24 posts tagged “geek points”
In case you haven't heard, there is a new scandal brewing at ACORN. Two young activists [1] dressed up as a stereotypical pimp and prostitute and went into several ACORN offices around the country and asked for advice on bringing young women into the country to act as prostitutes, getting a small business loan for their brothel, and how to avoid paying taxes to the IRS.
Now, looking at the image above, I gotta say that my first reaction [2] would be to ask “Where’s Mr. Funt?” [3]. However, it appears that the ACORN people actually gave these two the advice that they sought [4]. And, if we take the activists at their word, this happened not once, but several times in different ACORN offices across the country.
The most charitable reading is that the ACORN folks had the same reaction that I did and decided to prank the pranksters. However, if that is the case, it was criminally stupid (at best), as it exposes ACORN to RICO charges. The worst possible reading is that ACORN really does have that many people working for it that want to help our worst elements become our worst, rich elements.
In either case, it seems as if it is time and then some for a thorough clean up at ACORN’s central office. If they don’t stop these nuts from running the place, then who knows what other shady practices will grow?
John
[1] This isn’t a dirty word, really. It just means “people that care. A lot.”
[2] After I stopped laughing
[3] Geek points for the reference!
[4] E.g., “Don’t make big deposits into a single account. Get accounts in two different banks and make small deposits” (paraphrased).
Warning: The following rant contains spoilers to several movies. Though I am probably the last person in the free world to have seen these movies, the possibility exists that you may be even later to the gate than I. In any case, you have been warned!
Of late, I've been catching up on all of the movies I've missed over the past few months. I've had baths that were deeper than The Bucket List (to borrow from a character in the movie). Henry Pool Is Here was surprisingly good, with no easy answers. Kung Fu Panda and Space Chimps were both great for their in-jokes (especially the dead-on impression of Al Gore in the latter). And Star Trek only mostly sucked (pretty scenery, fair acting, plot holes large enough to fly a spaceship through [1]).
Now I'm just back from G I Joe, and I want my money back. Why? Because it demonstrates just how low the appetite for movies has gone [2]. Looking at the movie objectively, there are a few things that seem designed to insult your intelligence. I'm not speaking of the sort of "suspension of disbelief" that you have to use to watch, say, Star Wars [3]; I speak of full blown, no holds barred, the director screaming in your face "This whole movie is a great big piece of shit (yeah!) but I'm the guy singing and your the jerk who paid to find out (of yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah!) [a]".
What bothered me so much wans't the fact that the US President had a distinctly British accent. And it wasn't that they had five or six flashbacks (it was hard to keep track) to tell us why the characters were so screwed up. And the obligatory herky-jerky cinematography, designed to conceal that they ran out of money for CGI [4], was only mostly annoying.
No, what got my goat at the end was the way the evil guys decided to get rid of those pesky submarines that were plaguing their immense underwater lair [5]. Picture this - hundreds of tiny submarines that were dispatched from Egypt and make their way to somewhere near Greenland in under ten minutes [6] and are now making hash of the secret Cobra base. What is a villain to do? Why (and I'm not making this up), he blows up the ice pack, sending bits and pieces of iceberg raining down on the GI Joe subs. And that, to quote Robinson, is where my suspension of disbelief bust a mainspring. It appears to have passed the attention of Mr. Sommers and his entire CGI crew that ice freakin' floats! So breaking up the ice pack does exactly nothing.
Which is what the movie ended up doing for me. I don't mind a stupid movie [7]. And I don't mind plot holes, per se, if they help to move the plot along [8]. What I do mind are stupid plot holes that could have been patched by anyone who bothered to look at the glass of ice water that they were drinking.
So avoid GI Joe at all costs, even if it means watching Star Trek again. Though it isn't the worst movie I've ever seen [9], it is certainly the worst movie to come out so far this summer.
