Minor Thoughts from me to you

I agree with Ross Douthat.

We are in a situation where my third point applies, because the kind of blasphemy that Charlie Hebdo engaged in had deadly consequences, as everyone knew it could … and that kind of blasphemy is precisely the kind that needs to be defended, because it’s the kind that clearly serves a free society’s greater good. If a large enough group of someones is willing to kill you for saying something, then it’s something that almost certainly needs to be said, because otherwise the violent have veto power over liberal civilization, and when that scenario obtains it isn’t really a liberal civilization any more. Again, liberalism doesn’t depend on everyone offending everyone else all the time, and it’s okay to prefer a society where offense for its own sake is limited rather than pervasive. But when offenses are policed by murder, that’s when we need more of them, not less, because the murderers cannot be allowed for a single moment to think that their strategy can succeed.

∞

Ever since I was a kid, I've been fascinated by the idea of plant based meat substitutes. My interest is purely tech based. I'm not worried about the ethics of eating meat or about saving the environment. I just think that the idea of transmorgifying plants into meat is fascinating.

If Beyond Meat is right, it's an idea that may be closer to moving from SF to reality.

a box arrived at my door and made it easy.

Inside were four quarter-pound brown patties. I tossed one on the grill. It hit with a satisfying sizzle. Gobbets of lovely fat began to bubble out. A beefy smell filled the air. I browned a bun. Popped a pilsner. Mustard, ketchup, pickle, onions. I threw it all together with some chips on the side and took a bite. I chewed. I thought. I chewed some more. And then I began to get excited about the future.

It was called the Beast Burger, and it came from a Southern California company called Beyond Meat, located a few blocks from the ocean. At that point, the Beast was still a secret, known only by its code name: the Manhattan Beach Project. I’d had to beg Ethan Brown, the company’s 43-year-old CEO, to send me a sample.

And it was vegan. “More protein than beef,” Brown told me when I rang him up after tasting it. “More omegas than salmon. More calcium than milk. More antioxidants than blueberries. Plus muscle-recovery aids. It’s the ultimate performance burger.”

∞

This is a win for economic liberty. It's good to see judges who are willing to protect people's right to earn a living.

Isis Brantley, an entrepreneur who runs a hair braiding school in Dallas, sued the state in 2013, citing the laws that pertained to hair braiding schools to be unreasonable. Under Texas laws, hair braiding schools must first be a fully equipped barber college before turning into a facility that teaches students how to braid hair. In the case of Brantley, she had to first convert her small business into a barber school that had at least 10 student chairs that reclined back and a sink behind ever work station before being allowed to teach hair braiding.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks ruled the laws against hair braiders to be “irrational,” citing the fact that braiding salons don’t need sinks to do hair because hair washing is not a part of the braiding process. Judge Sparks also reasoned that the state cannot force entrepreneurs to do meaningless things before starting their own business and challenged the state to find a single hair braiding school that met their requirements.

∞

I wrote out reading goals for the first time ever, last year. I enjoyed the project so much that I'm going to do it again this year.

Last year's goals were pretty simple: read through several series and read a list of non-fiction books. This year, I'm going to go in a slightly different direction with a longer set of goals. I want to focus on some specific authors, reread some old favorites, read some literary fiction, some hard science fiction, more non-fiction, and books that hooked me with interesting ideas.

Last year, I made an actual reading list, with the intention of reading every book on the list. This year, I'm keeping things more casual and spontaneous, by making an ideas list rather than a reading list.

For the last 4 years, I've been keeping track of every book that catches my eye. I've also been noting down what I found interesting about each book. I went through that list and skimmed off the cream. The result is a list of over 100 books that meet each of these goals. I definitely won't be able to read everything on the list but it'll give me plenty of ideas to draw from throughout the year.

Specific Authors

I keep running across authors that intrigue me. I really like reading through an author's back catalog to get more familiar with him. This year, I'd like to focus on some specific authors that have caught my attention.

Guy Gavriel Kay writes fantasy that's often set in historical analogues to our own world. It may be fantasy, but it reads like historical fiction. I read one of his books last year and I want to read more of them this year.

Robert Silverberg is a giant in the SF field. He's been writing for decades, won countless awards, influenced the field in many ways, and has been named an SFWA Grand Master. I've read a few of his works and really appreciated the literary tone of them. I want to read a lot more.

