Echidnas in the News

It's always nice when echidnas make the front page of the daily newspaper. Even if the AP story everyone's running describes 'em as "primitive", and other accounts call them "bizarre". That's not a very nice way to talk about an animal that, of its own free will, deigned to permit researchers pick it up. It didn't have to, you know. I do think the whole "Lost World" thing is a bit overstated and romanticized. The actual new species are all birds, frogs, and so on. Everything bigger than a bird was already known to science, but just rare and poorly understood. Calling the place the "Lost World" is just hanging out a welcome sign for the inevitable ravaging hordes of well-heeled ecotourists. The echidnas won't be so friendly the umpteenth time someone spills their soy chai latte on 'em.

Meanwhile, down Australia way, echidnas can be a significant road hazard. Here, a small local newspaper congratulates a motorist who managed not to hit one. And thanks to the magic of the Internet, the whole world knows about it.

Also in Australia, a new anti-litter campaign features a computer-generated Echidna, who's sick and tired of people messing up his habitat. Ok, I guess that might work, if you're going for the cute angle, but I still like Tim Cahill's proposal to enlist Rodan as the ultimate anti-litter spokesmonster.

Echidnas make popular mascots, it seems. Back in 2000, one of the trio of Olympic mascots was an echidna named Millie. Which is great unless you think the whole idea of Olympic mascots is stupid, like the author of this amusing article. Be sure not to miss the gallery of mascots from Olympics past.

Here's a weird, recently-discovered fossil creature from China that's giving paleontologists fits. The front half looks like a shrew, and the back half looks like a monotreme.

And while we're talking half-n-half creatures, there's the Echidna of ancient Greece, half woman, half snake. In this article, a writer for the local paper in Bangalore, India, marvels at the weird creatures of Greek mythology.

And since no post of mine would be complete without at least a little politics, here's a recent Usenet post to alt.politics.republicans about that current "Lost World" news story, into which some random fundie inserts "editorial" comments bashing evolution and making a variety of cheesy know-nothing wisecracks. He's just read the press release, and already he knows infinitely more about the whole subject than those gol-durned commie pinko liberal scientists. It's just amazing how that works.

Jesus Loves Clearcuts

You probably haven't been following the current brouhaha at Oregon State University's "Forestry" department, so a brief bit of history is probably in order. Back in 2002, Southern Oregon experienced a huge forest fire, which became known as the Biscuit Fire. This obviously resulted in a lot of dead trees, and even before the fires were out the timber industry started lobbying for what it calls "salvage logging". The idea being that the dead trees will go to waste unless they're "salvaged", meaning hauled out and turned into subdivisions. And almost as quickly, OSU started churning out reams of third-rate academic blather to justify the "salvage" (talk about a loaded word). It's useful to understand that the "Forestry" department is in large part industry-funded.

Unfortunately, one of these studies discovered that clearcutting isn't actually an improvement over just leaving the forest alone after a fire. The study was of sufficient quality that the prestigious journal Science accepted it for publication. It's really hard to get published in Science, and you'd think OSU would've seen it as a big honor, but no. Instead, a cabal of pro-industry professors tried to suppress the paper, because it doesn't say what the industry pays the department to say. The journal didn't buy that argument, unsurprisingly. Even that rejection didn't cause the leader of the cabal (and primary author of the third-rate blather referenced above) didn't give up his jihad against the paper. Oh, no. I wouldn't bother blogging about the controversy if it ended with the paper being published. No, instead somebody (technically yet to be determined) went and called in the big guns. And by "big guns" I mean our Glorious Leader, whose minions at the BLM have now cut off all funding for the university's forest research programs.

The message is very clear: Tell George what he wants to hear, or starve.

Let me reiterate that I'm not against logging, per se. Historically it's been this state's only reliable source of family-wage union jobs, which isn't something one should just ignore. But when the only way to justify it is by censoring the facts and replacing them with bogus, politically-motivated junk science, anyone with a brain and a shred of ethics ought to reject the attempt out of hand.

As it turns out the very same John Sessions who's trying to censor academic work in this country is also a big advocate of large-scale logging in third world countries. For example, here are proceedings (which he co-edited) from a conference about logging the Himalayas [PDF]. Seems he's got a bit of a consulting business on the side, and has brought his expertise in "forest engineering" (another loaded term) to bear in such places as Bhutan, Costa Rica, Brazil, Colombia, and Malaysia. Of course, all this work in ultra-low-wage countries with no effective environmental laws will no doubt result in a loss of domestic logging jobs. I'm morbidly curious how they'll argue this is all the tree-huggers' fault, because you know that's how they'll spin it if they need to.

BTW, here's another amusing article about the Big Bang debacle. And the blogoverse has already dug up some of George Deutsch's greatest hits from back at Texas A&M journalism school, including an editorial where he insists the Laci Peterson homicide was the work of a "satanic cult". And now he's writing NASA press releases. Yes, Deutschie's doing a heck of a job. At this rate, by this time next year he'll be a federal judge, and those of us who've criticized him will be off standing on boxes at Abu Ghraib. Not bad for someone who, contrary to earlier news reports, didn't even graduate from college. And now he's correcting the work of world-respected scientists, on God's behalf. It's like a story by Horatio Alger's evil twin, or something. Is this a great country, or what?

The Raptures (Ours & Theirs)

I felt like being depressed, for some reason, and so I did a news search on "rapture". It's surprising how many of the hits aren't religious stories. I won't spend a lot of time on those, although I have to say in passing that using the word "rapture" in connection with birdwatching or mountain climbing is even less comprehensible to me than the usual religious meaning of the word.

So here's what we've got today:

• A rather bitter column about the country going to hell in a handbasket, titled "From republic to tyranny". Widespread belief in the imminent rapture is just one of the many ills that face us. The author describes the book of Revelation as a rogue text largely incompatible with the gospel, which is about as apt a description as I've seen. I'm a confirmed nonbeliever, but it's obvious even to me that the parts just don't mesh up. You can base your religion on one or the other, but not both, and our fundies have decided they prefer the book that reads like the violent, incoherent ramblings of an insane person. Somebody give that John guy some thorazine, stat!
  
• Well, ok, not all fundies are identical. They've got lots of petty little theological divides and fissures, and the precise nature and timing of the Rapture is one of them. Not everyone believes it's right around the corner. Or more precisely, some belive it's impossible to know whether it's right around the corner. This article surveys the wide range of beliefs occurring just in the Yucca Valley, CA area. Read, and be afraid. Be very, very afraid.
  
• That Jesus guy isn't the only one who's due back any minute now. The Mahdi will also return Real Soon Now, and Iran's new president is working tirelessly, making all those pesky last-minute preparations. See the article "Waiting for the rapture in Iran".
  
• And the National Review, of all people, has an overview of Islamic end times beliefs, titled "Sound familiar?".
  
• In one of the better Freudian slips I've seen in a long time, this page refers to our upcoming, hyper-expensive F-22 Raptor fighter jet as the "F22 Rapture".
  
• I've saved the true sign of the apocalypse for last. Seems that the band Blondie (remember them?) is reworking their song "Rapture" for re-release. Gaaaaahhhh!!!!!
  

Big Bang Memo

So now GWB and Co. are making NASA the latest target of their holy war against facts. It's not at all surprising that they're trying to suppress the evidence about global warming. It's pretty typical for industries to try to hush up anything that would cost them money. I probably ought to be more outraged about that than I am, but it's the sort of thing you come to expect from the Bushies. And the effort to mold all NASA PR to support George's goofy Apollo Jr. plan isn't that outrageous either; all bureaucracies do that in some form or other, and experienced scientists generally understand the importance of sucking up to whoever's writing the checks. That's just a fact of life.

