Scalzi has repeatedly done a thing where a character's gender is never revealed. I wonder how that would score.

Huh, maybe I should just ask him.

I'm pretty sure I've done that too (caveat: can't remember right now!). Also one story where there are three gender binary axes and everyone has at least two genders simultaneously. (Other aspects of the setting didn't work.)

A problem, perhaps, with the other "marginalised" groups - you specifically mentioned LGBT - is/are:
1: Those groupings are minorities - & I don't mean 45%, I mean down in single-digits ... and, before anyone goes off "bang" or even "pop" at that sentence ...
2: "Hard" LGBT+ persons are probably thin on the ground, whereas, people who are bisexual, or "only" 85% ( Say - I picked the number out of thin air ) "normal-heterosexual" - whatever that is, are actually in the vast majority ...
No-one said it was easy, & congratulations to Charlie for raising this one.
If only because of the vast, huge, gigantic shift in both public opinion & understanding of the wide range(s) of both human sexuality but also minority groups in general.
I can remeber the 1950's - & apart from some rare railway track & a few locomotive-types I missed I cannot imagine any possible reason AT ALL for wanting to go back there.

As usual, there are reactionaries, fascist & religious believers who are swimming aginst this - who appear to be winning in some areas, shudder.
{ Turkey, Florida, Putin's Russia, about 1/3rd of the tory party membership, some of the "gulf" states, & African states that have been captured by either evangelical christianity or brutalist sects of islam, for starters .. }

I'm guessing until humans have some way other than sight to sorta label other humans esp. strangers (friend vs foe, potential mate vs. rival), you're stuck having to describe your characters.

I do like the 3rd person POV where the narrator's characteristics (and reliability) are undisclosed so it becomes more of a challenge for the reader to decide who's likeable, trustworthy or not.

Has anyone ever done a 'blinded' study on the success of a book based on its central character's sex/race/ethnicity/age/occupation? Should be easy for English language stories - just do a search and replace for a few pronouns.

I'm not 100% sure how exactly you intend the extrapolation to work (in particular, what corresponds to "talk to each other about something other than a man") but it made me think of one example which isn't particularly an "underprivileged group", but which is similarly hard to find good examples of in fiction, namely (non-fanatical) religious beliefs.

There's plenty of examples of religion in novels, often as an important plot point. But very few cases of characters who have religious beliefs, but that fact is not important to the plot (and which doesn't somehow identify the character as "unusual", which is the relevant aspect of Bechdel Test if I'm understanding your extrapolation correctly).

I'd have to go back and check, but I thought there was a scene with the girls in Equoid that just squeaks it through, but that's be a pass-by-luck if it even is there.

Awestruck that you went back and analysed/re-read thousands of pages of your own work to figure this out. Long series authors presumably need to do this to lower the rate of plot inconsistencies, but is re-reading your own work a Recommended Author Thing To Do?

I did not re-read my books to figure this out—re-reading them all would be a six month project at this point!

Some authors re-read. Some maintain a world book. I generally do neither because by the time they're published I'm sick to the back teeth of them (although before I write the Last Laundry Files Novel I'll probably have to re-read them -- gack).

Can a book that "fails" the Bechdel Test then be a good book, or is it automatically a bad book?

If memory serves me right, Trunk and Disorderly doesn't pass it, although it's one of those settings where sex, gender, and attendant hardware are rather ... flexible.

I'll try to assume that you asked that in good faith, for now.

But yes, book which fails the Bechdel Test can be a good book, as in a book (or another type of story) which passes it can be bad. It's not a test of quality, it's more of a test of equality (pun intended).

I think it's a good measure among others to see if what you're creating addresses people as, well, people. It's not the end-all-be-all for anything.

I can think off-hand of multiple examples of media which don't pass the test and which I still consider good. I think you can, too, for vaules of good for you, and perhaps even some media which passes the test and which you consider good. And the other way 'round, too.

Can a book that "fails" the Bechdel Test then be a good book, or is it automatically a bad book?

Is "The Name of the Rose" a bad book? Because that's a definite fail!

(Spoiler: "The Name of the Rose" is set among monks in a mediaeval monastery, so it can't pass the BT. This doesn't make it bad, though. As noted towards the end, some situations render the test inapplicable.)

Yep. There's a whole range of fiction set among posthumans/non-humans where the classic Bechdel test simply doesn't work because it assumes sexes/genders are evenly distributed and mostly immutable.

Is there a gender bias in CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN entities?

Representation is a challenge for creators, particularly now. I have written (but not published) a few short stories that take place around where I live. It would be absurd not to include indigenous people, who are a bit part of the population and all around me. At the same time, my knowledge of local indigenous culture is limited, and it is hardly appropriate for me to 'make shit up' about an historically brutalized culture (notably brutalized by the culture I am a part of to boot).

It's a needle I have a hard time threading. I want to/have to include indigenous people and viewpoints, I cannot appropriate their voices. The same applies to women, GLBTQ etc. I am a moderately well-off middle aged, educated cis-het white guy in a culture that makes people like me the default perspective. I want to include other voices in my output, I don't want to appropriate or project onto those voices or experiences.

Crucial edit "A BIG part of the population'. Not a bit part, very different meaning.

The Bechdel-test is a crude sanity-check, intended to highlight the magnitude of a huge inequality problem, and it has done so very effectively.

It is neither a precision tool, nor a check-list-item to decide if an individual work of entertainment is "good" or "bad" - and if it is used that way, we will just see the horrible cop-out of "the token black" extended to "the token chick-talk".

Think of it this way: The average height of a population is a very good proxy measurement for malnutrition and famine, the height of an individual person is not.

And ... of course .. we have "forgotten" { Or have we? } a recent set of specifically SF books, where the gender/sex of the characters is ... *flexible":
Ian Bank's "Culture".
I don't think the late Jack Chalker's series (plural) qualify, though he was definitely reaching in that direction, with, as he himself admitted, inadequate means.

I am afraid that using this as a simple, unqualified test, rather than an indicative measure, deeply offends my statistical soul!

A FAR better test would be whether there were disproportionately more male-male conversations than female-female. I shall now explain why.

Yes, I agree that some 'affirmative action' is still necessary, though it isn't the 1950s any more, when sexual stereotypes were ubiquitous. In the following that would add a bit of justifiable bias, but not change the points - note that the calculations are for the unbiassed scenario.

Let's ignore the contexts in which a sex imbalance is to be expected. The question is how many pairs of people have conversations. Even for books with six such pairs, one in six such books should have no male-male interactions (and ditto for female-female). Once you have only two such pairs, it's more likely than not that there would be no male-male (or female-female).

Bechdel Test is not intended for the assessment of individual films or books or whatever, its main use is to demonstrate the bias present in "films as such" or "books as such".

You can have a very good book with no women in it, but if, say, 60% of all published books had no women in them at all, then I'd say the book publishing industry would have a very big problem.

(Currently about 40% of films do not pass the Bechdel test.)

The interesting problem with the Bechdel test and their kin is that it's easier to do in some types of stories than in others. The general issue is that stories have word or time limits (for non-word media), so space you use for passing any sort of test may be less available for other uses.

For example, SFF generally has a fair amount of scene-setting, which can limit space for human interaction. The cliched way around this is "As you know, Bobbie," said Alice...

I'd also suggest that stories with motor-mouthed first person narrators (perhaps Bob Howard?) have space issues that complicate including interpersonal interactions among other characters. To make such a story more Bechdel-affirming, the author might need to write something like "I cringed through Alice Karen-splaining the disease to Bobbie, who had an MD but happened to be brown-skinned and 20 years older than Alice."

Scalzi's Kaiju Preservation Society is a great example of limits in action. It passes a whole gamut of diversity tests by leaving out two things: a romance sub-plot (it's primary a workplace drama taking place over a short period of time) and extensive descriptions of the setting. IMHO that extra space allowed him to get away with a first-person narrator. I'm not grumping about the story, which I quite enjoyed, merely using it as a presumably well-known recent example of how to make the tradeoffs work.

The Wikipedia article for the Bechdel test has a really good section "Derived tests" (which, disclaimer, I have contributed to). That includes the Vito Russo test for queer representation (Does the film contain a character that is identifiably LGBT, and is not solely or predominantly defined by their sexual orientation or gender identity, as well as tied into the plot in such a way that their removal would have a significant effect?).

Latif & Latif’s tests for representation of people of colour are clearly quite analogous to Bechdel’s work but I really liked Raman Mundair’s 10-point expansion, which I think does a really good job at highlighting other problematic tropes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test#Derived_tests

Hmmm... does a woman talking about her parents pass or fail?

My first novel, 11,000 Years, I think passes, since I have female characters who are talking about what's happening... but do they have to be speaking between themselves, or will a more general conversation work?

My next novel, later this year, passes with a hell, yes. Of course, that leads to another question: what kind of conversation about a man? I mean, does it have to be a personal relationship... or what if it's about the boss/patron, and what he'll allow (say, for a major in uni)?

One way at looking at the Bechdel test is less looking at the first clause (‘at least two women‘) for representation but more at the second clause (’talking to each other about something different than a man‘). The latter is a difference between the character(s) written as persons or written as statists for another character.

As an example the only (unnamed) woman in The Name of the Rose is clearly a statist. We only see her through Adson’s eyes and Adson’s thoughts. Her only job in the novel is reflecting Adson‘s cluelessness, although that is a plot point in its own.

https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/the-mixed-results-of-male-authors-writing-female-characters/273641/

The Mixed Results of Male Authors Writing Female Characters

No winners or losers on which sex writes the other better. But there are strong opinions. When Nation magazine writer and poet Katha Pollitt learned that I was pondering whether men write women better than women themselves, her response practically crashed my computer. "You could not possibly be suggesting that! I think few men write female characters who are complex and have stories of their own. Where are the vivid, realistic and rounded portrayals of women in Roth, Bellow, Updike?"

Warning: potentially sexist minefield to follow....

There is a general complaint (see above) that male authors fail miserably when writing female characters. For example, it would seem that Jane Austin did a much better job at portraying Mr. Darcy than any male author could have done with the character of Elizabeth Bennet.

OK, which is easier, male authors writing female characters or female authors writing male characters?

Who is more accurate?

Do women do a better job of representing men than the other way around?

Does a male writer try to inhabit a female mind set (is there really such a thing?) when writing a female character or is she just "one of the boys" and he writes her as he would any other character?

Do female authors even have this problem since they have sized up men long ago?

Would this entire discussion be a sexist waste of time?

For some cringe worthy (but humorous) examples of male author failure see:

https://www.boredpanda.com/male-authors-writing-about-women/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic

30 Times Male Authors Showed They Barely Know Anything About Women

Should the highest possible Bechdel score go to LeGuinn's "Left Hand of Darkness"?

And how about Heinlein's "I will fear no Evil"?

OK, which is easier, male authors writing female characters or female authors writing male characters?

Who is more accurate?

Do women do a better job of representing men than the other way around?

If you've read Season of Skulls you'll be aware that I did a deep dive into a romance subgenre first. Overall women seem to do about as bad a job at writing men as men do at writing women. That is: some of them write believable male characters, complete with plausible interior narrative and attitudes, but many write men hilariously badly. Hey, authors are not identically insightful.

(This is even taking into account that in genre romance the male lead and antagonists fill a specific social role relative to the female lead.)

I strongly suspect (this is my probably-on-the-spectrum analysis speaking) that authors (of whatever gender identity) who get other genders right do so because they start from the premise that we're all variations on Humanity 1.0, and you can then apply cultural and social modifiers (and some biology: trivially: cisgender men don't have any experience of period pain or PMS, cisgender women have never been kneed in the balls). While authors who were brought up in a religion that emphasizes segregated sexual roles mistake the performance of the role for the experience of being what the role represents.

Finally: this Wednesday is my and my wife's 30th anniversary. (Also our 20th wedding anniversary.) If you're an adult male human author who has been in a decade-plus relationship with an adult human female you damned well ought to be able to write at least one female character accurately, from close observation over a period of years, and the converse is true. Nevertheless I am baffled by how many male authors can't even clear this low bar. (No, I'm not baffled. Most men carefully ignore the women they're closest to. It's how they've been trained: women are socially invisibility to men until they do something jarringly out of keeping with expectations.)

You're baffled? I'll take the cheap shot: Sturgeon's Law.

Sturgeon's law explains part, but only part, of it.

If you're an adult male human author who has been in a decade-plus relationship with an adult human female you damned well ought to be able to write at least one female character accurately, from close observation over a period of years, and the converse is true.

Sorry but after 40 years of marriage to the most wonderful woman on the planet (seriously) many things she does still baffle me.

For example, I stand in awe of here ability to socialize and spin a social network out of nothing with complete strangers waiting in the check out line.

At every party or social gathering I've noticed husbands like myself standing around quiet and occasionally smiling while our wives do most of the talking and socializing (unless it involves sports).

As explained by Ron Swanson of "Parks and Rec":

“I'm not interested in caring about people. I once worked with a guy for three years and never learned his name. Best friend I ever had. We still never talk sometimes.”

It would seem that women really are better at creating social networks than men, whereas many men will either have no friends at all or count watching sports on TV without talking to each other as socializing.

And superior ability to create social networks seems to have a medical advantage in helping women live longer than men. Social nets being a main indicator of life expectancy. The Census Bureau reports the average age a wife becomes a widow is 59 and the fact that half of those widows outlive their husbands by 15 to 30 years. In contrast a widower's average life expectancy is only 9.5 years.

For example, I stand in awe of here ability to socialize and spin a social network out of nothing with complete strangers waiting in the check out line.

Yes, but at least you've seen her doing it, and it stuck in your mind. Presumably if you were going to write female characters you'd bear it in mind as one of their distinguishing traits (that varies from baseline Human 1.0, which we all share): they easily and fluently form new social relationships.

True - I did say it was a cheap shot. More, I think that it's the whole broad-based meme (in the older sense of that word) that men are from/women are from/who can figure them out...?

The one and only answer that will allow you to figure the other sex out, and so write realistic characters is to internalize the climax of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where Gawain is given The Answer to "what does a woman want?"

Don't leave us hanging.

What do women want?

What do women want?

To continue breathing, except when life's too painful to bear.

Oh, you wanted a debatable answer. Sorry.

How do you want the answers binned and ordered statistically? What kind of within-bin and between-bin comparison stats are you contemplating?

Long story short, there are over four billion-odd women on the planet, so yeah...that answer will cost a bit of coin.

Well, you're no help.....

That's his job ....

I see, so you haven't read it, and don't want to bother.

humph

"Her will, just as any man." And if that isn't clear, she wants to be able to do or say whatever she wants, THE SAME as a man does. Oh, and as much control over her own body as any man does. (Oh, no, I must be... WOKE! How terrible... (/snark)

It took my wife 25 years to even begin to understand me, and I wasn't any faster. We have been married for 45 years now, and have just about got used to each other - but she and I are wildly different in social respects :-)

(shakes head) My late wife and I understood each other from the day we met, and Ellen and I understand each other. My ex's... there's a reason they're ex's.

Well, advanced congratulations to Feorag and yourself for the 28th.

Mikko Parviainen (he/him) @ 11:

I'll try to assume that you asked that in good faith, for now.

The question may not have been articulate enough, but it was made in good faith. Why would you assume it was not?

ttepasse @ 24:

One way at looking at the Bechdel test is less looking at the first clause (‘at least two women‘) for representation but more at the second clause (’talking to each other about something different than a man‘). The latter is a difference between the character(s) written as persons or written as statists for another character.

As an example the only (unnamed) woman in The Name of the Rose is clearly a statist. We only see her through Adson’s eyes and Adson’s thoughts. Her only job in the novel is reflecting Adson‘s cluelessness, although that is a plot point in its own.

I'm not sure I can be clear about this, but would a book with women characters fail the Bechdel test if they DID talk about men?

I mean what if they 99% talked about other stuff, but at some point "men" did slip into the conversation - even if only for a moment - does that completely disqualify the book under the Bechdel test?

In real life women and men BOTH talk about each other AND about other stuff.

DP @ 34:

Don't leave us hanging.

What do women want?

I doubt any man will ever know the answer to that question. But if you ever figure it out, bottle it & sell it. You'll be an instant gazillionaire.

Re: '... varies from baseline Human 1.0, which we all share'

Yeah - the range of human diversity seems to get lost in a lot of novels.

Until recently (past 30-40 years?), in real life the interesting and/or powerful jobs were almost exclusively held by men. Most novels have a fairly short list of characters so if the author is using an important/interesting job or considerable socioeconomic power as the core descriptor of a character's role in the story then it's not surprising that such authors have difficulty in inserting interesting female (secondary) characters. They didn't have many real life examples or experience to draw from.

Question for the folks here (who live in a bunch of different countries/cultures):

Which medium - in your experience - has been fastest to depict multidimensional major female characters?

My guess is TV because TV has the fastest turn-around in terms of production and audience feedback (ratings). Some TV shows that I can think of that pass the Bechdel Test and had multidimensional female characters were: CSI, SVU, ER, Grey's Anatomy and a couple of the StarTreks. Basically: cops, lawyers, docs & lab techs.

I'm guessing that the increase in the number/variety of media is going to make it harder for TV shows to continue their dominance in being able to shift overall social perception. To me, this means movies now are likeliest to draw enough large audiences to have any major societal impact. (One of the reasons I keep mentioning Disney movies - because they're watched and re-watched by kids many, many times and can have a major lasting impact as noted by Florida pols.)

A film containing only women who only ever talk about men would not pass the test. If they ever talk about something other than men then it would pass.

It really helps that both me and my wife are neurodivergent. I am an Aspie, and she is even LESS sociable than I am.

Also see the Murderbot stories -- Murderbot's gender has never been disclosed.

"What women want" = "what people want". To be treated with respect and dignity, usually. Other than that, it depends on the person.

I'm not sure it makes sense to say that bi people aren't "hard LGBT+". That's what the "B" stands for. (And no, bisexuality isn't gay-lite.)

In Chapter 3 of Fugitive Telemetry, Murderbot states its gender as "not applicable", which is consistent with its attitude throughout the series.

The only way I can see that working is for a story in a setting that's already largely race/gender/etc.-neutral. In most other stories these attributes are usually obvious for major characters from social context even without being directly stated, and it's impossible to remove that context without hugely changing the story.

For instance, in our host's latest novel the protagonist's gender is inextricably tied in with the plot because of its social and legal implications. Making a gender-flipped version of that book would require flipping not just that character, but the history and culture of the world she lives in. That in turn probably weakens the horror aspect of the book, because a lot of what makes the New Management books feel creepy (for me, at least) is how closely their supernatural evils line up with real-world evils. If one flips that to a world where [white] men have been treated as property by women, it loses that uncomfortable closeness and becomes a very different book.

One thing worth noting from the original strip, which I have read.

The characters were not complaining about the existence of works that did not pass the test, but about the non-existence of works that did.

They were also talking about movies, where single first person or close third person POV is generally not a thing. So "cannot pass because POV" does not really apply.

I think OGH's record, allowing for all that, is pretty good.

We might also nitpick about when is a conversation about a man, but perhaps we should not.

JHomes

Regarding whether women write men better than men write women, a hypothesis:

Under patriarchy, a man is generally able to ignore women entirely without suffering any obvious downsides. Women, conversely, have to pay attention to men constantly, as threats, as sources of things they want, or simply because almost all media is male-centered.

[Obviously this is over-generalized.]

»Which medium - in your experience - has been fastest to depict multidimensional major female characters?

My guess is TV[…]«

I'm not going to attempt to answer your question, but I have a pertinent observation about the power of TV to cause societal change:

We used to build houses where the kitchen was a very distinct and closed off room, with very distinct and quite expensive building physics, because it was the primary fire hazard.

For instance ceramic tiles were used extensively because they do not catch fire, but true to form, they were "sold" to the women as "easier to clean".

Then along comes sitcomms and in order to be able to make fun of Mum, she has to be on camera, so the wall between the kitchen and living room must go.

As time goes by, in sitcomm-world the two rooms slowly melt together, to the point where a kitchen ends up being just one side-wall of the living room where everything in life seem to happen.

A couple of decades later, give and take, the generation which grew up on soaps design their new houses with a "all-room" or "open kitchen" - /precisely/ as seen on sitcoms, and the number one reason to tear down an (often load-bearing) wall in old buildings is to fuse the kitchen and living room.

Along the way, this also drove almost unprecedented rapid innovation in kitchen white goods, to make that choice also work in practice, most notably the "invention" of the kitchen hood.

The fallout from this transformation is still precipitating.

For instance the "man-cave" and "walk-in-closet" phenomena are very much a counter reaction to the loss of the kitchen as "her room" and the living room as "his room".

Some sociologists have also linked this transformation to the decreasing reproduction ratio and consequent higher value of each offspring, which has led to the "surveillance-mom" and elimination of any kind of privacy for kids.

Do not underestimate the power of a high-bandwidth direct path into millions of brains.

I'm guessing that the increase in the number/variety of media is going to make it harder for TV shows to continue their dominance in being able to shift overall social perception.

