It sucks to be a predator
And you’ve got people. Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs. —Spike
Consider the vampire as a creature bound by the Law of Conservation of Energy.
According to the MadSci Network (how can I not trust these guys?), there are about 700 [kilo]calories in a liter of human blood. A vampire who sucks dry a human adult with five liters of blood is going to get 3,500 calories. One who believes in sustainable humaniculture, drawing at a rate no more than what the Red Cross recommends for whole-blood donors, will get half a liter, i.e., 350 calories, every other month.
So if the vampire needs 3,500 calories a day to sustain his or her undeath (more than the average human adult, but it makes the math easier, and heck, a vampire doesn’t spend all night sitting at a desk), he or she will need to either rotate among six hundred cooperative hosts, or take down one victim every day. In the latter case, even if every victim is consumed after he or she reproduces, and even if vampirism is the only cause of human death, we would need a population of at least ten thousand humans to carry each vampire. By comparison, in the classic study of population dynamics among moose and wolves, the moose-to-wolf ratio ranges from 15–50 moose per wolf.
Moose… hmm. What if we are dealing with emo-pires who refuse, on principle, to feed off another sentient species? It says here that “a 400 kilogram moose has a blood volume of about 32 litres”, so one moose could replace between five and six human hosts; a moose generation is only four or five years, so a stable population of ten thousand humans could be replaced by about a hundred and fifty moose—assuming, crucially, that the vampires would be just as successful at catching the moose as they would be at catching two-legged prey. So Maine’s population of 30,000 moose (according to Wikipedia) could support up to two hundred vampires, while its human population could support only a hundred and thirty.
Regardless of which scenario you choose, given how much impact a single additional vampire has on the food supply, it’s hard to see why any immortal vampire would deliberately turn a human.
If vampire-story authors would pay attention to these questions of population dynamics, they could enrich the genre.
Dead to rights
The City of Minneapolis will pay $165,000 to seven zombies, and their attorney, to settle a civil-rights lawsuit. The seven, during a protest against “mindless” consumerism, had been “walking in a stiff, lurching fashion and carrying four bags of sound equipment to amplify music from an iPod when they were arrested by police who said they were carrying equipment that simulated ‘weapons of mass destruction.’” Rather than defend the police’s brain-dead judgement in Federal court, the city agreed to settle.
Asked to comment on the settlement, the zombies’ lawyer only croaked: “Briefs… Must… file… briefs…”
via John Scalzi
Atlas mooched
Using a GPS logger—that is to say, using a satellite network that is funded by American taxpayers and available free of charge to everyone all over the world—some chap named Nick Newcomen has created an advertisement for Ayn Rand’s books.
Is there a store in the Boston area that services irony meters? I think mine needs to be recalibrated.
Translation from PR-speak to English of the Anti-Defamation League’s “Statement On Islamic Community Center Near Ground Zero”
We regard freedom of religion as a cornerstone of the American democracy, and that freedom must include the right of all Americans – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other faiths – to build community centers and houses of worship.
If we tried to use any legal maneuver to prevent this community center from being built, we would be laughed out of court.
We categorically reject appeals to bigotry on the basis of religion, and condemn those whose opposition to this proposed Islamic Center is a manifestation of such bigotry.
Bigotry is bad, mmkay?
However, there are understandably strong passions and keen sensitivities surrounding the World Trade Center site. We are ever mindful of the tragedy which befell our nation there, the pain we all still feel – and especially the anguish of the families and friends of those who were killed on September 11, 2001.
If the events of 9/11 have made someone feel squicked by Islam, that feeling should not be classified as bigotry.
The controversy which has emerged regarding the building of an Islamic Center at this location is counterproductive to the healing process.
We are as high as a kite.
Therefore, under these unique circumstances,
Our opinion regarding 9/11, like the Supreme Court’s opinion regarding the 2000 Presidential election, should never be used as a precedent for anything else.
we believe the City of New York would be better served if an alternative location could be found.
Not that we’re offering to draw you a map or anything.
In recommending that a different location be found for the Islamic Center, we are mindful that some legitimate questions have been raised about who is providing the funding to build it, and what connections, if any, its leaders might have with groups whose ideologies stand in contradiction to our shared values. These questions deserve a response, and we hope those backing the project will be transparent and forthcoming.
We have no evidence that the Islamic Center is run by terrorists, but we’re not above insinuating that such evidence might exist. We call ourselves the “Anti-Defamation League” but we’re not above defaming the Islamic Center’s leaders and donors.
But regardless of how they respond, the issue at stake is a broader one.
We actually don’t care whether or not the Islamic Center is run by terrorists. We just wanted to blow some smoke about that.
Proponents of the Islamic Center may have every right to build at this site,
Then again, they may not.
and may even have chosen the site to send a positive message about Islam.
If so, we will strive to prevent anyone from receiving that message.
