Matthew Rasmussen's journal of journals on various topics of interest, published here, there or somewhere since 1999.
The management is not responsible for lost or stolen towel cards. Should your towel card be lost or stolen, you will no longer have access to towels.
The Largest Apocryphal Explosion in History?
File Under: /skepticism
The 1982 Siberian pipeline sabotage incident is something I've been meaning to do a bit of research on. Yes, every bad or even mixed story in the U.S.S.R. was hushed up as best it could be by the Soviets -- witness C.J. Chivers' recent problems tracing the history of the AK-47 in The Gun -- but did the incident actually happen?
For years, the CIA is said to have fed defective "stolen" technology to the Soviet Union, including gas pipeline controllers programmed to eventually trigger an explosion. I've seen the Siberian incident reported as the largest non-nuclear manmade explosion in history, but every source is weak and third-hand. Obviously the CIA's and NSA's files from the time would still be classified. It seems the best way to establish the veracity of the incident would be by speaking to senior physicians in the surrounding cities. Even if there were no deaths, the casualties from the event -- if it did occur -- would have been high. Burst eardrums alone would have radiated for miles.
Has anyone come upon a strong source for this story, or does it remain hidden somewhere between Soviet coverup and CIA blowback?
>HP: 0
YouTube Captioning: Ayumi Hamasaki - Glitter
File Under: /web/caption
Dozens more captioned YouTube videos, including several complete feature films, at YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com. Create your own embeddable captioned YouTube videos here.
o
0
O
( Am I being emphasized? )
"Was the girl legal even in Japan, Miss Ayumi!?"
"MY STRENGTH BEGS SEX AT YOUR BUSINESS ¿"
"No, I'm... SH*T!"
All. The. Time.
>HP: 0
YouTube Captioning: Berryz Koubou - Tomodachi wa Tomodachi Nanda!
File Under: /web/caption
Dozens more captioned YouTube videos, including several complete feature films, at YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com. Create your own embeddable captioned YouTube videos here.
Yes, that's a bowtie necklace.
(In my defense, I still haven't subjected you to °C-ute.)
>HP: 0
Role Playing Games
File Under: /games
You arrive in the town. You check into an inn. It's on a back street. Out of the way. You're wanted criminals, so best not to draw attention to yourselves.
You've been trying to find Tintmere since the airship crash. She should be in this town. But where?
Porcelain and little Night set off with a shopping list. You and Kell head upstairs.
There's a window. The room overlooks an equally rickety row of buildings. Fourth floor. Lots of crisscrossing clotheslines and rising steam, people milling about below. In the distance over the rooflines: the Lightning Tower. Your ultimate goal.
Concrete pebbles fall discretely into the drowned, weedy flower pot in front of you. You crane, look up.
A bounty hunter tromps silently across the rusty pipes on the roof. The shadows of two more flit between the eaves.
You lean back in, smile, head gesture to Kell. A row of shurikens materialize in his hand, and he melts into the shadows. Hazard another glance out.
There's a bamboo-like pole caught between your building and the one across the street. One floor down. It looks tenuous. But you have been working on your balance.
The next room? The walls can't be too thick.
Nah. More fun to hide in the ratan basket.
Moments later, light feet land on the windowsill. Simultaneously, the door flies off its hinges. Two bounty hunters race into the empty room. They look around, walk to the center of the room. Suddenly a basket and a shadow burst to life, and both bounty hunters are flung out the open window with hardly a cry.
The ceiling caves in. It's time for the big daddy bounty hunter. You exchange blows, and are both parried and thrown back. Not good. He hasn't even broken a sweat. You grab Kell, flip him up onto the roof and climb out. The wall explodes. You make a grab for a drain pipe, swing out across sickening open space, and -- Kell's throw line jerks the pipe up toward the roof. You land. Smile. And RUN!
Rooftop chase, as the overpowered bounty hunter hurls force blasts after you, shredding the ancient stone. Chickens squawk. Cisterns topple. An adorable little girl tends a lovely three foot square rooftop garden; you scoop her up as you run by, and apologize, as the bounty hunter smashes her four flowers.
You give the girl to Kell, saying you'd like to try something. You insult the giant. A lot. Kell breaks left, sliding down the side of a building. You break right. It worked! He's following you.
Crap.
Fight! Fighting doesn't work. Escape! He catches you in midair. The bounty hunter sneers that the fee still gets paid if all your limbs have been pulled off. This is it.
Shwunk! The bounty hunter shakes you, looks around indeterminately. He reaches back. A magic dagger wrapped in lace protrudes from between his shoulder blades. He topples, turning to wood. The wood bleaches, hollows, cracks, shatters -- poof! Nothing but dust.
You pick yourself up, squint into the sun. A lace-adorned figure steps toward you through the haze, waving. Tintmere!
-----
Now imagine that the preceeding had been generated: The overall plot. The long separation from a comrade. The clues that led you to her. The streets. The repetition of the larger goal. The foreshadowed tip-off at the flower box. The personally appropriate strategy options. The easy mini-bosses. The unstoppable mega boss. The setback getting onto the roof. The dramatic save. The comic timing. The race. The moral choice. The losing battle. The last minute save, leading into the storyline completing reunion.
As flashy as today's RPGs are, they're still not true Role Playing Games. In them, players are rewarded for figuring out how the game engine works and finding ways to best it, not -- as the name would suggest -- for immersing themselves in the role of the character.
How does a game engine implement literary devices? How do you reinforce the players' choice to have more fun with the story, rather than the choice to simply learn better chess positions? Printed paper+pencil+friends role playing games have invented some interesting story game concepts, but digital RPGs still rely largely on grinding in the final analysis.
I'm not suggesting that hard work shouldn't bring character improvement, but I sanction it only because that too is a literary device. It's not, however, the only literary device. In the early days of computer games, perhaps it was the only trope that could be realistically implemented. Are we at the end of the beginning of computer games yet?
Those looking for something a little more crunchy may enjoy my RPG Stats Comparison Chart.
>HP: 1
>Great story, that! Really makes me miss playing RPGs. I haven't played a pen & paper game in years.
Panorama: View From the Old Vose Library
File Under: /sketchbook/panos
The Common, Union, ME.
Stitched together in Hugin from 21 camera phone pictures. Mercator projection.
>HP: 0
YouTube Captioning: Perversion For Profit (1965) (Part 4 of 4)
File Under: /web/caption
Dozens more captioned YouTube videos, including several complete feature films, at YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com. Create your own embeddable captioned YouTube videos here.
↑ ↑ ↑
Truly, these are some happening contemporary mofos.
"Don't call the police again, Mr. Rumblech."
"Banned!"
|
This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. |
♫ And the world...
