nihil architecture blogs

2003, a great time for liberty and democracy in the Greatest Nation on Earth. Lawrence v. Texas was ruled. A landmark Supreme Court ruling that ruled that the ban on sodomy was unconstitutional; thus we see the fine work of constitutions in practice. The very fundamental laws that challenge not citizens but governments to protect the citizens against them. Well, it didn’t go right immediately, a similar case was tried in 1986 which ruled in the negative. Apparently the flaw was that the Supreme Court [held] that it had viewed the liberty interest too narrowly.

Perfectly understandable looking at the text of the Fourteenth Amendment:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Hell, I would make mistakes interpreting that too. Because I have no idea what the fuck it actually is supposed to mean. Nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. What the hell is this shit even supposed to be telling me? Obviously if I make it a law saying that I can do it, then it is not without due process of law therefore not unconstitutional? liberty, the most vague term ever? So if without a due process some state stops me from walking around naked, that is unconstitutional? These words are so retardedly vague that you can conceivably argue any fucking law to be unconstitutional or constitutional given enough imagination.

But hey, let’s talk about another favourite, the second one:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Crystal clear honestly. So I take it that when I’m arrested on the streets with a nuclear bomb or an RPG, maybe a tank or whatever, then I could of course fall back to my constitutional right to bear arms right? Well, evidently not because it only goes so far. Great we established that obviously the letter of the law doesn’t mean to imply all arms, just some that don’t go too far. Great, vote for me for right honourable genetically engineered executive monkey of the US of A, I will just outlaw any piece of firearm except water guns. Constitutions: difficult is instant, the impossible takes five minutes. So obviously the truth is in the middle, as: What goes too far? which is going to be decided by someone. So in other words, if the constitution was there or not doesn’t make a flying fucking difference because the person who’s going to decide it is going for what he or she thinks goes too far anyway.

How about the first one, the holy grail:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Almost every piece of moral convention has a religious basis. Okay, so enforcing things like male circumcision would never fly because that’s enforcing religion? Great, let’s legalize murder while we’re at it, after all it clearly originates from the bible. You can argue in every single instance that whatever you’re doing isn’t because of your religion but something you’d do regardless of it. Freedom of speech is of course always a good one. For some retarded reason prostitution is illegal, except if you film it, because pornography is protected under the First Amendment. Okay, so apparently the First Amendment makes it legal to perform an unlawful act as long as I film it because freedom of speech? Cool, so why isn’t child porn legal to make or a good old fashioned snuff film? Of course, your opinion isn’t free if it’s ‘hate speech’ of course, where hate speech just means not liking some group where most people have no problem with them. I swear, if this piece of text did not exist wouldn’t make a flying difference, some Supreme Court justices were just okay with porn and decided to frivolously search in the constitution for a reason to make it legal.

Okay, so the US is basically the only western country that still actively practices capital punishment, so there’s the eight guy:

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Are you shitting me? Did the grand minds that wrote this text down really think it would change any-thing. excessive hmm? the vaguest term ever. I’m pretty sure what whoever imposes bails or fines imposes what is in his or her mind just right and not excessive? And cruel and unusual? What kind of flying drooling retard actually authors laws with these vague kinds of words.

Which you can do with anything really because this entire piece of text is worded so purposefully vaguely that with enough imagination you can make pretty much anything legal or illegal on constitutional grounds.

And that brings us to the point of Judical Activism. Let’s face it, the fact that the constitution is so vague doesn’t help it and all 9 of those justices are massive judical activists. You don’t have to be a genius transform a list what Scalia thinks the constitution says into the party he votes for. You also don’t have to be a genius to realize that as long as præsidents nominate justices and the senate has to approve it with a mere 50% majority that each and every one of those justices is going to be a judical activist. If you’re a politician who believes in something, why would you not appoint the biggest Judical activist to champion that cause? The people who appoint and nominate justices have no fucking interest in appointing neutral people who interpret the constitution free of political ideology. It’s in their fullest agenda to appoint the biggest judical activists in the history of judical activists.

It’s been a hell of a week being a woman for a week, and by that I mean completely uneventful with the highlight of the day the fifteen minutes in the morning try to convincingly get a feminine voice jarred in. My mother stopped taking it seriously 3 days ago and reverted back to my given name. I decided to not correct her as it was kind of awkward, I suppose a true transwoman would get offended over that, so maybe I’m not doing it completely correctly.

The one thing I learnt from all this though, is how badly men have it, having to shave every day, luckily I can go back to shaving once per month now, like women do.

