Forty years ago

Forty years ago today, the Apollo 11 Luna Lander touched down on the surface of the Moon. NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first two people to walk on another astronomical body.



We could do this forty years ago. Today, would we have the passion or the technology?

Fashion adverts

One of Melbourne's biggest (or at least most pretentious) department stores, David Jones, has started running a massive advertising campaign for something call "Industrie". I can't find a copy of the advertisements I see on the backs of buses everywhere, but this will give you an idea of what they look like:


In the adverts, the female model is standing behind the shirtless male model and quite obscured, the background is black instead of light grey, and the words "David Jones" and "Industrie" are written in the appropriate corporate fonts. That's about it.

Pop quiz: what are they selling? Has David Jones perhaps started their own chain of tattoo parlours?

Answer: what they're actually selling is dreams and illusions, but the product they're selling is menswear. To be precise, Industrie is a "youth-oriented menswear fashion brand". Yes, that's right, the way they are promoting men's clothing is to show a male model not wearing any of the clothing they're selling.

If your brain hasn't just shut down in self-defence, then you've drunk the fashion Kool-aid (in a nice raspberry flavour, peach being so last year) and there's no hope for you.

Another question: given that David Jones has presumably sunk millions into the promotion, why can't I find anything about it on their website? Why can't I find copies of their advertisement campaign on the net?

(For more photos, see here .)

Holy hand grenade!

From the Department of You Can't Be Too Careful, a British pub was evacuated after workmen came across a prop from the 1975 movie "Monty Python And The Holy Grail". Bomb disposal experts were called in to inspect the "Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch", and declared it safe after nearly an hour.

Left: the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch; Right: the Holy Hand Grenade Whoopee Cushion.

Schultz City

Thanks to ninjaink at DeviantArt, what if Frank Miller wrote Peanuts?



You can see the whole image here, or visit ninjaink's page here.

Why loony leftists matter

The consequences of giving power to the far-left -- whether the loonies in the London city council, Politically-Correct socialists in the ivory tower of macademia[1] or the genocidal criminals in Soviet Russia and Cambodia -- has been baneful and calamitous. As James Wimberley of the Reality Based Community says:

The record of these people in power is so disastrous that it would be tempting to wish them gone, as has more or less happened in the USA. Tempting but wrong. Like the gene for sickle-cell anaemia, the far left plays a useful irritating and balancing role, so long as it stays in a permanent minority.

I'm a great believer in the value, no, the necessity, of a few irritating trouble-makers, malcontents and enfants terrible who can stop us from becoming complacent, arrogant and self-satisfied. In the late 1800s and first few decades of the 1900s, capitalism was scared of communist revolution. Marxism was still a vigorous intellectual paradigm. The workers were flexing their muscles and demanding improved working conditions, better conditions and a measure of justice. Consequently, those hard-hearted and selfish capitalist leaders feared for their profits and their lives, and (eventually, reluctantly) modified their behaviour, and so the 20th century saw massive improvements in quality of life for those who weren't at the top of the social pyramid: pensions, universal health insurance and education, the 40 (or even 38) hour week, holiday pay, unfair dismissal laws and much more.

But in countries like the USA, where the masses turned their backs on unions and swallowed the lie that class warfare is by definition the lazy and envious poor against the deserving rich, things are very different. It seems like at least half the country -- even many of those going hungry because of medical expenses -- believes that having the government use its massive purchasing power to buy medicine at a discount is one tiny step away from outlawing private property and sending everyone to the gulag. Far-right wingers pose as centrists and moderate right-wingers are vilified as communists. Consequently, the fat cats in the capitalist classes have been behaving like the fox in the henhouse for decades now, with crisis following bubble every couple of years. Every crisis is followed by an even bigger one, and those perpetrating the disasters get rewarded each time. After losing inconceivably large amounts of money, the banks have gone to the US government begging for bailouts. No social safety net for the tellers, but the CEOs and executives get to give themselves massive pay rises.


And why not? What have they got to be scared of? The working class in the US is convinced that all they need is a couple of lucky breaks and they too will be as rich as Bill Gates, or at least comfortably middle-class, when the reality is that income inequality has exploded over the last thirty years. It's not clear whether the current economic crisis will level things out again, or simply punish those who work for a living while allowing the mega-rich even more opportunity to buy up assets. A lot will depend on moral outrage, and very few people do moral outrage over pigs-at-the-trough like old-school leftists. So let's give three cheers for the Loyal Opposition of Loony Leftists, may they prosper, but not too much, just enough to keep the bastards honest.




[1] Caution: May Contain Nuts. Back

Big Brother is Watching

How very apt...

