Caitlin Burke

who can’t quite cope with the idea of your boys sharing rooms with gay Marines:

I thought you were grown-ups. I thought you were tough. I find it hard to believe that you are foolish enough to encourage your Marines down a path that opens them up to blackmail, and that encourages an atmosphere of distrust and secrecy among what should be team members … you know, distractions from the job at hand.

So here’s the thing. You know your Marines are already serving with – and bunking with – other Marines that happen to be gay. You know that, and I think you know it would be pretty appalling to act as if gays are unfit to serve. General Pace tried something like that, and he didn’t get too warm a reception, did he?

Don’t give me a line about “introducing sexuality” – you already allow women to be Marines, and you’re already awarding some of them Combat Action Ribbons. More to the point, your Marines know all this, too, and the majority of them are fine with rooming with their gay comrades. In fact, Tammy Schultz, an Associate Professor of Strategic Studies at the US Marine Corps War College, has noted that there’s more support for serving side by side with gays than there was for desegregation.

So what will it take to toughen you up, grow you up, or get you to just show a little leadership?

A sampling of recent news:
General Pace backtracks on “immoral” remarks [WaPo, 2007]
WaPo on Pentagon survey about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
NPR report with Marine leaders claiming “vast majority” favor DADT
NPR Interview with Tammy Schultz

I’m not usually a big fan of lists of writing tips from famous people, but this particular tip from Chuck Palahniuk is laser-focused on a big problem I have:

Number Eight: If you need more freedom around the story, draft to draft, change the character names. Characters aren’t real, and they aren’t you. By arbitrarily changing their names, you get the distance you need to really torture a character. Or worse, delete a character, if that’s what the story really needs.

Yeah, OK, and Number 11 is pretty funny.

Read the rest at 13 Writing Tips.

Nice post by Russell Blackford about the fact that humanities does, in fact, have methodologies, making a clear distinction from mystical claims. I think the most helpful part is pointing out that rigorous investigation is available throughout human endeavor.

What I believe is simply that there are many techniques that are used to find out stuff. All of those techniques are available to scientists, just as they are to everyone else. However, science has refined some techniques to unprecedented levels of precision, control, systematicity, and so on, and has thus made progress with problems that were intractable for thousands of years … but started to become more tractable around about the beginning of the seventeenth century.

It should also be pointed out that the techniques that science has refined to this extent are also available to humanities scholars, just as those used by humanities scholars are available to scientists. There’s just one world and there’s no clear demarcation as to what techniques are going to be useful to find out stuff about it.

Maybe it’s helpful to think of these as “other ways of learning.” There seems to be a lot of anxiety locked up in the learning–knowing matrix.

Read the whole thing at Keeping the humanities alive – and a bit on “other ways of knowing”

Netflix has raised prices on DVD plans while introducing a low-pricing, streaming-only option. I understand the business shift, and, if I recall correctly, they raised prices when they introduced the streaming option in the first place. Introducing streaming was never a value-add for me—I’ve never actually been able to get it to work properly, so I haven’t even got to the point of evaluating the streaming selection. But while I have just shrugged over previous price changes, this one had me heading over to downgrade my plan immediately on receiving the announcement email.

I’ve heard a lot of others say they either did or plan to downgrade, too, and it makes me wonder what numbers Netflix expected for that. I’d love to see the projections and, in a couple of months, the reality.

This strikes me as rather sad, not least because it has the potential to (perhaps inadvertently) hold back some really interesting work:

ABSTRACT: From the process of organic evolution to the analysis of insect societies as self-organizing systems, biology is full of awe-inspiring examples of complexity arising from simplicity. Yet in the contemporary study of animal cognition, demonstrations that complex human-like behavior arises from simple mechanisms rather than from ‘higher’ processes, such as insight or theory of mind, are often seen as uninteresting and ‘killjoy’, almost a denial of mental continuity between other species and humans. At the same time, however, research elsewhere in psychology increasingly reveals an unexpected role in human behavior for simple, unconscious and sometimes irrational processes shared by other animals. Greater appreciation of such mechanisms in nonhuman species would contribute to a deeper, more truly comparative psychology.

“Clever animals and killjoy explanations in comparative psychology.” (essay; Sara J. Shettleworth)

This bird spent several minutes pushing wings and tail under the water.

And then danced on the surface to shake off the rinse.

I had hay fever as a kid, but I don’t remember it being particularly bothersome. My worst experience with allergies was when I acquired a cat allergy in my late 20s—pretty inconvenient. And I figured that dust and cats were going to be it, until pollen came back to haunt me.

I can handle most flowers and grasses now, but trees finally caught up to me. Junipers, so I have the added indignity of having my “hay fever” in the winter.

So I actually felt itchy looking at this gallery, in which the Telegraph offers us the opportunity to “know [the] enemy” through Martin Oeggerli’s scanning electron microscope images. Some of them are even creepier than this one.

More at Oeggerli’s website.

This image was made in a pinhole camera fashioned from a human skull. Pinhole cameras need no moving parts – any chamber that has a minuscule hole and some photographic film facing it can take photos with some detail, and often the results are similarly dreamy.

Skulls, of course, have lots of big holes, and Wayne Martin Belger closed those off and created a new hole for the exposures. The camera that made this photo is called Third Eye.

More about the pinhole skull camera at Inhabitat, and more about Wayne Martin Belger’s cameras at his website, including more about this camera. And more about the history and workings of pinhole cameras.