But it's no longer just a matter of being business-friendly or playing the bureaucracy game. Now the fundies in the administration are trying to suppress any mention of the Big Bang as a proven fact, since creationism is official government policy these days.

From the NYT story:

The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the "war room" of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen's public statements.

In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word "theory" needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator."

It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most."

More coverage at Bad Astronomy, The Inquirer and Slashdot.

In a not-entirely-unrelated note, Feb. 17th marks the 406th anniversary of the day the astronomer Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake by Church authorities. Among other things, he argued that the earth orbits the sun, contradicting certain passages in the bible -- that is, if you take them absolutely literally.

We aren't yet at the point where our present-day fundies can have people arbitrarily killed for disagreeing with them, but I don't think this is due to a lack of desire on their part. Our fundies think the same way as their medieval predecessors, and they certainly didn't mind a bit of bloodshed now and then.

The blue-n-green blob above is a map of the cosmic microwave background (faint echoes of the Big Bang) made by NASA's WMAP spacecraft. WMAP was proposed and developed during the Clinton administration. You have to wonder if it would've even made it off the drawing board in this day and age?

Religion vs. science is an area where there really is a difference between Christian fundies and their Islamic brethren. Where our wingnuts flatly deny the validity of any facts that contradict what they think their holy book says, the Islamic tendency is to argue and try to demonstrate that science and the Koranic account of creation are in perfect accord. I have to say is a point in their favor, just this once. If the two strains of thought were reversed, and scientists in the Middle East were the ones under attack, we in the West would just add it to our existing stereotypes, and chalk it up as more evidence of ignorance and backwardness on their part. Instead, it's a sign of ignorance and backwardness on our part, and one we ought to be deeply ashamed of.

I'm a Natural

After putting the previous post together, I came across a great article arguing that humanity generally divides into two camps: Naturals, "people who consider material evidence paramount", and Unnaturals, a.k.a. "those who think inspiration and intuition and all the internal imagery of their minds define their external reality; that what they wish to be so will be so if only they can articulate it and select and distort evidence for the purposes of persuasion". Like our nation's Glorious Leader, for example. When unnaturals run the show, things can get difficult for the natural world, like this recent Charles Darwin exhibit put on by the Natural History museum in NYC. When naturals run the show, the worst that unnaturals have to put up with is the occasional mean hillbilly joke.

Now, it wouldn't be accurate to say that the natural vs. unnatural, rational vs. antirational divide is precisely the liberal vs. conservative divide. At least in this part of the world, it's very common for liberal-minded people to adopt (or at least affect) a sort of hip pseudo-Eastern or pseudo-pagan belief system. I don't know if this is a holdover from the 60's, or a reaction against Christian fundamentalism, or what, exactly, but it's very common. Certainly more common than people openly "admitting" to being secular rationalists. I'm not equating the religious mindsets, since they are very different. The Buddha-by-way-of-John-Lennon thing may be an improvement over the stuff spewed by Pat Robertson & co., in the sense that it's mostly harmless, but that doesn't make it any more real. And New Age people do seem to give fundies the willies. Another example.

Infinite self-absorption and New Age solipsism certainly have fewer directly negative effects than the fundies' obsession with war and the imminent, ultra-gory end of the world. I think it does foster a mindset where being liberal and "enlightened" no longer requires an element of compassion towards other people. The key to being a good person is drinking soy lattes and attending upscale yoga classes, not doing icky stuff like helping poor people, or even thinking about poor people. After all, if people somehow create their own reality, poverty is entirely the fault of the poor, and the only solution is for them to realize it's all in their imagination. I'm not exaggerating. I've seen this precise argument presented repeatedly. And owls really are more important than loggers. I won't go off on a full owl vs. logger rant today, but it's worth noting that at one time in this state, timber jobs once were considered good, honest work, paying family wages, with strong unions that looked out for their members. And then, nearly in the blink of an eye, certain parts of society started seeing timber workers as objects of utter scorn and hatred, people whose basic needs could be comfortably disregarded with nary a thought. For doing exactly the same thing they'd been doing for a hundred years. You can imagine how bewildering and upsetting that must have been. The party of FDR and Harry Truman would've never pulled a stunt like that. I guess I'd call that a clear negative effect, although I'm not sure it can be entirely blamed on religious beliefs.

Where fundie unnaturals reject science and scientific thinking, new-agey unnaturals try to appropriate it for their own ends. Over the years we've gotten pop-philosophy interpretations of relativity, quantum mechanics, Godel's incompleteness theorems, chaos theory, and probably others that aren't occurring to me at the moment. The common thread is that people try to shape a scientific or mathematical notion about a very specific subject into a general philosophy of life, and the resulting philosophy goes something like "you can't know everything" or "it's all relative, dude", basically an antirational, anti-intellectual viewpoint. I expect the originators of each theory would find the whole thing rather appalling. Unless you're a physicist, you aren't likely to encounter relativistic or quantum mechanical effects on an everyday basis. The classical, deeply unfashionable, mechanistic physics of Isaac Newton explains the everyday world rather well, which may be why that theory was developed so much earlier. And as this Slate article notes, even most mathematicians don't need to know or care about Godel on a daily basis.

I really don't see how this is different from the misreading of Darwin in the 19th century, when Herbert Spencer (not Darwin) coined the term "survival of the fittest", when applying a purely biological idea to advocate a fairly vicious form of laissez-faire economics and social policies. Or the naive and almost touching faith displayed by allegedly-rational Libertarians, when they explain that global warming is impossible because the Invisible Hand is benevolent and wouldn't permit such things to happen to us. Or fundies arguing that the reason we can't predict the weather, or earthquakes, or volcanic eruptions, with total accuracy is that they're manifestations of divine wrath, and attempts to understand them in scientific terms are pure heresy. I've actually seen this argument too.

I think my occasional math geekiness (which Gentle Reader(s) may have noticed in previous posts) is partly because "infinity" is an inherently compelling topic (well, to me, anyway), and one that it's possible to consider and discuss in a rational, entirely non-mystical way. Sort of like how astrophysics means you can talk about the beginning of the universe without arguing over theology. I suppose it's nice that neither the fundies nor the crystal-gazers have really seized on math so far, although that might be an entertaining spectacle. Really, there are quite a few things out there that would make the fundies angry if only they were a little better educated. And lots of things the New Age types would surely think were really deep and meaningful, if they'd ever heard of 'em. Maybe in a future post I'll try coming up with a list, or the start of a list, anyway. That should be entertaining.

Viva la Evolution!

February 12th will be Charles Darwin's 197th birthday. Which is something worth celebrating, given the rising tide of thuggish, medieval ignorance spreading in this country and around the world. I think it'd be tiresome and a bit shrill to devote yet another post to bashing fundies just now, so instead -- in honor of Mr. Darwin -- here are a few more pictures of cute fuzzy primates. [As usual, each image links to its original source, where you'll typically find more info, and more & larger images.]

The first pic is of a pair of Pygmy Marmosets. Second is a Cottton-top Tamarin, a threatened species from Colombia. Third is an Emperor Tamarin, followed by a baby Gray Gentle Lemur. And finally we have Charles Darwin himself. Note the family resemblance.

It's impossible for any normal person not to go "Awwwww..." when looking at these pictures -- well, possibly except for the last one. People who get outraged by the idea that we're related to these lil' guys are just contemptible. I'm sorry, but that's just how it is.

Heyy, MORE Blasphemy....

Seems that blasphemy is everywhere, once you start to look for it:

• In Denmark, it's apparently blasphemous to sell flip-flop sandals with pictures of Jesus and Mary on 'em. I can only imagine what would be going on if they'd put those Mohammed cartoons on shoes.
  
