Atomic Nerds

Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab is a perfume company that has essentially carved out a niche for itself as an esoteric producer of scents specifically designed to attract geeks. Not only are they relatively unique compared to what you’ll find with more mainstream offerings, a lot of their lines- Picnic In Arkham, Mad Tea Party, Steamworks, Neil Gaiman fer Chrissakes- are aimed quite squarely at the horror-fantasy fan segment. There’s even something of a community of BPAL collectors that buy a box of various scents and trade them around the community; since BPAL has gone for “unique and striking” over “mass marketability”, a lot of their scents are very hit-or-miss with an individual’s skin chemistry, and thus trading around scents that just didn’t work for the buyer makes a lot of sense.

I do like well-done perfumes but I don’t have that big of a collection (what I have is almost all Demeter), so I have so far managed to successfully avoid this particular gotta-catch-em-all. I prefer my fragrances simple and light, not exotic and complex, so much of BPAL’s offerings in my areas of nerdiness don’t tempt me hugely.

But they’ve just introduced the RPG line and God help me it hits my G (geek) spot. Pity I don’t think Lawful Dwarf Paladin would combine well, but perhaps one out of three would work?

There’s a Tea Party protest in Santa Fe tomorrow (funny how they tend to happen on weekends, or other points where gainfully employed people can get away without a boss wondering where they are and using odd words like “fired”, but I digress). We’re not going because seriously, fuck the Santa Fe Plaza. And crowds. Crowds and one of the most vehicle-unfriendly environments outside of Massachusetts? Pass.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t help. So here are some helpful protest sign slogans you can use, free of charge without even a GPL license.

“Cut deeper, emo gov’t!”
“If your favorite program isn’t bleeding, it wasn’t a cut!”
“Slaughter the sacred cows!”
“Down with Quadafi (but don’t look too close at that Mugabe fellow)”
“New source of income: hunting licenses on congress”
“If the services are non-essential, why do we have them?”

Feel free to add your own. Or shoot a congress critter, whatever works for you.

Appropriately straightforward reporting on research into space-related phobias (claustrophobia and acrophobia, respectively) and people’s ability to process space neurologically.

The upshot is that neither fear of tightness/crowding/small spaces nor fear of heights are often tightly linked to trauma, and that the people who experience them significantly enough to have sought help for them both process space badly and tend to, respectively, dramatically under- or over-estimate distances.

Particularly interesting to me, because I have a pretty mild case of claustrophobia- simply small spaces and moderate crowding don’t bother me, but I can’t/won’t attend a concert of any size that doesn’t space people out with stadium seating and attempting to learn to change my own oil ended in near-meltdown- and I know for a fact my spatial sense is terrible. I can’t make visual judgements of distance or volume with anything even approaching accuracy, I’m clumsy because I can’t accurately estimate how far things are from me and either bump into them or under-estimate a gap and trip. It’s interesting to me because I can pretty clearly see some of my neurological “seams” when it comes to processing distance; I can throw an object and place it where I want to accurately, but I could not for the life of me tell you how far away my target was or model in my head how long I would have to walk to get there. Likewise my accuracy with a gun is fairly normal, but the distances are totally meaningless to me except as an abstract concept that relates to how small the target looks and how much I might have to lead something or raise my sights. Whatever feat of differential calculus my brain performs in order to handle projectiles appears to be different from the bit that moves my body through space.

I also have an extremely specific case of acrophobia that’s completely unrelated to the rest of how I process heights and is pretty clearly linked to trauma. When I was maybe six or seven, I was walking with my father on a rim hike at the Grand Canyon, and at one point he slipped on some loose gravel and nearly fell over the rim; he got close enough that his feet were dangling over empty space when he stopped sliding. Ever since then I’ve been overwhelmed with anxiety if I’m anywhere near a barrierless edge or am looking at someone else who is- but a barrier of any kind, even if flimsy, instantly removes the anxiety, and no other heights bother me at all. Top of a ladder? I don’t care. High building? Great view. Bridge over a river? I fantasize about jumping down*. When I was younger than the cliff incident I gave my parents a heart attack by climbing some twenty feet up into a tree on a camping trip, and I was the kid who had to learn the hard way that jumping off a swing at the highest point is not fun. (Several times, in fact- the flying part was always great.)

