If your computer freezes, not even the inadvertent blood sacrifice offered when you shove your thumb into the fan while aiming for the reset button will persuade it to unfreeze.
Technology sucks that way.
It’s Halloween eve and once again our place is deserted. Guess we’ll have to keep all those king-size packs of Reese’s cups to ourselves, sob. The combination of the poor lighting on the street and the fact that many of the driveways nearly qualify as a vigorous nature hike in and of themselves means that our abode is usually avoided except by all but the most intrepid teenage sugar fiends.
In any case, I’m stuck for material yet again and may as well do something thematic, so let’s talk scary movies. Horror is probably my favorite genre; some women like to watch movies about close-knit groups of women friends as they live, love, and inevitably one of them dies in great but photogenic suffering. I’m not big on those. I like movies about groups of friends as they live, love have hot sex, and are mostly killed off one at a time in photogenically grisly ways, according to just how annoying each one of them is and how much sex they’ve had. While slasher movies are great for nights of beer and candy such as… uh… Halloween, my favorites, the ones I can watch over and over again, tend to be much more in the line of psychological thrillers than splatterpunk. There’s still a bit of splatter, though.. wouldn’t be a horror flick without it.
Oh, and before we get to the listing? Heresies first, before you ask me why they’re not on the list. (Also, there are spoilers in this part, though there won’t be in the list. But given that every movie I talk about is over twenty years old and a giant of the genre, I don’t think I’m being too evil here.) I think The Exorcist is mind-numbingly boring after the first watch. I mean Christ, what was that, forty-five minutes of that one guy looking really stressed out in Iraq? And I’m sorry, but Linda Blair was pretty good, but not that great- Jennifer Carpenter’s turn in The Exorcism of Emily Rose made her look as though she could reasonably have been replaced with a Tickle Me Elmo doll.
I’m also mostly bored by Jaws, although it’s one of Stingray’s favorites, and while I’m sure he’ll kill me in my sleep once he reads this for saying so, no matter how awesome the effects were at the time, I can’t watch it now without feeling like I’m being menaced by the giant rubber shark I used to have for a tub toy. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the performances were awesome, but the only moment I find truly creepy is the one in the very beginning of the movie, where you can’t see the shark- because the damn thing shatters my suspense of disbelief each time.
What else? Alien isn’t on here. It’s pretty good, and before you leap out of your chairs to tell me so, I’m aware that it looks cliched now because it was the the one to CREATE all the cliches in the first place and was wildly original at the time. My problem isn’t so much that as it is by the fact that most of the irritating crewmembers didn’t die fast enough for my satisfaction, and the series in general was rather tainted for me by the way it went out of its way to make sure everyone you DON’T want dead in the first fifteen minutes eventually dies in the most horrible and pointless way the writers can possibly come up with. The first movie’s fine, though. They let the cat live. I’m pretty sure he was the only sympathetic character in four movies that did, except for the part where he might have died of old age before Ripley was rescued. So scratch that.
So, in no particular order because figuring out the order would actually take more effort than writing the entire rest of the post, my favorite horror movies.
1. Event Horizon. So far as I’m concerned, this one’s a lot better than Alien. They get the “welcome to outer space, you’re on your fucking own, buddy” vibe down pat, they did a very good job of sketching out the characters in just the amount of detail they needed to be flawed but likeable without wasting a lot of time that could be spent terrorizing the audience on tedious backstory, and it’s scary, which is the important part. With Alien, the whole conundrum for the crew is that there’s a giant acid-spitting flesh-eating monster roaming about the ship turning people into kibble, which I grant you is a not-insignificant problem, but the only thing there is to wonder about is whether or not it’s behind you or in that duct or whatever. Event Horizon gives you some mystery- about the ship, about the crew, about who’s going to survive, about whether or not you can watch the airlock scene without crawling into the sofa cushions.
2. Wicker Man. To the guy still mad about Jaws who’s going to accuse me of not liking a horror movie unless it’s got slick special effects- and I can practically see you, dude- here’s my riposte. And no, I am not talking about whatever abortion Nicholas Cage perpetrated on this horror great, which I have not seen and will never see unless I wake up in a trap contrived by the guy from Saw where my only choices are watching the remake or eating my own eyeballs or something. (I hated Saw, too.) This movie is a masterpiece example of what can be done with a shoestring budget, a decent unknown actor, a nice setting, and some freaking imagination. Watch the director’s cut/extended version- the new scenes look rather horribly fuzzy, but you won’t care, because a lot of them are really cool. (And there are naked people!) I also nominate this movie for managing to achieve a mind-bending mixture of horribly creepy, sexy, and inexplicably wholesome in one particular scene that will never, ever be topped. Especially not by anything Nicholas Cage does EVER.
3. Session 9. Most of the time when your audience gets to the end of the movie and thinks “Okay, what the FUCK just happened there?”, that’s a bad sign. Not so much with this movie, because if you’ve been paying a decent amount of attention- and not just sitting lazily back expecting to watch a nice straightforward monster or ghostie eating the cast- you can piece it back together. And then, lucky you, you can watch the movie again knowing what IS going on and it will be three times as creepy. The star of the movie is the setting, an abandoned insane asylum played by an actual honest-to-goodness abandoned insane asylum, which is every bit as creepy as such things really should be but usually aren’t. THIS is how you do atmospheric psychological thrillers, folks.
4. Haunted. I’m pretty sure there’s more than movie titled this, so I’ll clarify that it’s the pretty period piece with Aidan Quinn and Kate Beckinsale and based on a James Herbert novel. If you like ghost stories, folks, this one’s for you- and if you’re fans of a good mindscrew of a story, this also fits the bill. (Dear M. Night Shayalaman: this is how you do a twist properly, without making your viewers want to throw things at you.) Did I mention it’s also very, very pretty? The camera is quite in love with the English countryside on display here, not just with the actors. Like Session 9, this one is also much creepier when you watch it with the full understanding of what’s going on.
