A lecture at LCA 2011 which included some inappropriate slides was followed by long discussions on mailing lists. In February 2011 I wrote a blog post debunking some of the bogus arguments in two lists [1]. One of the noteworthy incidents in the mailing list discussion concerned Ted Ts o (an influential member of the Linux community) debating the definition of rape. My main point on that issue in Feb 2011 was that it s insensitive to needlessly debate the statistics. Recently Valerie Aurora wrote about another aspect of this on The Ada Initiative blog [2] and on her personal blog. Some of her significant points are that conference harassment doesn t end when the conference ends (it can continue on mailing lists etc), that good people shouldn t do nothing when bad things happen, and that free speech doesn t mean freedom from consequences or the freedom to use private resources (such as conference mailing lists) without restriction. Craig Sanders wrote a very misguided post about the Ted Ts o situation [3]. One of the many things wrong with his post is his statement I m particularly disgusted by the men who intervene way too early without an explicit invitation or request for help or a clear need such as an immediate threat of violence in womens issues . I believe that as a general rule when any group of people are involved in causing a problem they should be involved in fixing it. So when we have problems that are broadly based around men treating women badly the prime responsibility should be upon men to fix them. It seems very clear that no matter what scope is chosen for fixing the problems (whether it be lobbying for new legislation, sociological research, blogging, or directly discussing issues with people to change their attitudes) women are doing considerably more than half the work. I believe that this is an indication that overall men are failing. Asking for Help I don t believe that members of minority groups should have to ask for help. Asking isn t easy, having someone spontaneously offer help because it s the right thing to do can be a lot easier to accept psychologically than having to beg for help. There is a book named Women Don t Ask which has a page on the geek feminism Wiki [4]. I think the fact that so many women relate to a book named Women Don t Ask is an indication that we shouldn t expect women to ask directly, particularly in times of stress. The Wiki page notes a criticism of the book that some specific requests are framed as complaining , so I think we should consider a complaint from a woman as a direct request to do something. The geek feminism blog has an article titled How To Exclude Women Without Really Trying which covers many aspects of one incident [5]. Near the end of the article is a direct call for men to be involved in dealing with such problems. The geek feminism Wiki has a page on Allies which includes Even a blog post helps [6]. It seems clear from public web sites run by women that women really want men to be involved. Finally when I get blog comments and private email from women who thank me for my posts I take it as an implied request to do more of the same. One thing that we really don t want is to have men wait and do nothing until there is an immediate threat of violence. There are two massive problems with that plan, one is that being saved from a violent situation isn t a fun experience, the other is that an immediate threat of violence is most likely to happen when there is no-one around to intervene. Men Don t Listen to Women Rebecca Solnit wrote an article about being ignored by men titled Men Explain Things to Me [7]. When discussing women s issues the term Mansplaining is often used for that sort of thing, the geek feminism Wiki has some background [8]. It seems obvious that the men who have the greatest need to be taught some things related to women s issues are the ones who are least likely to listen to women. This implies that other men have to teach them. Craig says that women need space to discover and practice their own strength and their own voices . I think that the best way to achieve that goal is to listen when women speak. Of course that doesn t preclude speaking as well, just listen first, listen carefully, and listen more than you speak. Craig claims that when men like me and Matthew Garrett comment on such issues we are making women s spaces more comfortable, more palatable, for men . From all the discussion on this it seems quite obvious that what would make things more comfortable for men would be for the issue to never be discussed at all. It seems to me that two of the ways of making such discussions uncomfortable for most men are to discuss sexual assault and to discuss what should be done when you have a friend who treats women in a way that you don t like. Matthew has covered both of those so it seems that he s doing a good job of making men uncomfortable I think that this is a good thing, a discussion that is comfortable and palatable for the people in power is not going to be any good for the people who aren t in power. The Voting Aspect It seems to me that when certain issues are discussed we have a social process that is some form of vote. If one person complains then they are portrayed as crazy. When other people agree with the complaint then their comments are marginalised to try and preserve the narrative of one crazy person. It seems that in the case of the discussion about Rape Apology and LCA2011 most men who comment regard it as one person (either Valeria Aurora or Matthew Garrett) causing a dispute. There is even some commentary which references my blog post about Rape Apology [9] but somehow manages to ignore me when it comes to counting more than one person agreeing with Valerie. For reference David Zanetti was the first person to use the term apologist for rapists in connection with the LCA 2011 discussion [10]. So we have a count of at least three men already. These same patterns always happen so making a comment in support makes a difference. It doesn t have to be insightful, long, or well written, merely I agree and a link to a web page will help. Note that a blog post is much better than a comment in this regard, comments are much like conversation while a blog post is a stronger commitment to a position. I don t believe that the majority is necessarily correct. But an opinion which is supported by too small a minority isn t going to be considered much by most people. The Cost of Commenting The Internet is a hostile environment, when you comment on a contentious issue there will be people who demonstrate their disagreement in uncivilised and even criminal ways. S. E. Smith wrote an informative post for Tiger Beatdown about the terrorism that feminist bloggers face [11]. I believe that men face fewer threats than women when they write about such things and the threats are less credible. I don t believe that any of the men who have threatened me have the ability to carry out their threats but I expect that many women who receive such threats will consider them to be credible. The difference in the frequency and nature of the terrorism (and there is no other word for what S. E. Smith describes) experienced by men and women gives a vastly different cost to commenting. So when men fail to address issues related to the behavior of other men that isn t helping women in any way. It s imposing a significant cost on women for covering issues which could be addressed by men for minimal cost. It s interesting to note that there are men who consider themselves to be brave because they write things which will cause women to criticise them or even accuse them of misogyny. I think that the women who write about such issues even though they will receive threats of significant violence are the brave ones. Not Being Patronising Craig raises the issue of not being patronising, which is of course very important. I think that the first thing to do to avoid being perceived as patronising in a blog post is to cite adequate references. I ve spent a lot of time reading what women have written about such issues and cited the articles that seem most useful in describing the issues. I m sure that some women will disagree with my choice of references and some will disagree with some of my conclusions, but I think that most women will appreciate that I read what women write (it seems that most men don t). It seems to me that a significant part of feminism is about women not having men tell them what to do. So when men offer advice on how to go about feminist advocacy it s likely to be taken badly. It s not just that women don t want advice from men, but that advice from men is usually wrong. There are patterns in communication which mean that the effective strategies for women communicating with men are different from the effective strategies for men communicating with men (see my previous section on men not listening to women). Also there s a common trend of men offering simplistic advice on how to solve problems, one thing to keep in mind is that any problem which affects many people and is easy to solve has probably been solved a long time ago. Often when social issues are discussed there is some background in the life experience of the people involved. For example Rookie Mag has an article about the street harassment women face which includes many disturbing anecdotes (some of which concern primary school students) [12]. Obviously anyone who has lived through that sort of thing (which means most women) will instinctively understand some issues related to threatening sexual behavior that I can t easily understand even when I spend some time considering the matter. So there will be things which don t immediately appear to be serious problems to me but which are interpreted very differently by women. The non-patronising approach to such things is to accept the concerns women express as legitimate, to try to understand them, and not to argue about it. For example the issue that Valerie recently raised wasn t something that seemed significant when I first read the email in question, but I carefully considered it when I saw her posts explaining the issue and what she wrote makes sense to me. I don t think it s possible for a man to make a useful comment on any issue related to the treatment of women without consulting multiple women first. I suggest a pre-requisite for any man who wants to write any sort of long article about the treatment of women is to have conversations with multiple women who have relevant knowledge. I ve had some long discussions with more than a few women who are involved with the FOSS community. This has given me a reasonable understanding of some of the issues (I won t claim to be any sort of expert). I think that if you just go and imagine things about a group of people who have a significantly different life-experience then you will be wrong in many ways and often offensively wrong. Just reading isn t enough, you need to have conversations with multiple people so that they can point out the things you don t understand. This isn t any sort of comprehensive list of ways to avoid being patronising, but it s a few things which seem like common mistakes. Anne Onne wrote a detailed post advising men who want to comment on feminist blogs etc [13], most of it applies to any situation where men comment on women s issues.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/02/10/lca2011-harassment/
• [2] http://adainitiative.org/2012/10/open-source-software-open-to-all/
• [3] http://blog.taz.net.au/2012/11/18/done/
• [4] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Women_Don t_Ask
• [5] http://geekfeminism.org/2012/09/17/how-to-exclude-women-without-really-trying/
• [6] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Allies
• [7] http://www.alternet.org/story/82222/men_explain_things_to_me
• [8] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Splaining
• [9] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/11/08/rape-apology-lca2011/
• [10] http://www.codon.org.uk/~mjg59/ted_mail/0013.html
• [11] http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/10/11/on-blogging-threats-and-silence/
• [12] http://rookiemag.com/2012/05/it-happens-all-the-time/
• [13] http://www.thefword.org.uk/features/2008/06/men_feminism_ne

