Category: Not-politics

Book of the Week: The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld.

We remove The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression and replace it with The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld, which I imagine is a good deal more cheerful.

Well, I have all the Discworld novels, after all. So I’ve already read every word in the book. Just… in different order, that’s all.

I wish that the physicists would stay out of vampirism studies.

After all, do I try to give them advice on quantum mechanics?

(Via Fark)  There are some people trying to be ‘helpful’ on understanding the ongoing bloodsucking menace – and, in the time-honored tradition of scientists opining outside their field, they’re being less useful than if they had just been quiet about the whole thing.

If vampires are indeed living (unliving?) among us, then shouldn’t we have seen an undead population explosion by now?

Fortunately, our best minds are on the case. Physicists Costas Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi’s paper “Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality” offers a full explanation.

Efthimiou and Gandhi conduct a thought experiment: Assume that the first vampire appeared on January 1, 1600. At that time, according to data available at the U.S. Census website, the global population was 536,870,911. Efthimiou and Gandhi calculate that, once the Nosferatu feeding frenzy began, the entire human race would have been wiped out by June 1602 (thus forever changing the course of history by preventing the invention of the slide rule eighteen years later).

Having tracked down the paper in question, I am thoroughly unsurprised to see that the typical “assume the cow is a sphere” thinking predominates.  As I suspected, the authors fairly obviously based their assumptions on research that was originally gathered to track zombies: this is a common problem, as the basic reference and engineering texts for that field of research benefits from a general consensus in the academic community.  The conclusion that said research is applicable to other aspects of Undead Studies is not unique to Efthimiou and Gandhi.

Unfortunately, the field of ‘Undead Studies’ is a social construct, not a physical one: it is really a cross-disciplinary field that encompasses not only a plethora of various supernatural types, but also individual sub-species within those types.  As even a cursory look at the literature will reveal, there is precisely zero consensus over what even constitutes a vampire, let alone its feeding habits, lifespan, and/or reproductive cycle.  I am also forced to wonder where there is a sort of Balkanocentric bias being displayed by Efthimiou and Gandhi; contrary to flashy researchers, there is no reason why we should use the nosferatu over, say, the penanggalen for basic research data.  There’s not even an agreement in the community that vampires are a single-prey species! All in all, I find their base assumptions laughable.

And as for their critics!  I grant that the mathematicians did raise interesting points on birth rates and food supply, but to discuss this topic without actually looking at real biological predator/prey life cycles (or, as my engineer wife suggests, viral infection cycles) is practically criminal.  Moving from them to the economists… honestly, dragging in the social sciences to answer a problem that is clearly primarily the province of biology is inane at best and unholy meddling in God’s domain at worst.  In other words, the Smithsonian has the right idea:

Time to consult the zoology journals.

Indeed. At least, the cryptozoology journals.

Moe Lane

Napoleon… the romance author.

I am not making this up:

Napoleon Bonaparte – the romantic novelist

The first English version of his romantic novella Clisson et Eugénie, is due out this autumn, according to the Bookseller magazine.

When Napoleon died in exile on St Helena, aged 51, his possessions included the manuscript of his novella, the pages of which were scattered as souvenirs. But the fragments have been pieced together over the years, with the first page fetching £17,000 at auction two years ago.

The manuscript was written when he was an ambitious young soldier aged 26, shortly before he made his name by smashing a royalist coup in Paris in 1795. It tells the story of a brilliant young soldier who loves, loses and dies heroically in battle “pierce by a thousand blows.”

The New Ledger doesn’t really want to believe it. I sympathize, but it’s all too frighteningly plausible. They just let anybody write, you know…

[pause]

What?

2009 seems to have been an unpopular choice for Year of the Future.

There was Freejack…

…which was promisingly got-2009-comprehensively-wrong; and then there was Super Dimension Fortress Macross, which was superficially better at calling our modern era…

…up to the entire ‘mecha’ and ‘alien invasion’ thing.  But other than that, not so much.

Any others I’m missing?

Moe Lane

Bring back yellow journalism!

At least it’s usually interesting.  Not to mention, local.

In the process of commenting on the way that the Washington Post – a paper presumably interested in goings-on in Washington, DC – seems only interested in the Kwanzaa Diggs shooting on the Op-Ed page, R.S. McCain notes:

Murder is news. Rape, robbery and drug busts are also news. And guess what? Crime coverage, if done right, sells papers. If the Washington Post can’t be bothered to cover a shooting that leaves one teenager dead and two others wounded, what the hell is the point of publishing a newspaper?

Good cops-and-courts reporting used to be a staple of American journalism. Was such coverage sometimes lurid and sensationalist? Sure. But it sells newspapers. The problem is that too many people in our newsrooms for the past several decades have failed to understand that they’re in a business, the object of which is to sell the product and make a profit.

Where I differ with Stacy is that I think that this is only half of the problem; the other half is that the people running the papers today don’t really understand that, by and large, if the American reading public wanted a national paper that defined the news we’d already have one.  The New York Times likes to think of itself in such terms; so does the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times had some pretensions along those lines.  The fact that all three papers are in financial trouble right now has apparently not been taken into account. Continue reading Bring back yellow journalism!

Cracked.com celebrates Military MindF*cks…

…in its usual style.  I offer this one about #6 (Chuko “Sleeping Dragon” Liang):

According to historians, during the War of the Three Kingdoms, accompanied by a consort of just 100 soldiers and the rest of his army miles away, Chuko saw an opposing army with over 100,000 men marching towards him. The opposing general, Sima Yi, was a veteran who had fought Chuko in multiple battles. Familiar with the Sleeping Dragon’s clever ways and, deciding to take no chances, he led the massive army to capture Chuko.

Ordering his few men into hiding, Chuko commanded that the town gates be left wide open and, positioning himself atop the city wall, he proceeded to play the lute as the massive enemy army approached. Upon his arrival at the town gates, Sima Yi, who had fallen victim to many a Chuko-led ambush, halted his army and studied Chuko’s calm manner as he ripped a solo on the chords.

Convinced it was a trap he could not yet comprehend, Sima commanded a hasty retreat, more than a 100,000 soldiers pulling back from one man and his musical instrument. Chuko thus earned an entire wing in the Bullsh*tter’s Hall of Fame.

…mostly because some of you may need to look a gamemaster in the eye some day, and tell him or her that of course that damfool idea that the party came up with will work. After all, it worked for Chuko, right?

Moe Lane

PS: Remember. The trick is to get them to agree to roll the dice. Once you get to roll the dice, you can get the modifiers that you need.  But you have to be able to roll the dice.