Announcing the opening of WishSight!

WishSight is for managing wishlists and gift-giving. It lets you see who’s given (or promised) what to whom, and it lets gift-givers for particular people communicate with each other, via a comment-board, so that they don’t duplicate gifts.

It’s based on a Christmas-list application I wrote in 2005 that my family and friends have been using every year since then. It’s completely merchant-unaffiliated. You can post links for the gifts you want, and they can be links to any merchant.

WishSight helps you cut down on gift duplication, and increases the chances that people will get things they actually want, without the gift-givers having to do a round-robin of email or phone calls to pin down who’s buying what. And chances are they don’t all know each other anyway—which doesn’t matter on WishSight, because you all communicate by leaving comments directly on your mutual friend’s wishlist.

All you have to do is:

• sign up
• list the email addresses of people who you want to be able to see your wishlist
• get those people to sign up and “whitelist” your email address
• list your wishes
• stake “claims” on other people’s wishes

There’s no stealth: the email addresses are only used internally to determine who’s allowed to see whose wishlist. Also, you can list email addresses even if the people haven’t signed up yet. Once they do sign up, they will automatically have permission to see your wishlist and claim your wishes. No two-sided “handshakes” required; you just whitelist people.

Have fun, and let me know if any questions or problems!

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that other forms of hate and prejudice are extinct, or even on the wane. But it feels like the stars anti-Muslim sentiment and homophobia are in the ascendancy.

It’s very much about statements that don’t sound aggressive or hateful, on the surface, but that would never be made if hate didn’t lurk just below. I’m thinking, for example, of a report I heard on the radio of some attack or other, involving “three Muslims of middle-eastern descent.” I might have the phrasing of the “middle-eastern descent” part wrong (though it was that or close to it). In any case, the salient bit, for me, was “three Muslims.”

When was the last time you heard a crime described as having been committed by “three Christians”? How about “A Jew broke into a convenience store…”? So what’s up with “three Muslims”?

What’s up, of course, is hate. I don’t think the radio announcer or the newswriter hates Muslims. But they do operate under a compulsion to mention explicitly that Muslims are Muslims, and ultimately that’s so that the listenership can be put on alert to hate them. Does the phrase “three Muslims” have explanatory power? Did these people do whatever they did because they are Muslims? No. There’s no reason to mention their religion except out of habit of mentioning the fact that Muslims are Muslims.

Back when I was a university professor (1992-2005; in this case somewhere around 2003, I think), the school newspaper had a kind of “person-in-the-street” feature, where they’d ask a few people around campus a question and print selected answers. One week, the question was something about Iraq. One of the people quoted in the feature said something along the lines of, “Bomb them all off the face of the earth.” Or “Blow them all up”—words to that effect.

My response was to call the editor-in-chief of the newspaper into my office and have a little chat with him. I was under no institutional imperative to do so—I was not involved with the paper directly—but it seemed to me that I had an opportunity to teach him perhaps the most important lesson of his college career. “If the question of the week had been about how to improve the cafeteria food,” I asked him, “and someone had said, ‘Line the whole cafeteria staff against the wall and shoot them dead,’ would you have printed it?”

Of course he would not have, and said that he would not have. “The fact that what we would not say about the cafeteria workers, we would say about the entire population of a Muslim country,” I explained, “is the dehumanization process at work.” I do believe he understood and took my point on board.

So we mention that people are Muslims, and we lower the bar when it comes to suggesting (or, if you like, joking about) their violent deaths. And it’s all very dangerous and should be sending up serious alarms.

Labeling the gay as gay is an even more popular pastime. The world has settled for a breathtakingly stunted view of what homosexuality entails, and how it manifests itself. It manifests itself, by the way, as itself, not as an obsession with the song “YMCA” or an expertise in designer footware. Hey, more power to you if you have that expertise. But the set of all men who do intersects in a miniscule subset with the set of all men whose primary sexual orientation is toward men. Ditto for all the stereotypes.

Of course, the world can’t deal with the idea that homosexuality manifests itself only as itself, because if that’s true, it means you can’t tell who’s gay; and that, like being unable to tell who’s Jewish, is unacceptable. The workaround is to pretend that you can tell who’s gay, resorting to babytalk about your “gaydar” when the stereotypes, as they must, fail you.