I know you're from Canada and I'm from the US so read this with that context. I know the history of "free" TV in Europe is different but the details don't make much sense to me. And as to S. America, Asia, and Africa, well I'm very ignorant.

The dominance of the US/Canada TV shows has already fallen. Hard. At least in terms of the "free" TV prime time market that I grew up with. And maybe you. Anyone else remember NBC's "Must See TV"?

But that went away over the 90s into the 00s. Cable only networks proliferated and the free TV market share fell. A LOT. But over time the major producers of TV shows bought up all of those "cable" networks so now there are only a few actual DIFFERENT networks.

Now things are shifting again. To the streaming networks. And it is getting stranger. Outside of Amazon and Netflix most of the streaming content is now controlled by what was, decades ago, free TV production companies.

It is getting very confusing, at least in the US, of who is a part of what. All of those companies want to control their destiny but most are merging or getiing acquired.

Back to your point. The streaming services seem to be where the experimenting is happening now as to what the boundaries are.

This is causing some consternation amongst some of the true conservatice / evangelicals as to them this is just promoting sin. I keep wondering if the streaming entertainment services will spliter into R and D in the US. Sort of like cable news has. The problem is most overtly religious DRAMA programming is mediocre at best in terms of production values, scripting, acting, etc...

The send us money "blue haired" TV preachers I'm ignoring. As I wish the rest of the planet would do also.

We used to build houses where the kitchen was a very distinct and closed off room, with very distinct and quite expensive building physics, because it was the primary fire hazard.

Yes. But as someone who grew up in the home building industry in the US and kept watching it for the rest of my life...

The issue with kitchens into the 70s in the US was noise and fumes. Preparing meals (mostly by mom) was noisy and tended to generate fumes than needed to be vented to keep the food film off the rest of the house. In the US hoods over stoves have been a thing since the 50s.

These days the biggest issue with our personal kitchen is the noise from the dishwasher. Which is why we typically start it when full on our way to bed. So the noise doesn't interfere with whatever TV thing we might want to watch some evenings.

As to the fire hazard, my father build a house for us in 1956 when I was 2. Around 58/59/60 there was a grease fire while my mom was distracted and let a skillet sit on a flame too long. (I can't remember how many decades ago my wife or I heated grease in a skilet but I digress.) In a rare moment of composure for my mother she managed to run out the back door, turn on the garden hose, drag it back through the door, and put out the cabinets that had caught fire. Saved the house. (My memories are a bit confused but the strongest memory is of it being an exciting day.)

Ceramic counter tops and backsplashes would NOT have made a difference as it was the cabinets next to or above the stove that caught fire. Now in many older homes there were not much in the way of cabinets and my memories of many were none above or next to stoves. Likely a fire avoidance thing. Plus not as much need to store "stuff" as most folks in the 1930s and 1940s didn't have all that much stuff to store in a kitchen cabinet.

_"The Name of the Rose" is set among monks in a mediaeval monastery, so it can't pass the BT. _

Well if I remember correctly, there is one woman in the story, a cleaner or some other sort of servant. She fucks the main protagonist's young male amanuensis, who is also the first-person narrator, to his great surprise and delight. I don't recall her having any other plot function, or possibly even a name. Caveat: it's maybe 30 years since I last read it. I suppose it is technically possible that he could have overheard her talking with another woman (ISTR the liaison occurs in the kitchen, there could have been an older woman cook character), so the opportunity to pass the test existed, and perhaps would not even have been a stretch. But on the balance of things I'm inclined give Eco a generous reading for all this. It's one of those things where passing is good but failing isn't necessarily bad.

I'm actually a huge fan of Eco's non-fiction, he was just such a marvellously acute observer of life.

If it's any consolation, you've got a lot better at this over the years. I found The Annihilation Score to be a bit of a slog, it read like a male author really trying to write a female perspective. In contrast, Season of Skulls was just excellent, I didn't get the try-hard vibe from it.

On another note, having recently re-read Singularity Sky and Palimpstest, it's hard to believe they were written so long ago.

I'm not going to attempt to answer your question, but I have a pertinent observation about the power of TV to cause societal change:

Noted!

I can't see any obvious holes in that analysis, it has strong explanatory and predictive power, and really interesting implications. It's well-known that architecture affects human social behaviour and even the structure of institutions -- look at stuff like how schools were organized before the invention of the corridor, or how the arrival of corridors affected behaviour at royal courts.

(Just up the road from here is Holyrood Palace, sometime home of Mary Queen of Scots and now occasional residence of the British royal family when they're opening parliament. Holyrood Palace predates the corridor, so to enter it and visit the throne room and then the royal chambers you have to traverse a series of audience rooms, each of which would have been filled with supplicants and courtiers, of increasing seniority and in increasingly elaborate costumes as you got closer to the monarch. (Servants used small, inconspicuous, interconnecting doors at the edges of the rooms: nobs used the formal doors and their entrance was noted.) Corridors permitted privacy to emerge by allowing people to move between social settings -- formal rooms -- without interacting.)

Go back a few centuries earlier to stuff like Viking long houses and, well, the implications become more obvious.

Anyway: today we may see the ubiquitous open-plan living/kitchen room in new build homes thanks to the TV sitcom effect. We also see ubiquitous parking/garages and different street-facing frontages as affordances for cars. But the big TV screen as focus of the household is dying, replaced by a bunch of handheld tablets, laptops, and other devices. If AR headsets take off, the big TV may be banished completely because it's an annoyingly intrusive and un-resizable intrusion in the backdrop of the virtual space. And it's also going to have effects on media depictions of modern life, isn't it? Smartphones have also created new etiquette problems in public spaces (the annoying guy on the bus who's viewing a music video on their phone at full volume without headphones: the zombies striding along with eyes downcast, hogging the pavement: and the fact for drivers and cyclists that they now have to treat all pedestrians in view as if they're unaware of the vehicle approaching from behind because noise-canceling headphones are ubiquitous) ... what else is changing?

"OK, which is easier, male authors writing female characters or female authors writing male characters?

Who is more accurate?

Do women do a better job of representing men than the other way around?"

"(No, I'm not baffled. Most men carefully ignore the women they're closest to. It's how they've been trained: women are socially invisibility to men until they do something jarringly out of keeping with expectations.)"

Well people who are placed in a position of social inferiority HAVE to be able to read the mood of their "superior" accurately, and better be able to defuse conflict verbally while avoiding violence.

It's a survival skill.

The butler or the maid know a lot more about their master than the master know about them.

So I'm not surprised that women, who are usually placed in situation of social inferiority, have a much better character reading sensibility than men.

Given Homo Sapiens sexual dimorphism, it may even be a selected character.

We are an example of people who are apparently incompatible, but stay happily married for years. I will give an example, because it is peripherally relevant to the topic of this post, and is why very few authors manage to write convincing characters that are considerably different from themselves.

My wife spent two days alone as a student, revising, and went to go shopping just to have someone to talk to; I can accept that, intellectually, but not understand it as I don't feel it. I took a week's holiday a year to walk (mostly in the Highlands), completely on my own. It took her 25 years to realise that was essential for my sanity, if I had to spend the rest of the year surrounded by PEOPLE.

Some authors have written convincingly about people like me, but they are also ones who include few female characters, and portray them shallowly. It's a rare person who can portray someone very different, convincingly. In my experience, this applies even to most authors when including different sex characters, and I believe different gender, too, though I lack enough personal experience to be sure. No, I don't believe that this is purely a male about female failing, though there are an excessive number of egregiously awful male authors in this respect.

For clarification, the love of solitude is not solely a male characteristic (I have female relatives that have it, in a lesser degree), but the only female authors that I know had it wrote travelogues, which are essentially irrelevent to this topic.

Smartphones have also created new etiquette problems in public spaces

Interesting side note. My daughter is a speech therapist and part of her work includes teaching sign language.

When signing the word "telephone" kids today no longer hold their hand up to the side of their face with pinky extended to the mouth and thumb extended to the ear as if holding an old fashioned phone with speaker and earpiece.

They cup their hand in front of their mouth as if holding a cell phone and pretend to talk.

Most have never even seen the older type of phone.

I highly recommend Lucy Worsley's "History of the Home" in four parts: kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and living room.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnbW1IipihI

I found it amusing that long after indoor plumbing was available and widespread the upper classes continued to use servants to carry their chamber pots out to the rose gardens. Plumbing was considered to be middle class and therefore beneath the aristos.

I've always found "little history" like this, history of ordinary people and how they lived to be far more interesting than kings and battles.

»what else is changing?«

Thomas Friedman spat out a book called "Hot, Flat, and Crowded" about which the less said the better, but the title is probably as good a orediction of the future as we will ever get.

To me the most interesting thing is the "flat" part, which Friedman got totally wrong.

When I grew up, the most remote person I was in regular communication with lived 1850 meters away. Yes, we were nerds: We measured it.

My daughter, now in her late twenties, was in regular communication with people from all over the world at the same age.

I happen to be personally way ahead on that curve, because of UNIX, UseNet and FreeBSD, but I can tell from my cohort, for instance my school-mates, that they have /no/ clue about the world their kids live in - their kids are literally foreign, if not actually alien, to them.

Can I suggest a re-reading of Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities", only this time, for "Nation State" read instead "Social Media Site" ?

One thing which has become painfully obvious to me, is that the flatness is being weaponized 19 different ways from sunrise to sunset, by nation states, by mammonists, by criminals and by the sheer stupidity of the crowd.

I have no confidence in my ability to predict what the effects of flat global networking on a personal level will be, but I can see that it is such a tectonic shift, in such fundamental patterns, that most people do not even realize what supposedly umovable structures have been built on top of these now shifting dunes.

The dominance of the US/Canada TV shows has already fallen.

If you want to watch interesting TV watch something out of Germany (get used to subtitles, the dubbing in English is usually godawful)

Generation War (a German version of Band of Brothers)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nNL5koWmVo

Babylon Berlin (1920s German Weimar republic during the jazz age)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2664tNQZGo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an8gjr6rJcg

Maximilian (founding of the Hapsburg empire - real life Game of Thrones)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nr16j4sRxwM&list=PL8tu4F9QpC75JqtTHa5A1BR-JL6E2XYBu&index=11

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlSaO_eD2d4&list=PL8tu4F9QpC75JqtTHa5A1BR-JL6E2XYBu&index=26

I don't want to support a digression, but that interpretation is more polemic than analysis.

It couldn't have been anything to do with the hassle (and cost) of getting plumbing near to all of the upstairs rooms of a large, often stone-built, building, could it? I have been issued with a chamber pot in such houses, not because there wasn't a bathroom, but because it was a long way away, and the house was DAMN cold! I was expected to empty it myself, of course.

When signing the word "telephone" kids today no longer hold their hand up to the side of their face with pinky extended to the mouth and thumb extended to the ear as if holding an old fashioned phone with speaker and earpiece.

Heard an interview about this not too long ago. Prior to the 50s it was a common sign to pretend to hold an old candlestick phone as if talking on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlestick_telephone

Now we could start a digression on what is the age where the word dial no longer makes any sense to the people using it. In a literal meaning of the word.

I vaguely remember "Hot, Flat, and Crowded". How exactly did Friedman get "flat" part "totally wrong"? Details vary of course, but his main point -- that modern world allows global reach at very small cost, -- is almost trivially true.

Generation War (a German version of Band of Brothers)

Now this interests me a lot. And if I get confused I can bug my daughter who is very fluent from a US point of view. (She listens very very well. Speaking she's slow due to lack of practice with the grammar making it hard to use the right words in real time.) I think of the whiteness of the one from the US at times. But in real life it was very much so. I still think the ending of that US series is very powerful.

At some point HBO showed a longer version of "Das Boot" with subtitles. (There are a lot of versions of this from the 80s of various lengths that were used in different situations.)

I think the movie "Red Tails" came off wrong. I wish it had been done better. Seemed like a comedy that was turned into a drama.

I'm still upset with my wife when she told me she didn't tell me about the Tuskegee Airmen who would show up at her airline call center once a year manning a table on a vendor day they'd have. She didn't' think I'd be interested in meeting them. FYI - This was 20 years ago. I suspect there are very few left at 100 years of age.

But again. Thanks

We are an example of people who are apparently incompatible, but stay happily married for years.

I disagree with EC on a myriad of issues.

But I think we're on the same page that people keep assuming what we're thinking about something or our reasoning for doing something and they get it utterly wrong. Because our minds are not their minds and we don't process they way they do. At all.

My wife at times. Last night was one of those.

I found it amusing that long after indoor plumbing was available and widespread the upper classes continued to use servants to carry their chamber pots out to the rose gardens.

I suspect that EC's comment has a bit to do with it.

But even so in the US in all of those brownstones and row houses in the northeastern cities that have been around 100-150 years there is an odd thing. Many of them have the plumbing exposed. Especially the 2nd floor bath and toilet plumbing as it showed they could afford to not have to use an outhouse or chamber pot or tub in the kitchen or back porch to bathe in. Most of that gets hidden in any remodels done since the 1950s.

As for writing or portraying women, I would suggest that all of the common female archetypes in media (warm loving mother, whore with a heart of gold, strong frontier woman, bitchy high school queen bee, ball busting CEO, apple pie baking grandma, manic pixie dream girl, young career woman trying to make it in a man's world, Hallmark Christmas chick flick romantic heroine, etc.) aren't real women at all.

They are men's stereotypes of women.

I would suggest that all of the common female archetypes in media

That's a non-exhaustive list! Although I assume they're common in the media you're consuming, which is presumably targeting male readers.

Totally not surprising that man-targeting entertainment would reinforce mens' stereotypes of women.

what else is changing?

All kinds of things. But I think you're not fully right on at least two points.

The younger ones DO have large screen TVs. But they are not attached to a cable TV system. At least not so much in the US. They stream various things or cast the video from their phone/tablet. The big change is that they don't have a sitting room where that's all they do. Watch TV. Which old farts (my cohort) just doesn't get. To them a house should have a great room / family room where all non eating / sleeping activities should take place. There would be a TV in the corner or over the fire place and the toys over in another corner. The Internet and multiple TVs in a house blew this concept apart. And many of the over 60 crowd just doesn't get it. As a side stat, cable TV subscriptions went down by a NET of 6 million or so in the first 3 months of 2023.

As to open plan kitchens, this would not have happened until meal prep became quieter and quicker. At least in the US. In the 60s/70s my mother spent 2 to 4 hours (or more at times) a day in the kitchen and was making noise and generating oily fumes much of that time. So it was closed off. And in those 1200sf housing days, the laundry was there also. But the indoor kitchen of the last century was better than the semi attached thing of earlier times. Painted black to hide the grease and soot and detached or mostly so to keep a fire from taking down the entire house.

As I've said elsewhere, I go to watch the changes in the US middle class house with a yard from the 60s into current times. I'm constantly amazed at the number of people who think everyone would want a house plan to match theirs. Because we're all alike. Right? This really hit home in the last 10 years of zoning fights as people want their neighbors to build houses just like theirs.

"what does a woman want?"

An answer from a couple of centuries ago:

from "Several Questions Answered"

What is it men in women do require?

The lineaments of Gratified Desire.

What is it women do in men require?

The lineaments of Gratified Desire.

–William Blake

(Were WB writing today, I hope he'd be clued in to the LGBTQ+ community.)

I don't really control the TV except during football season.

Even then I'm limited to one NFL and one college game per weekend.

But your mention of gender targeted entertainment raises a serious question.

Why do women viewers make up 85% of the typical audience for murder shows (Land and Order SVU, Criminal Minds, Dateline, etc.) where horrible things happen to women?

Does this happen naturally or do the producers of these shows knowingly push female fear/fascination buttons?

The British murder shows I watch on BBC America or Britbox (Broadchurch, Happy valley, Prime Suspect, etc.) are far less graphic/demeaning/gratuitous and retain that polite sensibility that the British murder shows have going back to Agatha Christie.

So is this just an American thing?

Even so, why are they so popular among women?

I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. Multiple award winning actor Mandy Patakin played the original head of the Criminal Minds cast and he left the show in disgust. Mandy Patinkin felt he had to step away from Criminal Minds due to the show's dark subject matter. He specifically cited the drama's frequent portrayal of violence against women, which he described as a heavy emotional burden. The actor even went on record to say, "The biggest public mistake I ever made was that I chose to do Criminal Minds in the first place."

During a 2012 interview with New York Magazine, Patinkin opened up about what he actually thought of his role in "Criminal Minds" and the show in general. "The biggest public mistake I ever made was that I chose to do 'Criminal Minds' in the first place," he revealed. "I thought it was something very different. I never thought they were going to kill and rape all these women every night, every day, week after week, year after year. It was very destructive to my soul and my personality. After that, I didn't think I would get to work in television again."

Why do women viewers make up 85% of the typical audience for murder shows (Land and Order SVU, Criminal Minds, Dateline, etc.) where horrible things happen to women?

What is the typical outcome of such shows -- for the murderer? Just guessing here, but they're much more likely to deliver closure via the bad person getting their just desserts than a jump-scare to "thirty years later, the Innocence Project exonerated XXX and he was released from prison: to this day, the true identity of the killer is unknown ..."

Does this happen naturally or do the producers of these shows knowingly push female fear/fascination buttons?

Yes. We expect fiction to push our buttons deliberately; but this goes for all popular entertainment shows, so non-fiction formats cherry-pick for material that delivers the right dopamine hit.

»How exactly did Friedman get "flat" part "totally wrong"?«

Friedman always and only follows the money. For him "flat" (only!) means that the production can happen anywhere in the world, and therefore (All praise the Chicago School of Economics!) will always happen the cheapest place, so US is doomed to a race to the bottom against China etc. etc.

Does this happen naturally or do the producers of these shows knowingly push female fear/fascination buttons?

From a US point of view.

If you want to get a show green lit and get someone or someones to commit $5mil or $20mil, you will need lots of research that says "these demographic groups will watch and they will appeal to these ad sellers". Or if on Netflix and such, attract this many new subscribers or help retain this many existing subscribers.

I suspect much of it is data driven. After the gut feelings play out.

As to the other comments about the gruesomeness of the shows, well, most real life police crime solving is boring. Utterly so from those in the biz. And an episodic show based on solving boring crimes would be, well, boring. Unless it is a character study. But that is HARD.

means that the production can happen anywhere in the world, and therefore (All praise the Chicago School of Economics!) will always happen the cheapest place

I think the US PRI radio show Marketplace did a series on global trade. They did it on making T-shirts. Like are bought and sold at a concert. They worked backwards through the supply chain to where the typical cotton was grown then did the series from the dirt to the final product. I think their bit of cotton went across an ocean multiple times and traveled through 10 or so countries to get from a plant to a product to be sold.

The folks on this show dedicated to economics and business reporting were even to themselves a bit amazed.

Well, Friedman was not wrong. Race to the bottom DOES happen.

I mean, there is far more to the world being "flat" than that, and the race to the bottom is not even the most consequential part of it, but it is like saying "Tables exist for eating". It's a very small part of truth, but it is not wrong.

Colin @ 46:

A film containing only women who only ever talk about men would not pass the test. If they ever talk about something other than men then it would pass.

Ok. That's like 180° from what I was thinking - women who mostly talk about other stuff, but do occasionally talk about men.

David L @ 56:

The send us money "blue haired" TV preachers I'm ignoring. As I wish the rest of the planet would do also.

I don't want to ignore them. I want to put 'em all in rickety submersibles & let 'em go visit the Titanic!

I've been almost TV-less for 25 years or so ... only watching "TV" on YouTube or when I spent a night in a hotel room (which mostly meant sleeping with the TV on).

What you can get on YouTube is inconsistent, but I guess a lot of it would be compatible with the theme of the Bechdel test (woman's first person POV not talking about men).

I don't understand your description of cooking at all. Literally.

I cook a lot, like dinner almost every night, and have since my early twenties (except when my partner cooked). I don't make much noise, nor do I get much grease all over.

And why does cooking meat make "a lot of noise"?

I am reminded of the mid-nineties, at a Philcon, in the dealers' room. An author friend of mine and I start talking, and he drags me over to a used book dealer, and finds this book allegedly written by Newt Gingrinch. In the preface, you meet this "pouty-lipped woman". He tells me that she's a major character... but DON'T EVEN KNOW HER NAME until (he found it) around page 226.

Today, I'm wearing a t-shirt my computer professional daughter gave me - a floppy disk with a word balloon reading "I am your father", and a flash drive with a word balloon, "Noooooooo!"

The very nice young nurse this morning liked it... but after I explained, she had to google what a floppy disk was.

Yes, I do feel ancient....

We recently bought another set of waterbed sheets for our bed. Egyptian cotton, sewn in India.

Y'know, I am really looking forward to hearing comments about this when my next book comes out, maybe later this year.

“And why does cooking meat make "a lot of noise"?” Have you never tried getting the cat into the microwave?

DP @ 74:

As for writing or portraying women, I would suggest that all of the common female archetypes in media (warm loving mother, whore with a heart of gold, strong frontier woman, bitchy high school queen bee, ball busting CEO, apple pie baking grandma, manic pixie dream girl, young career woman trying to make it in a man's world, Hallmark Christmas chick flick romantic heroine, etc.) aren't real women at all.

