Malachai "Unk" Constant

A meme snagged (virtually verbatim) from preraphaelite:

The first five people to respond to this post will get something made by me! My choice. For you. I'll even mail it if need be, so geography is no barrier.

This offer does have some restrictions and limitations:

1. I make no guarantees that you will like what I make;
2. It'll be done this year;
3. You have no clue what it's going to be. It could be anything. It will have some material aspect, however -- it will be a thing, not just a collection of zeroes and ones;
4. I reserve the right to make something extremely odd.

The catch? The catch is that you incur a moral obligation to repost and follow through. Creativity is totally hip.

Although it's nothing that hasn't been said before and a bit bombastic, I still liked it.

From: David Byrne <music@everythingthathappens.com>
Subject: I Can't, But You Can
Date: November 3, 2008 7:26:47 PM EST

Pardon the bulk mailing. I Can't Vote. I am an immigrant with a Green Card and, therefore, I am not eligible to vote in a federal election. FYI - I can get drafted (luckily, Daniel Berrigan burned my draft board's records) and I pay taxes, yet I cannot vote for President. On Election Day, I see my neighbors heading to the nearby elementary school to cast their ballots. The voting booth joint is a great leveler; the whole neighborhood - rich, poor, old, young, decrepit and spunky - they all turn out in one day.

But most of you can vote. What can I say? The Republicans have made us less safe than before 9/11, bankrupted this economy, started an illegal war they can't - and don't intend to - finish, removed what sympathy (after 9/11) and respect the world had for the US, and have robbed US citizens of many of their basic rights. Global warming? What's that? Science and education? Investment in our future? No, thanks - we'll stick with a good 'ole hockey mom. Ignorant, and fucking proud of it, as is always the case.

Although it looks like a shoo-in, it ain't over 'til Florida. And there are plenty of racists in this country who will vote against their own best interests. So please, get to your local elementary school, post office, town hall, or whatever, and cast your vote and make this a country we can all be proud of. We can get out of this mess, and life can be better than it is.

David Byrne
NYC

So, the military is interested in packs of robot dogs that hunt down 'uncooperative individuals.' Sounds a bit too much like Fahrenheit 451 -- the book, not the movie. The movie had goofy jetpack people chasing down Montag. I suppose robot dogs were a lot more expensive than hanging a guy on a wire in front of a rear projection screen.

After seeing this, my highschool crush on Björk has officially been restored.

She's like some kind of deranged pixie.

Apparently, Pynchon has another novel in the works. I hadn't heard about it until a moment ago.

I just hope the prose is more readable than the anachronistic language in Mason & Dixon. I simply couldn't stick with it, which I regret. Gravity's Rainbow is one of my favorite books of all time.

I've been meaning to finish my project blog write-up of my robot but never gotten around to it. I will, eventually. I might even finish the project itself one day.

This is also a test of flickr's "blog this!" feature that I've never used.

New Pixar short.

It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.

Apparently, my off-the-cuff idea for a means of watering a Christmas tree has won a contest. I wasn't even aware it was a competition. I feel suitably smarty-pantsy.

I wonder if there's a prize.

Sometimes, how am musician actually looks differs completely from what I imagined.
I didn't know what this guy looked like until seeing this video. I'm surprised by how unsurprised I am.

One screaming, lunatic Eastern European coming up.

( Embedded video within. )

I just caught a couple minutes of Doctor Who being broadcast on the Sci-Fi Channel. It's The Sound of Drums, next to the last episode of the season. The gang has all gotten little talismans that make them effectively invisible (or, more accurately, unnoticeable). Trying to explain how it works, the Doctor says something along the lines of 'It's like how you fancy someone and they don't even know you exist.'

The American version cut straight to the next scene, which isn't how I remembered it. I checked the original version and, yes, they'd omitted Captain Jack Harkness' commiserating with Martha about the lovely, unobtainable Doctor.

Thank you, Sci-Fi Channel, for protecting us all from that dangerous little bit of gayness. TV is no place for queer characters unless they're useless, squealing comic relief.

Here's something I got from jimmystagger. Comment on this post and I'll issue you a letter, then list your ten favorite songs starting with that letter.

I got F. I can't guarantee that these are my favorite songs, but they are the ones I have given stars in iTunes, and my rating is a product of factors at the time.

Frontier	Dead Can Dance
French Disko	Stereolab
Flavour of Night	Robyn Hitchcock
Floorshow	Sisters of Mercy
For Science	They Might Be Giants
Fish	Throwing Muses
Fashion Zombies!	Aquabats
Fear of Drowning	British Sea Power
Fury Eyes	The Creatures
Fez Dispenser	Hence the Name

I feel a little like I'm cheating, since all my music is now stored on the computer and it took me all of a minute to get the list of favorite Fs.

Feel free to request a letter, even if you answer Jimmy's or someone else's. I'll issue you a different one.

Saw this today: a link to the sound effects from the haunted houses of Mountain Park.

I can't believe I may have beaten derspatchel to a link about Mountain Park. I know few who wax nostalgic about the place as much as he.

Otters are less cute when you call them what they are: sea weasels.

Apparently, the latest model of mystical free energy machine (don't call it perpetual motion!) is evidence against evolution, despite its anticlimactic but unsurprising failure to work*.

