Livre d'Or

Both our internal information people and the local press are getting very excited because some Karolinska people have made some pretty good progress towards developing a test that will predict dementia 20 years ahead. [Press release, with links to the original article] It's cool science, no doubt about it, but I can't help wondering, would you want to take a test at the age of 50 that might predict that you had a high chance of being senile by the time you were 70? I guess it's the same problem as with any predictive medical testing: in the absence of a cure or even sensible prevention, what's the point of knowing?

I think it's the timescale that bothers me, in part; I don't have the same objection to, say, cervical smears which tell me whether I might be at risk for cancer in the coming few years. That allows me to do something about it in terms of possibly readjusting my life plans. But I can't plan on the basis of some terrible thing that might happen in 20 years' time; I'd just have to live with the knowledge that this was likely to happen to me, which I don't think would be good psychologically.

It's true that almost everybody expects to be mortal (the exceptions are a few religious people and a few quasi-religious geeks who think the Singularity is going to cure death). So you always have to run your life on the basis that you have a few decades at best and possibly even less. But I'd still rather not know the probable time and manner of my demise more than a few years in advance, I think.

In non-morbid news: Stockholm is full of magicians and flamboyantly gay people with rainbow banners at the moment. I find this very cool, it's a bit like living in the Paul Gallico novel The man who was magic.

My friends, I am having a crisis of faith. (Not the religious kind; I don't have much of that anyway, and I wouldn't bore you with noodlings about details of theology.) No, I am starting to question my faith in communication.

I have always believed that communication is really, really important. Before I was even verbal my mother used to lecture me about how you should always be careful to communicate exactly what you mean and tell those close to you how you are feeling. And I've always lived with that principle.

It's

doseybat who started me off questioning this. (She has been causing me to question my assumptions and encouraging me to make really progress in the way I think and understand the world for over a decade now!) She pointed out (correct me if I'm misquoting you) that in fact good communication is no guarantee of a good relationship, and most relationships that go wrong go wrong for other reasons apart from communication problems. We were talking mainly about romantic relationships but it's applicable to other kinds too. For example, if one person stops loving their partner and prefers someone new, the original partner is likely to be hurt and upset, and no amount of communication about what the situation is is going to change that the situation is in fact bad.

There's also all the issues around attraction and sex and that sort of thing. It's something I spend a lot of time worrying about: what if he thinks I'm flirting with him when I'm not, what if I say something general and it's taken as a personal insult, and so on. But it's possible that this fear is exaggerated, it's a leftover from adolescence when none of us had any clue about these things, and now that we are adults we don't need to spell everything out because we have enough shared assumptions and common sense that this kind of disaster isn't likely any more.

sartorias made a really interesting post about marriage in fiction. She points out something that I hadn't thought of: misunderstanding is a convenient way of creating narrative tension while still maintaining sympathy for both characters involved. (Of course, it can get really annoying if it's over-done to the point where the reader is left thinking, if only they'd bothered talking to eachother on page 1, the whole novel would have been unnecessary!) But just because a lot of fictional relationships run into this particular set of problems, it doesn't mean that this is a proportionately huge danger in real life.

I still think good communication is better than bad communication, and some communication is better than none. But I am really wondering if I'm making too much of it. If one feels obliged to discuss every detail of one's feelings and thoughts, that has the potential to get boring. And several people have suggested to me that my very direct style of dealing with attraction can be unromantic or even intimidating, compared to the more expected style of flirting based on lots of hints and allusions and playfulness.

Of course, there's a huge sample bias here; since I believe communication is very important, I'm drawn to people who also care about communication. Indeed, some of the people I love best in all the world are the people I trust to tell me about anything I might want to know of their inner state, and to clarify and make effort to be sure we understand eachother always. But I do know empirically that there are people who are perfectly happy in their relationships and friendships, without basing their interaction on talking about absolutely everything or even really on conversation at all.