They are men's stereotypes of women.

Charlie Stross @ 75:

I would suggest that all of the common female archetypes in media

That's a non-exhaustive list! Although I assume they're common in the media you're consuming, which is presumably targeting male readers.

Totally not surprising that man-targeting entertainment would reinforce mens' stereotypes of women.

Just out of curiosity, what kind of stereotypes do women use when they're writing FOR women?

We recently bought another set of waterbed sheets for our bed. Egyptian cotton, sewn in India.

The point of the radio series was it was grown in one country, then the bales processed (washed and combed?) in another, then turned into threads in another, then into bolts in another, .....

At times looping back to a country where it had been before.

David L @ 81:

Does this happen naturally or do the producers of these shows knowingly push female fear/fascination buttons?

From a US point of view.

If you want to get a show green lit and get someone or someones to commit $5mil or $20mil, you will need lots of research that says "these demographic groups will watch and they will appeal to these ad sellers". Or if on Netflix and such, attract this many new subscribers or help retain this many existing subscribers.

I suspect much of it is data driven. After the gut feelings play out.

As to the other comments about the gruesomeness of the shows, well, most real life police crime solving is boring. Utterly so from those in the biz. And an episodic show based on solving boring crimes would be, well, boring. Unless it is a character study. But that is HARD.

Also, I think U.S. TV has always been more graphic because of the way it developed from competing commercial networks. NBC, CBS & ABC were always trying to out-do each other to attract viewers.

In the U.K. the BBC did not (at first) have any competitors, but you did have the wicked witch Mary Whitehouse constantly carping on anything and everything that [EXPLETIVE!! DELETED!!] "offended" her narrow minded sensibilities.

I don't make much noise, nor do I get much grease all over.

Pots and pans banging. Chopping things with knives on a block.

As to grease. Frying chicken or salmon patties in Crisco or lard. Or just making pasta sauce or beef stew in a big pot. Over time it will build up.

This was my mom. And most of the other ladies of her time. Southern cooking.

We are NOT all the same.

Oh. I rarely each such things now. Well pasta with sauce but...

Most of the graphic stuff that has been mentioned here showed up AFTER cable TV became big and the 3 (and a half) OTA networks were being pushed aside. I think Europe has cable now. :)

David L @ 96:

Most of the graphic stuff that has been mentioned here showed up AFTER cable TV became big and the 3 (and a half) OTA networks were being pushed aside. I think Europe has cable now. :)

I understand that, but the ROOTS from which it developed are still relavant.

I think Europe has a lot more satellite service as well.

Realizing my experience is now 20 years out of date, we had satellite receivers while I was in Iraq. Officially they were supposed to stay tuned to CNN or "Fox News" (which was BAD BIASED even then, but not as bad as it is today) ... but there was also a BBC News channel I'd try to switch it to when Fox got too bad ...

And AFTER duty hours ... the office became the rec room & the TV got switched to other things.

The ones I mostly remember were the music channels. There was a French MTV clone called MCN, but there were also music video channels from Turkey & India; Eastern Europe. MCN had a lot of music from North Africa, but also from further south.

Rock 'n Roll went out into the world, and what came back was WOW! The French took it in new directions and their influence further south was amazing. The local music was strangely good & the videos had high production values.

There were also channels with whatever TV shows were popular in their countries of origin. I didn't watch them so much because either they didn't have closed captioning (with auto-translation) or our equipment wasn't able to receive captions.

But there were a few U.S. TV shows dubbed into local languages & it was sometimes fun to catch something like Hawaii Five-Oh where you could follow what was happening even if you didn't understand the dialog.

U.S. cop shows did seem to be the big sellers overseas.

Well, roasting or boiling; even probably stewing, are quiet activities, but frying definitely sizzles.

Oh. I don't make much noise with pots and pans, and I have no idea how she made that much noise on the chopping block (I question how sharp her knices were, and her technique).

Salmon patties, in lard? No, I open a can, mix it exactly as I do hamburger (that is, add eggs, shredded onion, and bread crumbs, and saute it in enough olive oil to grease the pan...

Care to name groups or "movements" of French or further south? I'd be curious.

Really really interesting. Just to post the counter ( or possibly complementary ) argument: it may also have something to do with equality/not exiling the wife to the kitchen? Once the man sometimes cooks he doesn’t want to be sent to a closed off annex. Let everyone watch /talk to him/ appreciate his brilliance.

Or putting it more nicely, in an equal partnership you don’t exile anyone to a cooking room. You all hang out together.

Fascinating insight. I will think on this.

( *Every so often when I wonder why I still devote time reading the comments on this blog which -no offence, I have massive affection to all the regulars whose lives I find myself half-following - can be like a few old timers chatting the same conversations in a local bar, a notion like this lands. Cuts across all my interests - roughly how tech meets built environment meets social trends in city building. )

Just out of curiosity, what kind of stereotypes do women use when they're writing FOR women?

Go read some womens' fiction. I'm not your homework oracle.

At times looping back to a country where it had been before.

As we've discussed elsewhere on this blog, multimodal container shipping cut the price per ton for international cargo shipping by two orders of magnitude between 1960 and 1980. It costs about $2000 to send a 1-TEU container with 20 tons of cargo from the dockyards in Shenzhen to western Europe. So little that it's profitable to ship springwater from Fiji, because it's about 50 cents per half-litre (US pint) bottle but it's sold as a premium product for double the price of local spring water.

If you king-sized cotton sheet weighs 1Kg and retails for $10 (it's probably more, a $10 kingsize cotton sheet is an Amazon loss-leader) then the contents of a single container that costs $2000 to ship have a retail value of $200,000. So the cost of moving the raw fabric back and forth is lost in the noise.

$10? ROTFL! A waterbed sheet, king-size, consists of a top sheet sewn to a bottom sheet which is fitted (that is, it has places for short lengths of pvc pipe to hold it under the corners) and two pillow cases. $80 and up, as in up to $180 or so.

Yup, so there you go! That's a $1M shipping container cargo (by retail value) that costs $2000 to send halfway around the world.

The most mind-blowing thing about consumer capitalism I know about is what happens when Apple releases a new generation of iPhones. Tens of millions of units get shipped to receiving centres around the world by air freight. They only weigh about 500g each in boxes, so 2000 of them per ton, and it takes 200,000 iPhones to fill a cargo 747: That single 747 is carrying maybe $200M of product; five of them carry $1Bn of produce, or 1M iPhones. And Apple block-book so many freighters it causes the price of air freight shipping to spike globally ...

(Gold bullion, as a yardstick, costs on the order of $40M/tonne, so that cargo 747 could carry about $4Bn of gold.)

Clive James borrowed that for one of his song lyrics...
"A straight-up scalp-collector I could understand
All those lineaments of gratified desire
But he's handing me that old refining fire
This to me, the Shadow and the Widower"

You’ve never tried cooking Indian food then. You dry fry the spices in a hot skillet then add oil and sauces, which causes a percentage to vapourise with the steam and coats the room over time. Long term the environment picks up an orange tint from the spices.

It’s one reason why people who rent to ethnic groups complain about the smells - what’s a comfortable scent to the in group is a general miasma to someone else. You can easily keep renting to the same groups, but switching between isn’t a simple cleaning job, it’s almost a remodel. See also grandma’s house.

Even for books with six such pairs, one in six such books should have no male-male interactions

Except that in fiction there are very rarely pointless characters or pointless interactions. So it's unlikely that you would read the random blather that constitutes the 99% of a characters life, only the 1% where they're visible to the narrative.

Fiction also dramatically changes emphasis between genres and subgenres. There's (or used to be) a whole genre of "girls with horses" books, and they were about... girls and their horses. Incidental characters like parents, horse-grooms and so on appeared, but you could be forgiven for thinking that the world consisted on a (private, girls) school, a barn full of horse stuff and A HORSE. Also other girls with other horses, but only insofar as they served the needs of THE GIRL and THE HORSE.

In that context the Bechdel-equivalent would be "does a non horse owner talk to another non horse owner about something other than horses". And the answer would generally be: no, why would the author even think to put that in the book?

There (used to be?) whole subreddits dedicated to "men writing women badly" and such things, with occasional attempts to create the vice versa versions but those generally got bombed out of existence quickly through a combination of the dominant group not caring much and the minority caring a lot (and not in a kind way).

I suspect that most minority writers have majority readers, editors or people otherwise involved who point out the more egregious mistakes. But it's relatively easy to miss a particular minority if you're a majority author, and it can be a really PITA to find a skilled minority member to read for you.

This comes up in Australia where there are still ~200 first nations but some are small, so while an author might want to have their "black person from Nanutarra" sound authentic, getting one of the 18 first nations people from Nanutarra to read their draft could be tricky, and the person willing to do it will have their own approach which might not meet the approval of the rest of their family, let alone anyone outside that group who has (strong!) opinions of appropriate representation of first nations people in white-author fiction. And so on.

That's without even considering the opinions of people who have opinions about what constitutes a "real member of the minority". Are bisexuals even queer? Does the one drop rule really make someone a legitimate voice of all nonwhite people everywhere? And so on...

Also the credit card thing at that link is brilliant.

It's weird that the author didn't think to check the anal cavity for a cellphone. We know that cellphones can fit in there both from prisons and the chess world so it's obviously something to check when you find a corpse.

There's also Heinlein's Friday with the belly button pouch. She really wanted to be a marsupial (I assume Heinlein is already banned by the far right, but that sort of furry-adjacent stuff should cause a re-banning).

the fact for drivers and cyclists that they now have to treat all pedestrians in view as if they're unaware of the vehicle approaching from behind

Not to mention pedestrians have to treat drivers and cyclists as if they are unaware of the pedestrian in front of them… :-/

Yesterday I walked to the pharmacy (chemist) to refill a prescription. On the way I had to dodge a young woman who was blithely riding an electric scooter on the sidewalk while looking at her phone. I don't think she saw me. She had earbuds in, so she might well have been mostly cut off from the outside world.

I glad I didn't have earbuds in, otherwise I might not have heard the whisper of the tires coming up behind me.

Which is true, but it wasn't until I read an interview with Martha Wells that I noticed that no gender was ever mentioned.

the love of solitude is not solely a male characteristic (I have female relatives that have it, in a lesser degree), but the only female authors that I know had it wrote travelogues

I wonder if female introverts learn to mask/cope because being 'social' is considered a female trait and so when young they aren't given the same chances for solitude that boys get?

“And why does cooking meat make "a lot of noise"?” Have you never tried getting the cat into the microwave?

Put the microwave on the floor, on its back, with the door open. Wait for cat to sit in box. Close door. :-)

I certainly never did but then I was already an outsider everywhere we went. We were from another country and moved frequently. I went to Catholic schools and my mother was, at various times, an apparently single mother (we moved countries while my father was overseas and he joined us later), divorced and then re-married, so a social pariah in that world at all times, and I was too clever by half for my frequently new schoolmates -- it's funny how much stuff you pick up when you read all the time... One of my early memories, I must have been about 6, was reading The Last Battle under the kitchen table with a blanket over it to make a tent. I would have spent much more time on my own except I had to look out for my younger sister; there wasn't any childcare for single working mothers in NZ in the late '60s/early /70's. "On the way I had to dodge a young woman who was blithely riding an electric scooter on the sidewalk while looking at her phone. I don't think she saw me. She had earbuds in, so she might well have been mostly cut off from the outside world." I don't know if it's an introvert thing, but this horrifies me. The thought of being out in the world and not paying attention just does my head in -- I WANT to know what's going on around me.

Re: 'Once the man sometimes cooks he doesn’t want to be sent to a closed off annex. Let everyone watch /talk to him/ appreciate his brilliance.'

And his $50,000 remodeled kitchen with the latest in kitchen tech. Sometimes it's more about the toys than the food.

Realistically though with the long commutes and greater variety of prepared meals in the frozen section of most grocery chains (pop into the microwave for a few minutes, and eat!) plus more types of restaurants providing delivery service, the average number of meals 'cooked' at home is dropping. Home cooking for working/commuting folk is more likely on weekends or holidays.

Open concept works for both of the above scenarios. The kitchen island is usually part of the open concept and is just large and high enough to hide any mess.

About US TV cop dramas-

Mostly these shows are aspirational - what cops, lawyers, the justice system would like to be seen as.

Nevertheless, the taking victims' experiences seriously (e.g., women in SVU) has made a big difference in that such crimes are not as often offhandedly dismissed as trivial or the fault of the victim.

I wonder if female introverts learn to mask/cope because being 'social' is considered a female trait and so when young they aren't given the same chances for solitude that boys get?

I asked my very introverted wife this question. She said she tried to mask, but was never good at it. Instead, she learned at a very young age that at night, when everyone else went to sleep, they would leave her alone. Consequently she developed a lifelong habit of sleeping during day and being awake at night, and leveraged this habit into taking jobs which very few people want.

I supposed it is a form of coping mechanism.

The thought of being out in the world and not paying attention just does my head in -- I WANT to know what's going on around me.

Mine too.

I've talked to cyclists who ride on the sidewalk, and they insist that it is safer than the road. A few years ago a cyclist killed a pedestrian in Toronto, and was noticeably not only not sorry but blamed the poor woman for not looking both ways before she stepped on the sidewalk.

Toronto police don't track cyclist-pedestrian collisions unless someone is killed. In the most recent cases the fatal collisions have been hit-and-runs, the cyclist remaining at large.

So yeah, I walk defensively now.

Consequently she developed a lifelong habit of sleeping during day and being awake at night,

In my younger years, travelling with tour groups, I got in the habit of going to bed early and getting up early, which gave me 1-2 hours of peace.

At work I arrived close to 7 AM, which gave me an hour of peace before the school started to get busy. (Classes started at 8:45 which is normal for Ontario — I understand American schools start a lot earlier, like 7:30 or before.)

Its not just motorists and cyclists. I drive one of these - see https://www.christchurchattractions.nz/christchurch-tram/ - and part of the route is through pedestrian'ised areas. While we travel at walking pace through such areas you definitely have to watch out for pedestrians whose minds are elsewhere and not just while they are looking at their phones and/or have zero situational awareness. (And we cannot swerve or dodge around those pedestrians).

I wonder if its some form of counter-evolutionary survival thing...

Damn! That’s brilliant! So much for “no, I never microwave cats; it’s too hard to get them in” (I think a quotation of Bun-Bun?)

Darwin's Tram? Sounds like you have a whole different sort of trolley problem :)

I got knocked off my bike by a pedestrian last week, but in a novel way. I was riding on the road, a metre out from the parked cars like a sensible person. And there was a dog in the middle of the road. So I slowed down. Turned out the dog was attached to a pedestrian on the footpath by one of those retractable leads made of thin black string. Just after dawn it was bloody invisible.

Luckily I was going slowly enough that I more or less stepped off the bike. The pedestrian and dog took off running. I guess out of concern that they'd injured me, or perhaps that I would be annoyed by their actions?

But WTF letting your dog walk all over the road when there's traffic on it?

»(Gold bullion, as a yardstick, costs on the order of $40M/tonne, so that cargo 747 could carry about $4Bn of gold.)«

Only in theory: High density cargo is very hard to stow to limit: You need a lot of high-strength crating to hold it in place, in case down isn't.

Even the classical "full of punched cards/magtapes/cdroms" bandwidth hypothetical runs into that.

PS: Water is six times over the limit for "high density cargo".

I wonder if female introverts learn to mask/cope because being 'social' is considered a female trait and so when young they aren't given the same chances for solitude that boys get?

My mother made comments along the lines of liking being in solitude when growing up.

But she was severely manic/depressive (not officially diagnosed and in total denial but ...) and so I don't know how much this played into the situation. Don't such conditions mostly appear in late teens or even later?

I understand American schools start a lot earlier, like 7:30 or before.

Sort of.

High school (teens) start early like that. Elementary (pre-teens) start around 9:00 or 9:30. Middle schools (figure it out) start between them.

Medical science says we have it backwards. But attempts to change meet incredibly fierce resistant. Plucking chickens and melting tar type resistance. Mostly from working moms. The current schedule allows families (well mostly moms) to hire teens as baby sitters for the younger kids for the afternoons so the moms can work or whatever.

And before anyone gets annoyed at my use of the word "mom". My wife and I decided after a few months of day care when my son was between 1 and 2 to NOT use the child care system if at all possible. We both worked. Her a shift bid call center, me self employed. We arranged our lives so that 99% of the time we were with our kids. I spent more time with mine than most of the moms we knew. But I did get to see how many of the moms operated their lives.

For some cringe worthy (but humorous) examples of male author failure see:

Agree with most of the cringiness. But there is one I think is spot on. If still a bit sexist.

#18 The Count Of Monte Cristo- 1884

Whose beauty was quite remarkable in spite of her thirty-six years.

Photographs of families from that era in the US show parents with a flock of kids around them and the parents look at be in their 60s or later by today's standards. Even if they are really in their 30s. Especially farmers who spent a lot of time outdoors. Life was hard. It aged people. Especially their faces. I have some tin type photos of my ancestors from around then. None look youthful.

You can easily keep renting to the same groups, but switching between isn’t a simple cleaning job, it’s almost a remodel. See also grandma’s house.

Yep. We don't notice the smells that are NORMAL to us. And in ethnically segregated areas we just don't notice the smells.

As to grandma's house, you mean the one where you can write in the film that is high up on the walls?

Rbt Prior
Yesterday, "the boss" was nearly "got" by a total fuckwit riding an electric scooter past our front gate at FAR TOO FAST, dark clothing, no helmet - a danger to everybody - even if he was thankfully stupid enough to waste himself, the cleaning up would be extremely tiresome!

A propos of that, at night Wiley e Bicycle has bright lights, I have a helmet-flashing light & wear orange reflectives - I STILL need the loud bicycle bell, because idiots simply do not look ....

Steph NZ
A * PROPER* Tram! - like the ones they used to have in Innsbruck

dark clothing,

I've come to the conclusion that some people in my neighborhood think that clothing that blends into the background at dusk and after sunset is the best thing to wear when out walking.

Bechdel Test: wondering how the Raadchai do in Anne Leckie's "Ancillary Justice" et seq. fall?? (Not to mention the Interpreters.) :-)

And as for containers, what used to be $2,000 is now $20,000, if not $30,000...

There are, however, plenty of books with only a few characters major enough to have actual conversations (transactions with innkeepers etc. rarely count). And see what OGH said about the Atrocity Archives and Jennifer Morgue.

There are also books (and lots of films) with women pasted in just to show they have them. I still remember with horror (after 60 years) an abortion of King Solomon's Mines that did that (see the introduction to the book why that is so appalling). As you will guess, she did nothing except hang around being useless - a GREAT role model.

And it was shot in California - as someone recently returned from the part of Africa depicted in the book, I knew what it should look like!

getting one of the 18 first nations people from Nanutarra to read their draft could be tricky

The traditional ways to resolve such a problem if you (the author) don't personally have a Nanutarran who owes you a favour are (a) pay one of them to do a sensitivity read, or (b) invent a fictional first nation based on what you know about Nanutarra that has the characteristics you want for the story but a name sufficiently different that you have plausible deniability.

There are other problems with this approach, but you're less likely to be called out for being an asshole if the people you're being an asshole about don't exist.

I noted that one, too. #1 boggled me, because it showed the author didn't know anything about MALE anatomy, either! When it comes to difficulty pissing, it's far more often a male problem, and is near-universal in elderly males. Leakage is another matter.

One of the responses had a highly amusing typo., because it missed out a "not" and seemed to show that women are sometimes as ignorant about male anatomy as the converse: "Boobs are testicles. They don't "withdraw" because there is muscle and a rib cage underneath and they are just mounds of fat and milk producing tissue."

About a year ago I had to take a child to hospital with a broken arm after a fall from the monkey bars.

Two of the doctors there had a (good natured) argument about whether monkey bars or trampolines were the leading cause of broken bones in children.

They agreed that electric scooters had overtaken all other causes of fractures in adults.

Generation War (a German version of Band of Brothers)

I watched this youtube fragment you've linked and I have very strong ambivalent feelings about this, I mean a TV show with Wehrmacht protagonists at the Eastern Front is an ethical minefield. (Quick look at the Wikipedia shows that the show did, indeed, generate significant controversies)

Weirdly enough, when I watched the US TV series "SEAL Team" (which is an excellent piece of US military propaganda, very technically solid and realistic representation of how the US military uses its enormous technological and logistical capacities to stack the deck in its favour as far as it can go) I sometimes had this feeling that in a "Man in High Castle" future a TV series about heroic Waffen SS soldiers fighting terrorists would look very similar.