This morning Zoe woke up again at around 4am and ended up in bed with me. I don't even remember why she woke up, and neither does she, but she's assuring me it won't happen tomorrow morning. We'll see. As a result of the disturbed night's sleep, we had a bit of a slow start to the day. Zoe was happy to go off and watch some TV after she woke up for the day, and that let me have a bit more of a doze before I got up, which made things vaguely better for me. ABC 4 Kids has been showing a lot of ads for Ha Ha Hairies, which airs at 10:20am, lately, and it's one of the shows that isn't available on iView. Zoe had been lamenting that she never got to see it, and asking me if she could. Today the schedule was fairly open, so I made sure we were home at 10:20am. That involved a quick dash out to Woolies first to get a few bits and pieces for Zoe's birthday party. While Zoe watched the Ha Ha Hairies, I did some bulk egg hard boiling in the oven. After the Ha Ha Hairies and a little bit of general mucking around, we drove out to Spotlight to pick up the helium tank I'd rented. Zoe nearly fell asleep on the way out there. We picked up the helium tank and headed back home. That errand alone probably took a bit over an hour all up. We got back home and had lunch, but by the time all of that was out of the way, Zoe seemed to have missed the window for her nap. She did have a bit of a rest in bed, flipping through her library books, and I got to read some of my book as well, so that was nice. During that time, I got the call from Bunkers saying they were about half an hour out with the delivery of Zoe's bunk bed (my birthday present for her). That worked out well, as it was towards the start of the two hour window they'd advised me of. The bunk bed was delivered and then we popped out to Overflow to see if they had any food covers for the party food (they did) so we picked up a few of them. Today I learned that "As Seen On TV" is trademarked, and so "Similar To As Seen On TV" is the trademark dodging thing to put on cheap knock-offs. As Overflow is two doors down from Petbarn, we stopped in there as well and grabbed some more kitty litter. One does not just pop into Petbarn with Zoe, so we spent some time there looking at the fish and assorting aquarium paraphernalia. They also had some hermit crabs now too. On the way back home, we stopped in at (a different) Woolies to pick up the half slab of chocolate mudcake that I'd ordered for Zoe's birthday cake. I'd decided that the upright Minion cake I'd initially wanted to do was just way too adventurous for my abilities and not a good use of my time (and the quotes I'd sought for outsourcing it had come in at over $300). I scaled things back to just a flat slab Minion, which may still exceed my cake decorating abilities, but we'll find out tomorrow. There'd been a miscommunication at Woolworths, and my half slab hadn't been boxed up and wasn't ready for my collection. All the bakery staff had already gone home, and I didn't really want to come back tomorrow, because I had this crazy idea of possibly starting on the cake tonight (not going to happen), so a couple of non-bakery staff had to find the cake and figure out how to extract a full slab from the baking tray and cut it in half and box it up. It provided some entertainment for Zoe and I. We finally got home, and I rehashed some frozen leftovers for dinner. I decided to try something different for the bath time and bed time routine to see if it'd reduce procrastination. I got Zoe to pick out the three books she wanted to read at bed time before we got to story time, so we'd have something concrete to negotiate with. I also threw in the possibility of a "bonus story" if she didn't muck around. It seemed to work, and we had a fairly streamlined bath time. There's no doubt she was pretty tired today, and she went to bed without any fuss, so I'm hopeful that we'll have a good night tonight.

Yves Rossy is the Jetman, he flys with a wing and four jet engines strapped to his body, he gave an interesting TED talk about flying along with some exciting videos [1]. Larry Brilliant gave an informative and inspiring TED talk about stopping pandemics [2]. I thought that Smallpox was the last disease to be eradicated but I was wrong. Michael Shermer gave an interesting TED talk about pattern recognition and self deception [3]. It s a pity that the kissing prank shown at the end only pranked women, they should be less sexist and prank men too. Raffaello D Andrea gave an interesting TED presentation about Athletic quadcopters [4]. It s very impressive and has the potential for several new human/machine sports. Lisa D wrote an insightful article about Prejudice Spillover discussing the way that people who aren t in minority groups only seem to care about injustice when a member of the majority is targetted by mistake [5]. Ron Garret wrote an insightful post about the Divine Right of Billionaires which debunks some stupid arguments by a billionaire [6]. Ron says that it s often instructive to examine incorrect arguments, especially when those arguments are advanced by smart people and demonstrates it in this post. Lisa D wrote an interesting post about her problems with financial aid bureaucracy [7]. She intended the post to be a personal one about her situation, but I think it illustrates problems with the various aid programs. If aid was available to her with less bureaucracy then she would be doing paid work, completing her studies, and heading towards post-graduate studies. Mark Shuttleworth wrote an insightful article about ACPI, security, and device tree [8]. It s the first time I ve seen a good argument for device tree. TED presented an interesting video-conference interview with Edward Snowden [9]. It s unusually long by TED standards but definitely worth watching. Tom Meagher (who s wife was raped and murdered two years ago) wrote an insightful article about rape culture [10]. Key Lay (the Victorian Chief Commissioner of Police) wrote a good article encouraging men to act to stop violence against women [11]. It s particularly noteworthy when a senior police officer speaks out about this given the difficulties women have had in reporting such crimes to police. Emily Baker wrote an insightful article about the lack of support for soldiers who survive war [12]. A lot of attention and money is spent remembering the soldiers who died in the field but little on those who live suffer afterwards, more soldiers die from suicide than enemy fire. Daniel Pocock wrote an informative article about the failings of SMS authentication for online banking [13]. While he has good points I think he s a little extreme. Stopping the least competent attackers is still a significant benefit as most potential attackers aren t that competent. Jess Zimmerman wrote an interesting article for Time about the Not All Men argument that is a current trend in derailing discussions about the treatment of women [14]. The Belle Jar has an insightful article Why Won t You Educate Me About Feminism about some ways that men pretend to care about the treatment of women [15]. Jon Evans wrote an article for Tech Crunch about the Honywell Bubble Count measure of diversity in people you follow on social media [16]. Currently on Twitter I follow 57 accounts of which 15 are companies and organisations, so I follow 42 people. I follow 13 women 31%, for a visible minority group other than my own it s 2/42 or 5%, for people who live in other countries I think it s 8/42 (although it s difficult to determine where some people live) which is 19%. So my Honywell number is 55. The Top Stocks forum has an interesting post by a Coal Seam Gas (CSG) worker [17]. It seems that CSG is even worse than I thought. Ashe Dryden wrote an informative post for Model View Culture about the backlash that members of minority groups (primarily women) receive when they speak out [18].

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/yves_rossy_fly_with_the_jetman
• [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_brilliant_wants_to_stop_pandemics
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_the_pattern_behind_self_deception
• [4] http://tinyurl.com/pwa7hwy
• [5] http://chaoticidealism.livejournal.com/131742.html
• [6] http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/02/the-divine-right-of-billionaires_22.html
• [7] http://chaoticidealism.livejournal.com/132730.html
• [8] http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1332
• [9] http://www.ted.com/talks/edward_snowden_here_s_how_we_take_back_the_internet
• [10] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-18/meagher-the-danger-of-the-monster-myth/5399108
• [11] http://www.vicpolicenews.com.au/blogs/93-oursay/1302-ccp-ken-lay-on-family-violence.html
• [12] http://www.examiner.com.au/story/2248712/dont-forget-about-those-war-veterans-who-remain/
• [13] http://danielpocock.com/sms-logins-an-illusion-of-security
• [14] http://time.com/79357/not-all-men-a-brief-history-of-every-dudes-favorite-argument/
• [15] http://bellejar.ca/2014/02/22/why-wont-you-educate-me-about-feminism/
• [16] http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/26/whats-your-honeywell-bubble-count/
• [17] http://www.topstocks.com.au/stock_discussion_forum.php?action=show_thread&threadid=1106338
• [18] http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/dissent-unheard-of