(Click image for full sized image.)

At least the Spanish tell you when you're being filmed.

Silent longing

What a piece of work this guy is.

Last month, Sith Lord Benedict XVI declared that American Indians had been "silently longing" to be converted to Christianity by the Spanish Conquistadors 500 years ago, and had been seeking the god known only as God "without realizing it".

(One wonders how Emperor Popetine knows what was going through the minds of people from a foreign culture who died half a millenium ago? Oh wait, that's right, the god known only as God has made him infallible. That's what the Pope says, and he's infallible so he must be right.)

(Click image for full view.)

A steampunk night out

(Click image for full view.)

Driving Miss Black

For the last month or so I've been helping out my dear friend Miss Black by giving her some driving lessons in my car.

It's been equally an education for me as for her, I think. I've tutored people in maths and science for many years now, but there's a huge difference between doing geometry and differential equations sedately on a piece of paper and doing them instinctively while quarter- and half-tonne lumps of metal and glass whizz by you at twenty metres per second. Which is a lot faster than it sounds, especially when the lumps are being driven by Aussies.

For one thing, if you get something wrong and drive your car up the back of another car, you don't get to cross your answer out and do it again.

Not that Miss Black did anything like that -- although my car does have a few scrapes on the front bumper from a ninety-degree turn in an extremely narrow alley. How narrow? Well, let me just put it like this: after navigating in and out of the alley a few times, Miss Black is confident of her ability to drive a stretch Hummer through a revolving door without touching the sides.

So far we've had a couple of ... interesting ... experiences, like a couple of "No, not that left, your other left!" moments, a distressing tendency for her to check the wrong blind-spot, or to swivel her entire upper body so she can look directly out the rear windscreen when changing lanes, and the time I had to grab the steering wheel to stop the car from drifting across into on-coming traffic. (Actually, I make it sound more exciting than it really was. It was a very slow drift, and it was less a grab and more a gentle correction.)

But on the plus-side, Miss Black has exhibited a remarkable level-headedness on occasions when others might have panicked, like the time when the Temporary Australian decided that it was a great idea to step out from in front of a stopped bus, against the lights, without checking to see if there were cars coming. Miss Black managed to avoid the moronic pedestrian without swerving into the next lane, and continued on her way while I was still gibbering in shock. I'm glad she didn't hit him -- the police make you fill out paperwork if you do.

She's also very good at parallel parking. I'm finding it difficult to teach her how to parallel park, and that's not because I don't know how to do it myself, thank you Mrs Impala. Just last Tuesday, she surprised and amazed me -- in a good way -- with an expert example of trick parking. She went from a start position of angle-parked on one side of the road, and finished in a parallel-parked position on the other side of the road, in one smooth movement. Forget your three-point parks, this was a one-point turn and park, in reverse.



Admittedly the car ended up a smidgen further out from the curb than ideal, but I'm hardly going to complain about that.

Happy Pi Day

March fourteenth 3.14.yy is Pi Day, and as an extra bonus this year it is also Friday.

(Click image for full view.)

Did you remember to eat pie on Pi Day?

The Horror, the Horror!

There are some things Man Was Not Meant To Do...

Singing cosmos

How cool is this? The northern lights sing:

It's safe to say that the majority of scientists who do research in this field are skeptical of the notion that the aurora's dazzling light show has its own built-in soundtrack, but while visiting Lapland, Hill worked closely with a geophysicist who does: Esa Turunen of the SGO, whose research focuses in part on scientifically establishing the audibility of the phenomenon. Certainly the aurora borealis produces sounds in space, and those sounds are monitored and recorded regularly by observatories all over the globe, including the SGO. But the sounds heard on Earth are probably more local in origin.

Field instruments are finally sensitive enough to capture these weird sounds for empirical analysis, hampered a bit by the fact that the sounds only occur during the most intense geomagnetic activity. The Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) has an Auroral Acoustics program that statistically analyzes field recordings of auroral acoustics and compares them to a "control group" of recordings from nights when there was no geomagnetic activity. It's an ongoing project, but to date, findings support the anecdotal evidence: the sounds are real, they strongly correlate with particularly intense auroral displays, and they are produced locally, although scientists remain mystified by the exact mechanism doing the producing.

(Click image for full view.)

More here.

Amazon's chutzpah

There's a lot to like about Amazon, but also a lot to dislike, such as their ridiculous "One Click" patent and their spamming of customers. But you have to admire their chutzpah. They're running ads for their e-book reader, the Kindle, which includes this image promoting BoingBoing:



What does BoingBoing have to say about the Kindle?

