I have absolutely nothing written for this morning - server install is driving me completely insane. So, here's a gory little animated video that I've been enjoying. (This is absolutely NOT safe for work, unless maybe you're using headphones and you're in a small closet with the door locked.)
(My seven-year-old has been playing the Mechromancer in this game, so he keeps wandering around saying things like, "Third place in the science fair!?" in a faintly aggrieved tone of voice.)
Friday, August 9, 2013
Thursday, August 8, 2013
Notes from the Mad Science Lab: Long-Tailed Mice
My son has been playing with the gene sequencer again. Honestly, I try not to let him run around unsupervised - especially in the lab - but he's too quick for my current assistant, the indomitable Ms. Taft, and the others are distracted by their duties. (Commendably so, I might add.) Drake, for example, is extremely good with the boy - but he also has a strict schedule of feedings, waterings, exercisings, and cleaning enclosures in the Crypto-Zoo, and for him that schedule takes precedence over everything else. This makes him very little help with my son, but it represents a substantial improvement over his predecessor, the late and unlamented Mr. Howell.
Moreover, ever since our first attempt at creating a Hippofishimus, my son has been interested in creating new and better forms of life. His ideas on how best to go about this have changed several times over the years, but I can't deny that there's a distinct theme to his interests. So this discovery, while unexpected, was hardly a surprise.
It began simply enough: Drake mentioned that some sort of small rodents had been chewing their way into his feed bins. This happens sometimes, and we usually solve it with small mechanical drones: hunter-killers programmed to eliminate small targets. This time, however, the drones proved ineffective. Drake brought me the broken pieces of two of them. That was unusual, but we've dealt with stubborn pests before: a combination of motion sensors and chlorine gas (along with a mask for the Cryptozookeeper) usually does the trick. This time...
Well, the bins remained intact, but we lost one of the Chupacabras from the zoo itself. The beast had suffered from several small bites, but when I dissected it I found that it had actually died of strangulation. Considering the timing, I hadn't expected anything of the sort, so my first thought was that something must have escaped from elsewhere in the Crypto-Zoo. Drake and I conducted a thorough inspection, and found... nothing. Everything was in its place; nothing was missing. Even the Torglind Metamorph was right where we left it, pretending to be a rock in the hope that one of us would be stupid enough to step into its enclosure.
At that point, we gave up for the night. Drake went back to his suite, and I took the secret elevator back up to the house. It happens to come out in the kitchen, so I immediately noticed that the refrigerator door was open. It looked like a furry snake had slithered up inside.
I flipped on the light, and opened the door, and that's when I saw it: a long-tailed mouse. Its body was mouse-sized, but it was the tiny front end of a tail that was nearly a full meter long. When it saw me and fled, it was half running and half slithering. It went into a small hole in the wall, and when I put my ear by the opening I could hear chittering from many, many throats.
My house, as part of the lab, has a number of defenses built into it. I retreated to the safe room, sealed the door, and sounded the alert so that my staff could get to safety. Then I activated a couple of the anti-viral measures, and sent the pest control drones in to clean up the rest.
This was, it seemed, completely effective. According to the drones, both my house and the lab below are completely free of long-tailed mice. So I went to sleep in relative confidence, and it was only the next morning that it occurred to me to call my son (at his mother's house) and ask if he had created them. He had, of course, so I congratulated him and apologized for destroying them.
An hour later I called him back, because the drones had returned a zero kill count. Not only had they not killed anything, they hadn't found anything to kill. They hadn't even found any remains. In terms of cleanup, this was ideal. In terms of ecological balance... who knows? They understood the alert, or else they just panicked, and they fled. They are still alive out there, somewhere - in a neighbor's house, or somewhere further afield. They might be plotting revenge, or they might just be eating and breeding. They might be solving quadratic equations, for all I know.
Wherever they are, they aren't dead.
Moreover, ever since our first attempt at creating a Hippofishimus, my son has been interested in creating new and better forms of life. His ideas on how best to go about this have changed several times over the years, but I can't deny that there's a distinct theme to his interests. So this discovery, while unexpected, was hardly a surprise.
It began simply enough: Drake mentioned that some sort of small rodents had been chewing their way into his feed bins. This happens sometimes, and we usually solve it with small mechanical drones: hunter-killers programmed to eliminate small targets. This time, however, the drones proved ineffective. Drake brought me the broken pieces of two of them. That was unusual, but we've dealt with stubborn pests before: a combination of motion sensors and chlorine gas (along with a mask for the Cryptozookeeper) usually does the trick. This time...
