Blinded Test: Classical Singing Teacher on Classic Metal Singers

Entertaining. Here.

You Can No Longer Accuse Me...

...of being the world's biggest douche. (Even you TGP.) You know why? Cause this guy.



This jack-off turned on his GPS tracker and drove 12,000 miles in the shape of letters to spell that out. And I even like Ayn Rand. I just don't like douches. On a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is the douchiest, this dude comes in somewhere between ultraviolet and habanero.

Next time I recommend just wearing a T-shirt to get your message across. That way you won't have to change your name to Massengil.

It's Time for More Epic Metal

I think the following French dude might kick the ass of the previous Lamb-of-God-playing Taiwanese chick (sorry Taiwanese chick). He's total metal. Specifically, canon metal. Tell you what, I'm okay being behind on pop culture in general, but when there are sub-genres of frickin' metal that I didn't know about, that's how I know I'm way old.

Weird Stuff in Boxes

Ray Bradbury claimed to have a room filled with various interesting and grotesque toys and detritus of that prompted him to start writing if he had writer's block. If that's how it works then I should be the writingest guy who ever lived, but I'm not, so I'm throwing some of it out. On doing some house-cleaning recently I found a box in which I had stored the following ingredients, which would seem best suited for some very enterprising witch's brew:

- 1 nutria rat paw from the Louisiana bayou
- 1 large cattle bone fragment from the Lava Beds in extreme NorCal (remains of cattle slaughtered by Modoc Indians during their rebellion)
- 1 piece of the loading dock from Yuengling brewery (don't sue me; it was tiny)
- 1 eagle talon* from Alaska
- 1 kodiak bear claw* from Alaska
- 4 coati teeth* from Paraguay
- A chunk of salt from Badwater Flat, Death Valley
- 1 smooth stone from the shores of Lake Tahoe
- assorted Apache tears (little obsidian fragments you find all over New Mexico)

What could you make with this? An Apache- and Modoc-powered curse against Yuengling so that their beer turns salty and various boreal or rainforest predators attack them? But that would be bad. On par with the Black Plague.

However, with the asterisked ones, you can make a cool necklace for your four-year-old first cousin once-removed's birthday. Which is what I am presently doing. As it turns out bear claws are pains in the ass to drill holes in.

Fake Guitars Being Thrown Into a Volcano

Sometimes I wish that our ancestors could see the technological powers under our control now, and what we can do to make the world a better place. Other times I'm glad they're not here to see the goofy shit we're wasting our time on. Like flying over a volcano to throw videogame-guitars into it for a commercial. Imagine Galileo's disappointment in our frivolousness.

Then again, it's cool.

Space Travel is Not All Tear-Inducing Awe

Sometimes it's tear-inducing excrement fumes. Read Mary Roach's new book Packing for Mars to find out about this mundane but and therefore very relevant engineering challenge. New York Times review here.

WE WANT THE MAN WHO DID THIS

Forget that last post. The dude who did this is metal. He actually pisses metal dude. In the frickin desert.

So you think you're metal?

You might not be as metal as this chick in Taiwan who (fair warning) is about to kick your ass with some Lamb of God:



Here's the close-up so you can see the guitar work.

No, I wasn't trolling for metal babes, it came up at the start page on its own, perhaps because of previous trolling for metal and babes separately.

[Update: for yet more Hot Metal Chix(tm) check out the guitar riffage in LoG's Grace.]

More Yuks at Geeks' Expense

In the context of criticizing reportage on the recent gay marriage decision, Jon Stewart said:

Really, a gay bar? That's where you went [for a] story about marriage equality? 'Hey, let's go to a gay bar at three in the afternoon.' If this was a story about I don't know, virgins, would you go to Comic-Con?

Apparently he missed the nerd-on-nerd violence.

Hey, I just kid because I'm jealous I wasn't there.

Crocs Can Eat You, and Also They're Getting Smarter

Yes, that's his hand over there. Image credit Northern Territory News.

Saltwater crocodiles the scariest animal in the world, hands down. Lions are scary but you usually know when they're around. Great white sharks are scary but they don't come out of the water for 200 meters and drag you out of your tent, like these guys have. What's worse, now they're getting smart. The one above was photographed herding fish to eat them. Forget Bears Discover Fire, this is much worse. There are also unconfirmed reports that this one has learned to handle currency and was seen negotiating for a ride into downtown Darwin where he could eat more people.

