Matt McIrvin's Steam-Operated World of Yesteryear

This entire thread making fun of John McCain using They Might Be Giants lyrics (with video of "Purple Toupee", one of the greatest songs of all time) passed without anyone mentioning that John McCain and John Linnell have the same, slightly unusual middle name (Linnell apparently likes to sign autographs as "John Sid"). Coincidence... or conspiracy?

When I saw this terrific image of a total solar eclipse in Antarctica, distorted by atmospheric refraction, with a guy standing in front I was a bit disturbed by the fact that the moon's disc seems to be darker than the blue sky surrounding the corona, which isn't optically possible: this is the kind of thing pompe complains about in science-fiction illustrations. It makes some sense, though: the picture is a composite image designed to evoke what the event actually looked like, in the extremely limited range of brightnesses available to a picture on a computer. In the individual shots the moon isn't darker than the sky, but that may well be what your eyes would register were you there, because of the contrast with the brighter corona.

Taking the shots was apparently quite an adventure. (The guy standing in the shot is a fantasy/SF artist.)

Via Making Light: The Rather Difficult Font Game.

I got 30/34, though many of my correct guesses were by elimination.

It's not just John McCain: Obama and Clinton lend some credence to vaccine-autism fears as well.

Their noncommittal "science isn't settled/need more research" responses are better than McCain's claim that there's "strong evidence" that thimerosal causes autism, but, as scientifically reasonable responses (as opposed to effective pandering to frightened voters), they still aren't really that good. The two main fears over vaccines causing autism—MMR in Britain, and thimerosal-containing vaccines here—have been falsified pretty conclusively (Orac there also has further harsh words for the Democrats).

Some opponents of vaccines seem to have moved on to fretting about something else in them causing autism, such as aluminum. Since there's no end to these hypotheses, I suppose the statement that the science is inconclusive is technically true, since one could investigate different angles forever and eternally find the science inconclusive. At some point, calling for more research before taking a position no longer makes sense. The recently deceased John A. Wheeler said it best, in a different context:

There's nothing that one can't research the hell out of. Research guided by bad judgment is a black hole for good money.

I'm the parent of a small child, and I know that when it comes to the safety of children, no expense can seem too great. That's probably why the appropriate response seemed so obvious to all our major presidential candidates; you want to be absolutely, positively sure you're not poisoning your own kid. In this case, though, the legitimation of quackery and poorly supported fears could be costly in lives as well.

Here are a few pictures of Jorie from a couple of weeks ago, just uploaded:



( two more )

Sometimes I feel we've just moved in, or as if we lost a year at this house—when you're raising a little baby there's not much else you have energy to deal with, and just going outside can be a major expedition. Now Jorie's big enough that we can just go outside and let her run around, and the weather is finally getting nice enough that it's feasible.

The recent very nice pictures of Phobos from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter got a lot of attention, but, as Emily Lakdawalla points out, ESA's Mars Express has been taking lots of excellent pictures of Phobos and its weird grooves and crater chains, some from vantage points that MRO can't manage.

Daniel of Cosmic Variance writes about John A. Wheeler, who died yesterday at the age of 96.

Wheeler wasn't a household name (his student Richard Feynman, who I think inherited something of his style, was more famous), but he was one of the titans of 20th-century fundamental physics. I know him best for two idiosyncratic textbooks that he co-wrote (and that definitely bear his personal stamp), Spacetime Physics and Gravitation. The former is one of the best introductions to relativity you can buy, suitable for a college student or advanced high-schooler; the latter is a wide-ranging, phone-book-sized text on general relativity that you either love or hate, but it was what got me interested in differential geometry, and the chapters on black holes were a great help to me when I was writing FAQ material over a decade ago.

He should also be remembered by skeptics. Wheeler was deeply interested in interpretational problems in quantum mechanics, and sometimes wrote about the subject in a poetic and freewheeling style that caused people pushing quantum explanations for paranormal phenomena to take him as an ally. He wasn't, and the characterization greatly annoyed him; in response to the AAAS's incorporation of parapsychology as a discipline, he wrote a famous rant called "Drive the Pseudos Out of the Workshop of Science" (there reproduced with a background essay by Martin Gardner, which also mentions a name that old Usenet hands might find familiar).

My preoccupation with pinball sparked by the Crave Wii Williams sim continues.

