[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]
The Rhubarb game went around again, so I've gotten a new list of three interests to pontificate about. Let's see what happens with this list that came from![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cosmolinguist:
The Rhubarb game went around again, so I've gotten a new list of three interests to pontificate about. Let's see what happens with this list that came from
cosmolinguist:- Equity Over Equality
A concept that's been discussed a lot in the last couple years and brought into sharper focus this year, because of the Movement for Black Lives and other social justice causes and results being demanded to make the world better. Almost always related to a graphical series illustrating the concept of "equality" with showing the equal distribution of resources, which makes the least advantaged character still unable to surmount their challenge (most commonly being able to see over a fence to a baseball game) and the most advantaged person only more advantaged by the distribution of the resources in an equal manner. The comparative image, that of "equity," is where the least advantaged person has sufficient resources to surmount their obstacle, as does the moderately disadvantaged person, while the advantaged person that could already defeat the obstacle has no additional resources, because they don't actually need them to succeed. (So, there are more boxes underneath the person that needs them to see over the fence, some boxes underneath the other person that needs some boxes to see over the fences, and no boxes under the person who is already tall enough to see over the fence.) More recent versions of the image then add one more comparison, usually that of "liberation," where the obstacle itself has been removed (so there's no fence at all between the people and the baseball game). Most generally, the idea of "equity over equality" is that the best thing to do with resources that need distribution is to distribute the most to the places that need them the most so they can do the best work (which requires understanding your communities on more than a surface level or from a very high-level understanding) rather than distributing them evenly across the entire affected area. The problem is that the places with the most resources are also often the best at advocating for getting more resources, because they have the resources to spare to do advocacy work. When what we need is for them to provide the resources for others to use and to feel like it's a good thing for both sides. Preferably without the people with the resources getting paternalistic or taking the attitude that they're somehow "saving" the people who need the resources. Which would also require those people to take on the attitude that having the biggest bank account and being able to buy your way out of everything and avoid paying anything back to the community that supported and sustained you is the wrong idea when compared to being able to sustain and support everyone around you to a high standard of living and making sure everyone lives a happy and fulfilled life.
Equity over equality is also, hopefully, one of the guiding principles of my workplace, since the history of library services is one that prioritized equality and equal access and making sure that everyone could theoretically get all the resources that were available, even if in practice accessing library buildings and resources were only available to people of a certain level of privilege. (And still are, because there's a lot of resource concentration in the buildings, and in the pandemic, to access any library resources at all, you have to have a working Internet connection and a device that can connect to the same.) It's a slow process, which is maddening, because there's a lot of already done research about the ways that you can get organizations into better places, but also, it's slow because commitments like that need to be from the top to the bottom of the organization, and they need to be done well and correctly, neither of which is going to be served by undue haste. I'm trying to not be impatient, but there's still some low-hanging material, like permanent abolishment of fines, that could be done and that would have immediate beneficial effect, that's not happening. I suppose we'll know how committed everyone is to the practice as we go along. - Marching Bands
A staple of my required schooling and undergraduate university experience. Much less so now, because I am not participating in any such ensembles, but I certainly used them as an exercise program and as a way of making music in my life. The concept of the marching band goes back all the way to the fife and drum corps and other military bands and ensembles meant to help keep good time and order for the soldiers while they are on the move and while they are camped. Most militaries, of course, do not carry and entire band's worth of musicians along with them, given how fast they move these days, but there still may be buglers or others who help ensure schedules are kept and order maintained, and so the wind band and the marching wind band are now fairly exclusively the province of doing things for show, putting out formations and pictures on a field (usually a gridiron football field, but one of my friends from university mentioned that his marching band performed on an association football pitch as halftime entertainment) while playing music arranged for the composition of the band. There are varying levels of intensity and seriousness to the marching band experience, and most of the ones from my university were composed of non-music majors, because the possibility of damage to embrochure from the marching activities, especially the jarring lock-step, was nonzero and might otherwise cause a problem in a person who intended to make music for their livelihoods.
