Rhinocrisy

Everyone else is posting videos on their blogs. Are we any less? Nay. Here, eat this. Nice to see television get things right occasionally.

(Video courtesy of boston-legal.org)

is the prohibition of

“intimate touching, sexual squatting or sexual bending” during school dances.

Thank heavens we have someone working on that. (I don’t like freak dancing either. It hurts to rub up against the backside of a porcupine.)

New Scientists recently pointed out this patent, which is for a device that, because it can be used to disperse biological and chemical agents and was developed on a government grant, clearly violates anti-chembio weapons treaties. EM-barassing! The blushing DOD, which funded the effort, has apparently been trying to get the USPTO to remove the offending text from the patent. Thankfully the incredibly, incredibly, incredibly slow response time of the Patent Office is on our side. But any day now this ought to go poof…

As you know, South Dakota has banned abortion. The law is particularly fire-breathing, including a five-year prison sentence for doctors performing an abortion and abjuring any exception for rape or incest (which even President Bush feels should be allowed). There’s some compelling logic here, after all - why should you kill an innocent child merely for the crimes of its father? And as we read here, most women who are victims of rape or incest decide to keep their child anyway. Just ask Sheryle!

Sheryle Bowers didn’t take part in research for Victims and Victors [a book by the Elliott Institute, a pro-life research group --ed], but her testimony tells the same story. She was just turning 12, and her family was in turmoil. Sheryle’s mother, Mary, was doing her best to care for her five children after her alcoholic husband left them. Then a suitor entered her life. She was attracted to him and appreciated the attention he gave her children. But unknown to Mary, the 29-year-old man, whom she would eventually marry, began a sexual relationship with Sheryle.

“He told me we needed to be very careful not to tell anyone,” Sheryle recalls, “or we would get in big trouble.” Sheryle’s childish desire to protect her mother from further pain caused her to keep the terrible secret.

Undetected, the abuser continued the incest for years, even through his marriage and divorce from Sheryle’s mother. Desperately wanting to escape, Sheryle tried again to end it when she was 18. In return, he caused her to become pregnant, hoping to force her to marry and go away with him.

The pregnancy finally revealed the awful truth, and the abuser left. Sheryle’s family rallied around her. Her mother, in Sheryle’s words, “scooped me up.” Though dealing with shame, guilt and embarrassment, Sheryle’s Christian beliefs kept her from abortion, and she gave birth to Christopher, who is now 21.

“I cried for two days in the hospital,” she recalls. “It’s not your ideal way to have a baby. But does that mean, for our convenience, we take his life?”

Overcoming the abuse took years, but Sheryle attributes her healing to God, and she credits Christopher’s birth as the beginning. “Finally God fulfilled a promise He had given me: ‘The LORD has taken away your judgments, He has cast out your enemy. The King of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst; You shall see disaster no more’ (Zephaniah 3:15).

“My son was really a gift from God because he created a way of escape,” Sheryle says. “The natural thing is to stay in the dark, to cover [the incest] up. Abortion is another way [for abuse] to stay hidden.”

Thankfully, now all women in South Dakota can “choose” life, just like Sheryle did, with the gentle encouragement of the State. And if bans in other states like Mississippi fall into place, women everywhere will be able to “choose” life! With any luck, Jesus will be SO pleased by this turn of events, He will come right down and sweep up the righteous^* and take them to heaven.

Exciting times we live in. It’s enough to make you ask, what should we ban next? Poll to the right!

Is the lack of cages for large numbers of humans. Thanks heavens that’s being taken care of.

I wrote a puzzle out of boredom. I had the idea while sitting in floor meeting yesterday (which is good ground for the mind to wander in). It’s an MIT Mystery Hunt-style puzzle - the answer is a single word.

I love dragonflies. I do not look forward to gazing upon them with suspicion and dismay.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting research proposals in the area of Hybrid Insect MEMS….

DARPA seeks innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs, possibly enabled by intimately integrating microsystems within insects, during their early stages of metamorphoses. The healing processes from one metamorphic stage to the next stage are expected to yield more reliable bio-electromechanical interface to insects, as compared to adhesively bonded systems to adult insects. Once these platforms are integrated, various microsystem payloads can be mounted on the platforms with the goal of controlling insect locomotion, sense local environment, and scavenge power. Multidisciplinary teams of engineers, physicists, and biologists are expected to work together to develop new technologies utilizing insect biology, while developing foundations for the new field of insect cyborg engineering. The HI-MEMS may also serve as vehicles to conduct research to answer basic questions in biology.

The final demonstration goal of the HI-MEMS program is the delivery of an insect within five meters of a specific target located at hundred meters away, using electronic remote control, and/or global positioning system (GPS). Although flying insects are of great interest (e.g. moths and dragonflies), hopping and swimming insects could also meet final demonstration goals. In conjunction with delivery, the insect must remain stationary either indefinitely or until otherwise instructed. The insect-cyborg must also be able to transmit data from DOD relevant sensors, yielding information about the local environment. These sensors can include gas sensors, microphones, video, etc.

It is small comfort to fantasize that some prankster might already be developing cyborg barn swallows that eat these suckers for snack.

