We had a contest in our Information Services Division (ISD) of the Aircraft Repair and Supply Center (ARSC) of the United States Coast Guard (USCG) last year to design a new logo. Here was my submission, which came in second place:

ISD Logo

Last week, exactly one year later, we’ve got t-shirts for the division. The first place logo got the front, and my logo got the back.

ISD Logo on a Shirt

Yay! I’m cool. : )

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.

John Coleman, weatherman for KUSI in San Diego, has an unintentionally hilarious rant posted, Global Warming and the Price of a Gallon of Gas, where he blames Global Warming Theorists for the high cost of oil and what he seems to think is the impending destruction of civilization because of it. Mind you, it’s not Global Warming that’s going to destroy civilization, it’s people believing it that’s going to doom us all.

Coleman wants us to know that he knows what he’s talking about:

I have dug through thousands of pages of research papers, including the voluminous documents published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I have worked my way through complicated math and complex theories.

Got that? This Global Warming stuff is complicated, and Coleman’s a total wonk on this topic what with all that reading and math and stuff that he’s done. He summarizes the AGW theorists’ positions quite nicely:

According to Mr. Gore the polar ice caps will collapse and melt and sea levels will rise 20 feet inundating the coastal cities making 100 million of us refugees. Vice President Gore tells us numerous Pacific islands will be totally submerged and uninhabitable. He tells us global warming will disrupt the circulation of the ocean waters, dramatically changing climates, throwing the world food supply into chaos. He tells us global warming will turn hurricanes into super storms, produce droughts, wipe out the polar bears and result in bleaching of coral reefs. He tells us tropical diseases will spread to mid latitudes and heat waves will kill tens of thousands. He preaches to us that we must change our lives and eliminate fossil fuels or face the dire consequences. The future of our civilization is in the balance.

Got that? Al Gore. Al Gore. Al Gore. Al Gore. Al Gore. Al Gore. Al Gore.

This is pretty embarrassing. Coleman claims to have read so much AGW research, but then proves in this paragraph that the only thing he’s read is Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. I didn’t read the book myself, but I’m pretty sure it had a lot of pages in it, and those page numbers can get pretty complicated for some people when we’re talking about numbers as big as 10⁴ power, but this doesn’t excuse the silliness of AGW skeptic’s tactic of claiming Al Gore is the end-all-be-all of AGW theory. I don’t recall Al Gore’s name being on any of the scientific papers. I don’t recall Al Gore owning the NASA Earth observation satellites. And Al Gore’s name definitely wasn’t on the IPCC reports.

So take note, whenever an AWG skeptic says “Al Gore,” what they’re telling you is, “I don’t believe in Global Warming because I can’t be bothered to read primary sources.” Then imagine them drooling on themselves and drawing doodles of bunny rabbits.

Carbon Dioxide “is not a pollutant. It is not smog. It is a naturally occurring invisible gas.” Coleman argues. It’s a byproduct of our respiration; therefore, it doesn’t matter how much of it is in our atmosphere. I would like Coleman to demonstrate his faith in this fact by placing himself in a room filled with nothing but CO₂ for 10 minutes. After he expires, we can discuss why his whole “it’s natural” argument is bogus. Remember: arsenic is natural.

Coleman also trots out the “controversy” surrounding the AGW consensus, citing that tired old Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine’s 31,000 signatures of “Scientists” who dispute AGW Theory. Although released on May 2008, this is actually the same list released in 1998, which was heavily debunked then and carries no more legitimacy now.

But what does all this have to do with the price of oil?

The battle against fossil fuels has controlled policy in this country for decades. It was the environmentalist’s prime force in blocking any drilling for oil in this country and the blocking the building of any new refineries, as well. So now the shortage they created has sent gasoline prices soaring.

This is important, because it’s possible that there is as much as 3.5 billion barrels of oil underneath the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve, 3.5 BILLION. That’s almost enough oil to supply America for a whopping half a year!!! And we evil environmentalists are keeping you from it. Why would we do that? Why would anyone want to deny Americans a few more years of driving our SUVs just so we can have healthy forests, clean beaches, and wildlife???

Dittoheads consider Coleman a credible source on this subject because he tried to talk other people into suing Al Gore (but not himself) and he’s the founder of the Weather Channel in 1983. They always emphasize this fact, Founder of the Weather Channel, never mind the fact he got a kicked out of the enterprise, when, as he describes it, “The bad guys took it away from me, but they can’t steal the fact that it was my idea and I started it and ran it for the first year.”

