“Robotic”:

Happy birthday to my favorite Lemon! Bonus video:

As Dave Barry says, “I am not making this up.”

There’s this story on Snopes about finding money hidden inside a Gideon Bible. It’s new to me. I’d never heard about it, never even thought to go looking to see if it was true, despite the inordinate number of hotel rooms I’ve been in over the past few years. The story is weirdly appealing, and I can see the way the legend got started, and the tenacity with which it lives on despite the total absence of objective proof. A legend’s not a legend that doesn’t die, right?

Last week, I was in Kihei having an argument with myself about the precise wording of John 11:25-26. (Don’t ask.) And I thought, “Hey, I have a Bible right here. I can use one of these old-fashioned books to do my research; no need to fire up Google!” The Gideon was sitting in its desk drawer as if it had waited years for this moment: someone, a guest, was reaching in for an Answer. But something was wrong — it was lying strangely, as though a bookmark had been left inside. I let the Bible open on its own. There was a bookmark: a $1 bill.

This was clearly something that required Google, so off to the search engine we went, whereupon I discovered the aforementioned Snopes page and its dismissal of this urban legend as “indeterminate.” Fair enough, yet here I was staring a real-life counterexample. I could have bought the argument that the bill had been left in the Bible for safekeeping — if it had been a $20. But a buck? Who’s going to try to hide that? Then I looked more carefully at where the Bible had opened. It was the Gospel of John. I’ll bet you can guess which part.

This was obviously well into urban legend territory. Nobody was going to leave a $1 in a Bible of safekeeping; this was deliberate. I tried to imagine the mindset of a person who would mark those particular pages with a dollar bill, in the hopes that someone would find the bill, take the time to read the entirety of both pages and then recognize the significance of a dozen words in one verse of one book. (Note to that person if you’re reading: a highlighter might have helped here. Just saying.) Or maybe it was left as a talisman for someone else to find, a kind of “A Follower of Christ Slept Here” marker. I liked the idea of someone trying to reach out through time to communicate this message to another person, in such a specific way, while using a clumsy and blunt instrument like this. (Note to that person: maybe stick the bill out of the Bible too? So it’s obvious? With a highlighter?) Then I wondered whether it might just be someone familiar with the legend who was fucking with me and the future. Then I gave up thinking about it, because I couldn’t decide which scenario I liked more. Still can’t, actually.

But it got me thinking: John 3:16 is probably the most famous verse in the entirety of the Bible. It’s the Gospel In A Nutshell. It is the distillation of the essence of Christianity — put a gun to your head and tell you to explain that whole religion in 10 seconds or less, it’s probably the single best choice to save your life. I get this. (I also get it is a cultural cliche, but never mind that. I’m talking theology here.)

As has become more common these days, Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai had been to my hotel on Maui, and left their own contribution to the hotel room night stand religious conversation: The Teaching of Buddha. I’m highly familiar with this book, though I won’t lie — it’s hard to read and it is not what I’d choose if someone asked me to provide a non-denominational introduction to Buddhist thought. Staring at it, lying in the drawer, it occurred to me: what is the Buddhist equivalent of John 3:16? Gun to my head, how do I explain the essence of Buddhist thought in 10 seconds or less?

“God loves you; Jesus saves.” That’s the short message of Christianity. What would work as the Buddhist version of this? The core message of Buddhism, independent of school or sect, is that the world is full of causes and conditions and that our failure to understand and see those causes and conditions for what they are leads us to desire things, and those desires cause suffering; to alleviate that suffering, you need to — oh, I don’t need to spell it out. You’re smart. You know what it means. It’s a pretty simple message — see the world for what it is, stop pretending it’s something it isn’t, and you’ll feel better — but you can’t print that on the bottom of a take-out cup. It’s too nuanced, too dependent on explanation. So what else is out there?

(Sadly, the single best and most succinct explanation I’ve come up with isn’t from “The Teaching of Buddha” and it isn’t from any recognized authority on Buddhism. It’s also incredibly flippant: “Life sucks. Get a helmet.” But Leary wasn’t far off the mark, and despite the obnoxiousness it actually kind of works.)

