rahrahfeminista2

Leading Clerics Defy Ayatollah on Disputed Iran Election

They "called the disputed presidential election and the new government illegitimate on Saturday."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/world/middleeast/05iran.html?_r=1&hp

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/whatknows/~3/iaU1UKYMewI/

http://www.whatknows.com/blog/?p=636

There is a debate at work right now. Granted, it is a bit ideological, but it is one of those classic web developer debates we feel compelled to return to every couple of years:

Should we expect our users to have JavaScript enabled?

Perhaps more importantly, what should we do when they don’t?

Ever since Google Maps ripped open the possibilities of web-based development (with turn-by-turn directions no less), we have been stuck with this bizarre requirement: JavaScript. Sure, it makes the web go round, but I still have nightmares of trying to get the University of Utah labs to upgrade to Flash v7, and our web analytics show a stunningly high level of Netscape v4.

Right now I am building a fancy fan-dangled address widget for the Association (as fancy as an address widget can be), but through this process am also authoring/encoding into existence a fairly large number of front-end standards for our new Java/Spring architecture. Of course we are required to have some “lo-fi” version of what ever Dojo-steroided-monster I create, but when I ask my peers what possible message I could place between some <noscript> tags, they typically respond with a string of expletives.

Leave it to my colleague Patrick to find the perfect solution: A gentle message from mibbit that gets right to the point.

I kid you not. They are that awesome. I would tell you to go check it out yourself, but you would have to disable your JavaScript to see the message and I don’t want to be responsible for any more frogs. Consider this a public service.

I know a lot of people are throwing hope around, and emotions and tensions are high. This thing will take time, the efforts so far have caused great change in the world's view of Iranians and has brought out the worst of the Iranian regime.

It may get worse before it gets better, but be patient. Keep your spirits high and try to spread awareness of Iran and what is happening among friends, both Iranian and American (or wherever else you live).

Be optimistic.

I don't really know much about what's going on there. When I first heard the story, the idea of a military coup sounded pretty bad. But when I actually read the story, I'm less sure what to think. The president was ousted because he was pushing for a referendum that had been declared illegal by both the supreme court and the legislature independently. He managed to get the referendum conducted anyway, and I believe the military ousted him to stop him from declaring the referendum legal and victorious. (The referendum was one of these Hugo Chavez/Robert Mugabe/Michael Bloomberg things that extends the term limits of the person pushing it. I trust Bloomberg not to try to make himself mayor for life (though extending your own term in the middle of it is definitely distasteful), but I don't trust the others any more than I trust Disney with the copyright extension laws.)

I suspect there was a much better option than a military coup though. If the military had just confiscated the ballots, that seems like it would have been sufficient.

I suppose it depends on what the people of Honduras think. The coup that took Hugo Chavez out of power for a few days back in 2002 or so seemed to have some popular support, but apparently not enough to stop him from getting his referenda passed.

I cannot stop listening to this song. So weird and good.

Thanks dude from Fantastic Plastic Machine for recommending it.

My latest article for LWN explains (!) soft updates. The "(!)" is because soft updates are notoriously difficult to understand. If you go to a file systems conference and get people drunk, they will eventually confide to you that they don't really understand soft updates either.

Soft updates, hard problems

This is a free link; if you like the article, please consider subscribing to LWN. You'll still need an account if you want to make snide comments on the article. :)

Well, moving day is finally here. I'm only moving 4 blocks, but the chaos of not having all your stuff upended from its usual location is proving stressful.

Группа  WINE SHOP представляет вашему вниманию свою дебютную пластинку. Отправляя альбом в свободное распространение по интернету мы хотели бы, чтобы как можно больше людей послушали нашу музыку и написали свое мнение, это очень важно для нас. На альбоме представлено десять композиций, которые по нашему мнению наиболее точно отображают музыкальную концепцию группы  за почти что трехлетний период существования.

