ADD
March 8th, 2009 | Uncategorized
Whose idea was it to move daylight savings time up a month? Does this bother anyone besides me? Maybe it was announced somewhere, but since I’m in a news blackout, I missed it. I just seems wrong for it to be broad daylight out at 6:30pm in early March.
I saw The Reader last night, and am still feeling somewhat flayed. God.
Thanks to Steph for that great list of graphic novels on the last post! Good resource. And the folks who made additions to it. If I ever have time it would be cool to keep a page of folks’ recommendations and reviews going on here somewhere.
Thanks also to the people who contributed to the iPhone/unemployment discussion on the last post in a kind, open way.
Here’s my cat playing with a broken string of mardi gras beads. I know, I know, this is potentially dangerous, but she was well supervised and I assure you, no animals were harmed in the making of this video.
Here’s my brother playing a song called “Decay” with his band False Icons last month at Webster Hall.
I know you folks are probably not, for the most part, the right demographic, but if you like this, you can get the whole album here!
137 Responses to “ADD”
I don’t know who decided to move up DSL a month,either,but I’m going to love longer afternoon light. Is it the Sec’y of Agriculture who decides such things? The original idea was to give farmers more daylight hours to work in the fields,but in the 21st Century the concept if obsolete.
Yes,it would be great to have a list of rec’d books,films,reviews,etc.,lest all these brilliant suggestions get lost in cyberspace.
Mardi Gras beads – related: I love your final comment, “Don’t eat them!”. Cats are always so obedient! 🙂
Oh, btw, Happy International Women’s Day!
http://events.yahoo.com/womensday/2009/
I really enjoyed the video of your cat. Aren’t cats entertaining. I know watching my cat spaz out trying to catch her own tail is more entertaining than any tv show.
We have the Bush administration to thank for the earlier daylight savings. The Energy Policy act of 2005 was the bill that effected the change, and took effect in 2007. The earlier daylight is supposed to save energy somehow, but whether it actually does or not these days is definitely up for debate.
I apologize for the goofiness of my question: Is there a reason why I have not seen it mentioned that today it is (in numerous countries) women’s day? Although media make it sort of a silly thing here, it is (used to be?) a day for fight and pride and celebration, and the day was chosen because a group of women who were on strike got killed–I believe in a fire.
We’re the only country in the world, I believe, that honours Daylight Savings Time. I remember asking my mom about it when I was a kid. At first she said it was for farmers. A few years later she said it was so politicians could get in an extra hour of golf. I’m leaning towards the golf theory.
Heads up: BIG article on Lynda Barry in the Chicago Trib:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/magazine/chi-mxa0308magazinebarrypg13-22mar08,0,984414.story
Lots of countries use daylight savings time (though it’s often called “summer time” elsewhere). The start and stop dates aren’t universally synced, however. I lived in Germany for a bit a few years back and their summer time start was either ahead or behind the US by about two weeks, can’t remember which now.
The theory about adding two extra months of DSL (it now starts a month earlier and ends a month later) is that it will help save energy because people (particulary in offices) will have less need to use artificial light. Daylight savings time originally was supposed to benefit agriculture but I believe it was revived in the 70s during the (first) energy crisis. I’ve heard it argued that, air conditioning having since then become much more ubiquitous, it may not have any real benefit anymore.
Yo hey yo, Alison’s quoted in that article, too. Back to reading…
**clearing throat** I posted about IWD earlier today. Thanks to R2A for your enthusiastic response. For more info,Google IWD–history and current status.
I’ll bet Amy Goodman will provide some coverage about IWD on Democracy Now! on March 9.
Thank you for the Dr. W. videos. Our lovely old cat, Alice, died a few months ago and we’ve decided to wait a while before we go to the rescue and allow ourselves to fall in love again. Dr. Winnicott is my favorite temporary kitty fix.
So, in the background of video #1, I can hear a man explaining how to have a Jewish wedding. Clearly that commentary was not enough to hold your household’s attention for any length of time. I’m just hoping the wedding isn’t actually going on in the house while you’re all playing with beads.
Oooh videos! and an article on Lynda Barry! I can hardly wait, but first, the time!
I have always loathed having to change clocks back and forth, so last fall I just left the big kitchen clock “as is”, and mentally subtracted an hour whenever I looked at it.
That may seem awkward, but not nearly as much so as trying to figure out what the time is from my friend’s clock, which is chronically 12 or 13 minutes fast, or thinking I’m late, thanks to the one at work that is always 8 or 9 minutes off.
Bonus: leaving the clock alone had the effect of making me feel smugly “on time” (not my forte) for the past few months.
Arizona stays on standard time, so does Taiwan. so why not my kitchen clock (which is now “correct” again)?
We’ll see how I feel tomorrow morning when I have get up and to go to work a real hour earlier, in the dark.
And now — time for videos and the link!
I’m one of those people who thinks our national clocks should be set so that its light out till 10PM.
So there.
We Canadians celebrate Daylight Savings Time too. I was also told it was so the farmers had more daylight to plow their fields, so my elementary school teacher said. I like the fall one, but hate the spring one.
Sorry, I forgot to put my name on the post above.
PS, your brother’s band is very good!
Cat Pimp – I’m with you – way.
The only thing (that I know about) the Bush administration did that I am psyched about was adding time on the spring and fall ends to create the illusion of more daylight hours. It was such a pleasure to see the blue sky, still, at 6:45pm this evening.
And, for those fact hungry readers, here’s everything you ever wanted to know about Daylight Savings Time but were afraid to ask – http://www.webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/index.html
My question is, did Dr. Winnicott have to flash two or all eight of her natural endowments to get those beads?
Maggie! Ha! But…I thought it was six. Shows what I know.
That song is pretty good stuff, but of course, I’m the Metal Prophet, so there you go. My tastes aren’t so much in the industrial metal area, I rather prefer melodic death metal, thrash, progressive death metal, and the like.
In the past, I consoled myself with the thought that Daylight Savings Time would never be abolished because the folks in gov’t were too busy with other things – then they actually took the issue up, not to abolish it, but to tinker with the dates instead of delivering meaningful energy reform. ARG. Eva’s link explains the whys of this nonsensical practice. I’ll have to reread it – I’ve forgotten most of it since visiting that site a couple years ago.
