I was in the military of course, so mistakes in military matters bother me more than they should. Like this sentence from Rick Yancey’s The Fifth Wave.

I sink into the chair, sitting on its edge, back straight, chin up. If it’s possible to be at attention while seated, I’m doing it.

It is possible and taught in the military. Admittedly, it’s not all that common, but every military recruit ever has done it and knows how to sit at attention.

Here’s how it looks.

Saying the universe is “made of math” as many of the quantitative bent are prone to do is as moronic as saying it is made of cheese or of apathy.

If you study and understand any of quantum mechanics to even a basic level, it seems more likely to me that the universe is made of bullshit and crazy with a dash of “aww, hell no” thrown in.

I do agree that the universe at some levels has a strange correspondence to useful mathematical abstractions, but that is just a consequence of being in a universe where life is possible because the rules are relatively fixed. (Yes, I went full anthro on you. Sue me.)

Those who are (like Casey Johnston) mourning the death of journalism with Gawker.com’s demise and the larger Gawker Media’s bankruptcy, remember that Gawker is the organization that published a video of a college girl possibly getting raped in a bathroom stall.

Not to mention all of the other horrible things they’ve done.

I too am wary of having billionaires suing sites out of existence. But if there is one fucking site and media organization that deserved to be nuked from orbit, it was that one.

Good riddance.

What’s a movie that you really love that was pretty widely abhorred?

One of mine is The Fourth Kind with Milla Jovovich.

The objections seem to be that it’s in a documentary-ish style and that it goes full meta right at the beginning. However, I loved that at the commencement there’s a bit of narration where Milla herself tells us that’s she’s portraying another character — but then it claims to be a documentary recording “true” events as well.

It’s a huge wink at the audience and it rips up the barrier between cinema, documentary and life as it’s lived, just as Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell does so in a different but extremely related way.

What’s miraculous that after this the movie still works so well even with its narrative suspended in this framework of de-contextualized artificiality.

The movie is also a tragedy. People these days do not like tragedies. And like all great tragedies, it’s clear at the beginning that it will be one, too.

Also, it was marketed as some alien abduction snoozefest and it’s so much more than that. That was also a strike against it as people who saw it weren’t expecting what they got.

There’s just so much cleverness in this film — more than I can write about. And it is also truly creepy, as few films manage to be.

If I had to state the message of the film, it’d be that things we think that happen to us are just the same as things that actually do happen to us. Post hoc, it’s like an algorithm that can’t be reversed. There’s just no way to travel back to distinguish the difference.

YouTube…why do you recommend this bullshit (boxed in red)? I never watch videos like this and I don’t give a crap about the hottest athletes at the Olympics. Shocker, those people who work hard on their bodies and don’t think two Big Macs and two McFlurries constitute a balanced meal tend to look good.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I don’t think there is anything wrong with noticing that anyone — including an athlete — has a nice body. The left’s push to relegate everyone to a monastic, approved-sex only existence is completely doomed*. But the women at the Olympics have so much more to offer the world than how they look in shorts. I mean, obviously. Come on.

Mostly, I just want to tell YouTube to never show me anything like that. Show me Katie Ledecky lounging at the end of the pool with enough time to read War and Peace waiting for the other competitors to finish. Show me Aly Raisman doing a double layout as casually as I fall down the stairs. Show me Simone Biles in her attempt to finally let Isaac Newton know what’s what.

But keep that misogynistic crap away.

*I’ll have more to say later about how the left is just interested in regulating sex and sexuality as the right, but just in different directions.

Though the mainstream Democrats criticized vociferously the George W. Bush-era republican proclivity for saying that Bush was someone they’d want to “have a beer with,” the Dems who support both Obama and Clinton have the same cult of personality I’ve noticed about both of them.

For instance, they constantly share photos of Obama (the one called “At least this cool kid”) in particular doing something “cool” or looking suave. Or less commonly but also fairly often it’s snaps of Clinton looking competent, or that otherwise aver her competence in some way.

I don’t want to have a beer with my president. I don’t want them to look cool, suave or even competent. I don’t give a crap how he or she looks.

What I want is that my president not be a granny-starvin’ neoliberal, brown-people-bombing warmongering World War III apocalypse starter.

Dems are a bit better than Republicans. A bit. But that’s just not saying much these days.

I know this makes me unbearably terrible and racist in the eyes of the left, but if hundreds of recent immigrants ganged up repeatedly to sexually assault scores of my fellow citizens, I’d be tossing people out of the country so fast that we’d have to build new roads and buy new trucks just to get them all over the border.

The problem with the left’s tolerance of intolerance is that it doesn’t scale. When 0.25% of your “guests” don’t hold to your values or obey societal norms, it’s ok. When it’s more than 1% or 2% or so, there’s going to be huge problems. When it’s about 15% or so, your society is over even if it doesn’t know it yet.

