Atomic Nerds

I had a post about half written, but when I went to proofread it, it was just too depressing. Have a bit of re-run and hope LabRat comes up with something.

Today Stingray steam-cleaned a small tree that is growing in the office against our wishes.

And that is all you will ever hear of that.

Today I installed an appliance with zero (0) trips to the hardware store.

Stand in awe, puny mortals.

The new dishwasher arrived today to replace the one that died horribly last week, so my other half has spent the day largely on installing the beast, which seems rather fiddlier a process than the last one.

In the meantime, enjoy the fruits of yesterday’s labor: B&B Guns: Gear and Gadgets

I always want to post something on Veterans’ Day, but I never seem to have good words, or at least not words that someone else hasn’t already used better.

This year I’ll nominate NFO’s post for both having some good words and teaching me something new.

ETA: And Peter’s post, which brought a tear to my eye.

I’m driving the Dodge Testosterone along a long and arrow-straight gravel road in Secret Location, Colorado. I’m coming back from the quarry/shooting range, alone, having driven out there in the first place to check on some things. I keep seeing some small and impossibly quick animal flashing into view and out again on the side of the road. Suddenly, the engine makes a horrible something-metal-has-snapped noise and I have to wrestle the truck to the side of the road. Steam’s coming out of the hood; I call ahead to let people know I’m in trouble but not much of it.

I might actually be, though, because I see other cars stranded up ahead and there are a few people, strangers but not threatening ones, milling about looking glassy eyed, and they’re having problems too. I understand somehow that it all has to do with the little animal, that I am getting closer and closer glimpses of now that I’m not driving anymore* and know is not normal or natural.

Then the Farm Fam shows up to help me and we exchange hugs and I understand that this must be a dream, because everything has gotten too weird to be real.

And then I wake up.

I haven’t opened my eyes, but I’m in my own bed in my own home and I can hear Stingray washing his hands in the bathroom. He pads back to bed and climbs in next to me. I’m mostly awake and it’s getting later in the morning so I bet he is too, so I roll over and snuggle into his side. He puts his arms around me and nuzzles my neck, and I can tell he didn’t come back to bed intending to go back to sleep, so things are shaping up to be a nice start to the day after all despite the weird dream.

But I’m stroking his chest and something doesn’t feel right. I pull back a little and open my eyes, and I can’t see very well at all without my glasses and the morning light is dim, but I can tell something doesn’t look right either. I roll back over and get my glasses and he protests mildly, but when I put them on I can see there’s some kind of skin irritation covering his chest and stomach.

Honey, you’ve got some kind of rash.

What? It’s not so bad-

Yes, it is, it looks like chicken pox

He’s getting up grumbling to go take a look in the mirror, irritated that he’s doing this rather than what we were leading up to, and as he’s getting up he turns his back and it’s worse there, much much worse, I’ve only seen anything like that reading books with old photos of smallpox victims, and I’m seriously scared now. He’s in the bathroom now and making some sort of exclamation of alarm, and we’re talking about needing to go to the hospital, and somehow while he’s getting dressed I crawl back in bed because I was never fully awake and I’m so, so tired, too tired to deal with this right now, and I realize I can’t actually get back up if I try, I can’t even speak in fact, because I tried to ask him if this is reality hoping that it can’t be, but I can’t move either so it must not be-

And then I wake up.

I’m back in bed again and I’m alone this time. I can hear Zydeco off in the distance somewhere in the house, muttering and yowling to himself the way he does. I’m still pretty sleepy and vaguely wondering if I can get away with going back to sleep, though I’d really rather not buy another ticket to the Weird Dream Express, especially when it’s already had at least one stopover in Nightmareville. Things rarely get better after that. But I can still hear the cat, and he’s escalated from irritable muttering to the kind of guttural yowl he does when he’s feeling ill and about to puke on something.

I debate just resigning myself to cleaning up the mess wherever he leaves it or trying to get him onto tile first, since depending on where he is he might just dart under the center of the bed and puke there, and then I’d have to get Stingray to lift the bed to clean it up. But he’s not getting around from “yowl” to “gag”, and he’s getting louder and sounding stranger, and it is then I realize again that I can’t move. I also can’t speak, let alone scream though by now I want to, and now that I have opened my eyes (with that queer seeing-through-skin effect I realize is owing to my eyes actually being closed in reality) I can’t move my gaze from the fixed point it’s on due to not being able to move my head at all. My ears are still working fine though, as is my sense of touch.

