International Women’s Day at Harvard and Google

by philg

On the breakfast table this morning in a Harvard cafeteria:

Typing “oppression of” into Google results in “oppression of women” as the first option:

Clicking on Google’s “Women’s Day” graphic brings up pages celebrating Yoko Ono and Frida Kahlo:

What’s the message here, though? Weren’t these artists famous primarily due to their sexual relationships with successful male artists? (both of which male artists happened to be married at the time that the sexual relationships commenced) Was it a good day for Cynthia Lennon when Yoko Ono began having sex with her husband John Lennon? If Google is going to pick female role models, why not pick women who made it as artists without the assistance of a male sex partner? Mary Cassatt, for example, Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, or Louise Nevelson in visual art. Aretha Franklin or Mitsuko Uchida in the world of music.

Or maybe that actually is Google’s intentional message? The way for women to advance is with an already-successful male sex partner and the selection of the partner should not be limited to those men who are unmarried?

Readers: How did you celebrate International Women’s Day?

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Provincetown Public Library

by philg

One of the exciting things that I am able to do after 18 years of flight training is go to public libraries in different towns. The photos below are from a recent rare calm-wind, above-freezing day in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Adjacent books in the featured Young Adult Non-Fiction section:

From the rest of the shelf:

What about New (and/or featured) Children’s Fiction?

I do hope that at least one candidate in 2020 adopts Gordon Jack’s slogan of “When they go low, we go slightly lower.”

In between the fiction and non-fiction sections:

What about for little kids? The library is in a converted church and makes great use of the high ceilings:

There is a restroom:

The little kids have their own books, in which it turns out that adults and cisgender boys are guilty of cisgender-normative and hetero-normative prejudice.

The reviews of I’m a Girl on Amazon:

  • A wrongheaded picture book attempts to celebrate “girl power” and the rejection of traditional gender roles but ends up perpetuating stereotypes. … The damaging fallacy extends in every direction, though, as the bystanders’ sometimes derisive comments, which assume that she’s male (“Ugh! Boys are so messy.”), support an additional set of (binary) gender stereotypes.
  • Besides the message of “you can be as annoying as you want as long as you’re breaking gender stereotypes,” having to read “I’m a girl!” with emphasis throughout the entire story gets tedious.
  • Intentional or not, it’s about gender identity and being misgendered. … It never says she is trans, but could easily be read that way

And of 10,000 Dresses:

  • I am building a collection of books and lessons to help my children understand what the GLBTIQ crowd experiences to help teach them how to treat others and how NOT to treat others.
  • I selected this book as part of an independent English literature course that I am taking that involved examining LGBT experience through literature. This is an excellent selection for starting discussion on transgender identity in childhood. The author’s use of pronouns is especially insightful and overall it’s a reaffirming story. I removed one star from my review because the main character’s parents and sibling are rude and intolerant and the book in no way addresses this.
  • I do have a problem with the girl running to a stranger’s house and going in as if that is a perfectly safe behavior.
  • I returned mine today and was appalled as I read the story to my son before reading it to myself. Kids need to feel safe at home, especially when dealing with gender non-conformity.
  • This book seems intended to be positive about a boy wearing dresses, but in the story, the boys’ parents and sibling reject him, and one girl becomes his friend and makes dresses with him. The issues with his family are never resolved.
  • [From American University] 10,000 Dresses is a true depiction of what a young child goes through when feeling that they do not fit in. … There are also no diverse races in this book; every character that is depicted is Caucasian. Since children of color are unable to see themselves represented in the book, they cannot relate to the greater message behind the story.
  • The story is poorly conceived: the parents are unsupportive and cold, while a stranger provides comfort.
  • A child is systematically mocked by each member of his family, only to find refuge with a random stranger.

Should these paper forms be called “Normally aspirated tax”?

From the convenience store, we learn that customers are passionate about marijuana, but that the claimed health benefits for humans do not translates into health benefits for our canine companions:

What’s happening in the rest of the town?

