My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. The next chapter of the living story, Secret of Southsun, will be going live next week and there’s much anticipation for what will be included, plus the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
May 10, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
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Colby Cosh on “gendercide”
Despite the federal government’s efforts to keep this debate from happening, we apparently are going to be having a big national debate about abortion. (For those following from outside the borders of Former Soviet Canuckistan, Canada doesn’t actually have any abortion law on the books at the moment, and Stephen Harper’s government of “bitter-clinging, right-wing, Bible-thumping, fundamentalist Christian” Conservatives is desperate not to have to bring one in.) Colby Cosh explains why the efforts by some back-bench MPs to use “gendercide” as a way to force the government’s hand won’t work:
Here, then, is my contribution to the big conversation.
(1) “Gendercide” is incoherent religious militancy in cheap drag. (Editors certainly shouldn’t be taking sides by putting it in headlines as if it were an actual thing.)
(2) However you feel about personal eugenics, which is an accurate name for “mothers choosing babies that are likely to be better in some respect they deem relevant”, the Era Of It is arriving now and will not be wished away.
(3) Sex-selective abortion perpetrated for reasons of religious superstition is, upon all evidence, a marginal phenomenon in this country, probably a fading one, and quite likely to be an inherently self-correcting one. It makes a shabby excuse for blowing up the political truce our country clings to when it comes to the topic of abortion. (It seems remotely possible that Stephen Harper has perceived this and concurs with it.)
(4) In particular, no statute is likely to be effective against sex selection by mothers. We had one, you know, and it actually made a hypothetical exception for parents at risk of X-linked gene disease. A Liberal government devoted to “reproductive choice” criminalized sex-selective embryo implantation by means of the Assisted Human Reproduction Act; a Supreme Court found that law offensive to the Constitution; and a Conservative government closed the agency that was supposed to enforce it because it had accomplished the sum total of jack squat ever.
(5) People who wish to police sex-selective abortion had better figure out what exactly kinds they don’t like. And why. And what other reasons for a woman to have an abortion don’t cut their brand of mustard. And whether they really want their wives, girlfriends, daughters or nieces to end up as a future Case 6 running afoul of the law.
(6) Fellow-travellers of Mark Warawa who think he makes an awesome test case for parliamentary purity should consider looking for one that, pardon the metaphor, doesn’t have quite so many oopsies in its DNA.
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Is wine tasting bullshit?
There are lots of bullshit artists in the wine trade … and a lot of what is written about wine is definitely bullshit:
The human palate is arguably the weakest of the five traditional senses. This begs an important question regarding wine tasting: is it bullshit, or is it complete and utter bullshit?
There are no two ways about it: the bullshit is strong with wine. Wine tasting. Wine rating. Wine reviews. Wine descriptions. They’re all related. And they’re all egregious offenders, from a bullshit standpoint.
[. . .]
In 1996, research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology concluded that wine experts cannot reliably identify more than three or four of a wine’s flavor components. Most wine critics routinely report tasting six or more. The wine review excerpted in the top image for this post, for example (which is a real review, by the way – somebody actually wrote those words about a bottle of wine, in earnest) lists the following components in the wine’s “principle flavor” profile: “red roses, lavender, geranium, dried hibiscus flowers, cranberry raisins, currant jelly, mango with skins [Ed. note: jesus wine-swilling christ – mango with skins?], red plums, cobbler, cinnamon, star anise, blackberry bramble, whole black peppercorn,” and more than a dozen other flavors that I refuse to continue listing lest my head implode.
Fun fact: MIT behavioral economist Coco Krume recently conducted a meta-analysis of the classifiers used in wine reviews, and found that reviewers tend to use “cheap” and “expensive” words differently. Cheap descriptors are used much more frequently, expensive ones more sparingly. Krume even demonstrated that it’s possible to guess the price range of a wine based on the words used in its review.
Even with all the evidence that the wine world is replete with marketing bullshit, there’s still great wine experiences to have, and you don’t need to wear an ascot and fake a snobby accent to enjoy it. As I wrote last year:
There are good wines and bad wines. There are good wines and better wines. But my experience has always been that there’s a point of diminishing returns beyond which you’re paying more money for no appreciable improvement in the quality of the wine. In other words, beyond that point, you’re paying for the prestige of the label or the mystique of the brand not for anything intrinsic to the liquid in the glass. [. . .] If you’re buying wine to have with a nice dinner, find your point of diminishing returns and don’t go beyond it: you’ll save yourself a lot of money over time and still enjoy your wine. If, on the other hand, you’re buying wine specifically to impress then go as expensive as you like.
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Early signs of “rejuvenation therapy”?
An interesting report from the Harvard Gazette on some research into a possibility of reducing some of the effects of aging, specifically aging of the heart:
Two Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers — a stem cell biologist and a practicing cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital — have identified a protein in the blood of mice and humans that may prove to be the first effective treatment for the form of age-related heart failure that affects millions of Americans.