5. The Orphanage, or El Orfanato in the Spanish you should watch it in. (I hope subtitles don’t bother you. They don’t bother me.) I hear they’re making an American remake. If I believed in Hell, I’d believe in a special pit of it reserved specifically for directors that take a gorgeous, lovingly done and excellent foreign film and decide that what it really needs is to be more American and much, much worse. The excellent Guillermo del Toro, of Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy fame, produced this one, and his fingerprints are all over it- and yes, it is visually STUNNING. Also very, very creepy at points, and this is coming from someone who has seen so much of this stuff that it’s now very difficult to actually scare me as opposed to getting golf applause and a “Oooh, nice decapitation.” I won’t ruin the ending for you… or, well, most of the story, which is genuinely mysterious and interesting. And creepy. That damn kid with the sack on his head… brrr.
6. The Fog. Yes, I know there was technically a remake, but there is really only one The Fog, and that was the one made by John Carpenter in 1980 with Adrienne Barbeau and Jamie Lee Curtis and some dude that Jamie Lee bangs in the movie. I’m sure he’s some important actor in his own right, but he’s not the most interesting character in the movie- which are Adrienne, Jamie Lee, the fog, and that preacher guy, in that order- so I haven’t bothered to remember his name. John Carpenter deserves the title of horror master a lot more than some (I am looking at you, Wes Craven and Clive Barker), and this movie shows why- if it’s 1980 and your budget isn’t big and your premise is a little cheesy, make the star the atmosphere rather than the monster(s). There’s some sort of zombies or ghosts or something and they’re pissed off, but the source of the tension is the thick blanket of fog, Adrienne Barbeau’s voice, and some nice acting.
7. Army of Darkness. It’s not really scary, but it’s most definitely a creature of the genre, and god damn is it fun to watch. Bruce Campbell makes it (and makes you wonder why Sam Raimi ever went on to do some stupid emo spider crap with Tobey Maguire instead of making things starring Bruce Campbell for the rest of his career), and the zombies and other monsters are his medium of art. There’s a chainsaw hand. And a shotgun. And implausibilities abounding that you instantly forgive because you’re having so much fun. And it’s so quotable I’ll pull a first for anybody ever mentioning this movie and not quote any of them- if you’re not one of the zombie horde that can already pull five out of your head on a moment’s notice, then go watch it and join the horde.
8. Exorcist III. Yes, I’m only meh on the original, while this one rates inclusion in my top ten. That’s because this one’s better than the original, and it was seen by about six people including me- better writing, better acting, and it’s probably because William Peter Blatty, the novelist who wrote Exorcist (yes, it was a book first) was heavily involved in writing the movie. It has George C. Scott in one of his later roles being awesome, and Brad Dourif also being awesome, and if you’ve seen Brad Dourif in anything remotely horror, you know he’s a card-carrying member of the Creepy Motherfucker guild. Great psychological horror with some fantastic individual scare moments, even if the ending was a little weak.
9. In the Mouth of Madness, another John Carpenter movie. This is definitely a “your mileage may vary” movie, mostly because it feels like a love letter from Carpenter to horror fans. References and thematic riffs abound, and it’s got Sam Neill in it, which you know is your horror recipe for quality. Stephen King fans and H.P. Lovecraft fans will be especially pleased. It also has Charlton Heston being Charlton Heston, America’s creepiest little old lady, and a general prettiness combined with wrongness that makes for Horror Fun.
10. Dead Alive. Or Braindead, depending on where you live. Speaking of “what a great writer and director can do with not much money”, this is an early effort of Peter Jackson, who was clearly having obscene amounts of fun. It’s quite a sweet love story set in New Zealand (with Jackson’s characteristic loving touch with the landscape), about a boy, a girl, the boy’s mother, and their zombie-related difficulties. It has a kung-fu priest. It has zombie sex. It has a Giant Rat of Sumatra (sort of). It has the most traumatic afternoon out with the baby in the stroller ever. If you’re a fan of zombie movies, you have to see it just to see the part with the lawnmower.
I seem to have blown a fuse somewhere in my brain. So, have the latest thing to make me laugh: a spoof video based on the idea of certain distinctive directors doing McCain attack ads. It’s a tossup as to whether David Lynch’s or M. Night Shyalaman’s are better.
This is slightly reworked and crossposted material from a discussion elsewhere, because I wound up spending my evening on that instead of spending it on a long post about sexual strategies, mate selection, and human gender politics as I’d intended. So you get this instead.
One of the problems with judging if another animal has something like “a sense of self” is that their minds are highly likely to be RADICALLY different from ours, to the point where they may not even really be comprehensible to us, as our minds are heavily rooted in our own perceptions, instincts, and frames of references. Our intelligences have as much to do with being hominids, with all the special circumstances and influences that go along with that, as they do with being intelligent.
However, we can infer basic things about the minds of other creatures from the kinds of behaviors they’re capable of, what we know about their senses and therefore perceptions, and what we know about how minds in general work. For example, since abstract reasoning is the last ability to appear in the development of a human mind and for developmentally impaired individuals it may never appear at all, we can probably assume that abstraction is a uniquely human innovation. Since all animals need to be able to find necessary resources and avoid dangers, we can assume that even a pre-mind in a creature without a proper brain is capable of setting up some neurological rules that make certain kinds of tasks much simpler. It’s the areas in between that have the question marks on them, especially with respect to animals that are quite complex but not human.
What we really don’t know- and we try to infer when we do behavioral and psychological research- is which things are human innovations that go along with great intelligence, and which things are actually necessary tools for any animal that behaves in a complex fashion in a given context. If you’re going to swim efficiently, you need to have fins, and it doesn’t matter that much except to the details of what you’re doing whether you have a bony fish’s spined fin, a shark’s smooth one, a whale’s tail and flippers, a seal’s modified paw-flippers, or a human’s rubber fins; it’s just a tool that makes swimming much easier and you won’t be half as good at it without, which is why no animal that spends a lot of time free-swimming doesn’t have a structure like this. To borrow terminology from one of my favorite science writers, the exact kind of fin or flipper the animal has- the specific parts on a fish, shark, whale, seal, or human with special tools- are parochial features, unique to that species or general family of animals, but the existence of flippers themselves- a broad, flat surface attached to a limb and used to make moving in water more efficient- are universals, a ubiquitous or nearly-so solution to the same problem, innovated many times over. Lungs and gills are parochials; blood-rich areas of tissue with maximized surface area used for gas exchange from air or water to blood are universals. Chemotaxis, hunting, gathering, and filter-feeding are parochials; foraging is a universal.