And then, following a fairly tight train of thought, there’s hatred of gays.

First of all, let me explain that I include, as hatred, the “love the sinner, hate the sin” horseshit espoused by the Catholic church. It is, to be sure, a kinder, gentler hatred than the burning-at-the-stake kind. The idea is that you’re enlightened enough to acknowledge that some people just are gay. But you also understand that, as gays, they must never indulge in the kinds of sexual activities they feel interested in. So you, as the compassionate believer, offer to contribute to their happiness by giving them support and encouragement as they fight to maintain their chastity.

How noble.

The church, of course, has two thousand years of experience disguising hate as love. But this one is particularly devious and malign. Let’s cut to the chase: the only reason that one adult human being would try to stop another adult human being, on a lifelong basis, from attaining romantic and/or erotic satisfaction is that he or she (human one) hates him or her (human two). No amount of theological stroking can change that. It’s hate.

Not news, of course, that the Pope and friends hate gays. But interesting to see how slimy and prurient they can get, in the process. Anyway, let’s move on.

Actually we can borrow a concept from the church: “invincible ignorance.” When I read the stuff about homosexuality being a choice (note that it’s not that sexual preference is a choice, just homosexuality—which makes it kind of weird to describe it as a choice), my reaction is that if you put twenty articulate, knowledgeable people in a room for twenty years with the person who’s taking the “choice” position, that person would emerge still saying that homosexuality is a choice. There’s no point of entry for explanation, and no point of contact with reality.

It’s pathetic, but I still count it as hate. At least it leads to hate. Or from hate, perhaps. Or maybe these people are actually choosing to be vicious, and could stop themselves if they really wanted to. It’s hard to know. They’re not saying.

With gay marriage on the news radar these days, more and more of this kind of discourse is showing up: the choice thing, but also the “gays recruit people” thing (which is actually backwards; have these people ever watched television commercials?) and, most disturbingly of all, the “gays prey on children” thing. And each of these things embodies two problems: first, that people believe it; and second, that it’s acceptable to say it publicly.

Which hateful statements are acceptable and which aren’t is a kind of lump under the carpet that moves around but never goes away. Unfortunately, the underlying hate never goes away either—and ultimately, no matter which targeted people or groups we’re talking about, it’s the underlying hate that matters. But who gets to say what, and when, and with what consequences (or lack thereof) is, in itself, something that I think it’s worth keeping fairly close tabs on.

The bailout bill has just passed. I know very little about economics, little enough that I don’t feel entitled to a strong opinion one way or the other on whether the bill should have passed. But I am suspicious of it.

I’m suspicious of it, for one thing, because of the fear-mongering that has surrounded it; it’s very reminiscent of the ongoing “Terrorists will come and kill your family if the executive branch doesn’t get a blank check for waging undeclared war” campaign, and things in that vein.

But I’m even more suspicious of the bill because of all the rhetoric about how it will help “Main Street” as well as “Wall Street”. I don’t know whether it will or not, but what troubles me is the fact that this kind of rhetoric makes it sound like Congress and the Bush administration are desperate to help Main Street. The fact is that, in general, they’re not.

Every microsecond of every day in the history of this country there have been uncountable opportunities for the government to help citizens with financial problems, difficulty paying for a home, lack of job opportunities, inability to get credit, and all the rest of it. The thrust of the behavior of the government for most of the history of the country has been not to bother helping such people to any significant degree.

Now, all of a sudden, helping Main Street leaps to the front of the congressional and executive agenda. I’m disinclined to buy it. If the common weal were really a government priority, we would have known by now. I find it immensely suspicious that the greatest outpouring of social concern, at least as measured in money, comes tethered to a Wall Street bailout.

If Main Street is going to benefit from the delivery of a de facto blank check to Wall Street, surely it would not benefit any less from having money delivered to it directly. But you don’t hear any talk of, say, the government purchasing houses for the victims of fiscal mismanagement. I suppose it would have taken too long to draft a bill that did that; and as we know, the earth would have left its axis if the bill had not been passed this week….

During the week of July 6-12, I invite and encourage everybody who includes links in their email, blog posts, online chats, and other documents, to link to something other than Wikipedia.

I’m not trying to be a Wikipedia slayer. It wouldn’t matter if I were; that’s not going to happen.