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Google shows that James Damore and Econ 101 were right?

by philg

James Damore, the Google Heretic, was cast out for saying that intelligent people who identify as “women” did not enjoy staring at a screen and typing out pages of boring C and Java code (while simultaneously wearing headphones and rubbing elbows with other nerds?).

Damore suggested that the programming job be reconfigured so that it would be more appealing to people identifying as women. Instead of doing that, Google fired him for his thoughtcrime.

If Damore were correct, Econ 101 would predict that women at Google would be getting paid more than men for doing the same job. Otherwise, why would they be there doing something that was distasteful to them?

“Google Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men as It Addresses Wage Equity” (nytimes):

When Google conducted a study recently to determine whether the company was underpaying women and members of minority groups, it found, to the surprise of just about everyone, that men were paid less money than women for doing similar work.

Doesn’t this tend to show that both Damore and Econ 101 are correct?

Related:

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Less than a month to go before Google breaks hundreds of thousands of links all over the Internet

by philg

Google purchased Picasa, a super efficient photo editor that offered seamless integration with online publishing (e.g., you add a photo to an album on your desktop computer and it automatically gets pushed to the online version of the album). When they were pushing their Facebook competitor, Google+, they set it up so that Picasa created Google+ albums.

They wasted a huge amount of humanity’s time and effort by shutting down Picasa (previous post on the subject).

Now they’re going to waste millions of additional hours worldwide by breaking links to all of the Google+ albums that they had Picasa create. People will either have to edit a ton of links and/or, having arrived at a broken link, will have to start searching to see if they can find the content elsewhere.

Example: my review of an Antarctica cruise on the Ocean Diamond. It was so easy to publish the photos via Picasa that I just linked to the photo album from the HTML page. Now I will have to move the photos somewhere else, edit the HTML file, git push, git pull, etc. Then repeat for every other blog posting and web page that links to a Picasa-created album.

Maybe this is why Google has a corporate mission of making the world’s information accessible? They’re the primary force now in making information inaccessible?

Related:

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Why weren’t families coming over the border to seek asylum 30 years ago?

by philg

“Border at ‘Breaking Point’ as More than 76,000 Migrants Cross in a Month” (nytimes):

The number of migrant families crossing the southwest border has once again broken records, with unauthorized entries nearly doubling what they were a year ago, suggesting that the Trump administration’s aggressive policies have not discouraged new migration to the United States.

At least 70 such groups of 100 or more people have turned themselves in at Border Patrol stations that typically are staffed by only a handful of agents, often hours away from civilization. By comparison, only 13 such groups arrived in the last fiscal year, and two in the year before.

The difference is that the nature of immigration has changed, and the demographics of those arriving now are proving more taxing for border officials to accommodate. Most of those entering the country in earlier years were single men, most of them from Mexico, coming to look for work. If they were arrested, they could quickly be deported.

Now, the majority of border crossers are not single men but families — fathers from Honduras with adolescent boys they are pulling away from gang violence, mothers with toddlers from Guatemala whose farms have been lost to drought. Most of these migrants may not have a good case to remain in the United States permanently, but because of legal constraints, it is not so easy to speedily deport them if they arrive with children and claim protection under the asylum laws.

… the practical effect is that most families are released into the country to await their hearings in immigration court. The courts are so backlogged that it could take months or years for cases to be decided. Some people never show up for court at all.

Given U.S. law and policies, all of this makes sense. But why was it different 20 or 30 years ago? We haven’t changed our laws or policies, have we?

Is it Guatemala that has changed for the worse? The population was 8.9 million in 1990 and is now over 17 million (Wikipedia). In other words, there are twice as many people trying to share whatever resources they have down there. But, on the other hand, from 1960 to 1996, the country was embroiled in a civil war. Despite the pressure from the near-doubling of population, surely life in Guatemala today is better than during an actual war.

How about Honduras? Population was 4.9 million in 1990 against 9 million today (Wikipedia). But the 1969-1999 period is summarized as “Wars and corruption” by Wikipedia. Life in Honduras overall should be better today compared to 30 years ago.

