The Weird, Random, and Interesting things that Fit Nowhere Else Thread

Raithe · September 18, 2015

Wired - Solar System Scale Model In the Desert

The universe, as Douglas Adams so memorably explained, is big. Really big.

But so are the things inside it -- even objects like the Solar System, which on a galactic scale are absolutely minuscule.

A new project by Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh, spotted by Sploid, sought to explain just how vast our local neighbourhood of planets, dwarf planets, asteroids and comets really is, by building the first scale model of the solar system with complete planetary orbits. To do it they had to go to a dry lakebed in Nevada, and first build a model of the inner planets to a scale of 1 astronomical unit (AU, or distance from the Sun to Earth) of 176 metres. They then repeated this for the outer planets, and drove around each of the paths at night with a light.

The result is a time-lapse video that shows each of the orbits in motion, to scale, for what the film-makers claim is the first time in the real world. They also produced a seven minute film which is poignant, precise and inspiring, putting our solar backyard in true perspective for the first time.

Of course other models of the Solar System -- or bits of it -- do exist to scale. On the web there are several, perhaps most notably this illustration which represents the distances between the planets if the Moon were only the size of one pixel (get ready to scroll, a lot).

The film-makers have more details about the project at their respective websites, but WIRED encourages you to watch the whole film -- it's quite spectacular. Not unlike the Solar System itself, in fact.

GhoulishVisage · September 18, 2015

I thought this image of a Madagascan Hissing Roach giving birth was pretty interesting.

Bartimaeus · September 18, 2015

It might be wise to spoiler that and put the text ABOVE it, not below it. Some people are rather squeamish about these things.

Azdeus · September 18, 2015

Raithe · September 20, 2015

For that other perspective.. Epic Times - Bill Maher Does Not Stand With Ahmed Mohamed

The little noted fact that Ahmed went through 6 school periods showing it to teachers before he was questioned about the clock, and that they'd had a recent Isis inspired attack 20 odd miles away?

Hurlshort · September 20, 2015

For that other perspective.. Epic Times - Bill Maher Does Not Stand With Ahmed Mohamed

The little noted fact that Ahmed went through 6 school periods showing it to teachers before he was questioned about the clock, and that they'd had a recent Isis inspired attack 20 odd miles away?

I've never understood the appeal of Bill Maher.

True story, I once got in trouble when I was 12 for carving my initials into a chair at school. They had an administrator talk to me, then they had an on-campus police officer talk to me. I was suspended. At no point was I put into handcuffs. I was not interrogated for an hour and a half. Honestly it's like there was a complete lack of common sense among all the administrators and officers involved. You can expect a 14-year old to lack some common sense. Bringing a briefcase clock to school wasn't a great idea, it looked suspicious, and if I was his teacher I probably would have told him to let me keep it in my class and have him pick it up at the end of the day. I've had students bring worse things to school. But the adults involved in this situation all showed a remarkable lack of empathy. It's a 14-year old kid.

Fighter · September 20, 2015

A kid at my school built a detonator from an alarm clock and a camera battery. A real one, not just a clock. He wrapped the wires around a match to see if he could ignite it. It worked.

Never occurred to him or anyone around how the adults could have interpreted it.

Volourn · September 21, 2015

It is a damn clock. A CLOCK. HOLY HELL! THIS WORLD IS DAMN INSANE.

Elerond · September 21, 2015

U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-told-to-ignore-afghan-allies-abuse-of-boys.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records.

The policy has endured as American forces have recruited and organized Afghan militias to help hold territory against the Taliban. But soldiers and Marines have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as the commanders of villages — and doing little when they began abusing children.

“The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,” said Dan Quinn, a former Special Forces captain who beat up an American-backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. “But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did — that was something village elders voiced to me.”

Same time in US

Teen prosecuted as adult for having naked images – of himself – on phone

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/20/teen-prosecuted-naked-images-himself-phone-selfies

A teenage boy in North Carolina has been prosecuted for having nude pictures of himself on his own mobile phone. The young man, who is now 17 but was 16 at the time the photos were discovered, had to strike a plea deal to avoid potentially going to jail and being registered as a sex offender.

Experts condemned the case as ludicrous. The boy was, however, punished by the courts, and had to agree to be subject to warrantless searches by law enforcement for a year, in addition to other penalties.

The young man was also named in the media and suffered a suspension as quarterback of his high school football team while the case was being resolved.

Cormega Copening, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, was prosecuted as an adult under federal child pornography felony laws, for sexually exploiting a minor. The minor was himself.

“It’s dysfunctional to be charged with possession of your own image,” said Justin Patchin, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin and co-founder of the research website cyberbullying.org.

Copening was charged with four counts of making and possessing images of himself and one count of possessing a naked image of his 16-year-old girlfriend.