Well, the bins remained intact, but we lost one of the Chupacabras from the zoo itself. The beast had suffered from several small bites, but when I dissected it I found that it had actually died of strangulation. Considering the timing, I hadn't expected anything of the sort, so my first thought was that something must have escaped from elsewhere in the Crypto-Zoo. Drake and I conducted a thorough inspection, and found... nothing. Everything was in its place; nothing was missing. Even the Torglind Metamorph was right where we left it, pretending to be a rock in the hope that one of us would be stupid enough to step into its enclosure.
At that point, we gave up for the night. Drake went back to his suite, and I took the secret elevator back up to the house. It happens to come out in the kitchen, so I immediately noticed that the refrigerator door was open. It looked like a furry snake had slithered up inside.
I flipped on the light, and opened the door, and that's when I saw it: a long-tailed mouse. Its body was mouse-sized, but it was the tiny front end of a tail that was nearly a full meter long. When it saw me and fled, it was half running and half slithering. It went into a small hole in the wall, and when I put my ear by the opening I could hear chittering from many, many throats.
My house, as part of the lab, has a number of defenses built into it. I retreated to the safe room, sealed the door, and sounded the alert so that my staff could get to safety. Then I activated a couple of the anti-viral measures, and sent the pest control drones in to clean up the rest.
This was, it seemed, completely effective. According to the drones, both my house and the lab below are completely free of long-tailed mice. So I went to sleep in relative confidence, and it was only the next morning that it occurred to me to call my son (at his mother's house) and ask if he had created them. He had, of course, so I congratulated him and apologized for destroying them.
An hour later I called him back, because the drones had returned a zero kill count. Not only had they not killed anything, they hadn't found anything to kill. They hadn't even found any remains. In terms of cleanup, this was ideal. In terms of ecological balance... who knows? They understood the alert, or else they just panicked, and they fled. They are still alive out there, somewhere - in a neighbor's house, or somewhere further afield. They might be plotting revenge, or they might just be eating and breeding. They might be solving quadratic equations, for all I know.
Wherever they are, they aren't dead.
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
Real Work Conversations: Infiltrating The Humans
Me: "LV-426, we need to discuss your behavior among the Earth-humans. There is a thing they do, called 'sleep'..."
My boss: "Yeah. Let me know how that works out for you."
Me: "If you fail to 'sleep' while you are among them, they will realize that you are not one of them. Also, your biomorphic disguise requires this 'sleep' in order to function efficiently."
My boss: {snorts in a vaguely amused manner}
Me: "That is all, LV-426. You may return to your research. Ruaxor prevails."
My boss: "Yeah. Let me know how that works out for you."
Me: "If you fail to 'sleep' while you are among them, they will realize that you are not one of them. Also, your biomorphic disguise requires this 'sleep' in order to function efficiently."
My boss: {snorts in a vaguely amused manner}
Me: "That is all, LV-426. You may return to your research. Ruaxor prevails."
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Millennials and Church: They're just not that into you.
So, Rachel Held Evans and sundry others have been discussing why "Millennials" are leaving the church in droves. (This is the sort of question, by the way, that always makes me wonder whether decent droves are available second-hand, and what sort of gas mileage they get.)
I've mainly been watching this from a distance, because most of the discussion has been off in the Christian corner of the blogosphere, and most of it has been focused on what the church can do help keep the younger generation involved (or at least avoid actively driving them away). That's interesting to watch, but for the most part it isn't something that affects me directly, so I haven't felt compelled to have an opinion about it. The suggested solutions vary widely, mainly based on varied perceptions of how much of a problem this is, and how the people doing the opining perceive the problem. So you have, among other things, suggestions that the church itself needs to change: becoming less homophobic, more open to women in leadership roles, more focused on doing good in the community and the world. (Details, again, vary widely.) Alternatively, the church is doing fine, and this current generation of spoiled consumer-driven young adults needs to quit expecting the Almighty to cater to them, and start listening and learning. (Annnnd again: details vary.)
Meanwhile, over in the unchurched areas of the blogosphere, Hemant Mehta (The Friendly Atheist) suggests that us atheists are pulling the young'uns away. So, y'know, yay us - or something.
I'm dubious. So is Vorjack, over at Unreasonable Faith, and he offers one of his intriguing bits of historical perspective on the matter. It helped solidify some of my own thoughts.
