Monday, July 18, 2005

The File: Something Awful

When we went on our fifth grade trip to some overnight camp, no one would allow me to be in their cabin, and the school had to force me to be in this one cabin with these guys who all hated me. Sometimes those nights still haunt me. I remember someone taking my teddy bear and throwing it into a camp fire. God have mercy.
-- Nick "Mayor Wilkins" Dunn, "Crazies in Elementary School"

2:50:07 PM    comment []

Sunday, April 10, 2005

The File: "Oligarchies With A Populist Face"

In the face of this evidence, three theories have arisen. The first is that electoral outcomes, as far as "the will of the people" is concerned, are essentially arbitrary. The fraction of the electorate that responds to substantive political arguments is hugely outweighed by the fraction that responds to slogans, misinformation, "fire alarms" (sensational news), "October surprises" (last-minute sensational news), random personal associations, and "gotchas." Even when people think that they are thinking in political terms, even when they believe that they are analyzing candidates on the basis of their positions on issues, they are usually operating behind a veil of political ignorance. They simply don’t understand, as a practical matter, what it means to be "fiscally conservative," or to have "faith in the private sector," or to pursue an "interventionist foreign policy." They can’t hook up positions with policies. From the point of view of democratic theory, American political history is just a random walk through a series of electoral options. Some years, things turn up red; some years, they turn up blue.

A second theory is that although people may not be working with a full deck of information and beliefs, their preferences are dictated by something, and that something is élite opinion. Political campaigns, on this theory, are essentially struggles among the élite, the fraction of a fraction of voters who have the knowledge and the ideological chops to understand the substantive differences between the candidates and to argue their policy implications. These voters communicate their preferences to the rest of the electorate by various cues, low-content phrases and images (warm colors, for instance) to which voters can relate, and these cues determine the outcome of the race. Democracies are really oligarchies with a populist face.
-- Louis Menand, A Critic At Large: The Unpolitical Animal: How political science understands voters

Third theory omitted--see the article for it (about half-way down the page). These theories have a typically elitist feel. Eligible citizens who choose not to vote have done the mental arithmetic of deciding that the people who do vote are informed enough and sensible enough to make the right decision, and to have confidence that no matter who is elected, their lives will not be significantly affected. This works for the same reason representative government works: The People are too busy to make all the decisions of governance themselves, so they appoint or entrust others to handle it for them. Of course these are all commonplace observations. John Keegan's opinion, as stated in The Mask Of Command, seems to be that the real benefit of democracy is the ability to kick the reigning elite out of power when they become too obnoxious--the trappings of power which inevitably corrupt and lead to all sorts of outrageous abuses. It is true that we will always be ruled by the elite, but we can at least choose which klatsch.

2:13:41 PM    comment []

The File: Cerenkov Radiation

There is a visible phenomenon - Cerenkov radiation - a beautiful blue glow produced when fast moving particles strike water (speed of light in a transparent medium is a function of refractive index -- if particles have to "slow down", that energy has to go somewhere - it gets shot out in a cone of radiation).

If you're seeing Cerenkov radiation at the bottom of a reactor pool [umr.edu], it's beautiful. If you're seeing it because the neutron flux through your eyeballs is enough that your vitreous humor is glowing blue, it's probably less than beautiful, given that if you know what you're seeing, you realize that your lifespan is probably best measured in hours/weeks, rather than years.
-- "Tackhead" commenting on "Latest Chernobyl Motorcycle Photos", March 27, 2004.

I once got to watch a small nuclear reactor fire up, and got to watch the Cerenkov radiation at the bottom of the reactor pool.

That picture does not do it justice. While I was somewhat disappointed that the whole nuclear reaction was fairly anticlimatic -- no rumbling, no vibration, no nothing discernable except the blue light -- that blue light at the bottom of the pool was probably the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. There's just no way to describe the color. It's so vivid and so intense.
-- "einTier" comment from the same story.

Picture from UMR, Cerenkov Radiation and the "Blue Glow".

1:48:28 PM    comment []

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

The File: Alexander The Super-tastic Awesome

The increasing frequency with which Alexander was wounded as he led his army towards the limits of the known world implies a growing quality of desperation in his leadership and anticipated the probability of a serious wound.... At Multan in 325 probabilities caught up with him.... Impatient at the slowness with which his siege engineers commenced their deliberate procedures, Alexander put himself at the head of a small storming party and rushed the inner wall. He got to the top, found himself cut off and had to fight for his life. Over-exposed on the crest of the wall, he leapt down inside, put his back to the mudbrick beside a small fig tree and began to lay about him with his sword at a swelling body of attackers. For some moments he held his own, slashing and throwing stones. His attackers, deterred by his spitfire bravery, drew off and began to shower him with "whatever anyone had in his hand or could lay his hands upon." Three of his storm party jumped down to join him. One was shot in the face with an arrow. Shortly afterwards an arrow struck Alexander also. It penetrated "right through the breastplate into the lung, so that," according to Ptolemy, "breath together with blood shot forth from the wound." Such a "sucking wound" is extremely serious. Aelxander contrived to resist for a while, "but when a good deal of blood came forth, in a thick stream, as would be with the breath, he was overcome by dizziness and faintness, and fell there where he stood bending over his shield."

