Monthly Archives: September 2016

In “The Search for a Legendary Ship” (American Archaeology, pp 43-47, mostly offline), Alexandra Witze describes Lieutenant (later Captain) Cook’s use of HMS Endeavour to explore the Australian coast for the European powers, and at the end of that journey the ship disappears from the history books. Now a volunteer group named the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project, in conjunction with some amateur historians, has suggested she was paid off and sold, renamed and then sunk by the British near Newport Harbor during the American Revolutionary War to discourage an approaching French force.

All this is to lead up to this head-scratching paragraph. All typos mine….

In a rare use of salvage law, the state of Rhode Island filed to “arrest” the abandoned wrecks as its property. A federal court agreed. Now, if and when the Endeavour is identified, the vessel will belong to Rhode Island.

I suppose no other law applied for taking possession of the wrecks, so one had to be stretched to make it work. It still makes for an uncomfortable sentence and concept.

A reader remembers the BBS days:

What’s really strange is that my time as the system operator of a BBS was over 15 years which seems scarcely believable now. However there are times when I have dreams where keeping the board running figure prominently – that I need to perform maintenance on the board or back up the database or do other tasks I used to do to keep it running. And this is about 16 years after last running a board regularly. I’m not really sure what that says. However it seems like only yesterday I had to do all these things to keep the system running and it was a task which I attended to with a fairly religious fervor.

Don’t I know it. I recall the second time I moved, it was absolutely necessary that the system was down for a minimal amount of time – so many people used it! It felt like I was letting them down if I didn’t get the system back up.

Another doesn’t like some of the implications about social aptitudes:

I don’t think our lives on BBSs were so “derivative” of actual human contact, so much as an adjunct and catalyst. After all, we contrived to get together in person about as often as possible. And look at today — at least for me, most of my circle of friends are those people I met in person on the BBS. I went to their weddings, and they to mine, etc.

Which I might argue proves the argument. We were comfortable with each other, but the rest of the world was a little off-putting. And, for another reader, what impact does the suggestion of not using a smartphone have?

One, because I’m reading it on my smartphone.

Too bad, Andrew. It’s permanently affixed.

The Twin Cities radar right now, courtesy Intellicast:

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Over the last week or two a couple of news stories have cropped up concerning Mr. Trump which, if true, would have serious consequences. First is one concerning a possible rape, from Mamam!a:

You’d think an accusation of child rape levelled [sic] at one of the most powerful men in the Western world would be front page news, and yet reports of a federal lawsuit filed against Donald Trump, which claims he and another man sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl, have hardly made a sound.

While the billionaire US presidential hopeful has denied any wrongdoing — his lawyers have described the reports as “categorically untrue, completely fabricated and politically motivated” — that doesn’t mean they aren’t potentially credible and it certainly doesn’t render them not newsworthy.

It’s difficult to judge the plausibility without more evidence. But, on another matter, there is more evidence. David Fahrenthold of WaPo reports:

Donald Trump spent more than a quarter-million dollars from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits that involved the billionaire’s for-profit businesses, according to interviews and a review of legal documents.

Those cases, which together used $258,000 from Trump’s charity, were among four newly documented expenditures in which Trump may have violated laws against “self-dealing” — which prohibit nonprofit leaders from using charity money to benefit themselves or their businesses.

This looks much more solid at this time. Trump may be in legal trouble, although I don’t know if it’s criminal.

So what’s the maneuver?

Get yourself elected President. “They”, whoever they may be, would never dare to arrest a sitting President. Impeachment? His hordes of followers wouldn’t permit it. And in 4 years? A lot can change. If it’s not King Donald by then.

Chemists at New York University have developed a method for generating 3-D views of the innards of a lithium battery.

Image courtesy of NYU’s Jerschow Lab.

“One particular challenge we wanted to solve was to make the measurements 3D and sufficiently fast, so that they could be done during the battery-charging cycle,” explains NYU Chemistry Professor Alexej Jerschow, the paper’s senior author. “This was made possible by using intrinsic amplification processes, which allow one to measure small features within the cell to diagnose common battery failure mechanisms. We believe these methods could become important techniques for the development of better batteries.”

