Sassing judges: never a good idea

One reason why I love living in Montana: reading this sort of headline in the local paper.

Man accused of stealing Polson-area foreclosed house sasses judge.

Details and video of sassing at the link.

The way he stole foreclosed houses is pretty imaginative.   He'd find a foreclosed house that was on the market, take down the "For Sale" signs, break in change the locks, and file a bunch of weird paperwork.  For example:

"The designation trustee and steward as used herein," it reads, "shall include said resurrected and non-resurrected sons of man, and their heirs as required by context.

"Witnesseth that the trustee, for a valuable consideration paid by the trustee to the creator, Yahweh, the receipt of which is hereby acknowledged, has and by these presents does grant and convey stewardship unto brent-arthur: in fee-farm, all that certain lot of land situated on Lake, the county, Montana, the land, commonwealth yiisra'el, and more particularly described as follows:"

What follows is a lengthy description that begins with the "third planet from the sun" and ends with plat tract book information.

The document appears to be notarized, but in her charging affidavit, deputy county attorney Jessica Cole-Hodgkinson notes "it does not list the notary's name, expiration of their notary power, or their location." Instead, under an illegible signature, it reads, "My commission expires: upon my final breath."

"I couldn't believe the Clerk and Recorder would take something like this, but what I learned was they can't stop anybody from recording anything," [Ed] McCurdy says.

Ed McCurdy is the Realtor of the foreclosed property in the above example. Mr. Wilson was able to get at least one home equity loan on one of the properties he and Yahweh "own."  I thought lenders were being more careful these days.

Great picture of him in court.  There's something familiar about about this guy...

I couldn't help it.

Most Heartrending Consumer Medication Guide Ever

I saw an ad for Sabril (vigabatrin) in the current issue of Neurology Now, unlike any ad I've seen for a prescription drug in a consumer-oriented magazine. The ad was nothing more than a headline reading "Help for hard-to-treat seizures," the Sabril logo
and 2.75 pages of patient /consumer information. That's it.  No smiling people, no images implying one's life getting back together, no toddler with the helmet on the ground instead of on her head. Just easy-to-read text on epilepsy-awareness purple. If you fill out and send in the postage-paid card attached by the ad, Lundbeck will mail you a package of education materials that may have warm & fuzzy pictures.

Like most ads for medications these days the bulk of the ad buy is comprised of some or all of the medication guide / patient information leaflet.  Sabril's medication guide is also unlike any I've ever seen due to two words used repeatedly throughout the document: your baby.

Whenever the phrase "your baby" is used in consumer information it's always in the context of warning you that a drug could harm your baby if you take it while pregnant and/or breastfeeding.  Infants and 0-year-old children get all sorts of medications and have their own doctors, but in the world of consumer medication information babies rarely do.  Babies get vaccinations, caffeine citrate oral solution is given to premature babies, but little else.

In the second paragraph it states that Sabril is used to treat babies and you and your doctor or your baby's doctor have to decide if the infantile spasms (West Syndrome) is so bad you'll risk vision loss (which is not total blindness, but blurry tunnel vision). 

And the which sucks less for your baby equation is repeated over and over.


There are treatment options that probably suck less. There's prednisone, prescription-strength & pharmaceutical-grade vitamin B-6, ACTH (at the low, low price of $23,000, yes, 23 THOUSAND DOLLARS a vial), Topamax (topiramate), Lamictal (lamotrigine), Zonegran (zonisamide), Depakote (divalproex sodium), Keppra (levetiracetam) and Klonopin (clonazepam).  If the kid's been weaned the ketogenic diet is also an option.

If you look at these treatment guidelines and the American Academy of Neurology's official ones, the only treatments that "probably" work are ACTH (dropped by most insurance companies due to cost), Sabril, and the ketogenic diet, which can take anywhere from two to five months to start working.  Everything else is classified as "maybe it will work." B-6 is probably listed as first-line treatments due to a lower side effect profile.  I don't know why prednisone is, as it has a possible side effect of death.

Left untreated or poorly treated, infantile spasms can result in death.  Which sucks less?


