ideonexus.com

But who watches the watchmen?
- Juvenal

To my shame, I must admit I have never read Alan Moore’s literary classic Watchmen, the graphic novel above all graphic novels, the book that is required reading in many college English classes, and the comic that made Time magazine’s 100 All-Time Novels. I totally lose nerd-points for never having taken the time to add such an important and influential work to my reading list.

1986 Watchmen T-Shirt

Last week I corrected this personal shortcoming. My plan was to read the book in a week, but, unable to put it down, I read it in a six-hour marathon session. All I can say is, WOW. I had previously read Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta and Promethea, the latter held my previous #1 spot for all-time-greatest graphic novel before Watchmen dethroned it.

Watchmen is a classic noir tale, opening with a murder, leading to a mystery, and a journey through a menagerie of classic noir archetypes. The psychotic killer, fem fatale, confidant, mobster, floozy, bad-cop, hard-boiled detective, and wealthy untouchable are all present and accounted for, only here they are all superheroes.

With one exception, Alan Moore’s superheroes do not possess super-human powers. They are merely athletes, inventors, or vigilantes needing costumes to protect them from the law. Watchmen takes place in an alternate history where the existence of superheroes has intensified the arms race between America and the U.S.S.R., where their intervention in Vietnam allows America to win that conflict, and allowed Richard Nixon’s re-election. The book is brimming with historical inside jokes, as when Robert Redford is mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, a character responds, “Who wants a cowboy actor to be President?”

I would consider Watchmen a fairly anti-superhero book, wrestling with the philosophical concept of valetism, hero-worship (”No man is a hero to his valet.”). Moore’s heroes are so humanly-flawed, like any authority, how can we imagine consolidating so much power in their hands?

Which of Moore’s superheros’ worldviews would we trust to care for us? Rorchack’s extreme social conservativism, Ozymandias’ extreme socialism, the Comedian’s nihilism, or Dr. Manhattan’s impartial omniscience? At the book’s conclusion, the characters are faced with a disturbing moral decision to make, but one that is brought about from all their meddling in the world.

Watchmen is a book that requires several readings to fully appreciate the complex characters, myriad plotlines, layers of symbolism tying everything together, and the depth of its philosophical issues, to which there are no clear answers. It’s a book about superheroes in the real world, and the good and the bad that comes of it.

---

A film version of the novel is scheduled for March 9th 2009, produced by Larry Gordon who has been working for 17 years to bring this novel to the big screen. It will be directed by Zack Snyder, whose previously directed the offensively bad film 300, and who I think lacks the emotional maturity to pull off Watchmen. A trailer for the film further squelches my enthusiasm, as it features all the stereotypical shots of people in costumes striking cool poses, which really goes against the spirit of the novel.

For geeks, this is news is more tremendous than if archeologists were to discover Alexander the Great’s Tomb.

The Machine from Metropolis

I’ve previously written about Metropolis, a 1927 silent film that lost a full quarter of its footage to entropic forces; and, yet, still manages to be one of the greatest, most epic of science fiction films ever made. In 2003, a digitally remastered version of the film was released, with a newly recorded score and text describing what was happening in the missing footage, revealing a much more complex and profound plot.

Now the missing 20 minutes of footage have been found, and the next step will be to restore and release a new edition of the film.

So, having bought the film on VHS, DVD, and digitally-restored DVD, I’ll looking forward to getting my eager hands on a copy of the digitally-restored director’s cut DVD. : )

Then she got into the lift, for the good reason that the door stood open; and was shot smoothly upwards. The very fabric of life now, she thought as she rose, is magic. In the eighteenth century, we knew how everything was done; but here I rise through the air, I listen to voices in America; I see men flying–but how it’s done, I can’t even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns.
- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Whenever I mention the fact that the world’s most prominent programmers in Computer Science’s early days were all women, the listener invariably asks me, “Why is that?”

To which I always think, Why not?

Sadie Plant’s book zeroes + ones explores changing social status of women in an Information Age that empowers them while they empower it. She relates computer programming to knitting, and pulling together Web 2.0 resources to working a loom. She dances with the online world’s anonymity, and how that tears down all the social contexts people previously used to pre-judge one another’s words. Plant does these things with prose that is complete chaos.

