Elitist Bastardry, Mark VII

Category: Carnivalia

The November edition of the Carnival of the Elitist Bastards is ontube at Café Philos. Insert your monocle and enjoy!

Posted by Blake Stacey at 9:42 AM • 0 Comments

Lois Lowry on How to End a Book

Category: Bibliophilia

I know several people, both in real life and on the Intergrid, who have suffered through National Novel Writing Month. Chronologically speaking, that month is wrapping up; the terminator of those projects is sweeping around the globe. But, when the writing is done, it's time for rewriting, and how do we know when to stop that? For that matter, where do you chop off the unfolding of a story, anyway? Lois Lowry, author of a multitude of beloved children's books, suggests the following:

Is there a rule that one can follow? Probably not. But there is, I think, a test against which the writer can measure his ending, his stopping place.

When something more is going to take place, but the characters have been so fully drawn, and the preceding events so carefully shaped that the reader, on reflection, knows what more will happen, and is satisfied by it — then the book ends.

Yes, if you read The Giver (1993), you may well assert that in her most infamous book, Lowry failed to follow her own dictum. But consider: how many of the myriad arguments people have over the ending of The Giver could have happened if each reader were not individually convinced that they themselves knew what happened, and what would happen next?

Posted by Blake Stacey at 1:04 PM • 2 Comments

Around the Blogohedron

Category: Carnivalia

We now join our programme, already in progress:

• Thaddeus Nelson catches the last half of NOVA's documentary The Bible's Buried Secrets (2008), and doesn't particularly like what he sees.
• John Baez brings us the latest in the case of El Naschie: "According to the Elsevier spokesperson, El Naschie is retiring to spend more time with his sockpuppets."
• Seth Zenz gives me flashbacks to my days in an actual experimental laboratory by explaining how the tracking systems in particle detectors work.
• Dave Guarrera takes me even further back by listing analogies he's used to teach undergrads about electrical circuits.
• Tyler DiPietro unloads the Snark Cannon on the Marquis de Coiffure, so I don't have to.
• The Digital Cuttlefish gets its first glowing book review, and I get some serious cred as a layout designer. If you can't rely on unwitting praise from random people on the Internet, on what can you rely?
• Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk are handing a manuscript to their publisher, and Russell tries to remember how to relax.
• Tobasco da Gama has some photos up of the pro-marriage-equality rally we recently attended. The black-and-white film, apparently "really noisy from lying around unused for a couple of years", makes the pictures look exceptionally historic.

Posted by Blake Stacey at 12:14 PM • 4 Comments

How I Feel at Least Once a Day

Category: Wobosphere Silliness

This post was set to automagically appear whilst I am away trying to catch up on the work I didn't get done before the holiday because I was sick.

If SIWOTI Cat ever stops, people will start being wrong on the Internet again.

Posted by Blake Stacey at 10:45 AM • 3 Comments

Physics Makes a Toy of the Brain

Category: Neuroscience • Plectics • Popularization • Statistical mechanics • arXiv

Can physics tell us about ourselves?

To phrase the question more narrowly: can the statistical tools which physicists have developed to understand the collective motion of large agglutinations of particles help us figure out what our brains are doing?

If Jack Cowan and his colleagues are correct, ideas from statistical physics can tell us important facts about our own brains. By studying the recurring motifs of hallucinations, we can construct a geometry of the mind.

"Honeycomb" form constant,
from Bresloff, Cowan et al. (2002)It's hard to imagine any sort of regularity in a phenomenon as eccentric as visual hallucinations. Our culture is brimming with psychedelia, music and art produced "under the influence" of one or another infamous chemical. Yet the very fact that we can label artwork as "psychedelic" suggests that the effects of those mind-bending substances have a certain predictability. In the 1920s, long before the days of review boards and modern regulations for human experimentation, the neurologist Heinrich Klüwer ingested mescaline and recorded his observations. He reported visual hallucinations of four distinct types, which he called "form constants." These form constants included tunnels and funnels, spirals, honeycomb-like lattices and cobweb patterns. Similar structures have been reported with other drugs, like LSD; these same form constants also appear during migraines, in "hypnogogic" (falling asleep) and "hypnopompic" (waking up) states, when pressure is applied to closed eyes, and even in ancient cave paintings.