At the required schooling level, for my school, the marching band had a single show, music and movements, that we performed each week for the gridiron football crowd, with improvements and practice done in the intervening class time so as to make the show better each time it was performed. At or around the end of the gridiron football season, we would travel to one space along with many other bands, and perform the most polished version of the show for adjudication and rating at the festival. There were some good years where the rating was high, and there were less good years, including the one where I was drum major for the ensemble, which I was profoundly disappointed in and felt like was a personal failure. It probably wasn't a personal failure, as no one person can will an ensemble into being better than they are, so that was probably just a year where we didn't have the best musicians and marchers available to us. But it did make me disappointed in my leadership skills. (And also taught me some valuable lessons about where the actual ability to make decisions was in the ensemble, so that I can look back on this and recognize that I was trying to take seriously a role where I was more of a figurehead. Learning that lesson has also helped me recognize when actual power is being delegated and people are being seriously asked to do something and when someone's being asked to be a figurehead and to do something for the optics, rather than because an organization has any interest at all in implementing suggestions or sharing power.) There was also usually one show done in the gymnasium for all of the parents and boosters who were too busy working concessions to be able to see it on the field. Since we couldn't move in the gymnasium, some of the show had to be modified, but at least it was an indoors concert, so the warmth available from that was very much appreciated. And then, it would be done, and we would be on to concert band season.
At the university level, the marching band experience was essentially learning an entirely new marching show with formations and music in five days and performing it on the sixth day for the crowd at the gridiron football stadium. The show for before the game remained unchanged, but the halftime show would be different from week to week, and any extra time to learn a show was only because the game was away from the home stadium and the band was not traveling to the away space. I never could get the hang of memorizing the show fast enough to avoid having to compete for a spot in the ensemble at the end of the Friday rehearsal, where the challenged and the reserves would fight for the open spots in the block. This experience as well taught me about the potential for politics in decision-making, rather than those based on merit, as the system for scoring the challenges was never anything more than opaque, and requests for clarification from the people who had those scores were often incredibly unhelpful in making suggestions on where to improve. And that I spent a few weeks in the reserve as a fourth-year member, unable to figure out what I was doing wrong, until I finally asked to spend some time after and see what's happened. The person who stayed after made one comment about something that wasn't completely to specification, and from that point forward, I was able to get back into the marching group and stay there. Which, well, I suppose that was supposed to make me think that the competition was simply that intense that small things like that were the difference between people getting in and people staying out, and that I would have to practice yet harder at the task of perfecting things, but I was also a fourth-year person, and therefore it seemed less likely that the problem was something that had to do with my technique as it had to so with something else. But because there wasn't such a thing as getting a useful answer out of the people who were responsible for scoring, it's an equally plausible theory that what they wanted was for me to go consulting and asking for help about something as it was that there was something wrong with my technique. So I learned there, as well, both about music and musicality, about how to put a show together on one week, about traveling and performing and being able to say that I've been conducted by John Williams, yes that John Williams, playing a piece he arranged, but I also learned about how much I desire transparency in processes that could have problems or that might negatively affect me, a thing that I still desire from my organization, not that they have done a whole lot of anything toward the goal of greater transparency in decision-making at the administrative levels. (At least I have a competent manager at this point who believes that performance reviews should not have surprises in them.)
Marching band has been, on the whole, a good experience for me in my life, and in finding things out about myself that will serve me well later in life. - Sonic Screwdrivers
The tool of choice for The Doctor of Doctor Who, the sonic screwdriver is basically a device that allows the Doctor (or any other Time Lord, I suppose) to do whatever needs doing to keep the plot moving, rather than to have to find an appropriate tool to do such things has unlock doors, reprogram computers, perform diagnostics, or any other such things where the Doctor needs to do a simple action or gather some sort of information that would otherwise either take time or specialized equipment. It runs on Plot, mostly, although there are apparently some limitations to it, like it doesn't work at all on something that's completely made of wood. It seems to have been a thing in the 2005 series, starting with the Ninth Doctor, that when a Doctor regenerated into a new form, the sonic screwdriver took on a new form, although that didn't happen between Nine and Ten, possibly because the budget for the new series might not have been up to a new prop at the time. Christopher Eccleston only stayed on for one series, after all. So the blue-light sonic on Nine and Ten gave way to the green four-pronged sonic of Eleven, which changed to a more TARDIS-like one at Twelve, and then Thirteen reforged one out of Earth materials and a crystal not of Earth, and hat one looks much like the spoons that provided the steel for the casing. And, I suspect, much like the technologies that were considered simply standard for science fiction shows like Star Trek, there are people hard at work, who may have even produced prototypes, of objects that have the same form factor and maybe one of the many functions of the sonic. After all, we make technologies, and then we do our best to make them smaller until they're too small, at which point we aim for a good size and then start trying to stuff it full of features and other such things so that it becomes a true multi-tool in a compact form.
