Monthly Archives: August 2013

CSI: Space

Science is always pretty cool, but sometimes it’s WAY cool.  Remember the Chelyabinsk meteor that went streaking through the sky and exploded with the force of half a million tons of TNT earlier this year?  It was caught on video from many different angles thanks to the prevalence of Russian dash cams.  All those videos allowed scientists to triangulate it’s trajectory back into space and find out which larger chunk of rock hurled this warning shot across our bow.  The likely culprit?  The notorious 2011 EO40!  Dun dun DUUUUUNNNNN!

Yeah, I’ve never heard of it either.  It’s just one of many large chunks of space rock screaming through space and happens to cross Earth’s orbit.  But how cool is it that we were able to use the tools of science to track the origins of a fireball that exploded in our atmosphere and sprinkled to the ground?

Phil Plait’s article that I linked to above also pointed out something that is obvious once it’s pointed out, but I had never really thought about it before.  Many asteroids travel in packs, following very similar orbits to each other.  Scientists believe that the pack mentality of asteroids is the result of them all being part of a larger asteroid that had broken up.  This makes sense because many asteroids aren’t really all that solid.  They’re just giant balls of rock and dust loosely glommed together by their own gravity.  Strike them hard enough with another streaking rock and a new asteroid family is born!  Awww, how cute, he has your chemical composition!

DOOOOOOOOMMMM!

Scientists have stated that the Sun’s magnetic poles are only months away from reversing polarity.  The apocalypse is nigh.  This is going to be like every Star Trek episode where Geordi or Dax or whoever attempts to reverse the polarity of some gewgaw and science runs amok only supersized.  I fully expect the entire solar system to be transported into another universe as a result of this occasion.

We are, of course, ignoring the fact that the Sun does this every 11 years or so and I have already lived through 3 of these polarity switches.  That’s boring, though.  It’s much better to imagine massive upheavals and global chaos as a result of events that are long enough apart that our memories fade from the last event.  I’m pretty sure I just rehashed the formula for every trend known to man.

Really, though, all this means is the magnetic sphere that surrounds the solar system out well past Pluto gets all wibbly-wobbly forming lower period, higher frequency waves during the event.  This wibbly-wobblyness is actually good news for Earth and astronauts as it tends to protect us better from the high energy particles from outside the solar system that cause bad things to happen to astronauts and electronics.  It also can cause space weather to act up which means a greater likelihood of aurorae and other coronal mass ejection related phenomena.  This is bad for astronauts and electronics.  So I’m just going to call this whole event a wash.  Unless I’m missing something…

Finally Addressing The Problems With White Culture

Hurray for Chris Hayes.  Finally, someone in the mainstream media is addressing issues like white-on-white violence and the prevalent drug culture that pervades white youths.

[youtube http://youtu.be/R_oa_VEnNlA]

Book Review: Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Another award winning novel that I didn’t much care for.  I had a very hard time getting into “Zoo City” so take what I have to say here with a grain of salt.

“Zoo City” takes place in semi-modern day Johannesburg, South Africa.  The title refers to a slum section of the city where those who have been “animalled” live.  Being animalled is like having your own familiar.  The way an individual is animalled is a bit vague, but it has something to do with committing a serious crime.  Commit a serious crime and soon thereafter an animal will appear at your side and you are forever tied to it.  Separation from the animal causes immense pain and the death of the animal causes the human to be drawn in by the Undertow which kills you.  Animals can range from lions to butterflies and all have extended life spans and human.  The animals also unlock some sort of magical power in the humans.  This power varies from person to person.  Being animalled is like wearing a scarlet letter and the affected individuals are usually scorned by society.  It is an interesting concept with lots of avenues of possible exploration, but they are mostly avoided in this book.

The main character is Zinzi December who is animalled with a sloth.  She is an ex-druggie that owes lots of money to all the wrong people.  She is slowly paying that money back by using her magical power offinding lost things for people for money and running spam e-mail scams (of the Nigerian Royalty needing seed money to release a vast fortune variety) for the person to whom she owes the money.  She became animalled by doing something that led to the death of her brother.  What that something was is not entirely clear but it had something to do with drugs.  I find this incredibly frustrating.  Why even go into how Zizi got animalled if you’re not going to give the whole story?  It would be better if they simply left you to wonder how Zinzi got animalled.  There is a lot of stuff to choose from.

The plot centers around Zinzi being hired by a reclusive music mogul to find the female half of a set of twins who comprises his biggest current hit band.  She disappeared days before the band’s new album is supposed to drop.  The money is good so she goes against her usual rule of not using her power to find lost people.  What follows is a series of really hard to follow events leading up to the discovery of the lost girl.  This discovery is entirely anticlimactic and everything that follows afterwards makes no sense.  It is not entirely clear why Zinzi took the job when she certainly could have broken her rules and made a lot of money for finding missing people long before this.  It is especially not clear why Zinzi would continue on the case when it becomes abundantly clear that there’s a lot of bad mojo surrounding the twins and the music mogul.  And it makes no sense whatsoever why Zinzi would continue to pursue the case after the twin is found.

Outside of the main plot, though, there are some really cool, if depressing, views into South African life.  The peeks into the 419 fraud e-mail scams is legitimately interesting.  Zoo City itself is supposed to be a fairly real life look into one of Johannesburg’s suburban ghettos.  There are also glimpses into African issues like child soldiering, rebel warlords, and war refugee families.  These are all side stories but I found them much more compelling than the actual main plot.

