bloggable bits

[rax]

Random things:

• This morning Krinn convinced me not to write a mail client with the most effective threat I have ever had made to me. (Recently our office mail server upgraded, and while in theory getting new webmail and access to Apple Mail and Outlook 2012 should make things better, each of those three clients has some critical flaw I can't chase down that makes me have to run a minimum of two of them at all times. I now understand why people write mail clients.) She said: "If you try to write a mail client, all of your Shaymins will stop smiling." I think I actually gasped. The image is SO SAD. Good work, Krinn. <3
• I dreamt last night about being part of a band that did abstract process-as-performance shows where we dragged beanbag chairs on stage and had shitty rehearsals at various venues. It was awesome. I think the other members of the band were punk kids from our Pokemon league and from Albuquerque's. If no one has done this schtick yet, someone should. *finger on nose*
• rushthatspeaks 's blog (and in particular this book review) got me thinking about generation ships --- which, if I understand correctly, are giant spaeships meant to serve as a habitat for many generations of human as they go off to colonize some new planet. I mean, I have never actually read a book or really consumed any media that used generation ships, because I'm a very sporadic consumer of science fiction, but the idea in and of itself makes sense and has some plausibility benefits over AND THEN THEY WOKE UP FROM CRYOSTASIS ON "EARTH, BUT WITH CAT PEOPLE" or what have you. What it did get me thinking about was Lyotard's essay "Can Thought Go On Without A Body?," which I am pretty sure is in The Inhuman. He talks about the difficulty of producing machines capable of thought, with the idea of sending them outside of the sphere of influence of the sun so that  thought will persist after the sun explodes/implodes/whatever. The reason he thinks it wouldn't work is that machines don't have gender --- that is, some difference between some fo them that has an almost religious inscrutability and implies the imbrication of the other with the self. Or something, I'm butchering his argument. The point is, if I take that argument at face value, I actually think generation ships could be the cure for gender, if that inscrutable difference as expressed in the people on the generation ship was the difference between the people who did and didn't stay on Earth. Maybe? I dunno. Been chewing on it, figured I'd share. (Also: Does gender need a cure? "Curing gender" is not unproblematic, but boy are there some interesting thought experiments and maybe stories in here. Haha. "Boy." GENDER WHY)
• It turns out I can make fairly spicy lentil curry by just milling good black pepper into it until my arms are tired and then asking someone else to do the same. :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D I have been trying and failing to make reasonable curry since losing nightshades from my diet, and apparently the trick was to start from an Ethiopian recipe and modify, rather than starting from an Indian one? Once I've got it at "I know what I'm doing" I will post a recipe or something.
• I hate to do anything that even comes off as complaining about weather when I know a number of my friends are still stuck under snowdrifts, but on Sunday Rik and I walked for five miles or so and it was cold enough with the wind that my legs were covered in hives. Stupid cold allergy, and arguably, stupid me for walking five miles in shorts in February. It seems mostly better although my calves are still itchy as all get out, and while this is mostly not a huge deal I scratch in my sleep. :( I think as fashion disastery as this is, the best solution I have without spending money might be shorts, leg warmers, and sandals. ... ... ... how does one go about selecting good hiking pants? I don't know how to garment.
• There's still a long-form life update email... coming... soon... ish? Hope y'all are doing well!

Comments

[ranyart]

On the subject of hiking pants, I find that ones with a lot of knee room or that are otherwise baggy are important (so they don't get tight in the knee or thigh when I'm clambering up something), and something that's a lighter/more breathable fabric is preferrable to denim. A lot of outdoorsy places sell pants that are all or mostly cotton but are a thinner material. Some have ridiculous numbers of pockets, which may or may not be a plus for you.
Of course, I went hiking a bunch this past week in jeans and jean-like things, so clearly I'm not really following my own advice. But if I was up for clothes shopping more often vs. cowering in fear at the thought I'd probably go to an outdoor supply place and get something a bit more appropriate. Some of them even zip off into shorts, which can be helpful.