The frantic intervention of his followers saved the king from immediate death. They slaughtered all the Indians within sword distance and managed to carry their stricken leader away on a shield.... What this wound history suggests is a rising temperature of commitment, almost as if Alexander's fever for victory rose with the tide of difficulty....
-- John Keegan, The Mask Of Command, pp. 62-3

Finding himself over-exposed, he leapt inside. And even with the advantage of more years and better technology, no one has managed to equal his accomplishments. He was not just the right man in the right place at the right time, but the best exemplar of the heroic ideal in his era. And he must have been luckier than Lucky the Leprechaun because he kept winning. That's why, despite the Oliver Stone debacle, Baz Luhrman is still going to make a movie about him. A movie I will pay money to see!

11:42:55 PM    comment []

The File: Constantine XI

The defenders began to abandon their posts, running home to protect their families. The Turkish scaling ladders were no longer pushed away, and the attack triumphed in every sector.

The emperor Constantine preferred to die with his city rather than survive as a captive. He threw away his helmet with the imperial eagle, and his emblazoned surcoat, and sought an anonymous death in the heart of the fighting. The city finally fell....
-- Andrew Wheatcroft, The Fall of Constantinople, as excerpted in John Keegan's The Book of War: 25 Centuries of Great War Writing, pp. 68

Keegan would probably classify this as a Renaissance-era example of the heroic ideal of leadership brought to the extremes: not only does the emperor "lead from the front," but he dies with his men. Alexander, one suspects, would have approved.

11:17:19 PM    comment []

Blogs: I Would As Soon Call Her Mother A Wit

The latest Gawker blog takes a cutesy idea--wisecracking headlines in oversized fonts, lots of daily updates--and ruins it with an almost total lack of insight and humor. You won't find anything like big brother Gizmodo's whimsical gimcrackery here. Here's a hed for ya: NEW BLOG LACKS PERSONALITY.

11:11:09 PM    comment []

Babble: Amazon's Terrifying New Facelift

Looks like Amazon has changed their product pages... I'm confused and afraid. All change is bad! Why wasn't I warned?

Maybe it's books [img / link] only? Here's a dvd [img / link].

12:19:10 AM    comment []

The File: Sebastian O

The dandy has one unique advantage over the common herd. No matter what the situation, he will always be more exquisitely dressed than his enemies. Therefore, he has already triumphed.
-- Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell, Sebastian O

How many of these vintage-inspired graphic novels are we going to see? This one was fun, but not (of course) as fun as League.

12:07:17 AM    comment []

Sunday, April 03, 2005

The File: Unravelling The Franklin Mystery

It is interesting that the men seen on the march at Teekeenu had common native names--indeed, it is surprising that they had any native names at all. The leaders Toolooa and Aglooka could have acquired their Inuit names on previous voyages, but most of Franklin's officers had no experience in the north. Gilder concluded that it was probable that the names which the white men used phonetically resembled the Inuit names. If we look at the crew lists of the Erebus and Terror (appendix 1), it is hard to verify this. No men with names that sound like Aglooka or Toolooa leap from the page in the manner of "Ill-kern"/Pilkington or "Oolizhen"/Allison. However, it should be remembered that Stefansson found that even after repeated coaching the Inuit pronounced "Jim" as "Perk" or "Zerk" and that to them "Rae" sounded just like "Nerk"!
-- David C. Woodman, Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony, pp. 197

Mr. Woodman's book is an open-minded examination of the Inuit testimony and tradition regarding the Franklin expedition, the greatest disaster in the entire history of European polar exploration. Over the years the testimony of the native people of this region has been largely overlooked, in part due to the difficulty of deciphering the sometimes contradictory tales. To his credit, Mr. Woodman thoroughly investigates the possibility of Inuit confusion with other European expeditions in the same geographic area, while highlighting the elements that could only pertain to Franklin's doomed men. I found his argument that Capt. Crozier died relatively early, in 1849 or 1850, and that the mysterious "Aglooka" must necessarily be a surviving junior officer, to be particularly convincing. Nevertheless, given the disparate and contradictory details stated in the Inuit tales, it looks as though the only chance for a real breakthrough in this long-standing riddle must lie in the discovery of one of the lost ships, or of a hitherto-unknown cache of written records from the expedition.