If communication isn't the whole story, the major factor that makes the difference between good and bad relationships, then what else might there be? I'm tentatively inclined to propose the assumption of goodwill. Perhaps if there is mutual trust that the people involved care about eachother and don't mean eachother harm, any misunderstandings that might arise will be temporary and easily dealt with, and not the big terrible tragedy that I expect them to be.

I certainly don't intend to stop trying to make sure I listen and communicate to the best of my ability. But perhaps I should be less obessive about this point. What do people think?

It occurred to me the other day that I don't really care about immortality. This may be a common theme to quite a few of my quirks.

( introspective junk )

Unrelatedly,

pleonastic has some inspiration for people who are bogged down by paperwork, which is a fair proportion of us.

I will resist the temptation to go through my entire journal adding location data. I will. I have far more important things to do. But ee, location data!

Today it was so unreasonably hot that

hatam_soferet's (unlit) havdalah candle melted. We stayed in her room where there is air-conditioning, and studied some Gemara relevant to today's fast of Tisha b'Av.

The scene is this: some rabbis are discussing the events of around 70 CE (a generation or so after Jesus' death). Judea was under Roman occupation, and in 70, the Romans decided to take action to end the political trouble and fomenting rebellion in the province. This culminated in the destruction of the (second) Temple, the centre of Jewish worship, and the whole city of Jerusalem was also razed and the Jewish population relocated. This is one of the major tragedies that is commemorated by today's fast. R Jochanan tells the following story:

( Jerusalem was destroyed because of confusing Kamtza with bar Kamtza )

So the question is, whose fault is it that Jerusalem was destroyed? Answers in comments please! Not doing a poll because I want to know your reasoning. I've heard it said you can deduce a lot about someone's character from whom they blame in this story.

(The story is my paraphrase of a chunk from Gittin 55b. And yes, some of you have played this one before. Oh, and R Jochanan says it's R Zechariah b Avkoulos' fault for being excessively pious, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's right.)

There's been a lot of drama in peripheral bits of my LJ circle recently. A lot of it is to do with conflicting ideas about how personal someone's LJ is, and I think this is interesting. (The drama itself isn't interesting, because drama tends not to be. And I'm not posting links to the drama that has prompted this thought, because that would just be further drama-mongering.)

The situations run like this: somebody posts something contentious. Other people take issue with the original contentious post. Whether or not they initially confront the OP, at some point the discussion gets carried over to people's own LJs. Drama ensues.

The way I see it, if I see a post I strongly disagree with, especially if it's a drive-by thing rather than someone I know personally, my most likely response would be to make a followup in my own LJ. However, I have seen several instances in the past few days of people taking serious offence at exactly this response.

Assuming one doesn't actually want to cause offence, what are the alternatives? ( this got kind of long... )

One heartening thing, in amongst all this depressing drama: I really love

ozarque's response to someone who was pursuing a discussion in a way that seemed inappropriate to her. Whether or not one agrees with her assessment is not, I think, important here. I really admire the way she's handled the situation.

Given the complexity of the stuff I've rambled on about behind the cut, it's likely that at some point people are going to end up offending eachother. And what then? I've seen too many people recently slinging nasty insults at the person who offended them, whether it's for attacking them directly or for moving the discussion to their own space. Surprisingly enough, this just amplifies the drama and makes everyone look bad.

ozarque's approach isn't perfect; it hasn't completely defused the situation. But it has made it possible for her to continue the discussion she wants to have without getting sidetracked into a flame war. And to me, it reads as being extremely respectful of someone who is taking a different approach from hers, and that's something I find particularly admirable and would hope to imitate myself if I ever have to deal with such a situation.

Today is the 41^st day, making 5 complete weeks and 6 days of the Omer.

I'm seeing fragmented bits of a really interesting discussion going on on different bits of my friends list, and it's frustrating me because I think all these bits should be linked together. So:

rho posted a really interesting essay on using the maths from quantum physics as a metaphor for gender. This is going to make most sense to people who have a fairly advanced grasp of both maths and gender theory, so

compilerbitch, if you're reading, you should go and have a look at it. Plus, I think you and

rho might well get on, so I'm taking this opportunity to introduce you, in case you haven't met.

redbird saw it, and started some related discussion in her journal. Since

rho commented to that discussion, I assume

rho has seen it, but anyone else might go to

rho's journal but not see the continuation of the discussion.

