Made Out of Meat

Thanks to PZ Meyers for pointing me to one of my favorite short stories from long ago.

The Skyway Arcology

The other interesting thing about Minneapolis was the Skyway system. A big chunk of downtown buildings are linked together by a walkway system, making it possible to walk dozens of blocks without ever going outside. Apartment buildings, stores and business skyscrapers are all linked together in a heated, well-secured fashion. An interesting adaption for a place which is cold and gets that much snow.

Also, while guns are *not* banned in the walkways, they are banned in every building (at least all the ones I saw).

map here

Interesting Free Market Solution

I just got back from a week in Minneapolis, which was kind of interesting. In true libertarian fashion, they have almost no gun control laws. You can take your gun with you to the grocery store, to the playground, to the hospital, to the ATM line or to the porta-potties at the county fair.

However.

Business owners are also free to ban guns from their stores. "No guns allowed on these premises", "ING bans guns in this building", etc. . I thought this was an interesting approach. Not necessarily one I agree with, but interesting. The message is very libertarian, "You can have your toys, just don't bring them in here if you want to do business with me"

In a week of looking, I was unsuccessful in finding a single business (including a gun store) that *did not* have as sign banning guns.

I now need to look at the homicide, manslaughter and accidental gun death statistics on Minnesota and think about this a little more.

The Ardent Atheist

I took this test as suggested by PZ Meyers. I wasn't shocked to find I scored a little lower than he didwith my 70% (vs. his 76%). I thought I was a little soft in some of my answers actually and not all the strident.

Lesson: I'm more of a crank than I think I am.

The test asks for a lot of personal info at the end, so I don't recommend it. I have a special junkmail account I use for things like this.

The Ardent Atheist The results are in, and it appears that you have scored 70%...

You are an atheist, pure and simple. You think God is just one big lie, and consider religious people to be both annoying and beneath you. Ardent atheists will argue tooth and claw for their position, and have no truck with people that won't listen. You think being an atheist is the only way to lead an honest life, and see no reason to accept the pleas of faith. Ardent atheists are the backbone of atheism. Be proud.

My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 58% on pentagrams

Link: The Atheist Test written by chi_the_cynic on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Comet!

Cool!

73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann is proving to be a far more interesting object than first anticipated. The comet is closing toward the Sun and will swing around it on June 7, passing the Earth along the way at a distance of 11.7 million kilometers. The fascination comes from watching its ongoing disintegration, which has broken the comet into more than 30 separate fragments.

IFX

I'm off to Minneapolis for a week to attend the IFX Board Meeting.
Yawn.

If anyone has suggestions for things to do in the evening , please let me know!

What Should I Major In?

Your Scholastic Strength Is Developing Ideas

You can take a spark of inspiration and turn it into a full fledged concept. You are talented at brainstorming, visualizing, organizing, and independent thinking. You should major in: Natural sciences Computer science Creative writing Math Architecture Journalism

What Should You Major In?

They Have Such Things?

Ok, Ok, I promised I wouldn't get political but I read this and was quite floored.

newly released portions of White House prayer logs show that Bush's praying has actually gone up in recent months

White House Prayer Logs!

(heh!)

McNookie

The world's first, certifiable, medical aphrodisiac:

“A dose of PT-141 results, in most cases, in a stirring in the loins in as little as 15 minutes,” reports Julian Dibbell, “Women, according to one set of results, feel ‘genital warmth, tingling and throbbing’, not to mention ‘a strong desire to have sex’.”
So, what is PT-141?
It’s an odourless and colourless synthetic chemical that you inhale deeply through a small, white plastic inhaler. The compound, produced by Palatin Technologies and currently undergoing regulatory assessment, is a melanocortin-based therapy that seems to work directly on the brain rather than simply stimulating the loins as is the case with Viagra.

