Canadian Bacon Barbie

I am very seriously thinking of doing this. Or this. Sorry, Brazil.

Apparently our office printers release toxic particulate matter equivalent to the amount of pollution produced by a cigarette smoker. And, we are being inundated with electromagnetic radiation from our “cordless phones, cell phones, wireless computer networks, baby alarms, and microwaves.” According to a company that markets an Electrosmog Detector, “a vulnerable minority of sensitive individuals” may be in for a range of symptoms including “sleep disruption, nosebleeds, headaches, migraines, lethargy, increased blood pressure, skin problems, the triggering of epileptic attacks and electrical hypersensitivity.”

Of course, there’s no escaping pollution. Even if we decided to retreat to some kind of remote rural area and raise our own yaks, we’d probably still be subject to methane. (Do yaks produce as much methane as cows?)

Francis Crick’s wife, Odile, died on July 5th. According to the New York Times, Odile Crick actually drew the sketch of the double helix that appeared in the original publication of “A Structure for Deoxyribonucleic Acid” and circulated widely in textbooks and articles. Meanwhile, the original article was typed by James Watson’s sister Betty.

The article doesn’t say whether Betty or Odile were paid or otherwise acknowledged for this work, but I’m guessing no. Somehow I’m guessing that Rosalind Franklin and other women scientists in that time period didn’t have wives to type things for them or draw their pictures. Although some of them, like Lydia J. Roberts, a nutritionist, lived with family members. (Roberts lived with her sister, who basically kept house for her while she pursued her research).
The Doomsday Clock, used by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to indicate “how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction” was designed by a woman as well: Martyl Langsdorf, the wife of Alexander Langsdorf, Jr. , a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. (Incidentally, according to the Bulletin, it is 5 minutes to midnight, or in other words, “We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age.” Back in 1991 we were only 17 minutes to midnight. This could not be good.)

At any rate, this kind of supportive collaboration is interesting to me. Women have for many years, even centuries, worked as scientific illustrators, popularizers, and support workers. This continued well into the 20th century, and even today–the editor of the PBS science show Nova is a woman: Paula Aspell. Unfortunately, popularizers of science don’t tend to get the same kind of credit as the interpid, adventurous researchers making the big discoveries–even if those discoveries wouldn’t have occurred, or wouldn’t have been known to others without them.

Apparently pigeons in Hollywood will soon be put on the Pill. People are complaining about the large pigeon populations and especially the large amount of poop pigeons generated. But, um, isn’t this an environmental disaster waiting to happen? The drug in question, OvoControl P, will be placed in bird feeders around the city. But what if other species eat the food? What about the chemicals they are introducing into the ecosystem? Does OvoControl P contain hormones that have already been shown to affect male (human) sperm counts? Gees. Maybe pigeon condoms would be a better idea.

Apparently the name discrimination issue I posted about the other day is a little different than previously reported by the CBC. According to the venerable CBC, government officials are now saying that

“asking applicants to provide a surname in addition to Singh or Kaur has been an administrative practice used by our visa office in New Delhi as a way to improve client service and reduce incidents of mistaken identity. This was not a mandatory requirement. There is no policy or practice whereby people with these surnames are asked to change their names.”

They have also admitted that the letter they sent to Jaspal Singh, (the guy who brought this issue to light) was “poorly worded.” This seems to be the written equivalent to the apologies politicians have been giving for oral miscommunications. For example, when Joseph Biden called Barack Obama “clean and articulate” he apologized by saying that it was not his intent to insult Obama and that his words were taken out of context.

So, I know we are in a post windowpane theory of language moment… we know that the effects of language always exceed the speaker’s intent, and we question the speaker’s sovereignty over that intent in the first place, and that meaning is slippery. But examples like these show that language does have concrete effects and that we’d like to hold people responsible for what they say. Right?

I’m copying Chris, but here’s the TagCrowd for my book prospectus:

And here’s the one for this blog:

BoingBoing posted this bit about “Writing in the Age of Google,” quoting William Gibson on his writing habits. Gibson suggests that having online distractions actually improves his ability to write: “ I need a certain stimulation. It kind of feels like when you’re floating underwater and you’re breathing through a straw. The open Firefox is the straw: like, I can get out of this if I have to. I can stay under until I can’t stand it anymore, and then I go to BoingBoing or something.” I’ve been noticing lately that my own attention span is getting increasingly short, thanks to Facebook, this blog, and Allmj.com (online MahJongg–the real kind, not the solitaire kind). All these little addictions don’t seem to be improving my writing or anything, but they do keep me tied to my laptop so I guess that’s something. I could be practicing my salsa moves or playing my guitar or actually cleaning my house or something. So maybe in the end the micro-seconds where I am actually working will add up.

