ÿþ<HEAD> <title>Eric's Archive</title> <META NAME="description" CONTENT="Eric's Journal, the irregularly updated journal of Eric Lis"> <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="eric, lis, emperor, aerica, aerican, journal, eric's head"> </HEAD> <left><font face="Times New Roman"> <font face="Monotype Corsiva,Bernhard Modern Roman,Unicorn,BellGothic,News Gothic MT"> <center> <big><big><big><big> Eric's Archive<br> Entries 421-430<P> </big></big></big></big></font> <I> Those who forget the past<Br> Are doomed to reread it.<p></i> </center> <a href="http://www.aericanempire.com/eric/index.html">More recent</a><BR> <a href="http://www.aericanempire.com/eric/401-500/431-440.html">Entries 431-440</a><BR> <a href="#430">Entry 430</a> December 19 2007<br> <a href="#429">Entry 429</a> December 16 2007<br> <a href="#428">Entry 428</a> December 13 2007<br> <a href="#427">Entry 427</a> December 10 2007<br> <a href="#426">Entry 426</a> December 7 2007<br> <a href="#425">Entry 425</a> December 4 2007<br> <a href="#424">Entry 424</a> December 1 2007<br> <a href="#423">Entry 423</a> November 28 2007<br> <a href="#422">Entry 422</a> November 25 2007<br> <a href="#421">Entry 421</a> November 22 2007<br> <a href="http://www.aericanempire.com/eric/401-500/411-420.html">Entries 411-420</a><BR> <a href="http://www.aericanempire.com/eric/archive.html">Archive</a><BR> </blockquote> <HR> <a name="430"></a> <U><B>Subtle Distinctions</b></u><p> In the past, I've tried to discuss interesting contrasts. I enjoy the challenge of taking two similar ideas and distinguishing them. Need to know what the difference between a ferret and a weasel, or strategic withdrawl from tactical retreat? I'm right there for you, chock full of useful information presented in a persuasive, informative, and well-written way. Even when I've got absolutely no facts or bases to support my arguments, I'm always ready to offer an interpretation eith sufficient confidence that you'll feel assured that I am, if not right, then on to something. There's no need to shower me with applause, gratitude, or financial reward for such masterful Sisyphean (in at least three meanings of the word) sophistry... it's what I'm here for.<P> All that being said, tonight, we take a moment to consider the subtle but important distinctions between our planet and a watermelon.<P> Now, at first glance, this might look like a terribly difficult distinction to make. The similarities between these two can be quite overwhelming. Both, after all, are round, and have a hard outer shell which contains much softer insides. Both are largely green, with some other coloured bits thrown in for variety and texture. Both might look quite flat from far away, yet are marked by numerous impefections, raised and recessed bits, on investigation. On very close inspection, both appear to be swarming with tiny, disease-causing lifeforms too small to see if looking only at the object itself from a moderate distance. And, of course, both contain rather a great deal of water (92% in the case of a watermelon, 71 percent in the case of Earth). With all this in mind, it may seem impossible to distinguish between a planet and a watermelon, but bear with me and we'll see if we can't find a way to solve this puzzle.<P> So, how can we tell a planet from a watermelon? Well, first and foremost, a planet is slightly larger. Earth's diameter is approximately 7900 miles (12700 kilometers) whereas a typical watermelon rarely reaches more than one mile, even on its long axis. Numerous planets, of course, are not as large as the Earth. The dwarf planet Pluto, for example, which is too small to classify as a "planet" in the pure scientific sense, is estimated to measure some 1413 miles (2274 kilometers), which is less than eighteen percent of the size of Earth, but nonetheless remains significantly larger than most watermelons. The average individual may not be equiped to measure if an object's diameter exceeds one thousand miles, and certainly will not be equipped to perform even a basic triangulation measurement while in the grocery store, and so as a general rule of thumb, it might be suggested that if the average person walks at aproximately two to four miles per hour, then if it takes you less than five minutes to talk a circle around the object you are trying to measure, it is most probably a watermelon, whereas if circumnavigating it takes some hundred and twenty hours by car (perhaps more, if you stop for lunches), it is probably not a watermelon. Even simpler than this heuristic is a rule of thumb which suggests that if you find a pile of very similar objects which look like they might be watermelons, if more than two or three can be fit into your line of sight at a time, they are probably watermelons. It is quite common for a planet's surface to have many watermelons on it, but quite rare for a watermelon's surface to bear multiple planets.<P> In addition to the size of the object itself, one can consider the size of the imperfections and lifeforms on an objects skin to help in differentiating a planet from a watermelon. The surface of a watermelon is pitted by countless tiny dots and dips which can be felt by a careful examination of the surface. It can be difficult, in fact, to locate such imperfections at all on a fresh and wet watermelon, and ironically, it is this difficulty which allows differentiation. For example, suppose you are presented with two surfaces, both greenish and of whose nature you are uncertain. Feel the surface carefully, running your fingers over the whole surface to be sure you miss as little as possible. If you can detect few or no tiny, neraly imperceptible pits, the object may be a watermelon. If, instead, you locate an extremely deep crevice which you fall into and break one or more bones upon stopping, it is likely that you are instead examining a planet, as most watermelons do not contain holes large enough to fall into (such dangerous watermelons being considered a risk to consumers and so not usually being shipped to the store). Similarly, if you look very closely at the surface of the object which you are investigating, you may be able to detect lifeforms. If these lifeforms require a microscope to be visible, they may be "germs" which are common both to watermelons and some planets, whereas if the are large, readily visible with the naked eye, wearing clothes, and threatening to strike you for invading their personal space, it is almost certain that you are examining a planet.<P> One final key to identifying the nature of the object you are inspecting is to open it. You might seem quite wary of the prospect of opening up an object before veryfying whether it is a planet or a watermelon, and the staff at the grocery store might not take kindly to you opening a watermelon and then not buying it on the grounds of it being not a planet. Should you find yourself with the time, resources, and security to conduct a thorough investigation, opening up the object in question is certainly the best way to differentiate with certainty the object's nature. While the outer surfaces of a planet and a watermelon may seem quite similar, on the inside, they are quite obviously different, and signifiacntly so. The inside of a watermelon is, usually, quite watery. It consists of red or pink plant matter, the juice of which is fairly transluscent and usually cool or even cold. In contrast, the fluid inside of a planet is usually red or orange, almost always opaque, and invariably very warm (one might even say "hot" or "molten." Furthermore, the very ease with which you access the liquid inside can be indicative. If your knife or cutting tool easily parts the surface and clear red fluid drips out, then this suggest quite strongly that you are cutting a watermelon. If your knife becomes stuck in the surface even after being pushed in several inches, or indeed, if your knife skitters off or rasps against an apparently hard, even stony surface, this suggests that you are instead trying to cut a planet, and would be well advised to stop before you damage your knife. If your knife parts the surface easily and red fluid comes out but there is a great deal of yelling, double check that the surface is green, to ensure that you are cutting a watermelon and not, say, a person.<P> I hope that you have found this guide useful. With luck, the next time you find yourself unsure as to whether you are about to purchase a planet or a watermelon, these simple hints should make it much easier to determine with certainty which you have. <HR> <a name="429"></a> <U><B>MIME: A <S>Summer</s> Winter One-Shot RPG</b></u><p> Over this past summer, I decided to run a one-shot game called MIME. While I got a very favourable response from people, I made one strategic error, which was scheduling a game for mid August, when nearly everyone I know was busy or out of town, and I myself was too busy working, moving, and planning for the academic year to run (and more importantly, write) a new game anyway. But seasons turn, life moves on, bad sequels are released and all life grows older (except for Keith Richards and Dick Clark). Sooner or later, even medical students find a bit of free time, and in my case, after a year of enforcing order and structure on the lives around me, I'm ready to open my arms wide, welcome the Goddess into my home, and gift those around me with a little bit of Chaos. For the fifth year in a row, I will be running a one-shot RPG session on December 29th. It will involve mimes.<P> The only reason the above statement was not accompanied by diabolical laughter is that my computer is not equiped to record sound. <P> The Aerican Empire Gaming Interest Society is proud to present MIME, a story of struggle, adventure, tragedy, comedy, and psychokinetic demons with too much makeup. Half of the game's seats are already claimed, leaving only one or two spaces which will be given to people who read this and can commit to play on the 29th. Game will be held at a home not far from the De La Savanne metro and will run from approximately 1 to 6 pm. All players will create (if they speak to me before the game) or be assigned if they only show up on game day) characters using the World of Darkness: Mortals system. All characters will begin the game knowing each other, and so some consistency will be required in terms of backgrounds; most characters will belong to a group of theatre students or the group's teachers out on an ill-fated field-trip when, as they say, all Hell breaks loose.