I think the powers-that-be use DST as a sort of canary-in-the-mineshaft – as long as people fail to question this crazy monkeying with time, they know that the populace will still accept all kinds of madness 😉
>>I like the fall one, but hate the spring one.
Ha! JessicA, I’m the polar reverse! (Let me guess:you= morning person; me=night person, right?)
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Hear hear, Colin T. Amy Goodman had a guest on the other day who said that during the Bush admin., a coup d’etat was achieved in terms of making the US a military state (impunity for violations of nat’l and int’l law). People failing to question… a-yup.
~
So, I’m wondering what it’s like to generally walk around your house on lazy Sundays just kinda videoing stuff. I don’t own anything that does that, so I don’t know, but I wonder the impact of vid’ing the daily this N thats of one’s life while you are in the middle of… your life.
(impact on the vid’er, that is – not on the planet or the cosmos…. Does it change how/what you remember abt your day-to-day days?)
i really really like the Decay song…i was listening to psyche-out by meat beat manifesto at the moment and to hear the music on your site was very strange but cool..by the way your work is fantastic.
re: coup d’état by Bush Admin
I always like to go to the source materials for the unvarnished story.
If you can believe this, in the waning days of the Bush Admin, the *BUSH* Dept of Justice Office of Legal Counsel disavowed the legality/applicability of many of the legal opinions rendered by that very same band of criminals.
Read the legal memorandum withdrawing many of the patently illegal prior memoranda here:
http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/documents/memostatusolcopinions01152009.pdf
Read all the referenced legal memoranda here:
http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/documents/olc-memos.htm
I’m not an attorney, and I’m flabbergasted by what these criminals did to flout the Constitution. Even the mere titles of some of these memoranda are instructive: “Memorandum Regarding Authority of the President to Suspend Certain Provisions of the ABM Treaty (11-15-2001),” “Memorandum Regarding the President’s Power as Commander in Chief to Transfer Captured Terrorists to the Control and Custody of Foreign Nations (03-13-2002).”
Kudos to the Obama DOJ for posting these online. As Justice Louis Brandeis noted, “Sunshine is the best disinfectant.”
oooops, sorry feminista, kate and all. I try to read everything, but clearly do not manage.
I don’t like any time changes. I’m like an infant, if I’m not on my schedule I’m all whiny about when I should eat and sleep. Guess that means I should move to Arizona!
Because I’m a disgusting morning person, I’d rather have the light at the beginning of the day. I hate time changes of any sort. I wish they would just pick one and stick with it.
I love how cats feign indifference to a toy, then turn around and bunny-kick the daylights out of it. I’ve recently adopted a feral kitten and she’s adapting very nicely, but she plays demonically until she’s exhausted. We only play with toys, but she still nails my hands sometimes. Kittens are fun, but I look forward to her being a more sedate adult and not biting the toes of innocent passers-by.
I grew up in Northwest Ohio. Farm country. I always understood that the farmers didn’t like Daylight Savings Time. They don’t have jobs that start and stop at a certain time. I thought Daylight Savings Time had was so that people who had jobs that end in the late afternoon at a set time by the clock had more daylight hours after work, urban and suburban families who eat supper at a certain time by the clock have more daylight hours after supper, etc.
I was surprised a few months ago when I read something about how recently clock time was standardized between localities. What I was reading said it had to do with the advent of trains.
It is hard to post without a typo! had was!
Also, I should have said something like “farmers didn’t have jobs that started and stopped at a certain time”. I guess now they do, since they have a paying job to support their farming habit.
The wikipedia article on international women’s day isn’t bad.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Women%27s_Day
it’s one of those holidays, kind of like may day (two of my favorites, by the way) that has some communist origins, but has been claimed by many people. people continue to observe them, even when they are not entirely clear about what they are observing. i think this is ok, although it’s nice to know our lefty history too. seems like a whole lot of things kind of converged in march, and IWD commemorates them all. It’s not so simple as, say, the triangle shirt waist fire happened on March 8. it didn’t as far as i know. but it’s good to remember it. the communists now call it International Working Women’s Day and they claim the holiday for their own. The pagans claim may day. (they probably think we stole it from them, which might be true. I think that just makes may day even cooler.) and, it’s only six weeks away.
i spent the day standing up with the justice for palestine folks as a counter to the pro-israel debacle that occurred yesterday on the green of my oh-so-liberal little new england college town.
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as for daylight savings time, i think the diversity of opinion and preference on this question is quite fascinating, and seems, at least on this list, to be fairly evenly split between those who appreciate springing forward, those who enjoy falling back, and those who can’t reach the hands of their clocks. I’m with the third camp, and would rather not suffer the jet lag in either fall or spring. i think it’s a little presumptuous to play with time in this way.
ksbel6: You could move to Arizona, or to Hawai’i. They don’t monkey with their clocks either.
While I was looking for a summer-related wallpaper on the National Geographic website, I came across this: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/03/090305-daylight-saving-time-facts-history.html
Put me in the camp of more light later, please!
And now, back to work.
This isn’t especially relevant to the thread, but I thought people would be interested in these two articles on Rachel Maddow:
http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2009/02/22/style/t/index.html#pagewanted=0&pageName=22lesbian&
and the response:
http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2009/02/24/maddow_sex_symbol/index.html
Ugh. I hate daylight savings time, and I really hate having it pushed up into March. I’m not a morning person, but I have to get up early. That means when daylight savings time starts I’m back to getting up in the ugly pitch dark. From what I understand, the idea that daylight savings time helps farmers is a myth. Cows don’t change their body clocks, so when the time changes people who work with animals don’t really get to change their schedules, they just end up out of sync with the rest of the world–which can’t help with those dayjobs. I’ve read that daylight savings time is more of a help for retailers, because people are more likely to go out and shop after work if it’s light out.
Me, I just think noon should happen when the sun is at its zenith, not an hour before. Here in the Pacific Northwest the summer light stays and stays anyway, so even without daylight savings time there would be plenty of evening daylight in the summertime.