There’s no insight to wrap this up with. It’s just interesting to me.

*No, I’m not suicidal. I mean like in the way a pool with a diving board looks inviting. The high board at my school pool was never frightening to me either.

I’m told by a reliable source that the War Wagon for this year’s Blogorado (previously mentioned here) is a done deal. Top will be chopped, elk will be hosed out. No word yet on a pintle mount, but the basics are in place.

You know what this means, right?
(more…)

*peers* You here? Oh dear. It’s been one of those days, I’m afraid.

Robin In The Rye

Go there. It will bring you at least five minutes of delight if you had to read that thing in school, too.

So today I stumble across this post about sex-advice columnist Dan Savage, which was… interesting. I advise you to read the whole thing, especially if you want to comment, because it’s long, fairly nuanced, and I really don’t entirely disagree with its author. (Me making big things out of posts that I mostly agree with seems to be a trend.)

Post author Benjamin Dueholm and I seem to have in common that we’ve both been Savage readers for years, and in an important sense grew up with him in reading his stuff during times when we were still forming ideas of what sexual ethics, as well as ethics in general, should be. We also have pretty much the same problems with him; while I still agree with Savage more often than I don’t, I also think he’s grown a hell of an ego over the years, and his points of failure tend to be pretty consistent- he seems to think that asshole things you do to people whose politics you find repugnant aren’t really asshole things, that people with low sex drives are defective, and he’s developed a REALLY obnoxious tendency to propose opening the relationship as the universal solvent of problems within monogamous relationships. Dueholm also mentions Dan’s devotion to the Sex at Dawn people and their theories, although perhaps ironically he goes easier on that than I did.

Where Dueholm and I depart- and it’s not that far a departure- is in our estimation of how much, or if, sexual satisfaction has been placed unreasonably above and apart from other satisfactions and forms of happiness. In this, I don’t think he’s being quite fair to Savage, for once*. I also have a slightly different outlook on both the culture that produced him and what its future looks like.

Silly Sex-At-Dawn stuff aside, Dan has never promised that hewing to his ethics- which rely on the twin pillars of honesty and autonomy- would produce complete happiness. What he’s essentially always asserted isn’t that “it gets better” will end up at best, but that it’s better than the alternative- the alternative being, from his view and mine, deceit, self-hatred, and frustration and depression. People in relationships that don’t adhere to traditional sexual and relationship norms are still people, and whether you call it sinner’s nature or human nature they’re still going to screw up and still going to hurt themselves and each other and still going to miss out on opportunities they’ll regret, because they’re still people. That’s one of the reasons, when chewing out his supplicants that are doing something harmful to themselves and others, Dan tends to put disclosure above chewing them out for the bad behavior itself; nobody generally needs to be told something they’re doing is bad for themselves and others to know it is. They make seek affirmation for it (which Savage almost always refuses to give), but they’re still doing it because it’s satisfying to them in some way. Better behavior aside, the next step in damage control for Dan is telling them to own it and give their partner the option to figure out if this is behavior they can live with or a reason to terminate the relationship.

Among those reasons Savage finds acceptable grounds for termination of the relationship is lack of sexual compatibility, or at least lack that can’t be negotiated around with an open clause. Dueholm finds this cold, and a waste of the other happiness potentials in a relationship. To a point, I agree- having sex with someone else won’t always bring happiness outside the short-term sexual satisfactions, and monogamy isn’t such an unreasonable expecation that dropping it should be near the top of the list of solutions for sexual-compatibility issues. Sex isn’t the be-all and end-all of a relationship, no.