Sabril was approved for use in the US in August 2009, but available to desperate parents since 1988 after the FDA updated its personal use guidelines. Lundbeck doesn't make it any easier to obtain Sabril now that it is approved in the US.  Lundbeck's SHARE program that doctors, pharmacies and patients must pass in order to prove they are qualified to respectively prescribe, dispense, and take (or give to their babies) is just as, if not more complicated than the Clozaril registry upon which it was probably based.  At least there is just one Sabril registry.  Every company that manufactures generic clozapine has its own registry.

Ironic Gun Safety Lesson or Subversive Recruiting Technique?

Superintendent accidentally discharges muzzleloader in class

Dwain Haggard’s high school history lesson on Friday backfired.

Haggard, who used to be a Civil War reenactor, was showing the five students in Reed Point High’s American history class his replica antique black powder muzzleloader when the gun fired and lodged a ball in the front wall of the classroom.

“I can’t explain how it was loaded,” Haggard said.

Haggard has been district superintendent since 2007, and each year he’s visited the high school’s American history class to show off his Civil War-era equipment. When he shows the muzzleloader, he finishes the demonstration by firing a cap, which makes a small “pop” when he pulls the trigger, he said.

But this time, “when I dropped the hammer on it, to all of our surprise, it went off,” he said.

Jake Bare, a junior at Reed Point High, was in the class when the gun fired. He said it caught everybody off guard.

When Haggard pulled the trigger, there was a loud bang,and the room filled with smoke, Bare said.

“Holy criminy, you just shot the map,” he said.

Indeed, the ball shot through the “o” in the word “North” at the top of the map and lodged in the wall, Haggard said.

[...]

He described the incident as “bitter irony.” As superintendent, Haggard has worked with the school to increase safety at the school, updating its drills and the training staff receives.

Just one of those things that makes for a funny news story, right?

The thing is, the Freemen are making a comeback here in Montana.  Talk about being on the bleeding edge of '90s nostalgia; and perfectly timed with the growing torches and pitchforks anger and outrage the teabaggers are directing at the federal government and banksters. They haven't forgotten their roots.  In addition to starting petitions to recall elected officials...

Paul Stramer now heads a small group called Lincoln County Watch, where leaders of the unsuccessful petition drive attend meetings.

The group gathers in Eureka to talk about the "banksters" at the Federal Reserve, the judges "bought and paid for," the conspiracy that took America off the gold standard, and the need to "prepare for the worst."

Stramer has set his van up as a high-tech mobile communication base, he said, and is collecting silver against the collapse of the dollar.

"There may come a time," Stramer said at a recent Eureka meeting, one of many posted by the group on YouTube, "when the precious metal of choice is lead, because at least you can make some bullets out of it and shoot something to eat, and defend your family."

Participants at Lincoln County Watch meetings have told of Black Hawk helicopters landing in the rural area, and mysterious SUV's with dark windows and no plates, men in black, and C-130 planes flying low over the remote border town, the YouTube videos show.

Stramer, in turn, recommends that citizens carry radios and cameras to track covert government activity - creating a "local patriot network."

One take-no-prisoners issue the Freeman and Tea Party have is 2nd Amendment absolutism.  If the 2nd Amendment doesn't afford enough protection, Montana has added the 10th.  The Montana Firearms Freedom Act states that any gun and any ammunition manufactured and sold in Montana is exempt from federal regulation under the Interstate Commerce Clause of the US Constitution.  It doesn't state which state agency, if any, would be responsible for regulating made-in-Montana guns.

You can buy a left-handed 6mm Varminter now.  But what if you can't afford it now?  And by the time you can the ATF has a problem with it?  Who is going to protect the citizens of Montana from ATF interference in our God-given right to own hand-made, small-caliber, single-shot rifles?  Or muskets?

County sheriffs.  "Constitutional" county sheriffs have always been on the front lines of protecting our civil rights, albeit hypothetically:

While many of [former Utah sheriff Richard] Mack's backers are gun owners who believe the country is taking away their Second Amendment rights, Mack said true "constitutional" sheriffs will protect the rights and freedoms of all Americans on any front.