In my quæst for rare items being able to help me kill off my corrupted heart, I sawr a stand, as I recall it was a chip stand. So I put up my fine feminine voice I’ve been breeding for these past two days, no one notices a darned difference or even acts like ‘Oh, did he turn insane?’, they reacted like they would if I had a cold I suppose.

This still returns us to the philosophical issue of what defines womanhood, what makes one recognise something as feminine? There are some præ-hormonal transwomen who have been able to put up quite the likeness, bringing it back to Sasha Hostyn, she doesn’t seem to wear makeup, as far as se said she’s not started HRT yet, she dresses quite similarly as I, so what does she have that I don’t hmm? Perhaps beating top rated Koreans in video games is the epitome of womanhood.

Maybe I do need the dress to pull this off. I’m but a woman on the inside, a woman, a wannabe woman, ehh—let’s make that a moman perhaps?

Well, one girl, came over for the barbecue, expert on feminosity, or so she claims, I don’t think any womanoid guilty of appreciating the fine humour of Jonti Picking is in a position to make a claim to that coveted position. She completely understands the difficult situation I am in, doesn’t stop her from laughing at me but she does her best to help me and coach me with my newfound weekly gender identity.

Be it so, her motives weren’t completely altruistic, apparently this implies feasting out her life long dream of applying makeup to my mug, I feel the rouge doesn’t quite suit my features. Apparently a girl also doesn’t burps, she said while having burped five minutes prior due to iced tea.

Furthering my point though, as usual she again managed to smuggle two articles of my wardrobe through my customs of guilt which she’ll end up wearing like it’s nothing, she might want to just bring some clothing in that oversized purse in case of rain, or you know, bring one of those 20 articles that are located some-where in the darkest crypts of under her bed back for that case, if the weather god’s are pleased with those deeds, she can even actually consider to return them. Also, my hair is longer than hers.

As expected, after the initial choices to make and the daily vocal training, life has been rather uneventful in my new gender-identity. I told my family and friends about it and the reason I’m doing it, mostly by just showing them this blog since it’d become a rather cumbersome story to repeat; a few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent.

I suppose it sort of was the point of this experiment to demonstrate the insignificant nature of assuming a different gender role for a week and how little extra experience it gives you. A lot of people would be telling me that I’m doing it wrongly and I’m not actually living like a woman, but what more can I do? As I said, there are women that don’t wear make-up and to just assume I’m going to have to wear make-up and pink skirts or what not because I’m living my life as a woman for a week is nothing but an insult and making stereotypes of women.

Modern day western society is simply open-minded enough that even though there are correlations between the behaviour of men and women, these are far from absolute, and women do exist which basically behave completely the same as some man could do, except for the fact that their voice is different, and they are physically different; physical stuff I apparently do not have the right to control until that real life experience period anyhow. There are transgendered tomboys you know, a prominent example is this female progamer Sasha Hostyn, she’s a tomboy, she’s a progamer, look at her, she dresses like most other progamers do, she doesn’t wear skirts, doesn’t seem to wear makeup. So she’s got long hair, so do several other male progamers, so do I. And I’m pretty sure there are transwomen with short hair as well.

I’m just not sure what difference it makes that I’m living my life as a woman for a weak except my morning vocal training, except that some people find it very amusing to mock me with it.

I woke up today with my newfound assumed identity, tried to shave again but realized that testosterone in general was never too much on my side and it wasn’t needed to head towards the mirror, practise a more feminine smile and then contemplate the issue of makeup, to wear or not to wear?

While makeup has been traditionally associated with women in western culture, assuming that I was born in a female body, I doubt I would actually use it all that much, I’m not the person to especially groom myself a lot, or to get outside for it to make a difference. Furthermore, I know a lot of women who do not wear makeup, and I even know some guys who do. Surely to make makeup a part of my new gender identity perhaps is a bit patronizing and stereotypical to women, is it not?

However, it might be exactly what a practitioner would so very much require of me in that time of real life experience, I’m actually not completely sure if I should do it, for the moment though, I’ll keep working on the voice, since it’s actually pretty hard and I doubt I’ll even get close in a week.

I’ve since tried to some-what bring my intonation to a bit more feminine slide, since I usually have a pretty breathy voice (especially when I just wake up.) I suppose it’s a bit easier for me to manage since that’s where those voices tend to go to. Reading up on it though it seems that that’s a thing you should avoid and you should focus mostly on the intonation. Apparently the fastest therapies take more than 3 months to successfully complete, so I have a very long road ahead of me here it seems…

It’s actually ridiculously hard, I just spent an hour or so on the phone with a female friend who against her wishes was slyly manipulated into helping me out with my new found feminine powers of making people feel very guilty. I’m very good at imitating people’s voices, even of the opposite sex and copying their intonation, but getting my own feminine intonation is pretty darn complicated.