I just want to remind everyone that there are thousands and thousands of interesting, well-informed, thought-provoking, educational websites out there, written by professors, researchers, doctors, artists, scientists, practitioners of every craft and industry—and however you slice it, these websites are getting a raw deal when it comes to links.

It’s not about whether Wikipedia articles are accurate or not. Some are, some aren’t. But that’s true of the whole Web. Let’s stop acting as if Wikipedia has some special status.

The best thing about the Web is that it isn’t an encyclopedia. And Wikipedia is evidence that when Web culture meets encyclopedia culture, encyclopedia culture wins. Sure, Wikipedia is collaborative. Most encyclopedias are. They still give off an aura of total, centralized, complete knowledge and authority. And that’s not very Web-like, is it?

So:

• If you’ve got a point to make about grammar, look for an English (or whatever language it is!) professor’s site. There are some great ones. Point the person you’re arguing with to a couple of those.

• Countries have their own informational websites, some official and some written by people who live there. Many of them are multi-lingual. Are they “balanced”? Probably not, at least not in the network news way. So much the better! Balance on the Web emerges from the quantity and interplay of sites. It’s not supposed to be embodied in every document. How boring!

• Wikipedia is great for technology-related topics. But so are lots of other sites. Are you sure that Wikipedia’s description of the algorithm you’re discussing on that mailing list is really the best? the clearest? the most engaging?

• You get the idea! Strike a blow for the richness of the Web, and for the beauty of discourse that doesn’t try to be poker-faced and non-committal, even about important issues. Rediscover the expertise of the many Web contributors who write about their own specialties and have taken the time to share their thoughts.

There’s a lot to learn at Wikipedia, but it’s time to spread the linkage!

A guy I was chatting with in the men’s lounge of the spa at Harrah’s in Atlantic City was telling me about “slide words.” I can’t find anything about them (and I’ve tried “slider words” and a few other variants) anywhere. I don’t think he made the term up, and he certainly didn’t think he had.

Anyway, even though I can’t find any background information or previous discussion, I am going to talk about “slide words” (or whatever they’re called).

A slide word, I gather, is a word or phrase that has come to serve as shorthand for an entire argument—except that the argument isn’t really there. We’re all just supposed to think it is. The slide word acts as a black hole, drawing further discussion and thoughtful debate into itself and killing it.

Slide words are bad because they take the place of actual analysis of situations and events. Every slide word has a kind of implicit, “Sigh. Here we go again” attached to it, even though the “again” part is asserted through the use of the slide word itself and not actually demonstrated.

I have something to say here about three slide words: conspiracy theory, Chinese menu, and bikeshed.

“Conspiracy theory”

“Conspiracy theory” is perhaps the best example of a slide word. Consider the following exchange, which is made up but is actually very similar to several I have had:

With the invocation of the term “conspiracy theory,” all further discussion of what might have actually happened is discredited. The events surrounding the death of John Kipalani’s son need not be examined in any detail; nor need the press coverage (or lack thereof). “Conspiracy theory” plays the role of a rebuttal of the statements about the Challenger disaster, even though it has no actual connection to them.

Again, the slide word (or slide phrase) gets played as if it were a trump card, when in fact it has nothing whatsoever to do with the question of Bush’s culpability in the 9/11 attacks, and neither refutes the logic that’s on offer nor adds information that might bring about a reconsideration of that logic.

“Chinese menu”

Another slide word I’ve come across, in a somewhat narrower setting, is “Chinese menu.”

When I was teaching at a university, I was involved in lots of discussions, formal and otherwise, about core curricula: what they should include, how they should be administered, and so on. I remember that in one series of such discussions, any time anyone suggested anything along the lines of having students choose one or more courses from each of several course groupings, someone else would say, “That’s like a Chinese menu.” Eventually it became just “Chinese menu.”

I have no memory of any discussion of why it was considered a bad idea to adminster a core curriculum this way. All that was required to rebut the idea was “Chinese menu.” Actual argumentation did not enter into it.

“Bikeshed”

Another slide word, a rather obnoxious one that seems to be enjoying considerable popularity these days, is “bikeshed.” If someone says “bikeshed,” they’ve said all they need to say (or at least all they think they need to say, and certainly all they’re planning to say) to establish that what you have been talking about is trivial and not worth discussing.