Turned out the dog was attached to a pedestrian on the footpath by one of those retractable leads made of thin black string

I've used those. They're actually the best thing for letting them sniff around and explore, basically it's as much like being off the lead and free roaming as it's possible to get while still technically and (important this) legally being on the lead. Not using one at the moment as technically both our dogs are in training (both the 9-year-old rescue and the 15-month-old puppy), and these are totally wrong for training. Having said that the other reason to use the retractable lead, vs free roaming, is that you can stop your dog going on the road and getting killed. It could have been the human was picking up poo and had forgotten to lock the reel (or fumbled it... the expensive ones work okay with cold hands, the cheap ones are often complete junk). Especially first thing in the morning... guess my thinking is the same reason I'm a risk-averse Nelly when I'm driving. I assume the other car is full of noisy children and the driver has the attention span of a sandfly on ice (australisch for crystal meth), that half awake and squinting as I usually am, that everyone else is probably worse off. And why I might drive a 4,000km round trip and still brake for tailgaters when I'm nearly home.

last time I ran the numbers for hard-disks (semi trailer from the east coast of the US to the west coast) the bandwidth was pretty decent (taking shipping box packaging volume into account) latency however was nothing to crow about. Yet, these calculations completely ignored the fact that one needs to first write data onto the disk at the source and read it off them again at the destination, which will add a lot of time (even when read in parallel there are lots of units to handle). Still I guess there are use-cases where this can still be a decent operation, but I guess these are all pretty niche.

I agree with the utility of those for a well-trained dog. In this case the long lead was well down the list of "and then..." problems. I'm pretty sure the owner knew where the dog was and was vaguely aware of motorists, but was busy with their phone or something else more important than watching for quiet vehicles.

I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess that you're not the sort whose dog gets to play on the road unless it's the sort of road you'd let your kids play on (we still have those in Australia!).

Albeit round here there seem to be two main types of dog owners: where the leash is decorative and the dog will if necessary carry the owner-end back to the owner to say "you are supposed to hold this!" and ... oh boy. Small yappy things that are not trained at all, often with owners who think dog shit is someone else's problem.

Did I say 15-month-old? Gah, she's a 15-WEEK-old terror, who modulates between heart-melting loveliness and sinking needle-sharp puppy teeth deep into whatever part of you is available.

Here we have a leash law. If your PET (dog, cat, whatever) is not on your property or in a fenced area with permission, it must be on a leash. Periodically the neighborhood message board has someone post wanting to track down and report the driver who hit their dog (or cat) who was in the street not on a leash. Of course it's the fault of the driver to avoid animals that don't understand autos. Can't be the owner of the pet.

Growing up in a somewhat rural area, our dogs understood cars and would get out of their way if they saw one moving.

whether monkey bars or trampolines were the leading cause of broken bones in children.

Interestingly we had monkey bars in grade school. Ages 5 to 12. And non of this soft material underfoot. We had packed dirt. With a few pebbles. Lets say 900+ kids per year in the school. I have no memory of anyone breaking a bone on the monkey bars. Lots of very dusty kids with various scratches. And lots of blisters on hands. But no broken bones.

When 15 I did get to have stitches in my chin as the phys ed instructor decided to use what he called a Swedish Towel Relay to give us workouts. within 2 or 3 weeks we had multiple cases of kids getting stitches. Then after a broken arm the STR was banned. I can't find a reference to it online just now.

I watched this youtube fragment you've linked and I have very strong ambivalent feelings about this, I mean a TV show with Wehrmacht protagonists at the Eastern Front is an ethical minefield.

Made me look.

What mostly true to life such war based show isn't a mess of ethics? The object isn't to fight a good fight and go home as in sport then try again at the next meet if you loose. It is to win. Period.

On the eastern front you have an army driven by a government whose goal is to exterminate and enslave the populations in front of them and turn the land over to their own people. Defending against this is a government that treats individuals as expendable pawns to be used in stopping the enemy. Nothing nice about any of it.

All wars create such issues. The eastern front was just more brutal at times.

The WWII US war in the Pacific was similar in some ways. The Japanese would just not stop fighting. No matter how out numbered. So the US got into a war of extermination against the Japanese troops on the islands in the last year. Then there is what the Japanese did in Asia in the 30s. And to the soldiers and civilians conquered in the early 40s.

A few years ago speaking with a German friend of the family in who was born in the 60s. He basically said, "I'm proud to be a German but I don't think I'd like to live in the world that would be if we had won in WWII."

Bechdel Test: wondering how the Raadchai do in Anne Leckie's "Ancillary Justice" et seq. fall??

Edge cases get a free pass, as the test is inapplicable in context. (It's not a law, it's just a strong suggestion.)

Don't such conditions mostly appear in late teens or even later?

Introversion appears to be baked in from the start.

According to Karen Cain in Quiet, about a third of the population are introverts. She has references for that stat, but I don't have the book anymore so can't look them up.

When I was a child the school system seemed to regard introversion as a disorder. When I retired a few years ago that hadn't really changed. In fact, I think it is even harder to get quiet time alone at a modern high school, as the library has morphed from a quiet place for reading to a 'more welcoming' activity room. Introverts are expected to 'just ignore' other people. I hypothesize that getting really good at daydreaming, so much so that we're in a world of our own, is a coping strategy — if I'm forced to be in a noisy room full of other people, daydreaming is the only way to get some alone time!

My university lab partner has both an introvert and an extrovert among her children. She described it as how they recharge, not how they prefer to be. So her introvert loves playing with friends but needs alone time, while her extrovert likes listening to music alone but needs social time. As a parent she recognized that and gave her children enough autonomy that they could regulate themselves; something I wish more parents would do.

Yes definitely trams (and not "light rail"). There are currently seven trams in the fleet with an eighth planned to join the fleet in October. The youngest tram originally went into service in 1934, the oldest in 1903. All are fully restored heritage vehicles. However, the tram used as a restaurant tram has been heavily modified.

Don't such conditions mostly appear in late teens or even later?

Introversion appears to be baked in from the start.

Sorry. I was referring to the manic / depressive type things. Now layer that on top of an introvert. When in depressive mode, my distant memories are of someone barely functioning. At all. In the Manic parts, the introversion was swamped at times and could drive us all nuts.

And layer this on top of her first child being born with defective kidneys and only living 4 years.

But when you're growing up in the middle of it all, well life can be interesting at times. I and my brothers would never be guessed as brothers based on how we lead our lives. (Plus we don't look much alike.) We each came through growing up with very different survival skills.

(get used to subtitles, the dubbing in English is usually godawful)

Of course for a series this means HOURS of commitment. You can't get up and get something from the fridge or make a sandwich or let the dog in or out or whatever. You MUST watch or get lost.

Personally I think that the Bechdel test is balderdash.

The most important thing is how good you story is. If you write something like Robinson Crusoe, then it is very likely to have one sex narrative.

Or consider something like 源氏物語, Genji monogatari, which is a very strange, but fascinating writing by a female. Can you rate that story through a filter like the Bechdel test? Or consider The Tale of the Wyf of Bathe (apparently written by a male)?

No. I refuse to take the Bechdel test as a serious one.

Someone may write a wonderful story about a lonely male looking at the Instagram stories of beautiful females. Or a very vivid story about a lonely female, who is living in the basement of her parents, having a wonderful dream-life with male film-stars (well, that has already been done, as the one with the male in the basement looking at the instagram stories of females). But even better stories just wait to be written.

A good story is a good story. Even in the case that it annoys someone who wants to be conservative or woke. Even better if the story annoys 50% of people and fascinates the other 50% of people.

Personally I think that the Bechdel test is balderdash.

So change it to a statistical distribution.

What percentage of media hits this mark. Male, female, or whatever orientation.

If 90% male dominated there is an issue.

Somewhat to the rest of your point. Who decide what is crap and to be ignored and "good" and to be counted. Which may not (or many times not) correspond to sales/viewers?

See #19.

When I was a child, it was regarded as a fault to be corrected, at best, and one to be punished, at worst. While that has improved, the former is still how 'disorders' are treated in the UK - do you see why the term actively encourages discrimination?

I have seen claims that that kind of treatment of people with such characteristics is one of the causes of the large number of suicides amoung young people.

"So change it to a statistical distribution."

Ah, but what the statistical distribution tells you?

It does tell you much less than most people think.

"Who decide what is crap and to be ignored and "good" and to be counted. Which may not (or many times not) correspond to sales/viewers?"

If the stories are available to general public, then the readers/viewers practically decide what is good. But, however, there is a tendency of good stories that go on even if they are not the most liked in their time.

I do, personally, think that the stories that can survive time are good. Think about Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. The book is, in my opinion, quite boring. But still some young people and it and read it. There is something in the book that survives time. Even if I do not like it that much.

I believe that the best stories survive time and changing opinion. It may be that you change a she to a he or something, but the stories remain the same. In addition, I think that there is a limited number of basic stories that tempt our minds. (Evolutionary psychology and cognitive science and empirical studies of human attention and all that really, really boring stuff.)

Happy anniversaries, Feorag and Charlie.

120: I recall my boss once complaining, during a trip to our Amsterdam office, "how come these things weigh 80 tonnes and run on rails, but they still manage to sneak up on you without you realizing?"

145: definitely trams (and not "light rail")

Many years ago I went to a talk given by the person in charge of non-heavy-rail transport planning in London. He mentioned when he had a meeting with locals about the new South London Light Rail system being planned at the time. After a while he could tell that the audience was definitely not convinced. Then a little old lady put her hand up:

"Young man, do you mean ... trams?" "Well, I suppose you could call them that." "Oo, they were lovely. They kept running all through the War."

And after that the project was renamed "Croydon Tramlink" and even now it's officially "London Trams".

Further more, the trams themselves are not numbered starting at 1, they are 2530 to 2565. The reason: because the old London trams were numbered up to 2529.

It tells you quite a lot about the population (e.g. of films, films produced/directed by women etc.) See #17, #19, #20.

And, despite the claims by the ignorant, it is NOT true that you can't apply statistics to a single point. If a single film or book was extreme on a proper test (see #19), then it would be grounds for asking "why", at the very least.

"So change it to a statistical distribution."

Ah, but what the statistical distribution tells you?

It does tell you much less than most people think.

You completely missed the point of the test -- which is to highlight the endemic sexism in an entire medium.

If you're going to deny that it exists, or that it is a problem, then you're a fool.

"It tells you quite a lot about the population"

Yes, true. But, despite the claims by the ignorant, it is NOT true that you can apply single point statistics over time. Sorry for the pun.

We could go into the depths of human perception and related statistics. It is, for example, quite well-known which stimuli tempt our short-term attention and emotions.

Even in that case, the statistics behave in interesting ways. Surprisingly some empirical distributions are not normal. But that is a side-issue.

I still think that the most important feature of a good story is to be time resilient. People want to read/hear/watch good stories for a long time after they have been written/told/acted/etc. You may not like those stories, I may not like them, but if they stay alive for a long time, then they are good

"If you're going to deny that it exists, or that it is a problem, then you're a fool."

That would not be the only proof that I am a fool. I have been shown to be a fool much more often than I would have liked.

I may have some language barrier here, but I am still going to make myself looking like a fool.

I do not claim that there is no sexism in the field. I do claim that the we should not judge the stories on measures like the Bechdel test.

I wonder that if we would like to measure that inherent sexism in a field like publishing, then we should measure the publication deals given to males and females? Or the amount of money flows? Or something like that.

Is the Bechdel test a relevant measure or not?

I have seen claims that that kind of treatment of people with such characteristics is one of the causes of the large number of suicides amoung young people.

Introversion? Or relentless bullying of anyone deemed "different"?

One of the problems with social media among young people is the relentless 'need' to be connected 24/7, because not responding fast enough can be grounds for teenaged drama. I'm just now wondering if the kids who suffer the most stress from social media are also introverted, because the socially-imposed 'need' to be always connected means they don't really get alone time. (I would argue that being physically alone but continually interacting via a tiny screen isn't really being alone.)

Maybe someone has looked at this? A quick search didn't reveal anything but my search skills suck so that doesn't mean much. Or my speculation could be crap, of course.

Is the Bechdel test a relevant measure or not?

It is a useful statistical measure for looking at systemic bias, I think. As a pass/fail test for quality (whatever that means), not so much.

In terms of works that survive for a long time, there is still systemic bias there. If you don't know of a work/author you can't read them, so works/authors that aren't promoted/preserved fade into obscurity. I'm currently reading The West by Naoíse Mac Sweeney, and one of her arguments is that we have written many people out of history to present a 'preferred view' — and then use the argument that they clearly weren't important or we would still talk about them. It's circular reasoning.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/06/09/west-naoise-mac-sweeney-review/

Introversion, Aspergers etc., and NOT bullying (which is another important factor, but not what the claims referred to). Yes, it was pressure to conform (including "accept help in overcoming a disorder"), but, no, it was not just social media - it was also from people in power, such as teachers and employers.

It's a long time ago now, so I can't remember the details, nor am I asserting they were correct, but they certainly fit with my experience and observations.

"It is a useful statistical measure for looking at systemic bias, I think. As a pass/fail test for quality (whatever that means), not so much."

I am not sure that the Bechdel test is a working measure for looking at a systematic bias. It may be, but I find the thinking behind that measure to be at least ambiguous. In positive wording. In the case of well-defined metric there is a coherent theoretical structure behind the metric. In this case I cannot find such structure. Or I am just a moran who does not find it.

It may be a completely valid measure, but it does look like a kitchen-table invention. I would like to see a bit more theoretical dressing in the way of causality and time-series considerations.

On the other hand, I do no think the sexism does not exist. On the contrary, but I think that the measure is not valid.

Oh, you mean like the dhal I make us a once or twice a month? And you're suggesting that some people don't ever clean the stove, etc?

What drives me crazy are parking lots. When I was small, my mother taught me NEVER to run/walk in front/behind a moving vehicle. Ever.

And I'm not sure I would have gotten out of the young woman's way, and when she was on the ground, I would have have taken her picture (ear buds, phone) and asked if I should call the cops.

$50k? Hell, Ellen would be happy if I got us a new fridge and dishwasher, and neither one would be top of the line, since that wouldn't fit in the freakin' tiny kitchen.

And tools? You mean like the wok and its tools that I'm sure I paid < $40 for, all together?

Oh, I know, the $300 I forked out for the actual bbq barrel (with the offset firebox) that I use once or twice a year....

Oh, and all of that take-out/frozen... feel free to do a search on how ultra-processed foods are making us fat, and giving us serious medical issues.

Things have changed. When I was in school, from kindergarden to 12th grade (except for the year or so that my high school was using shifts, due to overcrowding at the hight of the Baby Boom), the bell rang at 08:30, and you had to be in class by 08:45.

I understand some high schools have started class early, so that THE STUPID ARSEHOLE coaches who want to start team practice in the hottest part of the day....

And then there's what us workin' folks did: by 5th grade, when I was enrolled on the other side of the park for a better school, my folks were off to work before I went to catch the (city) bus, then I got home, and they didn't get home until, oh, after 17:00.

And if someone says "oh, poor latchkey kid", I want to beat them silly, because they're obviously too well-off.

Tram - and #145 - I see, so, actually rebuilt Brill trolleys. Philly switched from them to PCC cars in the mid-fifties, and I understand a lot were sold to South America for a second life.

Although in the nineties? I remember seeing a ton of them piled up under I-95, presumably waiting to go somewhere.

Don't get any of you. I grew up in Philly. My kids NEVER played in the street (no, didn't live on small streets where they played stickball in the street). My critters do not ever go into the street, unless we're crossing.

And for a long time, the cats are indoor-only - too many scum that "speed up to run down small furry creatures."

True. I don't remember anyone getting broken bones from monkey bars - but then, not much space to fall.

The one time I had a broken bone (greenstick fracture, arm) was after a movie my parents took me to (too young to leave alone, bored by the movie) I was running up and down steps on the street (leading up to front doors) and I fell.

So, if you don't like that, considering it a very strong guideline.

Oh, and the reading public... you are, automatically, assuming it's published by a major publisher.

Your bias is showing, very strongly.

I also note that you have no suggestions for an alternative test, or guideline. And saying that there are only a limited number of stories is reductio ad absurdum. Are the 1001 Nights "boy gets girl, threatens to kill girl, girls tells stories and gets boy"?

I suggest that you drop this. Unlike you, I am a statistician (albeit rusty). I agree that it's a ghastly measure and worse test, but almost all of your remarks in #156 and some of those in #161 are irrelevant and/or erroneous. The measure/test I implied in #19 is a much more reasonable one, though not without its flaws.

And, yes, it IS perfectly reasonable to measure and test literary works using such criteria; amongst other things, it gives a fairly good indication of the prejudices of an era (or author). You might be surprised at how many academic disciplines do precisely that sort of analysis.

I think I remember kids getting broken bones in the play ground (both after school and at the community park). I also seem to remember it was two boys that were ones always getting them. Neither was very bright...

I must admit the playground equipment was not particularly safe, especially the way we treated it as kids. I remember, for instance, walking on top of the monkey bars, waxing the two story slide we had for extra speed, and spinning the swinging gate with a friend and seeing how far they would fly off, etc., etc. Ah, fun times :)

I'm not sure I would have gotten out of the young woman's way

I have osteoporosis. I've broken bones falling over. There's no way I'm sacrificing my health to make a point, for what would likely be a $4 ticket and no other charges (because no fatality).

Re: ' ... forked out for the actual bbq barrel (with the offset firebox) that I use once or twice a year....'

Yeah - use once or twice a year if you're lucky.

BTW, the $50K is not an exaggeration for a kitchen remodel - medium size kitchen with high but not highest-end quality appliances, cabinets and materials.

By tools I meant stuff like an espresso/latte machine, air fryer, sous vide, etc. which add up pretty fast.

Re: 'You might be surprised at how many academic disciplines do precisely that sort of analysis.'

This type of study was done decades ago on TV shows and consumer advertising.

As for the stats approach - doing a basic headcount is usually the first step along with some very basic demographic and usage/viewership data. As you compile more results and discover more variables associated with your key variable you can start trying out different stats approaches. Chicken-and-egg. At the same time, because human society keeps changing, some of the stats correlation results/tests will look 'wrong' at some point.

I'm aware of the 'correlation is not causation' caution, but correlation is a damned better starting place than some arbitrary (non-correlated) variable.

Re: [trucks full of harddisks]

I was involved in /precisely/ that exercise before one of the Brexit deadlines: We managed to copy that data over some borrowed dark fibers almost as fast as the trucks moved the kit out of UK.

Almost all data transfers involve one or more serializations, reading and writing to harddisks is one of the minor ones, because it can be done in parallel.

BBQ barrel - https://www.acehardware.com/departments/outdoor-living/grills-and-smokers/charcoal-grills/8511776?x429=true&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIpJDP3_Tm_wIVSUdyCh3yEwxqEAQYASABEgK5DfD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

Espresso machine? My DeLonghi cost < $100, and has a pump. I'm starting to see this conversation as looking like one on a mailing list I'm on. I asked about a gas stove (before I bought one), and they were talking $6k. I bought one from Home Despot for under $700. Your idea of "tools" and mine appear to be an order of magnitude different.

I would like to propose a corollary to the Bechdel test, call it 'Rocketpj's Bechdel Perception Test'.

'Are you upset by what the Bechdel Test implies about a particular piece of media, enough to challenge the validity of the test as a thought exercise, you might be a part of the problem.'

It is not nor was it ever meant to be a statistical test. However, outside of a range of outliers that are not the point, it can be a useful insight into a massive blind spot in much current and past media production.

It's a Pass/Fail where 'Fail' does not necessarily mean 'Bad'. All 'Fail' does is cause us to ask 'why'. Sometimes there is a good reason (it's a story told in the first person by a male). Sometimes there is no good reason (it didn't occur to the writer that women might exist as humans separate from male notions).

That's it. It is not a target, shoehorning a scene into something to pass the test doesn't automatically make a book or story 'good'. Not having three dimensional female characters might, in many cases, make a story 'bad'.

It makes me twitch a bit because it so very often gets cited by people who are taking it as an absolute, and use it to disparage the works of (mostly old-time) authors without taking any account of the "why". This is particularly annoying when at the same time they fail to notice that the author likes to slip in subtle but sharp feminist barbs when the opportunity arises, which come over even more strongly when you consider the time they were written in (for example).

I reckon it gives the same sort of partially/contingently valid result that you get from trying to test the pH of something using universal indicator paper. A lot of the time it works OK. But sometimes you get chromatography effects in the paper which separate the indicator dyes so you can't tell what's what. And some somethings are themselves strongly coloured and swamp the indication. Or some of them bleach the paper. Or some of them set fire to it.

Books were how I coped with too much time with too many people; with a good book I could totally block out the environment. In one memorable case I was reading so intently in a room full of people I missed a small earthquake. I can honestly say I am one of very few people I've heard about who had absolutely no issues at all during lock down.

I read a lot as a child, and it can be a form of escape. Doesn't work so well when one's female relatives have the attitude that "you're not doing anything, you're reading" and "it's rude to ignore someone when they talk to you". :-(

I recall causing consternation then considerable upset by saying to someone "I was enjoying being out in the garden reading my book by myself. Please go away" to one particularly persistent socialite. I thought that was exceptionally polite of me.

But there's a certain type of person who regards anyone who is by themselves as being available to entertain them. Indeed, obliged to entertain them. They can get quite unpleasant when refused. And will obviously tell everyone they can find how horrible you are for not obliging.

