David Erik Nelson's Blog, page 40
July 24, 2012
FACT: These are the best wedding photos of all time
(trust me, it's worth taking a second to click through and brighten your late working evening)
Find Out Why This Could Be The Greatest Wedding Photo Of All Time | Badass Digest
July 23, 2012
So I Guess *This* Is What Passes for Science These Days
How to build a jellyfish out of a rat – video | Science | guardian.co.uk
Tissue engineers at Caltech and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have set about recreating entire organisms. Instead of using steel and copper to build their machines they're using living cells, and have already created a creature out of muscle cells that is genetically a rat – but that looks and swims a bit like a jellyfish.
July 19, 2012
My Favorite "Who's on First"s
I, for one, totally understand why Lou Costello is so incredulous to learn that China's President Hu Jintao is a time-travelling first-baseman. The premise *does* strain credulity.
(This one hits it's "First" at around the 2 minute mark.)
(This one is criminally NSFW.)
The Secret Message Hidden in Obama's "Hawaii" Birth Certificate!
Ugh . . . slightly less funny than the last video I posted, since this guy legally carries a gun and is blowing money on this that ought to go toward bettering the lives of the citizens Maricopa County, AZ. Can't someone just buy this guy the mug and have this done with?
Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Birther Obsession Gets Stranger | TPMMuckraker
For months, the sheriff has been promoting the fringe conspiracy theory of birtherism, which claims Barack Obama’s birth certificate is fake and therefore he is ineligible to be president. But Arpaio took it to a grand scale with his latest stunt, promising to reveal “shocking” information about the document.
What he and his “investigator” ultimately presented, however, was something less than shocking. They spun new webs of the conspiracy, alleging secret codes were hidden in the birth certificate and claiming they found an elderly witness who could decipher the cryptography. It was the latest tweak to a theory that has long been debunked but remains kept alive by small pockets of conservative activists and writers.
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In case you're wondering about this alleged "cryptography"--which it isn't, just a data coding system--here's a credulous article reporting on it. Arpaio's Cold Case Posse Truth Squad has even released a video about the code:
And here's a meticulous takedown of this new and startling "evidence" of a wide-spread conspiracy half a century in the making.
And thus the Case of the Long Form Birth Certificate thus remains closed. *sigh*
BONUS: OBAMA'S TERRIBLE BIRTH SECRET REVEALED AFTER THE JUMP!!!
July 17, 2012
Shackleton's bravado, incompetence, whisky, and cocaine
The Four Horseman of that particular Apocalypse.
Drinking Ernest Shackleton’s Whisky - NYTimes.com
Whisky lovers also like to imagine that the occasional bracing, restorative tot helped Shackleton and his three companions — Wild, Eric Marshall and Jameson Adams — withstand the hardship of their 1,700-mile trek south and back. On Christmas Day, we know, they celebrated with creme de menthe. It’s unlikely, though, especially on the return leg, when exhausted and malnourished and racing to get back before the Nimrod left, that they would have wanted the burden of whisky bottles. What really got them through was cocaine — in the form of pills called Forced March, which at one point Marshall fed the group every hour or so.
July 13, 2012
The Negro Motorist Green Book
Black History Road Trip: Negro Motorist Green Book Destinations
I was recently at the Henry Ford museum-type-thing (where I'll be again soon for Maker Faire Detroit; come hang with me!!!), where they have a big new section dedicated to vacationing/car culture/highway culture in America. Among the displays was one of these Green Books ("green" both for the cover and the creator, Victor Hugo Green), pinned open to the two-page spread that listed *all* of the black-friendly establishments in Michigan. This book wasn't large--it was meant to fit in your pocket or purse--so it's not like a two-page spread held that many listings, and Michigan didn't even take up both pages. As you can imagine, the entry was dominated by listings for Detroit (already a black haven in the late 1940s), as well as many for Idlewild (an African-American friendly vacation spot in rural West Michigan). Ann Arbor (where I live) featured a hotel and a couple "guest houses" friendly to the Negro Motorist, and there were a few in Grand Rapids (a big furniture factory town). But there wasn't a single restaurant that would reliably serve black families outside Detroit or Idlewild. These two points are separated by 230 miles, and that's with the modern interstates, which weren't built until *after* the last Green Book was issued. So, that was several hundred miles of unlit, often unpaved backwoods two-lanes.
Three-decades later--in the goddamn 1980s, long after Idlewild had withered away because black folk were welcome to go basically the same places as everyone else--this simple fact, this vision of Michigan as a foreboding, barren wilderness devoid of oases or hospitality, still held sway in the minds of many African-American Detroiters. Even now it's not uncommon to talk to African-American teens who know every block of their side of Detroit, but have only the vaguest notion of what might lie west of Dearborn or north of 8 Mile.
So, despite wishing otherwise, this is what I think about when I think about summer road trips in Michgian.
July 10, 2012
Attention All Steampunks & Booknerds: All 111 Volumes(!!!) of Queen Victoria's Diary Are Online NOW!
Free for your perusal until the end of July.