His girlfriend, Brianna Denson, took a plea deal after being prosecuted on similar charges for having naked, suggestive pictures of herself on her cellphone.

While the pictures were technically illegal, actual sex would not be – the age of consent for sexual intercourse in North Carolina is 16.

Volourn · September 21, 2015

EVIL NAZI SJWS WILL BE EVIL SJW NAZIS.

Malcador · September 22, 2015

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/middle-east/ISIS-jihadists-defecting-because-they-are-not-getting-luxury-goods-and-cars-as-promised/articleshow/49053381.cms

Jihad's a bad career option it seems

Hurlshort · September 22, 2015

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/middle-east/ISIS-jihadists-defecting-because-they-are-not-getting-luxury-goods-and-cars-as-promised/articleshow/49053381.cms

Jihad's a bad career option it seems

The benefits package is not a advertised, such a shocker.

Malcador · September 22, 2015

I've never understood the appeal of Bill Maher.

True story, I once got in trouble when I was 12 for carving my initials into a chair at school. They had an administrator talk to me, then they had an on-campus police officer talk to me. I was suspended. At no point was I put into handcuffs. I was not interrogated for an hour and a half. Honestly it's like there was a complete lack of common sense among all the administrators and officers involved. You can expect a 14-year old to lack some common sense. Bringing a briefcase clock to school wasn't a great idea, it looked suspicious, and if I was his teacher I probably would have told him to let me keep it in my class and have him pick it up at the end of the day. I've had students bring worse things to school. But the adults involved in this situation all showed a remarkable lack of empathy. It's a 14-year old kid.

He's a condescending ****, some people really dig that I guess. As for the kid, well 14 year olds around the world are capable of violence and other malicious acts. I had heard he was joking about it being a bomb or something along those lines, but didn't chase it. Have to wonder if he went fishing for this and it has been rather funny to see the reaction of people tripping over themselves to reach out to him (apparently he's off to the UN...for some reason). Even if he was being a smartass, best thing would have been to just take the clock from him.

Gfted1 · September 22, 2015

And it was a different world from when Hurlshot was 14 and today.

Hurlshort · September 22, 2015

And it was a different world from when Hurlshot was 14 and today.

Is that a dig at my age? :bat:

Gfted1 · September 22, 2015

And it was a different world from when Hurlshot was 14 and today.

Is that a dig at my age?

Lol, I wish I was still young enough to make fun of oldsters but I'm the oldster now.

Nonek · September 22, 2015

Not saying i'm old but as a pupil I would never have carried out such an act as this youth, mainly because sundials were too heavy to carry around and i'm not sure one could make them explode.

Rimshot, I hank you.

Malcador · September 22, 2015

And they'd have executed you, not call the local tribunes.

Malcador · September 22, 2015

http://arstechnica.com/cars/2015/09/volkswagen-admits-11-million-diesel-cars-have-sneaky-software-installed/

11 million cars cheating emissions tests.

Edited September 22, 2015 by Malcador

Malcador · September 22, 2015

http://www.thespec.com/news-story/5924821--ginger-extremist-convicted-in-royal-death-plot-so-prince-harry-can-be-king/

A ginger pushed too far.

213374U · September 23, 2015

http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp

Excuse me, I must go stand in the corner now.

Raithe · September 23, 2015

Heh.

Tor - In defence of Indiana Jones' Archaeology

In Defense of Indiana Jones, Archaeologist

Indiana Jones isn’t that bad of an archaeologist.

I mean, okay, the low relative quality of his archaeological expeditions is so notorious it’s become a bit of a truism. There’s a great McSweeney’s list of the reasons Herr Doktor Jones was denied tenure. Even as I make this argument, I can hear friends of mine who spent their summers on digs cringe inside, across the continent. (Hi, Celia!) But hear me out. This won’t take long.

(Looks at rest of essay)

Um. Maybe it will. Keep reading anyway.

First, I want to acknowledge the common protests. Jonesian archaeology looks a lot different from the modern discipline. If Jones wanted to use surviving traces of physical culture to assemble a picture of, say, precolonial Peruvian society, he’s definitely going about it the wrong way. Jones is a professional fossil even for the mid-30s—a relic of an older generation of Carters and Schliemans. Which, if you think about it, makes sense. By Raiders, he already has tenure, probably gained based on his field work in India (Subterranean Thuggee Lava Temples: An Analysis and Critical Perspective, William & Mary Press, 1935), and the board which granted him tenure were conservatives of his father’s generation, people who actually knew Carter and Schlieman (not to mention Jones, Sr.).*

* I’ll set aside for the moment a discussion of cronyism and nepotism, phenomena utterly foreign to contemporary tenure review boards…

Jones is the last great monster of the treasure-hunting age of archaeology. To judge him by modern standards is to indulge the same comforting temporal parochialism that leads us to dismiss post-Roman Europe as a “Dark Age.” Jones may be a lousy archaeologist as we understand the field today. But is he a lousy archaeologist in context?