One of the most interesting chapters in the book, therefore, is chapter 18, "Keeweewoo". Here Mr. Woodman discusses the possibility that one of the Franklin ships sank near Kirkwall Island or O'Reilly Island in Utjulik. In recent years Mr. Woodman has been a member of several expeditions to the area searching for the lost ship, most recently in 2004. It appears that the theory that the ship sank at Grant Island has been discounted due to a lack of confirmatory sonar or magnetic evidence. Nevertheless, the proliferation of suggestive artifacts in the region of O'Reilly Island is encouraging. We wonder if any further information is available regarding the "three stone cairns" that may be located in Kirkwall Island (p. 268)?

Amid all the geographical confusion and contradictory reports of relics, artifacts, and cairns, one of the particular and humanizing details is the carved or painted hands that members of the Franklin expedition often used in directional signs and notes. These were found at the winter camp at Beechey Island (p. 69), which date from before tragedy struck. Presumably later examples were found at Cape Felix: "a piece of paper with a carefully drawn hand upon it, the index finger pointing at the time in a southerly direction" (p. 88), and at "Shar-too" on King William's Island, where an Inuit hunter found a carved wooden hand placed at the top of a cairn (p. 89). These hands served as markers, helping to guide Franklin expedition members in conditions of blizzard, fog, and Arctic night. And they point the way for the explorers of today, who share the enduring fascination of the expedition's fate.

10:26:34 PM    comment []

Thursday, March 31, 2005

The File: Is this an example of thinking outside the box?

Faced with similarly dire circumstances, other sailors made different decisions. In 1811, the 139-ton brig Polly, on her way from Boston to the Caribbean, was dismasted in a storm, and the crew drifted on the waterlogged hull for 191 days. Although some of the men died from hunger and exposure, their bodies were never used for food; instead, they were used as bait. Attaching pieces of their dead shipmates' bodies to a trolling line, the survivors managed to catch enough sharks to sustain themselves until their rescue. If the Essex crew had adopted this strategy with the death of Matthew Joy, they might never have reached the extreme that confronted them now.
-- Nathaniel Philbrick, In The Heart Of The Sea: The Tragedy Of The Whaleship Essex, pp. 175

Instead, they ate each other. Uncontrovertible proof that unoriginal thinking leads to cannibalism. RIAA, listening?

1:54:07 PM    comment []

The File: Half-Empty Or Full

The Essex survivors had entered what McGee describes as the "cotton-mouth" phase of thirst. Saliva becomes thick and foul-tasting; the tongue clings irritatingly to the teeth and the roof of the mouth. Even though speech is difficult sufferers are often moved to complain ceaselessly about their thirst until their voices become so cracked and hoarse that they can speak no more. A lump seems to form in the throat, causing the sufferer to swallow repeatedly in a vain attempt to dislodge it. Severe pain is felt in the head and neck. The face feels full due to the shrinking of the skin. Hearing is affected, and many people begin to hallucinate.

Still to come for the Essex crew were the agonies of a mouth that has ceased to generate saliva. The tongue hardens into what McGee describes as "a senseless weight".... Speech becomes impossible, although sufferers are known to moan and bellow. Next is the "blood sweats" phase, involving "a progressive mummification of the initially living body." The tongue swells to such proportions that it squeezes past the jaws. The eyelids crack and the eyeballs begin to weep tears of blood. The throat is so swollen that breathing becomes difficult, creating an incongruous yet terrifying sensation of drowning. Finally, as the power of the sun inexorably draws the remaining moisture from the body, there is "living death," the state into which Pablo Valencia had entered when McGee discovered him on a desert trail, crawling on his hands and knees:

[H]is lips had disappeared as if amputated, leaving low edges of blackened tissue; his teeth and gums projected like those of a skinned animal, but the flesh was black and dry as a hank of jerky; his nose was withered and shrunken to half its length, and the nostril-lining showing black; his eyes were set in a winkless stare, with surrounding skin so contracted as to expose the conjunctiva, itself black as the gums...; his skin [had] generally turned a ghastly purplish yet ashen gray, with great livid blotches and streaks; his lower legs and feet, with forearms and hands, were torn and scratched by contact with thorns and sharp rocks, yet even the freshest cuts were so many scratches in dry leather, without trace of blood."
-- Nathaniel Philbrick, In The Heart Of The Sea: The Tragedy Of The Whaleship Essex, pp. 127-8

Note that this is an example of extreme dehydration in desert conditions.