My question is: what mental tools are similarly necessary to be a complex social animal? I think self- not our convoluted inner worlds that humans experience that let us do things like plot revenge or write poetry about how fall makes us feel, that’s a parochial, but a very basic sense of “I”- may well be a universal. “I” doesn’t need to be profoundly complicated just because human selves are; if that kind of logic held, then sharks would be unable to swim between continents because they haven’t got submarines. “I” need only function so far and be exactly as complex as the animal requires- and the very presence of abstraction in human thought, and its deep attachment to how we think about ourselves, makes even thinking about the prospect difficult for us. In order to start wrapping your head around the most simple I, strike up a conversation with your nearest available three-year-old. For now, back to dogs.
In training, we know that relationship matters- whether or not the dog trusts you to know what you mean and be consistent, whether the dog trusts you to protect him (and thus does not feel that he has to deal with a “threat”, like an approaching tall man with a weird umbrella, himself), whether or not the dog respects your ability to lead and to enforce your leadership. Those factors- the way the dog tracks your individual behavior and the way you behave in relation to him- influence how fast or well the dog will learn, as well as whether or not the dog will even bother to try.
In a broader context, sociobiologists are seeing in more and more and more and more varied different sorts of social animals (other than insects) that a hugely important factor, maybe THE important factor, to animals that can have complex socal groups is their ability to remember cheater/cooperator distinctions with individual members of their group. This is the most basic form of relationship- and also happens to require a certain advanced ability to distinguish individuals, remember them individually, and remember how they behaved toward you specifically… and if we’re going to get into this level of complexity of distinguishing individuals and keeping track of their behavior, a basic sense of self- if only to have an internal point of reference, the central individual self, to relate all those external individuals to- is a simple solution to an otherwise complex problem. In other words, likely to be a universal among diverse groups of animals facing the same fundamental problem.
Speaking of complex problems, we also have learning to rapidly cope with chaotic and novel situations, and planning- both of which dogs can do, as any shepherd knows. Human trainers use stepwise small learning events to create complex behaviors by chaining them together until the dog grasps the entire sequence as a whole, but wild animals don’t work like that. A wild dog learning to hunt simply cannot rely on learning to capture prey by small, digestible, simple sequences that then eventually link up into a complete behavior; the way a prey animal behaves is FAR too chaotic and unpredictable to rely on that kind of learning, because the sequence would never be repeated in the same way, would rarely even be begun in the same way. Thus, the animal must make simple plans based on the rapidly changing circumstances, and be able to think in a flexible enough way to try to solve problems as they arise rather than repeating stereotyped sequences of behavior and varying them slightly.
In order to plan, you have to briefly project yourself and the other object into the future- only a few seconds or minutes at a time, but even so- it seems to me that this relies on HAVING a sense of yourself as an individual whose actions are under your control, rather than having a series of instinctual or rote responses for every possibility, which would actually be a vastly more complicated and inefficient system. So now we have self as an elegant solution to TWO problems (or three, when you add trying different ways of solving novel problems in novel situations, without necessarily having to develop a plan), which makes it even more likely to be a universal. Human trainers have to use the much more simple and stepped approach to teaching because, unlike a group of dogs on a hunt, they share no common language or frame of reference with the creature they’re trying to teach- thus, reversion to the simplest and most common shared vertebrate mechanisms of learning is the best approach.
We used to assume no animal but humans had a sense of humor, until we thought to thoroughly test that assumption, and we found otherwise. We used to think no other animal used tools, until we looked and found multiple examples. We used to think no other animals had culture, until we looked and found multiple examples across many intelligent and social, but otherwise unrelated species. (Obviously not culture as in Shinto and opera, but behaviors, innovations, and mannerisms that varied with local groups.) If the argument I’ve made suggests that other animals than dogs, perhaps some that are actually less intelligent, have a sense of self… well, I’m really not all that convinced we’ve looked all that well.
I’ve been quite thoroughly burnt out on politics as late. I still take my morning dose of poison, for much the same reason as a heavy smoker cures his morning attempt to expel his own lungs with a cigarette, but I’ve mostly lost the desire to talk about it.
I also have what appears to be one of my larger bio-stuff posts in mental draft form, but it still needs poking and punching to see which bits actually belong in there and which ones represent a several-hundred-word tangent, and of course there’s always the terrifying possibility that the whole thing will collapse like a distressed souffle, which happens from time to time.
Fortunately, a friend of mine found a bit of fluff of mine from many years back and before I started formally blogging, which I had completely forgotten ever having written. After looking it over again, I decided it’s pretty good for something that old, and also that I miss having enough of a sense of humor about politics to have written it in the first place.
So, without further ado, the field guide. It is very silly and meant to be taken as such, and was written when my very small audience was mainly to the left or REALLY to the left of me- I had gotten more than a little tired of seeing people talk as though conservatism was a blob of uniform thought that could be entirely represented by Dick Cheney and James Dobson.
The Paleocon
Distinguishing features: The Paleocon believes in small government, traditional values, low taxes, and minimal interference in foreign affairs. In general, he believes that America started to go downhill somewhere around Woodrow Wilson, and all things being equal would prefer to repeal the twentieth century in general. He’s still absolutely outraged about progressive taxation, and especially the New Deal. He feels the Republican party abandoned conservatism somewhere around Nixon.
Where found: Generally, with a cigarette and a martini somewhere in upstate New Hampshire.
Call: “The government should deliver the mail and declare war. We just have to get them to stop doing EVERYTHING ELSE. Dammit.”
