All posts by M.J.

#54: Nudity as Free Speech

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #54, on the subject of Nudity as Free Speech.

If the thirteenth century histories are to be believed, it is a practice that has roots back near a thousand years to Lady Godiva, who about two centuries prior purportedly rode her horse down the streets of Coventry clothed only in her long hair, to protest the heavy taxes assessed on the local population by the local Earl of Mercia, Leofric–who happens to have been her husband.  The technique has been used in variations since, and has more recently become a legal issue:  can public nudity be protected as a form of free speech?

Lady Godiva by John Collier, c. 1897, Herbert Art Gallery and Museum
Lady Godiva by John Collier, c. 1897, Herbert Art Gallery and Museum

On April 17th, 2012, a frequent air traveler named John Brennan (not to be confused with the Central Intelligence Agency director of the same name) was stopped at a Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) checkpoint in Portland, Oregon.  He had declined to pass through the scanners which would have produced an image of his naked body under his clothing in favor of a metal detector and pat-down.  However, the pat-down detected nitrates from his clothing–a substance found in some popular explosives, as well as in fertilizer, bacon, some hand lotions, and many other products.  This was certain to be a problem, so Brennan responded, in protest, by stripping naked at the checkpoint in full view of other passengers so that it could be plainly seen that he did not have a bomb.

He was arrested for indecent exposure.  It was a weak case–the applicable indecent exposure law in that part of Oregon, home of the “World Naked Bike Race”, only forbade having sexual contact in public and disrobing “with the intent of arousing sexual desire”, both conditions plainly absent here.  However, Brennan claimed that his act of disrobing was a form of protected free speech.  There is precedent for the notion that actions can be classed as speech or expression under the First Amendment, stemming from a 1971 case, Cohen v. California (403 U.S. 15, 91 S. Ct. 1780, 29 L. Ed. 2d 284 (1971)), in which the defendant was convicted of “offensive conduct”, defined as including “behavior which has a tendency to provoke others to acts of violence or to in turn disturb the peace,” for wearing a jacket bearing an obscene anti-war slogan to a protest outside a municipal courthouse.  The Supreme Court overturned the conviction, asserting that emotive speech intended to get attention is protected speech.  This subsequently gave rise to Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (561 U.S. 1, 130 S.Ct. 2705 (2010)), in which actions which were aimed at providing humanitarian aid to terrorist groups were deemed reasonably forbidden in the name of national security, but which classed such actions as freedom of expression and declared that laws which are otherwise about conduct face “more rigorous scrutiny” (greater than the ordinary “intermediate scrutiny” but not as severe as the nearly always fatal “strict scrutiny”) under facts in which the conduct is part of political speech.  The judge in Brennan’s case agreed that his actions were protected political protest, and found him not guilty.

Not willing to let it rest there, the TSA fined Brennan one thousand dollars for “interfering with screening”.  The fine was upheld, although it was reduced by half, in an administrative hearing under the auspices of an “Administrative Law Judge” whose qualifications were that he was a United States Coast Guard officer working for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).  The extended appeals process for such an “administrative” violation took over a year to reach the head of the department before it could be appealed to a “real” court, the 9th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals.  As of November 11, 2013, an appeal was filed with that court asking that the fine be voided due to several constitutional issues (including the vagueness of TSA regulations), and specifically that his action was constitutionally protected speech.  As recently as October that case was still pending, as the parties await the court’s decision on whether to hear oral arguments or base their decision on the filed papers.

Meanwhile, back in Oregon, Matthew T. Mglej is citing this case in a similar unrelated case.  On May 23rd, 2014, Mglej set up space in front of the federal court building in Portland, posting a few signs, then stripped naked and played the violin to call attention to his cause, a desire for greater transparency in government.  The police arrested him for public indecency (this law makes it “unlawful for any person to expose his or her genitalia while in a public place or place visible from a public place, if the public place is open or available to persons of the opposite sex”) but later released him.  On January 20th, 2015, he filed suit in federal court on a variety of claims including unlawful arrest and violation of his First Amendment right.  This past month U. S. District Judge Michael W. Mosman disagreed, dismissing the suit; Mglej’s nudity was not protected speech, he asserted.

However, as Harvard Constitutional Law Professor Noah Feldman observes (in print as The naked truth about the First Amendment, found online as Protesting Nude in Portland Should Be Protected), the basis for the dismissal is at best dubious.  Mosman asserted that the nudity did not advance the message, that an impartial observer would not have understood how the message and the nudity were connected.  This, as Feldman rightly observes, makes the judge the arbiter of style, as it were, assessing whether Mglej’s speech was effective in achieving its purpose.  The First Amendment does not require that the speaker be articulate, nor give anyone the right to judge whether the message could have been conveyed a different way.  Mglej was attempting to communicate something by his nakedness; does the fact that most people failed to understand what he was attempting to communicate negate his right to attempt to say it?

Besides, part of the message is the medium, and part of the medium is its function in drawing attention to itself and through itself to the message.  Large signs with hot pink lettering do not communicate the message more clearly, they only are more eye-catching; rock bands playing at evangelistic rallies might or might not convey the message as well as the speakers who follow them, but they do draw a crowd–a fact that was not lost on Salvation Army founders William and Catherine Booth, who took brass bands into the streets to draw crowds to hear the message.  Whether or not Mglej’s nakedness clearly conveyed the message of the need for transparency in government, it certainly got the attention of the crowd to hear it.  Absent that detail, it is doubtful that you would be reading about him here, now.  The nudity was as much a part of the message as the violin:  it was the neon sign that caught the attention of passersby to hear the message.

On the other hand, as one city attorney observed, anyone arrested for public nudity could claim that his state of undress was a political protest.  It is easy to imagine that people who subscribe to “nudism” might make it a practice to go about their daily chores completely naked, and assert that they are doing so in protest of the very laws they are violating.  How is that to be resolved?  Can one protest such laws by being naked?

This argument could be pushed to the absurd.  Someone robbing a bank could claim that they are doing so in protest of the laws protecting personal property, or of the unfair advantages accorded to those who own the banks.  Many bombers are already acting in protest, at least as far back as the Viet Nam War protesters, and many rioters become swept up into violent protests that were fundamentally about a reaction against the system.  If breaking one law can be protected speech, can the same be true of all these other laws?

It will be answered that these other crimes are dangerous; people get hurt.  The injury might be physical; it might be economic.  It is clear that we need to protect ourselves from such actions, lest we become their victims, and indeed we need to prevent these actions as much as possible for the sake of others who might be injured by them.  Inherent in that response, though, is the presumption that no one is “really” harmed by public displays of nudity, that those who object are simply being prudish, Victorian, censorial, trying to run the lives of others by requiring them to wear clothing and conform to public decency standards.  The point can be argued.  Those who oppose public nudity believe that there is harm, that for example children should be shielded from seeing naked adults, women should not be forced to look at naked men, and that people exposed to such sights may genuinely be harmed, suffering psychological injury of some type.  It is not a harmless nor a victimless crime.  If it were, it would never have been illegal in the first place–someone thought it was injurious to someone, so laws were passed to prevent it.

You might object that our prudish ancestors had a lot of misguided notions about right and wrong and about conduct that was deemed harmful to others, and that in our enlightened age we can dispense with such nonsense.  It is a point that can be debated–but the fact that it can be debated means that there is at least some merit to the claim that there is real harm; and if there is a basis for a claim of real harm, there is at least potentially reason to make such conduct unlawful.  That in turn pushes us into the quandary:  at what point does harmful conduct become protected self-expression?  If such nudity is in fact harmful to at least some ordinary people, then it ought to be as illegal as robbing banks and bombing buildings, and breaking the law should not be legal merely because it is self-expression.  If it is not harmful to anyone but perhaps a few overly sensitive individuals, then it ought not be illegal and we should find less intrusive means of protecting those weaker citizens who might be impacted by it.

Certainly there is a place for civil disobedience in self-expression, for violating laws in order to make a point.  As we previously noted, the Supreme Court has ruled that burning a cross in the yard of a black family is indeed protected speech, but the perpetrators might still be convicted of arson, trespass, and disorderly conduct.  The individual who chooses civil disobedience as a mode of protest is inherently agreeing to accept the lawful penalty for breaking the law, as part of his choice.  Henry David Thoreau spent a night in jail for refusing to pay a tax that supported the continuation of slavery; he understood that his disobedience to the law meant that he would be imprisoned, and took that as part of his protest.  It is not unreasonable to conclude that Mglej is permitted to make his statement, but that he still must stand trial for violating the law in doing so, just as any protesting bomber would.  That, though, does not seem to be what the courts are saying, and what they are saying seems to be that this particular law does not matter because violating it does not hurt anyone.  We are going to have to settle that issue, one way or the other, and decide whether public nudity should be forbidden or permitted.

Zymurgy’s Law of Evolving Dynamic Systems states, “If you open a can of worms, the only way to re-can them is to use a bigger can.”  We’ve got one of those here, for certain.

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#53: Character Battles

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #53, on the subject of Character Battles.