When the protein, called GDF-11, was injected into old mice, which develop thickened heart walls in a manner similar to aging humans, the hearts were reduced in size and thickness, resembling the healthy hearts of younger mice.
Even more important than the implications for the treatment of diastolic heart failure, the finding by Richard T. Lee, a Harvard Medical School professor at the hospital, and Amy Wagers, a professor in Harvard’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, ultimately may rewrite our understanding of aging.
Research of this type may be very important as the baby boomer generation enters retirement age … not necessarily to extend total lifespan, but to increase the chances for healthy activity longer into our existing lifespan. Few of us would want to live to 100 if the last 20 years are pain-wracked, immobile, and inactive … but being able to live that long and managing to keep doing the things we like to do for most of that time? That’d be much more appealing to many of us.
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Nine years of blogging
Nine years is a very long lifespan for a blog. The vast majority of blogs don’t even make it to a first anniversary before the blogger loses interest and stops updating it. As I have no other particular claims to distinction, I’ll hang my hat on longevity. If I were to do it over again, I’d probably have come up with a different name for the blog, but for a spur-of-the-moment joke, it’s held up well enough. I guess.
One thing I don’t regret is not specializing in a particular area. I’m not an economist, or a military historian, or a political theorist, but I have interests in those areas that crop up relatively frequently here on the blog. I don’t generally post personal items, as there are lots of other venues (like Facebook) which are better suited to that sort of thing … and I live a fairly boring life, so exotic trips and exciting adventures are things I read about rather than experience directly. I especially don’t post about (past) employers or (current) clients in a way that they could be identified: that’s the sort of thing that tends to have only negative repercussions.
I did a retrospective round-up of the first year for the 2010 anniversary, the “best of 2005″ for 2011, and posts from 2006 last year. To stay on that path requires a look at what I posted in 2007 (and may still have some relevance or interest):
January, 2007
- QotD: Matching Wine with Food. Jennifer “Chotzi” Rosen exactly captures the highly imaginative food suggestions too many wine writers toss into their reviews.
- A close call. Winter driving in Canada can be unduly exciting when you least expect it.
- Close call, follow-up. Fixing the damage from the unscheduled off-road trip.
- An unexpected down-side to wine snobbery. Where I recount the new first-world problem of knowing too much about wine to order the plonk you are offered at too many restaurants (that is, terrible cheap wine at expensive wine markup).
- How does Symantec stay in business?. Symantec loses a customer.
February, 2007
- Declining to dine Roman style. I hate meeses to pieces.
- The tour went well…. A successful campus tour at Trent University. Victor only hit me once.
- Mississippi traps State Farm. When state governments overreach, companies respond rationally.
- Misunderstanding economics. Responding to a Toronto Star article by explaining the Broken Window Fallacy.
- Accounting and the military. “Jack Granatstein explains why the military budget numbers seem to come from another planet than the one we inhabit.”
March, 2007 (a very busy month, resulting in very low blog output)
- Our dystopian future?. “Brad Warbiany takes a moment to glance into his crystal ball and finds . . . shite”
- “Good job, buddy!”. An extended comment from a regular reader becomes a full blog post.
- Very disturbing development. “These guys are not exemplars of “warriors”. They’re parties to conspiracy and murder. That is not what soldiers do. The distinction may be a bit subtle for those raised on anti-war protests and anti-military propaganda, however. “
April, 2007
- Toronto to export garbage at retail level. The social and political side of garbage collection.
- The diet dilemma. The inevitable result of two trends: more sedentary adult life and cheaper food.
- Why have an army at all?. A letter to the Toronto Star suggests that Canada has no actual need for any armed forces at all.
- Everybody’s talking about it . . .. Some conversations just repeat on a regular basis. This discussion of how a criminal got his hands on the weapons he used in his crime could be copy-pasted into any month of the last decade.
- Somehow, I’m not convinced. A long-standing problem with using US college students as guinea pigs for sociological experiments is that they’re not truly representative even of Americans, never mind non-westerners. Your results will be biased due to the sample you’re using.
- Potential outages. Jon switched ISPs at the end of April. It took several days to get the blog up and running at the new ISP. An abortive effort was made to update to the then-current version of MovableType, but eventually he had to admit it wasn’t working properly and revert back to the older install.
May, 2007 (a death in the family meant another month of irregular updates)
- The Food Police. Another blog comment from “Da Wife” that grew to be a full guest post on the blog.
- Historical context, lack of, see Time Warner. If you want to use a historical event to make a point about something else, make sure you actually know enough about the historical event you’re referencing.
- Over-the-top iconography. Where we have to wonder what the heck the graphic artist and/or approving purchaser was thinking.
- “Pirates” fight to a 2-2 draw. The start of the summer soccer reports.