Then

rysmiel came up with a systems programmer's take on the concept, again giving rise to some interesting discussion.

rho, I'm not at all sure whether you've seen

rysmiel's post and I think you might well appreciate it. New perspectives, anyway.

Times like this, you really wish LJ had trackback. Anyway, if anyone else reads this and finds this kind of thing interesting to play with, I hope you'll follow the different bits of this around. And bring it to the attention of anyone you know who might also enjoy it; I can think of a few people who might, but whom I don't know well enough to be sure. Plus, if there are any fun follow-ups in bits of LJ I don't see, please let me know so I can add them to the post.

Meanwhile, I have reviewed Gore Vidal's novelized biography of Julian. Like

shreena I have refrained from killing my mother. I went out last night to celebrate S&S getting their PhDs. I shall miss them, SC especially. My viva is on Monday (please don't wish me luck; I don't think it's a luck issue.)

I may expand on these items when things are less fraught, since the combination of the maternal visit with the imminent viva means I don't have a lot of LJ time.

Today is the 11^th day, making one week and four days of the Omer

coalescent reminded me that I've been meaning to blog this for a while but it got buried in the thesis panic: Het Grauniad ran an article fairly similar to my competition asking for single things that are essential for people to know. Incidentally,

gnimmel, if you're reading this, you haven't claimed your prize!

So the Guardian asks What is the one thing everyone should learn about science?. Of course, being a national newspaper they asked famous scientists rather than random people on my flist, but it's very much the same kind of idea. (Though my competition started off from science I didn't restrict it quite so much.) It's interesting how people have interpreted the question; some of them are quite meta and want to tell people things about science, whereas others pick scientific facts, ie observations about how the world works as interpreted by science.

I don't like a lot of the suggestions in the article. Some of them are very much playing up to damaging stereotypes of what science is. Science in some people's statements is coming across as a sort of peevish old man who wants to keep people from believing anything that gives them comfort or joy, whether religion or spirituality or the paranormal. Very Gradgrind, really. And that very much ties into the other stereotype, that science is a list of Facts that are True because they're handed down from on high and not to be contradicted. Which basically makes science hard to distinguish from dogmatism. So I rather like Ridley's: Science is not a catalogue of facts, but a search for new mysteries, and Maynard's paraphrase of Popper: Erecting hypotheses that can be falsified, and designing experiments capable of doing so, is the hallmark of the true scientist.

Perhaps a similar exercise is

misia asking What's your definition of "having sex"?. She gets some very interesting and provocative answers. It seems to me that in some contexts at least it's a fairly important question, and certainly it's a word that pretty much everyone needs to use conversationally some of the time, and there's really very little consensus on it.

So, anyone want to try a soundbite short definition of either science or sex? Or both, if you're feeling ambitious. It's something to ponder, anyway.

I made the mistake of posting a couple of sentences about the Frienditto site in the middle of a post about something else. I assumed it was sufficient to say, yeah, obvious scam, let's move on. However, the issue has been blown way out of proportion and there's all kinds of rumours flying around.

I'm aware that I'm possibly fanning the flames by making another post on the subject, but I want to spell things out clearly. The thing is, the Frienditto site has no legitimate purpose. Let me say that again: it is facilitating nothing that any decent, honest person would want to do.

To break it down: how does this self-described "archive" site work? You provide the URL of a LiveJournal post, and the site copies all the HTML of the post and comments and displays it on the Frienditto site. Now, why would anyone want to do this? If you see a cool post that you like, you might want to draw attention to it. The sensible way to do that would be to post a link in your own journal, or post it to del.icio.us.

If it's a really cool post, you might want to archive it for posterity. Now, why on earth would any sensible person choose to archive a post from LJ, with its established infrastructure and serious, large-scale commercial presence, to some random fly-by-night website? You may doubt the security and durability of LJ, but it's pretty obvious that Frienditto is going to do worse on any of these parameters. It makes no sense for archives to be vastly less secure than the originals. The sensible thing to do would be to copy the post to your computer, if you were really concerned about archiving it.