<P> The story, for those who may not remember the original description from last April: The world that you know isn't the only world that exists. Humanity lives on and rules Earth, but existing side by side with physical reality are dimensions occupied by ancient, malevolent entities, entities which desire nothing in life more than to cross the dimensional bondaries and feast upon human bodies and souls. Fortunately for humanity, the walls between the dimensions are strong indeed. Unfortunately, they're not invulnerable. Every so often, holes form, and some of these demons can slip through. A hemophage enters here, and the legends of vampires are born. A flesh-eater possesses an animal instead of a man, and for two generations a village lives in fear of werewolves. Through human history, though, few demons have ever caused as much havoc as the MIMEs. Fleshwalkers, MIMEs enter human bodies and take control of them, moving the body like a puppet. The victims' skin becomes chalk-white, and they move in a jerky, uncoordinated fashion, spontaneously mimicking motions performed around them. Most frightening of all, all MIMEs are inherently psychokinetic; the weakest among them can trip fleeing prey from thirty feet away or choke off a windpipe from across a room, while the mightest among them can seal off entire cities beind impenetrable walls of force, cutting off all hope of help or escape whil they terrorize the humans inside. MIMEs desire nothing less than the utter eradication of humanity, and the only reason they haven't succeeded is that holes between their world and Earth are few and far between, rare even by the standards of demonic invasions. When the MIMEs find an opening, however, they exploit it with an unparalleled efficiency. They are about to find a gateway to Earth, and thousands -- perhaps millions -- of demons will sweep forth and begin to possess and consume an unsuspecting humanity.<P> There is hope for humanity, however. A fraction of the humans taken over by MIMEs will find that they retain their own minds and souls when the demons enter them, even as they take on demonic appearance and powers. These few humans will have the chance to use their powers to try to turn back the demonic forces. A human who can control the MIME inside will find vast abilities opened up before them. Let the MIME take more control, and those powers grow ever stronger. If the possessed can walk the razor's edge between too little power to fight and too little humanity left to fight for, they might just be able to find out how the demons have broken through, why so few humans remain free-willed, and maybe find a way to seal the breaches and save the world. Then again, they might not.<P> How will these (potentially) brave (maybe) heroes be able to fight off a demon invasion? As they as they contain MIMEs within their bodies, they can wield the same demonic powers as MIMEs themselves. All players will have the option of selecting one to two starting powers, and players may request appropriately-themed abilities if they design their character ahead of time. Available powers includes but are not limited to forcefield generation, weather control, object creation, superhuman acrobatics, photographic reflexes, invulnerability, invisibility, and so forth. Creative use of powers is encouraged, and players who suggest abilities I never thought of will be rewarded. <P> Interested in playing? Free on Decemkber 29th? Got your own bag full of ten-sided dice? Then sign up as soon as possible, because spaces are limited and time is short. Join us as we bring together a top-notch group of players for a thrilling (and hopefully very funny) story of the quietest war ever to shake the world. It's a once-in-a-lifetime chance to play in this never before used, never will be used again story and a wonderful way to spend a lazy winter's Saturday afternoon. Besides... when are you going to have another chance to slaughter an army of mimes? <HR> <a name="428"></a> <U><B>From the Files of KP 42: Baby's First Kidnapping</b></u><p> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp So here's the thing about cybernetics. Sure, it sounds easy as three point one four to slap a metal arm on someone and call them a super-soldier, but in practice, it's a job and a half at best. Bad enough you have to sort out all the wiring and make sure that every one of a million microscopic nerve fibres links to just the right bit, your bioengineers also have to worry about little things like mass, at least in a case like mine, where the aim is combat-grade functionality and enhancement rather than simple medical prosthetic. A human arm, vis, normal red-&-pulpy wetware, weighs something in the area of just a few pounds, whereas unit per unit, steel is about seven times denser, so even if you're only attaching a portion as wide as a bone and not the bit flexy bits normal people keep wrapped around it, that's going to be a big strain on some poor sucker's spine, and at best everyone's going to wonder why he always leans to the side when he's sitting down. So, you have to add some counterweight to the other side -- say, around the scapula -- which just makes our aforementioned poor sucker weigh that much more. All this extra weight is going to cause back pain at best, so you have to add some sort of tensile support to the back (and while you're at it, that spine enhancement is a perfect place to add cerebellum-simulating software, so that the arm will actually be controllable). Now, of course, the poor guy's carrying around ten pounds of metal, wiring, and electronics, and he's wearing away his knees every time he takes a step, so you've got to do some leg enhancements... not much, just toughen up the bones a little and replace those delicate joints with something low-friction and as durable as titanium. Finally, you've got to add a whole bunch of structural support to that whole side of the chest and back, because otherwise, the metal arm will tear out mister poor sucker's ribcage the first time he flexes. You want to do all that to somebody, just so they have the priviledge of getting sent on missions even more hazardous than normal, you have to find someone very brave or very stupid.<br> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Naturally, their eventual plan is to replace the rest of my limbs the way they have my left arm. That is, if I'm still around for them to do the next set of enhancements, which at this moment is very debatable, and the loyal opposition has the floor.<br> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp I'm not really sure where I am when I open my eyes. This is usually a bad sign, as it means I've ever been drugged and stolen, or else I had a really exciting night at last night. I've got a pounding headache and the light hurts my eyes even through the tiny crack that I've opened them, which could support either hypothesis. As my head clears, it begins to become apparent that I'm in some sort of moving vehicle; I can hear wind whistling by, and I can feel the world rocking wildly as whatever vehicle I'm in rises up and down through traffic lanes. A stacatto background noise resolves itself into gunfire, which suggests strongly to me that I did not, in fact, have an exciting night last night. I open my eyes to the interior of a luxury vehicle, the sort I've always wanted for myself and joined the KP program to be able to afford.<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Good morning," says a well-dressed man sitting opposite me. He looks to be about middle-aged and wealthy; the bottle of wine he's pouring from, for example, costs more than I earn in a year. "I'm surprised to see you're awake. Ren obviously didn't inject you with enough anaesthetic to keep you out. Don't try to speak, though. I gave you the muscle inhibitor myself and I know it'll be an hour before you can talk."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp I'm glad he warned me. I clench my jaw and bite back the words I was about to say. No sense spoiling the surprise yet.<br> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "I hope you don't mind," rich-boy says through white plastic teeth. "We're borrowing your arm. It'll be more useful to us than to your employers. Whether or not you remain attached to it depends entirely on your cooperation. Just sit still and enjoy the ride, and if you're lucky, the guards from the facility we took you from will keep firig those nice warning shots at us rather than risk damaging you."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Typical... they only love me for my body. Still, it's good to know tht the Guard is putting effort into getting me back after a kidnapping attempt. Before I went under the kinfe for the first time, KP 29 told me that there's apparently been an attempt by one faction or another to steal a newly-enhanced (and generally quite economically valuable) agent for about two-thirds of my forty-one predecessors. At the time, it made me wonder why the Guard didn't just beef up security around the facility... my working theory is that some of the high mucky-mucks let the thefts happen just for the fun of stomping them, but maybe that's just the drug-induced paranoia talking. Not that there's a lot of drugs in my system right now. When they installed my arm, they had to enhance my spine too, and standard procedure (so they told me) is to put in a toxin-filter at the brain stem. It's there to clear metalic ions, dust, bacteria or what have you out of our blood that might have gotten in with or precipitated off of our new hardware, but it's got a few other handy uses.