It looks as if the definitive online collection of information about real machines is ipdb.org, which is pretty much what you'd guess and has nice pictures and reviews of almost everything. (Though, as on IMDB, the reviews are of varying quality, and in this case probably strongly affected by the vagaries of individual machines; almost every popular table has somebody calling it too easy and somebody calling it an impossible drain-o-matic. Check out the page on Black Knight for a really weird one claiming that Black Knight was hyped by some sort of conspiracy to destroy pinball.)

The Tower of Pin isn't the slickest or most modern site, but gives a sometimes interesting historical overview of personal computer pinball simulations, with screenshots. I don't know of anything comparable for console sims, but I suppose the general gaming sites review them all.

My impression is that the category of commercial PC sims is pretty much moribund because of free Windows projects like Visual Pinball/PinMAME and now Future Pinball, none of which I know much about.

In general, the simulated games run a wide spectrum from realistic sims of old tables, to things designed to be in the general genre of real tables without bringing down the lawyers (like the great Pro Pinball series, which played very much like 1990s Williams/Bally Superpin games), to things that are more or less pinball but would be mechanically impractical in real life (lots of multiple-playfield tables shaped like monitor screens), to fantastical games with pinball elements like Flipnic and Odama (which was a partly voice-controlled pinball/wargame hybrid for the GameCube in which you knocked a huge stone ball around a battlefield with medieval Japanese army guys running around on it--very strange and quite difficult).

I think that, in general, I like the more realistic and historical ones best; bring in too much fantasy and you might as well just abandon the pinball tropes and make some other kind of game. The appeal of pinball is the real-world physicality of it, and if you're simulating it the great goal is to capture as much of that as you can, knowing that it will never quite be enough. But I admit that it's also fun to speculate about what pinball could be freed from real-world bounds.

Speaking of They Might Be Giants, we now have occasion to watch the DVDs of both Here Come the ABCs and the new Here Come the 123s a whole lot.

I'm more impressed by the bonus material at the end of the CD/DVD combo of ABCs, which, besides a video for "Clap Your Hands" that seems to really impress Jorie and the obligatory Disney Channel tie-in, includes several live-action videos of the band singing "Fake-Believe" from ABCs, a few songs from No! and "Stalk of Wheat" from The Spine. But the animation in 123s seems much more slickly produced, probably because Disney knew it was a guaranteed seller—Here Come the ABCs was actually TMBG's second gold album after Flood, which was way back in 1990.

On the new one, "Triops Has Three Eyes" really stands out as a monster earworm, and "One Dozen Monkeys", "The Nonagon" and "Double Dutch" are also really good, but Jorie's favorite video seems to be the felt-animated "The Secret Life of 6".

jwgh mentioned Ezra liking the "Number 8" song. There's a moment in that video that looked awfully familiar to me, something that seemed to be a Homestar Runner reference. I looked at the credits—sure enough, "Number 8" was animated by the Brothers Chaps. Which means, if you think about it, that Disney has now distributed animation by the Brothers Chaps. I think that is what they call the Big Time.

Me. Beat. Gorgar.

Man, it's been a long, long time since I went to a TMBG show.

This was a great show, pretty typical of their recent tours from what I can tell, even though Linnell apparently had the flu. Good mixture of songs they were legally required to play, recent material (including a couple of tracks off "Here Come the 123s"; Flansburgh now refers to "The Else" as "our brand-new album that we have been touring so long for that it's now our previous album") and some old semi-obscure stuff ("It's Not My Birthday" and "Hey, Mr. DJ, I Thought You Said We Had A Deal", two favorites of mine).

Seeing them live in their current lineup also reinforces my belief that hiring guitarist Dan Miller was the best decision they ever made. The man is seriously talented.

From last April: Awesome video of the Borneo rhinoceros in the wild. This subspecies is so rare that before these automated cameras were used, nobody was sure they still existed. This one came right up and sniffed at the camera before going on its way.

If you're having trouble finding the Wii version of "Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection" in retail, there was still one copy of it going for $19.99 at the FYE store at Burlington Mall, last I checked. Come and get it.

You can also experience the weirdness of what's going on over there. They're shooting a movie, apparently a Kevin James comedy about a mall cop (my psychic power tells me that jewel thieves will be wackily clonked on the head in this movie). It's odd that the listed release date is post-Christmas, because it's clearly intended as a Christmas release: they've put a bunch of Christmas trees up, what looks to be the shell of a mall Santa display, and one of those pools filled with plastic balls (my psychic power tells me that there will be a wacky fight scene in the ball pool).