Back in the hip, groovy 70’s, I was a young thing working on my master’s degree at Indiana University in Bloomington. Ah, 1978. It was the summer of love… but I digress. the great Hoosier state of Indiana does not cotton to Daylight Savings Time. At least,not the part of it that contains Bloomington and Marion County. But it does not escape its effects, and neither (I would suspect) do Arizona and other locales in North America that remain fiercely anachronistic. I mean, fiercely independent. 🙂 National television in Bloomington would follow the eastern standard time schedule in the winter, then switch to the central daylight time schedule in the summer. For example, the network evening news might come on at 6:30 pm or 7 pm in the winter, but would air at 5:30 pm in the summer!
Laissez les bon temps rouler, Dr. W!
I think Daylight Savings Time was developed during World War I to save energy. Right now I’m too lazy to look that up and confirm, though.
Alison, right before I woke up, I had a dream that you’d started a new strip. You’d decided the old one had gotten too complicated, and so you wanted to start with a clean slate and keep it simple. The new, short title even had “simple” in it, but I can’t remember what it was. Your strip was on display, huge, in a hotel by the escalator or stairs, and I stopped and looked at it while on a stressful path throughout the building.
I have no idea what this means. I don’t think I’ve ever dreamt about you or your strip before.
Kate L: Alas, all of Indiana now does the DST thing (they changed in 2005).
Erika,
Another feature of my youth, gone! 🙂
most cats have eight, but it varies. I had a dog once with 9 of them-5 on one side and 4 on the other.
I lived in HI for a year, and I loved it that there was no DSL. It makes me feel better, though, to realize that DSL is actually earlier this year-it makes me feel less stupid for not realizing it was gonna happen until I was already an hour late for work…
Off topic (but I can’t believe no one else has asked about this yet, unless I missed it): AB, how come you guys are watching/listening to stuff about the Jewish wedding ceremony? 😉
and by DSL I mean daylight savings time (DST?) I need some coffee.
There is a nice little tongue-in-cheek article in today’s The Globe and Mail by Roy MacGregor about how the move of Daylight Savings is one of Bush’s great legacy achievements: “How George W. Bush delivered peace in our time”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090309.wmacgregor09/BNStory/Front/?query=
It does mention many of the positives of having it earlier. The main plus is that green proponents said it apparently saves us 100,000 barrels of oil a day and reduces the usage of house lights at the end of work days.
Speaking as a hoser, I have to say I LOVE the extra light going into the evening. It has always been pretty dire until late March. But last night I was chirping to my partner Monica and pointing to my watch – “Look it’s 7:30 and just now twilight!!!”
Happy (delayed) International Women’s Day everyone, and Happy Daylight Savings Time, Americans!
In the UK ours is gonna go over late March as per usual. I’m loving waking up in daylight but it’s still dark by 6.30ish.
Roll on June when it’s light at 10.30pm! That’s one advantage of living in the UK, which is so much further north than people realise. On Shetland they have a 2.30am sunrise mid-summer.
OK, this is all radically off-topic, but what the heck.
Concerning time-zone irregularities in Indiana and other places: Like many such “silly laws” there are often some subtleties involved that are not immediately obvious on first viewing. When DST was initially set up Indiana was essentially three states: The NW corner –basically a suburb of Chicago– the SE corner –an outlying province of the Cincinnati/Louisville area– and the farmland in the middle.
Consequently, it actually made quite a bit a sense –especially in pre-uniworld/mass communication days– that the widely separated regions around a Chicago and Cincinnati should each share the time-zone of their local urban center (where most folks worked, shopped, watched TV, etc), which, as it happened, were quite understandably in different timezones.
The net result was that for a long time Indiana had two separate time-zones, split roughly down the middle, eastern-ish counties in one zone, western-ish counties in the other.
This, in turn, caused further confusion because the state capital, Indianapolis, being smack in the center of the state, was surrounded by a number of counties, some in one zone, some in the other. This was something of a hassle for people who lived in these counties, many of whom were commuters into the city. As a result, it was standard practice in many of these “border countries” for “government time” (e.g. the schools and “the clock on the courthouse”) to be one time, and the “civic time” (basically, everyone one else) to be an hour earlier/later.
(For example, for a few months each year my father had the –seemingly unending– pleasure of telling friends that each morning “he left the house at 7:30 and arrived at work at 7:00”.)
The final result was that Indiana’s practice until recent years (that is, basically ignoring DST and keeping the “same time” all year) was intended to be a compromise to get around this hassle.
(In point of fact, as I recall India does –or use to do– something similar. That is, the country extended fully across two time zones. The compromise was to split the difference: I.e. rather than have half the country at 7:30 and the other half at 8:30, the entire country was at 8:00.)
No idea why Arizona does such things.
We still celebrate International Women’s Day here in Manchester UK, and what’s more it’s paid for out of our Council Tax -this is a local form of taxation, not sure what your name for that is.
See http://www.manchester.gov.uk/site/scripts/documents_info.php?documentID=380
We also celebrate Daylight Saving Time, which we of course call British Summer Time!
I played the False Icons clip while reading the posts. It made everyone’s comments more “hardcore”, which is to say, I liked it.
Just posting to say I’d be interested in more of your thoughts on The Reader, AB (and everyone else here). For all that it was about a heavy subject, I’m not sure it was that much of a heavy movie. But I’d love to hear how others reacted.
I feel fortunate in that I live in the only Canadian province that doesn’t observe DLS.
International Womens Day in the UK still goes on. It really got rolling in the 80s when there was Municipal Socialism to fund it. London had a biggish march for Million Women Rise, is this happening where you are? – it has galavanised a lot of women, my only regret is that by focusing on the single issue (!) of male violence, other feminist demands are diminished.
So thousandas of women and children from across the UK yelled their way through central London and into the faces of more thousands of shoppers. Those tall buildings make great acoustic reflectors. See my first attempt at journalist-type video, only because the noise was so fabulous, I did a few wobbly clips on my little amateur digi camera:
http://pamisherwood.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/saturday-afternoon-in-oxford-street/
I had a dog once with 9 of them-5 on one side and 4 on the other.