Eventually, I settled on the first line of Chapter 1 on causation: “The world is full of suffering.” I figured that if the unknown Christian traveler had counted on me reading all the way through two pages of John to find what he or she really meant, I could get someone else to read about the Fourfold Noble Truth. It wasn’t an evangelical act or anything like that — it was more of a thought experiment, a way of paying the notion of religious messaging forward; someone left me a Christian message, so I’ll try leaving someone a Buddhist one.

Maybe the next time I check in to a Marriott I’ll find someone has left me a message in the Book of Mormon. Who knows?

Rose Polenzani and Rose Cousins, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”:

I promise this will be the only piece of Christmas Cheer you’ll get from Lost in Transliteration this year.

“My liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman.” Dear God, I wish I’d been at this talk — I think I would have cheered myself hoarse.

You really need to watch this.

National Opt-Out Day has come and gone. I am saddened I was not in a position to participate in the festivities. The consensus seems to be forming that, as a mechanism for civil disobedience, the protest didn’t work — delays were minimal everywhere, and the TSA triumphantly announced that passengers were happy with the scans and searches (this one is especially precious).

I’m not tremendously surprised: if you knew your actions were going to be carefully scrutinized over the course of one particular day, don’t you think you’d be on good behavior, too? I’m more interested to see what happens next week — Opt-Out Week, or something like that. Granted, this was the single best opportunity to reach folks who don’t fly much… and it didn’t seem to go anywhere. Having said that: Air traffic was apparently very light; virtually every article written about the lack of a fuss on NOOD notes that lines moved quickly and that there were very few delays. You have to wonder whether it was NOOD, the threat of the scans, or the economy that drove most of that. (Also, I note the flying weather was reasonably good through most of the United States yesterday, which probably helped a lot.)

The uprising against the TSA is refreshing: this is the first time in a very long time (you could say since before 9/11, but I think it goes back even further than that) where a segment of the American Public has decided, en masse, that they’ve had enough intrusion into the personal space in the name of safety, security — or law and order, come to that. As with everything else these days, however, there is inevitably push-back against the push-back; the hacks are writing columns that suggest it’s everyone’s patriotic duty to get into the box and be irradiated, and even ordinarily good pundit-type folks (Kevin Drum comes readily to mind here) are arguing that the whole thing is a manufactured controversy that’s designed to hurt Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.

I can’t speak for absolutely everyone behind NOOD or dontscan.us, but at least in the places where I hang out (like, say, FlyerTalk), we’ve been complaining about this kind of thing basically forever. A lot of us have been talking about the absurdity of airport security — well, pretty much since 9/11. Bruce Schneier has pointed out, repeatedly, that the major change to prevent future 9/11-style attacks was more or less implemented by 09:57 EDT 11 September 2001. Everything else became theater to make people feel safer. Patrick Smith has similarly been making the argument that the true long-term threat to commercial aviation is, and always has been, explosives. To that end, the Nude-o-Scope is at least sort of understandable: Bozo J. Terrorist decides to smuggle explosives aboard an airplane by hiding them under his clothes, so perhaps we should see what we can do to find that stuff. But in that case, why not close the other holes, too? Why not make sure that everyone going air-side, and having unescorted access to aircraft, be screened to make sure they don’t smuggle something aboard? And what’s the evidence that the Nude-o-Scope actually works, anyway? We have no independent way to know whether the trade off — radiation exposure and strip searches — is worth it. We’re asked to take the TSA at its word: the scanners are safe, the images aren’t saved, you can’t see anything interesting.

Hopefully, I’ll be forgiven if I don’t fully buy into those assurances.

Glenn Greenwald has written a magnificent piece about the pushback to the pushback, using a smear job on John Tyner (Mr. “Touch My Junk And I’ll Have You Arrested”) as the framing device, and managed to hammer home a number of important points. Among them: “[T]herein lies the most odious premise in this smear piece: anyone who doesn’t quietly, meekly and immediately submit to Government orders and invasions — or anyone who stands up to government power and challenges it — is inherently suspect.”