Jack Vance is another writer that I only became aware of recently. He's another SFWA Grand Master and winner of multiple awards. His stories have a more literary tone to them. According to Wikipedia, "[a] 2009 profile in The New York Times Magazine described Vance as "one of American literature's most distinctive and undervalued voices"."

I first heard of Brent Weeks from Brandon Sanderson. His simple description, "Brent is making epic fantasy novels that read with the pacing of a thriller", intrigued me. Then I started seeing his name pop up all over the place. Hint taken, Internet. I'll see what the fuss is about. The last time I did this, I discovered how much I love Jim Butcher's Dresden series. I'm hoping this is just as successful.

William Gibson is the man who launched the cyberpunk movement and inspired an entire generation of writers. I've heard of him, often, but I've never actually read him. At the urging of my team lead, I'll remedy that this year.

Reread Old Favorites

I don't often indulge in rereads. I always feel like there's too much that I haven't yet read, to spend time rereading. But there are a lot of books that I really like and this year I'm going to indulge myself by rereading a few of them.

Literary Fiction

Last April, I talked to Adam about literary fiction and what makes a story literary. Since then, I've been thinking more and more about literary fiction. I don't want to admit defeat and an inability to read an entire section of writing. This year, I'm going to try reading a few different literary novels in the hopes of better finding out what I do and don't like.

Hard Science Fiction

For me, hard science fiction is what makes the entire genre worthwhile. The focus on scientific and technical accuracy takes the genre from mere entertainment to something that becomes educational. I took a college class on Physics and Science Fiction and learned a lot from it. As much as I like it though, I've read almost no hard science fiction in the last couple of years. That changes in 2015.

Non-Fiction

Whatever else reading is, it should be educational. I'll continue reading non-fiction, to ensure that I continue stretching my mind and increasing my store of knowledge.

Interesting Hooks

I've collected quite a list of "reading ideas" over the past 2 or 3 years. Many of them are books that had a specific hook that caught my interest. This year, I'll go through that list, write about what hooked my interest, and then read the books to see if they live up to the hook.

The End

I'll finish off last year's goals: reading the Wheel of Time series and finishing the Culture novels. I intend to purchase another Supporting Membership for Worldcon. I'll continue reading Hugo eligible books, to inform my vote. And I'll continue to give myself the freedom to read outside of my goals, as I find things that interest me.

About 3 ½ years ago, Brandon Sanderson gave a talk at the Polaris Conference. I listened the the recording and took some notes on his comments about the Wheel of Time. Here's the overview he gave of the series.

• Books 1-3 (The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn) are quest stories
• Books 4-6 (The Shadow Rising, The Fires of Heaven, Lord of Chaos) slow way down and are really deep character drawings. The destinations stopped being as important as what was happening with the characters and the way the world was expanding. If you don't make the transition, book 4 is a hard transition but is the favorite of many fans.
• Book 7-9 (A Crown of Swords, The Path of Daggers, Winter's Heart) are the start of a bunch of big arcs and they stopped being individual books. There aren't climaxes where you'd expect until book 9, which has one of the biggest climaxes of the entire series.
• Book 10 (Crossroads of Twilight) is a weird outlier. It's a parallel novel that tells the backstories of some of the side stories. It's the slowest and is catching you up on what happened with some of the characters during the big events of book 9. It lays a lot of foundation work.
• Book 11 (Knife of Dreams) starts to build on the foundation of book 10.

I've kept this in mind ever since. Now that I'm in the middle of book 8 (The Path of Daggers), it's an even better help to keep my bearings in this immense story.

With 2014 now in the rearview mirror, I've been turning my attention to my 2015 reading goals and reading list. I've actually been thinking about it for the past month, but I've been too busy with other things to actually put it together.

I have a pretty good idea of what the list is going to look like, but it takes time to create it and link everything up just right. I worked on it tonight and I expect to work on it throughout the week. I'd like to get it published by this weekend.

Until then, I'll continue reading either the next Wheel of Time or Culture novel.

(I also plan to write down some of my thoughts on my 2014 reading goals and accomplishments, but I'm not sure when that will be ready.)

I have a copyright footer at the bottom of my site. And I'd completely forgotten that it need to be updated for 2015. Shawn Blanc's post yesterday reminded me. He linked to It's 2015. Update Your Footer as a public service announcement.

