I'm sad. Tell me about something good in your life?

I need to sync a few folders between a mac laptop and a mac desktop. What should I use?

I have a lot of storage available on my web hosting site. I am willing to shell out for .mac or mobileme or whatever the latest such thing is, if it's easy.

rsync has already been suggested. I could do it that way, but after looking at the man page, I decided I don't want to think that hard.

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

I didn't expect much from the book that inspired George Romero to make Night of the Living Dead (I am not a fan of zombies), but I was pleasantly surprised. Published in 1954, I Am Legend had a huge influence on the modern vampire and zombie horror genres. The story focuses exclusively on the activities and inner dialogue of a man who believes he is the last survivor of a plague that infected all other humans with a zombie-ish form of vampirism. The book is well written and doesn't pull any punches. The survivalism/vampire trope is basically an excuse to explore human emotion in all its variety.

Trivia note: Richard Matheson also wrote the Star Trek:TOS first-season episode "The Enemy Within."

View all my goodreads.com reviews >>

We've been watching Star Trek: TOS on DVD via Netflix. We got through season 1 and partway into season 2 but for some reason we missed my favorite season 2 episode ("Amok Time," of course).

Now Netflix has gotten rid of all the original DVDs of this series and has replaced them with the "remastered in HD, with new CGI" DVDs.

I hate the idea of "new CGI." I'm trying to decide whether to buy the original DVDs (they are discontinued but can be purchased used for an exorbitant price) or to suck it up and continue with the remastered DVDs.

Have you watched any of the remastered-with-new-CGI DVDs? What are they like? Have they spoiled all the wonderfully lousy effects of the original? Have they removed the infuriating soft-focus around every single closeup of an attractive woman? Does Han still shoot first?

Comment I made in this post at living400lbs about loneliness. (Someone suggested that some people choose to be lonely because they "want to be miserable and 'play the victim'. I suppose people like that might exist but I don't think I've met very many of them. Most of the people I know who are persistently unhappy don't seem to be deliberately choosing it, but seem to have health and life challenges that are creating difficulty. Some such people might be able to learn better coping skills and change their loneliness or unhappiness, but that still doesn't mean that their unhappiness is chosen.)

I get lonely under two conditions. If either of these conditions applies, I will feel lonely whether or not I am around other people.

1. I am tired. (I was happy when I figured that one out. If only everything were fixable by having a good sleep!)

2. I am depressed. In which case it might seem from the outside that I am choosing to be lonely, because I tend to act cranky and cynical, which drives people away. But I am not choosing. One way that depression manifests itself for me is that I have a lot fewer behavior choices.

Have you ever had a conversation like the ones in comic books where you are saying one thing and thinking something else, and the words are in a smooth round balloon with a pointy bit hanging down and the thoughts are in a different font, in a bumpy balloon with three circles hanging down?

I had some of those today. My Prius's driver side headlight was out so I took it to the dealership for replacement.

Service advisor thought balloon: Oh dear, all my customers bitch about how expensive headlights are, so I had better do this song and dance about how other kinds of headlights are even more expensive, to distract her.
Service advisor says: "You're lucky that you don't have the blue high definition headlights. They cost several hundred dollars to replace. This type of headlight is on the cheaper end."

My thought balloon: He's trying to distract me. Shit, this is going to cost a bundle.
I say: "Cheaper is good."

Service advisor is printing out estimate. Thought balloon: I'm siiiinging in the rain, just siiiinging...
SA says: "Did you know that on Mercedeses and Lexuses, it costs $1500 to replace the headlights?"

I say: "People who buy Mercedeses and Lexuses are paying for the privilege of paying more."
My thought balloon: This is a real Busby Berkeley special

The estimate is for $125. I sign it and leave. Several hours pass. The SA told me the car would be ready by 1pm so I call at 1:10pm and after being put on hold for five minutes I am informed the SA is out to lunch and the car isn't ready. I go home and take a very long nap. When I wake up there is a voicemail.

SA voicemail, timestamp around 2pm: "The car IS READY. I apologize that I didn't have a chance to call right when it was ready, but I was doing something else and I wanted to let you know the car IS READY."
SA thought balloon: Eep, I fucked up. I had better use my special 'patronize the middle-aged lady voice'.

