Ryan's Journal

I wonder how long it will take to go from publishing this address to getting spam. That's part of the point, though. Here's a new email address you can use to reach me: 我@李思華.中国. Or you could, if your mail client supported internationalized email addresses. None of those I use regularly do (Thunderbird, Gmail). I'm curious whether spammers have become earlier adopters than the rest of the Internet, or maybe more accurately how many of them are and how quickly those will find me. I suspect lower-level mail sending software is more up to speed on potential ways to remind you of your need for L!pit0r and Nigerian bank accounts. It's not exactly a new technology, though they are still working on making the recipient part expand past the characters Americans can normally type.

I'll follow up later on who finds me and how long it took.

I mentioned to a friend that I now avoid refined sugar, and she later passed along this recent article in the NY Times on a study reaching the conclusion that sugar is downright toxic. As certain as smoking can cause cancer, sugar can cause type 2 diabetes. Before, this was generally anticipated but not proven, and there was some suspicion that obesity was the cause. It isn't. It's sugar.

We've moved in a direction to regulate secondhand exposure to smoke and heavily taxed people's freedom to waste their money on a health adverse activity everybody now knows might kill them prematurely. The picture with refined sugars is a lot more widespread and complicated. Most people see it as benign and comforting, to be feared only in excess in combination with a lack of brushing. It is widespread and mixes in with nearly everything instead of standing on its own, to the point where avoiding it is both more time consuming and more expensive than leaving it be. Does that seem right? It costs more to get a product that doesn't contain one ingredient or even a substitute (most of which are terrifying in their own right; it may be the case that diet soda is far worse than normal soda). Unrefined sugar, which at least contains actual nutrients, is more expensive to obtain.

What else? Is refining and mass distribution a recipe for public health disasters? At least, it seems we're just not very good at managing consumables at this scale.

Two fascinating pieces: one from a couple years ago on the hyper-specialization and normalization of laboratory mice and its detrimental effects on research, one on the unintended consequences of American social scientists studying only other Americans and its distorting effect on our understanding of humanity as a whole.

As both pieces point out, it matters a great deal which population is used in a study; the assumption of broad applicability may not be well founded. If you ever heard the idea that a hyper-low calorie diet might lead to longer life, that was a sound conclusion - if your population was lab rats. If your population was wild rats, it would likely be meaningless; lab rats are so far above the norm for their species in calorie consumption - eating whatever they want, living in a cage - that reducing calories to a species-normal level was bound to lead to healthier and longer lives. The studies are legitimate science, but they missed something foundational in their population that upsets the conclusions they reached. So too with the social sciences. No further commentary required: Americans are not normal. Though to be fair, maybe nobody is, and that may be grounds for re-examining what we think we know.

There should be a field of study devoted solely to questioning scientific research by disqualifying study populations. How much do we think we know now that's based squarely on deficient understanding of a population's inherent effect on data? It sounds like a fun and dangerous question to explore.

Most news outlets are noting why you should care that Aaron Swartz committed suicide - because he was the co-founder of Reddit. It would be correct to attribute its success to his involvement, but it would be tragic to reduce his contributions to the world to just one very popular gathering point on the web that hasn't even been associated with him for several years. Off the top of my head, he won the ArsDigita Prize before he was a teenager, an award given back then off the profits of an open source-drive consultancy whose brain trust picked him out of hundreds of applicants (NB: I worked there). Something about that contest attracted stars; those of Aaron's co-applicants I chanced to meet are successes in their own right. But he won.

Aaron was active as a young teen in discussions of formulating a general metadata framework viable for the web at the center of web standards development at the time, the W3C, also lending his voice to formulating one of the forerunners to today's web feeds (NB: I worked there). He was also, if I understand correctly, involved with both the technical and policy sides of Creative Commons, the people's license for artistic works placed on the web, and his association there with Larry Lessig seems to have helped move him to broader philosophical and political spheres. Much as Lessig shifted from the somewhat specialized concentration on intellectual property into battling political corruption, Aaron's interests also seemed to shift towards fighting for progressive political causes, trying to revolutionize libraries along the way.

I won't guarantee that's all factually precise, and you can find a more accurate narrative on Wikipedia, I'm sure, but Aaron's trail crosses all manner of domains. That kind of agile mind and thinking leave a distinct impression of brilliance. It would have been fascinating to follow where his philosophy and ideas carried him in the six decades or so of life that should have been left to him. But the world has instead lost one of its brightest and most innovative minds, and we are poorer for it.

Lessig has taken to the net to echo Aaron's family's sentiments, that the impending federal case against Aaron was a primary motivating factor for his final slide into the darkness of depression. His post on the matter outlines it clearly, but in summary there are two parties he picks out for special blame: the United States government and its prosecutor, and MIT (NB: I worked there).

I wish I'd used my position as an alumnus of the Institute to voice displeasure with their treatment of Aaron. No doubt he broke the law; but a school at the intersection of technology and effective technical policy should have a far better grasp of how to treat the criminal misbehavior of the young and bright. That is perhaps the soul of its educational being, to guide the rough edged brilliance of youth towards great things. It is an absolute shame that the Institute might become the sort of place where those who don't hew strictly to the rules are persecuted instead of admonished and gently redirected.

I am angry, but it is not to assuage a temporary feeling that I say this: I'm never donating a penny to the Institute again. I admittedly gave little and rarely before. Now I will give no more. Perhaps I'll reconsider if MIT can figure out a way to make this right. I am biased against that outcome.

Finally, a word to the young people who are considering MIT for their undergraduate education. Don't buy into college rankings. MIT might have that number one next to its name this year. But an absolutely brilliant young man is now dead in part because of a mistake he made while on its premises. Weigh that out in your decision making.

My film collection has shifted away from discs to digital. There's something about looking at them all in a folder that makes picking out gender gaps embarrassingly obvious. Of the twenty-five odd I have so far on a hard drive, maybe one or two of them would pass the Bechdel test, just one made to be female positive (Spirited Away). When women show up in the rest, if at all, it's ultimately as arm candy for the hero, eye candy for the male audience, or harpy antagonists. These stories have good things to say about justice, freedom, even love - but all from the male perspective. There's a historical and continuing imbalance in industry storytelling, to be sure - can you name three active female directors, not counting Kathryn Bigelow of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty? Any writers aside from Kristen Wiig of Bridesmaids? Cinematographers or composers? What was the last big film you watched that in some way focused on a female protagonist that didn't also revolve around romance? Women, how do you put up with such a dearth of fare? I mean, the Twilights of the world have their cotton candy place in some hearts, but nobody wants to subsist on junk food romance all the time. What do you make of the male-oriented offerings and the tangible paucity and seemingly dominating superficiality of female-oriented offerings?

Even with a burgeoning interest in achieving a greater balance in my own viewing and collection building, slow as that goes, there is a distinct numerical disadvantage to face. I ran across femaledirectors.com as a concentrated resource tied to Netflix, plus various lists by film lovers of where and whom to turn to. It's a sad byproduct of an artistic industry that historical profit margins dictate where all the resources go. One hopes the sheer ridiculousness of imbalance and a more vocal audience, in voice or, sadly, by spending patterns, might help to turn the lumbering behemoth in new and interesting directions. I wonder if they do better outside of Hollywood. Perhaps I'll get to see something at Sundance this year.

I've just wrapped up watching all of Akira Kurosawa, more on that later, and decided to move on to Zhang Yimou, with some hope that I can begin to understand some dialogue without English subtitle assistance, but next after that is a female director. Any recommendations?