titles aren’t descriptions

I recently came across a blog entry that claims the ACLU hates Christians and loves Muslims, of course written by the type of fundamentalist Christian who thinks Harry Potter will lead children to getting involved with magic and demons. It’s mainly just a list references to articles and other blog entries that agree with his position.

The first reference I looked at mentioned a federal lawsuit against a school district that was interesting enough to look into. But I soon became more interested in tracking down the ridiculous chain of references that never really lead to a reliable original source.

Here’s the deal: A personal blog cites another personal blog which cites an article on StopTheACLU.com which cites another article on StopTheACLU.com which cites an article on WorldNetDaily which cites six other articles on WorldNetDaily all about the same lawsuit. Each article on WorldNetDaily adds to the story, making it slightly more sensational each time. (The WorldNetDaily produces such fine articles as Soy is making kids ‘gay’.)

The original article on WorldNetDaily, upon which the others were based, refers only to “ASSIST News Service”. But it doesn’t actually link to the ASSIST article, and it doesn’t even link to the homepage of ASSIST News Service. Instead, it links to the homepage of ASSIST Ministries, which in turn links to the ASSIST News Service. There, you can find this article which only refers to the homepage of the law firm which brought the case. A federal case against a school, and ASSIST couldn’t find anything about it on the internet to link to other than the firm which brought the case?

I bet many writers excuse idirect sources by claiming they’re being polite by giving credit to the people who got the information to them. But if that were really true, they would simply include the indirect source along with the original source. But they don’t do that.

Looking around for more information about this case, I learned that other sources weren’t much better. Even the BBC article on the lawsuit only links to the website of the school district. None of the articles discussing this case give a case number or anything else which could be used to learn more about the case.

Many articles, essays, and blog entries are this way. Most writers are too lazy to find good references, even when it’s obvious they should exist. (e.g. a federal lawsuit should be listed on a government website) It’s a sad state of affairs. (Not that I’m any better.)

I’ve heard several times that Wal-Mart is an awful place, and I’ve never understood why anybody would think that. Their selection is huge, their prices are low, their parking lots always has plenty of free room, and there’s a Wal-Mart in almost every town with a reasonable population.

Usually when you ask someone why they hate Wal-Mart, they can’t really say much. I usually hear something lame about their stores taking up too much space, or traffic congestion, or low wages. None of that sways me at all.

But recently I noticed a huge difference between Wal-Mart and other stores: Wal-Mart employees are sad. Most of them act like they’re longing for death. It’s really quite depressing once you’ve noticed it.

It’s amazing to see employees at other stores, like Target and Albertsons, that actually seem somewhat happy. Sure they’re not constantly overjoyed to be working there, but they seem to be satisfied with life. They don’t behave like zombies.

I’m still against attempts to prevent Wal-Mart from setting up stores and competing with others. If a Wal-Mart is built and is successful, people want it there. It wouldn’t get enough business to justify staying open if people didn’t. Rather than trying to stop Wal-Mart with legislation, people who dislike it should just prefer alternatives, and explain to others why they prefer to shop elsewhere.

Of course, there’s a trillion things a million times worse than shopping at a Wal-Mart. It’s just that when I have an easy alternative, I would prefer to go with the alternative.

Why do we describe our sexual orientation in terms of our sex/gender? Most monosexuals, when describing their sexual orientation, would say they are straight, gay, or lesbian, instead of just saying which sex/gender they are attracted to. Does that not seem strange to you?

Imagine if we described colors in terms of our skin color. People with light skin might describe white as “homocolor” and black as “heterocolor”. People with dark skin might similarly describe white as “heterocolor” and black as “homocolor”.

Would that make any sense? Not to me. The colors black and white don’t change depending on who is describing them. Why then should a male and a female, who are both attracted to males, use different terms to describe their sexual orientation? In my opinion, describing colors in terms of skin color is no more ridiculous than describing sexual orientation in terms of sex/gender.

Yet look at the way the American Psychological Association describes sexual orientation (source):

Research over several decades has demonstrated that sexual orientation ranges along a continuum, from exclusive attraction to the other sex to exclusive attraction to the same sex. However, sexual orientation is usually discussed in terms of three categories: heterosexual […], gay/lesbian […], and bisexual […].

The Wikipedia article on sexual orientation is pretty similar:

The most common forms exists along a continuum that ranges from exclusive heterosexuality […] to exclusive homosexuality […] and includes various forms of bisexuality […].

What about someone who is physically and/or mentally between, or different from, male and female (intersexual and/or genderqueer)? Because they aren’t male or female, there is no same-sex and opposite-sex for them. Their sexual orientation cannot be described in terms of heterosexuality and homosexuality. Does their sexuality then not exist on the same continuum?

The idea of a single line is flawed, but we could at least make it less flawed. If we were to describe the continuum of sexual orientation as ranging from exclusive attraction to males to exclusive attraction to females, it would also apply to people with many unusual sexes and genders that it currently excludes.

“Heterosexual” and “homosexual” puts all the importance on the relationship between a person’s sex/gender and who they are attracted to. These terms tell nothing about who the person is actually attracted to without knowing their sex/gender.

Terms describing sexual orientation should be about sexual orientation, and not say, “oh, its the same as this” or “it’s the opposite of that”. Often, instead of using the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual”, it is better to use phrases like “attracted to men” and “attracted to women”. The best one-word terms I know of are “gynephilia” (attracted to women) or “androphilia” (attracted to men), but they also carry information about age.

