“Harry Smith” puppy-wuppy-doodle-dooo@gmail.com

he was merely this:

puppy-wuppy-doodle-dooo@gmail.com

… which is not helpful and, for that matter, does not provide a very good face for the organization.

More recently, I’ve been doing a fun little project involving ScienceOnline 2012. This is a conference to be held in North Carolina in January for bloggers, science communicators, and science writers. I’ve been going through the list of participants, and where they have provided a URL to the conference, I check the URL to see if it is a blog, and if there is a post on that blog written by that participant, and the post was fairly recent, etc. etc., I put a link to it on Google+ along with a sentence that might read something like “Mary Smith is a participant in Scienceonline 2012” where I use a plus sign before “Mary” and “Scienceonline” so those terms become links.

But there are several problems in doing this. Let me list a few of them:

1) I arrive at the web site and it is for a major corporation, university, or some other whopping big entity that the person is presumably associated with, but there is no reference to that person on the page I’ve arrived at, and no clear way to find one. In this case, the person has used a URL sort of like a business card. They work for ACME Industries Corporation Inc, and the line on their business card that says that is represented as the URL for ACME Industries Corporation Inc. Useful information, but a dead end. If a person who has an actual presence on the Internet (that they wish to share) uses a URL of their home institution this way, they are either messing up or, perhaps, are following some corporate rule that requires them to not be an individual person.

2) I arrive at a multi-authored blog that the person in question may be an author on, but there is no easy way to find that person’s posts. I may even find the person’s name on the “about” page, but unless there is a blog post by the person who supplied the URL on the top page of the multi-authored blog, there is no way to easily find their writing. If I enter their name in the search function, it turns up nothing. There is no link of author’s names that bring up their work.

3) I have a name associated with the URL, say, Professor Jane Ukumbe. I find a person on a multi-authored blog that is called “Doc Uki-Duki” and otherwise there is no one else indicated on that blog with a surname starting with “U” and an advanced degree. I could guess that Jane Ukumbe is Doc Uki-Duki. But it might be bad to get that wrong. My attempt to locate the written work of Professor Ukumbe has been thwarted.

4) I have a name, say, Mary Smith, associated with a URL that leads me to a blog written by “M.S.” with no easily located reference to said “Mary.” In this case, do I write the sentence I mentioned above? Do I say “This is a blog post by Mary Smith, who will be at ScienceOnline 2012”? If I do, I may have just given out the real name of “M.S.” who up until now has been using a pseudonym. Or is M.S. really a pseudonym, or was Mary simply being cute by using her initials? Or what? Having no way to tell, I must not use the person’s name, even though if it is an anonymous pseudonym, it is a rather thinly disguised one.

5) The person’s name really is “Mary Smith” or the equally ubiquitous equivalent, so when I try to use the “+” symbol to bring up a link to Mary on Google+ I get a hundred zillion Mary Smiths and I can’t tell which one is she.

6) Somewhat more subtle and a problem of only intermittent effect, the person’s name is something like “Joe Smith E. Hendrickson” or some other bunch of symbols with spaces between them that is not a simple first and last name, so things like the Facebook @ technology or the Google+ “+” symbol stumble and are unable to find a match, even though there is a match in there somewhere.

7) I click on the URL associated with a person’s name and either arrive at a site that has links out to all of that person’s Internet stuff including a blog, which I then go to, or I end up going straight to the person’s blog and right there is an interesting, recent post that I can snork. This outcome, the one I’m looking for, happens in far fewer than half the cases. If you think this seems like a low percentage, I agree with you. I was surprised at how few people provide URL’s that linked more or less directly to a current blog post. Remember, those links are provide by people in the blogging and interned communication industry. That’s a little like going to a Pharmaceutical Conference and searching everyone’s luggage and finding that only a third of them had free drug samples!

