OK. This is it. I got three things that have been sitting around my web browser forever and a fortnight, and it is time to finally clear them out and my browser actually clear of all non science related detritus for the first time in a long time.

As for the science stuff, well, I will get to that tomorrow.

Is it too early for this to count as spring cleaning? I doubt spring starts in February in any part of the world. But what the hell, it’s cleaning, and that’s the most important part.

Call it pre-spring cleaning, then.

Here’s the stuff.

First, we have this proof that Elizabeth Warren was placed on this Earth to put things right.

And all she does is ask the dead simple questions that everyone who is not wrapped up tight in the warm cocoon of lies and illusions and false respectability of the financial industry has wanted to ask for a very long time.

Questions like… “When was the last time any of you actually prosecuted anyone?”

Imagine if instead of financial regulators, she was talking to the head of the DEA, and he had to confess that he had never prosecuted any drug dealers, just negotiated fines that the drug dealers simply paid out of their massive illegal drug profits.

That would be a huge scandal and Republicans would be out for blood and screaming about how the Obama administration is “soft on crime”.

But switch over to the financial sector and suddenly the same thing is okay.

I think this reveals a massive weakness in the Republican position. Deep down, they just do not think white collar crime is as important as drug crime or any other kind of crime, and the reason is as obvious as a rose on grass.

All the other kinds of crime are poor people crime. White collar crime is rich Republican crime, or at the very least, it’s the kind of crimes a lot of their base hopes to be rich enough to commit some day.

And when it comes to policing their own house, they simply do not have the guts to do it. They are all for law and order when it’s all about the fun of punishing people nothing like themselves.

But when it comes to something that might have an impact on them, suddenly they turn into a bunch of limp wristed anarchists full of peace love and granola, saying “oh, don’t let the mean old government step on me, I should be allowed to be free as the wind!”

Yeah, well, fuck you and your buddy too. The law is the law. Comply or suffer. No exceptions.

Moving on to lighter fare, let’s talk about the latest hilarious bad thing to happen to celebrity chef and the man who is to food what Larry the Cable Guy is to comedy, Guy Fieri.

Apparently, the dude is a big deal over at the Food Network, presumably for making three more straight guys watch the network and hence double their coverage of that demographic, but I first heard about this living douchebeard when I heard about the epic bad review the NYT gave to one of his restaurants.

In a true measure of verbal virtuosity, the entire review is in the form of questions. so it’s almost like a Socratic deconstruction of the whole Guy Fieri meme.

And that is fun enough. I have nothing against the guy, but he has to expect that when he more or less declares war on good taste and traditional food criticism, it is going to fight back and it is not going to be a pussy about it, either.

But where the ridiculous became the sublime was when one smart cookie noticed that the domain for Guy’s chain had expired, snapped it up, and put up this masterpiece of surreal wordfuckery in its place.

Go read it all. Read it many times. Each time, you will discover wonders anew. Things like :

Panamania!
Deep fried snake with a printed out picture of David Lee Roth stapled on it and a sparkler stuck into each eye. Served with a side of Bud Light you have to write out of a Hawaiian shirt.

Or this one :

The Blitzmas Beast
Two jumbo Big Gulp Slurpee cups filled with nacho cheese and tied to each other with 25 bacon strips fashioned into a giant bow. Shellacked with Slim Jim style jus, and topped with a dollop of smoked kitchen leavings.

Hilarious. But I think my favorite is this one :

Reno!!!
Popcorn crusted popcorn chicken stuffed inside Guy’s Nuthin’ Fancy Meatloaf and superbanged into a volcano of Tabasco butter. We pour it into a Lucite heel, smother it with our own Jalapeno sugarbrew, and set it on your lap on a neon sign. Served drunk and on fire.
Add a Cinnabon and two more Cinnabons 4.95

Served drunk and on fire. LOL.

Finally, I would like to introduce you to an intriguing fellow, a fellow with the unlikely name of Melton (no, not Milton, Melton) Barker.

From around 1930 to around 1970, Barker made his living in an unusual way. He traveled from town to town, making the exact same movie over and over again, with the exact same script, and charging the parents of their town a fee for having their children star in it.

He would roll into town, make a deal with the local cinema to show the as yet unmade film, then make the movie with whatever kids showed up with the money.

I object to the way the article I linked to above insinuates that he was some kind of con man. He was not. Everybody got exactly what they paid for.

And the town always got to keep the movie, too. Sure, it wasn’t much of a flick, just a corny thing where the kids foil a kidnapper then do a few song and dance numbers.

But just think of what joy that movie could bring to people over the years. It would be like a home movie for the whole town. Think of what a kick the young stars would get out of it when they watched it as adults, and remembered back when.

