Stare at this for long enough and you, too, will discover true happiness. I could play with it for hours, coaxing the flighty little niblets into cute little calligraphic patterns...I could, and I did.
Have you heard of Donald 'Gollum' Luskin? He works for the National Review Online, apparently. And he claims to be a blogger. He also stalks economist and New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman. And he's stupid, and smells funny. Also, his mother hates him. So does his cat. He is threatening uber-blogger Atrios with a frivolous libel suit, after Atrios used the word 'stalker' in a Luskin-related post's title, after Luskin even referred to himself that way in one of his own articles. Oh, and Atrios's commenters were rude to him. Because Luskin enjoys being anally violated by ostriches, wearing hip waders and smeared with dung. Everyone knows it. The consensus seems to be that Lusky wants to dig up and expose Atrios's real name. (What? You mean he isn't really called Atrios?)
The Poor Man gives this legal action the treatment it deserves.
I have 'In the Aeroplane over the Sea' by Neutral Milk Hotel stuck in my head. It's sort of like you're having a bad yet oddly pretty dream in gritty black and white, involving an ocean, and possibly dying in it. Maybe this aeroplane flies into the sea. Or maybe there is no aeroplane at all. Chew on that one for a while.
Damn you, indy rock, for being so darned catchy!
Chum is a sort of bait made of ground-up, oily fish, spread across the water.
Maybe you've heard of this Gregg Easterbrook character. Apparently he's some kind of a journalist. He used to write a column for someone, but then they fired him, and he hated Kill Bill, so he probably deserved it. Anyhow. Apparently he has some kind of blog thing of his own, and apparently he says a lot of stupid things.
Like this, here. This is a very stupid thing to say.
As you may or may not have noticed, I get very stroppy indeed when people start abusing science in defence of theology. Or try to equate the two. This Easterbrook character is doing precisely that, in a particularly smug and head-up-the-arsey way. It annoys me greatly.
And I am not alone! He has already been savaged by Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber, mauled at The Loom, and severely inconvenienced by Atrios. But he could still use an extra helping of abuse, and I am just the spoon to serve it up. With a healthy side of ridicule. And peas.
The thrust of the thing seems to be that Gregg Easterbrook doesn't understand string theory or quantum mechanics, thinks physics is silly, and pooh-poohs foolish 'scientists' for swallowing such things while rejecting the blatant revealed truth of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus H. Christ. He doesn't phrase it in quite such blatantly Bible-thumping terms, but he goes on about 'spiritual planes' in a way that's quite unmistakable: he's trying to seem like a rational, urbane, sophisticated, intellectual sort, but just beneath the surface there's a rabid God-boy just waiting to writhe out and start organising youth groups.
Now, it is not impossible, by any stretch of the imagination, for religious people to get science. It is far, far, far from impossible for scientists to be religious. Believing in God or a soul or something of that nature doesn't automatically make someone a giggling ninny. (Nor does being an atheist automatically make someone sensible, rational, benevolent, wise, and fun at parties.) However, being dogmatic and wilfully ignorant and intellectually dishonest does make someone a giggling ninny. Therefore, Gregg Easterbrook is a giggling ninny.
He's attempting to write about physics while clearly not knowing anything whatsoever about it. He admits in his very first paragraph that he doesn't understand the stuff he's discussing. Why does he keep talking? I asked myself that question again and again. Why, oh why? It's not that he's even interested in string theory or quantum mechanics. He doesn't give a fig. The facts he tries to flash around to boost his street cred are just plain wrong. I will now list these.
He claims superstring theory involves ten unobservable dimensions. This is false. Four of the dimensions in all string theories are the three spatial and one temporal dimension(s) we see around us. In the ten-dimensional versions, it's the other six that are compactified away out of sight. It's a really basic point; I don't know how Easterbrook could have misrepresented it in that way unless he'd just heard 'ten dimensions' somewhere and never bothered to find out any more.
He claims the very idea of other dimensions is 'mushy' and without any evidence. This is false. The idea is mathematically very precise and very well-defined, and while there aren't yet direct measurements in its favour, it makes a lot of sense in the context of the physical theories involved. Furthermore, on high enough energy scales, the idea is testable; physicists aren't just pulling this stuff out of their asses.
He conflates 'other dimensions' with 'other universes', and string theory with cosmology. Like so:
To make things mushier, many theories hold that other dimensions or other universes will always be impossible to detect, perhaps because they are moving away from us at the speed of light.
'Other dimensions' and 'other universes' are completely different concepts, outside the world of Star Trek. A dimension is not a place; it is a degree of freedom in the universe we live in. Here Easterbrook is vaguely recalling a cosmological idea with nothing to do with strings or other dimensions. The universe is expanding, space stretching so that galaxies see one another, by and large, receding; the farther away two points are from one another, the more quickly they will each see the other recede. Light from one has an uphill battle to make it to the other, since the distance it has to cross keeps increasing. When two points are far enough apart, light can't make it at all; the distance is increasing faster than light can keep up. These points can't observe each other. This is pretty clearly what Easterbrook was thinking of, though it doesn't connect to anything he's been talking about in the way he claims.
