Atomic Nerds

Negative campaigning has a bad name. Every time a campaign releases an attack ad against its opponent or opponents, there’s usually a quick kerfuffle in the media about how it “went negative” and some high-minded chiding from the other side about how pathetic it was that the campaign had to stoop to that instead of making their own guy look good and selling himself on his merits.

Although it’s popular (and people seem to forget every other election they’ve ever been through every four to two years) to claim that negative campaigning is a modern product of television and sound-byte attention spans- we Americans are having to put up with this bullshit during our dinner hours because we’ve gotten so stupid and partisan we don’t deserve any better- cooler heads have pointed out that this tradition is as old as the country itself is. Political campaigns have always tried to make their guy look good by making the other guy look bad.

So, it’s not a new thing. That doesn’t invalidate the point of those lamenting that campaigns “have to stoop to such tactics”, but maybe a better question than “is it new?” is “is this something that works for a better reason than simply appealing to the basest fears and animosities of the voters?”

That would depend on what you mean by “a better reason”. The fact of the matter is that it DOES work and work extremely well, which is why campaigns keep doing it. Does it appeal to the worst in a voter? Maybe. That depends on what you think is “the worst”. Merely because a voter has fears does not mean that those fears aren’t completely legitimate ones, whether they’re fears that a candidate will raise your taxes, continue the policies of a corrupt and detested administration, use nukes, or govern as though they were National Pastor. Voters have every reason and right to take character, problematic public statements, frequent policy reversals, and other things into consideration- and campaigns have every right and reason to highlight their opponent’s weaknesses on these issues, since his own campaign will be trying to gloss those over just as hard as they’re trying to make the other guy look bad themselves. Does that extend to stretching, spinning, or outright torpedoing the truth? It shouldn’t, but it does… because it often works. That is the dirty side of negative campaigning, not the practice itself.

As for sticking to “the positive”, this isn’t as sound a tactic for a campaign as it first seems. The argument goes that if your guy is actually any good, he should be able to sell himself just fine this way- the problem is that, once in office, very few campaign promises are actually fulfilled. There is a good reason for this beyond “politicians are lying bastards”, of course; actual American government is run by thousands of people, not just one guy, and even if a candidate works himself to the bone trying to fulfill each promise, the odds are good that he won’t accomplish what he wanted to because others in government exercised their own power to stop him. This applies just as much to the executive branch, which depends primarily on Congress to actually draft and execute policy; even on areas that are exclusively the executive domain, such as foreign policy, the president can’t do much if Congress decides not to fund any of it. The voters, meanwhile, unless they’ve fallen in love with the candidate- which only happens to a minority of partisans- are extremely aware of this. Policy and promises are nebulous uncertainties- but character and track record are much more concrete right now.

Thus, the candidate must kiss babies, give handshakes, and flog himself trying to prove to three hundred million people, all of whom are of highly diverse background and beliefs, that he’s such a swell guy that he’s got all that character. The problem is that, thanks to that diversity, the same things that make one group’s heart swell with their candidate’s fabulous character make another’s shrivel with his obvious deficiencies. Is a candidate well-educated and well-spoken? He’s out of touch with the common man. Is he a man of strong faith and unwavering moral compass? He’s a religious demagogue with more devotion to a collection of antique shepherd’s tales than to common sense or the realities of a pluralistic society. Military veteran? General Ripper. Not a veteran? Pantywaist completely out of touch with the military he proposes to lead. Successful businessman? In the pocket of corporations. Lifelong politician? Scumbag Washington insider. First-time politician? Inexperienced naif. Trying to show his best side to as many groups as he can? Unreliable weathervane and an empty suit. Never compromises no matter what his audience? Tone-deaf boor who will be unable to work with other politicians or foreign powers. Almost any trait that’s a plus to one group is a minus to another- or at least, it can be spun that way.

Perhaps the best argument for negative campaigning actually lies in the mysterious and fickle group that everyone is courting the hardest in any election: the undecided middle. Most true “swing” voters aren’t swing voters because they’re ignorant of both candidates (they’d have to have made a deliberate effort to avoid coverage- unlikely to vote), and they’re not that way because they LIKE both candidates; there’s usually enough strong differences in background and policy between any two given candidates that it’s trivial for someone to decide who they like. No, the undecided middle is mostly the people who are trying to choose between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. In February, all three likely candidates had more people who were willing to vote against them than for them- in Hillary Clinton’s case, a much larger clear majority were more willing to vote against her than FOR anybody else!

The truly undecided are usually trying to decide just which son of a bitch they hate just that much more. And they are far more likely to react to negative campaigning than they are to react to attempts to polish the turd or make the douche smell a little sweeter- which is why it is with us, and why, if this election is not an anomaly, it probably always has been and always will be.

I’m not sure if this means that Breda has gotten carried away with spreading the joys of shooting, or if she’s just doin’ it that well.

(Stolen shamelessly from Unshelved.)

Now you can use your browser history to confirm! Found at the recently redesigned Maximum PC website, Mike Nolet, CTO and co-founder of AppNexus whipped up some javascript that’ll eyeball your browser history and wash it through some fairly simple math and take a stab at whether you’ve got a + or – in the pants region. The test lives here and is pretty dang accurate. LabRat reports that just about every other “I will guess your gender!” gizmo on the web reports her as either half-n-half or more likely to be male, and it gave her a 92% chance of being female. Given my 96% chance of being male, I suppose that means I’m more than man enough for her. I’ll even cowboy up and post my exact results:

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 4%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 96%

Site Male-Female Ratio
google.com 0.98
amazon.com 0.9
cnn.com 1.35
imdb.com 1.06
weather.com 1.08
hp.com 1.11
sears.com 0.98
gamefaqs.com 1.11
cabelas.com 1.25
newegg.com 2.23
icanhascheezburger.com 1.04
zonealarm.com 1.33
escapistmagazine.com 2.08
midwayusa.com 2.03

What, no girls go shopping for gun parts and computer hardware in the same day? The test is a *little* off since there are a good number of sites in my browser history that just don’t seem to have a ratio (none of my daily blog reads are listed, for instance), and it does take a while to run, but it’s still pretty nifty. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to have to find a site or two to buff up that last 4% chick I’ve got in my score. Jegs and Cigars International ought to do the trick.

