September Challenges/To-Do’s (by sarah)

September has snuck up on me and sees me papier mache-ing like a mad thing - my aim? To create a piece of textural science art for the visually impaired and the blind.

This piece of art work does not just involve papier mache though - it involves knitting, sewing, clay sculpting, sugru, polymer clay, wire work, metal casting, wood carving, stone carving, geology and acrylic paints not too mention lots of recycled pots and tubs and our mountain of graze boxes.

This all needs to be ready for the 24th of September for the Centre Arts Exhibition in Braille. And yes I am panicking - it is a play on the tree of life but I have gone for a more coral/byozoan feel and hope to have life in various forms sitting in the polyp tubes (what I have instead of branches). A relief of the scientific creation of life will hopefully be feelable along the base along with an audio poem/story of life.

Apart from that I am researching stuff for my Punk in Pink series and generally trying to take the musical me forward.

What if my child is gay? (by alaric)

It's widely held that it's a scary experience for somebody to tell their parents that they are gay. As a parent, therefore, I began to wonder how I could arrange it so that, if any of my children turn out to be gay, they could be spared any distress in telling us about it.

I surmised that the distress arose because of this pattern:

1. Child is raised by parents with the assumption that they will be straight. This might be a stated assumption - the parents actually talking about "when you start to bring [girl/boy]friends home" or "when you get married and have kids", or simply be signs of homophobia in the parent. Perhaps it could even be that the parents show no signs of expecting their child to be heterosexual, but the child (through other social conditioning) nonetheless assume (correctly or not) that's what their parents expect.

2. Child, at some point, realises they have desires they feel their parents would disapprove of or be shocked by, as well as or instead of "normal" heterosexual desires.

3. Child eventually announces this to the parents.

4. Parents reaction ranges from "Oh, that's nice dear" to "Oh my god! What a shock... but now I think about it it's no big deal" to "YOU ARE NO CHILD OF MINE".

I presume it's either the fear of not knowing how the parent will respond, or suspecting they'll respond negatively, that makes it stressful for people to tell their parents that they're gay, bisexual, transgender, or whatever.

So I started wondering if it'd be best to, at some point, outright say "You know, your mother and I are totally fine with whatever sexual orientation you choose". Maybe that'd be a bit awkward; perhaps it'd be better to just to leave it implicit-but-hinted-at by openly introducing our gay/poly/etc friends to the children as such, and other such ways of showing that we're OK with it all.

But I began to realise that it would be much better if our children never actually had to "come out" to us about anything. Rather than trying to make step 4 of the above list less traumatic, how about if we just make it unnecessary by stopping the process at step 1?

I mean, ideally, our children should be able to bring home same-sex partners or whatever without feeling they have to gain our permission and acceptance first.

For a start, I think people are too enthusiastic about putting themselves (and, worse, each other) into boxes. I mean, I am attracted to women, and have never fancied a man, so I guess I count as straight, but I can find no reason to assume I might never fall in love with a man (I might just be really really picky and have not met Mr Right yet). And what about a bisexual person who has the occasional gay crush, but never really acts on it, and (quite happily) only ever goes out with members of the opposite sex, eventually marries one, and lives happily ever after? There's no problem with that, and their actual sexual label becomes a matter of perspective.

So, sod that. As my children are human beings, I am aware that they might acquire any combination of sexual tastes that humans are capable of; and those tastes are their own affair - which they may or may not choose to discuss with their parents, as they see fit. And what kinds (and numbers; don't forget polyamory) of people they actually bring home to meet us is their choice. And I don't require them to declare a classification up front. I want my children to feel free to bring home whatever partners take their fancy.

Of course, I don't want to deny them the right to stand up and say "Father! I wish to declare that I BAT FOR THE OTHER TEAM!" if they want to. I think that labeling yourself can be an important thing for a young person, learning to establish their own identity. If they want to do that, that's fine, and I'll support them in doing so and treat the event with the gravity they seem to want from it; if they come to me looking like they're after a rite of passage, I'll try to provide one. But I don't want them to think they have to.

But what I really want in the end, I guess, is for my children to feel free to be themselves (at least at home; I can't be responsible for the reactions of the rest of society, sadly), and for them to know that they have my support in whatever they do, as long as they do it ethically.

Cloud Storage (by alaric)

Currently, you can go to various providers and buy online storage capacity (IMHO, rsync.net is best, after research I did to find an offsite backup host for work). It's more expensive than a hard disk in your computer, and miles slower, but it has one brilliant advantage: it's remote. So it's perfect for backups.

And that's the heart of a free market - storage is cheap to the cloud providers (they just buy disks, and in bulk at that), but their storage has more value to you than your own storage because of it's remoteness. So they can rent it to you at a markup, and you get a benefit, and everyone is happy. Money flows, the economy grows, and one day we'll get to have affordable space tourism et cetera.

But large, centralised, cloud storage providers are attractive targets for people who want to steal data. They become centralised points of failure; if they go bankrupt, lots of people lose their backups. Therefore, it's smart to do your backups to more than one of them, just in case. But that means setting up your systems to talk to each one's interfaces, arranging payment and agreeing to terms and conditions with them all individually, and so on.

Surely this state of affairs can be improved? With ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY?

Well, I think it can, and here's how. Read more »

Lords of a new economy (by alaric)

Pondering Bitcoin, I recently opined:

Who sets the difficulty of the puzzle and all that? The computers in the network do - when the system was created, rules were agreed, and written into the software. As everyone runs software following those rules, anybody solving easier puzzles or trying to award themselves more bounty for doing so will have their bounty-claiming transaction rejected as invalid. To loosen the rules, a majority of the computers in the system will all need to accept the new rules - so it will require consensus from the community.

I've been thinking more about this. Read more »

Bitcoin security (by alaric)

I've been learning about Bitcoin lately.

It's an electronic currency. I've seen electronic currency before - in the late 90s there were efforts to create them based on virtual banks issuing coins. The coins were basically long random serial numbers which, along with a statement of the value of the coin, were then signed by the bank. The public key of the bank is published, so people can check they're valid coins issued by the bank. The idea was that rather than withdrawing a bunch of notes from the bank, you can ask the bank to mint you a bunch of these signed numbers instead; and anyone who sees them can check their value, and eventually, return them to the bank (which can also check their value in the same way) to get their account credited.

Read more »