• Actually that's happened already, sort of, and Nike was the "guilty" party. One of the newer perils of being a profitable evil global monolith: If your product has any squiggly lines on it, you have to be absolutely sure they don't inadvertently spell anything in Arabic script. Of course, it's easy for Nike to get off the hook by blaming the whole thing on those prejudiced little Chinese 6 year olds who make all of their shoes.
  
• Meanwhile, AOL's new marketing slogan "I AM" is unforgivable blasphemy, according to certain psychotic Christian fundies. And they run our government, so you know what they're saying must be true. Or at least you'd better pretend it's true, if you know what's good for you.
  
• It turns out that Kanye West is a blasphemous infidel, as well, according to at least one fundie blogger. At one point he says "Good thing you're not God...and good thing I'm not God either (I'd be doing some major "zapping")". Which I think is a very revealing comment.
  
• In a bit of musical blasphemy, a couple of well-known Sunday school tunes have been given blasphemous new lyrics, singing the praises of Cthulhu. As for blasphemy against Cthulhu, I haven't really found anything worth posting, which is a bit surprising. Perhaps those who speak ill of Cthulhu are rapidly, ah, removed from the universe, along with everything they've ever posted on the net. That's one theory, anyway.
  
• Putting the Hindu god Ganesh on a beer label isn't just blasphemy, it's a hate crime, according to one offendee. So he's suing the Lost Coast brewery for a billion dollars. Indica is a great beer, and anybody who wants to get between me and my beer is the Enemy. As for food pairings, let me suggest sacred cow as a perfect accompaniment. Add some bacon on top, and you're up to 3 offended religions for the price of one. Eat it on Friday (rather than fish) and you might offend a few elderly Catholics as well. Mmmm.... Bacon....
  
• But if you're Catholic, maybe you're too busy being angry about a recent South Park episode. Yes, South Park is blasphemous too. Who knew?
  
• Of course, if you're a proper bible thumpin' fundie, you know that all Catholics are blasphemers, because of the whole Virgin Mary thing.
  
• And if you're a proper Koran thumpin' Wahhabi, you know that all Shias are blasphemers.
  
• Also, writing a comedic book about Jesus is criminal blasphemy in Greece, even now, in the 21st century.
  
• The UN, or at least its terminally silly "Human Rights Commission", thinks it'd be nice if we had a global ban on offending anybody's religion. The UN's also been in favor of world peace for the last 60 years, and look how that's turned out.
  
• Here's a negative review of John Travolta's film Battlefield Earth, which is based on the holy writ of L. Ron Whatsisname. Clearly this is an offense against the holy name of Xenu, and John and Tom are going to come looking for you.
  
• Believe it or not, even our Glorious Leader is a blasphemer. Seems that when he was in Japan, Dubya bowed at a Shinto shrine. Someone really ought to explain to the fundies that George only did it because he thought the shrine was the one where the war criminals are buried, and the bow was done strictly out of professional courtesy. That ought to make them very happy.
  

Equal Opportunity Offender

Surprising how little coverage the Danish cartoon crisis is getting in the US media. Part of it, I'm sure, is that US media people are clueless fools who can't find Denmark on a map, don't know anything about the place, and assume their readers don't want to read about the rest of the world anyway. But they all have AP news feeds, so they can't pretend to be completely unaware of what's going on. I imagine they're just deathly afraid of ever offending anyone. Call it political correctness if you like, although that's become an ideologically loaded term. I gather part of the original motivation for the cartoons was to comment on self-censorship in the Western media. I guess we really shouldn't be that surprised that our domestic media is timid and spineless, or that lots of other Western countries have a freer press than we do these days. I'm not saying they need to reprint the cartoons, just that it would be a good opportunity to editorialize in favor of freedom of expression, assuming they're still in favor of that. Or if even that is just too controversial, they could at least give it a couple of column inches on an inside page.

In an more unfortunate development, the story is getting a bit of buzz in the conservative blogosphere. Another example. And another. Yet another. I don't think it's exactly helpful to be pro-cartoon solely because you don't like Muslims. I've never found conservatives to be reliable defenders of free expression. Sure, they're in favor of it when they're the ones doing the offending, but say anything unflattering about their infallible King George, or their holy crusade in Iraq, or make fun of their religion, and they're all for having you hauled off to Abu Ghraib and hooked up to the electrodes. An additional ugly bit is that they're all acting shocked and amazed that anyone in Europe believes in free speech. They've all got to get in vicious little digs at France, even though a French newspaper had the guts to print something that no US paper (that I'm aware of) would touch. I guess the thinking is that anyone who failed to jump on the crazy train for war in Iraq must be against freedom of any kind. And then they're copping the same smug "I told you so" attitude as they did during the recent rioting in Paris. Like somehow they were proved right about something. About what, exactly? It's not entirely clear. Probably something about how this proves that our Glorious Leader is right to wage holy war against the unbelievers, or something.

For the sake of being "fair and balanced", here's an angry rant by someone who was offended by the cartoons. And here's an archive of many additional blasphemous images. And another blog about the controversy, this one taking more of a free speech angle, which is refreshing.

It's very simple, really. The right to free expression must include the right to "offensive" expression, with no exemptions made for anyone's personal sacred cow. There's no such thing as a right to never be offended by anything. And we certainly shouldn't start carving out exceptions to our basic rights in the name of religion, anybody's religion. All religions are irrational, stupid, and false, and buying into one of them shouldn't grant someone more legal rights than someone who chooses not to partake. Our own fundies claim they're being oppressed whenever they're legally prevented from imposing their beliefs on the public at large, whether it's creationism, mandatory school prayer, government-sponsored nativity scenes, or what have you. They want absolute "freedom of religion" for themselves, and none for anyone else, and certainly no freedom from religion for anybody at all. How this is appreciably different from what those nasty evildoers want is something they've never adequately explained. Perhaps it's because our country's fundies have got the One True Religion, while the fundies beyond our borders all believe in satanic false idols. But then, those fundies say the same thing about us. So who are we to believe? Maybe they're both right about each other, and wrong about themselves.

Mmm.... Cheeeeese.....

[I could talk about politics again and try to become a respected world-famous blogger, but I make a point of trying to spend as little time as possible being angry or depressed. So how about let's just agree that George W. and his minions are pure evil incarnate, and talk about something fun instead?]

The Super Bowl's coming up, which I couldn't care less about. I understand Seattle's involved somehow, which surprises me. Maybe if they'd put the players on ice skates, give them sticks, and make the ball sort of, well, puck-shaped, then I'd start caring about football. The only positive thing about football that I can think of off the top of my head is that it's an excuse to eat lots of cheese. Ok, and there's the beer, too, let's not forget the beer. But the whole experience would be so much improved if you didn't have all that TV nonsense to distract from the cheese and beer. Also, if you're going to have some cheese, it may as well be good cheese. Life is short. Why waste a single moment of it eating Velveeta?

A few selected news articles about cheese, some more fussy and pretentious than others:

• The ABCs of Wine and Cheese. I actually think beer goes better with most kinds of cheese. But no rant about beer vs. wine today.
  
• Making Fine Cheese a Respected Art. There aren't a lot of countries where you'd see a headline like that, or where within the article someone would remark that many people are afraid of cheese. You just want to explain to them that lots of people eat cheese every day, yes, even the "stinky" kinds, and many of them don't die, at least not because of the cheese.
  
• Foodie at large - the big cheese. Just a reminder that the UK produces a lot of really great cheese. Yes, it's food, and the British are good at it. Film at 11.
  
• Making the most of milk. A newspaper in Virginia profiles a local couple in the cheese business.
  

