What's been rattlin' 'round this old head o'mine:

[capri0mni]

1. A thought experiment, with the same premise as Jane Elliott's "eye-color racism experiment, to illustrate how society's ableism bias creates disability out of difference:
   
   Right now, whether someone has blue or brown eyes is simply a question of difference, but both are considered perfectly normal. But imagine: sometime in the not to distant future, because of security fears, all public buildings (government and commercial) are required to install eye-scanning cameras on their door locks, in order to get a license to conduct business.
   
   Now imagine that the technology works great for people with brown eyes, but some of the people with blue eyes don't have enough pigment in their irises for the cameras to image them clearly. Sometimes, the doors will open for blue-eyed folks, sometimes they won't... or they'll open part way and get stuck.
   
   Maybe, when they were testing the prototype of this technology, they didn't realize the shade of blue in a person's eyes mattered, or maybe they didn't even consider whether eye color would make any difference at all, and didn't check to see if they had eye color diversity in their testing samples. And by the time the camera systems are widespread enough to make the problem evident, it's too deeply embedded into the infrastructure to change.
   
   But that's okay -- there are always work-arounds. If a blue-eyed person needs to enter a building, a guard can come to a speaker, and ask them a series of security questions, or come take a scan of their fingerprints. Or the blue-eyed person can bring a brown-eyed friend or relative who can vouch for their identity.
   
   All of this takes extra effort and time, of course. ...And how long do you think it would be before people start questioning why the blue-eyes have to be out in public, anyway? And since blue eyes are from a double recessive gene, two blue-eyed people shouldn't be allowed to marry and have kids!
   
   
2. A startling thinky-think sentence from the introduction to Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of Strangers:*
   
   "The population of classical Athens when Socrates died, at the end of the fifth century BC, could have lived in a few large skyscrapers."
   
   
3. Remember my entry, here, about how "Monster" comes from a Latin word for offspring born with missing, or extra, limbs? I wonder if that's why so many 'monsters' have "Fish Tails." Where normal two hind legs would be, you have the two fused together, instead...
   
   
4. I love Geeks. I even enjoy, for the most part, hanging out with geeks who have a different flavor of geekiness than I do -- math geeks, or comic book geeks, for example. I think what makes someone geeky, and what makes geeky people so much fun, is that they refuse to develop a vaneer of cool cynicism: They remain enthusiastic about the things they love, and want to share it with others, regardless of whether or not others will think them silly for it. In this sense, I think, Geek is a better word than "nerd" because "geek" originally meant "village idiot" -- someone who knows a lot about their favorite subject, but doesn't really care for the fads and fashions valued by her fellow villagers.
   
   
5. This last weekend, I lost contact with the Internet, and so I resorted to reading an actually printed book to pass the time (the one I quote from above). And I realized one reason why I prefer to read from the computer screen. When I'm reading from a paper book, I have to hold it horizontally, so the light will shine on the pages, and that means, to read the pages, I have to bend my neck to look down at them, and that leads to strain, after a while... either that, or I have to hold the book up in front of my face, and that leads to arm strain. Whereas, when I'm reading on my monitor, my hands are resting on my desk, and my back and neck are straight, and I'm looking straight ahead. So my body's attention span doesn't give out before my mind's does. I think that's why an e-reader doesn't (yet) (fully) appeal to me: a computer that you have to handle like a book misses the point. ... or, at least, my point.

*(Well-written and engaging -- mostly, until the casual ableism slips out at random spots. Still, I'm enjoying the general flow of it, regardless of ocassional winces)

Comments

[spiralsheep]

1. Works for me as an illustration, but then my thoughts on the matter are probably similar to yours, heh.

4. Geeks FTW!

5. Book stand of some sort? Betterer reading light? I'm sure you've already thought of and rejected both of those. I used to find the 45degree cushiony things at the British Library very helpful when I was taking notes.

[capri0mni]

1. Heh. Indeed.

4. Always!

5. Both of these things would help, true. But they also require me getting More Stuff and to Figure out Where to Keep It. With the Web, all I need is information -- a url I can return to...

I still enjoy tactile books, and turning pages. But it's a different experience, and I have different stamina for it. This was just a reminder that being a web junkie isn't just mental laziness...

[jesse_the_k]

(1) Very intriguing. I will ponder some more.
(5) Indeed, reading hardcovers requires hand strength to hold open and arm strength to hold up. Reading paperbacks as well (just different muscles). The auto-scrolling web-reader on my iPod touch (also Android & Windows Mobile) & comes closest to frictionless magic -- Instapaper

[capri0mni]

Heh. With endorsements like that, I may soon be in the unenviable position of lusting for gadgets. ;-)