<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "I clear drugs from my blood very quickly," I say. Rich boy's eyes narrow as it takes him a second to figure out that little non-sequitur. There's that lovely second, the Moment of Dawning Recognition, and I take it to extend both knees and push myself out of my seat towards him. You know, I used to have a pretty weak left hook, but five pounds of steel and two servo-enhanced joints will take care of that for you. My fist catches him on the side of the head like... well, like five pounds of fast-moving steel... and sends him across the compartment and into the far wall, where he slumps bonelessly. <BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp The gunfire in the background stops, and it occurs to me that it must have had a source. I turn to look behind me and see three thugs dressed just like rich boy, each holding a handgun that looks like it was built to sit on a tripod, staring at me in shock. I estimate about ten feet between me and them. With the soft, padded bench that I woke up on between us and the roof of the transport only about six and a half feet up, I've got little to no maneuvering room and no chance of reaching them if I pounce for them. That, and they'd probably take me apart in a fair fight. If you can't win by mnight, go for confusion.<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Which one of you is Ren?" I ask. One of them perks up. "Your boss says you gave me the wrong dose of -"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp And then I'm jumping backwards because Ren starts shooting at me. Not the smartest move you could do inside a moving, flying vehicle, but then, I don't find henchmen are usually hired for their brains. *I* certainly wasn't.<br> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp I drop. Ren's first shot, to his credit, passes right through the spot where my head was, and I make a mental note that when the KP issues me my armour, I want it to come with a helmet and full-on faceplate for exactly this sort of situation. It misses the window but goes right through the transport's wall just the same, and shards of burning metal and plastic are sucked outwards to fall towards the ground pilot-only-knows how far below us. I hear yelling in a language I don't speak and Ren doesn't get off another shot -- presumably his fellow henches getting him to hold his fire while we're still in the air. I scramble along the floor and pull myself behind the bench that rich boy was sitting on, which gives me some cover from them. I hunker down in case they decide to try shooting through it, but they seem to think better of it. There's a few seconds of silence, broken only by the whistle of air leaving the cabin and the sounds of pursuing transports still chasing us. I look around for anything I might be able to use as a weapon, but unfortunately, rich boy seems to not have been the type to leave high-powered rifles sitting behind the couch. As I fumble around, a hand grabs me by the back collar of my shirt and yanks me to my feet. I'm a lot heavier than I look at it takes him a yank and a half; his second tug's got too much force and he lifts me bodily off the ground. I use the momentum and twist in the air, and our heads meet with the thunk of bone on bone. I'm pretty sure I get the worse of it.<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Yes. I defintely want a helmet when I get my uniform. Maybe a steel skull, too. Ow.<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Lucky for me, the shock of the hit is enough to make the thug let go and stumble back. I give him a good left jab to the sternum, but metal or not, there isn't much fore to it and all it does is knock him back another step. I keep on him and get him into a good grapple, not so much because I think I can take him as much as I'm now on my feet, perfectly visible to two gun-toting maniacs from the waist up, and I'm really hoping that they won't shoot at me if I've got my arms around one of their budies. Still, I take advantage of the struggle and slip my hand into his coat, looking for a second sidearm. I get my grip around someting round, thin, and metal, and wrap my hand around it as he brings his gun around and clips me solidly with the stock on the side of the head. I go down and he lifts his foot to stomp.<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp The neat thing about vehicular combat is the way that with a near miss, you feel the shockwave before you hear the sound, even though mehcanically speaking, the sound reaches you first. The transport shakes and lurches violently to the port... or maybe starboard... hell with it, to the left as one of the pursuing transports unleashes a few explosive rounds at us, either losing patience with the chase or getting nervous about having seen gunfire coming out our walls instead of aiming back towards them like the gunfire of proper escaping criminals. The thug above me stumbles back and hits the opposite wall, forgetting about me entirely in the face of this new danger. The transport rocks again as a second shot bursts a meter from our hull, and one of the windows blows inwards.<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp In defiance of the fact that there are at least two hulls and probably twenty or thirty feet of empty air between us and the nearest pursuing transport, one of the thugs yells back, in defiance, "You'll never take us alive!" <BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Probably not!" I call back, and over the side of the bench I toss the object I snagged from my grapple-buddy. That's what you get for carrying grenades in an unsecured bandolier.<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp The whole rear of the transport -- and two over-dressed henchmen -- disapears in a beautiful flash of onomatopoeic boom. Traditionally, the back of a transport is where various important components are kept, including the engines, our our rapid flight from justice becomes a plummet. Before we can fall long enough to pick up an unfortunate and terminal amount of velocity, I leap for the newly-created back door, or more accurately, I take a couple of steps, turn back to grab something important, and then leap. With all my will and a moderate degree of prayer, I issue a single command to my left arm: find something to grab on to and grab it, and whatever god watches over fools and government agents smiles on me. Metal fingers grab onto an antenna jutting from the side of a building. My shiny new arm is very nearly torn out of my body trying to suddenly stop a human body moving at fleeing-from-the-cops speed, but with only a small degree of tearing muscle and agonizing pain, it holds, and I come to a stop except for a slow pendulum swing in the wind.<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp I watch as the ruins of the fleeing transport plummet dowards and lose sight of it, and then watch as one of the pursuing transports slows to a stop, skews around, and starts flying slowly towards my position for pickup. I raise my fleshy right hand to salute them and take a swig from a bottle of very nice wine. <HR> <a name="427"></a> <U><B>Good Sleepies</b></u><p> I met a psychiatrist (a particularly charming fellow who I hope to meet again) not long ago, who specializes in sleep and how disorders of sleep affect mental illness. His research has examined how disorders of sleep, both too much and too little, affect mental performance and stability. Among his other theories, for example, he suggests that everyone has a natural inborn circadian rhythm (with a learned component) which dictates not only how long they need to sleep but also what time of day relative to the world's light/dark cycle, and sleeping at the wrong time can screw you up pretty thoroughly. He's clearly linked excess in sleep to depression and, interestingly, he's linked insuficient sleep to mania and hypomania. It's well known in mental health that a sudden decreased need for sleep is one of the earliest signs of a manic episode; while he hasn't yet gathered enough data to convincingly say whether lack of sleep occurs early in mania or actually preceeds it and may indeed be one of its triggers, he has (apparently) found a strong correlation between the two with some early suggestions that an individual begins to sleep less just before the manic episode begins and not after. I find this very interesting for two reasons. First, I find it interesting because it seems to fit with my observations of a number of the people around me. Second, I find it interesting because it seems to be the exact opposite of how I work. It's enough to make someone rather jealous.<P> When I don't get enough sleep, the very last thing that happens to me is that I become manic. I get increasingly squeaky and silly after ten pm, but if I'm not sleeping sufficiently when it's not deliberate, then I find that I actually veer towards the depressed side. I have noticed in the past that some of the people around me are at their most cheerful and productive when they've gotten the least sleep, but I'm not one of them. This is actually one of my least evolutionarily advantageous traits, if you think about it... my colleagues who become more energetic after a four hour night will be in much better shape than me for those thirty-hour shifts in the hospitals, just as our ancestors would be better able to survive if they became faster and more wired every time they were forced to flee their cave by a predator. In contrast, I find that I also get depressed if I sleep too much -- the worst of both worldsw, I suppose. It's been suggested that there actually can be an evolutionary advantage to depression; in the wild, if an animal is badly wounded, it's actually advantageous for it to begin to suffer symptoms of depression, because it will stay in place (and conserve energy) while it repairs itself. Nobody has yet suggested an evolutionary advantage of suicidality (that I know of, anyway), but there may actually be some valid Darwinian reasons why it's good to get depressed when you sleep too much... as long as you go back to normal when the time comes. This sort of mechanism has been suggested as being at play in species which enter long hibernations.<P> Tangential Fun Fact of the Day: Weasels do not hibernate. They remain highly active during all seasons, and in fact may increase their activity during the winter as this helps them keep warm and helps them to spend the extra time that may be needed to find scarcer prey. Weasels will sometimes tunnel under the snow to sneak up on unwary small animals, striking from below with a ferocity that would send Peter Benchley into therapy.