Atomic Nerds

TV Commercial: “Starting with fire-roasted peppers… and guaranteed all-breast-meat-chicken… introducing Wendy’s boneless CHIPOTLE WINGS!

Nerds: *tomato soup spit-take*

In the comments to my previous post, commenter Justin gave a link to an Insane Clown Posse music video discussing the wonder of the universe and asked for our comment. It’s a nice day and I’m feeling much more like having a beer and playing some Warcraft than banging my head on the wall trying to get thinky, so I’m happy to oblige him. The video is here:

It’s fairly cool- although I could have lived without the pregnant-belly shot- though I note that once they get into the magnets and such there’s pretty much a statement to scientists to fuck right off and not ruin the wonder of it all by explaining. (Hint: if you had been paying attention in high school physics, they should have gotten into magnetism. It’s not actually the complicated.)

I don’t really get that attitude. I find magic and miracles boring in concept; they may be zazzy, but they’re also an explanation that goes “an inexplicable entity decided to do it, the end”. The bare bones of science and the simplified lies-to-children explanations of natural law can indeed be boring and wonder-killing, but once you get far enough into learning those bare bones, you begin to understand enough of it that the wonder comes rushing back and then some, because it only gets more elegant and lovely the further in you get.

One of the things I’ve never been able to understand about the literalist variety of creationists is that they don’t seem to understand how very little glory their version affords the creator compared to the story that physics, chemistry, and evolutionary biology tell. The literalist creator zapped some lights in the sky and animals into existence with an act of fiat; if you assume a creator is the author of natural law, that intelligence managed to write a short book of rules from which the entirety of the cosmos formed by cascading effect, with minute differences in values of atomic weights and physical constants making the difference between a lot of heat and rocks and planets with life.

I don’t believe in such a creator, but I do know which version I find more impressive- and which attitude to life I find more of a source of awe.

I promised a contrast in the title of the post; here’s the first video from the wonderful Symphony of Science series, perhaps the best use ever found for the autotuner and a very good source of the encapsulation of that sense of scientific wonder. I’ll grant ICP have more musical talent than Carl Sagan (WOOP!), but I’d rather watch Carl.

I’m not the first, nor will I be the last, to observe that Hollywood is currently undergoing a compulsion to produce anti-war, frequently outright anti-American movies that subsequently tank at the box office, and then wind up and do it again. Nor am I the first or last to observe that these movies do so poorly at the box office not merely because people don’t necessarily want to watch something with an overtly anti-war or anti-current-American-government message, but because as movies they just plain suck.

If you bring this up to the sort of people who keep on doing this, they’re liable to accuse you of instead wanting the overtly pro-war, pro-American movies that came out of studios in earlier times. Which, no, I don’t. I think movies that portray American soldiers and causes in a more sympathetic light are fine, but the thing is they really aren’t any more interesting as movies than the other kind are. I’ve tried to watch a few of them. Stingray can tell you about my shot-with-tranquilizer-dart response to movies that bore me; actual pharmaceutical depressants don’t put me to sleep as quickly or surely.

The fundamental problem is that Hollywood, which is in the business of telling stories for money, is frequently unable to see anything in any terms other than as narrative, including politics, history, and life itself, including war. You can’t make a movie or a show without a narrative; there’d be no point. You can’t even make a documentary without a narrative; all documentaries are making some kind of point, though the point might be subtle or poorly executed and dull. Actual life, history, and warfare don’t really have a narrative unless one is imposed on them; real life is too chaotic, too wandering, and frankly too nonsensical to make a coherent or satisfying story until you hire a professional narrative-crafter to come in and sort it all into one. One of the distinguishing features of fiction as opposed to reality is that fiction has to make sense.

