Random Roundup

- Karaoke rage

- The absolute last article you ever need to read on this topic

- It's not fun to hate Taylor Swift, but do it anyway.

What kind of car does Dexter drive?

Metafilter talks Super Bowl ads:

One of these days there's going to be a Bud Light or Dodge Charger ad that is so fucking similar to A Handmaid's Tale that we won't be able to tell if it was done ironically or not. Wait in Republic of Gilead there's cool, refreshing Bud Light served out of vending machines? You use a Nokia phone to report women who are fertile but do not register? Two guys kissing get horrifically beaten and then a place card that says "Don't be a Gender Traitor: Eat Snickers" ? A man talking opening a bag of Doritos and suddenly he's in a room of Jezebels and a voice over that says, "Eat Doritos. Unleash your Commander" ? You'll just be sitting there, staring at your hands wondering if you saw the greatest social commentary ever, or the desperate ploy of a coked up ad agency given way too much money. We might never know.

What's dat?

So there's some kind of game today?

WMATAFAIL.

Metro running underground only tomorrow. How long does it take to clear the above-ground tracks? They're going to have to do it for Monday anyway and it's not snowing anymore.

My outrage filter is broken.

I really don't see the harm in doctors using tissue samples that would have otherwise been thrown away for research purposes. Nobody's violating your bodily integrity by doing so. It's not part of your body anymore. The fact that people don't grasp this is what's messed up:

"Deborah [Henrietta's daughter] never knew her mother.... She had always wanted to know who her mother was but no one ever talked about Henrietta. So when Deborah found out that this part of her mother was still alive she became desperate to understand what that meant: Did it hurt her mother when scientists injected her cells with viruses and toxins? Had scientists cloned her mother? And could those cells help scientists tell her about her mother, like what her favorite color was and if she liked to dance."

The only thing I am outraged about is that this woman's family got such a poor science education. And that has nothing to do with the general ethical status of requiring informed consent for research on tissue samples that would otherwise have been discarded.

The comparisons to giving unconscious women pelvic exams and implanting undisclosed experimental devices in patients are completely off base. And the question of patenting cell lines differs from the question of whether one should be allowed to profit off another person's cells, when those cells were valueless trash in their raw state.

Useful for online daters

How to stereotype people by their favorite author

How I read eBooks, and how I'd like to buy them

Tobias Bucknell, who stuff I enjoy, has a long summary of the Amazon/Macmillan dispute. It's good to hear from people who have perspective inside the industry, as all too often I find myself asking, with respect to eBooks, what exactly I am paying for. The limitations of the Kindle reader are the source of some of these questions, but not all of them are Amazon specific.

When I buy a book, I get a book. Physical, good for riffling through, resilient in the face of beach sand and cookie crumbs. Not searchable, though, and requires storage space. Heavy to transport. If used, sometimes the source of odd smells. I have a variety of price points to purchase at, usually based on release date. But there is usually no option to buy a premium-priced paperback at the hardcover release date; eager readers must pay the hardcover price.

When I buy an eBook on my Kindle, I get the following:

- Searchable version of the text, particularly handy for SF/F novels where characters have made-up and similar-sounding names.
- Lightweight transport with easy one-handed reading (for public transit!)
- Changeable text size for reading from a variety of distances.
- No option to lend freely due to DRM.
- Maps and other graphics or charts are often unreadable. Bad for epic fantasy novels where world maps are handy.
- Cover art is either missing or monochrome in color.
- Resolution lower than print, but nicer reading experience than on a backlit screen.
- Kindle version is almost always available later than the print version (and in many cases still not available at all).

As a weirdo who likes to read Word documents in Web View, I took immediately to the Kindle's text-size function. And on the Kindle, page breaks and chapter breaks can be maintained, but the number of words per page/screen is flexible. Bucknell lists the following, in addition to editors and marketers, as personnel at the publisher who need to get paid from the proceeds of a book:

A typesetter: makes the inside of the book look professional and easy to read, well put together

Designer: interior art, layout, more look and feel of the inside. The look and feel of the outside of the book and how it incorporates the cover art

Art: someone has to paint, create, or put together the graphics that sell the book

Copy editor: this person goes through and makes sure the book is readable, looks for internal consistency (your character has blue eyes here, but brown here. Suns don’t actually go nova like that).