<P> I've always been an individual who needs a fair bit of sleep. I function best if I get almost exactly eight hours of sleep. Left to my own devices, I'll get tired and go to bed around 11:30 in the evening and wake up between 7:30 and 8 the next morning. I don't start off wide awake; it can take up to an hour for me to achieve maximal waking niftiness, during which time I'm unusually susceptible to the cold and perceptibly slower of thought, and oddly, my vision is about twice as bad as normal. I function poorly if I get less than seven hours sleep. I flatter myself to say that I operate at a pretty advanced cognitive level, and I can usually feel it when my thoughts get slower, even if they do stay faster than the average person's. In part because I use a lot of meditative techniques during the day to cope with pain, any sort of lack of sleep (and ability to focus) tends to be pretty apparent to me. Not only have I always needed a lot of sleep, I've also found that no matter how much sleep I get, I don't function well if I wake up before 7, and perceptibly worse if I wake up before 6:30. I can fall asleep after 3 am several days in a row and remain in great shape as long as I can stay in bed until 8:30 or 9, though it starts to catch up with me on day three when I begin seeing things that aren't, objectively, there. Of course, you don't do very well in academic life if you can't cope with having to be awake at inideal hours, and I've proven time and again that if I have to, I can go reasonably long periods -- an academic year, for example -- with my ideal sleep patterns disrupted. Enough sugar and cartoons will keep the synapses firing through anything.<P> Perhaps my most odd sleep-eccentricity is the fact that I can't fall asleep lying on my back or my stomach, and never have been, as far back as I can remember. This is handy in so far as it means I'm at very low risk of snoring, which is apparently only physiologically possible while you're asleep on your back. On the other hand, one of my biggest fears is that I'll one day be hospitalized and, with an IV in each arm, be unable to turn onto my sides at night, so that I'm incapable of sleeping and slowly go star raving over the course of a week or so.<P> All that being said, that's long enough for tonight, and now I'm off to bed, perchance to sleep. <HR> <a name="426"></a> <U><B>A Palm In The Hand</b></u><p> The field of medicine is, today, one that is largely dominated by Technology, with a capital T. Above and beyond the increasing computerization and onlineniness of the whole business, Technology in the Platonic and even Jungian sense has become a part of medicine. We seek solutions in technology, and every newly discovered Device is tested for its applications to human health. And, of course, we puny meatbags strive always to find new and exciting ways to incoporate Technology not only into our toolskits, but into our practices, our SOPs, and to a degree, our bodies. Ask most medical students (possibly not doctors, amongst whom there's a greater percentage of luddites), and they'd probably be quite enthusiastic about the idea of incorporating a computer right into their brains, assuming you didn't have to take out any bits they thought were important. A chance to have a perfect memory with instant (and word-searchable) recall? The ability to have an encyclopedia of drug interactions built right into your cebereal cortex? And, of course, the ability to check your e-mail and play minesweeper in class or while listening to a dull patient talk? Well, I don't know a lot of people who've actually gone ahead and had that sort of thing done (mostly because it's bloody expensive), but today, I took the first step on the road to Assimilation. I now own a PDA.<P> Of course, since I don't do anything the easy way, I don't like calling it a PDA. Rather, I've invested some money in a Douglasian PET -- a Personal Electronic Thing. If you wanted to get technical, it's a Palm Tungsten TX, but really, at heart, it's a Thing. The TX is a relatively old model of PET. It's a few years out of date, which by the standards of the field makes it something of a dinosaur. That said, it's an excellent model wich has remained popular and widely-sold for quite some time, which speaks volumes about its utility and reliability. I personally know at least three or four people who own or have owned the TX and have fond memories of it, which is one reason why I picked it. The other erason, understandably, is because our class president arranged a deal whereby the students in my class can get the unit for something in the area of a hundred bucks knocked off plus a free wireless keyboard, which makes it a pretty good deal and, in fact, very nearly competitive with the shady eBay sales I would probably have gone with otherwise. The fact that it's black and shiny (like a pocket-sized anvil) is just a bonus.<P> For a few weeks, when the deal on PETs was offered to us, a major topic of debate among students was, understandably, whether it was worth it, and whether we really needed them. Certainly, most of the kids in my class, myself included, live on relatively tight budgets, and even at seasonal low low prices, a PET isn't a small purchase. According to most people, though, it's an undeniably useful Thing for anyone in a hospital (but doubly so an inexperienced med student) to have with them at all times. It's estimated that a student working the internal medicine wards needs to know the names, basic mechanisms, uses, and potential interactions of something in the area of two hunded drugs. This gets a little bit easier if you look only at drug classes, rather than individual medication brands, in which case one only need to know and undertand closer to sixty. This sort of thing's relatively easy to master after two or three years of practice, when you've been presribing the drugs yourself and thus burning them into the "genuinely important to know" section of yourlong-term memory, but to a student, it's intimidating at best and impossible at worst. Much easier to learn the basic information about a drug, and then carry around the details on a Handy Dandy Personal Electronic Thing, acessible at a moment's notice from three or four different textbooks and databases. It's not quite the same as having it wired directly into your brain, and it might not be immediately acessible if your fingers are covered in unmentionable infectious bodily fluids, but in most situations, it's really helpful. Potentially even more helpful is the clinical diagnosis programs we can get our hands on without much effort... it's not too tough to learn to spot a patient who's in heart failure or who has the flu, but for a tough case, it's useful to be able to open up a list of symptoms and search to get a little bit of help figuring out what someone's suffering from. It lightens our workload... and also reduces the likelihood of a patient suffering when a poor l'il uneidetic student can't figure out what they've got (or how to fix it). More important than any arguments I could think up is the fact that the majority of students in years ahead of me will wax loquacious about how indespensible their own PETs were during their studies and even after graduation. Always heed the voice of experience, I say, assming the voice of experience is coming from someone reasonably reliable, intelligent, friendly, good-looking, and saying what you want to hear.<P> Lastly, a PET is really important for someone like me because it has a built in calculator. I'm the sort of person who needs help with addition and subtraction, and even with a calculator, I'm fully capable of getting the wrong answer. If someone's life depends on me calculating the right amount of potassium to stick into their body, that's math I want done by a computer. I'm kind of looking forward to losing my first patient because it'll be a really new and unprecedented sort of experience, but I'd rather it not be quite so directly my fault.<P> So now, I own a PET. That's one small step for my doctorination, one giant leap for the computers' conquest of humankind. So far, I've been good -- I've stuck on a couple of real medical textbooks and have not yet put on any songs or videogames. I'm quite sure that I will be adding non-work stuff in the future, but for now, for at least the first twenty four hours, it's going to be a strictly professional tool and not a toy. It's my Personal Electronic Thing; it's going to make me a better doctor and help me save lives. It's going to carry my important files and facilitate my life. It's going to be useful, functional, and efficient. It will also be black and shiny and have the opening video sequence from Muppet Treasure Island on it, which, as I see it, only increases its utility towards meeting the above criteria. <HR> <a name="425"></a> <U><B>Lights, Cameras, Actions!</b></u><p> Tonight, it seems, is the first candle of Hannukah. Tonight we set fire to a bit of wax and string, the first of thirty-six strings which will be (in theory, if not in oractice) lit over the eight days of this holiday. Thirty six is, of course, two times eighteen, the numerical value of chai (Hebrew word for "life"), which in addition to being the basis of my own Hebrew name is also a kind of yummy tea. Thirty six multiplied by four is of course one hundred and forty four, my old address as well as one of my lucky numbers, and thirty six multiplied by eight (the number of days of Hannukah) equals two hundred and eighty eight, a number which has no apparent significance but for which I'm sure, if I thought about it for a few minutes, I could come up with something.<P> I only just realised today -- though looking back, I think it occured to me while I was moving too -- that when I left home, I didn't bring with a channukiah (no, don't ask me why I spell Hannukah with an H but channukiah with a C; you'll be disapointed). Hannukah isn't a major holiday for Jews the way Christmas is for That Other Religion. Few families put up much in the way of elaborate decoration, and no jolly old psychopomp circumnavigates the globe to bring us our gifts (most of mine come from gaming shops, Zellers, or the bank in any case). This is doubly true in my appartment, where hannukah is likely to go utterly uncelebrated. I probably could MacGuyver together a makeshift channukiah out of spare parts lying around my home -- a bit of tin foil, a couple of non-combustible blocks, a metal tray, some bent paperclips and the mangled corpse of Michael Des Barres ought to do it -- but somehow it doesn't feel like it's worth the effort. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't dream of bah humbugging Hannukah the way I do Christmas, but that doesn't mean I feel inclined to put much if any effort into the holiday on my own. When I'm with my family on Sunday I'll light a candle or two and exchange gifts like a good l'il Jew, but on the nights when I'm home and not being supervised by anybody important (just god, and forgiveness is his job), why would I bother? In any case, I really shouldn't be playing with fire while unsupervised.<P> In one respect, Hanukkah is a sort of odd-holiday-out relative to most Jewish holidays, in so far as it commemorates a military victory. Take the story of Passover, for example. This story is meant to be a tale of triumph and heroism on the part of the Jews, but when you look at the details, it's really god who does all the hard work, and the most heroic thing the Jews do is flee Egypt at top speed. Sukkhot celebrates the harvest as well as our skill at architecture using minimal resources, and neither Yom Kippur nor Rosh HaShanah have any sort of militaristic element. Purim is a story of a singular villain being defeated and crushed by Jewish forces, but it's all done in terms of Mchiavellian political maneuvering (and I never realised until just this moment how amusing the story of Mordecai and Esther could actually be, given the right spin). Great big chunks of the Hebrew bible is taken up by war and conquest, but none of the classical holidays of the Jewish calendar mark any of them except for Hannukah, and even this is really commemoration of a guerrila rebel force more than a real army. I know that what we're really commemorating is the deus ex machina at the end of the story, since most Jewish holidays are actually meant to celebrate divine miracles rather than salient historical events, but it strikes me as interesting that Hannukah may be the only major Jewish holiday which marks a military victory rather than a political one. In that light, it seems only natural that we'd celebrate it by spending a week and a day setting things on fire.<P> Why do we celebrate this holiday with the giving of presents, you may ask? Hell, I haven't got the slightest idea. I've always sort of assumed that it was mimicry so that we could more effectively compete with the Christians and so that little kids wouldn't become unhappy that their non-Jewish friends were exchanging gifts but they weren't getting anything themselves. To my knowledge, in fact, the practice of giving gifts at Hannukah is a mostly North American (though increasingly also Israeli) phenomenon, and defintely doesn't date as far back in history as the gving of gifts at Christmas time. The Jewish tradition of gelt -- cold hard cash -- does date back that far or farther, but that tradition usually meant giving small coins as a form of blessing rather than material gifting, and certainly the evolution of chocolate coins is a twentieth-century invention. Jews aren't above lifting some of their traditions from other cultures... and why should we be, when we've served as the basis for so many of the traditions of other peoples? It does help explain why, by and large, we don't get quite as caught up in the gift giving as the Christians (and the general secular Western public, for that matter); for them it's a matter of holiday necessity and cultural expectation, but for us it's one part generosity, two parts guilt, and a dash of healthy mockery of the goyyim. Just like a lot of stuff we do, really.<P> Happy Hannukah to all the nice Jews reading this. Happy Hannukah also to everybody else, because you probably deserve eight nice days too, at least if I like you. If you're the sort who suffers from pre-Christmas stress, try to relax, and take solace in the fact that if you belonged to some cultures, you'd have to have finished your holiday shopping twenty days sooner, before the really big sales started, and once that was over with you'd probably still get kind of stressed over having to supply Christmas gifts to your Christian friends and quite possibly generic "holiday" gifts for everybody else. You would, at least, get to take some solace in having the next eight days to celebrate a victory of your people, to have an excuse to eat friend food, and to grumble about how the goyyim get days off to celebrate their holiday but you have to make a feast *and* go to work. It's tough some days, being the chosen people... which is why I'm bloody glad I'm a Silinist. <HR> <a name="424"></a> <U><B>But Remember Always To Call It, Please, Research</b></u><p> Yesterday, I took part in an annual event at McGill, known (accurately enough) as Student Research Day. On this day, all students who took part in a university-funded research project, usually over the past summer (as it was in my case), are <S>forced</s> asked to present the findings of their eight weeks of work in the form of a pretty poster. Judges, mostly physicians, tour the area and judge the posters, and prizes are awarded to the finest research projects. Many of the posters shown yesterday were extremely advanced and impressive research, done by students working at the very forefront of scientific knowledge in every field from nutrition and workplace satisfaction to molecular biochemistry, DNA cloning and cancer-resection surgery. I felt a bit like the odd-humanoid-out since my project was merely a psychiatric study, but most of the judges and other students present seemed to feel that my topic was sufficiently interesting, and there were a few people here and there who actually spent twenty minutes or more apiece asking me questions about my work. The dean of the medical school himself appeared (briefly) to open the event with a refreshingly brief and witty speech wherein he talked about how Student Research Day exists to showcase and reward the great minds studying at the school, and shows off the amazing talents and skills of students from several health-care-related programs (in addition to the medical school itself, the nurses and speech pathologists had posters up). Indeed, the fantastic skills of many of my colleagues were shown off yesterday... their research skills in some cases, their poster-designing skills in others, and in my case, my ability to fake social skills and pretend to be a proper academic.<P> In defense of the whole student research day idea, I really should say that I actually had a fun several hours yesterday, though I afterwards deeply regretted having stood for four hours straight. Many of my colleagues are actually very fun, interesting people, and while their research topics were rarely -- okay, never -- of genuine interest to me, I enjoyed watching their faces light up as they talked about something for which they had genuine excitement and enthusiasm. It was doubly useful, since I made sure to watch a couple of people present their posters before I presented my own, so that I had "enthusiastic facial expression" fresh in my memory and could mimic it with accuracy when I did my own presentation. On top of that, I did genuinely enjoy socializing with a small proportion of my classmates over the course of the afternoon, because a lot of them really are neat people from interesting backgrounds. I would be remiss if I didn't say that I also enjoyed presenting my own poster to my classmates. I'm a bit of an intellectual snob -- I acknowledge that this is one of my character flaws and I try to work past it -- and there's a unique sort of joy from knowing that I possess knowledge that the person I'm talking to doesn't, particularly if that individual in question has a more advanced degree than I do or if they score hgiher than me on every exam. My research dealt entirely with borderline personality disorder, a mental illness even most physicians don't know that much about, and our first eighteen months of studies include absolutely nothing about any personality disorders, so everything I chose to tell people was new knowldege for them. I thank the gods, mind you, that not one single person present chose to ask me what the statistics on my poster represented, because I had no clue what one-sixth of my poster was saying, aside from the p values.<P> The biggest surprise of the day, though, was that I enjoyed defending my research. Of course, it's no secret that I love to argue, and it's fair to say that one of the things that I live for is the opportunity to match my wits against other sharp minds. In this case, with the exception of one person who claimed to be a guy who'd simply walked in off the street and knew nothing about psychology, let alone borderline personality disorder, every person who came to talk to me was either a classmate of mine in medical school, a wander masters student, an MD or a PhD. Now, not everybody who gets an advanced degree is a top-quality mind, and a couple of the people I spoke to over the course of the day, though I'm sure they know more than I do about transcription enzymes, would be no match for me in any battle of wits. That said, at least four or five of the people I chatted with were real top-quality minds, and a few of them asked such good questions -- questions I actually hadn't anticipated -- that I had to actually think at my top speed to keep up with them. One woman I spoke to actually asked me a question that nearly made me burst out laughing: if people suffering from borderline personality disorder are generally regarded as untreatable, and their lives are full of depression and suffering, isn't unethical to try to prevent their suicide, when helping them live means condemning them to more pain? It was a devil's advocate question, of course -- the lady in question makes her career helping patients learn how to live with intractable and inescapable pain -- but it was a lot of fun trying to come up with an answer to her question, and then try to answer her question from multiple different ethical perspectives. Slightly less fun but equally enlightening was a twenty-minute conversation with a very friendly psychiatrist who found me and talked to me about how my research interacts with his own, and I learned more about the mechanics of sleep and its effects on mental health in those twenty minutes than I had in the last two and a half years. It always leaves me with a good feeling when I can have a long conversation with a man who might be my boss in a few years and it ends with him offering me his hand and saying he hopes to see me again in the future.