There is absolutely nothing wrong, in and of itself, with narratives, even narratives about Big Important Issues. It’s what we’re paying Hollywood (and every other source of fiction) to produce; a narrative to entertain us for awhile. Where things go wrong is when the crafters of entertainment not only assumes that the audience shares the entirety of their point of view (or are so stupid they themselves lack one), but manages to roll narrative and message into one big, sticky ball. Thus we get a dozen movies since 2001 whose story is, in its entirety, “WAR IS BAD AND THE PEOPLE IN WARS ARE BAD.” Agree with this statement or not, it’s a really fucking boring story- and audiences, who are not interested in paying ticket price plus concessions price to be bored, respond predictably.

This is one expression of a fundamental writer’s sin, just an ideologically satisfying one: story should be in service to character, with message expressed through the interaction of the two. “War Is Bad, The Movie”, whatever the actual title may be, is invariably character and story in service to message- everything that happens and everything anyone does occurs in order to further the message. People don’t behave like people, they behave like an army of straw men, because they were animated in the first place to service the message rather than created as characters. History only becomes something interesting to watch when we can relate to the players as people; this is impossible when they are walking plot devices forwarding a chosen historical narrative rather than characters.

If you can think of any satisfying war movie, what makes them satisfying is that war itself is more of a setting than anything else; the narrative may have a point of view about the consequences of war, but it lets the characters move through the chaos and speak for themselves rather than frog-marching them to the message*. Dark movies with screwed-up or actively malevolent characters can be perfectly interesting to watch IF you spend your movie exploring the characters and the setting rather than just justifying everything with “because this is the sort of thing that evil people do”. You don’t even necessarily need to explain your evil characters; Dark Knight worked as well is it did because it was ultimately about the responses of flawed but complex people to actual unadulterated evil.

You can tell a story about things that aren’t morally neutral and not have it be a bad story. You can even make your story with a clear ideological point of view and have it still be a good story. What you can’t do is tell a two-hour “story” that is actually a message alone. Just because you think something is, in general, good or bad doesn’t make that the sort of narrative you can expect people to pay twelve bucks plus popcorn money for. Movies that stick to the principles of good storytelling will always sell, no matter what the point of view.

*This can be done poorly as well, the classic example being Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor, which Roger Ebert aptly described as “a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle”. It doesn’t so much take away from my point as illustrate that, if you want to set a love story in a war rather than give a love B-plot to a war story, you better make damn sure the love story is more interesting than the war is.

So in the Atomic Inbox (checked something like every three months, guaranteed), we got another couple of questions from commenter Tarb, tireless easy-content generator that he is. He noted that Cooking Noob tends to focus on recipes that are both novel and fairly complicated (I wouldn’t have anything to write about if they were simple and easy), and wondered what I make- or have Stingray make, since he still does most of the cooking here- when I just want simple comfort food.

The first thing I can remember my mother making for me- as in I have fuzzy pre-verbal memories of having bits of it spread out in front of me on a high chair tray- is what she called egg-in-the-nest and I have since learned is also called, depending on what Anglo culture you belong to, egg-in-the-hole, Rocky Mountain toast, frog in the hole, or moon toast. So simple even a college student can do it: butter some slices of bread on both sides. Cut a largish hole out of the center. Grease a pan, with more butter or cooking spray. Put the bread into the pan, and an egg in the hole in each slice. Fry the bread and egg together, turning once as you would for an egg over easy. Salt and eat. I still like this when I’m looking for a low-effort lunch or when I don’t feel well and Stingray is insisting that anorexia is not actually a productive way to approach illness. Apparently variants include using bagels or waffles, and I’ll have to try that someday if I can ever lay my hands on a bagel that wouldn’t make a rabbi weep.