I understand what’s happening because it’s happened to me before: I am somewhere between awake and dreaming, and having an episode of sleep paralysis. I can’t move because as far as my body is concerned I’m still asleep and my physical reactions to what’s going on in my head have been shut down, and what I’m hearing isn’t real or only partially is, and the same goes for what I’m seeing. I can’t speak or scream for the same reason I can’t move, but this time understanding what’s going on isn’t real doesn’t stop it. It never does.

I am trapped for however long this lasts, and the cat’s yowls are not only getting closer, they’ve changed from normal Siamese sounds to guttural, wet groans that can’t come from anything healthy. They’re getting louder and the cat- or whatever it is now- is getting steadily closer. The noise is getting stranger and wetter and deeper, and it’s rapidly apparent noise like that can’t come from anything living, or for that matter from this dimension. I can’t move, and I can’t scream, and I can’t close my eyes or avert my gaze from the side of the bed my head is facing, and the cat-thing is now on the bed and I can feel it walking up my body and I can’t tell if it sounds angry or hungry or lost or all three.

I also understand that being caught by the monster and experiencing whatever it will do to me is something that can happen before I wake up, again from experience, and I begin to panic because whatever’s coming I really, really don’t want to see it, let alone have it touch my face… or whatever it has in mind after that. I start hyperventilating partly because of the panic, partly because I’m trying to scream, and partly because my breathing is the only thing under my control, and I take faster and deeper and deeper and faster breaths as the thing creeps over my chest and I can smell it rotting and feel its avid warmth

Until I wake up.

I’m still breathing fast and deep, but when I open my eyes I’m not seeing through the vague pink filter of my eyelids. Better yet, I can move my fingers, which is simply fantastic. I am now 90% sure that it would be possible for me to get out of bed and walk into some relatively normal version of reality. There is some unpleasant wet sound next to me, but it’s just Kodos grooming himself while he waits for me to get up and feed him. The cat hops immediately up onto the bed and next to my face now he’s seen me move, but he’s normal and just staring at me in his normal insane Siamese way. I grab him and give him a hug, pressing my face into his fur. He hates that, but if it’s really so awful then he could always give up his habit of looming over my face in the morning. I pat Kodos on the head while he wags happily, and get out of bed.

There isn’t any more coffee when I make it into the kitchen, late and feeling like I’ve barely slept at all. God damn it.

*Turned out to be this critter in miniature. Go figure.

So I actually can’t really blame lack of potential content for once. I’ve got a story involving the dogs and some bigass raccoons that I just can’t seem to render funny or interesting, a fascinating collection of data from a Swiss lab involving evolutionary robotics and the spontaneous evolution of social behaviors, thoughts on learning and game design inspired by Smartdogs that I can’t seem to collect into a coherent whole, and on this occasion in general can only conclude that the problem is entirely me.

So here’s something to waste your time.

Super Mario Brothers Crossover. Exactly what it says on the tin. It’s the original Super Mario Brothers game, but you can play with other classic NES characters like Mega Man, Ryu, Samus Aran, Simon Belmont, Link, or one of the dudes from Contra. Friends are giving the edge to Simon for the whip and throwing axe, though I’m a Ryu loyalist myself for the wall climb and windmill shuriken. Surprisingly well-done and fun overall.

Recently, everybody’s favorite modern boogeyman the Large Hadron Collider fired up its world-destroying matter-beams, dumped a few bajillion volts of power into the magnets (that’s the sciency part right there- bajillion volts is a recognized base unit, like the decay rate of a cesium atom defining the unit of time we call the second), and smashed some lead ions together. I haven’t been keeping as close an eye on the project as people might expect, but hey, hobby, not job.

Anyway, the thin description of the results looks pretty promising. The scientists certainly seem happy, which is usually a pretty good indicator. One part I specifically wanted to comment on, however, is a matter of scale. A while back I won a contest that some welching bunch of luddites declined to pay out for. My thumbnail math relied on bowling balls, tipping the scales at several kilograms each, and a few napkin calculations to demonstrate that the possibility of the LHC creating a black hole capable of destroying the earth (and, presuming that happened, the rest of the solar system, but hey, it’s all about us right?) was, to put it mildly, negligible.