Ever looked at a website and wondered if it is still in operation? Maybe a thing or two looked like they could have been updated – and then you notice the copyright notice the in the footer. "2012. Right, this site must be dead. Let's move along."

Of course, it could be that the owner just forgot to update the year in the footer. That happens a lot, especially if those years are hard-coded strings. To future-proof your footer, it's better to just let computers take care of this. Grab one of these snippets and paste that on your page (or forward this site as a friendly reminder to someone who can do it for you).

The snippets on the page are for Javascript and PHP. I didn't want a Javascript based date and my site doesn't run on PHP. I'm using Pelican, written in Python. Fortunately, it was pretty easy to make my own snippet for automatically updating the footer every year.

Pelican uses Jinja for site templates. In order to have the date in the footer, I needed a Jinja variable to hold the date. Pelican made it easy to create one.

All templates will receive the variables defined in your settings file, as long as they are in all-caps. You can access them directly.

I added this to my pelicanconf.py file:

import datetime
TODAY = datetime.date.today()

Once that was done, it was easy to add a dynamic footer to my theme's base.html file.

Copyright © 2006–{{ TODAY|strftime ('%Y') }}

And that's it. Now my site's footer will always be current with the year of the last time that I updated the site.

To make things more challenging, I did the entire change on my iPad. I used Dash for reading Python documentation. I used Textastic to update my template and settings file. Just for fun, I opened both files using Transmit's doc provider extension. Finally, I used Pythonista to actually rebuild the site and push the updated files to the server.

For Christmas, my mom gave me a copy of the new edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales. The Guardian wrote about this new edition.

Rapunzel is impregnated by her prince, the evil queen in Snow White is the princess’s biological mother, plotting to murder her own child, and a hungry mother in another story is so “unhinged and desperate” that she tells her daughters: “I’ve got to kill you so I can have something to eat.” Never before published in English, the first edition of the Brothers Grimms’ tales reveals an unsanitised version of the stories that have been told at bedtime for more than 200 years.

I'm excited to have this edition. I think it'll make great bedtime reading for my four daughters.

Thanks, Mom!

Update: After reading this post, my mother would like to make it clear that she wasn't aware of the uncensored content of this edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales. Had she known, she never would have purchased it.

My wife thinks I keep the temperature too cold as it is. I don't think she'd be a fan of this line of research.

The mild cold exposure he advocates might be as simple as forgoing a jacket when you’re waffling over whether you need one, not layering cardigans over flannels despite the insistence of the fall catalogs, or turning off the space heater under your desk. And if you don’t want to annihilate the environment by running the air conditioner to get a taste of sweet, calorie-burning, metabolism-enhancing cold in the summer, there are devices like the ice vest, which really isn’t as terrible as it sounds.

“The first time you put it on, it’s a bit shocking, to be honest,” Wayne Hayes, the vest’s inventor, warned me. “You feel like, Holy shit, this is cold.” But after wearing it a few times, he said, most people barely notice they have it on. That was my experience. (Hayes’s wife has become so used to the vest that she wears it under her clothes instead of over them.) Hayes recommends wearing the vest twice a day until the ice melts—which can take an hour or longer—though he has himself worn it as many as three or four times in a single day.

∞

That’s when I realized that I had a problem. In fact, everyone I know in the craft beer industry has a problem: We’re so addicted to hops that we don’t even notice them anymore.

Hops are the flowers of the climbing plant Humulus lupulus, a member of the family Cannabaceae (which also includes, yes, cannabis), and they’re a critical ingredient in beer. Beer is made by steeping grain in hot water to turn its starches into sugar (which is later converted to alcohol by yeast). While the resulting liquid, called wort, is boiling, brewers add hops to tone down the mixture’s sweetness—without hops, beer would taste like Coke.

Every beer I've tasted is bitter and, I think, nasty. Especially the craft beers. Why can't I have a beer that tastes like Coke? I'd buy that in an instant.

∞

I endorse Brett Trepstra's suggestion.

I would like to take this opportunity to call for a cease-fire on the card guilt thing. You’re totally allowed to use that space in the closet that will be left open when you finally throw out that box of cardboard pieces bought at stores and hastily “personalized” by someone who doesn’t remember giving you the card at this point.

∞

Reed, at Pitt Blather, says goodbye to Pitt head coach Paul Chryst.