Yes, really. I feel this is a large accomplishment for me, because normally postmodernists make cranial fluid start spewing out my ears in about twenty seconds, which only makes the postmodernists feel superior. I know my brain shuts down because it can’t deal with more than a certain amount of nonsense before all the safety warnings go off and everything crashes to preserve my ability to continue making sense of the world, but they seem to take such reactions as evidence that they have hit upon something so brilliant it literally neutralizes the less enlightened.

That irritates me.

In any case, yesterday I came across a professor who is suing her students for discrimination because… well, it’s kind of hard to tell (and let me tell you, the cranial fluid pressure started spiking even before I realized she was a postmodernist), but the best as I can tell, it’s because she got a lot of very negative evaluations and was aggravated by their failure to soak up her worldview like eager little sponges. Then I made the mistake of clicking on the link to her article about how social constructivism or postmodern literary theory or something (she didn’t decide by the end of the article) is the best way to study biology, and had to spend some time in the fetal position. I recommend you only expose yourself to it via the filter of this post on postmodernism in general, Obama, and the good professor.

Initially, I set the whole thing aside because I couldn’t make heads or tails enough of the professor’s prose to realize that her point was that scientists should change the way they study, work, and discuss their work to suit political goals until the above blogger clarified that that was exactly what she meant. The thought process- not to mention the language- was simply too alien.

Then, it struck me, the secret decoder ring: postmodernists are people who seriously believe in the Theory of Narrative Causality, to the point of constructing an entire academic discipline around it. The Theory, for those of you who don’t want to interrupt to check the link and aren’t Terry Pratchett fans, is the idea that reality is essentially determined by what would be most appropriate to the “story” of a given scenario. In Pratchett’s books, it’s literally the driving law of that universe- plucky heroes will always succeed against overwhelming odds, something will ALWAYS happen on a dark and stormy night, old women who live alone are inevitably powerful witches, and so forth. Obviously, postmodernists do not put it in these terms- they have, essentially, invented a language to go along with the central idea that reality is fixed by how you talk and think about it- but at bottom, this is what’s going on. Simply replace literary tropes with ideas that have been deemed politically pleasing, and you have the central idea and goals of postmodernism.

This is not even a new idea. The device works as well as it does for fantasy authors like Pratchett because this is how humans are intuitively inclined to think about the world; some psychologists even suggest that we can’t think in an organized fashion at all until we develop language. Even education itself is essentially a process of storytelling, at least until the object of the education has become advanced enough to see beyond the borders of the story and intuit according to where the facts point rather than what makes intuitive sense. Theories themselves are stories that are built around large bodies of facts and made to conform to them as rigidly as possible: they are accurate narratives that allow us to mentally map and relate facts to come to accurate new conclusions and discover new facts.

The rigid empiricism that drives science and engineering is actually a fairly recent invention in human thought, and it didn’t appear out of the blue; it was slowly developed as science emerged as an endeavor with recognizable commonalities between disciplines and methods that produced excellent results across them, which is why we have apparent historical paradoxes like Isaac Newton’s obsession with alchemy. In Newton’s time, the “scientific method” was a concept that had yet to be invented. Steven Den Beste wrote one of his more widely-linked and controversial posts about conflicts in philosophical traditions, one of which was empiricism, and another of which was what he called “philosophical idealism”, the much older one- the teleological idea that the universe has a harmonious and aesthetic design that was possible to intuit. This is an obvious line of thought both for human intuition, and for the worldview that the universe was in fact brought into being by a creator God- and the natural conclusion is that we should be able to discover new things simply because they make aesthetic sense in context with other known facts and follow intuitive lines of thinking because that’s how the universe works- as it *should*.

In theory, children learn that the universe doesn’t work according to the way they think about it when they discover that golf balls don’t really have explosives in the middle, jumping off the highest point of the swing’s arc hurts like hell when you land, and there are never, ever, any monsters hiding in your closet or under the bed. 99% of people learn that regardless of WHAT you think and how sincerely you believe, you will ALWAYS hit the ground at terminal velocity when you step off the edge of the Grand Canyon, but this way of thinking is so natural to the mind that it’s extremely difficult to fully discard. It’s probably no coincidence that mechanical and electrical engineers are among the least politically correct professions; when whatever you’re working on instantly fails when you act according to your preferred intuition rather than according to EXACTLY what the math and the data say, it’s a rapid and effective way of training yourself out of thinking this way.

It is no accident that postmodernism originated in literary criticism and does not seem to exist outside the realm of academia. In literature- and in papers, as long as you keep within the circle of people who share your literature-born assumptions- reality is indeed exactly what you, the author, deem it to be. (Having your own language helps, because then you have much tighter control over exactly what you say and how many other people can use your words in unconsidered new ways.) How strange science looks to them- an entire group of apparently rational people behaving as though their words have no impact on reality! No wonder science can produce such horrifying conclusions, and their problem is right here… they’re not thinking about the impact they’re going to have on reality when they say things like “men and women have different IQ curves”. They need to change that, posthaste.

As usual, XKCD gets it right:

So, today is the first anniversary of our blogging experiment. Rather than put on a party hat and run around the room yelling “WHEE BLOGGED FOR A WHOLE YEAR GO US”, I thought I’d share what I’ve learned so far.

1. I know about as much about my own writing process as I know about the daily chemical reactions of my liver. Before I actually started, I was pretty sure I was mostly going to do politics with some science thrown in. I got THAT backwards. I also thought I’d probably write brief, pithy posts, like the comments I left on other people’s blogs. Turns out I’m only brief when I’m trying to get something up for the sake of having posted. I also thought fisking- going through a bad argument and tearing it apart line by line- would be a mainstay. Also something I only do now when I’m hard up for material. I don’t know WHAT the hell I’d call the long essays I turned out to actually be good at- around the world in ten thousand words, maybe- but it’s not at all what I expected.

2. No wonder writers refer to “muses”. I can’t tell when the hell I’m going to feel like writing, how long or exactly what the thesis and execution will be, when I’ll feel like spewing an ocean of verbiage on something that annoys me and when I can’t think of anything to say other than “bah”, or how long good periods or bad ones will be. Blaming the frustrating black box on a personalized abstraction seems as useful an approach as any other.

