Cagematch!

Suvudu has a great cagematch tournament going on. The tournament pits various sci-fi and fantasy characters (reps from major fictional universes).

Some of the best (possible) battles:

Dumbledore vs. Ender Wiggin

Aragorn vs. Arthur Dent

Rand Al’Thor vs. Conan the Barbarian

and my personal favorite:

Hermione Granger vs. Cthulhu

How great is that!?!

My prediction:

Final four: Arthur Dent, Roland, Aslan, and Cthulhu.

The Elder God drowns the simpering Christian allegory in a sea of endless dread.

And there it ends.

Arthur Dent and Roland Deschain battle endlessly. Arthur Dent is functionally immortal and Roland’s narrative is cyclical.

Wowbagger, the Infinitely Prolonged and Cthulhu bond over beers while watching the fight.

Alien contact

OK. This is extreme geek-out.

I came across this the other day (HT Instapundit)  which cheerily discusses the problems inherent in plausibly anticipating what contact with an extra-terrestrial intelligence might be like.

The genesis of the article was a meeting of the Royal Society in London on the consequences of alien contact. Essentially, the question raised was, “Should we broadcast our presence to the universe?” We’ve been (sort of) sacanning and listening for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence for a few years abut aside from some LP records (analog records!!!) stapled to the side of a space probe (Veeger!), we haven’t done much to advertise our existence to the cosmos.  David Brin responded with a cautionary note intended to squelch at least a little of the geek squee.

Robin hanson summed it up,

As Brin notes, many would-be broadcasters come from an academic area where for decades the standard assumption has been that aliens are peaceful zero-population-growth no-nuke greens, since we all know that any other sort quickly destroy themselves.  This seems to me an instructive example of how badly a supposed “deep theory” inside-view of the future can fail, relative to closest-related-track-record outside-view.  As Brin says, the track record of contact between cultures, species, and biomes is not especially encouraging, and it is far too easy for far-view minds to overestimate the reliability of theoretical arguments to the contrary.

J. Storrs hall goes further,

In fact, it’s a lot worse than that.  As far as I can tell, nobody talking about interstellar contact has a model even vaguely close to a reasonable analysis of the situation.  Short form: these discussions are the equivalent of the natives of a Polynesian island deciding who shall be allowed to wave as the galleons heave into view.  Our own technology, today, is getting close to detecting Earth-like planets around other stars, for heaven’s sake.  The galleons see the island, not the waving. …

Reality is that any alien race out there with whom we have any kind of physical contact at all is virtually certain to have (a) full-fledged nanotech, and (b) hyperhuman AI.  Given these capabilities, if they want to find Earth-like planets anywhere in the area of space they would have the physical capability of travelling to, they will find them. Period. Doesn’t matter whether we are standing on the shore waving or not.

Undoubtedly true. But Hall then goes on to make the same kind of errors he disdains,

Any sentient creatures that actually get here will be nanotech-based robots, not water-based organisms.  They won’t have spacecraft, they’ll be spacecraft.  They will be unlikely interested in the carbon-poor mudballs of the inner solar system, but reap abundant carbon from the outer planets and carbonaceous asteroids to build Dyson-sphere-like structures around the orbit of Mercury. …

We aren’t going to see any less ambitious visitors due to simple evolution: in a universe where the ultimate meaning of “carbon footprint” is the total mass of the superintelligent diamondoid robots you’ve built, spaceships burning cellulosic ethanol simply aren’t going to be anywhere near the fittest.  Indeed, cultures that aren’t inherently aggressive and ambitious aren’t going to put the effort into sending out starships at all.

Well… maybe. But probably not.

Any alien intelligence capable of traveling interstellar distances would have routine access to technology that is simply unimaginable to us.  Let me be clear about this, we can’t imagine what it would be like. Whatever we do imagine is almost surely wrong. The analogy isn’t Polynesian islanders waving to European Galleons, it’s Iron age Celts meeting 21st century archaeologists face to face. Alien technology would be as impossible for us to imagine as a nuclear reactor would have been for the druids who danced around Stonehenge. Saying that Aliens would have “full-fledged” nanotech is like an ancient Celt imagining that 21st century technology would have really, really big anvils and lots of iron tools.  Hyperhuman AI? Maybe… but that’s sort of like Columbus imagining that 21st century navigators would have really precise sextants. Sure, we still have anvils… but we also have titanium alloy golf clubs. We don’t use sextants because we have GPS systems.