There are signs all over saying that most of the shooting will be at night, but when I went there today it looked like they were getting ready to shoot some crowd footage; there were some lights and cameras up, and all these extras milling around waiting to be told to walk somewhere. One of the ceiling-mounted flatscreens near the cameras had a still image on it identifying the mall as "West Orange Pavilion". It's like living in the world of make-believe!

1. Actual pirate captains

2. Captain Hook (defeated by ticking reptile)

3. Jean La Foot (unable to hijack bowl of breakfast cereal)

4. Captain Jack Sparrow (shows disturbingly little evidence of piracy or, with intermittent exceptions, captaincy)

5. Captain Feathersword (friend to the Wiggles; mostly fond of dancing, saying "I'm sorry" and shoe inspections)

6. The other Captain Hook, of "Captain Hook and the Gospel Pirates" (fortunately, I may be the only person who has ever seen this)

I will be awaiting my job offer from McSweeney's in the mail.

Over the past couple of weeks, Jorie seems to have suddenly gained a lot of upper-body strength.

She's also been a bit more cranky and rebellious than usual, maybe in part because she's got her lower canine teeth coming in and causing her some pain, maybe partly because of incipient Terrible Twos or the developmental-spurt crankiness that kerri9494 mentioned a while back. But I think that a lot of what makes it noticeable isn't that her behavior has really changed so much as that she's now much stronger, and hasn't entirely adjusted to it. Actions that used to be harmless, like knocking objects against the floor, can now do damage or at the very least make a lot of noise. It's also much harder to keep her still for dressing or diaper-changing if she's actively trying to wriggle away.

When I read books to her, about half the time she now wrests the book away from me and starts "reading" bits of it at random, usually getting the gist of it right from memory. She's better about turning the pages without tearing them, but she now has a tendency to grab the pages in large chunks and crumple the edges in her fist. Again, I think it's that her grip is a lot stronger than it used to be.

PZ Myers talks about the evolution of placental mammals from egg-laying organisms, and what's left behind in the genes. Near the beginning, he talks about how human embryos still have yolk sacs.

That's actually something I've wondered about for a while. When Sam was pregnant with Jorie we didn't have an ultrasound that early, but my sister Megan had one pretty early and I remember her showing me proto-Greta's yolk sac. Turns out there's no actual yolk in it, not any more, but it's there. Ontogeny doesn't recapitulate phylogeny, but you can see how people might think that was the case since there are all these evolutionary leftovers in our development.

I don't have much to say except that this feels like the final passing of an age.

...Bradbury still lives. But he was always a bit apart from the core group in sensibility.

I played "Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection" some more last night, way more than I should have.

A while back urbeatle mentioned grinding elements escaping the MMPORG genre. One thing that made me a little apprehensive at first was that this disc has an achievement system. You start out with a rather small number of credits, which you can earn by meeting various challenges for the different tables, and though some of the games (Funhouse, Pinbot, Gorgar and Taxi, at least) have free play, the others take credits to play. You can unlock free play for any of the other tables by paying 100 credits.

If this had been badly tuned it'd have introduced an unpleasant grind element into the game. (You're going to make me work to play the games I already paid for?) Fortunately, even the easy achievements give you big wads of credits, and it's pretty easy to get enough credits not to worry about running out, at least at first. Still, a complete pinball newbie might find this daunting.

OMG BLACK KNIGHT AND FUNHOUSE AND PINBOT OMG OMG

Strangely, this seems to have gone directly to bargain bins upon release, at least in Wii form.

Ted Stryk talks about his work extracting new details of the night sides of Uranus's moons from old Voyager data.

This kind of thing fascinates me--the idea that there could be details lurking in old data that can be extracted now because anyone with a personal computer has access to power beyond what JPL scientists had in the 1980s (and because things that were the province of space-probe teams, if that, are now features of Photoshop). It very much reminds me of this 2004 work I've linked to before in which people heavily processed 1980 Voyager 1 pictures of Titan (cross-checking with some low-resolution pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope) to find that it actually did manage to pick out some surface details--there are fuzzy but recognizable outlines of the bright and dark regions now known as Xanadu, Shangri-La and Adiri.