Background I ve previously written about the claim that people use Autism as an excuse for bad behavior [1]. In summary it doesn t and such claims instead lead to people not being assessed for Autism. I ve also previously written about empathy and Autism in the context of discussions about conference sexual harassment [2]. The main point is that anyone who s going to blame empathy disorders for the widespread mistreatment of women in society and divert the subject from the actions of average men to men in minority groups isn t demonstrating empathy. Discussions of the actions of average men are so often derailed to cover Autism that the Geek Feminism Wiki has a page about the issue of blaming Autism [3]. The Latest Issue Last year Shanley Kane wrote an informative article for Medium titled What Can Men Do about the treatment of women in the IT industry [4]. It s a good article, I recommend reading it. As an aside @shanley s twitter feed is worth reading [5]. In response to Shanley s article Jeff Atwood wrote an article of the same title this year which covered lots of other things [6]. He writes about Autism but doesn t seem to realise that officially Asperger Syndrome is now Autism according to DSM-V (they decided that separate diagnosis of Autism, Asperger Syndrome, and PDD-NOS were too difficult and merged them). Asperger Syndrome is now a term that refers to historic issues (IE research that was published before DSM-V) and slang use. Gender and the Autism Spectrum Jeff claims that autism skews heavily towards males at a 4:1 ratio and cites the Epidemiology of Autism Wikipedia page as a reference. Firstly that page isn t a great reference, I fixed one major error (which was obviously wrong to anyone who knows anything about Autism and also contradicted the cited reference) in the first section while writing this post. The Wikipedia page cites a PDF about the Epidemiology of Autism that claims the 4.3:1 ratio of boys to girls [7]. However that PDF is a summary of other articles and the one which originated the 4.3:1 claim is behind a paywall. One thing that is worth noting in the PDF is that the section containing the 4.3:1 claim also references claims about correlations between race and Autism and studies contradicting such claims it notes the possibility of ascertainment bias . I think that anyone who reads that section should immediately consider the possibility of ascertainment bias in regard to the gender ratio. Most people who are diagnosed with Autism are diagnosed as children. An Autism diagnosis of a child is quite subjective, an important part is an IQ test (where the psychologist interprets the intent of the child in the many cases where answers aren t clear) to compare social skills with IQ. So whether a child is diagnosed is determined by the psychologist s impression of the child s IQ vs the impression of their social skills. Whether a child is even taken for assessment depends on whether they act in a way that s considered to be obviously different. Any child who is suspected of being on the Autism Spectrum will be compared other children who have been diagnosed (IE mostly boys) and this will probably increase the probability that a boy will be assessed. So an Aspie girl might not be assessed because she acts like other Aspie girls not like the Aspie boys her parents and teachers have seen. The way kids act is not solely determined by neuro-type. Our society expects and encourages boys to be louder than girls and take longer and more frequent turns to speak, this is so widespread that I don t think it s possible for parents to avoid it if their kids are exposed to the outside world. Because of this boys who would be diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome by DSM-IV tend to act in ways that are obviously different from other kids. While the combination of Autism and the the social expectations on girls tends to result in girls who are quiet, shy, and apologetic. The fact that girls are less obviously different and that their differences cause fewer difficulties for parents and teachers makes them less likely to be assessed. Note that the differences in behavior of boys and girls who have been diagnosed is noted by the professionals (and was discussed at a conference on AsperGirls that my wife attended) while the idea that this affects assessment rates is my theory. Jeff also cites the book The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen (who s (in)famous for his Extreme Male Brain theory). The first thing to note about the Extreme Male Brain theory are that it depends almost entirely on the 4.3:1 ratio of males to females on the Autism Spectrum (which is dubious as I noted above). The only other evidence in support of it is subjective studies of children which suffer from the same cultural issues this is why double blind tests should be used whenever possible. The book Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine [8] debunks Simon Baron-Cohen s work among other things. The look inside feature of the Amazon page for Delusions of Gender allows you to read about Simon Baron-Cohen s work [9]. Now even if the Extreme Male Brain theory had any merit it would be a really bad idea to cite it (or a book based on it) if you want to make things better for women in the IT industry. Cordelia s book debunks the science and also shows how such claims about supposed essential difference are taken as exclusionary. The Problem with Jeff Atwood Jeff suggests in his post that men should listen to women. Then he and his followers have a huge flame-war with many women over twitter during which which he tweeted Trying to diversify my follows by following any female voices that engaged me in a civil, constructive way recently . If you only listen to women who agree with you then that doesn t really count as listening to women. When you have a stated policy of only listening to women who agree then it seems to be more about limiting what women may feel free to say around you. The Geek Feminism wiki page about the Tone Argument [10] says the following: One way in which the tone argument frequently manifests itself is as a call for civility. A way to gauge whether a request for civility is sincere or not is to ask whether the person asking for civility has more power along whatever axes are contextually relevant (see Intersectionality) than the person being called incivil , less power, or equal power. Often, people who have the privilege of being listened to and taken seriously level accusations of incivility as a silencing tactic, and label as incivil any speech or behavior that questions their privilege. For example, some men label any feminist thought or speech as hostile or impolite; there is no way for anybody to question male power or privilege without being called rude or aggressive. Likewise, some white people label any critical discussion of race, particularly when initiated by people of color, as incivil. Writing about one topic is also a really good idea. A blog post titled What Can Men Do should be about things that men can do. Not about Autism, speculation about supposed inherent differences between men and women which are based on bad research, gender diversity in various occupations, etc. Following up a post on What Can Men Do with discussion (in blog comments and twitter) about what women should do before they are allowed to join the conversation is ridiculous. Jeff s blog post says that men should listen to women, excluding women based on the tone argument is gross hypocrisy. Swearing Jeff makes a big deal of the fact that Shanley uses some profane language in her tweets. This combines a couple of different ways of silencing women. It s quite common for women to be held to a high standard of ladylike behavior, while men get a free pass on doing the same thing. One example of this is the Geek Feminism article about the results of Sarah Sharp s request for civility in the Linux kernel community [11]. That s not an isolated incident, to the best of my recollection in 20+ years my local Linux Users Group has had only one debate about profanity on mailing lists in that case a woman (who is no longer active in the group) was criticised for using lesser profanity than men used both before and after with no comment (as an experiment I used some gratuitous profanity a couple of weeks later and no-one commented). There is also a common difference in interpretation of expressions of emotion, when a woman seems angry then she invariably has men tell her to change her approach (even when there are obvious reasons for her anger) while when a man is angry the possibility that other people shouldn t make him angry will usually be considered. The issues related to the treatment of women have had a large affect on Shanley s life and her friend s lives. It s quite understandable that she is angry about this. Her use of profanity in tweets seems appropriate to the situation. Other Links Newsweek s Gentlemen in Technology article has a section about Jeff [12], it s interesting to note his history of deleting tweets and editing his post. I presume he will change his post in response to mine and not make any note of the differences. Jacob Kaplan-Moss wrote a good rebuttal to Jeff s post [13]. It s a good article and has some other relevant links that are worth reading.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/04/23/autism-as-an-excuse/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/12/08/empathy-autism-and-geeks/
• [3] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Autism_is_to_blame
• [4] https://medium.com/tech-culture-briefs/a1e93d985af0
• [5] https://twitter.com/shanley
• [6] http://blog.codinghorror.com/what-can-men-do/
• [7] http://idea.library.drexel.edu/bitstream/1860/2632/1/2006175339.pdf
• [8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusions_of_Gender
• [9] http://www.amazon.com/Delusions-Gender-Society-Neurosexism-Difference/dp/0393340244
• [10] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Tone_argument
• [11] http://geekfeminism.org/2013/09/05/tone-policing-a-tool-for-protecting-male-power/
• [12] http://www.newsweek.com/today-tabs-meet-gentlemen-technology-248696
• [13] http://jacobian.org/writing/what-can-men-do/

In 2007 I wrote a blog post about swap space [1]. The main point of that article was to debunk the claim that Linux needs a swap space twice as large as main memory (in summary such advice is based on BSD Unix systems and has never applied to Linux and that most storage devices aren t fast enough for large swap). That post was picked up by Barrapunto (Spanish Slashdot) and became one of the most popular posts I ve written [2]. In the past 7 years things have changed. Back then 2G of RAM was still a reasonable amount and 4G was a lot for a desktop system or laptop. Now there are even phones with 3G of RAM, 4G is about the minimum for any new desktop or laptop, and desktop/laptop systems with 16G aren t that uncommon. Another significant development is the use of SSDs which dramatically improve speed for some operations (mainly seeks). As SATA SSDs for desktop use start at about $110 I think it s safe to assume that everyone who wants a fast desktop system has one. As a major limiting factor in swap use is the seek performance of the storage the use of SSDs should allow greater swap use. My main desktop system has 4G of RAM (it s an older Intel 64bit system and doesn t support more) and has 4G of swap space on an Intel SSD. My work flow involves having dozens of Chromium tabs open at the same time, usually performance starts to drop when I get to about 3.5G of swap in use. While SSD generally has excellent random IO performance the contiguous IO performance often isn t much better than hard drives. My Intel SSDSC2CT12 300i 128G can do over 5000 random seeks per second but for sustained contiguous filesystem IO can only do 225M/s for writes and 274M/s for reads. The contiguous IO performance is less than twice as good as a cheap 3TB SATA disk. It also seems that the performance of SSDs aren t as consistent as that of hard drives, when a hard drive delivers a certain level of performance then it can generally do so 24*7 but a SSD will sometimes reduce performance to move blocks around (the erase block size is usually a lot larger than the filesystem block size). It s obvious that SSDs allow significantly better swap performance and therefore make it viable to run a system with more swap in use but that doesn t allow unlimited swap. Even when using programs like Chromium (which seems to allocate huge amounts of RAM that aren t used much) it doesn t seem viable to have swap be much bigger than 4G on a system with 4G of RAM. Now I could buy another SSD and use two swap spaces for double the overall throughput (which would still be cheaper than buying a PC that supports 8G of RAM), but that still wouldn t solve all problems. One issue I have been having on occasion is BTRFS failing to allocate kernel memory when managing snapshots. I m not sure if this would be solved by adding more RAM as it could be an issue of RAM fragmentation I won t file a bug report about this until some of the other BTRFS bugs are fixed. Another problem I have had is when running Minecraft the driver for my ATI video card fails to allocate contiguous kernel memory, this is one that almost certainly wouldn t be solved by just adding more swap but might be solved if I tweaked the kernel to be more aggressive about swapping out data. In 2007 when using hard drives for swap I found that the maximum space that could be used with reasonable performance for typical desktop operations was something less than 2G. Now with a SSD the limit for usable swap seems to be something like 4G on a system with 4G of RAM. On a system with only 2G of RAM that might allow the system to be usable with swap being twice as large as RAM, but with the amounts of RAM in modern PCs it seems that even SSD doesn t allow using a swap space larger than RAM for typical use unless it s being used for hibernation. Conclusion It seems that nothing has significantly changed in the last 7 years. We have more RAM, faster storage, and applications that are more memory hungry. The end result is that swap still isn t very usable for anything other than hibernation if it s larger than RAM. It would be nice if application developers could stop increasing the use of RAM. Currently it seems that the RAM requirements for Linux desktop use are about 3 years behind the RAM requirements for Windows. This is convenient as a PC is fully depreciated according to the tax office after 3 years. This makes it easy to get 3 year old PCs cheaply (or sometimes for free as rubbish) which work really well for Linux. But it would be nice if we could be 4 or 5 years behind Windows in terms of hardware requirements to reduce the hardware requirements for Linux users even further.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/09/28/swap-space/
• [2] http://barrapunto.com/articles/07/09/28/0947220.shtml