How did this happen? I blame TV. Hold on, I can support this. How many police procedurals — think “Law and Order” — have you seen where the cops do something they’re clearly constitutionally constrained from doing, only to have the fruits of their labor tossed out of court on a “technicality”? The heroes of the show, thwarted! “And we would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for that pesky Constitution!” is the message we get. This is propaganda of the highest order; it induces this incredibly naive sense that only the true criminals need to rely on these loopholes to get away with their heinous acts. The applicability of constitutional protections to ordinary, law-abiding folks is lost under these circumstances. It never ceases to amaze me how many people are totally OK with this stuff, how many times I hear “if you have nothing to hide…” as the preamble to a blithe dismissal of one’s rights.

I don’t really care how people came to this conclusion. I don’t care whether they’re being Astroturfed into existence, or whether they’ve had their privilege shaken (by dint of being treated the way visible minorities are all over the place), or whether they just find strangers touching them icky. All are perfectly valid realizations. I care, a bit, about whether protesters want more profiling (it doesn’t work the way they think it does, but that’s an argument for another day). Mostly I’m just glad to see people waking up to the realization that the government doesn’t necessarily know what it’s doing, that it doesn’t always know best, and that it is proper, and even responsible, to question its pronouncements. One might, unreasonably I admit, hope that the new enlightenment spills over into other areas (e.g., Drug War). A guy can dream.

Now, I’m going to set that backpack on fire. What do you wanna take out of it? Photos? Photos are for people who can’t remember.
Drink some ginkgo and let the photos burn. In fact let it all burn… and imagine waking up tomorrow with nothing.

It’s kinda exhilarating, isn’t it?
–Ryan Bingham, Up In The Air

Sometime in the last 96 hours, the database that holds this site together disappeared. It was as though someone had gone through and said “DROP TABLE” on everything, then erased all evidence that the database itself had ever existed. Damn strange. My first thought is “crims!” but upon reflection the odds of anyone taking an interest in vandalizing this poxy Web site are basically non-existent. (I changed all my passwords just in case.)

There’s this weird sense of exhilaration that sweeps over you when you discover your data is gone. There’s the initial sadness — all the hard work you put into it, the strange impulses that led you to hang on to various bits of cruft. If it’s stuff you created, it can be heartbreaking: all the writing, all the photos, all that creative energy gone in a random stream of bits, never to return. The loss of a blog isn’t exactly that gut-wrenching (at least, not for me); it is, however, irritating. But once the initial shock wears off you realize that maybe it isn’t the end of the world after all — maybe something good can come of it! In my case I spent a bit of time thinking about what I wanted a re-invented blog to look like, and even asked myself whether I wanted to resurrect Under a Blackened Sky. (Then I realized that Under a Blackened Sky was a product of a very specific time and place, one that probably doesn’t exist anymore, and written in a voice I don’t think I have anymore.)

I don’t know that I came to any profound conclusions about what Lost in Transliteration is, or what it should look like, or who I’m writing it for, or why I even bother. But I do know that I’m happy with what I’ve done so far, that I’m pleased I managed to recover some of the posts from the past (hooray for backups!), and that things will continue as they have been for the foreseeable future.

Observe the Boeing 787-8 as it undergoes velocity minimum unstick, wet runway, and crosswind landing testing:

I know I’m a big geek for saying so, but that is one sexy looking airplane.

My old blog — the one I used to keep when I could write coherently for more than 40 seconds at a go, and about things that aren’t airplanes — once got a recommendation from someone using that line. So, in a similar spirit, allow me to heartily recommend that you should be reading Tiger Beatdown on a regular basis. I don’t remember what it was that first brought me to Tiger Beatdown, but I’ve stayed for one reason, and one reason alone: It is a staggeringly good blog, maybe one of the best examples of the genre. Sady Doyle, the blogger in chief, is a writer of astonishing power and clarity (I find myself wishing I could write a tenth as well), and if her cohorts seem less inspiring, it’s only because Ms. Doyle sets the bar so spectacularly high. Why read Tiger Beatdown? Because it will make you laugh. Because it will make you angry. Because it will make you sad. Because it will make you smarter. Mostly, though, you should be reading Tiger Beatdown because it will make you a better person. Approach it with an open mind, check your privilege at the door, and think critically — and you’ll become a better human being.

