Monthly Archives: October 2017

Netflix gets Stranger

TV Shows and Movies,

Stranger Things Season 2 will be available on October 27th, just in time for Halloween.

I expect there will be widespread disappointment, because there is always a lot of disappointment from the usual suspects when something loved is extended, redone, or done again. Part of the charm of the first season was discovering the 1980s retro allegory, and there is more of that in the new Stranger Things, but since it is the second time around … well, we’ll see. Also, Eleven was one of the great science fiction characters ever written, directed, and acted, and I understand that Eleven’s character is different this time around. So that will be a blow to civilization itself. Continue reading Netflix gets Stranger →

Can Stranger Things 2 be as good as Stranger Things 1?

TV Shows and Movies

Will the Second Season of Stranger Things be as good as, or better than, the first?

I suspect not, but I don’t say this because I don’t trust the actors, the director, the writers, or the producers, to do an excellent job. I say this simply because Stranger Things 1 was a) so very good and b) good in part because of its refreshing uniqueness.

What did that refreshing uniqueness come from? It is anti-uniqueness. Stranger Things Season One turned uniqueness upside down. Or, more exactly, it turned plagiarism upside down in a kind of alternate universe of unique familiarity. Continue reading Can Stranger Things 2 be as good as Stranger Things 1? →

Is someone you know a Russian agent?

Politics

The other day I was engaged in a conversation among people one might assume to have been entirely liberal or progressive (essentially interchangeable terms), but one of the individuals in the conversation kept making suggestions that would likely damage causes or candidates clearly on the left. The reasons given were weak, and over time, they began to remind me a lot of the anti Hillary Clinton rhetoric we see all the time from the Republicans, but dressed up in faux progressive terms.

Russian Spies.
I see that fairly often, people who claim to be on the left but who damage allies or potential allies out of a misplaced sense of purity, or a cult-like adherence to a particular candidate they have supported (and no, not just one candidate but several). But this individual had an advanced degree in a political science related field, a great deal of activist experience, and was generally regarded as an intelligent and well informed politically savvy operative.

Then, suddenly, it dawned on me. Continue reading Is someone you know a Russian agent? →

Why is my poop green?

Health and Medicine, , , , , ,

As a science blogger, I hear a lot of interesting questions, and this is one of the more interesting questions I’ve heard in a while. It is, I’m sure, rather disconcerting to notice that your feces are the color of a corroded penny, and not know why. Or, if your feces are the usual brown color that our species tends to produce, perhaps you’d like to know how to make your poop green for Saint Patrick’s day. Either way, read on:
Continue reading Why is my poop green? →

Trump has no shame, but that’s OK

Politics

We now know that Trump told the wife of a fallen Green Beret that the soldier knew what he signed up for. Technically true, but not what a real president says to a newly minted widow.

We now also know that he told the father of a fallen soldier, one who died in Afghanistan, that he, Trump, would send him $25,000 cash. He never did that.

Trump has claimed that he’s called each of the 30 or so American military personnel who have died since Trump took office. Reports are that he may have not called about half of them.

But that’s OK, because the right wing, who would have crucified a President Clinton over this sort of thing, will not be mad at Trump. Rather, they will simply start to believe that respecting the fallen soldiers is not necessary. Like the same individuals have decided that the NFL is bogus, because they oppose Trump.

This is because Trump’s main reason to exist, in the eyes of his deplorable followers, is to oppose things, mainly Obama. But other things too. Other things including whatever occurs to him.

Trump is truly changing America. He is making American something again. Not sure what that thing is. Or if it really anything again. But, that is clearly how it works now.

Just got Makey Makey, in search of a banana …

Technology, , , ,

I just got this Makey Makey kit (which, by the way, is on sale at the link provided, at this moment).

A Makey Makey is a device that allows a do-it-yourselfer to create a closed loop electrical signal, that the Makey Makey device converts into a specific serial signal that is sent via USB to a computer. The signal is a keystroke or mouse event. So, you can hook the Makey Makey to, say, a banana and a laptop, then when you touch the banana the laptop gets a mouse button click or a space bar or something. The kit is designed to give easy access to the key signals most used in gaming, but I think it allows the full range of keystrokes, and it can also interface as a sensor to an Arduino or similar, so you can use a banana to control, say, your robot. Or whatever.

I’ve not used it yet, so this is not a review, just a note that I’ve got one. Do you have one? This should be fun.

OK, off to get the bananas.

