Month: March 2013

Mars One Starts Life Support Design

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2013 03 14 Mars One Logo

Mars One is a private project to land 4 humans on Mars for permanent settlement in 2023, to be followed by 4 more every two years. The amount of money raised so far isn’t hugely impressive (about $60,000 in donations plus whatever they make in merchandise), but the lists of sponsors and advisers are.

Mars One has a list of vendors to provide all the necessary equipment for the mission, and according to a recent report the first of them–Paragon Space Development Corporation–has already started work on a conceptual design of the life support and space suit systems.

I wouldn’t place any bets yet, but it’s an exciting step.

A Great Mom At The End

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2013 03 14 Harlem Suicide

This morning I read a sad story from NY Daily News about a new mother (her son was 10-months old) who lost her battle with postpartum depression.

Yesterday at about 1pm she had an argument with her husband. After he left, she handwrote a 13-page suicide note in which she described herself as a bad mother. Then she strapped her baby to her chest–a little boy she was convinced had cerebral palsy even though doctors say he is perfectly healthy–and jumped out of her 8th story window.

“I heard a small scream when she was in the air,” said witness Steven Dominguez, 18. “I noticed something falling, but I didn’t want to believe it was a person.”

The impact killed the mother, but she landed on her back and that protected her son. He was physically unharmed. When I pointed this story out to my friend, he said simply:

maybe, in the last seconds of her life, she suddenly became the best mom ever

Spring Breakers, Empowerment, and Exploitation

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Film critic David Edelstein, whom I am about to drag into gender politics whether he likes it or not.
Film critic David Edelstein, whom I am about to drag into gender politics whether he likes it or not.

I like David Edelstein’s film reviews so much that I read them even for movies I know I will never watch, which is why I ended up reading his review of Spring Breakers in the first place.

In the review, Edelstein bravely plunges into the shark-infested waters of feminist politics, by painting the movie Spring Breakers as a textbook example of pervy middle-aged men co-opting feminist liberation. The movie features “three starlets from the Disney entertainment megaverse” (Venessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, and Selena Gomez), and Edelstein says that all three “are obviously there as a gesture of defiance — an attempt to free themselves from their Mouse patriarch overlord and the shackles of corporate teen celebrity.”

So how does that jailbreak go? Well, here’s the second paragraph of the review:

It’s also among the perviest movies ever made — although by spelling out why, I fear I’ll only make some people want to see it more. Spring Breakers opens with a montage of bouncing bare boobs and buttocks barely squeezed into bikini bottoms, the camera gliding up the lengths of young girls’ thighs — see what I mean? That skeevy guy down the street just grabbed his raincoat and headed for the multiplex. The point is that Korine isn’t a passive voyeur. He moves in-in-in on those hot bods — up, down, all around the town. A friend whispered, “The camera is like a giant tongue.” You can almost hear the slurping.

As I said: these are treacherous waters. One of my favorite stories about the politics of porn (I’m going to use that term broadly in this piece, and Spring Breakers seems to have the spirit of porn confined to a “hard-R” rating) is from the Penny-Arcade Expo. One year, there were a bunch of booth babes (attractive women hired to staff convention booths) and the folks at Penny-Arcade didn’t kick them out. They got a torrent of angry mail accusing them of being sexist for allowing girls to be objectified. The next year they asked a particularly over-the-top booth babe to go inside a school bus (it was part of the display, you can imagine why) to keep the convention floor more family-friendly. They got another torrent of angry mail accusing them of being sexist for treating women’s bodies as something to be hidden. Penny-Arcade artist Mike Krahulik wrote a disgusted post asking feminists of the world to please decide what he’s supposed to do, because no matter what he does someone yells at him for being sexist.

So: does porn exploit women or empower them? I don’t know if it was Edelstein’s intent to make a statement on that general question, but he comes pretty close to it: 

Read more

Roku 3: A Next Gen Settop Box

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2013 03 14 Roku 3

The Roku 3 has a lot of improvements over previous generations, like the headphone jack integrated into the WiFi-based remote, but for me there is one improvement that stands out above all the rest: the Roku will let you search for a show across all your “channels” (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) That’s a subtle but incredibly important feature that really changes the nature of the device. Check out the review at The Verge for more.