In many cases, I assume that the difficulty that I encounter is simply my problem, and not a tactical mistake on the part of the person whose identity I am engaging. A person wishes to be simply linked to Megacorp Inc, or MRU, and that’s what they’ve done and my effort to find a blog post they’ve written is thwarted because they haven’t written one, or at least, don’t want their blog which is out there somewhere linked to them for the present purposes. This is why, when doing this ScienceOnline 2012 link fest, when I hit the MRU or the Acme Inc web site, I stop looking. I don’t want to barge into someone’s Live Journal or MySpace site and point to photos of that trip to the Yucatan five years ago that they would rather forget but don’t know how to erase from the world wide web. When I encounter ambiguities in name use that might indicate that someone is using either multiple identities or trying to be anonymous, I also cease and desist in linking a name to the item I’m posting because, again, I don’t want to screw up. But in both cases, it is quite possible that the person in question is simply represented on the Internet in a way that is suboptimal.

There are several things you can do if you want to make yourself easier to find, see, link to, and otherwise engage with. Here are a few suggestions. If you look at my online identity, you’ll see right away that I am suggesting here that you do what I say not what I do. I’ve got a few flaws in my identity management. Also, I’m probably missing some important points here, so please chime in; Tell us in the comments about your ideas for identity management.

1) If your name really is Mary Smith, change it immediately to something like Lady Gaga. Only not Lady Gag, there already is one of those. OK, so, in fact, you may not be able to change your name if it is a fairly common one, but have a look at some of the suggestions below to help make your identity more easily engaged by others.

2) Try to make your on line identity two names, if at all possible. First name, last name. If you are E. Howard Hunt, or T.E. Lawrence, or George H.W. bush, the Internet is not ready for you. This is probably only a small problem, and it will probably go away as these technologies improve, so this may not be a big deal. Also, if you are Mary Jane Smith, being something like M. J. Smith or Mary Ja Smith may be a good thing (see number 1 above).

3) Wherever you can, list all of your standard docking points on the Internet, so that no matter where someone encounters you, they have a roadmap to all the other places you are. There is a place for links on your Google + profile, there are places to put these things on facebook. You can have an email signature with these links on it. If you have a blog or two or three, they should be listed. An email address people can use to contact you should be handily available. Your YouTube account, your facebook link and your G+ about page URL, and whatever else you have should be listed somewhere at each of those very locations, in the appropriate place. This is what About pages are all about. Make sure your name (pseudo or otherwise) is on the about pages.

4) Make all those names the same. Don’t be Doc Holiday in one place and Henry Holiday somewhere else and Hank Holiday somewhere else, unless you really are trying to confuse people and keep your identity obscure. If you want people to know “Oh, this person did this AND that, and I met her at this conference, and they gave THAT talk and wrote THIS book and blogged over HERE until moving THERE …” then provide the necessary information.

5) If your presence on the Internet is complex, maybe you should have a domain based on your name at which you have easily identified links out to your other stuff. Many of the individuals I encountered had this sort of thing and I was readily able to find their blog and thus post a link to their latest blog post. One person had a central hub page for their identity but forgot to put the main blog on it! (I’ll have to send that person, a friend and colleague, an email!)

6) Try to have a recognizable consistent icon. In these moments of uncertainty, when someone is trying to link to you in Google+ or on Facebook, and they have typed in your name but several different ones come up and maybe they are not exactly sure if you are Michelle Bachman or Michele Bachmann, and both forms are visible in the list of choices, that little icon sitting there that looks like the icons linked to your identity elsewhere … your avatar … will reduce the uncertainty.

7) Last and maybe least, but still important: Check your email software. When someone gets an email from you, can they tell it is form you?

What am I missing? What do you do to make the process of engagement with colleagues and community work more smoothly?

Recently, NASA affiliated scientists shocked the esoteric world of biochemistry with the finding that a bacterium could successfully replace arsenic with phosphorus in key molecules, such as DNA, and make that work. Although arsenic is often incorporated into bio tissues, no one has been able to point to a prior study that clearly demonstrates that this is possible. This is very interesting science with all sorts of implications, if it works out. There are important as yet unknown details and open questions. The ultimate importance of this research remains to be seen, like any new scientific research, but if it is demonstrated to be as stated, this is very cool, new, and interesting science.

In this case, NASA produced one small press release, the substantive parts of which are reproduced here:

WASHINGTON — NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.

The news conference will be held at the NASA Headquarters auditorium at 300 E St. SW, in Washington. It will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the agency’s website at http://www.nasa.gov.