The Very Moral Minority
Distinguishing features: This fellow believes that faith in God and the Bible automatically translates to good government. God = good, so how could government guided by God be anything else? American society will turn right back into the garden of Eden it was in the fifties if we just get God back into every single aspect of public life. Always shocked when it turns out most other Christians don’t agree, and keep quoting something annoying about that which is Caesar’s. Oh well, he’s still right.
Where found: With very bad hair and an equally bad suit, and not infrequently, a radio station.
Call: “The Communists were atheists, and they killed a hundred million people!”
The Crunchy Con (Hat tip for term to National Review)
Distinguishing Features: Highly literate, usually religious (though not always Christian), and deeply rooted in small-town traditional values. Disdains pop culture, big business, big government, and big anything, including big religion. Usually does not own a TV. May or may not own a radio. Shops in Wild Oats/Trader Joe’s/Whole Foods, but entertains private fantasies of shouting “I VOTED FOR BUSH!” to see if it really would start a riot.
Where found: In organic co-ops, small churches, and small towns. Distinguishable by simultaneous presence of Birkenstocks and lack of bumper stickers.
Call: “Feed your family good food for their bodies, minds, and spirits.”
The Neocon
Distinguishing Features: Did you ever wonder what happened to the liberal Democrats from the Kennedy era who believed in civil rights, women’s rights, and opposing totalitarianism by force and spreading democracy the same way? Now they’re neocons. Prone to pointing out that Japan was a backwards country mired in feudalism and civil war until Admiral Perry pointed several naval cannons at them. Admit that, okay, that whole East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere episode was a setback, but then we occupied them for a couple of decades and look at them now.
Where found: At antiwar protests jeering the protestors. Fleeing from said furious protestors.
Call: “Freedom and democracy for all.”
The Libbertaryan
Distinguishing features: First cousin to the Paleocon with less “traditional” values. Don’t believe the government has the right to interfere with them in ANY way except to enforce contracts and have a military. They are not totally sure about the military.
Where found: In Montana or Wyoming with their family, dogs, and a sign reading “Tresspassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.”
Call: “Gimme my guns, drugs, and whores, and GET OFF MY PROPERTY.”
The Clone Army Con
Distinguishing features: Changes depending on the decade, but roiling disdain for “liberals” is constant.
Where found: Anywhere.
Call: “(Whatever Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage is saying this week)”
The South Park Conservative
Distinguishing features: Smirk. Either consciously hip or consciously unhip clothing. Tendency to burst out laughing at seemingly inappropriate moments. Joy in making people angry, especially liberals, but other conservatives will do if there aren’t any liberals in range or they just feel like a change of pace.
Where found: Nearly anywhere, but take particular delight in being conservatives in traditionally liberal outposts.
Call: *singing* “America, FUCK YEAH!”
The Moderate Conservative
Distinguishing feature: Frequently indistinguishable from Moderate Liberals.
Where found: Ubiquitous.
Call: “I have to go to work in the morning.”
So, before we dashed off to spend the weekend hauling, sawing, pitchforking, splitting, stacking, and other such productive things, the ever-lovely Breda deemed us worthy of something called a Superior Scribbler Award.
Our reactions went with lightning-quick speed first to immense flattery- Breda knows a damn lot of good blogwriters- to “Oh freakinhell who do we give this to?”. Part of the rules, you see, involve handing it around to five other folks you also think deserve one.
The fact that since we began dithering several other bloggers we admire have already gotten one has not made this any easier, especially since our major criteria is writers that are both very good and, in our opinion, also very underappreciated. So before my excuse for delay winds down to nothing, here we go:
1. The writing team over at Querencia. A fascinating variety of experience, and if they have a common thread it’s rampant individualism and a curiosity in and respect for nature and those who live with it, as opposed to those who mostly experience it through the Discovery Channel. We’ve so far only had the pleasure of meeting Steve Bodio and his wife, sterling individuals, though with luck we’ll meet more of the contributors soon. I’ve found more worlds whose existence I had never suspected through here than any other blog.
2. Steve Browne, of Rants and Raves. A well-traveled individual who’s been in many places, free and unfree, his perspective is sharp and so is his writing- he has a gift all too rare among the journalistically-inclined, which is saying something important in a few words so that they are easily digested and not diluted by sheer bulk.
3. I’ve linked Doqz before, because he’s.. an underappreciated blogger who, in my opinion, does not get enough traffic. His major focus is political writing, but between the fact that he’s a history type that tends to have a broad familiarity with the past consequences of policy and philosophy and the fact that his readerbase somehow leans liberal, he’s of a higher grade than most- the libs keep him honest, and his wit can veer to the zany but tends to be sharp as a knife.
4. Smartdogs. I linked her just the other week, didn’t I? I did. She still fits my criteria well- very good writer who seems to get very little traffic relative to talent- so here you go again. For me, her site is that rarest of rare things- something written by someone who shares my interests, but seems to read an entirely different set of books and news feeds than me, so that I learn something new or gain something else to think about with nearly every post.
5. Matt G, of Better and Better. His pal Lawdog has already been noticed by the award, but not Matt, and I think he deserves it, too. When he has the time to write, his slices of small-town and family life, look into the world of a peace officer, and general philosophizing keep him on my daily-check list whether the posts have been daily or not.
Remember the rules, fellows and girls- if you accept the award, the rules are to link to five others of the deserving, and to refer back to the originator’s post and list yourself. It seems to be the project of a high school student to both study the behavior of this kind of meme and collect a lot of interesting reading, so help out.
Oh no! Still no content!
We’ve been spending the weekend catching up on Shit We Seriously Gotta Do, now that the prospect of the near-annual Halloween first snowstorm of the year has concentrated our attention on the winterizing chores that seemed so readily put-offable for the past… oh, several months. Hey, at least we DID finish the woodshed in a more or less timely manner… it’s just the filling of it that got neglected. And the rain gutters. And various vehicle maintenance. …Yeah.
If it’s the weekend or just about to be the weekend, we won’t be around much for a bit…
We blog more-or-less anonymously- it’s not that difficult to figure out who we are, but we’re not looking for total anonymity so much as we’re looking to avoid one specific person- so since our e-mail addresses are simply our names, we don’t post them on the site.
