Obsidian Wings

Fanvids are emotional bouillon cubes

by Doctor Science

Since my mind has been desperately distracted by the following fanvid, I am going to share it with you!

 
Direct YouTube link.

"Starships", by bironic. Music by Nicki Minaj. Lyrics may be NSFW; singing along loudly with them is *definitely* NSFW. And you may be tempted; I certainly am.

I'm working on a post about the Star Trek reboots, was reminded of this vid (which I saw when it first came out last summer), started re-watching, and just. can't. stop. It's partly the song, which is extremely catchy but also has at least 3 distinct moods: happy-bouncy, sense of wonder, and ludicrous speed. Bironic then matched each musical mood to clips from movies and TV shows to bring out all the ways I love the idea of space travel: with joy, with wonder, and with excitement.

What does this have to do with bouillon cubes? For me at least, fanvids are the most concentrated form of creative expression, because each clip comes from a much larger source work. To make a bouillon cube, you take out the water and (theoretically) leave the flavor behind, concentrating it. In a good fanvid, I feel as though the clips take out the time in the sources, leaving behind concentrated emotion. In this particular case, hundreds of hours of source gets boiled down to 3 1/2 minutes of vid -- bironic used 257 clips from 39 different movies or TV shows. I haven't seen absolutely all of her sources, but I *have* seen most of them and have strong feelings and associations with them.

For instance, at 1:50 in "Starships" Nicki Minaj is singing "if you want more" and the matching clip is Scotty talking to Captain Kirk. I immediately associate this with Kirk's habit of asking Scotty for "more power!" and "more speed!", while Scott has to explain that no, she can't do any more ... probably. And then there are a series of rapid clips showing others of my favorite engineers, giving just a bit "more" to get the job done. It's a lot of associations and the emotions that go with them, packed into just a few seconds.

Bironic described her process:

I made this vid in a week and a half at the end of April while working six-day weeks at my day job. That's how much time there was between when I first heard the song/got permission to submit it to Club Vivid, and when Club Vivid vids were due. Words cannot describe the scramble to get enough source—I only own about a third of the above—plus make all the clips, figure out the best aspect ratio, find a good vid structure, define constraints (e.g. only clips where people look happy/enthralled to be flying; only ships in space, not in atmosphere, except for launches/crashes), etc.

Having done a bunch of vids before definitely made this one possible; it was like previous experience built up to allow me to do this one in the allotted time. I knew how to rip and encode and clip several different kinds of footage. I figured out how to deal with a Premiere letterboxing problem. I knew that like half the clips needed speed work. I knew how to export for DVD when it was done. All of that and more meant technical problems didn't defeat the project and I had a little more time to devote to things like making sure this wasn't an "all white guys, all the time" show.

The latter is particularly notable -- I figure she managed to get the percent white dudes down to about 50, which is one of the things I like to imagine about space travel -- that the heroes can have all kinds of faces.

And one steps out

by liberal japonicus

Didn't post an open thread, as I thought Ugh and Dr. Science had things covered. But NBA center Jason Collins piece in SI seems to be something that you should read if you haven't and you might want to talk about if you have.

Some people insist they've never met a gay person. But Three Degrees of Jason Collins dictates that no NBA player can claim that anymore. Pro basketball is a family. And pretty much every family I know has a brother, sister or cousin who's gay. In the brotherhood of the NBA, I just happen to be the one who's out.

There's been talk that a group of gay NFL players were going to make a group announcement, so I wonder if Collins individual announcement may hasten that or perhaps forestall it.

There is the old joke that a pioneer is the person you find on the trail full of arrows. Cause whoever goes first is basically asking for trouble. Still, it is hard to imagine a better candidate for this than Jason Collins. He's friends with the politically powerful (Chelsea Clinton, Joe Kennedy), he's had a decent NBA career so is not in a precarious position, he's got a twin brother who also is an NBA player. 

Interesting times.

The West, Texas disaster wasn't an industrial accident

by Doctor Science

Or at least, not *just* an industrial accident. I see three interlocking sets of problems in the disaster[1]:

1. An industrial or occupational mishap at the West Texas Fertilizer Co. Some combination of mishandling or mis-storage of chemicals, improper or non-existent safely protocols, sloppy recordkeeping, sloppy materials-handling. These are the kind of issues people talk about when they discuss workplace or industrial safety.
2. No-one at the company, in the community, or at their various insurance companies seems to have considered that maybe it wasn't too smart having the middle and high schools so close to a plant dealing in explosive chemicals. Look at the damage to the middle school: and think how lucky they were that the explosion didn't happen while there were children present. Killing most of the fire department was a disaster; if it had killed a bunch of children as well, it would have been a *catastrophe*.
3. It's part of the ongoing investigation, but I haven't seen any clear indications that the volunteer firefighters were aware that they were facing a chemical fire, or that they had the training and equipment to deal with one.

