In other words, I got so many interesting news stories taking up valuable browser space that I just have to keep the headlines flowing around here.

Think of today’s blog entry as Tuesday Newsday, Part II : Overflow.

The Best Revenge Since Carrie

First off, a downright awesome story of a wrong righted and a negative act turned positive through the value of a community’s sense of justice.

The story is of a sixteen year old girl named Whitney Kropp who lives in West Branch, Michigan. She’s a high school student who was never very popular, so imagine her surprise and joy when she learned that she had been chosen to be homecoming royalty at her high school’s homecoming dance.

But her joy soon turned to sadness and pain when she found out her classmates had only voted for her as a cruel joke. There was pointing, and laughing, and cruelest of all, the boy they voted to be her opposite number stepped down after finding out who he was paired with.

What a senseless and coldhearted, brutal thing to do to this young woman. But from such darkness light came, because once her down caught wind of the terrible state she was in, they rallied around her, showering her with gifts and praise.

Check this shit out :

For the homecoming dance Saturday, businesses will buy her dinner, take her photo, fix her hair and nails, and dress her in a gown, shoes and a tiara.

For the homecoming game Friday, residents will pack the football stadium so they can cheer when she is introduced at halftime.

They will be wearing her favorite color (orange) and T-shirts with messages of support. A 68-year-old grandmother offered to be her escort.

Is that awesome, or what? The gifts alone might not have done the trick, but try to deny the power of a stadium filled with people wearing T-shirts (in your favorite color!) supporting you and cheering you on during halftime of the big game.

Take that, whatever evil pack of bitches cooked this whole abusive scheme in the first place. (And you know it was girls. Men simply cannot conceive of such cruelty. Sorry ladies, but you know it’s true. )

You Have A What Stuck Where

And speaking of things men can or cannot conceive, it is time to take a real dive down the rabbit;s hole with this not safe for work instant news classic : A New Zealand man was admitted to the emergency room with an eel lodged someplace.

And if you have been on the Internet for more than five minutes, you know where that eel went. Yup. Up the bum, or as they say in Kiwi land, “up the jacksie”. Apparently, “eel” is Kiwi for “hamster”.

Insert your tired old Richard Gere joke here.

Now it is not entirely impossible that the eel entered the Brown Lagoon involuntarily. Skinny dipping dude, eel tries to dart into a cave, dude has to make one hell of an embarrassing 911 call.

But every emergency room worker will tell you that lots of fellows end up with a lot of interesting things up there, so voluntary insertion seems more likely.

And being a gay man myself^[1], I find myself capable of following his reasoning. It’s naturally slippery, it wriggles about, it’s smooth sided and tapered… not hard to imagine what this no doubt lusr addled fellow was thinking.

I am guessing that what he did not anticipate was the eel, in this stressful situation, trying to swim as deep into this strange cavern as possible, looking for the other side.

I wonder why you never here about women who get things stuck up inside? Are women just smarter with their holes, or is it that the press just does not find that nearly as funny?

We may never know the truth.

Follies of True Libertarians

And lastly, this story of what hilarious things libertarians attempt when they get into power.

Remember that Scott Walker douchebag? You know, that scumbag who tried (and failed, as it turns out) to crush public service unions in Wisconsin?

Well check out what that pointy headed true believer tried recently :

Gov. Scott Walker has changed course on plans to remove fire-safety requirements from the state electrical code. Walker is now directing state officials to leave in place rules designed to detect fire-causing conditions and stop electric shocks, and to keep children from sticking foreign objects into electrical outlets.

Yup, that morons had plans to just plain get rid of a ton of fire safety and electrical regulations, presumably because government bad, business good, and all those pesky regulations are just that mean old Nanny State slapping your hand and making things hard for you and your money grubbing friends for no good reason at all.

It is a sign of the fundamental immaturity of the modern libertarian mindset that they simply cannot conceive of any good reason why they and those like them should ever be told “no”. They really seem to think that they should be able to do whatever they want, whenever they want, with absolutely no rules applying to them. Plenty for other people, especially if they’re poor, of course. But not THEM.

If they were true libertarian (and I know a few, and I applaud their ethical consistency) they would be just as active and angry about the supposed war on drugs and corporate malfeasance (what could be more anti-individual that a group being given the rights of an individual?) as they were about government overspending and what they consider excessive tax rates.

But no, part of the madness of modern conservatism is that it manages to take the worst aspects of social conservatism and libertarianism and fuses it into one incredibly volatile, psychotic, self-centered mess whose central message is basically anarchism.

Only without the good parts.

Wow, Tuesday again already. Feels like it should still be Sunday. Well, that is what happens when my bizarre sleep cycle dictates that I sleep all day. I end up missing a lot of time.

Oh well, at least I am well rested now. I think. I hope. Sleeping all the damn time gets old fast.

Anyhow, on the the news.

A Little Place Of Your Own

Over at CNN.com, they have an interesting story about the trend towards smaller homes.

Now I am interesting in all experiments in lifestyle. We are all more or less living the same way that people have been living since the end of World War II, and it is not quite cutting it any more. Too many other things have changes, both socially and economically. I am sure we can do better.

And so what particularly intrigued me about the article was the idea that by choosing a hyper efficient small space, a family might live without the enormous burden of a mortgage. That has not occurred to me before, because all the “small living” items I had seen beforehand were about apartment living and how to get the most out of your tiny downtown apartment.

But the family profiled, the Bezins, is a family of four (plus a dog and a cat) living in 168 square feet, on land they own, and they have no mortgage to pay and extremely low utility bills.

