Author Archives: dr.hypercube

Boston meets the Mooninites

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ATHF LED in Cambridge.jpg
By Rekha Murthy – crop of https://www.flickr.com/photos/rekha6/365208141/, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

More evidence that fear does not make people smarter. For folks who are not up on this latest Keystone Kops incident, yesterday the Boston PD, local and state government, and the media went ape after someone reported a suspicious device (one of which is pictured above). Additional devices were found around town – they’d been there for, apparently, three weeks. Look like a bomb to you? Not to me – I’m well past the twenty-something demographic, but I recognized the moon guys instantly. If I wanted to blow something up I might use a NEMA enclosure with some conduit coming out of it to hide my device; a high tech Lite-Brite – not so much.
Now, of course, the powers-that-be are embarrassed and are going to get even – starting with the 2 poor schmucks who put the nefarious devices up. Go ahead, fine ’em for violating a ‘post no bills’ law – write ’em a ticket, but anything more? Come on.
This is, as far as I’m concerned, a kind of Type II error – evaluate the hypothesis as true (OMG, we must treat those things as IEDs) when it is in fact false – the kind of error that is far more likely when dealing with terrorism (because there are so few terrorists and so much random real life going on) than a Type I: ‘that’s nothing to be concerned about’, pause, !boom!. It would seem to me that public safety folks might want to examine why they committed such a large and long mistake and do so in a public way so everyone can learn from the fiasco, rather than concentrating on whuppin’ on a couple of Lite-Brite hangers. I know, I know – I’m living in a fantasy world, but seriously – we need to start holding folks, government and media both, to account. Panic, overreaction and constant fear are no way to run a city, state or nation. In the absence of any real ‘learn from our mistakes’ effort, I suggest mockery.
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A little later – Speaking of mockery… My favorite comment:
Seventy-five-hundred-thousand dollars for emergency response services, a cool three-quarters of a million bucks, according to May-yah Mumbles (aka The Honorable T. Menino), and over the course of their busy workday they still only found 10 or 11 of the original 38 “performance pieces”. Of course, most of the missing 20-odd were probably pried loose and are now adorning dorm walls, or eBay auctions. But, yeah, at least one local bloviator (Jon Keller) thinks that the poor schmuck responsible should be punished, “they should throw the thickest book possible at him”, not least because of the “vulgar hand signal” part. Because nothing says “Al Queda Pwned Amurka!!1!” like a frowny icon flipping us the Lite-Brite bird.Pants-Pisher Nation. We should be ashamed of ourselves.
Even later – I just did my little truth-table – if the null hypothesis (presumed state of nature) is ‘no bomb’, I believe I’m OK describing this as a type II error. If I’ve boogered up the type number (I or II), my point remains…

Elephants

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Proof that I am an intellectual magpie hopelessly derivative an amazing synthesist – a blog post that brings together two of my (many) favorite Fretmarks posts – Facts and Figures and It must be the weather. Via the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy we have FM3-05-213 (warning – large PDF), aka Special Forces Use of Pack Animals. Regarding elephants we are advised:

ELEPHANTS
10-41. Elephants are considered an endangered species and as such should not be used by U.S. military personnel. There are about 600,000 African elephants and between 30,000 and 50,000 Asian elephants. Approximately 20 percent are in captivity, so it is difficult to estimate their numbers exactly. The Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species regards both species as threatened. Elephants are not the easygoing, kind, loving creatures that people believe them to be. They are, of course, not evil either. They simply follow their biological pattern, shaped by evolution. The secret of becoming a good trainer is to learn this pattern. The handler can then apply it to himself and the elephants under his control.

There you have it – “not evil either” – applies pretty well to most animals! The rest of the manual looks quite interesting – most of what I know about pack horses and mules I learned by reading Norman Maclean and can be summarized as one, loading is an art and two, done poorly it is a very bad thing.