3. Promising a post on a specific subject is a bad idea. Sometimes I’ll turn out not to have the argument I thought I had, sometimes it will turn out I actually wanted to write something else, sometimes I’ll realize a fatal flaw and the whole thing will collapse into a heap of smoldering rubble, sometimes I’ll realize someone else has already done it better and I’d feel lame next to them. And, of course, sometimes I’ll burn out on a subject with a flash and a pop that is damn near audible. I hate it when that happens.

4. I’m an atrocious judge of my own writing. Something I felt kind of bad putting up because I thought it sucked will suddenly turn out to be popular and linked around our corner of the blogosphere, something I posted feeling rather clever and full of myself will draw maybe one comment. I think the number of times I’ve accurately judged how popular a given post will be is actually a fair bit worse than sheer chance.

5. This was a really, really good idea. We’ve probably gotten much more back in value from this project than nearly any other we’ve started in the past year. (Save, maybe, for ponying up for central air.) Thank y’all for reading, for linking, and for generally being a highly entertaining and useful audience.

Volume 37, July 2008

Your sponge could KILL YOU! Learn the terrifying secrets of the deadly bacterial nightmare in your very own kitchen! p.28

Ladders! The vertical deathtrap! We blow the lid off 14 7/8 secrets that Big Ladder doesn’t want you to know about! Secrets that could SAVE YOUR LIFE! p. 7

Bird-flu nightmare! Learn the shocking truth about this deadly winged killer of death and your .2% chance of DYING TO DEATH! p. 3

If you’re not scared shitless about global warming, YOU’RE A BAD PERSON AND YOU WILL DIE! p. 16

Investment strategies! We’re so damn right about everything else, here’s how you should manage your money! Or you might DIE! p.48

THE SKY IS FALLING! No, we really mean it this time! We explain why you’ll need at least 6000 gallons of fresh water and canned food enough to nourish the 82nd Airborne for five years just to make it through the weekend – or you could suffer! p. 25

Pornography on the internet? We reveal the shocking secret the rest of the world has known about for thirty years! p. 18

Guns – the loudest killer! Having the means to defend your shitloads of water and canned goods WILL GET YOU KILLED! p. 52

Safety legislation! Does your senator oppose mandatory helmets for masturbation? We ask why he wants you dead! p. 9

Shitting where you eat? Not just for internet gun-board whackjobs anymore! Find out how your toothbrush is laden with DEADLY E. COLI DEATH! p. 14

NASA Assassins! The deadly rain of debris from beyond the atmosphere could fall in your back yard! These astroNUTS are trying to kill you! p. 20

Science shocker! So-called “law” of gravity could spell firey death for airline passengers! Can TSA protect us? p. 33

Cereal killers! Genetically modified wheat is a mutant in the breadbox! How will this affect YOUR LIFE? p. 40

Shocking survey! College kids DRINK! Will your 20-year-old child be next?! p.45

From Russia with Love? How EVERYTHING YOU OWN is made in China! The Red Menace is back, and deadlier than ever! p. 25

“Cell”-ular death! Your phone is giving you THE CANCER! p. 16

Out of service, out of life! If you don’t have your phone with you YOU WILL DIE! p.17

Just give up and die. You’re fucked anyway. p. 59

Larry Correia slams one out of the park, over the parking lot, past the interstate and somewhere out into the badlands. There is no other description possible for a rant which not only explains why Barack Enough With The Redacted Jokes Obama is dumber than our dog’s empty nutsack and about as concerned with staying within the bounds of the Constitution as a paramecium is with astrophysics, but he has offered up the best plan I’ve seen in ages in the process. Allow me to qutoe:

“‘Proportion’? Are you serious? A presidential candidate threw out a random tidbit about how he wants to make the largest change to the US government since… well… ever… and that’s ‘out of proportion’? Out of proportion would be digging a trench around Washington DC, filling it with lava, and then using trebuchets to launch plague rats into the city, only that would cost less. ”

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off trying to get the Lava Plague Rat Plan on our local ballots.

In my opinion, the Republican Congress of 2006 most thoroughly deserved to get voted out of power. With apparent total command of two-thirds of the government, the only thing they could seem to agree on was that they didn’t care overmuch for Democrats but WERE huge fans of spending lots and lots of money on dubious bills and programs. They left with a bootprint on their butts and an ignominious 25% approval rating. As anyone with three neurons to scrape together could have realized, the Democrats were on their way in. Harry Reid took over as the new Senate Majority Leader, Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House.

While I certainly believe the Republicans deserved to lose their jobs, I do not believe America deserved these people.

One of today’s interesting web finds was an older interview with Mr. Reid, on the subject of taxes. Here’s Harry:

The upshot of his position? Taxes are voluntary in America, unlike nasty other countries. For serious: he spends the whole goddamn interview trying to defend this position come hell or high water. His objection is to the interviewer’s use of the phrase “threat of force” to describe the government’s position on taxes, but his problem is that he doesn’t just admit this is absolutely true and defend taxation- he tries to argue that because deductions exist and fines come before jail, it’s not really force and taxes are really voluntary. Amazing.

It’s a great pity this interview hadn’t gone similarly viral in 2006; we would have saved ourselves a lot of grief. He went on to declare the Iraq war lost in 2007, deride General Petraeus as “out of touch” when he said he saw signs of progress in Iraq, and that he wouldn’t believe him anyway if he said the surge was working:

…and, of course, oil and coal make us sick and are ruining the world:

Which might be slightly more productive if they weren’t also our only current options, along with nuclear. Nevermind; Reid is the Majority Leader, the Senate is the last line to fall before any further drilling or other use of the world-ruiners is approved in Congress. The Republicans (and a few Democrats who are getting nervous about the reaction back home to obstructionism on energy) are pushing him hard. He reacts by… castigating the press for not reporting his energy policies in a way more favorable to him. Oh.

Result: 25% has become 9%.

Does anybody know how many running this year have an I after their name rather than D or R? It’s starting to look like we need a third option, and last I looked in on all of our most prominent third parties, they were getting their policies via direct transmissions from other planets.

Off today to the tattoo parlor so I can continue my transformation into a sure loser. Wretchedness? At least I don’t look like Orville Reddenbacher tried to go mountain-man, Dick Richard.

Real content to resume shortly.

