semanticals: killing it once

“You killed the animal once.  You don’t want to kill it twice.”

       -Chef Dominique Crenn on the careful cooking of a Thanksgiving turkey.

devourer of worlds

And so, dear friends, it begins.  The End of Days?  The destruction of space-time as we know it?  None call tell.  At least not so far.  What we do know is this: today the European Organization for Nuclear Research, AKA CERN, AKA Bad News for the Human Race, finally launched its $9 gazillion-dollar Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful atom-smasher on earth. 

Designed to blast beams of subatomic protons through miles of tunnel underneath Switzerland and France, the collider will reputedly emulate conditions in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang.  After months of delays and technical glitches, it’s finally up and running, raising heck and smashing protons.  But this is just warmup.  Come early December, CERN will really show us the business when they kick off the main event: some boffo proton collisions. 

And that, of course, is when physicists and experts fear the LHC might potentially unleash heretofore unknown havoc on our plane of existence.  Here’s a primer of what to expect in the coming months:

• The opening of a gargantuan black hole which will swallow the earth and all of its inhabitants.  This is the most popular and/or likely outcome.
•   A tear in the fabric of space-time, resulting in the unleashing of strange, macabre nether-creatures from one or more alternate dimensions.  Monsters will likely include, but are not limited to: A) giant primeval insects, B) dinosaurs and other ancient beasts, C) molemen and squid-people, D) vast and omnipotent Lovecraftian Elder Gods, who may or may not smite our fragile civilization and enslave the human race. 
• In a probable worst-case scenario, the LHC might collapse together two or more parallel dimensions within the “multiverse” predicted by quantum physics and string theory, likely introducing into our world alternate “shadow-self” versions of every man, woman and child on earth, resulting in either: A) mass confusion as regards who is who (how do we know WE’RE not really the shadow-selves in THEIR dimension???); B) a bizarro civil war, pitting regular-verse people against our mirror-image shadow-selves; C) large-scale identity crisis between you and your extra-dimensional doppelgänger, leading to widespread moral digression and existential paralysis (i.e. if you mess around with the other-dimensional version of your girlfriend, does that still count as cheating?)
• Did I mention dinosaurs?  What about squid-people?  In all probability, there will also be squid-people who’ve evolved to ride on dinosaurs.  But you think those dinosaurs are going to let YOU ride on their back?  Think again, fella!

In the interest of good science, we should reassure you that these outcomes, though likely, remain “theoretical.”  At least that’s what our legal department makes us say.  Personally, we think this shit’s a lock.

by the hair of their chinny-chin-chin

Last night the Senate cleared a major procedural hurdle by winning a cloture vote to begin debate on the hotly controversial healthcare reform bill.  The bad news?  As expected, they barely scraped past – by the hair of their chinny-chin-chins, in fact, just narrowly clearing a 60-vote bar with the full support of the Democratic caucus (58 Dems, and 2 Independents, Sanders of Vermont and Lieberman of Connecticut).

In short, there wasn’t a single vote to spare.  Not one. 

This is nerve-fraying but welcome news, and a large heap of the credit rightfully belongs to Majority Leader Harry Reid, the leader of this Democratic Senate, who bucked notable party members and centrist Republicans in crafting a piece of legislation with a public option, albeit an opt-out compromise version.  Despite reports to the contrary, the public option enjoys widespread support from the public in poll after poll after poll.  You have to applaud Reid for resisting temptations to start the Senate  debate and the impending slugfest of Republican lies and half-truths with a thoroughly watered-down healthcare bill.  More powerfully, he did it all with the looming thunder-cloud of a brutal re-election fight hanging over his head in 2010.  Nevada is a purple state, often more red than blue, depending on what stats you believe.  Reid’s support of healthcare reform, and his defense of the public option, may very well cost him his political career. 

Now the true test of this reform begins as the Senate starts what’s anticipated to be weeks of debate on the bill.  The vote last night signified only the willingness to open debate on the subject.  In the coming weeks, the two ladies of Maine, Snowe and Collins, will have a variety of Democrat and White House suitors knocking on their doors, blushing and blustering for their vote. 

Attracting the spotlight too will be Senator Nelson of Nebraska and that perennial neocon-in-sheep’s-clothing, Joe Lieberman, both of whom insist they will support a GOP filibuster should the final Senate bill maintain Reid’s public option in its final form.  Adding fuel to this particular fire, we have the more liberal adherents of the package, notably Bernie Sanders of Vermont (God love ya, Vermonters) who today unveiled a counter-threat of his own: the promise to vote against any bill without a public option.

So the coming weeks will require all the vim and persuasion of our ambitious president and his leaders in Congress.  Neither the Senate nor the House bills are perfect, and merging them will be perfectly nightmarish.  But there is much to support in these bills, and at this juncture, with Democrats gaining more ground in this skirmish than any other time in the long lifespan of the issue, we can’t afford to turn back now.  Like civil rights and Social Security, true healthcare reform will require a series of legislative building blocks.  It’s a long road ahead.

