Filed under: Babylon 5, J. Michael Straczynski, MetaFilter, SCA, Science Fiction, Society
Ah, yes, the retail market version of the Ghillie suit: Urban Camouflage.
The basic principle behind these is playing to people’s expectations. Blend in, act normal, and most people will not notice you. The idea of a pizza delivery guy or someone carrying a clipboard and “inspecting” being able to go into any business environment has been used in lots of television episodes and movies. Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski used a version of this in turning the repulsive (to most other races, due to their carrion-eating habits) Pak’ma’ra into couriers for the Rangers, since they traveled everywhere but were ignored.
Some 25 years ago I used a variant of this technique to great effect in the SCA. Following the large public ceremony where I stepped down as the second King of Calontir I went across the street to my hotel room, where I shaved my beard, took off my glasses, and changed into fairly bland SCA garb without any of my usual regalia. I went back to the site and spent the rest of the day wandering around as a “newbie”. Only my (later) wife and a good friend photographing the whole thing were in on the joke. By acting innocuous and not asserting my rank, I was literally ignored by many people who had just an hour beforehand been bowing to me. My friends and fellow peers looked right past me, and treated me as some schlub (though most of them were pretty decent about it) when I hung around for an important meeting. Only when I produced my coronet and changed my behaviour did they realize who they had been dealing with (or, rather, not dealing with) most of the afternoon. It was a very good lesson in just exactly what people perceive about others and their environment.
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi.)
Filed under: Faith healing, Government, Health, Humor, MetaFilter, Science, Society, Survival, Violence
Hey, it’s the Stupor Bowl! Time for some special treats! What’s better than some nice maggot cheese?
How about a little “blood marmalade”? Yum! It’ll cure what ails you:
Were Europeans once cannibals? Research shows that up until the end of the 18th century, medicine routinely included stomach-churning ingredients like human flesh and blood.
* * *
In 16th- and 17th-century Europe, recipes for remedies like this, which provided instructions on how to process human bodies, were almost as common as the use of herbs, roots and bark. Medical historian Richard Sugg of Britain’s Durham University, who is currently writing a book on the subject says that cadaver parts and blood were standard fare, available in every pharmacy. He even describes supply bottlenecks from the glory days of “medicinal cannibalism.” Sugg is convinced that avid cannibalism was not only found within the New World, but also in Europe.
In fact, there are countless sources that describe the morbid practices of early European healers. The Romans drank the blood of gladiators as a remedy against epilepsy. But it was not until the Renaissance that the use of cadaver parts in medicine became more commonplace. At first, powders made from shredded Egyptian mummies were sold as an “elixir of life,” says Sugg. In the early 17th century, healers turned their attention to the mortal remains of people who had been executed or even the corpses of beggars and lepers.
Welcome to the Enlightenment!
*sigh*
OK, why this walk into the grotesque? Because it is good for us to see exactly what magical thinking can lead to. See, the idea was that by consuming these bits and pieces of other humans, you could gain some of their “vital essence”. One more excerpt from the article:
Sugg even attributes religious significance to human flesh. For some Protestants, he writes, it served as a sort of substitute for the Eucharist, or the tasting of the body of Christ in Holy Communion. Some monks even cooked “a marmalade of sorts” from the blood of the dead.
“It was about the intrinsic vitality of the human organism,” says the historian. The assumption was that all organisms have a predetermined life span. If a body died in an unnatural way, the remainder of that person’s life could be harvested, as it were — hence the preference for the executed.
That’s some strong ju-ju there, man.
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi. Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, Climate Change, Emergency, Flu, Global Warming, Government, Guns, Heinlein, MetaFilter, Pandemic, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Robert A. Heinlein, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, Violence, Weather
An interesting post on MeFi about survivalists – here’s the lede:
“Civilization is Just a Thin Veneer. In the absence of law and order, men quickly revert to savagery. As was illustrated by the rioting and looting that accompanied disasters in the past three decades, the transition from tranquility to absolute barbarism can occur overnight. People expect tomorrow to be just like today, and they act accordingly. But then comes a unpredictable disaster that catches the vast majority unprepared. The average American family has four days worth of food on hand. When that food is gone, we’ll soon see the thin veneer stripped away.”It’s getting ugly. Very ugly.What if things just keep getting worse?James Wesley, Rawles will be prepared.Lots more advice here. (previously)
posted by Joe Beese (119 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
Now, I haven’t bothered to go look at the sites linked there. I know the mindset, and have no real need to read more of it. But I found the discussion on MeFi that ensued to be very interesting and insightful. Howso? Well, here’s one comment that stood out:
A lot of this is weird to me because I grew up and live in “flyover” country.