It’s actually very tempting to give up here, but I won’t, I will hold strong to prove the ridiculousness of it as well as gain a perspective on how hard it is to try to pass as a member of the opposite sex. Where others have fallen, I shall stand defiant.

For those who don’t know, typically undergoing sex-reassignment therapy, surgery or hormonal, in most countries requires meeting pretty strict criteria, honestly, independent of whatever stress it might cause for people to be born in the wrong body, I feel people have the right to change and modify their body in whatever way they want, chopping of your own arm? Well, it´s your body, not mine, you can’t have mine, but if you want to surgically let your arm be detached, your party. That transgendered people have been known to suffer great psychological trauma from having a body that does not conform to their identity makes it even more stringent. (Note that I also think that transgendered people are silly, just as I think that people with a gender identity at all are silly, gender identities are silly and probably a product of society placing a lot of emphasis on things that are very much irrelevant.

Part of the silly criteria to take in hormones is to have lived your life for a certain amount of time as the opposite sex, getting accustomed to your “new identity”. Okay? So what the fuck does that even mean? Do I have to wear a dress? I know women who dress pretty identically to how I dress, do I have to grow my hair long? I already got that. Do I have to wear makeup? Well, that’s getting a bit patronizing isn’t it?

However, to demonstrate the absurdity of this, I am going to live my life as a woman for a week, maybe more if I like it. This will involve telling everyone to swap pronouns and act a bit more like a woman, I act pretty indifferent to gender roles in general so it shouldn’t be too hard, am probably going to have to change my intonation up a bit though. Since my name is clearly masculine, I’d have to ask people to call me something else.

We’ve ventured into the unknown territories of being a woman, this has started by assuming the name Kim, going to the hassle of explaining a lot of weird shit to a lot of people, and actually getting down to shaving. Kind of ironic, since men tend to be the people shaving their facial hair. Makeup is for bimbos for the time being.

LaTeX is pretty much the standard for publishing mathematical documents, a pretty old standard too, and one I dislike on a fundamental level, already I should have acquired copious amounts of nerd-rage by writing this, but you know it turns me one when you guys are mad at me.

My main dislike is hardly the quality of the output—though that could really use some work too, despite what the liberal media may tell you, it’s far from the quality of a professional typesetter—it’s the language used to specify the output. The language to me is so daft and devoid of any reasonable thought, it feels like gotos all over the place again.

The year is 2010, Dijkstra has won, few modern languages still support the goto, those that do often require the code to have special privileges and/or be explicitly placed in some ‘unsafe’ clause. However there are more things to healthy programming, say I’m programming some code which does some-thing with prime numbers, tries to find some pattern in it, just hypothetically, say that initially, I’m not that ambitious, and I investigate only the first 1 000 000 primes. Afterwards, I’m on a lead and I want to scoop it up a notch and go for the first 10 000 000, surely, if I programmed it scalably, I would only have to change the number 1000000 to 10000000 once in my code and the rest adapts right? If I run a gravity simulator, say I want to then try it for two times as much gravity? If I programmed this well I would have to change that number only once right? If I make some program to output a web-page, and I suddenly decide to output XHTML instead of HTML, surely if I did this well I would only have to change one switch some-where and the rest follows?

Okay, so let’s port this idea to LaTeX, a real life example, a friend of mine was once collaborating, he used em-dashes in his version, his parter thought they were too prætentious, so he changed them to commata. He had to edit every single em-dash, a simple substitute didn’t work because it turns out they used --- in more places than em-dashes. It was a frustrating task I can imagine. Now, it’s quite possible to just use \medium-pause every time and let this be output as em-dashes or as commata at one’s pleasure. But this is seldom done, and LaTeX certainly doesn’t make this very convenient nor encourages this. Another quite simple example would be that you’re writing some-thing which uses the speed of light, and in a second edition you find out that the symbol conflicts with some other symbol in the same formula, you’d wish you had used s_l there or some other thing instead of c the entire time, now you have to edit it, probably missing a few, and introducing errors. In my world, I would have used some-thing like [lightspeed] from the start and bound that concept to a symbol at only one piece in the entire code, which is then easily changed. Alternatively, you might find out your publisher’s style doesn’t really like dots and wants crosses or spaces for multiplication, you’re stuck on editing that. You could just search and replace, but of course you want to check. Isn’t it easier to just specify multiplication each time and define the symbol associated with that at some higher level?

