Category: General

Mother’s Day

Mother­’s Day, in its best mani­fest­a­tion, is a day to cel­eb­rate fam­ily and togeth­er­ness and chil­dren, as well as moth­ers. On this day though, it’s also good to spare a thought for those who would like to be moth­ers but can­’t be, for whatever reas­on, and for those who’ve lost their moth­ers, in whatever way. These cel­eb­rat­ory days aren’t unal­loyed joy for everyone.

Unthinking Sexism

When I was at uni­ver­sity in Auck­land, one guy said to me that he had­n’t real­ized he was sex­ist until he met me. I’ve always found dis­crim­in­a­tion based on the bio­lo­gic­al cap­ab­il­ity of bear­ing chil­dren to make about as much sense as dis­crim­in­a­tion based on eye col­our. It seems much of the world does­n’t agree, pre­fer­ring pre­judging abil­it­ies to the hard work of fig­ur­ing out real, rather than pre­sumed, cap­ab­il­it­ies. A lot of dis­crim­in­a­tion is simply not think­ing, accept­ing the movie or tele­vi­sion view of the world and the roles that women and men (or for that mat­ter, people not of west­ern european extrac­tion) have in it.

There’s quite a lot of sex­ism in tech­no­logy. One woman I know hates start­ing a new job, since, as she says, it takes six months to con­vince the guys I know how to turn on the light. Shelagh Cal­la­han told me of an exper­i­ence she had doing booth duty at a con­fer­ence. She was start­ing to explain some­thing to this guy when he inter­rup­ted her, said she did­n’t know enough and he knew Dr Cal­la­han, the lead­ing expert on this top­ic, and he (Dr Cal­la­han) had a dif­fer­ent opin­ion. At which someone stand­ing next to him sug­ges­ted he look at Shelagh’s name badge. I’ve had my fair share of con­des­cend­ing males assume I would­n’t under­stand what they’re talk­ing about or be able to con­trib­ute any­thing of value to a tech­nic­al dis­cus­sion. One could argue that most women would­n’t under­stand a tech­nic­al dis­cus­sion, but that’s no excuse for the assumption. 

Of course, this prob­lem isn’t lim­ited to tech­no­logy. A female law­yer friend of mine takes some pains to dress dif­fer­ently to the way sec­ret­ar­ies dress, for example, so it’s clear she’s a law­yer and not a sec­ret­ary. She says it’s been inter­est­ing watch­ing the devel­op­ment of some men, who at uni­ver­sity assumed every­one was a pro­fes­sion­al and treated them all equally, but once out in the leg­al work­force star­ted treat­ing men and women dif­fer­ently, assum­ing women were sec­ret­ar­ies and men were law­yers. With the large num­ber of women gradu­at­ing from law school these days that should change. Wheth­er the prac­tice of push­ing women law­yers off into fam­ily court (“you’re so good at being under­stand­ing”) where they earn less than crim­in­al court law­yers changes soon is an inter­est­ing question.

There are lots of aspects to sex­ism, quite a few where people don’t under­stand why I find them irrit­at­ing, or even upset­ting. As an example, send­ing mail addressed to Mr and Mrs {hus­band’s name}. Hav­ing people assume mar­ried people share a sur­name is not unreas­on­able, but assum­ing we also share a first name is. To me it smacks of Vic­tori­an-era treat­ment of women, where they were an append­age of the hus­band, not beings with sep­ar­ate iden­tit­ies. I guess it seems petty to worry about these sorts of things when women in so many coun­tries have it so much worse, but on the oth­er hand sex­ism cre­ates an envir­on­ment that is not wel­com­ing. If you don’t feel your pres­ence is val­ued in a soci­ety, then you’re not going to be a full part of that society.

Twins and Genetics

Mod­ern genet­ics some­times has a bit of a “believe it or not” feel­ing to it, things are repor­ted that sound like they come out of Greek myth­o­logy. One of the recent news items on the BBC had that feel­ing for me, where they write about semi-identic­al twins. These babies, who come from one egg fer­til­ized by two sperm, have the same mater­nal genet­ic mater­i­al and each has some of the paternal genet­ic mater­i­al from each sperm. So they’re both chi­mer­as, and one is also a herm­aph­rod­ite. Search­ing through the web for inform­a­tion about soci­ety’s treat­ment of herm­aph­rod­ites through the ages is a good way of spend­ing a lot of time read­ing inter­est­ing art­icles; vari­ous cul­tures and soci­et­ies have differed greatly in how they treated these people. But I digress. 

In myth­o­logy chi­mer­as are those beasts that are partly one anim­al or mon­ster, and partly anoth­er. In the mod­ern med­ic­al usage of the term, a chi­mera has two sets of genet­ic mater­i­al, so a DNA test taken from one part of the body will give a dif­fer­ent res­ult to a DNA test taken from some oth­er part of the body. Some people with eyes of dif­fer­ent col­ours are chi­mer­as, for example, the dif­fer­ent col­ours com­ing from the dif­fer­ing genet­ic material.