Now keep in mind, that the initial hissy fits thrown by the anti-LHC groups revolved around experiments that would merely be colliding protons. Today’s experiment, using lead ions is, relative to the size of a proton, less like using bowling balls and more like using Mini Coopers. Shockingly to very few, the earth was not devastated, and we have not been overrun by elder gods, multi-legged patio chairs with teeth, or swarms of tame racing drivers, or any other sort of nonsense Chicken Little option those opposed to progress bandied about.

Honestly, at this point it’s hardly even worth making fun of the people who wet their pants over these experiments. The odds of any of the doom-and-gloom outcomes actually happening are so negligible that it makes playing the lottery as a retirement strategy look beyond rock solid.

Now, obviously to anyone outside of climate science, challenges and criticism are the fundamental backbone of how we make progress. You essentially cannot make a name for yourself in any real scientific field without throwing rocks at someone else’s name. If they’ve done their homework, and their methodology is sound, and the hypothesis is a bit more advanced than the usual dreck about “LOL GUYZ WE FOUND DA LIBWERAL GENE!” this will be very difficult to do. If, on the other hand, some crank on the internet can note that the numerator in your “amount of doom produced” equation is zero, then you may need to go back to the drawing board. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but regardless of what your soccer coach told you, not all hypothesis or positions are equally valid. OMG, science is hard guys!

So really, my heart just isn’t in it anymore. When the soccer mom brings in her minivan to the mechanic, and starts telling the grease monkey how the kers system on her Plymouth isn’t working right, and she’s positive of that because she heard it when her hubby accidentally left the TV on the speed network when he went to take a leak, we don’t exactly give her much credence. Sure, the unscrupulous mechanic (played here by journalists who think “OMG EARTH MAY END” makes a better headline than 47 lines of vector calculus) may nod sagely, agree with her, and even offer to tune the flux capacitor while he’s at it, but that doesn’t make her any more right.

Sure thing, Ms. Bambi. We’ll fix that kers right up for you. Earl, hand me a fan belt for a ’93 Voyager.

So evidently Bob Kerrey along with two other names I’m unfamiliar with (though admittedly Bob Kerrey is one for whom my only point of recognition is “some Democract”) has proposed that what the President really needs is a Chief Operating Officer to get him through all the petty little day to day crap like, I don’t know, governing and being an executive. No, seriously.

While a COO must understand how policy and politics influence decision making in Washington, he should leave the politics to the chief of staff and others in the White House and undertake the hard role of running the business of government. Far from reflecting poorly on this president or his chief of staff, this suggestion is about the efficacy of the office itself. This innovation would modernize the institution of the presidency and enhance the ability of this president and his successors to govern.

“Modernize”? Kerrey may be using the language of the corporate world, but in political terms what this most resembles is making the President King and the proposed “COO” prime minister. We do not elect Kings, nor appoint prime ministers. We elect executive officers. If Kerrey or anyone else, including Obama, thinks that the task of chief executive of the United States is too messy, too difficult, or too hard for Obama, he should never have run or been supported for the job.

Several recent examples of government action and inaction underscore the need for a COO. Few would dispute that the Federal Emergency Management Agency failed to perform during the Hurricane Katrina tragedy and that the Minerals Management Service fell far short of its mission leading up to the Deepwater Horizon crisis this year. The COO would be responsible for ensuring that such situations do not happen again.

Disaster relief is not actually the President’s job, though. It’s the job of FEMA and the Minerals Management Service on the national scale and much more so the job of local agencies on the local scale. If these two federal offices are completely and utterly ineffective in their missions, a)why do we still have them, and b)what makes Kerrey think that having one appointed dude whose job is ostensibly to make the entire government function the way it’s already supposed to would actually accomplish something?

The COO’s duties would lie in execution of government policy, including ensuring that the government is well managed and that it addresses key national priorities as one entity and not as hundreds of separate agencies operating in silos.

That’s also not the President’s or anyone else’s job. We don’t have any one branch or person in charge of managing the entire government for a number of reasons, many of which can be found within the Federalist Papers. Does Kerrey realize he’s arguing against the fundamental structure of American government and, effectively, for monarchy?

What are qualifications for this position?