John
[1] OK, so the Romulan captain gets sucked back in time 154 years and never once thins to send a note to the Vulcans "Hey, guys - this star is going to blow up soon. Do us all a favor and leave a week earlier or Romulus bites the big one"? They spend 25 years lurking about and never once impinge on the Federation, except to destroy Kirk's life? And what's with their magical lightning field? I thought Prince Barin shut that thing off before Flash started his run!
[2] As has been said before, we are in a race to the bottom and both sides are winning.
[3] "Stop the film! Things don't go 'vroom' in space!" [a]
[4] And that the director has no earthly idea of how to stage a good fight scene. Compare the fights in Captain Blood and Pirates of the Caribbean if you doubt me! Sadly, this style of faux cinema verite is likely to be regarded as this decade's signature, just as saturated colors were for the 70's and long shots were for the 80's.
[5] Three points on that one: (i) If you can afford to build a huge underwater lair, then you are too rich to be stupid enough to want world domination [b]; (ii) If you build a huge lair anywhere on Earth, it is going to get noticed - do you think we don't have damn good maps of the Arctic circle by now?; and (iii) If you are going to build an underwater lair, why build freaking huge missile silos to the surface - haven't you ever heard of the Polaris, Poseidon, or Trident?
[6] Another major problem with modern movies - they have no sense of scale. It takes days to move a sub from one place to another. And it takes hours to get from Moscow to DC, even in a plane traveling Mach 5 (1.2 hours to be exact), not minutes. So there is no way the Ripcord [c] could have gotten both missiles.
[7] I have Space Truckers in my collection, and have watched it more than once.
[8] I have Jurassic Park in my collection, and have watched it more than once. Heck, I even enjoy The Matrix trilogy!
[9] That would be Starship Troopers. Not only did they get the basic philosophy of the book wrong, they didn't even get the easy parts right, like fighting with combat suits or having an enemy that made sense (bugs that send flaming farts across the galaxy? Sounds like Verhoeven has issues...).
[a] Geek points for the reference!
[b] Have you any idea what the headaches of that are?
[c] Which, amusingly enough, is the name of a leather bar in Houston.
Think outside the (recyclable) box: What's an Act of Green someone might be surprised to learn about?
Sponsored by One Million Acts of Green brought to you by Cisco.
Increasing the standard of living in third world countries. You see, first world countries have much lower birthrates than third world countries do [1] and shifting the standard of living to one that is more like a first world country inevitably decreases the birthrate and so decreases demands for resources [2].
Interestingly, it does not appear that you have to raise the standard of living very much to have a strong effect on birthrate. Thus, by working with third world countries to increase their consumption of goods, we can decrease the number of new babies which will then decrease the total effect on the ecosystem.
Ain't unintended consequences great?
John
[1] Ethnologists are still divided over the cause, though there is no doubt about the effect. The most popular hypothesis is that the economic effect of multiple children shifts from a strong positive in third world subsidence level living to a strong negative in first world. The only first world country where this has not been the case has a very strong influx of immigrants who typically have very large families in the first generation and much smaller ones in the second (and assumed assimilated) generation [a].
[2] Think of it this way - you can hire 1,000 people for $10 each or 100 people for $50 each and still get the work done. Even though the amount of work is the same, the total cost is much lower to hire fewer people for more money. Believe it or not, it works just the same way for making babies as it does for making anything else!
[a] Geek points if you can name the country!
I have just learned a valuable lesson and wish to pass it on to the rest of you. Never, never, never watch It's A Wonderful Life and You Can't Take It With You back to back. The mental whiplash from seeing Lionel Barrymore swapping from mean Mr. Potter to kindly Grampa Vanderhof will nearly bust your noggin'! (Jimmy Stewart is in both films, too, but plays about the same character - kindly, bewildered, and not too bright. [2])
Has anyone considered doing a mash-up of the two?
John
[1] What the trade papers used to call Frank Capra's films, due to their "emotive form of presentation" [a].
[2] Then again, that describes most men.
[a] Geek points for the reference!
As previously noted on this blog, this is a good year for science buffs. Today marks the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, a scientist who had as much influence on the field of biology [1] as Wegner had on geology, Newton had on physics, or Galileo had on everything.