This is about the creation of my book Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel, now being posted to the web site in serialized form.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, so you might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them.  That link will take you to the table of contents for the book; links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.  There were also numerous similar previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts:

  1. #18:  A Novel Comic Milestone (which provided this kind of insight into the first six chapters),
  2. #20:  Becoming Novel (covering chapters seven through twelve),
  3. #22:  Getting Into Characters (for chapters thirteen through eighteen),
  4. #25:  Novel Changes (chapters 19 through 24),
  5. #27:  Novel Continuation (chapters 25 through 30),
  6. #30:  Novel Directions (chapters 31 through 36),
  7. #33:  Novel Struggles (chapters 37 through 42),
  8. #35:  Quiet on the Novel Front (chapters 43 through 48), and
  9. #37:  Character Diversity (chapters 49 through 56),
  10. #39:  Character Futures (chapters 57 through 60),
  11. #43:  Novel Worlds (chapters 61 through 66),
  12. #47:  Character Routines (chapters 67 through 72), and
  13. #50:  Stories Progress (chapters 73 through 78).

This picks up from there.  All three of our characters are involved in some kind of fight in these chapters.

img0053Phila

There is some essential background to the book as a whole in that first post, which I will not repeat here.


Chapter 79, Slade 26

I have never been a sports enthusiast, but I was forced to play a bit in high school and knew something of the various games.  Football is a particularly good example here, as each player has to do his job but probably does not know what the other players are doing—only that if they all do the little part they need to do, the guy who does understand the whole plan will see to it that they achieve the desired result.  My job might be only to push this incoming lineman to the left, but the result should be that our receiver goes through the hole that helps create and we advance the ball a few yards.

I would feel bad about stealing matter transmission, except I don’t know who created the idea.  They had it in Blake’s 7, and mine is most like theirs, but I saw it in Star Trek before that, and it was on Doctor Who at least as early as the Tom Baker years.

In my explanations of what happens when someone “verses out” I noticed that it was very like what theoretically happens in matter transmission:  the molecular structure of the body is disassembled, moved, and reassembled.  Thus for Slade his first transmat would feel similar to his last verse-out.  He’d never been fully conscious for that, but fortunately I’d already moved him to that semi-conscious state for his arrival here, so it was something that would feel familiar.


Chapter 80, Hastings 28

The idea of blessing water as it filled the tank of a pumper truck was mine.  We used it when we went after the Presemium, a high-brow theater that was the third of the three major vampire strongholds in Ed’s version of Chicago—it had underground caverns, and I wanted them flooded with holy water.  Since at this point I knew Lauren was not going to stay in this world long enough to do all that I had done, I decided to use the pumper truck, and several other bits we used at the Presemium, at the Pit.  (I also did a psionic transmutation, changing the water in the fire sprinkler system to alcohol, but I did not include that in the books.)

The camp food was modeled on Gumper’s Four-man Meal Packs, a staple of long-trek hikes and canoe trips.

I think I inserted this short chapter to give the feeling of delay, of the passage of time before the attack on the Pit, hoping that the reader would feel some anticipation from it.


Chapter 81, Kondor 27

I may have seen something like the ram catcher in a game source book somewhere, but I can’t recall to credit it.  I might have invented it and used it here initially, and then seen something like it elsewhere.

The fact that arrows are not terribly effective against skeletons is a Dungeons & Dragons™ trope, but it makes sense to me.

Eventually, when I designed this world for game play, I had to work out how the wizard did his magic; at this point, he only needed to be able to do it, particularly since Kondor, a disbeliever, would not be interested in how Sowan thought he did it.


Chapter 82, Slade 27

Two things are happening in this chapter, really.  One is that I am trying to give the impression of critical sections of the ship—a liquid or gas cooling system, a computer mainframe, and something like rods to control the reaction in a nuclear reactor—without actually saying what anything really did and so limiting the future technology or causing Slade to appear to know more than he did.

The other is that I’m trying to turn a routine raid into an action story.  The alarm sounding and the appearance of the technician are part of that effort, creating problems that have to be overcome.

The expression about there being no good plan Bs is something of a family enigma.  I’m sure I heard it from my brother Roy, who is equally sure he got it from me.  I joke that since I included it in my novel, I’ll be credited for it, but I suspect there’s someone out there who came up with it first who hasn’t gotten credit for it.

I wanted one-man life pods so that it would make sense for Slade to be alone.  They’re not exactly sensible, but you do see them on some science fiction movies.


Chapter 83, Hastings 29

I had staying power—Ed complained about how difficult it was to get my character out of a world, and he never actually succeeded in getting me out of this one.  Lauren is reflecting that to some degree, winning and surviving against the odds.  She is the only one of the characters at this point still in the original world—although in fairness, Slade stayed in his first world for a couple decades, and Kondor for perhaps a dozen years, and it’s really only been a few months for Lauren.  Still, I was going to have to move her out of this world, and I knew that this event was my best shot—if I did not do it now, I was going to have to expand into a lot of much more difficult adventures (my work eventually involved a paranatural predator, a ghost, an Egyptian curse, and a wizard, all of which were crazy open-ended stories).  So I knew going into this that somehow Lauren was going to come to the end during this fight.

This chapter is laced with Lauren’s scripture verses.  I wanted to establish them, and convey the texts to the reader.

The dimming is of course the wizardry of Horta, battling against her.  We’ve got a contest of skills and power here.

The baptism quote is one of my favorite “people get this wrong all the time” verses, which is why Lauren explains it.

The wizard whom Bethany replaces brought a Barbie doll—he seemed to be fixated on the things—and when he cast his spell it walked into the fray stabbing people in the ankles with something like a hat pin.  He complained that it was supposed to grow to be forty feet tall or something.  I wasn’t doing dolls with Bethany, and thought that military toys were a better choice.

The soldier was not an unreasonable possibility, given the priest’s connections with the hunters, but the real reason for having him here was to give Lauren the bullets that Joe was going to need in the last adventure.  I did not yet know what that was, exactly, but it was taking shape and I knew that he was going to be short on ammo and needing more.

I still did not realize that Lauren would be fighting Horta in the past, or that there would be a more powerful vampire, Tubrok.  Still, this confrontation was going to be adequate for the climax of this world.


Chapter 84, Kondor 28

C. S. Lewis somewhere spoke of the “materialist magician”, the person who tapped supernatural powers but believed they were entirely natural abilities of his own.  Kondor has something of that perspective of the wizard—who is not such a person, who actually is knowingly tapping supernatural energies.  However, he is correct that there is a difference between having mental abilities beyond those of everyone else that give you unexpected powers and using magic—he just fails to recognize that the latter is also possible.

Joe tells the dying man he’s going to be all right, and maybe he thinks so, if he can get back in time to help him; but there is something to the need for medical personnel to encourage positive thinking in patients, who are more likely to recover if they believe they will, and so it may be that this is just something Joe has learned as part of “bedside manner”.

Joe is faced with another evidence that what he thinks is happening is incorrect, as the dying soldier dies and comes back to life as a zombie to attack him.  First he has to deal with the problem; then he has to explain it to himself in a way that fits his view of the universe.


Interest in these “behind the writings” continues, so I’m still thinking they’re worth producing.  Feedback is always welcome, of course.  Your Patreon support is also needed to maintain this.

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#52: The X-Files Sexism Debate

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #52, on the subject of The X-Files Sexism Debate.

A few days ago I published mark Joseph “young” web log post #49:  Duchovny, Anderson, Sexism, and the Free Market.  It created quite a stir on an IMDB thread where I had announced it, and it seemed that I should provide some kind of response–but the sheer volume of the posts there (which has undoubtedly grown since I wrote this) made it difficult to provide a comprehensive and orderly reply there, so I am writing another post here to address it.

Early in my writing career I learned two important truths that all aspiring writers need to grasp.

First, you are much more likely to hear from those who disagree with you or do not like what you are writing than from those who agree.  As long as you are “preaching to the choir” the choir will nod quietly and let you speak uninterrupted.  Get a few objectors in your audience, and you will hear the objections.  This is good, really.  Those negative responses are valuable.  Some of them are valuable because they give you insight into opposing views; others are valuable because they clearly misunderstood what you were saying, and so may indicate that you need to communicate your points better.  It may be that both of these benefits acrue to me from the comments posted, and for this I am grateful.  Thank you.

Second, there will always be people who will criticize what you wrote without having read it.  They will base their opinion on a title, or a comment from another reader, or their expectations of what you are likely to have said based on such information as they have obtained about you.  My advice is to ignore these people.  Gradually others will realize what their opinions are worth, and arguing with them will not help your position in the least–they do not know and do not care what you are saying, only what they have already concluded regarding what they think you meant.

img0052Actors

The objections began with someone self-identified as alphabase17, who seemed to think that by asserting that the action of the producers was not sexist I was denying the existence of sexism in the world.  Perhaps I was unclear.  My point was actually that the sexism that was reflected in the situation was actually “in the world”, not in the producers.  Assuming arguendo that the facts are as they have been presented (more on that in a moment), the reason male actors are offered more than female actors is not because Hollywood producers are prejudiced, but because viewers are.  Both men and women want more to see male leads in their films and television shows, and so Hollywood produces more shows with male leads.  Over the decades as shows with female leads became more popular, more such shows were produced–but it is ratings that drive television, and the decision concerning what to pay an actor is ultimately a bottom-line decision:  will having this actor sell enough soap to pay that salary and still turn a profit?

Our poster alphabase17 asserts that we know the facts, but when those facts are stated they are the same incomplete facts I included in my article:  We know that at one point Anderson was offered half the salary that Duchovny was being paid.  We do not know what Duchovny was initially offered, and we do know that after negotiations were complete Anderson was being paid the same amount as Duchovny.  The way these negotiations work, of course, is that the producers approach the actor’s agent and say we’d like to have your client in our show and are offering X amount; the agent then says X is not enough, we want Z; the producers then say Z is too much, what about we settle at Y?  Eventually they agree on a number that is usually more than the original offer and less than the original response.  Our problem is that for Duchovny, we don’t know “X”, “Y”, or “Z”; for Anderson, we don’t know “X”, “Y”, or “Z” but we do know that her “X” is half of Duchovny’s “Y”, and her “Y” is the same as his.

