Trying to Get Attention

Sean Carroll posted a link on Google+ that caused me to have an epiphany. It's a blog post where fantasy author Michele Lee interviews her 7 yr old daughter about a new DC comics version of one of her daughter's favorite characters, Starfire.

Now I don't read comics, didn't know who Starfire was until now, and don't care that much that DC comics just pimped out some old characters to make pornos with them. But what this child says crystallizes for me something that has been bothering me forever in a nebulous way. (There's more pictures and background and links in the original article or this repost since her own blog seems to be down. Sorry it's a gawker site.) Apparently the little girl likes and admires this character -- the original one who was apparently in a TV show in the early 2000s. And she knows exactly why she likes Starfire. Brilliant.

"She's like me. She's an alien new to the planet and maybe she doesn't always say the right thing, or know the right thing to do. But she's a good friend, and she helps people. She's strong enough to fight the bad guys, even when they hurt her. Even her sister tried to kill her, but Starfire still fights for the good side. And she helps the other heroes, like Superboy and Robin and Raven.

"She's smart too. And sometimes she gets mad, but that's okay because it's okay to get mad when people are being mean. And she's pretty."

I think I like this kid. And Starfire sounds relatable. Michele asks her daughter about pretty.

"Does that outfit make her pretty?"

"Well, no. It shows lots of her boobs though."

"What does make her pretty?"

"Her long, pretty hair."

Oh, I wish that weren't true, but the kid is being truthful. I am personally annoyed with the idea that hair makes somebody pretty because it hurts my head to have long hair and it's very dangerous when working with machinery and I had a very bad experience when I let a man talk me into growing my hair long. I'm suspicious that long hair makes people think of you primarily as a pretty person with voluptuous hair and not a real person. Although apparently in Starfire's case she had enough personality to go with that much hair.

"Do you think the Starfire from the Teen Titans cartoon is a good role model?"

*immediately* "Oh yes. She's a great role model. She tells people they can be good friends and super powerful and fight for good."

"Do you think the Starfire in the Teen Titans comic book is a good role model?"

"Yes, too. She's still a good guy. Pretty, but she's helping others all the time and saving people."

"What about this new Starfire?"

"No, I don't think so."

"Why not?"

"Because she's not doing anything."

YES! This child is amazing. She gets it. Looking pretty is fine, but what can you DO?

"What about this Starfire? What do you think about her?" (Referring to image from DC's reboot Red Hood and the Outsiders)

"I can see almost all of her boobs."

"And?"

"Well she is on the beach in her bikini. But…"

"But?"

"But, she's not relaxing or swimming. She's just posing a lot." *my daughter appears uncomfortable*

"Anything else?"

"Well, she's not fighting anyone. And not talking to anyone really. She's just almost naked and posing."

And there you have it. THAT is what is wrong with objectifying women. A child can see it. You take a perfectly respectable character with admirable qualities and you reduce her to somebody that doesn't even act or dress appropriately for her environment. That's a shame.

I want to be really clear that I am have no problem with women posing. I have a friend who does some marvelous fine art photography of nudes. Posing for a picture to make the female form as attractive as possible is an admirable artistic pursuit in my estimation. What I mean is when you try to take a situation that requires a complete person and they blow it with their physical appearance -- I don't like that. They cross the line from making art to... I don't know. Help me out, 7 year old girl.

"Is this new Starfire someone you'd want to be when you grow up?"

*she gets uncomfortable again*"Not really. I mean, grown ups can wear what they want, but…she's not doing anything but wearing a tiny bikini to get attention."

Exactly. She's not doing anything but trying to get attention. I have never ever understood the idea of trying to get attention. I HATE attention. I am criticized by my stylish friends for being a boring dresser. I am just trying to blend. I want to look nice, but not striking. I want to be the kind of person that people ask for directions on the Metro in Paris, not the kind they try to photo bomb at the beach. I want to look like the kind of person that knows how to read a map. Not the kind that would have a map of the world tattooed across her breasts. (Although I do like the idea of a hemispherically accurate Mammagraphic Projection)

It is nice to know that I'm not the only person who feels this way. Clearly nobody at DC Comics does, but  at least there's a 7 year old girl somewhere who is uncomfortable with it too. I'm trying to get into the geek culture more because I think there might be friends to be made there. That's kind of why I had my own comic hero drawn on commission.

But I'm not 7. It would be stupid for me to imagine somebody I aspire to be when I grow up. So I made up a hero that I already grew up to be. I don't read comics at all, I don't play video games, I'm not really into sci-fi or fantasy, so I was probably unqualified to write the specifications for a comic hero. But I think I tapped into the sensibilities of my new favorite 7 year old and made a good hero who does something. She would appreciate that you can't see any of my boobs. I think she would be disappointed in my hair, but life is like that.