♫ ...will be a better place!
♫ And the WORLD... !
♫ ...WILL BE A BETTER PLACE!>HP: 0
The Big Bang
File Under: /sketchbook
>HP: 1
>I love this. Quantum mechanics next pls!
Émilie Simon
File Under: /music
Bertrand Russel: Why don't I know this?
G.E. Moore: Because philosophers think it's mathematics and mathematicians philosophy!
~Logicomix
French musician Émilie Simon. Writes and performs in English and French. Writes and performs her own songs. Massively popular in France, released in the U.S. Wrote the soundtrack for the French release of March of the Penguins. Sweet, biting, smooth, electronic. Why don't I know this?
Aside: The video for "Flowers" itself is brilliant; as near as I can tell it was directed by a collective called No Brain (viciously crap website here). Whether it's a hybrid of stop motion and computer animation or just computer animation with far too much work put into making it look like stop motion I can't decide from the YouTube video. Obviously the website is no help.
Click around on YouTube a bit. These songs are viciously good for French pop music. Why don't I know this in the U.S.? Why haven't my tracking cookies surrounded me with this? Has Simon been shuffled into the same hole all electronic music seems to fall into right now? Do we really need that much more room for Stefani Germanotta's particular brand of gaga desperation?
I expect a response from high-level authorities.
>HP: 0
YouTube Captioning: Perversion For Profit (1965) (Part 3 of 4)
File Under: /web/caption
Dozens more captioned YouTube videos, including several complete feature films, at YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com. Create your own embeddable captioned YouTube videos here.
Call 1-800-PUT-PORN to make a pledge!
o
O
( DAMN erection! )
Vice Magazine! There it is!
Friday & Saturday only at Le Shed
>HP: 0
YouTube Captioning: Perversion For Profit (1965) (Part 2 of 4)
File Under: /web/caption
Dozens more captioned YouTube videos, including several complete feature films, at YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com. Create your own embeddable captioned YouTube videos here.
James Dean and the Bull Dyke - pg. 37
This Film →
| 8:00 PM | 8:30 PM | 9:00 PM | 9:30 PM | 10:00 PM | |
PBS  |
An Appeal to the Sodamist: Live From The Hatch Shell! New (CC) |
Red Green Show Repeat (CC) | |||
>HP: 0
YouTube Captioning: Perversion For Profit (1965) (Part 1 of 4)
File Under: /web/caption
Dozens more captioned YouTube videos, including several complete feature films, at YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com. Create your own embeddable captioned YouTube videos here.
FOR KICKS!)
↓
THE SAN FERNANDO VALLEY
You better not fap...
♫
o
O
( Crap, I'm getting turned on! )
o
O
( Like that little slut Tammy next door... )
o
O
( Damn hard-on... )
Could they have censored any less?
with DJ Perversion
This Friday at Le Shed
YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com
>HP: 0
Retired Addiction
File Under: /housekeeping/addictions
"The Remix Game" by Bitter:Sweet
Each track on "The Mating Game" remixed by a different DJ, including Thievery Corporation, Yes King, Solid Doctor and Nicola Conte.
>HP: 0
11 Great Children's Book Titles or Terrible Band Names
File Under: /sketchbook
If there actually is a child chapter book or band named after any of the following, I stand behind my opinions.
>HP: 0
111 Minute Book Covers: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
File Under: /sketchbook/111
Speed composition of a book cover for C. S. Lewis's The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book of the Chronicles of Narnia (if numbered correctly).
Assets are "Tambako the Jaguar's" CC licensed photograph of a lion from Flickr, and Henningklevjer's CC licensed cloth weave texture from the Wikimedia Commons. Fonts are Charlemagne and Mona Lisa Solid.
Under 111 minutes? No, but with the template established, the rest of the series should go faster.
Click image for 300dpi.
>HP: 0
YouTube Captioning: Strawberry Sex by Ken Hirai [Official Music Video]
File Under: /web/caption
Dozens more captioned YouTube videos, including several complete feature films, at YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com. Create your own embeddable captioned YouTube videos here.
Roots
(BLACK HAIR)
(BLONDE HAIR)
(BLACK HAIR)
(BLONDE HAIR)
(BLACK HAIR)
"No, behavioral psychology has laid waste to its fundamental tenets!"
For All Your Tumbleweed Needs
Special rates for low-rent Japanese exterior shoots.
If you lose enough they comp your room.
>HP: 1
>I <3 Hirai Ken.
Retired Addiction
File Under: /housekeeping/addictions
William Gibson's Zero History (uncorrected proof)
William Gibson's new novel, Zero History, will be published in September. Confessionally, I read the first few chapters of Pattern Recognition without being drawn in, nor did I read Spook Country. Zero History seems to share a universe with these two, perhaps even complete a cycle of sorts. It's a brilliant piece of fiction, magnetic on the page, sharply observed, deeply witty and driven by an oddly ambiguous sense of peril. What becomes clear reading Zero History is that William Gibson never stopped writing cyberpunk: The real world simply caught up with him.
Here are a few short passages:
* * *
"How is she?" Milgram was having one of those experiences of feeling, as he'd explained to his therapist, that he was emulating a kind of social being that he fundamentally wasn't. Not that he was unconcerned with the pain he saw in Hollis's eyes, or with the fate of her friend, but that there was some language required here that he'd never learned.
* * *
"...What you need to remember, with these guys, is that they don't know they're con men. They're wildly overconfident. Omnipotence, omnipresence, that's part of the mythology that surrounds the Special Forces.... Your guy can walk in the door and promise training in something he personally doesn't know how to do, and not even realize he's bullshitting about his own capabilities. It's a special kind of gullibility, a kind of psychic tactical equipment, that he had installed during training. The Army put him through schools, that promised to teach him how to do everything, everything that matters."
* * *
"Were you ever a model?"
"No," said Hollis.
"I was," said Merideth, "for two years. I had a booker who loved using me. That's the key, really, your booker. New York, L.A., all over western Europe, home to Australia for more work, back to New York, back here. Intensely nomadic. George says more so than being in a band. You can cope, when you're seventeen, even when you've no money. Almost literally no money. I lived here, one winter, in a monthly-rent hotel room with three other girls. Hot plate, tiny fridge. Eighty euros a week 'pocket money.' That was what they called it. That was to live on. I couldn't afford an Orange Card for the Mtro. I walked everywhere. I was in Vogue, but I couldn't afford to buy a copy. Fees were almost entirely eaten up before the checks found me, and the checks were always late. That's the way it works, if you're just another foot soldier, which is what I was. I slept on couches in New York, the floor of an apartment with no electricity, in Milan. It became apparent to me that the industry was grossly, baroquely dysfunctional."