I was reflecting earlier that the only thing I really miss from Livejournal is having Doqz as a regular read.

Problem solved.

One of the funny things about dogs- and animals in general- is, as I’ve said before, they don’t generalize well. Something that a human would readily figure out is the same person in a slightly different context- like a friend standing in water so that only their upper half was visible- can freak a dog right the fuck out, if it’s new and strange to them. Apparently, the familiarity can only make it more disturbing- kind of like how a human might react to seeing their mother with an eggbeater growing out her ear. Breeds that are developed to keep especially close visual track of their surroundings, like herding and guardian breeds, can be particularly susceptible to this phenomenon.

Akitas, for a guardian breed, are actually pretty stable in this way, probably because they’re also a primitive breed that’s experienced relatively little human meddling with their mindset. Certainly, both Kang and Kodos handle novelty better than the shelties and German Shepherd I used to own, and they’re also much better at restraining themselves from reacting to stimulus. We complain about how much Kodos barks at passerby, but that’s because it echoes badly in this room and because we both HATE excessive barking, not because he’s actually all that bad. God knows some people I know with terriers or sheepdogs would give their right arm if their dog, having a huge vantage point on the street in the form of our glass office doors, would actually sometimes just sit and watch quietly while the same person that went by every day did so again. He’s quiet enough that it’s actually worth getting up and investigating when he raises a ruckus, which a lot of dog owners seem to have given up on entirely unless they’re hearing the “OMG SERIAL KILLER!!!” bark.

Kang, on the other hand, barely barks at all unless it’s important. She is very breed-typical in this, and it’s one of the reasons we have Akitas in the first place. If Kodos is barking, it’s probably worth checking out- if SHE’S barking, then that means for sure that someone is actually coming up the front walk, or that there’s a dangerous animal in the yard. (She is very noisily fierce with snakes, which thank God have all turned out to be nonpoisonous so far.)

This is why, when I was in the bathroom last night thinking Higher Thoughts, when I heard her erupt in a fury of barking and growling, I was actually concerned and a bit anxious about being caught with my pants down. I figured Stingray would deal with it, which is why my curiosity deepened when the next sound I heard was him in complete hysterics of laughter. I finished my business and went to see what on earth was so… inspiring.

As it turned out, she was barking at this man:

Not in person, of course. (If it were, we’d already be having some Words with him about his failure to cover the subject of the special challenges of cooking at serious altitude. It plays merry hell with some of his recipes.) At a still image on the TV, which, it turned out, was the problem.

We watch plenty of Good Eats, so manic Alton Brown performances are something she already knows not to pay any mind to. She sometimes shows interest in the TV, although her attention span is insufficient to maintain attention for longer than five or ten minutes, and normally she’s pretty cool with it. However, when we had finished watching an episode on eggplant on one of our DVDs, we had both found other little tasks to attend to, and had thus let the credits dump back to the basic menu for the DVD, which have a still image of Alton in a similar pose with a set of measuring cups and spoons. With the size of our TV screen, that’s a not-insignificant amount of Alton. Alton holding totally still and silent while brandishing kitchen tools, unlike Alton veering around the screen with high-speed patter. Which apparently was enough to unhinge our little guardian. She had walked in the room while we were both elsewhere, taken in the leering image of the Good Eater, and just lost it.

Kodos was deeply confused by this entire phenomenon, and thus had rushed to the front windows to bark furiously himself at… whatever must be setting her off, because he certainly couldn’t find anything INSIDE to justify that sort of reaction. After realizing that there was nothing out there, he charged back into the living room, looking around frantically for the threat. He made a few laps around the room (while Stingray continued laughing and I buried my face in my hands- my baby is retarded!), then finally came to a halt in front of the TV with a look on his face that I think probably translates most closely to “You have got to be kidding me“.

Finally, I heaved a sigh and walked up to the television and tapped it, giving the happy “see-it’s-nothing-bad” speech. Kodos walked up and began sniffing thoroughly. Kang hung back at first, but once she saw Kodos checking it out with no ill effects, she came up to join us. Eventually, they finally were satisfied that the image smelled of nothing- in the dog world, probably a suspicious thing all on its own- and I was free to wipe the noseprints off the TV and retreat to the couch with my book while I waited for Stingray to finish whatever he was doing so we could settle on the evening’s entertainment. Kang followed and curled up in her customary place next to me. For ten or fifteen minutes, all was peaceful.

“….Rrrrrrrrrrrrrr….”

I looked over the edge of my book. Kang was glaring at Alton and growling softly.

“Oh for heaven’s sake.”

Quiet.

“RRRRRRRRRRRRR.”

“He’s not going to hurt you. We’ve been over this.”

She thought this over.

“Rrrrrrrrrrrr….”

I gave up and turned the TV back to the usual feed on mute. The distraction of the flickering images was not worth having to listen to Kang menace inappropriately still television personalities. That was enough to satisfy her, and she dropped off promptly to sleep.

I’m tempted to get a picture of Bobby Flay to focus her protective instincts on a more appropriate target. After all, he’s the one with the show about humiliating home cooks in their hometowns…

Really, it’s not. Finally. It’s 98F outside and around 40% humidity thanks to the monsoon season, which is basically liquid air by our spoiled desert standards. But it ain’t a problem. I’m loving it. Why? Because last October we had central air installed. This time last year it was well over 105F in the computer room thanks to the southern exposure and copious amounts of silicon transmuting electricity into heat. Now, it’s a nice comfy 78F.

I don’t care if I have to sell crack on the corner to keep it running. Refrigerated air is the greatest invention of modern man.

“I think the only people still chattering about “9mm v. .45″ and “DGI v. piston” are doing it to hear their heads roar and would be much happier arguing over “Kirk v. Picard” or “Wolverine v. Han Solo”.” -Tamara K. in the comments at the linked post.

I can’t even claim to be in the same galaxy as Tam when it comes to gun knowledge and that one rings.

Sasha Nein: “Young man, I hope you’ve learned a lesson here today.”
Raz: “Yes! Shooting stuff is useful and fun!”

OK, I know we’re a little behind on this one, since Psychonauts was first released an eternity ago in 2005, but we’re still enjoying the backwards compatibility on the xbox 360 to catch up on some of the better titles we missed. This is very much a better title.

