Chipping the web – peg out
December 18th, 2007 7:09:59 pm pst by Sterling Camden
120 is the smallest 3-perfect (triperfect) number. The sum of its divisors is 360, which is 3 * 120.
Are you ready to upgrade from Vista to XP?
The best in programming profanity (thanks, Reg).
Or instead of swearing, just say Boo. An extensible language for the .NET Framework based loosely on Python (thanks, Arjan).
The true art of blogging? Jorn Barger (who invented the term “weblog” ten years ago yesterday) says it’s all about amping up the echo chamber (thanks, John Murrell). Naturally, Dave Winer claims prior art.
The many meanings of SEO. I like Mark’s own coinage best.
I unsubbed from TechCrunch months ago, mostly because I can’t respect Arrington personally. There’s more.
Me on TechRepublic: Top 5 programming languages (depends on how you rank them).
Me on Geeks Are Sexy: My Johnny Quest fantasy nears reality, the ultimate LOLcats, the Firefox detention hoax.
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Dude. Thanks for reading.
Sterling – I’m thinking about dumping TC from my subscriptions too. I’ve met Mike in person (once at Search Champs) and he didn’t seem at all like the same guy who has repeatedly been losing his mind in comments online lately.
He said he was going to quit writing for TC and the next day he’s back. Is what he says real or link bait? I don’t know lately. The comment about Marc Orchant’s heart attack, a truly nice human being that was well liked by many (I’ve never seen anybody say anything bad about Marc) was yet another indefensible comment Arrington has made lately. Shameful.
I wish Mike would quit with all the craziness and get back to the early days of TC when he only covered new companies and was excited about their development and launches. These days it seems like there is too much BS and side deals and ego stroking. And the site had a *lot* less ads back then too.
Far be it from me, someone who actively encourages webmasters to make more money at their sites, to suggest commercialism actually ruining a site, but TC may very well be a shining BAD example of over-commercialism and excess the way it stands today
(off topic: why are there two check boxes for subscription to the comments)
Thanks for your comment, TDavid. I tend to agree with your assessment of how TC jumped the shark. I can’t fathom where he comes out with some of his comments — perhaps it is just link bait.
Ah, I was only seeing one checkbox, but that’s because I’m the post author. Apparently both Brian’s Threaded Comments and the Subscribe to Comments plugin provide such a checkbox. I’ll have to figure out which one to nix. Thanks for the heads-up.
argh there = their
Fixed.
I suspect the one to nix is the box above the comment entry field. Checking the one below results in returns to the page showing the line “You are subscribed to this entry. Manage your subscriptions.” with the second sentence as a link. Checking the box above doesn’t seem to have any effect upon return visits — there’s still an empty checkbox.
Yes, that’s correct apotheon. It turns out that the “Brian’s Threaded Comments” plugin was sniffing out a function in the “Subscribe to comments” plugin and throwing up the extra checkbox if that function existed. Since that portion of the plugin is a supplied replacement for your theme’s comments.php (which I had already modified for MyAvatars) I just ripped out the extra code.
As handy as Brian’s Threaded Comments is, that makes two questionable practices for a WordPress plugin: (1) replacing a theme file, and (2) sniffing out other plugins and taking over part of their functionality. Not playing well with others, IMHO.
Thanks again, TD, for pointing it out.
Upgrading from Vista to XP? Isn’t that…backwards?
Check out the link, Joseph. It’s a satire — but like much humor, it contains a strong dose of truth.
Thanks, I shall definitely do so. (:
I got around to reading up a bit on the Shelley Powers vs. Michael Arrington thing, and even commented on the Lane Hartwell situation that started it all.
What I’ve found is that Arrington is apparently a wanker, but that he may not have been 100% wrong. Perhaps Powers wasn’t taking Hartwell’s side just because she’s a woman, but Powers certainly hasn’t passed up this opportunity to turn her little dust-up with Arrington into a “downtrodden women” issue.
In other words, Arrington may have been wrong about all the specifics of this case, but he may not have been entirely wrong about Powers being a little bit of a sexist. For example:
Where the hell Powers got all that from Arrington’s accusations is beyond me. In fact, it seems almost comically designed to lend credence to what Arrington said.
