How when you let go of people. And hold on to others. You sort of swing a different way. As if we were monkeys from a barrel. Let go of the strand you were holding. Grab another. Gravity takes a minute to settle things into a new equilibrium. You think: Is this where I want to be? Did I do that on purpose? Where are we going now?
Monthly Archive for March, 2009
Adam Wiggins posts an “Order of Operations” for building software:
- Make it work.
- Make it elegant.
- Make it fast.
- Make it secure.
I think I get bogged down in trying to do 2. right off the bat, when I should be focusing on 1.
“In our lifetimes we’re going from almost no one being able to communicate to almost everyone be able to communicate. We’re also going from almost no one having any kind of information and access to libraries to virtually everyone having access to every piece of information in the world. That is a enormous accomplishment to humanity.”
A paper for Spanish 101 by Erik Pukinskis. Disclaimer: the following is not vetted for accuracy in any way. It is culled from Wikipedia and even less reputable web sites. Nonetheless, it is probably not so far from the truth.
35,000 years ago, there were no people in the Americas. Just plants and animals. In some ways, they are the rightful owners of this place. But some time between 15,000 and 35,000 years ago, the first people made their way from Asia into the Americas via a land bridge, thus beginning a long string of territorial conflicts.
By 10,000 B.C., possibly earlier, people known as San Dieguito Paleo-Indians had settled in the region now known as San Diego. By the 18th century, these people had come to know themselves as Kumeyaay, and they occupied the land extending from the San Luis Rey River in Oceanside all the way to the Colorado River to East, and down into Baja California, well past what is now known as Ensenada.
Though Juan Rodrigues Cabrillo, a Portugese explorer sailing for Spain, landed a ship called the San Salvador in Kumeyaay territory in 1542 and declared it “San Miguel”, it wasn’t until 150 years later that the Spanish colonialization effort would begin in earnest. In 1769, Spanish conqueror Gaspar de Portolà established the first military outpost in San Diego, the “Presidio de San Diego” and began to try to establish rule.
Providing the religious component of the imperialist cocktail, Franciscan friars started building a mission in San Diego a few years later. The mission was built with slave labor, and despite arguments that Indians entered the mission of their own free will, by the time they were baptized, they were forced to work and forbidden to leave.
With the building of the mission came more and more European settlement and more and more Kumeyaay killed, abused, and forced out of their homeland.
The Kumeyaay were not happy with these conditions, and with the invasion into their territory, and in 1775 several hundred Kumeyaay stormed the mission, killed the priest, and burned it down. A new mission was built, where it still currently stands near the 8 and the 15.
With the arrival of the fort and the mission, the Kumeyaay population began it’s long decline. As of 1775, there were around 25,000 Kumeyaay, and 150,000 Indians in all of California. By the early 1800’s, their population was down to 3,000, due to disease and, destruction of their homeland and their forced relocation.
In 1821, Mexico gained it’s independence from spain, and in 1826, José María de Echeandía was the first Indian to be elected Governor of Alta California. He issued a “Prevenciónes de Emancipacion”, or emancipation proclamation, freeing Indians from mission enslavement, and granting them full Mexican citizenship.
In 1846, the U.S. invaded Mexico in what would come to be called the Mexican American War. 25,000 Mexicans were killed and the US took all of Nevada, Utah, and most of Arizona and California. Some Mexican soldiers, more loyal to their villages than to the imperialist Mexican state, deserted. The war ended with the so-called “Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo”, but the treaty only codified what had been decided through violence. The U.S. was stronger than Mexico and took the land by force.
About the war, Ulysses S. Grant said:
“For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.”
After the war, many Mexicans remained in the U.S. The current Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar is a descendant of one such family.
By and large, however, the Kumeyaay were not allowed to flourish. By 1875 U.S. settlers had driven most of the Kumeyaay out of their ancestral lands, and by 1910 only 800 Kumeyaay were left alive anywhere in the U.S.
The political climate today takes the U.S.-Mexican border as something of a given. We are over here, on our land, and they are over their on theirs. Illegal immigration is seen by many as a violation of U.S. citizens’ rights to property.
