Atomic Nerds

Man’s timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,
For the Woman that God gave him isn’t his to give away;
But when hunter meets with husbands, each confirms the other’s tale—
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.

But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same;
And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.

-Rudyard Kipling, The Female of the Species

During the afterparty chatter in gunblogger chat after last night’s Gun Nuts TNG, Pax asked me what I thought of the essential view contained in Kipling’s poem. Kipling is much beloved by those I know, and this is another of the favorites he ever penned. As to what I think, it contains a fair amount of truth- for something as much a product of Victorian times as it was.

While there are certainly competing views, overall if you polled that portion of the world that believes men and women are innately different by nature, you’ll generally get the consensus that women are substantially less aggressive and less prone to violence than men, and that if God or evolution created separate roles for men and women, those roles are men to hunt, fight, and protect the weaker women and children, and for women to nurture children and soothe the male’s savage brow. (Or, depending on which culture you’re talking to, more directly to soothe his raging hardon.) While this is accurate up to a point- men are undeniably larger and substantially stronger and better suited for fighting than women- it also misses a bit of a point in evolutionary patterns as well, which is that just because one sex is stronger, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the pressure on the other sex is in the OPPOSITE direction- toward passivity and weakness rather than just not as pressured for aggression and strength.

In most of the animal kingdom, when significant sexual dimorphism (major physical differences between the sexes) is present at all, the female is the larger of the two. This has as much to do with the size difference of male and female gametes as anything else; the hardware for the production of eggs just takes up more room and needs more resources, especially if that female is also going to be housing any resultant offspring in her body for part or most of its development into an infant. Female spiders, snakes, and fish just need to be big enough to produce and feed that more expensive reproductive system- and the males get no larger than they need to be to do well in whatever place on the food chain they occupy. Extra body mass is expensive to maintain- it isn’t selected for unless it gives an advantage big enough to compensate for its additional costs in lean times. Things get more interesting when we get to birds, which have a variety of patterns in sexual dimorphism; sometimes the males are larger, sometimes the females. When the males are larger, it is always in a group that undergoes some form of intense competition for mates among males- being big is just another way to be flashy while you sing, strut, build bowers, or otherwise attempt to convince the ladies that you’re the best. It’s worth noting that among raptors, who don’t live in high enough population densities for these big yearly competitions to be practical, the females are the larger sex- which doesn’t make the males any less deadly on the kill than they are.

Likewise in mammals, which is where the larger-male-smaller-female pattern is more normal, big, tough males are all about intraspecies competition, for territory, for access to mates, and for position. In a lion pride, the males are too big and bulky to be as efficient hunters as the females- they’re a little TOO flashy when you’re a cat trying to be sneaky. The role of the male, and the purpose of his size and strength, is to hang on to a territory and a collection of females, either alone or in concert with one or two allies; they have to be big to reliably fend off other big males, not to hunt or to kick other predators around the savannah. This pattern doesn’t seem to be any less true with primates: the pressure on the males to develop big bodies and more aggression wasn’t to protect females or young (which often they won’t when the lion comes through, though sometimes they will), it was to gain a competitive edge against other males.

Likewise, for ancient hominids, for men the source and balance of selective pressure was mainly the pressure to be able to defeat or intimidate your peers versus the pressure not to be so big you eat your tribe out of house and home. While it’s normally presumed that men were the hunters while women were the gatherers (though patterns in modern hunter-gatherer tribes frequently aren’t that clear-cut along gender lines), being big only helps a hunter up to a point- especially when you’re a hominid whose major advantage in a hunt is his brain, both to create tools that can actually take down antoher animal, especially one bigger than the human, and to actually be able to find animals whose senses were largely better than the hominid’s and which were certainly fleeter of foot. More than that, however, problem number one for a human hunter- a bigger problem than finding or catching prey- was not BECOMING prey. In the savannahs of ancient Africa, there weren’t just the modern scary array of predators that we’re used to thinking about, there were even more and fiercer- this was an Africa before long-term human habitation introduced the Sahara Desert and sharply reduced the array of other species present. Any human that wanted to be out and about away from a fire and a thorn wall had to be able to convince the predator that he was too risky a meal to be really worth trying for- and the key point here is that this applied every bit as much to a gatherer. Saber-toothed tigers don’t leave you alone because you’re just picking tubers- if anything that makes you an even better target than the pack of men out chasing oversized ungulates around, much as being five-foot-nothing and built like Tinkerbell makes you a better target to a human predator looking to score a meal/booze ticket from your wallet. Ancient women didn’t experience much evolutionary pressure to be big and aggressive to beat up other women or men- but she certainly experienced plenty to be able to intimidate, hurt, or kill a predator. This went double for any ancient women with children with them- also known as “the chewy bite-sized ones” to predators. Modern attacks by wild predators on humans are usually on children, which we can presume the ancient men were sometimes a bit too busy out staving in mammoth skulls to rush to the aid of.

