Category: Uncategorized

First in a hopefully occasional series of brief reviews of things I read or watch.

Sex Slaves is one of those English language books that it’s surprisingly easy to get hold of in Thailand, like memoirs of minor drug traffickers who’ve spent time in Thai prisons. You find them next to Lonely Planet. I actually bought it in 2004 and read it then, and was reminded of it by seeing it in Bangkok airport, so I’ve returned for another reading.

Brown’s book is a discussion of the different types of people involved in sex work, mainly sexual slavery or debt bondage work, in Asia: the prostitutes, the clients, the traffickers, the criminals, the lawmakers and the police. It’s mostly focused on what she believes is the major market for paid sex in Asia: Asian men (both residents of the country and sex tourists from rich Asian countries). She’s interviewed those who she can: largely the workers and to some extent the brothel keepers.

It’s something of a shock to the system for anyone who is used to reading careful anthropological standing-back-from trying-to-read atrocities (I read a lot of Inga Clendinnen). Brown is more immediately angry. Angry at the clients who largely don’t care whether the girl on the bed is allowed to say no to them, or whether she’ll see any of her earnings this decade. Angry at talk about ‘family values’ in countries where 70% or more of men visit prostitutes and where their family is not in an economic position to enforce make any objections. Angry at ads suggesting that men might want to protect themselves from the dirty dirty prostitutes, rather than protecting the women from their diseases. Angry at clients who do so by demanding virgins for unprotected sex.

Brown is, I think, more or less totally opposed to sex work in most conditions and certainly in Asian domestic ones: she thinks it is more or less always chosen only due to severe economic pressure or coercion. The money’s not bad, for the three or four years a lucky prostitute in Asia might be able to work safely after she gets out of debt bondage and before she’s too old for the clients and either dies of AIDS, has to prostitute a daughter or starts selling unprotected sex in order to compete for work. (It’s unclear what she thinks of prostitution in societies where a sex worker isn’t then an irredeemably fallen woman, I think she thinks the numbers of such women are too small and takes up too much space: women who can refuse clients are, to her, the lucky few.)

On this re-read, one of the more interesting points for me was her description of the women’s own perception of their human rights: essentially they (correctly) believe they don’t have any. This is particularly vivid in the case of debt bondage, in which the prostitutes must work either unpaid or on very low pay for around about five years (conveniently, their highest earning period and for some the only period where they are not visibly ill with AIDS-related sicknesses) because they must re-pay the brothel owner for the full cost of their purchase from the trafficker plus any money the brothel owner has spent on them. The debt seems to be usually real (as in, each sex act does pay off some part of it) but is openly manipulated with interest rates as high as 100% and when the debt is nearly done with the girl can be re-sold into a new debt bondage or a convenient raid from the police can be arranged, with the bribe or bail price being added to the debt. Brown says their reaction is never along the lines of I cannot be bought and sold, especially without my consent, this is invalid but rather they accept the notion and see repaying the debt, on whatever unfair and coercive terms, as an important matter of honour.

I recommend this, even if you don’t agree with her position on prostitution in all circumstances, although if you don’t she’ll repeatedly hit you with it. It’s possible to do more than quibble with the methodology, but it always will be: how does one do comprehensive longitudinal studies of a despised slave class being illegally held and usually doing illegal work? One can’t. It is, though, one of those books that left me a bit depressed about the possibility of change from activism; probably because Brown is. She thinks the sex industry is more than capable of changing in ways to beat any legal, international or NGO opposition either to it, or to its abuses of human rights.

Seth Schoen asks why some children are totally horrified to realise that meat comes from animals, and others aren’t and links to a story of a toddler who learns that she eats living things when she chooses a live fish to killed and cooked.