Proofreader: this final pass looks for any final typos that have slipped through everyone else.

Now I hate lame typos in books, so the editor, copy editor, and proofreader get a pass from me. I notice the absence of their contributions no matter what format the book is in. But with a Kindle book, the art is (for better or worse) effectively disabled. The page design is superseded by the imperative to fill the screen with words at different sizes. The font choice, page size, and margins are similarly short circuited; differences that would contribute to the feel of a paper book just aren't registering in the Kindle version.

And you know what? I am mostly fine with all of this. eBooks have limitations. They have offsetting conveniences, but not so much so that I am willing to pay the same price for an eBook as a regular book. The anti-DRM folks are right: there is no guarantee my Kindle books will be available in the long run. I solve this problem by purchasing shelfworthy books and buying via Kindle only those books that have not proven their shelfworthiness and are not easily available from the library. But as an eBook purchaser, I ask the following:

- Don't treat me like I'm stupid. If you tell me you want to price books between $14.99 and $5.99, I'm going to assume that most of the books are closer to $14.99. Particularly if you're fighting like a cat on a leash against someone who wants to price books at $9.99.

- Don't expect me to pay more than the price of a print book for a DRM-ed, limited life, unlendable text that lacks most of the aesthetic features of a print book. The price of an eBook should never be more than the price of an available print version. If a book is currently only available in hardcover, you might be able to get me to pay more than $9.99. But if you've released a book in mass-market paperback, the eBook better cost less than that.

If publishers want to squeeze more surplus out of eager readers, here is what I would like to see: a sort of Priceline for eBooks. A book comes out in hardcover. I don't want to buy the hardcover; I want it in eBook form. So it should be available for a price lower than the hardcover price--sort of like "Buy It Now!" on eBay. But if I don't want to pay that much, I should be able to name my price. The publisher drops prices over time, perhaps in conjunction with its schedule for printing trade and mass-market paperback editions. When the price drops to the one I named, the eBook is sent to my Kindle. The price of the eBook version should never be more than the price of the cheapest available print version. But once the market is squeezed of all people who value the book at or above the current price point, the eBook version can continue to sell. Amazon does this already for its pre-ordered books. Consider these purchases as pre-ordered eBooks.

Update: Tyler Cowen links to this long discussion of the dispute, which asks this very interesting question: "Will you some day download your e-books directly from [the publisher]'s website?" That sounds like a promising channel for eBooks. Say I want to read this book. Wouldn't it be nice if I could just type "The Inheritance of Rome" into Google and land on the Viking website, where I could then purchase the eBook directly from the publisher with a few clicks through Google Checkout? If I had the option to email my purchased download to my Kindle device, it would be nearly as convenient as buying it through Amazon's web page. (Assuming the format was readable on the Kindle.)

Bullying: An Academic Crime?

My first reaction upon seeing this story, after visceral disgust and rage, was that there ought to be some consequences for teen girls who bully a classmate to death. People have lost college admissions for less. But as PG pointed out, revoking admission for plagiarism is kosher because it's "an academic crime," whereas bullying goes on everywhere.

So what is an "academic crime"? Isn't this sort of bullying something that "brings into question your honesty, maturity, or moral character," just like plagiarism? If you can receive points toward admission for community service, leadership in extracurricular activities, and other holistic factors, why shouldn't you be downgraded for instigating the death of a classmate? (Presuming, of course, that authorities investigate and find you've committed wrongdoing?)

Finland saved by mittens?

Via Metafilter:

Simo Häyhä is often revered as the deadliest sniper in history. Using nothing more than a Mosin-Nagant sniper rifle with stock iron sights, Häyhä is credited with felling 542 Soviet soldiers during the Finnish Winter War (with as many as 150 more kills by SMG). Nicknamed "The White Death", Häyhä spent weeks in snow-covered forests, enduring sub-zero temperatures while sniping Russian officers, weapons crews and snipers. The Soviets placed a bounty on Häyhä's head, utilizing counter-snipers and artillery fire in an attempt to kill him. Over the course of only three months, the 5'3" Häyhä (a farmer by trade) killed upwards of 800 of the Red Army soldiers deployed to Finland. Despite eventually being shot in the face by a Russian sharpshooter, Häyhä recovered and passed away in 2002 at the age of 96.