Стилистически пластинка не выдержана строго в каком-либо определенном стиле. Если говорить обобщающим термином, то это инди-рок. Если разбирать все по кусочкам, то это микс из хлесткого гитарного рока, дэнс-рока и пост-панка.  Не ориентируясь на какую то определенную публику, мы надеемся что эта работа заинтересует абсолютно разную аудиторию. Как тех кто любит потанцевальнее, так и  любителей отдохнуть под спокойные мелодии. Enjoy!!!

Artist...............: Wine Shop
Album................: s/t
Genre................: indie-rock
Source...............: LP
Year.................: 2009
Information..........: http://www.myspace.com/wineshop


---------------------------------------------------------------------
Tracklisting
---------------------------------------------------------------------

1. (00:02:52) - Trains
2. (00:02:00) - Wrong Song
3. (00:03:03) - Death In Summer
4. (00:02:44) - Riding A Cloud
5. (00:01:34) - I'm Afraid
6. (00:01:49) - Shit Song
7. (00:02:34) - Cure me
8. (00:03:44) - Someday
9. (00:02:44) - Summer Is Broken
10. (00:02:53) - Anyway We Die

Playing Time.........: 00:27,09
Total Size...........: 64,1 MB
Ссылка:
narod.ru/disk/7420175000/2009%20-%20Wine%20Shop.rar.html
or
Ссылка:
prg.ifolder.ru/11457245
or
Ссылка:
www.sendspace.com/file/9ttkxq
or
Ссылка:
www.mediafire.com/download.php
or
Ссылка:
rapidshare.com/files/218213015/2009_-_Wine_Shop.rar.html

I can't remember if I linked to it earlier, but the NYTimes had a good article about the possibility of high speed rail in the US, and around the world. Since Matt's going to Europe in August (for the first time), I said he should check out the high speed trains there, since we may get one in California in about 10 years or so. (Apparently there are also some vague plans for a line connecting the Canberra airport to Sydney, so that it can be the second international airport for the metro area.) However, when Matt looked into things, it turned out that by flying within Europe instead of taking the trains, he could save money and also add Rome to his itinerary.

A pretty decent article in the LATimes about organic food, and how it really doesn't mean quite what you might hope. I don't think I've ever known people who are like the ones the author describes, that refuse anything if it doesn't have the organic label. But it would be pretty crazy, given that there are some non-organic fertilizers and pesticides that are much more environmentally friendly than many of the relevant organic alternatives. Also, the author points out that the taste doesn't always match up the way you want either, though I know much less about that. (I suppose that's ironic, given that I eat much more often than I use fertilizer or pesticide, but I've read more about the latter, and haven't paid enough attention to the former to figure out which produce tastes best.)

Also, same-sex sex is finally legal in Delhi (NYTimes, Times of London). This ruling can still be appealed to a higher court, so it only applies in Delhi for now, but it could well apply nationwide soon. I think Illinois legalized same-sex sex back in 1961, but all other states waited at least until 1970, with the last such laws being wiped out in the US only in 2003.

Wordnik - a new crowdsourcing dictionary. I don't quite understand how Urban Dictionary works, but this looks like competition.

I will be leaving the internets for a temporary holiday in reality over Thursday-Monday. Enjoy your weekend!

Not related to the linked articles, but this is why it is very important we move away from oil and natural gas before we hit Peak Oil Extraction Throughput and Peak Natural Gas Extraction Throughput. The industrial revolution freed us from the malthusian trap by progressively increasing the available energy per capita. A reduction in average energy per capita, even temporarily, would be very bad news.

I know what you're thinking: "Yellowstone has some of the most magnificent scenery ever, up there with the Golden Gate and the Swiss Alps? Isn't that exaggerating a little bit?"

This steam tornado forming over a geothermal hot spring proves otherwise.

Many more pics to come, I'm still working through them all. Some quick words: buffalo, buffalo walking on the road, elk, pronghorn antelope, deer, black bears, moose, bighorn sheep, osprey, golden eagles, herons, marmots, chipmunks; geysers, hot springs, waterfalls, mountains, lakes; snow, hail, rain, wind, sunburn.