"Modeling?"
"Fashion. ..."
>HP: 0
Retired Addiction
File Under: /housekeeping/addictions
Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great
[Emphasis from original. Ellipses mine. Page numbers refer to the first edition Twelve Books hardcover.]
These mighty scholars may have written many evil things or many foolish things, and been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no more of them today, and why there will be no more of them tomorrow. Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago.... We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness. (7)
As for consolation, since religious people so often insist that faith answers this supposed need, I shall simply say that those who offer false consolation are false friends. In any case, the critics of religion do not simply deny that it has a painkilling effect. Instead, they warn against the placebo and the bottle of colored water. (9)
[Quoting John Stuart Mill:] "He looked upon [religion] as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by setting up factitious excellencies--belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human kind--and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtue: but above all, by radically vitiating the standard or morals; making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful." (15)
It assures them that god cares for them individually, and claims that the cosmos was created with them specifically in mind. This explains the supercilious expression on the faces of those who practice religion ostentatiously: pray excuse my modesty and humility but I happen to be busy on an errand for god. (74)
In 2004, a soap-opera film about the death of Jesus was produced by an Australian fascist and ham actor named Mel Gibson. (110)
It was not until after the Second World War and the spread of decolonization and human rights that the cry for emancipation was raised again. In response, it was again very forcefully asserted (on American soil, in the second half of the twentieth century) that the discrepant descendants of Noah were not intended by god to be mixed. This barbaric stupidity had real-world consequences.... The entire self-definition of "the South" was that is was white, and Christian. This is exactly what gave Dr. King his moral leverage, because he could outpreach the rednecks. (179)
But to the totalitarian edicts that begin with revelation from absolute authority, and that are enforced by fear, and based on a sin that had been committed long ago, are added regulations that are often immoral and impossible at the same time. The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey. The resulting tyranny is even more impressive if it can be enforced by a privileged caste or party which is highly zealous in the detection of error. Most of humanity, throughout its history, has dwelt under a form of this stupefying dictatorship, and a large portion of it still does. (212)
In order to be a part of a totalitarian mind-set, it is not necessary to wear a uniform and carry a club or a whip. It is only necessary to wish for your own subjection, and to delight in the subjection of others. What is a totalitarian system if not one where the abject glorification of the perfect leader is matched by the surrender of all privacy and individuality, especially in matters sexual, and in denunciation and punishment--"for their own good"--of those who transgress? The sexual element is probably decisive, in that the dullest mind can grasp what Nathaniel Hawthorne captured in The Scarlet Letter: the deep connection between repression and perversion. (232)
[Quoting Blaise Pascal:] "Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie."
("The eternal silence of these infinite spaces makes me afraid.") (253)
Everybody but the psychopath has this feeling to a greater or lesser extent.... Modern vernacular describes conscience--not too badly--as whatever it is that makes us behave well when nobody is looking. (256)
Paine's Age of Reason marks almost the first time that frank contempt for organized religion was openly expressed. It had a tremendous worldwide effect. His American friends and contemporaries, partly inspired by him to declare independence from the Hanoverian usurpers and their private Anglican Church, meanwhile achieved an extraordinary and unprecedented thing: the writing of a democratic and republican constitution that made no mention of god and that mentioned religion only when guaranteeing that it would always be separated from the state. Almost all of the American founders died without any priest by their bedside, as also did Paine, who was much pestered in his last hours by religious hooligans who demanded that he accept Christ as his savior. Like David Hume, he declined all such consolation and his memory has outlasted the calumnious rumor that he begged to be reconciled with the church at the end. (The mere fact that such deathbed "repentances" were sought by the godly, let alone subsequently fabricated, speaks volumes about the bad faith of the faith-based.) (268-269)
The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to masses of people by easy electronic means, will revolutionize our concept of research and development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all this and more is, for the first time in our history, within the reach if not the grasp of everyone. (283)
>HP: 1
>This sounds a wonderful book.
Best Sellers
File Under: /culture
Just time this week to check in on the Times Best Sellers List...
Hardcover Fiction| 1. | THE LORDBURN REPETITION, by Kluey Part Smith. (Niffen, $26.00.) Super spy Rex Coulter must stop a large thing from happening. |
| 2. | THE PERSPICACITY OF DOUBT, by Lucy Blovine. (Scor/Delfine, $26.50.) Summering on Wild Horse island, recent divorcee Hailiey McElle-Saphire meets an otherwise perfect man with a dark secret. |
| 3. | CHURNED, by James Patterson and Olivia Sciatica. (Buffet, $28.00.) Ribald O'Makepeace will stop at nothing to avenge his carpool. Patterson Vermeers his name onto an eleventh USA Original-grade potboiler this year. |
| 4. | ROBERT LUDLUM'S THE BOURNE BORING, by Eric Von Lustbader. (Taipei Holdings Corp, $24.99.) Renegade agents delve underground as Von Lustbader continues to serve out some karmic purgatory inside the long-dead corpse of Ludlum. |
| 5. | PIECES OF A LIFE ONCE LIVED, by Katherine Loft. (Shumberg, $26.00.) Nothing much happens. |
| 6. | A MURDER IN THE COLON, by Dee Brettfield. (Snorium Mystery, $23.95.) Questions must be answered when bodies begin turning up outside homicide dick-turned-doc Rue Level's Hollywood practice in Brettfield's latest colonoscopy-flavored opus. |
| 7. | HEART OF THE HEART, by Lisette Poe. (Snaf Books, $26.00.) A story about sisters in which they don't just plain hate each other. |
| 8. | STAR WARS: QUORUM OF THE JEDI: THE FORCE AND ITS DISCONTENTS, by Callista Quing. (DF, $24.00.) A whole galaxy at war and it's the same ten goddamn planets and cast members. Followup to Star Wars: Quorum of the Jedi: Lodgers of the Force. |
| 9. | JEREMIAH'S SWORD, by J. Luke Taper. (Swaggart Press, $23.99.) A young man's flaming sword thrusts the spirit of God into the backs of the unrepentant in Taper's post-Rapture Christian allegory. |
