Atomic Nerds

Today in 1945, the city of Hiroshima received a uranium thank-you note for Pearl Harbor. The gun-type detonation mechanism in Little Boy had previously been untested due to the extremely high levels of confidence in the design (i.e. simply slam enough uranium together and it’ll go most-vigorously bang), and its yield of ~15 kilotons helped demonstrate that “just a theory” in science does in fact mean more than “just a guess.”

She sighed again. She was familiar with the syndrome. They said they wanted a soulmate and helpmeet but sooner or later the list would include a skin like silk and a chest fit for a herd of cows.

— (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Via Dr. Helen, I discovered John Hawkins’s Interviews With 3 Dating Gurus: Dating Advice For Men. Most of the article is pretty good, with a mix of commonsense advice and corrections of common wrongheaded attitudes, like the classic not-really-a-nice-guy perception that women’s failure to reward their fawning and pretending to be their friend with sex means that women only like jerks. However, the section of interest she excerpted was this:

Because nice guys are weak guys. They wear their heart on their sleeve and they don’t make the girl work for it. …What happens is that the guy says, “I had a good time, did you? Can I see you again? You’re really a nice girl! You’re sure good looking.” This girl is 28, she’s good looking, and ever since she was 12, guys have been telling her she’s beautiful. So, what effect does that compliment have? It’s a negative.

…The nice guy is too happy to be there and when she walks away from the first date she says, “Here’s another one I own” versus “I don’t know where I stand with this guy.” When you start tweaking that detective in her mind, she goes bonkers and her interest level goes through the roof.

I’ll also note the listed credentials of one of the other interviewees (who actually has some of the sanest advice, perhaps ironically):

Savoy is the President and creator of Love Systems. Love Systems teaches the science of dating and social dynamics through educational seminars, as well as a broad range of materials that include books, CD’s, DVD’s, etc. Savoy is also the author of Magic Bullets and co-authored the “Love Systems Routines Manual,” a collection of the best tried-and-tested scripts used by pick-up artists in their in-field experiences with women.

Before creating Love Systems in 2006, Savoy co-founded Mystery Method Corp in 2004 with fellow pick-up artist “Mystery.” While serving as a consultant on the VH1 show “The Pickup Artist,” Savoy worked to bring dating science to mainstream America. Savoy also appears in Neil Strauss’ best-selling book “The Game,” and operates the world’s largest free pickup and dating forum for men - The Attraction Forum.

The reason “pickup artistry” (the art of manipulating a woman into sleeping with you) and this kind of advice sells- and I can’t really blame these experts, as they are in the business of selling advice that will get people what they think they want- is that it works. Men and women are humans, which means they have a human nature and a human psychology, and buttons that can be pressed. It is, in short, the art of manipulation in order to achieve a desired result- just like business negotiating strategy. You can, in fact, get someone to be more interested in you by gaming her- or his- perception of your wealth, your status, your social skills, your physical attractiveness, and your desirability in general.

Oh, manipulation is Bad and Wrong, yes. Doesn’t mean people won’t still use what works- and the saying “all’s fair in love and war” shows that the tradition of jettisoning your normal ethics in order to score your romantic prize is an old and hoary one.

No, it works, and people are willing to do it because it does. What’s missing here is not a sense of ethics but the question of what exactly you expect to get out of this. Here’s another question: how many of the guys you know who are selling this kind of pick-up artistry advice sell it as “here’s how I have slept with dozens of women and had my pick of dates for Friday night”, and how many of them sell it as “Here’s how I met my wife, whom I love very much”?

You have successfully gotten her attention, you have successfully flipped her psychological switches, you’ve outdone all those other competing males who are also trying to sell themselves, and she thinks you’re an alpha male. Now your prize is: the woman who places a much higher value on your status than she does on whoever it is you actually are- she doesn’t really have much of an idea on that, and maybe she doesn’t really want to if you’ve gotten this far without her bullshit detector going off. Do you care? Is she sexy? Dynamite in bed, perhaps? If that’s all you wanted, then great! You have dynamite sex on tap with a woman who is either dumber than you are or sufficiently manipulative and shallow herself that she doesn’t care what you’re actually like as long as you meet her metrics.

As a companion, however, you’re likely to find her lacking. As a co-parent or financial partner- which is what she will be as a wife unless you’ve got one hell of an icy pre-nup- she’s likely to be even worse.

Most of the defense I see put forth by men who do this pickup artist stuff is that it’s the only way to even get noticed in the singles venue they’re in- let’s say, the bar scene in LA. If you know that the singles market you’re in is a meat market, then are you surprised that the singles there are shallow, that the men- which probably include you, if you’re looking for a mate in an environment where looks are everything and the women can and do shoot down 90% of the men that talk to them- are looking for hot women and the women are looking for high-status men? How many friends of yours that are coupled up happily- and by “happily”, I mean they genuinely seem to enjoy each other’s company rather than being satisfied with their mate’s hotness, bank account, or other measures of “success”- found love this way? Do you have ANY friends that this describes? Me, almost every other couple I know socially is like this- think the shared values that make the social associations pleasant to begin with might have something to do with that?

Don’t think for a minute, mind you, that I’m exempting women from this. Women have their own versions, and that particular package of poop even goes all the way up to manipulating your way through your marriage after you’ve captured your male. (Written, incidentally, as one of the authors was in the midst of a divorce.) As it is, men are simply a convenient default pronoun- if you change some of the words around and switch the pronouns, I mean every word to apply to women, too.

When you start from the beginning basing a relationship on head games, don’t blame your partner when she continues it on exactly those terms- I’m betting you didn’t prearrange a moment to suddenly start being genuine with each other. If you gamed your way to sealing the deal, followed all the Rules, worked the System, and got a parter that’s a 9 on the hotness scale, on their way up the career ladder, has a healthy bank account, and the values of a high-class hooker, then congratulations…

I had a nice rant all ready to go from cortex to keyboard to you, and so of course I fired up my trusty PC music player, Winamp. I CAN write in silence, but I’m easily two or three times slower and keep losing my train of thought or the momentum of the rant. Music helps me concentrate. A lot.

Winamp crashed. I forced the program to close and fired it up again. It crashed again.

Fine, I thought. There’s a new update out anyway. I downloaded it, installed it, jumped through assorted hoops and briefly noted how friggin HUGE the content and capabilities now were, and attempted to load my old playlist.

CRASH!

Could be a fluke. Let’s try one more time.

CRASH!