Divine right of kings was the only one I’ve ever heard that approached remotely adequate qualification for effective managing of an entire government to the ostensible betterment of all.

The COO should have significant business experience as well as sensitivity to the mechanics of government. That experience would serve him or her well in managing the government’s vast moving parts.

I want to frame this, hang it in an art gallery, and title it Paean of the Technocrat. Think I could get a grant from the NEA for the idea?

Fortunately, an ideal candidate comes to mind: New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg. He is a man of well-documented business savvy who has also exhibited an ability to apply private-sector know-how to a diverse government enterprise.

He’s also achieved national notoriety as one of the worst and most dogmatic advocates of nanny-state government in an era of nanny-state government. We will surely have no more Katrinas or Deep Horizons when trans-fat and salt bans go national…

I could go on, but suffice to say the rest of the piece boils down to “there is no possible way this could not improve everything and no one could possibly have a problem with it.” It’s the product of someone who, at the end of the day, really does think that these responsibilities are the President’s rather than the limited role most people who’ve taken Civics class would recognize as the role of the executive branch- and that, like a corporation’s CEO, the President’s role should be to provide vision.

You have admit, the choice of Obama for “national vision-producer” and Bloomberg for “national micro-manager” are as terribly apt as they would be disastrous…

Enough serious business. The Republicans will get round to hideously disappointing us in due time, I’ve been spending more time than is healthy for me wielding sabres in other people’s comment sections and for whatever reason my body clock came up on “NO SLEEP FOR YOU” at an indecently early hour this morning. I want some caffeine, video games, and just generally to do something other than stare at a monitor willing the internet to drop real content in my lap.

- Fall comes (a month and a half late and honestly stepping on winter’s toes at this point), leaves turn color and fall, horror movie season gives way to family movie season, and the cat ceases to be satisfied with his normal nap spots and starts seeking contact and warmth like a candiru fish. Lately he has been expressing his objection to my insistence on failing to be a lap on the couch by crawling into my lap when I’m maximally busy (let me tell you, it really enhances a precision moment in a game to have a cat jump into your lap with claws out to hang on if you resist), or like now, taking over my mousepad in protest. As I need to open links in other tabs to finish this, this will mark the fifth or sixth time today I’ve ejected him from my desk. It’s not as though there isn’t a much better sunbeam over on the other side that’s actually warm; at this point, he’s just doing it to piss me off.

- Once upon a time, TV Squad hired Wil Wheaton to do episode reviews of Star Trek: The Next Generation using his experience from behind the scenes playing the series’ most hated character. They were awesome and can be found here, but sadly the whole thing fell through before all the first-season reviews were even posted. It seems he’s published the first half of the first season as a book with the sections edited and expanded for content and to fix “dammit got to get this out of the way and posted AOL is paying me for this” factors. To my disappointment the last mention of the project on Wheaton’s blog seems to be dated 2009 so future volumes may be a no-go, however…

- Apparently Europeans are baffled about why we’ve fallen out of love with Obama, apparently because he’s just so cool and also not Bush. Same reason anyone who has ever dated the cool handsome kid in high school and then dumped him; cute is only enough from afar and so is “not my ex”. Y’all want him, he’s yours.

- So I suppose I should comment on what seems to be ongoing fascination with Ozzy Osbourne’s genome. Renowned sober-sided publication of record the New York Post refers to him as a “genetic mutant” because he has a number of gene variations that haven’t been bagged and tagged by geneticists before.

A little perspective; ten years ago there were exactly two fully sequenced human genomes out there. Now there are about 2,700 of them estimated to be complete by the end of the year, but compared to the size of the human population overall this is peanuts, especially given the overall rates of heterogeneity (multiple possible genes/alleles in the same location that do roughly the same thing) in the genome. Compounding the problem is that sequencing a genome is not remotely the same thing as annotating it- this is roughly the difference between copying the Rosetta stone and translating it. So yes, at this point if you sequence someone’s full genome and find a few things you don’t quite recognize among the things that the annotators have already gotten to and put into meaningful context, this is something of a dog bites man event.

Then again, given the number of spurious specifics cited by the genome sequencing company (Morbo says GENOME ANALYSIS DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY), this is most likely a pure case of GIGO. Most standout in the nonsense is the claim that Osbourne is the descendant of a Neanderthal- researchers don’t have anything approaching a list of reliable individual markers yet.