[rax]

if I was up for clothes shopping more often vs. cowering in fear at the thought

I ALSO HAVE THIS PROBLEM. :( My current pants came from ebay!

[ranyart]

My problem is that I can't guarantee that clothes I buy will fit because my size changes so I feel like I have to go in person. And then I take a HUGE stack of pants into a change room because I have no idea what size I am, what cut looks good, and at this point I've lost most of my ability to objectively tell if things are fitting correctly.
So sometimes I buy clothes and sometimes I cry a lot.

[picklish]

*sympathetic clothesplosion in y'all's general direction*

[pseudogeek]

On subject of machine not having gender, I'm a bit confused because aren't most AI created with a gender in mind, named with a gendered name and given a body or avatar of said gender? Humans usually don't create genderless AIs. This means the machines, having a gendered mind, would have a gender. Unless it's the few genderless ones. And it's not even that imbrication of self with another requires the existence of gender? All it requires is a desire and a capacity for said imbrication. What did he think of bacteria sex between two (presumably) genderless bacteria? Some bacteria have no sex as we know it and probably no gender, but has this thing where they form a bridge between themselves and exchange genetic codes. They don't have two types of shapes where one shape can only exchange with another shape. Gender isn't required for this kind of thing. Plus we have homosexual relationships, and the imbrication happen between them without the need of plurality of gender.

...What does gender do, anyway? Is there a purpose to it? Is it merely a by-product of having two sexes? Is it for diversity?

(Now I'm tempted to revive my abandoned sci-fi novel project. If only to play around with ideas.)

[pyrrhocorax]

I often wonder what gender actually is. It feels much more important and fundamental than just a preference like a favourite colour, but why? Even people who identify as not having a gender are usually very firm about their un-genderdness. It's a big deal to us and I have no idea why. ??GENDER??

[3rdofjune]

WRT artificial intelligence, the sticking point that I keep returning to is that thinking/intelligence/mind don't actually exist in themselves; they're metaphors we use to describe an aspect of embodied life. So a "machine that thinks" would be a kind of artificial body, rather than a program simulating an aspect of brain activity, which might reveal a lot about the way our own brains work but wouldn't have a sense of their own existence.

[sylvanstargazer.livejournal.com]

Dust, by Elizabeth Bear, is about a generation ship that sort of got lost, so it turns into a fantasy story. Recommended, with warnings for incest and a frustrating ending. I think I remember it engaging a bit with notions of gender and identity differentiation. (I feel like race/caste has had some association with trumping gendered sorting in the past, but always in otherwise-problematic ways that seem to make things worse and leave the gender differentiation of the hegemonic un-questioned, but that shouldn't discourage future explorations of alternative non-gender differentiation schemes.)

Good hiking pants are soft enough not to chafe and sturdy enough not to fall apart. Softer cargo pants are classic, as is long-underwear-under-other-pants, so the pants rub against the leggings instead of one's legs.

[rax.livejournal.com]

Love the icon. :)

I've had both strong recommendations and strong anti-recommendations for Elizabeth Bear. I will probably try something of hers eventually but it's always weird to approach a book with both of those? Thanks for the suggestion.

Long underwear under other pants would probably not work even in desert winter, although maybe there exists nice long underwear that is not like the kind I wore and hated when young. I might just go to, gasp, a hiking store and be like "yo I need pants" and see what happens.

[sylvanstargazer.livejournal.com]

Clearly, I know nothing about the specific recommendations you've encountered, so this isn't targeted at anyone in particular. I just overthink things sometimes.

Her early work is super-uneven (she has, for example, an Avatar-eque novel about fish-people and a classic second-wave-ish matriarchy novel, which I think only reads as a critique of that essentialism if you are familiar with the original 1980's genre of gloriously-bad matriarchy novels and even then is not particularly good, because it is still in the style of bad 1980's SF writing.) I suspect that if I didn't have the cultural context I do her prose would flow less smoothly since it at times relies on mythology, queer/poly/feminism references or quasi-academic language. She doesn't explain what is going on when she uses them, so, for example, I knew someone who wasn't used to hearing about multiple boyfriends for one person who ended up confused about why one guy was being referred to by two different names and seemed to teleport.
Then there was the racism disaster centered on her, so she is now known in some of my circles as "that RaceFail author". It didn't change how I read her books, for reasons omitted because it got long. I can respect people who choose not to read her because of that, though my perspective is different. I do think she, as an author, has become overdetermined in a way that can rapidly lead to that weird place of recommendations/anti-recommendations depending on the context in which one first encountered her work.

