Obsidian Wings

Tab Dump: January Thaw

by Doctor Science

Not that we had much of a January freeze, mind you.

Sir Thomas More, by Hans Holbein. Because he has such great links.

• Hardiness Zone Changes -- good tool to show how the USDA has re-calibrated the hardiness zones used by farmers and gardeners. My town has moved from 6b to 7a since 1990, which is a pretty serious change. Detailed USDA map here.
• Swiss "Verdingkinder" and American "orphan trains" -- which took poor children who weren't necessarily orphans from cities to live with farm families as extra workers.
• Piracy is part of the digital ecosystem -- excellent graphs
• Francis Fukuyama on the Financial Crisis, plus his recommended reading
• Google Is Facebook Is AOL: What Happens When a Good Google Goes Bad: or, Every Sufficiently Large Web Company Wants to Become the Internet. And they always do it badly.
• Language Log » The “dance of the p’s and b’s”: truth or noise? -- Stanley Fish disparages the digital humanities, while defining olde-skool criticism in an eminently mockable way.
• Elsevier-funded NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney Wants to Deny Americans Access to Taxpayer Funded Research
• Discussion of what a lot of young, attractive women encounter every time they appear in public. You only get the full flavor by reading the comments, too:
  • On Being an Object, and then Not Being an Object
  • Rookie » First Encounters With the Male Gaze
  • Street Harassment Discussion Bingo Card
• Fanworks of general interest:
  • As I Always Say -- one of the highlights of Yuletide 2011, starring Ms. Frizzle, Time Lord.
  • Outside the Box, a Maru the Box-Loving Cat vid from Festivids. Embedded below.

There is no barrel bottom to scrape Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

I'm not trying to get a rise out of anyone, but in the thread that turned into a copyright discussion, one person (and I'm not going to go back and check who it is, cause it's not really important) posited a situation where iirc a plumber breaks into your house and fixes your pipes. What should pop up but this article, with a story that about some horologists breaking into a place and fixing a clock. The story awaits below the fold

Friends Don't Let Friends

by Doctor Science

... publish in Elsevier journals.

Two years ago, Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber decided that he would no longer referee for, or publish in, journals published by Elsevier. Now Fields Medal-winning mathematician Tim Gowers has reached the end of his patience. He took the no-Elsevier pledge, and there is now a website collecting pledges from other academics. The signers -- over 500 so far -- pledge to not referee, do editorial work, or publish with Elsevier journals "unless they radically change how they operate".

What do they mean by that? As was discussed in the comments to my post last summer about the scandal of academic publishing, Elsevier has a long-established reputation for rapacity. As The Cost of Knowledge states:

1. They charge exorbitantly high prices for their journals.
2. They sell journals in huge "bundles," so libraries must buy a large set with many unwanted journals, or none at all. Elsevier thus makes huge profits by exploiting their essential titles, at the expense of other journals.
3. They support measures such as SOPA, PIPA and the Research Works Act, that aim to restrict the free exchange of information.

Many of the Cost of Knowledge signatories have links to statements, blog posts, etc., about the state of academic publishing, which should probably be put in this wiki -- there doesn't seem to be anyone acting as "archivist of the revolution", as we say in fandom.

Érik Desmazières, La Salle des planètes, from his series of illustrations for Jorge Luis Borges's story 'The Library of Babel'. Found via Freeman Dyson's NY Review of Books review of The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, by James Gleick

Baltasar Garzón and the tension between national and international laws

by liberal japonicus

This Guardian piece and the accompanying video is well worth your attention. Garzón was the judge who issued an international arrest warrant for Augusto Pinochet for his role in torturing and executing Spanish citizenship, followed by obtaining pursuing two Argentinian generals for the crime of genocide during the Argentinian dictatorship. No slap on the wrist either, one of the generals was sentenced to 640 years in prison. Garzón was also reported to be pursuing Gonzales, Yoo, Feith, Bybee, Haynes and Addington for charges and this New Yorker article gives some of the background on that.