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I always thought (when I thought about it at all) that War Pigs was just the title of a Black Sabbath tune. Not so – it seems that war pigs, also known as incendiary pigs, may have been used as a counter to war elephants.
A siege of Megara during the Wars of the Diadochi was reportedly broken when the Megarians poured oil on a herd of pigs, set them alight, and drove them towards the enemy’s massed war elephants. The elephants bolted in terror from the flaming squealing pigs often killing great numbers of the army the elephant was part of (Aelian, de Natura Animalium book XVI, ch. 36). *
I’ll never look at a greased pig contest the same way again. Also – Aelian, in his Varia Historia, gives an account of fishing using hooks dressed with red wool and feathers – it’s all connected.
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I’m pretty confident that quite a few readers of this blog will recognize the type of handgun pictured above and know why it’s included in an ‘elephants’ post. If I ever fall into a pile of money (very unlikely I’ll get that kind of coin by the sweat of my brow) one of my eccentricities will be a collection of howdah pistols. They are an echo from a different time – tangible, beautiful evidence of a world that is no more.

For those that aren’t up on obscure firearms, a howdah pistol was sometimes carried as a last line of defense when tiger hunting from atop an elephant. If an extremely upset tiger tried to get into the howdah with you, you’d use the pistol. Heavy caliber, not too accurate, brutal recoil, but better than a mauling…

Soma and synchronicity

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An interesting coincidence: I’ve been on a bit of a soma jag recently (research, not use) because of a brief mention of it in Helen Macdonald’s excellent Falcon. I started by re-reading Brave New World for old time’s sake; back in high school it added soma to my vocabulary; college brought R. Gordon Wasson and the idea of entheogens. Soma has been off the back burner and on a slow simmer in my head for a while; there seems to be a connection between the bowls found in Central Asian burials and either soma or Amanita muscaria use (allowing that A. muscaria might not be soma). The picture at the top of the post is a handle for one of these bowls. Falcon brought the simmer to a boil, so – in preparation for (maybe) writing a long soma post – I’ve been spending the past couple days reading things like The Soma-Haoma Problem. Now comes the coincidence – last night I was lying in bed reading The Areas of my Expertise and laughing my head off (not a great way to get to sleep, I discovered); page 87 consists of the following:

 

WERE YOU AWARE OF IT?

The famous Cole Porter tune “I’m In, You’re In” was actually Porter’s typically wry response to the urine-drinking craze of the 1920s.

The practice originated with the fierce reindeer herders of Siberia known as the Koryac, who centuries ago had devised a means of purifying the hallucinogenic toadstool known as fly agaric. A local shaman would eat the mushroom, using his body to filter out the poisonous muscarine; its mood-altering compounds were preserved in his urine, which was then ritually consumed by other Koryac and also some of the more favored reindeer.

Marco Pensworthy, a monocled young libertine and staff member of the American Museum of Natural History, who was later dismissed for seducing the skeleton of a giant ground sloth, introduced the custom to New York. During Prohibition, many a tuxedoed, thrill-thirsty swell attended one of Dr. Marco’s private “Siberian Tea Parties,” beneath the frozen gaze of the stampeding elephants of the Hall of African Animals, where, wrote Porter…

There isn’t any shame in
Meeting with the Shaman
And making like the reindeers do…
It’s just a little wonder
That will unfreeze your tundra
I’m in, you’re in. You’re in too.

After his disgrace, Pensworthy would wander Central Park humming Porter’s tune and offering passersby swigs from a suspicious flask. Finally arrested and institutionalized, he trepanned himself to death in 1952.

Like a lot of good tall tales, there’s a grain of truth in there – the Koryac references are accurate regarding the mushroom and the urine (I’d be surprised if they shared their pee with the reindeer – but I could be wrong).

I’m running into these kind of coincidences more and more frequently (the one before this was putting Lost World of the Moa down, flipping the teevee to Animal Planet, and falling into the middle of a segment on Haast’s Eagle). I’m developing a hypothesis that rests on two factors – both Internet related – the immediate availability of information and the number of personal contacts with like-minded people that communication technology provides us with. I’ll do some more thinkin’ on it – perhaps a later post.

 

Hug me till you drug me, honey;
Kiss me till I’m in a coma:
Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny;
Love’s as good as soma. *