog recently too; it seemed like an interesting and different alternative to Blogger, Wordpress and the other usual suspects, and one that might work for random thoughts and observations.

But I've never really read much from people on LJ, apart from when someone outside the LJ-o-sphere linked to something interesting. So I'm not one of the 99% of all users who came here from there, and most of what I've heard about the place is "teen angst and slash". (Sorry about the stereotyping, everyone.) So why am I crashing this party then?

What convinced me to sign up here was, I think, the pretty reasonable policies of this place, the fact that the people in charge seem to care about privacy, and the fact that it's being run for its users and not for advertisers. (You know, "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.".) And I like that sort of thing; privacy that is, not being sold, so here I am. Hello, Dreamwidth.

Who am I? Well, some random geek. If I manage to find out more than that myself, I'll let you all know.

And what was that random thing I wanted to say in the first place? No idea. Gone now. But there will no doubt be other things, random or slightly less so.