I'm a long time lurker (and occasional) poster, here, and have long agreed with you about this subject. I was a child in the 1950's living in what then was a small rural village in mid West Sussex. Everybody knew everybody, and being 'Shy' and 'Bookish' I had a very difficult time especially at school. Even at home I was always being told off for 'having my nose stuck in a book'. I was made to feel that I was different and wrong, out of step, no interest in sports, and no ability to make small talk and to be a part of the group. There was a constant pressure to 'fit in' and be like the rest of the kids, both at home and at school, but I was never able to. It was only much latter in life when I was receiving treatment for repeated extreme depressive episodes that I came to realise that rather than being, as I had been made to feel most of my life, of below average intelligence and 'slow' as it was put, I was in fact in some areas at least well above average. In some IQ tests the psychiatrist I was seeing suggested I take I could easily score over 140, (yes, I know not to put too much into IQ tests) and with it the realisation that I probably had Asperger's, although I have never been tested, but I can tick most of the boxes. This despite having 'failed' my 11+ and leaving secondary school at 15 to go and work for the local engineering company. I am still happiest on my own and when I am able still love to be out walking in the countryside indulging my love of birds and other wildlife, and photography. I still read enormously and books are my other escape from the pressures of being around other people. At 74 I have come to accept and to be comfortable with myself, but it has been a long hard journey and many of the scars from my childhood are not too far below the surface.

"Books" - yes, well ... me too. Though I did have the advantage that my father, particularly, encouraged or Passively-encouraged me to go on with reading.

I suspect we are getting a little off topic. But no, these trams re are not your ex Philly trolleys.

Of the seven trams currently in use in Christchurch, only two are Brill built products. They were ordered from J G Brill & Co of Pennsylvania, shipped to Ne4w Zealand as CKD/"flatpack" kits and erected locally in New Zealand for where they went into service in 1903 & 1921. They were then taken out of service in 1950s and all mechanical and electrical gear scrapped and the bodies sold off for use as "sheds" etc. Then many years later, subsequently restored back into running order.

The other five trams are Australasian designed and built products. But these five also all went through equivalent histories to the two Brill built units where post tramway use the bodies were sold off and used for other purposes before being restored and returned to running order.

And all seven trams have retained their original fleet numbers into restoration from the local fleets where they were originally in service. And while not completely quiet they do apparently "sneak up" on people who appear to be oblivious to their surroundings. Tho', very slightly on topic, about 5 of the 25 drivers are female.

Yup, that sounds like a very common experience around these parts!

For myself, reading shuts out an often unpleasant world nearly as well as recreational pharmaceuticals, with the added benefit of being able to deal with others, as well as I ever do, as soon as I close the book. No bothersome wait for ethanol to metabolize or other things to work their way through my system. Non-readers can be quite unpleasant and impatient.

And you're suggesting that some people don't ever clean the stove, etc?

You seem to be missing the point of several of us here. We're talking about the oils that wind up in the air as people cook that gradually permeate the paint, walls surfaces, wood cabinets, etc... And if the kitchen is not closed off the surfaces of the home in other rooms. Furniture (especially fabrics), carpets, and for the most fun, electronics and such. It happens. It is real. And happens slowly over time. And if done by a cooking culture not of your own, can be very noticeable. We ran into this several times when looking at houses. The realtor would walk us through such houses (to avoid legal issues) but we never stayed long.

Around here (RDU area of NC) we have a fairly large influx of first gen immigrants and also PHD folks from other countries here for a few years. From all over the world. (Costco on a Friday is a great place to heard 20 or more languages being spoken.)

There are two reasons to object to its use, of which that is one. My main one is that it is using statistics as a drunken man uses a lampost (*), and should be replaced by a potentially unbiassed test. That would be trivial to do.

But you are correct that, in addition to that, it is also abused. Not merely are there 'edge cases', expecting a drama to portray a sex balance that simply isn't there in the context in which it is set is a political position. That applies to most societies today, and essentially all historical contexts.

(*) Support rather than illumination.

And while in modern industrial "first" world kitchens this is very much reduced it is still a bit of an issue. Open kitchen / floor plans may be regretted 30 years on.

Back to somewhat the subject of this post. Keeping a kitchen closed off from the rest of the house or even as a detached structure tended to keep females segregated as they tended to be the cooks. This is going away a lot (but slowly) in modern industrial "first" world countries. Somewhat. Maybe.

And if the "women folk" are invisible in the home for hours per day, then the literature / media will tend to leave them out of major plot points as in the life of the audience they are also missing for hours per day.

Just out of curiosity, what kind of stereotypes do women use when they're writing FOR women?

out of curiosity i asked chatgpt this and it frumped at me about the importance of avoiding stereotypes

sigh

How exactly did Friedman get "flat" part "totally wrong"?

matt taibbi's review of its predecessor, "the world is flat" is still a favorite of mine: https://delong.typepad.com/egregious_moderation/2009/01/matt-taibbi-flathead-the-peculiar-genius-of-thomas-l-friedman.html

Could have been worse. My late wife had an early growth spurt (so early teen years was taller than a lot of the boys)... and grew up in a town (pop about 2000) the better part of an hour south of San Antonio. Culture? Ummm... and was stuck with the same classmates all through school (till she dropped out and finished her high school at the local community college).

Or maybe that I cook with far less oil than the folks you're speaking of.

Thank you. I had to read bits to my partner. I haven't laughed this hard since, oh, the latest really good Marinna Hyde column in the Guardian.

adrian smith @ 194:

How exactly did Friedman get "flat" part "totally wrong"?

matt taibbi's review of its predecessor, "the world is flat" is still a favorite of mine: https://delong.typepad.com/egregious_moderation/2009/01/matt-taibbi-flathead-the-peculiar-genius-of-thomas-l-friedman.html

Too bad Taibbi turned out to be as much a goof ("useful idiot") as Friedman.

Taibbi had a moment of brilliance with "vampire squid", but neither one of them could pass the Bechdel test.

It used to be an issue in the UK, back in the days when fried breakfasts, other fried food and deep frying in animal fat were common, but is much less of one now. Cooker hoods and extractor fans have something to do with it, too, but I suspect the main cause is the move to vegetable oil.

I really don't use much oil in cooking. I deep fry less than half a dozen times a year, and the rest... mostly, it's about 2-4 tbsp to lubricate the pan, and stir fry. Even friend matzah is just under 2 tbsp of butter.

The Neal Stephenson one only counts for people who haven't read the preceding part of the book first. In context it makes perfect sense for it to be like that.

Too bad Taibbi turned out to be as much a goof ("useful idiot") as Friedman.

is this about the twitter files? i appreciate the desire to draw a veil o'discretion over the implications of anything the first failson may or may not have been up to, but couldn't the democrats find someone more suitable and less cognitively-challenged-looking among their vast panoply of sprightly governors? they could probably even try rehabilitating anthony weiner

Taibbi had a moment of brilliance with "vampire squid"

yeah, turns out for a bank founded by jews that may have been a little on the anti-semitic side, bit like jk rowlings' goblins

but neither one of them could pass the Bechdel test.

well, i hope friedman hasn't turned his hand to fiction at least, that could be a horrorshow

We use more, but never deep fry.

Deep fry is only for a) fries (like steak fries - we cut our own potatoes, not frozen), and b) breaded (i.e., corn starch) meat for Chinese.

I deep fry less than half a dozen times a year

Well I think we might have deep fried something once in the last two-dozen years, purely as a novelty, and that's an interesting inverse I suppose. I suspect similar is true for most people here -- in this blog, I mean. Not sure I'd say anything about society at large here in Oz or elsewhere. There's a still-popular product on supermarket shelves called Supafry, which seems to be a mix of tallow and lard, but I think the proportion and what other fats are in there fall into the category of "What you want named meat?".

Fryhing
Shallow or minimal, all the time
Even when it's Schnitzel, or perhaps, especially when it's schnitzel ...
TURN IT OVER Sausages? - Roll them over ;πx2 at a time ...
No problem

It’s likely that you just don’t notice the buildup. Cooking bacon is a good example of generating steam + vapourised fats in western society. Most of it goes in the range hood, but some will go in the air, especially with how much water is in the meat nowadays. Even in a well cleaned kitchen, it will condense and accumulate on the high surfaces - look at the top of light fittings, or above the range hood, or on the high painted surfaces. If you have high cupboards, wipe the inside and outside and look at the difference.

It’s the same as visiting a house owned by smokers, or a little old lady, or a student flat - it will smell of “them”, and they don’t even notice it, because to them that smell is normal - “home”.

Or in my case, cats. (And no, it's not the litter box, that has a different smell and it's cleaned regularly.)

I had two things going for me -- my mother liked books and also liked when she didn't have to take responsibility for me so I could read as much as I could. Not as much as I wanted but still.

One of the advantages of moving so much was not knowing many people and thus not being required to spend time with them which would be better used for reading. As I get older I am much less likely to accept any invitation to socialise because I just don't want to most of the time and now have the liberty to refuse.

I do better with a non-zero amount of socialising, but from experience living with a significant other is often ample. Otherwise I tend to live in my own world to an excessive degree. Right now I'm putting off a couple of things purely because they involve talking to people... I'm slowly talking myself round to the idea that I'll enjoy them once I start doing them, but right now I have a cold as a result of going out and being social last weekend so that's not really helping.

OTOH I just read "Railsea" by China Miéville, and I'm enjoying "A half-built garden" by Ruthanna Emrys quite a lot. Complete with alien love story! But mostly because it's an optimistic take on a climate change survival scenario. Well, except for the aliens who are not optimistic about that at all.

I'm waiting for Heavenly Tyrant, the sequel to Iron Widow by Xinran Zhao. Partly because she's a new Canadian author, but mostly because it's a anime-inspired retelling of Chinese history that's pure escapist fun.

Also, while sex is part of the plot (although not explicit, this being marketed as a young adult novel) let's just say that who the character's love would lead to this being a banned book in red state America…

I've got some Laundry novels on the 'bought but not read' pile, but the daily news gives me enough horror that I'm looking for something more escapist right now.

Anyway, Iron Widow is a cracking good read. "Pacific Rim meets The Handmaid's Tale in this blend of Chinese history and mecha science fiction for YA readers." according to the publisher's blurb.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/series/IW1/iron-widow

Iron Widow is fantastic and I second the recommendation. I mostly commented because I wanted to note:

(1) that their name is Xiran Jay Zhao (not Xinran) and

(2) they specifically ask that people use neutral pronouns for them.

(Source: https://xiranjayzhao.com/index.php/press-kit/)

I've finally got around to reading that book about roads by Carlton Reid, and it's holding my interest a lot better than most non-fiction these days. It's my second pause in the middle of reading the Vienna Blood novel series, something I started since my wife and I binge-watched the TV series based on it. The first pause was for Season of Skulls.

Oddly I can't collect unread Laundry books, they generally seem to end up read within a couple of days of the release date. This time around I started a day or two late because I didn't notice it was in my Kindle app till I finished one of the Tallis books.

I thought I posted a comment on the post "Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)"

A few hours ago. It seems to have vanished. Did a break a rule? Or was I dreaming.

matt taibbi's review of its predecessor, "the world is flat" is still a favorite of mine...

Taibbi has much to say about Friedman's writing, I discover: "Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius."

I'm reminded of David Langford's description of Jim Theis, the author of The Eye of Argon, as "a malaprop genius, a McGonagall of prose with an eerie gift for choosing the wrong word and then misapplying it."

Ouch. And these are about things that got out into the world; we should dread imagining what lurks at the bottom of the slush pile.

Or was I dreaming.

Either this or I'm an idiot. Sorry.

Why not both? :-)

I'll not argue against your point. The Venn diagram has large overlaps at times.

Mods: Please remove, if this is too far out of from the topic or otherwise unacceptable.

One of my hobbies is studying formal vs. real power-structures, sort of "Observational World-Building" and that triggers a couple of neurons when we are talking about representation of women.

Because it is so well documented, USA is a very obvious subject for study, and being Danish but having lived in USA, I feel I have both sufficient understanding and detachment to make the following observations:

USA's constitution was designed to balance the three branches of government, so that any one can stop any other one, but any two can overrule the third.

That has generally worked out, except when it came to representation of the non-people at the time of the constitution: Women, slaves, non-whites in general etc.

To break into the white man's world, the excluded people literally had to get a toehold in two out of three branches of government, and as history has shown, that's exactly as hard as the framers of the constitution intended.

But changing the constitution is even harder.

At some point somebody figured out that provides for a hack: Make the Supreme Court rule what the constitution means, while the other two branches are unable to muster what it takes to change it to explicitly say the opposite.

To the surprise of many foreigners, "The Equal Rights Amendment" has never been ratified in USA. The 19th amendment only gives the women the right to vote, which in theory gives them the right to gain toeholds etc. etc.

But that women and men actually are treated (almost) equally, at least as far as the law goes, is only because rulings from the supreme court, perpetrated under the "hack" mentioned above.

Likewise the right to abortion, and the racism-work-around "Affirmative Action".

Until the rise of the US Taliban, it seems a majority of US voters found these decisions correct or at least acceptable, and presumably therefore nobody bothered to muster the necessary political action, to actually enshrine those rights into the constitution.

But what the SCOTUS grants, the SCOTUS can take away, and they have.

If one reads the two rulings where the SCOTUS reverses itself, first on abortion, and yesterday on Affirmative-Action, they do say rather clearly, that they think it is high time SCOTUS exits the law-/making/ business, and that if people think these rights should exist, they should go change the constitution to clearly say so.

That is strictly speaking not wrong: The US constitution does not authorize the SCOTUS to invent human rights out of pocket lint.

(It would sound so much more convincing, if the ruling had come from a majority of women and colored persons, wouldn't it ? But I have no doubt that this is why we saw Thomas, who until recently was the only non-white judge on SCOTUS vote to end Affirmative-Action: He /is/ principled when it comes to "the original constitution" - that is very much his thing.)

Where am I going with this ?

As fundamentally ethically wrong as it is, gaining representation in exclusionary power structures will always be a very slow process, because if one follows the rules, the rules are "osmosis - only slower".

Absent aliens which impose fairness from above, we are literally taking about a process which takes generations, because the old fossils have to die out and be replaced by somebody, who through exposure to it, has a more positive view of inclusion.

From a observational world-building perspective, the present setback for the so-called "liberals" in USA is because they tried a "hack" instead of doing the hard work of constitutional amendments, and even more so, for failing to do the less hard work, while that hack, surprisingly and temporarily did work.

And to bring this back to the original topic: It doesn't matter (much) how many good manuscripts with good and competent representation of women writers produce, while the top of the food-chain is occupied by a single Weinstein with a casting-couch.

And therefore I expect that getting to a point where the Bechdel Test does not fail by default, is unlikely to happen in our lifetimes.

The alternative to exclusionary osmosis is of course a revolution.

And between micro-plastics, militarized police, forever-chemicals, climate-change, wealth- and other inequalities, one seem long overdue.

Ironically, there's a great manuscript for such a revolution, a manuscript which has passed the Bechdel Test for 2434 years & counting:

Aristophanes "Lysistrate"

Until the rise of the US Taliban, it seems a majority of US voters found these decisions correct or at least acceptable,

Actually surveys show this has not changed. The majority seems to be against these new rulers. (More below.)

Absent aliens which impose fairness from above, we are literally taking about a process which takes generations, because the old fossils have to die out and be replaced by somebody, who through exposure to it, has a more positive view of inclusion.

Turns out even the strong R voters who are under 40 are against my generations' rules. They are just afraid of what would happen if they vote D. Because D is evil. So (and this is happening in my state) the old fart R fossils are working as hard as possible to make sure their ideas continue to rule even if the majority (and many of THEIR voters) go hard against them. Forget Gerrymandering. They want to make it hard for ANY D to vote. And for a new less hard right R to change things even after they die. Much less vote.

Please note: as of several years ago, VA, when it had the Dems in control, ratified the ERA. Now it's up to Congress to pass a bill that eliminates the original (and never done before) seven year limit on ratification.

adrian smith @ 202:

Too bad Taibbi turned out to be as much a goof ("useful idiot") as Friedman.

is this about the twitter files? i appreciate the desire to draw a veil o'discretion over the implications of anything the first failson may or may not have been up to, but couldn't the democrats find someone more suitable and less cognitively-challenged-looking among their vast panoply of sprightly governors? they could probably even try rehabilitating anthony weiner

That's just the latest episode. There's all his other inappropriate behaviors prior to the twitter files. Particularly his braggadocio about exploiting under-age women during his period working for "The eXile" & his subsequent run in with the ME TOO movement, which seems to have brought out a latent misogynist fascism in his political writing. He now denies he ever exploited under-age women in Moscow, but for me, that brings up another question:

Was he lying then or is he lying now? ... I actually believe he was probably lying both times.

And I strongly disagree with his pro-Russian, pro-Authoritarian, pro-Trump views and denialism regarding the reich-wing's attempts to steal the 2016 and 2020 elections.

Taibbi had a moment of brilliance with "vampire squid"

yeah, turns out for a bank founded by jews that may have been a little on the anti-semitic side, bit like jk rowlings' goblins

Founded in 1869 by a Jewish immigrant (apparently fleeing pogroms following the 1848-1849 German Revolutions), but the "modern" corporation is fully assimilated into the Wall Street Financial System ... as All-American as Apple Pie!

I think it's anti-Semitic to continually note the ethnicity of the founders, especially more than 100 years AFTER he passed on.

Both potentially sexist & racist &discriminatory & a slippery slope to fascism - The "Roberts' US Court decision on supposed "Free Speech.
Deeply disturbing.
US readers? Thoughts & comments.

Just the other day, they decided that a felon, once out of jail, could not be deprived of their Second Amendment rights of firearm ownership.

They don't seem to think past what they'd doing now, since I'm going to be that a felon who has served their time, but still can't vote, is going to sue, and cite this case.

I think it's anti-Semitic to continually note the ethnicity of the founders,

Nah, it's the same as any criticism of Clarence Thomas is necessarily racists and can only ever be based in racism, and any criticism of Amy Coney Barrett can only be sexist. Everyone just has to accept that it's difficult to make legitimate criticisms of 3/4 of the population and move on. (which 3/4 changes based on unchangeable characteristics of each person, obviously. OGH is Jewish, so can express concern about the treatment of Palestinians. I'm middle-class, so can express concern about wealth inequality, and so on).

It's all about making activism decorative rather than effective. Instead of working to change the system a whole lot of people have been side-tracked into changing the way the system talks.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/29/antiracism-diversity-training-liberal-antiracists-vocabulary-direct-action

Nah, I can criticize Barrett, on the basis of her being a religious wacko (her classmates were yelling that when she was before the Senate), and therefore will put the Bible before the Constitution.

Re: '... good manuscripts with good and competent representation of women writers produce,'

Lysistrata seems to be a one-of-a-kind plot unlike other ancient plays that seem to have been tweaked to adapt to modern, local customs.

And since you mentioned plays, how about Mary Poppins - the nanny who interprets instructions into what works for her. And Mrs Banks, a banker's wife campaigning for women's votes. I know Charlie doesn't like it, but heh! the Disney version is probably known by half the human population by now.

Off topic .... Farage leaving England?

Just read a BBC headline saying that Farage, the keenest of the BrExiteers, has had some banking issues and feels that he may have to leave England. What is going on? I'm guessing that bank accounts don't get arbitrarily frozen or examined in detail in the UK. Is/was he one of BoJo's best pals or get a large contribution from UK's successful rag owner (currently being sued by a royal) or some foreign unfriendly polity?

Guessing that he's not in the inner circle any more. He's played the game of mates and lost, so now he has to promised to be a good little boy or he'll get spanked. One can but hope that BoJo goes the same way, and that there's enough residual justice in the UK legal system that they get convicted and jailed. There's no shortage of crimes they've admitted to.

Perhaps Greg could ask Herself if there's any easy way for us proles to check if the chatter on Reddit alleging that Farage has a CIFAS (Credit Industry Fraud Avoidance System) marker against his name are true?

One hesitates to speculate but that kind of thing is what you might expect to see if someone was under suspicion of laundering Russian money in the course of a political campaign ...

Greg @ 225: Both potentially sexist & racist &discriminatory & a slippery slope to fascism - The "Roberts' US Court decision on supposed "Free Speech.

The article greatly exaggerates the impact of this judgement.

Today on TAP: If a Colorado web designer can refuse to serve a same-sex couple, why can’t a business owner discriminate against Blacks, Muslims, and Jews?

Because the core of the case was about the business owner's right to free speech versus the clients right not to be discriminated against. Most business transactions don't involve speech, so aren't affected.

(I'm going to ignore the recent discovery that this appears to be a manufactured controversy, because while its important in this case its a side issue to the actual argument)

Free speech includes the right not to speak; to publish or not publish anything according to your conscience. The US government cannot make you sign a loyalty oath, or statement of support for any cause, or anything else. If a government official says "you must say this or we will prosecute you" you can tell them to get lost. This is a constitutional right.

On the other hand under Federal law US citizens have a right not to be discriminated against on a list of protected characteristics, one of which is sexuality. So if a gay or trans person or couple want to stay in a hotel, they have to be given a room on the same basis as straight customers. The hotel is allowed to discriminate on other grounds, such as poor dress, no credit card etc, but not on sexuality (proving lack of discrimination is mostly a matter of having a written policy and showing that you enforce it evenhandedly).