The last three seasons are riddled with examples of poor game day management and head scratching decision making by Chryst. He had multiple brain freezes when it came to clock management and made some strange red zone calls. He made good decisions also but those just don’t stick out like his bad ones do.

We won some nice games over the past three years beating ranked schools such as ND, VT and Rutgers and our last game, a win over Miami was satisfying also. But in all honesty those don’t offset the bad feelings we had with the losses to YSU and Syracuse in ’12, then a poor Navy team and North Carolina last year and then the real kick in our collective asses being the loss to Akron this season.

He just never got us to the level of ‘beating the teams we should’ and that left a lousy taste in the mouth which wasn’t offset by the better winning games he did have. Always left us wanting a little bit more Paul did. I don’t really begrudge a 19-19 record as I think he really did have to rebuild the team and the roster.

Good luck with that Wisconsin. The Badgers have to hope that he doesn't have the same issues there that he did at Pitt.

Reed also has a nice note about the difference between being a college and NFL head coach.

Yes, Wannstedt was a NFL head coach but to me that is a very different animal than being a college head coach in that he didn’t have to answer to an Athletic Director or to the Chancellor, Donors, Boosters and Player Alumni. That is a huge drain of energy for a college HC. On top of all that the HC has to steer and corral 100+ young men into positive behaviors and academic actions. Not an easy thing to do consistently, effectively and well.

NFL head coaches don’t really have to deal with amount of personnel problems on the level that college head coaches do. So there is a lot more autonomy and less overall responsibility in the NFL than there is at a university where the football tail doesn’t wag the university’s body.

∞

The BloombergView editorial staff:

First, the potential for cameras to impartially resolve disputes shouldn't be oversold. Videos often lack critical context, and studies have repeatedly shown that jurors can be misled by variables such as a film's angle or focus, which can unduly sway perceptions of guilt. That cuts both ways: Footage of a protester bumping into a cop, devoid of context, could make life much easier on a prosecutor.

…

Finally, equipping police with cameras and audio recorders means that they're constantly conducting surveillance on innocent civilians -- and potentially storing it all. Police frequently enter private homes and encounter people in medical emergencies who may not want to be filmed. Some officers may be tempted to record people on the basis of race or religion. And some departments have asserted that the public has no right to see such footage.

In short, a policy intended to empower the public and monitor the police could have precisely the opposite effect.

It's thought provoking. It reminds me that, once again, there are no easy fixes for life's problems. The 24-hour surveillance angle is the most interesting. What if it's combined with FOIA requests? Allow it, and you could request footage of any encounter, both to look at a troubling incident and to snoop on other citizens. Deny it and police and prosecutors get something to hide behind.

∞

Today, I finally get to start using the new version of Minor Thoughts. I've been unhappy with my blogs for over a year now. I've been running three sites: Minor Thoughts for political discussions, a family blog for family news and updates, and DesertFlood for posts about programming, gadgets, or the tech community.

When I started working on this redesign two weeks ago, I had four goals: bring everything together, simplify things, make posts easier to find, and make the site better looking.

I was inspired by Gina Trapani's notes on short-form blogging.

If it’s a paragraph, it’s a post. Medium-sized content gets short shrift these days. Don’t go long. One or two paragraphs count. Then press publish.

Negotiate a comfort zone on two axes: personal and public, tech and everything else (feminism, musical theater, MMA, parenting, etc). 2001-era Scribbling.net was too personal, Lifehacker/Smarterware too tech. There’s something in the middle.

Simplify, simplify. No comments. (Maybe G+ or Disqus later on?) Use Markdown and Draft to write. No pages, no requiring an image every post. No categories, tags, footnotes, special post styles, pages. Virtually no plugins. Default WordPress installation with the most stripped-down theme possible.

Goal 1: Bring it all together

About a year after I started having three blogs, it stopped being fun. I didn't feel like any of the blogs fully represented who I am: the computer nerd who loves to read, enjoys watching sports, and likes to play armchair political analyst. My first goal with redesigning Minor Thoughts was to bring my blogs together, so that I could be fully "me" in just one place. Starting now, I'm going to feel free to talk about whatever's on my mind, whether or not it fits into what a specific "audience" might expect from me.

Minor Thoughts now has posts from both Minor Thoughts and DesertFlood. I also brought over pages from the family blog, so that everything related to me is here, in one place.