Wait a minute -- I've read some of the anti-evolution literature over the years (my personal favorite being a book entitled From Goo to You by Way of the Zoo). Entropy and the second law of thermodynamics have always been cited as evidence against evolution. Now, suddenly, it is in support of it? What's more, the creationists are writing as if it always has been.

I could accept it if there were two schools of thought, each seeing entropy as an argument for or against evolution, respectively, but these are the same people making the diametrically opposed arguments. I could accept it if they admitted that they had changed their minds, but they're actively using both arguments, just not simultaneously. And they seem to have no problem doing this, even though they cite differing theories of evolution as evidence that it is 'only a theory.'

Make up your fucking minds.

Incidentally, the perpetual motion machine's failure to operate was blamed on heat generated by the lights. I just happened to see a video earlier this week in which studio lights are blamed when an extraordinary claim can't be extraordinarily proven. Most charlatans just say the negative vibes of the dubious harsh their mellow and keep the psi-waves from flowing, but I guess that doesn't sound as scientific.

*N.B.: The link to the Kinetica Museum, above, is just to their main page, so the news of the failure will eventually be replaced. As of the moment, it reads:

KINETICA OPENING DELAYED: Due to technical difficulties the planned demonstration of Steorn's 'Orbo' free energy technology has been postponed until further notice. As a consequence, Kinetica Museum will not be open to the public during this period. A technical assessment is currently underway and information regarding the rescheduling of this demonstration will be posted on the websites of Steorn and Kinetica as soon as it becomes available. We apologise for this delay and appreciate your patience.

That is to say, I'm afraid of perpetual motion machines in the same way I am afraid of vampires, demons, pixies, nixies and bain-sidhe. In other words, I would be afraid if such things existed.

A certain company that has gotten some news touting the same perpetual motion snake-oil is supposed to put on a demonstration tomorrow. I'd almost forgotten about them, but they've gotten hordes of armchair physicists all riled up. On one side, we've got those who vaguely remember something from High School physics. On the other, we have those who vaguely remember some X-Files episodes and that movie about Nikola Tesla and Wilhelm Reich making a battleship go back in time with vacuum tubes and Orgone or something*.

Regardless of the particular spin of bullshit this time 'round, I don't think 'free energy' is something we'd really be better off with. If we had a clean, inexhaustible source of energy, what would happen? I can't even begin to ponder the economic upheaval it would cause. But looking at it strictly as a physics problem, we'd be screwed. The use of energy creates heat -- no way around that. Even if this magical machine produces energy with no biproducts whatsoever, we'd still have to live with the heat we'd create with it. One of the main reasons we try to reduce the heat production of the machines we build is to conserve energy. With an unlimited supply, there would be little reason to be efficient. But you can't get rid of heat; you can only move it around. Air conditioning doesn't produce cold; it just moves heat to one side of a box, creating more heat in the process. Heat alone produces greenhouse gasses, too. In a decade, we'd be using the perpetual motion machine to generate trillions of watts of power -- imagine the poorest parts of the world consuming as much energy and producing as much heat as the US does now, then imagine the US producing an order of magnitude more. A decade or two after that, we'd roast to death.

Then there's the other thing to be afraid of: where is this energy coming from, really? It has to come from somewhere, and if these people actually have something that appears to work, we need to look at it very, very carefully. People like the phrase 'over unity,' but as one physicist described it, such a statement is as meaningless as announcing an expedition to go south of the South Pole. If there's energy, it has a source. Earth's orbit? The mass constant of the universe? What sort of bill will a thousand years of using 'free' power stick us with?

But, anyway, the people behind this imaginary product are probably one of three things:

1. Charlatans, plain and simple.
   
2. Passionate but naive amateur scientists who really do see something in their research but are misinterpreting it.
   
3. A publicity stunt, either a comment on the way the world consumes energy, or for something stupid. (If it turns out to be something like an ad for IRN BRU's new flavor of high energy beverage, I'm going to fly to Ireland, go right into their offices on East Wall Road, and shout FUCK YOU in their faces. I may or may not pee in their lobby's obligatory potted palm as well, depending on how therapeutic the shouting proves to be.)

There's also the possibility of some combination, i.e. amateur scientists being hustled by charlatans. I'm not going to call that specifically it until I see it.


* I do know what movie I'm describing; my feined ignorance is for comic effect. But I also know that there are people on the Internet who believe it to be a documentary.

I'm not sure what part of this vignette is the most cognitively discordant:

Hundreds of photocopied fliers, one for the windshield of each car parked between Davis and Teele Squares, advertising part-time jobs working for the environment. One of these fliered vehicles is a late-model Lexus SUV.

I recently received a bit of spam that offered me 'INCRE DIBLE PRIC ES' on some incredible drugs. The most notable medicine they offered was 'Viagra Pro.' I wasn't aware that Viagra had professional applications, or that such professions were legal outside of Nevada or the Netherlands.

Speaking of Holland, I've won $40,769,150.00 in Internet lotteries so far this year, much of it from several winning tickets in the Netherland (sic) national lotto. Microsoft has also been quite generous, awarding me a good portion of their total prize of 'GBP 10,687,000 EURO.' Those European currencies are confusing.

I am: Kurt Vonnegut For years, this unique creator of absurd and haunting tales denied that he had anything to do with science fiction.

Which science fiction writer are you?

Not entirely surprising, but flattering nonetheless.

I caught a couple minutes of some horror movie or another while channel surfing last night. It featured a ghost with a knife. Why would a ghost have a knife? Did the knife die, too?

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