A quibble
Saying “weather is not climate” or “the plural of anecdote is not data” is like saying “the plural of tree is not forest.”
Well, it might be. How many trees we talking about?
March 5, 2008 — 6:37 am
Comments: 11
Green crystallized dead Russian mouse mineral thing
In geology, a pseudomorph is a mineral that takes on the shape of another mineral (or other object) by infiltration or incrustation. Petrified wood is an example, where the form of the original wood (right down to the cellular structure) has been replaced over time by minerals.
This here thing? It’s a mouse that has been partially incrusted with chalcanthite and atacamite. Where did it come from? Is it ancient? I don’t know! I found it years ago, while surfing the web for limonite pseudomorphs (for entirely personal reasons). It’s from the Fursman Mineralogical Museum in Moscow. Please to click the link and see it in its natural green.
When talk turned to Russia and Pravda and Lenin’s tomb and assorted other dead things — the internet today, for example — I naturally thought of my friend, green crystallized dead Russian mouse mineral thing.
February 26, 2008 — 4:09 pm
Comments: 26
Ewwww…
The team of nine students instructed volunteers to take a bite of a wheat cracker and dip the cracker for three seconds into about a tablespoon of a test dip. They then repeated the process with new crackers, for a total of either three or six double dips per dip sample. The team then analyzed the remaining dip and counted the number of aerobic bacteria in it. They didn’t determine whether any of the bacteria were harmful, and didn’t count anaerobic bacteria, which are harder to culture, or viruses.
[…]
On average, the students found that three to six double dips transferred about 10,000 bacteria from the eater’s mouth to the remaining dip. Each cracker picked up between one and two grams of dip. That means that sporadic double dipping in a cup of dip would transfer at least
50 to 100 bacteria from one mouth to another with every bite.
January 31, 2008 — 8:28 pm
Comments: 10
Is it chilly in here, or is it just me?
Brrrr…somebody throw another environmentalist on the fire…!
November 6, 2007 — 7:17 am
Comments: 9
Give us your nerds, your geeks, your poindexters
The head of our Research division gave a talk the other day. He’s having a hard time getting our labs fully staffed because of a shortage of H-1B visas. That’s the one they call the “highly qualified” visa, though that isn’t exactly accurate; it’s technically a “specialty occupations” visa. Congress has recently throttled back on them, from a cap of 190K down to 65K.
To which I can only say — you have GOT to be fucking KIDDING me! They’re trying to jam twenty million sullen agripeasants down our throats but can’t be arsed to poach a hundred thousand of the world’s smartest people?
Our laboratories are like the U-freaking-N up in there; I assume it’s that way in research labs across the country. Lots of Indians and Chinese, but we’ve nicked a fair number of Europeans and other exotics, too. I’ve worked with dozens of them over the years. I don’t care where they come from, these people make fantastic Americans! They’re smart, enthused and grateful.
I know, I know…IT types scream bloody murder about H-1B visas. Screw ’em. Apologies if any of you are corporate IT types, but in my two-decades-and-a-bit driving a desk, I never met one that wasn’t grossly overpaid and underperforming. And arrogant about it. Bill Gates is not proof God wants half-assed incompetent computer geeks to rule the world, okay?
Brain drain on the rest of the world? Fucking A! That’s the beauty of it! Continued American hegemony by absorption. We build a country smart people want to live in and then invite them to come live in it.
So what say we propose no cap on H-1B visas. None. Send them all — we’ll take them! And make it a path to citizenship (the current visa is six years and you’re out). I think it’s a winning antidote to the racism charge that got hung ’round our necks after that stupid immigration bill fiasco. Shoot, send in the Mexican PhDs, too!
Slogans? How about, “we judge no man by the color of his skin, but of the quality of his resume”? Hm.
We’re elitists, not bigots. Hm.
Not racists — snobs!
September 27, 2007 — 9:44 am
Comments: 20
A faceful of moonbattery
I once subscribed to a short — eight or twelve page (magazines always come in fours) — weekly science magazine that I liked a lot. Written for the layman, but not insulting. One or two paragraphs each on that week’s science headlines. I thought it was called “Science Digest,” so naturally I checked the obvious science digest dot org. I was surprised to find myself slapped in the face with these leading stories:
A STRATEGY of GENOCIDE and the DESTRUCTION of a CIVILIZATION: The American Paradigm for Democracy and Freedom
THE ZIONIST IN GOVERNMENT: A THREAT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY OF THE UNITED STATES
THE HIJACKING OF THE UNITED STATES BY THE PROPONENTS of the POLICIES of the PENTATEUCH: The Importation of Terrorism into the United States
“THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES”: A Paradigm of US Foreign Policy: ZIONISM: An Analysis of United States Foreign Policy in the Middle East
AMERICAN STYLE “DEMOCRACY”: THE CREATION of a NARCO-STATE in AFGHANISTAN
TERRORISTS or FREEDOM FIGHTERS?