Review: Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October 2011

Editor:	Gordon van Gelder
Issue:	Volume 121, No. 3 & 4
ISSN:	1095-8258
Pages:	258

Another review of a magazine that I finished quite some time ago. Apologies for any inaccuracies or lack of depth in the reviews. There wasn't much in Charles de Lint's reviews in this issue that interested me, but Michelle West covers a great selection of books. Two of them (The Wise Man's Fear and The Quantum Thief) are already on my to-read list; the third, The Postmortal, sounded interesting and would go on my list to purchase if I didn't already have so many good books I've not read. Otherwise, this issue is short on non-fiction. The only other essay entry is a film review from Kathi Maio, which is the typical whining about all things film that F&SF publishes. "Rutger and Baby Do Jotenheim" by Esther M. Friesner: Baby is a former pole dancer with a toy poodle named Mister Snickers, which warns you right away that this story is going to involve a few over-the-top caricatures and more use of the word "piddle" than one might ideally want. Rutger is a mythology professor who tolerates her for the standard reasons in this sort of pairing. They're travelling across country to Baby's sister's wedding when their car breaks down in Minnesota, prompting an encounter with frost giants. As you might expect, this is a sort of fractured fairy tale, except based on Norse mythology instead of the more typical Grimm fare. The fun is in watching these two apparent incompetents (but with enough knowledge of mythology to clue in the reader) reproduce the confrontation between Thor and Utgard-Loki. The fight with old age is particularly entertaining. If you've read any of Friesner's other stories, you know what to expect: not much in the way of deeper meaning, but lots of fun playing with stereotypes and an optimistic, funny outcome. Good stuff. (7) "The Man Inside Black Betty" by Sarah Langan: This story comes with a mouthful of a subtitle: "Is Nicholas Wellington the World's Best Hope?" It's also a story that purports to be written by a fictional character, in this case one Saurub Ramesh (with Langan credited as having done "research"). It's told in the style of first-person journalism, relating the thoughts and impressions of Ramesh as he interviews Nicholas Wellington. The topic is Black Betty: a black hole above Long Island Sound. Wellington is a scientific genius and iconoclast with radical theories of black holes that contradict how the government has been attempting to deal with Black Betty, unsuccessfully. The structure here was well-handled, reminding me a lot of a Michael Lewis article during the financial collapse. Langan has a good feel for how journalism of this type mixes personalities, politics, and facts. But it's all setup and no story. We get some world building, and then it's over, with no resolution except pessimism. Meh. (4) "A Borrowed Heart" by Deborah J. Ross: Ross starts with the trappings of urban fantasy transplanted into a Victorian world: supernatural creatures about, a protagonist who is a high-class prostitute, and sex and a sucubus by the second page. It evolves from there into a family drama and an investigation, always giving the reader the impression that a vampire will jump out at any moment. But the ending caught me entirely by surprise and was far more effective due to its departure from the expected path. Well done. (7) "Bright Moment" by Daniel Marcus: The conflict between terraforming and appreciation for the universe as we find it is an old story pattern in science fiction, and Marcus doesn't add much here. I think the story would have been stronger if he'd found a way to write the same plot with a pure appeal to environmental beauty without the typical stakes-raising. But he does sprinkle the story with a few interesting bits, including a pod marriage and a futuristic version of extreme sports as a way of communing with nature. (6) "The Corpse Painter's Masterpiece" by M. Rickert: This is typical of my reaction to a Rickert story: shading a bit too much towards horror for me, a bit too cryptic, well-written but not really my thing. It's about a corpse painter who does the work of an informal mortician, improving the appearance of bodies for their funerals, and the sheriff who brings him all the dead bodies. It takes an odd macabre twist, and I have no idea what to make of the ending. (4) "Aisle 1047" by Jon Armstrong: Armstrong is best known for a couple of novels, Grey and Yarn, which entangle their stories in the future of marketing and commerce. One may be unsurprised, then, that this short story is on similar themes, with the intensity turned up to the parody point. Tiffan3 is a department-store saleswoman, spouting corporate slogans and advertising copy while trying to push customers towards particular products. The story follows the escalation into an all-out brand war, fought with the bubbly short-cut propaganda of a thirty-second commercial. For me, it fell awkwardly between two stools: it's a little too over-the-top and in love with its own bizarre alternate world to be effective satire, but the world is more depressing than funny and the advertising copy is grating. More of a curiosity than a successful story, I think. (5) "Anise" by Chris DeVito: Stories that undermine body integrity and focus on the fascinated horror of violation of physical boundaries aren't generally my thing, so take that into account in this review. Anise's husband died, but that's not as much of a problem as it used to be. Medical science can resurrect people via a sort of permanent, full-body life support system, making them more cyborg than human. "Anise" is about the social consequences of this technology in a world where a growing number of people have a much different relationship with their body than the typical living person today. It's a disturbing story that is deeply concerned with the physical: sex, blood, physical intimacy in various different forms, and a twisted type of psychological abuse. I think fans of horror will like this more than I did, although it's not precisely horror. It looks at the way one's perception of self and others can change by passing through a profound physical transformation. (5) "Spider Hill" by Donald Mead: I liked this story a lot better. It's about witchcraft and farm magic, about family secrets, and a sort of coming-of-age story (for a girl rather than a boy, for once). The main character is resourceful, determined, but also empathetic and aware of the impact of her actions, which made her more fun to read about. I doubt I'll remember this for too long, but when skimming through it again for a review, I had fond memories of it. (6) "Where Have All the Young Men Gone?" by Albert E. Cowdrey: Cowdrey in his paranormal investigation mode, which I like better than his horror mode. For once, the protagonist isn't even a lower-class or backwoods character. Instead, he's a military historian travelling in Austria who runs across a local ghost story. This is a fairly straightforward ghost investigation that follows a familiar path (albeit to an unusual final destination), but Cowdrey is a good story-teller and I liked the protagonist. (7) "Overtaken" by Karl Bunker: This is the sort of story that delivers its moral with the force of a hammer. It's not subtle. But if you're in the right mood for that, it's one of the better stories of its type. It's about a long-journey starship, crew in hibernation, that's overtaken by a far newer and faster mechanized ship from Earth that's attempting to re-establish contact with the old ships. The story is a conversation between the ship AIs. Save this one until you're in the mood for an old-fashioned defense of humanity. (8) "Time and Tide" by Alan Peter Ryan: Another pseudo-horror story, although I think it's better classified as a haunting. A wardrobe recalls a traumatic drowning in the childhood of the protagonist. As these things tend to do in stories like this, reality and memory start blurring and the wardrobe takes on a malevolent role. Not my sort of thing. (3) "What We Found" by Geoff Ryman: Any new Geoff Ryman story is something to celebrate. This is a haunting story on the boundaries between the scientific method and tribal superstition, deeply entangled with the question of how one recovers from national and familial trauma. How can we avoid passing the evils and madness of one generation down to the next? Much of the story is about family trauma, told with Ryman's exceptional grasp of character, but the science is entangled in an ingenious way that I won't spoil. As with Air, this is in no way science fiction. The science here would have fascinating and rather scary implications for our world, but clearly is not how science actually works. But as an insight into politics, and into healing, I found it a startlingly effective metaphor. I loved every bit of this. By far the best story of the issue. (9) Rating: 7 out of 10

Today was another wet day. Sarah dropped Zoe around in the morning, and she watched a little bit of TV before we drove to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class. My cycling fitness is going to go completely to hell. Zoe's really taken to her teacher, Patrick. The classes have pretty much been just Zoe and I on Friday's, with the occasional other kids, and so she's formed a pretty close relationship with her teacher. The last few weeks, Zoe's really liked to help Patrick set up and tidy up the space before and after the classes. She loves to tell Patrick about what's been going on in her life. It's really sweet to watch. Today there was another 3 year old boy, but he was much less focused than Zoe. I will miss the classes, because I've seen real self-defense value in what they've been teaching. For proper comparison, I should see tae kwon do clases as well, but currently I'd be pretty happy with what I've seen taught in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I can see the practical application of it. We're going to go watch Patrick compete in May, and I'm looking forward to seeing some adult-level stuff. Megan's Dad was looking for something to do with his kids, so I suggested we meet at Lollipops Playland & Cafe in Cannon Hill after BJJ class. We were a bit late in getting there, mostly because Zoe wanted to hang around after class for a bit, but we got there eventually, and Zoe and Megan had a great time. We stayed for lunch and the girls played a bit more. It's the first time I've used a play cafe since coming back to Australia, and I found it almost overwhelmingly loud and busy. These places must love it when it rains. It was nice that Zoe's at an age now where she can go off and play on her own. Having Megan there was a great help in that regard, but the girls did keep losing each other, although that wasn't a big problem for either of them. While we were at the play cafe, I received an email saying that the Kindergarten working bee for tomorrow had been canceled on account of the wet weather, so that's opened up our Saturday significantly. After that, we headed down to Bunkers to place the order for the bunk bed I want to get Zoe for her birthday. I'd expected with all the morning's activities, for her to pass out in the car immediately, but surprisingly she lasted the distance, and had a great time sampling all the different bunk beds at the store. Even on the way back home, it took her a little while to fall asleep, so I extended the car ride by driving around the Port of Brisbane to see how much there was to see that might be interesting for Zoe when she's awake. After that, we went to the car wash to get the car cleaned, because it's been a while. Zoe had a babyccino and we sorted through the DreamWorks cards we'd traded with Megan that morning. It was time for dinner after the car wash, so we headed home, and Zoe watched some TV while I prepared dinner. At bath time, I realised that we hadn't had time to do anything for Science Friday. Yesterday at Bunnings I bought a roll of clear tubing for the heck of it, so we made a siphon in the bath. Zoe thought the tube was great fun, and had a good time blowing bubbles in the bath with it. Tomorrow we'll have to use some bubble bath for added entertainment. Bedtime went smoothly enough.

