NYPD officer Owen Hopper is suing to get his job back. He was dismissed last year after a woman said he'd flashed her at the police station. Problem is, so Hopper says, he is circumcised and the woman said he was not. He says the hearing officer unjustly concluded on his own, i.e. without having heard testimony from an expert, "that an erect circumcised penis and erect uncircumcised penis will appear the same and could have had the complainant confused".

You can't make this stuff up.

The gap in Google Street View coverage of the Whitestone Bridge (at the center of the pic to the right) is right about where I remember seeing a sign like this one:

But maybe that's just coïncidence. I mean, there are other such signs in New York that Google didn't remove from Street View.

Does anyone here think that someone intent on blowing up a bridge is going to be deterred from taking pics of it because there's a sign saying it's prohibited?  [pause]  I didn't think so. sign photo from Satan's Laundromat, used by permission under CC BY-NC 1.0 license The question of whether homosexuality is a choice often comes up in discussions of gay rights. There is a consensus among mental health professionals; e.g., the American Psychological Association's view is that

most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation.

I like that phrasing for how it respects and yet avoids the deeply complicated question of whether free will is illusory.

Every so often I hear the argument that homosexuality is obviously not a choice because no one would want to be gay. From a talk show host a few months ago:

I don’t think that anybody in this world wants to be gay considering all of the vilification that is brought upon someone who is gay. Why would you choose that?

The woman who said that is deemed supportive of gay people and as far as I know she wishes us well. But I find it presumptuous and unfair for a straight person to say the experience of being gay is that undesirable.

Would I change being gay if I could? The question is just about meaningless because sexuality is intertwined with and integral to all that is my personality, but I'll answer it anyway: no, I wouldn't.

I was a teenager in a place and time that was far less supportive of being gay than modern-day America is, and it took me a while to come to terms with my sexuality. I had a single, decisive turning point the first time I ever set foot in a gay bar, when I was struck by seeing a crowd of people plainly not unhappy about being who they were. I was at ease with being gay from that point forward.

While I am encouraged at how much progress has been made in US society toward understanding homosexuality, we still have a ways to go. My hat is totally off to Stephen Colbert.

First, a little background. In 2010, the US Supreme Court held (in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission) that the First Amendment precludes limits on independent spending for political purposes by corporations and unions. In a lengthy dissent, Justice Stevens said

The conceit that corporations must be treated identically to natural persons in the political sphere is not only inaccurate but also inadequate to justify the Court's disposition of this case.

For better or worse, the current election season is deeply influenced by the Citizens United decision. Seven so-called super PACs--organizations with axes to grind but which are not affiliated with any candidate--are running commercials on TV stations in South Carolina in advance of the state's primary election. As usual, many of the ads are negative.

Enter comedian and political commentator Stephen Colbert, who formed a super PAC alternately called "Americans For A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow" or "The Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert Super PAC". With the ability to accept anonymous donations, Colbert likens his PAC to a campaign finance glory hole: "You stick your money in the hole, the other person accepts your donation, and because it's happening anonymously, no one feels dirty!"

Colbert's PAC produced a commercial that parodies attacks on Mitt Romney and is running it on TV stations in South Carolina. In 60 seconds it highlights the style of campaign ads, the consequences of the Citizens United decision, the influence of money on US politics, Republicans' longing for an anyone-but-Mitt-Romney, and more. It is superbly constructed and it is funny as hell.

I don't like to embed Flash video in my blog postings, but I've posted a still image below and you can watch the ad here.

I close with another quote from Justice Stevens' dissent in Citizens United:

While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

Language Log has not one, but two pieces on the bookseller Waterstone's changing their name to Waterstones and various reactions thereto. Waterstones, for their part, have a sense of humour about all this and posted the photo shown to the right.
But as this is Tommyjournal and not link to Language Log journal, I would be remiss if I didn't post some Tommy-specific content. This I now do. Caltrans has been of two minds as to whether Toms Place takes an apostrophe. (They didn't ask me.) Apostrophe-free sign to the right; apostrophe-laden signs here and here. The USGS, the USPS, and Wikipedia deem it to be apostropheless.

I'll keep this short. Congress is considering laws, the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act, which are thoroughly wrongheaded in their implementations, could limit Internet freedoms and cause technical problems, and should not be passed (as I see it).

Info on the proposed laws here and here.
Resources for contacting representatives here. Most lumber is, to some noticeable degree, not straight. Even wood that's been machined to be straight may hold internal tensions, and once sawn into narrower pieces will be straight no more. The organic patterns of grain that make wood beautiful are the same things that make it a challenge to work with. It's kind of like working with people.

Warped lumber wouldn't matter as much if human vision weren't so awfully good at detecting straightness (or the lack thereof). If that ability evolved before humans made many tools, I think that's wild--because outside of man-made objects there aren't a lot of straight-edged things.

All men by nature desire to know and an indication of this is the love of the senses; for even, irrespective of their utility, are they loved for their own sakes, and pre-eminently above the rest, the sense of sight.

Thus wrote Aristotle. Could dogs write philosophy, they might go on about a different sense they love above the rest. Sometimes I'm not so sure that vision is my most delightful sense, and I'm not even a dog.

Way back when, my friend Rick asked why dogs go right for your crotch. (A dog had just done so.) Those who have had their nose in a few crotches know the answer, but Rick and I were kids and hadn't gotten to that yet.

I once stopped to say hi to a horse in my neighborhood and he (I'm guessing it was a he) put his nose in my crotch, then in my armpit. I thought to myself, this guy knows where the action is on the humans.