The weather we've been having here in Canberra the past day or so is the sort of weather I associate with Santa Cruz, though I think most people probably don't, since they've probably been there at times with better weather. It's the slightly dreary, windy, dripping weather that tends to occur in cool climates near the ocean, where you get sea spray in the wind. Not really what you expect from the mountainous inland region of the world's second-dryest continent (not that it's actually very mountainous, inland, or dry in Canberra).

When I was looking on a colleague's blog for a video from the dinner on Tuesday night, I discovered that she had recently written a blog post on food tongue, creating yet another independent intersection between my philosophy and mathcamp lives. (Others include the fact that the outside member of my dissertation defense committee was a student of Josh Tenenbaum, than in 2006 I was able to conveniently visit Tacoma and Bellingham in quick succession, and that Jeff Russell has been a part of both communities. My math connection to Sarah Moss is just through Budapest, not Mathcamp.)

Paint rollers were out covering up the graffiti I photographed earlier this week. It's a never ending battle of paint. Makes me wonder which is uglier the tags or the grey/beige dishwater they paint over them with.

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Posted via email from CyberBilly

Hey there! There's a new band in Miami working on a myspace right now but if you like experimental indie music check it out. The band is called Hippocrypt & The Metro Gnomes. Check them out at

WWW.MYSPACE.COM/HIPPOCRYPTANDTHEMETROGNOMES

Feel free to leave a comment! Thanks!

I'm not sure if this has been posted already and if yes then sorry!
http://www.spreadpersepolis.com/
a comic made about what is currently happening is gaining a lot of interesting and being shared all over.
please read and pass the comic on through things like myspace and facebook if you can.

Anyone know a cheap place to buy underbust corsets? The closer to Huntington Beach the better.

Well, we've seen a few waves of important news breaking on social media just in the last week. Most notably the Iran election, but there was also the Honduras coup. Both were stories that happened to a lot of people at once, where even the central narrative was highly disputed, and the 'official' sources of information were all interested parties.

It would have really helped if there were clearinghouses that could determine what was true and what wasn't. Some tireless bloggers like Andrew Sullivan have tried. But I know of no one who is really succeeding with any kind of nearly-real-time truth verification system.

The mainstream media, particularly television, is basically an entertainment system now, and can only live off of predigested food. If it is not already in a press release they cannot process it. There are wonderful exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions. Forget about them. They're gone.

So what can take on the truth verification role?

Suspend practicality for a moment. Is it even theoretically possible that we can distribute this work? Might there be ways to break down a small unit of data -- say, a tweet -- into component claims, and then assemble evidence and confidence levels for each, finally producing a summary percentage of how likely the original statement is to be true? This might require also producing some reliable confidence score for every person who adds data to the system, too.

A generalized system of credentials might have side benefits for sites like Wikipedia, or distributed identity systems in general.

Or, if you think the work can't be distributed, is there some way to get the right expert skeptics (on whatever topic) to sift through the data?

Some people think prediction markets are the way to go, since people are willing to bet money in proportion to their own confidence. I doubt it. There have been protests against the use of such markets in relation to facts about human misery (it feels wrong to have people betting "for" wars or climate catastrophes). But more importantly, such markets only work when there is some crisp outcome to test in the short term. A question like "were the 2009 Iranian election results falsified" may not reach a conclusion for a decade, if ever, so the prediction market would be dominated by speculation -- guessing what other people are currently guessing.

Got to get away from here

I believe that the purpose of the judicial system is rehabilitation to the exclusion of deterrent, punishment, or vengeance.

In cases of the incorrigible, this implies indefinite detention.

I don't know enough about Bernie Madoff to comment on whether 150 years for fraud is excessive or not.

I saw “Maggots and Men” last week at Frameline. It was amazing. Like seriously amazing.