The game centers around young Rasputin, Raz for short, who is a new cadet at the Camp Whispering Rocks, a summer training camp for kids with psychic abilities. Shortly after his arrival at camp (escaping his psychic-hating carnival acrobat father), the other campers brains begin to disappear and it’s up to Raz to somehow collect enough training to use the psychic powers necessary and rescue the brains and generally save the day.

The gameplay and controls are nothing to write home about; fairly standard all around. I’ve seen some places bitching about the camera controls, but really they weren’t that bad, except in one or two spots. What really made the game though was the level design, the character design, and the writing. Mostly the writing. Consider some of the following:

Dr. Loboto: The bad news is that we’re going to have to remove your brain and place it in an armored tank to shoot down innocent civilians with its psychic death beam. The good news is that your insurance is gonna cover the whole thing.

Ford Cruller: Aw, poor little thing.
Raz: That poor little thing just tried to kill me about eight different ways!
Ford Cruller: Well that’s not its fault. This was once just a normal sized lungfish, minding its own business in a mucus lined air bubble beneath a semi dry lake bed. But judging by the work done on it I suspect Maury has mutated it, accelerated its growth, and has placed an implant in its brain to make it do his evil bidding.
Raz: Aw, poor little thing.

The levels in the game take place within the brains of the camp counselors, who are full-fledged Psychonauts themselves, and in the minds of a few people you find around the camp (or more accurately, in the insane asylum across the lake), as well as a level or two inside your own head (well, Raz’s head – they haven’t quite managed to tap into the player’s skull just yet). One level was interesting and hilarious enough to even have a trope named after it.

The artwork looks like it came straight from the twisted mind of Johnen Vasquez, even though the only link to him is the always marvelous voice talent of Richard Horvitz, who played the main character. In a few spots in the game, Raz even managed to look rather suspiciously like Invader Zim. I’m not really doing the voice acting and writing justice here, so take a gander at the trailer for it:

The PC version isn’t even $10 at amazon. Just remember, if you laugh your brains out, have someone send them to me before you wander off to watch TV. I’ve got a use or two for ‘em….

I normally don’t have a very high opinion of our local newspaper. From the complete and utter lack of quality control to the only marginally literate staff allowing some truly shocking spelling and grammar errors to slip through, even with the dubious help of spellcheck, they’re mostly only good for the classified ads and the editorial page getting my rage up. Today they managed to actually pull off a rather interesting local interest story.

Here we have the tale of a man LabRat and I have actually been slightly curious about (though always, sadly, too busy to stop and find out WTF), one John W. Snell, a local ham radio buff (archival copy of the article reproduced without permission or formatting here). The upshot is that he’s a historical ham buff, and walks around town with his rig strapped to his back. Given some of the equipment descriptions I’ve seen in my very limited exposure to ham via the lovely alpha-geekette Roberta X’s posts on the subject, and my even more limited exposure to morse code, I gotta say, this guy is just plain slick. From the linked article, which given The Monitor’s shoddy website presence may or may not stick around for any length of time:

“Snell uses Vietnam-era radio pack and World War II-era telegraph key, combined with a five watt transmitter, 12 volt battery, folding solar panel, and an adjustable vertical antenna.”

And he keys at WWII pilot levels of 20-25 words per minute, well above the required 5wam speed to get a license. If any of the ham operators that read here are curious his call number is KD5RDD. See if you can add another pin to his map of contacts.

“Bleh, I hate this time of year.”

“Buh? You love this time of year. Trinity was a few days ago, and in a couple weeks you get your obligatory easy blogfodder for nuking Japan.”

“Well, yeah, but then there’s all the damn hippies running around for moon-a-hippie day, and they screw up the whole town for a week or so with their idiot little “arrest me” stunts that never get them arrested, there’s all the self-righteous hand-wringing and crybabyism in the paper, and to top it all off, those miserable little physics-denying rejects from “Tron” clog up just about every main road while they practice sending traffic into the oncoming lane or whatever it is they’re supposedly trying to accomplish. And it’s hot.”

“True, true. What we need is an influx of cool people or something to counter the idiots.”

“Yeah, we could have a hippie mooning contest or somethi– I just had the best idea ever.”

“Oh no…”

As usual with my more, ah, “interesting” notions, actions, and sentiments, there is a distinct possibility that alcohol had entered into the equation some time before this all transpired. The following has since been well and accurately described by someone cleverer than I as “…the product of drunken maunderings in an already deranged mind.” What is this besotted and ill-advised (and thankfully already dismissed as a bad job) notion?

Why that would be the Atomic Nerds Hiroshima & Nagasaki Shooting Match! On August sixth, when they dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima, we hold a 1911 match. On August 9th, when Fat Man hit Nagasaki, an M1 Garand match. See? Little Boy and Fat Man on the range! We could give out chunks of trinitite for prizes, drive by Ashley Pond and catcall/moon/laugh at the protesters, and on the 7th and 8th, let people either recover from the altitude shock, or cruise around and see the sights. It’d be a bit close to pull off this year, but next year would leave plenty of time to organize.

They say drinking and driving is one of the most dangerous combinations out there. With notions such as above, I’d say it’s probably much more dangerous to give me a couple beers and set me off about hippies.

Stingray: “I wonder if those idiots are going to have that ‘We’re sorry for Hiroshima and Nagasaki’ sign again this year.”

LabRat: “Probably. They’re not too swift with new messages.”

Stingray: “Ohhh… I just had the best idea for a counter-protest sign. I wanna stand next to their retarded little apology with my own big sign that says ‘I got the magic stick. I know if I can hit once, I can hit twice!”

LabRat: “Bwahahahahahahaha, ok, there’s all of maybe six people who’d get it, but for those six it’d be priceless.”

For some issues out there, there really are no clearly good solutions. Abortion comes to mind; there is absolutely no way around either of the legitimate issues- the morality of killing a developing fetus and the biological autonomy of the mother- through reason and simple ethics, so both sides generally substitute screaming at each other with increasing volume and increasing firebreathing rhetoric for debate. Nobody’s going to win the debate, and admitting that the other side has a really valid point and the only moral thing to do is try and demilitarize the battered middle ground as painlessly as possible just plain isn’t as much fun as the fire-and-brimstone rhetoric.