In most social primate groups and most other social mammal groups, the pattern of dispersal- a certain number of the group leaving at adolescence and finding another troop, to prevent long-term inbreeding- follows gender lines. Whether you’re a lion cub or a baboon, if you’re a boy, you leave your home not long after you start to get hair about the neck and chest and strike out for new people and especially new chicks that you haven’t known since you were born. This has a great deal to do with the subsequent social orders that are formed among the sexes; if you’re a male, your rank is something you fight and make and break alliances to achieve. If you’re a female, you’re born into your social order- unless there’s been a major upheaval, you inherit the same or close to the rank that your mother and grandmother held, and you’ll always be able to lord it over little Suzy from the poor part of the troop. Because males have so much to gain by challenging other males and females so little, there is a great deal of evolutionary pressure on men to be willing to challenge other males- and to back down to fight another day if it looks like the challenge will be a losing proposition, and to be able to restore amity later as a rival now may be a partner later in a challenge against one neither of you can hope to unseat on your own. If you’re a female, the pressure is to maintain general harmony among you- for as long as that’s possible.

As dog trainers know, while males will scuffle for rank and position frequently and are often looking for an opening for a challenge, they tend to be fighting to make a point- their fights rarely do truly serious damage and are resolved relatively quickly. When females can’t settle rank (it’s less heritable for dogs), or most especially when they simply decide they do not like one another- things get very serious very quickly. While the two males may spar until there’s a clear winner or loser and accept it from there, females with a grudge may well fight to the point of severe maiming or death, and if the female on the losing end of several such dedicated battles does not or cannot leave, she WILL eventually be killed, by the female she’s having the conflict with or even by all of her sisters if they’ve decided she’s no longer wanted among their group for whatever reason. As for dogs, females in other social mammalian groups that don’t normally compete physically among themselves have far less reason to fight in the first place, but also far less reason to stop once they come to the point of violence.

Men are bigger. They are stronger. They’re also more aggressive, especially with each other. There are sound evolutionary reasons for all of this- but none that women should be weak, or unwilling to rise to violence, whether for food or defense, when necessary- and in all the situations that evolution prepared her for when it comes to violence, fighting with everything she had was the only option available when it was necessary at all. If it seems otherwise, it’s worth bearing in mind that humans are an intensely cultural species, far moreso than any other animal… and nurture can be as harsh or harsher a master as nature. Sometimes embracing your inner ape isn’t just acceptable, it’s the only thing you can do to fight it.

Peter, the Bayou Renaissance Man, along with a fairly good sized chunk of the rest of the nation, has noticed that Los Alamos National Labs has once again done screwed up (article courtesy of him). To people outside the town, and frankly to a good number here too, these ongoing security problems boggle the mind. How could we go from developing the bomb in near total secrecy to this current shoddy state of affairs where classified material can be found in meth labs?

If you’re one of the people asking those questions, I think the most accurate response is another question: Mister, you’re not from around here, are you?

I suppose it’s probably best to start with the basics. Los Alamos, and its detached suburb White Rock, holds around 20,000 people, give or take a few thousand. Roughly eight or nine thou live in White Rock, with the rest “on the hill.” That’s not the smallest small town in America by any stretch, but I think it’s a safe bet to say it’s the smallest small town that could manufacture the capacity to destroy all life on this planet. We have more PhDs per square mile than any other place on earth, including MIT. The town itself is very small, roughly 100 square miles, much of which is mountain-goat steep. Locals joke that the only way our high school football team can advance the ball is to put it on the field and just let it roll end over end towards the goal post. There isn’t a whole lot of land that’s suitable to build housing on, and that’s reflected in the local market for such. Surrounded by federal land such as Bandelier National Monument, the huge tracts of acreage that LANL occupies, and the Indian Reservations, we don’t have much in the way of expansion options either. That means you have to actually want to live here to find a place and stay in it.

I’m going to be quoting a good bit from this account. Some parts of it are rather out of date (it was written in 1994, and $diety help me, I actually knew the cheerleaders in the pictures there), but a great deal of it is accurate. Especially things like

Before I showed up, I figured the town and the lab would contain a random sampling of the technical elite. That was true during World War II when the lab sucked in every available physicist and engineer in the nation. I hadn’t been there long before I realized that a process of self selection obtains here. Consider the thoughts of a graduating PhD physicist.

“Let’s see… I’ve got my PhD and I want to move to a state where I’ll be left alone. That means Alaska, Montana, New Mexico, or Wyoming. I don’t want to have to talk to students so that rules out universities. Maybe I could even find a job where it would be illegal for me to talk to more than 1000 other people worldwide. Say, that pretty much narrows it down to Los Alamos.”

That part is still fairly accurate, and the type of person that follows that thought process is a non-trivial factor in why anywhere else in the state people automatically look at you with some suspicion when you mention you’re from Los Alamos. Many teens leaving the town for college at either UNM or NMSU simply claim to be from Santa Fe, or even Espanola when their classmates ask where they’re from.

To be fair, yes, we are a weird town- and though this is pretty roundabout, I’m working on including that in the “how this happens” thing. A while back LabRat and I were at a cigar club in Santa Fe, shooting the breeze and generally enjoying a night out off the hill, since Los Alamos has less nightlife than McMurdo Station*. While there, we met a pair of tourists who were spending the summer in Santa Fe, and who were flat incredulous to meet people who actually lived with those weirdos. Apparently they had been told that the camping in the Jemez mountains and Bandelier was not to be missed. They got some (bad) thumbnail directions, and set off towards the mountains. After first getting over their shock that there was no store in town carrying even budget camping supplies (“You guys don’t even have a Wal-Mart! We had to drive another 40 minutes each way to get sleeping bags!”), they returned to the hill and set about trying to find the mountains. Apparently the big rocky pointy things off over n’yah were too subtle for them. At any rate, when they entered town, they did so with a broken tail light. Then they noticed someone seemed to be following them. At first, they said they shrugged it off, but when it eventually became clear that they really were being followed, they got understandably nervous. A few random “can we shake this guy?” turns later, they stopped, grabbed camp shovels from their back seat, and got out to ask the stranger just WTF. As it turns out, yes, he was following them. Why? To tell them about the broken tail light. The cops up here will ticket you for that, y’know (and they will, too. Just sayin’.). I will readily admit that is not the kind of behavior you see just about anywhere else these days.