What we can say for sure is that Alien tech would be fantastically advanced. Nanotech? Sure, why not? But nanotech might be as meaningful to the Aliens as blacksmithing is to us. Dyson spheres? Well, maybe. But again, that’s us imagining future technology in reference to our own context. We’re obsessed with power production, so we imagine really honkin big power plants. Like the Sun! Our Iron age forebears were really worried about food production. Imagine the farmland and grazing pasture needed to support 5 billion people using Iron age farming technology! Yeah, we have big farms, but our farms are many, many orders of magnitude more efficient than the druids would ever have imagined. Capture the power of a star by building a sphere to surround it? Why do that when you have a Magwumpzillwapper that generates a hundred times the power, fits in your pocket, and smells like daffodils? Or more likely, something else entirely?

As for motivations…. I don’t see why we should even try to guess the motivation of our supposed visitors. Do they want to conquer us? Maybe, but I can’t see what we could offer them. Resources? Whatever they’d want we’re very unlikely to value.  Imagine meeting a group of Druids and telling them you really want the rights to dig up that nasty black stuff in the bog. Think they’d argue much?  I think it’s more likely our first encounter would be with alien anthropologists and research scientists. But again, maybe they’d be zookeepers. Or teenagers on a joyride. Maybe instead of Cattle Tipping, rural alien punks go Human Probing. Or maybe we’re already in the zoo.

Whatever, we can broadcast or not broadcast. Whatever the aliens want to do, they’ll do. If they can get here, we won’t be able to stop them. And if they can get here, they can see us whether we wave or not.

But there’s another option too… that they’re really NOT out there, or if they are, it’s just as freakin’ hard for them to get here as it for us to get to them. It’s at least as plausible as any other theory.  Brin says that it’s likely we’d be the newcomers to interstellar society, but it’s also possible that we’ll be the first. Why not? Someone’s got to be first.

But just in case we’re not the first to the party, let me start the ball rolling by saying howdy to all the aliens reading this blog.

My kind of rap

(ht Adam)

Zappa Quotes

For no particular reason, I offer a selection of quotes from Frank Zappa:

Communism doesn’t work because people like to own stuff.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.

Rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say that there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

Stupidity has a certain charm – ignorance does not.

I’ll give you a simple formula for straightening out the problems of the United States. First, you tax the churches. You take the tax off of capital gains and the tax off of savings. You decriminalize all drugs and tax them same way as you do alcohol. You decriminalize prostitution. You make gambling legal. That will put the budget back on the road to recovery, and you’ll have plenty of tax revenue coming in for all of your social programs, and to run the army.

The rock and roll business is pretty absurd, but the world of serious music is much worse.

It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice — there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.

I’ll tell you what classical music is, for those of you who don’t know. Classical music is this music that was written by a bunch of dead people a long time ago. And it’s formula music, the same as top forty music is formula music. In order to have a piece be classical, it has to conform to academic standards that were the current norms of that day and age … I think that people are entitled to be amused, and entertained. If they see deviations from this classical norm, it’s probably good for their mental health.

The most important thing to do in your life is to not interfere with somebody else’s life.

Scientology, how about that? You hold on to the tin cans and then this guy asks you a bunch of questions, and if you pay enough money you get to join the master race. How’s that for a religion?

A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound. The problem comes in when people who take drugs treat them like a license to behave like an asshole.

Watch out where the huskies go, and don’t you eat that yellow snow.

The Ultimate Rule ought to be: ‘If it sounds GOOD to you, it’s bitchin’; if it sounds BAD to YOU, it’s shitty. The more your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don’t like. American radio listeners, raised on a diet of _____ (fill in the blank), have experienced a musical universe so small they cannot begin to know what they like.

There is no hell. There is only France.

Lileks!

James Lileks might be my favorite writer. He’s always worth reading, he’s funny, sharp, witty, insightful and writes about nearly everything. And he peppers his prose with Simpsons references that give me inordinate joy.