However some businesses involve selling expressive speech. Anything that involves creative or artistic input means that the business is publicly speaking about things for money, as is the individual person who does the creative work. This creates a conflict: on the one hand a creator has the right to decline to say things they don't agree with, but on the other hand the law requires them to accept orders to speak from those protected classes.

Of course you could just decline to be a paid creative person of any kind, but that's a pretty big deal when creativity is something you have invested time, effort and pride in, and you make your living from it. It might well have a significant chilling effect, and that is something that the courts rightly take notice of.

Also in the US its relevant that the 1st Amendment (free speech) takes precedence over anti-discrimination laws passed by Congress. To the extent that a federal law damages the right to free speech, that law is unconstitutional.

There are a few limited exceptions to this; if the government can show that it has an overriding need to limit speech, that its limits are narrowly tailored to the need, and there is no better alternative, then it can get a pass. That's how laws prohibiting CSAM pass muster. But its a very high bar.

So SCOTUS in this case has decided that the constitutional right to free speech trumps the legal right not to be discriminated against. Other similar cases are the UK Gay Cake case which reached a similar conclusion, and the Masterpiece Cake case also in Colorado, which was decided on the narrow ground that the Commission hadn't been neutral about the religious aspect.

However this only affects businesses which do something expressive, such as composing words or drawings or photographs. It doesn't affect non-expressive businesses. A hotel cannot reject gay, black or muslim customers, nor can a bar refuse to serve them. So much of the catastrophising in the linked article is unjustified.

Also, as a customer for a creative product, I'd want to employ someone who enjoys and supports what I want created, rather than someone who is dragooned into it. So as a practical matter of the impact on gay couples, or other protected classes, I don't see that this is actually all that big. Running up against bigotry is never nice, of course (and I'm in the privileged position of not having that happen to me), but I suspect it would be better to move on and find someone who wants your business than to force a creator to produce something just to make you go away.

Re: 'Perhaps Greg could ask Herself ...'

Yep - other news/data sources are needed to confirm/deny the underlying reasons given some recent press about the BBC's senior management's pro BrExit/Tory bias.

Back to the original topic ...

Just saw a tweet (from Melissa Stewart) that 75% of kids like non-fiction as much as or more than fiction but that only about 12% of signed kidlit book deals are for non-fiction.

Most developed and developing countries are supposedly trying to get their kids more interested in STEM in order to safeguard the development of their own countries' economies. (Sorta ditto for human rights/DEI). Unless there's a huge shortage of non-fiction kidlit authors/illustrators, this publishing stat doesn't make sense: huge demand alongside persistent inadequate supply. Does help explain the persistence of antiquated and harmful stereotypes and -isms.

but for me, that brings up another question: Was he lying then or is he lying now? ... I actually believe he was probably lying both times.

gonzo journalism isn't for everyone

should probably give this a rest until 300+ tho

the BBC's senior management's pro BrExit/Tory bias

i think they just reflexively tongue tory hinie out of fear of what some in the government might like to do to them

“ Yes, I agree that some 'affirmative action' is still necessary, though it isn't the 1950s any more, ”

The test came from a 4-panel cartoon in the late 80s, where a character said she didn’t go to Hollywood movies unless there were 1) two female characters who 2) had a conversation about 3) something other than a man.

The year it was written there were zero big budget movies in English that passed that test. The same was true the next year.

So “it’s not the 1950s anymore” is a little misplaced - it was about the extreme sexism of 1980s media portrayals of women.

And it should really be taken holistically about a body of works: the point is not whether any one work passes this test, but how many do and how many would fail a comparable test about having at least two male characters that have a conversation about something other than a woman.

Re: '... that have a conversation about something other than a woman'

Maybe 1% would fail? There are tons of books with male characters talking about everything except women - women simply do not exist in some authors' universes. Includes SF classics by Jules Verne who supposedly admired Victor Hugo whose works (IMO) do pass the Bechdel Test.

For the nitpickers - okay, not every VH story has two women having an extended conversation face-to-face BUT every story does describe in considerable depth the background, life experience and character of more than one key female character along with the various issues they and other marginalized members of that society faced.

So “it’s not the 1950s anymore” is a little misplaced - it was about the extreme sexism of 1980s media portrayals of women.

I don't know your age. I was born in 1954. So the 50s is not all that clear to me. But the 60s and 70s were. And compared to them the 80s were amazingly better in the sexism areas. But still a long long way from being perfect.

No, it isn't. It was a remark about when affirmative action (I.e. discriminating against men) was needed. For whether the film's of the year in which the remark was made were sexist, read the rest of my comment about that being a biassed test. They may have been, but that test does NOT demonstrate it.

poor the nige:

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/life-uk-becoming-completely-unlivable-brexiteer-farage-being-systemically-un-banked

it's hard not to smirk, but if he had a black mark under cifas i think he could just ask them: https://www.cifas.org.uk/dsar

Synchronicity - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/02/alison-bechdel-test-dykes-to-watch-out-for-cartoonist-interview

if he had a black mark under cifas i think he could just ask them

If he truly didn't know that would be a logical thing to do.

If he does know why his accounts are being closed, and it is indeed something CIFAS knows about, then loudly claiming he has no idea why while simultaneously not making real efforts to find out brings to mind the actions of a certain political figure who is rather fond of golfing…

OT, but I thought y'all might be interested in this if you're gonna' be traveling any time soon.

I rented a 2023 Polestar 2 from Hertz [YouTube] (Polestar is a Volvo subsidiary?)

Renting an electric car ... 🙃

David L @ 238:

So “it’s not the 1950s anymore” is a little misplaced - it was about the extreme sexism of 1980s media portrayals of women.

I don't know your age. I was born in 1954. So the 50s is not all that clear to me. But the 60s and 70s were. And compared to them the 80s were amazingly better in the sexism areas. But still a long long way from being perfect.

1950s TV attitudes (in the U.S.) towards women are exemplified in shows like Father Knows Best and Leave It To Beaver.

Re: '... brings to mind the actions of a certain political figure who is rather fond of golfing…'

Agree.

I saw some article that he was on Murdoch's payroll (Faux News) while a sitting member in the UK gov't. If true, then such behavior should be considered a serious conflict of interest if not a criminal offense (bribery).

such behavior should be considered a serious conflict of interest

Come now, we have it on good authority (the US Supreme Court) that as long as a public figure is not being explicitly paid in exchange for favours there is no conflict of interest.

(Yes, sarcasm.)

pretty sure farage has never been a member of the uk government, though he was a euro mp for ages (because pr)

I suspect Australia provides a useful reminder to everyone else of the benefits/dangers of having an independent body charged with prosecuting corruption at the top of government. NSW's ICAC has a collection of former premiers to its name as well as a whole pile of people further down the chain, as do some other states (IBAC in Victoria for example). Federal parliament has been slowly shamed into introducing a similar body.

Luckily for corrupt politicians they have a lot of allies in the media and generous funding for campaigns against such things is readily available.

Luckily for the rest of us (at least in Australia) the more damage ICAC et al do to criminals the more voters are inclined to support politicians who want to introduce such things. Hence the current federal government being inclined that way, and many senators have been elected on platforms demanding one.

we do see the Trump Defence used here a lot though. Gladys Berejiklian still denies that using state funds to support her boyfriend's electoral prospects was corrupt despite ICAC's comprehensive findings to the contrary. But at least she hasn't tried the Pell Play "I'm too incompetent and stupid to be able to do my job, let alone behave corruptly while doing my job".

Well it seems that having given up on preventing having one in the first place, the conservative opposition have teamed up with the government to ensure there are no public hearings. Ho hum. At least NACC will have the power to initiate its own proceedings without requiring a formal invitation to do so, which is the provision that is usually used to cripple other statutory commissions, like the state-based privacy commissions or human rights commissions.

We'll have to see how it goes, there's an obvious difference of opinion between the mainstream and the conservative side about what actually constitutes corrupt conduct. Generally it always looks a lot like "if we do it, it isn't corrupt", but there's something that at least apparently seems to be sincere in there.

Yes, Polestar's are sort of "Special Volvos", Volvo is a subsidiary of Geely, who bought them* when Ford was trying to evade the worst of the economic "Charlie Foxtrot" in 2008.

the provision that is usually used to cripple other statutory commissions

Defunding is a popular one. Not just the ABC and whatever the CSIRO has been turned into (part of the department for turning ecology into money?), but the "junior secretary for excusing refusal to comply with the official information act" and other nominally powerful offices that have been stripped of so much funding that they can barely cover the cost of one person and an office.

And then there are the various "advisory only" bodies, like the High Court and so on, where they can (and often do) say whatever they like and the government carefully files their remarks before doing whatever the hell it want.

Which makes the controversy over "The Voice" (first nations) seem greatly overblown. Yes, let's have another purely advisory body with no budget or statutory powers, that'll really shake things up.

Neglected to include, Volvo used the money from selling their passenger car division to improve their presence in heavy trucks. Survivable July holidays to those who celebrate them.

Talking of political corruption ...
There seems to be a rule or stricture, that for any party to be in uninterrupted & virtually-unbridled power for any extended period leads to sleaze, corruption & stamping on the little people.
This example - which I found amusing seeming to demonstrate it.
The SNP & the tories, are, to the people of Orkney, identical - far-away, entrenched, lying & corrupt.
Oops.

Just trying to add my 2 cents to the open space kitchen subthread: open kitchens are an abomination. They stink your entire living room if you do anything but heat up ready meals.

And in modern times they're a cost cutting measure. You need less space by code for a kitchen + living room than for two separate rooms. Not to mention the expense and space taken by the wall that's now gone.

Say no to open kitchens :)

You need less space by code for a kitchen + living room than for two separate rooms.

Where is this true? If I may ask?

Friends of mine do a lot of frying with bacon grease. They have a kitchen with sliding doors, which they use. The house still smells of bacon in the morning even in the living room, and when I first visit I can recognize their place by the smell.

Personally I'd rather smell curry. :-)

Am I the only one who saw this?

We should talk about the Bechdel test…

If we must.

How do you feel about it these days?

It was a joke. I didn’t ever intend for it to be the real gauge it has become and it’s hard to keep talking about it over and over, but it’s kind of cool.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/02/alison-bechdel-test-dykes-to-watch-out-for-cartoonist-interview

They stink your entire living room if you do anything but heat up ready meals.

I am yet to dislike any smell my wife cooks up.

OTOH, sometimes the fumes set off fire alarm. Having an open plan kitchen helps avoid it, as she points a (rather large) fan toward the door to the outside, and opens the door.

Open plan kitchens and "living" areas fit a life style. And if that fits your life, great. If not, whoops. And many people buy the look and don't think through how they deal with meals.

And some who do think it through during a new build or re-model put in a very good vent/exhaust hood. (Skipping how many times the exhaust on a 2 story house winds up being to just above the back desk for sitting eating in nice weather. Oops again.)

But if you're into fine art painting, I'd say nope.

Re: (UK) EMP not same as (UK) MP

To me, they still look like an elected-by-its-citizens government representative.

Per Wikipedia ...

Hmmm - no wonder he wanted the UK out: Geez, can't a pol accept a bribe anymore!? But seriously, I wonder whether any body audits declared financial interests vs. lifestyle during and after serving as EMP. BTW - he supposedly was paid the same salary as a regular UK MP. I'm guessing that his work hours were a lot shorter though.

'Financial interests

Members declare their financial interests in order to prevent any conflicts of interest. These declarations are published annually in a register and are available on the Internet.[17]'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_of_the_European_Parliament

I'm guessing that his work hours were a lot shorter though.

While an MEP Nige spent three years as the UK representative on the EU Fisheries Committee. He went to one meeting of 42 held, and subsequently used the plight of the UK fishing industry due to EU regulation as a Brexit talking point.

A father and son were driving to the ball game. On the way their car was involved in a serious accident. The father was killed outright, and his son was critically injured. He was taken to A&E by ambulance and prepped for immediate surgery. The surgeon came in, saw the boy, and turned away, saying "I can't do this: this is my son!"

Explanation?

I have to confess, when I first read this story (some decades ago), I couldn't figure it out. No, its not mistaken identity. No, there is no time travel involved.

When I did get it, I was ashamed. Lesson learned.

The Bechdel Test is of the same type. The point is not whether a story is good or bad, still less that it is a checklist item. The point is that you need to stop and think hard to find a story which passes, because of the way that in our society the default assumption is "male", with "female" being the exception for most positions. That's why when you ask Stable Diffusion for a picture of just about any profession, the person it shows is a white man.

(Hmmm. The Blackdal Test: does the story include two non-white characters, not romantic partners, who have a conversation about something other than a racially charged topic?)

The solution to this isn't to self-consciously include a scene which passes the test, its for writers to do the kind of exercise Charlie does in the OP, and hence to think about their default assumptions for the sex of characters. As a writer, when you want a character who is a surgeon, you don't think about his sex any more than you think about his hair or eye colour. You just call up a mental image of "surgeon", and of course he's a white male, just like in the Stable Diffusion picture.

Tim H. @ 250:

Yes, Polestar's are sort of "Special Volvos", Volvo is a subsidiary of Geely, who bought them* when Ford was trying to evade the worst of the economic "Charlie Foxtrot" in 2008.

Yeah, who built it was just an aside. I had to look it up because I'm not likely to be buying a car any time soon (if ever again if I can keep the Jeep running) so I didn't know who makes it.

I couldn't tell you who the actual manufacturer of most current ICE vehicles is either (unless it's one of the OLD brand names).

I was really more interested in the rental process not yet being "ready for prime time" as the guy making the video put it. He didn't make any complaints about the car itself ... well, his mother-in-law said the back seat was too small ...

The main "complaint" seemed to be the difficulty finding out how much charge it was supposed to have when he turned it back in and the only charging point convenient to the rental agency lot requiring him to download an APP to his phone (and not taking credit cards).

David L @ 257:

Am I the only one who saw this?

No, Uncle Stinky posted a link to the same article back @ 241:

Re: (UK) EMP not same as (UK) MP

Get your acronym right: it's Member of the European Parliament, or MEP. EMP would be Electro-Magnetic Pulse, and while Farage has brain-frying potential that's slightly inacurate.

Well, that's changing. Unfortunately, what it's changing to is the studios wanting chatbots to write scripts, because the content is irrelevant, all that's important are shots, explosions, loud noises, and other special effects, and poses by hot big stars.

I've been noticing people saying that the trailers show all the best points of a new movie...

No, I'm not exaggerating: I refer you to this article, about most people now turning on closed captioning because they can't hear the dialog. https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/23/07/02/2054221/why-are-so-many-people-watching-tv-with-subtitles

The annihilation of MEPs may be used to generate EMPs.

David L @ 259:

Open plan kitchens and "living" areas fit a life style. And if that fits your life, great. If not, whoops. And many people buy the look and don't think through how they deal with meals.

And some who do think it through during a new build or re-model put in a very good vent/exhaust hood. (Skipping how many times the exhaust on a 2 story house winds up being to just above the back desk for sitting eating in nice weather. Oops again.)

I'm becoming convinced this house was originally a tiny 3 bedroom "Jim Walter Homes" house (1991 according to tax records) and was remodeled recently by IDIOTS!. There's a lot of stupid here, but a lot more "fuck it, I just don't give a shit" (If the buyer can't see where I fucked it up 'cause sheet-rock [drywall] covers it, FUCK 'EM!).

But they appear to have knocked out a bunch of walls to remove one of the bedrooms and opened up the tiny dining room to the kitchen and opened the whole thing between the kitchen/dining room and living room/former bedroom.

It's really spacious if you don't mind a bedroom so small you can't "swing a cat" (which I would really like to do to the idiots).

At some level such stupidity/idiocy IS a criminal offense ... if nothing else criminal FRAUD! Theft by deception.

The "open plan" kitchen isn't a problem per se, but I've gone from having a 10'x10' kitchen with 12' of counter space (including sink) to a 12'x20' kitchen with 7' of counter space (including sink) and why the hell they put the connections for the washer & dryer at the same end of the kitchen as the work area and put the refrigerator connection (ice maker) 20' away on the other end of the kitchen I'll never understand.

PS: An example of WHY I consider the idiocy to be criminal - the house has several nice new appliances - stove, microwave, dish washer - but they took or more likely threw away the instruction manuals. I'm having to try to find the appropriate models by searching the internet for images that match & then locating the models on the manufacturer's web site to see if I can download PDF files of the instructions.

In Michael Flynn's 1990 novel In the Country of the Blind the protagonist is a black woman. When it was serialized in Analog he apparently got some anti-fan mail asking why he did that when there was no reason to make the character black. His answer was basically "why not?".

Reminds me of the "fan" outrage when Loan Tran was cast as Rose Tico in The Last Jedi. As the Sad Puppies show, science fiction has its share of racist sexist manbabies*.

*Even the women. Not mentioning specific names because UK libel law.

Paul @ 262:

A father and son were driving to the ball game. On the way their car was involved in a serious accident. The father was killed outright, and his son was critically injured. He was taken to A&E by ambulance and prepped for immediate surgery. The surgeon came in, saw the boy, and turned away, saying "I can't do this: this is my son!"

Explanation?

Yeah, OTOH, I've known the answer since I was in grade school (at least). Those are the kind of "logic" puzzles you use to entertain children. Any adult who doesn't see the obvious answer right away is a sad, sad puppy indeed.

Especially if that adult is a SciFi fan actually living here in the 21st century. SciFi featured CAPABLE women long before other genres of fiction ... or even non-fiction.

It is at least 65 years old, and probably much older. There were few female surgeos then, but some.

There is the even older one: In one village, the barber shaves every man who does not shave himself. Who shaves the barber?

We have a thread on introverts and a thread on whether open-plan kitchen/living spaces are a good idea. There is an obvious connection here: If you have a separate kitchen, that is the obvious place for us introverts to hang out in during social events. As captured by Jona Lewie in his immortal work "You'll Always Find Me in the Kitchen at Parties".

The rot set in when they started to make TVs as appliances for watching opera, ballet, musicals, etc, despite such things being an invisibly small proportion of the whole of TV broadcasting. This results in a TV which is unsuitable for general purpose use. For everything else on TV (apart from actual concerts, which are another invisibly small proportion and are more suited to radio in any case) the point of and need for the sound channel is to convey speech clearly, and nothing else matters that much. And for this a 3" circular speaker with no kind of acoustically designed enclosure whatever is not only adequate, but actually superior, since its crappy response filters out most of the irrelevant gunk while being fine for reproducing speech frequencies.

Though it does seem to be part of a more general (and weird) disappearance of understanding of what the sound is actually for, or maybe it's a (similarly weird) spread of some idea that because the video exists, it doesn't matter if the sound is a shitty and inappropriate match to it. Cinemas seem to have acquired the idea that it's provided especially to allow them to demonstrate how good a low frequency response you can get when you've got a cinema-sized space to accommodate the speakers. So they jack up the bass boost and everything gets obscured by the continual rumbling of all the overamplified low frequency ambient noise that in the real world isn't loud enough to hear/notice.

Or, back to TV, UK TV news segments about what's gone on in Parliament today have the Houses of Parliament as the background behind the reporter. Once upon a time they used to do this sensibly, with the reporter in a studio and the HP background inserted using chroma-keying, so you could hear the report equally as well as you could the reporter-behind-a-desk segments. These days they have the poor bugger actually stood outside the HP in the wind and rain, trying to shout the report over the roar of the traffic noise, and voice and traffic alike being repeatedly blotted out by the wind blowing into the microphone. This is, of course, shit, because you can't hear what the reporter is saying. It's also obviously a load more hassle for them to do than just having the reporter in the studio. But they have this weird idea that purely because the background image of a big building sitting there not moving is now a live image of a big building sitting there not moving, that is enough to make it somehow "better" even though the report is no longer comprehensible.

"SciFi featured CAPABLE women long before other genres of fiction"

I'm not sure that's true at all. So much early SF was highly constrained by adopting themes traditionally exclusively male-dominated - ships (sea or space) and the navy, war and combat, perilous exploration, and so on. It took a long time before it was possible to take seriously the idea of women in such strongly masculine situations, and also for SF in general to break out of the constraint and start including a wider variety of themes. "Other fiction" has been able to cover any theme it wanted to since long before "SF" existed, and there are examples of works featuring capable women going back forever.

There is a certain particularly nauseating style of writing produced by male authors who are afraid of emancipated women and write to convince themselves that men are still better really. So you get women holding positions of high office (of whatever kind) right alongside the men, but they keep throwing irrational tantrums or acting like silly little girls or otherwise behaving according to all the shitty stereotypes which are totally incongruous with someone being in their position. The male protagonist, who is probably in some less exalted position, spends all the time patronising the crap out of them and blatantly ignoring or contravening all their decisions, never gets fired or shot or put on a charge or anything, and eventually succeeds in despite of the female influence. Then often for extra special puke value the most important woman admits men might be worth looking at after all and they end up shagging.