Let’s be hypothetical, and extrapolate some thinking.  The numbers I’m using are intentionally unrealistic, for illustrative purposes.

    We’d like to launch a new X-Files.  We want Duchovny.  We can do the series without him, but we’d have to rethink it–whether to make it a reboot with a younger actor playing Mulder (like the 2009 Star Trek), or a next generation with a new lead agent taking Mulder’s job (like Star Trek:  The Next Generation), but we’ll take a hit–the show will be more popular if we have Duchovny as Mulder.  Let’s offer him a thousand an episode and see what his agent says.

    So the agent says no, make it ten thousand, and they dicker, and agree on five thousand.  Now they move to the next step.  If they didn’t have Duchovny, they probably wouldn’t want Anderson at all–if they’re replacing Mulder with a younger version, they’ll want a younger Scully, and if they’re moving to the next generation they won’t want Scully at all.

    Now that we have Duchovny for Mulder, we’ll want Anderson for Scully.  We can’t easily have a new actress play Scully, but we could replace Mulder’s partner with a new, younger, agent.  We’d rather have Anderson, but we have options.  Let’s offer Anderson twenty-five hundred, and see where that puts us.

    The agent thinks that’s a solid offer, but it’s his job to negotiate, so he inquires to find out what they’re paying Duchovny, and when he sees the five thousand figure he says, no, you’re going to pay Anderson as much.  They agree.

    Note that if the producers offered Anderson up front what they were paying Duchovny, her agent would reasonably have thought they were more desperate to get her than they were, and would have asked for more; then they would be in the position that Duchovny’s agent would insist that Anderson can’t be paid more than Duchovny, and the entire negotiation process would be in turmoil.  In a sense, they have to offer Anderson less than they’re paying Duchovny.  However, note in this hypothetical reconstruction, their initial offer to Anderson was greater than that to Duchovny, even though it was only half what they were paying him.  Note, too, that the producers expected to pay more than their initial offer.  Initial offers are almost always low-ball for that reason, and a low offer to Anderson meant Anderson’s agent could earn his commission by getting her more without having to demand that she be paid more than Duchovny.

No, we don’t know that this is an accurate reconstruction of the negotiations; the numbers are certainly not accurate.  However, the point that alphabase17 missed is that this is a plausible reconstruction precisely because we do not know what Duchovny was offered before he negotiated the agreed pay.  Comparing agreed pay to agreed pay, we find they are equal.  Comparing an initial offer to one against a final agreed salary of the other tells us nothing, because we do not have the initial offer to the one.  We can be pretty certain that whatever the number is for which Duchovny’s agent settled, it was more than the initial offer.

alphabase17 makes a valid point with this:

As to audience preferences, you offered no data to support the claim that “more viewers are more willing to spend more money to see male stars.”

I admit that to some degree my argument is circular, but it is not entirely so.  Television producers spend a lot of money trying to determine what viewers will watch.  There are people trying to sell them program ideas of all kinds, starring men, women, children, aliens, animals, and who knows what else.  They do audience reactions, surveys, ratings of what people actually do watch, sponsor interest, and much more, and they attempt to pick shows that will attract viewers–and if those shows fail to attract viewers competitively, they get cancelled.  The facts that more shows have male stars and that male actors get paid more than females are strong indicators that all this analysis points to viewer preference for male leads.  It has never been exclusively true–Lucille Ball was able to hold audiences in the fifties and sixties, Star Trek did a series with the wonderful Kate Mulgrew in the captain’s chair (I did not enjoy the series, but she was good), Cagney and Lacey held viewers to a police drama starring female detectives, and there have been many others–but even now more male-star series succeed than female-star series, and producers put their money where the probabilities favor success.

Maybe it’s wrong, but I think that in law it would be said that I’ve got a rebuttable presumption:  there is enough evidence that the statement is true that to contradict it would require proof.

I want to thank waslah for his contribution.  Mish4 (who specifically chose to criticize without reading the article) had said

Why I always expecting the best from a man when they always erase sexism and dismiss women’s serious complains (sic)?

waslah answered

…this comment is kind of sexist in it’s own right. It seems to suggest that all men are misogynists…and that’s a bunch of man hating, misandrist bullcrap.
(Ellipsis original)

waslah is correct, but he misses a critical point about progressivist philosophy:  for some reason, it is only discrimatory if the target is a “protected class”.  You can make prejudicial comments about straight white men without any fear of retribution, but the assumption is that any negative statement made about a woman, or a black, or a homosexual, is inherently discriminatory.  We see this even with Michelle Obama, who assumes that a short elderly white woman asking her, a tall black woman, to reach something on the top shelf in a Target department store reflects the white woman’s prejudice toward blacks, not a recognition of the advantage of height.  If I say that statistically women have less upper body strength than men (anatomically demonstrable) I’m being mysogynistic, because it doesn’t matter that it’s true, only that it can be taken as a negative statement about women (or a positive statement about men, which comes to the same thing); but if a woman says that all men are misogynists, even though that is demonstrably false (whether or not it applies to me specifically), that is not considered sexist because it is not a negative statement about women (or gays).  No, it does not make any sense, but it is the way the progressivists regard the matter.  It has something to do with the fact that our ancestors mistreated these groups, and so we, their descendants, must bear similar mistreatment.

Returning to alphabase17:

…I commented upon it [the Duchovny/Anderson pay discrepancy] on three websites and got a lot of ironic, belittling, condescending comments from men, and those champions of intellect claimed that of course the male deserves to be paid more than the female and that I know nothing about show business and that I must be a vile feminist and that people like me should be ashamed for finding sexism where there is none.

I certainly apologize if I came across that way.  There is nothing in what I said that I intended as a matter of what anyone “deserves”.  That’s a bit like saying that apples “deserve” to cost more than oranges because apples taste better, or are healthier for you, or something like that.  If apples cost more than oranges, it’s because the demand exceeds the supply.  If actors are paid more than actresses, it is because audiences want actors more than they want actresses.  I did not say that there was no sexism involved; I said that the sexism was in the audience, the culture generally, not in the bean counters trying to get as much as they can for the smallest possible expenditure.  They tried to lowball Anderson.  They probably tried to lowball Duchovny first, and they’ve undoubtedly had to negotiate with a lot of people, such as writers and directors, concerning how much everyone will be paid for this project.  Actors are not paid based on how hard they work; they’re paid based on how much audience they draw.

Pizza restaurants buy their ingredients and sell their pizzas.  As one chain likes to remind us, better ingredients make better pizza–but also more expensive pizza.  There are chains that never tell us they make good pizza, they tell us that they make it cheap.  A decision is being made by each restaurant, is it worth the extra money to buy the better cheese, the fresher spices, the more expensive tomatoes?  Will we be able to sell the pizza for enough more to cover the extra cost of making it, or will we make more money by making the cheaper pizza?  From the perspective of the television producers, actors aren’t employees paid for their work, they’re ingredients in a product, commodities bought and sold.  The question is, how cheaply can I buy this actor, and what’s the return on my investment?  Any sexism that goes into that is the sexism of, “What will the audience pay to see this man in the project, as opposed to that woman?”  It is an assessment of the attitudes of the consumers, finding those often to be sexist.

Many of the things I have said here have been said by others in the thread at IMDB; I have been working on this response for several days, and decided not to remove such points.  I will finish with a quote from nrkist2424, from what was the last post on the thread when I finished this.  It was a point I was considering making, but I had no numbers to support it.

[Gillian Anderson]’s pay outweighs the combined pay for all the returning character actors.  Are you concerned about that?

Indeed, if it really were about “equal pay for equal work”, there is a tremendous amount of disparity there.  I read a quote from an actor who said they paid him a lot of money to stand in the rain and drink coffee; the acting he did for free.  The lead actors do not work much harder than all the others on the set; they aren’t getting paid based on their work.  Their performances are being purchased according to an agreed price based on the resale value of those performances.

And in the end, Gillian Anderson was paid exactly the same thing as David Duchnovny, because the studio agreed that she was worth it when she asked.  That’s how negotiation works.

Again, I extend my thanks to all who read the previous article and provided feedback.  Your input has not gone unnoticed.

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#51: In Memoriam on Groundhog Day

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #51, on the subject of In Memoriam on Groundhog Day.

My father died a few days ago, at noon on January 27th, 2016.  There will be memorial visitation on Saturday, February 13th, from one to four in the afternoon at the Van Emburgh-Sneider-Pernice Funeral Home on Darlington Ave in Ramsey (New Jersey) near the home he has shared with my mother since I was twelve.  Before that we lived in Scotch Plains, and in Freeport, Long Island.  He came from Sardis, Mississippi, by way of an Electrical Engineering degree from Georgia Tech.  I will always remember him working decades for Western Union, but it had been decades since he was there and he had held a number of other jobs since.  He did not speak much of his education or his work, but I gather he had completed a masters at Stevens Institute of Technology, and worked sporadically toward a doctorate.  He held patents in focusing microwaves, and headed engineering in Western Union’s Data Services offshoot in the late 60’s.  He was the only person I knew who had worked in assembly language.