Goal 2: Simplify

I'm simplifying by ditching summaries. Now that I won't have to write post summaries, it should be much easier for me to get posts published. I'll probably also experiment with title-less posts. These will be quick asides, probably without tags or categories, that will be for stuff I'd normally only put on Twitter.

Goal 3: Make it easier to find

Gina is ditching her tags and categories entirely. I'm not going that far. I already tried that and didn't like it. My old design didn't show categories or tags for any posts. This kept the design simple, but I didn't like the way that it made it hard to find posts that were on the same topic.

My third goal for the redesign was to make the tags and categories visible for each post and to create indexes for each tag and each category, allowing me to browse through old posts. This used to be a multi-author site and I still enjoy reading Adam's old posts, so there's now also an author index.

The new site shows the post category at the top of each post and the post tags at the bottom of each post. This is a considered decision. While I am keeping my categories and tags, I'm also drastically simplifying them.

Categories are now for the 10,000 foot view of a what a post is. I'm using a simple rule of thumb: if I were to bring up a topic at the dinner table, how would you instinctively describe it? Am I discussing politics?, sports?, "Bible stuff"?, technology?, books? etc. This will allow you to quickly see the general topic or direction of a post and decide if you want to skip it or not.

I'm now using tags for sub-categorization of topics. This is hugely relevant to the Politics category, which still holds the majority of the blog's content. You'll now be able to browse by immigration policy, foreign policy, healthcare policy, etc.

Goal 4: Make the site better looking

I also just plain didn't like the old design. It had seemed like a good idea when I created it, but I never grew to love it. I like this new design much better. Goal achieved.

Brock Cusick writes,

My proposal for fixing these problems is fairly simple, and relies on a mix of civic organization and free-market entrepreneurialism. The goal is to break the current monopoly on ISP service held by local cable companies in most of America, force local utility companies to act in the public's best interest, and bring some competition to the ISP business to keep prices low and innovation high.

Here it is.

Require utility companies to lease space on their rights-of-way to at least four ISPs, at cost.

Call it infrastructure neutrality, or open leasing. This proposal should independently provide most of the benefits in changing the Internet companies' status to 'telecommunications service' as mere competition between local firms will discourage them from withholding any service or level of service offered by their local competitors. This competition would thus provide the consumer protections that voters are looking for, while allowing Internet companies to remain more lightly regulated (and thus more innovative) information services.

I like this idea much better than the current net neutrality suggestions floating around. I really want my internet providers to compete against each other for my business. I have far more faith in that competition than I do that we'll get competent regulation of monopoly internet providers.

∞

A group of black Ferguson residents armed with high-powered rifles stood outside a white-owned business in the city during recent riots, protecting it from rioters that looted and burned other businesses.

… a group of heavily armed black men stood outside a Conoco gas station.

One of the residents, a 6-foot-8 man named Derrick Johnson, held an AR-15 assault rifle as he stood in a pickup truck near that store’s entrance. Three other black Ferguson residents joined Johnson in front of the store, each of them armed with pistols.

The men said they felt indebted to the store’s owner, Doug Merello, who employed them over the course of several years.

I said before that I didn't like the rioting and looting that was going on in Ferguson. This story is both a good example of why not and a good antidote to the riots.

∞

Robert Tracinski writes,

The early reports were very clear that Michael Brown was a good, kind-hearted young man bound for college, that the shooting was totally unprovoked, that he was shot multiple times in the back, that he was executed in cold blood. Then the evidence, as it emerged, knocked down each of these claims one by one.

Cases involving the use of force tend to be messy, and getting at the facts is difficult. It requires a lot of sorting of competing claims, cross-examination and confrontation of witnesses, and a thorough review of the physical evidence, which often refutes the eyewitness testimony.

Here are his rules of thumb for future cases:

1. It’s not a story until there are facts (and claims aren’t facts).
2. Forensics is a science.
3. People are individuals, not symbols.
4. Legal procedures and privileges exist for a reason.
5. You are not the story.

I'm especially fond of #3 and #4.

∞

David Harsanyi writes at Reason,

Even if many of your grievances are legitimate, "justice" doesn't exist to soothe your anger. In the end, there wasn't probable cause to file charges against Wilson. And after all the intense coverage and buildup, the predictable happened. Even taking a cursory look at the evidence the grand jury saw and heard, the details of Brown's death were far more complex than what we heard when the incident first broke. Lawyers will, no doubt, analyze every morsel of evidence in the coming days. But if Wilson's testimony is corroborated by forensic evidence—and much of it seems to be—it seems unlikely that any jury would be able to convict him.