Then he suggests other dimensions play a role in the production of particles in an accelerator. They don't, and no-one, to my knowledge, has claimed otherwise. I think Easterbrook was just glomming around for cool-sounding buzzwords like 'virtual particles' so he'd sound like he knew things.
Then, after spewing tripe for a few paragraphs, he finally gets to his point. Ooh, other dimensions, aren't these silly? Aren't I sophisticated for pointing out this silliness? Doesn't the 'spiritual dimension' sound ever so reasonable now? Aren't I clever? Aren't I cute? Don't you love my dress? I just got a manicure! I'm dating a football player. I'm bound to be the Homecoming Queen now!
Or words to that effect.
If Easterbrook wants to talk theology, that's fine. That's great. There are whole departments devoted to it at Ivy League schools. Lots of physicists like to talk about that sort of thing, too. But if Easterbrook wants to be smug and airheaded and distort the truth to make pointless points, he should expect to be slapped around like a little bitch and left to cry.
Now, if you'll excuse me, 'The Elegant Universe' is on PBS.
As the knives come out for the hapless Iain Duncan Smith, I think we should all pause for a moment and reflect on how entertaining it would be if he were succeeded as Tory leader by Michael Portillo, who, carried away by the boisterous good spirits surrounding his ascension to power, then snogged Chris Morris on national television.
Good times...
The Guardian has a lot of pictures about of Iain Duncan Smith looking like a turnip. But then, doesn't everyone?
I am a full day's supply of beryllium sorbet.
It's almost November. You know what that means...
It's almost National Novel Writing Month!
What is National Novel Writing Month, you ask?
Why, it is a month. For writing novels. Nationally.
It's a convenient excuse, is what it is. For all the frustrated writers out there, who find themselves busily doing something non-writerly in their diurnal lives. People like me. People who would really, really like to be writers, but have day jobs. People who, in the ordinary run of things, don't quite seem to find the time, on any regular basis, to put pen to paper and let rip. So to speak. National Novel Writing Month is a great excuse. Instead of relying on your own (nonexistent) self-motivational powers, dedication, and will, pretend it's an obligation! Compete in word-count with your friends. Feel sad and shifty if you fall behind. Drive yourself into caffeinated frenzies to meet a looming, immediate, panic-inducing deadline! Make yourself feel better about de-prioritising work, because you know lots of other people are doing it too.
There is strength in numbers.
NaNoWriMo is a good experience...I did it last year, and the pressure did spur me on to greater feats of production than I had ever managed before. I find it is absolutely impossible to devote time to creative activity in any systematic way while I have other, paycheque-related obligations unless I have this sort of crutch, or whatever you'd like to call it. This is quite possibly because I am not, and probably will never be, a real writer. Even so, I enjoy trying. It takes me out of my mathematical rut. It gives other portions of my brain a workout for a change. I get to feel productive and unique and artistic, one month out of the year. I get to indulge my deepest darkest fantasies.
Yes, my deepest, darkest fantasies involve writing.
No, that isn't lame.
Well, the same to you, buddy.
Anyhow.
NaNoWriMo: it's a jolly good lark! Let the power of deadlines work for you for a change!
I think this year I might try to write a love story about Alaska. Or possibly not.
Apparently 'LaCrosse' is a slang term for whacking it among Francophone teens in Quebec.
Who knew?
Well, it shouldn't really be a surprise. Every word and phrase in every human language is a slang term for whacking it, if you say it properly.
Say, have you heard about the movie Bubba Ho-Tep? Starring Bruce Campbell as a geriatric Elvis, confined to a rest home with a cancerous growth on his hog? And Ossie Davis as an elderly black man who believes himself to be JFK, cleverly dyed by the evil Lyndon Johnson to hide the truth? Who find that an ancient, cursed Egyptian mummy in cowboy clothes, Bubba Ho-Tep, is stalking the rest home at night, feeding off the residents' souls, which it sucks out through their aged, withered bungholes?
It's good.
It's a comedy, as perhaps you might have gathered. You might imagine, from this brief synopsis, that it is wacky, or madcap, or silly, silly, silly. The funny thing is that it isn't, really. Sure, the premise and plot are, on the face of it, absurd. And it's funny; it has one or two incontinence jokes, to be sure. But it isn't just schtick. Old, incontinent, walker-equipped Elvis (and Bruce Campbell does a very good Elvis) is funny, but also sad; he's old, his life is over, and he's full of regrets. There is more to his character than just the silly-silly dimension. And JFK winds up being, of all things, dignified; it is hard to imagine, I know, but there you are. He's Ossie Davis; he has gravity.
It's an aggressive sort of comedy; aggressive enough to film a scene or two with a genuine horror feel. And to do some pretty good makeup. There's an attention to detail. It reminded me a bit of Being John Malkovich.
Only with more mummy.
I have hooked my roommate on Indie Pop Rocks.
Next I will get him hooked on crack.
Indie Pop Rocks, a service of SomaFM, plays Of Montreal fairly regularly. The college station back at the University of Iowa used to play their 'Ira's Brief Life as a Spider'. It brings back memories. So does urinating against garages.
God damn you, Doritos. God damn you right to Hell, thou simplices of suffering! Wedges of wickedness, thou!