Another thing I associate with comfort and family is chili over rice, which was the way my mother (again, is it ever anyone else in these things?) always used to serve any kind of chili, whether homemade or canned. This is even more straightforward: chili, however you make it, served over rice, with cheese on top. Mix. It’s also a good way to eat chili that’s too spicy for your tastes since the starch helps handle the oils responsible for the fire, but generally the only way I eat chili without rice is if we’re out of rice. If you really require a recipe, our chili looks kind of like this:

1 can kidney beans
1 can pork n’ beans
1 can chili beans
1 8 oz can tomato sauce
1 6 oz can tomato paste
1 Tbs garlic powder
1 Tbs onion powder
2 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp black pepper (freshly ground if you’re snooty and have lots of time to grind it)
1 Tbs cumin
1 tsp cocoa
chile powder to taste (we use about 3 heaping Tbs)
2 tsp oregano
2 Sandia or Big Jim green chile
2 jalapenos (raw, unpickled, etc)
1 habanero if desired
1lb stew beef/flavorful cut diced bite size
1 12 oz bottle of beer

Brown the beef in olive oil with salt & pepper and a dash of garlic powder and set aside.

In a large pot combine everything else except the raw chile and beer and stir to combine. Slice the chile into 5 or 6 pieces for the sandias, 3-4 for the jalapenos, and just halve the habanero if you’re using it. Keep count of how many chunks there are, and mix them into the pot. Add about 1/2 - 3/4 of the beer and stir. The rest is for the cook. Bring to a slow simmer and cook for about an hour. Fish out the chile chunks, and add the meat. Let it simmer long enough to heat up the meat, then serve in whatever fashion you eat chili. A shot of bourbon whiskey can add an interesting smoky flavor if you’re so inclined, and this is even better with venison or elk. You Texans can keep your comments about beans to yourselves, it has real chile in it and this is what qualifies it as chili by New Mexican sensibilities.

Vegetable soup with marrowbones is another, and once again traceable to Mom. Big pot. Every canned vegetable growing a layer of dust in the pantry. Rice. Pack of beef marrowbones from the grocery meat counter aisle. Throw everything in along with some herbs and seasonings and cook until the rice is soft. Fish out the bones and suck the marrow out. Efficient pantry-clearer as well as being nutritious, although I had no idea liking bone marrow was unusual in America until I was an adult.

What’s yours?

There are people coming across our border illegally who are there to take advantage of our much looser class structure and freer markets to carve out a better life for themselves and their families on raw work ethic and force of will. They are a tremendous asset to our economy and, if all of them could be deported at once today, several industries in several border states and port cities would likely collapse immediately. They would be citizens if they thought they could.

There are people coming across our border illegally who are there to take advantage of our generous public benefits in the realms of education, health care, and welfare for the unemployed. They have no intention of working as hard as the first group or maybe at all and they are a constant drain on our public resources. The only relevance citizenship has to them is more secure benefits access.

There are people coming across the border illegally who have no intention of either sponging on our public services or attempting to become a full member of American society. They are there to do work for much better money than they could at home, then send all of it home that they can afford. They have no intention of becoming citizens and while they have a fairly neutral effect on the US economy, the support they give to their home economy can be enormous.

There are people coming across the border who are dangerous criminals with every expectation of exploiting both native US communities and the community of immigrants, legal or illegal. They are professionals at mayhem, mostly involved in the drug trade, and account for disproportionate amounts of violent crime.

There are people coming across the border who are or aspire to be terrorists, and use the shelter of their host country to damage it.

There are people coming across the border who fit into none of these categories in particular, or a few of them at once, who have mixed loyalties and are basically just trying to have a better life, whether or not that includes honest work or criminal.

All of these things are true at the same time. Some of them are true of the same families at the same time. This is how immigration has always been, because immigrants are always people, same as the native inhabitants. If you structure your argument around how the other side is just racist/bleeding heart and totally deluded about the nature of immigrants, you are full of shit, because immigrants are people no matter what color they are and what language they speak. They aren’t a uniform pack of Oliver Twists with funny accents and they aren’t a conspiracy of cartels/mafia/jihadists either.

Any realistic proposition to handle immigration must acknowledge this truth, or else it’s just political grandstanding.

I have no serious expectation of anything other than grandstanding out of Washington for the forseeable future.

I’m not, but you know who is? H-S Precision is going to have a booth on the convention floor. If you’re adverse to link clicking, don’t forget that H-S Precision’s catalog once carried an endorsement from Lon Horiuchi, the federal sniper who shot Vickie Weaver at Ruby Ridge. Think it was just a fluke that slipped through the layers and layers of catalog editorial oversight? Think again.