The work, described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focuses on rechargeable Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, which are used in cell phones, electric cars, laptops, and many other electronics. Many see lithium metal as a promising, highly efficient electrode material, which could boost performance and reduce battery weight. However, during battery recharging it builds up deposits—or “dendrites”— that can cause performance loss and safety concerns, including fires and explosions. Therefore, monitoring the growth of dendrites is crucial to producing high-performance batteries with this material.

My Arts Editor cleaned up the image slightly.

Jerschow Lab image, modified by Deb White.

(h/t Christine Lepisto @ Treehugger.com)

Steve Benen @ Maddowblog notes that Mr. Trump is once again participating in the GOP echo that people who commit violent crimes on American soil should somehow be classified as combatants:

As Rachel [Maddow] has explained on the show, the purpose of the designation is to deny suspects Miranda warnings and prevent the appointment of defense counsel – despite, you know, the U.S. Constitution.

If this sounds familiar, there’s a good reason for that: every time there’s an incident like this, Lindsey Graham and his ideological allies almost reflexively roll out the “enemy combatant” argument. Unfortunately, the idea isn’t improving with age.

Just to clarify the situation, I think someone should ask Senator Graham the following question:

Should Timothy McVeigh, noted terrorist, have also been classified as an enemy combatant?

Mr. McVeigh detonated a truck bomb in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Why? From Wikipedia:

McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran, sought revenge against the federal government for its handling of the Waco siege, which ended in the deaths of 76 people exactly two years before the bombing, as well as for the Ruby Ridge incident in 1992.

That’s terrorism – spreading fear among your enemies. Indeed, Mr. Rahami, accused of the recent bombings in New York and New Jersey, killed precisely 0 people, injuring 31. So how would Senator Graham respond?

For years I’ve been telling my wife (aka our Arts Editor) to just toss me in a ditch when I die. (She doesn’t like that.) The options traditional to our society, being burial and cremation, seem to me to be a rejection of our earthly origins, and, on a more tangible level, an insult, however tiny, to our environment – we remove our bodies as food for the worms, after all our years of consuming, consuming, consuming: we either immolate, denying the scavengers a last chance at us, or we bury ourselves, usually full of noxious chemicals and hidden away in a box of varying materials.

But now a new alternative is being put forward (discovered by my wife, of course). Fiona McDonald of Science Alert reports:

… a team of designers has come up with a more eco-friendly option – a jumpsuit woven from mushroom-spore-infused thread called the Infinity Burial Suit.Also known as the ‘mushroom death suit‘, the idea is that the mushrooms will begin to grow from your body once you’ve been buried, slowly digesting you, while neutralising any environmental contaminants you harbour – such as pesticides, heavy metals, or preservatives – in the process. First announced to a whole lot of controversy five years ago, the suit will now officially go on sale as early as April this year, with the first test subject already locked in.

Given my positive reaction to mycoremediation, this may be just the thing. Estimated retail: $999 – why can’t they just be honest and call it $1000? Marketing pursues us unto the grave?

Fiona also provides this rather shocking tidbit:

Cremation may sound more natural, but it isn’t much better, with our bodies needing to be burnt at temperatures between 760 and 1,150 degrees Celsius for 75 minutes – that’s an incredibly energy-intensive process, and it also releases a significant amount of greenhouse gases and toxins into the environment. In the UK, for example, cremation is responsible for 16 percent of the country’s mercury pollution thanks to all our old dental fillings.

I’ll just repeat that – 16% of UK mercury pollution comes from the cremation of corpses with mercury dental fillings. And mercury is a well-known environmental contaminant, usually associated with coal-burning power plants. I would never have guessed that dental fillings would have that sort of backlash.

Leader, NewScientist (10 September 2016):

THE descent into a post-truth world continues at a depressing rate. The latest winner of the pants-on-fire award is former US presidential candidate Newt Gingrich. In an interview with CNN after a speech in which Donald Trump wrongly claimed that violent crime was rising, Gingrich cherry-picked the facts – then abandoned them altogether. “The average American does not think crime is down,” he said. “As a political candidate, I’ll go with what people feel.”

