Happy Namesday to me

May 18th is the feast day of Saint Eric, and therefore the closest thing to a namesday that I have, since there is no Saint Erika.

I was never very interested in St. Eric himself; I just liked it when my parents made me a cake for my namesday when I was a kid. Austrian heritage is good. You can get a personal cake two days of the year.

I've always liked my name, though it always has annoyed me when people spell it wrong. It's very strange, but I actually get "Erika" misspelled more often than "Hammerschmidt." I guess it's just that when people don't know how to spell "Hammerschmidt," they ask, but when they don't know how to spell "Erika," they guess. There are three common spellings of "Erika." There are no common spellings of "Hammerschmidt," since it's not a common name at all.

Another strange thing: when I studied in Mexico and Spain, nobody ever misspelled my name. This is strange because the usual misspelling I get around here is a replacement of the "K" with a "C," which is exactly what one would expect in a Spanish-speaking country, seeing that the Spanish language barely ever uses the letter "K" in any word, and always uses a "C" instead. But they didn't actually make that mistake, ever. I guess it's the same issue as with "Hammerschmidt"... the name "Erika" was so unfamiliar to them that they always asked when they didn't know how to spell it.

And it turns out neither "Erika" nor "Hammerschmidt" is really that bad, relatively speaking. When I decided to marry John Ricker, I thought about taking his name, since it seemed like an easier name to spell and pronounce than "Hammerschmidt." But after knowing him a while, I started to notice that "Ricker" actually got misspelled and mispronounced way, way more often than "Hammerschmidt." Seriously. I've seen him get called Richter, Riker, Stricker, Bicker... I've never figured out what is the deal with that.

So I kept "Hammerschmidt." "Erika Ricker" would sound silly anyway.


Anyway, in honor of my namesday, here is a song from the poetry page on my website:


Oh, beautiful for E and R,
for I and K and A,
Oh, beautiful for all of these,
Especially the K!
I'm Erika, I'm Erika,
God shed his grace on me,
But not on those who write my name
And spell it with a C!

New book is out!

I've been dead to the blogosphere for a while, because many things have been happening... but one of them is that the new edition of my book has come out from AAPC! This means you can buy it from their site, and you do not have to buy one of the secondhand older editions that are being sold exorbitantly on Amazon. (Man, the laws of supply and demand can do some crazy things.)

I mean, you still can buy it there, if you think having a first or second edition is a good investment in case I get so famous that my early books become collectors' items. But personally, I doubt my early editions will ever get up to $70 again. (Plus, I'm pretty sure that if you buy off that Amazon listing, you will not know whether you are getting the first or second of my early editions. It says "second edition," but probably some of the people who put their books up for sale there did not know if they had a second or first edition, since the two look exactly alike and the only way to tell the difference is the presence of one new chapter in the second edition.)

Anyway, this latest edition from AAPC is very different from the two editions printed by my old publisher. The first of my old publisher's editions was 121 pages, the second was 123. AAPC's edition is 198 pages. I've added several new chapters: some about things that happened since the first printing, like my semesters abroad, my job and my marriage; some about earlier things I hadn't gone into before, like the series of semi-boyfriends I had in junior high school; and some about ideas and insights regarding the autism spectrum, like how extreme honesty in autistics is mistaken for pathological lying, and whether the Sally-Anne test really works.

Anyway, feel free to go check it out, and have a great Spring.

Random link of the week

The Rice Ball Page is a delightful combination of broken English and hideous web design. I highly recommend it. And yes, it even has some useful information about rice balls, though that's not the main attraction.

In other news, my comic Abby and Norma got a bit of an overhaul a while back. I think it looks quite nice now.

double pterodactyls

"Higgledy Piggledy, My Black Hen" isn't really a Higgledy Piggledy-- but shouldn't it be? Here's my attempt to make it one.


Higgledy piggledy,
Gallus domesticus,
Feathered in ebony
blackness intense,

Hastens to ovulate
(Oft decatuply) for
Aristocratically
Pedigreed gents.

A segue into humility

My pride as a language major has just been dealt a crippling blow. I've suffered a defeat at the hands of the word "segue."