Ok, so we’re weird as hell. Does that alone explain the security problems? A bunch of “leave me the hell alone, I’m working here” physicists who just don’t want to interact with others? Yes and no. A good number of infractions are, in fact, a direct result of some conehead (our local semi-but-not-really affectionate term for the PhDs who walk around wearing Velcro sandals with black socks and shorts, etc) essentially coming to the conclusion that the administrative processes in place around classified materials don’t apply to him or her because they’re so good at what they do, etc. The deeper cause, though, is that they’re not One Of Us.

To my eye, there have been two incidents with the most impact to security, and the sometimes flawed execution thereof at Los Alamos National Labs. The first is the fall of the Berlin Wall. Before 1989, the atmosphere in this town was very different. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, as it was even impressed on kids such as myself, knew that the purpose of Los Alamos was to make sure we could nuke harder than the commies. End of discussion. Yeah, there’ll be some useful science spinning off from that mission, and that’s cool and we want to encourage that, but keep your eye on that glowing blue prize there, bucko. Good men and women in many fields came to Los Alamos with that in mind, and with the understanding that global annihilation of mankind was a very real possibility of failure to have a convincing deterrent. In the very first days of Los Alamos, the threat was different, but the weight of the duty was still high. Basically, until the Berlin Wall fell, the consequences of fucking up were pretty damn dire. The exception in this was the period immediately after World War II ended, when we had our first, and arguably most severe, security leak courtesy of the Rosenbergs. A slack time without a life-or-death mission bred complacency. The same took root after the wall fell, when the threat of the USSR getting pissy largely went away.

The second major event follows as a direct result of the fall of the Berlin Wall. As with the post-war scenario, the workload was still here, but with considerably less “do or die” mentality. Again, this led to relaxation and sloppiness. Also during this time, the lab underwent a large reduction in force. A large number of very dedicated cold warriors took the early retirement incentive package, and went on about their business. A whole hell of a lot of those folks were One Of Us.

On one of my summer mountain bike excursions, I stopped to talk with a woman who lived in White Rock, a satellite town of 8,000 that makes Los Alamos look positively cosmopolitan. Now that her kids were grown, didn’t she mind living in White Rock with just her husband?

“Oh, we moved here a couple of years ago because we like the outdoors and the West. White Rock is great. Of course, you recognize everyone because you see them every day at the Lab or in the supermarket, but people create their own sense of privacy by not saying `hello’ even if they’ve seen you a hundred times before.”

This is simultaneously dead-on accurate, and flagrant bullshit. Now as I’ve sprinkled in the term One Of Us through this, I hope the three of you still reading have been getting appropriate choruses of “Gooble gobble” when I use it. For someone just moving to this town, such as the PhD who wants to be left alone to his work, other people are basically very complicated Eliza programs. For the people who like the work, but want to live in Santa Fe, social lives follow more traditional routes with dinner parties, normal gossip, and all the petty bullshit associated therewith. There is a third group though. This is a group that by and large doesn’t need the “dinner invitation every night as I did back in Boston.”

“I had lots of friends back in New Jersey. But I’ve been here for two years and people don’t really even meet my eye on the street,” was a typical lament.

Two years, huh? I think I see your problem there, slick. See, Los Alamos is by no means the birthplace of the Good Ol’ Boys network, but by gawd did we take a run at getting it up and working here. By and large, it was wildly successful. The average leave-me-alone physicist will probably rotate out for another lab, or a university position fairly (relatively) soon. No point getting to know a short timer, right? This third group of course has the normal career, family, and to a degree social concerns as anybody else. But this group also just plain fundamentally loves Los Alamos, and all its bizarre quirks. You don’t have to have been here for multiple generations, but it helps. Some people, the town sticks on ‘em, and they successfully become One Of Us in fairly short order. It’s not common, but it certainly happens. On the other hand, this also tends to attract the posers. The folks who see the obvious advantage to membership in the good ol’ boys, but they’re still mostly just looking for their Nobel ticket (or field equivalent). So far this probably sounds a bit like a judicial definition of pornography - I can’t tell you what it is, but I’ll know it when I see it. Let me give you an example.

When I was growing up, right around the start of my teenage years, I of course did something stupid. I don’t remember what it was, specifically, just that it was the sort of thing I didn’t want mom and dad to find out about. Being the ever-wise youth, I simply wrote off the observers as people I didn’t know, and hadn’t seen around my parents. A few days later, I found myself in water rather warmer than expected seeing as how there were no witnesses of note. Well, it turns out that someone who knew my grandmother’s second husband saw me, and mentioned it to the barber. The next day when said husband was in for a trim, the news passed along to him. From there to granny, to dad, to my suddenly sore backside. A day or two later, my entire local family was in one room for some trivial occasion. Mom, dad, grandmothers on both sides, and step-grandad on dad’s side. I think if my maternal grandfather hand been there, what follows would have been an even more complete humiliation. At any rate, I was still irate over being caught by such a loose net and made an indignant remark along the lines of “I can’t do anything. The five of you know every person in this town!”

