Greta Christina has been writing professionally since 1989, on topics including atheism, sexuality and sex-positivity, LGBT issues, politics, culture, and whatever crosses her mind. She is author of
The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life, of
Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God, of
Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why, of
Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, and of
Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More, and is editor of
Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients. She has been a public speaker for many years, and many of her talks can be seen on YouTube. Her writing has appeared in multiple magazines and newspapers, including Ms., Penthouse, Chicago Sun-Times, On Our Backs, and Skeptical Inquirer, and numerous anthologies, including
Everything You Know About God Is Wrong and three volumes of
Best American Erotica. (Any views she expresses in this blog are solely hers, and do not necessarily represent this organizations.) She lives in San Francisco with her wife, Ingrid. You can email her at gretachristina (at) gmail (dot) com, or follow her on
Facebook.
I don’t usually respond, because I don’t have anything to add, but thanks for your memes of the day. They’re worthwhile.
Just a little note: You can get the ≠ symbol with “≠”.
Eclectic, unfortunately that doesn’t work on some of the more poorly designed browsers or operating systems. For example, on the system I’m browsing from right now, your sentence looks like:
You can get the <cat barfed up a lego> symbol with “≠”.
Arrgh, actually, that’s typepad’s fault. It has nothing whatsoever to do with your browser. It’s expanding my HTML into UTF-8 input, and converting Latin-1 to UTF-8. The not-equal symbol is U+2260 (let’s try: ≠ or decimal ≠), which is binary 10001001100000, which is broken into 6-bit parts for UTF-8 encoding as 10 001001 100000, and UTF-8 encoded as 11100010 10001001 10100000, or e2 89 a0.
The web server could have just left my $#%#@$ entity alone, or converted it to Unicode, but it did the latter and then did some more!
Typepad is then UTF-8 encoding those bytes as if they were latin-1, turning e2 into 11000011 10100010 (c3 a2), 89 into 11000010 10001001 (c2 89), and a0 into “ ”. Which, if you look at a hex dump of the raw HTML, is exactly what you get.