The bigotry some have expressed in attacking them is unfair, and wrong.
Did we mention that bigotry is bad?
But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain – unnecessarily – and that is not right.
We must perform a delicate balancing act between the feelings of people who, since 9/11, have become squicked by Islam (in a totally non-bigoted way), and the feelings of those “Islamic moderates” whom we used to call upon to denounce Muslim extremists. For an Islamic Center three blocks away from Ground Zero, that balance favors the non-bigots. Maybe this Center could be built four blocks away. Or maybe fourteen blocks away. Or maybe in Brooklyn. Then again, maybe not in Brooklyn.
The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world’s leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry.
God help us.
Brooklyn link via agrumer
“Translation” genre canonized by John Gruber
The call of cult-calling
The Lieutenant Governor of Tennessee, while responding to a constituent’s concern about a Muslim community center being built in Murfreesboro, remarked that while he is all in favor of freedom of religion, “you could even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion, or is it a nationality, way of life, cult, whatever you want to call it”. As others have already pointed out, this is free propaganda for al-Qaeda.
I, for one, would like to highlight that word “cult”, because when used among evangelical Christians, it does not always mean “organization that brainwashes its members”. Sometimes it means “organization that preaches heresy”.
Back when I was researching the Boston Church of Christ, I acquired a book by Walter Martin called The Kingdom of the Cults. Martin’s catalog of “cults” includes not only the Moonies and Scientology, but also Christian Science, Baha‘i, Buddhism, and Islam. In an appendix, he seriously examines the accusation that the Seventh-Day Adventists are a cult, but ultimately declares that they are legit. Judaism and Catholicism are not mentioned at all.
Ask not, fellow unwashed heathen, for whom the wingnut trolls; it trolls for thee.
Wanted: digital passports
Teresa Nielsen Hayden, bemoaning how CNN requires you to sign away your digital soul in order to post a comment on its Web site, remarks:
In the United States, we don’t have many laws protecting our personal information. We need more than we have. The alternative, the one we’ll get by default if we don’t do anything, is to have our online identities mediated by Facebook. If the government had proposed an online identity system that prone to holes, leaks, and exploits, we’d have been up in arms.
Which reminds me…
In the Anglo-American legal tradition we’ve always been antsy about government officials saying “papers, please”, but authentication of identity is one of the traditional functions of the state. The paper trail certifying that I really am Seth Gordon, for all transactions where it really counts, terminates in two places: a birth certificate issued by the State of Illinois, and a driver’s license issued by the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles. (If I had changed my name since birth, of course, that paper trail would have taken a detour through some probate court.)
The governments of Estonia and Lithuania have brought state-authenticated identity into the digital age with systems that combine a smartcard, a PIN, and the OpenID protocol. (My Web browser cannot authenticate the Web site for Lithuania’s national OpenID provider, which suggests there are a few kinks to be worked out of the system.) Why can’t the United States do the same thing?
For financial and medical transactions, this would create a single strong system for logging into the Web sites of multiple banks, credit-card issuers, and so forth. For non-financial transactions, a government-backed identity broker could authenticate a user by revealing the minimum amount of information that a Web site operator actually needs, rather than the maximum amount that some profit-seeking broker wants to share. The government could protect citizens’ privacy by offering them proxy identities: “account 2b740996-9919-11df-80f3-001aa0739303 is associated with a lawful US resident over the age of eighteen and you don’t need to know anything else about them”. And a Web site that accepted any OpenID-based authentication system could let users certify their identity through LiveJournal, AOL, Google, or any other private provider, so people who didn’t want to involve the government wouldn’t have to.
Obviously no system is perfectly secure, and letting a single agency manage hundreds of millions of digital identities raises the spectre of catastrophic failure. However, I believe that the current way we handle digital identity, juggling dozens of half-remembered usernames and passwords, is even less secure, because none of the institutions managing these databases have a strong incentive to do it right, and an attacker can wreak havoc by simply penetrating whichever system is weakest. The alternative to authentication by the government is not authentication by Bruce Schneier, but authentication by Facebook.
I am not hip enough to come up with a proper headline to this post
Shaul Magid,1 reviewing a sociological study of ArtScroll, remarks:
Indeed, the new Conservative Etz Hayyim is arguably a response to the Stone Chumash the way the Beach Boys “Pet Sounds”(1966) was a response to the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul” (1965).
1 I recall meeting Rabbi Magid at Michael Carasik’s Shabbat table, and now that I know he writes all this stuff on the intarwebs, I will have to look for more of it. Hey, look: “Shaul Magid’s controversial thesis that American Judaism is dominated by three dogmas: pro-Israelism, the uniqueness of the Holocaust, and the war against intermarriage.” That’s controversial?
One out of every four sentient species is a victim of domestic violence
I have seen various discussions online about colonialism, and of course, these make me think about colonialism in SF—especially the kind where our planet becomes someone else’s colony.