I discovered that Plant’s haphazard, non-linear romp through history, metaphor, and wild prose is a literary style known as Cyberfeminism, which is oddly inspiring. Her prose is delightful; her organization is terrible. For instance, she references Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, and then, a few chapters later, tells us what those laws are.

I would love to cut this book up into note cards of paragraphs and put it back together into coherency, but then it might lose it’s charm. A whirlwind of ideas lacking defined purpose appears to be what Cyberfeminism is all about.

A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own.
- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Her style is the essence of punk, intellectual, confrontational, and subversive. At first I was put off by some of those metaphors that usually turn me off to some feminist writers. Zeroes are made to represent vaginas at a point, ones are penises, which are then extrapolated into social views of women being empty, needing men to fulfill them. Although I find passages like this pretty silly, in the context of Plant’s book, I was okay with it.

She references science fiction novels and movies with cyberpunk and steampunk themes, such as Blade Runner, Eve of Destruction, and all of William Gibson’s novels, in support of Plant’s metaphor for women of the past being appliances, like computers, tasked with mundane work. Women are like the replicants or androids of science fiction, which break from their molds to empower themselves, rebelling against the authorities. As computers produce phenomenon beyond our expectations, so do empowered women.

And instead they watch the machines multiply that push them little by little beyond the limits of their nature. And they are sent back to their mountain tops, while the machines progressively populate the earth. Soon engendering man as their epiphenomenon.
- Luce Irigara, Marine Lover

There are many ways to bring women into the Computer Science fold. While I prefer strong, dispassionate reasoning, I believe Sadie Plant’s method, with its themes of rebellion, intellectual strength, and empowerment, is by far the much more effective means. Any tactic that inspires people to learn is a worthy tactic.

Because when we learn, we are programming ourselves.

---

Note: Quotes cited here, are cited in Zeroes + Ones, which is filled with such references.

Step the First

Download Miro Player, the free and open-source RSS aggregator for video podcasts. I’m sure there are others, but Miro is, to my experience, the sleekest and most user friendly.

Miro (Formerly “Democracy Player”)

Step the Second

Subscribe to the following shows:

• Nova’s Science Now presents engaging science from a longtime standard in documentary-making.
• PBS has a HUGE collection of classic clips from their documentaries. Awe inspiring, wonderful stuff!
• National Geographic’s Wild Chronicles are great, short clips to enchant you.
• dh love life is Daryl Hannah’s regular video blog exploring sustainable living. Fun and thoughtful (although a bit too new age at times).
• EcoGeeks’ Wild Classroom has it’s misses, but overall it’s a worthy subscription.
• Wired Science often introduces me to the more “out-there” science news.
• Dr. Kiki’s Food Science is fun, entertaining, and involves the chemistry in your kitchen. Highly highly recommended.
• Science Sensei is my favorite of ScienCentral’s videos. His kung-fu is superior.
• TED Talks takes the world’s most intriguing intellectuals and gives them 18 minutes on the soapbox.
• Every episode of Seed Salon takes two great minds and allows us to be a fly on the wall for their dinner conversation.
• Evolution Entertainment is a recent addition to my playlist, also of remarkable quality.
• Life on Terra is my absolute FAV. It’s hard to believe there are documentaries of this caliber for free online.

There are many many more shows out there. You can do a search on “Science” from your Miro Player to find them. There’s more content than I can keep up with. Enjoy!

WALL-E’s Curiosity Gives it Purpose Credit: Pixar Studios

Great Science Fiction films come out so rarely that I am overjoyed when a movie like Pixar’s WALL-E hits the screens. This is one of those rare SF stories that ventures into the distant future, a place so alien most SF writers don’t want to touch it.

WALL-E leaps more that 700 years into the future to a dystopian time where the human race has evacuated the Earth after burying it in trash. Waste Allocation Load Lifters Earth-Class (WALL-E) robots are left with the task of cleaning up the planet so humans may one day return. Only one such robot remains, WALL-E, with a cockroach as a companion, where all the other bots have long-since broken down.

WALL-E is Solar Powered Credit: Pixar Studios

WALL-E has survived these 700 years because it has learned to recycle from the skyscraper-tall mountains of garbage it has assembled. WALL-E is inquisitive, experimenting with the world around it, playing with all the toys left behind from our shopaholic binge on Earth. Its curiosity has obviously also had a crucial role in its survival all these centuries.