As with most good writers, he has that ability to write about whatever (old noir, matchbook covers, gun ads, Minneapolis, bad interior design) and keep the reader (at least, this reader) nodding and chuckling through every piece. It’s a rare ability, to keep your readers laughing and engaged. To do it on a daily basis is a sign of great talent.

From Tuesday’s Bleat,

I didn’t love America any less in the Clinton years than I did in the Bush years, or vice versa;  I don’t conflate my opinions about transitory leaders with my opinion about the nation’s role in history and its exceptional, if occasionally improvised, conflicted, and compromised struggle to do the right thing. I mean, go back in history and find another one of us. (Note: small ethnically coherent Nordic states that can’t project power six feet over the border really don’t count.) But unqualified love of country unnerves some people, as though the lack of qualifications means you don’t recognize qualifying factors. Me, I think they’re obvious; we’re made of humans, after all, and every house we build has beams of crooked timber. But I don’t recall a lot of FDR speeches laying out a litany of American sins in order to bolster the case for why America should fight Hitler, despite all those troubling similarities. After all, we lynched Jews, too, ergo we must face our own demons as well as those abroad. And so on.

The whole post is great. I’d quote more of it, but really, you should just read the whole thing.

The really wonderful thing about Lileks is that there’s so, so, so much more. Really, he’s actually put up a frightening amount of material… check out the Institute of Official Cheer, which is just a taste. It’s all up at www.lileks.com. Except for everything that’s up at Buzz.mn, of course.

Plus, he loves Disney and files wonderful trip reports. What more is there?

Happy Valentine’s Day!

For Valentine’s Day, some comics from xkcd.com

troopies365

Troopies365 these are great. The descriptions are pretty funny, click an an image to get the description.

http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?user_id=42202689@N00&set_id=72157604034244154&text=yes

Amy Bennett

I came across Amy Bennet and thought I’d share. These are paintings, by the way.

From her bio,

Two years ago, I contsructed a 1:87 scale model neighborhood, a fictitious cluster of eleven houses depicted through model railroading miniatures, styrofoam, cardboard, and plastic, complete with string telephone wires and working lights. The process of designing and assembling the setting over several months triggered my imagination to develop characters to populate the place along with a loose timeline of events that would culminate in the neighborhood’s history. I considered who lived in each home, their family dramas, and the way their private lives might spill into view of their neighbors. The model became a stage on which to develop the psychological implications of belonging to a particular family, with all of its dramas, struggles and familiar routines. I thought: this tree will be taken down after an old man crashes into it; a father will transform this lawn into an ice skating rink; this house will be abandoned after its residents are scandalized on the evening news.

Kaxil Kiuic

My step-father is Indiana Jones.

Seriously.

Well, OK. His name is actually George Bey, but he’s like Indiana Jones.

He’s Dean of Sciences and Professor of Anthropology at Millsaps College in Jackson Mississippi and is currently on a whirlwind tour of Southeast Asia looking for gold and secret mystical skulls that will vanquish tyranny from the face of the earth and give the New Orleans Saints a Superbowl victory.

Well, OK. So maybe that’s impossible; the Saints will always stink. But he really is in Southeast Asia right now and he really is a Dean and a Professor and an archeologist, and he even owned a whip, and although he’s too young to have ever actually fought Nazis, if he did meet some Nazis, he would seriously kick their butts.

He’s a fantastic teacher and a wonderful father and he runs this totally freaking AWESOME biocultural reserve, Kaxil Kiuic: The Helen Moyers Biocultural Reserve.

Located in the Bolonchen District of the Puuc region of Yucatan, Mexico, the Helen Moyers Biocultural Reserve is a privately owned entity managed by Kaxil Kiuic, A.C. It consists of 4,000 acres of dry tropical forest and contains within it the ancient Maya center of Kiuic as well as the remains of the historic community of San Sebastian. The abundant and diverse flora and fauna found within the reserve make it one of the best remaining zones of dry tropical forest in the Yucatan Peninsula. The ecological and cultural resources of the reserve are protected, and 50 hectares of the Maya center of Kiuic have been officially donated by Kaxil Kiuic to the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). Kiuic is one of the first archaeological sites that has been acquired officially by the INAH in Yucatan and will be preserved in its entirety within the protection of the biocultural reserve that surrounds it. This initiative represents a new model for development in Mexico to manage its ecological and cultural resources.

