Erik Pukinskis, Snowed In

Cryonics is the notion that one ought to have their body preserved through freezing upon death. For this to make sense, you have to believe that that “dead” is not a point of no return, but merely a state of mind. The hope is that one day advanced medical science will not look upon our thousand year old frozen bodies as “dead”, but “treatable”, and that by freezing ourselves, we are all but guaranteed to open our eyes on some fine day thousands of years in the future, don our government issued sexy neoprene suit, and grab for the nearest iPhone to check our stocks.

(Though the cryonic process will set you back a pretty penny, you only have to invest $5 in an investment fund with a 5% return, and by the year 3010 your nest egg will be worth about a sextillion (that’s 21 zeroes) dollars, although who knows how much that will be worth by then, what with inflation and increases in the “standard of living”.)

But let’s think about this for a moment. What actually happens in 3010, when scientists develop what they think to be a safe method for defrosting, reviving, and treating, say, a cancer patient who died in 2004? Who goes first? It’s not like you can ask for volunteers. They say you can sleep when you’re dead, and corpses take that money to the bank.

But the scientists can only reanimate so many pigs before they have to try it out on a human being, and nothing ever works the first time. Chances are good that a few of those first customers will get the good ol’ heave ho, and remain decidedly… dead. Or they’ll experience a “depressed standard of living” or whatever the cryonicists want to call it.

I imagine these first clinical trials will leave medical science with a few bodies that are disapointingly non-animate.

What do with them?

Well, back in the fridge of course! While their freezermates are successfully reanimated, these corpses will sit another thousand years, too damaged from handling or thoroughness of “death” to be reanimated with even fourth millenium technology.

Like lasagna that you cooked and ate half of, and then froze, and then brought to work and reheated, and then put back in the fridge when you were called to an emergency site visit, and then brought home and warmed up a third time, we’ll find ourselves with more than a few slightly putrified cryogenics customers, disappointed that their investment hasn’t yet paid off.

But eventually science catches up, right? That’s the whole point of the enterprise after all. So while the ranks of ancient frozen mummies will dwindle, as wave after wave of technology will sweep more and more of them back life.

Yet some will emerge from thaw time and time again, only to be refrozen for failure to launch. Some will gain a reputation for stubbornly clinging to death. Entire M.D. theses will be written about these patients. What might have gone wrong? How might we find a way around it?

Eventually a list will appear on Wikipedia. Number one on the “Oldest unrevivable cryocorpses” is a particularly decomposed gentleman, left after a failed revival to stew at room tempurate for hours during the summer of 3044 when a cryolab shift change went awry. Few scientists think it’s even theoretically possible to revive him, but contracts were signed.

And what if one of these folks *was* successfully revived? Thawed five times, dead for 3000 years, third millenium man rises from the dead! Hear his bizarre marrers of speech and behavior! Listen to his riveting stories of ancient sexual rituals! Tonight at 9!

Although, sadly, it is almost certain that evidence of our sexual rituals will surely outlast all of us, cryonics or not.

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d;

Sometimes I love attention from men. But when it’s respectful and when I clearly indicate that I want it. Guys, here is how you tell if a girl is interested: if she makes direct eye contact with you, smiles, and asks you questions, then she probably wouldn’t mind getting to know you. (If you’re British and you’re in America, you’re pretty much given an automatic green light. This is a half-joke.) If she’s mumbling, looking down, closing off her space to you, and gives short answers, she wants you to leave. She’s just been conditioned to think that she can’t say, “Get the fuck away from me.” There are LOTS OF WOMEN, I KNOW, WHO CAN SAY THAT. And who have every right. But I’m just not one of them. I can’t. I have to to think of myself first. I can’t worry that you, strange man in a bar, is going to flip out when I reject you harshly.

Almie Rose, “Stop Hitting On Me,” on the Ms. blog, as quoted from the Jezebel reprint by Tiffany B. Brown on her blog.

Go CollegeHumor for actually making something subversive!

The attempt for greatness, I’ll say, is the biggest drug in the world. After a fight, I tried every drug in the world. I just doesn’t do it. A couple of OD’s and everything… It just doesn’t do it. If you’re trying to get that championship…that high over drugs, you’re gonna die. It doesn’t work

– Mike Tyson, Centerstage, 5/26/2010

Mike Tyson, after his fights, did every drug out there, to the point of overdose, looking for the high he got from his (I would say successful) attempt for greatness. He tried every chemical he could, to excess, and he said the drugs could never achieve a high like that.

The California Supreme Court had this to say about one of the two witnesses the proponents of Prop 8 were able to put on the stand:

Blankenhorn’s opinions are not supported by reliable evidence or methodology and Blankenhorn failed to consider evidence contrary to his view in presenting his testimony.The court therefore finds the opinions of Blankenhorn to be unreliable and entitled to essentially no weight.