Atlantic: Beware Ukrainian Dolphin Attack Squad!

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2013 03 12 Killer Dolphins

The headline sounds like it’s from the Onion, but it’s actually from the Atlantic. Citing a radio show called The Dolphin Pod the article explains:

After rebooting the Soviet Union’s marine mammal program just last year with the goal of teaching dolphins to find underwater mines and kill enemy divers, three of the Ukrainian military’s new recruits have gone AWOL. Apparently they swam away from their trainers this morning ostensibly in search of a “mate” out in open waters. It might not be such a big deal except that these dolphins have been trained to “attack enemy combat swimmers using special knives or pistols fixed to their heads.” So if you are planning a family holiday to the Black Sea this week, I think it’s best you avoid any “friendly” dolphins that might approach – especially if they have KNIVES or PISTOLS strapped to their heads.

So, yeah. This really happened. It’s part of real-life now.

Incidentally, this is the second-best real-news story of militarized animals after the Beast of Basra. In that story, Iraqis claimed that giant, man-eating badgers had been released by the British Army near Basra. The rumors prompted UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer to issue an official response including (and this is a real quote): “We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.” That quote comes via the BBC, which cited experts who believed that the nightmarish creatures were probably native honey badgers. (Honey badgers are their own Internet meme, in case you didn’t know. The linked video includes lots of swearing.)

2013 03 12 Honey_badger

Atlantic: The Unemployment Cliff

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Writing for the Atlantic, Matthew Obrien points out the rather terrifying data on long-term unemployment in the United States.

2013 03 11 Unemployment Chart

The gist of this chart–and of the article–is that once a worker has been unemployed for more than 6 months they become virtually unemployable. Companies don’t even want to consider them. As a result, the high unemployment rate during the current Great Recession can permanently increase poverty in our nation because it has led to people having no job for extended periods of time. That’s all true, and it’s all scary.  But at the end, Matthew makes an erroneous assumption. He writes:

It’s what economists call hysteresis, the idea being that a slump, left untreated, can make us permanently poorer by reducing our future ability to do and make things.

In reality, however, the problem is not just a slump left untreated. It’s a slump maltreated. That maltreatment in this case has been the extension of unemployment insurance basically without limit. This sounds compassionate, but economists have known since at least the 1970s that the direct result of extending unemployment benefits is that people are unemployed for longer. Two studies (both from the 1990s) make this point:

Sharp increases in the escape rate from unemployment both through recalls and new job acceptances are apparent for UI recipients around the time of benefits exhaustion. Such increases are not apparent at similar points of spell duration for nonrecipients. Second, our analysis of accurate administrative data from 12 states indicates that a one week increase in potential benefit duration increases the average duration of the unemployment spells of UI recipients by 0.16 to 0.20 weeks.  – “The impact of the potential duration of unemployment benefits on the duration of unemployment” (Journal of Public Economics) Link

In this paper administrative data from the unemployment-insurance (UI) system are used to examine the distribution of unemployment spells. Hazard plots of the data reveal a strong clustering around the benefit exhaustion point. – “Unemployment insurance and the distribution of unemployment spells” (Journal of Econometrics) Link

In plain English: economists have known since the 1970s that the more you extend unemployment insurance the longer people remain unemployed. Why do we have a huge crisis with people remaining unemployed for 6 months or more? In part, at least, it’s a direct, foreseeable, and well-known effect of extending unemployment insurance. This problem is not merely caused by the Great Recession. It’s also caused by political pandering on the part of politicians in passing policies that sound nice but which lead directly to catastrophe.

T&S Post: What the Church Is Not For

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Times And Seasons Logo

I didn’t think about this when I picked Monday for my weekly posts at Times And Seasons, but I realize now that that posting on a Mormon blog on Mondays provides too many opportunities for alliteration to be ignored. I’m thinking “Monday Morning Mormon Madness”. Too much? I’m paralyzed by the overwhelming potential.