| 10. | DEAD IN THE FAMILY, by Charlaine Harris. (Ace, $25.95.) Sookie Stackhouse is exhausted in the aftermath of a Fae war. |
| 11. | PROFOUND TONE, by Paulo Coelho. (Shiv/Livertoot, $27.95.) The author of The Alchemist pads out another child chapter book plot with his trademark Buddhist Monk Voice. |
| 1. | THAT WEBSITE: THE BOOK, by Stu Borgen et. al. (eBooks iPublications, $22.99.) That website, in book form for some reason. Destined for the can. |
| 2. | IF IT WERE POSSIBLE TO HAVE SEX WITH A GENERATION, I WOULD HAVE SEX WITH THE GREATEST GENERATION, by Tom Brokaw. (Culthouse, $24.00.) Further wankery on the generation that beat the Depression, World War II, blacks and women. |
| 3. | MR. EIFFEL'S AWFULLY BIG TOWER, by Snake Morley. (B&W/Weege, $29.99.) New revelations on the temporary unpopularity of the monument, from the archives of the Parisian Ladies' Anti-Berber League. |
| 4. | STEPHENIE MEYER: CREEPY, SEXUALLY-REPRESSED MORMON BROOD MARE, by Deedee Copenham. (Salt Press, $22.00.) The authorized biography. |
| 5. | FAILED GOVERNOR, by Mitt Romney. (Tankard, $28.50.) The one-term Massachusetts executive explains why he's somehow relevant to national politics. |
| 6. | I'M A CELEBRITY... FUCK!, by some chick or other. (Tarpaulin Books, $23.00.) Yet more reminiscences by the woman who has the routine about- Wait am I thinking of the other one? The one who was always drunk. |
| 7. | MY MONEY IS IN MY SHOE, by Lou Dobbs. (Milli Press, $27.00.) Something about immigrants, something about gold, and other stuff it's getting increasingly hard to classify from the former pundit. |
| 8. | IN LEAGUE WITH DEVILS, by Gordon Bott. (Walden Press, $29.50.) It doesn't matter what it's about, the crappy university publisher didn't expect it to do any business and it'll be backordered for a month. |
| 9. | WHEN WE DIE, WE DON'T DIE, by Premaketuur Jones. (Shambhala, $24.50.) Deep meditations on the large "Continue? 10... 9... 8..." screen that appears over our heads when we die if we properly practice spiritual quantum mindfulness soul vibration wellness. |
| 10. | ...AND HE PROBABLY HAS A TINY PENIS, TOO!, by Laura Ingraman. (John Birch Books, $24.95.) Ann Coulter takes us on another tour of vitriol, crackpot research and insinuation. Laura Ingraham. Whatever. |
| 11. | COUNTERFACTUALS, by Malcolm Gladwell. (Greengreen, $24.99.) Sixteen more hilariously surprising bullshit essays, including "Reevaluating Ethyl," "Anyone Could Teach Elementary School" and "Caesar Invented the Typewriter." |
>HP: 0
Five Underused Horror Tropes
File Under: /film
And properties that make interesting use of them.
1. Frankenstein Creations: Powerful, perhaps immortal confusions of once-dead human parts reanimated by Dr. Frankenstein's (always) secret method. Not to be overly confused with James Whale's 1931 film with its constricted, single-location plot, dim bolt-necked creation, and memorable use of Nicola Tesla-inspired electrical equipment as the (revealed) method of cell reanimation.
Franken Fran: A manga series about a loveable but somehow unmistakeably monsterous patchwork girl who inhabits a mansion full of equally bizarre creations, "helping" people as she sees fit, and awaiting the return of her creator.
2. Dopplegangers: Classically, a mute apparition of oneself that appears to warn against impending danger.
Arcana: Another manga, slow to start, in which a girl matching no missing person's report is found by the police, and by her ability to see ghosts proves useful in investigating a series of brutal murders.
3. Former Tenants: Beings who inhabited the Earth long before humans, and who want their world back.
The short stories of H.P. Lovecraft: Lovecraft lived in the era when man was pushing into the final dark corners of the map. His dominant theme was a fear that the dark corners would push back. The double-switch Lovecraft plays in "At the Mountains of Madness" is particularly impressive. (Cthulhu, despite his fame, is a relatively minor player.)
4. Sirens: Beautiful female creatures, often with the aspects of seabirds, who lure men (and women?) to a watery death with an irresistable song.
There is a Japanese survival horror videogame series called "Siren," but it appears to have very little to do with the western myth.
5. The Motif of Harmful Sensation: Related to the siren, a broader term for the idea of a piece of sensory input that can cause a physical effect on the victim. (Well explained in the finest deleted Wikipedia article I've ever come across.)
BLIT: David Langford's remarkable short story revolves around the discovery of a class of images that "crash" the human brain, killing anyone who views them.
>HP: 0
India, Nationalism and Archaeology
File Under: /culture
East Asian cultural blog A Man With Tea muses on the implications of a request by the Archaeological Survey of India for the return of certain art objects in the British Museum.
On paper, at least, India under the Raj wasn't the single nation "India" as we know it today, but a massively fractured series of kingdoms and micro-nations. (Think of the Warring States period in China, or Italy until the late 19th century -- but cloned many times over.) Each was (in theory) independent, though deeply linked with the others through trade and treaty. Each (in theory) had its own arrangements with the British. In practice they were vassal states to a virtual vassal state ("India") of Britain.
In ethical terms, there is a difference between taking advantage of a period of unrest to loot art objects, and taking things with the permission of whomever is in charge of the place where the artifacts are located. (In some cases, like Boston's Japanese art collection, the items were literally being discarded during a period of unrest, and would no longer exist if some foreigner hadn't taken a shine to them. VERY tricky.) Obviously leaders change, and by the standards of democracy virtually no leader from the past would now be considered "legitimate" -- but that's applying modern ethics to the past. Modern ethics are a modern technology.
Indians are wonderfully legalistic, and I'd be a little disappointed if they didn't try to make a case for having the items returned. But Indians have a bad habit of building a convoluted case and then BELIEVING it too. I'm afraid that what this probably comes down to is nationalism, and that's something that I, personally, have no truck with.
>HP: 0
Panorama: Off Route 17
File Under: /sketchbook/panos
Union, ME.
Stitched together in Hugin from eighteen camera phone pictures. Mercator projection.
>HP: 0
Retired Addiction
File Under: /housekeeping/addictions
Current Addiction: Dimitri From Paris's Cruising Attitude album
I can't quite manage to not get happy listening to "Merumo." Slick, stylish and fun "faux jazz" in the '60s orchestra style. John Barry on a bender.
>HP: 0
111 Minute Book Covers: Paradise Lost
File Under: /sketchbook/111
Speed composition of a book cover for John Milton's Paradise Lost.
Assets are a photo of Michelle Webster from a shoot we did in March, and Ivan Tortuga's public domain image of a moth from the Wikimedia Commons. Fonts are Zdenek Gromnica's InfraRed and Gerard E. Bernor's Bambi Bold.
Under 111 minutes? Close.
Click image for 300dpi.
>HP: 0
Mac OS X Interface Criticisms
File Under: /web/design
For the statement of purpose, skip to the end. Let's get into this...