And a few of my favorite local cheesemakers, most of whom sell at local farmers' markets. If you're not in this neck of the woods, you may be out of luck, but hey. There's probably someone geographically closer to you who deserves your suport.

• Fraga Farm. I'm not going to name the particular item I'm most fond of, since I don't want to threaten my supply.
  
• Rivers Edge Chevre. Another great local goat cheese producer. Their site goes into a bit of detail about their goats. You can tell they really love their goats, which is always a big plus in my book. Besides, goats are just cool.
  
• Rogue Creamery. They're best known for a variety of blue cheeses. If you act now, you can still buy a Super Bowl gift pack off their website.
  
• WIllamette Valley Cheese. They're mostly known for their gouda and havarti, but I'm more fond of their fontina. But hey, I'm weird that way.
  
• Noris Dairy. Yes, if you want good local cheddar, and you don't want to have any dealings whatsoever with a certain coastal-based evil, litigious, predatory monopolist, you're in luck. And cheese is just part of a full range of dairy products, and they even do home delivery. With milk in glass bottles and everything. I remember having a milkman when I was little, and it was considered kind of weird and retro even then. In the 21st century, it's jaw-dropping that such a thing exists. I don't drink a lot of milk, so it's not practical for me, but if I did, I'd be all over this.
  

It's a shame that nobody in the area seems to be doing French-style triple cream soft cheeses (like Pierre Robert for example). Maybe those are still a little too decadent for local tastes, just a bit too "rich" and (some might say) "unhealthy". I'd argue that any food that makes you very, very happy is good for your mental health, and mental health is a crucial part of your overall health, therefore it's health food. It's obvious, once you think about it the correct way.

To teh Megist(r)on

In a number of recent posts, I've gone and totally geeked out over several theories of infinitely large and small numbers. In comparison, the topic of extremely large finite numbers just doesn't seem all that interesting. But I recently remembered an incident from when I was a small child, when a grade school teacher asked our class to name the largest number we could think of. The then-current Guinness Book of World Records insisted the "largest number" was something called "megiston", which was denoted by the number 10 in a circle. So that's what I answered, and I seem to recall that I either got a lower grade, or was publicly scolded by the teacher for making up numbers that didn't exist. Apparently the teacher didn't regard the Guinness Book as the final authority on these matters, even though I think I'd actually gotten my dog-eared copy at one of those Scholastic book fairs they used to have all the time. I remember the incident because it was one of those early inklings that either a.) grownups aren't always right, and/or b.) the stuff you read in books isn't always true. I also remember being frustrated because at the time I was absolutely sure I was right, but nobody would take me seriously, just because I was a little kid, and everybody knows kids don't know anything.

So I was thinking about this recently, and it occurred to me that I'd never seen the word "megiston", or any numbers in circles, in any context since that time. Which made me curious. Was this exotic-sounding number just something dreamed up in the Guinness-drenched offices of the official world record people? Was the Book wrong? Is it possible that I just imagined the whole thing, or misremembered it, or misunderstood what the Book was talking about? Thanks to the magic of Google, I now know that I was right, and my idols at the massive beer conglomerate had not betrayed me. What a relief that was, let me tell you. There is such a number as "megiston", though for some reason people occasionally call it "megistron" with an 'r', which is obviously incorrect. The ten-in-a-circle is one example of something called Steinhaus-Moser Notation, one of several different ways of expressing really humongous numbers, ones that are so big they can't be easily expressed in terms of exponents. Others include Donald Knuth's up-arrows, John Conway's chained sideways arrows, hyper operators, and Ackermann functions. The basic idea in each case is that, since mere exponents aren't up to the job, we'll just define more poweful operations, generally by iterated exponentiation, with the first and simplest higher-level operator sometimes known as tetration. This is just the logical extension of the process where exponentiation is iterated multiplication, and multiplication, in turn is just iterated addition. These various notations are attempts to define a symbolism general enough to express incredibly large numbers in a reasonable amount of symbols. Although, since the integers are infinite and all, any finite symbolism you come up with is eventually going to run out of steam, no matter how many nested levels of recursion you use, and no matter what kind of clever notational tricks you can come up with. In the end, the best you can really hope for is that your notation will be sufficient for any numbers you think you're likely to need, and won't be too clumsy to use for actual work. Despite the memorable, mysterious-sounding names, and mystical-looking notation, the Steinhaus-Moser seems like it would be awkward to use in "everyday" usage, in the unlikely event that you had to deal with quantities that big on a daily basis. Kind of a shame, really. And then, none of the notations seem to be entirely adequate for expressing certain really big numbers, like Graham's number. (Which, incidentally, I think has since replaced megiston in the Guinness Book.)

Another way to think about things like the Ackermann function and the like is that they're functions that increase much more rapidly than mundane ones like x^2, x!, or even x^x. Conversely, you've got things like the inverse Ackermann function (also discussed in the Wikipedia article linked to above) that increase far more slowly than, say, your garden-variety logarithms, for example. And remarkably, the inverse Ackermann function a(m,n) has real-world applications, including some in the computer science world. Here's a report about a fancy minimum spanning tree algorithm that runs in O( m a(m,n)) time, which is pretty schweeet. If you can't find an O(n) or better algorithm, and usually you can't, this is pretty much the next best thing you can hope for. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, here's a primer on Big O notation from a CS standpoint, and another one given from a more pure mathematical perspective. My impression has been that algorithms coming from a simple, "naive" attempt to solve a problem tend to be O(n^2), bubble sort being the classic example, and it can take a fair bit of head-scratching to come up with something more efficient. O(n^2) isn't always unacceptable, depending on the values of n you're likely to run into, but as they drum into you as a first-year CS student, you shouldn't settle for it if you don't have to. However, back when I had the inevitable C coding assignment to write a little program that implements 4 or 5 sort algorithms, for fun I decided one of them would be bogosort, known as the "the archetypal perversely awful algorithm", which runs in O(n*n!). That's pretty bad. I ended up putting in lots of printfs so the user could see it "working", because it's so unlikely they'd have enough patience to wait for it to complete. The wikipedia article referenced mentions an even worse variant known as "bozosort", although it probably still runs in some variant of factorial time. At the office a while back we got into a discussion about whether it's possible to write a sort that runs in worse than factorial time, without having the code take any pathological steps to deliberately avoid sorting the data properly. We couldn't come up with anything off the tops of our heads that might be worse than the repeated shuffle-and-test process. I think you'd have to be fairly ingenious to invent an O(n^n), or (even better) O(A(n)) sort. You probably woudn't get a medal, but you'd certainly merit a writeup on Slashdot. And probably here as well, FWIW.

Ahh, but it gets better, and weirder. A good article I came across titled "Who can name the largest number?" The author, Scott Aaronson, starts out discussing the answers you get when you ask kids this question -- all of whom gave answers vastly smaller than mine, I'm happy to say -- and then moves on to discuss things like our friend the Ackermann function, and then brings up a family of functions collectively known as Busy Beaver functions, one of the goofier names you're likely to run across in the math or CS worlds. The exact definition is fairly technical, involving various questions about Turing machines, but the really key point is that the functions are non-computable, meaning that although a function BB(n) is well-defined, there's no easy way to calculate its exact value for a given n. All you can do is build hardware, or write software, and try to determine the values experimentally. The really bizarre part: I'm not sure if this is the cause of, or an effect of, the functions' non-computability, but it's been proven that BB functions increase more rapidly than any function that can be recursively defined (exponents, Ackermann, numbers-in-polygons, whatever). I find this extremely puzzling and counterintuitive, and I have a lot of trouble imagining any sort of upper bound on how rapidly a "normal" function can increase, no matter how many nestings and such that you do. But so be it, I guess. The Aaronson article mentions that once you've got BB funtions, you can define even bigger functions in terms of them, but everything past BB is squarely in the realm of non-computability, continuing on up forever from there. So it seems that our familiar world of well-behaved, easily computed mathematical expressions is just the merest tip of the iceberg, and our difficulty in grasping what else is out there isn't just due to difficulties in notation. Wow. Freaky.