Cohabitation issues aside (and my own claustrophobia, eep), the economic efficiency created is astounding. Such a radical increase in disposable income has to be downright transformative. The article says it allowed the husband of the family to take a lower paying but more fulfilling job. That right there is exactly the sort of change I want to see people empowered to make. It flies in the face of the middle class dread of “settling for less” in a very positive way.

I hope this sort of thing spreads and becomes a real economic force in the marketplace.

And speaking of positive reform…

Rethinking High School

Over at cnbc.com, they have this article about one rural Arkansas town and their radical reform of their high school education system.

They took their high school and reorganized it into three streams, or as they call them, “academies” : engineering, communications, and health care. Students are given extensive testing when they enter the high school in order to help them pick an academy, and from that point on, it is an intensive hands-on career oriented training program.

Now as a liberal intellectual, I am supposed to be against this sort of utilitarian career oriented reform of education. What of the liberal arts? What of literature and poetry and higher maths?

But honestly, I am just not feeling it. Sitting here with being 40 coming at me at top speed, I find myself filled with the desire to go to colleges and tell kids “Screw that stupid arts degree, you are never going to be a professor, take something that leads to a real career.”

Basically, if it’s something that can only lead to a career teaching it, forget it. There is far too much competition and you will have to be willing to get a doctorate to even stand a chance.

So I am all for this career streaming. I imagine I would have ended up in communications in that sort of environment, with a focus on writing for broadcasting if that was an option, and hey guess what?

I might even have gotten employed in a chosen field that way, instead of falling through the cracks, ending up depressed, and losing my adult life to the disease.

I swear, I want to go back in time and tell my 18 year old stuff “stick with business and study literature and philosophy in your spare time!”. Beats the hell out of doing fuck all with your life.

I would have made a hell of an entrepreneur. I have the right combination of vision and business acumen. But no, that was too “boring”. Dammit.

The Latest From Mittens

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not share the latest in surreal, hilarious failure from the camp of Mitt “Mittens” Romney.

I can’t possibly do it justice in summary, so here it is, in Mitty’s own words :

“When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no — and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem. So it’s very dangerous. And she was choking and rubbing her eyes. Fortunately, there was enough oxygen for the pilot and copilot to make a safe landing in Denver. But she’s safe and sound.”

He is talking about minor engine problems in an airplane that had his wife Anne in it at the time. But the really interesting thing is that apparently, he has no idea why you can’t open the windows on an airplane flying hundreds of miles an hour tens of thousands of feet in the air.

Now granted, a lot of people would not know exactly why you can’t, but they would know that you can’t and they would assume it had something to do with air pressure or lack of oxygen or whatever.

But not clueless loser Mitt. He has no idea why his wife could not just open the window to get more oxygen. Instead of assuming that the people who make airplanes know what they are doing, he assumes that poor people are just too stupid to think of that.

Otherwise, his wife would be stupid for even asking the question, and that is clearly impossible. And I mean really, what is more important? The laws of physics, or the temporary comfort of a rich person?

I imagine that to Mitt’s friends in the private jet set, the fact that we have to even ask that question shows all that is wrong with the world today.

And you know what? I agree.

Seeya next week, folks!

Hey there science fans! Our science cup overfloweth, so we are going to jump right in without the usual brouhaha. (NOTE : Next week, “Friday Science Brouhaha”. )

First up, a story that almost made it into last week’s column :

Give A Monkey A Brain

This story came to my attention literally mere minutes after finishing last week’s FSW. It seems that those maniacs have finally done it : they boosted a monkey’s intelligence via a brain implant.

Or at least, they think they did. From what I gather from the article, the results are fairly thin stuff. One might even call them sketchy or even dubious if this work had not been published in a peer-reviewed journal. So presumably it is at least basically legit.

And hey, any story which features coked up monkeys with brain implants is worth at least a look. But the whole thing seems rather ramshackle and bizarre to me. So they were able to function normally despite the cocaine in their blood (poor coked up critters) after the brain implant. And only after like a zillion trials on a task they learned for two whole years before the surgery.

Too many factors designed to prejudice the results, in my opinion. Moving on.

India’s Next Supercomputer

When was the last time you thought about supercomputers? Ages ago, right? Well, it turns out that people are still making them for some reason, and India has plans to build the next mother of them all.

It is going to cost $870 million bucks, and will be the world’s first exaflop computer, meaning it will be able to do one quintillion (that is a million trillion) floating point operations per second.

And that sounds pretty impressive, but I am forced to ask : um, why?

What exactly is the intended application of that kind of computing power? What are we currently unable to do with other supercomputers that do a mere thousand trillion flops? I am serious, I have no idea what the hell you use all that computational might to accomplish.

I mean, there must be something, right? Otherwise, why spend nearly a billion bucks to build the thing? I am perfectly willing to concede that my lack of ability to imagine something does not mean it does not or cannot exist. But seriously, what do you do with that computer power?

I am guessing…. a really, really, really realistic game of Pong?

Leather in the Lab

Sadly, I am not talking about leather labcoats. Or am I? Hmmm.

No, what I am talking about is one of this column’s favorite subjects, tissue engineering, and how we might be only five years from lab grown leather.

It makes sense that lab grown leather would show up before lab grown meat. As the article says, the regulations for clothing and other leather items are far less strict than that for a food product, and there would presumably also be a lot less consumer resistance to vat grown leather than to vat grown meat.

I mean, just the phrase “vat grown meat” makes me a little queasy, and I am an enthusiastic supporter of the future technology. Other people will be an even tougher sell, I would imagine,

And what really intrigues me about this artificial leather concept is that it could theoretically apply to any sort of leather, not just cow leather, and this could in turn save a lot of endangered species from being hunted for their hide.