Another part we’re always getting hot about is re-use of code, Two or more, use a for!, LaTeX isn’t particularly friendly about this thing either, often you will find multiple æquations which re-use some basic concept into it which often leads to copy-ing and pasting of text. I once learnt that as soon as you copy and paste your code, you’re doing some-thing wrong and I agree with this maxim. Consider this simple example:


$\land$ and $\lor$ distribute over each other, more formally:
\begin{eqnarray}
x \land (y \lor z) &=& (x \land y) \or x (\land z) \\
x \lor (y \land z) &=& (x \lor y) \land x (\lor z)
\end{eqnarray}


Splendid, I’d rather just use:


\mutual_distribution(\land,\lor)


And define once how this is output, and then be done with it. I can change that template once then later if I want to make some changes. I’m to be honest surprised that LaTeX automatically enumerates your æquations for you and you don’t have to do that yourself. And yes, it is possible with some hacking around to make such a template, but the syntax for it is so limited and confuzzling that almost no one does it, and it almost makes things less readable to begin with. I tried and I tried to make this happen a little more but the language was quite clearly never designed for it that well, and it’s madness and pain.

LaTeX lacks a \Beta on its own, quite obviously because it looks visually the same as B so why bother? Well, even if you were a dusty computer scientists who has a fetish with not keeping his mind ordered, it still begs the quæstion in what typeface?, it’s not unlikely that a typeface exists which for clarity puts Greek letters in a slightly different makeup, and I would not think this would be a bad idea, differentiating A and ? in various manuscripts can be very handy. And this requires extensive workarounds in LaTeX, to be expected from a tool coming from a time which prided itself on writing all possible code with the mentality of not looking ahead and taking into account the future. LaTeX code manages to be a reasonable write-only language, an impressive feat considering you don’t even have to mentally follow the flow of computation, that its commenting syntax is so verbose that it discourages people from using them might be another part of the problem.

Another thing I don’t like is how it enters and closes math-mode, sure, if math-modes can’t nest? Why not take the same open and closing tag right? I am sure to speak for all of us when I say that never has debugging been such a pain as LaTeX incorrect LaTeX math-mode closing, the error messages are so enormously cryptic by misplacing a dollar sign that you often have no idea exactly which it is you misplaced and often when you got it to work you still have no idea what you did wrong. It’s like rebooting your computer when some-thing went wrong and you’re still not exactly sure on how you fixed it. It turns out that closing tags help error messages and help you find them. Maybe this is Donald’s savant mind speaking who makes no errors, but for us mortals this is damned annoying.

It’s quite clear that the base of this language was designed in a time when people were practically still cave-men scratching COBOL code in granite walls to keep track of how many mammoths they hunted down.

Finally, on a more meta-level. LaTeX, well, just PDF or Postscript really, defines a lot of things which I feel a document ought not define. Yes, they are languages to specify the layout for a printing place, every pixel, every vector, and I feel that the only thing that should ever receive that data is the printer, or the person who checks it before it goes to the printer. The consumer should never receive that on his or her computer. Things like font size, font type, letter spacing, colour, text width, line spacing, these should all be properties of the viewer not of the document it reads. Supposedly LaTeX is about legibility, and it has used some archaic myths about what is optimal legibility to algorithmically force that down our throats, in reality probably more Donald Knuth’s præferred style. In the end, legibility is subjective, dependent on person, varies through locus and time, has a genetic and an environmental component, what one person considers legible another does not. So people should be able to adjust those settings in their viewer, computers are powerful enough to calculate that on the fly nowadays. Especially since e-readers are coming up, why not use that advantage?

Some people have already done this, it’s called separation of præsentation and content, take apart what you are saying semantically, and how you are layouting what you say for the most part as you can. It’s scalable, it takes into account that the house style of the publishing magazine may later on change, it enables the same document to easily be published in multiple styles depending on the target audience, it also gives the audience itself control over the style if they receive it in digital format, and so on. I for one hate with a passion that new misodendric hype of basically 1 em line spacing in papers. I’m still not really sure if they actually hit enter twice after every line or make some switch that does that automatically for each line, but as they use LaTeX I would not be surprised if they actually accomplished their treeslaughter by the former. Every time I see it, I would kill to have my PDF viewer implement a simple switch that could take that away, it reads both annoyingly and I’d like my grandchildren to have a plentiful supply of oxygen.

