the
Cybersecurity
Snowden identifies something that really is racist: Within different ethnic groups, different facial features show most variation and are most easily recognized. Thus people of different physical types look "all alike and different from us" until our eyes learn to look for the features that make their faces recognizable. Guess what type of faces electronic "face recognition software" and spyware are programmed to recognize? Shopping while Black, Middle Eastern, etc., just might activate alarms from a computer that thinks you might be someone who doesn't even look like you. Con suerte the store manager looks at your face, looks at the image of the thief, and gets rid of the "stupid computer." Better yet, the store manager decides that face recognition software is an unhealthy kind of technology for society, generally, and never buys it in the first place.
Green
Google credits a Twit called @EcoClipper who tweets about building sailing ships.
Health News
If you can use languages other than English online, you probably should. Here's the Defender's top story in French:
Top story in Spanish:
This web site assumes that, since you're reading these posts in English, you're reading the Defender in English.
Science Done Wrong
How clear, exactly, does the link between paraquat use and Parkinson's Disease need to be made to some people? If Syngenta executives still have doubts, they need to volunteer for testing themselves. Seal them in an underground bunker, spray them with paraquat daily, and at the end of a year see whether any of them can still walk. Nobody but the poisoners deserves Parkinson's Disease. It is a miserable way to die.
Psychology
Why is this a meme? (Google traced it to somebody called Debra Coco on F******k.)
Because some of us got all the mothering we needed, when we were little children, from our actual mothers and other relatives, so we don't look for other people to make us feel loved. We don't need to be loved, or known, or adopted, by all the random people we meet. We expect people, generally, with some exceptions, to feel the sort of vague general good will that is expressed by good manners. We enjoy our lives; we hope they enjoy theirs. And that's all. And it's enough. Among people we don't know well, we're comfortable saying "I'm a stranger among you, I'm the one from [wherever else], I'm different from you."
And when social bullies try using "peer pressure," "We don't liiike that you're different from us," we don't feel any urge to conform. We say "Ewww! Bigots!" Bigots are such icky nasty things.
Words
And here's a very believable story of how people who would never behave like icky nasty bigots manage to seem...rude. As in raw, incomplete, unpolished, uneducated. Not knowing where people's home countries are is, after about grade eight, rude. (You paid attention in geography class because you might meet someone from any of the places you studied, some day.) Using the same word for people from other countries and hypothetical creatures from other planets is...unfortunately, what English has, but it is on the rude side.
What choices do we have? All foreigners are not legal immigrants; not all of them even want to stay here, believe it or not. But when did "aliens" replace "foreigners"?
I'm not in complete agreement with the author here...
I propose:
Foreigners = people who are not citizens of the same country the speaker is. It is not an offensive word. U.S. Americans don't mind being referred to as foreigners in Canada. It might make us feel homesick, but not hated.
Immigrants = people who come into a country other than their own (in-migration, movement into) on peaceful, lawful terms. This word is usually used to refer to people who want to stay for some time rather than students, tourists, refugees, or exchange students and workers, but it can legitimately include them too. In casual speech, though not in legal documents, most of the population in some of the U.S. are "immigrants" from other States or towns.
Unlawful/illegal immigrants = people who come into a country other than their own on terms that are peaceful but not lawful. Typically they came in as visitors, students, etc., on condition that they'd leave on or before a certain day, and they didn't want to go home, so here they are. Often the reason why they don't want to go home is that people like them and want them to stay. They're criiminals only in the most technical sense of the word, but they are violating the law and they are creating problems. Only a few of these people can be helped to qualify to stay here; otherwise the United States would be an overpopulated mess like wherever these people wanted to get away from. If they don't want to go home, there are other countries where people complain of decreasing population, such as Europe.
(Legal immigrants into some, not all, countries have the opportunity to become naturalized citizens, which is what some of us mean when we refer to "legal immigrants." I've done this myself. My husband was a legal immigrant from Trinidad to Canada, then from Canada to the United States, and then in due time he became a citizen of the United States, with a right to vote. Naturalized citizens of the United States have all the same rights and privileges as natural-born citizens, except one: they can be elected to Congress, but they can't be elected President.)
Invaders = people who come into a country other than their own on terms that are not lawful, for purposes that are not peaceful. Members of drug cartels, enemy spies, and fugitives from justice are invaders. They have no rights, but sending them back to their own countries is a milder punishment than declaring war.
"Alien" does have another meaning outside of science fiction. It originally described things or people that had been separated from their homes. Feuding tribes sometimes exchanged children as pledges of peace. These hostages were supposed to be well treated, and were often betrothed or married into the chief's family in the host tribe, but they might go home some day. If they did they couldn't be quite trusted. They had probably picked up the enemy tribe's language and habits, and people weren't sure which side they'd take if war broke out again. Since we no longer settle wars this way, what is "alienated" nowadays are usually emotions rather than people. Spending lots of time and money on a child in the hope that the child will want to live with you rather than its other parent might still be called "alienation of affections." A job-seeker who has been rejected so many times that his nightly prayer is "God, please let all of those business owners lose all their money and come to me begging for food, so that I can spit on them," is feeling alienated, but that term fell out of fashion because it was used about a hundred years ago as a euphemism for less curable mental illness.
Zazzle
One reason not to use the so-called "smartphone" (it may be "smart" for the corporation that made it, but from the individual purchaser's point of view it's better called a "stupidphone") is the slipperiness of it, the way those rounded contours make the slick plastic slide right off any surface on which you're trying to stabilize the phone to get a clear photo. For those determined to use a stupidphone, Zazzle introduces the Poipsocket phone grip, a handle that can be stuck into the back of the phone/ If you know a stupidphone user, this would be a good gift for that person, so why not put a "Save the Butterflies" motif on it? Mine:
For those who didn't know, in the south central States there's another species in the same genus with the Monarchs, known as the Queen. It looks similar to the Monarch from a distance but is slightly smaller and has a slightly different color pattern up close. Since they share habitat it's not especially rare for a Queen to alight on a blooming milkweed plant where a Monarch caterpillar is eating the leaves, but it must have been a special moment for someone to be able to snap a picture showing both. Not mine:
Zazzle added some new doormat designs (a larger size and a half-moon shape) and invited everyone to design a doormat. Why put a butterfly picture on a doormat? We don't want people to feel as if they're stepping on butterflies. Well, why not put the butterfly in the corner and the words where people will actually wipe their shoes....I thought about doing one with Werner Baumann's face where people would wipe their shoes. Considering that my one-off T-shirt that picked up on one of David B. Clear's more youthful ideas has lingered in my public Zazzle collection, I don't want to post a face doormat for sale...but you could order one and not post it for sale.
I think mine may be the very first butterfly-theme doormats in these styles. Here's another doormat design with a related feeling:
For those who are tired of pink and blue cartoons on baby things...
Here's my half-circle design:
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