David Erik Nelson's Blog, page 37
October 12, 2012
What's Dave-o Talking About?
At the tail end of the summer a nice cat I connected with via Maker Faire Detroit interviewed me for WXOU, which is 88.3FM in Auburn Hills, MI. I'd thought we were going to talk mostly about maker/DIY stuff, but it ended up being a really fun, wide ranging chat. Robo Robb is a really excellent, laid-back interviewer--which, compounded with my sprung sleep schedule (travel, new baby, etc.) meant that, about four minutes into the interview, I totally forgot that we were recording. When he grabbed his digital recorder off the table as we were leaving--the coffee shop had shut down and wanted to haul their tables in--I suddenly realized I had *no idea* what I'd said. So, everything at this link is gonna be news to both of us.
DISCLOSURE: This tape is long--more than an hour, as I recall--and I have a terrible, nasal Jewish Kermit the Frog voice and creaky geek laugh. It's downright *punishing* to listen to me go on about this stuff. Also, I go pretty far afield on education policy and race in America and clockwork robot war crimes--the whole thing is a hot mess. But Robo Robb is an excellent interlocutor and solid dude. If you ever get a chance to talk with him, *jump at it!*
Interview with David Erik Nelson - Robo Robb
*thx Robb!*
October 11, 2012
Romney: "That dude's the sickest. We hate him."
I offer this to you because I love you, Mojonauts. Now bow your heads. We thank you, oh Internet, for the bounty we are about to receive. Amen.
"Eye Of The Sparrow" — A Bad Lip Reading of the First 2012 Presidential Debate - YouTube
October 5, 2012
Your #FridayReads: THE SILENT HISTORY on your iPhone and a STEAMPUNK III sweepstakes #scifi
Lots of fiction news!
First off, Fritz and I are "Advance Reporters" contributing to the geolocated, serialized, iPhone/iPad literature thing The Silent History (as of right now our stories are the only ones located in Michigan). There's a nice concise description of the project over on Contents Magazine:
The Silent History is a serialized electronic novel that debuted this week on iOS devices. The story at its heart is big: beginning right around now, some of our children stop developing language, and no one knows why. The novel is an archive of first-person accounts told by parents, doctors, teachers, and neighbors, and they’re released on a schedule, one at a time, from the beginning of the epidemic through to 2043.
Orbiting the body of the novel are dozens of “field reports”—stories written by readers and connected to specific physical locations. To read them, you have to show up, device in hand, at just the right spot on the built-in map.
That's actually the lead-in to an interesting interview with the project editor Eli Horowitz, e.g.,:
Once you start thinking about it, the project is full of semi-comprehensible little resonances like that. I mean, it’s a lengthy book about the failures of language. It’s an oral history about people who can’t talk. It’s a digital book that is dependent upon engagement with the physical world. Etc.
If you want details, check out the Silent History website and Tumblr blog or this video trailer:
The Silent History from Richard Parks on Vimeo.
Mojo, Fritz, and I (in the guise of our dear Giant Squid) also have a story in Ann VanderMeer's upcoming anthology Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution--which is sort of a post-steampunk reimagining/re-examination of steampunk's blind spots. You can buy it come Non-Denominational Gift Giving Holiday time, or enter the Tor.com Sweepstakes and win one pronto. Check out an excerpt from the antho's intro and see what you think.
Finally, I've dropped the price on my novella Tucker Teaches the Clockies to Copulate--you know, to celebrate Sukkoth, or something. Happy October, everyone!
October 4, 2012
Deobfuscating Ballot Measures with Ballotpedia
Perhaps everything is on the up-and-up out where you are, but here in Michigan we once again have a confusing fistful of ballot measures that are lightly covered in the media, but energetically endorsed or opposed by PACs via direct-mail, online banner ads, and TV/YouTube vids. Much of this street-level lobbying is misleading, verging on fraudulent. Most notable in Michigan is Matty Moroun's ongoing campaign to keep his private near-monopoly on commercial trucking between the US and Canada via Detroit. (SHORT VERSION: Detroit-Windsor is one of the busiest trade corridors in the US; something like 60 or 70 percent of the region's commercial traffic passes through Detroit. The current bridge is a crazy bottleneck. Canada wants a new bridge so badly that *they are entirely picking up the tab.* Matty Moroun--who owns the one bridge from Detroit to Windsor [there is also a tunnel, but it cannot carry commercial traffic, just passenger vehicles] is dumping millions into running ads that say Canada *isn't* paying for the bridge. This claim is false.)
Moroun also wants to deeply fuck up the state's ability to levee taxes--which makes sense, as he's been actively antagonistic to the state, his nominal business partner, for years. Robbing us of the revenue we need to pursue him for breach of contract, civil contempt, and assorted other fuckery is sort of a rational choice, if you are a supervillain. Next thing you know he's gonna blow up the moon--or dump $4 million into amending our state constitution so that he has a monopoly on blowing up the moon, or who knows what.