So . . . they’re both wankers, and I will continue to avoid reading either one very much.
I think it was this comment, apotheon:
Arrington writes off Shelley’s support as being only because Hartwell is a woman. I know for a fact that Shelley hasn’t always sided only with women on an issue. Take for example the “mean kids” incident, where Shelley was one who called for restraint when the rabid mob wanted to burn those who created a forum in which Kathy Sierra was threatened.
I don’t doubt that Shelley Powers sometimes makes the right call. Even a stopped (analog 12-hour) clock is right two times a day. The way she has succumbed to the urge to turn the current situation into The Plight Of Women Bloggers, however, is kind of absurd. Did you see the title of that post of hers to which you linked with the word “personally”?
I find it very difficult to take her seriously after reading that.
Of course, if that one post were the only reason I’d found to avoid reading what she has to say, I’d give her another chance — but, frankly, I haven’t been impressed enough in general to give me an reasons to give her the benefit of the doubt.
YMMV
My mileage does vary. Without being a conspiracy theorist, I do believe that we men often discount what women say, often without meaning to.
Have you read Douglas Hofstadter’s satire A Person Paper on Purity in Language? Rather than having different pronouns for male and female, he uses them to differentiate between white and black people. The first time I read it, I got angry. But it’s lesson has stayed with me ever since.
I personally tend to ignore gender until I find myself faced with obvious, unavoidable evidence, or until I find myself trying to decide whether to call someone “he” or “she” — and I sometimes revert back to ignoring (read: “forgetting”) gender afterwards, too — when dealing with people I only know as text.
I have a tendency to discount what people say, when it’s clearly absurd, regardless of gender. I’m sure I’ve done so with men far more than with women.
Maybe I’m just a statistical outlier, but often my tendency is to be surprised at discovering someone I’ve been disagreeing with vociferously, online, is a female. I know for a fact that many men are more likely to agree with a woman than a man, all else being equal, too.
While it may be true that the statistical trend is toward dismissiveness from men toward women online, I don’t think anyone has made a good case for it, especially considering that those who support such a hypothesis probably, in most cases, suffer from confirmation bias. I think that’s the problem I have with Shelley Powers — she strikes me as someone who suffers from confirmation bias in this regard (and my belief on the matter has nothing to do with her gender).
As for Hofstadter’s essay, it suffers from one critical flaw: There’s no racial equivalent to the neuter male pronoun in answer to the lack of a truly neuter personal pronoun in the English language, just as there’s no racial equivalent to the use of “man” to refer to the species itself. These are limitations of the English language as it currently exists — not a case of necessarily gender biased linguistic structure.
Pronouns do not differentiate by race. They do differentiate by gender. Because “it” is a culturally unacceptable pronoun for reference to a human being (in the common case), we find ourselves using a traditional, neuter-context gender-specific pronoun in the generic case (“he”), using a clumsy construction like “he or she”, or sounding like idiots who cannot differentiate between “example” and “generic reference”.
Another, perhaps trivial, point of departure between the two is in the fact that “woman” contains the term “man”. Perhaps the answer, then, is not to eliminate the term “man” as it is often used (manhole cover, chairman, manhandle), but to alter the gender-specific term to etymologically better match the term “woman”. Since the indo-european root of “wife” (“wib”), which is in turn the root of the “wo-” part of “woman”, meant something like “veil”, perhaps men should now be called “toman”, pronounced something like “tumman” the same way “woman” is pronounced “wumman”. The “to-” part of “toman” would similarly be derived from “tie” — as in “bowtie”.
. . . or we could go back to using the term “wife” to mean “woman” in general, and use “husband” to mean “man” in general.
. . . or we could just continue using neuter male pronouns and neuter “man” as we have, because the English language doesn’t provide reasonable alternatives and we aren’t likely to make the language change by decreeing that it should be so.
Anyway . . .
Perhaps, if the words “race” and “ethnicity” did not exist, and if pronouns in the English language specified race as well as gender, Hofstadter would have a point. In the absence of either of those conditions, however, I don’t see it.