Saying “bikeshed” to someone, instead of telling that person outright that you find his or her statements trivial and worthless, is not only needlessly indirect but, in most cases I’ve seen, wrong.

The original bikeshed concept, as I understand it (which is from second-hand accounts, so I could be wrong), had to do with the phenomenon of committees spending more time arguing over what color to paint the company bikeshed, than over the allocation of funds to build a nuclear power plant.

The problem with the typical usage of “bikeshed” today is that there’s no nuclear power plant in the picture. It’s more likely to be a bunch of people on an email list discussing the best name for a proposed new method in Ruby, or something like that. Then someone who feels superior to the discussion (which would exclude the creator of Ruby, as well as many of his colleagues, associates, and friends) comes along and says “Bikeshed.”

But if we weren’t talking about method names, we’d be talking about literal constructors for runtime objects. And if not that, then perhaps the question of whether parentheses around parameter lists in method definitions should be mandatory. All of these things are important to people interested in the Ruby programming language; but, with respect, I will state unequivocally that none of them is as important an issue as nuclear power.

Furthermore, saying “bikeshed” implies that you think the group you’re addressing not only is wasting its time on the current topic, but has a history of spending too little time on important things. Even scaling it down so that the important things aren’t really important things in the nuclear power sense, no one ever says what those things are. That’s probably because “bikeshed” is just a snide way to say, “What you’re saying is stupid,” and not a unit of cogent or well-sustained argumentation of any kind.

Thus slide words. I’m glad there’s a name for them, even though it’s puzzling that the only person who seems to have heard the name is that guy at Harrah’s.

I love reading Wikipedia, and I’ve learned a lot from doing so. I’m not, in other words, rabidly anti-Wikipedia. But I do have a few serious concerns about it.

It seems to me that Wikipedia is, in effect whether or not in intent, pushing the Web in exactly the direction it isn’t best suited for: namely, centralization of information. Mailing list posts and IRC channels are full of links to Wikipedia articles, on everything from… well, on lots of things. It seems that the standard way of saying, “If you’re not familiar with the term I just used, here’s how to learn about it” is to provide a Wikipedia link.

I strongly suspect that this is automatic on the part of the people doing it—automatic, that is, rather than based on a thorough search of all the resources available on a given topic and a reasoned decision about which is best-written and/or most informative. That’s the thing: Wikipedia provides something close to one-stop shopping. You’ll find something on almost anything.

Furthermore, Wikipedia itself seems to buy into and cultivate the image of itself as a centralized, objective source of information about everything. One symptom of this is the fact that links within Wikipedia articles are always, or very nearly always, links to other Wikipedia articles. In spite of how open it is, in terms of contributions, it’s ultimately a closed system.

Yes, external sources are indicated at the bottom of articles. But the providing of sources, while important in terms of academic honesty and paper-trailing, never stopped scholarly publications from taking something very close to a “voice of God” position with regard to their subject matter. And it doesn’t stop Wikipedia from doing the same thing. How often have you bothered to go look up all the books and articles listed at the bottom of a Wikipedia article, and carefully analyzed how the information was gleaned and pieced together?

The editorial emphasis on balance and completeness and objectivity is another troubling sign. What’s wrong with balance? What’s wrong with it is that it’s a mirage. Any undergraduate who’s taken a reasonably decent mass communication course knows that what the news media call “balance” is simply an editorial or presentational style. And it requires constant reinforcement. “We report; you decide,” says Fox. “We’ll give you the world,” says at least one radio station (or conglomerate, probably, at this point). The idea is that the discouse provides a perfect substitute for the reality, so you can consider yourself to have been served the reality when you consume the discourse.

Wikipedia operates, I believe, in exponentially greater faith than the news media. But the philosophy of representation is the same, and it’s very old-school. An article is a simulacrum of a discrete, finite reality, and an article’s suitability for publication can be measured by how closely it has cloned that reality. While there’s often room for improvement, every article has the noble goal of achieving a perfect fit with its subject matter, and the potential to do so.

The fact, however, is that it’s not in the nature of written discourse to be a perfect fit with some arbitrary slice of reality. It doesn’t work that way. There’s no shame in acknowledging this, but Wikipedia battles against it.

