Obsidian Wings

Your Strawberry Fields open thread

by Doctor Science

It's the first week of distribution for the organic farm CSA, and here are some of the results:

Obviously I'm going to be experimenting with camera angles, but this was too delicious to pass up foodblogging.

My recipe is based on Bon Appetit's Lemon Shortcakes with Strawberries. My changes:

• replace buttermilk with a mixture of 1/3 plain yogurt, 2/3 milk. Include any whey that may have formed on yogurt.
• do not do anything with the perfectly ripe organic strawberries, which I picked myself, except slice them.
• top with heavy cream, whipped with vanilla and a small amount of sugar -- like, 1/2 tsp vanilla and 2 Tb sugar for a pint of cream.

Served with champagne, and blessed with the Shehecheyanu:

Blessed art Thou, O Lord
our God, Creator of the universe,
Who has blessed us, sustained us,
and brought us to this season.

We generally recite the Shehecheyanu for the first time in the crop year we had an "important" local food: asparagus (the first local crop to come in), strawberries, the CSA in general, cherries, sweet corn, tomatoes, peaches. Not every vegetable or even every fruit, but the ones we eat (or in the case of tomatoes and cherries, eat fresh) only when they're in season. The ones we look forward to. We often add another food blessing, but not consistently.

Talk about where you are in your seasons, or whatever.

a day late...

by russell

and hopefully not a dollar short.  this is a belated memorial day post.

The folks i remember:

My father, who was in for the duration (like everybody else) in WWII, and saw his war from an engine room as a USN machinist's mate.  Hot, sweaty, noisy, crap duty, a weird gig for a Georgia farmboy, but he did get to meet my mother while in NYC getting some mechanical training at ConEd.

My stepfather, who signed up before the war broke out because it was a good gig.  Three hots and a cot.  He knew how to operate heavy equipment, so they gave him a tank and made him a sargeant.  He was captured in North Africa, shipped over to Italy with a German field hospital group, and walked north until he was liberated.  Lots of weird sad stories from that adventure.  Then, back into the tank in the European theater until VE day.

My father-in-law, who spent his war tromping around the Phillippines.  Before the war, he had a pretty good little gas station in Butler PA, which he basically had to sell when he was drafted.  The thing he was proudest of about his war service was the fact that nobody in his group was killed in combat.

My good friend Put, just passed a week or two ago at age ninety-something, spent his war in tanks in Europe.  Took a very interesting over-and-under rifle and shotgun combination off an Austrian civilian, who had just tried to kill him with it.  Safety tip - go up against a tank with a hunting piece, and you will likely lose.  Put went back to Europe a few years ago, to visit the places he'd fought, and to try to put some demons to rest.  Didn't work, he was still prone to waking up with nightmares about the war (70 years later!), but he wrote a good book about it.

My good friend Bob, still here, in his 90's, trained and led a troop of black recruits during the war, then spent some years in Japan as part of the post-war occupation.

My mother-in-law, for that matter, who spent the war years building Corsairs in Akron OH.

Those folks, excepting only Bob and my mother-in-law, are all gone.

I have two brothers-in-law who served during Vietnam.  One served in Germany, one in Korea.  They lucked out.

One nephew of my step-father, not so lucky, fell into a man-trap full of punji sticks in Vietnam.  Messed his legs up, and was prone to weird intermittent undiagnosable fevers for many years after.

All of those folks would almost certainly have preferred to stay home if they could, and they all went.  I tip my hat to them, all of them, and remember the ones who have passed with love and respect.

Your Southeast asian Saturday open thread

by liberal japonicus

There will be a longer post about what I've been doing here in Yangon, and I'm a bit hesitant to put up an open post after we've had three excellent posts, but I'm getting ready to leave and I am marveling at the fact that Burma is looking, at least from a distance, like an island of stability compared to Thailand and Vietnam. Here in Yangon, not everyone is so sanguine though. The next election cycle is 2015, and no one really takes anything for granted. Not sure what the feeling is in Vietnam, but I start working on an August teachers seminar at Hue University, which takes a large number of Chinese students in June (our usual conference time, but this year, we've pushed it back to August)

At any rate, Southeast Asia or, as per usual, anything else, though do check out the other posts.

