Differentophobia (by alaric)

At the time of writing, there's been recent controversy about a fast food chain called Chick-fil-A, whose management have made statements against gay marriage, and who financially support organisations campaigning against it. I'm not going to go into detail about that, as it's just one more battle in a long war against the idea that it's OK to fail to understand that people who are different to you are still people.

There's a natural human tendency to categorise people into Us and Them. We have emotional reactions like empathy towards "Us", as we can imagine ourselves in their situations. We tend to trust "Us", and help "Us" when they are in need, and would rally to defend "Us" from harm.

"They", on the other hand, are assumed to be attempting to take something from "Us". "They" are not empathised with; we do not imagine what it is like to be "Them". We merely see that "They" are different, and therefore, we cannot imagine what "They" are thinking; and we imagine that "They" must feel the same about "Us", and therefore not have our best interest at heart; we assume that "They" will feel no compunction against causing "Us" harm if it's in "Their" interests, so we are quick to defend ourselves against "Them", including pre-emptive strikes. If "They" ask for something, it is clearly "Them" trying to take things from "Us", rather than "Them" and "Us" negotiating to find a compromise over some shared resource, and we must stand up against it or "They" will take everything and leave "Us" with nothing.

This general mechanism is behind a lot of pain and suffering in this world. Once somebody has been classified as "Them" in somebody's eyes, it's very hard to lose that classification, as all the good deeds they do and other evidence of trustworthiness are easily interpreted as deceit. Meanwhile, the criminals in the "Us" group use their implicit trustworthiness to great advantage. This simple classification into "Us" and "Them" presumably did us some good when were crouching in caves, but now we're a globally interconnected society, it's harming us.

I have suffered little from it, personally; I am white (and live in a country where that's normal), male (and live in a society where sexism has abated, but is still rife), without any visible disabilities, living in the country I grew up in, with an accent and mannerisms which can fit into most social "levels" (I come from a lower working class background, but went through elite education into a profession, so I have experience of all sorts of people), straight and cisgender. My only "minority" trait is being an unabashed nerd, which is something I can easily hide when amongst people who would be bored stiff by a thrilling discussion about logic circuit design; and I hide that in order to not bore people stiff, rather than out of a fear of discrimination.

But it still deeply irritates me, because it's just a stupid waste of happiness. The human race has enough to worry about without us being nasty to each other.

I like meeting people who are different, as it's interesting to try and find my own limitations and boundaries. How much of who I am is because of the limited range of experiences I've had, rather than inherent limitations of my human brain? I'd still really like to sit down with some gay and bisexual people of both genders, to try and really find out what the experiences of love, limerence and sexual desire are like for them; there's clearly some underlying difference because the objects of their attraction are different, but does that extend to differences in what it feels like for them? Bisexual people would be well-placed to compare, but then their experience might not be representative of what purely homosexual people feel. As I was at an all-male school when I became really interested in girls, I've never felt I've entirely understood heterosexual flirting/dating/courting protocols, and I'm quite interested in how much is purely social convention rather than fundamental parts of our evolved mating mechanisms; finding out what it's like from the perspective of homosexual people, who have been forced out of the social conventions in the first place and had to form their own in originally hidden communities, might provide me with insights into my own heterosexuality! I watch the activities of my polyamorous friends with interest!

I am not, however, immune to the fear of different people. If I suddenly find myself in an unfamiliar cultural environment, I feel a twinge of alarm. This is partly justified; in an unfamiliar culture, my social protocols may be incorrect, and might cause offence, and somebody who is not familiar with my own culture might not realise that this is unintentional. So when I find myself in such a situation, I am well advised to pause and think carefully about how I act - but purely to ensure that I present a respectful and friendly first impression; I then try to find common ground and establish an understanding that I can expand upon until I am comfortable with the new situation.

When a group of hoodie-wearing black youth rush past me in an alleyway, yes, I am mindful that they might try to mug me. But I am also just as mindful that a group of smartly-dressed white females might mug me, too. After all, if I wanted to mug somebody, I would carefully avoid mugger stereotypes in order to lull people into a false sense of security! If I ran a Fagin-esque gang of pick pockets, I would train little old ladies in martial arts and equip them with knives to be my agents! But I digress... I do not discriminate in my distrust. And yet my distrust is provisional; if I know nothing about somebody, I will assume that they might be a threat, and I will take care not to give them an opportunity to harm me or those in my care in any way; but I will not show hostility towards somebody unless they prove their bad intententions by makin a move to attack first. And on the other hand, I will extend trust towards people who have earned it, but I do so proportionally, assessing the cost of losing the thing I have entrusted them with against the benefits of trusting them.