And the other witness:

Miller’s credibility was further undermined because the opinions he offered at trial were inconsistent with the opinions he expressed before he was retained as an expert. Specifically, Miller previously wrote that gays and lesbians, like other minorities, are vulnerable and powerless in the initiative process, see PX1869 (Kenneth Miller, Constraining Populism: The Real Challenge of Initiative Reform, 41 Santa Clara L Rev 1037 (2001)), contradicting his trial testimony that gays and lesbians are not politically vulnerable with respect to the initiative process. Miller admitted that at least some voters supported Proposition 8 based on anti-gay sentiment.Tr 2606:11-2608:18.

For the foregoing reasons, the court finds that Miller’s opinions on gay and lesbian political power are entitled to little weight and only to the extent they are amply supported by reliable evidence.

Snap!

I just got an email from a recruiter looking for people for a software development job. I was reading their job posting when I realized there was really only one sentence in the whole thing that mattered.

Maybe job postings always have only one sentence that really matters.

So I got rid of everything in the job posting that was irrelvant. You can read the original and compare to my rewrite:

APS Technology Group creates optical character recognition (OCR) systems for the shipping container industry. We have some Rails and .net apps running on Windows Servers.

Can you integrate new page designs into our existing applications?

Yes or no?

Ability to integrate new page designs into existing applications. That’s where their team has a real need. There is too much shit to be done, or they hired someone who couldn’t hack it, and we need someone who has the ability to integrate new pages designs into our existing applications.

The way to get hired for that job is to take a genuine interest in that thing that the organization needs someone to do, and prove to them, beyond a measure of a doubt, that you can do that thing.

The premonition of what you are about to do
The present experience of doing something risky
The realization that everything went fine
A fleeting moment of security
Taking heed of the troubles around us
Understanding all is flawed
The premonition of what you are about to do

It’s sad to me. I really, really liked Matt Taibbi’s post this week on Rolling Stone, “Lara Logan, You Suck“.

I like how it ends anyway. I like it from about “True, the Pentagon does have perhaps the single largest public relations apparatus on earth” to the end.

That’s why the introduction is so disappointing to me. I should’ve guessed where it was going when the title of the article is an ad hominem attack. Here’s the opening sentence of the post:

Lara Logan, come on down! You’re the next guest on Hysterical Backstabbing Jealous Hackfest 2010!

“Hysteria,” once a medical condition, is a word that has been used for centuries to describe a woman causing trouble. It’s used today to mark a woman as having gone off the deep end. If a woman is protesting loudly, people are apt to listen to hear what the matter is. But if a man says she’s “hysterical” it’s code for “pay no attention to her, she’s just crazy.”

I watched the video of Lara Logan. She’s not screaming, she’s not jumping out of her chair. She’s not convulsing on the floor. She’s utterly calm, and she articulates a point of view that is shared by many, many people.

If you think “hysterical” is an appropriate word for describing Logan’s appearance, let’s do a test.

What if Anderson Cooper had gone on CNN and said exactly what Logan did, in the same tone of voice? Do you think Taibbi would label him as “hysterical”?

No fucking way.

Taibbi moves on:

And the part that really gets me is Logan bitching about how Hastings was dishonest to use human warmth and charm to build up enough of a rapport with his sources that they felt comfortable running their mouths off in front of him.

Gentlemen, “bitch”, like “hysterical” should be a red flag. If you hear it coming out of your mouth, there’s a 99.9% chance you’re about to step into a learning opportunity. Let’s pick this apart a little bit.

What does this word mean, “bitch”? Let’s forget for a second the decades of its use as a slur against women. It means the same thing as “complain” or “protest”, right? Maybe “whine” with a little bit of “nag” thrown in for good measure?

Putting aside the issue of sexism, is “bitching” really the right word for this what Locan is doing? Technically, in terms of good writing and word choice and say-what-you-mean and all that, is this “bitching”?

“What I find is the most telling thing about what Michael Hastings said in your interview is that he talked about his manner as pretending to build an illusion of trust and, you know, he’s laid out there what his game is… That is exactly the kind of damaging type of attitude that makes it difficult for reporters who are genuine about what they do…”

I don’t think so. She’s not whining. She’s not even really complaining. If anything it’s an indictment, not a complaint. She’s not begging for Hastings to repent or to change his ways, she’s just calling out the negative effects of his choices as she sees them.

I’m sure Taibbi would say that it’s still “bitching” and it has nothing to do with gender. But I don’t buy it. I think he passed on other, better words for what she’s doing… like “shilling”, for example… because he wanted to use the word “bitch”.

Because that’s the real point of that sentence. Matt Taibbi wants us to know that Lara Logan is a bitch.

But he can’t say that, because it’s not cool. He’s been trained not to call women bitches in print. But he still thinks she is one, so he finds a way to get it out there.

And the 1642 “likes” that he got from Rolling Stone’s overwhelmingly male internet audience? It’s about 100 times more “likes” than he usually gets on his blog posts.

How many of those people just “liked” seeing a successful, loud, opinionated women get dragged through the mud?

Finally put a new theme on my blog (http://snowedin.net/blog for those reading this on Facebook.) The old theme (K2) was horrific in almost every way.

Not that it really matters much. I seem to get most of my comments through Facebook these days. And the rest of you probably read this in a feed reader.

Still, it always bugs me when I visit the site and recoil in horror.