Well, now we have a contact e-mail: if you simply must get in touch with us and not in the comments, ping nerdsatomic -at- gmail.com. Yes, atomicnerds was taken for some reason…
Another tattoo session today, and as usual I am wiped. We’ll figure out awards of merit tomorrow.
In the meantime, Kang expresses my feelings:
With a quiet day at the Nerd Ranch, increasing burnout from politics, and just plain nothing interesting going on at the moment, we bring you the following blatant ripoff of loving homage to Marko, where I will make fun of the words people entered into search engines to arrive at this site.
who works at the black hole surplus store & museum in los alamos
Ed Grothus, and it’s a junk shop, not a museum. You can find more information about Ed by looking up words like “hypocrite” or “filthy idiot hippy”.
attomic dog show
Great, first the atomic bees started breathing, now we’ve got dogs that are so atomic they need an extra T, and they’ve already organized shows? I swear, if I get roped into grooming for this, it will not end well.
ironkey sucks
Nuh-uh! You suck!
doqz
super hyper obese nerd
fuck
Hrm, maybe I should watch my language a bit after all.
babeons
Easier to produce than the Higgins-Bosom particle, but generally considered less stable overall. The two available charges are “natural” and “surgical.”
nerd things to do at home
Ok, we’re going to need a soldering iron, a couple screwdrivers, a bottle of vodka, half a case of comic books, and more insurance. Still on board?
mutate the labrat game
I’ve got a bucket of cesium and a pair of dice. Let’s do this!
los alamos controlled burn pros and cons
That concludes today’s display of writer’s block. Tune in tomorrow when we try to come up with something not made of fluff and fill!
Have you ever wondered why we dye butter and cheese yellow or orange? This isn’t merely a common cosmetic convention- this was so important to dairy consumers that for years (and up until very recently in Quebec) there were laws in many states (backed by dairy companies) dictating that margarine could not be colored, or instead, that it be dyed pink. As you know if you were ever given the task as a kid to make butter from a carton of cream and a Mason jar, butter isn’t yellow either- like untreated margarine, it’s white, the color of all plain, homogenous fats. So what’s up with the yellow? Why is this so attractive to consumers?
If you guessed that the answer winds down eventually to “evolution”, you know me well. Have a cigar! Or a Kewpie doll, if you don’t smoke.
Although the sensory hardware in biological organisms can be extremely complex- for example, recent research is showing the sense of smell to be based on a sort of rough-and-ready molecular spectrometry that actually analyzes the molecular vibration frequency of compounds to determine what they should report them to the brain as- the level of analysis is much less so. The difference between a smell like caraway seeds and a smell like spearmint might actually be determined by the handedness (left-right orientation) of a molecule, but you don’t know that- you only know that they smell different, and that if you were choosing a candy, you’d rather have the spearmint.
This is because, rather than bog your brain down with the informational equivalent of a dense laboratory report for every sight, sound, or smell, it’s much simpler to connect your reactions and preferences to some obvious feature that tends to be strongly associated in the environment with something the body needs. You don’t look at a strawberry and think “My, I’d bet that berry is just full of valuable sugars, anti-oxidants, soluble fiber, and micronutrients”; you think “that looks juicy and sweet”. Given that the entire purpose of fruits for plants is enticing animals to eat them and thus enlist for seed-dispersal services, fruits have evolved to be visually distinctive and to be full of attractants meant to give the animal some kind of a payoff for bothering; thus, they tend to be bright colors or distinctive shapes or both, and they tend to come loaded with a biological bribe in form of sugars and nutrients.
Since brightly colored round objects that are sweet tend to only be applicable to fruits in a pre-agricultural, pre-civilization landscape, it was simplest for our brains to assume bright and sweet = something valuable that we should seek out and favor. Now that we’ve had several thousand years to innovate and get creative with our food, and discover the concept of “marketing”, we have things like the jelly bean- all the bright color and sweet flavor that our brains tell us is so desirable, but not a scrap of anything all that uniquely valuable to us, unlike the berry it’s passing itself off as to the brain. In fact, it’s even better than the berry- more of the payoff with less likelihood of the mild bitter flavors that the plant puts in the berry to ward off undesirables and preserve the berry better, and whose general flavor class we associate with poisonous things. Of course, it has almost none of the nutritional value of the berry, just simple sugars that modern humans already tend to get way too much of, but that’s not important to your brain’s simplified sense of “good”.
In the environment of evolutionary adaptedness that biologists, anthropologists, and nutritionists hung up on this concept like to reference, salty and fatty flavors were associated almost exclusively with meat, and not just meat, but the highest-quality parts. Wild carnivores (and ancient human hunter-gatherer cultures that have decided this Western civlization business is for obese blowhards) don’t go for the skeletal muscle meats first. In a wild animal, those are a nice store of protein, but not nearly as good a source for valuable fats and nutrients as the organ meats. They go for the really good parts- the liver, which stores a lot of glucose and fat and is stuffed with vitamins, the brain, and all the other “good for you” wobbly bits disdained by children everywhere. Human technology has distilled this salty, fatty incentive into the pork rind, among other things.
So what of the butter, and the cheese? Aren’t they white, without chemical treatment? The answer is that they are now- but not for the vast majority of humanity’s time with dairy animals, which were among the first domesticated, after the dog. I’m getting to it…
In order to produce more meat with less cost in time and space, the vast, vast majority of livestock are now raised in various industrial conditions, and fed on grain. The animals are not as healthy or as durable on this diet- ruminants like cows especially tend to be chronically ill on that starch-rich diet*- but it’s much more cost-effective overall, and has been one of the things that has made meat such a cheap and normal part of the diet in an affluent first-world society. A common vegetarian ethical and environmental objection to meat is that you waste resources by feeding an animal on grain rather than just eating the grain- but that isn’t so on the traditional method for raising cattle, sheep, and goats, which was pasturing them and letting them eat grass, a substance largely worthless to humans except in an ornamental or erosion-preventing capacity.