I'm working on a longer post about this disaster and about how we perceive and deal with risk, but I wanted to get this out first. It doesn't seem right to me to mostly talk about the West, Texas, deaths as workplace or occupational casualties, when very few (if any) of the deaths were of workers. It's not all that comparable to e.g. a mining disaster, because the death and destruction involves the community, not just the workplace.

---

[1] National coverage of the Texas disaster has been spotty and superficial. I'm following The Dallas Morning News and The Waco Tribune-Herald for detailed, ongoing reporting.

---

"The Smoking Fire", etching from Giovanni Battista Piranesi's series of imaginary prisons, mid-18th century.

"we refused to be terrorized"

by Ugh

O rly?

From President Obama's statement last Friday night after the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Massachusetts:

One thing we do know is that whatever hateful agenda drove these men to such heinous acts will not -- cannot -- prevail. Whatever they thought they could ultimately achieve, they've already failed. They failed because the people of Boston refused to be intimidated. They failed because, as Americans, we refused to be terrorized. They failed because we will not waver from the character and the compassion and the values that define us as a country. Nor will we break the bonds that hold us together as Americans.

I suppose that paragraph holds together overall, but the sentences about Boston and Americans are, IMHO, rather farcical.  I'm sorry, but what do you call shutting down the entire city of Boston (Boston!) and the surrounding area for 24 hours?  Or 9,000+ law enforcement officers and members of the national guard, etc., searching for one guy who was, AFAICT, not suspected of carrying a nuclear weapon?  Or 24-7 news coverage of the events provided to the rest of the nation? Or the increased security protocols across the country because, well, because? Or people celebrating in the streets after capturing an unarmed (it now seems) bleeding 19-year-old college student hiding in a boat in someone's backyard?

If that's not being terrorized or intimidated, I don't know what is.  

As for not wavering from "the compassion and the values that define us as a country," well, I see the public safety exception to Miranda has been invoked and that Tsarnaev will be charged with using a "weapon of mass destruction."  Most disturbingly, I see calls from the usual GOP suspects to treat him as an enemy combatant for who knows what reason (kudos to the Administration as it seems they will not do this) and lay blame on "lax" immigration standards so they can be further tightened (those dangerous 8 year old immigrants!).  Of course, this puts the lie to another of President Obama's statements:  "one of the things that makes America the greatest nation on Earth ... is that we welcome people from all around the world -- people of every faith, every ethnicity, from every corner of the globe."  Right.

I suppose on the political level he needs to say these things, but at some point the BS is too much to take.

More walking in the past

by Doctor Science

Last summer, I wrote about candid photos of women from the Edwardian era:

What I hadn't visually expected was how comfortably women *strode* even in garments that to me look heavy and awkward. I also hadn't realize how much women's posture is depicted as curving toward men. Even standing up straight is shown as "defiant" or otherwise posed -- while these photos show women standing up straight yet relaxed, because this is how they stand.

I just came across some Edwardian video which has been digitally enhanced to show motion naturalistically:
 
Direct YouTube link

Most of the people in the film are men, but if you pick a woman out of the crowd and watch her, you'll notice that she isn't walking slower than the men around her. In general, women are walking *much* faster and more directly in their long skirts than I am used to seeing these days, either in historical (or fantastic) films or at most Real Life long-skirt occasions.

I think the ease with which women used to move in long skirts was a combination of factors. First, they were used to it, it wasn't "acting" or "special occasion" or "fancy" wear, long skirts were just everyday clothes. Second, Edwardian women clearly didn't have crinolines or other voluminous or clumsy-making undergarments beneath their skirts. (I just lost a bunch of time looking through stereo pictures of Broadway in the 1860s, but there aren't enough women in those pictures to give me any sense of how they actually *moved*.

Third, footgear. Because long skirts these days are usually "special occasion" wear, they tend to go with "special occasion" shoes, which in current fashion have high, spike heels. The *point* of such shoes is that you can't stride relaxedly in them, they force a certain stressed posture and restricted gait. Though stiletto-type heels were known in the Edwardian era, they were fetish gear, not (relatively) normal street wear. So all of the Edwardian women in the video are wearing flats, or the same kind of short, chunky heels that the men are wearing. And because none of them are used to wearing high heels, the way most actresses and many other modern women are, their gaits aren't distorted by high-heeled habits.

Nana, by Édouard Manet (1877). Original: Hamburger Kunsthalle.

Nana's high heels are among the signals that she is a high-class prostitute meeting a client. This painting was submitted to the Salon but rejected, apparently on the grounds of excessive honesty -- paintings depicting complete nudes in sexual contact (e.g. Cabanel's Nymph and Satyr) were considered perfectly acceptable and even admirable, sanitized by history and mythology and cleaned up by the oil-painting equivalent of Photoshop.