Certainly, I would be a lot more willing to buy, say, a snakeskin wallet if I knew no snakes lost their lives in order for it to exist.

And think of how much cheaper it would be!

The Ultimate Mind Map

Astute followers of this column will note two things : I love me some brain science, and I always leave the most awesome science story for last.

So imagine what must be coming next if this story of a publicly accessible map of the human brain called the Brain Atlas is only second last.

It is a product of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and it is the most thorough and detailed map of the human brain ever produced. It took four and a half years, two and a half brains, and $55 million to do it, and it can be viewed and searched right here on the Internet.

The mind boggles when trying to imagine what this kind of extraordinary research tool will do for brain research in the years to come. Truly, with tools like this and fMRI and the recent functional analysis of the human genome, we are entering an era of medical breakthroughs without precedent.

I look forward to the day when we look back to today and say “What crude and barbaric medicine they had way back then! Thank goodness we are beyond that now.”

The Final Frontier

So what is this thing that is big enough to bump such an amazing thing as a brain map to second place in my weekly science hit parade?

Oh, just a little thing about a radical leap in the feasibility of warp drive.

You see, it turns out that there has been a potential warp drive concept floating around for a while called the Alcubierre Drive , named after its inventor, Miguel Alcubierre.

The idea is that your spaceship would rest inside a ring of something (maybe exotic matter) that warps space in front of and behind it. thus moving you by warping space and not by moving you through normal space by normal means, and thus getting around that whole pesky light speed limitation.

The whole rig could go as fast as ten times C, which would certainly making getting around the solar system a lot faster. Small problem : until recently, people thought that this would take a completely insane amount of energy.

Like, the amount of energy you would get if you converted the entire mass of Jupiter into energy all at once. That kind of insane. Kind of renders the whole concept laughable.

But recently, NASA scientist Harold “Sonny” White showed that if you take the warp disc and make it into a more of a rounded donut shape, the energy requirements drop to something like the energy contained in the mass of one of the Voyager spacecraft.

That is WAY more doable. And apparently, if you can oscillate the intensity of the warp fields (??), the energy demands drop still further.

Whatever you say, Geordi. Point is, faster than light travel just took a quantum leap forward in plausibility. It can be done. Not any time soon, but no longer than it be said that faster than light travel is outside the realm of scientific plausibility.

It is entirely valid within all known physics.

And that, my friends, is really fucking cool.

See you next week, folks!

Another Tuesday rolls around and it is time to clear more news type links from my Chrome window. Still wish Chrome had tab grouping like Firefox does, but for now, I am enjoying it simply not crashing as much or as hard too much to consider switching back.

My bookmarks bar disappeared recently, and I had to go hunting through the menus to find out how to bring it back, but it was not too hard to find. Still, not cool, Chrome. A web user without their links is like a modern person in a blackout : suddenly, you realize you don’t know how to do anything any more.

On to today’s news, which today has a theme : Bad News For The One Percent. See, things are going badly for the One Percenters and their (poorly) chosen candi-bot Mitt Romdrive. Mittens’ gaffes keep getting more and more egregious and offensive (and hilarious) and the long delayed forces of public accountability are catching up with them while we still, technically, have some democracy left to use against them.

That was clearly not the plan at all.

I mean, check this out : megabanksters like Barclay’s and JP Morgan are being investigated about their shady financial dealings with criminal enterprises.

I am quite happy to hear it. There has been anarchy at the top levels for far, far too long, ever since Ronald “government is the problem” Reagan rode into Washington, DC with a mission to really filthy up that town. Myself, I am an law and order kind of person, and have no sympathy for the criminal class who, as all black hearted villains do, hate law, order, police, and the very notion of anyone telling them “no”.

So I am glad that the regulatory systems their despise like a toddler hates their nanny have not been permanently removed, just weakened and bypassed, like the Mongols bribing their way through the Great Wall. As with the last Great Depression, poverty has a way of eroding away that vital connection that makes the middle class identify more with those above them than those below, and that means they are perfectly willing to turn on the people they used to aspire to be, and bring them down to their level instead. If they can’t move upward, they will bring you downward.

And I have through for some time that, to the Personal Jet Set, there is no distinction based on how you got the money. They simply accept criminality as a price of being rich, and so they figure a billionaire druglord and a billionaire corporate CEO are more or less just as much criminals. So why not get even richer laundering people’s money? We’re all part of the same club anyhow, right?

Well, not for long, pal. Turns out, the law applies to you no matter how long you pout and hold your breath. You are still citizens, and that means you are bound by the law.

I know. It just isn’t fair, is it?

And their precious, precious Rom-bot is not doing too well either. Secret video (oh how I love you) taken at a swanky private political function shows the Romdroid saying things like that he does not think the Palestinians want peace, and that the 47 percent of Americans who do not pay federal income taxes are basically a bunch of entitled freeloaders who expect the world to be handed to them and are basically a bunch of useless welfare moochers.

Because as we all know, there is nothing worse than a bunch of people who think the world revolves around them and have never had to work a day in their life, isn’t that right, One Percenters?

After all, your boy Mitt worked hard for everything he ever got, right?

So boom goes any remaining vestiges of populist support Mitt has. And with that, goes even more of his support from American conservatives. You just cannot come out and say “Hey, fuck nearly half the country, am I right?” and expect to win the election. At least some of those people have to actually vote for you.

Did I mention that this dreaded 47 percent includes 20 million senior citizens? Yup. Sure, take a crack at old people, Mitt. Tell all the people to tell their elderly parents that are on Social Security that they are a bunch of mindless feeders and Mitt Romney does not want their vote.

