National Day of Unplugging: March 1-2, 2013

Happening all over the place, the National Day of Unplugging is:

... a 24 hour period – running from sunset to sunset – and starts on the first Friday in March. The project is an outgrowth of The Sabbath Manifesto, an adaption of our ancestors’ ritual of carving out one day per week to unwind, unplug, relax, reflect, get outdoors, and connect with loved ones.

Download your own I UNPLUG TO poster, fill it in, take a photo of you and your poster, and upload it to the National Day of Unplugging website. When sunset arrives on March 1, experience what it's like to get seriously turned off.


Looking for ideas about how to unplug? The Ten Principles of unplugging is available for download at the Sabbath Manifesto. Folks looking to take more frequent technology breaks might also enjoy subscribing to the UNDO List, sent every Friday.

The Vast Bathroom Conspiracy, February 2013 edition

They're out to get you. That's what proponents of the Vast Bathroom Conspiracy would have you believe.

Bill C-279 is a federal Canadian bill that if passed, unamended, aims to add the terms "gender identity" and "gender expression" to the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code.

Explicitly affirming that Canada's equality rights actually apply to "everyone" doesn't necessarily make everyone happy. Even federal Members of Parliament have been known to participate in spreading the unhappiness on either current or previous iterations of the bill, one MP for this iteration going so far as to create a petition that tries to prevent some trans people from accessing washroom facilities (or, if one were to follow the actual language of the petition precisely, would affirm that people who have transitioned to male should continue to use non-female washrooms).

Unlike the Alberta Government's "CROTCHES KILL" campaign (featured above, slightly cropped), fearmongering propagandists have no evidence whatsoever that affirming Canada's equality rights do indeed extend to all Canadians will translate into terror in the toilets. Except, of course, in the fervid imaginations of those same fearmongering propagandists.

However, amendments to Bill C-279 appear highly likely. The bill possiblymaybeperhaps will be back in Parliament for third reading on February 27, 2013.


Note: See Alberta Transportation for the uncropped image (above) and full range of advertisements focused on trying to get people who text-and-drive to stop doing so. Alberta Transportation also has actual statistics of actual harm connected to distracted driving.

Recommended post: RPG and transitioning

Well worth reading: a fantastic reflection by Samantha Allen about role-playing games and transitioning, Boob Sliders, Or How Role-Playing Games Helped Me Transition.

Hat tip to E for spotting this for me.

Trans air travel: this explains almost everything

Back in January 2012, trans Canadians were startled to learn transgender people weren't allowed to board airplanes in Canada through a detailed post by blogger Christin Milloy. The problem arose from changes to regulations governing the federal Aeronautics Act that had come in to effect in July 2011.

The Canadian Bar Association's Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Conference (SOGIC) wrote a letter urging the Minister of Public Safety to amend the regulations to be inclusive of transgender and gender non-conforming people.

A motion to repeal this portion of the Act was defeated 6 to 5 in a meeting of the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities.

Where does this strange animus against transgender and gender non-conforming travellers come from? Why do legislators and policy makers freak out at the notion of trans folk travelling? Perhaps this clip from The IT Crowd (Series 3, "The Speech") explains it all:

... starting @ 1:30 on the clip:

Douglas: Oh, poppet. To think, when we met, you were so worried that you came from Iran.

April: What?

Douglas: When we met. As if I'd be worried about something like that. I don't care where you're from-- Iran, France--doesn't bother me. I'm very modern.

April: I'm not from Iran.

Douglas: Well you said something along those lines.

April: No, no--not Iran, a man. I said I used to be a man.

Home, sweet home ...

Via Slashdot, the American Department of Homeland Security considers the border to be within a 100-mile thick zone, according to a Wired article by David Kravets, DHS Watchdog OKs 'Suspicionless' Seizure of Electronic Devices Along Border. This generous border interpretation allows for searches on people passing through American border points long after they may believe they have completed this process.

According to a prior Wired article, ACLU Assails 100-Mile Border Zone as 'Constitution Free', and an ACLU fact sheet on what is described as a U.S. "Constitution-Free Zone", this interpretation of the border is being demarcated inland from the outer edge of the US border.

While this isn't happy news for folks on the inland side of that border, this is fortunate for those folks residing in Canada, because a substantial amount of Canada's "population lives in a narrow corridor at the southern part of the country, near the American border."

The 2006 Atlas of Canada from Natural Resources Canada has a population distribution map. Note the proximity of Canadian population to American borders.

