Blackcap Blog

Published at 21:21 on 17 November 2014

They apparently hired a theoretical physicist to review all the cosmology in their series, yet when it came to earthly things the special effects (and story) was so bad I found it difficult to suspend my disbelief to engage in it.

Probably the most noteworthy case in point was the dust storms. Pure cheap Hollywood special effects done by people who’ve never seen a real dust storm, or even a photograph of one. The dust was this light fluffy house-dust like stuff that looked and acted absolutely nothing like the soil dust that makes up real dust storms.

The aftermath of the storms looked particularly unrealistic, like someone emptied a bunch of vacuum cleaner bags at quasi-random. The aftermath of actual severe dust storms looks much like sand dunes, as any one of a large number of photographs from the 1930s Dust Bowl attests. The ready availability of such photographs means the producers really had no excuse for such shoddy special effects.

And what’s up with dust storms blowing up when everything is green outside? The actual Dust Bowl happened in a severe multi-year drought, when there was precious little green anything, and the fields were lying fallow instead of growing lush crops of tall corn stalks. Another epic fail.

And then there’s this “blight” which breathes nitrogen and in doing so somehow consumes oxygen. Hello? Oxygen and nitrogen are two completely different elements. Any massive outbreak of a new, nitrogen-breating organism would increase the relative concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere by consuming some of the nitrogen. So the movie flunks basic chemistry as well as basic meteorology.

How the producers could do such a terrible job on mundane aspects of science while obsessing over cutting-edge issues perplexed me for a while.

Then it hit me: it’s actually consistent with the whole strange premise of the movie, that it’s somehow going to be more easy and more practical to travel through a wormhole to the far reaches of the universe, and colonize some barren desert world (even the final scenes of that one last planet showed a pretty inhospitable place that made the Dust Bowl Earth look like a green Eden by comparison) than it would be to focus on fixing problems here at home.

It’s all about ignoring (neglecting, even) the mundane and chasing madly after the esoteric and distant.

Published at 09:06 on 12 November 2014

For years I was on Apple Mail. It worked, and its UI was consistent with the rest of the system. I was happy, even though Apple always tinkered with it, and the tinkering inevitably resulted in a UI I liked less than the one before.

Then Apple Mail’s searches just stopped working for me. I tried cleaning out the index files, that fixed things for a while, then broken again, and this time rebuilding the index didn’t help.

So in desperation I cut over to Thunderbird. It wasn’t a cleanly Mac-like, but it did have a main display window more like the classic Apple Mail I knew and loved. And searches worked! I was happy.

Until Thunderbird simply stopped working for one of my e-mail accounts. I could send mail, but new messages simply stopped appearing. This made me miss some important events. I was pissed.

In desperation, I went back to Apple Mail. It’s search function was a broken as ever, which was an annoyance, but at least I reliably received new messages. It worked.

Today I notice one of my inboxes hasn’t had any mail show up in a week or two. Could Apple Mail be broken for it? Indeed, it was. Worse, Apple had broken the configuration part of Apple Mail. It basically forces the most dumbed-down, bland, hyper-defaulted, hyper-normal situation on you, then “intelligently” tries to guess if that’s wrong, and if so gradually asks for more information until it “intelligently” concludes it works. Well, on one account, it was “intelligently” deciding the account was working fine, even though new messages never showed up.

Worse, there’s no way to tinker with all the settings of an account anymore. You’re not supposed to. That’s the job of the “intelligent” Apple Mail client. I tried deleting and re-adding the troublesome account twice (the only way I could figure out how to adjust all settings), to no avail. I gave up.

I notice that Thunderbird has been updated since I dumped it. So I update, and the account that didn’t work previously… now does work again. Whatever Thunderbird bug broke it has apparently been fixed. So change partners again.

Nice to have a more rationally-designed display of incoming messages, but I don’t expect this partner to last, not after doing years of the E-mail Client Dance. I fully expect to change partners again within a year or two.

Published at 18:17 on 3 November 2014

At 2:30AM last Friday I awoke to use the bathroom. I had fallen asleep on the couch in the living room, as I often do. As I turned on the light, I noticed something crawling up the backrest of the couch. “It looks a lot like the pictures of bedbugs that I’ve seen”, I thought.

A quick check of Wikipedia confirmed the worst. Interestingly, the next morning I found the story of someone else who had a very similar experience.

I’m not pussyfooting around with home remedies, however. This discovery is one I’ve dreaded for a long time, because bed bugs have a reputation (doubtless very well-deserved) of being extremely difficult to get rid of. It’s one situation that the services of a professional exterminator are required.

I’m not that impressed that the exterminator chosen by my landlord has chosen to spray instead of use heat, which based on my research has a better record. A friend who battled the same problem (different source, she got hers from an infested neighbor’s apartment last spring) had good luck with this type of exterminator, however.

I may opt to pay to have a heat treatment done anyhow, just to be safe and help ensure a sure kill. I’m almost certainly going to pay to have all my belongings loaded onto a big moving truck and taken to Seattle to be fumigated. Again, just to be safe.