Some related functions with far less astronomical values are disussed here. The author of that page is Australian, hence the names "placid platypus" and "weary wombat", and where BB functions look for the maximal values of various things relating to Turing machines, his family of Australian fauna functions look for the minimal values. And then of course you've got inverse Busy Beaver functions. The link is to the sole research paper I can find (via Google) that mentions the subject. If they need a flashier, sillier name, I'd propose "Sleepy Sloth", but then, I'm not a mathematician, so what do I know? :) Anyway, as the inverse of a BB, it seems like an SS would increase more slowly than any computable function. It would still tend to infinity, but at a nearly imperceptible rate.

Now, the main underlying reason I've been doing all this reading lately is that I've been trying to get a better handle on hyperreal numbers and related beasties. And it turns out that one way you can look at the hyperreals is to view them in a purely algebraic sense, as a field of real-valued functions. It's a little hard to get your brain around at first, but basically each real number can be thought of as a constant function with the value of that real number, while functions that increase or decrease without bound are infinite nonstandard numbers, and functons that converge on some horizontal asymptote are infinititesimals. And functions that oscillate get us in to that confusing business with ultrafilters, so let's not go there for right now. Really exploring this will have to wait for another post some time, but it's interesting to consider how BB and related functions fit in. In the world of the hyperreals, BB(n) and SS(n) (or BB-1(n), if you prefer) both define infinitely large numbers, while 1/BB(n) and 1/SS(n) both give us infinitesimals. 1/SS(n) would seem to be an especially "big" infinitesimal, with SS(n) being a particularly "small" infinite number, but neither is a limit. No, in the hyperreal universe (as well as that of the surreal numbers), there's no such thing as a least infinite number, or a greatest infinitesimal. So the domains of the finite, the infinitely large, and the infinitesimal stretch out towards each other without bound, but they never actually touch. Weird, huh?

And the rest I'll save for another post, when I get around to it. I've rambled enough for now.

Random(ish) Curios and Factoids

• You may not be able to tell from the photo, but you're looking at the world's smallest fish. The article says they live in peat bogs in SE Asia, but you have to wonder if they might be all over the place, and people have just been ignoring them up to now. They wouldn't be hard to overlook, certainly.
  
• My current source of occupational stress is a unit test suite that had fallen by the wayside several years back. It hasn't been maintained or updated for a long time now, and it's out of sync with the current codebase. Oh, and many of the tests either weren't passing at the time the suite stopped being maintained, or they didn't actually do anything, or they were failing silently without reporting anything back to the test framework. So when a test fails, you don't immediately know whether the test's broken, or the code it's testing is broken. And did I mention these are C++ tests, using a homegrown test framework, which has itself proven to be less than 100% reliable. No JUnit for us, nosirreee.... I really miss working in Java right about now...
  
• On the bright side, here are two more sites with cute pictures of cats and kittens: RateMyKitten and KittenWar. Enjoy!
  
• Elsewhere in the universe, it turns out there's a nifty way to recycle old worn-out spacesuits, which is to fill them with experiments and chuck 'em out the nearest airlock. Actually the idea of empty spacesuits floating around in orbit is a little creepy, now that I think about it. Hmm.
  
• Came across a blog with a few posts touching on superreal numbers. Turns out the reason there's not a lot of info on the topic out there is that it's a relatively new subject. The definitive book was only published in 1996. I'll do another math-related post in the near future, I expect, but not just yet. I'm still doing some additional reading, with the idea that any additional speculation on my part will be at least marginally better informed.
  
• You'll probably think this sounds gross, but here's a recipe for a Tuna & Tater Tot Pie. I guess it all depends on how you feel about tater tots. If you ask me, they're the Northwest's single greatest contribution to fine cuisine, and global culture, for that matter. I mean it, and not in a PBR-swilling ironic hipster way, either. Forget all that business about salmon, blackberries, hazelnuts, whatever. It's not like any of them were actually invented here.
  

Godmonster of Indian Flats

The "Godmonster" of the title is not a reference to Pat Robertson or Jack Abramoff, although I admit either would be a reasonable guess. But not this time. Tonight's bad movie is Godmonster of Indian Flats, a peculiar early-70's yarn about a gigantic, horribly mutated sheep marauding around near Virginia City, Nevada. As numerous IMDB users have noted, it's one of the, ah, less convincing monsters you're likely to see on film.

And, as is typical of old monster movies, you don't actually see much of the monster, and you get the feeling they're trying to pad the movie out early on, to bring what would otherwise be a 15-minute rampage up to feature film length. So we get a parallel story, a conflict between the local creepy, insular townsfolk and an eastern mining conglomerate that wants to take over the place. The whole "weird doings in an isolated town" angle is actually pulled off reasonably well, although you keep waiting for Mulder and Scully to show up and make fun of all the yokels.

The early 70's were a very serious time, both in and out of the film world, and it just wouldn't be right to make a monster movie without delivering a Serious Message. And in Godmonster, you get two for the price of one. First, the residents of this desolate mining town are concerned about the big bad easterners coming in and messing the place up with even more mining, which would cause pollution. Early on, someone mentions cyanide, which really is used for gold mining these days: It's one of the few substances that dissolves gold, so you just pour cyanide on top of a pile of dirt, and the gold goes into solution and washes out the bottom. This would be a great idea, except that cyanide is poisonous. Plus, gold-mining oldtimers tend to think that it's cheating, because it's too easy, kind of like fishing with dynamite, or something. So anyway, that's Serious Message number one.

Serious Message number two is (I think) an plea for racial tolerance and harmony and understanding, or something. The local representative of the eastern mining guys is black, see, and he spends much of the movie being mistreated by the ignorant, bigoted locals, which isn't very nice or hospitable of them. But on the other hand, he's working for the big Eastern polluters, so the two messages are sort of working at cross-purposes. In the end, it's not 100% clear exactly what important life lesson we're supposed to come away with.

But wait! There's more! If you get the DVD from Something Weird, cleverly hidden among the disc's special features is a second genuine full-length feature film! Who could resist a deal like that? The bonus movie on the disk is an obscure exploitation flick from 1964 called Passion in the Sun. The plot isn't overly taxing, to be sure. A "circus geek" in a cheap fright wig escapes from a disused amusement park, and heads off to go on a rampage. Meanwhile, a burlesque dancer is snatched from the local airport by a pair of Bad Men toting an important suitcase (probably full of cash, but we never see inside it). She escapes when the two men quarrel over the loot, and an extended chase ensues, with our heroine managine to lose articles of clothing at a remarkable rate. A pair of local cops are in the mix as well, following along several steps behind our heroine and the remaining Bad Man. As the movie's from way back in 1964, we know justice will prevail in the end, but not just yet. Since viewers will probably start drumming their fingers during the long chase through the underbrush, all the while waiting eagerly for justice to prevail, the filmmakers generously chose to break up the (lack of) action with a series of burlesque numbers. These take place at the club where our heroine was originally headed, and feature dancers who would be considered rather, uh, fleshy by present-day standards, at least cinematic standards. Eventually the geek shows up, does in the remaining Bad Man, and takes over the crucial role of chasing our heroine. So they inevitably end up back at the amusement park, and she ends up hiding on a rollercoaster. Naturally the geek fires the thing up, so as to better torment our protagonist. So she goes for a few spins around the track, trying to look terrified, but eventually the geek tires of this, or something, and inexplicably crawls out onto the tracks, where the rollercoaster hits him. Finally the cops show up and comfort the poor lady, who's been fending for herself the whole movie up to now. For their valiant efforts, HQ gives our boys in blue the rest of the night off, so inevitably they end up at a certain burlesque club of our acquaintance. There's another couple of numbers, now featuring our heroine with the others as backup, and our "heroes", not late to the party for once, enjoy a hearty handshake to close the film. The credits immediately pop up to tell us that the whole thing was filmed "south of the border", which I guess was important for legal reasons back in the old days, due to those few extremely tame topless scenes. I could swear that in one scene I saw a freeway exit for Galveston, but I suppose there could be a different Galveston in Mexico that I'm totally unfamiliar with.