Mirrors are standard equipment in houses; no one questions the value of being able to look at oneself, at least if not done excessively.

Hanging out with a family after we'd done some climbing, I heard the mom ask her teenage son, "are you smelling yourself?" -- in a tone that didn't just say it was the wrong setting to be doing it, but rather that she didn't get why he would want to.

My own scent varies with what I eat, what medications I take, how much rest I get, and so on. Knowing what you smell like is part of being attuned to your condition. To me, it would be more strange to never smell oneself. But I am not totally without a sense of decorum and I can see abstaining while other people are around.

That's not to say that I approve of how screwed up our culture is with respect to smell. What other sense has such negative connotations in our language? To say someone has looks is a compliment, but to say they smell is to say you'd prefer that they didn't.

A friend and I passed by a bookstore in San Francisco; he asked if I wanted to go in; I said OK; he said, "I love the smell of bookstores." Hear, hear. I think that I shall never see / a Kindle that smells as nice as a tree.

Wood products may have some scent, but nothing like what's in the air when you saw. I cut up a bunch of cypress wood recently and the shop smelled awesome for days.

I'm with Aristotle: we love the senses for their own sake.

This latest T-cell count is about like the one from January 2001. So the rough symmetry, that I said I wouldn't mind to see continuing, is continuing, roughly.

As the fourth of last month was about math, today sounds like a good time for some more.

A cute approximation for e as an expression using digits 1 through 9:

       e ≈ (1 + 9^-47*6)³²⁸⁵

that is,

       e ≈ (1 + 1 / x)^x , where x = 3²⁸⁵.

How close an approximation? It's good for about 18457734525360901453873570 decimal digits. (source here)

In the same vein--a trick made the rounds in the 1970s, for pocket calculators that could take square roots but not transcendental functions: for an approximation of natural logarithm, take the square root ten times in a row, subtract 1, and multiply by 1023. The inverse operations in the opposite order will approximate e^x. Because at least one person would probably ask: except for the T, the letters in this year's logo are from this font. The letterforms have been tweaked--not just because I wanted to change the shapes a bit, but also because free fonts sometimes deviate from established digital font design practice (to put it charitably).

This is as good a time as any to say I'm grateful to have Inkscape available for making such tweaks, and FontForge for various font editing and conversion functions.

Happy New Year, everyone. Yesterday, I was chatting with a neighbor who owns a bar in Los Angeles. We compared notes about having been subject to attempted muggings on the street in L.A. .  In my case, assailants wanted my money. My neighbor thought the guys he encountered just wanted to beat him up and take his dog. Supposedly, robbing someone of their dog is a way to prove one's bad‑assedness to fellow gang members.

I said that I like living in Lone Pine. My neighbor asked if that incident changed my willingness to visit Los Angeles; I said no. It's not like it was the first urban skirmish I'd been through.

But I live where I do partly because people behave better here. I don't have to feel like I'm on my guard at all times. I've seen a nice car left running with the keys in it while someone went into the post office.

Or, as shown by this pic of a truck parked in town yesterday: you can expect your dog won't be stolen while you run errands.

Happy solstice (9:30 tonight, PST), everyone.

I texted a climbing buddy this morning to see if he was around, but alas no. His response said he was in other desert cities. That is, fate had taken him to that distinctive area east of one of my favorite road signs. Note also that California is such a high-tech state that we number our roads in binary.

photo by jfs1988; used by permission

The more humorous and/or outrageous a mnemonic is, the more easy it is to remember. The traditional and proposed mnemonics shown here are from xkcd. The ones I remember from school, e.g. "my very elegant mother just sat upon nine pancakes", are now obsolete in light of Pluto's demotion. The xkcd from which this is excerpted declines to note a traditional mnemonic for the resistor color code. The one I've heard the most over the years is crude: bad boys rape our young girls but violet goes willingly. If I had a Siri, I'd ask it why so much humor relies on cruelty.

xkcd graphic used by permission under CC BY-NC 2.5 license I've been avoiding blogging about current Republican candidates‑‑there are plenty of other places to go if you want to read about them‑‑but I make an exception today to revisit something I read some 15 years ago.

In addressing the question of where all the extra souls come from as human population expands, Ian Stevenson proposed that

... human minds may split or duplicate, so that one mind can reincarnate in two or more bodies; the Inuit, the Igbo of Nigeria, the Tibetans, the Haida of Alaska and British Columbia, and the Gitksan of British Columbia all believe this.¹

Paul Edwards' 1996 book on reincarnation quotes Stevenson and considers what it would mean if a split resulted in, say, a Newt Gingrich and a double thereof. A footnote says

For the benefit of readers in a happier time when Newt Gingrich will have been forgotten, let me explain that he was for several years after 1994 the Republican party's foremost spokesman for intolerance, divisiveness, narrow-mindedness, and contempt for the underdog.²

Gingrich remains a spokesman for all that, if perhaps not the party's foremost (competition is stiff). Consider that the USA now lets gay people serve openly in the military, the sky didn't fall as a result, and indeed most Americans now support the change; yet in an interview last week:

Interviewer:	Would you actively work to get [DADT] reinstated?
Gingrich:	Well, I would encourage the Congress to pass reinstating it, and I expect the next Congress will pass reinstating it.

The man is, as my boss would say, a specimen.

---

1	Children Who Remember Previous Lives, pp. 207-208
2	Reincarnation: A Critical Examination, pp. 230-231

Word is that someone recently said "cameras are not meant to be beautiful". Well. Anything with an infinity sign engraved on it should, as a matter of principle, be made so that it is beautiful. This of course exempts many modern-day cameras on which infinity is nowhere to be found.