It’s strange to me that some of you don’t own generators because I wonder what the hell you do if there’s an ice storm.
I suppose some of you don’t own guns but in Michigan it’s damn near the easiest thing in the world to shoot a duck or a goose and save the $15 you would have spent at a grocery store to purchase one.
And everyone in my neighborhood has five or six gallons of gas on hand for the generator, truck, wood-splitter or whatever because the gas station is a long way off and unreliable.
So I guess the thing that surprises me most is that “survivalism” has now been relegated to “being able to keep shit running” and that’s kind of depressing. People should at least have something on hand to produce food and heat in case of a natural disaster.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 9:55 PM on January 28 [3 favorites]
It seems that there is something of a bell curve here – with the complete stereotypical “survivalists” on one end, and the total “everything is always fine in my world, why worry about the future?” types on the other – and both extremes viewing the other as crazy. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle, naturally, with distributions on one side or the other of the center according to our experiences and where we live. Few of us have a Farnham’s Freehold mindset, but likewise few of us would trust to fate for nothing bad ever happening to us – we make some preparations to cope with an uncertain future, whether it is only by insurance or savings or by keeping a few weeks worth of food on hand (and I don’t buy the claim that most families only keep a 4 day supply of food on hand – most people shop weekly at most, and could probably subsist on “stuff” in their cabinets for a couple of weeks, even if it wasn’t the sort of regular meals that they’re used to.)
I’ve written about my own attitudes on the matter a fair amount – taking what I see as some common-sense precautions, while understanding that I don’t want to just completely retreat from living my life in the present. We live in a world with earthquakes, tornadoes, flu, global warming and countless other things which can and do happen, or may realistically happen, which can lead to a period of civil disruption or at least the power being out for a few days. And yet to read the comments on that thread it shows me that I am further to the side of the bell curve than I would expect. And yes, of course I see all those who are less well prepared as being more crazy than I am.
Hmm . . .
Jim Downey
(Cross-posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Art, Humor, Joss Whedon, MetaFilter, Science Fiction, Survival
…to see this:
I showed a snippet back in October, but here is the full web pilot I shot during the strike. If you click through to Vimeo, you can see it in full-screen HD.1
For the past few months, the pilot has been shopped around to advertisers and other possible sponsors, but given the economy and my schedule, it’s looking unlikely that a confluence of money and time will lead us to shoot more. So I wanted to let people see it, particularly because it features some actors who should be on more lists. Including Ze Frank, who is now an Angeleno.
The web series business model has proved tough for everyone to figure out. Yes, Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible was fantastic, but even that couldn’t get the ad sponsors it should have. Selling through iTunes is an option for someone with Whedon’s name brand, but I don’t see it working for The Remnants, even given the recognizability of some of the cast members.
Interesting: a post-apocalyptic comedy. Wrap your head around that.
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi.)
(On vacation to the wilds of northern CA for a few days. So am running some non-current-event-specific posts.)
New Construction circa 1955 — One-owner home that’s never been lived in!
Circa 1955: The best way to describe this awesome find? “NEW CONSTRUCTION FROM 1953!”
This awesome 50’s bungalow, located on a quiet, cul-de-sac street on the Hill, has seriously never been lived in… at least on the main level. This ONE-OWNER home was resided only in the lower level during their stay here, so the main level has been frozen in time and perfectly preserved. The vintage Magic Chef gas oven had a head-count of 28 turkeys cooked in it for 28 Thanksgivings — that’s IT. The other meals prepared in this home were in the lower level kitchenette, where the family resided full-time. The quality of the 50’s shows, as everything is in great working order, the original wooden sash windows are in perfect shape, the tile is impeccable, the hardwoods are pristine (they’re there under the wool carpet)… the list goes on and on. There is an entry foyer, large living/dining combo, large eat-in kitchen, 2 bedrooms with hardwood floors and double (large!) closets, and bath on the main level. Downstairs, you could eat off the floor it’s so clean, and features an additional full bath (offered as-is). The yard is neat and tidy, and fully fenced, and has a 2-car garage with electric opener. Newer low-maintenance siding has been added to the home.