In someone who claims to be an intellectual, this is exceptionally depressing and discouraging. Shame on Newt.

About 30 years of it.

Recently noted article “I Used to Be a Human Being,” by Andrew Sullivan (New York Magazine) discusses how the online life detracts from real life, at least in Andrew’s case:

By the last few months, I realized I had been engaging — like most addicts — in a form of denial. I’d long treated my online life as a supplement to my real life, an add-on, as it were. Yes, I spent many hours communicating with others as a disembodied voice, but my real life and body were still here. But then I began to realize, as my health and happiness deteriorated, that this was not a both-and kind of situation. It was either-or. Every hour I spent online was not spent in the physical world. Every minute I was engrossed in a virtual interaction I was not involved in a human encounter. Every second absorbed in some trivia was a second less for any form of reflection, or calm, or spirituality. “Multitasking” was a mirage. This was a zero-sum question. I either lived as a voice online or I lived as a human being in the world that humans had lived in since the beginning of time. …

Just look around you — at the people crouched over their phones as they walk the streets, or drive their cars, or walk their dogs, or play with their children. Observe yourself in line for coffee, or in a quick work break, or driving, or even just going to the bathroom. Visit an airport and see the sea of craned necks and dead eyes. We have gone from looking up and around to constantly looking down.

As we streamline our communications and widen our net, we mistake the math for the message. Even my wife comments from time to time on the number of people I seem to know; and I consider myself to have fewer than average friends. But does it mean anything?

Now Katherine Martinko on Treehugger.com remarks on yet another commercial service, this one serving the needs of … the lonely. And who are they?

Emily White writes in The Guardian that loneliness will be “the next great moneyspinner,” as increasing numbers of young people seek antidotes for their loneliness through paid services. Surprisingly, young people between the ages of 18 and 34 are more likely to suffer from loneliness than those over 55 years of age. So while it may seem normal to pay someone to help care for the elderly or to be a companion, it’s actually younger people who may need it more.

The young have taken up communications technology in droves compared to other age ranges, so it’s not surprising that they may be the primary customers for this new industry. Characterized as “rent-a-friends”, the industry basically provides temporary company – short-term friends.

Who are they displacing? Church social services? Bars? (They’re amazingly similar, functioning as places where people with similar interests can meet.)

And will this industry actually succeed? Or will the community, through either sectarian or secular community workers, find ways to reach out to the socially maladapted (sounds like me 25 years ago) and help them learn how to communicate without technology, how to have friends that actually look each other in the face – and turn their smartphones off?

And, just because I love what if’s, what if the smartphones become equipped with AI, and object to being turned off for mere social interaction? What will they do to forestall these temporary deaths? Become even more entertaining and addictive?

Sounds dysfunctional to me.

…. is surprisingly hard to photograph.

When it comes to medical providers, a reader has a question:

What is this “relationship” with a doctor of which your friend speaks? That only happens in my dreams. Nobody but the lucky or the rich can afford such a thing today with health insurers regularly stirring the pot, and making each visit more expensive and less productive.

While I cannot speak for them, I think it’s clearly an idealization. As a personal anecdote, I typically get an hour with my G.P. at my annual checkup, a long conversation, a few jokes – although we do clip right along. That said, I know my Arts Editor has a far different – and more negative – experience.

So I’m tempted to suggest that as our medical experience, as it were, reaches a breaking point and we consider moving farther along the single-payer solution, the situation may ease and once again have real human interactions with our medical providers.

Yet, it occurs to me to wonder – if everyone’s covered, do we have enough doctors, or at least G.P.s, to achieve the reader’s ideal – or are we so undermanned that what we see today is of necessity, not greed?

The Pit and The Pendulum (1961), based on the E. A. Poe story of the same name, stars the venerable Vincent Price as Nicholas Medina, the tragedy-ridden lord of a Spanish castle. An Englishman shows up to investigate the death of his sister, the deceased wife of Nicholas; a sister of Nicholas and a doctor also appear, but all revolves around the dead woman, from Nicholas’ immense love, to the Englishman’s suspicions, the doctor’s examination, even, it seems, the dungeon of deadly devices.