So for the stylish convention attendee who feels the urge to remind folks not to do business with such class acts, I present the first ever Atomic Nerds Merchandising Boondoggle! (I’m new to this zazzle thing. If something didn’t come out right, a wizard did it.)

For a bonus, anyone who pisses off the HS employees on the con floor enough to get a black eye while wearing this shirt gets a free batch of our cocoa mix and peanut butter cookies. Happy convention going!

So this morning I see over at Tam’s a story about something ever so unexpected, epic quantities of fail in TSA. Specifically, some simpleton giving a bad name to minimum wage mouth breathers everywhere went through one of those new-fangled bodyscanners that have absolutely zero potential for abuse or unsavory behavior ever, really, we super-extra-promise now shut up and bend over, and his boss had a few choice remarks about the size of the monkey’s nightstick. The monkey was upset. The monkey expressed his upset via hickory shampoo.

Since it was TSA on TSA violence, I have no particular beef with this particular incident of conflict resolution. The supervisor was a dipshit (but he works for TSA, so that’s a redundant observation) and mouthed off in such a manner that in days past a quick application of remedial “being polite means you don’t get hit as much” would’ve sorted things out. The monkey was a dumbass (but he works for TSA, so that’s a redundant observation) for either getting caught, escalating to the point where now the entire nation knows he has a little winky, working for TSA in the first place, or not just taking it higher up the food chain like normal people (select all that apply).

Anyway, moving along past the stunning display of competence and quality from those in charge of keeping our skies safe from the semtex underoo brigade, we can find my main issue with this. Allow me to quote the final sentence of the article:

But if this latest incident is any indication, the scanners sound like good news for anti-terrorism and bad news for less-than-average men.

What.
The.
FUCK.

There is so much fail expressed there by Willard Shepard and Brian Hamacher that it makes me want to punch kittens and swear at boobies. “Oh, gosh, it sure is funny that these bumbling fucksticks who can’t even make it through THEIR OWN FUCKING TRAINING with any sort of professionalism, dignity, or impulse control suitable to avoid going to jail will be looking at the genitals of everybody trying to get on an airplane! That’s right comedic right there!”

Now that the Do It To Julia Pep Squad have weighed in, maybe it’s time to consider some other illusion ofsecurity devices we could bring in! How about the roto-rooter rectal-explosives detection system? “Sorry, ma’am. We’ve gotten a lot of 80 year olds claiming to be going to their grandchildren’s graduations loaded to the gills with semtex and metamucil!” Perhaps we could change the hiring standards to give those poor registered sex offenders a chance to get back on their feet! I know! let’s just get Brian and Willard there to explain how the new federal penis inspectors are going to prevent terrorism! It’s all very scientific, I bet. See, according to Dr. Phil, if you really want something you just have to think about it really hard. And if you want to blow up a plane, you’re busy thinking about that, and so you don’t think about other important things like keeping all your body bits phased in to this universe. So if they see someone go through without a penis then it means they’re going to blow up the plane! It’s sheer elegance in its simplicity! What flaw in the plan? “Women?” I don’t follow. Shut up, this will totally work.

Time to go put another five bucks in the jar of bail money we’ve set aside in case I ever have to get on an airplane again…

Sorry for the lack of substantive content this week; between chores and various hobby-related things (Kang resuming her show career and some game stuff) taking up more time than they usually do, there hasn’t been a whole hell of a lot of time to muse and post in.

So from a question Phlegmmy asked me in IRC, here’s a bit of my Bill Nye routine. The question being, do animals get STDs, and if not why not?