Related:

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Du Bois Orchestra concert

by philg

We escaped the suburbs recently for a concert by the Du Bois Orchestra:

Founded in 2015, the Du Bois Orchestra offers the opportunity to listen to and perform both the standard and historically neglected repertoire of the classical canon. Inspired by the work of Harvard alumnus and civil rights icon W.E.B. Du Bois, our mission is to raise awareness about issues of social exclusion in classical music. We in the Du Bois community see music-making and listening not only as a means by which to break down aesthetic stereotypes but as a model for constructive societal dialogue. The Du Bois Orchestra engages in community outreach and educational programming.

The concert featured one work by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a composer whose biological father was a physician from Africa and whose mother was an English woman who ultimately married a “railway worker”. It is unclear how he was an example of race-based “social exclusion,” though, since the program notes describe one of the most brilliant musical careers in history. He was admitted to the Royal College of Music at age 15. He become a professor of music, principal conductor of the Handel Society of London, was received at the White House by President Teddy Roosevelt, and enjoyed gushing reviews from critics around the world, e.g., “I have long been looking for a new English composer of real genius and I believe I have found him.” (Auguste J. Jaeger)

The overture to Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast (1898) was about 50 years ahead of its time. Coleridge-Taylor would have made good money as a Hollywood composer if he hadn’t died of pneumonia in 1912, aged 37. [The piece is not about a wedding among Elizabeth Warren’s ancestors, but rather is derived from Longfellow’s poem.] Listen to a version on YouTube.

A new piece by Sachiko Murata, Sorrow Songs, was well-received and easy on the ears due to incorporating a lot of folk tunes (not your usual painful dissonant “modern classical” work). She says that she was inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. From the program: “I am from Japan and came to the United States as an immigrant. … Du Bois used his whole life to promote equality and fight against racism. His message is still so strong and appropriate in this time.”

Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet was played. without a disclaimer that one or both principals would be considered criminals in most U.S. states (Juliet was 13-turning-14 and Romeo may also have been under the age of consent).

Thomas Cooper was the soloist for the Chausson Poème, which was beautifully played with perfect intonation and expression.

Apparently contradicting the “social exclusion” hypothesis, the program notes say that Ernest Chausson, who was from a wealthy white family, had a much tougher time with the critics and audiences than did Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. But maybe people today are more racist than folks were circa 1900 when Coleridge-Taylor was most popular? On the third hand, Kanye West does not identify as white (as far as I know) and he has achieved #1 status. So if classical music listeners have become more racist then there is no inconsistency? On the fourth hand, most classical music listeners will soon die of old age, so the problem will resolve itself.

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Why aren’t all dishwasher detergents the same?

by philg

Here’s a conundrum… given that dishwashers haven’t changed in the past couple of decades and fundamental detergent chemistry hasn’t changed substantially since 1946 (source), why wouldn’t all dishwasher detergents have converged to essentially the same formula? Or maybe there would be three formulae: soft water, medium water, hard water.

Perhaps detergents actually are all the same, but there is money to be made in fancy packaging and convincing advertising? If so, why does Consumer Reports rate detergents on a scale from 19 (Cascade Complete Gel with Dawn; looks like Procter and Gamble might need to spend more time in the lab and less time making toxic masculinity commercials for its Gillette division) to 85 (Costco’s Kirkland Signature Premium pacs, which might be Finish Powerballs in disguise? Finish rates 83).

Maybe it makes sense that the eco brands such as Seventh Generation and Ecover perform badly. Or the Trader Joe’s absurdly cheap (about 1/3rd the price of Costco!) pacs aren’t great (though nowhere near as bad as that Cascade gel product, above).

But why wouldn’t similarly priced pacs from the bigger vendors all be formulated essentially the same? How is it that the folks who make Finish know something that the chemical engineers behind Cascade don’t know, or vice versa? Even products with similar prices from the same company performed differently.