- Slow interface elements. When you click on a menu in Windows XP, there's often a "meh" moment where it hesitates before opening. As far back as System 6, clicking on a Mac menu meant, menu: now. Two Mac interface elements have always been painfully slow, though: Dashboard and Spotlight.
Dashboard. Great idea. Bad execution. I always found Dashboard unusably slow on my G5, but figured I'd use it all the time when I got an Intel. I was half right. It's about twice as fast. Which means it can still spend 10 seconds thinking about nothing of apparent difficulty before letting me type a word into my dictionary. I only have six widgets. Dashboard needs to be rewritten from the ground up for instantaneous speed.- Spotlight. Far too ubiquitous in the system. If I want to find a file, I go to the Finder and hit the standard key combination Command-F. If I want an address, I go to Address Book. If I want an email, I go to Mail. If I hit Command-Space, anywhere, any time, it's by accident. Usually, I don't even mean to open the Help menu. Lurking behind either accident is a judder as the Mac thinks hard about opening... a search box.
The default Finder window. What IS all this crap? The titlebar is half an inch tall. I've got a search box which, if I click on it and begin typing, MAY start searching in the current folder, or may jump out to the whole disk. It may decide to do Contents or File Name. If I "x" out of it, it will dump me back to list view when I was in column view. There's a gear-widgety thing that I've never used; it does nothing but duplicate the File menu. Most of the stuff on the left makes sense, but once again I've got search; can we just pick a place for search and leave it there? The bottom of the window is another quarter inch tall, and empty except for one line of text that could fit a dozen times in all the wasted space up top. Finally, there's a little tic-tac in the top right that hides all the useless stuff -- as well as the useful stuff in the left-hand pane.- Disk Images. I'm old enough to remember copying between two disks on a Mac Plus with no hard drive -- using "Eject" instead of "Put Away" so you could drag and drop a file from one disk to a greyed-out picture of the other, and spend the next several minutes swapping disks physically. Why do I bring this up now? Because the virtual disk concept is lost on all but the most propellerheaded users. Look at your mom's computer: she's still got every installer and .dmg file she ever downloaded. She doesn't get that you download a file, the file becomes a "disk," you copy from the "disk," then you "eject the disk," and delete the file. (No mom, deleting the disk image won't delete the copy of Firefox you just installed...) Applications shouldn't have installers and outside-the-bundle files in 2010 anyway, but that's a much wider abuse of the Application concept in modern graphical user interfaces.
- One-click application opening. Have we forgotten how to double click? How often do you accidentally begin the slow loading of a large application because it's next to the one you wanted on the dock? Here's a consistent workflow: Hover reveals nothing new but indicates that the object can act; Click hilights the object and reveals options; Second click performs the default action. (In an application's case, starting up.)
Dot-3 file extensions. What kind of teletype-era UNIX cancer is this? The file NAME is the file NAME. Nothing. More. The file TYPE is the file TYPE. You had this solved in LisaOS, never mind in the first version of the MacOS that was written when I was four. Two hidden pieces of data, each more than three characters long: The file type, and the file creator. The whole point of a graphical user interface is that the file system shows us -- with it's graphics-ical things -- what type of file we're dealing with. Which leads us to...- Thumbnail icons. Unless the image the file contains is not much more complicated than an icon, an icon-sized preview is unlikely to reveal much of value to the eye at a glance. Below a certain size, say about that of your fist at arm's length (your thumb thumbnail is far too small), images become jumbles, like a big table of numbers. My text documents all have thumbnail icons. They all look the same. Their icons do not reveal the file type or creator, which was supposed to be the point of an icon. It's possible we need to abandon miniature icons in their entirety.
- No application should ever steal focus from another application. Period. If I open three applications and then click back on the one I was working in, I should never be ripped back out of it. If I insert a CD, iTunes has no right to demand my attention whenever it gets around to deciding what the CD is.
- The jumping icon on the dock is much too annoying for developers to have access to it. Too many abuse it. Progress finished? So f***ing what? Leave me the hell alone. Apple's own Software Update abuses it, constantly demanding attention until it's allowed to tell the user that, eventually, a restart will be required.
The Finder vs. the open and save dialog. The special view of the file system in the open/save dialog made beautiful sense when we could only have one application open at a time. That was twenty years ago. There's no more need to duplicate the functionality, especially in a truncated manner. How should we decide where a new file is saved to? We click Save, and the top Finder window pops up with the file awaiting a name.
And briefly noted:
- If an application is going to take more than half a second to open, I should be able to tell it to stop.
- It's easy to browse FTP servers from the Finder, and it feels like a natural use of the filesystem. So why is it read only after so many years?
- Safari Command-arrowkey navigation doesn't work when a text box is hilighted. The page itself gets to decide when a text box is selected.
- Connecting to and rebuffering an internet stream locks up the entire iTunes interface with a modal dialog.
- *Sorting in column view. I'm asterisking this one because I understand it's finally been implemented in Snow Leopard. The trouble is, we should have been able to sort Finder columns the same ways we can sort Finder lists a long, long time ago.
I was making Hypercard games when I was ten on a Mac Plus. I learned Animation:Master when it was Playmation on a Quadra. I was modding Escape Velocity with Ray Dream Designer and ResEdit on a 60Mhz Performa. I won most of my film festival awards for a 12 minute short animated on a 500Mhz G3 iMac bubble. I freelanced after college with a G5 tower. I remember Strata, KPT, Aldus and Fractal Design, and I'm old enough to remember the MCP when it was just a chess program! I may know what I'm talking about.
>HP: 0
YouTube Captioning: March 19, 2010 - Rubi
File Under: /web/caption
So many more captioned YouTube videos, including several feature films, at YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com. Create your own embeddable captioned YouTube videos here.
Come on! Doctor Teeth looks more like a pediatrician.
I do?
Laaaaame!
YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com
>HP: 0
Is It Just Me...?
File Under: /culture
>HP: 0
YouTube Captioning: Clean Coal Success Story
File Under: /web/caption
Find more captioned YouTube videos from KKDW, TheDiva, GlitterRock and myself at YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com. Create your own embeddable captioned videos here.
TONIGHT WE DINE IN HELL!"Tha's right."
(Added in post.)
(Also works with bodies of water, stars, hilly forests.)
That means more pollution, you carpetbagging twat.
TMI, dude.
And expecting a handjob for it!
YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com
>HP: 0
Blosxom: Upgrading to an RSS 2.0 Feed
File Under: /web/blosxom
Blosxom still pretty much just damn works, but it's dying. A dead News link on a project site is never a good sign. It won't be long before the STP will have to move to another weblog backend, but that's for another day.