Mark Pilgrim has a great, incisive post about the Amazon Kindle e-reader that sums up almost all of the reasons I won't be buying it -- it spies on you, it has DRM (which means that it has to be designed to prevent you from modding it, lest you mod it to remove the DRM), it prevents you from selling or lending your books, and the terms of service are nearly as abusive as the Amazon Unbox terms (and worse than the thoroughly dumb-ass Amazon MP3 terms).

Anarchy

Comparisons are odious

Especially when they don't support the myth that conservatives are better for the economy.



(Via Brad De Long.)

Devil toads and narwhals

PZ Myers reports on the discovery of the extinct Beelzebufo frog:

It means "devil toad," and it was a 10 pound monster that lived 70 million years ago, in what is now Madagascar. It's huge, and judging by its living cousins, was a voracious predator. If it were alive today, it would probably be eating your cats and puppies.

In other words, this was an awesome toad, and I wish I had one for a pet.

Who wouldn't want one of these little beauties? (Artist's impression, naturally.)

(Click image for full view.)

And new research into narwhals has solved the mystery of the narwhal's 8-foot-long tooth. It seems that the tooth is actually a high-tech sensor: it is filled with millions of nerve connections, and is capable of sensing changes in water temperature and pressure, and in particle density of the water.

Bad writing and poor grammar

One of the most pernicious myths about English grammar is that you should never split an infinitive. Linguists point out time and time again that the prohibition against splitting infinitives makes no sense in English, and that it was originally derived from Latin and French where it is impossible to split an infinitive.

An infinitive is a verb with the word "to". For example:

• We plan TO GO immediately home.


• At the time I intended TO INVADE only half of Poland.


• My auntie told me TO KICK the guy viciously.

And here they are again split:

• We plan TO immediately GO home.


• At the time I intended TO only INVADE half of Poland.


• My auntie told me TO viciously KICK the guy.

There's no doubt that sometimes splitting infinitives can weaken a sentence, but very often it makes it clearer and stronger. In case you still believe that infinitives should never be split, please read this and this and this.

But then there are still those who continue to spread the superstition that splitting infinitives is bad grammar, like the aptly-named "Lousy Writer". When I first came across his site, I had just spent a delightful half hour or so browsing the World Wide Words site. Compared to Michael Quinion's delightful prose, which has flow and rhythm, going to the Lousy Writer site is like having your eyeballs sand-blasted. I can't imagine taking the Lousy Writer's advice on style matters, or common English idioms.

There's at least one common construction where even the most rabid "Thou
Shalt Not Split Infinitives" mavens end up splitting their infinitives:

• An effective way TO more than DOUBLE your income is by mugging little old ladies.

On a related note, are you shamed by you English?



Click thumbnail for full-sized image.

I so have to get a t-shirt of this

Thanks to BoingBoing:



(For the benefit of anyone who has been living in a cave for the last thirty years, the person in the image is Fawlty Towers' Manuel, shown in the style more familiar from the iconic photograph of South American revolutionary Che Guevara.)

Family walking on all fours

National Geographic has an article about a Kurdish family where five out of the nineteen siblings in one family walk on all fours instead of upright.

Scientists who have studied the three sisters and two brothers insist that it is not a hoax.

Uner Tan, a Turkish neurophysiologist, has studied them and believes they are "evolutionary throwbacks" to our ancestors. A team of German scientists led by Stefan Mundlos believes they have found the precise gene which has knocked out their ability to walk upright.

It's not clear what they mean by "the" gene that controls bipedalism: walking on two legs successfully requires many features, both anatomical and mental, and knocking out just one of them will cause the whole system to break. To take an extreme example, it's hard to walk upright if you have no legs. Less extreme example: the move to bipedalism would have required changes to our hips and backs. Our backs are still not completely evolved to suit our upright stance, which is why people are prone to back problems. Comparing us to our cousins (gorillas, orangutans, chimps and bonobos) shows that we have significantly longer legs than they do, relative to our body-size. The evolution of bipedalism would have required all these features to evolve more-or-less in lockstep (albeit presumably in fits and starts), and it isn't credible that there is a single gene that controls them all.

Nevertheless, certainly there could be a single gene -- or many single genes -- that the lack of could disable bipedalism. If you remove the accelerator cable from a car, the car won't move, but that isn't to say that the accelerator cable is the thing that makes cars move forward.

After studying the family, the British evolutionary psychologist Nicholas Humphrey pointed out that the genetic mutation alone wouldn't be sufficient to cause the lack of bipedalism. He gives equal credit to a family that was accepting of the children's strange gait, and making no efforts to cajole them into standing upright. Sensible, so far. But then he goes on:

"This is for real," Humphrey said. "You only have to look at the calluses on the hands of the young man [Huseyin] to see he's been on his hands for a very long time."

