2015

cmocka – unit testing framework for C
Nifty unit test framework which does the checking arguments and providing return values from stub/mocked functions which I tend to spend a bit of time re-creating each time I write a test.
(tags: test development programming testing unit-test C)
What cohabiting couples can to do put their financial house in order | Money | The Guardian
(tags: cohabitation finances will legal law money)

Mister Vimes’d Go Spare | Send in the Zeppelins!
One of the many online tribute threads for Terry Pratchett lead me to this fanfic about what happened after Sam Vimes died. Good stuff.
(tags: discworld fanfiction vimes gods terry-pratchett)
Temporary Mailing Lists | Hacking for Christ
Here’s a rough spec for something I’ve often wanted at work (less the “delete the archive after 2 weeks” part). Anyone seen an implementation of something like this?
(tags: email list ad-hoc)

liv | Fat girl running
Liv discusses Naomi Alderman’s piece on being a fat person who made a fitness app (“Zombies, Run!”). School PE lessons get a mention again as something which ends up discouraging exercise. I mentioned the discussion of Alex Gabriel’s piece on school PE here previously, as well as my own experiences.
(tags: fitness running zombies PE physical-education school)
‘Overnight, everything I loved was gone’: the internet shaming of Lindsey Stone | Technology | The Guardian
Interesting stuff. There’s some more on the Adria Richards/donglegate thing: she gave an interview to Ronson where she describes having a physical reaction to the joke and feeling “unsafe”, which, given that she was in no danger at that point, sounds like a sort of anxiety/panic attack. May explain the disproportionate reaction on her part. There’s also the bit where she says she did know what she was doing by tweeting the photograph and doesn’t feel bad about it. Such goodwill diplomats are not really suited for a career in PR, I’d’ve thought, although SendGrid clearly just fired her to get Anonymous off their back.
(tags: shaming twitter internet dongle adria-richards donglegate)
Exclusive Extract From Jon Ronson Book ‘So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’
A longer extract from Ronson’s book details Richards’s horrible childhood and I think lends weight to my panic attack theory.
(tags: adria-richards jon-ronson donglegate twitter pycon)
Hi, I’m Muhammad, President of Ex-Muslims of North America here with our leadership. We envision a world where every person is free to follow their conscience. Ask us anything : IAmA
Reddit “Ask Me Anything” with Muhammed the Atheist. Leftist critique of Islam should be lead by ex-Muslims, ISTM.
(tags: ex-muslim islam religion apostasy ama reddit)

THE FAILURE OF MULTICULTURALISM | Pandaemonium
Kenan Malik argues that multi-cultural policies amount to dealing with people as a bloc lead by self-appointed (or government appointed) leaders. Yet French assimilationism hasn’t fared better: Malik blames measures taken against alienness (burqua bans) and an inability to acknowledge that racism still exists even though the goal is assimilation.
(tags: multiculturalism kenan-malik culture politics racism immigration europe)
My Year Ripping Off the Web with the Daily Mail Online
The Heil rips stuff off and makes stuff up, as told by a former employee.
(tags: dailymail journalism fraud)

The value of a life
“If you have money and want to save lives, you had better put a price on life… But don’t mix up the price of a life with the value of a life. I see this happen all too frequently. To correct this mistake, I’m going to tell a little story.”
(tags: economics life value cost money charity death)
Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer – NYTimes.com
Oliver Sacks has terminal cancer. He reflects on his life.
(tags: death cancer oliver-sacks david-hume)

Lindy Hop Event Organizers Conversation on Creating Safer Dance Spaces – YouTube
An hour’s conversation between various scene and event organisers on codes of conduct and whatnot. Including the Swing Patrol UK’s Scott Cupit, and Nina Gilkenson of Mobtown Ballroom, whose CoC I’ve previously linked to. Good stuff. One thing I didn’t realise is that organisers are regularly giving offenders the boot but doing so quietly so people don’t get scared. Organisers don’t want to stop the party (are camps total debauches only in the USA, or do I just not get invited to the right afterparties?), want to treat people as adults (Cupit rejects the idea of CoC specially for teachers on that basis), and don’t want to police every damn social interaction. OTOH recognise that there’s a groundswell for more explicit policies and enforcement.
(tags: lindyhop lindy-hop sexual-assault dance dancing)
What ISIS Really Wants – The Atlantic
“The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.” Via Mefi.
(tags: isis islam war terrorism caliphate apocalypse)

Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness? | Oliver Burkeman | Science | The Guardian
Cos it’s a Hard Problem. Geddit?
(tags: consciousness philosophy zombies david-chalmers daniel-dennett)
Believing that life is fair makes you a terrible person | Oliver Burkeman | Comment is free | The Guardian
Just World Fallacy leads to victim blaming.
(tags: victim-blaming just-world psychology fairness)

Feminism and The Search for Truth | The Merely Real
Chana Messinger’s response to the Scott Aaronson thing (on whether feminism hurts geek guys) is the best one. I learned the term “scrupulousity”.
(tags: scott-aaronson nerds feminism laurie-penny chana-messinger)
Hume and subjective/objective moral values
A Twitlonger page (which I guess is what we used to call a blog post) about Hume and the varied meanings of “subjective” and “objective” wrt morality.
(tags: hume david-hume subjective objective morality)
What Color is Your Function? – journal.stuffwithstuff.com
Interesting stuff about asynchronous programming.
(tags: async programming)

This post links to descriptions of sexual assault.