The idea of this being a revelation to people is a puzzle to me: it’s rather like death. Just as I have no memories of a big revelation to me that humans get older and older and eventually die, I don’t recall the meat revelation. I don’t remember not knowing that chicken was dead chicken, that beef was dead cow and so on. It’s worth noting here that I don’t actually fall into the crazy damn city slickers, only see their milk in cartons and their meat on plastic trays, probably think it grows that way! category. Does such a thing really exist? Anyway, I grew up with the animal trade in the house. My father has been a stock agent (an agent who buys and sells livestock for farmers) my whole life and for several years now he’s raising steers as beef cattle. (Something I didn’t know though: beef cattle are killed quite young.)

I do remember that I’m eating an animal! was a common major plot point in children’s books I used to read, but always because it turned out that the meal on the table was not just any old chicken, but specifically the child protagonist’s pet chicken, or similar. Admittedly in The Robber Bride this does lead one child to become a vegetarian (although she turns out to have a rather unusual take on killing animals, namely that some people are the strong killing types and she just isn’t) but The Robber Bride is an adult book. When this is a plot point in children’s books — older ones where people were more likely to actually have a farm animal that the children thought of as a pet — the children almost always refuse the meal but don’t consider becoming vegetarian. (The horror of the children was so universal and generally well rendered that I suspect that most of the authors were drawing on an actual childhood experience of being told they were eating a pet halfway through a meal. After several episodes in different books it got annoying: why were adults so consistently cruel?) These days in Australia one doesn’t usually get as close as eating one’s own animals; the closest I’ve come is the occasional gifts of a butchered carcass my father has been given (professionally butchered, not home butchered).

The Edge Annual Question 2008: What have you changed your mind about? Why? has the answers up.

Marti Hearst appears from computational linguistics, saying that she no longer believes that computational analysis of language requires understanding language. (This is not a radical position in modern computational linguistics, by the way, although the position that all useful computational analyses of language can be done with shallow techniques remains radical and is probably getting more so at the moment.) Some others I’ve looked at are I stopped cheering for the Romans (James O’Donnell), The Internet (Douglas Rushkoff: I thought Amazon.com was a ridiculous idea, and that the Internet would shrug off business as easily as it did its original Defense Department minders.), Memory Storage (Joseph Ledoux: in 2000, a researcher in my lab, Karim Nader, did an experiment that convinced me, and many others, that our usual way of thinking was wrong. In a nutshell, what Karim showed was that each time a memory is used, it has to be restored as a new memory in order to be accessible later…), There is nothing to add to the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics (Carlo Rovelli) Good Old Stuff Sucks (Steward Brand) and We Are Alone [in the universe] (Martin Seligman). Confusingly, some are titled for the old rejected belief, and others for the new belief.

There’s lots more to go through and I want to keep adding them as I read, but that should be a fun sample and of course you can read them all yourself…

In general, the ones writing about their career field of expertise are more interesting than those who aren’t — I’m not terribly interested in Martin Sabbagh deciding, for example, that expertise is usually meaningless — and also ones from technology fields or debates I’m acquainted with. For example, Xeni Jardin doesn’t say a lot about moderating online communities that I haven’t seen Teresa Nielsen Hayden (who is, in fact, the unnamed moderator of Boing Boing’s comments section that Jardin refers to) write about (see, for example, Virtual panel participation and Moderation isn’t rocket science). But neither of those weaknesses is surprising: there’s still a lot of good stuff there.

This is the traditional time of year to be brave and bold and write in detail about why one doesn’t make New Years resolutions. Every year thousands of the brave and bold sally forth into fluffy summer supplements of the newspapers and onto blogs and tell us that they don’t make New Years resolutions because no one ever keeps them and also do you know how much money gyms make in January from people buying twelve month memberships that they then don’t use? A lot of money, that’s what. So therefore the writer rejects the HIVE MIND and has chosen to become the first person in the world to not make resolutions.

Sometime sooner or later people will get off that bandwagon and all simultaneously decide to buy shares in companies that own gyms instead. Get it while it’s hot.