I had the stupidest gosh-darned nightmare in the entire cosmos Friday morning. I was in a vast house, or hall, or keep; I lived there. There were many servants. Many floors. On a lower floor, there was a telephone, an older one, corded, white but smudged by the greasy paw of Time. There was also a little Caller ID box. This Caller ID box did not, however, actually identify callers. Instead, it told you who the caller had been calling. I happened to be downstairs, and checked this phone, and found a truly inordinate number of calls on it, all directed to one of my servants, the downstairs maid. I checked the messages; they were all telemarketers. They were all the same message, an automated sales call of some sort. I deleted them, and blocked anyone from calling the downstairs maid again; no servant was getting a free ride off of my telephone. But then more calls started to come in, to another servant, all the same message; I tried to delete them, and blocked that name, too. I looked away for just a moment, and suddenly there were fifty new calls, to different servants, and my voicemail was completely full of these mechanical messages. I tried blocking and blocking and blocking, but I couldn't make them stop. I began to panic. My heart pounded. The calls kept coming. I tried to switch the phone off; I tried to unplug it; I pulled it off the table, and smashed it, and ripped huge handfuls of colour-coded wiring from it, but it kept ringing and ringing and ringing with these calls, these automated sales calls...
Nothing could make the telemarketers stop.
I woke up on my side, shaking, my hands clenched into fists, emitting tiny half-paralysed moans of terror.
Then I realised that this had been the fucking lamest nightmare in the history of fucking lame, and also that we have the National Do Not Call Registry now.
Normally I have a lot of respect for my subconscious and all the wonderful things it does for me, but this time...I feel really let down.
My gosh, get a load of these grotesquely ugly fish!
I will never confuse 'grenadier' with 'grenadine' again.
George Smitherman, Ontario's incoming Health Minister, is openly gay.
I just think that's cool, is all.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that something existed--a force, an influence, a state of being, an entity, whatever--that could not be understood through science and logical reasoning. Call it Mr Jelly. Leave aside the question of what we would mean by asserting that such a thing as Mr Jelly existed at all; adopt a convenient definition of existence, and play along. What would this mean?
Now, note that this hypothesis is very rigid. For whatever reasons, Mr Jelly is not comprehensible by any scientific means whatsoever. There is, we're assuming, absolutely no way whatsoever to describe the behaviour of Mr Jelly--in so far as such a thing could be said to exhibit behaviour at all--reliably in objective terms, no way to quantify or measure Mr Jelly, no way to collect empirical data on Mr Jelly and with it test, refute, and refine hypotheses on the deeper nature and structure of Mr Jelly.
Mr Jelly cannot be seen, heard, touched; but that's not so bad. There are plenty of other unseeable, unhearable, untouchable things whose existence we accept. Gamma radiation. Quaternions. Thomas Pynchon.
But that's not all. Things like gamma radiation, quaternions, and Thomas Pynchon, though not directly apprehensible to our senses, nevertheless influence the world in ways we can observe. We can build Compton Gamma Ray Observatories, formulate theorems, and read novels. Our hypothesis is that this is not the case with Mr Jelly. However Mr Jelly interacts with the rest of the universe, it is, for some reason or another, intrinsically unmeasurable. This is problematic. How could Mr Jelly interact with the rest of the cosmos under these conditions?
Perhaps Mr Jelly doesn't interact with the observable universe at all. Though, in this case, it'd be mighty hard to work out what you mean when you say 'Mr Jelly exists.'
Perhaps Mr Jelly does interact with it, but in ways that carry absolutely no signature of Mr Jelly-ness: there might be no way to distinguish between something experiencing a Mr Jelly interaction and something experiencing some more comprehensible, banal, workaday phenomenon, like gravity, or seasonal unemployment. Though in this case, there's the embarassing possibility that someone might attribute to Mr Jelly the completely innocuous works of gravity or seasonal unemployment.
Perhaps Mr Jelly interacts, but in intrinsically unquantifiable ways. That is, an interaction with Mr Jelly might be a completely subjective thing, unrepeatable, unverifiable, each one unique, forming no statistical pattern or trend. There are a number of (almost) completely subjective things in this world whose existence we accept, so this does not seem too unreasonable. Until we consider what these other completely subjective things are. Like temporal lobe epilepsy. And bad acid trips. And dreams. And schizophrenia. (These have comprehensible, measurable causes, but the experiences themselves are, I think we can agree, not fully communicable to anyone who hasn't had them.) We normally associate such things with delusional states and distorted perceptions. What if we accidentally attribute to Mr Jelly the results of an organic brain disorder?
Perhaps, again, Mr Jelly interacts in ways that can be understood, but only if one first undergoes a very specific sort of interaction with Mr Jelly. That is, perhaps there are certain specific people, call them the Jelly Gang, who have had some kind of direct personal experience of Mr Jelly that has revealed to them the glorious workings of Mr Jelly-ness, which they attempt to explain to the rest of the population. The Jelly Gang can make firm and authoritative statements on all Mr Jelly-esque things, having directly experienced the truth of what they are saying, but cannot offer up verifiable data: the only way to know that what the Jelly Gang says is true is to experience the full Jellified truth of it yourself in a way which can't be quantified or described. But there's no way to predict when or how such an experience will come about, or how to get one, or else we'd have a piece of empirical scientific data on Mr Jelly, and we don't and can't. But how is anyone who isn't in the Jelly Gang supposed to know the Gang is telling the truth? Especially if there is also a Jam Gang, making similar yet irreconcilable statements about another unobservable quality called Miss Jam? And the Jam Gang and the Jelly Gang both claim that their completely subjective and non-repeatable experiences of Miss Jam and Mr Jelly have convinced them that the other Gang's experiences were false, perhaps due to something like our old friend organic brain disorder?