He was Cornelius Bryant Young, Jr.  Technically, he was the third, but his grandfather had died while his father was still young, and his father married old, so my granddad took “senior” and made him “junior” (although they never, as far as I know, called him that).  Since his grandfather was “Cornelius” his father was always “Bryant”, and he wound up with “C.B.”, although it was often reduced to “Seeb”, which is what my mother generally called him.  He hated nicknames–I never understood why, and as “Mark” always wished that there was a more familiar form distinguished as “my friends call me”.  (I might then have felt that I had friends.)  My mother wanted to name one of us Cornelius Bryant Young IV and call him Neil, and my father always said, “If you want to call him Neil, name him Neil.”  My little brother is Neil Bryant Young.  My wife also wanted to name a child Cornelius Bryant Young IV and call him Cory, but my father said–well, you know what he said.  My second son is Kyler Cornelius Bryant Young, and my third has Cory as a middle name.

I will remember many of the wonderful things he said over the years.  They come to mind particularly because he often quipped about today–Groundhog Day–saying “If the groundhog sees his shadow, we will have six more weeks of winter, but if he doesn’t, it will be a month and a half.”

Cornelius B. Young, Jr., in 2015 at his brother-in-law's birthday party.
Cornelius B. Young, Jr., in 2015 at his brother-in-law’s birthday party.

He gave the name Young’s Theorem to a quip he created and put on signs in a working lab he headed before I was born.  People working on various projects would find that they did not have the particular piece of equipment they needed, so would substitute something similar–“not the same, but not really different”–and then be surprised at the results.  My father’s sign read, “Things that are not the same are different.”

It was from him that I first heard Murphy’s Law, and he delighted in collecting such witicisms.  He gave me (appropriately, given the recent reaction to my article a few days ago on the X-Files sexism flap), “I know that you believe that you understand what you think I said, but I am not certain you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”  I was still in Cub Scouts, having trouble working on a Pinewood Derby model car, when he said, with a wonderfully instructive facetiousness, “If you cut it too short you can always stretch it, but what can you do if you cut it too long?”

He was the most patient man I ever knew (although once when I said that to my mother, she told me to remember that he lost his temper at me more than once).  I only heard him swear once in my life, in a famous story of our effort to navigate Skinner’s Falls on the Delaware River when it was several feet above flood stage.  He remained constantly calmly rational–my model of unemotive rationality long before Spock appeared.  It has impacted me significantly, as I, too, am generally not effusive in my expressions of emotion, regard foul language as an indication of a poor intellect, and choose rational response over impatient reaction.  Yet it had its negative side.  He would often praise my efforts after a success in my school days, such as a band or choral concert, but because he knew that his cool rationalism would not sound sincere he forced an enthusiasm that always sounded less sincere in my ears, and so I never received praise well from him–and in turn I made a point with my own sons not to attempt to sound enthusiastic in my praise.  I can only hope they understood that I was sincere.

He was always there for us when we were in trouble.  I think perhaps we relied too much on him.  I wonder, often, whether his available support caused me to rely less on God in times of trouble, or whether it taught me that a father is always there for you.  I probably called him for help about a tenth as many times as my wife suggested.  I knew I was a disappointment to him in that area, and that that was important to him.  I shall need more help from others in the years ahead, I expect, as he is no longer there.

He was, and in a sense continues to be, the reason for much that is in this web log.  Because of my law school degree (for which he paid a significant portion, and for which he never received an adequate return on his investment) he regaled me with articles, clippings in envelopes and links online, claiming that President Obama was not legitimately elected because he was not a “natural born Citizen” as required by the Constitution.  That led to the composition of my series on The Birther Issue and the addenda on The Birth Certificate, and my title as Newark Political Buzz Examiner.  The law and politics section of my website has been expanded to many times its previous size by those articles, and I still keep an eye on the political news and write about it here sporadically.  One of the last clippings he sent me before he died was an insightful piece on whether Ted Cruz was a “natural born Citizen”, although I had already addressed that.  I have not checked my e-mail since before his final hospitalization, but expect that I will find something there from him that might require me to respond here.

I miss him.  We rarely talked, and always when we did I felt that I had failed in the ways he had most hoped I would succeed, but I knew he loved me despite his cool exterior, and I know that my life will be a lot harder and a little lonelier without him.

He was a Southern Baptist in Mississippi, but had settled into the (calmer and less conservative) American Baptist Convention churches by the time I was born.  He often expressed doubts and raised questions about Christian faith, and I wanted him to read the draft of my hopefully forthcoming book Why I Believe (tentative title).  I don’t know whether he expressed those to me because of my degrees in Biblical Studies, and I never could be certain exactly about his faith in Christ, but I have good reason to hope that he has had those doubts resolved and is in the presence of our Lord even now.

Dad, if you get this message, my long-remembered college friend Steve Freed established the rendezvous location for us and I promised to meet him there, along with everyone else:  East Side, Center Gate.  I hope to see you there in a few short years.

With tears on my face,

    I love you, Dad.

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#50: Stories Progress

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #50, on the subject of Stories Progress.

This is about the creation of my book Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel, now being posted to the web site in serialized form.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, so you might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them.  That link will take you to the table of contents for the book; links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.  There were also numerous similar previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts:

  1. #18:  A Novel Comic Milestone (which provided this kind of insight into the first six chapters),
  2. #20:  Becoming Novel (covering chapters seven through twelve),
  3. #22:  Getting Into Characters (for chapters thirteen through eighteen),
  4. #25:  Novel Changes (chapters 19 through 24),
  5. #27:  Novel Continuation (chapters 25 through 30),
  6. #30:  Novel Directions (chapters 31 through 36),
  7. #33:  Novel Struggles (chapters 37 through 42),
  8. #35:  Quiet on the Novel Front (chapters 43 through 48), and
  9. #37:  Character Diversity (chapters 49 through 56),
  10. #39:  Character Futures (chapters 57 through 60),
  11. #43:  Novel Worlds (chapters 61 through 66), and
  12. #47:  Character Routines (chapters 67 through 72).

This picks up from there.  Our characters are advancing in their efforts.

img0050Cemetery

There is some essential background to the book as a whole in that first post, which I will not repeat here.


Chapter 73, Slade 24

I took Slade’s cryptic comments in another direction with his statement that he’s died before and will do it again.

The concept of an “auto-mechanic” is very much a twentieth century concept, and while it’s not dead yet it probably will be if we keep going a few more centuries.  Thus I realized that the crew of the spaceship would be just as clueless regarding what an “auto-mechanic” was as the medieval adventurers.

The captain’s comment that the assassin Ishara has “problems with intimacy” is, as far as I recall, the only line of which my editor specifically said it was funny.

I also thought it likely that people in the future would have no understanding of smoking, and that faced with that Slade would realize that it can’t be explained.

The stuff in the small treasure chest was invented on the spot, as things I thought might have use as well as value.


Chapter 74, Hastings 26

I had imagined—not as much as envisioned—that in future books when Lauren trained Bethany in the past some of these magics would come into that.  They never did, although the trick with the die came to have plot significance in making something work when I painted myself into a corner with Merlin.

I still had no clue about the acorn.  I often wonder when I read books by others whether the author knew when he put the “shotgun over the mantel” how he was going to use that particular shotgun, or whether it was an “I can do something with that” moment, or simply a bit of serendipity.  This was a highly serendipitous “I can do something with that” object, and I stunned myself when I realized what I had given myself.


Chapter 75, Kondor 25

Kondor’s dream is dealing with the idea that the fact that you disbelieve something does not mean it could not be a reality.  It is easy to laugh at supernatural horrors when you know them to be fictional; it is much more difficult when they might be a reality.  Army of Darkness can fill the screen with horrors, but they are never real horrors for us, and we can laugh.

When he was in Sherwood, I spent very little time on the notion that he would learn their skills; but it seemed reasonable that having been there for years he would take a bit of time here and there to learn a few things outside his medical specialization.  He was, after all, also a soldier.  Thus the bow was a reasonable choice; at one time all English peasants were expected to learn the bow, and it was the weapon that defeated the French.

Joe had a resource problem:  his bullets were limited.  I knew by this point that I was going to have to find a way to re-supply him, but also that he was going to have to be careful about how quickly he used what he had.

Because of Kondor’s skepticism, the explanation of the vorgo is a superstition, and he thus thinks that what is being done in that vein is wasted resources.  He tries to justify this based on the morale of the fighters, but at every turn he sees more problems—such as the fact that manpower is going to be used to move corpses to the pyre when it should be on the walls.


Chapter 76, Slade 25

In technology skills, Multiverser recognizes that the level of skill necessary for various tasks differs in kind.  The ability to design a machine is the highest level, but there are people who are very good at building a machine from a design, even better at building than the designers, who could not create a design.  There are those who can modify a machine by looking at how it works and improving it, those who can repair a machine if it breaks, those who can (intelligently) sabotage a machine so that it won’t work properly, and those who can operate a machine with only a basic knowledge of how it works.  Slade is looking at star drives and gravity generators and particle weapons, and he cannot begin to fathom how these work—but he’s also looking at electrical systems and fluid and gas conduits and support structures, all of which are simple enough that he could fix a problem without knowing how that particular part of it makes the rest of it work.  Thus he has repair skills that can be used here.

The listening post raid is inspired by a Blake’s 7 episode in which they attack a Federation Outpost to get the latest code cipher machine.  It was an obvious type of mission for this kind of scenario, and I run it frequently in live games (although, as I think I mentioned, this world was created in this novel and only subsequently detailed for game play).  I had to remove the code cipher machine, as that was too obvious a connection, and I expanded the outpost significantly both to give me more room for my adventure and to make it different.

The line about Slade trying to decide “what medieval gear he should have for a raid on a space station” was another that my editor mentioned positively.  The image of an armored knight with a sword attacking a space station does have something of a lark to it.