"What would a constitutional sheriff have done in 1959?" Mack asked the crowd.

When the call came in to the Montgomery County, Ala., sheriff's office that a black woman was refusing to move to the back of the bus - as required by law - the sheriff would have arrived on the scene and talked to Rosa Parks.

"Ma'am, what's the problem," a constitutional sheriff would have asked her, Mack said. Told she had taken an empty seat and just wanted to be left alone, the constitutional sheriff would have sat down next to her, ridden with her to her stop - and, once off, for good measure taken her into a whites-only restaurant so she could buy sandwiches for her and her husband.

He'd have then escorted her home, Mack said - asked if her husband was armed and could defend his family if anyone upset by what had happened came around and threatened them - and ordered extra patrols of the house.

"Remember, segregation wasn't a tradition, it was the law of the land," Mack said. "Rosa Parks taught us what you do with stupid laws."

Which brings us back to superintendent Haggard and his one-man Civil War reenactment.  He shoots at the North, literally, as an act of rebellion against the Federal Government.  He reminds the students how far the government will go to enforce its dominion over the states and citizenry.  True patriots must be willing to stand up and defend themselves.  With muskets and varminters.

This bit of pseudo-paranoia is brought to you by:

 Batshit Crazy shirts.

Alternative History Cartography: Japanese Division

I don't expect much in the way of accuracy from a globe that's a paper balloon (kami fuusen).  For what it is the geographic features and political boundaries are pretty good; far more accurate than the wildly distorted boundaries of the Ohio Arts globes I'm so found of.  The errors that are here, accidental or intentional, are still amusing.

As the globe is from Japan I'm hardly surprised the Kuril Islands are depicted as Japanese territory, so that doesn't count.

The globe was designed in, or based on maps from early 1990.  This is easily apparent as Germany and Yemen are divided, the Baltic states are independent, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia haven't broken up, and Eritrea is still part of Ethiopia. 

While the most sloppily rendered section, the European nation states are relatively accurate for that time; allowing for Belgium and Luxembourg being too small to bother with displaying, and Switzerland and Italy being too similar in color to show up in this picture.  Someone had it in for France.  So far so good, right?

Now we get into the parallel universe.  In addition to losing the Baltic states, the USSR has split into Soviet Russia (approximate translation) and Kazakhstan (Kazafusutan), which is comprised of all of the Soviet Stans.  It's not clear from this picture that Afghanistan is an independent state as it's the same color as the super-sized Kazakhstan.

In spite of the pro-Stan stance the cartographer had, Pakistan got the short end of the stick when it comes to Kashmir.  India has full control of it.  But what the cartographer gave with one hand, the cartographer has taken away with the other.  It looks like the separatists in Northeast India got what they wanted.  Almost.  Instead of being an independent nation they're part of the unlikeliest country on the planet to have any territorial ambitions: Bhutan!  Some of the states joined with Bhutan, Burma grabbed the rest and half of Bangladesh as well.

In the early 1960s the Malay states, Sarawak, Sabah, Singapore and Brunei were trying to come to terms with their numerous conflicting, ethnic, religious and political forces and enclaves as they struggled for independence.  Eventually the first three formed what is now Malaysia, Singapore became a city-state, and Brunei decided to remain a British Protectorate until 1984.  At the time there were all sorts of possible outcomes, and an independent North Borneo Federation was one of them, albeit an unlikely one.  Especially unlikely was naming the federation Brunei and moving Bandar a few hundred miles west.

At first I thought they considered Microsoft's headquarters as the co-capital of the United States.  Nope.  That's Toronto.  Why Toronto is in Washington state and when it replaced Ottawa as the capital of Canada are the greatest mysteries of this globe.







I don't know who makes this globe, but you can get one of your own from J-List.

New Shirt Design at Straitjacket T-Shirts

Just one this time:

Are You Sure The Door's Locked And The Stove Is Off?

Each shirt in the Obsessed and/or Compulsive section is now in its own subsection.

Dumbest Criminal of the Month (to date) - Montana Edition

No comment necessary.