I mean, it is not like senior citizens watch a lot of Fox News and Florida is a key electoral battleground. Oh wait… yes it is. It is exactly that. Oops!

Speaking of Fox News, they recently got punked by someone claiming to be a ‘former Obama supporter’.

And the real story is not that it happened, but that it was ridiculously easy. All the fellow had to do to get on the air with Gretchen Carlsen was to email Fox News that he was, indeed, a former Obama supporter and that was it. No vetting, no verification, not even the most basic of fact checking, like for instance, checking out the many ways they could have proved that the young guest was not even of voting age when Obama was elected in 2008.

Thus, it is the perfect sting for proving that Fox News does not give a shit about the truth and will believe absolutely anything that agrees with their dominant narrative.

Of course they do not fact-check. Facts are the enemy, why encourage them? If you fact-check, you might find out that something you really wanted to be true is not, in fact, true, and that would make you all disappointed and sad, and place you on the slippery slope towards verifying all your beliefs, and you are pretty sure that would only make you even more sad, and worse, confused.

Thus, they will remain extremely vulnerable to this sort of thing, something we in the reality based community should seek to exploit as much as humanly possible.

The idea is to force them to choose between two equally deadly (to their delusions) options :

1) Agree with a liberal
2) Actually think about what they say and do and believe.

Either way, they lose.

Well, here it is, one quarter of a lunar rotation later, and time for more awesome science.

First off, my own personal science : Last night, I took my first dose of Quetiapine, and let me tell ya, that stuff packs a wallop. Just one teeny tiny pill, and I slept all day. Here it is, over 14 hours after my initial dose, and I am still pretty sleepy. That is likely the result of burning off a backlog of sleep debt, but still. Potent mojo!

If you would like to read my slightly scientific notes taken after initial dose, they can be found here.

Faster Than A Bolt

Meanwhile, in the world of somewhat creepy yet highly impressive robotics, we have this video of Boston Dynamics’ Cheetah robot running a stunning 28.3 miles per hour.

This robot was already the fastest robot ever to run on four legs, but now that it has run over 28 MPH, it is also slightly faster than the fastest human alive, Usain Bolt.

I am sure that will be of great use when the Great Robot Uprising occurs and Skynet needs robots to run us down and drag us back to the slave pits.

Seriously though, the video is a little creepy. For one, the sound. Something about the robot’s footfalls are creepily in between the biological and robotic. They sort of sound like someone moving on metal crutches, or maybe some sort of evil doll.

But even creepier is just much like a cheetah it is. Very Uncanny Valley. It runs just like the big cat it is named after, and that is pretty creepy, seeing as it is so clearly just a robot. The biomimickry is uncanny, and hence, very Uncanny Valley.

Still, at least the thing has to be plugged into the wall, right? So it is not like it can run you down if you are far from a wall socket… right?

Absolutely true. The Cheetah still has to be plugged in to work.

But The Wildcat, Boston Dynamics’ next generation Cheetah, does not.

Thanks a lot guys! I am sure Skynet will kill you last for your contribution!

Pigtails… in… SPAAAAACE!

Moving on, we have a pretty nifty contribution to our Cool Stuff In Space file, we have this recent discovery of what it is being called The Pigtail Molecular Cloud in deep deep space.

How deep? Thirty thousand light years away. So, not exactly in our cosmic neighborhood. But still, the discovery of such a strange object (namely two helical clouds of molecular gas 60 light-years in length, one nested in the other) has given scientists something to study in order to unlock some of the secrets of just what is going on 600 light-years from the galactic core.

That is a region that is nothing like our boring and stable suburb of the galaxy, far out on one of the Spiral Arms of the Milky Way. That close to the action, the stars are far closer to one another. Their interactions are therefore that much stronger and more complex. And they are that much closer to the ultra massive black hole that in all probability lies at the very core of our humble galaxy.

So we really have no idea what is going on at the Core, and what is possible there that would not be possible in our relatively spare and distant neighborhood, and so the discovery of this wonderfully weird formation might well lead to a number of key insights as to just what goes on there at the crazy, constantly changing Core.

Certainly, it will make an excellent example of just how strange things are way in there, and an excellent spur for the imagination of astronomers, astrophysicists, and dreamers on the sidelines like me.

I mean, seriously. It is a massive double helix in space. It is like it is an enormous DNA molecule made of molecular gas, the very stuff from which stars are born.

It is almost like it is mocking us with a picture of what might be.

DNA as functional information

Finally, as always, I have saved what I consider to be the most awesome and exciting science news for the last : scientists have completed a functional analysis of the entire humane genome.

That’s right, all 3 billion base-pairs have been analyzed as to function, and so we now have a rough idea of what every single one of those base-pairs does.

That is staggeringly amazing right there. This is clearly the next big step up from simply decoding the genome in the first place, and is bound to be, as the article says, the foundation of all biological science from this point onward.

The world now has a complete encyclopedia of the human genome to consult when trying to create future genetic therapies and while examining existing ones.

And that is just the short term medical angle. In the long term, this sort of fundamental and categorical increase in our understanding of our own DNA as information could be key to unlocking all sorts of mysteries about life as a human being, like why we get cancer, why we age, and why we have to die.

And in the further future, could even be what leads us to being able to change our DNA however we like. No more crippling genetic defects, no more genetic predilections towards certain diseases. Perhaps we will even discover how to strengthen our tolumere repair function and hence expand our lifespans indefinitely.

And all because someone provided the right scientists with the resources they needed to do this extraordinary work, which took nine years to complete and who knows how many hours of labour.

This just blows my mind. And already it has produced a major result : the human genome is eighty percent functional, not only twenty percent like we thought it was before.