Participants are:
– Mary Voytek, director, Astrobiology Program, NASA Headquarters, Washington
– Felisa Wolfe-Simon, NASA astrobiology research fellow, U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, Calif.
– Pamela Conrad, astrobiologist, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
– Steven Benner, distinguished fellow, Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, Gainesville, Fla.
– James Elser, professor, Arizona State University, Tempe

That’s it. Prior to this press conference, the blogsophere went moderately wild (I’ve seen more wild) discussing and predicting what the find might be, talking about aliens, extraterrestrial life, etc. etc. Then, when the finding was reported in a paper released at the same time as the press conference (which is normal) and discussed in the press conference, most bloggers wrote about how NASA had totally screwed the pooch, putting out a press release (the one above) that caused widespread craszsiness in teh blogosphere.

I don’t agree. I think the widespread craziness was caused by the blogosphere itself, not by the press release above. I don’t think NASA needed to say less, or more, in this press release, but rather, those doing the wild speculation needed to read the actual press release and stick to what it says. Some did, by the way … several science bloggers pretty accurately predicted what the press conference was going to be about because they looked up who the participants were and did the math, as it were.

So, once again If find myself thinking one thing while the entire planet is thinking something different. I don’t think NASA screwed up this press release. (To reiterate: I don’t think NASA screwed up this press release. .. I did not mention the press conference or the research itself.) But many do.

So, I want to be edumucated. I want you to change my mind. Rather than stating that NASA did it wrong, prove it. In the comments below, reproduce a part of the press release, then cite a report in the blogosphere that came from this wording that was incorrect and over the top (about aliens or whatever) and show how a thoughtful rational expert or semi-expert in science or science writing can make the link that was made. Show us, in other words, how this press release caused some web site to say that NASA had found alien life, or whatever. Clearly distinguish between the press release being badly done in a way that caused the reaction vs. the blog or web site or press agency in question simply saying stupid crap because it was better press.

As a second exercise, and this would probably be more useful than the first (and the first exercise will not go well, I’m sure) try this: Simply rewrite the press release. This could be useful. I personally know people at NASA in public relations and elsewhere. I’ll make sure that anybody who is anybody sees the best of the rewrites.

And, if someone else has bothered to rewrite the press release in the comments, feel free to critique that press release too! We might as well get this right!

But really, in the end, my problems are minor compared to those of others. And that is true of everyone and everything I mention in this post, which is why I’ve posted illustrated links to important stories about the overarching topic of discussion. Lest we forget.

I mention all of this misery of my own for a reason: Staring on Monday or Tuesday, I began to slide more and more rapidly toward the edge of an abyss, and on Wednesday at 10:05 AM I was kicked straight into it. I have been floating on air since then. Floating on air like a person who is falling off a very very high cliff to his death. Or, floating on air like a person who is ecstatic and uplifted by his own happiness. I can’t tell yet. But one result of this whole floating thing is total distraction from what has been happening on the blogosphere, mostly in reaction to my initial discussion about rape, related issues, rape switches, and so on. Well, all of the sudden, with the help of my friend Stephanie and my friend Lou (at least, I hope he’s my friend!), I’ve caught up on this discussion and I am now ready to do the following to you depending on who you are:

1) issue you a sincere apology;
2) kick your ass into oblivion;
3) enlighten you about life; or
4) have violent sex with you. Figuratively.

I demand an apology!

First, I want to address a few blogospheric issues. One person whom I consider to be a friend, and another person whom I consider to be some troll who dropped out of nowhere, and a few others, have been waiting for me to apologize for one or both of the following statements:

That all soldiers at war are rapists even if they don’t rape anyone, and/or that Doms as in BSDM are rapists.

Regarding the first demand for an apology: This is a semantic issue and has been from the beginning. I happen to refer to men who’s theoretical rape switch went on as “rapists” even if they had not raped, much like a person who learns how to sweat pipe might be thought of as a “plumber” even if they have not yet … plumbed anything. Technically, what I just said might still be true, or it might not be. Who cares? Clearly, people are sensitive about this and those who have not actually committed rape should probably not be called rapists. I acquiesced to this point at the time, right when the first objection was made.