Debian Women is proud to announce that it will hold a MiniDebConf in Barcelona on 15-16 March 2014, where Debian enthusiasts from far and wide will gather to talk about the latest Debian changes and the Debian community, as well as to meet new and old friends. The MiniDebConf is fast approaching, be sure to make your travel arrangements! It is going to be an exciting event, in a beautiful venue, in one of the most famous European cities! Schedule A draft schedule (still subject to some last minute changes) is already available. The list of talks promises two days packed with great talks! If you have an exciting idea for a talk, but missed the deadline, please get in touch with us, we might still have a slot for you. Crowd-funding We are still raising funds to cover the costs of running the conference and to offer travel sponsorship to people who can't pay for it. Please, consider donating any amount you can, everything helps! Sponsorship If you want to attend the conference, but are unable to cover the costs. Please contact us! We don't have a big budget, but we will make our best to help. Naturally, priority will be given to participants who have an accepted talk. About this MiniDebConf We want to have a MiniDebConf with both talks and social events, to which everyone in Debian is invited but where the speakers in the talks are all people who identify themselves as female. We consider this important to

• Encourage women who haven't yet given their first DebConf talk
• Provide role models for women who are interested in contributing
• Debunk the myth that there are not enough women who can give talks in DebConf

The idea behind the conference is not to talk about women in free software, or women in Debian, but rather to make discussion about Debian subjects more inclusive for women. If you agree with this goal, spread the word. Forward this announcement and help us make this event a great success! About our sponsors This event is possible thanks to the help provided by our generous sponsors. In particular, we'd like to thank our platinum sponsor, Google. We hope to see you in Barcelona! For more information, visit http://bcn2014.mini.debconf.org

I gave two talks at this year s DebConf, both about systemd. A huge thanks goes to the video team for their excellent work and putting up the videos that quickly! Find the recordings and slides here:

1. Making your package work with systemd (508 MiB ogv) (Slides ( 230 KiB PDF))
2. systemd myths debunked! (456 MiB ogv) (Slides ( 230 KiB PDF))

Review: Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April 2011

Editor:	Gordon van Gelder
Issue:	Volume 120, No. 3 & 4
ISSN:	1095-8258
Pages:	258

Charles de Lint's book review column sticks with the sorts of things he normally reviews: urban and contemporary fantasy and young adult. Predictably, I didn't find that much of interest. But I was happy to see that not all the reviews were positive, and he talked some about how a few books didn't work. I do prefer seeing a mix of positive and negative (or at least critical) reviews. James Sallis's review column focuses entirely on Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore (by way of reviewing a collection). I'm always happy to see this sort of review. But between that and de Lint's normal subject matter, this issue of F&SF was left without any current science fiction reviews, which was disappointing. Lucius Shepard's movie review column features stunning amounts of whining, even by Shepard's standards. The topic du jour is how indie films aren't indie enough, mixed with large amounts of cane-shaking and decrying of all popular art. I find it entertaining that the F&SF film review column regularly contains exactly the sort of analysis that one expects from literary gatekeepers who are reviewing science fiction and fantasy. Perhaps David Langford should consider adding an "As We See Others" feature to Ansible cataloging the things genre fiction fans say about popular movies. "Scatter My Ashes" by Albert E. Cowdrey: The protagonist of this story is an itinerant author who has been contracted to write a family history (for $100K, which I suspect is a bit of tongue-in-cheek wish fulfillment) and has promptly tumbled into bed with his employer. But he is somewhat serious about the writing as well, and is poking around in family archives and asking relatives about past details. There is a murder (maybe) in the family history, not to mention some supernatural connections. Those familiar with Cowdrey's writing will recognize the mix of historical drama, investigation, and the supernatural. Puzzles are, of course, untangled, not without a bit of physical danger. Experienced fantasy readers will probably guess at some of the explanation long before the protagonist does. Like most Cowdrey, it's reliably entertaining, but I found it a bit thin. (6) "A Pocketful of Faces" by Paul Di Filippo: Here's a bit of science fiction, and another mystery, this time following the basic model of a police procedural. The police in this case are enforcing laws around acceptable use of "faces" in a future world where one can clone someone's appearance from their DNA and then mount it on a programmable android. As you might expect from that setup, the possibilities are lurid, occasionally disgusting, and inclined to give the police nightmares. After some scene-setting, the story kicks in with the discovery of the face of a dead woman who, at least on the surface, no one should have any motive to clone. There were a few elements of the story that were a bit too disgusting for me, but the basic mystery plot was satisfying. I thought the ending was a let-down, however. Di Filippo tries to complicate the story and, I thought, went just a little too far, leaving motives and intent more confusing than illuminating. (6) "The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu: Back to fantasy, this time using a small bit of magic to illustrate the emotional conflicts and difficulties of allegiance for second-generation immigrants. Jack is the son of an American farther and a Chinese mother who was a mail-order bride. He's young at the start of the story and struggling with the embarassment and humiliation that he feels at his mother's history and the difficulties he has blending in with other kids, leading to the sort of breathtaking cruelty that comes so easily from teenagers who are too self-focused and haven't yet developed adult empathy. I found this very hard to read. The magic is beautiful, personal, and very badly damaged by the cruelty in ways that can never really be fixed. It's a sharp reminder of the importance of being open-hearted, but it's also a devastating reminder that the lesson is normally learned too late. Not the story to read if you're prone to worrying about how you might have hurt other people. (6) "The Evening and the Morning" by Sheila Finch: This long novella is about a third of the issue and is, for once, straight science fiction, a somewhat rare beast in F&SF these days. It's set in the far future, among humans who are members of the Guild of Xenolinguists and among aliens called the Venatixi, and it's about an expedition back to the long-abandoned planet of Earth. I had a lot of suspension of disbelief problems with the setup here. While Earth has mostly dropped out of memory, there's a startling lack of curiosity about its current condition among the humans. Finch plays some with transportation systems and leaves humanity largely dependent on other races to explain the failure to return to Earth, but I never quite bought it. It was necessary to set up the plot, which is an exploration story with touches of first contact set on an Earth that's become alien to the characters, but it seemed remarkably artificial to me. But, putting that aside, I did get pulled into the story. Its emotional focus is one of decline and senescence, a growing sense of futility, that's halted by exploration, mystery, and analysis. The question of what's happened on Earth is inherently interesting and engaging, and the slow movement of the story provides opportunities to build up to some eerie moments. The problem, continuing a theme for this issue, is the ending. Some of the reader's questions are answered, but most of the answers are old, well-worn paths in science fiction. The emotional arc of the story is decidedly unsatisfying, at least to me. I think I see what Finch was trying to do: there's an attempted undermining of the normal conclusion of this sort of investigation to make a broader point about how to stay engaged in the world. But it lacked triumph and catharsis for me, partly because the revelations that we get are too pedestrian for the build-up they received. It's still an interesting story, but I don't think it entirely worked. (6) "Night Gauntlet" by Walter C. DeBill, Jr., et al.: The full list of authors for this story (Walter C. DeBill, Jr., Richard Gavin, Robert M. Price, W.H. Pugmire, Jeffrey Thomas, and Don Webb) provides one with the first clue that it's gone off the rails. Collaborative storytelling, where each author tries to riff off the work of the previous author while spinning the story in a different direction, is something that I think works much better orally, particularly if you can watch facial expressions while the authors try to stump each other. In written form, it's a recipe for a poorly-told story. That's indeed what we get here. The setup is typical Cthulhu mythos stuff: a strange scientist obsessed with conspiracy theories goes insane, leaving behind an office with a map of linkages between apparently unrelated places. The characters in the story also start going insane for similar reasons, leading up to a typical confrontation with things man was not meant to know, or at least pay attention to. If you like that sort of thing, you may like this story better than I did, but I thought it was shallow and predictable. (3) "Happy Ending 2.0" by James Patrick Kelly: More fantasy, this time of the time travel variety. (I call it fantasy since there's no scientific explanation for the time travel and it plays a pure fantasy role in the story.) That's about as much as I can say without giving away the plot entirely (it's rather short). I can see what Kelly was going for, and I think he was largely successful, but I'm not sure how to react to it. The story felt like it reinforced some rather uncomfortable stereotypes about romantic relationships, and the so-called happy ending struck me as the sort of situation that was going to turn very nasty and very uncomfortable about five or ten pages past where Kelly ended the story. (5) "The Second Kalandar's Tale" by Francis Marion Soty: The main question I have about this story is one that I can't answer without doing more research than I feel like doing right now: how much of this is original to Soty and how much if it is straight from Burton's translation of One Thousand and One Nights. Burton is credited for the story, so I suspect quite a lot of this is from the original. Whether one would be better off just reading the original, or if Soty's retelling adds anything substantial, are good questions that I don't have the background to answer. Taken as a stand-alone story, it's not a bad one. It's a twisting magical adventure involving a djinn, a captive woman, some rather predictable fighting over the woman, and then a subsequent adventure involving physical transformation and a magical battle reminiscent of T.H. White. (Although I have quite likely reversed the order of inspiration if as much of this is straight from Burton as I suspect.) Gender roles, however, are kind of appalling, despite the presence of a stunningly powerful princess, due to the amount of self-sacrifice expected from every woman in the story. Personally, I don't think any of the men in the story are worth anywhere near the amount of loyalty and bravery that the women show. Still, it was reasonably entertaining throughout, in exactly the way that I would expect a One Thousand and One Nights tale to be. Whether there's any point in reading it instead of the original is a question I'll leave to others. (7) "Bodyguard" by Karl Bunker: This is probably the best science fiction of the issue. The first person protagonist is an explorer living with an alien race, partly in order to flee the post-singularity world of uploaded minds and apparent stagnation that Earth has become. It's a personal story that uses his analysis of alien mindsets (and his interaction with his assigned alien bodyguard) to flesh out his own desires, emotional background, and reactions to the world. There are some neat linguistic bits here that I quite enjoyed, although I wish they'd been developed at even more length. (The alien language is more realistic than it might sound; there are some human languages that construct sentences in a vaguely similar way.) It's a sad, elegiac story, but it grew on me. (7) "Botanical Exercises for Curious Girls" by Kali Wallace: One has to count this story as science fiction as well, although for me it had a fantasy tone because the scientific world seems to play by fantasy rules from the perspective of the protagonist. Unpacking that perspective is part of the enjoyment of the story. At the start, she seems to be a disabled girl who is being cared for by a strange succession of nurses who vary by the time of day, but as the story progresses, it becomes clear that something much stranger is going on. There are moments that capture a sense of wonder, reinforced by the persistantly curious and happy narrative voice, but both are undercut by a pervasive sense of danger and dread. This is a light story written about rather dark actions. My biggest complaint with the story is that it doesn't so much end as wander off into the sunset. It set up conflict within a claustrophobic frame, so I can understand the thematic intent of breaking free of that frame, but in the process I felt like the story walked away from all of the questions and structure that it created and ended in a place that felt less alive with potential than formless and oddly pointless. I think I wanted it to stay involved and engaged with the environment it had created. (6) "Ping" by Dixon Wragg: I probably should just skip this, since despite the table of contents billing and the full title introduction, it's not a story. It's a two-line joke. But it's such a bad two-line joke that I had to complain about it. I have no idea why F&SF bothered to reprint it. (1) "The Ifs of Time" by James Stoddard: This certainly fits with the Arabian Nights story in this issue. The timekeeper of a vast and rambling castle (think Gormenghast taken to the extreme) wanders into a story-telling session in a distant part of the castle. The reader gets to listen to four (fairly good) short stories about time, knowledge, and memory, told in four very different genres. All of this does relate to why the timekeeper is there, and the frame story is resolved by the end, but the embedded stories are the best part; each of them is interesting in a different way, and none of them outlast their welcome. This was probably the strongest story of this issue. (7) Rating: 6 out of 10