I go to the dealership. When I enter the service area to wait for my car to be driven up, I see the SA across the parking lot. He holds his arms out and shouts
SA says: "Did you get my voicemail?"
SA thought balloon: Maybe I can make her think it's her fault for not returning my voicemail.

I hold my thumb up.
My thought balloon: Of course I got your voicemail, that's why I am here, isn't it?

SA comes closer and says: "Yes, they told me 'your customer called!' and I was out, yada yada."
SA thought balloon: Commencing 'confuse with lots of words' mode.

I say: "It would have been convenient to pick it up at 1pm, but after that I had some things to do, so yeah."
My thought balloon: Why were you out precisely at the time you promised the car for? And why did you lie about when it would be ready? It's not like I asked for the car to be ready at 1pm. I just wanted to know when it would be ready.

At least I got a sorely needed car wash into the bargain.

Making Light linked to this blog post about Michael Jackson.

Here is the comment I left:

I thought Rossney's post started out well enough, but by the time he got to saying MJ was "no longer really...human in any meaningful sense" and saying "it feels strange to call him 'a man'," I had serious problems. Human beings who are seriously damaged are still human beings. Men who are seriously damaged are still men. It's disrespectful to the damaged people and to the rest of us to deny this. It's also misguided, because it creates a false sense of otherness and a false sense of security, a sense that this sort of thing could not happen to real people. Well, it could and did.

(This part wasn't in the original comment.) This might well be something going on only in my own head, but I also have the uncomfortable sense that MJ's race is partly involved in the blogger's othering him, especially because of this sentence:

(it's a mark of how profoundly damaged Michael Jackson was that it feels strange to call him "a man", just as it feels strange to recognize that when he died he was older than the President of the United States)

For the record, my opinion of MJ is that he made some music that I loved and that he had a big influence on pop music, and that he seemed like a pretty unhappy person during the latter part of his life. I also know he is accused of child molestation, and I didn't follow the stories about that, so I don't have an opinion. If he did it, I am sad about the damage caused.

...that the word "hallelujah" and the word "schadenfreude" rhyme and scan the same.

Possibilities are left up to the imagination of the reader.

Details in this post by sylvianq:
http://community.livejournal.com/wiscon/229543.html

every year Aqueduct Press produces a volume covering the WisCon for the previous year. Timmi Duchamp has asked me to edit the 4th WisCon Chronicles, covering WisCon 33. It's a great honour, if somewhat daunting!

Anyhow, at the moment I'm formally calling for materials for WisCon Chronicles 4.

She is looking for panel reports and "overall personal views" of the con, among other things.

Tags: wiscon, writing

I think I'll start a series of posts about companies I like to do business with.

I found out about Wild Pacific Seafood http://www.pelicanpackers.com/ (aka Pelican's Choice) from the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program, which includes resources for buying sustainably harvested seafood.

Wild Pacific Seafood has one fishing boat and they catch albacore via the trolling method, which is listed on the Seafood Watch card as a best choice. Troll-caught tuna are younger and have lower mercury levels than longline-caught tuna. Trolling produces less bycatch than longlining or purse-seining.

Anyway, they sell several flavors of canned albacore in pop-top cans. The OH and I buy the no-salt-added variety, 100% tuna. It's expensive compared to regular supermarket tuna, but a can of this stuff goes farther than a can of supermarket tuna, which has a lot of water in it. (And our cats, shockingly, don't seem to like tuna water.)

Every time we place an order (we usually get two 24-packs, which works out to $2.75 per can), they include a hand-written letter. Sometimes they include a sample of a different flavor.

The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan

This is supposed to be the first book of a trilogy.

Audiobook narrated by Simon Vance. He's a technically good narrator but I'm getting sick of how he overuses/misuses accents. In this book I'm just not convinced that nomads of the steppes should have cockney-esque accents.

Richard K. Morgan, prior to this novel, has written noir/cyberpunk; this is his first foray into sword & sorcery fantasy. I kind of think his writing style works better for cyberpunk. It's not that every fantasy has to be written in formal language, but the use of a term for sexual intercourse as punctuation (a feature of all Morgan's books) is kind of jarring in a fantasy book.

I like that the primary point-of-view character is ( spoilers; there may also be spoilers in the comments )

Darn it, I do not need a USB hub that transforms into a panther.

