Star light, star bright

I found it on the way to work a few days ago. A turquoise blue stretchy adjustable strap, with a flashy thing on it. The flashy thing is yellow, octagonal, and faceted sort of like a really cheap toy jewel.

It has a button on the back. Push the button once, and two lights inside it flash alternately. Push it twice, and both lights flash together. Push it three times, and both lights stay on and don't flash. Push it a fourth time and it turns off.

When it's on my head, or around my neck (the adjustable strap allows for either) I look like some alien babe in Star Trek. (The Original Series, of course.)

When it's over my eye, I look like some android or cyborg alien babe in Star Trek. (Still the Original Series. Back then, they were on such a low budget that something like this item might very well have been used as a costume accessory. In multiple episodes. For multiple types of alien babes. With only minor alterations. Like wearing it on the neck instead of the head.)

Wearing it drives my husband absolutely crazy. He says it is the dumbest-looking thing he has ever seen. It's become a game between us. I put it on and see how long it takes him to look up from his video game and notice. Eventually, he notices, and grabs it off my head and throws it across the room. I try to sneak over to where it is and put it back on before he notices.

*dies laughing*

Now, nothing can be done by machines

For some reason, today I've been thinking about a story one of my teachers told me once. Some young relative of his had wanted to participate in an Invention Fair, but couldn't think of a real invention, so he just put a name card next to an empty space, with "Invisible Nothing Machine" written on the card.

I can just imagine his conversation with the judges:

"What's that?"
"It's an Invisible Nothing Machine."
"What's it made out of?"
"It's made out of nothing."
"What does it do?"
"It does nothing."
"Why would we need a machine that's made out of nothing and does nothing?"
"It saves a lot of time and money. Building it requires no resources and no work, and once it's built, it saves humans from having to do nothing all by themselves."
"Hmm. He's got a point. If we had a machine to do nothing for us, we could spend more time doing something. It would greatly boost our overall productivity as a species."
"I say we give him a prize."

According to my teacher, the kid actually did get a prize. An Honorable Mention or something. I suppose that says something about the world, but I'm not sure what.

Don't ask, don't tell... doesn't work

Okay, so now the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy is coming back into the public eye. Frankly, it has always annoyed me. Clinton had some good ideas, but this was not one of them. And I think that kind of policy is useless not only in the military, but also in all the other places it's put into practice.

There are various possible kinds of "don't ask, don't tell" policies... including the one that is commonly used for interviewing anyone for any job. Of course, depending on the company, this policy may or may not apply to sexual orientation, but it generally does apply to such things as ethnicity, religion, marital status and disability. Questions on such subjects are referred to as "illegal" questions, but interviewers are not technically prohibited from asking them; they are just prohibited from requiring the applicant to answer them.

On the one hand, I can see why the law tries to keep interviewers from finding out things that might cause them to discriminate against the applicant. If you want to prevent discrimination, it's not enough just to prohibit choosing applicants based on religion, ethnicity, disability, etc. For instance, if a company refuses to hire a certain applicant who is known to have a disability, there is absolutely no way to prove that they did it because of the disability. You can't prove why people did something, because that information exists only in those people's heads... and sometimes it's buried pretty deep in there. They may even have convinced themselves they're doing it for an acceptable reason. There is only one way to make sure people don't discriminate against you: Make sure they never find out that you have any traits they might discriminate against.

But sometimes that's impossible. If an applicant refuses to answer an "illegal" question, it will pretty much always be assumed that the answer is something the interviewer doesn't want to hear, and that will be taken into account when deciding whether to hire the applicant. Obviously, the system doesn't work.

One could make it a little stricter, so that interviewers could actually be punished for asking such questions-- but that still wouldn't be foolproof, because lots of applicants wouldn't even know that the questions were illegal, and if one of them did decide to charge the interviewer with asking an illegal question, it would be very difficult to prove him guilty. And, of course, if the interviewer broke the rule and asked the question, an applicant who replied "You aren't supposed to ask that" would still be assumed to be gay, disabled, of an unwanted religion, or whatever the question was about.

One could try to deal with this problem by penalizing both "asking" and "telling"... not only making it punishable for the interviewer to ask the question, but also making it punishable for the applicant to reply either yes or no. The only advantage of this: if the applicant refused to answer the question, it could be seen as an attempt to avoid committing a crime, instead of an admission that the answer would be unattractive to the interviewer.

But it would create a lot more problems. Applicants would have to be constantly on guard to avoid mentioning anything that could give the answer away, even if it were not an unattractive answer. For example, if such a policy were used in the military, a male applicant who happened to mention his wife or girlfriend at any point in the selection process would essentially be stating that he was not gay, thus violating the rule against "telling," and earning whatever punishment the law provided for that offense.

