Year: 2019

Pinned over the summer and fall…

Parenting articles:

  • Who’s to Blame for a Generation of Angry White Men? (Dame Magazine) Asking the valid question, if all these mass shooters came from “normal” white families, what is wrong with normal white parenting?
  • The Conscious Kid‘s month+ long series on disrupting racism with kids covers enough theory and practice to get started on dismantling that normal white family, although it is focused on raising racialized kids to thrive. Instagram, like most social media, is just useless about archive navigation, so I’m going to link the whole series in another post.
  • Parenting Science looks at the evidence about babies’ moral lives. In short, babies are so loving it makes me tear up.
  • How couples try to equitably divide childcare. We found the practicalities of this surprisingly difficult, and if I didn’t have first- or second-hand experience with non-couple models like collective houses, multi-parent queer families, and project management I don’t think I would have been able to figure out how to approach this. The article highlights division by task rather than turn-taking as a way to share the mental load, which is mostly what we landed on as well. In the early days, a milk parent and an everything-else parent. Then a day parent and a night parent for awhile. Currently, a daycare liaison and an inventory / research coordinator.
  • The pregnancy-related chimera situation is so much bigger than I thought. Content note: lots of genetically-determined gender assumptions in that article.
  • I know a lot of folks who did/do baby signs with their kids, who like me probably had not considered perspectives on that from Deaf folks who sign. There are (of course), many takes, but this story makes such a basic point that baby sign resources created by hearing people are often incorrect that I felt ridiculous for not assuming that would be the case.

Other things:

WHEREAS, the earth is round

I wanted to get a world map play mat, after seeing examples of using maps to disrupt assumptions of whiteness with kids, talk about immigration and indigeneity, etc (e.g., Dr. Rosales Meza here). Remembering an old scene from The West Wing about how mainstream maps make Africa and other equatorial landmasses unfairly small, I went looking for info on the most justice-minded map projection.

Wikipedia has a good discussion of the argument given by the cartographers in the West Wing scene and the much larger context of the politics of area vs shape trade-offs in flat map construction and the great map projection debates of the twentieth century.

To my total delight, I learned that in 1989, a group of North American cartography associations endorsed a resolution against ALL map projections on the grounds that all flat maps warp our perception of our spherical home planet.

WHEREAS, the earth is round with a coordinate system composed entirely of circles, and

WHEREAS, flat world maps are more useful than globe maps, but flattening the globe surface necessarily greatly changes the appearance of Earth’s features and coordinate systems, and

WHEREAS, world maps have a powerful and lasting effect on people’s impressions of the shapes and sizes of lands and seas, their arrangement, and the nature of the coordinate system, and

WHEREAS, frequently seeing a greatly distorted map tends to make it “look right”,

THEREFORE, we strongly urge book and map publishers, the media and government agencies to cease using rectangular world maps for general purposes or artistic displays. Such maps promote serious, erroneous conceptions by severely distorting large sections of the world, by showing the round Earth as having straight edges and sharp corners, by representing most distances and direct routes incorrectly, and by portraying the circular coordinate system as a squared grid. The most widely displayed rectangular world map is the Mercator (in fact a navigational diagram devised for nautical charts), but other rectangular world maps proposed as replacements for the Mercator also display a greatly distorted image of the spherical Earth.

Way to cut the gordian knot, cartographers. I’m so glad to know you are out there caring whether I have an accurate impression of the shapes and sizes of lands and seas. For real. We got kiddo a pillow globe.

Pinned in March: podcast edition

People keep asking if I am getting any projects done while on leave and I keep saying no, but I realized I actually have been making decent progress on my project to be a little less ignorant about China. Here are my favourite recent episodes from my top two podcasts about China:

  • How does China’s advertisement market work? (Middle Earth Podcast). When I am trying to learn about something I am profoundly ignorant about, I find the easiest way is to piggyback on something I do know about. So I have been listening to tech analysis about China. This one covers the large differences between American and Chinese digital privacy laws and consumer tracking data, plus how social media and influencers work in China, where being too influential can get you arrested. Fascinating (to me)! Middle Earth panelists always seem eager to talk to each other– the two advertising industry guys in this episode have intriguing questions for the Weibo influencer.
  • Huawei and the Tech Cold War (Sinica Podcast). This has a great discussion of 5G and the international politics surrounding it. There is a non-techy panelist so things get explained for civilians.

A couple of other favourite podcast episodes that have made me less ignorant about some other things:

Pinned over the winter

  • The Risks of Using Auction Prices as Artworks’ Fair Market Value (Artsy) I am aware that the high-end art market is a weird financial scam run by rich people, but this article gives some great examples of how that actually works. Secret agreements, price fixing, show auctions– what a trip!
  • The Value of Childhood Crushes (The New York Times) It’s rare enough to see children respected as whole people that each instance is a treat. What a sweet and caring little article about a sweet and lovely topic, crushes.

    One option, of course, is to do nothing at all about a crush except to savor it. “That is so safe,” Mr. Smallidge said. “That’s such a delicious feeling. One of the messages that would be nice for kids to hear is that they don’t have to do anything about crushes. A crush has its own value because it opens us up and it’s exciting. And most of them, I would say, end there.”

  • Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier (Los Angeles Review of Books) I had my usual Jaron Lanier response to this, which is to really enjoy reading a critical perspective on Silicon Valley by someone who knows a lot of insider lore, while simultaneously dreading the condensed version of this I will be hearing from oppressively anti-tech/pro-human-connection west coast hippies for the next few years. Also, being filled with desire for Lanier to cut off his weird white man dreadlocks. I had forgotten about this SEC decision:

    One thing that’s really interesting is that Facebook is not a normal company, in the sense that its valuation when it went public wasn’t based on how much money it made, which is what would normally happen with a business. It actually somehow talked the SEC into creating this other category, where it would be valued based simply on how much it was used, just on user engagement. And I think that was one of the most dreadful decisions in the history of financial governance, because, unfortunately, it set the pattern for other companies that went public later, like Twitter. So it’s almost like a government mandate that, instead of actually making money and serving customers, a company will become an addiction and behavior modification empire.

  • Can New Energy Technologies Save the Planet? Ask the Sperm Whale (The Tyee) Andrew Nikiforuk points out that most of the whales that were killed for oil were killed after the invention of refined fossil fuels made that oil unnecessary, because that invention also made boats a lot better at chasing whales. Capitalism can’t be used to conserve anything; its whole thing is to run the planet into the ground.
  • Leashes, licences for cats promoted as way to protect birds (Times Colonist) Do it, Saanich! This is my #2 favourite minor political goal behind getting rid of daylight savings time.
  • Island Voices: Seeing the forest for the trees in urban planning (Times Colonist) An informed, coherent letter to the editor is a joy.