Neither articulate nor clean

I have a habit of losing track of how well I'm articulating myself when I speak, but it turns out that I'm definitely not the only one.  For some reason, I have always been hugely amused by the ambiguity in language, and respond to misinterpreted words with embarrassing fits of laughter (like how my sister always thought NPR's Bob Edwards was Bob Backwards.)  I just hope no one interprets my amusement as language snobbery.  I don't think these mistakes are dumb - I think they're kind of brilliant, and give insight into how people think about language.

I noticed how lazy I can be about articulating myself soon after I graduated college and started working closely with a woman who'd grown up in China.  She was a great phonetic speller (which I imagine is true of most people who grow up speaking Chinese) and wrote down exactly what she heard people around her saying.  To Xun, Anthrax was antruas.  This was about ten years ago, and I've slipped considerably in the interim.  

I have to wonder when being inarticulate becomes an accent or dialect in itself.  

Security without passwords

This idea strikes me as right.  Passwords are unwieldy and hackable in ways that location isn't.  However, it's kind of hard to give myself a visceral sense that this would be more secure.  It's like how people a generation older than I am like to have documents printed out.  I've always felt like something is more secure if it's stored in a digital format somewhere.  I lose paper all the time.  What if I spill something on it?

HT to D for the video.

I don't really tell my spouse my passwords, but I also don't really care if he uses my devices, usually.  I wonder how the actual implementation of this new authetication regime deals with shared devices.  

FYI: If this seems like a weird subject for me to be taking on, you might be interested to know that my spouse has taken a job at Google, and we're now living in California.  So this kind of thing is on my mind more now.  

The Elephant in the Drawing Room

I work with animals in captivity, and I love it.  There are things about it that make me uncomfortable, and I've been wrestling with them for a while now.  I found a movie on Netflix called The Elephant in the Living Room which told the story of a pretty impoverished guy who kept a lion as a pet.  My first reaction to the idea of a guy keeping a pet lion in Ohio was, "That's horrible!"  The movie also followed the activity of a police officer who responds when exotic animals kept in situations like that get into trouble.  He was portrayed as the enlightened savior, the reasonable one.

Then I got to thinking that there are lions at "my zoo" whose lives aren't very much like the lives of wild lions.  What makes it so much better for a zoo to keep an exotic animal than for some schlub in middle America to do that?  He's not a zoologist or vet, but that doesn't mean he's not a clever and sensitive guy with a sense for what animals need.  My intuition tells me that he can't provide for a lion what it needs (namely, space and other lions).  I'm just curious about how much of my intuitive revulsion at the idea of keeping a lion as a pet is informed by my social class.  My experience among animal lovers tends to have been that the more affluent an animal-lover, the more they feel like an animal needs its space.  But even people who take the hardest line against pettification of animals have a hard time resisting nuzzles from an animal who's giving them.

Overall, the movie really seemed like a study in class-differentiated attitudes towards animals among Americans.

The thing that blew my mind was when Lambert's owner ended up taking in a female lion, and since he didn't really have the right facilities for Lambert (the original lion he'd raised) and the female, he ended up keeping them in a grimy horse trailer for a period of time.  The female lion got pregnant and ended up having a healthy baby.  I was shocked that things turned out so seemingly well in what looked like deplorable conditions.

The real shock came when Lambert was accidentally electrocuted.  The movie depicted this, and it was sickening and terrible.  I think it just goes to show that caring for exotic animals requires a lot of resources.  Accidents happen, but the rules that accrediting agencies come up with will help prevent them.

I don't think wild animals should be treated like pets and hand-raised to be human companions.  People really get excited about animals, and want to snuggle them and keep them as pets.  I don't believe that an animal necessarily needs to be in its natural environment to be "happy."  It's a difficult thing, when the natural environments aren't as available as animals need them to be.

Then there's the issue of access to the animals: I think zoos do a good service in giving people the chance to see animals close-up and really understand what it is we're working to conserve in the wild.  There are lots of people out there who are driven to be up close and personal with wild animals, and I'd prefer they do something like get educated and maybe become a vet or find a wildlife sanctuary to work at.  But there are people who don't have access to that kind of thing and will do things like bring home a lion cub.  I'm glad that the law doesn't side with them, but I just wish that the man in this movie had a better outlet for his desire to be with animals.        

I'm cheating on you with another blog

But I swear, it doesn't mean anything to me!  If you've been reading my blog, or just know me, you probably know that I'm not religious.  A friend of mine mentioned that she wanted to read the Bible and see what she thought.  I told her I'd be happy to do the same and blog it with her.  We current non-believers have joined up with a Christian to go through the Bible and respond.  If you're interested, check out The Pragmatist, The Perplexed and The Prophet.  I'm Pragmatist, and Perplexed is the one who initiated this project.  She's doing some nice cliffs-notes TWOP-style recaps of each chapter, so I've hardly touched my own Bible, I have to admit.  

A Crackpot's Views on Nutrition

I like like like food.  Cooking it is fun, but often I find myself balking at cooking due to laziness and a lot of pressure I put on myself to EAT RIGHT.  Plus, I tend to panic when I get hungry.  If I have a bunch of things like Kind bars sitting around, I can go days where 75% of the food I consume comes in bar form.  It's carby and low-effort and sort of expensive, but it makes me stop worrying about how I'll get my hunger sated.  I read a review of Soylent, the nutrition shake that everyone somehow is convinced is much cooler than Ensure  (Via Andrew Sullivan.) and it sounds to me like Soylent is a gateway to orthorexia.  If I'm going to replace my fun, stimulating food with a goo, I think plumpynut sounds much yummier.

