Potpourri CLVI

Doing a little electronic housekeeping today. Let's just reach our hands into the bucket and see what sort of scary stuff comes out of it, shall we?

First, a little mayhem and humor courtesy of Allstate (via The Deastroyer).

I like these. I shouldn’t, but I do: Killhouettes.


This past week aviation buffs celebrated the 107th year of powered flight by the Wright Brothers. Others, more impressed with mass transportation, celebrated the 75th anniversary of the Douglas DC-3.


Bored? Have some skill with electronics? You, too, can program your Christmas lights to indicate when you have incoming messages.
 
Know a geek you'd like to overspend on this Christmas? Consider one of these gifts.
 
For reasons that elude me, Liberty University decided to put together a choral version of Antoine Dodson's "Hide the wife, hide the kids" rant. Maybe they'll take on the Double Rainbow guy next?
 
Ever felt the urge to drop an asteroid on the planet and see the results? Well, now's your chance. Purdue University has a site made just for you.
 
More YouTube goodness from Father Dan:

• Silent Monks "sing" the Hallelujah Chorus.
• A six-minute video about unbelievable courage and persistence in battle: "Tango Mike Mike." Absolutely worth watching.

From Charlie: a guy who watched Ocean's 11 and learned all the wrong lessons.
 
Awhile ago I tried to explain why it's impossible to calculate the odds of one's employment continuing at NASA. An email I received this morning sort of crystallizes the matter nicely:

Congress has passed a continuing resolution through 12/21 and the President is expected to sign today. We have been advised by the Office of the Chief Financial Officer at NASA Headquarters that all ongoing NASA operations should continue at least through 12/21/10. Additional information will be provided as subsequent funding actions are enacted.

Basically NASA, like the rest of the federal government, is subject to the political debates and whims of elected officials in Washington...which, at present, consists of the lame-duck Democrat-controlled Congress trying to push through as much stuff as they can before the next, Republican-controlled session can take place. New laws are apparently more important than passing the budget, so the budget gets passed in days-at-a-time increments. If the lame-duck Congress can't come to any sort of agreement on what to do with the rest of Fiscal Year 2011 after December 21, the government will "shut down," meaning nonessential personnel like me will be kept at home on furlough until a more complete budget IS passed. Wacky times.

And since it's that season, here's an Irish version of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

Here's something interesting...a demographic map of darn near every city in America.

I mentioned the Make A Wish Foundation a few days ago. If you've got some serious spare change, you can buy a Stormtrooper helmet autographed by various Star Wars cast members, with the money going to M.A.W.F. No, really.

In my continuing series of gastronomical challenges, I'm including this link from Yohon on the "worst foods in America."

Jerry Pournelle has had some very thought-provoking essays lately on the recent debates re: renewing the Bush-era tax cuts. He manages to get beyond the rhetoric and consider what sort of society we really want...and what we want the economy to do. Any decision has consequences. Let the tax cuts expire and you make a bad economy that much worse by taking money that belongs to productive citizens and giving it to government. Soak the rich (however you define them), and eventually those folks will either run out of money or take what resources they have and LEAVE the country. Pournelle has other thoughts that, again, are worth thinking about.

I saw these in my internet "travels":

• A Victorian book on how to write fiction, and the then-perceived problems thereof.
• The U.S. Navy has a new gun--and you really don't want to get hit by this one.
• Cold weather isn’t good for electric cars, either.
• Holiday greetings from Jabba the Hutt.
• Googling America…look up a state on Google, and here’s what comes up. Funny!
• C-3PO and R2-D2 swimsuits. Um. Wow?
• While BoingBoing.net finds this letter "thin-skinned," after awhile, you've got to say enough is enough and get the prankster's attention. "Not just no, but heck no!" obviously didn't do it.

From Tracy:

• National Geographic released images of the top most unusual animals discovered in 2010. Some are goofy-lookin', others gross, one or two fascinating. The discovery of these creatures begs the question: how do we "know" how many species exist or have really gone extinct on our planet if new beasties keep creeping up (so to speak)?
• An NPR story about Neil Armstrong and why we should go to the Moon.

From Lin: a two-part article on the role of males in a post-industrial society. I'll read the whole thing eventually, I promise.

 

Myers-Briggs, Culture Wars, and the Avant-Garde

In the process of reading The Introvert Advantage, a few facts converged in my mind:

• Extroverts outnumber introverts 3 to 1 in the general populace.
• The science, space, and engineering communities that I support (as a semi-extroverted introvert, I'll note) are dominated by introverts.
• My extroverted friend Darlene the Science Cheerleader has been fighting against stereotypes and for broader public participation in science- and technology-related debates.
• Awhile back, I wrote an article about the arrival of professionals (i.e., extroverted marketing types) into the space advocacy business.