The movie Up lived up to its positive reviews. And also, for me it contained one enormous disappointment. I wrote this unashamedly mawkish bit of fanfic to address it.

( spoilers for <i>Up</i> )

http://www.flickr.com/photos/trinlayk/3632136251/in/set-72157594450375382/

Where I'm coming from: I am an Obama supporter in most ways. I support health care reform in the US and want everyone to have affordable access to health care. I am concerned about some of the rhetoric of health care reform right now.

I would welcome your suggestions about fat-activist communities to send this message to.

The Obama administration's first forays into health reform focused on eating habits and exercise, without mentioning weight per se. But that seems to be changing. Over on http://healthreform.gov/ there are now a number of articles claiming that it is possible to "prevent" obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

In one article there are claims such as "85 percent of the money spent on health care goes toward people with at least one chronic condition." The article also promotes the claim "Scientists say this generation of American children may not live as long as their parents did," which was literally mapped out on the back of a napkin and is based on the now-debunked "fat kills 400,000 people a year" statistic. http://healthreform.gov/forums/secretaryscorner.html

The first bullet point in the "Closing the Gap" article about disparities in health care availability among ethnic minorities is: "Obesity is debilitating and is often a catalyst to chronic disease. Seven out of 10 African Americans ages 18 to 64 are obese or overweight, and African Americans are 15% more likely to suffer from obesity than Whites." http://healthreform.gov/reports/healthdisparities/index.html (Lack of access to health care is a huge problem, and it's vital to bring health care access to under-served groups. But I don't think that sticking more African Americans on diets is the best first priority.)

One of the major items linked from the first page of healthreform.gov is an op-ed from the CEO of Safeway, which includes such claims as: "70% of all health-care costs are the direct result of behavior." "74% of all costs are confined to four chronic conditions (cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity)." "80% of cardiovascular disease and diabetes is preventable... more than 90% of obesity is preventable." http://healthreform.gov/forums/whatpeoplearesaying.html#rewarding_healthy_behavior

I think the fat activist communities need to address the Obama administration's overfocus on "obesity."

• We need to explain that weighing more than the government approved BMI is not a health condition. If fat people incur more medical costs than thin people (which I'm not convinced is true), it's partly because so many of us are either (a) ignored with "go away and lose weight" when we go to doctors with real conditions, until those conditions become drastic (see the First Do No Harm blog for some tragic and infuriating examples), or (b) treated as if we are at death's door, just because we weigh more, and subjected to unnecessary tests and "treatments".
• We need to explain that weight and diabetes are largely genetic and debunk silly statistical claims such as "90% of obesity is preventable."
• We need to explain that weight is not a behavior.
• We need to explain that blaming people with chronic health conditions for the high cost of health care in the US is not a good strategy for lowering health care costs or improving health care access for women and ethnic minorities.

(I would welcome being convinced that this is just a bunch of hot air and not a hammer about to come down on the backs of fat people. But I am worried.)

Note: I am not going to allow debates on the benefits of weight loss or the possibility of achieving permanent weight loss in this journal entry.

I listened to the Audible Modern Classics edition, well narrated by Victor Levine. I especially liked his characterization of the Blue Fairy Godmother.

This book is set in WWII Germany, post-war New York City, and a prison cell in Israel. It has no science fiction tropes. I did not find any of the characters particularly likeable (but that's true of most Vonnegut for me).

A line from this book is one of the favorites in my quote file, and it sums up one of the themes of the book:

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

This book is evidence that Vonnegut is one of the great American writers. He has the gift of making hope out of emptiness and simplicity, something that many people assume only Zen Buddhist masters can do.

View all my goodreads.com reviews.

---

Goodreads.com posted to my Facebook status line when I added this book, and my friend supergee commented that he didn't like the book. I asked why and he wrote "Not sf, crappy characters, dumb moral."

I agree with point 1.

I also somewhat agree with point 2 (see above) and it puzzles me why Vonnegut's "crappy characters" don't bother me the way some writers' crappy characters do. I think it has something to do with how Vonnegut's protagonists mostly aren't emo, and/or how Vonnegut's writing style is definitely not emo. (I'm contrasting it to my reaction to Dan Simmons's Hyperion, which has some tremendously emo characters which are punched up because the writing style can be pretty emo.)