I spelled it wrong, and my husband, who has only the most basic knowledge of spelling, knew that I had spelled it wrong.

My mistake was not for lack of having encountered the word before. I had read plenty of written examples of a word that meant "transition" and was spelled "segue," and I had heard plenty of spoken examples of a word that meant "transition" and was pronounced "segway."

Yet, somehow, I had never figured out that the two were the same word.

I had assumed that the word that was pronounced "segway" was spelled "segway" (I don't think it was because of the vehicle; I think my misconception of the spelling dates back to before the vehicle existed). And I assumed that the word that was spelled "segue" would be pronounced "seg," or "seeg," or "sayg."

The latter was because, to my knowledge, all words in the English language that end in "gue" pronounced it as a simple hard G. Spanish and French, two languages from which English has gotten many words, follow the same rule. Up until then I had found no exception to that rule in any language, and supposing that "segue" might be pronounced "segway" would require assuming an exception.

So my misconception was caused by my knowledge of a somewhat obscure spelling rule-- while my husband, who knows only the most basic spelling rules, had figured out the correct pronunciation of "segue" by sounding it out phonetically-- a technique that any literate fourth-grader knows you can't trust in this language.

I feel I've been punished for knowledge, and my husband has been rewarded for ignorance. I can't help but think life has been unfair to me. But I guess it just means I have to keep gaining more knowledge.

Abby and Norma Latest News!!

Abby and Norma is now on a new website, with automatic updating so that I will never, ever be late in posting a strip again! Also, there is now an Abby and Norma Merchandise Page, with various shirts, hats, mugs and bags bearing these pictures:


(inspired by strip #42)


(inspired by strip #15)


(inspired by strip #51)


(inspired by strip #39)


(inspired by strip #36)


(not inspired by any strip, just a random idea I had)


(just a simple Abby and Norma logo).

Any ideas will be welcome.

Four weeks of bad luck

I'm posting while lying on my back with the laptop on my stomach, which is a very awkward typing position, so this may not be a long post.

Week before the week before last: busy helping a friend move out of her house and clean up/recycle/ebay a basement full of computer paraphernalia that her husband left her and refused to help get rid of when he divorced her.

Week before last: busy moving our own stuff (and leftover computer crap from helping this friend) into our new townhouse.

Last week: on vacation at Lake Superior. Husband broke his leg on second day of trip. Spent most of it in cabin taking care of bedridden husband. We will be a single-income family until he recovers in 4-6 weeks.

This week: busy unboxing and putting away stuff in new townhouse, until my back gave out last night. Today we are a no-income family. Hope I can go back to work tomorrow.

You see why I have been so quiet lately?

Ah, college days... and grade school days...

I'm reminiscing about college a bit today.

I took an education class once in college, more just to pass the time than because I was interested in learning about education. But there was some interesting stuff there... some of which just made me laugh at how silly people can be.

One article talked about a project in which hundreds of children were encouraged to write poems. A couple paragraphs of it were devoted to talking about a child whose poems were "disturbing"... specifically, that he wrote about "shooting his teachers, and killing his mother and flushing her head down the toilet." He was removed from the class and put in counseling.

Now, I don't know if his teachers had ever been children. I know I was a child once, and I remember it very well, and I remember that when I was a child, at least half of the other children I knew sang some variation of a song that went:

"Joy to the world, [insert name of victim here] is dead.
What happened to her head?
I took it from her body
And flushed it down the potty
And around and around it goes..."

And they also sang some variation of a song that went:

"On top of spaghetti, all covered with cheese,
I shot my poor teacher with a 40 MC
Thirty years later he rose from the dead
And I took my bazooka and blew off his head."

I strongly suspect that the poems written by the boy in the article were these ones, or something like them, and that the reason he wrote them was because he had heard them from other children. So he shouldn't have gotten in trouble for "disturbing writing"-- he should have gotten in trouble for freaking plagiarism.

Not that I approve of those songs, mind you. They're so unrealistic. You can't flush someone's head down a toilet. The only toilets that a human head would fit down are outhouses and porta-potties, and those don't flush.