INTERNATIONAL HUMAN ORGAN TRAFFIC OPERATED OUT OF ISRAEL
Ahem. Wooee! It’s like Mister Wizard meets Ward Churchill. What is it about Jews that makes people so gosh-darned nutty?
It’s obviously a labor of love for one author; one angry, bitter, not-fun-at-parties little mammal. The guy who registered the URL — for a ten-year chunk — has only one other Google hit: part-time high school science teacher. The rest of the site is pretty orthodox math-and-astronomy stuff. Er, well there was this:
THE EMPIRE OF EVIL and THE EXPLORATION OF SPACE
Let us hope that our attempts to reach other planets continues to meet with failure; that they remain far beyond our vitiating reach, until we purge ourselves of hate and greed and intolerance. Then we are ready to reach out beyond our own planet.
Not exactly the upbeat, breathless, gee-whiz style of science reporting so beloved of weasels.
Wikipedia says there once was a print magazine called Science Digest. It was similar to Reader’s Digest. That’s not the one I was thinking of. My magazine was called Science News and does, indeed, have an online version.
Eh. I almost hate to burn a good moonbat graphic for this feelth.
August 28, 2007 — 7:21 pm
Comments: 53
An embarrassment of riches
Meh. Kind of got jammed up today. But I’ll never let you down — you, my imaginary friends who live in the computer. When I’m in a hurry and I need a dose of teh crazy in a hurry, I always turn to Pravda.
Yes, that Pravda.
Well, sort of that Pravda. The original house organ of the Soviet Union was shuttered by Boris Yeltsin in 1991. A few weeks later, the people who had written for the original registered a brand new paper, also called Pravda. Several years after that, there was a schism, and the majority of the original writers left the paper to start an online version, Pravda.ru. The paper and website currently have little to do with each other.
The website — which, glory be, has an English version — is a smorgasbord of crank and sleaze. Batboy would be embarrassed to appear in its pages. It is virulently anti-American and pro-UFO. Today, for example, I could choose between the following delectible morsels of cheez:
Huge oceans underneath Earth’s surface caused global flood in times of Noah… Soviet Union witnessed invasion of US-made UFOs in 1980s… George W. Bush may not live up to his mandate end due to Tecumseh’s curse… Man splashes sulfuric acid in his lover’s face, begging her to marry him… Virtual sex in Russia advances from silly chat rooms to USB vibrators… Two brothers get too drunk on their father’s funeral and forget to bury his body… Man dismembers his friend and sends his body parts to different regions… Five-year-old girl perversely murdered by elusive Siberian maniac… BBC: British Bullshit Corporation… Okay, I’m kind of persuaded by that last one.
The Opinion Page is so consumed with America hating, it’s actually running these two pieces consecutively: Is the USA a bully? followed by Is America a Bully? Seems to me there might be some editorial overlap.
Let’s go with Mysterious dwarfish alien brutally murdered in Russia’s remote village. It’s from their science page. There’s a flurry of stories on this one; I’ll see if I can piece it back together in chronological order.
An old lady named Tamara Prosvirina found a dwarf in the woods near the village of Kaolinovy. She named him Alioshenka. Her daughter in law saw this creature and described it thusly:
“I used to visit my mother-in-law twice a week. She was living on her own. On that day I brought her foodstuffs just like I did before. I was about to leave when she told me: ‘We’d better give some food to the baby too.’ Then she showed me to the bed. I took a closer look at it and saw him. He was on top the bed, squeaking some funny sounds. I could see his mouth shaped like a small pipe. His tiny scarlet tongue was moving. I also spotted two teeth inside. In a way, he looked like a little baby. His head was brown, and his body looked gray. I didn’t see any eyelids. He didn’t have any genitals either. His head looked like an onion. And the pupils of his eyes were widening and narrowing just like the cat’s eyes do when you turn on the light and turn it off again several times in a row. The fingers on his hands and feet were pretty long. I only bothered to ask my mother-in-law where on earth she’d got the monster from. She told me she’d found him in the forest. She kept calling him ‘Alioshenka.’ She gave him a candy and he started sucking on it. I thought it was some kind of animal.
[…]
“He was giving off that smell, you know, one of a kind. You can’t take it for any other smell. Actually, the smell was pretty agreeable yet somewhat nauseous at the same time. And he didn’t pass any liquid or solid waste matter. He was sweating, and that was all. I saw the mother-in-law wipe the sweat off his face with a rag,” Tamara added.