The only conclusion I can come to is that it's impossible for any kind of "don't ask, don't tell" policy to work worth crap. That's why so many people can't get hired for any job-- because there's no even remotely workable way to prevent discrimination. And it's especially impossible for it to work the way it's set up in the military, where the law requires discriminating against any applicant who gives the unwanted answer.

No more Orson Scott Card

I once read a diatribe against gay marriage by the celebrated science fiction writer Orson Scott Card-- a diatribe that had a lot of big words and fancy language, trying to look intelligent, but had no real arguments. Assertions that children needed both a mother and a father, but no real explanation why.

And one overly literal interpretation of the law: "Gays already have equal marriage rights. Just like heterosexuals, they have the right to marry someone of the opposite sex." (Well, if we're going to be that sophomoric, we can even go a little further and say that men and women don't currently have equal marriage rights: unlike men, women have the right to marry men, and unlike women, men have the right to marry women. How unfair.)

But I was still able to read and enjoy his work, for the same reason I can enjoy Tom Cruise movies despite disagreeing wholeheartedly with his religious beliefs. The man does not equal the actor, and the man does not always equal the author, either. I enjoyed Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, Ender's Shadow, and Shadow of the Hegemon.

Sure, he had some scattered references to "every living creature's natural desire to reproduce," and I would balk for a moment at his apparent assertion that I wasn't a living creature, but then I would ignore it and read on.

But when I got to Shadow Puppets, I drew the line.


(Spoilers beyond this point.)


Bean, the main character, because of a very disadvantageous genetic condition, has decided not to have children. His friend Petra wants to have his children, and she keeps pestering him about it.

Then, at one point, they meet a man who "has no desire for women." It is not 100% clear whether he is gay or just not interested in love and sex at all. But he clearly serves as a mouthpiece for the author.

He claims he is about to get married to a woman who already has some children of her own, and spend the rest of his life living with her and raising her children, despite having no desire for her.

And he gives them this long lecture about how the only way to feel truly fulfilled in life is to raise children together with a member of the opposite sex. They don't have to be your own children, and you don't even have to like this member of the opposite sex-- but raising children with a member of the opposite sex is the instinct that's programmed into every living creature, so if you don't do it one way or another, then you won't feel that your life was worth living.

And this convinces Bean; he gets all weepy and realizes deep in his heart that this man is right. That's where I stopped reading.

When I had read Orson Scott Card's essay on gay marriage, I had taken his comment about equal marriage rights as an over-literal interpretation of the phrase "equal rights," twisting it to fit his own views while choosing to ignore the fact that gays can't be happy being married to the opposite sex. But now I realize he's even crazier. He actually thinks gays will be happier in heterosexual marriages.

Furthermore, he thinks I am incapable of being happy in my own lifestyle-- a heterosexual marriage with no children. Never mind the fact that I panic, curl up in a ball with my hands over my ears, and rock like the stereotypical autistic, if I spend more than fifteen minutes trying to be in a position of control over a child. Never mind that screaming babies and whining toddlers make me want to physically smash something if I even overhear them in the supermarket. He actually thinks I would be happier if I were raising kids.

No more. I'm not reading his books any more. That's it.

%$@#! new Starfleet Academy movie thing

Don't mind the following, I'm just ranting about the makers of Star Trek and their evident inability to let anything rest in peace.

(To the tune of Beautiful Wreck.)

All you newer Treks, I've given up on you,
'Cause I like the original Trek, I do.
Of all of those shows set in the Milky Way
TOS, you're the one I wish could have stayed.

You're the one that's least sub-par
What a beautiful Trek you are
Flying star to star,
Beautiful Trek you are.

They go crazy every seven years, you know
And so every seven years they make a new Trek show.
Except for TOS, 'cause you just got three,
Which is sad, 'cause you're still the best Trek to me.

I’m still sitting here waiting by my TV set
But there's been nothing good yet
But there's been nothing good yet

You've got Spock pon farr
What a beautiful Trek you are
You've got Kolinahr
Beautiful Trek you are.
What a beautiful, such a beautiful
A beautiful Trek you are.

All you newer Treks, I've given up on you,
'Cause I like the original Trek, I do.
Yeah, I like the original Trek, I do.
I like the original Trek, I do.

Yeah, you've got T'Lar
What a beautiful Trek you are

But not Tasha Yar
And not Selar
But what a beautiful Trek you are.

What a beautiful, such a beautiful,
Beautiful Trek you are.
What a beautiful, such a beautiful,
Beautiful Trek you are.