Jay Pinkerton Doesn't Care Much for Narnia

I saw Narnia on a flight from Atlanta to Seattle a couple of weeks ago. I was in the fron row and had some work to do, so I watched it with the sound off, peeking up occasionally to see what was going on.

I'm utterly positive that the dialog I made up in my own mind was a great deal more entertaining that whatever was actually said. OTOH, Jay Pinkerton actually watched the whole thing with sound and had this to say:

Narnia, on the other hand, is like the K-Mart discount bin of mythology. Every monster or creature you've ever heard of is incoherently tossed in with the animal kingdom, and now they all talk. I like fantasy as much as the next sixth level cleric, but the bare minimum for me is knowing the author gave his ridiculous shit more thought than I'll have to. Narnia comes off like a shitty Trapper-Keeper drawing by a twelve-year-old who plays Dungeons & Dragons and really likes the zoo. In one scene a pair of badgers have a conversation with Santa Claus, and in another a human on a talking horse does battle with the White Witch of the North while griffins divebomb centaurs, and your head’s just spinning from the random senselessness of it.

Yup, that was my sense of it. I also don't understand the giant ice dam which was causing it to be winter, but fell easily to a group of plucky teenagers. Some kinda metaphor or something...

Next Stop: Interstellar Space

This is an excellent article. Not much to add.

In a paper to be published as a chapter in a book on NASA ‘Vision’ missions this summer, Thomas Zurbuchen (University of Michigan) and a team of researchers discuss the specifics of powering such a probe by nuclear methods and find them wanting. The paper is so rich that I want to discuss several issues from it in coming weeks. For now, though, let’s consider the propulsion dilemma as seen by scientists running the numbers using existing technologies.
A solar sail gets you to the interstellar medium more quickly than the kind of chemical propulsion with gravity assists used by Voyager, but even so the task is daunting, requiring the probe’s escape velocity to be a factor of 3 greater than Voyager 1’s. And existing sail designs deliver speed but at a cost in payload weight.

NASA’s now defunct Prometheus project would have created a spacecraft too heavy and slow for a mission to the nearby interstellar medium — the Zurbuchen paper centers around a nuclear power source in conjunction with electric propulsion fine-tuned for the mission. For a variety of reasons, the best compromise between the various proposals seems to be the radioisotope electric propulsion advocated by Ralph McNutt and the IIE team.

Benevolent Inventor

A little more introverted than I usually score on these kinds of tests. Still, it was better done than most, so it might be more accuracte.

Results here , but you can mose over the pick to see what they mean

Benevolent Inventor

Peeps: Not As Popular As I Thought?

It seems that, despite their sweet taste and charming disposition, some people... well... there's no other way to say this. Some people just plain *don't like peeps!*

Yeah, I don't get it either.

However, the Strawberry Woman send over this video which seems to offer no other conclusion.
WARNING! This video contains scenes of extreme peep disrespect, violence and, in some cases, quirk death. Not for the young or for Peep lovers.

The Value of Human Life

Interesting, my value is almost exactly equal to the amount of money I think I need to have in assets in order to retire.

I am worth $2,787,932 on HumanForSale.com

Thermite vs. Liquid Nitrogen

As you all know, thermite is a complex, inorganic mixture of aluminum, iron and adolescent sexual frustration with a burning temperature exceeding the surface temperature of a M-Class star. In my teens, I performed dozens (but not hundreds) of "experiments" with thermite.

However, I never had the resources to try these experiments.

Kinda Creepy

From those pining away for the days when women were property and "certain folks" knew their place.

The Purity Ball

The Heart to Heart™ program, created by jeweler Joe Costello, differs from other abstinence programs in some important, unique ways. [...]

First, the "key to her heart." This beautiful heart has a smaller heart in the front. Behind that heart is a keyhole. When making the covenant with your daughter, you explain that the covenant is between her, you and God. Since God has placed her in your care as a parent, you and only you can hold the "key to her heart."

God not trusting her enough to let her be responsible for her own heart.

