Thought-Provoking WHAT?

I was not at my best this afternoon. In the post-lunch phase I found myself inattentive and distracted, and for at least five minutes I stared at the back of a model magazine that happened to be on my desk. It was upside down, but I can read upsidaisium, up to a pointium.

It was an ad from a company that was selling pre-assembled, pre-painted military models. This has always seemed strange to be because most of the enjoyment I get out of modeling comes from the assembly and painting thereof, and the actual gazing-at-the-finished-model part is usually pretty banal. But, what's true for me isn't true for everyone, and it turns out that pre-built models are actually pretty popular these days.

So I was staring at the ad and saw that they were selling, among other things, prepainted historical miniatures of German soldiers (the dividing line between "toy soldiers" and "historical miniatures" is that what I own are historical miniatures; what you own are toy soldiers). The ad copy was a tissue of lies and misstatements, but what really amused me with the notion that the soldiers had been sculpted in "thought-provoking battle poses." I am not making that up. Thought-provoking battle poses. To me, a thought-provoking battle pose is General Patton going to war in a Carmen Miranda hat. Or Julius Caesar arriving fashionably late at the Battle of Pharsalus aboard a mutant five-legged goat. Or Terry-Thomas leading the troops ashore on Gold Beach while trying to keep his feather boa out of the surf.

But what have we got, thought-provoking-battle-pose-wise? One guy looks for all the world like Julia Child gripping a yam that is ever so slightly sexually suggestive. One guy looks like he just hit his head on the cabinet door, really hard, and is afraid to probe his scalp lest he find blood. Another guy has the kind of spooky dead-eyed aspect that I normally associate with Little Orphan Annie and her cadre of brain-dead zombies. Of the Germans bears an expression of bland hopefulness, as though he expects the war to be called off as a mistake any minute now, and I'm sorry, but GI Joe with Kung-Fu Grip had more convincing hands than any of them.

Well, maybe they really are thought-provoking. Just not in the way they hoped.

Naderhotep

And so, every four years, Naderhotep emerges from his dusty sarcophagus and lumbers across the landscape in his shuffling, arm-crooked pursuit of third-party Presidential victory, tanna leaves, and Princess Ankhesenamun, though I'm only guessing at the latter. After chasing the princess for 4,000 years, he may have decided that what Flo over at the bowling alley lacks in nobility she more than makes up for in accessibility.

"He's going to split the Democratic vote!" the pundits and Egyptologists cry - the Republicans with glee, the Democrats with wails of outraged déjà vu. And yeah, Naderhotep will probably cause a certain ruckus in the electorate as he brews his tanna leaves and tries to clip off the dangling threads on his mummy wrap. But in my role as amateur Egyptologist, I offer this handful of thoughts.

1. Mummies don't make good Presidents.

2. As much as I wish Naderhotep would remain in his sarcophagus and let the electoral process go on without his wretched tanna leaf tea and inarticulate groans, the Constitution gives him the right to run and I'd be about the last person to say he positively can't run. The two-party system isn't in the Constitution, after all. It's convenient (mostly for the two parties) but it isn't a founding principle.

3. Naderhotep is a man of impeccable moral standing and the argument that he comes out of the dusty desert as some sort of Republican stooge is silly. He has no use for Democrats or Republicans; he sees them as two manifestations of the larger "Business Party" and thinks they're all corrupt. And it's a tempting conclusion, but I'm of the mind that there are just enough differences between Democrats and Republicans for one to be preferable to the other. So there is value, I think, in going after limited but achievable victories instead of betting the whole Upper Kingdom on a third party home-run play by a shambling mummy who, regardless of his moral fiber, can't win because every time he moves his arms, his followers are overcome by the smell of camphor and scarab beetles.

4. I think it'll be harder to split the vote this year. Naderhotep will still win some votes - I think Anubis will swing his way, but the Nubian vote may be hard for him to hang on to - but I don't foresee a big split this time around. My memory is that last time it was largely "green" issues that gave Naderhotep traction, but I think this time around "lucid foreign policy" and "somewhat less exploitative economic policy" and "at least a token stab at health insurance reform" are going to be bigger issues than mere greenness, and I don't see Naderhotep getting anything done on those issues. The big unknown is what he'll do with the rising tide of American anti-globalism. Will he court it? And if so, will he be able to do anything with it, or will it just snag in his linen wrappings and make him wave his arms in useless inarticulate rage? The matter awaits scholarship.