Fine. Fuck Winamp anyway. It’s Pandora for me for today, even though I don’t like using it while I write, because if I’m concentrating on what I’m writing I can’t give any feedback to Pandora, which is the point of using in the first place, to me.

There’s always my Creative Labs portable mp3 player, but the reason I don’t use it all the time (besides battery limitations) is that my computer’s hard drives have a lot more space on them than it does, and I have a lot of music. Does anybody know of a simple desktop widget that doesn’t try to take over all media functions for the computer, search for music, look for DRM licenses, do my taxes, or paint my house? I just want it to play common digital music files. That’s it. That’s ALL. That’s why Winamp USED to be my reliable, non-crashing media player of choice, before its programmers apparently decided that they needed to directly ape Windows Media Player to be competitive.

You know it’s going to be an interesting (in the curse sense) day when it begins with a phone call explaining how someone you’ve met is about to be arraigned for first degree murder, the first in over 15 years in Los Alamos.

Posts from me will be a tad sparse for the moment.

For those that care: Night Elf Druid, “Wifkottr”, Steamwheedle Cartel.

I’ve been avoiding the subject for some time, partly because the sheer amount of piled bullshit and pointless rancor gives me a headache, and partly because other folks handle the issue much better than I ever could. I don’t have the expertise to analyze it as well, or the interest in the subject to keep as close track as I should.

But, all the other substantial posts I currently have in my mental queue are in some way unfinished, and a few people have asked me about it, so… here is my best effort at a quick primer for the sense and nonsense in the climate debate. As with energy, the biggest problem is that there is no broad consensus among the public debaters (as opposed to the scientists) about what the argument is actually about. “Is global warming real?” is FAR too broad a question; there are actually a great many questions involved in the serious debate.

1. Is the climate changing?

This is, perhaps, the only gimme in the lot. Yes, we may be certain that the climate is changing, because that is what the climate does. Expecting it to stay static because that would be convenient for us is idiocy of the first order. Climate has changed enormously over the course of history in general, and even within human history, in smaller cycles within overall “ice age” and “warm” periods. One of the problems of the debate in general is that humans have only been able to accurately measure certain variables precisely within the last few decades; our knowledge of what “normal” is only covers the last thirty years or so with any precision. Outside of that, we’re stuck with inaccurate “thermometers” that can be powerfully influenced by other variables- like tree rings- or best guesses based on our knowledge of history, such as the Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age- which are controversial precisely because our “records” are so spotty and unreliable.

2. Is humanity influencing climate?

Probably. Humans have caused massive ecological changes before, usually without meaning to, even when it should have been obvious. The megafauna extinctions of North America spring to mind, as does the deforestation of the Middle East and North Africa. Today, North America is far more heavily forested than it ever was- because we killed off the massive herds of grazing animals that create those wide-open plains, and then we became so efficient at agriculture that we no longer needed huge amounts of farm and range land to have a food surplus. Human activities DO release an abnormal amount of the carbon dioxide that normally stays locked up in earth and rock, and we DO know that CO2 plays a role in climate. The question here is not “can we influence climate” but “how sensitive is climate to our influence”.

3. Does CO2 cause warming?

Almost certainly. A tremendous amount of time and energy is expended by skeptics on attacking this link, but it’s wasted effort; this part of the debate really is “settled science”. The problem is that because they think global warming is bullshit, they don’t do any followup research- such as the important questions “how much warming does CO2 cause on its own”, and “is CO2 a primary driver of climate or a secondary amplifier”. These are not even the most important questions, because even the IPCC* (the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which produces the big, thick reports on various aspects of climate change that seem to set the standard for the debate) agrees that CO2 has a diminishing-returns relationship with warming- CO2 absorbs solar radiation, but that relationship isn’t linear. By their own calculations, carbon dioxide by itself can only cause about 1-1.2 degrees Celsius of warming, about half of which we (may) have already experienced. This is an effect, but it’s not a catastrophe- the catastrophic scenarios are based on feedback effects, which are posited to be heavily dominated by positive feedbacks.

4. “Wait, positive feedbacks? What feedbacks?”

…Annnnd here is the part of the debate that is rarely mentioned in media reporting at all (probably more because most reporters are scientifically illiterate rather than any attempt at spin), and is usually only even alluded to by skeptics who observe that the earth’s climate has undergone large recognized historical shifts, but has remained in stable oscillation around a median rather than freezing to a snowball or heating up into a slightly cooler Venus. All of the climate models used by the IPCC assume the feedbacks are mostly positive- that, when the earth warms, various natural systems (like ice albedo and cloud formation) will drive more warming. How much solar radiation is reflected back out by ice and other reflective surfaces; how much is absorbed by water vapor; how much cloud cover might reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching the surface; how much in additional greenhouse gases will be released by melting ice, and how much will be absorbed by plants and other biological processes**. Whenever you hear of a climate “tipping point”, the person is talking about 100% positive feedback- that the earth could go unstoppably climate-critical, like a nuclear reactor. The IPCC models do not assume 100% feedback- over time, it’s gone from 45% positive assumption to 68%. (At the same time, their estimates for how much warming is due to carbon dioxide alone have gone down.) If you like numbers and want more detail, a pretty good analysis of the IPCC’s feedback assumptions and how they’ve changed over time lives here.

What we DO know is that the climate models have consistently made much higher predictions for warming than actually occurred as time has marched on since this field of study began in earnest. Something is wrong with the models- which is, in itself, not surprising, since climate is a massively complex system and we still don’t understand a great many variables. As Roy Spencer*** recently testified before Congress, this assumption is being re-examined.

5. “Wait, are the climate scientists and modelers morons or what? Why would they assume strong positive feedbacks?

While I cheerfully agree with the assessment that the UN is led by morons and the policy recommendations based on the IPCC’s science were crafted by morons, there was a good reason for this assumption. If you’ll recall that CO2 by itself doesn’t actually have that strong an effect on climate and that it operates in a diminishing-returns relationship with warming, the .7 degrees Celsius of warming we experienced in the twentieth century was a good bit more than could be explained by CO2 alone. Positive feedback relationships were posited to fill in the gaps of what was understood about warming and CO2, in order to explain why, again, reality didn’t match the model. When that happens, the model needs changing- regardless of which direction the error is in.

6. “So what did cause the warming?”