Tangent aside, Ballotpedia has been a balm on my nerves, counteracting the gobsmacked rage I fly into each morning when the mail arrives with yet another glossy libel. It's a non-partisan project to elucidate state politics, with a special flair for all the "down ballot" initiates and candidates--the ones that don't get covered much in the media, but can have an enormous impact on your day-to-day life.
Live in Michigan? Here's a run-down of our 2012 ballot measures. The most contentious of these are Props 2, 5, and 6. *I* advise voting YES on 2, NO on 5 and 6--but that's just me.
More than anything, I advise doing a little reading--with Ballotpedia as your jumping-off point--and voting for what you think will most benefit the state and its citizens. Thanks!
October 1, 2012
THIS WEEK'S RESEARCH HOLE: Whale Meat (Which Should Probably Be Considered Kosher)
I'm not gonna explain how this happened, but I fell down the research hole last week and ended up reading a bunch of stuff on eating whale meat. This piece was pretty good--and interestingly calls into question our visceral, and generally irrational, American reaction to the notion of eating whale meat[*]--but the real gem is this 1918 New York Times article about a whale-meat luncheon held in the American Museum of Natural History in an attempt to boost public demand for humpback meat (and thus free up pork and beef for soldiers). Even more fascinating than the intended content of the article is all of the side-channel details it accidentally offers, an imagination-galvanizing glimpse at what store shelves must have looked like in 1918 America. Just one e.g. (emphasis mine):
[Admiral Perry said] "There will be an intense practical advantage to this movement if we can ever get the American people to substitute whale meat for beef, mutton, and pork. It can be kept indefinitely in tin cans the way they are now putting it up for market. . . ."
. . . there are at present on the Pacific Coast of America seven whaling stations. Only three of these are equipped to handle whale meat for food. Most of the whale production on the Coast is utilized for the manufacture of fertilizer. About 1,000 whales are captured annually on the coasts of America.
Simply mind-boggling. When my granddad was a boy--when *either* of them was a boy--canned humpback whale meat was on store shelves, and was evidently regarded as a SPAM-caliber grocery item. I've also heard that during WWII flavored whale-oil spread replaced both butter and margarine in the UK (due to rationing). Whale butter, because, you know, renewable cow butter was too precious. Spock would weep.
Incidentally, whale meat is not kosher largely because the authors of Deuteronomy didn't have the benefit of our current understanding of evolution. Note:
The passage in Deuteronomy (14:4-5) gives a list of the animals that chew the cud and have cloven hooves and are thus kosher: oxen, sheep, goats, deer, gazelles, roebuck, wild goats, ibex, antelopes, and mountain sheep. It is interesting to note that whale meat and whale oil are forbidden not because the whale is a forbidden fish but because the whale is a mammal that, obviously, does not have cloven hooves and does not chew the cud.
We learned at the tail end of the 20th C that whales not only are ungulates, but are more closely related to cows than to pigs. Their common ancestors--which looked like big-headed bear-dogs--even had tiny cloven hooves at the end of their long toes (you can check these out yourself on the mesonychid skeleton at the University of Michigan Natural History museum). And whales have retained their multi-chamber stomachs. They don't *tend* to chew their cud, but evidently could if push came to shove.
FYI, there likewise still seems to be debate as to whether whale is halal, although it I guess the Prophet (who seems like a basically OK guy) ate some sperm whale one time--although it's unclear if that makes whale generally OK to eat, or if this was a special situation because it G_d special-delivered these faithful a sperm whale to nosh.
[*] e.g., some Buddhist sects consider all souls to be equally, uniquely valuable. Ergo, in their estimation, eating a whale is *more* ethical than eating shrimp, as in the former case one instance of suffering feeds tons of folks, while in the latter many instances of suffering constitute little more than a Chili's Extreme Popcorn Shrimp Slammer Cocktail!™ appetizer. Most meat-eating Americans, in my experience, have a complex metric for determining what's ethical to eat, largely based on cuteness, testable intelligence, and child rearing practices--all of which favor whales and dogs over benthic insects and anything mechanically separated it an easily fried paste.
September 29, 2012
These really are quite endearing: Jerry Seinfeld's "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee"
Basically just Jerry Seinfeld cold chilling with famous-ass funny folk. I, for one, was never much a Jerry Seinfeld guy, but these are very sweet little vignettes about humans. It's sorta like what This American Life would be if it was condemned to exist in a universe entirely bounded by the constraints of People magazine.
I Want Sandwiches, I Want Chicken - Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks - Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee
September 28, 2012
We're mostly miserable because we make bunky comparisons
I don't know how I feel about TED talks in general--some are outright scams, many just sorta lame--but this one is very interesting, and plausibly sort of cognitively world-changing.
