Categories
conspiracy theory

Watch a conspiracy theory form

Juggle.com examines how a Wired story started trending on Google as a “brain eating vaccine.” It’s interesting to see just how quickly a story can be misinterpreted and then taken on a left turn to Weirdsville – particularly when the inaccurate version of it supports someone’s rather odd fears. Jonah Lehrer, author of the original Wired story, responds here.

Also in conspiracy nut news, how about a little follow up from yesterday? Susan Greene at the Denver Post points out just how full of winners this year’s gubernatorial race is.

Turns out that Dan Maes stands behind his assertion that the red bike cooperative and Denver’s membership in the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives are signs of a global conspiracy.

“This is bigger than it looks like on the surface, and it could threaten our personal freedoms,” he said.

Most politicians seem to backpedal and distance themselves when someone points out how crazy they sound, but not Maes. I’m thinking he comes from the Michele Bachmann school of nutty politics. This is me, backing away slowly.

What scares me most about Maes’ bicycle theory is that voters may not see its “damfoolishness,” as H.L. Mencken would have called it.

“The central belief of every moron,” Mencken wrote in 1936, “is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights.”

Word.

Categories
colorado conspiracy theory wtf

Cycling our way to a New World Order

This is why I love state/local politics. It’s also why I occasionally feel the need to drink cough syrup until I put myself in an uncaring stupor so that the unceasing bombardment of stupid will just stop for a moment.

Maes said in a later interview that he once thought the mayor’s efforts to promote cycling and other environmental initiatives were harmless and well-meaning. Now he realizes “that’s exactly the attitude they want you to have.”

The ominous they of course are the United Nations, no relation to the giant radioactive ants of Them. (Or ARE they?)

I’m not sure what I find funniest about Maes’ position – that he’s attempting to make the UN some sort of boogeyman for Colorado, or that the UN’s supposed nefarious plot is to (THE HORROR!) get people to whiz around on cute little red bicycles in downtown Denver. Those bastards! Driving an enormous, gas-guzzling car between any two points that are more than ten feet apart is the American way, you know. Curse you Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, you won’t get away with this twisted plot no matter how adorable the little dingly bells on those bicycles are. We’re Americans, damnit!

“At first, I thought, ‘Gosh, public transportation, what’s wrong with that, and what’s wrong with people parking their cars and riding their bikes? And what’s wrong with incentives for green cars?’ But if you do your homework and research, you realize ICLEI is part of a greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty,” Maes said.

Imagine me doing this in my best Glen Beck Voice:
First they came for our SUVs, and I said nothing because I didn’t own an SUV. Then they gave me a bicycle, and I still said nothing, because I thought they were kind of cute. Then they established the new world order in our city and started exterminating anyone that didn’t believe in their twisted socialist agenda and…

I can’t do it. I just can’t. I threw up in my mouth a little just then.

Needless to say, Maes is the “Tea Party” favorite, which I’m starting to think translates out to “we think a strait jacket is a perfectly valid fashion statement.” I find myself actually hoping that he gets the Republican nomination. First off, because I like Hickenlooper, and I think this level of crazy is just the boost his campaign needs. And secondly, there’s something wrong in my brain which means I actually enjoy trying to laugh and cry at the same time, so this man’s campaign literature (which I’ll no doubt be bombarded with since I’m unaffiliated with a political party) would be an amazing resource for me.

Categories
igneous stuff

Dwelling in the Ashes

Very, very cool pictures of Kandovan village in Iran, where the dwellings are carved in to a tuff, which is basically rock made of compressed volcanic ash and other debris.

This of course made me immediately think of the cliff dwellings at Bandelier National Monument, which are carved in to the Bandelier Tuff. Kandovan wins the coolness contest, though, since people are still living in those dwellings.

The site about Kandovan says:

As we have noted previously, in the area of Kandovan, Sahand’s volcanic ash and debris was compressed and shaped by natural forces into cone-shaped pillars containing pockets that became caves.

Off the top of my head, I don’t know if I buy that there would be some factor in the formation of the tuff at Kandovan a bunch of cone-shaped pillars. It’s probably just more of a function of tuff in general that you get those very organic, steeply-sloped shapes when it weathers.