But in the meantime, stay close to your cats and if you smell tanna leaves or mothballs, head for the exits.

Incentive Pants

I happened to find myself at Target on Friday. I like phrasing it that way because it makes it sound like I rolled on the wind like a tumbling tumbleweed for weeks and just happened to end up at Target. It seems more interesting than saying "My wife and I went to Target to buy pants." Because I could just as easily ended up like a tumbling tumbleweed at Cabela's, or Andy's Hobby Headquarters, or somewhere in Belgium.

Yes, pants. I don't really need pants that badly. What I need more than anything is a nice suit - I lean toward charcoal grey - but I figured at long as low-end Wrangler jeans could be had for less than twenty bucks per, I might as well try something. I've been losing weight since July (total score is about seventy pounds) and I decided to buy pants that I knew I wouldn't quite fit into. Size 42s if you must know. The idea was that not quite being able to wear them would motivate me and renew my dietary and exercisory vim. Incentive pants, in other words.

Trouble is, I didn't read the label. It turns out they're "instant gratification pants". I can not only wear them already, but wear them well, and I could probably wear 40s with some discomfort and a certain Mickey Mouse tone in my voice - "Hi, kids! Wow, are my testicles ever experiencing a positively insalubrious level of torque right now! Whee!"

I appreciate the instant gratification pants, but now I have no incentive pants.

I guess 38s are the incentive pants now. I guess I (wait for it) need to put a pair of 38s in my closet - and you can interpret that however you like.

A Warning from the Surgeon-General

I was listening to my iPod at work yesterday and made an interesting discovery.

I was listening to the song "Dance With You" by Bowling For Soup, which has lyrics like this:

You go up and down
turn around
merry go round and round
shake it shake it two times dose doe cotten eyed joe
run around pull me down never gonna come around
I’m never gonna forget you


Then I listened to the song "To End the Rapture" by Avenged Sevenfold, which has lyrics like these:

The wind of life and air from above smells of death.
Angels sing of the end.
Nothing you say and nothing you try can change time.
Human race prepares to die...

If you switch back and forth between these songs often enough, you'll eventually experience a strange psychic phenomenon where you literally come to believe that you're literally losing your mind and you're turning into a toaster oven.

My advice: not so much Avenged Sevenfold, thank you very much. There's a time and a place for it, but not as a chaser for Bowling For Soup.

PS: All lyrics presumably copyrighted by Bowling For Soup and Avenged Sevenfold.

Killing Me!

Man, these three-day work weeks are killing me. Just killing me! I was off for three days. Now I'll work for three days, and then I'll be off for three days again. And I have the gall to gripe about it! My nerve knows no bounds.

I keep thinking that during my three days off, I should do something about the weeds that the rain has raised from the ground. But the thing is, I actually kind of like the weedy look! It makes me think that we live in a temperate clime and I like the sense of greenness and lushness. And since there's no HOA (excluding Roger Ramjet from up the street) do I really have to do anything about the weeds? No. So I'm torn. I may leave them till they stop looking green and lush and then pull them up - or is that a rationalization for inactivity?

Movies

I feel that I am coming down with what scientists refer to as the "creeping crud". I don't know if it's the flu or just a sort of corporeal ennui, but it's not pleasant. I can see myself spending some time watching movies today in an attempt to throw off the creeping crud. And that got me to thinking about my favorite movies.

I used to really like science fiction movies when I was a kid, but they were different then. They were goofy, almost joyfully stupid, and fun to watch. Aliens come to Earth. Aliens want our (pick one) oxygen, water, women, '32 Fords, brainwaves. They take some and leave, or, the plucky scientist figures out how to defeat them using nothing more than a can of Dinty Moore beef stew and a radio antenna.

Now science fiction movies seem different to me. They seem heavier and more formal, like I was supposed to read a briefing before watching the movie. I tried to watch the X-files movie and was mystified throughout, but perhaps someone who has never watched the TV show is not the audience they were trying to appeal to. I still watch them, but really, there hasn't been a science fiction movie made since roughly Empire Strikes Back that I've genuinely liked.