Also, people apparently read websites using an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal movements followed by a vertical scan down the page. They found this out using eyeball tracking software of some kind.

Another random nugget: in conversation with some friends the other night about how we motivate ourselves to work, I coined the term “prewarding.” I used to reward myself for good behavior (i.e. finishing a book or a few pages of writing or whatever), but I have gotten into the bad habit of prewarding myself. i.e. Let me buy these cool pens and post-it flags so that I will be motivated to proofread my manuscript…. or Let me just go shopping and buy that yellow dress I was thinking about, and then I’ll do work for a good 6 hours, because otherwise I will just be thinking about the dress anyway and I’ll be distracted. Between the prewarding and the microsecond attention span, I have actually been rather productive, for some reason: I proofread and edited my manuscript once in 5 days (one chapter a day) and also drafted my bodies/wartime/women workers article (although I still need an argument). So maybe I deserve another preward before I go through the manuscript again.

The Canadian government has apparently banned two common Sikh last names under its immigration policy: Kaur and Singh. The reasoning is that these names are too common. According to the CBC, “In a tradition that began more than 300 years ago, the name Singh is given to every baptized male and Kaur to every baptized female Sikh.” Hmm. It’s not like immigration policy ever pretends not to discriminate. But still. This seems kind of ridiculous.

Two editorials in the New York Times have got me thinking about “rhetorical recalcitrance” or, in other words, the stubborn resistance of arguments that seem like they’d be easy to refute.

In “Final Period,” Karen Houppert discusses a new birth control pill that eliminates periods completely, linking it to the recalcitrant argument that women are somehow physically and mentally debilitated by their periods. This argument has emerged periodically throughout the last 100 years (and more), and is generally trotted out any time women seek more rights or to enter into spaces from which they were previously excluded. In my research on women scientists during World War II I found an article by psychologist Georgene Seward, called “Psychological Effects of the Menstrual Cycle on Women Worker” (published in the Psychological Bulletin in 1944) in which she smashes previous arguments against women workers that were based on menstrual debility. She notes that women who got more exercise and worked more actually had fewer premenstrual symptoms, suggesting that PMS and related infirmities had more to do with culture than biology. Yet we still get the message that women are somehow weakened by menstruation and that, thanks to modern pharmaceuticals, we can just avoid menstruation all together.

Similarly, Paul Krugman argues that “the opponents of universal health care appear to have run out of honest arguments.” While I wish this were the case, even Krugman cannot magically vanquish all arguments against universal health care by fiat. I’m sure that they will continue to circulate as the debate continues, with opponents offering the same objections they’ve been offering for years: universal health care = higher taxes, longer waits, etc.

What accounts for “rhetorical recalcitrance”? It doesn’t seem to have much to do with logic, that’s for sure, but it does have a lot to do with the values, beliefs, habits, and customs that give certain arguments a kind of “rightness” or “appropriateness” to audiences. Plus, these resistant arguments tend to have a lot of backing from economic interests.

On an unrelated note, from a NYT Editorial on Conrad Black: “there is nothing so frighteningly passive-aggressive as a well-irked Canadian.”Also, with regards to Canadian Exceptionalism: “In Canada, any disagreement with the United States is typically cast in David and Goliath terms, with the Canadians as beleaguered underdogs and the Americans as rapacious swindlers (see: soft wood lumber, treaties regarding).”

A short article in the latest issue of the Chronicle features a rhetoric professor who has made T-shirts with phrases like “Ask Me About Rhetoric” and “Isocrates, Youplato,” in the hopes of raising public awareness of rhetoric as a discipline.

After a little searching at CafePress, I’ve decided to put these T-shirts on my Christmas list:

• Team Rhetoric
• I Love Rhetoric
• The Canon

Plus, this rhetoric sticker. As a public service I might order a few hundred of these and plaster them on telephone poles and stuff wherever I go.

The Chronicle also featured a piece about a Dictionary of Canadianisms, including the following quiz. (Match the term with the corresponding image. I’ll post the answers tomorrow).