The light flickers

When I think about my childhood, I founder on the fact that memory is not linear, it’s not complete, and most of what remember is a wash of general feelings and confabulations anchored by brief, vivid flashes of specific moments that are lit up by unforgettable events. I was fortunate that much of that vague blur of background events was made up of kindness and love, of a stable and affectionate home, but that also means that the specific memories are scarce and hard to salvage from the general wave of goodness, and are difficult to place in a clear sequence, unless they’re attached to a recorded historical event.

One such memory is from March of 1964. I was seven, attending Kent Elementary, and I was alone, walking across the playground, which was conveniently across the street from my house. I was alone because I had no friends; we had moved to a new house and a new school, which was a common event, since my parents were struggling economically, and we moved roughly once a year, as they tried to simultaneously move out of the poor places they were trapped in and build a stable home for their family. That’s part of the background noise of my childhood memories, trying to remember which house we were living in when some more interesting thing happened. My memory warehouse is built of one rental after another, creating a ramshackle sequence that stitches events together.

The bright moment that illuminates this one memory is the Great Alaskan Earthquake of 1964. I was walking, alone, when suddenly my legs were swept out from under me, and I was on my knees wondering why I was still wobbling and how the earth beneath me wasn’t stable anymore. I looked up at the school and saw a crack had formed in its south wall. I looked to the right at my house, and saw a few bricks fall from the chimney. That was all — this was near Seattle, far from the epicenter — so damage was light, and maybe the worst of it for me was the abrupt loss of certainty. Not even the Earth could be trusted.

That house, though…
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Matthew “Choad” Walther gets a free pass at the NY Times

Matthew Walther looks worse when he tries to clean himself up.

The scrubby mustache, the sweater vest and tweedy suit, the necktie, the sloppy part — I’m no fashion plate myself, but even I can see that that is the most twelve-year-old vision of a professional head shot I’ve ever seen. It’s good enough to get Matthew Walther a spot on the opinion page of the New York Times, though, which ran with a head shot that looks more natural, but just as unprofessional.

Oh, yeah, he wrote an opinion piece, which was accepted by the NY Times, telling people to not bother with voting, since he doesn’t bother himself. It’s garbage. I have no idea how it was accepted, since Walther is a nobody who has only published a few times in the page of conservative rags (they’ll take anything), and it’s a damned regressive, anti-American piece. I think it just reflects the atrocious mindset of the publishers.

They didn’t even fact check the thing. We have to go to Wonkette to see that Matthew Walther has voted, multiple times. He has even complained when he couldn’t vote, because he’d neglected to register. He’s a liar.

Par for the conservative course, though. At least the NYT felt it necessary to pare back the headline a bit.

It’s not much, but the lies kept getting pointed out, so the NYT had to make a third revision.

OK, OK, he had voted, but he wasn’t going to vote in the next election, pinky swear.

The appropriate response would have been to delete the opinion, and publicly announce the retraction, but this is the New Fucking York Fucking Times. They’ll probably invite him back to give more dishonest opinions in the future. After all, they’ve given Brooks and Friedman permanent sinecures, and it doesn’t matter how much they lie and mangle the facts.

I gave up reading the NY Times years ago, shortly after I gave up on Fox News as well. You should do likewise.

These monsters are all dead

I hope you all like long tubular creatures, because that’s all I’ve got for you today. Maybe they’d be less horrifying if they had lots of legs?

Here’s a 4-meter long salamander-like beast from the Permian, named Gaiasia.

I’ve seen giant salamanders before, but not ones with big box-like skulls full of razor-sharp fangs.

Here’s another muscular tube, Vasuki indicus, only 47 million years old, but somewhere around 10-15 meters long.

The amusing thing about this beast is that everyone in the popular press treatment is making it all about how long it is — it’s a partial skeleton, there’s not enough to determine exactly how long it is. It’s either shorter than Titanoboa, the gold standard of giant ancient snakes, or bigger than Titanoboa. It’s not a competition, people! They’re separated by about 10 million years. But of course they’re in competition for starring roles in cheesy sci-fi CGI epics.

That’s why we’re seeing ridiculous comparisons like this one:

OK, the snake was longer than T. rex, but so what? It wasn’t as massive, and they were temporally distant from one another. This illustration reveals how some people are thinking:

That could be an ad for the next movie by The Asylum. These kinds of team-ups are popular to promote cheese, like Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla or Dracula vs. Frankenstein. Learn to love Vasuki for itself, OK?

Congratulations, UK!

This has been a strange election to witness from our side of the pond. The polls were saying way in advance that Labour was going to win, but nobody quite believed it. I know I was cynical.

Right up to the wire, Labour politicians could not quite believe they were on track for a historic election victory. Despite every poll for more than a year suggesting Keir Starmer would end up in No 10, they worried something could go wrong.

For some, it was the ghost of 1992, when the polls predicted Neil Kinnock was on course to take power, but in the end John Major’s Conservatives clung on. For others, it was their fear that after 14 years in opposition, Labour had lost the ability to win.