This means the percentage of “junk” (in other words, nonfunctional) DNA is a lot less than we imagined before, and a lot of pretty theories as to why “so much” of our genome was apparently useless have now turned out to be entirely unnecessary.

Oh well, that’s science for you. Nothing is sacred, not even graduate theses.

Seeya next week, folks!

Or should that be Tuesday Newsday? Oh god, that sounds like another regular feature. I swear, I set out to keep things loose and format free in order to allow for the maximum scope of self-expression, and yet somehow, order seems to coalesce out of the planned chaos like crystals forming in a hyper-saturated solution. Oh well, I am getting tired of talking about myself anyhow.

Yesterday, I was just too damned tired to do anything else.

But today is a new day, and for today at least, I shall talk about the world outside my head for a change.

First up, there is this rather amusing (in a bitchy ass way) story of literary malfeasance.

The story is thus told : Award winning and highly successful crime writer R. J. Ellory has been caught red-handed using an alias to write glowingly positive reviews of his own works on Amazon.

As a (in theory at least) writer myself, I find this hilariously scandalous. How extraordinarily embarrassing for him! I am sure it will not have much of an impact on his book sales, but in the literary world of authors, agents, publishers, etc., this must be profoundly humiliating, and I doubt he will be showing his face at press events any time soon.

And I find that funny. I was unaware of this guy’s work before now, so it’s not like I am a fan of his, so I feel no need to defend him. And what he did was clearly dirty pool, so it’s not like I do not feel he deserves what he gets.

But I will say that I understand how a writer might read some awful reviews of his work on Amazon and convince themselves that there was Only One Way To Set The Record Straight.

But then again, he also used his alternate persona to slag the competition, so really, he does deserve whatever social fallout rains down upon him for doing something so hilariously petty.

I mean seriously. That is like faking your death so you can attend your own funeral.

From that petty crime, I am afraid we must move on to a story of a truly horrible (yet, I must guiltily admit, also pretty badass and awesome) crime from Turkey.

Picture this : You are a 26 year old Turkish woman. You have two children. For months, you have been being raped by a man who blackmails you into sex by threatening to send nude pictures of you to your family, which would be a serious enough thing here in the West, but I am betting in Turkey might just get you killed, or at least, permanently thrown out of your family as a horrible slut.

Then you find out your are pregnant by your rapist. And he tells you maybe he will send the nude pictures to your family anyway, and tell them all about what a dirty slut their daughter is.

What do you do, faced with this scenario?

Well, the woman in question shot her rapist ten times, then cut his head off and threw it into the town square, and declared “This is the head of the man who toyed with my honour!” when police arrived to arrest her.

Which, you have to admit, is pretty fucking epic. It is hard for me to retain my usual reverence for human life and insistence that everyone has a right to live and nobody has a right to take that away in the face of such a Tarantino level of epic badassery delivered to someone who so richly deserved it.

Turkish women’s groups have praised the woman, and I can see why. Not only did this woman stand up for herself, but she did it in a language that men understand : brutal fucking retribution, and in the name of honour, no less.

This, I think, will get the message across in a way that all the marches and posters in the world never would. Sad but true.

After all, look at what Columbine did for bullying.

Still, it is an unpleasant subject, so let us round out today’s news with a super positive story about, basically, the most awesome father ever.

What makes him the most awesome father ever? Glad you asked.

See, he has a little son who likes to wear skirts and dresses, and to paint his nails. This was not a big problem when they both lived in West Berlin, but then they moved to a very conservative little village in South Germany (did I mention he’s German?) and people were a lot less accepting.

So his little boy, out of fear of being teased by his classmates, stopped wearing the skirts and the nail polish. But his father knew this was making his son very sad.

So his dad did the most amazing thing I have ever heard : he put on a skirt himself so his boy would not feel self-conscious wearing one.

And now the boy goes to school dressed as he pleases, and when the other boys tease him, he just says “You would do this too if your dad was as brave as mine!”.

And you know what? For a few of them, at least, that is probably true.

Needless to say, I heartily approve. Obviously, this is a father for whom there is truly nothing in the world more important than his child’s happiness, not even his own dignity or masculinity.

And that makes him not just an awesome dad, but an awesome human being. When I first read the story, I had such overwhelming admiration for this man that I kind of wanted to ask him to marry me.

The fever passed, but the admiration remains. He has officially raised the bar on fatherhood for all men. Sure, lots of fathers say they would do absolutely anything for their kids, but how many of them would show up in public in a skirt for them?

Scotsmen not included, of course. That would be cheating.

This article is a followup to yesterday’s thoughts about the role of rough play, and will hopefully clarify and extend the points made there.

I realized I wandered quite far afield in yesterday’s piece, so I figured I ought to do another in an attempt to hit some kind of point.

This must be why real writers do outlines, multiple drafts, and all that beeswax. Well, maybe someday.

First, to clarify a connection I left muddy before by wandering off topic : When I point to rough play and its connection to poor social development in nerds, intellectuals, Asperger’s patients, and so on, I do not mean to imply that lack of understanding or acceptance of the greater social context of rough play is the only or primary form of this lack of social understanding.

I just think that it is a very important one, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, because it is something that is with children from the moment they become ambulatory. The vital personality and/or cognitive pattern will be seen even in two year old children. Some will automatically grasp the difference between being invited to rough play and actually being aggressively attacked, and others will treat them as the same, and thus both fail to grasp a basic element of social interaction and come to some understandably dire conclusions about human nature.

But more important this malfunctioning of a social-play mechanism could well be a vital key to understanding how the phenomenon of bullying comes about, and that is what I wish to explore today.