So she had a superfluous nipple, like Krusty the Clown. Cool.
Pam, that video was LOUD! Dang! I love to see women raising a ruckus.
i will add to the queries about the sound track to dr. winnicott’s big fun…are you planning a jewish wedding, or do you just like klezmer music?
and, another question i’ve been pondering, why is dr. winnicott dr. winnicott? cats are not typically named after british psychoanalysts, no matter how wise and down to earth the psychoanalyst might be!
Funny, Ginjoint, when I hear “extra nipple” I think of Chandler Bing.
Fun Home just made a Time Magazine Top 10 list…
http://nerdworld.blogs.time.com/2009/03/09/the-top-10-graphic-novels-of-all-time-good-to-get-that-settled/
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1883296_1883291_1883287,00.html
Congrats.
More on International Women’s Day: Two top stories on Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org.
Pam I–a very enthusiastic march! I liked seeing lots of 20- somethings who don’t subscribe to the “I’m not a feminist but…” sentiment.
Thanks for being there and documenting history. (No,I don’t say ‘herstory’ because the etymology of history isn’t inherently sexist.)
Love that video, Pam I. Refreshing in every way!
ps I think AB & HRT (and Dr. W.) are just listening to Public Radio, no?
@ NLC 9 March 1:42 PM: I would dispute the claim that Indiana ever really needed so many time zones. If you look at where the sun is at noon, it’s clear that Central time should actually start somewhere east of Columbus, Ohio, and should include the whole of Indiana. As it is, such Indiana residents as my humble self who are on Eastern time have found that in June and July DST has put us in the Land of the Midnight Sun.
@Colin Tedford 8 March 11:22 PM: “I think the powers-that-be use DST as a sort of canary-in-the-mineshaft – as long as people fail to question this crazy monkeying with time, they know that the populace will still accept all kinds of madness.”
You may be more right than you know. When Indiana was debating DST in 2005, our leading businesspeople assured us that the reason our state’s economy has been lagging so far behind the rest of the Great Lakes region is that we don’t fiddle with our clocks twice a year. I kept waiting for someone to ask them why, if the lack of DST is such an economic burden, Arizona and Hawai’i have such high growth rates. I knew better than to hope that any voice heard throughout the state would suggest that the sorry condition of Indiana’s businesses might reflect in some way on the abilities of our leading businesspeople.
Feminista, I have to jump in and argue (in a sisterly fashion *grin*) about the etymology of history. It’s root is the Greek histor, which meant a learned man or judge, specifically male — women were not capable of being learned or judges, in their opinion. My current source is the Online Etymological Dictionary,, but originally, back in the 70s, we used the same root to move away from it as we moved away from mankind instead of humankind or humanity, fireman instead of firefighter, etc. It was NOT because “his” was in the word, we’re just not that stupid or trivial.
In a similar fashion, we drew attention to the inherent sexism of testify and seminars by using alternative terms — I believe it was Tee Corinne who coined ovular as a replacement for seminar. Testify means to swear an oath by grabbing your testicle, so obviously women were excluded from giving testimony (or having the expectation of truth coming from us, clearly). Seminar comes from semen.
Just as I believe precision in language is extremely important, I believe understanding and, where possible, subverting the oppressive/exclusionary roots of certain words is valuable. Hence, I don’t use blackmail, refer to a coward as “yellow”, or speak of bargaining as jewing someone down.
Since patriarchal opposition arose en mass to ridicule, deny, or simply halt any substantive changes in replacing the most serious gendered words (i.e., mankind and man-anything — they won’t give that up without a fight to the death, apparently, because in fact conditioning children to think of males as “real” and “first” human beings is crucial to maintaining the status quo) — since then, the use of herstory has also come to mean someone who is willing to be up front about her/his resistance to maintaining language as is. It’s a code, an indicator — like refusing to give up “liberal” for “progressive” or refusing to call undocumented workers “aliens” or “illegal aliens”. At least, that’s how I see it.
Anyone else see “The Reader”? I know the basic details and all, but so far gotten mixed reviews from peers…Think I should hurry up, see it in the theater now, or wait for the rental?
Kate Winslet is worth seeing on the BIG SCREEN!!!
let me rephrase that,,,,Kate Winslet is ALWAYS worth seeing on the BIG SCREEN…..(can you tell I love her) tee hee
she is worthy she is worthy
i think I messed all that up….Ok I will stop now…but truth be told…I find Kate to be a high caliber actress…nuff said…..
Maggie, I’m with you on language (for the most part). Another word to avoid (when possible) is disseminated.
Another is getting away from dark/light metaphors, which are rooted in white superiority/ideology.
But here’s a word I’ve not quite found a good alternative to: gypped (an awful, racist word). I’ve used screwed, ripped off, and jilted. But they don’t always confer the precise meaning I’m trying to get at. Here’s an example from a written story: “Susan always felt she’d been gypped in life; her parents died when she was young and she never had the oppty to….”
Anyway, I need a good alternative word.
re: Mucking with clocks
I hate Daylight Time, and I refuse to call it Daylight *Savings* Time because it saves nothing. If I wanted to have the sun above the horizon until 7PM in what is still officially winter, I would move to a more southern latitude.
All this mucking around with clocks and timezones wreaks havoc in the worklives of folks responsible for maintaining computer systems (of which I am one). But at least the Daylight/Standard Time effective dates tend to be fairly static in North America, literally requiring an act of Congress or other legislative body to change, and then the dates stay put for many years.
Not so for our good friends Down Under. The Australian Parliament seems to have a lock on ephemeral and whimsical changes in the effective dates of Daylight Time. They’ve changed the effective dates twice in the past eight years; in 2000 for the Summer Olympics, and in 2006 for the Commonwealth Games. Each of these changes was for that specific event/year only. Major headaches for computer geeks everywhere on that continent, and the time changes were driven only by demands for greater commercial exploitation of the event broadcasts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Australia
@R2A
How about “cheated”? It work in the example you gave above. I suppose you’d have to use other synonyms in other uses.