I've noticed that kind of thing in general fiction coinciding with the rise of concern in general society over the very basic rights for women, like being allowed to own property or run companies or vote. In SF on the other hand it doesn't crop up much until after WW2, ie. both after the war had provided so many successful demonstrations of women doing "men's jobs" and not wanting to stop just because the men had come back, and after the effects of women being given access to higher education had had time to work their way through.

Tomorrow is the 4th of July here in the good ol' U.S. of A.

Elderly Cynic @ 272:

It is at least 65 years old, and probably much older. There were few female surgeos then, but some.

There is the even older one: In one village, the barber shaves every man who does not shave himself. Who shaves the barber?

Well, as stated here, the obvious answer is the barber doesn't need to shave because SHE is no man ...

OTOH, the original as proposed by Bertrand Russell ("Does the barber shave himself?") has no answer ... it can't be the barber, but it can't be anyone else BUT the barber ... paradox.

in modern times they're a cost cutting measure.

In some ways reasonably, we've constructed society so that a lot of people have no use for a kitchen, they have to work all the time. Why make them pay for a kitchen they can't use when we could take that money as pure profit instead?

There's also a lot of inefficiency in providing a whole kitchen in a flat designed for one or two people. But scaling down is hard, as anyone who's used a "mini fridge" knows. Or 1/2 a washing machine.

The granny flat I've has designed has the kitchen along one side of the living area because I'd rather have more usable living area than an extra wall. With a proper fume hood, obviously, and knowing that I need to be careful when frying. The fun part has been getting enough cupboard space (I have cooking equipment and food).

I disagree. It's only in the last dozen or more years that it's gotten like this.

Now, admittedly, concerts have been screwed by the sound people since the eithties, with 11 on a scale of 5 being "right", never mind if fuzzes the singer(s) voice.

But now, what should be ordinary conversation is bad - it's like the whole idiocy of "oh, it's so edgy to use hand-held, unsteady cameras", I think.

Pigeon @ 275:

"SciFi featured CAPABLE women long before other genres of fiction"

I'm not sure that's true at all. So much early SF was highly constrained by adopting themes traditionally exclusively male-dominated - ships (sea or space) and the navy, war and combat, perilous exploration, and so on. It took a long time before it was possible to take seriously the idea of women in such strongly masculine situations, and also for SF in general to break out of the constraint and start including a wider variety of themes. "Other fiction" has been able to cover any theme it wanted to since long before "SF" existed, and there are examples of works featuring capable women going back forever.

I disagree. Consider Susan Calvin & Hazel Stone (Asimov & Heinlein).

Although I will accept that Miss (Jane) Marple & Prudence Beresford ("née Cowley") WERE capable women NOT from the SciFi genre who came before my chosen examples.

Nonetheless that wouldn't excuse misogyny, chauvinism and just plain sexism among TODAY's SciFi readers, especially those who came up reading the golden age authors. The wider world may still be ignorant, but we should not be.

Well, they certainly started appearing in the seventies, and by the early eighties? The captain of the Norway is female, in Cherryh's Alliance/Union universe.

Consider Susan Calvin & Hazel Stone (Asimov & Heinlein).

Well, Pigeon did say "In SF on the other hand it doesn't crop up much until after WW2". Susan Calvin first appeared in 1950 and Hazel Stone in 1952.

I can suggest a much simpler reason why so many people are using subtitles to watch TV. The aging population. I had been using subtitles for years. Then I finally accepted that my diminishing ability to hear higher frequencies needed action. I now wear (free) NHS hearing aids. I can now listen to “Lark Ascending” without the high notes fading away, appreciate birdsong and no longer use subtitles on TV (except for Nordic Noir detective stories in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Finnish). My daughter, two brothers in law and sister have also stopped using subtitles after starting to wear hearing aids. There are lots of people around who have damaged their hearing with loud music. I doubt that the USA is any different. However hearing aids and batteries are free in the NHS and I doubt if that’s true in the USA. Subtitles are free.

In 271, JohnS noted: "Yeah, OTOH, I've known the answer since I was in grade school (at least). Those are the kind of "logic" puzzles you use to entertain children. Any adult who doesn't see the obvious answer right away is a sad, sad puppy indeed."

That was precisely the point Norman Lear and his coauthors were trying to make with that episode of "All In The Family" just over 50 years ago. What's even more disturbing is that the culturally embedded gender prejudice is still apparently a thing: https://www.bu.edu/articles/2014/bu-research-riddle-reveals-the-depth-of-gender-bias/

I'm old enough to remember watching the TV episode in question (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0509876/", seeing the answer to the riddle given, and my eyes being opened wide: "grownups aren't aware of what they aren't aware of; that's fucking scary!" I also remember my dismay at the uproar over the riddle, which lasted a good week worth of angry debate at my school.

If you're too young to have seen this show, it's worth a look. It's undoubtedly dated, but my recollection is that it achieved some truly penetrating social commentary at times.

Yeah but Asimov and Heinlein are like the day before yesterday. Novels as we know them start around three times as long ago, and there were novels with female protagonists from the beginning (written by female authors, sure). There are even arguments that literature declined for women since the 1800s. Personally I found that 50s stuff okay when I read it as a teenager in the 80s (probably more because I didn't know better than being closer to the time), but find it harder to make sense of now. I think everyone tries to derive universal understandings from within a bounded worldview, and sometimes, maybe due to time and distance, the things people write make their worldview look smaller. I'm sure the same would be said of our perspective now, the embedded cultural baggage we all still have, looking back from another 70 years or so, say, the 2090s. Assuming continuity of the cultural setting that makes such things possible, of course, that's not something that's certain anymore. Although I suppose it became suddenly uncertain in the late 40s anyway...

TVs and Sound and such.

Like much fo tech today. Us tech nerds have strong opinions about what people should by. But it turns out that most of those people could care less about what we think they should buy.

Most people are "ok" with the sound that comes out of their TVs. And for the rest of us the TV Brands are more than happy to sell us a sound bar / system for $100 to $500. This also helps them make up lost profits from the cut throat TV market. At least in the US.

If you stick with the top 5 or so brands in the US they don't sell anything smaller than 43" these days. Will maybe a loss leader 1080P. But for 4K you likely are looking at a 50" or bigger. At prices for a 65" that a 32" cost 2 or 3 years ago.

Again, the general public doesn't care all that much (give a crap) about TV speakers. As they don't listen to anything but voices 99% of the time.

As why I have sound bars. My wife's higher frequency hearing is going away fairly quickly. And by boosting the treble to max means she can hear without cranking the volume up to what are painful levels for me.

To me, they still look like an elected-by-its-citizens government representative.

well, mps and meps are allowed to have second jobs (mps aren't if they're ministers) as long as they're reasonably scrupulous about declaring their earnings, otoh if yonder nige has been carelessly taking delivery of large bags of unmarked rubles and someone's found out about it i can imagine he could find himself in financial coventry

Re: 'Get your acronym right: it's Member of the European Parliament, or MEP ...'

Thanks for the correction and the laugh!

Happy belated 20th wedding anniversary to you and Feòrag!

JohnS @280:

Re: 'golden age SF'

My impression is that the definition/perception of SF among the general public changed with Star Wars (1977) - action, adventure, one character has the power to completely alter history, etc. Basically, it's the wildest wild west shoot-em up yarn only it's now set among the stars - and some of the aliens are friendlies, the weapons are a hybrid of romantic past with exciting future, the enemy has no personal features that we (the good guys) can identify with, and any women in power are probably daughters/wives/sisters of some elite. Overall, I think that the original StarTrek was a lot closer to the range of ideas first explored in the golden age of SF.

adrian smith @ 287: ' mps and meps ... 2nd jobs'

Hadn't known that - thanks!

Might have made sense when these rules were first introduced but not now: way too much information to process now, and that info is getting increasingly technical/sophisticated.

"Again, the general public doesn't care all that much (give a crap) about TV speakers. As they don't listen to anything but voices 99% of the time."

That's just it. TV speakers (and the circuitry feeding them) used to be designed with that point firmly in mind. So what you got was basically the same AF stage and speaker as you'd get in a pocket transistor radio, with the speaker just screwed to the inside of the case wherever it was convenient. This did perfectly well for reproducing voices, and nobody cared that it was crap for anything more than that. (Well apart from the sound effects bods, who liked it because it made their job easier that you couldn't hear the thunder was only tin.)

But then they started getting pretensions to "hi-fi" and actually putting effort into trying to get a wide and flat frequency response. The speaker is still tiny by necessity, but now it has a long-travel diaphragm so it has enough piston action to have some sort of ability to reproduce bass frequencies. Instead of being just screwed to the inside of the case, it's tucked into some complicated plastic moulding with deliberate acoustic properties. And the circuitry that drives it now has specific frequency response shaping to flatten out as far as possible the lumps and deficiencies of the [speaker+mouldings+case] assembly. The broadcasters, given this, started playing up to it and actively using those parts of the audio spectrum that they previously hadn't expected people to be able to hear and so hadn't bothered about.

All this despite as you say most people not giving a crap about anything but voices. And the result is that TVs no longer have the audio bandwidth limitations which if anything clarified voices while filtering out intrusive background noise. Instead they accurately reproduce everything you don't want to hear alongside the voices you do, and it gets in the way of making the voices out. Subtitles provide a way around this problem, and it makes sense that once people realise they're now there, they'll start using them.

(Which isn't to say there aren't other reasons as well. Like those shows which have people talking at normal volume but every time the presenter finishes a sentence there's an earsplitting thunderous chord which fetches tiles off the roof and stuns insects in mid-flight.)

"My impression is that the definition/perception of SF among the general public changed with Star Wars"

Do you mean in a sort of negative, oppositional-reaction sense? I'd be more inclined to regard Start Warts as a kind of "last great fling" of the "Hero's Quest IN SPAAACE!!" kind of SF. Not to deny that it has its own strong fandom, but it seems to me that people were beginning to notice that SF in general was mostly just recycling the plots of standard fairy tales with a different version of magic, and starting to want something that was making wider use of the possibilites offered by the genre.

At about the same time as Start Warts we had THHGTTG, which used it for humour, and not that long after we had Neuromancer, which is a much-cited "landmark". And the variety we have these days is a whole lot wider, of course.

If you're looking for men who write knowledgeable, capable women, we could start with... idunno... Shakespeare.

Oh. And some of the women in the Bible are quite adept at procuring justice for themselves or their people; Tamar and Esther come to mind.

Not to mention Judith

OTOH, the original as proposed by Bertrand Russell ("Does the barber shave himself?") has no answer ... it can't be the barber, but it can't be anyone else BUT the barber ... paradox.

Only if you assume the barber is clean-shaven…

Yes... I only talked to novels, with are a, um, novel form, so to speak.

Not just Shakespeare, I think it was just relatively common for female protagonists to have agency. One from the same era that occurred to me off the top of my head is John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, which probably passes due to conversations between the Duchess and her maid. I tried looking for classical examples, but that's really hard to google.

"SciFi featured CAPABLE women long before other genres of fiction"

Probably little known outside the UK, but the Dan Dare comic strip from the Eagle features a Very capable woman in the person of Professor Jocelyn Peabody. This comic strip dates back to the early 1950's, and although in many respects it can be seen as RAF Battle of Britain fighter pilots in space, was in many ways quite forward looking with women and non Anglo Saxon people in positions of authority and fully capable of holding their own. I believe it played a part in shaping the young me and my interest in science and attitude toward others, much as Star Trek did for a later generation.

My memory my be at fault, but I am pretty sure it I have seen it in a book that predates Russell in the form I gave.

pigeon & SFR
NO "2001" - released in 1968

In the formulation that was posted here either the barber is a woman or he's a man who does shave himself.

Tbh it's hard to do it properly in a language where "himself" is gendered.

I've noticed that kind of thing in general fiction coinciding with the rise of concern in general society over the very basic rights for women, like being allowed to own property or run companies or vote. In SF on the other hand it doesn't crop up much until after WW2, ie. both after the war had provided so many successful demonstrations of women doing "men's jobs" and not wanting to stop just because the men had come back, and after the effects of women being given access to higher education had had time to work their way through.

why not WW1? Women did all sorts of jobs in WW1. Or at least they did in the UK.

How about John Cleland? Fanny Hill (1748) certainly has agency. And, shockingly, a happy ending.

I have Boccaccio's Decameron in my head too. Several of the narrators are women, and some of the stories have female protagonists. It might be a technical pass (the female story narrators are telling the story to the group of men and women, so technically they are holding forth at length about something other than a man to a group that includes other women... but it's not really a conversation as such). But I think that's getting into the weeds a bit... it's reasonably clear that each generation looks back and imagines the previous generation is much more conservative, as the present generation has invented pretty much everything libertine from scratch. It comes as a shock to many people that this is not really the case.

Raise Daniel Defoe. Moll Flanders was published in 1722.

Henry Farrell channels OGH's approach to bureaucracy in a factucidal take on LLM's?

https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/03/shoggoths-amongst-us/

Our piece was inspired by a recurrent meme in debates about the Large Language Models (LLMs) that power services like ChatGPT. It’s a drawing of a shoggoth ... As Cosma said, the true Singularity began two centuries ago at the commencement of the Long Industrial Revolution. That was when we saw the first “vast, inhuman distributed systems of information processing” which had no human-like “agenda” or “purpose,” ... Those systems were the “self-regulating market” and “bureaucracy.”

I think Prof Peabody is an attempt to depict the capable women who came to the fore in WW2. Figures such as Beatrice Shilling, Hedy Lamar and the many WAAF’s working sector controls in the RAF fighter command. A reaction against the sexy depictions of women in the pulps which the Eagle was set up to be very much against. Unfortunately she is often misused in the strip and can end up as the woman in peril. Nothing new there, Edgar Rice Burroughs sets Princess Dejah Thoris up as a proud and capable ruler then mainly uses her as a Mcguffin to be rescued by his lost cause hero. I read these but probably grew up in several ways reading Alan Moore’s Halo Jones and the Street Samurai of Neuromancer. I think those prefigure the post human female that OGH has in Jupiter’s children but in very different ways. All consider the aspect of the male gaze and abuse while finding a way for the protagonist to express who they actually are.

As for writing or portraying women, I would suggest that all of the common female archetypes in media (...) aren't real women at all. They are men's stereotypes of women.

That's kind of interesting, because I'm not sure that's generally true. Many of them IMO are women's stereotypes of women.

• warm loving mother: Unisex. Everyone wants one.

• whore with a heart of gold: If we're being reductionist then a basic stereotyping male doesn't care about the whore's inner life. For a man's stereotype, this is at least a second-order stereotype where they prefer their whores to be reasonably happy in their trade, rather than the more typical trafficked/exploited victim. OTOH as a stereotype for women, this character is someone with agency. Not the greatest life choice, sure, but at a time when the equivalent life choice for men was enlisting, it's not necessarily bad. And for women this is a powerful subversion of everything that women are "supposed" to not want - and financially and socially successful into the bargain. It's hard to see this as a status quo thing.

• strong frontier woman: Also unisex. Who doesn't want a competent parent?

• bitchy high school queen bee: I'd say this can only be a female thing. To stereotype men, we mostly just don't do this. Not only that, we mostly don't consume fiction containing this kind of character. OTOH you can read any book about schooldays, written by women for girls, and find this character. Blyton, Brent Dyer, all those old boarding school stories - none of them were writing for any male figure at any point.

• ball busting CEO: Probably a male-gaze monster, sure, at least initially. But if there's some kind of inner life there, they can also be a female-gaze "if you get here then you can get to do this too" kind of person. And post-Thatcher you have to ask why you'd identify a driven personality as "ball-busting" when they're merely equally driven - that speaks to the gaze of the person analysing the fiction and not necessarily the author.

• apple pie baking grandma: Unisex again.

• manic pixie dream girl: Hmm. Maybe male gaze. But then as a woman, wouldn't you also like a friend like that? How many people don't have that one friend who's a bit more off-script than the rest?

• Hallmark Christmas chick flick romantic heroine: Fiction written and produced by women for women. They're not a man's stereotype, they're a woman's Mary-Sue.

I wouldn't disagree that they're stereotypes, but IMO it's hard to say that they're stereotypes from a gendered gaze.

As why I have sound bars. My wife's higher frequency hearing is going away fairly quickly. And by boosting the treble to max means she can hear without cranking the volume up to what are painful levels for me.

This may be an argument for investigating AppleTV. (Set top box with streaming content from Apple as well if you want to pay for a subscription, but works via apps with other providers.) The new tvOS firmware due to drop with iOS 17 apparently includes HomePod integration so you can get Dolby ATMOS surround sound via a pair of HomePods that know about your AppleTV. And the new firmware for AirPods is going to include hearing tests and affordances for hearing-impaired users == they're not yet going to disrupt the hearing aid market, but they can do stuff like boost speech frequences while suppressing background noise if you're in a noisy venue and want to talk to someone.

So I suspect they're at most a year or two away from supporting personalized listener auditory profiles with AppleTV, to adjust the frequency levels and compression for optimal hearing.

I solved the Spanish Barber paradox pretty much immediately when I first heard it back in school. The Spanish Barber (male) is shaved by his ten-year-old apprentice (male). We had been reading history at school about the medieval-period apprentice system and it was obvious.

This may be an argument for investigating AppleTV.

Surely you've noticed that you and I are two of the more Apple invested people around here. [grin]

My wife's issue is likely to need in canal aids before Apple has something that makes a big difference and doesn't annoy my listening.

But periodically I do look at how well the Airpod Pros we have might help her. But for her to keep one or two in her ears all the time is a fashion statement she doesn't want.

The barber is obviously Duncan Goodhew

ilya187 @ 282:

Consider Susan Calvin & Hazel Stone (Asimov & Heinlein).

Well, Pigeon did say "In SF on the other hand it doesn't crop up much until after WW2". Susan Calvin first appeared in 1950 and Hazel Stone in 1952.

I'm pretty sure the Asimov wrote the first story that has Dr Calvin in it in 1941 ... and here in the U.S. where Asimov was living at the time, WW2 TECHNICALLY hadn't started yet.

Whether I'm right or wrong about the dates, my point about what our attitudes as card carrying SciFi devotees should be TODAY - here in the 21st century - still stands. We shouldn't need to tell us to treat women and other OTHERS as full human beings.

Hell, there's a rule from the 1st century** about that if we'd only put it into practice today ... "Do unto others ..."

** Probably older than that, but y'all already know how bad I am with older dates 😉

there's a rule from the 1st century

The Christian version of that rule is absolutely terrible. "Do unto others as you would be done by" is a perfect justification for everything the Spanish Inquisition got up to, auto da fé and all: "I want to be treated like this, and so must you" is just plain wrong.

There's a better Talmudic formulation, in the negative, from about the same time, by Rabbi Hillel: "Do not do unto others as you would not want them to do to you. That is the entire Torah." (Although in various forms it goes back to Confucian times, about five centuries earlier.)

In it's most succinct formulation: "don't be a dick".

SciFi featured CAPABLE women long before other genres of fiction ... or even non-fiction.

Well, there is one very capable woman whose life has generated an enormous body of fiction and non-fiction (and lots of art)... Jeanne d'Arc (1412-1431).

ilya187 @ 293:

Not to mention Judith

With all those prior examples to shape our attitudes (our perception of others?), there's really no excuse for being an asshole about women and people who are different today. That's all I'm really trying to say.

Greg Tingey @ 298:

pigeon & SFR
NO "2001" - released in 1968

For me, "2001" is still the most "technically" proficient SciFi movie because the "space ships" in the film moved (looked like they moved) the way "space ships" look in reality.

But "Star Wars", despite it's technical flaws, was a fantastic film. Even the second & third iterations were pretty good. After it became a franchise I thought it went downhill, but even some of the spin-off films (Rogue One & Solo) have been pretty good.

I didn't care much for "Episodes I, II and III"; I just didn't think they were up to par, really stale.

But the original film, when it was a stand alone BEFORE the rest of it came along, was just an unbelievably fresh take (for me) on what a SciFi film could be.

For me, "2001" is still the most "technically" proficient SciFi movie

There's a mostly-joking conspiracy theory about the Moon landings: NASA faked the Apollo program, but they hired Stanley Kubrick as director and he was such a fanatic for detail that they ended up filming on location because it ws cheaper.

("Star Wars" is basically Magic Space Wizards. Zero credibility as SF, but it works pretty well as fantasy. You could re-frame it in a bronze age Aegean/Mediterranean setting as some sort of ancient Greek myth-making and it would still work perfectly.)

Charlie Stross @ 312:

"there's a rule from the 1st century"

The Christian version of that rule is absolutely terrible. "Do unto others as you would be done by" is a perfect justification for everything the Spanish Inquisition got up to, auto da fé and all: "I want to be treated like this, and so must you" is just plain wrong.

There's a better Talmudic formulation, in the negative, from about the same time, by Rabbi Hillel: "Do not do unto others as you would not want them to do to you. That is the entire Torah." (Although in various forms it goes back to Confucian times, about five centuries earlier.)

In it's most succinct formulation: "don't be a dick".