I don't know what supergee thinks the moral of the book is; the closest I can come to a moral in it is what I quoted above. I don't think that's a dumb moral, although I'm not sure I agree with it. (For me, it might be a prescription that I tend to over-follow. I have a hard time pretending, and it limits me in some ways.)

Tags: audiobooks, booklog, books, ethics, reviews

There's an Internet conversation about rape, one post about which is here.

After reading that post, I saw several posts in which a woman said although she intellectually understands that many women fear men as potential rapists, she doesn't have that fear, and she has never been sexually assaulted, either because no one tried or because she defended herself with words or weapons.

I'm really glad that these women haven't suffered sexual assault or fear of sexual assault.

But I don't understand why a number of women are apparently responding to this conversation by saying that they aren't afraid of rape and don't have a general fear of men as potential rapists. Do they feel they should be afraid? I'm getting the impression that they feel not being afraid of rape makes them weird. Maybe that it makes them unfeminine somehow? Is this because our culture sends the message that all women should be afraid of rape?

I'm also not sure what I think about the suggestion that a certain attitude or body language -- specifically, attitude/body language that shows a lack of fear -- can prevent an assault from happening. I think it can make a difference in some situations--maybe a lot of situations. (I gather that it's part of what's taught at self-defense classes.) But I don't think it's any kind of guarantee. I know plenty of people who have a "don't mess with me" attitude/body language who have been assaulted.

(For the record, I haven't experienced sexual assault either. I have feared it in a few specific situations.)

Hello Kitty wears granny glasses!

Via the Hello Kitty Hell blog, which is one of the best sources ever for cool Hello Kitty stuff. (Except the author refuses to tell you where to get any of it.)

http://www.kittyhell.com/2009/06/04/hello-kitty-canned-ramen/

My mother's sister in Florida passed away last week, and my parents want to adopt her miniature Schnauzer. My cousins in Florida are willing to arrange this, but none of us has any experience with it. Apparently there are services that will help transport an animal. Do you have experience with any such services? Do you recommend or dis-recommend any particular one? Tips/warnings?

A Case of Conscience by James Blish

I listened to the Audible Frontiers audio book, well narrated by Jay Snyder. The book was written in 1958 and won a Hugo. The audio book includes an amusingly snippy foreword by Blish in which he defends the ways he chose to imagine how Catholic doctrine would change 100 years in the future.
( spoilers )

A Different Light by Elizabeth A. Lynn

If I told you the plot of this book it would sound like a space opera, or possibly a romance, but it doesn't entirely have the feeling of either. It's sort of noir, and it's sort of...langorous. The protagonist is a visual artist, and Lynn pulls it off so I got a pretty clear picture in my mind of what he was seeing and depicting.

I really liked that the main characters were bisexual and non-monogamous and that no big deal was made out of this -- it was just how they behaved naturally. I really liked that the relationships among the main characters were emotionally complex and that the characters gave each other emotional space.

Yes, I mostly read this book for the atmosphere and relationships, and I didn't read carefully enough to comment critically on the science or the plotting.


View all my Goodreads.com reviews.

There may be spoilers in the comments.

Tags: booklog, books

http://wiscon.piglet.org/program/detail?idItems=172

Wish Fulfillment in Fiction
Track: The Craft and Business of Writing
Description: What is the role of wish fulfillment in fiction? If you're a writer, what personal wishes do you want your stories to fulfill? Are they the same ones you want to read about? How do our fictitious wishes affect our everyday dreams?
Moderator: P. C. Hodgell
Panelists: Beth Friedman, Anne Harris, Stef Maruch, Caroline Stevermer

I wasn't really happy with my performance on this panel, but I was glad that I did get on the panel because we had a really interesting pre-panel email discussion. Basically PC and I were talking about problems with using wish-fulfillment as a driver of fiction writing, and Anne and others were talking about the benefits. And what we saw as the problems they pretty much saw as the benefits.

For example, PC brought up "Mary Sue" fanfic, and Anne said let's not diss fanfic, a lot of good pro writers got their start in fanfic. So then PC said that she was thinking about a particular story where the writer tortured one character so the other character could comfort him, and Anne said oh, hurt/comfort stories: one of my favorites.