It’s a bit of an open question, one related to another one that isn’t asked often enough that I mentioned earlier- Is CO2 a primary driver of climate? There’s a growing body of research into the idea that the primary driver of the warming we experienced recently may actually be solar radiation. This is a fairly new idea, only really starting to get off the ground since 2005, and NASA is on it. The debate is now about how much these other sources of warming contribute and have contributed in the past (obviously, we have little to no data on historical solar fluctuations and corresponding Earth temperature changes, not even anything as shaky as tree rings), how much of the assumptions of positive feedbacks are changed by this new information- some are claiming that evidence of sensitivity to solar radiation actually proves that climate is dominated by negative feedbacks- and how this would interact with what is already known about greenhouse gases. So, the short answer to the question is: we don’t know. This is science working normally, no matter what Al Gore or Michael Crichton say.

And that’s the thing of it: we really don’t know. It’s a young science for a field that’s necessarily going to be of breathtaking complexity, simply because it’s about how physics, chemistry, and biology interact to create long-term patterns over every aspect of the entire planet. Based on what I do understand, I personally think that climate change is real but that it’s unlikely to be the catastrophe we’re told it will be, simply because it makes no sense for climate to be dominated so heavily by positive feedbacks that it would be that sensitive- as many have observed, Earth has undergone truly massive perturbations in its climate’s history and yet still returned to oscillating around a median. I can’t think what would be so different about human-generated CO2 that could suddenly change all those rules.

However, just because I can’t think it doesn’t mean it’s not true. I quite rightly bash on others for rejecting huge chunks of science just because it offends their uneducated intuition, and I’m about as educated on climate science as Roy Spencer is educated on biology. The catastrophists could be right, and the logic of preparing for the worst-case scenario rather than blithely hoping for the best dictates that I must think about what will happen if they are. Lots of people point to the shrill hysteria among the catastrophists, and their cultlike insitence that humanity must pay for its carbon “sins”- but just because some nut tells you you’ll burn in Hell for your sins in order to bully you to behaving as he would prefer, it does not follow that Hell does not actually exist. As this kind of Christian wingnut usually smugly asserts, after you’re dead and standing before judgment is a lousy time to find out that they were actually right about what kind of tolerance God has for earthly funny business.

That leads to the last question, which skeptics and alarmists alike need to address honestly:

7. “If global warming is real, what should we do about it?”

This is a very serious question. The cost of serious CO2 abatement in the absence of some seriously heavy-duty deus ex machina results of alternative-energy research amounts to a serious chunk out of the global economy- in one of Al Gore’s proposals (which would reduce warming down to a couple of degrees, by the catastrophist models), nearly half the entire current global economy. Again, this is more than just belt-tightening, reducing, and reusing: this is with 20$-a-gallon as a plausible FLOOR on gas prices, and food prices just as bad, since food requires a substantial energy investment to grow, store, and ship. Almost no one is currently meeting Kyoto Protocol targets, and those targets are incredibly wimpy compared to what will be required for serious carbon abatement- one of the arguments against the United States becoming a signatory nation is that even the catastrophists admit that even if everyone DID comply, it would be an insignificant drop in the bucket so far as warming were concerned. The other reason? The nations didn’t want to take the economic hit, as their leaders know damn well and good that their populations would revolt. Whether a nation chose not to sign or chose not to make real efforts to meet its goals has mostly been a matter of how seriously they take treaties and what kind of black eye they want to take.

It’s incredibly ironic that the IPCC and Al Gore shared a Nobel Peace Prize for their work in spreading awareness about catastrophic global warming, because if they’re absolutely right and the skeptics are absolutely wrong, the conflicts over resources, energy, and the consequences of warming would be the single biggest cause of death, poverty, and warfare among increasingly-desperate nations in history, making squabbles about land, religion, and economic theories look like playground scuffles. People who think we’re all going to link hands and sacrifice nearly everything in some sort of global harmony in face of the threat are either on mind-altering chemicals, or appallingly ignorant of history. The UN is typically concerned about the impact of climate change on women and minorities, but doesn’t seem to consider that the economic impact of serious carbon abatement will almost certainly be much, much worse.

And in that disconnect, it’s pretty easy to see why a lot of skeptics have called global warming a “scam”- because in it, the same people who have always been dreaming of re-engineering the world to their vision see an excuse far better than the old ones of “economic justice” or religion- a threat that could conceivably affect EVERYONE to the point where they might acquiesce to the social engineers’ control. And that prospect has attracted them to global warming catastrophism like flies to honey, which is why so many of the “solutions” look like repackaged socialism: they are. Only this time, instead of killing off huge numbers of people implementing a ham-handed collectivist approach to industrialization, it will kill off large numbers of people in a ham-handed collectivist approach to taking humanity back to a completely imaginary time when we supposedly lived in environmental harmony with the planet. (Most true historical cases of human populations living with a very light environmental impact have been due to a very high mortality rate, especially of children.)

At the end of the day, one thing that both skeptics and catastrophists should be able to agree on is that our only plausible way out of the trap- whether you consider the trap dependence on fossil fuels, global warming, or dependence on an energy source that is largely controlled by psychopaths- is through alternative energy. Alternative energy is not there yet. Nowhere near. Getting there will require lots and lots of money… which will be in very short supply if we react to a climate change whose magnitude and scope we still have only a very fuzzy idea of.

Real solutions to problems involve a lot of serious cost-benefit analysis, careful and detailed research, and an ethical approach grounded in reality rather than ideology. I suspect the sign we’ll have that alarmists have truly begun to take the problem seriously- and that skeptics have truly begun to take energy problems seriously- is when this actually starts to dominate the discourse. For one, those nuclear plants suddenly look like a really attractive proposition in terms of energy produced versus carbon emissions.

I apologize for how abruptly this ends, but trying to wrap all these issues up into a neat and symmetrical package is like trying to stuff forty snakes into a hamster ball. This issue is a hydra: for each head you lop off, more grow.

*Plain language to this effect can be found in the IPCC third assessment, but not the fourth, which is the most recent. While they made a number of updates to the physical science they address directly- not always in favor of the catastrophist scenario- an explicit demarcation of the boundary between “CO2 period” and “CO2 plus feedbacks” seems to have vanished.

**For a quick guide to feedbacks according to the IPCC, go here.

***Those who are also interested in my primary science-and-culture issue, evolution, may know that Spencer is also a doubter of evolutionary theory. I don’t find this to be hugely problematic; Fred Hoyle’s denial of evolution didn’t make him a bad astronomer, just a man who had overestimated his own reasoning skills and didn’t understand someone else’s field.