It’s a private organization, on privately owned land and supports a growing number of research projects, educational programs, and efforts to contribute to the development of long-term productivity and sustainability for nearby communities.

USA Today did an article on him and the site in Kaxil Liuic last June. (There’s a great photo gallery that accompanies the article too.)

I say he’s Indiana Jones, but the truth is, he’s cooler than Indiana Jones. He’s cooler because he’s real and because I know him and love him and grew up with him and because, well… because he’s a searching for meaning and truth. USA Today also interviewed him and they asked him about Indiana Jones. This was his answer,

Indiana Jones is a myth about archaeology and archaeologists. And like most great myths, it does at some level reflect a truth about what we do and our identity. Maya archaeology has a great history of adventure and most Maya archaeologists can tell you at least one hair raising tale that might find its way into an Indiana Jones film. And I don’t think we would be living and working in the jungle if we didn’t at some level enjoy the whole idea of exploration and adventure. Yesterday morning as I was leaving Stairway to Heaven, I put my hand on a tree only to find it occupied by a very long tree living snake looking me in the eye. Its skin perfectly mimicked the color and texture of tree it occupied. However, although the moment was Indiana Jones-esque, my reaction was not to yell or curse the beast and kill it, but pull out my dvd recorder and record the snake’s movement from tree to tree. I am a scientist and the moment was thrilling both because snakes are a little bit scary, but also because it was very cool to see this type of snake close up and have a chance to record what I was seeing.

I think this is one of the main things that distinguish the myth from the reality, the thrill is based on a combination of discovery and exploration from a scientific perspective. The moment of discovery, whether of an ancient tomb, or building or cache of pottery is one of the things that drive us to do what we do. It is a rush, no doubt about it. But the rush comes from unearthing a piece of the past that will aid us in understanding the questions of the past, not about cosmic powers or aliens, but about things like, how did the economic system operate, or what evidence is there for changing patterns of elite political organization. So, unlike Indy, we don’t grab things and run, we spend weeks and months and years, carefully unearthing things, most of which are very mundane. My team is out in the field excavating houses, and garbage dumps and plaza floors, systematically recording the data with cameras, and drawings. Carefully bagging and tagging each set of artifacts from a particular context. Others are collecting soil samples to try and extract information on plant and animal remains that might tell what an object was used for or what the Maya diet consisted of. These field archaeologists then send the work back to our field lab for analysis, so we can find out the dates for our buildings, or plazas and what they might have been used for. From there select material is sent to professional laboratories for chemical analysis or C14 dating. The end result are papers and presentations and books that interpret all the data in an effort to answer both the small and large questions that drive our discipline. It is from this data that our project is rewriting the history of Maya civilization in the Puuc region.

Photos from the Kaxil Kiuic website:

F.O.R.D.

Ages ago, when men were men and women were shorter, automobiles inspired the kind of unabashed allegiance and partisan fervor that we now reserve for computer operating systems. Entire families would align themselves behind a giant mega-conglomerate from Detroit and forswear ever buyin’, ridin’, fixin’, or otherwisen’ any so-called cars made by the competition. Dadgummit.

Ford clans would wage war on Chevy clans and Chevy clans would wage war on Chrysler clans, and so on and so on. Well, OK… “war” was hanging a sign with a pithy saying in the garage and maybe buying a pair of branded pair of fuzzy dice. And these were clans with a “c” not a “k.” White sheets were for chamois and not much else. Occasionally things would escalate when that no-good brother-in-law would show up for Thanksgiving in a car made by the Evil Competition, and Dad would mutter under his breath about the godawful indignity of it all until he passed out during the football game and the brother-in-law would change the channel.

In those days, Brothers-in-law were always no good bums and lousy moochers. It wasn’t until they passed of the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Extended Families Act that Brothers-in-law were required to be given equal standing. The Act reads in part, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of a sibling’s marital status, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination by any relation-in-law.”

Aficionados for the various car clans would rally in garages across the country and make up derisive and mocking jeers that they would hurl–always with great relish and while holding a warm can of PBR–at the competition. These jeers were always, always acronyms.