That doesn't mean that many of black America's concerns about these kinds of incidents aren't genuine. It doesn't mean that police departments like the one in Ferguson aren't a major problem. It only means that this incident should be judged on the evidence, not the politics or the past or what goes on elsewhere.

No person should be shot by authorities for stealing some cigarillos. Too often, cops in this country use excessive force rather than prudently avoid violence. Just the other day, a 12-year-old boy playing with a BB gun was shot dead in Cleveland. We have a need for criminal justice reform and law enforcement reform. After reading through the grand jury testimony in the Wilson case, it's obvious there are far more egregious cases that deserve the attention.

According to Wilson's grand jury testimony, Brown hit Wilson 10 times while he was in his police car. He had punched Wilson twice in the face and was coming for more. Wilson asked Brown to get down. Witnesses saw Brown charge the police officer. Brown also reached for the cop's gun.

In this case, a number of witnesses paraded out by the media had never actually seen Brown's death and simply repeated what they had heard elsewhere—namely, that Brown was shot in cold blood from afar. Those stories became part of a narrative—repeated even after the report was released—that is almost certainly believed by many of those protesting in Ferguson and elsewhere in the country.

I'm all for pursuing justice in cases of police brutality. But I don't support railroading someone for the sake of "justice". True justice means punishing the guilty, not punishing the innocent so that we can feel like something is being done.

∞

Asimov’s, September 2014
by Sheila Williams

My rating: ★★★☆☆
Read From: 22 August 2014 - 26 August 2014
Goal: Flotsam & Jetsam

Novelettes

Place of Worship by Tochi Onyebuchi—Lit fiction. I couldn't even read it; I had to just skim it. It seemed to wander around aimlessly. It was less of a story and more of a meandering reflection. Parts happened in space—that was about the only thing in it that could be loosely considered to be SF.

A Lullaby in Glass by Amanda Forrest—New writer takes us to a future Vietnam. A young man struggles to figure out what caused a recent production failure, to protect his family. I feel like I should have felt more than I did, reading this story. But I didn't.

Bogdavi’s Dream by Tom Purdom—This novella is the concluding piece of a much longer story that Purdom's been writing about interspecies war in the distant future. Groups of humans and aliens will have to join together to fight other groups of humans and aliens, to protect the dream of peaceful coexistence. Before reading this, I hunted down some of Purdom's previous stories. I enjoyed them. This feels more like the mid-50's SF that I read growing up.

Short Stories

Patterns by James Gunn—A secret lurks inside of the most hidden of patterns. Of course, to talk about the secret is to trigger another pattern: denial, denunciation, and ridicule followed by dismissal and irrelevance. But the secret is still there, still lurking, still waiting. This was extremely short, but I really like it.

Everyone Will Want One by Kelly Sandoval—What is it about this new toy and why will every teen want one? It just might hold the key to gaining social status in the most elite of cliques. Isn't that reason enough? This was another really good story. It's something that's plausible and that I could imagine being reality in another decade or two.

Scouting Report by Rick Wilber—A baseball scout spends a few days watching Cuban teams, checking out some new prospects. He also reflects on the aftermath of an alien crash that occured 10 years ago. I wanted to like this story more than I did. The infodumping was heavy handed and I feel like the main character is a real dunce for not seeing what was obvious to me just one-third of the way into the story.

Windows by Susan Palwick—This story showcases the harsher side of life. A mother travels to a far-away prison to pay a visit for her son's birthday and to share birthday greetings from his sister, onboard a generational space ship. She arrives at the prison only to learn that the generational ship just exploded, but hides that news from her son in order to create a happier birthday for him. It's another story, in this issue, that I didn't really feel was SF at all. The only sci-fi element in the story was that it mentioned a generational ship. I think a story needs more than that to qualify as SF.

Departments

Reflections: Flashing Before My Eyes by Robert Silverberg—Every career has to start somewhere and this is Silverberg's story of how he started his. Silverberg reflects on the SF magazines that he admired as a teen and his struggles to get his own stories into these magazines, next to the writers that he so admired.