Chapter 77, Hastings 27

The game system imposes limits on how much people can carry, both in terms of what can be lifted or carried while walking and in terms of how much will move with the person from universe to universe.  This latter limit increases over time, but particularly in the early worlds people who are pack rats have to consider what they really need to take with them.

It is also often the case that players wish they had gotten one thing or another in a previous world where it was relatively easily obtained, and Lauren is considering that aspect now.  She has sort of left it to the last minute, and while I might be accused of the convenience that she managed to think to do this shopping very shortly before she left this world (and I had at this point realized that I was going to have to move her before I’d used all the cool stories I’d developed in play), it is certainly the case that facing the fight she has planned she would be aware of the possibility of moving to another world in it.


Chapter 78, Kondor 26

The darkness was needed because without it there would be no explanation for how the undead were able to fight in daylight.  I don’t think I ever explained how it was done, but I attributed it to magic used by the specters, the most powerful of the enemy.

The eyesight adjustment was one of the key reasons for giving him that eye before.  I wasn’t certain where or when I would use it, but seeing in the dark was the point.

It is interesting that Joe thinks of the natural eye as the “good” one, and the cybernetic one as a substitute, not a real eye and therefore inferior, even though it does more and responds faster.

That the castellan regards Joe’s vision magical fits into Joe’s preconceptions about magic, that it is simply a word to describe what we do not understand.


Interest in these “behind the writings” continues, so I’m still thinking they’re worth producing.  Feedback is always welcome, of course.  Your Patreon support is also needed to maintain this.

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#49: Duchovny, Anderson, Sexism, and the Free Market

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #49, on the subject of Duchovny, Anderson, Sexism, and the Free Market.

The scuttlebutt in the entertainment industry at the moment is that for the new X-Files revival, actress Gillian Anderson, who plays scientist/agent Dana Scully, was offered half the pay that was offered to actor David Duchovny, who plays agent Fox Mulder.  The outrage arises, that an actress (I’m sorry–“female actor”) would be paid only half as much as an actor (that is, a male actor) for the same work.  It screams that the wage gap is still a real issue, even in mostly liberal Hollywood.

No one can argue that Anderson isn’t every bit as good an actor as Duchovny.  She has more awards and more nominations, even in the “big” ones–Duchovny has two Golden Globes (the second in 2008 for Californication) to Anderson’s one, but she also has a Prime Time Emmy and a Screen Actors Guild (SAG) award.  Even supposing that the competition is stiffer for the male awards than the female ones, her credentials are impressive.

Yet in all the hullaballoo a few points are being overlooked.  So, what’s the real issue?

img0049XFiles

First, let’s be clear:  In the new revival X-Files miniseries Gillian Anderson is being paid the same amount as David Duchovny.  The complaint is that when they contacted her initially they offered her considerably less than they had agreed to pay him.  Of course, they did not contact her, and they did not contact him–they contacted her agent and his agent, and made offers, which the agents then negotiated to an agreed salary.  Further, we are not privy to any of this negotiation.  We do not know any of the numbers.  It might be that they offered Duchovny a half a million per episode and then settled for a million per episode, and then made the same half million per episode offer to Anderson and negotiated to the same million dollar mark.  The numbers might be much smaller than that; they might be larger.  No one is talking numbers, and no one is talking about the negotiation process.  However, clearly there was a negotiation process, because Anderson’s complaint was that they offered her half of what they were paying Duchovny, but she does not know what they initially offered Duchovny and she does know that her agent negotiated her the same pay before any filming was done.  Maybe that’s not the case; maybe they really did offer Duchovny twice what they offered Anderson.  Neither we nor she know that.

There is, though, a more fundamental issue here.

Star Trek:  The Next Generation was one of the great “ensemble dramas” of the eighties.  Hill Street Blues, L. A. Law, Dallas, and a number of others dotted primetime.  One of the things that distinguished this type of show from those of the sixties was that there was not really a “star”–that is, the original Star Trek was a vehicle starring William Shatner as Captain Jim Kirk, with Leonard Nimoy’s Spock and the other characters all in supporting roles.  Even when a particular episode was primarily about Spock, such as Amok Time, Kirk was the hero.  By contrast, in Next Generation there were entire episodes in which Patrick Stewart’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard was not on screen at all.  Yet when the first film was made, it was reported that Patrick Stewart was paid twelve million dollars to appear, and Brent Spiner (Commander Data) eight million, the two together making near as much as the other major members of the cast combined.  Sure, they had big roles in that film–but we don’t know to what degree they got paid more for the bigger roles versus were given the bigger roles because they were costing the studio more.  The latter is the more likely.  Studios negotiate with actors (through their agents) individually, and from the studio’s side the question is whether having this actor is worth the money in the sense that more people are likely to buy tickets if he is in the show than if he is not.  Presumably Paramount concluded that Michael Dorn (Lieutenant Worf) could be written out of the script if he wanted more than whatever they paid him, and Dorn agreed that he would rather work for that lesser amount than be dropped from the movie.  Picard and Data were vital characters; Riker, Crusher, Troi, La Forge, and others not so much.

So if we assume that 20th Century Fox actually did initially offer Duchovny more than they offered Anderson, the obvious conclusion is that they thought Duchovny was worth more to the show, or would demand more to be on it.  Further, there is evidence to support such a conclusion.  Duchovny had a starring role in the popular pay-cable series Californication for seven years, and since then has the lead in the police drama Aquarius.  Anderson has had a number of critically acclaimed roles–the National Theatre’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Great Expectations, Bleak House–but no leading roles in something primarily popular.  As important as she is to the X-Files franchise and as highly praised for her other work, her name does not sell as many tickets as his does.  The producers do not have the financial incentive to pay her as much, because they would not necessarily expect–or get–the same return on their investment.

Arguably, Duchovny has gotten popular leading roles and Anderson has been working in less prominent jobs because Hollywood favors leading roles for men.  Yes, it does–but not because Hollywood producers prefer men in leading roles.  It’s because of audience preferences.

Geena Davis played a powerfully compelling action hero in The Long Kiss Goodnight, and Samuel Jackson as the sidekick was every bit as entertaining in it as he was in Die Hard 3 alongside Bruce Willis.  Willis was the actor who made yet another sequel, because men prefer to see men in the action hero roles.  Meanwhile, women prefer hearthrob men in their romantic leads, from Rudolph Valentino to Matthew McConaughey.  The prejudices are not with the producers–they will attempt anything they believe will make money, without regard for names or quality or race or gender.  The track record, though, says that male leads draw bigger audiences, and so make more money, than female leads.  There are some women who buck the trend, get good roles and make them work, but most big roles go to men because that’s what audiences pay to see.

So there is indeed sexism in the video entertainment industry, but it’s not in the producers, not in the people who make the movies and television shows.  They pay for what they perceive themselves to be getting.  What they are getting is viewers, ticket purchasers, and what they are selling is what those viewers want to see.  If most of the world wants V-Neck sweaters, most clothing manufacturers are going to invest in V-Necks and avoid Turtlenecks.  When fast food purchasers move more toward healthy food, McDonalds shifts its emphasis away from burgers into chicken, salads, wraps, and yogurt.  Male actors get more money, in the main, because more viewers are more willing to spend more money to see them.  The sexism Gillian Anderson faces is not that of the people making The X-Files.  It’s the sexism of the people watching, who would pay more money to see David Duchovny than to see her.

Sure, there are people who will scream to high heaven that Gillian Anderson is the important person in the show.  Never mind that she was originally hired to be the sidekick to Duchovny’s starring role, instructed to stand slightly behind him so he would be prominent in most shots in the first season, she became the indispensible equal, for some even superior, partner.  Yet the numbers say that you, the viewers aggregately, pay more to see Duchovny than to see Anderson, even if some of you consider her the real star.  The producers are only trying to provide the product that will draw the most customers, the biggest audience, at the lowest total outlay.  As far as they are concerned, the fact that they might be paying a man more than a woman has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with spreadsheets.  It is, ultimately, what viewers are willing to buy that pays those salaries.  That’s where the prejudice is found.

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#48: Inequities in the Justice System

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #48, on the subject of Inequities in the Justice System.

I have a story that intrigues me on so many levels I have to tell it.  It is, as they say, a true story–that is, I have my information largely from the first-hand account of one of the key persons involved, but for parts of it that I on the one hand witnessed myself or on the other hand deduced.  I shall attempt to keep them clear.  It is a case of an injustice that was, in large part, remedied, but the sense of injustice looms over it nonetheless.

img0048Court

The story begins with a young man in his early twenties out for a walk on a late summer afternoon.  He happened to pass what must be the main intersection in the sprawling sparsely populated town, as it is the only traffic signal, and there are two gas stations on the corner, owned by the same near-eastern immigrant family, the only gas stations within the town.

He was at least three blocks from there, around a corner out of sight, when two police cruisers arrived behind him.  The young man has been detained by police before, largely because he has friends who have been in trouble with the law on several occasions, although he himself has never been charged with anything.  They asked him to identify himself, and he gave his name but was reluctant to tell more.  After some discussion he gave his address, and was told he was not permitted to leave until they had identified him.  They then insisted on patting him down, then handcuffed him and informed him that he was under arrest.

I have to interject here.  The police are indeed permitted to stop a person if they have a reasonable suspicion of possible involvement in a crime, and if we stretch that–as you will see–they might arguably have had that here.  The purpose of such a check is to ensure that the person with whom they are speaking is not able abruptly to produce a weapon; the rule exists to protect the police.  It’s called a “Terry Stop” after the case which confirmed that it was legitimate.