Like most port cities, Seattle has a firm that specializes is fumigating possibly infested goods by the truck-or-container-load. They gas the whole container at once, so there’s no worries about an infested container re-infesting your recently-sanitized possessions. People moving out of a bedbug-infested residence are but a small subset of those who need such a service; I spoke to one of their agents and it’s a completely routine job for them. They process dozens of loads an evening. No advance appointment needed. Time will tell if they’re as good as the rave review in this article.

What I dread most of all is this (a) taking months and months (with bed bugs, it sometimes does), and (b) taking “hitchhikers” with me and becoming into the new member of the HOA who brought the first-ever load of bed bugs into the building.

Realistically, though, the real horror stories typically start out with the victims either living in denial despite increasing signs of infestation, often trying various mostly ineffectual (or even outright counterproductive) home remedies. The professionals are only called after a several months, at which point they struggle for months to get a severe infestation wiped out.

Then again, it certainly didn’t help in my case that I’m one of the approximately 30% of people who do not have adverse reactions to bed bug bites. I never had an itchy welt at all despite being fed on regularly for at least a month. If I had, I would have probably suspected something was very wrong in my apartment a whole lot sooner.

Published at 10:23 on 29 October 2014

The reason is, there’s no easy profits to be made in doing what needs to be done.

Take fighting the disease in Africa. Those who are getting it are primarily poor. They can’t afford to pay for the necessary health care. It must be simply given away to them. There’s obviously no money in doing that. So not enough care is being provided, and the disease is exploding into an uncontrollable epidemic.

Take reasonable travel restrictions. Right now, health workers are getting there primarily via commercial air flights. The same flights that will carry anyone with money to buy a ticket, with only minimal screening. The airlines have no incentive to adopt aggressive screening, because it would make it harder for paying customers to buy tickets. Moreover, restricting flights would restrict commerce, meaning that the countries affected would become even more dependent on the First World just giving them necessary aid, at lest in the short term (the epidemic won’t last forever, after all). So there’s two more ways in which capitalist greed is interfering with the fight against Ebola.

Take a both prudent and humane quarantine policy. Right now, we can’t have both, thanks again to capitalism. We can either be prudent but inhumane, confining returning volunteers in unacceptable conditions, or we can be humane but incautious and subject them to ineffectual measures that are less immediately punishing. What should be done is to be both cautious and humane: treat them as returning heroes and give them luxurious quarantine facilities (devoting a rural luxury resort to such purposes would be a good way to do this). But there’s no profit in that, so capitalism won’t do it, either.

And neither the liberal or the conservative faction of Establishment politics is advocating what needs to be done. The former promotes a recklessly incautious policy, and the latter the stigmatizing of both its victims and those who are fighting the disease.

So instead we live in a world which has been pushed needlessly to the brink of a catastrophic global pandemic, thanks mostly to the capitalist profit motive.

Published at 08:57 on 17 October 2014

It’s not a complete surprise to me that there’s many abandoned homes in such places.

What’s hard for me to understand is how all the furniture inside them was also just abandoned in many cases. The houses might have been doomed by a location that is no longer considered desirable, but all that furniture still has some value and it’s really not that difficult to move furniture. One would think that would be done.

The family mementos are also a surprise. Those people had relatives, and things like framed photographs are easy to take.

It’s not the first time such things have struck me as odd, and it’s not just abandoned residences, either. I’ve also been struck by how many abandoned furnishings are evident in photos of derelict commercial and institutional structures in Detroit.

Published at 07:48 on 15 October 2014

It’s happened a second time in Dallas.

Now the line is starting to shift to “Well, there must be something wrong with that hospital’s (as opposed to just that nurse’s) protocol, but it’s still not super-contagious, trust us.”

Wonder how long that revised version of the lie is going to last.

Published at 21:58 on 14 October 2014

Last June, while on a botanical survey, I happened across a peat bog on the way to the survey site. I find all bogs to be fascinating places, because of the unique flora they have, and this one was even more so because depending on where you are in it there’s two distinct types of bog: the more normal (for this latitude and climate) terrestrialization type, created by a rain-fed pond filling in, and the far less common (here; worldwide, most peatlands are this type) paludification type, caused when beavers dammed the pond after the land was clear-cut, waterlogging the soil and causing the sphagnum moss to spread onto it from the adjacent bog, expanding it. The old logging road bed itself was even revegetating with bog plants.

Amongst those were wild cranberries, which were flowering profusely at the time. That naturally made me want to return in the fall to see if they were fruiting profusely. I did, and they were. I harvested just under a gallon of berries.

The following recipe is adapted from “averaging” the measurements of several recipes for cranberry sauce I found on the Web and in my old copy of The Joy of Cooking.

• 6 cups cranberries
• 2 cups water
• 3 cups sugar
• 3 whole cloves
• 1 large, fat or two skinny sticks of cinnamon

If you’re going to can the result, have the necessary number of clean mason jars, lids, and bands ready in a boiling-water canner. Do this first. It takes a long time to get such a large pot boiling. By the time the cranberry sauce is ready to can, your canner should be ready as well (i.e. boiling hot).

