How to torch your own home for the holidays

Oh, dear. Maybe these people should eat out next year:

For seven more “how not to deep-fry a turkey” videos, visit Eat Me Daily.

Bored on a Friday night?

I’ve trying to imagine the process by which the star of this video and his friends came to think this was a good idea:

As you can imagine, I failed.

Antimatter found in lightning?

Just to show again that Nature contains more wonders than the mind can imagine, Science News reports that the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has spotted the tell-tale signature of antimatter in terrestrial lightning:

Designed to scan the heavens thousands to billions of light-years beyond the solar system for gamma rays, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has also picked up a shocking vibe from Earth. During its first 14 months of operation, the flying observatory has detected 17 gamma-ray flashes associated with terrestrial storms — and some of those flashes have contained a surprising signature of antimatter.

During two recent lightning storms, Fermi recorded gamma-ray emissions of a particular energy that could have been produced only by the decay of energetic positrons, the antimatter equivalent of electrons. The observations are the first of their kind for lightning storms. Michael Briggs of the University of Alabama in Huntsville announced the puzzling findings November 5 at the 2009 Fermi Symposium.

Neat!

The Science News article may be behind a subscriber firewall, so visit Watt’s Up With That for more information and analysis.

Flowchart of the Rings

Via Strange Maps,  a rendering of the Lord of the Rings as a flowchart of the progress of the main characters. It’s too big to show here, so a sample will have to do:

Visit XKCD.com for the full diagram. They also have flow charts for Star Wars (original trilogy, of course) and Jurassic Park.

Visions of other worlds

Beautiful photos of Cassini’s fly-by of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. See the giant water geysers!

And to think, had we kept up with Project Orion, we could have been there to see it in person nearly 40 years ago.

Queen to Queen’s level three

I started a new correspondence chess section this week, under the auspices of the CCLA. This is my third event with this group since leaving the US Chess Federation (You think Congress is screwed up? Try the USCF.), and I’ve been mostly happy with how things have gone. The people seem friendly and the officials helpful. Aside from one major glitch with my entry into my second event, all has gone well.

While some people still play correspondence chess by post card, more and more play is online via email or, increasingly, a web server. Web server play is great: the system keeps the official game score and watches the time limits (in CCLA, you have 40 days to make 10 moves). All you have to do is worry about your moves – and what your opponents are cooking up.

I’m playing in a section of people rated roughly equally (my own CCLA rating is about 1670 – “Class B”). I have four opponents, and we each play two games against each other: one as White and another as Black. It’s early days yet, as we’re still making our opening moves, but things have already gotten interesting in a couple of games. Here’s the position in one:

Stuart v. Ragan, CCLA Fall Server series S90251

I’m playing Black, and Mr. Stuart has just played 10. Bb5, threatening and pinning my knight. (No kibbitzing, please. We’re not allowed help with our games. I do think I have a slight advantage in this position, however.) This game had started as a kind-of Trompowsky Attack, but had evolved into into something resembling a reversed Scandinavian Defense. A bit weird, since the Scandinavian is my main defense against 1.e4.  Just this morning, however, I realized that the pawn structure most resembled a reversed Slav Defense. I’ve never played with or against a Slav in my life, though it bears some resemblance to the Scandinavian.  If this confuses you, think how I feel! I have some studying to do.

Meanwhile, it’s always fun to start a new section. I’ll try to post updates as they occur.

The ten worst owners in sports

Some of these I quibble with and some I can’t say one way or the other (I’m not much of a baseball fan and I lost interest in basketball several years ago), but Number One is spot on.

And that picture – hah!

Bad writers, bad!

The cast of Criminal Minds

It’s one thing for a character in a movie or TV show to make a mistake that costs them dearly: pick the wrong door, dial the wrong number, or cut the wrong wire, and something bad happens. If no one made a mistake, then the story would never advance – or, if it did, it would be very dull.  So… mistakes happen, and the writer needs for them to happen.

It’s another thing altogether, however, for a writer to take his character from the realm of mistake to that of mind-numbingly stupid in order to advance his story. That is unacceptable; it ruins the tale.

Case in point: The other night, I was catching up on episodes of Criminal Minds, a generally very good series about a team of FBI profilers who ride to the rescue to catch serial killers and mass murderers. My writing partner and I have been following the show with the idea of writing a spec script for it.