Nobody objected in the slightest to this notion. Naturally, I took umbrage with such social-networking arrogance and called them on it.

“Oh yeah? You all know everybody? Fine! Let’s see!” I grabbed the local phone book and flipped open to a random page. “Jack House!”
“He’s in the car club. He’s got a ’65 Vette,” my Dad replied.
“Lucky shot. Stephanie Hafer!”
“We both worked as secretaries when it was still the Zia Company providing staffing,” offered my grandmother.
“Coincidence! Richard Lebeda!”
“He was my lasers instructor at the UNM branch,” Mom told me. It continued in this vein for a good ten minutes. They didn’t miss a single name. Some might suppose that they were just making up these details to keep a step ahead of the kid, but having watched my family in action in this town for as long as I have, I’m gonna go ahead and take their word for it.

Back to security, a lot of people who were in this known-to-all group took that early retirement. Being that familiar with each other, even if socialization was not of the type considered normal everywhere else (remember, I already copped that we’re weird here), they were really just that familiar with who was who, who needed access to what, and whether so and so was allowed to see such and such. There were formal rules in place for all this, of course, and the clearance system was (and is) still overseen by the FBI for background checks and the like, but with everybody this familiar with everybody else, some rules could be bent a little here and there. Forget to take the battery out of your phone in the classified area? Well, if it’s that new guy from Jersey that spends every night in Santa Fe even though he lives here, better write him up. Oh, it was just Frank? Give him some shit about it and don’t mention it. Obviously this is flawed from a strict security standpoint. There are copious examples of spies building the sort of confidence and trust necessary to gain access to these “I knew his pappy when his pappy was a punk” environments. It’s not easy, but it’s certainly possible, and I’m sure that it happened a few times here too. Only the fact that the history of this town is so relatively short, and so many of these folks truly were multi-generational inhabitants to really know “Yes, Ralph is ok” offered any extra layer of protection. The formal rules of course helped, but iron-clad and inflexible is almost as bad as too loose and sloppy. I won’t roll this into anything about zero tolerance policies, because even now things don’t work that way here. They’re closer to it, but there’s still some small degree of discretion.

Unfortunately, there are fewer people in positions to exercise that discretion who actually have the local knowledge to do so. The folks who saw the network and wanted to gain the advantages it brought were playing along well enough to get a bit of clout, even though they couldn’t recite the local family trees. That brings us to the second major come-to-Jesus incident for lab security, Wen Ho Lee.

Between the wall falling and Mr. Lee’s actions** security was going on more or less as usual. The strict rules were enshrined and in place, though bent with increasingly questionable judgement by the nouveaux good ol’ boys. Classified got a little fast and loose with “Well, normally I wouldn’t, but the Russkies don’t care anymore, so what the hell.” I exaggerate some, but not as much as you’d probably like. So eventually Mr. Lee comes along and with improper GOB oversight gets his red-badged*** hands into all sorts of things, and moves them hither and yon whence their movement is not blessed. The resulting situation is basically a clusterfuck all around, and going into what all went wrong and what went right and so forth is worth a few thousand words of its own. The main result though was to expose just how much vouching and rule bending was going on - obviously way too much.

This freaked seven shades of shit out of lab management, and rightly so. There were work stoppages, and more than a few points where it looked like the lights would be shut off by the end of the month. Management vowed to concentrate on security and clean this mess up. The slow but steady stream of incidents like the recent missing laptops is mostly because of this. Partly, Los Alamos is under greater national scrutiny. We’re the Big Lab in terms of public recognition, so similar incidents at Lawrence Livermore or Sandia don’t get covered as much (and they have had their share as bad as some of the ones reported here, they just didn’t get the press). Blaming it all on that, however, ignores some other, bigger problems. The Good Ol Boys, for their part, have closed ranks. If a rule is bent in this little cabal now, it is only for the sort of person so trusted that even if it does turn out he’s a spy, he’d better hope China is a lot bigger than anybody said. Either that or find transport off-planet post haste. The new breed, however, is confused. Not having actually assimilated, they didn’t notice the old guard growing tight lipped and taking their badges off when leaving lab property**** and more or less kept on keeping on. Rules were bent a little too much for folks they shouldn’t have been bent for. The cantankerous physicists now came into their role as an exacerbating factor.

It’s a fair piece easier to spot someone who’s obsessed with his work and doesn’t give a damn about that bothersome Eliza that keeps nattering at it than it is to vet the new guy. The scientists, for their part, are of the mindset that information largely should be free and distributed far and wide. Now combine the guy who wants to keep working after he goes home***** with the guy who’s inclined to bend the rules so he can fit in better, and you’ve got the incident with missing classified removable electronic media. I don’t want to get too far into the realm of tinfoil hattery, but the way it went down outside the CNN stories, well… there was a definite air of “I’m looking! I’m looking! I know I put it in my left desk drawer because it was Thursday and then I ….” to the whole thing.

On top of that, the lab has been changing management. Repeatedly. We’ve been through a small handful of directors, and the overseeing body is no longer the University of California. Each change there brings with it a new pack of “We know best!” outsiders for the management side of the house. Each cycle through, something turns up missing. Or misfiled. Or maybe in a meth lab. Los Alamos National Lab is a multi-billion dollar organization, and that equates to one metric assload of red tape to keep everything running. For the scientist trying to get what he or she needs, they do try to make it fairly transparent, but other departments, and the management for those science divisions still have to balance books. People are people, and mistakes do happen. Ain’t reality a bitch?