[Separately, if Consumer Reports is right, you should never ever buy dishwasher gel. A Palmolive eco+ was a mediocre performer and all the rest fell on a spectrum of bad to worse. The top-end Costco pacs were the best performers as well as about 1/3 the price of the top-end brand name pacs.]

It makes sense to me that a Tesla and an Audi electric car will be different. But why should dishwasher detergents be? Everyone wants the same thing (clean dishes).

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MIT Private Pilot Ground School in streaming video

by philg

Folks:

I finished uploading 1.6 TB of “pro res” video to YouTube and assembled it all into a playlist for our Private Pilot Ground School.

Do the videos work reasonably well?

Is it fair to say that, on a bytes-divided-by-value-to-viewers basis, this is the largest ratio ever achieved by anyone ever uploaded to the public Internet?

Related:

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Dear Evan Hansen: A musical for 12-year-old girls…

by philg

… and their parents too.

Most of the newer Broadway musicals seem to be targeted at 12-year-old girls (e.g., Wicked). In order to guarantee that at least one member of the Greenspun 2019 business trip theater expedition had a good time, I augmented my inner 12-year-old girl with an actual 12-year-old girl (she’ll be 13 soon) for a night at Dear Evan Hansen. We had a tough time getting into the theater because there was a huge herd of 12-year-old girls being ushered in by their adult (female) chaperones. My companion: “This is the hottest show on Broadway right now.”

The material seems to fit the musical format better than most. Most of the show is one-to-one conversation in which it doesn’t seem crazy that one actor would sing to another.

In addition to the challenge of navigating the teenage years, the show dwells on the challenges and limits of parenting, especially of parenting teenagers who are not thriving. Thus, this musical has much broader appeal than the typical new show.

One group that might not love the show is LGBTQIA. “This must be the only new Broadway show without an LGBTQIA theme or character,” I remarked. My companion, a regular at the theater, agreed, but that might be because her LGBTQIA teacher typically chooses LGBTQIA-themed shows for the public middle school crowd. The only reference to LGBTQIA issues is when teenage boys are anxious to avoid being perceived as gay (“that’s how it is in my school, too,” said the 12-year-old next to me).

Stop reading and buy a ticket if you are afraid of spoilers…

The title character is a casualty of the American no-fault divorce revolution. Dad wanted to have sex full-time with a “cocktail waitress,” so he abandoned Mom when Evan was 7 years old. Evan is marooned in an unnamed suburb in an unspecified state while biological dad has moved to Colorado and has two new kids with the new sex partner. It sounds as though Evan hasn’t seen the dad for years. Mom doesn’t seem to be getting any child support cash from dad so she is constantly working as a nurse’s aide and taking classes to become a paralegal. Mom-of-suburban-teenager (Lisa Brescia) is Manhattan/Paris slender with fantastic posture.

[While heroic involuntarily single mom makes for good theater, the father who leaves the wife and kid is a statistical rarity in the U.S. Most commonly it is the mom who wants out and sues the dad (3:1 ratio here in Middlesex County, Massachusetts). Larger statistical studies have shown that in states where a woman can expect to win custody of children and associated lucrative child support, the majority of divorces and divorce lawsuits are initiated by women. Also, Wife #1 has first claim on the man’s income in nearly all U.S. states, so it doesn’t make real world sense for Evan’s mom to be financially struggling if this guy has enough money to support the cocktail waitress and two new kids.]

Perhaps as a consequence of being fatherless, Evan (25-year-old Michael Lee Brown on the Tuesday night that we attended; usually a 16-year-old(!) plays the role) is a psychological wreck and his therapist instructs him to write letters to himself, staring with “Dear Evan Hansen.” An even more distressed teenager at the school (Alex Boniello as Connor) grabs one of these notes out of the printer and commits suicide with the letter in his pocket. The parents assume that these are their son’s final words and that Evan Hansen and Connor were close friends. Evan is in love with Connor’s sister so he is anxious to insinuate himself in this grieving family’s life. A web of lies ensues. This is probably the funniest show about suicide ever created.