You then explain to the child that you will hold the key to her precious heart until the day of her wedding. On that day, you will give her away like at all weddings, BUT in doing so you will also “give away” the key to her heart to her now husband. The key and lock are actually functional and your son-in-law will place the key in the heart to open it.

Nothing at all Freudian going on here!

Inside will be a small note that had been placed in the heart on the day you made the covenant. That note can say something like, "I do not know your name or what you even look like, but this is my promise to save myself for you this day. Love, Melanie."

Or, the note could say something like, "I've been saving myself for you for many horny years, so the sex tonight had really better be worth it!. Oh, and make sure my Dad gives you the key to my chastity belt too. Love, Melanie."

The New 300, 600, and 1000 Euro Notes

I'm guessing they were designed by the French or the Italians in an attempt to get the UK to switch currencies.

here

The 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference

Register Now!

Like most Nigerians, you're probably finding that it's increasingly difficult to earn a decent living from email. That's why you need to attend the 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference.
"This conference is an investment in your future. Learn to take advantage of modern technology, and make a great deal of money with very little effort. If you have any question, please contact me and I will send you a proposal that may be of interest to you. I await your response by return while assuring you that the transaction is absolutely risk free."
- Dr. Collins Mbadiwe

A Contest I Will Be Entering

This is something I've done in the security lines at airports for the last few years.

And, btw, if you're in the "this kind of thing only gives the terrorist ideas/knowing about the secret wiretap program only aids the terrorists" camp, I suggest you stick you head back in the sand for the duration. It's only through these exercises and through transparency that we improve security.

Announcing: Movie-Plot Threat Contest
NOTE: If you have a blog, please spread the word.

For a while now, I have been writing about our penchant for "movie-plot threats": terrorist fears based on very specific attack scenarios. Terrorists with crop dusters, terrorists exploding baby carriages in subways, terrorists filling school buses with explosives -- these are all movie-plot threats. They're good for scaring people, but it's just silly to build national security policy around them.

But if we're going to worry about unlikely attacks, why can't they be exciting and innovative ones? If Americans are going to be scared, shouldn't they be scared of things that are really scary? "Blowing up the Super Bowl" is a movie plot to be sure, but it's not a very good movie. Let's kick this up a notch.

It is in this spirit I announce the (possibly First) Movie-Plot Threat Contest. Entrants are invited to submit the most unlikely, yet still plausible, terrorist attack scenarios they can come up with.
Your goal: cause terror. Make the American people notice. Inflict lasting damage on the U.S. economy. Change the political landscape, or the culture. The more grandiose the goal, the better.
Assume an attacker profile on the order of 9/11: 20 to 30 unskilled people, and about $500,000 with which to buy skills, equipment, etc.
Post your movie plots here on this blog.

Judging will be by me, swayed by popular acclaim in the blog comments section. The prize will be an autographed copy of Beyond Fear. And if I can swing it, a phone call with a real live movie producer.

Entries close at the end of the month -- April 30 -- so Crypto-Gram readers can also play.
This is not an April Fool's joke, although it's in the spirit of the season. The purpose of this contest is absurd humor, but I hope it also makes a point. Terrorism is a real threat, but we're not any safer through security measures that require us to correctly guess what the terrorists are going to do next.
Good luck.

McSweeney's Reviews of Food

'casue nothing is more amusing than reviews of food.

An Exerpt:

Kellogg's S'mores Pop-Tarts
Submitted by Marshall Norton Jr.
She shoved me under her bed and told me not to move. Her father had gotten home earlier than expected. As the minutes passed, I inventoried the various pieces of dirty laundry and discarded plates under her bed with me.
A little later, her face appeared, upside-down. "They're leaving soon. I'll come back when they're gone. Here, have some," she said, offering me a piece of the Pop-Tart she'd brought up on a plate. I thought it best not to ask about the other plates for the moment.