Anyway, I sort of do make New Years resolutions. I won’t go into how I don’t regard these as binding if, say, I lose interest or something. Or if I lose a leg, for that matter. I will add my personal bold and daring disclaimer, which is that this is not an entry in search of advice, thanks. Discussion yes, but the mere fact that I am resolving to make relatively small changes in my life in 2008 shouldn’t mean that you can assume that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

These are mostly process-based, rather than outcome-based. That is, rather than wanting to finish X or achieve Y, they’re more along the lines of lifestyle changes.

Yoga

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I’ve been doing yoga weekly for over three years now. Skills-wise, I am more or less where I was a year and a half ago. In particular, I’m in no danger of being able to lower to Chaturanga from plank pose, even if I drop my knees to the ground first. (I can’t do full length push-ups either. And here is where I would like to (a) remind you that I’m not looking for advice and (b) inform you that I’m familiar with the — excellent — Mistressing the Pushup article.) I can no longer do upward bow, although due to a chronic shoulder weakness I don’t push myself there: if it happens it happens.

So, this year I am planning to do fifteen minutes of yoga as many mornings as I can, probably alternating flowing work, static strength work and static flexibility work. I am not sure how much extra skill this will gain me, but judging from the immense difference that taking two classes a week (something I can’t afford to do regularly for reasons of both time and money) makes, I suspect it will be greatly helpful.

Household hacks

Andrew and I are infamously untidy, although I did hear yesterday that we’re less infamous than some other of our friends. However, infamously untidy nonetheless.

I don’t really have aspirations to be an enormously tidy person: I know very well the amount of work it takes to have a house be really clean every single day and there’s a reason that some people do it instead of having a salaried job. Plus I’m not interested in doing the lion(ess)’s share of the housework, and you betcha we just have different standards! would start that one rolling. But I would like to make it easier to achieve a higher level of tidiness. Andrew and I already made a small change last year, which is that we’re trying to stop thinking of cleaning and tidying as all-or-nothing: that is, once you start wiping down bathroom tiles you’re not allowed to stop until you’re smiling at your reflection at the rear of your oven. Instead we’ve tried to do a small and incomplete tidy every night.

Above that though, I want to make sure I have a potentially tidy house: that is, I have enough room to put away everything I own. That means stuff like having a filing cabinet, because we have too much important paperwork for a single file folder now. Having enough bookcases for all our books. Researching how to recycle our now large collection of old computer hardware. Getting rid of our giant desks that take up too much room.

We experimented for a while about a year back with food shopping about once a week rather than every single day. (Note: we don’t have a car.) I am thinking about at least shopping a few days at a time for meat and such, and picking up vegetables and fruits daily from the greengrocer that is about 100m away (unfortunately they aren’t actually very good, but at least they aren’t full of fruit flies and the smell of rotting fruit anymore).

More clothes is more better

I feel a little bad about this one, because many of my friends are joining the anti-consumer boycotts of buying new clothes and such, and I broadly agree with these.

However. Historically, I haven’t bought a lot of clothes. I own many many more than people in most parts of the world, and many more than I need, yes. But my clothes consist of about ten year’s accumulated clothing, a substantial amount of which was either cheaply made or just not really designed to carry its wearer from teenagehood into early twenties or early twenties into late.

In addition, I’ve rarely spent the kind of money and time buying clothes that I should spend to get decent, long-lived, well-fitting clothes. At university I was buying myself food. I’d only been out of university a year and a half when I got a mortgage (and now I’m back, doing a PhD). I’ve never found myself drowning in money, and when I’m not drowning in money I spend my limited free money on travel, unreasonably expensive food and the occasional gadget. (In my circles I’m rather under-gadgeted. Only one games console, for example, and a Canon 400D rather than the 30D or 40D. This isn’t the poor house we’re talking about.)

So this year I will do some considered clothes shopping, which, given my long standing dislike of doing so in shopping centres (like everyone else on the planet, I do not fit in most clothing sold for women in stores) will mean going white-knuckle and trying out things like Vertically Blessed.

Read more and watch more movies

This will consist entirely of consistently implementing something I only do occasionally: not using my computer in the evenings. As in, deliberately switching it off, unless I have work or a project to do (this is rarely what I’m doing with it, I’m usually surfing).