The classic hiker-specific long underwear is often made out of silk, which makes it slightly less irritating than traditional stuff but also more expensive. If you go to a hiking store they probably have fancier pants now made out of spacesuit material or something.

[sprrwhwk.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I really liked Undertow -- it's one of my favorite books of hers, actually. (Although I say that about, like, half of her books I've read.) I'm not sure I'd call it Avatar-esque, or at least I didn't get such a "what we need is a honky" vibe from it.

A big part of what I like about Bear's writing, in Undertow and Dust in particular, is the way she writes technology, and technology as a part of people's bodies -- which I think is germane to the discussion.

"Overdetermined" is a good way to describe people's reaction. I'm sad about it, because she's an extremely important author for me, and her work is problematic in its own ways, surely, but I think less in the ways than that association would suggest.

[sprrwhwk.livejournal.com]

I'll second the recommendation for Elizabeth Bear, and for Dust in particular if the interaction of gender and generation ships is of interest to you. (ISTR badoingdoing enjoyed them as well -- "They have a character like me in them!")

Without trying to apologize for or diminish the mistakes Bear has made, or for the blind spots that she has, I see her trying so damn hard to get stuff -- especially around gender and sexuality -- right. She succeeds much more often than not, for me at least, and I have learned more from her failures than from the vast majority of successes. I can't help but give her credit for that. (With the disclaimer that she's my favorite living SF writer, now a mentor, and... kind of a personal friend? So I'm not exactly unbiased.)

Modern long underwear is nothing like the nasty old waffle-weave stuff. It's silky-soft polypro; it's really nice.

[crankycoyote.livejournal.com]

how does one go about selecting good hiking pants?

I like hiking pants that are durable and baggy, and I tend to avoid cotton because it doesn't dry quickly and that can be bad in the mountains when you fuck up. For the desert, I use REI convertible pants in the summer, or cargo/tactical pants in the winter. I like my 5.11 Taclite Pros because they have lots of pockets and reinforced knees, and the knees are the first to go on all of my pants. I've never needed long underwear in the desert except overnight, but the newer synthetic long underwear (you'll hear it called a 'base layer' in outdoorsy stores because people like fancy new things) is quite comfortable, either underneath something or just by itself if it's a calm day.


The reason he thinks it wouldn't work is that machines don't have gender --- that is, some difference between some fo them that has an almost religious inscrutability and implies the imbrication of the other with the self

That reasoning seems to me to be based on a highly anthropocentric view of sentience and sapience, but there's a lot of assumptions there - especially regarding what gender is and isn't - that I'm not sure I have the background to properly unpack.

Charlie Stross had some blog posts that I thought were interesting on the viability of generation ships though:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/designing_society_for_posterit.html
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/on_the_road_yet_again_and_agai.html

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

That reasoning seems to me to be based on a highly anthropocentric view of sentience and sapience

That was pretty much my reaction too; I find the notion of gender as a distinction that comes with inherent inscrutability both implausible given my experience of humans and dangerous in the directions of essentialism it could be claimed to support.

The setting I am currently primarily writing in has medical tech such that a full somatic sex-change is a matter of spending thirty-six hours unconscious in a regen tank; one of the incidentals arising from that is a subculture of people whose gender identity is "we change every few weeks". This has not come into focus yet as it needs a lot more mulling on my behalf; my protagonist's sweetie belongs to that culture, but my protagonist is also rather firm that her love life is not generally the business of the people for whom she's writing. (I have a strong and abiding antipathy for first-person narratives that do not make sense as anything the person in question would plausibly actually write down.)