As rocks go, tuff is pretty soft and shockingly light, which is why it’s an ideal rock for people to try to carve dwellings in to. It’s strong and stable enough that undermining it isn’t going to make it collapse, but it’s also much easier to work with than a much harder rock, like granite.

There’s a few pictures I took of the Bandelier dwellings, toward the end of the album from my second New Mexico trip.

Categories
gaming

Games: Ideology

This is a game that Mike and I recently picked up; it’s from the company Z-Man Games, which also made Pandemic. This one’s a competitive game, however. How could it be anything else, with a name like Ideology?

The basic concept is that you play as one of the ideologies – Capitalism, Communism, Imperialism, Islamic Fundamentalism, Fascism – and attempt to influence a bunch of hapless little countries, thus eventually taking over the world. Of course, the entire time, you’re sparring with the other ideologies, sometimes declaring war on them, sometimes pretending that you’re friends, and occasionally just blowing them up with a Weapon of Mass Destruction.

It’s a very entertaining game. It can get a little bogged down because of how many phases occur in each turn (most of which must be done in turn order and take several loops around the table to complete) but the charm of being an ideology and vying for world domination does a lot to balance that out. Also, it helps to have a plethora of inappropriate jokes to make about Communism trying to take over Cuba or Fascism going after Argentina or Israel.

The game claims that it’s good for two to five players. We’ve played it with three, four, and five players. The fewer players you have, the less conflict there seems to be. Four is alright; three sees very little conflict and there’s a tendency for players to just keep to themselves and fortify their own countries. I’m not sure why the dynamic works that way, but that’s how it’s gone in the games that I’ve observed. Ultimately, I really think it’s a game best played with four or five. When you max out the number of players, the diplomacy phase of each turn becomes a lot more interesting, and there are more opportunities to engage in conflict with other players – which is a big part of what makes this game fun and is a source of endless amusement if you have even basic historical knowledge and a sick sense of humor.

And of course, we picked up the game because Mike wanted to play Imperialism. If you don’t find that immediately hilarious, lose 500 geo-geek points for missing every time I’ve mention that my husband is British.

Categories
grad school

First day as an ex-employee

Yesterday was my last day at Noble, so for at least the time being I’m no longer a corporate stooge of Big Oil. As last days went, it was pretty tame; I finished cleaning my personal belongings out of my office, I turned in my badge, I shook hands with a lot of people. What struck me is how unaffected I was by all of it.

Admittedly, I haven’t had that much experience when it comes to leaving jobs. When I got laid off from AT&T, I ended up crying on my last day. I think that was partially because it was the only real job I’d ever had, and I was scared as all hell. When I got fired from NBM, there was more crying, but those were the sort of frustrated tears you tend to have when you’ve been screwed over by your boss completely out of the blue.

So I guess with those as my only experiences, I expected at least to get sniffly on my last day at Noble. And… nothing. It really just felt like any other day. Who knows, maybe in a week when it all hits home I’ll have a nice little cry because I miss my coworkers and my job.

But I kind of doubt it. I think, fair or not, I really said my goodbyes to the job back in February when I got accepted in to grad school. And even before that, I was slowly drifting away. There hasn’t been a whole lot of work for me to do since the economy took a dump, really. Budgets are tight, exploration is limited, and I think a lot of us were scrabbling for things that would just make us look busy. But that feeling of not being needed really hit home in January, when I had the opportunity to start working full time again and discovered that I just didn’t have enough work to justify charging forty hours on the clock.

So rather than that sharp, abrupt severance that I had with my former jobs, this feels like I’ve simply come unmoored and drifted slowly away. There are worse ways to part from a job, I think. I’ll miss my coworkers, but I certainly don’t miss crying over it.

And it also helps, I think, that I’ve got a three year adventure to look forward to.

Categories
Uncategorized

5 reasons a zombie would make an excellent pet

1) More intimidating than a rottweiler, yet quieter.
A lot of people keep guard dogs on the understanding that these razor blades with legs will intimidate a burglar enough that he won’t even think of smashing your window and making off with your porn-filled iPad. Barring that (or if you happen to have an extremely stupid burglar scoping out your house) a guard dog will still stop the burglar, but also splash blood liberally all over your carpet and walls. But your iPad will be safe. The down side to this sort of protection plan is that dogs bark. That’s part of the intimidation act, letting the bad guys know that there’s a dog waiting to gnaw on their femur in this house. But it also means that you have to listen to a lot of random woofing every time the neighborhood children run across the street, or the neighbor’s handbag dog takes a crap in your rose bushes.