The last few days have seen something of an explosion of hand-wringing and hysteria among the blogging community. First Sitemeter had some issues with IE7, then a whole bunch of good people had their Blogger blogs falsely marked as spam. Since Google’s heavy left-leanings are pretty well documented, a goodly number of people immediately noted that their favorite non-left-leaning blog had been flagged, and started pointing the finger of indignancy.

If I may take a moment to step away from my normally sensitive and caring nature to offer a loving and helpful suggestion to those calling the spam-blog flagging a vast-$wing-conspiracy: Shut the fuck up.

Yes, Google, blogger’s parent company, is rather far to the left. But do you know what they are even more so than liberal? Programmers. Coders. Sysadmins. People heavily involved with machines that operate on a very complex system of yes/no - same as me, same as a few of you all out there. Remember that little note you sent to Susie Jenkins in the third grade, “Do you like me, y/n circle one”? Remember the frustration when it came back with her flowery script informing you “Maybe”? Computers don’t have a “maybe” option, yet. All it takes is a typo to cause major fuckups across far reaching and completely unexpected areas. Maybe some over-tired code monkey meant to type “>” for the conditional check to determine if your blog was spam or not, and instead accidentially hit “<". Or maybe "<=" or a particularly frisky ">=”. One extra keystroke, along with a convergence of human error missing the bug (seriously, try to read some code and tell me your eyes don’t start to glaze over faster than you can say “tin foil sailor hat” - even the people who do it for a living fall victim to this sometimes), and suddenly a whole bunch of people are off screaming about how Hillary is using the Jews to control Blogger’s pro-Obama algorithms in an effort to make sure Rush gets timely refils on his prescription drugs which then allow him to call Michael Moore so he can… you get the idea. Sorry, snowflake, you’re just as unique as everyone else in this case. Nothing special about your uniqueness to single you out for a flag.

Now a few folks have started observing “Hey, he who controls the servers and software controls the data! I think I’ll get my own setup, with a domain name, and hosting!” That’s all well and good, and will in fact give you a much much higher degree of freedom to do what you want with your blog. Of course, with freedom comes responsibility. There’s the simple stuff first - make sure your domain name stays registered. Make sure you’ve got enough monthly bandwidth to keep your readers happy. Make sure your passwords are secure (this should be old hat, fortunately). Make sure you stay up to date on the security patches and updates on whatever software you choose to blog from. Keep an eye on your widgets and plugins in case someone finds a typo in their code. Whoops, that’s right. Now it’s at least partly your job, whether you read code or not, to care and keep an eye out for the same typos that flagged your blog as spam in this last go round. You may not have the skill to fix the problem yourself if it comes up, but if it does, there won’t be a safety net uber-corp there to fix it when the howls of outrage reach a certain decibel level. If you do go that route, there’s still one more hurdle in your path to complete data-autonomy.

You still don’t control the server.

No, if you’re paying for hosting somewhere, that’s basically the digital equivilent of renting an apartment somewhere. You’ve got your front door and storage space, hallways to access the place with, but if you do something the building manager lists as a no-no, you’re out on your ass, maybe with your stuff, maybe without. Hell, the disks your blog lives on probably won’t even be in the same state as you. Sure, you can keep backups and everything, but there is still a real (and this sort of thing has happened before) chance that someone will come along and file a complaint against you with your hosting company. Kinda like all the Rovebama-bots supposedly did this weekend to send everyone scampering for the Reynold’s wrap.

Now just to be clear, a hosting company is more like the apartment building owner than the normal analogy-fuzziness allows for. They really don’t care what you’re up to as long as it’s not illegal where the servers (buildings) live. This means that rolling your own blog site with your own software is, in fact, about your best bet for keeping an untouchable blog online, but still isn’t perfect.

The catch is that there is no perfect method, unless you own a telco.

Short of going out and buying huge amounts of stock in a company interested in slinging 1s and 0s hither and yon via their own cables, you’d need to run your own server. Hitch up to some ripping fast connection (no, your cable modem won’t do - see how long it takes pushing 20, 40, 80gb a month before Comcast says “Um, you’re being a hog. Throttle time.”), grab a copy of IIS, or Apache, or whatever floats your boat, and roll the whole shebang.

Of course, if you’re watching the operating system and webserver you’ve just added another big pile of places to watch for typos, many of which could now be your own. If blogging wasn’t a big time investment before, it certainly will be now.

By the way, who’s watching the wires for breaks in that telco you bought?

Today was very full but very good. We swung by the homebrew store and picked up enough stuff for several more batches of beer (an Irish red, an Australian-style ale, more of the light-and-pleasing ale we brewed before, and we also have stuff for an IPA and a pilsner- should anyone like to vote on which one we start tomorrow), and also hit Best Buy for some action movies and other light popcorn-friendly fare.

While I was there, I picked up World of Warcraft.

Stop making that face. We have been nerds for a very long time and we have no shame of any kind left.

I’ve been feeling the RPG itch for quite awhile, and while we used to play Final Fantasy XI, we quit when it became apparent that it’s just not doable unless you either have enough patience to burn an entire evening just trying to put a workable party together, or enough patience to kill low-level monsters for three hundred hours just to advance one level. I caved on WoW when I heard that it was in fact possible to reasonably solo all the way as long as you picked the right class, or at least to play as a two-man duo. (Stingray initially mocked me all the way home, but seems willing to see how bad it sucks or doesn’t and maybe play with me later. We’ll see.)

So, those of you who don’t play and think it’s for hopeless losers… like I said, we have no shame, so sneering will have little effect. You can’t actually stuff my head in a toilet. For those that DO… Alliance or Horde, and server? At least having the theoretical ability to communicate with friends would be nice. Newbie tips would be welcome, too.

Marko? What say you?

Everybody has heard of the Fire Triangle, right? Three things are necessary for fire: fuel, heat, and oxygen, and should you remove one element everything collapses and the fire theoretically goes out. I’ve come up with a similar triangle, except it is for how much people suck, and it works backwards.

Look, I know the reason the triangle metaphor works for fire is because if you take a single leg out it all collapses, rather than needing all three legs gone, but I’m going to blame this on the fact that people are clever and can turn a triangle with a missing leg over on its side to a /\ which will still kinda stand. I’m reaching, you say? Fine. Design your own damn triangle. If yours includes blackjack and hookers, I may even be interested.

Anyway.

