More on orcs
Check out this wonderful article on orcs. Tolkien must have been having the time of his life coming up with those names–Shadrat, Ugluk, and Radbug…
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The Afghan Refugee
One of the most amazing pictures I’ve ever sceen. It’s of a 12 year-old girl who fled Afghanistan to Pakistan in 1983 during their war with the Soviets. Here’s the article that goes with it. Of course, this is yesterday’s news. But some things are worth revisiting.
Uncanny cool
I just had the most uncanny, coolest experience. It’s 6 PM. I’m out on a walk along a road that runs by a swampy river called Birch Creek to a fork in the road. The sky is this glorious blue with brilliant white and gray clouds. I stop and pick some ripe black currents off a little spindly bush growing down off the shoulder in the rocks and continue on.
I take the left fork, south along the hill and enjoy the sight of the mown fields, a scattering of green ton bales standing on the short meadow grass, and the storm clouds gathering over the hills to the west.
A few rabbits spook and run across the road. I reach the mile mark and turn back. I’d already done 30 minutes worth of shred before the walk and needed to get back to practice basketball with my oldest. The whole time I’m listening to Lois McMaster Bujold’s HALLOWED HUNT read by Marguerite Gavin. It’s warm, sunny, lovely. The story is good.
I come back by the fork and hear this sound over the audio. It’s like a single prop airplane in the distance. I continue on another hundred yards. That distant, thin drone grows, but I can’t figure out what it is, so I put the audio book on hold and take off the ear phones.
The air is perfectly still. That muggy stillness that precedes a storm. But all around me is this sound. This thin drone, filling up road. It’s coming from all sides.
Insects?
I look down off the side of the road at the sloughs and cattails and willows and see nothing. I look back up. Look around. And then I notice a small black body speed past. And another. And another.
Flies? It can’t be flies. When have you ever seen a fly pursue a straight line?
Three more. Half a dozen. Another, another, and they’re everywhere. But they’re not flying thickly. Not mobbing. Not massed in some cartoon clump. They’re all spread out. I strain to see them in this odd light.
Bees. They’re dark. Almost black in their flight, but it has to be bees!
And they’re all around, thirty feet to either side of me. Zooming past. There, there, and there. It’s like dozens and dozens of refugees in flight with single purpose. There’s no looping around. No dalliance. No crazy panic. They’re serious, focused. All of them going the same way. Straight ahead on some urgent goal.
There’s a big fat blue dragonfly in the willows that keeps zipping after individual bees as they fly past, trying to get a meal, but each time, just at the moment when it would attack, it spooks and darts back for cover. Dragonflies are voracious buggers. But these aren’t single bees. It must be thinking the other bees are coming for it. Still it can’t resist and darts out again.
And all around is the humming. It grows. The bees directly in front of me see me as they approach and make course corrections. I keep walking. A half a mile and the thin droning still surrounds me. The bees keep coming, but they’re thinning.
Thunder cracks behind me. The wind begins to pick up. The sky behind me is darkening.
The sound of the drone grows thinner, is almost gone. But there are bees still out there, following. I can hear them. See them. Individuals trailing the others, flying past me toward the storm that’s still about a mile off. And I think they’re too far behind.
Maybe their hive was wrecked. Maybe it’s just time to swarm and there’s a queen up front leading them. And somehow her scent is on the wind. Somehow they know to follow.
I don’t know if they’ll find a new place. They’re going to have to cross a mile of mown meadow before they get to anything that might serve as any type of shelter. I don’t know if the wind will ground them, or the main group will find safety but the stragglers will be blown to their deaths. All I know is that I’m sitting here in awe, electric with life.
You’ve heard of the nocebo effect, right?
We all know about the placebo effect. Well, here’s its ugly brother.
nocebo (no-SEE-bo) noun: A substance producing harmful effects in someone because it is believed to be harmful, but which in reality is harmless. [From Latin nocebo (I will harm), from nocere (to harm). Modeled after placebo (I will please).]
Both groups who received nocebos showed elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their blood.” James Morgan; Is Your Pain a Trick of the Mind? The Herald (Glasgow, UK); Jan 12, 2007.
An article with many interesting examples of nocebo effect.
From words at wordsmith.org
Emotion…
Zing!
P.S. This is one thing I love about English–it’s alive and growing, stealing from any language it can.
NPR’s Intelligence Squared
Sometimes I love NPR, and sometimes those folks drive me nuts. But with Intelligence Squared they’ve come up with wonderful programming. I accidentally tuned in one night and found I couldn’t turn the radio off.What they do is bring together articulate experts, half who argue for a motion such as “Guns reduce crime?” or “Is the government responsible for health care?” and half who argue against it. The nice thing is that they make enough TIME to allow full statements. These aren’t roundtables of knucklehead pundits spouting sound bites. These are long discussions.
Of course, so much depends on the presentation skills of the various experts. But being able to listen to both sides of an issue, at the very least, gives much to think about.
In this debate they argue for and against the motion “The US is winning the war in Iraq”.
They convinced me (I won’t say which side, however). Take some time and listen to this while you do monkey work for the day job.
Iron Man, Military Insect Spies
Iron Man was wonderful, every bit of what the trailers promised–adventure, humor, and a huge dose of gosh-wow. Of course, the idea of military exoskeletons are not new. It’s been in science fiction for a long time. More recently, Dan Brown used the idea in his thriller Act of War. In fact, if you think about it, it becomes clear that airplanes, ships, and tanks are all exoskeletons. So this is all old hat. But when did we ever need a brand-spanking new idea to have a wonderful and new story? What’s important is what the do with the idea–the characters, problem, plot, and setting. And Iron Man does a wonderful job of imagining new twists on all these parts of story.
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In other news, it appears the future is not so far away. The military is going to be using robot bugs for recon.
British defence giant BAE Systems is creating a series of tiny electronic spiders, insects and snakes that could become the eyes and ears of soldiers on the battlefield, helping to save thousands of lives.
Prototypes could be on the front line by the end of the year, scuttling into potential danger areas such as booby-trapped buildings or enemy hideouts to relay images back to troops safely positioned nearby.
Soldiers will carry the robots into combat and use a small tracked vehicle to transport them closer to their targets.
Then they would swarm into the building and relay images back to the soldiers’ hand-held or wrist-mounted computers, warning them of any threats inside.
I’m all for saving lives and projecting power while we’re doing it. And robo spies are just cool. Except, of course, when they’re used against you…
Humm, zing!
