Archive for Uncategorized

The Readercon Thing

I’m sure that most people on my friends lists are already aware of the sexual harassment incident at Readercon, but here’s my attempt at a link round-up:

The key links:

Other link collections:

Reactions:

July 17th

July 18th

July 20th

July 25th

July 26th

  • Liz Henry: “Readercon creeper”. I think that this post is the first (chronological) post that publicly identifies the person under discussion as René Walling.

July 27th:
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The Dark Knight versus Occupy Gotham

My friend, sabotabby, perfectly captures my apprehension about The Dark Knight Rises. But spoilers out the wazoo, so you’ve been warned.

What If…?

What if they rebooted a movie franchise and nobody came?

Talking directly about a class struggle

I frikkin’ love this:

Dark Knight Rises?

Is anyone planning a Dark Knight Rises outing next weekend that I can glom on to?

Kalora!

I mentioned this over on Google+, but I’m still pretty excited about it, so I’m gonna mention it here, too.

A while ago, I encountered the work of a comic artist named Dave Wachter — I particularly love the stuff he does with ink wash. So I decided to commission a piece from him. I ended up asking him to use a coupl’a mostly-forgotten WWII characters (who’ve fallen into the public domain): Marvelo and his arch-nemisis, Ramun. Dave also threw in Ramun’s ape sidekick, Edpo. I thought the end-result was quite striking:

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Thought for the Day

I cannot hide my anger to spare your guilt, nor your hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.

– Audre Lorde from the essay “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” – in the text Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde

My THAC-colleague, Ajamu, had this in his sig file for an email he sent me. Ajamu often has lengthy quotations in his sig, and I often skim over them, but I’m glad I read this one fully because it communicates something in different words that I have heard many times over the last few years.

Elizabeth May on Bev Oda’s departure

I can’t and won’t explain or defend the $16 orange juice or the limo, but why people focus on that and not the fact that every single day Stephen Harper moves within Ottawa with a motorcade of two black sedans (front and rear) with three smoky-glassed, bullet proof SUVs in between — FIVE vehicles — is beyond me. The reality of our outrage levels are such that $16 orange juice grabs headlines and $20 million a year on the PM’s personal security (more than double previous PMs) rolls right by without notice. It’s the way people freak out over a few pennies increase on a litre of gasoline, but, without a whimper, purchase completely unnecessary bottled water at a higher price per litre than gas. It’s just one of those human nature things that defy rational explanation.

Where I think we need to give our collective head a shake (and here I am looking directly at the national news media reporters) is the forgery of the KAIROS approval documents. The story line from the mainstream press seems to be that Stephen Harper has been putting up with a Minister who makes mistakes and gets into trouble. The inserted “NOT” in the KAIROS document gets remembered as a mistake by Oda for which Stephen Harper defended her.

[…] The very most logical conclusion of the train of events is that Bev Oda approved KAIROS funding and someone higher up, someone in the Prime Minister’s Office being the most likely suspect, ordered the Minister’s approval be reversed — resulting in the crude forgery. Harper has not been covering for Oda. She was covering for him. And, in true form, he just threw her under the bus.

– Elizabeth May, “Defending Bev Oda – but not for the reasons you think”, rabble.ca

An SVG Experiment

How well does SVG work in WordPress? Here’s some SVG here:

Are you using IE? And an old version of IE at that? IE doesn’t support SVG, which is one of the reasons why I dislike it so much.

Hm. It looks like embedding is my best bet.

What’s Newsworthy?

I developed and manage a web site that deals with health care standards. One of the features that I threw in to the site was the ability to fetch health-related news articles from a handful of news sources, so that there’s a rolling “top stories” section.

The weird part is that I also extract keywords from the site — usually keywords that the original news source originally identified. And I have a tag cloud that shows me the relative importance of those keywords over the last three months.

As of today, I’m currently seeing the following top keywords:

  • cancer
  • children
  • doctors
  • drugs
  • health care
  • medicine
  • mental health
  • obesity
  • ontario
  • research
  • workout

There’s a part of me that’s just boggled that obesity is on this list and, say, HIV isn’t.