When I go to see art produced by people I know, and starring people I know, my expectations are low. I don’t mean that my friends aren’t talented. I mean that I’m already on their side and pre-disposed to be positive. I’ll laugh at the in-jokes. I’ll forgive hammy behavior. I’ll wince with them at hard moments, not be thinking “someone else might have done this better”.

“Maggots…” however, exceeded every expectation I had.

When I moved out of my apartment on Valencia St. 15 years ago, Cary (the Director) moved in. We had known each other through Epicenter and the punk scene. Indeed, the house I was moving out of, and that he was moving into back then in 1994, was a hub of the queer punk scene. My housemates had helped found Q-TIP (Queers Together in Punkness) and also produced shows under the name “House of Failure” (our phone number was 552-FAIL… what a happy coincidence for the “beautiful loser” generation). I’m not aware of any touring queer punk bands of that era didn’t drop by at some point, even if just to change outfits or use the bathroom before the show since we were only a half block from Epicenter.

When I saw that his movie was finally finished I knew that it was the one thing I couldn’t miss in this year’s film festival, even if it was just to see what an old friend had done over the last 5 years. “Maggots…” is the re-telling of the Kronstadt Uprising of 1921. The last hope of the real Russian Revolution, sailors at the Kronstadt naval base made 15 demands to the revolutionary Bolshevik government, which might have altered history and prevent the Soviet Union from becoming the tyrannical, farce of a revolution that it became. After a few minor victories, the sailors -- many of whom had fired on the Winter Palace during the 1917 revolution -- were killed, jailed, or forced to flee over ice to Finland. (Kronstadt, like the Spanish Revolution of 1936, has always been an anarchist talking point.)

“Maggots…” certainly owes a debt to Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin”. While I don’t know if anyone has every been a better visual filmmaker than Eisenstein, “Maggots..” is a beautiful, beautiful film. And brilliantly scored.

Cary also made the incredibly smart decision to make the film narrated by a rebel sailor in Russian, with English subtitles.* In this way, the film could be made with its mostly transgender/gender queer cast of friends and not have the varying levels of acting ability affect the final product. ** I was overjoyed to see lots of people I knew on the big screen of the Castro, (including House of Failure housemates) but this film rose above the art-of-friends category and is seriously a film I would recommend to anyone. It’s gripping, assumption-challenging, and, in the end, tearfully sad. Of course, the place to see it is at a film festival because it’s only a 50 minute movie and it deserves to be seen on the big screen. Watch for it! Request it from your local festivals!

While the movie does not have much humor, the funniest part of the screening was when asked a question about the maggots filmed in the movie, Cary told how they had to grow them for the film a number of times. He said that his relationship to them really changed after all that. After all, they’re really only “going through their own transition”.

The film doesn’t over-polemicize. With its mostly trans cast, it draws out questions between revolutionary moments in history and a time when gender can be revolutionary transformed, but doesn’t try and make them direct parallels. It’s a beautiful look at the potential of revolutionary moments to be beautiful, perhaps even challenging folks to appreciate that beauty before stronger social forces can organize to take back control. It's also a love letter to rebels who have the courage to take up these fights.



*There is an agitprop retelling of the history of Kronstadt by a theater troupe in English as well
**An example of this is the Bratt Brothers’ early film “Follow Me Home”. It’s a masterpiece in some ways, painful to watch in others. The Rainbow Grocery joke was hilarious though.

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http://www.demotix.com/news/election-protests-continue-tehran

EDIT:// and I just got this "Iran president election Petition"
http://www.petitiononline.com/923561/petition.html

Ahmadinejad has called for an investigation into the "suspicious" death of Neda Agha-Soltan by the government. How "nice" of him...grr.

Here's a clue, look in the mirror, you can wrap it up in mere seconds! I think I especially like the lame reasoning that the Basij could not have been responsible because "the bullet used was a different type".

The desperate attempts to spin this away from the galvanizing force it has become are almost amusing if not so tragically disgusting.

Freedom for Iran.