Imagine what a treasure it would be to have locations in the town preserved on film, so people who miss that old malt shop or the hardware store where their Dad worked can see it right there on the screen.

So no, the man was no huckster. He might have prayed on people’s pride in their child and their town a little, but that’s not fraud, that’s marketing.

And just think of how interesting it is that, somewhere out there, there could be hundreds of versions of the exact same movie.

So far, only 20 of them have been found, but that is still pretty interesting. I would love to see if you could seamlessly splice one into the other, or run them side by side and have them sync up.

All in all, I find the whole thing fascinating, and I applaud Mister Barker’s ingenuity and industry.

If you want to sample his oeuvre, there is a website with all existing prints on it here.

Nothing really noteworthy about my therapy today and this browser of mine is absolutely overflowing with stuff, and that is really slowing down my computer, so it is time for a full flush, y’all.

First of, Ron Paul is a massive hypocrite.

The one thing this guy had going for him, in my view, was his integrity. He might be a crazy ideologue who believes in a lot of things that are stupid, evil, and crazy, but you got the feeling that he was sincere and meant every word.

But not the words he spoke against the UN, apparently, because now Ross Perot’s crazier cousin has called upon a UN body to confiscate ronpaul.com from its legal and rightful owners just because he does not feel like playing the perfectly reasonable $250K the owners want for it.

Wow. Getting big government to stomp on the little guy to give you what you want for free. That sounds like pretty much the opposite of his supposed free-market libertarian stance to me.

Guess libertarianism is only fun when it means you have more money. When it might cost you money, it is Big Government time.

Just goes to show that American libertarianism is intellectually bankrupt.

Next up, this interesting piece from Jezebel.

Apparently, on the show Girls, they dared to have an episode where the average-looking character Lena met a rich, handsome guy who thought she was beautiful and they had a fab date together.

Bravo for them! But what makes this truly television worth doing is that it has brought all kinds of ugliness to the surface where people think the show is “unrealistic” in supposing a hot guy could ever fall for someone average, and some people are even asking if the whole thing was a dream sequence because in their minds, this kind of thing just cannot happen.

And the intriguing thing is that this is not all coming from horribly sexist men. No, most of this flack is coming from women, ones who presumably think of themselves as feminists but who are quick to support the notion that a woman is worthless if she is not good looking when it happens on TV.

In TV world, everyone who matters is beautiful, and everyone else is background, and maybe normal people hook up just for laughs now and then, but the cardinal rule is that beautiful people never, ever, ever hook up with normal people.

Not of their own free will, anyhow.

So bravo twice for this Girls show. Obviously, this episode is stimulating a very necessary discussion about television and lookism and all that nasty business.

And speaking of the beautiful people, how about this video about the women of LA?

Also got that from Jezebel, where they correctly grokked that there is something off about this video but lacked the subtle understanding of the male psyche to really understand it.

They are right to call out these guys for being shallow for not being willing to date the fat chicks from the valley or the hairy Persian girls. Ignoring the ones who are not model/actress pretty is just as shallow as them ignoring you if you are not rich, boys.

But what I feel is truly going on is that our hero comes to a place with so many gorgeous women, all on the make (because that’s Hollywood, baby) that he just can’t believe that absolutely none of them are interested in him. Somewhere in his male mind, his standards just went through the roof, and he and his two can’t-get-laid friends have been blinded by beauty and lost all sense of proportion.

Obviously, they need to get their head out of the clouds and their hands out of their pockets and look around for other people who look like them and who also can’t get the beautiful people.

And just remember, nobody gives a fuck what funny guys look like… if they are successful!

And now for the token Valentine’s Day content. (No I didn’t forget, I just don’t care. )

But because this is me we are talking about, it’s not just about love.

It’s also about BRAIN SCIENCE! w00t!

I am particularly caught by the idea that OCD might be related to low serotonin levels. Perhaps OCD should be added to my mental list of “all the ways that the same chemical imbalance that causes depression can manifest in behavioural problems”.

After all, all the little compulsive behaviours associated with OCD have one thing in common : they stimulate the pleasure center of the brain. That’s how our brains reward us for following our instincts to clean, or follow superstitions, or what have you.

When an OCD sufferer gets caught in their obsessions, perhaps what is really going on is that they are stimulating their brains to release more serotonin until they feel “normal”.

If so, that seems like a particularly cruel self-medication trap.

Finally, OMG, a video web meme that I really like! Finally!

It is called the Harlem Shake, and here is an example.

Basically, they all use the same sound clip, and start off with someone dancing alone, then at the point where the deep voice says “Do the Harlem Shake!”, it cuts to the same place but full of people dressed up crazy and dancing like lunatics.