How to recover from a failed Linux upgrade

Computers

Ahem. I followed my own advice from yesterday, and went ahead and upgraded to Ubuntu 17.10, and it did not go well.

I can’t explain exactly what went wrong, but eventually I ended up with a dialog that required that I click “OK” followed by the same dialog, again and again, long enough that I figured it was infinity time.

I eventually followed a procedure that I’ve found to work sometimes. First, I turned the computer off and the back on again (always a last resort) and the desktop never loaded, so I knew something was pretty messed up. Continue reading How to recover from a failed Linux upgrade →

Books of interest currently cheap; fermenting, writing, history, atheism

Other, , , , ,

These are all $1.99 in Kindle form, presumably for a limited time only, so act now!

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century is a book by Stephen Pinker in which he explains to everyone else why they are such bad writers.

Why is so much writing so bad, and how can we make it better? Is the English language being corrupted by texting and social media? Do the kids today even care about good writing—and why should we care? From the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature and the forthcoming Enlightenment Now

In this entertaining and eminently practical book, the cognitive scientist, dictionary consultant, and New York Times–bestselling author Steven Pinker rethinks the usage guide for the twenty-first century. Using examples of great and gruesome modern prose while avoiding the scolding tone and Spartan tastes of the classic manuals, he shows how the art of writing can be a form of pleasurable mastery and a fascinating intellectual topic in its own right. The Sense of Style is for writers of all kinds, and for readers who are interested in letters and literature and are curious about the ways in which the sciences of mind can illuminate how language works at its best.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Fermenting Foods (Idiot’s Guides) by Wardeh Harmon is science applied to making stuff you can eat.

Continue reading Books of interest currently cheap; fermenting, writing, history, atheism →

Updating Ubuntu 17.04 to 17.10 the easy way

Computers, ,

Go to Software and Updates (in your control panel or system area, depending on your flavor). Go to the tap for “updates” and set the “notify me of a new Ubuntu version” to “For any new version.”

(See picture above.)

Then, in either a terminal or in the box you get when you hit Alt-F4, type the following and hit enter:

update-manager -cd

You might get something that looks like this, and you can hit the upgrade button and follow instructions. Good luck. Have a backup. Should work fine.

If things don’t work fine, try THIS.

What is New in Ubuntu 17.10, the Artful Aardvark

Computers, , ,

The next release of Ubuntu, the most commonly used and thought of by normal people and a few others version of Linux, is set to be released on Thursday, October 19th. The exact set of changes and improvements is not known, but a few key ones are, and some can be guessed at from the multiple pre-release releases.

This is a momentous occasion because this will be the first version of Ubuntu’s main flavor that does NOT include Unity as its default desktop.

If you don’t know, Unity was a menu and control system for the desktop, your main interface when working with the computer other than, obviously, while using a particular application. It was the look and feel, the essence, of the operating system. Unity was supposed to unify things, like diverse features of a typical desktop, like Ubuntu running on a cell phone, a desktop, a laptop, a whatever.

Unity used a modus operendus that many other interfaces were shifting towards. I hear there are versions of Windows that looked a bit like this, and Gnome from version 3.0 onwards had this basic approach. Continue reading What is New in Ubuntu 17.10, the Artful Aardvark →

Why Was the Grizzly Man Eaten by a Bear? (Film review and commentary)

Animals, TV Shows and Movies

Grizzly Man is Werner Herzog’s film about Timothy Treadwell, mostly using Treadwell’s own footage of his time living among grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) in Katmai National Park, Alaska. Treadwell spent each of thirteen summers up to 2003 mainly in two areas of the park where a community1 of grizzly bears lived and foraged. During the last three years of this stint, Treadwell went to the field with video cameras and produced quite a bit of footage. In 2003 he and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were killed and mostly eaten by a bear.

Continue reading Why Was the Grizzly Man Eaten by a Bear? (Film review and commentary) →

Science books On Sale

Other, ,

I remember reading Living Fossil: The Story of the Coelacanth by Thomson when it first came out. There actually were not a lot of science for the masses books back then, or should I say, the rate of production was low compared to recent decades. It is an interesting story.

In the winter of 1938, a fishing boat by chance dragged from the Indian Ocean a fish thought extinct for 70 million years. It was a coelacanth, which thrived concurrently with dinosaurs and pterodactyls—an animal of major importance to those who study the history of vertebrate life.

Living Fossil describes the life and habitat of the coelacanth and what scientists have learned about it during fifty years of research. It is an exciting and very human story, filled with ambitious and brilliant people, that reveals much about the practice of modern science.

