So cloaking devices exist now…

A clear abrogation of our treaty responsibilities.

Jamie posted this at 3:15 PM CDT on Friday, November 11th, 2011 as Nerdom

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Sady Doyle’s review of George R. R. Martin’s fantasy epic, A Song of Ice and Fire — whose first volume, Game of Thrones, was recently adapted for television by HBO — is a classic example of literary criticism done badly: i.e., it says little about the work being reviewed and much about the reviewer.

Doyle’s thrust is that Martin is a raging sexist whose female characters are imprisoned by male conceptions of the proper role for women while being under the constant threat of gang rape, all for our entertainment; in short, J.R.R. Tolkien with Joe Francis’s aesthetics.  Martin’s fans (male) fans devour the misogyny and mayhem with neither examination nor scruple.

To be sure, the people of Martin’s Westeros do have traditional gender roles for women.  These women are, moreover, the victims of a nearly endless series physical and sexual assaults, which Doyle summarizes at length.  The summaries are – in fairness to Doyle – quite funny in how they undercut Martin’s penchant for melodrama.  For instance, her summary of Lady Catelyn Stark, a very serious and important character in the series, begins:

Meet Catelyn! She’s a dutiful, obedient wife and mother. Also, her husband is the hero. She will, therefore, be a sympathetic figure. Catelyn’s an all-around swell gal, and seems pretty sharp and competent, too, except when she is (a) getting all hysterical and non-functional because [of] HER CHILDREN, (b) stupidly kidnapping members of the royal family on a whim because HER CHILDREN, and (c) being a total bitchface to Ned’s illegitimate son because he is not HER CHILDREN.

Taken out of context like this, one can make a seemingly-persuasive case that Martin has issues with women. But as Alyssa Rosenberg argues at ThinkProgress, this analysis fails because it assumes 1) that Martin’s description of such a society is an implicit endorsement of it, 2) that his readers are incapable of rudimentary moral examination, and 3) that there is no literary value for writing about characters struggling against (or within) their society’s expectations, to say nothing of their own identities.

It fails for another reason as well, one Rosenberg either missed or left out entirely: that any society with strict gender roles for women is fated to have reciprocally restrictive ones for men.  Indeed, armed with a perspective equally myopic to Doyle’s,  male characters fare no better than the women (spoilers ahead): Read the rest of this entry »

Tom posted this at 7:49 AM CDT on Wednesday, August 31st, 2011 as Belles Lettres, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Nerdom

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Below is a picture that caused my blood to boil:

Yes, your eyes don’t deceive you. That is George Lucas on the set of one movie that took a dump on my childhood, wearing a t-shirt celebrating a horrible thing he did to another great movie from my childhood, which he sells for a profit on his website.

Screw you, Mr. Lucas. Screw you very much.

Jamie posted this at 12:03 PM CDT on Monday, August 15th, 2011 as Film Rants, Nerdom

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LaForge: Captain, if we re-route ancillary credits toward this endeavor, the resulting economic incentive might provide a sufficient engineering catalyst to spur technological innovation.

Riker: So, basically, we offer them prize money to make the damn thing?

Data: Pricely, sir.

Picard: Make it so!

‘Trek’ tricorder could win $10 million

The objective of the project, currently being explored by the X Prize Foundation and Qualcomm, is not just to create one more cool gadget for “Trek” fans … although the idea of a hand-held, automated medical diagnostic device is pretty cool. The objective is to extend the reach of health information and services to billions more people in the world.

“We believe this is a fundamental step in helping people become true ‘health consumers’ who can have as much say in assessing and accessing health care as they would any other service or product,” Don Jones, vice president of wireless health strategy and market development at Qualcomm Labs, said in this week’s announcement about the project. “Qualcomm believes the value of this X Prize is also in changing the cost structure and focus of health care. By having consumers take the initial actions to obtain health assessment data, the use and the quality of physicians’ time is improved.”

The competition is modeled on earlier incentive programs such as the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private-sector spaceflight, or the $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize for super-efficient road vehicles. The basic idea is to encourage the development of mobile devices that can diagnose patients at least as well as a panel of board-certified physicians.

“The goal obviously is to drive a lot of innovation toward this narrow goal of easy-to-use, low-cost, minimally invasive, rapid, portable and scalable diagnosis,” Jones told me during a follow-up interview.

H/T: Instapundit.

Tom posted this at 10:02 AM CDT on Monday, May 16th, 2011 as I have seen the future. . ., Nerdom, Science!

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Dear God, they invented a universal translator…

I wonder if Uhura ever told Kirk…”Yeah…there’s an app for that.”

Jamie posted this at 11:31 AM CDT on Friday, December 17th, 2010 as Nerdom

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What does the electorate actually think?  AEI crunched the numbers.

Hubbard posted this at 11:54 AM CDT on Wednesday, November 17th, 2010 as Nerdom, Politics

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Is being pulled towards us via TRACTOR BEAMS!

WASHINGTON – Tractor beams, energy rays that can move objects, are a science fiction mainstay. But now they are becoming a reality — at least for moving very tiny objects.

Researchers from the Australian National University have announced that they have built a device that can move small particles a meter and a half using only the power of light.

Physicists have been able to manipulate tiny particles over miniscule distances by using lasersfor years. Optical tweezers that can move particles a few millimeters are common.

Andrei Rhode, a researcher involved with the project, said that existing optical tweezers are able to move particles the size of a bacterium a few millimeters in a liquid. Their new technique can move objects one hundred times that size over a distance of a meter or more.

The device works by shining a hollow laser beam around tiny glass particles. The air surrounding the particle heats up, while the dark center of the beam stays cool. When the particle starts to drift out of the middle and into the bright laser beam, the force of heated air molecules bouncing around and hitting the particle’s surface is enough to nudge it back to the center.