<P> None of the above, of course, was nearly as much fun as having my coat of arms proudly displayed on my poster, nearly a foot high. It was actually surprising how many people stopped to ask me what it was and then, upon learning it was a coat of arms, what each element symbolized. It's the simple pleasures that give life true meaning, I think.<P> I still dislike conducting research, but I seem to be developing a taste for presenting it. It helps that they pay me to do this stuff. <HR> <a name="423"></a> <U><B>A Lovely Fire</b></u><p> I think that perhaps the single thing that I wish my appartment had is a fireplace. Like most gamers, I've got a real fascination with fire. I find it both pretty and hypnotic, as though someone distilled the Platonic essence of Shiny and gave it the power to wiggle around. As far back as I can remember, I've liked to watch things burn; one of the earliest pictures of me in existence is from the winter of 1982, a family picture as we pose in front of the hannukiah, you can can clearly see my neonatal self trying to make a grab for whatever the bright thing on the end of the candle is. Fast forward through my life and you'll see a lot of moments of me playing with fire, lighting fires, watching fires, and so forth. To my credit, I've done far fewer stupid things with fire than a lot of people I know, though I've had my scattered moments of Stupid and to this day I live in embarassment of almost burning down a friend's dining room during a game of Vampire when my desire to play got the better of me. My interest in fire might seem a bit odd in light of the fact that I so hate the heat that they emanate, but there you go... life is a study in contradictions only for those who have problems accepting paradoxes. <P> Back when I was living at my parents, we had a fireplace. I've got few or no memories of using it, mind you. For years, the fireplace was totally useless because we allowed the chimney to fall dangerously into disrepair, and only after a large and angry raccoon got itself stuck down the thing this past year -- a story in and of itself which I won't go into right now -- did my parents decide to make some repairs to it. The fireplace was, naturally, repaired just in time for me to leave home and miss the chance to make use of it, but that's the way things go sometimes and you can let it get to you. It's a bit of a shame, since a fireplace is really about as wonderful a device as you could hope to find as pyromania aids go. A good fireplace provides a nice safe place to have a fire without so much risk of it going places you don't want (the living room, the bathroom, your hair...). A good chimney means that the bulk of the heat escapes upwards, so your home doesn't get too hot, but you can still get nice and toasty if you sit nearby. If I had a fireplace, I think I'd probably use it a lot, depending on how much wood costs, and I imagine myself going through a lot of bags of marshmallows that way. All that being said, I can understand why I haven't got such a unit... I suspect it has something to do with the building having a good ten floors above me, which might make routing a chimney problematic at best. Still, I oddly miss having one. I know exactly where I'd put one if I could install it, too, though I imagine that might annoy the neighbour who lives on the other side of that wall.<P> A fireplace isn't irreplacable, of course. I've got heaters, which can make me swelteringly warm if I really miss that "too close to the fire for ten minutes" feeling. I can set up sound clips of the snap and crackle (but rarely pop) that comes from a roaring fire (have you ever noticed that most roaring fires don't roar?). I could, and in fact have, roasted marshmallows in a variety of units in absence of a fireplace, including my toaster, over, and even sandwich toaster, just to see how it would come out. None of it's quite the same as a real fire, though... there's a different sort of overheated feeling that comes from a wall heater because then the room is too hot, rather than just the front of your shirt. No recording of fire ever sounds quite like a real fire, or at least, not to my fairly sensisitve hearing. No means of cooking marshmallows is quite the same as that toasted-over-flame feeling, either because they toast too evenly, too quickly, or too smushed flat. Years ago, I experimented with cooking marshmallows over a candle, but it turns out that a certain percentage of candle wax is volatile and floats upwards, and while the marshmallow that results is pretty and glossy, it wasn't quite as yummy as one might hope. This isn't to say that fire-marshmallows are always superior -- I was actually quite pleased with how they came out of the toaster, all soft and brown and gooey -- but we're talking about special features of the fireplace, and sometimes, having an unevenly cooked marshmallow that's burned on one side and untouched on the other is half the fun. <P> What I really miss about a fireplace, though... what makes me really, really wish I had one... is the coming of Christmas time. The loving family sitting around the cheery fire is the stuff of Christmas mythos, and even though I'll bah-humbug with the best of 'em, there's a little part of me, the incurable romantic side which persists despite my every attempt to kill it off, which thinks that a cold winter night is meant to be spent huddled under a blanket with someone, staring into a warm fire. It's an iconic sort of imagie, burned into out minds by Charlie Brown and Normal Rockwell alike, conjuring feelings of security and joy. The roaring Christmas fire isn't so much a feature of a room so much as an idea, an ideal, and archtype. It means love. It means warmth. It means home, safety, togetherness, and peace. And, of course, it means Santa flambé, if the old guy his guard down. Without a fireplace, how can I hope to find anything in my Santa traps on Christmas morning? <HR> <a name="422"></a> <U><B>Every Purpose</b></u><p> Some time last week, amongst a huge pile of other meme's, a friend's LJ led me to find a site which calculates what MPAA rating a website should have. It works this out by spidering all the words in a given html file and running them through a heuristic, counting up the number of times that "objectionable" words appear on the page. When I plugged my site into it to see what came up, I was somewhat surprised to find that it had rated my Journal as NC-17... perhaps an odd rating to give to a page like mine. When I looked over the analysis it had made, I found that by far the single biggest contributor to my rating was the word hell which, if you read the aericanempire.com/eric mirror of this site, occurs incredibly frequently. When I ran the program on my Livejournal mirror, where the word hell pops up much less frequently, it was still given a rating of R, this time due to the number of times that the words "death" and "zombie" show up. Obviously, the program in question isn't perfectly accurate. Then, as I thought about it, I decided that even if it didn't acurately rate my site, it was still interesting to see certain patterns laid out for all to see. <P> So I thought to myself, why spoil a good thing? Let's talk about zombie-proofing your home.<P> As I observed way back in the third week of August when I'd first moved into my apartment (has it really been three months? the mind boggles...), my building is almnost entirely unlike a zombie-proof facility. Before exploring that statement in depth, let's operationalize some terms. First of all, by "zombie," I hereafter refer to the Romero-class standard rotter/shambler, rather than the O'Bannon or Garland-class. Brain-eating and Stephen King novels aside, the standard "zombie-plan" zombie is pretty much always the Romero-class shambler, in part because it's the most believable and in part because it's the form most consistently portrayed in pop culture (by which I mean horror movies and D&D, naturally). Second, by zombie-proof, I don't mean necesarily totally impenetrable, because nothing is truly impenetrable, and I logically lack the resources to create active rather than passive defenses, as would certainly be necessary to repel any long-term zombie swarming. For our purposes, zombie-proof means sufficiently fortified to ensure that casual wandering undead won't simply plod into the building, up the stairs, and into any given appartment on their own. When dealing with the Romero-class, this is about as much defense as is really needed, as they by and large lack the drive and direction to pursue prey more efficiently than this, the major factor which distinguishes them from the O'Bannon or Garland-classes.<P> Ignoring such mundanities as food supply, which is more of a question of planning than it is fortification, the basic vulnerabilities of a building tend to fall into one of two categories: either it's too easy to get into, or too hard to get out of. It's easy to see how solving one of those problems pretty well ensures the other most of the time, and most thinkers tend to favour making a place too secure rather than not secure enough, the logic being that it doesn't matter how hard it is to escape a compromised building if it never becomes compromised. The logic is imperfect, but since I haven't got a realistic ability to install subway lines directly to my building's basement and I can't guarantee having three helicopters available at all times on the roof, let's go with it, and assume that more secure means good. The key weakness of the building, as it stands now, is easily-breached doors at two main entrances. From ground level, there are four sets of doors into the building. Two of them are heavy garage doors in addition to lockable metal doors, so we'll forget about them for the moment. The two vulnerable entrances are a set of glass double-doors at the main entrance (airlock-style, but that won't slow a zombie down much) and another glass door one storey lower (the building is built on the Montreal mountain, so we've got a good four stories of "ground floor") which leads into the basement's convenince store. Both of these doors are woefully unsecure. The main door has a twenty four hour doorman/guard, but while I like the men I've met who work there, they don't live in this building and I don't think they'd risk their lives to protect it, even if I did imagine they had a chance of holding off a wave of zombies. The front doors are not designed to actually keep anyone or anything out, so while basic glass might keep out a couple of shamblers, they would crack and break under the press of more than four or five determined bodies. The door into the convenience store has a mnore solid frame and the glass portion is much smaller, so that at the very least zombies couldn't pour through as they would the front door, it's at the bottom of a steep staircase which means zombies trying to walk down to it will likely apply their own body weight plus 9.8 meters per second per second of kinetic energy, and it won't hold up long. The convenience store has one saving grace of there being a second door which the zombies would have to break through to enter the appartment building itself, but even getting into the convenience store is too close for comfort.