The episode in question was titled “Roadkill,” from late last season. The killer murders his victims by running them down with his truck. Not a bad idea; it has kind of a “Christine” vibe to it. Trouble is, in each of the killings we see, the victims have to be unbelievably moronic to advance the story:

• Victim #1 is caught alone on a narrow rural road, her car broken down. A truck pulls up, and she thinks help has arrived. When she realizes the driver instead intends to run her down, she flees. Up to this point, fine. No problem. Her escape is simple, right? Just run off into the nearby woods where the truck cannot follow her. So, of course, the writers have her run along the road ahead of the truck, eventually meeting her grisly death
• Victim #2 is caught in a multi-level parking structure. When he realizes the psycho is trying to run him down, does he run into the nearby public stairwell where the half-ton pickup cannot go? Nope. Does he hide behind other cars, using them for cover until he can escape? Nah, that would be too logical. No, this fool runs ahead of the truck down a spiral ramp until he’s crushed against an elevator door.

In both cases, the victims were so dumb that I was left with little sympathy for them. They deserved to die. And the writers deserve to be mocked mercilessly.

The problem with mandated stupidity is that it breaks the suspension of disbelief. Instead of being caught up in the story, the viewer is suddenly shaking his head and asking that famous question, “WTF?” And, as I mention above, you stop caring what happens to the characters. If you don’t change the channel, you keep watching just to see how much worse the cluster-frak before your eyes will get, like watching a train wreck happen in front of you.

And that is a moment of failure as a writer.

Both writers have excellent credits to their names, so how did something this bad get out of the writer’s room? I can only guess there was time-pressure to get the episode shot and in the can to meet the schedule, and that there was no time for an extensive rewrite.  Whatever the reason, Roadkill is a good example for budding writers of what not to do.

Who is Number One?

The trailer for the miniseries remake of the surreal classic, The Prisoner.

Some observations:

• I can already tell Ian McKellen will steal the show.
• A friend in the movie-trailer business once warned me that you see the best parts in any trailer.
• Remakes always leave me wondering “If the original was so wonderful, why does it need a do-over?”
• Like the gentlemen at Exurban League, let us hope this does not suck.

The site for the miniseries.

To the dungeon with you!

The site is linked in the sidebar to the right, but I wanted to promote Megadungeon.net as something special: a collaborative, volunteer-based design of of a large, ruined monastery and dungeon in the tradition of the early days of roleplaying games, especially Dungeons and Dragons. Even if you don’t play D&D, the maps are quite nice and easily ported to other games. There are some nice new creatures, too.

Well done.

Headline of the year?

Via Breitbart:

Insane killer escapes on field trip to county fair

A criminally insane killer from eastern Washington is on the run after escaping during a field trip to the county fair that his mental hospital organized.

Why such a dangerous person was out in public was a question many, including Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire, were asking as authorities searched for Phillip Arnold Paul.

Authorities at Eastern State Hospital, where Paul is a patient, are being criticized for allowing him to visit the fair despite his violent criminal past and a history of trying to escape.

An insane killer? Escaped at the fair? You just know that, when he’s caught (and let’s hope it’s soon), he’ll be wearing a clown suit.

A murderer’s garden

Popular Mechanics has an article on the 10 Deadliest Plants in the World. My favorite? Oleander. So common, yet so fatal:

This extremely common evergreen shrub is one of the most poisonous plants in the world. “If I were a parent and covering every electrical outlet in the home to protect the kids, I would really have to ask myself why I had an oleander plant growing,” Stewart says. The leaves, flowers and fruit contain cardiac glycosides, which have therapeutic applications but are likely to send someone into cardiac arrest should he eat part of the plant. Stewart points out that there is a woman in California currently on death row for trying to poison her husband with the plant, and two young boys were found dead after ingesting oleander a few years back. “People tend to be blasé, because the flowers are bright and pretty, sort of candy-colored. But it is a very poisonous plant that will stop your heart.”

Happy gardening!

Gone to the dogs

Here’s a really fun video of a dog-trainer act in, I think, Germany. This guy is good, and the dogs are a crack-up:

(via Wag Reflex)

The evolution of canine intelligence

I’m a lifelong dog-lover, and I’ve always felt they were much more intelligent than our “dumb dog” jokes make them out to be. In fact, we used to say around the house that, while our dogs couldn’t talk, they certainly knew how to communicate.

Anyway, Time Magazine has a really neat article on investigations into the evolution of canine intelligence. The whole piece is worth reading, but this especially caught my eye:

To understand how dogs evolved this skill, Hare traveled to Siberia. In the 1950s, Soviet scientists set up an experiment on a farm outside the city of Novosibirsk to understand how animals were domesticated. They decided to study foxes, which are closely related to wolves and dogs.

The Russians began by breeding a group of foxes according to one simple rule: they would walk up to a cage and put a hand on the bars. Foxes that slunk back in fear and snapped their teeth didn’t get to breed. Ones that came up to the scientists did. Meanwhile, the scientists also raised a separate group of foxes under identical conditions, except for one difference: they didn’t have to pass a test to mate.