As with the fire triangle, there are three elements in this little polygon of human decency: Porn, Pork, and Pets. Take out any one side, and the odds are that you’ve still got a fairly decent person. Consider, there are many folks who find porn distasteful for some reason or other. Well, that’s no deal-breaker as far as being a tolerable person. So long as the person is still down for a good BLT and appreciates a good loyal dog, or a nice cute kitten, I’d be willing to bet we can all still get along. Not ameniable to cats, dogs, guppies and geckos? Again, I’ll look at you askance, but so long as we can ogle various lovelies both artificial and natural over a nice Christmas ham, there’s no need to get too worked up. Don’t like pork chops, but down with porn and pets (though hopefully not at the same time)? Again, probably still a decent enough person.

Take out another leg and see what happens. No porn, no pets? Well, we can discuss the finer points of bacon, but we’re going to run out of conversation before long. Likewise if you hate pork and pets, one can only discuss the exploits of Belladonna for a limited time. If porn and pork are off the table, we can discuss Fluffy for a while, though I suspect this condition is what spawns crazy cat ladies.

Now let’s go one step further. If you hate porn, pork, and pets, what the hell do you do for fun? Wait, you’re gonna tell me there’s a huge swatch of the planet where porn, pork, and pets are right out? I’m suspicious! And now, for a cherry on top, we find that Saudi Arabia has banned selling dogs and cats because you can pick up babes with pets.

So let me get this straight.
No bacon.
No titty mags.
And I can’t use Fido to go out and covertly attract some non-paper boobage, which I couldn’t see anyway because boobs are so horribly corrupting that they and anything attached to them must be hidden from all sight lest I lose my barely-there self control and go on Rapefest 9000.

See, now if I could at least get a ham sandwich in Riyadh, which sounds suspiciously like something you chant to summon an elder god with tentacles for a face anyway, things might just be tolerable. As it stands though, I think the options are either mass deployment of daisy cutters, or to relocate Las Vegas, and give a battalion or two of Marines the best deployment of their lives.

Hell, I think for this plan we might even be able to bring Frankie and the Rat Pack back from the dead to help out.

Negative campaigning has a bad name. Every time a campaign releases an attack ad against its opponent or opponents, there’s usually a quick kerfuffle in the media about how it “went negative” and some high-minded chiding from the other side about how pathetic it was that the campaign had to stoop to that instead of making their own guy look good and selling himself on his merits.

Although it’s popular (and people seem to forget every other election they’ve ever been through every four to two years) to claim that negative campaigning is a modern product of television and sound-byte attention spans- we Americans are having to put up with this bullshit during our dinner hours because we’ve gotten so stupid and partisan we don’t deserve any better- cooler heads have pointed out that this tradition is as old as the country itself is. Political campaigns have always tried to make their guy look good by making the other guy look bad.

So, it’s not a new thing. That doesn’t invalidate the point of those lamenting that campaigns “have to stoop to such tactics”, but maybe a better question than “is it new?” is “is this something that works for a better reason than simply appealing to the basest fears and animosities of the voters?”

That would depend on what you mean by “a better reason”. The fact of the matter is that it DOES work and work extremely well, which is why campaigns keep doing it. Does it appeal to the worst in a voter? Maybe. That depends on what you think is “the worst”. Merely because a voter has fears does not mean that those fears aren’t completely legitimate ones, whether they’re fears that a candidate will raise your taxes, continue the policies of a corrupt and detested administration, use nukes, or govern as though they were National Pastor. Voters have every reason and right to take character, problematic public statements, frequent policy reversals, and other things into consideration- and campaigns have every right and reason to highlight their opponent’s weaknesses on these issues, since his own campaign will be trying to gloss those over just as hard as they’re trying to make the other guy look bad themselves. Does that extend to stretching, spinning, or outright torpedoing the truth? It shouldn’t, but it does… because it often works. That is the dirty side of negative campaigning, not the practice itself.

As for sticking to “the positive”, this isn’t as sound a tactic for a campaign as it first seems. The argument goes that if your guy is actually any good, he should be able to sell himself just fine this way- the problem is that, once in office, very few campaign promises are actually fulfilled. There is a good reason for this beyond “politicians are lying bastards”, of course; actual American government is run by thousands of people, not just one guy, and even if a candidate works himself to the bone trying to fulfill each promise, the odds are good that he won’t accomplish what he wanted to because others in government exercised their own power to stop him. This applies just as much to the executive branch, which depends primarily on Congress to actually draft and execute policy; even on areas that are exclusively the executive domain, such as foreign policy, the president can’t do much if Congress decides not to fund any of it. The voters, meanwhile, unless they’ve fallen in love with the candidate- which only happens to a minority of partisans- are extremely aware of this. Policy and promises are nebulous uncertainties- but character and track record are much more concrete right now.

Thus, the candidate must kiss babies, give handshakes, and flog himself trying to prove to three hundred million people, all of whom are of highly diverse background and beliefs, that he’s such a swell guy that he’s got all that character. The problem is that, thanks to that diversity, the same things that make one group’s heart swell with their candidate’s fabulous character make another’s shrivel with his obvious deficiencies. Is a candidate well-educated and well-spoken? He’s out of touch with the common man. Is he a man of strong faith and unwavering moral compass? He’s a religious demagogue with more devotion to a collection of antique shepherd’s tales than to common sense or the realities of a pluralistic society. Military veteran? General Ripper. Not a veteran? Pantywaist completely out of touch with the military he proposes to lead. Successful businessman? In the pocket of corporations. Lifelong politician? Scumbag Washington insider. First-time politician? Inexperienced naif. Trying to show his best side to as many groups as he can? Unreliable weathervane and an empty suit. Never compromises no matter what his audience? Tone-deaf boor who will be unable to work with other politicians or foreign powers. Almost any trait that’s a plus to one group is a minus to another- or at least, it can be spun that way.

Perhaps the best argument for negative campaigning actually lies in the mysterious and fickle group that everyone is courting the hardest in any election: the undecided middle. Most true “swing” voters aren’t swing voters because they’re ignorant of both candidates (they’d have to have made a deliberate effort to avoid coverage- unlikely to vote), and they’re not that way because they LIKE both candidates; there’s usually enough strong differences in background and policy between any two given candidates that it’s trivial for someone to decide who they like. No, the undecided middle is mostly the people who are trying to choose between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. In February, all three likely candidates had more people who were willing to vote against them than for them- in Hillary Clinton’s case, a much larger clear majority were more willing to vote against her than FOR anybody else!