I’m fond of slightly obscure synonyms for some of the uses of “gypped” to mean defrauded. One of my favorites is “hornswoggled”. And then there are the old favorites such as “bamboozled”, “hoodwinked”, and “swindled”. Current financial reporters must be digging deep into their Roget’s Thesauri to keep their writing fresh amidst the devolving Ponzi schemes and Madoff fraud.
Dark/light metaphors surely go back to the days of sun worship, long before racism as we know it was invented. Not xenophobia, as that as always existed as condemnation and hate of the other has always been a ‘useful’ tool to use in order to bond together a tribe.
*Sigh* I’d love to do a degree in anthropology but I’m not sure they do them any more.
@R2A
Many years ago I worked on a computer system which had one server designated as “master” and the other as “slave” by the manufacturer. I actually had to write a response to someone in the non-technical foodchain about the naming convention; apparently someone had complained after overhearing the techies discussing masters and slaves.
I still work on systems with a designated master and one or more slaves, some manufacturers still use that terminology, but others are going by “primary” and “secondary” to refer to the servers, even when that’s not an accurate description of how they work. Primary/secondary usually indicates more of a peer/failover setup, where a secondary server takes over and becomes primary if the primary server dies.
The control relationship on some systems is more accurately described by master/slave where the slave can’t take over if the master server dies, but I haven’t found a satisfactory substitute for the terms. Any suggestions?
good point, Ian (as usual 🙂 ). Guess I was thinking of ‘a black day on Wall Street’ – ‘dark night of the soul’ – ‘she had a very dark side’ etc. — all negative meanings of blackness, darkness, etc. black is beautiful, y’all!
cheated, hmm, a good alternative, HoH – thx.
how’s about leader/follower?
Hey, did anyone else see the article about a “Funeral Museum” in today’s NYT? How cool is that? They definitely should invite AB for a Fun Home reading!
Regarding DST, I heard that some psychiatrists are concerned that DST may exacerbate SAD (seasonal affective disorder), perhaps because of less daylight in the morning. There is a a PBS story (2 years ago, exactly) that mentions something about this.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/jan-june07/daylight_3-09.html
Dark and light do precede racism and are present in every culture and language, as is wet/dry, up/down, etc. But the association of dark (and black) with evil and light/white with good does not necessarily flow from observance of nature. I think of Langston Hughes’ poem (set beautifully to music by Sweet Honey in the Rock) pointing out that worshop of the day can be matched by worship of the night.
Again, I would turn to etymology when trying to decipher if a dark/light or black/white term arose during a time (and in a culture) where racism already held sway.
When seeking an alternative to master, I often find “mother” works well. Mother-child is a good allegory for two-part systems.
As for electrical parts labeled male and female (anything with a hole is female, of course), I use concave and convex if possible, but am still searching for another set of terms. I often try to imagine what our art and icons, and the subsequent effect on design of every kind, would look like if we had not had millenia of phallic worship and instead our “preferred” symbol of power was, for instance, a vulva. Folds and asymmetry. Examples are everywhere in nature.
Why is Dr. W’s name Winnicott and not Winnicat?
innie and outie (like belly buttons?)
@Maggie
When my friend’s two daughters were about 7 and 10 years old respectively, we built their mom a state-of-the-art computer system from scratch as a fun project. I let the kids do most of the assembly and installation work. I only installed the (expensive) CPU chip and RAM, they did everything else, including installing Windows, with a little coaching from me.
In the process, they inadvertently got TMI (Too Much Information) as I had to explain why some connectors were called male and the others female. Lots of giggles from them, and Mom simply assumed we were having so much fun building a computer.
It’s usually ok to describe connectors as plugs for male and jacks or sockets for female (or plugs and receptacles if dealing with AC electrical power) instead of male and female, except when the shell surrounding the pins/sockets also imparts an implied gender.
Determining connector gender is much more confusing today. Look at the antenna connector on your wireless router as an example. On most routers, it’s something called RP-SMA, which stands for Reverse Polarity SMA. Each connector has the outward characteristics of one gender, but the inward characteristics of the other gender in the RP series designation.
For example, the connector shell on the wireless router is externally threaded, and on a standard SMA connector it would have a socket at the center of the connector, and would be called a female connector. But look closely at the center of the RP-SMA connector on the router, it has a pin sticking out, making it a male RP-SMA. Ditto for the antenna, it is an internally threaded shell and has a socket, the reverse of normal SMA connectors, hence making it an RP-SMA female.
I always wondered why connectors which had both sockets and pins on each side of the connection weren’t called hermaphrodites.
More electrical/computer terminology with gender:
The system board on computers is commonly called the motherboard. Occasionally, someone might call it the mainboard, but that seems to be in used mostly in translation from Asian languages. Small subassemblies that plug into a main circuit board of some type tend to be called daughterboards.
The only manufacturer I’m aware of that does not call the main system board a motherboard is IBM (and now also Lenovo); they call it a planar. Outside of IBM geeks, no one knows what a planar is. A friend got her repaired Thinkpad back from Lenovo, and she asked me what it meant when the repair ticket said “Replaced planar.”
IBM has been calling mainboards planars for well over 20 years that I’m aware. But they also call the subassemblies daughterboards, so they’re not totally gender-neutral.
Maggie and R2A–Y’all make some interesting points. But I’m too brain-fried and frazzled to tackle this one tonight.
I just got back from a quick trip the grocery store and found the handles on my outer storm door were twisted down about 3 inches. Methinks someone tried to break in,and then gave up.
I have the double bolt on the wooden inner door and will put something heavy against it tonight.
Safe sleep to you, Feminista. I’m going to light a candle for you. Literally.
I love, love, love the light late in the day (though is does seem incongruous to be watching it snow in the daylight and have it be 7 pm). Actually, why don’t they just keep us on daylight savings time all year? So it’s dark when you get up in the winter, but it is anyway.
I’ve always thought of it as Daylight Wasting Time. They rob us of an hour in the Spring and shove it back at us unapologetically with no interest accrued in the fall. Where is the savings in that? If you’re going to rob and return, at least take the thing out for a joyride… or host a kegger or something.
O hai!
Am I the only one bothered by Basement Cat always being black? (And spooky, and mean, and etc.)