I’d personally prefer we just use “it” as our neuter pronoun, but people keep objecting when I do that. That ridiculous concoction, “hir”, just ends up sounding like “her” in conversation, and is thus pretty well unacceptable in practice — the last thing we need is another homonym as our “solution”, particularly when it can so much more easily lead to confusion than many other homonyms. People have enough difficulty figuring out the difference between “to” and “too”, without having to deal with homonyms that cannot always be sorted out by context.
I’m also inclined to prefer elided gender-specific constructs, such as replacing “chairman” with “chair”, rather than replacing gender-specific constructs with far clumsier gender-neutral constructs like “chairperson”. I’m a little mystified as to a “good” answer to the “manhole” problem, though. Even the traditional term sounds dirty and wrong, though, so I don’t think that’s a problem of neutering the term so much as a problem of the term itself sucking.
Woah. I’ve really rambled on a bit, here. Anyway, I don’t think the language itself is “sexist” so much as operating under the weight of an unfortunate kludge. Unless and until we replace that kludge with something better, though, we should probably keep using what we’ve got. It is changing, gradually, and in good ways. The recommendations made by extremist language reformers are not, thank goodness, catching on much — with the exception of that idiotic tendency to fail to differentiate between examples and generic references (using “she” where a neuter “he” would imply generic reference just makes it sound like you’ve forgotten to edit your writing to account for a specific example in most cases). We don’t see “hir” and “personhole cover” in general use. “Chairperson” is unfortunately being used a fair but, but in my experience it seems less common (and to have less probable longevity) than the simple term “chair” (e.g. “the chair called our meeting to order”).
One needn’t shoot the language in the head to solve the problem of an old kludge.
That’s an interesting observation that “man” can be taken as neuter, if we allow that the language lacks a masculine form of the word. I think in terms of the development of the language, it comes from a time when every noun had gender, and since most business involved only males, people in general were considered male, and the female terms were used only to specifically indicate that women were under discussion.
As far as connotation goes, we modern readers and speakers do associate “man” with the male. I don’t mind using “human” for the neuter instead (even though it does contain “man”, it’s incidental — they’re from different roots) Although, the root of “human” also meant either a person or a male person; but I think most people today understand “human” to be gender-nonspecific.
I’m not one to want to make radical and artificial changes to language, but I think Hofstadter’s satire raises a valid point. We would be appalled (nowadays, a couple centuries ago not so much) if our language drew distinctions between races — yet we take a gender distinction in language to be perfectly normal, and have done so for millenia. What does that say about how we view women as people?
It doesn’t say anything in particular about how we view women as people. The reason people would be appalled at language making such distinctions between races in the modern age is that there’s no uninsulting precedent for it. Meanwhile, there’s centuries or even millennia of traditional usage that makes usage of “man” a neuter generic term in many cases. If we suddenly swapped in “white” for “man”, it would be the lack of history that makes it unacceptable.
. . . or do you contend that everyone that says “bondsman” intends, even if only subconsciously, that women are inferior to men somehow?
No, I don’t think that the -man suffix is always intentionally denegrating (now there’s a good word, based on the Latin for “black”) to women, but I do believe that its repeated usage creates an image in our minds of that role being typically played by a man, and only exceptionally by a woman.
BTW, I never answered your question about the title Shelley used for her second post. Not many people still remember the John Lennon song whose title she borrowed and modified.
Oh, and . . .
Claiming Shelley takes the side of a woman just because it’s a woman may be incorrect in this case. I don’t dispute that. It is not, however, necessarily evidence of The Plight Of Women Bloggers.
. . . and that was my point.
That comment at mathewingranm.com has apparently been used as the springboard for a massive straw man.
Chuckled at the wankers description, apotheon! I don’t know why that word cracks me up.
Ah aimz ta pleeze! I’m glad you enjoyed it.
Although I admit I didn’t have time to check out all your links today, I really did enjoy the best in programming profanity. I wish now that I had been brave enough to leave those kinds of comments back when I was programming. LOL. I’ve been away from programming so long now though that comments are probably the only part of code that I still understand. heh.
That was my favorite link too, teeni. Sometimes you just need a good cuss word to light up your day.
Hi, Chip! Thanks for the link to Blogging Gal!
My pleasure, Tish! Looks like you’ve got your new blog well under way.
What appears in my blogroll is fed by an OPML file generated from my feed reader, so you can bet I’ll be following your future posts (as well as I can these days).