Since nutritionists figured out that the differences between fats are important, and that some of them are extremely important to us because we can’t produce them ourselves, the “essential fatty acid” has entered the average health-conscious American’s lexicon. Since one of the two, omega-6 fatty acids, are really very common in any carnivore’s diet, the less common, the omega-3 fatty acid, has become the latest nutritional holy grail. Since omega-3 is relatively uncommon except in certain kinds of nuts and seeds and seafood, especially salmon, after the importance of the omega-3 came to prominence, fish oil supplements (of which you must choke down thousands of milligrams daily for efficacy) have invaded the shelves, salmon steaks are in demand, and everybody that wants to get a premium for their food has been pumping extra omega-3 into it, whether it’s in a form that can actually be used by the eater or not.
Since the omega-3 fatty acid’s importance to brain development and function was learned, it even created a problem for anthropologists working to piece together human evolution- if we need this stuff so badly to make big brains, and the story of hominid evolution is increasingly big brains, how could we have evolved and survived on prairies, savannahs, plains, and other areas that weren’t directly coastal? We know from shell middens that hominids of all sorts liked seafood, but it seemed like there were too many inland populations for it all to make sense.
The problem for the anthropologists was that the societies that produce anthropologists, and the chemists that are able to analyze the ratios of various different kinds of fats in a nicely marbled piece of steak, are the same societies that had long since upgraded to the efficient industrial model of livestock keeping. The average supermarket steak doesn’t have enough omega-3 in it to explain how hominids got eggheaded chasing buffalo with spears instead of salmon with fishing hooks- but pastured beef**, and wild game meats from other grazing animals, do. The chemical toolkit to make them is found in chloroplasts- in the grass that a grazing animal consumes bucketloads of.
What does any of this have to do with yellow butter and cheese? Dairy milk is influenced heavily in chemical composition and flavor by the diet of the animal making the milk- and it was long recognized in agricultural societies that used dairy products that the butter and cheese made during the spring and summer, when the cows and goats and sheep and water buffalo were enjoying the richest pasture and browse, was infinitely superior to the winter dairy made when the animals were being fed on hay and grain- and that summer dairy IS yellow with no dye whatsoever required. Why? The omega-3s that make it into the milk as well as the meat- they give an overall yellow tint to the fats they’re blended with. The higher the percentage of omega-3s, the stronger the yellow tint grows and edges toward orange. If you see omega-3 eggs in the grocery store, which are created by giving chickens feed heavy in the high-omega-3 grain flax seed, their yolks are bright orange.
With biological evolution prodding us toward the intense yellow or yellow-orange egg yolk, and cultural evolution prodding us toward the yellow butter and the most intensely yellow cheeses as the best-quality, without realizing it we have innovated to entice our senses with the implicit promise of value yet again: I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter and the Kraft Single or Velveeta cube take their place next to the jellybean and the pork rind.
*You’ll note that horses, which are physiologically less committed to grass-eating than cows, are fed primarily on hay with a grain supplement. They’re required to be healthy and athletic to be useful, and too much grain makes them sick as well as fat. Cattle are supposed to be fat, and poor condition and immunity can be dealt with with lots of antibiotics…
**I don’t normally link to sites that are trying to sell something, but their list of citations is much more complete than I could find on any of the kinds of online web sources I prefer to link. Most of the material I originally read this in is printed on paper and sitting on my shelves.
…are apparently doomed to remind the rest of us about it inadvertantly. Seems the story du jour is over Joe “Don’t Mess Wit Mah Beretta, Yo” Biden all but promising to create by his lonesome an international crisis within the first six months of a Team Barry presidency. Y’know, like The Glorious Kennedy faced. But absolutely under no circumstances like what that evil Hitlerclone faced in the first eight weeks. No. Definitely not anything like that.
Granted, I think Bush flubbed that little test, but then my idea of a diplomatic solution after an enemy fighter rams “bumps” one of our flights and offers to send it home by UPS Ground one screw at a time, ask about the crew next month, is to park a couple of carrier groups right off the coast, a few battalions of ground forces nearby and a nice steady stream of B2s flying over Beijing toting the big firecrackers, but then I’m told I often lack subtlety.
You’d think for all the criticisms the left has piled on Bush in the last eight years, they could at least remember one of the valid ones. Then again, pointing out that Barry in the big chair would make for even more disastrous results than Bush in this particular stripe might have just managed to accidentally set off the “this is a bad idea” alarm somewhere in Barry’s ranks of politburo campaign advisors. Anyone want to bet on what he’d give up to the first pissant to come knocking? Rather than just let the commies crawl through our electronic spy gizmos, he can just fax over blueprints for the Seawolf subs or something.
We’ve been hit with a plague of allergies and lawyers, so it’s light content day. Have a picture of an insane siamese with a soda fort after the dogs brought in a bunch of mud.
Via Smartdogs, the latest news from the front in the war against the antibiotic-resistant bacteria that now haunt hospitals and nursing homes is that they have a powerful new weapon- the shit transplant.
After I picked myself up off the ground, got back in my chair, and finished being outrageously pleased to live when and where I do so that this is the news I get to read over my morning beverage, it occurred to me that this is rather illustrative of something I think we could use more of in medicine- a greater evolutionary and ecological perspective.
Backing up for a minute, the reason the more politely named “stool transplant” was a procedure that occurred to anyone, and the reason it apparently has a very high success rate, is the circumstances that allow the drug-resistant bug in question- Clostridium difficile- to do its nasty work. C. diff, as it tends to be nicknamed, starts coming in and wrecking the place after the patient has been given antibiotics for some other reason; as many of you who have ever been put on a course of serious antibiotics know have discovered to their discomfort, the antibiotics tend to cause diarrhea. Why? Because the work we do in digesting our food isn’t all ours- our guts have massive and diverse colonies of bacteria that, rather than being undesirable invaders or freeloaders, actually help us digest our food. This is why lactose intolerance isn’t actually a true food allergy at all; lacking our own enzyme to digest lactose, the lactose-digesting bacteria in a normal gut colony suddenly get a banquet, and the resulting riot of activity (and the gas that is the byproduct of their metabolizing the lactose) causes problems, not the lactose itself.