In any case, here is my latest offering. It’s called “What the Chruch Is Not For“, and it represents my attempt to find a 3rd way between the TBMs (true-believing Mormons) and liberal/intellectual crowd. Not that I’m the first, of course, but I hope y’all will find my particular take on it interesting.

RIP, Charlie Eades

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2013 03 08 Eades-Shells
That’s Charlie in the middle.

One of the things that has kept me from my usual blogging schedule this week is the passing of my wife’s grandfather, Charles H. Eades, Sr.

It seems like everyone in my wife’s family is named “Charlie” in honor of this man (including at least one girl), and it’s not hard to see why. He had an infectious smile, gentle love for everyone, and he was a war hero to boot. Of course I knew that Charlie served in World War II, and I asked him to tell me about it one day, a few years ago. I quickly regretted doing so, however. Although I was respectful, it was immediately obvious that what I saw as history was still living, breathing reality to Charlie. All I learned from that discussion was that he had landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day, that he lost a lot of close friends, and that the pain was still fresh, more than six decades later.

Today, at the viewing held in his honor, there was an article from the Southside Sentinnel for Veteran’s Day, 2010. I learned a little bit more about Charlie. I learned that he joined the Army National Guard before Pearl Harbor, that his landing boat was sunk before it reached the beach on D-Day,  that “some men” made it to shore, and that out of the 12 howitzers in his battalion, only one got on to the beach. It was assigned to another unit, and Charlie became an infantryman. I also learned that in addition to Omaha Beach, Charlie (this time back in the artillery) took part in action during the Battle of the Bulge. The article quotes his perspective on the extremely violent opening to the movie “Saving Private Ryan”. Charlie said simply: “It was exactly like that.”

I only knew him for the last 8 years of life, but I loved the man I knew. He had so much love for his kids, his grandkids, and his great grandkids. When my wife and I got married, he walked her down the aisle. For that alone, I would have thought he was a great man. Learning how  much pain and sorrow he had to face and overcome in his life only deepens my admiration for him. He lived a great life, and I’m honored that I was able to see even a small part of it.

RIP, Charlie.

2013 03 08 Charlie-Eades

On Standing With Rand

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I’ve had a lot of crazy things going on that have put a temporary squeeze on my blogging. Have no fear! I have some great pieces I’m working on. (He said with great humility.) But due to family and professional things and also the Snowquester, I am a little behind my own goal for posting.

And I was about to go to sleep without posting anything at all, but the Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster (nearly 11 hours so far) has grabbed my attention.

2013 03 07 RandPaul

Senator Paul is filibustering the nomination of John Brennan to serve as CIA head. The problem is not with Brennan. It’s with the Obama Administration’s murky stance on using drones to assassinate Americans even far away from the battlefield. I’ve been following that legal discussion for some time, and the gist of it is that the White House says that they will only exercise that authority if there’s an “imminent” threat to America, but then they defined “imminent” to basically mean “whatever we feel like”. Real issue? Yes.

I’m as cynical as the next guy. There’s no question that Paul has an eye on 2016. Now Senator Ted Cruz is acting as his wingman–asking “questions” that involve just reading Tweets about #StandWithRand (trending at #1 on Twitter, I think), and there’s no doubt that Cruz is riding some coattails. This is politics. Cynicism goes without saying.

But the reality is that I love this symbolic gesture. I love that it’s an old-school filibuster, the kind where they actually stand up and talk the whole time. I love that it’s a legitimate and serious civil liberties concern that is behind it. And yeah, I love that it’s the GOP standing for something. For once.

If you’re interested, and if you read this post soon, watch the live feed here: C-SPAN. (If C-SPAN sold commercials I bet they’d be really excited by this random spike in traffic!)

I don’t know if this is going to be a watershed moment in politics or not. Probably not, but I’ve got a cool feeling watching the feed. (A feeling that was dampened by some disgusting accolades for Ayn Rand, but which remains nonetheless.)