In dittohead land, one skeptical meteorolgist is enough to overturn the G8, Brazil’s Academia Brasileira de Ciéncias, France’s Académie des Sciences, Italy’s Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Russia’s Academy of Sciences, the United State’s National Academy of Sciences, United States of America, the Royal Society of Canada, the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, the Science Council of Japan, the Academy of Science of South Africa, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy, the Academia Mexicana de Ciencias, the Royal Society, United Kingdom, Malaysia’s Academy of Sciences, New Zealands, Academy Council of the Royal Society, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Australian Academy of Sciences, the Woods Hole Research Center, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Meteorological Society (AMS), the National Research Council, Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS), the Federal Climate Change Science Program, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the UN Project on Climate Variability and Predictability, the American Geophysical Union, the Geological Society of America, American Chemical Society, the American Association of State Climatologists, the US Geological Survey (USGS), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), the World Meteorological Organization, Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospherice Sciences, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Australian Meteorological And Oceanographic Society, the Pew Center on Climate Change, and 928 peer reviewed scientific journal papers.

But in dittohead land, it’s the people who don’t believe John Coleman who are acting on faith.

Dancing Shadows

The photo set for this exhibit is a big let down, mostly because the real life display is so dynamic. A still photo doesn’t capture what spinning geometric shapes does to your brain. A photo of a spring that isn’t there has none of the effect of actually trying to reach out and touch it. A photo of a prism, proportional room, or bionic vision display gives none of the uncanny effects these illusions have on our sense of reality when we experience them.

You can view the complete flickr set here, but remember that none of my photosets captures what you would experience visiting these places in real life.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. – Charels Darwin

Homo sapiens experience change throughout our lives, but when it comes to changes on the scale of our civilization or environment, we have the perspective of walking along the Earth’s surface, unaware of its curvature. Because our memories are recreations of events, rather than a recording, we experience landscape amnesia, recalling events from the past in the environment surrounding us today rather than the way it looked then.

They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. – Andy Warhol

Science tracks the long-term changes our short lifetimes cannot comprehend. Although Global Warming occurs at pace of such tiny increments, we cannot perceive the increase in temperature from year to year, science catalogues and documents such change. When the snows of Kilimanjaro vanish, science overcomes our brains’ tendency to forget this feature was ever there.

Snow Coverage on Mt. Kilimanjaro Credit: NASA

If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less. – U.S. General Eric Shinseki

Our brains have evolved to perceive the world one way. Science equips our minds to perceive it a more accurate way. We must embrace these cognitive advances that have rendered our innate biological state obsolete, lest we become irrelevant along with them.

And evolution’s method for dealing with irrelevance is extinction.

In honor of the recently established Hip Hop Chess Federation, which combines the mental discipline of chess with the physical discipline of the martial arts and the intellectual strength of Hip Hop music (I’m not up on the new stuff, but am a longtime Public Enemy fan), I thought I’d post some inspirations for the game.

First there’s this three way chess board that has me leering (Yes, I “leer” at chessboards.):

Three-Way Chess

More on the dynamics of how three-way chess is played here (HT BMF). There’s also a four-way chess variant here, and you can play it against a pretty dumb computer program here.

Then there are chess puzzles, like the classic chess problems found here or daily chess problems presented here.

And let’s not forget Benjamin Franklin’s admiration of the game in his 1750 article, On the Morals of Chess (complete essay linked):

The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions; for life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events, that are, in some degree, the effect of prudence, or the want of it. By playing at Chess then, we may learn: 1st, Foresight, which looks a little into futurity, and considers the consequences that may attend an action … 2nd, Circumspection, which surveys the whole Chess-board, or scene of action: – the relation of the several Pieces, and their situations; … 3rd, Caution, not to make our moves too hastily…

Which brings me to Gary Kasparov discussing how playing chess prepared him for political office, because the same mental strategies required to win at chess are required in rational debate:

Large Hadron Collider Credit: US LHC

Actress Marth Plimpton reads a short short story Lydia Millet was commissioned to write for Studio 360 on the idea of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) producing a black hole, and the cultural, political, and spiritual ramifications of this ludicrously remote possibility.

What happens if the worst happens? is a nice bit of speculative fiction, and just a few minutes of your time. The rest of the show is interesting as well (if a bit sensational).

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.

Space Aliens Grille & Bar Photo by dacotahsgirl

I am 99.9 percent certain that the video of an alien peeking through a window is a fabrication. I am aware of the experts who have examined the video and claim its authenticity, but, to my mind, this is like having experts certify Dittoheads have hearts, no matter how realistic the video, the content remains nonsense.