WALL-E meets EVE (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), a vastly more advanced robot sent from the humans in space, in a “boy meets girl” storyline that makes WALL-E a stowaway back to the human ship, where we find a society of humans all turned into obese blobs floating on mobile beds which perpetually feed them commercialized media and “meals in cup.” Such a dystopian future is not difficult to imagine in our present society, where we are encouraged to buy things we do not need and consume nutritionless calories far in excess of what our bodies can burn.

WALL-E and EVE Credit: Pixar Studios

Can WALL-E and EVE save the human race? See for yourself. I left the theater to find myself confronted with a world of brandnames, and a fascinating new perspective on them and what they are doing to our human evolution. Impacting our worldview is what good science fiction is all about.

I also had lots of fun playing with Disney’s WALL-E Website

MTV’s Kurt Loder refers to the Ang Lee’s film as “too thoughtful,” which is a bad thing for reasons I and Roger Ebert can’t understand. There are two kinds of Hulk fans. There are those who enjoy the dramatic conflict between an alienated egghead scientist and his raging psychopathic alter ego, and then there are those who just like to see a big green monster smash things.

Hulk The End

I’m of the former club of fanboys (a miniscule club, I know). My favorite Hulk comics are those with Hard SF themes and speculative storytelling. One of my favorite Hulk comics was a What if..? issue involving the Hulk stranded on a distant planet, leaving Dr. Bruce Banner as his only remaining nemesis. They take turns writing taunts in the dirt to frustrate one another while sabotaging each other’s efforts to live comfortably. Another favorite, titled The End, follows the Hulk as the last human on Earth after a nuclear war, with Dr. Banner begging the monster to let them die.

Leterrier’s 2008 Hulk movie is for the fanboys who need another “explosion of violence” fix. I think there was a plot in there somewhere. It probably had something to do with Dr. Bruce Banner not being happy about turning into the Hulk, and trying to find a cure, but the explosions are what’s important.

There is no CGI powerful enough to make the big green hairless giant look even remotely real, and Leterrier seem oblivious to this fact, opting to place the Hulk in a gritty, real-world setting. Ang Lee recognized the toy-like appearance of his Hulk and crafted a movie style to match its main character. Ang Lee’s Hulk is filled with pastels, scenes cut into comic book panels, and comic book storytelling.

Leterrier’s Hulk (top) Ang Lee’s Hulk (bottom)

Ang Lee’s Hulk doesn’t kill anyone. In fact, Ang Lee’s Hulk goes to great pains not to kill anyone. Even when they are blasting bullets, explosive shells, and missiles at him, Lee’s Hulk retains just enough of the human being inside to restrain himself from annihilating his persecutors, as easy as that would be for him.

Lots and lots of people die because of Louis Leterrier’s Hulk, which raises a serious ethical issue for Edward Norton’s version of Bruce Banner. Doesn’t he have a moral obligation to euthanize himself? Instead of selfishly trying to find a cure, a bullet to the head would solve everyone’s problems (Although this would not work in the comic).

Leterrier’s ending is the more epic on an action-packed special-effects scale, while Ang Lee’s ending is more epic on a mythological scale. The battle between Lee’s Hulk and the elemental force his father has become rages across the sky, earth, and into the dark depths. The battle between Leterrier’s Hulk and Abomination is just a street fight.

Leterrier’s Hulk wins a few brownie points for putting the Environmental Media Association’s Green Seal in its credits, but the fans of his Hulk won’t care. Only Ang Lee’s fans would appreciate such a “thoughtful” gesture.

The fictional religion Bokononism featured in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, describes an interesting theory of social relations. In this worldview, there are two types of organizations, granfalloons, which are artificially imposed relationships, big bureaucracies such as political parties (because they are big tents) or corporate organization, and karassi, which are naturally-emergent social networks.

Here Comes Everybody

Clay Shirky does not use these terms in his book Here Comes Everybody, but these are concepts he touches on in his exploration of how the Information Age has revolutionized the way people organize. An example of a grandfalloon he references is fans of Everybody Loves Raymond, a show pushed on consumers so that the people who share the experience of watching it will probably have little else in common, because the sample-size is so large and artificial.

