If Superman had a cat…

There’s something I’ve been missing in the superhero movie genre — characters who aren’t defined entirely by their superpowers. There’s always been some of that, of course: the whole point of Spiderman, for instance, is that he’s a teenager struggling with responsibilities, and Batman is the grim vigilante. Sometimes the personalities are getting lost in the milling crowd of magical abilities vying to be expressed in glorious CGI, though.

And what about Superman? He was vastly overpowered to the point where his multitude of unstoppable powers were utterly boring, and got in the way of the story. But the one thing that did make him interesting was that he was the personification of kindness and decency, something that’s been lost in the movies, at least since the Christopher Reeve version.

Sometimes the comics still remind us of that core of his character, though. So here’s a little story about Superman’s cat.

supercat

It’s not the superpowers, it’s what you do with them that makes for a good story.

Feminists are doomed…to laugh

ferengi

Someone mentioned me on Reddit, which is never a good thing, I’ve learned, but at least this time their comment is ironically funny. This person is announcing the imminent demise of feminism and America because human beings are apparently going extinct, to be replaced by cats.

They will trumpet nothing. They will not exist. They don’t tend to breed, having cats instead of kids, and even if they did the West will collapse soon. Occasionally some of these freaks do breed, like PZ Myers or Jessica Valenti, but those are rare exceptions. Plus PZ bred in the era before feminism completely destroyed America so I’m not sure how applicable his example is anyway.

Hey, I’m not that old! They make it sound like I was born in the paleolithic or something. Humanity is also not undergoing a population crash, so that argument is always kind of silly.

But what amused me is where this argument was made: feminists don’t breed, except for a few freakish outliers, says the guy on the Trucels subreddit.

The Truecels subreddit is an online community where involuntarily celibate males can vent and express their feelings and frustrations without fear of getting banned. The moderators of other online communities for incels (e.g. ForeverAlone) are often not so welcoming to the very people they are supposed to cater to. Females may post here too, but they will not be given any special treatment, and you will not be banned for disagreeing with one. This is a free speech subreddit.

If Jessica Valenti and I are freaks who have children (as do a great many feminists), we’re going to need a new word for people who are bitterly envious. Maybe incels ought to adopt a cat?

I’ll never be able to read Gay Talese without shuddering ever again

creepypeeper

Gay Talese said some stupid things lately, especially that he was never inspired by women journalists, but we’re not supposed to throw him under the bus, because he’s old, and he has written some good stuff. Both statements are true, although it’s not clear how these passes give anyone an out, or much more importantly, when you get them. Is this like the discount you get at the Sizzler for having an AARP card? You’re over 50, so you get 10% off the all-you-can-disgorge gaffe buffet?

But I agree, he should not be thrown under the bus for not reading or enjoying women writers. I suspect he was just being honest — he doesn’t. Was he supposed to lie and say he loved Diablo Cody and Lena Dunham? No! He’s a man of a certain age, uninfluenced by women’s words, and that is who he is.

Although, we might suggest that exploring the wider world of human experience might have been good for him, given his other remarkable publication lately. He’s written a story called “The Voyeur’s Motel”, and it is very well written — you’ll read the whole thing. The one problem is that there is an absence of humanity at its center. It’s as if the person writing it had so mastered the motions of clinical objectivity that he could calmly watch and participate in gross ethical violations of other people’s privacy because he was following a higher calling, the crystal clear rules of journalism, and could then dispassionately describe these activities as just things that happened. A sequence of events. Nothing more.

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Unintended technological consequences

US-Navy-Submarine

You never know what nefarious activity might be associated with your IP address — as it turns out, companies that try to map the physical locations of computers and electronic devices have a crude workaround for searches that don’t return a valid location. They instead return a default location, which is the geographic center of the country or state or county. The problem is that sometimes there are people living there, and suddenly the police trying to trace a stolen laptop are knocking on your door with a search warrant.

Back in the day when I was programming stuff, this was consider extremely lazy, sloppy programming. You were supposed to return a sentinel value or NaN for an invalid search, not throw in an arbitrary answer. This is a case where it’s a good idea to tell someone making a query “not found”, rather than making something up.

So now there’s a farmhouse in Kansas that is associated with 600 million IP addresses. The owner has an old Gateway computer that she uses to write Sunday School lessons, but apparently she’s the nexus of all the high-tech evil that goes on in America.

The company that sells this IP mapping service says they’re going to fix it.

Now that I’ve made MaxMind aware of the consequences of the default locations it’s chosen, Mather says they’re going to change them. They are picking new default locations for the U.S. and Ashburn, Virginia that are in the middle of bodies of water, rather than people’s homes.