When you take strong antibiotics, especially ones that are designed to hit just about anything bacterial in you, your garden of happy helpful gut flora is decimated- which leaves a sudden vacancy in the internal ecosystem that is you. With a sudden availability of resources and a lack of other residents protecting those resources in their various ways, what moves in next could be a lot less desirable and a lot less helpful- like C. diff, which will attack the gut so aggressively it can start breaking down intestinal walls. Think of it like the bacterial version of certain areas of post-Katrina New Orleans; move out the hardworking with a stake in preserving the quality and integrity of their community, and the predators and the scavengers will move in. The stool transplant works by a rough-and-ready fashion of moving the hardworking back in to retake the community- they are better at it, which was why they were dominant before the antibiotic wiped them out.
In a separate interview with the Washington Post that I now annoyingly can’t find again, Dr. Aas*, the pioneer of the procedure, said that he thinks of shit stool as an independent organ, like a kidney. While that’s certainly a helpful perpsective when it comes to next coming up with the idea of a transplant- a healthy organ brought in to help or replace a damaged one- I think the article I could link has it right: it’s an ecosystem. The first thing I thought of when I first read about the effects of antibiotics on a normal, healthy gut and the chaos that sometimes follows was the Crown-of-Thorns sea star, a species that’s just fine in a normal, undisturbed reef ecosystem, but will completely destroy it if its predators are overfished or agricultural runoff creates a nutrient bloom. This vulnerability of marginal or recently disturbed (or previously isolated) ecosystems to invasion and destruction by an opportunistic species is Ecology 101.
This phenomenon isn’t even the only example of health problems arising from a damaged internal ecosystem. Tooth decay is caused by a bacterial species that secretes acid when it eats the food particles and residue left behind on your teeth; too much sugar has roughly the same effect on it that the runoff-caused nutrient bloom has on the crown-of-thorns or the lactose has on the normal flora in a lactose-intolerant individual. Besides that, saliva normally keeps things at a pH that inhibits the bacteria- if you have a dry mouth (from any number of medical or drug-induced causes), you will be vastly more vulnerable to tooth decay. Likewise, the vagina is normally inhabited by an acid-loving species that keeps the place clean- when the pH balance shifts, as with too much douching or a hormonal change from birth control, the acid-lovers are weakened and opportunistic yeast and bacteria may move in**.
The phenomenon of widespread antibiotic resistance itself is a consequence of a lack of people in the appropriate places thinking in ecological and evolutionary terms; if you pour massive amounts of direct selective pressure on a group of organisms, especially organisms with a very short generational time, you produce organisms that are able to resist that pressure with incredible speed and across a wide variety of species. This, also, is Evolution 101. The fact that many antibiotics are derived from molds and fungus- natural predators of bacteria- doesn’t help. It should have been easily forseeable, but instead doctors gave out antibiotics to placate patients with a viral infection (or “just in case”) for decades, and the agricultural industry treated them as though they were a nutritional supplement. Natural selection was not foremost in anybody’s mind- though this might also be partly a consequence of the way people tend to not think about bacteria as organisms (Animalia prejudice), and also to think of medicine in terms of a sort of mechanical engineering rather than trying to beat biology itself at its own games.
As it stands, medical students are required to be conversant in a breathtaking number of biological and chemical disciplines- and evolution and ecology, as the business of the fellows out in the field chasing butterflies and classifying sea cucumbers, tend to get short shrift. Respect for evolution’s role in the proper education of a medical student- as the unifying theory of biology, in which medicine is rooted- is such that a university professor who declined to write a letter of recommendation to medical school for students who would not affirm evolution actually came under investigation by the Justice Department. Among the university’s defenses of the practice was that there were other professors who would be fine writing such a letter for a creationist student. As for ecology- not a damn bit of it makes sense except, in Dobzhansky’s words, “in light of evolution”.
*Yes, I know. This is the sort of thing that makes me question my atheism. It might well be pronounced “ayse” or “ahhs”, though.
**I once saw it seriously suggested that women prone to yeast infections make a frozen popsicle out of live-culture plain yogurt, which has a lot of acid-lovers, and… you see where I’m going with this.
One of those basic little “why” science questions, right up there with “Why is the sky blue?” and “What makes a rainbow?” is “Why do men have nipples?”
The actual reason why is a look into one of those concepts of evolution that’s not always apparent in the lies-to-children version taught in high school biology: not every feature on an organism is there for something, or in response to some specific need. Evolution operates in a fashion that has a lot more to do with what materials are on hand and what saves energy than with what would be optimal to meet a specific purpose, so some features are there quite literally because it was simpler to have them there than it was not to.
All human fetuses start off sex-neutral (or, if you prefer, female, since the anatomy needs fewer modifications for a girl than a boy), and one of the reasons it’s actually possible to perform a sex-change surgery that leaves some sexual feelings completely intact is because all the relevant sexual structures develop out of the same “neutral” tissues and tubes. Since “male” and “female” were in the developmental blueprint of the critters that eventually formed the base of our lineage long before “mammal” was, nipples aren’t part of those sex-specific developmental tissues- mammary glands are modified sweat glands, in fact. A developing fetus gets nipples before it undergoes the stage of development that involves sexual differentiation; therefore, nipples are a unisex feature. Nipples are minimal-cost to develop and don’t tend to affect a male’s fitness in any fashion, and fetal development patterns are something that evolves very slowly because of the higher likelihood that a variation will be fatal: and thus men have nipples, although they’re useless.
There has been more than enough time for the body to make functional nipples into an apparently exclusive female thing, so that the hormonal changes of pregnancy also prime the maternal pumps and leave the lady overflowing by the time the hungry offspring makes his official debut. However, because so many things can go wrong with lactation, and because being able to lactate successfully is such a massively important thing for a female mammal, especially one whose offspring remains dependent on milk for a year or more, there are… backup systems in place. Specifically, the sort of nipple stimulation that frustrated suckling provides is an encouragement to the system to work harder at lactating.