Let us oversimplify by talking just about two broad categories of children, high physicality children and high abstract reasoning children.

The high physicality children tend to express themselves through energetic physical activity, and are highly in touch with their bodies and their capabilities because they are constantly testing and expanding them. They run, they wrestle, they yell.

The high abstract reasoning children, by contrast, express their emotions with words, thoughts, and emotions, and the same energy that the physical child devotes to learning their physical capacities is used, instead, to explore and expand intellectual capacities. They tend to be quiet, introspective, and thoughtful. They write, they paint, they ask questions, they learn.

What happens when two children from these categories interact?

When two high physicality children meet for the first time, there might be a period of tension as they suss out the dominance hierarchy of their relationship, but before long they will discover areas of mutual interest and soon they will be happily playing rough with one another, and expressing their exuberant physicality through active play.

Likewise, two high abstract reasoning children may be awkward with one another at first, but soon they will be happily playing quietly, perhaps playing a board game, or just talking about books.

But when a high physicality child encounters a high abstract reasoning child, the results can be disastrous, as we all know. But the interaction sours very quickly, and in order to understand just what is going on here, we have to slow things down and see things from both points of view.

The high physicality child is often the one to initiate the interaction, and they do so in a way that works perfectly well with other high physicality children : a play-entreaty, delivered in the form of a mock attack of some sort. It might be physical, or it might be verbal, but it must be stressed : this is not genuine hostile intent. It is, to this child, a relationship-opening gambit that has worked well in the past, and which comes naturally to someone who expresses themselves physically.

The high abstract reasoning child, however, is blind to the difference between a mock attack and a real one, and reacts with shock, pain, anger, and distress. The vital social cues are missed, and the child, understandably, views this as an unprovoked attack and reacts accordingly.

The high physicality child is not ready for this and does not understand it. Perhaps they even lack the mental maneuverability to be able to see it from the other child’s point of view. Certainly, they lack the ability to examine what they have learned only instinctively. They can only reach the conclusion that those same social instincts provides them : they have been socially rejected. And they do not know what to do in this sort of situation. The tools they use in other situations are suddenly inadequate.

Now, what happens next depends on the nature of the high physicality child. Most will not become bullies at this point. They might say an angry word or two (only furthering the other child’s impression of unprovoked and incomprehensible violence) but that will be all.

But there will always be some children who, for whatever reason, be it anger issues, or extreme social sensitivity about their own intelligence, or any number of other reason who will respond to this seeming rejection via the most direct and physical manner available : aggression.

And thus, the cycle of bullying begins. The high physicality child, after a few such encounters, comes to the conclusion that “those kids”, the nerdy kind, think they are better than you, and the school system seems to agree, rewarding them more even when you work just as hard as them. A lifelong bitterness can then settle in, along with its attendant and persistent desire to “even the score”.

The high abstract reasoning child, on the other hand, lacking the vital social information that this was not, in fact, an unprovoked attack, is left with the impression that certain kinds of people are violent, sadistic brutes who hurt people for the sheer joy of oppressing the weak, and that people in general cannot be trusted.

Thus, battle lines are drawn and the struggle continues, not just on the playground but throughout our adult lives. The physical types versus the intellectuals, a silent and secret war that might not cost lives directly, but does untold damage on the psychological level every day.

And all because of a simple social misunderstanding.

Surely, we can do something about this, and stop bullying at the source.

I figured “link thump” sounded better than “link dump”, because eww.

Thursday again. Seems like only yesterday it was… Wednesday. (But a different one than actual yesterday).

May or may not have people coming over tonight. Getting a little tired of the runaround re a project my friends and I are trying to develop. I sure as hell do not want to invest my time, energy, creativity, and belief in another project that is just going to die with a whimper because people are flakes and there is nobody in charge to make sure the center holds and everything keeps moving forward.

But to heck with dark thoughts. Let’s share some awesome links instead!

Like this story that is making the rounds of not just the Internet but all the late night talks shows, showing it is truly a story with staying power.

It is the story of a dear sweet little old lady named Cecilia Gimenez who took it upon herself to restore a painting of Jesus in her church, and did not quite succeed.

Ecce homo ergo ick.

From left to right, the original painting (Ecce Homo by Elias Garcia Martinez), the deteriorated version that Cecelia Gimenez started with, and the “Seventies Tom Jones squished between two plates of glass” monstrosity that was left when she was done.

The “restored” version has become an overnight sensation, and ironically, tourist traffic to the small church in Spain where this picture hangs has never been higher. Everyone wants to see the famous ruined picture of Jesus.

After all, now it is unique. Terrible, but unique.

But from the perspectives of art and history, it is a tragedy. Cecilia claims that she did what she did with full permission from the priests of the church. They disagree.

I imagine she asked “if she could help restore it”, they figured she meant by donating (who would have thought an eighty year old woman with no art restoration skills would take a brush to it?), and they said “Yeah, sure you can help!”, and that was all the permission she needed.

Next up, this hilarious story of midirection and confusion from far off Iceland.

Picture a small tour bus on a tour of Iceland’s rugged and majestic coastline. They make a rest stop (all those crashing waves probably make people need to pee more often) and one tourist decides to get off the bus to freshen her makeup and change clothes.

The unintended result is that when she gets back on the bus, nobody recognizes her as being the same lady who has been on the tour with them all this time.

Thus, people start wondering. What happened to that other lady who was on the bus with us earlier? Concerns rise about the “missing woman”. After all, this is rough country, far from civilization. Could she have gotten lost, or gotten into trouble?