First, though, Obama and his dream super-majority must accomplish this landmark first step.  For that to happen, liberals and centrists alike will have to learn to live with imperfection.  The stark choice they face, after all, isn’t between this flawed but valuable bill and a perfect one; it’s between this flawed bill or nothing at all.

antic ewoks

Oh, live television, how do I love thee?  What’s not to enjoy of the goofs and gaffes of real-time telecasts.  And this one’s a You Tube doozy.  And I don’t say that lightly, believe me. 

In honor of Halloween, the hosts of NBC’s The Today Show donned Star Wars costumes for a cooking segment on holiday treats and cocktails.  Someone in the Today Show brain trust apparently also ran out and hired a couple of Central Casting midgets and threw ‘em in Ewok suits to add a little intergalactic color.  At some point before ol’ Matt and Meredith tossed to Al and the gang, those very same costumed midgetwoks tossed back some drinks… and then wrecked havoc on the set.  According to industry blogs, the midgets were legitimately wasted, unbeknownst to crew and hosts. 

Yes, friends, you heard that right – drunk ewoks run amok.  I couldn’t bring you Ann Curry in slave Leia get-up, so here’s the next best thing.  And after viewing it MANY times, I can’t decide on my favorite part.  Watching an Ewok moonwalk?  Watching two of them start to brawl?  Or is it just the visual of Al Roker decked out like Han Solo?  You decide for yourself.   

last meals

On Tuesday evening, John Allen Muhammad, the infamous Washington DC sniper, was executed by the Virginia Department of Corrections.  Per custom, he was granted his choice of a last meal, though in accordance with Muhammad’s wishes, the details of the meal were not released to the press.

How does that whole death row last supper work, you ask?  In and of itself, it seems like almost a quaint notion.  Surely if a prisoner asked for a twelve-course French dinner, the request wouldn’t be granted.  So how are the decisions made?

Well, now Slate’s Christopher Beam supplies some answers over at their “Explainer” column.

According to Beam, the least meal policy differs from state to state, and sometimes from prison to prison.  In many states, the last meal must consist of foods easily prepared in the facility’s own kitchen, often by the head cook, another prisoner, or readily procured from a nearby eatery at reasonable cost.  Without question, the most oft-requested is McDonald’s, or similar fast food.

As for the specific items themselves, the list includes lots of cheeseburger, fried chicken, chicken-fried steaks, ice cream and cake requests, served alongside plenty of Coke, Dr. Pepper and sugary fruit juices. 

In fact, for further specifics, you can scope out the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s website, which until 2004 made a practice of listing last meal requests of its death row inmates.  There’s plenty of them, too, as you might guess, given Texas’ reputation for lethality.

Allen Janecka, for instance, executed in 2003, asked for “chicken fried steak, French fries, ketchup, salad, blue cheese dressing, iced tea with lemon, two sodas, rolls and butter.”  Convicted murderer Bruce Jacobs asked for “a whole fried chicken, twelve buttered bread slices, fried onion rings and okra, six RC colas, one large bag of Fritos, two tomatoes, salt and pepper,” while another inmate, James Powell, asked for only “one pot of coffee.” 

Among the annals of more infamous criminals, Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, requested two pints of mint chocolate-chip ice cream.  John Wayne Gacy, the well-known clown-faced serial killer, requested shrimp, fried chicken, French fries, and a pound of strawberries. 

And as Beam points out, convicted Arkansas murderer Ricky Ray Rector, who in 1992 shot himself in the head in a botched suicide attempt before capture, suffering brain damage in the process, ate a meal of steak, fried chicken and Kool-Aid, but before getting marched off on his final walk insisted on saving his pecan pie dessert “for later.”

emperor mike

Yikes, Emperor Mike, that was a close call!  New York’s (sort of) beloved Mayor Bloomberg barely eked out a victory in yesterday’s elections there.  Sort of an embarrassing turn of events, considering the polls showed him winning by sound double-digits.  In exit polls, New Yorkers thankfully verified that they were more than a little yucked-out by Bloom’s meek grasp of democratic principles. 

As previously noted on this blog, America’s favorite power-hankering Independent not only had the city’s popular mayoral term-limit law overturned to afford himself a third stab at Giuliani-like heraldry, but even creepier, he funneled into his campaign’s coffers an estimated $90 million of his own scratch, more than any other candidate in human history.  Congrats on your tenuous reelection, Mister Emperor-Mayor.  You’ve proven campaigns in America can still be jiggered and bought, just not as quietly as they used to.

uncanny valley

It’s a question of preference: The Incredibles or The Incredible Hulk?

By which I’m referring to Pixar’s 2004 stylized animated adventure about a family of superheroes, versus the 2008 Louis Letterier-directed actioner, which featured a fully computer-animated and (kind of) photo-real Hulk.  That is, as photo-real as you can get without encountering a real-life muscle-bound green-skinned gigantor. 

But to the point, both films turned on animated characters.  The difference, of course, being that Pixar’s characters were cartoonish and stylized, all goofy outsized features and limbs, whereas the transforming monster of the Marvel film was intended to look, well, real enough to stand side-by-side with honest-to-goodness human actors… and Liv Tyler too.  Somehow the Pixar characters had so much more expression and humanity to them.