Philosophy, contrast, and monetisation

I just caught the trailer for the film, Being in the World: A Celebration of Being Human in a Technological Age

... and was delighted and amused that before I could watch this video about relating to people and objects and all that fascinating philosophical stuff, first there was an ad, an increasing-common way for free services to remain, well, free-of-charge. And not just any ad, but an ad for a new Die Hard film, A Good Day to Die Hard:

Best quoted conversation from A Good Day to Die Hard to contrast the Being in the World video?

"Need a hug?"
"We're not a hugging family."
"Damn straight."

Form follows failure (not function)

In Henry Petroski's 1992 book, The Evolution of Useful Things, he asserts that form doesn't follow function, form follows failure.

Petroski cites a number of people discussing design and failure, including architect Christopher Alexander and designer David Pye. Petroski notes,

According to [David] Pye, "function is a fantasy," and he italicizes his further assertion that "the form of designed things is decided by choice or else by chance; but it is never actually entailed by anything whatever."

Quoting Pye further,

The concept of function in design, and even the doctrine of functionalism, might be worth a little attention if things ever worked.  It is, however, obvious that they do not. .... Nothing we design or make ever really works. We can always say what it ought to do, but that it never does.

Is there a solution? According to Pye,

All designs for devices are in some degree failures, either because they flout one or another of the requirements or because they are compromises, and compromise implies a degree of failure ....
It follows that all designs for use are arbitrary. The designer or his client has to choose in what degree and where there shall be failure. 

Who are you?

Over on Slashdot, a discussion looking at name conflicts in automatically-generated email accounts includes a variety of problems that arise from making assumptions about identity as expressed by names.

(Note: this post has links aplenty, but there's a video from A Bit of Fry and Laurie embedded at the end that's both funny and directly relevant to this discussion.)

Many problems noted in the Slashdot discussion relate to different cultural and linguistic practises, not to mention the need to accommodate non-Latin written scripts.

One Slashdot commenter links to another blog with a post called Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names by Patrick from Kalzumeus Software. The post and its entire comment thread are well worth a read.

Items 32-37 are of particular interest to trans folk:

32. People’s names are assigned at birth.
33. OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty close to birth.
34. Alright, alright, within a year or so of birth.
35. Five years?
36. You’re kidding me, right?
37. Two different systems containing data about the same person will use the same name for that person.

Assuming a trans person doesn't have complicating factors such as having been born in a foreign jurisdiction using a non-Latin alphabet or a naming convention atypical for North America (which seems to assume firstname middlename lastname is the gold standard), the practise of many institutions of establishing system identity using information from a birth certificate poses substantial problems.

Before peeking at those problems, let's take a brief look at some of the non-trans complications that occur when names and databases collide (through specific comments on the Falsehoods article) :

1. Organisations insist you must be identified by names you never use
2. Due to prior technological limitations your name is changed to a shorter character length yet multiple records may now exist
3. Your legal name is required (by law) yet the database structure doesn't accommodate your actual legal name
4. Multiple cultures and nationalities use divergent standards yet local laws require different standards that conflict with these many divergencies
5. The same person may be identified in different places in different ways in accordance with local practises
6. Some types of assumed names are considered acceptable, while other types of assumed names are considered to be criminal, even if all name usage is actually non-criminal
7. Names may not be registered at all or may be adopted names rather than legal names
8. Conflicts between how a name is rendered by the database and the person's real name results in substantial problems when dealing with large institutions, including government

As noted by one commenter in response to the notion of "don't let the ideal be the enemy of the good" is that "the problem is that the majority of systems in use today aren't even good."

For trans people, these systems seem to be peculiarly not good:

• The system can't handle a person changing gender
• In addition to gender being non-conforming, a person's title (or titles) may vary widely by language and occupation
• Beyond names, a system might also be complex due to being capable of entering highly-divergent sex differentiation
• A system capable of entering highly-divergent sex differentiation may be making assumptions about the actual genetics of the person in question

And of course, unlike married people adopting names as part of a non-legal but commonly accepted tradition, a trans person changing gender causes databases to be destroyed.

Yet appropriate possible solutions must exist. For example, some places--such as hospitals--have to be capable of handling individuals who may not have a name or whose name may be unknown. These records may be tied to other systems with the weight of law behind them, such as a government.

Despite all this, many people want to be called by their proper identity, an identity determined to be proper according to their own norms, not imposed externally.

(Note: this video was sourced thanks to links posted by some commenters to the Falsehoods article.)