{"id":2653,"date":"2009-07-05T00:06:22","date_gmt":"2009-07-05T04:06:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/?p=2653"},"modified":"2009-07-05T00:07:55","modified_gmt":"2009-07-05T04:07:55","slug":"saturday-night-shotgun-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/05\/saturday-night-shotgun-post\/","title":{"rendered":"Saturday Night Shotgun Post"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>While I&#8217;m uploading some MP3s for a music post a little later tonight, let&#8217;s do the tab closing dance:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Did you see the story about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theregister.co.uk\/2009\/06\/15\/slumbering_arctic_alien\/\">the scientists who unfroze the blob of 120,000 year old life in the Arctic<\/a>? I can&#8217;t do my usual thing of making the news sound like a creepy SF or Lovecraftian story, since the actual article takes core of that&#8211;especially the bit about how the scientists think &#8220;their laboratory revenant may be related to indestructible super-aliens&#8221;. Hell, why not just call them shoggoths?<\/li>\n<li>I see where s<a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencedaily.com\/releases\/2009\/06\/090630082647.htm\">cience has invented an even blacker black than the last blackest black<\/a>. I am totally ready for this to become productized as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technovelgy.com\/ct\/content.asp?Bnum=1495\">fuligin<\/a>, so that I can start buying some T-shirts.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve never been even vaguely interested in cigarettes, but I do like <a href=\"http:\/\/allthingsger.blogspot.com\/2009\/07\/id-walk-mile-for-pal-wednesday.html\">these ads from the 60s<\/a>&#8211;they are kind of like the boiled down essence of advertising to men. I particularly like the last one, as it plays into my whole book thing.<\/li>\n<li>I kind of feel sorry for Paul Krugman&#8211;he keeps thinking it&#8217;s possible for the populace, and the pedagogues, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/07\/03\/opinion\/03krugman.html?_r=1&#038;partner=rss&#038;emc=rss\">to learn from history<\/a>. And, all Obama&#8217;s apparent skill aside, I suspect he&#8217;s doomed to disappointment.<\/li>\n<li>And in the absolutely most insane true story I saw this week category, the clear winner is the one about the unassuming German librarian who <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2009\/WORLD\/europe\/07\/02\/germany.aircrash.survivor\/index.html\">survived a plane crash<\/a>, a fall of over 3km (no chute!), and then a 10 day jungle hike with a broken collarbone. What are the odds of that fall being survived, and the compound that with the odds that the lucky survivor would be hard-core enough to walk out of the jungle with a broken collarbone. Damn. Of course if I were her, I would probably never take another chance on anything again&#8211;I&#8217;d assume my lifetime quota of luck was completely used up.<\/li>\n<li>I know it was a joke to Mark Thomas, but I kind of think there&#8217;s a serious argument to be made for the notion of an <a href=\"http:\/\/freethinker.co.uk\/2009\/07\/03\/let%E2%80%99s-have-an-age-of-consent-for-religion\/\">age of consent for religion<\/a>, at least as a kind of thought experiment. That&#8217;s some powerful memetic crack there, and there&#8217;s something fundamentally wrong about laying it onto someone who hasn&#8217;t finished their mental development enough to make responsible decisions about it. <\/li>\n<li>While I&#8217;m picking on religion, let me <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=zeCHiUe1et0\">pull out a little bit of Feynman<\/a>. I love his statement that he likes questions and being unsure, but I especially love his snap on creation myths as being &#8220;too provincial&#8221;&#8211;that&#8217;s a solid burn, and one that I intend to use later.<\/li>\n<li>I love stories about &#8220;unbreakable&#8221; ciphers being cracked, and I love stories about real-world historical mysteries, so a story about <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB124648494429082661.html\">a professor stumbling on a historical cipher and working it out<\/a> is pretty much right up my alley.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And that should do it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p class=\"excerpt\">While I&#8217;m uploading some MP3s for a music post a little later tonight, let&#8217;s do the tab closing dance: Did you see the story about the scientists who unfroze the blob of 120,000 year old life in the Arctic? I can&#8217;t do my usual thing of making the news sound like a creepy SF or Lovecraftian story, since the actual&hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/05\/saturday-night-shotgun-post\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[201,132,267,281,265,340,193,107,67,380,182],"class_list":["post-2653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linkapalooza","tag-blaak-is-the-new-black","tag-cartoons","tag-cosmology","tag-cryptography","tag-economics","tag-gene-wolfe","tag-lovecraft","tag-religion","tag-science","tag-strange-but-true","tag-vintage-advertising","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-GN","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2653"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2664,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2653\/revisions\/2664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}