Why would someone something capable of traversing the vast chasms of space, distances in hundreds of lightyears, need to sneak up and peek through a window??? The aliens have mastered interstellar voyages, but never figured out how to put two convex lenses together to make a telescope? Here on Earth, engineers have developed technology that can see through walls, and yet ET has to stand on its tippy-toes to get a look at a human living room?

What possible scientific data are aliens getting from looking at a human living room anyway? Right now anyone within a 50 lightyear radius of Earth is watching our 1957 I Love Lucy episodes. They can see all the human living rooms they want by tuning into a few of our television broadcasts!

Why doesn’t this ET just plug into our Internet? There is nothing Klaatu is going to see with a real-life look at a human dwelling that they can’t get on YouTube. We should be looking for aliens hanging out in coffee shops, leaching off the free wi-fi, not snooping around our backyards like bug-eyed perverts.

If there are aliens observing us, they are doing so with satellites the size of microchips. They aren’t visiting in person, they are using nanobots, remote exploration, just as we use rovers to explore Mars.

And don’t even get me started on everything that’s wrong with the whole alien abduction for invasive medical experimentation silliness.

Arthur C. Clark’s book 2010 has an early scene that was left out of the movie. A Japanese spacecraft has raced to Jupiter’s moon Europa, ahead of a joint American-Russian expedition, to claim the satellite, and all its water, for Japan. Soon after the craft lands, Earth receives a radio transmission from a lone, doomed astronaut, stranded on the moon after something came up through the ice, attracted by the bright lights, to swallow the expedition’s ship.

Europa’s Thrace Region (Evidence of an Ocean Beneath the Ice) Credit: NASA, Arizona State University

The prolific SF author Alan Dean Foster’s Sentenced to Prism explores a planetary ecosystem of silicon-based life, as opposed to our carbon-based version. Dr. David Brin hypothesized plasma life hidden in our Sun in his book Sundiver, alien beyond understanding. Carl Sagan and Edwin E. Salpeter proposed in a 1976 paper, that an entire ecosystem of gas-inflated organisms could hypothetically exist, floating in Jupiter’s massive ocean of an atmosphere.

Life on Jupiter Credit: NASA

If such speculation seems too implausible to take seriously, consider the many extremeophiles, life forms that thrive in harsh environments, here on Earth. Hyperthermophiles, like those giving Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone Park, survive in 140 degrees C (284 degrees F) temperatures. Acidophiles live in pH of 2 – 3, such as phosphoric acid, which gives soft drinks their fizz and is strong enough to dissolve pennies. There are also bacteria fueled by radiation two miles below ground, taking up to a century to acquire enough energy to reproduce.

Grand prismatic spring, Yellowstone National Park Credit: National Park Service

Recently, scientists have found an entire ecosystem of bacteria eating deep sea rock at fantastic pressures. Entire ecosystems, filled with large, complex animals surrounding sulfur vents also demonstrate that life need not be powered by the sun, as we are through Photosynthesis, but rather chemosynthesis, extracting energy directly from chemicals. Both of these are environments potentially mimic Europa’s oceans, which researchers are currently testing the Environmentally Non-Disturbing Under-ice Robotic Antarctic Explorer (ENDURANCE) probe to explore in the future.

Cryobot Exploring Europa Credit: NASA

In 1976, the Viking spacecraft landed on Mars, where it performed the Labeled Release experiment, stirring a radioactive broth into the Martian soil to detect emissions from any microbial life that may exist there. It found emissions indicative of life, but follow-up experiments were inconclusive, leading to a long-standing debate over what Viking discovered. In the 1990s a Martian meteorite found on Earth yielded fossilized hints of ancient bacterial life on Mars, but this finding also generates more controversy than consensus.

Top: Magnetobacteria on Earth Bottom: Possibly Fossilized Magnetobacteria from a Martian Meteorite Credit: NASA

Astrobiologists hypothesize the myriad ways life unlike our own could exist and thrive on alien worlds. Organisms survive in environments of extreme heat and cold, acid and alkaline, and powered on energy sources solar, radioactive, and chemical here on Earth. For these reasons, the world pays close attention as the Phoenix Mars Lander gathers and analyzes Martian soil samples, seeking water, nutrients, and signs of life.

Is There Life in That Dirt? (From the Phoenix Mars Lander) Credit: NASA