1:46:04 PM    comment []

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

eMusic vs ITMS : High-Gloss Music Store Smackdown

Putting aside all the candyass objections to subscription vs. purchase-based models, I decided to investigate two major, legal digital music purveyors: Apple's iTunes music store and eMusic's MP3 download service. Who wins? Who dies? I decide!

First up, iTunes. Meh. I object to Apple's iTunes on two grounds:
1) 128 bitrate AAC. Why? Why?!
2) DRM, which is illegal for me to remove

At first sight, eMusic offers a compelling alternative to iTunes.

The good:
1) 192 VBR LAME --alt-preset-standard MP3 encoding. La crème de la crème. This I can get behind; it's what I use for my personal collection.
2) No DRM. eMusic trusts me to be an adult--what a concept!

The bad:
1) Although eMusic positions themselves chiefly as purveyors of "indie" mp3s, iTunes has more indie music! Go look for recent stuff by Lemonjelly or Jans Lekman and you will not find it on EMusic.

Therefore I have sailed the seas and canceled my EMusic account. As another strange plus to choosing eMusic, cancellation is a breeze and can be done through their website. This is way cooler than Netflix or Earthlink, who force you to call their hallucination-inducing tech support to cancel your account. (Note: I savor and love my Netflix account. Earthlink es del diablo.)

Given my objections above and my possession of an iPod Photo which I regard with the tenderest affection, you'll understand I would not glance at Napster except to spit across its path. eMusic might be ok for the occasional download, if you can avoid getting suckered into a subscription, but there is still, for me, no ideal music store from which to make legal purchases. Looks like I get to visit the used CD store or The Site That Must Not Be Named. Since musical preferences are so individual, however, your mileage will vary.

10:22:58 PM    comment []

The File: The Gift Of Fear

[B]ecause my childhood became all about prediction, I learned to live in the future. I didn't feel things in the present because I wanted to be a moving target, gone to the future before any blow could really be felt. This ability to live in tomorrow or next year immunized me against the pain and hopelessness of the worst moments, but it also made me reckless about my own safety. Recklessness and bravado are features of many violent people. [...]

As a child, I was left with the pastimes that cross time: worrying and predicting. I could see a vision of the future better than most people because the present did not distract me. This single-mindedness is another characteristic common to many criminals. Even things that would frighten most people could not distract me as a boy, for I had become so familiar with danger that it no longer caused alarm. Just as a surgeon loses his aversion to gore, so does the violent criminal. You can spot this feature in people who do not react as you might to shocking things. When everyone else who just witnessed a hostile argument is shaken up, for example, this person is calm.
-- Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence, pp. 51

1:38:01 PM    comment []

The File: Weird And Tragic Shores

During the two-week crossing [Charles Francis Hall] came again under the spell of the maritime Arctic. He was awed, as so many other explorers have been, by the strange and often beautiful optical illusions created by refraction in northern seas. Mountains appeared and disappeared on the horizon; the sun, surrounded by a corona, was duplicated so that there were two suns and two coronas; the moon rose swollen to immense size and distorted into strange shapes; indescribable forms moved with miraculous fluidity between water and sky. As usual, Hall thought of God:

A thousand youthful forms of the fairest outline seemed to be dancing to and fro, their white arms intertwined--bodies incessantly varying, intermixing, falling, rising, jumping, skipping, hopping, whirling, waltzing, resting, and again rushing to the mazy dance--never tired--ever playful--ever light and airy, graceful and soft to the eye. Who could view such wondrous scenes of divine enchantment and not exclaim, "O Lord, how manifest are thy works! In wisdom hast Thou made them all; the earth is full of Thy riches!"
-- Chauncey C. Loomis, Weird and Tragic Shores: The Story of Charles Francis Hall, Explorer, pp. 77

1:29:33 PM    comment []

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

The File: Ease

To enjoy ease, it is surely necessary to labor. To enjoy luxury, it is necessary to live hard. Since our work in these after-days is all too often sedentary, since we all too often tend to overfeed, and since we shun living hard, if we have not lost the capacity for it, it is small wonder that we are dyspeptically out of tune with life, and have to pay to have our jaded appetites whetted by manufactured thrills on stage, screen, dirt-track, or playing field.
-- Sidney Rogerson, Twelve Days, as excerpted in John Keegan's The Book of War: 25 Centuries of Great War Writing, pp. 271

Rogerson was writing of his experiences as a British officer serving in the trenches of World War I. 89 years later, citizens of the developed world are even further cocooned by technology, and our "manufactured thrills" are ever more complex. I doubt they are any more satisfying. You can try to distract yourself from your hunger for life, but when the entertainment is over the hunger is still there. So people fall asleep with the television on, whispering to them as they dream....

12:09:31 AM    comment []