Monkey Waiters

In Japan, of course.

Not everything ironic is funny

I try not to be too snarky, but in this goal I am a spectacular failure. I think, however, I might be getting better at distinguishing between the truly funny and somebody else's painful karmic feedback. Among my friends in the liberal onlineliness, there's a great deal of joy at the news that conservative screech monkey Ann Coulter has broken her jaw and that her recuperation involves getting her mouth wired shut.

Keith Olbermann found that funny--he totally mugged it upon his show Monday night upon hearing the news. I hope it's not just the fact that I'm right now in post-operative pain myself (got my ACL surgery Tuesday morning and I'm experiencing worse and more sustained pain than when I first tore up the ligament in August) causing me to think some rightwing nutjob's horrible pain is still undeserved horrible pain. Yes, it's ironic that a hatemonger can't talk. But she can still type and, frankly, there's just no humor in a fractured mandible.

On the other hand, as terror rips through Mumbai and the death toll from the attacks Islamic extremists reaches triple digits, there are still things about terrorists that I can still get an honest laugh from.

For instance, when al-Qaeda borrows a page from Sean Hannity's book and starts kvetching about the left wing media bias in favor of Barack Obama. See, Obama truly is a uniter: he's already brought al-Qaeda and Little Green Footballs together in common cause.

I am wrong about something

Today I learned I am (probably) wrong about something. I am an anti-multiverser. Don't get me wrong, I totally love the idea of multiple alternative universes where the Confederates won the Civil War and therefor Leonard Nimoy wears a goatee. That would be awesome.

But what hangs me up about the concept of multiple realities is this: what could possibly caus a multiverse to come into being? I've argued this around and around with people, both, live and on the internet till I was blue in my Atlantean gills. The basis for most of these arguments is the theory that there are all sorts of real alternate realities "out there," each reflecting possible different historical outcomes that might result from humanity making different historical choices--so that there's one history where the Nazis nuked London in 1943 and another universe where zeppelins replaced the luxury liner in the 1930s and yet another where alpacas have taken the place of the common house cat.

For me this notion breaks down at the point where you start asking how big a change, or how big a choice, is required to create a new universe... and by logical extension by what mechanism is an entirely new universe split off from the molecules of this universe every time some kid on Betelgeuse chooses between chocolate and vanilla ice cream with his birthday cake. (I know--trick question: Betelgeusean kids have to choose between asparagus and onion-flavored ice cream).

I just can't picture how a human choice made here, or a cat choice in Albuquerque, or a Rigelian blubber-rat choice made in the swamps of Rigel 17-B could cause all the molecules in the universe to split up into separate realities, creating quite definitively an infinitude of parallel universes. I don't see a causative link between a mental process and the resulting physical outcome. I can't even imagine where all that energy would go to once it split reality in half (or for that matter where all that energy would be created from--since Einstein among others tells me energy can't be created).

Of course I'm not a scientist, so most of what I say in this post is bullshit.

Of course, serious scientists think about bearded Vulcans when speculating on what dark matter and wormholes are and what they could mean for the parts of the universe that seem to be in places where we can't see or measure. What these bearded labcoats think about, instead, is truly different realities: universes with different physical laws, universes without planets or gravity, universes where the relationships between mass, space, and velocity might be entirely renegotiated. Shit that would blow your mind, man.

The evidence for there being more reality than Horatio's philosophy can imagine has to do with dark matter and the strange ease with which the universe creates life. Blame it on carbon molecules, I say, but given the bigness of the vacuum and the relative smallness of earth's surface (the only place where life is known to exist), obviously the phrase "the universe's basic properties are uncannily suited for life" should be seen in relative terms.

The argument pro comes from physicist Andrei Linde:

If... protons were just 0.2 percent more massive than they actually are, they would be unstable and would decay into simpler particles. Atoms wouldn’t exist; neither would we. If gravity were slightly more powerful, the consequences would be nearly as grave. A beefed-up gravitational force would compress stars more tightly, making them smaller, hotter, and denser. Rather than surviving for billions of years, stars would burn through their fuel in a few million years, sputtering out long before life had a chance to evolve.

There's also a lot of "dark matter" out there that scientists can't account for and apparently some strings tying it all together in ways my mind simply can't understand. Taken all together, Linde and likeminded theorists conclude there's more to it all than meets the electron telescope. The best accounting for it they can come up with, so far, is that there's other realities, or maybe blindspots in our reality, where the physics that we know and love don't fully explain how molecules and their sundry subatomic particles behave.