I recently visited the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History - or, as I knew it growing up in Albuquerque, the Atomic Museum. The museum has a brand new full size building, with enough room to display most of their catalog for the first time, but not quite enough money to do so professionally. The result is a brief, magic window in which rare artifacts are finally out on display, but you can touch them and bang on them and crawl around in them. Many of the larger items, including a disassembled B-52 bomber and many rocket engines, are simply dumped in rows in a dirt courtyard in back.

Somehow, I expected that I would traipse through the museum, looking at old photographs and brushing up on my nuclear weapons trivia, with perhaps some solemn moments of reflection in front of the reproductions of Fat Man and Little Boy. Instead, I found myself oscillating between uncontrollable sobbing and open-mouthed technological awe. It went something like this: "Wow, a cyclotron! Holy crap, the Potsdam declaration. (Muffled sob.) A real nose-cone from an ICBM, cool! Whoa, photos of ground zero at Hiroshima. (Fountain of tears.)" I went back the next day to take some original photographs with the intention of writing a thoughtful, well-researched article on my personal experience.

Unfortunately, I have discovered that I seem to know almost nothing about the history of nuclear arms testing and development - and this is from someone whose parents worked on the Strategic Defense Initiative (Reagan's "Star Wars"), who read Richard Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" AND "The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb", who grew up in New Mexico, home of the Manhattan Project. More accurately, I knew some of the relevant facts, but in a vague sort of manner devoid of any connection with everyday life. They were numbers of megatons in a reference book, fictional movie plots involving lost nuclear weapons, and contrived acronyms for arms reduction treaties.

But walking through the museum, I saw brass Nazi goggles and notebooks, the car that carried the Trinity bomb to the test site, a copy of the Potsdam Declaration, movies of ordinary Japanese citizens clearing rubble with hand baskets in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the dented shells of nuclear missiles that were, for reals, lost in a midair collision over Spain and recovered after a multi-million dollar search. (Far more were lost and never found, in or over the ocean.) I saw, and touched, and yet still almost could not believe in, the outer shell of a "Davy Crockett" miniature tactical nuke - a literal "backpack nuke," small enough that I could encircle it in my arms. I thought backpack nukes were only a theoretical possibility, and yet they were manufactured, assembly line style. I was particularly struck by how heavily the shoulder straps of the backpack were padded - a consideration so practical and down-to-earth in the face of the incomprehensible horror of the weapon itself.

And then I really got myself in trouble: I bought a copy of Michael Light's 100 Suns from the book shop. It is a collection of 100 photographs of nuclear explosions from the U.S. nuclear testing program, during the time when nuclear tests were conducted above ground. I knew, intellectually, that Enewetak and Bikini Atolls had been practically obliterated by thermonuclear bomb tests, but seeing a 20"x26" color photograph of the fireball of a 11 megaton explosion is... entirely different. And entirely different than seeing it on the computer screen - the image below has nothing like the power of that in the book.

Castle Romeo test, Bikini Atoll, 1954, 11 megatons

Each photograph in this book symbolizes and encapsulates the conflicting and overpowering feelings I had in the museum: awe, excitement, and deep grief. My favorite photos are ones of the people watching the tests - most of them are bored, or matter-of-fact, but a few of the faces show the same awe and awareness that I feel when I look at the photos of the explosions, decades after the fact. The photos are accompanied by short footnotes at the end of the book, describing the technical and political circumstances and fallout (literal and figurative) of each test.

And here, yet again, I learned how little I knew: that several of the thermonuclear bombs accidentally exceeded expected yield by several megatons and accidentally sickened people (How!? can something as complex as a thermonuclear bomb go wrong - and result in even greater power?? That's not how computers work!), that we actually exploded nuclear weapons above the atmosphere and were surprised by the resultant EMP (I thought physicists predicted it, not that we knocked out Hawaii's power grid by accident and worked backwards from there), that the largest nuclear explosion ever was a 50-megaton test by the Soviets in the Arctic ("test" - it was entirely for political effect), that we exploded thermonuclear bombs in the continental U.S., that U.S. soldiers were put in trenches close to bomb tests in Nevada so that they could conduct maneuvers within a few hundred feet of the smoking, radioactive craters immediately afterwards.