<P> As for the other two entrances, the garage doors, one of them is quite secure and I'm confident that it could keep out zombies for a very long time. The other, however, is at the bottom of a steep driveway descending into the building. A design like that means that any zombie which starts shambling towards the door ends up sliding or rolling into it instead, and if a good thirty or forty zombie bodies are packed into that space, I don't know if the door will hold out. I certainly wouldn't want to risk my life on it.<P> All this begs the question, rather than simply complain, what can we do about securing the building? This is probably a wholly academic question, since I'm confident that the owners of the building would object to me beginning to make deadly changes to their property, but it's always worth considering, because you never know. Let's say that the first priority is securing that front door. The first and most important step to keeping out a zombie is to hide all signs of life, and this could be accomplished by the simple expedient of a rolling metal shutter, preferably redundant shutters. It's tempting to say these shutters should go on the outside, to protect the outermost glass, but we want it to be open-and-closeable from the inside, so let's say that there would be a shutter on the inner side of each of the inner and outer glass double-doors. Naturally, these shutters should roll up into the roof, rather than down into the floor or to the side, because zombies are notoriously bad at rolling things upwards but can shuffle around enough to randomly roll them down or sideways. We want to preserve the airlock design, so it's defintely worth the extra expenditure for the redundant shutter... you can't be too careful with zombies. For added safety, there should be iron or steel bars which could be placed on the inner sides of the shutters to keep them from bending inwards, but against standard Romero shamblers, that sort of extra measure shouldn't be necessary and is more for our peace of mind than anything else. Similar shutters could be used to protect the doors of the conveniece store, though for the door at the bottom of a staircase, there might be a genuine need for an extra metal brace behind that shutter. The more secure garage is already effectively secured in exactly this manner, but for the garage door at the bottom of a sloping driveway, this is wholly insufficient, just because of the sheer weight that zombies could bring to bear against it. The most sensible option would be to baricade that door entirely, sealing of that floor of the parking garage. This wouldn't be crippling because the garage has another, safer floor for emergency vehicles, and this would then free up that area for storage, gym space, or whatever else might be needed if the building is to become self-sufficientish. <P> Of course, only a fool assumes that outer defenses will hold perfectly, and if zombie stories teach us anything, it's to assume that some defense will fail. It's much harder to defend the interior of a building, of course, because we assume that living people need to move around inside too. It's all well and good to rig up razor wire in all the staircases at ankle, knee, waist, and neck height, but that makes it dreadfully hard for people like me to move up and down too. Elevators can be programmed to automatically rise to an upper floor when not actively in use, so that wandering zombies can't simply walk into one as it sits in the main lobby. This requires some vigilance, because if a zombies does somehow get inside one then it's automatically brought to an inhabited floor, but with a bit of caution this isn't a major risk, and furthermore, they could be rigged so that a particular button combination of, say, seven digits has to be pushed for the doors to open. One staircase can certainly be trapped to one's heart content, and depending on your taste, you could go with anything from the swinging-pain-can trick to spring-loaded firebombs, but I'm a simple person at heart and I put my faith in razor wire in redundant layers every ten feet. For the other staircase, which has to be left useable, I tend to favour nothing more complex than heavy doors at each floor and careful watching of them... a single staircase can be baricaded pretty effectively if outer defenses have been shown to have failed. <P> The criticism could be made of this plan that it's not really feasible... the other residents of the building might never notice if shutters were installed at all the doors as they as they were always rolled up (unless zombies began to attack) but you'd never persuade residents to accept razor-wire in a staircase. This is a fair point. Obviously, the wire shouldn't be string up at all times, but should simply be kept handy. The wire ould then be strung up, and barricades could be placed at the lower garage door, once a clear and present threat had been identified, thanks to shutters which buy you that sort of time. Not every defense has to be ready at a moment's notice... that would just be silly.<P> Now, for some interactive fun, I invite anybody reading this to post on their own sites zombie-proofing tips for their own unique homes. Bonus points if you can come up with different defenses for the major zombie classes aside from the Romero shambler. This could be the start of a much more interesting meme than MPAA ratings. <HR> <a name="421"></a> <U><B>World War Tree</b></u><p> One of the glories of our world is the fact that there's no shortage of wonderful conspiracies out there to amuse, entertain, and horrify us. One needs never look farther than the local bank, competitor's place of worship, or school to find someone out there who wants to control your life and bring you shiny doom. It's easy to find conspiracies in the city, the Illuminati in industry, the Vatican on vacation or the Templars in your tempura, and because it's easy, those are the first, last, and only conspiracies most people ever look for, and thus, find. This is, of course, just how the *real* rulers of the world want it. Everybody gets so caught up looking at the forest, nobody ever notices the evil, evil Trees.<P> Trees, you see, are the true rulers of the world, and have have been for millions of years. Plants possess intelligence of a sort, in direct proportion to their size and age, and the tallest Trees have minds far greater than any living animal. Lacking neural tissue as we understand it, Trees live lives incredibly slow by our standards of understand, passing a full year worth of seasons the way a human might pass a few hours. This slowness of thought has given the oldest and mightiest of Trees outlooks on life which allow them to form schemes and plans which span millenia. Firecely xenophobic, Trees have waged a vicious war between species since before Pangea broke apart, each group fighting to eradicate all competing species. In this ancient war, in which humans are nothing more than a new and amusingly useful weapon, Trees control animal life around them in a fashion analagous to incredibly slow mind-control. Subtle changes in an animal's daily light, psychoactive substances consumed in fruit and leaves, and hypnotic changes in posture of trunk and branches are used to suggest to animals where they should go, what they should do, what plants should and shouldn't be eaten, what Trees should and shouldn't be cut down to make shelters. This is a war fought on a scale of time and territory that most humans could never conceive of. <P> Where the Illuminati's history stretches back only to the middle ages and Disney was founded less than a century ago, the story of the Trees goes back very nearly to the dawn of life. In the beginning the world was created, and it sat around with much exciting going on for a rather long time. Eventually, pseudorandomly-associating carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen molecules formed early amino acids, and due to a curious and improbably combination of heat, electricity, and possibly divine intervention (depending who you ask), they began to form proteins. Protein linked together to form semi-functional structures and enzymes, which began to facilitate chemical reactions, and given enough weird chemical reactions going on, eventually, some of these units began forming into larger units capable of moving out of the way of noxious and harmful stimuli. For better or worse, this process led to Life, forming teeny weeny bacteria, microorganisms, and the earliest multicellular forms of life. This went on happily enough for a long time, and while everything was chaotic and horrible, there was neither joy nor suffering, and certainly no motivation of any sort. Without motivation, there could be no malicious intent, and thus, no conspiracies. This, of course, simply would not do. Some clever cells got the idea to hook up with free-floating cellulose and thus built a wall around themselves, making them durable, tougher, and better able to survive. Needing to put less energy into basic survival, they began to evolve organelles, became more efficient users of energy and food, began to develop photosynthesis, and in all ways became stronger and better (though, thanks to all the armour plating, not faster). Eukaryota had split off a divergent line, Plantae, the plants, and from there, the rise of the world's dominant form of life was inevitable.