Wash the cranberries well in a large bowl. Agitate the water vigorously with your fingers to dislodge any old petals or sepals from the tips of the berries. Repeat until all such debris are removed.

Bring the water to a boil, then add the cranberries, cinnamon, and cloves. Return to a boil and cook until the skins on the berries crack (for me, this was basically when the berries returned to a boil). Remove the cinnamon and cloves and put the berries through a food mill or ricer.

Bring the cranberry purée to a boil and add sugar. Stir until dissolved then return to a full rolling boil then remove from heat.

Yield about five pints.

If canning (which is what I did, Thanksgiving is still nearly two months off), leave 1/2″ head space in each jar and process for 15 minutes in a boiling-water canner.

Published at 21:25 on 13 October 2014

One thing seems clear: it’s obviously significantly more contagious than the Establishment media claims it to be. The fact that health care workers contact it so readily despite being aware of the dangers and taking precautions proves that. Now that that has happened here in the USA, such indidents can’t all be waved off due to inadequate conditions and resources in Third World hospitals.

We’re obviously being lied to by the Establishment in order to maintain the façade that they have everything under control. They don’t, and the pressures of capitalism ensure that it’s very hard for them to do so (because effective precautions would probably take hundreds of billions of dollars).

It may not end up being a horrible global pandemic, but the combination of a globalized economy, rampant inequality, and health care being a privilege instead of a right is needlessly putting all of humanity at risk.

Published at 08:44 on 8 October 2014

It’s both the job market and the allergies that pushed me away, probably in about equal measures.

Of the two, the job market is the one that, fifteen years ago, I wouldn’t have thought could be that big an issue. I’m really not all that focused on material things, and am quite willing to downscale my life and live modestly.

But, it’s more than just that. If the job market is bad, people will not only offer jobs for less pay. They will also offer less benefits, in particular less vacation time. In general, such a market appeals to businesses who focus on maximizing profits by spending as little on their employees as possible. So you can expect to have a less comfortable office surrounding and worse resources to work with as well as lower pay and worse benefits.

You will be working under managers who tend to be clueless and inept, as well. The good ones tend to be working in other cities where they get better compensated for their talents (and don’t have to contend with the subpar benefits or resources, either).

A job takes up such a huge chunk of one’s waking life that all this extra suckiness really ends up making one’s whole life suck more. Particularly when the stingier time off benefits make for one spending more time in that sucky office.

So sure, Seattle sucks a lot when compared to Portland. It is in general more establishment and less bohemian. Access to nature is much more strictly meted out by ability to pay for it. The mass transit is nowhere near as good.

In the end, however, those minuses don’t matter so much. There’s more time available to get away from the office and out into nature, because the jobs come with better benefits.

Because the jobs in Seattle pay more, it’s possible for me to pay for that access to nature. (It sucks that many can’t pay and have the easy access, and I will continue to advocate for fixing that, but it’s possible for me to fix that problem for myself alone in the here and now, so why shouldn’t I?)

It’s also been possible to pay for the privilege of living someplace where I can use the ferry system and a bicycle to avoid the need to choose between driving in awful traffic and coping with subpar mass transit. Again, that’s not a fix for everyone, and it sucks that this is a privilege Seattle metes out to the few who can pay, but why shouldn’t I opt to fix the transport mess for myself if I am one of those few? Again, it doesn’t stop me from advocating for more general and widespread solutions.

There’s thing that suck about both Portland and Seattle. No place is perfect. It’s just that, for me, coping strategies generally exist for dealing with Seattle metro area’s suckiness much more than they do for Portland’s.

Published at 08:20 on 8 October 2014

Per this:

• The Tri-Cities would be the relationship I entered just because he had some money and offered me a home away from my parents, with whom I was bickering endlessly and sharing living quarters with had become most unpleasant. I knew it was not at all that good a match and wouldn’t last at the start, and I was right.
• Seattle would be a lifelong on-again, off-again, on-again romance. First and for a long time absolutely smitten, then disenchanted by subpar mass transit and housing choices, then further disenchanted when I realized how a chilly the social climate was there (particularly in comparison to the Bay Area). Then, finally, realizing that, despite all that it’s probably at this stage in my life the best achievable choice, provided we don’t shack up together and I just live in the neighborhood and visit him regularly.
• The San Francisco Bay Area would be a quick fling, motivated as more by my disenchantment with Seattle than anything. There’s still lot I find to like about him, but overall I learned he’s less good a match than Seattle was.
• Portland would be the dream romance I had often fantasized about that, excitedly, eventually manifested itself in reality. And which was in fact pretty damn awesome in most respects. Alas, it was also pretty damn awful in two critical respects: my grass pollen allergies, and the absolutely horrible local job market.
• Vancouver would be the dream romance that’s never happened.
• New York City would be a famous celebrity I had lunch with once, a celebrity that has a somewhat formidable reputation as being vain and snobbish, but someone I found to actually be a genuinely interesting person who I really enjoyed interacting with, despite being way too different to ever even think about having a serious relationship with. I still have his contact info and plan on getting in touch with him for another long lunch some time; I’m sure we’ll enjoy it as much as we did the last time.