But in light of the history of the region, this view is completely bogus. If anything, the land belongs to Mexico, or to the tens of thousands of Mexicans who were killed by U.S. soldiers while defending their land, or to the tens of thousands of Kumeyaay where were killed by Spanish and U.S. settlers while defending their land.
In light of these things, the notion that a U.S.-Mexican border is “defended” by a U.S. department of “Homeland” security is preposterous.
Words:
salvador(a) – savior, rescuer
tierra natal – homeland
rey – king
el río – river (el río san luis rey)
frontera – border
presidio – fortress
independencia – independence
prevenciónes – proclamation
emancipación – emancipation
el pueblo – village
leal – loyal (Ellos son leal al la el pueblo)
son – to be, conjugated for Ellos
la guerra – war
el imperialismo – imperialism
invadir/invasión – invade/invasion
I’ve been watching some of the videos from RubyConf 2008. One of the noteworthy things about RubyConf is that out of about 50 presenters, zero were women.
Hold on, let me get out my <h1> tag…
ZERO WERE WOMEN
This is a problem in the free software community, in the computer science community, in the nerd community. Nerd women are everywhere. Woman are huge nerds. But in these very public spaces, they are often invisible.
It’s a big problem, and I don’t know how to solve it, but here’s one tiny little thing that contributes:
Rubyists call each other “guys”.
All. The. Time. It’s not just rubyists, it’s all engineers. When addressing an audience, they’ll say “you guys probably…” When talking about a group of developers, they’ll say “Are any of the Devver guys here?”
And the truth is, sometimes… maybe most of the time, there really are no women in the audience. Sometimes… maybe most of the time, that development team is all “guys”.
But often it is not. And often there are women involved who are not being recognized. Maybe they are not blogging, because they are too busy with other things. Maybe they are not blogging because bloggers get death threats, and women bloggers get sexualized death threats.
And this is my first point:
Just because women are invisible to you doesn’t mean that they are not there.
But even in the cases where there just aren’t any women there, I would still not use “guys”. Because using “guys” so commonly, as shorthand for “developers” reinforces the belief that everything is being done by men and that women are the exception. It reminds men that they can act like they do when there are no women present. It reminds women that the people around don’t acknowledge their presence or contributions. It, in short, contributes to the invisibility problem I mentioned above, even if you actually are referring to a group of men.
This is point two:
Gendering groups of people as male reinforces their maleness.
I’ve called people out for this, and they say “buy when I say ‘guys’ I don’t mean guys, I just mean people. Maybe it used to be a gendered term, but people say guys for mixed-gender groups all the time.”
And I believe them. I believe that they didn’t intend to gender everyone. I believe that people use guys in a gender-neutral way all the time. But it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that some women, when they are referred to as a guy, or when they are lumped into a group of “guys”… feel erased. They feel as if there is an implication that they are not a woman in this context, but some sort of honorary “guy”. I know this because some women have said this to me.
And that would piss me off too, honestly, if I was an honest to god ass-kicking woman like these women are.
So, if you are only concerned with your language as you understand it… fine, keep calling women guys.
But if you are concerened with your language as other people hear it, and particularly if you are a nerd concerned with how you might be creating an environment hostile to women…. please… stop calling everyone “guy” and start calling them developers or hackers or folks or people…. or ladies and gents or lovelies or whatever other gender neutral terms your brain can dream of.
And please, if there are other rubyists and free software folks with blogs that get wider reach than my little old blog, please write something about this. Even if you disagree, please write something about women in your nerd community and what you think might help. Let’s keep the conversation going.
Much as I loved learning that President Bush is a voracious reader, I loved reading this:
At the end of his first year in Washington, Mr. Obama was asked to explain the best aspect of being a senator. His answer from an interview on Dec. 16, 2005, offers a glimpse into his attachment to the telephone, which aides said has not gone away.
“Everybody takes your phone calls,” Mr. Obama told me. “If there is a topic I’m interested in, I can call the smartest people in the world on that topic and talk to them about it. Sometimes they’ll come into my office and that is just a huge luxury.
“If I’m interested in finance, I can call Warren Buffett. If I’m interested in health care, I can call the top administrators or health-care experts in the country. If I’m interested in foreign policy, I can not only call experts here, but I can call experts overseas,” Mr. Obama added. “That’s fun.” – nyt