What troubles me is not just that it’s child’s play to debunk the “voice of God” philosophy of discourse, but that I’d thought the Web was doing a pretty good job teaching people that reality and discourse actually map to each other sloppily, crazily, contradictorily, and ironically. Measured both by its editorial policies and by its wide, eager adoption as a centralized authority, Wikipedia unfortunately pushes against this more intriguing and, I would argue, more balanced take on things.

As of this morning, I can't find my London cell phone. Yes I know it sounds pretentious for an American even to have one... but I go to London usually two or three times a year, and you really can't have any kind of social life over there without one. Anyway, I'm at home in the U.S., and I can't find the phone.

That means I will almost certainly have to buy another one, solely because I'm too stupid to have put it away properly last time I got back from London.

I consider the price of the new phone to be a Stupidity Tax payment. I pay several hundred dollars a year in Stupidity Tax. I forget to cancel hotels; I neglect to send in rebate forms; I lose things. I have to say, the losing things thing is very deep-rooted; there's more to that syndrome than stupidity. Still, to the extent that I lose expensive things that should be simple to keep track of, their replacement is Stupidity Tax.

Thinking of all of this as Stupidity Tax actually makes it a little easier to deal with. It's just part of the cost of living. Of course I'd like to reduce it as much as possible. But it's unlikely I'll ever reduce it to zero. Life is too much of a sieve to hope for that. At least I can keep things interesting by rotating the reasons for the tax: a lost item here, a forgotten bill there. I'd like it not to get too interesting... but the Stupidity Tax is here to stay, so I might as well try to adapt to it.

I don’t think you have to be a language snob to wince (and laugh) at the way advertisers misuse English. They’re protected, of course, by the myths that surround their profession. If they get their grammar wrong, or misuse an idiom, they must have some ingenious marketing reason for doing so—or so people are willing to asusme. In fact, I think what’s happening is that the lousiness of the American educational system is trickling up into the ranks of copy writers and copy editors and basically everyone in the chain of custody of commercials.

The one that got me writing this post is a Verizon radio ad, specifically an ad for Verizon’s phone/cable/Internet triple package. It features the usual fake testimonial sound-bites from actors pretending to be customers. That’s par for the course, until one of them says (and the stuff in square brackets is a paraphrase; the rest is verbatim):

“[Verizon gives you a great deal,] providing all three services and not pulling any punches.“

I love the image of a Verizon repair person coming to my door and slugging me in the jaw, as hard as he or she can. (I’d rather it not happen, but I love the image.) It is, of course, completely clear that the person who wrote that line has no idea what the expression “pulling a punch” actually means, and neither do the executives who paid to have the ad written. I surmise that they think it means “pulling a stunt”, so that not pulling any punches means you’re entirely honest. Or something. Who knows?

I suppose that if Coors can actually bring to market a product called “Artic [sic] Ice”, then Verizon can sleepwalk through the process of producing radio commercials. In fact, it doesn’t surprise me any more. I no longer expect the ostensible gatekeepers to know what they’re doing. They probably never did, but I do think it’s gotten worse. And funnier.

I’m a sort of mediocre good sudoku solver—flashes of brilliance, too lazy to bother writing in all the possible values of each field so not in the running to solve a lot of the harder puzzles. But I enjoy them, and I go through phases of doing them quite a bit.

I also do crosswords—specifically, British-style cryptic crosswords. I’m quite good at those. I rarely finish one completely, but I still consider myself good at them because I often come within, say, two or three clues of finishing. And if the answer is something I’ve never heard of, I give myself partial credit, so to speak.

It’s actually the answers that I’ve been thinking about: the answers to crossword clues, and the answers to Sudoku.

When you work on a crossword clue, there’s a very specific goal for that clue. Clues can be fun, even in isolation. You can work on a crossword puzzle with someone else, even someone who can’t see the puzzle; you just give them a clue, and tell them how many letters you’ve already got, and they can work on it.

Sudoku are different. You can’t really say to your friend, “I’ve got a square that’s missing 2,8, and 9. The blank boxes are the center, the top right, and the middle left” and expect your friend to come up with a solution.

And after you’ve worked on a crossword puzzle – more to the point, after you’ve given up – you want to see the solution. When you see the answers to the clues you didn’t get, you may feel stupid or you may feel vindicated (if you decide the clue was bad, or the answer was something you truly never would have been able to come up with).