Trail of snacks, MySpace surfing lead to Hamilton burglary suspect

HAMILTON - Stephan Crane will probably never be a professional burglar.

The 19-year-old Hamilton man was arrested Tuesday morning following an early morning break-in to the Ravalli Republic.

Crane allegedly broke into the newsroom through a window and then watched some pornography on the computers he found inside. He also logged onto his MySpace and Facebook pages using his own name.

Somewhere along the way, the man doused the room with a fire extinguisher.

Following a short investigation, Hamilton police officers found Crane at his sister's apartment just across the hallway from the paper's newsroom.

The officers followed a trail of stolen trail mix and M&Ms to her door.

The article continues at the Missoulian's website, where you can read about Mr. Crane's incredible and nefarious motives, and further details of the Hamilton Police Department's efforts to catch Mr. Crane.

Unfortunately I am unable to find Mr. Crane's Facebook page.

Matlock. I want Matlock! MAAAAAATTTTTLLOOOOOCCKK!

How old and out of the loop am I?  I didn't know Rowland S. Howard died about six weeks ago, 30 December 2009.  Then again it's probably remarkable he reached 50 in the first place.  I consider myself fortunate to have seen The Birthday Party and Crime and the City Solution play live.

Screw the Olympics.  I'm spending most of today listening to 20-30+ year-old vinyl recordings of The Boys Next Door, The Birthday Party, Crime and the City Solution, These Immortal Souls, the collaborations with Lydia Lunch and The Bad Seeds, Barry Adamson, and whatever I don't have but can find on the InterTubes.

Obituary from Melbourne's The Age.

Remembrance from the UK's Guardian.

Brisbane Times interview from 1 November 2008.

MySpace page.

Discogs' Discography.  

Discography by Maurice Maes and Leo Meijer at claranet.nl  Although complete only through January 2001, and included as a subset of Nick Cave's, this one is easier to read and covers important omissions from Discogs' list.  E.g. The Young Charlatans.

It didn't help that I was already weirded out yesterday when I heard Negative Trend had reformed.  Showing once again how old and out of it I am. 

While the various replacement bass players for the reconstituted version of Flipper haven't been involved, drummer Steve DePace was a couple times.  The only reason I'm bothered by this is I'm one of the last people to have seen Will Shatter alive.  The night he OD'd we were at the Mab watching somebody, drinking beer (at least I was), and, among other things, discussing my playing didgeridoo with Flipper or one of his other projects.  A few hours later he was dead.  His girlfriend even brought up the subject of how long he had been clean.  Will and I were neighbors for a couple years (we both lived on the same block on Moss, then I moved about a block away), and when Will or Bruce saw me at a gig they'd ask if I paid with my "punk bucks" (currency I'd type screeds on).  They got paid with some one night and asked to be paid with it whenever possible.

I guess whoever is supposed to walk over my grave needed to ask for directions.

Updates on Crazy Meds

If I haven't written a real article about a med after six years (e.g. Dilantin, the individual benzodiazepines), who knows when an article for said medication will be written.  As such I'm deleting the stub articles, associated PI sheets, and I'm in the process of removing links to them from most pages.

As I'm removing all those pages, I'm expanding / cleaning up pages about families of medications.  E.g. the page on benzos.  This is an on-going process.  Real articles for additional medications may or may not be written in the future.

I'm removing broken links as I find them.

References to "the usual side effects" for anticonvulsants now link to the anticonvulsants side effects page, instead of the basic info about anticonvulsants page.  Like they should have.

I'm also doing some miscellaneous cleaning up.

They're certainly appealing to *my* demographic

The 1990s are back in force here in Montana.  The Freeman reconstituted around the fear that Kenyan-born and secret Muslim 'President' Obama is going to steal everyone's firearms and county sheriffs are the first line of defense against the baby killers in the BATF.  The black helicopter crowd has found a link between socialized government-run health care and the New World Order (NWO):  The FDA's Codex Alimentarius Commission. Specifically its work with the UN's World Health Organization (WHO) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on the International Harmonization of food. And who is overseeing all of this? None other than the World Trade Organization!  Of course it's the WTO.