Pretty soon, a search party forms to go looking for this “missing woman”, which our friend, the lady who changed clothes at the rest stop, naively joins.

Thus, a woman ended up joining her own search party. About 50 people searched until the wee hours of the morning to find her, and she was one of them. They even were readying a helicopter to aid in the search.

Then, at around 3 am, they suddenly realized she was among them.

That… must have been quite the moment of shock and embarrassment. I can only imagine that whoever figured it out had to shout “Um…. I found her. ” and tell everyone else that they had been searching hard for someone who had never been lost in the first place.

Oh well, no real harm done. Consider it a drill. Next time, it could be the real thing.

Meanwhile, in India, justice for women looks like this.

Would you mess with these ladies?

They call themselves the gulabi gang, or Ping Gang, and they are a group of women who have banded together to fight abusive husbands, corrupt officials, and a society which offers women no protection from rape and abuse at the hands of men.

They started out as just five close friends, but now there are over 20,000 Ping Gang members, who wear their bright pink saris with pride and who brandish laathis – bamboo sticks of the same sort used by local police – as their symbols of power and defiance.

Like I said yesterday, mob justice is not the best justice, but it is far far better than no justice at all. The Pink Gang are vigilantes, and normally I do not approve of vigilantism outside of a fictional setting, but when official justice fails and fails badly enough, mob justice has to take its place.

And so I am a big fan of the Pink Gang. If India was not such a horrible place to be a woman, with all the nightmarish problems of rampant physical and sexual abuse of women that are endemic to the kind of moral wasteland that patriarchy inevitably creates, the Pink Gang would never have come into existence. There would be no need for it.

But in parts of India, women are still thought of as property, as less than men, as less than people. Couple that with terrible, terrible poverty, and you get a lot of angry men taking out their anger on women, and because the system is run by men for men and corrupt as hell to boot, the women have no recourse to law or justice except that which they make for themselves.

So go for it, Pink Gang ladies. Show the men that women can be a forced to be reckoned with. In a perfect world, it would never have had to come to this.

But in the real world, sometimes the only way to protect yourself from oppression is to band together with people in the same situation as you, and fight like hell.

Someone has to fight for those who cannot defend themselves.

Welcome, welcome one and all to the latest (for now) edition of my Friday Science Whatever, wherein I vent some of my gushing and frankly slightly more than sane enthusiasm for all the latest and greatest (or sometimes just the freakiest and geekiest) science stories of the week.

And yes, that was all one sentence! That’s just how enthusiastic I am folks. Better not stand too close or you might get some of the froth on you.

Warning : The first three rows WILL get wet.

But enough of my usual palaver, let’s get down with some freaky cool science stuff!

Breaking The Rules

First off, let’s go to the always fascinating world of nanotech, and the deceptively simple substances known as graphene.

Graphene was one of the first nanotech materials created, and consists of a hexagonal grid of carbon atoms, like hex paper made of carbon but in three dimensions.

Pretty cool, huh? But it gets much cooler.

Recently, some scientists at science powerhouse MIT have discovered a new weird property for graphene : when spread in a single atomic layer over a substance, it begins to show some of the same chemical properties as that substance.

That violates one of the most fundamental rules of chemistry : that substance A is substance A and will behave exactly like substance A and not substance B unless something chemically changes substance A to substance B.

The very idea that substance A can be made to behave like substance B just be putting the two close enough together is downright ludicrous. It sounds, in fact, like some kind of Homeopathy woo-woo bullshit about water having memory or your Special Magic Charm Healing Magnetic Jesus Bracelet being extra powerful because it was in the same box as a chunk of meteorite.

But the results are in, and it is happening. The going theory is that graphene is so incredibly thin that its atomic fields overlap with whatever it is wrapped around, and thus begins to share some of that substance’s chemical properties.

Freaky! Here is my concern : I hope this information promulgates rapidly through the nanotech world, because I could easily see this bizarre property causing a lot of confusion where different studies produce radically different descriptions of the properties of graphene depending on what substance the graphene happened to be laying on when they studied it.

Watch Out For Sand People

Next up, we have this amazing hotness : the Aerofex hover bike, something remarkably like those way cool bikes they zoomed through the forests of Endor on in Return of the Jedi!

It is still in the testing phase and so might never make it to market, but still, when you have an image like this to show investors :

Aerofex tester, shown here on his way to Tashi station to pick up some power converters.

I am pretty sure they will get whatever funding they need.

And there is no special new science fiction style technology making the bike go up. It is actually a very old design from the 1960s, otherwise known as the “hovermania age” by hovercraft enthusiasts named me, with a modern fix up to its mechanical design.

As so often happens in this column, this scratches a speculative itch that I have had ever since I learned the sad news that hovercraft, while amazingly super freaking cool, are really not practical for anything but the occasion Channel crossing and/or Bond action scene.

The ground effect is just too hard to control and render stable, and so you get a sad world where you could have a hovercraft in your garage, but it would get you to work at the speed of a person on a bicycle who is looking for an address.

Since then, I have wondered if the march of technology would someday bring ground effect vehicles back into the ream of possibility. And it seems it finally has!

If they could make something like in that picture available at a commercial level, it would make all those people on their motorcycles seem laaaaame.

Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.

Now you know I save the coolest story for last, and you might be thinking, what could possibly be cooler than real world hoverbikes?

The answer : a real world replicator!

Or at least, the closest thing yet.

The Imagine 3D Printer from Essential Dynamics (what a great vague corporation name!) prints at room temperature (no more of that hot extruded plastic crap) and can print with damn near anything you can make soft enough for its tubes.

And this means…. you might wanna sit down for this… it can print food.