Shortest version: We make ourselves miserable by making decisions based on invalid comparisons. Do you want to be happy? Then make each Right Now decision by imagining you're a year or so in the future looking back at that decision.
See also: The Two-Thousand-Dollar Popsicle : The New Yorker
FYI, at around the 29-minute mark, during the Q&A, the speaker (Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert) gets wonderfully zinged by a sociologist in the audience--which, for my money, is part of what makes this TED talk a solid winner (although I dispute the sociologists claim that one *cannot* get any pleasure from simply destroying a dollar).
September 21, 2012
"Chicken of the Sea" EXPLAINED!
Likely much, much more than you think you need to know about tuna and the evolving protein-eating habits of 20th C Americans, but nonetheless fascinating. FYI the real takeaway is in the lede: Evidently your kid shouldn't eat tuna more than *once per month* because of mercury content! Damn!
Mercury in Tuna: Why do Americans eat so much tuna? - Slate Magazine
Canned tuna also owes its early success to El Niño. The California Fish Company, which popularized canned tuna in America, originally specialized in sardines. A change in the weather in 1903, however, pushed the tiny fish out of San Pedro Bay, forcing the company to experiment with substitutes like halibut and rock cod, eventually settling on albacore.
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The novel product faced a serious marketing challenge. The only Americans who had ever heard of albacore were West Coast sport fishermen. The California Fish Company decided to label albacore as tuna, even though scientists of the day considered the two fish taxonomically distinct. While scientifically questionable at the time, the gambit worked, and Americans came to think of albacore, and not the better established bluefin and yellowfin, as the definitive tuna fish. The company was vindicated decades later, when scientists reclassified albacore as a tuna.
That wasn’t the last taxonomic controversy in the commercial tuna industry. When albacore became scarce near U.S. coastlines in the mid-20th century from overfishing, canneries sought to sell the skipjack as a substitute. Skipjack belongs to the same taxonomic tribe (Thunnini) as albacore, but not to the same genus (Thunnus). The government ultimately decided to let the industry market skipjack as “light tuna,” arguing that scientific and commercial names don’t always have to agree.
FYI, there's some useful research on trauma recovery buried in this movie review
(The review also features a really odd use of the phrase "fudge factory"--could *this* be journalism's new "as though by some occult hand"?)
Should people with concussions rest until their symptoms disappear, as the film repeatedly suggests? That's been the standard advice since the 1940s, but there's very little evidence to show it's more than superstition. The only real work to support the notion came out in June, with equivocal results. (Researchers found that a week of rest taken right after getting hit did as much good as a week taken several months later.)
Let's stick to this last point, since the idea that players should be barred from competition after getting dinged is seen as gospel by nearly everyone who appears in the film. It's the closest thing we have to a solid fact about concussion. It's also the central point of Concussions and Our Kids, the new book (out this week) from one of the major subjects of Head Games, BU professor and concussion expert Robert Cantu. "Rest is the hallmark of concussion therapy," Cantu writes.He advises parents and doctors to keep young athletes away from school for weeks or months, if necessary, after a nasty head injury. They should avoid all physical exertion and also mental overload—the kind associated with taking tests and reading books. They should also be prevented from using Facebook, sending text messages, and watching movies.
All that resting could be hurting more than it helps, however. A review published in the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation this June points out that extended inactivity can cause depression, anxiety, headache, insomnia, and even balance problems, even in the absence of any head injury whatsoever. In other words, too much rest could itself produce the scary symptoms of "post-concussive syndrome." The authors of the review point out that "being sedentary after an injury or illness is one of the most consistent risk factors for chronic disability," and that the lasting symptoms of concussion (which affect a modest percentage of its sufferers) happen to overlap very neatly with the symptoms of depression. Could taking kids out of school or pro athletes off the field worsen their sadness and frustration?
This is almost certainly the most terrible thing you will read today
I'm not excerpting anything, because it's all pretty bad. The first paragraph is chilling. Later grafs read like something that a deranged adolescent might write in a "horror" story that would land him in psychological counseling. The Catholic Church and Penn State are evoked, but the situation at Spirit Lake is possibly worse, as it's implied that there *isn't* exactly an effort at a "cover-up", per se, because the town is so neglected by society that there's no *need* to conceal what's happening there, what has been happening there for generations.
The header/link title--U.S. Is Taking Over Spirit Lake Sioux’s Social Services - NYTimes.com-- is oddly benign. The title of the online article itself is "A Tribe’s Epidemic of Child Sex Abuse, Minimized for Years," and in the print edition the even more foreboding "Seeking to Stem Endless Abuse of Tribe's Children."
If you *don't* want to be sad and angry this morning, just let this one pass you by. For reals.
