I have many posts that need writing over the next few days (review of LOEG: Century 1, a post about why Lib Dems should support unions, a review of Ecological Debt, my next BFAW), as well as putting together the Newniverse site, and providing some more comment to a Special Secret Project coming up soon, but I’m having trouble organising my thoughts in a coherent manner, so for now have some links:
Planet Perl, a perl blog aggregator, has started having some very interesting stuff on it recently (rather than its normal stuff about data types and suchlike). As well as some stuff on Dreamwidth development, it’s also got a proof that the stable matching bipartite problem leads to polyamory as the stablest option (with the unfortunate side-effect of suicide), a demonstration that the word ‘wank’ disproves a theory in linguistics, a post on removing the phrase ‘known to man’ from wikipedia and a simple disproof of some bad statistics on the net, none of which involve Perl anything more than very tangentially, but all of which are written by Mark Dominus, whose posts I’ll have to look out for in the future. His blog is here, and I’ll be adding it separately to my feed reader. I urge you all to check it out…
Over at the Mindless Ones, The Beast Must Die has a great post about Fighting Fantasy books (I was amazed how clearly I remembered most of the ones he talks about), and they have another round-table ‘annocommentation’ of Seaguy.
Tucker completes the thirty best albums of 1978 countdown with a look at Parallel Lines (which has coincidentally become Holly’s favourite album in the whole of this week, though I’m still obsessing over Blunstone’s first two solo albums).
People have been linking all over the place, quite rightly, to James Graham’s post about the Telegraph, Guardian and BBC being misogynist arseholes towards Jo Swinson. However, Jennie also rightly points out that she and Caron had brought the subject up earlier to much less response, and wonders if it’s the ‘blokeosphere’ in action.
And a lot of people have been writing about electoral reform. I won’t link to everything, but Alix at Lib Dem Voice, Andy at Wouldn’t It Be Scarier and Costigan Quist have all had interesting things to say.
Filed under: comics, computing, linkblogging, music, politics, science | Tagged: blondie, comics, electoral reform, fighting fantasy, linguistics, linkblogging, mathematics, misogyny, music, perl, seaguy, statistics
The “blokeosphere” is an interesting concept. It’s funny how if just one group writes about something, it’s easy to push it off as a fringe thing. But if it gets picked up by a “mainstream” source, people respond.
Ooooh – Parallel lines! There are a few songs on there I haven’t heard before…
[...] Andrew Hickey linked to a post at the Universe of Discourse about syntax, arguing against a syntactical rule which says that the hypothetical verb “to flimp” can’t exist. Go and read that post for more explanation. While reading it occurred to me that the search for a universal syntax often ignores culturally specific meanings, and that sometimes arguments against it do too. David Dowty suggests the counter-example that “to cuckold” is “to have sexual intercourse with the woman who is married to”. For example, in the sentence “Peter cuckolded John”, John is the direct object. But if you expand it to Dowty’s version (“ Peter had sex with the woman who is married to John”) the woman is now the direct object, and John has been relegated to an adjectival clause which describes the woman. That’s one way of defining cuckold, but it seems to be very specific to modern Western liberal individualism. Having sex (probably consensual) with a woman who happens to have a husband. But things were different in cultures and societies which used the word cuckold more frequently than we do, such as early-modern England. In early-modern gender ideology wives were supposed to be subordinate to husbands. To cuckold a man was to take his property, and undermine his authority and masculinity. To put it another way, it was to injure him by using his wife, just like to stab someone is to injure them by using a sharp object. The indirect object implied by the verb is what is used to carry out the action. In Latin we would use the ablative of means to describe this relationship. A wife is necessary for cuckolding to take place, but she is absent from that sentence. Not even an object. Of course this is horribly misogynistic, but cuckold is a horribly misogynistic word from a horribly misogynistic culture. [...]