On the other hand, a zombie serves many of the same functions as a guard dog – intimidation of intruders by standing menacingly in backlit windows or doorways, chilling vacant stare that puts fear in the heart of evildoers, leaving a twenty foot long smear of blood on your linoleum – but without the hell hound-style baying. Instead, there’s the much quieter (but still intimidating in its own way) moan of “braaaaaaaains.” As distinctive as the howl of the Hound of the Baskervilles, and twice as pants wetting, since it’s a zombie and not just a nice dog that’s been coated with glow in the dark paint.

2) Other than the blood, easy to clean up after.
Think about it. Have you ever, once, in all the zombie movies you’ve ever watched, seen one of the walking dead stop for a potty break? Their relentless pursuit of living flesh, unbroken by the occasional pitstop, is one of their most terrifying features. So yes, you may have to spend a lot of time spraying your carpets down with Nature’s Miracle to get out all the blood, but say goodbye to having to scoop poop out of a box of clay bits, or hunting for it in the overgrown jungle of your backyard. Personally, if I had the choice between slipping on a dog turd as I run through the grass or slipping on a bit of some trespasser’s intestine, I’d vote for the intestine every time.

3) No vet bills.
Zombies are like Hondas. You get one, and then you just run it until it falls apart. It doesn’t really matter what one eats – no more running your pet to the vet because the little darling thought that eating four inches of plastic tubing sounded like an excellent idea. No more vaccinations – once you’re a zombie, rabies is about the last thing in the world you’d be concerned about. A zombie will take a licking and keep on ticking, at least until someone destroys whats left of its brain with a well placed shovel blow or a couple episodes of Jersey Shore. And if that happens, it’s easy enough to find a new zombie once you’ve said a few words over the ashes of your former pet.

Bonus: Like other pets, you can name all of your zombies the same thing. They won’t care. They’re zombies.

4) You don’t have to walk a zombie.
Seriously, leading one of the undead around on a collar? If that sounds like a fun time to you, you’ve got some issues, man.

5) Save on pet food.
Your pet food budget basically drops to zero once you’ve acquired a zombie. Instead of paying good money for the meat that was too weird to be made into sausage, all you have to do is let your zombie wander the neighborhood. The neighborhood cat that keeps peeing in the bushes right in front of your house will make a lovely snack. Those awful children who think its hilarious to bounce a basketball against the side of your house at three in the morning when you’ve got a hangover? Gone. The weird guy that stole that pair of underwear you threw away because it was just some holes held together with elastic out of your trash can? I wouldn’t bet on those odds in Vegas.

Now, I’m sure there are some bleeding hearts out there that will say a healthy, happy zombie is an indoor zombie, and not one shuffling through the streets of your neighborhood and decimating the squirrel population. These people should go back to their hippy retreats where they can fondle their dread locks and convince themselves that tofu isn’t actually made out of styrofoam. It’s a freaking zombie. If it gets hit by a car, the zombie will likely come out just a little more ragged than it started and get a free snack on top of the deal. Want cleaner, quieter neighborhoods where nothing even survives to become roadkill? Outdoor zombie, all the way.

Categories
cats

In which I owe Isaac, big time

You may or may not know this about me, but I have a soft spot that is actually larger than my entire body for cats. And a soft spot only slightly smaller for dogs. If there is a dog or a cat looking sad or sounding pitiful, I will be there, and I will quite likely be sniffling a little bit myself. This sometimes gets me into… well, not trouble exactly. But into awkward spots.

Thankfully, my friends know this about me and put up with it. Such as when my best friend, after driving up to Denver to visit, ended up sitting with me for hours at an animal shelter on July 5th so I could hand over a little lost dog that I’d found.

Tonight was another example. Isaac had just dropped me off and I was fumbling for my keys when I heard a pathetic mewing. It took me a while to locate the source, which involved a sad little game of Marco Polo where I wandered around the grassy area of my complex and meowed, then listened for the kitty to meow back. Then I had to go in my house and locate a flashlight. Then I had to look around some more. I eventually found a cat a little more than halfway up one of the pine trees near my house.

Common wisdom says that if a cat gets itself up a tree, it eventually will get itself back down. Common wisdom can hang itself; I didn’t think there was any way I’d be able to sleep tonight with a sad kitty crying outside my window.