Trigger warnings are the opposite of censorship

by Doctor Science

The NY Times reports that students at a number of colleges are starting to request "trigger warnings" for classroom material. The story has been picked up all over the place, and articles and posts about it either say trigger warnings are censorship (and therefore bad), or the comments do.

This is bollocks. Trigger warnings aren't censorship, they're the opposite.

I can state this with some authority because I've actually seen trigger warnings used, in a variety of online settings, over a long period of time. Unlike the vast majority of recent commenters, I actually know what I'm talking about.

Regular readers here will have noticed that I use trigger warnings when I'm discussing rape and/or abuse. It's so usual and customary in fanfic-dominated parts of the Internet that I hadn't really noticed I was doing something that needed explanation, but now that the custom seems to be breaking out into the wider public I'll explain why I use warnings and how college courses could benefit from them.

Fanfic writers and readers have been arguing about story warnings for a long time; other communities should take advantage of our hard-earned experience. In fact, I wonder if the students who are speaking up about this learned about such warnings in fandom, on Tumblr, or elsewhere on the Internet.

I'm cutting here as a trigger warning, because talking about the warnings means talking about the topics: rape, assault, PTSD, and vile and demeaning language.

TNC speaks, you listen

by russell

TNC is Ta-Nehisi Coates, he writes for the Atlantic.  He mostly writes about issues around race, which is a topic of interest to me.  He is, consistently, a thoughtful and measured writer, and he does his homework.

What's not to like?

He has a long piece up now which I'm making my way through, and which I recommend.  It has the guaranteed-to-start-arguments title The Case For Reparations.

"Reparations" in this case refers to reparations to American blacks, from the American public.  There are probably a thousand plausible bases for a pro-reparations argument, Coates starts from the patterns of systematic housing discrimination that persisted well past Jim Crow days.

Coates was until fairly recently not an advocate of reparations; he explains some of the reasons for his change of mind here.

FWIW I am, personally, not an advocate of reparations, but not for the obvious practical or logistical reasons.  My feeling is that, were reparations ever to be made, they would be followed by widespread resentment of blacks that would make current-day blabbing about "those people" seem like very small potatoes in comparison.  The attitude would, I think, be we've paid you off, now leave us alone.  You're on your own.

Just my opinion.

In any case, Coates is always, always worth reading.  Enjoy.

 

h/t to our very own Donald J.

The most influential American novels

by Doctor Science

There are two American novels that have had unparalleled influence. Not "literary influence", in the sense of influencing other writers, but works that have had a real effect on how many Americans think and act, and thus on the course of society and history itself.

For the 19th century, I'm obviously talking about Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. I'm afraid that for the 20th century, well, in the immortal words of John Rogers:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Alas for American culture: Tolkien was British.

Your wonderseat open thread

by liberal japonicus

How can you resist an article about Japanese toilets entitled "Backwash"? I know I can't.

I'm doing some work with a Yangon NPO for the next week so I'm not sure if next week's open thread is possible.

World-building is a literary value and a political act

by Doctor Science

In our discussion of the Hugo nominees we talked a little about Larry Niven's Ringworld, which won the Hugo, Nebula *and* Locus awards -- but not necessarily because it's a good *story* (in the sense of "plot"). What makes Ringworld an sf classic is the world-building.

World-building as a term is normally used only to talk about sf & fantasy, but it's a perfectly valid concept and source of literary joy, something that people read for.

"Approaching Dawn on Ringworld", by Steven Vincent Johnson. Until I started looking for "Ringworld" images, I had no idea that the game Halo involved ringworlds. Yes, I am uncool. But less uncool than I used to be!

Your unexpected cheesecake open thread

by Doctor Science

Back in the fall, my husband D bought a cheesecake (Southern Pecan) one of his fencing students was selling as a school fundraiser. The cheesecake arrived, frozen, and was apparently left in the freezer (at the salle or at the student's house, I'm not sure which) for a month or so, then was defrosted, then was frozen *again*. This past weekend it finally reached D's hands, he brought it home and we defrosted it. D and Sprog the Elder had pieces last night and did not die, so I am having a piece now.

It's really good. Lighter and fluffier than many, not dense like our wedding cake, but that works well with the pecan flavor IMHO.

So what unexpected delights did your week bring?