The truly undecided are usually trying to decide just which son of a bitch they hate just that much more. And they are far more likely to react to negative campaigning than they are to react to attempts to polish the turd or make the douche smell a little sweeter- which is why it is with us, and why, if this election is not an anomaly, it probably always has been and always will be.

I’m not sure if this means that Breda has gotten carried away with spreading the joys of shooting, or if she’s just doin’ it that well.

(Stolen shamelessly from Unshelved.)

Now you can use your browser history to confirm! Found at the recently redesigned Maximum PC website, Mike Nolet, CTO and co-founder of AppNexus whipped up some javascript that’ll eyeball your browser history and wash it through some fairly simple math and take a stab at whether you’ve got a + or - in the pants region. The test lives here and is pretty dang accurate. LabRat reports that just about every other “I will guess your gender!” gizmo on the web reports her as either half-n-half or more likely to be male, and it gave her a 92% chance of being female. Given my 96% chance of being male, I suppose that means I’m more than man enough for her. I’ll even cowboy up and post my exact results:

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 4%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 96%

Site Male-Female Ratio
google.com 0.98
amazon.com 0.9
cnn.com 1.35
imdb.com 1.06
weather.com 1.08
hp.com 1.11
sears.com 0.98
gamefaqs.com 1.11
cabelas.com 1.25
newegg.com 2.23
icanhascheezburger.com 1.04
zonealarm.com 1.33
escapistmagazine.com 2.08
midwayusa.com 2.03

What, no girls go shopping for gun parts and computer hardware in the same day? The test is a *little* off since there are a good number of sites in my browser history that just don’t seem to have a ratio (none of my daily blog reads are listed, for instance), and it does take a while to run, but it’s still pretty nifty. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to have to find a site or two to buff up that last 4% chick I’ve got in my score. Jegs and Cigars International ought to do the trick.

Yes, really. I feel this is a large accomplishment for me, because normally postmodernists make cranial fluid start spewing out my ears in about twenty seconds, which only makes the postmodernists feel superior. I know my brain shuts down because it can’t deal with more than a certain amount of nonsense before all the safety warnings go off and everything crashes to preserve my ability to continue making sense of the world, but they seem to take such reactions as evidence that they have hit upon something so brilliant it literally neutralizes the less enlightened.

That irritates me.

In any case, yesterday I came across a professor who is suing her students for discrimination because… well, it’s kind of hard to tell (and let me tell you, the cranial fluid pressure started spiking even before I realized she was a postmodernist), but the best as I can tell, it’s because she got a lot of very negative evaluations and was aggravated by their failure to soak up her worldview like eager little sponges. Then I made the mistake of clicking on the link to her article about how social constructivism or postmodern literary theory or something (she didn’t decide by the end of the article) is the best way to study biology, and had to spend some time in the fetal position. I recommend you only expose yourself to it via the filter of this post on postmodernism in general, Obama, and the good professor.

Initially, I set the whole thing aside because I couldn’t make heads or tails enough of the professor’s prose to realize that her point was that scientists should change the way they study, work, and discuss their work to suit political goals until the above blogger clarified that that was exactly what she meant. The thought process- not to mention the language- was simply too alien.

Then, it struck me, the secret decoder ring: postmodernists are people who seriously believe in the Theory of Narrative Causality, to the point of constructing an entire academic discipline around it. The Theory, for those of you who don’t want to interrupt to check the link and aren’t Terry Pratchett fans, is the idea that reality is essentially determined by what would be most appropriate to the “story” of a given scenario. In Pratchett’s books, it’s literally the driving law of that universe- plucky heroes will always succeed against overwhelming odds, something will ALWAYS happen on a dark and stormy night, old women who live alone are inevitably powerful witches, and so forth. Obviously, postmodernists do not put it in these terms- they have, essentially, invented a language to go along with the central idea that reality is fixed by how you talk and think about it- but at bottom, this is what’s going on. Simply replace literary tropes with ideas that have been deemed politically pleasing, and you have the central idea and goals of postmodernism.

This is not even a new idea. The device works as well as it does for fantasy authors like Pratchett because this is how humans are intuitively inclined to think about the world; some psychologists even suggest that we can’t think in an organized fashion at all until we develop language. Even education itself is essentially a process of storytelling, at least until the object of the education has become advanced enough to see beyond the borders of the story and intuit according to where the facts point rather than what makes intuitive sense. Theories themselves are stories that are built around large bodies of facts and made to conform to them as rigidly as possible: they are accurate narratives that allow us to mentally map and relate facts to come to accurate new conclusions and discover new facts.

The rigid empiricism that drives science and engineering is actually a fairly recent invention in human thought, and it didn’t appear out of the blue; it was slowly developed as science emerged as an endeavor with recognizable commonalities between disciplines and methods that produced excellent results across them, which is why we have apparent historical paradoxes like Isaac Newton’s obsession with alchemy. In Newton’s time, the “scientific method” was a concept that had yet to be invented. Steven Den Beste wrote one of his more widely-linked and controversial posts about conflicts in philosophical traditions, one of which was empiricism, and another of which was what he called “philosophical idealism”, the much older one- the teleological idea that the universe has a harmonious and aesthetic design that was possible to intuit. This is an obvious line of thought both for human intuition, and for the worldview that the universe was in fact brought into being by a creator God- and the natural conclusion is that we should be able to discover new things simply because they make aesthetic sense in context with other known facts and follow intuitive lines of thinking because that’s how the universe works- as it *should*.

In theory, children learn that the universe doesn’t work according to the way they think about it when they discover that golf balls don’t really have explosives in the middle, jumping off the highest point of the swing’s arc hurts like hell when you land, and there are never, ever, any monsters hiding in your closet or under the bed. 99% of people learn that regardless of WHAT you think and how sincerely you believe, you will ALWAYS hit the ground at terminal velocity when you step off the edge of the Grand Canyon, but this way of thinking is so natural to the mind that it’s extremely difficult to fully discard. It’s probably no coincidence that mechanical and electrical engineers are among the least politically correct professions; when whatever you’re working on instantly fails when you act according to your preferred intuition rather than according to EXACTLY what the math and the data say, it’s a rapid and effective way of training yourself out of thinking this way.

