Skirts are for girls - Gender-based textile conformation confusion

I have a 2 year old.  Pants are superfluous.  Really, really superfluous.  Without pants, our toddler uses the toilet on his own.  With pants, things are more complicated....and messy.  The cultural expectation for boys (and men) not to wear skirts is ridiculous.  In the subculture of our home, friends, and family, unless there is a need to protect toddler knees or daddy from power-tool flotsam, we will wear skirts.  And on some days, we won't wear pants, skirt, or kilt.  Wearing pants for the sake of wearing pants is stupid and clearly a cultural anachronism.

My technical name for the problem: gender-based textile conformation confusion

Stereotypical Presentations (as cultural misconceptions):

• Skirts and dresses are for women
• Men in skirts aren't tolerated in the workplace
• Straight men in skirts are gender confused 

Primary Symptom: Lack of clothing options for the male sex resulting in prodigious clothing-related limitations and health issues

Epidemiology: Widespread across European and Western cultures with many notable exceptions. 

Cure: Wear a skirt proudly and smartly.  Tell others about the benefits.  Fight cultural anachronism.

Health and Societal Benefits: 

There are a number of benefits of remission or cure of this cultural anachronism: 

• Less constricted movement
• Easier toilet training for toddlers
• Ease of access overall
• No more bulging male parts in pants
• Fewer male fungal and related body-odor problems 
• Easier to design and less expensive clothing
• Ready availability of male styled skirts and dresses
• Reclaim a lost freedom
• Demonstrate gender equality
• Diminish artificial gender differences

Textile Conformation Confusion is an artifact of culture.  Proof can be found in the numerous non-bifurcated textile conformations worn by men in other cultures, namely: 

• Scottish & Irish kilt
• Southeast Asian lungi, dhoti, sarong, and related garments
• Pacific lava-lava
• North African djellaba
• Arab jellabiya
• Persian kaftan
• African kanga
• Religious dress
• Emo & Punk subculture
• many, many others

Some links:

• Men's skirts - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Lakeland Ledger - For total secual equality -- skirts for men
• Skirts And Dresses Men Can Wear In Public
• Why Men Should Wear Skirts
• Men in Skirts, Men in Kilts
• Suppliers of Kilts and Other MUGs
• Macabi Skirt

Some definitions: 

• bifurcation: to split
• conformation: an arrangement
• anachronism: something misplaced in history; occurring at the wrong time
• cultural artifact: a consequence (thing, idea, practice) which represents an arbitrary choice by a particular  culture

What if the universe looks like discarded origami

That is, folded up many times with some sharp creases, but in the end just crumpled up in a ball.

Would we be able to jump between folds? What are the properties of such a universe? If the universe in the dimensions that we know is just a crumpled ball in higher dimensions does this mean that we might travel between places that are far away in our conventional frame of reference but would be short distances in the crumpled dimension?  Would we have a choice of where to travel?  How would we map such a universe from the inside in our 3 dimensional viewpoint?

What happens at the center of such a universe? Does such a universe imply that although we have a 3 dimensional center, that there also exist centers that are in higher dimensions?  The center of a crumpled piece of paper is probably not in the same location as the center of the sheet of paper laid flat.  Does any type of energy or subatomic particle travel between folds?   Gravity?  Does this explain the spurious gravitational measurements postulated to be caused by dark matter?   What are the implications for space travel? Teleportation?  Unless you can convert yourself to an energy form that traverses folds...

Could we store energy in this other dimension? Heat? Computing?  Can we change the shape of this origami universe?  Affect its shape?  Is the shape, the very structure of our origami universe changing?  If the topology changes, then it is unfolding, folding, crumpling, ...?  In what way would the origami universe evolve?  How do non-local gravitational forces affect local galactic structures?  Can portions of the membrane pass through other portions, very unlike our familiar origami?   How many sheets are there?  Do the sheets have the same physics?

How do we determine whether a folded, membrane universe is a good model?  Or not?

Thoughts and musings on membrane universes from the net:

• Scientists predict how to detect a fourth dimension in space, Duke University, May 25, 2006
• New Theory Proposes Strong Gravity and a Universe at your Fingertips, Paul Preuss, Berkeley Lab, June 19, 2000
• Vaster view of cosmos unfolds as millennium approaches end, Tom Siegfried, The Dallas Morning News, January 1, 2000
• Folded Universe,Georgi Dvali, New York University, November 19, 1999
• The visible universe could lie on a membrane floating within a higher-dimensional space.
• Brane cosmology, Wikipedia, 2009
• Extaterrestrial Visitation: Higher Dimensions in Superstring and M-Brane Theory, ufoskeptic.org
• NOVA: The Elegant Universe

Disabling spindump diagnostic and crash reporter on Mac OS

The spindump process detects and collects information about crashing processes.  While this is great and all, it doesn't always work and spindump itself hangs indefinitely, taking with it an entire processor pegged at 97% usage.  Uhg. Sometimes an application is unresponsive because it is very busy doing some type of IO.  I get spindump hogging cycles when I am copying movie data from one disk to another in iMovie.  With spindump running, my system basically becomes unusable.  You can read the spindump manpage for more info on this process. 

To disable it permanently: 


sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.spindump.plist


Re-enabling it is just as easy:


sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.spindump.plist


Thanks to James Knowles for this tip: 
http://jamesreubenknowles.com/disable-spindump-71