Iran is another such issue. There’s really nothing we can do to Iran to make them stop their quest for nuclear weapons, short of actually attacking them, if there’s nothing we can offer them that they want more than they want nukes. As it is, the last time we had talks, the Iranians almost immediately swept suspension of enrichment- the ONLY thing the US really wants from Iran, aside from less-likely goodies like “Stop trying to exploit Iraqi instability in order to expand your power in the region”- completely off the table of possible deals.

Everybody recognizes invading Iran as a highly undesirable result (including Iran), but there don’t seem to be any really good options in between. Diplomacy doesn’t work if the other side either wastes your time in endless bad-faith negotiations or just plain tells you to go hang- both of which Iran has done- so our realistic options are reduced to sitting around waiting to see what’s going to happen and how fast and crossing our fingers that the Israelis know where all the facilities are and are willing to take another international black eye to avoid the green-glass-sea option. You would not, however, know any of this from the public debate, which sounds like this:

“If you think diplomacy is actually going to work, you’re a PANTS-WETTING PANTYWAIST THAT’S DOOMING ALL OF US TO THE APOCALYPSE.”

“You foaming knuckle-dragging bloodthirsty chickenhawks are exactly why America has such a bad reputation! If you’d ever been willing to try TALKING instead of BOMBING, we wouldn’t be in this mess!”

“They’re happy to TALK until they have their NUKES. Show me where they’ve ever kept a single promise they’ve ever made!”

“If we actually welcomed them into the international community, they wouldn’t feel like they needed them! The US and Israel have them!”

“Neville Chamberlain!”

“Ghengis Khan!”

…ad nauseam.

Depending on how you look at it, fortunately or un, the only realistic way of dealing with Iran at the moment is also the default result of indecision: sitting on our butts and waiting for something to happen one way or another that makes one bad option just that .01% less unpalatable than the other.

Definitely UNfortunately, one of the other biggest issues in the country today is one where sitting on our butts waiting for something to change is definitely not the best option: energy. The price of oil has risen high enough and fast enough to make that majority of America which is normally happy to leave such messy and tedious issues in the hands of the chattering classes feel the butthurt. Where normally candidates get a “get out of issue free” card by blathering for a bit with the correct buzzwords calculated for that carefully calibrated share of their own base plus a healthy slice of the middle, now Americans really want to know just what the fuck the people In Charge plan to do about this. The politicians in question, though, probably don’t have many good rhetorical options of their own- they just can’t get by without looking inadequate. This is because the debate about energy policy currently looks like this:

“NOW are you paying attention, you wasteful SUV-sucking scum?! Now that your widdle wallet hurts? Too fucking bad! This is the way it’s going to be, because oil is a finite resource, you braindead protosimian!”

“Yeah? Yeah? What are you planning to power civilization with, Mother Gaia’s heartfelt sighs? What did you think, oil would get a little costly and so we’d all go live in yurts and eat grass? If you hadn’t decided that practically any kind of domestic production made the spotted owls cry, we wouldn’t be paying four bucks a gallon- OR having to give a shit what those psychos in the Middle East think!”

“That WOULD be your solution- we’ve been whipping it for all it’s worth and now it’s running out, so now obviously the solution is just to DRILL MORE. I guess your solution to lung cancer is MORE CIGARETTES to kill the tumor, huh?”

“What the fuck do you think ‘alternative energy’ is, pixie dust kept in Chevron’s secret Tinkerbell warehouse that they’re keeping off-limits so people don’t wake up to the oil scam?”

“Do you like breathing without coughing up your pancreas? Do you like water that doesn’t taste like a chemistry set? Do you like forests you can shoot all the Bambi you want in? We only have that stuff because we declared it off-limits to rapacious morons like you and put some goddamn national commitment into CONSERVATION! If you got everything you wanted, we’d still have the EXACT SAME FUCKING PROBLEM except LATER and with all of that stuff GONE. How is that a solution?!”

“WE ARE NOT GOING BACK TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY SO YOU CAN FEEL BETTER ABOUT YOUR CARBON FOOTPRINT!”

“NEANDERTHAL!”

“BONGHEAD!”

As with abortion and Iran, the fundamental problem here is that both sides are right. Oil and other fossil fuels are, in fact, a finite resource. There is only so much energy locked up in naturally-formed carbon compounds that are extractable from various sources in the earth. Oh, there’s plenty more of it- it will just require greater investment in getting more out of failing fields (in fact, it is lack of investment that is putting so many oil-rich nations with nationalized oil industries into failing production), investment in new technologies for exploiting things like shale oil, and general commitment into putting more and more into less and less.

Depending on the pace of advancement, this could even carry us on much further than we currently think it could- we usually underestimate our own capacity for technological advancement, especially when we’re feeling a pinch that makes it a sudden priority. However, only an idiot thinks that this is a viable strategy indefinitely. Add in the very real international problems we have that we presumably wouldn’t if we didn’t need to be so concerned about the whims of nations that have lots of oil but governments staffed by the All Star Slimeball League, and getting off the oil teat sounds like not just a really good idea, but maybe the only good idea.

Only Possible Rational Position number one: We can’t depend on oil forever, and we need to find more sustainable sources of energy for when it becomes a nonoption.

Stop smirking, greenies: I haven’t even started with you yet. The problem is, despite all the glowing reporting on various possibilities for alternative energy technology, we’re nowhere even REMOTELY close to being able to turn the bulk of our energy needs over to other sources- not even coal, not even nuclear. As for solar, wind, geothermal, and hydroelectric: they’re all great supplements, but we can’t get on-demand, storeable power through any of them the way we can with fossil fuels. They are good solutions… except that they’re all hopelessly local, as current technology stands. As for biofuels and hydrogen, they’re NON-solutions, as I’ll get to in a bit.

It’s become popular to frame the energy crisis thusly: “America is addicted to oil”. In the sense of “we desperately need it, and a lot of it, to survive as a civilization”, this is absolutely true. In that sense, I am also addicted to oxygen in order to survive as an organism. Just because certain bacteria have managed to find ways to survive on CO2 and sulfur doesn’t mean I can manage the same trick, or that if I could, I’d find any aspect of my new existence a fraction as fulfilling as I found being a wasteful oxygen-consumer.