But yes, it’s racist, even though if a bunch of white people went around assaulting, robbing and raping I would say the same thing.

I like Susan Tedeschi’s version better, but I really enjoy this interpretation too. It’s more country and that feels truer to the song despite less vocal swagger.

Compare and contrast Tedeschi’s version. (And that flute player. Goddamn. I didn’t even know you could play the flute like that.)

Academics — who tend to move around all the time – have great difficulty understanding in their informal writing and in their official monographs why poor people don’t just up and move when economic conditions decline in an area.

If you’re already destitute and don’t have a job lined up already, traipsing to another faraway city where you have no social connections and nothing to fall back on is just a terrible idea. It makes no sense at all.

Also, I shouldn’t have to mention but I will the fact that most people actually want to live near their families and friends and not abandon them every two years when the neolib overlords decide to blow up the world again.

It can all be true — yes, all at the same time — that unrestricted immigration is harmful to some, beneficial to others, overall not the best path for a nation and will harm women while improving overall welfare by several measures.

And it can be true that those who oppose unrestrained immigration are both racists and largely right about the perils thereof, and that the left who defend open borders can also be racist (and usually are in their “defense” of immigrants’ rights to trample the rights of people already present).

Simpletons want to reduce everything to dichotomies, to some Manichean conception of the world.

If only it were so easy. If only.

Been reading too many books that break my brain, that I can barely understand. Or in some cases, cannot understand.

So today I will read this finally.

Aye, that’ll be a big change from Cognitive Evolutionary Neuroscience edited by Platek, Keenan and Shackelford and Supersymmetry in Quantum and Classical Mechanics by Bijan Kumar Bagchi.

Shit, that last book is a bear. I have an easier time by far understanding quantum math than anything for classical phenomena. It’s just easier — at least the basics. So much more constrained than classical phenomena. Just throw out all your intuitions about the macro world, and it’s pretty cake. This damn book is a mix of both, though, and I have to say I only understood about 50% of it. That was even with pulling a Tony Stark and trying to get up to speed a little better.

The classical stuff is just too hard for me, and I don’t care enough about math or have enough skill to go any deeper. Everyone has limitations, and that’s mine.

Well, gonna start on The Fifth Wave now.

This reminds me of being in the grocery store one time and asking for “oven-roasted garlic cheese” that was stocked in the deli case. That is exactly what it said on the sign: “oven-roasted garlic cheese.”

So I ordered some. The woman behind the counter snottily said to me in the most dismissive and immediately angry way possible, “Sir, there is no such thing as oven-roasted cheese.”

Arrogant dismissive confidence while being completely and hilariously wrong is one thing that sets me off and even though I try not to be a jackass to service workers she — for lack of a better term — triggered old instincts.

I said, “Look, I’m just reading the damn sign. Says ‘oven-roasted garlic cheese’ right there. Turn it around and read it yourself.”

I felt bad later about that, but not that bad, because she never admitted she was wrong nor apologized or otherwise made any indication she started down the path of asininity while I just closed the gate behind us.

The cheese, at least, was good.

You know you’ve found the right partner when she doesn’t even think to wonder why you’re reading the flight manual for the 747-800 or a book about nuclear reactor shielding. Or a practice guide for the GRE. Or a book about the genetics of lichens. Or a physician’s drug interaction manual.

I mean, why wouldn’t you read books about stuff like that? Right?

Blackhat is not a very good movie.

But one thing notable about it is that it showed what actual bullet damage looks like during a battle. Bullets don’t spark off things with cute little flashes of light. They pass right on through. An AK-47 round can go all the way through a shipping container (as occurs in the movie). And it leaves big holes as it does so. This is very rare to show in a film.

When I was a kid we — as many North Florida rednecks do — had an abandoned car in the yard. We’d shoot at it sometimes, so I got to see pretty early exactly what a gun does to a vehicle. Only thing that really stopped the bullets was the engine block.

Small bits of sheet metal are like air to a bullet. Does nothing, really.

In response to this homework assignment, I don’t have time at the moment to go seek out new things, but cinema is an area I know pretty well so I can offer something without having to do a lot of research. I will choose recent works because older works have already been discussed to death or forgotten altogether.

Lowbrow trash: Landmine Goes Click.

Highbrow Trash: Upstream Color.

Classic: Moonrise Kingdom.

I didn’t pick Ex Machina as a classic even though I think it’s a better film than Moonrise Kingdom. If one defintion of a classic is “stands the test of time” then despite MK being made in 2012, it is indeed timeless. I don’t think that is true of Ex Machina. After we actually get AIs walking around and cultural norms change again it’ll seem really dated and confusing I suspect.

And don’t watch Landmine Goes Click under any conditions. What a piece of gutter crud.