The muppets do Bohemian Rhapsody


watching this full screen in HD sort of blew my mind.

I'd heard about the dry ice and soapy water trick many years ago, but this is the first time I've had the dry ice to dink with.

( cut because it's a big closeup of a hairy spider )I got so involved taking its picture, I forgot to evict it.</p>

Usually, I really enjoy Boingboing. Yet I notice it doesn't take but one or two poor editorial choices in a week, for me to want to back away slowly from this link.

Two days ago, it was this one, amplifying a claim made in wired that there are people out there who are themselves afraid of vaccines, and those of us who aren't afraid of vaccines, should be afraid of these people and their children.

Honestly, I didn't really care one way or the other until I had to start taking care of a severely autistic child. It's almost as stigmatizing as having a major mental illness oneself!

And then today:The truth about truthers.

What makes me green about this post, is the way the word "truth" is used as a bludgeon to discredit anyone who claims to have questions about the last eight years, specifically the part about the last eight years having to do with 9/11.

If you thought there was something fishy in the way Enron started a crisis that toppled a certain California governor, you're not yet in the tin foil hat crowd. If you don't like what's been going down in Iraq and Afghanistan, you're in good company. But if you harbor doubts about what supposedly happened on 9/11, then you are lumped in with those who think they know the truth about 9/11.

In other news, black is white, war is peace, and the chocolate ration has been rectified.

It bugs me that this is such a tar baby, I can't talk or think about it without getting upset and losing my objectivity. Which is kind of a win for the terrorists, if you think about it. It takes a certain self discipline to conclude that the bad guys won that day, and the chance that they can be brought to justice, or even taken to trial for some civic closure... It ain't gonna happen.

...but set that aside for a bit, take a longer view, and take in the bigger pattern... there's a lot more going on than scary anthrax flu outbreaks, or magic bullets box cutters taking down building seven.

I have to remind myself that the reason I think the good guys are gonna win, is because they/we actually have a bigger menu of options to choose from. Conversely, violence for the sake of violence does have its own self consistent logic- that is also self limiting.

These things can't truly be seen in real time, it takes historical hindsight to spot the tipping points. I don't think it was really Hiroshima and Nagasaki that marked the high point of violence as a force multiplier. I think the invention of the cobalt bomb was as far as it was possible to take that thought. The only possible outcome more extreme, would have been the *use* of the cobalt bomb, and no further discussions would then be possible.

Maybe in another sixty years, it will be possible to look back and point at the moment where a nonviolent/ less-violent force was exactly equal in combat strength, to a conventional violence-as-a-force-muliplier agenda.

In the moment, we can't see the tide- we only notice the ripples on the top.

Just after I told cindygerb that real wasabi was out of the question, I'd have to make do with the flavored horseradish, I wentn and found real wasabi for these deviled demonized eggs.

none came back from the party, so I have to conclude that they tasted OK.

Listening to the soundtrack for Smoke Signals, I just had a 'what if' plotline hit me. The ghost dance tradition of the late 19th century begins to produce useful results. Not so much with the resurrection or bulletproof clothes, but more like channeling the most important, most useful souls. After a while, it becomes clear that it's not just indian souls that are coming back, and increasingly white folks are getting in on the action. But the souls coming back are pretty consistent in their tactics and strategy, allowing for the limitations of their own time, of course.

This would probably be more satisfying if done as an alternate history. The dance really picks up at the turn of the century. By 1976, Callenbach's Ecotopia, or Robinson's Pacific Edge have essentially been realized.

Hah. Now all I have to do is write the damn thing.

When Jim DeMint compared health care reform to the battle of Waterloo, he didn't specify who Obama was supposed to be. We all know Napoleon lost that one, but Arthur Wellesley just isn't as famous as Napoleon.

Actually, I'm inclined to agree with the Senator: Health care reform could well shape up to be a kind of Waterloo moment, just not in the way he imagines. If the public option can indeed be a stepping stone to single payer, it would incidentally mean that a whole lot of corporate information, files having to do with the insurance companies and Big Pharma, all this data will eventually come under public scrutiny.

I'm not talking about the super-seekrit HIPAA stuff about whether or not you are predisposed to cancer, I'm talking about the choices that private for-profit entities have been making about who gets covered and who doesn't, and why.