The rule I’m not following: The “Stand still while I continue to scream at you that you must apologize!” rule.

There are actually two fallacies in effect here: 1) That you (Rystefn, or whomever) have the right to pick a moment in time during an on-going thinking out loud conversation that happens to give you your trollish jollies and insist that this is the only thing that your trollee — your victim — has ever thought or said. No, you don’t get to do that. In fact, if you do that you will get spanked (see below for the spanking). 2) The fallacy of the universal. Both Rystefn and Lou are making this mistake, as are many others in this discussion. I’ll get to that in a moment.

You can’t have your apology, but I am sorry.

So no, guys, you can’t have your apology. We are talking about a serious issue here, and we are knocking around ideas. Nobody is accusing anyone of anything. We are just conversing. If you want to propose terminology or rhetoric, do so. If you want to propose alternative ideas, do so. But do not pick up pieces of mud and make love to them like they were the last piece of mud on the face of the earth. Do not huff and puff and blow my house down especially when it is also your house. In other words, stop acting like you were made entirely of your y-chromsome and nothing else. And, most importantly, begin to understand the fact that this discussion is not about you.

• Trolled
• U.S. Rape Statistics
• When Is a Rapist?
• Why So Silent?
• Words, Pride and Obligation: A Note to Rystefn and Lou

During this time I’ve only read a few of the comments and I entirely skipped reading two of her posts on Almost Diamonds. As I say in the very beginning, I was a bit distracted with my whole life falling apart and shit. So I have reasons for having let my friend down, but I still am very very sorry about that, and for that I apologize. The most important point Stephanie makes is probably that this whole discussion is not about the guys who are slogging around in this argument. I wonder, do any of them know what this is about?

Is there any wonder why most of my best friends are not heteronormative middle class white men?

Almost all of the people I’m close to in this world are women, and I think this is in part because you don’t really get close to men quite often. You get close to their ideas or, more likely, their ideals (such as they are). You share things (like proclivities and preferences) not thoughts and points of view. You do other stuff that guys do, whatever that is. As the present discussion progresses, I increasingly understand why. I compare the comments, both on the blogs and in private emails that are going back and forth, between the women and the men and I see an overwhelming difference, and this is not even counting Stephanie with whom I communicate a lot anyway. And, if we go back to Stephanie’s post on pay rates, and to my very recent quickie about how women are smarter than men, the problem becomes utterly obvious.

Most men have very small dicks and can’t handle it.

It is not the case that I’ve simply agreed with every woman who has voiced a thought in this discussion. In fact, I’m not sure at all that there is a gender bias in how much what I think may be similar to or different from what anyone else thinks. But there is a clear difference based almost entirely on gender in affect and style of effrontery.

(This is also not to say that women are nice and men are mean. If any sort of generalization would apply, that is not it. Perhaps women are smart and men are dumb. Most likely, though, I think most women are more thoughtful about what they are both saying and hearing than are men, who really don’t listen to what others say and who rarely think about what they are about to spew out as much as they should. On average.)

OK, back to some troll related commentary:

We cannot discuss anything substantive until everyone agrees on the meaning of the words we are using

This is the hobgoblin of an unthinking mind, and it is the sort of thing I have never heard a woman commenter or blogger say. I’ve only heard men say it. And no, it is not true. Well, I supposed it depends on what one means by ‘meaning’…

… As you can detect, I’m working off a bit of a laundry list here… and the next items have to to with the science that has been abused in some of this discussion.

Are human universals … universal?

The term Universal in this context is not a term one simply pulls out of one’s ass. It is a term that has been in use by scholars for some time, and there is quite a bit to say about it. What it does NOT mean is this: If there is a “universal” (like the tendency to run away when the tiger looks at you) it is simply not the case that every individual has that behavior or will effect that behavior under a given circumstance.

Deer. Headlight. You know the story. You shine a spotlight or headlights into a deer’s eyes and they freeze. If you have a firearm, and you shoot the deer this way, that is called “jacking” the deer. Easy hunting. (Note: This only works at night.)

