herewiss13

I feel very out-of-it for not knowing the recent outages were DDoS attacks out of Russia.  I'm certainly glad they're quieting down.

Nonetheless, I've finally made the jump to Dreamwidth (same user name) as an emergency backup should LJ ever implode catastrophically.


Anyone else who's already done so, please let me know...I'd love to set thing up as smoothly and seamlessly as possible.  Thanks!

I'm still figuring out things like invite-codes, but if you'd like them, let me know that too...once I have any (or have found them) I'd be more than happy to pass one along.

It makes me vaguely enraged that I get a CNN breaking news update to inform me that former politician Geraldine Ferraro has passed away, but I have to log onto my Friends List to learn that Dianna Wynne Jones passed away.  I haven't read nearly as much of her work as I ought to have, but given how very influential and popular she was, some more official recognition of her passing seems warranted.

::sigh::

I actually turned the computer on to rave about "Midnight Riot" by Ben Aaronovitch, which is about a police constable in London who sees a ghost and is subsequently apprenticed to the only wizard on the London police force.  It's amazing.  Other people have talked about the spirits of the River Thames (which are very cool), but my favorite part was the fact that the main character is cunning.  He's not scientist, but he's got a rationalist background and so he tries to puzzle things out.  Magic interferes with electronics, so he takes a bunch of old electronic calculators, lays them out in a line and casts a spell to see how far the techno-scrambling effect goes.  He's not codifying magic (Newton did that), but he is trying to figure it out from a 21st century perspective.  Harry Dresden tells you how magic works, Peter Grant is trying to tell himself how it works.  The difference is very intriguing.  It's not often I want to immediately go out and buy a book that I just finished reading from the library, but this is a series I want to commit to early.  The fact that there's already a sequel out: "Moon over Soho" is just a bonus.

I should also mention that the writing is very _very_ droll.  If you like that sort of thing, it'll hook you within the first page.  Otherwise, YMMV.

Ben Goldacre writes the "Bad Science" column for The Guardian.  Watch him give a 15 minute lecture on the placebo effect in 5 minutes.  Hyperactive and educational (and somewhat profane right at the beginning and end)!


The mini-lecture really got me thinking this afternoon.  Can we test the placebo effect in other animals?  I had this grand vision of giving rats flavored caffeine pills...and then giving them flavored sugar pills and seeing if they still got hyper...but then The Wife crushed my dreams of a Nobel by pointing out that this would be more of a conditioned response and that I was basically recapitulating Pavlov. (Thanks, Wife.)

But I thought on!  What sort of non-humans can we explain medicine to directly?  Bring on the Apes!  Someone needs to recruit an enterprising Zoo Vet and some chimps that have learned sign language.  It'd be brilliant!

...and in the mean time, as a more practical research path let's look at a bridge between human and animal: anyone know if post-verbal toddlers are susceptible to the placebo effect (since they are effectively the same mental age as most great apes)?  What's the cut-in point?  When to sugar pills take effect?  And is it a gradual thing?  Sure, you kiss boo-boos to make them feel better pretty early on, but what about a sugar pill that did other things?  Could you induce a psychosomatic rash with words alone on most 5 year-olds?  6 year olds?  Inquiring minds want to know!!

I'm was the middle of watching the latest episode of 'Smallville' when a thought struck me (don't look at me like that, it's the last season!  The only other one I watched was the first...it seemed symmetrical!).  When are superheroes going to stop re-hashing McCarthyism?  

If that trope was a dead horse, it'd be pulped by now.  Every single team/universe, either in comics or on TV has, at one point or another, been attacked by a hysterical populace/media/government as a "Hidden Menace".  Occasionally X-Men delves deeper into racism/xenophobia, since some mutants are visible, but superheroes?...they look like everyone else (but dangerous).

The irony of this reverse-McCarthyism trope can be seen if you replace "Superhero" with "Commie".  "There are hidden Commies out there, superior human beings who are needlessly persecuted as they work for the betterment of humanity."  If McCarthyism is soooo bad (and, mind you, I'm not saying it wasn't) then the people it opposes must be really swell folks indeed!

...kinda makes you wonder if some sort of Soviet propaganda meme has been tireless churning away beneath the surface long after its instigators faded away.  Did Stan Lee ever visit Russia? :-P

The Wife's watching "Ferris Bueller's Day Off".  It's a favorite.  Given the recent wave of nostalgia film & TV are currently riding, we began to wonder when they'll remake it...or even if they could.  That's when it hit me.

Matthew Broderick is 48.  In 20 years time, they'll make a sequel.  Beuller, 70+ and in a nursing home will sneak out for one last day of freedom...with his buddy (who he's liberated from the Alzheimer's ward).

It's a little uncanny how quickly the picture assembles itself in your mind from such a brief & simple concept.  Almost writes itself, doesn't it? :-)

Between currently checked out library books, books I've recently purchased and books I've taken off the shelves and put in a stack because I feel like it's time I read them again, I've got 52 volumes at my bedside (I've dug out a small bookcase for them).  Can we please pause the world until the end of October so I can catch up?

I want to post about books, but I never seem to have either A) the time or B) the insight.  You can only use the phrase "that was really neat" so many times in a row before it begins to pall.  I will say this though: having just read Seanan McGuire's lastest Toby Daye book and re-read the first half of Elizabeth Bear's Elizabethean Promethean Age duology ('Ink & Steel'), I'd really love to see what the Fae would look like if those two authors collaborated.  Their takes aren't identical, but similar enough for some really groovy synergy, I think (and yes, 'groovy' is a technical term).

...of course I think lots of author collaborations would be groovy...Bear/McGuire is just realistically so (for a given value of realistic).

Just finished enjoying the hell out of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. 

The most amusing thing, though, was then I had an epiphany halfway through the movie: it would actually be possible to film 'War for the Oaks' by Emma Bull.  I have an awful time visualizing (audiolyzing?) music in novels, so this may just have been a reflection of that, but if someone announced they were actually doing it, I'd now feel more confident about the whole endeavour.

It's amazing what sticks with you, and why, and when.

Last two days I've had a song stuck in my head from Sesame Street...a song I have not heard in at  _least_ 20 years, and one I only half-way remembered.  I don't know where the earworm came from, but to exorcise it, I finally found the damn thing on YouTube.  It's just as catchy and clever as I half-remembered it and so now I share it with you.

3 seasons in 3 days and I am blown away.

I'd seen the pilot and one other episode back when it first aired, and it seemed nice enough, but I never quite got into it.  I'm actually glad of that, because seeing the finished product as a unitary whole was extremely satisfying.  It had some narrative heft to it that most cartoons lack...without going into the overblown angst and sturm-und-drang of some "adult" anime.

Also...once she gets going, Katara kicks ASS!  Her fight scenes were always my favorite.

I really wish I could be more coherent, but I'm on a bit of an Avatar overload right now.  I can say that, when I first saw the trailers for the live-action movie, I thought they looked promising...but having seen then entire series now, I cannot imagine how a movie, or even a series of movies, could do it justice.