Sturgeon's Law As A General Principle

     Under a government where both parties, no matter how much they quibble with one another, both approve of wiretapping (listening to celphones, monitoring online communications)  citizens with no real warrant, maintaining a secret and unchallengeable "no-fly" list and torture as a means of interrogation, remaining loyal to either party is just letting them play you for a fool.

     The actual government in this country is an oligarchy of influential and (eventually if not to begin with) wealthy persons, membership in which is largely closed to most citizens.  They may squabble over the fine points but they close ranks against any outside challenge.  All they're in it for is themselves,, no matter how much they natter on about public service, posterity or the beleaguered taxpayer.  If you get in their way, they will grind you up but in general, they regard you the way an old-fashioned farmer regards barn cats: disposable conveniences.  Get inconvenient and...  Well. There are plenty more.

The Government Wants To Help Veterans With PTSD -- By Putting Chips In Their Brains

     Massachussetts, still and always the cradle and grave of freedom!

     Who doesn't support stuffing circuitry inside people's skulls to ensure they only think Goodthink?  MIT's got a grant to dust off the 40-year-old research (PDF) and get it running.  From the horse's, er, whatever:

     Darin Dougherty, a psychiatrist who directs Mass General’s division of neurotherapeutics, says one aim could be to extinguish fear in veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Fear is generated in the amygdala—a part of the brain involved in emotional memories. But it can be repressed by signals in another region, the ventromedial pre-frontal cortex. “The idea would be to decode a signal in the amygdala showing overactivity, then stimulate elsewhere to [suppress] that fear,” says Dougherty.

     Where's that line to sign up?

     Also, consider,  “The idea would be to decode a signal in the amygdala showing overactivity, then stimulate elsewhere to [suppress] that fear,” and ask yourself what other military applications there might be for fear-suppressing brain machinery.

     It's a helluva a world.  I may have another 30 or 40 years in it and I've stopped looking forward to them.  Fearless brain-wired solders are only one of the more obvious little clouds on the horizon.

Better Mood

    So that's something.  Now I need to get find out if the dryer really is working now. Yep, some fun.

     Update: it is.  This is good.

Wow, Am I Ever In A Crappy Mood

     I thought I had managed to dodge Birthday Depression this year.  Nope.

You Know What Would Make Me Happy?

     I'll tell you what would make me happy: the entire United States Congress and all of their staffs, out of work and lined up at highway exits, panhandling -- and getting darned little except the occasional thrown nickel.

     Sure, it's cruel, arbitrary and unfair, but hey, "as ye sow, so shall ye reap."  'Scroom.  Down to the last and least of 'em.  Time for a new and less-entrenched band of crooks, nitwits and schemers.

Wimmen: You Can't Leave Earth Without Us!

     NBC has some new show "coming soon" with a female NASA engineer in the 1960s, which I'm figuring for an anachronism-fest of the first order, likely with risible "science" for a bonus.  After snickering at them, I began to wonder--

     You see, networks aren't very original and engineering is one of those things that either you can do it or you can't and it's objectively demonstrable which. While historically it wasn't easy for women to get such work, it did start getting more and more possible though the 20th Century.  A talented, determined female rocket engineer (or six) might've worked at NASA even back in the unreconstructed 1960s. Was there a real-world counterpart to the TV-program premise?

     Oh, is there ever!  The U.S. wouldn't've gotten our first successful satellite into orbit without her -- and you've probably never heard of her: Mary Sherman Morgan, who worked out the high specific-impulse fuel that gave von Braun's Jupiter C enough oomph to get Explorer 1 high enough and fast enough to circle the globe.

     If you scroll to the bottom of the Wikipedia article, there's a hint, perhaps, of where NBC got their idea.  History is, yet again, more impressive than fiction.

 

Happy Birthday To Me

     Happy Birthday to me.  Happy happy, happy birthday, happy birthday to me.

     Hahahahahaha.

     It's a wonder they don't have to talk me in off a ledge every May 28th, but I'll take that wonder, thank you very much.

Oscar Wilde, Updated

     "We're all standing in the gutter, but some of us are barking at the Moon."
  

The Indiana State Museum

     Indiana has had a State Museum for a long time now.  It spent a long time housed -- somewhat awkwardly -- in the old City Hall (after the city government had gone Unigov and slunk off down the block and across Market Street to roost in the City-County Building) until getting a bespoke building along White River State Park, wedged in between the Eiteljorg and NCAA's  Hall of Champions.  Like many such museums, it's a great mess of natural history, cultural history, political history,  archeology and art, fussed into coherence by a dedicated band of curators.  They run a nice Imax theatre, too, one of the first in the city.

     The Data Viking visited yesterday and he and Tam and I spent half the day or more in the museum:

Mind Control!

People used to paint caves after nightmares like this, you know.

"I for one--" No.  No, I do not welcome our armored-squid overlords.  Oh hells no.

This kitty would fit right in at my house -- especially if it brought enough wild hog to share.

Surprisingly, this was not made the State motto.

Used to be in my boss's boss's boss's office. Unsurprisingly, he was Don Burton.

Fuzzy image but it turns out one of my friends used to use this mike at work -- not one like it, this one.

     An interesting time was had by all, including a couple of (45-minute) documentaries in the Imax

Hey, You Guys...

     I can see the Statehouse from here!

     At the Indiana State Museum.

Decoration Day

     Call it Memorial Day, if you'd rather; these days, and despite our recent pair of undeclared wars, Americans spend little time at the cemetery leaving flowers and flags for the honored dead.

     Perhaps we should be taking that time; perhaps seeing the price, tallied up in the lives of men (and women) who stood up when it counted and fell in the doing, would serve as a reminder that war's bill always comes due.  The first generation that did so, in the wake of a bloody internecine war, knew the price full well, in lost sons, brothers and husbands.  There was little they could do except honor their memory.

     This day is not about politicians or policy.  It's not about parades and brass bands, either, though you may see one or two.  This day is for all those who never came back.

     Maybe you can't leave a wreath.  Spare the dead a moment nevertheless, no matter what you think of the war that killed them: they went and stood between you and "war's desolation."  Remember them.  Don't let their deaths go for naught.

...A Techie's Work...

     Annnd, I've got to go into work.  Emergency service.  With a smile.