Queen Victoria's Journals - Home Page
The interface is whack, but start browsing--almost at random--and you'll find some startling and wonderful passages. To wit, this lil bit from page one of volume one, recounting one moment from Victoria's 1832 journey to Wales via carriage:
It rains very hard. We just passed through a town where all coal mines are and you see the fire glimmer at a distance in the engines in many places. The men, women, children, country and houses are all black. But I can not by any description give an idea of its strange and extraordinary appearance. The country is very desolate ever where; there are coals about, and the grass is quite blasted and black. I just now see an extraordinary building flaming with fire. The country continues black, engines flaming, coals, in abundance, every where, smoking and burning coal heaps, intermingled with wretched huts and carts and little ragged children.
This is the world that even the *richest little girl in all of the British Empire* saw and found remarkable, but by no means shocking or foreign. If you're writing steampunk and this isn't in there, then you're doing it wrong.
July 9, 2012
Obamacare, Compassion, and Taxes/Penalties on Inactivity
Ari Kohen (a poli-philosophy professor at the U of Nebraska) has been writing a bit about the Supreme Court's support of "Obamacare" (approvingly, of course--y'all know my slant).
I know that term--"Obamacare"-- is meant as a smear, and that we're supposed to call it the ACA ("Affordable Care Act"), but I *love* the term "Obamacare." We should *all* love it. Among normal, compassionate human beings, it should be among our central life-goals to do something that causes average folks to irrevocably link our names to the word "care." It's like being a fully ordained Mensch. I feel like we live in a pretty whack country when we seek to smear someone's reputation by closely associating him or her with the Christian notion of mutual caretakership. Seriously, what up with that, America? Are we a nation of poorly supervised middle school boys teasing the kid who points out it might be wrong to set fire to the cat?
At any rate, Kohen is a much clearer thinker than I am, more concise, and eager to take hyperbole ("This is a tax on *doing nothing*! This is the end of freedom! Worse than Hitler!") back to the brass tacks of *what the actual SCotUS judges actually said.*
His point? Obamacare fits comfortably within the traditional role of government: To incentivize behaviors that are in the best interest of the country and its citizenry. To wit:
Running Chicken: Health Care, Taxation, and the Constitution
Think back to when the blogger was aghast at the notion that there might be a tax on having children. We actually have precisely the opposite — a tax credit for having them! And that means, of course, that there’s a tax penalty for not having them. I have a child; I get a credit and thus pay less. You choose not to have a child; you don’t get a credit and thus pay more. Your inactivity results in a higher tax burden. Just like the inactivity with regard to purchasing health care.
The same is true, as Chief Justice Roberts writes, of home ownership and professional education.
My point? That Obamacare is just that: Our nation writing into law the *fact* that we all should make the well-being of our fellow citizens our personal business, that we should take a personal stake in being sure that our friends and neighbors don't suffer needlessly. You know, like that Jesus guy said. Now, the Jesus guy's pretty popular in America, so you'd think this would go over pretty well.
Bizarrely, this enormous freakout seems to largely be coming from segments of the pundit universe where Jesus is *HUGE* and taxes are *despised.* That leaves one to wonder what's at the heart of the hyperbolic freakout about what is, in essence, an enormous, Sermon-on-the-Mount-compliant middle-class tax cut?
In my humble, it's the growing pains of a young child getting a new sibling. When mom and dad come home with baby sister, even a toddler can do the math: The denominator in the fraction of the Family's Love they are to receive has just gotten bumped up by one. There is less love to go around. The human loss aversion terror kicks in, and bizarre tantrums ensue.
Of course, over time, we grow and we realize that the magic(k) of Love is that every additional slice doled out *increases* the size of the pie, 'cause Love isn't a goddamn pie we divvy up; Love is a brain made wiser and faster and more wonderful with each additional synapse. More neurons, more connections, more Love.
Right now, as a country, were throwing some crazy tantrums because we just suddenly realized we have an extra 16 million siblings, and haven't yet realized that those extra 16 million brothers and sisters have us, too.
Hey, America, I still love you, because we are each others'.
See You at MAKER FAIRE DETROIT: JULY 28 & 29!
I'll be at Maker Faire Detroit again this year, braving the searing rays of our terrible and merciless sun and shooting off water rockets like a mad man. I'll have a "Cheap Thrills" booth outside, where I'll be showing off under-$10-projects from SNIP, BURN, SOLDER, SHRED (as well as a couple of the new projects from my upcoming book of unconventional musical instruments), signing books, and making free water rockets with all comers (while supplies last). I'll also be giving a half-hour, air-conditioned presentation on Sunday: "Your First Synthesizer: A Weird Little Noise-Toy You Can Build Tonight."
Our own dear Fritz Swanson will also be at Maker Faire (his first ever!) demoing "Letter-press Printing: Data Distribution the 19th Century Way," as will our pal Amy Stevenson, teaching at-home artisanal paper making. See you there!
Reduced rate early-bird tickets are still available, or so I'm told (click through the above link for details).