On the other hand, a niche interest, like anime, where fans must proactively seek out media (going so far as to import it from Japan and subtitle it themselves), is an idiosyncratic enough hobby that two fans who meet will often have a great deal in common. Two strangers who discover a shared interest in anime are much more likely to form a permanent social connection than two Everybody Loves Raymond fans (Shirkey, 199).

The Internet connects people, not just across immense distances and language barriers, but across time as well, allowing us to maintain asynchronous conversations via e-mail, blogs, and forums. As a result, previously tiny karass-style clubs with interests like Mathematical Knitting, speaking an artificial unambiguous language, or SteamPunk Fashion are forming meganiches (Shirkey, 102), a word that sounds like a total contradiction in a non-WWW context.

This newfound ease of organization is a double-edged sword, however. Before the World Wide Web, I hosted a Bulletin Board System (BBS) on my Commodore 64. People would call my computer with their computer, post messages, trade software, play games, and chat with me or whoever was hanging out in my bedroom. BBSers were a niche, people with widely diverse interests, but united with this common computing hobby, and small enough a group to meet at BBQs and local events, as few users were willing to accept long-distance charges to call computers in other area codes.

Then SysOps (System Operators) started adding “echo” functionality to their boards in the early 1990s. Everything posted to one BBS got copied out to BBSes across the country, and vice versa. Suddenly, conversation threads previously comprising a few dozen users became a cacophony of hundreds.

It was the same information overload most people experience today, and one Merlin Mann describes best:

Email is such a funny thing. People hand you these single little messages that are no heavier than a river pebble. But it doesn’t take long until you have acquired a pile of pebbles that’s taller than you and heavier than you could ever hope to move, even if you wanted to do it over a few dozen trips. But for the person who took the time to hand you their pebble, it seems outrageous that you can’t handle that one tiny thing. “What ‘pile’? It’s just a pebble!” (Shirkey, 94)

“Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention,” Shirkey notes (Shirkey, 91), and the Age of Communication has made interpersonal relationship imbalance the standard. Internet “fame” doesn’t always translate into effective results, as we saw with Howard Dean’s 2004 Presidential Campaign. Internet popularity is easy, translating that into a grassroots effort is what’s hard (Shirkey, 222). This is the difference between bridging versus bonding relationships, quantity versus quality.

Traditional media, like newspapers and television, provided quality control for us. The Internet has no built-in content control. The onus is now on us to filter, not on traditional media to filter for us. Spam filters, RSS feeds, and human aggregators assist us, but we still have to figure out who is the human contacting us and who is the bot, what source is factually accurate and which is BS.

Aside from some new anecdotes on flash mobs, the importance of radio in German blitzkriegs, and the formation of controversial online groups such as pro-ana (pro-anorexia), there’s not much new here, and much old territory belabored. I will definitely continue following Shirkey’s brilliant blog and look forward to his future books and observations, but it feels as though Here Comes Everybody was written a few years ago, when these observations would be more ground-breaking, but are now taken for granted. Ironically enough, this period where we take Information Technology for granted, when it becomes a seamless part of us, that is when Shirkey predicts the real revolution will happen.

---

Related: 2004 ideonexus beta article on Karassi and Grandfalloons in politics.

“It came to me suddenly–
and this discovery preoccupied me entirely–
that here was unity,
here was the eternal and primitive family,
the family of the Bible:
father, mother, child, beasts of burden,
all composing one body with multiple heads.”
- Gontran De Poncin describing the Inuit Tribes people

Inuit Woman with Children Photo by Gontran De Poncins

The recent news of an isolated Amazon tribe photographed from the air pointing bows and arrows at the plane flying overhead, has inspired a great debate about the rights of such indigenous peoples who are threatened by illegal logging and development in their native lands. How will they react when exposed to civilization, as the Peruvian government seems helpless to prevent further encroachment into undeveloped lands?

Kabloona Gontran De Poncins

In 1938, Gontran De Poncins spent 15 months exploring the Canadian arctic, living with the Inuit (Eskimos), and studying their culture. He collected his experiences into a book published in 1941 titled Kabloona, which was the Inuit word for Europeans. His goal was to find an Inuit tribe that had never met a European before, which he succeeded in doing, but this was actually one of the least fascinating parts of his account.