Related to what Ian said, I do wonder though if the origin of black=bad comes from the simple fact of how much harder it is for humans to see at night (especially before electricity), and the uneasiness (and lack of safety) that can result from that. I have no idea if this is true or not.
Feminista – I’ll be bathing you in white light in my thoughts. <— GAAHH!! LOOK WHAT I JUST DIIID!!!
‘Sjoke. I totally meant to do that.
Thanks Maggie Jochild on the info on seminar and testify. Gosh, hadn’t come across that before. And for the link to the etymological dictionary. I’ll be using that often 🙂
As for The Reader, despite the mixed reviews (most of which I am convinced comes from a mistaken interpretation of anti-semitism), I rate it as the best film I’ve seen in several years. It’s an intelligent,nuanced and multilayered script, an unequivocally grown up movie, with complex characters exquisitely portrayed by Winslet and David Kross.
Ginjoint: does your name mean “at this joint, we drink gin” or “first we hit the gin, then we hit the joint”?
I’ve wondered.
Yeah, I am bothered by the Basement Cat = Black thang. That’s why I never use it in my weekly Lolcat roundups.
Remember in Ghost, when the “bad people” died, the spirits that came to drag them down to hell were always black shadows, while the ones who finally came to get Patrick Swayze were swirls of white? When are we ever going to get over this simplistic crap?
In the early 1980s, there was actually a theory being spouted in some New Age circles (though not in the ones I connected to, at least not voiced more than once around me) that having brown eyes meant you had bad karma/rotten past lives, and the more “evolved” beings were born with blue eyes.
Brown Eyed/Blue Eyed. (Jane Elliott)
oh and it goes on and on: white knight, white angel, White House. Black Monday, black mood, black devil. Red-handed. Anyway, yeah – language – very important.
Feminista, so sorry… a violation… we’re here with you.
@ Maggie Jochild
Wow. My first reaction re: the brown eye stuff was “that sure was crazy” but then I decided to change it to “that sure was racist” especially since so many of those “New Agers” in the US were white.
Some people (I’m not sure—possibly Wiccans?) have kicked around the alternatives red magic/power (for blood and pain) and green magic/power(for life and growth)
but I think with either the information systems (master or slave) or the jacks (female or male) or the the black/white magic/power/etc. the either/or system of thinking underneath could be more dangerous than what the poles are named!
Ooh, thank you, I do like the False Icons’ song! Rich sound — at first I thought it was Klezmer! Perhaps the background kitty-video music influenced my ear. Some eastern European feel to the beat and the slithering around inthat minor key
Great song. Driving. I like it. Is that a theremin that the keyboard guy is playing? Kewl!
A few years ago, I saw something by Andrea Dworkin in a used book store. The dust jacket mentioned that in the book, Dworkin expounded on her ideas about the methods and significance of etymology as a discipline. I didn’t have any money with me at the time, and by the time I got back to the store the book had been sold. I hadn’t noted the title, and no one there remembered it.
Since then, I’ve been trying to figure out which book it was. None of her books (at least none of those I’ve gotten hold of) seems to have the word “etymology” in the index, or any other word that would point to such a discussion. And university library copies generally don’t have dust jackets, so I can’t find that original blurb. I’m at a loss. Can anyone help?
Never mind! I just found it. It was SCAPEGOAT.
Segueing back to maple syrup and bacon, Bloomberg reported today on a shortage of maple syrup in Vermont, leading to rationing in local restaurants:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601093&sid=ah5DD99EXVkw&refer=home
What really caught my eye in this article was the description of a cocktail, which sounds disgusting to my palate, but could have been concocted by the bloggers in this here Internet neighborhood:
“The sweet stuff is also moving beyond the breakfast menu, for use in foods such as fish entrees and salad dressings. At New York’s PDT restaurant, the $13 bacon-infused, bourbon-and-maple-syrup old-fashioned is a popular cocktail, said Don Lee, beverage director.”
A bacon-infused cocktail with maple syrup? To quote the late, great Anna Russell, “I’m not making this up, you know!”
Jessica – the name has several facets that appealled to me. Back in the 1920’s, speakeasies were also known as ginjoints. I liked the word’s associations with a rebellious, underground spirit (no pun intended) – they were, of course, illegal during Prohibition and usually steps were taken to hide them from prying eyes. They proliferated in Chicago, my hometown. So there’s that.
Jazz, one of my favorite forms of music, was played in them – I was raised listening to jazz by my parents (my grandfather was also a jazz and big band musician).
I also feel an affinity for the 1920’s, the time of a true sexual revolution and beautiful design and architecture.
And I love gin. So it all fit into one word.
Wow, that was TMI. Sorry about that. Ask a simple question, get an overly detailed answer.
Recently, I told my classes about the radiometric dating of geologic samples. The decay rate of a parent isotope to a daughter isotope (the standard terminology) is something I pointed out as being non-patriarchal termonology. Hmmm… seems to be a little edge to a lot of my geology lectures. I wonder why. Also, the polarity of Earth’s magnetic field has reversed itself from time to time in geologic history, and the record of “normal” and “reversed” magnetic polarity is recorded in seafloor crust that was being created at divergent plate tectonic boundaries like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The resulting magnetic pattern can be used to date the age of oceanic crust without having to actually collect samples for dating. What I always point out to my classes is that, by convention, “normal” polarity like we have in the present day is always represented by a black color, “reversed” polarity is always represented by a white color.
Smash the Patriarchy! The Seventies Shall Live Again!!!
Ah, maple syrup, another of life’s fine joys. I make a salad of poached chicken, apples and pecans with a maple syrup viniagrette from Lucia Watson’s _Flavors from the Heartland_ It could easily go vegetarian by omitting the chicken.
Ms. Watson is the owner of a fine restaurant in Minneapolis, one of the first here to get into the local, organic way of doing things.