To place his achievement in the proper context consider that at the time he published The Origin of Species:
Despite this, using just his remarkable intellect and years of observation, he developed the hypothesis of natural selection:
- Most doctors refused to believe that germs caused disease.
- Most biologists thought that life arose through "spontaneous generation"
- Most geologists and physicists thought that the Earth was, at most, a few hundred million years old
- Radioactivity hadn't been discovered
- Mendel's work on breeding hadn't been published
- How fertilization works hadn't been discovered
- Chromosomes, genes, and DNA hadn't yet been discovered
Taken individually, his statements are now so self-evident that it seems inconceivable that anyone could disagree with them [2]. Taken together, they represented a fundamental shift not only in biology, but in ethics as well. No longer was man a separate creation, aloof and apart from the other animals. Instead, we share a common ancestor with chimpanzees, gorillas, and politicians. As a result, how we treat our fellow animals becomes less abstract and more of a family affair.
- All species have more offspring than can survive
- Offspring vary
- Some variations will be more advantageous to the individual, increasing its chances of survival
- As variations concatenate, they create new species
Since Darwin's day, his hypothesis has been expanded into the theory [3] of evolution, and forms the central organizing principle in biology and medicine [4]. The theory has been enriched several times by such discoveries as ring species, jumping genes, and epigenetics [5], and continues to be tested and expanded. Thanks to the theory of evolution, we have developed new medicines and improved our ability to use and develop plants and animals.
If you are interested in learning what evolution is all about, here are a few resources to aid you:
So hoist a beer today in honor of Darwin, and remember - when evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve!
- Talk.origins - a sometimes-rancorous interaction between those who understand evolution and those who don't
- National Science Teachers Association evolution resources - aids to teaching and understanding the topic
- American Geophysical Union position statement on teaching evolution
- Geological Society of America position statement on teaching evolution (pdf)
- Understanding Evolution - a resource hosted by the University of Berkeley
- Issues in evolution - the theory continues to change over time
- BBC Evolution games - can you adapt or will your species die out?
John
[1] Darwin also had a strong influence on geology, especially with his correct description of how atolls form.
[2] And yet, they do.
[3] Simplicio [a]: "Hey! What happened? First it was a hypothesis and now its a theory? And isn't that just a fancy word for guess?" Salviati: "No, a theory includes a bunch of observations and hypotheses that have been tested and found to be correct. Darwin's initial idea (that descendents can form new species) was a hypothesis. The full ramifications of his idea form the foundations of the theory of evolution."
[4] Which is really just applied biology, with a little engineering on the side.
[5] Also known as "Lamark's revenge".
[a] Geek points for the reference!
According to a report at Discover magazine, we brought back the bucardo by cloning. (Yeah!) Unfortunately, the fawn died shortly after birth, due to breathing difficulties. (Rats.)
However, as is always the case in science, there is more to the story than it appears. You see, they used the eggs of a near-relative in the cloning [1], which means that the critter lacked some of the DNA of the original [2]. In addition, there is the lesson of Carbon Copy, the first cat to be cloned. You see, even though they did everything possible to get CC to match its clonee Rainbow, CC has different coloring and a different temperment. That's because of epigenetics - the effects of outside influences on gene expression.
Consider the humble lab mouse. When the diet of pregnant mice was changed just slightly, they went from having big, fat, yellow baby mice to skinny, little, brown baby mice. Similarly, breastfeeding raises the IQ of human infants, but only if they have a specific gene. Other epigenetic effects [3] have been explored, from cancer-causes to obesity to longevity. It is an obvious axiom that understanding epigenetics will do for us what understanding DNA did for our parents.