It never even occurred to me that thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people had witnessed nuclear tests and that I could go talk to one of these people and ask them what it was like. And I never would have guessed that I would be jealous of them, because more than likely, no human will ever witness a nuclear explosion first-hand ever again.

I don't know what to do now. Maybe most people already know these things, in which case it will be difficult to communicate my awe. Maybe they don't know these things, but I won't be able to cross the boundary between intellectual knowledge, like what I knew before I went to the museum, and the intense visceral awareness that the physical objects and photos gave me. Maybe I can't do better than Michael Light's magnificent book and I should just write him a positive Amazon review. Maybe I can do better, if I use all the resources available to me on this here World Wide Web.

Questions for you, dear reader:

• Which of the above facts surprised you? What is the most shocking thing you know about nuclear weapons and the Cold War?
  
• Do you know anyone who saw a nuclear explosion in real life? Have you asked them about it? Are they willing to talk about it?
  
• What is the movie/book/web site/whatever about nuclear weapons that you would recommend the most?
  
• Any advice for me on what (if anything) to do with this project?
  

Thank you for reading all the way through this.

Per my previous post, I'm making bracelets. I'm slightly overwhelmed with the amount of people asking for them, & I'm a little backed up, but I'm hoping to have them all made & shipped out within this week. Sorry for the slight delay, but unfortunately my work schedule only permits me to have so much free time. :(

the march tomorrow is going to meet at the federal building on wilshire and veteran at 11 am in west la. After enough people congregate there, people are going to start marching, most probably in sets, through a set course around west la. These protests are going to last a few hours but its suggested that you get there earlier.

please bring your friends, remember to wear green, make signs (if you'd like to) and take pictures/video - all the same as you normally would do. This one is anticipated to be a very powerful protest with a large turnout, so the more people we can have there to make a loud noise for peace the better.


The Iranian government has really cracked down with a no tolerance policy against the student youth resistance, so it's up to us to keep their voices heard. People are still being beat and killed every day over there, and this crisis hasn't gotten any better. We need to work hard to spread the word of the civil rights violations and injustices against humanity taking place in Iran. The world will hear the voices of the oppressed wether they want to or not.

Does anyone know of articles, originally in English or translated, about demonstrations in Iran against the taking of the hostages? I can't find anything so far, but I know they happened. Thanks.

EDIT: I want to add that I'm really surprised about the lack of info, since they were very large and violently suppressed.

No? not the smiths?
Then Sonic Youth anyone ?

(sonic youth)

Apparently it's a little different from US politics. As in, the sitting prime minister was on a comedy talk show as just one of five guests, including Sacha Baron Cohen as Brüno (who managed to get the host of the show to dress in a skin-colored knit faux-nude body suit, and then pulled off the g-string to reveal the anatomical details of the suit).

Kevin Rudd ended up spending most of his few minutes on the show making fun of the leader of the opposition for forging e-mails trying to say Rudd abused his power to get a truck (or "ute" as they say here) for himself. I tried to imagine Barack Obama doing this, and realized that half of the explanation for why he couldn't is that there's no leader of the opposition here, and half is that American politics normally tries to stay a bit more serious (Mike Huckabee's appearances on the Colbert Report are the one exception I can think of).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAjzP8ZbgRg

I wrote this for 3 friends in Iran, and have since met many others who felt comforted by it too, so this is for all of you. I'm very sorrowful for the need to write it, yet glad to do something to show that many of us
around the world do care. Kindness is what reaches across differences and boundaries, and music
lets us find common ground - we are all people of this one world.

Bless you all very much.

"""
"...and he hates me because I let Jill die."

"She let herself die. Speaking of that, that's what I do like about these kids: they're trying to kill it. Even if they kill themselves in the process."

"Kill what?"