Offered for 129,900 — seller open to negotiatng furniture/furnishings to remain. Truly one of a kind to find. WILL NOT LAST.
Incredible. And in a cool part of St. Louis called The Hill, an area which still has strong roots to the Italian immigrants who settled there, and where you can still find the finest Italian foodstuffs. I would think that some smart movie company should buy the place and archive it for use in sets in the future – probably cheaper than having to recreate it later.
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi.)
Filed under: Babylon 5, Heinlein, J. Michael Straczynski, JMS, MetaFilter, Predictions, Robert A. Heinlein, Science, Science Fiction, tech
It’s never safe to assume what’s left behind when a great empire collapses is safe. This is a staple of SF, and was one of the recurring themes of Bab5 – culminating in the spin off series Crusade. Unfortunately, the author of the series had entirely too good a reason to think of such things, with the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union still fresh in the news.
One such: the legacy of nuclear-powered lighthouses.
Powered by fairly simple radioisotope thermoelectric generators, these lighthouses aided safe navigation through the fringes of the Artic Ocean, along the northern coast of the USSR. But eventually they fell into disrepair, and because a source for scavangers. From the English Russia site:
Then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the unattended automatic lighthouses did it job for some time, but after some time they collapsed too. Mostly as a result of the hunt for the metals like copper and other stuff which were performed by the looters. They didn’t care or maybe even didn’t know the meaning of the “Radioactive Danger” sign and ignored them, breaking in and destroying the equipment. It sounds creepy but they broke into the reactors too causing all the structures to become radioactively polluted.
Those photos are from the trip to the one of such structures, the most close to the populated areas of the Russian far east. Now, there are signs “RADIOACTIVITY” written with big white letters on the approaching paths to the structure but they don’t stop the abandoned exotics lovers.
I mean, who wouldn’t want to visit a charming ruin that will leave you with leukemia in a few years? It’s such a romantic way to die.
*sigh*
“Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.” And that from a guy who loved nuclear power, saw it as the future.
Cheers.
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi.)
Ah, nice. Via MeFi, it seems that AMC now has all of The Prisoner episodes available online for free. Gonna have to bookmark that . . .
More later – trying to get a lot done today.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Civil Rights, Constitution, Government, MetaFilter, Religion, Society, Violence
This will not be an easy post to read. If you’re looking for something light and happy, move along.
So, when is something an act of revenge and torture? And when is it a simple act of justice?
A doctor can remove your hand to save you from death by gangrene, or a doctor can remove your hand as a state-sanctioned punishment. What is the difference?
I’m going to be very up-front about my bias here: my father was murdered, and were it up to me his killer would have been put to death just as soon as there was no reasonable doubt that he was guilty of the crime. That’s a simple hankering after revenge. I also think that there is a legitimate case to be made that it makes sense for the State to execute murderers, but that’s not what I want to talk about here. Rather I just mention this so you know where my bias is.
A man blinds a woman who has rejected his offer of marriage. Does it with acid. What punishment does he deserve? Can you envision being blinded with acid could be a legitimate, state-sanctioned punishment? Now wait, there’s more to the story:
Late last month, an Iranian court ordered that five drops of the same chemical be placed in each of her attacker’s eyes, acceding to Bahrami’s demand that he be punished according to a principle in Islamic jurisprudence that allows a victim to seek retribution for a crime. The sentence has not yet been carried out.
The implementation of corporal punishments allowed under Islamic law, including lashing, amputation and stoning, has often provoked controversy in Iran, where many people have decried such sentences as barbaric. This case is different.