But I digress...

long essay on random topic

There's a lot of talk about how many of our personality traits come from genes, and there's a lot of dispute over it, especially when the question comes up of whether, and how strongly, any of these traits are connected to gender or race. Basically, I believe that many of our behaviors are genetic-- but also that many people take the idea of genetic traits too far, and that we have to recognize the dangers that come with this kind of thought.

First of all, I do believe that many of the personality traits we associate with gender are genetic, and that there is a basic tendency for these traits to follow the genders we expect them to follow. After all, practically every animal species that has genders exhibits behavior differences between them-- differences that often resemble the gender differences we see in humans-- and nobody doubts that they are genetic when found in animals. We share over half our genes with most animals; why should we think that we're the only species that doesn't have any inherent instincts (or at least any that tend to follow the gender lines)?

However-- and this is a big "however"-- we must be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking that such genetic traits always, or even almost always, follow the gender lines. They do not. They are tendencies, no more. Within the human species there is enormous variation in what instincts we experience, and also in whether we choose to act on our instincts. For any generalization describing human behavior, there are so many exceptions that the rule is barely any use.

When I was little, I was obsessed with frilly dresses, princesses, ballerinas and jewelry, and my brother was obsessed with cars, tanks, submarines, airplanes and guns. No one knew where this came from. Our parents had made an enormous effort to raise both of us in a gender-neutral environment, encouraging both of us equally to play with traditionally "feminine" toys, traditionally "masculine" toys, and gender-neutral toys. We couldn't have learned traditional gender roles from our parents' example; they were as far from the traditional gender roles as any parents can be. We had barely any friends, and mostly avoided our peers; I doubt we learned anything from them. We were isolated from almost everything outside the family. We didn't even watch TV. And at that age, we saw our mother as the ultimate authority on everything, and she said gender didn't matter, so we wouldn't have listened to anyone who said otherwise.

And yet, somehow, we had developed stereotypical masculine and feminine interests. The only explanation seems to be that it was an inherent instinct.

Yet it's also clear that such inherent instincts do not always appear in the genders they're expected from. At the same time that I was obsessed with princesses and ballerinas, I also played with worms and centipedes in the backyard. At the same time that he was fascinated with war machines, my brother also devotedly loved kittens and puppies.

And of course, time and time again throughout history, a mother has brought her daughter up with nothing but dolls and tea sets to play with, forbidden her to associate with anyone who went against gender expectations, and still found the girl becoming a "tomboy," developing interests in traditionally masculine activities. Such a girl's interests must be genetic-- there's no place else they could come from-- and yet they do not follow our expectations of where such a genetic instinct would appear.

There are similar issues with race. I believe it is quite possible that there are some genetic behavioral tendencies associated with race-- after all, evolution has caused different races to have many different physical characteristics depending on what is useful for survival in the environment where each race originally developed. It's not too much of a stretch beyond that to suppose that we might also have evolved different genetic leanings toward behaviors that were beneficial in our ancestors' original habitats.

However, this idea poses the same dangers as the thought of gender-related genetic tendencies. First, it sometimes leads people to believe that some races are genetically "inferior" to others. Obviously, this is not true. There would never have been any reason for a race to evolve a behavior that was inherently harmful. The only traits that could have been evolved are ones that are helpful in certain environments.

For instance, it's been shown that members of cultures that live in cold climates tend to be more introverted, while members of cultures that live in warm climates tend to be more extroverted. It's quite possible that this is just cultural, but I also wouldn't be surprised if there were some genetic factor. After all, the ability to enjoy being alone is very useful in an environment where snow and cold may often prevent you from going out and spending time with people... while the ability to enjoy other people's company is useful in an environment where warm weather brings everyone outside most of the time.

In contrast, I do not believe that there is anything genetic behind the fact that some races in the United States have higher crime rates than others. There would be no reason to evolve a tendency toward crime. The most likely explanation is that such tendencies come from the economic situations that some races are forced into.

And again, as in the case of gender, it is dangerous to start making assumptions about people based on the idea that there are genetic behavior traits linked to race. It is possible that there are such links, but if so, they are weak links; remember that we haven't even found proof of them yet. And even the most reliable generalizations about human beings have enough exceptions to get you in trouble if you use them as your basis for understanding people.