After all, in the last 100 years only three Labour leaders have ever won elections – Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair – and the last of those was almost 20 years ago. No opposition leader has ever flipped a landslide defeat into a majority in a single term.

“I can’t help it,” one shadow cabinet member said. “I know everything points to a Labour win. But I still wake up at night in a cold sweat about it.” Yet with the exit poll indicating an overwhelming Labour victory, perhaps the doubtful can finally rest easy.

I guess the prediction actually came true.

Keir Starmer has said the “sunlight of hope” is now shining in Britain again as Labour won a landslide UK election victory, bringing a crushing end to 14 years of Conservative rule.

Wait…you’re telling me a nation can actually successfully kick a political party run by scandal-ridden conservative buffoons out of office? That gives me hope, except that the polls in the USA don’t show that kind of promise at all.

To temper any optimism, though, Nigel Farage won a few seats for his hateful party. Also, I have no idea what’s going on in France, but it doesn’t look good.

An outpost of reason in a county of conservatives

That’s my town!

Unfortunately, they cropped out the university, which would be to the left of the top of the photo. I say unfortunately, because it comes from an article that’s all about how the University of Minnesota Morris’s Green Initiative has benefited the entire region.

The farm town of the future is visible long before you reach the city limits, thanks to a pair of wind turbines rising as high as the Statue of Liberty above the flat terrain. They pump cheap electricity into the local grid, providing the energy to make carbon-neutral fertilizer. Closer in, cows graze next to solar panels that provide them with shade. A county-wide compost operation disposes of food and agricultural waste, electric buses take kids to school, the public library relies on geothermal heating and even a city-owned liquor store has rooftop solar panels. (The shop motto: “We chill your beer with the sun.”)

Where is this environmental Nirvana that’s checking off so many boxes on the climate warrior’s wish list? Denmark? Germany? Northern California? No, it’s Morris, Minn., population 5,206, a conservative prairie community in a conservative rural county that favored Donald Trump by 22 points in the 2020 presidential election.

It’s fair to say that environmental and climate concerns have never been front of mind when it comes to votes and policies in Morris. But residents will talk all day long about rural self-sufficiency, high energy and fuel costs, saving tax dollars and eliminating costly inefficiency and waste. When Troy Goodnough, the director of sustainability at the local campus of the University of Minnesota, arrived more than 15 years ago and asked how he could help address those economic concerns, a partnership emerged that has made Morris one of the most sustainable farm towns in America—even though that was never the town’s goal.

They know that Trump hates wind turbines, but it’s all about the money.

Goodnough’s bet was that the common-sense, cost-saving goals the farmers prized could lead them to choices that also happened to be good for the environment. But could it really be as simple as changing the terms of that conversation? Yes, says Blaine Hill, the recently retired city manager who helped make it happen. “We never made it about climate. We just did it because it makes sense. And the more we did, the more we wanted to do.”

The result has been dubbed “the Morris Model” by its participants: the town, the school district, Stevens County and the campus of 1,500 students. They are making their data and blueprints available to other communities interested in trying something similar. Thirteen other towns in Minnesota are at various stages of adapting Morris Model projects. The one furthest along is spearheaded by the city of Fergus Falls, with the help of a regional planning nonprofit. They are organizing 10 other rural towns into a “solar cohort” to increase purchasing power and simplify the complex grant process to get state and federal aid for these efforts.
…
Goodnough sensed an opening. The Morris city government had a tight budget, and its high electric bills were a sore spot. The university, meanwhile, had just realized substantial savings by converting old lighting on campus to modern LEDs. Goodnough offered to help the city do the same, including help with tapping into Department of Energy funds to offset the upfront costs. The conversion ended up saving the city $80,000 a year—a significant windfall for a small town. Soon, the Morris town elders came to the university to ask, “What’s next?”

The larger community might be conservative, but it’s the liberals and progressives of the university that got it all started. You’re welcome, Republicans.

I have a phenomenal idea for a horror movie!

It would much scarier and less stupid than this one, and much cheaper to make.

Imagine a world in which most of the insects are dying, told from the perspective of the perpetrators, not the victims. The monsters who have murdered all the pesky little bugs wander around their homes, wondering why it’s so quiet, but appreciating the absence of mosquitos. Slowly it dawns on them that they don’t hear any birds, either, and they notice that all their fishing trips to the lake turn up fruitless. The more discerning members of the community are horrified to learn that the spiders are missing.

Maybe we could have a few species that are exempt from the holocaust. They’d probably be ticks. The killers’ pets are infested, large mammals are dying in agony. Crops fail. The protagonists respond by poisoning the environment further, trying to confer safety for their few chosen favored food organisms. Unforeseen consequences arise, worsening the problem.

It would be one of those tense, slow-build movies, where the danger increases and the outcome becomes unavoidably inevitable. All attempts to restore the planet are futile. It would not have a happy ending.

Maybe we could title it Silent Spring. Has that been taken already?

OK, how about Silent Earth?