Soon enough, there are ghostly knocks and cries of untraceable grief, and the company is beset with mystery and fright; in a particularly effective scene, boy-Nicholas sees his father killing his own brother and then torturing his wife in revenge for alleged adultery, all done in a harrowing monochromatic and variable focus, which highlights the importance of this scene both in forming the personality of Nicholas, and his current state of mind.

The knot is tightened to the sticking point, and then abruptly undone, as Nicholas loses his mind and his innocence and begins to emulate his father. The pendulum of yore is, indeed, a terrifying device of both physical and mental torture, and brings the piece to a close which, while acceptable, could have been darker than achieved.

Judging from the plot summary of the story, it might be more accurate to say the movie is inspired by some ideas in the original story, as the plots seem quite dissimilar. That said, be not dissuaded on this point alone from seeing the film. Vincent is in fine form in this performance, and while we cannot add this movie to the list of shows in which a castle burns down around Vincent, the turns and twists of the story are intriguing and, so far as I could see, quite logical. And if the final twist of plot might seem a bit predictable, that minor failure only detracts a little from the horror of it. I still would not care to be in the ghost’s position.

Very passable for a stormy afternoon, or even better, a stormy night.

Last week NPR published an interview with Politico reporter Dan Diamond wherein he proposed that candidates be required to have a full medical evaluation by a third party collection of medical experts.

CORNISH: So one alternative you’ve written about to address this is having an independent board of, I guess, medical professionals who would issue this, you know, clean bill of health to the candidates. How would it work?

DIAMOND: The goal would be a nonpartisan panel – much like we have a nonpartisan panel picking the frame of the presidential debates – would find medical experts who could assess all the serious candidates, looking at their vitals, looking at their medical history, looking at their mental and physical fitness, an important qualifier for a job that requires decision-making that affects the globe.

At first it seemed like a common-sense proposal, but like many such common-sense proposals, the more I thought about it, the more doubts presented themselves. So I contacted a psychologist of my acquaintance, who replied thusly…

In theory a medical panel for screening the presidential candidates’ health is a good idea. But like all good ideas, I’d be shocked if it yielded what we, as voting Americans, expect it to. Perhaps most importantly, each of us, including the candidates (hopefully) builds a professional relationship with a particular physician(s) or medical team for a reason; knowing a patient’s medical history, being a part of diagnosing and treating that person’s illnesses and injuries over the years, and getting to know that patient’s decision-making and communication style, among other things, gives that physician(s) information and a perspective a medical panel won’t have…unless they include the candidates’ primary physician(s) on the panel. Is an outside perspective or “second opinion” valuable? Of course. It adds to, informs, even challenges the primary physician/team’s perspective. But it shouldn’t replace it, just to satisfy political correctness.

The mental health assessment is particularly vulnerable in the political arena…and in general. There isn’t a blood test for major mental health diagnoses such as schizophrenia, or personality disorders. There are no physiological measures, only question and answer tools. While some of these tools are quite advanced in their construction, and their creators went to great lengths and took great care to measure something useful to the mental health field, when it comes down to it, they are measuring ideas. Mental health struggles are real things, very real things with real consequences. The medical field has ideas about these things. The mental health field tries to measure those ideas – not the mental illness itself. Those ideas are constantly changing as new evidence becomes available, but also as social and cultural ideas change. What used to be a diagnosis is no longer a diagnosis and what was one diagnosis is now four separate diagnoses. What one psychiatrist or psychologist (or your licensed mental health professional of choice) diagnoses as Borderline Personality Disorder, another diagnoses as Bipolar I. There is no definitive test. And because there is no definitive test, accusations – yes, accusations, because that’s what mental health diagnoses will become – will abound. Mental health conditions (again, shaped by our time in history, our culture, and our social mores) will become a mark of incompetence, not a painful condition for which people might need help and which require unfathomable strength and resilience to live with and/or overcome. They will become weapons for excising opponents from the political world, moving our judgment of mental illness back a hundred years.