Far more interesting was his observations of the invading European culture interacting with the Inuit, generating results keeping with the Law of Unintended Consequences. The Europeans thought the Inuit were dim-witted and amoral for sharing their wives and taking an aloof stance toward murder and theft, and the Inuit thought the Europeans were equally softheaded, foolishly giving away material goods and writing down everything because they had no memories.

Poncins describes a phenomenon where the Europeans began subjecting the Inuit to their laws, imprisoning those who murdered or stole. This kicked off a crime wave among the Inuit people, who were trying to get into the European prisons, where it was warm and there was free food.

Poncins started out sharing the European perspective that the Inuit were a lesser society, but came to appreciate their cultural innovations as adaptations to living in the Arctic climate. Their 20-hour-long feasts were not gluttony, but a way of storing up fat-energy to keep warm. Their practice of euthanizing older members of the tribe by setting them out on ice flows, was a survival necessity in an environment where anyone who cannot contribute to the community endangers the whole.

Both Europeans and Inuit peoples judged one another from the perspective of their own ignorance, with a numerous unintended results. Who would have thought, in our Information Age, that we would still be dealing with this same ignorance? Gontran De Poncins suspected he would be the last person on Earth to contact a previously untouched group of natives, with this discovery of an untouched tribe in the Amazon, and the certainty that there are others also within the mysterious jungles, we see that the Earth still has many surprises in store for us yet. There are lessons in Poncins’ historical account, if only that there are known unknowns when contacting an alien people.

---

Footnote: A Sunday-morning discussion on one of the morning news shows concerning the uncontacted Amazon tribe, covered the issue that even contacting these tribes would expose them to foreign illnesses for which their immune systems have no resistance. Similar to the way Native American exposure to smallpox by Europeans both intentional and unintentional wiped out entire civilizations, and the same way scientists and tourists working to save gorillas are exposing them to pathogens, which further endanger their existence.

Survival International takes up the cause of defending tribal peoples.

Finally installed the World Wide Telescope (WWT) after downloading it to sit on my desktop (aka “The Place of No Return”) for a few weeks. It’s very impressive, but less impressive when you run it side-by-side with Google Earth (GE). Still, there are a few features that are going to make me keep both softwares running on my system (and possibly a third software as soon as I get around to reviewing Digital Universe Atlas).

WWT’s library of subject matter is impressive. A “Planet Explorer” feature allows users to get a “Google Earth” style look at Venus, Mars, the Moon, Jupiter, and some of its moons. There are also some awesome panorama shots of Mars from Spirit and Opportunity rovers. I believe a Mandelbrot example was meant to demonstrate more to come, allowing users to zoom in on the fractal with fantastic detail; however, being an infinitely complex structure, it left me wanting to zoom in further.

The problem with all of these images is the way they tease. Giving me the ability to zoom in close on a Mars rock is no good if the zoom is blurry. The view of Earth was so bad it left me wondering why include it at all? Details in WWT don’t render as smoothly as they do in GE.

Google Earth Zoom of the Empire State Building

World Wide Telescope Zoom of the Empire State Building

Both WWT and GE software observatories allow you to see the night sky through WMAP and IRAS; however, WWT also has SFD, VLSS, IRIS, USNOB, and other sky survey projects, each providing a unique look at the hidden dimensions of our night sky. Just getting the opportunity to gaze at the SFD Infrared Dust Map made downloading the software totally worth it. At the same time, being able to view the night sky with Rumsey Star Maps from 1972 in GE is also a wonderful resource.

WWT edges out GE slightly for educational value as well. GE has many tours of the universe and topics to explore, but WWT has many more. WWT’s tours and features of the night sky are also much more apparent. GE has all the same tourist sites, but WWT does a better job of letting you know they are there.

Both softwares divide up the night sky into areas. In WWT the areas aren’t visible until users point their crosshairs at it, in GE there is a layer of areas users can toggle on and off. In fact, everything in GE is a layer that may be toggled, which is superiorly convenient. To WWT’s credit though, when an area becomes highlighted, the upper and lower navigation bars fill with items of interest.

Google Earth Viewing Orion

World Wide Telescope Viewing Orion

GE definitely wins on navigation, scrolling much more precisely and smoothly than WWT. Spinning the Earth in WWT, the mouse slips over its surface. GE is much more precise and responsive to the mouse wheel. Plus GE has that nifty effect where you can give the Earth a spin and let it go without you.