They do. Part of the reason we don’t hear much about it is that “sexually transmitted disease” is something we think of as a very discrete category, but it’s not really that way in nature; we think of them as a defined class of ailments because we’re deeply concerned with the kinds of trouble we can get in screwing around, but most STDs are essentially fluid-borne diseases that may or may not have sexual contact as their primary transmission route. AIDS, for example, began as functionally a blood-borne disease that could be transmitted sexually- though a few decades is more than enough time for a virus to mutate and take greater advantage of a very successful way to propagate.

The other part of the reason is we really have little reason to notice or investigate STDs outside our own species unless it’s having some kind of economic impact on us, or is having enough of an impact on a species that it threatens their survival AS a species. We tend to think of science as a nearly limitless sprawling body of knowledge, but the truth is there are a huge number of areas in which we know almost nothing because those areas just aren’t really very relevant to humans. The science of scent and smell is one such area- our body of knowledge on the science behind how this sense works is incredibly primitive compared to our knowledge of light and sound, because smell just isn’t terribly relevant to a primate. We only noticed how ignorant we were when smell became relevant as a way of detecting illegal drugs and explosives- and people seeking to create artificial noses as good as, say, a dog’s found there was no way to even begin because they had no idea how scent could be modeled or how it was being processed in the first place. Animal parasites and diseases are another such thing- unless it’s a disease of something domesticated and economically and emotionally important to us, or a species we’re trying to save, we simply have no reason to go looking.

For this reason, if you want to know about animal STDs, you should go talk to the folks for whom it IS economically relevant- like horse breeders, cattle breeders, and dog and cat breeders. Knowledgeable breeders concerned about the health of their stock and the animals in general usually demand a clean veterinary bill of health to make sure they’re not putting their stud or queen at risk; the only disease that has much publicity outside the stockmen themselves is brucellosis, a bacterial-caused ailment that causes abortion and infertility in some mammals, since that one is contractable by humans.

The ecological vulnerability of native Australian species in general means that they’ve been the main public face of wild STDs, as koalas are under significant existential threat from chlamydia and that species’ version of AIDS. A particularly strange and tragic case is the Tasmanian devil, who are also under serious threat from a strange cancer that is actually transmissible from devil to devil- without any underlying viral cause at all. In addition to being a unique case of a contagious cancer, it’s also effectively a sexually transmitted disease- the cancer mostly occurs on the devils’ faces, and biting at the face is part of devil courting practices. (Tasmanian devil sex is every bit as violent and strange as their reputation would suggest.)

From time to time I’ve seen reference by the sort of religious individual inclined to see God’s punitive hand in nature to the supposed uniqueness of STDs to humans to be punishment for our promiscuity. It’s not: sex is an efficient way for a bug to propagate, so like all the other efficient ways, it is widespread in nature. We’re just so much more interested in our own genitals and sniffles that we don’t notice unless we have compelling reason to.

*Not the same virus or bacteria that affects humans, but genus Chlamydia is a group of bacteria that became professionally parasitic ages back in their evolution and it has many members. Immunodeficiency viruses are also more common than we’d like.

So two years ago to the day I had a bit of an automotive mishap.

Today, I was putting fresh tires on the same car. Guess what happened on the very last lug nut of the day.

From now on the tools stay in the box on 5/5.

- Ah, the comforting, domesticity of stepping out of the shower to the dulcet sounds of your spouse extensively and in brutal analysis and detail reaming out the hapless campaigner who called representing a town councilman running for re-election. Almost as familiar as grilled cheese sandwiches and socks left around the house in random locations.

- Today I tried Rhapsody’s free 14-day trial. Today I canceled my subscription after an hour. When your installation software is too buggy to install without crashing without several attempts, and your single-track MP3 fees are 30 cents higher than Amazon.com’s despite having a ten dollar a month flat fee on top of that, and the only possible advantage I get over Pandora.com’s free service is on-demand and being able to try out one or two whole albums a month before buying (!), I think I might just take my business elsewhere. So far I’m enjoying my trial of Pandora’s premium service, which is seven dollars a month cheaper, a whole lot more.

- As tinfoil hat theories of movies go, this exhaustive analysis of Fight Club as a dark sequel to the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip is a masterful one.