Thought Experiment: Tomorrow Through the Past by Allen M. Steele—This is a speech that Steele gave at the Philcon Science Fiction Convention, in 2013. He looks back at the history of the SF field and how the genre has reinvented itself over the years. He laments the current clichés: alien invasions, space battles, dystopias, and guys in body armor shooting at each other with big guns. He argues that SF has become paranoid and militaristic and needs to regain a sense of optimism, to tell stories with positive outcomes instead of just stories with negative outcomes. He argues that the genre needs to be more about stories set in the future, rather than just stories about the future. It's a thought provoking speech and I hope some of the authors and editors in the field are inspired by it.

My Take

I liked Steele's speech. I liked three of the seven stories in this issue. Asimov's continues to be something that I subscribe to and read but not something that I eagerly wait for each month.

When I was young, before junior high, I strongly believed that women were the weaker sex and that it was up to men to protect them. I believed that women shouldn't fight in the military, that they probably shouldn't engage in the hurly-burly of the working world, and that men should take on all of the physically demanding work leaving women the easier, less physically demanding work.

Through the loving, persistent efforts of a Sunday School teacher and many female friends, I became accustomed to the idea that women were just as hardy as men, just as able to take on any task, just as able to bear any burden, and just as able to engage the world. For the past 15–20 years, I've heard that women are equal to men in any area that they care to be involved in and that men shouldn't treat them any differently from how men treat other men. I thought that being a feminist meant believing that there were few, if any, differences between the genders.

Over the past 2 years, I've run into a different brand of feminists. They tell me that women are horribly discriminated against. They tell me that men are predatory beasts who prey upon women and that it's up to men to protect women from these predators. They tell me that women want to be computer engineers, software designers, scientists, and mathematicians but that the culture in these fields is too toxic for women to endure. They tell me that these fields need to be cleaned up and sanitized before women can feel safe enough to work there.

Now I don't know what to think. Are women strong and resilient like men? Are they hardy, able to live in unpleasant conditions, to clear a space for themselves, and to blaze a trail? Or are they hothouse flowers who need a carefully controlled environment before they can live and thrive? Are women as I was taught: strong, confident, able to defend themselves? Or are women as I first believed: a weaker sex that needs to be protected by the strong sex?

Here's a perfect example of my dilemma. An anonymous women provided this advice on software development: Engaging With Hateful People in Your Community Lends Legitimacy to Their Presence. She's writing in the context of a software development project that takes feedback and contributions from the general public. The words are hers. Any extra emphasis comes from me.

What’s the right way to deal with male supremacists and similar hate groups showing up?

I don’t have a clear answer. What I care most about is that community members are protected.

Here’s my suggestion #1: Don’t engage. It’s better to instantly block that person from the repo and delete their comments.

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GitHub’s weaknesses make it not very safe for women and minorities, so if you want those voices heard, avoid the GitHub issue tracker.

By the way: Similar things apply when male supremacists send you reasonable-looking pull requests.

I noticed that this gr.amergr.ate person had sent a small PR to a [my-project] plugin, and the plugin maintainer merged it.

This made me super uncomfortable, and I hope I don’t have to interact with that maintainer, because I really don’t trust their judgment.

When you get a PR from an author whose very name spells hate, then even if the diff looks reasonable, don’t merge it.

This women is arguing that the best way to get women involved in software development is for other people to carefully police the software project, instantly banning commenters and contributors just on the basis of their usernames.

She's not arguing that these contributors have demonstrated harmful behavior and need to be banned on that basis. She's not arguing that these individuals have personally done anything that's even threatening. She's arguing that usernames that represent a community that she doesn't like are themselves a threat and that anyone with such a username should be immediately banned from the software project. Without this, she won't feel safe enough to contribute to the project.

To my ears, this represents a view of women as hothouse flowers that need protection. This isn't something that a strong, confident, assertive, girl power, "hear me roar" woman would write. This is something written by a woman who always needs a fainting couch nearby, a shrinking violet who can't survive in the harsh, uncontrolled environment of the real world.

I'm willing and ready to treat women however they want to be treated. Just, please, make up your minds. Should I censor your mail, only passing along what's safe for you to read? Should I carefully pre-screen your online communities before letting you engage? Should I create special woman-safe zones, carefully monitoring language and behavior for anything indelicate or offensive? Or should I stand back and let you engage the world as equals, trusting that you're strong enough to face whatever comes your way, that you're up to the challenge of engaging the world without a male chaperone?