California has a special election this year, and I’m following my routine of discussing my choices, with the intent of normalizing the voting process. It won’t be too long this time, because there’s just one proposition. Well, there’s also a local measure, but I tend not to discuss those.
Proposition 50: Yes
This is pro-gerrymandering legislation, and counterintuitively, I’m in favor of it!
The Fifth Head of Cerberus, by Gene Wolfe is a work of anticolonialist science-fiction published in 1972. Personally, I am suspicious of anti-colonialist fiction of that age. Books may inadvertently take on certain colonialist assumptions and perspectives even while attempting to reject others. (Of course, we continue to do this today.) I was interested to see how Gene Wolfe’s first major book fared.
The book is structured as three novellas taking place in the same universe. There is a pair of twin planets, Saint Anne and Saint Croix, colonized by humans a few generations ago. It’s said that there was an indigenous population on Saint Anne (the Annese). However, there is barely any trace of them left. What’s there is veiled by layers of folklore, hearsay, and charlatanry.
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I just came back from the No Kings protest. Last time, we went to the San Francisco protest, which was the largest crowd I’ve ever seen. This time, we went to a more local protest. Every one of the suburbs seems to have its own separate one. Our resistance is fractal.
Where the San Francisco protest blocked off a whole street for a mile and a half, the Fremont protest occupied the sidewalks for about 5 blocks. I’d estimate there were several hundred people. You could stand at a corner and basically stay stationary the whole time, but we walked back and forth several times. Because we weren’t blocking the road, cars were driving past us, and constantly honking in support.
Like before, we brought our big US flag. My husband wore a shirt with a rainbow US flag, and I borrowed one of his shirts that said “Make Treason Wrong Again”. We met up with another friend and took the opportunity to socialize–not just talking about politics, but also the usual.
All sorts of signs, ranging from the simple “NO 👑”, down to more specific fuck-yous to ICE or RFK Jr. There was not one but two bands–one small brass band, and one saxaphone quartet.
If you google “how to prepare for a protest”, I think the advice is overly cautious, preparing for the worst. But the median protest is entirely safe. I recommend bringing a bottle of water, sun tan lotion, and a friend. These protests are an environment of joyful resistance. People are angry, but there’s an inherent optimism in the activity, seeing all the popular opposition. I fully recommend participating.
It’s said that the world is made of stories. But, if that were true, why is translating a personal experience into a story so lossy? Invariably, you must choose where the story starts and ends, which pieces of context to include or exclude, which events to highlight as important. You must choose the “moral” of the story, or lack thereof. You must adjust the story based on who you tell it to (unless, you know, you’re a bad storyteller). If you want your story to be 100% objective and accurate, my advice is don’t tell a story at all; just live it, and then your life will be 100% accurate to itself.
In atheist circles, we occasionally circulate deconversion stories. They’re probably most common among people who recently left religion, and then after enough time people stop caring so much any more. I wrote a deconversion story back in 2009, so long ago that I don’t even remember it. It’s not a story I need to tell over and over, even if it would be new to most readers. But I might still tell it occasionally, perhaps with different goals in mind than I had back then.
What sort of goals do we have when telling a deconversion story?
My video game, Moon Garden Optimizer, just released a demo on Steam. If you’ve already tried previous versions, it’s not new. Otherwise… try it! Looking forward to a full release soon.
The Ace Journal Club this month talked about global ace solidarity. It’s a very good discussion of how queer activists around the world can support each other, as well as the specter of cultural imperialism. Great article, although maybe I’m biased because the article praises a blog series that I ran ten years ago.
The Many Schools of the Rationality Debate | A Failure to Disagree – This article discusses several different stances in the “rationality debate” in psychology. There’s the classical view of decision-making that assumes people are following economic decision theory. Then there’s the idea that people follow heuristics which cause them to be biased. There’s the “Fast and Frugal” view which points out that heuristics are often rational. It is rationally incorrect to calculate the exact trajectory of a ball in order to catch it; you’ve already failed to catch the ball at that point. The author advocates a fourth school of thought, which is based more on empirical study of how experts really make decisions.
For all that skeptics have discussed rationality and tried to advocate good epistemological practices, they largely stopped at the heuristics and biases viewpoint. Nobody ever talked about computational costs or its implications on best epistemological practices.
2nd Brillouin Zone of the fcc Structure, designed by me
So let’s talk about photo organization. I have 13 years of origami photos, and every month on this blog I select one to share. How do I avoid publishing the same photo more than once? Well I have a primitive but effective method. I have one folder of unposted photos, and another folder of posted photos. Whenever I post one, I move it from one folder to the other.