GE also wins on fun features, with a slide bar that allows users to watch planets orbit to where they will be three months from now. It also has a slider to watch the Earth spin through night and day cycles. These features increase the entertainment value of GE, which will make it more educational than WWT in the long run, because fun keeps people coming back for more. GE mashups like Twittervision and Flickrvision also ensure GE will continue to dominate the Internet’s Mindshare.

Overall, WWT is a keeper for the harder space enthusiasts, but for people who only have enough room for one astronomy software in their life, go with Google Earth.

---

You can download the World Wide Telescope here.

You can download Google Earth here.

Myth-Nomers and Im-Pervections

A moment of silence please for fantasy/SF author, Robert Asprin, who has passed away at 62. Author of the delightful MYTH Adventures, a seemingly never-ending series of novellas, which chronicled the lovable Skeeve, Aahz, Tananda, the pet dragon Gleep, and the carnival of other characters making up the M.Y.T.H. mythos.

I very much enjoyed reading my way through almost all of the 19 books, which began in 1978 and may not end with the latest published just this year. For 30 years I and others have followed Skeeve grow from an inept wizard’s apprentice to the wealthy CEO of his own magical adventuring company. Many LOLs were had in these pages, and many there are many more to come as other readers discover the series.

Robert Asprin will be sorely mythed.

“Words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.” - Hobbes

The Stuff of Thought

I once had a conversation with a girl that went like this:

“Ryan, you’re a bama.”

“What’s a ‘bama?’”

“It’s… you know… what you are.”

“That makes no sense.”

“A bama’s a bama, and you’re a bama.”

“You can’t use a word to define itself.”

She shrugged, “Well, that’s what you are.”

The conversation went in circles like this, never making it anywhere, but it does raise questions about how new words enter our lexicon and how they derive their meanings. The semantics of language are an often debated subject in politics and law, as with the lawsuit over whether the World Trade Center attacks constituted one or two “events”, which affected the insurance pay off by billions of dollars.

This is the subject Stephen Pinker tackles in The Stuff of Thought, the third book in his trilogy on language. As with The Blank Slate, there were numerous inaccuracies in Pinker’s writing, but I was more forgiving of them as his politics were much tamer in this book. Reading Stephen Pinker is like reading spaghetti, anecdotes here, references to future chapters there, digressions abound, overly erudite at times and mind-numbingly thorough at others. But reading Pinker is an overall rewarding experience, and his style works for this subject.

I come away from Pinker’s books with a plethora of new anecdotes. In TSoT I learned that the Turkish language has an inferential tense, which communicates whether something was learned firsthand or as hearsay, a proof for the theorem that a horse has an infinite number of legs, and all the Beatles symbolism surrounding the death of Paul McCartney. In English we describe time as forward and backwards, the Chinese phrase it as up and down, and the Aymara describe the future as coming up from behind us, which makes sense metaphorically. Creationists and Evolutionists have a very different definition of the word “species,” with Creationists taking a view that includes strict boundaries between different animal types, and Evolutionists seeing a blending of characteristics from one form to another.

All of these anecdotes raise interesting questions about language. Does a culture’s language restrict what it may think about? If Paul McCartney died in 1966, and someone else took his place, then what does the name “Paul McCartney” refer to? Were the WTC attacks one or two events? Are the differences between Evolutionists and Creationists a reflection of a relative worldview butting heads with a dichotomous one?

A section on baby name fads was fascinating, as people try to choose uncommon names, and, in doing so, inadvertently choose a name that will be common. Consider all the brainiacs named “Steve” in science literature (Hawking, Gould, Pinker, Project Steve), or consider how names like Ethel, Ruth, and Agnes make us think of old people, but these names were simply popular when these people were born. You can check with the Social Security Administration to find out what names will be the “old people” names of the future.

Pinker explores how much of our language is programmed, with examples like the fact that swearing in our own language is more cathartic and that there is an instinctive basis for swearing. An entire chapter on swear words both defends the fact that swear words aren’t intrinsically worse than any other, and upholds the restriction on their use, as their cathartic effect would be dampened and language cheapened if everyone started using them all the time. I also learned the origins of words like “jerk” and “scumbag,” which are no longer considered especially offensive, but would be if people knew what they refer to.