When the correct typing posture involves having one’s hands just above the level of one’s thighs, and one’s eyes level with the top of one’s monitor, why is it that most ‘computer desks’ sold by furniture manufacturers have a desk height that is right at the top of one’s waist (closing the elbows up and bending the wrists down) and a monitor stand that is only about ten or fifteen centimetres higher? The user needs to have a monitor the size of modern day televisions in order for that to reach their eye level.

I just measured on my home setup, which is reasonably good but which I’d like to replace because it takes up too much horizontal room, and I get a keyboard height of about 66cm/23in above the floor, a desk height of about 74cm/28in and a monitor stand (for a 17″ LCD with its own 5cm stand) of about 95cm/37in. And if anything I’d like the keyboard a little lower. But alleged computer desks are sold with a desk height of 70cm (usually without the adjustable keyboard tray that it seems I’m very lucky to have) and monitor stands at 80cm if that.

No wonder everyone slumps.

I was at a party on Saturday and someone mentioned they had a car share car with them. Actually, she didn’t mention it in a good way: she’d gone to pick up the car and it was misconfigured and she’d been terribly late. But it reminded me to check on them.

Car share systems work something like this: the company owns a number of cars with their own guaranteed parking spots in various suburbs. You subscribe for some amount of money per month (in the $15 to $50 range) and then you can book and use a car as you need (assuming that there’s low contention for them): you usually swipe a card to get into it. Cars are charged hourly and also by the kilometre and the rate includes insurance and petrol (apparently you can buy it more petrol on their account). For errands and such they’re much cheaper than rental cars, because you can pay by the hour rather than by the day and the companies themselves claim that you save money on car ownership up to 10 000km a year.

Since the hire system is automated, you also aren’t bound by the rental car opening hours, which has bit us several times (either hiring or returning a car on Sunday is a particular pain). Nor their ‘base rate’ quotes where they quote the price before compulsory ‘extras’, much like the way international airfares are quoted. (The quote in the article about a $39 airfare that turns into $59 is deceptive, by the way. In Australia domestic airfares must be quoted as all-inclusive. It’s only international airfares where they quote it before compulsory extras. And apparently the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is just dying to move on both rental car and international airfare quoting practices, but they need some legislative backing.) Nor their enormous excess charges, unless you pay another $20 to lower the excess.

However, most of them are focused on the city. GoGet has two cars in Chatswood and one in St Leonards, but the whole thing sounds a lot less attractive even when I have to get a train for half an hour to get to and from the car in the first place. If you’re in the Hornsby area and interested though, go tell them to get us a car.

Even leaving aside the fact that I can’t find any with a car in Hornsby yet, there are a few problems with them from our point of view.

There’s the minor one that Andrew can’t drive them yet, as he is not on a full unrestricted licence. However, he is on his P2 provisional licence — “green Ps” — and eligible to take the test to move to unrestricted in May. However, rental car companies don’t let provisional drivers hire cars either, and in fact some require that drivers have held an unrestricted licence for a full year. Most of them do have a nice feature whereby you can add an extra driver to a plan for little or no cost.

A bigger one is with the pricing model. When we need a car it is typically because we’re going to a lengthy event that’s not easy to get to on public transport. (Sydney, which is 100km across in some directions, has radial public transport, meaning that you have to travel into and out of the centre to cross suburbs. This party on Saturday would have been a 25km/40min drive but was about 60km on public transport and took us 2 hours on the trip home. That’s partly because a scheduled bus didn’t turn up, but cars don’t do that as much.) The shared car rates look a little less attractive when we consider that when we’d want them, we’d most likely want them for at least 10 hours at a time.

Another problem we would ideally want also want cars for trips of several days in length taking in about five hundred kilometres. Once we get to that point, we might as well rent a car, the price is equivalent before the monthly subscription fee. (Give or take excess reduction charges and it’s difficult to figure out how the included petrol plays in in advance.)

Nevertheless, if a car ever gets to Hornsby we’ll at least give it a trial run.