And my favorite science fiction movie? Five Million Years to Earth. It has everything. Psychic energy, paranoia, not-so-subtle references to McCarthyism and the other isms of the day, enigmatic metals, Cockney accents, tower cranes, electrical discharges, devils, chunky bearded Englishmen, and best of all, slowly-frying British officers. It's a classic, and it's no surprise it was made in 1967. If they made it today, it would feature 1,203,394,094 computer-generated special effects shots and no slowly-frying British officers. It's actually an interesting cross between horror and science fiction, sort of like a 1960s version of Event Horizon. If you mental edit out the fact that it's a Martian spacecraft, it could easily be a demon-possession movie.

I also like "modern Westerns". I don't much care for the Westerns from decades prior to about 1980, but I generally like Westerns made since Silverado. The older ones are either intolerable on racial grounds or too schlocky, if you can imagine such a thing, but the modern Westerns like Tombstone and Silverado sit pretty comfortably with me - especially Tombstone, which is on my list of desert island movies. "Skin that smoke-wagon and see what happens" indeed!

And then there are horror movies, which I have an apparently endless taste for. I confess I don't really watch the "serial" movies like Nightmare on Elm Street or Freddy Versus Jason or even Jason Versus The Argonauts. They're too straightforward and predictable, and I don't much care for the way anyone who has sex in them is rewarded by being butchered. Why is it always people who have sex are the first to die? Why not people who rob liquor stores or spin doughnuts in the grocery store parking lot at 3 AM?

But I do like the Saw movies, though I've found them to be trending generally downhill since the first one, and what with no Amanda, I may not be back. I don't know what the trade name for movies like this is - Saw, Hostel, Wolf Creek. "Detailed Slashers" maybe? I don't know. But I usually like them in my toe-curled grimacing way. What's interesting about these movies in particular is that there are no aliens, no radiation-induced mutations, no evil spirits, just very sick and twisted human beings.

I'm also quite fond of demon possession and to-the-devil-a-child movies, like (cough) To The Devil A Daughter and Prince of Darkness. Ghosts of Mars gets in under the bar in this category because even though it's technically science fiction, it's written and filmed in such a way that you can just sort of ignore the Martian corn smut and imagine that it's evil spirits doing the deed. And then there's The Exorcist and its various spawn, and even the Omen movies, which I like more than I should. And even that flawed classic, Event Horizon, fits in here. It's sort of like Marooned meets Hellraiser, and that's an interesting mix, and Sam Neill persecuting (or being persecuted by) the woman with no eyes and flipping back and forth between nerdy scientist and demon-possessed hardass, that's pretty cool!

And then there's the greatest horror movie ever made: Raising Arizona. But I kid Nicolas Cage.

Space Hygiene

I see the US Navy has been "requested" to shoot down the disabled US spy satellite before it finally comes out of orbit on its own. Yeah, I'm sure they had to ask the Navy more than once if they wanted to cue up an SM-3 missile and light the fuze...

The expression "shoot down" doesn't make any sense in this case because the SM-3 missile uses a so-called "hit to kill" warhead, also known as a "kinetic kill vehicle". It doesn't contain any explosives; it just smacks into the target at a very high rate of speed and causes damage by kinetic energy. As someone who was struck in the head with a brick (well, technically, a cement shingle, but the same spirit) I can attest to how much impact energy inert projectiles can generate.

But it's not like Star Trek, where we shoot the offending spacecraft with a blue-green beam, we listen to a restless whirring sound, and then the offending dingus simply vanishes. Would that it were so, but it aint. Instead we smash the equivalent of a high-tech brick into it and try to smash the target as throughly as possible.

And I have no doubt than an SM-3 KKV will do a very thorough job on the satellite, which I'm sure was designed to be only just barely stout enough to withstand the stresses of launch; the KKV will probably go in one side of the satellite and right out the other and convert big chunks of it into confetti.

But let's be serious a moment. This has nothing to do with the sudden fear that the satellite's monomethyl hydrazine fuel might accidentally land in a public school cafeteria. The satellite is going to break up at very high altitude - 400,000 feet or more - and as it tears itself apart, the fuel tanks will come apart, all the source gas will vent, and the relatively small load of MMH will dissipate into the upper atmosphere.