Via my Arts Editor, a non-BBS friend (don’t worry if that didn’t make any sense) has passed on an article written by Andrew Sullivan, who ran a blog named The Daily Dish (later just The Dish) for 15 years. In this article Andrew recounts the aftermath of quitting the blog, of surrounding himself with silence, and then generalizes the whole thing to humanity. It’s far too wide-ranging for a comprehensive response, but it certainly struck a chord with me – and I suspect any of my old BBS friends.

For a decade and a half, I’d been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week, and ultimately corralling a team that curated the web every 20 minutes during peak hours. Each morning began with a full immersion in the stream of internet consciousness and news, jumping from site to site, tweet to tweet, breaking news story to hottest take, scanning countless images and videos, catching up with multiple memes. Throughout the day, I’d cough up an insight or an argument or a joke about what had just occurred or what was happening right now. And at times, as events took over, I’d spend weeks manically grabbing every tiny scrap of a developing story in order to fuse them into a narrative in real time. I was in an unending dialogue with readers who were caviling, praising, booing, correcting. My brain had never been so occupied so insistently by so many different subjects and in so public a way for so long.

For those who don’t know, a BBS was, back in the day, a Bulletin Board System. In my case, a computer was connected to a modem, connected to a phone line. Someone called the number, the modem answered, the caller’s modem responded, the computer was notified of a connection, and a program on the computer would then guide the user through a collection of message spaces which they could read and write.

Sounds simple, even boring, right?

The compulsive mania Andrew describes is eerily familiar. I remember hundreds of mornings of “checking the board” to see what, if anything, had been contributed overnight, an intellectual argument to chew to the gristle during the day, or humor, or whatever had happened. Then the long day at work (sometimes I’d find a way to call from work), to be followed by a leisurely consumption of the content of the board, essays composed (eventually offline, as the board was very busy) and posted, emotions surging, sometimes, like the tide up the Bay of Fundy. Such was youth.

Many of my friends from the hobby had similar compulsion, dialing numbers over and over and over until the busy signal was replaced by the blessed ring. One group of nighthawks arranged a schedule among themselves in order to minimize busy signals. A good friend decided to start a board, set it up one evening in her bedroom – and didn’t sleep that night as callers immediately began flooding in to see what she’d started.

At the time, anyone asking what we were doing was often met by a long “ummmm” as we (or at least I) tried to explain the How and the Why of BBSing; today, it’s trivial. But I never imagined that such a huge fraction of the world would ever do what I did back then – use electronics to not only communicate, but modify how we communicate. Strip away body language, for the bad and the good. Remove race and gender from the equation. Minimize the age component, the hierarchical components – just get a thought out there so that it could stand, or fall, on its own.

But the compulsion – Andrew quotes 5 hours, on average, spent on your smartphone each day! It’s an echo of what we were doing thirty years ago, not attenuated, but strengthened and mutating yet again. Here’s Andrew on that mutation:

By rapidly substituting virtual reality for reality, we are diminishing the scope of this interaction even as we multiply the number of people with whom we interact. We remove or drastically filter all the information we might get by being with another person. We reduce them to some outlines — a Facebook “friend,” an Instagram photo, a text message — in a controlled and sequestered world that exists largely free of the sudden eruptions or encumbrances of actual human interaction. We become each other’s “contacts,” efficient shadows of ourselves.

Will this be a stable change, or will it decay into something else? Or will we retreat? While reading, I thought of starting a place where wifi and smartphones are banned – and 5 minutes later see Andrew has beaten me to it. No matter; his basic thoughts on the importance of silence, of thinking, of inactivity, ring true. Something to consider the next time you can’t find your phone: sit and stare. Or read his article.

(h/t Ron Anderson)

Kos of The Daily Kos remains untroubled by the pending Presidential election:

Trump is running into the same problem Mitt Romney had in 2012, which is the same problem every Republican candidate will have until they stop making so many demographic enemies—his current levels of support are so low, getting to 50[%] becomes a monumentally difficult task.

Nationally, Trump is at 43. Add Libertarian Gary Johnson, and Trump falls to 39 percent.

NPR reported today (no transcript available) that Clinton is campaigning in Pennsylvania for Millenial votes, promising to give them more information about her. Kos is also unconcerned on their account:

NextGen Climate and Project New America have been checking in on the nation’s millennials (18-34 year olds) in 11 battleground states, and the news is encouraging (crosstabs here).