Lindy hop got its own version of the Jimmy Saville revelations recently, when it became clear that a long standing international dance teacher (who wasn’t someone I’d heard of prior to this, as it happens) had abused various women. Jeff Leyco has collated a bunch of links to people talking about it, the most important of which is Sarah Sullivan’s original blog posting describing her experiences.

Elaborating on some comments I’ve made in other places:

There’s sometimes a confusion about types of evidence, and between degrees of evidence and degrees of belief, that happens when people read accusations like this online. Testimony is evidence, especially if it’s potentially costly to the testifier if they lie. We rightly demand a very high probability of truth before we bless certain beliefs for certain uses (for example, in a court of law or a science journal). But that the probability doesn’t need to be as high before deciding to keep someone away from young women at dance camps, for example. There were surprisingly few “oh, the Internet says it, so it must have happened, riiiight” comments, but not none. Those commenters looked pretty foolish when the other shoes dropped, and a pattern of predation emerged in the reports of other women. If you’re not actually having to decide whether to allow that teacher to come to your dance camp next weekend, it seems wise to shut up and wait for those other shoes to hit the floor rather than sounding off on the Internet.

There was some use of the word “awkward” to refer to the perp. People who are socially awkward don’t do the stuff described by these women, which, moral considerations aside, requires some nerve (in the case of initiating physical contact) and Dark Side social skills (isolating the victims, telling them they’re special, and so on). Let’s stop calling predators “socially awkward”, it’s an insult to socially awkward people.

Codes of Conduct

One popular suggesting in the wake of all this is to institute codes of conduct for dance events. Having been initially a little wary of that, I’m now in favour as a result of chatting with friend C (who got me into lindy in the first place) and reading around.

One thing that seems to be happening is that people are adopting language from codes for professional conferences. I’d argue that these codes are not suitable for use at dance events without modification. If you’re going to have a code, it’s not a talisman against predators that you can just hold up like a crucifix in front of a vampire and hope they go away. You have to enforce it, and that means getting language right so it’s enforceable.

The general

What am I on about? Broadly, that there’s a difference between the environment you want at a conference where everyone’s on the clock (and subject to employment law) and something that’s a cross between a party and the practice of an art.

There’s also some danger of confusion between the social justice concept of a Safe Space, and the sort of environment the general public would want to dance and socialise in. A Safe Space in the former sense is typically heavily policed against a fairly strict and specialised language code which bans certain words, and the police usually prohibit discussion about matters they consider settled. Assuming that such Spaces make anyone safer, they do so at the expense of other good things, which are put aside in favour of an overriding concern for Safety; and the converse is also true: not making your Space Safe means you’re trading off those other goods against the risk of some people not being Safe (see Mefi, previously). Face this, accept there’s nothing wrong with trading off goods against each other, and don’t use the phrase “safe space” to describe the environment you’re trying to create.

Elizabeth Dingivan criticises this post on safe conferences both for advocating an over-patrolled environment and for concentrating on preventing problems rather than promoting positive values. It’s worth checking our her comment.

Edit: another thought that occurs is that unless you have the resources to police heavily, you cannot in fact offer a totally safe space even if you want to, so your terminology should not offer something you’re not going to deliver.

The specific

More specifically, we need to say more about banning “sexualised material”: if it means porny pictures are banned that’s fair, but do you want to ban a bunch of those songs about food which aren’t actually about food or the songs in which there’s sexual commentary on men’s and women’s bodies? Probably not, because we allow things in an artistic context that we don’t want to see around the office (if you were trying to create a Safe Space, the answer would be different here).

Relatedly, partner dancing got started in part as an early form of speed dating, and some people come to dancing hoping to meet romantic partners, in a way which would not be appropriate for a professional conference. There’s nothing wrong with this in itself, though there are wrong ways to go about it and one needs to be alert for the difference between dance chemistry and sexual desire. I don’t know how to convey this in a short document, but just “no harassment, no sexy stuff” won’t cut it.

When we dance, we’re touching another person and, in some dances, adopting a close hold. It’s worth going into more detail about what’s OK here, rather than just banning “inappropriate touching”. It’s also worth dealing with what to do when bad stuff happens by accident when moving at speed, not something that ForkMyDongleCon ’13 attendees had to worry about, I guess. (I’d also like to ban teachers from initiating back-rub circles at the end of lessons, please: that sort of touch isn’t what people signed up for).

Good examples

I like the policies of Mobtown, Baltimore (though the bullet about various banned -isms shades towards Internet social justice jargon and makes me wonder if I’ll get the boot for saying “Mark’s such a crazy dancer”) and Holy Lindy Land, Israel. I like Bryn’s suggestions on Sarah Sullivan’s posting.

A couple more general points: it’s worth distinguishing hints and tips from serious offences. It’s worth emphasising that we’re dealing with hopefully rare stuff here and most people are lovely. I remember discussion of Cambridge Dancers’ Club’s etiquette page where people wondered whether a long etiquette manual might put the punters off. Both these points can be addressed by having a serious bit and a funny FAQ (a FAQ’s a good format for avoiding the CDC page’s wall of text). I like Holy Lindy Land’s pictures, too.

Final point: there’s no point in any of this if there’s no-one to tell about problems or if problems are not investigated and resolved once you tell someone. This requires a lot of the people who organise events, who are often volunteers. In the case I’ve heard about where harassment was not dealt with at an event, those organisers were women, so it wasn’t a case of men belittling women’s problems. Organisers want to be liked and find confrontation difficult, just like anyone else. I’ve never done that job, so I don’t know what to do about that.