[rax.livejournal.com]

Not that I disagree with you, but to devil's advocate, I think that it's reasonable to say that human thought as we experience it now is pretty tightly linked to gender and sexual difference. I guess "reasonable to say" is different from "unquestionably true" and that difference is important, but exploring things through that lens feels useful.

Are these folks changing gender identity at the same time as they're changing their bodies? That's actually very surprising to me; maybe I misunderstand.

[kelkyag]

If I'm reading correctly, the characters in question are claiming the mutability as their gender identity.

Losing a weekend a month to a voluntary medical procedure sounds like an awful lot of lost time, to me. And probably very expensive.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

You are reading correctly. I am intrigued by the notion of new forms of identity as enabled by new technology - by analogy to wondering how, say, people for whom being drawn to rubber is an important part of their sexuality could have coped in a time before rubber existed.

The setting is post-scarcity*, expense is not an issue; the time investment of a weekend a month is worth it to some people, and it's not as if anyone in the setting has to work, unless they effectively have a vocation. One of the underlying influences here is putting the boot into the appallingly poor Star Trek depiction of supposedly post-scarcity society and its influence; to an extent the books are spiritual cousins of Iain M. Banks' Culture novels in that regard.

*The core of it is, anyway. As ever, the places one gets interesting story-shaped conflicts are around the edges where it's bumping into people who do things differently.

[ab3nd.livejournal.com]

Lyotard's title mentions thought, but doesn't clarify it as human thought, which seems a little off. I mean, if you're assuming you have machines that think, why assume they think like humans? Humans are notoriously bad at thinking.

I guess part of the point of making machines like that is to have more "us" to fill the galaxy with, rather than making something totally different, and so it would be useful to have something to say to them, and to expect them to say to us. A commonality of thought that would at least support the mutual delusion of shared experience. But of course, if we're creating them to be like us, why not make them gendered? "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." and all that?

How much do people who theorize about thinking machines (e.g. Lyotard, I assume others (I R not theorist)) converse with the people actually attempting to build thinking machines (e.g. AI researchers, cognition and neurobio researchers, psychologists)?

Wouldn't the difference between introspective and extrospective capability be enough cause that perception of an other with whom one can have some form of intellectual overlap and exchange? That is, I can "see" into myself, and to some extent see and imagine my own exterior. I can't really see "into" you, but I can observe similarities in our exteriors that lead me to conclude that we have some shared interior aspects as well.

The Culture novels by Ian Banks also have members who can change sex, at will. If they do it by triggering a biological shift, it is a pretty gradual process, taking a year or so (although it could be done faster by copying the person's mind into a different-gendered artifical body). Some parts of the Culture regard only ever having been one sex as a little immature or narrow, sort of like never leaving the town you grew up in. I'm not sure how or if they change gender identity as well, but considering that some members of the culture chose to be robots (gendered or not), utility fogs, bird people, etc., I think it is a matter of personal preference, and the Culture likely makes less of a big deal of it than our culture. It is kind of a world where most people don't even have 0-th world problems (e.g. death, boredom, inconvenience, etc.) unless they go looking for them. Banks has pointed out that a novel set entirely in the Culture would be more a comedy of manners than a space opera, and the Culture novels are generally space opera, so the matter isn't handled in any super-heavy depth.

[jessiehl.livejournal.com]

How much do people who theorize about thinking machines (e.g. Lyotard, I assume others (I R not theorist)) converse with the people actually attempting to build thinking machines (e.g. AI researchers, cognition and neurobio researchers, psychologists)?

In my experience in a couple of subsets of the latter category...not very much. Though I suspect they're more likely to talk to professors and the like than grad students like myself. And it might happen more with the cognition people. I know Tufts has some cross-talk between the philosophy and cog sci folks, but I don't know any details.