However, and this is the point in which I think cultural outlook comes in, in a really monogamous relationship based on love it’s also important enough to be a very serious consideration in terms of how partners treat one another. People talk about sexual norms and marriage as though they’ve always been as we’ve understood in the last fifty or sixty years, but that simply isn’t. The love-marriage based on mutual romantic affection and undying love is a modern construct; for the bulk of history it was more of an economic and legal relationship than a romantic one. In a lot of times and places, romance and passion were understood at things that explicitly occurred outside of marriage**. Twentieth century Americans may have gotten exercised about adultery, but in many cultures for many periods of history, seeking sexual and emotional satisfaction outside the relationship was more or less taken as given if not savory, with the only real problems arising from bastard children.

This is Dan’s point coming from another direction: if you’re really going to have a relationship with someone you love, you need to deal with their needs and desires, and if you’re the only one in a place to fulfill them and you want this situation to continue, then you do in fact have a responsibility to them in that sense. We may have been able to societally cope with not having such frank conversations about it before- but we were also taking the idea of having relationships for the sake of love and mutual fulfillment less seriously than we were taking them for the sake of economic and social alliance and a clear path of inheritance.

Yes, sex is not the be-all and end-all in a relationship, but it’s also not unimportant. Sex is a powerful enough drive that people chase it no matter what kind of norms and mores are in place, and one of the benefits of a loving long-term relationship is that it’s a context in which you can show and be more of yourself than you can in society-at-large- in large part that’s the very definition of intimacy. If sexuality is effectively taken off that table, that leaves a gap in intimacy that’s a lot larger than merely the absence of mutually satisfying orgasms and stretches well into the emotional realm. Religious/philosophical compatibility isn’t the be-all and end-all of a relationship either, but that doesn’t make its potential in its absence to damage or even ultimately destroy a relationship any less real- and the compulsion to satisfy sexual needs is a lot stronger and more deeply rooted than the compulsion to understand one’s place in the universe at large.

Challenging norms isn’t inherently a bad thing, since norms aren’t inherently beneficial or even inherently harmless; we’ve collectively rejected a lot of harmful norms over the course of our history, like “people of high birth are just better than other people”, or “children are the property of their parents and may be dealt with as they choose even if it’s bad treatment”. Over the course of examining which taboos are malum in se and which are malum prohibitum, there comes the question of what it is we actually want out of a relationship- and when requiring a long-term apparently-monogamous relationship is no longer necessary for general societal acceptance, the answers may sometimes end up surprising.

What people think they want and what would actually work for them aren’t always the same, and Dan Savage isn’t that great an ethicist… but both beat sweeping large sectors of the human experience off the table for discussion, expectation, and negotiation. Intimate relationships are tough enough as it is.

*I tried to find a quote to hang this off of but really the whole thing is needs to be read in its entirety to be understood. Sign of good writing, really.

**Here using “marriage” as an interchangeable concept with indefinite monogamous relationships, which I don’t think should be too controversial.

This Is My Smug Robe

Kevin Baker managed to keep us relentlessly wrestled on topic for nearly two hours.

Sorry about the radio silence yesterday and most of today. Aside from being fairly busy just in a background way, I managed to fritter away some impressively large chunks of time on a chase regarding canine coat color genetics. (Short version: it’s complicated. Long version: it’s *really* complicated.)

So that you get some sort of benefit out of my rabbit-hole dashes, here’s a bit of biology on the side.

Have you ever noticed that a dog, or cat, or rat, if it’s going to have any white on its body at all, almost always has the white hairs on its belly, toes, center of its chest, or the tip of its tail? There’s a reason for that, and also a reason for why so many (color)-and-white critters seem to have the white spreading out from its belly and feet up its chest.

There are a lot of different genetic mechanisms underlying white markings and white animals, but one of the most common and best understood is the piebald series of genes, common to dogs, cats, rats and mice, and probably more mammals that I don’t know about.

The way the alleles in the piebald series seem to operate is by, at a very early point in a fetus’s development, interfering with the migration and establishment of melanocytes- early cells that will later do varying things in your skin including providing the pigment in your skin and hair- so that a white area represents an area on that very early fetus in which the melanocytes didn’t quite reach or didn’t reach in sufficient numbers to produce a visible pigment.