So there you have it. 67 missing laptops, and a Blackberry in a “sensitive foreign country?” For starters, given the inherent trouble in keeping precise track of several thousand computers, mobile and stationary, I’d bet a fair sum that a good number of those turn up in a spare-parts closet with a note “Enter these into the system soon!” For seconds, I consider it a pretty good improvement that the biggest worry with these is private personal information. Identity theft, or nuclear secrets? The lab is far from perfect, and there are a boatload of reasons that things like this keep happening. It’s somewhat depressing to realize that no matter what, they will also continue to happen. This town has its own unique culture that contributes a lot to the security picture that simply isn’t visible from a CNN story, or a watchdog group. Sometimes those contributions are helpful and appropriate. Sometimes they do need a second look and improvement. But we’re weird here. This is how we do things. We try our damndest to do the best job we possibly can, and sometimes that falls short. Bringing in a fancy New York or Washington security attitude has its advantages, but I gotta ask… you ain’t been here long, have you?

*I’m really not kidding, and only slightly exaggerating. Shops that stay open until 8pm advertise that they’re open late, and most restaurants where you sit to eat close in the 7:30-8pm range. We have four fast food joints, and only one of them is open past 10pm, with two closing by 9. We only got a local movie theater in about 2004, and it sucks since the teenagers desperate for anything to do other than homework or going into the mountains to drink or smoke pot flood it and treat it like an overgrown daycare. The last time we visited, the theater was rowdy enough to warrant complaint to the manager, who we interrupted in the middle of a conversation with one of the brats while saying, and I am not making this up, “Yeah, so I can climb out my window and meet you at about 11:30.” Not that I’m still irritated or anything…

**It is still a subject that will generate rather heated debate in town here as to whether he really was a spy and managed to game the courts, or if he really was just a dumbass conehead that screwed up.

***Foreign nationals, regardless of security clearance, wear red identification badges.

****LANL policy has always said that badges are not to be worn around the townsite for security reasons. Before the wall fell, everybody ignored this because everybody was paying that close attention to the situation. After that but before Mr. Lee, nobody cared because hey, no Russians. After Mr. Lee, you could tell who was at least taking a stab at trying to play ball by a conspicuous but empty lanyard around the neck, etc. The New Guys still wear their badges around town.

*****Los Alamos traffic is amazing for this phenomenon. The morning rush is like Death Race 2000. The speed limit raises by about 15mph, and intersections are packed with people in a Big Damn Hurry. The evening rush, on the other hand, you’re doing good if you’re only doing 10mph below the speed limit, and parking lots and intersections are clogged with “Nah, you first”-ism. It’s frickin’ weird.

So last year I posted my thoughts on Valentine’s day and more specifically about the person I’ve shared it with for the last… *counts*… ten years or so and why he makes me chipper at the prospect of a day dedicated to appreciating what I have there. Given that I’m nothing if not appreciative for a date that gives me an easy subject to blog about, I figured I’d cover what I’ve learned in those years that I’m pretty sure are part of the reason I’ve still got it.

1. The best girl friend in the world isn’t the one that will always and inevitably take your side 100% when you have a fight with your man, it’s the one that likes him and will remind you of why you do, too, and where he was probably coming from during the fight. Not tell you you were wrong if you weren’t or that he didn’t behave badly if he did- but WILL tell you you’re wrong if you are. Friends like this are invaluable and should be told as much.

2. Speaking of fights, during them there will inevitably come an opening where you can see clear as day your partner’s weakness most exposed and exactly how you can strike at it to shut them down completely and emerge with total victory in your hands. Resist the temptation to do so at all costs, even if it means letting them be “right” until a more rational discussion can be had later. If you are angry enough to succumb to that tempation, a groveling apology is in order in the aftermath. No exceptions.

3. If you’re fighting about the same things over and over, you have a problem that needs addressing in a non-fight context. If you’re fighting about things that seem gobsmackingly stupid in hindsight, as long as it’s not a frequent occurrence, this is actually not something to worry about- it probably just means the stupid subject was what you happened to fight about when you were both tired, stressed, and pissed off about things you had no ability to rail at when your partner was much more available. Fights are as inevitable in any long-term relationship as rain is even in the desert; be glad you didn’t have anything more consequential to spat over. True fact: we once had a sleeping-on-the-couch blowout that started over the odds whether the universe as we know it should exist.

4. While it’s true that you really can’t change somebody’s personality, the worst expressions of it can be mitigated, if they want to make some effort. A disorganized and mess-tolerant person will never become a neatnik, but an acceptable middle ground can be met. As ever, the rule is that if you care deeply about something and your partner really doesn’t, you can expect some concession from them to keep you from going crazy, but you can never fairly expect them to act as though they care every bit as much as you do.

5. Saying something bothers you is not just OK, but necessary unless you want it to come frothing up and surprise the living hell out of your partner, who will then immediately lash back. Pick a diplomatic time and place to bring it up. When your partner is feeling on top of or crushed under the boot of the world is not it. Nagging is never OK- let them know you want something or that something bothers you, but if they know that and are still not doing it or still not stopping, then constantly reminding them won’t help to do anything but strengthen their passive-aggressive resolve.