Doesn't that read like the scariest shit this side of the USA PATRIOT act?  It's one of those things that has the far right and far left meeting each other in the same part of Crazy Town.  Cue the theme from The X-Files.

I bring this up because the same UNABomberish guy keeps showing up in the ads at weather.com, regardless of what they're selling.  I put the first one up on fail.blog:

It could be a demographic identification fail, or he could be the 'mom' in the new UNABomber / Manson family.  Then again they could be enticing him with the promise of lots of moms attending college, because he looks like the sort of guy who'd be hitting on the MILFs.  Or any other mammal that is breathing, or at least still warm.

Now I'm seeing this:

Oh yeah, Harold could be my neighbor.  You bet.  Assuming he hasn't had his license revoked after his 11th DUI.  Although he doesn't strike me as the type who would bother with a driver's license, let alone insurance.

Crazy Meds back online

I currently don't know why or for how long Crazy Meds was unavailable, but we're back now.  When I do know I'll post something.

EDIT: Fuck if I know what happened.  The server went down at 2:43 a.m. Mountain Time (09:43 GMT) and I brought it back up at 1:45 p.m. (20:45 GMT).  I've been through every freaking log there is and nothing explains why a shutdown was ordered.

Pruning the Panoply 2

I've pruned various defunct or defunct-seeming sites from my various blog rolls.  Most are still available in a new section further down.

I've kept some that have a history of dormancy, e.g. Hospital Food.  They may or may not be moved at a later date.

Some entries have misleading dates.  The Flickr version of Texts from last night is updated several times a day, but the feed I'm getting is updated only if someone posts to the discussion.  If the folks at Not Hired haven't received a truly awful resume in some time they'll post a classic, and that will get tagged as being a year old.  The Horse Head Huffer blogs (Spare some LOL, What the Face and others) have dates all over the map.

I'll probably be adding new sites to the various blog rolls in the relatively near future.

Scenes from my boring life

All y'all should be as bored as I am with my 'life.'   This is the shit I do or just think about when I'm too demotivated and/or too medicated to do much of anything.  Which is how I am most of the time.

With only a few days left I come up with a name for this decade: The Yikes!², which is probably more accessible than Y²Kes!, although the latter might be easier to understand.  I think "Yikes!" squared  pretty much sums up the Y2K years, which sandwiched terror attacks, war, paranoia, electoral turmoils, and a global natural disaster between the dual hangovers from overhyped panic & parties and the worst international economic downturn since the 1930s.

Wacky weather haiku:

Texas white Xmas

bare, brown Montana landscape

Climate change? Really?

I got new snow tires, so of course it's not going to snow again until 2012.  If then.

I had a music-related dream the other night, yet another one that made me sad I don't know shit about music.  I heard Siouxie & the Banshees doing a Joy Division cover, which for some strange reason sounded like Siouxie Sioux singing with Interpol instead of her singing with Bauhaus / Love & Rockets, which is what Siouxie & the Banshees doing a Joy Division cover would probably sound like.  Anyway it was an original song (like all the music I dream about) with the lyric "I look in her eyes and see I can never win."  The Google can't find anything close to that in the same sentence, but there are so many great bands whose lyrics have yet to be published on the Intertubes.

Tremble in the majesty of my Kvetchmas booty, bitches:  Seasons 1 & 2 of Wonder Showzen. Robot Chicken Star Wars Episodes I & II. Family Guy Blue Harvest & Something, Something, Something Dark Side.

The animation involving things like ships and asteroids in Something, Something, Something Dark Side is better than that in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. That's saying something, I just don't know what. 

I used to be told, frequently, that I'm the reincarnation of someone from Japan.  A Meiji-era comic was the final consensus.  While hikikomori is a modern condition, it certainly describes me during adolescence:

Called hikikomori, or social withdrawal, the ill-defined but debilitating syndrome afflicts as many as 1.2 million young people--seven in 10 of them male. Symptoms include agoraphobia, paranoia, aversion to sunlight and severe anxiety; sufferers become antisocial [sic] in their teens or 20s and spend months or years holed up in their bedrooms. "They see themselves as ugly. They think they smell," says Tamaki Saito, who runs the outpatient program at Sasaki Hospital in Chiba. "They fear that they're being watched by neighbors, so they cover windows with curtains or black paper."