One of the reasons that I've stayed out of the conversation is the mostly-unspoken assumption (from Christian commentators) that attending church is a good thing, and not attending church is a bad thing. I'm not so sure that's the case. In fact, I'm fairly sure that such is not the case for everyone. Rachel Held Evans is, I think, not really considering the full ramifications of a fairly obvious factor: church just isn't as important to most millennials as it is her. If it was, they'd still be there. (And then you'd probably have a schism instead of an exodus, but that's a thought for another time.)
Look, I'm not a historian. I'm not even a sociologist. I have a minor in Anthropology, but that was years ago and I've done essentially nothing with it. But one of the things that I picked up from Anthro classes was that essentially anywhere you find people, you find two things: art and religion. What kinds of art, and what kinds of religion, are completely open questions - no two groups come at either topic in precisely the same way. But the general tendency is there, and it seems to be wired in to the species.
But, like a lot of what we call "human nature", the strength of the tendency varies a lot from individual to individual. Some people seem to be extremely religious by nature, while some of us just... aren't. Which leads me to suspect that the big difference between the current generation and their parents and grandparents is that a lot of the things that used to be available (exclusively, or primarily, or most easily) through the church are now fairly easy to find without the church. So the exodus we're currently seeing isn't so much because "millennials" have a compelling disagreement with the church; they're leaving because they don't have any need to be there, and they don't have this sense that attending church is important for its own sake.
Are there things that "the church" (said as if Christianity were some sort of unified, monolithic entity - ha!) could do to be more appealing to the current generation of young adults? Probably. But people want different things, so it's not going to be any one thing; it's going to involve a variety of approaches, and a certain amount of trial and error. Is that going to solve the problem of millenials leaving the church? Probably not. Are atheists responsible for pulling people away from the church? I seriously doubt it. At most, I suspect we've made it more acceptable for people not to go to church; and with the possibility there, people are finding their own reasons not to go.
I've mainly been watching this from a distance, because most of the discussion has been off in the Christian corner of the blogosphere, and most of it has been focused on what the church can do help keep the younger generation involved (or at least avoid actively driving them away). That's interesting to watch, but for the most part it isn't something that affects me directly, so I haven't felt compelled to have an opinion about it. The suggested solutions vary widely, mainly based on varied perceptions of how much of a problem this is, and how the people doing the opining perceive the problem. So you have, among other things, suggestions that the church itself needs to change: becoming less homophobic, more open to women in leadership roles, more focused on doing good in the community and the world. (Details, again, vary widely.) Alternatively, the church is doing fine, and this current generation of spoiled consumer-driven young adults needs to quit expecting the Almighty to cater to them, and start listening and learning. (Annnnd again: details vary.)
Meanwhile, over in the unchurched areas of the blogosphere, Hemant Mehta (The Friendly Atheist) suggests that us atheists are pulling the young'uns away. So, y'know, yay us - or something.
I'm dubious. So is Vorjack, over at Unreasonable Faith, and he offers one of his intriguing bits of historical perspective on the matter. It helped solidify some of my own thoughts.
One of the reasons that I've stayed out of the conversation is the mostly-unspoken assumption (from Christian commentators) that attending church is a good thing, and not attending church is a bad thing. I'm not so sure that's the case. In fact, I'm fairly sure that such is not the case for everyone. Rachel Held Evans is, I think, not really considering the full ramifications of a fairly obvious factor: church just isn't as important to most millennials as it is her. If it was, they'd still be there. (And then you'd probably have a schism instead of an exodus, but that's a thought for another time.)
Look, I'm not a historian. I'm not even a sociologist. I have a minor in Anthropology, but that was years ago and I've done essentially nothing with it. But one of the things that I picked up from Anthro classes was that essentially anywhere you find people, you find two things: art and religion. What kinds of art, and what kinds of religion, are completely open questions - no two groups come at either topic in precisely the same way. But the general tendency is there, and it seems to be wired in to the species.
But, like a lot of what we call "human nature", the strength of the tendency varies a lot from individual to individual. Some people seem to be extremely religious by nature, while some of us just... aren't. Which leads me to suspect that the big difference between the current generation and their parents and grandparents is that a lot of the things that used to be available (exclusively, or primarily, or most easily) through the church are now fairly easy to find without the church. So the exodus we're currently seeing isn't so much because "millennials" have a compelling disagreement with the church; they're leaving because they don't have any need to be there, and they don't have this sense that attending church is important for its own sake.