In case you haven't cottoned on, I'm actually talking about God here, and I'm claiming He is pretty much a crock. (I'm trying to be polite tonight, so I omitted from that last sentence the prepositional phrase 'of shit.') I'm also talking about Intelligent Design, and Young-Earth Creationism, and Republicanism. Pretty much anything faith-based, in fact. If you cannot produce some kind of replicable, patterned, scientific data on a phenomenon, how do you know this phenomenon exists? How do you know you aren't just smoking crack when you think you've had the truth dropped into your lap? What does it mean to claim something exists, even, if there's no objective way to verify it somehow?
If God exists, he's going to show up on a God-o-meter some day. If you can never, ever, ever measure Him, even indirectly, then He just isn't there.
This rant was provoked by a poster I've seen up on the Math Department lately, advertising a lecture soon to be given here by the Director of the Vatican Observatory. While his topic sounds reasonable on the surface--a dialogue between religion and science when both give up their idolatries--it is, on a more fundamental level, total bunk. The Director claims that the idolatry of science is to believe science is the only path to true knowledge. I would argue that, by any reasonable standard of knowledge and truth, it is. If you can think of any other way to tell the difference between an external event and delusion, I would love to hear it.
I would like to give people temporal lobe epilepsy for a living.
The leaders of the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives on Thursday actually managed to come to an agreement on uniting into a single Conservative Party of Canada. I was taken my surprise. But then, that's the story of my life, really. It was not a smooth process; when I'd checked up on things last week, Peter MacKay and Stephen Harper were trading barbs and meetings were disintegrating into abject fruitlessness. You can find a fairly comprehensive sort of historical survey of the process here, thanks to those good folk at the CBC. About a quarter of the Tory membership is said to be vehemently opposed to the merger, including a former party leader (though it is only Joe Clark) and a leadership candidate. But in the end, the deal will be sold; it is the only sensible course of action for the two parties. The Liberal Party is a juggernaut, a big honking eighteen-wheeled poly-articulated road hog, driving which Jean Chretien has crushed all who stand against him like skunks beneath his tires.
The Conservative Alliance no longer stood a chance against such a force, if indeed it ever did. As I may have mentioned before, the Alliance is a party of freakish socially-retarded bumpkins. Their brand of social conservativism hasn't played outside the West. Thank Dog. They're historically homophobic, vaguely racist, anti-immigrant, religious, pro-capital punishment, anti-social services, anti-abortion rights, and basically Republicans. Oh, and they're anti-Quebec. They were born of a fire-and-brimstone evangelical prairie populist demagoguery, evolving from the Reform Party of Preston Manning, who was in turn the son of the Bible-thumping Social Credit Premier E. C. Manning. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this sort of regional politics hasn't played outside its region. I believe it is true that the Alliance has never elected an MP east of Manitoba. And they weren't about to start, either. Their support had peaked, and they'd milked their regional base for all they could. The Alliance had nowhere to go but down. They're just too creepy to be electable.
The Tories, on the other hand, just...sucked. They were haemorrhaging seats like there was no tomorrow.
A united Conservative Party of Canada does stand a better chance than either party did individually. This is because anything is more than nothing. But the Alliance's creepy factor, while perhaps diluted somewhat, will still, I think, be a force to be reckoned with. Moderate Tory voters might be pushed over into the Liberal camp, because incoming leader Paul Martin is basically their kind of guy anyhow, and they wouldn't have to worry about voting in Alliance freaks. And leftish voters who might have voted for the New Democratic Party because the Liberals aren't liberal enough might be scared into sticking with the Liberals for fear of splitting the vote and letting more Alliance freaks sneak in.
And how much electoral strength, really, will the Tories add to the Alliance? Especially if former Ontario Premier Mike 'Cut, Cut, Cut' Harris gets the Conservative leadership, the Ontario electorate who just resoundingly rejected the Tories and Harris's legacy aren't likely to warm to the new party. Quebec is out of the question. The urban parts of British Columbia, with their same-sex unions, blessed by their local Anglican church even, are unlikely to drink the Conservative Kool-Aid.
At best, the new party could become a credible opposition. Paul Martin is still going to bring the Liberals a fourth term in power. Beyond that, who can say? Given the sheer ineptitude the conservative factions have demonstrated in the past--electing Stockwell Day, for example--I don't think a fifth Liberal government would be out of the question.
Especially when it's the left-wing parties, federal and provincial, who have all the jokes and satire. The NDP has its satirical swipes at Paul Martin; the Ontario Liberals have their kittens...Oh, kitten jokes will keep Ontario in stitches for years. Premier-elect Dalton 'Kitten-Eater' McGuinty recently gave this triumphal speech:
"They said you can't win unless you run on tax cuts and we proved them wrong; they said you can't win unless you go negative and we proved them wrong; they said you can't win if your leader eats kittens and we proved them wrong."