In April, Garzón opened an investigation into killings during the Franco regime and was suspended in May for abuse of power, specifically for ignoring the amnesty law related to that regime, and now, he is on trial in three prosecutions. One, which hasn't come to trial, concerning connections with a bank, and the second concerning Garzón ordering the recording of conversations between defense lawyers and prisoners in a goverment corruption case, seem to me to be incidental to the questions involved, but the third is much more related . It is a private prosecution brought by a rightwing trade union, dealing with the same point for which Garzón was suspended in May, that he ignored the amnesty laws to bring about these prosecutions. These amnesty laws came into force in 1977 as Spain was transitioning to democracy and I think it is important to note that even after the passage of these amnesty laws, there were two attempted coups, in 1981 and 1982, the first averted when King Carlos appeared on TV to denounce the conspirators. In checking references and dates for this, I see that a book about the first coup called Anatomy of A Moment has just been translated. The title refers to

...the moment ... when Tejero, just after storming into Parliament, screams at the MPs to get down on the floor. His Civil Guards let off a burst of gun-fire. Everyone flings themselves under the benches, except three people, who remain in their seats while bullets whirr past – Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez, Santiago Carrillo, leader of the Communist Party, and General Gutiérrez Mellado, the Deputy Prime Minister, who had courageously advanced on Tejero and ordered him to lay down his arms.

I'm a big fan of Faulkner's comment that 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' and I think the case of Garzon is reflective of those bargains made when Spain went from Franco to democracy.  

Breaking News: Equality in NJ

by Doctor Science

N.J. Senate committee advances gay marriage bill. Sprog the Elder and I did *not* make it down to Trenton, as we had hoped, but despite the lack of testimony from me the bill advanced out of committee on an 8-4 party line vote.

If I had gotten my head and act together, I would have said that I support same-sex marriage because things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. Traditional marriage is between legally unequal persons, man and wife. My heterosexual marriage will be only *proven* to be between equals if there are other marriages around between people who are patently, obviously, legal equals. Until then, my civil, egalitarian, heterosexual marriage is under threat from those who think marriage is necessarily religious, traditional, and unequal, and that I'm just pretending to be otherwise.

Chris Christie has said he will veto the bill ... probably ... and that it should be put to a referendum. The latest polling shows 52% of NJ voters support marriage equality. In other words, the Republicans don't want to have to choose between what their national party wants and what NJ voters want.

I don't know what the schedule on the next step is, but I hope we can get ourselves in gear this time to make a public stand. At least the NJ Democratic Party has made equal marriage a priority issue: the bill in question is S1 for this session.

Justly Married: photo © Derek Powazek, showing the San Francisco City Hall steps, February 14, 2004. Do it now, NJ.

Something Strange on the Way to Writing this Post

--by Sebastian

You may or may not have been aware that the US government was pushing the Supreme Court to allow warrantless placement of GPS tracking devices with unlimited monitoring.  But it was.  United States v. Antoine Jones

The Supreme Court was about to hand down the decision so I was gearing up to write something scathing about an out of touch institution with idiot conservative justices who mistrust government power unless the police have it, and liberal justices who only recognize privacy when it has to do with sexual functions or artistic renderings of sexual functions.

But then something strange happened.  The Supreme Court UNANIMOUSLY ruled that use of a device to monitor movements counted as a search, and then Alito wrote a scathing concurrence (no that really is possible) saying that the court should have gone further and ruled on similar devices such as cell phones.  That concurrence was joined by Ginsburg, Breyer and Kagan.  Sotomayor also wrote a separate concurrence suggesting that the Court did not go far enough. 

Every now and then, when I think the politics of the country is so mired in idiot minutia that we can't get anything right, I get pleasantly surprised. 

I could get used to being wrong like this!