Admittedly, it can’t just create it out of thin air (or ‘warp energy’, for us Trek nerds). You kind of have to put food into it to get food out of it. And you have to stick that food into a blender and make it into a thick paste before you can print with it.

But still, as someone who loves kitchen gadgets, it sounds like the ultimate kitchen toy. Imagine all the possibilities inherent in being able to print with, say, chicken paste. You could make incredibly intricate sculptures for your wedding table centerpieces in a snap.

But that is too linear. Once you start imagining a printer that has chicken, beef, carrot, and garlic instead of red, yellow, blue, and black, you realize that this could open up an entire new world of cuisine. Who knows what experimental chefs could create with something like this?

Even more becomes possible if you add some sort of simple baking element, like for instance the sort of “hot bulb” oven that powers all those Easy Bake Ovens. That would give people a way to harden their creations. I am guessing stuff made of goo does not hold together well.

And that is just the food options. This could very well be a Clarke level invention, where it is as impossible to imagine all the applications for the technology as it was to predict all the future applications for plastic way back in the days of Bakelite.

Pretty exciting stuff, huh?

Seeya next week, folks!

Ever so much science this week. So without further ado… 3..2..1… CONTACT!

Starting as usual with the most harmless and friendly of the back, we have scientists who have reach the highest possible resolution for laser printing : 100,000 DPI.

Why? Because they could. It is not like the human eye has a resolution that high, And to pull this off, the Singapore researchers had to print like this :

Each is a tiny gold or silver nanodisk fixed to a tiny pillar. Color is conjured by adjusting each disks diameter and the spacing between it and its neighbors, creating an effect called plasmon resonance that is perceived by the eye as different shades.

That is not exactly going to be coming to a Lexmark near you any time soon.

I mean, just imagine what they would charge for printer ink if it had gold and silver in it!

Moving on to a more more interesting limit-braking exercise, the USAF is in the very early stages of developing a hypersonic jet that could fly at speeds approaching a mile a second.

And when I say early, I mean the exploding prototypes, just past proof of concept type stage.

But still, I am including it because it is fun to imagine a future in which the jet age is replaced by the hypersonic age, and a trip from New York to Paris takes a little over an hour, and a trip from New York to Melbourne, Australia takes just under three hours.

That would be a profound world shrinking technology. I can’t imagine it will replace the airlines so much as form a layer above them. Just as now, you have big jets between big hubs, smaller jets between smaller hubs, and sometimes even prop planes to get you to the more obscure destinations, I think the hypersonic jets would be reserved only for long trips between large, distant hubs.

Unless they someone prove to be cheaper, in which case, they will take over completely. But that sounds pretty unlikely without some unforeseeable economies of scale factor changing the game.

And speaking of game changers, a coalition of ticked off Internet users have gotten together to create app.net, a new social network that plans to keep the hooligans and riffraff out by charging $50 to get in.

The sentiment appears to be the old saw that the Internet sucks now that just about anyone can get on it, and it was so much cooler when it was just us l33t nerds who were on it, and so the only solution is to create our own Internet gated community and pretend the rest of the Net does not exist.

This rankles my base egalitarianism, so I am having trouble being objective about it. It has 10,000 subscribers so far, so it is well funded enough to work. And I imagine that they will not have the problem of say Google Plus, which simply failed to reach social network critical mass and therefore people signed up only to find that nobody they knew was there.

With a $50 up-front investment, people will be far more motivated to pressure they equally pissed off friends to join up.

However, their central idea that the $50 at the door entry fee will keep out the riffraff is flawed, in my opinion. It assumes that all the Internet hooligans are poor, which is a very naive and bourgeois view of the world. And it also assumes that nobody would pay $50 just to mess with people, and that is clearly wrong. Paying $50 will make certain types of people feel entitled to do whatever they want on the service, as opposed to the implied social contract of a free service, where you paid nothing for it and lose nothing (monetarily) if it is taken away for your bad behaviour.

The other philosophical plank of their endeavour, that being a user-funded enterprise with no advertising will keep the company focused on what users what, seems dubious to me as well. Right now, their funding model is pay $50 once and you are in for life. That is a lousy business model from the customer’s point of view. After they have your money, what is their incentive to keep you happy? The incentive, in fact, is to pare operating costs down to the minimum possible in order to keep the largest amount of that initial deposit for themselves as possible.

That assumes a traditional corporate business model, of course, but I will not go further into it or I will be here all night.

Let’s just say that if they want me to fork over $50 to join a social network, it is going to have to offer an advantage far more potent than merely being “far away from the madding crowds”.

Finally, our Creepy Science story for this week. Skynet, if you are listening, this is your cue : the U.S. Navy has developed the first autonomous war-drone.

It is called the X-47B and it is capable of taking off, heading toward a target, evading enemies in hostile air place, attacking a target, and returning to base all by itself.

Well isn’t that just dandy!

It is what the Army types are calling “man-in-the-loop” technology, which means that there will be a remote pilot monitoring the X-47B at all times during operating, but all the moment to moment decisions will be made by the machine’s computer.

To me, this sounds like we are going from drone operators piloting their vehicles to them merely commanding them. The robot is now the pilot, and the operator is merely the commanding officer back at the base shouting instructions to the pilot in a movie.

And just like in that kind of movie, there is always the possibility that the drone will ignore orders and go rogue, and then what do we do? I am not talking the drone becoming evil or anything, but what if some malfunction makes it go haywire and decide a kindergarten is its target?

And of course, if it is controlled remotely, the enemy could always take control and then suddenly they have a US drone with US markings to use for whatever nasty surprises they can think up.

So color me concerned.

That’s it for this week, folks! Seeya next time!