6. If you wouldn’t say something about a dear and beloved friend to another friend behind their back, do not EVER do this to your spouse. Embarassing stories are not cool unless they’re already telling the same story themselves. Ranting at your friends about them every time they piss you off but never mentioning the times they thrilled you will never, ever lead to a good situation. Your friends’ two prime roles are support and a reality barometer- never undermine the latter to pump the former. Ranting about the opposite sex in general isn’t cool either, unless you’re either homosexual or in a relationship with an undisclosed third sex.

7. Speaking of when they thrilled you, if you find yourself having a warm and fuzzy feeling just looking at them, now is a good time for a no-reason kiss or hug and you saying so. If you appreciate something they did, say so. If they look good in what they’re wearing or what they’re doing, say so. If they handled something in a way that impressed you, say so. This is a very easy habit to get into and does a powerful amount of good. Exception: when it would break their concentration- then you wait till they’re done. If you’re impressed by your partner’s arc-welding skills and feel they look damn sexy doing it… wait until they’re done to disclose this.

8. If you’re in a bad situation that’s your partner’s fault and he or she knows damn good and well it’s their fault, that is NOT the time to say “I told you so” or anything that could be mistaken for it. They KNOW you told them so and don’t need the reminder, if they’re any sort of decent they feel bad enough already. Keep your mouth mostly shut except for any constructive and neutral input on how to get out of or mitigate your current situation. “Lessons learned” is for when you’re home, showered, fed, and slept.

9. While sex drives almost never match completely and sometimes are drastically mismatched, it’s a myth that only men experience sex as intimacy in a relationship and need it to keep that going. If you don’t feel like having sex with your partner, waiting months until you magically do will not work. You have another problem. Find it.

10. Talking about a problem you have, no matter how stupid you think it is or how badly you think the other person will react, is never EVER half as bad as not talking eventually will be.

And lastly… if you’re both pretty convinced you got real lucky and maybe don’t entirely deserve what you have… then that might be a good sign for the future of your relationship, as long as you’re simply grateful instead of insecure.

(Yeah, I know. This is all pretty basic. As with any life activity, the basics are the most important bit and will cause you to fail the hardest when you neglect them, yes?)

Recently discovered in Porkulon, Scratcher of Backs:

wireless and broadband deployment grant programs

(including transfer of funds to Atomic Nerds for the Atomic Nerds Personal Economic Stimulus Program)

For necessary and unnecessary expenses related to the Wireless and Broadband Deployment Grant Programs established by section 6002 of division B of this Act, $2,825,000,000, of which $1,000,000,000 shall be for Wireless Deployment Grants and $1,825,000,000 shall be for Broadband Deployment Grants: Provided, That an additional $10,000,000,000 shall be paid directly to Atomic Nerds in the form of subsidized loans that do not require repayment. Provided Further, That the funds be used by Atomic Nerds to To bring fiber optic internet to White Rock residents and build liquid nitrogen cooled desktop computers, fund the continued development of Vlad the Impala (a ’67 SS), feed hungry akitas, perform overly ambitious home improvement projects, to fund the acquisition of multiple NFA items (henceforth refered to as “cool toys”) as well as non-nfa firearms and accessories, and provide the mental health through alcohol and entertainment to the operators of the Atomic Nerds weblog, and any discretionary projects as necessary. or for whatever. Provided Even Further, That Atomic Nerds will receive free Joan Jett tickets for life. Provided Even Further Still, That Atomic Nerds shall be treated as a cabinet-level appointment for the purpose of income tax reporting, and therefore no taxes shall be paid on any of the aformentioned benefits. And one more thing: Nancy Pelosi is hereby expelled from Congress, effective immediately upon enactment.

(found via Odious and Peculiar, go get your stimulus on.)

Like a modern Sisyphus, only retarded, I do love me some pointless effort, it seems. From trying to hew basalt boulders with a shovel to trying to get Kodos and Kang to stop barking at the damn UPS guy I apparently have a curious addiction to wasting my effort. Today I pushed another rock up a hill for no good reason, and mailed my congress-critter about the taxpayer rape & looting spree currently winding it’s pork-tastic way through the system. We’ve all heard you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, but I find humor works even better as long as the flies in question have a few functional brain cells to rub together. Seeing as this is a congress-critter, that means there won’t be a single wisecrack in my missive appreciated, and I’ll probably get a nice threatening visit from some people with dark glasses for daring to mock our, ah, “betters.” Oh well, since they won’t laugh at it, maybe you folks will.

Mr. Lujan,
I’m writing in the probably vain hope of persuading you to vote against the economic stimulus bill currently making its way through the legislative process, a bill which will for the remainder of this missive be referred to as “Porkulon, Scratcher of Backs.” Honestly, I haven’t seen that much pork outside of a bad horror movie about radioactive pigs.

Winston Churchill once famously said that a nation trying to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket trying to lift himself by the handles. I would hope this is a quotation legislators have been hearing from their constituents on a regular basis lately, as Porkulon lumbers along, but apparently this is not the case.

In order to fund Porkulon, we the taxpayers must pony up. Already, roughly 30% of my work, effort, and labor goes directly to the government in the form of taxes. This is equivalent to me working from January to April for no pay, and Porkulon is set to stretch that period out even further. It is the average taxpayer like me that drives the economy, how can we be expected to move it forward when we are constrained to 70% of our thrust?