What this SM-3 shot is really all about is trashing the "sensor" in the spy satellite so thoroughly that Country X (pick your adversary) will be able to learn nothing from it even if they get their hands on all the debris. The National Reconnaissance Office and the various intelligence agencies want the "sensor" (they never call it a "camera") thoroughly wrecked, and what better way to wreck the camera than by A) pretending that they're doing a bit of orbital hygiene, and B) teaching the Navy's SM-3 missile system a new trick? I have no problem with that, especially if they wait until the absolute last minute so reduce the load of debris the test will produce.

The Russians used to put a self-destruct system in their spy satellites in case they fell into Yankee hands, but as far as I know, the system was never used. All it ever seemed to do for them was cause their spy satellites to blow up prematurely when the self-destruct systems got confused during launch.

Doh.

Why?

I was reading a news story about Barack Obama defeating Hillary Clinton in another primary today, and veteran readers of my blog will probably correctly surmise that this pleased me. As it did.

One of my worst habits as a person, other than public intoxication and licking myself in inappropriate ways, is clicking on the Read Comments section at the end of AOL news stories. Why do I do that? Why? Is it malignant self-hate? Why can I not break that perfectly wretched habit?

It's not that I disagree with the political or cultural views of the people who post the comments, though I often do. America is a democracy and people are free to believe what they like, and I'm okay with that. I'll even extend that courtesy to Dinesh D'Souza, though I'm not always convinced that he would reciprocate. And in any event, the odds are they wouldn't agree with me if I posted comments, so it balances out nicely.

But what really scares me is the almost unbelievable display of pure blockheaded stupidity most of the comments demonstrate when it comes to simple things like writing complete sentences, punctuating in a half-assedly right way, and employing dictionaries when it comes to spelling simple words like "country". Sometimes I can't even make out what the commentator is trying to say because his comment is so poorly written it might as well have been produced by a player piano. I'd copy-and-paste some notorious examples, but it's probably illegal and certainly unsporting to reproduce some private citizen's writing without permission.

But seriously, folks, there's the news story right above the comment box, so there's really no excuse for "McCaine", is there? You just read the story, didn't you?? And how seriously should I weigh the opinion of someone who believes (as demonstrated in more than one instance) that there is an "s" in "country"? Or, the one that really makes my jaw ache, the profligate apostrophizer who turns an ordinary expression into a gruelling death-match like "it's the word's of god". Every time I see this I hear sheets of plate glass breaking in my head.

I'm not talking about so-called "spelling flames" or wars between specialists over whether it's appropriate to split an infinitive (I hew to the Star Trek model, myself), or whether one needs permission from one's elders before creating an ad hoc gerund. I'm talking about the ability to write even the most basic of sentences, and I worry that not being to write the most basic of sentences means that the commentator can't even support the most basic of thoughts.

Maybe I'm just being an elitist.

But here's an interesting finding. The comments associated with AOL sports stories are very often better written in a technical sense, less inclined to hysterical hyperbole, and more inclined to admit that one's opposite number may have a point, than the comments on AOL's political and general news stories. What does that mean? I think it means "Al Michaels for President", by cracky (though honestly I don't know if Al Michaels is still working or, for that matter, still alive).

(Just to close this out, the worst comments by far are found following entertainment stories, especially ones featuring the latest celebrity who is circling the drain and about to take the plunge. Reading more than one or two of them in a row makes me feel like there's someone punching holes in the sheet metal of my soul with a rotary hammer.)

Apocalypto

I didn't sleep well last night. I seem to be developing problems with my back, which seems singularly unfair since I've lost 70 pounds. Maybe my disks and whatnot are decompressing and changing shape; maybe I'm just a whiner.

The point is that I couldn't sleep, and I ended up sitting up and watching Mel Gibson's movie Apocalypto, which is about, generally speaking, the waning days of the Maya civilization in what I presume to be the Yucatan region of Mexico. I went into this movie with certain misgivings, most of them revolving around the figure of Mel Gibson himself and his anti-Semitic rants. More of those I don't need, and support of those who make them I don't give. But it's hard to see the hand of Mel Gibson behind the movie. Impossible, maybe, since it strikes such an alien tone.