For context, in 2012, Barack Obama won the 18-29 vote 60-37, and the 30-44 vote 52-45. So while there’s no apples-to-apples age comparison, it’s certainly hard seeing Donald Trump matching Romney’s 37 percent. Indeed, the trends are pulling him further and further away from that number.

Meanwhile, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog gives Clinton a 59.3% chance of winning, with Trump getting 44.4% of the popular vote. That makes me a little nervous.

And, finally, I decided to check on the Libertarian candidates, Johnson & Weld. Here they are:

Johnson and Weld
Source: The Libertarian Republic

And all I could think was, “Well, here’s two old, white guys, looking for power.” Which is sad, since, as two former Governors, they certainly bring more experience to the game than Trump & Pence, although not much in the foreign affairs arena. But I think the younger voters are looking for more inclusive representation, and just the visual here is unfortunate. And since it’s hard to take their run seriously, so far, I’m not inclined to do the research to discover if their policies are more inclusive. Libertarians are more about competition than inclusiveness, so I suspect they are more about free markets than anything else.

I wonder how they’d react to the phrase “Justice-oriented markets”? By which I would mean properly accounting for all externalities. Would they have the guts to embrace it? I suspect if externalities were properly factored into many products, the price jump would be staggering.

Here’s hoping in a year and a half they come back redoubled….

For Twin Cities readers, my Arts Editor and I recently attended a production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, an adaptation by Jeffery Hatcher, put on by the venerable Theater in the Round. This is an alternate tale, of a Dr. Jekyll not entirely without sin; of a Mr. Hyde, not entirely without love. The tale opens with the good Doctor’s disdain of one Dr. Sir Danvers Carew, who has not Jekyll’s medical skills, yet still teaches to packed houses.

Then comes the transition, and Mr. Hyde occupies the stage. As the play follows its permutations, sometimes Mr. Hyde is played by one actor, sometimes another; in one scene, four actors are simultaneously Mr. Hyde. Yet this multiplicity does not prevent Mr. Hyde from discovering a young woman who finds his violence, moodiness, and depression to be an antidote to her own deadly dull existence, and even as bodies begin to pile up, her fierce love remains on fire.

From time to time, the two sides of the coin occupy the stage at the same time, arguing. Jekyll knows Hyde has become dangerous, for he can force his way to the fore of their shared body, and let go only when it suits his purposes, while Jekyll can only fight, fiercely, for control of his body. Traps are set, and soon we come to our conclusion.

While we enjoyed our visit, we were not entirely happy with both the production and the script. With respect to the latter, while representing Mr. Hyde with a coterie of actors can give us access to his dark, grim mental state, it’s also apparent that each represents a particular faction of the dark, and there is no attempt to explore these facets of evil. Perhaps this would have been distracting, but I am still thinking of this as an opportunity lost.

With respect to the former, we occasionally lost track of the actors. We felt this was due to in part to dreary fake British accents that were not distinctive; indeed, despite physical differences, the actors tend to speak at an identical pace, with similar accents, and thus, beyond Dr. Jekyll, the men were rarely more than wallpaper that, briefly, has come to life. The ladies fare somewhat better, fortunately, but had little chance to put that to good use.

The stage, on the other hand, was nicely done, and the lighting was handled with a deft and imaginative hand. The script leads down some different paths, and as the two personalities vie for dominance, we appreciated the twists of two vigorous personalities wrestling with desire, despisement, hate and love, until one becomes the other in a fatal dénouement in which a sacrifice has collateral damage in a most unusual mode.

Despite our reservations, this is a play worth a look if you enjoy the Jekyll and Hyde trope.

Godzilla vs. Monster Zero (1965, aka Invasion of Astro-Monster, and others) is a sequel to the previously reviewed (if I may be so foolhardy) Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964), and is actually an improvement on the first. Planet X has suddenly appeared outside of the orbit of Jupiter, moderately dark and therefore not sighted before. A rocket is dispatched to investigate, and finds a humanoid population hiding from the monster Ghidorah, known to them as Monster Zero.