Terrorism as Performance

by Doctor Science

Steve Almond, writing in The New Republic, said:

I refuse to beat my chest over a grief that belongs to others, or shout about how terrorists messed with the wrong city. I find no virtue in braying over the capture of a teenager whose toxic grievances, and misguided loyalties, led to such senseless ruin. It is sad, all of it. The greater sadness for me is that America feels increasingly like a nation united by spectacles of atrocity. We pay attention, and open our hearts, only when violence of a random and gaudy enough variety strikes.

On tumblr, Fursa Sa'ida said:

I spend a fair amount of time thinking about what terrorism is and how it can be defined separately from other forms of violence. I still don’t have a comprehensive answer, but one of the major, MAJOR features that seems to be overlooked all too often is that terrorism is performative. One of the reasons we handle it so badly is that we consistently overlook these performative aspects in favor of playing into them—the kind of reaction Almond is describing here. But the performative aspects of a terrorist act can tell you so much about what motivated it, what it was really about, sometimes even more than knowing if there was a group behind it or if there was religious thought involved. All of those things are stops along the way to the occurrence of an act of terror; but the how of such an act can’t be separated from the why.

A Broad Abroad noted that the US media devoted much more attention to the Boston bombing than to e.g. the recent Chinese earthquake, and pointed out one reason:

this is something with a narrative. There’s a protagonist. There’s the frisson of dread that it could happen again. There’s the satisfaction of having an iniquitous scapegoat to focus all that anger onto - whereas with an earthquake there’s just inchoate dread, and, for the religious, there’s the sense of confusion and disquiet that a loving god could let this occur - and hating god is much less reassuring than hating The Bad (presumed-brown-until-proven-WASP, and then STILL, even if he is a textbook example of Caucasian) Guy. The thing is, The Hunger Games was rather terrifyingly close to the bone, as a piece of dystopian satire.

Basically, Americans (or at least our media) are absolute *suckers* for performance and narrative, and we make a wonderful audience for terrorists, mass murderers, and anyone else who's willing to die for the chance to be a supervillain.

I think part of the popularity of this exemplar of the British stiff-upper-lip approach to traumatic events

is because an honest American version would be more like this:

where the "stuff" that is broken may include entire countries. [parody found repeatedly on the Internet, flag logo added by me.]

The instinct for cuteness

by Doctor Science

Yesterday's birding walk was good, but nothing unusual in the way of bird life. What made it one for the record books was the single cutest thing I've ever seen in nature: four Red Fox kits playing together. They must have been out of the den for a couple of weeks because they're no longer dark, pretty much like the ones in this video:
 
Direct YouTube link

And let me tell you, if I'd had a video camera, a strong lens (I was about 50m away), and a tripod (because, judging by my photography, my cinematography would be Adventures in Shakycam), I could have made something that would get a million views on YouTube.

some historical notes

by Fiddler

 

In the first Boston Massacre, on March 5, 1770, British troops fired into a rioting crowd of civilians on King Street in Boston, without being ordered to do so; four people died immediately, one soon after, and six were injured.  The British governor asked John Adams, who was known for his views on independence from England but who was also an excellent lawyer, to defend the British soldiers in their trial, who had fired without orders from an officer.

The trial took place in open court, with the public admitted to view the proceedings.  As a result of Adams' arguments in their defense, six of the eight were acquitted of murder charges and two were convicted of manslaughter for firing directly into the crowd -- this, in spite of the tremendous amount of propaganda that was circulated in the press and in rumors beforehand.

The summary of this at Wikipedia is not too bad.  For a closer view of part of the proceedings, the miniseries John Adams devotes one of its six episodes to this.

So.  We now have a second Boston Massacre, the death of ordinary people at a public event, without the excuse of military presence or riot.  One of those accused of responsibility for the bombings has died; the other, 19-year-old Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, has been captured and is hospitalized; he has not been read his Miranda rights.  Here is the text of a free Miranda Rights card that can be printed to carry with you:

I wish to invoke my Miranda Rights to remain silent under the statutes and constitution of the United States of America. I do not want to talk or answer any questions to law enforcement. I do not want to participate in any lineup or show-up until I consult with an attorney and he is present. I do not consent to any search of my person, property or possession under my control or which I have an interest. I declare that I do not waive my legal rights and I insist on having my lawyer present.

Police are required to read Miranda rights to people who are arrested as a result of the Supreme Court case Miranda v. Arizona, decided in 1966.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was not given his Miranda warning because of a 'public safety exception', which is supposed to expire after 48 hours.  This exception comes from the Supreme Court case New York v. Quarles; in order for information learned under this exemption to be admissible in court, the suspect must not be "actually compelled by police conduct which overcame his will to resist" and it must be a situation "in which police officers ask questions reasonably prompted by a concern for the public safety," according to Carl A. Benoit's article, "The 'Public Safety' Exception to Miranda," in a FBI law enforcement bulletin dated February 2011.