Yes, it is different. The usual sentence under the law is for the offending person to pay “blood money” compensation to his victim. And in the society where women are not valued as much as men, this penalty can be a small amount – enough so that such acid attacks are on the rise. But there is one way in which men and women are equal under the law: she can demand retribution. In this case, literally an ‘eye for an eye’. From the same article:
“At an age at which I should be putting on a wedding dress, I am asking for someone’s eyes to be dripped with acid,” she said in a recent interview, as rain poured against the windows of her parents’ small apartment in a lower-middle-class neighborhood of Tehran. “I am doing that because I don’t want this to happen to any other women.”
Some officials also said the punishment would be a deterrent.
“If propaganda is carried out on how acid attackers are punished, it will prevent such crimes in the future,” Mahmoud Salarkia, deputy attorney general of Tehran, told reporters after the court issued its ruling.
OK, revenge? Justice?
I spent a good deal of time reading about this case, and the reactions that people have to it, over on MeFi. Here’s a good comment I want to share:
Cruelty isn’t justice.
There is no such thing as justice. Some wrongs, once perpetrated, can never be undone, balanced, or compensated for. Justice is a fiction we permit ourselves to aid in codifying society’s response to rule breakers. If we do too little, we live at the mercy of the most brutal among us. If we do too much, we become the most brutal among us. So we try to find a middle ground, and we call that justice, and try to forget that there is no magic formula for deterring violence or relieving the victims of cruelty. A cruel and brutal response to cruelty and brutality absolutely can and does continue the cycle. Unfortunately, a measured and merciful response to cruelty and brutality doesn’t necessarily break the cycle, either. So we aim for whatever measure of consistency best helps us sleep at night. And as always, your mileage will vary.
And here’s an excerpt from another:
Laws are a citizen’s primary education in justice, and Shari’ah is quite clear. Women living under Shari’ah are second-class citizens from the perspective of testimony, inheritance, marriage, and divorce. Two female witnesses are needed to convict one man, a woman inherits half of what her brother will receive, Muslim women may not marry non-Muslim men, but Muslim men may marry non-Muslim women, (plus polygamy is allowed but not polyandry,) and men may initiate a divorce but women may not.
Is it any surprise that men who grow up with such laws would sometimes choose to destroy the face of their beloved? Shari’ah law enforces a sexist double standard that disadvantages women, and so everyone treats them as disadvantaged. Such legal standards have a strong educative effect: they persuade citizens of their justice because they are backed by the tripartite authorities of tradition, the state’s allegedly justified violence, and God’s Word. Yet within that tradition, from the position of an authorized jurist, and with the backing of an alternative interpretation of Scripture, there are plenty of nuances and interpretive freedoms that would allow a jurist to steer Shari’ah towards more progressive ends.
The one place where women aren’t supposed to be unequal is in regards to their equality before Allah. Thus, in matters of retribution, they deserve the same protections that a man would receive. Unfortunately, so many of the other procedural inequalities don’t really allow that, which is why this seemingly barbarous punishment is the best way to achieve equal procedural consideration for women and men: the question before the court was equality or patriarchy, and it has chosen equality. Equality, in this case, means judicial blinding.
Without laws that are basically fair and equitable, how can we expect citizens to relate to each other as equals? And without equality, how can there be an end to the acid, for both victims and perpetrators?
There’s a lot to make you think – and think hard – in that thread, about what is the nature of justice and revenge. We make the assumption now that jail time is the appropriate form of punishment for almost all serious crimes, fines for lesser ones. But those forms of punishment do not hit all equally, nor do they really seem to work particularly well. Then add in the layer that in this situation, in this country, a woman getting equal treatment under the law is actually progress.
As I said, I have a bias. I am of the opinion that there are many crimes which when committed, place one outside the usual humane treatment of society (as an aside, that’s what the term “outlaw” actually used to mean – that you were outside the protection of the law, and could be attacked and even murdered without legal retribution.) If you do thus-and-such, you no longer deserve to be treated humanely. Murder, torture, maiming – these are such crimes, as far as I am concerned. I’d have no problems at all with the punishment of blinding by acid for what this man did.
But I’m not sure I’d want our society to function that way.
So, revenge? Justice?
Both?
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Expert systems, MetaFilter, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, tech
Well, another prediction arriving just about right on time.