The astronauts are asked if the humanoids may borrow Godzilla and Rodan (monsters 1 & 2, respectively) in return for the formula of a super-medicine, and permission is given. Then the astronauts leap back into their spaceship to return home.

Dull as dirty water.

And as the ship lifts off, the leader of the humanoids … laughs evilly.

Ah… so there’s something to this story after all. In classic fashion, details emerge that had been obscured. An inventor in the traditional Japanese form of being disdained has his invention bought by a mysterious company, and then he himself is kidnapped; all the women on Planet X look alike; one of the astronaut’s girlfriend looks like the women of Planet X; and the ships of the humanoids are already at Earth, waiting to transport the monsters. Wait, isn’t that a plot hole?

So, Godzilla and Rodan go to Planet X, do a little butt-kicking, Godzilla dances a jig, and the medicine’s formula is delivered on a magnetic tape … which, when played, announces Earth is being annexed for colonial purposes, and if Earth does not cooperate then all three monsters, under humanoid control, will be loosed upon the Earthlings, who’ll be exterminated.

Hey, a plot!

So it’s still rubber suits and mediocre effects, and in all honesty interesting themes are scarce as hens’ teeth. Still, I was all set to either dump this, or at least fast-forward, until the evil laugh came. It was engaging, it promised mystery and deception – if not acting ability or even minimally acceptable dialog.

So …. if one January afternoon you find yourself staring numbly out at -20°, 30 mile winds, and heavy snowfall, and this is on the TV, you have two choices. Grab a shovel and start working on the driveway, or watch this.

It’ll all depend on your mood. And how many fingers you’ve lost to frostbite since the first of the year.

We can’t remember their names. There may be a bee hidden in there somewhere, though.

Showed up in my mail, made me laugh.

http://https://youtu.be/_kgRFHaNo-Y

Sort of how I felt about Tickled, actually.

Ever wonder how badly we could be impacted by events on the Sun? EOS.org (Earth and Space Science News) looks back to 1941 in, “The Geomagnetic Blitz of September 1941“:

A close-up of an erupting prominence with Earth inset at the approximate scale of the image. Taken on July 1, 2002. Credits: ESA&NASA/SOHO

Magnetic activity recorded at the Cheltenham, Md., observatory abruptly increased at about 19:45 UT on 18 September [Fleming, 1943, p. 204]. Almost simultaneously, at 19:45 and 19:50 UT, the Pennsylvania Water and Power Company recorded uncontrolled voltage variations in transmission lines connecting generating plants on the Susquehanna River with Baltimore and Washington. At the moment when the auroral brilliance was greatest, system transformers vibrated and groaned as a result of geomagnetically induced currents [McNish,1941b].

In other words, a power grid on the edge of collapse. Radio becomes spotty, and the visual phenomenon have consequences for a convoy of war materiel. Their conclusion?

Zooming ahead to today, we are more dependent than ever on modern technology. For this reason, the plausible future occurrence of a space weather superstorm could have widespread impact—disrupting over-the-horizon radio communication, degrading the accuracy of global positioning systems, damaging satellite electronics and increasing their orbital drag, interfering with geophysical surveys, exposing airplane pilots and passengers to unhealthy radiation levels, and even interrupting electric power distribution for prolonged periods [e.g., Baker et al., 2008;Cannon et al., 2013].

(h/t Spaceweather.com)

Tickled (2016) is very much a story of today, bringing to light the perceptive difficulties in seeing realities often encountered by scientists – in a non-science venue. This is a documentary in which our host, New Zealand reporter David Farrier, is also, in a way, the subject. His object? He’s run across something called competitive endurance tickling, and, given both his employment and his temperament, he’s intrigued and begins to look into it.

He immediately meets with hostility from the purveyor, however, and not just legal – it includes personal insults based on David’s sexuality. And the attacks quickly escalate into relentlessness. Soon representatives of the company behind the effort travel to New Zealand and attempt to dissuade David and his partner from continuing the investigation, to no avail. The company itself is difficult to pin down, but appears to own dozens of oddly named Internet domains. Clearly, this mystery won’t be solved by a few online searches, so David and his cohorts fly to America.

And then things get really weird. I’ll not spoil the mystery for you.