Car sharing companies in Australia:

• GoGet: Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane (formerly “Newtown Car Share”)
• FlexiCar: Sydney and Melbourne
• Charter Drive: Sydney

Simon Rumble writes:

I quite enjoy the various Planets I read because I get to read more about people. I read about their cats, their struggles with the landlord, their healthy problems, all kinds of stuff.

[…]

Of course, the shadowy cabal who run Planet Linux Australia clearly don’t agree with this thinking, [as demonstrated] by silently dropping all of my blog except the geek category.

[I believe the cabal in question is still entirely comprised of LA’s very own shadowy underworld evil genius, Michael Davies, for what it’s worth.]

I generally concur with Rumble’s sentiments within certain limits that I won’t go into here extensively, save to note that there’s different genres of blogging and actually, not all of them do work on a Planet. There’s a certain level of formality, a certain level of curiosity and a certain level of detail that makes for a geek’s blog — even when they write about cats or landlords — and I do notice when there’s a syndicated blog that is substantially out of genre and it does bug me. (Even when the blog in question is a good example of its own genre.)

This is part of the reason that I generally choose to have my short, whiny, chatty, half-geeky thoughts section syndicated, and never my diary section. It is out of genre, mostly because individual entries are far too long for Planets (the most frequent comment I receive on it these days is well, it’s good writing and all, but I don’t read twenty paragraph stuff online), but for another reason also, which is that I don’t really want it publicly criticised. It’s not a dialogue. I’m happy to take email input on what wireless audio device to buy, but I don’t really want or expect anything other than very neutral commentary on what I put in the diary section, not much more than sounds like you had fun or similar.

In particular, geek blogs are very commonly assumed to be in a genre where unless quite strongly specified otherwise, the poster is assumed to be asking for advice or a critical take, much like a posts to a user mailing list for a software project. There are reasons I’ve written about my day-to-day life online for over seven years, yes, and I am aware that by doing so I at any time could suddenly receive one hundred thousand emails and discover a thousand blog posts containing nothing but kindly advice concerning and stinging criticism of my every sentence. And what’s more, I’d probably deal with it fine. Well, relatively! But it’s not the genre I intend, and so I don’t feel comfortable having it syndicated on a Planet any more than I would, say, fiction or poetry I wrote, even though in practice I’m sure none of those things would horribly jar Planet readers.

I did a fair bit of web research before buying and returning a 2.4GHz A/V sender yesterday but it turns out I didn’t use the right search terms: including the frequency in the search is revealing. Basically, 2.4 GHz is the frequency used by 802.11b and 802.11g, and also by many cordless phones. Interference is pretty much inevitable unless you have the luxury of not having any close neighbours who have wireless networks and then, if you’re lucky, you can set your wireless network to one end of the spectrum and the A/V system to the other and most A/V systems will be happy (some of them use pretty much the entire spectrum, so not then).

Various solutions and proto-solutions:

Use the 5.8GHz spectrum? No. Firstly, people are already starting to get cordless phones in this spectrum in order to avoid interference on those so it’s just deferring the problem until there’s just as much noise in 5.8GHz. Secondly, all A/V systems I’ve found are analogue (FM) modulation and analogue use of the 5.8GHz spectrum is illegal in Australia. (Such systems are sold nonetheless, usually with the disclaimer that unless you’re buying them exclusively for use in the US and other countries, you don’t want them, nudge nudge, wink wink.)

Use digital modulation in either 2.4GHz or 5.8GHz (which is legal)? Well, this ought to be possible. A lot of cordless phones do exactly that and advertise it heavily. However, this just doesn’t seem to be an option with A/V systems: they all use analogue, pretty much. The one possible exception is the AVLabs AVMagic system, which is alleged to use 802.11g. But that’s only stated in a few reviews of the product (using identical wording), not on AVLab’s homepage and not on places where the system is actually sold, which makes buying it a bit of a risk.