It is no accident that postmodernism originated in literary criticism and does not seem to exist outside the realm of academia. In literature- and in papers, as long as you keep within the circle of people who share your literature-born assumptions- reality is indeed exactly what you, the author, deem it to be. (Having your own language helps, because then you have much tighter control over exactly what you say and how many other people can use your words in unconsidered new ways.) How strange science looks to them- an entire group of apparently rational people behaving as though their words have no impact on reality! No wonder science can produce such horrifying conclusions, and their problem is right here… they’re not thinking about the impact they’re going to have on reality when they say things like “men and women have different IQ curves”. They need to change that, posthaste.

As usual, XKCD gets it right:

So, today is the first anniversary of our blogging experiment. Rather than put on a party hat and run around the room yelling “WHEE BLOGGED FOR A WHOLE YEAR GO US”, I thought I’d share what I’ve learned so far.

1. I know about as much about my own writing process as I know about the daily chemical reactions of my liver. Before I actually started, I was pretty sure I was mostly going to do politics with some science thrown in. I got THAT backwards. I also thought I’d probably write brief, pithy posts, like the comments I left on other people’s blogs. Turns out I’m only brief when I’m trying to get something up for the sake of having posted. I also thought fisking- going through a bad argument and tearing it apart line by line- would be a mainstay. Also something I only do now when I’m hard up for material. I don’t know WHAT the hell I’d call the long essays I turned out to actually be good at- around the world in ten thousand words, maybe- but it’s not at all what I expected.

2. No wonder writers refer to “muses”. I can’t tell when the hell I’m going to feel like writing, how long or exactly what the thesis and execution will be, when I’ll feel like spewing an ocean of verbiage on something that annoys me and when I can’t think of anything to say other than “bah”, or how long good periods or bad ones will be. Blaming the frustrating black box on a personalized abstraction seems as useful an approach as any other.

3. Promising a post on a specific subject is a bad idea. Sometimes I’ll turn out not to have the argument I thought I had, sometimes it will turn out I actually wanted to write something else, sometimes I’ll realize a fatal flaw and the whole thing will collapse into a heap of smoldering rubble, sometimes I’ll realize someone else has already done it better and I’d feel lame next to them. And, of course, sometimes I’ll burn out on a subject with a flash and a pop that is damn near audible. I hate it when that happens.

4. I’m an atrocious judge of my own writing. Something I felt kind of bad putting up because I thought it sucked will suddenly turn out to be popular and linked around our corner of the blogosphere, something I posted feeling rather clever and full of myself will draw maybe one comment. I think the number of times I’ve accurately judged how popular a given post will be is actually a fair bit worse than sheer chance.

5. This was a really, really good idea. We’ve probably gotten much more back in value from this project than nearly any other we’ve started in the past year. (Save, maybe, for ponying up for central air.) Thank y’all for reading, for linking, and for generally being a highly entertaining and useful audience.

Volume 37, July 2008

Your sponge could KILL YOU! Learn the terrifying secrets of the deadly bacterial nightmare in your very own kitchen! p.28

Ladders! The vertical deathtrap! We blow the lid off 14 7/8 secrets that Big Ladder doesn’t want you to know about! Secrets that could SAVE YOUR LIFE! p. 7

Bird-flu nightmare! Learn the shocking truth about this deadly winged killer of death and your .2% chance of DYING TO DEATH! p. 3

If you’re not scared shitless about global warming, YOU’RE A BAD PERSON AND YOU WILL DIE! p. 16

Investment strategies! We’re so damn right about everything else, here’s how you should manage your money! Or you might DIE! p.48

THE SKY IS FALLING! No, we really mean it this time! We explain why you’ll need at least 6000 gallons of fresh water and canned food enough to nourish the 82nd Airborne for five years just to make it through the weekend - or you could suffer! p. 25

Pornography on the internet? We reveal the shocking secret the rest of the world has known about for thirty years! p. 18

Guns - the loudest killer! Having the means to defend your shitloads of water and canned goods WILL GET YOU KILLED! p. 52

Safety legislation! Does your senator oppose mandatory helmets for masturbation? We ask why he wants you dead! p. 9

Shitting where you eat? Not just for internet gun-board whackjobs anymore! Find out how your toothbrush is laden with DEADLY E. COLI DEATH! p. 14

NASA Assassins! The deadly rain of debris from beyond the atmosphere could fall in your back yard! These astroNUTS are trying to kill you! p. 20

Science shocker! So-called “law” of gravity could spell firey death for airline passengers! Can TSA protect us? p. 33

Cereal killers! Genetically modified wheat is a mutant in the breadbox! How will this affect YOUR LIFE? p. 40

Shocking survey! College kids DRINK! Will your 20-year-old child be next?! p.45

From Russia with Love? How EVERYTHING YOU OWN is made in China! The Red Menace is back, and deadlier than ever! p. 25

“Cell”-ular death! Your phone is giving you THE CANCER! p. 16

Out of service, out of life! If you don’t have your phone with you YOU WILL DIE! p.17

Just give up and die. You’re fucked anyway. p. 59

Larry Correia slams one out of the park, over the parking lot, past the interstate and somewhere out into the badlands. There is no other description possible for a rant which not only explains why Barack Enough With The Redacted Jokes Obama is dumber than our dog’s empty nutsack and about as concerned with staying within the bounds of the Constitution as a paramecium is with astrophysics, but he has offered up the best plan I’ve seen in ages in the process. Allow me to qutoe:

“‘Proportion’? Are you serious? A presidential candidate threw out a random tidbit about how he wants to make the largest change to the US government since… well… ever… and that’s ‘out of proportion’? Out of proportion would be digging a trench around Washington DC, filling it with lava, and then using trebuchets to launch plague rats into the city, only that would cost less. ”

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off trying to get the Lava Plague Rat Plan on our local ballots.

In my opinion, the Republican Congress of 2006 most thoroughly deserved to get voted out of power. With apparent total command of two-thirds of the government, the only thing they could seem to agree on was that they didn’t care overmuch for Democrats but WERE huge fans of spending lots and lots of money on dubious bills and programs. They left with a bootprint on their butts and an ignominious 25% approval rating. As anyone with three neurons to scrape together could have realized, the Democrats were on their way in. Harry Reid took over as the new Senate Majority Leader, Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House.

While I certainly believe the Republicans deserved to lose their jobs, I do not believe America deserved these people.

One of today’s interesting web finds was an older interview with Mr. Reid, on the subject of taxes. Here’s Harry:

The upshot of his position? Taxes are voluntary in America, unlike nasty other countries. For serious: he spends the whole goddamn interview trying to defend this position come hell or high water. His objection is to the interviewer’s use of the phrase “threat of force” to describe the government’s position on taxes, but his problem is that he doesn’t just admit this is absolutely true and defend taxation- he tries to argue that because deductions exist and fines come before jail, it’s not really force and taxes are really voluntary. Amazing.