"The softness. Sex, love; me, mine. They're doing it... They're burning it out with dope. They're going to make themselves hard clean through. Like, oh, cockroaches. That's the way to live in the desert. Be a cockroach. It's too late for you, and a little late for me, but once these kids get it together, there'll be no killing them. They'll live on poison."
"""

john updike ~ rabbit redux

Apparently today is the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which started the modern gay rights movement. (Well, you've still got a few minutes to go until the day if you're in the Pacific time zone.) The New York Times has a little bit of an odd commemoration. Frank Rich's op-ed is characteristically astute, pointing out that there's no reason gay people in particular should be disappointed with Obama for his inaction on issues of gay rights that he pushed during his campaign - we should all be disappointed with him (at least on this point).

Then the Style section has a characteristically clumsy article pointing out that yes, gay men and straight men can be friends, and people sometimes find it awkward. It compares such friendships to the supposed awkwardness of those between men and women (presumably both straight), where sexual interest can cause problems. However, the article seems to suggest that there is no awkwardness at all in friendships between gay men and straight women (despite the equal possibility of unreturned sexual interest). It does note that there are some gay men that only have gay friends (a phenomenon I've noticed) just as there are some straight men that only have straight friends.

Interestingly, Frank Rich also gives links to the three articles the NYTimes ran at the end of June, 1969, discussing the Stonewall Riots. Unfortunately, the full text of those articles is hidden in the archive, but the first paragraphs suggest a dramatic change in the way the Times discusses gay people.

As a Palestinian, I am ashamed to say that I don't know much about Iran despite its relative closeness to my family's homeland. All I know is what I've read in Reading Lolita in Tehran. What do Persians have to say about the authenticity of the book? Do you agree with it? What are your opinions on Iran, religion, and so on? Please enlighten me.

Hello,
Can anyone recommend a good place to get a new pair of glasses. I went to local Lenscrafters stores but they have really basic frames, Targets and Walmarts don't seem to carry a wide selection of frames either... Where else can I go? Please help.

Thank you

I made it to Australia safe and sound, and had a good amount of sleep on the flight. Now I just need to make sure I can stay awake for several more hours to get myself used to the time zone.

Anyway, I was reminded by a post on arrowedumbrella's journal recently of the Bechdel test - a movie passes the test if it contains a scene in which at least two named female characters have a conversation that is not about a man. (Perhaps a simpler characterization is that there should be a scene with human interaction that doesn't contain a man, either on screen or in the content of the dialog.) Simple enough, and yet remarkably few movies pass it. For instance, out of the 18 movies that I have watched in 2009, there are only a few that might have passed it - 88 Minutes, Secretary, Queen Margot, and Annie Hall - and I'm pretty skeptical of all four. Yet when you reverse the test (are there at least two named male characters who have a conversation that is not about a woman), I'm pretty sure that they all pass, with the possible exception of Annie Hall.

Then I recently ran into another way to bring out the sexism of the movie industry - note how many movies have top-billed female vs. male leads. Note from that list that fewer than half of the movies listed have even one female in the top two billed actors, and that out of the 120 films, the top-billed actor is male in 115 of them.

This sort of institutional sexism is very well hidden in Hollywood, because the most public vehicle for recognition of actors automatically recognizes two males and two females in every year, no matter what the prominence of their respective roles. This is affirmative action that covers up the problem without really doing much (if anything) to address it. I've often wondered why it is that there are separate categories for best male and female actor. Normally, different categories mean that the people involved are doing different sorts of things that can't be easily compared (for instance, how would you rank a director against a cinematographer, or perhaps better, how would you rank an original screenplay against an adaptation of a novel?) but that really doesn't make sense here. Is there a reason why you can't tell whether Julia Roberts or Al Pacino was a better actor? There's more of a case to have separate categories for adult and child actors than for male and female. And why not separate actors by race if you're going to separate them by gender?