San Juan Chamula is a village in Chiapas, just outside of San Cristobal de las Casas. Its residents are famed for their fierce independence, which kept them out from under the thumb of Spanish rule for all of their history. Nowadays Chamula is a popular destination for tourists (such as myself) on day trips, to see authentic Mayan customs being practiced.^*

Chamulans (now numbering about 60,000) are ruled by an elite group of families who pass their authority down hereditarily. Their law is absolute, and Chamulans obey to the letter. It is these elites who decide the shape of Chamulan society. It changes when they change and stagnates when they stand firm. The penalty for disobedience is exile or death; those Chamulans who convert away from Catholicism, for example, are given twenty days to leave the valley, or they and their family are burned to death.

Chamula resisted converting to Catholicism for a long time. Never having been subject to Spain, they were never really beholden to missionaries in any way and had few motives to convert. In the end, though, a group of missionaries managed to convince the village leaders to become Catholics. They decided they would; they built a church, kicked out the priests, and told their shamans to dress in sacerdotal vestiments from now on. The Mayan gods were replaced with Catholic saints (whom the Chamulans continue to refer to as “gods”), with the principle deity being Saint Sebastian. (Chamulans have only recently started to accept Jesus Christ as a being of some importance, and he’s still pretty low on the totem pole.) These days the principle deities are Saint Sebastian, Saint Peter, and Saint John the Baptist in the lead.

This is about all that Chamula took from Catholicism; most of the rest of their religious praxis comes from traditional Mayan rituals. Or something.

Chamulan healing and prayer rituals use a few key ingredients. One is a sugarcane liquor called posh, used to induce intoxication which brings one closer in line with the world of spirits. Another is a dark brew sipped in several ceremonies (I’ve forgotten the name of it).

A few decades ago, Coca-Cola made its introduction to Chamula. It was superficially similar to the traditional dark brew that was used in sacred rituals, but it was sweeter and tastier. Many Chamulans began to substitute Coca-Cola for the traditional drink.

About eleven years ago, the leaders decided to replace the traditional drink completely with Coca-Cola. The latter now became the ‘holy drink’, to be used in all sacred rituals. Naturally the level of cola consumption in Chamula skyrocketed.

Not long afterwards, the Pepsico company became apprised of this situation. Not wanting to be left out of a plum arrangement, they came into town and greased the palms of the leadership with a generous amount of money. Soon it came to be known that Pepsi, too, was a sacred drink.

This situation persisted until about three years ago, when Coke and Pepsi both decided that they could do better by diversifying their inventory in Chamula. After all, Coca-Cola and Pepsico are nowadays properly considered titans of the “beverage” market, rather than mere “cola” giants. Why restrict a broad range of products from sale, merely because they happen to be the wrong color?

Soon enough the shamans announced that the primary benefit of the sacred drink came from the production of gas, rather than the dark color. Gas produced burps, which aided in the expulsion of bad spirits. Any carbonated beverage would thus serve as a sacred drink. So long as it was made by Coke or Pepsi, of course.

The result is a Chamula where soda beverages are consumed by the entire population on a daily basis. In the town church, when we visited, everyone was armed with a bottle of soda, and many of the residents around town could be seen drinking the stuff. The leading families, of course, are the only authorized distributors of soda products in the valley, ensuring that this tidy market succeeds in aggrandizing and confirming their power. In exchange, they only have to give up a modicum of authority and verify that all their decisions meet the approval of the Coke and Pepsi corporations. Thus they may maintain the rigid control over Chamula that allows them to preserve their ancient Mayan ways.

At times, I have thought it would be handy to run a search engine that trolls government web pages and — in real time, not with some 6-month delay — lets users see how a page has changed. In particular, it would automatically alert users when web content disappears.

(As someone shows in Jonathan’s comments, the page didn’t disappear from everywhere, just from all *.mil sites.)

The U.S. government is in a censorship frenzy*. Sometimes I think a very clever person could divine what they’re worried about from seeing what they censor. But the page Jonathan refers to is mystifying. Would the Pentagon really take down an entire interview with their Secretary in order to (ineffectively) hide one not-very-embarrassing sentence? It’s hard to believe and it’s also possible, given the current environment. When in doubt, leave it out — of the public record.

Google has put up Mars maps (to go along with their Earth and Moon maps). Pretty neat; they have an elevation view which goes from -9 to +21 km. This is 2.4 times the maximum elevation on Earth (Everest, at 8844 m). At some point when I acquired an interest in landscape simulations I learned that this is because of a phenomenon called “mass wasting”, which basically refers to the shear stress on a surface as a result of the force of gravity acting on it. Since the gravity is comparatively greater on Earth than on Mars, this means that the same surface will experience greater shear stress on Earth; or, conversely, we would expect a comparable shear force for steeper surfaces on Mars (assuming the material is roughly the same). This means weaker erosion on Mars, and thus higher peaks. The equatorial surface gravity is about 2.65 times stronger on Earth than on Mars, so there’s some rough agreement there. Although, as is obvious if you tool around on the map, there’s clearly much less volcanic activity on Mars than there is on Earth.