I’ve gotten quite a bit of blog-linkage for an essay I wrote about Phillip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy, hailed by liberals and hated by evangelicals for its anti-Christian themes. What I found was that the books were hardly anti-Christian: they feature angels who wage a war in heaven, as well as a God. The only anti-Christian part of the books, as far as I could tell, was Pullman’s condemnation of how the Church has (sometimes violently) crushed children’s budding sexuality.

What creeped me out about the books was the way his endorsement of sexual freedom hinged on women’s subjugation to men. In fact, the trilogy can be read as the story of how a brave little girl — Lyra, the main character in the first book — must learn to become a second class citizen in order to grow up. When the third book ends, she has just gone through puberty and had angel-blessed sex with a boy who has taken over her former leadership role on their adventures. Once she has sex, she loses her one super power (reading a golden compass of truth), and she has to return to her own dimension where women can’t attend Oxford University and must instead go to an inferior women’s college. That’s just fucking great. So Lyra has killed God, but patriarchy lives on.

Read my essay.

With my book tour winding down, it’s time to catch up on what I’ve been writing all over the place. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote my column about a bill introduced at the end of the last Congressional session. Called Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act, it was proposed by Sens. John McCain and Charles Schumer, and had it not died at the end of the session it would have threatened both free speech and privacy online. Unfortunately both senators have promised to revive it in a slightly different form this year.

To “protect the children,” this bill calls for the creation of lists containing emails, screen names, and other online pseudonyms of known sex offenders. Online service providers — everyone from editors of blogs to businesses that provide online forums — are asked to shut down the accounts of people on this list. They are also asked to patrol their online services for “possible” obscenity or child porn.

I protest the bill for a number of reasons: most notably, it tries to force online publishers to spy on (and judge) what people are doing on their websites; and it also prevents former sex offenders who are honest enough to use their real names from going online and developing healthy social connections that might prevent them from committing more crimes.

After publishing my column, I was surprised to recieve several emails from convicted sex offenders who thanked me for speaking out on their behalf. I hadn’t really thought that I was doing this, because my main concern is preventing “tell on your neighbor” legislation. But I believe very strongly that sex offenders, like other people, can change their destructive behavior — and having the freedom to connect safely with people online could be very helpful in doing this. There are support groups online where people can talk about their past crimes honestly and anonymously. Undeniably, this can be therapeutic. Taking that away from people who are already scorned and stigmatized in the real world could be a trigger for recidivist behavior. Check out my column about this.

So I’m on a book tour for the next couple of weeks, doing readings to support the anthology I co-edited with Charlie Anders, She’s Such a Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff. Some of that time actually involves travel to distant, exotic locales like Boston and New York. If you want to catch me on the East or West Coasts, come out on any of the dates below. If you want to bring us to your non-coastal city, please let me know! I love the midwest and the south, and would love to visit either or both again. Our main barrier is travel money, so if your university or organization or group of friends wants to pay us to come out there, we’ll do it!

Tour dates:

Boston

1.11 Center for New Words, Cambridge, Mass. 7 PM.
1.13 Arisia, Cambridge, Mass. 2 PM. Must pay for a day pass to the conference.

New York

1.16 Bluestockings, Manhattan. 7:30 PM.
1.18 Performing as part of the Drunken! Careening! Writers series at the KGB Bar in Manhattan. 7 PM.

San Francisco

1.25 City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco. 7 PM.
2.1 Modern Times Bookstore, San Francisco. 7 PM.

We hope to add more dates in the South Bay and Los Angeles. I’ll keep you posted.

I got a bit stroppy last week when I read yet another study in which some researchers threw a few people into an MRI machine and claimed to have discovered the part of the brain responsible for thinking about the future. Around the same time, another set of researcher found something even more improbable: an area of the brain connected with the urge to shop. While I think there’s some value in trying to figure out where certain kinds of thoughts happen in the brain, there’s got to be some limit. That’s why I wrote a column about how I want to do a series of studies to locate the science fiction center in the brain. I mean, if people can get funded to do experiments that involve imaging people’s brains while they imagine their future birthdays, why not fund a study where people imagine spaceships and aliens? It might turn out that Cory Doctorow’s brain has a really big science fiction center and Darren Aronofsky’s is non-existent (which would explain why his latest SF flick The Fountain sucked so horribly). Read my rant, erm, I mean column.

Want to know what I did on my winter vacation? Read all about it on the Popular Science blog by visiting the following links. First, I arrived at the Chaos Communication Congress. Then I discovered that people were buying RFID tags and wearing them so that they could engage in recreational surveillance. Christine Corbett taught me about MOSES, open source software for rapid, machine translation. She endeared herself to me forever by suggesting this might be a good way to translate Finnish into Klingon. Steven Murdoch explained how to identify computers over a network based on something called clock skew, which is caused when the machine’s heat makes its clock run faster or slower.

Melanie Rieback gave a great talk on her RFID Guardian, a soon-to-be-mobile device that filters out unwanted requests from RFID readers trying to get information off the RFID chips in your passport, clothes, shoes, credit cards, and whatever else. She’s a whiz at RFID jamming, and is also prone to making goofy jokes — an excellent combination in a scientist. I described the “hacker scene” at CCC, and speculated about why computer geeks are one of the only groups of professionals whose conferences combine technical discussions with socializing as well as cultural/political analysis.

Finally, I wrote about Sebastian Wolfgarten’s exploration into how to get around the Great Firewall of China. And I gave PopSci readers four CCC-related projects to do in their spare time: hack digital TV signals, build software for the One Laptop Per Child project, turn a backpack into a wifi signal detector, and learn the logical language Lojban. It was a great conference, and my lecture there about women in technology went really well too. As soon my lecture is available in video format, I’ll post it here.