Along those same lines, you ever wonder why Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny manages to retain so much more humanness than the photorealistic CGI denizens of a flick like Polar Express?  Think back.  Think hard.  Remember how dead-eyed mannequin Tom Hanks haunted us that holiday season? 

High-gloss digital characters and environments pervade the cinema of the moment, but so much of it seems to leave audiences cold.  It’s hard not to feel like special effects are… well, not all that special lately.  Are they in retrograde?

And what’s the cause of this chilling effect?  With filmmakers like Peter Jackson and James Cameron crowing the advances of motion-capture and digital character-making, why does it all still look so phony?

According to scientists and robotics experts, the answer lies in a decades-old theory known as “the uncanny valley.”  Conceived by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, the term literally refers to a dataset mapped on a graph, one axis depicting a robot’s increasing human likeness, and the other our emotional response to viewing them.  As robots more closely resemble real people, we actual humans become more and more distrustful of them, even a little revolted.  When machines reach for a close degree of human mimicry, we become ever more keenly aware of their innate inhumanity.

Now a major new study by a bunch of fancy Princeton scientists suggests the uncanny valley phenomenon affects primates too.  According to this article in Science Daily, monkeys show a humanlike fascination with visual representations of themselves.  But as those representations grow increasingly lifelike while not necessarily real-looking, the monkeys grow distrustful. 

Based on these early results, said fancy-pants researchers suspect the uncanny valley response is tied to the highly evolved facial response functions we humans share with our primate cousins.  Others suspect the phenomenon may be connected to human “disgust responses,” developed to help early man and woman identify their sick brethren, and in turn avoid infection. 

But enough with all the science.  I want to know, what did the monkeys think of that Avatar trailer?

semanticals: da vinci crowed

“He turns not back who is bound to a star.”

                                                                       -Leonardo da Vinci

hollow developments

In other news, too, perhaps more pressing than China and green tech, today we learned that Hamid Karzai, the sometimes president of Afghanistan has agreed – under great American duress, no doubt – to allow a runoff to last month’s disputed banana republic-style national election.  Throughout the media hoopla, it’s hard not to feel like the US is saying to Afghanistan, if you’re going to rig elections, at least do a better job of covering it up.  

The Obama administration has, it seems, strong-armed the strong-armer, which, instead of bringing glad tidings of a bright political future for Afghanistan, merely underscores the morass of nation-building we’ve waded into over there.  

Sure, the media continues to refer to this tarpit of an occupation with that puzzling term “war,” which seems a little far-fetched at this juncture.  In a war, there are clear enemies, a well-delineated objective, a constant series of combat operations.  We’re not fighting a war in Afghanistan.  This is an occupation, puntuated with occasional guerilla-style skirmishes.  This is national-building, carried out in a nation that for centuries has refused to be built, least of all by imperial forces.

Any war has an objective, an endpoint in sight.  What’s our objective in Afghanistan?  Obama, like his weak-minded and ill-intentioned predecessor, talks continuously of “victory” and “success.”  But the parameters of success have never been clearly circumscribed.  We arrived at first in the wake of 9/11 to topple the Taliban and rout Al Qaeda.  Over years, we achieved a measure of accomplishment and sent militants fleeing.

Now they’ve regrouped across the border in Pakistan, where the issue of armed imperialist adventuring becomes a whole lot pricklier.  We can’t invade that nation, and its tenuous, enfeebled government is of two minds when it comes to helping the US.  As this re-energized Taliban snaps at the haunches of the Pakistani government, launching attacks within their own borders, Pakistan’s leaders continue to be preoccupied with old Indian feuds.  What’s worse, Pakistan’s nuclearized, which ups the ante darkly should that government fall to militant forces.

And yet, despite the stakes with Pakistan and the rudderless stagnation in Afghanistan, President Obama continues to consult with his military and diplomatic advisers, promising via proxies a rich resolution right around the bend.  

There is easy resolution in Afghanistan.  We need to quit trying to democratize a hostile, mountainous, decentralized nation-state.  We need to quit playing the occupier in a futile game of atttrition.  

From what I’ve read of the closed-door negotiations taking place within Obama’s inner-circle, it seems apparent they get some of this.  McChrystal has asked for more troops, but when – as has often been pundited – do military strategists request less?  And it’s not like he can throw up his hands and admit he’s out of options.

As far as I can tell, it’s Biden’s plan that looks the most promising.  We pull back and secure the borders, maintain current troop levels, but focus on securing the major urban strongholds.  Then we focus the bulk of our efforts on foiling terrorist activity throughout the region with precise surgical strikes, all of it buttressed by a strong multilateral diplomatic push, spearheaded by the president himself.

Obama needs to quit defining this effort in Bush/Cheney terms.  We need to return Afghanistan to autonomy and quit trying to democratize the region, and stop propping up Karzai’s straw man narco-state.  

Let’s see Obama scale down this occupation, this endless non-war.  After all, he won a peace prize.  Let’s see some alternatives to perpetual warfare.