here’s a toast to Alan Turing
born in harsher, darker times
who thought outside the container
and loved outside the lines
and so the code-breaker was broken
and we’re sorry
yes now the s-word has been spoken
the official conscience woken
– very carefully scripted but at least it’s not encrypted –
and the story does suggest
a part 2 to the Turing Test:
1. can machines behave like humans?
2. can we?

Thank you to my blockmate Jeremy for sending it to me.

I don’t understand how any of this is possible.

But the point: you’ve never heard of Ivri Lider, but he’s this super-famous pop star in Israel who is openly gay. Some giant Israeli radio station you’ve also never heard of asked him to cover “I Kissed a Girl” for their 2008 chart-toppers show, and then he also made this video where he’s all depressed and confused in the restroom of some gay bar because he kissed a girl and he liked it. It’s great.

(Sidenote: if we’re going to talk about bicurious pop stars singing songs entitled “I Kissed a Girl”, I’m partial to Jill Sobule’s 1995 song. Too bad the actual music video isn’t available online, because it’s fabulously campy and it has Fabio in it.)

Today, Joe.My.God is reporting that hero-of-geek-lit OSC (author of Ender’s Game and many other speculative fiction novels and short stories) has joined the board of directors of the National Organization for Marriage, the anti-gay-marriage group responsible for the oft-parodied “Gathering Storm” ad.

I’ve been a fan of OSC since I was very young. I loved the stories of Ender and Bean - stories of children who are different and catch a lot of crap for it, who are tormented by everyone they know but still hold on to their integrity and compassion.

These portrayals resonate with most nerds, who already have “different” and “tormented” on lockdown, and would like to believe - need to believe - that they, like Ender, like Bean, are also special, powerful, and wise beyond their years. At least, I know I did.

Gay nerds, of course, usually get an extra helping of different and tormented, which (anecdotally speaking) seems to cause many of us to identify all the more strongly with OSC’s protagonists. As a seriously miserable middle schooler, I took a lot of comfort in the Ender series. Orson Scott Card was one adult who really got it, who knew what it was to be young and different and at the mercy of your peers.

That’s why it was so jarring when I found out that OSC believes to the core of his being that homosexuality is immoral, and that any institution or government that seek to legitimize it “is [his] mortal enemy“. When I was a young person reading OSC’s books, I assumed that because he had such a deep understanding of the pain of being different, he would obviously support things that would make being different less painful.

But of course, it’s not that easy. There are explicitly queer characters in many of OSC’s novels, most often struggling against themselves, but there is nothing simple or moralizing in his portrayals of these people - and still, he writes these essays condemning gays for, well… existing. And daring to state that our existence is not a crime.

I know many gay people who were huge OSC fans before they found out about his stance on homosexuality, and who are no longer able to enjoy his books as they once were. I understand this - it seems a betrayal of the trust we placed in OSC as teens.

As for me, I still reread the Ender and Bean books from time to time. The themes they deal with still fascinate me, and many of the values they endorse are ones I share. I do wish that OSC’s Mormon viewpoint didn’t function to muddle the message implicit in his Enderverse novels, that people who are different are valuable people from whom we can learn much. I have learned much from the novels of Orson Scott Card - now I wish he could learn something from people like me.

Kent Conrad (D-N.D.):  “Oh, you are good.”

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa): “Well, your wife said the same thing.”

h/t to my buddy Rob at politics et alia sensae.

After talking about 1) Wordle and 2) Ender’s Game with my friend Sarah tonight over dinner, I decided to Wordle a few of the non-DRM’d ebooks I’ve collected over the years, starting with, you guessed it:

Our bets were on “Ender” “boys” “others” “battle” and “army” - looks like we didn’t do too badly. This could be a(n extremely dorky) fun new game! Guess the Wordle big words for your favorite book.

I did a few more, and they can be viewed here in my Wordle gallery.

This post is brought to you by my current obsession with books+technology, which is entirely the fault of the slick Sony PRS-505 that I bought off of craigslist yesterday.

From the announcement:

The initial release exposes four types of data: a list of members for a given Congress and chamber, details of a specific roll-call vote, biographical and role information about a specific member of Congress, and a member’s most recent positions on roll-call votes.

The four work together, so you can start by retrieving a list of members, find the one(s) you’re interested in and then fetch additional details through other calls. We built this service to work with other publicly available data sources, so you can identify members of Congress with a seven-character code from the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. For individual member responses, we included the numeric ID assigned by GovTrack, a free and open-source service that monitors legislative activity.

The rest of the announcement goes on to detail which data sources they are pulling from, and ends with this call for feedback: “Just as it’s early in the 111th Congress, this API is in its beginning stages, and we have other types of information we plan on adding. Let us know what would be useful to you.”

If you are a political-junkie code-monkey (I know a couple of you read this) and you can think of some things that would be OMFGSOCOOL to have available via this API, you should totally comment. (Only 4 comments are up right now, so it looks like you have a good shot at being heard through the usual blog-comment noise on these kinds of things.)

I’m pretty happy that a major Old Media organization is stepping up to make this data more accessible via software - they’re both performing a public service and carving out a piece of the new media pie for themselves.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see what people do with this API. I hope to see some slick webapps that make keeping up with US politics fun - maybe we can hold the attention of some of the millions of young people who turned out to vote for the first time in November.

Check it out: NY Times Congress API

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

created by Apt Studio to celebrate the 25th anniversary of 4th Estate, a literary division of HarperCollins. more about the film.

A relatively SFW example:

Have fun!

That’s all I got. Mele Kalikimaka!