To me, those kittens taste like another Liberal majority.
Today I solved a topology problem--I figured out how to create a homeomorphism of any connected manifold to itself moving any point to any other, arbitrary, point--by thinking about General Tommy Franks farting into a jar. Or, alternatively, lava lamps. I will draw you a picture tomorrow.
It worked much better than my original inspiration, which involved farting into goldfish bowls. And not surprisingly; farting into goldfish bowls is just silly.
Who was General Tso, and how did he obtain such ultimate mastery over chicken?
Eric Hochman has the answers. As does the Washington Post.
(Goddammit, I love the Internet.)
Yes, I like to eat dead chicken. Is that a problem?
So, baseball. Yeah. How about that? Did you see the way those guys hit that creamy orb with a stick?
I don't actually know anything about baseball, but everyone seems to be talking about it right now, and I didn't want to feel left out.
I do know how to play baseball mod 2.
There are only two bases, home and first. Only one strike and you're out, but that's not so bad, because after zero balls you get a walk. But that doesn't make things as easy as you might think, because there is only one person on each team. Or there would be one person on each team, if teams were involved. But a game of baseball mod 2 is played between zero teams. All the professional baseball mod 2 players stay at home making obscene phone calls to each other all day long.
I found the strangest thing at Safeway last night: Monty Python's Holy Grail Ale. 'Tempered over burning witches,' it says. From the Black Sheep Brewery of Yorkshire. A pale ale, sweet, lingering aftertaste, not bad. And apparently officially Python-sanctioned. I'm not quite sure what to make of that. It's the strangest damn thing. I'll photograph the bottle later, and post it up here for all to gaze upon in awe and wonder. It even bears a bit of Gilliamesque art.
UPDATE: Behold the mighty bottle.
I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey, into archaic pre-Cambrian life and cosmology.
But first, note that the first season of The Kids in the Hall is coming out on DVD.
Have you noted? Oh good. Let's carry on.
Consider this paper, which also appeared in Nature. It's motivated by studies of the temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. Like pretty much everything else in life, these fluctuations can be viewed as a sum of harmonics. It's precisely analogous to the way a sound wave can be decomposed into simpler, pure sine waves. In mathspeak, one finds a convenient orthonormal basis for the Hilbert space of functions one is studying. In this case, cosmologists are mapping microwave temperatures on the surface of a sphere, since that's all we can observe. The natural basis for functions on a sphere are the famed spherical harmonics, which are combinations of cosines and complex exponentials, and very pretty. You can plot them online here. They also inspired the science fiction novel Spherical Harmonic by Catherine Asaro, which I've been meaning to read.
Anyhow. One can break up the microwave temperature fluctuations into spherical harmonics, and use this data to evaluate cosmological models, since the temperature fluctuations stem from primordial cosmic evolution. As it transpires, the usual picture of an infinite universe runs into some trouble here. It matches very well indeed with all the higher harmonics, but diverges wildly from what's actually observed in the quadrupole, the lowest observable term. This corresponds to an absence of very long-wavelength density fluctuations in the early universe, since density fluctuations are the primary source of temperature fluctuations. In an infinite universe, this shouldn't be so; there should be no preferred length scale. The authors of the paper try to get around this by positing that space might not be infinite at all; perhaps, they say, topologically at least, the universe is the Poincare dodecahedral space.
You can imagine this as a dodecahedron, with opposite faces glued together (with a p/5 twist): if you or someone you loved happened to run into a face on the boundary of the dodecahedron, you'd find yourself coming back into the dodecahedron from the opposite face, yacked around a bit. So it's a finite space, but unbounded, like the surface of a sphere. Only weirder. Obviously, a finite space couldn't support any waves bigger than the space itself, so a finite universe like this dodecahedral space would naturally lead to the low quadrupole.
Now isn't that neat?
For some bizarre reason, last night I suddenly started to remember an article I'd read early in high school in a pop-science magazine, about bizarre, extremely primitive forms of life pre-dating the Cambrian. I couldn't for the life of me remember what they were collectively called, though. Fortunately, a little Googling saved me a lot of brain-wracking. The critters I was thinking of were the Ediacarans, from the Vendian Period. The Vendian stretched from about 605 million to 543 million years ago, an epoch practically Lovecraftian in its antiquity. For the last twenty million or so of these years, the soft-bodied beasties called Ediacarans (named after the Ediacara Hills in Australia, where a large deposit of their fossils was found) collectively thrived. Even now, no-one is entirely sure what these creatures were, since they have pronounced differences from any more familiar forms of life. They were generally floppy, blobby sorts of things, like fried eggs, modellable by a substance not unlike Jell-O. (Lovecraftian, indeed; protoplasmic, prehistoric proto-Shoggoths. Only tiny and harmless.) And then there are oddments like my personal favourite, the Tribrachidium, exhibiting a really beautiful threefold rotational symmetry, which you can see again here. What the heck were the Ediacarans? Were they jellyfish? Worms? Corals? Were they a weird dead end that died off completely in the Cambrian? Were they animals at all? A lot of them seem to have had a sort of 'quilted' surface; perhaps, one theory goes, they were composed of flattened, fluid-filled balloons, possibly filled with symbiotic algae (though probably not). It's not really clear how such soft-bodied creatures managed to leave so many fossil traces at all.