The old lady told her neighbors about Alioshenka, and they called an ambulence. Seems she had a history of teh crazy. The guys in white coats described her guest as a cat in a bundle of rags. They left it behind.
While she was in the nuthatch, her family leased her home to a Vladimir Nurtdinov. He found the alien, now dead, and thought it looked cool. Like an alien. So he put it on the roof of the garage to dry out. As you do.
Later he was picked up on suspicion of stealing wire, so he blurted out that he had a dessicated alien on top of his garage. As you do.
The authorities assumed what they had was just another a self-induced, late-term abortion and turned it over to a pathologist. At autopsy, he concluded that it had died violently from a blow to the head, and it was Not Of This World. Its skull had four plates and a human’s has eight. Plus, DNA confirmed it was some kind of weird shit.
Men describing themselves as ufologists introduced themselves to the authorities at this point and confiscated Slim Jim. Turns out they were…well, nobody knows, but they vanished with Alioshka and all that’s left is police videotape and a little piece of alien jerky that somehow fell into the hands of a Japanese film crew.
The old lady was due to tell her story under hypnosis when she was fatally run down crossing the street in a town that sees maybe one car a day. Her relatives are sure it was murder. Two men who investigated the scene have also fallen ill or died mysteriously. More here.
See also Russian fishermen catch squeaking alien and eat it. And Did George Bush bully squeaking alien and then eat it?
Yeah. I made the last one up.
April 11, 2007 — 6:39 pm
Comments: 5
Speaking of Global Positioning Systems…
I just read a weird article in the International Herald Tribune about global positioning systems. Russia, among others, intends to throw up its own GPS satellite network to compete with the US system.
MOSCOW: The days of their Cold War may have passed, but Russia and the United States are in the midst of another battle – this one a technological fight over the future of America’s Global Positioning System, or GPS.
Fight over the future? Say what? Russia is putting up more satellites. More satellites means more accuracy and better coverage (if handheld makers choose to add a chip to read Glonass signals). Multiple systems happily coexist.
But what is also behind the battle for control of navigation technology is a fear that the United States could use its monopoly – the system was developed and is controlled by the military, after all – to switch off signals in a time of crisis.
Well, I guess. Before 2000, the US military did alter the signal, making civilian receivers less accurate than military ones. But today — as the article observes — GPS navigation has become vital. It would have to be a gigantic crisis before we did something that impaired the navigation of our own ambulance crews and search-and-rescue operations at home. If we were in a crisis serious enough to fuck with the whole world’s GPS navigation, that’s probably a crisis serious enough for all sorts of scary shit to shake loose. I don’t see it happening short of Armageddon.
When that happens, countries that choose to rely only on GPS, he said, would be falling into “a geopolitical trap” of American dominance of an important Internet-age infrastructure. The United States could theoretically deny navigation signals in countries like Iran or North Korea not just in time of war, but as a high-tech form of economic sanction that could wreak havoc on power grids, banking and other industries, he said.
I know of no way satellite signals can be selectively denied within specific geographic boundaries. We could mess with the whole signal, as was done before 2000, or a whole hemisphere, I guess. But I don’t know how you’d blackout one country. It’s everybody or nobody, and blocking everybody would be huge. [Correction: McGoo says it can be done over selective regions. And he actually seems to know what he’s talking about, which is a little spooky.] But I love the description of our era as the “Internet-age” — yeah, say, where did that Internet thing come from again?
The Russian project, of course, carries wide implications for militaries around the world by providing a navigation system not controlled by the Pentagon, complementing Moscow’s recently more assertive foreign policy stance.
You mean the purpose of the system is to provide signal to countries at war with America. Swell. It’s a good thing the whole article is nonsense. [Except apparently it isn’t nonsense, so this is even sweller. Here’s why the Russians and Chinese have a hair across their collective ass.]
The United States formally opened GPS to civilian users in 1993 by promising to provide it continually and for free around the world.
You’re welcome. Oh, wait…that wasn’t a thank you? Okay, this is like that Internet thing, isn’t it? We build it and pay for it and give it to you for free, and you bitch and whine that you don’t control it. Trust Russia instead. Good plan. You know they’ll do the right thing in a ‘crisis.’
“The network must be impeccable, better than GPS, and cheaper if we want clients to choose Glonass,” Putin said last month at a government meeting on Glonass, according to Interfax.
Cheaper than free? How does that work? It’s worth mentioning here that the Europeans embarked on their own version, Galileo, but abandoned it when the financiers decided they wouldn’t get their money back. Yeah. They were going to charge for it.