And I love it so, so much.

I mean, check this one out :

Those army people know how to party the fuck out. I just love how this meme taps into people’s deep down desire to just be as weird as they possibly can be.

That is what makes me love it so. It is like every video is this magnificent explosion of colorful, enthusiastic nuttiness of just the kind that I adore.

This one wins the attendance award :

Far fuckin’ out, man.

But this is probably my fave because of location.

That is to say, both that they did it in a subway car, which appeals to my desire to make boring locations into something magical, and that it is from Canada.

And has what kind of looks like Samantha Bee in a cow costume and a guy wearing a pixelated head of our loathsome Prime Minister, Stephen Harper.

Keep letting your freak flag fly, folks!

Well, more or less about sex, anyhow. Sex, gender, and so on.

First off we have this article about how polyandry might be more common than previously thought.

Polyandry is, of course, the fraternal twin to polygamy. It is the practice of women being able to marry more than one man, and in the survey of world cultures, it is considered to be extremely rare.

It is certainly rare compared its twin polygamy, where men can have multiple wives. But it should be stressed that both of those are relatively rare compared with single marriage as we recognize it in most of the world today.

Regardless, according to the article, there seems to be some evidence that polyandry exists in a larger number of societies than previously thought, and this merits attention.

Conventional wisdom has held that polyandry was rare because men are inherently jealous and aggressive and domineering, and would never consent to share a wife except under the strangest of situations.

But that would suggest that men are more jealous than women, and I think one would have trouble establishing this as true in any non-anecdotal sense.

Myself, I have always considered the tendency of human societies to enter a polygamous phase to be an evolutionary throwback to our more primitive arboreal primate ancestry. We are still, weakly, a “hareming” species. Our pair-bonding mode is very strong (that’s why we fall in love, after all) but it is a fairly recent evolutionary addition, and our previous mode, where dominant males collect harems of females and guard them zealously, is always there, waiting in the wings.

And the evolutionary argument is simple. One male impregnates many females, his genes are spread further than with a single pair-bond.

So where does that leave polyandry? My guess would be that it evolves in societies where death during childbirth causes the number of males to outstrip the number of females by enough of a margin that young men are willing to share a wife because half a wife is better than none.

We also must keep in mind that in a lot of less advanced societies, the link between sex and paternity is not as well understood as it is in the modern world. The idea of one father per baby is one that is relatively recent, and a lot of these societies barely grasp that sex and babies have anything to do with one another, let alone grasp that each baby has a single father.

And speaking of babies, here is a hilarious story of religious excess from the world of Islam.

Seems that last year, some ambitious imam decided to suggest in a television interview that baby girls should have to wear the burka.

And predictably enough, the world went apeshit over the very suggestion, which I find quite interesting. It shows the power of our taboo against putting sexuality and children in the same context at all that the reaction to this notion, which to my mind does not seem any loonier than a lot of other religious practices, was so universal and vehement.

The guy sited worry about the molestation of babies, which is a curious thing to worry about. I hardly imagine there has been an epidemic of baby groping in the Islamic cultural world to justify such a move.

Although I have to wonder… if the only recognizable, unbagged female forms that are around for males in these societies to imprint upon are preteens, that could plausibly be linked to a rise in interest in preteen females. Sexuality tends to seek the “closest thing available”, after all.

So maybe this foolhardy fellow had a point. Maybe all this sticking girls in a bag the minute they show any sexually stimulating characteristics is leading to a rise in child molestation.

Of course, from a Western standpoint, the obvious solution would be to let the girls out of the damn bags and let the primacy of appropriate sexual response sort things out.

But that would be letting common sense into the room.

And speaking of common sense as it fails to be applied to human sexuality, let’s talk about the tragedy of the media freaking out about little kids touching each other’s bathing suit areas.

Apparently, at some preschool in Carson, California, some little girl was caught with her mouth on the penis of a little boy, and people are, predictably, freaking out over it.

Pedophilia is the moral panic of our age, and as is always the case with moral panics of the past, the main motive force is the public’s appetite for occasions to enjoy the thrill of being shocked and titillated while also engaging in the fun ritual of everyone assuring everyone else that they are “normal” and “not at all like that” and that “those people” are nothing like us good, normal, wholesome people.

As such, the pathology of a moral panic always follows the same route as any thrill-seeking and addictive decadence. It seeks larger and larger doses of the stimulus. But unlike traditional decadence, moral panic also contains a pressure to lower the threshold for offense which works in the opposite direction.