Alien. That's a good word for it. The bulk of the story revolves around the lives and times of a Maya hunter-gatherer village in the jungle. The dialog is entirely in Mayan, and the actors all appear to be Mayan. I'm no expert on the Maya by any means, but the combination of Mayan language, unmistakable Mayan facial features, and fairly realistic Neolithic living conditions produced a feeling of strong authenticity in me. I entirely bought the premise that these people were Maya in the 16th Century living the way Maya actually did.

Presently the village is overrun by slave-hunters, who are realistically brutal. They drag the surviving men and women off to an unnamed Maya city (actually, the movie doesn't even claim that it's a Maya city; it's just a "stone-built place"). The women are sold into slavery and the men are dragged up to the top of a pyramid and sacrificed. It's a literal assembly line of death - human raw material going up the ramp at the back; blood and severed heads going down the steps in front. I don't know if Gibson was accurately depicting what historians believe the mood in Maya cities to have been or if he was just winging it, but his interpretation seemed incredibly real and frightening to me. It's as though they know their civilization is failing and they sacrifice more and more people and slowly work themselves into a state of desperate terrified blood-glutted brutality.

The story turns more personal again once the hero escapes from the madhouse of the Mayan city. He's pursued by about eight Mayans, and in the end he prevails, but it isn't easy. But his victory is hollow, because a new threat appears on the coast, an enemy that in the end he will not prevail over.

The mood of the movie is dark and rather depressing. It's very bloody and violent, but what makes it depressing isn't the pumping blood and screaming but the sense of impending doom that follows everyone like their own personal storm system. And you don't need to have much of a grasp of Meso-American history to know that in the long run the hero is totally screwed.

It isn't a date movie. It isn't a family movie. It isn't even a fun movie. But it is a singular viewing experience, an immersion in a convincing Maya world with all that that implies. It may be a while before I watch it again, but I'm glad I watched it. It reminds me a little of Schindler's List in that it's also a masterpiece of film-making, but it's also very hard to watch.

On the one hand it's an amazing technical achievement - the level of detail in the scenes in the Mayan city, for example, commands respect. And yet it's also a brilliant achievement by the actors. Though they're speaking Mayan, they act and emote in a very real and human way, all of them. Jaguar Paw and Flint Sky were particularly good, but the real stolen scene in the movie occurs when a seven-year-old Mayan girl curses the slave-hunters. Now that was creepy, but what's perhaps even more creepy is the fact that the seven-year-old girl came from a nearby village and had never acted before... She's going to appear in my nightmares, I'm sure.

Anyway. An excellent movie, but not one I'll watch often, and not a movie for the squeamish.

Super Tuesday

I don't know who's going to come out of Super Tuesday with the lead. Well, McCain seems like a done deal for the Republicans, but I don't know which Democrat will come out ahead. I know who I hope will come out ahead - Barack Obama, because I frankly think Hillary can't win the general election even against the Goofy Talk Express. But will Barack actually win? Beats me, and at this point, I don't even really care. I'm so fatigued with the whole business I've decided to to a proper bang-up job of learning about the First Punic War instead of listening to pundits. At this moment, I'll accept any change as being for the better, no matter who it involves.

The Romans, now those were people who knew how to take politics seriously. You only have to take that delenda est stuff to heart once before people start giving you a very wide berth indeed. (Yes, I know the delenda est stuff was from the Third Punic War, but throw me a bone here.)

Health Update

I haven't talked about my health much lately, and I'm not going to start. But I did decide to gloss over the high points, not so much because it's Big News but because it bugs me to not add something to my blog just about every day.

Mainly, it's this. I keep losing weight. Not rapidly, but steadily. I gained about pounds over Christmas and had to lose them before they took up permanent residence, and I'm glad to say I've managed to expunge them and then some. I'm going to cross a major weight threshold in a few weeks and I'm very excited about it. I'm also very excited by the fact that I no longer recognize myself on closed-circuit TVs.

Now if I could just get excited about apples. Partially to save money, partially to save packing time in the morning, and mostly to save calories, I've taken to having an apple and two pieces of string cheese for lunch. It leaves me pretty famished in the afternoon because it's just not enough to please my vast doughy midsection, but every time I get well and truly sick of apples and cheese, I remember the weight threshold I'm about to cross and I gain fresh motivation.

Oh, I might as well say it. I'm about to drop below 300 pounds for the first time in a long, long time. I shouldn't even be THIS heavy, but I'm doing what I can. You try losing 70 pounds and quitting smoking at the same time and tell me how easy it is!