I think I want the AI Singularity to happen before the Crocodile Singularity.

Direct Evidence That Skynet is Manipulating the Financial Markets

From the Atlantic: "...what you see here really is just the afterscent of robot traders gliding through the green-on-black darkness of the financial system on their way from one real trade to another."

Engineering Geeks Take Notice

"... we [the U.S.] now rank 12th in the number of college graduates (having once led the world); and soon, 90 percent of all engineers will be working in Asia. Translation: Goodbye U.S. manufacturing."

This and other charming statistics were cited by Wilbur Ross on Charlie Rose. Via P.M. Carpenter.

Mongolian Neo-Nazis

Does anyone remember from William Gibson's story Johnny Mnemonic, the racially contorted name of the band used as a password? Christian White and His Aryan Reggae band. Here's more evidence that we're now living in Gibson's notebook from 1983: an article in the Guardian via Marginal Revolution about Mongolian Neo-Nazis. Yes, really. Although their fascist salute seems a little posed for/by the photographers.

If you're short on irony for the day, read that story and you will learn, among other things, that Mongolians defend their racial purity by recording hip-hop music and following the teachings of Adolf Hitler. Hey guys: you're doing it wrong.

Some related trivia of interest to science fiction geeks and geeks in general:

1) In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the book that Blade Runner was based on), Roy Batty, the superhuman Nexus 6 replicant was described by Philip K. Dick as having Mongolian features. Of course in Blade Runner the character was played by the decidedly un-Mongolian-looking Rutger Hauer. Perhaps it was in multiple rewatchings of the Ridley Scott masterpiece that these misguided fellows took a wrong turn. (Certainly I've paid the price for doing that very same thing in my own life.)

2) It turns out the Mongolians aren't the only racially confused fascists. The Nazis themselves were quite foggy as well. The late nineteenth century saw the rise of a kind of Pan-Indo-European spirit, driven by archaeologists and linguists who as it turns out were actually laying the foundations of our understanding of the peopling of Eurasia. They were doing good science - but that didn't stop Bismarck and later politically-motivated characters from co-opting that science for their own ends. To this day, German linguists speak not of the Indo-European language family but of Indogermanischen. In fact in pre-First World War linguistic texts, "Indo-Aryan" was also substituted, and believe it or not the use of the term "Aryan" in that era comes across as a bit flaky and crunchy. Nowadays it's being rehabilitated by patriotic North Indians, who seem to have an agreement to re-brand it by pronouncing the first syllable as "are" rather than "air". But the point is that the ultimate symbol of the racially-obsessed Nazis was one that they borrowed from brown people.


Try to be optimistic. At least part of William Gibson's future came true. Whereas I've been to Chiba, and the sky over the port was actually nice and blue. It was even clear enough to see Mt. Fuji that day.

A Neglected Solution to the Fermi Paradox

The most common answers to Fermi's famous question "Where is everybody?" are some version of either "we're unique", or "something makes intelligent species short-lived on geological time-scales". This second category corresponds to Drake's Omega Factor and could be the result of self-destruction or predation by nearby interstellar replicators.

A far more plausible explanation for our failure to find anything so far is summed up as "They're out there, but we haven't been looking for long, and we don't know what to look for anyway." The good people of SETI have said that so far, all we can conclude that the sky is not littered with constantly-blaring high-power microwave transmitters. Such cautious phrasings are wise. And from such a specific statement as this, are we really able to generalize that we're the only nearby intelligence?

Assuming that intelligence and tool use progress at roughly similar rates in other species, consider the gap in cognition and tools in our own species just over the past 100,000 years. And what is the chance that a planet-bound intelligence would be synchronized even within an order of magnitude of that timeframe? Would H. erectus understand our attempts to communicate? Would we even recognize our own million-year descendants, much less understand them? Now apply that to space-tuna, and you see the magnitude of the problem.

To say we haven't found anything so far, and therefore there are no non-human intelligences, seems foolish. We are barely a half-century into trying to answer this question, and it's not clear that we even know what to look for.