On the other hand, an arrest requires “probable cause”.  At this point all the police have–well, we’re getting ahead of the story.

They emptied his pockets into a plastic bag, and put him in the back of one of the patrol cars.  The officer in that car then produced a bag of marijuana from another satchel and placed it in the bag with his possessions.  The young man objected, loudly, that he had never seen that bag in his life, but the police officer claimed that an attendant at the gas station had seen him stop and hide the bag at the control box at the traffic light on that corner.  He was told he was under arrest for possession of marijuana.  The officer then drove to that gas station, and once in the parking lot read the young man his Miranda rights while this witness, a near eastern immigrant, observed.

Maybe you have noticed the three problems with the “identification” here.  I did immediately, but then, I hit these problems in law school.  Still, I cannot believe that the police procedure here was so incredibly bad.  One of these problems might have been excusable, even unavoidable, but there was no reason for this kind of work unless they expected to strongarm the suspect into a confession.

The first problem can be called the problem of cross-cultural identification.  You’ve probably heard the rubric that all Blacks look alike, and while that’s not at all true it is true that Whites and Asians have trouble recognizing the distinguishing features of Blacks, and that the same is true for most cross-racial or cross-cultural observers.  If you did not grow up among people of a particular racial/ethnic group, the specific features that distinguish one from another are often difficult to spot.

I often recall the story of The Five Chinese Brothers.  In brief, one of five brothers was condemned to death, but he and each of his brothers had a particular invulnerability.  Each time the emperor declared how the boy was to be executed, he would ask to say goodbye to his parents, and be replaced by the brother who was invulnerable to that form of execution.  The conceit is that no one can tell the difference between one Chinaman and another, so if they were also brothers not even the Emperor could tell them apart–which tells me that it is not a Chinese story at all, but a European story about European perceptions of the Chinese.  Had it been a Chinese story, it would have been The Five Swedish Brothers–all tall, light hair, light skin, light eyes, they look exactly alike, because the characteristics by which Chinese distinguish each other are not those by which Europeans distinguish each other.  That’s the problem of cross-cultural identification:  our near-eastern immigrant gas station attendant would have trouble distinguishing one tall white American boy from another.  The identification is already suspect.

However, even if that were not so, there is a much more significant problem.  You’ve probably noticed that on television shows when the police want a witness to identify a suspect they have a lineup, or if not a lineup a photospread.  They don’t usually present the suspect to the witness and say, “Is this the guy?”  That’s because those kinds of identifications are inherently prejudicial–and this one is extremely so.  We have a suspect who fits the description “young white male” in a town where that describes a significant portion of the adult population.  Our young white male has been brought to the witness handcuffed in the back of a police car, and in the presence of the witness the arresting officer makes a point of Mirandizing the suspect, clearly placing him under arrest and signalling, “This guy is a criminal.”  The witness then has in essence been told, “Identify this guy,” and even if we assume that the witness wants to be honest and has been honest to this point, we just played a game with his memory.  The police told the witness who to remember; human memory is a fluid and flexible thing in most people, and by this act the police helped the witness solidify an image that matched the guy they caught.

It should also be noted that if the story the officers told is true, the witness must have called to report having seen someone hiding something at the traffic light control box perhaps fifty feet away, the police must have arrived and searched the area and found the bag, then the witness must have told them in which direction the person left who had placed it there.  By that time, anyone who might have been in the area would have walked out of sight, and indeed the suspect was not in sight–which means that the witness could not point to him, and the police could not see him when they arrived at the scene.  They have no idea who they are seeking.  Anyone they find who roughly fits the description is likely to be identified by the witness as the person he saw.  He made no claim of having seen him up close, or having recognized him from previous acquaintance.  He had not kept his eye on the suspect, and could not be certain the person he saw didn’t enter one of the houses along the street.  About the only information the witness gave the police was young white male, went that direction.  They should have known their identification was going to be problematic.

For a legitimate witness identification, they needed to take the suspect to the station and take the witness there separately, keeping them from seeing each other until the suspect was mixed with several other persons who also roughly fit the description, and then determining whether the witness could choose the suspect from among the group without any assistance or prompting.  That would not solve all the problems here, but it would be a much better case for the police than what they did.

They also should have known that they had insufficient basis for probable cause.  A young man walking quiet sub-suburban streets in a rural town on a late August afternoon is not suspicious.  Being a young white male is not suspicious.  Nothing was found on the suspect to connect him to this or any other crime.  The police don’t like it when you avoid answering their questions, but even if it could be argued that the refusal to answer questions implies guilt, it is illegal to draw that conclusion:  the exercise of the Constitutional right to remain silent cannot be taken as evidence of guilt of any crime, and therefore cannot support probable cause of such guilt.  The police had sufficient cause for the Terry Stop–it requires an articulable suspicion, and it is reasonable to argue that a young white male walking somewhere within several blocks of the site of an alleged crime allegedly committed by a young white male afoot is at least vaguely suspect.  Having questioned him and learning nothing that connected him more closely to the crime, they did not have probable cause for an arrest.

The police took him to the station and held him for a while, and then began questioning him.  They intimated that they had surveillance video of him planting something there, and he responded that he knew they did not because he never did so–he was not even really cognizant of the fact that there was an electrical control box there.  They attempted to get him to explain how he thought the marijuana got there, as if it were his problem and they hoped in solving it he would confess something they could use against him.  They then gave him a summons to appear in court to answer charges, and released him.

He went to court and applied for a public defender.  His parents had prepared him well–within twenty-four hours of the events he wrote down everything that happened, so there would be a clear written statement, and he gave a copy of this to his attorney.  He also had been made aware of the problems already mentioned regarding witness identifications, and also that in New Jersey the governor had recently required that all police cars be equipped with dash cameras, and a Superior Court Judge had ruled that all those recordings were public records, so his attorney subpoenaed these.  It took six months for the State of New Jersey to realize that on those facts they had no case, and dismiss the charges.  The public defender application fee is not refundable.

No one apologized for the wrongful arrest.  In fact, in an odd turn, as the judge dismissed the case he told the defendant to be sure not to be arrested on that charge again.  It was an entirely inappropriate thing to say under the circumstances, although the judge probably was not fully aware of the circumstances.  After all, the young man had been charged simply because he was the nearest person out walking somewhere near the scene of the crime, and he could not have anticipated that there might have been such a crime.  If we assume the integrity of everyone involved, and that these were the honest mistakes of a couple of police officers who found the contraband and believed they had the right person who would probably confess and plead guilty (and not that they were trying to create a case from nothing), there was no way he–or indeed anyone–could have avoided being so charged under these circumstances, except perhaps by staying at home at all times, or at least never taking a walk in public.

In all of this I want to mention one point that you probably did not notice, although it was mentioned.  The defendant was not a young black male; he was a young white male.  It may or may not be true that young black males are unfairly singled out by police, but it might not be because they are black so much as that they are young and male.  It is difficult to know how to react to that; young males disproportionately commit crimes, and so it becomes proportionate to suspect them disproportionately.  Yet if one is more likely to be arrested and charged because one is a young man, the claims that the disproportionate arrests of young black men demonstrate systemic racism are seriously weakened.  Such racism may still exist in some places, but racial oversensitivity also plays a role in causing us to perceive racism where the real problems are agism, sexism, and classism.  If there is a real disproportionate correlation between criminal activities and factors such as age, gender, race, and social class, it can hardly be said to be discriminatory to make disproportionate arrests.  If such correlations cause police to be careless in their procedures, that needs to be corrected–but it does not make it a matter of racism.

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#47: Character Routines

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #47, on the subject of Character Routines.

This is about the creation of my book Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel, now being posted to the web site in serialized form.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, so you might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them.  That link will take you to the table of contents for the book; links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.  There were also numerous similar previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts:

  1. #18:  A Novel Comic Milestone (which provided this kind of insight into the first six chapters),
  2. #20:  Becoming Novel (covering chapters seven through twelve),
  3. #22:  Getting Into Characters (for chapters thirteen through eighteen),
  4. #25:  Novel Changes (chapters 19 through 24),
  5. #27:  Novel Continuation (chapters 25 through 30),
  6. #30:  Novel Directions (chapters 31 through 36),
  7. #33:  Novel Struggles (chapters 37 through 42),
  8. #35:  Quiet on the Novel Front (chapters 43 through 48), and
  9. #37:  Character Diversity (chapters 49 through 56),
  10. #39:  Character Futures (chapters 57 through 60), and
  11. #43:  Novel Worlds (chapters 61 through 66).

This picks up from there.  Our characters are settling into new plans.

img0047Earth

There is some essential background to the book as a whole in that first post, which I will not repeat here.


Chapter 67, Slade 22

People who quit addictions remain addicted.  My father quit smoking in essence by saying that he did not need to have a cigarette right now whenever he wanted one, and managed not to have one for half a century.  Bob Slade had quit smoking before he was a verser, which is why he always had those matches, later toothpicks, in his mouth, but the tense situation of finding himself trapped and hunted on someone’s starship made him nervous enough that he wished he had one.

Slade realizes that he’s having something of an alien encounter, but the crew looks human, so he’s dealing with that in his own offbeat way by discussing little green men.

The spell is gibberish.  I needed him to cast a “darkness” spell, and the particular concepts of magic he was learning from Omigger involved incantations in lost languages combined with specific movements (and sometimes materials) to tap supernatural energies.  Darkness is a relatively easy spell, in Multiverser terms, as far as what works in different worlds, and it’s defensive without being aggressive.