Kinetic Energy

One last rail gun related item. Here's a photograph of a cast aluminum (aluminium to our friends in the UK) that was struck by a seven-gram Lexan projectile moving at 23,000 feet per second. Note that the hole in the metal block is over four inches deep, and the block has been visibly deformed by the impact. Note that 23,000 feet per second is about 15,700 miles per hour, or 4.3 miles per second. Obviously this test had to be performed in a vacuum to avoid turning the Lexan projectile into a puff of incandescent gas. An example of the disk-shaped projectile is visible mounted in a wire in the hole.

Geography

I've always liked geography. When I was a kid I wanted to make a profession out of it before I realized there was no profession as such. But here's an on-line geography quiz that I found rather amusing.

http://www.lizardpoint.com/fun/geoquiz/index.html

Doing Some Math

I'm not necessarily very good at math, but sometimes I get drawn into strange mathematical vacations at work. I remember once years ago I was trying to calculate roughly how many beans it would take to construct an actual hill of beans. The answer depended strongly on the angle of repose of said beans, and since I had no way of determining their angle of repose by empirical means, I concluded that my calculations were as unscientific as string theory. Don't like the answer you got? Well, just perturb some variables and try it again!

My boss came by and caught me in the middle of this furious pinto-bean math-fest and asked me what I was doing. I replied (and the trick, really, is to reply with gusto): "I'm doing some math, Jefe!" He assumed I was doing important math and proceeded to stammer "Oh, well, in that case, um, carry on, I'll leave you alone..."

So I did some math today about the Navy rail run described below. And wouldn't you know, I believe I found something wrong with the article. I happen to know, courtesy of http://www.fas.org/, that a 5-inch/54 fires a 32 kilogram projectile at 808 meters per second. By my math, using the infamous ke = 1/2 mv2 bruiser, I come up with a bit over 10 MJ. In fact, reverse-calculating the muzzle velocity based on a 10 MJ of energy and a 32 kilogram projectile yields a muzzle velocity of 790 meters per second - close to 808, but a hair below. So I'm not sure why the article insists that these guns produce 9 MJ when a bit of elementary physics suggests that they produce over 10 MJ.

Now, let's assume that our 10 MJ rail gun is 100% efficient. That is, it produces no heat, has no friction and no electrical resistance. I happen to know that there are 3,600 Joule in a kilowatt-hour of electricity, so a 10 MJ gun would consume 2.8 kilowatt-hours of electricity per shot (Editor's Note: there are in fact 3600 Joules in a watt-hour of electricity. A kilowatt-hour is 3.6 million Joules. The math is right; I simply cited the wrong number.) Electricity was going for about ten cents per kilowatt-hour in 2001, so per shot, the gun would cost 28 cents. That's pretty economical, considering you can't even get a Diet Coke for 28 cents.

However, we know the gun can't be perfectly efficient, if only because the rails aren't superconductors. Let's say it's 10% efficient, once you add up all the various sources of inefficiency. That means it uses 28 kilowatt-hours of electricity per shot, at a cost of $2.80. That's still pretty reasonable - I mean, I'd pay $2.80 to pull the trigger on a ten million Joule rail gun! Darn tootin!

But that 28 kilowatt-hour number is starting to get sizeable. That's a lot of power.

Let's go back to our 100% efficient rail gun for a minute and assume that we want to fire it every ten seconds. That is, every ten seconds we have to cram 2.8 kilowatt-hours of power down its throat. Conversion charts seem to tell me that that's roughly the equivalent of 135 horsepower. Double that because no generator is 100% efficient and it would seem to require the services of a 270-horsepower generator to keep a 100% efficient 10 MJ rail gun in power if it was going to fire six shots a minute.

But multiply by ten because the rail gun is really only 10% efficient, and suddenly you need a 2700-horsepower generator to run thing. That's getting into a size and weight bracket rarely seen in home generators. It's not, to put it mildly, the sort of thing you're going to be able to power up with your Homelite or Honda generator. In fact, I'm not sure but I think we're talking about engines the size of those found in very large mining trucks like the Caterpillar 797.

Well, maybe a rail gun isn't such a hot idea after all. At least not until room-temperature superconductivity becomes real.

And thus, I stop doing some math.