Introduced, for the court’s consideration, as evidence:

• I Went To Your Concert And There Was Nothing Going On: “People are always shocked when they hear this, if they know me, because they have a very specific sense of “women who play in bands” and it is most emphatically not me. In order to be a woman who plays in a band you have to be, first and foremost, hot. Preferably hot in that slightly NOT ONE HUNDRED PERCENT CONVENTIONALLY ATTRACTIVE way, so that dudes can believe that they are the only guy in the world who really, truly understands how hot you are, and can correspondingly believe that by bestowing upon you their belief in your paramount hotness, they are giving you a sweet gift which will make you so ecstatically happy, and can therefore believe that, because all you want in the world is for dudes to think you are hot, you will sleep with them.”
• Mommy’s All Right, Daddy’s All Right: “I finally think I may have pinned down what bothers me about “ironic” racism and sexism and what have you. Here is what bothers me about “ironic” racism and sexism and what have you: it’s just. So. Fucking. Bougie. Yes, that’s right! My crankiness about the young people has turned out to be, in fact, merely another example of my crankiness about the moral codes of the white middle class! Which makes sense, given that the hipster thing is, in and of itself, a pretty white, middle-class phenomenon. This was the entire point of Stuff White People Like, right? This is not a new point that I am making! But, to explain how it ties into hip racism and sexism, I invite you to go on a journey with me. A journey many of you may have taken before. A journey to your white, middle-class parents’ house for Thanksgiving.”
• I HATE I Love The Way You Lie: “A music video came out this week, one that deals with intimate partner violence. It begins with a close up of Rihanna’s face, with her fucking fierce hair and her 500$ dollar eye shadow. It cuts to Megan Fox sleeping with some skeezy dude on a dirty bed, which is EXACTLY what I’d be doing if I were Megan Fox. Then back to Rihanna. She’s singing in that gorgeous voice of hers, and for a moment I think “Maybe this won’t be so bad.” A few seconds later, the recording fails and “I Love The Way You Lie” turns into a rap song. By Eminem. Who is literally the last fucking person I want to hear singing about intimate partner violence.” I came very close to clapping when I read this particular post. The awesome is so thick you’d need a chainsaw it cut through it.

You might, from these posts, be drawing the conclusion that Tiger Beatdown is a blog with a bit of, how shall we say, a moral and philosophical position. You’d be correct. It is an aggressively feminist blog. And a very very smart one at that. I have, more than once, read a post there and thought, “Uh, no,” only to find myself turning it over in my head later the same day, and eventually coming around to, “Well, maybe” and then eventually, “Hell yes.” (This actually happens with most feminist blogs I read periodically, and the ideas eventually seem so reasonable I get angry when other people don’t see the reasonableness inherent in the argument.) If you’re at all concerned about power structures in society, about the way we internalize these dynamics and how they are recapitulated over and over again, and about how the marginalized in society continue to be marginalized — this is a great place to spend time. It makes you think, and that’s a wonderful, precious thing.

I’d normally say there’s just a leeeeetle too much self-congratulating and idol worship going on in the comments section, along with a smattering of epistemic closure, but (a) it’s not my space so what the hell do I care and (b) the comments themselves are often just as informative as the original post. And besides, (c) most of the posts are, in fact, that awesome — so it’s hard to get annoyed when people keep explaining about how they want to marry the particular post when you, in fact, wanted to stand up and cheer too.

Goddamn it’s a good blog. Go read it right now.

Why haven’t refractory problems been bred out of populations? What is the prevalence of refractory errors in other animal species? How would you measure this?