The first thing to remember in understanding the consistency of the resulting effect that this migration happens before a fetus has limbs, so that its overall shape and the contours over which the melanocytes are moving is still “large-headed tadpole”. The second is that melanocytes migrate out of the neural crest, an area that roughly corresponds with the back of your head in an adult. They migrate back from this point and move toward your rear, with the effective furthest point from their origin being the ventral midline- roughly the center of your belly. If you need a visual metaphor, picture pouring syrup over the tadpole with the point of flow starting at just the back of the head.

The further the cells from the origin point of the melanocyte migration, the more likely it is the piebald alleles will have been able to knock out enough melanocytes to leave a white patch on the adult. Since limb buds appear on the ventral (belly) side of the embryo, the extremities are in that group. So it’s not so much that the white spread from there, as that they’re the places the color was least likely to have a chance to. Likewise, since the color spread from the top/back of the head or where that location would eventually be, the last place on a very piebald animal that still has some color is likely to be the top of its head and its ears.

This, by the way, is why some white dogs and cats are likely to be deaf while others are not- as I said there is more than one way to get a white mammal, and the short version is that one of those ways is powerful piebald gene expression, and another common one is a set of genes that prevents pigmenting of the hair shafts rather than knocking it out from early development. Melanin is involved in ear and eye development as well as just color- this is also why many breeders in the more vulnerable breeds use the lack of pigment over ears or eyes as a rule of thumb for testing for deafness.

*It’s a *lot* more complicated than this- some breeds that get white through piebald or merle genes, which also restrict the development of melanin-producing cells, seem to be much more or much less likely to get deafness or blindness with a doubling up of merle or piebald. Why? Dunno.

With tax day looming just around the corner, many of the folks with refunds coming are considering buying a gun in the annual loose display of “Hey, Gov’t! Be afraid of us!” that annually causes the government to notice absolutely nothing what so ever known as Buy A Gun Day.

Since it’s been a while since I beat on this drum, it’s time to sound it again, and remind people that under no circumstances should you purchase a gun that has a stock made by H-S Precision.

I know not everybody has memorized our entire archives (and if you don’t, shame on you! I was much funnier in the past!), so let me give you the recap.

Originally, H-S Precision put out their annual catalog for the 2008 year. This particular catalog included an endorsement of the products from one Lon Horiuchi. For those not familiar, Lon Horiuchi is the federal sniper who killed Vickie Weaver at Ruby Ridge, as she was holding her baby, against the rules of engagement in place, and was rescued from prosecution by federal fiat. He continued on in his career to help turn the Waco stand-off into the disaster it was. If you haven’t read it already, please check out Lawdog’s summary of Horiuchi’s actions. The man, simply put, is evil and should not be tolerated on this side of the dirt.

Anyway. When a large portion of the shooting community noticed this, and issued a vigorous cry of WTF, H-S Precision responded by removing the endorsement. No apology was issued. They issued a statement which was labeled as an apology (see previous link), but essentially said “Fine, if you don’t like it we just won’t run endorsements.” This did not go over terribly well, but since a new season of American Idol was starting, the matter more or less went away.

A couple months later, someone was dumb enough to give me media credentials for the 2009 NRA Convention. This made me obnoxiously full of myself, so I felt it appropriate to commit an act of journalism. I sought out the H-S Precision display at the convention, and tried to get some clarification on just what in the blue hades happened that they picked such a poorly thought out mascot, especially since he was the only endorsement in that particular catalog.

The H-S Precision representative, the man in charge of putting out a positive image of the company, told me red in the face with anger, that Vickie Weaver deserved to be shot simply because she was there.

I honestly wish I was making that up.

Vickie Weaver committed no crime at all. Whether her husband had done anything illegal is still a murky issue at best, and is a debate for another time, but the simple fact is that the official position of H-S Precision, as related to me by their staff, is that an innocent woman deserved to die holding her infant because of guilt by association for a malum-prohibitum crime. I know our audience is not comprised of 100% gun nuts, so if you’re not familiar with Ruby Ridge, or your association is “Oh yeah. Some crazy cult-like Christians got shot,” please read the last link. I can’t say I’d have wanted Randy Weaver at my picnic, but the federal handling of the whole thing was nothing short of an abomination.