However, the fact that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was not given this right leads to the suspicion that his case might never see an open court -- might, instead, be judged under 'anti-terrorist' provisions, because of his not being a US citizen.  His older brother Tamerlan is dead, so nobody can ever know what Tamerlan intended when he dropped a backpack containing a homemade shrapnel bomb on the sidewalk during the race. The fact that Tamerlan did this appears beyond dispute, as one of the victims of the blast looked him full in the face just before he did it and was able to identify him for police later.   But Tamerlan is not Dzhokhar, who is now in custody.  Photographs put Dzhokhar at the scene, carrying a shoulder bag -- but I am unaware of any witnesses who can testify that he personally dropped that bag near them.

I can't help being reminded of the Beltway Snipers in 2002, when the adult John Allan Muhammad convinced teenaged Lee Boyd Malvo that it was all right to use ordinary human beings going about their daily lives as targets. I can't help wondering what sort of influence Tamerlan had over Dzhokhar, and why, and whether we will be allowed to learn any of it in an open courtroom.

Will Dzhokhar have a defender as able as John Adams to represent him in an open court?   Muhammad and Malvo faced open courtrooms; so did the Unabomber, and Timothy McVie, after the Oklahoma bombing.  Will Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?  

 

 

 

How we make progress Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

Not sure if this is good for an open thread, but Atul Gawande's New Yorker piece about how the Boston area hospitals handled the recent bombing opens with this observation

The bombs at the Boston Marathon were designed to maim and kill, and they did. Three people died within the first moments of the blast. More than a hundred and seventy people were injured. They had their limbs blown off, vital arteries severed, bones fractured, flesh torn open by shrapnel or scorched by the blasts’ heat. Yet it now appears that every one of the wounded alive when rescuers reached them will survive.

The thought, best expressed by Russell, that for our existence, grief and loss are something that become like the weather, all encompassing, inescapable, and something we just have to deal with, seems to be linked to this. As Gawande further notes

We have, as one colleague put it to me, replaced our pre-9/11 naïveté with post-9/11 sobriety. Where before we’d have been struck dumb with shock about such events, now we are almost calculating about them. When ball bearings and nails were found in the wounds of the victims, everyone understood the bombs had been packed with them as projectiles. At every hospital, clinicians considered the possibility of chemical or radiation contamination, a second wave of attacks, or a direct attack on a hospital. Even nonmedical friends e-mailed and texted me to warn people about secondary and tertiary explosive devices aimed at responders. Everyone’s imaginations have come to encompass these once unimaginable events.

Many have observed that almost everyone becomes more conservative as they get older. I wonder if the shift in imagination is, more than aching joints and slower mental processes, why this happens. As children, our imagination gets to work on what hasn't happened, so we imagine flights to the stars and the world of possibilities ahead. As adults, our imagination gets pressed into service to deal with all the things we know could happen. Sadly, we seem to be getting older much faster these days.

"nonconsensual warrantless blood draw"

by Ugh

This week SCOTUS decided MISSOURI v. MCNEELY, opinion available here, essentially saying that the "natural dissipation of blood-alcohol" did not, on its own, constitute an exigent circumstance, one of the current exceptions to the warrant requirement of the 4th Amendment.  Hence, the ensuing blood test showing that McNeely was clearly above the legal limit could not be used as evidence to convict him of DUI as the police did not obtain a warrant.  

Without unpacking all of the Constitutional issues in that paragraph, I wanted to focus on how Justice Sotomayor, who wrote the (somewhat splintered) majority opinion, characterized the search.  In particular, as noted in the post title, as a "nonconsensual warrantless blood draw" - see page 4 of the linked opinion, page 8 of the pdf.  

This turn of phrase disturbed me, I think because its use seemed so casual, in an "Oh yeah, send her to the nonconsensual warrantless blood draw room" sort of way.  I think SCOTUS reached the right result in at least this case while leaving the door open to reaching a different result elsewhere, but fundamentally, should such a thing be okay even with a warrant?  

That is, doesn't strapping someone down and extracting blood also implicate 5th, 8th, and 14th Amendment concerns, at least the pre-conviction context?  And yet the court, other than a single citation to a 5th Amendment case, barely even addresses these issues (this may be the fault of the parties to the case, of course).  If a bone-marrow sample were required, would that be okay, even with a warrant?  An ova or sperm sample?  Heart tissue? One of the two kidneys?  

It seems to me that perhaps SCOTUS is missing the point, in this and other areas of Constitutional law, and has adopted a very narrow "purposive" view of the individual rights amendments and very few who argue in front of them are willing to advocate for a revisiting.  That's a bit of a ramble but it was bothering me.