Just no soul-sucking lizardmen so far.

As Evolution Blogger Jason Rosenhouse phrases it: "The hypothesis of a multiverse explains a lot of data, and is strongly suggested by the best physical theories we have." Still, Rosenhouse adds, "I can understand why it is a bit frustrating as an hypothesis, since the best we can hope for is indirect evidence that it is correct."

So maybe I am wrong. And maybe I am right, although if I am right about there being no alternative realities, it's entirely by accident.

I Know What I Learned Last Summer

Yeah, this is technically something I learned during summer reading, but I was reminded of it by the lesson I was teaching at Che High School today. Fernando Magellan (not his real name) survived the debilitating attacks of scurvy that incapacitated his men because he liked jelly on his toast.

Well, actually, it wasn't jelly, it was preserves. He took it along to sweeten up the hardened biscuits that served as the crew's mainstay in the two year journey around the globe. The vitamin C content in quinces is low, but it was enough to hold off the bleeding gum disease that beset just about everyone else. The only other source of the scurvy preventing nutrient on board's Magellan's five-ship armada was was rats--rats apparently produce their own vitamin C, so if you eat them, you can at least slow down the progress of disease as well.

But let's call that Plan B.

"God damn you"

There's a great, if that's the word I want, tradition of poisoning monarchs. Napoleon was snuffed at St Helena with arsenic. George V of England muttered "God damn you" to his attending physician in 1936 when the monarch's attendants, unable to endure a prolonged deathbed scene from his majesty, ordered their lord and liege hurried along to death with a fatal short of morphine and cocaine.

Welp, now another royal can be added definitively to list of poisoned potentates. Apparently Qing Dynasty China's Guangxu Emperor was also rushed toward a very different Mandate of Heaven in 1908 at the tender age of 38. His own beloved step mama, the Empress Dowager Cixi, she who wink-nudged the Boxer Rebellion into fruition, ordered the deed done on her late hubby's heir, sending one of her attendants over to give the last adult Qing emperor a bowl of yogurt laced with arsenic. She knew was dying and I guess the old gal wanted company in Heaven.

More significantly, she knew that if the lad got out from under her thumb he would want to reinstitute reforms in China, moving it away from an antiquated feudalistic sleeping giant. Being the sentimental type, Cixi decided the best way to prevent reforms would be to knock off the young emperor and install Puyi as the tragic "Last Emperor" of the Celestial Kingdom.

Her plan worked for about four years... until Puyi was himself dethroned by Sun Yat-sen. Of course, none of this should come as a surprise; don't all our problems usually begin with family?

dumbest site ever

Draw a House.com is the dumbest website ever. Today I learned that. But it took me a minute.

My bigotry

I know I have bigotries -- things that make me simply intolerant of my fellow human beings. I just recently quit posting on Democratic Underground because I simply lost my manners on that online community from my own intolerance of other people's stupidity.

I thought sometimes it was kinda fun to do a form of intellectual jiu jitsu there, making as little and as unoffensive post that would still trigger other peoples' irrational rages. The last post I did there yesterday was an example of this. I see now that I was just trying to piss people off--which is uncool. My need to trip others up is mean and simply had no place on that board. I'm not the boss of other people's manners.

This is not my worst bigotry, of course. My worst, impulsive, misanthropic hatred is my gut level loathing of people who've had cosmetic surgery. That shit is just gross. I don't need to make amends for that prejudice.

----

Update: (ten minutes later) I also think people who write "G-d" instead of "God" are being unnecessarily squeamish. I really don't think you're gonna be struck by lightning if you write down the letter oh there, kids.

René Descartes was a nice guy, but...

René Descartes may have been the "first modern thinker" in his belief that everything should be doubted and everything asserted must be proved, but he wasn't perfectly modern in his personal conduct. In his regard for the sanctity of nonhuman life, he was every bit a renaissance man.

He believed that the human soul was located in the pineal gland because (he thought) animals didn't have them. And so, because they didn't have souls, René concluded, they couldn't feel pain. And that made it perfectly okay in the brilliant scientific, enlightened mind of René Descartes to gash open animals like dogs and monkeys in living vivisection session, ignoring the plaintive cries of torment wailing from the mouths of the poor dying beasts.

Good on ya, René--make those critter suffer.