Although this is a Blake’s 7 inspired world, my captain is more like Kirk than Blake (although I think he’s more like a choral conductor I had in New Jersey All-State in 1971), and my computer/science guy has more Spock than Avon in him.  Slade’s claim that he called some darkness makes no sense scientifically, but as I wrote decades ago, in magic cold and darkness are energies opposed to heat and light, not mere absence of energy.

My predictions concerning the demise of TV and console games seem to be on track a bit faster than I anticipated, but it certainly made sense to assume that they would be unknown this far in the future.  I had seen PBS specials covering wearable computers, and was expecting them to move into use more quickly than they have, but they do seem to be coming via the smartphone and possibly Google Glass®.

The name game is something that happens with versers, because no one knows who you are until you tell them.  I’ve often had players invent names to identify themselves, or use the names of fictional characters.  Bob at this point just gives them the names people have used for him in the past, and the reference to his girlfriend is a throwaway—I never detailed the girlfriend.


Chapter 68, Hastings 24

In game, I was working with Chris Jones’ character Shadow, who had the ability to become invisible, was incredibly strong and very hard to hurt, and could fly.  He grabbed the ghoul and flew with him, and let me pretend I was doing it somehow.  We got the guns after we reached the airport.  Most of the rest of it was very similar to the game, although I think the game character chose Atlanta.  I liked the idea that Arnie’s now long dead parents retired to Miami so he could visit their graves there.

I was not sure what should happen to the bullet that hit the wall.  It could have deflected, but that would have created a serious danger that it would hit Arnie, and I didn’t want that.  I thought it made sense for a telekinetic force wall, as opposed to a psionically generated force shield, to hold things that hit it, and prevented the dangerous bouncing.

I know that cursing is common in modern books, but it’s not part of my speech patterns and I saw no reason for including it in the books.  It was simple enough to say that Arnie cursed.  I have often wondered how I would cover this if it ever went to film or video, because of course he would have to say something.

The guns will become part of Lauren’s gear.  They are just like a set my character has.  John Cross has since raised issues with whether the design is possible, but has concluded that it could be, given certain assumptions that are not contrary to the book.

I liked the gag about dropping him at the airport where people land safely all the time, instead of just dropping him from wherever they were over Philadelphia.  She doesn’t actually say that she could smash him into the ground below or put him down gently, but she conveys it in the metaphor of landing at the airport.


Chapter 69, Kondor 23

That iridescent indigo sky is among my favorite colors, and I included it largely because of that.

Kondor’s wariness probably reflects the way I run game characters when I’m playing the party leader:  always cautious, moving slowly and keeping eyes open at all times.  I don’t like to lose party members, and I don’t often lose them.

I notice two points now, in retrospect.  One is that I never mention horses in the telling in the book.  Often in play characters will ask for horses to make the trek more quickly.  The other is that when I created the world I made the distance twelve miles, which no one can walk in an hour.  The “less than an hour” is not from the castle, but from the sunrise at the second crossroad.

I like the phrase, “monumental reminder of his own mortality” as a description of a graveyard.  I should shorten it, removing the possessive, and put it on a Facebook image card or something.

People are often uncomfortable among dead bodies, and for many that extends to cemeteries.  I thought it was a good counterpoint for Kondor’s atheism and general skepticism of all things supernatural that he could not account for his own discomfort with tombs, and that his explanation that it was a reminder of his mortality was both a plausible excuse and an answer that had been invalidated by his experience.  It also sets up his own internal inconsistency, that he does not want to admit he is afraid of something in a graveyard but he is compelled to express the fear through his actions.

Standard marching band steps are usually a short eight steps to five yards or a long six steps to five yards.  Both of those are slightly unnatural practiced steps.  A standard pace—a double stride—is about five feet, varying from one person to another.  Ten yards is thirty feet, six paces or twelve strides, so his steps are a bit short.  He is struggling to do this.

People think that football fields are a hundred yards long; they are actually a hundred twenty yards long, due to the end zones of ten yards each.  Kondor makes, and then corrects, that mistake, although he is estimating, and he is trying to encourage himself.

I wanted my characters to be credible adults who did not swear.  It was easy with Lauren, and with Slade his oaths are all references to Pagan deities.  With Kondor, the solution was that he was raised to avoid such words, and had his mouth washed out with soap more than once for using them, so he tended to avoid saying them.

When I originally designed the vorgo, I described it as exactly the size and shape of a bowling ball, roughly the same weight.  Someone suggested that it ought to be bright green, which would add to the comedy for the player character who made a trek to retrieve what proves to be a bright green bowling ball.  When I got to this point in the story, though, I ignored the color suggestion—I was trying to maintain a dark mood and did not want the levity.  It is still humorous enough that he identifies it as a bowling ball and sees nothing of value to it.

The “gravest” importance was a deliberate word choice.

The shock value of the bodies rising to seated positions works in the game; I hope it works in the book.  I put the break here, again returning to the notion that I wanted readers to want to know what happens next and so keep reading.


Chapter 70, Slade 23

I have a very clear image of Ann Parker in my brain, but have no idea where I got it.  She’s got long blonde hair, and is petit.  The implant is there because of the character Gan on Blake’s 7, who had an implanted violence limiter, and there was an episode in which there was a defect with it which forced them to find medical help; I did not know what adventures we were likely to have at this point, so I wanted options.  Her implant is my own idea, although it owes something to some book I read where pilots interfaced directly with their ships by a plug.

Kozakowski was the name of the smartest kid in my high school class (or at least, that’s what everyone thought), but I just used it for a name.  The character is somewhat modeled on Tarrant, pilot who joined the Blake’s 7 crew in a later season, but I made him black to push myself away from the feeling that I was copying the show too closely.

Tom Titus is again very much Vila Reston.  I always loved Vila’s line, “There isn’t a door I can’t get through if I’m scared enough.”

Bert “Burly” Bently is more of a copy of Gan, a big gentle guy, but I made him the engineer.

Ishara Takamura is another whose image is very clear in my mind but whose origin I cannot identify.  He has typical features for a slender Japanese male, with a bit of a sinister look to him.

I always picture Toni Bently as tall, thin, and black, a sweet smile and gentle disposition, and an air of culture.

George White is a composite of a number of people I’ve met over the years none of whose names I recall, a guy who can do all different kinds of things because he’s done all different kinds of things; he’s older than most on the crew, probably in his late fifties or early sixties.  A “Jack of All Trades” skill set was used in the game Traveler, which I never played but for which I created characters once, and I liked the idea.

When I put Marilyn Wells on the crew, I had in mind a character something like Troi on Star Trek:  The Next Generation, but a slightly different look with lighter hair.

The notion of finding a ship adrift was a bit of an improbability, but I needed an explanation for how they had a ship, and to avoid being too much like Blake’s 7.  This barely qualified, but I couldn’t think of another option.

Torbin is based on the computer of the original show, including the idea that it won’t talk about what happened previously or where it originated.

When I run this world in games, I often give this chapter to the player to read when he finds a way to get historic background on the world.  I pretty much invented the Federation backstory, looking for a credible way that a totalitarian regime could arise in something as vast as interstellar space.

The progression from ‘chairman of the meetings hosted at my home’ to ‘chairman the most powerful ruler in known history’ is modeled after one theory of how the Bishop of Rome became the Pope.

As Slade defines himself as landing on the rebel side of a civil war, it is the first step in his view of who they are and what they do.  It takes another step in a later chapter.


Chapter 71, Hastings 25

My recollection is that Lauren forgot her workout in part because I forgot it.  I considered going back and trying to work it into the earlier chapters, but decided that there was enough happening in her life that it was perfectly logical that she would forget an appointment.

The thing about throwing off your sleep cycle with a nap is a rather personal experience of my own—I often find that a nap at the wrong time means I’m awake too late and can’t get up the next day.

John “A1Nut” Cross gave me a lot of trouble about those bullets after the book was published.  I might have handled it differently had he given me feedback on the draft (he helped me immensely with the rifle/pistol arrangement for the world Dark Honor Empire I created for Multiverser:  The Third Book of Worlds), but I was working pretty much from what Ed did in-game.  The issue is whether you can have a pistol that fires the same bullets as a fifty-caliber machine gun; fifty caliber revolvers (they are made) use a shorter bullet with less kick.  However, in the end he agreed that one could custom-make such a gun, and the fact that it would have a lot of kick was covered in the description.

I used the trick with the coin to destroy the Coffee Shoppe.  By this point I had decided that Lauren was not going to survive the attack on The Pit, and the coin would become both a meaningless scrap and a problem for future worlds if I didn’t use it—besides, I thought it a clever idea and wanted to use it.  In game, I used an epoxy, because PC7 was the best glue I knew when I was still keeping track of such things (I read about Superglue and have some grasp of how it works, but don’t ever use it for anything), and Ed had me use something called PC12 when I looked.  But here I thought that the more modern superglue type adhesive was the better choice.

I had worked out what the three objects did for which the clues were given, and was working out how she would test them as I did it.  With the die, though, I thought I could get a good cliffhanger from having her black out—particularly as both Slade and Kondor had already died and gone to other worlds, so I figured the reader was expecting it to happen to Lauren, and I wanted to use that expectation.


Chapter 72, Kondor 24

Part of the fun of this chapter lies in the tension between Kondor’s certainty that there is no such thing as undead monsters and his recognition that something which looks entirely like that is now pursuing him.  He tries to invent explanations for what he sees, but he is still terrified and running for his life.