Using generalizations may increase your chances of guessing correctly about people's personalities, but it's better not to guess at all. There will always be times when your generalizations will cause you to guess wrong and offend someone, and those times will cause a lot more problems than the times when you start out with no assumption at all.

For instance, I would be very upset if everybody looked at me and said, "She's a woman, therefore she probably has a strong maternal instinct-- let's all ask her to baby-sit our kids." They would be wrong. Most women (and most men, for that matter) do have some parental feelings, but I'm different. I panic if I have to look after a child, and I'd be offended if people assumed otherwise just because of my gender. Similarly, I'd be very upset if people looked at me and said, "She's part Norwegian, and Norway is a cold place; therefore she's probably a loner. She'll be happier if we all avoid her and don't talk to her." I am introverted, but that doesn't mean I want everyone to ignore me... and I certainly don't want anyone to make assumptions about me based on my ethnicity.

So, the conclusion I've come to is that each race or gender may carry a somewhat increased likelihood of having certain genetic behavior traits, but even if that's true, it's irrelevant to the question of what's the moral way to treat people. Such traits, if they exist, are not universal or even close to universal within the given gender or race. The best thing we can do for society is to act as if there were no connection between behavior traits and race or gender... and simply avoid making assumptions about people until we get to know them.

Domain name etc.

I know I haven't been posting on this blog every week as I said I would-- that's partly because I'm reconsidering whether some of the things I was going to post are too controversial, and also whether they may be boring.

In any case, I'd like to announce that I've bought the domain name www.abbyandnorma.com, which now redirects to my comic page. The comic is getting more and more hits, and I wanted to be sure I got that domain before anyone else did.

Which may mean I'm smarter than the government, which didn't even think of buying the domain names "whitehouse.com" and "whitehouse.org" until they'd already been bought by a porn site and an anti-Bush parody site.

This is why I don't trust any decisions the government makes regarding computers. Every government is made up mainly of old men who have spent their whole lives in careers almost completely unrelated to technology-- so expecting them to be tech-savvy is expecting too much.

What. The.

Someone just found my website by searching for "how to fix baby's pointy ear."

Obviously without the quotes, because that sentence is not on my website. I may have used the words "how to," "fix" and "baby" a few times, but my only reference to pointy ears was about a costume piece I made that you can wear in order to look as if you have pointy ears.

So, fat lot of help they got for Poor Pointy-Eared Baby. I hope they buy one of my pointy ear headbands. That'll at least make Baby look like he has two MATCHING pointy ears.

I'm safe

Those of you who know that I live in Minneapolis, don't worry about me. We were on our way home when the Mississippi River bridge fell down, but we weren't on that route, although it was one of the routes we could have taken. (When the collapse happened, there were workers on the bridge repairing the surface, and some other construction going on nearby... and we try to avoid routes that are under construction, because of the traffic.)

For what it's worth, we don't think it was sabotage. My husband, who's into physics and chemistry, thinks that it could've been caused by a malfunction of the heater that they were using in repairing the bridge surface... and the reason it collapsed during rush hour instead of some quieter time is probably because of all the extra weight of cars on the bridge.

Abby and Norma's first mention on *someone else's website*!

I'm all excited today because I found out that Abby and Norma was mentioned on ITworld.com! In fact, it was the Geek Comic of the Week! Still is, as of the time of this writing. Awesome! I had put a few Project Wonderful ads for it on Dinosaur Comics and Dr. McNinja... and I guess the publicity is paying off.

By the way, I highly recommend Project Wonderful to any ordinary person trying to get visitors to a website. I got three days of ads on Dinosaur Comics and one day of ads on Dr. McNinja for less than ten dollars. The genius of their system is that they charge by the day, not by clicks or page impressions, so you can't get screwed by someone who decides to click on your ad eighty times. If you've decided you don't want to get charged more than ten bucks, you won't get charged more than ten bucks. (Not so great if you're the person selling ad space... but actually, in my case, it would be better than Google Ads, which have gotten me only 5 clicks and $3.34 in the several months and thousands of page views that they've been on my website.)

No faith in the existence of faith

If "faith" is defined as "believing something without evidence," then there is no such thing as faith.