More likely than LJ disappearing is the possibility that the post's author might decide to delete their post. Why would someone delete their post? The most likely reason is that they regret publishing it for some reason, perhaps because it's generated a really negative response, attracted trolls, caused drama, whatever. In this situation, the only purpose that is served by having a publicly available "archive" copy is to make it possible to continue trolling or harassing or creating drama related to the original post.

So Frienditto makes it possible to use someone's words against them after they've chosen to delete them. But there's a more serious problem. Frienditto also "lets" you archive Friends Only posts. The way it does this is by asking for your username and password so that the site can see posts that you have access to. This makes it possible for the site to archive, or in other words, make a publicly viewable copy of a post that was meant to be private.

Now, clearly there are ways to do this without needing to use Frienditto. If I am an untrustworthy person with access to your Friends Only entries, I can if I wish copy the entry and republish it somewhere online. It's a little trickier to do so anonymously than Frienditto makes it, but it's possible. But just look at that hypothetical scenario again: the whole point is that only if I were an untrustworthy person would I want to do such a thing.

Then there's the whole issue of giving your password to random strangers. It's possible that Frienditto could use your password to post unwanted material in your name, or to read other Friends Only entries apart from the one you decided (for some reason) to "archive", or to lock you out of your account and delete your entries and generally cause problems. I have no reason to believe Frienditto plan to do any of these things with the passwords they harvest; there are plenty of silly LJ toys that ask for a password to get access to protected information, and their creators are harmless fools who reason that, well, I'm a decent person and I wouldn't do that, so obviously everybody should trust me when I say I wouldn't.

But the point is that even if Frienditto are completely scrupulous with the passwords, they are using them for an intrinsically bad purpose in the first place. On the other hand, even if you believe (because all I can do is present my own opinion) that making other people's Friends Only entries public is a legitimate thing to do, as a general principle you should never reveal your passwords. Surely this is obvious?

I have the impression that the people involved in Frienditto are in fact not at all trustworthy. I'm not sufficiently certain of this to defame them though. It is possible that some of the moronic trolls claiming to be involved are actually not, but they just like having their names associated with anything that people are stressed about. It is possible that although they may have done cruel things and abused personal and private information and attempted to cause LiveJournal trouble in the past, they are not planning to do so in this case. This is not the point; I repeat, the site has no legitimate purpose, so even if they only do exactly what they have claimed they are going to do, that is still a bad thing to be doing, and the fact that they are attempting to do it on its own makes them untrustworthy.

Conclusion: Frienditto is a very bad thing. But at the same time, let's not blow things out of proportion. I really doubt that the site is going to do any serious damage to LiveJournal; LiveJournal has survived much more serious attacks before and will do so again long after Frienditto is forgotten. The world is not going to come to an end either, because a few foolish or naive or petty people have provided their passwords to a dodgy site.

My prediction is that the site will fall over in a few days because it doesn't have the infrastructure to support the volume of use it will be getting with all the fuss. (The site is in fact down at the time of writing.) Or if they manage to get it back up again, it will piss someone off enough to find itself attacked either digitally or legally. I doubt the trolls care enough to put serious money or effort into keeping the site going.

Final note: people (claiming to be) connected to Frienditto have been trolling journals with posts critical of the site. As a result of this, I have screened non-friends comments to this post, because I can't be bothered to deal with a potential troll-fest. Legitimate comments may be unscreened at my discretion.

Addendum 6.3.05: _hypatia_ has a really wonderful critique of my arguments in the comments. I suggest everyone should read her views because wow, I've learnt such a lot. (She doesn't disagree with me about this particular site, but does have some very interesting counters to the more general principles I was arguing from!)

Note 7.3.05: Various people seem to have been finding this through links and Google, which is great. I'm almost sorry I ended up screening comments because instead of attracting trolls I've attracted loads of people with interesting contributions and information! I hope to reply to everyone who's contributed individually, but just as a general statement, thank you all for your thoughtful remarks.