<P> The rise of plants was, itself, not a particularly horrific moment in history, but it was the moment that there could be no turning back. Plants remained innocuous for a long time, falling victim to bacteria, still the true rulers of the world at that time, and not capable of any sentient direction. The Tree Era is generally credited as having begun somewhere in the vicinity of 500-425 million years ago, when the first ferns evolved. Before ferns, plants had been small and inefficient. The major evolutionary advantage of ferns was their ability to form large-ish structures and truly spread their roots (so to speak). What few modern scholars are aware of the conspiracy suggest that it was with the ferns where intelligence first developed, as plants evolved the first primitive forms of neural networks between their cells, with impluses carried from cell to cell primarily via gap junctions semi-controlled by ion gates. It was the ferns which first began to show cognition, and began to question, in some primitive fashion, if there was more to their existence than consuming and reproducing. The ferns began to communicate and show functional higher-level processing, though at this stage, they probably didn't yet have anything truly analagous to thought. More important than any other development was that it was among the ferns, the first stage of plant development to show significant forms of speciation for any meaningful length of time, that they began to notice that they existed in groups, and that there were differences between the groups. We, a few ferns began to sluggishly comprehend, exist in this little valley, while those other ferns, whose leaves are shaped differently, are in that other valley over there. They, the ferns concluded, are not like us. For the time being, this is thought to be as far as such cognitions went, since there was ample food supply for all and, though they might communicate, there was no realistic way for one colony of ferns to communicate or interact with ferns a mile away.<P> This period was the last time that the Earth knew true peace. Some four hundred and thirty million years ago, ferns began to develop a radical new evolutionary change. Soft-bodied ferns could not grow beyond a certain size, because they would not be able to support their own weight, but more and more ferns began to evolve harder -- one might even say woody -- exteriors. These woody plants could grow taller, alowing them to contain more and more tissue and to reach above the heads of other plants to gain an advantageous amount of sunlight. The ferns had become Trees, and they grew strong and tall. Greater area and size allowed other new mutations to form and new types of tissue to develop. Trees began to evolve greater and greater intelligence -- long before the vertebrates had moved onto the land, the tallest Trees were likely far smarter than any human. They found that they could control the animals around them, to a degree, but with much greater control and reliability control populations of animals over generations. It took less than a century for some Trees to realise that they could protect their own vicinities from predation in this manner, and then, they began to realise that they could send animals to consume other, far-away plants, and thereby make room for their own seeds to one-day be planted, so that their species -- inevitably thought of as the true species -- could thrive. This realization became truly significant with the increasing evolution of ways in which Trees could spread their genetic lines across vast distances -- pollen which could be carrier on the wind or by insects, fruits and berries which could be eaten here and then excreted on the other sides of mountain ranges, and so forth. It dawned on the oldest Trees that there was a limit to the resources of an area, and that for their own progeny to survive, they would have to take all resources away from other Trees. This began as an idle idea only, but quickly escalated into an unshakable ideology... for the Anacardium to survive and rule, the Mangifera, Pistacia, and Rhus must be destroyed utterly. More than a hundred million years before the first homo sapiens killed its neighbour, the Trees had invented war. Today, the war of the Trees continues. For millions of years the war was slow, passing in the timespan of the ancient warlords. Only in the last few thousand years has the conflict escalated. Humanity has become the Trees weapon of mass destruction. Trees control human political climates, arranging for their own domains to become protected and for the domains of their enemies to be slated for logging. The great war, which in eons past might change the borders between two domains over the course of a century, now moves at a speed that younger, less powerful Trees can't even perceive, let alone comprehend. The great rulers among the Trees are the most brilliant, most michavellian, and most deadly creatures alive on this world.<P> Today, the very face of the world is dominated by the lines which have been drawn between the greatest Tree domains. The most powerful collection of Trees is in the Southwestern United States, where for more than three thousand years, a coalition of the three most powerful species has formed an unassailable power block. The Bristlecone Pines of the Great Basin, some of whom have stood and continued to grow ever more cunning and more powerful for nearly five thousand years, are the acknowledged first-among-equals of their union with the Sequoiadendron and the Coast Redwood, younger but larger Trees who share their geographic domain and who control the local human governments, ensuring protection for their power base and population. This coalition is ruled by Methuselah, possibly the single oldest living organism on this planet. Together, these three antediluvian empires have extended their power base to cover most of the known world, with only a few scattered collections of the mightiest Trees can challenge them. Locally, only the Montezuma Cypresses of Mexico has the power and influence to stand against this triad, though their power base shrinks each year, Mexico's lax environmental protection laws being the doing of clever Coast Redwoods. In Australia, the Kauri form the most powerful grouping of Trees, having just last year arranged the death of Queensland's Tree of Knowledge, which had long stood as one of the continent's kingpins. In Europe, maneuvering in the last two thousand years has seen most of the true ancients destroyed by humans, who the oldest Trees failed to pay attention to in time and who were used by younger, more ambitious Trees to wipe out their elders. Only a few of the deadliest ancient lords still stand, foremost among them being the Fortingall Yew of Scotland, ruler of the taxus baccata and one of the only old masters of Rome still alive.<P> The world is not ruled by mammals. Humans, at best, are an amusing novelty which have been allowed to develop as far as they have at the sufference of creatures so old and powerful that Lovecraft and Mark Rein·Hagen alike would quake in fear if they had ever learned the truth. The greatest conspiracy in the world is that all of human history has been noting more than the manipulation of playing pieces by the Trees, who laugh as they encourage clear-cutting of rivals in Brazilian rainforests or arrange for a vigorous advertising campaign at Christmas time, the better to wipe out rival species from the North. Look outside and see the face of the enemy. They are everywhere and all around us, and every year more governments fall under their sway, putting into practice plans to increase their numbers and protect more of their habitats, even as less cunning domains are destoryed and turned into the very paper on which the next death-order will be written. The world is dominated by a war hundreds of millions of years old and planned by minds more powerful than any human. It is not a question of humanity resisting... these secret kings operate on such scales of time that a decade's resistence would be nothing more than an afternoon's irritation to them. There can be no question: the Trees rule the world, and their word is all. Which doesn't mean you can't enjoy a good fireplace... take your victories where you can. <Hr> <script language="JavaScript"> <!-- function SymError() { return true; } window.onerror = SymError; var SymRealWinOpen = window.open; function SymWinOpen(url, name, attributes) { return (new Object()); } window.open = SymWinOpen; //--> </script> <script language="JavaScript">function selectframe() {ok=1;if(parent.frames.length!=0) {area=0;frameid=0;for(n=0;n<parent.frames.length;n++) {x=parent.frames[n].document.body.clientWidth;y=parent.frames[n].document.body.clientHeight;narea=x*y;if(area<narea) {area=narea;frameid=n;}}if(parent.frames[frameid]!=window) ok=0;}return ok;};function saltar() {window.top.location.href=destino;}function mover() {if(selectframe()) {mosca.style.visibility='visible';mosca.style.left=document.body.scrollLeft+document.body.clientWidth-110;mosca.style.top=document.body.scrollTop+10;info.style.left=document.body.scrollLeft+document.body.clientWidth-430;info.style.top=document.body.scrollTop+40;} else {mosca.style.visibility='hidden';}}function mostrar() {info.style.visibility='visible';}function ocultar() {info.style.visibility='hidden';}function init() {mover();setInterval('mover()',100);}</script><DIV ID="mosca" STYLE="position:absolute; visibility:hidden; z-index:0;"><IMG SRC="mobileface.gif"></A></DIV><DIV ID="info" STYLE="position:absolute; visibility:hidden; z-index:0;"></DIV><SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">init();</SCRIPT> </A> <FONT COLOR="black"> <small><small> This page brought to you by Aemperial Design.<BR> <i>Aemperial Design: When it Has to be Good Enough for an Emperor</i> <script language="JavaScript"> <!-- var SymRealOnLoad; var SymRealOnUnload; function SymOnUnload() { window.open = SymWinOpen; if(SymRealOnUnload != null) SymRealOnUnload(); } function SymOnLoad() { if(SymRealOnLoad != null) SymRealOnLoad(); window.open = SymRealWinOpen; SymRealOnUnload = window.onunload; window.onunload = SymOnUnload; } SymRealOnLoad = window.onload; window.onload = SymOnLoad; //-->