It was part of the conceit of the world that the undead could, at need, walk about within their cemetery but could only cross into the world in darkness.  The notion of the importance of darkness gave me some other problems, but the solutions were at least workable.


Interest in these “behind the writings” continues, so I’m still thinking they’re worth producing.  Feedback is always welcome, of course.  Your Patreon support is also needed to maintain this.

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#46: Blizzard Panic

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #46, on the subject of Blizzard Panic.

I am going to blame, or credit, Isaiah Richardson for the push that moved this from annoying musings to an article.  I do not know him well, but he is connected to me through Facebook, and more particularly through being one of my sons’ peers.  He posted to his Facebook to the effect that those who do not live around here must be quite confused that the impending blizzard caused us all to need to make so much French Toast.  Think about it.

I have never understood the panic over a bit of snow.  People seem to lose all sense when the snow is threatened, and don’t know how to live when it arrives.  I live in Cumberland County, in New Jersey, which is almost as far south as you can live and still be considered in the Northeast Corridor–we are south of the Mason-Dixon Line, south of Elkton, Maryland.  I grew up much farther north, and I learned to drive in the snows of Massachusetts–I was there for the Blizzard of ’78 (which as you can see in the picture closed highways pretty completely).  Down here, within a couple days the snow is mostly melted.

New England's Blizzard of '78
New England’s Blizzard of ’78

That’s part of the problem, of course, is that people down here have rarely experienced the kind of snow we had, even at the northern end of the same state.  My parents do get snow that would make me nervous about driving, and they’re just south of the New York Thruway off Route 17.  I drive in weather like that–weather like this–but people around here don’t, and those who do usually are too frightened to drive well.  They become the worst part of driving in this weather.  For one thing, too many of them drive so slowly that one mistake, one change in road surface, and they’ll be stuck, without any momentum to carry them forward.  I know, they’re afraid that if they have momentum they won’t be able to stop if they lose control and something is in front of them, but controlling a car out of a skid is not that big a deal as long as you are familiar enough with the experience that you respond correctly and smoothly.  It’s just a bit nerve-wracking at that moment.

That aspect of having the experience, though, is a significant part of it all.  My father spent his childhood in central Mississippi (I don’t know whether that’s why I can spell that, or whether it’s because of that song).  He commented once that in central New Jersey, where we then were living, if it snowed a few inches they had plows and other equipment out on the roads to make it possible for everyone to get where we needed to be.  I walked to school in snow like that–snow like this–many times.  Back home, he noted, if there was a layer of white dust on the road, everything closed, because no one was equipped for it.  By contrast, years later when I was in Rockport for the aforementioned famed blizzard within hours the town was clearing roads as front end loaders filled dump trucks which emptied snow off the stone pier into the ocean, jackhammers chipped away the underlying ice, and small caterpillar-driven plows rode down sidewalks to carve paths for pedestrians.  They knew what to do when it snowed a bit.

The worst fear here is a power outage.  We are fairly resourceful.  It is a design flaw that most gas appliances operate electronically, but the stovetop can be lit to keep a fire going in the kitchen, which will prevent the house from freezing.  The problem is the water–pumped electrically from a well beneath the house, the pressure is generally gone within the first half hour even if we’re mindful of it.  In summer blackouts, pool water can be used for washing and other sanitary needs, but melting snow is not the best choice for such problems–the amount of air in snow makes it very difficult to thaw over a fire without burning the pot. We keep a dozen two-liter bottles of water in the freezer, but they take time to thaw and we go through them fast if we’re not careful with them.  Mercifully, the power company is pretty good, and only once in memory was there a blackout that lasted more than a couple days.  We had a scare this morning when a breaker blew, but it was quickly resolved.

Usually we have enough food in the house to last a few days, if only because I don’t want to have to shop every day.  That has become less so of late–financial pressures have meant less long-term shopping and more focus on immediate expenses–but if pushed to it there is enough pasta to keep us fed for a few weeks, as long as we can light the stove and put water in a pot.  So I’m not one of those who suddenly has to fill the larder because I might not be able to get to the store for a few days.  That seems crazy to me.

Which brings us back to French Toast.  I’m hoping you got it.  It’s about the products that fly off the shelves during blizzard panic.  Everyone talks about how very quickly the three perishable staples vanish.  Those would be milk, eggs, and bread.  Those are the primary ingredients of French Toast.  The odd question is, what else would you make with these three ingredients?  Bread pudding, perhaps?  So it is a strange combination for people to be stocking in anticipation of being trapped at home, but those are the products most noticeable in their absence from the shelves, so that’s probably what people plan to make.  After all, you only need to light the stovetop and put a bit of oil in a pan….

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#45: The Math of Charging Your Phone

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #45, on the subject of The Math of Charging Your Phone.

I once had a charger for my phone that I could plug into the cigarette lighter outlet (now called “power outlet”) of a car.  I used it sometimes when I would leave the house and then discover my phone was dying, or when I was headed to a convention and knew I was not going to be in the hotel room long enough or frequently enough to support the battery, or when the wires on the one in the house came loose and I couldn’t justify buying another house charger right away.  I don’t use it now because the lighter outlet in the one car we still have on the road broke.  However, I’m given to understand that newer cars are more and more coming equipped with USB ports for the specific purpose of charging cell phones or powering similar equipment, and people are doing this far more.

So of course now someone has come along and said that we shouldn’t do that because it’s contributing to an environmental disaster.

img0045Phone

He’s not a nutcase.  He’s an automotive electronics engineer, retired.  In general, he makes a good point; but in making it, he does a few things that create a misleading result.  We will get to the good point eventually here.

He begins his calculation by estimating that a smartphone requires 4.8W (four and eight-tenths watts) to recharge.  That’s fascinating, because Universal Serial Buss (USB) ports don’t deliver that much.  All USB ports deliver five volts (5V).  The common USB 1.0 and USB 2.0 ports are limited to a maximum of five hundred milliamps (500mA), or half an amp.  That means maximum output is two and a half watts (2.5W).  The newer USB 3.0 ports can deliver nine hundred milliamps (900mA), nine tenths of an amp, which comes to a maximum output of four and a half watts (4.5W).  You can’t get as much as he says the phone draws from a USB port.  We might presume that the ports in a car, not being directly tied to a computer, might have higher current capabilities, but the way USB works, the connected device controls the current flow (amperage) and thus the total power (wattage), and the smartphone is not going to assume the port can provide more than specifications dictate.

Our author gets his number not from what USB ports provide but from the amount required to charge the phone from completely dead to fully charged.  It might take a long time to do that on a trickle charge, but he’s right to the degree that if you are completely charging your phone from nothing, you’re going to use that much power to do it.  But then he assumes that you get that 4.8W in one hour, from which he calculates that this will cost you 0.03 (zero-point-zero-three, or three one hundreds) of a mile per gallon.  That’s not negligible–it’s about half a football field per gallon, a bit more than the distance around the high school track on a ten gallon tank–but if you’re getting thirty miles per gallon, it’s point one percent (0.1%), one part in one thousand.  He then multiplies that by the three trillion road miles traveled by all United States drivers in a year assuming an average velocity of thirty miles per hour, and comes up with one hundred million gallons of gasoline spent to charge phones.  That’s two hundred million dollars.  It also produces as much greenhouse gas as burning nine hundred forty-five million pounds of coal.

The article does make one excellent point:  It will cost you thirty times as much to charge your phone on your car’s engine as it will to charge it on your house current.  That’s because electric companies don’t use gasoline engines to generate electricity, but go for the least expensive options at all times, and automobiles are designed to be efficient transportation, not efficient electrical generators.  It will cost you about two cents an hour to charge your phone in your car, about six one-hundreds of a cent for the same hour of charging at home.  It will cost you, personally, even less to charge it in your hotel room if you’re on the road.  Car chargers should be the backup option, not the primary choice.

On the other hand, he’s using the phantom of big numbers to frighten us.  It is reminiscent of the famous “National Geographics Disaster” covered thoroughly (and facetiously) in The Journal of Irreproducible Results, in which scientists jokingly calculated the long-term consequences of the fact that the relatively heavy National Geographic Magazine is never scrapped but rather stored in growing piles in basements and garages, such that in millions of years the accumulated weight would cause continents to buckle and sink.  Because we’re multiplying that tiny two cents an hour by three trillion miles of driving, of course we get a huge number.  If all of that charging was shifted to wall outlets, the cost would still be over six million dollars–a lot less than two hundred million, but still one of those huge frightening numbers.  The amount of power we’re talking about for one phone is still a very small amount.  Your car stereo probably draws several times that.  If you don’t have the new light-emitting diode (LED) or similar high-technology low-power headlights, they almost certainly do.  Besides, even were you to leave your phone connected to the charger for every minute that you drive, one of the functions of USB charging systems is that when the device is fully charged it stops drawing power.  So if in that first hour of driving your phone is fully charged, it doesn’t charge more until you’ve used it.  It’s absolutely foolish to imagine that we are, or ever will be, charging our cell phones every mile that we drive.  We charge them until they tell us they’re charged, then we put them away until we notice that they’re getting low again.  The scary numbers are inflated by this critically unreal assumption.

So do the reasonable thing and charge your phone from less expensive more environmentally sound wall current instead of the power system of a gasoline engine, but don’t obsess over the number of charging ports in new vehicles.  Driving is already an expensive environmentally unsound convenience.  Using the charging ports in the car is another one, a far less one on the grand scale of things and one which can more easily be replaced by something better.  Do so when you can.

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