It’s a great pity this interview hadn’t gone similarly viral in 2006; we would have saved ourselves a lot of grief. He went on to declare the Iraq war lost in 2007, deride General Petraeus as “out of touch” when he said he saw signs of progress in Iraq, and that he wouldn’t believe him anyway if he said the surge was working:

…and, of course, oil and coal make us sick and are ruining the world:

Which might be slightly more productive if they weren’t also our only current options, along with nuclear. Nevermind; Reid is the Majority Leader, the Senate is the last line to fall before any further drilling or other use of the world-ruiners is approved in Congress. The Republicans (and a few Democrats who are getting nervous about the reaction back home to obstructionism on energy) are pushing him hard. He reacts by… castigating the press for not reporting his energy policies in a way more favorable to him. Oh.

Result: 25% has become 9%.

Does anybody know how many running this year have an I after their name rather than D or R? It’s starting to look like we need a third option, and last I looked in on all of our most prominent third parties, they were getting their policies via direct transmissions from other planets.

Off today to the tattoo parlor so I can continue my transformation into a sure loser. Wretchedness? At least I don’t look like Orville Reddenbacher tried to go mountain-man, Dick Richard.

Real content to resume shortly.

I was reflecting earlier that the only thing I really miss from Livejournal is having Doqz as a regular read.

Problem solved.

One of the funny things about dogs- and animals in general- is, as I’ve said before, they don’t generalize well. Something that a human would readily figure out is the same person in a slightly different context- like a friend standing in water so that only their upper half was visible- can freak a dog right the fuck out, if it’s new and strange to them. Apparently, the familiarity can only make it more disturbing- kind of like how a human might react to seeing their mother with an eggbeater growing out her ear. Breeds that are developed to keep especially close visual track of their surroundings, like herding and guardian breeds, can be particularly susceptible to this phenomenon.

Akitas, for a guardian breed, are actually pretty stable in this way, probably because they’re also a primitive breed that’s experienced relatively little human meddling with their mindset. Certainly, both Kang and Kodos handle novelty better than the shelties and German Shepherd I used to own, and they’re also much better at restraining themselves from reacting to stimulus. We complain about how much Kodos barks at passerby, but that’s because it echoes badly in this room and because we both HATE excessive barking, not because he’s actually all that bad. God knows some people I know with terriers or sheepdogs would give their right arm if their dog, having a huge vantage point on the street in the form of our glass office doors, would actually sometimes just sit and watch quietly while the same person that went by every day did so again. He’s quiet enough that it’s actually worth getting up and investigating when he raises a ruckus, which a lot of dog owners seem to have given up on entirely unless they’re hearing the “OMG SERIAL KILLER!!!” bark.

Kang, on the other hand, barely barks at all unless it’s important. She is very breed-typical in this, and it’s one of the reasons we have Akitas in the first place. If Kodos is barking, it’s probably worth checking out- if SHE’S barking, then that means for sure that someone is actually coming up the front walk, or that there’s a dangerous animal in the yard. (She is very noisily fierce with snakes, which thank God have all turned out to be nonpoisonous so far.)

This is why, when I was in the bathroom last night thinking Higher Thoughts, when I heard her erupt in a fury of barking and growling, I was actually concerned and a bit anxious about being caught with my pants down. I figured Stingray would deal with it, which is why my curiosity deepened when the next sound I heard was him in complete hysterics of laughter. I finished my business and went to see what on earth was so… inspiring.

As it turned out, she was barking at this man:

Not in person, of course. (If it were, we’d already be having some Words with him about his failure to cover the subject of the special challenges of cooking at serious altitude. It plays merry hell with some of his recipes.) At a still image on the TV, which, it turned out, was the problem.

We watch plenty of Good Eats, so manic Alton Brown performances are something she already knows not to pay any mind to. She sometimes shows interest in the TV, although her attention span is insufficient to maintain attention for longer than five or ten minutes, and normally she’s pretty cool with it. However, when we had finished watching an episode on eggplant on one of our DVDs, we had both found other little tasks to attend to, and had thus let the credits dump back to the basic menu for the DVD, which have a still image of Alton in a similar pose with a set of measuring cups and spoons. With the size of our TV screen, that’s a not-insignificant amount of Alton. Alton holding totally still and silent while brandishing kitchen tools, unlike Alton veering around the screen with high-speed patter. Which apparently was enough to unhinge our little guardian. She had walked in the room while we were both elsewhere, taken in the leering image of the Good Eater, and just lost it.

Kodos was deeply confused by this entire phenomenon, and thus had rushed to the front windows to bark furiously himself at… whatever must be setting her off, because he certainly couldn’t find anything INSIDE to justify that sort of reaction. After realizing that there was nothing out there, he charged back into the living room, looking around frantically for the threat. He made a few laps around the room (while Stingray continued laughing and I buried my face in my hands- my baby is retarded!), then finally came to a halt in front of the TV with a look on his face that I think probably translates most closely to “You have got to be kidding me“.

Finally, I heaved a sigh and walked up to the television and tapped it, giving the happy “see-it’s-nothing-bad” speech. Kodos walked up and began sniffing thoroughly. Kang hung back at first, but once she saw Kodos checking it out with no ill effects, she came up to join us. Eventually, they finally were satisfied that the image smelled of nothing- in the dog world, probably a suspicious thing all on its own- and I was free to wipe the noseprints off the TV and retreat to the couch with my book while I waited for Stingray to finish whatever he was doing so we could settle on the evening’s entertainment. Kang followed and curled up in her customary place next to me. For ten or fifteen minutes, all was peaceful.

“….Rrrrrrrrrrrrrr….”

I looked over the edge of my book. Kang was glaring at Alton and growling softly.

“Oh for heaven’s sake.”

Quiet.

“RRRRRRRRRRRRR.”

“He’s not going to hurt you. We’ve been over this.”

She thought this over.

“Rrrrrrrrrrrr….”

I gave up and turned the TV back to the usual feed on mute. The distraction of the flickering images was not worth having to listen to Kang menace inappropriately still television personalities. That was enough to satisfy her, and she dropped off promptly to sleep.

I’m tempted to get a picture of Bobby Flay to focus her protective instincts on a more appropriate target. After all, he’s the one with the show about humiliating home cooks in their hometowns…