I'm not sure the Spanish Inquisition was the first or even the worst example of how the formulation can be perverted (with some of the stuff going on around here nowadays). Forcing your own religious system on others is certainly not in the SPIRIT of the admonition.

But, the way I learned it as a child, "DO NOT" is insufficient, you have to be proactive respecting others. "Don't be evil" alone is not enough to make one "good".

I find the admonition to "do unto others" inextricably linked with the parable of the "Good Samaritan" ... the despised man who is the only one who will help someone in distress when the "good people" passed him by. You have to BE the Samaritan, not one of the "good people".

Charlie Stross @ 316:

"For me, "2001" is still the most "technically" proficient SciFi movie"

There's a mostly-joking conspiracy theory about the Moon landings: NASA faked the Apollo program, but they hired Stanley Kubrick as director and he was such a fanatic for detail that they ended up filming on location because it ws cheaper.

Never heard that one before, but I like it!

("Star Wars" is basically Magic Space Wizards. Zero credibility as SF, but it works pretty well as fantasy. You could re-frame it in a bronze age Aegean/Mediterranean setting as some sort of ancient Greek myth-making and it would still work perfectly.)

My understanding is Star Wars was a homage to the Flash Gordon & Buck Rogers (a pair of comic strip characters) serials from 1930s Hollywood with updated modern practical effects so you don't get the cheesy look of smoke from the "rocket exhaust" curling up towards the ceiling of the sound stage ...

for her to keep one or two in her ears all the time is a fashion statement she doesn't want

Doesn't want to be mistaken for a youngster? :-)

Why we should prefer the negative formulation is extremely straightforward to demonstrate: masochists and people who truly love pineapple on pizza exist.

(TL;DR: "good" differs a lot, "that which is hateful" much less.)

As someone who loved Pilipino pizza (ham, pineapple, anchovies), I've always preferred the Golden Metarule formulation:

Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.

With the sensible proviso that one is not obligated to do anything, it works well in a variety of settings.

Or in my case, it hurts too much to keep them in for longer than 5 minutes at a stretch.

There's a better Talmudic formulation

Well there's also the Kant's first formulation, Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law, though I guess Kant has multiple formulations too and there are plenty of people interested in reconciling Kantian deontology with some sort of Singer-adjacent rule utilitarianism. Maybe I am one.

What I found was the need to include a cross-cultural perspective, and because that radically undermines some principles the working ethicists find important ("bah, relativism!"), I got bogged down (in terms of getting into the space academically, I mean, not in terms of "solving the problem".) Anyway, it was one of the more interesting angles/opportunities to emerge from doing that postgrad law-for-non-lawyers degree. I should go back to that one day.

As a sports coach and parent I have usually formulated guidance as 'don't do what you don't want others to do', shortened to 'don't be a dick' where appropriate.

Do unto others etc. works until it doesn't - e.g. if you don't want or care if others wear a mask in the middle of a pandemic.

Rawls takes a different angle, and suggests establishing standards of 'justice' from behind a 'curtain of ignorance' - i.e. not knowing if you will benefit or be harmed by a particular standard.

RE: 'NO "2001" - released in 1968'

I agree that 2001 remains a true SF classic but still maintain that StarWars is what made SF movies sure hits at the movie box office among the general public (vs. just among SF fans).

And some of this has to do with the relevance of kid-appeal: StarWars had it in spades, 2001 with its ambiguity about what's out there and warning about AI level computers was a movie for adults.

https://www.the-numbers.com/box-office-records/worldwide/all-movies/creative-types/science-fiction

Oh crap! - the above site also has 'most anticipated movies' and Barbie of the anatomically impossible female body tops the list. If it's about childhood toys/story characters, I'd rather watch a Muppets movie.

Kant and Hillel have the advantage that they're more accepting of diversity. We've discussed this before, but masking during covid is a good example of the defects in personalising the maxim.

In Australia we also have the clash of cultures between "bushfires are unprofitable" and "burning is necessary to keep the country working". Which shows the limits of even Kant's approach. More generally we can extend that to "maximum profit now" vs "species survival is good", two fundamental axioms that are incompatible with each other.

Um, and perhaps the studios are thinking that people are watching this on their mobile... and at that point, I refer to a review I heard on the radio, around '10, on new phones. After nearly 10 min of the features, the last sentence is, "and by the way, how is the sound quality on these phones?" To which the answer was "two were mediocre, and the rest terrible."

Episode I was, for most people over 12, awful (and pod race, soon to be a ride at whatever studio amusement park"). Episode two was not good. Episode III was, in fact, the one I was waiting for, complete with Obi Wan's failure to kill Darth, leaving him to presumably suffering until he died.

Of course it was an homage, that's what Lucas does. May I refer you to Raiders (also an homage)?

Oh, and speaking of capable women: Dorothy Vaneman, later Seaton, Doc Smith, Skylark of Space, began writing in 1919... and she's a Ph.D. in music, and Mart considers her worthy to play his Stradivarius. Also, kidnapping her is not a safe proposition....

First off, belated congratulations to Charlie and Feorag on their anniversary!

Second off Star Wars...did anyone notice that the real genius of Star Wars was massive marketing? While it wasn't the first TV or movie series to have toy spinoffs, IIRC it was the first movie to have fast food tie-ins, massive numbers of toys at various price points, comic books, and so forth. That may be its real genius. A genius, of course, that the Maus Haus Corporate seems to be at pains to disassemble, for reasons.

Third off, since I've been having fun reading about "The Dreaming" (which has a reasonable analog in "Native American Spirituality", "African Indigenous Religion" etc. In other words, it's a loosely-defined blanket term under which anthropologists and ethnographers justify their existence, which naifs like me ignorantly take to mean things it doesn't...), I want to point out something weird:

So far as I understand, one major point of all having "Dreaming" or whatever, is to preserve and protect information without writing it down: it's a shared universe of mnemonic devices. Things like Star Wars, D&D, Marvel and DC, Harry Potter, and others seem to generate shared universes that share some of the same mechanisms. For example, people nerd out, obsessively collect information and mnemonic devices merch, go to conventions, bond over their shared interests... And these shared universes simply started with artists trying to make money. To get from a commercial shared universe to a dreaming, all the nerdy stuff has to be tied to the real world somehow.

For example, LOTR can (and has!) been read as a fairly accurate metaphor for the experience of writing a PhD dissertation (Precious will drive you insane at the end, and you've still got to lug it up the hill). What if Middle Earth's stories had been deliberately designed to help students graduate? It's a weird example, but that whole experience of nerding out and bonding over shared interests seems to be what old-time religion used as a teaching system. It's about teaching stuff that's fairly tedious to learn and perfect in a way that's "sticky" enough to help people learn and retain what they learn.

Now that we've outsourced our memories to external media, this use of art and memory doesn't matter so much, so the streets have found other uses for these parts of human experience. But it might be fun to think of going to a Con as a hint of what going to an ancient religious festival might have been like thousands of years ago.

And if you want to re-enchant the world, you might do worse than to start with Cons, turning nerds into initiated stans, and making shared universes that are practically useful as teaching systems.

Or in my case, it hurts too much to keep them in for longer than 5 minutes at a stretch.

Before the Airpod Pros with the replaceable variously sized ear bits, I could never wear any Apple ear "things". My ear canals are just too small for the one size fits all. Now the "Pros" with the various sized soft cups, they work fine for me.

I agree that 2001 remains a true SF classic but still maintain that StarWars is what made SF movies sure hits at the movie box office among the general public (vs. just among SF fans).

2001 was like watching a really really really well made documentary. Dialog was a bit thin. And people went because up till then most SF in media was, well, you could see the latex too easily. Plus "reverse the polarity" type tropes were all over.

Star Wars had the visuals that didn't look like 2 pie plate hanging from a string AND a plot AND dialog AND excitement. Not that all of the last 3 made sense all the time but zowie it moved. Air resistance and wings on space fighters not withstanding.

massive numbers of toys at various price points,

Well sort of. The first released movie had the big toy certificate sale. Lots of parents had to do some fancy talking Christmas morning. Read the first few paragraphs in the History section of this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenner_Star_Wars_action_figures

Star Wars...did anyone notice that the real genius of Star Wars was massive marketing?

I and my buddies in our mid 20s saw the previews the winter/sprint before the release and were convinced this was going to be something different.

Oh crap! - the above site also has 'most anticipated movies' and Barbie of the anatomically impossible female body tops the list.

Eh, no: you're missing a treat if you don't at least watch the cinematic trailer on youtube with an eye for the deliberate subversion! The Barbie movie is almost certainly going to be a complete head trip, insofar as Greta Gerwig seems to be leaning hard into the "let's blow this shit up" approach as opposed to the "let's make a two hour marketing infomercial targeting tweenage girls" one you seem to expect.

And, crossing the streams with 2001, here's the first teaser trailer ...

As I understand it, Lucas made Star Wars on a low-to-medium budget and it was expected to break even and mostly do well in summer matinee showings, not set the planet on fire.

The studio didn't pay enough attention to the contract small-print and when Lucas quietly inked in a very broad gimme for all the toy merchandising rights they rolled over without even querying it.

Then Lucas went into a frenzy of marketing even before the movie opened, and even though it was the box office sensation of the year, it netted him far more money from the toys.

Money which he then reinvested in bigger and better SFX for the next two movies, leading to more toy sales ...

Ralph Bakshi said it was worse than that, his Wizards was roughly contemporary and in the DVD comments track he said that the studio had a management shake up and told the directors of projects they didn't approve of to accept pay cuts, Lucas asked for the merchandising rights in exchange, and got them.

If IBM's lawyers had paid attention with Gates's contract, the computing world would have been very different! Star Wars didn't have quite the same impact, significant though it was.

OK, we are now well past post #300, so for all you hard science SciFi fanatics, here's the latest science news.

We've (probably) detected intelligent life.

Some of you may recall I drew attention to an odd LIGO gravitational wave detection last year: S200114f. This was distinctive in that it was very short (milliseconds) duration with high frequency (100's Hz). To me it looked like an impulse -- something like the waveform you get when a drum is hit just once.

Well, what do we find in LIGO's O4 observations, which began in late May 2023? Six further similar observations! So S200114f is not an anomaly, but a regular occurrence. And I think this means we can probably discount one suggested explanation: a head-on blackhole collision (instead of the usual inspiralling collision).

For those interested, all detections are listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gravitational_wave_observations

Thoughts anyone?

The question that comes to my mind is "What LIGO signature would a warp drive starship generate?".

There was one of THOSE physics papers published a few days ago, with about a hundred authors with the first three names staking a claim for a Nobel down the line, that addressed the LIGO data with regards to the "ripples". They think it's dark matter finally showing itself gravitationally if I read the summaries correctly.

Whether the dark matter in question is proof of extraterrestrial intelligence is another matter (so to speak).

Er, he is then a man who does not shave himself, and therefore he is shaved by the barber (himself)! Anyway, my point was that this is a classic conundrum that was adopted by Russell, not invented by him. I quoted a bit loosely but, in the form I was referring to, the clue was in the wording, and the answer was that the barber was a woman. This was mostly explained by Russell himself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barber_paradox

The surgeon example has the same form, but its point always was the mistaken assumption that a surgeon must be male.

For what it's worth: I saw an entertaining cartoon about climate change just now.

More true than I would like.

Oscillations, even repeated periods of them, are quite common in many contexts. Frankly, I am as inclined to believe that it's Skarl the drummer (Dunsany) as it's dark matter.

The question that comes to my mind is "What LIGO signature would a warp drive starship generate?".

Well, tell me how your warp drive operates, then I'll tell you what sort of signature we'd see! /snark

But, being serious, what LIGO will detect is big things operating near us (say an Ark Ship), and small things accelerating very hard.

A big thing would likely leave a longer -- more continuous -- signature, than we are seeing.

Those impulse signatures suggest its something "small" hitting and/or puncturing the space-time fabric of the universe. Something small being of the order of 10km for a millisecond duration event. That's how Hewitt and co. determined what was going on when Jocelyn Bell discovered Pulsars.

Ahh, one of those papers.

I suppose it's possible that what LIGO detected is a very truncated series of snap shots of a continuous process, but it has the feel of discontinuities to me. I wonder what EC makes of the wave forms?

See here (Figure's 1 and 2) for plots of S200114f: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.02551.pdf.

Of course unlike Nojay, I'm no physicist. That's Mrs L's specialism... ;)

That I can't. I would prefer, if humans build one, it be tested 2 AU away from the home planet, preferably with our home star between it and us.

»I wonder what EC makes of the wave forms?«

You should read a paper like this as trying to answer the question "Does these observations rule that theory out?"

The overall tenor of such papers are "Let us try to find a set of (plausible) parameters, which makes this theory produce these new observations"

If you cannot find any such parameters, then the theory has a problem, but if you can, you are not much wiser than before you started.

Over time you may get multiple such fixes on the parameters, and if they converge, good, and if they do not, the theory is in trouble.

It is important to always keep in mind how tall the ivory tower this kind of science is standing on top of, and that a lot of the foundations are merely speculation.

Well reasoned speculation, but speculation all the same.

For instance, right now we have three different values for the Hubble constant, 67, 70 and 74, and it is a good assumption that a paper like the one you link to, might be using different values, based on the various precursor articles they build on top of.

If you want to monitor seismic shifts in astronomy, keep an eye on the GAIA catalogues and the avalanches of articles each version generates.

Basically, as Poul-Henning Kamp says. It's not so much turtles all the way down, as plausible guesses all the way up. The much-vaunted 'proofs' are almost all invalid as proofs because they are never more than proofs of consistency, and often depend on assuming the very theory that is being 'proved'.

Having a dark sense of humour, I still like the possibility that the Hubble red-shift is not solely due to recession and might, for example, be partially due to interaction with the vacuum. Current theory predicts the birth of electron-positron pairs; I am not enough of a quantum mechanic to even guess if that could plausibly cause that effect. If that were true, the whole tower of speculations has one of its main pillars undermined. In that area, the current theories do not match observation well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem

And, if 'vacuum interaction' were even partially the cause of the red shift, continuous creation would be back with a big bang :-)

Perhaps I shuld clarify what I meant in #345. Feedback effects are ubiquitous, and are often (even usually) best modelled by an ARIMA system. One of the properties of those is that they can generate short-term or irregular periodicity (think sunspots or El Nino). The classic error is to assume that the effects are genuinely periodic, and to use them for prediction over timescales of multiple 'cycles'. Note that, in many physical systems, the effects can modify the parameters, so introduce non-linearity; at that point, the patterns can be very hard indeed to analyse.

Before even speculating intelligence, I should like to see a decent analysis that such apparent sections of periodicity could not reasonably be due to a simple feedback system.

We've (probably) detected intelligent life.

Erm, let's do the non-physicist probability testing too. AFAIK, gravity waves have two properties that matter in this case: they take energy to generate, and the wave front expands spherically, meaning that the amplitude of the wave when detected is proportional to 1/distance². So the further away the event, the more seismic the source has to be, squared.

In this regard, let's think about how much energy would be wasted by a warp drive that makes gravity waves that can be detected at interstellar (let alone intergalactic) ranges. Kind of a lot, maybe? The image that comes to my mind is a moped engine that generates noise at 200 decibels: most of the energy used by the engine is going into making the noise, rather than making the the moped go forward.

I'm not an engineer, of course, but I'd hazard a guess that if a warp drive is feasible, it would waste as little energy as possible in the form of non-functional gravitational waves. That in turn would mean it would be detectable only at relatively short distances.

Does that mean these waveforms weren't generated by artificial activity? No. Presumably, something could be waging war at interstellar scales, and making big things go boom-wobble as a result. While this might be a sign of extraterrestrial life, as with the general-ship that led during WW I, I hesitate to call it intelligence.

Skimming that, it looks like they're saying they think it might be (at the most exotic) an interaction between "stars" a couple of hundred solar masses in size, made of gravitationally-bound particles with a mass of the order of 1e-13eV, (and if such things exist then they would only interact gravitationally so they would count as dark matter); or it might just be that the models they're using to distinguish interesting wiggles from random ones aren't up to it, so they don't really know.

Me, I think it's a couple of galactic space pigeons having a scrap. (It being of course already well known in certain circles that so-called "dark matter" is actually giant invisible space pigeons several hundred light-years across.)

FWIW Susan Calvin was a particular example I was thinking of when I wrote the post, and I was thinking it was about 1950 she first showed up :)

OTOH there are odd bits of interviews with Doc Smith floating around where he says he couldn't handle doing the "romance" bits so he got Margaret Crane to do them, so how much of Dorothy Seaton is actually his own writing is not really clear.

He does try to include capable women, but he pretty much always fucks it up horribly. He even has a whole planet inhabited entirely by women, and has them not understanding the concept of "love" on the grounds that there aren't any men.

"why not WW1? Women did all sorts of jobs in WW1. Or at least they did in the UK."

I'd put it down to something like the activation energy for destabilising a long and robustly established system having two humps; you could say that WW1 smashed the neck off the bottle and spilt a bit of the content, but it took WW2 to actually push the bottle over and spill lots of it. You see the same sort of thing with a lot of the changes in society during the 20th century, not just those relating to women - WW1 got things moving (or helped to), the next 20 years they were brewing up, then WW2 and the state of the participants after it got the mostly-latent changes to start to take actual shape.

As an example of capable women in fiction, let alone a role model, Susan Calvin is terrible: misanthropic and socially dysfunctional. That is actually the standard depiction of male geeks (i.e. anyone with Aspergers) in fiction, too: ask how many works portray us as reasonably happily married, with children?

Worse, it feeds into the belief that you can't have two people with full-time careers and children. That isn't helped by the number of other works that portray the only couples with both two full-time careers and children as being rich enough to employ nannies or similar. And a few 'modernist' works that portray it as no problem :-(

I can witness that it is damn tough on both partners, but I can also witness that a lot of us do it.

I can witness that it is damn tough on both partners, but I can also witness that a lot of us do it.

If you mean a couple raising children. Yes. I/we did it also. And we gave up a lot of income choices to make it happen. We did NOT turn over the raising of our kids to strangers. Which many feel is a good thing to do.

My sample size is small but I think my younger 30 somethings have turned out reasonably well. Unlike many of their contemporaries.

As an example of capable women in fiction, let alone a role model, Susan Calvin is terrible: misanthropic and socially dysfunctional. That is actually the standard depiction of male geeks (i.e. anyone with Aspergers) in fiction, too

Ugh. Never thought of it this way before, but you are right. Not only Susan Calvin is socially dysfunctional, she is not even a female Aspie. (I know many female Aspies, and they are nothing like Calvin.) She is very stereotypical MALE Aspie in a woman's body.

Worse, it feeds into the belief that you can't have two people with full-time careers and children.

Well, you CAN, as many couples demonstrate, but it is not healthy. For almost all of history people lived in extended families. What we call "nuclear family" is a product of industrial age, and completely unnatural.

Your last paragraph is definitely true.

Re: 'The Barbie movie is almost certainly going to be a complete head trip, insofar as Greta Gerwig seems to be leaning hard into the "let's blow this shit up" approach ...'

That is one helluva a trailer - wonder how much they paid the '2001' studio for the rights to blatantly copy probably the most identifiable opening scene finale of any movie ever produced. Even so, I'm going to read the reviews before forking out any $$$ to see it.('Barbie' --- it'll take a lot to undo my childhood reaction, i.e., yewh!)

If it's as good as the 2001 riff suggests, SNL will probably do a major skit on it and they're usually pretty good at picking out major plot/character issues. The SNL mention sorta ties in with the current blog topic, i.e., SNL mostly passes the Bechdel Test. SNL is one of the few comedy shows that has had a steady stream of female comedians in their regular cast who created interesting and memorable characters. And both the former female and male SNL comedians that eventually left SNL usually moved on to star in film/TV often carrying over some of their SNL-created personas into new roles.

Strongly disagree. You just don't like movies with plots that are not Boom! every 10 min.

Ever see "My Dinner With Andre", and did/would you feel the same about it?

Well, since you ask, it's doing an energy-gravity conversion, and to use a non-scientific description, pulls in space from in front, and shoves it out the back, thereby not allowing the "bow wave" buildup that would increase the mass.

Continuous creation... and a torus-shaped universe!

They show up with Dick and Dottie quite happy. Reference, please, because I don't remember a planet of all women.

Oh, no - at least a Klein bottle!

Holy cow. I literally can't remember the last film I went to see in a cinema, but I might have to go to see that.

Re: 'Continuous creation... and a torus-shaped universe!'

Cover art by Gary Larson (The Far Side) would be apt - he had such a gift for succinctly tweaking the weird into the commonplace.

Oh good grief. You just added 2+2 and got 234.

You have no idea what kinds of movies I like. And while it may not be the same set of VENN diagrams as you that doesn't make either of us wrong.

I really despise it when people claim to be able to read my mind.

As to the kinds of movies I like. Based on your comments, you'd be very surprised. And it is a wide range of genre's.

I thought 2001 was crap. Yes, I agree with the documentary aspect, but not with the well-made one; good documentaries have a better 'plot' and fewer WTF moments than it did. And the musak was ghastly, but that's now the norm.

That may be heresy in this blog, but I stand by it.