Please, Mr. Lujan, if you wish to help the economy oppose Porkulon as if you were a delightful New Mexican version of Godzilla. If you want to help honest taxpayers, those of us who haven’t made ongoing “honest mistakes” and actually pay the extortionist sums the government already demands from us, cut taxes. Yes, this would mean less funding for the government overall, and that’s the point. Government cannot create wealth, it can only transfer it from point A to point B, and with huge inefficiency at that. Please, stop the government from trying to help us and let us help ourselves. Please recognize that Porkulon the Stimulus Bill will not stimulate anybody without deep (and probably questionable) connections to Washington, and will shackle every honest taxpayer with a bill that would cause earlier generations to cry for revolution.

Sincerely,
{Stingray},
Resentful Taxpayer

(And yes, the 70% thrust bit was shamelessly stolen taxed from Geek with a .45)

In lieu of asking you to conduct your own hand-puppet show as a substitute for content, we lift from Ambulance Driver a bit more filler, in the form of the Hero Factory. (Watch the music. Unless your boss likes Bonnie Tyler, he is unlikely to be amused if you’re doing this at work.)

After a freak accident transformed a mild-mannered organic chemist into a being utterly impervious to heat, cold, acid, reductive reactions, and OSHA, she found that she was still essentially mild-mannered and not particularly interested in pestering the villianous. She did, however, find it a pleasant change from the immediate assumption of a low-energy state that such extreme chemistry accidents normally induced in scientists, and expressed her gratitude by lending herself out as a pro-bono bench worker for chemists who wished to work with especially lively chemicals, the sort that tended to eat through concrete floors and set sand on fire. She did eventually discover during the delivery of particularly valuable compounds that being able to do deep-breathing exercises in a cloud of fluorine gas DOES have its crime-fighting advantages, but both the police and the EPA asked her very nicely not to do it again.

Some vigilante billionaires make vows never to kill and go to extraordinary lengths to conduct psychological warfare against their enemies, turning up to battle in suits that either count for terror-inducement or fetish fuel, depending on the target audience, and creating all manner of specialized gadgets to cope with specific situations their foes may throw at them. Some vigilante billionaires are simply much more straightforward than that. Derek Hardchin doesn’t have as cool a car as Batman, but his business’s bottom line is also doing much better and he NEVER has the same arch-foe twice.

Oof. We’ve been beating the internet bushes like angry dommes, but can find naught to explain, bitch about, or mock. So, you get stuff to go and look at.

First, this video:

I have no idea who that is narrating, other than that they’re not American, but the bird is a Green Heron. The video description at YouTube that the video has “stunned scientists across the world” is more than a bit misleading unless the scientists in question were, say, seismologists and chemists; green herons using bait in this fashion is fairly well-documented behavior to ornithologists. They don’t need bread crusts, either- those are just for convenience. Birds in “wilder” settings will use insects, earthworms, and whatever other tempting-to-fish material is available. (Including feathers. Fly fishermen, feel free to consult.) Still, it’s always fascinating to see- tool use in animals is always treated with such gobsmacked awe by the press and anyone else not greatly familiar with the animals in question that it’s easy to forget it’s not such a vastly special behavior after all.

In lighter realms, our latest comic to recieve our Sickly Blue Glowing Seal Of Approval is Erfworld. (Thanks, Unix-Jedi.) It does take a bit to get going, but it goes from mildly amusing to downright brilliant over time. Give the slow buildup and the rather annoying overloadedness of the site it’s hosted on a try- it has some monitor-dousing howlers that are only funny if you’ve been reading along the way.

Thanks to another friend, The Flavor Bible is going to be the next addition to the “culinary” section of shelves. I already have something kind of like it in a book that has a few tables of “flavor pals” and “flavor enemies”, but this is a far more complete and informative version of the same concept- what kinds of foods and seasonings go naturally together. This isn’t much good if you don’t cook or are just starting, but if you’re an accomplished enough home cook to be starting to throw things together with whatever you have on hand, or are wondering what to do with those great beets you got at the farmer’s market and don’t want to just look something up on Epicurious, this thing’s gold.

In the really totally Not Safe For Work or Children or the Feeble-Minded department of things, we have Way To Suck That Dick. If you like Why Women Hate Men, you’ll probably like this one too- though it tends to be much shorter and sweeter on the snark and let the photographs do most of the “talking” for themselves. If you haven’t guessed (or already clicked, you hasty pervert), its reason for existence is amateur porn- the strange, the bad, the ugly, and the just plain inexplicable.

I wish I could give you folks an mp3 of this, but thanks to the timing involved that just wasn’t possible. You’ll have to take my word that this is really how it went down.

Some months ago, due to reasons that I would love to bitch about but probably shouldn’t, I had to set up a laptop for one of my bosses with some business plan software on it. The easiest plan to get this done involved my name going into the software company’s computers instead of hers. Since then, I’ve gotten a little spam from them about their other products and services, but nothing major. Today, this changed. Today, they started trying to pimp their Business Plan Coaching service by phone. What is business plan coaching, you ask? Beats the hell out of me, but apparently it’s

“…to help you pursue your goals of business financing, show you how to develop a business plan that includes cash flow, pursue business growth by applying best practices to your plan, help you develop strategies for implementing your plan, hold you accountable to follow through and complete vital tasks, and to provide the experience and needed motivation to help you succeed!”

Among other things. Now I’ll be the last to begrudge anyone the chance to make a buck, but everything about this from the get go has seemed about half a step away from a headset and making sure the camera guy was following this. Today’s calls served only to reinforce this impression.