More than 40 generations of foxes have now been bred in Novosibirsk, and the results speak for themselves. The foxes that the scientists bred selectively have become remarkably doglike. They will affectionately run up to people and even wag their tails. In 2003, Hare traveled to Novosibirsk and ran his pointing test on baby foxes. The ordinary ones failed miserably. As for the doglike ones, “they did just as well as puppies right out of the box,” Hare says. As the animals were bred for their affability, a new side of their social intelligence was apparently awakened.

The article also argues something I’ve long suspected: they train us nearly as much as we train them.

What if it turns out to be porn?

Researchers in Israel claim to have developed a way to decipher previously unreadable ancient texts using technology similar to that of fingerprint readers:

The program uses a pattern recognition algorithm similar to those law enforcement agencies have adopted to identify and compare fingerprints.

But in this case, the program identifies letters, words and even handwriting styles, saving historians and liturgists hours of sitting and studying each manuscript.

By recognizing such patterns, the computer can recreate with high accuracy portions of texts that faded over time or even those written over by later scribes, said Itay Bar-Yosef, one of the researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

“The more texts the program analyses, the smarter and more accurate it gets,” Bar-Yosef said.

I love history, and it always gives me a thrill when some lost ancient text is recovered. The possibility of a Google-like searchable database is fascinating. I can’t wait to see what this new technology uncovers.

Now watch. It will be some scribe’s shopping list.

Anime review: Blue Seed Beyond

(The following is a review I posted at Netflix for Blue Seed: Beyond, the sequel to the wonderful anime Blue Seed.)

The original Blue Seed is my favorite anime; it has everything I like about the form, Blue Seed Beyond, however, doesn’t live up to its predecessor. These three episodes feel more like a coda or an epilogue –or even an afterthought– than a true continuation of the story of Momiji and the TAC.

The first two episodes tell the story of a reappearance of the arigami, only this time as a mad plot by a US scientist. (Blue Seed has always had a hint of Japanese nationalism to it.) While all the main characters appear, and we learn what has happened to most of them in the intervening two years, the story is quite rushed, especially in comparison to the pace of the original series.

The third episode is unrelated to the first two: the women of the TAC travel to a Japanese hot spring to enjoy the baths, and a terrorist plans to blow them up. The highlight for me comes when Kome, my favorite character, tracks the bad guy to his lair. Things go wrong and her reaction is typically “Kome.” The animation is good, though sometimes strange. At times, Kome looks like an identical twin to Momiji. The rest of the characters look mostly like themselves from the original series, however. The voice acting is adequate, though the English-language actor for Kusinagi just doesn’t compare to his predecessor.

It must be noted that this series give in far more to “fan service” than the original series: Momiji has grown from a flat chest to a very full “C” (thus killing one of her humorous anxieties from the first series), while all the women of the TAC regularly run around semi-nude. I’ve no objection to nudity or sexuality in anime, but this much feels out of place and, indeed, gratuitous in Blue Seed. Parents who let their kids watch the original series might want to preview these episodes.

Overall, for those who are new to Blue Seed, rent the original series first; it’s surprisingly good. For fans who have already seen the original, rent Blue Seed 2, but don’t expect too much.

Technorati tags: Blue Seed: Beyond, anime, Yuzo Takada

Plan your “sin tour” of the US!

From Andrew Sullivan via Razib Khan, maps of the continental United States showing the distribution of the seven deadly sins. For example,

The American southeast seems particularly “steamy.” I imagine Mark Sanford accounted for most of South Carolina’s contribution. And, with apologies, but Nebraska and Iowa seem uniformly boring.

Technorati tags: maps, seven deadly sins, cartography

White Heat

Here’s a link to a great post by Big Hollywood’s John Nolte on Jimmy Cagney and what’s arguably his best movie, White Heat:

“White Heat” remains as powerful and entertaining sixty-years on because the goals its creators are grounded in the modest, timeless idea of gathering together the most gifted of artists to tell the best story possible. That might sound like an old-fashioned concept among the sophisticates, but long after the intellectual fad of postmodernism joins the hula hoop and the lava lamp, [Cagney's] Cody Jarrett will live on.

Weird news story of the week

And I love the headline:

Man with Spears tattoo steals earring-wearing dog

Fri Aug 21, 7:47 pm ET

WILTON MANORS, Fla. – A man with a tattoo of Britney Spears‘ name on his arm or neck allegedly stole a Chihuahua with pink earrings from a South Florida gay bar. Brian Dortort, 48, said Thursday he has spent weeks searching for his 4-month-old pooch, named Hudson Hayward Hemingway. The dog, about the size of a softball, was in a specialty pet bag.

And I thought these things only happened in California… For the rest of the story, click here.

Google Ooops

Noodling around on Google Maps, I searched the Casitas Pass and saw a link to the Albertson’s in Carpinteria. Look at the picture below, and tell me if you can spot something a bit off about it….

I know people are fleeing California, but I didn’t know a whole town had relocated.