But that’s not fair, you cry. What a civilization needs is not oil but energy, and there are a lot more ways to get energy- and civilizations aren’t limited the way organisms are in what kind of energy they use.

Fine. The base of third-world diets is almost always some form of starchy grain- rice, corn, or wheat are the most popular- and almost all the evidence is now showing that subsisting with starchy grains as the overwhelming bulk of your diet is one of the worst diets you can undertake. It’s contributing to rates of obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease in all sorts of populations as soon as the citizens that rely on these diets take up any form of existence that doesn’t involve hours of mandatory labor. They are addicted to grain.

However, if you proposed to drastically cut or eliminate starchy, nutritionally poor grains from a third-world nation- perhaps through some form of divine fiat- the result would not be a healthier population, it would be a population in which most people had starved to death, because they couldn’t afford or store most of the meat, fruits, vegetables, and nuts that make up a healthier diet. Grain is the near-universal unit of the human diet in civilization not because people are stupid and don’t know any better, but because grain is incredibly energy-dense, economical, and easy to grow, transport, and store. It doesn’t spoil easily, it doesn’t get destroyed by mildly rough handling, it can be shoved into a cabinet for months with no ill effects, and all of those economic realities are reflected in its price (cheap) and its production (huge and ubiquitous). Getting off grain as the base of the food pyramid is, currently, only something a rich and most thoroughly industrialized nation can afford- that, or a population that’s willing to reduce to a few thousand widely scattered hunter-gatherers.

Oil- and other fossil fuels- are like grain: they’re produced with known technology, they’re relatively easy and cheap to transport, they’re easily stored, the energy payoff per volume unit of fuel is high, and it works with or through just about everything. If corn, wheat, and rice were what the sustainable populations of big industrialized civilizations of the modern world were born and grown from, fossil fuels are the similarly cheap and efficient- though not cost-free- substances that make it all run. We have effectively been coasting along on an extraordinarily well-designed-for-use-by-humans substance that happens to be finite.

“Coasting along”, mind you, does not describe mere consumer excess- it’s everything we associate with advanced civilizations. Without fossil fuels, we wouldn’t just have to do without our iPods or corner Starbucks; we’d also have to go without heat in winter (that saves lives and enables year-round production in temperate regions), cooling in summer (that does likewise for hot ones), the refrigeration that makes it possible to live prudently off fruit, veg, and small amounts of meat… and the technology and laws that make it possible to set aside huge areas of wild, pristine land for our recreational pleasure. There is a reason the only less-than-fabulously-wealthy nations that are remotely known for their environmental quality are either ones that are living almost purely off a tourist trade from fabulously-wealthy nations… or have never developed much beyond the band-and-tribe level of civilization.

Clean, healthy environments in any remote proximity to people cost wealth. Lots of wealth- to make people rich enough that they can live as data-entry technicians instead of slash-and-burn subsistence farmers, to make them rich enough that they can entertain the idea of having some of their wealth taken away by the government and used to enforce clean air and clean water laws, to make them rich enough that they can depend on goods and services other than the exploitation of natural resources to produce something like a gross domestic product.

One of the reasons you so rarely see a concrete price tag put on serious carbon dioxide abatement when it’s discussed in the media (as opposed to heart-warming shots of the whole family recycling) is that it’s so stupid high it’s almost impossible for humans to wrap their heads around- trillions and trillions and trillions, much of it in lost opportunity for growth. All developing nations give up any chance at ever emerging from poverty, all developed nations cut back to the point where wealth levels per capita look like India does now. You may as well read “CO2 abatement” as “reduced use of fossil fuel”, as they are fundamentally the same thing; the vast, vast majority of those CO2 emissions are from the burning of those efficient, finite fossil fuels- the use of energy to drive economy and human development, in all civilization the world over. This outlook is not belt-tightening or reducing and reusing, it’s wholesale rollback of human progress- and while there are a small minority that are completely okay with that, it’s sure as hell not what the rest of the world is ever going to go along with.

Even if those who are taking the position that blocking the use of fossil fuels will lead to higher prices that will pressure America* to take alternative energy Really Seriously (as opposed to the complete inattention we’ve apparently paid so far) get their way, the major impact is not going to fall on the relatively wealthy and Highly Principled voting constituency that thinks this is a good idea- it’s going to fall mostly on people who can’t afford that kind of principle when it comes to working, feeding their families, and heating their homes. And they vote, too.

Only Possible Rational Position number two: Everyone would prefer clean water, air, and forests full of animals to bad water and air, unchecked development, and no animals: nobody is FOR an unsustainable lifestyle or a filthy environment. Opposition to “sustainable” movements have other sources.

BUT they are ALSO for being a first-world developed country and being able to live as though they’re a citizen of such, and support for the “sustainable lifestyle” for the nation will vanish as their own lifestyles become seriously unsustainable- not “buying McMansions on credit and driving their Humvees”, but “commuting to work and paying the same bills every household has to on less and less money”. Environmentalism as a movement depends on the support of this majority: and if it takes an unmoveable stance against them, it is not they but conservation as a movement with serious political power that will be destroyed first.

Only Possible Rational Position number three: Nobody is actually FOR taking humanity back to the Neolithic.

Those who oppose any further drilling (not Alaska!), shale oil development (not the Rockies!), offshore drilling (not our beaches and coasts!) are not actually morbid misanthropes out of the worst Malthusian fantasies, they think we already have, or can rapidly develop, alternate, cleaner, more sustainable forms of energy. The practical problems with solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, and many other things have been covered enough to make some impact on the overall consciousness, which is why the two big things that people cite when they’re groping for a true, sustainable alternative to oil are biofuels and hydrogen.

Biofuels are all the rage right now- dude, did you hear about that guy who runs his ride on cooking oil?- but they’re also proving to be completely UNsustainable. A few mavericks can run a car cheaply on what’s currently mostly a waste product- although cooking oil prices are already skyrocketing elsewhere, and there’s a been a big enough spike here to make thefts of used cooking oil go through the roof- but NOT as a serious alternative to fossil fuels.

The acronym in the title of this post is Robert Heinlein’s; it stands for There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. On the surface, biomass fuels look like a free lunch: they’re made from plants, which have this really cool thing they do where they use solar power to EAT carbon dioxide and turn it into energy that WE can then use. It’s a beautiful surface image- like the green opposite of pulling energy we can’t replace out of the earth and spewing excess CO2 in the process.