Damn. I guess we’re fucked.

The UK is having an election on our national holiday?

Good for them, I’d personally rather forget about the US for at least a day.* So get in there and throw the rascals out!

Meanwhile, William Hogarth shows us what elections were like a few hundred years ago. Nothing has changed!

*I know my mother would rather ignore today — her house is next to an Indian reservation that sells fireworks, and the noise & chaos starts in June. She’s in the hospital now, I hope her room is soundproofed, and that she gets out soon, after the nightly explosions die down.

Stupid movie

While I was waiting for it to get dark so I could run my disappointing experiment, I walked down to the local theater to see A Quiet Place: Day One.

My short summary: my god, this was a stupid movie.

Here’s the premise: a meteor shower drops a swarm of alien animals on Manhattan, which proceed to run wild and kill everyone. That’s not much of plot, I know, but the monsters are really, really stupid. They’re big and vicious and fast, but they don’t have eyes, and not even the dimmest sense of sight — people shine flashlights on their faces and they don’t respond. But make a noise, and these gnarly sensors open up on their head and they bolt towards the source. That’s the different feature of these monsters: they can’t see you, but you better not make a sound or they’ll kill you.

The problem is that they’re not particularly good at hearing. They don’t have echolocation or anything particularly sensitive, they just respond to ordinary, human-perceptible noises. Drop a book, they’re on you. Shout, and they attack. Walk quietly on the debris-covered streets, they don’t notice you. They’re not bats, that have a highly evolved sensory ability, they’re more like psychopathic grade school teachers with claws and teeth that will murder you if you don’t keep quiet during study hall.

And then, their response is stupid. They charge blindly at any source of sound and attack it. A car alarm goes off — a stratagem used more than once by the protagonists — and monsters will run from blocks away to jump on the car and flail at it. This behavior and their extremely crude sensory capacity raises many unanswered questions.

How did these pathetic brutes evolve? What kind of environment did they come from? One where all kinds of radiation was blocked or limited, so deep underground or an opaque atmosphere? They could hear, but that’s it, and they relied on obvious sound cues to find prey…not able to detect stealthy movement, but their prey need to make a loud squeak to be noticed.

And what kind of hunting/prey capture strategy is that, to blindly run at any sound, especially in a cluttered, dangerous environment like the ruins of New York? There should be dead, wrecked aliens impaled on fence posts and razor wire and traffic signs and spiky debris everywhere. Also, one fortified bunker, a couple of .30 cal machine guns, and you would have endless waves of monsters throwing themselves against the racket and getting shredded by the defenders.

They arrived in a meteor shower that did the initial destruction, exploding and smashing and punching holes in buildings. Why weren’t they deafened by all that noise? Wasn’t this a terrible delivery method for dropping off creatures that respond to noise?

Why? Why have an alien invasion that involved dumping a lot of stupid, cripplingly limited animals on a city? Who is doing this, because these were not intelligent aliens, who could make even idiotic space ships that exploded during landing?

There was also some pathos-filled story involving Lupita Nyong’o, a random stranger who was following her around, and an imperturbable cat, but I was so annoyed by the stupidity of the premise that I couldn’t care. Hey, Hollywood: next time you want to put out a science fiction/horror movie, the first step is to get writers who can assemble a coherent, intelligent premise. You spent $70 million on this sloppy trash, the writers working before you spend millions on expensive acting talent and sets and special effects are the cheapest part of the process, so get that bit right before the budget explodes.

A disappointing observation

Tonight, I set up a white sheet in my yard, with a bright LED pointing at it, to see what insects would be attracted to it. It was pathetic.

After 45 minutes, 10pm to 10:45, all I found was a handful of moths, 20 or 30 tiny little flies, and about 10 mosquitoes. I’ll try again a different night with an additional UV light source, but this was mediocre. Nothing substantial enough to even feed an adult spider.

Dehyping AI

I left Facebook a few years ago, and have never gone back.

I left Twitter 9 months ago, and have never gone back.

I have never once regretted abandoning them, even though they were a pretty good bullhorn for me. It seems they’re just getting worse now, but I don’t want to look in to find out. These things came from profoundly capitalist companies that poisoned their own product with their addiction to growth and algorithmic garbage injection, which they’re now investing in the hope that AI will keep the pointless, cancerous growth. Here’s a fine dissection of the Next Big Thing, AI. It’s also shit.

Ed Zitron makes a good point comparing AI to previous technology improvements: the iPhone was a great and obvious advancement that had immediate utility, but ChatGPT has done nothing significant, other than fueling paranoia. In my own occupation, there is so much hysteria over Large Language Models without real justification.

They also mention another cool advancement, the Raspberry PI. I agree with that too, since once upon a time I spent a heck of a lot of time doing custom lab automation that a $40 circuit board can do with a few lines of code. AI is empty noise by comparison.

To the contrary, though, AI is great for ungodly nightmarish fantasies. HP Lovecraft would have been driven mad by this video of AI-generated gymnastics.