Now, when I say "evidence," I don't mean "absolute proof." It's impossible to have absolute proof of anything. Even if you see something with your own eyes, you could just be hallucinating. Even if the answer to a mathematical problem makes perfect sense to you, that might be because of some deformity in your brain. There are plenty of things that can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but there is nothing that can be proven beyond all doubt.

So if someone says that we don't have absolute proof of the theory of evolution, for example... well, that's technically true, but meaningless, since we also don't have absolute proof that there are any planets besides Earth, or that light comes from the sun, or that fairies don't exist.

It's pointless to define evidence as absolute proof. The most that evidence can be is "a piece of information that convinces you that something is likely to be true." And nobody can believe something without any evidence at all. It's just that some people need more evidence than others.

For example, I believe that evolution happened-- because there is a lot of scientific evidence that convinces me that evolution is more likely than the alternative (since the alternative is either "Thousands of scientists are conspiring to fake their results" or "God faked all the fossil evidence just to mess with our minds.")

But some people hold their beliefs based on lines of reasoning like the following:

A) "My parents taught this to me, and I believe my parents are always right about things like this, therefore I will believe it."

Or:

B) "I believe that God is good, and I like X and dislike Y, therefore I believe that God also likes X and dislikes Y, because otherwise God wouldn't be good in my opinion."

Most religious beliefs are held based on these two logical processes. They are not very strong lines of reasoning, but they are also not faith. They are evidence, in the sense of "a piece of information that convinces a person that something is likely to be true." Starting with pieces of information like "My parents believe this" or "God is good and I think that these things are good," people draw a line of logical reasoning and reach a religious belief.

The reason it's impossible to have blind faith is because there are thousands of religions in the world. If people could have faith in a religion without any concrete proof or logical argument in favor of it, then they would believe every religion that exists... and since religions contradict each other, this would necessitate a lot of doublethink.

So it doesn't happen that way. In reality, people believe in their religions either because they've been brought up in those religions, or because the teachings of those religions make sense to them... in other words, arguments A and B as described above.

Which are a form of evidence, as I've shown. So it makes no sense for a proselytizer to tell me that I just need to have faith and believe what he says without evidence of any kind. A dozen other proselytizers for different religions are telling me the same thing-- so if I didn't need any evidence in order to believe something, then how could I choose which one to listen to? Obviously, when multiple people are trying to convince me of different things, I have to choose who to believe based on who has the best evidence. And right now, the theory of evolution has the best evidence for me.

My mind to your mind... *cuts your head open*

Is Sylar really going to be Spock?

I'm not sure how I feel about this.

There's always a reason... but not in real life

Have you ever noticed that everything always happens for a reason in fiction?

I don't mean that everything has a cause, or that everything is connected to everything else in small, hard-to-detect ways-- those things are true in real life, too. What I mean is that whenever something, no matter how small, happens in a work of fiction, it always seems to be connected to the main events of the story in an important, "meaningful" way.

For example, if a fictional character has a slip of the tongue, saying something other than what he or she meant to say, it can mean one of three things:

1. It's a Freudian slip, and it gives us a glimpse into what was on the character's mind.

Or:

2. It shows that the character is nervous or stressed, and therefore making mistakes in speech because of distraction.

Or:

3. It's part of character development, indicating that the character is "the type of person" who would make such a mistake-- which, in stories, always seems to mean a clumsy, bumbling type of character.

Of course, in real life, we frequently see dexterous, alert individuals in relaxed, non-stressful situations having little slips of the tongue that cannot possibly be interpreted as windows into their psyches. But those mistakes are completely irrelevant to the "important" events of these people's lives-- and so, if the events of their lives were made into a fictionalized story, those slips of the tongue would undoubtedly be left out. Everything in a novel or short story has to be relevant to the plot, or else readers start asking, "Why is this even in here?"

This is one of the things that annoy me about fiction. In real life, not every tiny little event is relevant to the things we consider important. Connected, yes, in some tiny way-- but not connected in the overt ways we always seem to see in fiction. Which means that fiction-- or at least the vast majority of fiction-- is unrealistic.