And as long as I’m rambling, here is a link to a new food-related documentary some here might find interesting: http://www.foodfightthedoc.com/
Ginjoint: loved the story, and not TMI! I’m curious about why you characterized the 20’s as “the true sexual revolution.” Please share your thoughts–
@judybusy / ginjoint: Margaret Sanger where you are; Marie Stopes where I am. (Contraception as a subject of frank discussion, sexual physiology ditto, pleasurable copulation as the acknowledged ideal / norm.) Or: The integration of Freudian concepts into general cultural discourse. A general shift from covert sexuality toward overt / recognised sexuality. Or: Propagation of Magnus Hirschfeld’s ideas on homosexuality (although those had mostly to do with male homosexuality, to be sure) beyond the German cultural sphere.
I am ignorant of Francophone / Hispanophone developments leading into any “true sexual revolution” in those large tracts of the West. I hope that someone will tell me.
Anna Karenina, Effi Briest, Emma Bovary — small-town adulterous misery in the late nineteenth century. The patterns are the same everywhere. The same, I expect, for the demystification of sexuality in the first decades of the last century. Surely Sanger and Stopes had their counterparts in Paris, Buenos Aires, Madrid… Who were these counterparts? Being Anglophone lets me be so lazily, cosily uninformed…
@Kate L, re: color-coding
I suspect the color convention for magnetic polarity derived from the early color codes for DC electrical wiring, where black was the (+) positive lead, and white was the (-) negative lead. Sometimes you will still find that color coding used in low-voltage DC applications, such as intercom systems.
These days, standard DC color codes use red for (+) and black for (-). For example, look at the battery connector for a standard 9 volt battery, the leads are red and black. Or look under the hood of your auto, same red/black usage on the 12 volt battery (and your jumper cables).
Ok, but Smash the Patriarchy, anyway! 🙂
@h_o_h: I guess top/bottom would be too confusing too 😉
my thoughts on “daylight savings time”: There is, in fact, something being saved: The extra daylight at the end of the day is saving my sanity! In fact, I keep the clocks set to DST all year round (I call it “Liz Standard Time”). My long-suffering partner keeps asking “What time is it in real time?” while I protest that someone else’s arbitrary imposition of a “standard time” doesn’t make it real. I hate it when the clocks “fall back” and suddenly it is dark at depressingly early hours. Of late I have become a much more chipper and cheerful person!
I am completely disturbed by daylight savings. I’ve had a lot of late nights and I cannot get up in the dark! I’m with Liz, let’s just have our own time all year round.
@Kate L
Yup, let’s smash the patriarchy! You’ve got my hammer on it. And it’s a *BIG* hammer.
On the topic of nasty color associations, nothing beats the resistor color code mnemonic for misogyny.
In case your geekdom doesn’t extend to electronics, resistors are small cylindrical devices with a series of color bands painted on them to denote the unit’s resistance in ohms. Each color is assigned a number, and the combination of the color bands represent the resistance value.
0=Black
1=Brown
2=Red
3=Orange
4=Yellow
5=Green
6=Blue
7=Violet
8=Grey
9=White
I won’t bore you with the details of least-to-most significant digits, multipliers, and tolerances to interpret the color codes.
Students of electronics and engineering have to memorize this color code (B,B,R,O,Y,G,B,V,G,W) and the associated numeric values (0-9), and learn to use them in everyday design and troubleshooting.
The vile ubiquitous mnemonic that has been used since the color standard was developed in the 1920s is the following:
Bad Boys Rape Only Young Girls But Violet Gives Willingly
In some locales (mostly Southern US), the first word was Black.
Do a Google on ‘resistor color code mnemonic’ (no quotes) and see what turns up, you’d be shocked how prevalent this offensive mnemonic is worldwide.
As the first and/or only female in most of my classes and work assignments, I would ask my (always) male colleagues where they first learned the resistor color code and the vile mnemonic (every single one of them knew the mnemonic). They answered that they learned it in their electrical engineering classes, in military training classes, in trade schools, ham radio clubs, etc. I would also ask them if they ever heard a different mnemonic that didn’t involve rape. Not one ever heard or learned a non-violent or non-sexist mnemonic. I would ask them if this was taught in the open classroom or in some hush-hush conversation, it was always in the open classroom. And this was in the “Smash the Patriarchy” 1970s and 1980s.
These days, I occasionally ask recent hires (many of whom come from technical colleges as well as military) about the resistor color code. I get sheepish looks and blushes, and stammers, so I presume they are still teaching or passing it on samizdat style. Even the women (and thankfully there are a few more of us in the field these days!) know the mnemonic.
@Liz G, re: top/bottom
I suspect top/bottom won’t work for most of us. Even us vanilla types. 😉
hairball,
Uh… I just checked back in to say that it occured to me that saying, “black is the color used for normal magnetic polarity, perhaps because black is the color of positive leads in electrical wiring; white is color used for reverse magnetic polarity and for negative electrical leads” would be a pretty smash-the-patriarchy thing to tell my class. My original version of it seemed to make a real impression on a young black man in one of my earlier classes. I hadn’t known about the mnemonic.
@Kate L
Cool. Knowing that scientists were studying electricity and magnetism as separate forces initially, I tend to think the choice of black is somehow related to the color of magnetite (for you non-geology geeks, magnetite is an iron oxide mineral that is silvery-black, and has magnetic properties). Once they figured out that electricity and magnetism were related, the black as (+) for magnetism also became the (+) for electricity.
But that’s just my theory.
omg h_o_h, the resistor coloring! I had completely forgotten about it. I was also the only female in my EE class in the 70’s. But just to be fair, I am pretty sure that I heard it from a classmate, not the professor.
@ hairball-of-hope.
Woot, thanks for the explanation on the plugs/receptor gender issues. I’ve always wondered how that worked and why.
The resistor’s color code mnemonic is scarier than I thought possible. I knew there was a color – number code that needed memorization, but I had no idea what EE classes were teaching.
I’m working on a replacement mnemonic. Anyone else want to have a go? I’m thinking it should have some sort of video game theme.
I learned the mnemonic from my professor – also in the (mid) 70’s. I can only hope that has changed.
He had (barely) enough shame to give an alternative:
Bad boys race our young girls but Violet generally wins.
@hairball_of_hope
As an alternative mnemonic, how about:
Brown
Bears
Root
Out
Yams
Grizzly
Bears
Viscerally
Gnaw
Wildlife
Viscerally may be kind of hard to remember. Could substitute violently, I guess.
hairball_of_hope
Actually, it would make more sense if you started the mnemonic with “Black Bears” so it corresponds with the hierarchical colour classification.