So I called Isaac, because I knew he’d still be awake, and hoped he had a ladder. And, remarkable enough, he didn’t tell me to go to hell, even though he’d just been sitting down to eat something. Instead, like the amazing friend he is, he tied his ladder to the roof of his car and drove over to help. I spent the wait standing under the tree with my flashlight and meowing at the cat. Quite a few people from my neighborhood passed by in that time, and they probably all thought I’d gone mental.

Getting the kitty out of the tree was a two person job. Isaac climbed up and tried to peel the cat off of the tree. Considering how small the cat was, it had an impressive, kung-fu like grip and Did Not Want To Move. He managed to get the cat wrapped up in a towel, which he then handed off to me. I tucked it under my arm like a football and carried it down the ladder.

So, Operation Rescue Cat From Tree was a success. I’m sorry to say that Operation Shove Cat Into Carrier was not, however.

It’s very likely that the cat is a resident of the neighborhood. There are several people here that let their cats outside. I think that these people are all insane. My housing development is next to a highway and two extremely busy streets. We’re also near an open space where there are coyotes. I tend to disagree with the practice of letting cats wander unattended outside to begin with, and here I just worry they’ll end up as road pizza or a coyote snack.

But anyway, this cat didn’t have a collar, so I had wanted to shove it in a carrier, hold it captive in my house, and probably take it to the vet the next day. Because it was quite the adorable little cat as well. Unfortunately the cat had other ideas and escaped. I tried to follow it, but it ran off toward the highway and I didn’t want to pursue, just in case the cat thought that might be a good avenue of escape.

And Isaac still loves me, and most of his blood remained in his body even after his wrestling match with an extremely displeased cat in a tree, so I suppose it could have gone a lot worse.

Categories
movie

Inception

The quick review: You really, really, really ought to go see this movie.

If Memento was the warm up, Inception was the main event. I really don’t want to go into a lot of detail about the story or the concept. If you want to know either, you can read other reviews and get a reasonable explanation of both. But to be honest, I think it’s best to just go in knowing that there are dreams, and a McGuffin that allows people to share them, and then you can just get knocked on your ass by the rest.

It says a lot about the writing, and how tightly plotted the movie was that afterward, my husband and our friend David were bickering about whether or not a section of screen time that was supposed to be three minutes actually was three minutes long, or if it was longer because it felt longer. When the plot of the movie is so tight that you are left with nothing to pick at but tiny details, it is impressive indeed.

And of course, there was one moment of plotty gut punching powerful and genuine enough that it made every occupant of the theater let out a dismayed exclamation at exactly the same time. Which is quite the accomplishment when you consider the average audience, which has had its brain melted by horrible attempts at 3D this summer.

It’s beautiful, and it’s suspenseful, and I actually cared about each and every one of the characters. Go see it.

And: Soundtrack by Hans Zimmer. Bigger win than Sherlock Holmes on the music front, and I didn’t think that was possible.

Categories
astro stuff tv

It’s a Bad Universe out there

Finally! Phil Plait’s sooper sekrit project has been revealed! He’s been talking about this (or rather, annoyingly not talking about it other than to say that there’s a secret project) for months and I’ve been dying to know what it’s about. It looks like a lot of fun, sort of a Mythbusters with more focus on the science.

This makes me really, really wish that I had cable. Maybe I can talk Mike in to it.

I’m very entertained by the little trailer. I’m not sure if my favorite bit is Mutant!Phil shooting lightning out of his eyes at the UFOs, or Phil just saying “oh god” when he’s apparently being taken on some crazy maneuver in a jet.

(Phil has now posted about his project on his blog.)

Categories
oil and gas

The Pelican in the Room

I am getting increasingly worried about the Macondo well’s continuing shut-in state, not to mention the way BP and Admiral Allen seem to be bickering about it. I guess the good news is that the pressure has built to a reasonable level and has pretty much parked there. That’s certainly better than the alternative1. And to a certain extent, I can understand why what was supposed to be a pressure test has been extended for days to keeping the well shut in. Because it is preferable to allowing the well to continue to flow into the Gulf.

However.