Today's issue: Facebook keeps inexplicably dropping my RSS feed. Facebook is of course happy to pretend there isn't an internet outside its walls, but I get a lot more feedback on my ideas through Facebook than in the blog comments. Whether it's the cause of this problem or not, in keeping with its age, Blosxom serves feeds in the RSS 0.90 format, which would be a bit of a ColecoVision even if Blosxom had ever done it right.
I've modified my copy of the blosxom.cgi script to produce a modern RSS 2.0 feed that validates correctly. You can do the same. Here's how:
1. Open blosxom.cgi in a text editor and scroll to the bottom.
2. Replace this rubbish:
rss content_type text/xml
rss head <?xml version="1.0"?>\n<!-- name="generator"
content="blosxom/$version" -->\n<!DOCTYPE rss PUBLIC "-//Netscape
Communications//DTD RSS 0.91//EN"
"http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.91.dtd">\n\n<rss
version="0.91">\n <channel>\n
<title>$blog_title $path_info_da $path_info_mo
$path_info_yr</title>\n
<link>$url</link>\n
<description>$blog_description</description>\n
<language>$blog_language</language>\n
rss story <item>\n
<title>$title</title>\n
<link>$url/$yr/$mo_num/$da#$fn</link>\n
<description>$body</description>\n </item>\n
rss date \n
rss foot </channel>\n</rss>
3. With this rubbish:
rss content_type text/xml
rss head <?xml version="1.0"?>\n\n<rss
version="2.0">\n <channel>\n
<title>$blog_title $path_info_da $path_info_mo
$path_info_yr</title>\n
<link>$url</link>\n
<description>$blog_description</description>\n
<language>$blog_language</language>\n
<generator>blosxom $version</generator>\n
<docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>\n
rss story <item>\n
<title>$title</title>\n
<pubDate>$dw, $da $mo $yr $ti:00
GMT</pubDate>\n
<link>$url/$yr/$mo_num/$da#$fn</link>\n
<guid
isPermaLink="true">$url$path/$fn</guid>\n
<description>$body</description>\n </item>\n
rss date \n
rss foot </channel>\n</rss>
That's it.
>HP: 0
Thirteen Ideas We Need Words For
File Under: /culture
1. verb. Treating a verifiable fact as a philosophical opinion. (Evolution, heliocentrism, tax rates, etc.)
2. adjective. An idea which is neither fringe nor mainstream; a plausible idea without sufficient refuting or corroborating evidence.
3. noun. The desire to marry outside one's ethnicity, religion or culture.
4. noun. The talent for attracting resources to oneself, as distinct from talent or charm.
5. noun. The peculiar semi-English used in Indian advertising. India's version of "Engerish."
6. noun. Putting a great deal of work into looking less attractive.
7. noun. The inflated price of a good or service from which a predetermined "discount" is expected to be deducted. (Magazines, cars, medical services, etc.)
8. verb. Looking for attractive friends-of-friends on a social networking site.
9. adjective. The quality of a language to sound good rapped.
10. noun. An imagined period of time which doesn't fit into the known timeline of history. (Nationalist myths, "ancient wisdom," the 1001 Nights stories, etc.)
11. noun. The ageing character who survives the story despite having little concern about his or her death. (The hostages in the Nausicaa mangas, Terence Stamp's character in The Limey, etc.)
12. pronoun. A neuter third-person singular.
13. pronoun. A second-person plural distinct from the second-person singular.
You'll notice that there are no adverbs on the list. We have more than enough adverbs as it is, and compositions are usually improved by their deletion.
Some suggestions for the above:
1. To murdoch? In honor of its greatest worldwide proponent.
2. Borderland? Useful for grain-of-salt publications like "Counterpunch."
3. No idea. "Exo-" constructs sound too cold.
4. Does this already exist as an off-label use of the word "gravity?"
5. Hindlish? (Hindi + English.) Not entirely accurate, but most Indian culture that reaches the West escapes via (Hindi speaking) Bollywood.
6. Emoing down? More of a term than a word.
7. Bulltag?
8. This usually gets lost under the broader term "Facebook stalking."
9. Spittable? As in "Korean is not very spittable."
10. i-time? Ugly, esoteric and hyphenated. Refers to the mathematical concept of i -- imaginary numbers which can be visualized as extending to the left and right of the number line.
11. Old soldier? Most stock characters get a term, not a word.
12. Ee? (False root of "he" and "she.") None of our other pronouns have this problem.
13. Yall? I still flinch when I hear "y'all," but unless we somehow bring back the third person singular "thou," it's our best hope. Perhaps we should drop the apostrophe and make it a proper word.
>HP: 3
>1) yes, we do need a word for that 5) Inglish? Ingrish? (from 'In'dia) 7) Nice. I like it. 12) YES. 13) My Classical Hebrew book translates the plural second person into "thou", and it took me a long time to understand what it was referring to, i.e. how "you" and "thou" or "ye" and "thee" or whatever it is they were using differ. Confusing....
>The Hindi word for English (the language, the people -- and basically white people in general) sounds in our mid-Atlantic accent sort of like UN-GRAEZ or UN-GRAE-ZEE (soft mouth G and R, like in French) even though phonetically Hindi could easily render IN-GLISH or British EEN-GLUSH. I still like "Hindlish." Saying it aloud sort of forces you to reach for that high, pure "i" and clean "l," which takes you halfway to what I know of the Mumbai accent anyway.
>Well, you know far more about Hindi and India than I do, so I defer to your expertise...
YouTube Captioning: Jesus and Moses Went Golfing
File Under: /web/caption
The YouTube Captioning Thing has been upgraded to handle higher resolution videos. Find more captioned videos from KKDW, TheDiva, GlitterRock and myself at YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com. Create your own embeddable captioned YouTube videos here.
/ 2) - o
O
(He's right... He's right... That's right... Oh my god, that's so right...)
←Bad Good→
Capital of the Ancient Assyrian Empire
YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com
>HP: 0
Panorama: Beech Hill
File Under: /sketchbook/panos
Rockport, ME.
Stitched together in Hugin from fifteen camera phone pictures. Mercator projection.
>HP: 0
Retired Addiction
File Under: /housekeeping/addictions
Massive Attack's Heligoland album
Massive Attack is dangerous. Massive Attack is back.
>HP: 0
How to Tell If You've Been Ripped Off by the Developers of Your Corporate Site
File Under: /web/design
It's thoroughly embarassing what even Fortune 500 companies will accept from their website designers. There's a lot of snake oil out there, like Twitter and almost anything to do with Facebook, not to mention the Russian roulette of gaming search engines, but we're just going to look at your website. If you're a not too tech savvy manager trying to figure out if your vendor is ripping you off, read on.