(”Bisexual” seems fine in this regard, but the “bi” prefix implies attraction only to males and females, excluding anyone between or different. Some people prefer “pansexual” (or “omnisexual”) for that reason.)

What’s the big deal, though? Sure the terms are a little indirect, but it’s not like they’re broken. What’s so bad about them?

Do you see the difference? For each set, try dividing the four groups into two. Which groupings seem more obvious in each set?

Without terms that describe sexual orientation based on sex, it suddenly seems strange to group people based on whether their own sex/gender matches the sex/gender of people they are attracted to. But with such terms, the distinction is glaringly obvious.

As long as “homosexual” and “heterosexual” remain in popular use, male androphiles and female gynephiles (homosexuals) are going to have a hard time fitting in with male gynephiles and female androphiles (heterosexuals).

Have you ever gotten in an argument over the internet? And then been embarrassed afterwards? There’s a saying about this:

Arguing on the internet is like running in the Special Olympics. Even if you win, you’re still retarded.

I for one have had a horribly difficult time arguing on the internet. From upsetting admins continuously, to becoming almost universally hated at my favorite message board, to constantly getting modded troll and flamebait, arguing on the internet is something I’ve never been very good at.

The key is simple, but difficult. Just be nice. That doesn’t mean giving in. It means not cussing, not trashing your opponents, and not getting upset. Just stay calm and be nice. By doing this, even if you don’t win the argument, you’ll win at arguing.

But even when I try really really hard, I still often end up throwing in a mean-spirited word or two and losing my credibility. I’ve certainly improved greatly over the years, but it definitely continues to be a significant issue.

This problem seems to be extremely widespread. Even highly respected people who should have a lot of experience in this area are prone to losing their cool and criticizing individuals or entire groups of people. The internet would probably be much more enjoyable and productive if everybody had the preserve to remain calm and treat others kindly.

I have a 20.1″ LCD monitor with 1600×1200 resolution. (It wasn’t expensive, get with the times, people.) To easily read text, I set KDE’s font size to 14 and Firefox’s minimum font size to 18. (Neither say what the units are.)

There’s a few problems with local programs, mainly teeny tiny windows/columns that I have to resize every time or scroll a lot to see all the content, but for the most part it works pretty well. Surprisingly, I’ve never seen any UI elements become ambiguous/confusing or unusable due to my large font sizes!

The web is an entirely different story. You may notice that my blog is extremely ugly. Why would I choose such an ugly theme when there are so many beautiful ones? That’s because every single one I tried broke horribly with my large text size, even the newer default one and the ones that claimed they were flexible.

It’s not just volunteer/free stuff that has this problem. Even some major sites like PCWorld, MSNBC, Microsoft.com, RottenTomatoes, and Apple.com have this problem. Yahoo’s new beta mail UI is completely unusable, so I stick with the old one. And these aren’t minor problems; they’re complete show stoppers. Labels running over form elements and making them unfocusable/unclickable, labels separating from form elements so that I don’t know what form element does what, text overflowing onto other text, whole navigation bars floating on top of articles, inaccessible/hidden content, etc.

While websites shitting all over themselves from big text is a significant problem, it’s definitely not the norm. In fact, most sites, even minuscule no-name ones, are able to expand and expand to insane levels and remain perfectly usable. Why do some bigguns get it so terribly wrong when so many get it right?

I sure don’t know why, but I’m going to make wild guesses now. Perhaps it’s because the developers at the big sites aren’t willing or able to compromise. The designer comes up with a design, and the coder is expected to implement it exactly. He’s paid megabucks after all, so he better be able to do it perfectly. At the smaller sites, if somebody can’t quickly get something to look right, they change the design a bit to make implementing it easier. They readily admit their limits and accept them. The coder at the big site making megabucks has to keep hacking away with kludge after kludge to get it exactly the way he was told to make it.

But from a user’s standpoint, the cause doesn’t matter. Whatever the reason, it sure sucks.

As a reader of Slashdot, I often hear about how great Emacs is. So every now-and-then I give it a try. Each time I immediately think, “This sucks. Why would anybody use this shit?” But I eventually forget how terrible Emacs is and have to try it again. Today was one of those days.

After opening GNU Emacs, the first thing I did was go to File > Open. Here’s what it looked like after that:

Gorgeous, isn’t it? Notice that there isn’t a file selection dialog anywhere. That’s because I’m supposed to use the text input at the bottom where it says “Find file” to select a file. GNU Emacs actually seems like it’s trying to be un-user-friendly. All the better for it’s snob appeal, I suppose.

GNU Emacs isn’t the only popular Emacs out there. Next up is XEmacs, and joy of all joys, it has a file selection dialog!

I’ll understand if you piss yourself in amazement. I know I did. With such an advanced tool as this, how could anyone not? And this isn’t just any old file selection dialog. Oh no. This one has a really amazing feature that is infinitely useful. I like to call it “user expandable empty space”. All you have to do to take advantage of this remarkable feature is expand the dialog, like so:

Unbelievable, right?! I don’t think I’ll be able to live without it now that I’ve experienced it. It even remembers your empty space settings when you shrink the dialog back!

I’m not complaining about Emacs, its creators, or the people that use it. After all, I don’t have to use it. I’m just bewildered. I absolutely do not understand at all why anybody would want to use Emacs, and I do not understand why such a beloved program is left with so many obvious terrible problems. If so many talented programmers love Emacs so much, why is not updated to keep it modern? Why is it left to rot? Maybe one day I’ll just accept that I’ll never understand.