Primary Document Update:  the actual opinion is linked above at "UNANIMOUSLY"

Look away, Dixieland

by liberal japonicus

Haley Barbour, the outgoing governor of the state I used to call home, (who apparently had seriously entertained pursuing a presidential campaign but thought better of it) decided to distribute some of that compassionate conservatism that I keep hearing about, and pardoned 221 as he was out the door.  Not precisely sure about how it breaks down, but some observe that certain crimes seem to draw more compassion than others. It was apparently a particularly ham handed move, hitting the 67% constituency (the percentage of Mississippians who voted to keep the Confederate battle flag as part of the state flag) rather hard and poorly executed, because a number of the prisoners did not post public notice of their pardon requests, a state requirement, leading a judge to halt some of the releases. Whoops. And surprise, surprise, the process seems to demonstrate some racial disparaties. Who'da thunk it?

So, when Count-me-in and Russell both mentioned Louis CK in the copyright thread, this (definitely not safe for work) riff of his came to mind.

It Takes Two to Tango

by Doctor Science

The current issue of Christian Century has several articles about dating, sex, and relationships. One is about College chaplains on the hookup culture, with commentary by six chaplains from across the spectrum of American colleges: state schools, Ivy League, Christian, small, and large.

Vermeer's Girl with a Wineglass. Her face is certainly rather odd, but the expression to me looksmost like she's smiling because she's expected to, when actually she has no real idea what's going on. Dating in college can feel like that.

What really astounded me was how resolutely all the ministers ignore men. Some of them mentioned the attitudes or difficulties of male students, but only in passing. *All* of the anecdotes about particular students they have counseled involve women. They talk about the problems "hookup culture", promiscuity, or objectification makes for *women*, but as far as men are concerned their ministry seems to be "boys will be boys".

TRIGGER WARNING: discussion of rape and rape culture in post and comments.

What should have been your Friday open thread, dude

by liberal japonicus

This should have been your friday open thread, but the blog gods blinded me to it until just a little bit ago. 

Eagle-eyed watchers spotted a marijuana leaf on Yu Darvish's t-shirt as he landed in Dallas today for his official introduction with the Texas Rangers. 

The "explanation," at least in the city's local news, was that the shirt (pictured right) showed a Japanese maple leaf.

Nonsense. It's weed. But, it doesn't necessarily mean that Darvish may be your next smoking buddy.

In Japan, the marijuana leaf is a popular symbol without any real smoking context. Plenty of native Japanese have leafy t-shirts, or necklaces, or air fresheners in their cars, and don't really know that they're symbolizing a drug.

Yu Darvish is a pretty interesting figure. His father is Iranian, his mother is Japanese, and they met while both were attending university in Florida and there are some things to take away from that, but the pot leaf thing was one of those things that I wanted to share. Japanese really don't associate the symbol with drugs, and hemp appears in lots of places because it has a 'fresh nature' feel. Maybe this is unwarranted, but it tells me a lot more about the US than about Japan that you've got a pack of sportswriters tittering over it like 6th graders making fart jokes. 

Much More Restricted In Europe

--by Sebastian

I was recently having a discussion with a friend, and she wondered why abortion remained such a big deal in politics in the United States while its political valence in Europe was nearly zero.  It seemed to me that it was because European restrictions on abortion tend to be much more restrictive than those in the US, and thus much more in line with most people's intuitions about a fetus having a protectable interest as it became close to becoming a separate child.  She thought that was crazy because she thought that abortion laws were much more permissive in Europe than in the United States.

It isn't true.  A very large number of European states (and most of the large ones) have much more restrictive abortions laws than even the very most restrictive states in the US.  I think most left leaning people in the US imagine that you can't have a progressive state with dramatically tighter abortion restrictions.  Here is evidence to the contrary.  (Largely though not entirely culled from here)  Significant abortion restrictions in the States do not kick in until week 24 (if at all). 

Sweden

Gestational limit: 18 weeks

Conditions: Between 12 and 18 weeks of gestation, the women must discuss the procedure with a social worker. After 18 weeks, permission must be obtained from the National Board of Health and Welfare.

France

Generally available only in the first 12 weeks.  After that, two physicians must separately certify that the abortion will be done to prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman; a risk to the life of the pregnant woman; or that the child will suffer from a particularly severe illness recognized as incurable. A multi-disciplinary diagnostic center is required to certify if relying on the birth defect exemption.[more beyond the fold]