About nine person-years of work summarized in 12 pages

The International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP 2010) program
committee is delighted to inform you that your paper #64 has been accepted
to appear in the conference.

Title: A Certified Framework for Compiling and Executing
Garbage-Collected Languages
Authors: Andrew McCreight (Portland State University)
Tim Chevalier (Portland State University)
Andrew Tolmach (Portland State University)

Uh, so, yeah. We're going to Baltimore!!!!111 And for those who didn't know, this is my first academic publication, ten years after attending my first ICFP and nine years after entering grad school for the first time.

An Imaginary Conversation

[Inspired by a Facebook comment by a friend and a reply he received. The first two lines are paraphrased from that discussion; the rest is my invention]

BOB: "I don't like 'men'/'women' options on medical forms. Can't I just check off the questions that apply to me?"
ALICE: "Let's just have more options. After all, men and women have different health concerns and we can't track that if we don't know what someone's gender is."
BOB: "Just to be clear, when you say that 'men and women have different health concerns', do you mean that there is a set M of health concerns for men, and a set W of health concerns for women, and that men share the concerns in set M, while women share the concerns in W, and the contents of M and W are disjoint?"
ALICE: "Yep!"
BOB: "Well, I'm a guy, but one of my health concerns includes the fact that I need to get regular Pap smears, which I suspect you wouldn't include in set M."
ALICE: "No, I wouldn't include it."
BOB: "So...?"
ALICE: "When I said 'men' and 'women', I really meant regular men and women. Of course, you know what I mean."
BOB: "No, I don't know what you mean. You agree that I'm a man, right?"
ALICE: "Of course!"
BOB: "So when you say that 'men have health concerns that don't include Pap smears', do you mean that since my health concerns do include that, I'm not a man?"
ALICE: "No, of course not. But you know what I mean."
BOB: "Are you saying that I'm a less typical exemplar of the category 'men' than is my friend Ted, who has a prostate and doesn't have a cervix?"
ALICE: "Of course I'm not saying that! That would be wrong."
BOB: "So if I'm just as much of a representative of 'men' as is Ted, why does 'men's health' refer only to Ted's health and not to mine?"
ALICE: "..."
BOB: "I mean, you don't like it when people claim that 'he' is gender-neutral in the sentence 'Everyone must tie his own shoes' while the same people would never write the sentence 'If a person is pregnant, then he should take folic acid,' right?"
ALICE: "..."

Poll #3357

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 17

View Respondents

This imaginary conversation is about:

View Answers

language
12 (70.6%)

politics
11 (64.7%)

semantics (as in, what words mean)
12 (70.6%)

semantics (as in, stuff I don't care about)
0 (0.0%)

decentering the discourse
8 (47.1%)

politically correct fascism
2 (11.8%)

other
6 (35.3%)

none of the above
0 (0.0%)

Where is Carol in all of this?
6 (35.3%)