This is how you end up with the Edwardian sex panic and women wearing a dozen layers of clothing in order to conceal any trace of femininity, or for that matter, the burka.

This all said, I do not quite agree with the Jezebel commentator’s stand that this is just children innocently exploring one another’s bodies. It might be that, but it might be… worse.

See, investigators into child abuse know that one of the signs of sexual abuse of children is that the child is sexually precocious, in other words, that the child seems to know a lot more about sex than would be normal for someone their age.

So I would have to ask, who taught this girl about oral sex? Usually, with the little ones, you get touching and rubbing and that is about it.

So there might be something there for people to be angry about after all.

And with that happy thought, I sign off for today.

I wasn’t sure I was going to write about this topic, as interesting as it is, but then, completely by chance, I decided to watch an episode of Family Guy with today’s lunch, and lo and behold, which episode should come up but this rather on-topic one.

Well I can take a hint when the universe is sufficiently blunt and obvious about it. Time to talk about parallel universes and, more specifically, this article about the real people who claim to be from them.

The star of the story is Lenina Garcia, a Spanish woman, a well-educated professional, 41 years old, who woke up one morning in a world subtly different from the one she knew.

For example, she went to work to find that she was in a different department than the one she had been in when she went to bed, and had no memory of ever having switched.

Other things were different too. She found out she was still in a relationship with someone that she thought of as her ex-boyfriend. (Man, that’s got to be a kick in the cunt.) Nobody remembered her going in for surgery on her shoulder. There were clothes in her closet that she did not remember buying.

All in all, a very strange and disturbing to happen to the poor woman, regardless of the origin. Nothing in her story absolutely rules out some form of fairly specific retrograde amnesia, possibly brought on by a mild stroke. She says herself that it as if she lost five months of her life, months that she does not remember but everyone else remembers her living.

That is pretty much what would happen if she had a stroke that disconnected five months of her memory from conscious access. Again, that would be a suspiciously specific amount of time to result from a random stroke, especially considering that it did not, according to the story, result in any other symptoms, like loss of motor control or an atypical epilepsy.

And of course, the idea that she came from a parallel universe is a much more interesting theory.
The idea that this is all some big hallucination due to stress is something I reject out hand as simply absurd. People have far less complicated and subtle stress reaction disorders.

But as a big time science fiction nerd, I would remiss if I did not at least take a poke at the idea that this poor woman actually did, somehow, switch alternate realities and end up in the wrong one.

Being an absentminded dreamer who often wonders what reality he is in myself, this seems all too plausible. I have had very vivid dreams where it seemed like I was living someone else’s life, and when I wake up, it takes me some time to remember who I really am, and what is truly real.

Truly, being me is one freaky ass trip sometime, and I suppose it would be at least somewhat cool to find out I have been exploring alternate universes in my sleep.

But somehow, I think the drugs have more to do with it.

Anyhow, back to Lenina Garcia (aren’t Spanish names gorgeous?). Suppose this poor woman did genuinely hop universes somehow. Why would it happen in her sleep? Perhaps in sleep, we all wander.

We don’t notice because, well, we always come back.

So that would imply that Lenina’s fate is some sort of cosmic accident. But if so, who (or what) screwed up? If this sort of thing is possible, one must ask what force it is that makes it so that a trillion times out of a trillion and one, we all get back into our right bodies in the morning?

Is there some sort of super rare cosmic weather system that makes the membrane between parallel universes permeable enough to allow for such mistakes?

Perhaps it is more common than people realize, but most of the people to whom it happens never say anything and just adjust the best they can to their new lives.

Maybe most of the time, the differences are so small and subtle that we just assume the problem is our faulty memories and gloss over it and get on with our lives.

Or maybe there truly is a super rare form of mental illness that results in this sort of delusion. That is also pretty unlikely and interesting in its own right. The closest thing I can think of to it would be the phenomenon known as fugue state, where a person loses all memory of their lives, wanders off in a daze, and creates a new life for themselves, only to suddenly remember who they really are months or even years later.

That one I can see as a result of unprocessed stress. Who hasn’t wondered what it would be like if they just left everything they knew behind and went someplace where nobody knew them and just starter their whole lives over with a new identity?

Just hit the reset button on life, and see if you can do better the second time around!

So I can imagine how, as a result of deep psychological pressures locked away in someone’s subconscious mind that they simply cannot, for whatever reason, let surface consciously, the person’s mind might become overloaded and use the unusual route of a fugue state to resolve the tension.

But just forgetting five months of your life? I would have to know what happened five months before the onset of the amnesia that marked it as somehow special in Lenina’s life.

Maybe she wanted to go back to a time before some certain even happened and was willing to forget everything that happened since then to accomplish it?