The definitive book or academic paper about 60's exploitation films has surely been written already. It's not like the material is very subtle and hard to puzzle out, for starters, plus the main thing to talk about is the nudity, which gathers a crowd in the academic world just like it does everywhere else. And the genre certainly had its weird conventions. There were only a few set circumstances that gave you an excuse for a nude scene. 60's viewers, presumably all male viewers, seemed to really go for the "peeping Tom" thing, since viewers are treated to an endless parade of scenes with women in the buff, sitting around putting on makeup, or idly chatting with friends, or doing some other very mundane activity, blissfully unaware they're being watched. You don't need to be a graduate student to pick up on the obvous male gaze aspect here. When the movie camera's not peeping in the shower, you get things like the aforementioned burlesque scenes, which I guess are there because putting anything on stage automagically turns it into art. Or at least it gives you a reasonable legal defense on grounds of artistic merit, in case somebody tries to prosecute you. And then, the costumes used on stage tend towards the ethnic, lots of grass skirts and "Indian princess" outfits. If you start out with the right set of clothes, by unspoken social convention you'd temporarily become sort of pseudo-ethnic, and nudity didn't really count somehow, because you're just an innocent child of nature, a la the old days of National Geographic.

And then, to take the cake, after pulling off their vastly underwhelming "rescue", our two police buddies win the right to see the heroine in the altogether -- in a pure and innocent 1964 way, of course. Hey, the movie may not sound like much, but it's a definite step up from the oeuvre of Doris Wishman. That is, unless you like endless shots of feet and inanimate objects, which I understand really does the job for some people.

To sum up tonight's double feature: Start off with "Godmonster" (if you dare, and/or care), so that you'll have had a few drinks or whatever by the time you get to the lower half of the double bill. Otherwise you'll either a) vastly overanalyze the thing, like I did, or b) get extremely bored and turn it off. Which would be understandable, considering that every moment you spend watching a bad movie is a moment of your life you'll never get back. But it's also true that sometimes you've got nothing better to do on a Saturday night, relentless sands of time notwithstanding, and if so, you could do worse than "Godmonster". I know, because I have, so sooner or later you'll probably be hearing about those bad movies too.

Oxymoronic

[Ok, the network's finally back to normal, and I can post here again. I was starting to suffer withdrawal symptoms. This "blog" thing is oddly addictive.]

Today's rant once again involves our local Powers That Be. One of their current silly notions is that our fair city desperately needs an official Public Market (not to be confused with the one in Portland, Maine). As the story goes, we really need to work on being a properly European city, and one of the absolute necessities is a government-operated (or at least sponsored) fresh produce market, open-air if possible. This is absolutely essential, a non-negotiable point, they tell us.

Furthermore, the perfect site for this hypothetical market has already been identified: Precisely the spot where the successful Portland Saturday Market has operated since the 1970s. This means Saturday Market is going to be pushed aside, and they'll need to find a new home, with little or no assistance from the Powers That Be.

It's important to note that we already have quite a few sources of high-quality local produce, both grocery stores and farmers' markets. To date, "Public Market" proponents have offered no compelling reasons why we need a taxpayer-supported competitor to these existing businesses. They just think we need to do it, regardless.

I see several reasons behind the recent push.

1. First, our perennial inferiority complex vs. Seattle, home of the famous Pike Place Market. They've got one, so we need one. This is the yuppie version of the argument that we desperately need a publicly-funded baseball (or football) stadium, just because Seattle already has both.
2. Second, the existing Saturday Market only runs on weekends (hence the name), and during the rest of the week the area's fairly sketchy. The Powers That Be are stoked about gentrifying the area, and they've arranged to relocate a nearby fire station to make way for even more high-rise yuppie condos. Apparently firefighters are insufficiently upscale, and therefore need to be shuffled out of sight / out of mind. A public market in the area would boost property values, and thus property tax revenuse, therefore it's absolutely imperative that we do it. It's down to greed, basically.
   
3. As our current Powers That Be are for the most part a clique of affluent Baby Boomers, the existing Saturday Market is an inconvenient reminder of their more disreputable days back in the 70's. Saturday Market is still your source for tie-dye apparel of all sorts, 100% organic hemp macrame, a thousand kinds of incense, you name it. Our glorious leaders would rather not be reminded of their youth. They'd much rather have us think they've been the same pretentious Bordeaux-swilling cigar-chomping foodies slash deep-pocketed patrons of the arts since age 18 or so, and therefore we need to sweep any authentic vestiges of those days under the rug, ASAP.
   
4. It's just a naked show of influence, showing the world who controls all the levers of power in this town. We've been told that any public market built in this town will involve big payments to our bloated "creative class" community for various design services and so forth. It's important that everyone understand that nothing should get built within the city limits without an official Creative stamp of approval. Meanwhile, the restaurant folks and their "foodie" groupies were lured on board with the idea that the market will be named in honor of James Beard, who was from here originally. Honestly, if you're going to put your loyalty up for sale, the price should be higher than that. In the end, a memorial is just pure symbolism, nothing more. How this city handles monuments and memorials is a fairly appalling read, but I'll save that for another day.
   

The really sad thing about the whole debacle-in-progress is that we've already tried this once before. We've already demonstrated quite clearly that, so far as this city's concerned, the term "Public Market" is an oxymoron. Back in the 1930's, our city fathers decided we needed to replace the existing produce market (which had come into being without state involvement) with a gigantic Art Deco market right on the waterfront (pictured above). Well, I'll grant that the building was pretty cool, but the market went bankrupt after just a couple of years. By which time the existing privately-run produce markets had been driven out of business, and we were condemned to a life of nothing but tuna casseroles and Spam for another 4 decades or so.

They say those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Normally I'd say that's a tired cliche, and quite often the opposite is true -- as in, those who know too much history are the ones doomed to repeat it, see the Balkans for one choice example -- but in our case the old cliche is true. As I've noted before, the people running the show here don't really believe the world existed prior to 1970, and even if it did, they don't belive it has any relevance whatsoever to the utopia we've built here in the last 40 years.

We ignore history at our peril, that's all I'm sayin'.

Exploding Toads!!!

Gentle Reader(s), I present to you the most excellent product recall of all time: the Case of the Exploding Toads. My wife came across this one back in 2003, and it's been a household favorite ever since. (No, we aren't weird people, why do you ask?)

Text like this is what makes the recall such a priceless gem:

Hazard: A small hose inside the toad can fail, allowing water to fill the toad's cavity. The increased water pressure can cause the toad to explode, posing the risk of injury to anyone nearby.

Note that the recalled toads are not known to be hallucinogenic when licked, unlike certain other toads -- which, ironically, you can still purchase online. Maybe this is because the Colorado River Toad works as advertised?


Note that the exploding toads also lack basic mind control abilities.