The problem with raising of extinct animals from the dead should now be obvious: neither their extranuclear DNA nor their environmental factors remain. Though for some animals, near relatives are available (e.g., the chicken for T Rex [4], the cow for the guar, the politician for the dodo bird), for many others the whole branch has died off with no near relatives left. And even if we do find a near relative, both the environment needed to properly raise the critter [5] and for the critter to survive may no longer exist or may have been taken over by some other critter (e.g., starlings replacing the passenger pigeon). Thus, the cloning (short-lived though it was) of the bucardo should give us cautious optimism - and a slight shiver of dread that someone, sometime is going to screw it up [6].
John
[1] Cloning mammals, made ridiculously simple: Take one egg from a female of the species (the clonor). Cut it in half and scoop out the nucleus. Take one cell from the mammal to be cloned [a] (the clonee) and throw away everything except the nucleus. Put the nucleus from the clonee and put it into the egg of the clonor. Zap with electricity to force the egg to seal back up. Put into the nearest handy uterus and wait for the little darling to come into the world. This method is simple enough that I expect high school students to use it for biology lab work soon.
[2] Think all of your DNA resides in the nucleus? Not true, not even during mitosis. This extranuclear DNA comes in (at least) two sorts - the mitochondrial DNA in the little powerhouses that provide your cells with energy, and the satellite DNA whihc may work to mediate RNA transcription. Obviously, since this isn't in the nucleus, it isn't in the clone. SO your clone may not be your twin, even if everything else goes right.
[3] Though neither the "frightened by a horse" nor the "frightened by a pawnshop" [b] have come up in the scientific literature for some reason.
[4] But pity the poor thing when it comes time to lay that egg!
[5] Witness the experiments in raising a chicken by a goose.
[6] Just about the only science that Crichton got right - things will always go bad in ways that you never anticipated. Also known as "Finangle's Law".
[a] Star Trek notwithstanding, hair and fingernail clippings won't work - those are just protein, not actual cellular material.
[b] Geek points for the reference!
If you had to live as an animal for the rest of your life, which creature would you choose to inhabit?
A human. After all, all my stuff's there [1].
John
[1] Geek points for the reference!
This is worth exactly what you've paid for it, but here is some unsolicited advice for those of you who want to buy someone a telescope for Christmas: Don't. Instead, buy them a good, inexpensive pair of binoculars.
Here's my reasoning: Telescopes are difficult to master and good ones run $350 and up [1]. They require time to set up and time to take down. They require maintenance and patience. And they will never show you what you think you'll see. You don't see the Triffid Nebula in color, you see a fuzzy patch in the sky [2].
Binoculars, on the other hand, are easy to use [3]. Point and look. They are eassy to set up [4], easy to take down [5], and easy to maintain. They give you as good a resolution as you will get on all but the most expensive telescopes - and better resolution than Galileo had when he saw Saturn's rings, Jupiter's moons, and the craters on the Moon [6]. And binoculars can easily be used in the daytime as well as the nighttime [7], so the kid will find more uses for it.
If you want to make the binoculars even better, give the kid a tripod or monopod for it. That minimizes the shaking that makes looking at the stars so challenging. And if you want to make it the perfect gift, add a membership to a local science museum - and then make a commitment to take the kid there once a month so he will know what stars are out that month and can show them to you.
In the words of Jack Horkheimer [8], "Keep looking up!"
John
[1] Don't do as my parents did and buy one of those $20 scopes at Wal-Mart. Those aren't even toys; they have bad optics, bad mounts, and can't see anything. If they don't get stolen by your older brothers so they can spy on the neighbors and then dropped from the roof and broken in the first week [a], they'll so frustrate your kid that he will never want to use another scope as long as he lives.
[2] Those color photos are taken using long exposures and sensitive CCDs. The human eye doesn't do long exposures and isn't all that sensitive.
[3] Especially the no-focus ones. They suffer from a limited depth of field, but that's not important for star gazing.
[4] Step 1: Take them out of the bag. Step 2: Hold them to your eyes. Step 3: There is no step 3 [b].
[5] Step 1: Put them back in the bag. Step 2: Put the bag someplace that you will remember.