I fucking love the minds coming to this website.
And Ginjoint — never too much TMI from you, honey.
I recently had to go into Radio Shack and ask for a male-to-male VGA adapter. I think I stammered a little.
Plus I agree with Maggie on both counts.
I, for one, love your brothers band. If I ever have money again I’m going to get the CD. That song had a very Hawkwind vibe to it.
@ ginjoint: interesting, thanks! So, if I ever visit your house, should I knock three times and whisper low… that you and I were sent by joe… ?
@Jessica Bessica, Ginjoint
You’ll need the password… SWORDFISH.
@Jessica Bessica: Ah yes. So much better than the Golden Fingerbowl. I mean, really. Who wants to go out and meet your Uncle Max and everyone you know?
I HATE the switch to/from DST. I don’t care which one it is, leave it alone.
Accident rates for both pedestrians and vehicles go up significantly the Monday after the spring switch, and down the Monday after the fall switch. It’s been proposed that this is because of visibility during the morning commute, but I think it was eventually concluded that it’s really because of sleep: people are deprived, cranky, and poorly co-ordinated in the spring, and more rested than usual in the fall.
Also, when Indiana went to “One state, one time zone” they found out there was no improvement in energy consumption rates: in fact, the counties that started using DST had slightly _higher_ energy consumption.
Oh my. Swordfish was the warning word my mother would use when I was little and about to fall to pieces. Its absurdity somehow pulled me out of many a slip into chaos. Id forgotten — all these decades.
But I wanted to write and say that I love the education I’m getting from all of you on this blog, and in particular, thank you, hairball_of_hope, for those links to Bush’s DOJ Office of Legal Counsel.
Thank you everyone. And, Ms. Bechdel, how is the blog supporting itself these days? I hope healthily but let us know, eh?
(Fun to write this while I’m temporarily skinned.)
I absolutely loved The Reader. I’m surprised more people aren’t raving about it. It was a great movie, not to mention totally hot. My friend described the first 40 minutes as soft-core porn, but not in a bad way. My other favorite movie from last year was The Visitor, so see them both if you haven’t already.
whenever i saw your name -ginjoint- i thought of that expression “rodger dodger stan old man…”
Yes, I have one of those eye-level sliding panels in my front door. Of course, after knocking, the muzzle of a gun is the first thing you’ll see, but after you give the password you’ll be rushed right through.
Judybusy – yeah, what Alex said. Thanks, Alex! You saved me from once again being late to work due to playing on this blog.
Hoppyland, I Googled that, and came up with nothin’. What does that mean? What is it from?
Oh, also – one of my best friends is an electrician. I’m going to ask her if she was ever taught that awful mnemonic.
to ginjoint check out “one special summer” it put a smile on a happy punk rocker…
loved the grizzly bear mnemonic! perhaps you should contribute it to this page: http://www.lcficmbs.com/cgi-bin/boards/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=10;t=000743;p=
They already have a bunch of others to replace the vile one.
@iara
Wow… Thanks. Good to see that lots of folks are working on resistor color code mnemonic replacements. But note that there was only one person in that whole thread who didn’t know the original vile one, so obviously we have a long way to go (at least one generation of EEs) until this resides in the dustbin of history (oh damn, what was the PC replacement for history? Herstory? Maggie, help!).
I noted they posted a Francophone mnemonic, I wonder if the original French was also a vile sexist ditty.
Wow, yr. brother is in the big (industrial metal) league – working with Al Jourgensen of Ministry! Talented siblings indeed!
Thanks for the video, AB. My cat loves to play with twine and ribbons around the chair like that. I think being behind chair legs makes the chase process more intriguing for them, you know, more of a challenge since they have to look and reach around things.
As for justifications for and reasoning behind DST, check out this link:
http://www.webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/nodes.html
What’s fascinating is that there have been dozens of claims offered in support of DST, but few, if any, have proven to be scientifically or economically valid. Apparently, DST started in Europe, spread to the US intermittently (state by state, county by county), and wasn’t adopted nationally until after New York state started using it. And why did New York’s legislature approve the change? Because Wall Street traders wanted to have an hour of overlap when they were open and the London markets were open. Yes, “high finance” rules our every waking minute….
PS. I never know if posting a blog this late in the discussion is ever worthwhile- i.e. am I speaking to an empty room. Do others worry about that too?
… hello…?
(imagine of tentative, searching expression) << couldn’t find this emoticon…
So do I, BrooklynPhil, and for what it’s worth, a lot of The Reader was filmed right around the corner from my house. Icky book though.
Brooklyn Phil, I keep an eye on the number of comments in each of the three posts on the home page, and will usually take a look at a new comment even if conversation has been dormant for a while. Can’t speak for anyone else. Once a post moves off the home page, I don’t try to keep track of it.
Me too, that is, I do what Andrew B does, look at the numbers of those on the home page 🙂
Yup, I also look at the number of comments. So all three of us have posted about monitoring the number of comments, which in turn increases the number of comments, which causes us to check the posts, and perhaps post again… fractal-like behavior… I’m being sucked into the vortex… help…
In case anyone is still reading responses to this post, there’s a out about Daylight Savings Time. I imagine you can Google it to find the title.
I remember reading that DST encourages shopping after work. When it’s dark after work, people go home. When it is still light, they go out and spend money.
Capitalism at its finest.
I look at the number of comments also, but only on the front page UNLESS it’s been a fascinating series of topics. I get attached to certain threads, and certain commenters. (No names, please, don’t want to make anyone feel left out…)
Why, I keep wondering, Ellen, do people go home when it’s dark but go shopping when it’s light, regardless of the clock (and whether there are, say, kids waiting for dinner at home)? I think of most shopping as part of the American penchant for addiction, perhaps a greater drug for us than alcohol. So why would daylight affect that? Theories, anyone?
yes its absurd. i lived in arizona for 20 years and loved not dealing with forced time change. i dont get it and it messes up eating/sleeping, its just wrong!