Some day over a beer I can tell you my coelocanth-Stephen Jay Gould story. Good beer story, not a good writing story.

Anyway, at that link, the book is $1.99 in Kindle format.

Not strictly science but skepticism, so I thought it might be of interest, is Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism by Barbara Weisberg.

A fascinating story of spirits and conjurors, skeptics and converts in the second half of nineteenth century America viewed through the lives of Kate and Maggie Fox, the sisters whose purported communication with the dead gave rise to the Spiritualism movement – and whose recanting forty years later is still shrouded in mystery.

In March of 1848, Kate and Maggie Fox – sisters aged 11 and 14 – anxiously reported to a neighbor that they had been hearing strange, unidentified sounds in their house. From a sequence of knocks and rattles translated by the young girls as a “voice from beyond,” the Modern Spiritualism movement was born.

Talking to the Dead follows the fascinating story of the two girls who were catapulted into an odd limelight after communicating with spirits that March night. Within a few years, tens of thousands of Americans were flocking to seances. An international movement followed. Yet thirty years after those first knocks, the sisters shocked the country by denying they had ever contacted spirits. Shortly after, the sisters once again changed their story and reaffirmed their belief in the spirit world. Weisberg traces not only the lives of the Fox sisters and their family (including their mysterious Svengali–like sister Leah) but also the social, religious, economic and political climates that provided the breeding ground for the movement. While this is a thorough, compelling overview of a potent time in US history, it is also an incredible ghost story.

An entertaining read – a story of spirits and conjurors, skeptics and converts – Talking to the Dead is full of emotion and surprise. Yet it will also provoke questions that were being asked in the 19th century, and are still being asked today – how do we know what we know, and how secure are we in our knowledge?

I’m not sure if this is a good find or not, but have a look. You will be out $1.99 for the Kindle version.

Guys crossing the street, rabid dogs, and elevators

Gender, Reproductive Biology, Sex, Violence and Guns, , , ,

I feel it is time for a repost of an essay I wrote about five years ago during an earlier period of turmoil on the internet caused by women and men acknowledging that women are generally under constant sexual harassment and under constant threat of sexual assault.

There may be a few broken links here that I’ll just deaden, but otherwise, I’m not changing the essay at this time.

I want to mention three separate instances of men acting inappropriately towards a woman that occurred to people I know over the last couple of months.

[Trigger warning: Sexual harassment and rape]

In once case, a man drove up to a woman who was just getting out of her car, in a relatively secluded parking lot, to ask her what kind of mileage she got on that model and make. There was nothing exceptional about the car that would cause special interest in this issue. In the second instance, a man skated (on in-line skates) up next to a woman who was skating on a long trail a mile or two into the woods where no one was around, and insisted on “teaching her” how to “draft” which involved him skating to a few inches behind her and holding his hand on the small of her back while he explained how great that felt. In the third instance, a stranger cornered a women in an enclosed space, tried to rape her, and in so doing hit her several times in the head while pulling off her clothing.

Continue reading Guys crossing the street, rabid dogs, and elevators →

Falsehood: Correlation Implies/Does Not Imply Causality

Falsehoods and Skepticism, , , ,

As is the case with any good falsehoods, one can never really be sure what the falsehood may actually be. In this case, there are two falsehoods: 1) When we see a statistical correlation between two measurements or observations, we can not assume that there is a causal link from one to the other. This is the way the statement “Correlation does not imply causality” or some similar version of that aphorism generally means, and this is an admonishment we often hear; and 2) When we see a statistical correlation between two measurements or observations, there probably is a causal link in there somewhere, even when we hear the admonishment “Correlation does not imply causality” from someone, usually on the Internet. To put a finer point on this: What do you think people mean when they say “Correlation does not equal causality?” or, perhaps more importantly, what do you think that statement invokes in other people’s minds?
Continue reading Falsehood: Correlation Implies/Does Not Imply Causality →

The Theory of Relativity: and Other Essays

Other

On Kindle for $1.99

The Theory of Relativity: and Other Essays is a collection of seven key essays by Einstein about his work. It is available at this reduced price for a time, but I’m not sure how long. Of course, whether it is a long time or a short time is relative.

Here’s a fun thing to do wit this collection. Take a paragraph or two and post it as a Facebook post, as though you said it, and wait a few hours. Then, after all the amateur theoreticians explain how wrong you are, edit the post to make it clear that it is a quote from Einstein, from a particular source. Bwahahaha.