- On any page, go to View Source, and search for the word "<table>". Did it come up? If so, is there any actual spreadsheet-type data on the page? No? Then you've been ripped off by a firm that can't use modern code to build a site. They'll want twice what they should be charging for any minor layout tweak, because they'll have to practically rewrite the page from scratch every time it needs changing.
- When you enter a phone number in any reasonably logical manner into the phone number field, does the site fail to understand it? Does it give you an error, and tell you how it wants the number entered instead? If so, you've been ripped off by a vendor who thinks your customers' patience is less valuable than half an hour of its billable time. Teaching a computer that 555-555-5555x102 is (555)555-5555 ext.102 and 5555555555ex102 is not taxing. An incredibly badass phone number validator might run to 50 lines of code. Might. Five minutes on Google will turn up dozens of good ones, ready made and free to use. See also: Social security numbers, dates and zip codes.
- Does clicking the link to log in redirect the user to a different website? It's easy to create a fake site at a plausible-looking address. There are thousands of them on the web at any given time, designed to trick the user into typing in their account information. Redirecting from TinyCreditUnion.com to login.2MyAccount.co.cz/TinyCreditUnion?=mainsite?=login.redirecttome.com goes against every shred of good internet consumer advice in existence. If you train your customers to make bad decisions with their account information, some of them will.
- Does a password have to contain numbers, symbols, etc? Bear the following in mind: There are lists available on the web, compiled by legitimate security researchers, of what the most common passwords are. Beyond screening for those, the difference between the password "buylamps" and the password "4f9s^fg)3" is statistically meaningless. Brute-force attacking an eight character password containing nothing but lower-case letters would require an average of over 104 BILLION attempts. If the site designer is smart enough to take the tiny precaution of ignoring more than one login attempt per second (which your customers will never be bothered by, on the receiving end) it would take 3,309 years of constant guessing just to get an even chance of breaking into an account.
- Is there a meter that tells you how "strong" your password is? It's bullshit. It's calling 3000 years "weak," 30,000 years "fair" and ten lifetimes of the universe "strong," and chances are it's not even checking against a list of common passwords. If the small steps above have been taken, it's as meaningless to you as mathematician talk about the different sizes of infinity.
- If you enter the wrong password a few times, does the account lock you out? More fake security. The obvious trouble is, it's only ever going to be invoked by already pissed off customers who can't remember the machine-exact keystrokes with which to enter this particular password on this particular website. I know you want to think of yourself as the center of your customers' financial lives, but you're not. So unless you want to pay someone at a call center to deal with every minor issue the website was designed to handle, fire the bums who try to sell you customer lockout.
- Does the password need to be changed at regular intervals? This is not even fake security, nor merely irritating: it's actually negative security. Your customer can't memorize a new password every month (nor can you) never mind half a dozen. That means the password has to be written down somewhere. Which means it's not a password anymore, it's a bearer bond. Suddenly, leaving an address book in the restaurant, losing a $10 thumb drive, having a purse snatched, or just plain leaving a sticky note in the wrong place can compromise half of a customer's financial life.
- Does the site use security questions? If you can make a security question specific enough to be unambiguous (mother's maiden name) it will be a matter of public record. If it's any vaguer than that (your first crush), it will lead to so many possible answers that no customer will be able to consistently enter the same, correct, exact, machine-confirmable string of characters in answer to the question each time without -- again -- writing it down. Most users settle on a consistent string of profanity, which is guessable and still usually needs to be written down. Guess a few strings of profanity yourself if a vendor ever tries to sell you this.
>HP: 0
YouTube Captioning: 2010 K-POP Single Chart (March Week 3)
File Under: /web/caption
So many more captioned YouTube videos, including several feature films, at YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com. Create your own embeddable captioned YouTube videos here.
To be fair, chicks with violins rock.
To be fair, chicks with violins rock.
"Go my child! Escape from the man fairy!"o
O
(Dammit, I'm almost out of condiments)
[INSERT EMOTION HERE]
(He's technically a woman but don't tell the officer)
Marginalia Man!
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I knooooow a little place/ Not far from town/
(Gotta go) A kind of pretty place/ Three up, two down
"Good. Gooooood..." ↑YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com
>HP: 0
Zombeatification
File Under: /sketchbook
From a picture of my friend Michelle...
Still not as awesome as this image, or this image, but fun.
Lessons learned:
- I'm trying to teach myself not to just go in and make a mess in Photoshop. You can always get an image done faster by painting and filtering the assets directly, but adjustment layers and smart objects REALLY save grief when you need to go back in and fix things. This composite is almost completely nondestructive.
- Applying a filter to a smart object creates an editable "smart filter." I don't know how I missed this feature. I wish to god I'd noticed it when I did the Ego Likeness flyer for Plague.
- Also useful in a project currently underway, simulating the look of still film has two parts to it: grain and schmutz.
- Grain can be created by adding a 50% gray layer, setting its composite mode to Overlay, applying a small amount of noise, and scaling the layer up as desired.
- Schmutz is small fibres, hair and dust on the negative. This is a little harder. Opaque bits on a clear negative, they appear white when printed. I'd love to find a high-res print of an unexposed frame of film. Then you could just apply it as a layer in Screen mode. I wonder if it's possible to make a convincing one in Animation:Master with instances and flocking.
- When you see what happens to people when zombies get them, why are the zombies we see always so intact?
>HP: 0
Retired Addiction
File Under: /housekeeping/addictions
Barnaby Ward's Sixteen Miles to Merricks and Other Works
I've mancrushed on Ward before. Picking up his graphic novel was worth the money. Now where's the next one, Barnaby?
>HP: 0
Building the Shack, Part 12
File Under: /sketchbook/shack
Ended up spending most of the winter on the walls, working on warm days. Started by cutting and stapling sheet plastic over the frame where the walls would go.
Collected usable scrap lumber from around the property. Angle cut boards on the table saw to 30°. Made perpendicular cuts in the workshop with hand-held circular saw.
Started on the west wall. Didn't beat the snow. Got most of the west wall nailed into place standing on saw horses. Finished on the extension ladder.
East wall was the most complicated. Hung the entension ladder on the roof peak from the foot of the banking, being careful of the picture window.
Made a platform with the ladder, to get the board above the window nailed into place. Steadied the ladder by running ratcheting straps out from the side windows, and finished the roof peak late one night in February under freezing drizzle.
South wall easier. Stood on the block of styrofoam from the picture window installation to get the top board in place. Worked up from the bottom. Recut the final board a few times.
North wall finished last. Cut the final board trapezoidally by hand.