Okay, so let’s say you have to be operated. You go to meet your doctor, he shakes your hand, he’s friendly, he makes a little small talk, tries to ensure you that it’s not a big deal, that this operation is routine work for him and that he’s done it for years and the risks are really quite small, he’s friendly, and he seems genuinely concerned for your well-being. There’s just one catch.

He’s some-one who look to be in his twenties, and he has long, green hair and an eye-brow piercing.

Now, as you go to the operating table, you see him there again, he’s removed his piercing, his hair is tucked back, he’s wearing his white coat, his gloves, and he’s wearing an operating mask and all that good stuff. Obviously none of this interferes with his task at hand.

However he’s still a youthful bloke who’s got long green hair and an eye-brow piercing when he first introduces himself to his patients. The quæstion at hand is if people can, or should, be able to be refused for a job like this regardless of meeting all other qualifications because they don’t radiate the authority with that that they should.

Where-ever you go, laws regarding this are opaque at best, the concept of ‘discrimination’ is vague and arbitrary. Discrimination was illegal when it was legal to not hire women into executive functions because they didn’t radiate authority enough. And it is still illegal this day while for a lot of legal things the only qualification one needs is to be older than a certain age. What is ‘discrimination’ and what is not, is quite simply just translating the mass consensus of the people about ‘how far you can go’.

And quite obviously, there are a lot of people who would not feel that women radiate enough authority to be able to be a doctor. However not hiring women because of that rule is out of the quæstion in most western countries these days, that’s ‘discrimination’. And of course being a woman is irrelevant for one’s capabilities as a surgeon. Just as having green, long long and an eye-brow piercing is. However people grow a lot more sympathetic to requiring doctors to change that, because people might not feel safe then. Even though obviously it’s just conceding to their præjudices.

Of course, there is a fundamental difference between being a woman and having a piercing and green hair, you can change the latter easily, but not the former. Or is that entirely true? Quite absurdly one can say: ‘You can also change your sex!, and that’s quite true. But of course, a very big sacrifice to make for most people to be a doctor. But perhaps not bigger than for some people to live their lives in a hair colour they do not like just because some people are small-minded bigots?

Piercings and green hair are again different, you can take out a piercing quite easily, but to die your hair back and forth from every interview is quite cumbersome, to cut it and let it re-grow is again completely impossible.

But this is all still the public service. Let’s say you are a commercial entity with a for-profit raison d’être, if the law would require you to hire women, even though the sad reality is that hiring women in certain positions will simply mean less profit—then you’re stuck with that. You might even think that this is a sad thing and honestly want to give these woman a chance to prove themselves, but the reality is that you’re primary responsibility as a ceo is delivering profit to your shareholders, and not hiring women accomplishes that. You cannot let your political convictions interfere with your job, so to speak.

As said, what the law requires and what not of employers is opaque. However it seems to have been established some-what by præcedence that sex and ethnicity are not a quality you cannot hire people on. Even though it will eventually hamper your profit because the world is simply filled with small-minded bigots. You can also argue that this has a good reason, as you cannot (easily) change these qualities of yourself. It’s imaginable that you for same reason also can’t disqualify short people on the argument that clients are simply still small-minded bigots.

But it seems to go deeper than that. Long hair poses a risk in various job situations, but women seem to never be required to cut their hair short even though it could hamper their performance. Women simply in various cultures conventionally have long hair, and you can’t ask them to cut it, because it would be seen as quite hard for a woman to live without long hair should she desire to have it.

However, say you’re a male waiter in a classy restaurant, it’s quite imaginable that they require you to cut your long hair. Admittedly it hampers with your job performance, and not even for a tangible reason, but only because the world is filled with small-minded bigots. But because it’s ‘unconventional’ for males to have long hair, this can be required of them. Even though some security risks that are far more important cannot require women to cut their hair short. It would be unsurprising for me if some men have just as much troubles having short hair as some women. This can also be a cultural thing though, indeed, to ask a Sikh to cut his hair, a thing his religion forbids, is again more complicated.

A fundamental difference between public services like health-care and commercial things is though that health-care is seen as a right provided free of charge, at least in the civilized world outside of that isolated greatest nation in the world. While those commercial things are privileges you pay, if you pay for it, should you not be able to demand that you are assisted by some-one who is not a foreigner if you so please? While if it’s a thing the government provides free of charge, you have nothing to complain, take it or leave it. If you don’t like it, then try to pay a doctor out of your own pocket.