Lady Longleaf protects the forests. She defends diversity against invasive exotic species. Her weapons are the pinecones of Pinus palustris, the Longleaf pine. She wears stout gloves to protect her hands from the sharp spines on the pine cones when she throws them at her foes. The ripe pine cones are for warnings. She uses heavy, hard green pine cones like armor-piercing rounds. (I became aware of their power during Hurricane Frances listening to them hit the metal roof of the porch. It was like mortar fire.) She can release thick clouds of yellow pollen to make a dramatic entrance. She only tolerates attention because it helps her save the ecosytem. (Lady Longleaf is not really into people that much. Sorry, kid. I had no Starfire role model growing up.)

First Aquarius Map

The first map of ocean salinity as measured by the Aquarius satellite was released today. (NASA link.) I like that I can look at this and know what I'm seeing. Usually oceanographers specify salinity as a ratio to a standard KCL solution (potassium chloride.) This is called the Practical Salinity Scale. It is used for any measurement based on conductivity and has no units. I think they are making the assumption here that grams per kilogram is the same as PSU, for practical salinity units, which is of course a silly name, because it's unit-less. g/kg is a compromise I'm willing to accept.

Anyway, 35 is what oceanographers consider nominal for PSU. Green is normal sea water. That blue band across the Pacific? That's an equatorial counter current moving towards South America. When it's blue like that it's called La Niña. You can equate lower salinity with lower temperature in this case. If it was an El Niño year there would be a red band across the Pacific indicating hotter, saltier water from increased evaporation. The side effect of that low evaporation in the Pacific is Texas is very dry. Dry earth heats up more than wet earth, and I am here to testify to it. The lowest high temperature in September in Austin so far is 90°F. There might be two more of those days and this is not one of them. It's going to be 101°F this weekend.

I'm not sure what the Gulf of Mexico salinity looks like in a normal summer (No La Niña or El Niño.) Looks to me like the lack of fresh water from Texas and Mexico is making it pretty salty on the West. I'm glad my Georgia home is producing lots of water. That blue and purple area in the aptly named Florida Big Bend is from fresh water input from the Appalachicola and Mississippi Rivers. That's what makes it oyster friendly.

The other big purple and blue blotch off the Venezuela part of South America is the Orinoco and the Amazon comes out of that notch farther south. You can see it runs north and heads across towards Africa in the Equatorial Counter Current. I love that I can see features in an up-to-date salinity map that I had to memorize off lines and arrows on maps.

I'm not sure what to make of all that detail of differences down around Antartica. That's kind of fascinating.

And you can tell a lot of sea ice is melting up in the Arctic adding all that fresh water to the surface.

Thanks Aquarius! Fun times!

Push Notifications Boost Perceived Popularity

I don't have a lot of personal interaction in the course of a day. I don't see people. I don't talk on the phone. Some people send me text messages when they have an anecdote they think will amuse me. I rarely get personal email. My primary form of communication is instant messenger with about 6 people.

Because of this overall low noise floor I've become quite sensitive to any incoming signals. On the rare occasion when I do hang out with another live person I'm somewhat overwhelmed by how often their phone makes a noise and it's something they have to pay attention to right then.

In those conditions I found that I was grateful that my own phone would sound off from time to time. It was typically just automatic email from the CFI Meetup Group or some advertisement, but I could get out my phone and look at it and pretend to be engaged with it. My phone makes a different noise when somebody plays their turn at Words With Friends or if I get a text message with a picture of some herpetological specimen I'm meant to identify for my friend who apparently goes for walks in a severely fragmented ecosystem in Dallas. According to my phone I'm in big demand!

But then I realized that when I'm home alone I get excited by the email noise. Stop what I'm doing to see that Cooking.com wants me to buy a cupcake maker. Or I'm at the grocery store and I have to get out the phone to see that Delta has a new vacation package to somewhere I can't afford to go. It seemed like it was skewing my reality. It would raise my hopes that somebody wanted to tell me something but it was always something I didn't care about, like a new line of running shoes at Zappos. I mean, I really don't need anything from Victoria's Secret. There's no reason for me to look at those ads every day, let alone the instant they arrive. But what if I DO need something from Victoria's Secret? It could happen! They put the coupon codes in those ads. Well my friend that encouraged me to shut up the constant email from the CFI Meetup Group had an idea for the advertisements I actually might be interested in. Filter them out but archive them so I can look at them on purpose when I actually need something. As for CFI I can go to the website and look at the news there. Also for Google+ I turned off email notification because they put a little number in a red box at the top of Gmail to tell me when I have a message and in a red circle on the icon on my phone. That's plenty of notification for me. I'll look at it when I'm out having a coffee trying to look busy and popular with my phone.

For the last week I've been on a mission to unsubscribe to email lists I really don't care about and filter the ones I might be interested in. It's amazing how much junk mail I was deleting without really paying attention. I thought I would share the procedure in case anybody else wants to try to adjust their email volume so the signal to noise ratio makes actual communication possible. Most automatic ads and newsletters have an unsubscribe button at the bottom. Click that thing and unsubscribe early and often. For the things you actually care about, but not as often as they want to tell you, follow this procedure to filter them. These instructions are for Gmail. We all use Gmail, right?