The wittiest (it’s a low bar) were always directed at Ford owners, Found On Road Dead, Fix Or Repair Daily, Ford Owners Recommend Dodge, Full Of Rust Deposits, For Old Retired Drunks, etc… GM came in for its share: General Maintenance, General Mistakes, Generally Malfunctions, and General Misery. But my favorite is one for Chevy: Can’t Have Everything Vern, YaknowwhatImean? Not only is it peculiarly specific, it’s also a wonderfully tortured acronym. Plus, my Grandfather’s name is Vern.

Foreign jeers? There really weren’t any. For a long time, no decent self-respecting American would buy a foreign car (except maybe someone’s no-good, lousy, mooching, bum of a brother-in-law). And by the time foreign cars actually started to become popular, creating an acronym that made sense was kind of hard. Toyota: Runs For a Long Time with Low Maintenance Costs.There’s just no zing to that. It doesn’t flow like Darn Old Dirty Gas Eater does.

Chrysler has recently tried to reinvigorate this lost sense of Americana with the attempted reinvigoration of pseudo-brands. “That thing got a Hemi, Bob? Why of course it does, Earl! I’d no sooner buy a truck without a Hemi than loan money to my wife’s no-account brother!” (So… I actually had to do some research on this one. “Hemi” means that the engine has hemispherical combustion chambers–I suppose instead of those pesky rhomboid chambers. It’s an engine style that was used in 1912 by… wait for it… Peugeot! Peugeot! They’re French!) Aside from insipid product placements in movies and television, “It’s got a Hemi!” doesn’t seem to have caught fire with the public. (Chrysler lost $2.9 billion in 2007. Peugeot made $2.7 billion in 2007.)

My Dad was a Chevy guy. Well, sorta. He has this really cool old 1947 Ford logging truck that’s pretty slick (looks like this). But it doesn’t run anymore. He had a lot of old Chevy trucks over the years too. Most of them ran sporadically. Except for the one with the Ooogah horn. (I loved that horn.) It was a 56 (or a 57 or 58… I can’t remember). It ran for a long time. Had a pinto wagon too. That doesn’t run anymore either–but it also didn’t blow up, which is suppose can be considered a positive in the Pinto. Mostly we were poor so whatever car was actually running was the one we rallied behind.

Me? We have a Jeep Cherokee and a Ford Contour. The Jeep is great. It’s a two-wheel drive Jeep (I know.) so it stinks in the snow, but otherwise it’s great. The Contour on the other hand…. well, it’s Dead in the Driveway right now. It was Dead on the Road a few hours ago, and it’s quite frequently in and out of the shop. It’s loud, it shakes like Lindsey Lohan in rehab if you push it past 45, there’s a broken seatbelt in the back, and it’s once lustrous silver (I’m assuming it was lustrous once) is now the color of dirty road slush ice. It’s a truly craptacular car.

But I’m no car-maker fanboy. If and when we go out to buy a new (heavily used) car from a reputable dealer (Jimbo’s CrazyLot), I’ll do my research and select the car that best matches the family’s needs (is cheap) regardless of who makes it (Yugo). In the meantime, I’ll reserve my allegiances for the contests that my generation finds compelling. I’ve even got some acronyms: Most Annoying Cult, Annoying People Playing with Little Electronics, Defunct Operating System, Vastly Inferior Software To Apple’s, and my personal favorite: Vastly Improved Solitaire Tiling Algorithms.

***Note: I realize that I seem to be picking on Lindsey Lohan a lot lately. Well, in the last two posts at any rate. I’d pick on other people, but the problem is that I need druggie references and I’ve become such an old man that I don’t really know who’s hip and with it (and consequently in and out of rehab) anymore. My wife thinks that the very fact that I use the words “hip” and “with it” means that I’m hopelessly “square.” I was tempted to go with Gary Busey yesterday… I mean, he must be on drugs, right? But he was too scary. Britney might be a druggie, but she also might be insane and, regardless, she just seems kind of sad now. Plus, with Lohan, there’s the added schadenfreude of watching a former child star (and the star of The Parent Trap, for goodness sake!) go all loopy–doin’ the Bonaducci as it were.

***Note: How about Patsy T. Mink joke! I was very proud. (I know, I know.) Look her up. It still won’t be very funny, but at least it will make sense.)