BP’s making noise about wanting to try another surface kill. I suppose because the last one went so well. Now, one point in favor of this is that they’ve got the well actually shut in, so there’s at least some integrity to the well cap now. But I’m with Bob Cavnar; I’m worried about the continuing integrity of of the casing and the flex joint2, and I’m also worried about the integrity of the formations. There have been concerns since the beginning about casing damage that could allow oil/drilling fluid into the surrounding formations, which could lead to failure, fracturing, and give the oil a new pathway into the open water. This hasn’t happened yet, but it very well could, and with no warning. And, now that the relief well is getting close enough to completion to give us a little hope, that kind of failure could needlessly complicate those efforts as well.

If you’ve ever watched the movie True Lies, think about the scene where the terrorists are driving along the highway across the Florida keys, and the bridge basically gets blown up around them. One of the trucks ends up teetering between staying on the road and falling off into the ocean. The terrorists try to creep toward the back of the truck, hoping to get it to sway back onto the highway. Then a bird (a pelican, I think) lands on the hood and they all go tumbling into the drink.

That sort of farcical balance, teetering between safety and disaster, is what this is making me think of, and BP’s inexplicable maneuvering is the pelican in this equation.

With the new cap on the well, they’ve got four good fittings they could hook in to for the purposes of pumping oil. One excuse for not having done that yet is that one of the risers still needs to be completed, and I believe that one or two of the vessels they would be using aren’t there yet. (And of course, constant weather worries.) But what about the vessels and risers already on site? As far as I know (again, geologist, not engineering expert) they ought to be able to just retrieve oil from a couple of the valves and not all of them. They should be able to just take whatever capacity the vessels on site have, which would also keep the well at a lower pressure even if they’re not taking the full flow. Why are the pushing the pressure on the well by keeping it shut in if they’re worried about the flex joint failing? Why are they looking at a plan that might cause catastrophic failure with the relief well so close to completion? And so on. Unfortunately, I’m not in full possession of the facts, and through no fault of my own; there’s a lot of detail that BP is keeping to itself.

I’m starting to fall into the paranoid camp that thinks BP is fighting to keep the well shut in and even pushing for the inexplicable attempt at a static kill because that will prevent truly accurate measurements of the well flow. Since, after all, knowing how much the well can flow at would give a pretty accurate way to measure just how much oil has gone into the Gulf, which is important since fines are charged per barrel – and fees for removal of oil from the lease are also charged per barrel.

It would also be easier for me to dismiss my growing sense of paranoia as misplaced suspicion if it weren’t for the fact that this company has already shown a blatant disregard for safety in the interest of savings/profit. BP was aware of the leak in the BOP’s control pod for months, and did not see fit to have it fixed. They didn’t bother to run a cement bond log3. They didn’t conduct a circulation test to see if there was gas in the wellbore. And so on, and so on, an infuriating list that just gets longer and longer the more times BP is called to testify.

BP killed eleven people because they thought the savings were worth the risk. Which is an easy enough decision, I suppose, when you’re making it from hundreds of miles away from the drilling rig. BP has put a knife in the heart of the Gulf of Mexico’s ecosystem because they thought the savings were worth the risk. BP destroyed the livelihoods of thousands because they thought the savings were worth the risk. No one set out to kill eleven people or damage an ecosystem or destroy the livelihoods of people; but all of these things add up to show a disregard for risk, where the people making the decision about that risk are not the ones that will bear the brunt of the damage if the odds turn sour.

So how paranoid am I actually being, if I find it a reasonable conclusion that they just might be willing to risk exacerbating this heartbreaking situation because it could get them out of some fines? It might be worth the risk. At this point we’re all just teetering at the edge of disaster and waiting to see where BP lands.

1 – As in, constant low pressure or a sudden drop in pressure, which would basically indicate that the oil’s found a different way to escape the well.

2 – Mr. Cavnar provides a more technical discussion of that issue here. The problem is, none of us armchair quarterbacks knows precisely what fittings/etc are being used, and no one’s bothering to share that information.

3 – This is basically a sonic assessment to see if there’s cement fully surrounding the casing, which lets you know if the cementing worked properly. Logs usually cost by the foot, so running a log through the entire 15,000 foot length of this well would be a costly proposition. In the past, I’ve seen different types of logs (for a cement bond log you really have to run the whole thing) that companies have tried to save on by only running them for sections of the well, a couple hundred feet at a time. As a geologist, I find this practice very annoying.