Buy one of the many products by the consumer router companies (Netgear, D-Link…) which claim to be wireless media players or digital entertainers or similar? Well, possibly. However, most of these require software to be installed on my (Windows or sometimes Mac, ie no) PC which streams signal to it. Or often it streams just straight out files, which means that in future it may well not be able to read my new-fangled format of the twenty second century media files. In fact, most of them don’t support Ogg Vorbis. Plus they’re pretty DRM-happy. I don’t know anything about DRM from a technical point of view, but I know what I don’t like.

Use a second computer sitting near my speakers in various ways (make it my media centre, stream some audio to it)? Again, possibly, but I do rather like having only one 24/7 computer in my house (noise, power, impending heat death of the universe). If I could get a wee fanless PC in Australia with enough grunt to decode a stream and run a sound card for the kind of prices I see at cappuccinopc.com, then probably. For more than about $400 at the absolute most, not so much.

Buy a mini-ITX board and little case and build it yourself, lazy bones. This is me we’re talking about. I was once warned away from sewing machines due to my lack of patience and short temper. I’ve never built a computer either, and you want me to start with an eeny one? (I did once change a CPU. It went OK. Except then I had to get someone help me underclock it, and it made me the least cool 22 year old on the planet.)

Get your man to do it. He’d probably eventually try, maybe if I had a gun or something, but just as I worry that during the process of building it, I’d go crazy and throw the motherboard across the room with a ninja scream, he worries about his hand tremor. The hand tremor that gets worse when he worries. And besides, c’mon. Why can’t we substitute money for time? Paying for fiddly things to already be done is awesome.

Reconfigure the house network so that everything lives near the speakers? Kind of a pain because the aerial connection and the telephone jack (ADSL) are separated by about ten metres, which includes doorways and cupboards and stuff. We like using the computer itself as the router for a bunch of reasons. In fact Andrew really likes it and strongly discouraged me from playing around with it. (He probably remembers the first time I set up PPP over ethernet, which took two hours of yelling. On my birthday. This comic is the story of our relationship, except that every so often we switch roles.)

Buy another set of speakers? Given how much the current set cost, the ‘buy another computer’ solution is better.

So what are you going to do? Not sure. Maybe a Squeezebox. (Open source server, uncompressed streams.) But man. C’mon wireless revolution, get with the program.

I feel crappy being sad about the news that Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer’s mainly because of the books… but then, I mainly know the books. Pratchett outside the books I mainly know from his Usenet posts, which I’m sufficiently interested in to go and do that search about once a year.

Anyway, it’s sad. For him, and for the books. Good luck, Terry.

I’ve been in the market for wireless audio-visual transmission equipment for about a month, since my good speakers are now living next to the TV so we can listen to Wii, DVD and TV sound through them. The computer with music on it is tied to another part of the house by the modem location and I’m well over the era of running cables all over my house.

For the benefit of people thinking of suggesting a product, what I’m looking for is not anything that requires software to run on the computer itself. Instead, I’m looking for something that takes the soundcard output — ie probably just RCA plugs — transmits it over radio and which has a receiver that I can sit near the speakers which will feed out sound via RCA. That way I have fairly good future-proofness: the wireless sound is entirely independent of the operating system I’m running and the origin of the sound it’s transmitting, it just transmits to the speakers anything I can feed to my soundcard.

However, we found such a thing today, and I must say: DO NOT BUY the Cocoon Wireless AV systems being widely sold in Dick Smith Electronics. The diagram on the back may well have a brick wall between sender and receiver, but we managed to get significant interference just by putting me between the sender and receiver. In addition, 802.11 wireless networks interfere quite strongly, to the point where Andrew started sending pings over the network and could hear the related interference. (They’re listed as interfering in the troubleshooting guide too, without a solution, just a mention that you might want to consider turning your network off to eliminate possible interference.)

Unfortunately, well, in a way, Dick Smith was very ready to do a full refund of something I’d only owned for an hour, because I was all ready to tell them this story, but they cut me off when the hand gestures started, and wrote down ‘DOES NOT WORK AS ADVERTISED’.