[6] I have actually looked through Galileo's telescope. It was on display in the science museum in Florence, in a glass case on a shelf near the floor. So I lay down on the floor and squinted through the eyepiece. Didn't see much, but it was fun - and my mother now has a blackmail shot of me doing yet another "strange John thing".
[7] You can use telescopes in the daytime, too, but few people ever think to do so.
[8] A true gentleman who I was priviledged to know for a brief, happy period. He's still with us, but I've moved away from his hometown.
[a] Not that that has ever happened to me...
[b] Geek points for the reference!
NB: This post has been moved back to the top, in honor of the approaching election. Read at your own risk.
Once upon a time, we had statesmen; people who would take a stand because it was right, not because it was a plank in their party platform or might get them elected. Nowadays, we have politicians that are afraid to vote their beliefs because they value their position more than they value their nation.
The most egregious example of this is earmarks - bits of the budget set aside by politicians to buy votes back home, whether or not the programs they support make any sense. The bridge to nowhere. Creationist doctrine. Tap-dancing classes for mulatto dwarves [1].
However, no matter how bad earmarks are [2], there is something worse. The simple abandonment of their ideals for job security by politicians, en masse. For example, the New York Times reports that Democrats are likely to pass the wiretap bill that extends the [3, 6] existing law allowing the President to wiretap on anybody, anytime without needing a court's permission - despite their promises to the contrary. Why? Because the Democrats don't want to seem "soft on terror". They may even give the administration immunity for past misdeeds! Similarly, Republicans are voting against a child welfare bill, not because they disagree with the purpose, but because they don't want to be seen as "expanding government health care".
So what does that mean in the next administration [4]? Simple - if you want the United States to get out of Iraq anytime in the next five years, you'll probably have to vote for a Republican, as no Democratic candidate has the guts to say "Enough already! We need to get out now!". And if you want a balanced budget, you'll need to vote for a Democrat as no Republican will have the guts to say "Admit it, folks - we're broke and need to reduce spending and raise revenues". For almost every issue, you will have to vote the opposite of what the parties say - and try to find a candidate strong enough to actually speak truth to power [5].
Good luck on that.
John
[1] OK, I made that one up. But you almost bought it, didn't you - which just shows how out of touch these idiots are.
[2] And they are bad - worse than a Farrelly brothers remake.
[3] Probably unconstitutional and definitely unAmerican
[4] Yes, I'm already counting the days. If Rush Limbaugh can do it, why can't I?
[5] Geek points for the reference!
[6] After this was originally written, the Democrats did indeed knuckle under and pass the wiretap bill almost entirely as requested. So yet another opportunity to return responsibility to government has passed us by, because the Congressmen were more worried about the short-term problem of getting re-elected than the long-term problem of keeping the United States government honest.
John Lennon [1] once said "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans".
And that is why I've been quiet for the past few days and am likely to remain so for the next few. Right now, I have Ken visiting [2] and am trying to buy a house [3] and have to come up with a polite way to tell another friend that I love him dearly but don't want to move to Dallas to join his company [4]. So I'll be out of pocket and out of time until sometime in mid-November.
I may move a couple of op-ed pieces back to the top of my queue, as comments on the political scene. But don't count on it.
Until life calms down, all I can say is "Let's be careful out there" [5].
John
[1] Great artist, terrible philosopher, IMHO. But he did occasionally have a point.
[2] We are going to see Tina Turner in concert. It is his birthday present.
[3] I am on my sixth offer for a house. The first two times, the owner raised his price in response to my offer. The next time, the person went into the hospital (not because of my offer) and couldn't promise we'd close in time. The fourth time, the house had aluminum wiring and bad A/C. The fifth time, the people came down all of $500 on a house that was 20% over market. And now we are on try number 6 - with an end of November deadline for closing on a house lest I lose my relocation benefits.
[4] Mainly because I fit in so well at my current company. You may have always worked someplace where they truly cared about you; it has happened to me only a couple of times (at a science museum, at a science project, as a grad student, and here). It is worth an extra 25% on my salary any day of the week.
[5] Geek points for the reference!