Start in the Inbox. Pick a message you'd like to filter. Pull down the "More" menu and select "Filter messages like these."

You don't really have to do anything here. It fills in the From: and that should take care of all email from that advertiser. Go to the Next Step.

Next Choose action.  Check "Skip the Inbox (Archive it)." Labels are up to you. I did one just for an example. Be sure to select that box at the bottom to apply filter to all the similar messages in your inbox. This is going to automatically get 300 Adorama ads out of my inbox.

Click "Create Filter" and wait for all of your dreams to come true!

Now if you want to see the things you filtered out you can click the label on the side or click All Mail instead of Inbox. Here's what happens when I select my label for Sales. I get just the daily ad email for the vendors I actually use sometimes.

I have filters that don't skip the inbox as well, like the YouTube label gets automatically applied to comments on my rocket video and Bill gets applied to email from the addresses that send me my monthly paperless statements. The automatic email with job listings get that Job Search label to help me fill in my spreadsheet of weekly search efforts. Filters and labels are handy, and the skip the Inbox feature is extra useful.

I have never lost a pair of sunglasses

Brett Arends of Wall Street Journal online says Luxottica makes most of the designer sunglasses so they really are all the same, except for the fashion statement you choose to make based on the designer brand. He says it's a waste of money.

If you make your shades last for many years, that would be one thing. But who does that? The people who want designer items want the latest fashion each year. And then there are the pairs that get lost. Scratched at the beach. And sat on. Personally, I have come to consider sunglasses a disposable item, and I suspect I am not alone.

Yeah probably not. But I am. I bought a pair of Serengeti drivers when I was about 14 years old with money I saved up from sweeping the warehouse and sorting screws and bolts and washers in the stock room at my dad's construction company. I wore them through college and then got a prescription pair of Serengetis for driving when I got my first consulting job. In 2000 I bought some expensive frames on the Champs Elysees and had prescription polarized lenses put in them back in Atlanta. When I moved to Tallahassee and had to work in the field they were too small for the bright light there. I bought some big wraparound Maui Jims specially made for working on the water and had those French frames converted to computer glasses. In the field I was looking far away and writing on paper up close so the prescription wouldn't have worked anyway.

I still have all of these glasses and every other pair I've ever owned. I broke a temple on the Maui Jims swimming underwater with them. I sent them to the service center and they replaced the temples for free. And I ground them down with my Dremel tool again to fit my freakishly small head. I guess I've gotten the cost of those $200 glasses down to about $0.02 per hour of use over the 6 years I've been wearing them. They never were in fashion so they aren't going out. Also I'd argue that Maui Jims aren't the same as the drug store glasses at all.

My brother buys expensive polarized anti-reflective sunglasses too, as he should, working outside in South Florida. But he loses them something awful. What makes me different? Is it that I started out so young with glasses that represented about 6 months income? Is it because I am a girl and get to carry a purse? I think both. I established muscle memory for putting them straight in the case when I take them off. I couldn't lose them or get them scratched at this point in my life any more than I could forget to put the gas cap back on my car. Even when I have that moment of panic pulling out of the gas station where I think, "Did I put the gas cap back on?!" I remind myself that it would be nearly impossible to stop the automatic motion of screwing that thing back on until it clicks about five times and closing the door. No, I don't remember doing it. Why would I? I don't think about it anymore. Muscle memory.

I'm trying to think about what I think of as a disposable item. Dishes. When I started living in my tiny house I bought melamine plates and polycarbonate glasses. It was easier to wash them by hand and store them in a drawer. I liked that process so much even when I got a dishwasher and more space I put my set of 12 dishes up on a high shelf and bought two of each size plate or bowl that I wanted in melamine. They cost about $4 each at Target. When I move I'll throw them away.

I've also switched from heavy furniture for clothing to individual polyethylene drawers. When I sold my house in Atlanta the buyer requested that I leave behind the solid wood "chester draws." How could I refuse? I got so many good laughs out of that! What if I'd had a bureau and a chifforobe, too?

Now I'm hooked on the plastic drawers with the convenience of being able to move everything in manageable, contained units. I try not to own anything I can't pick up by myself. When I was building my little house I had to carry everything out in the yard every weekend. I guess those plastic drawer units are disposable, albeit long lived and very moving-day friendly.

I can't think of a single other multi-use item that I consider disposable. I guess I just like nice things and am prepared to take care of them. Oh, non-stick frying pans. Totally disposable.

Only a matter of time for the remaining pair of spectacles.

Good ol' bike

Update: Just sold this bike Saturday October 8 to a nice Texas A&M student who had been looking for a good old bike for over a month. He loves how it rides. It's a good day for good machinery!

Time to admit I'm not going to ride this bike. If my social anxiety is about an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10 my anxiety about traffic is an 11. For some reason Craigslist won't show this ad in the searches, probably because I changed it too much. I found out I was calling it the wrong thing. All this time I thought it was a Continental but it's a Deluxe Varsity. I'm posting it here so I can tag it for all the internet. I'll deliver this bike within 100 miles of Austin, TX if the buyer pays for gas.