botany, shoes, books, and justice
I’m at ESA in Austin, Texas – thanks to you! I’m melting from the heat, but so happy and excited to be here. I’ve already run into lots of old friends and interviewed my first awesome ecologist.
Awesome ecologist posts will likely be up late this week or sometime next week. Until then, have a look at some of the talks I might see today, a breakdown of what people at ESA are presenting on, or keep up with #esa11 on twitter.
Sally Shapiro – He Keeps Me Alive
Dreams from the Malaria Pills (Turner)
Forward Operating Base Eagle, Iraq
This time it’s beautiful.
He’s in the kelp beds somewhere
off the California coast, floating
where green leaves touch the sun,
as if he’s disentangled
from thought itself, as if the mind
has come this far, up from the depths
to release him to the crests and shallows
drifting wave by wave back to shore.
He knows there are bombs
washed up on the beach. There are limbs
of people he has never met. Bandages
soaked in blood and salt.
He knows the Qur’an and the Bible
have washed page by page to shore,
their bindings stripped loose, their ink
blurred into the sea.
And if people are crying there,
wading out in the surf to carry it all
back in, then he hasn’t seen them yet.
the ocean sounds in the bones
of his skull and the albatross fly
reconnaissance over the waves,
searching for a route home.
Brian Turner
From Here, Bullet
The Pride Festivals I attended before this weekend were literally walled off events. The festival would rent part of a city park and surround it with chain link fence, then plaster the fence with signs. You couldn’t see in or out. These events were trying to carve out a safe space and do a little GLBT education in towns that had, at best, weakly accepting climates. The events were small, smaller even than you’d expect for the size of the town and were attended mostly by local GLBT people who seemed desperate for a little community, a space to be visible yet safe. I loved these events for their hope and solidarity and defiance and having that wonderful at home feeling of being surrounded by queers. But when you walked out of those walls, the feeling was gone.
Pride in Big City was completely different. 
The crowd was hundreds of thousands strong and incredibly diverse – everyone from Chinese grannies to the Cleaver family (and of course, all manner of queers) showed up.
The mood was welcoming and celebratory – the streets were lined with flags and every business decked out in Pride gear with special deals or free rainbow swag. The parade made it very clear that Big City values its queer community (or at least our money…) more than anywhere else I’ve lived. In addition to all the local queer community groups and organizations, major political figures made speeches and had floats, the police department not only marched in the parade, they were recruiting at the event, the school board and teachers marched in the event pledging to support their queer students and protect them from bullying (for US comparison, see here and here), and major banks built elaborate floats and costumes and paid fit, scantily clad men and women to dance and flirt with the crowd.
Yes, it was fairly mainstream, crassly commercialized, and appropriate for the average 5 year old. But I still had a really, really good time.
I’ve switched to Disqus for comment management here. Until all the comments originally made in the old system finish importing into Disqus, comments on old posts may not be visible. Give it a day or two before you start emailing me about problems with comments showing up.
I was really excited about the possibilities of Google+. I really enjoy using it – so much smarter and more useful and fun than facebook. I was disappointed early on when the privacy controls on my profile weren’t as fine grained as I’d like – I wanted to include a link to my blog, but only visible to members of certain circles. But all links on a Google profile page have the same access settings, so I’d have to give the same set of people access to both my research website and my blog. Not cool; it’s ok if my boss sees my research website, but not ok if she sees my blog. But Google+ is just getting started, so I cut them some slack. I submitted some feedback and thought there was a good chance Google would make a change.
I’d also hoped for Google+ to have privacy and access controls good enough to let me link my identity as Sarcozona with my real identity, at least behind the scenes – or at least make it so I could switch between the two easily. Circles seemed built for this sort of thing.
In my Google+ fantasy land, every field – including the name – would have multiple versions, or multiple, linked profiles would be permitted. I’d have my real name in the first and Sarcozona in the second. Anyone searching Sarcozona would then see my ‘Sarcozona’ profile and anyone searching my real name would see a version of my profile associated with my real name. I’d get to choose which circles see me as Sarcozona, which see me as my real name, and which see a merged version.
I figured that even if my particular version of this fantasy didn’t come true, Google+ would find a clever way to help people integrate their online identities through their service.
But then some people who’d set up Google+ accounts with their pseudonyms suddenly found themselves unable to access any google services, including their email. There was no warning and the appeals process was slow and confusing. Even worse, once these people’s accounts were suspended, they were unable to liberate their data. The idea that I’d always have the ability to extract my data from Google is why I’ve felt so safe using Google services: if something went wrong, I could leave with my emails, contacts, documents, etc. Now I know that if something goes wrong that might not be an option. That is terrifying. Huge amounts of my life are on Google servers. Losing access to that data would be more painful and inconvenient than my house burning down.
It’s not uncommon or wrong for people to have multiple online identities. I don’t understand why Google is handling the pseudonym issue so badly; you’d think the advertising potential for having access to everyone’s real and pseudonymous identities would be enormous.
I started using Google+ thinking it would be the answer to my social media prayers. Now I’m considering moving away from using any Google services – as much as I dread the extra work leaving will entail.