Now it’s happening among feminist professors of literature

cn: sexual harassment

I saw a New York Times article titled “What Happens to #MeToo When a Feminist is Accused?” The answer, it turns out, is that academics close ranks and defend their own.

The article is about an NYU professor of literature, Avital Ronell, who was found by a Title IX investigation to have sexually harassed a former grad student, Nimrod Reitman. Some professors circulated a letter in support of Ronell, and a draft of the letter leaked. The letter appears to take the ludicrous position that Ronell should be judged on the quality of her scholarship, rather than the substance of the investigation.

The kicker is that the first signatory of the letter is Judith Butler.

Now I did a bit of research, and I found a small mitigating factor that I thought I should mention first before going into how terrible this is. Apparently, the signatories of the letter were given false information about the investigation. There was another leak of the letter soliciting professors for signatures in defense of Ronell. Signatories were told that Ronell had undergone a long investigation, which had cleared her of sexual harassment, and was moving on to non-sexual harassment charges. Ronell was apparently worried that she would be fired even if found innocent, and the letter was intended to support her under those circumstances.

One can hope that Judith Butler et al. will retract their defense of Ronell once they learn the findings of the investigation. But even if they do, for shame. These professors should know better than to lend their support to some professor under investigation for sexual harassment, when they know little about the case.

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I tried microtonal music and liked it

The pitch of a note is determined by its frequency, and frequency can vary within a continuous spectrum. And yet, in the western music tradition, we only use frequencies with discrete values. That’s not a bad thing, but it implies a whole world of possibilities not explored. Microtonal music, also known as xenharmonic music, sets out to make use of the unused frequencies.

I recently tried listening to a lot of microtonal music, because I discovered that you can find lots of it through the microtonal tag on Bandcamp. Sure, a lot of it isn’t very good because anyone can put music on Bandcamp, but there were enough gems that I continued to peruse the tag. I’ll share just two examples. First, I selected Brendan Byrnes, because I think his music has the most pop appeal, while also being unapologetically microtonal.

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Link Roundup: August 2018

In Bob We Trust – On “Nannette” and the state of comedy (video) – Hannah Gadsby has a comedy special available on Netflix, which I saw recommended several times by different people.  But this video is the one that finally persuaded me to watch it, because Bob described it as an anti-comedy.  Well, I hate stand-up comedy, and I like deconstruction, so if there was ever a comedy special that I’d want to watch, this sounded like the one.

I thought it was good, but calling it an anti-comedy might be a bit of an exaggeration.  I thought there were plenty of jokes and laughs.  Perhaps someone who actually likes stand-up comedy might feel the number of laughs per minute is a bit low, but I just can’t see it that way myself.

On Laziness – Ozy talks about the concept of laziness, and why it’s a terrible idea.  When people lack motivation, there must be a reason for that, and calling it laziness is a way of halting any inquiry into the causes, and unhelpfully turning it into a moral issue.  Nonetheless, laziness is still a compelling concept that I probably use with some frequency myself.  I think some parallels could be drawn with the way that “stupid” is used as an insult.  We know that there’s nothing morally wrong with having less cognitive ability, and yet “stupid” is still a compelling insult that people have difficulty avoiding even when they understand it’s wrong.

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Explaining the light mill

 

A crookes radiometer, as described in the text

Image source: Wikipedia

The light mill, also known as the Crookes radiometer, is a little curiosity that can be found in stores at science museums, or in the offices of physics professors. It consists of four vanes, each painted white on one side, and black on the other. The vanes are placed in a bulb, under partial vacuum. When you shine light on the radiometer, the vanes spin around, with the white sides facing forward (counter-clockwise in the above image). A demonstration is shown in the video below.

Supposedly, the Crookes radiometer is an educational tool, but I can’t for the life of me determine what lesson it’s supposed to teach. Because if you ask how it works, the correct explanation is far beyond the ability for most people to understand. I have a Ph.D. in physics, and I still couldn’t understand it! There are numerous internet sources that identify “thermal transpiration” as the correct explanation, but fail to explain what that means or why it happens. So instead I found explanations in scientific literature,1 and now I will share the explanation with you.

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In which I destroy marriage

Attentive readers may have noticed a while ago when I started referring to my robot boyfriend as my robot fiancé. As I’ve told various people, we’ve been cohabiting for years, so we’re functionally already married. But after graduating, getting legally married has become a good financial decision, for two reasons.

First, it lowers our taxes. The general principle is that marriage most benefits couples where one partner has much higher income than the other.1 Since I’ve been unemployed for at least the first half of 2018, marriage very likely benefits us this year.

Second, it lets me buy health insurance through my partner’s employer. This is fairly significant, because I regularly take medication for asthma, and this stuff is surprisingly expensive without insurance coverage. Obamacare guarantees that I at least have the option to buy healthcare, but as I found out when I looked at insurance plans last December, the options aren’t nearly as good as what you can get through employers or universities.

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Origami: Toroidal Cube

 

Toroidal cube

Toroidal Cube, a design by me

In case it’s not clear what’s going on in the photo, the model is in the shape of a cube, and we are looking at it directly onto one of the vertices.  However, the vertex has been cut out, and there is a triangular hole in its place.  There is also a triangular hole on the opposite end, so that you can see directly through the cube.  The triangles aren’t really triangles, but they look triangular from just the right perspective.

Today’s model was inspired by the regular toroid.  You may have heard of a torus, which is the shape of a donut, or a mug.  A toroidal polyhedron (aka a toroid) is a polyhedron which is also a torus.  A regular toroid is a toroidal polyhedron where each face has the same number of sides, and each vertex connects the same number of edges.

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Great classics

I consider myself very “anti-classics”. Which is to say that whenever someone praises the great “classics” of literature, such as Shakespeare, or Tolkien, or the Bible, I have a negative gut reaction. And it’s not so much that I think classics are bad, if only it were it so simple to explain. Some classics are good, some are bad–all as a matter of subjective preference–and to call something a “classic” is simply no recommendation in my eyes.

I have had difficulty translating these thoughts to ideas, and ideas to words. But it recently came up when I went with a group to see a small stage production of Hamlet, and we also had some conversations afterwards. So I’m sharing some of my thoughts on Hamlet and Shakespeare to illustrate my viewpoint.

To be clear, we all enjoyed the play. I hadn’t seen Hamlet since my high school put on a musical version of it themed on Queen, so it was nice to see it again, now with a more developed taste in literature. To the extent I complain about any aspects of the play, I have to say there’s a special appeal in having something to complain about, so it should not be taken as evidence of dislike.

By merit or by accident?

After we watched the play, someone in our group wondered aloud how Hamlet became so great a classic. In response, some of us speculated that it was a historical accident. These things happen! For example, the reason the Mona Lisa is so famous is because it was stolen (link is to video). For the two years it was missing, the media talked up the Mona Lisa as particularly great art–with textual descriptions rather than photos. After its recovery, its fame was self-perpetuating.

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