All glory to the Hypnotoad!

Kablooey!!!

On today's walk to the office, I noticed they're finally tearing out the old Portland police building at SW 3rd and Oak. As you can see from the photo, it's sort of inexplicable that I left it off my recent list of ugliest buildings in town. I think it's fair to say nobody's sad to see it go.

Of course, they wouldn't be tearing it out now without a good rea$on. For several decades it had just sat there, forlorn, empty, and decaying, a building people would cross the street to avoid walking past. But soon it'll be gone, to be replaced by Oak Tower, the latest tall, skinny, market-rate condo building. As that last link indicates, it was originally going to be apartments, but the developers switched it to condos instead. Seems that in order to qualify for the usual witches' brew of tax abatements and subsidies, they would have had to reserve a certain number of units as "affordable" housing. Now, the city's definition of affordable is fairly lenient. In some cases, it's affordable if someone making a mere 120% of the metro area's median income can afford it. In other words, you may still qualify if you're above average, but just not enough above average. But apparently there's no way to make money anymore catering to 120-percenters and similar pikers, so instead we get more condos for the ultra-rich. What a topsy-turvy world we live in.

As usual, there's an amusing take on the subject over at Bojack. And if you're curious about our many exciting skyscraper projects, a fairly comprehensive list is maintained here.

One of the projects on the list is The Cronin, which is named for one of the much smaller buildings it will replace. I had the privilege of watching those buildings be torn down as well. It's kind of fun, although I can't really put my finger on exactly why. Maybe it's a male thing, I dunno.

It's not strictly a destructive impulse, mind you. Watching buildings go up can be fun, too. I usually rationalize that as watching real engineering as it happens -- as opposed to just schlepping out lines of C++ code like I do. And maybe that's the whole reason, and maybe it isn't.

A few months back, I noticed an intriguing machine being used to smooth out some freshly poured concrete on a building that was going up. I only recently figured out that it's called a ride-on power trowel. The same counterrotating blades that smooth the concrete also serve as propulsion and steering. It looks like a lot of fun. If we ever get a new dot-com bubble, and I have a pile of IPO cash to play with, I swear I'm going to rent one, have a big mess of concrete poured somewhere, and let everyone in the office have a turn driving the thing.

And then, and then, um, we'll go find us a bar that's got a mechanical bull, and we'll give that a try, and maybe there'll be, like, some actual country western music playing or something. One of those places where the whiskey is not imported, and you order it "no ice", not "neat", you know the kind of place I mean. The plan is for no actual bar fighting, hopefully, because HR wouldn't be happy about that, but we can vicariously feel like we're living kinda dangerously for a couple hours. And after that, maybe a trip down to the, heh heh, Acropolis, heh heh, to blow a pile of ones, or whatever.

Honestly, we geeks are at our very lamest when we're trying to have ourselves a "real man" moment...

I'm starting to ramble here, but the #1 link on a google search for "Real Man" is fairly amusing. It seems that if you're a Real Man, you really ought to have a solid granite bicycle seat. And speaking of bicycles, on my way to the office today I was yet again nearly run down in the crosswalk by a completely oblivious guy on a bike, decked out in the usual "alternative" pseudo-bike-messenger regalia. Aargh! But that's worth a post in itself, which I'll get around to sooner or later.

Fine Whine

It's quite unusual for me to point people at the comments section of a Slashdot story. Usually there's nothing to see on /. except the usual Natalie Portman / Soviet Russia / Beowulf Cluster idiocy, which is great fun if you're 15 and have no social skills, but which is excruciatingly tedious for everyone else.

What's doubly unusual is that the Slashdot story is about wine. Seems a company in Japan claims to have developed a gadget that rapidly "ages" wine, doing in seconds what would normally take years or even decades.

The comments cover most of the salient points. Some posters argue that it won't catch on, because people are so stuck on the traditional way of making wine. Others point out that a lot of people are into wine solely because it's expensive (and therefore sophisticated), so they won't go for anything that makes it less of a luxury item. Some posters quote studies showing that wine conoisseurs often have trouble distinguishing expensive wines from cheap ones in blind tastings, remarking that the whole subject is a complete pseudoscience. There's a bit of the inevitable beer vs. wine arguing, of course, and quite a few people express doubts that the machine even works, at least in the way the article describes.

Now, I like wine and everything, but I'm basically a beer geek. It's sometimes said that farmers make wine, and engineers make beer. Well, and SCA dorks make mead, but that's beside the point. I have to say that if someone invented a gadget that made beer taste better, I doubt there would be any controversy about it. Beer's not generally regarded as, or priced as, a luxury item, and the price tends to reflect the actual cost of ingredients and of distribution, where wine pricing is a black art that reflects perceived scarcity, name recognition (for both the winery and the geographic area), ratings by a handful of superstar reviewers, current fads in pop culture, and so forth.

It's notable that the original story's from the Sydney Morning Herald, since Australia seems to be the blessed counterexample to the whole wine-as-snobby-luxury-item meme. If the gadget works, they'll probably go wild for it, just like they have for putting wine in boxes. It's been repeatedly demonstrated that wine in a box keeps better than wine in a bottle, but outside of Oz everyone seems very resistant to the idea, I guess because it takes away some of the mystique. Next people will be drinking the stuff out of regular glasses, and just imagine how horrible that would be.

It concerns me a little that certain elements of the beer world want to be more like the wine world. I don't know where they got that inferiority complex from, but it definitely exists. The recent push towards Belgian-style beers reflects this line of thinking. I mean, as a business person you're certainly going to be on the lookout for anything you can do that would boost your margins. You'd be silly not to. And putting strongly-flavored, high-alcohol beers in chunky bottles with corks seems to be a winner right now. It's also interesting to see the mixed reaction in the beer world to certain breweries experimenting with micro-canning, i.e. putting beer you'd actually want to drink into a can. My first experience with this was about a year ago, with the tasty products of the Oskar Blues brewery, and I have to admit it was kind of surreal, drinking something from a can and being able to taste the hops. Like boxed wine, canned beer keeps better, and it's easier to take with you if you're going camping or rafting or whatever.

Duelling Fictions

So I was walking to work the other day and noticed a very curious billboard. It was done up to look like graffiti, and carried the slogan "Not a crime!", brought to us by the public-spirited citizens at NotACrime.org. The curious thing about the billboard is that it's part of an astroturfing campaign by ClearChannel, the huge, predatory, monopolistic, warmongering corporation that owns all the billboards in town. Seems that a few years back, the city of Portland decided that billboards and large ads painted on the sides of buildings were an eyesore, and banned them. You could get away with this in most states, but the Oregon Supreme Court takes a very absolutist position on free expression, and it's not ok here. The state constitution doesn't give explicit permission to treat commercial speech differently than other speech, so you can't. Our Supremes ruled against the city a few years ago, and at first the city decided to do the usual Portland passive-agressive thing, and go after "real" mural art, just to show how mean the nasty Supreme Court was by making them be consistent and all. That proved controversial, so then the city came up with the clever idea of reclassifying billboards and murals as city-sponsored "public art", so they need to go through a permitting process and be judged on artistic merit. Meanwhile, ClearChannel has made it clear they won't settle for anything less than total laissez-faire, so they can place ads anywhere they want, in any format, with no city oversight of any kind. In the end, it's about money, not speech, so far as they're concerned.