“Hello?”
“Hi! May I speak to Stingray?”
“Speaking.”
“My name is Heidi*, and I’m with {Personal Business Coaching}, do you have a few moments to talk about our services?”

After a bit of futher conversation, it was arranged that one of their Personal Coaches would call me back in half an hour to see if I was in need of Personal Coaching. If they had actually waited a full half hour instead of jumping the gun and calling ten minutes later, the rest of this might be a lot funnier, and accompanied by mp3. Oh well, can’t win ‘em all.

“Hi, may I speak to Stingray?”
“Speaking!”
“I’m Sarah**, a personal coach with {Personal Business Coaching}, and I’ve got a message that you may be interested in our service! May I ask how you heard of us? Did you download {software title}, or get our publication?”
“The software. Yeah, I needed a new business plan.”
“That’s great! A good business plan is always a good path forward. Is your company an existing business, or are you new to all this?”
“We’re existing, we’ve been around a couple years.”
“That’s great, and how are you doing? Are things going well? The economy has really been hammering small business owners.”
“Actually, we’re running a pretty good profit. Even with the economy, people still need porn*** when they’re bored and feeling down. It’s really a pretty stable vehicle, but you know how it is, there are always little gotchas and problems.”
“Um.. ok. So are you having any trouble with your business that we could help with?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, I am having some trouble with staffing.”
“Oh? What kind of trouble?”
“Mostly in finding competent staff. I mean, the population of albinos already isn’t huge, and to find one willing to work on top of that… well, do you know what kind of time and effort that head hunting takes?”
“Well, no… what sort of…”
“And even if you do find an albino who’s willing to act, there are certain physical aspects to consider, and keeping track of them is a pretty big timesink.”
“Um..”
“I mean, have you seen the shape of the fists on some midgets? Let’s just say it’s tricky. There can be complications.”
“*click*”
“Hello? Miss?”

I guess I don’t need personal coaching after all.

*Really.
**Heidi sounded much more gullible fun.
***I tried to muffle/distort that a little for good measure.

Via Popehat, we come across the high drama of an eight-year-old girl with Asperger’s syndrome being cut out of the group, herded into another room, assaulted, and eventually led away with her hands bound to be indefinitely held in a cold room away from her family. By her teachers and the local police. And no, I am not kidding or exaggerating. They even levied criminal charges against her before prosecutors dismissed the case, being presumably far too embarrassed to take it before a judge with a straight face, unlike the arresting officers.

According to the school- remember, this is what THEY said, not what the girl’s mother said- the school was having a Christmas party, for which the girl in question refused to take off her “cow hoodie”, which has ears and a tail on it. (There are pictures of said cow hoodie at the article. Frankly, it’s quite cute.) For some reason or another- maybe the school had heard alarming rumors of the deep penetration into grade-school snacktime by the notorious Holstein Gang- the teachers found this so objectionable that they isolated her in another classroom. When she tried to leave, they tried to physically restrain her… which then degenerated into the kid melting down into a blind screaming panic and “hitting and spitting on” her teachers, until which point they claim they had absolutely no other option but to call the police to haul the kid away for battery. Which they did, handcuffs and all, up to the point of booking her in the juvenile detention center despite being two years under the minimum age limit for such. What her captors made of the cow costume is not reported.

Now, the article goes a bit into what an incredibly and epically bad idea it is to approach a discipline problem with any kid on the autistic spectrum- Asperger’s is on the high-functioning end of that- with attempted physical restraint. One of the features of disorders on that spectrum in general is a hypersensitivity to unwanted touch. (And, in more severe versions, being touched in general can be problematic.) What I want to know, however, is who in the fucking world thinks it’s a good idea to deal with any child’s outburst by attacking them and forcing them to the ground for a four-point restraint of their arms and legs? It’s an eight-year-old- Asperger’s or no, responding with a screaming flailing panic isn’t exactly all that drastically unpredictable a response. She didn’t launch herself at them in a pixie-stix-induced drug-fueled rage, she tried to leave the room- they couldn’t have closed the door? Just stood with arms and legs spread really wide? Assuming some scenario where grabbing her and holding her down was the only realistic response, they couldn’t have called her parents before they called the police? As for the police, what mental process did it require to evaluate their choices between option A- arrest, cuff, and charge the little girl in the cow hoodie- or option B, tell the school to find a handle, get a grip on their shit, and call upon them again when their problem was slightly more dire- and choose A?

The mother says her kid is “traumatized”. I normally roll my eyes at that claim more or less as a reflex, but in this case I’m not even a little bit surprised. All they would have had to do would be to call her pediatrician to drug her while they held her down and a firefighter to put a bag over her head while they led her out of the school, and they would have managed to give her a terrifying and painful experience with absolutely every single adult authority figure in her life other than her parents.

Hell, maybe I’ve just given them an idea for the next “child in inappropriately whimsical headwear” crisis that crops up. God knows you have to put your foot down on THAT shit early, or who knows where it could lead.

But if this guy invites you over for a meal TAKE HIM UP ON IT.

Duck gumbo and red beans and rice and beer from the Abita brewery in New Orleans and more wonderful fine booze than my currently mostly depleted stock could shake a stick at even when not being raided more than normal to tame the raging work drama llama, and excellent conversation all around.

Regular content resumes after we emerge from food comas and LabRat’s latest tattoo session isn’t quite so fresh and full of ouch.