Here's an article quoting a Dr McMenamin who seems to be verging on crackpottery and bad science. Fun though blobby balloon-beasts are, how the heck could he conclude they were on the way to intelligence? They're blobs. That's pretty much all we know. Also, people disliked his book.
There are more photos here.
And more here.
Whatever they were, they were jolly strange. And that is why I like them. It's almost enough to make me take up biology...I love a mystery.
So long as it isn't a mystery like 'Where did my underpants go?' or 'Why haven't I been paid in a month and a half?'
Tom Tomorrow's latest strip brings together two things very near and dear to my heart, political satire and Batman. Though this isn't the first time, of course; the world will not soon forget Dick Cheney as the Penguin. It's the most perfect match since hazelnut butter and raspberry preserves.
I have a sick, sick desire to see these turned into Flash-based cartoon political ads. Featuring the voice of Adam West. He's not dead, you know. In fact, he has a vaguely-creepily-Bat-centric official web site. He's hosting a comedy night in Olympia soon.
You like fun, don't you? Sure you do! Then you should wander over to Chthonic Iconic to baste yourself with quirky Internet amusements. I laughed myself into some kind of funny spasm over a Flash animation. I do love Flash animations. Remember all the ones with strange Scandinavian singing, accompanied by Margaret Thatcher's head on a plate, and Rowan Atkinson cutouts dancing, and fish? It's sort of like that, artistically speaking. It is a touching story of two crippled scientists who find love: Stephen Hawking, and Davros. Everyone is touched when an unlikely couple finds happiness...So you should watch this. Watch romance blossom! Watch Davros do the washing-up! Watch a chorus of Daleks go to the pub to get exterminated! Oh, lawks...I do love Daleks.
I had a vision or flight of fancy today in Lie Groups, concerning people made of a dirty, off-ivory clay, powered by coal. One could see the dull reddish glow of it luminating up from their bellies when they opened their mouths. I had the notion that, when they needed more air to keep the coals burning suitably fiercely, a bellows might be inserted into their butts, and then worked vigorously.
This is all.
Behold the most evil eggs in all of Christendom.
You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll watch your cholesterol intake very carefully.
I just listened to the Fresh Air interview with Bill O'Reilly after reading elsewhere that O'Reilly had stormed out in a snit after reducing Terry Gross to laughter with his outrage. I just love it when O'Reilly appears in the media in a situation he doesn't control. His fight with Al Franken at the Book Expo back in the day was hilarious. This interview wasn't quite as funny, but it was still quality stuff, showing off all the things that lead me to announce, with some certainty, that Bill O'Reilly is in fact a no-talent ass-clown. In that vein, I would like to make a lengthy ad hominem attack on him now.
I hope he doesn't sue me.
The worst thing about him is the repulsive, clammy, insinuating way he passes himself off as an unbiased friend of the little guy, standing up to all the Fat Cats and Spin Doctors and so forth who are out to fleece the hard-working, honest, God-fearing folk of America, when he's guilty of every sin he accuses others of committing. His hypocrisy is staggering. In the interview, Ms Gross mentioned an unfavourable review of O'Reilly's last book that O'Reilly had gone on to mention and criticise on his programme; O'Reilly, at first, claimed that the reviewer had been attacking O'Reilly personally, rather than dealing with the book, which he found completely unacceptable. Mr O'Reilly, champion of civility and reasoned discourse, called the reviewer a 'pinhead'.
Then there's the way he passes himself off as a non-ideological problem-solver. (Along with the sickeningly folksy way he speaks, as if he's trying to convince you he's just one of the guys, not a wealthy Big Media tool. But that's neither here nor there.) I have my doubts about him. How would the practical Mr Bill respond to creeping socialism in Iraq, I wonder? The American proconsul, Grand Moff Bremer, is planning to axe Iraq's food distribution programme:
A more substantial assault on Saddam's legacy is under way in the Republican Palace, where the occupation authority is making preparations to dismantle the food distribution system which gave free rations of flour, rice, cooking oil and other staples to every Iraqi.Described by the UN as the world's most efficient food network, the system still keeps Iraqis from going hungry. But the US civilian administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer, views it as a dangerous socialist anachronism. The coalition provisional authority (CPA) is planning to abolish it in January, despite warnings from its own technical experts that this could lead to hunger and riots.
When socialism is demonstrably to the people's benefit, is Bill O'Reilly in favour of socialism? Inquiring minds want to know.
Actually, the worst thing about Bill O'Reilly may be his irrationality, hatred of logic, and anti-intellectualism. Andrew Sullivan also has this particularly loathesome quality. In the interview, O'Reilly railed against 'secularists' like the ACLU and progressives who wanted to strip spirituality out of political discourse, when, O'Reilly arsetrumpets, 'We are founded on Judeo-Christian philosophy. There's no question about that.' Curiously enough, this statement appears to be either disingenuous hyperbole, or a sign of enduring self-deception, given that the US Senate and President John Adams approved without apparent reservations this treaty, which a lot of people have been citing lately, with Tripoli declaring 'the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion'. One could claim, I suppose, that as Europe itself was dominated by Christian theology for so very long, everything stemming from the European intellectual tradition is rooted in Judeo-Christian philosophy...But that's like claiming the stock market is controlled by quantum mechanics. While it might technically speaking be true, it's completely vacuous because it's true of almost everything else also. It's not an intellectually honest thing to say.