Stereotypically, in these kinds of stories, the aliens are either Bad Guys or Good Guys. If they are Bad Guys, they dominate the planet by sheer brute force, disintegrating anything that stands in their way until (in American SF) our plucky heroes find the aliens’ weakness and create a glorious victory for humanity, or (in British SF) everyone dies. If the aliens are Good Guys, then they are protecting us from the baser elements of our nature until we can rise to full membership in the galactic community. The problem with the stereotypical Bad Guy scenario is that historically, colonial regimes among humans never1 act purely with brute force; an effective colonial administration knows how to co-opt at least some of the natives. The problem with the stereotypical Good Guy scenario is that it uncomfortably resembles a justification for real colonialism: the aliens in these stories are, so to speak, taking up the little green man’s burden.
Thinking of Good Guy aliens made me think of Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood trilogy (formerly titled Xenogenesis); I had read these books when they first came out around twenty years ago, and recalled them as a well-written and original take on the whole alien-invasion theme. The aliens in this series are the Oankali, who arrive on Earth shortly after nuclear war has wiped out most of the human population. Their schtick is to exchange genetic material with other species, so that the descendants of each contact with a new world acquire new traits. To this end, they scoop up as many nuclear-war survivors as they can and prepare them to become parents of human-Oankali hybrids. The main character of the series, Lilith Iyapo, is charged with training other humans to survive in Earth’s recreated wilderness and mediating between them and the Oankali. Over and over through the series, the Oankali remark on a “contradiction” built into the human condition: that we are both intelligent and hierarchical, and that without an injection of some Oankali genetics, this combination will doom us to self-destruction. So: Good Guy aliens. More or less.
I reread Dawn looking for stuff about colonialism, but what struck me about the book, instead, was the gender politics.
- Victims of domestic violence are frequently confined and stalked, unable to move freely, right? Lilith spends the first book on a spaceship and in the opening chapters, she can’t even open a door.
- Most of the humans that Lilith trains hate her for being a collaborator with the enemy. She refers to herself as a “Judas goat”, but I was reminded of a not-uncommon pattern in abusive families: Dad beats both Mom and the kids, but the kids resent Mom for not standing up to Dad.
- Control of sexuality and reproduction is one hallmark of domination in male-female relationships, and indeed, the Oankali decide whether or not Lilith is fertile, without even asking her opinion.
And consider these quotes (page numbers are from the trade paperback edition of LB):
“We… do need you.” Nikanj spoke so softly that Joseph leaned forward to hear. “A partner must be biologically interesting, attractive to us, and you are fascinating. You are horror and beauty in rare combination. In a very real way, you’ve captured us, and we can’t escape….” (p. 153)
Isn’t that one of the classic excuses for sexual assault? “She was so attractive, I couldn’t keep my hands off her.” And savor the irony of humans trapped on a spaceship being told “you’ve captured us”.
…It reached out and caught his hand in a coil of sensory arm. “I won’t hurt you. And I offer a oneness that your people strive for, dream of, but can’t truly attain alone.”
He pulled his arm free. “You said I could choose. I’ve made my choice!”
“You have, yes.” It opened his jacket with its many-fingered true hands and stripped the garment away from him. When he would have backed away, it held him. It managed to lie down on the bed without seeming to force him down. “You see. Your body has made a different choice.”
…
“Let go of me.”
It smoothed its tentacles again. “Be grateful, Joe. I’m not going to let go of you.” (pp. 189–190)
Ten pages earlier, Lilith had intervened violently to prevent one human from raping another. In this scene, though, an Oankali commits what in a human-on-human context would be clearly recognizable as date rape, using the rationale he said no, but he didn’t really mean it—again, a classic—and Lilith just watches approvingly.
In spite of all this, the Oankali do come off as generally sympathetic characters. Perhaps they give me this impression because the human characters, throughout the series, are frequently brutal to one another—more often for the sake of conventional crimes (banditry, kidnapping, etc.) than over anything directly involving the Oankali. Like I said, the Oankali are Good Guy aliens. More or less.
PS: Butler also wrote a novellette, “Bloodchild”, that examines human-alien family dynamics from a different angle. I recommend the Lilith’s Brood novels, but I think “Bloodchild” is one of the finest SF stories ever written.
1 Well… hardly ever.
Sorry, Bibi
The Nine Days are an appropriate time for Jews to repent, and it is appropriate for me to repent for being too cynical about the Israeli political process. I had assumed that the Israeli government is so independent of the Diaspora1 that complaints from liberal American Jews could not possibly block MK Rotem’s proposed conversion bill. I was wrong. חטאתי.
1 Note that for all the fulminations over the “Jewish lobby”, the Israeli government probably gets more political benefit in the US from evangelical Christians than it does from the Jews who live here.
Cool new renewable-energy idea of the month
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a one-megawatt power plant!
via Hacker News