Then there’s the part I personally find confusing, the way people speak indirectly. How, instead of telling someone to pass the green beans, we ask them if they could pass the green beans. Or how it is considered completely offensive to request a sexual encounter with someone, so the appropriate thing to do is ask them in for coffee or a nightcap. A year after my “bama” conversation, I was in a clothing store and overheard the following:

“What’s a ‘bama?’”

“It’s what you are.”

“I don’t get it.”

The young couple paused when they noticed me smiling knowingly at their exchange before moving on. It had finally clicked with me what a “bama” was.

It was an excuse to flirt.

---

Note: The UrbanDictionary has several definitions for “bama”, one of them mentions the phrase being local to Washington DC, where both of these conversations took place.

A recent study in the BMJ Suicide and the Internet, found that results for suicide-related search terms most frequently support or encourage suicide.

I like to think of the Internet as one big ecosystem of ideas, or memes, where our minds naturally select out the good ones. Obviously, if most sites are pro-suicide, then we need to get some better memes online.

So if you’ve stumbled across this blog post after googling “how to commit suicide” or “should I kill myself?” or seeking other suicide advice, please take a moment to consider the following reasons not to logout of this great big game of life:

Don’t you want to know what happens next? Like what’s that show Lost all about? I mean, really, what’s the deal with that freaky island? Is it a crazy scientific experiment, a paranormal limbo, or the imagination of some four-year-old girl playing dollies in a sandbox somewhere? If you kill yourself, you’ll never find out! And there’s a lot of other stuff you’ll miss out on too, like movie sequels and xkcd comics and the end of George Bush’s Presidency!

Do some charity work! Giving to others has been scientifically proven to make people happier. Suicide might end you, but everyone else has to live with the burden of your death. Instead of transferring your pain to others, work to easy their pain, and improve your own outlook on life in the process.

Puppies! Ending yourself denies you the opportunity to meet all the puppies still to come into this world!

Puppies Just another reason not to commit suicide. Photo by ehecatzin

Pain isn’t forever. It only feels that way. Death is forever. That means it lasts longer than high school, bankruptcy, heartbreak, and the extended director’s cut of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (Yuck! Too Geeky even for me.).

People will make fun of you. (Q: How does Kurt Cobain collect his thoughts? A: With a dust buster.)

Kittens! Awwww… Wookie da wittle kee-kees! Aren’t they just adorable? Go pick one up from the SPCA today!

Kittens They don’t want you to commit suicide Photo by Ruskis

Stop taking life so seriously! Look, according to Dr. Nick Bostrom at Oxford University, chances are pretty good that we are living in a computer simulation and Brian Whitworth at Massey University has even got a pretty good explanation of how our physical world is a virtual reality. And I’ve got a short story online exploring the implications of this hypothesis. Go spend some time in Second Life to get some perspective.

Do you know what happens to Super Mario every time he dies trying to complete a level? He has to go back to the beginning and start all over again. If life’s a video game, then you’re gonna have to relive all this until you get it right.

Don’t log out of the game, get into it!

Bonk The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex

I was confused when I read several online criticisms of Mary Roach’s new book Bonk that described it as “oddball,” “trivia,” and “idiosyncratic.” Reviewers compared this book, which is about the history of scientific research concerning sex, to books on orchids, spelling bee contestants, or some other unusual hobby, where the author gives us a peek into an esoteric realm of knowledge.

But this is a book about sex research. You know, sex? The subject that most men think about at least once daily, and, according to the Kinsey studies 19 percent of women do the same. If sex is an “out there” subject, then why all the decades of sex in advertising? What about the $97.06 Billion yearly revenues for pornography?

You can’t call a subject that daily enters most men and women’s minds and generates billions of dollars in revenue “idiosyncratic.”

In fact, I read most of Roach’s book on my bus ride to and from New York, where, during a significant portion of the ride back, I was treated to an out-going African American woman describing her previous-night’s roll in the hay with her boyfriend in explicit detail to her friend on a cell phone (the words “five times” and “wash rag” were involved). “Idiosyncratic” my ass.