O'Reilly also announced that he doesn't believe in the Big Bang, and thinks that the fact that Nature works reliably and consistently, with food and air and suns and all the things living creatures need all present and accounted for, is proof of the existence of God. I consider it proof that he is unwilling to attempt to understand science on even the most basic grade-school level. It's worse even than the Strong Anthropic Principle as a piece of illogical buffoonery. The reason Nature is so well-suited to life is that life developed around pre-existing Nature. It's a funny old thing that Nature spawned people in the end; but trying to invert the causation is just absurd, and Bill O'Reilly is talking through his asshat.
And that's not even touching on his professional conduct.
The following is a (non-exclusive) list of those who are more qualified for the governorship of California than Arnold Schwarzenegger. Anyone who chose Schwarzenegger over any of these is clearly a fool.
Thank you.
I've got some bad news, I'm afraid...It looks like serial sexual assaulter Arnold Schwarzenegger has become governor of California.
It made the Times of India.
On the bright side, Minnesota is no longer the stupidest state in the Union.
On the dark side, Arnold Schwarzenegger has become governor of California. Living on the West Coast, this makes me uneasy. I would not be altogether surprised if Governor Steroids decided the best way to balance the California budget was to loot and pillage neighbouring states like the Vikings of old; I'm not sure Oregon would be enough to satiate his ravenous hordes. He certainly doesn't seem to have any more practical proposals on the table. We have a bunch of ballistic missile submarines sitting in the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard; maybe that'll deter him.
This really shakes one's faith in humanity. (As if King George wasn't enough.) Just how stupid are people, anyhow? The man has nothing but fame and an Austrian accent, and now he's won an election. I mean, think, people. Think. You wouldn't hire a one-legged narcoleptic midget to drive your car. You wouldn't hire a waste-paper basket to babysit your hyperactive pyromaniac children. You wouldn't make a smirking chimp your president.
Oh, wait.
Well, it's the principle of the thing. It's just dumb. Just really, profoundly dumb. Shockingly dumb. Amazingly, colon-spasmingly dumb. If you're going to vote Arnold, why not just admit flat-out the whole thing's a joke and go for Gary Coleman instead? Or just write in David Lynch.
Now there's a thought. Imagine a parallel universe in which David Lynch just became Governor of California. Dressed as a giant chess piece he would announce a garmonbozia tax in his budget, backwards, while two lesbians made out on a heap of cocaine. Legislators would find their minds swapped at random, until they were replaced with tiny clowns made out of wood, one by one. Traffic lights all across the state would suddenly start changing in a much more meaningful fashion. And then everyone would die.
But at least it would not be what it seemed.
I do not think the Governator has any such hidden depths. What you see is, alas, what you get.
Oh well. While it might be a great setback for the human species, at least I, personally, can sit back, point, and laugh at the freak circus to my south.
But honestly! He has no discernable talents whatsoever. I'd made a better governor than Schwarzenegger! I've known cats that'd make better governors. Has America become so obsessed with celebrity that any no-talent ass-clown with a famous face can win its support? Where will this end? Britney Spears for Congress? President J. Lo? Pope Shatner I?
Let's just make Leonard Nimoy our God-Emperor and be done with it.
Do you like hamsters? Do you like IKEA? Do you like online comic strips? Would you like to see all three of these things combined into one? Then behold: Shaw Island, drawn right here in Seattle-land.
I woke up today suddenly knowing how to do a homework problem for my Ergodic Theory class that'd been bothering me. I just thought you should know.
What will Prime Minister Chretien do after retirement? Smoke reefer!
Winnipeg — It's an unlikely retirement scenario for Prime Minister Jean Chrétien: he's at his lakeside cottage, sipping tea with his wife Aline — and smoking a big fat joint.The 69-year-old prime minister has never smoked marijuana, he says, but he joked in an interview this week he might be willing to give it a try once it's decriminalized.
Mr. Chrétien made the joke in an Ottawa interview with the Winnipeg Free Press published in Friday's paper.
Mr. Chrétien was asked how it felt to have bills for decriminalizing marijuana and legalizing same-sex marriages as the exclamation points to his lengthy political career.
“I don't know what is marijuana,” Mr. Chrétien replied.
“Perhaps I will try it when it will no longer be criminal. I will have my money for my fine and a joint in the other hand.”
I can just picture him starring in a remake of Easy Rider.
Every sentence in the English language becomes an innuendo if you put some of the words in quotes.
Observe:
If humans were marsupials, what would you keep in your pouch?
I would keep in it:
The idea of having a pouch sounds whimsical and cute at first. But if you think about it too much and dwell on the practical ramifications, like hair or no hair inside, cleanliness, possible nipple positioning, sweat...It gets unappetising, and you decide you're just going to start wearing hoodies with those big pockets in the front for both hands.
UPDATE: Also a lemon, to ward off scurvy.
I've now read Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan, and I'm 70% of the way through Gormenghast now; these two novels were the source material for the BBC's mini-miniseries Gormenghast, about which I had such nice things to say earlier. I wanted to share with you the line I just read, spoken by Steerpike:
'And I will understand, if you have no wish for Satan.'