In Communion of Dreams, one of the major plot points concerns the application of a new computing technology, based on what I call “Tholin gel” (a superconducting superfluid found on Titan which is not entirely understood by the scientists and engineers of the time). The first generation of computers using this technology are just becoming available, and only a few are in operation. They are superior to the computers based on a different technology, but have some limitations which I use for advancing the plot of the book. The computers they are just starting to replace are the third (fourth? Hmm . . . I don’t remember) generation of thin-film computers, a very well understood and mature technology (at the time of the novel).
Well, guess what – we’ve just had a technological breakthrough with will lead to those thin-film computers:
How We Found the Missing Memristor
It’s time to stop shrinking. Moore’s Law, the semiconductor industry’s obsession with the shrinking of transistors and their commensurate steady doubling on a chip about every two years, has been the source of a 50-year technical and economic revolution. Whether this scaling paradigm lasts for five more years or 15, it will eventually come to an end. The emphasis in electronics design will have to shift to devices that are not just increasingly infinitesimal but increasingly capable.
Earlier this year, I and my colleagues at Hewlett-Packard Labs, in Palo Alto, Calif., surprised the electronics community with a fascinating candidate for such a device: the memristor. It had been theorized nearly 40 years ago, but because no one had managed to build one, it had long since become an esoteric curiosity. That all changed on 1 May, when my group published the details of the memristor in Nature.
Combined with transistors in a hybrid chip, memristors could radically improve the performance of digital circuits without shrinking transistors. Using transistors more efficiently could in turn give us another decade, at least, of Moore’s Law performance improvement, without requiring the costly and increasingly difficult doublings of transistor density on chips. In the end, memristors might even become the cornerstone of new analog circuits that compute using an architecture much like that of the brain.
Indeed. Here’s a bit about how memristors work, and how they will be used (and why I chose the term “thin-film”), from Wikipedia:
Interest in the memristor revived in 2008 when an experimental solid state version was reported by R. Stanley Williams of Hewlett Packard.[13][14][15] A solid-state device could not be constructed until the unusual behavior of nanoscale materials was better understood. The device neither uses magnetic flux as the theoretical memristor suggested, nor stores charge as a capacitor does, but instead achieves a resistance dependent on the history of current using a chemical mechanism.
The HP device is composed of a thin (5 nm) titanium dioxide film between two electrodes. Initially, there are two layers to the film, one of which has a slight depletion of oxygen atoms. The oxygen vacancies act as charge carriers, meaning that the depleted layer has a much lower resistance than the non-depleted layer. When an electric field is applied, the oxygen vacancies drift (see Fast ion conductor), changing the boundary between the high-resistance and low-resistance layers. Thus the resistance of the film as a whole is dependent on how much charge has been passed through it in a particular direction, which is reversible by changing the direction of current.[8] Since the HP device displays fast ion conduction at nanoscale, it is considered a nanoionic device.[16]
Memristance is displayed only when both the doped layer and depleted layer contribute to resistance. When enough charge has passed through the memristor that the ions can no longer move, the device enters hysteresis. It ceases to integrate q=∫Idt but rather keeps q at an upper bound and M fixed, thus acting as a resistor until current is reversed.
Memory applications of thin-film oxides had been an area of active investigation for some time. IBM published an article in 2000 regarding structures similar to that described by Williams.[17] Samsung has a pending U.S. patent application for several oxide-layer based switches similar to that described by Williams.[18] Williams also has a pending U.S. patent application related to the memristor construction.[19]
There’s still a long ways to go before we see practical application of this technology. But it will likely mean the same sort of radical change in electronics that transistors meant. That should keep us going for, oh, say another 40 years or so (as the transistor revolution did), until we can discover and then start to use something akin to Tholin gel.
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi.)
Filed under: Humor, Marketing, MetaFilter, movies, Science Fiction, Space, YouTube
Worn out from a weekend involving a huge bonfire, excellent scotch, and firearms (no, not all at once) – along with the onset of an annoying cold – so I’ll just pass along a little surreal something I stumbled across on MeFi:
There’s a whole series of these. All are completely hilarious. Or maybe it’s just the fever I have . . .
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 