The family devastated by suicide was an intact 1950s-style family in which the lawyer dad wears a suit and tie to work every day and mom doesn’t work. Dad (Michael Park, a lot more slender than the law partners I meet with in conference rooms!) has no function with the kids other than to pay the bills. He was not sensitive or sympathetic to his son’s troubles. The mom (Jennifer Laura Thompson) was heavily invested in her son and infinitely forgiving, but she couldn’t reach him either. The teenage daughter (Mallory Bechtel) is the only one who could see her brother rationally.

One funny part of the musical that we experienced is that a Jewish teenager, originally played by a white actor, is now played by a non-white actor (during the performance we watched: Roman Banks, who was fantastic). So we saw an African-American youth talk about his Bar Mitzvah, etc. (Of course, in real life a black convert to or adoptee into Judaism would be most welcome, but the situation is unusual enough to entertain the audience.)

I like works that don’t take the easy way out and Dear Evan Hansen is one of them. Nobody does anything that is radically implausible. There is not a neat happy ending. (See also The Weather Man.) As a provincial, I was awed as usual by the depth of talent in Manhattan, including the orchestra.

Final verdict from the local 12-year-old critic: “This is my favorite show so far, except for Hamilton because it’s Hamilton.”

(I said that I would see Hamilton when it could be accomplished for $15 or less at the movie theater. This prompted my retired fund manager friend to respond that he was waiting for it to be available for free on a Chinese file-sharing site.)

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Bad year for air shows and the U.S. military

by philg

Readers: Who has some good ideas for air shows this year? My personal favorite, the Rhode Island Air Show, has been canceled (NBC) :

“Hundreds of key National Guard members will be called to federal duty overseas in support of the RING’s primary mission of national defense,” a news release said.

“With this anticipated federal mobilization commitment in 2019, we have been presented with a difficult decision regarding our ability to safely and effectively conduct this public event. The volume, timing, and the particular trained skill sets of the more than 500 Soldiers and Airmen who will be away during the traditional timeframe of the Open House Air Show presents a unique challenge,” Maj. Gen. Christopher Callahan said in a statement. “Ultimately, we could neither compromise the training and support of those being deployed, nor the planning and conducting of our Open House Air Show. As such, we regrettably must forego the event in 2019.”

So New Englanders are out of luck, particular considering what a total Charlie-Foxtrot the Westover show is (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/07/13/great-new-england-air-show-this-weekend-at-westover/ ).

Excited about a female pilot flying a fighter plane (like Hannah Reitsch?) in a tight pattern around the runway? You’re out of luck there too: “Zoe Kotnik: First female F-16 demo commander out after two weeks” (BBC)

Here are some ideas:

  • April 6-7: Blue Angels in Lakeland, FL at Sun & Fun (Oshkosh Lite)
  • May 4-5: Blue Angels at Ft. Lauderdale Air Show (on the beach, so all roads lead to the show!)
  • May 25-26: Blue Angels at Miami Beach Air and Sea Show (same deal; how much worse can the traffic be than usual for Miami?)
  • June 15-16: Blue Angels at Ocean City (Maryland) Air Show
  • June 29-30: Thunderbirds in Traverse City, Michigan
  • July 22-28: Airventure at Oshkosh; air show every afternoon and two evenings!
  • August 21: Thunderbirds at the Atlantic City (NJ) Air Show
  • August 24-25: Blue Angels at KSWF (New York; good for New Englanders); Thunderbirds in Rochester, NY (proceed to Niagara Falls after?)
  • August 31-September 1: Blue Angels in Nova Scotia (how bad can the crowds be?)
  • September 14-15: Thunderbirds at the Reno Air Races (could an F-16 beat a Glasair?)
  • October 5-6: Thunderbirds in San Juan, Puerto Rico (if you’re escaping AOC’s income tax and Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax (payable in wampum?) to enjoy a tax-free lifestyle)
  • October 19-20: Blue Angels in Jacksonville Beach; Red Bull Air Race in Indianapolis (only US location)
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