It has been a while since I last wrote here. The lack of updates isn't really because of a lack of want to update, but really because there is just so little to update. But, to keep things interesting, allow me to spew some vitriol on something controversal first, before expounding on more... mundane things. I mean at the end of the day, what's the point of a blog if not to rant?
``Victim blaming'' is a phrase I keep hearing time and time again, and often times, this is associated with the loaded word ``rape''. ``Rape'' is a loaded word because in many cases it ends up becoming a case of circumstantial evidence, a case of ``he said, she said'', and only because the conditions in which it is set up is based around the notion of consent, yet without the formality that is provided by usual contractual law. But that's not what I'm going to rant about -- I am ranting about the notion of ``victim blaming''. One common defense that rapists make is that the victim ``had it coming by dressing in a way that is sexually provocative''. Is that a valid defense? No, definitely not; in a liberal society, everyone is allowed to wear whatever the hell they want and walk wherever the hell they want. However, and this is a really big however, we should all be aware of how certain seemingly innocent factors can cumulate towards increasing the risk in which someone can become a victim.
Here's a slightly less controversial example. Suppose that there is a step ladder leaned against the wall, with someone on top of it painting. You are walking and you see this ladder. Will you walk below the ladder or around the ladder? Here, I am creating a scenario where there are two obvious courses of actions, one that is obviously less risky and one that is obviously more risky. A rational agent assumption would suppose that a rational agent would be slightly more risk averse, and therefore choose the course of action that is least risky, and in this case, walking around the ladder. Will anyone stop you from walking below the ladder? No, not really -- you can always do that, though if the ladder falls on top of you, you have no one to blame except for your own judgement.
Accusing someone of ``victim blaming'' is jarring to me only because it pre-supposes that the consequences of all possible actions taken are solely dependent on the environment, and that the victim is an innocent party. I disagree. While the victim ought to be empathised for his/her plight, he/she should also be taken to task for having poor judgement on his/her choice of actions given that the world is not an ideal non-hostile environment. I have to emphasize that last point because it is crucial -- just because you can dress skimpily (for example) doesn't mean that you have to. Should you be raped if you dress skimpily? Definitely not! But by doing so, you've already shifted the odds against you -- so while you shouldn't be sexually assaulted at all no matter what you wear, by dressing skimpily, you are already sending the wrong signals out. And I find that yelling at people who point out this at-risk behaviour as ``victim blaming'' is not only unfair, but highly irrational.
But try to get this past the general population. Good luck.
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In other news, the eye infection that I was fighting for the past three weeks has finally been fully healed over. It was stupid -- I thought it was yet another one of those corneal abrasions that I seemed to be prone to getting, but it turned out to be a viral infection. The opthalmologist suspected that it was a Herpes Simplex (HSV-1) infection; the infection managed to clear up from a sustained dose of topical Acyclovir. Having one blurry eye and one good eye made it really hard to see things and get stuff done, and more often than not I was just feeling rather irritated.
After nearly 4 years of service, Elysie finally kicked the bucket. I ended up making Elysie Mk II with a Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD3H mother board with Intel Core i7 4770 Haswell processor and 32GiB RAM, housed in a Coolmaster HAF 912 chassis. I cannibalised the relatively new ASUS Nvidia GTX 680 and PSU from Elysie Mk I for Elysie Mk II, and moved the 1TB hard drive over to join with the 2TB hard drive. I had originally planned to rebuild Elysie next year, probably when Broadwell is released, but due to the sudden death of the old motherboard, I had to bring forward the upgrade plans. I ditched the Windows XP 64-bit Professional edition ``gaming'' operating system and installed a Windows 7 64-bit Professional edtiion one instead. I tried to get Xubuntu 12.04 LTS to work, but the Intel GbE ethernet interface was completely unrecognised -- had to use Xubuntu 13.04 instead.
I find the Elysie Mk II (or Elysie-II from now on) is not very stable for some reason. On Xubuntu 13.04, I started to get random kernel panics from kswapd, so I disabled the swap partition -- that seemed to do the trick. But then after nearly 24 hours of running the prime95 (version 27) program, she suddenly had a black screen and seemed to be turned off, and I have no bloody clue what was going on. On Windows 7, I had slightly different problems -- some of the graphics when playing Poker Night 2 were jittery, and there were a few random crashes for almost no reason. Thinking that the virtual/physical memory map was the issue, I have disabled the page file, and so far, that seemed to do the trick also.
I'm starting to suspect that perhaps 32GiB of RAM is starting to encroach upon other reserved memory locations that I was previously unaware of from running everything with memory of at most 8GiB. I have run memtest86+ on the RAM chips, and they seemed to be good. Guess I'll have to keep an eye out on things from now on.
Finally, my Bose QC20 In-ear Active Noise-Cancelling Headphones finally arrived last Friday. I test run the device on over the weekend and damn was I impressed. The comfort was like the usual IE2 that I use regularly (audiophiles can take a hike -- I value comfort over ``audiophilic quality playback'' from the headphones since I wear the damn thing for at least 8 hours a day), but it was damn good at blocking out the mundane noise that one would expect from living in a non-air-conditioned HDB flat on a low floor. Earlier today, I used the QC20 on the bus, and in the office before finally using it on the train, and I have the same comment as before -- the damn thing does a really good job at blocking out the unwanted noise, whether it was a consistent hum or human speech. I might have over-paid for this (it is Bose after all), but I'm not regretting it at all. I have tried many types of in-ear headphones, but of the lot, I still like the comfort that the basic Bose IE2 design has, where the speakers sit in the bowl of the pinna instead of digging deeper into the ear canal to find a hold there. The sound reproduction of the QC20 is not fantastic, but for what it is supposed to do (cut back on ambient noise), it does it really well in a form factor that lends itself to a much longer use time.
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Man, this is fast turning into one of those über-long and ranty posts. And I'm still not quite done yet. The last thing I want to rant about is the incident that occurred in my previous post. Let me put things into a little perspective. I write entries on this blog mostly as a way of airing my views on issues big or small, as well as to highlight some observations that I have made about the world around me. I love comments, because it is one of the ways to have some light interaction here. But I maintain an iron-grip on what comment gets published and what doesn't -- this is just prudence at work, and not really about censorship.
Recently, there have been two instances of trolls who have decided to make use of the anonymous commenting capability of my blog to slam me with rather negative and useless comments. One basically accused me of ``wasting my advisor's money'' (false: I was funded directly by the Organisation) and the other was goading me into thinking that I was a loser. I could have easily refused to publish those comments, but I chose to do so, as well as to rebut their allegations. Immediately after the appearance of the second troll, I promptly disabled anonymous commenting on my blog.
In all the years that this blog has existed, I have rarely had a troll situation like this. Yet in the short span of less than six months, I see two instances of such abuse of the anonymous comment system. I can shrug it off and get on with life, but I suspect this is likely to escalate over time -- I doubt that these comments happened ``by chance''. I don't have to deal with this crap -- and so, the anonymous commenting capability is removed.
Those who care will still know how to get hold of me, so nothing of value was truly lost. =)
And with that, I'm done with this post. Till the next entry then.