Nobody's an angel in this argument. On one hand, ClearChannel is about as evil a corporation as you can find, and I'd hate to see them have any more power and influence than they already do. And the idea that they're really supporting the rights of poor, oppressed muralists and taggers is just laughable. They certainly aren't in favor of graffiti when one of their billboards gets defaced, after all. On the other, I'm instinctively very, very skeptical when any government body tries to reclassify something so it's not protected speech, no matter how noble their intentions may be, or how malevolent the target of the action might be. Yes, lots of people think billboards are a public nuisance, but you could say the same about protest marches. Lots of people don't like those, and they tend to inconvenience commuters far more than billboards do. In general, we ought to be leery of restrictions on speech, and the more popular the restriction would be, the more skeptical we ought to be.

If I had to pick a side, right now I'm somewhat inclined, quite reluctantly, towards the evil, bloodthirsty corporation, even though I agree that billboards are ugly and all. But that's not really the fundamental issue here, for me, anyway.

The thing that really bothers me is that the issue's being debated in entirely fictional terms. One side pretends to be the friend of the common (artistic) man, while the other claims to be merely standing up for good art, as judged by a municipal panel of experts, and generally promoting the beautification of the city. Both duelling fictions are undoubtedly pollster-approved and focus group-friendly, but they're also utterly untrue in all respects. Nobody's being honest about their real motives. One shouldn't expect ClearChannel, or any corporation for that matter, to have motives beyond doing whatever makes the most money, and one certainly shouldn't believe them if they claim to have other motives. LIkewise, the city's trying to come up with a way to go on treating advertising differently than "real art", despite that pesky state Supreme Court ruling, purely because they don't like large outdoor advertising very much, and they really don't like ClearChannel much at all. Even that ruling contains fictional elements, in that the very idea that a corporation has a general right to free expression stems from the notion that a business is considered a person under the law, a 19th century legal fiction concocted by the US Supreme Court, back when the railroads and various industrial robber barons called the shots. People have gotten used to this concoction over the years, but it really is a ridiculous idea on its face. And the fact that your average corporation has vastly more financial resources at its disposal than the average living breathing human means that the corporation tends to win out when the two come into conflict, with the legal system all the while pretending that the two are precise equals under the law.

Within the world of law, the culture equates cleverness in a legal argument with truth, beauty, justice, and sometimes even morality, even if there's no factual basis behind it whatsoever. A while back I promised an eventual rant about Oregon's "landmark" Beach Bill, but a full rant is unnecessary to this argument, so here's an abbreviated version. The law, which aimed to protect the coast from encroaching development, did so by reclassifying the state's beaches as a state highway. Really. This was considered a great move, because it prevented anyone from building directly on the beach, portions of which remain technically private property to this day, with the owners not receiving a single cent in compensation. And not a thought given to the obvious fact that the beach is not a highway. In reality, the law was passed this way because it was cheaper than actually buying everyone out, plus any improvements the state wanted to make nearby -- parking, campgrounds, etc. -- could be funded through state gas taxes, since they'd effectively be rest areas along the side of a (fictional) highway.

I suspect, but can't currently prove, that reasoning along these lines for too long eventually damages one's basic ability to think rationally, to distinguish fact from fiction, and right from wrong. If you want to know why our political system seems so broken, look no further.

Yor! And More!

This time around, we'll start with the bad movie and go from there. I'm afraid that tonight's bad movie is Yor, the Hunter from the Future, which is your standard Italian-Turkish barbarian movie, with an exciting twist! It turns out that (spoiler alert) this epic tale takes place not in the prehistoric past, but in a barbaric post-nuclear future, which explains all the androids and ray guns in the last half hour or so of the movie. This would be a big surprise, except that the English-language title gives the whole game away before the film even starts. It's not clear how a nuclear war could have triggered the evolution of very fake-looking dinosaurs. And, um, the filmmakers would be wise to not let the lawyers at Lucasfilm see those sinister black-clad, black-helmeted androids. The movie's worth it just for its synth-heavy 80's new wave theme song. If you have a low tolerance for cinematic crappiness, but you're mildly curious and/or bored, you can get a pretty good feel for the movie by just watching the first 10 minutes or so. Besides the theme song, there's also a bit close to the beginning where Yor whips out his bow, shoots down what appears to be a giant moth, and uses it as a primitive hang glider to soar in and rescue the heroine. I bet you've never seen that before. If you manage to tough it out through the whole movie, towards the end there's a trapeze bit you don't want to miss. Yes, trapeze.

This movie is actually rated PG, with no nudity, and with violence so fake that nobody's likely to find it disturbing. Normally this makes for a very poor and tedious barbarian movie (like Ator, or Krull), but this one manages to be surreal enough to keep it interesting.

Apparently you can watch the whole thing on Veoh here if you install some sort of player. I haven't tried that, and I don't know what's involved in this player they're offering, so ymmv, caveat emptor, etc..

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And since we're on the topic of barbarians and nuclear apocalypses, the Iran situation is heating up again. Certain Democrats with their eyes firmly set on 2008 are trying to position themselves to the right of Bush on the Iran nuclear issue, as if being to the right of George was actually possible. Hillary Clinton and Evan Bayh have now gone on record saying that the administration isn't taking a sufficiently hard line against Iran. Someone ought to tell them this is not just another political game, and it's all not just a matter of positioning yourself properly for the next election cycle. Democrats in Congress lined up en masse to compete over who could take the hardest line against Saddam, figuring it was all business as usual, just another meaningless beltway charade. And as a result we got stuck with an ugly, unpopular, expensive, and apparently endless war that they'd all happily authorized. You'd think they'd have learned a thing or two by now, but I think they're still sitting around, utterly bewildered by what happened last time. Bush is so dangerous precisely because he's not all about business as usual, or insulating oneself from attack ads in the upcoming primary, or anything so mundane. He's got nothing but scorn for business as usual, DC style. Give him permission to start a war, and he really will start a war, and then you won't be in much of a tenable position to criticize him when the war goes badly. What's more, he's got Karl whispering in his ear, and Karl knows how to play the D's for fools. Look at them right now. Even with nearly 3 years of war in Iraq under our belts, they still think the safest political strategy is to steer themselves as far to the right as they possibly can, so that they're cheap imitations of "real" Republicans. Even now, war is incredibly easy in the political sense, it's by far the path of least resistance, and everyone's for it, in the usual DC abstract way where (even now) they assume it'll never actually happen. I expect that in the near future, George will "generously" grant the D's a chance to look really, really tough on national security issues, by giving him very explicit permission to spy on, detain, torture, and kill anyone he chooses, with no legal checks and balances whatsoever, and they'll happily give it to him. There is no part of the Constitution they won't throw overboard in a heartbeat if they think it'll help their reelection chances. I'd say they'd all been hypnotized, or replaced by pod people, except that they've been acting this way pretty much nonstop since around 1980.

And Congress is far from alone. I don't think that Ahmadinejad guy has any clue what he's started here. Iran's highly suspect nuclear program, combined with his, um, outspoken views about Israel, has given politicians across the western world a golden opportunity to talk tough without going out on a limb. Jacques Chirac, fresh off a year of continuous domestic problems -- failed referendums, riots, etc. -- would like to remind everyone that France has the bomb, and as president he's not afraid to use it if need be. Politicians in Germany are predictably outraged, but when you're trying to look tough, outraging foreign politicians is rarely a bad move.

Now, the Iran nuclear issue is certainly something to be concerned about, but right now it seems everyone's just cynically trying to exploit the thing to their own benefit. And I'd just like to point out, if I may, that the whole issue would be much simpler if there was no internationally-recognized "right" for a country to obtain and use "peaceful" nuclear technology. If you just drew a line in the sand and said that nuclear power was a mistake, period, and nobody ought to be using it, there'd be none of this game where everyone looks at a country's nuclear program and tries to figure out what it's really being used for. I mean, RTGs would still be OK, I guess (see previous post), but any big reactor would be immediate cause for alarm.