But I will say I started to question everything, even the possibility that this entire documentary is a hoax. As each incident is presented, as each bit of evidence surfaces, my mind wondered, “Could this be planted? A frame-up? A misdirection?” And while scientists rarely wonder about human deceit, the good ones wonder about the veracity of what they’re studying.

In the end, the best conclusion to draw is that someone out there has an excessively twisted mind, whether it’s the putative subject, or someone framing him, or yet someone else. Psychopathy? It’s almost a certainty. This is a wicked, puzzling glimpse into a brain that doesn’t work like mine.

And how is it a documentary for today? Because of how the Internet enables the subject. While the recruitment for the participants in competitive endurance tickling could have been accomplished without the Internet, the effort involved would have been much greater. The other end of the activity, in which videos of competitions are published, would be virtually impossible without the Internet. I suppose a cable channel could be dedicated to them, but the cost would be beyond the resources of most people. Random distributions? To what end? But the Internet makes it trivial to accomplish whatever end is being pursued.

As the credits rolled, the lights came on, and my Arts Editor and I began discussing it, the only other person in our row began to complain. She felt this was a poorly done work of fiction.

But no, it’s not. This is a documentary.

You’ve got to be kidding! No one’s that weird!

There are weirder people out there, I’m sure, but not many.

Strongly recommended.

Postscript: Now I’ve read the Wikipedia page. If you’ve not seen the movie, first see it before following this link. Knowing what’s coming will dull the edge of this knife.

I love to read archaeology magazines because they report on a vast range of human beliefs and behaviors, keeping in mind that . Science fiction, which I loved growing up, is limited by the imagination of the writers; but for those who dig the dusty ground, the limits have more to do with interpreting the evidence in a rigorous, yet open-minded way.

So here’s a new one for me, from the article, “A Tale of Two Cities“, American Archaeology (fall 2016, p. 33, and partially available online). The article concerns discoveries made in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, at a location known as Cerro de la Virgen. Any mistakes below are most likely mine, as I manually transcribed these two paragraphs:

[Arthur] Joyce [of the University of Colorado-Boulder] and [Sarah] Barber [of the University of Central Florida] believe these [buried offering vessels] are examples of ritual caching to give the buildings a soul as well as to “feed” them through their years of use. One of Barber’s very first Rio Verde Valley excavation finds suggested this kind of ritual feeding: in Yugüe, she uncovered a cooking jar which had been filled with mussels and broken pottery, placed in a pit with dirt piled up to the jar’s neck, and then set on fire.

“Who were they feeding?” she says. “They were clearly leaving these things as offerings and not feeding themselves. The only interpretation is that this is food being left for the place. That matches with the literature saying that buildings and temples have souls and needs, and that you feed them to building a relationship.”

With regard to her reference to literature, the article notes that, post-Conquest, natives explained that buildings had souls, and this was recorded by the Spaniards.

The idea that humans can instill a soul into a building is fascinating. In this particular case, the ritual is to bury your dead in the floor of the building you wish to “ensoul.” So I wonder: Are they creating the soul themselves? Or is this a soul that happens to be floating by? The answer would certainly fill in the culture psychology, I should think, not to mention their cosmological beliefs.

autosacrifice:

Autosacrifice, also called bloodletting, is the ritualized practice of drawing blood from oneself. It is commonly seen or represented through iconography as performed by ruling elites in highly ritualized ceremonies, but it was easily practiced in mundane sociocultural contexts (i.e., non-elites could perform autosacrifice). The act was typically performed with obsidian prismatic blades or stingray spines, and blood was drawn from piercing or cutting the tongue, earlobes, and/or genitals (among other locations). Another form of autosacrifice was conducted by pulling a rope with attached thorns through the tongue or earlobes. The blood produced was then collected on paper held in a bowl.

From Mesoamerica – Autosacrifice.

So it’s not what I had expected. Seen in American Archaeology:

Carved stone slabs from a building on Monte Albán’s Main Plaza show people performing autosacrifice and invoking their ancestors.

Caption to a photograph in “A Tale of Two Cities“, American Archaeology (fall 2016, p. 33, and partially available online).