You may recall that I made a point of clarifying that, structurally speaking, nipples are in no way a “female” thing, because it’s developmentally simplest to just stick them on both sexes and then tie all the hormonal primers to pregnancy. Likewise, for a prod like stimulation leading to lactation, it’s also simplest to just leave this as a unisex feature, given that men will almost certainly not be the targets and thus calorically expensive lactation won’t provide a fitness hit to males.
Leave it to humans to innovate. The hormonal stew that is childbirth has always produced a few babies of both sexes that had “witch’s milk”, lactation at birth, and a few hormonally-charged teenage boys* found themselves milky after playing with their nipples. Throw in treatments for testicular and prostate cancers that involve hormonal cocktails, and you have a sudden phenomenon of lactating men. Men don’t have the extra development of the whole production and delivery system that female mammals now enjoy after puberty, so it’s never as much as a woman could produce, and, I thought, never more than a trivial and biologically-fascinating amount.
As it turns out, I should never, ever underestimate this particular primate species. There is substantial interest… up to and including at least one father who managed to work up to enough milk to feed the child on his own. (And, possibly, one tomcat.)
We may have to dispense with the colorful simile I titled the post with… it may soon be obsolete.
*Fun fact: Testosterone is a simple chemical variation on estrogen, and when processed as “excess”, becomes estrogen. Thus the phenomenon of “bitch tits” in steroid-abusing bodybuilders and extra potential for weird hormonal hanky panky in adolescents.
Must be a phase of the moon thing or something. Tam pimps some knives, of the sort recently photographed by Oleg, and then just a little later Breda starts looking around at various bits of nifty steel, specifically something in the broad category of “boot knife.”
For that role, I’m partial to the Sog Mini-Pentagon (availible for a considerably less WTF price at SMKW). This isn’t exactly what I would prefer for a primary line of defense, but in places with odd rules where knives are kosher but anything with a bangswitch is verboten, it’s better than nothing. Normally when I have this on me (which I admit isn’t terribly often), it’s role is a backup tool for cutting jobs too big for my leatherman or regular pocketknife. AUS8 steel isn’t my first choice, but it doesn’t suck, and for the type of use this blade is most likely to see, it’s adequate. The serrations are handy, but I wouldn’t want to rely on only them to saw through anything much bigger than a half inch diameter or so.
The blade length is convenient, and the handle is nice and grippy. It holds and takes an edge about as well as you’d expect AUS8 to do so (which for the folks who have better things to do than obsess over metallurgy means “Pretty dang well, but not spectacularly”), and is nicely balanced overall. I can’t say I’m ever much a fan of kydex (it just feels weird against my skin), but again, given the purpose and price point it fits the bill nicely. This one has actually pulled duty in the kitchen when a regular paring knife wasn’t quite up to some task or other, but going to a full chef’s knife would’ve been way too much, and it handled the jobs in that category excellently (if memory serves, it was some sort of potato-based chore).
Since you all know how awesomely low-drag* I am, I can of course attest to winning countless knife fights with this thing. My elite training with Spetznaz, SEAL Team 6, and the super secret stuff I can’t tell you about where some of my teachers probably hang out in your gun store clearly makes my opinion of this knife count all the more.
Ok, seriously though, for defense I’d much rather have a gun, or lots of guns, or lots of friends with lots of guns, but this thing is a pretty handy tool and in an emergency, it’s at least a better defense than harsh language. Keep it in your car or backpack (or use the clip and put it on your boot just to feel cool), and it’s certainly worth the price from a reputable retailer.
(Click for Dang I’m Huge version)
‘Course the downside to all this talk of nifty steel today is that now I’ve got the itch to add more. Wonder if I could get that one on some sort of advertising deal…
*Can’t have drag if you’re not moving.
Like dogs? Like to think? Like thinking and biology in general and don’t mind dogs? Check out the latest addition to the blogroll, Smartdogs.
The fact that one of their recent posts touches on the emergent nature of the dynamics of behavior, a subject that’s been much on my mind lately (but frustratingly not leading to postable material so much as a lot of questions), doesn’t hurt.
Apparently, the BeeGees earworm Stayin’ Alive can actually help people stay alive.
Specifically, the beat of the song is so closely matched to the ideal rhythm for cardiac compressions that it can actually help people performing CPR stay close to a good rate of compressions. It’s a little bit too fast, but a few too many is better than not enough.
a)I can now freely admit to liking this song with no shame, and
b)To all you EMTs, nurses, doctors, and paramedics? You’re welcome, and please don’t kill me.
For those who have not already discovered this story: One of the nifty little widgets available for Google’s e-mail program, Gmail, is “Mail Goggles”, a program designed to prevent you from sending humiliating drunken e-mails by making you complete simple arithmetic problems before you can compose and send mail. The program automatically activates between the hours of ten in the evening and four in the morning, though you can change these settings if you are an alcoholic, a fraternity member, a journalist, or a libertarian in an election year and start your serious drinking earlier in the day.
At first, I thought the article had to be kidding and started combing the URL looking for the giveaway small difference between it and Time Magazine’s actual URL. Then it occurred to me that I use Gmail and could therefore solve the mystery fairly simply. After much messing around with my settings, I found out the article is not kidding and the program exists, although it seems to be a third-party developed addon rather than an actual Google-pushed product like Google Crom Chrome.
The article’s conclusion is that the math problems are simply too easy to really stop anyone from drunkenly informing their ex-girlfriend that they’re thinking of killing themselves every day that they’re apart, or their professor that they’re a know-it-all asshole who should fuck themselves and die, but that the irritation factor is sufficient to discourage all but the most determined of drunks ready to commit social suicide.
Me, I just activated it. To all my friends, relatives, and acquaintances: if you get an e-mail at three am telling you that I’ve always thought you sucked dead dog balls, I’m just testing it. After all, it just won’t work unless I’m ACTUALLY impaired enough to show genuinely terrible judgment.