If anyone wants to link to this post they are absolutely welcome. My position against Frienditto has no bearing on my attitude towards legitimate links. And if people are finding this piece helpful, I'm happy to disseminate it.

I have left a couple of comments screened, not because they're deliberately trolling but because they're drawing attention to artificially created drama and unsubstantiated rumours. Part of the point of this post is that you don't have to believe that Frienditto is the spawn of the devil and eats babies to see why it's a bad thing. So I don't want the comments of this to degenerate into wild rumour-mongering; all that does is give Frienditto supporters a case because they can say, look, people are spreading false information about us! We are poor innocent victims!

Also word up to largesock who spotted a really horribly embarrassing typo in my original post. I've left his comment screened at his request, but I still think he should get some appreciation for eagle-eyed proofreading skills. I'm very much the sort of person who prefers for people to let me know if my knickers are showing.

Firstly, let me point everybody to this post of

leora's about the so-called archiving service that is floating about on the meme-waves right now. Just in case it isn't completely obvious to everyone how much of a Bad Fucking Idea this is,

leora spells it out very clearly.

If you want to make a local backup of your own entries, which is more of a good idea, LJArchive is very good in lots of ways. Highly usable, open source and generally yummy. However, it's Windows based. If you use a sensible operating system I'm less able to help you, but if you use a sensible OS and understand Perl, you may find this stuff helpful. Or you may not, but I think that's where to start looking.

Addendum 4.3.05: Apparently, it is not in fact as obvious as I thought why this archiving service is evil. Let me spell this out in so many words: giving your password to a site you know nothing about is stupid. Even if you're prepared to take that risk for yourself, letting them use that password to read and make public copies of other people's Friends Only entries is not acceptable IMO. Even if you disagree with me, please do not "archive" my Friends Only entries offsite. I have no way of enforcing this, but I would be very, very pissed off I found someone was breaching my privacy like that.

Anyway, having got that out of the way. My last post was a bit of a rant about scientific illiteracy compounded by mystification of fairly basic science. In the comments, it kind of degenerated into a general bitchfest about the state of education. So to follow that up, my challenge for the day is this:

Can you name one thing that everybody should know but few people actually do? Because I'm feeling mean this morning, I'm restricting you to one thing. And it has to be described in 100 words or less, mainly because I'm trying to exclude cheating definitions of 'one thing' that are actually several distinct things.

Proposals for how ignorance of your chosen topic might be combatted are welcome, and can be as long as you like. Vague proposals such as 'make primary school education work properly' will be frowned upon, however. I may give prizes for the best suggestions.

DNA sequencing is not magic.

Thankyou.

This comment prompted by a combination of:
– an otherwise good novel in which the simple fact of sequencing the human genome, described in mystical terms, is enough to propel the world into an SF future.
– a death penalty debate where it is suggested that now we have DNA evidence, we can execute people in good conscience.
– general frustration with scientific illiteracy.

I shall now return to my regularly scheduled thesis writing (in which sequencing DNA does not magically solve any problems, and in many cases does not in fact give any useful information about biology.)

Author: Bruce Sterling

Details: (c) Bruce Sterling 1996; pub Phoenix 1997; ISBN 1-85799-884-7

Verdict: Holy Fire is an enjoyable read, recommended.

Reasons for reading it:

lethargic_man wanted me to read HF so that he could refer to something in it. Yes, we do take the whole bacterial sex thing to extremes. What can I say? Anyway, I'm not at all sorry I read HF, cos I got on very well with it.

How it came into my hands:

lethargic_man lent it to me.

( detailed review )

I tried to respond to

shreena's marriage survey only the system rejected my comment for being too long. So I'm posting it here instead, cos I'm too lazy to edit it to be less verbose. And because the post in question is getting old anyway, so maybe more people will see it this way.

( ramblings )

I really shouldn't be displacing like this, but I can't resist questionaires, especially about bookies. I got this rather lovely meme from

rysmiel.