A while ago I wrote a blog post debunking the idea that swap should be twice as large as RAM [1]. The issue of swap size has come up for discussion in a mailing list so it seems that it s worth another blog post. Swap Size In my previous post I suggested making swap space equal to RAM size for systems with less than 1G of RAM and half RAM size for systems with 2-4G of RAM with a maximum of 2G for any system. Generally it s better to have the kernel Oom handler kill a memory hungry process than to have the entire system go so slow that a hardware reset is needed. I wrote memlockd to lock the important system programs and the shared objects and data files they use into RAM to make it easier to recover from some bad paging situations [2], but even that won t always make it possible to login to a thrashing system in a reasonable amount of time. But it s not always good to reduce swap size. Sometimes if you don t have enough swap then performance sucks in situations where it would be OK if there was more swap. One factor in this regard is that pages mapped read-only from files are discarded when there is great memory pressure and no swap space to page-out the read-write pages. This can mean that you get thrashing among memory for executables and shared objects while there s lots of unused data pages in RAM that can t be paged out. One noteworthy corner case in this regard is Chromium which seems to take a lot of RAM if you have many tabs open for a long time. Another factor is that there is a reasonable amount of memory allocated which will almost never get used (EG all the X based workstations which have 6 gettys running on virtual consoles which will almost never be used). So a system which has a large amount of RAM relative to it s use (EG a single-user workstation with 8G of RAM) can still benefit from having a small amount of swap to allow larger caches. One workstation I run has 8G of RAM for a single user and typically has about 200M of the 1G swap space in use. It doesn t have enough swap to make much difference if really memory hungry programs are run, but having 4G of memory for cache instead of 3.8G might make a difference to system performance. So even systems which can run without using any swap can still be expected to give better performance if there is some swap space for programs that are very inactive. I have some systems with as much 4G of swap, but they are for corner cases where swap is allocated but there isn t a lot of paging going on. For example I have a workstation with 3G of RAM and 4G of swap for the benefit of Chromium. Hardware Developments Disk IO performance hasn t increased much when compared to increases in RAM size over the last ~15 years. A low-end 1988 era hard drive could sustain 512KB/s contiguous transfer rates and had random access times of about 28ms. A modern SATA disk will have contiguous transfer rates getting close to 200MB/s and random access times less than 4ms. So we are looking at about 400* the contiguous performance and about 10* the random access since 1988. In 1988 2MB was a lot of RAM for a PC, now no-one would buy a new PC with less than 4G so we are looking at something like 2000* the RAM size in the same period. When comparing with 1993 (when I first ran a Linux server 24*7) it was 4M of RAM, maybe 15ms random access, and maybe 1MB/s contiguous IO approximately double everything I had in 1988. But I ll use the numbers from 1988 because I m more certain of them even though I never ran an OS capable of proper memory management on the 1988 PC. In the most unrealistically ideal situation paging IO will be a factor of 5* more expensive now relatively than it was in 1988 (RAM size increase by a factor of 2000 divided by contiguous IO performance increase by a factor of 400). But in a more realistic situation (random IO) it will be 200* more expensive relatively than it was. In the early 90s a Linux system with swap use equal or greater than RAM could perform well (my recollection is that a system with 4M of RAM and 4M of active swap performed well and the same system with 8M of active swap was usable). But nowadays there s no chance of a system that has 4G of RAM and 4G of swap in active use being usable in any way unless you have some corner case of an application allocating RAM and not using it much. Note that 4G of RAM doesn t make a big system by today s standards, so it might be reasonable to compare 2M in 1988 to 8G or 16G today. But I think that assuming 4G of RAM for the purpose of comparison makes my point. Using Lots of Swap It is probably possible to have some background Chromium tabs using 4G of paged out RAM with good system performance. I ve had a system use 2G of swap for Chromium and perform well overall. There are surely many other ways that a user can launch processes that use a lot of memory and not use them actively. But this will probably require that the user know how the system works and alter their usage patterns. If you have a lot of swap in use and one application starts to run slowly you really don t want to flip to another application which would only make things worse. If you use tmpfs for /tmp then you need enough swap to store everything that is written to /tmp. There is no real upper limit to how much data that could be apart from the fact that applications and users generally don t want to write big data files that disappear on reboot. I generally only use a tmpfs for /tmp on servers. Programs that run on servers tend not to store a large amount of data in /tmp and that data is usually very temporary, unlike workstation users who store large video files in /tmp and leave them there until the next reboot. Are there any other common corner cases that allow using a lot of swap space without serious performance problems? My Swap Space Allocation When I setup Linux workstations for other people I generally use 1G of swap. For a system that often has multiple users (via the user-switch feature) I use 2G of swap if it only has 3G of RAM (I run many systems which are limited to 3G of RAM by their chipset). For systems that I personally use I generally allocate 4G of swap, this is to cater to excessive RAM use by Chromium and also because I test out random memory hungry programs and can t easily predict how much swap space will be needed a typical end-user desktop system is a lot more predictable than a workstation used for software development. For servers I generally allocate 512M of swap space. That s enough to page out things that aren t used and make space for cache memory. If that turns out to be inadequate then it s probably best to just let the watchdog daemon reboot the system.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/09/28/swap-space/
• [2] http://doc.coker.com.au/projects/memlockd/

It's been a few years coming, but the day has finally arrived. Contrary to some rumours which I've had to debunk over the years, the m68k port did not go into limbo because it was kicked out of the archive; instead, it did because recent versions of glibc require support for thread-local storage, a feature that wasn't available on m68k, and nobody with the required time, willingness, and skill set could be found to implement it. This changed a few years back, when some people wrote the required support, because they were paid to do so in order to make recent Linux run on ColdFire processors again. Since ColdFire and m68k processors are sufficiently similar, that meant the technical problem was solved. However, by that time we'd fallen so far behind that essentially, we needed to rebootstrap the port all over again. Doing that is nontrivial, and most of the m68k porters team just didn't have the time or willingness anymore to work on this; and for a while, it seemed like the m68k port was well and truly dead. But then, two things happened. The first thing that happened was called "ARAnyM", short for "Atari Running on Any Machine". An atari emulator, it started supporting running Linux at some point, allowing us to work on the port while on the road, using a laptop something not possible beforehand. While there were some bugs in the emulation of early versions of aranym, these were all fairly quickly fixed, and before long we could run Debian/m68k in the emulator. However, that was still the etch-m68k port on debian-ports.org, some time after Debian etch wasn't even supported anymore; this still required work. The second "thing" that happened was called "Thorsten Glaser". A fresh DD and maintainer of the "mksh" shell, he wanted to make sure his shell would work on all Debian architectures, including the ones on debian-ports.org. When he found out that the m68k port was in a pretty bad shape, he did not, like many before him, shrug and move on; instead, he took it upon himself to start compiling things, just so he could compile his shell. How's that for dedication. Anyway, fast-forward two years, and we're now, finally, at a point where I spent most of today getting buildd up and running on arrakis, one of our oldest buildd hosts. There were some issues while trying that, but it looks like everything is in working order now; and the first package to start building on the first functioning buildd host since a long time (the build of which is still ongoing at the time of this writing) is "babl". Of course, with only one buildd, we'll have no hope whatsoever of ever catching up. But that can be remedied easily by using more than one buildd host... Update: It built! Party!