To answer this question, we must evaluate the tasks Jones sets for himself—or the tasks set for him. Often Jones seeks an object smaller than a standard sea chest, with at best a vague sense of its location. In most cases the object is regarded by the brightest minds of the field to be mythical. Nor are these objects hiding just out of sight—in Raiders, Jones searches for the Ark of the Covenant, which his mentor, Dr. Ravenwood, pursued for his entire career without success—and finds it in less than a month. In Crusade, Jones finds the Holy Grail. Yes, he uses his father’s grail diary to get there—but, then, Henry Jones Sr. had that diary, and he didn’t find the Grail himself.

In each of the first three films*, Jones pursues two legendary objects, with a presumed goal of delivering each to a museum—one in the opening act, and another in the main plot. That gives us six data points: the idol head, the Ark of the Covenant, the ashes of Nurhachi, the Siva Stones, the Cross of Coronado, and the Holy Grail. Only the Cross actually makes it to the museum, which leaves Jones with a 16.7% success rate, but he does locate each object he sets out to find. If we ignore the Siva Stones, which Jones seems to have always planned to return to the village from which they were stolen, Jones’ success rate at converting “this object is probably mythical” into “this object is part of a publicly accessible museum collection” rises to one in five. His methods may be unorthodox by modern standards, but 20% is a lot higher than average, considering that we remember the names of archaeologists who do this even once.

* I have not seen Crystal Skull. Maybe I should?

Having addressed the question of his success at his own goals, let’s turn to some common complaints against Jones. Outstanding among these is the assertion that any of the death traps Jones casually subverts would be worth a great deal more to archaeology than the objects he sets out to recover. How many actual working pressure-sensitive blow gun traps do we have from Pre-Colombian Peru?

This is the strongest challenge to Jones’ methods, and to respond I’ll resort to a kind of movie logic, which pains me, but here we are. It’s hard to ignore that the Jones universe clearly differs in small but important ways from our own—consider, for example, the existence of magic, or the fact that a rubber raft can double as a parachute. The death traps Jones subverts would be archaeological fascinations in our world, where such things don’t exist (outside of Qin Shihuang’s tomb, perhaps) and would in fact be an amazing discovery. But they clearly do exist in Jones’ world, and are quite common.

Consider the case of the Peruvian tomb, in which Jones tries to defeat each trap in sequence. Either he discovered a description of the tomb’s traps, which suggests that Jones expected any extant traps to be functional, suggesting in turn that Jones possesses an overabundance of caution (hah!) or a history of encountering just such death traps—or he had a general sense of what traps are commonly used in tombs, even when those traps (like the beam of light-spear trap in Raiders) have no easily-deduced mechanism.* In either case, we’re forced to admit that active death traps in Jones’ universe are a common concern for archaeologists, on the borderline between nuisance and real danger. Perhaps a wave of archaeologists in the Indiana Jones Universe’s 1970s will earn tenure as a result of advances in the revolutionary field of death trap archaeology, much as the study of middens has become key to modern archaeology.

* Seriously. How the hell does that spear trap work? This is Raiders’ biggest mystery, as far as I’m concerned—much bigger than the question of how Jones holds his breath during the U-Boat ride. The ancients seem to have had an excellent command of optics.

Another common challenge, more easily dismissed, is that Jones is a bad teacher. Let’s set aside for the moment the fact that it’s perfectly possible to be a successful researcher and a horrible teacher. We seldom see Jones in the classroom, but what we do see paints him as a terrific teacher. In, let’s remember, 1936, his class looks like this:

This is not what the classroom of a bad teacher looks like. Trust me. I’ve been a teacher, and when I started I was not a good one. This is especially not what the classroom of a bad teacher in 1936 looks like—look at that gender balance. Jones, who we’re led to believe works at an old-money institution*, if not an Ivy than a near-Ivy, has a classroom of at least two-thirds women.

* I still haven’t seen Crystal Skull, but exterior shots of Marshall College for that film were made at Yale.

For contrast, my alma mater didn’t even admit women to its undergraduate program until the embarrassingly late year of 1969. And before you pass this gender balance off as a wartime phenomenon, we’re in ’36—Pearl Harbor’s a long ways away. The gender balance is such I might assume Marshall (Jones’ institution) to be a women’s college, but there are clearly male students, so we’re left to assume that Jones is a popular teacher, especially with female students. Suggesting all those women are in Jones’ class because they want to sleep with him—a common assertion—rejects out of hand the possibility that these women are legitimately excited about archaeology as Jones presents it, which seems like a skeevy and disrespectful move to me.