It's also important to recognise when people are being afraid of you because you are different to them. Their initial reaction to you might be to flinch, to be defensive, or even to assume that you conform to their culture's stereotype of yours. And if you are feeling skeptical of them being one of Them, then their initially negative reaction would just needlessly reinforce your suspicion. If you then act in a way that makes you seem hostile and defensive in their eyes, then your relationship has gotten off to a probably irreparably bad start.

So, dear reader, when you feel that frisson of fear and distrust when you meet, or hear about, strange people doing strange things, recognise that feeling for what it is: a quick warning that these people might find you strange and frightening, so you must be polite and welcoming; and try to turn the other cheek if they exhibit knee-jerk defensive reactions towards you. The more you can learn from them about the amazing variety of the human experience, the better a person you will be.

Getting kids into programming (and what the Raspberry Pi is lacking) (by alaric)

Back when I were a lad, if you bought a computer, you'd bring it home and plug it into the telly and turn it on and a BASIC prompt would appear.

Tough luck if you wanted to do practical tasks like word processing, but you could type a single command (such as CIRCLE 100,100,50) and be instantly treated to a circle appearing on the screen. Before long, my generation were writing programs to crunch numbers for our statistics homework, and lots and lots of games. And thus a generation of software engineers was born.

Getting started in programming is trickier for the contemporary twenty-first-century child; they have to install a software development environment (their computer probably didn't come with one), and then go through a wizard to Create New Project, write initialisation code to open a window, then write a redraw event handler that takes a graphics context and draws a circle with it. A little less approachable than "CIRCLE 100,100,50". At least you get a simple word processor and a Web browser out of the box, though... I'm no nostalgic Luddite 🙂

Now, the Raspberry Pi has been widely hailed as the answer to our woes; costing just twenty pounds and usable given access to a TV and a dirt cheap USB keyboard and SD card, it's cheap enough to be purchased and given to a child to play with, unlike Mummy's laptop. Also, it has a user I/O port, meaning it should be relatively easily to integrate with home-built robots and other such fun electronics projects.

However, that's just the hardware side. What's seriously lacking is the software. If you buy a Pi and install one of the available Linux images onto an SD card and boot it up, you'll be presented with a Linux desktop environment. You'll be able to get to a shell prompt with little effort, and start learning shell, or get into a Python prompt and start to write Hello World, but that's not incredibly inviting; the effort required to do anything interesting from there is quite high. In particular, getting graphics going is hardly a job for a beginner.

So, I set out to improve on this situation. I've written a turtle graphics engine on top of Chicken Scheme, called Simple Graphics. Installing it is often painful as you need to get all the required bits of SDL and Cairo installed, but once that's done, thanks to Chicken's excellent egg system, installing simple-graphics is easy. And once you've done so, it's just a matter of:

(use simple-graphics)
(forward 10)

...to get started with drawing things on the screen.

However, that initial installation pain can be bypassed by making a Raspberry Pi image, based on the existing excellent work on basic Linux distributions for the Pi, that has Chicken and simple-graphics pre-installed, with a desktop icon to fire up a Chicken prompt with the simple-graphics library already loaded so you don't need the use line. But then I'd also like to add Chicken eggs to drive the I/O port on the Pi, including I2C and SPI. And sound generation, so you can make noises to go with your graphics while driving a real robot turtle through the I/O port...

It would also be good to have a version that boots straight into a full-screen Chicken prompt (which, if you start doing turtle graphics commands, splits into two, a graphics area that can be hidden/revealed/made full screen with hot keys, and the command-line area), for people using small screens.

That way, kids of all ages could immediately have an interactive environment that lets them program the full range of capabilities of the Pi. And being based on Scheme, it wouldn't be a "dumbed down" environment they'll grow out of and have to learn a new language in order to do more powerful things; they'll be able to use all the Chicken Eggs available, as well as being able to write their own code in a language eminently capable of the full range of programming tasks - yet still simple enough for anybody to get started with. Sure, I could have based Simple Graphics on Python or Ruby; but anything they can do, Scheme can do better.

Ju Jutsu Jean (by sarah)

This a poem I have written for my little girl Jean who is so enthusiastic she wants to take part on the next Olympics even though she will only be 10 then!

Her current plan is to work hard at Ju Jutsu which she has been doing for just over a year and to then cross train to Judo as there do not seem to be many martial arts in the Olympics.