When I was cleaning up the mess after my dad died, I tried to get a hold of his medical records. The response I got back from Blue Shield of Minnesota made it clear that they would only release to me information that wouldn't incriminate them, and if I wanted more than what they decided, I'd have to take them to court.

When they cited HIPAA at me, it wasn't any sort of consumer privacy being protected, it was their corporate bottom line. And I don't think my dad's case is any kind of exception.

Color me paranoid, but I've read a little bit about medical experimentation since WW2. I smell something stinky in this health care reform "debate", that's far worse than what Big Tobacco had going for so many years. I smell something that makes Watergate look like a marital infidelity.

The profit motive is pretty easy to understand, we rank #1 in the world as far as how much money we pay, and we rank #37 in the world in terms of health outcome for that money. (We're still higher ranked than Cuba, which spends a piddling 6.3% of their GDP on their system!)

What's harder to understand, is what kind of positive outcomes, beyond just the profit motive, all that money is buying. There are no conspiracies any more, not since 9/11, only board meetings. And the Fox news perception that ACORN is somehow more significant than the end of a 1.3 trillion dollar a year racket- this is all they got?

In the long run, conscience trumps money. It's just a matter of time before someone decides they'd rather be able to live with themselves than be smelly rich. It's not a war crime if it was done during peace time.

So on the down side, I finally caught the same bug that's been going around the household. But since I'm the last to succumb, the other two adults are in a position to help me out, and I can coast on some of the goodwill I built when they were sick.

I found a stereo card viewer at a thrift shop, including some of the cards. And wouldn't stereograms be a nice way to document steampunk displays? I don't know if I can get it together in time for steamcon, but I *do* have a stereo film camera that wouldn't look that out of place at such an event. I can even imagine doing some kind of goofy bluescreen backdrops where the matte behind the subject is itself a 3D display! maybe a scene from Fritz lang's Metropolis, or a zeppelin in the background... It's all quite doable, just not quickly, and probably not by me.

Oh, but the viewer was a fold-up version with a broken hinge. and tonight I finally cobbled together a much nicer workaround, using a handle from a previous project, some lego bricks, and some duct tape. Not only can I look at the cards, but if I press it against the computer screen I can also view a bunch of 3d stuff on Flickr. (I hate to try to free view this stuff, it always gives me a headache, and now there's a firefox plug-in that lets me switch from cross-eye to parallel, and vice versa.

Oh, and I was kind-of tickled to read This modest proposal seriously suggesting a one-way trip to mars. It's the farthest from a "flags and footprints" mission that I've ever seen, and it stirs up the pot nicely.

I think I'd like to see a stepped-down version of this for the first crewed mars missions. The nominal mission profile has room for maybe a third of the crew to come home at any single opposition. In a dire emergency, everyone could all come home at once, but that would take up all the reserves, and we wouldn't be going back any time soon under that kind of failure mode.

A Man-rated mission is an order of magnitude less risky than a robotic mission, this idea would be yet another order of magnitude more reliable: we're not going to send people off for decades at a time, unless we're very sure of our ability to make a comfortable home there.

(i kind of wish I knew the endurance record for south polar exploration. Are there any permanent residents of Antarctica, people who don't expect to come back north until they retire?)

Anyway, I still needs to get me a couple of inexpensive digital cameras, so I can bolt them together and have them share a trigger. Seems a shame to have to dip back into the chemical world just to get human scale stereo vision.

I've read the creation myths about the modern corporation, and how the Limited Liability Corporation came into being. I just don't understand why the idea still is being used.

Just a random example that came to me this morning:Misleading soaps are bad for everything

Now, of those thousands of products, no one product is ever going to be shown to be the one that caused the killer strain of staph that became captain trips. Divide the blame widely enough, and no one gets called out. Yet as a whole, even though the science is pretty clear on this one, nothing can be done to stop it.

As a general principal, the Limited Liability corporation can cause a lot more harm than it can ever be called to task for. Yet its legal charter protects its decisionmakers from the negative consequences of their actions.

If this made sense back when there were continents to be exploited, does it make any sense now?

House Flooby Nooby just got back from Disneyland. We all took pictures...

The Child, his father, and my neck on Big Thunder Mountain

tavalon in front of the mad hatter's shop

Me on the Jungle Cruise

galen1's got the plane tickets

The Child's Grandmother has a favorite Disney Character.