Granted, at least one student is romantically interested in Jones, which has led some viewers to the conclusion that Jones makes a habit of the kind of affairs that feature largely in the sort of novels certain English professors write about English professors. But Jones seems unsettled by his student’s romantic interest in him—and, while this draws aside form the main course of my argument, we see no evidence Jones is attracted to women over whom he has power.

Jones has three romantic engagements over three movies: Marion Ravenwood, whose introduction scene features her drinking a Sherpa under the table; Willie Smith, who may not be terribly well-prepared for bar fights and elephant rides but is a canny operator in her own right—it takes savvy for a farm girl to establish herself as Shanghai glitterati (Smith and Jones are actually a great pair, in a way: they both have chips on their shoulders the size of Texas, Smith’s discomfort with insects matches Jones’ discomfort with snakes, they have the same temper, etc.); and Ilsa, a hypercompetent archaeologist whose only weakness is that she happens to be a Nazi. Jones’ erotic interests appear consistent: he likes people who see him as a partner, a screw-up, or both.* Which, of course, parallels his relationship with his father…and that’s as far as I’ll take this psychoanalytic sidebar. Let’s leave it here: people can behave in weird and bad and inconsistent ways, but I see no indication Jones is interested in affairs with his students.

* Compare this to James Bond, habitually drawn to fish-out-of-water innocents to whom he can condescend.

Which leads me to the final point often used to argue that Jones isn’t a good (or representative) archaeologist, which tends to be that he’s too badass. Too hot. Too competent. Too adventurous. Archaeologists wear tweed. Archaeologists have glasses that make their eyes look bigger.

Bull****.

Let me tell you a story: in my 20s I met a young woman riding on the Mongolian steppe. I was part of a tour, on our third or fourth day out from base camp, feeling like a sack of potatoes in the saddle. She appeared at the summit of a ridge we were riding up: glint of sunlight on blonde hair under blue sky, moving as if born to the saddle. We hailed one another and paused to talk and share airag. She grew up in Montana, she said, around horses, and she had a few weeks off so she decided to go steppe riding by herself, and sleep under the stars. A few weeks off, said I. Where was she working?

At a dig, she replied, in the Gobi Desert. “There are abandoned cities all over the place out there,” she said. Then I asked her how I could stop feeling like a sack of potatoes in the saddle, and she taught me how to post.

This encounter set me afire with the dream of going back to school for central Asian archaeology. I investigated the idea and learned that in addition to the modern and Classical Chinese I already knew, I’d need at least a reading knowledge of French, German, Russian, Japanese, modern Mongolian, Sogdien which is a language I swear, Tangut, Uighur wouldn’t hurt, and at some point I’d have to pick up the Chinese character transliterations for Mongolian used in Yuan dynasty records. Then roughly seven years of PhD study in places where my girlfriend of seven years couldn’t follow—I’d have to surrender most of my friendships, and set aside writing as a serious pursuit. (All those languages!) But, God. Ancient cities in the desert.

Another anecdote: I’ve had wonderful professors, I’ve had brilliant professors, but without doubt the most badass professor I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with was Doctor Kimberly Bowes, a late classical archaeologist who spent a year teaching what amounts to introductory Mediterranean political science and history. Dr. Bowes knew a billion languages and she spent her fieldwork being lowered down pits into buried villages and subterranean temples of blood-drinking cults (I mean, Christian churches, but, you know, same diff). Having swallowed the “real archaeologists aren’t Indiana Jones” pill along with every skeptical kid my age, I thought she must be the exception, the Sole Awesome Archaeologist. Then a colleague of hers arrived one day to watch her class—he rode in on his motorcycle, with leather boots and a lanky figure and the kind of five-o-clock shadow actors pay people to help them fake.

And the stories I’ve heard from friends who’ve gone on fieldwork! Yes, it’s grids and dust and potsherds and toothbrushes, sure, but if you’ve ever camped out, and I mean really camped out, like a week in the mountains somewhere hiking ten miles a day kind of camping out—imagine doing that for months at a stretch, digging all day and working (or drinking, or both) all night. Imagine scars and shovel blisters and sweat and back pain and waking before dawn because you were so tired you went to sleep an hour after sundown. Imagine speaking three languages around a campfire. Imagine poisonous snakes on a thornbush-covered mountain at sunrise.

You know that bit in Firefly, where River says the cows forgot they were cows while they were inside a spaceship? If you’re reading this, I’ll hazard that your job takes place entirely inside the spaceship. Not so for an archaeologist who does fieldwork. That’s pretty awesome.

Indiana Jones isn’t that bad of an archaeologist at all, within his cultural and historical context. He’s a successful adventurer. He’s a popular teacher. And he, as per usual for archaeologists, is a badass. The real practice of archaeology doesn’t look much like the movies, no. But he’s far from the disaster he’s frequently envisioned to be.