After a lecture at LCA 2011 included some inappropriate slides there was a long discussion on several mailing lists about the issues related to this. In February 2011 I wrote a blog post debunking some of the bogus arguments in question [1]. Of course the matter didn t end there, at LCA 2012 I was drawn into a few debates IRL about the issues, as long as there are more than a few men who want such porny pictures used in LCA talks the issue can t be properly resolved. The most serious aspect of the discussion in question is that of rape apology, the bad ideas that were presented have a real impact on the way people behave, merely making public statements saying that something is OK is going to increase the incidence of it happening. The Geek Feminism Wiki has a good page summarising the issue [2]. The Finally Feminism 101 post about Rape Culture is also worth reading in this context [3]. Recently Valeria Aurora wrote a post for the Ada Initiaive blog about the rape apology issue and how the community needs to act to prevent such behavior [4]. This inspired Matthew Garrett to write about the issue and state the position that In the absence of an apology and explanation from Ted, I ll be interacting with him to the bare minimum that I m compelled to as a result of my job [5]. I agree with Matthew s article, everything he writes is logical and I believe that it is all for the benefit of the FOSS community as a whole. I think that most guys have quietly defriended guys who are rape-positive in the past (for example when I was 12 I refused to play D&D with boys who were raping NPCs). But blogging about it, explaining the problem, and giving the offender the possibility to reform is a good idea and it s something that should be done more often. Sam Varghese has written about the issue for ITWire [6]. He has taken the wrong approach to this, he specifically claims that Matthew Garrett has kicked off what could be a damaging episode . I think that Matthew s approach is necessary and the situation demands it. If Matthew had been on holidays and I had read the TAI post earlier then I would probably have written a blog post which Sam could have described in a similar manner. So I don t think that Matthew kicked anything off (I think that someone had to do it). I also don t think that this has to be damaging it depends on how everyone reacts. On her personal blog Valerie says When I first read Ts o s comments, I couldn t sleep for two nights. I wanted to throw up every time I thought about it. I was furious and frightened at the same time. Every time I think about this, even now, I literally have nightmares. I can t bear the thought of working with him even over email, much less attending the same conferences [7]. I don t think that any of us who are seriously involved in the FOSS community have a way of avoiding this issue, allowing Valerie and other women who have the same understanding of the situation to go through that without any support is not a neutral action. I think we need to consider whether someone who gives other delegates and speakers nightmares should be welcome to attend a conference. Valerie s post makes sense to me and I can understand why she doesn t want to associated with Ted, my understanding of the issue isn t important or even required, I merely note this because I m sure that there are lots of readers who will ignore anything that a woman might say. ITWire has a follow-up article with Ted s response, Ted fails to address all the issues and seems to think that the people who disagree with him merely don t appreciate his nuance [8]. The thing is that the issue of the incidence of rape was raised in discussion to consider the probability that rape survivors would have been in the audience for the Mark Pesce talk in question. None of Ted s claims indicate that rape could be rare enough that a crowd of 500+ random people could be expected not to have multiple rape survivors so his comments weren t even relevant to the discussion. Ted seems unwilling to try to understand the position of all the people who disagree with him.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/02/10/lca2011-harassment/
• [2] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Rape_apology_on_LCA_mailing_list
• [3] http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/rape-culture-101/
• [4] http://adainitiative.org/2012/10/open-source-software-open-to-all/
• [5] http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/18505.html
• [6] http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/57290-garrett-slams-tso-as-rape-apologist
• [7] http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2012/10/29/the-linux-community-cant-remain-silent-while-leaders-make-anti-woman-comments/
• [8] http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/57296-tso-denies-ever-saying-rape-is-not-a-problem

Update 2: Richard and especially Moray debunked my statistics and given that they're actually on the DebConf team, they simply know it better what to look at and which numbers cannot be trusted. So look over to Moray's post for some numbers about DC11 and DC12.

Oops. At least the average count of days per person seems slightly higher. (But then the stats may likely be off, given that any part of the day counts as full.)
This year's DebConf will have remote participation through video streams and IRC chat, as usual. But they will be late at night for Europeans. Despite those hurdles, let's make this conference a success! The same procedure as every year. ;-)

Update: I don't have any privileged access to Pentabarf and hence I was just working on the exported data at the link above. When perusing the "Statistics for ONLY people who have both dates in Penta" I get this:
That's because this year seems to have a much higher percentage of people filling out both fields (~58% for DC10/DC11 and 85% for DC12). I'm still unsure if Penta was set to filter out those who did not reconfirm. But after all the others would not be very meaningful for room planning.

A Polish geek going by the handle of mmemuar has recently written a blog post claiming that people use Autism as an excuse for bad behavior [1]. He gets enough things wrong in one short post to make it worth debunking it. It seems that Google s translation of Polish isn t as good as some other languages, but unless Google mistranslated about a dozen sections such that they had the exact opposite meaning then mmemuar s post has a lot of wrong ideas. Does Anyone use Autism as an Excuse? I ve read a lot of blog posts written by people on the Autism Spectrum, read many forum discussions, and talked to more than a few people in person. So far I haven t yet encountered any evidence of people using an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) diagnosis as an excuse. There are probably about 70,000,000 people who meet the diagnostic criteria (most of whom have not been diagnosed due to not having access to anyone who is qualified to do an assessment). The number of people who have been diagnosed is large enough that I couldn t claim that none of them have ever used it as an excuse. The number of self-diagnosed people is also large enough that there has to be some people who wouldn t get diagnosed if professionally assessed. But I don t see any evidence that using an ASD as an excuse is at all common. I imagine that some people would take someone merely mentioning the fact that they have an ASD diagnosis in a public place (EG a mailing list or a blog post) as some sort of an excuse. One problem with such an interpretation is that for every way in which people on the Autism Spectrum annoy other people it s the ones who aren t diagnosed (or who reject a diagnosis) that will do it the most. Being diagnosed with an ASD is correlated with annoying other people less. Another problem is that keeping quiet about such things when they get raised for discussion so often takes a psychological toll. When someone is diagnosed as an adult a fairly common reaction is to study Psychology and Sociology (usually through web sites such as Sociological Images which I highly recommend [2]) and try to get a better understanding of other people. Any time you assume that everyone else thinks like you then you will get things wrong, when someone gets an ASD diagnosis they will probably take more care to avoid making such mistakes. Is Autism Obvious? Mmemuar says if you were full of autistic, which is very easy to overheat the brain from excess signals at the input, it would be very obvious to all . There are some people who are utterly incapable of acting like an NT. But the majority of people on the Autism Spectrum have some ability to pass as NT, it just takes a lot of effort. So if someone is spending all their effort to walk, talk, and make eye contact in a way that most people expect then they will have little spare effort for other things. This can result in them having little patience for other people. The solution to this is to not require people to look average. Even apart from Autism there are people who fidget, don t make eye contact in the way you expect, and do other things a little differently. Being tolerant of such things won t hurt you and will generally make things easier for everyone. TheAnMish gave a good Youtube presentation about the way that she has to act normal [3]. Note that while her video represents her own personal experiences (which differ slightly from those of other Aspies particularly male Aspies) they are regarded as representative enough for her video to be shown by Tony Attwood (a world renowned expert on Asperger Syndrome) at a conference about women on the Autism Spectrum. As an aside I disagree with her use of the word normal without scare-quotes. Learning about Psychology through Sci-Fi In the end of the blog post and in some of the comments there is discussion about learning to understand people through reading sci-fi books. The first problem with this is that fiction books generally have a range of characters that is determined by the author s understanding of people, if you read multiple books by an author then you will usually notice the same character types. The second problem is that characters in fiction books are simplified to fit into a reasonable sized book, in real life people have lots of really boring reasons for doing what they do, in fiction only stuff that is interesting ends up in print. But the biggest problem is that fiction books just aren t a good way of learning about people. Whatever lessons might be in a fiction book will probably be missed by a reader who is concentrating on the plot. You can learn things about people by reading an analysis of literature by a Psychologist or a Sociologist, but apart from that you probably won t be able to learn things if you don t already know them. As an aside, my experience of reading sci-fi books suggests that some of the popular sci-fi authors have such a poor understanding of people that it impairs their ability to write believable fiction about human characters. If I was going to try and learn about people by reading fiction I d choose something that s been popular for a long time. If a book has been popular for more than 100 years and sold well in different times, cultures, and languages then it probably has something to say about the human condition. Catching up on Youth Mmemuar says absolutely nothing prevents you to the age of twenty he began to catch up on some of youth . Actually one significant thing is that the human brain develops in particular stages, the older you get the more difficult it becomes to learn things. So even if it was just a matter of learning things someone who was behind at age 20 would have some significant difficulty in catching up. But some things just can t be learned, for example someone who has extreme discomfort in making eye contact can t just learn to be happy with it. Also there are some things which people would have learned if it was possible. For example people who have Prosopagnosia (an inability to recognise faces) suffer extreme bullying in school, if they could just learn to recognise people then they surely would do so, so if they complete school without learning then it s probably going to be impossible for them. Prosopagnosia is one of many conditions which can contribute to social difficulties and therefore contribute to an ASD diagnosis. Can Aspies get Married? Some people think that people on the Autism Spectrum can t get married. In fact this belief is so widely held that some people who seem very obviously Autistic are convinced that they are NT simply because they are married! The fact that there are more than few books offering advice to people who have married someone who is on the Autism Spectrum is clear proof that such claims are bogus. The Relevance to Geek Communities People who meet the diagnostic criteria for Asperger Syndrome will almost certainly be Geeks due to the Restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities section of the diagnostic criteria (the proposed revision for the DSM-V is the best reference I know for this [4]) as the modern use of the term Geek applies to anyone who has an extreme interest in something. The more Geeky a community is the greater the incidence of people who could be diagnosed with an ASD. Spreading ideas such as those of mmemuar will lead to people not being assessed for an ASD. I would have been assessed earlier if it wasn t for hearing an influential member of the Linux community say some things which were similar in concept (although not as deliberate). Having people not be assessed is bad for the individuals in question and bad for the community.

