Halfway down the Danube

Sweep the kitchen

Links and other miscellanea.

Armenia will have its next Parliamentary elections on May 12. Incredibly, these have been scheduled on the same day as Eurovision! I foresee much channel-surfing that night.

I am enjoying Dr. Vector. Probably because he's obviously enjoying himself.

I have seen and handled many common snapping turtles, and I can tell you that they are meanest creatures on the planet, and that legends of their ferocity usually come nowhere near the truth. I raised one from a hatchling to sexual maturity (carapace length of about 8 inches) and when it was younger it would frequently kill fish that were bigger than it was. The speed and power of the bite and the turtles' willingness to use it on anything that moves could hardly be exaggerated. They are my favorite living tetrapods.

Dr. Vector likes taking things apart. Like us, he has a small child.

Dr. Vector led me to Bad News Hughes. His latest post takes us to a Renaissance Faire:

“So is this going to be the Renaissance Faire or the Medieval Faire?” she asks.

“Is this the... Wait, what?” Man, that’s a stumper.

“Is this the Renaissance Faire or the Medieval Faire? Is there a difference?”

“Is there a... Look, Becca, the Faire combines many ostensibly disparate eras, including the Renaissance, Medieval times, the days of yore, the days of Conan, the Dark Ages, the Pirates of the Caribbean, albums by Tool and the Insane Clown Posse, the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block of programming, World of Warcraft, Monty Python’s Holy Grail, the Legend of Zelda, shitty new age Celtic music, the bleachers at a NASCAR race and, finally, all those attention whores in your high school drama club. You can’t be all hung up on authenticity or classification. You just have to wander through the crowds, wide-eyed and innocent, enjoying the swirling, festive mélange of totally made-up cultures. And also you have to eat one of those giant turkey legs, so I can take a picture and use it to make jokes on the Internet.”

I've been posting a lot over at the Fistful. It seems to come in waves. I have no idea why. My recent posts are here.

Old-time radio! Now I want to look some of these up. It seems like someone would have a library of sound files...

Did you hear about the "forge your own boarding pass" episode last year? Here it is.

My favorite part is where he explains whey airlines like the Photo ID. I remember those ads! You used to be able to buy people's airplane tickets from them. "New York to London, March 31st, male." A whole grey market, gone with the wind.

Meta-geekery is when a geek does something geeky about geekery. Like categorizing the twelve levels of comic book fan agreement. (And, you know, there are exactly twelve.)

Note that the person committing metageekery here is female. I find that encouraging.

I like this quote a lot:

Tyranny starts as a habit; it has the tendency to, and generally finally does develop into a disease. I believe that habit may coarsen and stultify the very best of men, reducing them to the level of brutes. Blood and power make a man drunk: callous coarseness and depravity develop in him; the most abnormal phenomena become accessible, and in the end pleasurable to the mind and the senses. The human being and the citizen perish forever in the tyrant, and a return to human dignity, to repentance, to regeneration becomes practically impossible for him," - Dostoevsky, "Memoirs from the House of the Dead.

I've seen the beginnings of this process up close, on a very small scale. (In my past as a political attorney.) "Habit may coarsen and stultify, yes indeed.

A German does something amazing:

Paragliding 2005 World Cup winner Ewa Wisnierska, 35, was lifted to 32,612 feet by a storm that apparently killed a Chinese paraglider in eastern Australia on Wednesday. The pilots were preparing for the 10th FAI World Paragliding Championships next week, event organizer Godfrey Wenness said.

He Zhongpin, 42, died during the same weather system, apparently from a lack of oxygen and extreme cold, Wenness said. His body was found 47 miles from his launch site.

Wisnierska described Friday how she attempted to skirt the thunderstorm and when that failed, repeatedly attempted to spiral against its powerful lift.

She said she could see lightning around her and decided her chances of survival were "almost zero."

She said she radioed her team leader at 13,123 feet.

"I said, 'I can't do anything,'" she told reporters at a news conference. "'It's raining and hailing and I'm still climbing — I'm lost.'"

Officials and Wisnierska's ground team used global positioning and radio equipment to track her altitude as she soared well beyond the 29,000-foot plus height of Everest, the world's tallest peak. Wenness said she went from 2,500 feet to the maximum in about 15 minutes.

She lost consciousness for more than 30 minutes while her glider flew on uncontrolled, sinking and lifting several times, he said.

She regained consciousness at about 1,640 feet and landed safely, but had ice in her lightweight flying suit and frost bite on her face.

The last few hundred feet of Everest are known as the "death zone". Wisnierska was up about 3000 feet higher than that. She was not wearing special protective clothing.

More details here and here. An earlier interview with Ms. Wisnierska here. "I have fun living like a bird!"

Via James Nicoll, I see we missed a naked-eye nova. It peaked at around third magnitude (medium bright star) and has now faded to under fifth magnitude (you can barely see it). Statistically speaking, I have about one chance in three of living to see a nova, and maybe one in twenty of living to see a supernova. (There was Supernova Shelton in 1987, but I was on the wrong side of the planet for that.)

To bring this back down to earth, here's a depressing little post about Lake Sevan here in Armenia.

But since I'd hate to end on a depressing note, here's a webcomic: Questionable Content. Yes, cute twentysomethings talking endlessly about relationships: it's a guilty pleasure. But they're so cute.

Links, quotes, odds and ends. What've you got?

Posted by douglas at February 21, 2007 03:39 PM