Why single out Huseyin? Don't the other four siblings have calluses on their hands? And walking on your hands is hardly the only way to make them callused.

I don't have any specific reason to expect a hoax, but calluses on the hands of one of the five siblings is hardly a reason to give the all-clear. Nevertheless, in the absence of any specific reason to expect a hoax, I think it is worth treating it as genuine.

The behavior could potentially reveal much about our own evolution, Humphrey says.

"Here we've got a living example of how it might be for a member of our species to walk on four legs," he said.

Most experts assume that the quadruped ancestors of humans walked in a similar way to apes such as gorillas and chimpanzees.

But the Turkish brothers and sisters walk on only their wrists or the heels of their hands, with their fingers held off the ground, the researchers say. This position appears to have saved their fingers from damage; the sisters, for instance, engage in both crochet and embroidery.

Chimps, our closest living relatives, use their whole hands and fingers for walking.

"Chimpanzees basically wreck their fingers by walking on them," Humphrey said.

[...]

"I think this new evidence, suggesting that [early-human ancestors] walked on their wrists, is much more plausible and interesting," Humphrey said.

I question this completely. Chimpanzees wreck their fingers? Chimps have very good manual dexterity, I'd need to see some support for this astounding claim before accepting it.

But even if correct about chimpanzees, Humphrey's claim that the siblings walk only on the heels of their hands isn't supported by the evidence available. The article has one photo of four of the siblings walking. In it, you can clearly make out just two hands on the ground, and in both of them, the people are clearly using their entire hand, fingers and all.

(Click image for full view.)

The photographic evidence contradicts Humphrey's claim, and calls into doubt Uner Tan's conclusion that this is a viable model of pre-bipedal human movement.

If you try it for yourself, I'm confident you'll find that it is impossible to do what the researchers claim. With the heel of the hand, or the palm, flat on the ground, it is virtually impossible to bend the fingers back far enough to keep them off the ground. There's maybe a couple of millimetres give in the finger joints, and it is quite tiring. There are basically three ways of hand-walking: with open hands flat on the ground; on closed fists; or on the knuckles of the fingers, as apes do when knuckle-walking. I do not believe there is any evidence at all, either in anatomically modern humans or any plausible ancestor, for a mode of quadrupedal walking where the fingers are held up off the ground.

There is no doubt at all that human development is complex. The five siblings in question all display a range of congenital deficiencies, include mild mental retardation and lack of balance. It is absolutely possible that whatever genetic damage the five siblings have -- and it might be as little as a single gene -- could lead to them doing the "bear crawl" into adulthood.

But I am extremely skeptical that this gives us any insight into human evolution. For Uner Tan to describe this as "backward evolution" is as absurd as it would be to describe Tay-Sachs disease as backwards-evolution, or sufferers of Huntington's Disease as "evolutionary throwbacks" to an otherwise unsuspected ancestor. The siblings are clearly broken. They're not a throwback to "primitive Man". The most one could say is that, possibly, early pre-bipedal ancestors of human beings may not have had the gene which the siblings are missing. But that's not the same thing: if you rip out the computer chip from a modern Ford Fiesta you don't get a Model T Ford, you get a broken Fiesta.

(Unlike modern cars, biological organisms are astonishingly good at continuing to work with bits missing. As fragile as living things are, we're also incredibly resilient.)

Update, January 3rd: More information here.

Market failures

Slate has an article discussing the ways that Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of the free market can be very bad at providing goods and services that are outside of the norm.

This brings us back to Nike's new shoe. Foot Locker is full of options that fit me and most other Americans. But American Indians make up just 1.5 percent of the U.S. population, and with feet on average three sizes wider, they need different-sized shoes. If we had all voted in a national election on whether the Ministry of Shoes should make wide or typical-width shoes, we surely would have chosen the latter. That's why Friedman condemned government allocation. And yet the market made the same choice. If Nike's announcement looks like a solution to this problem of ignored minority preference, it really isn't. The company took too many years to bring the shoe on line, and according to the Associated Press, the new sneaker "represents less of a financial opportunity than a goodwill and branding effort."

The Wall Street Journal is reporting on a different sort of market failure: the ever-increasing gap between rich and poor. This might be defensible if the rich were getting richer and the poor richer too -- in fact I remember being suckered into believing this myth as a teenager, but as the WSJ explains, in fact the poor are getting poorer, the middle class are treading water to keep from sinking, while only the rich are moving ahead. America hasn't been so unequal since the 1920s.