That does not strike me as very likely. Again, there are much simpler stress reaction disorders, like for instance total fatigue, that are far more common.

Oh well, time to transport myself into the alternate universe where I am done writing for today.

Seeya later folks!

Time to share some of the stuff that is clogging up my browser and has yet to find a home in one blog post or another, but which I can’t bear to just throw away.

In other words, this is the sort of post I do to prevent myself from becoming a link hoarder. I am pretty sure I could never be a hoarder not because I am any good at being neat and organized and minimalist or anything. I totally am not.

It’s just that I do not get very emotionally attached to objects, and so I have no problem throwing stuff away or giving it away if it becomes a hassle.

Anyhow, on with the links!

First off, there is this interesting piece about the simultaneous rise and fall of Wikipedia.

On the one hand, Wikipedia has never been bigger, better, more comprehensive, more trusted, more used, or more ubiquitous in our lives. It is the reference desk of the Internet, the go-to repository for all human knowledge for the entire human race. I cannot over-stress how amazing, important, and powerful that is. Wikipedia is beyond the dreams of scholars past and truly represents a new frontier in human thought and human understanding.

But, as the article points out, the original concept of Wikipedia as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” has mostly been eclipsed by the realities of human nature and Internet life.

Theoretically, anyone can still edit and contribute, but when you combine the stringent rules that they have had to implement to keep quality up and more important to keep the random defacers out, and then add the very real possibility of having your contributions rejected by the community for not meeting its standards or covered in other people’s edits, it is no wonder that actual number of contributors has declined sharply over the years.

And that is not even getting into the fact that human knowledge is, in fact, finite, and therefore over the years fewer contributions are actually needed. Eventually, it is all in there, more or less, and it is harder for a potential contributor to find an area that is not already covered.

So all that is needed is people to update the entries that are open to updating, and that will always take far fewer people than the initial rush of documentation did.

But that does not make Wikipedia worse. It is still the most amazing knowledge tool ever. I Wiki thinks all the time.

It just does not require millions of participants any longer.

On a completely different note, a man walking his dog on the beach discovered something which might be worth nearly 100,000 pounds, or about $155K in Canadian bucks.

But it was not a golden treasure chest or a casque of ancient brandy.

It was a big lump of ambergris, otherwise known as whale puke. And it’s worth a fortune.

That is because, hard to believe as it might be, it is highly sought after by perfume makers, who use it as the base for (I assume) very expensive perfumes.

See, here’s the thing. I knew about ambergris. I knew what it was and where it came from and what it was used for. It did not even surprise me that it was worth money.

But the picture in the article seems to imply that this find is around the size of a standard turtle, and that implies that the stuff is worth more than truffles or gold.

So even if it took only a tiny bit to make perfume more wonderful, I am guessing you will not find any of it in your cheap bottles of Lady Brut.

Surely, we have an artificial substitute by now.

Sticking with the animal kingdom, we have this, Budweiser’s Super Bowl ad for this year.

Awwwwwwwww! That just about melted my heart and made me cry. Budweiser did something amazing and made a one minute horse movie for men and it totally, totally works.

And yes, as the Jezebel article where I got the link says, it is obvious and cheaply manipulative and designed entirely to pull at your heartstrings in order to make your beer money come out.

But I do not care. Sure, it is obvious. So are horse movies for chicks. And it’s predictable, but they cleverly counter that by having it all happen so quickly and smoothly that your cynicism and jadedness can’t quite keep up.

Sure, you know what is going to happen, but it doesn’t matter, because you are looking forward to it and the ad does not give you a chance to get bored.

Of course, I am gay, and an animal lover, so I might be easier to engage on this subject than your average manly heterosexual type.

But I don’t think so. Men have their sentimental side too, and I bet this ad will go over like gangbusters with the beer crowd.

And hey, chicks watch the Super Bowl too. And they will fall for this ad like the Berlin Wall.

I am not sure it will make people want beer, but what the hell, you can’t have everything. Some ads are more about the brand than the product.

And this certainly will give people a warm happy feeling about the Budweiser brand and their iconic Clydesdale horses in general.

And often people buy the product that makes them feel good. See : politics.

Lastly, I think I might have linked this before, but it bears repeating : this is totally my favorite Bad Lip Read that they have done recently.

Something about it just works better than their usual stuff. Maybe because the quick cuts let them do more with context than their usual “so random LOL” type humour, which gets old pretty fast.

I think my favorite moment is “I encompass, and I eclipse. ” It’s just so magnificently unexpected after all the goofy random crap. It really takes the comedy to the next level.

And that level is where genius lives.

Seeya tomorrow, folks!