We decided not to make the panel into a debate though.

Some highlights from the panel (again, I paraphrased and I might have got it wrong):
( Read more... )

Tags: wiscon

http://wiscon.piglet.org/program/detail?idItems=223

Your Electric Critics
Track: The Craft and Business of Writing
Description: Writers groups and slush piles are two of the basics for new authors. Traditionally, writers met with a group of other local aspiring authors and critiqued each others work. Then they would send off their newly polished babies to a publisher, where they would be smothered in the slush pile. With the web, there are some interesting new wrinkles in this formula. Online critique groups like Critters make it easy to find other writers, and sites like Baen's Bar and Authonomy promise to make the slush pile a visible, living thing. How useful are they? Can you really get published using them? And what the best ways to make them work for you?
Moderator: Jack McDevitt
Panelists: Laurel Amberdine, Carol F. Emshwiller, Gary Kloster

Jack McDevitt and Carol Emshwiller are seasoned professional writers; Laurel Amberdine and Gary Kloster are newer at it.

The following notes organize what I thought were the highlights of the panel into various topics.
( Read more... )
The list:
There was also a handout listing various interactive slush piles and online writers workshops. I have mislaid it. I only remember that Baen's Bar was one of the slush piles (more information here: http://www.baensuniverse.com/subguide.html) and that Gary and Laurel had positive experiences with the following online writers workshops: http://www.critters.org, which is paid for by donations, and http://sff.onlinewritingworkshop.com, which is $50/year with a free one-month trial membership.

Tags: wiscon

http://wiscon.piglet.org/program/detail?idItems=96

Track(s): Power, Privilege, and Oppression (Feminism and Other Social Change Movements)
Description: Although it's not absolute, there's a strong tendency among masculine people to always want to have the definitive answer for everything, even if they don't necessarily know. In panels and elsewhere in life, it can be hard for men to admit they don't know things. Why is this? How can men deal with the pressure (either internal or external) to always have the right answer? How do women and other non–masculine folks deal with Male Answer Syndrome? If you think the answers to all these questions are obvious, then you need to come to this panel!
Panelists: Suzanne Allés Blom, Moondancer Drake, John Helfers, Stef Maruch
Moderator: John H. Kim

In my pre-panel post, I said: "I wanted to be on this panel because it's All Answer Syndrome All The Time at my house...and the XY person in the relationship is not the only person participating. So I have experience from multiple sides. I also have funny stories and techniques that you'll want to know about!"
( Read more... )

Tags: wiscon

Romancing the Beast
Track(s): Reading, Viewing, and Critiquing Science Fiction (Feminism and Other Social Change Movements)
Description: Paranormal romance almost always features the hero as a paranormal being and the heroine as an ordinary human. How does this resonate with gender relations and power relationships in our society? And is it emblematic of women seeing men as Other?
Moderator: Vito Excalibur
Panelists: Catherine Cheek, Stef Maruch, Heidi Waterhouse, Janine Ellen Young

I was a panelist so I didn't take very thorough notes.

When I read the panel description I immediately thought of a bunch of counterexamples, so I played the panel contrarian.

Counterexamples:
--Anita Blake books (everyone is paranormal. However, heroine starts out more human. In one sense she stays more human than her entourage, in another sense she becomes more paranormal than they are)
--Marjorie M. Liu, A Taste of Crimson (a romance in which the lovers are a male vampire and a female werewolf)
--First Underworld movie (ditto, except a female vampire and a male werewolf)
--My unpublished vampire erotica story, with a female vampire and a male human (Vito asked if my vampire character is very old. She isn't. However, she is older than the human character.)

We discussed stories in which the male beast becomes human (e.g., most versions of Beauty & The Beast) vs. not (e.g., Robin McKinley's Sunshine, although I gather this isn't a bog-standard romance)

I mentioned Cocteau's version of Beauty & The Beast, in which the beast becomes human but he resembles a man who had been pestering Beauty, and she expresses some displeasure/distrust at the change.