I reiterate that the best place to look for evidence of extraterrestrial replicators are the asteroids and the comets of our own solar system (my reasoning is here.) We should be looking for chemical traces of von Neumann biochemistry, not radio signals grandly announcing their presence. While I don't expect a thorough investigation of these bodies to be completed in my lifetime, I would be thrilled if it were. A lack of findings would cause me to dramatically lower my estimation for the chances of extra-terrestrial replicators.

The Award for Blog with Coolest-Sounding Use of Language

...should go to Metaphortean. My favorite from the articles I read: apocalpyticist.

The "Military" Conceit of Alien Invasion

The likely strangeness of any non-terrestrial replicators, along with the fact that it's likely we'll be wondering whether they're intelligent (or even "alive" and self-directed) make the typical scenarios of alien invasion fiction seem a little quaint. Contact with alien life that results in predominantly poor outcomes for Earth life - an "invasion" is likely to seem more like an extermination effort on their part, or the by-product colonization by non-native organisms, like kudzu.
It probably won't look much like Independence Day. It probably won't look "military" at all, in the sense of the aliens it/themselves, or our response to it. (I appreciate that most people would rather pay to see Will Smith in a dogfight with aliens than a nuanced exploration of the ecological impacts of contact with alien life, but I think there is still an audience and place in independent films for this, though this one wasn't it. Come on guys!)



Of course, I'm assuming we would even notice anything is going on. Mammoths no doubt noticed the first humans wandering down North America's west coast from Alaska, but whether they were able to comprehend the existential threat of a new superpredator along with climate change is doubtful.

But we're not mammoths, you say; we have language and writing and tools. So how could we not know what's going on, and what the effect will be? Yes, we can accurately claim that we're at the top of the cognitive pyramid in our own biosphere. Just because that's true does not mean that we've magically come to some plateau where, because we can understand more things than other vertebrates, we can understand everything. There's an enormous amount of chutzpah in that assumption. There are no doubt dots that humans can't connect, just like there are dots the mammoths couldn't connect. A mutation in FOXP2 in the late Lower Paleolithic didn't suddenly make us into all-powerful general comprehenders. Polynesians watching European landing parties row to their shores weren't able to really figure out what was going on, and they were dealing with members of the same species, separated by only a few millennia of technology. If there are in fact any replicators moving outward from the galactic center, they've possibly been using tools for millions of years longer than we have. (Still not convinced? Try figuring out a quipu or cuneiform and then leave a comment. And those are "primitive" technologies, again from your own species.)

Alien invasion films are fun, but they really look a lot more like movies about fighting funny-looking humans with technology from a few centuries in the future. After all, the U.S. military now has Martian heat rays. The key will not be how to stop alien invaders. The key will be recognizing what they are in the first place, and what impact they will have on us. Talking philosophy with them is a long-shot. A zebra mussel once tried to argue with me about Hegel and it was the lamest conversation I ever had.

Something to Take Into Account for Far-Future Science Fiction: Earth's Slowing Rotation

Via Boing Boing, I saw this awesome article about what would happen if the Earth's rotation stopped. I don't mean all of a sudden like H.G. Wells once asked, i.e. everyone suddenly flying to the east at about 500 mph x the cosine of your latitude. I would link to the story but couldn't find it. But who cares, because here's the cool map:

I think you should take the color-coding as elevation only; there are good reasons to believe the middle of the landmass would have no green at all (keep reading.)

In essence, the maps reflect that without angular momentum, the ocean water would flow to the poles; right now it's 8 km deeper at the equator because of centripetal acceleration. But this isn't completely a thought experiment, because the Earth's rotation is slowing down, as a result of tidal forces (pay attention the next few New Years Eves and you'll notice at least one leap-second added.) In fact during the Devonian, there were about 400 days per year, which we know from fossil corals. The rate of the Earth's rotation will have fallen to roughly half its present value by the time the Sun goes red giant, although it probably will become tide-locked for a geologically brief period while the parent star expands. But nothing could survive on the liquefying cinder that will be Earth at that point, so we don't have to worry so much about that.

(If you really want to stop the rotation of the Earth like I personally tried to stop the San Andreas fault, we could all of us in the world fly to Belem, BR and then on the count of three start running due east to zero-out the Earth's angular momentum. Wouldn't work. In fact it wouldn't work even if all biomass in the world came along with us, because we'd have to go faster than the speed of light to do it. Besides not knowing exactly how the trees and plankton of the world will join us in our little escapade, by going around the world faster than the speed of light you risk going back in time like Superman as noted previously. Also of relevance, you can't. But I hear Belem is still nice for an Amazon port city.)