I didn't think I smelled bad, but everything else fits.  Although I was socially avoidant, which is what most post people usually mean when they use the term "antisocial."   I'm the kind of dick who points out that sort of shit.  I came across the article while researching Apathy Syndrome for a topic on the Crazy Meds forum.

Christmas Music

A bit late, given how this song is especially relevant this year.  But one of only two Kvetchmas songs you really need:

Culturcide's Santa Claus was my Lover

The other is Happy Flowers' All I Got were Clothes for Christmas.  From the Touch and Go compilation God's Favorite Dog.  I don't know if that has been re-issued on CD or not.

Lurn 2 spel

It's "straitjacket" you moron, not "straight jacket." Someone is tightly (strait) confined when wrapped / encased (jacketed) in one. It is not a linear article of clothing. The Cafe Press store name and reference on the Mental Mall page have been updated. 

 

It's been how many fucking years until I noticed that?

More Flavor, Less Lexico-Spatial Awareness

My Topamax dosage was raised by 50mg to 375mg a day, in addition to the lamotrigine (250mg), protriptyline (50mg) and methylphenidate (a whopping 5mg).  This has allowed me to take the methylphenidate daily, work on a crossword puzzle if I don't have anything better to do, and eat food seasoned with nutmeg and cloves without worrying about having an aura.  Taking the methylphenidate is especially important because taking it daily means my sense of smell and memory are better, and the tremors aren't as bad.

One downside is my appetite isn't worth shit.  More Topamax + daily methylphenidate = can't even force myself to eat that much.  I'm not dangerously skinny, gaining weight is just another thing I've given in to giving up on.  While nutmeg and cloves are kosher again, peanuts are now part of my permanent Lent.  No peanuts means no peanut butter.  No peanut butter means no peanut butter and banana milkshakes, which were a great means of caloric intake when I couldn't deal with cooking and/or eating.  Fortunately I don't have the "look at a peanut and die" allergy, just an "eat peanut butter and spench" allergy or sensitivity of some kind.  As peanuts are legumes it doesn't surprise me that they'd eventually not like me any more.  The cost is too prohibitive for other nut butters.

I've gone back to needing nine to ten hours of sleep.  That wouldn't bother me if I were able to go to sleep at nine PM.  I'm lucky to fall asleep at 10:30.  Waking up after eight in the morning just messes with me.

The oddest effect is a kind of jamais vu or other Topamax-related size issue.  When I'm doing a crossword puzzle it won't matter how many times I count the number of squares and the number of letters in the word or phrase I know is the answer, I can't make it fit.  It's too short, it's too long, I've yet to discern a pattern.

Updates on Crazy Meds

I did a minor update to the Abilify page and posted a new PI sheet for it, to reflect its recent approvals.

I also did a slightly less minor update to the Clozaril page and posted a PI sheet to replace the dead link, along with links to PI sheet equivalents and consumer information from Australia, New Zealand and the UK.  Clozaril is being discussed more and more these days.

New Board on Crazy Meds Talk for Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Conditions

I just created a new board on the forum for Crazy Meds.   Schizophrenia & Other Psychoses: Messages from the Zernox Galaxies

Throughout their lives, membership in the nine versions of the Crazy Meds fora has skewed towards affective mood disorders.  We never have had many people in the spectrum of psychotic conditions, but we've been one of very few sites run by the mentally interesting that caters to the psychotic.  I've yet to come across a site specifically about schizophrenia that isn't run by, and is primarily for family, friends and 'caregivers.'  It's the same patronizing attitude NAMI has these days and it disgusts me.

What finally got me off of my ass to create the board was a post, that, in part, reminded me the latest round of anti-crazy bigotry from NPR, Huffington Post and other bastions of liberal groupthink. In their effort to avoid even raising the questions of what parts religion or nationality may or may not have played in the Fort Hood event (My take: Exactly like those of Timothy McVeigh when he killed 168 people in Oklahoma City 19 April 1995, a perverted form of religion mixed with an extremist and racist nationalism.) they dug and dug for the slightest hint of crazy. Long before the rumor of an insanity defense plea.  Unable or afraid to wade into a complex debate regarding the motives of a fratricidal traitor they prefer to deflect the issue by raising the specter of crazy.  Because it's perfectly acceptable for everyone to hate and fear us.