Anoth­er genet­ic­ally inter­est­ing con­di­tion that involves twins is the van­ish­ing twin syn­drome, where one twin absorbs all the genet­ic mater­i­al of the oth­er, some­times lead­ing to a chi­mera. The per­son, if born before early ultra­sounds were com­mon, prob­ably won’t even know that he or she star­ted off as one of twins. There was a well-known case of a moth­er who could only accept a kid­ney trans­plant from one of her three sons because the oth­er two had genet­ic mater­i­al from the van­ished twin rather than the moth­er who gave birth to them (see the above link or this one for more details).

These things give rise to some inter­est­ing issues, such as what about DNA test­ing? If one per­son can have the DNA of two people, with one set of DNA in some tis­sues, and the oth­er set in oth­er tis­sues, DNA test­ing becomes prob­lem­at­ic. Cur­rently there’s no way of know­ing the real pro­por­tion of van­ished twins, since there is only sel­dom a reas­on to test any giv­en per­son thor­oughly enough to find out (one example being need­ing to prove par­ent­age of chil­dren, as in the rel­at­ively recent Lydia Fairchild case). Chi­mer­as can have two blood types as well, mak­ing them ideal blood recip­i­ents, but less than ideal blood donors. That’s anoth­er way people may find out, I guess, when they get their blood type tested, but again it’s hard to know what pro­por­tion of chi­mer­as have two blood types.

I hope the par­ents of those babies (now tod­dlers) suc­ceed in keep­ing their names and oth­er inform­a­tion private. The interest in their unusu­al genet­ic make-up could badly affect their lives if the par­ents aren’t strong enough to with­stand pres­sure from the press, or sci­ent­ists, or the curi­ous pub­lic. I also hope they’re treated with com­pas­sion and empathy as they grow older, rather than intrus­ive nosiness.

HotMetaL

When I first came to Canada I worked at SoftQuad. SoftQuad was one of the first SGML com­pan­ies, well known (in some circles, any­way) for its Pres­id­ent, Yuri Rub­in­sky. And well known in many oth­er circles for its HTML edit­or, HoT­Met­aL. The Sur­rey office did most of the devel­op­ment work on HoT­Met­aL and it was my main focus for quite some time. So it was with a cer­tain amount of nos­tal­gia that I saw HoT­Met­aL lis­ted on eWeek’s Jim Rapoza Picks the Top Web Tech­no­lo­gies of All Time — gone but not for­got­ten, as they say. Thanks to Kim for send­ing me the link.

Compostable Plastic

The oth­er day Tim brought home some food in a con­tain­er that claimed to be made of corn and there­fore com­postable. I was intrigued by this, since I remem­ber going to street parties and Christ­mas mar­kets in Ger­many where the dis­pos­able plates were grain-based and even edible (not that people usu­ally did eat them) but haven’t seen them here. So I looked into it a bit more.

The con­tain­er was made out of some­thing called PLA, which is made from starch. The label said not to microwave it, which had me puzzled — isn’t corn safe to microwave? What would hap­pen? Would it melt? I tried microwav­ing some water in the con­tain­er and noth­ing unto­ward happened, so I poked around on the web­site for the com­pany (Nature­Works LLC, a sub­si­di­ary of Car­gill) to find out more.

The web­site did­n’t give any details that I could find as to why not to microwave the con­tain­er, so I emailed them. And got back a rather mixed reply. Some breath­less mar­ket­ing prose (new, revolu­tion­ary, bridges the gap between nat­ur­al and syn­thet­ic products), the actu­al answer in the middle, a some­what odd para­graph about how all the tech­nic­al info they’re pre­pared to dis­close is on the web­site (if the answer to the microwave ques­tion had been there, I would­n’t have emailed them). Any­way, the answer is sup­posedly that PLA has a low melt­ing point, so the con­tain­ers might leak in the microwave. 

Next Step

So if this con­tain­er is com­postable, where can one com­post it? The store has a big bin to take them back, but what about the Van­couver com­post facil­ity? Or indeed my com­post bin? The cash­ier said “oh, just throw it in your com­post bin.” “Are you sure?” “Yes, abso­lutely”. Accord­ing to the PLA bro­chure, you need 140ºF and humid­ity between 80% and 90% for exten­ded peri­ods of time. So that rules out my com­post bin. And the Van­couver City com­post facil­ity as well, unfor­tu­nately, since they use an open win­drow pro­cess. I emailed the rel­ev­ant people in the Van­couver City engin­eer­ing depart­ment, and they poin­ted out not only would it not com­post, if I put the plastic in the yard waste bin, it might encour­age oth­er people to put unsuit­able plastic con­tain­ers in there. So it’s back to the store with the con­tain­ers; for­tu­nately it’s not a big deal since it’s one of the loc­al stores we shop at anyway.