So besides the obvious map changes wrought by stopping our rotation, what else would happen? First and most obviously, a major climate shift. The oceans would be colder, because they're both at higher latitudes and deeper than our current oceans. This would considerably cool the overall climate of the Earth. If just the opening of Drake's passage was enough to put us into a sequence of glacial pulses, I would bet restricting all the world's water to the polar regions would put us into a very long-term snowball Earth phase. The land mass would be one continuous equator-girdling supercontinent with very little moderation by the oceans in the center (more on this later).

Of course as noted above we won't see the full effects of stopping the Earth's rotation but prior to the red giant age, there will still be some slowing. But then again the continents will have moved in the interim. Here's New Pangea, a mere 250 million years from now, 5% of the way to the red giant age (if you went back that far, you'd be at the start of the dinosaur age):



So for any future maps of the Earth that you smart geocomputer people make, don't just look at plate tectonics guesstimations, also look at the distribution of ocean water assuming a decreased (but not zero) rotation rate. (While you're at it, I want to buy property on Loihi ahead of the rush, i.e. before it breaks the surface of the Pacific. Work hard to find me a nice spot and in return I shall give you a shiny penny!) But look closely at the map - if the Earth's rotation stops, Loihi would be almost right on the coast! Also of note is that the wreck of the WWII dreadnaught Yamato would in fact be exposed on dry land.

The continuous belt of land around the equator highlights a second probable difference (and problem) with the no-spin world. The tropics drive evolution; biological innovation typically spreads from low latitudes to high latitudes. This has been shown to be historically true by an analysis of the fossil record, and it's true even when you look at the rate of evolution in current tropical ecoregions. The way the world works today, the equatorial regions are very wet, because of moisture from the oceans and east-west currents that drive moisture inland. But with no rotation, what would the polar ocean currents be doing, if they exist at all? If there are no north-south currents, then the center of Equatoria will make the Atacama Desert look positively lush. Not only will evolution slow as a result of the disappeared tropics, there will be less opportunity for biodiversity to appear: now there is only one continent, and all its climate zones are continuous east-to-west. That means there are no climactic gene-flow barriers. This is bad because if there's a problem in one part of the continent - a blight on critical grasses, an animal virus, an eruption that further cools the temperature at that latitude - there are no refuges.

(Take a minute to look back at that map of Future Pangea - it's also interesting to think that right now on Earth, we're in an odd period where the continents are near the point of maximum isolation from each other; we may have just passed it a few million years ago, right before South America joined North America. Coincidence that the planet's first intelligence appeared out of this era?)

The equatorial areas that were once abyssal planes will be undergoing a nice post-oceanic rebound, like much of Canada still is after the weight of the glaciers disappeared. For Canada this means all those awesome lakes and waterfalls, but if my other guesses for the climate of Equatoria are right, there won't be any water at all, except near the coasts, and it will likely be frozen. Maybe there will be two isolated ecoregions - two coastal tundras, separated from the Mars-like Equatorial Dry Valleys of the interior.

This of course neglects the most devastating effect of tide-locking: the sun-facing side would be cooked, and the far-facing side would be frozen solid. Even assuming some heat exchange between the two sides and without even calculating the heat of the sun-facing side, chance are the atmosphere would expand and all the water would be in vapor phase, and a lot of it would be lost to space. Even if somehow that didn't happen, you're still looking at two narrow temperate bands around the dawn/dusk rim of the Earth, with one piece of land at the equator of both. (For a long-dead discussion of terrestrial tide-locking see here.)

Long story short: don't stop the Earth's rotation. Like crossing the streams, it would be bad.

HAL-9000 Infiltrates College Sports

Not really, but this Onion article is really funny.

Testing Amazon Links

I'm buying an iPhone car charger and this gives me a chance to make sure it works. If you need an iPhone car charger, please feel free to order it through that link as well.

Blade Runner Blasphemy

Over at Pharyngula, they're mourning a frickin octopus with words from Blade Runner. An outrage! A travesty! A truculent shambolic affair!