I finished reading “Zoo City” with so many unanswered questions.  Maybe my inability to get into the book made me miss some key points in the plot and that’s why I have so many questions.  It is a possibility.  But I am a fairly astute reader and, while I can pass a point or two on something I just didn’t pick up on, this book just had too many of them for me to recommend to anyone.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention one other thing that I though was pretty cool about the book.  Race was almost completely invisible while being set in a country known for it’s racial issues.  At no point was I conscious of the race of any of the main characters.  It wasn’t until probably three quarters of the way through that I realized it.  It’s quite an accomplishment in my book.

Movie Review: 2 Guns

Jean-Paul’s rating: 4/5 stars

Q: What do you get when you cross Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg?

A: An incredibly fun action movie with some hilarious interactions between the two stars.

A word of warning, this movie is not to be taken seriously.  Any attempts to take this movie seriously will be used against you in a court of law.  That said, wow is this movie fun.  Stig (Mark Wahlberg) and Bobby (Denzel Washington) play two drug dealers/problem solvers who are working for a Mexican drug kingpin, Papi Greco (played by the always awesome Edward James Olmos).  Only, Bobby is actually a DEA agent trying to take down Papi.  Oh, and Stig is actually a Navy Seal who is trying to, well, that’s not entirely clear.  I mean, they have an explanation but it doesn’t really make much sense and has to do with robbing a bank that contains Papi’s drug money stash.

So they’re off to rob a bank.  Things don’t go quite as expected.  This leads to a series of events that can only be described as improbable.  S’ok, though, this is an action movie.  The action sequences are pretty standard, but entertaining.  Where the movie shines, though, is all the interactions between Bobby and Stig.  It’s like Abbott and Costello with those two.  Bobby’s the straight man and Stig’s the goof.  The only real problem with the movie is that there are a sequence of events when Bobby and Stig are separated and then it just becomes a standard action movie.  Get them back together and the fun starts once again.

A funny story.  Prior to the movie, my brother and I were discussing Mark Wahlberg and he had commented on how he could never take Mark Wahlberg seriously as an actor.  He has a bit of a prejudice against crossover stars who start as musicians and move over into acting (except for Ice Cube who he thinks is awesome).  I was defending Mark Wahlberg as a pretty competent actor who can do some serious work.  Then this movie comes along and validates everything my brother thought about Mark.  This is not to take anything away from Walhberg.  He plays off Denzel Washington incredibly well in this movie.  He can not by any stretch of the imagination be called a serious actor, though.

After watching this movie, I want to see a “2 Guns” comedy series featuring Wahlberg and Washington.  They were that much fun together.  What “2 Guns” provides is an outlandish plot strewn together with some decent action scenes and packaged with some teriffic buddy antics.  It’s not art, but it is high quality entertainment.

Respectability Politics

I had never heard of the term “respectability politics” before this video, but it is grossly prevalent in our society whenever race is involved.  The context here is that Don Lemon, a CNN anchor, was taking about the Trayvon Martin shooting when he started talking about black people needing to pull their pants up.  That’s respectability politics.  Bringing up superficial issues of respectability when the issues at hand have nothing to do with it.  Trayvon wearing a hoodie was another example of respectability politics at play.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmdlMlRdt7Y&feature=youtube_gdata_player]

A Great Talk About Race In America

Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about Trayvon, President Obama, and the history of racism in America.  It’s a must watch.

Electoral College Machinations

So, it turns out that there has been this quiet state level push to effectively abolish the electoral college.  How they are doing it is an ingenious bit of political science.  States are passing bills that would guarantee that all of the electoral votes for the state will go to whomever receives the most popular votes from the entire country.  The kicker is that this will only happen once enough states representing half of the electoral votes pass a similar bill.  Rhode Island just signed on and that puts them half way to their goal.  Or, states representing one quarter of the total electoral votes have now signed on.  Once they reach their goal, bam, the President of the United States will forever be elected by the popular vote instead of the electoral college even though the electoral college will still exist.  Constitution followed, check.  Popular vote enabled, check.  Ingenious.

Of course, as the article states, the likelihood of getting enough states to sign on is pretty low since only Democratic states have been able to pass it and any individual state could always just change the law back to what it once was.  Which is a shame.  The only decent reason to keep the electoral college is to maintain minority representation and minority states already get massive over-representation from the Senate.  I don’t think they need the same at the Executive level.  Regardless, it’s still pretty cool political science jujitsu even if it will ultimately fail.

The Shape Of The Universe Explained

I’ve posted other things about the shape of the universe, but nothing that is quite as clear as this video.  The gist of the video is that we are three dimensional beings in a higher dimensional universe and you can have a universe that looks flat and finite but still travel in one direction only to end up back where you started.  This is similar to walking around a sphere only supesized!  I am in awe of people that can take such a difficult concept to wrap your mind around and make it easy to understand and clever at the same time.  This is part one of a promised three and covers the idea of a flat universe, which you may recall is one of three recognized models for the shape of the universe.  The others being spherical and hyperbolic.  Those will be covered in the next videos to come.  Watch:

[youtube http://youtu.be/_k3_B9Eq7eM]

 

Not Much To See

Work on the house has been slow. Things are getting done but they’re not very visible. The sewer and water hookup are waiting on the city, but the underground plumbing for the house is done.

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