Month: February 2010

Catching up on my RSS reader I ran across this post from Gizmodo titled Windows Phone 7 Interface: Microsoft Has Out-Appled Apple.

Oh. Provocative. Go read it. I’ll wait.

Back? Ok then. Now, opinions are like ass holes; everybody’s got one (well, not not everyone [wikipedia.org].) but I want to poke fun at the author, Jesus Diaz, opening opinion:

Windows Phone 7 feels like an iPhone from the future. The UI has the simplicity and elegance of Apple’s industrial design, while the iPhone’s UI still feels like a colorized Palm Pilot.

Jesus Diaz, in Windows Phone 7 Interface: Microsoft Has Out-Appled Apple [gizmodo.com] on Gizmodo.

Yea the Windows Phone 7 UI looks cool, and it remains to be seen if users will actually like it when it gets into the hands of all those people with ass holes opinions. But I’m going to bet on the oh-so-boring Palm Pilot-esque grid layout the iPhone uses.

Why? Same reason I don’t think everyone will be sitting on a Feel Seating System Deluxe [animicausa.com] sofa. The tired old sofa that your parents have might be musty and hold too many memories of the 70’s or 80’s to be healthy but there is a reason it looks like almost every other sofa in every other normal house in the world for the past, oh, I don’t know, 1000 years or so.

The basic design of the sofa —as used in the real world outside of the Milan furniture fashion show world— hasn’t changed much over the years. That’s a testament to one thing: it works. And while every furniture designer out there wants to do something new and original, so they make crazy sofas [freshome.com] (or crazy chairs, tables, etc.) their designs don’t change our platonic ideal of the sofa because they just aren’t practical in the end. Um, that’s why we call it fashion, different doesn’t mean good.

So, unless the Windows Phone 7 UI breaks down to a grid layout (or list layout) in the end, with some funky cool icons, I’m betting it eventually will by hook or software update.

Then again, this is just my ass hole opinion, feel free to ignore it. Oh yea, and I’ve been itching to use that sofa metaphor in a blog post for about a year.

This coming Sunday, in addition to being St. Valentines day to most of the world, also marks the end of the Year of the Ox and the beginning of the Year of the Tiger in the Chinese Calendar.

Someone mentioned to me the other day that they had noticed that it was in-vogue this year, here in Singapore, to refer to the upcoming celebrations, also known as the Spring Festival as “LNY” or “Lunar New Year” rather than “CNY” or “Chinese New Year”.

Since they mentioned it I have noticed more use of LNY than in previous years. I wonder why? Maybe people think “Chinese New Year” is somehow racist or in some other way derogatory?

I don’t know but I think calling it LNY is the tyranny of the masses, at least in Singapore. Since both the Muslim and Indian calendars are lunar based and both lunar new years are public holidays here in Singapore. It should be CNY.

To back up my thoughts I looked it up on Wikipedia and found this choice quote:

…the Chinese calendar is still used for marking traditional East Asian holidays such as the Chinese New Year (or Spring Festival (春節), not to be confused with Lunar New Year, which is the beginning for several lunisolar calendars)

Emphasis mine

Read the rest of the article on the Chinese Calendar [wikipedia.org]. More on the Spring Festival or CNY [wikipedia.org]. Read more on Lunisolar Calendars [wikipedia.org].

In the US, and to a lesser extent in some other countries, the debate about ‘Gay Marriage’ is slow boil topic, currently mostly eclipsed by the debates over health care and the economy but occasionally still erupting into a volcano of mud slinging and hate mongering. I would like to propose a solution.

My attempt at a solution is based on the observation that marriage is a religious institution that, for historical reasons, has been co-opted into the fabric of secular law. This is, of course, a holdover from the days when there was little or no distinction between the religion and secular laws —and this can be applied equally to almost all societies and religions, the idea of marriage, the way we think of it today, seems to exist in all societies. In most of the “west” what we think of as marriage is a direct result of the Abrahamic cultures ideas codified into religious belief and later into law.

This is of a particular problem in America. Partially due to the strange fact that, alone among the “developed world”, America is becoming more religious. The acceptance of homosexuals in Western Europe seems to be more than in the US. Perhaps due to it’s seemingly more and increasingly secular nature. (I need a small army of sociologists and statisticians to verify all of my claims and ‘facts’ of course… But it’s my website so IMHO is gospel.)

The point of all this is to establish that what we call marriage, is a religious institution that, for historical reasons, has had legal status attached to it. Once we acknowledge this then we should realize that we have an issue in the US: because marriage is a religious institution, and the laws about it stem from a particular religious background, they are a violation of the constitutional principle of separation of Church and State.

To fix this I would abolish all reference to “marriage” in federal, state and local law and replace it with “Civil Union” or some new term with less baggage. A Civil Union would be defined as a legal status formed by mutual agreement between two adults to the exclusion of all other adults granting certain entitlements. The nature of these entitlements would basically be the same legal entitlements that exist for “married couples” today—things related to taxes, inheritance, health care, etc. Marriage would then revert to the exclusive authority of the religious institutions to grant and deny as they see fit—but without legal consequences.

This then would allow two men or two women to enter enter a civil union of equal standing to the civil union of any man and woman. If any couple, man and woman or man and man or women and women wanted to be ‘married’ it would be an issue for their religious community and not an issue of legality. (Interestingly not only would this allow a guy couple to have a civil union equal in all legal ways to the civil union or a hetero couple but it would allow the FLDS to practice polygamy of marriage, but they would only be entitled to a single civil union. Could an older polygamist marry a 12 year old girl? Maybe that would be up to the religious authorities but there are some other issues there like informed consent and sex with minors laws must still apply. Civil unions anyway should have a minimum age requirements, like 18 or something, if the government does not think you can fight or consume porn you probably shouldn’t be able to join yourself to another person.)

So, that’s the idea. Marriage is a religious institution so it should be removed from the legal world in the US as it violates the principle of separation of Church and State. Replace the legal side of it with a civil union that does not discriminate based on sex. Plenty here for the lawyer to thrash out and argue over, but I think it’s a good solution to the issue.