They’ve learned nothing. That’s not how you do it. I’m kind of shocked that these security companies should be taking advice from an old geezer biologist: don’t substitute in any fake map coordinates. Your functions ought to be returning an indication that the IP address does not have a known physical location.

Next unintended consequence: county police all over the country start lobbying homeland security for the money to buy military surplus submarines, because of the sudden rash of high-tech meth labs being built at the bottom of the lake in the old gravel pit, you know, the one down the road near the center of the county? Yeah, that one. There are a million computers installed in that facility, so you better make sure you get us a nucyuler sub, with the best torpedos and missile tubes.

I thought this was going to be a useful list

Vox-Day

Vox Day started to make a list of all SJWs — he calls it a complete catalog. Well, good, I thought, it could be handy to know who all the decent people are. Unfortunately, it’s very short, so I think he’s missing a lot of people, and also, weirdly, it includes people like Ben Shapiro, far right fanatic and former editor at Breitbart.

So it’s more of a list of people Vox Day doesn’t like.

It is kind of a strange obsession that some of the worst people on the internet have, of maintaining Enemies Lists and threatening to put people on it if they get out of line, as if anyone has ever been intimidated by such a fate, and as if being put on a List was significant. Anyone remember the List Lord of Talk.Origins, Peter Nyikos? I think I was on a few of his Lists. It was mainly good for a laugh.

The governor of Florida creates an attack ad…against a constituent?

I had no idea Cara Jennings was running against Governor Scott, or was so powerful and influential that she must be crushed, but I guess she is. Or maybe that public rebuke in a coffee shop was so painful that he had to relieve himself of some bile.

Here’s Rick Scott’s reply to a citizen:

I learned one thing from that ad.

Rick Scott is weak and afraid.

Good.

What I would say to Bernie and Hillary, if they cared about my opinion

amicabledivorce

Remember the long game.

In a few months, the Democratic party will hold a convention and pick a nominee. It will be one of you. Go ahead, imagine that it’s you.

You are then going to turn to the second place finisher and ask them to continue their campaigning and help you defeat the abomination that is going to lurch out of the Republican convention. You want them to agree to do so. Put everything you say now into that future context, please.

I say the same thing to all the Bernie and Hillary supporters.

I would also say something special to Bill: your wife is doing a fine job without you. Stop “helping”.

Nothing but us big fat chickens around here

fatchicken

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who are deeply suspicious of twin studies, and those who welcome their confirmation that that their identity is fixed and heritable. I’m in the first group. I always have been. Maybe it’s something in my genes.

I first encountered the popular accounts of the Minnesota twin studies when I was a teenager, seeing the scientist and some of the twins doing the rounds of the afternoon talk shows — I think I saw them on the Mike Douglas Show (I’ve dated myself now). I remember them going on and on about the amazing similarities between the twins who had been raised apart. They both married women with the same name! They drank the same brand of beer! They were both volunteer firemen! They gave their dogs the same name! But while there were some recognizable similarities in the pairs, at the same time the obsession with superficial trivia wrecked the credibility of the stories. What? You’re trying to argue that my pet’s names are somehow encoded in my genome? It seemed to me that what we were seeing is echoes of similar culture in their upbringing (later confirmed: most of the twins weren’t really ‘separated’, but were raised by different relatives).

I also saw psychological tropes that ought to have been recognized. These were people who were rewarded for finding coincidences, and they avidly complied, and the scientists were readily accepting of coincidences as evidence of fundamental causal similarity. I was exposed to this pop genetics at the same time I was reading Fate magazine with a critical eye, and the stories were similar. I’d see stories that claimed to confirm the fact of reincarnation, for instance, by compiling lists of similarities between the contemporary claimant and their past life incarnation. They have the same birthday! Note the resemblances in this old-timey photograph! He lived in the Civil War era, now he is a Civil War re-enactor! He died in a fire, and now he’s afraid of fire!

It was exactly the same. That bugged me. And to this day I still see people touting the old twin studies as conclusively demonstrating the genetic basis of personality and intelligence, declaring that it has been positively confirmed that the heritability (a word they often don’t understand — genetically, it has a very narrow and precise meaning that isn’t exactly what they think it is) of intelligence is exactly 50%, meaning that half your IQ is determined by your genes (again, that’s not what it means), and therefore we should be more concerned with breeding intelligent people than teaching people. I also see this fandom coupled with other ugly associations — racists love it, as do Libertarians and simple-minded techno-fetishists. There are definitely genetic contributions to brain development and behavior, but human twin studies are deeply flawed and prone to exaggeration.

Stephen Hsu is a member of the gullible second group. He has posted a reply to my criticisms of his claim that we can readily ramp up human intelligence to reach an IQ of 1000 because hey, intelligence is obviously heritable. The twin studies say so.

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