• [1] http://mmazur.7thguard.net/2012/03/24/w-kwestii-aspergera/
• [2] http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/
• [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFxWdpuyY6o
• [4] http://www.dsm5.org/ProposedRevisions/Pages/proposedrevision.aspx?rid=94

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2. Autism vs Asperger Syndrome Diagnostic Changes for Autism Spectrum Disorders Currently Asperger Syndrome (AS)...
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The other night, I was tucking the boys into bed. I occasionally use a few German words with them (I don t know all that many myself, but hey). They d been rather bored with it, so I had dropped it for a few months. I said to Oliver, Gute Nacht, Oliver. That means good night in German. Oliver laughed. I said it a few more times. He laughed some more. Jacob peeked down from his top bunk to see what the fun was, and pretty soon was getting into it also. Apparently I m quite the comedian, because when I said Auf Wiedersehen, Oliver burst out laughing uncontrollably. Finally he d say, Say it again! AGAIN!! And I would, and he d laugh and laugh some more. And then, I happened to say tsch ss. Jacob loved that one. He said it over and over, much to Oliver s delight. Finally I closed the door, and heard the laughter still going on behind me, as Jacob would yell out a mangled German word, and Oliver would fill the room with laughter. I was a little surprised, but figured it d end there. Not so much. The next night, I tucked them into bed like usual. I left their room, and about 10 seconds later, I heard frantic yelling from the boys room. I went back in, and poor Oliver was so upset he couldn t even say what he wanted. I finally figured out he was pleading, DAD! Say gute Nacht again! So we went through some German words again, and I left the boys much relieved. Phew. The next night, I almost repeated my horrid mistake of no German at bedtime, but Jacob stopped me before I left their room. Dad! You forgot to say tsch ss! So I did, with the boys prompting me on what words they wanted to hear. Then Jacob started asking me how to say these things in other languages. He was rather disappointed, and I think also didn t really believe me, when I only knew a few of those phrases in Spanish and French. Though he was surprised that I could come up with them in Greek. (Kali sp ra / good evening) was a hit. By this point, another day or two later, Jacob says tsch ss when I leave. Oliver wishes me gute Nacht at breakfast time. We ll have to work on that one. So, if you ever walk in the door at our house some morning, don t be surprised if our 2-year-old wishes you good night, our 5-year-old says goodbye, and they both start laughing.

<p><a href="http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-debunks-myths-gender-%0Amath.html">Study debunks myths about gender and math performance</a></p> <p><a href="/tags/math" class="tag">#math</a> , <a href="/tags/gender" class="tag">#gender</a>, <a href="/tags/physorg" class="tag">#physorg</a></p> <blockquote> <p>A major study of recent international data on school mathematics performance casts doubt on some common assumptions about gender and math achievement in particular, the idea that girls and women have less ability due to a difference in biology.</p> <p>&quot;We found that boys as well as girls tend to do better in math when raised in countries where females have better equality, and that&#39;s new and important,&quot; says Kane. &quot;It makes sense that when women are well-educated and earn a good income, the math scores of their children of both genders benefit.&quot;</p> <p>Mertz adds, &quot;Many folks believe gender equity is a win-lose zero-sum game: If females are given more, males end up with less. Our results indicate that, at least for math achievement, gender equity is a win-win situation.&quot;</p> </blockquote>

It s been busy lately, and I haven t had the time to blog. With the change in job, various travel, and settling into a new routine, I ve not done as much writing of late. But life marches on, and before memories grow too fleeting, I think I should share a few. We recently changed the arrangements for the boys. Instead of them each having their own room in which they sleep and sometimes play, we purchased a bunk bed. Oliver graduated from his crib to the lower bunk, and Jacob has the higher bunk. This has, predictably, created a few opportunities for behavior issues. Overall, it s going well, and they appreciate their new, more open, play room. Both boys sleep with their stuffed animals. Jacob calls his my friends . He still likes his butterfly, which he has had since he was an infant. He sometimes talks about how much he loves his friends, and how they like to get hugs, and how they are happy. Jacob continues to enjoy reading. He has a toy low-res camera and he even recorded a video of himself reading Brown Bear, Brown Bear. Oliver s vocabulary is coming alive and is fun to watch. Jacob has taken to trying to teach Oliver how to say things. One day, Jacob saw a number like 451 on the side of a train, producing a conversation like this: Oliver, can you say four hundred and fifty-one? Four dred iffy on! You got it!!! YAY! Today as I was walking past Oliver s train track on the floor, he grabbed me by the hand, had me sit down, and kept holding on to make sure I d stay right where he wanted me as he pointed and talked all about his trains. Aww. One cold and windy Saturday morning, the boys were getting restless. What to do, we thought? I decided to bring out one of the manual typewriters from my collection. Oliver loved watching it do things as he pressed buttons. Jacob enjoyed spelling mom . New problem: boys fighting over how long each one s turn at the typewriter is. This has gone on for a month now. Ahh, winter. A few weeks ago, Jacob informed us that he built an antenna out of blocks. He was REALLY proud of it, and even, incredibly, insisted I take his picture with it! I m pleased to have a 5-year-old that calls this structure an antenna instead of a skyscraper or tower or some such thing ;-) We took a train trip to Portland, OR, recently. That s about 2.5 days on the train each way. It went pretty well we had quite a bit of excitement though it got a little long for the boys at times. One evening, Jacob excitedly noted that the sky was almost really dark blue, just like my song! Wow. That was a song he made up in New York in summer 2010. Jacob enjoyed collecting leaves as we walked around in Portland. He would then stash his pile of leaves outside the door of whatever building we d enter, then hope to find them still there when we got back out. It usually worked out OK for him.

Forbes has an interesting article about crowd-sourcing by criminals and law enforcement [1]. Ulissescastr0 made a Youtube video showing how to install SE Linux on Debian/Etch [2]. Probably no-one is using Etch nowadays so this video is outdated, but it s a good way of teaching people. It would be good if someone made a similar video showing how to do SE Linux things on Squeeze. I discovered the above SE Linux video through Explow which provides a neat interface to multiple searches and information sources [3]. I don t think I will be using Explow much in future as I could get the same result through Google video search. They also have a news portal but there are other sites for that. But it does seem that Explow would be useful for newbies. Eric Michael Johnson wrote an interesting article about the inherent bias in Psychological research based in the US [4]. People who live in urban environments think differently in some ways to people who live in different environments or who have different lifestyles. Therefore generalising from university students in the US to the entire human race is likely to get incorrect results. This is something to consider the next time you are tempted to generalise to the wider population from your own friends, colleagues, etc. The Daily Kos has a scary article about the TSA having a woman detained for reciting part of the US constitution [5]. The US will remain on my list of countries to avoid for the forseeable future. Vorlon has written an informative article about the use of hardening options when building Debian packages [6]. It s now even easier to do this, so every package that simultaneously deals with data of differing levels of integrity or sensitivity should be built this way. Bunker Roy gave an interesting TED talk about his Barefoot College that teaches useful skills to people in rural parts of India who don t have a traditional school education [7]. His talk really shows up some of the arrogance in the people who run traditional education. Justin Hall-Tipping gave an interesting TED talk about ways of solving the world energy problems [8]. He started with explaining the problems and why they need to be urgently solved and then described in detail some of the research that his group has done to solve the problems. This includes flexible photo-voltaic cells, infra-red vision to save on lighting, and a way of using carbon nano-tubes to control the thermal properties of windows.

• [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/oreillymedia/2011/10/03/the-rise-of-crime-sourcing/
• [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLPx7HLLteI
• [3] http://explow.com
• [4] http://blogs.plos.org/blog/2010/09/23/reflections-on-the-weird-evolution-of-human-psychology/
• [5] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/18/1027775/-TSA-Arrests-Me-for-Using-the-Fourth-Amendment-as-a-Weapon-(Tales-from-the-Edge-of-a-Revolution-2)?via=siderec
• [6] http://web.dodds.net/~vorlon/wiki/blog/Debian:_not_stale_just_hardened/
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/bunker_roy.html
• [8] http://www.ted.com/talks/justin_hall_tipping_freeing_energy_from_the_grid.html