Regardless, H-S Precision’s position is utterly disgusting.

So this is your Buy A Gun day reminder from the Atomic Nerds. Don’t buy anything that has any association with H-S Precision. Don’t buy anything new with their furniture, and personally, I don’t care if they already got the money for the stock out of someone else and you’re buying it used. Any gun with H-S Precision furniture is morally tainted. There are better companies out there.

And if you’re going to the NRA Convention this year, we have a shirt I would encourage you to wear when asking them yourself why a murderer was a good celebrity endorsement.

By way of FarmDad in #GBC (no, that’s not twitter you damn kids- 140 character limits are for people too stupid to articulate full thoughts), we discover that unsurprisingly P.J. O’Rourke and I have one of (well, several really but we’re focusing here) the same pet peeves: those gasping two-wheeled rolling senses of entitlement. In an article so full of awesome it’s hard to pick just one money quote, but I’m going with this one:

Although the technology necessary to build a bicycle has been around since ancient Egypt, bikes didn’t appear until the 19th century. The reason it took mankind 5,000 years to get the idea for the bicycle is that it was a bad idea. The bicycle is the only method of conveyance worse than feet.

+1, truth, ^, and any other internet shorthand you can think of to indicate “Yes, the statement above is correct and I agree with it in both general and particular as the author has done a bang-up job of making an excellent and useful point.*”

I have absolutely no point of disagreement with any point the estimable P.J. brings up in that entire thing. I do have one minor point on which discussion could be brooked. As I said, everything he has written is correct. There is no use for cyclists in heavy urban traffic other than to make heavy urban traffic worse. On the other hand, I don’t particularly object to cyclists in rural or residential settings provided they don’t act like god’s own gift to transportation as they gasp along and stay off to the side and behave as if they understand that 3000 lbs of steel might have a bit of an advantage in any kinetic experiments that might come up.**

Those conditions given, this leaves a third circumstance, highway riders. Highway riders here are the lone and sole exception where I would accept a bike lane, because the miserable piles of panting stupidity are already there, and on many of the roads here in Los Alamos, are vastly more dangerous than their urban counterparts. A lane to contain them might, theoretically at least, ease tensions and extend the life of my car’s brakes. As it is, there is no shoulder for these sweaty asses, forcing their insipid hobby on the rest of us, to force cars on to, or to use themselves. There’s line, 6″ of pavement past that, gravel, ditch. Or worse, line, 6″ pavement, barricade, cliff face. And on top of that, there are blind corners on these roads, which, being highways, are traversed at 50+ MPH.

For as much as I enjoy spirited driving, the number of times I’ve had the anti-lock system kick in for play is utterly dwarfed by the number of times I’ve had to slam the stop button as I come up on some miserable gasping 40 year old child dressed as if he was raped at a rave in my lane with something large and unyielding coming at me at said 50 MPH in the other lane leaving me nowhere to go but court, the hospital, or for clean shorts and new tires. So, exceedingly grudgingly, I think bike lanes in these places could be an improvement.

And hey, as long as we’re widening the road, how bout we just make it two lanes in each direction so we’ve actually got chance to pass the legion of Los Alamos drivers who were apparently told that the detonator to a hidden nuke is under their gas pedal and couldn’t find the speed limit with the entire cast and production team from Top Gear in the car? I mean as long as we’re “solving” problems, could we at least actually solve one?

*164 characters not including the *. Suck it tweet-twits.
**The counterexample to this inoffensive type is a particular strain of fuckwaffle that says “Oh, everybody is going slow! I’m just like a regular car now and can ride in the middle of the road and not use any signals or obey stop signs!”. The extreme version of this is one I’ve seen more than once, where the asscunting jackwagon, blissful expression and all, was using the space inside the double yellow line as a bike lane.