If the same hallucinatory images appear from many causes, might they be indicative of some more general property of brain structure?

Read on »

Posted by Blake Stacey at 1:06 PM • 6 Comments

Fooberry Bread

Category: Cooking

These little "cold and flu multi-symptom relief" pills have left me far too placid to deal with the Internet. I updated a recent post with an addendum, but that seems to be about all I can accomplish today. Oh, well. Instead of the snark I would have unloaded on incidental and unworthy targets, here's a recipe! I will be cooking this tomorrow morning.

FOOBERRY BREAD

2 eggs
1 cup oil
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 cups applesauce
2 cups self-rising flour
1 cup wheat germ — and you thought only Wonko the Sane cooked with wheat germ.
In excess of 1 cup blueberries, raspberries, cranberries, chopped strawberries and/or other fruit of a similar nature.

Grease and flour two loaf pans. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Mix eggs, oil, sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, and applesauce. Add flour and wheat germ and mix well. Fold in the fruit. Pour batter into pans. Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour.

The self-rising part is important, since this particular bread is fairly thick and cake-ish. Adding baking powder to general-purpose flour should work as well.

Posted by Blake Stacey at 2:18 PM • 1 Comments

"I Find It Kinda Funny / I Find It Kinda Sad..."

Category: Wobosphere Silliness

When it comes to politics, I'm still very much in the "I have to laugh or else I'll cry" mode. It is in that spirit that I present the following, which is dedicated to everyone out there who saw a midnight screening of Donnie Darko (2001).

Read on »

Posted by Blake Stacey at 7:42 AM • 4 Comments

Baby's First Light Cone

Category: Astronomy • Cosmology • Popularization • Special Relativity

My mother was looking through the photo albums in the closet, and she found this, which apparently I drew in kindergarten:

This must have been after I watched Timothy Ferris's The Creation of the Universe for the Nth time. Looking back, I realize I flipped it around, compared to my source: in the show, Ferris draws a light cone, showing how much of the Universe can be seen, so the diagram is the other way around, with the narrow end at the present. (We see nearby objects the way they were at more recent times, because light takes time to travel.) Here, I made the vertical axis represent the size of the Universe, as in this more glitzy NASA image. The blackish-green dots are galaxies, and the red plus signs are quasars.

Read on »

Posted by Blake Stacey at 9:24 AM • 14 Comments

Reverse the Baryon Flux Polarity!

Category: Popularization • Quantum mechanics • Video

I've been watching my way through a heap of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes lately, and I've come to some uncomfortable realizations. In many cases, I hadn't seen these episodes since they were first aired, nigh on twenty years ago; consequently, I've been picking up stuff — often too obvious to be called "nuances" or "subtext" — which completely missed me the first time around. For example, take the fifth-season episode "The Game" (stardate 45208.2), in which aliens take over the Enterprise using an addictive virtual-reality-like game, and only Wesley Crusher and his newfound girlfriend can stop them. OK, first of all, the connotations of the reactions people have to the pleasure signals which the game pipes into their brains completely passed me by in 1991. Second, when Wesley and Robin Lefler have their first date in Ten-Forward, I couldn't help noticing the tenor of their conversation: Robin's parents were "plasma specialists" who moved from starbase to starbase, so she seldom connected with friends her own age. "My first friend was a tricorder," she tells Wesley, who responds, "My first friend was a warp coil!"

"Hey," thought I. "That sounds like. . . euh. . . every first date I've ever had?"

Add to this realization another troubling thought: Wesley Crusher was the Mary Sue self-insertion character of Eugene Wesley Roddenberry. And, last year I was writing fanfiction about science bloggers and now I've become one of them, which makes me kind of a living example of. . . .

OH GOD I'M WESLEY CRUSHER.

Sorry. I'm going to have to take a moment to adjust to this.

But at least maybe I can claim to be the fifth-season Wesley Crusher, who has grown up a little from his exasperating roots? Or, does admitting I know this much about the development arcs of Star Trek characters just make my situation worse?

Maybe it's best if I moved on as rapidly as possible to the episode I really wanted to discuss today. There is a point in here about science and television, if I can find it.

Read on »

Posted by Blake Stacey at 12:34 AM • 11 Comments