I haven’t decided what is cooler: That we now have fricken tractor beams, or that they were invented by Aussies.

Jamie posted this at 12:18 PM CDT on Wednesday, September 8th, 2010 as Nerdom, Science!

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An alleged “scientist” tries to crush my hopes and dreams:

Captain Kirk might want to avoid taking the starship Enterprise to warp speed, unless he’s ready to shrug off interstellar hydrogen atoms that would deliver a lethal radiation blast to both ship and crew.

There are just two hydrogen atoms per cubic centimeter on average in space, which poses no threat to spaceships traveling at low speeds. But those same lone atoms would transform into deadly galactic space mines for a spaceship that runs into them at near-light speed, according to calculations based on Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

The original crew of “Star Trek” featured as unfortunate examples at a presentation by William Edelstein, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University, at the American Physical Society conference in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 13. The physicist showed a video clip of Kirk telling engineer Scotty to go to warp speed.

“Well, they’re all dead,” Edelstein recalled saying. His words caused a stir among the audience.

This pseudo-scientist has clearly failed basic Warp Theory, Astro-navigation and Elementary Starfleet Engineering. In the first place the deflector array is there to take care of these issues while at impulse and at pre-warp speeds. At Warp Speed they are dislocated from the normal space time continuum inside a subspace bubble.

Duh!

Nice try, Mr. Scientist.

Jamie posted this at 5:29 PM CDT on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 as Nerdom

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…but at least one dromaeosaurid species might have been venomous.  That’s right: raptors with poison!

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m locking my doors, boarding up my windows, and staying in for the rest of my life.  My only consolations is that — whenever they come to murder me — it will all be over soon.

Tom posted this at 5:27 PM CDT on Monday, December 21st, 2009 as Nerdom, Science!

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In our ongoing quest to go where no man has gone before scientists have bad another breakthrough:

To prove that they had really created the trios, called Efimov trimers, the researchers produced one set of  three lithium atoms bound together, and then reproduced it with a binding energy 515 times the first one. (Essentially, binding energy indicates how tightly the particles hold onto one another and how much energy it would take to pull them apart.)

The researchers used a setup called a Feshbach resonance that allowed them to tweak the energy levels of their atoms. They found that when they hit multiples of 515, the particles would bind, but at other energies they wouldn’t, proving that the trios really were Efimov trimers.

“It’s an amazing effect, really,” Hulet said. “A lot of people didn’t believe [Efimov] at first. It was a very strange prediction.”

That’s right! They created the substance used to wipe out entire star systems.

Jamie posted this at 5:40 PM CDT on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 as Nerdom, Science!

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I am not what you would call an audiophile. I don’t obsess over my meticulously cataloged music files in .FLAC format, I don’t own $500 headphones, and I don’t buy all my albums in vinyl because “the music just has more soul, man.” That said, I was recently lent a copy of The Beatles Mono Box Set from a friend of mine.

Holy Crap.

To say that this was an entirely different experience is putting it mildly, it was like hearing many of these songs for the first time. Over the course of the day, and evening, it became quite clear that most of these songs were never meant to be heard in any other format. They were written, arranged and mixed for mono sound and to hear them the way they were intended is to hear the true genius of the greatest band of all time.

I highly reccomend this box set for any true fan of The Beatles (stereo…blech) I know I will need to buy it as my friend is expecting his copy back today.

And rightly so!

Jamie posted this at 10:28 AM CDT on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 as Nerdom, Ourselves

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Hot damn, they invented the Tri-Corder.

Jamie posted this at 10:18 AM CDT on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 as Nerdom, Science!

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Thought of the day: I’m studying under Tom Pangle, who once roomed with Alan Keyes, who ran for Senate in 2004 when Jack Ryan dropped out due to a sex scandal involving his wife, Jeri Ryan.

Dorothy posted this at 12:32 AM CDT on Friday, September 18th, 2009 as Nerdom, Ourselves

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• I just did a lesson in West Coast Swing.  Neat stuff, and I have progressed from not knowing what I’m doing to knowing what’s what and doing so incompetently.  Progress!

• Chesterton quote: “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” 

• Interestingly, I’ve gotten to the point where I have relatively little trouble asking men to dance, but women are trickier for me to ask.  One more thing to play around with.

• Orwell: “Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue.”

• Politics is getting to me these days.  It’s a slow motion trainwreck.  Both sides deserve to lose—and they’re doing that.  I realize that trends inevitably end, but being patient eludes me.  Better to focus on other things.

• Florence King:  “Another kind of conservative would get drunk. This is easy because we don’t drink liberals’ sissy concoctions; it takes forever to get drunk on wine coolers but we can get there on a few belts.”

• I seem to be losing my taste  for wine and beer and even my old standby, whiskey.  People are starting to think that I’m in AA when I go out and get Diet Coke with lime.

• La Rochefoucauld: “Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.”

• When I’m too old to set a bad example, please do me the courtesy of not reminding me.

• Eric Hoffer: “Facts are counterrevolutionary.”

• The counterrevolution is coming.  It’ll be interesting to watch.

• I like Texts from Last Night, but it concerns me somewhat when they refer to places I’ve been.  But even ones that are cliched are funny.  Plus, there’s one thing that I did the other day on there.

Hubbard posted this at 10:39 AM CDT on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Nerdom, Ourselves, Random Bloggish Things

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Last night I eschewed fireworks and took an Australian friend of mine to a screening of Red Dawn at the New Beverly with Lea Thompson.

Is there a more appropriate way to spend the 4th?

No. Wolverines!

Jamie posted this at 2:13 PM CDT on Sunday, July 5th, 2009 as Nerdom, Ourselves

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