The problem with laptops

by Doctor Science

-- is that they're a necessity (like a car), but the people selling them think they're a disposable, fungible luxury (like a TV).

What brings this on is Sprog the Younger's current laptop, a Samsung NP365. It's over-heating and occasionally making funny noises. Of course it's no longer under warranty. I said I'd open it up, look at the fan and see if I could fix it -- we've done similar things with laptops in the past, after all.

I found a YouTube video of someone dis-assembling the related NP355, and followed along (deeply amused by the guy's Scots accent, so I could imagine Fitz was talking me through it). It was only toward the end that I realized I'd have to go all the way down to the friggin' motherboard to get at the power supply, and I decided this was all too fraught and put it back together. Eventually. After some aggravation and hilarity -- and the leftover screws are totally my husband's fault (this time).

We'll struggle along with this computer until the AP exams are over, but then we have to start thinking about a new laptop for Younger, to take with her to Boston-Area Liberal Arts College (BALAC) in the fall. I started googling for info on "laptops that are easy to repair", and found Jason Perlow at ZDNet talking about The repairable PC is dead:

This trend in the PC industry towards more appliance-like, non user-serviceable devices and systems and away from those that are friendly to the home brewer/PC is analogous to how the automobile industry has also evolved, where component integration has driven down manufacturing costs.

This has come at the expense of being able to self-service vehicles as well as no longer being able to repair or recondition many parts, and an increased dependency on dealership and authorized service center expertise. The car has become, in effect, an appliance as well.

Perlow is writing this about Adrian Kingsley-Hughes' traumatic breakup with Windows PCs, and his switch to Macs. Despite what many Apple-fanboys have long appeared to believe, the attraction of PCs over Macs has *always* been centered on the fact that PCs are modular, both for hardware and for software. You have more options for which monitor or hard drive or spreadsheet program you use, you can customize.[1] And this is why Window PCs continues to rule supreme for most businesses and government: multiple vendors means you can get competing bids, which means prices are *much* lower.

Perlow feels that we all, even us tinkerers, recognize that

Where the endpoint devices are concerned, whether we use Windows or Mac or something else entirely, such as a mobile OS like iOS or Android, we are simply end-users.

It's all about the Apps, stupid. And the delivery mechanism for those apps and the data services they need resides in the Cloud.
....
No more trying to make hand-picked white boxed or retail components work with each other and spending hours prepping systems. You buy a PC, it comes with an OS, and it just plain works. And your applications are subscriber-based, so you're always up to date.

What Perlow and his friends in the tech industry don't seem to recognize is that this Cloud-based computing absolutely depends on constant, reliable access to a) broadband Internet, and b) money.

In the US, in particular, broadband access is uneven. One of my friends was just talking about how his parents only have access to *dialup*, and they live in a part of the Appalachians where cell-phone reception is also impossible. My husband and I are looking for a new house, and even in central NJ we have to strike many areas off our list because we both do computer work at home, only FIOS gives us acceptable upload speeds, and there are many towns where FIOS is unavailable.

And then there's the idea that your stuff will be safe in the Cloud ... as long as you keep paying your subscriptions, of course. But if your income isn't steady and your subscriptions lapse, well ... the net effect is to just deepen the "Digital Divide" between the financially secure and the people in the second half of the country.

But if you don't use the Cloud, then when your laptop -- which you depend on -- breaks, you might have to wait a week or two or even three to get it fixed, if you're still under warranty, as it gets shipped off to whereverland and back. And the thing about laptops is that they're inherently breakable, they're one big moving part. I think every laptop the kids have had, has had problems with the keyboard, the screen, and/or the power supply, at one point or another. So I want laptops where those things are easy to fix -- and also where it's easy to get the battery and the hard drive out. IS THIS TOO MUCH TO ASK?!?

Any recommendations for Dell or Apple laptops that meet these criteria gratefully accepted -- they're the brands BALAC has educational discounts with, and that the IT department supports.

---

[1] One of the huge ironies about Apple is that its iconic 1984 ad presents Apple as the iconoclast, fighting the conformity of the Big Brother PC -- even though it's Apple computers that have always been uniform, un-customizable, un-individual. You can be a free spirit with Apple -- as long as you're exactly like all the other free spirits.