But plants aren’t magic energy pixies, they’re living organisms that have a lot more needs than just sunlight, water, and air- like fertilizer to provide the boatloads of other nutrients they need, which costs energy to produce and distribute. They also require processing- which takes… more energy. And then there’s the refining. And oh, all that space to grow, which has resulted in huge food price increases that are affecting… everybody poorer than us… and, oh yeah, massive deforestation as those same third-world nations that live much closer to the bone and can’t afford to place premiums on their wild land take advantage of the new market. It’s not just not as good as fossil fuels, biofuels turn out to be actively destructive to the environment. Whoops.

Hydrogen suffers from similar, but more obvious problems: since there are no natural reservoirs of pure hydrogen (and how would we extract it if there were?), getting the hydrogen takes so much energy that using the hydrogen itself as a fuel source would be as inefficient if not more so than powering everything by hamsters on wheels. In order to get hydrogen, you need electricity… rather a lot of it. The hydrogen itself is also hard to store (thanks to its lively chemistry, it brittles metals and increases maintenance costs) and hard to transport. If it takes more energy to create a “fuel” than it gives in result, it is not a viable alternative. Supplement, maybe- build a ton of nuclear plants (as the scientists in the linked article, from our own home Bomb Town, suggest) to power the creation of tons of hydrogen fuel, and then use that to run mobile fuel-requiring things like car. But that’s not a solution to any kind of energy crisis, since the net energy balance is the same: a loss.

Only Possible Rational Position number four: We can’t go “cold turkey” or even lukewarm turkey from oil until we have real candidates to replace it- and right now, we just have potential supplements from varying sources.

Our cheap lunch that we’ve been relying on for so long isn’t so cheap anymore, and there’s no way in hell we’re going to get a free one now matter how shiny it looks on the surface. The last position I consider “only rational”- and I would, because it’s my own- is to answer both sides: put as much as we can afford into VIABLE alternative energy research- not unworkable ones that happen to make the agricultural lobby really, really happy. At the same time, widen the pipeline- I’m no happier about the idea of disturbing the environment for more oil resources than anybody else that would take one empty Yosemite over the entire human-filled mess of Manhattan would be, but I also recognize that I live in a republic, and if I want my political priority (conservation) to remain viable, it can’t come to be percieved as an elitist hobbyhorse pushed by people who don’t give a shit what happens to anyone who’s not on the Endangered Species List.

More radically, I’m in favor of letting the oil companies keep their “obscene windfall” profits- because they actually know that investment is necessary to their future survival, they know how to work with and transport energy, and they’re who we’ll be needing to go to for distribution and technological help when that far-off alternative to fossil fuels actually DOES come around. Their track record at all of these things is far better than the government’s- even though the government gets more in tax than the oil companies get in profit they can keep already.

What I actually expect will happen is that Congress will curl into a ball and make humming noises as long as it can, and then most of it will take the position that seems least likely to get them unelected, which will consist of some combination of obstructionism, lip service, and cargo-cult economics. In the meantime, conservationists will continue to pretend that they’re in an episode of Captain Planet in which the evil oil companies and their political tools conspire to keep us all poor and sick and away from the free lunch, and conservatives will continue to pretend that their enemies are the sinister New Marxists who’ve adopted a strange death cult.

In other words, life as usual.

*To those that think if America takes the moral lead and really makes the economic sacrifices necessary to seriously cut fossil fuel use, nations such as China, Russia, and India will be so impressed they’ll follow suit: Name me ONE instance in history where pure moral example on the part of one nation was so compelling that other powers of similar size (but less wealth) followed suit at serious cost to themselves. Hell, name me one instance where pure moral authority was enough to make them do so at moderate cost to themselves.

The last day or two has seen a spark or two of debate about fugly guns vs. the pricy and pretty custom jobs from Big Names. Words such as reliability, pretentiousness, function, and I’m pretty sure bling have been bandied about. What about sentiment though?

Say hello to Papa Baer and Mama Baer.

LabRat and I don’t wear wedding rings. Besides the fact that we prefer our jewlery to be permanently attached, why on earth should we spend a few thousand dollars on a chunk of over-glorified Au-197 with a hunk of polished C-12 when all that’ll do is just sit there, and maybe get lost somewhere? Custom 1911s on the other hand will actually do some nifty stuff. And they feed and cycle just fine, thankyewverymuch.

Me, I like the bling-bling bang-bangs, but there’s a chance I’m slightly biased.

My yeast are happy. My yeast are VERY happy. Look how happy they are.

They were not this happy two hours ago. Two hours ago, it was bubbling normally, if a tad briskly. As of 4:30 mountain time, I think I’ve got a couple more hours before this thing decides to just detonate and launch the airlock into low orbit through the roof.

This is my plan for the moment:
1. Clean around the airlock to remove any dried and/or sticky crap from where there was a puddle of beer before I cleaned slightly for the photo.

2. Mix up some sanitizing solution, and pour it onto the top of the lid to sterilize around the airlock hole.

3. Sanitize the rubber tubing that was on the wort chiller, since it looks to be about the right size to jam in there.

4. Yank the airlock, stuff the tubing in, and run that into a bucket of water.

If the tubing won’t fit the hole securely without leaving air-gap, plan B is to see if I can slip the tubing over the inside tube of the airlock, then still run it into a bucket.

If anyone has a better plan, or any flaws in mine to point out, I’d love to hear from you. Quickly. If any of the couple of people what have our real names and address and also brew have some tips, we’re fairly easy to find in the phone book and would be much obliged for a quick call.

Update: On closer inspection, the rubber hosing from the wort chiller wouldn’t have fit the airlock hole, so plan B became plan A. I boiled the bejesus out of a couple feet of various diameters of tubing (spare parts from a dozen or so past water-cooling projects for computers), popped the lid off the airlock, caught the bubbler as it shot briefly above the rim, and got lucky with my first guess, 1/2″ tube. The other end is now in a big-ass pot of water, with a few spots of duct tape around to make sure the end stays submerged. Later on I’m going to flush the cup on the airlock with some water so we don’t have a puddle of beer sitting there attracting all sorts of microbial whatsits.

If this stuff comes out drinkable, I’ll be amazed.