That’s where I wonder about Sudoku. You always get the solutions in the back of Sudoku books, or published the next day in the newspaper. But why, exactly? I can’t imagine working on a Sudoku, failing to complete it, and then looking at the third box from the left in the middle row of squares and saying, “Oh, of course! Seven!” The individual squares just don’t have the same relation to their answers that crossword clues have to theirs.

Another kind of weird thing about the solutions to Sudoku is that, at least if you put yourself in the right frame of mind, seeing them doesn’t matter. If I set out to solve a Sudoku rigorously – with no guessing, never filling in a box until I’m sure about it – having access to the solution doesn’t really make my job any easier.

What all of this amounts to is, I think, that the culture of puzzle publication dictates that solutions accompany puzzles, but not too closely (at the back of the book, or a day later), even though this way of doing it is a rather odd fit, in some respects, for Sudoku. No harm done, of course. I just find it kind of funny.

Just spotted on the on-screen program guide for Cablevision: “When a female Secret Service agent is killed, detectives investigate clients of her husband, a well-connected lobbyist.”

Years ago, there was a kind of riddle or puzzle in circulation—something to the effect of:

A father and son are in a car crash. They’re taken to the hospital. The doctor comes into the room, looks at the boy in the bed, and exclaims, “My son!” How can this happen?

I’d like to think that that riddle is obsolete. But I wonder. Apparently television blurb writers still feel the need to specify that a character is a female Secret Service agent, not just a Secret Service agent, even though reference is made to “her husband” in the same sentence.

I can understand alluding to a character’s sex—or ethnicity, age, sexual preference—if it’s materially relevant to the plot. The dramas of our culture involve these things, and there’s no reason that dramatic representations can or should be expected not to revolve around them. If an episode of a show is about child pornographers, I don’t expect the description not to mention children. If it’s about a serial murderer of gays, I don’t expect the description to be poker-faced on the matter of who the victims are.

So there are cases where the issue is the message, so to speak.

I don’t know, because I haven’t seen it, but I suspect the “female Secret Service agent” episode isn’t one of them. But just for the sake of argument, let’s say it is. That still leaves the question: what the hell could the “her” in “her husband” mean, except that the agent is female? Even if the plot does hinge specifically on the femaleness of the agent, “her” conveys that femaleness completely and unambiguously. There is literally no possible reason for the presence of the word “female” in that blurb.

I dislike the implication that it’s unacceptable to keep the femaleness of a Secret Service agent unrevealed even for a handful of words. That’s no good. If people find themselves thinking it must be a man and then revising their view later in the sentence, so be it. They should have to do that, if they assume that “Secret Service agent” means male agent, or that “teacher” means white teacher, or that “man” means heterosexual man.

Enough already with these regressive habits.

Now this was fun.

In London, the past Wednesday evening, I had dinner with two old friends: writer and critic Nicolette Jones and literature scholar-turned-banker Gurdon Wattles.

I met Nicolette in 1981, when I was a senior at Yale and she had come over to do a year at Yale as part of her graduate work in English at Oxford. So we’ve known each other for about 25 years. Nicolette and her family are among the friends I spend the most time with in London; indeed, I’ve spent more time with them over the years than with any number of my friends who live in, say, New York, less than fifty miles from me.

Gurdon I’ve known for forty years. We met when we were seven. My family was living in Cambridge, England, for several months, and I was going to school there. Gurdon and I became best mates at school. Over the years we’ve seen each other, either with our families or on our own, only three or four times, the most recent being in 1988. It’s only in the past few weeks that we’d been back in touch at all.

Here’s the funny thing, though: Nicolette and Gurdon, quite independently of me, have been good friends since their university days back in the late seventies or so. How did we figure out that we all knew each other? It was back in 1982, in the Spring of the year that Nicolette spent at Yale. She and I were sitting across from each other at a table in a student dining hall, and she was writing a postcard. Postcards are fair game, right? So I glanced at it, and saw that it was addressed to my old friend from Cambridge, Gurdon Wattles. That broke the ice, you may be sure.

Now it’s 2006, and the three of us were together in one place for the first time. And it was really fun. A long time in the making, and an absolute delight. More of the same to follow, I hope!