Are there things that "the church" (said as if Christianity were some sort of unified, monolithic entity - ha!) could do to be more appealing to the current generation of young adults? Probably. But people want different things, so it's not going to be any one thing; it's going to involve a variety of approaches, and a certain amount of trial and error. Is that going to solve the problem of millenials leaving the church? Probably not. Are atheists responsible for pulling people away from the church? I seriously doubt it. At most, I suspect we've made it more acceptable for people not to go to church; and with the possibility there, people are finding their own reasons not to go.
Monday, August 5, 2013
I don't like Mondays...
So, Friday pretty much kicked my butt. Long day of trying to install The World's Most Recalcitrant Software, then an emergency room visit for the three-year-old. (He needed stitches - his older brother wound up in the emergency room a couple of times, but it was for things like croup. Secondborn, for whatever reason, hasn't been in for any sort of disease; both of his visits have involved stitches.) We finally made it to my brother's house to catch up with some friends, but by then everyone was pretty worn out.
Beautiful Wife let me sleep in on Saturday, and that was a huge help... but Sunday was given over to trying to figure out where the power supply for my laptop had gone (I still don't know), bringing Secondborn back to the doctor for a follow-up visit, and generally trekking about in the hundred-and-five degree Texas heat.
So now it's Monday again. I have a dental appointment (for a cleaning) and then it's back to working on the Software Install From Beyond The Grave.
...I'm just sure I had some writing projects I was working on. But anyway...
I don't want to go to Monday. I just want to crawl in a hole and hide. So, um, have some music:
Beautiful Wife let me sleep in on Saturday, and that was a huge help... but Sunday was given over to trying to figure out where the power supply for my laptop had gone (I still don't know), bringing Secondborn back to the doctor for a follow-up visit, and generally trekking about in the hundred-and-five degree Texas heat.
So now it's Monday again. I have a dental appointment (for a cleaning) and then it's back to working on the Software Install From Beyond The Grave.
...I'm just sure I had some writing projects I was working on. But anyway...
I don't want to go to Monday. I just want to crawl in a hole and hide. So, um, have some music:
Saturday, August 3, 2013
Write and Crash, Write and Crash
So, I haven't touched the short story for a couple of days. Combination of work and illness (either allergies or a tummy bug, no way to tell) pretty well took me down. Now, not actually writing for a couple of days isn't necessarily a crisis in itself. The problem here is that the interruption has taken my head completely out of the story. That's the sort of interruption that tends to capsize, or at least indefinitely delay, my projects.
Now, that sounds (even to me) like I've run aground, and I'm giving up. No - not yet, anyway. I have a good five pages or so already. Even allowing for some changes I'd like to make, that's enough that if I can sit down and read it through, I can probably drop my brain back into the story.
So that's the plan for tonight: put the boys down, sit down with the story, read what I have so far, and pick up from there. That used to be my methodology back in high school, when I was writing for a couple of hours every night: read the last page or two so I was caught up on exactly where I'd left off, and go from there.
We'll see how it goes. And if this doesn't work, I have at least two more ideas I can try.
Now, that sounds (even to me) like I've run aground, and I'm giving up. No - not yet, anyway. I have a good five pages or so already. Even allowing for some changes I'd like to make, that's enough that if I can sit down and read it through, I can probably drop my brain back into the story.
So that's the plan for tonight: put the boys down, sit down with the story, read what I have so far, and pick up from there. That used to be my methodology back in high school, when I was writing for a couple of hours every night: read the last page or two so I was caught up on exactly where I'd left off, and go from there.
We'll see how it goes. And if this doesn't work, I have at least two more ideas I can try.
Friday, August 2, 2013
Blech. And also, ick. And generally blah.
So, yeah... Remember when I said earlier I was probably coming down with something?
...I hate being right.
Spent yesterday at home. Slept a lot, and didn't move around any more than I strictly had to. It helped. Whatever was upsetting my stomach seems to have passed, and that weird bout of extreme crankiness as well. I still feel like I've been run over by a truck, though.
Anyway, I'll try to have some more, um, actual content later on. (That may not be 'til Monday, though.) Meanwhile, let's all just get down with the sickness, shall we? (Definitely NSFW.)
...I hate being right.
Spent yesterday at home. Slept a lot, and didn't move around any more than I strictly had to. It helped. Whatever was upsetting my stomach seems to have passed, and that weird bout of extreme crankiness as well. I still feel like I've been run over by a truck, though.
Anyway, I'll try to have some more, um, actual content later on. (That may not be 'til Monday, though.) Meanwhile, let's all just get down with the sickness, shall we? (Definitely NSFW.)
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