Well, I suppose it had to happen eventually. Here's a sunscreen package I spotted in the shops just the other day:
Apparently you can now purchase things made without chemicals. Srsly. And here I always thought that mixing anti-matter with matter would bring about a catastrophic failure of the universe, resulting in the same universe's immediate lack of ongoing existence, but apparently I'm wrong on that point.
You can purchase this chemical (matter)-free material for less than $20 Canadian, probably in any number of fine establishments that scoff at the laws of physics.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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) :
I'm in the market for a lightweight, portable keyboard for all the usual reasons someone who actually knows how to touch type might not want to deal with the frustrations of the on-screen keyboard on iOS devices. While the Mac wireless keyboard works perfectly fine, it's a lot larger and a bit heavier than I want to carry.
Imagine my happiness at finding what appeared to be a tiny, compact board with actual, pressable keys. Over the years, I've successfully worked with keyboards so small that the home row could be adequately demonstrated by simply placing your fingertips in a line, touching together. On that board, due to the extreme compact placement of keys, I had to slow down a bit, but I could achieve between 40-60 wpm, with excellent accuracy.
A well-designed small board has well-demarcated keys (often called a Chiclet keyboard, after the candy-coated chewing gum). A well-designed keyboard has keys in places that make sense--commonly used items such as punctuation shouldn't be assigned to some apparently random place.
The first clue that my newest acquisition might not be up to the task was the simple question of how much does it weigh? Carefully inspecting the package provided no enlightenment. Expecting the manual to contain this information, the store manager helped me to open the package: nope, nothing. The manager went online and managed to find a product specification sheet, not linked here because I can't find it anywhere--the website has minimal information on the product specs.
In any case, the product specs she found and gave me to me on hardcopy included all the typical information of description, reorder number, pack size, brand, system requirements, compatibility, etc. The bad omen arises when you see the answer to my question about the product weight.
This answer is a classic blunder, one that's shown up in some fairly spectacular examples. As you know, we get fabulous data about Mars regularly from the Mars Climate Orbiter. Wait--you don't remember the Mars Climate Orbiter? Maybe you remember this: it didn't get to Mars, at least, not in one piece, possibly not even in particularly tiny pieces thanks to disintegrating. Why might that happen, you wonder? A simple problem--the spacecraft operated on metric, while the ground-based software back on Earth operated in Imperial. When it comes to manouevring, this discrepancy is disastrous.
According to the keyboard specifications, the weight is 7.23 oz (3.28 kg). I don't use ounces, but I understand they're pretty light. I do, however, use kilograms and something that weighs more than three of them is pretty hefty. One kilogram is one thousand grams, and one gram is about the weight of a paperclip. Google's conversion feature shows that 7.23 oz should be nearly 205 paperclips, which feels about right.
Despite being much lighter than claimed on the specification sheet, I won't be keeping this keyboard. Again, the whole point of having a keyboard is so that a touch-typist can, well, touch-type. After giving it a thorough workout, it's clear that the problems go far beyond merely getting used to a new board. These problems are not surmountable simply by continuing to use it--fundamental design problems make the board no better than the problems that already exist using built-in iOS on-screen keyboards. Others have reviewed the downsides of this item at length, I'll just add that given the strange position of the spacebar relative to the letter keys, I have to wonder whether the designers themselves actually know how to type.