To the extent that it happens, it seems like it's mostly philosopher types talking to a handful of really theoretical AI people who are quasi-philosophers in their own right (e.g. Minsky), with most of the people who do AI and neurobio research not paying that much attention. I mean, I've read some stuff on embodied cog sci written by theory-focused AI researchers, and it was very interesting, but when I read about Lyotard or other famous philosophers, I have trouble concentrating on the words because they are full of jargon that I do not understand or am guessing the meaning of.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Not that I disagree with you, but to devil's advocate, I think that it's reasonable to say that human thought as we experience it now is pretty tightly linked to gender and sexual difference.

I think that would be very arguable, and while my experience suggests that any inherent systemic effect on modes of thinking based on gender/sexual difference is negligible compared to, and swamped by, other differences between individuals, it seems entirely likely that my preferences in terms of the people I tend to get on with are introducing severe sample bias.

I guess "reasonable to say" is different from "unquestionably true" and that difference is important, but exploring things through that lens feels useful.

No argument there.

Are these folks changing gender identity at the same time as they're changing their bodies?

I am inclined to think some of them think of themselves as doing so and some do not, and there may well be people with strong attachments to theoretical models inclining either way.

[anasai.livejournal.com]

I still can't understand this line of thought as anything but insane. In a world with only one gender, humans would cease to be capable of true thought? If a person does not experience thought tightly linked to gender and sexual difference, they do not think? Philosophy of thought at this level is basically thought experiments, and I personally can't construct any thought experiment where that makes any sense whatsoever. Surely there is a strong link between the way humans tend to think and their physical embodiment, which has some variation by sex, but that is an entirely different statement.

[rax.livejournal.com]

I think that Lyotard as I read him has a bunch of baked-in assumptions that I don't like but there's also a lot to do with his work despite those assumptions? I dunno maybe actually working this out requires 5000 words and reading ten other books, ugh. :P

Thanks for the recommendations --- by "convertible pants" do you mean ones where you can take the legs off? Because that seems like a really good idea for me potentially.

[crankycoyote.livejournal.com]

Yup, the pants with the removable legs. The lightweight ones usually have cuff zips too so you don't even have to take off your boots to reconfigure your pants.

So I skimmed the first part of the essay in question (really not the best way to deal with the text, I know - apologies), because I'm supposed to be at work or something and I'm bad at that, and got an even stronger impression of Lyotard's anthropocentrism. My reading is that he is intentionally conflating "thought" and "human thought", and the subject of the essay is specifically whether or not human thought can exist outside the context of a human body. In that sense I think there's something there - namely that thought is an embodied process that will change as the body which is considered 'self' changes, and without a sufficiently human body (or a sufficiently detailed simulacra of a human body) it's unlikely that "human thought" (for sufficiently narrow definitions of "human") would happen. What I didn't read or didn't catch was whether or not Lyotard is also stating that all thought (or all worthwhile thought) is human thought; that's where my serious disagreement would start.

[ab3nd.livejournal.com]

Convertable pants are good for biking, because you can take off the leg on the side near the chain and avoid getting it eaten by your bike.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

generation ship book suggestion: Wolfe, "The Book of the Long Sun". Assuming you have the time in your life for a BIG HONKIN' TETRAOLOGY.

Also the cliche for generation ships is "slow descent into savagery and complete forgetting of the Original Mission."

[ab3nd.livejournal.com]

I think someone (Baxter?) did one where that's pretty much what is assumed to happen by the designers of the original mission, and so they have failsafes/backups for when the humans eventually evolve into a simple tree-dwelling folk and the beasts that prey on them in darkness.

It STILL doesn't end well, though.

[csbermack.livejournal.com]

I have recently been interested in the SeV stuff from ThinkGeek, and finding the original source led me to: http://www.scottevest.com/v3_store/Convertible_Travel_Pants.shtml

I am grumpy that none of the women's sizing goes anywhere near my size and I don't know how you feel about gendered pants. I wish I could get one of those cute trenches that hold ~everything. But I can't. So I completely can't vouch for this brand at all and have no idea, but I love clever pockets. Also the jacket to vest that uses magnets, that's interesting.

Probably you should get cheaper cargo pants, though, at least to start.