Things that were mentioned, but I don't remember what was said about them:
--Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance by Jayne Ann Krentz (Editor)
--http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/
--The beta hero (I think this referred to a less dominant, more sensitive male hero. I didn't say this on the panel, but Liu's A Taste of Crimson had some gender-role switching between the protagonists and the vampire could have been said to be a beta hero.)
--Dark Hunter series
-- (the beast remains "beastly")
--Reaper TV show: Hispanic boy has relationship with demon woman
--Queer reading of paranormal romance

Someone suggested there should be a panel in the future about the uterine replicator.

Toward the end of the panel we began discussing "male human, female sexbot" romances. A theory was promulgated for why women prefer beast romances and men prefer sexbot romances: Women fear loss, and men fear failure. The beast is only attractive to the particular woman who sees his inner beauty, so she won't lose him. A man can't mess up with a sexbot (is this what was said? I can't remember), so he doesn't experience failure. (In her writeup  vito_excalibur said that this was interesting but these arguments could get too essentialist. I agree.)

http://wiscon.piglet.org/program/detail?idItems=143

Reinventing the Adventure
Track(s): The Craft and Business of Writing
Description: The adventure story archetype lies at the heart of both science fiction and fantasy, and is the oldest and arguably most profound literary form in human history. How come contemporary society has ghettoized this art form? Even in science fiction, many authors have shied away from adventure in their desire to be taken seriously. How can we reverse this trend? What does it take to write fiction that's fast, fun, shamelessly adventurous, and at least as challenging as what passes these days for mainstream lit?
Panelists: 4 Carol F. Emshwiller, 1 John Helfers, 3 P. C. Hodgell, 2 Monica Valentinelli

I arrived at this panel late.
I'm ruthlessly leaving out anything that I found uninteresting or that I can't reconstruct accurately from my notes.
I'm paraphrasing from my notes; any words I incorrectly put into anyone's mouth are my fault.
( Read more... )

Tags: wiscon

Triton is set in a future in which humanity has spread to various moons and planets in the solar system. On the moon Triton, people have a lot of freedoms that we don't have on present-day Earth, for example, ( vague spoilers start here; post has no major spoilers but there may be spoilers in the comments )

This is coming up for me as a result of a combination of things, including: having started to read Star Trek the Reboot fanfic, conversations I heard at Wiscon, and posts I saw today, including this one.

Describe science fiction fandom.
Describe media fandom.
What fandoms do you consider yourself to belong to or feel some affinity with?
What terms do you use to describe them?

Tags: sf&f, wiscon

I'm pissed that the court did not vote to repeat Prop 8.

I'm also inclined to hope that this analysis by The Daily Kos is right and the court's decision basically amounts to "OK, you have to call it 'mawwidge' instead of 'marriage' but otherwise it's exacty the same thing." (I don't know enough to understand if that's correct. But if so it's pretty cunning.)

And I do think that by leaving the marriage rights of the 18,000 already-married same sex couples in place, they're pointing out that California is in a completely untenable position with regard to same-sex marriage.

I know full well that this will lead to at least two ballot initiatives in the near future, and I'm dreading having to go down that road again.

But since we have to go down that road again, at least the pro-marriage side appears to be better-organized now than it was during the prop 8 campaign.

If I were legally married to the OH, I would talk to him about getting a divorce in response to the court's decision. But we never did tell the government.

(However, an unmarried opposite-sex couple has more privilege than an unmarried same-sex couple, because people presume we're married unless we explicitly tell them otherwise.)

Incidentally, because it seems important to be out these days: I'm bisexual and polyamorous.

http://wiscon.piglet.org/program/detail?idItems=100

We Are the Apes Who Pray

To explore the evolution and purpose of the supernatural worldview (in all its forms) as purely a matter of human invention. As an atheist, it is often challenging to foster an uncompromised discussion of religion and spirituality without bowing to the social pressure to 'respect' or treat 'seriously' beliefs and opinions which, ultimately, have no basis in scientific fact. Beginning with the acknowledgement that human beings are, without exception, products of biological evolution, how do we move forward to discuss religion and belief for what they are: neurological, anthropological, psychological and sociological aspects of the human condition whose true value rests in what they reveal about us as apes who pray?

Panelists: Erin Cashier, Catherine Anne Crowe, Janet M. Lafler, Keith R. Watson
Moderator: Richard F. Dutcher

Everyone on the panel was an atheist or agnostic.

Some useful/important things that were said:
( Read more... )

Tags: ethics, religion, science, wiscon