She has just spent the morning watching the Judo and is now watching the swimming. She came up with a lot of the rhymes in this poem so it is really a joint effort.

Ju Jutsu Jean

Ju Jutsu Jean was ever so keen
To travel to London to impress the Queen
So she practiced and practiced and practiced some more
Till her muscles ached and her bottom was sore

She tried and tried
Till her mum cried
Not with sorrow but a bursting pride!

Ju Jutsu Jean the string bean
Was tall enough to be on a basket ball team
But she was kind and never mean
She washed her ghi
And made herself clean
Braiding her hair into a plated pair
And took the train to get her there

At the palace gates the guards said no
They informed Jean she would have to go
Ju Jutsu Jean turned said SO!
And with hands on hips did some back flips
And gave the guards some tips
On fighting a keen string bean called Jean

After a while
With the guards in a pile
Jean remembered her letter written in the style Roy-al
The guards groaned and opened the door
And Jean was amazed at the marble floor

In she went to see the Queen
Ju Jutsu Jean represented her team
And was awarded a medal with gleam

And so Ju Jutsu Jean the keen string bean
Beamed at the Queen
Showing off her gleam

Then she headed home once more
Were her mum had put bunting round the door
And smiled knowing there was a party in store
With food and singing and fun galore!

Bread Puppies! (by sarah)

SO... I found an idea/recipe for bread puppies here yesterday and today I have baked them for a friends birthday present!

They are not the best bake ever and I used sour dough and we don't have a bread maker etc... but I'm happy with them 🙂

Krav Maga (by alaric)

I've always enjoyed combined mental/physical challenges. As a child, I often entertained myself with things like getting from one part of the house to another without touching the floor. This required planning, and finesse; the combination was exhilerating.

I enjoyed my time in the Combined Cadet Force, as many of the exercises we were set involved this combination; and I particularly enjoyed being in the school shooting team. Especially when we went out to electronic target ranges and did exercises involving running to checkpoints with an assault rifle, diving into the prone position, inserting the magazine, shooting at targets as they popped up, and then running to the next checkpoint. It was like playing Time Crisis!

However, that kind of thing has been missing from my life for the past decade or so. Also, I've been spending far too much of my time sitting in cars or at desks, with my main exercise being carrying heavy objects (such as sleeping children) for short distances. I was feeling a keen desire to exercise more.

Then about a year ago, Jean started doing Ju Jutsu, and I started to wonder about taking up a martial art. I remember, many years ago, a friend saying he was taking up Krav Maga, an interesting-sounding Israeli martial art that grew from self-defence techniques in the Jewish gettos of Hungary before World War 2.

However, my searches found no nearby Krav Maga groups; the nearest was in Bristol. So I gave up on this idea for the time being. But a few weeks ago I spotted a poster in a shop window in Cheltenham advertising local Krav Maga courses; sure enough, a group had started!

So yesterday evening, I turned up to give it a try.

It's delightfully pragmatic; most of the attacks seem to revolve around wacking your attacker as hard as you can in the softest bits of them you can reach, then running away. The first skill I started practicing was how to kick somebody in the groin, punch them in the face twice in quick succession, pull them down hard onto your rapidly-rising knee into their stomach, elbow them in the kidneys, and end up behind them (running away, of course), in one smooth motion. We then proceeded to have a try at being pinned from behind by one person while another ran at you from the front; there is a technique to escape the grip and leave the person gripping you curled up in a painful ball on the floor, but doing it while also dealing with the person coming at you from the front makes it a lot more interesting. There were also some more abstract exercises in dealing with large numbers of people coming at you, avoiding being cornered or surrounded, and getting them to get in each other's way. That involved some physical activity in keeping moving, but it was mainly a mental exercise, observing the paths of the attackers and planning your movements.

The practising was good exercise in itself, but we also did a bit of general fitness exercise, largely as part of the warm-up before getting into the practice. I left feeling tired but lively, and today I've been feeling the ache of growing muscle over much of my body, so it's been a good work-out.

I got on well with the other students, who were very helpful with the new people in their midst; and the instructor seems to be a truly intriguing and inspiring person!

It was good challenging fun, so I'm going to keep going, hopefully switching to the Gloucester group that will be starting on Mondays in September!

I turned up in a shirt and trousers, straight from the office, but most of the people there had track suits. Black ones, and t-shirts with martial-looking imagery on, were particularly popular. The contrarian in me is now wondering if I can get a glittery pink tracksuit in my size...