As meep mentioned in the comments on arrowedumbrella's post, with many genres of movies (and perhaps almost all), "Gender issues are not in the forefront when I'm watching these." And this generally seems to be true - despite this striking lack of representation in these two very simple measures, most people assume that acting is one profession that is largely open to both genders (leaving aside the issues that are in fact quite obvious to many people, that female actors have a harder time staying relevant as they age, and that people who aren't gendered either male or female are basically non-existent in Hollywood (by which I mean the film industry and not the region of Los Angeles, which does in fact have such representation).) But this seems to me to be all the more reason to see these facts about the non-representation of women as symptoms of something problematic. When gender issues are in the forefront (as in some of the films of Pedro Almodovar) it makes sense that one gender will be underrepresented (Todos sobre mi madre is the one film I can think of that unambiguously fails the reverse-Bechdel test). Even if gender issues aren't in the forefront, there are some settings (say, an 18th century British naval vessel) where gender representation wouldn't make much sense. But for all other movies, if gender isn't a relevant issue, then the only explanation for the extremely striking lack of female characters (or female representation at all, apart from as romantic object of males) is that the people writing and directing the film (or perhaps their assumed audience) doesn't think of women when thinking of people.

And this is perhaps the central point of feminism - women are people too, and people are (basically) just as likely to be women as men. If you treat women differently from the way you treat people by default, then there's something messed up with you.

And this is why I worry when people refuse to describe themselves as feminists. Just which part of that formulation do you disagree with?

Two more blog posts attempting to explain the discrepancies. The digression about curly hair in the second post seems on-point - I noticed this sort of effect when Matt and I went to get our hair cut at the same time. The person there seemed to do quite well at dealing with our extremely different hair (mine is thick and wavy, while Matt's is quite soft and thin and straight) and gave us cuts that suited them differently, which is an experience neither of us had had much before.

And here is a discussion of similar points in logic rather than film - if you have further names of female logicians that are suitable as keynote speakers at conferences, forward them to the e-mail address there!

My friend Kristen complains that she can't get a good photo of me because I'm always making some kind of face. She's right, I read too much Calvin and Hobbes growing up and now automatically make a Calvin face for every photo. But I made a heroic effort last night and got this one:

I know what you are thinking - someone who wears that much jewelry can't possibly understand cryptographic hash functions! That's totally untrue - although I did have to throw out my copy of Applied Cryptography to make room for my earring collection.

http://brownfolks.blogspot.com/2009/06/translation-of-mohsen-makhmalbafs.html

I couldn't find a translation of Mohsen Makhmalbaf's recent letter, which calls for a Sham-e Ghariban ceremony to be held for those who have been killed in Iran, so I've translated it myself. Makhmalbaf may be the official spokesperson of Mousavi's campaign abroad, but his grandiloquent declaration that he speaks for the Iranian people is nothing but hot air. He does not speak for the Iranian people any more than Ahmadinejad, Mousavi, or any other public figure does. He also whitewashes Mousavi's past, claiming that he "did not order the killings of opponents" despite Mousavi playing a role in the brutal purges of leftists and religious minorities from Iranian universities during his term as Prime Minister in the 1980s. I think Makhmalbaf should stick to cinema (where he is absolutely brilliant), but in any case this ceremony may be a good tactic for the Iranian opposition.

Sham-e Ghariban ("evening of the dispossessed") is a mourning ceremony for the martyrdom of Imam Husayn during the Battle of Karbala. This is particularly noteworthy because Sham-e Ghariban is always held on 'Ashura, a holy day in the Islamic calendar. This year the 'Ashura processions coincided with Israel's assault on Gaza, and the Iranian government (among others) linked the massacre at Karbala to the situation in Palestine. Calling for a Sham-e Ghariban ceremony for the killed protesters is a subversive attempt to wrest the discourse of martyrdom from the hands of the government, and employ it against the state. For more on the use of martyr imagery in Iranian culture, see the notes at the end of this post. Below is my translation of Makhmalbaf's letter. If I have erred at all in translation, I would appreciate your comments.

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"It's pretty safe to say that I am the only person in the history of Virginia to be elected to statewide office with a union card, two Purple Hearts, and three tattoos."

~ Jim Webb