In the hierarchy of the mentally interesting the schizophrenic and other psychotics are pretty low on the social totem pole.  I've read posts from plenty of people with affective mood disorders (depression, bipolar, etc.) who were glad they aren't schizophrenic, don't want to be lumped in with people that crazy and so forth.  Crazy Meds strives to be the big tent of brain cooties, it was about time I continued with that tradition.

Tyler Durden: TV Commercial Consultant

I sent the link of my HTC & clam commercial mashups to Adnoxious and a couple other ad-related blogs on the Panoply of Stupidity etc.

Adnoxious did something better than noting their interchangeability, they found the pedigree of the $cientology ad: the "You're not your fucking khakis" scene from Fight Club.

See for yourself.

Words of Wisdom

From frumiousb's galleries via 

Best use of Live Journal (Official) via

FFFFOUND!

Photonuclear Excitation by the Large Hardon Collider

A diseased sun burns through the wounded sky...

The dealer's cold, black, insectoid eyes kept shifting to and from Nielsen and Ninomiya, the only two players at her table. Sitting in the somewhat functional remains of what was once Singapore's finest casino they had doubledowned on a pair of diamond sevens. They were dealt a pair of suicide kings. Faye, their dealer, had 18. Nielsen and Ninomiya were all in with all of their available time.

Two sixes of spades.

"23," Faye said, her voice as cold and flat as her eyes, "you lose."

"No," said Nielsen, "we all win."

"What are the odds?" asked Ninomiya, shrugging as he attempted to fade from his chair.

Strong fields and multiple excitations

Because of the strong fields associated with ultra-relativistic heavy-ions, the probabilities for several electromagnetic processes are very large at small impact parameters, and calculated, un-unitarized first-order probabilities may even exceed 1. This is for example the case for two-photon production of e+e− pairs.

The dominating process is photonuclear excitation of the target into a Giant Dipole Resonance followed by emission of one or more neutrons. The probability for mutual Coulomb dissociation reaches about 35% in a grazing Au+Au collision at the Large Hardon Collider.

 "As anyone who has read the literature can attest," Dr. Benway said, "not all particles require collision as a means to reach a state of excitation.  Many electron-hole interactions are often played out in the form of bondage and confinement scenarios, with the hole invariably the bottom.  Typically the interaction lasts only three pulse-pumps.  Photoexcitation is required for multiple excitations, but the second hardon won't be as large nor will it last any longer.  Two is usually the limit."

Subluminal Cerenkov Radiation

Three a.m. and two graduate students at CERN were playing cards.

"Blackjack is a stupid game.  Who in hell would want to play that?  If you can count cards it's easy, if you can't you're a sucker.  Plus someone has to be the house, so there's no point in playing if not in a casino."

"You're right.  I don't know what I was thinking."

Weak Force 

"When the largest quantum orgy of all time happened, what did electrons do when they had a chance to interact dangerously with positrons?  They were as conservative and repressed as Lutherans!"

The large mass of the "W" Intermediate Vector Boson (IVB) is also interpreted as a re-creation of the dense spacetime metric of the primordial electroweak force unification era during the initial moments of the "Big Bang".

Looking at a simple example, we diagram the decay of a muon (u) to an electron (e-) (antiparticles are underlined and the symbol (v) represents a neutrino):

W-[u- (e+ x e-)] ---> vu + ve + e-

(Where the square brackets indicate the interior of (or the mediation of) the "W" IVB)

We see how natural a reaction this is when diagrammed via the catalytic action of the W- and a virtual electron-positron pair. The negative muon (u-) and positron (e+) simply cancel each other's opposite electric charges, which frees both their neutrinos (vu and ve), and forces the electron (e-) to become " real", as it no longer has an antiparticle annihilation partner. All the W has done is catalyze the reaction by bringing the muon (u-) and the virtual particle-antiparticle pair (e+ x e-) into intimate contact, where the charge cancellations and energy transfers can take place safely. Hence the "kissing box" of the IVBs is really a "conservation containment", which ensures that charge and energy transfers take place in a secure environment - a perfectly natural role in the well regulated and orderly conservation domain of spacetime.