When asked in 1998 how he had become such a good shot, he answered, "Practice."

But the secret of Häyhä's success may have been in his mittens:

One of the reasons Häyhä was so successful, believe it or not, was because of his mitten ensemble. They consisted of three layers: the bottom layer was an incredibly finely knitted tight-fitting glove made of handspun yarn, finer than commercial woolen knits could be found at that time. The second layer was a fingerless mitt that stopped short of the base of his fingers, while covering his wrist and the first joint of his thumb. The outer layer was made of heavy, thick wool, in a technique unique to scandinavia called nålbinding, which was looped rather than knitted. This nålbinded mitten, in addition to being virtually impervious to cold, also had a split in it for his trigger finger, so he could fire his rifle without taking them off.

The underglove was fine enough that he could reload his rifle without taking THAT off, drastically reducing the amount of time that his hands had to be exposed to the cold. And if he did have to do maintenance on his rifle that required the underglove to come off, he could put the wrist-covering mitt back on; because that covered the pulse point in his wrist, it kept his blood warmer longer and kept feeling in his fingers.

The Russians, by contrast, had thick, bulky gloves or mittens in a single layer. The gloves had to be taken off to reload, which caused a lot of wasted time due to numb fingers. And the mittens had to be taken off even to FIRE the gun! Numb, frostbitten hands were the cause of many poor shots and lost ammunition, or even parts of the rifle if field maintenance had to be done.

so. Hoorah for mittens! Warm hands, strong people!

My mittens are not this cool.

Skinflint 2.0

What I really need is an iPhone app that cross-references my downloaded Kindle samples with the card catalog at my local library.

Mini Book Review: The Red Wolf Conspiracy

Are you tired of waiting for Scott Lynch to finish the next Gentlemen Bastards book? Have you exhausted the complete Robin Hobb catalog and are stymied from further satisfaction due to her prohibition on fan fiction? Maybe want to give a new author a whirl? Try this. The sequel is already out, so if you like it, there's no need to jones in vain. The action is well-paced, the world well-realized, and the characters appealing. If it has a few improbable twists ... at least the plucky tarboy in love with the prince's betrothed isn't also the secret son of the emperor or something.

Flatter me

Phoebe has some interesting thoughts on the elusiveness of flattering clothes: in particular, how the very secondary sex characteristics that appeal to the "Darwinian hindbrain" make clothes unflattering.

To relate this back to Lady Gaga: Part of why her spectacle is so compelling is that she's completely short-circuited the frump/skank dynamic. It can be startling to see a scantily clad pop star who is so emphatically not seeking your approval through the standard channels to sex-object status. Is this really skanky? Frumpy? There's something almost wholesome about her here, like a diving girl from a century ago. And a lot of the time she's embracing the iconography of sexiness without actually submitting herself for your sexual assessment or gratification. The refusal to submit was particularly marked during her performance of Teeth---Gaga was definitely the sexual subject, and the audience was getting the business.

There were monster claws involved.

So, this weekend I went to the Lady Gaga concert in NYC: the first concert I've ever been to in a nice venue with seats, where I could sit and see the stage and all that jazz. And while the music was great (kudos to performers who actually sing instead of lip sync), I spent most of the evening staring at Lady Gaga. Specifically, her body. Specifically, her belly. She has this delightful, rounded little torso and it completely freaking hypnotized me.

See, this is the weird part. Lady Gaga is one of the most normal-looking celebrity women I see. Yes, normal. Look at her arms, her thighs, her proportions. Contrast Rihanna, who always looks like she was extruded from a machine, or like some sort of articulated doll. And compare Amanda Palmer, whose belly is slightly softer than Gaga's but was too fat for her label. I am in love with Lady Gaga and her non-anorexic belly.

One of the criticisms of haute couture is that a model's physique makes already avant garde designs look even more alien---a 6-foot 100-pound woman is just beyond the average person's experience. But Lady Gaga is a more or less average-to-petite young woman, and she totally rocks the weird fashion. She makes me want to run around in a PVC bodysuit with a rooster hood, or no pants with giant hoof-heels, or whatever weird thing you can imagine. She is really inspiring.