IdeaFarm™ Returns – August 2009

IdeaFarm™ Returns – August 2009

Originally uploaded by sindy

I meant to post this a while ago, but here it is now: the IdeaFarm™ truck reappeared at the corner of Castro St. and El Camino in Mountain View, CA in late August. It disappeared apparently on September 11 at the conclusion of its Political Economy course. If you can’t read the sign, it reads (I think): “Mexicans colonize because you don’t receive them as brothers.”

Read my previous posts on IdeaFarm™: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

The IdeaFarm™ website has been significantly updated since my previous posts and it looks like there will be a big opening performance.

Nail Salon Stereotypes

I was looking up Platino pedicure chairs for a friend and found something amusing: the spatech website includes documentation (installation instructions, specs, etc.) on equipment and for this chair, they have non-English versions. The languages the documentation comes in? Korean and Vietnamese.

While nail salons are stereotyped as being owned and run by Korean and Vietnamese people, but there’s always some truth to a stereotype. For example, I am related to people who own and run a dry cleaners, a nail salon and a liquor store. My parents even owned a grocery store back in the day.

Weed vs. Salvia

Again, from tosh.0:

96% Nerd, 61% Geek, 13% Dork

I joined OKCupid on a whim (mostly because it’s free). They have personality tests like most dating sites do to better match you with other members. I took one today called “The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test.” I apparently scored 96% Nerd, 61% Geek and 13% Dork, amounting to being a “Modern, Cool Nerd.” Which is good, I guess.

More interesting is the breakdown of each word/category:

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.
You scored better than half in Nerd and Geek, earning you the title of: Modern, Cool Nerd.

In true nerd form, I found this interesting and worth sharing.

Is it racist?

From the Comedy Central show Tosh.0:

I didn’t think a show about web videos would be interesting since I’m not a fan of “wrap-up” shows and I think it’s weird when you people use TV to talk about things from the Internet– it’s like they’re dumbing down computers and the Internet to make it more accessible via television because staring at a TV screen is easier than staring at a monitor.

In any case, I gave the show a shot because I love Daniel Tosh and the show is actually pretty entertaining. And yes, I actually find exactly what I thought I wouldn’t like– using TV to “wrap-up” popular web content– useful since I don’t usually have time to troll the Internet for funny videos. And the Tosh.0 blog is actually a nice complement to the show itself, without being redundant. Give it a shot.

Here’s Daniel Tosh’s hilarious follow up to the above video:

My South Park character

The SP-Studio website has been around forever, but I was bored, so I went to the site and, instead of just playing around, actually created and saved my South Park character, which I had never really bothered to do. I either forgot or didn’t realize how much detail you could take advantage of, from jewelry to belts to eyebrows. I also found it amusing that I chose today, of all days, to create the character– I happened to be wearing a camouflage t-shirt. Bizarro.

Two Women, Two Babies, One Family

An amazing story about two women (partners) who got pregnant at the same time, using the same donor too!

Two Women, Two Babies, One Family (from Real Simple)

A sweet quote:

At night, we started putting our bellies together so the babies could say hi and tap at each other. It was sweet.

What could make this more perfect? Marriage.

Casual Relationship

While watching The Rules of Attraction, went online to look up the complete details of Victor’s monologue about Europe (read the transcript here, skip to text “Victor:”). It’s great, as is Kip Pardue when he’s delivering it, and was let to the Wikipedia article on the book, which I’ve also read and, like most Bret Easton Ellis books, found it, in a word, “interesting.” Also found it interesting that, while describing Dick and Paul’s relationship, there’s a link for “friends with benefits,” which leads to this article on casual relationships. Wikipedia really is trying to catalog everything.

Helicopter Parents and Gender-Neutral Housing

Here’s an unfortunate situation: Karin Morin, a Stanford student’s mother, goes to the helicopter parent extreme, writing a National Review article, complaining about her daughter’s gender neutral housing assignment. Sadly, as her daughter Daisy Morin comments herself in this New York Times blog comment and covered in this Daily article, a family argument has turned into national news. Interestingly, although gender-neutral housing is a new housing option introduced to several campus residences, gender neutral room assignments have been a part of co-op life for decades through the consensus decision-making process practiced in these houses– one of which is Columbae, where Daisy lived in a quad with another female and two males (FYI, the quad is a very large, but single room). Daisy was completely aware going into the house (or even submitting the house as a choice during the housing draw process) that a co-ed rooming situation was a possibility and knowing this, was comfortable not only living in the house, but being assigned such a room even though she was not even present at the meeting where the decision was made.

Here’s one of the most troubling paragraphs from the National Review article:

By its own terms, Stanford is failing to live up to its housing contract. As parents, Stanford holds us responsible for payment of our daughter’s bill. We, in turn, expected Stanford to enforce the terms of its own housing contract. It should not be acceptable for any group of students to alter the conditions of that contract. Furthermore, it should not be up to individual students to determine whether to protest a housing arrangement which so obviously violates this contract. There would clearly be social difficulties for any student who protested. Thus, it is Stanford that should rectify the situation.

In reality, Stanford holds the student responsible for payment of her bill, not her parents. And why shouldn’t it be up the individual student to make a complaint? If a student is unhappy with her housing assignment or feels that the housing contract has been violated, it’s up to that student to speak up. Social difficulties are a part of life and especially part of speaking your voice– if you’re not willing to endure the possible social difficulties, then you’re saying the issue is not important enough to you.

In any case, the article is riddled with unfortunate comments– when you read Daisy’s various responses to the article and if you know anything about co-op housing, which I’m sure Daisy did before choosing to live in Columbae– you’ll see that this is a parent blaming Stanford for the differences between her daughter and herself. Karin didn’t even find out about the rooming situation until the end (during winter break) and makes it sound like her daughter was unhappy with the room assignment, saying “she didn’t ask for this room arrangement” and that “she doesn’t want to upset everyone’s consensus arrangements.” She didn’t even get the reason why her daughter wasn’t at the meeting right (she appointed a proxy because she was on a plane, not because she had a friend visiting). In general, Karin expresses a sense of entitlement, that she had the right to know everything about her daughter’s life at Stanford. Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works– while FERPA provides students with access and control over their education records, it also specifically limits to what parents have access. Specifically, when the child turns eighteen, the child takes responsibility of her education records and schools are not required to notify parents of general information that does not directly apply to the student or even answer questions about the student. At the end of the day, it is a rights and privacy act, with the student at the center.

Karin, in response to her daughter’s decision to live in the co-ed room during fall and winter quarter, pulled financial support for her daughter’s final quarter at Stanford, making Daisy take $3,000 in loans (in addition to the loans her original financial aid package included). Given that her daughter is, being well over eighteen, an adult, that’s certainly Karin’s prerogative, but at the same time– again, as an adult– Daisy should be free to make her own decisions. In the course of a lifetime, those few thousand dollars is a small price for Daisy to pay for her freedom and an ultimately trivial amount over which her mother is making a gesture simply to prove a point. (Ironically, her parents pulled financial support for the current spring quarter during which Daisy is actually living in a single-gender room. Co-ops often switch around room assignments each quarter as part of the consensus decision-making process.) I completely empathize and sympathize with Daisy as a member of a sometimes overbearing family and while I hope she works out this disagreement with her parents, I also hope she stays confident that she had and has the right to make her own choices.

Do I make you randy?

I was watching Austin Powers today on cable and noticed that they had dubbed over his signature phrase “Do I make you horny?” with “Do I make you randy?” In what way is “randy” better than “horny”? How is “horny” unacceptable, but “Alotta Fagina” okay?

Stupid censors.