 "One can only hope," Dr. Benway drawled, "that the Large Hardon Collider is used to excite particles beyond the kissing box and get them outside of what they would normally consider a secure environment."

This quasi-Burroughsian pastiche and interictal interlude is brought to you by:

Extra Medication For All!! shirts.

Cult of HTC Hero Commercials

As I wrote a couple of posts down, there's a remarkable similarity between the commercials for HTC's Hero and the latest ads from Scientology.  To give you all a better idea as to what I mean, I present a mashup of their commercials:

Unclear on the Concept

I got a letter informing me my truck has been included in the expanding set of vehicles covered by a recall.  It's in the category of "No reported problem of spontaneous automotive combustion, but it has the same faulty part that probably caused the 200 instances of minivans blowing up for no good reason."  I was warned not to park the truck anywhere near a building as the fire could start when the vehicle isn't running.

This, of course, tempted me to park it in the garage under my bedroom instead of the carport where I usually do.

The faulty part has to do with cruise control. I never could wrap my head around the concept of why something with manual transmission has cruise control in the first place, let alone how that combination works.

So I go to Ford's website to find the nearest dealer, who is a lot closer than Missoula and has  online appointment scheduling.  The VIN is enough to tell them I need the recall service.  Everything is working like it's supposed to.

Except after I click on submit I get an error message and am told to contact the service department.  You know, the people with whom I was attempting to make an appointment.

I was reminded of this Fail Blog entry.

Fortunately the only fail regarded something I wouldn't have missed, because I received a confirmation e-mail.

TV Show Math

I like cheesy, science fictiony TV shows.  They are often dismissed as formulaic.  True enough, as actual formulae are used.  Some examples:

Stargate Universe = (Stargate SG1 * (2000s era Battlestar Galactica - 1970s era Battlestar Galactica)) - Stargate Atlantis + The Starlost

Eureka = ((Original The Prisoner - 1960s Patrick McGoohan-era Secret Agent Man {a.k.a. Danger Man}) * Dexter's Laboratory) - Bill Nye the Science Guy

Sanctuary = ((Torchwood - Dr. Who) * Angel) + The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - Buffy

Fringe = (X-Files - Glenn Beck)  * (All those Mirror Universe episodes from Deep Spare Nine / the original Star Trek's "Mirror, Mirror" episode) + (Eureka / Mythbusters) - Twin Peaks

Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles = Terminator 2 * Firefly

Flash Forward = (Lost - Fantasy Island) * Quantum Leap

While on the subject of TV, am I the only person to have noticed the remarkable similarity between $cientolgy's "No Life" ads and the "You are different" ads for the HTC Hero?  It sounds like the same narrator, the ads are thematically similar, if not identical, and if the former were more colorful or the latter shot in muted tones they'd be practically indistinguishable.  Other than everyone using the newest tech toy in the HTC ad.

The HTC ads were done by DEUTCH LA.  I can't find who did the clams' ads.  Several people have found Boston's Co$ displayed as a favorite footprint about 3:20 into the original demo video.

HTC's Hero runs Google's Android software.  The last thing Google needs is to be associated with $cientology.  It's one thing when their ads were displaying all over Crazy Meds, because they have a right to advertise their sham 'religion' and Google shouldn't discriminate against them.  And if they want to pay me out of their antipsychiatry budget, I'm more than happy to take their money.  Getting any closer to the clams just makes you go "eeewwww" and not want to buy the phone.

As if I have any standing to write on that subject.  I rarely use my cell phone, and the most complicated thing I do with it is take a picture that I'll send to one person.  The only thing that keeps me from getting anything cheaper than what I have now is living just within range of Alltel's service.  And only Alltel's.

Any day now I'll start living in the 21st century.