I have some sort of crackpot ideas as to why living on Soylent won't work out very well.  I don't have any good links, but I have gotten the impression over time that an entire diet of nutritional supplements generally won't cut it for maintaining good health.  If we're going to accept that as true, then I can move on to why I think it doesn't work.

At Zoo Boise, I got to hang around some giraffes a lot (I miss you, Julius and Jabari!), and the giraffes were fond of chewing on the fence of their exhibit.  A guy who was watching that said he was a vet and that some herbivores will just chew on things because there's a behavioral-physical loop where if the animal's body doesn't do enough chewing, it doesn't feel like it's sated.  In that case, they just chew on whatever's around.  This comes up when herbivores eat food that's too soft for them.

I find that I don't feel very "full" after processed food gets to digesting inside me.  I wonder if it's the same mechanism working in me.  The same goes for when I am eating a lot of yogurt or cottage cheese or other semi-solid food.

The other thing that I imagine influences why "whole foods" tend to work differently in our bodies than what I'll call "constructed foods," is some research that showed that the RNA found in the organisms we eat can control  the transcription of our own genes.  

Lucy in the Sky Without Anxiety

I use antidepressants, and have for years.  I was resistant at first (mostly due to some ableist nonsense about being one of those people with something wrong.  I also didn't understand that I had any kind of problem.)

Popular ideas about "happy pills" are so wrong about how these drugs work.  A "happy pill" would be basically useless, I think.  The thing that makes a good antidepressant useful is that it makes depression manageable, so you have the strength/insight to deal with symptoms as they come along.  

I had to learn a lot about psychoactive drugs when I dealt with a lot of anxiety and depression as my life turned upside down in 2008.  This is not to mention insomnia, which has been a problem for most of my life.  I ended up using a lot of sleep aids then, and looking into anti-anxiety meds.  My impression of anti-anxiety meds like benzodiazapenes wasn't a good one.  They seem more like traditionally-recreational drugs, where they just push a psych symptom out of view for a while, until the drug wears off.  

I don't see how that helps very much.  It's the difference between a hand up and a handout.  Then again, these drugs are widely used for an illness I don't know that I've truly experienced.  However, Andrew Sullivan points to someone's anti-anxiety experience with psilocybin that sounds precisely like my description of why antidepressants are useful drugs.  

Hallucinogens and other recreational drugs that aren't alcohol or marijuana are pretty taboo in the world of psychology, but I wonder if they need to be.  

Add The Words Idaho

So I was pretty busy as I got close to moving from Boise, but I regret not being a part of the Add The Words campaign.  Check out this really amazing trailer, but be warned that it starts with a metaphorical punch.

  

Be Careful, but Don't #CancelColbert

I just love Stephen Colbert.  Let's get that out of the way first.

Because of that, I don't think his show should be canceled.  He regularly plays with fire, and it's both brave and reckless of him.  I do wish he'd stop with the transphobic jokes, but I watch and enjoy his show.  He's a biting social critic, and generally a voice for morality in public life.

Sometimes he steps over the line of decency, but almost always in a way that ridicules others' cruelty, rather than joining in it.  When he makes a joke that goes, "Ha ha, how can Dan Snyder not know he's being an asshole?" by employing an ugly and hurtful stereotype, he's doing something inherently risky.

I think I've reversed my position on hate speech being necessarily worthy of legal protection.  I used to believe that it needs to be, because it is speech.  Now I believe that it's a luxury of my position to be able to laugh off a slur.

When I say this humor is "risky" I don't mean, "at risk of offending liberal crybabies."  I mean it risks the safety and comfort of marginalized people.  Correlation isn't causation, but the specter of a more-racist society is enough to scare me off of saying the n-word even in private.  A society where the n-word is frequently used is probably an especially dangerous society for black people. I'd  rather not be comfortable with the hallmarks of white-supremacy, in case there's a causal relationship I don't quite understand.  It takes a lot more than just not using a particular word to evolve beyond our legacy of white supremacy, but I think good-hearted people generally agree that a racial slur is something we can give up in service of that goal.  In fact, it's possibly the very least that can be done. It is a limitation on expression, but I find it to be truly tiny.

The joke was unnecessarily offensive.  Stephen Colbert the man did not choose to highlight it, probably for that reason.  

I Signed Up for Obamacare

...and it was not a good experience.  It took me hours, and a few phone calls.

Looking back, I'm not quite sure what the problem was, but apparently Chrome and healthcare.gov don't play together well.  I spent a lot of time on something unresponsive, just figuring it was slow.

Click login, see nothing is happening, and come back later to find that my click wasn't registered.  Finally log back on with a new browser, and get an error saying that I need to log out and try again, then get stuck looking at the login screen again.  That was a mistake.  I made an account, applied for the ability to choose a plan, and got to the point where I thought I was finished, but realized I hadn't chosen a plan.

If you need to do this too, you might want to see Sarah Kliff's guide to signing up with healthcare.gov.

In the end, I was able to enroll in a plan, but I was very determined to make it work.