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve shined the spotlight into the eye of the deer or the antelope — hundreds of times I’m sure — and I can tell you that sometimes the “universal” behavior happens, and sometimes it does not. I have it from a good source that on one particular reservation here in Minnesota, where the deer are “jacked” on a regular basis, very few of the deer stop in a light. Learning? Natural selection? We don’t know. But it is evidence that the “universal” may be labile.

So, please do not convert the hypothetical assertion that a particular thing like a rape switch is a human trait (which could be called a universal by some) to telling every man that he is a rapist. How stupid of you to think that. You must be a guy. I don’t even “believe” in universals, for fucks sake. And more importantly, learn what a “universal” is. And isn’t.

Proximate vs. Ultimate and Conscious vs Unconscious

People are messing up these concepts all over the place. I’ll be brief: The reason we have sex is to have babies. Period. The way we have sex has nothing to do with having babies. Obviously. Same with power relationships. Same with all of it. You have to separate ultimate explanations from proximate mechanisms if you are going to speak non-stoopidly of behavior.

Same goes for conscious vs. unconscious. In fact, just forget about that. The degree to which a behavior, tendency, switch, repression, all of it is known to the individual exhibiting the behavior is not relevant at all. I assure you that the belief that you know what is going on inside your own head is one of the greatest fallacies you will ever commit. Get over it.

Who put the “D” in BDSM?

This last bit is only for you Doms (as in BDSM). Everyone else kindly go away, because this is not going to be pretty.

I’ve already addressed the issue of whether I want to call Doms rapists. I’ve addressed it a half dozen times, but I’m sure I’ll have to say it again because some of you are just not that smart: I don’t need to call you a rapist. I don’t think that pretending to rape your girlfriend is the same thing as actually raping your girlfriend.

But Dom Rystefn himself (in between bouts of raping his girlfriend and beating his dog, I assume) pointed out that play-rape is to real rape what shooting skeets is to killing people. I love that analogy, and it is exactly what I have been thinking. It is what makes the D in BDSM interesting in the context of the rape conversation.

For myself, I can’t contribute much. I am not B,D,S, or M, and I am not an expert on this, and I’ve not read the literature. I would love to hear what people who do know what they are talking about have to say about this, other than total denial that there are things to learn.

Shooting skeets is a way of shooting pigeons that does not require the pigeon. This saves some trouble and money, and it also separates the shooter from pigeon-killing which may or may not be an issue. Pigeon-shooting is interesting, and has some recent anthropology done on it. The relationship between gun-owing cultures, right wingosity, The Klan and similar groups, pigeon shooting, and the construction of whiteness has been analyzed usefully by a colleague of mine. It is all very interesting.

Similarly, I can imagine that rape simulation can bear light on actual rape. What do I mean by this? What am I implying? Of what awful thing am I accusing you (you, the Doms who are allowed to read this)? Ha! Have you not been paying attention? Would you mind please putting down your dumbifying y-chromosome for a minute and think about how you LOOK when you are foaming at the mouth?

Which brings me to my last point. It suddenly dawned on me earlier today. I had been reading comments by Angry White Male (who is either a total parody or a total ass) and our friend Rystefn and some others, and I had been discussing this very post that you are reading with a friend. The friend said “Just leave out the stuff about the Doms… they won’t handle this well.” And it all came together.

You Dom’s are a bunch of whimp-ass babies. You want someone (who is what we call “willing”) to allow you to dominate them physically and psychologically, and this is how you get off. Or how they get off. But when the issue comes up that your behavior relates to violence you fall apart and get all teary eyed like you were just jumped by the bullies. You make the rules that say everyone else has to leave you alone and while that is happening one person should volunteer for you to pretend you are raping him or her, and when the core of the argument goes a bit over your head or turns out to be something that you didn’t think it was (egg on your face) you focus on spelling and word meaning and other stupid ass shit.

I have a little advice for you. Grow some balls and start paying attention to what you are presenting to the rest of us. Stop trying to control the conversation like you control your lover’s posture and position. Be a man for once. No, wait, don’t be a man! (What am I saying?) Be smarter, more interesting, less dogmatic, and braver.

Be a woman for once!

And remember. This conversation is not about you.