I'm guilty of doing this in my own fiction, too, if only because I'm afraid of readers getting confused about why I put some particular detail into the story. There always has to be a "why." If any author ever wrote a realistic story-- a story in which at least 70% of the events were unrelated to the plot in any vital way-- people would not understand it. They would look at 70% of the paragraphs and ask, "Why is this even here? It's not relevant." In fact, the same would happen with a story where only 10% of the paragraphs were irrelevant. If there's even one sentence in a story that's not connected to the plot, then someone, somewhere, is going to criticize it.

So all the characters have to speak perfectly, unless they are nervous, clumsy, or thinking about another subject. No sight, sound or event can be described unless it is useful in building character, setting or plot. How can people say that this is the right way to write a story, and yet still say that fiction should be realistic?

The insane conversations that my brain has with itself...

"Hi, my name is Roe. I am a salmon egg."
"Hi. My name is Wade. I am a guy wading into the water to take you out and cook you and eat you."
"But I don't want to be eaten! I want to hatch into a salmon and grow up."
"Sorry, that's not your choice. Life begins at hatching, it doesn't begin at spawning. Right now, it's your mother's choice."
"But my mother is dead. All salmon die right after they spawn."
"Oh. Well, then, I believe that this situation does not fall under the legislation established by the Supreme Court."
"Then this conversation has been meaningless. We have not reached any conclusion on any controversial topic. We have only established that salmon are different from humans."
"Well, then I guess it also pointless for me to eat you. Goodbye, Roe."
"Goodbye, Wade."

... goodbye, sanity...

Spiders on potatoes are better than fruit flies

Sorry that Abby and Norma is late today. I was out late last night and had to work early this morning.

There is a Spider-Man/Mr. Potato Head crossover toy called Spider Spud. I am not even kidding. He shoots webs... what are they, a mutant version of those white tendrils that potatoes send out when you leave them in the drawer too long? And who does he fight? Doctor Okra and the Green Gherkin? Nobody knows. There is no comic book, no story, not even the usual plethora of accessories... just the potato and the web.

I got heat stroke today on the way home. Didn't pass out or anything, but I started feeling very sleepy as I approached my apartment building. Once inside, I drank ice water and put a cold cloth over my head, and now I'm a little shivery, but awake.

We bought Guitar Hero! It's bizarre that I enjoy it, seeing that I'm usually rather indifferent to both music and video games-- but I really do enjoy it. I guess there's no accounting for taste, even one's own.

IKEA bot again

I've managed to get my IKEA bot video to upload to YouTube with a better screencap picture showing up in Youtube search results. You basically just have to make sure the frame you want them to use is right in the middle of your video.

I improved a few other things too, but basically it's the same.

Random robotic reflections

Have you heard of the "Uncanny Valley"? It's a theory about people's reactions to robots. People can't relate to robots if they look nothing like humans, and we find them cute if they look slightly like humans... but the closer they get to looking exactly like humans, the more disturbing they will seem. They stop seeming like cartoonish representations of people, and start seeming like very strange-looking, creepy real people. It's a "valley" because we can theoretically come back out of it on the other side, when we get good enough at making humanoid robots that they can't be distinguished from humans at all.

I personally apply the same theory to animals. Humans tend to find animals very unattractive if they look completely and utterly unlike humans (for example, centipedes and worms and squids). We begin to find animals attractive when they look a little more like us (lions, gazelles, eagles). We admire their beauty, and compare beautiful people to them. Yet when animals get too close to looking like humans (monkeys, chimpanzees, gorillas) we suddenly don't find them beautiful at all.

However, there is one important difference: Animals that look very much like humans do not disturb us in the same way as robots that look very much like humans. Most people do not get "creeped out" when they see a monkey or ape. We have a certain affection for them, even though we would never look at our spouses and say "You're so beautiful, you look like a gorilla." We might very well look at our children and say "You're so cute, you look like a monkey." The difference between "cute" and "beautiful" is important here; we might compare a monkey to a child, someone toward whom we feel parental affection-- but we do not compare it to someone with whom we could be "in love." This may be because monkeys and apes remind us of human children instead of human adults, with their more playful and simple nature.

And speaking of children, this is where I first found out about the "Uncanny Valley." It is graphic proof that a robot that looks like a human child is definitely not endearing in the same way as an animal that looks like a human child. Prepare to be creeped out.