Look, I’m flailing around for a way of describing how stupid this article is. GPS satellites don’t “compete” in any meaningful sense. We’d be out nothing if the makers of GPS receivers decided to switch entirely over to the Russian system instead — other than being held hostage to a similar “geopolitical trap,” this one under the control of a sociopathic thug. We don’t make anything off providing the positioning signal. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The people who do make money — the manufacturers of GPS receivers, most of whom are American — benefit from an increased number of satellites in the air, assuming the extra accuracy and coverage is worth incorporating the chips needed to read new signals. It’s certainly a net plus for consumers (remember those blank spots in my breadcrumb trail?) It should be easy enough to build receivers that will read signal from all the navigation satellites, if the owners allow it (the Chinese are working on a system, too). The only possible advantage to do-it-yourself global positioning tech is the military one, and it’s lame.
April 4, 2007 — 10:11 am
Comments: 15
Tell me a story, Dr Fang
Okay, now I feel bad for dissing scientists. The ones I’ve known all share at least one excellent characteristic: they’re natural born explainers. No scientist would dream of letting me draw something until he was sure I had a basic grasp of the science.
This probably does result in a slightly better illustration than they could’ve squeezed out of me otherwise, but I don’t think that’s why they do it. They do it because they can’t stand to be around ignorance. And for the sheer joy of explaining things.
To do science takes all sort of depth and, like, math and stuff. But the underlying concepts are usually pretty accessible. All you need is one excitable scientist with a pencil and a lunch napkin. Some of the top scientists in their respective fields have sat at my workstation and told me stories. Lordy, I love that.
My favorite scientist was an elderly Chinese. Call him Dr Fang. Everyone hated to work with Fang, because he was a high-strung chap with a completely impenetrable accent. And yet, he was a popular public speaker on the science circuit. That’s because he was fizzing with excitement. Old Fang was chuffed to buggery about science. But it was especially important for him to have good art, because otherwise no-one could tell what he was gabbling so happily about.
I always got stuck with him, because I have a good ear for Chinglish (and Indianglish, for that matter). Being, as most Chinese are, a fun-sized human being, Fang could barely peer over my head as I sat at the work station and he stood behind my chair barking instructions.
“Make it blue! No, make it yellow! No, make it green! No, blue! No, delete the whole thing! Ahahahaha! No, bring it back again!” That last order was especially off-pissing, as the software we had then didn’t undo.
I never heard how Fang got to the States. But the first time he was allowed back into China to visit his family, they had been disappeared. People, furniture…everything gone. Nothing was left but empty houses. Next trip, everything was back where it should be and no-one would talk about it. Spooky place, China.
On one of those trips, he brought me back this piece of artwork. He says these are ubiquitous in rural homes in China (he didn’t actually use the words “ubiquitous” or “rural” — I think his soft palate would’ve exploded). It’s a thin, translucent sheet of black and white marble and something that looks very like a Chinese ink painting of a landscape can be picked out of the dark streaks. An appropriate poem is painted on them. I asked what my poem was, and Fang said, “Ohhhh, I dunno. Rain, somethingsomethingsomething.”
He carried that thing in his hand-luggage all the way from China so it wouldn’t break. Very touching.
Dr Fang died this year. I was shocked. I didn’t even know he was ill. He retired several years ago, but he kept an office in our building and he was working on a book. I’d seen him around.
I hope he finished his book. I wouldn’t be able to read it, but he knew more about the thing he knew about than anyone in the world, they say.
Goodnight, Dr Fang. I shall forever hear your voice in the “rain, somethingsomethingsomething.”
March 9, 2007 — 8:20 am
Comments: 4
Damien Weasel, Cat Scientist (episode two, hydrology)
Damien is an ordinary gray stripey tom, but it’s interesting how much he shares with bengals. Bengals are a mix of some South American wild cat and ordinary gray stripeys…but I wonder how many of their famous weirdnesses they actually owe to the domestic side of their heritage? Damien’s fascination with water isn’t quite as powerful as a bengal’s, but I have to scrape him out of the sink to brush my teeth.
There’s a Norwegian guy on YouTube who’s filmed his bengals a lot. He caught them making peculiar chattering noises at birds out the window. Damien does this, too. I think of it as mimeenking — it sounds like he’s saying “mee…mee.” The “M” sound is rather hard for cats, as I learned when I caught my mother trying to teach the family cat to say “Mama.” It’s a noise Damien makes when he knows he can’t reach something interesting; like a fly buzzing around at ceiling level, or me, tapping on the window from outside. It’s a frustration sound.
March 6, 2007 — 8:06 am
Comments: 17