The books have always been weird, but the sort of weirdness has been changing as it's gone along. In Titus Groan it was mainly a weirdness built of the grotesque, and Peake's heady infatuation with his own poetical prose. It wasn't as funny as the television adaptation, because all the funny bits were wrapped up in this lyrical language, but quite affecting in its own way, with a sort of warped beauty. Gormenghast is getting more extreme, changing much in the way that Gormenghast is changing in the book. It's getting positively self-referential. What is one to make of the gigantic puppet-show on the shallow lake, scripted centuries before, on the occasion of Titus's tenth birthday? The wolf-headed puppet, carrying bottles of poison, clearly represents Steerpike. Peake isn't even trying to hide it. There's also a dunce-capped Lion, which made me think immediately of Headmaster Bellgrove of the leonine mane, though there's no reason I can think of that it should be connected to him...And a moronic, apparently female, Horse with a long and absurdly supple neck, a feature associated with Irma Prunesquallor. Also an angelic, crowned Lamb, who one would immediately take to be Titus himself. If these figures are meant to stand in for characters--and there's nothing to indicate that any but the Steerpike Wolf do--then Titus should surely be the Lamb, but who would the other two be? What would the tableau represent? The Horse, one would think, ought to be Gertrude, or Fuchsia...It carries poems, which are Fuchsian...Then who would be the Lion? Is it the late Lord Sepulchrave, and does the tableau then show Steerpike and the Groans who stood between him and power? Or is it something completely unrelated altogether?
And a little monkey called Satan...Not that the name seems to mean much to the Gormenghastly, whose only religion is that of their timeless, lifeless ritual.
One of the most vivid pieces of Peake's imagery is, I think, Professor Opus Fluke, who fills one with a horrid revulsion...Reclining in some chair, with a jaw like a loaf of bread, he is rocked with soundless laughter whose description inspires in me thoughts of some horrid soggy flippered thing twitching and shaking, sort of like a landed fish only infinitely more unpleasant. It would've made good television.
I was afraid Irma Prunesquallor's party wouldn't be as funny in print as it was on the screen, but I found quite the opposite: our little glimpses into Bellgrove's and Irma's wracked brains filled me with a sick glee, even though the Professorial spasm was less immediately comic, having as it did some philosophical roots.
Dr Prunesquallor remains a marvellous creation. His flights of poesy go so well with Peake's style. The Doctor also reminds me, to an extent, of me, which is perhaps why I take to him so. One wonders about him. On television, he seemed to take a suppressed erotic interest in Fuchsia, while in the books it is made explicitly paternal (though one could read it as having an almost incestuous component as well, if one were really determined). On the other hand, he manifests a repulsed attraction for a shirtless Steerpike early on in Titus Groan which I cannot read as being other than sexual. Even though the Steerpike of the books is manifestly less beautiful than Jonathan Rhys Meyers.
The book is taking on the unnatural vitality and potency of a dream...
All of Ontario is holding its breath today, and not for fear of SARS, either. It's Election Day! The Liberals are poised to wrest power from the reigning Tories in a victory of truly epic proportions, rivalling even the battle scene towards the end of The Two Towers when the Orcs are besieging Helm's Deep; Dalton 'Gandalf' McGuinty is even now riding up on his white horse with a legion of potential MPPs to smite the misshapen and darksome Tories as they have seldom been smitten before. What is the secret to the Liberal campaign's early and unquenchable success?
Tipped off by a mole in the Tory camp that Ernie Eves was about to call an election, the Liberals bought their TV ad spots a full two hours before the Tories, securing the coveted Seinfeld re-runs. Which, apparently, are now delivering power into their hands. Such is Jerry Seinfeld's power. Perhaps he will choose the next Pope. I would not be at all surprised.
Another key weapon in the Liberal arsenal has been the mighty T-shirt. A paltry four hours after a rather overenthusiastic Tory strategist accused Dalton McGuinty of being an 'evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet', the Liberals had an armory of T-shirts printed up, bearing kitten-eating slogans. Everyone wanted one. (I want one.) Thunderous legions were kitted out in this imposing garb. The Toronto Star reports they bore the battle cry 'Call me a reptilian kitten-eater, I want better health care.' The Globe and Mail, on the other hand, insists it was 'I'm an evil, reptilian kitten-eater because I support change.' The debate rages on.
I discovered, while Googling for more on these kitten-eating T-shirts, that Mr McGuinty had a small blog. Which he seems to have written himself. He likes Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. Mr McGuinty, if I were an Ontarian, you would have my vote. But why are they not selling T-shirts from the Ontario Liberal site?
Also, Google spat out this headline from the National Post: 'Liberal MPPs would be "trained seals," Hampton says'. As if this would shock anyone in this day and age. Non-hominid legislators are certainly not news; Robert Anton Wilson promised long ago, if elected governor of California, to 'Fire 33% of the legislature [names selected at random] and replace them with full-grown adult ostritches, whose mysterious and awesome dignity will elevate the suidean barbarity long established there.' I was expecting the NDP to be more with the times.
Pity California will get Schwarzeneggar instead. No guns and dope for Californicators now.
They should try to be more like Canada.