( Read more... )

Author: Walter M Miller Jr

Details: (c) 1959 Walter M Miller Jr; Pub Orbit 1997; ISBN 1-85723-014-0

Verdict: A brilliant book, moving, complex and intelligent. Wow.

Reasons for reading it: It's vaguely famous, and M's talking about it jumped up the priority of a vague intention to read it at some point.

How it came into my hands:

lethargic_man lent it to me.

( detailed review )

Author: Olaf Stapledon

Details: (c) Olaf Stapledon 1930; the rest of the details I don't have, since I have given M's copy back to him. Random edition here.

Verdict: Some interesting ideas, and a strong style, but flawed.

Reasons for reading it: M recommended it to me.

How it came into my hands: M

( detailed review )

On the whole, I'd say that Last and First Men is worth reading despite its problems.

rysmiel posted a meme about explaining one's unique entries in the interests section. So here's my version, cos I'm displacing.

chevruta: Traditional Jewish approach to text study, where you work with a partner and basically argue until you get some personal meaning out of whatever you're reading. It's a very effective way to understand a subject (I've found that a chevruta-type approach works for a wide range of things other than Jewish texts), and at best it can be incredibly intimate and exhilarating. My first boyfriend had been my chevra for a while before we got together, and as far as I was concerned sex had nothing on chevruta in the intimacy stakes.

I don't know anything else that comes close to good chevruta in terms of sheer fun (though obviously that's a matter of personal taste), and mediocre chevruta is also analogous to sex in that it's better than none. I had some really good chevruta going in Oxford, with various combinations of Old A, J and new A and occasional others. (Hey, let's drop the metaphor now before this gets dodgy, hmm?) And I miss it tremendously. At the moment I'm getting by on the occasional session with RB or preparing a supposed shiur for Prof S which isn't quite the same, but at least it's something.

Everett Fox: The coolest Biblical translator I've ever come across. Sadly he's only up to Samuel so far, but his translation is absolutely amazing. It's incredibly close to the Hebrew, to the extent that he makes subtle textual allusions and assonnances transparent, but his English is very readable. It's not exactly standard English, but it's poetic and inspiring rather than clumsy. His amazing translation is published by Schocken Books, and it's totally changed my life. (He also acted as the religious adviser for Prince of Egypt, which is how the obscure Jewish mythological references got in there...)

GB Edwards: The author of one of my favourite books of all time, unfortunately terribly obscure. Edwards was a sort of recluse from Guernsey, but was also an autodidact and spent some time as a professor of English in an English university. He was absolutely miserable and regretted ever leaving Guernsey, so he wrote a sort of alternate history autobiography about his alter ego who didn't. The first volume of this is The Book of Ebenezer le Page; it took him about 40 years to write and he died with the remaining two volumes only in note form. It's an amazing piece of social history, describing Guernsey over the whole span of the 20th century, and it has a cast of characters like nothing else I've ever read. I shall post a proper review of it at some point.

Jewish-Christian dialogue: I've been deeply involved in Jewish-Christian dialogue since I was a young teenager; now I'm branching out into more general interfaith work, but Jewish-Christian will always be my first love. At least partly because I know Judaism and Christianity far better than any other religions, so it's easier to get into a profound level.

Through dialogue, I've met some of my dearest friends, and learnt an amazing amount about myself and maybe even the nature of truth. I also think it's a worthwhile enterprise in terms of promoting goodwill and multiculturalism and all those other sorts of things. It's perfectly possible to be cynical about it, and indeed, sometimes it's little more than mutual congratulation by liberals being fluffy at eachother. But I honestly believe that in some circumstances it can be a genuine force for social change.

Microphotography: Taking (artistic) photos of microscopic things, particularly cells, in my case.

When I first checked with the intention of writing this post, I had BBC micros and Weizmann Institute as unique interests, but it turns out that other users were interested in BBC computers and Weizmann, so I've altered mine to match. And there is one other lj user who is interested in p53 (my professional speciality, which deserves a post in its own right, but this isn't going to be it).

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