It has since occurred to me that the "two cultures" identified by C. P. Snow in the early 1960s were misidentified. The war might not be between cultures but between temperaments: between the introverts and the extroverts.

Consider a few side effects of being introverted:

• Natural quietude and deep (internalized) thinking.
• A tendency to focus deeply on topics of personal interest, often in compensation for social awkwardness.
• A tendency to believe, often rightly, that others don't understand you or your interests.

The result of these introverted tendencies is a long-running snobbery by introverted and technically minded individuals against generally socially minded extroverts. This snobbery is not limited to the science or engineering worlds, however; introverted artists often exhibit pessimistic or depressive outlooks and tend to look down on optimistic extroverts (e.g. cheerleaders).

What, then, is the "culture war" or "temperament war" about? I think it has to do with influence, power, and money. There are many, many more extroverts than introverts, yet introverts often monopolize the cultures of high technology and the arts, which generate much of the wealth in this country. The majority wants a piece of the action.

That is why "geek" is now more chic.

That is why fantasy, science fiction, and comic book-based movies are now the big money makers in Hollywood.

That is why the shape of space exploration is shifting toward a more participatory activity.

That might be why we have our first nerd President.


"Geek" might be chic, but the extroverts are taking over, and they now want their say on issues which, up to now, were controlled by introverts because they were the only ones with enough interest to pay attention to them.

So what will be the end result of this invasion of the introverts' domain by extroverts? Speaking as a moderately extroverted introvert, if I had to guess I'd say that as "geek space" becomes more mainstream, the introverts will move on to other, even more esoteric interests, ideas, art forms, and technologies.

Introverts might not say much, but they do keep the avant-garde moving steadily onward, continually pushing the boundaries of the human experience. So the "war" won't be won or lost. Instead, the introverts will simply move the battle lines somewhere they can get a little peace and quiet. As with anything avant-garde, by the time the avant-garde has become mainstream, the frontier has already moved on, simply because introverts hate crowds.

Say What?

My buddy Doc and I had a brief, relatively conflict-free discussion about healthcare legislation yesterday, something that excites me about as much as talk about someone else's diet. However, Doc has interesting thoughts, so I held on. He did make one assertion that just astounded me: he told me that Medicare/Medicaid were underfunded! Wow. I didn't have the figures in front of me at the time. I do now. From the Congressional Research Service:

The President [Bush]’s 2009 budget estimates current law Medicare net outlays of $413 billion in FY2009. The budget includes Medicare legislative proposals with estimated savings of $12.2 billion in FY2009 and $178 billion over the five-year budget window. (Emphasis mine.)

Dang. $413 billion. That's just over $1,375 per American citizen, which covers most private insurance premiums for a year, if that's the way the program were run, but of course it's not. Direct handouts or insurance vouchers to citizens could work if they were allowed to purchase private plans, but that's not how federal bureaucracies work. Last time I looked, 72 cents out of every dollar in Medicare/Medicaid goes to covering overhead--government employees.

But let's go back to just talking money. Not everyone is being covered by Medicare and Medicaid. So that means that MORE than $1,375 of federal dollars per person are being spent on Medicare/Medicaid insurance. When is enough enough?

*

On the plus side, Doc and I get along on a sheer geekitude level (he's much more savvy on both English lit and science fiction than I am, plus a master on things like comic books and the internet), and he did have a couple of cool links of interest, which I must share:

• Last Exit to Nowhere, a site that sells shirts for companies or organizations that appear in movies. For example, Cyberdyne from Terminator or the Tyrell Corporation from Blade Runner.
• Shirt.Woot, which offers up a variety of clever logos from random(?) artists, which visitors vote on. The logos that get the most votes get their shirts published.

These are both akin to CafePress, which neither of us could think of at the time. Self-publishing for t-shirts: the internet is an interesting place.

Thought for the Day

From NASA Administrator Mike Griffin:

"I don't know who hosts which TV talk show, or care. I first heard of Saturday Night Live through all the hoopla surrounding their twenty-fifth anniversary. But being ignorant of those things has given me more time to learn, and to apply what I've learned, to the physics, engineering, and management challenges of my profession, aerospace. If that makes me a "nerd" or "geek" or a "workaholic", then it does. I know the conventional wisdom about leading a balanced life, but I have not done it. The people I know who set out to accomplish something meaningful in their careers have not done so either. They too are nerds, geeks, and workaholics. Frankly, I think our society owes a great deal to such people."

I can relate.