June, 2007
- How not to encourage foreign companies. A friend’s travelling tale of woe, showing how little has changed since the Cold War era.
- Bucket status: undefined. The job search and minor technical glitches of the moment.
- Why James Lileks won’t play. “Clearly the ability to soak up arbitrary complexity and incomprehensible names peaks at age 8. “
- Ontario under siege. The OPP and angry natives orchestrate a highway shutdown and perform some ritual Kabuki posturing. Foreshadowing the Caledonia confrontation, in hindsight
July, 2007 re-employment took its toll on blogging output
- New dog pictures. Pictures of early interactions between Xander and the new dog. We ended up adopting her and (of course) calling her Buffy.
- Daycare and the public interest. Always a hot topic of discussion among new parents. Always a hot potato for politicians as their mouths want to promise what the public purse can’t actually deliver.
- Raising fears of terrorism to fight terrorism?. Some things never seem to change.
- More on framing the war on terror. The usefulness or lack thereof in various government responses to terrorist threats.
- Home sweet (demolished) home. I was upset to discover that my childhood home was going to be one of thousands to be levelled in a massive redevelopment in Middlesbrough.
August, 2007
- Trains to Burlington. The long tale of moving a model railroad layout from Brooklin to Burlington.
- HTML markup accuracy. Amazing how much clarity a properly formatted superscript can provide.
- Public transit boondoggles. Once again, a topical issue as Toronto considers how to get all the subways, streetcars, light rail, and other public transit toys without actually footing the bill themselves.
- Fake volunteerism, overseas edition. The negative aspects of doing overseas volunteer work.
- Vikings trample Jets in exhibition game. The first of many mentions of the great Adrian Peterson (this was his first appearance in a game for the Vikings).
- And what else would you expect them to do?. The Canadian media still doesn’t understand or appreciate the military, but it’s actually better now than it was in 2007, as shown in this little post.
- Electrical gremlins. A follow-up post to the train layout post at the start of the month.
September, 2007
- Trains to Burlington, conclusion. The month-long tale of the model train layout comes to an end.
- Burlington Ribfest. After installing the layout, we took a side trip to the local charred meat festival.
- Amusing co-incidence. Being able to tell exactly when the satellite took a photo of your neighbourhood.
- Arctic Patrol Vessels: now with less sonar. An early warning sign that the APV contract would not go smoothly.
- Pirates finish out of the medals in playoffs. The end of that soccer season comes in pretty predictable fashion (including a default because we couldn’t get enough players to show up for a meaningless game).
October, 2007 (the job was consuming all my waking hours this month, so blog posts were very light indeed)
- There’s no place like Florida. There’s just something … special … about Florida.
- Voting day in Ontario. The election John Tory had to work really hard to lose. But he somehow managed the trick.
- Micro microeconomics. I explain “Russon’s Law of Economics” as applied to the Ontario economy just before the entire North American economy hit the skids. In hindsight, this was a flashing red light about the near-term performance across all retail sectors.
- The anti-age-effects movement. Rather than working toward mere longevity, put efforts into reducing or even eliminating the worst aspects of old age.
November, 2007 (deadline pressures at work kept blogging light)
- Outlook for Vikes-Chargers game today. I think it’d be safe to say that Vikings rookie running back Adrian Peterson had a pretty good game.
- A word to the Word-Wise. A cautionary word to those folks who have to depend on Microsoft Word for mission-critical tasks.
- This nicely explains it. The point where The Economist‘s drift towards advocating centralization and expansive government finally got me to let my subscription lapse. This was around the same time many UK bloggers were starting to refer to it as The Ecommunist.
- The real reason Ron Paul’s message is becoming popular. The cognitive dissonance of having a “Republican” who actually advocates for smaller and less-intrusive government.
- Canada cracks down on religious extremists. Well, some religious extremists, anyway. The kind that quote the Bible and all.
- Toronto council wastes money . . . in other news, water is wet. A rare link to the Toronto Star, and not for purposes of pointing and laughing.
- Go, Royson, Go!. The Toronto Star reporter fires back at the mayor who dissed his first article about council wasting money.
- Another good example of “spin”. Media gets report. Media spins report for maximum headline effect. Media then condemns the author of the report for hysterical over-hyping.
- Change your sexual orientation, get 10% off your flight. How not to advertise to minority customers.
December, 2007
- Victory is Mine!. A minor victory, admittedly. And the piper must be paid in the update.
- Another light blogging forecast. Toronto drivers. Snow. Do not combine these two elements lightly.
- Freedom of speech? In Canada, not so much . . .. Tip-toe past the word “censor”, or else!
- Attempting to excuse the inexcusable. Honour killings in western society.
- Velcro is not your friend. Christmas decorations. The joys of, sorta.
- Our Frankenstein connection. A bit of genealogical research leads to an interesting literary connection.