Finished this afternoon, in sunny 45° spring weather.
Caulking needed in places, but walls are in place.
>HP: 0
YouTube Captioning: Duck and Cover
File Under: /web/caption
So many more captioned YouTube videos at YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com. Create your own embeddable captioned YouTube videos here.
Oh god, the monkey was a suicide bomber!
"Forget it, baby. It's... Chinatown."
"Me?"
YouTubeCapper.blogspot.com
>HP: 0
YouTube Captioning: Sylvia Browne's Predictions for 2009 (Part 1)
File Under: /web/caption
So many more captioned YouTube videos at YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com. Create your own here.
You fail again, Professor Umbridge.
"The 2009 Atlantic hurricane season was below average in activity, with a total of nine named storms and three hurricanes. For the first time since 2006, no storm brought hurricane force winds to the United States..." ~Wikipedia
YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com
>HP: 0
The YouTube Captioning Thing Upgraded
File Under: /web/caption
I've added a second mode to the YouTube Captioning Thing. The original version allowed you to create a running commentary beneath any embeddable YouTube video. The new version has a second mode where the captions appear directly on top of the video. Here's a demo:
*crowd cheers*
o
O
(Two more verses! I can make it!)
*puff puff*
o
O
(It can't be my healthy 3-pack-a-day habit, why am I so beat?)
YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com
>HP: 0
Korean Hangul Cheat Sheet
File Under: /language
This is a cheat sheet for cramming the basic phonemes of Korean. It's a printable PDF, and a first draft. I've noted the approximate sounds in English and Hindi, because Hindi has a better phonetic alphabet. It's mostly based on this guy's YouTube video. (He doesn't give his name, and I'm not going to look for it.) I number the order of the phonemes in the syllable blocks, rather than using his LRB/TMB system. Corrections welcome.
>HP: 0
Panorama: The Eddy, Wiscasset, ME
File Under: /sketchbook/panos
Stitched together in Hugin from 17 camera phone pictures. Miller Cylindrical projection.
>HP: 0
Panorama: Breakwater in Winter
File Under: /sketchbook/panos
Rockland, ME. A much balmier 20°, but breezy.
Stitched together in Hugin from 13 camera phone pictures. Stereographic projection.
>HP: 0
Panorama: Stepped Brook
File Under: /sketchbook/panos
Union, ME. Air temperature about 10° F.
Stitched together in Hugin from 24 camera phone pictures. Stereographic projection.
>HP: 0
Retired Addiction
File Under: /housekeeping/addictions
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
Does a book listing all non-self-referential books contain itself? A book about the founding of modern logic has no right to be such a compulsive page-turner.
>HP: 0
The Fiddlers of Rome
File Under: /culture
Sneering, populist climate science denialism from a self-described Libertarian is nothing shocking, but it should be a bit beneath the New York Times science page. I'm beginning to think the best thing to do is just to sneer back, and keep asking questions about those lovely secondhand robes they've bought from the Emperor.
Leaving aside the question of whether libertarian philosophy is even flexible enough to mount a response to a problem with personalized rewards but socialized consequences, let's make sure we understand why this is denialism, and not skepticism. Climate change "denialism" relies not on a single set of arguments, but on several tiers, whose only commonality is a defense of inaction on the issue:
- I don't "believe" in climate change, because of X,Y, Z
- If you show that X,Y,Z are invalid, I will find new arguments U,V,W
- If you demolish U,V,W, I will say that even if climate change is happening, there is no evidence that it is anthropogenic because of A,B,C
- A,B,C become D,E,F through the same process that produced U,V,W
- When D,E,F fall, I will argue that there's no evidence that it will be harmful
- When harm is shown, I will pass the buck to the next generation, assuming they will invent some whiz-bang technology to reverse the damage
- Why, under libertarian philosophy, anyone in the future would undertake a massive program whose only benefits are social will remain unasked; presumably in the future Libertarians will remain a fringe minority
The scientific consensus on plate tectonics is about as old as I am. It's been around much longer than that, much like our understanding of the greenhouse effect. To certain generations of Americans, though, the Earth never moved. The geological revolution was a boon to oil and gas exploration, and the free market as a whole. If modern climate science had such a rosy picture to offer, would such an unfortunate gap have ever been opened in the last ten years between scientific consensus and public perception?
>HP: 0
Carry On
File Under: /culture
No existential threat to the civilized world exists from fundamentalist terrorists. We do not call the madman Emperor, and we do not call the criminal Nemesis. Were terrorists able to threaten the existence of our values, the existence of our institutions of law, or even the lives of any great portion of us, they would not require the tools of cowardice. If Cheney, Beck, Limbaugh, Palin or O'Reilly will argue otherwise, let them do so, and let them stand against evidence. Fear will always be sold cheap by shameful men. Defend reason. Keep calm, and carry on.
>HP: 0
The Sci Fi Channel
File Under: /film
>HP: 0
Spaceships
File Under: /sketchbook/fiction
If you don't have artificial gravity, science fiction starts to look more like the age of schooners. To get from place to place in the solar system it'd be necessary to accelerate halfway, turn around and decelerate for the rest of the trip. Accelerating or decelerating at more than the equivalent rate of Earth gravity (9.8m/s) would be difficult for the crew to withstand for long. Jupiter is about 983 million km from Earth at its nearest point. If I'm doing the math right (and I'm probably not) accelerating halfway at 9.8m/s would take 158 hours -- about 6½ days. The full trip would take two weeks.
Laser weapons are a must. You'd only be able to see them when they shoot through gas or dust, but when it comes to shooting from one moving platform and hitting another on a logarithmic scale you won't get much time to aim. A projectile would deliver more energy with less expended, but a powerful lazer would be able to vaporize or nudge it out of the way. Opponents would basically joust on a split-second timeframe, trying to pass momentarily close enough for their computers to shoot. Ships would be no more than specks to one another, usually less. Forget about human combat.
Until someone tells me what exactly an "energy shield" would be, we'll have to assume that surviving a lazer attack means thick, dense plating all over the ship. If a lazer can vaporize a few cubic meters of hull in one shot, you'd better have a lot of hull to spare. It should be shiny too. Getting hit with a lazer might lead to some pretty refractions.
One last thought: Get used to the solar system. It takes light from the sun (which doesn't have to accelerate) eight minutes to reach Earth, four hours to reach Neptune, and four years to reach the nearest star -- itself a burnt-out red dwarf, Proxima Centauri.
Blowing some of the cobwebs out of scifi tropes, fiction begins to slip into unfamiliar grooves.
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YouTube Captioning: Morning Musume - Onna ni Sachi Are
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Morning Musume: 20
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BACKHAND ME!
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Maxwell
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