You are what you....say?

Yes, you are what you say. I know I've said before that actions matter much more than words, and I still believe that. I promise a full blog post on that later, but in brief, my thoughts on this are that you can profess to believe something until you're blue in the face, but it's your actions that will both matter to others and that will prove what you truly value the most. However, words can be crucial in other ways.

What I'm thinking of right now is how our words can shape our attitudes. Yes, our words express our attitudes, but like many things, there is a complex feedback loop of interdependence. We cannot easily just change our feelings or attitudes, but we can go out of our way to say something considerate even when we're not feeling considerate, and this has been proven to temper one's attitude.

This occurred to me when having to deal with someone whom I love very much, but nonetheless I know that I still sometimes have trouble being patient with them. At my worst I sometimes complain under my breath about them, or to a few trusted confidantes, but I also try very hard to express sympathy and understanding for them out loud, either to myself or to my confidantes. I do this to remind myself that they are not just a problem for me, they are a person with problems of their own with which they have to cope. Although their actions sometimes bother me, and I believe actions are much more important than intentions, on those occasions I try to remind myself out loud of the good in them, because their actions are not under my control, and so at those times I need to find a way to think of them with sympathy rather than frustration.

Research has proven that the act of regularly turning up the corners of your mouth as if smiling can actually improve attitude. So while in the end it is your actions that matter much more than your intentions, you can make it easier to act in the way you want by using small actions or even the right words to help shape your attitude and intentions.

Sometimes it takes a village...to sexually harass someone.

Internet stalking, gaslighting...I know that more often than not they are gender-targeted forms of harassment...but really, you could say that about just about any harassment. But reading this Washington Post article, describing men harassing women by pretending to be their target and trolling online for sex, it occurred to me that this wasn't just a crime perpetrated by a lone individual. Can you imagine a woman trying to harass a man by placing ads asking random women to meet him for sex? Even if women showed up, which I find highly doubtful, it would not be nearly as threatening for the target. Spurning the advances of a random woman is a lot less likely to lead to violence.

And what kind of men would travel to see a woman they have never met and expect sex? I'm guessing it's the kind who would blame the victim for not having sex with them, not the kind to feel bad for the target and embarrassed for themselves.

So this kind of crime is not just the lone act of a harasser, although they certainly deserve a lot more than they will get from our justice system. My point is, it's a crime that would be impossible if there wasn't an undercurrent in our society of treating women like mere sex toys. Without the complicity of these other men, the harasser would not be able to do anywhere near as much damage from behind their false online persona, and they would be caught much more quickly. To me, the attitude of the men who responded to the ads by showing up at someone's door demanding sex is as much the problem as the harasser themselves.

I don't know what it gains us to point this out, or what else we can do about it right now other than keep shaming and fighting harassment and bullying, but I'm hoping that the more we notice and understand societal problems like this, the better equipped we will be to eventually deal with them.

Bigger isn't better, Google...

If you just noticed your Google Chrome context (right-click) menu get bigger, then you were using the --disable-new-menu-style switch, which has very recently been disabled. You, like me, like a compact, concise user interface and got used to exactly where each line would be in it, so you could almost use the Force to navigate it blindfolded.

Well, Google didn't like that, for some reason. The rumor is that Google was "looking to create a unified experience for Chrome users across all versions of Windows." So why not also make everyone have the same start pages, and background, and only support one OS, since uniformity is so wonderful?

Anyway, if you were using the previous command line switch, try this one instead, it worked for me:

--force-fieldtrials="NewMenuStyle/Compact2/"

(If you aren't familiar with command switches, just right-click your desktop shortcut to Chrome, click "Properties", and at the end of the "Target" field, paste in the text above.)

There really is an "American Taliban"....

You know, I keep thinking that the term "American Taliban" is overblown hyperbole...and then something like this happens, and I remember how accurate it really is.

"Indiana GOP passes law making it a crime for clergy to perform gay weddings"

For those who don't want to click through, my tl;dr version: for those faiths that are in favor of marriage equality, the law clearly makes it a crime for clergy to perform a religious wedding ceremony according to the tenets of their faith. The article finds that the wording of the law considers the performing of the religious marriage ceremony, regardless of the marriage's legal status or licensing, illegal.

Overheard this morning...

“Mom, chameleons shouldn’t French kiss. Their tongues would be too sticky.”

I am Max's total lack of outrage.

OK, so I'm reading the story McDonnell lawyer says children took minimal food from mansion in the Washington Post, and for once I'm failing to be outraged. The governor's college-aged kids took food with them from the governor's mansion to their dorms? OK....I think lots of us brought food from home if and when we lived in dorms. Of course, our parents paid for our food, not the taxpayers, but if the kids were at home with their parents, they would be eating food paid for by the taxpayers. Maybe the difference is that an elected politician needs to be a lot more scrupulous about allowing people to feed from the taxpayer-funded larder...literally. But it seems pretty natural to send food from your household with your kids when they go off to college.

I suppose the McDonnell family should have made sure to make separate shopping trips and to pay for them with personal funds, but the only reason I think this deserves any attention is because there seem to be a lot of other, much worse improprieties, so I suppose that it's not a partisan assumption to think that the McDonnell parents were intentionally trying to reduce their personal expenses by using taxpayer-funded supplies.

Still, I'll admit that upon reading this story, my first thought was "So what? Who wouldn't do that?"

How neither Apple nor Microsoft get user interfaces quite right

After reading this article in Slate, I came to the realization that user interface wars are much like political or religious differences -- both sides are so intent on being right that neither can see when it's time to compromise.

The image on the left is the iPhone calculator, and the image on the right is the Windows Phone calculator:

Neither gets it quite right.

The display on the left does seem more inviting, but notice that it has more buttons, a useless conceit held over from the limitations of physical buttons. Also, the one on the left has smaller, harder to read buttons, but the shading does add some depth to the interface, and the difference in color of the display bar is helpful.

The display on the right is easier to read since the buttons and the fonts are larger, but the buttons could use some more distinction, whether it be shading or depth or highlights on the edges.

Realism in the user interface does have its place. As mentioned in the Slate article, it provides an intuitiveness that may be very important for the less technically literate (think of the yellow legal pad feel in iOS Notes). But these literal interpretations of real-world items should not be taken too far. The fact that these applications are virtual means we are not constrained by things such as lighting or viewing angles or physical space, and skeuomorphic design should take advantage of that lack of limitations while still referencing the most familiar and salient landmarks.

Larger buttons with more shading and distinction of boundaries would provide a better display than either of the two shown above.