It’s a real shame that people view sex as an odd topic, because, as Mary Roach demonstrates, this is why we know so little about it. Roach documents numerous examples of scientists having to cloak their research in euphemisms, leave out technical details, and otherwise obfuscate their methods to prevent having their research funding cut. Without concrete scientific data on which to base our understanding of sex, we are left to pornography, which is about as useful as going to the circus, to understand the norm.

It’s embarrassing that we know so little about such a fundamental, indispensable aspect of our physiology. I was grateful to learn that, thanks to Masters and Johnson’s innovative research techniques that the “dildo-camera unmasked, among other things, the source of vaginal lubrication: not glandular secretions but plasma (the clear broth in which blood cells float) seeping through capillary walls in the vagina.” I can find Medical Journal Articles referencing this fact, but many sites don’t mention it at all and confuse vaginal lubrication with cervical mucus.

I was also glad to learn that a personal hypothesis I’ve been meaning to figure out how to research has already been tested and confirmed. “The Human Penis as a Semen Displacement Device” is a journal article that confirmed my suspicion that the knob on the end of our giggle-sticks is an evolutionary adaptation for sweeping the semen of competing males out of the vagina. It is not, as a punch line to an old joke goes, “To keep your hand from slipping off the end.”

Mönchskopf Clitocybe geotropa Photo by Lebrac

These are insights, not trivia, and Mary Roach offers a multitude of them. Some passages involving penis surgery made me involuntarily cross my legs. Others made me scratch my head at the ridiculous hypotheses of the past. They had some weird ideas a hundred-plus years ago.

Throughout it all, Mary Roach keeps the subject fun. She does not distance herself from the subject matter, describing her personal interactions with scientists, surgeons, and sex-toy manufacturers. She even participates in a few studies herself, going so far as to have sex with her husband and having images taken with ultrasound.

The puns, metaphors, and euphemisms Roach uses throughout the book kept me smiling. Her footnotes were enlivening distractions as well. In one of these, I discovered a place for one of my own personal kinks, the Yahoo Clown Fetish Group.

Yay! : )

Most of all, what I took from Bonk is that sex research hasn’t produced the answers we really need on many important topics. For instance, we still don’t really know why women have orgasms from an evolutionary stand-point. We’re an enlightened species, we should know this by now, and the research-funding should be there without stigma to find out.

---

Note: In writing this review, I have learned that while Microsoft Word will acknowledge the correct spellings of “penis” and “erection,” it will not offer them as suggestions when you right-click them as misspelled words. Prudes.

“There was a time when reading wasn’t just for fags. And neither was writing. People wrote books and movies. Movies with stories that made you care about whose ass it was and why it was farting. And I believe that time can come again!” - Joe Bowers, Idiocracy

Channel-surfing with my siblings during a family visit, I happened to come across Mike Judge’s film Idiocracy right at the opening, a film I would not even know existed if it weren’t for HBO playing it perpetually for several months now. We LOLed through most of it, and when the credits rolled and the laughter subsided. Someone stated what we were all thinking:

“That movie hit a little too close to the mark.”

Quick Synopsis: Joe Bauers is a completely average person, average in every way. He gets put to sleep and wakes up 500 years in the future, where centuries of increasingly inane entertainment, Fox News, and commercialism have brought average IQs down to what we consider mentally challenged today.

The opening clip is totally awesome (language advisory):

Although Fox had a contractual obligation to release this film, they did nothing to promote it. Probably because the film’s critical satire of Costco, Starbucks, Carl’s Jr., Fudruckers, and Fox News wasn’t good for advertising.

Mike Judge has a Bachelors in Physics and his film Office Space was very funny and insightful. While his shows King of the Hill and Beavis and Butthead had mass appeal. This blend of intelligence and accessibility make Judge perfect for making a movie like this.

Judge’s depiction of the culture of stupidity is actually frighteningly realistic. Watching the dittohead assault on academia or spending an hour browsing MySpace profiles confirms that, when a doctor in Idiocracy diagnoses Joe, “Ah, you talk like a fag, and your shit’s all retarded,” Judge is taking a page from a segment of today’s society.

Friday night’s at the comic shop, we gamers are subject to endless verbal abuse from drunk people hanging out at the neighboring nightclub. They laugh at us, call us fags, and deride our preference for intellectual stimulation to chemical intoxication.

We laugh at them with films like Idiocracy.